Post #200 January 20 2020

“Recap of Year 2019”

Today, I provide a summary of writing and publishing results for calendar year 2019. 

In general, 2019 was a great year for me, in publishing terms.  Following is a breakdown of downloads from all sources (reported via Smashwords.com) for all my online titles.

Total net downloads for 2019 = 24,042

Total cumulative downloads for all titles since I first went online = 42,636

Downloads for Tales of the Quantum Corps = 9454

Downloads for Quantum Troopers = 21,382

Downloads for The Farpool Stories = 6961

Downloads for Time Jumpers = 1838

Downloads for alternate history titles (3) = 2602

All others = 7360

Several points should be made about the above numbers.  First, note that Quantum Troopers is half of my total downloads for all titles.  This series has and continues to be pretty successful.  It doesn’t take a genius to see that, gee, maybe I should do more of this.

Toward that end, a new series which continues Quantum Troopers begins with availability on February 7, 2020.  It’s called Quantum Troopers Return (clever, no?). Unlike all my previous titles, this series and all new uploads this year will come at a small price.  I’m anticipating setting the price of QSR at $0.99.  We’ll see what affect, if any, this has on downloads.

In addition to the above series, I have started a new science fiction novel, entitled Monument, which I anticipate will be available probably in late summer 2020.  Again, this title will come with a small (as yet undetermined) price.

I also continue to work in the medium of short stories, novelettes and novellas.  As these are collected, look for a new collection coming in the next 2 years.  I have just recently uploaded a new collection of short works entitled Elliptical Galaxies (on January 17), now available from the Smashwords store and other fine ebook retailers. 

This recent collection and all existing titles which are currently free will remain free.  That seems only fair to me.

I have recently gotten some feedback from reviews and readers that they would like to see more stories set in the Farpool universe.  While, I don’t have any specific stories planned or outlined, such a development is not out of the question.  Bringing more Farpool stories to you won’t happen in 2020 but I am considering it and there is decent chance such stories could begin to appear in 2021 or later.  Stay tuned.

Finally, I really appreciate any feedback, on this blog or in reviews and other means.  I do not currently have a Facebook account but that is another development in the works.  Look for something in the latter part of 2020 along with an updated web site.

Many thanks to all of you who have waited patiently for new stories from my feverish brain and thanks for all the downloads and reviews.  The Word Shed will plug along in this new year with more posts about what it means to work as a writer in 2020 and more ideas about how we can improve our craft and pull in even more readers.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 3.  In this post, I’ll look at how writers hook readers and drag them in with killer first lines and paragraphs.

See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

Post #199 January 20 2020

“Characters, Characters, Characters”

Today, we conclude our study of good storytelling practices with Point #10, which is all about characters. 

Even if you have a plot-driven story, your characters are what make a story really shine. A bland or passive protagonist makes for a boring story. Interesting and unique characters are memorable, if not timeless, even when relegated to smaller roles. Go the extra mile to give each character distinction, depth, and history. Consider writing character bios for each member of your cast and see if it gives you further insight into how to portray them.

Let’s look at some of the details.

1. Remember that readers live vicariously through your characters.  It’ll be easier for them to identify with a character if you’ve done your homework and made the character seem real to them.  But the devil is in the details.  Don’t spend so much time describing the character and his or her background that you forget to tell the story.  Perhaps the best way to remember this is to remind yourself that character is best revealed through action and how the character responds to the challenges he faces trying to achieve his goal. 
2. In developing your character(s), strive for the unique and memorable.  What sets this person apart from others?  Why should I care about what happens to this character?  A unique and memorable character is a little different, a bit off-beat, perhaps, displaying attributes such as physical characteristics or attitudes or a manner of speaking that sticks in your memory. Toward that end, one way to do this is to—
3. Recall from your own life people you have known who really stick out.  I remember my senior-year typing class teacher in high school.  One: she was black (unusual in Atlanta, GA in the late sixties).  Two: she was extremely friendly and encouraging.  Three: (most important) she knew I was smitten with a girl in the class and pestered me to ask her to the prom. Her name was Miss Simms.  I recall her fondly even today for all these reasons. 
   Ask yourself this: why is James Bond so memorable?  Or Harry Potter?  Or Tarzan or Tom Swift, Jr?  They are well described.  They act consistently across a number of stories.  With series characters, all the author has to do to invoke a character is mention a few traits, just a few words…”shaken, not stirred,” for example.  We remember these characters because they are well-drawn, they are different in engaging ways and unique in their outlook on life, not to mention in their actions in the stories.   
4. How much detail should you put in your story?  I strongly recommend writing character bios for your main characters.  You don’t have to use every single word or incident from the bio in your story but at least if Og and Grog both have blond hair and moles on their left cheeks, you’ll be consistent in how they’re described.  Readers notice that sort of thing.  Even better, some times in the process of developing a character and writing a short bio, plot points will jump out at you and suggest ways of steering the story that you might not have considered.
5. Here’s an example from a science fiction novel called Monument I’m writing now that illustrates what I’m saying:   
   Octavio Morales Patron
   Age: 50-ish
   Height: 5’9”
   Weight: 285 lbs
   Hair: Bald
   Face: Olive complexion, round and red, splotchy with nanoderm patches that aren’t working
   Other Distinguishing Features:  huffy, wheezing kind of breath; crushing hand grip; small slits for eyes, lost in extra folds of fat around the eyes; smile that vacillates between a smirk and a sneer.
    
   A Short Biography:
   Octavio Morales Patron (aka O.P. or Octo) fab lord, scope dealer and smuggler, scoopship fleet operator and shipping magnate, transmuting plant owner, terreta developer and influence peddler in the halls of the InFed Council.  Patron is the one who gives Dugay the commission for the Outer Ring project.
   Many words could be used to describe Patron: larger than life, boisterous, rambunctious, loud, obnoxious, annoying.  All of them would be true.  Patron lives aboard a luxurious personal terreta called Zanzibar, orbiting in a cycler orbit between Earth, Venus, and Mars.  It is a pleasure palace worthy of Kublai Khan, whose history has often fascinated Patron and whom Patron often fashions himself after.  He sometimes thinks of himself as a latter-day 23^rd century Khan.
   Patron’s initial fortune came from his father Julio, an early sunpower investor.  One of Julio’s legacies was to will ownership of several sunpower stations to his children.  OP has a sister Eugenia and a younger brother Oscar (now deceased).  He owns ten sunpower stations—known locally as the Sunflower Group—which beam power to customers all over InFed.  Most of the Sunflower stations are inside Mercury orbit.  These stations are the source of his original wealth.
   OP was born on Earth itself, in Buenos Aires, to Julio and Constanza Morales Patron, in the year 2195 CE.  But as a child, he was relocated to the family terreta Cordoba in halo orbit around Earth-Moon L3 and this is where he grew up.  Patron is a creature of space, or at least non-Earth and now can no longer return to Earth due to its powerful gravity well.
   Today, Patron’s most lucrative business after sunpower is smuggling, something which InFed tries to control but mostly winks at, for OP has supporters even among SpaceGuard and Frontier Corps.  His smuggling includes scope, illegal fabs (nanobotic fabrication systems) and many contraband goods to a variety of settlements especially along the borderlands of InFed, along the inner ring of the asteroid belt. 
   Another source of wealth for Patron are his multiple shipping lines, notably the Patronic Line, consisting of dozens of scoopships, dredges, transmuters (factory ships which take elemental materials and use nuclear reactions to transmute them to other elements), container ships and even a small cruise line for high-end tourists (Cabalgada or Cavalcade).  He is a powerful fleet operator across the spaceways of InFed with interests everywhere, one of the biggest, and this gives him great influence inside InFed, especially with the Secretary-General and the General Assembly.  His own personal cruiser Bolivar is a scoopship extensively modified to serve as a sort of floating office for flitting around his varied interests from one end of InFed to the other.
   One of OP’s later businesses is to finance the development and sale of dozens of terretas all over InFed, making him sort of a land developer and which is the initial impetus for the idea of the Outer Ring…to outflank the Concordance and ensure a long-lasting supply chain of materials and resources for InFed well into the future.  His latest project is a sort of planned development of terretas called Elysium, mostly located in orbit around the Sun near the Sun-Mars L5 point, trailing Mars but easily reachable from many points.
   OP wants a name architect-developer for the Outer Ring (so does InFed) and that’s why he pursues Philippe Dugay so assiduously.
   All of these business interests give Patron a strong voice inside InFed government, and he uses that influence to buy politicians all the time.  It doesn’t hurt that he has had off and on relations with one Katerina Lind, daughter of InFed founder Arthur Lind and an early sunpower developer himself.
   OP has been married and divorced five times and they were (in chronological order): Ria, Khamis, Selene, Marguerite, and Fumiko.  He currently has two mistresses Eva (who lives with him at Zanzibar and Dolores, who resides at Copernicus City, the Moon.  They both know of each other and have communicated remotely at times.  They aren’t exactly married to OP but the relationships are more than just friendships. Both want to become pregnant by OP to strengthen their hold on him but OP is notoriously careful about this. 
   OP views his Outer Ring project and his association with Philippe Dugay (if he can be convinced) as the capstone project of his career, one which will cement the names of both for all history, for Patron has become increasingly concerned about his legacy.
   He is pondering letting Eva and Dolores become pregnant by him, so as to have sons to leave his empire with.
    

I don’t need to have any more details on this character to have a good feel about what type of person he is.  And I only do this for major characters in my story.   With this, I have enough background on Octavio Patron to reliably and consistently sketch him out whenever I need him to show up on stage.

This concludes our brief story lab.  I hope discussing these 10 points of good storytelling practices will help you in all your future writing endeavors.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on January 27.  In this post, I’ll provide a re-cap of my writing activities and results for year 2019.

See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

Post #198 January 13 2020

“Get in late, get out early”

For our study of Point #9 in the storylab listing of good storytelling practices, I refer back to Post #189 and thank the website storysci.com for this advice…

“Start as late as possible in your scene or story to provide both audience interest and optimal conflict, and then end the scene as soon the conflict has run its course. This doesn’t mean truncating valuable exposition or foregoing a beginning, but it does mean opening where the vital information starts. And once the scene or story has said all there is that needs to be said, get out! Don’t hang around and dawdle or you will be diluting your story’s final punch. For example, the audience doesn’t need to witness an entire 4-hour board meeting. They only need to see the handful of minutes that count. In short: focus on where the action is happening.”

1. This is all about grabbing the reader immediately and keeping him (or her) hooked by concentrating in your story on what is most important.

I like to start a story right in the middle of the action.  For example, in my sf short story ‘Second Sun,’ this is the opening paragraph:

Not everyone was happy about having a second Sun.  That’s why the Guardians sent me to Bernini in the first place.  Kisan Malakel, engineering inspector 1^st class for the Concordance.  I had an official job to do and that was to make sure everything aboard station Bernini was up to spec…the gas pulses streaming off Saturn’s atmosphere were coming in on schedule…the deflector controls were receiving and diverting the pulses properly into Jupiter’s atmosphere…the King of Planets was bulking up on schedule so the thing could be ignited on time…that all aspects of the Second Sun project were proceeding according to calculations.  Oh, I had a job all right.  But my real job was to sabotage the whole works, sabotage the deflector system, and get away before station Bernini was likely destroyed by an incoming pulse.

 

Say what you will, this paragraph grabs you right away.  The premise itself is fairly unique.  And we learn in the last sentence that the narrator is there to sabotage the whole works.

1. Hook the reader’s interest early.  Use conflict.  Something unique.  Some memorable or unexpected details of setting or character.  The storysci.com advice is well intentioned. Ask yourself what you like to read when a story opens.   Do you want to read the entire minutes of a four-hour board meeting?  Or do you want to know why the CEO has a loaded gun in his lap and what he plans to do with it?  Will he murder the entire board?  Threaten everyone to get better quarterly results?  Take out his frustrations on the HR guy?  Just the suspense alone in the situation I’ve sketched should keep a reader turning the pages.  That’s what you want.
2. The advice to get in late and get out early is really about doing whatever it takes to advance the story…and only that.  Unless it’s germane to the story, sets up motivation, reveals character or something like this, leave the rest out.  Remember what ultimately drives a story forward: Your hero has a problem and wants to solve it; people or situations or life gets in the way solving the problem and conflict develops; tension rises as the hero is continuously frustrated; just when your hero is about to blow his stack, he solves the problem or at least fails magnificently and the problem is resolved. Every single word in your story should be traceable back to one of these elements.  If it can’t be, take it out.
3. Focus on the action.  Your characters should be doing something to solve their problem, not just sitting around bitching and moaning.  When you convey to your wife what happened at the office today, do you drop every last detail on her or do you give her the highlights and the most dramatic parts?  It’s the same with storytelling.

Picture this: Og and Grog are sitting around the campfire one evening after a dinner of mammoth meat and tree roots.  Og is sharpening his spear points.  Grog is skinning a hide.  Og grunts and gestures at Grog: “If you had followed my orders, you wouldn’t have been injured by that mammoth, you stupid dolt.”  After some loud arguing back and forth, and few threats, Slamdok intervenes and, using more gestures and grunts, recounts the events of the day that led to Grog’s injury and tonight’s dinner.  Some modifications are made to the account and after awhile, after everyone is stuffed with enough mammoth meat and some fermented berries that Slamdok’s wife made, everybody agrees that this is what happened.  The day’s hunt goes down in the annals of the tribe as “the way things happened.”

It becomes a legend.  Later, maybe a myth.

Man is preeminently a storytelling animal.  We don’t know if this is how stories began but we do know, from research, that stories have for generations served a profoundly important evolutionary purpose.

I have posted about this before.  Why does our brain love stories so much?  In an article from the Greater Good Science Center (University of California, Berkeley) in December 2013, neurobiologist Paul Zak says this:

“The first part of the answer is that as social creatures who regularly affiliate with strangers, stories are an effective way to transmit important information and values from one individual or community to the next. Stories that are personal and emotionally compelling engage more of the brain, and thus are better remembered, than simply stating a set of facts.

“Think of this as the “car accident effect.” You don’t really want to see injured people, but you just have to sneak a peek as you drive by. Brain mechanisms engage saying there might be something valuable for you to learn, since car accidents are rarely seen by most of us but involve an activity we do daily. That is why you feel compelled to rubberneck.

“To understand how this works in the brain, we have intensively studied brain response that watching (compelling video) produces. We have used this to build a predictive model that explains why after watching the video, about half of viewers donate to a charity. We want to know why some people respond to a story while others do not, and how to create highly engaging stories.

“We discovered that there are two key aspects to an effective story. First, it must capture and hold our attention. The second thing an effective story does is “transport” us into the characters’ world.”

Grabbing and maintaining attention and building empathy for your characters are thus two critically important jobs that any storyteller has to complete.  There is now strong neural evidence to support this.

Get in late, get out early.  Leave your readers gasping for more, to know more, to learn what happens.  One of the best ways to do that is to follow point #9. 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on January 20.  This post will cover the final point in our storylab sequence: ‘Characters, characters, characters.’

See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

 

 

Post #197 January 6, 2020

“Say as Much as Possible With as Little as Possible”

Point number eight in our storylab list of good storytelling practices is seen in the title above.  The website storysci.com talks about making good use of subtext.  I’ll get to that in a moment.

According to Wikipedia, the sentence often claimed to be the longest sentence ever written in English is in Molly Bloom's soliloquy in the James Joyce novel Ulysses (1922), which contains a "sentence" of 3,687 words.  Trust me…don’t do that. 

This good practice is all about being proficient and effective in your word choice.  There are several considerations to be aware of as storytellers when we tell our stories.

1. Make use of your readers’ imaginations.  Often, a well-chosen word or turn of phrase is all it takes to trigger a cascade of thoughts and feelings and emotions in a reader.  Readers have lives too.  They have experiences.  A good storyteller will connect his own narrative with that well of imaginative resources that is your reader’s brain.  Readers enjoy helping you out.  They want to help you out.  The trick is to find the right words or sentences to trigger the reader’s imagination.  Here’s an example from science fiction.  What if I describe a character in my story as an alien?  That conjures up all sorts of images, some from bad sci-fi films, from works you may have read, etc.  But what if I describe the character as a non-human or unhuman?  Different images come to mind, in this case, a sort of comparison with what we think of as human.  Deliberate word choice can send a reader down one alley of thought while another word choice may send them in a completely new direction. 
    
   Simpler is almost always better.
    
2. Subtext is important.  The example from storysci.com speaks of a brother and sister talking about their lives at college but not talking about the recent death of their father.  If you, the reader, know that the two are talking around a very painful subject, it colors the scene differently and tells us, without even using words, a little about their emotional state.  Maybe the storyteller describes a few furtive glances, some halting or stumbling conversations, descriptions of tone of voice.  Without ever mentioning that their father died (and with the reader fully aware of this bad news), the storyteller communicates a lot without even using words…awkward silences, deep sighs, nods of the head. 
    
   The word subtext is a synonym for the implied story inside the main narrative.  All stories contain implied stories inside them.  If Og and Grog are describing their experiences during yesterday’s mastodon hunt, and every time Og speaks, Grog interrupts him with more details, we learn more than just the details of the hunt.  We learn about the relationship between Og and Grog and we may wonder whose description best captures the reality of what happened.  Maybe the tribe decides as a group to take words and descriptions from both and make something bigger and better from that.  In any case, how something was said in this situation was at least as important as what was said.  Again, an implied story or subtext is unfolding before our eyes.
    
3. Finally, saying as much as possible with as little as possible means making the proper word choice.  If my character is a being from the planet Tralfamador (and the reference is to Kurt Vonnegut…look it up), what is more important and best advances the story: that the character looks like a toilet brush with two heads or that the character just lost someone close to him and expresses that sorrow in ways unique to Tralfamadoreans?  Either choice is okay.  It depends on what you, as storyteller, are trying to achieve.  Are you going for a straightforward physical description?  Are you comparing the Tralfamodorean to humans?  Are you trying to convey how Tralfamadoreans show their emotions?

I ran into this very issue in my series of sf novels called The Farpool Stories, where most of the characters are water-breathing marine creatures who mainly communicate and sense by sound.  I had to be very creative and selective (in word choice) to illustrate how the Seomish experienced their world and yet be cognizant of the obvious fact that my readers are very human.  In my case, I actually invented the sounds of an alien language and tried to (judiciously) use that to convey alienness and feeling and thought. 

Or as Occam’s Razor puts it: all else being equal, the simplest explanation is the best explanation.

As storysci.com makes clear, without subtext, your story will likely be dull and shallow.  It’ll read like a grocery list, not a compelling narrative.  But with good word choice and attention to the underlying implied story (and I think a lot of this is second-nature to good storytellers), your narrative will resonate on multiple levels with your readers and make for a very powerful experience.  Remember, your readers live vicariously through your words…”hey, that could have been me…I really identify with that person…he or she really spoke to me…”

All these things make for the most compelling and engaging stories, the stories we remember for a lifetime.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on January 13, 2020.  In this post, we’ll look at point #9 in our storylab: “Get in late and get out early.”

See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

 

Post #196 December 23, 2019

“It’s Better to be Simple and Clear than Complicated and Ambiguous”

Point number 7 in our storylab list of good storytelling practices is stated above, for which I am indebted to the website storysci.com for details.

Storysci.com states the need very clearly: “Simplicity creates clear understanding in the minds of the audience.”

Some writers feel (mistakenly) that they must tell their stories in some kind of high-falutin’ literary prose style to be taken seriously.  My advice: get over yourself.  Your job is to tell the story…period.  Do whatever it takes to tell the story, in an engaging, entertaining and memorable way.  Nothing else matters.

Especially in sf and fantasy, some writers spend so much time building their imaginary worlds, they feel they have to dump all of it into the story.  While this isn’t specifically an issue with simplicity, it can slow a story down.  Storytellers work the details of their setting into the story itself.  Or you can do what I have done, as so many sf/f writers have done (like Frank Herbert with Dune) and put your world-building details in an appendix.  That way, the story can proceed at its own best pace.

As a storyteller, you are trying to ‘transport’ your readers to an imaginary place.  Simple, active-voice prose is almost always the best way to do that.  What do I mean by ‘active vs passive voice’?  Here’s an example: (ACTIVE) “Harry ate six shrimp at dinner.”  (PASSIVE) “At dinner, six shrimp were eaten by Harry.” 

According to storysci.com, one mistake some storytellers make is to try and tell too much without spending enough time on the story details that make up the big picture. Sometimes, the info dump slows down the story too much and the reader lose the thread of the narrative.  My best advice: Forget the big picture, the philosophizing, the stream of consciousness and just tell the story.  This happened, then this happened, then that happened….Allow your readers to engage their own imaginations in filling out the details. 

Clarity is vital to a storyteller.  You want your readers to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ and even ‘taste’ and ‘feel’ what it’s like to be in your story, fighting off the aliens, rescuing the hostages, surviving the breakup of the planet or fleeing the storm that just moved in.  Simplicity means not only fewer and simpler words, but more importantly, well-chosen and descriptive words.  Analogies are commonly used. This is like that.  Here’s a rather lengthy sentence from a novella I’m writing now, part of my upcoming Quantum Troopers Return series:

“Energized by movement and the upcoming prospect of some action, the atomgrabbers of 1^st Nano, constituted as Operation Selene Hammer, boarded Badger and Prairie Dog and hung on as their hopper transports lifted off the crater floor and scooted forward, flying so low over the rubbly, black terrain that Glance felt he could stick his hypersuit boot out and kick the tops off the mountains.”

Here, I am using a sort of analogy to describe the feeling of what it is like for a quantum trooper to fly at a very low altitude over the Moon’s surface en route to beginning a mission, so low he could almost reach out and kick the mountain tops.  A lengthy sentence, perhaps, but hopefully each word conveys the feeling of being there and being anxious for the mission to begin.

Simplicity in storytelling is always the best way.  Use just enough of the right words to move the story along and immerse your readers in your imaginary world.  Active voice, short sentences unless otherwise needed, descriptive words, analogies with your reader’s common experiences, all of these are good tools to use to build and carry your story forward. 

Do be shy about letting your readers do some of the imaginary work.  Your role as storyteller is just to help them get there.

With the upcoming holidays, The Word Shed will take a two-week break.  The next post, item #8 on our list of storytelling practices, comes on January 6, 2020.  It’s called “Say as much as possible with as little as possible.”  Kind of a good follow-on to today’s post.

See you then and have a great holiday.

Phil B.

 

 

 

 

 

Post #195 December 16, 2019

“Know What Your Story is About”

Not too long ago, I finished a science fiction short story called ‘Second Sun.’ (Soon to be available in my newest collection of short works Elliptical Galaxies, uploaded on January 17, 2020…look for it!).   In this tale, the basic story is about a saboteur who comes to a space station orbiting Jupiter with the intent of sabotaging the station and destroying it, preventing it from fulfilling its mission.

But there is an underlying story here.  It turns out the saboteur’s mother is a member of the station crew.  Our saboteur, long estranged from his family, now has a conundrum: whether to continue his mission or succumb to long-buried family memories.  The underlying story is about the persistence of family and memory and our struggles to reconcile those memories with who we are now or what we have become.

The sixth tip in our story lab sequence of good practices for storytellers is in the title above.  Know what your story is about.  In my case, I had the basic plot of the saboteur’s mission and would he be able to complete this mission?  But I also had to know there was a sub-story of family and memory and reconciliation at work too.  How would this affect the saboteur’s mission?  You’ll have to read ‘Second Sun’ to find out.

Storytellers work on multiple levels of meaning.  As the website storysci.com says: “At some point you will have to know what your story us about—not just at its core but at every level—in order to weave your story around it.”

This requires some thinking.  I like to think of this a different way.  Try to live inside the world of your story.  Know your outline, plot and setting so well that you can lie in bed late at night and “be” there in your mind.  What do you see?  What do you feel?  What do you hear? 

Motivation is at the heart of any good story.  What is the hero motivated to do?  Does your plot allow the hero to follow his motivation?  Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?  From the bottom of the pyramid, it goes like this: physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, self-actualization.

Does your hero act and react logically at each of these levels?  For our saboteur, who became estranged from his family due to the accidental death of his father and his mother’s extreme and overbearing, overprotective reaction to that accident, he’s able to attend to his physiological need as any adult can.  He winds up joining a sort of future terrorist, anarchist group (called the Guardians), sworn to oppose the mission of the Jupiter (and other similar) stations. 

Being a member of the Guardians gives our hero-saboteur a sense of ‘safety’ and love and belonging that became missing in his own family.  Being trusted to carry out important missions for the Guardians also adds to his esteem and self-actualization needs.  The story conflict develops when these already-met needs come into contact with his mother—his original and native family—and he must sort out what and who he really believes.

This story works on multiple levels and the storyteller needs to be well aware of all this, or you’ll wind up with a mess at the end, hanging, unresolved plot lines that go nowhere, characters that don’t ring true and aren’t very believable.

Readers treated like this usually won’t return to that author.  Trying to read their work is a waste of time.

A good storyteller knows not only the sequence of events that comprise the plot.  They also know the intimate thoughts and innermost fears and worries of their characters.  They know what it feels like, sounds like, even tastes like to be aboard a station in Jupiter orbit threatened with destruction by an unstable terrorist.  And the storyteller knows and feels the inner turmoil experienced by the saboteur-terrorist as he wrestles with family memories, inner demons and the dictates of his mission.

And you thought you were just telling a story.

The next post to The Word Shed continues our story lab and comes on December 23.  We examine storysci.com’s tip #7: “It is better to be simple and clear than complicated and ambiguous.”

See you then.

Phil B.

 

Post #194 December 9 2019

“Have a Central Theme to Your Story”

Continuing our story lab, we come today to the fifth element of good storytelling; having a proper theme.  The theme of any story is like your spinal cord, a scaffolding upon which all other elements of the story can be hung.  The best themes are simple, able to be stated in a sentence.

Earlier this year, I wrote a science fiction story called ‘Second Sun.’  In this story, a future saboteur comes to a space station with the intention of destroying the station.  However, the saboteur encounters his own estranged mother aboard the station as a crewmember and winds up sacrificing himself to prevent the station’s destruction in the end.  What’s the theme of this story?  That family ties are stronger than personal circumstances.

Your story should be about something.  I’m indebted to the website Storysci.com for these thoughts: the central core or theme brings unity to all elements of the story.  Of particular importance is the notion that your theme should be explainable in a few words or a sentence.

The theme is best exemplified by the actions, words and thoughts of the main character(s).  It often involves conflict: with another person, with himself, with society, with fate.  In my story above, we see several of these conflicts at work.

Realistically, every word you write in your story should contribute to the theme, amplify it, employ it to provide significance to the story.  The theme is why you want readers to read the story.  The theme is usually something universal: bad guys lose in the end, war is bad, you can’t go home again.  That universality is what readers identify with.  “Hey, that could be me in that predicament.”  Or “hey, that same thing happened to me once…maybe I should pay attention here.”

Themes are what resonate with your audience and the more universal the theme, when done well, the stronger that resonance.

The website literarydevices.net provides these short examples:

1. When the astronaut landed on the moon, he felt loneliness. Thinking there was no one else, he became a little forlorn, though the view of Earth was stunningly beautiful.
   (Theme of loneliness)
2. The space travelers were travelling to the moon, when their spaceship suddenly ran out of fuel. They were all frightened to learn that they wouldn’t be able to return to Earth, and could only land on the moon.
   (Theme of fear)
3. The bus was travelling at a great speed when it was stopped by a gang of robbers. The passengers were ordered to get out, leaving their precious belongings in the bus.
   (Theme of fear)
4. Their marriage ceremony was taking place in a grand hotel. All the eminent people of the city were invited, the reason that the celebration was excellent.
   (Theme of happiness)

Several years ago, I ran across an article in the November 12, 2016 edition of the Wall Street Journal entitled “Novel Findings: Fiction Makes Us Feel For Others.”  The author was Susan Pinker.

 

It seems that in 2006, a study at the University of Toronto connected fiction-reading with readers’ increased sensitivity to others.  To measure how much text the readers had seen across their lifetimes, the readers took an author-recognition test—a typical measure for this type of study.  The more people read, the better they empathized.

 

In 2009, the same team of psychologists reproduced the study with a sample of 252 adults, controlling for such variables as age, gender, IQ, English fluency, stress, loneliness and personality type.  In addition, the subjects took an objective test of empathy called the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test.  The purpose of all this was to see how long-term exposure to fiction influences the subjects’ ability to intuit the emotions and intentions of people in the real world. 

 

Once the variables were statistically controlled for, fiction reading predicted higher levels of empathy.  Such readers also lived larger in the flesh-and-blood social sphere, with rich and enduring networks of real people to provide entertainment and support than people who read less fiction. 

 

Later studies confirmed that reading fiction causes a spike in the ability to detect and understand other peoples’ emotion. 

 

The experimenters then assessed participants on several measures of empathy.  Non-fiction, along with genre fiction—science fiction, romance, horror—had little effect on the capacity to detect others’ feelings and thoughts.  Only literary fiction, which requires readers to work at guessing the motivations of characters from sometimes subtle fictional cues, fostered empathy.

 

As one of the investigators put it, “What matters is not whether a story is true or not.  Instead, if you’re always enclosed in a bubble of your own life and interests, how can you ever imagine the lives of others?”

 

So now there is solid scientific support for what readers, editors and authors have known for generations, probably for thousands of years.

 

With a strong theme in mind, create a memorable character, give him a big problem to solve and drop him in a believable setting and you are doing your part to help Humanity evolve and grow. 

 

And you thought you were just telling stories to amuse yourselves.

 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on December 16.  In this post, we’ll look at item #6 in our story lab of basic storytelling elements: Know what your story is really about.

 

See you then.

 

Phil B.