Post #113 February 26, 2018

“Growing Characters”

To grow a plant, stick it in the ground, add water and fertilizer and let nature take its course.  To ‘grow’ a character in a story, you have to do some other things.

Characters grow when they change in the unfolding of the story.  Sometimes they grow in positive ways.  Sometimes not.  Since our readers experience the events of the story vicariously through our characters, it behooves us to make them as realistic as possible.

How is this done?

1. For me, it starts with knowing your character, especially your main characters, as well as possible.  I do this by writing down beforehand a fairly extensive chronological biography and a basic personality analysis.  For example, let’s use the main character from The Farpool Stories.  Meet Chase Meyer….

“Chase Meyer gives one the impression of a happy-go-lucky fellow.  He seems to be unconcerned about anything and to live in the moment.  He seems to many people, even those who know him, to be almost like a child. This isn’t true but his outward demeanor is often mistaken for childlike innocence and wide-eyed wonder at the world.

Chase is motivated by curiosity, by learning and especially experiencing new things.  Some might call him an adrenaline junkie…he likes to experience things himself.  He does get a rush out of new experiences.  He is not one to spend a lot of time studying things.  Detailed learning is not something he does well.  He prefers to do things.  He learns by doing.

There are exceptions to this.  Chase likes sea sports and he likes music, especially a genre popular in the early 22^nd century called techjam.  He’s always been intrigued by being able to make sounds and make songs.  He likes to sing.  He can find within himself the discipline to do something he wants to do, like learn to play the go-tone, jam with the Croc-Boys, and learn how to scuba dive safely.  His Dad Mack sometimes has to restrain his impulsive, somewhat head strong son.  Scuba diving does require attention to detail and following safe practices.  Mack has hammered that into his son’s head for years.  But his nature is impulsive.

Chase is an ocean bum.  He grew up around the ocean and has spent most of his life around oceans.  He has maintained a lifelong interest in great sea stories, and great sea explorers.  He doesn’t normally read a lot but he likes to follow their lives and stories on tablet shows from time to time.  In his dreams, he sometimes fancies himself as a great explorer.  He has the curiosity and the impulsiveness and the sense of daring.  One of his great loves is cave diving in the Big Bend and central Florida areas.  It can be dangerous.  That’s why he likes it.

What does Chase imagine himself doing ten years from now?  His Dad Mack has offered him an opportunity to come into the surf shop business as a partner, but deep down inside, Chase doesn’t see himself as a businessman.  Mack wants to expand.  Chase wants to dive.

Although he doesn’t worry a whole lot about the future, when asked, Chase would probably say he sees himself as some kind of explorer.  There aren’t too many frontiers left on Earth for explorers.  Most of the oceans are being mapped by robots, by the early 22^nd century.  People live permanently on Mars and the Moon and in the asteroid belt.  Maybe he could explore Europa or some icy outworld.  Frontiers and new challenges beckon to him. 

The opportunity to go through the Farpool and experience another world like Seome is a challenge and opportunity that Chase Meyer could never resist.”

2. The next step for me is to put my main character(s) into situations of increasing difficulty.  Give him or her problems to solve or confront.  And these problems should grow organically out of the story narrative.  Rather than have Chase save Earth from a wayward asteroid that appears out of the blue, why not have Chase deal with the political and cultural problems of organizing an effort to deflect the asteroid?  Much more realistic, don’t you think?

3. Because I know my character from previous work on his background, I can now more easily decide how my character Chase will respond to the next big problem he faces.  This response is one of the most important forces driving the story forward.

4. The next step is deciding (for me, ahead of time), how my character (Chase) will change when he encounters or suffers the results of his response to the problem.  Living life changes us, every day.   Sometimes in big ways, some times in small ways.  In the case of Chase, he is changed in the sense that he comes to a fuller and deeper understanding of what he wants out of life and what kind of person he really is.  In other words, he grows, as a person, just like you and me.  Since that should make him more realistic and perhaps sympathetic, the reader is that much  more fully engaged with the story. 

5.  After this challenge and response scenario, the story advances to the next problem.  Ideally, Chase’s response to the first problem generates complications that lead to the next one.   And the next one could be even more difficult than the first.  Kind of like real life, huh?

Several points should be reiterated about this sequence of events.  The problems your characters face should grow from the story itself, and hopefully, come as a result of their own (often) misguided efforts.  The problems should compound for awhile and throw up ever-greater obstacles to your character’s well-being and happiness.  In the end, your character somehow manages to overcome the problems and either stands on top of his ‘mountain’ in triumph or fails magnificently.  And in this process, he learns something about him or herself he didn’t know or suspect before.

Should the author attempt to guide this process in minute detail or should the author let the characters loose and see what happens?  My answer to this conundrum is ‘yes.’  I actually do a little of both.  I am a meticulous planner and outliner.  I want to know what’s coming ahead of time so I can lay the groundwork for it.

On the other hand, I’m enough of a realist to understand that sometimes a character takes over the story and forces the narrative in directions the author didn’t plan on.  I’m not averse to letting this happen but when it does, I invariably re-outline what will happen next as a result of this unexpected twist.  This is what makes writing fiction so challenging and rewarding.  If done well, it really engages the reader, who can marvel at an unexpected development and say, “Wow…I didn’t see that one coming.”

Authors grow characters by understanding them well and giving them problems to solve.  Just like nature can take a plant, with water and fertilizer, and make it grow, so too can an author drop a well-sketched character into the ‘soil’ of real life, mix in some problems, and let matters proceed from there.  And just like a gardener prepares the soil of his garden ahead of time, so too an author preps the story with his deep knowledge of his characters and what will most effectively and revealingly ‘test’ them to good effect.

That’s how you ‘grow’ characters.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on March 5, 2018.

See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

 

 

 

Post #112 February 19, 2018

“Update on Downloads and More Thoughts About Series Writing”

I recently uploaded a new title in my Farpool series to Smashwords.com.  It’s entitled The Farpool: Exodus and has been doing pretty well.  Below, I’ve tabulated the total, cumulative downloads for all my ebook titles, roughly by series and category.

Tales of the Quantum Corps:  4853

The Farpool Stories: 1161

Nanotroopers:  6281

All Others*:  1143

*This catch-all category includes 3 horror stories and one collection of short science fiction.

Total cumulative downloads as of 12 February are at 13,438.

Those are the hard numbers.  As you can see, much of my sf is in series form.  Although I’ve posted on the challenges of series writing before, I’d like to add a few more thoughts on this topic. 

Many science fiction writers do series stories.  There are some definite advantages.  One is that you can ‘amortize’ your research and development of fictional worlds (very important in sf) across many titles.  It takes time and hard work to develop an alien world set in a galaxy far, far away and be consistent and somewhat scientifically accurate.  Series writing in sf enables you to have a ready-made setting to drop your story into…all you need is a plot line.  Usually, series also have continuing characters.  You don’t have to re-describe Flash Whizbang each time, since presumably the readers already know a lot about him.  Think Tom Swift, Nancy Drew or even better, Sherlock Holmes. 

But there are definitely challenges and pitfalls in writing a series too.  You’re constrained (to some degree) by what you’ve written before.  The longer a series goes, the more detailed your notes had better be, since nobody can keep all those myriad details in their head…except your readers, who will surely let you know that in story #1, Flash was blond with two heads and in Story #5, you describe Flash as brown haired with tentacles.  Take notes.  Consistency is vital in series writing.

That said, you’d like to have a character who can meet challenges and grow and change in resolving them, as real people do.  Which means, you can either plot this growth out ahead of time or just write the stories and be surprised by what Flash develops into as he evolves in your mind and on paper.  Actually, I do a little of both and I suspect many authors of series do as well.  Ideally, your main characters have enough imaginary room to evolve as the series goes on.  We see this in TV as well, which lends itself well to series stories and characters.  When developing and writing series fiction, know your main characters well.

Another issue in writing series fiction is coming up with ideas for plots.  This really should be pretty well thought out ahead of time.  There should be an overall story arc for the series, into which your individual stories will fit, perhaps chronologically or in some way thematically.  The story arc should be something that can be stated in a single sentence. Here’s what I said at the beginning of each episode of my Nanotroopers series:

1. Nanotroopers is a series of 15,000-20,000 word episodes detailing the adventures of Johnny Winger and his experiences as a nanotrooper with the United Nations Quantum Corps.
2. Each episode will be about 40-50 pages, approximately 20,000 words in length.
3. A new episode will be available and uploaded every 3 weeks.
4. There will be 22 episodes.  The story will be completely serialized in about 14 months.
5. Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc. 
6. The main plotline: U.N. Quantum Corps must defeat the criminal cartel Red Hammer’s efforts to steal or disable their new nanorobotic ANAD systems.
    
   Does this work?  Apparently, 6281 downloaders think it does.
    
   Sometimes series just develop without authorial intention.  That’s what happened to my series The Farpool Stories.  Originally, there was only The Farpool.  But the reader response was sufficient for me to consider writing another story with the same characters and same setting, with some expansions and adjustments.  After the second book, I decided to make the Farpool stories a formal series and plot out a story trajectory that would make sense.  Now the third book has been uploaded and I’m planning two more.  And, through the wonders of wormholes and time travel, the series will come back to the place it originally started, albeit in a different time stream.  You gotta love science fiction.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 26, 2018.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.
    
    
    
    

 

 

Post #111 February 12 2018

“Building and Maintaining Suspense in Your Story”

The best stories are full of suspense.  Building and maintaining suspense is really the essence of storytelling, from the days of Og and Grog around the campfire to the digital stories you read on your Kindle today.  But how, exactly, do writers do this?  Writer’s Digest offers nine ideas that make for a good place to start.  I run the list below and make my own observations about them.

1. Give the reader a lofty viewpoint. 

2. Use time constraints. 

3. Keep the stakes high. 

4. Apply pressure. 

5. Create dilemmas. Suspense loves a dilemma. 

6. Complicate matters. 

7. Be unpredictable. 

8. Create a really good villain. 

9. Create a really good hero. 

10.  Write in short sentences.

My first thought about this list is that it doesn’t give proper place to the importance of creating empathetic characters.  In my upcoming horror story The Specter, I spend a good bit of time creating the fictitious town of Scotland Lake and its inhabitants, with some background and history behind the main characters.  The purpose of all this to create and describe people that readers will care about.  It’s hard to maintain suspense when you don’t really care what happens to the people involved.  I would put this at the top of the list, rather than Points 8 and 9 as Writer’s Digest does.

My next trick to building and maintaining suspense is to give your empathetic characters a problem, a big problem.  Here’s where points 2, 3, and 4 come in.  It needs to be an important problem, maybe even life-threatening.  That what ‘Keep the stakes high,’ really means.  If they don’t solve this problem, people may die or be badly hurt.  Having some kind of inherent deadline or time pressure is a good way to keep the pot bubbling.  “If we don’t solve this problem by the end of the day, our town may be destroyed.” 

The problem that your empathetic characters must solve should also be something that isn’t easily solved.  There should be complications, dead ends, side tracks and dilemmas, all of which get in the way of solving the problem, all of which have to be overcome along the way to really solve the problem.  It’s best if the outcome looks in doubt to the end.  Think of the best games you’ve either played in or watched.  The most engaging or entertaining games, the ones that keep you on the edge of your seats, are the ones that aren’t decided until the last second…the issue is in doubt to the very end.  In a real sense, games are like stories.  This same trick applies to both, and for similar reasons…drama.

Point number 7 can be tricky.  Plot twists are all fine and good.  When done right, they perform the same function as complications and dilemmas.  They provide resistance to the characters’ attempts to solve their problem.  But often plot twists and turns are just thrown in, out of the blue, and leave the reader just rolling their eyes and throwing up their hands (or their Kindles).  Good plot twists should grow out of the basic story setting and story line.  They should be organic to the situation, yet also be something your characters could not or did not anticipate.  A good plot twist makes the reader sit up and slap his forehead: “Damn!  Nobody thought of that!”  It should be obvious and even inevitable in hindsight…which of course, none of us actually has. 

Point number 10 is also a tried and true technique to pump up suspense.  This does the same thing as extreme closeups and a menacing musical score in horror films…when you see this as a viewer, you just ’know’ something bad is about to happen.  The best directors know this too and they sometimes use it to trick your sense of impending doom, then when your guard is finally down, they spring the surprise…the bloody hand in the mirror, hanging down from the ceiling, for example.

Suspense is the lifeblood of a story.  Well done suspense is like blowing oxygen on a fire.  It burns hotter, becomes a bit more dangerous, it makes you sit up and pay attention.  Keeping these points and tips in mind will help you keep the fire going in your readers and keep them on the edge of their seats.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 19.  In this post, I’ll give you an update on my Farpool series, including early download history from my newest ebook, The Farpool: Exodus.  And maybe some more ideas about writing a series.

See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

 

Post #110 February 5 2018

“Finishing the Race”

Recently, I finished the firsts draft of my next Farpool story, entitled The Farpool: Exodus.  In fact, by the time you read this, you should be able to download this ebook from Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers.  All of which has led me to ponder what we authors do to finish a book….is it ever actually finished?

To finish something means to bring it to completion, to attain the end of something.  Just as every author writes his or her story a different way, every author finishes a story differently too.  I have my own routine to follow and below I’ve reprinted a checklist I use called Next Steps.  This is a checklist I use not only to define what needs to be done to start a book, but also to make sure all bases are covered when I bring the book to a finish.  I’m going through this right now, with The Farpool: Exodus.

NEXT STEPS:

1. Complete any needed expansion of Outline of the Story, especially any Research Needs. DONE
2. Research details on sequence of events in a star collapse, or supernova.  Is Sigma Albeth B big enough to go supernova?  We’ll say it is.  DONE
3. Complete List of Major Players DONE
4. Background and personality sketches on major characters  DONE
5. Write Chapter and Scene Details DONE
6. Map of Atlantic seafloor near Bermuda DONE
7. Map and details of South China Sea DONE
8. Review biblical story of the Exodus  DONE
9. Review details of genome editing, amphibians and CRISPR techniques DONE
10. Started first draft: 14 September 2017
11. Finished first draft: 19 January 2018
12. Complete The Farpool: Convergence excerpt to add at the end DONE
13. Review and edit final DONE
14. Spellcheck 
15. Book descriptions DONE
16. Tag lines DONE
17. Word 97 version
18. Verify cover format USE JPEG!  DONE
19. Print final DON’T DO THIS

Let’s focus on steps 10 through 19.  The first 9 steps are related to research needs prior to actually starting the story.

Note that the first draft was written over about a 4-month period.  This is where I am now.  I’m reviewing and editing as we speak and should have this done by February 2, which is when you should have looked for the title to be available. 

Then note all the finishing details: spellcheck, book descriptions and tag lines (for Smashwords).  The distributor only accepts titles in Word 97 format, so that has to be done (takes about 2 seconds).

I have to make sure my book cover works and that it’s in the right format, sized properly for ebook distribution. 

As an indie author, I’m responsible for all editing.  That means in completing step #13, I have to read and re-read enough to make sure the story flows okay, that there aren’t any obvious holes or logical inconsistencies in the plot, that it’s engaging and intriguing enough to keep you turning the pages.  And, as this title is the third in a series of what will probably be five titles, I have to make sure I don’t say or so anything that is greatly at variance with what has gone before.  This requires managing a lot of details (take my advice: keep copious notes!).  Every author of series books faces the same issues and we all go about it different ways.

One other detail:  I’ve found it to be a good practice (and Smashwords promotes this too) to include at the end of one story an excerpt for the next story in the series, as a way of promoting and intriguing readers to keep their eyes open for the new stuff.  The next story in the Farpool series is called The Farpool: Convergence and I have done this…included an excerpt from Chapter 1 at the end of Exodus.  So I had to write that as well.  This one gets started on or around March 5 and should be available in the fall of 2018.

Plus, I’m working on correcting and re-formatting a scanned copy of a horror story (The Specter) which I wrote many years ago but which still reads as a pretty good story.  This one comes available in May 2018.  More finishing.

Writing a story is only half the battle.  Recently, we engaged in a major bathroom renovation at our house.  It took two months and there were times we thought it would never be done, although now it is and we’re happy with the results.  Fortunately, our contractor is a fanatic at finishing little details and making sure we were happy with the results. 

It’s true of bathroom renovations and it’s true of writing books as well.  It’s not really done until it’s finished.  With the Super Bowl in mind, I don’t mind telling you I’m an Atlanta Falcons fan and we know a thing or two about not finishing a job (see Super Bowl 51 in Houston, February 2017!).

In the next post to The Word Shed, I’ll cover some of the basics of building and sustaining suspense in a story, at least as I see it.  Look for this one on February 12, 2018.

See you then.

Phil B.