Category Archives: On Writing

Vox Protagonist

Posted by natechen on

We’ve talked about voice before, in an abstract sense, but today let’s take a look at one very specific aspect of it – personage. Or, in other words, what person your story is written in. What they are, strengths and weaknesses and why you might choose a specific viewpoint for a story are all things to consider.

So a quick overview of the three ‘persons’, or viewpoints, of storytelling. A first person story is told from the viewpoint of a person who actually takes part in the story. The narrator is a character, refers to his or herself as “I” and tells what he or she saw and heard from other people, or learned from inanimate sources or just plain guessed from thin air.

First person narrators are not always the most trustworthy of people. We can only know what they know.

A second person narrative is a story told about what you are doing. The author seeks to put you in the shoes of a character in the story, tells you what you’ve done and why you might have done it, and generally comes of as really stilted or stylized unless you’re really careful with it.

A third person narrative just talks about what’s going on. The person telling the story, if there can really be said to be a ‘person’ telling this story, plays no part in events and only reports what is going on. They may report just the events experienced by, and thoughts of, a handful of main characters (first person limited) or report all details going on in a scene and/or the narrative at large (first person omniscient).

Hopefully you already know what these viewpoints  are or that’s enough for you to go on. If not, there’s a more detailed breakdown of these viewpoints here.

Now, why would you want to use a particular viewpoint?

Well, let’s start by dealing with the elephant in the room. If you’re going to use a second person viewpoint, the odds are you’re writing a Choose Your Own Adventure book or Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas. And someone’s already done one of those two options, so that leaves you with the adventure books.

Really, second person is a very limited voice, I haven’t seen it used effectively in serious storytelling before – excepting the frog pajamas – and I wouldn’t recommend your trying to crack the code now. Second person is a very effective way of communicating suggestions or instructions but there’s not been many really good uses of it in fiction. Feel free to disagree, but this author doesn’t think that will change any time soon.

First person, on the other hand, is incredibly flexible. First person stories are engaging, conversational and very interesting. They let the personality of the narrator come through very strongly, although this is a double edged sword because if your narrator is too disagreeable or just plain boring your readers could wind up disliking an otherwise serviceable story. First person stories also allow for a lot of narrative tricks on the part of the author. A first person narrator cannot (or at least should not) tell the audience anything the character doesn’t know. This lets the author build suspense by keeping information from the reader in a totally acceptable, believable way.

A story written in the first person makes the most out of its medium when it sticks with strong characters, fast moving plots and carefully controlled suspense. On the other hand, while a first person story can have more than one narrator, it has to be careful not to go overboard. Any more than two or possible three viewpoints to juggle and it might be better to go with something else.

A third person limited viewpoint lets the author spread his focus more without sacrificing the limited information of a first person voice. You can think of a third person limited narrator as someone who heard a bunch of stories from a group of people and wove their individual stories into a coherent whole. He’s still limited to knowing what the characters knew and thought, what they heard and said, but by smoothing over inconsistencies in their viewpoints and, more importantly, by toning down the personalities so they are less in your face, the third person narrator lets us focus more on what’s happening in the big picture.

The third person limited voice lets us hear a larger story in a more complete way without drowning us in a schizophrenia of different personalities and viewpoints. When written in a particularly Lemony style the narrator can even maintain a personality of its own.

Eventually a story reaches a scale where the audience cannot learn everything they need to know just by relying on a few voices. Then third person omniscient steps in. By the time you’re dealing with a third person omniscient narrator, facts, events and plot structure is starting to supersede the individual thoughts and characters in the story. While it’s still important that these characters be strong and interesting, you use this voice when their interestingness is secondary to the interesting nature of what is going on around them.

First person stories are very popular today for their experiential nature. They suck you in and drag you along like an enthusiastic friend dying to tell you all about the awesome thing that happened to them yesterday. It’s a particularly effective tool for engaging the short attention spans of some people in this day and age. (ASIDE: These people exist in all age groups, so that’s not a dig at the YA crowd. Although YA writers in particular seem to love first person narratives.) On the other hand, the personality of the narrator can become a distraction from the story at large.

Third person stories give the author more distance, making exposition easier to work into the story, but they can also be a crutch for much the same reasons. If you wind up telling more than you’re showing in your stories you may want to switch to writing in the first person for a while, just to hone your showing chops a little more.

Ultimately, the viewpoint you choose for your story should reflect the scale and nature of your story and your strengths as an author. You should probably experiment with all three (and by this I really mean first person and third person limited or omniscient since I can’t recommend second person under any known circumstances) for each story you attempt. Don’t get locked into thinking that a YA story has to be told in first person simply because so many successful young adult series use that viewpoint. Harry Potter is written entirely in third person, after all.

Most importantly, choose a viewpoint that lets you have the most fun. Because if you’re not enjoying your writing, your audience won’t be either.

Genrely Speaking: The Amateur Detective

Posted by natechen on

Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, where we talk about the genres of fiction and what they mean when they’re mentioned here at Nate Chen Publications. Genres are a slipper thing, as much based on the whims of whoever is doing the classifying as any specific criteria. That also means that creating a new genre is almost as simple as saying, “this is a genre,” and then mentioning it as much as possible. If it catches on, great, if not, that’s no real loss.

Today we’re going to invent a genre.

You won’t really find much if you Google amateur detective stories, other than to find that sometimes the protagonists of detective stories are amateurs and not professionals. And in the very broad, general sense that’s true. But if you read the Gernely Speaking post on detective stories you’ll find that, when we use that term here, we’re talking about stories where the main character is a detective to the bone. A story with a protagonist who’s never solved a crime before is not what those stories want. Besides, amateur detective stories have their own standards that must be met.

What standards, exactly? Well by now you know that’s what we’re here to talk about.

  1. An amateur detective is not normally a detective, but has attributes that will prove useful in solving a mystery. Amateur detective stories are still detective stories in the end, there’s going to be some kind of mystery that needs unravelling and our protagonist is going to be leading the charge. As such, he needs to be equipped to handle the problem but not with years of experience and savvy, but rather a set of skills that will give him a unique and fresh perspective. One classic example is Miss Marple, the matronly old lady who stars in a number of Agatha Christie stories, solves problems using logic and an incredibly shrewd insight into human nature honed after years of being a benevolent busybody. Another example would be Ellis Peter’s Brother Cadfael, who is a monk who serves as apothecary to his cloister and the nearby village. As a soldier and man of learning in the dreary middle ages, Cadfael is well equipped to solve murders and has a sense of right and wrong that burdens him to do so.

  2. The amateur detective usually stumbles into his mystery by accident. Where as the protagonists in police procedurals and detective stories will often be sought out or called into an investigation, amateur detectives tend to just get swept up in the course of events. They’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they know someone who was, or they just have a friend who tends to fall into bad company – there’s as many excuses as there are stars in the sky, really. But, while the hero can, and perhaps should, be a man of upstanding moral character he is not, by nature, a person who seeks out and challenges injustice on a regular basis.

  3. The amateur detective survives by cunning and occasionally luck, but not skill. This doesn’t refer to how the protagonist solves his mystery but rather how he deals with the frequently manifold dangers solving a crime will present him with. Since amateur detectives aren’t used to dealing with criminals they probably hasn’t been put in significant physical danger at any point in their lives. There are possible exceptions, of course, but for the most part amateur detectives will have to get out of tight scrapes using something other than skilled gunplay or fisticuffs. In fact this wild improvisation is frequently part of their appeal to the audience.

What are the weaknesses of the amateur detective story? Unlike other detective stories you can’t write a series of amateur detective stories – at some point the protagonist’s amateurish characteristics will stop being appealing and start making them look kind of lame. Thus most of these stories have a one-and-done kind of a feel. There’s nothing wrong with that from the writing perspective but it may make your audience and/or publisher less willing to invest the time into the story – long running mystery series are some of the biggest money makers out there, they’re popular with people and thus with publishers. But people really want them to go on, not come to a stop.

And for the writer the biggest pitfall is letting too much hinge on happenstance. Your protagonist is already (most of the time) involved in the story at least partly by coincidence, and will probably need some measure of luck to survive a scrape at some point. If you let your protagonist skate by on nothing but luck your plot starts to look a little bit thin. On the other hand, take fate completely out of the equation and your protagonist may wind up looking a little too much like Batman to be believable.

What are the strengths of an amateur detective story? The biggest is simply that the protagonist is much more relatable than most in the mystery genre. Let’s face it, the average reader is not Sherlock Holmes, nor does he understand the chemical or biological sciences of an experienced CSI tech. She might get the basics of the psychology behind interviewing witnesses and tricking or forcing information out of them but there’s a good chance readers won’t be entirely comfortable with those things.

Neither will an amateur detective. This isn’t what they do, after all. As an outsider to the game of crime and punishment they are just like us. This is part of the genre’s great appeal. While everyone wants to see justice done when we are offended; few people want to actually get their hands dirty doing it. Finding the truth of a situation is often unpleasant and makes you a lot of enemies. But the amateur detective is driven by something greater than their personal comfort or satisfaction, and that is often the only thing that sets them apart from us. They can be more than a little inspiring to find, and make us want to be a little more like them. That alone makes them worth our time.

Graveyarding

Posted by natechen on

 I think I’ve mentioned once or twice the practice of sticking various story elements in my “graveyard” once I determine I’m not going to do anything more with them, at least in the form they were in originally. What sends a story to the graveyard varies, anything from writer’s block to needing extensive research to confirm details can result in this treatment. I’ve even had ideas for good scenes that just don’t fit anywhere and reluctantly found myself sending them to the graveyard. This is where many of the short stories I write come from.

And that brings me to the subject of today’s post: Graveyard management. The first thing to recognize is, when you find something that doesn’t work, killing it doesn’t mean it’s gone for good. You’re a writer, not a surgeon. You are constrained only by your imagination and vocabulary in the language of your choice. If you set something aside it’s only gone for good if you can’t remember it. So it’s less important to fret about cutting ideas you like and much more important to take solid steps to insure you remember those ideas.

So why call a file of unused stories a graveyard?

Mainly because they’re rarely going to come back as you remember them. That particular idea may be dead but you can use it as the foundation of something new, or weave multiple story ideas together creating a veritable Frankenstein’s Creature of a story. With cut and paste, we have the technology to lay the ground work for such a thing quickly. You can make it better, faster, stronger… you get the idea.

Project Sumter itself is one such creation. The characters take their cues from an old set of short stories I worked on, where Circuit was just a megalomaniac fronting a global network of technologically savvy insurrectionists, Lethal Injection was his mentor, not his first victim, and Helix was an intelligence agent who knew something was going on but had no idea what. Superpowers were something the story was supposed to explicitly reject.

Obviously, that didn’t work out.

Project Sumter, as I said a couple of weeks ago, was supposed to focus on the American Civil War. It was only when I started trying to work out all  the possible interactions of Corporal Sumter and his Confederate rivals into the existing timeline of the Civil War that I began to appreciate exactly how complicated a those stories would be. So the early phases of Project Sumter went to the graveyard.

There they bumped into the old technothriller stories and sat for a few months, stewing. The results are still playing out, but hopefully they’re enjoyable.

And that’s the beauty of the graveyard. If you properly maintain it, glancing over it every so often so that the ideas in it stay fresh, you will eventually find a home for all those stray thoughts, fun characters and snappy dialog. You don’t have to call it a graveyard, of course, you could call it the pot, the top shelf, the cutting floor, whatever you want. But if you’re going to be a writer it’s important to conserve your most important resource – the writing you’ve done. So whatever you do, don’t ever let any of it slip through your fingers!

Out of the Dark – Disappointment Deconstructed

Posted by natechen on

Every Wednesday we sit down and you get to hear about something that I think is cool. Usually, it’s a book or series of books because, hey, I’m a writer and books are what I do. Sometimes it’s movies or theater but a lot of my cool things are books or their distant cousins, graphic narratives (which is like a graphic novel except it applies to things that are not novels as well as thing s that are.) While reading good stories is great for a writer we can’t read good stuff all the time. Bad stuff is going to sneak in sooner or later, it’s a statistical inevitability. Normally when I encounter something bad I just don’t talk about it.

Not today.

There’s a lot a writer can learn from writing we find bad, but only if we take the time to dig into it and seriously ask ourselves what we don’t like about it. Let’s walk through that process today by looking at the novel Out of the Dark by David Weber – but before I start I want to warn you that

—->There Will Be Spoilers<—-

so if you’d rather not read them stop now. Normally I wouldn’t include spoilers but it’s impossible to really discuss what I felt was most disappointing about this book without them.

My disappointment with this book actually begins before I picked it up. David Weber writes a military scifi series known as the Honor Harrington books that focus on a female starship commander in a space operaesque setting. (I haven’t covered military scifi in Genrely Speaking yet, but it’s coming. For now, think of it as space combat with carefully analyzed tactics.) I’ve had Honorverse books recommended to me a couple of times before but I’ve avoided the series simply because it’s so large – thirteen novels in the main storyline, not counting spinoffs which add another sixteen published works to the universe. But I’ve been told it’s good.

So when I saw the name David Weber on a stand alone novel I had high hopes, since the overanalysis that goes into military scifi is fun from time to time. And to be fair, Out of the Dark did deliver, to an extent. At it’s core Out of the Dark is an alien invasion tale, where a race of overlarge doglike aliens invade for the purpose of stealing all of earth’s heavy metals and enslaving it’s people. They make a lot of miscalculations in building their strategy, some because of general genre blindness, some because of cultural unfamiliarity and some just because hey, invading a planet is a big logistical undertaking.

One of the best ideas Weber plays around with is that humanity is advancing much faster than the aliens are used to seeing. While only one race invades Earth, they represent a much larger group of aliens called the Hegemony. The Hegemony fist scouted Earth during the Battle of Agincourt (literally, the scouts took a lot of footage of the battle but apparently never did a solid analysis of what it might mean about humans both tactically and in general disposition) and show up in the modern day expecting a much lower level of technology to deal with. Drawing on their collective history the invaders determine humanity has been advancing several times faster than they would normally expect. The invaders have come with an invasion group equipped to suppress a civilization tinkering with steam engines, not one putting satellites in orbit.

The unexpected tech level, cultural and historical differences all result in the aliens loosing several rounds early and their invasion getting off to a slow start, but the promise of a race that could put them ahead of their neighbors on the technology curve is very tempting. But ultimately human resistance goes on much longer than the aliens expect. Even with all the major human cities bombed out of existence guerilla groups continue to harass the invaders and take a terrible toll. Eventually the alien commander decides to bioengineer a virus to wipe humanity out, deeming subjugating them to be too costly.

Now so far the book is decent but not exceptional. David Weber is a popular military scifi writer for a reason and he does a great job setting up believable exchanges between scattered human irregulars and semi competent alien invaders. (And again, to be fair to the invaders, competently invading a planet inhabited by creatures you haven’t studied much is pretty much impossible. Or at least it would seem so.) The characters aren’t compelling but the tactics and ideas are fun and I was legitimately wondering how he was going to dig humanity out of the hole it was in. After all, with most of it’s population centers gone there would be no facilities to try and create a vaccine for the alien’s virus.

Pretty much the only option would be to destroy the lab making the virus before it was deployed, a great opportunity for more scheming and great tactics, ploys and moments of breathtaking personal sacrifice, the stuff that is the bread and butter of the typical military history (and thus, military scifi.) At least, that seemed like the only option to me. It turns out Weber had another one in mind.

Vampires.

No, really.

Vampires come out of hiding among normal humans and wipe out the invaders.

I never finished Out of the Dark, in fact this “plot twist” (coughdeusexmachingacough) actually made me so mad I closed the book, put it face down on my desk and didn’t touch it again except to take it back to the library. It really felt, to me, like Weber had written himself into a corner and just made something up to get himself out of it.

To be totally fair Weber does provide a little foreshadowing for this twist but even the idea of vampires isn’t introduced until the last third of the book. It feels tacked on. And I feel, as a writer, that it’s really the only thing wrong with Out of the Dark. It could be a great military scifi/alien invasion story if it just didn’t cheat. Worse, by using vampires – and not something like the traditional folktale vampires but the uberpower vampires of modern myth – it feels a lot like deliberate pandering to a new audience, as if Weber was making a play for the Twilight crowd.

My deep disappointment with the book, so deep that I did something I rarely do and quit reading it before the end, stems from three things. First, I went in with high expectations. There’s not much that I, as a writer, can learn from that other than beware overhyping yourself. But it’s still worth noting that I expected something I didn’t exactly get, namely a book that was military scifi to the core.

The second thing was the lack of consistency. Vampires and aliens from outer space? Yeah, you could put them in the same book. I get it. We actually have more evidence supporting the existence of vampiresque creatures than aliens. There are stories of bloodsuckers in pretty much every cultural tradition in the world, dating back thousands of years, while stories about aliens are rare and recent. (Let’s not go into ancient alien astronauts, m’kay?) But military scifi often leans very heavily towards the hard end of the scale of scifi hardness, trying to stay away from too much phlebotinum. Vampires, on the other hand, are pretty much made of the stuff.

Weber tried to take two incredibly disparate things – hard, well analyzed tactical military scifi and vampires-as-superheroes – and mash them together. If he had put as much work into that as he obviously did in all the human vs. alien encounters in the book it might even have worked. But it really feels like he was just hoping the rule of cool would make it work. And it doesn’t.

The third thing was he didn’t set up his biggest plot point enough. I said it before and I’ll say it again, we don’t see any hints of vampire activity until we’re approaching the climax of the book. That’s just too late to introduce the thing your entire story basically hinges on. In fact, if it doesn’t come up until then it’s probably not what your story is about and you should save it for another story entirely. There’s nothing wrong with that. It should have happened in Out of the Dark but it didn’t.

In short, I think that David Weber had a potentially workable story idea. But I think he put it in the genre he was comfortable with, not the genre it actually wanted to be, and it wound up being a worse story for it. Definitely a pitfall all writers should look out for.

Writing – A Love Letter

Posted by natechen on

Happy Valentine’s Day! I hope you all will enjoy celebrating this august holiday with your paramour. If you live in the Fort Wayne area I highly recommend your celebrating by taking your significant other to see The Princess and The Goblin tonight. I will be performing in it, and thus not celebrating romance with the rest of you, for the Arts are a harsh mistress.

Yes, that’s definitely the reason.

Well. Partially.

But mostly, it’s the Arts. The Arts are what define a society. They call us on to greatness, they take our ideas and paint them in bold colors across a canvas that stretches across the hearts and minds of an entire society. The Arts, my friend, embody a romance that goes beyond sentiment and passes on into the very fabric of our thoughts and lives. They are not merely professions of beauty or adoration. No, they are, in a way, the foundations of that admiration.

Writing, it would seem, is the least of the Arts. It is so old, so ancient. Surely it is surpassed, in this day and age, by others. The Arts, after all, embody so much more than just words on a page. A picture is worth a thousand words. They say that Music hath charms to sooth the savage beast, and with radio and the Internet to help spread it Music has a reach and impact like never before. Theater, the Art that claims me tonight, can draw on Music and combine it with the nuance and power that comes with the dynamics of audience and performer to drive story and draw people in. Film looses the power of that bond but offers the opportunity to craft the perfect performance on the cutting room floor and duplicate it time and time again.

And yet I am drawn back to Writing. It captivates me, demanding my time and my energies as jealously as any romance.

The empty page is the greatest promise of all, full of untapped potential, crisp and fresh and pure. In time it will be marked and marred and scrubbed over, mistakes made and imperfectly erased, or simply crossed out. There is nothing  in the world like flipping back through the pages, running your fingers over the words and reading, over and over again, the thoughts that shape your life. The written word cannot suffer for being spoken poorly, cannot be forgotten by the mind of an actor.

And for all its simplicity, you will find that Writing is the Art that underpins all the others. There can be no Music without a score, no Theater without a script, no Film without a screenplay. Writing is at the center of all the other Arts. Its simplicity is its strength.

Writing endures. We have films dating back to the creation of the medium, music from a few hundred years ago, plays from the time of the Greeks. But the oldest written words may be twice as old as the oldest play, if not older, and have survived because they embody ideas that are essential to understanding the human condition. (Also because they’ve been written down.) Writing has gone from tablets of stone to the hides of animals, the pulp of trees to pixels on a screen and it will undoubtedly continue to transform itself as long as there are people with ideas they love.

So today, this is my Valentine. May Writing long endure.

Genrely Speaking: Paranormal Investigation

Posted by natechen on

Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, the part of the show where we look at various genres and dissect exactly what is meant when they’re mentioned in this blog. Today’s subject is the paranormal mystery.

This is kind of a fine distinction, and once upon a time I would have just lumped this in as a subgenre of urban fantasy. But after some reading I’ve come to be of the opinion that the paranormal mystery is distinct enough to qualify as a genre of its own. What defines it? I’m glad you asked.

  1. An aggressive mixture of traditional investigation techniques and mystical or magical methods of detection. While urban fantasy is about the blending of the supernatural and the mundane, paranormal mysteries are about methods of investigation – they’re a kind of ‘what if’. A great example is Alex Hughes‘ Mindscape Investigation novels, where a powerful psychic serves as a consultant for the local police. He can read minds and, to a lesser extent, emotional echoes from locations, but the evidence he gathers is only admissible under some circumstances. For the most part, while the main character can generate leads, the police still have to do their share of legwork and deduction. See also Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series for a similar take. The X-Files, on the other hand, is about trying to understand the paranormal using human science, with the characters bringing varying levels of faith in the paranormal to the table, but it still fits into this genre. There’s many different ways a paranormal investigation can work to strike a balance, but they all have to have a balance between the paranormal and normal aspects of the investigation in order to count – paranormal abilities can’t let the detective cheat or be the only angle the investigators pursue.

  2. An emphasis on the paranormal as strange and unpredictable, even to those  who have spent their whole life working with it. While most paranormal investigators have a concrete problem their trying to solve, like a murder or mysterious disappearance, the very paranormal forces they’re dealing with tend to be opaque and not entirely understood. Whether no one’s ever used magic as an investigation tool before or the nature of the Masquerade makes it almost impossible to find the goblin witness detectives need to interview, the paranormal forces at work can be as much a hindrance as a help to investigators. While a particular book/episode in a series may deal with a specific paranormal crime, the difficulties of the medium serve as a unifying arc. Laura Anne Gillman’s Paranormal Scene Investigators series provides a good example of this.

  3. A mix of paranormal and mundane sources of trouble. This is part of what justifies keeping regular investigation methods around. While a powerful psychic may hypnotize people to extort their money he probably has to launder it or otherwise keep it safe using normal banking methods. Or, conversely, a powerful mob boss may be keeping evidence of his mundane crimes suppressed by hiding them behind magical illusions. A ghost haunting a hospital may turn out to be the victim of a decades old murder that has to be solved before the spirit will rest. Regardless, both mundane and paranormal methods of investigation will be necessary to solve the problem.

What is the greatest weakness of a paranormal investigation story? Probably the incredibly delicate balancing act involved in keeping your mundane and your magical angles of investigation relevant. Lean to far one way and there’s no need for ghosts and goblins in your story at all, lean too far the other and there’s no need for normal forensics or deduction at all. Worse, because of the many ways the paranormal can enter into stories, from fairies in the attic to wizards killing with curses, there’s no short list of tropes writers can turn to for reference, at least not yet. Time may ease this difficulty.

What is the greatest strength of a paranormal investigation story? Probably it’s incredible diversity. As I mentioned in the police procedural post, and again in my post on the detective story, mysteries are in no small part about their characters. And that’s good, I’m for anything that encourages strong characters. But there are only so many ways you can dress up a robbery or a murder with mundane tools, so many ways to execute a kidnapping or make a ship go lost at sea. Adding a plethora of new paranormal tricks, or new paranormal creatures to conspire with or paranormal obstacles to overcome this genre can bring a new feeling of freshness or just give a story new directions to go in.

Paranormal investigations are kind of a young genre, one of the earliest examples of it would be the 1965 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and even that only lightly touches on the possibilities of the genre. I’m not sure where it’s going yet, but I think I’m going to getting there.

World Building: A Project Sumter Timeline

Posted by natechen on

I thought I’d throw together another little world building post for you, this time focusing on Project Sumter and it’s history. If you’ve ready any of the fiction here you’ve probably gathered that Project Sumter is a government organization dedicated to enforcing the law among people with unique talents (read: superpowers) and keeping their existence secret. It’s also the largest legitimate employer of talents in the United States.

You probably also know that many of the rules that govern the Project are extrapolated from the rules governing a man known as Corporal Sumter, who was given his strange title and most of his assignments by no less than President Abraham Lincoln.

Believe it or not, Project Sumter was originally about Corporal Sumter, not Double Helix.

So there’s actually a very detailed timeline of what happened between Lincoln’s election in the mid-1800s and the Enchanter’s first arson in the early 21st century. I still hope to use a lot of that material, but here’s a semi-redacted version of that timeline (and honestly, what else would you expect from Project Sumter?)

April 12 – 13, 1861 – Fort Sumter is besieged and surrenders to Confederate forces.

April 15, 1861 – President Lincoln declares a state of insurrection.

June 22, 1861 – A cadet at West Point lifts a cannon that had fallen on another student in a training accident. He not only lifts it off the other cadet but slings it over one shoulder and moves it across a courtyard, a feat of strength that cannot be explained by simple adrenaline. This cadet gains something of a reputation.

July 8, 1861 – Word of the Herculean cadet makes it’s way back to President Lincoln, who sends for the man, later be known as Corporal Sumter.

July 10, 1861 – After meeting the cadet in person, the President decides to terminate his commission in the Army. He fears that allowing a superman to lead in a war that is at least partly about the respective status of races will send the wrong message. Corporal Sumter reluctantly agrees and all records of his enrollment at West Point are destroyed.

January 10, 1862 – A Confederate officer at the Battle of Mill Creek is observed being shot several times without apparent injury. When a cannonball strikes him and falls off like a dead fly Union soldiers become unusually concerned.

January 12-20, 1862 – Rumors of an invincible Confederate officer begin to circulated through the Union’s Western Theater of Operations.

February 3, 1862 – A letter reaches Corporal Sumter, sent by a friend from West Point, telling him of the strange officer on the other side of the lines. The Corporal in turn writes to President Lincoln, detailing the situation and asking if he can still serve the Union in some way. The President will later claim the letter was never received. The truth of this claim remains in dispute.

March 3, 1862 – With no answer from Washington, Corporal Sumter departs for the West on his own.

-Further details on the period between 1862 and 1865 are classified Top Secret. Further detail only available to those cleared for codewords CORPORAL SUMTER, SHENANDOAH, FOG OF WAR, BUSHWACKER and SHERMAN’S BANE, talent indexing numbers 0001 – 0005.-

May 18, 1865 – President Johnson thanks Corporal Sumter for his service and signs his discharge papers, ending his official service in the Union Army.

1865-1940 – The family of Corporal Sumter, Shenandoah and Sherman’s Bane remain under quiet surveillance by those members of the U.S. Government who are entitled to know what they are capable of.

Summer, 1940 – British intelligence reports intercepting communications regarding people with strange abilities, particularly power over ‘frost’. These reports are corroborated by soldiers returning from Dunkirk.

August 2, 1941 – The newly formed Office of Strategic Services, combining previously received reports from British Intelligence with documents scattered through Army records, concludes that precedents already exist for how the Army should deal with potential talented soldiers should the US be drawn into the new World War.

August 18, 1941 – The OSS sets out a proposal, later approved by the War Department, that creates the basic administrative apparatus of Project Sumter and recommends a total of six individuals who are believed to have talent that the Project could attempt to recruit.

October 2, 1941 – Daniel Wells, grandson of Shenandoah, is located by Project Sumter and reveals that his grandfather’s talent has not been passed down, although all the research Shenandoah did on his abilities has. The Project offers Wells a supervisory position and he accepts.

October 5, 1941 – Agent Wells approaches the granddaughter of Sherman’s Bane and offers her a position with the Project. She is given the codename Clear Skies and later becomes a member of the Women’s Army Corps.

October 20, 1941 – Corporal Sumter’s great grandson is located but declines to participate. No other members of the family demonstrate the original’s incredible abilities and Project agents return to Washington empty handed.

November 12, 1941 – Project Sumter’s headquarters is officially established in Charleston, South Carolina.

December 7, 1941 – The Imperial Japanese Navy launches a surprise attack on the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

December 8, 1941 – Sumter’s great grandson arrives in Washington D.C. with a changed heart, seeking admission to Project Sumter. Within eight hours he is in Charleston, being sworn into Project Sumter.

December 23, 1941 – U.S. forces on Wake Island surrender to the Japanese after successfully resisting invasion for a little over two weeks. A long debate at Sumter HQ comes to an end and Corporal Sumter’s successor is named for a recently lost stronghold, just like his ancestor. Sergeant Wake’s file is officially opened in the Project records.

-Further details on the period between 1941 and 1946 are classified Top Secret. Further detail only available to those cleared for codewords CLEAR SKIES, CHIEF STILLWATER, SERGEANT WAKE, SAINT ELMO, COLD SPIKE and JACK FROST, talent indexing numbers 0006 – 0009, 0036 and 0044.-

September 22, 1947 – With the War Department recently dissolved Project Sumter’s administrative fate is left up in the air. After much debate, with the newly minted CIA pushing hard to be given control, the Project is instead made an independent body. No longer a branch of the military, it begins the long process of working out new long term goals and identity.

September 25, 1947 – A fundamental shift in Project structure occurs when the three seniormost talents, Clear Skies, Chief Stillwater and Sergeant Wake, decide to retire now that there is no pressing military need for their services.

-You actually need clearance to know what clearances you need to read about the Cold War. Seriously.-

April 18, 2004 – Double Helix, talent indexing number 3729, is taken on a field stress test by Senior Special Agent Darryl Templeton and Special Agent Eagle Ear. He discovers a pair of cold spikes who, it is later concluded, were part of a breeding program trying to foster talented bloodlines. It marks the beginning of a very troubled career with Project Sumter.

August, 2004 – It is believed that the talented serial killer Lethal Injection committed his first murder in this general timeframe.

February 12, 2005 – Lethal Injection’s killing spree begins to make news. Project Sumter determines these grisly murders are probably caused by a talented person and goes to Condition One.

March 8, 2005 – Teresa Ortiz’s father is killed by Lethal Injection. She will later be adopted by Javier Herrera, with the financial and legal support of the Oldfather Foundation.

May 17, 2005 – A hacker shuts down the Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix, Arizona and prevents Lethal Injection from escaping Project agents. Lethal Injection is killed while resisting arrest. Analysts from Project Sumter determine that the hacker was a talented individual who was actually in the airport terminal, directly manipulating electrical circuits. A file is opened and the talented hacker is codenamed Open Circuit. The Project correctly surmises this is Circuit’s first crime. It will not be his last.

So will I ever go back and tell you what happened in those missing years? Surely there were plenty of freaky goings on during the Second World War and the Cold War, along with the Civil War, yeah?

Oh yeah.

But those are stories for another time. For now, I hope you enjoyed reading a little bit about the background of the story we’re telling right now. Tune in Monday for the next instalment of Water Fall, until then may you have as much fun with your world building as I do.

Writing Men: Axioms

Posted by natechen on

Obligatory opening summary: Writing Men is a thing. But not enough of a thing. Thus, I’m writing about it. Huzzah! If you haven’t seen them, my introduction to the topic, an analysis of the importance of having objectives. That is a brief summary of everything I’ve written on the topic so far.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about axioms. First of all, I’m talking about the principles that form a foundation for a line of reasoning, not the starliner from Pixar’s WALL-E. One is part of a great animated film. The other is a fundamental part of how men look at life.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.

A while back a friend was trying to explain the TV show Defiance to me. I had not and still have not seen this TV show, but I know from what I was told that it features an alien invasion of Earth (and they obviously haven’t read the guide) that results in humanity nuking the invading space fleet and destroying it (or something like that – again, this is hearsay). When I heard this, the following exchange took place:

Me: They nuked them?

Friend: Yeah.

Me: While they were in orbit?

Friend: Uh-huh.

Me: Okay, let’s ignore the radiation poisoning issues that creates for a minute. How is it even possible that you could stop a race technologically advanced enough to cross interstellar space-

Friend: Because Nukes.

Me: (pause) I’ll buy that.

Okay, so maybe I’ve edited that a little, but the point-blank justification “because nukes” and my immediate acceptance of it did happen, and is an example of what I want to talk about: The tendency for men to look at life through a series of simple principles. In this case, nuclear weapons represent the most terrifying destructive weapon mankind has every created. The scale of their destruction is beyond the ability of most people to comprehend, most people believe they exist only because they’ve already been created and used. Of course they’re gong to destroy the alien fleet. Nukes always destroy their targets when they hit. If they didn’t, that would mean there was something even bigger than a nuke out there, and that’s just silly. It’s like saying there’s something bigger than infinity.

The axiom: Nukes always win.

Therefore, when you have nukes vs. aliens the nukes win because they are nukes.

Men are always thinking in axioms, even when they don’t realize they’re thinking in axioms. Take a big special effects blockbuster – for this example, The Avengers. Many people have watched the movie and griped that the Hulk’s sudden willingness to work with the other heroes of the movie rather than against them makes no sense. (These people were not paying close attention to Bruce Banner’s character progression through the course of the movie. Watch it again carefully and pay attention to people’s interactions with Banner – not what they say about him or what he says about himself but what he’s saying and doing the rest of the time – and it adds up a lot better. Banner’s character progression affects the Hulk’s. After all, they are the same person… ish.) Regardless, many of these people are okay with Hulk’s sudden switch because it’s followed by a crowning moment of awesome.

Axiom: Blockbusters exist to be awesome.

Therefore sometimes the awesome can trump the plot. (You heard it here first.)

Note that you’ll almost never hear a woman offer this explanation. It’s axioms taken to the point where they fly in the face of sense. Men are okay with doing that because we live by axioms.

When writing men, axiomatic thinking is a must have. Of course, just like with objectives there’s nothing saying the man you’re writing has to be aware of their axioms, just that they have to exist and be informing their actions. Also, no one has just one axiom they live their life by, no matter what they say. Axioms can range from “Telling the Truth is Better Than Lies” to “Paperwork is a Bane Upon Existence” to “Boxers Are Better Than Briefs, Period”. There’s nothing saying you have to even know all the axioms a man is living by. But it doesn’t hurt to mention one or two when he stops to make a decision of some importance.

When multiple axioms go into a decision a man usually sorts them based on his objectives (yes, an understanding of objectivity is vital here). Thus a man who wants to live to have a million dollars will not want to spend much money, because he can’t get to a million that way, but he will spend money on food, because starving to death also precludes reaching his objective.

As I continue to note when writing these bits, axiomatic thinking is not a strength or a weakness, but rather a double edged sword. I used some very absurd examples at first, in part because they illustrate my point in a fun way but also because a man can work himself into equally absurd (but also painful) quandaries when axioms conflict or point him toward potentially harmful situations. And why doesn’t he ignore the axioms and go with what makes him feel better, you ask?

Because ignoring the axioms makes him feel just as bad! Just one of the burdens of being a man.

At the same time, axiomatic thinking also lets the man put aside feelings like fear or anger and deal with a situation with a clearer head – at least, if he’s doing it right. The axioms help him quickly sort, prioritize and deal in circumstances where stopping for conscious thought could be counterproductive.

In short, just like with objectivity, axioms are an important part of writing male characters. Whether it’s a man in the crux of a moral dilemma or just trying to figure out what kind of shoes to wear that night, look for a chance to show the principles that undergird his thought. It will give you a better rounded, more believable character.

Before You Write

Posted by natechen on

I’ve mentioned before that I have a kind of ritual I go through before I sit down to write, a way to get my thoughts running in the right patterns. It’s mostly physical, going to get a glass of water or, on rare occasions, something else to drink. A few stretches, cracking my knuckles. 

Every writer should have something like that to help them get into the swing of things. Why, you ask? I’m glad you did! 

The biggest reason is that your body and mind are part of the same system. By going through a set of motions before you write you get your mind used to thinking about writing before you sit down. It’s a way of priming the pump, of getting yourself in the mood to do what you love. These little rituals are more than good luck charms or something to make you comfortable, in the best case they’re an integral part of your thought process. Choose what you do accordingly. 

For example, try not to read anything significant for about half an hour before you start writing. If you do you’re more likely to wind up thinking about what you just read than about what you want to write. By the same token, while some people (I’m looking at you Kevin Thorne) like to do a string of writing exercises before they actually write what they want to write. While that may be helpful in getting the brain moving it’s also likely to introduce a lot of extraneous bunny trails that will keep you away from what you really want to write. If you don’t have anything pressing on you that may be fine, but if there’s anything you’re really looking forward to putting on paper it’s probably better to just start with that, rather than potentially sidetracking yourself. 

Moving around in some way is probably a good idea. It gets the blood moving to your brain, which helps it work more effectively. Also, you’re about to be stationary for a while, which can be hard on you. Moving a bit offsets that and helps you keep your focus longer. This means your writing is that much better. 

It’s probably not a bad idea to get a small snack to munch on while you’re writing either. Thinking burns energy and having something to replenish energy with will keep you chugging away. Of course, choosing a good, healthy snack and not overdoing it is important, but this isn’t a dietary advice column – I’m sure you can find a dozen better places for advice on what’s best to munch with a simple Google search. I usually go with some kind of nuts and a glass of water, but that’s just personal preference. 

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of writing as something you just sit down and do. And sometimes it is. But all the people who are the very best at anything will tell you that it takes practice, constant searching for new ways to improve, for them to reach the point where their work seems effortless. Looking for every possible advantage as you strive for that level is important. Don’t be afraid to develop habits that will make sliding into that effortless state easier. You may not always have the option of using them but, if nothing else, they’ll have helped you reach a level where it may not matter as much, and you will probably do it faster than otherwise. 

So next time you sit down to write, pay attention to what you do before hand. Then ask yourself, how much of this is under my control? Does it help me write, or not? And then, decide what you’re going to do about it and let us know how it turns out. 

Genrely Speaking: The Time Travel Story

Posted by natechen on

Science fiction stories are stories about human ideas. They take these ideas and examine them from a number of angles. Hard Sci-Fi is all about technology and science – what will the ideas of our greatest scientists look like as they drive civilization for another one or two hundred years? Space opera is more about the ideas of society and sociology, how will disparate cultures interact in the future?

The problem with these genres is that they can rapidly loose touch with the individual. Since readers are individuals, and they will identify best with individual characters and not abstract ideas about “science” or “society”, that means that the readers can frequently loose interest in the story (which is bad.) Sure, some readers who buy into the author’s ideas will be totally enthused, but that just means the author’s appeal will be playing to the choir. But there is one great way to solve this problem.

What if all the major ideas the sci-fi story needs to advance could somehow grow out of the decisions or actions of one person? What if the consequences of that person’s decision(s) could be explored, not just in their immediate effects on the world around them but through their effects decades or centuries into the future? What if a person could know that their thoughts and actions would change the future – and what’s more, choose what kind of a legacy they were leaving?

That “what if” is the core of the time travel story, a kind of sci-fi that lets a single person shape reality in fantastic ways by traveling through time. Time travel stories are tricky from the genre standpoint, as they are both a thing of their own and tend to be lumped into a dozen other subgenres of science fiction. They can be anywhere on the scale of sci-fi hardness and may be set in a space opera setting or confined entirely to Earth. But they will have a few things in common.

  1. Some way for a character or characters to travel through time. This sounds like it should be obvious, but hey. It’s a fact. If no one’s traveling through time, or at least seeing through time, then we’re not dealing with a time travel story. Note that the direction of the time travel doesn’t matter. People can be going backwards to meddle in the history of the Roman Empire or dashing forwards to get lotto numbers and strike it rich, they only need be traveling through time. (Going “sideways” to alternate realities doesn’t count. Slider stories and alternate history will have their own entry thank you very much.) If you want to be really generous, stories with clairvoyants who can predict the future can kind of fall into this genre too. I am not so generous, but you can be if you want.

  2. The consequences of some action taken, and the ability to alter them with time travel, are central to the conflict of the story. Watch the classic Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever for a detailed example. In the typical time travel story one of two things happens – either the protagonist meets a time traveler who has come back to avert a coming disaster, or they themselves are going back in time to avert a disaster. Things usually unfold from there. Typical permutations involve accidental time travel – to the past that disrupts the flow of history, or to the future to give a warning of things to come.

  3. An emphasis on personal responsibility. Unlike many sci-fi stories, where science or crushing impersonal forces reduces mankind to a set of preprogrammed responses, the time travel story tends to focus on a person’s ability to make broad changes with just one or two little decisions. This, in turn, places an enormous burden on the person who can travel through time, to use that power in a constructive fashion. Or, at the very least, in some way that doesn’t cause reality warping paradoxes. Conflicts with people who want to use time travel in selfish or destructive ways can also come into play, particularly in a long running series about time travel.

What are the weaknesses of a time travel story? In short, they are confusing. Like, really, really confusing. Since time travel offers the ability for characters to go back and actively alter events that the audience has already experienced once it’s only natural that at least some readers will mix up what happened the first time and what the ‘altered’ state is. Heaven help the author who meddles with the same point in time multiple times. Add in temporal paradoxes, possible explanations of how time travel works in the first place, the Hitler Time Travel Exemption Act (along with any possible corollaries you can think of), the possibility that – well, you get the picture.

Writing a time travel story that your audience can follow, without insulting your intelligence or leaving some kind of glaring plot hole, is difficult. Not all who try succeed.

What are the strengths of a time travel story? First, it lets sci-fi do something it doesn’t always do well – let individual characters come shining through. Even with advanced technology, meticulous planning and the advantage of being able to check their work, time travelers still face a great deal of difficulty in changing the past. There’s enough room for conflict, but the potential for a single person or small but dedicated group to effect significant changes and see the outcome makes for very powerful story telling.

Also, it’s a very flexible medium, as I said before. Time travel can be used to tell just about any kind of story, from a romance to a spy thriller. It can be about exploration, saving the world from a disaster or fighting against crooks who exploit people via temporal manipulation. It’s scope is much broader than many genres in that respect.

Finally, there’s a wonderful quality to the idea that the past can be rewritten. The idea that the inadequacies that we face can be made up for, if a person would just have the power, the integrity and the compassion to find what went wrong and help us fix it. Everyone has at least one thing they wish they could do over. Sometimes the moral of the story is that the outcome we got was the one we needed, not the one we wanted. Sometimes the moral is that we need a helping hand. There’s a hundred shades of the possible between the two, and there’s nothing saying you can’t have both at once.

And in the end, that’s the beauty of time travel in a nut shell, isn’t it?