I was in a Romance writing discussion on Google+ and somehow the subject of porn came up.
The question distilled from the discussion was: "How can a writer confront sexuality as a component of Romance with pure honesty, and still avoid writing porn?"
It seems obvious to me, and probably seems obvious to you as well -- but I've read a lot of Romance in various genre-mixtures, and I've only seen this done full-out, no holds barred, once -- and that was in a fanfic!
But that's where I learned to look for this subtle but extremely distinctive signature that divides erotica from porn. I believe the writer was a professional fiction writer who was writing fanfic because the story was organic to the TV show universe it was derived from. But maybe she (or he? who can tell?) was simply a good writer who had never felt like writing professionally (I've known many fanfic writers who work that way).
The technique is very simple to say but very difficult to do. In that, it's like the rule "Show Don't Tell" -- every writer presenting their work for evaluation and expecting praise believes with absolute conviction that they have indeed shown not told their story! Even when they have not.
And this simple distinction between erotica and porn is just exactly like that. Erotica writers believe they have in fact done this, when they have not.
The reader may not even notice the failing!
That's because it's a technique which combines most of the craft techniques we've explored in these Tuesday posts on this blog.
You've seen an accomplished portrait artist doing an oil painting, comparing the painting to the subject, putting down one brush, picking up another, dousing the brush with this and that, daubing on a bit of color, putting that brush down and selecting another -- considering, and selecting another, daubing, etc.
Writing a great sex scene is like that, at least the first few times you do it because you have to train yourself to the technique mixture. In that, writing sex scenes is just exactly like writing "action" or "chase" scenes -- an artform within a precisely defined structure.
Writing a great sex scene that isn't porn is just like painting a portrait.
A portrait isn't a photograph of reality; an erotic sex scene isn't REAL sex.
Exactly the same thing is said of dialogue -- good dialogue is not transcribed real speech.
Exactly the same thing is said of action -- good fight scenes are not REAL fighting.
Like a good portrait, a good sex scene is a selective representation of reality.
But above that and more than that, a good sex scene is a SCENE.
A "scene" is a clearly defined unit, a building block of story.
Like a "chapter" a scene does not start in an arbitrary place nor does it end in an arbitrary place. The "middle" point of a scene is not arbitrarily determined by dividing the number of words in half.
Like a novel, or a story of any length, a scene has a beginning, middle and end defined by what happens.
Here's part 2 of an entry here on scene structure with a link to the previous part.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
Here's a post with links to Verisimilitude vs. Reality series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html
Here's Plot vs. Story
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
Shifting Point of View
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/shifting-pov.html
And what you can do in a Novel that you can't do in a Film:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
All of these blog posts introduce concepts and techniques that must be orchestrated when you construct a sex scene that is not porn.
But we're talking here about the sex scene.
First and foremost, it must be a SCENE -- with all the components of a scene in their proper places and proportions as delineated in those previous posts.
Secondly, this peculiar scene, the sex scene, usually (not always) delineates an encounter between two people.
These two people do certain things to, with, beside, and for each other -- they interact.
Read that last sentence again, carefully and think about it hard. What does it really say about what the two people in the sex scene are DOING?
One acts, the other reacts by doing something, to which the first reacts by doing something, to which the second reacts by DOING something.
Read that last sentence again and think about it. What does it describe?
Does it describe a fight scene?
Does it describe a conversation? High Tea? A waltz? A chase scene?
It describes any and all of the above -- including a red-hot-steaming sex scene.
Just like a conversation, a sex scene can be in total private, in complete public (such as on a stage before an audience), in private but overheard or peeped at, etc.
So what exactly is a sex scene? What distinguishes it from other scenes in a story?
Is the distinguishing characteristic that the two people have, mimic, or approach and retreat from intercourse?
If that's the case, what exactly is intercourse that distinguishes it from a) violence b) chase c) conversation?
From the dramatist's point of view, strictly speaking, nothing distinguishes the sex scene from any of these other kinds of scenes.
All of these types of "scenes" (violence, chase, conversation, dance, -- anything two people do) is fundamentally sexual in nature.
The key to good drama of all kinds (mystery, suspense, wargames, strategy-and-tactics of say, Napoleon, Civil War, Helen of Troy, King Arthur) -- all of these kinds of drama are fundamentally sexual in nature, and the dramatic component takes its power, its fuel, from the basic human sex drive.
Watch some Indiana Jones movies with your finger on pause, and note down what happens in sequence in the chase scenes. Strip that out into RISING and FALLING tension -- look at the pattern. Use that pattern in a sex scene. DYNAMITE. Because that's what it is.
Or at least that's one way of looking at the world, or perhaps just the human world.
Personally, it's not my way of looking at the human world, but it is a way that I learned to look -- as a portrait artist has to learn to see light and shadow instead of a person. For me, it's an optical illusion, but a very useful one to a dramatist.
So if all dramatic art is essentially just a sex scene, what's the difference between eroticism and pornography?
It must be a very fine line because most people don't see it and don't really care. They either throw out all eroticism as porn or imbibe all porn as if it were mere eroticism.
To me, that's like saying a novel that has a Vampire as a character must be a horror novel.
That's actually a pretty good analogy because one easy way to get a handle on the difference between porn and eroticism is to understand the difference between "dark" and "light" in drama.
What is the difference between Romance and Horror?
In publishing jargon, Romance is a genre and Horror is a genre, and you can't mix them because their formulas are opposite.
All good Romance has to have an HEA - a Happily Ever After ending.
Romance may dip a tiny bit into the dark side of life, just for dramatic contrast, but the fundamental assumption of the nature of reality behind the Romance is the existence of the HEA, that it's real, permanent, attainable, and a final ending. You get to win.
All good Horror has to have an Equivocal Ending -- the nature of the universe is such that Evil can not be conquered by Good, nor can Good ever permanently be separated from Evil. All happiness is "just for now" -- and Evil Will Rise Again. Virtue, Honor, Good Deeds, etc do not exempt anyone from being wontonly destroyed by Evil. Horror lurks in the basement of reality. You can't win.
Which is true? Probably neither. These are marketing requirements, genres, not livable philosophies.
But understanding these two views of reality can give you a start at grasping the difference between erotica and porn.
Erotica is of the Light. Porn is of the Dark. (genre wise; not reality-wise).
To make the HEA possible, the couple involved in the sex scene has to achieve communication. That two-way flow of emotional understanding is the essence of Love and of Happiness. "When I tell him how I feel, he knows what I mean." That's erotica. It arouses the hope of fulfillment on a soul-level.
In a reality where the HEA is not possible, nobody can achieve communication with anyone else. Communication on an emotional level as well as a spiritual level is a thing of the Light - it makes us one with each other. Porn is a thing of the dark. It is self-gratification using another person without understanding that person's humanity or respecting the divine essence within the other human.
Humans, possessing an animal body, can have sex without communicating with each other. The exercise can go on and on, or repeat, without achieving an HEA, just as all animals do. Humans can go through the gymnastics of sexual intercourse without communicating. It even results in procreation! Or not.
And here's the shocker.
Humans can say words at each other without communicating, too.
Think of a punch-and-judy-puppet show. Round and round and round, with no resolution, no progress in the RELATIONSHIP, no change at the soul level. That's porn personified.
Now think of one of those scenes where the feuding couple get trapped in a collapsed mine in the dark, or imprisoned in adjacent cells with only a hole to talk to each other through -- the raw, defenses-down-communication with rock-bottom confessions, self-admissions, etc, -- true honesty. The relationship changes -- even if later, they deny it.
Now here's the secret I learned from a fanfic writer about sex scenes.
A Non-Porn Sex scene is a DIALOGUE SCENE, even when no word is spoken.
Caresses, movements, positions, shifts, touches of this part to that part, pauses for sensation to rise, fall, rise again -- it's DIALOGUE.
It's like sign language, a dialogue in movements.
And like dialogue in spoken words, it's not transcribed reality.
The rules for constructing such a conversation of caresses are the same as for constructing dialogue.
It's a discussion of problems. If it's just hitting, venting, yelling and using the other person as your emotional garbage pail, then it's porn. If it's a two-way dialogue, a problem solving session that results in a CHANGE IN THE SITUATION (as every scene must in a story) then it's erotica.
A sex scene is a scene first, sex later.
It must advance the story, and must do so in a limited number of words (based on a percentage of the total number of words in the piece) or it will distort the pacing.
The same is true of a dialogue scene where the characters only pace the room and talk, exchange information, duel innuendo, threaten, plan together, whatever they're doing -- if it's done in dialogue, it is still a scene first, dialogue second, and must conform to the structural requirements of a scene.
So there's the definition in a nutshell:
A sex scene is erotica if the participants communicate (albeit silently) to advance the plot and the story at a well-paced scene length toward a definitive resolution of the initial conflict.
A sex scene is pornography if the participants fail to communicate, and/or fail to advance the plot AND the story at a well-paced scene length and the activity does not lead to a definitive resolution of the initial conflict.
I saw this video series on YouTube which crystallizes these notions precisely.
The screenwriting teacher (famous for his screenwriting) says a writer doesn't write dialogue, a writer writes STORY.
And that's it. A writer doing a sex scene isn't writing sex, but STORY.
Now go analyze the movie DIRTY DANCING -- the older versions are better for this exercise. It's erotica, but by the standards of a culture long gone and buried, so you should be able to see the silent conversation with an alien's eye. By the older cultural standards, this film was "edgy" -- i.e. on the edge of what is publicly acceptable. Compare the older and newer versions for another lesson.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Showing posts with label Dirty Dancing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dirty Dancing. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Information Feed Tricks And Tips For Writers Part II - Definition of News
BUT FIRST (yes, this is news) -- I have to announce that the Sime~Gen Novels (by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Jean Lorrah, and various combinations of us) along with new ones, are now coming out in Kindle, Nook, Apple, and almost all other e-book formats, plus new paper availability. HOUSE OF ZEOR is available now in paper, in December 2011 on Kindle, Nook, other formats, so you can give it as a holiday gift.
You'll find news, updates, on this (huge) project on http://whatsnew.simegen.com/
Here is the link to my Kindle page which now has MOLT BROTHER and CITY OF A MILLION LEGENDS with the Dushau Trilogy and the omnibus Hero/Border Dispute in Kindle
http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fs%3Fie%3DUTF8%26x%3D12%26ref_%3Dnb_sb_noss%26y%3D16%26field-keywords%3DJacqueline%2520Lichtenberg%26url%3Dsearch-alias%253Ddigital-text&tag=rereadablebooksr&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=390957
And here's the link to Jean's page on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fs%3Fie%3DUTF8%26x%3D17%26ref_%3Dnb_sb_noss%26y%3D11%26field-keywords%3DJean%2520Lorrah%26url%3Dsearch-alias%253Ddigital-text&tag=rereadablebooksr&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=390957
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Now to work:
In Part I, posted Nov. 16, 2010 on
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/11/information-feed-tricks-and-tips-for.html
we discussed the 5 questions to answer in order to tease the tangled lump of a "story idea" out into a straight line and grind it into "bread-crumbs" that can be laid down to lead a reader into a huge universe.
We noted how the story and plot "dance" together, and how genre is a bit like different dances because of the pacing of that dance, waltz, fox trot, macarena, square dance, grand march, quadrille.
Notice how each dance name evokes era, pacing, dress, level of social intimacy, -- a whole story-universe in a word.
Your plot and your story "dance" together just like that, and readers choosing which book to buy recognize those dances and choose by their mood or taste. Your novel opening has to identify which "dance" your story and plot will be doing in order to engage the reader.
Readers will engage (or not) when they see that "first step" into the dance on the "downbeat" (on page 1) of your novel. From that first step, they know the name of the dance and the steps. They want to watch your characters do this dance because they've enjoyed watching others doing it - maybe they've done it themselves. They like this dance. The moves feel good.
The 5 questions we discussed last time lead you to name the dance (genre) for your novel, and to submerge out of sight all the pairs of characters doing a different dance, to put the spotlight on the couple (protagonist; antagonist -- or lovers-to-be) who will entertain us.
And now we'll add a 6th question, after we look more closely at the structure of a breadcrumb.
In this case, a "breadcrumb" is a tidbit of information about your universe, your characters, your story, that answers a question and contains the next question.
This is part of what we discussed in how to structure a scene, and string scenes together. As a professional reviewer, I've seen (and discarded) a number of mass market novels lately that fail at scene structure. To rise out of the pack after publication, structure your scenes thusly:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
Here is the key concept you need to be able to apply this writing technique of breadcrumbs and structured scenes to the tangled story-idea seething in your head so the plot and story "dance" with each other.
NEWS
That's it. That's the whole secret to generating suspense, creating a page-turner novel, writing non-fiction about boring topics and getting people to read it and talk about it.
News.
It's so simple a caveman can do it.
Do you have a "nose for news" as a journalist must?
Do you know the difference between news and gossip?
Why is it that seasoned journalists write novels that attract big publishers who lavish vast sums on publicity campaigns for them? (and they do marvelous scene structure, and sell film rights!)
Because working in journalism hones the "nose for news."
And "news" is what fiction-plotting is all about. No story is widely interesting unless it has a plot.
Here's where I showed you the difference between story and plot and how they're glued together into a novel.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html
In brief, I use the word "plot" to represent the chain of events initiated by the protagonist which culminates in the final climax, or resolution of the conflict.
I use the word "story" to represent the meaning of the events to the characters involved, and how the plot-events prompt or cause the characters to learn life-lessons, articulate theme, and change their actions. "Story" is the sequence of changes characters undergo as they "arc."
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
It doesn't matter what words you use to designate story-components.
Every professional writer understands fiction to be composed of components each of which does something important to communicate to the reader. It doesn't matter what you call the component, just so it does what it is there to do.
Editors, too, recognize those components (and call them by different names). And they recognize the dances between plot and story, and call them by different names. It just doesn't matter what you call it as long as you do it.
See the 7 part series on Editing starting here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
So using my definitions, (which I didn't make up, but learned from professionals) fiction-plotting is the process of taking that amorphous lump of material in your mind that you "just know" and are tangled up in because it's so interesting to you, and spreading that lump out into a straight line
You take the ball of string in your mind and unwind it, laying it down across your living room as many loops as necessary to get it all laid out.
Now you look at how long that string is. It may be several novels long. Don't try to stuff it all into one volume if it's too big.
How do you know how big it is?
A really big idea will have a lot of characters doing things that change everything, very likely dancing different dances between the character's story and the overall plot of the universe.
A really big idea will have characters who are massively changed by events.
That is there are lots of events, and characters learn huge lessons that turn their lives totally around.
The older the characters are, the more "backstory" they have accumulated through their lives, the wider the turning-radius for the ship of their life. Big characters make big changes one tiny event at a time.
Young characters can turn on a dime. One event, and BOOM, the teenager sees the light and starts behaving differently.
A fifty-year-old CEO of a corporation has a habit of life-coping-strategies ingrained into the subconscious. One event, they start fending off the temptation to wonder about their habits. Two, three, four, maybe they'll wonder. And so on -- takes a lot to change an older person, usually ending in a huge calamity and the necessity to risk all to save others.
So the age of the main characters, the number of main point of view characters, and the size of the character-arc is what determines how many novels it'll take, and how big those novels have to be.
Here's where to learn how to estimate the size of your project and how to construct theme-structures robust enough to support larger stories.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
If you make your characters "see the light" after one tiny event, you end up with something called "thin plotting" -- with a kind of comic-book or juvenile feel to it. Just not plausible because the character changed too much from too little impetus.
OK, so now you know how to unravel your universe from a ball of twine, separate out the odd little threads tangled through it, and straighten it out into a linear sequence of EVENTS (i.e. plot).
You have charted how the events affect the characters, so you have a story-line, all neatly linear.
Your interesting universe has become long and tedious -- even boring.
Now what do you do?
Like I said, the key is news.
To make it interesting, you FEED the INFORMATION you have organized into a linear sequence to the reader/viewer as one event after another. Breadcrumbs. Tiny ones, so the reader is kept hungry and looking for the next crumb in the trail.
Each event will be CAUSED by the previous event, and the first event is caused by the PROTAGONIST.
In Chess the first move is made by the white player - it's a protocol. In novels the protagonist is defined as the one who moves first. Usually, "pro" tagonist is defined as the one the reader is rooting for to win, and antagonist is the one the reader wants to lose.
A reader chooses a book off a bookstore shelf, or an editor chooses a manuscript out of a slush pile, or a reviewer (like me) chooses a book to read through with an eye to reviewing it, by reading the first paragraph.
If the "white" - protagonist - character to root for to win, isn't doing something in that first paragraph or first page to make the reader want that character to succeed in solving the problem presented in paragraph 1, the book will be tossed aside (unless of course you have a known byline, guaranteed to deliver the goods in the end).
If the story-plot dance doesn't have an interesting rhythm, the book will be tossed aside. There are a lot of other books that have the sought-for attribute. No need to read this one.
Now, it may be that the antagonist's action is EVENT 1 of your novel.
Your protagonist is sitting in his living room with his feet by the fire enjoying a pipe, and the antagonist breaks the door down and yanks him out of his comfortable home.
You, as the writer, must know why the antagonist attacked the protagonist.
But you don't tell the reader -- that would be boring exposition. The protagonist doesn't know, so why should the reader?
Instead, you keep it secret, but let the reader know you have a secret and that you will try to keep the reader from finding out what it is. That's the game you play with the reader - a game of wits. You lay down the breadcrumb trail and lead the reader on a merry chase, with just enough challenge to be fun.
Controlling that information feed, the space between breadcrumbs and the size of the crumbs, is your job as a writer. It's the skill and artform that makes you a story-teller.
So you go back to question 1 and question 2 in Part I of this post. Find out why you want to tell this story (it'll be the reason why the reader wants to read it).
Take your semantically loaded vocabulary list, and then describe the protagonist's comfy living room, the fire, the kind of socks he's wearing, anything he's doing or thinking, SYMBOLIZE his spiritual situation and his starting point -- SHOW DON'T TELL WHY THIS PROTAGONIST DESERVES TO BE ATTACKED - maybe not by this antagonist, but inherently needs to be attacked, and is just begging for it.
The first bit of news, the first breadcrumb, the reader should see has to symbolize and contain the answer to this new question:
6) What did this protagonist do to deserve this?
That is the content, the subtext, of the calm, quiet opening scene before the antagonist does something. It is the pose of the tango dancers on stage in Dirty Dancing, that indrawn breath before the downbeat AND!.
And this first breadcrumb then makes it clear to the reader that the protagonist has made the first move that has set this chain of EVENTS into motion. The protagonist's story is now dancing with the antagonist's plot.
It takes more skill to do that than to have both story and plot be driven by protagonist. Don't let the editors see you practicing.
You must pose this question of what the protagonist did to deserve this to the reader in such a way that there are many answers, and a lot of them are correct. Different readers will choose different answers, different ways of understanding this protagonist. Don't limit the reader here. Eventually, you want to have the audience dancing in the aisles.
Now back to NEWS. News is information that's added to what the hearer already knows that changes the significance of what they already know.
This concept NEWS is so important, and so much harder than it seems.
The exact same information presented one way is boring, another way is news.
What makes your boring universe interesting to your reader is that the reader encounters a bit of news that raises a question that changes a significance of what happened before.
The reader then strives to find the answer to that question.
In striving, the reader becomes invested in your universe, just as you are, and your universe becomes interesting to your reader, because they have a stake in "what happens next?" They've guessed what will happen, and now need to find out what will happen -- and if they find they're wrong, they have to see that what does happen is better than what they expected.
Oh, do watch Dirty Dancing again for that stage scene where they do the tango for the audience. Will she do the lift? Now compare the stage dance to the finale where she runs down the aisle at him. Study that film for the way the story and the plot "dance the tango" together. It's a very old film, and it still "works" because of how the story and the plot tango, while the surface of the thing is a girl learning to tango professionally.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092890/
But just because you can see some Hollywood writers did it, that doesn't mean you can just do it with your own material.
How did they do it?
Let's look at how to apply the idea of breadcrumbs as news items, or beats in the dance rhythm.
When you set out to write a novel, what you are actually doing is writing a NEWS ITEM FOR A NEWSPAPER OR TV SHOW.
The mental process you use is identical to that a journalist uses.
The journalist is using that process on "reality" -- the tangled mess of say a traffic accident caused by a bank robber fleeting the scene of a messed up getaway attempt facilitated by a bank employee who let the robber in, but the robber shot the employee on the way out, but the employee survived to testify, but the robber was paid to rob the bank by someone who wanted the employee dead because the employee was helping them launder money for a charity that was accused of (but innocent of) funneling money to Al Queda.
See?
Just as a news story unfolds from a twinkle of light ricocheting off a bit of metal hidden in deep shadow -- so too your novel must UNFOLD one tiny bit at a time in linear form.
Breadcrumb 1 is a traffic accident, Breadcrumb 2, protagonist is bank robber, and each crumb follows the last forming a trail into a huge news story (probably complete with a Trial scene - maybe jail visits, an appeal, being exonerated, getting out of jail free at last).
So just as a journalist needs a "nose for news"....
"Traffic accident? That was no ordinary traffic accident. Who was driving? Bank? What bank? ..."
-- so too does a fiction writer telling a wholly fabricated story.
Yet I've never seen anyone try to teach a beginning fiction writer how to find the news story inside the complex universe that comes with having "an idea."
Where do you get a "nose for news" -- how do you tell what's news and what isn't?
One reason so many of the new fiction writers trying for their first publications as self-published e-books are failing is that the TV news does not "model" (or demonstrate) the difference between what is news and what is not news.
The "news show" comes on, flicks through a few items that might be news worthy, then settles into long pieces on items that are absolutely not news but are labeled news. And so the definition of what is news is no longer ingrained in young minds from their earliest years. But it's still what novel readers want.
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Definition of News
Information that changes your understanding of what has happened before.
Information that changes your understanding of what will happen next.
Information that changes what the READER/VIEWER will anticipate.
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The essence of "news" -- change.
Most of what you see on "news" shows on TV these days isn't news.
Even "the top five stories" on the AP wire online are rarely all "news."
These news sources are advertising driven. Therefore they must attract not just large audiences, but audiences larger than the other news shows.
Advertisers pay per eyeball, not per news story. So instead of giving you the information you really need to know about (which would bore you away from the text), the "news" organizations are now giving you what you want to know about.
That would be fine, and really useful to fiction writers, provided we mostly wanted to know what we need to know.
If a novel gives you what you want to know, pretty soon you lose interest because "nothing's happening." What you want hasn't CHANGED. So you get bored.
It's the strangest thing. Satisfying a desire causes the desire to go away. You don't want your readers to go away too. Every once in a while, something has to happen to cause a new desire to know, a new curiosity. Something that makes the plot progress, something that CHANGES understanding of what is happening, has to emerge along the breadcrumb trail.
The schools in the USA have somehow fallen off the curve in terms of educating our children. Today they "get an education" instead of "become educated."
That huge difference has gone unnoticed, and as a result we have about two generations of people who are easily bored.
You can use that to make a living if you pay close attention to it.
Reading good novels can teach how to follow a breadcrumb trail, and how much fun it can be to out-figure the writer (i.e. dance with the writer).
People who "get an education" are taught what to think. They are forbidden or discouraged from reading the entire textbook for a course before Lesson Two or Class Two. They are discouraged from reading textbooks or sources other than the one chosen for the class, and if any test questions are answered with information from other sources, the answer is marked "wrong" even if it's right and the class text was wrong.
This starts in the earliest grades. It teaches that Authority is always right. Get to be an Authority and your opinion becomes fact for others whether they want that or not.
The implication is by extension that once you "finish" school, you stop learning. You've learned what to think. So you've no idea what to do with information that contradicts what you were taught. You've never seen a Teacher have to yield to a fact which contradicts the textbook. You don't know how to think.
Also the teaching techniques make learning boring, not fun, so nobody in their right mind would ever try to do any learning on their own.
Can you see what a huge readership awaits the clever author who studies TV News?
We had an incident in our neighborhood recently where some cars were broken into. The police responded in force and with a rolling crime lab (quite a sight!) but shrugged it off. They get a rash of car-break-ins every time school lets out.
The minute there are no classes they're forced to sit in, students stop learning.
That's failure to produce educated people, not failure to educate -- which is why we can't solve the problem of what's wrong with the schools. The politicians are trying to solve the wrong problem, so they make no progress on the real problem. (oh, what an opportunity for fiction writers!)
So when confronted with an authority like a TV screen that demonstrates "this is a news show" -- today's young students take the contents as the definition of what news is.
Later, having become well educated, perhaps in college or life, trying to write a novel, such a student will not know how to reduce the "idea" to a sequence of News Events - because they don't know what News is.
If you've been caught in this trap, and you've read this far, it's no problem anymore. Here's what you do.
1) Learn the definition of news above
2) Observe the world
3) Find the News out in the world
4) Compare with what the media label as news
Now, understand that your target readership for your novel is more confused than you ever were.
But it doesn't matter. Hit them with News along your plot-line and story-line, and they'll not only recognize it, but clamp their mental jaws on it and worry it like a dog with a bone until they crack it open and understand it to the marrow. And they'll learn how to think, not what to think.
That's what people do, whether they're smart or not, whether they're educated or not. It's a survival behavior, very cave-man, very primal.
Any information that CHANGES EVERYTHING is inherently fascinating, especially if it's a tip-of-the-iceburg, a hint of something hidden, better yet something SECRET, something the writer knows but isn't telling.
Practice identifying news in your everyday reality, and noticing how much of what is on the TV News is not news at all because knowing it changes nothing in your life.
Now, do the same thing with the characters in your novel.
Things they do and the things that happen that CHANGE NOTHING are not news, and therefore not interesting, not plot events, not story events. Skip them. They may happen, but they're not part of the scene structure.
Frame your scenes from the consequence of previous NEWS to the arrival of NEW NEWS.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
As the news arrives in your character's life, your character will change behavior, change opinions, ask new questions, seek new answers, understand how he/she was wrong to begin with and go through all the stages of adjusting to that shock. Hit the character with NEWS again before the shock wears off, and you've got a plot going that'll dance with your story.
NEWS moves the plot. NEWS moves the story.
That's the very definition of NEWS, you see. News changes things.
Now,Gossip.
Most of what comes off the TV News shows today is not news, but it is gossip. Usually, it's really good gossip, too.
What's the difference between news and gossip?
News changes things. News moves the plot. News moves the story. Gossip does NOT.
Gossip is stationary. Gossip goes around and around and AROUND the same material, perhaps revealing deeper rounds of more of the same juice, but changing nothing.
For example:
NEWS: A drunk driver drove a tractor-trailer rig off an overpass, and it fell onto a school bus in a freak accident on the first day of school. VIDEO: tractor-trailer spinning through air in improbable ballet.
NEWS: Driver of a car who was drunk when he hit a tractor-trailor rig that fell on a school bus killing twelve has been convicted and given a 20 year sentence.
Between those two news stories, our TV delivers gossip.
What the drunk driver's mother had for breakfast (beer?). Who sold the drunk driver other drugs. Funerals for the 12 kids killed. Interviews with doctors who prescribed impairing drugs for the drunk driver. Psychiatrist interviews. Drunk driver's brother's testimonials. A 1 hour feature on rehabilitation for the quadrapelegic tractor-trailer driver. Interviews with 3 people running for office who pledge to get the railing fixed on that overpass so nothing else falls off. Marches of anti-drunk-driver organizations.
All of that is gossip, not news. It's all interesting if you have a focus on drunk-driving, but it doesn't change anything for you (unless you drive drunk, that is).
That gossip would be news if that was the only freak traffic accident caused by drunk driving this year, or in 10 years, or ever.
In fact, what makes the steady stream of accident reports, fires in apartment buildings, bank or 7-11 robberies, kidnappings, missing children, gossip rather than news is that the events focused on are not unique.
NEWS: Traffic fatalities are down 20% year over year as a result of enforcement of the new cell phone laws. (uh-oh I better get a hands-free cell rig for my car)
GOSSIP: a tractor-trailer fell on a schoolbus killing 12. It was awful for everyone involved. It was really awful. It was even more awful than that. (oh, that's terrible; maybe I'll donate some money)
If a story on the tractor-trailer accident were about the first and only time any such event had been handled by "the system" then how it was handled would be news you could use in voting on how the system should be changed to avoid this in the future.
Another example: the coverage of the BP Gulf Oil disaster.
A good 10% of that coverage was actually NEWS. We needed to know what had happened, how it happened, why it happened, what was being done to fix it, and the results of the efforts, and eventually (not during) who was responsible and what penalty was leveled at them (so we can vote for Congressmen who advocate new laws).
But go over the coverage and you'll see that information is buried amidst huge heaps of gossip.
Note the questions: WHO, WHEN, WHAT, HOW, WHY. News answers those questions, and that's it. The rest is "color" and "filler" -- details that you don't really need to read or remember.
Detail can, however, be important. It speaks volumes beyond the hidden opinion that twists the essential facts. From the details in a news story you can reverse engineer the news into what really did happen, the actual facts, if you understand the difference between news and gossip.
But, as with fiction, too much detail obscures the useful information feed, and ultimately bores.
So TV News laden with gossip function to direct attention away from the actual facts, to dwell on the unimportant, the data that isn't information until viewers get bored and go away. (that systematic process is now called a news-cycle and lasts about a day for most events). When Neilsen's ratings drop, they move on to another story.
Given that this kind of gossip-laden TV News is how audiences have been trained to view news, the clever fiction writer can imitate the rhythm that glues that huge audience to their screens, and sell a lot of books.
Finding that balance between News and Gossip, the rhythm, the spacing between bread-crumbs, the style of the dance between story and plot, the fiction writer can plant breadcrumbs of news for the characters to discover along the way and keep readers glued to the page.
We may be back to this subject to study the composition of crumbs, so in the meantime, study the structure of your favorite TV News, and then study the News shows you really hate (those are the most revealing).
Channel surf from one news show to another, watch the placement and duration of commercials, chart that throughout the day (prime time news has more commercials and shorter intervals). Think about "who" those commercials are aimed at - that gives you the demographics of the audience, and you can therefore see how the content of the show is crafted to grab that specific audience.
Selling fiction to an Agent who sells to an Editor who has to enthuse to the Marketing Department, etc. is the same process in reverse. Reversing your mind is hard, but it's the difference between a reader and a writer, a viewer and a TV News Editor.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
You'll find news, updates, on this (huge) project on http://whatsnew.simegen.com/
Here is the link to my Kindle page which now has MOLT BROTHER and CITY OF A MILLION LEGENDS with the Dushau Trilogy and the omnibus Hero/Border Dispute in Kindle
http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fs%3Fie%3DUTF8%26x%3D12%26ref_%3Dnb_sb_noss%26y%3D16%26field-keywords%3DJacqueline%2520Lichtenberg%26url%3Dsearch-alias%253Ddigital-text&tag=rereadablebooksr&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=390957
And here's the link to Jean's page on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fs%3Fie%3DUTF8%26x%3D17%26ref_%3Dnb_sb_noss%26y%3D11%26field-keywords%3DJean%2520Lorrah%26url%3Dsearch-alias%253Ddigital-text&tag=rereadablebooksr&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=390957
---------------------
Now to work:
In Part I, posted Nov. 16, 2010 on
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/11/information-feed-tricks-and-tips-for.html
we discussed the 5 questions to answer in order to tease the tangled lump of a "story idea" out into a straight line and grind it into "bread-crumbs" that can be laid down to lead a reader into a huge universe.
We noted how the story and plot "dance" together, and how genre is a bit like different dances because of the pacing of that dance, waltz, fox trot, macarena, square dance, grand march, quadrille.
Notice how each dance name evokes era, pacing, dress, level of social intimacy, -- a whole story-universe in a word.
Your plot and your story "dance" together just like that, and readers choosing which book to buy recognize those dances and choose by their mood or taste. Your novel opening has to identify which "dance" your story and plot will be doing in order to engage the reader.
Readers will engage (or not) when they see that "first step" into the dance on the "downbeat" (on page 1) of your novel. From that first step, they know the name of the dance and the steps. They want to watch your characters do this dance because they've enjoyed watching others doing it - maybe they've done it themselves. They like this dance. The moves feel good.
The 5 questions we discussed last time lead you to name the dance (genre) for your novel, and to submerge out of sight all the pairs of characters doing a different dance, to put the spotlight on the couple (protagonist; antagonist -- or lovers-to-be) who will entertain us.
And now we'll add a 6th question, after we look more closely at the structure of a breadcrumb.
In this case, a "breadcrumb" is a tidbit of information about your universe, your characters, your story, that answers a question and contains the next question.
This is part of what we discussed in how to structure a scene, and string scenes together. As a professional reviewer, I've seen (and discarded) a number of mass market novels lately that fail at scene structure. To rise out of the pack after publication, structure your scenes thusly:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
Here is the key concept you need to be able to apply this writing technique of breadcrumbs and structured scenes to the tangled story-idea seething in your head so the plot and story "dance" with each other.
NEWS
That's it. That's the whole secret to generating suspense, creating a page-turner novel, writing non-fiction about boring topics and getting people to read it and talk about it.
News.
It's so simple a caveman can do it.
Do you have a "nose for news" as a journalist must?
Do you know the difference between news and gossip?
Why is it that seasoned journalists write novels that attract big publishers who lavish vast sums on publicity campaigns for them? (and they do marvelous scene structure, and sell film rights!)
Because working in journalism hones the "nose for news."
And "news" is what fiction-plotting is all about. No story is widely interesting unless it has a plot.
Here's where I showed you the difference between story and plot and how they're glued together into a novel.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html
In brief, I use the word "plot" to represent the chain of events initiated by the protagonist which culminates in the final climax, or resolution of the conflict.
I use the word "story" to represent the meaning of the events to the characters involved, and how the plot-events prompt or cause the characters to learn life-lessons, articulate theme, and change their actions. "Story" is the sequence of changes characters undergo as they "arc."
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
It doesn't matter what words you use to designate story-components.
Every professional writer understands fiction to be composed of components each of which does something important to communicate to the reader. It doesn't matter what you call the component, just so it does what it is there to do.
Editors, too, recognize those components (and call them by different names). And they recognize the dances between plot and story, and call them by different names. It just doesn't matter what you call it as long as you do it.
See the 7 part series on Editing starting here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
So using my definitions, (which I didn't make up, but learned from professionals) fiction-plotting is the process of taking that amorphous lump of material in your mind that you "just know" and are tangled up in because it's so interesting to you, and spreading that lump out into a straight line
You take the ball of string in your mind and unwind it, laying it down across your living room as many loops as necessary to get it all laid out.
Now you look at how long that string is. It may be several novels long. Don't try to stuff it all into one volume if it's too big.
How do you know how big it is?
A really big idea will have a lot of characters doing things that change everything, very likely dancing different dances between the character's story and the overall plot of the universe.
A really big idea will have characters who are massively changed by events.
That is there are lots of events, and characters learn huge lessons that turn their lives totally around.
The older the characters are, the more "backstory" they have accumulated through their lives, the wider the turning-radius for the ship of their life. Big characters make big changes one tiny event at a time.
Young characters can turn on a dime. One event, and BOOM, the teenager sees the light and starts behaving differently.
A fifty-year-old CEO of a corporation has a habit of life-coping-strategies ingrained into the subconscious. One event, they start fending off the temptation to wonder about their habits. Two, three, four, maybe they'll wonder. And so on -- takes a lot to change an older person, usually ending in a huge calamity and the necessity to risk all to save others.
So the age of the main characters, the number of main point of view characters, and the size of the character-arc is what determines how many novels it'll take, and how big those novels have to be.
Here's where to learn how to estimate the size of your project and how to construct theme-structures robust enough to support larger stories.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
If you make your characters "see the light" after one tiny event, you end up with something called "thin plotting" -- with a kind of comic-book or juvenile feel to it. Just not plausible because the character changed too much from too little impetus.
OK, so now you know how to unravel your universe from a ball of twine, separate out the odd little threads tangled through it, and straighten it out into a linear sequence of EVENTS (i.e. plot).
You have charted how the events affect the characters, so you have a story-line, all neatly linear.
Your interesting universe has become long and tedious -- even boring.
Now what do you do?
Like I said, the key is news.
To make it interesting, you FEED the INFORMATION you have organized into a linear sequence to the reader/viewer as one event after another. Breadcrumbs. Tiny ones, so the reader is kept hungry and looking for the next crumb in the trail.
Each event will be CAUSED by the previous event, and the first event is caused by the PROTAGONIST.
In Chess the first move is made by the white player - it's a protocol. In novels the protagonist is defined as the one who moves first. Usually, "pro" tagonist is defined as the one the reader is rooting for to win, and antagonist is the one the reader wants to lose.
A reader chooses a book off a bookstore shelf, or an editor chooses a manuscript out of a slush pile, or a reviewer (like me) chooses a book to read through with an eye to reviewing it, by reading the first paragraph.
If the "white" - protagonist - character to root for to win, isn't doing something in that first paragraph or first page to make the reader want that character to succeed in solving the problem presented in paragraph 1, the book will be tossed aside (unless of course you have a known byline, guaranteed to deliver the goods in the end).
If the story-plot dance doesn't have an interesting rhythm, the book will be tossed aside. There are a lot of other books that have the sought-for attribute. No need to read this one.
Now, it may be that the antagonist's action is EVENT 1 of your novel.
Your protagonist is sitting in his living room with his feet by the fire enjoying a pipe, and the antagonist breaks the door down and yanks him out of his comfortable home.
You, as the writer, must know why the antagonist attacked the protagonist.
But you don't tell the reader -- that would be boring exposition. The protagonist doesn't know, so why should the reader?
Instead, you keep it secret, but let the reader know you have a secret and that you will try to keep the reader from finding out what it is. That's the game you play with the reader - a game of wits. You lay down the breadcrumb trail and lead the reader on a merry chase, with just enough challenge to be fun.
Controlling that information feed, the space between breadcrumbs and the size of the crumbs, is your job as a writer. It's the skill and artform that makes you a story-teller.
So you go back to question 1 and question 2 in Part I of this post. Find out why you want to tell this story (it'll be the reason why the reader wants to read it).
Take your semantically loaded vocabulary list, and then describe the protagonist's comfy living room, the fire, the kind of socks he's wearing, anything he's doing or thinking, SYMBOLIZE his spiritual situation and his starting point -- SHOW DON'T TELL WHY THIS PROTAGONIST DESERVES TO BE ATTACKED - maybe not by this antagonist, but inherently needs to be attacked, and is just begging for it.
The first bit of news, the first breadcrumb, the reader should see has to symbolize and contain the answer to this new question:
6) What did this protagonist do to deserve this?
That is the content, the subtext, of the calm, quiet opening scene before the antagonist does something. It is the pose of the tango dancers on stage in Dirty Dancing, that indrawn breath before the downbeat AND!.
And this first breadcrumb then makes it clear to the reader that the protagonist has made the first move that has set this chain of EVENTS into motion. The protagonist's story is now dancing with the antagonist's plot.
It takes more skill to do that than to have both story and plot be driven by protagonist. Don't let the editors see you practicing.
You must pose this question of what the protagonist did to deserve this to the reader in such a way that there are many answers, and a lot of them are correct. Different readers will choose different answers, different ways of understanding this protagonist. Don't limit the reader here. Eventually, you want to have the audience dancing in the aisles.
Now back to NEWS. News is information that's added to what the hearer already knows that changes the significance of what they already know.
This concept NEWS is so important, and so much harder than it seems.
The exact same information presented one way is boring, another way is news.
What makes your boring universe interesting to your reader is that the reader encounters a bit of news that raises a question that changes a significance of what happened before.
The reader then strives to find the answer to that question.
In striving, the reader becomes invested in your universe, just as you are, and your universe becomes interesting to your reader, because they have a stake in "what happens next?" They've guessed what will happen, and now need to find out what will happen -- and if they find they're wrong, they have to see that what does happen is better than what they expected.
Oh, do watch Dirty Dancing again for that stage scene where they do the tango for the audience. Will she do the lift? Now compare the stage dance to the finale where she runs down the aisle at him. Study that film for the way the story and the plot "dance the tango" together. It's a very old film, and it still "works" because of how the story and the plot tango, while the surface of the thing is a girl learning to tango professionally.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092890/
But just because you can see some Hollywood writers did it, that doesn't mean you can just do it with your own material.
How did they do it?
Let's look at how to apply the idea of breadcrumbs as news items, or beats in the dance rhythm.
When you set out to write a novel, what you are actually doing is writing a NEWS ITEM FOR A NEWSPAPER OR TV SHOW.
The mental process you use is identical to that a journalist uses.
The journalist is using that process on "reality" -- the tangled mess of say a traffic accident caused by a bank robber fleeting the scene of a messed up getaway attempt facilitated by a bank employee who let the robber in, but the robber shot the employee on the way out, but the employee survived to testify, but the robber was paid to rob the bank by someone who wanted the employee dead because the employee was helping them launder money for a charity that was accused of (but innocent of) funneling money to Al Queda.
See?
Just as a news story unfolds from a twinkle of light ricocheting off a bit of metal hidden in deep shadow -- so too your novel must UNFOLD one tiny bit at a time in linear form.
Breadcrumb 1 is a traffic accident, Breadcrumb 2, protagonist is bank robber, and each crumb follows the last forming a trail into a huge news story (probably complete with a Trial scene - maybe jail visits, an appeal, being exonerated, getting out of jail free at last).
So just as a journalist needs a "nose for news"....
"Traffic accident? That was no ordinary traffic accident. Who was driving? Bank? What bank? ..."
-- so too does a fiction writer telling a wholly fabricated story.
Yet I've never seen anyone try to teach a beginning fiction writer how to find the news story inside the complex universe that comes with having "an idea."
Where do you get a "nose for news" -- how do you tell what's news and what isn't?
One reason so many of the new fiction writers trying for their first publications as self-published e-books are failing is that the TV news does not "model" (or demonstrate) the difference between what is news and what is not news.
The "news show" comes on, flicks through a few items that might be news worthy, then settles into long pieces on items that are absolutely not news but are labeled news. And so the definition of what is news is no longer ingrained in young minds from their earliest years. But it's still what novel readers want.
-----------
Definition of News
Information that changes your understanding of what has happened before.
Information that changes your understanding of what will happen next.
Information that changes what the READER/VIEWER will anticipate.
-----------
The essence of "news" -- change.
Most of what you see on "news" shows on TV these days isn't news.
Even "the top five stories" on the AP wire online are rarely all "news."
These news sources are advertising driven. Therefore they must attract not just large audiences, but audiences larger than the other news shows.
Advertisers pay per eyeball, not per news story. So instead of giving you the information you really need to know about (which would bore you away from the text), the "news" organizations are now giving you what you want to know about.
That would be fine, and really useful to fiction writers, provided we mostly wanted to know what we need to know.
If a novel gives you what you want to know, pretty soon you lose interest because "nothing's happening." What you want hasn't CHANGED. So you get bored.
It's the strangest thing. Satisfying a desire causes the desire to go away. You don't want your readers to go away too. Every once in a while, something has to happen to cause a new desire to know, a new curiosity. Something that makes the plot progress, something that CHANGES understanding of what is happening, has to emerge along the breadcrumb trail.
The schools in the USA have somehow fallen off the curve in terms of educating our children. Today they "get an education" instead of "become educated."
That huge difference has gone unnoticed, and as a result we have about two generations of people who are easily bored.
You can use that to make a living if you pay close attention to it.
Reading good novels can teach how to follow a breadcrumb trail, and how much fun it can be to out-figure the writer (i.e. dance with the writer).
People who "get an education" are taught what to think. They are forbidden or discouraged from reading the entire textbook for a course before Lesson Two or Class Two. They are discouraged from reading textbooks or sources other than the one chosen for the class, and if any test questions are answered with information from other sources, the answer is marked "wrong" even if it's right and the class text was wrong.
This starts in the earliest grades. It teaches that Authority is always right. Get to be an Authority and your opinion becomes fact for others whether they want that or not.
The implication is by extension that once you "finish" school, you stop learning. You've learned what to think. So you've no idea what to do with information that contradicts what you were taught. You've never seen a Teacher have to yield to a fact which contradicts the textbook. You don't know how to think.
Also the teaching techniques make learning boring, not fun, so nobody in their right mind would ever try to do any learning on their own.
Can you see what a huge readership awaits the clever author who studies TV News?
We had an incident in our neighborhood recently where some cars were broken into. The police responded in force and with a rolling crime lab (quite a sight!) but shrugged it off. They get a rash of car-break-ins every time school lets out.
The minute there are no classes they're forced to sit in, students stop learning.
That's failure to produce educated people, not failure to educate -- which is why we can't solve the problem of what's wrong with the schools. The politicians are trying to solve the wrong problem, so they make no progress on the real problem. (oh, what an opportunity for fiction writers!)
So when confronted with an authority like a TV screen that demonstrates "this is a news show" -- today's young students take the contents as the definition of what news is.
Later, having become well educated, perhaps in college or life, trying to write a novel, such a student will not know how to reduce the "idea" to a sequence of News Events - because they don't know what News is.
If you've been caught in this trap, and you've read this far, it's no problem anymore. Here's what you do.
1) Learn the definition of news above
2) Observe the world
3) Find the News out in the world
4) Compare with what the media label as news
Now, understand that your target readership for your novel is more confused than you ever were.
But it doesn't matter. Hit them with News along your plot-line and story-line, and they'll not only recognize it, but clamp their mental jaws on it and worry it like a dog with a bone until they crack it open and understand it to the marrow. And they'll learn how to think, not what to think.
That's what people do, whether they're smart or not, whether they're educated or not. It's a survival behavior, very cave-man, very primal.
Any information that CHANGES EVERYTHING is inherently fascinating, especially if it's a tip-of-the-iceburg, a hint of something hidden, better yet something SECRET, something the writer knows but isn't telling.
Practice identifying news in your everyday reality, and noticing how much of what is on the TV News is not news at all because knowing it changes nothing in your life.
Now, do the same thing with the characters in your novel.
Things they do and the things that happen that CHANGE NOTHING are not news, and therefore not interesting, not plot events, not story events. Skip them. They may happen, but they're not part of the scene structure.
Frame your scenes from the consequence of previous NEWS to the arrival of NEW NEWS.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
As the news arrives in your character's life, your character will change behavior, change opinions, ask new questions, seek new answers, understand how he/she was wrong to begin with and go through all the stages of adjusting to that shock. Hit the character with NEWS again before the shock wears off, and you've got a plot going that'll dance with your story.
NEWS moves the plot. NEWS moves the story.
That's the very definition of NEWS, you see. News changes things.
Now,Gossip.
Most of what comes off the TV News shows today is not news, but it is gossip. Usually, it's really good gossip, too.
What's the difference between news and gossip?
News changes things. News moves the plot. News moves the story. Gossip does NOT.
Gossip is stationary. Gossip goes around and around and AROUND the same material, perhaps revealing deeper rounds of more of the same juice, but changing nothing.
For example:
NEWS: A drunk driver drove a tractor-trailer rig off an overpass, and it fell onto a school bus in a freak accident on the first day of school. VIDEO: tractor-trailer spinning through air in improbable ballet.
NEWS: Driver of a car who was drunk when he hit a tractor-trailor rig that fell on a school bus killing twelve has been convicted and given a 20 year sentence.
Between those two news stories, our TV delivers gossip.
What the drunk driver's mother had for breakfast (beer?). Who sold the drunk driver other drugs. Funerals for the 12 kids killed. Interviews with doctors who prescribed impairing drugs for the drunk driver. Psychiatrist interviews. Drunk driver's brother's testimonials. A 1 hour feature on rehabilitation for the quadrapelegic tractor-trailer driver. Interviews with 3 people running for office who pledge to get the railing fixed on that overpass so nothing else falls off. Marches of anti-drunk-driver organizations.
All of that is gossip, not news. It's all interesting if you have a focus on drunk-driving, but it doesn't change anything for you (unless you drive drunk, that is).
That gossip would be news if that was the only freak traffic accident caused by drunk driving this year, or in 10 years, or ever.
In fact, what makes the steady stream of accident reports, fires in apartment buildings, bank or 7-11 robberies, kidnappings, missing children, gossip rather than news is that the events focused on are not unique.
NEWS: Traffic fatalities are down 20% year over year as a result of enforcement of the new cell phone laws. (uh-oh I better get a hands-free cell rig for my car)
GOSSIP: a tractor-trailer fell on a schoolbus killing 12. It was awful for everyone involved. It was really awful. It was even more awful than that. (oh, that's terrible; maybe I'll donate some money)
If a story on the tractor-trailer accident were about the first and only time any such event had been handled by "the system" then how it was handled would be news you could use in voting on how the system should be changed to avoid this in the future.
Another example: the coverage of the BP Gulf Oil disaster.
A good 10% of that coverage was actually NEWS. We needed to know what had happened, how it happened, why it happened, what was being done to fix it, and the results of the efforts, and eventually (not during) who was responsible and what penalty was leveled at them (so we can vote for Congressmen who advocate new laws).
But go over the coverage and you'll see that information is buried amidst huge heaps of gossip.
Note the questions: WHO, WHEN, WHAT, HOW, WHY. News answers those questions, and that's it. The rest is "color" and "filler" -- details that you don't really need to read or remember.
Detail can, however, be important. It speaks volumes beyond the hidden opinion that twists the essential facts. From the details in a news story you can reverse engineer the news into what really did happen, the actual facts, if you understand the difference between news and gossip.
But, as with fiction, too much detail obscures the useful information feed, and ultimately bores.
So TV News laden with gossip function to direct attention away from the actual facts, to dwell on the unimportant, the data that isn't information until viewers get bored and go away. (that systematic process is now called a news-cycle and lasts about a day for most events). When Neilsen's ratings drop, they move on to another story.
Given that this kind of gossip-laden TV News is how audiences have been trained to view news, the clever fiction writer can imitate the rhythm that glues that huge audience to their screens, and sell a lot of books.
Finding that balance between News and Gossip, the rhythm, the spacing between bread-crumbs, the style of the dance between story and plot, the fiction writer can plant breadcrumbs of news for the characters to discover along the way and keep readers glued to the page.
We may be back to this subject to study the composition of crumbs, so in the meantime, study the structure of your favorite TV News, and then study the News shows you really hate (those are the most revealing).
Channel surf from one news show to another, watch the placement and duration of commercials, chart that throughout the day (prime time news has more commercials and shorter intervals). Think about "who" those commercials are aimed at - that gives you the demographics of the audience, and you can therefore see how the content of the show is crafted to grab that specific audience.
Selling fiction to an Agent who sells to an Editor who has to enthuse to the Marketing Department, etc. is the same process in reverse. Reversing your mind is hard, but it's the difference between a reader and a writer, a viewer and a TV News Editor.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Information Feed Tricks And Tips For Writers Part I - Definition of News
In college, there are majors for Creative Writing, for Journalism, and for various skill sets that fiction writers need -- such as English, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology.
But there are no actual majors in COMMERCIAL FICTION WRITING that I know of. If you find one that covers the material I've been including in these blog posts, please drop a comment here.
There's a major for Music Arts. But not a corresponding one for Fiction Arts to prepare you for a career in fiction writing, editing, publishing, or fictioneering in various other media such as comics, animation, dramatic writing, etc. The stage arts have a major, and so do the screen arts. But where is the major in writing novels for the commercial market?
Isn't that curious? If you want to become a professional novelist or editor you are on your own after college, and woe betide you if you didn't take the courses you need. But of course, nobody will tell you what those course are before you start college.
Now, the brutal truth is that there is a living to be made in Journalism, but very rarely in commercial fiction writing. Perhaps that's why there's no major?
Oddly, most of the best selling novels I've encountered lately were written by Journalists with long track records in magazines and newspapers.
News "papers" are dying, but "news" and news gathering and news writing are still here.
A lot of journalists are going indie after being laid off from newspapers.
And they are doing very well with blogging and building audiences that click on advertising links for which they get paid. Huffington Post, Politico and similar blog-sites have real, well trained journalists both announcing and commenting on the day's events.
Fiction writers are going indie with either publishing their own e-books or finding new e-book publishers that do packaging and presentation, but usually the writer then has to do promotion, publicity and advertising.
However, non-fiction is doing much better than fiction in paper editions, so it's worth studying non-fiction closely for clues, tips and tricks.
The competition for the attention of readers and viewers is more fierce than ever. There is a growing population, and more people online willing to read (more enchanted by images on YouTube, true, but still reading a lot), but there are more people writing and creating videos, more different media that are accessible to the indie creator, so that the result is more stuff for each reader to choose from.
There's the information glut come to full fruition just as predicted in the 1970's.
How do you, as a fiction writer, attract and hold attention?
Writing teachers will tell you that the core of that trick is "suspense." And you can see that trick being used on TV news programs as "the teaser."
Just before a commercial, they will announce what they're going to cover "next" and tell you something about it that makes you want to hear that item. When they get back from the break, they go on about some other item, with yet another "teaser" about the item that you wanted to hear about, repeatedly putting it off until the end of the show.
They string you along like that with artificially generated suspense.
If you're smart, you give up, channel surf, get bored, and go google the item up. It'll take you five minutes to find out what you wanted to know instead of sitting around for an hour watching commercials.
But solid research shows people do sit there in suspense, waiting, and letting the commercials wash over them. Research shows exposure to those commercials does change behavior later in the stores. (Sad, horrifying, but true, which is why they do it.)
Series TV fiction does the same kind of artificial suspense, cutting to commercial just where you want to see what's coming next. Good fiction writers do that at chapter ends and scene ends.
The tricks and tips for how to structure a scene so suspense is built "naturally" rather than "artificially" by tricking the reader into waiting are in these posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
Suspense works every time to create a "page turner" when it's not done as a "delay" or a "digression." Why is that and how do you learn to do it with your own material? And how do you tell a "delay" or "digression" from real suspense technique when you're the one who's written it? How do you test your own material to see if you've achieved "suspense?" (after all, you know what comes next, so you can't feel the suspense you are generating!)
How do you take a story you have had erupt into your mind whole cloth, a universe, a character, a whole complex situation that is too fascinating for words, that spreads over galaxies and is built on centuries of political history, that has the characters entangled in a huge web of bizarre science unthinkable by your reader, and criss-crossing love affairs finally erupting into True Love, and make that reader see what is fascinating about it?
Suspense is not fascinating. It makes you impatient. "Get on with it already!"
To get suspense to work for you as a writer to attract and hold a reader, you need to achieve a pace that the reader is comfortable with.
In previous blog entries here I've defined how I use the word "pace" to mean "rate of change of Situation" rather than "fast action" or "how many fight scenes how close together."
One error many beginning writers (even selling professionals!) make is to blow the suspense right at the beginning of the novel by TELLING the background.
That creates an expository lump
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html
right at the opening.
Expository lumps are long sections (3 paragraphs or more; half a page even can be a lump) during which the Situation does not change, but the writer stops the forward momentum of the story to "fill the reader in" by telling about the background, or what has happened before, or what is happening off stage, all very interesting to the writer and crazy-boring to the reader because it does not go where the reader wants to go. Ahead.
Here's an example of how to show not tell the material in an opening paragraph of exposition so that it becomes dramatized narrative:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/tv-show-white-collar-fanfic-and-show.html
But that was just one paragraph of information. How do you dissect out the pieces of "an idea" that arrives with a whole Universe attached and lay it out in linear form so that someone who does not know everything about it can see just how fascinating it is?
How do you grind your idea up into bread crumbs and lay them out in a linear trail for the curious reader to follow to your HEA ending?
Well, there is a technique for that which I call INFORMATION FEED.
Every bit of "information" becomes a crumb to be laid down in a trail for the reader to follow. Pacing is all about how far apart you put the crumbs.
Here's how you take a lump of a universe and create a linear "feed" of information.
1) Ask yourself, "Why do I want to write this story?" What is the payload you want to deliver?
2) Find the vocabulary that scintillates with hints of that payload. It's all about semantics. Find the semantically loaded vocabulary you need.
3) Ask yourself, "Why would anyone NOT be interested in this?" What's boring about your universe?
4) Ask yourself, "What does my typical reader want to read about?" Tease that subject out of the morass of the "idea" you have. It's in there somewhere, but you have to bring it to the surface by submerging the rest. "Submerged" material is what gives fiction "depth." The more you submerge, the more "classic" your work will be. But submerge it under something clean, clear, simple, something you can express in one sentence.
5) Ask yourself, "What does my typical reader want to know first?" What will show the reader that this breadcrumb trail will lead to the payload that reader enjoys most at the end of the story. (i.e. the "HEA" ending, the "enemies vaquished" ending, the "hero triumphant" ending, or the "poignant loss of everything" or the "villain gets his comeuppance" ending, or the "villain becomes hero" ending).
With those 5 Answers, you now have some facts about this story that you can arrange into a series, a trail of breadcrumbs. You might have to switch it around several ways before you find the right path into the story, but you no longer have an amorphous lump.
The trick is to sort the lump so that the reader doesn't have to know all about the universe, the politics, the historic wars among kingdoms or galaxies, the succession to the throne, or anything else before the story starts. See? To have "pacing" the story and the plot must start to dance with each other, not just stand there and wait while you explain the history of the dance steps.
From those 5 answers on, your job becomes very much like plotting a mystery.
You stretch the information into a line of clues, and the protagonist follows his/her nose through to the end.
Suspense is created by what the reader does not know that the writer does know.
But the reader must never sense that the writer is "withholding" information. Suspense and surprise endings are not created by keeping the reader ignorant, but by keeping the reader engaged, moving (pacing) from one bit of information to the next at a rate that satisfies the reader.
To formulate that all important "beginning," the "downbeat" of the dance music between plot and story, choose semantically loaded words, words fraught with subtext, and weave them into a seductive, rhythmic sentence which carries the promise that you will answer the questions it raises as the story unfolds.
In the first sentence, reveal the first breadcrumb.
That will tell the reader if it's rye, whole wheat, or barley bread -- maybe raisin?
Simple choice of vocabulary can establish genre and invite the book-browser to work to figure out whether they want to buy this book by searching for the next breadcrumb.
Within a few paragraphs, reveal the next breadcrumb.
The space between breadcrumbs then defines the rhythm of the piece, the type of dance between story and plot: waltz, cha-cha, boogie, adagio, tap, break, macarena, tango!
The rest of the information on defining the conflict, the characters, and the setting is transmitted by implication, hint, symbolism, imagery, by careful selection of DETAIL.
Every detail you mention overtly when describing a scene (the color of the carpeting, the provenance of the vase on the mantel) carries information by inference. That you selected this detail to emphasize, rather than leaving it to the reader's imagination, indicates that it's important and must be remembered.
Too much detail, and the reader feels they're working too hard for too little reward. Lard in extra detail between breadcrumbs, and the effort-to-reward ratio becomes way too large. The book is not worth reading.
Too little detail between breadcrumbs, and the book is too "thin," too transparent, boring and not worth reading.
Get the proportion of detail to breadcrumbs, the distance between those crumbs of information wrong, and for the book-browser, it's like sticking their head into a room where someone is practicing playing the violin, one scratchy note at a time with repeated tries at hitting the note. The plot and story aren't dancing. There's no performance to watch.
Get the proportion of detail to breadcrumbs, and the distance between those crumbs of information just right, and the suspense becomes as engaging as watching the stage in the film Dirty Dancing when the lights come up revealing a couple posed just so, dressed just so, -- no other details on that stage but the spotlight, and you can tell they are about to tango and it'll be hellishly sexy. The downbeat, AND!, movement, suggestive, fascinating -- will she make the lift or not?
You don't have to have watched the movie up to that point to stare at the screen, holding your breath as they tango. The suspense is so thick you can cut it with a knife.
But it's natural suspense, inherent in the Situation, not artificial. The prior information about how he taught her this one dance in order to fill in as his partner, enhances the suspense, but doesn't create it.
Watch that scene in Dirty Dancing out of context. Watch how the camera "reveals" the old couple in the audience.
You don't have to know what's going on back at the resort to know that the presence of that old couple implies something is going to happen next.
That is natural suspense. Inherent in the Situation. And it works every time. That is how you want to lay down your breadcrumb trail.
And that's what News Shows don't do.
Their "coming up next" or "after the break" teasers are overt, hits over the head, carrying the information in text not sub-text.
Study news shows. Study "hard news" and "opinion" shows, study how they handle the huge and distracting commercial breaks, how they open a segment after a break and how they end off on a cliffhanger just before the break.
These are writing techniques illustrated in blatant, easy to learn caricatures. It's a clear illustration of how to grab an audience and how to hold it by arranging information in linear sequence.
In fiction, you have to do the same thing with the information you are transmitting to your readers/viewers, but you must do it by subtext, by inference, innuendo, and even mis-direction.
But it is the same technique. The same goal, too. You need to keep the reader/viewer interested in something that's interesting to you and inherently boring to them.
You have to take that lump of a universe that is so fascinating to you, and dissect it just the way TV news dissects our real world into an over simplified straight line presented by sound-bytes that don't bore the viewer (too much).
When is information boring?
When it does not answer the question you have in your mind.
When is it fun to acquire information?
When you have been harboring a burning question you need the answer to, AND when you have found that answer for yourself, by your own efforts, without anyone TELLING YOU.
Information someone tells you is boring.
Secrets you unravel for yourself are interesting.
That's what editors mean when they say they want to read a well written manuscript that "holds my interest." That's code for "make me figure it out."
Information that is kept from you is irresistibly interesting.
So how do you make your reader interested in your universe?
You lead him on a treasure hunt to the answer to a question he wants answered.
Your reader won't get interested enough to follow you if you don't let him know you are keeping a secret. But if you tell him/her the answer, he/she won't care anymore because now he/she knows.
That sounds so obvious and simple, but it is incredibly difficult to do.
In Part II, we'll look at just how to select your breadcrumbs and arrange them in a trail that is paced just right.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com - current availability
http://www.simegen.com/jl/ - full bio/biblio
But there are no actual majors in COMMERCIAL FICTION WRITING that I know of. If you find one that covers the material I've been including in these blog posts, please drop a comment here.
There's a major for Music Arts. But not a corresponding one for Fiction Arts to prepare you for a career in fiction writing, editing, publishing, or fictioneering in various other media such as comics, animation, dramatic writing, etc. The stage arts have a major, and so do the screen arts. But where is the major in writing novels for the commercial market?
Isn't that curious? If you want to become a professional novelist or editor you are on your own after college, and woe betide you if you didn't take the courses you need. But of course, nobody will tell you what those course are before you start college.
Now, the brutal truth is that there is a living to be made in Journalism, but very rarely in commercial fiction writing. Perhaps that's why there's no major?
Oddly, most of the best selling novels I've encountered lately were written by Journalists with long track records in magazines and newspapers.
News "papers" are dying, but "news" and news gathering and news writing are still here.
A lot of journalists are going indie after being laid off from newspapers.
And they are doing very well with blogging and building audiences that click on advertising links for which they get paid. Huffington Post, Politico and similar blog-sites have real, well trained journalists both announcing and commenting on the day's events.
Fiction writers are going indie with either publishing their own e-books or finding new e-book publishers that do packaging and presentation, but usually the writer then has to do promotion, publicity and advertising.
However, non-fiction is doing much better than fiction in paper editions, so it's worth studying non-fiction closely for clues, tips and tricks.
The competition for the attention of readers and viewers is more fierce than ever. There is a growing population, and more people online willing to read (more enchanted by images on YouTube, true, but still reading a lot), but there are more people writing and creating videos, more different media that are accessible to the indie creator, so that the result is more stuff for each reader to choose from.
There's the information glut come to full fruition just as predicted in the 1970's.
How do you, as a fiction writer, attract and hold attention?
Writing teachers will tell you that the core of that trick is "suspense." And you can see that trick being used on TV news programs as "the teaser."
Just before a commercial, they will announce what they're going to cover "next" and tell you something about it that makes you want to hear that item. When they get back from the break, they go on about some other item, with yet another "teaser" about the item that you wanted to hear about, repeatedly putting it off until the end of the show.
They string you along like that with artificially generated suspense.
If you're smart, you give up, channel surf, get bored, and go google the item up. It'll take you five minutes to find out what you wanted to know instead of sitting around for an hour watching commercials.
But solid research shows people do sit there in suspense, waiting, and letting the commercials wash over them. Research shows exposure to those commercials does change behavior later in the stores. (Sad, horrifying, but true, which is why they do it.)
Series TV fiction does the same kind of artificial suspense, cutting to commercial just where you want to see what's coming next. Good fiction writers do that at chapter ends and scene ends.
The tricks and tips for how to structure a scene so suspense is built "naturally" rather than "artificially" by tricking the reader into waiting are in these posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
Suspense works every time to create a "page turner" when it's not done as a "delay" or a "digression." Why is that and how do you learn to do it with your own material? And how do you tell a "delay" or "digression" from real suspense technique when you're the one who's written it? How do you test your own material to see if you've achieved "suspense?" (after all, you know what comes next, so you can't feel the suspense you are generating!)
How do you take a story you have had erupt into your mind whole cloth, a universe, a character, a whole complex situation that is too fascinating for words, that spreads over galaxies and is built on centuries of political history, that has the characters entangled in a huge web of bizarre science unthinkable by your reader, and criss-crossing love affairs finally erupting into True Love, and make that reader see what is fascinating about it?
Suspense is not fascinating. It makes you impatient. "Get on with it already!"
To get suspense to work for you as a writer to attract and hold a reader, you need to achieve a pace that the reader is comfortable with.
In previous blog entries here I've defined how I use the word "pace" to mean "rate of change of Situation" rather than "fast action" or "how many fight scenes how close together."
One error many beginning writers (even selling professionals!) make is to blow the suspense right at the beginning of the novel by TELLING the background.
That creates an expository lump
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html
right at the opening.
Expository lumps are long sections (3 paragraphs or more; half a page even can be a lump) during which the Situation does not change, but the writer stops the forward momentum of the story to "fill the reader in" by telling about the background, or what has happened before, or what is happening off stage, all very interesting to the writer and crazy-boring to the reader because it does not go where the reader wants to go. Ahead.
Here's an example of how to show not tell the material in an opening paragraph of exposition so that it becomes dramatized narrative:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/tv-show-white-collar-fanfic-and-show.html
But that was just one paragraph of information. How do you dissect out the pieces of "an idea" that arrives with a whole Universe attached and lay it out in linear form so that someone who does not know everything about it can see just how fascinating it is?
How do you grind your idea up into bread crumbs and lay them out in a linear trail for the curious reader to follow to your HEA ending?
Well, there is a technique for that which I call INFORMATION FEED.
Every bit of "information" becomes a crumb to be laid down in a trail for the reader to follow. Pacing is all about how far apart you put the crumbs.
Here's how you take a lump of a universe and create a linear "feed" of information.
1) Ask yourself, "Why do I want to write this story?" What is the payload you want to deliver?
2) Find the vocabulary that scintillates with hints of that payload. It's all about semantics. Find the semantically loaded vocabulary you need.
3) Ask yourself, "Why would anyone NOT be interested in this?" What's boring about your universe?
4) Ask yourself, "What does my typical reader want to read about?" Tease that subject out of the morass of the "idea" you have. It's in there somewhere, but you have to bring it to the surface by submerging the rest. "Submerged" material is what gives fiction "depth." The more you submerge, the more "classic" your work will be. But submerge it under something clean, clear, simple, something you can express in one sentence.
5) Ask yourself, "What does my typical reader want to know first?" What will show the reader that this breadcrumb trail will lead to the payload that reader enjoys most at the end of the story. (i.e. the "HEA" ending, the "enemies vaquished" ending, the "hero triumphant" ending, or the "poignant loss of everything" or the "villain gets his comeuppance" ending, or the "villain becomes hero" ending).
With those 5 Answers, you now have some facts about this story that you can arrange into a series, a trail of breadcrumbs. You might have to switch it around several ways before you find the right path into the story, but you no longer have an amorphous lump.
The trick is to sort the lump so that the reader doesn't have to know all about the universe, the politics, the historic wars among kingdoms or galaxies, the succession to the throne, or anything else before the story starts. See? To have "pacing" the story and the plot must start to dance with each other, not just stand there and wait while you explain the history of the dance steps.
From those 5 answers on, your job becomes very much like plotting a mystery.
You stretch the information into a line of clues, and the protagonist follows his/her nose through to the end.
Suspense is created by what the reader does not know that the writer does know.
But the reader must never sense that the writer is "withholding" information. Suspense and surprise endings are not created by keeping the reader ignorant, but by keeping the reader engaged, moving (pacing) from one bit of information to the next at a rate that satisfies the reader.
To formulate that all important "beginning," the "downbeat" of the dance music between plot and story, choose semantically loaded words, words fraught with subtext, and weave them into a seductive, rhythmic sentence which carries the promise that you will answer the questions it raises as the story unfolds.
In the first sentence, reveal the first breadcrumb.
That will tell the reader if it's rye, whole wheat, or barley bread -- maybe raisin?
Simple choice of vocabulary can establish genre and invite the book-browser to work to figure out whether they want to buy this book by searching for the next breadcrumb.
Within a few paragraphs, reveal the next breadcrumb.
The space between breadcrumbs then defines the rhythm of the piece, the type of dance between story and plot: waltz, cha-cha, boogie, adagio, tap, break, macarena, tango!
The rest of the information on defining the conflict, the characters, and the setting is transmitted by implication, hint, symbolism, imagery, by careful selection of DETAIL.
Every detail you mention overtly when describing a scene (the color of the carpeting, the provenance of the vase on the mantel) carries information by inference. That you selected this detail to emphasize, rather than leaving it to the reader's imagination, indicates that it's important and must be remembered.
Too much detail, and the reader feels they're working too hard for too little reward. Lard in extra detail between breadcrumbs, and the effort-to-reward ratio becomes way too large. The book is not worth reading.
Too little detail between breadcrumbs, and the book is too "thin," too transparent, boring and not worth reading.
Get the proportion of detail to breadcrumbs, the distance between those crumbs of information wrong, and for the book-browser, it's like sticking their head into a room where someone is practicing playing the violin, one scratchy note at a time with repeated tries at hitting the note. The plot and story aren't dancing. There's no performance to watch.
Get the proportion of detail to breadcrumbs, and the distance between those crumbs of information just right, and the suspense becomes as engaging as watching the stage in the film Dirty Dancing when the lights come up revealing a couple posed just so, dressed just so, -- no other details on that stage but the spotlight, and you can tell they are about to tango and it'll be hellishly sexy. The downbeat, AND!, movement, suggestive, fascinating -- will she make the lift or not?
You don't have to have watched the movie up to that point to stare at the screen, holding your breath as they tango. The suspense is so thick you can cut it with a knife.
But it's natural suspense, inherent in the Situation, not artificial. The prior information about how he taught her this one dance in order to fill in as his partner, enhances the suspense, but doesn't create it.
Watch that scene in Dirty Dancing out of context. Watch how the camera "reveals" the old couple in the audience.
You don't have to know what's going on back at the resort to know that the presence of that old couple implies something is going to happen next.
That is natural suspense. Inherent in the Situation. And it works every time. That is how you want to lay down your breadcrumb trail.
And that's what News Shows don't do.
Their "coming up next" or "after the break" teasers are overt, hits over the head, carrying the information in text not sub-text.
Study news shows. Study "hard news" and "opinion" shows, study how they handle the huge and distracting commercial breaks, how they open a segment after a break and how they end off on a cliffhanger just before the break.
These are writing techniques illustrated in blatant, easy to learn caricatures. It's a clear illustration of how to grab an audience and how to hold it by arranging information in linear sequence.
In fiction, you have to do the same thing with the information you are transmitting to your readers/viewers, but you must do it by subtext, by inference, innuendo, and even mis-direction.
But it is the same technique. The same goal, too. You need to keep the reader/viewer interested in something that's interesting to you and inherently boring to them.
You have to take that lump of a universe that is so fascinating to you, and dissect it just the way TV news dissects our real world into an over simplified straight line presented by sound-bytes that don't bore the viewer (too much).
When is information boring?
When it does not answer the question you have in your mind.
When is it fun to acquire information?
When you have been harboring a burning question you need the answer to, AND when you have found that answer for yourself, by your own efforts, without anyone TELLING YOU.
Information someone tells you is boring.
Secrets you unravel for yourself are interesting.
That's what editors mean when they say they want to read a well written manuscript that "holds my interest." That's code for "make me figure it out."
Information that is kept from you is irresistibly interesting.
So how do you make your reader interested in your universe?
You lead him on a treasure hunt to the answer to a question he wants answered.
Your reader won't get interested enough to follow you if you don't let him know you are keeping a secret. But if you tell him/her the answer, he/she won't care anymore because now he/she knows.
That sounds so obvious and simple, but it is incredibly difficult to do.
In Part II, we'll look at just how to select your breadcrumbs and arrange them in a trail that is paced just right.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com - current availability
http://www.simegen.com/jl/ - full bio/biblio
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