I promised the audiences that I would post the PowerPoints and handouts to the website. Well, here they are. For those wondering, we do not have any recordings of the events.
How to Build an Action Plot Handout
How to Build a Romance Plot Handout
How to build a romance plot lecture notes
Here you go. And here’s the presentation in PDF: Story lessons from The Hunger Games handout. Thanks again to Stephen Nelson for the recording!
Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells are doing a series of podcasts on writing called Writing Excuses.
The have two podcasts on magic:
http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/05/12/writing-excuses-episode-14-magic-systems-and-their-rules/
I found these two interesting, and, as always, entertaining to listen to. However, while their focus on limitations and ramifications is excellent, I’ve found asking “what does the magic cost” to be counterproductive. Here’s why: “cost” leads people to think ONLY of magics where you trade x thing for y power. Blood, memories, vitality, years of life, your children, etc. The problem with this is that while magics that use fuel (cost something) can be great, it isn’t necessary to do it that way. There are many stories with wondrous magics that don’t cost a thing.
For example, Heroes shows a lot of magic without cost. What does it cost Hiro to time travel? Nothing. It’s free. What about the painter? He can do it at will. Same with the guy who goes invisible, the cheerleader who regenerates–all the other characters there. What about the magic in Elantris? It costs nothing to draw the runes. What was consumed? Nothing. What about Orson Card’s Hatrack world? Alvin can doodlebug until doomsday. There’s no fuel required.
Some may say it’s semantics, but it’s not. It affects the paths taken in the invention of the magic. I’ve seen it in my invention sessions and those of groups I’ve been in. Don’t trust me, do a group magic brainstorm session where you ask the cost of magic question and then another where you ask about limitations instead.
I’ve found that it’s MUCH more helpful to ask these questions but NOT necessarily in the order below.
Costs are simply ONE type of limitation. In magic, limitation and ramification are the key things. By opening up the question, we can use costs or MANY other types of limitations like genetics/bloodlines, intelligence, scope of power, duration of effect, sources, scarcity of ability, morals, geography, times when it’s effective, mysteries, etc.
Listen to the wonderful podcasts and then focus on powers, limitations, and ramifications, and use costs only if they are limitations that jazz you.
Interview with The Man Monday nightDungeon Crawlers Radio interviews The Man Monday, March 8th at 10:30 PM MTN. You can listen live or to the archive they’ll post to their site. All brought to you by UtahFM. Malak and Revan are great guys. I had a blast with them.
New page on writing facts & figures in the On Writing section.
CURSE OF A DARK GOD is moving along. You should see the progress bar move along quite a bit this week.
This is a cheap day-long writers conference and looks like it’s going to be another great one. I’ve highlighted what I’ll be doing in red. I’ll be making adjustments to the HOW TO WRITE A STORY THAT ROCKS presentation for things learned at LTUE.
Here’s their website. That night I’ll probably be attending the Whitney Awards Gala which is also being held down in Happy Valley, Utah.
DATE: Saturday April 24 2010
8-9 a.m. Registration
9-9:10 Welcome (Plenary)
KEYNOTES
9:10-9:40 Keynote #1 Ginger Churchill, “What I Wish I had Known as a Beginning Writer”
9:40-10:10 Keynote #2 Ally Condie, “My Journey to National Publication”
10:10-10:40 John D. Brown, “Aiming for National Publication”
INTRODUCTIONS of editors and authors
10:40-11:05 EDITORS: Derk Koldewyn, Granite NAME
AUTHORS: Caleb Warnock, Linda Jefferies, Shannon Guymon
11:05-11:20 15-minute break
11:20-noon BREAKOUT ONE
Upstairs room “Crafting the Novel” with Shannon Guymon, John D. Brown
Downstairs One “Finding and Working With an Agent” with Ginger Churchill, Ally Condie, Caleb Warnock
Downstairs Two “Taking Your Questions about Publishing” with Deseret Book and Granite Publishing
noon-1 LUNCH “Mix and Mingle with Authors and Editors”
1-1:40 BREAKOUT TWO
Conference One Derk Koldewyn of Deseret Book “What Deseret Book is looking for now”
Conference Two Ginger Churchill “How to Write and Publish Picture Books”
Upstairs room John Brown, “How to Write a Story That Rocks Part 1: First Principles & Story Concept”
Office room Caleb Warnock “10 Things Every Writer Should Know about Copyright”
Downstairs One Granite Publishing “What Granite is looking for now”
Downstairs Two Ally Condie “Writing Young Adult Fiction”
1:40-1:50 Ten-minute break
1:50-2:30 BREAKOUT THREE
Upstairs Room John Brown, “How to Write a Story That Rocks Part 2: Character”
Conference Two Ginger Churchill “Genres of Children’s Books, from Board Books to YA Novels”
Conference One Derk Koldewyn of Deseret Book “National Publication with Shadow Mountain”
Office room Caleb Warnock “How to Write the Query Letter”
Downstairs One Granite Publishing “Publishing Options with Granite”
Downstairs Two Shannon Guymon “How to Write Romance”
2:30-2:40 Ten-minute break
2:40-3:20 BREAKOUT FOUR
Upstairs Room John Brown, “How to Write a Story That Rocks Part 3: Plot”
Conference Two Ginger Churchill “How to be a Writer and a Mother Too”
Conference One Linda Jefferies “Writing Poetry”
Office room Caleb Warnock “Write a Synopsis? I’d Rather Gouge My Eyes Out!”
Downstairs One Ally Condie “Succeeding as an LDS author”
Downstairs Two Shannon Guymon “Writing Nonfiction”
3:20-3:30 Ten-minute break
3:30-4:10 BREAKOUT FIVE
Upstairs Room John Brown, “Writing Scenes: The Basic Units of a Novel”
Conference Two Ginger Churchill “Querying Agents and Publishers”
Conference One Linda Jefferies “Publishing Poetry”
Office room Caleb Warnock “Okay, You Were Rejected – Why, and What to Do Now”
Downstairs One “How to form a critique group that works”
Downstairs Two Shannon Guymon “Succeeding as an LDS Author”
4:10-4:20 PRIZE GIVEAWAYS, GOODBYE
REVISED (MAY CHANGE)
Gallup did a poll in 2005 asking readers how they selected the books they read. Here are the results.
What this says to me as an author is that the most important thing I can do to help my career is write the best dang story I can, seeing that almost 60% of what readers select is driven by the experience they or someone else had with the book.
The next most important factor has to do with helping my book stand out for browsers. This would include the cover, store placement, blurbs, flap text, and the opening pages. The only part of this an author can really focus on is the opening pages–again, writing the best dang story I can.
So it seems authors, especially debut authors, can’t do much to affect sales. But not being able to do much doesn’t mean they can’t do anything. Somewhere, somehow the first readers have to be enticed to give the book a go. Robert Sawyer talks about some of the methods to do that here.
EDIT: 4/8/2011
Kris Rusch adds more information that confirms the findings of the poll above in “The Business Rusch: Promotion”. READ HER WHOLE ARTICLE. Notice she does concede that publishers can get some notice for a book. So there ARE things that can be done to make the offer. But I agree with her advice that the best thing to do is get more product out the door. The studies she cites are:
2010 Survey of Book-buying Behavior by VERSO Advertising. The key conclusion on book-buying is that “Multiple factors impact consumer awareness of a particular title, but final purchase decision (online and offline) driven by author reputation, personal recommendations, and price.” If I were you, I’d read the whole presentation.
| # | Reason | % Respondents |
| 1 | Author reputation | 52% |
| 2 | Personal recommendation | 49% |
| 3 | Price | 45% |
| 4 | Book reviews | 37% |
| 5 | Cover artwork/blurbs | 22% |
| 6 | Advertising (including on-line) | 14% |
2007 Survey on what motivates readers to by a book by Spier Advertising, reported in Publishers Weekly
| # | Reason | % of Respondents |
| 1 | Friend’s Recommendation | 49% |
| 2 | Familiarity with Author | 45% |
| 3 | Description on Jacket | 32% |
| 4 | Reviews | 22% |
| 5 | Advertisement | 21% |
| 6 | Place on bestsellers list | 17% |
| 7 | Reading group pick | 16% |
| 8 | Cover design | 12% |
The main role of villains and antagonists in stories is to generate suspense, anxiety, and fear in the reader. They make it possible for us to worry that the hero will not be able to avoid a significant threat or remove a lack. There are other effects–mystery, poignancy (about the human situation like in Les Mis). But those are secondary.
For the main things to happen the villain has to be a credible, significant, and immediate threat…all the way through the book until he or she is smushed or wins.
If he’s not credible, the reader realizes there is no real threat. If the threat is not significant, who cares? If it’s not immediate, again, who cares?
So how do we make a villain like that? We make him or her smart, powerful, a few steps ahead of the hero, and dedicated to doing something we root against (because it’s just plain wrong or because we love our hero and want the best for him and the villain is pitted against him). He has to be able to put the hero on his heels most of the way through the book, and our poor hero is scrambling to adjust.
You can have all sorts of villains–liked by many or few, kooky or calculating, eccentric or plain, noble or sadistic–just as long as they remain significant, immediate, and credible threats. The minute they lose threat status, the game’s over because at that point fear, anxiety, and suspense in the reader vanish.
So how do writers use questions in their story development? Let’s hear first from Ian Creasey, whose short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy and Weird Tales, and has been reprinted in several Year’s Best SF anthologies. His excellent collection Maps of the Edge was published last year.
by Ian Creasey
I’d like to begin by thanking John for the opportunity to write a guest post about the technique of using questions to help create stories. This is not a “where do you get your ideas?” post. Rather, it assumes that you already have a basic idea, which you want to develop into a complete story.
I’ll use one of my own stories to illustrate how the question technique works in practice. The questions themselves are sufficiently general that they can be applied across a whole range of stories. What tends to change is the order in which they are asked. I find that stories sometimes start from an idea for a specific detail, in which case the process involves working backwards to develop the appropriate context. In other cases, the initial idea is rather abstract, and the task is to flesh out the premise with sufficient detail.
My example story is “The Report of a Doubtful Creature”, which was published in Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show (November 2009). I mention the publication date, because this was actually the seed for the story. The year 2009 marked the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and also the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species. I live near the Yorkshire town of Ilkley, which Charles Darwin visited just before the first edition of Origin was published. I therefore decided to write a story about Darwin’s visit to Ilkley, with the aim of getting it published in November 2009, exactly 150 years after the first edition of Origin of Species in November 1859.
So I had a story I wanted to write, without any notion of what its plot might be. The technique of asking questions helped me to shape the story, and I’ll list some of those questions here.
For my particular story, the answer is already in the premise: it’s about Charles Darwin. But other times, it’s not immediately obvious who a story might be about — for instance, if the initial idea is to explore a technological or social development, then there is a wide range of people who might be affected. In this case the standard advice is to ask, “Who is the most hurt by this development? Who has the most to lose?” That person is often a suitable protagonist (or antagonist) for the story.
In this example, it’s fairly obvious that the story has to be about evolution. There’s not much point in writing a story targeted for the anniversary of the Origin of Species, if it’s not about evolution!
The Origin of Species is a famously controversial book, symbolising a clear conflict between science and faith.
Wow… so far it looks easy, doesn’t it? It may appear that I’ve cheated by starting with several questions to which I already know the answer. But in fact I’m illustrating the point that if you have the germ of an idea for a story, then there are already some questions and answers implicit in your premise, no matter how vague it may initially seem to be. It can be useful to state these answers explicitly, to help crystallise the starting position.
This is what John calls a “power question”, a key question that can be widely applied, and which cuts right through to the essentials. The question “what is the specific example?” can be asked in many contexts (e.g. in considering how to show characterisation), but I find it particularly useful when framed as, “How does the conflict manifest itself?”
This isn’t mathematics: there’s no right or wrong answer. But you need some kind of answer. It’s a classic beginner’s mistake to write a story entirely in abstract terms: telling the reader about the conflict, without showing it. Stories are made of scenes. There should be at least one scene which dramatises the overarching conflict by putting a specific example onstage.
A short story will typically hinge upon a single scene that illustrates the core of the conflict. A novella or novel may require more instances, e.g. a small-scale scene near the beginning, and a large-scale scene toward the end. But the principle of needing specific examples still applies.
If I say that I’m going to write a story about evolution, and the conflict between science and faith, I’m speaking in general terms. I need a specific example. The device I chose was to have Darwin encounter a strange creature, which might possibly be a fairy.
This is another “power question”. It’s a way of saying, “Why does this story matter? Why should the reader care?”
There are different ways of addressing the question, depending on whether you develop the story on a top-down or bottom-up basis. If you start from specific details, then you may need to establish that those details represent important issues. Conversely, if you start from the big issues, then you need to establish that your illustrative details are sufficiently representative.
For my story, the question of evolution (i.e. science vs. faith) is already a high-stakes issue. So the crucial task was to establish that my specific example adequately represented the issue. Basically, if fairies exist — so what? Why would that affect evolution?
Here is the answer from the story, in Darwin’s words:
“My theory of natural selection requires that life proceeds by common descent. All creatures are related, however distantly. So any particular creature must possess living relatives, of some kind; and ancestral forms should be preserved as fossils. Any beast, however unprecedented to man’s eyes, must fit somewhere within the Linnaean taxonomy.
“If fairies exist as material creatures, what genus do they occupy? Where are their fossils? (The fossiliferous strata contain an imperfect sample of past organisms, yet surely we could hope for one example to be retained from the entire fairy lineage.) If the traditional description be correct — like a small man with wings — it is clear that fairies cannot fit anywhere within the existing genera of Mammalia. We could only accommodate them within Animalia by supposing an entirely separate line of descent, one which has left no close relatives, no intermediate forms, and no fossils. The evidence does not support it.
“It would be simpler, therefore, to suppose that fairies were a separate creation. After all, why should we require all creatures to be related?
“We indeed require it, for if we allow that any creature may be a separate creation, then we must allow the possibility to all creatures. How could I argue that a wolf must have descended from canid predecessors, if I cannot argue likewise for a fairy? Any opponent could simply say, ‘The wolf was independently created in its current form, just like a fairy.’ I would have no refutation for such a critique. Even those who accepted the Wolf might balk at the descent of Man from simpler progenitors, if given the excuse of the Fairy.
“My hypothesis must explain all creatures, or it explains none. Everything, or nothing. The thought burned in my mind: If this fairy truly exists, it will destroy my whole Theory.”
This is another “power question”. A story tends to feel more meaningful if the protagonist faces a genuine choice — a difficult decision. The nature of the choice obviously depends upon the overall conflict, but its onstage manifestation is determined by the specific example that illustrates the conflict. So when deciding upon an example, it’s helpful to bear in mind the choice that the example implies.
In my story, what choice did Darwin face when he encountered the fairy?
“A thought struck me that it would be simple to let the creature escape, thus avoiding the revelation of what it might be, and what it might imply. The temptation seemed to hang in the air before me, needing but a single step to reach out and grasp.”
Once the specific example has been selected, and its importance has been established, our questions move to the realm of practicalities. We must decide how the example is “staged”.
Stories are made of scenes. The scene begins when the protagonist encounters the situation, whatever the situation is. So the author’s task is to decide where and when that encounter takes place.
For my story, I needed Darwin to see a fairy. How could that happen? Maybe he goes out for a walk, and simply happens to see one. But that feels rather coincidental: too obviously contrived by the author. Also, at the time the story takes place, Darwin is ill: he’s in Ilkley to take the “water cure”. So he’s not likely to be wandering very far.
I decided to introduce a secondary character: a woman who had captured the fairy. She knew that Darwin was a famous naturalist, so she asked him to come and see it.
It’s important for a short story to remain focused, and not become cluttered with too many characters. It’s dangerous to answer every question by introducing a new character. But in this particular case, it was a useful solution. I started off with only a protagonist, Darwin. He didn’t have anyone to interact with. By introducing a secondary character, I allowed myself scope for dialogue, interaction, and contrast.
I’ve deliberately ended this post on an anti-climactic note, because although stories conclude with a climax, this doesn’t mean that the climax is the last thing you work out when writing it. Personally I find it easier to begin by shaping the overall structure of a story, including the ending, before I work out all the nitty-gritty staging details.
The questions that I’ve listed here are, obviously, not exhaustive. But I hope they give an indication of how an abstract idea can be turned into a detailed narrative. In my opinion the most important thing to remember is this: Stories are made of scenes. The most useful questions are those which help you envisage a particular scene. Once you can imagine the scene in your head, half the task of writing it is already done.
So are you curious about his story yet? If so, “The Report of a Doubtful Creature” is available to IGMS subscribers at http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=issue&vol=i15&article=_003 . You can also learn more about Ian and his work at www.iancreasey.com.
I’d like to thank Ian for taking the time to write up his process on this story. I though he made a number of interesing points. Did you notice what he said about envisioning scenes? Did you see that at least one of his questions is particular to this story and might not be used on any other?
Understand the core principles. Get a list of core questions. But then realize you’ll need to use creative Q&A as you go with all sorts of questions, large and small.
For more in this series, see How to Get and Develop Story Ideas
Comments are closed.
John, your crash course workshops were definitely the most beneficial for me. Thank you!
Great to hear that, Tyson. Let me know if you have questions about the material now that it’s had a week to cool 🙂