Prompt Bingo

I'm getting a new project off the ground, which has the working title of "Firebird Project."  It's a novel about a girl who has to put up with this guy who is a firebird.

Sometimes I have a brilliant idea and sit down and write for hours and stay up at night thinking about what I'll write next so I'm ready to go write it all down the next day.

This is not one of those times.  I blame it on being out of practice.  Like when you don't go to the gym for a week and you know it's going to suck when you finally go again so you put it off even more.  Or like when you forget to do the dishes one day and then might as well burn down your house because there's no coming back from that.

I also blame it on how this donut looks tragically unappetizing even though I'm sure it's perfectly fine.  I consider this a very good excuse, thank you very much.

So anyway, this procrastination cannot continue and it's time to get an action plan together to actually get this thing flying.

Step 1 is a little thing called "Prompt Bingo."  What you do is make yourself a bingo card and then fill it in with writing prompts.  These writing prompts can come from anywhere, including the many many writing prompt generators on the internet.  Some will even just spit out a random bingo card for you.

Here's my current one:

Safe and Sound	In the Park	The Kraken Wakes	Degenerate	Serpent
Finger	Mouth	Petal	Murder	Haiku
Hurt	Wife/Husband	Free Space!	Special Forces	A Quiet Moment
On the 4th Bridge	At Brimingham New St.	Summer	Labyrinth	Far Away
Window	Soft	In Battle	Belief	Jungle

You don't have to write in order.  So you find a prompt that jumps out at you and then write a scene using your characters and world and plot.  You can hone in on a prompt and think, "How does this word fit into my story?" or "What would my characters do with this prompt?"

The cool thing is that it first gives you some direction when writing if you start with very little (like me right now.)  Then once you have a string of these scenes, you can piece them together and start to get a better view of the plot and the story's overall structure.  Once you have a kind of skeleton, you can start to flush it out and fill in the gaps.

BYOT Blackout Editon

Bring Your Own Theater happened again last weekend. It was a lot of fun, especially since a bunch of writers went to Clarke's to write together and not only did it feel less lonely, but I also got to eat pancakes.

I felt really good about this one and the play ended up really close to the script. They added tinkly restaurant background music. When the lights came up, Vinny was sitting alone at the table, looking sad with sad music and the crowd went “Awwww!” Five seconds without saying a word, and he had the audience hooked.

So, for your reading enjoyment, here's "Glitching."

Breaking up is hard to do

Yesterday, for the fourth book in a row, I gave up on a book because of the second act breakup.  A second act breakup takes place after your main romantic leads have fallen for each other and everything seems like it's going great and everything looks like it might turn out okay. 

But wait!  She's suddenly had a brain wave that they're too different after all and maybe this won't work out.  Or the mobsters to whom he owes money track him down and he has to break up with her for her own protection.  And...did you lie to me about that thing???  Unforgivable! 

Also he's keeping his secret wife in the attic.

It's in most stories, especially most romances, and it has completely valid reasons for being there. 

1. Stories need conflict.  If they get together too fast and have a happy, healthy relationship and that's the entire focus of the story, then that's boring.  And also like 20 pages long.  So if you have a romance story, something has to keep them apart.
2. This structure lines up well with the hero's journey.  There has to be a low point of the story from which the hero or heroine can bounce back.  This initial failure usually mirrors the climax in some way: they fail at first, but then get stronger or learn and then overcome it at the end.

Now, I've written second act breakups, and I'll probably write one again.  But they've really been getting on my nerves lately.  I think mostly because I'll be enjoying a book and then this will come completely out of the blue.  One of them will suddenly go, "Wait!  I'm not good enough for you!" and run off without talking to their partner, who could reassure them that that's bogus.  One of them will need to do an outside thing and go, "I could talk to my partner about this and get their help with it, but instead I think I'll lie about what I'm up to and then go it alone." 

Gah.  Nope.  I'm done with this book.

If the conflict of your story could be solved with a single conversation, something's wrong.  This would solve a lot of stories' conflicts, but not all of them.  A chat between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader (although enlightening) isn't going to keep Alderan from getting blown to bits.

So I've been thinking (since I've written this and started wondering if I'm as irritating as the stuff I've been reading lately) and I've come up with some ideas to break out of this structure.

• They don't get together enough to break up until the very end.
• They get together and have a happy, healthy relationship that grows over the course of the story, but the main conflict is outside of their relationship and they face it together instead of having it tear them apart.
• They have a big fight, but work through it and they're back together by the end of the chapter.  Bonus points if this happens every chapter and every time the fight is different.
• The break up is a ruse!  They'd planned it together to confuse their rival families. 
• There's a second act breakup, but it's because of spiders.

Guess What

I have not been writing much lately because it turns out the first trimester of pregnancy is terrible.

That's my smooth way of telling you I'm pregnant.

I'll get back to the regular schedule of talking about writing and reading and whatnot next week, and this will hopefully be the only pregnancy post.  But since I haven't been doing much writing, I'm going to indulge today.

1.

I gave up caffeine.  It was terrible.  The week before I figured out I was pregnant, I made a big push to finish my latest novel.  I woke up, had a coke, went to the coffee shop, had a coffee, went to a different coffee place, had two more coffees, went to work, came home, and had another coke.  People keep telling me when I complain about it that I don't have to give up caffeine.  "If you just have one cup of coffee a day, you'll be fine :D"  Like one cup of coffee is a completely reasonable amount. 

As soon as I realized this routine had to stop, I froze and gaped indignantly at my only audience at the moment: the cat.  "I'm not prepared to change my lifestyle that much!"  

The cat stared at me, and I provided his side of the conversation.  "You think that's bad?  You ain't seen nothing yet." 

I hate it when the cat is right. 

So I just quit cold turkey and felt like crap for a while as I went through withdraw.  Or maybe it was the zygote making me nauseous and tired.  One or the other. 

2.

Prenatal vitamins are enormous.  Remember Flintstones vitamins?  You know those chewy vitamins they advertise on TV that look like fruit snacks?  I was expecting those. 

Instead they are horse pills.

My mother cackled when I told her over the phone.  Apparently they have not decreased in size since the 80s.

3.

I called and told my parents when I found out, and told them they could tell whoever they wanted, but they would be responsible for un-telling those people if it became necessary.  Then the other day, now that I'm out of the first trimester, I made an announcement on Facebook, because this is how we pass information these days.

My uncle saw it, and immediately called my dad to be sly.  "So...what's new with Cary these days?"

My dad is a firm believer that nothing is anyone's business.  This character trait added to my warnings, and he shrugged and said, "Nothing."

It made my uncle's day when he got to break the news to my dad. 

4.

Instead of calling the print outs of ultrasounds "photos", they should be called "soundos."  Because no photons are involved.

5.

Ron calls the fetus "Cary Jr." and refers to it exclusively with female pronouns.  Everyone else seems to think this is really funny and it's caught on.

6.

I've gotten aggressive about correcting people when they ask about the baby's gender.  Let me explain it to you.  "Gender" is about identity.  We won't be able to know that until the baby tells us.  "Sex" is about genitals.  The fetus right now has genitals, but you couldn't see them yet on an ultrasound.  And I don't know why everyone keeps asking about my fetus' genitals. 

Crime and Punishment

I recently saw an info-graphic about how long it takes to read famous books.  It's pretty interesting, but it mostly reminded me of my Crime and Punishment story.

When I was in high school, like a lot of high schoolers, we had to read Crime and Punishment.  What makes this story unusual is that we had three days to read it.  We got the book on Tuesday and had a test on it on Friday.  The reasoning for this escapes me now, but I think it had something to do with the end of the grading period, how long we spent on Wide Sargasso Sea, and the fact that our English teacher didn't really like the book that much.

So we tackled this book in indignant, panicked frenzy.  We tried to finish other homework, study for more reasonable tests before staying up late, trying to get one more chapter read, two more chapters read.  We hurried between classes so we could get a couple minutes of reading time in.  We read over lunch, in a group around a table, all of us buried in our books in silence, eyebrows pulled together and shoulders hunched.

All the teachers made fun of us.  This was terribly hilarious to all of them and they showed no sympathy at all.

I don't remember how our English teacher managed it--what she said, how she guilted us--but the level of energy and fruitless effort put into reading this thing was surreal.  We were nerds, sure, but we were math and science nerds.  And we were seniors, who had decided that previous projects weren't worth it and thrown in the towel.  Surely this was a fruitless effort and running ourselves ragged would prove counter productive.  But no.  For some reason, we were crazed to get this book read.

I got the audio book so I could listen on my hour long commute to and from school.  But looking at the box, I frowned and calculated that there was no possible way I was going to finish, even if I secretly listened through my blow off classes.

Thursday night, my friend Matt called at 8:00 with a plan.

"Okay.  I went to the video store and rented the movie.  Come over."

Normally, this would be a ridiculous suggestion since we all knew that movie adaptations from the video store were created with the sole purpose of leading lazy high school kids astray, and that the whole English department had movie night or something where they watched the adaptations and then wrote test questions to trick you into admitting you didn't read the book.  They were sneaky and were really proud of themselves for it.

But this was a desperate situation, and so far no one knew how the damned book ended.  I don't know why none of us knew about cliff notes.

"Okay," I said, said goodbye to my mother (who laughed at me and wished me luck), got in my car, and drove to Matt's house.

At Matt's house, Matt and I exchanged terse nods.  Our friend James had his book in hand, like that might help.  And Matt's father laughed at us.  We glared at him.  This was serious.

Matt's dad made popcorn, then ate it while watching us set up the VCR.

I remember it being a three hour movie, but IMDB now says it's only two.  Either way, both Matt and James fell asleep and missed the ending anyway.  When the movie ended, I explained it to them.

For those like Matt and James who don't know, there's a guy, Raskolnikov, who decides (based on divine compulsion more than anything else) to murder his neighbor and rob her.  He kills her with an ax, then freaks out, kills her sister too when she catches him, then flubs the robbery part and only takes like $20.  This much we had all managed to read.  The guy spends the rest of the novel wracked with guilt--a guilt that burns and builds and eats away his sanity.  He's pursued by a detective who knows he did it because he's the most suspicious, guilty person on earth.  There's drama involving a sister and a prostitute with a heart of gold, and in the end the guy turns himself in.

Matt and James were disappointed with my synopsis.

The next day, we slouched into English class, curling in on ourselves in guilt, ready to face the music.  No one pulled out their book to try to read one more page.  We sat in silence and waited for our teacher to come.

I looked around, so overwhelmed with spending every spare moment wrapping myself in this story, and thought, "We are all Raskolnikov."

"Alright!" Ms. McDonald said, clapping her hands and taking her place in the middle of the room.  "What'd everyone think?"

Silence.

Silence.

"We didn't finish."  Someone said it.  We all said it.  Heads in hands and slumped into desks.  Tired eyes giving up and flagging in defeat.  We confessed.  We surrendered.

Ms. McDonald smirked.

We are all Raskolnikov.

And none of us had finished the book to realize it.

World Building Over-share

I said last time that I wanted to talk about unnecessary world building, so we can kind of think about this as a Part 2 of that rant.

Sometimes authors do world building that just isn't necessary.  I once heard the advice that when you're editing, any scene in your story should do two things (plot development, character building, setting the scene, etc), and if it's only doing one thing, you should cut it.  I like to think of world building the same way: if the world building isn't supporting the plot or characterization, then it's superfluous.

So for example, let's talk about languages.  Let's say there's a character that speaks a fictional language.  Now, this could do a lot of things to help plot and characterization.

• It could highlight cultural differences between the character and the people she has to interact with who don't speak the language.
• It could be a point of contention between the character and her mother.  The mother wishes our character spoke the language of her people, while our character is rejecting that culture.
• It could be a plot point in that two characters can communicate in secret to plan their escape from the villain's clutches.

However, if it doesn't do anything else besides "be there" or get a response of "well, that's kinda different, I guess", then it's it's only there because the author wanted to make up a language. 

And there WILL BE things in world building that don't help the plot or characters. 

Did you know, that in this alternate history story I'm writing, Thomas Jefferson didn't invent the hideaway bed???  How unusual!  I'm clever!

But does this fun fact in any way affect the story I'm telling? 

No.

Well, then there's no need to mention it.

You can, in fact, not mention a lot of things.  As long as your reader is not left wondering about them, you're good to go. 

Where did the first vampire come from?

Who cares?

That's not important to the story.  What's important to the story is the current culture of vampires and how they live their lives and how their presence affects the world around them.

We can black box that and no one will question it.

 
And this brings me to the main point I want to make: over-sharing the world building to the point that the story no longer makes sense.

"The Maze Runner" by James Dashner is a good example of this.  Now, usually I don't like saying negative things about books I've read, but this is a New York Times Best Seller and it has a movie in production, so my criticism on my little blog will not hurt anyone.  (Also, I'm about to spoil the end of this book, so turn back if that bothers you.)

In this story, kids appear in a labyrinth with no memory of who they are or what they need to be doing, and subsequently try to escape.  The world building of the maze is wonderfully done.  It's eerie and pervasive and everything you'd want out of world building.  The kids build a society for themselves, which is flushed out an organic, and catches art my attention because even though they bicker with each other, there are no pig heads on sticks.  The maze changes every night, and the monsters that wander the maze are really interesting.  The kids don't know why the maze is there or why they're in the maze or if there even is a way to get out.  It's a great book up until about the last chapter.

Then the mystery of the maze is reveled with further world building that makes absolutely no sense and spoils everything that has come before.  We learn that the kids were put into the maze because a solar flare (what?) caused the Earth to go post apocalyptic (what?).  In an effort to get the best minds working on the project, some scientists gathered the best and brightest children, educated them, and then gave them all amnesia and put them in a maze (what?), because when they made their way out of the maze, they'd be smarter and more prepared to tackle the problem of solar flares (what?).  What's even worse is that very few children survive to get through the maze, so several of their best minds (kids who found important solutions to problems within the maze) were killed off and could not contribute later to the solar flare problem.

This last bit of world building has so much that isn't working for it.  1. The science is just bogus.  2. It comes out of nowhere and is completely unrelated to the story I'd just read.  It's tonally jarring at the very, very end.

3. The response to the flare makes no logical sense.  There is no natural progression from "get smart kids to work on the problem" (which sounds good to me) to "put them in a deadly maze with amnesia."  No.  That is not even remotely a solution to the problem.  It makes the maze overly contrived, I don't see how it gives the kids better skills to solve their problem, and it drastically thins their pool of genius children even though they've learned from the maze that they do best pooling their intelligence an working together.

And 4. the world building is purely there for exposition.  It does not give us a better insight into the characters (because none of them remember this) and it doesn't even really help the plot.  This did nothing to support the story, and instead caused massive problems. 

I would have greatly preferred it if the "why" of their presence in the maze was left a mystery, if it were black boxed in the same way as "where did the first vampire come from?"  They could leave the maze into a white light, and the book could end ambiguously, and I would have loved this book.

World building done well: what we can learn from Tolkien

And we're back!

I've been having this ongoing feud (with fisticuffs and harsh words) with a friend of mine about world building.  My view of it is "If you're writing speculative fiction, you better be thinking about world building.  Reading lazy world building is one of the worst things ever."  His view (as far as I can tell) is "Thinking about world building is not what I like about writing.  Some people get carried away with it.  And I am disdainful of the whole thing." *

Which is a completely valid point.  Not liking something doesn't mean you're not going to do it on a finished product, and we all have our favorite and least favorite parts of writing.  And, yes, some stories get carried away with unnecessary world building, which I'm going to talk about in a later blog post.

But let's talk about why it's important, and what good world building can do for your story.

One of the great examples of world building, because there's just SO MUCH of it and because it's done really well, and often the first example people think of when talking about world building is The Lord of the Rings.  Now, I'm in no way saying that you have to do as much world building as this in order to have a good speculative story.  I'm saying that it does a lot of stuff right, and we can learn from it.



First of all, it's pervasive.  The history and culture of the different peoples of Middle Earth is sewn into every scene.  I've talked before about what a difference this makes, but it never hurts to have another example.

“It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.”

What do any of those words even mean?  So many proper nouns to parse through.  But the cool thing is that I don't really need to know.  It says, "This one group of people say this sea sounds like music, and it's kinda eerie," but it hints at a deeper history. 

• There is "the Music of the Ainur" which must be recognizable and unique enough to be singled out in this description, and we can get some idea of what it must sound like if it sounds kind of like a roaring sea.   
• "It is said by the Eldar" means that the Eldar have enough culture to have their own stories or proverbs or sayings.  They say this.  Other groups don't really.  And is there more to them saying this?  Is there a story there?  It implies something deeper.

Secondly, history set up in world building directly affects character's motivations and actions.  Part of the world building tells this story that back in the day, the king of Gondor and his descendants went into hiding because Sauron was after them.  This left the kingdom of Gondor without a king, so a steward took over and led the people, and his descendants have been ruling ever since.  Okay?  hat's the world building.  Now, that's all well and good, but what makes it great is that this event has direct reprecussions for characters in the main story.

When Aragorn (who is of the line of kings who went into hiding and is therefore heir to be King of Gondor) shows up, Boromir (who is next in line to be Steward of Gondor) says, "Hell no, you're not our king.  We haven't had a king in centuries.  The stewards have ruled over Gondor while you were off dicking around.  You've lost your claim, so GTFO."  Which makes perfect sense!  He's kind of a jerk about it, but he's got a valid point.  And his take on this issue reflects the point of view of a large portion of the people of Gondor.

On the other hand, there's Boromir's brother, Faramir.  He says, "The Stewards are stewards, and their job is to take care of things while the king's away.  That was the deal in the beginning, and the noble thing would be to keep his seat warm, take care of the people, and hand power back when the time comes and the king returns."  This makes sense too!  And again, it's the same point of view as a good chunk of the population of Gondor, who are like "Huzzah!  The king has returned!"

Now, what we can take from this is that this event from the past as part of the world building 1. informs the characters decisions in the main story of the book and 2. highlights differences in the two brothers' personalities.  That's great world building.




* He probably wouldn't start a sentence with a conjunction.  But it's my blog, so eat it!