Write at the Light

The reading was from Mark 1:35-45.

It is a perfectly plotted story arc. This is no accident.

Here’s the story (liberally rephrased):

Jesus, wants solitary time with God. He wants it badly enough to get up very early and go out to a quiet place. [OPPORTUNITY]

But the guys come and get him. They say, “What are you doing? Everybody’s looking for you.” He says, “It’s time to go.” [PLOT POINT 1]

They go out to the towns around the area, where he heals and preaches, and then a leper comes and asks to be healed. Jesus looks at the man with compassion and chooses to heal him, but he says, “Don’t tell anybody.” [MIDPOINT]

The leper, being a human being who has been separated from the community for whatever period of time, cannot keep from telling people, and he tells everybody he meets.

Now the crowds are so great that Jesus is forced back into the deserted places [PLOT POINT 3], and they’re still coming after him.

It’s a short passage, with the arc more of a sequence (series of scenes) than an entire screenplay. Still, someone could write a screenplay with a parallel plot that could be a riveting movie.

But as I look at it again, I see that in this story, the protagonist is actually the crowd. Jesus wants, Jesus acts, but it’s the crowd’s desire that drives the action. The crowd wants miracles, why everybody’s looking for Jesus in the first act. It’s the crowd’s discovery that he can cure leprosy that is the turning point at the midpoint. It’s the growing crowd that forces Jesus out of the towns at the second plot point, and having “lost” him, surges out to the deserted places to find him again.

I’ve heard it said that every story is one of two plot lines: “A man goes on a journey” or “A stranger comes to town.” This is both.

I said that it’s no accident that the Gospel story follows the plot outline that we now call classic screenplay structure, not because Mark was some “advanced” storyteller far ahead of his time, but because story is story is story. It’s written in the DNA of the human soul.

Say something smart, get their attention, say something smart. Don’t waste people’s time. Earn the desire to turn the page.

There’s a lot of wisdom in marketing and advertising writing for folks who write fiction. Here’s a nugget from a top advertising writer-turned-mystery writer. Read the whole interview at Lawrence Bernstein’s Info Marketing Blog.

Read the whole thing.

At a party the other night, I asked a writer working on his first novel what kind of novel it was. He said it was a romance, and he said it with that self-deprecating expression that makes you know that he expects you to sneer.

I told him that I thought romance was a fine genre. It’s about hope, renewal, rejuvenation, new life.

All the genres speak to some inner question within us, and this is the first of a series of posts exploring what those questions are. I looked at romance, mystery or detective, thriller, fantasy and horror, science fiction, and mainstream. They divided themselves into what is (including the hidden what is), what ought to be, and what might be, and of those categories I was surprised at how some of them fell.

What is – “What is” stories, including the “hidden what is,” teach us about the world as we live it.

• Mainstream — Mainstream is the look through the lighted window. It’s the reader’s chance to experience life as someone else leads it. At its best it’s compassion; at its worst, voyeurism. We feel the world through someone else’s skin.
• Thriller – The thriller is the lonely stand against the power of evil. It teaches the sacrifice of courage, and usually it ends with the evil set back but not vanquished. This requires the reader or viewer to make a choice: When the evil comes back, how will you respond?

The hidden what is – Fantasy and horror are two sides of the same coin, the hidden “what is.” Both present stories of the hidden reality, the other side of the tapestry, what we would see if only we had eyes. In both fantasy and horror, we experience other worlds that reveal the awe and mystery of our own.

• Fantasy – Fantasy is the bright version of the hidden reality. Fantasy stories end in the triumph of light.
• Horror – Horror is the dark version of the hidden reality. This is the genre where Aristotle’s tragedy has gone. It represents retribution for hubris, what happens to those to violate the cosmos (Greek for beauty, harmony, order).

What ought to be

• Romance – Romance presents hope, rebirth, renewal, fecundity. It ends in marriage (which over the last 50 years is often symbolic). In American romantic comedy, one of the protagonists is always in disguise, and for the couple to come together there has to be an unmasking and forgiveness, permitting the couple to be their true selves.
• Detective/mystery – The detective story (in which the audience knows the answer before the protagonist does) or mystery story (in which the audience discovers the answer as the detective does) represents the triumph of justice. The wrong is righted, the crime is punished; equilibrium is returned.

What might be

• Science fiction – Science fiction, the newest genre, is a social extrapolation. If trends continue, this is where we’ll end up. At its most hopeful, it’s about the difficulty of dealing with change — meeting unimaginably foreign cultures or adjusting to new technologies. At its most dystopian, it’s about the terrible future we’re creating. But no matter how dystopian the story is, the fact that it’s written comes out of an optimistic belief that it’s not too late to change the future. In Orwell’s 1984, the protagonist loses to the State, but the story is told to warn us to prevent the rise of that State.

As I said, the categories surprised even me. Most of the time science fiction, fantasy, and horror are lumped together as speculative fiction, and people who like mainstream fiction will hardly acknowledge that fantasy is a story of “what is.”

Tell me how I’m wrong.

Mystery author David Hewson talks about a technique he uses for getting into the heads of his characters. He listens to conversations between the on ordinary subjects, how they express themselves, what opinions they hold, how they react to each other.

It looks like a valuable resource, and I plan to try it.

Heck, I talk to myself enough anyway. It would be more interesting to hear from somebody else once in a while.

Most books aren’t silent movies. Real characters communicate. So writers need some way to recreate the dialogue between the people in their books inside and outside the book itself. Understand what I’m saying here? I need my people to talk to one another constantly, making everyday small talk that never finds its way to the page. I need them to live inside me before I can reproduce them to the world at large. There are few better ways to do this than to cultivate the habit of the interior conversations. Talking to yourself, out loud or in silence, in the character of the people you’re inventing The kind of habit that once got you committed to lunatic asylums when they still existed.

The whole post is worth a read.

Populating a novel can demand quite a cast of characters. School friends, great-grandparents, pizza delivery boys, and the accident victim, along with the regular cast of major, minor, and walk-on characters who have to names, ages, ethnic extraction, and all the rest of the paraphernalia that comes with being alive.

Not only that, but they have to sound unique. Yes, in a given second-grade class there may be four Devons and six Ashleys (or whatever the top baby names were in 2002), but in a novel you don’t ask your reader to keep track of them.

The problem is, once I get on a roll, they all start popping out the same. I’ve got a Chloe, Kelly and Kayla in my work in progress, and Kelly and Kayla are sisters. Not going to work.

So my contribution to the never-ending search for unique names and characters, here are the best of the name sources from the web. Each one has something different to offer. No matter what your story, you can populate it here.

• Social Security Administration popular baby names — What name would be plausible for a 24-year-old woman in 1942? How about a 97-year-old man in 2046? If you want some connection to reality, 1880 to the present, this is your source. It ranks the top given names for boys and girls for each year, along with percentages of births and numbers of births.
• Think Baby Names — Generate a name by meaning, origin, popularity, or random. Popularity goes back to 1880 for United States (see the Social Security Administration site above), 1998 for Canada, England and Wales, Scotland, Sweden, and Australia (separate lists).
• Behind the Name: The etymology and history of first names — I love the variety of ethnic groups, including some obscure ones, along with Biblical Hebrew, Greek, Latin and English Bible, history, theology, literature, popular culture, mythology, and ancient. I use the middle name function to generate family names, too.
• Fantasy Name Generator — Not my cup of tea, exactly, but it makes me wish it were. Choose from consonant heavy, vowel heavy, long, short, medium, names with apostrophes or dashes; go for serious names or fun names; go for Japanese, Hawaiian, Pokemon, or Dragons of Pern.
• Fake Name Generator — If you really want to jump start a story, go to Your Randomly Generated Identity. Not only do you get a name (first and last) of the nationality and ethnic extraction of your choice, you get address, website, email address, password, phone, mother’s maiden name, MasterCard, Social Security Number, occupation, and UPS tracking number for a package that isn’t specified. Sounds like the beginning of a mystery or thriller.
• Seventh Sanctum — This one doesn’t stop at names (mostly fantasy sorts). It will generate and entire novel if you give it a chance. Genre, setting, characters, skills, technology, organizations, along with story prompts. You could spend many a rainy afternoon playing among the generators here.
• What to Expect — More baby names for the truly stuck, with a message board, browse the full list, and search for notable namesakes from stage and screen, among others.
• Facebook app — The Name Generator — I should have known there’s an app that has 463 billion different first and last names that you can access through Facebook. You can tag them and view names that others have tagged, which gives a sort of order to them. It’s not the same as asking for Greek and getting Greek, but you might want to come at it from a different direction.

A lot of fiction suffers because the author mishandles showing versus telling. Both are necessary in a piece of writing. Showing is what brings the reader into the midst of the action and makes the reader feel what the character is feeling. There are times, however, when it’s wise to skip lightly over events that don’t further the plot.

Knowing how to show is the difference between bang and blah. Knowing when to show is the difference between sparkle and blather.

When the Odyssey Writing Workshop offers an online class in Showing versus Telling,” anyone with an interest in writing fiction would do well to take note. It’s true that the workshop specializes in onsite teaching for writers nearing publication quality and working in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, but every genre needs to master the craft of showing versus telling.

I’ve been listening to the Odyssey Workshop’s podcasts for a couple of years now. They have top writers teaching on all aspects of the craft.

Give them a look.

I’m signing up to write for Technorati. The site will launch an article aggregator.

Anyway, the process asks bloggers to post a bit of code to find out if we really own our blogs. Here it is: ctgkwxv96d.

Does anybody here have an interest in doing children’s picture books for the Chinese market? I heard from a Chinese Canadian who wants to work what seems to be some kind of joint venture. All I know about is what the email says, but I’ll forward the email to anyone who is interested. Email me for more info.

They say nonverbal communication is 55 percent of the total message, and I believe it. In fact, if verbal and nonverbal are in dispute, nonverbal trumps. Another word for that, for fiction writers, is text and subtext.

Here’s the video.