Chess anyone?

It is impossible to win gracefully at chess. No man has yet said "Mate!" in a voice which failed to sound to his opponent bitter, boastful and malicious. ~A.A. Milne
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So you were anticipating a blog post about the correlation between writing and chess? Well let me tell you, I can give a really good analogy of a chess/life scenario but I’ve really got to work on the writing/chess scenario.

Okay where do I begin? I’ll start with the white side. This is the team I always go for in playing chess. It reminds me of purity and all that that entails. Strength,wisdom, knowledge,etc.

In writing, the white team can be visualized as the protagonist, or the good guy. The dudley-do-right, the main character of the story. Then we have the black team and they are the antagonist, the bad guys, the dark force, the one or ones that will be causing all kinds of trouble in the story.

We have pawns on both sides, correct? The same powerful pieces standing behind the pawns on both sides too. The pawns can be seen as the disposable characters, if you will. Now you have all of these characters standing behind you vying for a place so lets give them a place.

The rook will be the homestead or the solid foundation of your story, the dark side has an ominous looking castle which probably houses Count Dracula or some other dark figure.

The knight will be the character in your story that does all the fighting for you. They don’t call it the Knight in shining armor for no reason at all. He just might save, your damsel in distress. The dark fights for the light, the light normally wins IN THE END, hopefully, with fingers crossed, the Light will win. (emphasis on WILL win)

Then we have the bishops. They can be your moral compass. The bishop can stand for our values, beliefs, hope, faith and promise. The good seed buried in all of us that sometimes we call a conscious. Now the dark bishop is who in your story? Well it’s the dark force or the bad seed that will not and can not take root because you’ve given him/it no fertile soil in which to grow. He is going to be the turmoil around every corner in your story.

Ah, now we have the king and queen. This will be the strong lead characters in your story who eventually are left standing with the dark side (king and queen) all alone on that big checkered board, or white paged palette we call a storyboard.

What do we do in this position? We do what any good writer would do and that is knock the pants off of the Dark Force and we have our main characters all full of light left standing in a triumphant glow of completion. Check Mate!

Does any of this make sense? Well to my demented writers brain it does. Look out Stephen King, I figured you out! Now lets see if I can see what gardening and writing have in common. Okay, I’m kidding! (not really)

Now we know what makes a story so what are you waiting for? Why are you sitting here reading, shouldn’t you be writing? 

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'Tis all a chequer board of nights and days,
Where destiny with men for pieces plays;
Hither and thither, and mates, and slays.
~Edward Fitzgerald

The Dark Side

The Dark Side of Writing will grab hold of you on the night you sit alone contemplating all there is to feed off of as you wriggle in fear and write...the as the dark side of creativity comes alive.

It will happen writers. You’ll be sitting there tapping on the keys when a dark cloud passes over your window. Falling from the cloud are the spirits from the past, drifting through the air like sheets of silk.They come tiptoeing across the field to peek into your window and before you know it, you find, you’re writing turns dark.

Well it won’t exactly happen like that but you will be writing a story in happy mode, and suddenly feel the pull of the dark side wanting to come out. You may want to write about vulgar adultery, or bloody murder, or a bank-robbing bandit. All of which you’ve never experienced before, but are willing to compromise for your readers sake.

We as writers often find ourselves writing what we know and oftentimes we need to step out of the box and write about things we would never in a million years do or say or try. Through our writing we can become the hero and the antagonist, the child or the dog. We’re writers so we can truly go places we’ve never gone before.

Writing through pure eyes is good but what kind of antagonist will you have? Have you ever seen a good bad guy? Sometimes the bad guy turns out to be a good guy in the end but those stories usually wind up boring and on the back of bookshelves or in some attic or worse yet in the dank basement being used to sop up moisture.

Haven’t you ever wanted to climb into a schizophrenic’s head, or an unstable killer on the loose? Have you ever dreamed of the ghosts that haunt those old Victorian mansions, Irish Castles?
Whatever the case may be, don’t be afraid to write about the bad things, the dark abyss that lingers in this world. Being a writer gives you the free blank page to bring some of the scariest, creepiest and soulless vile beings into existence.

I know of many writers that are afraid of crossing those boundaries of the different realms. They feel that those dark forces will lay claim to their soul or something. Don’t be afraid. Fear is the dark force that wants to grip you. If you don’t fear, you’ll be surprised at what comes out of your non-wicked mind.

Don’t tell me as a kid that you didn’t fantasize about space aliens, ghosts, space travel, or haunted houses. The bogeyman was a part of every child’s growing up phase. But as adult writers we can bring the bogeyman back to life.

Were you afraid of the dark? Maybe you feared walking alone in a park past midnight. Did you ever think these could be the seeds of a story brewing? Make mincemeat of all your fears through writing. Make Stephen King shiver in his boots! Watch Dean Koontz sleep with his light on at night!

Give the horror genre something to be proud of. Turn all your white light romantic fan fiction into the DARK. Let your inner evil loose on the writing world, just to see what you come up with.

Little writing exercises can help in this area. Your antagonist will thank you for it. *wink*wink*

Monday Funday Word day!
obfuscation - ob·fus·cate --
–verb (used with object), -cat·ed, -cat·ing.

1.to confuse, bewilder or stupefy
2.to make obscure or unclear:
3.to darken

turpitude - tur·pi·tude

1.vile, shameful, or base character; depravity
2.a vile or depraved act