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 the notes for the Compulsive Writer’s Support Group for 11-15-08. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, use this link:

http://www.mindofbryan.com/cwsg/feed/podcast/

Writers in general are a curious bunch of people, especially when it comes to another writer’s process. The curiosity is most often centered on outlining versus freewriting, and advice from pros is kind of spotty, and sometimes not all that helpful. I want to give some guidance and some ideas for you.

We can break writers into two different groups, or create a spectrum between these two points. Some writers are completely organic, and some are completely structured. There isn’t anything wrong with either. It’s just an individual way of working. The organic writer has no plan in mind when writing commences, and the path of the piece is discovered in the writing process. The structured writer comes up with a kernel, and may do some early exploration but tends towards finding a plot quickly, creating an outline and writing the way through. I have a tendency to feel that these are two words for the same thing in some ways, but we’ll get to that.

My word of warning is this: if you want to experiment with organic writing and you are a structured writer, you might want to pick a short subject to start with. Any sort of writing is a skill and it takes work to develop not just the skill, but the confidence to push through. A case in point from my own life was in the original writing sessions for The Hidden. We were writing television scripts, and each was 60+ pages of script, which can equate to 75 pages of novella. One of the better episodes was written by Dan Haracz, and he wrote in a very structured way, we talked out the story, had an outline and scene breakdown, and things maybe changed somewhere in the middle, but the structure was viewed as flexible and it all worked out. His next episode he decided to try to let it grow organically, and it fell apart. He wasn’t used to dealing with ideas in disparate parts of the timeline, couldn’t organize thoughts, and just kind of lost the story. I still remember the story, and have it in my head, and will write it soon. I think the failure was that he wasn’t used to writing in this manner, and so organization became an issue, but also that he didn’t have the confidence that he could push through.

I’ll tell you what I do. I’m very organic on most of my short stories. I know at the very most if I take a wrong turn, I’m going to lose 5,000 words, which for me could be a couple days, could be a couple hours. I heard one writer talking recently and he said he writes organically, and the most he’s ever had to throw out was 90,000 words. Gulp. But we have a lesson to be learned here. Don’t be afraid to write the wrong words, or the wrong story. I have had times where I knew a story was wrong, but it wouldn’t go away until I had it written out. The wrong story was a block to the right one. Beginning writers are generally afraid to set down the wrong thing, or to throw away stuff they’ve set down. Pro writers will tell you that this is quite common, an accepted part of the trade. Don’t fear it. Every word that you write makes you a better writer. Every word you don’t write puts you farther from being a good writer.

Now, I have a lot of stories floating around in my head, and they all get worked on constantly, and so the organic portion of my process happens without paper and computer. I take notes as things happen, but mostly I wait until a story is ready to be written before I write it. With as many stories as I have, that is possible. A younger writer might not have that, and so the process is much more on paper.

With longer projects, I definitely outline. I start at the beginning and usually have a good idea of where things are going from beginning to end. In fact, a lot of the time, I can’t even outline fast enough for my head. My outlines are a list of scenes with occasional bits of dialog. The descriptions may be 20-250 words, more if they have pieces of what I think will be finished text. For my next book, I think that for an expected 1000+ pages, my outline is going to be 200 pages on its own. I remember mentioning that to a friend, who was currently working on his largest project, twenty five comic pages. It blew him away. Read the rest of this entry »

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 3 in my essays on writing. These will be on a podcast called The Compulsive Writer’s Support Group starting November-ish. You’ll be able to get links to it from here, as well as my site, www.mindofbryan.com.

We can look at other structures from other Mediums as well when we think about giving structure to our pieces. If you have an idea and you have no idea of how to structure it, we can think about things in acts. Giving just this much structure might give the organic writer some better concept of how to outline without interfering with their organic process. One of my degrees is in theatre, and I’m quite glad I did it, because the intense work of analyzing character and creating movements from words on a page is what gave me a good understanding of character, voice and motivation.

Theatre has a number of structures, from Beats to acts. A beat is the smallest structural unit of theatre. The story goes that when modern acting method was brought over to England and the United States by Stanislavski, he wanted to say “bit” but in his thick Russian, it came out as “Beat” and the term stuck. I believe this is a significant structural element that can be used in constructing a book as well. If we write a conversation, any kind of dialogue, we can think of turning points. Any turning point represents a beat. These points can be moments where advantage is gained or lost, information is imparted, a character loses it, or calms down. The entry of a new character almost always signifies a beat change, as does the exit.

When we look at a conversation, we should look at beats, and if things feel aimless, often that is a sign that we wrote a conversation without thinking about the structure of it, likely we spouted a lot of information without thinking about what it meant to either of the characters that said it. Exposition is tough, especially when you have a lot of it, and you feel like you have two people just spouting it off without any real reason for it. We can change that by giving them a reason to say it, give each of them a stake in it. Every beat has a beginning, and a turn. These are my terms, so you might not find them in any other places. Beats can be long or short. The centerpiece of a beat is a motivation, which literally comes down to what is this character trying to accomplish right now? When the answer to that question changes, you have a new beat. These beats are what give a story momentum and direction.

If you look at a conversation, and it feels flat, it is probably worth looking at it, and breaking it down to points where the conversation turns. If it doesn’t turn, or more importantly, turn enough times, it may not be an important conversation, and maybe you could do without it. If there is crucial plot information, you’re probably going to have to work it, to find points where significant development can happen. We as writers can very easily get lost in information, and thinking about what has to make it to the page to get the plot moving, while forgetting about developing our characters for a scene. Thinking about breaking these scenes into beats is maybe the best way to inject that development back in.

Sometimes, a beat breaks with a pause. You know that five minute lull? That is a break in a beat where the author hasn’t written the next beat yet, and that can be a great way to develop a character. If there are pauses while nothing happens, it can indicate contemplation, boredom, any number of isms that make a character tick. Somebody who is socially awkward might let this pauses drop without thinking about it, others may use it as a tool to force the other character into saying something in the uncomfortable silence.

When you string together enough beats, you get a scene. Some plays have scenes, and some don’t. Some just have action for an act and then more for another act, and one of the main elements that will dictate this is setting. One setting, one scene is often the rule. Shakespeare moves things around quite a bit, and so he writes scenes. In Waiting for Godot, Becket has a tree as a setting, and there are no breaks in action, though there are a lot of beats. Scenes are very much like what we have in our books, screenplays or other writing projects. They represent fairly major actions and movements of the story, and may be spelled out, or may be interpreted by the director. Scenes are more widely used at this point in film and books, but scenes are used extensively in theatre with origins before the mid 20th century. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »