There won't be much in the way of sageness with this post; it's mainly to reveal the cover art that I've produced for The Oneironauts book 1. It took less than a day and I had to go through several iterations, but I came up with a cover art that I'm fairly satisfied with. I'm in the process of querying agents, and if I get a real publisher then they'll pay a real artist to do the cover. But just in case I decide to self publish, I'm prepared! Here it is:
Isn't it glorious? Now, I'm not really an artist. I can't produce anything aesthetic with a pencil. But I do know what I think looks good and I know how to Google things. I made this using GIMP 2.8 and Google. If you're interested, this is the picture that inspired my cover. Feedback would be appreciated, seeing as I can still change things. Tell me what you think!
Here's my first draft for comparison:
Oh, and for those of you who don't know, oneironaut is a word of Greek origin and of the same form as astronaut. Astronaut is Greek for star sailor. Oneironaut is Greek for dream sailor. My book is therefore about people who explore the dream plane.
(Edit 6/26/2015) I figured I might as well throw up the actual cover art :)
In the process of coming up with a good plot, you may have encountered some difficulty. Maybe you're hypercritical of every idea you get. Maybe you designed a plot only to realize that it's not particularly interesting. Maybe you always get halfway and then peter out. Allow me to introduce you to a system that you hopefully already utilize.
I call it the Repository of Awesome. It's essentially a document you keep (on MSWord, GoogleDocs, &c.) where you dump all the cool ideas you get. For me personally, I have a section for concepts (philosophical points), lines to use, settings, characters, points of action/conflict, and a miscellaneous category. I have a general document that can be harvested from for all my books, and I have book-specific documents. For example, in the repository for The Oneironauts, I have a list of forms for the Consortium Oneirautis. That was important for that specific book, but not really useful in my other works.
Show Me How It's Done
Where do you look for sources for this Repository of Awesome? Basically everywhere. Movies, books, sites you visit, people you interact with. You liked the idea of a clandestine magical institution from Harry Potter? Great, write it down. You liked the excavation labor camp from Holes? Write it down. Thought the idea of humans interacting with a pantheon of gods from Percy Jackson was cool? Put it on the list. How about the sudden death survival tournament from Hunger Games? Note it.
Now this is where the magic happens. Combine your ideas. Let's see... A young man is enslaved at a labor camp in some remote mountains. There are dueling tournaments once a month. They select several random inmates and have them fight to the death. The last ones standing get spirited away. Protagonist is selected for the tournament and wins. Turns out they get taken to a secretive monastery/school where they are taught magic directly from the gods. They then get placed in society where they serve as vassals for the gods. A group of former graduates has rebelled and is planning a coup against the gods. Our protagonist has to decide whether he wants to join the resistance or the establishment.
See? I literally churned out those two paragraphs of ideas and then plot in less than 8 minutes. I'm not saying it's the best plot ever invented, but it's entirely different from the four sources I drew upon and slightly catchy. I promise that you can create amazing plots by amassing all your awesome ideas and combining them. Remember that good conflict is going to be the most crucial part of your plot. I would give you some examples from my own writing, but it's not published yet, so I'll wait.
I would also like to point out that if you have an okay plot already but you don't think it's up to snuff, treat it as an extended idea. Then take other ideas from your Repository and layer them together.
Your ideas are mostly just seeds and will flourish as you actually write the book. I had the original idea of "shared dreaming school" and it evolved immensely over the time that I wrote The Oneironauts. Another thought that I had was "what if one of the characters was in a coma?" Obviously that specifically applies to the dreaming books and isn't so much a general idea, but it ended up becoming an entire subplot in my book. I hope you can do the same.
Ten years ago, an idea was introduced to the world called the Seven Basic Plots. It came in the form of a book written by journalist Christopher Booker. He posited that there were only—as the precocious reader will have already observed—seven basic plots. Every other story is based off this brotherhood. He tells us that they are
Overcoming the Monster (Lord of the Rings, Star Wars)
Rags to Riches (Cinderella, Aladdin)
The Quest (Lord of the Rings)
Voyage and Return (Odyssey, Alice in Wonderland)
Comedy (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mr. Bean)
Tragedy (Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet)
Rebirth (A Christmas Carol, Despicable Me)
*As a side note, I think that if you wanted to you could lump most of them into Overcoming the Monster.
Well I'm going to present my new thesis: there's only one plot, i.e., Something Happens. It holds true in every book I've read or movie I've seen. This superplot can be subdivided though. In many stories not only does something happen, but more specifically, the protagonist progresses. The other two options are remaining stagnant or retrogressing. All of the above seven plots are composed of the three I just mentioned. That means there are at most three basic plots.
But "he progresses" doesn't exactly make for the most exciting plot. It needs an arc. The bones of a plot might follow something like this: he progresses, stalls, progresses, stalls, retrogresses, progresses, retrogresses, progresses. Maybe you could even assign values so you know how much the protagonist is stepping forward or backward. Let's analyze the Bible story Jonah this way. He's preaching as a prophet of Jehovah (+10). Gets a vision to go to Nineveh (+5). Decides to run and hide from God instead (-15). Get swallowed by a great fish (±0). Repents and preaches in Nineveh (+15). Stubbornly waits for the city's destruction after they repent (-15).
Beyond the Basics
But who wants a basic plot? Like a drug, we need more and better stuff to stay satisfied. Most plots that I've read in the past ten years go above and beyond basic. They've also been combinations of the above seven. They've been intricate weavings of human emotion and action.
This post may not have the best flow to it, but I hope it gets my point across. If you believe there are only seven basic plots, your writing will show it. Don't buy into it. Look everywhere for inspiration for books. Write down small ideas you have. Combine those ideas to make more elaborate tales. Don't let your plot look too much like another, but allow it some similarity. The tree of plots is an everbranching organism with unlimited possibilities.
The cliffhanger is a hallmark literary device. When employed correctly, it spurs the reader on to the next section of book. When used incorrectly, it buffers the reader into a corner of frustration. I have read books that swing both ways. Let's talk about avoiding your books leaving your readers' hands at high velocities by proper application of the cliffhanger.
Writing is an art, and as such it uses themes. Any theme in any artform can be overdone. Let's take the example of the band After the Burial. They had a fantastic debut album with sweeping guitars and complex polyrythms. More recently, perhaps in an attempt to be more brutal, they have somewhat dumbed down their song structure. In this cover video, the parodist shows that although the original musicians performed the number on 8-stringed instruments, he can pull off the entire song on one string.
You may think of cliffhangers as an exciting element to utilize in your book, but make you think about it more than once. After a while of chapter after chapter being strung up on some inhospitable cliff, the reader is tired and perturbed. Good job, writer.
Where It's Particularly Painful
Now, the effect isn't that bad if you have the events immediately after the break, or if you have a short sequence in between. Much of the time you can get away with entire interloping chapters. But don't string your readers up over three or four chapters on a cliffhanger, particularly if all the intervening chapters end in cliffhangers of their own. If you want an example of this, read the Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flammel series. It's well constructed, but it becomes splintered at the end and—you guessed it—he makes every chapter a cliffhanger.
It goes something like this: Kendric is flying in a plane. Suddenly there's a big boom. An engine has exploded. End chapter. Alfie is walking down the street. A car pulls up, window rolls down, and a gun is pointed at him. End chapter. Pamela is awoken by the sound of scratching at her door. The door bursts open. End chapter.
The plane is heading to the ground. It hits. End chapter. Alfie tries to soothe his attackers. They roll down the back window. His sister is bound and gagged. End chapter. Pamela rolls off then under her bed, grabs her pistol, then listens to footsteps walk up to the bed. A masked face peaks down and says, "Hello, lovie." End chapter.
Kendric survived and is in the forest. A snarl. Wild beasts attack. End chapter. Alfie gets instructions to place a package where the people want it by a certain time. They drive away. He opens it up. It's a live bomb. End chapter. Pamela draws upon years of training and shoots. The bullet bounces off the mask. Something grabs her leg from behind and starts dragging her. End chapter.
Now imagine that all of those were fully flushed out chapters and you had to go through 2000-6000 more words before you could find out what happens next, every single time. It's torture. Ways to avoid agitation against you, the author, is to reduce time between stop and go, reduce cliffhanger usage, or use a light cliffhanger.
Obviously don't let this scare you away from using the cliffhanger, just become more conscientious of the frequency, intensity, and execution. It's a beautiful device, but it reacts like makeup when you cake too much on. And most importantly...actually, I'll leave that for my next post :)
First, welcome to the place I've deigned to deposit my ruminations upon such possible topics as writing, music, physics, religion, et cetera. Now you know. And since this post is about burning fluff...
Fluff. It's an essential part of every story. Without it the result is bone grinding on bone. Fluff is like the cartilage of literature. But imagine trying to walk with 5 inches of gristle between your femur and tibia. Your locomotion would be extremely unconventional. The same holds for writing.
A good story can be drowned in excessive fluff. It can also get dehydrated from lack thereof. Our job as writers is to find that golden meridian and promenade down it. To illustrate, we generally type ourselves into one of the following situations:
Alright, Tyson is in the cave and now he needs to get the dagger. Run Tyson. Grab. Good. Stab troglodytes. Escape. Hey look, Tyson got out safely! Done.
Well, I've led Tyson to the mouth of the mountain and now he needs to swipe the dagger. But how are my readers going to know that this is a cave unless I sequence the molecular bonds on every stalactite and guano streak? And what about the several drippings? They must know how the stalagmites formed over the past million years! How else are they going to appreciate that the troglodytes are hiding behind them? AND THE TROGLODYTES! The readers must become familiar with their hygiene, temperament, and breeding habits in order to truly understand the danger Tyson's in.
I'll stop there. You've probably been in one of these two boats if you've ever written a scene. 1) I know what happens next and it shall occur immediately; or 2) the details are churning inside me like a gallon of ingested phlegm and must be vomited out extensively. Ooh, is that a thorn-encrusted salamancer?
Before the inventions of the television, computer, and internet, authors tended much more toward the second inclination. That's why the average survival rate of works such as War and Peace is only 15%. Even some of the more streamlined classics can get their drag on. Fast forward to TV and the internet. The average citizen thinks: I award my full attention to everything in the world. I'm not going to dedicate my time to a novel unless it gives me as much enjoyment as the Youtubes. That requires us as authors to change our game.
Introducing: show, don't tell. I quote Orson Scott Card on exposition:
"When science fiction was just beginning, it was common for writers to stop the action in order to explain the cool new science or technology that they were introducing in the tale. It was not until Robert Heinlein that science fiction writers began to weave their exposition more subtly into the action of the story. The classic example is when, in telling of a character leaving a room, Heinlein wrote, "The door dilated." No explanation of the nifty technology behind dilating doors -- just a simple statement that seems to take the new technology for granted. This was a great step forward, allowing science fiction writers to introduce a vast amount of novelty into a story without stopping the forward movement of the plot in order to explain it."
One method of fluff reduction as shown here, is to replace a description with a verb. It's highly effective. Also, it doesn't deplete the richness of the narrative. Look for opportunities to explain the backstory during the nowstory, but don't impede the nowstory in order to do so. Slip it in. Gentle accents.
Good fluff. But sometimes you want to include something that's non-essential to the plot, yet still entertaining. Feel free! Just don't drown yourself in such excursions. An author I think does this quite well is Obert Skye. Here's an excerpt from the fifth Leven Thumps that I remember even though I read it 4 or 5 years ago.
Leven shrugged. "That's not important; we should find Tim." "I would have mentioned them leaving," Clover said. "But Tim was pretty insistent about me staying quiet. He said they were taking Azure because he promised to show them the way." "So you saw them go?" Winter asked incredulously. "I was writing in my dream journal," Clover said defensively. "At two in the morning?" Leven asked. "Why didn't you tell us they had left?" "I had an interesting dream," Clover insisted. "What does it mean when you dream about barns?" Leven and Winter just stared at him.
Alright, so it's not the fluffliest bit of fluff, but it works. Skye could have just explained that they woke up and saw that Tim was gone, so they started following him. Instead, he created a situation that became a memory for at least one reader. That's good fluff.
At the end of the day, your readers want a ravishing tale with some spicy details, not a spicy mess with little substance. Give them what they want, or they will punish you.
