Success recipes

The problem with many books and the majority of mainstream movies is that they use proven success recipes. These recipes work for a reason but their effectiveness to the reader/viewer drops with the number of times they’ve been used. Sooner or later an idea will drop into a full-blown cliche, not because it doesn’t work (cliches don’t become cliches if they didn’t work plenty of times) but because it’s been done to death. When this happens, some screenwriter/writer will try to make tweaks of the original idea, trying to create some variety. This often doesn’t work, party because it deviates from the success recipe and partly because its sole advantage was in the fact it is not the cliche it was trying to avoid. Tweaks are often boring, tedious and as a rule don’t work. When tweaks do work, they do because they aren’t just tweaks but whole new subplots, well developed and well defined.

Lately we’re witnessing a lot of successful tweaks to the original success recipes. That’s because audience is so more demanding today than ten to twenty years ago. Try watching old movies. Even the classics are getting a bit sour. When I look at some older shows or movies I can’t believe I used to be entertained by them. We are not so easy to satisy as we were before.

This is the main reason why an author should read books written by others: to see what works for him and why and to use that in their own writing. If they don’t do it, they will keep using the same old ideas until they turn into cliches. Read books by others, mix those ideas with your own and you will tweak your success recipe before it turns into a cliche.

Anything that deviates from the conventional success recipe runs a serious risk of not working.
Anything that deviates from the conventional success recipe and still finds a way to work has a serious chance of becoming a great story.

Finished

Clockworks Warrior

30,946 words but ‘Clockworks Warrior’ is finished. At least the first, rawest version. Editing third chapter right now. Expect to be done by the end of next week, then it’s off to the freezer for a month so I can give it a final read before shipping it out. Meanwhile, time to give the cover a try. This will be fun…

Sense of sense

What is the first sense that comes to your mind when you wake up? When I wake up in an unknown place (like staying in a hotel, camping or anywhere I’m not traditionally), the first thing that pops into my mind are the sounds and smells. Usually sound is first unless the smell is very strong. Fortunately, seaside air has that irresistible salty smell that I simply cannot ignore.

Visual description of a scene is usually something rational and informative, good for basic information: someone came into the room, something was happening on screen, etc. As a reader, you don’t need to be reminded that you’re getting visual information.

However, when trying to evoke an emotionally more intense experience for the reader, I always go for other senses. For instance, instead of seeing the person coming into the room, I would use the smell of a perfume or something similar to annouce someone’s arrival. So much more evoking not to see the person but knowing he/she’s there.

One of the hard rules of writing they try to drill into a newbie writer is ‘use more than one sense’. Nobody tells you that using several senses considerably slows down the reading pace. The reader must mentally switch from one sense to another and that doesn’t come as quickly as that. Our brain processes different stimulations and different speeds and in different ways.

If I’m going for a slow paced scene, I will give the reader the luxury of exploring the scene with as many senses as possible. But a fast paced scene simply doesn’t have room for them. When running for dear life, would you notice the smell of that nearby cherry tree?

Sometimes our senses work faster than our rational mind. That is why I will write “My hand moved to block the incoming blow.” At that time, it really acts on its own. It’s called instinct for a reason. In a tense situation, emotions run wild and they block rational thinking. That’s when the instinct of training comes in.

Word count

Out of the projected 25,000 words, Clockworks Warrior has 26,200 of them right now and I’m still to write the finale.

Clockworks Warrior

I cannot keep them under the limit no matter what I do…

Flower arranging… or is it?

Lately, I’ve been having thoughts on creating a setting for a story. Thought I should share.

The story I’m working on at the moment was my first finished story written in English. Alas, it was a fan fiction story and I could never publish it.

Or could I? The only thing I truly borrowed was the setting because I’m so terrible with creating settings of my own. So if I could replace the setting with another, original, and replace a few names, it could be my story after all. I could publish it.

The first step was ripping the story out of its borrowed setting and try to fit it with the setting I’ve been developing for years. It was a painful process. I had to discard so many bits and pieces that belonged to the borrowed setting. So many little things that gave the story that special something. And after it was torn out by the root and plucked into the new setting, I realized it didn’t fit. The setting and the story were too different to work together.

What I did was turn the clock forward a few thousand years and thus modified my new setting so that it could accept the story. And it worked because I adapted the setting to the story, not simply dump it in there, hoping for the impossible. With more time and effort, the new setting had grown around the story, accepting it as its own, both becoming dependant of the other.

Strange that I’m using a planting metaphor, because I’ve never been one for flower arranging. But yes, a setting of a book is very much like a plant, growing around a piece of architecture that is the story.

There’s two ways of forming the decor. You can either place the pots with the plants neatly around it, creating a pleasant but dull scenery. But that setting is weak. A strong setting is like an ivy plant, winding its way around the entire house, a house that is the story. A weak setting can easily be picked away from the story, just like you can easily remove a few pot flowers, leaving the architecture barren. But can you remove the ivy plant that has grown around the house? You can’t, not unless you tear out half the bricks in the building.

I always thought a setting is like a backdrop in a drama play. I thought the story can work without the setting. I was wrong. It would be like trying to strip a living body of its veins. But that’s another metaphor…

My way with character names

Here’s the thing about characters: as soon as you name one, this is a cue for readers this character needs to stick in their minds. It’s subconscious, I think. The name is a label. When encountering new people in our lives, the first thing we usually tell them is our name and they, if polite, return the favour.

For this reason, are stories out there that have all those ‘random guard #1-#142′  in them. The writer didn’t think such minor characters needed names because they serve as a living backdrop. This is similar to movies: you need actors to portray important characters, but you don’t need to pay for talent to portray ‘Screaming citizen #654′. That’s what extras are for.

I’ve decided to name only the important characters. But what to do with all those in-between characters that are important for individual scenes but not the story itself? So I’ve reached an agreement with myself: the key characters get a last name while the minor characters only the first one. We’ll see if it makes sense.

As a side note, I’ve heard once that it’s wise to use different initials for important characters. This is done so the reader doesn’t mix them up. I don’t necessarily do that but I definitely use names that sound different from one another. All the same, I don’t think a name can do what good characterization can do instead. The name is a label. If you build a character well, your readers won’t have a problem remembering who is marked with that name. For instance, I have no problem remembering names in A Song of Ice and Fire even though there are tons of them while I can’t say the same for Lord of the Rings (sorry, Tolkien fans, nothing personal). Lord of the Rings characters are simply too simplistic for me to be remember them, especially when you consider that most characters have 5 names or so. That’s equal to slapping a reader in the head, daring them to drop your book.

Thinking ahead might be worth the effort…

So I was editing away my current WIP, book 1. I came to a point in the story where two characters are chatting about recent events. They mention something that will be a major plot piece in book 2 where a retrospective takes place. Suddenly I realized I need to know what the public opinion of that event in book 2 will be so I know what information is passed between these two characters in book 1. I know what the event was but the person who decides what information the public eventually receives must have gone through a lot of thinking before deciding for the selected course. So I realized I have to dive into that character’s mind to see how he would think this through. I did that, played out all the thinking he did, then realized his thought pattern is way too interesting to not include it in book 2. So instead of just keeping the outcome of the character’s brainstorm, I will include a full thought process in book 2 as a juicy dialogue. And I love dialogues (have I said that before?).

From a simple gossip that passes between two characters in book 1 I found a delicious way of introducing two new, interesting characters for book 2. No wonder I love this job.

Any thoughts you’d like to share, send them my way.