Don't Think You're Writing Historical Novels? Think Again.

There was a time when people (women) did the laundry down by the stream, pounding the clothes with rocks. Then came the washtub and washboard. Then the wringer washer. Then the automatic washer. The automatic dryer replaced the clothes line. Trust me. I don’t want to go backwards (even if the clothes did get cleaner in a wringer washer) but sometimes I wish I could yell "stop!" and take a breather from how fast the world is changing.

Especially when it comes to my stories. Because most contemporary stories are written in the ever-present "now," we writers have to stay abreast of what's going on in the world.

Trust me. It ain't easy.

The world is becoming more gadget crazy every day, and technology just keeps bringing us more and better gadgets than we know what to do with. Some of those gadgets change the face of society so rapidly that your stories are dated within just a few years. Think about it. How long ago were cell phones the new thing? No one had them twenty years ago. Now everyone does. Well, everyone but me, but only because I don’t want to be in-touch 24/7. That and I know how reliably I lose or break things. And I’m sure that when I needed it, it would either be dead or home in the recharger. (Or if they follow the current trends, it will be so damned small I won't be able to find it.) So though I do think it’s très cool when I see someone in a big box store call their mate or their kids who are on the other side of the store to coordinate with them, it just seems like more hassle than it’s worth to me.

Land-lines are going the way of party lines. And dial-up internet? Fuggedaboutit. Boombox? Nah. (See my IPod?) VCR? You can’t give those tapes away. Yet each of these were once state-of-the-art innovations.

If your character uses a VCR, your story is now dated.

Soon, any character who complains that he has 100+ cable channels but there's nothing on TV will be old school, because TV on demand is already here.

How long will it be before having a character pick up a book instead of a Kindle or Nook dates the story?

 I remember seeing a Columbo episode (way back in prehistoric days) where he proved the suspect was the murdered because a traffic cam ticket (complete with picture) proved the suspect was where he claimed he wasn't the the critical moment. It was brilliant stroke of plotting at the time. Now it's common to see fictional cops track someone by the tolling sticker on their car. If your car is equipped with On-Star or Lo-Jack, they can pinpoint its location. How long before every car sold has built-in GPS? How long after that will they be able to tell not just where it is, but everywhere it's been?

 If you have a cell phone, you're even easier to find because they can triangulate your position from the cell towers.

High-definition TV isn't going to be dominant for long. 3D TVs are already here and as low as $1k on Amazon already. How long will it be before we have hologram movies? And after that, will the audience be able to wander through the hologram, watching whatever they want, almost like a participant? From there, it's not hard to envision the leap to Star Trek's holodecks.

I probably won't live to see it. Then again, I know people who never imagined they'd have a box-like appliance that would cook their meals in minutes.

I don't want to even go into how fast DNA-science is improving.

Woe to writer who ignores these tecnological advances because they're already common enough that readers will question why the authorities aren't using these methods to solve their problems.

Can you imagine what next year will bring? Or the year after that?

Wouldn't a crystal ball be nice right about now?

And it's not just technology that changes. A critique buddy of mine informed me that it's a rare under-30 woman who wears panty hose. Not sure how universal that is, but it reminds me to check whether societal attitudes are different if I'm writing a character out of my age group.

Those attitudes are a major component in this widespread embrace of new technology.

For instance, let me tell you about the refrigerator the daughter of a friend of mine just bought. It's Wi-Fi capable. Seriously. It can tell her the weather outside and look up recipes. It has speakers for the built-in radio. It can twitter, for crying out loud.

It has both her mother and me scratching our heads and wondering "why?" But her daughter is a different generation and doesn't find it nearly as incomprehensible as we do.

The future is here, folks.

Fortunately for my sanity, some things don't change quite so fast.

One of my favorite stories is the one where, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, NASA scientists finally got to ask Soviet scientists how they solved the problem of pens that wouldn’t work in space where there’s no gravity. (If you didn’t know that the pens that will write upside-down are compliments of NASA, now you do.)

The Soviet Scientists' reply?

“We used a pencil.”

I love that sort of out-of-the-box, low-tech thinking.

So what technology amazes you? And have you thought about how to incorporate it into your stories?

First Plot Point

Most stories are told in a 3-act structure. Each act takes the hero/ine into a different world. Blake Snyder (author of Save the Cat! which I reviewed here) defines these three worlds as

• the thesis world (where the character is comfortable)
• the antithesis world (where the hero/ine's world turns upside-down)
• the synthesized world (the new world the hero/ine proves him/herself and applies what he/she has learned.)

There are some basic things to look for for each of these turning points. The first one (where the character steps out of their comfortable world in act one), which comes about 1/4 of the way into the story, is usually easy to spot, if you know what you're looking for. The common wisdom says that the main things to look for are:

• The hero must make a choice. (In the Hero's Journey based on Joseph Campbell's analysis of myths, this is where the hero/ine answers the Call To Adventure) The hero may make this choice kicking and screaming and often doesn't really understand what they're getting into, but it must be his choice. (This is what they all tell you, but is it true? We'll look at that, too.)
• The story must change directions 
• 
  

Movies tend to be more universally familiar to everyone, so I'm going to use a number of them to illustrate this.

In Romancing the Stone, Joan Wilder's sister has been kidnapped and needs her to bring a map to Columbia. In spite of the fact that she gets motion sick on escalators, Joan goes, thereby stepping out of her comfort zone in Manhattan and into a third world country she's totally unprepared for.

Sara Conner in The Terminator makes her choice by taking Kyle's hand when he says, "Come with me if you want to live."

In Dirty Dancing, Baby makes the choice to become involved with the dancers' problems when she asks her father for the money because "someone's in trouble." For the first time in her life, she lies to her father, denying that it's for something illegal (as abortion was back then.)

Ethel and Norman agree to keep 13-year-old Billy for the summer in On Golden Pond, so their daughter and the boy's father can take a trip to Europe.

In Sleeping with the Enemy, Laura chooses to fake her own death to escape her abusive husband, leaving the hell she knows for a new life.

After forging a successful New York career, Melanie returns to Alabama to get her husband to sign divorce papers so she can marry the mayor's son in Sweet Home Alabama.

In The Sting, Redford and Newman make the choice to run a revenge con on the man who killed Redford's conman mentor.

Luke Skywalker refuses to join Old Ben Kenobi until the Empire's storm troopers kill his aunt and uncle in Star Wars, but in the end he chooses to sign on, spawning five more movies.

Small town cop and neatnik Scott Turner's life is turned upside-down when he reluctantly takes responsibility for Hooch, an unmannerly junkyard dog, who is the only witness to his previous owner's murder in Turner and Hooch.

In Victor/Victoria, Victoria and Toddy hatch a plan to pass her off as a female impersonator. Though she's skeptical at first, she lets him convince her.

In all these cases, the hero/ine made the choice to step into an alternate world. Sometimes that choice is the only reasonable one to make. But is that step into the new world always the hero/ine's choice? The movies below would argue it's not. In these stories, the only choice the character has is to deal with what life has dealt them. Let's look at some of those.

When the seeds of the sacred tree perch all over Jake's body, Avatar changes directions. Jake is no longer an alien invader but the special someone who has been foretold in Neytiri mythology. Though Jake doesn't understand what this means, at this moment, he can no longer be who he was before.

In Peggy Sue Got Married, Peggy Sue is thrust back in time to high school, not long before she got pregnant by her boyfriend. This isn't her choice, but it most certainly changes the direction of the movie. Once she's in the past, she has little choice but to go with it. (Unless you count telling everyone the truth and being thought crazy.)

In P.S. I Love You, Holly steps into the second act when her husband dies. Does she choose this? Hell, no.

In Ransom, Tom Mullen steps into an unknown world when his son is kidnapped. Again, not his choice.

A chemical specialist for the FBI is told he will go with the seal team on their mission to free Alcatraz from the military rouges who have taken over The Rock. Maybe this is a choice, if he you count his ability to quit his job as an option.

After a bathroom accident, ad man Nick Marshall can hear women's thoughts which pushes this misogynistic man into a world he neither chose nor wanted in What Women Want.

Twelve-year-old Josh Baskin makes a wish to be "Big" which is magically answered. Though this might be considered a choice, he never actually expected his wish to be granted nor is the result really what he had in mind. This is, in many ways, the same movie as Peggy Sue Got Married because the real choice comes at the end of the movie when the characters choose their old lives.

In many of the examples where the character didn't make a choice, the protagonist is thrust into the antithesis world by magical means, but not all of them. This seems to argue that having the character make the choice strengthens the story, but that it's not a deal breaker if they don't. The story must, however, change directions at the first plot point.

How do your stories change direction? Does your protagonist make the choice?

Lessons From a Lifetime of Writing - A Review

Lessons From a Lifetime of Writing: a novelist looks at his craft
(Republished in 2008 as The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing)
by David Morrell
Writers Digest Books (2002)
Table of Contents of the 2008 version is available on Amazon.



The Author
David Morrell has written more than 20 books. His best known is First Blood. Yes, as in Rambo: First Blood. I always find it reassuring when the author of a writing book has written books that are still in print years later. Even better when it's a book I recognize or have read. Having written a character that/s become a cultural icon, I expect him to know his stuff.


That said, I wasn't sure what to expect from the title of this book. Was it going to be about his personal journey as Stephen King's book  is, or would it be more of a how-to book? Turns out it's a bit of a hybrid.


Morrell writes about his journey, but his insights are universal. Such as when he writes about what you should write about, he relates what he was once told by Science Fiction author Philip Klass (pen name, William Tenn):


Look inside yourself," Klass said. "Find out who you are. In your case, I suspect that means find out what you're most afraid of, and that will be your subject for your life or until your fear changes."


Morrell calls this "fiction writing as self-psychoanalysis." Because of his childhood, Morrell's fascination is the father-son relationship. This isn't exactly a fear, but it's a part of his personal history he seems to have never worked through completely and so he keeps returning to it. I understand this completely because, having come from a dysfunctional family, my fascination is with how family shapes you. These personal issues are where good characters are born.


Like a lot of writers, I enjoy playing "what if." Morrell adds another question to my repertoire. So What? He recommends employing it as you start playing with your story idea. His own method is to write sort of a stream-of-consciousness conversation with himself. In this way he explores the idea, locating the dead ends without having to write the actual scenes that lead nowhere. This is one of my favorite things that he shares. He also keeps this "conversation" so he can refer back to it to remind himself what he was thinking when he made his story decisions. I've adopted this method and I love it.


There's so much good stuff here. He talks about things like respecting your walk-on characters, the value of hands-on research, writer's block, finding your character's motivation, and dialog tags, among others.


He's also a bit of a contrarian. For instance, unlike most other writing advice, he doesn't jump on the bad-adjective bandwagon. Instead, he illustrates how to disguise the use of adjectives with a passage from Farewell to Arms:


In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. 


Morrell then writes: Surprisingly, this sentence has five adjectives and one adverb, if you take the time to notice them, but Hemingway usually doesn't give you the time to do that. The sentence is constructed so that the adjectives don't precede the nouns they modify and thus impede the flow of the sentence. Instead, they come after the nouns and stand alone, occupying so strong a place in the sentence that they feel like concrete nouns. 


He also doesn't like the idea of reading dialog out loud. In fiction, Morrell states, dialog is an act of silent communication. Reading it aloud allows one to add inflection that isn't there on the page and to convince yourself that the dialog is good (when perhaps it isn't.) He has a point. (A good compromise might be to allow Adobe to read it out loud for you. I guarantee, you won't risk mistaking poor dialog for a performance by Lawrence Olivier.)


One story he relates is about the writer's block he encountered while writing Extreme Denial, a story that started out as being about two men, two neighbors who were best friends, one of whom is in the witness protection program. A hundred and fifty pages in, the story stalled and refused to budge. He couldn't quite figure out what the problem was but, following advice he got from his agent, he made some changes to try to expose the problem with the story. It worked. He saw that his motivation for one of the men was illogical; that it was an idiot plot. He changed the story and presto, the story is off and running again. What was the change his agent suggested? Change the sex of the characters. In the end, he only changed the sex of one of the characters, and that simple thing makes the story far more compelling.


Some of the thing he shares are things I wouldn't think about on my own. For instance, he tells how his agent made sure that the movie contract for First Blood contained a clause about how he would be paid for sequels. He didn't see the point since Rambo dies at the end of the book, but the movie industry managed to stretch the character into three movies. How important does he think it is to have a good agent? I bet you can guess.


Another point I found interesting concerns how books that open on bestseller lists get there. Or at least the ones you see posted in stores like Fred Meyer. He learned about this because he emulated Jacqueline Suzanne's promotion methods of courting the folks who worked in the book warehouses. On one occasion, when he brought donuts and coffee to the warehouse staff, the manager took him into his office where he made up his list.


Number one is this title. Number two is that title. Those aren't true best-seller lists. They have nothing to do with sales. They're prepared six months in advance based on arbitrary rules. The top five are for brand-name authors (King, Grisham, Clancy, Steel, Cornwell, whoever has a new paperback that month). The middle five are for non-brand names that have flashy story ideas: The shark that ate Pittsburgh. The bottom five are genre books: a Western, a romance, a detective story, whatever. This system varies from distributor to distributor, but not much.


Now we're not talking the NYTimes bestseller list here, but it does make me question how they do it, given that I've seen books at #1 the day they're released. Particularly since the publishing houses are so unsure of what's sold that they have to keep a reserve against returns, and indeed, booksellers are allowed to return unsold copies months later.


So do I think this is a worthwhile book? Oh, yeah. Morrell doesn't give you "rules" or even a lot of writing advice. He doesn't harp about conflict or story structure. What he does give you are tools. He encourages you to think outside the box. How to find that story that you need to tell. You can bet that you'll find this book on my keeper shelf.


If you'd like to see reviews of other writing sources, go here.


What's the best writing lesson you've learned from a writing craft book?