I have a lot of respect for high school English teachers. It takes superhuman persistence to try and express the value of Shakespeare to a crop of 16-year-olds who can't stop laughing at his "gay neck brace." And yet for as much as I love these brave bastions of educational might, I can't help but wonder if they're missing the point.
The sheer number of people reaching college age and beyond with no understanding of how to write can't be chalked up entirely to an era of text messaging. There's a fundamental piece to constructing a story in a way such that someone other than you can access it that has been missing from far too many classrooms for the last decade or more. With all the focus on either playwrights or professional writing, it's no wonder so few people see the glaring, chalkboard-scraping flaws in the works of modern phenoms like Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown.
I know that there are still positions out there where a five-paragraph argumentative statement is a valuable salvo in the war to keep your job, but realistically most professional writing these days is done through email, with all the amorphous edges and conversational tone that medium entails. Any more advanced professional documentation, like grant proposals and research papers, require so specialized a format that they're covered in the college-level curriculum of the fields to which they apply.
Likewise, while I know that the five-act play is still not only a reality but a cultural mainstay, the range of applicable careers for its skillset falls more in line with theatre than English class. Leave the Drama majors to their vague stage directions, writers need to know how to properly describe a scene with more poetry than "go to table, pick up dagger."
The only stylistic writing I recall from four years of high school English is the one form that seems sensible to tackle in a single semester: short stories. It gives hopeful writers exposure to character building, narrative description and forming the pieces of the literary rollercoaster that is their tale of adventure. But there's a problem: short stories are weird.
If you've never written a novel, you may not quite see at first what's so different about a short story and a full-length work other than the word count. In truth, there is such a shift in form that it's hard to recognize one from the other. It's as different as reading a play: the missing pieces between the dialog constitute the majority of almost any work of fiction. Like broth in a stew, they're the essential pieces that flavor the interactions as a whole. If the broth tastes like bathwater, it doesn't matter how tasty the meat was when it went in.
In an effort to stop making myself hungry, let me change analogies: writing short stories as an introduction to novel writing is a lot like teaching someone to play the drumset by handing them a gong. It's a percussion instrument, sure, and it makes noise when you hit it with a stick, but the similarities end there. For one thing, you only have one thing to focus on, but you also have to hit it a completely different way. In reality, all learning to play the gong teaches you about a drumset is how to hit a thing to make it make noise, and you probably knew how to do that already.
The structure of a novel involves dozens or even hundreds of rises and falls between the movements of the plot, all in turn traveling along a larger curve as it crests its way to the climax. That isn't to say that short stories are easier (when you only have a gong to play with, it's a lot harder to get all the different sounds out of it that you want you audience to hear), but the two formats are so different that one doesn't suffice in teaching you how to use the other.
Short stories begin in the middle. You have enough time to introduce a handful of characters halfway through there situations, either on the cusp of or smack in the middle of the core conflict of the work. From there, it's all action (from a literary perspective) to the end, with just enough time to set up a three-part pattern before you run out of word count. If you listen to a rock song, the pattern is similar:
intro, verse, verse, bridge, key change, verse
You create a pattern with the first two verses so that the audience settles into the way things are, and tacetly assume that this is the way they always have been, or always will be. The bridge comes in sideways and knocks the main character entirely off his course. He then comes back to the verse with the proper key change to denote that the character has grown, but hasn't lost who he was in the process. With only three minutes to kill, there isn't much room for anything else.
A novel is more like a concerto. If you don't know what I mean, go to YouTube and search for "Bach." Watch for a moment and you may start to see the key difference. There isn't one pattern created, but many, and they begin to interrupt each other. Four minutes in, new patterns are still being introduced to the work as a whole, only to merge with and change the other patterns as the pieces rises towards its climax.
It's no different with parts of a novel. Several veins of plot all intersect, criss-cross, or even seem unrelated as the new elements are introduced and begin to collide, but out of it all a beautiful harmony is formed. The complexity alone becomes a thing to marvel, to say nothing of the music that goes with it. It's easy to sit back and listen to a three-movement piece in about 8 to 10 minutes and feel the full depth of the composer's intentions, yet no one once told me how similar it was to trying to craft a work of literary wonder.
Even the dreaded five-paragraph essay fits the same unified model. Five paragraphs, five acts, five movements. Literature, theatre, music. Three fields, one common vein: getting a rich emotional experience out to an audience you've never met by taking them on a pre-designed rollercoaster.
Here's a different approach: novels are a science. It doesn't matter which science you follow, there's an expression of it that fits the growth and shaping of a novel.
Physics: Novels focus on interactions. All spare matter and energy must be accounted for. It's in the small pieces that are forgotten that we often learn the most about our world, when they begin affecting things outside the range of our initial experiment. More than that, momentum tells us that even small things can be forces of great change if they get even speed behind them.
Chemistry: Even stable elements can become explosive under the right conditions. Put characters together in the wrong amounts and things start to change, drastically at times. If the elements won't react on their own, introduce heat to the reaction, add energy to the mixture, or introduce a catalyst. Keep going until something starts smoking. Just remember to clean up the lab when you're done.
Biology: Living things adapt to changes in their environment. Anything tough enough to survive new challenges will grow to shape itself around them. Evolution takes time, and you don't always get it right on the first mutation, but sooner or later life finds a way.
Atomic matter: Your character is like an electron: he's somewhere in this general cloud about 90% of the time (we think). We know he's coming around again, and that he's going to keep orbiting the same general point, but what shape that path is going to take is anybody's guess. In the end, he's just waiting for some positively charged ion to wander by so that he can set up a nice paired orbit and become a happy little atom.
I could go on, but I think I'm wandering into established turf.
Returning to my original point, English teachers might be better served educating their students on the common veins in the various curriculae. If you understand how to interpret a work of fiction from six different angles, chances are that one of them will work for you.
That, and it gives writers the excuse to dress up in lab coats for a change. Nothing says "I love my copy editor" like holding a manuscript over a Bunsen burner. Or making a Kindle live up to its name...
Friday, September 24, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
How to Write a Novel Without Trying
A brief outlining of my planned and future works left me with one very present notion: I will be writing forever.
At my current age (just south of 30), I already have enough planned works to keep me writing until I'm 51, which does not account for marriage, children, and the various other life moments that tend to take precedence over penmanship, nor does it account for more than 20 years of continued experience and the neverending imagination which has led to so many topical options in the first place. That is to say, my creativity has entered something of a cycle of perpetual motion.
The List, such as it is (tentative titles, all):
So, the plan is thus: every week of every month of every year, I will write at minimum 1,000 words. In addition, I will be aiming to meet the NaNoWriMo challenge each year. I will, however, except a total of 30,000 words instead of the typical 50,000 pending the following condition: June is now mini-November, meaning that I will be partaking of two Writing Months each year.
Running the math, I'm left with 44,000 words from the weekly devotion plus (at minimum) 60,000 words from the paired NaNo's, producing over 100,000 words per yer, which allows me to meet just about any publisher's minimums. Any novel falling shy of 100,000 words will be edited using the remaining word count time. I anticipate at least a few of these to run over, but the overall model is maintained: instead of a novel ever two and a half years, I can put out most novels in a year, fully functional, and the larger projects in two years or less.
For any potential writers out there who can't seem to get an idea off the ground, I highly recommend this model. 1,000 words to the average person is about 2-3 hours of writing. That's less than1.5% of your week. You likely spend as much time reading Digg, Facebook, or various random blog postings :) Hold yourself to 1,000 words a week and you'll have 50,000 words at the end of every year. It's not as grueling as the NaNoWriMo challenge. Not only will you not risk losing friends, it's likely they won't even notice you're writing until the work is complete.
If what you're having trouble with is forming your idea, stay tuned: next week I plan on discussing the nature of the novel idea through the eyes of a number of other more familiar media. It turns out even writers have a Circle of Fifths, and I'm not referring to the drinks around the table :)
At my current age (just south of 30), I already have enough planned works to keep me writing until I'm 51, which does not account for marriage, children, and the various other life moments that tend to take precedence over penmanship, nor does it account for more than 20 years of continued experience and the neverending imagination which has led to so many topical options in the first place. That is to say, my creativity has entered something of a cycle of perpetual motion.
The List, such as it is (tentative titles, all):
- The Order
- Dawnwatcher (fantasy epic)
- Gunner 7: Final edition
- The Rules (romantic comedy)
- Shinigami Blues II
- The Empty West: Book III
- Darcy's (three intertwined stories)
- Letters to Marianna (dark Elizabethan romance)
- The Furies (modern sci-fi adventure)
- Persephone's Return: Book I (future sci-fi adventure)
- Persephone's Return: Book II
- Persephone's Return: Book III
So, the plan is thus: every week of every month of every year, I will write at minimum 1,000 words. In addition, I will be aiming to meet the NaNoWriMo challenge each year. I will, however, except a total of 30,000 words instead of the typical 50,000 pending the following condition: June is now mini-November, meaning that I will be partaking of two Writing Months each year.
Running the math, I'm left with 44,000 words from the weekly devotion plus (at minimum) 60,000 words from the paired NaNo's, producing over 100,000 words per yer, which allows me to meet just about any publisher's minimums. Any novel falling shy of 100,000 words will be edited using the remaining word count time. I anticipate at least a few of these to run over, but the overall model is maintained: instead of a novel ever two and a half years, I can put out most novels in a year, fully functional, and the larger projects in two years or less.
For any potential writers out there who can't seem to get an idea off the ground, I highly recommend this model. 1,000 words to the average person is about 2-3 hours of writing. That's less than1.5% of your week. You likely spend as much time reading Digg, Facebook, or various random blog postings :) Hold yourself to 1,000 words a week and you'll have 50,000 words at the end of every year. It's not as grueling as the NaNoWriMo challenge. Not only will you not risk losing friends, it's likely they won't even notice you're writing until the work is complete.
If what you're having trouble with is forming your idea, stay tuned: next week I plan on discussing the nature of the novel idea through the eyes of a number of other more familiar media. It turns out even writers have a Circle of Fifths, and I'm not referring to the drinks around the table :)
Friday, September 10, 2010
Moving - Updates and the New Mission
Welcome to the new home of the random ramblings of Andy Click, a part-time author with aspirations of publication. If you're curious about where this all began, follow the "Old Blog Archives" link to the old LiveJournal blog where it all started.
I've been writing for almost exactly ten years now, with four completed works and a fifth in its final four months of gestation. I'm proud to say I have met the NaNoWriMo challenge (November 2008, "Shinigami Blues"), and plan to do so again (hopefully this year, despite my earlier intentions to the contrary).
The current work is called "The Order," a prequel to Gunner 7, a book I can best describe as a sci-fi western, which is always fun to say. Other genre buzzwords like "post-apocalyptic," "dystopia," and "steampunk" vaguely apply. The ten-second synopsis is that a virus has killed off a large percentage of our vast populace, and cut off the remaining few into pockets of clean air and water, one of which happens to be the middle of a god-awful desert where our hero, the last devoted bastion of a coalition formed to end the violence of the few remaining gunslingers, works to collect and melt down the only remnant firearms still floating free in their tiny bubble of life.
Despite the seeming intentions of the earlier portion of the work, Gunner 7 was never meant to speak against gun ownership, or to depict all gun owners as violent. In fact, the contrast of the main character as less anti-hero and more obsessed jerkface was intended to prove that violence is violence regardless of the weapon. Gunner 7 is due for one final rewrite in the middle of next year, but we'll get to that in a moment.
The Order was intended to talk about the days before, the coalition the main character (Geno) belonged to, and the days when they still believed they were doing the right thing. It helps to humanize the main character, further explain the world inside the "bubble" of the New Southwest, and explain the events which led to the world as it is now.
I recently realized that writing an entire 250-page novel in medias res was actually a terrible idea that would lead to much confusion and loss of emotional impact, which is to say, I've given myself about 150 pages more to write within the span of the remainder of this year. But hey, that's what November is for.
Once it's done, I'll have the first two pieces in the eventual trilogy I'm thinking of naming "The Empty West," with a third title pending within the next five years that will describe the coming of the end for the virus plaguing mankind and the re-opening of the world into a large and scary place again.
With The Order to be out in print this coming January, I hope to then wrap up Gunner 7 by midsummer with all the new changes, in time to start a new fantasy epic called "Dawnwatcher" in November of 2011. Given the size, I don't expect to finish it before 2014, but I'm hoping it will be well worth it. Of everything I've written and currently have planned to write, Dawnwatcher is the one I'm most proud of already (with Shinigami Blues being a very close second).
Anyhoo, that's the plan for now. I'll be posting updates as I get The Order closer and closer to complete, with previews of new scenes and the like as they come.
I've been writing for almost exactly ten years now, with four completed works and a fifth in its final four months of gestation. I'm proud to say I have met the NaNoWriMo challenge (November 2008, "Shinigami Blues"), and plan to do so again (hopefully this year, despite my earlier intentions to the contrary).
The current work is called "The Order," a prequel to Gunner 7, a book I can best describe as a sci-fi western, which is always fun to say. Other genre buzzwords like "post-apocalyptic," "dystopia," and "steampunk" vaguely apply. The ten-second synopsis is that a virus has killed off a large percentage of our vast populace, and cut off the remaining few into pockets of clean air and water, one of which happens to be the middle of a god-awful desert where our hero, the last devoted bastion of a coalition formed to end the violence of the few remaining gunslingers, works to collect and melt down the only remnant firearms still floating free in their tiny bubble of life.
Despite the seeming intentions of the earlier portion of the work, Gunner 7 was never meant to speak against gun ownership, or to depict all gun owners as violent. In fact, the contrast of the main character as less anti-hero and more obsessed jerkface was intended to prove that violence is violence regardless of the weapon. Gunner 7 is due for one final rewrite in the middle of next year, but we'll get to that in a moment.
The Order was intended to talk about the days before, the coalition the main character (Geno) belonged to, and the days when they still believed they were doing the right thing. It helps to humanize the main character, further explain the world inside the "bubble" of the New Southwest, and explain the events which led to the world as it is now.
I recently realized that writing an entire 250-page novel in medias res was actually a terrible idea that would lead to much confusion and loss of emotional impact, which is to say, I've given myself about 150 pages more to write within the span of the remainder of this year. But hey, that's what November is for.
Once it's done, I'll have the first two pieces in the eventual trilogy I'm thinking of naming "The Empty West," with a third title pending within the next five years that will describe the coming of the end for the virus plaguing mankind and the re-opening of the world into a large and scary place again.
With The Order to be out in print this coming January, I hope to then wrap up Gunner 7 by midsummer with all the new changes, in time to start a new fantasy epic called "Dawnwatcher" in November of 2011. Given the size, I don't expect to finish it before 2014, but I'm hoping it will be well worth it. Of everything I've written and currently have planned to write, Dawnwatcher is the one I'm most proud of already (with Shinigami Blues being a very close second).
Anyhoo, that's the plan for now. I'll be posting updates as I get The Order closer and closer to complete, with previews of new scenes and the like as they come.
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