Target reader emotions when you plot

WHAT DOES THE READER REALLY WANT?

I just had a tough decision to make in a scene.

I waffled – there were two ways to write the thing, and there were pros and cons for each of the ways.

Until I hit the right question.

The two ways were:

for a character to stew all day hoping she could achieve her goal that night

-or-

to be confident all day that she would achieve the goal, and spend the time planning how she would enjoy it.

The first way is more dramatic – for the character.

The question?

What is worse – for the READER?

The actual plot will go to the same place: either she will or she will not get what she wants; that was predetermined in 2000 when I started this.

But now that I’m writing the scenes, I need to shift a bit from ‘what happens’ to ‘how do I PRESENT what happens’?

I know where it’s going – the reader does not.

I created the rollercoaster – the reader wants a good ride and a thrill.

My virtual teachers (writing books) teach me that the reader can handle the centrifugal force from being thrown around curves in the plot.

More than they can handle being on a nice calm piece of exposition which is BORING.

Once I asked the right question

the answer was obvious.

The ride for the reader is MEH if they see her seethe all day – they can hope she won’t achieve her goal, assume something will come along, again, to defeat her.

Instead, if I write it right, the reader will see her confident – and reviewing all the reasons she is sure to get – what they don’t want her to get!

And that will torture the reader more than the feeling of ‘she has failed before, she will fail again’ READER certainty.

Can’t have the reader comfortable, now, can we?

Process

This is why I spend the time arguing with myself, in writing, and asking myself why my brain isn’t letting me go ahead with the writing – because it needs to know which plan we’re following here before it will set out the tea lights in their little tin holders and illuminate the path we’ll walk.

I never get much lighting beyond what I need strictly not to tumble over roots and rocks. Then I pick my way along.

It works better for me to know – and the reader to have to guess – where we’re going. I already discard great gobs of ideas and executions which are not what I need. I can’t afford to make decisions on the fly.

I like my shiny new toy. I’ve been using an intuitive version of it for a long time, but I love having the tool be something I am conscious about, in the top tray of the toolbox. Makes it more likely that I’ll pick it up.

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If you’re a writer, do you do this?

If you’re a reader, admit it – you want drama, not a smooth ride. You want that ending EARNED.

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There is only one way to the ending

DO YOU TRUST YOUR AUTHOR?

And it goes THROUGH the plot, through the characters, through the planning that an extreme plotter like me goes into great detail to connect.

Novels start with ‘WHAT IF?”

And must continue to the bitter end, or their promise is compromised by the very one who created them, because of FEAR.

I admit it. It’s going to get rough, very rough, for my characters – as I’ve known since this story came to me.

There is no way this ‘WHAT IF?’ works – except my way. The way I designed to answer that question TWENTY YEARS AGO.

A great portion of that time has been spent making sure it is the ONLY way I can write THIS story.

The Resistance Journal tells the story

Saturday July 25, 2020 at 6:02 PM

…

All I need to do is in front of me: finish this scene, finish the next, … – get on with it.
Nothing is going to change in the plot.
I can’t make it sweeter or more palatable – and it is NECESSARY.

…
And then … steps up and decides to fight for what … wants.
This is what I’m writing.
This is what I designed.
This is what’s foretold in the …
Nothing has changed.

I have removed (…) the pieces that would give away too much of the plot.

The angst is real. Writers bleed with their characters.

We don’t LIKE causing pain: it is NECESSARY.

Our characters have to grow, change, evolve, show us the consequences of their decisions in their lives – because this is the entire purpose of fiction: showing readers what happens when different life choices are made.

Have readers ever thought about this?

I know I never did, as a reader. When Agatha Christie killed someone off, I never wondered if it caused her personal pain.

When Dorothy L. Sayers denied her detective the woman he loved, I cried (metaphorically) into my (metaphorical) hanky – but I never wondered much what it cost Sayers.

Now I understand – because I WRITE

No mother ever reared a child without that child crying. Not successfully, anyway.

Not with a child who grew up with the tools to become an adult (they still have to do so much work after we leave them be).

Writers get to be judge, jury, and executioner.

We also get to commit the crime, and be the detective, and work in the hospital where the crushed bodies come in to be healed.

This is what we do:

We torture characters after we make readers care for them.

To show their humanity.

It’s getting harder.

My beta reader tells me she gets what I’m doing.

She calls me a horrible person, too. Which is fine.

You don’t get to have an influence without challenging the status quo.

And it’s going to get a lot worse before it’s better.

I promise: eventually it will be better.

But it has to be EARNED.

Thanks for listening

It’s particularly hard right now.

And I worry about whether readers will decide this is the place where they stop reading.

But then I remember they sat through The Silence of the Lambs.

I’m not THAT bad.

And I mean well. Really.

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Seniors beginning the covid-19 hard part

THE CONSEQUENCES OF SMALL MISTAKES MIGHT BE DEATH

That’s what makes it so scary.

We have now had one staff case of covid-19.

Management sent a memo, said this staff person is not in direct contact with Residents of our retirement community, and that they had done contact tracing with whoever might have been in contact with the staff person. They were waiting for the results.

Today, at our weekly half-hour QuaranTV closed-circuit broadcast, I asked, and was told the tests on the contacts have come back negative. We have not been told how the staff person is – they were home self-isolating a week ago or so, and we have not had any more information.

And a couple in Independent Living

is under their doctor’s care, and self-isolating in their apartment.

Word is they brought the virus in from somewhere they went, which could have been anything: a doctor’s appointment, a trip to the grocery store, dinner in town during the recent reopening (now canceled), or a trip to their Lake Tahoe home for a weekend or a month.

I understand privacy laws.

We will be told only what we need to know.

Which begs one important question in a facility which also has Assisted Living, Skilled Nursing, and Memory Support: can the person(s) whose contacts were traced be trusted to remember everyone they came in contact with?

A major facility rehab is ongoing

Painting, new carpeting, woodwork – the whine of tools is omnipresent.

The workers are doing their best – and need the work.

But I keep seeing people – Residents, staff, workers – who seem to not realize that the mask they are wearing MUST cover the NOSE as well as the mouth. Or is basically useless.

Why so many people are incompetent at that basic task baffles me.

They don’t seem to realize. I’ve seen someone when reminded put the mask up over the nose – only to have it fall off IMMEDIATELY – and then they do nothing.

How do we protect ourselves?

I personally treat the entire world outside our apartment as contaminated with a layer of a fine dust. The dust is invisible. The dust is like the radioactive dust from Chernobyl: invisible but deadly.

“If you could SEE the virus, would you go out?” asks a Facebook post.

Of course not. And if we did, we’d take it more seriously.

But that only includes those who listen to the scientists, and understand the concept that whatever you pick up needs to be delivered, at some time, to your eyes, nose, or mouth – the mucous membranes are their target.

Even just putting on my gear – nametag, mask, phone into plastic sandwich bag into pocket, keys into other pocket, backpack – is the start of the whole ‘you might be contaminated.’ I wash my hands at least twice when I come back: once immediately, and again once I have removed my outer gear, nametag, etc., etc. – just in case.

I don’t know if those who have gotten ill here – staff and Resident – were careless

I’m assuming they were unlucky.

Since we don’t know, AND THERE ARE NO PRECAUTIONS WE AREN’T ALREADY TAKING, it doesn’t really matter.

I won’t worry – I will just continue to do EVERYTHING, because I don’t know what people are thinking out there.

Wash hands. Don’t touch face. Wear mask. Do not give the virus, which you may assume you have picked up somewhere, A RIDE TO YOUR EYES, NOSE, OR MOUTH.

THIS IS STILL THE FIRST WAVE OF THE PANDEMIC

We in the States never defeated the First Wave.

The Reopeners are living in a fairyland.

There is no vaccine.

There is no cure.

The treatments are symptomatic – and don’t fix much.

If you end up in a hospital, you’re already in bad shape.

If you end up on a ventilator, your chances of making it out are abysmal.

An estimated 10% are NOT RECOVERING – still sick after months.

And we’ve now had several cases in our little enclave.

And Yolo County – and most of California – are finally paying attention and closing down, because there are more cases and more deaths – AGAIN.

I’d hate to be one of the unnecessary deaths.

One of the people who were refused treatment.

One who got the virus from someone acting irresponsibly.

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It sounds self-centered, but the time will go by, regardless of how I use it. I’m writing. NETHERWORLD continues to get written, polished, and sent out to my lovely beta reader.

Me NOT writing will help no one.

If I’m still around, I will have made progress.

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Which reminds me: I promised to leave a summary of the rest of the trilogy – so you know what happens – where it will be made available to anyone who started reading.

In case I don’t make it.

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To the lovely person who bought a paperback: thank you! Hope you leave a review.

Some people prefer paper.

I set my ebook and paperback prices so I make around $5 when someone buys either; it seems about right.

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Love you all. Drop by and tell me you’re okay.

Alicia

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Too tired to post about ME/CFS yesterday

MISSED EVEN WRITING A BASIC POST:

MAY 12th WAS INTERNATIONAL

ME/CFS AWARENESS DAY

So today, a day late and many dollars short, I’m boosting a post from @ChronicallyRising on Facebook, which will give you an idea of what I live with.

For over THIRTY YEARS now, I have been in the very badly mislabeled ‘moderate’ category – with occasional good days where I’m lucky if I have lost ONLY 50% of my functionality.

Because this is my daily reality, I don’t make a big deal about it.

I have used my experience with the disease

to write the on-going Pride’s Children trilogy, where I have gifted one of the main characters, Dr. Karenna (Kary) Elizabeth Ashe, with the ‘mild’ form – and explore how being chronically ill affects your whole life and all your choices.

When you lose your entire medical career, ‘mild’ is a misnomer.

Society writes you off; it did her.

She learned to write – something I’ve done. But I’ve given her a better experience and a traditional publisher in 2005. She’s turned into a reclusive but well-loved author of several historical novels, by spending ALL her energy on her work (since there is no way she can be a physician any more).

And living alone.

She is much younger than I am – in the ‘adult woman’ vague category.

And there’s nothing wrong with her – except disease and society’s expectations. And how much she gives in to them.

The world may find out

after covid-19 slams through its entire population, that the incidence of this kind of a post-viral, post-survival of the acute phase, syndrome, is far more common in the pandemic’s aftermath.

It is speculated that a large proportion of the survivors will have life-long problems. Numbers are not available this close to the outbreak.

Maybe my stories will help those who are ignored by the healthy, the researchers, and those who fund public health initiatives – until it happens to them.

We are all still people, still worthy, still capable of pain and loyalty and love.

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The mainstream literary pleasure of highly literate readers.

STUCK WITH THEIR HEAD IN A BOOK

That’s where the young readers are, when they can get away with it. I was.

I kept books in three locations in our house in Mexico City, and snuck around so my mother wouldn’t find me and want me to do something – but I always had a book. In English. Of what was around the house, including my parents’ collection of the Great Books (only the half I liked) plus the James Bond novels and such my father brought home from business trips..

It is like an addiction, pouring words into your head.

Many people learn the pleasure of reading later – and do perfectly fine with it. But there is a subset of humans who are bookworms from a young age, and once they discover the printed word, can’t get enough of it.

My readers tend to be in that group.

Figuring out words in context is a big part of that

If you read material that is probably too hard for you, you’re going to run into words you’ve never seen before. That’s when the vocabulary starts to build: you don’t understand the sentence a word is in until you have some tentative meaning for the word, so you guess, store it away as a ‘possible,’ and move on with the story.

Do this enough times, and that word will get its meaning altered a tiny bit each time you run into it, because each place you see it will give it context, and eventually most words will have a complex meaning that settles pretty close to what you’d find in a dictionary.

Or you could ask someone (mom, teacher…) or look it up, and nowadays touch it on your Kindle and have the meaning pop up, but all those things take more time and interrupt the flow of the story, so many of us reserved that for rare occasions, and just kept reading.

The literary mainstream novel

English is an incredibly rich language (we steal anything we don’t have, and, voilà, it’s English now), and I can find the perfect word for most applications – with the nuances I’m looking for.

My readers don’t need anything explained: they either know it already, or they will be fine figuring it out in context.

Mind you, I’m not looking for the truly ‘literary’ one-of-a-kind only an English professor would know them words.

Just the words that I’ve acquired from all those books I’ve read – without paying specific attention.

The only ‘class’ I’ve ever taken in ‘English’ was the Freshman English course I took when I transferred as a junior from UNAM in Mexico City to Seattle U., which it turned out later I didn’t need to take.

That class also got me to write the only term paper I ever wrote, something wild about the psychological significance of Wuthering Heights, and for which I immersed myself in the literary criticism journals at the SU library, which had articles such as ‘The Window Motif in …’

I had fun, I got an A+, and never before or since was exposed to language that way.

I am not a literary writer; I’d have to have an entirely different background for that, and it wasn’t my path as a physicist. At this stuff, I’m an autodidact. They’re at an entirely different level.

Pride’s Children is just where it all came to roost.

They said, “Write the novel you want to read, and can’t find.”

‘They’ were right. It has been great fun just letting a novel be what I wanted it to be, and using everything stored in my very odd and now damaged brain exactly the way I want to.

And my readers like it!

That’s such a charge.

Here are some of those words from Chapter 27 of Pride’s Children NETHERWORLD, which I just finished writing, and am now polishing up to send to Rachel, my wonderful – and omnivorously trained like me – beta reader. AutoCrit, my editing assistant software, flagged them as ‘uncommon in general fiction.’

• interlocutress
• verandah
• malevolence
• illusory
• epigraphs
• attribution
• obeisance
• dopamine
• quintessence
• scrupulous
• galvanized
• volition
• tableau
• pragmatist
• modus operandi
• bafflegab
• choreographed
• Janus
• excoriated
• impeccable
• preternatural
• demotion
• demonstrably
• asunder
• pique
• bawdy
• Uttar Pradesh
• pachyderm
• impunity
• wafting

Not really that tricky, are they?

But you don’t hear them much, and they like to get some attention, too.

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Thanks again to Stencil, which allows me to create graphics with very little effort – and wonderful photos. When I need more than a few a month, I will definitely get their paying version. Meanwhile, I mention them here every once in a while, in case others need the same capacity.

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The tiny start of each new day

WE HAVE IT EVERY DAY

I realize it’s become a little routine, getting going in the mornings as efficiently as possible, so I’m recording it to laugh at in the future.

Mind, this is me ALWAYS – and has little or nothing to do with the coronavirus.

It might amuse you.

There are many steps (beyond the obvious first one):

1. Find brain – it’s in there somewhere
2. Do anything that absolutely must be done before you even turn the computer on.
3. Turn on the lamp in the corner from the switch by the door.
4. Say my morning prayers – even though I rarely remember the promises I made.
5. Turn the overhead light on from the control on desk I can reach from the bed.
6. Move to the desk chair.
7. Turn the big monitor on – and make sure the switch goes to blue (behind PostIt so it doesn’t affect my sleep by being too bright).
8. Lift the lid to the Macbook. While waiting for the screens to come back,
9. Reach for phone, and plug it into the charger (I don’t charge overnight because I need it for a clock in the middle of the night, and a flashlight)
10. Critical: reach down and turn the power strip with the two bright green lights ON
11. Now it’s okay to turn the desk lamp on (with a touch).
12. Open the venetian blinds and the shade to let the light in.
13. Pills: take morning ones, set the later ones out.
14. Check the email.

The reason for waiting to do 11. until 10. is done is that I keep forgetting to do it – until my Macbook suddenly shuts itself off and goes blank.

And when I look, and the two green lights are NOT on, I realize I forgot – and the battery went to as close to zero as the Mac allows, and I DID IT AGAIN!

So I’ve linked them deliberately.

After that come the optionals:

• Diet Coke #1.
• Breakfast (but that can wait for hours if the brain is on and I want to try using it first).
• Water and ice for the HydroFlask tumbler I sip from all day long. Cold!
• Facebook, quick answers to anyone who seems to want one.
• The Washington Post, and The New York Times – quick scan.
• Load up a page of sudokus – hard – for when I block the internet.
• Check the calendar.
• Check the To Do list – maybe – not good with that; stuff gets done, but not in an organized manner. Occasionally, clean the list, remove stuff already done.
• Extra Vitamin C? Extra painkillers? Extra liquid B12?
• Checking if any books have sold on Amazon overnight, or the nice person who took it out of KU has read any more pages.
• Check The Passive Voice and Writer Unboxed; comment if I feel like it.
• Think whether it’s been long enough that I should consider watering the twin coffee plants and the flowery thing.
• Open the living room blinds that let me see out from my office past the living room, somewhere into the distance.

And finally, if I have any energy left at this point,

think about what I might need to accomplish today.

Think about adding an energy-draining shower to the list for today.

Including whether I both need and can afford to take a short trike ride for mental health and a tiny bit of exercise, like today – if so, try to remember the ritual associated with that now – from taking the cellphone and the locator bracelet for emergencies, and the keys, and the backpack, and water…

There you have it – boring as all get out, so I try to do it quickly, so I can go on to procrastinating from writing by thinking about writing.

Oh, and worry about the coronavirus, COVID-19,

and whether we’re still going to be safe, here in our total lockdown at the CCRC.

But that one goes without saying.

All this is so I can get to the real reason for getting out of bed:

• Working on the current/next scene in Pride’s Children NETHERWORLD.

Which is coming along very nicely.

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Do you find yourself doing the same list of heuristics every morning in the same order and playing a game with yourself to see how fast you can get past it?

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How true can a story be?

IF YOU WANT ‘TRUTH’ WRITE MEMOIR?

Knowing that memoir, non-fiction, history… all are someone’s version of  ‘the truth’ or ‘what actually happened.’

Back before I finished Pride’s Children: PURGATORY, I remember wondering whether it was okay to tell a story that would take quite a lot to be true, and yet should feel absolutely as if it was true, as all fiction that lasts does.

The image above, or a very ripe strawberry, reminds me of one of the early scenes in Firefly (one of our family’s all-time favorite TV shows), where Kaylee acquires an amazing strawberry from Shepherd Book, as part of his passage on the ship.

Is the idea better than the reality?

I can’t eat one – and we have them daily here – without thinking of the look on her face as she bites into the perfect fruit. All of them aren’t that perfect, but we don’t care – the idea of  ‘strawberry’ is a powerful umbrella which covers a little imperfection here and there.

I stopped worrying, went ahead and finished that part of the story exactly as I had planned, making it as true as I could make with smoke and mirrors.

I’m trying to do the same sleight-of-hand with the next volume.

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From October, 2012:

Telling fairytales: giving readers false hopes

One of the things getting in the way of getting on with editing Pride’s Children, the WIP, is an insidious little voice in my head saying, “That could never happen!”

My brain tells me I shouldn’t write the story of someone who gets something in the story she would never get in real life – and that it would discourage people with similar problems from even thinking about what happens in the book – lest it give them FALSE HOPES.

And then I remembered that’s why humans tell stories.

In stories, the ugly duckling turns out to be the swan, more beautiful than all those picking at him. And Cinderella, the girl whose stepmother and stepsisters treat her like a servant, marries the Prince.

The point is – if we don’t tell stories and read stories – all we have is reality. Reality is harsh. If it were not for stories, humans would all die early by ‘failure to thrive.’

We need stories in which there is hope.

That it may be temporarily false is not important. If we mature, we will grow up to discover our own place, our own story, our own Prince – our own way to be happy. Either we will become President – or we will decide it is too much work to be President, anyway.

Children – and I think most people can remember being different, wanting more than they had, wishing they were more popular, or their parents had more money (so they could have that pony my eldest still asks for – at 26) – don’t have the tools to create their own reality where they are happy. Stories teach them (and adults who are still struggling with the same questions) those tools, or at least, that there ARE tools.

This could happen.

My story, if I am successful in my aims, will let someone spend a bit of time thinking ‘this could be me, this COULD happen,’ and thus keep that someone happy enough to keep trying for another day.

That is a good enough reason to write.

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Gather scene plot points before writing

WARNING: FOR PLOTTERS

I have no idea how pantsers (those who write ‘by the seat of their pants’) decide what goes where in their books, or scenes, so if you’re a writer of that persuasion this post isn’t for you!

Even plotters have many variants

Some plotters are outliners: they construct a detailed outline for their novels, listing events in each scene, and, when they have a clear enough picture, follow their characters along and write down how they talk to each other as the events unfold.

There are writers who plot part of the time, as necessary, when they get stuck or when a section has to have a chronology to make sense.

And then there are people like me (I hope I’m not unique!): decisions are made in advance for every little thing that could happen in the whole story – an interaction between two characters about their Motivation; the introduction of a theme; the next step in a plot sequence that spans the whole trilogy…

I don’t know if I would have been this controlled had my brain still functioned the normal way – I didn’t write novels ‘before.’ But it helps me function when the amount of work I can keep in my head at a time is about one scene’s worth. At times, one beat – a section of a scene. My problem when I don’t do this it that the same ‘good idea’ will end up, in slightly different words, in more than one place in the novel!

So, necessity or temperament:

I call us Extreme Plotters

All this goes into the scenes in the list. Each scene has its little laundry list.

And then the improvisation can begin – everything is ready but the words.

And that little bit of ‘business’ will occur in only one place in the novel – and I know where and why.

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From January 2013 (but I still use it every writing session):

Appreciations: Stuff that has to go somewhere

There are marks that a story has to hit to be considered complete.

For example, Blake Snyder, in his Save the Cat series on screenwriting, lists what he calls beats (on his ‘beat sheet’), things such as Opening Image, Theme Stated, Catalyst, and Dark Night of the Soul.

James N. Frey, in The Key: How to write damn good fiction using the power of myth, has a similar set which he calls a stepsheet that includes marks to hit such as the Call to Adventure, the Confrontation with the Evil One, or Obtaining the Prize; and a set of mythological characters to encounter such as The Armorer, The Evil One’s Sidekick, or the God with Clay Feet.

Other theorists have their own sets of points to hit for a novel or screenplay, and other structural systems such as Dramatica have their own collections of ‘pieces’ to include somehow in the finished product.

Finding a home for the pieces in the list of scenes

The last part of my Scene template is the section where all these systems have space to assign their points to particular scenes. I call these appreciations, or apps, from the original Dramatica version terminology.

Many of these systems have points in common, and are different ways of interpreting features that stories need. Odds are that people evaluating a novel or screenplay for acquisition will have their favorite system- and there is no reason why different systems can’t be accommodated within the same story and story structure.

The appreciations remind me that somewhere within THIS scene, I have elected to show, say, my protagonist preparing for the quest ahead by consulting The Wise Woman, or that this scene is the place to illustrate what Snyder calls the ‘All is Lost’ moment.

The illustration (‘encoding’) of the appreciation could be a bit of description or setting, a phone call and one or both sides of the ensuing dialogue, or a character’s thought expressing the theme for the reader. My choice – and where the writing and the artistry happen.

There are an infinite number of ways to illustrate any appreciation.

When done, a list of the appreciations showing the required points, scene by scene, could show an editor or studio exec that the story follows his favorite system* – and ‘validate’ the story’s structure. The point is that if the story needs to have a ‘consultation with a Wise Woman’ in it, I need to know which scene I’ve chosen to put that into. When I’m writing/I’ve written the scene, I can check the beat/story point/mark off my list once it is illustrated somehow. It is bookkeeping – that’s what templates are useful for.

The remaining few lines at the beginning and end of the Scene template situate that scene within its Chapter, and keep track of the action on a larger scale.

It looks like a lot of work to create and maintain this much structure. I think of it as preparation before going into battle. I know that when I reach the end, each of my scenes has done its job, and I haven’t left things out.

And it frees me up to do what I really want, which is to write the scenes: the stage is set, the actors are costumed and ready, and we get to Action!

—
*This is not an original idea – that you somehow include different ‘systems’ into the same book or screenplay – but I can’t remember where I ran across it. It makes sense – many systems are different ways to accommodate the same structure, and are not necessarily incompatible.

Thoughts?

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Fiction dialogue easier if you write a play

TO WRITE FICTION, WRITE DIALOGUE

Beginners novelists have a lot of craft to learn.

Technically, you are still a storyteller if you write the story as prose, an epic poem, a graphic novel, a play, or a movie, but the crafts are very different. But learning the particulars takes years, and most writers pick a format and stick with it, with each form (Ex: prose) having long (novel) and shorter (story, novella) versions to practice on.

But you don’t stay a newbie novelist if you find you like writing, and learn some of the finer details such as point of view, plotting, or theme. There is room for continuous improvement, and one of the areas which bedevil beginners the most is the art of writing dialogue.

Mine became adequate as I went along (and no, I’m not showing you early drafts of Pride’s Children), but I needed to kick it up several orders of magnitude.

It took several years before the play (Tangled Webs) I naively thought would be ready for my daughter’s sixteenth birthday present was finished, and she was in college before I did, and here is part of what I learned.

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From November 2012:

For better dialogue in fiction: write a play

When you can’t depend on interior monologue to get your point across, you lose a huge advantage. As a writer of fiction, you can either be blatant (He felt like death.) or subtle (He remembered med school: learning all the ramifications of the vagus nerve, enervating myriads of gastric components and pathways, useless for pinpointing the source of trouble in his gut, useful only to prove something, somewhere, thought it was wrong. But he’d never expected to feel so many of them. Simultaneously.) when using interior monologue, deep or distant.

But you get to choose.

As a playwright, you work with action and dialogue. Period. And have collaborators – actors and directors – who may aid you or may fight you, but whom you don’t control.

Tradition in the theater preserves the playwright’s absolute control over the dialogue, the WORDS. Many actors and directors will routinely cross out stage directions and the author’s parenthetical instructions on HOW to say a line or move about on stage, but they will not change a WORD of the dialogue.

Even in an adaptation of the play ‘Mary Stuart’ in high school, in SPANISH (I was Queen Elizabeth I, the actual lead – whee!), our director limited himself to crossing out large amounts of dialogue (the play was too long for us), and making the tiniest transitions where absolutely necessary. He would not change the translator’s version of the WORDS.

This is an absolute gift for novelists.

I urge every novelist to go out and write a play*.

Buy yourself $100 worth of playwriting books (buy – so you can write in them). Swallow them whole. Pick a visual story. Write the darned thing (maybe I’ll get back to the how in a later post).

And learn to live within the constraints of the form: you tell your story in the DIALOGUE you give your characters.

Oh, all right. You also have setting, and choosing WHICH of your characters are on stage at a given time, and stage/dialogue parenthetical directions.

But DIALOGUE is your main weapon.

And your written dialogue in your fiction gets much better.

You shouldn’t do ‘talking heads’ or ‘As you know, Bob’ dialogue, any more than you should do it in a novel – doing so demonstrates a distinct lack of technical skills.

It’s “I’m going to paint the Mona Lisa with BOTH hands tied behind my back, using only this paintbrush clenched in my teeth.” Because that’s what it feels like when you start.

But it CAN be done. It’s been done since the beginning of time. It can be done WITHOUT a narrator to gum up the works. And it can be done so the audience feels like eavesdroppers, watching something real happening right in front of them, right now.

Heady stuff. Ask full-time playwrights. Ask actors and directors.

Dialogue in plays is elliptical (not the shape – the punctuation mark), at cross purposes, full of innuendo and half-said things. And lies. Lots of lies. But it must tell the story or you are merely doing pantomime. It has to add up.

The WORDS matter.

And that is precisely its value for writing the dialogue – and telling the story – in fiction: it has to add up.

Doing it with time constraints – on stage – leads to the most economical method of telling a story, the fewest words. Doing it on stage, intended for a live audience which gets BORED and restless within seconds if the pieces of story it is receiving do not add up immediately, is like boot camp for dialogue.

The audience can neither skip ahead nor review something unclear.

And it won’t like being bored. So you learn to leave nothing out, and put nothing extraneous in.

Audiences want stories to make sense, pronto, and continuously. So you learn to feed them the story in bite-size pieces, story beats, so they can put the whole thing together in their heads and follow.

It is an awesome discipline to acquire – and the results, in terms of the ability to create good dialogue in fiction, are equally awesome, so much so that stripping a scene I’m editing down to ONLY the dialogue, and walking through it as if I expected it to be performed on stage, is now one of the basic steps in my process, and a step that often shows exactly where the flaws are.

Thoughts?

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A quick reminder: Pride’s Children will only be on sale for about another week, if you wanted to get the 0.99 ebook version. I’m putting it back up there, and, just for the heck of it, will try the $9.99 price point. (It was 8.99 before the dollar experiment.)

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The fight for more than survival

Mostly boxes

LIKE ENDING OF INDIANA JONES AND THE LOST ARK

This was us last week, after quite a bit of finagling once the movers did their job – and moved most of our stuff into the one bedroom apartment at the URC complex in Davis, Ca.

A bunch more boxes were stored directly in the ‘Resident Storage’ locker (no, they don’t store the RESIDENTS there). Those were raided a bit by husband in search of the lighter frying pan (I hate electric stoves even more now than before) and a few necessary significant items (dish drainer, etc., which had been packed in the bigger boxes at the last minute, along with the framed paintings).

When we’re a little tidier, I’ll show you the layout, but, aside from having to switch walls on the TV because the cable outlet was on the wrong wall, we are almost out of boxes that must be unpacked immediately.

Today is a happy day – which is why I can blog

I probably mentioned that, way back on July 3, 2018, I lost control of my computer (the internal hard drive didn’t have enough space for a proper recovery, even after restarting), and I haven’t been able to write in my Pride’s Children: NETHERWORLD files since then.

NOR extract anything from my files, which means I also owe my Patreon site posts on methodology and process and glimpses into the background of my weird and wonderful writing way. I cobbled together the promised posts for serializing NETHERWORLD, and scheduled a bunch of those in advance, but I haven’t been able to produce the ones which give some people the writer’s equivalent of a ‘backstage pass.’

Which is one of the reasons I started that page, so patrons can poke behind the scenes if they wish.

Well, my dears, today I recovered access to my Scrivener files, and haven’t gone any further because one major happiness per day (at a great cost in energy) is about as much as I can take and still function tomorrow.

How?

If you don’t care, skip this heading.

The short version was:

One hour of paid time with a local Mac guru who couldn’t fix it.

Over an hour on the phone with a lovely man with the nickname of ‘JT’ at Apple Customer Support who hung with me as we delved into permissions on the High Sierra operating system.

Over an hour today with the Scrivener knowledge base: the first article that showed up  when I searched for ‘permission’ was the exact thing I needed.

Plus everything I learned when talking to these people and reading stuff online.

So I’m quite pleased that I was able to put all this together (the Apple guy bowed out when it became obvious that it might be a problem with the Scrivener part) in my pretty little head, and figure out that I needed to get a copy on a writable medium, go through a bunch of steps to make the permissions affected by my unorthodox method of upgrading give me access to my own files (the Mac had come to know me as both Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt and aliciabutcherehrhardt, and I still don’t know how to disabuse it of the personality split).

There is probably a better way, and a way to do this in big batches, and possibly a way to mend the great personality divide, but I’m satisfied for now.

And it was my prime missing part to the move.

No point in just complaining on the blog, is there?

You guys pay me for solutions, not problems.

Hehe, as the kids say.

That, and getting stains out of husband’s favorite T-shirt with a toothbrush, laundry detergent (we haven’t bought bleach yet), and a toothbrush which will remain dedicated to the purpose of laundry, have made this a good day.

The two biggest problems with a CCRC

Dinner.

People.

Both absolutely great – but I don’t think I can have dessert at a restaurant every night, and expect to fit into my bathing suit; and having dinner with new people almost every night is a whole heck of a lot more socializing than I’ve done in a long time!

We’re managing both: big salad before dinner, and scheduling dinners ahead two or three times a week (the hospitality chair dropped off an actual paper calendar – and its getting USED).

I had to call an old friend – we’ve been here three weeks tomorrow, and she needed to hear from me – so we’re going to go get dinner (5:30 is so EARLY), and then maybe, if it settles down, go swimming afterward.

Or crash, and try again tomorrow.

Best decision I ever made

The weather is California, late summer, and the humidity is really low.

Everything is in the same building.

I’m still trying to find an adult trike to ride; promises were made about there being one here which will have to be pursued.

There are so many convenient exercise and fitness classes that I’ve already overdone it.

You have to work hard to get your money’s worth – but we will do it.

Not the slightest desire to return to the East Coast.

Over and out for now, and I’ll try to find something more interesting for the blog next time, but this is our life now, and we’re making it work. Husband is on the Security team for the Bizarre Bazaar – starting this week. I unpacked a copy of Pride’s Children: PURGATORY, and delivered it to the library – maybe I’ll find a few readers here.

And I’m getting back to work on NETHERWORLD tomorrow. Promise. Go catch up on the chapters already posted there.

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And how are you? What have you been doing for the last three weeks?

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New post: Pride’s Children’s Spiritual Roots

New posts which are about the books will be posted on Pride’s Children’s site, rather than at my writing site. If you have any questions for me about what you’ve read, please let me know there or at the address on the contact page (About) here.

Pride’s Children’s spiritual roots are many; I will post about them as I have time (or someone asks!).

There are now two reviews on the book’s Amazon page, and two on Goodreads.