Drinking from the font of ideas (Also Laser Sharks!)

This morning, I found out that some brilliant and/or daft people mounted a laser on a shark just to prove that they could. I rushed over here with every intention of telling you all about how I was right and we really are living in the future. I mean, flying cars are all well and good, but after laser sharks, everything else is just gravy, right?

And then my inner geek became my outer geek and I said: "Heh. Dude... Laser Shark!"

Talk about a gift that just keeps on giving; you could do almost anything with a premise like that. Almost any story can be grafted on. Science fiction? Of course; c'mon, that writes itself. How about something hard...
Military Fiction: The brave men and women in uniform who labor shoulder-to-should to bring together the ultimate weapon, lasers and sharks!
Techno-thriller: Terrorists (there are always terrorists) hijack the laser sharks and threaten to loose them upon an unsuspecting world.
Mystery: A body washes up on a desolate stretch of the Australian coast, burned and bitten beyond recognition. Was it murder? What could possibly have committed such a heinous act?
Spy Thriller: A foreign power is developing a secret weapon at their base beneath a volcanic island.
Romance: A handsome marine biologist meets a winsome laser engineer with a dreadful secret.
Steampunk: Aetheric amplification of Sol's brilliant light reaps unexpected rewards in the submarine base of the nefarious Doctor Villainous Deeds!

The list goes on and on and on. Ideas tumbling over ideas in a rush to get their hands on a real-live laser shark. And it occurred to me that this week, of all weeks, was the perfect opportunity to talk about where ideas come from.

Are they delivered to me by Laser Sharks?

Sadly, no.

I started thinking about this when thriller writer Joseph Finder said this:

Then, he said this:

And got me thinking about just how fertile is the daily news crawl that crosses my screen. Not just for things like digital organ thieves and shark-mounted lasers. Take that same Facebook-borne logic leap that Joe was talking about and graft on a story about an MI-6 codebreaker found locked in a bag in his locked apartment and you have the material for quite a thrill ride.

How about a conservator in the rare book room at Brown University that found an engraving signed by Paul Revere stuck in a medical book? How did it get there? Who put it there? Were they hiding it from someone? Historical fiction, thriller, romance, the world's your oyster with a core story like that. And how about a 400 year old map that was found to have a fortress marked in invisible ink that could lead to a lost city in West Virginia? Really! Where can't you go with a lead like that?

Historical fiction and thrillers aren't your thing? Want something that's sweet, but just a little creepy? How about this story from NPR about how a baby's cells lurk in mom's tummy long after the baby is born.  If you're not interested in sweet and want to focus on the creept, there are cannibal shrimp are invading the gulf coast, Iceland is sending tourists into the heart of dormant volcanoes,  and scientists are getting blood samples and DNA from 5,300 year old Alpine mummy.  

That reminds me, there's a GIANT statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of tombs, being carted around Seattle like a parade float.  That's either a horror story, the next Indiana Jones movie, or a lawsuit waiting to happen. Maybe all three.

Speaking of lawsuits, I found out this week that space lawyers are apparently a real thing. My high school career councilor really dropped the ball on that one. But you want a comedic legal thriller? Fine. A bear fell out of a tree and led to a lawsuit that could literally change the face of copyright law in America. yes, really.

Mysteries? A guy carrying a big bag of money had a heart attack on a train platform at Penn Station and no one knows where the money came from. And how about those thieves that staged an elaborate movie-worthy heist in Connecticut to steal a few truckloads of pharmaceuticals? Heck, just today I found out about a robot petting zoo and a hexapodal walking car that will, oh yes, it will be my next ride.

But I write Children's books you say? This week provided me with a harmonica-playing pachyderm, a kidnapped penguin, and an escaped Tokyo parakeet made it home because it could tell the cops its address. No excuses.

So where do I get my ideas? I pay attention. Because in the end, it's not coffee, or my favorite pen, or a special table at the coffee shop, or mystical muse that brings me my stories. It's not even the friends and news sites that dropped those leads into my inbox. I bring me my stories. I get them by paying attention, by collecting all the various bits of the history that came before me and the world around me right now. And I find the bits that fit together but don't fit with anything else.  And the glory of this weird enterprise of writing is that anyone else can take in the same elements from the same news items and they will create entirely different stories from the same ingredients.

So that's it. And the next person who asks me where I get my ideas gets poked in the eye. Seriously. Safety glasses are advised.  Don't worry, you can get a new bionic eye to replace it. Because this is the future we're living in. 

Oh, and I'd stay out of the water until the batteries on that laser run dry. 

Just a thought.

With enough time and coffee...

Running out of stories, or just looking for a way around?

The other day, I posted on a discussion board dedicated mostly to discussing Queen Elizabeth & her reign, that I'd seen a copy of "The Secret History of Elizabeth Tudor, Vampire Slayer" on the shelf at a bookstore. I confess that I was snarky about it.

As someone who posted after me pointed out, this is one of an emerging genre of books that posit famous historical personages as secret warriors in the fight against the undead. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer is a famous one. There are others including Queen Victoria and even Sarah Palin, though I hope the latter is satire of some sort.

For what it's worth, I have nothing against these authors or any other who turns their hand to the literary mash-up genre. Kudos to all of you for pursuing your idea and getting it published and read in a tough market. This genre is emerging as adjacent to if not part of the literary mashups like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies among others.

My problem isn't with the individual books, but that they are viewed by the world at large as science fiction or at best fantasy. And we should all be aware that to those outside the fan base for those things, there isn't a difference.

But the question this really begs is have we expended all of our ideas to the extent that the only way forward is endless remixing and rehashing of what we've already done?

I have a folder full of ideas that argues otherwise.  But if every author has one of these folders (and they do) then why does it seem like it?

While I was thinking about this, I stumbled across a thought-provoking essay by astrophysicist and novelist David Brin on how to define Science Fiction and while I don't agree on every point, it clarified a lot of what I've been feeling about the state of science fiction.

The lack of originality is one part pessimism and one part laziness. Because if you believe there are no new stories to tell, or if you believe that telling an imaginative and uplifting story is trite, then why not be lazy?

"Let there be no mistake—this is the giant fault line down the middle of science fiction’s broadly varied and tolerantly diverse community of authors and readers. The notion that children might, possibly, sometimes,learn from the mistakes of their parents, avoid repeating them… then forge on to make new mistakes all their own, overcoming obstacles on their way to becoming better beings than ourselves."
David BrinWriting for the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologieshttp://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/4947

On this point, I concur with Dr. Brin: we live in a time when optimism is treated as though it were a contagious disease. When the hope that (as Dr Brin says) our successors might learn from our mistakes and not repeat them seems anathema to us. Year after year, we are hammered with stories whose key element seems to be complete failure of human society to learn and improve.

And I get that too. I watch the events that are happening in the world. As a student of history, I see the cycles of human experience repeat. And it saddens me.

But it does not make me a pessimist.

Howard Carter is an homage to the greatest stories of Sci Fi's past, but it is more than that. Its story rests on the refutation that cycles are unbreakable. Its stance is pointedly and fearlessly anti-fatalist.

Because I am, at heart, an optimist. I'm a cynical one sometimes, but an optimist nonetheless.

There are dystopian stories that need to be told. And science fiction does and should have a role to play in warning us of the future consequences of current trends. But I feel deeply and personally that we took a wrong turn somewhere when we decided that science fiction had to stop positing positive futures. Not that dystopian stories should not be told, but by making it cliche or trite to posit any advancement and dwell solely on the inevitability of decline, we've shot ourselves in the collective foot as a literary movement and as a society.

Though much of it is dystopian, Steampunk is an expression of this, a point that I think Dr. Brin misses. That by re-imagining the past as more enlightened and inclusive than it really way, we've turned our optimism inside out and sent it back in time and into alternate universes. When we were told we're not allowed to imagine that mankind can be better, we started imagining how mankind could have been better.

I don't think these strange genre fluctuations and mash-ups mean we've run out of ideas or that we've reached the end of our creativity. I think it means we're running against a wall and I see it as a sign of frustration on the part of authors at the constraints imposed upon them. I see them as a way of saying, 'If we can't go forward, we'll go under, over, or around'.

But then... I am an optimist.

A Horse of a Different Color

I was met with a round of blank looks.  It's okay, I'm used to it by now, but it didn't make it any less frustrating.

"This is a book?" One person ventured.

"It's a kid's book," I said.  "It came out when I was in high school."

A round of knowing looks went through the group. Someone patted my forearm, I forget who it was, and leaned in to whisper "Scott, by high school, most of us stop reading children's books."

Actually, I was twenty six or so when I finally read it. A fact that I keep to myself, preferring to pretend to be horrified that they hadn't been reading stories about boys and their horses when they were sixteen.


I thought about asking about those Harry Potter books I knew they had on their shelves, but gave up.  Those were different, or at least those were the worm that turned.  And even though JK Rowling was largely responsible for drawing adults into the young adult sections of their bookstores and libraries, most of the venturing seemingly went forward from Harry's pub date, not backwards.

Which is too bad, really. There are some great overlooked books on those shelves, languishing in the boy wizard's shadow.  It's possible that I'm one of the few Americans who had even heard of War Horse before it became a play.

I cheated, I suppose, by being a children's bookseller. 

Today, it was featured in the New York Times, but only because it's about to open in New York.  In short, it's a story about a boy and a horse. Big deal, right?  Then the British army takes the horse to Europe and the boy follows his equine friend into the blood and chaos of the First World War.

Written from the viewpoint of the horse.

There have been a number of great stories written from the viewpoint of animals and some not-so-great attempts to mimic them.  Traveller, by Richard Adams, is the book it reminds me of most.  And though War Horse predates Traveller by a few years, comparisons are inevitable because of their animal's-eye-view of war, the comparisons stop there.  Both narratives attempt to draw attention to how strange the enterprise of war is by showing it from the viewpoint of an uncomprehending animal forced to participate. Much though I liked Traveller, I think War Horse wins the bout, capturing the full scope and horror of the putative War to End All Wars.

War Horse is one of those books that hollows you out and shakes you and then puts everything back just a bit wrong and with extra parts left out.  In a good way.

I haven't seen the play, but I will if I get the chance. In fact, I was reminded of the book (prompting the discussion above) by the play, or rather by the puppets used to bring horses onto the stage.  The puppets are so beautiful and amazing that the designers were invited to talk at this year's TED Conference.  It's no secret that I love puppets and puppetry. I wanted to be Jim Henson when I grew up and I still quietly dream of working with his people someday, somehow.

The horse puppet will show you how powerful a puppet can be.  Seriously, the could not have been more powerful if they had brought actual horses onstage.  I cannot fathom how the upcoming movie adaptation by Stephen Spielberg can hope to measure up.



Before you see the play or watch the movie (Christmas of this year, I believe) I hope you take a moment to read Mr. Morpurgo's amazing book.  And if you're a writer as I am, read the story behind that book.  It's the perfect story of a tale that made it to print only to be written off more times than you can count, finding its audience decades later and an author who never gave up on it.

Why Bother?

At least two people who've read only the brief description of the novel I'll be writing for National Novel Writing Month have asked me why I'd bother writing about boy geniuses and giant robots.

I find this approach simultaneously amusing and frustrating.  The idea that seems to be operating here is that in order to tell a new story, all of the characters have to be of a variety no one else has ever thought of before.  As if such a thing were even possible.

Entire forests have been expended in pursuit of young wizard's apprentices and orphans, yet that didn't stop JK Rowling.  She knew that even though she was walking in the footsteps of everyone from Charles Dickens to Craig Shaw Gardner, her book would be different because she wrote it.  And thank God she did too -- Harry Potter almost single-handedly reawakened the sleeping giant of midgrade and young adult fiction.

Because she wasn't afraid to take a comfortable idea -- the boy wizard -- and say something new with it.  In many ways, she rewrote David Copperfield for a post-Tolkien world.  She took almost word-for-word the  grafted on a lot of ideas that were floating around at the time and synthesized them into something that felt new even though nothing really new happened in those books.


I don't remember the last time I read anything that was literally unprecedented.  The Odyssey, maybe.  And Joseph Campbell assures us that Homer's epic mostly feels original simply because it's far enough in the dark and hoary past that we just don't know where Homer got his ideas.  While that's no excuse for not attempting do to something new, the best anyone (Homer included) can really hope for is to look at something with fresh eyes.

Which puts me in mind of something I read the other day...

"While the optimist tells you the glass is half-full, the hipster tells you they knew about the glass before you and it's not cool anymore." -Anonymous

The quote was unattributed when it crossed my desk, so I'm not sure who came up with it, but I find it very telling.

Tom Swift was the iconic boy genius.  Over a hundred books have featured the character over the years and almost every writer I admire from Asimov to Douglas Adams have pointed to young Master Swift as an inspiration. Talk about territory that's been thoroughly explored.  But just as Star Wars didn't signal the end of spaceships and laser guns (quite the opposite, actually) Tom Swift didn't bankrupt the storytelling power of the young genius. Walking that same ground has come have Encyclopedia Brown, The Mad Scientist's Club, Artemis Fowl II, Hermione Granger, Veronica Mars and Agatha Heterodyne.  My personal favorites among many, many others.

And while my young genius may be informed by all of those and more, and may have come out of a childhood spent absorbing the adventures of Tom Swift and Encyclopedia Brown, he's not going to be either.  Nor will he be any of the other young geniuses featured in the stories I've absorbed during my stay on this odd little planet.  It goes back to what I've said a thousand times about why ideas can't be copyrighted -- because if you and I set out to write a book from the same idea, the two books would not even remotely resemble one another.

Don't get me wrong, there are many stories that have been told a thousand times and characters that need a rest. Our culture likes to dry up a well before we move on to drilling the next one.  I'm personally rather sick of stories about vampires, werewolves and zombies, but that doesn't mean there's nothing new to say with those characters.


It may or may not be true that there's nothing new under the sun.  The greatest stories ever told all came from somewhere, but that didn't keep those writing them from licking the tip of their pen and getting to work writing them.

Howard Carter is a deliberate homage to the science fiction of the past and the unrealized promises concocted to brighten up The World of Tomorrow.  Promises written so deeply into our culture that everyone periodically gazes skyward and dreams wistfully of a jet pack or flying car.  (A phenomenon that is directly proportional to the amount of ground traffic around you.)  Even his name was inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's iconic character John Carter.  But this isn't an Edgar Rice Burroughs story, it's a Scott Perkins story.  And in some ways, it's going to be a story that looks at the 21st century we have and contrasts it with the 21st century we were promised.  (Yes, that's been done before too and I still don't care.)

There is a fine line between creating a pastiche and paying homage.  And don't think I'm not looking down at the wreckage of those who slipped and fell before me. The danger is half the fun.
- Scott

---
Howard Carter Saves the Earth is my next novel, to be written in public by posting chapters as they are finished.  Subscribe to my Facebook page and/or follow me on Twitter to receive updates, links and free short stories.  You can also read "Tractors Aren't Supposed to Do That", a prologue posted here last Tuesday.

SideNote: I was delighted to discover recently that the earliest adventures of TOM SWIFT are out of copyright and available as free downloads via Project Gutenberg.  Just enter "Tom Swift" into the title search. Of course, all of these books predate modern sensibilities, so the usual caveats apply.

Block Party II

If life gives you writer's blocks...

Stories In Surprising Places :: Finding Ideas

The most ridiculous question I get -- that any writer gets -- is "Where do you get your ideas?" We don't know. Sometimes we answer flippantly and spin yarns about a clandestine mail-order catalog that we all have a subscription to, but in truth we usually have no idea or just can't remember.

But the truth underlying the truth is that we know exactly where we get our ideas and aren't willing to admit it: we get them by paying attention to the things that most people ignore. And by doing the things that other people avoid. By watching and paying attention to the world around us. And (this is the most important part) by writing it down.

You wouldn't believe the number of people who tell me they want to be writers but don't actually want to write anything.

Once in awhile, I post a picture on Dailybooth where I'm holding a sign (or some children's blocks) that says "Tell a story".  I'm always surprised by the results and the stories have almost always been anecdotal (at least they were until a recent deviation into matters of passing gas in elevators... we don't judge here at Pages to Type...).  These stories from life, from your past, from your present, from a road trip you took through Pennsylvania or riding your bike down the street when some hoodlums jumped you.... these stories are the nuggets from which many a novel or short story could easily grow.

I think that we tell anecdotes because it's easier than making something up and because we don't feel licensed to do so.

And that's an important lesson. It's not because there's anything wrong with storytelling based upon our lives (don't ever say that were Bill Bryson can hear you) but because the people who paid attention are the ones with stories to tell. The people who stepped out there and got involved, have the stories to tell.  And if you take that a step further, they have in a single experience the nuggets for a lifetime's writing in any genre.  Yes, even science fiction.

In 2008, I was summoned for jury duty and was cut off from the internet by dint of the fact that the jury room in the Pierce County court house is in a bomb shelter and therefore doesn't allow for WiFi. Cut off from the rest of the world, I kept a journal of my experiences.  Over the course of the next few days I plan to share it with you, because I want you to see how even perfectly banal days (and there's nothing more banal than jury duty) are packed full of story ideas ranging from the mystery novel to the flights of science fiction and certainly a certain kind of horror.  Romance might require a bit more of a stretch...

If you don't see how you find story ideas from every day life by the end of this... well, the world needs readers too. ;o)

Incidentally, If you like storytelling, you owe it to yourselves to and read @jimbonius's "Uncle Milt" story from the first go-round of Dailybooth storytelling: http://dailybooth.com/Pages2Type/4547132#comments

A Story Short

For the past week and heading into the next month or so, my updates have not been and will continue not to be as regular as you've come to expect.  There are several illnesses in my family and something's got to give.  But as often happens amid turmoil, creativity has burbled to the surface as I take refuge in my typewriter.

I believe that I've mentioned before how my dad loved Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories and how he wanted me to love them too.  But I just couldn’t. There was too much of a gap there, too far of a leap required of a kid born in the 70's.  A kid who had already sold his allegiance to the Ray Bradbury and Tolkien crowd.  I was conquering Martian frontiers with John Carter and exploring Middle Earth with Frodo.  I didn't have time for stories set in rural Michigan circa 1910, I was living in THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!

Though in fairness, dad gave me my first battered copy of John Carter of Mars and it was at his behest that I

spent some time exploring Victorian Africa with Allan Quartermaine.

I often wondered what it would have been like if I had liked Nick Adams and what it would have taken to make that happen for a kid of the Star Wars era.  What if those stories had been written by someone who spoke in a voice I recognized, a voice less burdened by Hemingway’s affection for the primal male rituals and closer to the swords and sorcery of Tolkien or the jetpacks and laser guns more familiar in my late twentieth century childhood?

Short stories are not my usual forte.  I tend to take large bites of the stories I concoct and I want a large canvas to make them as detailed and beautiful as their architecture can bear without the constraints of the short story getting in my way.  I love short stories, but I don't write them very often.

But the coming-of-age in the space age idea kept prodding and poking me.  Mine was a childhood spent wondering why the promised WORLD OF TOMORROW kept being put off until tomorrow and then the next day and the next.  And a character began to coelesce.

The other day I sat down at the computer and was surprised to find a story of a young man of my generation looking for the future he had been promised by those same Science Fiction visionaries and moth-eaten books from the 1950's and 60's that haunted the basement of the local library.  A kid who thrilled to the same ideas as I had and wanted to know what happened to that jetpack he was supposed to get when the world's odometer clicked over to the year 2000.  A kid who was far more clever and self confident than I insomuch as he was willing and able to do something about it.

It never ceases to surprise me when I find stories hiding in my head that aren't 100,000 words long.  And the self-discovery that like Hemingway I could tell fantastically exagerrated tales spun from my own childhood imaginings.  No more or less surprised than I was to find those half-imagined adventures were still lurking in there, buried under the more literate and adult adventures that overlay them.

What I ended up with was not even close to an attempt to rewrite the Nick Adams stories, far from it. For one thing, I'm definitely not Earnest Hemingway and have no desire to be.  Nonetheless, the stories I've been telling myself for the past couple of weeks are informed by Nick Adams even if it was just that I was reacting against that archetype.  Nick was in the back of my mind as I filtered my thirty year old self back into the ten year old body of a boy that was (in the words of Douglas Adams) similar to but not entirely unlike me.   Certainly I made him smarter, more self-assured and at once more naive than I have ever been.  Because in the end, even if a character contains a sizeable portion of Scott, it's never Scott.  His sister is never my sister and his parents never my parents, though in this case I would say his soul is my soul.

These new stories owe as full a debt to the things I was reading the summer of my tenth year on the planet.  John Carter of Mars, The Mad Scientist’s Club, The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown and God knows the pages of those musty picture books from the 1950’s that teased and tempted my young mind with the impossible future of gleaming domed cities, jetpacks and monorails.

Eventually, of course, that ten-year-old became a thirty-year-old and we made the leap together and I treasure those stories less for what they are than for what they meant to him.  But before the end, my dislike of Hemingway became a bonding thing for us. Which is why I return to it time and again.

Regardless of Hemingway’s influence on these stories, his influence on my dad meant that Dad and I talked about books from the very beginning and the Nick Adams stories in particular. I learned to love them because he did, just as I learned to love books because he made it look like the right way to live.

---
John  Carter cover public domain - care of Wikimedia Commons

A Miscellany: The Ides of March, Looking for the Next Story, Keep An Eye Out for Characters and Practical Filekeeping... et al

It's March 15th. If your name is Julius, you might want to hide for awhile. And watch that Cassius, he's a skinny fella and skinny people tend to know a good deal about knives.  I don't know why that is, but Mister Shakespeare is not to be second-guessed.

I've said several times in recent days that I was looking for the next novel to write, but in all honesty, I generally have several projects in various stages of completion at any given moment.  The real question isn't "what book do I write next" but rather "which book shall receive the brunt of my attentions?"

Since I pronounced the book I'd been working on "Done" (but never finished) I've been shifting the piles of notes and character concepts and sundry whatnot trying to find the next story to receive my concentrated efforts.  I've spoken before of my habit of squirreling away every idea that springs to mind in one of two computer files.  Nascent story ideas are "Seedlings" and characters go into the "Cocktail Party" to mingle with other character ideas in hopes that they'll naturally form alliances, hook up, etcetera.

As you know if you've been following this blog for any length of time, I subjected myself to the insanity of NaNoWriMo and came out of it with fifty thousand words of a proto-novel.  By itself, this isn't really a great novel and the story I created that November by itself isn't a novel.  So I tossed it into the garden with the other seedlings and it got trampled on by the attendees of my character cocktail party and... well, I think I've found my next project.

Today's writing tip is as old as Julius Caesar's very bad day: Save every idea you have.  Write them down so you won't forget them.  File them away, let them mingle, grow, mutate, and do the things that are best done out of the sight of decent society.

I know I keep repeating that, but it's worth repeating.  I'm always amazed at how often they come out of the files stronger for having spent their time there.

And in case you doubt that talking to the people you come across every day has value, today I sat down next to an archaeologist who knew and acted as a sort of general factotum to Thor Heyerdahl.  I would never take his stories because that would be rude and I rarely turn people I know into characters wholesale.  But if there's not a story seedling or two there, I don't know where else to find them.

Here There Be Dragons...

I'm currently at loose ends and as I look through my "seedlings" file for what I want to work on next, I've uncovered a trove of some fun stuff I did awhile ago.  

For instance...

Way back in 2006 someone foolishly left me alone with a little stuffed dragon, a camera and some miscellaneous props.

The result was a strange little picture book. 
The Adventures of Snap the Dragon.

I thought you might enjoy it.

Sunday storytime with Werner Herzog

Did you enjoy Prides & Prejudice & Zombies?  Then you'll love Curious George and the Existentialists.  Ok, it's not really Werner Herzog, but it is a brilliant deconstructionist take on a classic children's book.  I love this for its quirky sensibility... 

One caveat to rule them all...

I create a lot of lists. Some of them are personal guidelines I follow while I'm writing. They're not rules because I firmly believe that there aren't very many hard and fast rules to writing. In fact, there's only inviolate rule I can think of... Elements are in service to the story, the story is never in service to its elements. I've stated it here before, but it's been awhile and it bears repeating. All of the suggestions I bring to the table can be summed up by that one. Cormac McCarthy taught us that even punctuation is optional under the right circumstances and Anthony Burgess and Irvine Welsh taught us that language is infinitely malleable if the story is served. Under the correct circumstances, you can and should throw it all to the wind and tell your story. And in the spirit of brevity, I find to my surprise that that's all I have to say today.

Neil Gaiman discusses Audio Books with David Sedaris

From NPR's Morning Edition - 30 November 2009

It Builds Character (A Letter To My Nephew)

Dear Jared, Your mom tells me that you have a story to write for school and want some advice on creating and introducing characters in a way that doesn’t detract from the storytelling. The most important thing anyone ever taught me was that stories don’t ever begin and they don’t ever end. We always join them in the middle and leave before they’re done. I know that sounds odd, bear with me for a moment. Say, for instance, that you are a character in a short story. The story is about what you did last Saturday and it begins with waking up Saturday morning and ends with you going to bed that night. Saturday is your story. But you didn’t spring into existence on Saturday morning and you won’t wink out of existence at the end of the day. Sunday morning, you will get up and do Sunday things. Your story didn’t begin with the first sentence of the story and end with the last sentence, your Saturday did. You existed before it began and you’ll go on once it’s over. The story is just a snapshot of one day. That’s probably the most important thing to keep in mind when you’re crafting any story, because you have to decide where you’re going to jump into a story that’s already in progress. There’s a name for that, by the way, it’s called “In medias res” which is Latin for “In the middle of things”. Characters are much the same. They have a beginning (they are born), the have a middle (they live) and they will eventually have an end (they die). But unless your story is ten thousand pages long, odds are you’re going to have to leave some of that out or your reader will never get to the good parts. So, we will almost always join them in medias res -- in the middle of their story. So, what do you leave out? What do you put in? Think about Harry Potter. How much do we know about Harry at the beginning of the books? He’s got messy dark hair and he wears glasses. Oh, and he has a scar on his forehead. JK Rowling takes a hundred pages to tell us that he’s a wizard with a tragic past. That he’s destined to fight Lord Voldemort has to wait another hundred pages. And we never get a complete description of the characters. We know Hermione has bushy hair and we know Ron Weasley is a freckle-faced redhead -- anything more than that is discovered later through the storytelling. For now, all the author needed us to know is that he’s a kid with glasses and a scar and that’s enough to get the story rolling. When you create a character for your story, it’s vital to keep in mind that they’re supposed to be a person, just like you or me or your brother, mom. dad, or teacher. We’re going to see a small fragment of their life in the story you’re writing and all we need to know about them is what’s important for the story you want to tell. Introduce characters quickly. Tell the audience as little about them as you can. Fill in the details as you go along. Another cardinal rule of writing is “show, don’t tell.” Rather than telling the audience all about how this kid with the scar on his head is really a wizard and has this evil enemy lurking in the shadows, just waiting to strike and he’s the chosen one… JK Rowling told us the bare minimum and let the rest of it come to light as the story progressed. She didn’t tell us, she showed us. How you show us will largely be a function of how you’re choosing to tell the story. And that means talking a little about Point of View. The key elements of storytelling and characterization will be mostly decided by how your readers are seeing the story. If the story is told through the eyes of a specific character, your readers only get to know what that character knows. This is called “first person”.

First Person: “The lady walked into my office. She had a hat the size of a super-deluxe pizza with all the trimmings. I could tell she was going to be trouble the moment I laid eyes on her.”

We only know what the guy sees, and more importantly, we only know what the guy bothers to tell us. He leaves a lot out because he’s obsessed with her wacky hat. It’s a great way to keep from having to tell your reader too much by having your character focus on the wrong thing. It’s a lot of fun to write like that and a lot of writers do it, but it gets really hard to write in first person because you can’t tell the readers anything that your main character isn’t there to witness and describe. Often this leads to some pretty preposterous stories because you have this one guy running all over the place, doing crazy and unrealistic things simply because the writer needs them to be there to tell the readers what’s happening. If you are telling your story from outside, seeing all the characters as if they’re in a movie and you’re not inside the head of any of them, that’s called “third person”.

Third Person: “Jordan dropped her cigarette as she tumbled out of the car. He took a step back and held up both hands as she glared at him with all the dignity she could muster. Now that he had her out of the car, he looked surprised rather than angry. An average-looking fellow of about thirty, bearded and tanned around the neck of the faded flannel shirt. Her gaze dropped to the dried mud on the knees of his jeans, pegging him as a gardener. “Smoking isn’t allowed on the school grounds, miss.”

Even in third person, description is kept to a bare minimum because your reader wants something to happen, they don’t want to sit and read Jordan’s resume. Almost all of my books are told in this style and this is an excerpt from my most recent novel. The two characters have just met and all we know at this point is that Jordan is a woman who got caught smoking (and she's a bit clumsy) and the man who caught her is average-looking, bearded and dressed like a gardener. It’s another twenty pages before you learn his hair color. I chose the passage above for two reasons:

1. This is the only description of the main character that the reader ever gets.
2. The character isn’t a gardener. I’m using Jordan’s perception of him in his grungy clothes to mislead my audience into believing that he is. At least for the moment. This is because, even though I’m using ‘Third Person’, I’m only telling the readers what the characters know about each other.

That last part is important. When you’re introducing a character, don’t venture much beyond what the characters could see if they looked at each other. Think back to what I said about characters being like real people. How much do you know about the average customer that walks into your parent’s store? You only know what you can see and what they tell you. Even when you’re talking about a good friend, you only know so much about them. Only show your readers what they absolutely need to know. My early novels and stories were almost all fantasy novels, which is what I believe you’re currently working on. It’s difficult sometimes to get this same information across in a fantasy setting because you’re worried that your reader doesn’t know as much about your world as you do. They won’t, and that's ok. They might not know specifically what a Ranger is, but all they really need to know is that the character spends a lot of time in the woods. Any special abilities he gets from his status as a Ranger (or a rogue, thief, wizard or whatever) can be unveiled in the story. And if you don’t get to it? Don’t worry about it. If it didn’t come up, it wasn’t worth worrying about and you have something saved for the sequel. -Uncle Scott

Role to hit...

I learned to tell stories from my dad, who was quite the raconteur when the mood struck him. I learned to love stories by reading a lot of them. I learned about characterization and what made a story drag you to the edge of your chair by participating in them. As if I haven't already made it clear that I'm a nerd, today I shall remove any lingering doubts. Today we're going to talk about... (deep breath) role-playing games.

I'm sure I have a pocket protector around here somewhere.

A table in a basement surrounded by young men, soda cans and empty pizza boxes. This raucous gathering was sterotypically the smarter kids from their school who found common cause in their esoterica. Mostly young men, they gather to breathe life back into a faded mythos governed by obscure rules and the chance roll of polyhedral dice... role playing games. About the only legal activity in the high schools of America circa 1980 that had any air of mystery about it. Movies and news reports tried to link role playing games to all sorts of satanic pseudo-mystical nonsense while most of the players viewed it in much the same way their fathers viewed Friday night poker games.

Most people know about Dungeons & Dragons, but there were far more than that: Top Secret, Vampire the Masquerade, Ninjas & Super Spies, Shadowrun, Battletech... the list seems virtually endless and at one time or another and I played them all.

What does this have to do with storytelling?

Everything and nothing.

It's axiomatic that the story looks different from the inside than it will look from the outside. I can tell you stories about things that really happened to me in the back-country during my mountaineering and backpacking days and make you laugh every time. Stories that were frightening, uncomfortable and dangerous when I was living them. I can tell you stories about bad guys thwarted, secret plans stolen and dragons slain in imaginary games and get much the same reaction. But in neither case - the real or the imagined - will it be the same for your reader if you re-tell my story to someone else. It's inherently different because I was there. I was standing in front of that bear or staring over that ledge or slaying that imaginary dragon.

The dramatic tension comes from the experience. The story would not be the same had I not subjected myself to the whims of chance, the roll of the die. And since you didn't experience it except through my narrative, you will tell it differently and with less immediacy than I.

That isn't to say that I want you to run out and throw yourself in front of a bear, or get buried in an avalanche. You don't need to do that in order to write about them. Nor do you need to put together a role-playing game based upon the novel you're writing.

Roleplaying games taught me to have an experience that didn't really happen, to watch it unfold through the eyes of a fictional character. Even if I didn't know what it felt like first-hand to stare down the snout of a black bear or free fall into nothing on the end of a bungee cord, I could create a semblence of that experiencve because I've learned the skill of putting myself into the head of a person that does not exist.

In Telling Lies for Fun & Profit, Lawrence Block talks about how finite even the most compelling life is in terms of storytelling potential. Even if you lived a life of danger as an international jewel thief, you are still - as Block puts it - sitting on a raft in cold waters, chopping bits off the back-end to feed the fire you've started at the front. At some point you will run out of boat. Being able to live through the eyes of an imaginary person allows me to build a bigger boat, feeding the fires with imaginary planks.

One last thing about lessons role-playing games can teach us and then I'll shut up about them...

In Across the Crowded Marketplace, I dwelt on the definitive archetypes, the roles your characters play in the stories they inhabit and how important it is that your readers be able to recognize them on a cultural level. At the core of that is a crucial understanding of your character and what role they fill in the story.

Part of this is the ability to play them consistently through the entire story. If one ear is lower than the other on page one, then on page 220, those ears had better still be assymetrical. I keep track of this using something else role-playing games taught me... the character sheet. Height, weight, eye color, hair color, ethnicity, skin tone, education, distinguishing features, idiosyncrocies... all on an easy-to-reference sheet of paper. This sounds fussy and even anal, and I suppose that it is. It also keeps my legendary absent-mindedness from sidelining my writing while i search the manuscript for some tiny detail from the first chapter.

Role-playing games take place in worlds that are fully-realized entities apart from ours, a shared landscape of the imagination replete with maps, politics and adventures in the offing. they are a place where we can step into other skins and other lives. A similarly-realized world should unfold each time I open my laptop and type "Chapter One" at the top of a page.

I owe it to my world and to my characters to know them well enough to be able to tell their stories as if I'd been there too.

---

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines. Contact Me: swalkerperkins@gmail.com

Contact Me

Frank McCourt in memorium

Lawrence Block said it best: "It's not enough to be a genius Arnold, you have to be a genius at something." Yesterday, we lost a man who was truly a genius at something... he was one of those gifted souls for whom the English language sang a special song, for whom the alphabet danced like notes in a score. Writer, educator, wordsmith, Pulitzer Prizewinning writer of unforgettable memoirs and a master of his craft: Francis "Frank" McCourt died Sunday in a Manhattan hospice, reportedly of complications from Meningitis. Beginning with the harrowing tale of his coming of age in Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt killed us slowly and then revived us one-by-one. Breathed life into his past and through the eyes of his upbringing, shed new light into dark places. McCourt worked as a New York City school teacher for thirty years, eventually ending up at the famed Stuyvesant High where he taught English and eventually Creative Writing. In an April 2002 Op Ed in the New York Times, McCourt spoke eloquently of dragging these kids out of their middle-class stupor and into a world of stories. A world where everyone has a story to tell, no matter their background...

"I assured them that ''Once upon a time'' was good enough for the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault and even James Joyce. My students resisted. They were comfortable and middle class and everything was programmed and they were in this school because they were strong in science and mathematics. They would graduate from high school to the best universities and have no adventures because that's the way it was with their families. They had no stories to tell, and in their lives there was no once upon a time. They envied me my miserable Irish childhood and wished (almost) they could be poor so they'd have something to write about." -Frank McCourt New York Times 14 April 2002

I don't know how many of my readers are McCourt fans or how many fully realize the loss that our culture suffered yesterday with his passing. He was every bit the storyteller that Updike was, just in a different vein and a unique context all his own. I spent some time last night trolling through my books and the collected 'wisdom' of the Internet, looking for some exemplar of his talent, some tidbit of writing that I could point you to that would give you the measure of this man's genius with the language. I decided that you need to read all of it to really get the measure of him. However, you could do a lot worse than reading that 2002 New York Times Op/Ed I mentioned earlier. If brevity truly is "the soul of wit" as the Bard tells us, then this is proof. In the abbreviated eloquence required by the medium, McCourt lays out his educational philosophy, his wonder at how students inform the teacher and how to tell stories. Any story. If all else fails, tell a story about last night's chicken. Just tell your story. Thank you Mr. McCourt. For your words, for the thirty years you gave to the education of young minds. And thank you for the glimpse inside your life that you showed us, for reminding us that even the most deplorable of basic circumstances can be overcome.

"The last thing a writer needs is answers -- the end of thought and the dream. [...] Where are the dreams and fantasies of childhood? The heads of adolescents are clogged with media images and sounds. The teacher, then, is the Knight or Fair Maid of the Imagination and the battle lines are drawn. Pull the plug, cut off the juice, let the batteries die. Just sit there and dream. And when in doubt, tell a story." - Frank McCourt "REFLECTIONS ON CREATIVE WRITING CLASS: THE TEACHER; How to confront 30,000 words a week of teenage angst and ecstasy." Editorial. New York Times 14 Apr. 2002. 20 July 2009

Stories in the mists...

Morning fog on Darrow Pond, East Lyme, Connecticut.

Believe it or not, this is not a black & white photo of a color world,

it's a color photo of a black & white world.

Thing One: I went to New York.

Thing Two: Really? What was it like? 
Thing One: I don't know, I didn't see it!

It was very foggy today in the Big Apple. (Seriously, does anyone call it that?) So while I spent the better part of a day in Queens and Long Island, I can't say as I once saw more than the shadow of a glimpse of the famed city skyline. Maybe next time.

We weren't there to sightsee. We enurned my wife's grandfather at Calvary Catholic Cemetary, which is a beautiful and haunting place (photos tomorrow for Wordless Wednesday). It all took several hours because of scheduling problems with the priest and the military honor guard. Which left the younger cousins and myself free to wander the aisles of weathered statues, taking pictures of marble angels and mausoleums in the fog.

Once again I was struck by how many people tell me that they would write a book if only they had an idea. Today was one of those days where I was surrounded by them. From the weathered statuary of the mausoleums to the names engraved in the granite, too weathered to be clearly read... there are stories everywhere. From the family that surrounded me and the elders that greeted me with the gravity and willingness to open up about the dim and fading past as befitted the occaision... there are stories everywhere.

Open your eyes, your heart and your ears.

My next novel came to me today. In total. I have only to write it down, dictation from my subconscious mind, distilled from a dozen conversations I've had over the past few days watering a nugget planted last winter in a conversation I had with my father right before he passed away. Or maybe it's just that New York really is a city with a thousand stories...

I'll be back in the Pac Northwest and writing about writing in nothing flat. I appreciate your patience as I sort through these things. So much has happened and I have so much to write about it that it's all at war in my head. As soon as something slips free from the melee and claims the flag, I'll let you know...