Tag Archives: On Writing

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?

Editing Resolutions

Posted by natechen on

Hey look, it’s New Year’s Day! Lots of people are probably making resolutions about how they’re going to spend the next year. For a lot of people this is an important tradition, it helps them focus and determine what they hope to accomplish in the next year few months day or two. And that’s great. If you recall, last year about this time I did that as well.

But what many people don’t do after putting their resolutions together is go back and look over them later to see how they’ve done. Such a thing can be pretty depressing, after all. But I’m a writer! Writers do that all the time, and in the process they tweak things in order to make them better – you’ve probably heard this called ‘editing’ and it’s an important part of the writing process. So this year, I’m not going to write a whole new set of resolutions. No, I’m going to go over last year’s and note how I did, and possibly make some tweaks. Below are my original ten resolutions, with notes and edits in italics and stuff I’m taking out of my goals for this year struck out.

  1. I will maintain this blog, doing my best to continue to post on schedule, no matter how many toothpicks I break keeping my eyelids open. This goal was pretty successful. I didn’t miss any posts except those I had planned for in advance and gave my readers notice for. I hope to do the same this year, although maybe with less toothpicks. 
  2. I will not poke myself in the eye with a toothpick. It impedes the writing process. Yeah, see my notes for point 1. No more toothpicks. It’s all around unhelpful. 
  3. I will try to read less garbage in my continuing attempts to understand what kinds of stories currently drive the writing market. Sadly, it’s hard to pinpoint all the garbage. I need to keep working on this one. 
  4. I will read more garbage with the intent to discover what makes bad writing bad and how to correct those flaws. This would be easier if reading the garbage wasn’t so painful. I’ve gotten a few lessons from what I’ve read, but I’m afraid I still need to work on this one too. 
  5. I will remember that finding ways to resolve apparent contradictions helps a person become more creative and flexible, it’s exercise for the imagination and every writer needs more of that. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but in practice takes up way too much brainpower that could be used more productively. I’ll do it when absolutely necessary, but it’s no longer something I will go out of the way to accomplish. 
  6. I will continue to offer shameless critique of people who have succeeded in an industry I have not yet broken in to, as well as people who work in industries I know little about. If they want to sell me stuff, they better make it a worthwhile product. Consciously aiming to develop a critical mind has resulted in… my being very critical of how I spend money. This has resulted in my buying less low-quality stuff overall, even if I haven’t made much progress on the publishing front. Saving money is always a worthwhile goal, however. It’s good for another year. 
  7. I will do my level best to get an e-book assembled and available for purchase from Amazon.com, so that my work can be held up for ridicule in the largest forum available. This is me being grossly ignorant of the kind of time and work I would need to put in, above and beyond what I already do to maintain this blog and my real life. I’ve made almost no progress here and that’s no one’s fault but mine. While this isn’t a bad goal to keep for this year I think that sometime in the next month or two I’ll need to try and break it down into it’s component parts to see how I plan to accomplish it this year.
  8. I will attempt to finish and publish at least two short stories this year to help build name recognition for my work that will hopefully help when book proposals start going out. This is a new and hopefully worthwhile goal.
  9. I will add as much suspense to my stories as is humanly possible, because day to day life does not contain nearly enough uncertainty. Lately I find myself craving a little more certainty in daily life. Not getting it, but craving it. Alas, I’ll have to keep going for suspense because verisimilitude is still important… 
  10. I will add more romance to my writing, because write what you know is more a loose guideline than a mandatory requirement. This remains absolutely true. 
  11. I will hire a person to stand behind me with a rolled up newspaper and periodically whack me over the head yelling, “Make with the funny!” This should keep my writing from being overly gloomy. This year my stories have included: the death of a woman, which emotionally devastated her husband, a man nearly going insane when confronted with the mind-numbing darkness of the deep ocean and a man getting frozen into a Schmidtsicle. BUT you were entertained, were you not? So probably not too gloomy! (Still, the guy with the newspaper can keep his job, it helps the economy.) 

 So there you have it! My plans for this year. If you have any suggestions or goals of your own to share, please feel free to share! And here’s hoping your year is a time to experiment, adjust and set new goals.

I Am Not Making This Up

Posted by natechen on

The title for this post is one of Dave Barry’s favorite phrases, one he trots out whenever he’s found something so bizarre, so ridiculous, it seems like there’s no way it could actually be a part of the world we live in. Except, of course, that it is. And really, for a humor columnist, what could be better than that? Why spend all his time and energy making up halfway funny stuff when Barry could let us find stuff twice as funny for him? By the end of his syndicated column’s run he actually had people all over the nation who would scour newspapers, flip through ads and watch news broadcasts just to find new absurdities to send to him.

And they didn’t even get paid!

Why do I mention this? After all, the primary focus of this blog is fiction, am I right? (Of course I am.) Well, for a moment or two I’m going to wander into the territory of nonfiction. See, while I write fiction for this blog my degree is actually in Journalism, a field that actively blends nonfiction and fiction.

Okay, I kid, I kid. To all those newspaper editors around the country who are about to denounce me from your pages, I ask that you resist the urge. In spite of some high profile cases, there are still such things as journalistic standards and fact checking. It is a form of nonfiction writing, just as humor columns, editorials and technical writing are. In this post, we’re going to look over three things nonfiction needs to do well in order to succeed and how being a good nonfiction writer can help your fiction writing succeed as well. The things that nonfiction needs to work are facts, structure by importance and a clear evolution of ideas. These things are present in all forms of nonfiction writing and, if you manage to write them well in nonfiction applying them your fiction will benefit you as well.

The first thing nonfiction needs in abundance is facts. This is kind of a “duh” thing, but if you’re making up what you’re writing about it’s fiction. You can only be writing nonfiction if you start with facts. Gathering facts and organizing them is where a nonfiction writer starts. So if you’re writing fiction, guess what you need?

Facts! Not facts in the same sense as a nonfiction writer, of course, but facts about your story. I’m not just talking about outlining here, I get that some writers don’t find that to be helpful. But you need to have facts about your story – where is it taking place, who is at the center, what are they doing when it starts, when it ends, what makes them qualified to tackle the problems the story will throw at them? The list goes on and on and on. What’s more, the kinds of questions often vary from genre to genre. A sci-fi tale will need more information about places, new technologies and societal changes than a romantic comedy.

The second thing nonfiction does is structure it’s information by importance, particularly in journalism. Rather than starting you at the beginning and working through to the end, most nonfiction starts with a premise and explains why it is relevant to the reader, then begins with the foundation of it’s argument and works it’s way through to the conclusions. Fiction is the same – not every story should begin at the beginning. Every story should begin at the part most likely to grab the reader’s interest. The ‘beginning’ of the story may not be revealed to the reader until they are part way into the story because it reveals too much about the plot, or it’s just not interesting enough. It’s important to start your story where it will interest your readers – not at the beginning.

Finally, nonfiction has to clearly work from it’s premise to its conclusion, that’s the whole reason nonfiction gets read. Fiction needs to be just as clear. Even in stories like Pulp Fiction, where the timeline is convoluted, there’s clear purpose and drive to the story and the audience can follow what’s going on all the way to the conclusion, even if the exact order of events doesn’t make complete sense to every member of the audience. Fiction is more than a series of unrelated events, no matter how clearly those events are told. If they don’t tie together into a cohesive whole with a purpose in mind they’re not good fiction. Reading (or writing) well written nonfiction gives one a good sense of how to tie fiction together in a similar way.

In short, don’t underestimate nonfiction as a resource for the fiction writer. Reading works of history and journalism in particular of great value to you as you seek to hone your craft. You could do worse than seeking them out actively.

Naming Right

Posted by natechen on

Names are tricky business. The name of your story tells prospective readers a lot about it. By the same token, the way you name the characters in that story says many things about them. How you choose character names is at once complicated and simple.

Now some people might say that the name you get when you’re born doesn’t really say a whole lot about you, so why should fictional characters be named any differently?

The answer, of course, is because they are fictional characters. Fiction does aim to replicate real life to an extent, but it also aims to tell a story that evokes an emotional response from its readers. One of the biggest ways fiction connects with its readers is through its characters, and that means every aspect of the character must be chosen to maximize the reader’s reactions. That includes how the characters are named.

So what kind of things should you think about when naming characters?

First, you have to like the relationship between the character and the name. This is not exactly the same thing as liking the name you give your character, although that certainly helps. It’s entirely possible you will want to create a character who’s name is a loathsome thing because the character is not that nice (or they are nice and you want to create some irony, more on this later.) What you have to do is love what your character’s name is saying about your character.

So the next thing to do is find a name that actually says something about the character you are naming. For example, in the Project Sumter stories Teresa Herrera is a young Hispanic woman who acts as a calming, more positive foil to Helix’s sometimes cynical and always temperamental personality. Naming her after a famous, nearly sainted member of the Catholic church does a couple of things. First, the Hispanic community and Catholicism are closely linked, so it speaks to her culture. Second, it emphasizes her approach to life and highlights the contrast between her and Helix. The inverse of this would have been to give her a name that contrasted starkly with the idea of compassion and empathy, such as Ayn (for Ayn Rand.) Such a name would have been weird and highly ironic given her personality.

Be careful playing around with ironic naming, though. A character’s name is what the reader is going to see every time your character comes into the story. If the character is a big enough part of the story their name may come up so often that their name ceases to be ironic and starts putting the character at odds with itself, destroying the impact rather than enhancing it.

One way to get around this problem is nicknames or titles, ways of being identified that the character has earned through previous actions or that they have been assigned by people who know who they are. Of course, the talented people in Project Sumter’s files are a perfect example of this. Double Helix’s codename comes from his long line of ancestors who worked with the Project – the double helix being the shape of DNA and thus heredity. Likewise, the incredible stability vector shifts have results in their being named after mountain ranges, beginning with Shenandoah and continuing up through Aluchinskii Massif. Nicknames let a character have an ironic or just plain meaningless given name but still be known to the reader and other characters in a more appropriate fashion.

Finally, it sometimes helps to build the identity of your setting if you respect certain naming conventions. For example, the patronymic is an old, reliable way of coming up with last names in European cultures, so choosing to use it extensively is a good way to give a sense of cultural continuity in a story. Likewise, Project Sumter codenames tend to be abstract, chosen more to be cryptic than to be impressive, since it’s a secret government organization. This helps set a Sumter talent apart from the average superhero. Loose naming conventions like this will help build the identity of the story through the names of it’s leading characters.

Of course any story, regardless of length, benefits from having someone named Sam in it.

Seriously.

There’s more to naming characters than just flipping through a book of baby names or hitting up a few websites. Everything from saying the name out loud so you can hear it’s cadence and tone to considering how important a character is, and thus how awesome his name should be, goes into the process. It’s important that you like the name, that it be fairly easy to remember and that it make a good impression on your readers. But more than that, for a fiction writer, the name is powerful and has to be chosen with care. May you find the process a little easier with these things in mind.

Writing Men: Objectivity

Posted by natechen on

It’s time to talk about writing men a little bit more. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, clicking that link will take you to the introduction of the idea a little while ago. Feel free to catch up and check back when you’re done. We good? Okay.

According to Merriam-Webster’s, objectivity refers to a lack of favoritism for one side or another. Throw out this definition, at least until you finish reading this.

When writing men, objectivity refers to the way we love to have goals and seek to fulfill them.

Now some of you out there might object to this by claiming that a lot of men today seem kind of aimless, just drifting around life with no real goal in mind. I’m not going to argue with that, because I’ve met my share of guys who sound exactly like that. However, that just means that they have little interest in life as a whole, if you observe their activities you’ll start to see the objective theme playing you.

For example, the vast majority of men who are drifting through life probably have an obsession of some sort with video game(s). Most video games are objective driven affairs – clear this level, defeat those enemies. In fact, there’s a special term for these kinds of objectives in videogame land: Achievements. And people become obsessed with them.

Even the most free-form video games become objective driven for most guys. Take the bizarrely popular Minecraft, for example. It’s a game that lets people gather blocks and build things out of them. In my day, we called these Legos. The appeal of Minecraft is that it offers an infinite number blocks that are basically free. Some people will use them to recreate famous buildings, others will set out to build the Ultimate Fortress, some people want a life sized model of the U.S.S. Enterprise (NCC-1701 no bloody A, B, C or D).

So even the seemingly aimless men you meet actually have goals, they’re just goals that have been provided by someone else, or goals with little connection to reality. Whether it’s wealth, enlightenment or the World Record for time spent on a unicycle, the odds are that 99% of the men you meet have some sort of objective they’re actively pursuing at any given time. What does that mean for the way you write men in your stories?

  • Men are pursuing goals. Given today’s subject matter that probably sounds obvious but it bears repeating.

  • The goal isn’t necessarily something a man will talk about. Maybe they feel embarrassed about it. Maybe they don’t want anyone else to try and get there first. Maybe they haven’t given their own motivations enough thought to properly articulate them. Regardless, the fact that a man doesn’t mention or understand his goal doesn’t mean he isn’t pursuing one.

  • The objective has a high level of importance, possibly being the most important thing in their life. Men are far more willing to obsess over and sacrifice for their goals than most women. This is why they frequently wind up running businesses, making massive scientific breakthroughs, setting out on quests for vengeance and destroying their families and lives in the process.

  • The above doesn’t mean that men never take a break. In fact, most men have multiple objectives and balancing them can become a goal in and of itself. With the exception of the most obsessive, men are okay with taking a breather now and then. Particularly when there’s nothing more that can be done to advance their project at the moment. But they’re rarely drifting aimlessly. They’re just pursuing a different goal.

  • Men will evaluate their actions first and foremost in terms of their objective. This is why doing something crazy risky like jumping over a spike pit is only stupid to a guy if it doesn’t result in the man getting something of value in exchange. The actions of other men are also evaluated in terms of the impact they have on goals, both the observer and the observed.

  • Men evaluate other men by their goals. The things a man values and pursues are usually viewed as the foundation of his character, at least by other men. This is why men who share interests tend to get along so well even when their personalities seem to have little in common.

If you’ve been reading this with a discerning eye so far you’ve probably already figured out that being objective centric is a double edged sword. Just having something you hope to accomplish and putting effort into it doesn’t mean the goal is good or bad. But when the goal is good, that focus makes it more likely that the objective will be reached.

To men, accomplishing a goal is something to be desired. It’s a foundation of who we are. So when writing men, remember to give them their objectivity.

Genrely Speaking: Urban Fantasy

Posted by natechen on

When people think of fantasy they generally think of something like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. In other words, they think of something where the fantastic elements of the story stand pretty much on their own, and are only contrasted with the technology, culture and standards of the mundane world we live in superficially, if at all. However the genre of urban fantasy exists to do pretty much the opposite. While it includes many of the things that the average person associates with fantasy, it puts them in a much different context from the typical fantasy yarn. Oddly enough by doing so urban fantasy actually bears more resemblance to the early folktales that inspired modern fantasy than most modern fantasies do. After all, the people who originally listened to folk tales heard stories about people living much like they did interacting with fantastic creatures and forces.

So, for the purposes of discussions on this blog what defines Urban Fantasy?

  1. The story takes place in a city or large town that would be recognizable to the average citizen of a first world country. It doesn’t have to be a real city or town, nor does it even have to exist on Earth as we know it although that certainly helps, the important part s that the people have access to and be familiar with the trappings that make modern culture tick. Things like modern telecommunications, transportation and mass media are as much a part of urban fantasy as the fantasy elements are. Part of what defines the story is the conflict between recognizable culture and everything else.
  2. The story includes at least one element of myth or magic. This is the “everything else” mentioned a second ago. Whether it be gremlins in the sewers, wizards hiding as librarians or who knows what else, some aspect of the fantastic has to exist as a contrast to the recognizable, modern world. There can be only one fantastic element or many, they can be known to the world at large or hiding in carefully maintained obscurity, they can replace one or two mundane elements such as when teleportation magic replaces cars, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the contrast between modern society and the fantastic.
  3. There must be conflict over how the world will define itself. In short, the first two bullet points tend to be in conflict. Modern society isn’t really built with the fantastic taken into account. Sure, many people would like to have magic powers or be able to shapeshift, but the fact is our society currently doesn’t have the measures in place to police and protect such people from each other or the public at large. All kinds of issues creep out of this. The attempt to strike or maintain a balance that lets both sides exists peacefully is often at the core of urban fantasy.

What are the weaknesses of urban fantasy? First, it has a tendency to become obsessed with it’s fantastic elements. In order to explain how such things could coexist with modern society magic tends to become an uberpowerful fix-all, or vampires wind up holding all positions of political/financial/cultural power or something else that makes the everyman totally irrelevant to the story. While there’s nothing wrong with characters who are exceptional, in fact exceptional characters are pretty much a requirement of good fiction, cutting the everyman out of the story entirely makes it very hard for your audience to become invested. More than anything else, that must be managed.

Second, many urban fantasies feels similar. They frequently begin with, or arrive at, the All Myths are True trope. This is at least in part because they rely so heavily on their fantastic elements and, like all successful book franchises, run as long as the publishers think they can get away with. The constant need for new material keeps authors grabbing new ideas from mythology, but they tend to choose things that readers will be mostly familiar with. This is why there are so many werewolves and vampires in the genre, to give just one example. The best urban fantasies pick one shtick and try and stick with it. A great example are the October Daye books by Seanen McGuire.

What are the strengths of urban fantasy? Well, the author doesn’t need to spend a lot of time bringing the audience up to date with obscure culture or political situations, at least most of the time, because the characters are probably already living in an Earth a lot like our own. This leaves more time for developing characters and plot.

But most of all it makes the characters a lot more accessible to the reader. No one in the last three or four hundred years has spent their lives wishing to get out of their squiring to a drunken knight or cleaning out stables while wishing they could be a squire. The characters in an urban fantasy have problems similar to what readers have, or readers will at least know someone who’s had similar problems. When new, extraordinary problems come up it will make it easier to relate to how the characters are coping. The same goes for all other aspects of the story, not just the character’s problems.

All in all, urban fantasy is a great genre for people who love to tell fantasy stories but don’t feel confident in tackling all the world building needed for high fantasy. It’s also great for people who love more character driven stories and don’t want to bother keeping track of all the cultural, historical and political baggage that seems to come with so many other genres of fantasy. Lastly, if you’re just cutting your teeth on the fantastic it’s a great way to start.

Dialog Part Two

Posted by natechen on

Dialog – when two people get together and talk to each other. In case you missed my first post on dialog, you can browse it here.

So, what do you do when you have a scene with dialog that isn’t quite working? Read it out loud? Start over from scratch and rewrite it? Find another writer to hash it over with?

Those are all options. Generally when I come across a scene with a lot of talking and I don’t think it’s quite working I step back and run it through three layers of scrutiny. Before I get to these three things, let me point out that this isn’t a checklist, it’s more like a troubleshooting procedure. If one of these things work, there’s no real reason to keep going, unless you’re really dedicated to perfecting a scene.

The first thing I do is try and identify exactly what I’m trying to accomplish with a scene. Your writing needs to serve your story. Every scene needs to accomplish something in pushing forward your plot, a sideplot or perhaps even the myth arc. Identify exactly what your scene is trying to do, then go through and trim out everything that doesn’t advance that goal. You might go back and add some of what you trim back later, but at least look at it without all the excess fluff. Most likely, it doesn’t need to be there. Hopefully that will give you better, snappier dialog.

If that doesn’t work, it’s time to look at pacing. I know I said it last week, but it’s vitally important that you keep your characters from saying too much at one time, and from keeping too many people from being in a conversation at once. While conversational free-for-alls aren’t that rare in real life, most people will tend to tune out some conversational threads and focus on others. You don’t want that to happen in your scene. By the same token, people don’t tend to launch into huge, prepared speeches in causal conversation. Yeah it can happen, but if it happens more than once a scene you probably need to rework something.

When all else fails, I resort to the index card method. You’ve probably heard writers talk about laying your plot out on index cards and spreading it out on a desk or the floor so you can see the whole thing at a glance. Well, this is the same principle applied to writing a scene. In this case, instead of writing plot points on your index cards, write out the first line of each chunk of dialog, or each action that a character will be taking between chunks of dialog. Then spread them out and start sorting. Move things around, cut things or, if necessary, add them until the scene starts to work like you want. This is a court of last resort, and by the time you’re done the scene is probably going to need a total rewrite. But not necessarily.

Dialog is a tricky thing. It drives plot, gives insight into characters and makes for memorable moments all at once, but if you don’t handle it well it can also leave your readers confused and lost. I hope these tips from the last few weeks will help you to assemble better written and more believable dialog.