Part III:  Setting and Locale…or where the hell are we?

Any novel exists in time and space and also in some kind of place.  As the writer, your job is to describe that place in such a way as to give the reader a sense of being there, without boring the reader to tears with details that belong in National Geographic.  Or in an atlas.

My current project is called The Farpool.  Much of the story takes place on an oceanic world and involves people who live underwater and don’t look (or act) like you and me.  I find in efforts like this that drawing a map of the place helps me get a feel for this imaginary location and also helps me be consistent with the details.  Here’s a map of this imaginary world, which is called Seome:

 

I originally did this by hand, re-did it in Corel Draw, converted it into a .png file and here’s what it looks like.  I also have done a hand-drawn map of a fictitious coastal town on the Gulf side of Florida, where other action in the story takes places.

But that’s not all. 

Because I am so anal about being prepared, I have something like nearly a hundred pages (originally hand-written…remember The Farpool comes from a story I wrote 30 years ago, so much of this was done when Reagan was president) of details of the setting.  I’ve got notes on language and key words, more detailed maps of sections of the map above, notes on the biology of the Seomish, how they live and love, how they organize themselves, their culture, cuisine, sports, religion, politics, all of it using many of the words I made up in their fictitious language.  In fact, I plan to incorporate some of this detail in a series of Appendices at the end of the main body of the story…there are science fiction readers out there who eat this stuff up. 

Now, am I just slightly nuts to be doing all this?  Do you really have to do all this for a setting?  No, of course not.  If your setting is present-day Earth, circa October 2015, maybe just a few notes will do.  Readers will ‘get’ your setting if it’s like the world they live in.  But that’s my whole point.  My story largely takes place in an imaginary world 6000 light years from here and the people are intelligent fish.  I need enough detail to convince the reader that this is (or could be) a real place and so it has to be internally consistent.

In the world of science fiction, this is called ‘world-building.’ 

How much of all this gets into the story?  Obviously not 100%...it would read like your 9^th grade World Geography book if it did.  The art here is putting enough setting and place background in to convince the reader that this is real…to immerse the reader in an alien place and time and not have him get totally lost.  The operative word here is verisimilitude…resemblance to the truth.  Enough detail to grab the reader and make him suspend disbelief, but not too much, not enough to drag down the story or cause the reader to shut the book (or shutdown the ebook reader) and sigh: I’ll do this another day.  When that happens, you’ve lost for good. 

To belabor an earlier point: your story outline is the foundation of the story.  It should drive everything.  The setting is all the pretty buildings and flowers around the place.  The people live, work and play among all the pretty buildings and obviously react to them.  You, the storyteller, are a juggler.  You sit on a three-legged stool (outline, people, place) and juggle the details like a juggler handles balls (or chainsaws or whatever…it’s a metaphor, okay?).  

In the next post, I’ll provide a chapter excerpt from The Farpool and deconstruct what I did and why.  Nuts and bolts…that’s what I’m all about in these posts.  Like Geppetto, the shopkeeper, that’s me.  (Look it up).

See you next week.

Phil B.

Part II: The People in Your Novel

Well, now that we’ve got a detailed outline for our proposed novel, it’s time get to know the people. Some writers call them characters but I like to call them people.  Seems friendlier.  When I think of characters, I think of some of my aunts and uncles… now they are real characters.

List of Major Players

Anyway, one of the first steps I do, as I am developing the Chapter and Scene Details (my detailed outline) is to keep a list of primary people who appear and have roles in the story.  I call this list my List of Major Players.  It is exactly what it sounds like: a list of names and what they do.

A note about names:  Every author has his or her own way of giving his fictional people names.  I found a little trick long ago that helps me.  Don’t look at the phone book, if there are even any such things around anymore.  Look at a map, or an atlas.  A lot of place names, all over the world, are named for actual people.  Take two cities and put the words together.  Massage it a little.  Voila…a unique name.  As for my newest novel, The Farpool, that I just started writing last week, the Seomish had to have names that would be appropriate for a marine people, basically they’re fish, but intelligent.  Sounds travel well underwater and certain sounds travel better than others.  Since I had already developed a proto-language for my fictional marine people (more on that later), my people names have to be consistent with that.  So, one main character (whoops, I used that word again) is named Pakma tek kel’Om’t.    She’s female, and she’s a citizen of a great water-nation or family called Omt’or.  The families are generally called kels.  So Pakma is a citizen of the kel of Omt’or, which I shortened somewhat. 

That’s how I come up with names of extraterrestrials.  Humans…use maps or your next-door neighbors or whatever works. 

Once I have my List of Major Players, I identify those who really are major players, key characters upon whom the story really depends.  These people are in for detailed treatment.

A Brief Biography

That detailed treatment involves doing a reasonably brief biography of each one.  If this sounds like a lot of work, it is.  But trust me: you’ll know these people a lot better after you’ve done this.  Moreover, you’ll have a better chance of being consistent with their backgrounds, personalities and motivations, etc if you do this.  It works.

Each person who gets a detailed treatment gets anywhere from 3or 4 to maybe 10 written pages of the following: a physical description (height, weight, age, face, distinguishing features, etc), a biography that is chronological (John Smith was born in 1 million B.C., second son of Og and Grog and lived for a few years in a cave in France…that sort of thing). 

Personality and Character

After detailing John Smith’s chronological background, including certain key things that happened to John at various points in his life and how he responded and reacted to them, I delve more directly into personality and character.  This is my third section.  I’m no psychologist.  But I can imagine things and I can write.  And I’ve found that going through this exercise gives me pretty detailed insight into why John Smith turned out to be the way he is, why he’s more like Og than Grog and why he often tries to imitate Uncle Klog. 

Incidentally, in preparing for The Farpool and developing the major players, I’ve started to search the Internet for faces that look like I imagine these people look like.  That’s not hard to do with Google now.  I found that putting a face to my imaginary friends adds to the realism with which I can describe them. 

If you’re writing sf or fantasy, developing details of the major people is especially important.  Often you’re dealing with people or creatures or beings who aren’t like you and me at all.  The details of how Tralfamadoreans eat lunch may or may not be germane to the story, but you really ought to have an idea, since that detail will percolate in your head and show up, for good or ill, somewhere in your writing.  Writing teachers say “write what you know.”  Since no one (but Kurt Vonnegut) has been to Tralfamodor, you have to imagine it and create it before you can know it. Details matter and more and more detail helps. Be specific in your details too.

One final word: about jargon.  Decades ago, I wrote an earlier version of the same basic story as The Farpool.  The language, planet details, culture, history, has all been developed.  But one of the mistakes I made and why it was never published (and shouldn’t be) is that I used too much jargon, too many language terms from the fictitious language, in the story.  That made it hard to read…it got in the way of the story. 

The real art to doing this is to give a sense, a flavor, of a fictitious world without bogging down or boring the reader with an anthropological treatise.  Regardless of where your people are from and what they look like, your readers are human.  They’ll relate better to your people if they can understand what they’re saying and understand what motivates them.  Your fictitious people aren’t just humans in funny-looking suits.  They should be consistent with their world and their culture.  But remember who your readers are.  The art is striking a balance.

That’s all for now. Next post will be details of place and setting and how I typically go about developing those critical items, and they are critical in science fiction and fantasy.

See you next week.

Phil B.

“So You Want to Write a Novel?”

Congratulations.  You’re about to embark on a great adventure.  It’ll be a lot of hard work.  It’ll be frustrating.  It’ll seem like it won’t ever end.  But it will also be, in the end, very rewarding.  Like working out at the gym, it feels so good when you stop.

I’m starting my own new novel The Farpool this week.  Over the next few posts, I’ll give everybody a little peek behind the curtains, and explain just what kind of gymnastics I go through in my process of planning, researching, outlining and otherwise getting ready for writing the first draft.  First I’ll cover the story itself (plotting), then the people (characters), then the setting.  I’m not posting a primer on how to write a good story.  Others have done that for centuries.  This is just a peek at the nuts and bolts of how I do it.

Part 1: The Story (Outline)

For me, everything starts with a written idea of a few sentences and a title.  I’ve found that having a good working title seems to encapsulate everything I want to say about this nascent idea.  Write down in as few sentences as possible what the story’s about.  What sticks in your mind?  What lingers in your imagination while you’re taking a shower?  Put it on paper.  It may not be much, but from that seed, bigger things will grow.

My outline drives everything, including the people (what I used to call characters), even details of the setting.  From the few sentences I’ve already written, if this idea continues to hang around and doesn’t go away, I begin a process of elaborating and structuring that takes anywhere from a few days to a few months. 

 

Key Plot Points – General Story Outline

The next step for me is to take these few sentences and expand.  I write a list of things I expect to happen in the story, preferably in sequential order:  1. John does this. 2. Then Mary does this and the whole city blows up.  3. Then aliens land and take them prisoner and perform unmentionable experiments. 4. Mary has a child with one of them.  That sort of thing.  Just a straight list to see what plot points need to be illustrated, narrated, connected, who does what to whom, etc.  This list usually runs about 5-10 pages.  For The Farpool, my plot points and story elements list is 9 pages. 

The next step is to take these elements and put them into some kind of order.

 

Table of Plot Lines

This step is just what it sounds like.  I work out how many different threads of story there might be, how many plot lines.  In my example above, there could be John’s story, Mary’s story and the aliens’ story.  That would be 3 plot lines.  I literally build a table with one column devoted to a brief description of the relevant plot points for that story thread.  Then each row of the table contains the plot points, as they develop and unfold sequentially. 

Why do I do this?  So I can see at a glance how the different plot threads relate to each other, how something Mary does caused John to do something else and the aliens then responded this way.  It’s an easy way of connecting plot elements and making sure the whole thing hangs together.  Later I’ll number these individual plot elements in what I call Scene Order, that is, the order they will be written and appear.  This is like taking (1) from Column A, (2) from Column B and so forth.  This gives me a sense of how the story flows.

Finally, I’ll take a red pen and start grouping these numbered scene elements into chapters.  Often, in fact, usually, there will be plot elements from different columns comprising a chapter.  The table starts to look like I spilled spaghetti on it.  But it helps me visualize, in increasing detail and specificity, how the story will unfold.  John does something, Mary reacts or runs away, the aliens swoop in and pick her up, then John reacts to that.

Now I’m finally ready for the Big Outline.  As I said, my outline is my Bible.  It drives everything.  I may veer off from the outline in writing the story, but when I do, I’d better have a good reason, and make sure I don’t unravel other plot threads in the process.

 

Chapter and Scene Details

The final outlining step is to take each plot element I’ve written, inserted into a table, numbered and grouped, and write a few paragraphs, up to a page about what happens.  In other words, more detail.  Sometimes I find in actually writing the story that I can lift phrases and whole paragraphs from this outline; it’s that detailed.  Mainly, this final outline gives me a chance to expand my ideas, note particular actions or character responses, identify research needs I hadn’t thought about, etc.  This outline is detailed.  For The Farpool, it came to 18 pages.  It’s a sequential outline too, since I note details of setting (to be expanded later as needed) and time frame as well as expound on what is to happen. 

The outline that I call Chapter and Scene Details is what I will write the first draft directly from. 

And that starts this week.

In my next post, I’ll cover the process by which I learn about the people in the story…what the English teachers call characterization.  As you might expect, I have a detailed approach to this as well. 

See you next time, in about a week. 

Phil B.

On my last post, I promised a look at the actual word shed.  But I didn't upload it.  Shame on me.  Here it is...

I always deliver. 

Hi there. My name is Phil Bosshardt.  I'm a writer. I write science fiction, mystery,  horror and other kinds of stories. I'm starting this new blog to write about writing and what it's like to be involved in this crazy but ultimately rewarding business.

A word about the title: The Word Shed. There actually is a word shed...it's in my backyard. It looks like this:



I intend for this blog to be a "peek behind the curtains" of what it's like to imagine, create and bring to life the stories that people read, especially my readers (come on: I know you're out there). I have a number of books published through Smashwords and available at Barnes and Noble, Apple iBooks and other fine retailers. In future posts, I'll talk about them, how they came to be and where you can buy or download a copy. If you do buy or download, I'd sure appreciate it if you write up a review of what you read, good or bad.

I’ll also talk about and review books I’ve read recently, like Aurora (Kim Stanley Robinson)...a good read, to be sure, but kind of dissatisfying at the end and not up to his usual standards.  More on that later.

I’ll give you a peek at what’s coming up on my end (It’s called The Farpool) and then I’ll probably rant about issues that all writers have in common: editors, contracts, deadlines, markets, and any other axes I have to grind. 

Why read this blog and post to it, if you’re a reader?  Because you’re curious to find out where all this stuff comes from.  Because you want to know more about the kind of mind that would put stuff like this out.  And because you want to participate…be a part of the process. 

That’s my real reason for starting this blog.  To dialogue with fans, readers and other writers who love science fiction, fantasy, horror and mystery and just about anything written that gets their blood pumping and their ‘sense of wonder’ jolted. 

I aim to do a lot of jolting in the coming months.

You’ll see several posts a month coming out of The Word Shed.  Don’t be shy about blasting back and contributing. 

Until next time….