The Power of Myth-Chapter 2

Last post I said that I hadn’t figured out how The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell With Bill Moyers could be useful to fiction writers. In the second chapter I found at least one explanation as it deals with what a myth is and how it was created and adapted through time. Although I don’t agree with his philosophy that, as I understood it, claims that the universal ruler, if there is one, isn’t as important as the bit of that creator inside each of us that unites us, I do recognize his usefulness in creating mythology for our fictional species.
Mythology is how people explained and related to the world around them before they had the time and technology to explain the world scientifically. Deities and mythical creatures helped the ancient people accept any natural disaster that occurred, entertained nomads then farmers around the nightly fires, and the worship rituals gave the people who had to spend all day everyday doing the same job, such as working the fields or caring for the family, that they may not have liked doing something to look forward to. The belief that the world was ruled and judged by unseen eyes provided order as people feared the wrath of a powerful being more than the punishment of a friend or a town. Ceremonies like asking the blessings of a god on planting or harvesting or a birth allowed people to leave the fields and gather together every few weeks or months and see family members and friends that may have moved away.
Mythology is an important part in the development of a culture and helps form the morals and laws of a culture or species. This book tells of what Campbell believes is a single truth that is retold throughout the world in different variations depending on the culture telling it. He believes the truth for Earth is to live in harmony with everyone and everything but the truth of your planet may be one creature that created the world from loneliness or a need for an army to defeat his enemies. I believe that to create a culture you need to decide what the focus is (is the creature a warrior’s culture like the Klingons, a merchant culture like the Ferengi, a culture aimed at watching other species without interfering, or any other type of culture) and decide how the planet created. Once you know those two things you can decide what myths entertained the early nomads or cave dwellers and how those myths progressed to create the current religion/culture.
Even if you have no intent of knowing the entire mythological evolution of the culture you are creating or that one of your characters comes from, you should still have an idea of what the “religion” or focus of society is whether it’s the reputation of a person or family like with the Klingons or money like the Feregis or understanding and peace like the Minbari spiritual caste or family or success or anything else you want your species to aim for and a few cultural

How To Publish Your Novel

In 5 Steps

Be sure your novel is amazing
Write a synopsis
Decide on a few agents, or not
Write some query letters
Don't wait around forever

Of course, you may not want to do all that so here is an article on how to self-publish an e-book with a link to self-publishing a paper book.


Due to pressure at work to get a huge certification done very soon, I will not have a lot of time to research my blog posts as I usually do. Last time I ran out of time like this, I shut down the blog for a month to get things done. I don't want to do that this time because when I get this certification done, I get to restart my fiction writing again. Thinking about that, I realized that I have a number of writing books I haven’t read yet. For the next month or two I will read through some of these books and tell you each week what I’ve learned and what I think of what I’ve read so far.

The first book will be Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth. Based on a few televised interviews, Campbell talks about how modern people live out the themes of myths everyday. He believes that all stories are similar to the myths and legends of old and has devoted his life to comparing the myths of cultures all over the Earth.

While Joseph Campbell’s book may not exactly be aimed at writers and the second book on my reading list is. Christopher Vogler bases part of his idea in the book The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers that every story ever told successfully, from ancient myths to current movies, has been written with the same basic outline and characters. I’ve heard rave reviews of the books and think that reading these books over the next two months will improve my fictional characters and hopefully my storyline and plots.

I hope you join me as I review these books and learn new things as we go.

Best of 2011 Writer's Journey

The new year has come and the old year has gone. Before we say adieu to 2011, let's have a look at the things I talked about this year.

2011 I focused a lot of creating the right setting for your story.
Creating a Space Ship
Creating a Space Station
What to think about when setting your story in the real world and the partially real or alternate Earth

Next I wrote some writing techniques to help you actually write your story.

Now you have everything you need to write your story. Sit down and write it so you can make 2012 the year you write your best work so far.

Why a Synopsis?

Once your story is perfect, or at least awesome, you need to write a synopsis of your book. More than a summary, your synopsis is the entire story in a few pages. (I originally read that a page in the synopsis for every twenty-five pages in your book. Although that is a good way to narrow down the plot points, the two articles I like about writing a synopsis recommend fewer pages so the reader doesn’t get bored. Remember that publishers, editors, and agents read hundreds of letters and synopsis a month and yours needs to be just right to get a second look.) It needs to grab the readers attention and enthrall them in just a few pages. That’s tough and here are two articles (here and here) to help you figure out how to make your synopsis exactly what publishers are looking for.

Writing Techniques

As much fun as it is to sit down and write your story, to just let the words flow and watch your story come to life before your eyes, you need to remember that isn’t all it takes to get a story published. You need to remember to craft your writing and think about using the best wording every time you write. At the beginning it’s okay to write and then focus on technique and craft in the revisions. Soon you’ll be so used to thinking about craft and technique that you’ll be wording things naturally while you write your first draft. That will make it much simpler when it comes time for the revisions.

Although there are a lot of techniques involved in writing well, here are a few we covered.

Point of View
Writer's Voice
Use Your Vocabulary
Cut Your Project into Manageable Parts
Avoid Rambling
Know the Details
How to Create a Setting
How to Create a Character
A Tip for Making Realistic Characters
A Final Thought on Characters
Plan Your Writing
Stop Thinking and Write Your Story!

Time to Revise Your story

Foreshadowing
Are You Writing a Report or a Story?
Avoid Cliches
Think About How You Tell Your Story
Pacing
Watch the Grammar
Imagine the Movie
Be Careful with Technical Terms
Watch the Details

Time To Watch The Details

You’ve gone through your story and edited it some and taken out the scenes you decided were no longer needed. Now you need to sit down and go through your story with a highlighter. Read the story slowly, preferably out loud if you aren’t disturbing anyone, and don’t just read what you think you wrote. Read only what you actually wrote and make sure all your character and story points are still valid. Often my view of my character, especially details and background, changes throughout the book. Maybe I thought she had a cousin early in the book only to decide later in the writing process that her parent was an only child. Readers will notice those things and editors are paid to notice those differing details. If you wrote a story over a few months or years, you may have very different backgrounds to your characters that will confuse editors and lose you a deal on what could otherwise be a very well written story with excellent characters, at least at the end of the book. Details can make or break a story and reading through your story in a short period of time such as a week or weekend will allow you to keep all those details in your head and allow you to notice differences.
As you’re reading your story look for clichés or dialogues that go on too long. Early in the writing process it is easy to write a cliché or explain everything at once so things are on paper quickly. During the following revisions is when you need to notice those things and rewrite or remove such things.

Time To Revise Your Story

Now that you’ve written your first draft and edited it some, let’s talk about revising your story for the second or third draft.
This is where you go through your story and make sure everything is needed and in the right place. Now that you know where your characters will end up at the end of your story, you can go back and debate with yourself if that scene in the kitchen really needs to be set in the kitchen, or would it be better after the next two scenes and set on the porch. Now you can go back and remove scenes that don’t support the story or plot and figure out where you need to add more scenes to foreshadow or hint at how the story will end. Did you put scenes in the beginning of the book that no longer make sense with the ending you wound up writing instead of the one you thought you’d write? Now is the time to take those scenes out. Start first with the scenes needed, then we can edit the information in the scenes you decide to keep.

Watch The Technical Speaking In Dialogue

How often have you watched those technical shows so popular on television these days? I’m talking about medical shows like House M.D and Gray’s Anatomy or crime shows like the CSIs and Law and Order series. As you watch those types of shows, you’ll hear them say a lot of technical things, such as scientific things, but eventually they will convert the conversation to simple terms for the laymen who didn’t get degrees in what the characters did. As you write your stories, you need to be careful about how much technical garble you put in them. You should have done a lot of research to write your story accurately and you may have learned a lot of the technical phases the professionals use. Although you may understand what your characters are saying to each other, your reader may not and they may get lost in the garble. If they get too distracted from the flow of the story and upset about not understanding the conversation, they will but the story down and find another story they can understand without a textbook next to them.
A good rule of thumb in creating dialogue for your characters is to keep it simple while still being true to the character. The balance needed for that is a delicate one and it may help to have a beta reader who has no problem telling you when you confuse them with too much phraseology and need to rewrite a scene to clarify things.

Cinematic Views In Writing

Something I read recently was advice to “write from different cinematic views”. I was looking for some similar articles online but all I found was references to a looked-down-upon way of writing fiction that focused on external and internal dialogue rather than description.



Not quite what I was looking for, so I went back to the website I found the tidbit on and the description was “Turn your notebook into a camera.” I like that idea because how often when you write do you see a scene in your head as you go? I often think like that as I write a conversation between characters or have a character walking down a path somewhere. I never thought about moving the camera in my head around the room though.



Let’s say you’re writing a scene about a husband and wife making dinner together and talking about the upcoming visitors for supper or the weekend. You wrote the scene looking at them in your head from the front. How different would the scene look on to your writer if you moved the camera to the left side of the room? Would the reflection of the couple in the window above the sink change the image much, or at least the effect given the reader? Would the effect change if the reader were looking in the window or through the door to the dinning room? Would the story be better by having the conversation take place or summarized by the couple’s kids waiting in the living room? These are all good things to think about when you edit your current work of fiction and viewing possible changes in your head as if it were a movie is a good way to decide if the changes really do improve your story.

A Writer's Enemy

As a writer, I believe the hardest thing about writing well is doing so inside the rules of grammar. Here are some online resources to help you learn the rules of grammar and punctuation.

Grammarbook.com

A Guide to Grammar and Writing

A page full of grammar downloads and PDFs

A great grammar book now online: The Elements of Style

Once you know the rules, it is much easier to write well and know how to ignore the rules to get the effect you want on your readers.

Pacing Reviews

Something I’ve recently learned about when looking into the craft and techniques good writers use is that you can control the pace and mood of the reader as they go through your story by alternating lengths of sentences and paragraphs. As I just discovered the new technique, I don’t think it smart for me to try and explain it to you in a helpful way. However, I believe this to be an important technique to learn so I am going to give you links to other people who do understand this technique and can explain it to you better than I can.

K. M. Weiland’s video blog on pacing based off of chapters definitely gives me something to think about when revising my stories. For those of you who prefer reading to listening, the UTube video is also transcribed below the video box.

She wrote an excellent blog post about 5 ways to pace a story that I recommend every writer trying to capture the attention of others read. Those are some great ways to vary pacing and thoughts to remember as you edit.

Aimed more at those who want to create suspense, Heidi M. Thomas does a great job of explaining how to speed up a book. However, she gets into the basics of pacing and those of you that want to slow your story down can merely reverse her ideas

Watch How You Tell Things

One of the hardest things to do as a writer is to balance the action with description. When I write a story, I tend to write down all the description at once. I remember reading the Babysitter’s Club books years ago and getting annoyed after the first few books because the writer always did the same thing. Whenever the Club had their first meeting in the book, the writer always spent a whole chapter describing every person at the meeting. The idea was that if the reader hadn’t read ever book in the series until that book, it wasn’t hard to meet the characters. To those that had read most or every book in the series, it was plain annoying. I quickly got in the habit of reading the first page or so of conversation and flipping through the chapter to the rest of the conversation, effectively skipping all the family and personal data of the characters I already knew. Now that I’m reading books for older people, I’m noticing a much more effective way of describing people and their backgrounds, which is in little pieces. It’s expected that when a character is introduced the writer will give a description and maybe an biographical paragraph if the point of view character knows the information. Saying the guy is tall, brown haired, and has a gorgeous smile but the character knows he’s hiding a black heart behind that smile as she used to date him often works better than having all their past history fly through her mind at the sight of him on the way to her important meeting. Although seeing him again may serve to distract her at the meeting, a long description of the past may slow down the pace for the reader.

Depending on the effect you want to create, a better way to introduce character may be more subtle like giving a brief physical description and the point of view character doesn’t realize for a few pages that his sister’s friend has lovely green eyes up close rather than the plain brown eyes he assumed because of her hair color or the friend’s dimples don’t make it into the book until he actually smiles.

As you write your story, I want you to keep in mind the different effects you can use in description and introduction of characters and settings. Think about how you want your readers to view this new place or person and what mood you have going in your story or scene. Once you know those things, you can decide how you want to craft the description to create the desired affect.

What's So Troublesome About Cliches?

As you go through and revise your rough draft or your tenth draft or any other draft you do, remember to watch out for clichés. Wikipedia describes clichés as: “an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, rendering it a stereotype, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel… A cliché is often a vivid depiction of an abstraction that relies upon analogy or exaggeration for effect, often drawn from everyday experience. Used sparingly, they may succeed. However, cliché in writing or speech is generally considered a mark of inexperience or unoriginality.” Although readers may skim over clichés in their reading, an editor or other writers will notice. Being labeled unoriginal in the writing community is laughable and until you can learn to minimize the use of clichés, or better yet: avoid them, you won’t be taken seriously as a writer and aren’t likely to get anything published.
Here is a very thorough article on clichés to involve clichés in expressions, plots, characters, and a self test on clichés. Another place to look for information on clichés is a list of clichés in alphabetical order on the ClicheSite.com.

Is It A Story Or A Report?

When you pick up a newspaper or read a news article online, you may get a lot of details and facts, but you don’t feel as if you were standing right there. News reports are designed to give a lot of information in a small amount of space; they don’t have a number of pages to write about how the scene affects all five senses or to describe the setting in thrilling detail. They can’t make the scene come alive as story writers need to be able to. People read newspapers in order to get facts about current events. People read stories hoping to be somewhere else, someone else for a little while. They don’t merely want the facts of what happened and how, readers want to feel it and sense the action or tension in the room.

The difference is in the details: how they’re incorporated in the scene and how they’re worded. Wording and timing are a writer’s best tools. Use them correctly and you may have an award-winning story. Don’t use them enough or correctly and you may not even have a good report to let others read. Which would you prefer to have at the end of your project?

Foreshadowing

There is just one more thing I want to comment on before talking about editing your story, and that is foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is where you put hints of future events or the climax earlier in the story. Readers then anticipate the event and it adds suspense. Here are some general ideas on how to foreshadow in a story and here is a page on foreshadowing used in Star Wars.
Earlier I wrote about writing from a basic plan for your story. Foreshadowing only works well when you know how your story will end or what your next scene will be. For that reason it is probably best to save foreshadowing for the revision period of your story but if you have a plan of your story and plot, adding foreshadowing can be a lot of fun as you write.
Here is an article that explains foreshadowing and flashbacks rather well.

All You Need To Write Your Story!

Are you planning to write that story that’s been in your head that you know will be a bestseller if you could just figure out how to write it? Well, I’ve given some pointers on creating a setting and about specific settings in science fiction writing. I’ve talked about knowing your characters and even given you a profile to use to get to know each of your characters. In my last post I wrote about having at least a basic plan of what you’re writing. You’ve done all those things, correct? Well, what are you waiting for? Sit down at your computer or notebook and start writing! Stop procrastinating and get your rough draft done. Don’t worry about writing the perfect story in your first attempt. Books go through a lot of drafts before even getting to the publisher, who usually asks for at least one more draft because the author was too close to the story to notice things. The rough draft is where you put your idea on paper and the editing process is where you adjust wording, cut paragraphs or scenes that don’t add to the story, and generally polish your story until it shines. However, before you can edit your story, you need to write it. Now, stop procrastinating!

Work From A Plan

So you want to write a novel or short story? Where do you start? I’ve already talked about creating settings and characters, so let’s assume you already know your setting and all your characters as well as you know yourself. Now you’re ready to sit down in front of your computer or notebook and start writing. Before you start, though, you should think about your plot and story. If you’re like me, you decided to write a story based on a character or a scene that’s been stuck in your head. You may even write a story because you want other people to experience a setting in your mind or you want to prove a part of society foolish, like in Animal Farm which was a political commentary. Whatever your reason for writing your story, you need at least a basic idea of your plot and story.

Many writers say you should have your story and plot completely outlined before starting stories. Other writers talk about how their characters “talk” to the writers and the story ends up differently than the writer thought it would. To be honest, my way of writing has always been to just sit down and write, making it up as I write it down. That has yet to provide a story I’m happy to let others read so I’m starting to plan out a story and plot. It’s hard to write an organized story when you don’t know where you want the novel or short story to go. As much fun as it can be to just go for a walk one day and not have a destination in mind, you get places faster by knowing where you’re heading. If you want a story about a lady rediscovering her confidence after a divorce or a man who finds the strength inside himself to leave a job he hates, you need at least a basic idea of plot points needed to get the character where they need to be. Not only does a basic plan help avoid major writer’s block in your rough draft, it also helps you keep the story focused on the transition your character makes so your reader doesn’t get confused or bogged down by long and pointless scenes you shouldn’t have spent so much time on. No matter what your style of writing fiction is having a basic plan of where you want your story to end is beneficial.

More On Characters

Since I've been talking about characters and character development these last few posts, I thought I'd finish up by posting some great articles I recently found on characters.

This is an interesting article about seven basic types of characters that may give you a different way to think about the characters you create.

While I'm talking about a different way of looking at characters, I thought this article quite useful. It's an intriguing look at character development combined with story and setting. The writer wrote about generalities on how to write an unforgetttable book with unforgettable characters using small details that had me itching for my pen in order to write my forgotten stories.

Although the writer of the previous article spent little time on specific details, this article can give you some ideas to help breathe life into your characters while this article is an excellent reminder of how important body language is in real life and therefore in fiction.

This is a useful article to keep in mind when creating your characters and here is my character profile if you still need help interviewing your characters. Feel free to add to it or ignore parts that don't apply to your particular character.

How To Make Realistic Characters

I think Dr. Hinze said it best in the opening lines in his article on creating characters: “In 1757, in Poor Richard's Almanac, the wise and astute Benjamin Franklin wrote: "Little strokes fell great oaks." Important message to writers in that saying, because it is through incorporating little strokes (details) that writers create and develop unforgettable characters. Little strokes turn stick-characters into real people.”

Little details make fully developed characters seem real to the readers, whether it’s body language hinting at emotions or mannerisms reminding the readers about habits the character has.

Another place to remember to put details is in schedules. Whether you’re dealing with a regular day schedule for a human, an daily schedule for an alien, or a nighttime schedule for those that live at night, remember everyone has needs that need to be fulfilled. Everyone needs to eat, sleep, and remove wastes somehow or they start getting weak or sick. Even if your character is running for its life and living on adrenaline, the body can only go so long without nutrients and rest. The effects of not getting needs fulfilled can add tension to a story or scene.

However, too many details can slow a reader down and bore the reader enough to put the book away. It’s a good thing that there are many ways to show a reader your characters are real. Instead of having a scene where the character on the run steals a pie on a shelf below a window, you can mention that the character feels guilty about stealing someone’s dessert later but rationalizes that they won’t miss it with the rest of the meal the family had planned. For characters that are sitting down to a family meal while debating if they should take a job in another state, you can write in dialogue around bites of dinner. For detectives in the middle of a case, you can have them glance at their clock and debate getting lunch or having a mid-afternoon snack at the convenience store. You can have dialogue wrapped around a subtle nighttime routine before bed for some characters or let others decide to sleep after their late morning meeting or college final.

Finding that perfect balance between too many details and an unrealistic character is hard but important as many readers and critiques as well as editors will notice those things. Just remember that while plot and story may be what intrigue the readers, little details are what keep them absorbed in the book.

Character Profile

Character profiles are, in my opinion, necessary in any story. Developed at least in part at the beginning, a profile should grow as the story continues. Add items that come up during the story, such as family members or old flames or an old memory told of a vacation. Doing that will help you keep the details straight as the story progresses or if the story becomes a series and you need character details years after writing the first story. You may not put everything in this profile in your story, especially in the case of profiles of side characters such as a mentor or a roommate, but every character in your story should have a profile so you can keep straight everyone as you write.

Name:

Gender:

Age:

Position in story: Is this the main character, a love interest, a sibling, a friend, or an enemy? There are many other positions a character can play in a story, such as a rival-turned-grudging-ally or mentor. What part will this character fit?

How do people view this character?: Do most people see her as the quiet one in the corner or the vibrant girl no one can control? Is he the sociopath people think is awesome or is he the gentle man everyone thinks is a freak? You don’t have to go in depth here, that is what the rest of this post is for, but it may be helpful to put down how others in your story stereotype this character.

Ethnicity: Ethnicity is a major part of character as it can dictate limits to how your character can look. It can also dictate things like language spoken or known, temperament, and influence choices such as education, career, hobbies, and where they live.

Appearance: Although you don’t need to be precice in all the questions, you should have a general idea
Skin color:
Hair color:
Eye color:
Height:
Weight:
Distinguishing marks: Such as scars or moles or birthmarks

Culture: Although culture and ethnicity seem the same, culture has more influence on choices made, even if ethnicity can narrow the choices some.

What religion is your character?: Like ethnicity and culture, religion can have a huge effect on a person’s life and choices.

Style: Does your character prefer to dress up to go out or wear jeans and a tee shirt? Maybe your character prefers to stay in and wears lounge wear if it needs to leave its house. Although influenced by culture, style shows a lot about the character’s personality or the image your character wants to project.
What jewelry does your character prefer? Is there a favorite piece they usually wear?

Major places this character has lived: Along with helping to define the culture a person has been in contact with, where your character lived can influence what memories they have of years past.
Memorable places visited:

People who influenced this character in the past and currently: This can include family, friends, rivals who made your character work harder and get better, random acquaintances who had a strong influence, teachers, old lovers, children in your character’s life, or anyone else that may come up in a story. Here is one place you may not need to fill in at the beginning, but be sure to fill in anyone who may come up in the story as you write it. That way you won’t confuse people in later chapters or books.

How was your character’s childhood?: Were they well loved and spoiled or neglected and raised themselves? Did a relative die that effected them when they were young or did they have pets? Were they picked on at school, ignored or popular? What secrets does your character have? What memories do they have or stories of the past that they tell in the story?

Education: Where did your character go to school and what for?

Occupation: What does your character do for money or spend much of their time doing?

Hobbies/interests: What does your character do to relax and forget about the world or wish they had studied more in school?

Mannerisms: Mannerisms are an excellent way to show personality or past experiences. They could be anything from how a person shows emotion to addictions to posture to things they may be conscious about such as smoking when annoyed or chewing on their lip as they think.
Now that you have a good ideas about what formed your character you can explain your character’s personality and what its self image is.

Where will your character be at the end of your book or series? It’s always good to have a destination in mind as your story progresses. Although the destination may change as your character develops throughout your story, it should still be reflected in your character profile.