I wonder if you could link this to the GPS/
And I live with neighbors who think a free range pit bull is cool...
]]>What comes first for you? The meta-story-idea that needs deep cultural knowledge, or the action-plot-idea? And how do you bring both together? Or are they inseperateable for you in the process of writting?
]]>If I came up with a plan for a near-future novel, then sat down to do the research for it, it'd take me a couple of years to research it and then the plot would have changed out of all recognition and I'd be a couple of years late getting paid. So I don't do that.
Rather, I try and read widely (and occasionally deeply) all the time, and save up concepts until it's time to pitch a novel, at which point I've got 90% of the pieces already in place and can write the thing in under a year (and get paid on time).
Academics and non-fiction authors have the luxury of time to put research on the critical path before writing the book. Fiction is seldom sufficiently well-paid to make that practical.
]]>About the only tutorial on writing fiction that I've read that was any kind of use at all was Stephen King's "On Writing", where he spends about four chapters anatomizing the different levels of stuff that go into a novel. I wrote it around the time I was writing the first couple of Merchant Princes books, and the part I found most useful then was his discussion of the highest level aspect of a novel: the theme. Which is nothing so concrete that you can easily describe it, but if you consider a novel to be a metaphor, then the theme would be its subject: "war sucks", or "young love isn't necessarily going to endure forever", and so on.
Theme is a tenuous construct, and it is only mostly-mandatory in the novel-length form, although novellas also usually have a theme (a novella being the stage below a novel -- 20,000-40,000 words). Shorter forms of fiction are allowed to have a thematic resonance but don't absolutely require one.
I discovered that I wasn't always clear on the theme of my projects, but that working out what they were about at that satellite's-view level made it easier to see where the plot and characters should go. So these days I always try to look for the theme of a novel as early as possible in the writing process -- a very top-down approach.
"Neptune's Brood": the theme is an exploration of the implications of financial corruption, in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis. Yes, it's a space opera. "The Rhesus Chart": the theme is ... superpowers almost invariably come with unwelcome small-print attached. Also: parasitism sucks. "Dark State" (working title of Merchant Princes #7, not due in print before 2015 at the earliest) is hopefully going to be a black farce about the metastatic security state and the corruption of democracy (see also my wibbling about the Beige Dictatorship in recent months). And so on.
]]>IMHO, you shouldn't turn the paranoia up too far... :)
If you compare Ken Macleod's most recent books, "The Execution Channel" (for me) painted a more extreme security apparatus than "Intrusion". IMHO "Intrusion" was scarier because it was more believable.
For me, credibility comes more from cockup than conspiracy, carelessness rather than cunning - "Brazil" rather than "1984", if you like. Overworked civil servants, ad-hoc political control, and some embittered policemen are worse than a mastermind with a hollowed-out volcano and an army of boiler-suited minions.
]]>I grant you the cock-up/conspiracy trade-off works in favor of the cock-up. I have a gorgeous cock-up in mind for "Dark State" -- one that could only happen in the internal culture of the state security apparatus of the USA.
]]>Enjoy!
Frank.
]]>Crossovers (not collaboration). Have you ever thought about trying it with a couple of your settings? Have agents or editors suggested it to you? Any general thoughts?
]]>Charlie talks about the theme. It's both at a different structural level and on a much smaller scale, but there is Lester Dent's pulp adventure formula. 6000 words is very short fiction, but I think the basic structure still holds, and there are parallels with what Charlie does.
Consider Rule 34
The strange murder method: check.
The villain's strange objective: check.
The locale: check.
The looming threat: check.
But the book is much more than 6000 words, so we start off with apparent multiple sets of these things.
There's also a four-part structure that Dent describes and you can see that in a lot of TV. Maybe three parts. You're so rigidly bound with a novel, you have a bit more flexibility of timing. One part could be twenty thousand words, another thirty thousand, or is that too many words to a climax?
You cannot have a dialogue with Lester Dent over that sort of detail, or over anything. He's dead. I'm sure that we can all think of schoolteachers who, in our most sardonic moods, we might aver were almost certainly dead. But, if we ever are going to be writers, we have to assemble something from fragments, and all the dead voices telling what we should and should not do are giving us fragments to use.
]]>Robert McKee method for screenplay is for beginners. Power users (studios, big-name screenwriters) pay up to $20,000 per screenplay to be evaluated by a proprietary algorithm with database of thousands of focus groups, which tells one: "for your target demographic, the hero should have a side-kick. And lose the bowling scene."
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