Part of me believes this subject is too broad to cover in a single blog post, and that's probably true, but in the hopes of exemplifying that which I aim to discuss, let us cast off and see what harbors await.
Anyone who's ever read bad fanfiction knows that there's something uniquely off in some authors' writing that leaves the reader feeling deeply unsatisfied, despite all points of the narrative being clear and delivered.
The phrases seem to stop short; the taste of it feels dry, like a highly caffeinated fanboy anxious to reach the story's end (which, for most fanfiction, is precisely what we have at play). All the information is there, but you're no happier having had it than you were before. The flavor is missing.
That flavor comes in many forms, from the brusque to the infinitely intricate, but the same element is present no matter how long the storyteller chews the proverbial scenery: there's a subtlety of expression that allows the author to give the reader some idea of what is unfolding without hedging in their imagination.
Just like with music, as much lies in what's not being said as it does in the notes themselves, and the silence is far more difficult to sculpt. That silence is the difference between an awkward writer too rushed to get the ideas out of his head and a storyteller painting a scene with patience and care.
Subtlety gives the reader's imagination room to expand beyond the confines of your words. It entices them into taking a scene and filling in the dark or boring corners with whatever phantoms and dreams their mind can concoct. If you get too caught up in specifics, you leave them with no breathing room.
Don't think of a scene like a blueprint: your audience doesn't always need exactitude. Sometimes the significance or feeling of a thing is far more important than the specifics. It has the added bonus of allowing your reader to map said thing to their particular cultural lens.
Enough of the theory, down to specifics. Seems like a contradiction, no?
First, the base example:
"Charlotte's hands began to bend and point in the air in front of her, shaping the spell she had practiced years ago under her mother's careful teachings. Her right hand turned palm-upwards as her left hand cut a wide arc out to her side, hovering directly over the line of salt on the floor at her feet."
Not horrible, and you have to be a few fathoms past horrible to reach "unpublishable." So why fix what isn't broken? Observe:
"Charlotte's hands began to work the pattern of the spell, each gesture flowing into the next with a graceful rhythm. She could still remember the gentle touch of her mother's hands on her wrists as they guided her through the motions of the now-familiar spell, waltzing across the tiny dance floor outlined by the ring of salt at her feet."
What changed? All the information is still there and not much else. We removed the exact framing of the motion of her hands and replaced it instead with the symbol of a dance, one which in turn lends a powerful touch to the notion of her mother's teaching.
Now the memory isn't of a young witch learning a spell from a master, it's of a mother dancing with her daughter. In the instance, we have added for the reader a whole host of possibilities. A little subtle implication leaves an open piece for the reader to fill in.
Consider that Charlotte's mother may not feature in the work at all save in memory and passing mention. The reader now has free reign to picture the matron witch guiding her child in the old ways and the many humorous, frightening or touching moments which no doubt came part-and-parcel with such a unique and at once familiar childhood upbringing.
In addition, leaving the ritual described only in general terms gives your audience power to envision Charlotte's particular brand of magic without their own preferential context.
There are shamanic roots throughout the world that offer mystical and arcane elements in more flavors than might fit within any one person's reckoning. The reader can apply their own template to the motions, thus shifting Charlotte's own culture and background to fit what they find more appealing or more approachable.
Even minor clues can risk ruling out or locking in a particular option. The line of salt, for instance, has many very fixed connotations. While arguably appropriate to the setting if Charlotte is "that kind of witch," a note of "protections" around the room or in a circle at her feet might leave more room for alternatives.
Consider how the scene changes if Charlotte is surrounded by trinkets from her mother's family and the long line of witches before her, meant to link to the spirits of a long lineage. A reader from a difficult culture may be looking for entirely different signs than what you might expect. Providing the meaning of a thing as its description (see "protections") leaves them room to find a familiar connection.
There is an additional advantage to replacing detail with painted implications: in brevity lies speed; speed creates momentum; momentum creates emotion. In short, some scenes are best to hurry through.
Like the motion of Charlotte's hands, use vague, flowing reference and comparative analogy to avoid drowning in the minutia of the moment. Focus on the important details, "zoom out" for the rest.
It can be best to lead with detail to set up a finite pattern and then fade to a more implied series of actions before returning to detail at pivot points and key moments within the scene. Your audience will fill in the missing pieces on their own. Don't feel like you have to draw them a map of every scene.
"The two warriors battled across the ridgetop until they clinched on the edge of the cliff, locked in a struggle to see who if not gravity would win the day."
That's easily three or four pages between the start of the conflict and its first or final pivot point, whittled down to a single sentence.
Unless you know you are writing to those who crave detail and technicality (military fiction or hard sci-fi), don't be afraid to skip to the complicated bits and leave the rest as one quick, flowing brush stroke across your overall canvas. The meat of the novel is important, but it's always the spice that makes it memorable.
Which brings us to at least three separate metaphors for writing within this post alone. I should start calling this place "Analogy Central..."
Friday, February 18, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
Using What They Know - Drawing on the Cultural Consciousness
There are bonuses to creating your own setting: the lack of confinement when you not only get your own sandbox but get to build the very sand and tell everyone how it behaves is a tempting proposition. Obviously there's some work involved, but the biggest disadvantage of starting from scratch with your own setting is not always clear from the start.
The power of the cultural consciousness goes without saying so often that most people don't quite realize that it exists.
What I'm referring to is the common bank of information, understanding and emotion that all members of a culture (or at least a large portion of them) regularly draw upon. They can be iconic moments in a common history, normative veins of ambition, popular misconceptions or even just widely-used memes and well-known references.
It's difficult to notice when you're in the thick of it because these things have become the backbone of our everyday communication, especially in entertainment. Nods to beloved movies, famous people and other parodies make up a significant portion of how we convey what we're hoping to say.
Simple jibes like "Thanks for the tip, professor," may not be consistent across every setting. You have to consider that for a remark like that to make sense, there must be professors, which means there must be colleges and universities, which means there is higher education, a relatively recent concept (and one that may not have a long future, depending on how current trends develop). A dark-ages fantasy novel may need to think of a better quip (and the cut-and-paste method only gets you so far).
Basing your novel in a setting you know lets you call upon real events and idioms that your readership connects with naturally and won't need explained. When the bruiser in a band of thieves reacts to his leader's new cooperative approach with "Great plan, Gandhi," your audience has a good chance of simply 'getting it' without any effort.
It allows you to allude, to be subtle, to jokingly juxtapose common conception with what your characters and narration are saying. You can relate local impact to the larger concepts that touch the hearts of more than just your character's small-town neighbors. To wit:
This was his last chance; the thin line between Leroy and a crumpled heap of a man was his late-night job at the gas station. The Stop 'N' Go had become his Alamo.
In one word, a kaleidoscope of concepts comes to bear: a last stand, proud men, old soldiers, and the cause they were willing to die for. The brutality of the Alamo became a flag around which the remaining revolution rallied. All that implied with a single word.
Tapping into the power of the cultural consciousness allows you to say more with less, but it also just allows you to say more. To call Leroy's situation dire, desperate or futile is all well and good, but any such words are absent of scale. Leroy's "desperate," and your "desperate" as an author may in no way compare to the "desperate" your readers perceive.
The cultural memory can attempt to set the bar. Such icons have an intrinsic and understood value, and while it's not a guarantee, much of your readership will value such events with a relatively similar gauge. At the very least, comparing a dead-end job to a battle in a revolution is a powerful metaphor regardless of the value of that particular event in time.
More than that, choosing the Alamo versus the more generic "a battle in a war" adds an additional layer: the failure of the defenders at the Alamo mission, or the fact that it was fought on what was once holy ground, add more meaning to Leroy's struggle than just "he's a soldier in a war."
Now he's a soldier defending a religious-site-turned-fortress, and the odds are against him. He will fail, and it will not be a graceful loss, but perhaps the fires of his defeat will inspire others to carry on with what he had hoped to do from the start.
When you pin another well-known moment to your story, you give the reader a whole new web of sub-meanings and implications, and I don't just mean the inter-linking labyrinth that is Wikipedia.
We pin our emotions, our dreams, our hopes, our take on our own past to these moments and figures, these people and places and slivers of time. Tapping into that vast and varied array of cultural icons can lend more power, more humor and more depth to your work than a story isolated in space and time.
Hitch your hippogriff to the ongoing conversation of the larger world around you and watch as it rides off in directions you never thought possible. After all, one day, someone may be hitching their flying wagon to you.
The power of the cultural consciousness goes without saying so often that most people don't quite realize that it exists.
What I'm referring to is the common bank of information, understanding and emotion that all members of a culture (or at least a large portion of them) regularly draw upon. They can be iconic moments in a common history, normative veins of ambition, popular misconceptions or even just widely-used memes and well-known references.
It's difficult to notice when you're in the thick of it because these things have become the backbone of our everyday communication, especially in entertainment. Nods to beloved movies, famous people and other parodies make up a significant portion of how we convey what we're hoping to say.
Simple jibes like "Thanks for the tip, professor," may not be consistent across every setting. You have to consider that for a remark like that to make sense, there must be professors, which means there must be colleges and universities, which means there is higher education, a relatively recent concept (and one that may not have a long future, depending on how current trends develop). A dark-ages fantasy novel may need to think of a better quip (and the cut-and-paste method only gets you so far).
Basing your novel in a setting you know lets you call upon real events and idioms that your readership connects with naturally and won't need explained. When the bruiser in a band of thieves reacts to his leader's new cooperative approach with "Great plan, Gandhi," your audience has a good chance of simply 'getting it' without any effort.
It allows you to allude, to be subtle, to jokingly juxtapose common conception with what your characters and narration are saying. You can relate local impact to the larger concepts that touch the hearts of more than just your character's small-town neighbors. To wit:
This was his last chance; the thin line between Leroy and a crumpled heap of a man was his late-night job at the gas station. The Stop 'N' Go had become his Alamo.
In one word, a kaleidoscope of concepts comes to bear: a last stand, proud men, old soldiers, and the cause they were willing to die for. The brutality of the Alamo became a flag around which the remaining revolution rallied. All that implied with a single word.
Tapping into the power of the cultural consciousness allows you to say more with less, but it also just allows you to say more. To call Leroy's situation dire, desperate or futile is all well and good, but any such words are absent of scale. Leroy's "desperate," and your "desperate" as an author may in no way compare to the "desperate" your readers perceive.
The cultural memory can attempt to set the bar. Such icons have an intrinsic and understood value, and while it's not a guarantee, much of your readership will value such events with a relatively similar gauge. At the very least, comparing a dead-end job to a battle in a revolution is a powerful metaphor regardless of the value of that particular event in time.
More than that, choosing the Alamo versus the more generic "a battle in a war" adds an additional layer: the failure of the defenders at the Alamo mission, or the fact that it was fought on what was once holy ground, add more meaning to Leroy's struggle than just "he's a soldier in a war."
Now he's a soldier defending a religious-site-turned-fortress, and the odds are against him. He will fail, and it will not be a graceful loss, but perhaps the fires of his defeat will inspire others to carry on with what he had hoped to do from the start.
When you pin another well-known moment to your story, you give the reader a whole new web of sub-meanings and implications, and I don't just mean the inter-linking labyrinth that is Wikipedia.
We pin our emotions, our dreams, our hopes, our take on our own past to these moments and figures, these people and places and slivers of time. Tapping into that vast and varied array of cultural icons can lend more power, more humor and more depth to your work than a story isolated in space and time.
Hitch your hippogriff to the ongoing conversation of the larger world around you and watch as it rides off in directions you never thought possible. After all, one day, someone may be hitching their flying wagon to you.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Size Doesn't Matter - e-Pubs and the Age of the Novella
Having recently converted from the what's-my-wordcount-this-second school of interim deadline management, I've been reminded of a wholly different change in the works as far as literature on the whole is concerned.
But first, some exposition...
For those of you who haven't considered self-publication, I highly recommend it. Services like Lulu provide a relatively painless means by which to equip something you wrote in your spare time for massive global distribution with the click of a few buttons and at no personal cost to you.
That said, despite the allure of rule-my-own-destiny publication, I found I was still drawn to the old standard of hiring an agent, submitting a manuscript to a faceless editor and praying someone, somewhere, might buy my book. There's a certain validation that comes from a large corporate entity giving you the green light that is difficult to extract from the self-publishing game.
Odd as that sounds.
But the truth is traditions are seeded into each of us heavily and can be difficult to break on a personal level. That was why I started the 90-day ordeal of rewriting a previous novel so that it might be clean, crisp, and up to the snuff of the professional writing world (at least, as well as someone who has never been a part of said world can estimate it might be).
I had planned until very recently to then find myself an agent, submit the work for consideration and follow the trail of dots as they led me on toward the promise of seeing my book on a dusty shelf in the back of an Eddie McKay some day. But then I was offered up the ridiculous tirade of a published author slamming the publishing industry as a whole in an effort to dissuade new authors from even considering it.
While the article itself was based largely on unrelated causal conjecture and personal elitism, it brought to mind a few key points quite my accident that led me to consider the quest I had always intended to embark upon.
Over the course of the last few years, we've seen some incredible shifts in the delivery models of a number of media. It should cause anyone hoping to take a thing from their brain and distribute it en masse to minds worldwide to pause and consider if there might not be a better way than to cram a coffee-stained manuscript inside a manila envelope to start its week-long trek down the street.
At one time, the advantage to a publishing firm was the printers. A regular guy couldn't just hop down to Kinko's and make 300 well-bound copies of his work with any hope of turning a profit, let alone mailing them out to distributors or delivering them direct to customers.
With services like Lulu, that's no longer an issue: customers order your work and have it printed ad-hoc, or you can order a massive printing for resale. Distribution is no longer reliant on a massive central printer station cranking out hundreds of copies a seconds.
Add to that a publisher's second greatest draw: getting onto the shelves. The publisher handles negotiation with the ailing bookstores on a national (or international) level to get your copy added, sorted and sent out en masse to stores where hipsters sipping their mocha lattes can happen across your overdramatic cover art and be wowed accordingly.
Borders and Barnes & Noble, two of the best known print warehouses in the country, are teetering on the edge of oblivion. While there will likely always be a place where someone can happen across a paper copy of your work, there's a good chance the social meccas that are coffee-shop bookstores may be a dying breed.
Which brings us to the third and possibly biggest advantage of the pro publisher: marketing. Someone else will handle the selling and promotion for you. Someone else will whore your work out to the masses and make it known. Someone else gets to talk about you than you.
For most writers, that may be reason enough in and of itself to hand over your rights to the first publishing shop that will take them. That said, even the self-publishing quorum offer marketing services at less than the price of an agent. It may not be as intense as seeing the word "Penguin" stamped on the side of your book, but it puts your book where it will be seen, on the new shelves today's readers are wandering past.
The e-shelves.
Amazon and its Kindle have redefined the marketplace, and I don't mean that as a pun. People are taking the bookstore with them now, browsing online through an infinite web of related keywords and customers-also-bought threads of commonality. There's no more printing press, no more negotiation, no more cramming your paperback in next to Stephenie Meyer's latest affront to the cultural conversation.
Which brings me at length back to my original point: size no longer matters.
Not that it ever did, really. As many hearts have been tugged by Elie Weisel's Night and the works of Jack London as anything by the late Robert Jordan or Charles Dickens. 700 pages does not a master make you; nor are you clever for fitting a story inside a mere pamphlet of a book. Length is just that: the time it takes to tell your story: no more, no less.
That said, for ages word-count has been the final bell on the worth of a work. Minimums were required: people wanted readers to feel they had gotten their money's worth, and the more pages, the more worth, clearly. I myself fell victim to the old song of "it's not a real book until you crest X-many words," but words are not the wealth of a story: what they hold, what they evoke in you, the reader, is.
Like some surreal welterweight division, the novella has been lost in the overall fight of print publishing for decades. With occasional moments of brightness, the 100-page margin between a hulking short story and a pitiful paperback was a black void of emptiness reserved only for certain unique masters whose ways no one was willing to question.
With the sudden surge of the e-publishing world and the continued decline of print as a singular avenue of expression, the lines between length and size will, I hope, blur to nothing. Without an arbitrary mesh through which to pass all potential contributions and the revelation that more bytes do not cost more to print and send, stories can take as much (or as little) time as they like.
And given the overall predilection for not staring at a screen at length, there's a good chance the shorter, still-heavy works in the forsaken novella range may have their own heyday at last.
Why am I such a fan of the novella? I'm not. I'm eager to see it and its kindred labels of "short story," "novel" and "epic" vanish entirely, though I doubt that will happen any time soon. A story is a big as you make it, as rich as you make it, as deep as you decide to go with it. The dimensions should be fluid so that each writer can take their time (or get to the point) at their own pace.
It isn't a matter of simple comfort for the writer, it's about not stretching a round peg to fit a square whole. It's about removing the boundaries so that any peg, no matter the shape, can pass through unhindered and reach the reader for whom it was destined.
And if that's not enough innuendo for you, I don't know what will be.
But first, some exposition...
For those of you who haven't considered self-publication, I highly recommend it. Services like Lulu provide a relatively painless means by which to equip something you wrote in your spare time for massive global distribution with the click of a few buttons and at no personal cost to you.
That said, despite the allure of rule-my-own-destiny publication, I found I was still drawn to the old standard of hiring an agent, submitting a manuscript to a faceless editor and praying someone, somewhere, might buy my book. There's a certain validation that comes from a large corporate entity giving you the green light that is difficult to extract from the self-publishing game.
Odd as that sounds.
But the truth is traditions are seeded into each of us heavily and can be difficult to break on a personal level. That was why I started the 90-day ordeal of rewriting a previous novel so that it might be clean, crisp, and up to the snuff of the professional writing world (at least, as well as someone who has never been a part of said world can estimate it might be).
I had planned until very recently to then find myself an agent, submit the work for consideration and follow the trail of dots as they led me on toward the promise of seeing my book on a dusty shelf in the back of an Eddie McKay some day. But then I was offered up the ridiculous tirade of a published author slamming the publishing industry as a whole in an effort to dissuade new authors from even considering it.
While the article itself was based largely on unrelated causal conjecture and personal elitism, it brought to mind a few key points quite my accident that led me to consider the quest I had always intended to embark upon.
Over the course of the last few years, we've seen some incredible shifts in the delivery models of a number of media. It should cause anyone hoping to take a thing from their brain and distribute it en masse to minds worldwide to pause and consider if there might not be a better way than to cram a coffee-stained manuscript inside a manila envelope to start its week-long trek down the street.
At one time, the advantage to a publishing firm was the printers. A regular guy couldn't just hop down to Kinko's and make 300 well-bound copies of his work with any hope of turning a profit, let alone mailing them out to distributors or delivering them direct to customers.
With services like Lulu, that's no longer an issue: customers order your work and have it printed ad-hoc, or you can order a massive printing for resale. Distribution is no longer reliant on a massive central printer station cranking out hundreds of copies a seconds.
Add to that a publisher's second greatest draw: getting onto the shelves. The publisher handles negotiation with the ailing bookstores on a national (or international) level to get your copy added, sorted and sent out en masse to stores where hipsters sipping their mocha lattes can happen across your overdramatic cover art and be wowed accordingly.
Borders and Barnes & Noble, two of the best known print warehouses in the country, are teetering on the edge of oblivion. While there will likely always be a place where someone can happen across a paper copy of your work, there's a good chance the social meccas that are coffee-shop bookstores may be a dying breed.
Which brings us to the third and possibly biggest advantage of the pro publisher: marketing. Someone else will handle the selling and promotion for you. Someone else will whore your work out to the masses and make it known. Someone else gets to talk about you than you.
For most writers, that may be reason enough in and of itself to hand over your rights to the first publishing shop that will take them. That said, even the self-publishing quorum offer marketing services at less than the price of an agent. It may not be as intense as seeing the word "Penguin" stamped on the side of your book, but it puts your book where it will be seen, on the new shelves today's readers are wandering past.
The e-shelves.
Amazon and its Kindle have redefined the marketplace, and I don't mean that as a pun. People are taking the bookstore with them now, browsing online through an infinite web of related keywords and customers-also-bought threads of commonality. There's no more printing press, no more negotiation, no more cramming your paperback in next to Stephenie Meyer's latest affront to the cultural conversation.
Which brings me at length back to my original point: size no longer matters.
Not that it ever did, really. As many hearts have been tugged by Elie Weisel's Night and the works of Jack London as anything by the late Robert Jordan or Charles Dickens. 700 pages does not a master make you; nor are you clever for fitting a story inside a mere pamphlet of a book. Length is just that: the time it takes to tell your story: no more, no less.
That said, for ages word-count has been the final bell on the worth of a work. Minimums were required: people wanted readers to feel they had gotten their money's worth, and the more pages, the more worth, clearly. I myself fell victim to the old song of "it's not a real book until you crest X-many words," but words are not the wealth of a story: what they hold, what they evoke in you, the reader, is.
Like some surreal welterweight division, the novella has been lost in the overall fight of print publishing for decades. With occasional moments of brightness, the 100-page margin between a hulking short story and a pitiful paperback was a black void of emptiness reserved only for certain unique masters whose ways no one was willing to question.
With the sudden surge of the e-publishing world and the continued decline of print as a singular avenue of expression, the lines between length and size will, I hope, blur to nothing. Without an arbitrary mesh through which to pass all potential contributions and the revelation that more bytes do not cost more to print and send, stories can take as much (or as little) time as they like.
And given the overall predilection for not staring at a screen at length, there's a good chance the shorter, still-heavy works in the forsaken novella range may have their own heyday at last.
Why am I such a fan of the novella? I'm not. I'm eager to see it and its kindred labels of "short story," "novel" and "epic" vanish entirely, though I doubt that will happen any time soon. A story is a big as you make it, as rich as you make it, as deep as you decide to go with it. The dimensions should be fluid so that each writer can take their time (or get to the point) at their own pace.
It isn't a matter of simple comfort for the writer, it's about not stretching a round peg to fit a square whole. It's about removing the boundaries so that any peg, no matter the shape, can pass through unhindered and reach the reader for whom it was destined.
And if that's not enough innuendo for you, I don't know what will be.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Playing Dress-up - How NOT to Reinvent the Wheel
Anyone with a WordPress account is familiar with the concept of theming: you slap a new skin on what was already there, and while the content is the same, the look is now snappy and new.
People have applied this same basic principle to literature for centuries.
I'll be the first to admit that variations on a theme are a legitimate means of growth and evolution within the literary world (or any story-based medium), but that's not the same as wrapping orange latex around someone else's toy and calling it new and improved.
Down here, we call that "regifting."
While originality is not the only stick by which a work should be measured, to call something your own involves throwing at least a modicum of effort at it. Placing a completed work inside an unfamiliar box just to capitalize on recent trending is a base, if profitable, tactic.
If you want to be upgraded from the state of harlequin knock-off, but don't want to start from scratch, there are a few considerations to take into account:
1) What the hell for?
While I have also stated that meaning is what meaning does, if you're going to reskin an old story, know why you're doing it. If it's money, then you needn't look far from the source. Check Amazon's best-seller list, I guarantee you a theme will be present.
If instead you want to update a classic so its lessons are not forgotten, you are off to a powerful start in the game of becoming well known on your own merit. Your gift will be perspective: don't just insert a gimmick around the characters, update the issues that made them powerful to begin with.
Layering, say, vampires onto Napoleonic politics provides more than just kink-fuel for steamy romances within the work. Agelessness and inheritance becomes an issue; the breadth of history still rich in the minds of those who have lived it; a dark parallel between human parasites and the inner bowels of post-monarchical France...you get the idea.
Understand your reasons for putting the trappings of that particular trend into that particular story and how the two change each other. It doesn't have to be a particularly good reason (personally, I would be all for a steampunk Hardy Boys myself), but knowing the reason will help you shape the setting accordingly.
Sometimes, those reasons just involve chainsaws.
2) Influence and Consequence
Every action will have an equal and opposite explosion. When you introduce a new layer, things change. Having high technology in the days of Abraham pits Moses against the aliens who helped build the pyramids. Oh wait, that's kind of been done already.
Poorly.
The setting changes around what you introduce like a body reacting to an infection. Consider District 9 and the dehumanizing element of introducing actual non-humans. You have to consider how things would (and wouldn't) change when you throw in a new piece that didn't fit before. What's kitsch can be caustic, especially if you don't account for it.
Consider what superpowers do to average people. Having eyes that shoot lasers sounds great until you find you can't turn it off. Now you're one tap of the brakes away from carving a ravine through East 32nd street. You have to consider the consequences, both good and bad. Sometimes the way things suck is more interesting than the awesome bits.
3) The Best of Both Worlds
Dolling up something awful with a fun new reckoning does occasionally pan out, but the truth is outside of open parody, popular fiction follows similar lines as computers: garbage in, garbage out. Making a hacky-sack out of used cat litter gets you points for ingenuity, but nobody's really going to want to play with it.
You may also get a few bonus points for knowing what a hacky-sack is, but I digress.
Throwing mad science into the middle of Hard Times doesn't make the plight of those characters any more fun to read. Don't think of your themes as just something fun to spice up something dull: look for something beloved and try to make it better.
It can help to pick your theme first. Look for lines of harmony between it and periods of history, genres, or authors you're familiar with. Magic and the dark ages are a natural pair, as is apparently fanciful technology and Victorian England (though I hear the Edward era is getting its due).
Look for other similar synchronisities. Modern gothic themes applied to Edgar Allen Poe. Paladin tanks in the Crusades. Actual demons in the Inquisition. Huckleberry Finn in space.
A raft drifting slowly down the Mississippi isn't all that different from an escape pod on Impulse when you really think about it. Given the recent debate, though, you may have to go with something other than "Klingon Jim."
...That was bad and I feel bad.
The point of all this is to caution writers away from slapping a sample of what the proverbial kids are buying onto a ready-made piece not already vaulted to the forefront on its own merits (or simply long past its day in the minds of the young).
If you're hoping to ensure readership by hitching your work to the coattails of what's popular, at least look for the harmonic trends that might bring out something new and legitimately improved about the trend, your work, or literature as a whole.
And for the love of god, don't let it be vampires...
People have applied this same basic principle to literature for centuries.
I'll be the first to admit that variations on a theme are a legitimate means of growth and evolution within the literary world (or any story-based medium), but that's not the same as wrapping orange latex around someone else's toy and calling it new and improved.
Down here, we call that "regifting."
While originality is not the only stick by which a work should be measured, to call something your own involves throwing at least a modicum of effort at it. Placing a completed work inside an unfamiliar box just to capitalize on recent trending is a base, if profitable, tactic.
If you want to be upgraded from the state of harlequin knock-off, but don't want to start from scratch, there are a few considerations to take into account:
1) What the hell for?
While I have also stated that meaning is what meaning does, if you're going to reskin an old story, know why you're doing it. If it's money, then you needn't look far from the source. Check Amazon's best-seller list, I guarantee you a theme will be present.
If instead you want to update a classic so its lessons are not forgotten, you are off to a powerful start in the game of becoming well known on your own merit. Your gift will be perspective: don't just insert a gimmick around the characters, update the issues that made them powerful to begin with.
Layering, say, vampires onto Napoleonic politics provides more than just kink-fuel for steamy romances within the work. Agelessness and inheritance becomes an issue; the breadth of history still rich in the minds of those who have lived it; a dark parallel between human parasites and the inner bowels of post-monarchical France...you get the idea.
Understand your reasons for putting the trappings of that particular trend into that particular story and how the two change each other. It doesn't have to be a particularly good reason (personally, I would be all for a steampunk Hardy Boys myself), but knowing the reason will help you shape the setting accordingly.
Sometimes, those reasons just involve chainsaws.
2) Influence and Consequence
Every action will have an equal and opposite explosion. When you introduce a new layer, things change. Having high technology in the days of Abraham pits Moses against the aliens who helped build the pyramids. Oh wait, that's kind of been done already.
Poorly.
The setting changes around what you introduce like a body reacting to an infection. Consider District 9 and the dehumanizing element of introducing actual non-humans. You have to consider how things would (and wouldn't) change when you throw in a new piece that didn't fit before. What's kitsch can be caustic, especially if you don't account for it.
Consider what superpowers do to average people. Having eyes that shoot lasers sounds great until you find you can't turn it off. Now you're one tap of the brakes away from carving a ravine through East 32nd street. You have to consider the consequences, both good and bad. Sometimes the way things suck is more interesting than the awesome bits.
3) The Best of Both Worlds
Dolling up something awful with a fun new reckoning does occasionally pan out, but the truth is outside of open parody, popular fiction follows similar lines as computers: garbage in, garbage out. Making a hacky-sack out of used cat litter gets you points for ingenuity, but nobody's really going to want to play with it.
You may also get a few bonus points for knowing what a hacky-sack is, but I digress.
Throwing mad science into the middle of Hard Times doesn't make the plight of those characters any more fun to read. Don't think of your themes as just something fun to spice up something dull: look for something beloved and try to make it better.
It can help to pick your theme first. Look for lines of harmony between it and periods of history, genres, or authors you're familiar with. Magic and the dark ages are a natural pair, as is apparently fanciful technology and Victorian England (though I hear the Edward era is getting its due).
Look for other similar synchronisities. Modern gothic themes applied to Edgar Allen Poe. Paladin tanks in the Crusades. Actual demons in the Inquisition. Huckleberry Finn in space.
A raft drifting slowly down the Mississippi isn't all that different from an escape pod on Impulse when you really think about it. Given the recent debate, though, you may have to go with something other than "Klingon Jim."
...That was bad and I feel bad.
The point of all this is to caution writers away from slapping a sample of what the proverbial kids are buying onto a ready-made piece not already vaulted to the forefront on its own merits (or simply long past its day in the minds of the young).
If you're hoping to ensure readership by hitching your work to the coattails of what's popular, at least look for the harmonic trends that might bring out something new and legitimately improved about the trend, your work, or literature as a whole.
And for the love of god, don't let it be vampires...
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