November 03, 2013 ( Comments Off on The Painful World of Grey )
There are some stories that flow from your mind into Scrivener like water down a stream. World of Grey wasn’t one of those. I had to beat the flaws out with large, literary hammers.
The story started out simply enough. A friend wanted a short story of about two thousand words to go into one of his gaming books. World of Grey clocked in at about 21,000 words. I never meant for it to be that large but Sarge had a lot to say and that’s one guy I’m not arguing with.
It also flowed out of a need to work on action scenes. My yet-to-be-published followup to New Moon Murders sagged in the middle and I resolved conflict too quickly. I decided writing a new, action-packed tale would be just the thing to practice before ripping the covers off of Prescription for Revenge.
Thus World of Grey was born. Problem was, it had issues. I didn’t like it much. I guess for an exercise it wasn’t bad but the main character, Sarge, started to grow on me. I started another story in the series named Serpent’s Strike which I’m writing as part of NaNoWriMo. I didn’t want World of Grey to be a tossed away. It had some real gems buried in the pile. I wanted to pull them out and make them shine.
The beginning of the original story was all exposition. I did this to explain the gaming universe. Several of the beta readers didn’t like that. Others loved it so I left it in. The copy editor at Flourish Editing said it needed to go. I argued but her point was that capturing a reader’s attention and holding it involved managing the rise and fall of tension throughout the story. Large amounts of exposition killed that.
So I rewrote the first chapter, adding conflict and failure in the Kzzick Warrens to explain why Sarge was in such a bad mood in Chapter 2. It worked out very well and Chapter 1 said most of the things I had in the exposition except it introduced the universe with the reader in the story.
After attending Jim Butcher’s writing workshop I added Sarge’s emotive response to the conflict. My original concept of the character was a cold, killing machine without much emotion. Turns out that gave the readers a slim ledge with which to engage with my story. I added a sequence to each scene. Word from the Beta Readers was that Sarge’s emotional response put him more into the story. The unspoken truth of that was that it put the reader more into the story as well.
Another Butcherism was the point of view aspect. Sarge was often watching Doc pilot the ship during the two atmospheric battles. I altered those to center the PoV around his actions with Doc’s piloting as an aside. It felt a little unnatural, since her piloting was what kept the shuttle intact but, again, it put Sarge more into the story.
Overall it’s a better tale than the one I first wrote. I’m very proud of the way it turned out and with my growth as a writer.
It’s time to get back to NaNoWriMo. I just thought I’d take a little break. You can find World of Grey on Smashwords and Amazon.
October 15, 2013 ( Comments Off on The Future of Storytelling Online Course )
This came across the social streams the other day. It’s an online course on the future of storytelling.
Are you interested in the mechanics of current fiction formats? Do you want to know how stories are told? Do you want to analyze, understand, contextualize and create stories and narratives? Then join our MOOC and share our passion for storytelling!
Together with a whole network of media researchers, creators and students we will:
– learn storytelling basics such as antagonist/protagonist relationships, narrative/narrated time, …
– have a look at exciting current media projects
– analyze how they are designed and executed based on aforementioned basics
– and discuss how (and if) new online tools and formats change the way stories are told and perceived.
The 8-chapter course starts on October 25th, 2013 and ends on December 20th, 2013.
It will offer weekly video material, lessons, interviews and tasks on the following topics (not necessarily in this order):
– storytelling basics
– serial formats (on the TV, web and beyond)
– storytelling in role-playing games
– interactive storytelling in video games
– transmedia storytelling
– alternate-reality gaming
– augmented reality and location-based storytelling
– the role of tools, interfaces and information architectures in current storytelling.
For more information, check out https://iversity.org/c/6?r=94d70
October 11, 2013 ( Comments Off on Are Your Characters Chickens or Pigs? )
In a breakfast of ham and eggs, what’s the difference between a chicken and pig? The chicken is involved. The pig is committed.
I named this blog Hard Lessons for a reason. The rules of writing aren’t always obvious. I started writing decades back as a hobby. I shared my stories and essays with friends and they seemed to enjoy my work. Life was good as long as the characters were properly heroic, had some interesting character traits, and spun witty dialog.
Or so I thought.
I began studying the craft and inviting professionals to critique my work. Two of the many issues discovered were sagging plots and short scenes. The stories were enjoyable enough but I my readers never finished the longer ones. The reason? Lack of tension.
Conflict is the essential interest-inducing, ingredient in stories. It creates doubts as to the outcome leading your readers to turn the next page. It comes in many forms, most of which we learned in high school. Is the following list familiar?
Man vs. Man/Society
Man vs. Nature
Man vs. Self
A previous post detailed scene/sequence combinations – the pattern of conflict followed by introspection. This post will focus on Scenes and the importance goals, conflict, and setbacks.
Scenes
The elements of a scene are point-of-view (PoV), goal, conflict, and setback.
The Main Character (MC) has a goal and something stands in the way. The reader should know the goal early on. Back to Pig vs. Chicken – is your character committed to the goal or just involved in achieving it. If the MC isn’t committed to the goal your PoV is wrong. Find another that really cares about the outcome. By default, the PoV of the scene should be the person with the most to lose i.e. committed.
What about the goal of the antagonist? How committed are they to the goal: Pig or Chicken? The need to be Pigs. Great villains invest themselves in victory. Think of Darth Vader. He wants to bring order to the Galaxy and believes in that cause. The Storm Trooper in the same scene is just following orders.
After you know the goal, describe the conflict. Don’t spare the paragraphs. Build the tension over pages. Use stimulus/response. The Antagonist does something. The Protagonist responds. Back and forth until the scene is over. Keep saying to yourself at each turn, Chicken or Pig?
Now, is there a setback? Did the MCs accomplish their goals? Your answers are
Yes
Yes, but
No
No and further more
See the previous post describing each of the above. Your answer needs to be one of the latter three.
So what’s the difference between your Antagonist and Protagonist? The Antagonist gets more Yes answers. Things break in the direction of the tension builder. That said, don’t make it too easy on you villains. Make them work for it as well. Remember, they need to be pigs.
So how does this play out? In my upcoming novella, there was a scene where the captain piloted a shuttle avoiding certain doom. The story was written in first person so I’m stuck with the guy sitting next to the pilot. Originally, he watched and described the action. He was a chicken, involved but not committed. The pilot was committed. So how to fix it.
Get the PoV involved and at the center of the action. Don’t let other characters lead the way. It seemed awkward at first but in the end gave at much better product. Remember that the reader sees things from the PoV. Give them an adventure!
September 12, 2013 ( Comments Off on Ya Ain’t Talkin’ Right )
My copy editor from Flourish Editing returned my latest story. There’s a few persistent flaws that need work, one of which is dialogue. This post and others like it become a check list for the revised draft phase. Yes, I use my blog as a personal notebook.
Use ‘said’, ‘asked’, etc. sparingly. Other methods let the reader know who’s speaking. Only a fifth of meaning comes from words in the dialogue. The rest come from actions, gestures, and tone.
Never use ‘replied’. It’s obvious they’re replying.
Use dialogue to do more than document what a character says. A clever choice of words is an opportunity to show how the character feels about themselves and others.
Always spell out numbers in dialog unless they are ridiculously long.
Use a hyphen ‘-‘ to show interrupted speech not an ellipse ‘. . .’
Lessons I’ve learned and applied to the latest story from previous experience:
Don’t spew. Long, stilted dialogue makes for hard reading.
Similarly, avoid talking heads whose only purpose is information dumps. Bob, from the Dresden Files, is a clever shot at Jim Butcher’s writing mentor. She told him to avoid talking heads so he put a knowledgeable skull in the story.
Everyday speech patterns work much batter than formal statements. If you have a large vocabulary, resist the urge to exercise it. Write dialogue as short sentences that go back and forth. Remember the stimulus response pattern from scenes.
Listen to conversations around your and try to mimic them but only use lines relevant to the story. Hitchcock said “Drama is just life with the dull parts taken out.” Your dialogue is the same. Remove parts that don’t support the story.
Ignore proper sentence structure and grammar unless that’s an important characteristic of the speaking character. Proper grammatical usage goes out the window during day-to-day conversation.
Characters should have different voices. I pick an actor from a film for each character and imagine the words coming out of their mouth. It helps.
I’m sure more bullet points are on the way. I expect the finalized set of edits some time this weekend.
I wrote a previous article about Jim Butcher’s advice on writing. I attempted to carry out those methods in my latest story, ‘The Edge of Space’. Below are a list of my scenes and sequences. Note that this was a story I had already written. I simply added to it to cover Mr. Butcher’s advice on Scene/Sequence and Action Response.
I used Scrivener to lay out each scene matched with its sequence, color-coding them blue for scene and purple for sequence. In the document notes, I laid out the scene or sequence template. Since this was a previously written story, immediate structural problems became clear. I had almost no reaction to some of the scenes. This meant the reader had no view into Sarge’s feelings or thoughts about what was going to happen next. You can see the results below.
This method works! When I sent the piece off for copy-editing, the response was ‘no structural issues’; a first.
August 31, 2013 ( Comments Off on My Writing Goal )
It’s submission day, the day I turn over my latest work to an editor. Most editors ask a series of questions about your goals for the piece. As I prepare this package, I realize my goals really haven’t changed. Here’s the last response.
My goal as a writer is to produce fun stories that are easy to read. I’m not attempting high literature but I don’t want people putting the book either. My wish is to keep people in the story and not have them stumble over poorly constructed sentences, bad grammar, misspells, and unclear content. I don’t write overly dark, hyper-sexualized, or politically correct stories. I want the reader to laugh occasionally, care about the characters, and enjoy the plot ride. I like my characters to have quirks since humanity is quirky by nature. I like huge backdrops with a character focus and hope my readers enjoy the same. If I meet these goals I’ll be happy with the result.
I wrote that a year or so back and my goals have not changed.
At some point you need to consider the tools in your writer’s toolkit. I’m not referring to tricks for writing engaging dialog or chapter construction. I’m talking about the actual programs and places you go to write.
Microsoft Word is the go-to tool for most writing tasks. The Microsoft Corporation did an excellent job with Word and the other Office products but most writers won’t even scratch the surface of Word’s capabilities. It has built-in search, formatting, spell checking, and more ways to insert cool stuff into your document then you’ll ever use.
Believe it or not, there are other options. Libre Office, from the Open Document Foundation, offers a comparable tool set that run on any platform. Their word processor, Write, works well with Word documents and does all the things you expect a word processor to do. But sometimes free isn’t good enough either.
Word processors are great for general writing but being a novelist is more than just typing words into a screen. We need something more. That something would include the ability to organize and collect research, organize draft material, manage meta data (characters, plot, descriptions, etc.) with chapters.
Authors do these functions without tools. To do these functions now, you likely
In your head (even if you don’t realize it)
In a separate document
On index cards
But if you had the choice wouldn’t it be better to have all of this in one tool? My answer is a resounding ‘Yes’ but I didn’t always feel this way.
Once I started using a tool I realized how much it sped and organized my writing. As a useful bit of serendipity, I stumbled upon the tool when joining National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO) this year. If you ever take part in NANOWRIMO, you’ll need a way to keep yourself on track to get to the 50,000 words written in 30 days.
As it turns out, my friend Matt Jackson put me onto a product named Scrivener. Matt’s always tossing out ideas for me to try. He’s also one of the truly supportive people in my life who tell me my stories are good enough to publish. So when Matt speaks, I listen. He’s also the graphics artists if you ever find yourself in need of a book cover or interior art.
So, at Matt’s suggestion, I download Scrivener from the Literature and Latte web site. Scrivener is a tool for authors, researchers, and script writers. Rather than write a blog post about all that Scrivener can do, I’ll simply direct you to their ‘about‘ page and let you read about its features, watch a few videos, and check out some screen shots. What I will do for the rest of the article is show you how I used it for current project, Prescription for Revenge.
Scrivener is cross-platform, meaning that it runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Since I use Ubuntu Linux, this is an important feature. To add to its attractiveness, the Linux version is free. The Windows and Mac versions are attractively priced at $40 USD.
Below is a screen shot of my Scrivener project for Prescription for Revenge. The primary sections are the Binder, Main Screen, Synopsis, Metadata, and Notes.
August 24, 2013 ( Comments Off on Planetary Map Generator )
I found an interesting web site the other day that generates planetary maps. You can, in fact, download the C source code for your own use. The author, Torben Ægidius Mogensen, claims it’s been tweaked and updated for over twenty years so the code may be a bit messy. Still, you know the saying about gift horses.
There is a simple web interface to the program. Although you may not know the difference between gnomonic, mercador, and mollweide you’ll be able to figure out how to get the map style you want in short order.
Here’s a snap of the control console. As long as you use the same values for Seed and Waterline, you should be able to generate the same map over and over with different viewpoints, shades, effects, and angles.
Here’s a small sample of the maps its able to generate.
I’m sure you can see how this will help you and your reader visualize the worlds you create.
There are some stories that flow from your mind into Scrivener like water down a stream. World of Grey wasn’t one of those. I had to beat the flaws out with large, literary hammers.
by 
