Tag Archives: On Writing

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.

Dialog Part One

Posted by natechen on

Dialog is a major part of just about any story. Unless you’re writing a Castaway or something similar you’re going to write a fair amount of it as you go along. I’m sure a whole book could be written on just the art of writing dialog, but for now I’m going to try and keep it down to two posts. In this first one I want to look at the basics of framing a scene with a lot of dialog. Next week I’ll look at the methodology I use to “debug” a dialog intensive scene that isn’t quite working.

So without further ado, what do you do with a lot of dialog?

  1. Set the scene. It almost goes without saying but all scenes happen somewhere; describing the setting gives you an idea of where your scene happens and lets you set up props or prompts for later. You don’t have to set the whole scene at the start, but at least sketch a basic layout for the readers to keep in mind as the scene progresses.

  2. Have your characters move around. The vast majority of people don’t just sit and stare at each other the whole time they’re talking. They fidget, they get up to get things or gesture with their hands, sometimes they even bury their face in their hands. You don’t have to mention every little tic or gesture, but mentioning these things from time to time keeps the scene realistic and keeps the scene from devolving into huge chunks of talking, which gets tedious.

  3. Place things in the setting your character can use. Have someone at a dinner party gesture with their knife and fork, or a dishrag left in the kitchen can become an impromptu weapon in a squabble between siblings. You don’t have to have a lot of these, in fact not every scene needs them. But a few from time to time are a big plus.

  4. Let the setting of the scene put ideas in your character’s minds. A picture on the wall might prompt a detective to ask about a family’s children, or a pile of clothing left in the corner can spark an argument over whether or not a character is a slob. As with the previous point, you don’t need these in every scene but they help keep the reader grounded in what’s going on.

  5. Give a few of the character’s inner thoughts. People do occasionally stop to collect their thoughts or recall some detail in the middle of a conversation. This is a great way to add background information but you have to be careful not to overdo it. Too much is both unrealistic and interrupts the flow of the scene but the right amount helps break up the dialog and helps the reader get a handle on elements of the scene that might not be entirely clear to them.

  6. Try and keep chunks of dialog short. If you have one person talking for more than a couple of hundred words, at the very most, it’s probably a good idea to find some excuse to break things up. Have the other character interject, or add some business for the character to do.

  7. Try and keep the number of characters in the discussion to a minimum. It’s not natural to have half the characters in the room keep quiet for a page or two at a time, but it does make the scene easier to read. Dialog refers to two people talking, after all. Two isn’t always the ideal number, but fewer is generally better.

When I write a scene with a lot of dialog, those are the things that I keep in mind. Next week I’ll look at some of the things that I do to make a dialog-heavy scene work.

When You Don’t Want To Write

Posted by natechen on

Every writer runs into writer’s block – that dreaded time when your story comes to a screeching stop because you have no idea where to go with it next. This post is not about that.

This post is about when you wake up in the morning and feel like there is absolutely, positively no possible way you could spend an hour or two in front of a keyboard or a blank sheet of paper and arrange words in a comprehensible fashion. You may have five or six ideas on the back burner, just waiting for you to put ink on their bones. You may have a great scene all blocked out in your mind, or even on paper! You just can’t bring yourself to put pen to page and do the hardest part – write it all out.

There’s any number of reasons you may not want to write. It’s too nice outside, or you’re depressed, or the classic – you’re just too busy right now. Add to this list as you see fit.

But the fact is, writers write. It’s kind of a given. So what do you do when you just don’t wanna?

  1. Eliminate distractions. I can usually manage to listen to music and write at the same time. It helps block out distractions, like a white noise  generator, and it gives me a rhythm to play with. But if I’m having a hard time finding the will to write the music has to go – it will just suck me in and I’ll spend all my time singing along or thinking about they lyrics, not about what I want to write. This principle applies in other ways. For example, if you usually write in a coffee shop or something, stay away from it. The traffic in and out will demand your attention and your manuscript won’t get it.

  2. Take five minutes to do something else and get your head in the game. For me this usually consists of doing a few stretches and getting a glass of water. I almost always do this before I start writing and repeating these kind of rituals often at times when you don’t want to write helps keep your focus on what you should be doing. If you don’t have a ritual like this you don’t need to start one, although it may very well help, but find something to do that will get your focus back on writing.

  3. Set a concrete, attainable goal. A couple of years ago, when I was struggling to finish my first novel (still unpublished) I found myself writing in the middle of the holiday season. It wasn’t ideal, and with all the stuff going on I very frequently didn’t want to write. So I told myself just to do one sentence a day. Just one sentence, and I’d be good. I managed to get that sentence in every day and it frequently turned into more than one sentence as the ideas got flowing. An attainable goal is not only a motivator, it gives you a sense of accomplishment when you’ve reached it. It’s okay to shoot low, as sometimes just taking the first step gives you the will to go farther.

  4. Decide not to write. Okay, this last one may sound like crazy talk. And it’s important not to over do it – try not to go more than one day without writing or you’ll lose your edge. Be deliberate. Set a fixed amount of time where you’re not going to try and write, say two hours in the afternoon. Take a nap or get some exercise, run some errands and just get out and about a little. Don’t think about writing at all. Then come back and you might be surprised how much your attitude has changed. Just be sure to come back and write, or else there won’t have been any point in taking the time off. You’re not quitting, after all, just straightening yourself out.

Writers aren’t superhumans that just crank out idea after idea for the betterment of mankind. It would be nice if we were but the fact is that you will get tired of writing from time to time, no matter how much you love it. In this way, writing is a lot like a relationship.

And just like relationships, the fact that you go through rough patches is not something to shy away from. If handled correctly, rough times just makes you a better writer in the end. Hopefully this handful of tips will help you handle them better. Of course, the more tricks in your bag the better, so if you have any good ways of dealing with writerly apathy please share them! I think we could all use the insight.

World Building Stuff: A Glance at Terra Eternal

Posted by natechen on

It’s time for some nitty gritty stuff. Everyone likes world building, at least everyone that I know, and it’s one of the most involved parts of writing there is. Today, instead of messing with all the boring theory of writing, I thought I’d take you on a quick tour of some of the fun world building that I’ve done while writing stories. Today let’s look at Terra Eternal, a major part of the Endless Horizons story setting. If you haven’t read The Doyen and The Dragon, my first short story that involves them, you might want to do that before checking this out. On the other hand, perhaps you’d prefer to browse this first. It’s up to you.

Now technically, Terra Eternal represents all or part of 52 different worlds scattered about under the great sky. So really, working with them is more like worlds building than world building. But at the same time, since all of these worlds are connected to each other and even share something like a unifying culture, in many ways they are actually a single world.

Now I could run you through the entire history, or give you a quick sketch of the overarching government and social systems, but really that would be way beyond the scope of a single post.

Besides, that’s really not how their world grew up. Believe it or not, Terra Eternal actually started out as the villain of another piece, which I haven’t shown you all any part of as yet. However, beyond knowing that they were a vast, interdimensional empire with practically inexhaustible resources, I didn’t bother to set much in stone about them when that project was starting. I simply selected a number of cool sounding ideas and figured I could work out a good overarching structure for a society they could call home later.

So rather than give you the unified theory of Terra Eternal, I decided to just share some of the ideas that now define them, and let you enjoy envisioning the shape of their worlds just like I did. Ready? Let’s go!

  • “Bruja” Magic – In some worlds, magic itself displays consciousness and can form the basis for strange and alien forms of life. This is called bruja magic by theorists in Terra Eternal. The origin of the term is not known, although it’s frequently credited to Veronica Locke. Because it is often hostile or malicious towards humans, bruja magic is considered a bad thing by most in the borders of Terra Eternal.
  • Doyen – Literally means “brilliant” and refers to a small group of crack problem solvers. Doyen are called in whenever the red tape that binds the empire together pulls too tight and what needs to be accomplished cannot be done in good time. They have a great deal of autonomy to deal with problems, and can take great liberty with the resources on hand, but they also suffer a set of fairly draconian restrictions to keep them from running wild. Technically speaking, they don’t belong to the nobility of any of the fifty two worlds, or swear allegiance to any of the three lesser thrones.
  • Friedrich Goltermann – One of the Three Founders. A shrewd politician and philosopher, he is credited with establishing much of the basic theory behind Terra Eternal’s government. The fact that it still functions several hundred years later, on a much larger scale than he ever anticipated, is credit to his brilliance.
  • “Powers” – Refers to any creature that embodies, or claims to embody, an abstract concept. In some cases, can also refer to creatures that embody or claim to embody specific places or the consciousness of things. Exactly what the power embodies tends to severely warp it’s personality and perspective. A form of bruja magic that is considered particularly dangerous.
  • Regula – Term that refers to the commanding officer of a military unit. The rank is always given along with the position and size of the unit the officer commands. Thus a regula millenia outranks a regula decima and a regula centuria.
  • Sail – The foundation of magic is the sail. Just like a ship is propelled by sails collecting the wind, so magic matrices are propelled by sails collecting magic as it rises up out of the earth. Also, just like the sails on ships, more surface area creates a better sail. Thus, those who use a lot of magic tend to wear flowing, many layered garments.
  • Soul of One – The nature and rules governing the many Earths vary greatly, and as often as not the face of the world is different as well. But sometimes there are enough similarities between worlds that even some people are duplicated. People that exist on multiple Earths are known as Souls of One, and Terra Eternal has a special role for them to play in the life of the Empire…
  • “Sterile” Magic – Magic that is simply a resource to be harnessed, like the wind or water. Pretty much the opposite of bruja magic.
  • Throne of Terra Eternal, The – Refers to a massive magical construct built by the Three Founders when establishing Terra Eternal. The exact functions of the construct remain known only to the successors of the Founders, but it is generally viewed as an important part of keeping the empire ticking.
  • Thrones of Terra Eternal, Three Lesser – Refers to those individuals who have inherited the authority of the Three Founders. The roles of the three lesser thrones are defined by the True Throne, making the people who hold the lesser thrones surprisingly limited in their powers. These three thrones are frequently referred to by the name of the founder who’s authority they embody. Thus “the Throne of Vesuvius” refers to Terra Eternal’s supreme military authority, and so on.
  • “Thrones” – A generic term for the individual who rules a specific political group or piece of territory. For example, “So-and-so is the throne of Terra Geodesia.” Frequently used when the speaker cannot remember the local name for such rulers. It’s automatically considered respectful, since it’s also the term used to refer to the seat of Terra Eternal’s powers. Of course, not everyone likes to be reminded that there’s a bigger power out there that they have to answer too…
  • Throneworlds – Refers to the first two worlds of Terra Eternal, which are still the seat of culture and progress for the empire. Unlike the other worlds in the empire, no special measures are needed to travel between the two beyond finding one of a series of “shallowings” between the worlds that were created by Locke.
  • Veronica Locke – One of the Three Founders. Credited with first envisioning the Throneworlds and convincing the other two to help establish them. Many of the spellworks that tie the empire together are based on her work. When they are not direct copies.
  • Vesuvius the Great – One of the Three Founders. Locke’s ideas required influence across two globes to implement properly. Vesuvius led the military campaigns that gave Terra Eternal that influence.

So there you go! A few of the ideas underpinning Terra Eternal. Is there any other part of the world building process you’d like to see me highlight here? Or perhaps another part of another story you’d like to see highlighted? Project Sumter? The Divided Futures? Post it in the comments!

Genrely Speaking: High Fantasy

Posted by natechen on

Welcome to Genrely Speaking! Today we’re going to tackle the genre of high fantasy, a kind of story about the conflict of good and evil, the nature of humanity and formidable legions of heavy cavalry making glorious charges to save the day. Or, at least, that’s what most people think of when they think of high fantasy, probably because they’ve seen the movie versions of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. And in a way, they’re not wrong. The Downfall of The Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King is the definitive example of high fantasy. Tolkien codified many of the things which embody the genre today. It’s true, he based his stories on many of the epic myths he studied and taught as a professor, but stories like Beowulf don’t actually meet all the modern criteria of high fantasy. Strange, but true.

So what are the characteristics of high fantasy? I’m glad you asked!

  1. A world distinct from our own, usually existing in some kind of idealized Middle Ages, with it’s own history, geography, customs and very often peoples. There can be no cheating here. There can’t be connections between our modern world and the world of the story, or really our world at any point. The fantasy world must stand on its own, and any similarities between the two superficial at best. This first and biggest criteria is what keeps the old bardic tales from counting as high fantasy – they all supposedly happen at least in part somewhere in the world as we know it. It also rules out a lot of modern day fantasy such as The Chronicles of Narnia, which contain fully realized fantasy worlds that are visited by people from our own.

  2. An emphasis on the motivations of the character to enter into conflict, usually to protect something or achieve a moral purpose, such as redeem the family name or atone for some crime. This is what rules out a lot of “swords and sorcery” tales from the genre. High fantasy is not about mercenary warriors seeking to amass fortune or wizards delving into lost secrets so they can amass more and more power. It’s about the efforts of people to achieve something they perceive to be a noble end (whether it proves to be noble or not is part of the journey) and in doing so putting the things they value to the test. Most sources will tell you that these two things are the standards by which high fantasy is judged. However, for the purposes of this blog (which is why Genrely Speaking exists, after all) I add one other requirement, as sort of an extension of this one.

  3. The depiction of magic and the supernatural as rare, and outside the scope of everyday life. The purpose of high fantasy is to sketch the conflicts between light and dark in epic proportions. That’s easily undermined if the conflict comes down to who has the most magic mojo. At the end of the day, Sauron wasn’t defeated on the fields of Rohan, or at the walls of Gondor or the gates of Mordor. It wasn’t even because Frodo was willing to go, or Sam turned out to be a determinator made of iron. He was defeated because, decades before, Bilbo had compassion on Gollum and spared his life. Of course, without all those other people working to stall Sauron and divert his attention, it’s unlikely Frodo and Sam could have made the trip to Mount Doom. But without the compassion of Bilbo, none of the rest would have mattered. It was the unforeseen consequences of Gollum standing in the shadow of the volcano with Sam and Frodo that ultimately made Sauron’s defeat possible. In the end, that is the kind of thing that sets high fantasy apart from the rest.

What are the weaknesses of high fantasy? With all the crazy epic plots, focus on the fate of the world and themes of good and evil, it’s very easy to loose track of the individual human characters that are caught up in the whirlwind. Since no experience is really meaningful to us unless we can relate to it, that means the impact of high fantasy can be significantly weakened if not done well.

Note that this doesn’t mean there can’t be nonhuman characters in high fantasy in order for it to resonate with us. Hobbits strongly appeal to the human desire for safety and comfort, things just about everybody wants. They’re relatable, in fact much more so than some of the technically human characters, like Aragorn (how many here are born to be kings?) The importance is to keep these relatable characters in the spotlight as much as possible, while still keeping events moving as well.

What are the strengths of high fantasy? The ability to look at ugly things about ourselves from a safe vantage point. The veneer of a fantastic setting makes it easier for us to look head on at the kinds of evil that high fantasy tries to portray. While it’s very easy for the evil to become totally remote because of the fantastic skin put over it, the best writers remember to keep pointing out the potential for evil that exists in the best of us. Saruman the White and Denethor, Steward of Gondor are both excellent examples of Tolkien reminding the readers that the enemies were not orcs – it was evil. Sure, Sauron and the orcs were handy personifications of it, but the selfish cruelty they represented can easily show up everywhere.

High fantasy is a troubled genre. In many ways Tolkien, as it’s codifier, casts a shadow that people have had a hard time overcoming. Elves, dwarves and rings are all fantasy tropes that are deeply rooted in the audience’s mind. However it also has great potential as a storytelling medium, potential that is at least partly untapped. It’s worth an occasional read, at least to see where the genre is at. What works do you think embody the genre best?

Writing Men: An Introduction

Posted by natechen on

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!

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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

Posted by natechen on

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

Posted by natechen on

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.