fiction

T.V. writing / fiction / screenwriting / writing — 4 Comments
20
Feb 10

Story Shorthand

I used to write slowly. As a novelist, I would meander, let myself go, simmer, get stopped up, go around in circles, find my way again and again. I still do that, I just do it very fast now.

If you’re on a deadline, but want to write a rich story fast, here’s a shorthand:

Every character gets an arc that hits at least three beats:

  • We meet them when they’re low — or don’t know yet they’re about to take a big fall.
  • They struggle with a new challenge.
  • They change as a result.

Show each of these beats in a scene or scenes consisting of:

  • a visual image
  • an emotion
  • a question in the mind of the audience — what comes next?

Weave these scenes together like a building conversation: each scene interviews the next, asking a more insistent question that’s only partially answered by the next, which answers a question with its own question in turn. Building in speed and intensity.

Every moment in your story is a great moment — if it’s not, lose it.

If you’re on a tight deadline, you can use this shorthand to develop a pretty tight story. Once you’ve got the story down, you can get profound.

  • Share/Bookmark
emotion / fiction / non-fiction / screenwriting / writing — No Comments
21
Dec 09

Follow The Emotion, Cut The Rest

Here’s the difference between fiction and non-fiction: fiction evokes emotion. Non-fiction conveys information.

As storytellers, we side with fiction.

Even if you write articles or blog posts or biographies or State Department briefings, you convey information by transporting your reader emotionally. You sacrifice telling them everything in favor of telling them enough, in the right way, so they’ll be moved. Or engaged. Or entertained.

Here’s what got me thinking about this: I put aside the pilot for a few days because I wanted to do a quick pass on this novel before sending it to some people. I cut and resisted cutting and finally realized that in fiction — if it doesn’t follow the emotional throughline, it doesn’t belong there. No matter how interesting or informative or important-seeming or beautifully written — if the writing doesn’t build to the emotional whole, it must be cut.

All stories are fiction.

The purpose of story is not to inform. It’s to transport. We don’t engage the heart and senses when we fill someone in on everything they need to know. If it’s important, they’ll get it because it comes attached to something a character cares about. Descriptions of place don’t matter, but a character might be devastated then notice her vicinity in a way that echoes what she’s feeling. That’s the only way that descriptions of place matter: how they reflect our insides.

We’re not reading travel guides. We’re reading metaphor guides, travel guides inward. This is the function of story.

  • Share/Bookmark
books / fiction / genre / literature / novelists / novels / writing — No Comments
2
Sep 09

Literary Fiction Sucks Up To Genre Like A Hot Girl At Comic-Con

Lev Grossman is the book critic for Time and the author of “The Magicians”, a novel. In this great piece in the WSJ, he writes about the “plot against plot”–the abandonment of story in 20th century literary fiction–and the new trend in fiction to embrace story again.

I’m a huge lover of modern and postmodern fiction. But I do think we as novelists owe as much to our readers as we do to art. The current pendulum swing back towards hybridizing literary fiction with genre fiction to make the former readable is good for writers and good for readers. It only makes what we write that much more relevant, because what use is the most artfully written novel if it interests no one? Novelists have a lot to learn from the challenge of being entertaining.

n.b.: I had jumped on the bandwagon without even realizing it–my new novel is literary fiction inspired by graphic novels. ‘Cause I’m trendy like that I guess.

The novel is getting entertaining again. Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance. They’re forging connections between literary spheres that have been hermetically sealed off from one another for a century. Look at Cormac McCarthy, who for years appeared to be the oldest living Modernist in captivity, but who has inaugurated his late period with a serial-killer novel followed by a work of apocalyptic science fiction. Look at Thomas Pynchon—in “Inherent Vice” he has swapped his usual cumbersome verbal calisthenics for the more maneuverable chassis of a hard-boiled detective novel.

This is the future of fiction. The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century.

via Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard Work – WSJ.com.

  • Share/Bookmark
features / fiction / journalism / non-fiction / novels / screenplays / sex / story ideas — 3 Comments
29
Jul 09

Four boys charged in the rape of an 8-year-old girl – Los Angeles Times

This story is devastating and incredibly tragic. All four of these children’s lives are ruined–not to mention the parents who now have to live with the fact of having refused to take their raped daughter back–and it brings up all kinds of questions about culture, identity, sexual and gender politics considering everyone involved are Liberian immigrants living in the United States. Would make for an incredibly powerful novel or feature for anyone able to take it on.

A 14-year-old boy is charged as an adult. The other boys — ages 9, 10 and 13 — are charged as juveniles. Authorities say the victim’s family has rejected her for bringing shame on them.

Associated Press

July 24, 2009

Phoenix — Authorities said Thursday that four boys ages 9 to 14 took turns raping an 8-year-old girl for more than 10 minutes after luring her into a shed with chewing gum, and now her family has rejected her for bringing shame on them.

“The father told the case worker and an officer in her presence that he didn’t want her back,” Phoenix Police Sgt. Andy Hill said. “He said, ‘Take her, I don’t want her.’ “

The victim is in the care of Child Protective Services, authorities said.

The 14-year-old boy was charged Wednesday as an adult with two counts of sexual assault and kidnapping, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office said. He is being held without bond.

The other boys — ages 9, 10 and 13 — were charged as juveniles with sexual assault. The 10- and 13-year-old boys also were charged with kidnapping, the county attorney’s office said.

Phoenix investigators said the boys lured the girl to an empty shed July 16 under the pretense of offering her gum. The boys held her down while they took turns assaulting her, police said.

“She was brutally sexually assaulted for a period of about 10 to 15 minutes,” Hill said.

Officers responded to an emergency call about hysterical screams. They found the girl partially clothed and the boys running from the scene.

via Four boys charged in the rape of an 8-year-old girl – Los Angeles Times.

  • Share/Bookmark
advice / fiction / literature / magazines / writing — No Comments
22
Jul 09

Glimmer Train Conductor

Susan Burmeister-Brown–editor of top literary journal Glimmer Train–answers some questions about her process for selecting stories:

EWR: Glimmer Train has been very successful at choosing high quality fiction. Can you speak to the process a story goes through in order to appear in your magazine?


Susan: If the story comes to us using our online submission system (which is the case for 98% of what comes in), I am the first reader. I read the first page of the story online. If I want to turn the page, I mark that piece for “full read”. I do my full reads in a separate session, since the process of screening work is very different from full reading. I print the stories out at this stage, since I still find it easier to lose myself in pages rather than on the screen. If I love the story, I sit on it for a few days. I see how it stays with me, and I reread it. If I still love it, I give it to my sister. She’s a slower and more thorough reader. She’s the one who can identify any weak spots, suggest possible edits, etc. She reads it, sits on it a couple of days. If it’s staying with her, then she reads it again, circling strong passages as she goes along. It’s her way of sinking into a piece. Finally the two of us sit with the stack that has endured, and we talk about each story. We can only print 40 stories a year, so we have to keep our bar extremely high. It basically comes down to our selecting the stories that we can’t stand the thought of not publishing.


If the story comes to us on paper through the mail, the story will first be read by our story screener who’s been with us for over eight years now. She’ll give me her top quarter. Those get my full read.



EWR: What advice would you give to new or young writers trying to build a career in writing?


Susan: I have two pieces of advice:


-Regularly read good writing.


-Unplug yourself from the hurly-burly of life on a regular basis so your subconscious has time to make some good compost. If you have too much going on all the time, or you’re always emailing or texting or talking on the cell phone, always have a browser open on your screen seeing what’s going on out there in the world, or the radio on in the car – well, these are not conditions in which productive mulling can take place. Writing does not just occur when you’re at the keyboard or with pen in hand. It brews in the mind.

via Interview with Susan Burmeister-Brown.

  • Share/Bookmark
books / fiction / journalism / literature / magazines / non-fiction / novels / readers / reviews / writing — No Comments
17
Jul 09

Pulling Back the Curtain on New York Times Book Reviews : Selling Books

Most people who write books have two dreams: to go on Oprah and to get reviewed (favorably, ‘course!) by The New York Times Book Review. Following is an expose on how that happens. (N.B. It don’t look good for first-novelists. It never does.)

The process of deciding what gets reviewed and what doesn’t is quite demanding work. “It begins with the clerk who goes through the pile of 750 to 1000 advance manuscripts that the office receives each week,” says Gewen. However, don’t expect your self-help book, reference guide or travel manual to get any attention in the initial review by the clerk. Those books are “tossed.”

Then, the rest of the manuscripts are taken to Tanenhaus’s office where the senior editor and deputy editor divide them up and get rid of more.

This leaves the six preview editors with about 25 books to look through. Keep in mind this winnowing process has just cut upwards of 750 or more books! Gewen said he spends at least a half hour on each book and chooses four or five, then rejects the others. Reasons most often cited for exclusion, “too narrow for us” or “workmanlike.”

In an interview with Tanenhaus by Michael Orbach of “Knight News, ”If a writer is not bringing something new to the conversation or is not very well-established with a following, long-awaited book, or has really superb narrative or analytical skills, there’s a good chance the book won’t get reviewed.”

In another article that tries to depict the workings of The New York Times Book Review, “The Book Review: Who Critiques Whom- and Why?” by Times Editor Byron Calame, Tanenhaus continued to say that books often get rejected because they “lack originality” or are “packaged assemblages of smaller pieces.”

And for those of you authors who want your first novels to be reviewed, Tanenhaus said, “It has to be strikingly good.”

via Pulling Back the Curtain on New York Times Book Reviews : Selling Books.

  • Share/Bookmark
fiction / future / sci fi / writing — No Comments
6
Jul 09

Cory Doctorow: Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise

Apparently, in an age of free information, writers will be the new inventors:

“New warfare expert John Robb coined the term “plausible premise” to describe the new reality of  ”open source insurgencies” (“insurgency composed of many small groups without any hierarchical leadership or organizational structure that typifies 20th century practice”). Open source insurgencies don’t run on detailed instructional manuals that describe tactics and techniques. Rather, they run on a master narrative about how insurgency may be conducted — as screenwriter John Rogers put it:

What you really need is a plausible premise. i.e. “You can kill US soldiers with IEDs.” and then the new Interconnected Marketplace Of Shitty Evil Ideas will solve the problem for anyone looking to kill US soldiers with IEDs.

Or, more succinctly, in order to get the marketplace off its ass to solve the impossible, you have to just pull off the highly improbable and make sure everybody knows about it. Show it can be done, show how you did it, and watch the “marketplace” attack because you’ve made the “premise” “plausible.”

But this doesn’t just work for insurgents — it works for anyone working to effect change or take control of her life. Tell someone that her car has a chip-based controller that can be hacked to improve gas mileage, and you give her the keywords to feed into Google to find out how to do this, where to find the equipment to do it — even the firms that specialize in doing it for you.

In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it.”

Cory Doctorow via Locus Online Perspectives: Cory Doctorow: Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise.

  • Share/Bookmark
fiction / future / literature / sci fi — No Comments
28
Jun 09

10 Sci Fi Books That Launched Their Own Genres

Great article here about 10 sci fi books that launched their own genres:

http://io9.com/5302367/science-fiction-books-that-launched-their-own-genres?skyline=true&s=i

  • Share/Bookmark
Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes