The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

For the short term, I have some time off right now, and have completed a new short story for a collaborative anthology based on my Singularity Diner concept. I’m going to get a few more things taken care of and I’ll be in a good position to move forward again with all of the blogs, podcasts and projects. Would anyone prefer to get everything in one feed? All of the podcasts and writing? I could arrange for that to happen.

Next on the agenda, I have to do a mix-down of “Tev” for the Horror Addicts podcast (thanks to PC Haring for the fast voice recording). I have some essays to upload and record, and I’m finishing up re-writes on The Hidden. Then I move onto Inside, The Singualrity, The End of the World Times, and Walter.

Right now, I’m looking around, and seeing an industry in decline. Publishers are hurting, magazines are declining, and for a writer like me who is trying to break in, it’s looking more and more difficult. I’m going to spend some time thinking about this, but I want to market things a little differently. I would rather get my short stories out to as many people as possible than have them in a submissions queue for months or years. Isn’t that really the point? I’d rather have community than scant dollars, and I’d feel far closer to my audience. Nobody makes a living at short stories anymore, magazines are cutting back on how many they publish, how many issues they are publishing, some sci-fi outlets don’t even publish fiction at all anymore.I have to call out Escape Pod and Pseudopod a little on this one. They have probably the largest following of any of the new media magazines out there, and put out a new story every week, sometimes more, and they seem to do more reprint material than any first-run material. I often hear that a piece was first printed in a magazine in 2002, for instance. That’s a six year old story. In science fiction, genres have come and gone since then. On Pseudopod, I heard a story last week that was plot point for plot point, a throw away excercise from Stephen King’s “On Writing”. Is this really advancing us anywhere? Is this building a new market? Taking the place of the old?

Maybe I need to start a magazine site. Maybe I need to get my stuff up here, and at goodreads.com, and other places just to get my name and work out there. Isn’t that a more direct route to people, a more direct route to following? The down side is that I’m just some other putz putting things up on a site, and I have no professional editors selecting me for their publications. Maybe I should just submit to on-line magazines, with their ability to turn around a story faster, and have no printing costs. That would certainly shorten the times spent in submissions hell.

Maybe I should look at Michael Mennega’s model of offering things for download in e-book form for a slight fee. I need to eat, and my day job sure isn’t paying well enough right now.

What’s my goal? to sell short stories? I don’t really think so. To sell the novel? Closer. To get an agent? That is probably the best thing I could do. In the time frame I’d like to do it in, I won’t even have my first round of submissions back from a print magazine. But if I could say that my stories are up in so many places, being read by so many people, I can demonstrate that I’m very actively promoting myself, which is really probably more important than a couple sales, assuming my novels are good enough to be picked up by an agent, at least more important than having a couple of credits to my name.

This I have to consider. It isn’t the traditional proffesional route, I know, but what would be more effective right now? I’ve never succeeded in doing things the traditional way, and I seem to be doing really well with social media. Maybe that’s just my track. As I consider this, if you could leave in comments some good on-line venues, both public and magazine type venues, I’d appreciate it. I know of goodreads and scribd (my scale book is getting a lot of attention there). Know there’s a couple of good mags that are SF on line, but I don’t know of any horror or fantasy specific magazines. Haven’t done any looking.

As far as the future of here, I’m planning more diary types of entries, and more fiction will come up here soon. I’ll keep you posted on everything else.

Go directly to the other parts of the essay:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Film

Part 3: Theater

Part 4: 4 Act Teleplay

Part 5: Aristotle

Part 6: Wrap up

This is part two of notes from a planned podcast called The Compulsive Writer’s Support Group. It will be available on my official website, www.mindofbryan.com, as well as via a link here. In this section I’m going to talk about the three-act structure of film. I believe this might be a good way to give structure to a novel, especially a shorter Nanowrimo sized novel.

Screenwriters and filmmakers employ a couple different structures: acts and reels. These are simultaneous structures, and I’m much more used to thinking in acts.

In terms of reels, let’s imagine that every movie is 90-120 minutes. This number works for most films. There is a physical limit to how much film we can load onto a projector, and that’s something like 20 minutes. That is a reel. I hear reels being used more in pitching a movie, and producers like to hear very significant things about the first reel, explosions, car chases, a body, whatever really gets the action going. Most acts wind up being two reels in length. If we think about it, most movies have a very significant plot point 15-20 minutes in. Maybe this is a good number for the average movie viewer, the point where we make a decision whether this movie is worth another hour or so, and so we put something major here, just to keep the viewer interested. After this point, we’ve got them.I don’t think we can as writers of novels think in reels, but there are lessons to be learned in the reel. First, the inciting incident needs to come early. There is no better way to lose readers than to bog them down with exposition early. Second, as a smaller division of time, we can think about whether we have the right balance of action, story, character development and plot for a given breakdown of time or pages.

Let’s move on to acts.

There are almost invariably three acts to every screenplay. I suppose you could make a case that Brazil has a fourth act tacked on, and there might be others, but this is the exception to the rule. Acts can be thought of in terms of action, or they can be thought of thematically, or you can think about them as they apply to a character’s development. Thinking about one will often lead you to the others, or you can think of them in conjunction. If you want some support for the theory of a fractal story structure, a film script has three acts, and larger stories that are written at one time are most often trilogies.

There are basic standards for what each act does, however, and knowing them gives us our story’s main structure. Act One is introduction. It introduces the world, the characters, the relationships of those characters, and the problem. Act two is complication. We put more obstacles in front of our hero. Act three is resolution.

Once I have thought about those, I’ll come up with actions and themes to lay over them.

So let’s look at our standard model, Star Wars, for some structural analysis. In terms of on screen actions, the first act of Star Wars establishes the entire series. Since we have a three-fold plot (Empire, Rebellion and Force) we have three main story lines in each act. In act one, Leia gets captured, which in this case represents both the Empire and Rebellion storyline. The Force reaches out in the form of two droids who bring the secret plans to Luke and Obiwan. We meet Han and Chewie, and we escape from Tatooine. We end the act with Luke beginning his training in the Force, and the destruction of Alderaan. I choose this point because it brings us to see the larger conflict, back to the Rebellion and the Empire, and we see just what is at stake. Up to this point, the conflict is hinted at, but not fully elucidated. This keeps the viewer interested in something that was at the time a very foreign idea, and through what is kind of dull in many respects, even though it is necessary storytelling. Read the rest of this entry »