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...
Friday, January 21, 2011
No I in Team - On Perspective and Voice
Anyone who's survived high school English has received the lectures on the use of passive voice and first-person perspective.
Anyone who's done any writing after high school knows that both those standpoints are crap.
In all fairness, it's more accurate to say that both arguments are simply oversimplified. Passive voice in the wrong scenario can take all the impact out of the case you're making. First-person perspective in the wrong hands turns your short story into little more than an extended blog post. It's easy to see where they're coming from.
The lesson they should be teaching is that voice and perspective help shape the whole tone of your work, and ignorance of either can lead to stiffness in the best of cases. Unfortunately, most high school teachers barely have time to cover half a sonnet before students lose interest, so I suppose it's an understandable oversight.
Voice first, since it's the easiest to misuse: passive voice, for those fuzzy on the details, is not just a liberal use of the words "There" and "It" at the start of a sentence. Don't feel bad, even Strunk & White bombed identifying passive voice three times out of four.
Passive voice is a flipping of the traditional sentence, usually with a helping verb involved. It places the recipient ahead of the action being done to him, her or it, which can change the stress of the phrase. "I was cheated by my bookie" places the emphasis on the "I," while "My bookie cheated me," the active voice, focuses your attention on the bookie.
Understanding what that inversion does will help you spice up your style and bring the readers' attention where you want it. "I was cheated" makes the narrator sound any of: self-centered, pitiable, gullible or paranoid, depending on the situation. "My bookie cheated me" has more chance of making the reader angry at or suspicious of the bookie, and takes the focus off the narrator and onto the bookie and the action performed.
You can use the passive voice to keep attention on a central character while they're being affected by several outside sources, giving the impression that they are in the middle of a storm of actions either good or bad. Avoiding passive voice entirely limits that focus control and can force you to wrap some very awkward clauses around an active-voice sentence just to keep the reader's mind on the character at the heart of it.
Perspective provides a similar function in both directions. The typical third-person limited puts focus on your main character without making them seem accidentally arrogant (or yourself accidentally a huge Film Noir fan) by overusing the first-person perspective. That said, once you've gone third-person, it's bloody hard to go back.
Third-person is the most mobile and flexible perspective, which is why it's legitimately the most popular, and why first- and second-person novels will often stand out boldly if they can hold the reader's attention and beat down their knee-jerk reaction to the more intimate attention.
To keep your third-person viewpoint fixed purely on your main character makes it seriously "limited." While you can use third-person perspective to write a first-person novel with a bunch of he/she pronouns instead, there's a great deal of power unique to the third-person angle that should not be overlooked.
Consider the poor analogy of a camera crew. The action on which everyone is focused tends to go through one particular lens for much of the program. You can start with the high angle shot that zeroes in on the more localized focus of your story, but the motion doesn't stop there. Switching between lenses provides not only a fresh angle on the subject, but a noticeable shift that can generate all manner of emotion, even in a written work.
In a typical 3PL gambit, when your protagonist ends the night of her awkward date with a clumsy kiss before the door to his apartment shuts, leaving her out in the cold, she sulks off downtrodden, assured she has ruined her chances with the love of her life for good.
With a more flexible third-person take on the same scene, you can let your protagonist slink away, and then flip to the far side of the door where her date is slowly smiling to himself, unable to think anything further than "...she kissed me."
Separate takes on the same combat or political equation can lend an entirely too-true shape to an otherwise flat us-versus-them scenario, humanizing both sides so that the reader is forced to consider the implications. Alternatively, you can show what a rat bastard the bad guy really is as he works his way through the countryside, delighting in his reign of havoc as he watches the villages burn with a sadistic grin.
Don't feel like your narration is velcro'd to the back of the hero's head. Take your perspective for walkies from time to time, it could use the exercise.
First- and second-person get a little more dangerous, but that doesn't mean they're out of the question. Just understand what they do to your reader's sense of comfort.
Third-person is passive and voyeuristic, arguably a kindred companion to the readers themselves. It rests alongside them, unaware of their presence and dictates to the room at large the tales of Sir Whatsit of Woebegone.
First- and second-person address the reader directly. First-person may be talking about herself, but she's talking to you, and second-person cuts out the middle man. Both have the potential for evoking strong emotion, which in turn means that both have the potential to scare off or annoy your reader. Use with caution.
First-person is best kept to the sort of diary-style monologues people actually find titillating: the sin-rich detective who doesn't yet know she's searching for redemption, the well-meaning scientist who is dictating his final moments while the product of his inventions claws angrily at the door to the lab, the unexpectedly-personified narrator (see: housecat), and so forth.
This is, by no means, a comprehensive list, but consider the sort of stories where the captivation and necessary focus of first-person perspective lends something extra to the work that helps draw the reader in. If it sounds more like the 40-something bachelor with a comb-over reliving his glory days, chances are you're doing it wrong.
Second-person is by far the most dangerous, as even casual statements can be taken as accusatory depending on your reader. Any therapist will tell you the danger in using "you" over "I," so be cautious of the type of box you may be seen as standing on.
Second-person tends to be best kept to more friendly narratives. The tales of a local hero from the perspective of a man sitting in a rocking chair on your grandmother's porch is just one example. Another could be a series of letters from a lover (or would-be lover) kept distant by duty, describing their adventures with the pang of longing and familiarity.
As with anything, have a reason for doing it (something other than "but I like these pronouns...") and be aware of the consequences to your reader. Those effects can be what makes your story more than just words on a page. And never listen to anyone who tells you there's no place for the second-person take in real literature.
Clearly, they need some perspective.
Anyone who's done any writing after high school knows that both those standpoints are crap.
In all fairness, it's more accurate to say that both arguments are simply oversimplified. Passive voice in the wrong scenario can take all the impact out of the case you're making. First-person perspective in the wrong hands turns your short story into little more than an extended blog post. It's easy to see where they're coming from.
The lesson they should be teaching is that voice and perspective help shape the whole tone of your work, and ignorance of either can lead to stiffness in the best of cases. Unfortunately, most high school teachers barely have time to cover half a sonnet before students lose interest, so I suppose it's an understandable oversight.
Voice first, since it's the easiest to misuse: passive voice, for those fuzzy on the details, is not just a liberal use of the words "There" and "It" at the start of a sentence. Don't feel bad, even Strunk & White bombed identifying passive voice three times out of four.
Passive voice is a flipping of the traditional sentence, usually with a helping verb involved. It places the recipient ahead of the action being done to him, her or it, which can change the stress of the phrase. "I was cheated by my bookie" places the emphasis on the "I," while "My bookie cheated me," the active voice, focuses your attention on the bookie.
Understanding what that inversion does will help you spice up your style and bring the readers' attention where you want it. "I was cheated" makes the narrator sound any of: self-centered, pitiable, gullible or paranoid, depending on the situation. "My bookie cheated me" has more chance of making the reader angry at or suspicious of the bookie, and takes the focus off the narrator and onto the bookie and the action performed.
You can use the passive voice to keep attention on a central character while they're being affected by several outside sources, giving the impression that they are in the middle of a storm of actions either good or bad. Avoiding passive voice entirely limits that focus control and can force you to wrap some very awkward clauses around an active-voice sentence just to keep the reader's mind on the character at the heart of it.
Perspective provides a similar function in both directions. The typical third-person limited puts focus on your main character without making them seem accidentally arrogant (or yourself accidentally a huge Film Noir fan) by overusing the first-person perspective. That said, once you've gone third-person, it's bloody hard to go back.
Third-person is the most mobile and flexible perspective, which is why it's legitimately the most popular, and why first- and second-person novels will often stand out boldly if they can hold the reader's attention and beat down their knee-jerk reaction to the more intimate attention.
To keep your third-person viewpoint fixed purely on your main character makes it seriously "limited." While you can use third-person perspective to write a first-person novel with a bunch of he/she pronouns instead, there's a great deal of power unique to the third-person angle that should not be overlooked.
Consider the poor analogy of a camera crew. The action on which everyone is focused tends to go through one particular lens for much of the program. You can start with the high angle shot that zeroes in on the more localized focus of your story, but the motion doesn't stop there. Switching between lenses provides not only a fresh angle on the subject, but a noticeable shift that can generate all manner of emotion, even in a written work.
In a typical 3PL gambit, when your protagonist ends the night of her awkward date with a clumsy kiss before the door to his apartment shuts, leaving her out in the cold, she sulks off downtrodden, assured she has ruined her chances with the love of her life for good.
With a more flexible third-person take on the same scene, you can let your protagonist slink away, and then flip to the far side of the door where her date is slowly smiling to himself, unable to think anything further than "...she kissed me."
Separate takes on the same combat or political equation can lend an entirely too-true shape to an otherwise flat us-versus-them scenario, humanizing both sides so that the reader is forced to consider the implications. Alternatively, you can show what a rat bastard the bad guy really is as he works his way through the countryside, delighting in his reign of havoc as he watches the villages burn with a sadistic grin.
Don't feel like your narration is velcro'd to the back of the hero's head. Take your perspective for walkies from time to time, it could use the exercise.
First- and second-person get a little more dangerous, but that doesn't mean they're out of the question. Just understand what they do to your reader's sense of comfort.
Third-person is passive and voyeuristic, arguably a kindred companion to the readers themselves. It rests alongside them, unaware of their presence and dictates to the room at large the tales of Sir Whatsit of Woebegone.
First- and second-person address the reader directly. First-person may be talking about herself, but she's talking to you, and second-person cuts out the middle man. Both have the potential for evoking strong emotion, which in turn means that both have the potential to scare off or annoy your reader. Use with caution.
First-person is best kept to the sort of diary-style monologues people actually find titillating: the sin-rich detective who doesn't yet know she's searching for redemption, the well-meaning scientist who is dictating his final moments while the product of his inventions claws angrily at the door to the lab, the unexpectedly-personified narrator (see: housecat), and so forth.
This is, by no means, a comprehensive list, but consider the sort of stories where the captivation and necessary focus of first-person perspective lends something extra to the work that helps draw the reader in. If it sounds more like the 40-something bachelor with a comb-over reliving his glory days, chances are you're doing it wrong.
Second-person is by far the most dangerous, as even casual statements can be taken as accusatory depending on your reader. Any therapist will tell you the danger in using "you" over "I," so be cautious of the type of box you may be seen as standing on.
Second-person tends to be best kept to more friendly narratives. The tales of a local hero from the perspective of a man sitting in a rocking chair on your grandmother's porch is just one example. Another could be a series of letters from a lover (or would-be lover) kept distant by duty, describing their adventures with the pang of longing and familiarity.
As with anything, have a reason for doing it (something other than "but I like these pronouns...") and be aware of the consequences to your reader. Those effects can be what makes your story more than just words on a page. And never listen to anyone who tells you there's no place for the second-person take in real literature.
Clearly, they need some perspective.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
The Act of Creation - Sci-fi from the Ground Up
Many writers get their start in the areas of science fiction, fantasy and the myriad of genres that incorporate or border on one or the other.
One common assumption is that it's easier to build your own world than to work within the confines of an existing one, so that when you begin to write about things more interesting or grandiose than those you've done yourself, you don't have to waste time on any pesky research or risk straying accidentally into potential hot-button areas of the modern world and its many sensitivities.
In a sense, that's true: when you write the world, you write the rules. Want laser swords? Look at that, laser swords. How do they work? Who cares! They're laser swords! Welcome to soft sci-fi, friend. Take a seat next to the hemophage and make yourself comfortable.
The age-old joke of "a wizard did it" is actually at the core of a frighteningly high percentage of first works (and sometimes entire series). Why bother with rules when you can just chain a number of cool scenes together on an arbitrary set of environmental factors that just crapped out for the heck of it. It makes the backdrop to your stunning foreground an effortless exercise in "because I said so."
The difference between the slurry of such half-assed pseudo-settings and an iconic world that keeps a series alive even when you kill the characters off every other book is the dedication to building yourself an honest-to-god world.
If you're taking to sci-fi or fantasy with any seriousness, you've got to look at your setting from the perspective of the skeptic. Every science from physical to social is involved in crafting a new world, a new time, a new species or culture. The moment you step off the well-defined rock, you had better hope you are prepared for the void of empty space between yourself and the believable setting you crave.
That's not to say you have to triple-major just to craft a fantasy epic. There are holes in the science of some of the greatest fictional settings of all time and no one much seems to mind. What's important is that you recognize where the sticking points are in a setting so that at least your second-tier readership don't bang their heads against the wall trying to reason out the presence of Olmec writings in North Dakota.
First, the physical: if you're going with a new locale, it's important to start roughly at the beginning. If your setting is stable and planetary, use the basics of what you know here on Earth to support it. Altering the overall climate, the ratio of land to water or properties of the metals used will give it an alien feel without having to redefine physics as we know it.
Be careful of going to extremes. While they can emphasize a point and lead you into an entirely new feel for how people survive, most systems we're familiar with work on the perspective of equilibrium.
Too much of anything tends to come with some fairly drastic drawbacks or environmental repercussions. If you can provide the reader some evidence of that backswing or an external point against which the extreme is balanced, it settles the brain from wondering why the whole thing hasn't teetered into the abyss already.
Life systems are far more complicated to intertwine. Metals or elements with new properties are simplistic and pure enough that readers can adapt to rocks that float and liquids that crystallize under new and different stimuli, but life is a system unto itself, which when wrapped inside a larger ecosystem creates a sort of Sierpinski Triangle effect that can become infinitely recursive.
If both these terms are alien to you, you might want to consider going with fantasy instead of sci-fi.
When it comes to life, remember that every quality something has was at some point an evolutionary advantage. It doesn't have to be an obvious one (in fact, sometimes all the better when it isn't), but if it's unnecessarily complicated or doesn't have at least the hint of a practical application towards survival your readers are likely to guess you're just playing with the scenery.
Though they may not necessarily mind.
Life is connected both to its environment and to each other, so if you're going to toy around with the ecosystem, you may want to start with what you know. If you need help emphasizing the alien nature of the new lifesystem within an existing context, look to our finest and weirdest examples: deserts, jungles, and deep under the ocean.
Depending on your story, the social element can be more vital, and much more complex. As I mentioned, life interacts with both its environment and each other. The same is true from a social perspective: cultures evolve, grow, interact, impact each other, absorb, blend, conquer, trade, intermarry and collapse.
If you're planning on building a social/political world, don't just build up the city or kingdom where the story takes place: have an idea in mind of the outlying lands. Distant nomads, enemies abroad, a land across the sea: even if the local knowledge is sparse, rumors and legends will abound. It helps prevent your setting from being Castle #187 and blends it with a new canvas of worlds that tantalize the imagination and leave you open for far-ranging sequels.
Time is another realm where you can insert a good bit of mystery even in more modern settings. History is not always perfect or clear, and the past leaves treasures galore in the ghosts of civilizations long since past their time. Just remember that even The Ancients had a culture and a reason for being. Leaving behind ruins or abandoned technology doesn't make much sense if you haven't thought about why the people are no longer there in the first place.
Politics is an entirely different can of worms. If your story involves an organized society, there's bound to be law and rule and possibly even those who dispute that rule. Understand the basis for that structure before you start to impose it on the world. You don't have to explain it at length to the reader, just ensure that the parts of it which impact your story are internally consistent, else you risk wandering into Disney Villain territory.
There are dozens of premade ways to rule and philosophies on how best to govern a society, from militaristic martial law to free-thinking, laissez-faire, communal democracy, and none of them are inherently good or evil. Just because a dictator is totalitarian doesn't mean he doesn't have your best interests in mind. Just because the fate of a people is in their own hands doesn't mean it's in the best hands.
Again, be careful of extremes: history tells us that we rise up against too much law or in the absence of any. Humanity and its kindred ilk strive for some degree of balance and stability. Again, use the environment to help stabilize an otherwise lopsided situation. A city on the dangerous frontier is more given to martial law that a large urban center far removed from any immediate threat.
Don't be afraid to be fancy. Need a unique form of government your readers likely haven't seen before? Look no further. Just remember that every style has its place, and it weaknesses. Look for them in your setting before your readers find them for you.
When it comes to world-building, don't feel pressured to reinvent the global wheel. There's a great deal of variance on our own terrestrial home, it's easy enough to switch things up and keep it interesting without having to build everything from scratch. But if you're looking to make your own place out of the pieces floating through your mind, just be sure to fill in the blank spots between.
Try to follow the dots you're drawing and see if they add up to anything sensible. Want laser swords? No problem. Just have in mind a rough sketch of how they work. "Magic rock" here is an acceptable answer (in fact, it was), because a rock is already a more attainable concept that "my sword glows like a Christmas tree on steroids."
Remember, too, that you don't have to explain all this to the reader. We come to sci-fi and fantasy wanting a little mystery and magic and mysticism. But if you start to build for yourself rules on which that mystery is based, you run into fewer problems when the pieces don't seem to add up. It's enough to keep the larger part of your audience satisfied (and brainstorming new ideas) so that you can get your story out without any distractions.
And when the Comic Book Guy's of the world try and tell you it's still not good enough, remind them that when wookies are the norm, they can overlook a little thing like hyperdrive.
One common assumption is that it's easier to build your own world than to work within the confines of an existing one, so that when you begin to write about things more interesting or grandiose than those you've done yourself, you don't have to waste time on any pesky research or risk straying accidentally into potential hot-button areas of the modern world and its many sensitivities.
In a sense, that's true: when you write the world, you write the rules. Want laser swords? Look at that, laser swords. How do they work? Who cares! They're laser swords! Welcome to soft sci-fi, friend. Take a seat next to the hemophage and make yourself comfortable.
The age-old joke of "a wizard did it" is actually at the core of a frighteningly high percentage of first works (and sometimes entire series). Why bother with rules when you can just chain a number of cool scenes together on an arbitrary set of environmental factors that just crapped out for the heck of it. It makes the backdrop to your stunning foreground an effortless exercise in "because I said so."
The difference between the slurry of such half-assed pseudo-settings and an iconic world that keeps a series alive even when you kill the characters off every other book is the dedication to building yourself an honest-to-god world.
If you're taking to sci-fi or fantasy with any seriousness, you've got to look at your setting from the perspective of the skeptic. Every science from physical to social is involved in crafting a new world, a new time, a new species or culture. The moment you step off the well-defined rock, you had better hope you are prepared for the void of empty space between yourself and the believable setting you crave.
That's not to say you have to triple-major just to craft a fantasy epic. There are holes in the science of some of the greatest fictional settings of all time and no one much seems to mind. What's important is that you recognize where the sticking points are in a setting so that at least your second-tier readership don't bang their heads against the wall trying to reason out the presence of Olmec writings in North Dakota.
First, the physical: if you're going with a new locale, it's important to start roughly at the beginning. If your setting is stable and planetary, use the basics of what you know here on Earth to support it. Altering the overall climate, the ratio of land to water or properties of the metals used will give it an alien feel without having to redefine physics as we know it.
Be careful of going to extremes. While they can emphasize a point and lead you into an entirely new feel for how people survive, most systems we're familiar with work on the perspective of equilibrium.
Too much of anything tends to come with some fairly drastic drawbacks or environmental repercussions. If you can provide the reader some evidence of that backswing or an external point against which the extreme is balanced, it settles the brain from wondering why the whole thing hasn't teetered into the abyss already.
Life systems are far more complicated to intertwine. Metals or elements with new properties are simplistic and pure enough that readers can adapt to rocks that float and liquids that crystallize under new and different stimuli, but life is a system unto itself, which when wrapped inside a larger ecosystem creates a sort of Sierpinski Triangle effect that can become infinitely recursive.
If both these terms are alien to you, you might want to consider going with fantasy instead of sci-fi.
When it comes to life, remember that every quality something has was at some point an evolutionary advantage. It doesn't have to be an obvious one (in fact, sometimes all the better when it isn't), but if it's unnecessarily complicated or doesn't have at least the hint of a practical application towards survival your readers are likely to guess you're just playing with the scenery.
Though they may not necessarily mind.
Life is connected both to its environment and to each other, so if you're going to toy around with the ecosystem, you may want to start with what you know. If you need help emphasizing the alien nature of the new lifesystem within an existing context, look to our finest and weirdest examples: deserts, jungles, and deep under the ocean.
Depending on your story, the social element can be more vital, and much more complex. As I mentioned, life interacts with both its environment and each other. The same is true from a social perspective: cultures evolve, grow, interact, impact each other, absorb, blend, conquer, trade, intermarry and collapse.
If you're planning on building a social/political world, don't just build up the city or kingdom where the story takes place: have an idea in mind of the outlying lands. Distant nomads, enemies abroad, a land across the sea: even if the local knowledge is sparse, rumors and legends will abound. It helps prevent your setting from being Castle #187 and blends it with a new canvas of worlds that tantalize the imagination and leave you open for far-ranging sequels.
Time is another realm where you can insert a good bit of mystery even in more modern settings. History is not always perfect or clear, and the past leaves treasures galore in the ghosts of civilizations long since past their time. Just remember that even The Ancients had a culture and a reason for being. Leaving behind ruins or abandoned technology doesn't make much sense if you haven't thought about why the people are no longer there in the first place.
Politics is an entirely different can of worms. If your story involves an organized society, there's bound to be law and rule and possibly even those who dispute that rule. Understand the basis for that structure before you start to impose it on the world. You don't have to explain it at length to the reader, just ensure that the parts of it which impact your story are internally consistent, else you risk wandering into Disney Villain territory.
There are dozens of premade ways to rule and philosophies on how best to govern a society, from militaristic martial law to free-thinking, laissez-faire, communal democracy, and none of them are inherently good or evil. Just because a dictator is totalitarian doesn't mean he doesn't have your best interests in mind. Just because the fate of a people is in their own hands doesn't mean it's in the best hands.
Again, be careful of extremes: history tells us that we rise up against too much law or in the absence of any. Humanity and its kindred ilk strive for some degree of balance and stability. Again, use the environment to help stabilize an otherwise lopsided situation. A city on the dangerous frontier is more given to martial law that a large urban center far removed from any immediate threat.
Don't be afraid to be fancy. Need a unique form of government your readers likely haven't seen before? Look no further. Just remember that every style has its place, and it weaknesses. Look for them in your setting before your readers find them for you.
When it comes to world-building, don't feel pressured to reinvent the global wheel. There's a great deal of variance on our own terrestrial home, it's easy enough to switch things up and keep it interesting without having to build everything from scratch. But if you're looking to make your own place out of the pieces floating through your mind, just be sure to fill in the blank spots between.
Try to follow the dots you're drawing and see if they add up to anything sensible. Want laser swords? No problem. Just have in mind a rough sketch of how they work. "Magic rock" here is an acceptable answer (in fact, it was), because a rock is already a more attainable concept that "my sword glows like a Christmas tree on steroids."
Remember, too, that you don't have to explain all this to the reader. We come to sci-fi and fantasy wanting a little mystery and magic and mysticism. But if you start to build for yourself rules on which that mystery is based, you run into fewer problems when the pieces don't seem to add up. It's enough to keep the larger part of your audience satisfied (and brainstorming new ideas) so that you can get your story out without any distractions.
And when the Comic Book Guy's of the world try and tell you it's still not good enough, remind them that when wookies are the norm, they can overlook a little thing like hyperdrive.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Fight Club - Writing John Woo
Some media have it easy.
A photograph can capture with the press of a button what a writer would need hours to recreate. When it takes more strokes to pen the words than it would a brush across canvas, you know you're looking at something truly beautiful; something you may have little chance of conveying with any power through words alone..
Accents are easier to write (and to read) when there's true audio involved. An otherwise delightful cockney lilt becomes a gushing river of dropped word-endings and apostrophes the likes of which God himself has never seen.
According to conventional wisdom, video equates to 24,000 words a second. Not even Steven King can match that. At least, not yet. The man has written a successful story about a possessed Plymouth, I put nothing past him at this point.
As an amateur musician and playwright, I know first-hand that every media has its downsides. Writing has its own brilliant constructions that other methods have to strain themselves to mirror. The sheer poetry of the right five-word phrase can bring even theater to its knees, to say nothing of the ability to quantify emotion as part of the standard narration filling every foreseeable crack on the page.
That said, there is one area where writing gets its comeuppance: when it comes to the deeply technical, visual media win out time and time again.
The ember that has set this particular flame burning with new life lately is the myriad of fight scenes required to complete The Order. I've covered action scenes in general previously, but this particular discussion veers into new territory, and it isn't limited to fight scenes alone.
To clarify the point: imagine a fight between two real people. It's ungraceful and uncoordinated, a flailing hodgepodge of misguided attempts to get the other person to stop hitting you back. Now imagine instead a fictional fight: a deeply choreographed sequence of fluid movements leading to regular shifts in supremacy resulting in a climactic final flurry with the clear victor walking away.
The former is not terribly impressive through any medium, although the writer can add to it all manner of meaning that it might otherwise lack, bringing light to the private internal struggle exploding within each combatant. The latter, by contrast, is extremely entertaining to watch, but loses something of its original grace when delivered via the written word.
It comes around to the same old song: that which is visually stunning is not always passable in print. If you're looking for the skillful fight between experienced opponents, the unnaturally orchestrated exchange of blows, then you need to take into consideration a few significant modifications to achieve the same result.
The initial trouble (and the natural lure) are the technical details. If you have a visual imagination or find it easiest to base your scene on what you've seen, you will want to describe each move as it happens:
With the exception of a narrative voice that border on the obscene, the above isn't necessarily all that bad, but break it down: this is about two seconds of action, total. That's thirty words a second. Compared to the rate of film doesn't seem so bad, but film also captures more than just the blow-by-blow.
To keep your fight engaging, you have to involve the environment around them. As the fight moves to new surroundings or the elements in the room become part of the action, you have to ensure that you not only convey what the characters pick up or slam into, but that those objects were there all along. You have to dress the scene as you go, placing Chekhov's fabled guns in each new room they enter.
More words and all the white space between now creates a second problem, this time for your reader: the pacing will shift. Reading "and then he totally kicked him in the junk" takes longer than watching it, if only just. Add in even the slightest poetry to your narrative and the scene starts to stretch like so much silly putty until it becomes too thin to sustain itself.
Both issues also apply to highly technical scenes. When describing intense operations with which the general populace isn't already intimately familiar leaves you with a lot to explain before the reader can have any hope of knowing what's going on without already being a professional in the field.
The more common examples include hacking, military operations, invention (also known as "the entire pull of the MacGuyver series"), bypassing security (or generally being a sneaky thief), piloting and nearly any mechanical operation or maintenance.
In order to truly convey the scene, you have to fill in the missing pieces in your audience's knowledge, and that means straying into the same arena as lecture material and technical manuals, neither of which are exactly flying off the shelves. You're left with selling exclusively to those already in the field or looking for a way to convey what normally takes a six-year degree to understand in half a paragraph.
Thankfully, there are tricks to circumvent all these issues (or at least con your audience into thinking you did).
Addressing pacing: start by throwing out what you were taught in English class. Formal sentence structure and big words can interrupt the flow and kill the rhythm of a fast-paced scene. I don't care of the wounding was egregious, if your reader has to pause to fetch a thesaurus, you're generating the wrong kind of action. Don't get flowery. Flowers have no place in fight scenes, except when in vases hurled at people's heads.
Quick descriptions, short sentences or interwoven run-ons will keep the momentum going. If it doesn't feel like time for a period, blow past it and keep writing. If you reach the end of a page and the closest thing you have to ending a sentence is a misplaced semi-colon, you may way to give the reader a chance or two to breathe. Otherwise, chain away.
As for getting the necessary additives out of the way, there's only so much you can scrunch: without a reliable familiarity with the jargon, you can't boil down a complex process with phrases like "bubble sort" and "electroplating." Instead, look for analogies. Transpose the process you want to describe to something so basic (and, hopefully, poetic) that your readers can connect with it.
For those thinking it's an overdone trope, you're right, but it remains the best method for getting your meaning across without simplifying the process itself and thus risking offending the core readership (i.e. those who actually know the process you're describing).
If you're concerned with appearing unoriginal, bring it within the confines of the fourth wall and let the characters involved in making the analogy comment on it directly. If they're just as baffled by the analogy or recognize it as a "dumbing down" of a situation the other character clearly has a handle on, it gives the reader a chance to laugh at the situation without feeling like the joke's on them.
Barring the easy solution, it's time to think about your end-game: you want to convey to the reader that what's happening is involved, complex, difficult, challenging, fragile or similarly unattainable to those without skill and/or luck in unnaturally high quantities.
Eschew accuracy. Look for ways to convey the same meaning without describing the technical specifics. If you've set one of your characters up as a the resident genius or ace in a given situation, sometimes all it takes is for the other characters to be in awe of the mystery of their machinations as they work to solve the latest crisis impacting the crew.
All you have to describe is the end result, the surface evidence of their very involved underpinnings. If you have the opportunity, mix their actions with another concurrent chain of events that can take the focus off the pilot/hacker/mechanic between their moments of effective brilliance.
Back to the original issue: fight scenes. When you can't squeeze, it's time to truncate. There are dozens of moves and counter-moves in a cinematic duel because that's what it takes for quick punches and flicks of the wrist to fill a solid three minutes of film. In a book, it doesn't take that much combat to fill the pages.
Boil it down to the major turning points. It's rare you're going to impress someone with the mere description of a feat of skill inside a fight scene. If they can't see it, it doesn't have the same allure. All that matters is how close to danger their hero is that second, and how close she might be to overcoming the odds and winning out against her foe.
It all comes down to the same thing: when it comes to writing the things that look better on screen, remove the bits you don't need in order to maintain the pace and pulse rate you're seeking.
Now if only I had a cool graphic of someone drop-kicking the word "egregious" out of the middle of a sentence, I'd be set for life.
A photograph can capture with the press of a button what a writer would need hours to recreate. When it takes more strokes to pen the words than it would a brush across canvas, you know you're looking at something truly beautiful; something you may have little chance of conveying with any power through words alone..
Accents are easier to write (and to read) when there's true audio involved. An otherwise delightful cockney lilt becomes a gushing river of dropped word-endings and apostrophes the likes of which God himself has never seen.
According to conventional wisdom, video equates to 24,000 words a second. Not even Steven King can match that. At least, not yet. The man has written a successful story about a possessed Plymouth, I put nothing past him at this point.
As an amateur musician and playwright, I know first-hand that every media has its downsides. Writing has its own brilliant constructions that other methods have to strain themselves to mirror. The sheer poetry of the right five-word phrase can bring even theater to its knees, to say nothing of the ability to quantify emotion as part of the standard narration filling every foreseeable crack on the page.
That said, there is one area where writing gets its comeuppance: when it comes to the deeply technical, visual media win out time and time again.
The ember that has set this particular flame burning with new life lately is the myriad of fight scenes required to complete The Order. I've covered action scenes in general previously, but this particular discussion veers into new territory, and it isn't limited to fight scenes alone.
To clarify the point: imagine a fight between two real people. It's ungraceful and uncoordinated, a flailing hodgepodge of misguided attempts to get the other person to stop hitting you back. Now imagine instead a fictional fight: a deeply choreographed sequence of fluid movements leading to regular shifts in supremacy resulting in a climactic final flurry with the clear victor walking away.
The former is not terribly impressive through any medium, although the writer can add to it all manner of meaning that it might otherwise lack, bringing light to the private internal struggle exploding within each combatant. The latter, by contrast, is extremely entertaining to watch, but loses something of its original grace when delivered via the written word.
It comes around to the same old song: that which is visually stunning is not always passable in print. If you're looking for the skillful fight between experienced opponents, the unnaturally orchestrated exchange of blows, then you need to take into consideration a few significant modifications to achieve the same result.
The initial trouble (and the natural lure) are the technical details. If you have a visual imagination or find it easiest to base your scene on what you've seen, you will want to describe each move as it happens:
The hero brings his arm back at its full length before shifting all its new-found momentum into a singular declarative strike at the chin of his reeling opponent. The target of this concentrated malice meanwhile raises his arms in defense, cutting short the deliverance of vengeance and instead levying his own haymaker to the hero's solar plexus.
With the exception of a narrative voice that border on the obscene, the above isn't necessarily all that bad, but break it down: this is about two seconds of action, total. That's thirty words a second. Compared to the rate of film doesn't seem so bad, but film also captures more than just the blow-by-blow.
To keep your fight engaging, you have to involve the environment around them. As the fight moves to new surroundings or the elements in the room become part of the action, you have to ensure that you not only convey what the characters pick up or slam into, but that those objects were there all along. You have to dress the scene as you go, placing Chekhov's fabled guns in each new room they enter.
More words and all the white space between now creates a second problem, this time for your reader: the pacing will shift. Reading "and then he totally kicked him in the junk" takes longer than watching it, if only just. Add in even the slightest poetry to your narrative and the scene starts to stretch like so much silly putty until it becomes too thin to sustain itself.
Both issues also apply to highly technical scenes. When describing intense operations with which the general populace isn't already intimately familiar leaves you with a lot to explain before the reader can have any hope of knowing what's going on without already being a professional in the field.
The more common examples include hacking, military operations, invention (also known as "the entire pull of the MacGuyver series"), bypassing security (or generally being a sneaky thief), piloting and nearly any mechanical operation or maintenance.
In order to truly convey the scene, you have to fill in the missing pieces in your audience's knowledge, and that means straying into the same arena as lecture material and technical manuals, neither of which are exactly flying off the shelves. You're left with selling exclusively to those already in the field or looking for a way to convey what normally takes a six-year degree to understand in half a paragraph.
Thankfully, there are tricks to circumvent all these issues (or at least con your audience into thinking you did).
Addressing pacing: start by throwing out what you were taught in English class. Formal sentence structure and big words can interrupt the flow and kill the rhythm of a fast-paced scene. I don't care of the wounding was egregious, if your reader has to pause to fetch a thesaurus, you're generating the wrong kind of action. Don't get flowery. Flowers have no place in fight scenes, except when in vases hurled at people's heads.
Quick descriptions, short sentences or interwoven run-ons will keep the momentum going. If it doesn't feel like time for a period, blow past it and keep writing. If you reach the end of a page and the closest thing you have to ending a sentence is a misplaced semi-colon, you may way to give the reader a chance or two to breathe. Otherwise, chain away.
As for getting the necessary additives out of the way, there's only so much you can scrunch: without a reliable familiarity with the jargon, you can't boil down a complex process with phrases like "bubble sort" and "electroplating." Instead, look for analogies. Transpose the process you want to describe to something so basic (and, hopefully, poetic) that your readers can connect with it.
For those thinking it's an overdone trope, you're right, but it remains the best method for getting your meaning across without simplifying the process itself and thus risking offending the core readership (i.e. those who actually know the process you're describing).
If you're concerned with appearing unoriginal, bring it within the confines of the fourth wall and let the characters involved in making the analogy comment on it directly. If they're just as baffled by the analogy or recognize it as a "dumbing down" of a situation the other character clearly has a handle on, it gives the reader a chance to laugh at the situation without feeling like the joke's on them.
Barring the easy solution, it's time to think about your end-game: you want to convey to the reader that what's happening is involved, complex, difficult, challenging, fragile or similarly unattainable to those without skill and/or luck in unnaturally high quantities.
Eschew accuracy. Look for ways to convey the same meaning without describing the technical specifics. If you've set one of your characters up as a the resident genius or ace in a given situation, sometimes all it takes is for the other characters to be in awe of the mystery of their machinations as they work to solve the latest crisis impacting the crew.
All you have to describe is the end result, the surface evidence of their very involved underpinnings. If you have the opportunity, mix their actions with another concurrent chain of events that can take the focus off the pilot/hacker/mechanic between their moments of effective brilliance.
Back to the original issue: fight scenes. When you can't squeeze, it's time to truncate. There are dozens of moves and counter-moves in a cinematic duel because that's what it takes for quick punches and flicks of the wrist to fill a solid three minutes of film. In a book, it doesn't take that much combat to fill the pages.
Boil it down to the major turning points. It's rare you're going to impress someone with the mere description of a feat of skill inside a fight scene. If they can't see it, it doesn't have the same allure. All that matters is how close to danger their hero is that second, and how close she might be to overcoming the odds and winning out against her foe.
It all comes down to the same thing: when it comes to writing the things that look better on screen, remove the bits you don't need in order to maintain the pace and pulse rate you're seeking.
Now if only I had a cool graphic of someone drop-kicking the word "egregious" out of the middle of a sentence, I'd be set for life.
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