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I used to work at a publishing company that did a speculative fiction magazine (because we weren't just about horror or science fiction or fantasy) and one of the tasks which fell on my plate was reading the mail. The editor wandered by my desk one afternoon and asked me what I was doing. "Reading," I said.
"Why?" he responded.
I indicated the manuscript in front of me. "Because they sent it in?" Figured this was one of those trick questions.
He picked it up, skimmed the first page and handed it back to me. "Ditch it," he said. And, seeing my confusion, laid it out for me. "You are looking for an excuse to toss these. Spelling, a phrase that rings wrong, plot material that you've seen before, even if they misspell my name or don't have the right information at the top of the page. Any reason you can think of not to turn the first page is a good enough reason."
"But how will I know if it is any good?" I asked.
"It won't be." He indicated the pile of eighty or so story manuscripts on the desk. "This is the mail from today. There will be another stack just like it tomorrow. Trust me. You can read them today if you like, but by next week, you'll be looking for excuses. The only stories I want you to bump up to me are the ones that you can't stop reading."
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Next time you are in the bookstore pick up Stephen King's Bag of Bones. Read the first chapter. Notice what he does. King sucks you into Mike Noonan's pain -- his despair at the loss of his wife. You get hints at the fragility of his current existence as well as the tragic nature of his wife's death. You feel for this guy and you're all wrapped up in his life by the end of those fifteen pages. And then he reaches under the bed...
This is the hook. This is what gets the reader's attention. In short stories you get a line. Novels have a little more breathing space. But not much.
When I'm in line at the grocery store, I check out the rack of paperbacks that are begging for my attention. I go through them one by one, reading the first page, seeing if I can stop at the bottom of the page, seeing if my interest is pulled towards the rest of the chapter. It doesn't matter if the genre is something that I'm interested in; these books are placed to be impulse buys. Of all the books in the supermarket these should be the ones that I glance at and, having done so, find myself wanting more.
They never do. The fat cats have forgotten about the hook. We can't. We don't have the luxury of name recognition. We have to lay a trap for the readers and hook them hard.
Posted by Teppo at 03:52 PM | Comments (0)
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If you look at the table of contents of a Hardy Boys book -- or a Nancy Drew mystery, the process is the same -- you'll notice that the story is broken down into a series of succinctly titled chapters. "Frank and Joe Find a Clue." "Chet Falls in a Hole." "The Mystery Man Revealed." Each one is a swift summation of what you'll find in that chapter.
This is called "The Hardy Boys Outline." Each chapter has its purpose, clearly defined and spelled out on the first page of the section, and, if you read down the list of chapter headings, you will have a basic idea of the course of the story. We don't need a detailed plot. If you've got character sketches and the trailer, then the ideas are percolating in your head. This is just a framework to hang them all on, a roadmap by which to orient yourself. The Hardy Boys Outline helps you see what is next so that you never get lost.
I use a sheet of butcher paper that is three or four feet long -- big enough to be readable from across the room -- and I give myself 25 chapters. If the book is going to be 50,000 words, then each chapter is 2,000 words long. 100,000 word novel means chapters are 4,000 a piece. You can break them up later, but for the time being, give yourself 25 divisions.
Start at the top. Keep it short. Write legibly. Bang them out. If you get stuck, use "SEX" as the contents of a chapter. You don't have to advance the plot during that chapter -- no one ever stops reading because there is sex on the page -- and it keeps you moving. Forward momentum is important.
And, suddenly, you've got a plot. A start, middle, and end in easily digestible segments.
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The naming of the Hardy Boys Outline falls to Thomas J. Lindell who, while he would qualify himself as a "failed writer," still has a good idea or two in his head. You just have to wait patiently sometimes for them to fall out.
Posted by Teppo at 03:46 PM | Comments (2)
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There are a couple of musical pieces that I -- and the rest of the movie industry -- find extremely useful. "O Fortuna" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and Peter Gabriel's instrumental version of "The Rhythm of the Heat." You know them, even if you can't place them right now, you'd know them if you heard them. They crop up at least once a season attached to a movie trailer. And they're there because they work.
You've got about two minutes to seduce your audience with the trailer. Modern Hollywood theory seems to cater to the idea that a movie's plot must be completely divulged during these two minutes, and that isn't a seduction as much as it is just a poorly designed info dump. It should be a series of images and ideas which catch your interest. It's a come-on, a hint of what you will find on the screen.
As for the book in progress, we've barely started. You may have a bare bones idea of what you want to accomplish in your novel, maybe even a half page of scribbled notes. But you don't know what happens at every point.
Which is the perfect time to build the movie trailer.
"O Fortuna" and "The Rhythm of the Heat" work because they give you a variety of options with pacing. They start slow, quiet strains which allow you the opportunity to craft setting and establishing shots. They grow in intensity until they are thunderous, filling the theater with their noise. You finish with a montage of images, quick cuts of impressions, split seconds of ideas or thoughts which feel like they belong in your book.
They are best written quickly, listening to music like this if possible. You don't have to use everything that you find in the trailer, but you do have to get something exciting on the page. You do have to throw up an interesting two minutes because if it doesn't thrill the audience then what is going to bring them to your work?
Or, more importantly, how are you going to sustain any enthusiam for writing it?
Posted by Teppo at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
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When I was younger, I wanted to be Steve. Not a specific Steve, just a Steve. It seemed a much cooler name than the one that I have, and, in my dreams, I was Steve. Too many years of pulp novels infected my youth and my heroes were always steely-eyed with unshaven jaws chiseled out of stone. They always managed to have their shirts torn off and were never deterred by pain. You know, "Steve."
"Mark" was always the side-kick, the short guy with glasses who knew how to do bypass complex security systems with eighteen keystrokes and could decipher ancient hieroglyphs in about fifteen minutes. They always had hair that never behaved and perpetually had at least one button that never quite stayed clasped. They moped while Steve got the girl.
Pulp heroes always have monosyllabic names, filled with hard consonants which cause the villains to spray spittle as they chew on their nemesis' name. John Carter. Dirk Pitt. Nick Fury. Doc Savage. John McClane. Clark Kent. Lamont Cranston.
Ah, that last one is an alias. See? No one would suspect that he was The Shadow. Not with a name like that.
This is how a life of pulp novels will leave its mark on a young psyche. I'm okay with my Christian name now, ever since I discovered that Mark is a variation of Mars, God of War, while Steve can be traced back to some poor bastard of a first century martyr who was stoned to death. I've never asked my parents why they chose Mark, figuring that any ulterior motive on their part has passed its expiration date by now and I'm making my own destiny with the name. And I'm not about to have a mid-life crisis and join the armed forces to realize the inherent violence of my namesake.
Our characters, however, can be molded by their names. We don't have to wait twenty years for them to grow into the history of their nomens; we get to build that legacy into them the instant we cull them from the herd. Names are important. You're going to be spending a lot of time with these people running around your head; you may even talk to them in the bathroom when you think no one else is around.
"A" names are red shirts for me. I find myself defaulting to "Arthur" when I'm on the spot for a name. Why I don't go with "Adam" I'm not sure. It may be too obvious. Characters with "A" names don't last long. My wife teaches junior high school and I hear her and her fellow teachers discussing names. There are certain names which they all agree would be horrible to name their children. They have up to a hundred kids that they teach every year, and time and again they've discovered that kids with specific names just never add up to much. Too many bad seeds by the same name can spoil it forever.
You can get about a hundred hits on Google with "baby names" and most of them use the same data. They aren't worth much of your time. This random name generator uses census data as its database. You can adjust the obscurity level of the choices and, with the flip of a button, can get a list of a hundred names. It is certainly easier than paging through the phone book. And more exotic.
Go. Find names for your characters. Find your new pseudonym. I'll be right behind you.
Posted by Teppo at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)
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National Novel Writing Month is the brainchild of Chris Baty. It says something about the explosive nature of this concept that "National" is a misnomer now. Several years ago, Mr. Baty conned several of his friends into attempting to write a novel. Aspiring scribes dream (or have nightmares) about the first book and it is one of those landmarks that writers have to confront. Baty's idea was to quit waiting for it to happen on its own. Get the damn thing on paper, stick it in a drawer, and say, "Fine. Got that out of the way."
Baty and Company decided to give themselves a month to pour everything onto the page. 50,000 words was the goal -- a short novel, but a novel nonetheless. Quality wasn't an issue. Finishing was the only goal. They picked November as the thirty days of doom and got down to business. And when they were done, some had finished, some had flamed out, and some wished they had spent the thirty days waxing their car instead. But most of them came back for more a year later.
Year two saw 128 participants, and last year the number of eager flagellants numbered more than five thousand world-wide. The rules are simple: 50,000 words, thirty days, any word counts, and you can't start before the first of the month.
Fine. But the rules don't say anything about prep time. I'm starting now. Until the first of November, I'm going to be building the framework. I'm going to knock the characters out of the rough blocks; I'm going to build the movie trailer; I'm going to do the Hardy Boys Outline; I'm going to try out several hundred names until I find the right ones; I'm going to read Vogue magazine.
I've got the fall fashion issue on my desk right now. Eight hundred pages of the clothes no one can afford for the fall and winter seasons. I'm going shopping. The characters are going to have to wear something.
Men, let's be honest, wear boots and shoes. Women wear slingbacks, mules, flats, spike heels, boots, slides, mary janes, clogs, ankle boots (yes, I know, but they're not the same), flats, loafers and oxfords. Guys? Women like it when you know the difference.
Posted by Teppo at 01:47 PM | Comments (0)
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We assemble every week in the basement of the local church or pub and we sit together in a ragged circle. We're here to make confessions. Hello, my name is Mark. I write.
I'm here because I've got a problem with the writing process. It's not fatal, my problem, but it certainly distracts from the act of creation. Modern psychology likes to reductio ad absurdum with the platitude that "recognizing the problem is halfway to a solution," and I'm all for clearing out the channels. The process and I have become good friends over the years; I did five drafts on my second book, three of which were complete -- and wildly different -- versions of the story. That's not a fact that I'm terribly proud of, and one that certainly lies there and stares at me from time to time, but it has certainly made me much more comfortable with the idea of starting.
It's fall and there are two things I look forward to as the year dies: rain and NaNoWriMo. Rain means you can stop making excuses about the yard work you're not doing and allows you to spend hours squatting next to the water heater with a keyboard on your lap. NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month -- is a wild excuse to undertake the nearly impossible: write a novel during the month of November. While most people take six months to more than a year to write a book, NaNoWriMo expects you to get off your ass now. For us process-devotees, this is a sweet deal.
This column is a window. I am a monkey and there is a typewriter in the cage with me. I've also got a sharp knife. Gather 'round, we're going to dissect the process. We'll start with this deep-end dive of the novel in a month. And we'll see just how much life this book can have after its accelerated birth. Along the way, we'll stop off at those points which catch our eye and put the knife to them as well.
I'm calling this SYMBOLIC: Adventures in Text. Whether you traffic in film, music, comics, or art at some point you bump into text. You have to deal with symbols on the page or the screen. How does it work? What structure -- artificial or genetically wired -- is in place that allows you to understand me when I say, "There is a purple cow standing next to the red barn." What causes you to argue with me that there is no such thing as a purple cow? How do the symbols work? And, more obsessively, how much of their power have we forgotten?
Posted by Teppo at 10:22 PM
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