Worldbuilding

I love exploring new worlds as I read. It's one of my favourite reading experiences. However I often find books which introduce me to an entirely original setting that fall completely flat because the constructed world is inherently unbelievable. Which is why I've created a few guidelines for use in my own writing to keep myself honest and my creations believable.

1) Things must have rules. I remember the first time I encountered a world where magic had rules, The Belgariad series by David Eddings. His system of magic obeys the first law of thermodynamics, you cannot create or destroy energy/matter. Before casting a spell, Garion had to learn to draw in energy from his surroundings. It was a simple rule, that had no real impact on the story, but it made the world feel far more alive to me. The rule that a sorcerer cannot destroy matter actually did have an impact on the plot of course.

2) Inventions must be more effective than the things they replace. Whether it's Science Fiction or Steampunk, I see it all the time. I suppose it's partly my military background, but when I watch a show like Star Wars or Star Trek (especially DS9) it bugs the hell out of me that their weapons are inferior to what we field today. Think about it, how often are they stuck in a corridor, shooting single shots back and forth >pew< >pew<, most of which serve only to throw some sparks from a wall. Haven't these people heard of automatic weapons? Or, better yet, hand grenades?

3) The world must have internal consistency. Obviously many things will not be 'realistic' in a made up world. Magic will always disobey fundamental laws of physics, that's the nature of magic. However, I believe it detracts from the world when the author tells, or shows the audience how magic works and then breaks those rules because they weren't paying attention, or because it was an easy way out of a plot-hole they'd written themselves into. Likewise, don't tell me one minute that an airship has static buoyancy so the weight on-board must be balanced perfectly and then later have it flying at 8,000 feet. The atmosphere is at 75% of its sea-level density at 8,000 feet, so on a static buoyancy craft you'd need an incredible amount of lift from engines or you'd have to drop 25% of your weight to fly that high. And don't get me started on how much impact 200 Kg of mass would impart on a vehicle much larger than the Hindenburg (which had a gross lift of 242 tons).

4) As much as possible, the society should reflect any changes you've made. If magic is freely available, and practitioners can cast spells with lasting effects then most households would probably have a few magical conveniences like refrigerators or fire-starters for instance. If your story is steampunkish, takes place in pre-civil-war America and you decide it's easy to build robotic constructs, then that would have a significant impact on slavery, which might mean the civil-war never happened, or the war might have been fought for entirely different reasons.

The more you apply rules and logical extrapolations upon your world the more of those satisfying worldbuilding details will come out in the end product. Even if all the details don't make it into your book, just having them in your head can't help but enrich your world. So get out there and build a cool new world that feels so real readers get lost in it. When you do, drop me a line, I'd love to read it.

Threads

It's an old metaphor. A story is a tapestry of threads woven together. Useful to help visualise plot elements, but not completely accurate.

Threads in a novel come in many different shapes and sizes. Some are master threads, they begin at the start, and run through to the end, like the main character, an overarching theme, or the central conflict. These should run thick and strong through the entire manuscript, because they bear the bulk of the story's weight. If they fade in a portion of the book it normally means that section will be weaker, more likely to bore readers or cause them to lose interest entirely.

In fact, I would argue that any thread, once introduced, should not be ignored for too long. Either cut it and tie it off, or it must appear occasionally. For instance a character who is essential to the finale and is introduced early, cannot simply fade into the background for several chapters. Plot-threads and conflicts are the same.

All this seems obvious enough, but now that I think about it in these terms, I can see holes in my manuscript and in most of those I've read, even in many published novels. It's a surprisingly common problem. The next time you're reading a novel and you begin to lose interest part-way through, think about the threads. Most of the time they're the culprit.

High Concept

A couple of trailers I saw recently really brought home the message of a good, clear high concept. The first is for NBC's upcoming TV series Awake. Yes, after watching it, read that again, it's a network TV series. It looks absolutely fantastic and I guarantee I'll be there to watch, and I suspect once you've seen the trailer you'll be there too, the high concept is just that good.



The second is for the upcoming film Another Earth. The high concept here blows my mind as well. Both of these trailers have fantastic ideas with characters so deeply intertwined in the concept it seems almost impossible to separate them. Both concepts, when taken alone might seem a bit goofy and far-fetched, but with the character involvement they become a fantastic hook.

Curves

Every kind of emotion in a novel can fit on a graph. There is the climactic curve, which should increase steadily to each climactic point in the novel, fall and then begin building again for the next climax, like the 1812 Overture. And the G/I curve, which Kurt Vonnegut introduces below (which, combined with some beta reading I've been doing got me thinking on the subject).



Those are macro-curves, which detail an entire story, but each character should have their own emotional curves within scenes. For instance, in the first draft of Aetherstorm, I had Konrad running in fear of his life. He accidentally stumbled into a party and ended up fighting a sort of swashbuckling duel with one of the guests, complete with witty repartee. It was a great scene, but it stood out like a sore thumb, because people who are fleeing in panic don't suddenly collect their wits, pass some urbane banter and finish their opponent with urbane wit.

Which made me think of how emotions, and character development intertwine in the greater picture. Some emotions, such as fear, play out in a curve within one sequence and then after a few minutes, hours or days, the emotion is forgotten. Other emotions get reinforced by ongoing experience. The writer becomes more and more frustrated over time as he continues to face rejection (not speaking from personal experience or anything :P ). The grieving father who turns to alcohol only drives himself further into depression. If there is nothing inciting the emotion to change it will carry-on in a fairly smooth and predictable manner, only jumping erratically when something significant to that emotion comes along. Grieving father finds out it was all a mistake and his son is alive after all, or the writer catches his big break.

I think it's these bigger emotional curves that define characters and character development and having predictable emotional curves is what defines a character we can all fall in love with.

Maybe that's all obvious to some people, and maybe it's been said before, but that's what I learned about writing this week.

Character Studies

Characters are the motive force behind any good story. You can have the most amazing plot, world building, write the snappiest dialogue and create prose that makes editors shrug and say, "I have nothing to say", but if the characters are flat and lifeless the story will never succeed to any great degree.

Building good characters is essential to writing good fiction.

So, what makes a good character?

They are a living, thinking, autonomous person. One of the tests for me is that my characters don't always do as I say.

They have emotional consistency. This is one I figured out only after a pile of rejects unfortunately. I knew one of the scenes near the beginning of Aetherstorm was a little out of place, but I loved it, it was clever and witty and I couldn't really place my finger on what was wrong. Then I figured it out. On page five he has the crap scared out of him, then a scene later he's all suave and clever, it felt completely out of place.

They come across on the page. This has been the toughest one for me to learn. I thought I knew what was going on inside my character's heads before I really spent the time to focus on this. One whole edit of Aetherstorm was spent scene-by-scene putting myself inside their heads and thinking, "Okay, I'm Konrad. X just happened, how does that make me feel?"


As I went through and edited for character, I found that, with Konrad (the lead) especially, it gave me a ton of insight into who he is and he changed in nature from how I had envisioned him. In my early drafts he was essentially a nice guy, caught up in something bigger than himself.

Then I started to really think about who he was. All those Psych classes I took in college began to pay off. I thought about how he lived, and where he came from. His mother died when he was a baby, and his father raised him. His mother and father were stowaways when Himmelberg first launched so they aren't even legal citizens, which places them in a sort of permanent underclass. Add to that the fact that his father had been the product of some experimentation which made him much stronger and faster than a normal human, but he and Konrad cannot use their advantages, because non-humans are automatically labelled mortal enemies of humans and killed on sight. That makes for a mess of an adolescent. He feels he's better than everyone else, but lives as the lowest of the low. That's at the core of his personality. Obviously anger and arrogance are his biggest character flaws at the start.

Over the course of the book he does a lot of things to survive that haunt him. Guilt and the fear that he's turning into exactly the sort of monster humans believe he is keep him up at night. He turns to alcohol and starts to alienate his friends. Everything got a lot darker in the re-writes, and I think the manuscript is better for it. Konrad is certainly a lot less likeable at the end of the newer drafts than he was in the early ones, but he's also more sympathetic and more real, which I think plays well into the bittersweet ending which was inevitable once all the pieces were in motion.

[Mask picture modified from a picture found at http://bobbasset.com/, the background photo is by Charles Bodi (who has an amazing collection of beautiful abandoned factory pictures at ridemypony.com)]

Hey, What's the Big Idea?

I think the big idea, or high concept, of a story is one of the most important things for an aspiring writer to consider before setting pen to paper.

I believe there are two main ways a book sells to a publisher.

1) The author is a known quantity so the editor knows they have a saleable product.

2) The concept for the book is so catchy the editor just has to read it for themselves.

That's opinion but it seems to hold true most of the time. I've seen lots of dreck by established authors on the shelves. Unfortunately if you are not an established author so you cannot take the easy route. On the other hand if you go and find just about any debut book from a new author published in the past 5-10 years you will find the idea is usually quite original and the first quarter of the book is very engaging. Often they tend to fall off after the first book, especially in a series. IMO Derek Landy, Joseph Delaney (who had published before The Spook's Apprentice, but nothing really successful), and Brandon Mull are all good examples of what I'm talking about. To be clear, I'm not saying their follow-up books are poor, they are all very good, but the first is the best and the first quarter of a first-time author's book is normally amazingly tight.

Derek Landy - Skullduggery Pleasant, a girl falls in with a noir-style detective who happens to be a wisecracking, fireball-throwing living skeleton.

Joseph Delaney - The Spook's Apprentice, A young man is apprenticed to a witch and monster hunter in medieval times.

Brandon Mull - Fablehaven, Two young siblings spend the summer on their grandparent's nature reserve only to find out its a preserve for all variety of mythical and magical creatures.

Maybe I haven't expressed them all as well as possible, but I think you get the idea, all were created around a highly original core idea. All these are YA fantasy because that's what I've been writing and reading myself lately, but if you look at the larger picture, what are the standout books across all genres in the past ten years or so? Think about it. And what do they all have in common? An amazingly clever premise that can be summarised in a few words.

Blindness - A pandemic disease renders people blind. Scientists cannot find a cure.
The Time Traveller's Wife - Title pretty much sums it up.
Harry Potter - A young boy goes to wizarding school.
The DaVinci Code - A man finds riddles within DaVinci works that hint Jesus lived a very different life from the story in the Bible.

Even Twilight, which I know many writers love to hate, has a really engaging and original concept behind it.

It's not a new phenomenon either if you go back to older titles it holds.

The Hobbit (may not seem amazingly original now that it's been emulated a million times, but groundbreaking when it first came out)
James Bond series (as with The Hobbit, it's been copied so many times it no longer seems as original as it once was), Lolita, The Name of the Rose.

So, whatever you're writing next, if you're working towards being published make it a grand idea. Something big, bold and original.

Hooks

Hooks, for those of you who don't write, are the bits at the beginning of a book designed to reel in a prospective reader, agent or editor. If you've ever picked up a book in the store, read the first page and decided on the spot that you had to buy that book you've experienced a well written hook.

The hook is arguably the most important part of a book. Certainly for an unpublished author seeking publication it's the most important part. If I can't get an agent or editor past the first few pages it's really irrelevant how good the rest of the book is.

Since I've been getting into the querying process I've been thinking a lot about hooks lately. Because Aetherstorm has a prologue I need to have two solid hooks, one for the prologue and one for chapter 1. The way I see it there are as many hooks as there are writers, but the ones that work well fall into a few categories.

1) Action: Think about any James Bond movie. I think action hooks work really well for movies but don't work so well in print. They are commonly used though, I'd have to say this is the most frequently used hook technique I've seen while critiquing manuscripts from other aspiring authors.

2) Character: Catch 22 starts with a great character/funny opening. Yossarian is just sitting in the hospital, censoring mail from the enlisted men, but because he's bored he plays games with the mail he censors. It really gets you inside his head and rooting for him before you're done the first few pages. You care about him and want to know where he's going.

3) Mystery/suspense: A woman wakes up to a creak from downstairs. Was it the cat? The house settling? Or an intruder? Very effective hook, as long as the reader is asking the right questions and it doesn't feel contrived.

4) Shock value: Many horror genre movies and TV shows like Criminal Minds use this hook. Two young boys are fishing on a public dock, one turns to stare, goggle-eyed at the water. The other follows his gaze and proceeds to vomit. Camera turns to show their POV and we see a bloated corpse rocking gently on the waves. Effective but risks turning some readers off.

5) Comedy: Get the audience laughing and they will flip pages. Comedy is tricky though, you need a deft touch or you risk falling flat on your face.

Of course the best hooks use multiple devices. My prologue starts with character/suspense, then moves on to character/shock value. Chapter 1 starts with suspense which builds with some shock value to heighten tension, then a major shock, the lead turns and flees and things transition into an action sequence with some comedic elements.

I am sure I have missed at least a few good devices for hooking an audience. What about your experience? What are some of your favourite hooks?

Writing Advice

This has done the rounds, but I think it's a good list so I thought I'd share. Here is a list of writing advice from Gordon Silverstein.

1. Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.
2. Never use no double negatives.
3. Use the semicolon properly, always where it is appropriate; and never where it is not.
4. Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it where it is not needed.
5. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
6. No sentence fragments.
7. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
8. Avoid commas, that are not necessary.
9. When you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
10. A writer must not shift your point of view.
11. Do not overuse exclamation marks!!! (In fact, avoid them whenever possible!!!)
12. And do not start a sentence with a conjunction.
13. Place pronouns as closely as possible, especially in long sentences, as of ten or more words, to their antecedents.
14. Hyphenate only between syllables and avoid un-necessary hyphens.
15. Write all adverbial forms correct.
16. Don't use contractions.
17. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
18. It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms.
19. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
20. Steer clear of incorrect verb forms that have snuck into the language.
21. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors.
22. Avoid modernisms that sound flaky.
23. Avoid barbarisms: they impact too forcefully.
24. Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
25. Everyone should be careful to use singular pronouns with singular nouns in their writing.
26. If we've told you once, we've told you a thousand times: avoid hyperbole.
27. Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
28. Do not string a large number of prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
29. Always pick on the the correct idiom.
30. "Avoid overuse of 'quotation' 'marks.'"
31. Never use more words than are necessary to get your point across: be concise.
32. Awayz check you're spelling. (Your spellchecker would only pick up one of the two errors here.)
33. Always be avoided by the passive voice.
34. Every sentence a verb.
35. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague: seek viable alternatives.