Jan. 26th, 2018

mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Original Posting Sept. 7, 2017

Well, that's interesting. The wikipedia page on fear  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear has three lists of fears. Any of these might be a useful focus for a scary story, right?

2005 Gallup Poll, adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17, top ten fears were: terrorist attacks, spiders, death, failure, war, heights, criminal or gang violence, being alone, the future, and nuclear war.

Bill Tancer analyzed online queries to produce a list of: flying, heights, clowns, intimacy, death, rejection, people, snakes, failure, and driving.

Then there's a generic common phobias list, "according to surveys": demons and ghosts, the existence of evil powers, cockroaches, spiders, snakes, heights, water, enclosed spaces, tunnels, bridges, needles, social rejection, failure, examinations, and public speaking.

Whoosh! All kinds of things to be scared of, right? And can you make a scary story about it? Sure you can...

tink


mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Original Posting Sept. 19, 2017

Writer's Digest, July 1999, has an article on pages 48-49 and 60, by Brad Herzog, with the title Six Secrets to Finding Ideas That Sell. Admittedly, Brad is mostly looking at ideas for nonfiction features and columns, but I think they may be useful for any of us. So here's his guide to finding ideas.

1. Explore the fringes of knowledge. Take a look at odds and ends that turn up even in fields that you know really well. "The best way to catch the eye editor is by presenting an angle he or she hadn't considered or piece of information teeming with potential." Overlooked or underappreciated tales are out there, just begging for you to tell them.

2. Wait until you have a hook. Sometimes you might be interested in something, even collecting information and research about it, but it isn't quite there yet. Wait for that hook. "Diligence is a necessity for any successful freelancer."

3. Don't forget important dates. Anniversaries can be great. "If you decide to develop a story tied to an anniversary, make sure you leave enough time."

4. Sell no wine before its time. Timing. "The trick is to keep one eye on your files and the other on the news."

5. Be fruitful and multiply. Watch for follow-ups. Spinoffs, sequels, all of those odds and ends that can come out of research and writing you've already done. "Take some time to leaf through your old projects, keeping an eye out for patterns or intriguing subject matter you might have missed the first time around.

6. Become a world chronicler. "What do you find interesting or peculiar or funny or relevant? Chances are somebody else agrees with you.… Tilt your head at the world. Remember, just about any subject, with the right angle, the right outlet, and the right presentation, can be fodder for a paying publication."

That's all there is to the article, although you might want to read it for the little stories that Brad tells. Or, you might want to try exploring his six secrets – check out the edges, look for a hook, watch for dates, hit the right time, reuse, and keep your eyes open. Oh, you also better…

WRITE!
tink


mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Original posting Sept. 22, 2017

Writer's Digest, February 2001, has an article by William Hutchinson on pages 36-38 and 53, talking about your second draft. As the subtitle puts it, "Spilling a story out of your heart and onto the page is easy sometimes. Putting your thoughts into usable form can be the tricky part." But William provides you with a guide…

How do you sort out the first draft and turn it into a great second draft? Well, here's one approach.

1. Start with 250

Do a story summary. If you've got several stories or your story has lots of twists and turns, you might expand the summary to 500 words, but keep it simple. You're looking for the story inside your plot.

2. Set the total count

Now, how many words do you think it takes to tell your story the way you want to tell it. You may have overwritten, and need to cut a lot, or you might need to add. Decide how long you think your story should be.

3. Count chapters

All right, now you know how many words. But how many chapters? This is partly style, genre, and what kind of a story you're trying to tell. Some people like one page chapters, others have long chapters with many scenes and points of view. Thrillers are likely to have short chapters, romance longer chapters. Action? Brief chapters. Character driven? Probably longer meditative chapters. Estimation? Say 2500 words per chapter, so divide your length by that size and see what you come up with.

4. Separate scenes

Most chapters have more than one scene. Three or four chapters is fairly common. Go ahead and lay out how you think the chapters break up into scenes.

"If you're lucky, your first draft will reveal the story you want to tell; not necessarily the story you set out to tell, but the story that has emerged in the writing. Outlining means focusing in on that single thread, recognizing extraneous plot twists and characters for the distractions they truly are and ruthlessly eliminating them, no matter how painful that may be."

5. List your scenes

Make a written list of the scenes in your current manuscript. Check for good scene construction. Does each scene have a beginning, middle, and end? Does it start with action? Does it clearly and quickly establish where we are and who is present?

Now check whether the scene advances the plot, establishes character, and describes setting.

6. Add and subtract

Now, fit that list of scenes into the distribution of scenes over chapters that you have developed. Cut, combine, add, shift the order. Eliminate scenes about people, places, and things that don't match the story you're telling now. Subplots about people that aren't really important to your story? Cut them. Scenic travel that doesn't do anything? Hop a jet plane, and get to the action.

7. Eliminate repetition

One or two good scenes are better than several mediocre scenes – get rid of the extras! If your characters keep doing the same things, show us the best version or two, and then something new.

8. Consolidate

Combining scenes and characters can give your scenes richer texture. One outstanding secondary character will stick in the readers mind, where several bit players just vanish.

9. Build bridges

You may need some bridge scenes to advance the story. Go ahead!

10. Count to three

Construct your outline, using the classic three-part dramatic structure. The first act is about the first third of your manuscript, and it's the character section. Lots of description, get us into that world, and quote tantalizing nibbles of plot." Development and exposition of characters is what you should be focusing on here. The second act? About half of your manuscript. Conflict! Complications. Plot driven, lots of action, keep it moving. The third act, the resolution, is your shortest. 15 to 20% of the pages. "When the monster dies, the movie's over."

So that's it. Then you get to write that second draft! Yay.

Practice? Well, take something you've written, a first draft that you haven't cleaned up, and walked through the steps. Here's the short version that William provided in a sidebar:

1. Summarize your story in 250 words.
2. Set the total word length of the book.
3. Divide the number of words by 2500 to decide how many chapters you need.
4. Divide your chapters into scenes.
5. Make a list of the scenes in the current draft.
6. Cut, combine, add, and reorder scenes.
7. Eliminate repetition.
8. Make sure scenes and characters work together.
9. Create bridge scenes as needed.
10. Make sure you have a beginning, middle, and end.

10 steps, and you're on your way to your second draft.
Write?

tink
mbarker: (Burp)
[personal profile] mbarker
Original posting Sept. 27, 2017

Okay. Here's the thing. We've got the Halloweenie tales coming up, and I was just listening to Writing Excuses where someone mentioned the idea that you structure a short story around beginning, middle, and end. So…

Five quotes for a beginning? Random quotes about fear from www.quotationspage.com...

1. Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear. Mark Twain
2. You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means uses to frighten you. Eric Hoffer
3. There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say. Cyril Connoly
4. You see what power is - holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them! Amy Tan
5. Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is an illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them. Marilyn Ferguson

All right? Pick one of those, and use it as the seed, the inspiration, for your beginning. The hook that pulls the reader into your story. Add character, setting, and other details for your very own stone soup, okay?

Five quotes for the middle! Random quotes about terror...

1. If you are a terror to many, then beware of many. Ausonius
2. Greater is our terror of the unknown. Titus Livius
3. No man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices. Edward R. Murrow
4. I'd rather get my brains blown out in the wild then wait in terror at the slaughterhouse. Craig Volk
5. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. Franklin D. Roosevelt

And that could keep you stirring the pot for a while? Pick one of those, and feel free to mix up your middle. Try-fail, try-fail, try-fail! Make the story boil...

Five quotes for the end. What the heck, let's check on random quotes about horror. That is the fancy dish for Halloween, right?

1. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." You must do the thing you think you cannot do. Elinor Roosevelt
2. To know one's self, one must go all the way to horror. Jacques Bossuet
3. How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? Barry Lopez
4. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain under this made at the proximity of normal to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, essentially, abnormal. Dr. Karl Menninger
5. The young know how truly difficult and dreadful youth can be. Their youth is wasted on everyone else, that's the horror. The young have no authority, no respect. Anne Rice

There we go! Pick a quote, then contemplate that little thought about horror, and work out your ending. Go for it!

Now, put your beginning, middle, and ending together. Apply setting, characters, dialogue, plot, all that good stuff liberally. And...

Dingdong! We have a story. YAY!

tink


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