Category Archives: On Writing

Writing Men: An Introduction

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A lot of people think that men are a simple topic. When Dave Barry wrote a book on the subject he made jokes about how no one thought he’d be able to get a whole book’s worth of material out of it. Even a lot of men share in this attitude. Sports, sex and video games are pretty much all they are shown to care about – unless power and money take the place of sports and games.

Now part of this might be because of the prevalence of sitcoms on TV, which have a tendency to reduce people to easily sketched caricatures. Dramatic television and books are a little more balanced, but even then outside the central characters there is a tendency to create men who are fairly one dimensional.

It’s true, in many ways men are simpler than women. We take a lot of pride and a lot of flack for that. However, there’s an assumption that simple because we’re dealing with one thing at a time we’re single dimensional. There’s a line to walk in properly depicting men and a skilled writer needs to learn what it is.

But, while there’s a large and growing body of study into women in literature as writers and characters, little or no study has been put into men. Some might say that’s because men are already so prevalent in stories, so isn’t it time for women to have the spotlight? But that assumes that all the portrayals of men are accurate and depict the thoughts and characters of men with all their good and bad points. That’s not a good assumption to make any more than it would be to make such an assumption about the depictions of women.

I am in no way an expert on writing or men, although I am one and that makes me better suited to speak on writing men than, say, on writing women. So what I propose is take a look on some things that I think you should keep in mind when writing for men. There’s a comic strip that runs in the local newspaper called Between Friends, a comic about  the friendship between a trio of forty-something women . My mother was surprised to find that I read and love it. But there’s nothing that’s given me more insight into women than reading a comic strip that’s written by them, for them. While the entertainment value might not be as high, hopefully in exploring what writing men means we will develop a better idea of what writing men entails for all of us. This isn’t going to be a regular even, to the extent that Genrely Speaking is, but it’s an idea that’s caught in my mind and I want to explore it with you some.

If you are a male writer, please chime in with things that you think I might have missed. If you’re a non-male writer, and something doesn’t sound right to you, by all means hash it out in the comments. It’s not possible to have a definitive set of guidelines to writing for men, but hopefully we can get a clearer picture over time.

Hammering Out Your Plot: The Beat Outline

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So I’ve talked about outlining once already, but I said that I would do another post on exactly what kind of outline I prefer. And here it is. I’m not going to take the time to rehash why you might want to do an outline, that’s all spelled out in the last post. If you’re curious, you can read that but I’m going to assume you’re already onboard with the whole outlining idea already.

I usually use an outlining structure I first encountered in college, when I took a class on script writing, as in, writing scripts for movies. While novels and movies are very different storytelling formats, modern novel writing needs to maintain many of the same things movies rely on – dramatic tension, narrative drive, and so forth. To help us get a grip on exactly what that entailed our prof had us work with the “beat” outline.

Any of you who are familiar with music already know what a beat is – it’s the pulse of the song, the most basic measurement of time which all the rest of your music is measured by. It’s similar for story writing, but not exactly the same. A story beat measures each point where the audience should respond. In other words, every point where you want the audience to feel something is a beat. I’ve said before that the basic purpose of writing is to provoke a reaction from the reader, and the payoff of a story needs to be in proportion to it’s length.

A longer story needs to be looking for a bigger finish. But you can’t get there all at once. You build to it little by little, or poco a poco for you musicians. The hero can’t go from loosing badly for the first sixty beats of the story to winning triumphantly for the last ten. Over time, the hero collects little things that will help him win. His enemy’s weakness, a new set of skills or allies will all give him a leg up in the final confrontation.

At the same time, you need your story to have dramatic tension. The audience needs to wonder where things are going or, at the very least, how the story is going to get to the resolution. (After all, sometimes they just know the good guys are going to win. What’s the point of a detective story if you can’t check your work?) In order to maintain that tension, it’s important to make sure your protagonists aren’t always winning, or always loosing.

As a result, the beat outline consists of two different kinds of points along the line – upbeats and downbeats. An upbeat is any point along the outline where things look good for your protagonist. This can be anything as minor as getting a cup of coffee for a pick me up or as major as important as finding Excalibur. They can also be events that show weaknesses in the antagonist, things that reveal critical flaws or just show him loosing track of something important. Downbeats are the opposite, they’re events that set back the protagonist in some way or show the antagonist as formidable or actively working against the protagonist’s goals.

Of course, by the end of the story the upbeats should slightly outweigh the downbeats, resulting in a hard earned success for the protagonist – unless you’re writing a tragedy, in which case the downbeats should win. But again, only by a very thin margin.

One of the best things about beat outlining is that it is very general. All you really need to do is come up with a list of upbeats and downbeats and put them in order. The details of a scene, who’s present and exactly how the beats play out are things you’re free to work out as they come up, and it’s very easy to rearrange things, or add and subtract scenes, if you want.

Incidentally, one of the interesting things about writing the Sumter novels is the dual nature of the protagonists – each one is the other’s antagonist. Heat Wave’s beat outline was measured as positives for each protagonist, and it was difficult to balance the beats and have the right winner come out on top. Water Fall has three narrators, and for a time I was tempted to make the beat outline a three way tug-of-war. But in the end, it was simpler to keep it a two way battle between the Project and Circuit, which will hopefully make it easier to follow the action. All in all, I’m not sure I’ve hit the right balance so far, but I know it would be a lot harder without an outline!

——–

Okay, announcement time! Next week I will be moving. It’s not a major shift, just from one place in the city to another, but it is going to eat up a lot of my time. I don’t want to leave the story dangling, so I’m going to update on Monday. But that will be the only update for the week – I’m taking Wednesday and Friday off. It’s also possible that there will be no update Monday, October 7th. We’ll just have to see how things go. I will certainly be back by Wednesday the 9th, but if you want to be absolutely sure you don’t miss a post you can always hit the subscribe or RSS links off to your and get everything published here delivered straight to you. See you around!

Genrely Speaking: The Detective Story

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For the first time ever, an episode of Genrely Speaking ties back to a previous installment! No longer a handful scattered categories, the genres are beginning to link up and a picture forms. The game’s afoot!

Yes, the detective story is a branch of the mystery, and thus a close cousin of the police procedural. But at the same time, they’re very different kinds of stories, as well. The sleuth is a classic trope of modern literature, and has been in use pretty much since it was created by Edgar Allen Poe. In many ways, the sleuth was the first superhero, slicing through tricky problems with his superior intellect to set difficult situations to rest.

Indeed, the super sleuth has much in common with later superheroes. His abilities dwarf those of the people around him, and he is usually highly admired and in much demand. In fact, Batman is sometimes characterized as the world’s greatest detective, and it’s considered a part of his “powers”. Great detectives may not be as flashy as superheroes, but that’s one of the things that’s helped them find wider acceptance. It’s easier to read about a snappily dressed sleuth who solves real, understandable crimes and not be laughed at than it is to read about a man in spandex who fights dinosaurs (or something).

But the other thing that gives detective stories their respectability is the fact that they are, in many ways, a kind of puzzle to exercise your mind. While you don’t have to read them that way, just wading through them should sharpen you a little bit. In theory, at least.

The hallmarks of the detective story are a little something like this:

1. A central character who is absolutely, no holds barred, brilliant. This character is the detective, and these stories demand that he stand head and shoulders above the rest of the crime-solving crowd. All stories want something special about their main characters. Detective stories need a main character who is good at solving mysteries.

It doesn’t really matter if they’re good at anything else. In fact, Adrian Monk and the Sherlock Holmes from CBS’ Elementary both need significant help with some (or all) aspects of their life. But in the sole arena of crime, the detective must reign absolute. Whether it be Holmes’ merciless logic, Hercule Poirot’s deft use of psychology or Monk’s obsessive need for order, the detective can somehow pierce through every layer of deceit to find the person who committed a crime. And, perhaps just as importantly, they have to do pretty much all the work themselves.

It’s not that there can’t be supporting characters who help the detective. There can, and should, be such characters. But they serve more as foils for the detective’s brilliance, by not understanding how the sleuth arrives at his conclusions they show how ordinary people don’t make the same connections the detective does. Take Poirot’s Chief Inspector Japp. He’s a competent detective, has to be or he wouldn’t be Chief Inspector. He can do all the leg work for a case, knows all the typical causes for crime and deftly handles multiple cases at once. But when confronted with the really devious problems he can’t seem to match Poirot. Which nicely brings us to the next hallmark of the detective story.

2. Crimes that feature a level of complexity and planning that far surpasses the norm. The detective is brilliant, and so the problems he tackles have to be worthy of his attention. They must challenge his intellect and, at the same time, that of his reader. After all, if part of the purpose is to challenge the reader with the puzzle of the murder, it needs to test our brains. Of course, complex crimes are more interesting as well, to both the detective and the reader. While a drive-by shooting is no doubt a crime and definitely a tragedy, it’s rarely going to lead us on a long, twisting crawl through the lives of the victim and his associates or the mechanics of the killing that eventually culminates in a brilliant set of deductions that pins the crime on the least likely suspect. In short, detective stories need unusual crimes, and so unusual crimes they will have.

Note that, while the crime in mysteries is almost always murder, or leads to murder, there are a few instances, particularly in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories, where the crime was a theft or kidnapping of some sort.

3. The detective figures things out through the use of his brain, not legwork or chance. Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that there’s no legwork needed, but the detective usually has a sidekick or plucky assistant to help with that. And there are elements of chance in the story, but they never help the detective – if anything, it’s the addition of some chance happenstance to the murder scenario that makes the situation so difficult to suss out.

The point of the story is that the sleuth is solving the crime through his superior crime-solving method. Chance is cheating and legwork is a way to fuel the deductions, not something to replace them. Of course, in real life oftentimes all you really need is to do enough legwork without breaking any rules that will hinder the DA from prosecuting, which is why most super sleuths are private detectives rather than actual policemen, and why the police procedural is a genre in it’s own right. This also let’s the reader “check his work” as he tries to solve the mystery on his own.

3a. The rule of fair play. Unlike the above, this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but you find it much more often in detective stories than you do in pretty much any other kind of mystery. The rule of fair play simply states that all the facts the detective uses to solve the case have to be made known to the reader, to give them a shot at solving the mystery before the summation scene. Fair play mysteries are the ultimate embodiment of the detective story as a puzzle for the reader.

What is the greatest weakness of the detective story? There are two. First, the overly complex crimes can defy belief. After all, who’s going to kidnap someone, kill them, then demand a ransom while staging an alibi when they could just mess with the victim’s brake lines and be done with it? The second is that the highly cerebral nature of the crime solving can take a lot of time from other aspects of the story, cutting into character development and side plots. While that’s hardly fatal, both the heavy intellectual emphasis and the lack of time for other matters might loose some readers. This is why so many modern detective stories are hybrids, including elements of comedy, romance, suspense, ect.

What is the greatest strength of the detective story? Mysteries are incredibly addictive. The quirks detectives bring to the table make them very interesting and people never seem to get enough of them. Also, with so many moving parts there are countless possible combinations of method, motive, alibi, ect to make one mystery different from the next, so they franchise well. But perhaps most of all, the detective himself is quite enduring. The best, Holmes, Poirot, Ms. Marple, Monk, are well known and enduring. And really, what more could an author ask for?

While the detective story is a very demanding genre to work in, the rewards are quite high as well. It’s a genre that offers an enthusiastic, if sometimes critical readership and the promise of a lot of work to come. If you enjoy reading them, there’s sure to always be something for you.

A Time for Gimmicks

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You may have noticed that the first actual, for reals chapter of Water Fall contains a timekeeping gimmick. Specifically, it references the Michigan Avenue Proclamation and when the narrative is in relation to it. In case you were wondering, that refers to the events of the prologue, which the story itself will make clear in time. The Proclamation is a central even in the book and in the Project Sumter world as a whole. I wanted to start the book with it, to give the opening a bigger impact, but I also wanted the readers to be aware of how the story was stacking up next to it, and I wanted to tell what happened before the Proclamation, and not as a flashback per se. So I settled on “X much time before/after the Michigan Avenue Proclamation” format and decided to just put a note before each chapter. Note that time will pass within some chapters, so one chapter might start two weeks before the proclamation but end only eight days before it.

There’s plenty of precedent for this kind of gimmick to help people keep track of the timeline of a story. A great example would be the TV series 24, where each one hour episode of the series corresponds directly to an hour of the day. At pretty much each commercial break, before and after, a digital clock display would tell you exactly what time of day it was. It was a great way to keep suspense (how are they going to wrap this up before the day ends?) and remind people of where in the day they are (more than just early afternoon).

I was a bit worried about using a timekeeping gimmick, mainly because there was no comparable device in Heat Wave. I also don’t plan on using them in other Project Sumter stories, although that may change in the future. However, the whole point of gimmicks is to get your point across. If they’re doing that, great. If not, then they’re dead weight and need to be cut.

For some writers there’s an automatic desire to cut out gimmicks. Maybe it’s a desire for originality, maybe you just want to avoid the same ol’ same ol’, but if you find yourself bothered by this anti-troperism, keep in mind that these things are your tools, and to be used wisely in the creation of your story, not your enemy to be fought.

While overusing tropes and gimmicks is dangerous, odds are that if you try too hard to be original everywhere, you’re just going to wind up reinventing the wheel at some point, and you might not even realize you’ve done so. Being aware of your tropes and using them deliberately is the best way to make sure you’re avoiding the pitfalls that other writers have already mapped out and experimented with and taking advantage of all the best parts of them.

Writing is an act of creative expression, but if you express yourself better by borrowing from others there’s nothing wrong with that. You’re still going to be expressing something of your own, and there’s nothing on Earth that wasn’t a part of something else before so you’re in good company when you recycle. Don’t be afraid to use a gimmick if it fits.

Sequels

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So I’ve been thinking about sequels lately, for the obvious reasons (starting Water Fall this week) and the not-so-obvious ones (check out next Wednesday’s post for more on that.)

The biggest question most people wrestle with is, how good is the sequel? But for the writer, the bigger question is, what makes the sequel good? In movies, sequel status is almost a death knell. For books, sequels are much more viable and, in fact, the publishing industry usually wants fiction to be serial in nature, rather than a bunch of stand alone novels, since the pre-existing audience makes selling the story much easier. On the other hand, even among books, the first book in a series is frequently viewed as the best, perhaps simply because the ideas and the presentation are fresh and the reader approaches them without expectations, or at least with fewer.

That’s not to say that there are no cases of a sequel being just as good as, if not better than, the proceeding works. But it’s a rare thing, and when it does happen most people are surprised because they recognize that it’s the exception and not the rule. So what are the things that set those rare exceptional sequels head and shoulders above the rest?

Well, as is so often the case, there are at least three main things (probably more, but humans like threes, so that’s how many you get.)

A larger story at work. There are many great examples of this, but I want to be consistent in this post and use something most readers will recognize, so I’m going to pick the classic Star Wars trilogy. The Empire Strikes Back is widely considered the best movie from the trilogy (not by me, but I still feel it’s at least as good as the original, although in different ways) so it’s fair to say it was a sequel that equaled or exceeded the original. One of the things that made it work was the fact that George Lucas wanted A New Hope to feel like part of a larger story. With a galaxy wide rebellion in progress, of which he basically only showed us one small part, it comes as no surprise to us that there’s more story.

Sometimes authors or film makers do a story, wrap everything up, publish and then realize they’ve got bottled lightning as their story just flat out takes off. This can result in awkward sequels getting written, because there was no more story planned for afterward. The simplest way to get around this is to set your story in a world that’s really, really big, with more than enough going on in the background to allow for another story or two. Of course, you can always be planning to slowly spin your stories into one, titanic mythos, as well… Whatever you do, it never hurts to make your world and characters bigger than the bounds of their story,

Excellent use of characters as a resource, rather than an obligation. There is a kind of compulsion, once you have a story you like, to include every aspect you liked about it in the next, especially in terms of characters. This is to be avoided. Your new story needs new characters to stay fresh, and to make room for them sometimes old characters will have to get less screen time, or even catch a bus. The Empire Strikes Back introduced us to people like Lando Calrissian, Yoda and Boba Fett, while the droids and Obi-wan Kenobi got less screen time (although it seems we couldn’t give up Old Ben entirely, even if he was dead…)

Finding the right mix of characters to properly carry out your story is an adventure in trial and error, but as a general rule some kind of re-balancing of characters has to be done. Your main character is probably going to be a constant, although even that’s not an iron clad rule, but new faces have to crop up to give new dynamics to relationships, and old faces have to step back some in order to really make the sequel work.

New developments, as opposed to retreading the same ground. Coyote and Roadrunner do not have sequels, just variations on a theme. The situation must change some from story to story, or people will rapidly loose interest. Star Wars does this particularly well by starting off the second film with a Rebel defeat and chasing them across the galaxy while their heaviest hitter takes a break for self improvement. Then it throws a massive plot twist and a cliff-hanger ending into the mix for added impact. It’s this novel, heavy-hitting formula that makes it so many people’s favorite part of the trilogy. (It’s also only possible because it’s the second film in the set, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Carefully examine the pacing and plotting of your stories, and make sure they’re different from each other. It’s a good rule for all fiction writing, not just stories that are a direct sequel to something else. Also, make sure the plot points themselves aren’t too similar, and that different characters from among your leads and rogue’s gallery are making an impact.

Of course, there’s no recipe for instant great book, but with these three things in place, sequels begin to look a lot like books that stand on their own, rather than just a continuation of what came before. Once a story is judged on its own merits, the some of the stigma of being a sequel is gone. More importantly, by actively trying to make it as fresh as possible you ensure that the story is as good as it can be on its own merits, thus making it as strong as possible. Which is all a writer can really hope to do, anyways.

Writing, Philosophy and the Colors of Magic

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Mark Rosewater is the head designer for Wizard of the Coast’s card game Magic: The Gathering. He’s also a former scriptwriter for the TV show Roseanne and has a degree in communications. He also goes to great pains to interact with the audience of the game and share information with them. One subject that frequently comes up is the color pie.

Now a brief aside, for those unfamiliar with the game – and yes, this does all tie back to writing so I hope those who are interested in my thoughts on that subject won’t tune out. In Magic, players gather land cards and use them to cast a variety of spell cards. Each spell can be one (or more) of five colors (or no color, but that’s much less common.) In order to make the game more interesting, each color tends to do different things with it’s spells. The layout of what color gets what effects is referred to as “the color pie.”

The mechanics of the pie itself aren’t what’s really important to us, so we’ll gloss over that part. What is important is that each color’s abilities are heavily influenced by it’s philosophy. The philosophies of the color pie are as follows:

White wants every one to stand in line for their pie, and will make sure that everyone get’s a piece that’s the same size.

Blue wants to know what’s in the pie, to study the recipe and try to improve it.

Black just wants as much pie as possible, by whatever means are necessary, and hang the consequences.

Red wants pie now, and doesn’t really care about what it takes to get it. Even if the pie is technically on fire when it arrives.

Green wants organic pie, and as much of it as possible.

Each of these philosophies gives different gameplay. For example, White is all about fair play and order, it’s not going to arrange an “accident” for its enemies in order to get its way, though Black might, neither is it going to run about doing things at random, although Red might. That brings us back to Mark Rosewater, the color pie guru.

See, in the time he spends talking with the people who play the game and getting feedback one question that gets asked a lot is, “Why can’t my favorite color do this?” Where “this” is something that the color wouldn’t normally do, like Red spinning a clever illusion to protect itself from attackers. Red sets it’s attackers on fire. (Works a lot better.) The answer Mark gives, every time, is, “That doesn’t fit your favorite color’s philosophy.”

Okay, so you’ve made it this far and there hasn’t been anything about writing yet. So what lessons can we learn about writing from the way Magic handles the color pie? The answer is simple. Your characters have to be consistent to who and what they are at all times, with meticulous attention to their attitudes, ideas, predispositions and prejudices, whether they’re good or bad for you, them or the story, just like the color pie of Magic, or else their impact will become muddled and your story will suffer.

For a simple answer, it sure was long, huh?

Okay, let’s break that down. First, why is an example from a game designer even relevant to a writer? Don’t get into a haughty snit if you’re not a fan of card games or other geeky hobbies. Magic: The Gathering has lasted twenty years and continues to experience growth in sales and mainstream acceptance. Whatever Wizards of the Coast is doing with it, they’re doing right. Mark, as one of the public faces of the game, insists that the color pie is a big part of it and he’s in a position to know. They do research into this stuff.

Second, just like comic book fans tend to identify with some specific character such as Wolverine or the Flash as their “touchstone” in a comic universe, many people who play Magic identify with a specific color. People care about these things, and if they’re not consistent, they cease to be as meaningful. For Magic, the difference between the play styles of the colors is a big part of what gives them their identity. Look at chess. The black and white pieces all work the same. There’s no identity there. The colors of Magic have identity because they’re different, and those differences must be maintained.

As a writer, your characters are what people identify with and touch base with. You have to stubbornly work to keep them distinctive in order to keep people engaged with them. If all the characters start to look the same, they lose value immediately. It’s better for you to have a character that is passionately hated for consistently unpleasant behavior than for you to tinker with the character and wind up with a totally forgettable character. Keep attitudes and dispositions consistent and a character becomes much more believable.

By the same token, actions have to match attitudes or credibility is lost. If a character isn’t likely take part in a plot of his or her own free will, hound them. You have total control over their circumstances. Put other characters in their path constantly, bend circumstances until they have no choice and then hit them with the consequences of avoidance – lost time, missed opportunities, hurt feelings and anything else you can think of. This stuff is the meat and potatoes of the story.

This isn’t to say that characters shouldn’t change over the course of your story. The characters of your story are very dynamic, and free to discover new parts of themselves or go through revelations that challenge and change the way they think. But we have to see the hows and whys of that change, and if you’re not very deliberate about them then you risk damaging your character’s impact. It’s also important not to do too many of these changes at once, or your readers will have trouble keeping track of everything that’s happening. They already have a lot to track in real life.

But in real life, as in card games and writing, consistency is key. It’s a skill well worth developing for the sake of all three endeavors.

Water Fall: Foreward

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You are too dangerous. By nature, what you are and what you can do is too great a possible threat to let into the world. Certainly, you could do great good. But the very fact that you could also do great harm is enough to cause panic, terrify people into either fighting you or bowing down before you. Neither one is good, and the fact that you have the potential to cause both is enough to warrant preventing them entirely. It’s no one’s fault, it’s just the way the world is. Or it’s the times, or the culture or the conclusion of a more enlightened age. Regardless, we all have to live with it. You’ll just have to live more carefully.

It’s a simple premise. In troper terms, it’s called The Masquerade. It’s the foundation of a thousand and one paranormal/urban fantasy story lines. In fact, it’s at the heart of Project Sumter and an inescapable influence on the lives of independent talents like Open Circuit, Heavy Water and the Grappler.

It’s a lie.

On some level, everyone understands that. But the lie makes life so much easier. Just do away with the uncomfortable ideas, hide them from people and drag anyone who uncovers them into your Masquerade and you’ll never have to deal with any large scale problems, am I right?

Except the very act of stifling the information in itself raises problems, often far greater ones than the ones you hoped to suppress. Squashing the truth, spiriting people away, coercing cooperation and browbeating silence all comes with consequences. Ask the Soviets. Grudging acceptance and growing resentment are a powerful and dangerous combination, a powder keg just waiting to go off. Instead of constantly working on a better, more stable solution you wind up running around putting out ground fires while a volcano is about to erupt just underneath your feet.

That which you have whispered in secret will be proclaimed from the rooftops.

Sometimes it will come from avenging angels, come to set the wrongs to right at last. But far more likely it will come from upset, middle aged men who have spent their whole lives struggling against heavy handed declarations of what is best for them, working to understand why they cannot seem to use their best abilities for their own edification and the betterment of themselves and others.

Worse, these people will come out of the woodwork with no mind for negotiation, little or no thoughts for the ramifications of their ideas and no mercy at all. The world they’ve lived in has left no room for such things, and it will be at least partially the fault of the people who have worked all those years for secrecy. That’s not to say there’s no fault resting with the other side. When two people come to blows, there’s usually plenty of blame to go around. But when you’ve spent the entire time trying to keep them quiet, why should they keep trying to talk to you?

So what do you do when your duty is to keep law and order but the way law and order has been kept until now is both immoral and chaotic? For a long time, people like Double Helix, one of Project Sumter’s most powerful and experienced talents, have been pondering that issue. But pondering isn’t change, and when the situation calls for change nothing else will do.

Because little by little, Open Circuit is changing the status quo. And with every crime, a little bit of the Project’s control of the situation is lost. They strike the Project like drops of water, slowly leaking through a crack in the dam. Each one carries away a little of what holds the Masquerade together, widening the crack until the whole edifice must way, and the flood begins.

The water starts falling next week. It will be a sight to see.

Put the Outline Out

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Outlines are something of a controversial subject among writers. Some just don’t like doing it – if they’re going to write, they should just write, right? Some think it constrains them too much. Some think it’s impossible to write anything without at least a thesis statement and a dozen bullet points. Some writers without an outline are constantly on the verge of crippling panic attacks. And on and on it goes.

As I mentioned before, I’m working on the outline for Water Fall, the second book chronicling the activities of the U.S. Government’s secret agency that handles talented individuals (read: superpowers).  This has been a therapeutic exercise for me, because I love outlining. It lets me get all my ideas out somewhere I can look at them and mess with them in a physical (or at least digital) medium.

See, I don’t like to just write and run with it, because whenever I do it I wind up leaving something out. On the other hand, when I’m outlining it’s often a frenzied exercise where things just pour out in a rush. For example, on my first pass at the Water Fall outline there were at least two dozen points where I just wrote, “So-and-so does things.”

Sometimes I included a note as to the tone of the things being done, like, “Tension!” or “Foreshadowing” or, my personal favorite, “CD” which of course stands for “character development.”

Not every part of my outline is that vague, some scenes I have a very clear picture for, they just don’t all string together nicely and I frequently have to fill in the gaps between major events during second and even third passes on the outline. Of course, to keep my mind fresh, I usually let the outline sit for a week or two between passes, which is how I come to “still” be working on it. (Because it’s not like I’ve been writing anything else…)

One reason I like having an outline is because it lets me quickly run through the pacing of my story and see how I like it. It’s at this point that I spend the most time moving things around and tweaking what characters a scene might call for. But this isn’t the be all and end all of what I’m going to need, frequently in the process of writing details that I hadn’t anticipated come up and the outline can get changed on the fly. While I like having it, I try not to let it become diktat, that alone can kill a story.

It’s important to keep your outline and the length of your story in perspective. For example, Heat Wave had an outline with 80 to 90 points to begin with. However, Trial by Winter had a ten point outline. Obviously, Trial by Winter was not 1/8th the length of Heat Wave. Rather, each “point” represented a smaller chunk of the story. (Exactly what kind of outlines I tend to use and how they tend to translate into story is probably a subject for another post.)

On the whole, outlining is something authors can do to help them get a handle on their story and keep the broad strokes of it in mind, and easily at hand, so that when they are buried in the minutia of the story in progress they don’t have to stop and run through everything again in their mind to get a handle on where they are. Whether it’s something that they haven’t written yet or something that has already been put down in digital print, a glance at the outline brings it to mind much faster than relying on memory or having to page through pages and pages of what’s already written.

So, an exercise! (I know, I’ve never done writing exercises before. If you don’t like them I promise they won’t become a regular thing.) Find your favorite book and put together an outline for it. Then, find a story you’ve written and do an outline for that. And lastly, create the outline for a story you’d like to read from scratch. You don’t have to finish it, just rough out the ideas. Most importantly, enjoy!

Genrely Speaking: Cosmic Horror

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Many genres of fiction focus on unanswered questions. However, the allegory is rather used to create stories that vividly illustrate great truths in a clear and forceful way. I use the term “great truths” to refer to those ideas that are central to the way the author looks at the universe, many of these ideas have been hotly contested since the beginning of time.

Cosmic horror is the allegorical fiction of a particular brand of hard core Rationalism, most forcefully pioneered by H.P. Lovecraft. It attempts to illustrate the emptiness of human existence and the meaningless, indifferent nature of the cosmos, not using math, logic or philosophy but rather through the careful application of pure dread. Whether that is because dread was what Lovecraft felt was the most enlightening human emotion or simply because Lovecraft thought it was most likely to produce the desired reaction in his intended audience is unclear.

A few quick notes before we go on. First, like all brands of mythology, cosmic horror has gained a great deal of popular acceptance over the years, although it’s still much more obscure than many other flavors. However, just as the movie Clash of the Titans had little in common with Greek mythology, most aspects of cosmic horror that are used in pop culture today have little to nothing in common with cosmic horror. Don’t be surprised if what I describe sounds nothing like the stories about squidheaded Old Ones you’ve heard before. If you’ve no clue what that even means and/or you’ve never read any Lovecraft, Nylarthotep is a decent primer.

Second, like all brands of fundamentalist religion, cosmic horror is not representative of the whole or even the majority of Rationalist thought. However, also like most brands of fundamentalism, it does show what core ideas look like in their most undiluted form.

Third, debating the validity of core ideas is not what the Internet is best for. While I am going to point out what look, to me, like weaknesses in cosmic horror as a storytelling platform, deconstructing an analyzing the systems of thought behind the genre is not my purpose here. It’s way outside the scope of a single blog post. That said, I’m sure one of the reasons I dislike cosmic horror as a genre so much is that I also find the ideas it’s founded on to be… lacking. I do have a bias when writing this, so keep it in mind.

So what defines this obviously very difficult genre of fiction?

1. A strong emphasis on the insignificance, helplessness and doomed nature of mankind. Lovecraft didn’t think much of humanity, looked on them as something of a cosmic accident. They had stumbled onto Earth with their bizarre ideas of reason, purpose and civilization and proceeded to muck everything up. Fortunately, they were constrained by their nature and doomed to an inevitable fall back into what they had originally come from – primal instinct and savagery. These instincts are programmed into man, and he cannot escape them no matter how he tries.

2. Powerful, incomprehensible, amoral and uncaring beings, usually aliens, that exist and sometimes tinker with humanity in some way. Probably Lovecraft’s most enduring creation, the great Old Ones were what he considered the nearest thing to gods to exist, in fact they were often portrayed as at the center of cults and possibly even as the inspiration for major world religions now and in the past. These creatures don’t care anything about what their activities do to mankind, they may not even realize we exist, and if they did we are so different that there is no way we could relate to one another. Humanity is helpless before them, we survive only because the stars have aligned in such a way as to thwart their activities and lock them away. (How such incredibly powerful beings could fail to predict and allow for the mathematically logical movements of stellar bodies is unclear.) So powerful and strange are these creatures that just encountering them drives people insane.

3. An emphasis on occult knowledge. Which is to say, the “truth” of the universe is known only to a select few. These people have delved “too deeply” into some field of knowledge, gone exploring where they should not or studied some arcane, forgotten document and thus been exposed to the truth. These truths will ultimately destroy those who know them, but ignorance is no defense, offering only a false sense of security. Characters are predestined for destruction whether they know the truth or not.

What are the weaknesses of cosmic horror? Well, if I got going we’d be here all day, so I’ll try and just hit what I feel are the top three.

Poor characters. While the protagonists in cosmic horror are usually well educated, articulate or at least worldly men, the emphasis on their total inability to accomplish anything of note really cuts them off at the knees. Ultimately they’re unimportant, so why bother getting to know them? Whether because of the nature of the genre or simply because cosmic horror authors rarely learn to develop good characters, there’s rarely anyone you can relate to in a cosmic horror story. This stems, at least in part, from the constraints the genre puts on human characters.

Poor conflict. The greatest threat to humanity is often the Old Ones, beings so immense in potential that they are to humanity as we are to microbes – they are totally beyond our ability to trouble in any way.

ASIDE: I’m not sure if this analogy is original to Lovecraft, I haven’t read his full body of work, but just about every other cosmic horror writer uses it, so I suspect it is. Regardless it’s a bad one, considering viruses, the smallest of microbes, have probably killed more human beings than war and famine combined… END ASIDE 

Back to the conflict part. Since part of the conceit is that Old Ones drive people insane, just being around them effectively ends the story.  Cultists are sometimes used as proxies, but in the end they’re just as big dupes as the main characters are. The Old Ones are inscrutable, with aims supposedly beyond human knowing, and totally indifferent to humanity. So, by the same token, clever manipulation or direct hostility on the part of the Old One is out the window as a source of conflict.

Most conflict in cosmic horror consists of the main character(s) trying to escape his fate and finding he can’t. This usually takes the form of the environment reshaping itself to prevent it or the character simply being restrained by inexplicable forces. When the character’s reason or the advice of others plays any part in moving him towards his doom he usually repents of it later, only to find he was trapped by predestination, his birth or the wonderful invisible hand all along.

With all these forgone conclusions built into the genre, there’s very little in the way of doubt about the ending. You just sort of sit there and wait for the hammer to fall. It might be kind of entertaining the first time or two, but it doesn’t really hold up well.

Poor analogies. You would think, after nearly a century of existence, the genre would have come up with some new ways to describe the influence of its prime characters.

But no. There are some phrases the genre simply cannot seem to get away from. Unnatural or non-Euclidean geometries. Fleshy tentacles. A feeling of immense presence or intellect. These analogies are evocative, if vague. Lovecraft himself coined a number of other very nice phrases to explain specific instances. A color out of space is probably the best. However, the genre’s very insistence on experiences that defy reason and rely on occult understanding make it a very poor genre for explaining things. You must either experience it and be equipped to understand, the cosmic writer seems to insist, or you will merely be another one of those deluded fools who can’t handle the truth.

Now it may sound like I’ve just said that the very things that define the genre are part of what make it a weak form of fiction. In fact, that’s exactly what I’m saying. The tropes and devices of the genre actually work to undermine it’s storytelling potential – just one of many reasons I dislike it.

What are the strength of cosmic horror? If done correctly, and the reason most people mention Lovecraft as their example first, last and always is that he’s one of the few people to have done it correctly, cosmic horror is really, really scary. Not in the, “something jumps out of the closet and yells boo” kind of a way, nor in the, “look, there are zombies everywhere” kind of a way. Rather, in the, “something under the bed is drooling” kind of a way. You know it’s out there, and that it’s coming for you. But what are you going to do about it? Nothing! HAH! Because there’s nothing you can do!

Ultimately, there’s not much to recommend cosmic horror. Sure, existential dread is great if you’re an angsty teen or an overly intelligent author who never seems to have developed sympathy for your fellow, less intelligent man, but in the end, even if the allegories it presents us with are true, thinking about it overmuch doesn’t get us anywhere any more than worrying about our gray hairs will make them go away or stop them from coming. I have better uses for my time, and you probably do, too.

Portfolio Diversity

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A week from next Monday marks the end of the Nate Chen Summer Short Story Extravaganza, that wacky event where I write short stories until all our eyeballs bleed and hope somebody reads them (and I know from my stats and likes that some of you are, for which you have my thanks.) The first and last of these stories are Project Sumter tales, beginning with #63 at the end of June and ending with Trial By Winter, coming week after next.

But in between I’ve chosen to highlight three other flavors of story that I’ve had bouncing around in my head.

Stories of the Divided Future and the Weavers of the Heartland are based on things I’ve written before I started on Project Sumter, which was actually something of a whim that occurred to me last Spring after I finished reading most of Mark Waid’s Irredeemable. In fact, my first full length novel focused on the Weavers of the Heartland. Maybe someday I’ll get that published in some format…

Endless Horizons is of more recent vintage, like Project Sumter. In fact, they arose just about the same time and, just like Sumter, incorporated aspects of other stories that I had not found a good use for yet. Hopefully all that will come to light in due time.

So why go to all this trouble to get exposure for all these different stories? Don’t authors usually stick to one or two kinds of stories once they get started?

Well, for one thing, I’m not really “started” yet. I have a small readership on a blog in a busy section of the Internet. It’s not like I have a hard, fast profile to keep to yet. Branding is important to a writer, but right now I’m still looking for something that will give enough exposure that branding matters.

But more than that, once I do have a large readership I’d like to have the reputation of writer who writes lots of different kinds of stories. I like writing about Circuit, Helix and the strange slew of people that you could theoretically call their friends, but I’ve also loved sci-fi and fantasy since I was a kid, and most of all, as a writer, there are a lot of different genres out there that I’ve enjoyed reading and would like to write in.

So I hope to keep writing a lot of different stuff, and I hope you’ll keep reading it. I’m still feeling all this out, as you’ll quickly witness next Monday. I had originally intended to introduce Endless Horizons with a couple of short stories from what I like to call The Legend of Veronica Locke. Unfortunately, I made a common mistake and started the story at the beginning. This is because I wanted to produce two short stories that could stand alone and also make sense together, kind of like the many short stories in I, Robot. After a lot of work, I decided this week that it’s just not working. The Valley of the Shadow of Dagon turns out to be a chunk of a larger story, but something that’s not quite a novel. Consider it a teaser for a project that will hopefully be continued at some point in the future. In the mean time, on Monday we’re going to hop around the time stream a bit and look at something entirely different, but still under the same sky.

I also hope you’ll check back in a few weeks for the beginning of Water Fall, the next Project Sumter novel. I say a few weeks, as I currently plan to take a week off between Trial by Winter and the first chapter of Water Fall, to work ahead a little and hopefully finish a manuscript that I’ll be marketing for publication. The kind that comes with actual payment. (*gasp*) More on that as it plays out! See you next week.