Flames Resound

Hello, and Happy 4th of July! In celebration of this holiday, I’ve dug out one of my old stories (I believe I wrote it out last year for just this occasion) which may seem quite odd until you reach the end, so stick with it!

And I also want to inform you of the premier of my ongoing Steampunk series, The Remarkable Rift, next Monday! That’s right, on July 11th you’ll be able to read the very first part of my series, which I have planned out for at least six story arcs. I’m talking flying ships, floating cities and steam-powered technology, along with pseudo-sorcery and enormous beasts from other worlds. I hope you’ll join me as we begin our journey together through The Remarkable Rift!

Now without further ado, I present you with Flames Resound.

It happened in the flash of an eye. As I was walking in my backyard, admiring all the plants that lined the fence, I began to smell the pervasive odor of smoke wafting toward me. I sniffed once, twice, trying to determine its origin. Then came the rumble, a distant quaking in my feet which carried up my legs and moved as far as my ears. I heard the echoes, the repeated blasts of some distant dangers. I heard it again and again, but I couldn’t tell where the smell or the sounds were coming from, so I began to run back into my house for safety.

But when I got to the door, I found that it was shut tight, trapping me outside, away from shelter, where more rumbles and the smell of more smoke began to grow stronger. I briefly looked around at the yard, spying the shadows which were stretching menacingly, as if clawing at me, threatening to pull me into the nighttime gloom which was almost upon me. I noted the gate of the fence and was dismayed to see a padlock, for which I had not the key to open it. But not far away, there was another possibility: a hole dug out but never finished. Running to it as fast as I could, I stretched forth and began pulling the dirt away, expanding this passage to freedom. More smoke, more rumbling pounds from some distant location, more digging furiously beneath the fence, the protection which may have become my doom due to its great height.

At last, the hole was big enough for me to squeeze under. I felt my innards compressed by the immobile boards as I pushed and pulled myself under them, but finally I emerged on the other side, no longer trapped by walls of wood and nails. Another rumble brought to my realization the fact that I was now beyond the bounds of safety, out in the world and closer to the angry mystery.

I ran around to the front of my house, but the door there offered no more passage than did the back. I screamed for help, but after only a few seconds, an explosion much closer startled me and I backed down into the yard, afraid that such an explosive sound would tear down my very home. I saw eyes under the porch and hunkered down to see my cat hiding under there, presumably from the same thunderous, ashy danger that I could sense. I wanted to reach in and pull her out, but she was feisty and would surely scratch me something fierce, so I left her and ran out into the street, hoping to find someone who would know what was happening.

My friend, Ben, came running up to me, the same look of panic in his eyes that I’d seen in the eyes of my cat. “Ben, what’s going on?!” I yelled as another rumble rolled up my legs and along my spine.

“I don’t know!” he called back, his voice high and frightened. “I’ve seen fire in the skies, and everywhere is the smell of burning! What should we do?!”

“I don’t know!” I yelled back, but stopped as I saw someone standing on a box down the street, their voice calling out in an attempt to rival the power of the peals of thunder. “Maybe he will!” I howled as a crack from the sky echoed in my ears, making my bones quake and my mind begin to ring.

“That guy’s crazy!” Ben responded. “All he talks about is the end of the world!”

“Does this seem like anything else?” I asked as I took off at a slow pace, keeping myself hunkered low in case any of the fire Ben spoke of made an appearance. It took less than a minute for us to reach the geezer standing on the street corner. There was a milk crate below him and he was calling out to anyone who would listen, his cries and howls being, for the most part, totally ignored. But we were listening, Ben and I, to the strange words from a stranger elder.

“The days of the human race have come to an end!” he cried out, his voice not even reaching the other side of the street, it was so weak.

“What’s happening?” I asked him, my voice going hoarse from the smoke, which seemed to settle on my tongue and tickle my throat.

“The fire from the sky!” the old geezer screeched, and as if on cue, there was a sudden flash in the sky above him, a crack of white lightning followed by an all-consuming darkness. Seconds later, there was another flash, this one radiating out like a great wheel, with tendrils stretching out from the core in all directions. “The human race has brought its end!” he continued. “This is the day spoken of by our kind for a hundred generations! The day when fire will consume the sky, when the footsteps of their end will echo in their bones and when it all is done, only silence will fall and smoke will remain! This is the end of days, of nights and of time itself!”

“You’re crazy!” Ben yelled back at him.

“Am I now?” the old one asked. In the dark, his eyes almost seemed to glow, reflecting the explosions which preceded every rumble and burning odor. “Mankind will fall to its doom before this night is through!” Seeing the terror on mine and Ben’s faces, the old one softened somewhat and he looked down at us from atop his crate. “Do not worry, my sons. The few of us who survive will live on, and in a few generations, all memories of this night will be lost, vanished in the dark like the men who called forth the burning light.”

There was a shrill whistling from nearby, a high-pitched sound barely able to overcome the great quaking in our feet. I followed that sound, leaving Ben with the crazy rambler as I moved toward the shriek in the night. I at last found its source at my very own house, where a beautiful young woman was standing with the door open. “Come inside!” she called to me, and I obeyed, stooping low as I entered. But even inside, I could still hear the rumbles and cracks filling my ears with their terrifying noise, could still see the light illumining the windows. Scrambling, I scurried under a nearby table, shoving the chairs out of the way as I moved.

“It’s okay,” the beautiful woman cooed softly, stooping down to my level. “It’ll be over after tonight.”

I heard her words, and I trusted her words, and as she put her hand gently on the back of my head, I began to remember what had happened last year, and the year before that. The end of the world was a recurring event, it seemed. Fire in the sky, thunder in the ground and smoke in the air…this time of year is always difficult for my kind. That’s why it’s a common saying among dogs: why, oh why, the 4^th of July?

The Craft of Writing, Part Eight: The B&E Factor

Good afternoon, my few and fellow readers! This post officially concludes our eight-part series on the craft of writing. Fiction writing, that is. For nonfiction, there are completely different criteria, but I’m not very experienced in that arena, so there’s little advice I can give. I appreciate those of you who have stuck it out on this long, two-month series, and I hope that if you enjoy the craft of writing, you’ve found some helpful advice in what I’ve written. This craft, the use of language in drafting stories to enchant a captivated audience, is a topic which lies very close to my heart, so I offer my deepest gratitude to you, dear reader.

Today, I’m going to cover a topic that I have invented, and I call it the B&E Factor. The “B” stands for “beauty,” and the “E” stands for “exploitation.” This is essentially a ratio, which can be represented as B/E or B:E, but before I go on with this, let’s go into detail on what each of these terms mean in my vocabulary. After all, it’d be irresponsible of me to keep discussing the ratio if you have a completely different interpretation of those terms  than I do.

Beauty

By “beauty,” I’m not necessarily referring to descriptions of pretty scenery or beautiful women. Rather, I’m talking about the quality of the story and the writing itself. Do your words flow poetically, or do they engage the reader with a quick wit? Do you introduce high concepts and delve into the deep philosophical or spiritual undercurrents which run beneath your story? Or does the story come to represent something far more grand than the simple story itself, becoming an exemplar for the working of fate and destiny?

There are two examples of this that stand out in my mind, both in film (although one of them was based on a book which I’ve never taken the time to read). The first is from the movie Stay, which is one of my favorite movies. I’ll spare you the plot, but I’ll say that I believe this to be one of the most beautiful films ever made. The storytelling style, the dialogue, the characters and pacing, and what it all builds toward create a beautifully tragic tale, set within the philosophical concept of dream-worlds. The beauty comes not from any one factor, but from the overall style of the storytellers (the writer and director, in this case). The second example is the film Holes, which deals with the concepts of luck, fate and generational curses. While the style of this film is more fun and kid-oriented, the overall narrative weaves multiple storylines which grow closer and closer together until they all converge in the film’s climax, at which point we realize that everything has been building toward a greater destiny for the protagonist and his close friend.

Exploitation

Exploitation can also mean a variety of things. It could refer to the antagonist exploiting the main character’s weaknesses, or it could refer to the narrator taking advantage of different avenues of thought in order to draw in the reader and get their own imagination rolling. It could even mean properly using the craft of writing in order to produce a high-quality tale. None of these are what I mean when I talk about exploitation. In my vocabulary, exploitation refers to cheap sensationalism used to increase your readership. For instance, while Playboy once contained fascinating stories (and might still, I don’t know, I’ve never touched a copy, though I’ve read stories which are noted as having been originally published there), they draw in the majority of their audience through immodest displays of the female form. Similarly, we can see in many, many, many, many films these days that the stories and characters are oversexualized, intending to draw in the viewer by appealing to their more primal instincts. And as far as literature is concerned…well, let me just say that I don’t think it was the story which drew in the fans of Fifty Shades of Gray.

Similarly, the horror genre too often lends itself to gore and dismemberment, as opposed to the dark creep factor which was more prevalent in works of the early masters like Poe and Lovecraft. In films, Rob Zombie is notorious for his obsession with gore, and in literature, Clive Barker uses both sex and gore to acquire his audience. In my opinion, the need for sex and/or gore in your writing in order to gain a captive audience simply speaks of bad writing. If you need to appeal to the baser instincts of the audience in order to keep their attention, then it simply means that your writing isn’t good enough to stand on its own. That’s why, as much as I am able, I try to avoid these two things. It forces me to perfect my writing by challenging me to keep an audience captivated without appealing to cheap exploitation.

The B&E Factor

So now that we have the concepts, how do they relate to each other? Well, that’s simple. You want to keep the ratio as high as possible. You want to maximize the B and minimize the E. Mind you, there must, unfortunately, be at least a little exploitation in order to draw in an audience in the first place, but if you can keep that as absolutely as low as possible, then even that attempt will make the beauty of your work stand stronger by contrast.

Keep your writings beautiful. Never sacrifice your style, your story or the heart which drives it just to gain a wider audience. And never compromise your own integrity through exploitation. Then, when you’ve brought everything together and told a story worth telling, your audience will remember the work you’ve done. Let your work stand on its own strength, power and beauty.

Until next time, friends…

The Craft of Writing, Part Seven – Productivity

Good day, my fellow readers! I hope this leap day is treating you well. For me, it’s just another day, but I’ll persevere. Anyway, today I’d like to begin with a story. More specifically, it’s the story of me as a writer.

I mentioned back in the beginning of this series that I started writing my first book in the seventh grade, but I didn’t make it very far because I didn’t have a storyboard. Well, not long after I gave up, I thought up the storyline for a new novel, a fantasy which I initially called “A Knight’s Journey,” and later changed to simply “War.” I wrote this novel on-and-off for the next five or six years, completing a chapter or two, then taking a six month break, then writing furiously, then taking a year off, and on it went. I would write, then take a long sabbatical. When the anxiety, pressure and guilt finally got to me, I’d drag out my computer and write more, as much as I could before I lost interest and put it away for another long break. Then I hit my senior year and I decided that I just had to get that book done. So, almost exactly a week before graduation, I finally typed the last words of the epilogue and boom! My first novel, Torjen, was complete (minus the revising, which came later).

But in that time, over the course of those five or so years of writing one book, I’d compiled ideas, characters, plotlines and connections to over thirty-five other books that I decided to write in my life. There was only one problem: if I took as long to write each of them as I did to write Torjen, then I would die of old age before I made it even halfway down the list. That was when I committed to my book-in-a-year plan. Thereafter, once I began a book, I would plan everything in such a way that I would complete it in a year or less. As such, during my five years in college, I completed (year-by-year and in this order) Torjen II: The Search for Andross, Reality, The Hybrid, Torjen III: Diablo and finally the science fiction novel, Infrared. Most of these have yet to be published, but I promise they will be released from their digital prison cells someday. From college, I dove into my studies in seminary and, graduate studies being what they are, I was forced to suspend my novel-writing until I completed my studies. Finally, in the first year of marriage, I was able to dive back in with my newest creation, The Choice of Anonymity, only to take yet another year off afterward so I could make strides into the realm of publication. But regardless of whether or not I get published by this fall, I will definitely begin work on the sequel, tentatively called The Struggle With Conformity.

Now why am I telling you all of this? Because I believe one of the chief qualities of a writer can’t simply be good ideas, skills and talents. It can’t just be good planning, groundwork and carefully crafted worlds and characters. The quality which differentiates between the one-hit-wonder and the legitimate writer is productivity. A good career writer doesn’t write one novel and then live off of that for the rest of his life; if he does, he’s just a fluke, not a true writer. No, a writer writes, and he writes, and he writes because that’s what he does. He writes his stories because he must get them out, or because the need to write, to share his thoughts is driving him mad. Or perhaps he’s in a deep (non-romantic) love affair with the craft itself. He doesn’t just think about writing; he writes!

But too often, I myself have struggled with long periods of inactivity. After all, it took me five years to write my first book! So what’s the solution? For me, what makes the one-year rule successful is a concept that probably brings a nauseating sensation to many stomachs and a woozy disgust to many minds: deadlines. Yes, that terrible beast which plagued each of us in school is what I have to enforce upon myself: deadlines. Check out the 2014-2015 schedule I crafted for The Choice of Anonymity below.

After completing my storyboard of the plot, I looked at how much was to compose each chapter and I gave myself the necessary time to complete it. Notice, for instance, that chapters ten, twelve and fourteen each took nearly a month to complete, while most of the others took about two weeks. That’s because those chapters were whoppers. On the other end of the spectrum, the prologue and epilogue each took about a week because those were miniscule. And chapter nine took another month because, in all honesty, I took two weeks off for the holidays. It wasn’t my most megalithic chapter.

By sticking to these deadlines, I made the writing of my book into a much less daunting task, and I ensured that less than a year after selecting the first few words of the story, I was writing the last few lines. This is the tactic that works for me, the strategy which keeps me productive and ensures that I will not die of old age before I make it halfway through my list of future books (which still rests at around thirty-five to forty, although I now have other follow-up ideas if my memory isn’t shot by then).

If the system of deadlines doesn’t work for you, then I encourage you to find something that will. But remember, you absolutely must find something that works. If you don’t, your productivity will be very low – if alive at all – and a writer you will cease to be. Stay the course, my friends. Be committed to seeing your works through.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for next week’s finale to our eight-part series on the craft of writing, in which I’ll discuss the nature of beauty versus exploitation in storytelling!

The Craft of Writing, Part Five: Information

Hello, hello, hello, hello! I hope your Valentine’s Day went well. Whether with a romantic partner-in-crime or alone with God, I’ve recently heard a number of my wise friends say that what matters most is that you foster the prime relationships you have – both with God and your fellow man. I have to wholeheartedly agree.

Today we’re crossing into the second half of our series about the craft of writing. So far we’ve covered plot, character development, setting and pacing. Now, continuing on the notion of pacing is a factor to which it is intimately tied: the dissemination of information. What do I mean by this? By “dissemination of information,” I mean the revealing of mysteries, the answering of questions or the introduction of something new to the story. Essentially, it’s adding a bit of novelty.

Suppose, for example, you’re writing a story in which your protagonist unveils and ultimately foils a grand conspiracy. You can’t simply reveal the whole conspiracy in your first chapter, or else you’d have nothing left to reveal in the rest of the tale. But if you wait until the second-to-last chapter to reveal all that information, then with what have you filled up all of the previous chapters? What you need to do is space the information out, spreading it like butter over the toast of your novel. This is most preferable for two complementary reasons:

1. By spacing out the information, you’re contributing to the proper pacing that you worked hard to establish according to last week’s post. If you go too long without revealing information, your story may soon grow boring. And if you give away everything at the start, then you have nothing left to reveal and the rest of your book (until the climax) will be similarly boring. What works best is establishing a steady rate of revelation: a little bit here, a little bit there, some more here, some new facts there. And eventually, these little bits of information will begin to form something new underlying your story, something rich and developed. Your readers will feel like detectives, better able to identify with your protagonist as they put the information together along with him (or her).
2. But you also want to add breaks. If every chapter reveals truckloads of new information, then your reader can quickly become overwhelmed and lost in all of the novelty. My recommendation is similar to that of the pacing: after every high-speed place, after every information dump, take a break and allow the reader to catch their breath. Let them process the information for a bit before you throw something new into the mix. You don’t want to pull a Matrix Reloaded and wait until one of the last parts of the tale to unload everything, or it will be too much for the audience to take in at a time (I still have no idea what The Architect was saying in that scene). Let the audience take the information in little spurts, or at a slow and steady rate, but not too slow, or you’ll lose their interest.

Now you may, unfortunately, run into a pinched point where you have no choice but to reveal a large amount of information in a short amount of time. It’s understandable, it happens to me from time to time. If you have exhausted all other options and find yourself facing this conundrum, my advice is to try and be as careful and clever as possible. While writing Torjen II: The Search for Andross, I arrived at a chapter where I was forced to introduce over a dozen new characters who were to have an intense discussion. The best I could do in that scenario was to make each as unique as possible so that the reader could keep them separate, then focus predominantly on only a few of them. I had a similar issue in my most recent work, The Choice of Anonymity, in which the ultimate explanation was revealed in one chapter. To balance this, I added foreshadowing in order to set this up, and then I still held a few key bits of information on reserve so as to keep the reader engaged. The foreshadowing worked like a charm, allowing for the revealed information to read more like a linking of facts than a wholesale revelation of them.

So the basic rule of thumb is to tie in the revealing of new information with the pacing you’ve already constructed. That adds some consistency to your book, as well as depth. But as a final note, let me point out that in the end of your work, all of the most important information must be explained. That’s my personal pet peeve in writing, when mysteries are established and then left unsolved. I mean, sure, you don’t have to explain whether or not one character followed through on their resolution to quit smoking or if another character ultimately conquered her fear of flying. But the big, crucial information that forms the core plot of your work must be answered.

However, it doesn’t necessarily have to be answered in this book. Suppose you’re writing a trilogy, or a series, or a grouping of works that interrelate but don’t form a linear series. If, over the course of your stories or books (notice the plurality there), those things will eventually be answered, then you may withhold key pieces of information to be made clear later. Again returning to The Choice of Anonymity, I leave the ultimate fate of all but my protagonist unknown, but the reason for this is that there will be two follow-up novels in this trilogy, and their fates will be made known there.

So if you’re going to establish a mystery, or some unresolved question, please ignore the tendency of the highly-talented and fascinating writer/director J.J. Abrams, who chooses to leave his mysteries unresolved. Let it be known, my friends. Let it be known.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I’ll discuss the deeper relationship between the protagonist and antagonist!

The Craft of Writing, Part Two: Characters

Hello! I hope you had an excellent weekend. Mine was enjoyable for the most part, though tiring. And with the new weightlifting and exercising routine I’m doing, I’m fairly sore these days, but it will all be for the better!

Last week, I talked about the most important part of storytelling: the plot. That is what makes a story a story. Now you may remember that I said the three most important elements to a story are plot, characters and setting, so with that in mind, let us move into the second element: character development.

When I was writing my first book, Torjen, I based each of the characters off of friends that I had at the time. In that way, the characters were already mostly developed, although they did have a tendency to evolve over the course of the rest of that trilogy, until by the end they bore little resemblance to their foundational counterparts in the real world. However, with later books, in which I had characters wholly unique, I realized that sitting down to write out the story with only the base notion of characters was simply not enough. I had to develop the characters, giving them backgrounds and personalities that were wholly unique and highly developed. Without that groundwork, there was simply no way to ensure that the characters had any sort of consistency in behavior. And in addition, by figuring the characters out before I sat down to write, I could establish personal growth within them.

So how does one go about creating a character? Well, first, you can choose the basic facts: gender, age, era, physical characteristics, personal history and hierarchy in the plot (good buy, bad guy, sidekick, etc.). When creating a slew of characters, what you’ll want most is at least one protagonist and at least one antagonist. A protagonist is simply your main character, like Harry Potter, the pale girl from Twilight, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, etc. This is the individual who is the main focus of the narrator; or, if you’re writing in first person, this is the narrator. The antagonist, on the other hand, is typically seen as the villain. The Joker, Sauron and Lord Voldemort are some of the more memorable antagonists in fiction. But there’s a trick: it’s usually the antagonist who propels the story forward. For instance, in the Harry Potter series, it is the evil machinations of Lord Voldemort that cause all of the events that Harry must endure. Without Voldemort, the Harry Potter series becomes a series about a kid in school. Boring. Without the evil corporations or mad megalomaniacs, James Bond is simply a guy in a tuxedo drinking martinis. Also boring. It’s the antagonist who causes the events of the story, and the protagonist who tries to resist these changes (which are usually for the worse).

So you have your protagonist, your antagonist and your side characters. Now what? Well, here’s where it gets deep. Now you draft what I call a “psychological profile” for each one, detailing four primary qualities: a deepest concern, a result of that deepest concern, a flaw (sometimes called a fatal flaw) and a journey.

1. Deepest Concern: referred to in philosophy as one’s telos, this is that which defines the character on the most fundamental level. This is what they are either consciously or unconsciously striving for in life, that goal for which they’re working.
2. Result: this is how that deepest concern manifests in the character’s mannerisms, traits and behaviors. Sometimes, the result can be good, while at other times the result is unfortunately counterproductive.
3. Flaw: this is the character’s psychological weakness, which the opponent character is to discover and exploit. But the protagonist’s success in rising above this flaw is what makes his ultimate triumph in the story so truly powerful, and the antagonist’s succumbing to it emphasizes his truly tragic character.
4. Journey: this is how your character grows throughout the story, how he gets from seeing his goal or deepest concern and actually achieving it, or changing so that he has a new and far greater deepest concern.

In order to demonstrate each of these, I’ll use The Choice of Anonymity and share the psychological profiles of my protagonist (Cale Anders) and my antagonist (Formulus).

Cale Anders’ Psychological Profile (protagonist)

Deepest Concern: love of family. Seeks to emulate his father.

Result: struggles with the reality of his father’s own fallibilty. Also sometimes comes across as more fatherly toward his girlfriend, for which she teases him.

Flaw: tries to assume the protective/father role of his friends, with the result that he loses sight of who he really is and represses his own struggles. In order to cover up for this fatherly demeanor, he sometimes intersperses his speech with odd and goofy phrases.

Journey: comes to learn who he really is apart from others, when not in the protective/fatherly role. Eventually grows strong enough to confront the problems which he had suppressed for the sake of others.

Formulus’ Psychological Profile (antagonist)

Deepest Concern: desperate curiosity, beyond a reckless extent.

Result: has little regard for human life, and so he racks up an enormous body count without much care. He develops a love/hate relationship with humanity, seeking to understand them and find someone like himself, but growing dangerously angry at the seeming failure of his “experiments.”

Flaw: doesn’t know who he is and fears being unique, thinking that it will leave him inescapably alone in the world.

Journey: develops an affinity for Cale, thinking he’s found a kindred spirit, only to go too far in his obsessive curiosity, resulting in his own destruction.

With these four characteristics, you will establish who each of your characters are on the most fundamental level, as well as how they will grow and change throughout the book. Along with these, you can incorporate other quirks of personality, like Cale’s love of astronomy and psychology, or Formulus’ rage toward his makers. Now with secondary characters, you don’t necessarily need to have all of these factors; in general, I think the more important the character, the more you need a psychological profile. But I certainly wouldn’t spend an hour drawing out a psychological profile for the mailman who says one line and is never seen again. It’s just more work than it’s worth.

So now that you have your plot and the characters to engage with that plot, you are ready to move on to the third part of our core triumvirate: setting. But for that, you will have to wait until next week.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I explore the creation of a setting!

The Craft of Writing, Part One: Plot

Greetings, and a fair day to those of you reading this! I hope the past week has treated you well. Mine has been busy getting back into the swing of things, but I’ll soon pick up the energy I need. Now I would like to begin a new seven-part series on the craft of writing. Essentially, I want to cover everything from plot to character development to pacing, and the most important things in between. Most of what I plan on sharing with you is what I’ve picked up over the course of my…twelve?…years of writing. I’m not claiming to be an expert, but based on what I’ve learned over the years, I’ve found that I’ve become more sensitive to examples of poor writing. In addition, my writing skills often translate into a deeper understanding of stories in any medium, which is why when I watch movies with my wife, I’ve learned to keep my predictions to myself; I have spoiled too much with my startling accuracy, to my wife’s utter annoyance.

In my senior year of high school, my English teacher taught us that there are three chief components to storytelling: plot, characters and setting. A perfect balance of these will create a balanced story, but you can still be memorable if at least one of these is done well. Today, I want to talk about what I feel to be the most important of these three: plot. After all, without a plot, there is no story. If you focus on just character development, you end up with a psychological profile but no story, and if you focus on just setting, you’ve essentially described a painting. Plot, my friends, is the action of the story, that which pushes the reader forward in time (or backward, if the plot involves time travel).

So then what is plot? Plot is the events of the story. This is what happens. Suppose, for instance, that I were to tell you a story where a man and a woman go into the woods, only to confront a werewolf, who chases them back to the village, then that confrontation and the ensuing chase would be the plot.

Since this is the basis of the story (what makes a story a story), then this is where I would advise you to begin. This is born from a single, core idea, perhaps an event or a scenario. Perhaps a virus infects a family member and is determined to be highly contagious. Or perhaps a man goes to visit his dear aunt, only to find a colony of ants spelling out words in her living room. I began watching a movie earlier called Don’t Blink, in which ten friends go up to a cabin for the weekend only to find all people and wildlife have seemingly vanished from the area (kind of similar to Ghost Ship, only at a cabin instead of a lost vessel). It doesn’t really matter what that event or scenario is, but once you have it, then you can begin to play around with it. What will a set of characters do in response? Will they search for answers? Will they go on a quest? Or will they turn on each other?

From this, you begin to develop the plot, threshing it out into a story. Here’s where it begins to get difficult, and to demonstrate this, I’ll first explain a tactic I used unsuccessfully when I was young, and then I’ll describe my regular process now. When I was in the seventh grade, I began to write a book called The Choice of Anonymity. The plot was simple: a shapeshifter begins murdering people in a town, and a kid has to stop him. That was literally all I had when I first began writing. So naturally, I didn’t get very far. After about two or three chapters, I realized that I had no idea where I was going. I had no endgame in mind and no guide to get me there. So the book ended.

Fast forward eleven years. I chose to return to The Choice of Anonymity, but I wanted to do it right this time. So before I even began, I thought out a bunch of scenarios all relating to that one central theme (the murderous shapeshifter). I thought of a group of zombified students chasing my characters through a school. I thought of a daring escape from a collapsing hospital. I imagined a religious experience at the altar in a church. A murder in an observatory. A house that comes alive. I wrote each of these on a notecard. I chose a starting point (my main character sees a neighbor’s house burning down), and an ending point (my main character has a confrontation with the shapeshifter himself), and I put those on either end of a spectrum. Then, all I had to do was organize the rest of the events in a logical order, fill in the blanks to connect them into a reasonable storyline, and then bam! I have my plot. This is called storyboarding. Below is a picture of my storyboard for The Choice of Anonymity.

By storyboarding, you’re able to do a number of extremely important things. First, you’re able to add much more complexity to the storyline. After all, if you don’t fully understand your story, then you’re fairly limited, for you’ll be forced to either keep it simple or any complexity you try to add will become incomprehensible. How many times have you watched a television show only for it to become painfully obvious that the writers have no idea where they’re taking it? Heroes, for instance, knew exactly where it was going in the first season, but after that, the writers fumbled around with no storyboard, and the quality was significantly diminished. The same happened to Supernatural once it went beyond season five. It’s still enjoyable, but just nowhere near what it once was. On the other end of the spectrum was Carnivale, which had a storyboard for more seasons than the show got picked up on (if only it could have controlled its budget, alas). So the storyboard allows you to have a much greater control over your story, giving you the power to develop greater – but, more importantly, coherent – complexity in it.

But there’s also a much more fundamental purpose to the storyboard which I’ve already hinted at: coherency. I’m talking about plot holes. A plot hole is a place where you look at the story and realize that something didn’t quite work out logically. Perhaps a character reveals information that there’s no way he should have known. Or perhaps your antagonist tracks your characters to a tavern, only for you to realize there’s no way he should have known they were there. These issues can be catastrophic for your story, for if they are critical enough to the plot, then the whole plot can break down, leaving your story in unappreciated shambles. But the storyboard allows you to correct for this! By looking at the storyboard closely for hours at a time until your eyeballs begin to ache, you can pinpoint plot holes and then, with the whole storyline sitting before you, you can reconfigure and massage the plot until the problem is reconciled.

Finally, when your storyboard is perfected, polished and totally coherent, you can begin the next few steps. But before that, I want to touch on one last concept: organic writing. Organic writing is when you sit down with no plan and choose to go wherever the story takes you. This is in stark contrast to what I’ve described in this article. I will say that organic writing is a good and powerful tool for improving your own abilities as a writer. I, myself, do it once every couple of weeks or so in order to test myself and keep my writing mind sharp. However, organic writing is, in my opinion, better suited to shorter works, like short stories or flash fiction (stories of a thousand words or less). But if a book is what you’re going for, I don’t believe organic writing will get you there, at least not without a severe sacrifice in quality. It sure didn’t work when I first attempted The Choice of Anonymity.

I hope this has helped you writers out there. If your process is different than mine, please, I encourage you to share it in a comment. After all, a challenge to do things differently is a great opportunity for growth.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I’ll discuss character development!

The Interior Battle

Howdy, folks! Okay, that’s all the Texan you’re going to get out of me for right now, so let’s move on.

I’d like to share something that’s been on my mind since Saturday night. After my wife went to bed, I chose to watch a movie online, settling on a Halloween-themed horror film consisting of ten scary stories. Some of them were good, some unsettling, some bizarre and others left me wondering if I was actually saved for watching them. You see, I am quite a fan of the horror genre. I love scary stories and horror movies; not the gory or sexy ones, but instead the eerie, unsettling, creepy ones which get the audience’s own imaginations going into full-gear. I’ve liked horror movies since high school, and my love of scary stories goes back at least to Elementary school.

Yet for the last day-and-a-half, I’ve found myself wondering about the spiritual impact of these things, especially the films. I’ve wrestled with this concept before, as you can read in my Christian Defense of the Horror Genre, and I still stand by what I said in that article. So, then, what exactly is the problem? I watched a horror movie with the belief that a proper understanding of horror can be good, possibly even helpful, to one’s spirituality.

I think my issue arose from the question of what it is I truly like about the genre. When I watch a scary movie or read a scary story, am I appreciating its creativity? Am I focused on the ultimate triumph of light over darkness, or seeing it as a cautionary tale? Or am I instead reveling in the darkness and the fear, inadvertently losing my focus on the light? As you can guess, this is a deep spiritual struggle within myself. But I think that may be the point: as much as we hate to admit it, there is no one who is wholly good or wholly evil. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “there’s evil in the best of us, and good in the worst of us.” We are all a mix of the two, the intermingling of two opposites fighting for control over our souls. Each of us carries seeds of light as well as seeds of darkness, and that which germinates from each wars against the other in a struggle which continues until death (and possibly even beyond, who knows?). So when you enjoy a story, or you watch a movie, which side has your focus? Do you root for the slasher, or for the teens he’s stalking? Do you root for the misunderstood monster or the angry mob coming after him with torches and pitchforks? And do you enjoy the giant monsters for the sake of God’s creativity in creating such things (I fully understand that those things are Hollywood-produced, so stick with the analogy), or do you revel in their destructive power and the devastation they leave behind?

I’d like to say that I side with the teens, the misunderstood monster and appreciate the awesome creativity in giant monsters, but that’s not always the case. I am a human being, after all, a mix of darkness and light, and sometimes I dip into the dark and lose myself the way we all do when we fall to temptation. But I’ve not given up. The battle still rages, the light fighting against the darkness. Sure, the darkness may sometimes win the battle, and it may sometimes overwhelm the light, but in movies, that’s usually what happens just before the hero recovers and gains his ultimate victory. When you feel crushed by the darkness, take heart, for the dawn is coming. Even in the final book of the Bible, after all the devastation and turmoil we’re to expect at Christ’s return, we’re left with the light of God banishing the darkness forever. Whenever I doubt myself, I think I’ll pray and think about what that future world may be like.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I’ll explore how the interior battle manifests in the exterior world!

The Combined Universe, in Fiction

Hello! I earnestly hope that you had a good, no a great, Halloween. My wife and I ended up running a 5K for an animal defense charity, and we did it dressed like Jack and Sally from The NIghtmare Before Christmas. Our dog joined us, dressed like a pumpkin, and we ended up winning the award for best dog/owner costume combination. It was awesome.

Anyway, I also hope you enjoyed last week’s bout of scary stories. I had fun writing them. Now with stories in mind, I wanted to take the next two weeks to discuss an interesting trend in the fictional world: combined universes. This week, I’ll explain exactly what a combined universe is, and next week, I’ll explore some of the more famous ones we’re seeing in movies these days.

What is a combined universe?

A combined universe is a concept in fiction wherein multiple works all take place within the same universe. This becomes most obvious when you get crossovers, like when the main character from one book shows up as a minor character in another book. Suppose, for instance, you have a book about a man named John Grey who explores a haunted house and only barely escapes from the ghosts within. Now suppose you have a second book which takes place fifty years later, in which a boy named Eddie Black is being pursued by evil spirits. Then, suddenly, an old man shows up and saves him. Eventually, you come to realize that Eddie’s savior is the old and worn John Grey. Eddie is still the main character of his own book, mind you, and Mr. Grey is only a minor character, or a side character; it’s always clear that this is Eddie’s story, not Mr. Grey’s. Now when you put these two books together, what you discover is that they take place in the same fictional universe, and together, John and Eddie’s stories tell a greater story. This is a combined universe.

Now to be totally clear, it must be established that a book series does not constitute a combined universe. For instance, the Harry Potter series does not take place in a combined universe, because, put simply, the books tell one main story (Harry’s story) with no crossover with other books. If J.K. Rowling decided to write a separate series focused on, say, Professor Lupin’s exploits, or Mad-Eye Moody’s adventures, or perhaps detailing the stories which Gilderoy Lockhart claimed were his own, then you would have a combined universe because these stories would intertwine and intersect with Harry’s story but without being subsumed by it. Am I clear as mud on this?

Here are two examples from one of the masters of science fiction/horror, H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft famously created two combined universes, one referred to as the Cthulhu Mythos and the other known as the Dream Cycle. In the Cthulhu Mythos, Lovecraft used a number of stories all related to one malevolent being known as Cthulhu. All stories in this combined universe relate in some way to the interaction between regular humans and these evil, godlike alien beings, Cthulhu being the most famous of them. The fact that some characters recurred through stories, and the stories took place at different times and places, established that the Cthulhu Mythos constituted one fictional universe. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle is very similar, only instead of the focus being evil alien monsters, it is instead on strange realms and lands only accessible via dreams and visions. Again, the recurring characters and plot elements establish that all the stories encapsulated by the Dream Cycle take place in a single combined universe.

I hope I’m becoming more clear here. The basic premise is that the writer is using multiple, intertwining stories to tell the greater story of the evolution of a single event, or entity, or history of a world. This is especially popular in comic books, in which one comic book character who has his own series will have a run-in with another comic book character who has her own series, thus establishing that both series take place in the same universe. Some writers seem to like this concept, while others avoid it, and still others dip their toes in it every now and then. Stephen King, for instance, occasionally suggests some sort of combined universe through the tiniest of hints, though so much more of his work can be considered stand-alone material. Writer Darren Shan, on the other hand, who made it big with his amazing Cirque Du Freak series, had the tiniest of possible connections between his last Cirque book and his later series, The Demonata. However, in an interview with a fan, Shan denied the connection, thus obliterating the possibility of a combined universe (unless he has since changed his mind).

But by far, one of the most famous of these was constructed by the writer of The Lord of the Rings, Mr. J.R.R. Tolkien. While many of his works can be read as stand-alone novels or trilogies (like The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion), these works cohesively tell the history from beginning to end of the world of Middle-Earth. Middle-Earth, thus, constitutes a combined universe.

More often these days, what we’re starting to see is a shift toward what is called a Cinematic Universe. A Cinematic Universe is, quite simply, a combined universe established in film, rather than in books. But, seeing as that is the focus of next week’s article, I will withhold that explanation until then.

Until next time, friends…

Quick Tale – The Man at the End of the Hall

In commemoration of the upcoming Halloween, I decided I’d like to put a few posts this week. Only (get excited) I won’t talk about random thoughts; instead, I’ll share short stories which I’ve written! Each of these will be approximately 1,200 words, so don’t expect to read an extensively long post this time.

Anyway, this story was originally written for the most recent meeting of the San Antonio Writers Meetup. Our prompt was simply the challenge to incorporate the phrase “down the hall of the shabby hotel” into our stories. I left mine up to multiple interpretations, so in the comments, feel free to let me know what you think is really going on! And without further ado, allow me to present to you The Man at the End of the Hall.

“Down the hall of the shabby hotel, I see a man staring at me. At least, I think that he’s a man. He’s so far away that I can barely make out any details, causing him to look almost like a silhouette. It could be the vast distance between my end of the hallway and his, or it could be the cheap and shoddy lighting that fails to illuminate him properly, but the way he’s standing, the height of him, and some deeply-felt instinct all tell me that this strange figure is a man.

My heart is beating fast, but I take a few breaths to calm it down, to catch my breath and come back to my senses. My hairs stand on end as I lock my eyes on the visage staring at me, that unmoving, unmistakable outline of a human being. When I’m calm, I slide sideways beyond the corner and brace my back against the cheaply painted and garish yellow which is peeling off the wall. I don’t care that the paint is shedding on my shoulders, or that the even the plaster behind it is leaving faint trails of white dust scurrying down my arms and chest. At this moment, all I care about is avoiding the man down the hall.

After a few more minutes, I build up the courage to turn the corner and I see that not only has the light gone out in the lone bulb swinging callously halfway down the hall, but the man has vanished as well. I breathe a sigh of relief, but I still don’t want to go near that door at the end, don’t want to pass that frame in which he stood. So I turn and instead take the hallway to my left. Its walls are chipping away as well, but at least its light is on, showing me the exposed stud in the wall about a third of the way down. Unfortunately, it also shows me a clearer view of the man standing at the end of this hallway, still unmoving, still staring. Before I turn away, I try to get a clearer view, noting how his clothes seem to be as shabby as the hotel, all dark with glistening stains barely visible in the weakening light. I can see glasses on his face, thick-rimmed with thicker lenses. His hair is still indiscernible, blending into the shadows cast around him. But this all becomes invisible as the light down this hallway also dies, and I’m left with yet another black tunnel to be avoided.

I retreat and take a third hallway. This is dimmer, but the light manages to remain, and I take off at a slight jog, trying to make it down to the end, hoping that perhaps this is the way out. The bare lightbulb seemingly stuck into the ceiling shifts a few inches as I pass beneath it, casting deep shadows which morph along the crumbling walls. I turn my eyes as I pass by the end of that hallway and veer left again, going about twenty feet before I stop and turn around. There, standing in the spot which I had just passed, is the same man, the lower portion of his body disappearing into shadows as the upper portion faces me half-turned. His shoulders shake slightly, as if some terrifying anger is welling up inside him, and his hair stands at odd angles, looking oily as if drenched in sweat. His eyes are still hidden behind those thick glasses, but they’re pointing at me, staring at me, bearing down upon me.

I sprint away from him and veer around another corner, praying that this is the way out of this place, but it isn’t; I’mt only be yet another indiscernibly familiar hallway. My feet slow before stopping directly beneath the bare bulb. I’m covered by a wave of frustration, thinking that even one covered bulb would give me a point of reference in this labyrinth. Exasperated, I slide down to the floor. I bring my hands up to my face and, for the first time, notice the blood etched in thin rivers across my knuckles. I don’t remember being in a fight, but, then again, I don’t remember coming to this hotel either. I stare at my hands, hoping they’ll awaken some memory, of the hotel, of the strange man stalking me, of what mistake of fate has brought me here. But the more I reach out for my memories, the more they seem to pull away, as if taunting me with their infinite possibilities. Have I fought the man, injuring him in some way? Is he stalking me for vengeance?

I look down at my shoe and notice the tiny piece of glass embedded in the sole, not enough to punch through and stab me in the foot but enough to remain firmly attached to my sneaker. I pull out the glass and peer into it. Does this have something to do with how I got here? I ask myself. Perhaps I crawled through a window, assaulted this man and tried to escape down the hallway, only to become inescapably lost in this condemned fleabag of a hotel. The theory gives me at least a little bit of comfort, some order in this confusion.

Suddenly, my muscles tighten and I feel something icy in my chest as the man appears in the glass shard. Dropping it, I leap to my feet and run before he can catch me. I can’t imagine how he managed to sneak up on me so quietly, but what I lose in stealth I more than make up for in a panicked run. I turn down one hallway, then another, each one looking identical to its predecessor.

At last, I come to a stop and rest. I look behind me and see nothing, just the empty hall with its single source of light. But then I glance to my right, and I see him. He’s less than two feet away, staring at me through the frame which meets the corner between two halls. At this proximity, I can barely make out the eyes behind the glasses, and without thinking, I ball up a fist and take a swing at the man, wanting to take him down before he has a chance to do worse to me. I feel a sharp thud, then a clattering sound and the image of the man cracks and breaks, falling to the ground around me. Some of him still remains on the wall and I punch with my other hand, causing more glass pieces to rain down upon the stained carpet. I stomp on some of these shards and one becomes embedded in my shoe, but I ignore it as I stumble away, my heart beating faster than it ever has before. Panicking and exhausted, I stumble away from the mess.

I turn a corner and see something off in the distance, but I can’t see it clearly. I adjust my thick glasses and it becomes clear. Down the hall of the shabby hotel, I see a man staring at me. At least, I think that he’s a man.”

Until next time friends…

Protagonist

Hello! I apologize for being a day late on this current post, but yesterday being Labor Day, I was unable to contrive the time necessary to write. Now I was initially unsure of what to write on today, but then I remembered a story I recently wrote which has been generally well-received by anyone who’s read (or, rather, listened to me read) it. Given my most recent two blog posts – one discussing fictional accounts of breaking the Fourth Wall, and one discussing fictional accounts of characters recognizing the falsity of their reality – I found this story to be a reasonable cap to this series.

I originally wrote this story for the San Antonio Writer’s Meetup Group, a gathering of local writers who meet twice a month to share their work. The ideal word limit is approximately 1,200 words, so I took that as an exact directive in constructing this piece. I hope you enjoy it!

Hello, my name is Max Destroyo. Seriously? That name is just so…terrible, and pretentious. It’s like the writer took maybe five minutes to come up with it. I mean, come on, man, am I a human being or a cyborg? Honestly, I’m not really sure because the writer didn’t develop me enough. Anyways, like I said, my name is Max Destroyo, and…I just feel like I’m dying whenever I say that. The “Max” part isn’t bad, but “Destroyo?” What, was “Explodo” already taken? Seriously…

In any case, I have recently come to the conclusion that I am a fabricated, written character. How do I know this? Well, my lack of body is a great indicator. Most real, living people don’t exist solely as words on a page. Most of them have things like hair and arms and a mouth, none of which my writer took the time to develop in me. What’s my hair color, bud? That’s right, intangible, because that’s a real color. And don’t get me started on my mouth, or, more specifically, my voice. Did my writer research and build a psychological profile or historical background for me, factors which are extremely necessary for building a character’s unique voice? Of course not, that’d be far too much work! I suspect that the writer thought of this earlier in the day, and then later in the afternoon, after a big meal and a nap, sat down to write out the story organically. Let me tell you now: you don’t develop a character organically and expect him to have a unique voice right off the bat. It takes pages and chapters, sometimes even whole volumes, to develop the voice of an organic character, and I have the sinking feeling I don’t have that much time.

Okay, now let’s pretend there’s a segue between that paragraph and this one. I’m also supposed to tell you that I’m quite sarcastic. Okay, now that’s just bad writing. If I have to tell you about a personality characteristic as bluntly as that, then that’s just laziness. Where’s the subtlety in the writing, the fine art of allowing the audience to come to conclusions on their own? When I say things as bluntly as “I’m quite sarcastic,” it’s like I’m taking control of their perspective of me, and that’s too much control in the writing process. But I’m not the writer here, and certainly neither is my own writer.

You know, I think I should just take a deep breath and relax. I’m not normally this angry, after all. I think I’m just frustrated. I mean, how would you respond if you just found out that your entire existence is tied up with a short story with a 1,200-word limit? And what word are we on now? 463? That means my life is over one-third over now. I’m the equivalent of a guy in his late twenties or early thirties, and reading this page probably took less than three minutes. Maybe if I slowed down, I could extend my life just a little…bit…long…er…

It doesn’t really matter. What is the purpose of trying to extend my life if my whole purpose is to be the narrator for one, single story? I mean, if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll get the story expanded into a book, and if I’m extremely lucky, maybe even a series of books. But even then, when I reach the last word of the last sentence of the last chapter of the last book, my existence will draw to a close. As the last stroke is drawn on the page, so my own life ends. It’s true of any character in any work of fiction: when the last story about them ends, they die. They don’t live forever, don’t keep going. The grim reaper waits upon that final letter, and though a shadow of them may live on in the reader, the core of them has ceased to be.

What will that be like for me? At the end of this story, will the last word hurt, like a knife in my back? Will it be eerie and disturbing, like hearing the last of the dirt tossed upon your casket? Yeah, I got morbid there. Sorry about that. But will I die and go on to a fictional afterlife? Or will I simply cease to be? These questions plague me. It’d help if I could remember what it was like before I formed through the writer’s words. But how could I remember from before I existed? If that were somehow possible, perhaps it would undermine the real value of my purpose here.

I don’t think I blame the writer so much anymore. I mean, sure, he didn’t really do any sort of character development, but he at least created me, bringing me here for a purpose, though I just passed the two-thirds mark and I still don’t know what that is. Is that what life is like? Trying to find your purpose, your reason for being here? Are we here simply for our stories, or is there some deeper, more true purpose for our existence?       I can understand if I was placed here to oppose some evil mastermind, or some brooding supervillain. Or maybe, on a lower key, a minor antagonist. But where is that antagonist for me to rail against? Maybe…maybe the antagonist of my story isn’t so much a person, but more a state of being. Am I here to fight against my impending death at the end of this story?

I think I just wish that my purpose would extend beyond the end of this story. If I’m lucky enough to be the protagonist – and I think it’s safe to assume that I am, here – then I’ll make it at least as far as the story’s climax. If I’m really lucky, there may even be some falling action, but that’s like walking that last green mile before the executioner’s chair. I know death waits for me at the end of the falling action. So it all goes back to my core question: am I only here to complete a single story? Man, I wish I existed like the audience and the writer. At least for them, there’s the possibility of living on, not to mention having a body. I mean, what if I wanted to be a runner and run forever? Thank God that’s not true, because I just don’t have the energy for that.

Enough of the reveries, I think. Back to reality! Er, I mean, back to fiction! So what’s this story supposed to be about? I only have about a hundred words left, so I don’t think I’ll be able to accomplish much. Hey, hey, hey, I just thought of something devious, yes, yes, a way to get back at the writer for not giving me characteristics: instead of actually doing anything, I just wasted his entire story on this one, single monologue. Take that, writer! You wanted a story and all you got was rambling nonsense! Oh, now I’m sad. And there, ladies and gentlemen, is more bad writing.

Sixteen words left, I should make them count. But how should I end this? How about…

Until next time, friends…