Insofar as TV seasons as such exist anymore, the summer series are winding down and the fall programs are starting up (with more overlap between the two phases than usual, it seems). EUREKA, set in a small town inhabited almost entirely by scientific geniuses working for a cutting-edge technology company, climaxes with a space flight to Titan. TRUE BLOOD has finished its season, and HAVEN, which so far I haven't found as exciting as I'd hoped (lots of delicious hints about the town's past but few revelations), will end for the year next week. I liked FALLING SKIES, about a group of human survivors coping with an alien invasion, very much and was glad to learn it's returning next summer.
Of the regular-season SF or fantasy series I watch, SUPERNATURAL and THE VAMPIRE DIARIES are still around. I gave up on FRINGE a long time ago (which may have been a mistake) and never got into some of the other cable SF shows.
New series: THE SECRET CIRCLE, based on novels by the author of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, has already started and shows possibilities. A teenage girl gets drawn into a coven of witches replicating a similar circle their parents belonged to. The heroine's situation, not surprisingly, has distinct resemblances to that of Elena at the beginning of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES.
There are two fairy-tale-based shows I'm looking forward to: In GRIMM, a detective who's descended from the Grimm brothers solves crimes involving evil creatures from legends and fairy tales, which, unknown to the general public, really exist. ONCE UPON A TIME features characters such as Snow White cursed to live in our world.
About Spielberg's TERRA NOVA, I'm dubious. I'll give the pilot a try. A group of colonists is sent back to the age of the dinosaurs to make a fresh start for humanity. How is that supposed to work? If they're intended to engineer a reset for human evolution, they're starting way too far back. Given the butterfly effect, who knows what kind of world would result from their intervention? Or maybe the purpose is to establish a population base in a fresh environment unspoiled by the human-made disasters that have ruined the future they've come from. If so, again, why pick the dinosaur era? Couldn't they find a more recent epoch just as unspoiled but a lot less dangerous?
What returning or new spec fic shows are you looking forward to?
By the way, what caused the decline of the old TV schedule with premieres in the fall and reruns in the summer? Cable? In my view, that's an improvement, by the way—lots more viewing choices. And why do contemporary "fall" shows typically have fewer episodes per season than series did decades ago? When do we ever see a conventional 26-episode season anymore? Cost of production, I assume, but I don't know enough about the industry to guess why the present-day cost per hour would proportionally exceed similar expenses thirty years ago.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Verisimilitude VS Reality - Part 3 The Game, The Stakes, The Template
Last week we covered 3 "Clues" about how to integrate Multiple Point of View with Story Structure; Master Theme Structure, The Camera, Nesting Plots and Stories.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.html
This week we have 3 more "Clues" for the advanced writing student, and a homework assignment that should keep you busy a few years.
CLUE 4 The Tennis Match vs The Football Game
Your reader is reading your novel as if watching a tennis match, or a football game (depending on how many Point of View characters you have).
If you write a novel with only one point of view character, that character is the only thing in the novel that the reader is watching. That character is the only thing that matters to the reader. So if that character fails to capture affection or identification from the reader, the novel fails. But it is much, much easier to write from a single point of view with one theme, one conflict, one resolution. Do that in 1st person, and you may have a small readership, but you will glue those readers to the page.
When you have more than one point of view character, the reader ceases to be totally absorbed in one character.
At least that's how it should work. If a reader finds one POV character much more absorbing than the others, the reader is likely to skip the sections from the other POV and then not recommend the novel to friends.
So when you move from single POV to multiple POV, you shift what is important to the readership from the character of the person experiencing a story, to the PLOT rather than the STORY.
Consider the person who goes to a dance recital to see one dancer perform several pieces on stage, to demonstrate what they've learned, or how good a dancer they are. Or Figure Skating championships where you have the single skater at a time, but several in a row to judge against each other.
That's a single POV novel, or novel series where each novel has a different protagonist, POV character.
The typical Romance bounces the POV from the woman to the man and back, each of them most concerned about what's going on in the other's head and how to get the attention they want.
The typical Romance novel is more like a Tennis match where the audience watches two people volleying a ball back and forth. It's pretty simple, the stakes and the feats required to prevail are clear. But the viewer watches the ball, not the characters.
Now move up to the football game.
Yes, we cheer particular players or root for this team or that, but we go to THE GAME not a given player's performance.
The performance (the story) is secondary to the GAME and it's outcome.
The viewer's attention is on the scoreboard, the referees' calls, the bench, the coach, the cheerleaders, and the concessionaire barker moving through the stands, maybe the TV cameras in the booth above. And the viewer is having a great time. People "go to the game" not for the players but to have a great time!
The Camera mentioned in Clue 2 which was on the POV character's shoulder, and is on the shoulder of each of the POV characters in a more complex work, now is on the viewer's shoulder.
The writer of a 2 or 3 POV novel can inter-cut from all 2 or 3 cameras on character's shoulders, creating verisimilitude by following each POV character's story and plot within that character's "blinders."
Use more than 3 characters and you don't "intercut" you "pan" the camera from one thread of a story to another. The reader's attention is under the reader's control, not yours, and your success as a writer depends on anticipating where the reader's eye will light next, not on guiding it where you want it.
The technique of inter-cutting between cameras to get a different perspective on what's going on, becomes the technique of following The Game - following the ball when it's in play, following the bench when a player substitution goes on, following the TV cameras up above when something happens, following the cheerleaders when they take the field at half-time (yes, the 'beat' that belongs at the halfway point changes by how many POV characters there are).
The reader is no longer interested in the emotional reality of an individual character, or two, but is interested in the outcome of The Game.
That makes all the stories of all the characters of lesser import.
But it allows the writer to tackle bigger, more emphatically egregious themes, themes which violate all the reader's ideas of reality.
Such novels place the reader in the position of Observer, outside the action, above "all that." The reader can feel superior to all the characters because the reader understands what's going on better than any given character on the field.
That makes it harder for the writer to get the reader to care about "the stakes" a given player is playing for.
The trick in Point of View Shifts is to follow The Ball, follow The Game, to follow the journey toward finding out whether the stakes are won or lost.
So you come to a point where a character throws the ball, and shift point of view in a PAN not a CUT to the player who catches that ball, then follow what the player with the ball does with it until it leaves his/her hands, and you follow that ball not the character's story, across point of view shifts. How the ball travels, where, to whom, who gets smeared and who carries it to the next touchdown all explicate and illustrate the theme without ever stating that theme.
So in a multiple point of view novel, you don't shift point of view, you follow the ball that is describing the theme by the way it moves.
So we're back to THEME.
CLUE 5 The Stakes
The more points of view the writer presents, the more crucial it is to get the reader involved in The Stakes, and the harder it is for the writer to achieve that involvement.
When you have only one Point of View, "The Stakes" are just what that one person stands to gain, lose, or learn from resolving the conflict.
When you have 2 Points of View (as in a Romance) "The Stakes" are whether that couple will coalesce into a working Relationship that will last. The rest is decoration. The real goal is forming a stable Relationship.
When you have multiple Points of View, "The Stakes" is the outcome of "The Game."
In the first two instances, the writer's job of getting the reader to care is fairly easy. Show don't tell how the character is likeable and the rest falls into place. That's the thesis of Blake Snyder's works on screenwriting, SAVE THE CAT.
To create a likeable character, show the character's very first action the reader sees as "saving a cat" -- doing something that displays a good heart, something the reader/viewer approves of that takes an effort or a risk on the part of the character, a risk beyond the ostensible reward.
So even in multiple point of view novels, you must create that likeable character trait. What's "likeable" varies with target readership.
But one thing is always the same.
The outcome of The Game is the important thing to the reader.
How The Game comes out will defy or validate the reader's sense of Reality, of Truth, Justice And The American Way, of Good vs. Evil, or whatever The Game is about.
The Game is always The Game Of Life.
And it is the reader's life at stake, not the writer's.
Hence the writer must learn to walk a mile in the reader's moccasins, must learn to espouse with vigor and sincere enthusiasm whatever philosophy the reader holds most dear but has no clue is inside them.
When the writer brings a subconscious value held dear by the reader to the surface, or just barely under the surface, at the end of the novel, the reader CRIES or LAUGHS or responds in a part of their being they didn't know was there. In a way, the reader loses virginity in this process. And the reader will always remember that book.
That is the payload the writer lives to deliver. It is the essence of the artform. Punch. Impact. Revelation.
So in the outcome of The Game the reader has been viewing from the 50-yard line, the reader will come to understand the theme of your novel.
But the reader's understanding of your theme will not be your understanding of it.
If you have "the good guys" win, the reader could conclude not, "justice prevails" but "might makes right." Or possibly the reader won't "buy" the ending, and will feel it's "contrived" because they were rooting for the bad guys.
You can't make a reader understand life the way you do because their reality isn't yours.
But using verisimilitude, you can allow the reader to experience a reality that is not their own, even if it isn't yours either.
The more point of view characters you use, the more likely it is the reader will not even be aware of your theme.
But if you, as writer, are not very clear on why each element is emphasized in the novel just this amount, not more or less, then the reader won't feel verisimilitude or reality -- they will feel confused.
CLUE 6 Steal From The Best
One mistake many new writers make is to attempt to create or innovate a brand new, never before used, plot structure in order to be seen by publishers a "original" and thus get promoted big time.
But if you study some first-published works of very famous writers, you will find (and this is not an easy study) that their first novels, or breakout novels, all shared one characteristic.
They used an old, tried and true, done to death, plot structure.
They say there aren't any new plots. Maybe not, but there are new plot structures popping up all the time -- just not as first sales by unknown writers.
Occasionally you'll see one that seems to be a first sale, but digging a little you'll find that writer has a professional track record under a different name.
You might want to read my post on pen-names:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-ii.html
It has a link to part one.
If you have Microsoft Office, you may have found on the Microsoft website where they sell or give away "templates" for their more complicated programs.
You need such a template to attempt the leap from single POV to multiple POV novel structure. It's what I used to structure MOLT BROTHER.
But they don't give away templates for novels. The closest thing I've found is Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet, referenced so many times in the posts listed in Part 2 of this series.
Using a familiar Template for your multiple point of view novel gives you a leg up with inducing suspension of disbelief in your readers.
Snyder uses the 3-act screenplay template.
There is a 4-act screenplay structure favored by many.
The classic 100,000 word novel structure is 4-act.
But you can't really do more than 2 or possibly 3 points of view in 100,000 words of novel.
For real multiple point of view, a whole football game, you need 150,000 to 175,000 words, and few publishers would take a chance on a new writer at that expensive length, at least not if they hadn't won some prestigious awards in the same category with short stories.
So pick a word length you think you can sell, and figure how many points of view you'll need to cover your theme. If there are too many points of view for the length you can sell, divide the work into a series of novels.
Today you can sell novel series provided the first novel stands alone well enough that it works if the second novel is not published because sales on the first didn't justify it.
I would suggest finishing, completely polishing, 3 novels in a series before presenting them to a publisher if you have no previous sales.
Now, find four or five novels in the general genre or subject area of your material, aimed at your market, that are all of the same length as what you think you can sell. Choose novels which really twang your heartstrings just the way you want to reach your readers. Be sure you choose novels that you find unutterably fascinating, re-readable, and moving. Choose the best of the best of what you have read that represent the reason you want to write this story. Eventually, your marketing materials will be based on these choices. Editors will pitch your novel to their sales staff as "just like" or "appealing to lovers of" those 5 novel choices.
By the time you get done with the following exercise, you may be bored to tears with those novels.
Study those novels for structure.
Count how many pages between internal-climaxes (I don't mean sex scenes).
Count the length of the scenes (750 words is a great meter per narrative scene).
Count the points of view. You want to choose novels that have the same number of points of view that you will be using.
Find the story and the plot-thread for each point of view.
Find the Beginning, Middle, End, and quarter-points for each story.
Find which story starts first and ends last.
Find which starts second and find where it ends. And so on, until you've charted the emotional ups and downs, climaxes and suspense-lines of each of the points of view in all your samples.
Find the "ball" -- and name the Game -- in each novel. What is the objective of the game? Who's playing? What are the stakes? What is the meaning of it all?
Read reviews, especially by other readers such as you find on amazon.com, to find what other readers found interesting or boring in these novels.
If I've guessed right, you will find the novel structure behind each of your choices is the same.
Yes, very likely, if you loved each of these chosen novels all that much, you will very likely find that all (or at least most) conform to the same structure.
Why is that? Because what makes us love novels is not the characters but the structure.
Every single reader believes to the tips of their toenails that what they love is the character in this or that TV show or novel.
It isn't. What evokes that fascination is the structure that displays the character.
It's like putting a classy, sparkling diamond on a glittery white background under flourescent lights, or putting that same diamond on clean, rich black velvet with one single, tiny spotlight of sunlight spectrum. Do you love the sight of the diamond or the setting? Unless you're a gem-buff, it's the setting that sparks the emotion. That setting in the gem world is the same as the structure in the novel world. The structure is the part the consumer, the buyer, never notices. But the professional will fuss over it endlessly.
Or as caterers will tell you, how delicious food is said to taste depends entirely on presentation not ingredients. Ingredients count, of course, but presentation can ruin marvelous ingredients.
Why is this presentation, or novel structure, really the heart-grabber?
Because that structure (like the football game and its rules) provides the element of verisimilitude.
The novel's structure reflects or echos our perception of reality.
In order to deal with reality, we cut it down to size by wearing philosophical "blinders" - like a racehorse wears so the horse won't spook at movement to the side or get flying mud in their eyes.
We try to understand reality.
We impose our own philosophical structure on our personal reality, just so we can deal.
Likewise, in entertainment or art, in the perception of beauty or deliciousness, or sexiness, we respond most strongly to that which fits into the structure we use to understand our reality.
Fiction seems realistic, and thus more satisfying, when its structure mimics our own perception of reality.
That structure of novel and our reality contains within its bones our most cherished, subconscious assumptions about reality, our values, our notion of what is right and what is wrong, of good and evil and whether such a thing actually exists. The most fundamental axioms and postulates of our personal philosophy (you can't trust men/women; Big Business is the Enemy of the People), are encoded into that structure.
In my series on Astrology Just For Writers on this blog, I think I've explained how Saturn is structure -- it is referred to by some of the most prominent Astrologers as the Illusion that Reality is Real.
That's what I'm talking about here. The structure of our fiction contains the skeleton that supports our cherished (and necessary for sanity, just as a racehorse's blinders are necessary for the horse's sanity) illusion that our reality is real.
Some people go to fiction for a challenge to that illusion, for a glimpse outside their daily blinders.
Others go to fiction for a validation of that illusion they need so much.
The same reader might have either or both purposes in mind when choosing a given novel to read. Whatever your reader's purpose, thwart it at your own peril.
Romance actually caters well to both purposes.
A writer's journey to craft mastery requires the cautious, gentle, shedding of those blinders, at least the cultural ones.
The first step on that journey is choosing the 5 novels that have impacted you the hardest and analyzing them for all these traits I've listed, and more that I've touched on in other posts.
But most especially analyze for the structure that validates your personal reality via theme.
The only place for theme in fiction (except for maybe one line of dialogue at the end, or possibly one line at the beginning, and rarely should that line be "on the nose.") - the only place for theme is inside the bone marrow of that skeleton of structure.
So find 5 novels, analyze them for their structure, and then extract that structure to be your TEMPLATE for this type of novel (chosen by number of POV characters).
If you work at it, you'll end up with several such templates, each for a different type of novel aimed at a different readership, different kinds of publishers, different number of points of view.
This same trick works for non-fiction too. Structure is everything in fiction and non-fiction.
Extract successful templates, shake off the clinging details, delete anything specific to other writer's styles, and use that template for your own fiction or non-fiction.
For MOLT BROTHER I used a template of converging plot-lines.
I took two main characters connected by a single huge Project (in this case an interstellar archeological pursuit of evidence of a forerunner civilization in the galaxy). The two characters' lives were connected by secondary characters who were running the dig.
The weak spot in this novel is that the reader can't see clearly enough, right off the bat, what the connection between the two groups of characters will be. You don't see the convergence of the plot lines until too deep into the novel.
But the novel developes velocity as the two main POV characters are on a collision course, and finally meet.
Then both main characters and their secondary characters are furiously involved in the same big stakes game.
MOLT BROTHER and CITY OF A MILLION LEGENDS
are about individual characters and their present lives, but what they are doing, why they do it, and what happens because they do it are all the result of karmic forces they let loose thousands of years ago, converging forces. One of those forces is the invisible, unknown to exist, arch-enemy orchestrating dire events off stage - the evil puppet master.
It's an enormously complex piece of worldbuilding with a deceptively simple reader-interface.
The Converging Plot Lines structure is classic, but it's difficult to do.
MOLT BROTHER has enough technical flaws in the facade to allow writers to deconstruct it and learn the template for their own use.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.html
This week we have 3 more "Clues" for the advanced writing student, and a homework assignment that should keep you busy a few years.
CLUE 4 The Tennis Match vs The Football Game
Your reader is reading your novel as if watching a tennis match, or a football game (depending on how many Point of View characters you have).
If you write a novel with only one point of view character, that character is the only thing in the novel that the reader is watching. That character is the only thing that matters to the reader. So if that character fails to capture affection or identification from the reader, the novel fails. But it is much, much easier to write from a single point of view with one theme, one conflict, one resolution. Do that in 1st person, and you may have a small readership, but you will glue those readers to the page.
When you have more than one point of view character, the reader ceases to be totally absorbed in one character.
At least that's how it should work. If a reader finds one POV character much more absorbing than the others, the reader is likely to skip the sections from the other POV and then not recommend the novel to friends.
So when you move from single POV to multiple POV, you shift what is important to the readership from the character of the person experiencing a story, to the PLOT rather than the STORY.
Consider the person who goes to a dance recital to see one dancer perform several pieces on stage, to demonstrate what they've learned, or how good a dancer they are. Or Figure Skating championships where you have the single skater at a time, but several in a row to judge against each other.
That's a single POV novel, or novel series where each novel has a different protagonist, POV character.
The typical Romance bounces the POV from the woman to the man and back, each of them most concerned about what's going on in the other's head and how to get the attention they want.
The typical Romance novel is more like a Tennis match where the audience watches two people volleying a ball back and forth. It's pretty simple, the stakes and the feats required to prevail are clear. But the viewer watches the ball, not the characters.
Now move up to the football game.
Yes, we cheer particular players or root for this team or that, but we go to THE GAME not a given player's performance.
The performance (the story) is secondary to the GAME and it's outcome.
The viewer's attention is on the scoreboard, the referees' calls, the bench, the coach, the cheerleaders, and the concessionaire barker moving through the stands, maybe the TV cameras in the booth above. And the viewer is having a great time. People "go to the game" not for the players but to have a great time!
The Camera mentioned in Clue 2 which was on the POV character's shoulder, and is on the shoulder of each of the POV characters in a more complex work, now is on the viewer's shoulder.
The writer of a 2 or 3 POV novel can inter-cut from all 2 or 3 cameras on character's shoulders, creating verisimilitude by following each POV character's story and plot within that character's "blinders."
Use more than 3 characters and you don't "intercut" you "pan" the camera from one thread of a story to another. The reader's attention is under the reader's control, not yours, and your success as a writer depends on anticipating where the reader's eye will light next, not on guiding it where you want it.
The technique of inter-cutting between cameras to get a different perspective on what's going on, becomes the technique of following The Game - following the ball when it's in play, following the bench when a player substitution goes on, following the TV cameras up above when something happens, following the cheerleaders when they take the field at half-time (yes, the 'beat' that belongs at the halfway point changes by how many POV characters there are).
The reader is no longer interested in the emotional reality of an individual character, or two, but is interested in the outcome of The Game.
That makes all the stories of all the characters of lesser import.
But it allows the writer to tackle bigger, more emphatically egregious themes, themes which violate all the reader's ideas of reality.
Such novels place the reader in the position of Observer, outside the action, above "all that." The reader can feel superior to all the characters because the reader understands what's going on better than any given character on the field.
That makes it harder for the writer to get the reader to care about "the stakes" a given player is playing for.
The trick in Point of View Shifts is to follow The Ball, follow The Game, to follow the journey toward finding out whether the stakes are won or lost.
So you come to a point where a character throws the ball, and shift point of view in a PAN not a CUT to the player who catches that ball, then follow what the player with the ball does with it until it leaves his/her hands, and you follow that ball not the character's story, across point of view shifts. How the ball travels, where, to whom, who gets smeared and who carries it to the next touchdown all explicate and illustrate the theme without ever stating that theme.
So in a multiple point of view novel, you don't shift point of view, you follow the ball that is describing the theme by the way it moves.
So we're back to THEME.
CLUE 5 The Stakes
The more points of view the writer presents, the more crucial it is to get the reader involved in The Stakes, and the harder it is for the writer to achieve that involvement.
When you have only one Point of View, "The Stakes" are just what that one person stands to gain, lose, or learn from resolving the conflict.
When you have 2 Points of View (as in a Romance) "The Stakes" are whether that couple will coalesce into a working Relationship that will last. The rest is decoration. The real goal is forming a stable Relationship.
When you have multiple Points of View, "The Stakes" is the outcome of "The Game."
In the first two instances, the writer's job of getting the reader to care is fairly easy. Show don't tell how the character is likeable and the rest falls into place. That's the thesis of Blake Snyder's works on screenwriting, SAVE THE CAT.
To create a likeable character, show the character's very first action the reader sees as "saving a cat" -- doing something that displays a good heart, something the reader/viewer approves of that takes an effort or a risk on the part of the character, a risk beyond the ostensible reward.
So even in multiple point of view novels, you must create that likeable character trait. What's "likeable" varies with target readership.
But one thing is always the same.
The outcome of The Game is the important thing to the reader.
How The Game comes out will defy or validate the reader's sense of Reality, of Truth, Justice And The American Way, of Good vs. Evil, or whatever The Game is about.
The Game is always The Game Of Life.
And it is the reader's life at stake, not the writer's.
Hence the writer must learn to walk a mile in the reader's moccasins, must learn to espouse with vigor and sincere enthusiasm whatever philosophy the reader holds most dear but has no clue is inside them.
When the writer brings a subconscious value held dear by the reader to the surface, or just barely under the surface, at the end of the novel, the reader CRIES or LAUGHS or responds in a part of their being they didn't know was there. In a way, the reader loses virginity in this process. And the reader will always remember that book.
That is the payload the writer lives to deliver. It is the essence of the artform. Punch. Impact. Revelation.
So in the outcome of The Game the reader has been viewing from the 50-yard line, the reader will come to understand the theme of your novel.
But the reader's understanding of your theme will not be your understanding of it.
If you have "the good guys" win, the reader could conclude not, "justice prevails" but "might makes right." Or possibly the reader won't "buy" the ending, and will feel it's "contrived" because they were rooting for the bad guys.
You can't make a reader understand life the way you do because their reality isn't yours.
But using verisimilitude, you can allow the reader to experience a reality that is not their own, even if it isn't yours either.
The more point of view characters you use, the more likely it is the reader will not even be aware of your theme.
But if you, as writer, are not very clear on why each element is emphasized in the novel just this amount, not more or less, then the reader won't feel verisimilitude or reality -- they will feel confused.
CLUE 6 Steal From The Best
One mistake many new writers make is to attempt to create or innovate a brand new, never before used, plot structure in order to be seen by publishers a "original" and thus get promoted big time.
But if you study some first-published works of very famous writers, you will find (and this is not an easy study) that their first novels, or breakout novels, all shared one characteristic.
They used an old, tried and true, done to death, plot structure.
They say there aren't any new plots. Maybe not, but there are new plot structures popping up all the time -- just not as first sales by unknown writers.
Occasionally you'll see one that seems to be a first sale, but digging a little you'll find that writer has a professional track record under a different name.
You might want to read my post on pen-names:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-ii.html
It has a link to part one.
If you have Microsoft Office, you may have found on the Microsoft website where they sell or give away "templates" for their more complicated programs.
You need such a template to attempt the leap from single POV to multiple POV novel structure. It's what I used to structure MOLT BROTHER.
But they don't give away templates for novels. The closest thing I've found is Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet, referenced so many times in the posts listed in Part 2 of this series.
Using a familiar Template for your multiple point of view novel gives you a leg up with inducing suspension of disbelief in your readers.
Snyder uses the 3-act screenplay template.
There is a 4-act screenplay structure favored by many.
The classic 100,000 word novel structure is 4-act.
But you can't really do more than 2 or possibly 3 points of view in 100,000 words of novel.
For real multiple point of view, a whole football game, you need 150,000 to 175,000 words, and few publishers would take a chance on a new writer at that expensive length, at least not if they hadn't won some prestigious awards in the same category with short stories.
So pick a word length you think you can sell, and figure how many points of view you'll need to cover your theme. If there are too many points of view for the length you can sell, divide the work into a series of novels.
Today you can sell novel series provided the first novel stands alone well enough that it works if the second novel is not published because sales on the first didn't justify it.
I would suggest finishing, completely polishing, 3 novels in a series before presenting them to a publisher if you have no previous sales.
Now, find four or five novels in the general genre or subject area of your material, aimed at your market, that are all of the same length as what you think you can sell. Choose novels which really twang your heartstrings just the way you want to reach your readers. Be sure you choose novels that you find unutterably fascinating, re-readable, and moving. Choose the best of the best of what you have read that represent the reason you want to write this story. Eventually, your marketing materials will be based on these choices. Editors will pitch your novel to their sales staff as "just like" or "appealing to lovers of" those 5 novel choices.
By the time you get done with the following exercise, you may be bored to tears with those novels.
Study those novels for structure.
Count how many pages between internal-climaxes (I don't mean sex scenes).
Count the length of the scenes (750 words is a great meter per narrative scene).
Count the points of view. You want to choose novels that have the same number of points of view that you will be using.
Find the story and the plot-thread for each point of view.
Find the Beginning, Middle, End, and quarter-points for each story.
Find which story starts first and ends last.
Find which starts second and find where it ends. And so on, until you've charted the emotional ups and downs, climaxes and suspense-lines of each of the points of view in all your samples.
Find the "ball" -- and name the Game -- in each novel. What is the objective of the game? Who's playing? What are the stakes? What is the meaning of it all?
Read reviews, especially by other readers such as you find on amazon.com, to find what other readers found interesting or boring in these novels.
If I've guessed right, you will find the novel structure behind each of your choices is the same.
Yes, very likely, if you loved each of these chosen novels all that much, you will very likely find that all (or at least most) conform to the same structure.
Why is that? Because what makes us love novels is not the characters but the structure.
Every single reader believes to the tips of their toenails that what they love is the character in this or that TV show or novel.
It isn't. What evokes that fascination is the structure that displays the character.
It's like putting a classy, sparkling diamond on a glittery white background under flourescent lights, or putting that same diamond on clean, rich black velvet with one single, tiny spotlight of sunlight spectrum. Do you love the sight of the diamond or the setting? Unless you're a gem-buff, it's the setting that sparks the emotion. That setting in the gem world is the same as the structure in the novel world. The structure is the part the consumer, the buyer, never notices. But the professional will fuss over it endlessly.
Or as caterers will tell you, how delicious food is said to taste depends entirely on presentation not ingredients. Ingredients count, of course, but presentation can ruin marvelous ingredients.
Why is this presentation, or novel structure, really the heart-grabber?
Because that structure (like the football game and its rules) provides the element of verisimilitude.
The novel's structure reflects or echos our perception of reality.
In order to deal with reality, we cut it down to size by wearing philosophical "blinders" - like a racehorse wears so the horse won't spook at movement to the side or get flying mud in their eyes.
We try to understand reality.
We impose our own philosophical structure on our personal reality, just so we can deal.
Likewise, in entertainment or art, in the perception of beauty or deliciousness, or sexiness, we respond most strongly to that which fits into the structure we use to understand our reality.
Fiction seems realistic, and thus more satisfying, when its structure mimics our own perception of reality.
That structure of novel and our reality contains within its bones our most cherished, subconscious assumptions about reality, our values, our notion of what is right and what is wrong, of good and evil and whether such a thing actually exists. The most fundamental axioms and postulates of our personal philosophy (you can't trust men/women; Big Business is the Enemy of the People), are encoded into that structure.
In my series on Astrology Just For Writers on this blog, I think I've explained how Saturn is structure -- it is referred to by some of the most prominent Astrologers as the Illusion that Reality is Real.
That's what I'm talking about here. The structure of our fiction contains the skeleton that supports our cherished (and necessary for sanity, just as a racehorse's blinders are necessary for the horse's sanity) illusion that our reality is real.
Some people go to fiction for a challenge to that illusion, for a glimpse outside their daily blinders.
Others go to fiction for a validation of that illusion they need so much.
The same reader might have either or both purposes in mind when choosing a given novel to read. Whatever your reader's purpose, thwart it at your own peril.
Romance actually caters well to both purposes.
A writer's journey to craft mastery requires the cautious, gentle, shedding of those blinders, at least the cultural ones.
The first step on that journey is choosing the 5 novels that have impacted you the hardest and analyzing them for all these traits I've listed, and more that I've touched on in other posts.
But most especially analyze for the structure that validates your personal reality via theme.
The only place for theme in fiction (except for maybe one line of dialogue at the end, or possibly one line at the beginning, and rarely should that line be "on the nose.") - the only place for theme is inside the bone marrow of that skeleton of structure.
So find 5 novels, analyze them for their structure, and then extract that structure to be your TEMPLATE for this type of novel (chosen by number of POV characters).
If you work at it, you'll end up with several such templates, each for a different type of novel aimed at a different readership, different kinds of publishers, different number of points of view.
This same trick works for non-fiction too. Structure is everything in fiction and non-fiction.
Extract successful templates, shake off the clinging details, delete anything specific to other writer's styles, and use that template for your own fiction or non-fiction.
For MOLT BROTHER I used a template of converging plot-lines.
I took two main characters connected by a single huge Project (in this case an interstellar archeological pursuit of evidence of a forerunner civilization in the galaxy). The two characters' lives were connected by secondary characters who were running the dig.
The weak spot in this novel is that the reader can't see clearly enough, right off the bat, what the connection between the two groups of characters will be. You don't see the convergence of the plot lines until too deep into the novel.
But the novel developes velocity as the two main POV characters are on a collision course, and finally meet.
Then both main characters and their secondary characters are furiously involved in the same big stakes game.
MOLT BROTHER and CITY OF A MILLION LEGENDS
are about individual characters and their present lives, but what they are doing, why they do it, and what happens because they do it are all the result of karmic forces they let loose thousands of years ago, converging forces. One of those forces is the invisible, unknown to exist, arch-enemy orchestrating dire events off stage - the evil puppet master.
It's an enormously complex piece of worldbuilding with a deceptively simple reader-interface.
The Converging Plot Lines structure is classic, but it's difficult to do.
MOLT BROTHER has enough technical flaws in the facade to allow writers to deconstruct it and learn the template for their own use.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, September 18, 2011
A Bridge, An Earthquake, And A Cast Of Thousands
I like to mix things up in multiples of three, and the ingredients must come from different sources. "Eye of newt and toe of frog..." doesn't work so well, unless one is working through the To-Do list for a quest saga.
For those who like to write the alien romance version of "Towering Inferno" or any other disaster movie, how about the current situation of deteriorating infrastructure as seen this month with the closing of the Sherman-Minton bridge between Indiana and Kentucky, which has turned a fifteen minute commute into a twice daily, two-hour exercise in frustration?
http://bridgehunter.com/ky/jefferson/minton/
http://www.wdrb.com/story/15460972/yarmuth-says-sherman-minton-bridge-closing-should-not-be-a-partisan-issue
Who would you put on the other, still-sound but congested bridge?
President Obama?
An elderly prima in labor?
A politician rather fond of enlivening traffic jams by sexting at the wheel?
A fugitive of some sort?
A couple of truckers... maybe one big rig ought to be the mobile, broadcasting home of an Assange of the airwaves, or a rushed conservative broadcaster.
A school bus....
I wonder, would a motorcade get through? Are there any circumstances under which a Presidential motorcade cannot take priority over traffic on a bridge? I suppose, if traffic is already log-jammed and the motorcade wasn't expected.
Now to up the ante. The October issue of DISCOVER has an article by Amy Barth about projections that there could be a killer quake in the Central United States. Apparently, in 2006 FEMA commissioned a study of what would happen if there were a 7.7 magnitude quake in the Mississipi Valley around the New Madrid seismic zone. The study was cut short in 2009 owing to new funding priorities under a new FEMA administration.
So, yes, one definitely must have someone from --or dear to-- the current administration on the bridge, if only for the thusness of it all.
It is not inconceivable that an earthquake between Little Rock, Arkansas, and Evansville, Indiana, could shock Louisville, Kentucky. It looks as if the same river (Ohio) runs through, marking the Indiana/Kentucky border. So, there is already disruption and congestion because everyone is on two bridges, instead of three. The projection is that 15 major bridges would fail, if there were a major earthquake, over 7 million people would be displaced.
The third element would have to be alien. Should one put a shy and reticent merman in the mighty river? Or a Troll! Why shouldn't there be Bridge Trolls in Kentucky? Possibly, it would be more credible if the Assange-type were a Time Lord (in a really big Tardis)?
On that note, I will sign off.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Derivative Works: Where Is the Line?
Speaking of making unlikable characters sympathetic, there’s a good example in Sharyn McCrumb’s THE DEVIL AMONGST THE LAWYERS, which I’m rereading. This novel concerns a Depression-era murder case in the mountains of Virginia and focuses on several of the out-of-town reporters covering the trial. One of them, from a wealthy Philadelphia family, comes across as an aloof, condescending snob. Yet by showing through introspection and flashbacks how this man has been scarred by traumatic events in his past, the author brings us to sympathize with him by recognizing that his persona serves as a shield against further pain.
This week, though, I started thinking about fanfic and other derivative works when I read a notorious ten-year-old work, THE WIND DONE GONE. Here’s a draft of the mini-review of it that will appear in my October newsletter:
THE WIND DONE GONE, by Alice Randall. You may remember that this 2001 novel raised a lot of controversy because of the lawsuit against it by Margaret Mitchell's estate. A court ruled that its publication was legal on the principle that parodies don't constitute copyright infringement. Well, this story isn't a "parody" of GONE WITH THE WIND any more than THE WIDE SARGASSO SEA is a parody of JANE EYRE. THE WIND DONE GONE is a spinoff, most of which occurs after the end of Mitchell's novel, with Rhett already having left Scarlett. The narrator, Cynara, Rhett's mulatto mistress, fills in details about the other characters' earlier lives in brief flashbacks and, later, moments of revelation when she learns facts previously hidden from her. The narrative is not satirical but quite serious. The only feature that might be considered parody is Cynara's habit of giving nicknames to Mitchell's characters, as well as the plantation itself (she refers to Tara as either "the Cotton Farm" or "Tata"). Rhett gets off easily, being identified simply as "R." for most of the novel (but later as "Debt Chauffeur"). For example, Scarlett, Cynara's half sister, is Other; Scarlett's parents are Planter and Lady; Belle Watling is Beauty; Bonnie is Precious; Melanie is Mealy Mouth; Ashley is Dreamy Gentleman. Prissy's pseudonym as Miss Priss stays closest to the original, and Mammy is still Mammy. This technique ensures that the story never explicitly duplicates the contents of GONE WITH THE WIND, making Randall's novel all the more obviously a transformative rather than merely derivative work. Cynara, the daughter of Gerald O'Hara and Mammy, was sold away in her teens and eventually ended up in Belle Watling's brothel. Working as a maid, not a prostitute, she met Rhett Butler and became his mistress about a year before he met Scarlett. In fact, it was at Cynara's instigation that Rhett first became aware of Scarlett. Cynara's memoir's knife-sharp reflections on the events of GONE WITH THE WIND give the black perspective on the story with a different slant, revealing that the way Mitchell tells the family's history is not necessarily what really happened. Births and deaths play out differently from the way Mitchell tells them. Mammy and Pork (called "Garlic" by Cynara) steer the course of life at Tara behind the scenes. Ancestral secrets are revealed to the reader, though not usually to the oblivious white characters. As was notoriously mentioned when the book first came out, Ashley is gay—well, not exactly. Bisexual, maybe, and that facet of his character receives only a few brief mentions. Given his willingness to accept a sexless marriage with Melanie after the birth of Beau, it's not unbelievable to read that Ashley at one point in his early life had a liaison with a male slave. I started reading the novel to decode its rewriting of GONE WITH THE WIND, but I gradually became interested in Cynara herself as a strong, complex character. Her love-hate relationship with her Mammy and Scarlett unfolds little by little. She accompanies Rhett to Washington at the height of Reconstruction, when educated black men occupied the seats of power, and becomes involved with a black Congressman. Through her viewpoint, Reconstruction represents a brave new world, in contrast to Mitchell's portrayal of those years as nothing but brutal oppression against the South. This embryonic utopia soon falls apart, of course, and Cynara's Congressman loses the next election. Her first-person diary is framed by a prologue explaining how it came to be published and an epilogue summarizing the rest of her life.
On the basis of the content described above, I consider THE WIND DONE GONE a sort of rebuttal to GONE WITH THE WIND, in dialogue with its famed predecessor. Although it relies on the reader’s knowledge of the source novel, it’s a strong, original story in its own right. In my opinion, it’s neither parody nor plagiarism. Plagiarism and copyright infringement, of course, aren’t the same thing (although the former is usually the latter, too, but not always). Plagiarism means reproducing someone else’s work and claiming it as one’s own. A novel that changed all the names in DRACULA but nothing else in the text and tried to sell the result with a new author’s name on it would be plagiarism but not copyright infringement, since DRACULA is now in the public domain. Fanfic is a delicate area because, although fan writers don’t claim ownership of the original author’s characters and setting, if they use these without the creator’s permission they are legally violating copyright. Most copyright holders tacitly ignore fanfic, to the benefit of readers in my opinion. I’ve read fanfic based on TV shows that I think has deeper characterization and storytelling than the source material.
THE WIND DONE GONE falls into a different category because it was published commercially. However, I think it’s transformative enough to escape the charge of copyright violation, and a judge obviously agreed.
In the era of the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, standards for such things seem to have been looser. Henry Fielding’s first two books were fanfic—or maybe anti-fanfic—of Samuel Richardson’s PAMELA. The first, SHAMELA, is an outright parody of Richardson’s sentimental romance. Fielding’s JOSEPH ANDREWS, rather than a direct imitation, is a sequel or spinoff, starring the naïve younger brother Fielding invents for Pamela. If PAMELA and Fielding’s two derivative works were written nowadays, though, he would not be able to get away with commercial publication of either one.
Where do you think the line falls?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
This week, though, I started thinking about fanfic and other derivative works when I read a notorious ten-year-old work, THE WIND DONE GONE. Here’s a draft of the mini-review of it that will appear in my October newsletter:
THE WIND DONE GONE, by Alice Randall. You may remember that this 2001 novel raised a lot of controversy because of the lawsuit against it by Margaret Mitchell's estate. A court ruled that its publication was legal on the principle that parodies don't constitute copyright infringement. Well, this story isn't a "parody" of GONE WITH THE WIND any more than THE WIDE SARGASSO SEA is a parody of JANE EYRE. THE WIND DONE GONE is a spinoff, most of which occurs after the end of Mitchell's novel, with Rhett already having left Scarlett. The narrator, Cynara, Rhett's mulatto mistress, fills in details about the other characters' earlier lives in brief flashbacks and, later, moments of revelation when she learns facts previously hidden from her. The narrative is not satirical but quite serious. The only feature that might be considered parody is Cynara's habit of giving nicknames to Mitchell's characters, as well as the plantation itself (she refers to Tara as either "the Cotton Farm" or "Tata"). Rhett gets off easily, being identified simply as "R." for most of the novel (but later as "Debt Chauffeur"). For example, Scarlett, Cynara's half sister, is Other; Scarlett's parents are Planter and Lady; Belle Watling is Beauty; Bonnie is Precious; Melanie is Mealy Mouth; Ashley is Dreamy Gentleman. Prissy's pseudonym as Miss Priss stays closest to the original, and Mammy is still Mammy. This technique ensures that the story never explicitly duplicates the contents of GONE WITH THE WIND, making Randall's novel all the more obviously a transformative rather than merely derivative work. Cynara, the daughter of Gerald O'Hara and Mammy, was sold away in her teens and eventually ended up in Belle Watling's brothel. Working as a maid, not a prostitute, she met Rhett Butler and became his mistress about a year before he met Scarlett. In fact, it was at Cynara's instigation that Rhett first became aware of Scarlett. Cynara's memoir's knife-sharp reflections on the events of GONE WITH THE WIND give the black perspective on the story with a different slant, revealing that the way Mitchell tells the family's history is not necessarily what really happened. Births and deaths play out differently from the way Mitchell tells them. Mammy and Pork (called "Garlic" by Cynara) steer the course of life at Tara behind the scenes. Ancestral secrets are revealed to the reader, though not usually to the oblivious white characters. As was notoriously mentioned when the book first came out, Ashley is gay—well, not exactly. Bisexual, maybe, and that facet of his character receives only a few brief mentions. Given his willingness to accept a sexless marriage with Melanie after the birth of Beau, it's not unbelievable to read that Ashley at one point in his early life had a liaison with a male slave. I started reading the novel to decode its rewriting of GONE WITH THE WIND, but I gradually became interested in Cynara herself as a strong, complex character. Her love-hate relationship with her Mammy and Scarlett unfolds little by little. She accompanies Rhett to Washington at the height of Reconstruction, when educated black men occupied the seats of power, and becomes involved with a black Congressman. Through her viewpoint, Reconstruction represents a brave new world, in contrast to Mitchell's portrayal of those years as nothing but brutal oppression against the South. This embryonic utopia soon falls apart, of course, and Cynara's Congressman loses the next election. Her first-person diary is framed by a prologue explaining how it came to be published and an epilogue summarizing the rest of her life.
On the basis of the content described above, I consider THE WIND DONE GONE a sort of rebuttal to GONE WITH THE WIND, in dialogue with its famed predecessor. Although it relies on the reader’s knowledge of the source novel, it’s a strong, original story in its own right. In my opinion, it’s neither parody nor plagiarism. Plagiarism and copyright infringement, of course, aren’t the same thing (although the former is usually the latter, too, but not always). Plagiarism means reproducing someone else’s work and claiming it as one’s own. A novel that changed all the names in DRACULA but nothing else in the text and tried to sell the result with a new author’s name on it would be plagiarism but not copyright infringement, since DRACULA is now in the public domain. Fanfic is a delicate area because, although fan writers don’t claim ownership of the original author’s characters and setting, if they use these without the creator’s permission they are legally violating copyright. Most copyright holders tacitly ignore fanfic, to the benefit of readers in my opinion. I’ve read fanfic based on TV shows that I think has deeper characterization and storytelling than the source material.
THE WIND DONE GONE falls into a different category because it was published commercially. However, I think it’s transformative enough to escape the charge of copyright violation, and a judge obviously agreed.
In the era of the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, standards for such things seem to have been looser. Henry Fielding’s first two books were fanfic—or maybe anti-fanfic—of Samuel Richardson’s PAMELA. The first, SHAMELA, is an outright parody of Richardson’s sentimental romance. Fielding’s JOSEPH ANDREWS, rather than a direct imitation, is a sequel or spinoff, starring the naïve younger brother Fielding invents for Pamela. If PAMELA and Fielding’s two derivative works were written nowadays, though, he would not be able to get away with commercial publication of either one.
Where do you think the line falls?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Verisimilitude VS Reality-Part 2: Master Theme Structure, The Camera, Nesting Plots and Stories
Part 1 of this series can be found here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html
And now we're going to tackle an advanced topic, integrating two whole sets of writing techniques into a more complex composition. I'll highlight 3 major clues this week, and three more next week, a lot to digest.
But first, review these previous posts that we'll build on here. They contain the components of integrating multiple point of view with story structure.
Related posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/six-kinds-of-power-in-relationship.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/expletive-deleted-tender-romance.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/dissing-formula-novel.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/shifting-pov.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
(that you can't do in a Movie)
Oddly enough that last one has the structural trick of multiple Points Of View explained in the best way I've managed, but I've been asked to revisit the topic of integrating multiple-point-of-view stories with Plot Structure.
Last week I told you about my first attempt at the 2-POV plot structure.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/audiblecom-audiobook-adventure.html
So this week's focus on multiple point of view and plot structure will make a good lead-in to a much deeper exploration of THEME and how to work with it, because that's the core of the integration technique. Theme holds a story and plot together. Theme is what makes it possible to switch points of view without losing the reader's interest.
Integrating Point of View with Plot is a juggling act, for sure, and an advanced craft technique newly published writers may need to master swiftly after their first sale, both because long series require it, and because editors are seeing sales statistics that make them lean hard on writers to do it, even though the editor doesn't know how to teach it.
I can't honestly say I've mastered it myself.
My first attempt was my novel Molt Brother, newly available in a very wide variety of e-book formats.
Now here's the thing. The readership at the time Molt Brother was first published in Mass Market (I'm assuming you've read it because I've discussed it here before) was not conditioned to reading SF novels with a plot structured for two different points of view. Worse than that, actually using both a male and female point of view, or a human and non-human point of view, was just not done in the action genres. Yet I did both male/female and human/non-human in the same novel.
So Molt Brother was both an experimental piece and my first attempt at this structure.
Molt Brother has recently been picked up for audiobook, and you will find it on audible.com, iTunes, and Amazon in audiobook. I'm hoping the direct sequel, City of a Million Legends will be out in audiobook soon.
I tried Molt Brother out on a Historical writer I admire, Carol Buchanan, and she has praised it several times on twitter. I told you a little about that last week. See the link above.
From the readers at the time of first publication, I got a lot of blowback about how readers really couldn't tolerate one of the point of view characters, an alien female named Arshel. More recent readers don't seem to be having the same problem (others maybe, but not the same ones).
Arshel was a character pretty much invented by my editor and the dual point of view was required, not something I had originally intended for telling this interstellar archeology story.
So I can sympathize with the new writer, recently breaking into publishing, who is now wrestling with this problem.
The lesson is basically, don't try to do too many new techniques in one novel. Master them one at a time, but keep adding techniques.
You don't "master" a "technique" by paying close attention and concentrating, rewriting until you get the manuscript "right."
The object of these doing writing lessons is not to produce one perfect novel. The object is to master the process of producing novels so you don't have to think about craft and can fully concentrate on your art.
You master a technique by doing 5 or 10 manuscripts with it, until you can do it without knowing you've done it. When you can write it while minding the kids and talking on the phone, timing dinner in the oven, and jotting down notes for your next novel, then you've "mastered" the technique.
But first you do have to do it on purpose, one tiny step, one line and one paragraph, one bit of dialogue at a time, rewriting and rewriting one manuscript until it's the best you can do. Then do another story, then another, work against distractions and against the clock.
The hallmark of professional mastery in any field, particularly a performing art like writing, is that you meet your deadlines. "The Show Must Go On" is the main adage of the writer. Get the manuscript out of your hands, go on to the next.
So let's break this down into components that can be added one at a time to the writer's toolbox.
CLUE 1 Master Theme Structure
From my post: http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
-------QUOTE---------
I was delighted when a student writer asked me (and then reminded me) to explain the structure of very long novels, with emphasis on how to structure a novel for 3 viewpoint characters, even if they're all protagonists.
It's really very simple to do, but infernally difficult to explain.
In order to understand how to craft such a long novel that doesn't sag in the middle or peter out at the end, you have to have a firm grasp of the basics of structure that I've discussed previously.
Protagonist, antagonist, conflict, beginning, middle, end, and THEME.
And the most important structural component in a long piece is THEME.
A short story (under 7,500 words) can have one theme, and only ONE. It must be something very clear, starkly simple, mostly concrete -- something you can say in 3 to 10 words. "Life is Just A Bowl Of Cherries" -- "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished" -- a bumper sticker.
A novelette (to 17,500 words) can have a DOMINANT THEME and 1 SUB-THEME (and only one).
A novella (17,500 to 40,000) can have a DOMINANT THEME and 2 SUB-THEMES (only 2).
A NOVEL (40,000 words and up) (up to any length) can (but doesn't have to have) a DOMINANT THEME and UP TO 3 SUB-THEMES and no more than 3.
I did not make this up. I learned it in the Famous Writer's Course (a correspondence course on how to write fiction which I completed in the 1970's).
I've been a professional reviewer since the 1980's and a paid reviewer for The Monthly Aspectarian since 1993. I've read a lot of books in addition to the books I read just because I want to. I have NEVER seen this above paradigm of thematic relationships successfully violated.
If you want to see how it works in practice, read the early draft of my Sime~Gen Novel, UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER which is titled SIME SURGEON and posted for free reading at
http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/rimonslibrary/surgeon/SURGEON1.html Then read UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER (which had a HC edition and a paperback edition so you might find a copy somewhere).
The difference is the thematic structure paradigm strictly enforced, rigidly applied -- because my editor at Doubleday insisted or no publication. Her favorite mantra "It isn't clear" -- comes from how she searches for that thematic structure and the inner relationships between the sub-themes. But she, like most writers, does that subconsciously.
----------END QUOTE------------
You can find all the Sime~Gen novels here:
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20 (that's an Amazon "store" with links to paper and ebook editions)
Look on the right, find Jacqueline Lichtenberg, click, and find Molt Brother, City of a Million Legends, the Dushau Trilogy, and other books including 2 short story collections by me. Many of Jean Lorrah's novels are there too.
So, the first CLUE is to master THEME STRUCTURE. And to understand the use of the Master Theme, or the main theme. We'll have to discuss that in later posts, slicing and dicing philosophy, psychology, religion and other really discomforting topics. To be able to extract the most Romance Writing Craft clues out of those future posts, you will need to foster a clinical distance from your own personal belief system and subconscious assumptions about reality.
Most writers have probably been fostering that clinical distance from about age 5 already, simply because writers, like actors, just adore studying people --- other people with different points of view.
So now --
CLUE 2 The Camera
I don't think I've used this Camera analogy before, but again, as with the thematic structure clue, I didn't make it up. I learned it.
And it isn't something that the e-book revolution will change, destroy, wipe-out or even modify.
That's because this is how the basic human brain is hard-wired.
In "Reality" from the title of this piece, humans (the majority of your readership will be human, probably) view their lives, and the world through one, single, narrow point of view with "blinders" (like race horses) on the sides of their philophical vision to narrow and concentrate their vision of reality.
It's disturbing to glimpse what's outside those blinders.
Your personal philosophy is probably outside the blinders of the majority of your intended readership.
People used to publish books because they were "important" -- because they would "disturb" readers -- because they said something most readers hadn't thought of. That was before publishing was thrust onto a "profit or die" platform, when readers were only the highly educated, vastly intelligent 5% of humanity looking for new ideas.
Today, that 5% is gravitating toward the ebook and indie-publishing market, and everyone else is buying from Barnes&Noble, often on Nook but really just looking for "the same but different" as Hollywood puts it. You can be successful with strange, different things in the indie market that won't fly in Mass Market.
That shift is maybe half done, and there could be a sea change before you finish your latest novel, so stay in touch with what's succeeding and what is not.
So if you're aiming at Mass Market (or an "opens everywhere" screenplay, not an indie screenplay) you must create verisimilitude -- the illusion of reality.
To do that, you have to have a good grasp of what your readership sees as reality, then you must frame your information feed (oh, do read those posts listed above) to cast the illusion of reality around your characters and their world.
Lately, many Action-Fantasy and Fantasy-Romance novels are being publishing using First Person narrative because it is easy for a writer who can't handle point of view to cast that illusion of reality if the narrative is all about "I did this, I thought this, I wanted that, I changed my mind" -- it's a cheap trick, and not literarily valid all the time, but it works and it's very easy to do.
The success of the First Person narrative in today's market may reflect our modern young culture's obsession with Self. It often seems as if in our reality, we are very concerned about "I think about others all the time," or "I can't let the helpless starve," or whatever idealistic value is in focus. It's about how I practice this value in my life.
So First Person narratives have verisimilitude for those who, in reality, think inside their own minds "I - I - I"
So if you choose a Third Person narrative, or Omniscient Narrator, you have to work harder at verisimilitude.
What exactly do you do in your mind to create verisimilitude in a Third Person narrative?
Here's how I learned it.
You set a video camera on the shoulder of your character and show the reader what it records.
The camera is not inside the character's head. You can discuss his "I" narrative only by inference.
The camera analogy automatically sets those "blinders" around the edges of the character's peripheral vision -- this works wonders for writing Mystery or Mystery-Romance.
The writer will be tempted to talk about (in those dreaded expository lumps) all the things going on that the writer knows about (must know about) but that the character doesn't know about, doesn't see, isn't aware of. The CAMERA POINT OF VIEW will prevent the writer from spilling the beans to the reader, or make it easy for the editor to slash out the expository paragraphs and send the manuscript back for rewrite.
What the character does not (yet) know is the single, easiest, way to create a "suspense line" right alongside the "because line" that I've discussed in those posts listed above.
When the character finds out what was happening outside their camera angle, outside their blinders, the reader will experience the emotional shock right along with the character -- so you have created empathy and character identification in your reader, all by leaving out the exposition.
Now, using the Camera On the Shoulder, you can insert a character's thoughts on ocasion when the "beats" (oh, do read the posts listed above) require the information be fed to the reader. You do that by setting the character's thoughts in a different "grammatical voice" and using a different verb tense than in the narrative. And you set those "worded thoughts" in italics, not for emphasis but because they are not spoken. So you don't use quotes on worded thoughts.
The character's inner-story is revealed, only one sparse hint at a time, in those worded thoughts. Be very VERY careful to get the verb tense right because that's what carries the emotional impact, the shift from third to first person brings a loud shout of immediacy and personal contact. A lot of Mass Market novels today are too loosely edited and very often the italics are omitted or the verb tense and person of the pronouns aren't changed properly in the worded thought. For good examples, see Marion Zimmer Bradley's novels. Studying her work for the source of the effects she creates is where I learned the worded-thought technique.
CLUE 3 Nesting Plots and Stories
In a very long novel with multiple points of view, you need to have a complete story for each character, but only one plot for all the characters.
No two writers do this breakdown in the same sequence, and any given writer will do this exact breakdown in different ways for different projects. How it's accomplished is never the same twice. But every really great novel or film with wide readerships/ viewerships displays the exact same results as I'm about to describe.
As you outline before writing, during writing, and after finishing the first draft, look for and impose this structure on the work, ruthlessly. After the structure is in place, go back and polish up the "art" that was your original intent.
1) MAIN THEME - nail a single main philosophical theme that dominates the work
2) MAIN CHARACTER - the main theme is the lesson the main character learns. Don't let the supporting players overshadow or upstage the main character. Count the main character's pages of "face-time" and dialogue lines just like an actor's agent would. The FIRST CHARACTER intro'd on page 1 is the MAIN CHARACTER, and his/her conflict resolves on the LAST PAGE. This is the envelope surrounding all the internal commentary.
3) 1st SUPPORTING PLAYER -- that character's complete story explicates the 1st sub-dominant theme, and the lesson of that sub-dominant (fraction of the main theme) theme is the lesson driven home to the supporting player at the single climax of the novel. The 1st supporting player is intro'd second, and his/her sub-plot conflict resolves just before the Main Character's story resolves. The 1st supporting character's plot-conflict resolution CAUSES the Main Character's conflict to resolve.
4) 2nd SUPPORTING PLAYER - exactly the same as 1st Supporting Player except this one is intro'd third, has a plot conflict that resolves before the 1st Supporting Player's conflict resolves, and CAUSES the 1st Supporting Player's conflict to resolve.
See the pattern? NESTED STORIES, one inside the other like Russian dolls.
That's enough to chew on for a while, especially if you re-read the posts linked at the top of this entry.
I'll give you 3 more CLUES next week.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html
And now we're going to tackle an advanced topic, integrating two whole sets of writing techniques into a more complex composition. I'll highlight 3 major clues this week, and three more next week, a lot to digest.
But first, review these previous posts that we'll build on here. They contain the components of integrating multiple point of view with story structure.
Related posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/six-kinds-of-power-in-relationship.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/expletive-deleted-tender-romance.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/dissing-formula-novel.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/shifting-pov.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
(that you can't do in a Movie)
Oddly enough that last one has the structural trick of multiple Points Of View explained in the best way I've managed, but I've been asked to revisit the topic of integrating multiple-point-of-view stories with Plot Structure.
Last week I told you about my first attempt at the 2-POV plot structure.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/audiblecom-audiobook-adventure.html
So this week's focus on multiple point of view and plot structure will make a good lead-in to a much deeper exploration of THEME and how to work with it, because that's the core of the integration technique. Theme holds a story and plot together. Theme is what makes it possible to switch points of view without losing the reader's interest.
Integrating Point of View with Plot is a juggling act, for sure, and an advanced craft technique newly published writers may need to master swiftly after their first sale, both because long series require it, and because editors are seeing sales statistics that make them lean hard on writers to do it, even though the editor doesn't know how to teach it.
I can't honestly say I've mastered it myself.
My first attempt was my novel Molt Brother, newly available in a very wide variety of e-book formats.
Now here's the thing. The readership at the time Molt Brother was first published in Mass Market (I'm assuming you've read it because I've discussed it here before) was not conditioned to reading SF novels with a plot structured for two different points of view. Worse than that, actually using both a male and female point of view, or a human and non-human point of view, was just not done in the action genres. Yet I did both male/female and human/non-human in the same novel.
So Molt Brother was both an experimental piece and my first attempt at this structure.
Molt Brother has recently been picked up for audiobook, and you will find it on audible.com, iTunes, and Amazon in audiobook. I'm hoping the direct sequel, City of a Million Legends will be out in audiobook soon.
I tried Molt Brother out on a Historical writer I admire, Carol Buchanan, and she has praised it several times on twitter. I told you a little about that last week. See the link above.
From the readers at the time of first publication, I got a lot of blowback about how readers really couldn't tolerate one of the point of view characters, an alien female named Arshel. More recent readers don't seem to be having the same problem (others maybe, but not the same ones).
Arshel was a character pretty much invented by my editor and the dual point of view was required, not something I had originally intended for telling this interstellar archeology story.
So I can sympathize with the new writer, recently breaking into publishing, who is now wrestling with this problem.
The lesson is basically, don't try to do too many new techniques in one novel. Master them one at a time, but keep adding techniques.
You don't "master" a "technique" by paying close attention and concentrating, rewriting until you get the manuscript "right."
The object of these doing writing lessons is not to produce one perfect novel. The object is to master the process of producing novels so you don't have to think about craft and can fully concentrate on your art.
You master a technique by doing 5 or 10 manuscripts with it, until you can do it without knowing you've done it. When you can write it while minding the kids and talking on the phone, timing dinner in the oven, and jotting down notes for your next novel, then you've "mastered" the technique.
But first you do have to do it on purpose, one tiny step, one line and one paragraph, one bit of dialogue at a time, rewriting and rewriting one manuscript until it's the best you can do. Then do another story, then another, work against distractions and against the clock.
The hallmark of professional mastery in any field, particularly a performing art like writing, is that you meet your deadlines. "The Show Must Go On" is the main adage of the writer. Get the manuscript out of your hands, go on to the next.
So let's break this down into components that can be added one at a time to the writer's toolbox.
CLUE 1 Master Theme Structure
From my post: http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
-------QUOTE---------
I was delighted when a student writer asked me (and then reminded me) to explain the structure of very long novels, with emphasis on how to structure a novel for 3 viewpoint characters, even if they're all protagonists.
It's really very simple to do, but infernally difficult to explain.
In order to understand how to craft such a long novel that doesn't sag in the middle or peter out at the end, you have to have a firm grasp of the basics of structure that I've discussed previously.
Protagonist, antagonist, conflict, beginning, middle, end, and THEME.
And the most important structural component in a long piece is THEME.
A short story (under 7,500 words) can have one theme, and only ONE. It must be something very clear, starkly simple, mostly concrete -- something you can say in 3 to 10 words. "Life is Just A Bowl Of Cherries" -- "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished" -- a bumper sticker.
A novelette (to 17,500 words) can have a DOMINANT THEME and 1 SUB-THEME (and only one).
A novella (17,500 to 40,000) can have a DOMINANT THEME and 2 SUB-THEMES (only 2).
A NOVEL (40,000 words and up) (up to any length) can (but doesn't have to have) a DOMINANT THEME and UP TO 3 SUB-THEMES and no more than 3.
I did not make this up. I learned it in the Famous Writer's Course (a correspondence course on how to write fiction which I completed in the 1970's).
I've been a professional reviewer since the 1980's and a paid reviewer for The Monthly Aspectarian since 1993. I've read a lot of books in addition to the books I read just because I want to. I have NEVER seen this above paradigm of thematic relationships successfully violated.
If you want to see how it works in practice, read the early draft of my Sime~Gen Novel, UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER which is titled SIME SURGEON and posted for free reading at
http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/rimonslibrary/surgeon/SURGEON1.html Then read UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER (which had a HC edition and a paperback edition so you might find a copy somewhere).
The difference is the thematic structure paradigm strictly enforced, rigidly applied -- because my editor at Doubleday insisted or no publication. Her favorite mantra "It isn't clear" -- comes from how she searches for that thematic structure and the inner relationships between the sub-themes. But she, like most writers, does that subconsciously.
----------END QUOTE------------
You can find all the Sime~Gen novels here:
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20 (that's an Amazon "store" with links to paper and ebook editions)
Look on the right, find Jacqueline Lichtenberg, click, and find Molt Brother, City of a Million Legends, the Dushau Trilogy, and other books including 2 short story collections by me. Many of Jean Lorrah's novels are there too.
So, the first CLUE is to master THEME STRUCTURE. And to understand the use of the Master Theme, or the main theme. We'll have to discuss that in later posts, slicing and dicing philosophy, psychology, religion and other really discomforting topics. To be able to extract the most Romance Writing Craft clues out of those future posts, you will need to foster a clinical distance from your own personal belief system and subconscious assumptions about reality.
Most writers have probably been fostering that clinical distance from about age 5 already, simply because writers, like actors, just adore studying people --- other people with different points of view.
So now --
CLUE 2 The Camera
I don't think I've used this Camera analogy before, but again, as with the thematic structure clue, I didn't make it up. I learned it.
And it isn't something that the e-book revolution will change, destroy, wipe-out or even modify.
That's because this is how the basic human brain is hard-wired.
In "Reality" from the title of this piece, humans (the majority of your readership will be human, probably) view their lives, and the world through one, single, narrow point of view with "blinders" (like race horses) on the sides of their philophical vision to narrow and concentrate their vision of reality.
It's disturbing to glimpse what's outside those blinders.
Your personal philosophy is probably outside the blinders of the majority of your intended readership.
People used to publish books because they were "important" -- because they would "disturb" readers -- because they said something most readers hadn't thought of. That was before publishing was thrust onto a "profit or die" platform, when readers were only the highly educated, vastly intelligent 5% of humanity looking for new ideas.
Today, that 5% is gravitating toward the ebook and indie-publishing market, and everyone else is buying from Barnes&Noble, often on Nook but really just looking for "the same but different" as Hollywood puts it. You can be successful with strange, different things in the indie market that won't fly in Mass Market.
That shift is maybe half done, and there could be a sea change before you finish your latest novel, so stay in touch with what's succeeding and what is not.
So if you're aiming at Mass Market (or an "opens everywhere" screenplay, not an indie screenplay) you must create verisimilitude -- the illusion of reality.
To do that, you have to have a good grasp of what your readership sees as reality, then you must frame your information feed (oh, do read those posts listed above) to cast the illusion of reality around your characters and their world.
Lately, many Action-Fantasy and Fantasy-Romance novels are being publishing using First Person narrative because it is easy for a writer who can't handle point of view to cast that illusion of reality if the narrative is all about "I did this, I thought this, I wanted that, I changed my mind" -- it's a cheap trick, and not literarily valid all the time, but it works and it's very easy to do.
The success of the First Person narrative in today's market may reflect our modern young culture's obsession with Self. It often seems as if in our reality, we are very concerned about "I think about others all the time," or "I can't let the helpless starve," or whatever idealistic value is in focus. It's about how I practice this value in my life.
So First Person narratives have verisimilitude for those who, in reality, think inside their own minds "I - I - I"
So if you choose a Third Person narrative, or Omniscient Narrator, you have to work harder at verisimilitude.
What exactly do you do in your mind to create verisimilitude in a Third Person narrative?
Here's how I learned it.
You set a video camera on the shoulder of your character and show the reader what it records.
The camera is not inside the character's head. You can discuss his "I" narrative only by inference.
The camera analogy automatically sets those "blinders" around the edges of the character's peripheral vision -- this works wonders for writing Mystery or Mystery-Romance.
The writer will be tempted to talk about (in those dreaded expository lumps) all the things going on that the writer knows about (must know about) but that the character doesn't know about, doesn't see, isn't aware of. The CAMERA POINT OF VIEW will prevent the writer from spilling the beans to the reader, or make it easy for the editor to slash out the expository paragraphs and send the manuscript back for rewrite.
What the character does not (yet) know is the single, easiest, way to create a "suspense line" right alongside the "because line" that I've discussed in those posts listed above.
When the character finds out what was happening outside their camera angle, outside their blinders, the reader will experience the emotional shock right along with the character -- so you have created empathy and character identification in your reader, all by leaving out the exposition.
Now, using the Camera On the Shoulder, you can insert a character's thoughts on ocasion when the "beats" (oh, do read the posts listed above) require the information be fed to the reader. You do that by setting the character's thoughts in a different "grammatical voice" and using a different verb tense than in the narrative. And you set those "worded thoughts" in italics, not for emphasis but because they are not spoken. So you don't use quotes on worded thoughts.
The character's inner-story is revealed, only one sparse hint at a time, in those worded thoughts. Be very VERY careful to get the verb tense right because that's what carries the emotional impact, the shift from third to first person brings a loud shout of immediacy and personal contact. A lot of Mass Market novels today are too loosely edited and very often the italics are omitted or the verb tense and person of the pronouns aren't changed properly in the worded thought. For good examples, see Marion Zimmer Bradley's novels. Studying her work for the source of the effects she creates is where I learned the worded-thought technique.
CLUE 3 Nesting Plots and Stories
In a very long novel with multiple points of view, you need to have a complete story for each character, but only one plot for all the characters.
No two writers do this breakdown in the same sequence, and any given writer will do this exact breakdown in different ways for different projects. How it's accomplished is never the same twice. But every really great novel or film with wide readerships/ viewerships displays the exact same results as I'm about to describe.
As you outline before writing, during writing, and after finishing the first draft, look for and impose this structure on the work, ruthlessly. After the structure is in place, go back and polish up the "art" that was your original intent.
1) MAIN THEME - nail a single main philosophical theme that dominates the work
2) MAIN CHARACTER - the main theme is the lesson the main character learns. Don't let the supporting players overshadow or upstage the main character. Count the main character's pages of "face-time" and dialogue lines just like an actor's agent would. The FIRST CHARACTER intro'd on page 1 is the MAIN CHARACTER, and his/her conflict resolves on the LAST PAGE. This is the envelope surrounding all the internal commentary.
3) 1st SUPPORTING PLAYER -- that character's complete story explicates the 1st sub-dominant theme, and the lesson of that sub-dominant (fraction of the main theme) theme is the lesson driven home to the supporting player at the single climax of the novel. The 1st supporting player is intro'd second, and his/her sub-plot conflict resolves just before the Main Character's story resolves. The 1st supporting character's plot-conflict resolution CAUSES the Main Character's conflict to resolve.
4) 2nd SUPPORTING PLAYER - exactly the same as 1st Supporting Player except this one is intro'd third, has a plot conflict that resolves before the 1st Supporting Player's conflict resolves, and CAUSES the 1st Supporting Player's conflict to resolve.
See the pattern? NESTED STORIES, one inside the other like Russian dolls.
That's enough to chew on for a while, especially if you re-read the posts linked at the top of this entry.
I'll give you 3 more CLUES next week.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Patterns Of Injustice
Many truly gripping novels involve extreme injustice, usually visited upon the hero or heroine, or someone in their immediate family. The dilemma for some of us who write alien romances is how to find inspiration that is fresh and powerful, without dipping a toe --or even an arm and a leg-- into the territory of horror.
A possible resource is to anthropomorphize. Take for instance the modern example of "give a dog a bad name and hang him for it" as seen in modern American perceptions of Pit Bulls.
Do you know that there are condominium associations whose bylaws ban the possession of Pit Bulls simply because they are "Pit Bulls"?
If you on the list of potential or past donors to Alley Cat Rescue http://www.saveacat.org
you might have received a letter last month stating (of starving and abandoned cats) "Our animal shelters should be duty bound to help animals, but instead say: 'Don't feed them. They will go away.' I say: 'To where?' Have they ever worked in alleys to see what happens to the cats humans ignore?"
There is another example of injustice that could be adapted to an alien-abduction-gone-wrong premise.
And, here is an example of what our own, human kids suffer if they are unfortunate enough to be born with allergies that inconvenience the rest of society.
This is true stuff. People on international airplanes would obviously rather cause the potential death of a peanut allergic kid than forgo the tiny bag of peanuts to which they are entitled. One wonders why airlines still serve free peanut snacks at all.
On another note, it's September. Before we know it, NaNoWriMo time will be here. Will you be ready?
All the best,
Rowena Cherry
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Real People as Characters
I've just finished reading "A Time to Cast Away Stones," by Tim Powers, a novella sequel to his innovative epic vampire novel THE STRESS OF HER REGARD, featuring an ancient silicon-based species of near-godlike predators. The novel and the story use the Romantic poets (mainly Byron, Keats, and Shelley) and some of their real-life associates as protagonists. Earlier, Kathryn Ptacek wrote a novel about the major Romantic poets being victimized by a different kind of vampire, the sexually predatory lamia. Thinking of these works and many other cases where writers create excellent stories with historical figures as protagonists, I'm reminded of a guest-of-honor luncheon speech I heard a couple of years ago at a conference. The author giving the talk voiced his aversion to any fiction using a real person, no matter how long dead, as a major character. If I understood him correctly, he viewed this practice as a form of exploitation.
This author would definitely object to recent horror novels starring Abraham Lincoln and Queen Elizabeth (Tudor) as vampire slayers. (To my surprise, I found both of those books fairly convincing and respectful of their historical models.) But taking the principle to the rigorous lengths his lunch speech implied, he would also disapprove of all fictionalized biographies, e.g., Barbara Hambly's sympathetic treatment of Mary Todd Lincoln in the novel THE EMANCIPATOR'S WIFE, or any speculative retelling of historical events from the viewpoints of the main participants, such as Sharyn McCrumb's THE BALLAD OF TOM DOOLEY, forthcoming in a few days. In my opinion, the universe of fiction would be poorer without this kind of book. What about THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY and other biographical novels by Irving Stone? Has Michelangelo been dead long enough to be exempt from the prohibition? Taken to the ultimate extreme, the principle would rule out fiction on the lives of ancient figures such as Saint Paul or Julius Caesar. It would even apply to Shakespeare's history plays, which I strongly doubt the speaker had in mind.
The issue becomes more problematic when considering fiction about people who've died within living memory. Novels with H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian), C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien as heroes in completely invented storylines have been published in recent years. Needless to say, some critics have objected that these fictionalizations over-simplify or even caricature their subjects. Elvis Presley transformed into a vampire appears, though not as a major character and not explicitly named, in the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris. I've read a horror story with Elvis, near the end of his life, as the protagonist. Stephen King's forthcoming novel about the Kennedy assassination will include Lee Harvey Oswald, inevitably, as a central character.
Is any dead celebrity or historical figure fair game for fictionalization? Or do creative ethics require a writer to abstain from using a real-world person as a character (at least, onstage rather than as part of the historical background) until everyone who could remember him or her personally has died?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
This author would definitely object to recent horror novels starring Abraham Lincoln and Queen Elizabeth (Tudor) as vampire slayers. (To my surprise, I found both of those books fairly convincing and respectful of their historical models.) But taking the principle to the rigorous lengths his lunch speech implied, he would also disapprove of all fictionalized biographies, e.g., Barbara Hambly's sympathetic treatment of Mary Todd Lincoln in the novel THE EMANCIPATOR'S WIFE, or any speculative retelling of historical events from the viewpoints of the main participants, such as Sharyn McCrumb's THE BALLAD OF TOM DOOLEY, forthcoming in a few days. In my opinion, the universe of fiction would be poorer without this kind of book. What about THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY and other biographical novels by Irving Stone? Has Michelangelo been dead long enough to be exempt from the prohibition? Taken to the ultimate extreme, the principle would rule out fiction on the lives of ancient figures such as Saint Paul or Julius Caesar. It would even apply to Shakespeare's history plays, which I strongly doubt the speaker had in mind.
The issue becomes more problematic when considering fiction about people who've died within living memory. Novels with H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian), C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien as heroes in completely invented storylines have been published in recent years. Needless to say, some critics have objected that these fictionalizations over-simplify or even caricature their subjects. Elvis Presley transformed into a vampire appears, though not as a major character and not explicitly named, in the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris. I've read a horror story with Elvis, near the end of his life, as the protagonist. Stephen King's forthcoming novel about the Kennedy assassination will include Lee Harvey Oswald, inevitably, as a central character.
Is any dead celebrity or historical figure fair game for fictionalization? Or do creative ethics require a writer to abstain from using a real-world person as a character (at least, onstage rather than as part of the historical background) until everyone who could remember him or her personally has died?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
Audible.com-The AudioBook Adventure
See below for news on Sime~Gen in audiobook edition.
A couple months ago, Wildside Press put my novel Molt Brother
Molt Brother (Lifewave)
and the Sime~Gen novels into Audible.com's program for audiobooks which are distributed on audible.com, on iTunes and on amazon, and I don't know where else.
A couple weeks later, a reader was assigned, and a couple weeks after that Wildside sent me an MP3 of the first few pages of the novel.
The accompanying note just said the editor had reservations about the accent the reader used during the opening.
I recently upgraded my ebook reader to an iPod Touch 4, and was easily able to listen to the MP3 on it that evening.
When I listened to it, I knew what the problem was.
But at the same time, I was suddenly extremely pleased with myself, I'd venture to say insufferably pleased. Molt Brother is one terrific book. It got a new review on amazon from Carol Buchanan, a writer I met on twitter who is not an SF reader at all, and she said,
------Carol Buchanan----------
I don't read science fiction. Or fantasy. And I hate snakes. I don't believe in reincarnation, or karma. Yet I think _Molt Brother_ is a work of high imaginative quality. Translation: It's a great read.
....While wholeheartedly recommending _Molt Brother_ to anyone who reads English, and I'll be happy to read anything else by Ms. Lichtenberg, I have to admit I still hate snakes.
---------END QUOTE-------
I so wanted the audiobook version to live up to that review!
I introduced you to Carol Buchanan here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/gold-under-ice-by-carol-buchanan.html
And you heard from her here in a later post with writing craft advice:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/carol-buchanan-on-writing-tricks-and.html
She's a great writer, and you really should read GOLD UNDER ICE.
So back to my problem with the audio opening of MOLT BROTHER.
The opening works very well on paper, but read aloud with an "alien" (i.e. non-human) accent that kinda sounds like the sort-of reptilian amphibian species -- there's a brick wall between the listener and the story. There's no reason for a listener browsing book samples to waste time trying to understand that opening.
I offered 2 solutions and asked if the editor had a third.
I said we could ask the reader to re-do the opening scene, which is just 3 non-humans having an argument. Later in the recording, the accent used for the non-humans becomes better, clearer and more practiced, so a re-recording will probably be more intelligible for the opening.
Or I could write another opening to put a frame around the scene before the aliens start having at each other. This would give listeners a chance to hear the great dramatic reading Voice and realize the audiobook is worth its price before hitting the accent.
I had particularly suggested the aliens speak differently from the humans because their mouths are shaped differently -- and because a listener can't see a whole page of text in front of them and know who's talking to whom and what species they are at a glance. You hear one word at a time, so to know who's talking, you need a suggestion of verbal style. After a few pages, she got it just right, so I think this will work very well.
The editor at Wildside emailed right back and said BOTH solutions.
When I suggested that I'd write something, I had no idea what to write. It had been many years since I'd read the novel or worked with that material. And having just heard the opening read so nicely (this reader is really good!), I didn't want to touch a word of it. I feel that MOLT BROTHER and its direct sequel CITY OF A MILLION LEGENDS showcase my "Voice."
We discussed "Voice" a little in the last two weeks.
So how could I frame that opening in that same "Voice" -- I didn't know, so I just started typing.
In my mind, I was thinking of the opening sequence to the old film.
And I just typed. In a very few words (for me) I achieved my objective, so I attached it to an email and wrote the editor:
----------
Attached is what might be the opening "voice over" for a panoramic
opening of a film -- as the titles roll, we start with STARS, focusing
on a blue planet, close on an island with a big excavated
archeological site, swoop to a nearby house, cut to the interior pond
room and Arshel's confrontation with her parents. (I'm thinking of
the opening of the film ISLAND IN THE SUN - 1957)
----------
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050549/
So here's what I wrote to go before the opening dialogue:
-------------
Way off the beaten track of the Galaxy, a space ship full of humans crashed on a verdant water world occupied by the Kren. The humans crafted an alliance with the Kren natives which functioned well until the galactic civilization rediscovered them.
Generations later, the Kren and human natives have begun to integrate on a deeply personal level – in some parts of their world.
Arshel Holtethor, a young Kren female, does not live in such an integrated place. She has grown up on an island where human archeologists are excavating a city that is hundreds of millions of years old. Enamored by that project and by a human boy of her generation also working on the excavation, Arshel dares too much, then must confess her situation to her parents.
It is not going well….
-----------------
He wrote back with a couple tweaks I've included above I think, and I said fine, and he wrote back that he'd sent it to the reader.
At this writing, I haven't heard the re-recording of MOLT BROTHER with my new opening.
If you get a chance to hear it, let me know what you think.
Meanwhile, I ran into an old friend on Twitter, @MichaelSpence , and we got to talking about Sime~Gen, which he thought he should re-read now it's out in ebook edition.
So I mentioned that Wildside was looking for a reader, and since he's spent the last few years doing voice acting, he went and applied to Wildside for the job of reading House of Zeor.
A few weeks later, I got the audition recording of the opening of House of Zeor that Michael Spence had made, and before I could get together with Jean Lorrah to discuss that, Wildside sent a different audition for House of Zeor -- so we suddenly had a choice.
Jean Lorrah and I agreed, and later two more of our simegen.com staffers also agreed, Michael Spence was the one for the job.
The other reader had used software that allows for background sound effects and for filters to change the reader's voice when "doing" other characters. All very nifty, and actually very well done by this reader, but none of us liked the overall effect. That is so strange, but totally unanimous, a conclusion we all arrived at independently.
Just last week I was told that Spence had turned in the first chapter done with better technicals on the audio, but I haven't gotten a copy yet.
Meanwhile, upon my return from Coppercon (held over Labor Day weekend this year) where I was on several panels with Gini Koch (whose novels I've discussed here ...
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html
) I found the final-final proof of the 12th Sime~Gen volume in my inbox. So the new novel, The Farris Channel, will indeed be out in e-book and paper editions soon.
Meanwhile, if you download from audible.com, iTunes, or Amazon, the audiobook editions of either of these novels, do please let us know your reaction - drop a note on this blog if you like. There will be more opportunities to make choices like this.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
A couple months ago, Wildside Press put my novel Molt Brother
Molt Brother (Lifewave)
and the Sime~Gen novels into Audible.com's program for audiobooks which are distributed on audible.com, on iTunes and on amazon, and I don't know where else.
A couple weeks later, a reader was assigned, and a couple weeks after that Wildside sent me an MP3 of the first few pages of the novel.
The accompanying note just said the editor had reservations about the accent the reader used during the opening.
I recently upgraded my ebook reader to an iPod Touch 4, and was easily able to listen to the MP3 on it that evening.
When I listened to it, I knew what the problem was.
But at the same time, I was suddenly extremely pleased with myself, I'd venture to say insufferably pleased. Molt Brother is one terrific book. It got a new review on amazon from Carol Buchanan, a writer I met on twitter who is not an SF reader at all, and she said,
------Carol Buchanan----------
I don't read science fiction. Or fantasy. And I hate snakes. I don't believe in reincarnation, or karma. Yet I think _Molt Brother_ is a work of high imaginative quality. Translation: It's a great read.
....While wholeheartedly recommending _Molt Brother_ to anyone who reads English, and I'll be happy to read anything else by Ms. Lichtenberg, I have to admit I still hate snakes.
---------END QUOTE-------
I so wanted the audiobook version to live up to that review!
I introduced you to Carol Buchanan here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/gold-under-ice-by-carol-buchanan.html
And you heard from her here in a later post with writing craft advice:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/carol-buchanan-on-writing-tricks-and.html
She's a great writer, and you really should read GOLD UNDER ICE.
So back to my problem with the audio opening of MOLT BROTHER.
The opening works very well on paper, but read aloud with an "alien" (i.e. non-human) accent that kinda sounds like the sort-of reptilian amphibian species -- there's a brick wall between the listener and the story. There's no reason for a listener browsing book samples to waste time trying to understand that opening.
I offered 2 solutions and asked if the editor had a third.
I said we could ask the reader to re-do the opening scene, which is just 3 non-humans having an argument. Later in the recording, the accent used for the non-humans becomes better, clearer and more practiced, so a re-recording will probably be more intelligible for the opening.
Or I could write another opening to put a frame around the scene before the aliens start having at each other. This would give listeners a chance to hear the great dramatic reading Voice and realize the audiobook is worth its price before hitting the accent.
I had particularly suggested the aliens speak differently from the humans because their mouths are shaped differently -- and because a listener can't see a whole page of text in front of them and know who's talking to whom and what species they are at a glance. You hear one word at a time, so to know who's talking, you need a suggestion of verbal style. After a few pages, she got it just right, so I think this will work very well.
The editor at Wildside emailed right back and said BOTH solutions.
When I suggested that I'd write something, I had no idea what to write. It had been many years since I'd read the novel or worked with that material. And having just heard the opening read so nicely (this reader is really good!), I didn't want to touch a word of it. I feel that MOLT BROTHER and its direct sequel CITY OF A MILLION LEGENDS showcase my "Voice."
We discussed "Voice" a little in the last two weeks.
So how could I frame that opening in that same "Voice" -- I didn't know, so I just started typing.
In my mind, I was thinking of the opening sequence to the old film.
And I just typed. In a very few words (for me) I achieved my objective, so I attached it to an email and wrote the editor:
----------
Attached is what might be the opening "voice over" for a panoramic
opening of a film -- as the titles roll, we start with STARS, focusing
on a blue planet, close on an island with a big excavated
archeological site, swoop to a nearby house, cut to the interior pond
room and Arshel's confrontation with her parents. (I'm thinking of
the opening of the film ISLAND IN THE SUN - 1957)
----------
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050549/
So here's what I wrote to go before the opening dialogue:
-------------
Way off the beaten track of the Galaxy, a space ship full of humans crashed on a verdant water world occupied by the Kren. The humans crafted an alliance with the Kren natives which functioned well until the galactic civilization rediscovered them.
Generations later, the Kren and human natives have begun to integrate on a deeply personal level – in some parts of their world.
Arshel Holtethor, a young Kren female, does not live in such an integrated place. She has grown up on an island where human archeologists are excavating a city that is hundreds of millions of years old. Enamored by that project and by a human boy of her generation also working on the excavation, Arshel dares too much, then must confess her situation to her parents.
It is not going well….
-----------------
He wrote back with a couple tweaks I've included above I think, and I said fine, and he wrote back that he'd sent it to the reader.
At this writing, I haven't heard the re-recording of MOLT BROTHER with my new opening.
If you get a chance to hear it, let me know what you think.
Meanwhile, I ran into an old friend on Twitter, @MichaelSpence , and we got to talking about Sime~Gen, which he thought he should re-read now it's out in ebook edition.
So I mentioned that Wildside was looking for a reader, and since he's spent the last few years doing voice acting, he went and applied to Wildside for the job of reading House of Zeor.
A few weeks later, I got the audition recording of the opening of House of Zeor that Michael Spence had made, and before I could get together with Jean Lorrah to discuss that, Wildside sent a different audition for House of Zeor -- so we suddenly had a choice.
Jean Lorrah and I agreed, and later two more of our simegen.com staffers also agreed, Michael Spence was the one for the job.
The other reader had used software that allows for background sound effects and for filters to change the reader's voice when "doing" other characters. All very nifty, and actually very well done by this reader, but none of us liked the overall effect. That is so strange, but totally unanimous, a conclusion we all arrived at independently.
Just last week I was told that Spence had turned in the first chapter done with better technicals on the audio, but I haven't gotten a copy yet.
Meanwhile, upon my return from Coppercon (held over Labor Day weekend this year) where I was on several panels with Gini Koch (whose novels I've discussed here ...
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html
) I found the final-final proof of the 12th Sime~Gen volume in my inbox. So the new novel, The Farris Channel, will indeed be out in e-book and paper editions soon.
Meanwhile, if you download from audible.com, iTunes, or Amazon, the audiobook editions of either of these novels, do please let us know your reaction - drop a note on this blog if you like. There will be more opportunities to make choices like this.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, September 04, 2011
Risk Takers In Fiction And Life
Risk-taking is in our DNA.
It is valued in times of crisis (war, exploration) but not so much in local emergencies when the authorities fly red flags on the beaches and urge folks to stay out of the surf and the rip currents.
I stood instep deep in the surf as Irene passed north west Florida, and I watched people around me take breathtaking risks. Persons in loco parentis took toddlers thigh deep. Tanned teenagers with broken noses and surf boards paddled far out (among the whales and dolphins and who knows what else) to ride the biggest waves. One at least was parted from his board and visibly struggled not to drown before staggering out of the water tens of yards down the coast. He retrieved his board, moved south of the rip current, and went back to surf some more.
To some extent, that surfer's behavior reminds me of one of our society's strictures. If you fall off your bike (or horse) you must get right back on again, or you will lose your bottle and may never ride again.
Aside: Have you ever noticed how many popular proverbs cancel out one another?
Presumably, the "Type" of person who ventures into space will be one of the risk-taking types, unless he or she is a mild-mannered abductee or conscriptee. Or, do you think that spacefarers and their descendants will be "all sorts", just like us?
Here's an interesting blog http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/10-most-popular-professions-for-romance-novel-heroes_b28447 listing the most popular professions for romance novel heroes.
How much does it differ from the most popular alien romance novel heroes? We probably have more captains, generals, commanders; more resourceful fugitives; more pilots, pirates, and smugglers. Not to mention professional demons, dragons, angels, vampires and vampire hunters. Risky jobs all.
An author has to up the ante. Therefore, each consecutive risk must be more dangerous, more costly to the risk-taker, and the stakes must be ever higher. The trick, perhaps, is to remain plausible. Or is it?
If, in the middle of a chase scene and desperate fist fight, the American hero picks up a secret note written by a foreign spy who generally speaks his foreign language among his fellow foreign conspirators, and a vital note dropped by the villain is in English, does anyone mind?
If one shady hero was shot in the shoulder and fell off a two-storey building the fictional day before yesterday, and his unwilling, geeky side-kick is shot in the shoulder yesterday and also in the foot today (and neither received more medical attention than one can pick up in a cut price supermarket first aid kit) can they really climb tall chicken wire fences, leap ditches, and triumph in several consecutive bouts of fisticuffs?
Does The Risk trump everything else? Serious question. Has the audience changed in a faster paced world? Does it matter only that the reader keeps turning the page, or virtual page, until the end? Or does it still matter if there is that "Hey, how is that possible...?" reaction as the reader closes the book?
It is valued in times of crisis (war, exploration) but not so much in local emergencies when the authorities fly red flags on the beaches and urge folks to stay out of the surf and the rip currents.
I stood instep deep in the surf as Irene passed north west Florida, and I watched people around me take breathtaking risks. Persons in loco parentis took toddlers thigh deep. Tanned teenagers with broken noses and surf boards paddled far out (among the whales and dolphins and who knows what else) to ride the biggest waves. One at least was parted from his board and visibly struggled not to drown before staggering out of the water tens of yards down the coast. He retrieved his board, moved south of the rip current, and went back to surf some more.
To some extent, that surfer's behavior reminds me of one of our society's strictures. If you fall off your bike (or horse) you must get right back on again, or you will lose your bottle and may never ride again.
Aside: Have you ever noticed how many popular proverbs cancel out one another?
Presumably, the "Type" of person who ventures into space will be one of the risk-taking types, unless he or she is a mild-mannered abductee or conscriptee. Or, do you think that spacefarers and their descendants will be "all sorts", just like us?
Here's an interesting blog http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/10-most-popular-professions-for-romance-novel-heroes_b28447 listing the most popular professions for romance novel heroes.
How much does it differ from the most popular alien romance novel heroes? We probably have more captains, generals, commanders; more resourceful fugitives; more pilots, pirates, and smugglers. Not to mention professional demons, dragons, angels, vampires and vampire hunters. Risky jobs all.
An author has to up the ante. Therefore, each consecutive risk must be more dangerous, more costly to the risk-taker, and the stakes must be ever higher. The trick, perhaps, is to remain plausible. Or is it?
If, in the middle of a chase scene and desperate fist fight, the American hero picks up a secret note written by a foreign spy who generally speaks his foreign language among his fellow foreign conspirators, and a vital note dropped by the villain is in English, does anyone mind?
If one shady hero was shot in the shoulder and fell off a two-storey building the fictional day before yesterday, and his unwilling, geeky side-kick is shot in the shoulder yesterday and also in the foot today (and neither received more medical attention than one can pick up in a cut price supermarket first aid kit) can they really climb tall chicken wire fences, leap ditches, and triumph in several consecutive bouts of fisticuffs?
Does The Risk trump everything else? Serious question. Has the audience changed in a faster paced world? Does it matter only that the reader keeps turning the page, or virtual page, until the end? Or does it still matter if there is that "Hey, how is that possible...?" reaction as the reader closes the book?
Thursday, September 01, 2011
Creating Sympathetic Protagonists
The latest issue of RWR (the membership magazine for Romance Writers of America) includes an article called "The Unsympathetic Protagonist," about techniques for avoiding this pitfall by making flawed characters sympathetic. Here are a few methods among the ten listed by the article's author, Janice Hussein: "Timing is key"—supply details to make the reader like and sympathize with the protagonist before showing him or her doing something that could turn the reader against the character. (This sounds like the "Save the Cat" principle Jacqueline often mentions.) Include reprehensible characters to make the protagonist look attractive by contrast. Make the antagonist less likable in order to encourage the reader to like the protagonist more. Show that the character is potentially redeemable. Include events in the character's background when he or she has been hurt or wronged.
One good example might be Red from Stephen King's RITA HAYWORTH AND SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION. (Hussein's article refers to the film SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION—she apparently hasn't read the novella—but focuses on Andy, the protagonist but not a good example for this topic. It's clear by midway in the movie, if not earlier, that Andy did NOT murder his wife, yet this author somehow got the impression he did. The whole point of his character is that he's a wrongfully convicted man struggling to keep his dignity and integrity, totally different from the "unsympathetic protagonist" trope.) The narrator, Red, unlike Andy, IS guilty of having murdered his wife, as a bitter young man. When we meet him in the story, decades later, he regrets his youthful crime and has grown into an admirable person (as convicted felons go). Moreover, he is surrounded by characters far worse than himself, and he shows his good qualities by befriending Andy before the reader finds out the details of Red's crime.
Last week I re-watched GONE WITH THE WIND and started thinking about Scarlett O'Hara (in the novel, which I've read multiple times) in relation to this advice about making a potentially unlikable protagonist sympathetic. Although Scarlett is the book's protagonist, author Margaret Mitchell intended saintly Melanie as the story's true heroine, the ideal Southern woman. Mitchell's protagonist, on the other hand, is definitely not likable. Scarlett knows how to make herself irresistible to most men, but no woman without Melanie's compassionate view of human nature would want her for a friend. Not only is she manipulative, selfish, and greedy, she combines self-centeredness with an almost total lack of self-awareness. Until her epiphany after Melanie's death, on the rare occasions when guilt or self-doubts intrude into her mind Scarlett puts them off with, "I'll think about that tomorrow." Yet millions of readers have sympathized with and rooted for her.
As far as sympathetic characters go, Mitchell doesn't give us much to work with in Scarlett. When we first meet her, she's laughing off the possibility of war and instead anticipating a party where she expects to be the center of attention. At the barbecue she heartlessly flirts with multiple men, including naively vulnerable Charles Hamilton, throws herself at Ashley Wilkes and then slaps him, gets into a violent argument with Rhett Butler, and agrees to marry poor Charles out of spite at Ashley's rejection. She doesn't get her "Save the Cat" moment until much later in the novel, when she stays in besieged Atlanta to take care of pregnant, bedridden Melanie. The only hint of a redeemable quality in Scarlett early in the story is the fact that she aspires to be like her refined, gracious, generous mother, Ellen. We don't see Scarlett taking any action to fulfill this desire, though; whenever it conflicts with her craving for male attention or material security (often), she puts it off until "tomorrow." She does, however, have bad experiences that induce us to sympathize with her. Despite her behavior toward Ashley, whom everybody else including Ashley himself knows she wouldn't be happy with, we can't help feeling sorry for her when he crushes her hopes. And of course we can't help rooting for her to recover from the devastation caused by the war. We do see thoroughly unlikable characters brought onstage as foils to make her more appealing, such as the Yankee soldier who invades Tara and the "riffraff" who attack her when she drives her buggy through the bad part of town alone. Scarlett displays admirable qualities in defending herself against these attackers with a fiery spirit. As for unlikable antagonists, the first half of the novel paints a negative picture, to the point of caricature, of all the Yankees we meet. Among other techniques mentioned in Hussein's article beyond those I mentioned earlier, Scarlett is shown as fascinating to the opposite sex, and she does "intriguing" things such as agreeing to dance with Rhett at the charity ball in defiance of convention even though she's supposed to be in mourning for her late husband, Charles. Her admirable traits of determination and perseverance show forth after the fall of Atlanta, when she works "like a field hand" to save her beloved home, Tara, and keep her family from starving. These goals enable the reader to keep sympathizing with her even when she tries to trick Rhett into lending her money for Tara's taxes, traps Frank Kennedy, her sister's beau, into marriage, and later exploits convict labor in her lumber mill. At this late point in the story, after Frank's violent death, she shows her potentially redeemable side by remorse over her indirect role in his killing and fear that she'll go to Hell for it.
Still, Mitchell pulls off an impressive tour de force by keeping us interested in Scarlett as the protagonist long enough to recognize her admirable traits, given the mostly negative way she is portrayed early in the book. Is this a risky strategy of which most writers should be told, "Don't try this at home?"
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Astrology Just For Writers, Part 10, Pluto The School Of Hard Knocks
Last week we talked about expository lumps, and how a writer's job is to chop them up into small pieces, to make salad out of grocery bags of ingredients. Here's one of the tools for chopping up your expository lumps: Pluto.
I've done 9 previous posts on Astrology Just For Writers, which I suspect many of you skipped.
Here's a post listing the URLs of my posts on Astrology:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
And here are a few mentioning those posts and elaborating on the content and showing how powerful an understanding of Astrology can be for writers:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/02/happily-ever-after.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/choosing-age-of-your-protagonist-to-win.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/six-kinds-of-power-in-relationship.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html
And particularly this one on Greed which mentions how writers (who don't actually know astrology) can use Astrology to create compelling effects in their writing:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/greed-is-good.html
That last one is about character motivation, Romance, screenwriting, and Gordon Gekko.
Astrology Just For Writers Part 9 focuses on Pluto:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/astrology-just-for-writers-part-9-high.html
It's titled High Drama and is about Pluto and how to use those transits in writing by listening to the "drumbeat" of the world of finance. It references Tiger Woods and his fight with his wife. Subsequently, we've seen his struggles to get his golf game back into shape, and now health issues (Pluto is related to that kind of bodily breakdown) keeping him off the circuit. Part 9 traces world trends over long decades of time, even centuries, showing how that High Drama has peaks and valleys in a rhythm that writers can use to create plots.
When you talk about Astrology used in fiction, people think immediately of creating a Natal Chart for characters, or using some cookbook on transits to plot.
That doesn't work. You don't get "realistic" effects, and you end up with expository lumps because you have to "explain" the astrology which is just plain Greek to your readers.
And the truth is, you don't understand it either, so don't try to explain it. Just use Astrology to understand the world around you in ways that are not your own ways.
That's right, learning just a little about what Astrology is and does can let you see the world through the eyes of your readers whom you've never met and maybe never will.
I saw recently how everyone views the world through Astrology, consciously or unconsciously.
I caught a comment on twitter flying by me about the rhythm of the world that seemed to the tweeter to go in 30 year cycles.
I tweeted back that was the period of Saturn (which is 29 years or so).
The tweeter answered that was just the natural way the world goes.
Well, yes, it is, which is why Astrology is still with us after millenia. It isn't a theory people invented to explain things. It's empirical. People observed that when such-and-so kind of life event was afoot, if you look up at night, you will see this-and-that for sure. They tabulated those observations over generations and compiled a set of reliable coincidences. And it works backwards. When you look up and see this, look down and you'll find that, sure enough.
Since we now live long enough to see a couple or three cycles of Saturn, people are more aware of it than ever. We now have TV clips from 30 years ago, film from 60 years ago, a library of the past which reveals how it is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
It's that cycle, that drumbeat of general public moods which you can sort out by using astrology, then write to the mood that will prevail in a few years, or 10 years or more.
The sledge hammer of the zodiac is Pluto (which got demoted from planetary status because it's small and very likely a "capture" not a piece of matter native to this star).
Pluto is a "foreign influence."
People who don't study Astrology often pick up the charlatan's rant about how they can predict what will happen in your life, or how the stars "rule" (we still use that language, rulerships, but it has nothing to do with having power over you.)
Astrologers know the planets are just a giant clock, and we live to the rhythm of that clock.
A planet transiting a position in your natal chart does not MAKE YOU do or feel a certain way. It does not make anything happen. It merely signifies the time in your life when such a thing might be more probable than at other times. But what can happen, what will happen, what might happen and how probable each is depends on the free will choices and actions the character has taken up to that point.
Understanding astrology can help a writer avoid having the plot events in a novel seem "contrived" and the characters who get hammered by events (to the good or to the bad) seem undeserving. Of course, there are many other disciplines and studies that can supply that craft dimension, but Astrology being a mathematical analysis of human personality, is peculiarly suited to Science Fiction and therefore to SFRomance. (oh, yes, scientists will argue against that idea. Controversy makes good drama!)
The key the writer needs to grasp is how a character's free will choices combine with the prevailing influence in her life to produce events which, though decades apart in time and place, nevertheless are related poetically.
Astrology maps the heavens with the Earth at the center, making it useful as a timer giving you information on the shape of your life.
The timer may say you have an appointment with the dentist, but it doesn't say whether you'll be there or whether he'll be there, or whether you'll have a cavity.
Even if Pluto is a capture, a "stranger," its effects are still linked to the period of its orbit which is no accident but a property of it's mass, the Sun's mass, the angle at which it approached, and the speed it had at the time.
One might say humanity needed that "hand" on our clock, so G-d provided it.
A clock hand doesn't cause things to happen. It signifies the probability that such a type of event might happen. If free will actions have set up the conditions for a Pluto-style Event, that Event will most likely occur at the point in time signified by a transit of Pluto to some point in the Natal Chart -- or the starting event in the sequence which is culminating. Remember how I discuss novel plotting as a "because-line" -- where because this happened, that happens, which causes something else, which leads to whatever.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/11/information-feed-tricks-and-tips-for.html
Those are two posts related to "because line" plotting.
Pluto style Events hit with sledge hammer force, but usually they're not "unpredictable" (as Uranus style events can be). Pluto brings consequences, usually from actions taken decades previously.
Pluto does have certain kinds of Events linked to it (it rules the 8th House, Scorpio, hidden things, other people's resources including money and money used as power, inheritance, public values, taxes imposed by a government, especially death taxes). But it's main property is FORCE. Hence, if you want to understand the hidden power behind world events, "follow the money."
Whatever is happening, whatever has been earned, whatever train of events is in motion, when Pluto gets involved that pattern signified by other planets will become bigger, larger, more exaggerated, larger than life, dramatic, and will hit not with jeweler's hammer force but sledge-hammer force.
Noel Tyl (http://noeltyl.com) attributes the timing of major illness to transits of Pluto.
Other transits - you catch a cold. A Pluto transit, and it's pneumonia.
Other transits, the mole on your leg is just cancerous, they take it off, and it's gone. A Pluto transit and the mole turns out to be melanoma and then, as Pluto swings back and forth over the sensitive Natal point, they find the melanoma is of the most virulent sort -- maybe you survive, maybe not.
If a character's life is constructed strong, with plan-B, C, D in place, with cross-bracing of many friends, people willing to go to the mat for that person, a grand paper trail of accomplishments, and assets stockpiled against trouble, that sledge hammer will change but not destroy that life. He'll pay the hospital bills, and walk away into bigger and better things. But because of the expense, maybe he can't move to the larger house, or has to buy a used car again, or doesn't dare try to change jobs to get a promotion. He becomes entrenched, having been hammered down by the blow.
A life of sandcastles built on hopes and dreams is likely to be smashed to smithereens and scattered to the winds. Because of lack of money, caused by a lack of a college education maybe (though not in today's world), he won't have gone to the doctor in time, will be relegated to the least expensive treatment paid for by public funds, maybe not be educated enough to follow instructions, -- too little, too late, and the character dies of melanoma.
But Pluto can have another effect. It can magnify the fame, glory and fortune of a character beyond recognition. The cancerous plight becomes the News Story of the Day, experts consult all over the world, a new experimental treatment gets authorized, the whole world waits for the results. Huge drama.
That in itself can be extraordinarily destructive. Fame can become notoriety, and the character never gets another job requiring security clearance. The character might be the spy who gets outed, gets captured, escapes, and gets fired (yes I watch Burn Notice!)
When you grasp how both horrendous disaster and grandiose success are exactly the same thing in life, and how both can be toxic to your characters' peace of mind, mental stability, or love life, you can begin to slice-n-dice your characters' backstories into "salad" as I discussed last week.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/source-of-expository-lump-part-2.html
Feed it to your reader a bite-size at a time, it's delicious. Hand them the whole head of lettuce with sand still on it, and it's not delicious.
When you understand the periodicity of "life" in the same terms that your readers understand it, you can center the plot around those specific life-changing events that are signified by Pluto.
Pluto, as I said, hits like a sledge hammer, but you can see it coming if you know where to look.
You can start your opening scene with the Pluto sledge-hammer landing a hard blow ( melanoma is diagnosed) and you have one story -- how to cope with the diagnosis, what treatment to get, where, when, paid for how, who will help during recovery, etc.
Or you can showcase the Pluto blow as the middle Event of your novel's plot -- the main character makes a long chain of really bad decisions leading to Melanoma, and then has to cope. For example, you open on the college kid taking a lifeguard position during summers to work his way through school, drops out of school to become a beach-bum running drugs, melts down on drugs, gets diagnosed with melanoma and deserted by all friends, gets through it, goes back to school and gets an MD degree.
Or Pluto's blow may destroy the villain at the very end of your story with Poetic Justice which the Hero has been trying to avert by getting the Villain to repent and mend his ways -- maybe the Villain was a Tanning Bed mogul getting rich off giving others melanoma, and the Hero is campaigning to get laws against tanning salons, and they battle in the media and YouTube and the mogul tans himself charcoal -- gets melanoma. End villain, weepy funeral, great wedding for the Hero.
One prominent characteristic of Pluto transits is that when they hit (usually 3 times as Pluto transits retrograde back over the sensitive Natal point, then again over that point) with humongous force, and HAMMER YOU DOWN into the ground.
If your character's life is built strongly, the character will be hammered down hard, harder, hardest, and with each blow sink deeper into his life's position. But once the 3 blows have landed, the character is firmly entrenched in his life and no subsequent event can dislodge him -- because Pluto moves so slowly it won't hit like that again in 100 year lifespan.
The Pluto transit is actually the source of the realistic, and real life, Happily Ever After. Terrible things happen, and after that it's smooth going.
Of course Vampires, that's another story. Pluto again and again 4 times during every 248 years or so (it's the squares and oppositions that get you).
For example: a character with a strongly built life might 1)Get a girl pregnant 2) shotgun wedding, not really liking this woman very much 3) she has a Down's Syndrome kid. 3 Pluto type blows.
Now what? The woman turns out to have the Love to accept and nurture that child, the guy reaches down inside and finds the strength to go to school and become a therapist for the learning disabled, together the couple creates, invents, politically motivates groups, spreads the word on the internet, gets the help they need, raises the child who actually grows up to be self-sufficient and perhaps even a valuable contributor to the world in some way.
The same character with a weakly built life 1) Gets a girl pregnant 2) shotgun abortion 3) gets murdered by the girl when she realizes what he did to her. Maybe the novel is her trial for murder, and the Romance is with her lawyer, they win and live happily ever after. Her life has become entrenched because of the blows of Pluto, and she will never again be dislodged by a blow that any other transit can deliver.
That's the pattern you can use to break up your expository lumps. Take your lump of explanation, divide it into 3 BIG BLOWS then play out the logical consequences. Don't explain it, do it.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
I've done 9 previous posts on Astrology Just For Writers, which I suspect many of you skipped.
Here's a post listing the URLs of my posts on Astrology:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
And here are a few mentioning those posts and elaborating on the content and showing how powerful an understanding of Astrology can be for writers:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/02/happily-ever-after.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/choosing-age-of-your-protagonist-to-win.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/six-kinds-of-power-in-relationship.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html
And particularly this one on Greed which mentions how writers (who don't actually know astrology) can use Astrology to create compelling effects in their writing:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/greed-is-good.html
That last one is about character motivation, Romance, screenwriting, and Gordon Gekko.
Astrology Just For Writers Part 9 focuses on Pluto:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/astrology-just-for-writers-part-9-high.html
It's titled High Drama and is about Pluto and how to use those transits in writing by listening to the "drumbeat" of the world of finance. It references Tiger Woods and his fight with his wife. Subsequently, we've seen his struggles to get his golf game back into shape, and now health issues (Pluto is related to that kind of bodily breakdown) keeping him off the circuit. Part 9 traces world trends over long decades of time, even centuries, showing how that High Drama has peaks and valleys in a rhythm that writers can use to create plots.
When you talk about Astrology used in fiction, people think immediately of creating a Natal Chart for characters, or using some cookbook on transits to plot.
That doesn't work. You don't get "realistic" effects, and you end up with expository lumps because you have to "explain" the astrology which is just plain Greek to your readers.
And the truth is, you don't understand it either, so don't try to explain it. Just use Astrology to understand the world around you in ways that are not your own ways.
That's right, learning just a little about what Astrology is and does can let you see the world through the eyes of your readers whom you've never met and maybe never will.
I saw recently how everyone views the world through Astrology, consciously or unconsciously.
I caught a comment on twitter flying by me about the rhythm of the world that seemed to the tweeter to go in 30 year cycles.
I tweeted back that was the period of Saturn (which is 29 years or so).
The tweeter answered that was just the natural way the world goes.
Well, yes, it is, which is why Astrology is still with us after millenia. It isn't a theory people invented to explain things. It's empirical. People observed that when such-and-so kind of life event was afoot, if you look up at night, you will see this-and-that for sure. They tabulated those observations over generations and compiled a set of reliable coincidences. And it works backwards. When you look up and see this, look down and you'll find that, sure enough.
Since we now live long enough to see a couple or three cycles of Saturn, people are more aware of it than ever. We now have TV clips from 30 years ago, film from 60 years ago, a library of the past which reveals how it is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
It's that cycle, that drumbeat of general public moods which you can sort out by using astrology, then write to the mood that will prevail in a few years, or 10 years or more.
The sledge hammer of the zodiac is Pluto (which got demoted from planetary status because it's small and very likely a "capture" not a piece of matter native to this star).
Pluto is a "foreign influence."
People who don't study Astrology often pick up the charlatan's rant about how they can predict what will happen in your life, or how the stars "rule" (we still use that language, rulerships, but it has nothing to do with having power over you.)
Astrologers know the planets are just a giant clock, and we live to the rhythm of that clock.
A planet transiting a position in your natal chart does not MAKE YOU do or feel a certain way. It does not make anything happen. It merely signifies the time in your life when such a thing might be more probable than at other times. But what can happen, what will happen, what might happen and how probable each is depends on the free will choices and actions the character has taken up to that point.
Understanding astrology can help a writer avoid having the plot events in a novel seem "contrived" and the characters who get hammered by events (to the good or to the bad) seem undeserving. Of course, there are many other disciplines and studies that can supply that craft dimension, but Astrology being a mathematical analysis of human personality, is peculiarly suited to Science Fiction and therefore to SFRomance. (oh, yes, scientists will argue against that idea. Controversy makes good drama!)
The key the writer needs to grasp is how a character's free will choices combine with the prevailing influence in her life to produce events which, though decades apart in time and place, nevertheless are related poetically.
Astrology maps the heavens with the Earth at the center, making it useful as a timer giving you information on the shape of your life.
The timer may say you have an appointment with the dentist, but it doesn't say whether you'll be there or whether he'll be there, or whether you'll have a cavity.
Even if Pluto is a capture, a "stranger," its effects are still linked to the period of its orbit which is no accident but a property of it's mass, the Sun's mass, the angle at which it approached, and the speed it had at the time.
One might say humanity needed that "hand" on our clock, so G-d provided it.
A clock hand doesn't cause things to happen. It signifies the probability that such a type of event might happen. If free will actions have set up the conditions for a Pluto-style Event, that Event will most likely occur at the point in time signified by a transit of Pluto to some point in the Natal Chart -- or the starting event in the sequence which is culminating. Remember how I discuss novel plotting as a "because-line" -- where because this happened, that happens, which causes something else, which leads to whatever.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/11/information-feed-tricks-and-tips-for.html
Those are two posts related to "because line" plotting.
Pluto style Events hit with sledge hammer force, but usually they're not "unpredictable" (as Uranus style events can be). Pluto brings consequences, usually from actions taken decades previously.
Pluto does have certain kinds of Events linked to it (it rules the 8th House, Scorpio, hidden things, other people's resources including money and money used as power, inheritance, public values, taxes imposed by a government, especially death taxes). But it's main property is FORCE. Hence, if you want to understand the hidden power behind world events, "follow the money."
Whatever is happening, whatever has been earned, whatever train of events is in motion, when Pluto gets involved that pattern signified by other planets will become bigger, larger, more exaggerated, larger than life, dramatic, and will hit not with jeweler's hammer force but sledge-hammer force.
Noel Tyl (http://noeltyl.com) attributes the timing of major illness to transits of Pluto.
Other transits - you catch a cold. A Pluto transit, and it's pneumonia.
Other transits, the mole on your leg is just cancerous, they take it off, and it's gone. A Pluto transit and the mole turns out to be melanoma and then, as Pluto swings back and forth over the sensitive Natal point, they find the melanoma is of the most virulent sort -- maybe you survive, maybe not.
If a character's life is constructed strong, with plan-B, C, D in place, with cross-bracing of many friends, people willing to go to the mat for that person, a grand paper trail of accomplishments, and assets stockpiled against trouble, that sledge hammer will change but not destroy that life. He'll pay the hospital bills, and walk away into bigger and better things. But because of the expense, maybe he can't move to the larger house, or has to buy a used car again, or doesn't dare try to change jobs to get a promotion. He becomes entrenched, having been hammered down by the blow.
A life of sandcastles built on hopes and dreams is likely to be smashed to smithereens and scattered to the winds. Because of lack of money, caused by a lack of a college education maybe (though not in today's world), he won't have gone to the doctor in time, will be relegated to the least expensive treatment paid for by public funds, maybe not be educated enough to follow instructions, -- too little, too late, and the character dies of melanoma.
But Pluto can have another effect. It can magnify the fame, glory and fortune of a character beyond recognition. The cancerous plight becomes the News Story of the Day, experts consult all over the world, a new experimental treatment gets authorized, the whole world waits for the results. Huge drama.
That in itself can be extraordinarily destructive. Fame can become notoriety, and the character never gets another job requiring security clearance. The character might be the spy who gets outed, gets captured, escapes, and gets fired (yes I watch Burn Notice!)
When you grasp how both horrendous disaster and grandiose success are exactly the same thing in life, and how both can be toxic to your characters' peace of mind, mental stability, or love life, you can begin to slice-n-dice your characters' backstories into "salad" as I discussed last week.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/source-of-expository-lump-part-2.html
Feed it to your reader a bite-size at a time, it's delicious. Hand them the whole head of lettuce with sand still on it, and it's not delicious.
When you understand the periodicity of "life" in the same terms that your readers understand it, you can center the plot around those specific life-changing events that are signified by Pluto.
Pluto, as I said, hits like a sledge hammer, but you can see it coming if you know where to look.
You can start your opening scene with the Pluto sledge-hammer landing a hard blow ( melanoma is diagnosed) and you have one story -- how to cope with the diagnosis, what treatment to get, where, when, paid for how, who will help during recovery, etc.
Or you can showcase the Pluto blow as the middle Event of your novel's plot -- the main character makes a long chain of really bad decisions leading to Melanoma, and then has to cope. For example, you open on the college kid taking a lifeguard position during summers to work his way through school, drops out of school to become a beach-bum running drugs, melts down on drugs, gets diagnosed with melanoma and deserted by all friends, gets through it, goes back to school and gets an MD degree.
Or Pluto's blow may destroy the villain at the very end of your story with Poetic Justice which the Hero has been trying to avert by getting the Villain to repent and mend his ways -- maybe the Villain was a Tanning Bed mogul getting rich off giving others melanoma, and the Hero is campaigning to get laws against tanning salons, and they battle in the media and YouTube and the mogul tans himself charcoal -- gets melanoma. End villain, weepy funeral, great wedding for the Hero.
One prominent characteristic of Pluto transits is that when they hit (usually 3 times as Pluto transits retrograde back over the sensitive Natal point, then again over that point) with humongous force, and HAMMER YOU DOWN into the ground.
If your character's life is built strongly, the character will be hammered down hard, harder, hardest, and with each blow sink deeper into his life's position. But once the 3 blows have landed, the character is firmly entrenched in his life and no subsequent event can dislodge him -- because Pluto moves so slowly it won't hit like that again in 100 year lifespan.
The Pluto transit is actually the source of the realistic, and real life, Happily Ever After. Terrible things happen, and after that it's smooth going.
Of course Vampires, that's another story. Pluto again and again 4 times during every 248 years or so (it's the squares and oppositions that get you).
For example: a character with a strongly built life might 1)Get a girl pregnant 2) shotgun wedding, not really liking this woman very much 3) she has a Down's Syndrome kid. 3 Pluto type blows.
Now what? The woman turns out to have the Love to accept and nurture that child, the guy reaches down inside and finds the strength to go to school and become a therapist for the learning disabled, together the couple creates, invents, politically motivates groups, spreads the word on the internet, gets the help they need, raises the child who actually grows up to be self-sufficient and perhaps even a valuable contributor to the world in some way.
The same character with a weakly built life 1) Gets a girl pregnant 2) shotgun abortion 3) gets murdered by the girl when she realizes what he did to her. Maybe the novel is her trial for murder, and the Romance is with her lawyer, they win and live happily ever after. Her life has become entrenched because of the blows of Pluto, and she will never again be dislodged by a blow that any other transit can deliver.
That's the pattern you can use to break up your expository lumps. Take your lump of explanation, divide it into 3 BIG BLOWS then play out the logical consequences. Don't explain it, do it.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
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