King, Strunk, and White

Following the advice of Stephen King, I read Strunk and White’s Elements of Style this week.  I expected an exhaustive work on the technical aspects of writing, but at 26 pages the writing guide only scratches the surface of the subject.  The book consists of a mere 18 rules of usage and composition followed by three sections which cover common grammar mistakes.

Reading Elements of Style brings into focus the influence the book has on Stephen King. The following quotes from Elements closely correspond to what King advocates in his own book on writing:

“The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative principally concerned with action, but in writing of any kind.”

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

While I found the information in Elements of Style useful, I think following its guidelines to the letter would tend to result in a somewhat dry writing style. Then again, Stephen King, great advocate of the book, has a writing style that is anything but dry. Does he bend the rules a bit perhaps? ;)

2003 Spacemouse 9 Storyboard

Life was incredibly busy at the beginning of March and I missed my goal of posting here a least once a week. Things are more free now, so hopefully I can devote time again to Spacemouse 9. Here are some more of my past sketches. These are the first four panels of a storyboard sequence of nine panels I did in 2003. I am a little embarrassed to share these since they are quick sketches and not what I consider my best work. Still, here can be seen one of the many variations I experimented with trying to find the right look for Spacemouse 9's spacesuit. Previously, I posted a 1997 sketch of our hero without his helmet.

More About Storybook Software

After playing around more with the open source "novel writing" software, Storybook, I  unfortunately found that the features that interest me the most are only available in "Storybook Pro", the non-free version of the program. Such features include a "gantt chart of characters" (creates time lines of characters lives) and the ability to export information out of the program in formats such as TXT and PDF. At first I thought Storybook was intended only as a tool to organize plot information, but the creators of the program proclaim on their website that Storybook "can be used as a replacement for a word processor". While that may be true, I think the way the program "compartmentalizes" the story information would somewhat mitigate against a writing style that flows.  Still, Storybook may have its uses. I think I will keep it around for a while longer. ;)