DeAnna Knippling's Blog, page 77

Interview with Elizabeth Barone

I just finished Elizabeth Barone’s first novel, ABNA Quarterfinalist Sade on the Wall, a few days ago, and I’m still trying to put it in enough of a framework to write an intelligent review of it.

In short, it’s about a teen, Sade (sha-day), who has to find a way to deal with her best friend becoming a drug addict–navigating the Scylla and Charibdis of misplaced loyalties and teenage identity crises.  I’ve known Liz for a couple of years now–well, known, in the Internet sense of the word–and I’ve loved watching her put the pieces of her writing life together, though all kinds of challenges.

1) You started Sade on the Wall as a NaNoWriMo project in 2010, posting each chapter on your blog as you wrote it.  Which seems incredible right now.  I can’t believe how much time has passed since then.  How much did you know about your story before you started?  What was the most interesting thing you discovered as you wrote, in plot terms?  What was the most interesting thing you discovered, as a writer?

I knew some key things before I started—like the girls’ theme song for their friendship, that Sade has two moms rather than a mother and father, and a basic idea of how the story would end—and had a rough chapter-by-chapter outline ready before November 1st, but much of what I outlined changed as I wrote (which almost always happens to me). I also knew that I desperately needed to write this story.

Writing Sade on the Wall for all the world to see as the story unfolded was a really weird, unnerving experience. If it sucked, I had to deal with it. If I didn’t post a new chapter right away, I knew I had readers who would be disappointed. I literally had people tweeting and emailing me, asking when the next chapter would be up. Initially, I thought this would freak me out and send me into a dead end for the novel, but it actually kept me going.

I also learned that knowing your ending is more important than knowing your beginning before you start writing.

2) As a writer, I know that the inspriration for a story is rarely something that can be answered with a “Where do you get your ideas” kind of question.  However, watching you blossom as a writer over the last couple of years has been really fascinating.  Do you feel the theme of using creativity as a way to handle the difficult side of life in Sade on the Wall reflected more of your high-school self as a creative person, or does that story reflect more of what you were feeling in 2010-ish?

Sade’s poetry came from my own teenage self. Between the ages of thirteen and like sixteen, I wrote more poetry and songs than I’ve written novels and short stories. Most of them were terrible, angsty things, but I think I learned a lot about writing and how to figure out my own problems through it.

Strangely enough, I don’t really write poetry anymore (though my writers’ group mate and mentor likes to bust my chops and tell me I’m a closet poet).

[DeAnna--wow, that sounds familiar ]

3) For those who haven’t read the book yet, Sade’s best friend, Jackie, has become a drug addict.  Liz, weird question for you.  I know you continually struggle with chronic illness situations, trying out different drugs, treatments, etc., and have been through all kinds of tests, diagnoses, and general harassment from people who don’t get what you have to deal with on a daily basis.  When you wrote Jackie, did you draw on your chronic illness experiences at all?  I felt more sympathy for Jackie than I would have expected, even though you don’t especially throw in a lot of sympathetic details about the character, and wondering where that came from.  You can tell me to bugger off if that’s too personal a question

I actually based Jackie on a few people I knew in high school. Writing from Sade’s point of view was somewhat easy, because throughout high school I watched several friends struggle with drug abuse—including someone I was really close to. I kept seeing the same pattern with these people: they spiraled deeper and deeper, and I kept feeling completely helpless to save them.

Even though I put Jackie through the ringer, I really sympathized with her, too. She had a hard life, and I’ve seen firsthand what can happen if you’re in those shoes.

4) I liked the subplot with Sade’s brother Corey exploring Islam–why did you include it?  I think I can guess, but I want to hear your take on it.

Corey’s exploration of Islam came from an interest I’ve always had in the religion. I’ve always been fascinated by the etymology of many religions, and there was a period in my life where I explored as many as I could. (For some reason, though, I still remained a devout atheist. I’m weird, I guess.) I think it’s a beautiful religion, and often misunderstood—as most religions are.

I was baptized and raised Protestant, but my parents never forced me to stay with it. I was pretty free to explore, so long as I didn’t do harm to anyone. Corey has a voracious appetite for information, and even though he’s pretty misinformed in the beginning, he continues to stick to his path—something Sade really admires, and kind of envies.

5) So years have gone by for Sade; she’s your age and looking back at her life.  She sits down in the morning with a notebook and writes something to Jackie.  What does she write?

(Slight spoilers!)

Jackie,

Some of my best and worst memories revolve around you, floating through my mind and wrapping around each other. It’s been nearly ten years and yet I can’t forgive you, still grieve for what you lost. I still find myself dialing your phone number sometimes, when I’ve had an especially good or bad day. I’ve even texted you once; that number isn’t yours anymore, so I got a really ghetto “Who dis?” instead of a “What’s up, girl?”

For years I wondered what I could have done differently to get you back on the path you were on before the raves. I blamed myself for not being stronger. I finally forgave myself, though, because at fifteen, no one is strong—we’re all sailors on a ship, headed toward the same land but once the ship is docked, we have different destinations. We gain our strength in our early adult years, as we fight through our transformations from childhood and discover ourselves. I’ve learned that in the last couple of years.

I hope, wherever you are, you’ve come to peace with yourself and have found your way again. If I close my eyes and reach out far enough, I can almost believe you have.

-Sade

Elizabeth Barone is the author of the weekly drama for busy women, Sandpaper Fidelity. She lives in Waterbury, CT with her family. Sade on the Wall is her first novel. Check out her website at http://elizabethbarone.net. You can find Sade on the Wall at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and more.

Romance Means Never Having to Say Midpoint

As I’ve been chewing my way through regencies lately (I’m just starting to read romances and have lately gone nuts over them), I’ve been trying to scope out their structure on a basic level: where’s the midpoint?  When do the characters go into the strange world?  When do they go into the final conflict?

I’ve gotten used to looking at this kind of thing in other books; it’s become a matter of habit.  As I’m flipping pages, I watch for the 25%, 50%, and 75% marks and the milestones that I’ve come to expect from them…I’m not usually disappointed.  ”Aha, a huge reversal…and my ereader says it’s at 50% for this book.  Quelle surprise!”

But I’m struggling with breaking down these regencies.

What I need to do is take one of them that I like and do an outline of what actually happens, and on what page–and I will.  But I worry that I don’t know what’s typical yet, and I might outline something that isn’t typical and end up with a skewed view of things.  So I just keep cramming them down, keeping an eye out for something that seems typical, or picking up a sense of what’s typical, or at least finding The Perfect Romance.  But I barely know what constitutes my The Perfect Romance, so that’s difficult, too.

Case in point, I still find it pretty shocking when the characters get married before the end of the book.  Especially if they’re already in love.  I almost always flip to the end to see whether the ending is at the end, or if there are a bajillion sample chapters of the next book at the end or something.

I’ve come across the early-marriage thing several times.  The first part of the book shows the characters out in society, lusting after each other, stealing kisses, getting laid.  Then, two-thirds of the way through the book, they get married, and they head off to so-and-so’s estates, at which point they go through this whole process of feeling like they made a mistake and didn’t know each other, oh crap.

What I would expect, given the pacing on any other genre, would be: they don’t get into society until the 25% mark, they get married and suspect a mistake at 50%, then they go to the estate at 75%.  Into the strange world at 25%, out of it and into the final sequence at 75%.  You see it in book after book…outside the romance genre.  A major reversal at 50%, yes, yes.

But no. Strange world starts at 0, reversal at 67%, at which point strange world stops–or starts, if you count the setting at the beginning of the book as the normal world.

And yet the books don’t feel like they’re paced funny.  The beginning doesn’t drag on and on and on.  Imagine Star Wars if they started with the phrase, “These are not the droids you’re looking for,” didn’t have Alderaan blow up until two-thirds of the movie was done, and tried to get everything else packed into the last 40 minutes…losing 20 minutes of the last half.  The section from “not the droids” to “a billion voices cried out” would take 80 minutes instead of 30 and feel like molasses.  The rest would feel rushed.  They’d have to cut out most of them running around on the Death Star, probably.  The trash compactor sequence and all that.

Yet in a romance, it works.

An idea I’ve been playing with lately is “the four stages of a romantic relationship.”  It’s gone through a couple of different phases, but it’s currently at:

Focusing on getting a relationship.
Focusing on getting the other person to understand you.
Focusing on understanding the other person.
Focusing on delighting the other person.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who have had failed or meh relationships, where you bottom out in an early stage, you give up on ever really getting along with the other person, but eh, whatever.

In the first stage, it’s all about making the other person do what you want: go out on a date, have sex, whatever.  In the second stage, you want the other person to look into your heart and tell you that you’re worth something, that you’re the best thing ever, that you opinion is right (or at least not crazy), etc.  The third stage is about finding out why the other person is doing something, why they’re doing things that annoy you, where they came from as kids, etc.  The fourth stage is about accepting the other person, accepting yourself, and having fun.  You goal is to elicit a smile–that Heinlein definition of love as someone else’s happiness as essential to your own.

In regencies, the love story is almost always two people who meet each other for the first time, or two people who knew each other before, but it’s been so long that it might as well be the first time.  There’s a seduction.  Then there’s a phase where the characters try to convince each other that they shouldn’t be together for some reason, that it’s all an aberration, I’m not as hot for you as you think I am kind of thing; being in love with the other person will hamper them somehow.  Then they start digging into each others’ pasts, the things that made the other person the way they are, and the closer they get to the truth, the more the other person defends themself.  Finally the characters honestly try to get the obstacles to their relationship out of the way, either to get married or to change a miserable marriage into a happy one.

I’ll have to do more reading to make sure the actual and hypothetical structures line up, but at least it’s another line of thought to try: that the structure of the story has very little to do with the external events of the story, and everything to do with the internal journey.  Which, when I look at it a little more objectively, sounds exactly like what a romance should be.

Goodreads Giveaway: Exotics Book 1 New Cover

All, I’m giving away a signed copy of the new Exotics 1 softcover.  You can sign up here, at Goodreads; the giveaway ends on December 2.  Pleeeeeeeeeease sign up!

Plot Structure for NaNoWriMo

A lot of beginning NaNoWriMo writers get stuck due to poor planning.  ”Oh!  I’m just going to sit down and write!”

One of the solutions to that problem is to look at structure.  The idea that you can plot out what you’re going to write next offends some people: what if your work isn’t that original?  There’s a whole discussion to be had around the idea that you can be original in a story, but the important point to remember with NaNoWriMo is that nobody gives a damn whether you’re original or not, and looking at a good structure will tell you what kind of thing to write next if you’re stuck…something fun to write that will help keep you motivated and un-frustrated.

I’m a proponent of the Blake Snyder/Save the Cat! plot structure, although I strip it down to the most basic elements and throw in a few bits and pieces of other structures.  Here are the points in my simplified/modified outline. I was shooting for 2100-word chapters, although I’m running over just a tad.

Try to end each chapter on an “Oh Shit” moment.

Setup and Introduction: 1-12,500 words (Days 1-7.5, Chapters 1-6)

Introduce the main character, setting, and problem ASAP.  Show/hint at the main problem the character will eventually have to deal with, and show the character vacillating on how to deal with it, usually between Stupid Solution A and Stupid Solution B (thesis and antithesis).

Have something desperate and major go amuck toward the end of this section, driving them into the next section.

C1: Intro character/setting and give a mini-quest (problem).

C2: Start out on the mini-quest; something horrible happens just at the end of the chapter.

C3: Resolve mini-quest; resolution troubles the main character and foreshadows the main plot problem.

C4: Just when there was supposed to be a moment’s peace to think about things, the next quest (the start of the main quest) comes along, and the stakes are much higher, the solution much more muddied.

C5: One of the two solutions (A) is tried out, goes horribly awry.

C6: Nobody’s happy, and there’s nothing we can do about the real problem at this point, but the main character has to get the heck out of that situation in a hurry.

Fun and Games: 12,500 words to 25,000 words (Day 7.5 to 15, Chapters 7-12)

Enter into the “Strange World” of the main part of the story (crossing the theshold).  The setting itself changes significantly.

This is the stuff that made the idea of doing this story appealing, before you get to all the reversals (tests, allies, and enemies).  The emotional core of the story (B plot) happens here.

Right before the next section comes the midpoint, in which there’s a false victory or a false defeat: one HUGE event that is the “tent pole” for the rest of the story (crisis/reveral, abyss, etc.).

C7: New setting is cool, and often a team of unlikely allies forms.  A breather in which the subtext is “but we’re missing the point, aren’t we?” The beginning of a mini-quest to solve the main problem along the lines of the other solution (B).

C8: A new problem emerges, one that should just take care of itself, if only people were emotionally tougher, but they aren’t.

C9: The emotional problem does a headbutt into solution B and causes even more problems.

C10: Everyone tries to get solution B back on track, but the emotional problem just makes everything worse.  A moment of slapstick.

C11: Solution B is back on track, the people with the emotional problem have been bullied into keeping their mouths shut or otherwise silenced into semi-functionality, and POW!!! the main problem rears its ugly head.

C 12: The main problem is too much to handle, solution B is knocked off course again somehow, the emotional stuff bursts out around the seams again, and everyone runs around like chickens with their heads cut off.

Bad Guys Close In: 25,000 to 38,500 words (Day 15-23, Chapters 13-18)

The bad guys get closer, members of the team are stripped away, and THE BIG PLAN TO SAVE EVERYTHING goes horribly awry, leading to a black moment/moment of death when the character realizes all the things they thought were doing right are failing miserably.

C 13: Everything is massively worse, yet there is a glimmer of hope: a big plan to save everything, and the main character puts the plan in motion.

C14: A mini-quest that is the first part of the plan kicks into motion with all hope of success, but something comes up, tied to the emotional crap that we made shut up for a while in Fun & Games…

C15: The bad guys have anticipated the plan somehow (a trap!), and attack the good guys, who fight back valiantly, hampered by their emotional vulnerabilities that they put off dealing with…

C16: The good guys are pulling ahead, and things look like they’re going to succeed (even if some unacceptable compromises that would just break your heart might need to be made), but then…

C17: Everything falls to pieces.  Every single element of solution B goes wrong.  Every new idea they’ve tried has failed.  The team is struck down, stripped away, even killed (especially if there’s a mentor).

C18: But wait, there’s more!  Even more things go wrong, and the main character is worse off than when they started.  They may as well never have tried; everything they tried to do has made things worse, and everything they care about is stripped away.  They don’t care whether they live or die at this point.

Storming the Castle: 38,500 to 50,000 words (Day 23-30,  Chapters 19-24)

The main character regroups, gathers as much of the team as they can, and leaves the strange world to invade the bad guys’ stronghold in one way or another.  They have a PLAN, which the bad guys thwart easily – it’s usually a trap that strips off every defensive/offensive advantage the main character has, at which point, they have to reach deep inside, slap something they learned from the beginning of the book (Setup), something they learned in the middle of the book (Fun & Games), and the desperation of the black moment (BGCI) to craft a final, original, surprising solution.

The rewards of victor are at 50,000 words, Day 30.

C19: The main character has a new plan, a desperate plan, a risky plan…”That’s so crazy it just might work!” They gather all the resources they can muster and head forth valiantly.

C20: Ooh, it’s a trap; didn’t see that one coming.  The emotional crap from the middle two sections rears its ugly head and says, “I told you so.”

C21: The main character frantically fights back, but every resource they brought into the fight is stripped away from them, one by tortuous one.

C22: The main character is utterly defeated, ripped down, ego smashed into a thousand pieces.  The light turns on: hey, maybe if I stuck parts of Solution A onto parts of Solution B using the values I had in Setup with the tools I picked up in Fun & Games, and knowing the failures of Bad Guys Close In, maybe I could…Nah, it’ll never work.  But what else have I got to try?  If the bad guys have to make a speech, do it here to give the main character a moment to go, “What idiots…I was almost like them…but now I know better…NOW I will listen to the emotional crap.”

C23: The new solution (synthesis) is tried out.  It shouldn’t work.  It almost doesn’t work.  There’s no real reason, from the point of view of the character as they were in the Setup, for it to work.  It’s like magic.  And it works.

C24: Bloodied but unbroken, changed but undefeated, the main character applies the new solution (or sees the ramifications of the new solution) to their world, seeing benefits both to themselves and their loved ones.  Peace at last, even if (in a series) the peace won’t last for long.

—

You can split the pieces up however you like, as long as you hit each new section at the end of each NaNoWriMo quarter.  Being a gamer, I find it helpful to think in terms of mini-quests vs. main quests.   You have to follow the main quests throughout the story, but if it looks like things are slowing down, then throw in a mini-quest (aka subplot).  If the main quest is mostly an emotional quest, throw in active mini quests, and vice versa, but always come back to the main quests, which should take up 75% of the time.  I’m really seeing this in romances.  Too many action mini-quests, and I’m disappointed with the book.  The mini-quests should help level the character somehow, too, without feeling like you’re grinding.

 

 

New cover: Exotics Book 1: The Floating Menagerie.

Here it is, the new cover by Martha Lancaster!  So sweet.

As soon as the POD goes live (I’m waiting to check the proof), I’ll set up a contest on Goodreads.  Right now, I’m finishing up the last book in the series…I’m waiting to see if I need to make any changes to fit the whole series together before I publish The Exotics Book 3: The Subterranean Sanctuary.  I think my daughter’s about ready to kill me…

Find copies at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, and more!

Fear and Character

I was reading Syd Field’s Going to the Movies: A Personal Journey through Four Decades of Modern Film in the bathtub, accompanied by a cold mug of tea and an even colder but faster-to-disappear cherry milkshake, when I came across something and knew I couldn’t stay in the tub any longer.

He’s talking to Robert Towne about Chinatown:

…I asked him how he went about creating his characters, especially how he’d conceived Jake Gittes, the Jack Nicholson character.  He replied that first he asks himself, What is this character afraid of?  In other words, what is his or her deepest fear?  Gittes, a private detective specializing in “discreet investigation,” has a certain reputation to uphold, so he does everything to make a good impression.  He dresses immaculately, has his shoes shined every day and his own code of thics.  Gittes’s greatest fear is not being taken seriously.

I’ve always struggled with the idea of character goals being the same thing as character motivation.  What does the character want?  I don’t care.  What is their inner journey?  It always sounds trite when you say it out loud.  But when I size people up in person, my friends, strangers on the street, things like that–I think about how they see themselves, and what they’re afraid of.

Yes, I’m sorry.  I look at people like I’m a writer.  I do.  I judge people all the time.  I especially like judging strangers, because it means I can make up stories about them without a significant amount of guilt, but I do that for people I know, too.  A crazy flaw that gets called “talent.”

Here is something you’re afraid of.  I’m watching for it…there it is.

And there is the way you see yourself; I can tell because the same story keeps coming up, the same facts, anecdotes, favorite songs, books, movies, attitudes…yep.  If you’ve mentioned something to me three times, I mentally file it in the “how X thinks of themselves” file.  Consciously.

What you’re afraid of is usually at odds with the way you see yourself.  If it’s not, it’s because you’re depressed, usually; a certain amount of depression brings a horrible clarity, although too much does tend to blind you as much as not enough.

–Anyway, so now I’m thinking of some of the books I have sketched out for future projects.  I’m just rambling and brainstorming here; neither one of these is the epic fantasy I’m worldbuilding for.

The Earl is afraid of dying because his despicable, middle-class cousin will take over the estate if he doesn’t produce an heir: the protections of the upper class will also damn it.  His immortal soul is worth less than the idea that his desperate gamble might save a dying society for just a little bit longer.   While she is afraid of crossing the line between propriety and ruin, seeing herself as a young woman–not one of those pesky independent types–who has an innocent habit of reading lurid novels.  She thinks willing to sell her virginity to a dead man, hold an affair with his blessing, and live a lie in order to produce his heir, in accordance with her parents’ wishes–to do her duty–but she can’t; she’s too afraid of losing her chance for love, even though all decency and duty stands in her way.  Both of them, damned if they do, damned if they don’t, trapped by a false self-perception and fear.  That one’s a Regency, of course, with a plot ripped out of the Romantic novels of an earlier generation, i.e., Frankenstein.

Hm, the fantasy one.  She sees herself as soiled, evil, ruined–all because she’s infected with a curse, blood magic that destroyed France a century ago, inherited from her mother, who went mad and murdered with her knitting needles, and had to be struck down in the middle of a killing spree.  She fears that the curse will drag her down into her mother’s madness.  And so she lives recklessly, sleeping with a married man, stealing antiquities, dressing as a man in 19th-century French Algieria.  Playing with fire, almost hoping that she’ll be locked up or killed before she can do serious damage.  He’s a magician believes in tradition over all, even the idea that his branch of magic is an “evil” one, against the will of God.  He holds himself still, restrained, silent, dignified–fearing that his every true thought and feeling is heresy, even when they are good.  Allah punishes him for his pride in his skill, binding him to a demon who can’t shut up–can’t stop from saying all the things that he will not–or cannot.  He fears to be known, to be judged as nothing, before the will of God.  Heh.  They fight crime!

The Wound at the Heart of Serious Literature

Yesterday I held a cooking party.  (I’ll get the final recipes up soon, I promise.)  People came over, drank, cooked, ate, talked, had fun.  Every one of these I do, they get better.  More fun.  It takes a lot of work, a lot of hidden prep to make these things go off.  An understanding of when to boss people around, and when to let fortunate accidents happen.  When to sit down and do nothing, even.  To whirl with the whirlwind, to find the stillness at the center of it.  Even when to skip recipes (a lot of recipes, this time).

It takes a lot of work to make something pleasant.

It wouldn’t have taken nearly as much work to make something miserable, although I’m sure if I’d been determined about it, I could have done far more work and have been miserable.

Skill…finesse…I’ve been at serious sit-down suppers that were dull as hell and took about as much work.  Why have them, if you aren’t going to enjoy them?  And yet people do, all the time.

Because they’re supposed to, I guess.  Because that’s the way it’s done.  Because when they were small, it was considered an achievement to graduate from the messy mischief of the children’s table to sit with the Adults.

I’ve been mulling over writers lately.  People who write serious Literature.  (Or even not-so-serious-yet-deadly-serious Literature; there’s a great home for satire there.)  As I change from someone who wanted to write serious Literature at one point (but thought that I’d never be able to, because I had nothing serious to write about), I have to sort through what I left behind and why.

I think, looking back, that I wanted to write serious literature because I wanted to move from writing at the children’s table (unskillfully) to the adult table (skillfully).  I associated the seriousness of literature–the thickness of the language, and thank you DWS for that term–the lack of clarity in the plots, the depiction of reality, in one shape or another–with skill.  Lightness, playfulness, and a steamroller of a plot?  Cheap escapism; anyone could do it.

I doubt I’m the only one who thought that.  Or who still thinks that.

I went to a local bookstore lately–Poor Richard’s.  They have all kinds of curious used books.  Do you know what section they don’t have, or, if they do, isn’t somewhere that I’ve ever found in the building?  Romance.

What’s the best-selling genre?  Romance.

Why wouldn’t a bookstore–and supposedly bookstores everywhere are having trouble–not set out a section for romance?  Better yet, why wouldn’t they set out a section for romance divided by subgenre, and cultivated for high standards?  Why wouldn’t they carry the most enjoyable, most delicious books?  There’s a horror section, even a few shelves for manga.  It’s not like they look down on genre.  SF/F has a lovely stretch of books.

No, the romance writers haven’t even left the children’s table is what it is.  So their books get shelved in “fiction,” and we all pretend they’re not there.  The romance writers aren’t unskillful, either.  They’re throwing whirlwind parties full of charm and light and good food, if perhaps a few well-placed swoons into the arms of the chosen lover.  It isn’t that they don’t work at it, or that it doesn’t take skill.

It’s that they’re having too much fun.

And serious literature is not about fun.

And respect, when it comes to writing, is not about fun.

Why?

I think there’s a wound at the heart of writers, and I think it comes out of college writing programs.  College writing programs are usually about teaching people how to analyze great works of literature (some of which are very fun, but have been around so long that the grumps have had to give in and call it respectable, although perhaps not as respectable as more serious works–Jane Austen is fun, and Kafka, in his black way, is fun, but neither one is as respected as, say, The Great Gatsby).  They’re about picking and picking and picking.  And it’s useful–the one thing that I took away from my college writing program that I liked was being able to pick apart what people say, or how they act, and find the hidden motivations.  Being able to analyze fiction has made me much more able to handle the complex fictions of real life, from media spin to gossip.

But it didn’t teach me how to write.

And it certainly wasn’t about having fun (except, maybe for a beautiful Shakespeare class I took where the teacher explained structure in more distinct terms than, “It rises and falls and rises and falls, until it really rises, then really falls”–I still use his analysis of Shakespearean subplots in my work, when I want to have fun with subplots).

We’re told: stop having fun.  Be serious.  –How we’re supposed to do this isn’t necessarily addressed.  How do you build a character?  You’re inspired.  How to you plot a story?  It just forms.  How do you know whether it’s a good story or not?  You sit around in a circle with a bunch of people who don’t read the kind of stories you write and let them pick the story apart to examine your hidden motives rather than the quality of your entertainment, unless you happen to write stories that the professor likes, in which case, they’re good.

We’re told: your hidden meaning is more important than your overt meaning.  Your theme is more important than your story.  (No wonder a lot of writers go into hissy fits if you ask them about their theme: they’re defending themselves.)

We’re told: you shouldn’t have a shtick.

We’re told: tragedy is more respectable than comedy.

We’re told: you should try, in all ways, to be original.  Except in grammar.  You should be perfect in grammar.  But original in everything else.  Unless you’re writing surreal fiction, and then you can be surreal in your grammar.

We’re told: Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever, but don’t try to write like him.  Because he’s just not done anymore.  Plus he stole all his plots; don’t do that unless you’re Jane Smiley, who managed to rip off Shakespeare without actually making it fun (although it was pretty good literature).

We’re told this by people who were told pretty much the same thing, and then went on to be college professors.  Not bestsellers, mind you, and usually not professional writers.  Although there are some wonderful exceptions.

Look.  The message of serious Literature has been passed down, hand to hand, from analyst to analyst–not from creator to creator.  From one person who successfully abandoned the children’s table to another.  From one tragedy to another.  Because coming to truly believe that fun shouldn’t be respected is a tragedy.

Sure, there are pleasures to be found in the autere, solitary meal.  A certain sternness of character, and the undeniable pleasure of indulging your own particular tastes.  Seriousness has its own pleasures.  Obscurity has its own pleasures; writing for yourself and finding out that at least one person likes it has its pleasures.

But–sometimes it’s fun to go to that party that everyone will enjoy.  Sometimes it’s fun to organize the party.  Sometimes you abandon perfection and rigor in the name of fun.  Sometimes you abandon originality in a crowd-pleaser.  Sometimes you set up a children’s table and nothing else.  Sometimes you indulge in a little fun that won’t survive the critical attack of a bunch of literature professors, or even the little literature professor in your brain.  ”Oh!  How cliche…”

But sometimes stupid is fun.  (And sometimes a theme is fun, like the White Trash Potluck we had at an old job once, as I was reminded of yesterday.)  And sometimes fun is the refreshment you need in order to process, survive, and heal from serious things indeed.

So the next time you’re looking into someone else’s foolish garden of silly, cheesy, ridiculous, even melodramatic delights, and you feel bitter and mean and superior, try asking yourself–but if I weren’t so superior, if I hadn’t been punished for being so silly as a younger writer, wouldn’t it be fun?

Choose Your Own Character: games, fiction, and the illusion of choice.

So I’m getting better about writing fiction every morning.  I missed a couple of days last weekend, but I went to a funeral, so sue me, shoulder-angel.  But I’ve already cleared out the queue of stories that I had in mind, so I need to find something else to write.  Turns out when you set yourself a daily BUTT IN CHAIR goal, you become less picky about story ideas.  I haven’t lost sight of the doubt-story that I’m researching for, but there are some things I want to play with first to test that out.  Like conscientious worldbuilding, but that’s another story.

Here, the important thing is, I went to Lee and Ray and said, “I need subjects for boy-middle-grade stories to write, to fill out my next Tales Told Under the Cover collection, because I have ONE boy story and four girl ones.”

I wrote one of the stories already, and it hared off in an unanticipated direction of such scariness that I don’t know that I can use it.  It’s more Stephen King than Goosebumps.  Even though I think it’ll be good for kids (especially kids who have lost a family member), it doesn’t seem like anything I can sneak by parents.  No cussing, no sex – but lots of violence.  A dead brother comes back to haunt a kid who just wants some Halloween candy.  There are guns.  That kind of thing.  I think it’s a great story.  But I’m going to sit on it for a while.  If nothing else, I need to come up with a title for it.  It was supposed to be about a kid who goes trick-or-treating and gets attacked by evil caramels.

On to the next idea: a kid gets sucked into his computer, into a video-game world.

Wellll, I’m working on finishing the first BioShock.  (I just started it this fall; FPS used to make me ill, but I think framerates have improved enough that I don’t need to avoid them anymore.)  And I looked at the list of stations for the submersible and said, “Those look like nice choke points for a CYOA story.”

The problem with writing a CYOA (Choose Your Own Adventure)-type story is that the emphasis isn’t on the story, but on the branchings.  How many branchings can you have?  How many deaths vs. lifes?  How can we maximize the amount of page-jumping?  The mechanisms of how to lay out options are there, but not how to design the story itself.

Pfft.  Game designers have to deal with story design in a kind of multiverse, a story-space with multiple choices, all the time.

Personally, I think you have to have an overall story arc that can be adapted to the multiple choices that a character can make (either in games or in CYOA-ish books).  As a creator, while you’re controlling the kinds of choices your characters can make, the reader/player makes the choices for the characters.  The kinds of CYOA-style books that eventually frustrate me are the ones where the choices don’t matter; they’re just split points where the choice leads to an arbitrary outcome.  ”Go right or left?” kinds of choices.  Or the choices where you think you’re doing something smart, but something pops out of nowhere and kills you.  Whoop de do, how satisfying is that?  Not very.  However, I often find that controlled game play is often satisfying: I’m playing a lot of Torchlight II lately, too, and I really enjoy the choicelessness of it.  You have all this freedom to wander around in any order that you like…within a certain area.  You have to complete XYZ before you can pass a chokepoint, though.  It’s an illusion of choice, while forcing an action.  The choices only seem arbitrary; you can only be killed by your own stupidity or lack of skill.

BioShock, I think, deals with the problem of choice vs. not writing a game the size of a multiverse by telling a story about control vs. freedom, backing you into places where the game takes over for you.  What’s the one choice you really get?  How to deal with the little sisters.  Everything else is “how can I survive this using the fewest resources?” Which isn’t choice, but optimization.

In the end, you can’t get away from the reality that you can only give the player/reader so many real choices.  You have to railroad them down certain paths.  You don’t have an infinite amount of time to build a world for all the possible options a player might want to take.  So how do you deal with providing an illusory freedom (or even meaningful choices) in a limited environment?

Writers have been dealing with the problem of providing the illusion of freedom without meaningful audience choice for a very long time.  Nobody in a story is free to act the way they want.  Nobody.  They’re written creations, and they only have one option, which is to do what’s on the page.  The writers, we have a lot of choices to make…but once you’ve set up the story, there are only so many types of ways it can play out, in order for the story to be satisfying.  The more I study structure, the more I know how limited I am.  Which, to be honest, I kind of like.  I used to go, “How will this story end?  Howwwwwww?”  No I go, “Eh, I forgot what I put in the beginning again, didn’t I?” And I go back to the beginning, see what kinds of tools I left lying around for the character to play with, apply the lessons learned in the middle to the tools they had in the beginning, voila, an ending.

So.  Let’s say that games and stories have things in common and things different that they do, and that a CYOA-ish story might be a good place to play with the tools at hand for both.  My rules: all paths must be satisfying.  That is, they must either have a beginning, middle, and end, or they must end unsatisfyingly due to a poor, believable choice (not random crap).  All choices must have meaning, either a substantial choice about the way the character will develop, or an optimizational choice that makes the character better or worse at what they do.

The story will be organized by structure that reaches across all choices: choke points.  For example, the first phase will be the setup of the story, the debate between major options in a decision (admit to love and get shaken up or stay single and safe; try to defend your current way of life or leave it behind in search of something new–whatever). The second phase will be entering into a new world or state of being of some kind.  The third will be the ramifications of the new stuff–the problems/bad guys closing in restrictively, taking the character down to a moment of death.  The fourth will be resolving the problems of the new way using tools from the old ways of doing things: a synthesis.  I intend to have multiple paths through the choke points in order to keep continuity, but the choke points must be passed through.

Most MMORPGs don’t do this; they don’t admit to nice structures like this (well, not that I know of).  You set up the character and choose your specializations, and that’s the extent of your substantive character choices.  After that, it’s all in how you optimize your character, including your gear, skillset, and style of play.   Game play changes depending on what level you are, but you can get to different levels using different methods (like by not actually killing anything, or by not actually completing any quests, etc.).

MMORPGs get repetitive, and add things like new character classes or new play areas or new abilities or whatever to keep people interested.

Books, on the other hand, never have to add more material (except as sequels of one kind or another), yet people will go back to them repeatedly, if they like them.  Nothing ever changes, yet they are still satisfying. Fiction writers have to know how to control readers who had no choices, and yet make it feel impossible that the character could have made any other choice, to the point where you will reread a book on purpose, even knowing how it will come out.  Movies, too.

BioShock has worked really well for me so far, because it uses fictional techniques to railroad me, mixed up with some satisfying gameplay.  (But, again, I’m no FPS expert, so maybe it’s just me as far as how good the mechanics are.)

I wrote the intro up to the first choice on this kids’ story this morning.  The first choice is whether the kid enters the video game world or not; if he doesn’t, boink! Out of the story he goes.  I think I’ll give three or four fantasy MMO class choices for the character he “plays,” then carry him through a structured story, using each of those classes.  I’m debating over whether to use specializations or not.  –And, if he makes it through the challenges in the game (which will be of a fantasy quest nature), he will get booted out into the real world (I’ll force this, but provide a couple of options so the reader can try to avoid getting booted out first), deal with his real problem, and THE END.  I may even use the turning points in the game-world to give the character a couple of thoughts about his real-world situation, because I’m all clever like that.

We’ll see how it comes out, though.

And I have NO idea what to call this story, either.  Oh, well.

New children’s fiction: The Girl and the Genie

Available at Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online bookstores.

The Girl and the Genie

by De Kenyon

In this fairy tale, a girl finds a magic bottle with a genie inside (she can tell there’s a genie inside, because she can see it having adventures), but the genie won’t come out to give her wishes.  What does she do?  She goes inside…

Like a story from The Arabian Night’s Entertainment, the girl has to travel far, posing as a traveling teacher (of things like math problems and standing in line), making friends with some curious demons, and surviving a revenge that was meant for someone else before she finally gets the genie to give her at least one wish.

(For children 8 to 12 years old.)

Once upon a time, there was a girl who found a genie bottle. She could tell it was a genie bottle, because it was a clear bottle, and she could see the genie in it, strong and magical and half-made out of smoke, having adventures.

The girl immediately opened the bottle to let the genie out, in expectation of getting three wishes. However, when she opened the bottle, nothing came out—no smoke, no genie, not even sand—when she turned the bottle upside-down and shook it. And no matter how much she yelled— “Genie! Genie!”—the genie didn’t answer, but only kept having adventures. Without her.

And so the girl did the only thing she could do, which was to go into the bottle.

At first she thought she wouldn’t be able to fit, but at last she managed to fit in a single finger, her pinkie finger. With her pinkie finger inside, she was able to fit another finger, and another, until finally she had her whole arm inside, then her legs, her body, and her head and other arm, until she was hanging from the inside of the bottle by one hand. She was afraid to let go, because inside the bottle was dark, but her hand was getting weaker and weaker by the second, so eventually she did let go, because after all she had not climbed into the bottle in order to not have adventures.

Two types of lies (for writers)

Let’s stipulate that there are two types of lies that writers can use: the lie that comes from the heart, and the lie that comes from the head.  Neither is true.  Even when you’re telling a true story, it’s not true.  Your memory is wrong, and your emotions are wrong.  What you think and feel happened wasn’t what really happened.  I’m serious about this.

But it’s the lies that come from your heart that the good stories come from.  The things that you long to be true, instead of the things that you think ought to have been true.  The lies that come from your heart bother your head: “Don’t say that.  People won’t like it.  And anyway, it wasn’t true.”  Your head isn’t any better, though, assembling and reassembling a bunch of crap that never sticks together, a lie that, no matter how well structured it is, nobody will believe, because belief isn’t about facts, even though it should be.

There’s a time for your head; it’s called editing.  When you’re writing, you have to write from the heart–even if it’s a lie.  Maybe even especially if, because that kind of lie is the one you tell because you can’t go on otherwise, in some small but important way.  Even as adults we have to face things we can’t face, not really, and stories can heal us just enough to let us go on.  It’s a lie.  No matter which way you go, it’s a lie.  It couldn’t have, and it didn’t, happen that way, no matter how much you needed it to have done.  But there it is, that story, and it rings true, because you wrote it out of the lie that came from your heart, that said, “Please, for just a second, let it have happened this way.”