New creatures & mystery in wonder fiction

ByJohn Brown

I love listening to writing excuses because I get to hear three smart and funny authors discuss interesting topics that get me thinking. This week’s writing excuse was on building non-humans in SF&F.

Here’s my take.

An alien race, if done right, can be a huge draw to a story. For example, Brandon Sanderson’s Kandra point of view in HERO OF AGES is one of the most enjoyable parts of that book.

However, I want to suggest that aliens (in fantasy or sf) create that draw only IF they’re kept sufficiently strange or mysterious. The minute they become common or too human, they lose their power to enchant.

That’s one thing I like about how Tolkien did the elves and orcs–we never got the National Geographic on them. They never became common. And so I always wanted to know more. Easterlings, ents, balrogs, the orders of wizards, dragons, etc. were the same. There were tons of tales Tolkien hinted at, curioisties raised, but those desires were never sated. This is part of what drove me to other fantasy books.

It’s the same thing that made me love mammoths and dinosaurs, bats and giant squid, and far-off places. However, once these things became common and explained, their magic departed. The curiosity generated by the wonder of things new is one of the key things science fiction and fantasy offer its readers. But I think authors can only keep it alive if they approach it in the same way a fan dancer approaches her work.

This leads me to another point. It’s true that focusing our world building on the conflicts and story touch points can keep us on track. And we do need to produce. However, I think if we strictly limit our alien development to the central story conflicts, we might miss many opportunities for that wonder. Some of what we develop might end up complicating the plot while other parts might only enrich the experience. And I don’t think that’s bad.

For example, one of the most poignant parts of the LOTR, of which there were many, was the tale of the ents and the entwives and Treebeard’s poem. Tolkien could have eliminated that and the story never would have been affected. But, O, how much richer the story was for that little side trail that still beckons. Or you might think of the ring Bilbo found. When Tolkien first wrote THE HOBBIT, it wasn’t THE ring of power. It was merely a ring that Gollum used. Only later, when he began to work on LOTR and was trying to figure out the main problem of the story did he work that detail into it becoming THE ring of power.

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    Your single biggest challenge writing novels

    ByJohn Brown

    I’m about to put together a brand-new novel writing boot camp, but before I do that I want to know what would be most helpful to YOU.

    So if you want to write novels, my question to you is this…

    When it comes to writing novels, what’s YOUR single biggest challenge, frustration, or concern?

    Please CLICK THE LINK to tell me.

    Click here.

    As a thank you, those that answer the question will get a seat at a virtual, 1-hour training session I’m putting on where you discover 3 key principles of keeping your readers hooked.

    I look forward to the insights.

    You’re awesome ?

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  • When the workshop works

    ByJohn Brown

    From a workshop participant at MountainCon:

    I’m going to give a shout out to all the goodness I experienced. So if you don’t really care what happened at the con, you can stop after this paragraph and take this message away with you: Brandon Sanderson (who does Writing Excuses, has published several novels, and is the chosen one to finish Jordan’s Wheel of Time series) and John Brown (with a must buy novel coming up next year) are incredible teachers. If you ever get a chance to attend a class or workshop by any of them, don’t let it pass.

    We loves to hear these things, Precious.

    But we loves it just as much when we can make the students shiver with excitement: more here: http://www.amichopine.com/blog/?p=318

    To those who missed this run of the 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories Workshop, know I’ll be holding it again. Check back to see when.

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  • How much does author Jim C. Hines make?

    ByJohn Brown

    Dear But-All-Writers-Are-Rich,

    Jim C. Hines is a hard working midlist author with a couple of fun series out. Hines reveals what he makes in his post 2011 Writing Income. More importantly he reveals what he’s been making for a few years. For more information on advances etc., please peruse my page on Writing Business Facts & Figures.

    Sincerely,

    The Man

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  • Generating Story 2: No Clue, No Solution

    ByJohn Brown

    I want you to think about Ed Smylie, who helped save the Apollo 13 astronauts with his duct tape contraption. What if the authorities had come to Ed, but instead of saying, “Look, we need to fit the round CO2 scrubbers into the holes for the square ones,” they’d said, “We want you to do something; it involves thinking.”

    Ed would have blinked. Waited.  “Yeah?”

    “That’s it. Something. A lot is riding on this.” And then maybe they urged him on with a significant wave of their hands.

    Can you see Ed at this point?

    “Sure.” He’d say. “I’ll get right on that.” Then he’d wonder who put these guys up to this practical joke.

    Do you see how impossible it is when you frame things that way?

    To come up with solutions, you have to have a clue about what it is you’re trying to do. Even if it’s just a rough idea. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to fix a space ship, roast hotdogs, or write a story.

    Once we have a rough idea of what we want to accomplish, the mind automatically kicks into gear to perform its wonders. Until we do that, we’re going to be like Ed in the example above—staring at a blank wall, wondering if our superiors aren’t a bit cuckoo.

    So what are we trying to do?

    Think about your reader. Is it a woman? A teen? A crazy dude? Do you remember my book tour with Larry Correia in 2009 and the guy who, during a booksigning / doughnut party at a Phoenix Barnes & Noble, proclaimed my book to be true?  Aliens really were eating our souls and enslaving humanity. They were lizards living in the hollow portion of the earth.

    The point is: what are your readers hoping your story provides them? In fact, since you’re the first audience, what do YOU want from your stories? Why do you read?

    I want you to write down five stories you really like. Movies, TV shows, novels, short stories, plays—I don’t care the genre or type. Just write down five. Do it now. Here are five random stories I like.

    • The Incredibles
    • The Good Guy by Dean Koontz
    • Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
    • The Sound of Music
    • Runelords by David Farland

    This is going to be a powerful exercise for you. It was for me the first time I did it in a class on interior design.

    A few years ago, Lovely Wife and I were building a house. We wanted to make our living space sing. We wanted our surroundings to make us happy, but we didn’t quite know how to go about doing that. So we took a class on interior design, hoping to learn the principles involved.

    Except when we showed up in the first session and saw the many different design styles, it overwhelmed us. Some styles were ethnic (Southwestern, Asian, French, Gothic, Pygmy), some philosophical or religious (Zen, Feng Shui), many were artistic (Modern, Arts & Craft, Minimalist, Art Deco, College Room Mate ), a lot were mixtures. Some were about making statements and creating moods, some about practicality (here’s a taste of those styles).  How in the world were we going to learn this?

    Luckily, we had a very perceptive teacher. She knew that most of us were there, not to learn all the styles, but to decorate our own houses. So in our second session, she brought dozens of home magazines. She spread them out on the tables we were sitting at and told us we would go through the magazines. When we found a picture or image we liked, we were to rip that page out and put it in our personal stack. So for about 45 minutes we looked and ripped and looked and ripped. Lovely Wife and I each ended up with a pile of a few dozen pictures.

    Then the teacher told us to spread our pictures out in front of us and look for things that the images had in common. Colors, features, design elements.

    I spread my pictures out. Lovely Wife spread out hers. And it was like magic. Boom! Right there in front of us. I loved arches and eyebrow windows. Loved dark blues and purples mixed with creams and whites. Loved the color of blond wheat and a navy blue sky. I loved wood. Loved Arts & Craft with a few tweaks.

    Lovely Wife’s pile was equally revealing.

    The teacher then said, “This is your personal style. This is what’s going to make you happy.” She told us that when designing the rooms in our house, that we should think about their function and merge them with these elements. And if any of us were to work with clients, we’d do something similar with them and find out their wants and likes.

    With our styles now beginning to be fleshed out, Lovely Wife and I went to work. Some of her elements and colors overlapped mine. Some didn’t, like her idea of sleeping bliss: a bed with sheer red drapes hanging from some lamp shade contraption in the middle.

    I told her I didn’t know if I could keep my man card and sleep in that bed. She decided I should keep my man card, but said she couldn’t sleep in a plain-walled zen room. We compromised. She got textured red on the walls. I got a bed without too many frills. We came up with designs for our spaces that did what we wanted them to do.

    But we couldn’t have done this if we hadn’t identified what we were after.

    So I’ve adapted that visual art technique used in the design class for our purposes. It’s just as powerful with literary arts. Which is why I want you to write down five stories.

    I want you to take a moment and identify what you’re after, in a big picture general way.

    I can’t do this for you.

    You and I are different. Just like Lovely Wife and I are different. While our tastes may overlap in some places, they’re going to diverge. You don’t want to write my stories. You want to write YOURS.

    So write down five stories. Then write down what you really enjoyed, over all, about each of those five stories. You might do this on five pieces of paper. What did you enjoy with each of the main story elements—character, setting, problem, plot, and text? What kind of an experience did they give you? What drew you to them in the first place?

    You don’t need to go all crazy detailed on me with this and do a twenty page report. Just hit the highlights. The stuff that will fit on one page without writing in four point font.

    When you finish that, step back and look at all five pieces of paper side by side. What common elements do you see? Circle them.

    This is your style. This is what, in general, you’re going for.

    If you found the exercise insightful, do five more stories. Ten is such a nice number.

    I’m going to predict that 99% of the things you identify have to do with what the story did to you. The stories made you laugh, smile, scream, want to fall in love again. They made you curious or jealous or feel some type of desire (be a Ninja king, strong, beautiful). Maybe they gave you insight. Maybe they affected you so profoundly that it changed, if even in a small way, how you decided to live your life.

    Stories–the ones people pay money for; the ones people stay up until four a.m. reading with a flashlight; the ones people tell their friends about–make people feel things.

    A while back I wrote about this in three parts. I believe the things you’ll read in those short posts, if you don’t know them already, will change how you think about stories. They did for me. And it all begins with lipstick.

    1. Lipstick
    2. Getting specific
    3. My big draws

    Okay, I hope at this point you are getting a general idea of why readers pay money to read the stories we create. Why YOU pay money and spend countless hours reading what others write.

    This is the first step in being able to produce on purpose, not on accident. This is the first step to becoming the Ed Smylie of fiction—understanding what you, as a writer, are trying to do.

    This week, keep your eyes open. Notice what stories do to you. Notice how you feel about different characters and plots. If you feel like taking it farther, notice the effect of different beginnings and ends of novels, chapters, or scenes. Notice the effect of different ways authors describe characters, places, and actions.

    Of course, while knowing these general objectives is critical, it’s not enough. You need to know what you’re reaching for with the current story, the current characters, the current plot. How do you translate all this general stuff to the specifics of the story in front of you? Do you have to define everything up front? And what if you don’t know what you want in the current project anyway? What if you are clueless and have nothing but a handful of random ideas that for some reason are generating electrical sparks? What do you do then?

    In the next post, I’ll talk more about those questions and where the how-to’s fit into all of this, and then we’ll get into the principles of invention.

    For more in this series, see How to Get and Develop Story Ideas

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  • Is Amazon’s game totalitarianism?

    ByJohn Brown

    nazi_flagAmazatzi?

    Franklin Foer and Scott Turow recently made comments which suggest Amazon is in the process of ushering in a totalitarian book economy.

    Is Bezos, as Hitler was in the 1930s, biding his time, playing a long game, one that will lull the masses into a false sense of bookish security? Are we appeasing him, letting him take over the continent bit by bit? Is the blitzkrieg less than a decade away?

    If you listened to a recent Intelligence2 debate, you would have heard Foer-Turow claim that, yes, that’s exactly where we are headed. On the other side of the debate were Joe Konrath and Matthew Yglesais, arguing that Amazon is the reader’s friend.

    Konrath and Yglesais made some good points. But they left the central Foer-Turow argument standing like a citadel. It was left standing because much of what they had to say, as good as it was, frittered around the edges or went off into beer land.

    But the Foer-Turow argument is not a citadel. It’s a house of crackers.

    Here’s why: publishers, authors, readers, and entrepreneurs all have brains. And somehow, in their threat assessment, Foer-Turow forgot that.

    How could they forget something so fundamental?

    Well, their argument went like this.

    1. Amazon right now provides an amazing service that’s far and above anything any other bookseller currently provides. They have made more books more accessible to more readers than anyone else ever in history. Readers, of course, love this. But this is a bad thing.
    2. It’s bad because Amazon is becoming a monopoly–it already has 41% of all new book and 67% of all e-book sales, and in many divisions of those markets it has even more.
    3. If Amazon were an enlightened ruler like Aslan, okay. But Amazon is a business, and as a business it only cares about its profits. And the way to make profits is buy low and sell high. So when Amazon finishes consolidating its hold on the market, it will force publishers and authors to take less of the pie.
    4. In fact, Foer-Turow claim Amazon wants to not just reduce the share of the pie publishers get, it wants to kill off the publishers and take their share of the book pie completely. In addition to being very poor manners, this is bad for three other reasons.
    5. First, authors of non-fiction books that take a long time to research will never be able to get the money they need to do that research. Publishers are the only ones who can give them that money, which they do in the form of an advance.
    6. Second, few authors of fiction will be able to afford good editing, marketing, and book design, and so the many voices that could have been heard will be stifled, or never rise out of the crap to their true potential.
    7. Third, and this is the nefarious Nazi part, if Amazon is the only place you see books, they can control which books you see, which means they will exert enormous control over our culture because they will be able to suppress some books, and therefore the ideas in those books, and promote others. Foer-Turow claim Amazon has already done this.
    8. Finally, because it’s a business and has a goal of profit, when Amazon covers the land, it will probably eventually charge readers more. In fact, it may charge them a lot more. It can’t avoid it; it’s a business.

    So Amazon is taking over more and more book territory. When it’s taken over enough territory to be unassailable, it will then proceed to ruin our culture because its model of book selling will suppress quality non-fiction and fiction alike. And then it will gouge readers.

    Sounds depressing.

    Sounds like Orwell’s 1984 or global warming.

    The only problem is that there is a big honking flaw in all of that.

    Like BIG and HONKING.

    And I’m not talking about the issues like the idea that publisher advances are the only way non-fiction writers can be funded, or that publishers are the only way the vast majority of fiction writers can obtain quality book covers, marketing, and editing. Or that one internet site has the power to put a choke hold on ideas.

    No, it’s about something else.

    You need to know I’m not an Amazon groupie. Nor am I a hater of publishers. I am a businessman. I’m looking for good partners. And I recently wrote a post pointing out that it’s delusional for authors to think Amazon is their BFF with pinky rings. They are just, at the moment, a great indie partner. But their interests and mine are not perfectly aligned. Our love is definitely not written in the stars.

    So I’m not here to stand up for Amazon. I’m here to say that the scenario Foer-Turow paint is fantasy.

    Why?

    Because they’ve set up a chess board and assumed that Amazon is the only player.

    Monopoly

    How does a monopoly stay a monopoly?

    The government either legislates it. Or the company maintains their position by force. Or they own something that nobody else can get. Or the barriers to entering that market are so high nobody can get in to play. In all these scenarios, if people want the goods, they are forced to interact with the monopolies.

    But has the government given Amazon a legal monopoly?

    Um, nope. No charters here to be the only fur trappers in the West.

    Does Amazon have an army of thugs who are going to beat people up and make them join Amazon Prime?

    No. Well, maybe that’s what the drones are for, but they haven’t rolled them out yet.

    Do they own something nobody else can get, like a piece of land? Are they sitting on the world’s largest reserves of cheap book oil?

    Nope. They’ve got a great website and excellent logistics. But websites really aren’t that hard. And if we’re talking ebooks, you don’t need logistics.

    What about the barriers to entry?

    The big advantage Amazon has is that they usually have the lowest book prices around, the biggest selection (you can find almost any book you want there in any format it’s available in), and are incredibly convenient, providing samples, reviews, recommendations, and easy checkout. And they have the crowds.

    It’s hard to get crowds. It’s hard to get all that content. It’s hard to beat their prices. Those are some dang good barriers that keep new guys out.

    And Foer-Turow figured that’s all set. In stone.

    Human Beings

    But what happens if publishers have brains and are actually headed up by, like, real humans who aren’t just going to roll over and play dead? What would such folks do should Amazon keep killing off more and more of them and stealing their pie?

    Amazon doesn’t own the rights to their books. As soon as any contract ends, publishers could simply say, we’re done. Our books will no longer appear in your store. If you’re faced with extinction or something else, what do humans normally do?

    Amazon’s advantage is being the everything store. You can find every book imaginable there. So what happens when shoppers go there and can’t find the most popular books of our time? How long do they stick with Amazon when the shelves are empty? Anyone think about why Amazon kept selling Hachette books even when they were having contract disputes?

    What happens if indie authors have brains and are real humans who aren’t going to roll over and play dead either? What would such folks do should Amazon keep squeezing more and more profits out of them? Could such folks pull their books (like many bestselling indies have from Kindle Unlimited), form a co-op, and create their own site?

    What if everyone was talking about this awesome book that was all the rage, but it wasn’t stocked by Amazon? It was stocked on the indie site, and Apple, and all the others. How would that affect shoppers?

    What happens if there are real human entrepreneurs out there or real humans leading other businesses, and they were all wanting to make a buck, and they see Amazon charging readers a ton and swimming in easy dollars? What happens when they see those tempting profits?

    Do you think they might offer disgruntled publishers and authors better terms? Do you think they might give better deals to price-gouged readers?

    So is Amazon going to kill publishers? Only if the humans have left the building.

    Will they kill authors? Only if authors let them.

    Will they gouge readers? Not when other folks see there’s money to be made by undercutting them.

    Amazon is playing in a global market with the likes of Alibaba, Google, Apple, Walmart, etc. Amazon is playing in an internet economy where college students can come up with an idea and become billionaires. Equally important, Amazon owns nothing that somebody else can’t recreate. They have no legal monopoly. They have no army of thugs. What they have is a lot of content, a well-known URL, logistics for the hard copies, and good prices.

    But what they do not have is a marketplace where everyone else involved is absent a brain.

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    Story insights from the director of Pixar’s Up

    ByJohn Brown

    How would you like to listen to a master story teller for almost an hour? You can. Radio West recently interviewed Pete Docter who directed Pixar’s recent motion picture Up.

    Docter has been with Pixar since the beginning and he shares a number of insights into story telling. He talks about the importance of emotional hooks, getting ideas and developing them via the creative Q&A process, and editing a story from schlock to greatness, and much more. What a wonderful interview.

    Click here to listen.

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2 Comments

  1. You’re right on both counts!

    By the way you may want to read this article. It vividly illustrates your philosophy on how children learn best. http://www.deepastronomy.com/how-i-overcame-my-math-blocks.html
    Also, for kicks–or maybe to get more zings–you might as well watch this guy’s YouTube video he put together called, The Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Image Ever Taken. It’s mind boggling.

  2. when I’m interested in something, I devour every piece of information I can find on the subject with a laser beam focus. Nothing else exists for me when I’m learning something I care about.

    Amen, to that.

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