J.B. Garner's Blog, page 39

Writing Is A Bad Habit: Just Lie To Me a.k.a. The Unreliable Narrator

A key element to creating intriguing fiction is to have an air of mystery and the unknown during the plot.  It works on the basic premise of human curiosity.  We want to know things, to understand things.  There are many ways to go about this, but one particular device that adds a human element to the mystery is the use of unreliable narrators.

An unreliable narrator is, if you didn’t know, a viewpoint character in a story that does not necessarily tell the whole truth.  The actual facts of any scene they are in or story they communicate to the reader may be distorted or straight out fabricated compared to the ‘true’ plot of the story.  It doesn’t matter the character’s reason for doing so or if it is intentional or not; they are still unreliable narrators.

Why bother using such a character as a mouthpiece?  After all, technically, the writer can simply misrepresent facts in the text on his/her own.  There is a problem with that though.  Readers consider words from the author, such as text that is not attributed to the viewpoint of a particular character, as being, in essence, the word of God, true facts.  If you, the author, as the voice of God, lie about the truth of any situation you describe, you build mistrust with your readers directly and they begin to question the entire narrative that you are weaving.  By putting the source of distrust into a character’s viewpoint, you avoid that intrinsic mistrust with the fictional world as a whole.  Any person can lie for whatever reason; the gods don’t.

Now, at first thought, you still might shy away from the concept of unreliable narrators.  If your Point of View character is your protagonist, for instance, and you’ve established her as scrupulously honest, you might feel it’s a breach of character to interject any kind of mistruth to their tale.  However, remember that just because someone always tells the truth doesn’t mean they always speak the absolute facts.  Maybe they don’t know all of the facts and thus have to make conjectures.  Maybe they didn’t see the whole situation and thus misrepresent it unwittingly.  Maybe their other emotions and experiences color their perceptions, turning the facts somewhat into their own personal truth.  Or maybe you just want to have a point-of-view character who is far from honest.

Even if you don’t intend to have a traditional unreliable narrator, you can still take elements of this trope to interject some uncertainty and drama into a story.  If you go with a first-person perspective or a limited third-person viewpoint, there is always room for uncertainty as the information and viewpoints that you use to transmit the story to the reader is limited.  The viewpoint characters probably don’t know everything or perceive every event, so their recollection is inherently skewed.  You can use that to your advantage to turn what the character (and reader) thought was fact into fiction.

In the end, consider using an unreliable narrator, in any permutation, from time to time.  They can add a dash of uncertainty and drama into any literary concoction!

Until next time, good reading, good writing, and good luck!

Monday Musings: Caught in a Creative Cyclone a.k.a. An Overly Creative Mind

There is such a thing as too much creativity or, perhaps it would be better said, too little constraint for creativity.  Yes, good readers, it’s true!  Unconstrained, rampant creativity can lead to the exact opposite of creativity’s intention (to create), leading to a perpetual state of whirling ideas and useless pontification.  Worse, sometimes unconstrained creativity leads to a giant mess of a creation, so wrapped up in its wild, disparate parts that it scarce resembles anything cohesive.

I suppose I’ve always known this, but I received a lesson on this yesterday.  I am an avid pen-and-paper gamer, good old school roleplayer for decades now (a subject that will come up sometime soon, be assured!), and I was tasked with coming up with a new character for a small Pathfinder game.

“Okay,” I told the gamemaster (the person referring the game and telling the story for the uninitiated), “what are my parameters?”

“Whatever you’d like to play, as long as it works with the other player,” he replied.

“Wow, cool, this is a great chance to try out some of the more unusual things out there!  Thanks!”

So I went out into the world with a blank check.  Couple that with a fellow player with few quibbles with what I wanted to play and I could do almost anything.  Any kind of character could be my creation.  Therein lied the problem.

Unconstrained, my creative mind ran wild.  I had hundreds of ideas, intriguing notions I had stored up from years of gaming, and they all flooded in at once.  That led to hours of consternation, trying to sort so many rapidly evolving ideas and notions, half-baked character concepts all tangling up into a messy ball of unrecognizable dough.  I was being tripped up by my own creativity, having set no bounds for myself or having none set for me.

You can see this same effect in other creative ventures.  A writer with no editors or beta readers can spit out lurching masses of pages, tangled up with too many characters, subplots, and half-baked ideas to form a solid narrative.  A renowned filmmaker, in much the same way, might be let go creatively with no studio or editorial oversight and steer a beloved cinematic universe down an erratic and incomprehensible path (NO I’M NOT STILL MAD ABOUT PHANTOM MENACE, THANK YOU FOR ASKING!).  All creative people need filters, be they self-imposed or, better yet, imposed by others outside of the direct creative process, lest our imaginations all run off the rails.

Until next time, good luck, good reading, and good writing!

Starving Review: The Devils That Have Come To Stay by Pamela diFrancesco

The Devils That Have Come To Stay by Pamela diFrancesco (Amazon, Goodreads)

As I do my regular sort of the pantry, I always try to place literary foods together by type.  It’s often good to know what I’m going to eat before I put it into my mouth, after all!  Once in a while, though, I find something new.  Well, maybe not new precisely, but new to me.  Today, we have one of those things: an acid Western.  It’s a genre I’ve never heard of so, needless to say, I was anxious to dig in and find out about it!

Before we get to nitty-gritty, let’s recount the Starving Reviewer’s creed:

I attempt to rate every book from the perspective of a fan of the genre
I attempt to make every review as spoiler-free as possible.

So it may sound strange, but at the end of this treat, I don’t have much more of an idea of what separates an acid Western from any of a number of other Westerns I have read.  However, that does not mean that Devils is a bad book, or even an average book.  Oh no, this slice of literary pie is truly wonderful.  Yes, the cat’s out of the bag early this time, but let’s give the chef her due and touch on why it is such a tasty treat.

Devils drips, no, gushes with style.  Every scene fits the dramatic whole and pushes forward the central themes of the book and does so in a semi-mystical trance, leaving the reader to decide what is truth and what is illusion along with the nameless protagonist.  Told through journals and letters, the book provides a razor focus on the travels of our protagonist who, despite the lack of a name, lacks not at all in the characterization department.

In fact, one could argue the lack of names for the protagonist and several other major recurring characters lends more to their characters than if they had them.  Their nameless quality cuts through preconception and lets each stand in a certain archetypical fashion, while each retains strangely distinct qualities, something often lost in books with strong archetypes as characters.

The overall tone is dark and driving, focusing greatly on the evils that men do.  It doesn’t shy away from anything and so it may dip into being too dark or horrific for some tender-stomached readers.  However, Devils is never lurid or exploitative; its gore and terror are, despite the mysticism that roils off the page, far too grounded in reality to be such.  Unlike some chefs, diFrancesco handles it with aplomb, dishing out the necessary horror without overfilling to the point of ridiculousness.

The plot is perfect.  The pacing is constant, ebbing and flowing naturally like a country stream, but never abating.  As I said above, ever scene fits into the larger puzzle and, by the end, the reader will wind up satisfied by the conclusion and yet filled with the inevitable sense of fate, as if it could have ended no other way.  It was a meal I couldn’t put down until I had finished.

So, fellow literary foodies, while I still do not know what an acid Western is, The Devils That Have Come To Stay is a fantastic literary feast, filled with dark images, creeping horrors, and flavored with the timeless spices of the American West.  If you like Westerns or not, I could consider this a must-read volume, only to be strayed from if you don’t have a strong stomach.

FINAL VERDICT: ***** (A fantastic literary feast, filled with dark images, creeping horrors, and flavored with the timeless spices of the American West!)

General News: Starving Review Requests Closed Once More!

The title says it all.  Thanks to all of you that gave me new books for the pantry!

As I have gotten another tremendous burden of books backlogged, I am going to have to close down requests for two months to try to cut into that review queue.  So, the next open review request period will be on August 1st to August 3rd!

Your next Starving Review will go up tomorrow.  Until then, good luck, good reading, and good writing!

Writing Is A Bad Habit: There Are Only So Many Stories a.k.a. How Original Can You Be?

You think you have the greatest, most original plot idea ever … until you wind up looking through your bookstore and see it.  There, right there, is a book that seems to be your exact same concept!  Someone beat you to the punch and so there goes a great idea!  Or does it?

They say there are only seven core plots in the world and that’s pretty much right.  No one has a problem with that.  It is even said there are only so many stories ever and that even makes a certain degree of sense.  When you have billions of people in history all being creative, there’s bound to be convergent thoughts that lead to similar plotlines and story ideas.  That doesn’t mean you should give up or simply throw away anything that seems similar to previously told stories.

The trick about writing is not always coming up with a unique idea (there are few, if any, of those left), it is how you tell the story itself.  No one tells a story in the same way and no two characters are totally identical.  You can take a plot that may be identical in its key points to another story, then change it all up by implanting different characters, different styles, and different dramatic beats.  New themes, new ideas, and your own unique perspective can radically alter a tale.

All the same, if you do find that you’re looking at a mirror image of a book on the shelves, it might not hurt to compare them.  The last thing you want is to wind up on that one-in-a-million chance that you running on such a convergent set of thoughts that it really seems like you *are* copying the other work!

In the end, you can take any plot and apply your own unique style and outlook to make it your own.  Until next time, good luck, good reading, and good writing!

Trope of the Week: Snark Master

jbgarner58:

Trope of the Week time! Time to bring on the snarkers!

Originally posted on break the system:

Cynical to the bone, this character loves to make his opinion known in the snarkiest way possible. You may find him making sharp one-liners or exchanging some sassy dialog, but chances are that whatever he’s doing, he’s saying something funny with a hint of mean.

Why this is bad: Snarky characters aren’t bad. There’s a reason people love them, and TV Tropes has a huge list of snark-related tropes. We love our Tony Starks, Gregory Houses, and Artemis Fowls. However, the issues come when you overdo this. Too much of a good thing, right? I think this is most notable in the most recent Marvel movie, Age of Ultron. I love Tony Stark, but his snark was over the top to the point that it defused tense scenes and often came off as awkward or misplaced. While sometimes this can be used to reveal something about the character…

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Monday Musings: You Should Play Video Games!

You should play video games, especially if you’re in a creative profession or indulge in creative past times!

Why would I say that?  Aren’t games just, well, games?

Not so much anymore.  You could argue that video games haven’t been just games for sometime, especially since the first true RPGs were created.  It comes down to the simple fact that video games have moved forward from simple games to deep interactive entertainment.

Let me elaborate.  Yes, many games are still, at their heart, games.  Diversions for pure entertainment, but even that makes them far closer to something like popcorn genre books and can aspire to be just as good.  More and more video games in the modern era go deeper than that, as they reach towards something more: true interactive storytelling.

It’s hard to discount the joy of interactive storytelling.  If you’ve ever say around a campfire making up stories with friends or sat at a pen-and-paper roleplaying table with a gaming group, you already know this.  The best video games add on to this with immersive graphics and sound design, creating a truly wonderful interactive entertainment experience.

Will video games replace books and film?  No, never.  However, they will rapidly become just as important as those other forms of media.  Video games can tell stories in completely different ways than a book or a film.  Each form of media have their strengths and weaknesses and each form has its place in our media consumption.

So what this means is that, if you don’t currently do so, you should pay attention to video games and try to play some of the best!

Until next time, good reading, good writing, and good luck!

General News: Starving Review Request Open From 6-1 to 6-3

A quick announcement!  Starving Review requests are open once more, from now until the 3rd.  Get them in while you can!

Starving Review: Ben Brown’s Flying Machine by Michael Thorp

Ben Brown’s Flying Machine by Michael Thorp (Amazon, Goodreads)

Some literary delights promise it all!  Action, adventure, spirituality, deep characterization, coming-of-age, science fiction, this week’s meal seeks to deliver all of that and more to its readers.  It’s a tall order for any book to deliver on, but it’s far from impossible!  Let us break out the forks and knives to cut into this layer cake of story and find out!

Before we cut in, let’s recite the Starving Review creed:

I attempt to rate every book from the perspective of a fan of the genre
I attempt to make every review as spoiler-free as possible.

There is some good, quality cooking here so, before I pull out the really sharp knives, let’s delve into these positive flavors first.  We really have to look at Ben Brown as three distinct pieces, because it honestly feels like three different books (more on this below).  If you look at each of these segments, they seem to be solid pieces on their own.  The first segment has a wonderful, science fiction/fairy tale feel.  The second segment makes for an interesting, if badly paced, alien adventure akin to Stargate, and the last segment is a surprisingly stark take on alien invasions, with a large dollop of Independence Day.

Though very, very roughly sketched-out, there’s nothing wrong with the characterization of the story.  However, that being said, there’s not much done right, as all the characters feel very flat.  We learn little about any of them, even the titular Ben Brown himself, outside of a few choice bits of characterization.  Yes, what is shown to us is flavorful, but there is not much substance to the tastes.  I believe Mr. Thorp’s intent is to let the character’s actions speak entirely for them, offering little internal insights to even the PoV characters, and that is admirable.  However, there isn’t enough of it in such a short work to rely on that, especially with the expanse of scope and the rapid shifts of setting and tone.

Let’s tackle the biggest issue: the layer cake set-up of the plot.  There are three distinct layers of this cake, three distinct plot sections.  Each one has a substantial shift in tone, pacing, and plot.  Though they all follow one after the other to make the final recipe, each layer really feels like it should have been its own novel.  Again, this is a fairly short work, so each separate leg of the overall adventure feels extremely rushed and hard to follow because of that horrible pacing.

What complicates this even more is the chef’s decision to add extra spice to some parts of the story while skimping on others.  There are some dense chunks of technical exposition in places, or intense focus on a character’s specific actions in a routine or technical section, while the creamy, flavorful bits of character development and, especially, world building in the later sections is left sparse and thin.  For a treat intended for young adults, focusing vital scenes on the technical jargon and extensive use of acronyms and specific terms, even if they are real-world ones, instead of the characters, world building, and action do not help.

The last critical issue I found in the recipe is the problematic foreshadowing.  There are elements that come up that literally are smacked into the reader’s face.  Sudden reveals, vital plot points that come up only in hindsight, and the like leave for jarring transitions and head-scratching moments.  Some of these are very scantly foreshadowed.  Most don’t even have a hint of flavor in the mix before they come out in the recipe.  It’s all right, certainly, to have some secrets to reveal.  The problem is that if there is no hint at all, no foreshadowing, not even a hint of a reveal to come, especially when it is something the PoV character knows all about ahead of time, it makes the entire situation very jarring on the readers, stretching the bounds of disbelief to the snapping point.

So, to put it all together, Ben Brown’s Flying Machine promises a vast variety of flavors and delivers, but only in very small portions with jarring changes at every turn.  There is some real promise in this book, but it really needs a few more revisions and, hopefully, a split into three books, with each major story section properly expanded to do them justice.

FINAL VERDICT: ** (A vast variety of flavors, but only in very small portions with jarring, puzzling changes at every turn!)

Writing Is A Bad Habit: One of Many! a.k.a. Writing Story Arcs In A Series

Book series are the norm for today’s writing culture as opposed to the exception, much like it is in the gaming and film world.  The reading public overall seems to crave long-term stories as opposed to single flashes these days, so we as authors are often eager to feed that craving.  It helps, as well, that writing in a favorite series can be like snuggling down in a warm, cozy bed, bringing with it a sense of familiarity and ease that makes our work that much easier.  Of course, like any other writing methodology, series writing has its own needs and its own pitfalls.  Today, I want to talk about a particular pitfall that I have run into both as a writer and as a reader: balancing the story arc of a single volume versus the story arc of the whole series.

As with most literary problems, this one seems a simple thing on the surface.  Obviously, it is important for each volume of a series to have a complete story arc that is properly explored while also advancing the overall arc of the series.  The problem comes most often in the implementation of those ideas.  From my reading experience, the most common issue is when the author leaves the story of any one volume rather anemic, instead focusing on the overall story of the series.  In essence, the author turns the series of novels into one giant serial novel.

What’s the difference, you might be asking?  Serials are one continual story, broken into chapters; series are a series of individual stories all with a common theme.  To be honest, most modern book series include dashes of both, leaning towards traditional series, but often with an underlying serial plotline as well.  That being said, there is absolutely nothing wrong with writing a ‘series’ as a serial, as long as you are clear about that upfront.

However, one vital thing to consider in this ‘serial vs. series’ debate is the length not only of each book but the overall series.  Think of it like this: the longer each book, the greater the need for self-contained story arcs, thus the greater likelihood you need to balance more towards series writing.  Not many readers want to read three hundred pages and have no dramatic pay-off and no real resolutions!  However, if each installment is, let’s say, only a hundred pages, you could easily string together a six-installment serial or more.  A reader will understandably expect more of a pay-off as your works grow longer.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have long-term series storylines!  Naturally, the core concepts of character arcs and continuity call for it.  There are quite a few huge, famous book series with only the loosest of continuities and overall story arcs (The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Mack Bolan, The Destroyer, among others), but many modern readers have come to expect continuity in modern books.  Again, this goes along with trends in both film, comics, gaming, and other related creative arts.

What I suppose this comes down to is this: for each volume in your book series, ensure there are some dramatic pay-offs and resolved story arcs, even if you do go full serial or full series.  The more you trend towards series, the more self-contained each book should be, the more serial, the more chapterish each book should feel.  Whichever you decide to do, be clear about it in describing and marketing your book and then stick to it!

Did you find what you read helpful?  Want to see more and expanded content in the future?  Support me through my Patreon or by just buying my books!

Until next time, good reading, good writing, and good luck!