In another context this week, I was asked to give clues to writers on how to handle Writer's Block. This blog entry is actually one (of many) such clues I have to offer. If Writer's Block seems to be a problem for you, follow the thinking here, then go find totally different input data and replicate this kind of thinking. Eventually, you'll find something to say that only you can say.
Two online newspaper stories came to my attention last week about social change starting to affect other levels of our culture while at the same time this Alien Romance blog began examining some ethics and moral issues, and now Linnea Sinclair has brought up a George R. R. Martin anti-hero -- pondering that character's value in a Romance!
Of course, the most alien aliens in Alien Romance or any Paranormal Romance are humans. It's not only that "verisimilitude" thing we're talking about -- it isn't just that we create our aliens to have something human in them so readers can understand them. It is that humans are in fact alienated from one another, at a very basic psychological level.
The icon, or symbolic representation of this is the Tower of Babel -- the Tower Card in most Tarot decks refers to this psychological barrier we carry. (My Not So Minor Arcana Tarot books do not include the Major Arcana like the Tower Card.)
Our minds are fragmented by these Tower barriers, and we are divided from one another by them. And yes, the differences between genders are included in that compartmentalization.
As a result, Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.
Criminals are too alien to comprehend for law-abiding folks. Infanticide is unthinkable to those who haven't been driven over that edge. And so on through all the "immoral" and "unethical" acts.
When normally sane people are driven over that edge, I think they are striking OUT at an anguish that originates INSIDE themselves.
The strike doesn't solve the problem because the target is wrong, so they hit harder and HARDER until someone stops them. Every blow at the external target makes the internal pain worse, but they can't see how they are hurting themselves.
The Tower represents the barrier that divides the inner self from the outer world, and the shocking experience of discovering that the two are one. When you hit OUT, you hit IN too.
Until you've crossed one of those barriers, you don't know they exist.
Loss of Virginity is one such barrier we cross. Those on one side really can't communicate to those on the other side of that barrier.
Being "blooded" as a soldier is another. Committing your first criminal act, or trying your first alcoholic drink -- or drugging with friends, are also losses of virginity. Those who have done these things are forever alienated from those who have not.
Maybe computer gaming is such a barrier.
Turning 30 is another. (Saturn returns to its place when you're 28-29 and by the time you turn 30 you have crossed one of those divisions. You can't shout back across that chasm to the younger people.)
Crossing such a barrier is a Tower experience. You thought you knew it all. You discover you knew nothing. And you have no clue that you're wrong about that too. The Tower is a kind of cluelessness.
If you take the familiar barriers, language, age, innocence, and analyze them you can create an analogous barrier between human and non-human, then stretch and reach to connect in a Relationship across that barrier. That's Alien Romance.
Oh, I do wish my Boxmaster Trilogy had been published so I could refer you to just such an exercise. I have a few chapters of each of the volumes posted at http://www.simegen.com/jl/boxmaster/
I was writing about the shift in values from the Hero's values to the Husband's values.
The first volume was bought by a publisher that went under before publishing, but they said it was Heinleinesque. The very long third volume was presented to several agents and editors and none could get past the breaking of the SF trope into a gradual segue into the Romance trope in Chapter 4. This is not an action series, but it has action in it.
Several things I've encountered in the last few weeks have kept putting me in mind of the Boxmaster universe I built. I wrote it to be a paradigm shifting entry into the literature. It never got published. And now that paradigm is shifting under the impact of other forces.
The news articles I've seen recently fit into the pattern that's been developing in fiction publishing in general, but also exemplify a deep shift in the paradigm underneath our society. Fiction and movies (and gaming) don't cause change. They reflect it.
This paradigm shift is like an earthquake miles deep under the surface. It's felt only slightly on the surface, but it sets up fractures that will cause future quakes.
A deep paradigm shift has occurred this last few years, and we are starting (only starting) into massive change.
These social changes are of interest to writers (of any genre, but especially Romance) because they reveal much about the internal "life" of the readers. You can see what's happening inside the readers by what they strike out at. (News article blog comments on Yahoo for example reveal a lot.)
These newspaper (or News Service like AP, Reuters) articles surface only long after the actual events, very like scientific advances appear first in discussions at conferences and then maybe 5 years later, in the general press.
By the time it's in the newspaper, it's old news.
The ongoing significance lies in the simple fact that it is now coming to the consciousness of the readers of fiction and so writers have to adjust.
What were the two that caught my attention this week?
-----------------
a) PUBLISHING MELTDOWN:
http://mobile.washingtonpost.com/detail.jsp?key=352322&rc=al&p=1&all=1
b) HS & COLLEGE STUDENT EXPECTATIONS
for their lives
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/education/18college.html?_r=1&em
-----------------
I posted article b) to my facebook profile and it started a long discussion when another writer (former professor) Jonathan Vos Post commented on it on my facebook page.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=558182547&ref=profile
People who work with college students have seen the expectations shift over the last generation.
Put these two articles together and you see a trend.
The Web has conditioned a generation to expect whatever they want for free (well advertising, but ignorable advertising). They have never known a world without peer-to-peer music sharing, and other copyright violating activities.
There are many websites that post e-books that are under copyright protection. It's worldwide and nobody can make them stop.
Copyright doesn't mean much anymore.
As a result of the communications revolution, the firm footing under writers has dissolved in yet another way, too.
Article a) shows us that text on paper is not the business model of the future.
Well, you and I have known that for years. It's e-books and web-news!
But have you been thinking what free on the web means in terms of who pays for it?
"Who pays for it" is not something this youngest generation is equipped to think about because of their "expectations" as delineated in the NYTimes article. (see article b) )
In the world of young expectations (pre-Tower Experience - Virgin Expectations), nobody pays for anything.
They are entitled. The implications of that are huge. Grades are a proxy for wages and they aren't learning the cost of getting a wage. What about the government printing money to give everyone a check or build some handy things like bridges. Nobody pays for any of that. You just get entitled. If the government gives it to you, it's free. Right?
"Who pays for it" is an issue organically intertwined with all the issues of morality Rowena Cherry brought up in her post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/things-we-take-for-granted-morality.html
People advocate Pro-Life choices, but avoid "who pays for it" and in what coin. (Personally, I'm pro-Life, but that's another issue.) Contraceptives and Abortion have wrought a social change in which young people see no COST to personal intimate behavior and so fall screaming off their Tower when confronted with an unwanted pregnancy.
The core of all moral and ethical rules is the concept that everything has a cost if not a price. And cost is the pure essence of all business. Marriage can be a business as all Regency fans know.
A business model is a circuit diagram that shows how activity pumps money around in a circuit and multiplies the money to a profit.
You put this-that-the-other-thing in one end of the black box, and this-that-the-other-thing PLUS PROFIT comes out the other end.
The business model is the tracing of the circuit inside the black box.
The business model of NEWS is that a bunch of people scurry around the world scarfing up interesting tidbits of news, run home, write it up, turn it in and get paid. They then have the money to go out and do more scurrying. Someone has to go find the news -- and finding costs a lot. So whoever gets to read the news has to pay the reporter a living wage plus expenses.
Authors have a business model that used to go like this:
a) Buy a typewriter, paper, ribbons, white-out (or today, computer, backup device, net access) huge up-front investment
b) dream up something
c) ruin a lot of expensive paper by typing black squiggles on it. (wear out a computer keyboarding)
d) sell the ruined paper to a publisher
e) go through rewrite hell ruining more paper; galleys; eventually it's done
f) get paid more than it cost to buy paper, ink, reference books, computer whatever tools
g) buy more blank paper
h) ruin the new blank paper
i) sell it
A writer's business model is to sell ruined paper so they can buy more and groceries too.
It's a pump. You put in words, you get out money.
We have long since shifted from ruining paper to filling up external backup drives with files that tend to go obsolete before we can re-sell the words to another publisher.
Newspapers are just facing the fact (and resisting mightily -- this recession may convince them) that the business model has to shift drastically. Some papers in Philadelphia filed Chapter 11 this past week. At least it's 11 and not 7 (total liquidation).
People still want to know what's happening, but they want to know NOW not tomorrow, and NOW not when the 6PM news goes on. NOW - like on their blackberry.
But someone still has to scurry out and scarf up news and write it and post it -- and faster news costs more. Someone has to pay the reporter to scurry around, the editor to edit, the distributor to distribute (websites that really work cost a lot).
Now look at article b) about student expectations.
Their parents expect the news to pop up on their blackberry in real time. The kids grow up in a world of entitlement, where everyone has access. Parents even give kids cell phones.
Students go to schools where they don't have to trek across town to the library to stand in line to use the printed encyclopedia for a school paper. They google up what they want and cut and paste (and get caught usually). Kids don't understand plagiarism or paraphrasing -- in fact, the generation that grew up on copy machines missed out on the fine points of copyright and have passed that blindness on to their children who see even less use in copyright. To them copyright is even more immoral than infanticide.
I read another article last year about how the new crop of college grads is forcing businesses to change their office-behavior codes to allow multi-tasking which includes texting friends, surfing the web, IM'ing, tweeting, all while working, all while on the employer's clock. They are, you see, ENTITLED to spend their time how they want as long as they get the minimum done, just as they were in school. Just showing up (as it said in the education article) gets at least a B; maybe an A.
There's a generation that feels ENTITLED to do as they please on their employer's time because in school they could do as they pleased and still get good grades even if they missed deadlines.
Read that article b) . It illustrates a huge paradigm shift in values, a shift way way deep down-down-down inside everything that makes us who we are.
This is only the surface vibration. Only the beginning.
What you must do to get something you want -- that's the raw basics of ethics, morals, and economics -- AND ROMANCE.
Do you take what you want? Do you beg for it? Trade for it? Negotiate (which is an aggressive form of warfare)? How do you get what you want? How do you know the difference between want and need? When are you entitled to take what you need?
This "entitlement philosophy" represents a huge change in how we establish and maintain all our relationships, including love, including finding a soul mate.
Imagine feeling "entitled" to a soul mate!
Imagine what happens to marriage when both partners feel "entitled" to a perfect marriage without effort, without cost.
And there's one more surface vibration from this deep quake.
It is the shift away from text to images.
Read this one:
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090219/tc_nm/us_hollywood_web_6
Hollywood struggles to find wealth on the Web (Reuters)
Posted on Thu Feb 19, 2009 9:14AM EST
Psychology has long established the power of visual images as greater than that of text or spoken words without images. Images penetrate to an emotional level that is unique because of the evolutionary position of the EYE -- the amount of data it collects and the brain areas responsible for interpreting that data are way high. Visuals pre-empt everything for us.
One huge trend that I see in all this is the older generations fighting mightily to STOP CHANGE, and as usual the younger people want everything "old" destroyed RIGHT NOW with a mad urgency that is insane because they haven't created something better to replace it with. Middle aged people are usually at the point where they have created something to replace the old with, something they think is better.
The technology revolution has accelerated this old, established cycle of progress so that the middle-aged can't establish their new before the young set out to destroy it.
But perhaps one of the reasons we have death in our world is that without death, entrenched elders would refuse all change, and change is life. (This is a reason I love Vampire novels).
The core definition of life is CHANGE.
So I think the objective of elder generations might be better served by guiding change into new pathways that are chosen with conscious and deliberate wisdom.
On the third hand -- has humanity ever done that?
Under what impetus from what outside source would the denizens of this galaxy (presumably somewhat related biologically) re-think this whole "change" issue?
What does it take to shift the human paradigm?
Are we at that point yet? Are we really at an evolve-or-die threshold in human history?
Will some Alien species arrive here at last only to discover a dead world, not an atomic cinder but an ecological collapse?
If not, how will we get through all this? If our paradigm of Life is shifting, what is it shifting into?
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Showing posts with label Writer's block. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writer's block. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Villain Defined
Linnea Sinclair and Susan Grant have fingered the exact problem most writers face. Most of us aren't criminals or megalomaniacs, not even deep inside. Most of us just want to make you laugh, smile, and cry all at the same time. We deal with the tender stuff inside our readers, not the coarse, gross, inelegant world outside.
After all we spend most of our young years reading (even in class, even when supposed to be doing homework, and sometimes even on dates!). We are readers more than we are do-ers, and as a result have a hard time thinking what nasty people would do.
Now we write fantasy (even SF is fantasizing of some sort, about the future, the galaxy, alternate times). And people don't read fantasy to get Headline News. (movies ript from the headlines, maybe, but not reading fantasy/sf/romance). We write classics to be enlightening a hundred or a thousand years from now, not a brief on current events.
So HOW DO YOU CRAFT A VILLAIN?
We don't know any villains. We see them on TV, read about them on Yahoo News, but they aren't in our social circles if they're "larger than life." They hold CNN Press Conferences. We just toil in our solitude hoping for a fan email from someone who has understood our novels.
Villains are complex and deep, so crafting them is especially difficult, as Linnea points out, when you're working in cross-genre with a severe word limit.
You can't include the whole life backstory of ALL the characters. Readers have to know what to infer from a few clues, so you have to craft a villain character readers (who like you don't know any villains) that the reader will instantly understand from a Japanese Brush Stroke image. Because your readers (and yourself) only see villains FROM OUTSIDE, you have to show your villain character from outside. There's no space to go that deep into them, and it wouldn't be fun for the reader.
If you want true-crime that goes into a psycho's head, you read something other than a romance spinoff genre.
So that's why we tend to create cardboard, cliche villains. Next week, I'll discuss how to accomplish this feat of larger than life character invention using Pluto as the ruling planet of Vampires and avoid the cardboard, single-dimenional villain problem. And in fact, I'll include last week's current events.
But right now, let's look at the easier part of the job of finding the antagonist/ villain/ Bad Dude.
So where do you look to find the correct villain for an SF Romance?
Back to the writing basics I keep harping on in these posts.
THEME. PROTAGONIST. PLOT. RESOLUTION.
That's where you find your villain/antagonist/BAD BUY.
The glue that holds the Romance plot and the Action plot together is THEME. Both plots have to be expressions of the same archetypal THEME, to say something about the same issue of morality, life, the universe and everything.
This structure saves you lots of words so you can put two genres together in the same wordage allowed for one genre. It's economics as well as art.
The theme comes from (or alternately generates; every writer and every project may randomly choose a different starting point -- but in the end, all the parts of the story must be in their proper places) -- so the THEME comes from the PROTAGONIST.
Look inside the protagonist, find what his/her life is really about (unbeknownst to him), then TEST TO DESTRUCTION that protagonist's view of life-the-universe-and-everything.
Find the one premise of that character's existence that he/she has never questioned, and present the protag with proof that the premise nearest and dearest to their heart is WRONG.
That's what antagonists do. Show the Protag how wrong he/she is.
The key to a hot romance is figuring out "what does he see in her" and "what does she see in him?" Both questions are answered by the THEME.
The key to a hot KILL THE ENEMY story is figuring out the tie between the two enemies. Why does this hero need THIS PARTICULAR VILLAIN? What inside the hero gives this villain a hook into the underside of his psyche?
Both the hot romance and the hot kill-the-enemy story need RELATIONSHIP DRIVEN PLOTS. They're just different relationships. (or maybe not so different)
WHAT DOES THE HERO NOT-KNOW ABOUT HIM/HERSELF? What does the hero keep secret from himself?
It is by that short-hair that the villain grabs hold of and jerks around the life of the hero and JOLTS the hero into becoming a Hero (Hero's Journey -- we all start as plain dudes and dudettes, and something happens that is NOT OUR FAULT and WHAM we are in a fight for our life against huge forces. And to win we have to solve that inner problem where those forces have hold of us.)
EXAMPLE: Guy photographs you in a compromising situation. Sends photo, demands money. He's got hold of you by your secret. What are you willing to do to protect that secret? The ONLY SOLUTION is to cease having the secret. So you plaster it all over the airwaves and the NYTimes -- you don't "confess" but you ADVERTISE as if it's a virtue not a shame.
When you reach the point where you're not ashamed of what you've done because it has brought you to a new psychological and spiritual level, there is no longer a place inside you where the villain can take hold. You are FREE. Problem solved.
So to find the protagonist's natural antagonist, look deep inside the protagonist. The mirror image in the bottom of the protag's mind IS THE ANTAG.
This is where the amateur writer fails. This is where the "Mary Sue" story comes from. The failure of the author to LOOK INSIDE the protagonist because the protagonist is too much like the author, and so it's too painful to look too deep inside.
As Linnea points out, writing is the hardest work there is but she didn't mention that it's the least paid in money; hence the hunger for fan feedback -- not worshipful gaa-gaa fan feedback, but illustration that the work has propagated into others' lives as goodness.
Writing does drive some to drink because it does require that deep, inward searching and brutal self-honesty that other professions (not even psychiatry) do not require.
Now, sometimes you have to work the problem backwards. So think again about the story element list.
THEME. PROTAGONIST. PLOT. RESOLUTION.
Sometimes you have a protagonist and you know the problem, but what there is about the story that makes you want to write it is the RESOLUTION.
So to find the antag, look deep into the RESOLUTION. Dissect it. Analyze it. Find the philosophical core issue that changes because of the resolution. Lay back with your eyes closed, become the protag at the resolution moment and just FEEL the non-verbal effect you want to create for the reader in that end-moment.
I've been showing you in previous posts how to look at any issue using tools such as Tarot and Astrology to parse the real world down to its immutable (smallest indivisible unit -- just like the Greeks taught us) core components, then re-arrange the components in an original way and come up with a story element you can build on. The problem of generating the antag yields particularly well to these techniques.
Grab good hold of any ONE of these story components I've been discussing, any one, and ALL THE OTHERS ARE DETERMINED.
The art of story telling is just that -- understanding the relationship among things in this world and reflecting that relationship in the artistically created world.
In reality, your nemesis, your antagonist, actually lives inside you. Think back to High School. Who would you hide from? Would you hide from that person today? If your HS antagonist no longer lives inside you, you won't hide now.
Lots of good novels are about the moment of release when an adult vanquishes their HS antagonist forever -- by growing up themselves.
So if you have a protag, you already have the antag, plot, theme, resolution, etc etc. You even have the beginning, but that's the hardest to find. However, if you know the ending, then the beginning and middle are already determined.
In screenwriting, they call this relationship BEATS. I'm learning and practicing how to do that particular paradigm and having a ball at it.
This system works backwards too -- find the villain, look inside, and you'll find the protag who is that villain's nemesis.
The protag and antag are tied together along the axis of the theme. They are each living out different answers to the question posed by the theme.
Take the blackmail example again. The blackmailer has found that knowing someone's secret gives POWER. The blackmail victim has LOST POWER by losing the secret. It's all about the theme of the use and abuse of POWER. So every other backstory detail about both blackmailer and his/her motives and victim and his/her motives, right down to the breed of dog they own has already been DETERMINED by the nature of the thematic tie between Hero and Villain -- they have built LIVES based entirely on POWER, and probably have no room for LOVE.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.slantedconcept.com
After all we spend most of our young years reading (even in class, even when supposed to be doing homework, and sometimes even on dates!). We are readers more than we are do-ers, and as a result have a hard time thinking what nasty people would do.
Now we write fantasy (even SF is fantasizing of some sort, about the future, the galaxy, alternate times). And people don't read fantasy to get Headline News. (movies ript from the headlines, maybe, but not reading fantasy/sf/romance). We write classics to be enlightening a hundred or a thousand years from now, not a brief on current events.
So HOW DO YOU CRAFT A VILLAIN?
We don't know any villains. We see them on TV, read about them on Yahoo News, but they aren't in our social circles if they're "larger than life." They hold CNN Press Conferences. We just toil in our solitude hoping for a fan email from someone who has understood our novels.
Villains are complex and deep, so crafting them is especially difficult, as Linnea points out, when you're working in cross-genre with a severe word limit.
You can't include the whole life backstory of ALL the characters. Readers have to know what to infer from a few clues, so you have to craft a villain character readers (who like you don't know any villains) that the reader will instantly understand from a Japanese Brush Stroke image. Because your readers (and yourself) only see villains FROM OUTSIDE, you have to show your villain character from outside. There's no space to go that deep into them, and it wouldn't be fun for the reader.
If you want true-crime that goes into a psycho's head, you read something other than a romance spinoff genre.
So that's why we tend to create cardboard, cliche villains. Next week, I'll discuss how to accomplish this feat of larger than life character invention using Pluto as the ruling planet of Vampires and avoid the cardboard, single-dimenional villain problem. And in fact, I'll include last week's current events.
But right now, let's look at the easier part of the job of finding the antagonist/ villain/ Bad Dude.
So where do you look to find the correct villain for an SF Romance?
Back to the writing basics I keep harping on in these posts.
THEME. PROTAGONIST. PLOT. RESOLUTION.
That's where you find your villain/antagonist/BAD BUY.
The glue that holds the Romance plot and the Action plot together is THEME. Both plots have to be expressions of the same archetypal THEME, to say something about the same issue of morality, life, the universe and everything.
This structure saves you lots of words so you can put two genres together in the same wordage allowed for one genre. It's economics as well as art.
The theme comes from (or alternately generates; every writer and every project may randomly choose a different starting point -- but in the end, all the parts of the story must be in their proper places) -- so the THEME comes from the PROTAGONIST.
Look inside the protagonist, find what his/her life is really about (unbeknownst to him), then TEST TO DESTRUCTION that protagonist's view of life-the-universe-and-everything.
Find the one premise of that character's existence that he/she has never questioned, and present the protag with proof that the premise nearest and dearest to their heart is WRONG.
That's what antagonists do. Show the Protag how wrong he/she is.
The key to a hot romance is figuring out "what does he see in her" and "what does she see in him?" Both questions are answered by the THEME.
The key to a hot KILL THE ENEMY story is figuring out the tie between the two enemies. Why does this hero need THIS PARTICULAR VILLAIN? What inside the hero gives this villain a hook into the underside of his psyche?
Both the hot romance and the hot kill-the-enemy story need RELATIONSHIP DRIVEN PLOTS. They're just different relationships. (or maybe not so different)
WHAT DOES THE HERO NOT-KNOW ABOUT HIM/HERSELF? What does the hero keep secret from himself?
It is by that short-hair that the villain grabs hold of and jerks around the life of the hero and JOLTS the hero into becoming a Hero (Hero's Journey -- we all start as plain dudes and dudettes, and something happens that is NOT OUR FAULT and WHAM we are in a fight for our life against huge forces. And to win we have to solve that inner problem where those forces have hold of us.)
EXAMPLE: Guy photographs you in a compromising situation. Sends photo, demands money. He's got hold of you by your secret. What are you willing to do to protect that secret? The ONLY SOLUTION is to cease having the secret. So you plaster it all over the airwaves and the NYTimes -- you don't "confess" but you ADVERTISE as if it's a virtue not a shame.
When you reach the point where you're not ashamed of what you've done because it has brought you to a new psychological and spiritual level, there is no longer a place inside you where the villain can take hold. You are FREE. Problem solved.
So to find the protagonist's natural antagonist, look deep inside the protagonist. The mirror image in the bottom of the protag's mind IS THE ANTAG.
This is where the amateur writer fails. This is where the "Mary Sue" story comes from. The failure of the author to LOOK INSIDE the protagonist because the protagonist is too much like the author, and so it's too painful to look too deep inside.
As Linnea points out, writing is the hardest work there is but she didn't mention that it's the least paid in money; hence the hunger for fan feedback -- not worshipful gaa-gaa fan feedback, but illustration that the work has propagated into others' lives as goodness.
Writing does drive some to drink because it does require that deep, inward searching and brutal self-honesty that other professions (not even psychiatry) do not require.
Now, sometimes you have to work the problem backwards. So think again about the story element list.
THEME. PROTAGONIST. PLOT. RESOLUTION.
Sometimes you have a protagonist and you know the problem, but what there is about the story that makes you want to write it is the RESOLUTION.
So to find the antag, look deep into the RESOLUTION. Dissect it. Analyze it. Find the philosophical core issue that changes because of the resolution. Lay back with your eyes closed, become the protag at the resolution moment and just FEEL the non-verbal effect you want to create for the reader in that end-moment.
I've been showing you in previous posts how to look at any issue using tools such as Tarot and Astrology to parse the real world down to its immutable (smallest indivisible unit -- just like the Greeks taught us) core components, then re-arrange the components in an original way and come up with a story element you can build on. The problem of generating the antag yields particularly well to these techniques.
Grab good hold of any ONE of these story components I've been discussing, any one, and ALL THE OTHERS ARE DETERMINED.
The art of story telling is just that -- understanding the relationship among things in this world and reflecting that relationship in the artistically created world.
In reality, your nemesis, your antagonist, actually lives inside you. Think back to High School. Who would you hide from? Would you hide from that person today? If your HS antagonist no longer lives inside you, you won't hide now.
Lots of good novels are about the moment of release when an adult vanquishes their HS antagonist forever -- by growing up themselves.
So if you have a protag, you already have the antag, plot, theme, resolution, etc etc. You even have the beginning, but that's the hardest to find. However, if you know the ending, then the beginning and middle are already determined.
In screenwriting, they call this relationship BEATS. I'm learning and practicing how to do that particular paradigm and having a ball at it.
This system works backwards too -- find the villain, look inside, and you'll find the protag who is that villain's nemesis.
The protag and antag are tied together along the axis of the theme. They are each living out different answers to the question posed by the theme.
Take the blackmail example again. The blackmailer has found that knowing someone's secret gives POWER. The blackmail victim has LOST POWER by losing the secret. It's all about the theme of the use and abuse of POWER. So every other backstory detail about both blackmailer and his/her motives and victim and his/her motives, right down to the breed of dog they own has already been DETERMINED by the nature of the thematic tie between Hero and Villain -- they have built LIVES based entirely on POWER, and probably have no room for LOVE.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.slantedconcept.com
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Sexy Information Feed
I touched on the technique I have dubbed Information Feed last week:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html
So it's possible some writers may be trying to dissect their expository lumps into a linear information feed stream that's also dramatic, gripping, suspenseful and explicates their theme. At the beginning of a project, the theme is not usually even known, which is why dissecting lumps is part of the rewrite process. You may not know which parts of a lump you need until you've at least drafted an ending.
Here are a few more clues to the Information Feed technique and how to apply it.
So imagine (yeah, real hard, I know) you have created an entire universe in your mind filled with characters in love and angst all jumping up and down to get their OWN stories told.
My students know that the first thing I will pound on them for is choosing the wrong protagonist, someone whose story is not being told just now, a bystander not even as involved as Doctor Watson in Holmes's investigations.
One reason a writer produces expository lumps at the opening of a story is simply that they've chosen the wrong viewpoint character. The real story is happening offstage, and so lump by lump, the writer tries to tell that gripping real story from the point of view of "nothing happening."
The following technique will probably not help you discover which character your story is actually about. But it might break the logjam and let you begin investigating your universe to discover where the stories are happening.
So here's how to take your well and thoroughly imagined Universe where the reader has to know ALL THIS STUFF before they can understand the story -- and straighten it out into a linear sequence of information bits that are fun to learn instead of lumps to swallow.
You have to play a trick on yourself.
Pretend your imagined universe is real, that you've just been there and all this really nifty stuff happened to YOU - not to a character in the story, but to YOU (you might be a character in the story, but that might lead to writing a Mary-Sue.)
Remember one of the most seductive traps for a beginning writer is to try to tell the story from First Person when it's not appropriate. That's why it's good to be your-real-life-self explaining where you've been and why you have a black eye rather than being a character in the story. You can recount the story as if telling about a new favorite TV show. You want to hook them, but don't want to reveal "spoilers."
And that's what "expository lumps" are mostly composed of - spoilers - stuff you gotta know but not NOW.
So, here you are in front of your parents, your landlord, your boyfriend, maybe the police, an insurance adjuster, a private eye you have to hire or your least favorite clergy authority figure.
You don't want to confess. You don't want to admit you've been wandering around inside a TV show, inside someone else's business. You really don't want them to know how seriously sexy this whole thing is!
This is so awful. This is so embarrassing. This is private stuff. It's top secret. If you tell them, you'll have to kill them. Or they'll think you're crazy.
But there you are, evidence dripping from your hands, peeping from under your skirts, bulging out of your pockets.
They start asking questions, and you must come up with something to say -- even if it's not an explanation. Even if it's a lie. You want the respect of these authorities, but the questions keep coming and you have to say something. What to say first that will kind of "break it gently" that you've been seduced. Or done some heavy duty seducing and pried a really hot story out of someone they'd never let you associate with.
"So why didn't you do your homework last night?" "Where did you get that black eye?" "When are you going to fork over last month's rent?" "So who's the father this time?" "Why is there a puppy peeking out of your coat pocket?"
So the interrogation of you begins, and you have to say something. Some bit has to come first -- something has to be kinda "interred at the foot of a sand dune" and hidden to the end where it'll be a surprise, a twist, a shock, a hook for a sequel (I mean, who has sex just once if it's really great sex?)
Lump-dissection is all about building SUSPENSE. And the main technique is what Linnea Sinclair called being a "puzzler" rather than a "plotter" or "pantser" as a writer.
Meaning, do you plot out every event before you write, or do you fly by the seat of your pants, or do you ferret out the ending by solving some puzzle you start with and don't know the answer to.
All that is from the writer's point of view. And it really doesn't matter how the writer does it. It only matters that the reader can't TELL how the writer did it.
Every good novel contains (after rewriting) a firm plot-sequence, a because-line, and the kind of surprising and delightful details that a "pantser" will create on the fly, PLUS a good, hard puzzle for the reader to solve. The best way to achieve all that is to do 3 drafts, one as each of the 3 kinds of writers.
When you're breaking expository lumps, it is most effective to be a "puzzler" -- and unwind the lump into a trail of bread-crumbs as clues to the big revelation. The way to figure out which bit of the lump is a bread-crumb and which a big revelation is to present yourself before your imaginary authority figure for interrogation.
So answer the question about your condition after this adventure in your universe.
"Well, it isn't actually a puppy. It's a baby turus."
"A baby what?"
"I'm not totally sure it's a baby."
Examining the creature. "Where in the world did that thing come from?"
"I found it in a crashed space ship."
This completely omits mention of the tall-dark-handsome-almost-human Guy you pulled from the ship just before it exploded which is how you got the black eye.
Shouts of laughter and the interrogator reaches out to remove the puppy's pasted-on costume and find out what breed the dog is. The costume doesn't come off. The ears are real.
"It's a mutant something. How do you know it's a turus?"
"This guy told me." or "The Turus told me." Or "The dying mother Turus told me."
"We better call animal control."
"No!" Now you have to come up with a reason NOT to call animal control.
Do you see how an impenetrable ball of wax can become a linear string of data under interrogation?
ASKING QUESTIONS is the key to dissecting an expository lump, and discovering what goes now and what goes later, what's a bread-crumb and what's the payload at the end of the trail.
As I noted in the discussion of the Expository Lump, what goes first and what goes second is a function of WHAT THE READER IS ASKING.
Your reader can be your interrogator, and you have to satisfy that curiosity while not giving away the whole ball of wax.
As with most structural issues that arise while crafting a piece of fiction, the Expository Lump yields to a systematic questioning.
You just have to know what the questions are, and to find out you have to go adventuring in your universe - and figure out "who" will confront you with questions on your return.
In the writer's mind, the reader is an Authority Figure -- skeptical, wary, unconvinced, and with the power over you of NOT BUYING this book.
Now, don't let that intimidate you, and don't let the rule against expository lumps choke you up.
You don't want to prevent yourself from passing a Lump. You'll only give yourself writer's block doing that. In fact, most writer's block cases are just cases of rampant perfectionism, or sometimes not having the confidence to say what you want to say. So nevermind -- spit it out! Just splosh it onto the page.
In rewriting, remember that nothing is permanently gone. Delete something here, you can put it in over there. But to make this technique pay off, you have to have something to delete. So write those lumps! Then handle them as if undressing a sex partner.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html
So it's possible some writers may be trying to dissect their expository lumps into a linear information feed stream that's also dramatic, gripping, suspenseful and explicates their theme. At the beginning of a project, the theme is not usually even known, which is why dissecting lumps is part of the rewrite process. You may not know which parts of a lump you need until you've at least drafted an ending.
Here are a few more clues to the Information Feed technique and how to apply it.
So imagine (yeah, real hard, I know) you have created an entire universe in your mind filled with characters in love and angst all jumping up and down to get their OWN stories told.
My students know that the first thing I will pound on them for is choosing the wrong protagonist, someone whose story is not being told just now, a bystander not even as involved as Doctor Watson in Holmes's investigations.
One reason a writer produces expository lumps at the opening of a story is simply that they've chosen the wrong viewpoint character. The real story is happening offstage, and so lump by lump, the writer tries to tell that gripping real story from the point of view of "nothing happening."
The following technique will probably not help you discover which character your story is actually about. But it might break the logjam and let you begin investigating your universe to discover where the stories are happening.
So here's how to take your well and thoroughly imagined Universe where the reader has to know ALL THIS STUFF before they can understand the story -- and straighten it out into a linear sequence of information bits that are fun to learn instead of lumps to swallow.
You have to play a trick on yourself.
Pretend your imagined universe is real, that you've just been there and all this really nifty stuff happened to YOU - not to a character in the story, but to YOU (you might be a character in the story, but that might lead to writing a Mary-Sue.)
Remember one of the most seductive traps for a beginning writer is to try to tell the story from First Person when it's not appropriate. That's why it's good to be your-real-life-self explaining where you've been and why you have a black eye rather than being a character in the story. You can recount the story as if telling about a new favorite TV show. You want to hook them, but don't want to reveal "spoilers."
And that's what "expository lumps" are mostly composed of - spoilers - stuff you gotta know but not NOW.
So, here you are in front of your parents, your landlord, your boyfriend, maybe the police, an insurance adjuster, a private eye you have to hire or your least favorite clergy authority figure.
You don't want to confess. You don't want to admit you've been wandering around inside a TV show, inside someone else's business. You really don't want them to know how seriously sexy this whole thing is!
This is so awful. This is so embarrassing. This is private stuff. It's top secret. If you tell them, you'll have to kill them. Or they'll think you're crazy.
But there you are, evidence dripping from your hands, peeping from under your skirts, bulging out of your pockets.
They start asking questions, and you must come up with something to say -- even if it's not an explanation. Even if it's a lie. You want the respect of these authorities, but the questions keep coming and you have to say something. What to say first that will kind of "break it gently" that you've been seduced. Or done some heavy duty seducing and pried a really hot story out of someone they'd never let you associate with.
"So why didn't you do your homework last night?" "Where did you get that black eye?" "When are you going to fork over last month's rent?" "So who's the father this time?" "Why is there a puppy peeking out of your coat pocket?"
So the interrogation of you begins, and you have to say something. Some bit has to come first -- something has to be kinda "interred at the foot of a sand dune" and hidden to the end where it'll be a surprise, a twist, a shock, a hook for a sequel (I mean, who has sex just once if it's really great sex?)
Lump-dissection is all about building SUSPENSE. And the main technique is what Linnea Sinclair called being a "puzzler" rather than a "plotter" or "pantser" as a writer.
Meaning, do you plot out every event before you write, or do you fly by the seat of your pants, or do you ferret out the ending by solving some puzzle you start with and don't know the answer to.
All that is from the writer's point of view. And it really doesn't matter how the writer does it. It only matters that the reader can't TELL how the writer did it.
Every good novel contains (after rewriting) a firm plot-sequence, a because-line, and the kind of surprising and delightful details that a "pantser" will create on the fly, PLUS a good, hard puzzle for the reader to solve. The best way to achieve all that is to do 3 drafts, one as each of the 3 kinds of writers.
When you're breaking expository lumps, it is most effective to be a "puzzler" -- and unwind the lump into a trail of bread-crumbs as clues to the big revelation. The way to figure out which bit of the lump is a bread-crumb and which a big revelation is to present yourself before your imaginary authority figure for interrogation.
So answer the question about your condition after this adventure in your universe.
"Well, it isn't actually a puppy. It's a baby turus."
"A baby what?"
"I'm not totally sure it's a baby."
Examining the creature. "Where in the world did that thing come from?"
"I found it in a crashed space ship."
This completely omits mention of the tall-dark-handsome-almost-human Guy you pulled from the ship just before it exploded which is how you got the black eye.
Shouts of laughter and the interrogator reaches out to remove the puppy's pasted-on costume and find out what breed the dog is. The costume doesn't come off. The ears are real.
"It's a mutant something. How do you know it's a turus?"
"This guy told me." or "The Turus told me." Or "The dying mother Turus told me."
"We better call animal control."
"No!" Now you have to come up with a reason NOT to call animal control.
Do you see how an impenetrable ball of wax can become a linear string of data under interrogation?
ASKING QUESTIONS is the key to dissecting an expository lump, and discovering what goes now and what goes later, what's a bread-crumb and what's the payload at the end of the trail.
As I noted in the discussion of the Expository Lump, what goes first and what goes second is a function of WHAT THE READER IS ASKING.
Your reader can be your interrogator, and you have to satisfy that curiosity while not giving away the whole ball of wax.
As with most structural issues that arise while crafting a piece of fiction, the Expository Lump yields to a systematic questioning.
You just have to know what the questions are, and to find out you have to go adventuring in your universe - and figure out "who" will confront you with questions on your return.
In the writer's mind, the reader is an Authority Figure -- skeptical, wary, unconvinced, and with the power over you of NOT BUYING this book.
Now, don't let that intimidate you, and don't let the rule against expository lumps choke you up.
You don't want to prevent yourself from passing a Lump. You'll only give yourself writer's block doing that. In fact, most writer's block cases are just cases of rampant perfectionism, or sometimes not having the confidence to say what you want to say. So nevermind -- spit it out! Just splosh it onto the page.
In rewriting, remember that nothing is permanently gone. Delete something here, you can put it in over there. But to make this technique pay off, you have to have something to delete. So write those lumps! Then handle them as if undressing a sex partner.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
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