The Place For My Writers Notes

Original Posting Jan. 30, 2017

Yesterday, we went to a small performance. An opera singer and her husband, a pianist, and a belly-dancer with her husband playing drums. About 30 people in a local coffeeshop, enjoying the performance. But one of the pieces caught my attention.

See, they did the Copacabana. By Barry Manilow. Instrumental, with the pianist and the opera singer playing a keyboard, the drummer thumping away, and the belly-dancer happily shimmying and shaking. But... I was trying to remember the lyrics. It seemed to me that this was one of those songs that has a happy tune, but lyrics that are a bit less upbeat? I mean, I enjoyed the melody, and the dancing, but... what was the story in the song?

So when I got home, I checked it out. Google immediately turned up the lyrics. OH! That's right.

Lola and Tony! The showgirl and the bartender, "They were young and they had each other, who could ask for more!"

And Rico. "He wore a diamond. ... But Rico went a bit too far. Tony sailed across the bar. ... There was blood and a single gun shot. But just who shot who?"

And the last verse... "Her name is Lola, she was a showgirl, But that was thirty years ago... She lost her youth and she lost her Tony. Now she's lost her mind."

With that trailing advice in the chorus, "don't fall in love..."

Oh! Three verses, about 200 words, and there's a whole story there! The two lovers, Rico and the fight, and... the aftermath, 30 years later. Whoosh. That's storytelling.

And the setting, in the driving rhythm and happy melody.

Can you do that in a short story? Why not! Hey, go ahead and tell us the story of Lola, Tony, and Rico. It's a well-worn tale, but there's still a few times to run it around the ring of tales.

Music and passion were always in fashion...
tink

Original posting 7 March 2010

Hi, ho. Over here http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-does-intelligence-work.html Jacqueline Lichtenberg talks about where those crazy ideas come from. In other words, what is her process for getting ideas that go into stories or novels. Admittedly, she's in the science fiction romance area, which combines the trivial and ridiculous ideas of romance with the out-of-the-box crazy and pointless ideas of science fiction. But anyway, here are her seven steps:

1. Ask silly questions. (tink says I might call that challenging assumptions). In particular, look at things that people take for granted, and ask why or how.
2. Find a conflict generating emotion, a plot generating dynamic buried in that assumption. Look for fears, panic, worries and concerns.
3. Do some "What if..." speculation. Try out some variations on that concept.
4. Re-state the question. Add some details, mix in some things, and ask a question that connects the abstract thought or concept to a reader's daily worries and conflicts.
5. Look back at the original question.
6. Now take a world builder's view of what you've been brewing. Apply it to a lot of people, push it to extremes, look for the breaking points.
7. Build a series of alternate worlds, expressing various versions of your concept. Fantasy, science fiction, paranormal... here on earth, out in space, in another time and place... try it out.

So that's her process, and she demonstrates it as she walks through the seven steps, looking at the little question of "How does intelligence work?"

Obviously, you may want to try your own silly questions, and then push them through the wringer to come up with your very own worlds of what if. That's fine.

Just don't forget to write.

Original Posting 26 Dec. 2009

The other evening, I stumbled over a short session on TV with an artist working with two students. This particular artist apparently is of the manga comic persuasion. He was helping the students develop four panel comics. What I found intriguing was the broad descriptions of each of the panels that he gave while they were drawing.

Basically, he said that the first panel needs to show something happening -- the setting and a problem. So one of the students drew someone in their bed with the sun shining through the windows -- the person is stretching, throwing the covers back, groaning it's morning! The other student drew a washing machine that was leaking and the kids looking at the leak.

Then, he said, the second panel shows the first reaction of the characters, with the problem getting worse. The first student had their character getting a small milk carton out and not being able to open it. Frustration! The other student showed one of their characters climbing into the washer, headfirst, to find out where that leak was coming from.

The third panel is catastrophe, with the problem getting the upper hand and the stakes going up. The first student had their character yelling and violently trying to pull the carton open. The second student had the upside down character madly spinning around in the washer gone crazy.

The fourth panel is the punchline, with some kind of resolution or release. The first student had their character taking a chainsaw to that stubborn milk carton. The teacher pointed out that there should be a small geyser of milk to let us know that the chainsaw did the job. The second student had the character hanging on a clothesline in the sunshine, drying out.

What I thought was fun about this is the way that it parallels a short story. That initial hook, some action, in media res, and a hint at the setting to get us started. Act one, if you will. Followed by complications and frustrations as things get worse. That's act two all the way. And then the climax, the resolution as the character does something incredible. Act three.

The other thing that was interesting to me was the problems that these two students used for their comics. The frustration of getting up, and a  leaking washing machine. Neither one is earth shattering great issues, and yet the comics were fun. In some ways, I think using these kind of little everyday problems that we can all relate to is really better than the huge crises.

Anyway, something to think about. Four panel comics as a pattern or template for stories.

Original posting 3 June 2009

Writers' Digest, October 2004, pages 26 to 33, has a collection of short "nuggets of wisdom" related to getting published. Maria Schneider is the author of the compilation. Take a deep breath, and here we go:

"Art has shape and meaning, and life may lack both. Specifically, a story has a beginning (the setup), a middle (logical complications) and an end (a climax that implies something enduring about human beings). Real life may, unfortunately, lack all of these things. This means that for your actual experience to work as fiction, you must usually reshape it: adding events, leaving other things out, changing what really happened to what might have happened, all in the service of telling a better story." Nancy Kress

That's interesting. Real life may be too complex, may be lacking in connections and causation and motivation, but your story needs you to shape the raw materials. Somewhat like doing a sketch or a painting -- the real landscape is right there in front of you, but the art consists in leaving out the telephone pole, simplifying that tree with lopsided branches, making the whole thing vibrant. That's what we do with the story. Make sure that it says something, that it reaches into our hearts and lives and makes us feel.

Not just the facts -- better than that!
Write.

when you get to the part where he's breaking her heart...

Original posting 14 Dec 2007

I first read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card quite a few years ago. Recently, through a strange concatenation of circumstances, a new hardback copy passed through my hands. I sent it on to a friend, but while it was here, I took a quick look and found that Card had added an introduction! Rather interesting . . . a couple of quotes that I found particularly resonant.

p. xiv  "I learned -- from actors and from audiences -- how to shape a scene, how to build tension, and -- above all -- the necessity of being harsh with your own material, excising or rewriting anything that doesn't work. I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn -- that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale."

p. xxi "This is the essence of the transaction between storyteller and audience. The 'true' story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears."

Separate the story from the writing, and learn about rewriting to find the right way to tell a story.

And don't imagine that you are writing a story alone - it is a cooperative effort between the storyteller and the audience.

Words to write by, perhaps?