If you are a serious SF or Fantasy (or other speculative or historical fiction) writer and are going to go to one con, go to this one and pay for as many workshops as you can get into. Great material. I have all too many notes for rewriting and fixing Cerelian Gold, especially the center, and once I change the center, the end will probably change as well. Tips i found particularly applicable here were:
Give the characters hope and the illusion of nearing at least their first, lower level goal before dashing it and making them realize they have to deal with a bigger a problem than they hoped.
As you approach the climax, give the characters a big setback so the climb to success (or ultimate failure) is even bigger than it was before.
Add more problems as you go (complications) as well as solutions to the problems that were there from the start.
Lots of work to do.
Also, along the way I realized one of the reasons I was having trouble with my Something New: I have yet to create a character I actually like. I haven't had that problem when I've put the story further away from semi-contemporary life so I'm thinking of creating a character in space, maybe even an alien, or way back in the past, then turning them into a more contemporary human and plopping them back into the world of Something New, with an outsiders view even if they aren't actually an outsider: a lot of people, including but not limited to loners, geeks, and rebels have a tendency to at least feel like outsiders, and they are characters most of us can relate to, even like, so I can start there and see if that doesn't work a little better.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Friday, August 13, 2010
fixing the arc or arch or wave or something
I've been playing with the ending sections because they had a bit of mashe together feel, rather than the kind of flow I wanted. I don't think it's quite there yet, but I think it is improving overall. the tricky bit with these kinds of big changes is that I've probably left quite a few references to action in other scenes that maynot be out of alignment. If you notice something that seems out of sequence or just wrong, it probably is. Please let me know.
I still probably need to do something with the middle too, the story arc as they call it, though I think it a misnomer. An arc implies a fairly straightforward buildup to a climax, but most stories, especially novel length ones aren't that straightforward, and if they are, they shouldn't be. One description I was given was that it should be more like a W or an M, ups and downs, things seeming to go right as well as going wrong, even if they get undone in the next breath. I think my arc is too smooth an arch and needs some more ups and downs, contradictory forces, or misleads (mystery like). The trick of course it to have those ups and downs, and also changing between action, intensity, and other qualities while overall still building toward a climax. I've been working on one of my other books that does it rather better and noticed the nature of the problem, but haven't yet figured out how to fix it. How to you get a feeling of success as a prisoner on an enemy ship without it seeming a total illusion or a solace?
I still probably need to do something with the middle too, the story arc as they call it, though I think it a misnomer. An arc implies a fairly straightforward buildup to a climax, but most stories, especially novel length ones aren't that straightforward, and if they are, they shouldn't be. One description I was given was that it should be more like a W or an M, ups and downs, things seeming to go right as well as going wrong, even if they get undone in the next breath. I think my arc is too smooth an arch and needs some more ups and downs, contradictory forces, or misleads (mystery like). The trick of course it to have those ups and downs, and also changing between action, intensity, and other qualities while overall still building toward a climax. I've been working on one of my other books that does it rather better and noticed the nature of the problem, but haven't yet figured out how to fix it. How to you get a feeling of success as a prisoner on an enemy ship without it seeming a total illusion or a solace?
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Another scene, tech as an afterthought
i started this, thinking to try a short story on an apathy/stagnation theme and it took a different turn as I wrote...
She toyed with the coffee cup, gave the handle a push, and watched it spin. the highly polished alloys, designed to minimize friction and reduce spills wnt rough and round, the soft inwardly curving lip catching the liquid and cycling it back into the cup. She finally grabbed it, watched the coffee slosh itself inward, and took a sip, the cup’ lip adjusting o the light pressure of her lips to allow her to drink the tepid coffee safely. She sighed, bored and wondering what a really hot drink tasted like.
“Another conference freeby?” he asked as he set his own trey down. He grabbed the bttle as if flipped and uprighted it with a practiced flip. He’d gotten it two years ago, an easy-clean, seal-fit replacement for the recyclables -- from the consumables conference, made before they decided that a slightly easier to break version would keep them in business longer.
“just the cafeteria stuff. Thought you’d have recognized their logo by now. Don’t you eat here regularly?”
“Nothing at the salad bar has logos. Besides, that company owns plenty besides cafeterias. Just thought they might have invented it.”
“Probably did. Safety first and all that. Another year and the city will control the last free driving lanes left.”
“So you can sit back and relex, enjoy the commute. Doesn’t mean you can’t go anywhere you want.”
“No, just means I can’t take the route i want, the speed I want, the passing lanes I want... It’ll add twenty minutes to every commute, what do you bet?”
“No takers. They’ll want to make the buses look faster.”
She toyed with the coffee cup, gave the handle a push, and watched it spin. the highly polished alloys, designed to minimize friction and reduce spills wnt rough and round, the soft inwardly curving lip catching the liquid and cycling it back into the cup. She finally grabbed it, watched the coffee slosh itself inward, and took a sip, the cup’ lip adjusting o the light pressure of her lips to allow her to drink the tepid coffee safely. She sighed, bored and wondering what a really hot drink tasted like.
“Another conference freeby?” he asked as he set his own trey down. He grabbed the bttle as if flipped and uprighted it with a practiced flip. He’d gotten it two years ago, an easy-clean, seal-fit replacement for the recyclables -- from the consumables conference, made before they decided that a slightly easier to break version would keep them in business longer.
“just the cafeteria stuff. Thought you’d have recognized their logo by now. Don’t you eat here regularly?”
“Nothing at the salad bar has logos. Besides, that company owns plenty besides cafeterias. Just thought they might have invented it.”
“Probably did. Safety first and all that. Another year and the city will control the last free driving lanes left.”
“So you can sit back and relex, enjoy the commute. Doesn’t mean you can’t go anywhere you want.”
“No, just means I can’t take the route i want, the speed I want, the passing lanes I want... It’ll add twenty minutes to every commute, what do you bet?”
“No takers. They’ll want to make the buses look faster.”
Monday, August 2, 2010
Hope for the future in our fiction
Agent hunting left me depressed even without any new reject letters, not least its subtle messages about the state of Science Fiction which was not encouraging. So for my new story, something not toooo far into the future, maybe on earth, since that is what they are looking for, but it must be hopeful, even uplifting, which means at least a bit of trajedy along the way as well as cheerful. But what do we hope for?
Things I worry about but have hopes for include:
A shift toward caring about our environment as if it were the natural thing to do as well as the right thing to do. There is a tendency to think that the right thing must be the hard thing, and sometimes it is hard to start, but usually only because it is a change. Many companies going green have discovered that the results were both better and cheaper, and who can beat that? So one of our characters works at a recycled production plant (no point in recycling if no one's going to do anything with the gathered stuff). Is is possible to have a shortage of supplies from recycling, due to minimizing packaging and waste, and the regular habit of reuse as long as possible? That might be a fun problem to address :->
To take my own advice, though, it shouldn't be the main story line. I was once told that children's stories that taught values through some adventure or another, were very good at teaching children to pack their tooth brush and brush their teeth, because the characters always did so when they started their adventure or went to bed, just as a matter of course. So the recled production plant should be the setting, not the story.
Other things I have hopes for are space travel (though I have drafted a blog on that and wonder where we are going in that regard, whether it still serves the same purpose that it did before, and whether it has slid, for the next generation or two, into the impossible dream category). Still, it's there, and one or more of my characters can be aware of it, maybe with background on the state of the Mars project if the near future, or some similar project in the further future, to provide a sense of time. When is the next Haley's commet or some other space event due?
Medicine always progresses, many cancers have become avoidable or treatable, though not all, and the next bit worry seems to be new, less categorized things like autism (I still suspect it's a result of all those comms signals filling our lives from every direction, though some say not, or some other environmental effect that wasn't around in the past). Less invasive medicine would be nice, and better consideration of mixing medicines without all our medical information being stored in too many databases... How much information can be on a card and not give it to the computers using the data...
Well, that's a few pieces of the world to think about as we build some scenes and put some characters in it. More to come.
Things I worry about but have hopes for include:
A shift toward caring about our environment as if it were the natural thing to do as well as the right thing to do. There is a tendency to think that the right thing must be the hard thing, and sometimes it is hard to start, but usually only because it is a change. Many companies going green have discovered that the results were both better and cheaper, and who can beat that? So one of our characters works at a recycled production plant (no point in recycling if no one's going to do anything with the gathered stuff). Is is possible to have a shortage of supplies from recycling, due to minimizing packaging and waste, and the regular habit of reuse as long as possible? That might be a fun problem to address :->
To take my own advice, though, it shouldn't be the main story line. I was once told that children's stories that taught values through some adventure or another, were very good at teaching children to pack their tooth brush and brush their teeth, because the characters always did so when they started their adventure or went to bed, just as a matter of course. So the recled production plant should be the setting, not the story.
Other things I have hopes for are space travel (though I have drafted a blog on that and wonder where we are going in that regard, whether it still serves the same purpose that it did before, and whether it has slid, for the next generation or two, into the impossible dream category). Still, it's there, and one or more of my characters can be aware of it, maybe with background on the state of the Mars project if the near future, or some similar project in the further future, to provide a sense of time. When is the next Haley's commet or some other space event due?
Medicine always progresses, many cancers have become avoidable or treatable, though not all, and the next bit worry seems to be new, less categorized things like autism (I still suspect it's a result of all those comms signals filling our lives from every direction, though some say not, or some other environmental effect that wasn't around in the past). Less invasive medicine would be nice, and better consideration of mixing medicines without all our medical information being stored in too many databases... How much information can be on a card and not give it to the computers using the data...
Well, that's a few pieces of the world to think about as we build some scenes and put some characters in it. More to come.
Where are we going?
Agent hunting, I came across one listed in the past for Science Fiction and they still are, sort of, but they provided a fairly specifica discussion of what they were looking for, and it was, in my old fashioned view, about as science fiction as Flubber, Shaggy Dog, and that movie more recently where the guy could suddenly read the minds of women--contemporary Earth, near future, with some element a little further along than now or taking a bigger place in someone’s life, all about the people.. I suppose, technically, they could be labeled SF, just like most of the James Bond movies, but such stuff has always been in the main stream, on the general fiction shelves. Do they really need to be on the Science Fiction shelves? Do they belong there? and perhaps more important, is that what science fiction genre fans really want, the future that is no further away than next week or next year? If that’s really all they want, my own science fiction is doomed, but in reality, I haven’t noticed that much of a decline in Star Trek books on the shelves, either.
According to one recent discussion, it would be a sign of a decline in curiosity about the world and science, and leave the science fiction to the Chinese consumers, where curiosity is still growing. To me, the lack of curiosity dooms us to stagnation for years to come, for it is a sign of a generation lacking hope, faith, dreams of better to come, an interest only in the struggles of the day, and in addressing those struggles only in the most short-sighted way, if they can address them at all. Today, ethics, the environment, the sense of right and good, and long term value and meaning all too often seem to lose the argument. Even the books that address them seem too often to sermonize instead of letting the reader or student learn, and that is the approach of the defense, not outreach.
If I wanted to write about the contemporary world, I wouldn’t choose to take the course of science fiction and fantasy (though a few fantasies, like Harry Potter, have done it well and left the genre not in question). Popular fiction inevitably does better than genre fiction, and anything that can take that route should probably do so.
According to one recent discussion, it would be a sign of a decline in curiosity about the world and science, and leave the science fiction to the Chinese consumers, where curiosity is still growing. To me, the lack of curiosity dooms us to stagnation for years to come, for it is a sign of a generation lacking hope, faith, dreams of better to come, an interest only in the struggles of the day, and in addressing those struggles only in the most short-sighted way, if they can address them at all. Today, ethics, the environment, the sense of right and good, and long term value and meaning all too often seem to lose the argument. Even the books that address them seem too often to sermonize instead of letting the reader or student learn, and that is the approach of the defense, not outreach.
If I wanted to write about the contemporary world, I wouldn’t choose to take the course of science fiction and fantasy (though a few fantasies, like Harry Potter, have done it well and left the genre not in question). Popular fiction inevitably does better than genre fiction, and anything that can take that route should probably do so.
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