Nanowriter series, post #3
In a previous post in this series, I state that the best way to organize your writing idea into a plot for nanowriting is to consider it as a Quest. Your main character is out to obtain some treasure--- the Holy Grail, the Maltese Falcon--- or perhaps the love of a good man or the capture of the real killer.
Who should the main character of your Quest be? For easiest nanowriting, I'd suggest holding out for a Hero. By 'Hero' I don't mean that your Hero has to be a muscular warrior type like Conan the Barbarian or Hercules of the Legendary Journeys. You have to have just the right kind of Hero for the Quest at hand. Conan may be a tough guy, but Scarlett O'Hara has a much better skill set for winning the love of Ashley Wilkes.
What does your fictional Hero need? Strength, for one thing. It need not be physical strength if the Quest does not require it. Miss Jane Marple doesn't wrestle alligators as a hobby, but she has the right kind of strength--- inner strength--- for the Quest she is on.
Heroes can have varying levels of physical strength, but they must have enough for the Quest at hand. Imagine a sword-and-sorcery tale in which the Hero is a weakling
who must entirely rely on hired swordsmen and mages to fend off physical and magical attack. Such a Hero would not be strong enough. Imagine Scarlett O'Hara of Gone With The Wind as so physically fragile she most usually spends her day on a fainting couch in a darkened room. We might feel sorry for her, but would we follow her through the many pages of the novel to see if she what happened? No, because she would have been entirely passive.
Mental strength is also something a Hero needs. Imagine a large, muscle-bound swordsman who believed everything he was told--- even the things that the Villain's agents told him. Would he be a good Quest Hero? No--- by page 15 he'd be in the Villain's pocket, or dead.
Moral strength is something else your Hero will need in some degree. Imagine if Frodo in Lord of the Rings happily sent off all his loyal friends into deadly peril in order to protect his own precious life. Imagine if Scarlett O'Hara at the start of Gone with the Wind responded to the news of Ashley's engagement to Melanie by purchasing some arsenic-based rat poison. Would you have been willing to root for a character like that?
What about a character like Dexter Morgan in the Dexter series of novels? He is a serial killer. But the author makes it clear that he was condemned to be some kind of killer by his early childhood trauma, and the fact that Dexter only kills other serial killers gives him the minimum level of moral strength needed to be accepted as a fictional Hero. Therefore the reader doesn't have an uncomfortable moment visualizing Dexter killing their own spouse, parent or child.
A Hero must be strong, but not too strong. Imagine if Scarlett O'Hara was such a raving beauty that she had only to say the word and Ashley Wilkes would break it off with Melanie, and Rhett Butler would find he was indeed a marrying man after all. Every challenge Scarlett met with, as least the ones involving human males, would have been conquered far too easily.
A too-strong Hero kills a story as surely as a too-weak one does. In the Superman comics, they quickly saw they had to make their invulnerable Hero vulnerable sometimes, and so they invented kryptonite. A Hero should be just strong enough to complete the Quest, with great effort.\par
What about replacing the Hero with an anti-hero? That doesn't make much difference. An anti-hero is just a Hero made out of antimatter. If he touches a Hero the universe might explode, but other than that....
Seriously, an anti-hero is just name for a Hero that lacks a high level of moral strength. He must have a touch of moral strength--- he might be a hit man, but he can't spend his spare time robbing widows, taking the insulin from diabetics, and cutting the arms off babies. His Quest, likewise, ought not be wholly evil--- not in fiction for the mass audience, anyway. There is no real market for novels about the Quest of a death camp technician to find ways to kill innocents more efficiently.
For nanowriting, a more traditional hero is easier to pull off than one that dips too far into anti-hero territory. In fact, a good Hero is at least a wee bit larger than life, at least by the end of the Quest. Think Frodo at the end of Lord of the Rings--- he has been transformed from a humble hobbit into something larger and grander by his experiences, so much so that he has to leave Middle Earth along with the elves.
Exercise: think of the main characters of three novels you have recently read and enjoyed. In what way does the main character have physical, mental and/or moral strength that might be seen as Hero-like? What weaknesses does he have that prevent his Quest from being all too easy?
Showing posts with label nanowriter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nanowriter. Show all posts
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Why be a Nanowriter?
This is actually the first article for the Nanowriter series. I wrote and published the second article first.
Have you ever participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November? This is an event, started by amateur writers, in which one attempts to write a 50000 word novel in 30 days. This requires working at a pace of 1667 words per day, or a little under seven pages per day. (Writers from the typewriter age tend to express their output in typewritten pages per day--- the standard conversion rate is 250 words per page.)
While writing at this pace is often described by the amateur participants as 'madness', this writing pace is actually not at all unfamiliar to the career novelist.
Michael Moorcock, in the early days of his career, wrote a great number of his
sword-and-sorcery books in 3 to 10 days. This includes his most famous books about the tormented hero Elric--- books that are still sought after and read today.
Lawrence Block, during his earliest writing years, wrote soft-core pornographic novels at a rate of one a month just to keep paying the rent. These books, though full of naughtiness, still had one-half of each chapter which could be used as practice for things like plotting, characterization and other things one can use in real novels. Block wrote the pornography books in 10 working days, taking the weekends off, and then had the rest of the month to work on his mystery short stories. He also sometimes worked with Donald Westlake as co-author--- the two men alternated chapters.
Many other prolific authors have at some point written at the seven pages per day pace or better. For novels longer than 50000 words--- and most genres today demand a minimum of 60000-80000 words--- this pace will demand close to two months before you type 'The End'.
This writing pace is often adopted for bread-and-butter reasons. For the lowest-paying sorts of fiction, only the fast writer can make enough money to write full time or to subsist with a low-paying day job.
There are other advantages to writing at this pace. If you are dealing with an executive function deficit or attention deficit, as is the norm in Asperger Syndrome or Attention Deficit Disorder, dragging out the writing process increases the chance that you will become so distracted that you will drop the current novel altogether six months or a year down the road.
The fast clip also keeps you in the story. You don't have to start each day's session consulting your notes as to the major characters' first names and significant characteristics, because you've been working intensely with them every day.
My name for this kind of fast-pace writing is nanowriting--- not just in reference to the nickname of National Novel Writing Month, but because, compared to the kind of writing in which an author takes five to ten years to write a novel, the nanowriter seems to get done 'in a nanosecond'.
Who should consider becoming a nanowriter? The unpublished beginning author, for one. There is a danger in the beginning writer's becoming too caught up in a first novel, endlessly polishing it, rewriting it, sending it out to publishers and waiting to start a second novel until the first novel's fate has been decided.
This is a kind of poverty of the writer's mind--- you stick to that first novel because you are afraid there are not going to be any others. Nanowriting can cure that. Once you prove to yourself that you can do it, you know that you are only 10 or 20 or 30 or 45 days away from having a whole new novel in first draft. You'll know you have riches of novels in your head and you can get them out.
So if you, like Stephen King, have to write four or five novels before you write one that can find a publisher, you can cope. Because you know you are producing them at a good pace. The early-career published writer also might consider being a nanowriter.
According to literary agent Donald Maass in 'The Career Novelist', it takes 5 novels in one genre to establish yourself as a writer. These five novels must be written rapidly enough that the first one is still in print when the fifth comes out.
Writing at a fast clip ensures you can publish at the minimum required pace to establish yourself. In addition, writing rapidly gives you a better chance to make a living as a writer. You may end up writing one type of novels for one publisher, and a second type for another, perhaps under another name. If you can do this competently, you make yourself much more attractive to the best literary agents.
The article series 'Nanowriter' is meant to help you learn to write at a beneficial fast pace--- not just to earn bragging rights at the National Novel Writing Month's forums, but to help you achieve your dream of not only getting published, but of becoming a career novelist.
Have you ever participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November? This is an event, started by amateur writers, in which one attempts to write a 50000 word novel in 30 days. This requires working at a pace of 1667 words per day, or a little under seven pages per day. (Writers from the typewriter age tend to express their output in typewritten pages per day--- the standard conversion rate is 250 words per page.)
While writing at this pace is often described by the amateur participants as 'madness', this writing pace is actually not at all unfamiliar to the career novelist.
Michael Moorcock, in the early days of his career, wrote a great number of his
sword-and-sorcery books in 3 to 10 days. This includes his most famous books about the tormented hero Elric--- books that are still sought after and read today.
Lawrence Block, during his earliest writing years, wrote soft-core pornographic novels at a rate of one a month just to keep paying the rent. These books, though full of naughtiness, still had one-half of each chapter which could be used as practice for things like plotting, characterization and other things one can use in real novels. Block wrote the pornography books in 10 working days, taking the weekends off, and then had the rest of the month to work on his mystery short stories. He also sometimes worked with Donald Westlake as co-author--- the two men alternated chapters.
Many other prolific authors have at some point written at the seven pages per day pace or better. For novels longer than 50000 words--- and most genres today demand a minimum of 60000-80000 words--- this pace will demand close to two months before you type 'The End'.
This writing pace is often adopted for bread-and-butter reasons. For the lowest-paying sorts of fiction, only the fast writer can make enough money to write full time or to subsist with a low-paying day job.
There are other advantages to writing at this pace. If you are dealing with an executive function deficit or attention deficit, as is the norm in Asperger Syndrome or Attention Deficit Disorder, dragging out the writing process increases the chance that you will become so distracted that you will drop the current novel altogether six months or a year down the road.
The fast clip also keeps you in the story. You don't have to start each day's session consulting your notes as to the major characters' first names and significant characteristics, because you've been working intensely with them every day.
My name for this kind of fast-pace writing is nanowriting--- not just in reference to the nickname of National Novel Writing Month, but because, compared to the kind of writing in which an author takes five to ten years to write a novel, the nanowriter seems to get done 'in a nanosecond'.
Who should consider becoming a nanowriter? The unpublished beginning author, for one. There is a danger in the beginning writer's becoming too caught up in a first novel, endlessly polishing it, rewriting it, sending it out to publishers and waiting to start a second novel until the first novel's fate has been decided.
This is a kind of poverty of the writer's mind--- you stick to that first novel because you are afraid there are not going to be any others. Nanowriting can cure that. Once you prove to yourself that you can do it, you know that you are only 10 or 20 or 30 or 45 days away from having a whole new novel in first draft. You'll know you have riches of novels in your head and you can get them out.
So if you, like Stephen King, have to write four or five novels before you write one that can find a publisher, you can cope. Because you know you are producing them at a good pace. The early-career published writer also might consider being a nanowriter.
According to literary agent Donald Maass in 'The Career Novelist', it takes 5 novels in one genre to establish yourself as a writer. These five novels must be written rapidly enough that the first one is still in print when the fifth comes out.
Writing at a fast clip ensures you can publish at the minimum required pace to establish yourself. In addition, writing rapidly gives you a better chance to make a living as a writer. You may end up writing one type of novels for one publisher, and a second type for another, perhaps under another name. If you can do this competently, you make yourself much more attractive to the best literary agents.
The article series 'Nanowriter' is meant to help you learn to write at a beneficial fast pace--- not just to earn bragging rights at the National Novel Writing Month's forums, but to help you achieve your dream of not only getting published, but of becoming a career novelist.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Nanowriter: The Quest as Plot
Nanowriter, part 1
Can one write a novel in thirty days, in a week, in three days? National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and other similar writing challenges show it's possible.
Can that novel be publishable? Well, yes. Author Michael Moorcock in the early days of his career wrote fantasy novels in three to ten days. He later gave interviews about his method, which were included in the book Michael Moorcock: Death is no Obstacle.
The plot type used by Moorcock was The Quest. This plot is found in stories about the Holy Grail, the Maltese Falcon, the great white whale, the lost treasure, and so on.
The story is about a Quest Object, which many people want. The Hero thus faces frequent challenges from the others who also seek the Quest Object.
The Quest story also includes other challenges for the Hero--- attacks from those NOT seeking the Quest Object, such as an Indian attack in a western or an attack by elves or aliens or zombies, challenges posed by the forces of nature, challenges from friends and family who don't understand why the Hero's on the Quest.
The advantage for the Nanowriter is that the Quest plot gives the writer a focus to build the story around. Every event you might think of putting into the novel, you must think--- how does this help or hinder my Hero's Quest?
Another advantage is that it rules out a lot of stories that are more complex to write, and appeal to a smaller audience. For example, the dreaded Coming of Age novel that every would-be writer who's taken a college English class feels he has to write.
Have you ever gone to a bookstore which had a Coming of Age novel section? Are there organizations of Coming of Age authors which give annual Coming of Age fiction prizes? Are there Coming of Age novel fan conventions? Well, no.
The problem of the Coming of Age novel is that the main character's goal is not concrete and measurable. No matter what your seventeen-year-old hero does, if he waits long enough and doesn't die, he will turn eighteen. And that's what makes pretty much every Coming of Age novel by a neophyte writer unpublishable, and unlikely to attract readers.
The Quest keeps the words coming--- and later, the pages turning--- because the goal is something you can see and touch, and writer and reader will know if the Quest Object has, in the end, been found.
The Quest can be adapted to nearly every genre and type of fiction. In a mystery, the Quest Object may be The Real Killer, carefully hidden among a wide range of suspects. In a romance, the Quest Object may be the Romantic Object--- the desirable man that the Romance Heroine really wants. Or, the romance novel might feature a Romance Heroine and a dreadful man trying to obtain the same Quest Object--- the deed to grandpa's ranch, say--- and falling in love on the way.
The reason the Quest is so adaptable is that in every form of fiction people actually read on purpose, the main character has a story goal. The Quest Object is a symbol of that story goal, if not the goal itself.
Some stories with the Quest as plot:
Moby Dick: Captain Ahab's quest for the White Whale.
Raiders of the Lost Ark: Indiana Jones seeks the Ark of the Covenant, which melts Nazis.
Lord of the Rings: A reverse Quest, Frodo must destroy the One Ring he already possesses.
Gone with the Wind: Scarlett O'Hara's Quest for the love of Ashley Wilkes.
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Enterprise crew seeks fallen comrade Spock
In my current NaNo, my heroine is searching for her brother and the valuable object he stole, a statue called the Blue Infant, which she must return to its owner to prevent that owner from taking her family's ranch.
How might you use a Quest plot for a current or future writing project? How might adopting a Quest plot simplify or clarify a plot idea you have? Can you name any other stories with a Quest plot?
Can one write a novel in thirty days, in a week, in three days? National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and other similar writing challenges show it's possible.
Can that novel be publishable? Well, yes. Author Michael Moorcock in the early days of his career wrote fantasy novels in three to ten days. He later gave interviews about his method, which were included in the book Michael Moorcock: Death is no Obstacle.
The plot type used by Moorcock was The Quest. This plot is found in stories about the Holy Grail, the Maltese Falcon, the great white whale, the lost treasure, and so on.
The story is about a Quest Object, which many people want. The Hero thus faces frequent challenges from the others who also seek the Quest Object.
The Quest story also includes other challenges for the Hero--- attacks from those NOT seeking the Quest Object, such as an Indian attack in a western or an attack by elves or aliens or zombies, challenges posed by the forces of nature, challenges from friends and family who don't understand why the Hero's on the Quest.
The advantage for the Nanowriter is that the Quest plot gives the writer a focus to build the story around. Every event you might think of putting into the novel, you must think--- how does this help or hinder my Hero's Quest?
Another advantage is that it rules out a lot of stories that are more complex to write, and appeal to a smaller audience. For example, the dreaded Coming of Age novel that every would-be writer who's taken a college English class feels he has to write.
Have you ever gone to a bookstore which had a Coming of Age novel section? Are there organizations of Coming of Age authors which give annual Coming of Age fiction prizes? Are there Coming of Age novel fan conventions? Well, no.
The problem of the Coming of Age novel is that the main character's goal is not concrete and measurable. No matter what your seventeen-year-old hero does, if he waits long enough and doesn't die, he will turn eighteen. And that's what makes pretty much every Coming of Age novel by a neophyte writer unpublishable, and unlikely to attract readers.
The Quest keeps the words coming--- and later, the pages turning--- because the goal is something you can see and touch, and writer and reader will know if the Quest Object has, in the end, been found.
The Quest can be adapted to nearly every genre and type of fiction. In a mystery, the Quest Object may be The Real Killer, carefully hidden among a wide range of suspects. In a romance, the Quest Object may be the Romantic Object--- the desirable man that the Romance Heroine really wants. Or, the romance novel might feature a Romance Heroine and a dreadful man trying to obtain the same Quest Object--- the deed to grandpa's ranch, say--- and falling in love on the way.
The reason the Quest is so adaptable is that in every form of fiction people actually read on purpose, the main character has a story goal. The Quest Object is a symbol of that story goal, if not the goal itself.
Some stories with the Quest as plot:
Moby Dick: Captain Ahab's quest for the White Whale.
Raiders of the Lost Ark: Indiana Jones seeks the Ark of the Covenant, which melts Nazis.
Lord of the Rings: A reverse Quest, Frodo must destroy the One Ring he already possesses.
Gone with the Wind: Scarlett O'Hara's Quest for the love of Ashley Wilkes.
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Enterprise crew seeks fallen comrade Spock
In my current NaNo, my heroine is searching for her brother and the valuable object he stole, a statue called the Blue Infant, which she must return to its owner to prevent that owner from taking her family's ranch.
How might you use a Quest plot for a current or future writing project? How might adopting a Quest plot simplify or clarify a plot idea you have? Can you name any other stories with a Quest plot?
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