Learning the Chords
I once had a college professor for a creative writing course who told us that great writers were born that way. The rest of us mere mortals could only hope to strive for mediocrity with enough practice and effort. Up until recently, I believed this pile of rubbish and have even taken it to heart. I’ve been convinced that if I can’t naturally produce great novels just by sitting down and writing, then I must be one of those writers doomed to hope for mediocrity. Writers are already prone to perfectionism and self-loathing, so adding additional self-deprecating baggage onto the burden we bear does no one any good.
I was thinking about this and suddenly came to the conclusion that my college professor was an idiot. First of all, this same professor “taught” us that using said as a default attribution is a bad idea and taught us a whole bunch of other things that an editor recently told me were all wrong. I am now in the process of unlearning all the garbage I was taught by this particular professor.
When I was a kid I remember taking one of those aptitude tests, the ones designed to tell you, based on your scores, what sort of future career you to which you might be suited. This test told me that I should pursue a career in “sanitation”. That’s right, the aptitude test told me that I should be a garbage truck driver. The moral of the story: I’m done letting other people tell me what I can and cannot do.
I firmly believe that if you have that raw spark (neurosis?) within that makes you a writer, then you can hone your craft, learn your tools, and produce great fiction. I think it is foolish and the greatest form of hubris to think that one can be a writer and never once pick up a book on how to write.
Imagine a musical genius whose instrument of choice is the guitar. The man can hear songs in his head that are absolute gems, pure musical perfection. Now, ask that musical genius, who has never lifted a guitar, to go and play the songs in his head. With the exception of a few savant types, this musical genius is going to struggle to play “Happy Birthday” on the guitar, let alone the complex songs in his head. He needs to know how to use the tool, he needs to learn the chords.
Knowing that, in the heavy metal genre, an A chord with the distortion cranked up will make your audience want to punch stuff (a good thing) is essential if you plan to compose heavy metal songs. You wouldn’t know that, regardless of your level of creativity, if you didn’t know all of the chords, how they sound, and the emotions they produce.
The same is true for a writer. We can’t create a page turner without knowledge of plot and structure. We can’t make readers cry without knowledge of characters and character bonding. We can’t make readers so immersed by our fictional world that they ignore the pot of boiling water and the pets with full bladders begging to be let out unless we have a mastery of plot, structure, characters, description, setting, dialogue, and every other tool in the box.
So I picked up a bunch of books on how to write. I’ve already read a few, including those by Stephen King and David Morrell, but these books were down and dirty technical manuals for how to convert raw inspiration into truly readable fiction. I must admit that I ate quite a bit of humble pie in reading those books. Rather than being upset about it, I ordered about 10 more books. Every speck, every tiny granule of knowledge that I pick up teaches me to better hone my stories. The end result is a work of fiction that is not only more fun to read, but much more likely to be published.
So, to summarize: You can’t create music on the guitar without knowing the chords. You can’t create good fiction without knowing the techniques available to writers. Learn your Chords and your readers will thank you for it.
Amazon Heads Apple Off at the Pass With Kindle 70% Royalty Deal
Amazon announced on January 20th that is was launching a new “70% royalty option” for the Kindle. I’ve since logged into the DTP (Digital Text Platform) website and it looks like the options for the 70% royalty opt-in aren’t visible yet but I’m sure that will change soon. Basically what Amazon is offering is 70% of the list price of Kindle books to either the author or publisher (looks like it would be very easy to self-publish through DTP). This royalty rate is much, much higher than what normally is offered for printed books. There are a lot of concessions that must be made in order to get the 70% royalty deal, such as never selling your book for more than a percentage of the physical price, never charging more than $9.99, offering it in all geographies, etc.
On the surface this looks like a nice deal, and it probably is, but you know that Amazon is in it to make money and dominate market share. Their M.O. has always been to make it financially irresponsible for anyone to compete with them in a market segment that they intend to dominate. If you’re a Trek fan, think of Amazon like the Borg. Little shops are either assimilated (become Amazon partners and give a cut of their business in exchange for not being disintegrated) or they fail. There are obviously exceptions but overall this is how it works.
Amazon’s plan here looks a lot like a plan to cut Apple off at the pass. Apple has been in talks with Harper that we know of, which means they’ve probably been in talks with other publishers as well. The iTunes store is currently the largest media distribution hub on the planet, and certainly the most profitable. Apple is about to unleash a Tablet on the world, a 10″ piece of technocandy that will have geeks fauning and eReader lovers drooling. If Apple is allowed to create eReader buzz with their tablet, hook it up to the iTunes store so that downloading books from the tablet is as easy as downloading stuff for an iPhone, and Apple gets a bunch of publishers on board with eBook distribution through the iTunes store – you can see where this might end: with Apple dominating the eBook market the same way they dominate legal music downloads. If this happens, then the Kindle will become 2nd fiddle in a market that is rapidly expanding and gaining in popularity. Amazon doesn’t want that.
So what do they do? They offer a 70% royalty deal that includes a clause to prevent you from offering digital copies of your book anywhere outside the Kindle store to intice people into their camp. Lowered eBook prices could generate a huge increase in sales volume for eBooks, which will make publishers see more profit potential in eBooks and the entire thing becomes a self-feeding, beneficial cycle, the “network effect” as it were.
A lot of people in the publishing industry might not know this, but 70% is what application developers get as royalty from sales in the iTunes store. What this really means is that for an indie developer, the entire production chain is taken care of for them – the only thing they need to concern themselves with is building the software. There is no distribution cost to them, and Apple only taking 30% is actually a bargain considering what the independent developer might have to pay otherwise to get their application out in the world.
The conspiracy theorist in me figures that since the developer royalty rate on the App Store for the iPhone is 70%, and Apple is about to unleash a Tablet, and Apple has been talking to publishers, and Apple is currently sitting on the biggest media hub on the planet, that Amazon figures Apple’s going to offer a 70% royalty rate as well. This is why I think they’re trying to cut Apple off at the pass. They get people to start coming up with plans to adopt Amazon’s DTP, Amazon gets their hooks in, and by the time people get ahold of the Apple Tablet, they’ve sold their souls to the Kindle.
This whole business reminds me of the HD-DVD/BluRay format wars. Do I get a Kindle and read only Kindle books? Do I get a Nook and read only Nook books? Do I get an Apple Tablet and read only iTunes eBooks? At some point the house of cards will fall and there will be one winner. Only time will tell if any of this is good for the consumer and how it will change the publishing industry as we know it. As I’ve said before, the bottom line is that if authors and publishers do not embrace change, adapt, and move forward they will be left in the dust.
Are our bookshelves going the way of the CD case and should we worry?
There has been a lot of buzz lately about eReaders. Amazon is having tremendous success with its Kindle reader and Barnes and Noble introduced it’s “Nook” reader during this past (2009) holiday season. Sony has had a successful eReader for quite some time and virtually every mobile device on the market has some form of PDF or ebook reader on it, including the iPhone which sports a software version of the Kindle reader. The big question on every body’s mind is
Are our bookshelves going the way of the CD case?
Regardless of the answer to that question, that’s still the wrong question to be asking. Lots of people are worried that printed books are going to disappear the way CDs have “disappeared” (I use quotes here because you can still buy CDs in stores, they are just losing popularity). What happens to writers if printed books go away? Are we all just going to go extinct like the dinosaurs? From talking to some people and listening to their fear, one would think that one day all writers on the planet are simply going to sink into a tar pit and disappear, to be replaced by the proverbial “thousand monkeys” sitting in a room typing out Shakespeare (eventually).
We’re not looking at an extinction here. Everything evolves, including the art of storytelling. Writers can either put themselves on or ahead of this evolutionary change or they can be left behind. There will never cease to be a market for storytelling, the only thing that changes is the medium through which the story is told. Primitive cultures that had no written language told stories, including oral histories, to each other. Once people figured out how to paint on cave walls, stories depicting great hunts were painted on those walls. When people figured out how to write on papyrus, great stories were told on papyrus. When man invented the printing press, great stories were told to larger numbers of people. When man invented the eReader, great stories were told to people riding buses, sitting on trains, or wiling away the hours on a beach.
Writers will always write, and people will always crave a great story. The medium through which people crave those stories is going to evolve as technology evolves and people’s lifestyles change. It is my opinion that writers need to embrace these new mediums and be part of the evolution of those mediums, helping bring about fantastic new ways to tell stories. Historically, artists who cling to the “old ways” and refuse to accept new mediums are left behind.
So, in conclusion, I don’t think that our books are all going to disappear. I don’t think that we’re going to lose the pleasure in visiting a library that smells like books or visiting a big book store and spending hours just browsing. We are, however, going to have more options available to us that are tailored to our specific needs and lifestyle and that represents great new opportunities for writers, not a death knell.
People have real flaws so why don’t characters?
I’ve mentioned in a previous post that the more you treat the people in your story like people and the less like characters the more vivid, lifelike, and believable they will be. As a writer it’s your job to keep the reader entertained, but there are more subtleties to it. You want to keep them turning pages so that they want to reach the end of the book. To give the reader motivation to turn the page to find out what happens next, the reader needs to care about what happens next. They will not care about what happens next if they have no investment in the characters in the book.
What all of this means is that readers will put the book down if they don’t identify with, sympathize with, or want to be like, characters in the book. If the reader has no emotional investment in any of the people in the book, then they don’t give a crap about what happens to your protagonist. They won’t want to see the antagonist get his (or hers) in the end. They won’t care whether the love interest blossoms into a relationship. They simply won’t care – no matter how good the plot is. You can have a fantastic plot driven by flat, unbelievable, caricatures (not characters).
One of the things that I see a lot, especially when reading the fantasy genre is that an author will fail to make their character real enough by making them too perfect or sometimes even the reverse: too flawed. When characters reach an extreme like that they cease to be people with whom the reader can form a bond and become nothing more than an archetype. You could easily replace “Character A”‘s looks, personality, background, and name with an entirely new persona and the book would read the same way. This is because “Character A” is just that - generic and lifeless. They’re a placeholder, not a source of motivation or inspiration to the reader.
I’m not saying that this is a cardinal sin. No, if you look at the bookshelves of a Barnes & Noble on any given day, you’ll see countless popular books with archetype placeholders instead of living, breathing characters. Some readers can tolerate it.
If you think about your characters like real people then giving them a rich, full history filled with joys and sorrows, flaws and positive traits, becomes easy. Think about all of the things that motivate your character through the book – the history and life experience that pushes them to make the decisions they make. You could leave all of that stuff unsaid, or you could turn all of those motivations into chances to breathe real life into the character. What if your ultra-brave soldier protagonist suddenly has a burst of paralyzing fear because the sight of the enemy recalls some childhood horror? To me, that’s far more believable than a soldier who is brave and strong throughout the entire book. What if your main character has an addiction that they are constantly fighting and struggling with? Not only will millions of readers be able to identify with that problem on some level and immediately bond with that character, but it provides a wealth of opportunity for coming up with great struggles, climaxes, victories, failures, and plot twists.
The bottom line is this: think about all of your friends and family. Think about every single one of them. They all have flaws, dents, dings, cracks in the armor and skeletons in the closet. It could be an innocent skeleton like having a secret love of green frosting, or it could be the story of a childhood victim or someone who suffered through a terrible loss that effected them tremendously and changed who they are today. All you have to do is look around you and at the people you live with, talk to, love, and barely know and you will find a plethora of flaws, character traits, and histories that chisel your character into a real person instead of a bland, generic archetype.
3 Illegal Acts That Will Ruin a Scene
Have you ever been happily reading through a book and then all of a sudden felt strange and had to stop? Have you ever been watching a movie and you feel suddenly jarred out of the movie and you become keenly aware of the seat, the people around you, and the crap stuck to your shoe? Most of the time, these aren’t random events. This happens, whether we’re conscious of it or not, because someone in a scene has committed one of 3 illegal acts. Committing one of these illegal acts will cause immediate discomfort for the reader or viewer.
The three biggest offenders that will ruin your scenes are: Acts Against Motivation, Acts Against Rules, and Acts Against Soul.
Acts Against Motivation
An act against motivation is pretty self-explanatory. This is when a person (not a character, I hate calling them that. They are fictional people, characters are mockeries or shadows of people) does something in a scene either without visible motivation or worse, against their current motivation. Huge offenders in this category include a lot of fantasy. In many fantasy tales, characters go off on these world-saving epic quests without ever being properly motivated. For a lot of people this can be overlooked, but for some, seeing some farm boy leave home and everything he holds dear without proper motivation is a huge turn-off and enough to put the book down.
Every single thing every person in your story does needs to be motivated. They shouldn’t eat if they’re not hungry, they shouldn’t fight if someone in their position wouldn’t fight. When people move from scene to scene in a story without ever being properly motivated, what you have is a thin plot. Movies often take short cuts in the motivation area because they simply don’t have time to build up the proper motivation and most moviegoers accept that. A 700-page epic fantasy, however, should be rife with motivation and you, as the reader, should never ever doubt why a character did what they did (unless the author wants you to doubt it… but authors that can do that don’t have to worry about spinning motivation properly as they’ve already mastered it).
So next time you put down a book and have that strange, unidentifiable feeling of “this sucks but I don’t know why”, ask yourself if someone in the book just did something without any clear reason for doing so other than furthering the contrivance of a flimsy plot.
Acts Against Rules
This one is far more subtle. The more complacent the reader or viewer, the harder it is to spot these problems. Every world, fictional or real, has an internal set of rules that govern everything that can or cannot take place in that world. In the real world, these rules are simple: the laws of physics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, etc are the rules that everyone and everything must obey. In a fictional world, however, there is usually a second set of rules. These rules dictate how magic works, or what level of technology exists in the science fiction world, how strong people are, what the average person can do versus what the protagonists and other heroes can do. If someone in your scene violates the world’s internal rule set, everyone will immediately know it. The reaction may range from almost no reaction whatsoever to outright rage.
A standard plot tactic to enrich a story often involves hindering the protagonist somehow at the behest of the antagonist. The classic “villain traps the hero” scenario. This, unfortunately, is also where a lot of stories violate their own internal rules. Let’s say you have a character that is a master thief. This character is then captured and placed in an ordinary prison cell. Your brain expects that thief to break out of that cell and, if written well enough, you might even have been in suspense waiting for that thief to break out. However, if the author leaves the thief to rot in the cell while someone else breaks them out, you will feel disappointed. This is because the world rules were violated: thieves, especially protagonist thieves, can break out of ordinary confines.
Here’s another example. Let’s say J.K. Rowling throws Harry Potter with his wand into a locked room in a muggle house. If Harry were to spend more than 30 seconds confined in that room against his will, we would all feel disappointed because we know the rules, and we know that a muggle door is no match for a wand.
World rules can be an author’s worst enemy but they can also be a huge ally. Think about this: take that same ordinary prison cell and lock someone like Gandalf up in it. When the reader sees Gandalf not escape, the reader is likely to start thinking that something else, something bigger and more epic might be at play. The reader, knowing Gandalf’s true power and position in the universe, is probably thinking that Gandalf has something up his sleeve. None of that has to be explicitly told to the reader, the reader will guess that something is amiss because world rules were intentionally violated, or at least, appeared to be.
I’m going to leave this topic cut off here because I could spend several additional blog posts on the topic of world rules alone. Suffice it to say that if you trap superman in a wooden box and there’s no kryptonite around, your readers will stop reading.
Acts Against Soul
This one on the surface might look like an act against motivation but if you think about all of the times in all of the books where this comes up, a character often has to choose between the direction of motivation and the direction of their soul.
If someone in your story does something that is so completely against their true, inner nature then you run the risk of jarring readers out of your world and back into the real world. If you see a highly moral character turn and suddenly start butchering innocent women and children, there’s a problem. If a character who has consistently made choices to never sacrifice the innocent suddenly chooses a selfish path that hurts everyone around him, it can cause problems and halt the reader.
On the other hand, if you deliberately make one of your characters do something against their true nature, you can, if done properly, use that to great effect. This is often called “hanging a lantern”. In other words, if you’re going to break a world rule (or commit one of the 3 illegal acts), you’d better hang a lantern on that fact so the reader knows you’re intentionally doing it and that it isn’t the result of you being a terrible author.
In my opinion, the scene in one of the (bad) Star Wars movies where Anakin kills all the kids in the school is a classic rule breaker. In fact, it breaks all three illegal acts in a single scene. First, it breaks the “Acts Against Soul” rule. I don’t care how much propaganda he’d been filled with, it should take a LOT more than we saw to convince a Jedi learner to murder innocent kids. Second, it violates the “Acts Against Motivation” rule. There is absolutely no clear motivation for him to kill the kids. You can tell in a blatantly obvious way that particular scene is nothing more than a contrivance to get the plot from point A to point B. Everything in that scene is a rule breaker. Finally, that scene also violates the “Acts Against Rules” rule. Given everything that everybody knows about Jedi, the Jedi homeworld, and everything they’ve seen up to that point, the fact that a pile of guards doesn’t immediately rip Anakin to bits once they discover what he’s doing is just inconceivable.
So, in conclusion, I always keep these three “illegal acts” in mind when writing a scene. Before I edit a single piece of grammar, spelling, or writing style, I double-check the scene to make sure that everyone is acting in accordance to the world rules, to their inner core, and to their motivation. If a character isn’t motivated or is otherwise breaking rules, I re-work the scene. To me, breaking any of these three rules means I don’t have a scene and I need to fix it immediately.