So, where was I? Right! Chapter 9.
Chapter 9 was giving me some trouble. We’re already about 8 pages into the story. We’ve met two of our main characters and established a premise and shown a bit of the world. Time to get into the guts of the story and have some fun. But I still have to take care of some business, namely, getting us to a stable plot point form where to progress. Remember, our hero,Major To has traveled through time and is in a world that looks similar tot he one he left but just enough is different to throw him off. he’s got to get his legs about him before we can just throw him into the wilderness again. This is the point of chapter 9 and at first, chapter 10 as well. That was my problem. I had given myself way too much space to do what is essentially the novel-equivalent of an establishing shot. Where is Tom living and how is he coping? That doesn’t need 5000 words. In my attempt to fill up the alloted space, i was spinign out a web of cliches. Tom gets a cell phone! Tom meets his wacky gay neighbors! Tom has an epiphane about the tragic nature of the future… Well, so what? That’s not the point. Noone wants to see Major Tom sit in his livign room, trying to figure out how to order a pizza with his brand new iPhone.
So, I took the parts of chapter 9 that worked and the parts of chapter 10 that worked and smooshed them together (well, edited them together).
This seems like a trivial thing but it’s not. I have the whole rest of the book to show how Tom is or is not adapting to this crazy wacky futuristic world in which he finds himself. no need to dump it all out on the table at once. Our goal is, whenever possible, to do at least two things at once. We can both move the plot forward and establish that Tom finds this world confusing and strange. Idelaly, we would do more than just those two things but for th epurpose of our illustattion, the take-home lesson is this: Don’t waste your reader’s time. If you, the writer are bored by the idea of doing that scene, skip it. If it doesn’t interest you, it sure as hell isn’t going to interrest your reader, who will never know it’s missing. And if it turns out later you need to add that scene back in, well, that’s what the second draft is for.
This cleared the way to jump into the complication, or Act 2, where things start to get really interesting.
My, how the recruitment standards for the Plumbers have fallen. Almost 40 years on and you fuckers still can’t figure out how to tap a phone* right but at least G. Gordon Liddy never dressed up like a fake pimp to pull a Halloween trick and then demand it be taken as serious journalism.
And this is how you dingbats are planning to build an empire? Hiring Young Republicans to shit themselves in a fit of public embarrassment as part of some ill-conceived plot to undermine the Democrats? The Democrats? All you have to do is ask politely and they’ll undermine themselves. Instead, you find some eager young fascist willing to pull some old-school Nickelodeon prank and expect that to send a message of fear and loathing into the hearts of your enemies. Instead, we’re all pointing and laughing.
This is why America is doomed: Nero set the city of Rome on fire and then blamed it on the Christians, and that was just for a laugh one Saturday night. Meanwhile our would-be emperors are cribbing their grand master plans from Saturday Night Live skits. We’ll just skip the Glorious Imperium stage, thanks, go straight to the part where the descendants of madmen squat in the ruins of a once-upon-a-time beacon of hope and enlightenment.
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* Now they’re claiming they weren’t trying to tap senator Landrieu’s phone, just disconnect it. Because sabotage is so much better than unlawful surveillance.
It doesn’t help our claims that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aren’t modern-day Crusades when the military is using firearms inscribed with Bible verses. In the great and infinite list of bad ideas, this one is pretty much number 2 (number 1: don’t start land wars in Asia).
Why don’t we just send clerics and wizards over there and be done with it.
So, the other day I had a story-related epiphany–
Wait. Let’s back up a sec, so I can make sure we’re all on the same page story mechanics-wise.
When writing (or just telling) a story, it’s important to now what the nature of the conflict at the heart of that story is about. Some of you may recall the conflict types discussed in English lit classes but for those who don’t, a quick refresher. All story is conflict. Period. Nice happy tales about people getting along, communicating clearly and always telling the honest truth and never hurting anyone’s feelings are boring.[1] Drama comes form conflict. There are a few archetypal conflicts:
Man vs. Man
Man vs. Nature
Man vs. Society
A few examples:
Man vs. Man: Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth vs. Darcy, over their true feelings. Man vs. Nature: any disaster movie, ever. Something bad happens (tornado, volcano, killer fog, alien invasion, etc.) and our characters must overcome the world to save their asses. Man vs. Society: 1984. Winston feels compelled, by his own humanity, to rebel against an arbitrary and repressive society that regards him merely as a useful tool. This arbitrary society at various points in the story manifest in the form of characters, namely O’Brian, who is it’s mouth piece and Julia, who is likewise used to seduce him into thought crime.
So. The epiphany: I had the wrong conflict in mind.
I kept thinking that The Man From Planet X was a Man vs. Man conflict, namely it would all resolve down, after much running about doing cool, dramatic bits, two Tom and his idealism vs. Our villain, Victor Malenfant, and his cynicism.[2] But, ahah! It doesn’t. I was trying to figure out why I couldn’t break act 4 into a satisfactory conclusion and it wasn’t working, because I was trying to contrive a way for our villain to be responsible for all the other problems that our protagonists encounter. That felt hollow and didn’t ring true but I couldn’t figure out why. Sure, on the most obvious level, having one man be responsible for everything wrong with the world is unrealistic. But beyond that, it’s a cop out. It makes our villain a scapegoat. You kill him and then the world is fixed because all the bad stuff goes away. Except, it doesn’t. The real world doesn’t work like that and neither does this particular fictional world. Malenfant is a villain, sure, but he’s not a magical font of concentrated evil. He’s not Voldemort or Sauron.[3] He’s just this guy, you know?
Which made me realize that the conflict of my story is not Man vs. Man but Man vs. Nature. Tom and our hero protagonists are trying to figure out why the world is so screwed up and how they can unscrew it. Malenfant is not our antagonist, he’s a villain protagonist. He’s trying to take advantage of the fact that the world is screwed up for personal gain. This changes the dynamic of the story a lot. Instead of a major climatic battle between the two characters, they instead will circle each other in ever tighter spirals, eventually meeting and realizing that circumstantial evidence has made them think each other is the cause of their problems. This causes the characters to have to reevaluate what they’re trying to accomplish. More conflict! More drama! But it all comes out of the characters making choices based on faulty information, a classic and ever-relatable story hook that goes back forever, at least to Homer.[4]
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1. It’s slightly more complicated than that, but not by much. This is the reason that the Twilight series is riddled with such bad story telling: it’s not that the vampires are lame (though that certainly is a contributing factor)* it’s that there are no real dramatic conflicts in the stories. Everyone likes Bella. She and Edward are in love. The only moments of pseudo tension wrung out of the plots in those books comes when one character picks up the idiot ball and does something to create conflict for no real reason. Edward runs off, without telling Bella why, making her mopey. This is the basic plot impetus for all subsequent drama in New Moon. It’s sudden, unmotivated and once you learn why he left, doesn’t hold up to a moment’s inspection. He did it just because there was no drama and Stephanie Myer had three more books to write.
*The reason the vampires are lame: Stephanie Myer forgot what vampires represent. They’re dark symbols of sexual predation.They aren’t bad boys or cool. They’re rapists and murders who murder you with their mouth rape-y fangs. Worse: they seduce you into letting them kill you slowly, in a manner that is pleasurable for them by convincing you that you deserve to be raped to death. Falling in love with a monster is not a good thing. See; Buffy: the Vampire Slayer for how that kind of self-loathing relationship turns out.
2. This being a science fiction story, these internal conflicts and ideas will be manifested concretely through metaphor. Because that is what fantastical literature is good at: taking abstractions and giving them a concrete form against which to examine yourself. There’s a school of thought that in sci-fi and fantasy stories, all your metaphors should be walking around in the story, given a voice, and that descriptive passages should contain similes only. I find this intriguing and might need to give it some more thought.
3. The problem with both these villains is that they are too big to be believable. While the respective worlds they both inhabit do not become happy magical fun lands when the villains are defeated, way too much of the evil does vanish. The surviving Death Eaters are still mass murdering fuck heads. Same with the Orks of Middle Earth.
4. Homer never has correct information. That’s why his get rich quick schemes never work, like invading Troy to corner the market on doughnuts.
PZ Myers alerts us to the grasping straws of those dimwitted creationist nincompoops, who, having had their ass handed to them by real scientists, have turned their baleful glare on science fiction authors:
Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution. Sagan and Asimov, for example, were prominent evolutionary scientists. Sci-fi arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware!
It’s true.[1] Most Science fiction authors are atheists, or even worse, espouse strange ideas that would make a vicar’s bowls loosen.
Science fiction, by its nature is unorthodox. More than that: it’s heretical. The author is deliberately creating parallel universes, like the one God supposedly made, but with additions or subtractions that no God created (or else we would be living in that universe instead of just writing about it). It’s a deliberate affront to orthodoxy, implying that the world we have is lacking something and the author, a mere mortal, knows what that is and can create it himself. Sci-fi is a hack. It’s a software patch, illegally brewed in some guys basement, and grafted onto the cracked open, proprietary operating system of the world. That’s why it’s so awesome.
The world is bigger and weirder than the narrow view of some dusty old poem about how evil shrimp are and why we should all grow our beards and how the straight and narrow path and not spill our seed. Science fiction is a reflection that the world can and should be different and better and that human minds, creative, inventive and hyped up on sugar and caffeine, can make it so. Sci-fi also points out the glaringly obvious: that God is an evil alien who wants to suck on your soul, or worse doesn’t even exist at all, and is just the mad by-product of some sufficiently advanced alien experiment gone wrong.
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1. Except for Sagan and Asimov being evolutionary scientists. As PZ points out, Sagan was an physicist and Asimov a chemist. But let’s not quibble about facts, that just makes creationists cranky. And you wouldn’t like them when they’re cranky.
To pick up where we left off before being so rudely interrupted by the holidays…
Wait, back up for a second. For the curious, here’s a picture of my workspace, from the Ceiling Cat perspective.
Yes, that's a big pink owl on top of my mini. No, I won't tell you why.
This is where I do most, but not all, of my writing. The desk is not always this organized but I’m working on trying to keep my creative space in some shape, to help me work, if not faster, at least more efficiently. Hence the Big Board.
This will get a lot more cluttered, very quickly.
As you can see by the above picture (blurred for your protection[1]) I’m organizing my chapters and scenes using the tried and true note card method.
Each card has a brief scribble noting what should happen in that chapter. The 8 cards in the top left hand corner are the completed chapters while the single card just below those is chapter 9, where I am (and feel as if I always have been). The three cards (and attendant sticky note) below Chapter 9 are chapters 10-12. The four cards bellow those are chapters 13-16, which are the beginning of Act 2. As you can see, I’m breaking out the last third of Act 1 right now.
Act 1 is the Set up. That’s where we introduce the bulk of the characters (all the important ones anyway) and set up the drama that will get complicated in act 2, reversed in act 3 and resolved in act 4.[2] The note cards let me shuffle some ideas around before I even start writing the scene, that way I can tell if I even need the scene, or if I can move the action into another chapter. This makes things easier for me to see where I am and what’s going on, rather than just tying to visualize inside me wee little noggin.
Each act of this story is slotted for 12 chapters. Every 4 chapters makes an episode, with each of the 4 chapters as a miniature act. This, chapter 9 is a set up chapter for what gets complicated in chapter 10, reversed in chapter 11 and resolved (kinda sorta) in chapter 12.
And that’s where I am. I’ve been wandering around in chapter 9, trying to figure out what happens here in relation to what went before and the hundred and one strange ideas I have fr what happens next. You can’t se eit on the blurry picture of The Big Board, but the card for chapter 9 says:
Major Tom moves into a bungalow in the Castro and throws a housewarming party. Hijinks ensue.
This is more of a suggestion, or a hook, but it gives me something on which to focus. It’s a nice little set up. Two months have passed since chapter 8. Tom is settling into the 21 C but is having a few issues, such as a mild case of PTSD. But Salome and his gay neighbors are helping him through it and then along comes Alice Atomo, a friend of Salome’s invited to the housewarming party. Oh, and she’s brought her father with her. Who’s a mad scientist. It sounds sort of like a new story is starting, which it should. This chapter introduces the romantic subplot and, if I play my note cards right, a few other things that will get interesting later.
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1. I used the secret Photoshopping skills called “not focusing the camera” to hide the incriminating evidence of my heinous handwriting. It’s blurry not because I’m concerned about people finding out my precious ideas (I do actually want people to read my book) but his post is more about the method I’m using for breaking the story than what the actual story is all about. This clearly is not a secret, as I wouldn’t be writing this if it were.
2. I’m using the modified 4 act structure, based on the the 3 act structure outlined by just about everyone. Most people recognize that act 2 in the 3 act structure is twice as long as act 1 and hinges in the middle on the climax. They dutifully break the act into 2A and 2B. But really it’s 4 acts. So for our purposes, if you read Syd Field or any other story structure guru, when he refers to act 2A, I’m talking about act 2 and when he says Act 2B, I’m talking about act 3. act 5 is right out.[3]
3. Historical anecdote: most plays written before the 19th century had a 5 act structure that was just the same as our 4 act structure but they always added a sort of prologue explaining the set up, called an introduction. You see this in Shakespeare’s plays, especially Romeo and Juliet, where someone comes out and sets the scene for you. By the 19th century, most writers realized this was redundant, as the details of the story could easily let you know where you were and who was doing what, so they dropped the introductory act.
Try not to break this one before Summer starts.
John Scalzi reviews Avatar and makes explicit what we already knew:
Cameron has enough of a track record that even without seeing this film I pretty much know how it will be: Amazing visually and technically, with a story that ranges from barely passable to moderately intriguing, with the weaknesses of the story compensated for by a better than average cast of actors and very well integrated action sequences. That’s pretty much a given at this point.
But what about that story?
The story was serviceable, and serviceable, lest we forget, is actually a positive.
No, a serviceable story is not positive, especially when we consider how much money was spent on this particular film. Cameron could have hired any number of willing screen writers, dialogue masters, sci-fi novelists or monkeys with typewriters to help him make the story as impressive as his visuals. But he didn’t. I’d bet money the idea never even crossed his mind. Because to Cameron and most movie producers, big sci-fi action films don’t need a compelling story. In fact, movie audiences have been trained to not even bother looking for one, and so the stories have become mere plot coupons to carry the audience from one exploding set piece to another without boring them too much. You see this more than most with Avatar, where many of the reviews gloss over the story and spend most of the time talking about the effects. That’s all the movie is really about. The fact that it all hangs on a shallow skeleton of a story is not even mentioned, or if it is, apologized for, as if a complex and engaging story is somehow a sin. “Heavens, let’s not irritate the mouth breathers by making them think too hard about what they’re seeing!”
And of course what they’re seeing is pure racist tripe. It’s the noble savage, wrapped up in a burrito of white guilt/anti-imperialism with a dollop of muddled racial essentialism on top. Or, as Michael Berube summarized it:
…the disabled jarhead goes into the Matrix, dances with wolves, falls in love with the princess, and (as Janet says) learns to paint with all the colors of the wind. And people are complaining that they’ve seen this movie before? Good grief, people, can’t you see that you’re getting at least five or six movies for the price of one? I mean, you’ve even got some Antz in there, you’ve got Vasquez from Aliens reunited with Sigourney Weaver (hey, and some guys from the Company, too!), and you’ve got a bunch of Ursula LeGuin narratives incorporated by implication. The visuals really are stunning, and how great is it that they actually called the mineral ”unobtainium”? It’s like calling it “macguffinite ore.”
But at least it looks pretty. (And yes, I’m “over”thinking it).
I realize I’m pissing into the wind in demanding better stories for my money.* The market for such a thing is against me. Audiences don’t demand better stories, and so directors and producers don’t make them. And until they do, we will see only thinner and thinner spectacle. Bread and circuses, chariot races around gladiators stabbing bears, noble savage myths about Thundersmurfs. It’s the same shit, warmed over again.
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* $10 13 for a 3D-induced headache is not my idea of a good time. Maybe I’m getting old and cranky, and will soon start muttering about children and lawns, but I refuse to pay money for the privilege of minor head trauma. If James Cameron wants to beat me up, fine, but I won’t let him mug me while he’s at it.
A long, long time ago, back when I was actually writing things on this blog, instead of just posting random cat pictures and promising to write things on this blog, I was working on a novel. This was so far back in the danky, drippy mists of time, even before the great Nanowrimo fiasco.[1] So, September, October, even. I had thrown out a few random links to news items and bits of weirdness that were jangling around in my head and generally being sticky with ideas for the novel-in-progress, refereed to cryptically on twitter as Novel # 3.
Well. Now that Nanowrimo is safely behind us, smoldering in the distance,[2] I can get back to focusing my short attention span on the proper novel that, truth be told, I’ve been fiddling with off and on since May. The fiddling is done, dear reader(s). The twangy Philip-Glassian warm up music has given way to a full blown orchestra (if John Williams directed an opera by The Ventures), harrumphing and blaring away in my brain. And it’s a doozy. And I will lay all its piece sout for you here, as they stand, partially to document the creative process I’ve developed since the previosu novel, but also as a self-evaluation tool, to see if any of the funny, silly, sticky bits that I think are so wonderful aren’t in fact total shit when I try to explain them to someone else.
Novel # 3’s proper title is: The Man From Planet X. I’m borrowing the title from a little-known sci-fi movie from 1951, about a visitor to Earth from a rogue planet who is mistaken by the military for a threat when in fact, he’s jus a curious visitor who looks funny. And so they kill him. The movie offers an atypical criticism of the cold war and red-baiting era, somethig most of the sci-fi movies of the period address in purly jingoistic terms. Well-scrubbed white American men beat the ever-loving shit out of those skinny, weird looking Martians, who all look alike and want to steal our women folk, whose sole purpose in the film is to scream while wearing a bra designed by a munitions manufacturer so that an entire generation of American kids grow up associating bullets and breasts in an unhealthy Pavlovian manner that confuses sexual urges with aggression. In this movie, the military is the bad guy, shooting first and asking questions never, to the detriment of humanity in general. Same as it ever was.
My novel actually has nothing at all to do with any of this. I just like the classic B-movie ring to it. No, that’s not true either.
The main character is Major Thomas Jones, USAF, pilot of Freedom 7-II, the last Mercury-era mission.[3] Major Tom launches into orbit in 1963. And disappears. Almost 50 years later, in 2012, he falls out of the sky and lands in Uzbekistan. Due to the fragile political climate of that hollow state, the US military can’t go in after him. So they send in Salome Anaconda Divine, a Biological agent for a futurist NGO called the Geranium Appreciation society (which is sort of like if Boing Boing and Greenpeace merged and were funded by Bono and Richard Branson). Salome gets herself captured by the cannibal warlord who has Major Tom in his castle in the toxic wasteland adjacent tot her Aral Sea. Hijinks ensue. And by Hijinks, I mean the rest of the story. You see, Major Tom doesn’t belong in this world. He’s the first ever documented time traveler. Untethered from causality, he’s fallen through time and space and is free to change the future. But first, he’s got to figure out the world of 21 C and his place in it. Salome is there to help. Complicating matters are a government bureaucracy, militant Transhumanists, a secret society, madmen, monsters and other escapees from various futures that never were.
So, Major Tom is the Man From Planet X. He’s come to visit and see what this world is like and try not to get himself killed in the process. Currently, he’s just met a charismatic Investment banker who decides to be his arch enemy and a stranger who knows who Tom is and where he is really from, eaten sushi for the first time and been offered a job saving the world.
And that’s the story thus far.
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1. Some may say that ‘fiasco’ is rather harsh, considering that the half-assed attempt to write a novel in 30 days is the point of Nanowrimo, but I barely go 8K words into it before the bottom fell out. So, yeah. Not exactly a high point on my own personal commitment scale. I had intended to use it as a short-form look into the creative process, documented on the blog for all the world and posterity to ogle at and be informed, or at least interested. So much for that idea.
2. I’m not really slagging on Nanowrimo. It was great fun, as it always is and is a wonderful exercise to get the creative process moving again. Working on that ill-conceived story gave me the perspective I needed to work out some of the thornier plot issues under which Novel # 3 had stalled. And that really is the point of Nanowrimo. It’s a boot to the butt of the muse.
3. In the real world, Freedom 7-II was canceled, it’s crew (Alan Shepherd) and funding transferred to the new Apollo program. This actually points to a larger part of the world I’m building in the story, and is a cross between a spoiler and an Easter Egg.
This time to Texas, for my brother-in-law’s wedding. Probably won’t have internet access, as we’ll be out on the farm, mostly. If you’re still interested in my holiday book discount, you can still send me an email, I just won’t be able to respond until next week.
