Post #203 February 17, 2020

“Why Johnny Winger isn’t Tom Swift Jr...But Maybe Should Have Been”

For many years, I have been working with a continuing character I created for three different series, Tales of the Quantum Corps, Quantum Troopers and Quantum Troopers Return.

His name is Johnny Winger.  Although I have consciously patterned these series stories after the Tom Swift Jr. books, Tom Swift is not Johnny Winger…but maybe he should have been.

Serial characters are both fun and a challenge to write.  Over the course of the series, you want to see them grow and evolve, confront problems and overcome them.  You want your reader to identify with them and like an old flannel shirt, become comfortable with all their idiosyncracies and nuances.  Think James Bond, Captain Kirk and Spock, Jason Bourne, Harry Potter and so on.  Just the mention of a well-known series character can evoke all kind of memories and expectations.  Building a series character is like building a brand name.  Readers like that because they know what they’re getting when they buy a book.

Think about Tom Swift Jr and what comes to mind?  An eternal teen-ager.  A boy genius who never ages.  An inventor of some cool and some rather ridiculous inventions.  An adventurer who’s always up to his armpits in problems with devious foreign governments, wicked crooks, space beings, you name it.  Tom Swift Jr, as written in the series, is the quintessential, blond, crew-cut all-American boy.  Well raised, courteous, respects his elders, tries to do the right thing.  I could almost imagine him as an altar boy or acolyte at a medium-sized Methodist church.

Jeff Duntemann has written a background study of Tom Swift in his Tom Swift Jr:  An Appreciation: To wit:

Tom Swift was perpetually eighteen, an age far enough removed from where my nerd friends and I were to be beyond understanding, but close enough for us to think we might just get there someday. He didn't seem to go to school, and there was no indication as to how he learned all he knew. Hey, he was a genius. My friend Larry could play any song he heard on the piano, immediately, with both hands—and had never taken a single lesson. He was just born with it. So, apparently, was Tom Swift.

None of that bothered us at all. Similarly, it was no bother that Tom Swift as a character was almost completely devoid of distinguishing personality traits. He was brilliant, strong, patriotic, hard-working, and respected his parents—and beyond that was as featureless as a billiard ball. In one sense that was because Tom Swift was a sort of Halloween costume that we donned in our imaginations, and any specifics that clashed too strongly with our specifics might have made this identification difficult. (I had this problem with numerous other characters in later SF, which made me more a spectator than a participant in the action.) Grosset & Dunlap knew what they were selling, and it wasn't literature.

I did consciously have Tom Swift Jr. in mind (or at least his adventures) when I created Johnny Winger but there are some notable differences in their personas.

Winger has undergone personal tragedy in his young life, in the death of his Mom and the depression of his Dad.  We don’t know what Tom Swift did before the stories; Grossett and Dunlap writers never tell us.  Tom Swift Jr inherits his father’s business (Swift Enterprises) and apparently his genius and plucky approach to life.  Johnny Winger joins Quantum Corps to get away from his life and live a different way.

In my series, Johnny Winger is in military service, with all that implies.  Tom Swift is a civilian, though he has close relations with various government departments.  Johnny Winger is no genius inventor, but he does have latent and initially unrealized skills as an atomgrabber, which makes him a special commodity to his superiors at Quantum Corps.   It also gets him into trouble at times.  Plus, throughout the series, Johnny Winger sometimes imbues his nanobotic devices with personalities and qualities he can’t seem to find in his human relations. 

In my series, I have endeavored to have Winger grow in his responsibilities.  The reader can see Winger progress in the ranks from a Lieutenant right out of nog school all the way to a flag officer, a General and Commander-in-Chief of Quantum Corps  (CINCQUANT).  At the end, he even allows himself to be deconstructed  into a para-human swarm entity (aka, an angel) to better fight off the evil criminal cartel Red Hammer (later Red Harmony) and their otherworldly benefactors.  Tom Swift never did that.

Have I shown any other changes, growth or evolution in Johnny Winger?  Well, I tried.  He gets married, to another quantum trooper.  They have kids.  He loses his wife to a religious cult called the Church of Assimilation.   But like the creators of Tom Swift, I never let Winger’s need to grow get in the way of the story.  At least, he doesn’t remain eighteen years old forever.

One challenge of creating and using a continuing series character is having to write around the facts of what you have written before.  That can be both a challenge and an impediment.  You find yourself reading and re-reading earlier writing to keep up with what you’ve already said.  If nothing else, you want your series character to be consistent across the stories…readers will give up quickly on your stories if you’re not.  Ian Fleming always took pains to portray James Bond as essentially the same person from story to story…shaken but not stirred.  And we readers found some comfort in that. 

Johnny Winger is not Tom Swift because their backgrounds and their story environments are completely different.  But I did often have Tom in my mind as I drew up adventures and problems for Johnny to face.  What happened to Johnny Winger often happens to characters that authors create…he took on a life of his own and drove the stories in unexpected directions.

And that’s not a bad thing.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 24, 2020.

See you then.

Phil B.

Post #202 February 10, 2020

“He Said What?  Effective Dialogue for a Good Story”

 

Every writer of fiction, every story-teller, must deal with fictional dialogue.  Writing dialogue is a true art.  That’s because dialogue has to serve many masters in any story.

Here’s snatch of dialogue that opens my sf novel The Farpool, from the very first page…

 

Angie Gilliam squirmed a bit more but it was no use.  Something sharp was pinching her butt.  The weight of Chase Meyer on top of her made it hurt like crazy. 

“Ouch…that hurts like hell…what the hell are you doing?”

“Sorry…just trying to…it’s the Cove.  Water’s choppy today—“

Angie twisted and contorted herself to ease the pressure.  That was better.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea, huh?”

They had packed a meal and grabbed a boat from Turtle Key Surf and Board—that was Mack Meyer’s shop, Chase’s Dad.  They had puttered along the coast off Shelley Beach until they came to Half Moon Cove—they always did it in Half Moon Cove—and found a secluded spot a few dozen meters off shore…right under some cypress trees.  Always smelled great there.

Then Chase and Angie wolfed down their sandwiches, dialed up the right music on Chase’s wristpad so they could slam some jam properly and settled down to business.

That’s when the wind fetched up and the Cove got way choppier than it usually did.  Most of the time, you could lay a place setting on top of the water and have dinner like home, it was so placid.  But not today.

“Ouch…look…let’s give it a rest, okay…something’s not quite right…”

Chase groaned and pulled out of her, cinching up his shorts as he did so.  He lay back against the side of the boat, and turned the volume down on his pad…whoever it was screeching on that go-tone needed a few more lessons.  He checked the growing waves beyond the Cove and that’s when he spied the waterspout.

“Jeez…look at that!” 

Angie pulled up her own shorts, ran fingers through her dark brown page-boy hair and sucked in a breath.

“Wow---that’s so wicked--“

There was a strange, wave-like agitation on the horizon just beyond the Cove, maybe a few kilometers out to sea, past Shell Key, easily.  For a few moments, a slender multi-hued waterspout danced just above the waves, like a gray-green rope writhing and hissing on the horizon.  It only lasted a few moments, then it collapsed.  There was a calm period, then the ocean began seething again and became more agitated than before.  Waves piled into the Cove, nearly upending the little boat.  Before long, another spout had formed, all in an odd sort of rhythm. 

 

In the dialogue above, notice that I’ve thrown in some colloquial sounding words, some slang, chopped it up a bit, yet you can tell what’s going on and how the characters feel about what’s going on.

Okay, so what’s going on here?  Dialogue serves many purposes…

1. Dialogue has to sound real, without being real.

Think about the speech you hear around you all the time.  It’s filled with ums, uhs, fits and starts and circuitous, poorly constructed, often grammatically incorrect sentences.  That’s the way real people talk…in any language.  Dialogue has to sound like that, without actually being like that.  That’s why it’s an art.  A few selected ums and ahs goes a long way in fictional dialogue.  It leads the reader’s inner ear to hear something that sounds real but it also performs other fictional duties as well.

     2. Dialogue has to advance the story.

Look again at the passage above.  What do you know about the story: two lovers are getting it on in a canoe in some kind of cove.  Their little tryst isn’t turning out so well, so they stop.  They see a water spout.  The ocean starts heaving.  Strange things are happening.  All this on one page.  All dialogue has to do something to move the story along and it has to do this through the words of the characters.  They see and experience things.  They report and comment on what they see or hear or experience.  They respond verbally to what’s happening: “…ouch, that hurts, stop doing that….”  The reader lives vicariously through the characters so dialogue is really important….it has to sound real.  You want the reader to empathize with your characters.  Dialogue helps make the connection.

      3. Dialogue has to reveal character and convey feelings and emotions.

There are ways other than dialogue to do this, narrative ways.  The writer could just say: “Jane felt sad and wished the pain would stop.”  But in general, it’s always better to show rather than tell.  Show Jane reacting in a way that conveys sadness.  “Tears flowed down Jane’s cheeks and she sighed, ‘I wish I was dead…I can’t take this anymore.’”  This reads a lot more powerfully and dramatic.  The dialogue, when done well, puts the reader in the character’s shoes and practically compels sympathy, empathy, all those things a writer or story-teller wants.  Now we want to know more about why Jane wishes she were dead, what’s driven her to this point.  Hopefully, the writer and the story will reveal that.  Done well, dialogue can really establish a strong emotional bond between fictional characters and the reader.

Fictional dialogue carries a lot of weight.  It’s not easy to do well.  You don’t normally talk in stilted, formal phrases (unless the story requires it) so your characters shouldn’t either.  Write dialogue like you talk and like you hear other people talking.  Then clean it up a little and bend it to the story’s needs.  As for me, whenever I hear a particularly colorful word or phrase, I write it down.  Usually it’ll turn up somewhere later in a story.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 17.  

See you then.

Phil B.

Post #201 February 3, 2020

“Grabbing the Reader’s Attention Right Away”

The first line or paragraph of your story are the most critical words in the entire story.  Try out these memorable lines from famous works:

“Call me Ishmael.”  (Moby Dick)

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” (Lolita)

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Anna Karenina)

“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.” (1984)

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” (A Tale of Two Cities)

 

First lines and paragraphs have numerous functions but none are more important than grabbing the reader’s attention right away and sucking them into the story. Here are some of the main purposes of a good first line:

1. Hook or intrigue the reader.  The reader asks “What’s going on here?”
2. Set the stage and tone of the story.  Is it a mystery?  A comedy?  Action adventure?
3. Build the foundations for later conflict.  Who, what, when and where?
4. Indicate who’s telling the story.  Whose story is this?

In creating a memorable and riveting first line, ask yourself this: what are you trying to achieve?  Is it suspense?  A unique sense of place?  Are you trying to make a philosophical point?  Detail a character attribute?  Maybe the character is kind or impulsive or happy-go-lucky.  Show this early on, in a first line or paragraph.

Here’s a first line from my sf short story “Second Sun,” now available in my collection of short works called Elliptical Galaxies:

“Not everyone was happy about having a second Sun.” 

What comes out of this first line?  That there is a second Sun, whatever that means.  That somebody’s not happy about it.  Makes you wonder why some are not happy.  A certain amount of conflict and intrigue is implied here.  Perhaps this is not the best first line ever created but it points in the right direction.  It makes you want to know more.

How do you go about hooking or intriguing your reader or generating questions in the reader’s mind?  You want the reader to ask these questions about what he’s reading:

1. What do I have to do to get my questions answered?  You have to read on.
2. Why should I care? (this involves creating empathy for your character)
3. What do I gain from going on?  Satisfying curiosity, validating or proving out my suspicions, seeing how the character gains his goal or gets his comeuppance.

Spend some time or thought on your first line or paragraph.  What intrigues you?  Try it out on your reader.

As in life, so it is in storytelling.  You only get one shot to make a first impression.  Make it a memorable one.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 10.  In this post, I’ll look at some idea for how writers create memorable characters that readers can empathize with.

See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

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.