Details and Minimilism

Screenplays are a study in minimalism. You have a brief slug to set up the scene, dialogue to create the mood, and very few physical actions to reinforce it all. The cardinal rule is, “Don’t tell the actor, director, cinematographer, editor, grip, or even the sandwich boy what to do”. Of course, you really are telling them what to do. It’s your job. You just have to be subtle about it.

I recently decided that because I am simply lacking focus on my novel right now, I would turn one of my old screenplays into a novella. I figure it will be good to have for promotional purposes down the line and this way at least I’m writing something. I started off with the notion that I could keep it really minimal, but I’m finding more and more that it simply won’t work that way.

I’ve never been one for intense world- building and detail over-sharing. I’ve been told I’m a pretty clean writer. However, in a novel, unlike a screenplay, I need to specify what kind of car the hero drives, what color the heroine’s hair is, and where exactly the desk is in the room. I need to let the reader follow the character’s movements through their world. If I can’t build a picture, the book doesn’t come alive.

It’s been fun so far, filing in the little details and discovering just how much more information I’m going to need in this story. It’s quickly ballooning up to the right number of pages. The only problem is that character motivations must be explored more than in the original screenplay and that is difficult to balance with the ambiguity that must remain for the mystery to work. Oh, and the whole reason I’m writing this is that I’m currently completely stuck on a scene of a romantic nature. I hate writing those and this is pretty much the king of all awkward make-out sessions.

 I think it’s a foregone conclusion that too many or too few details will sink a novel, but how do you find your balance?

POV and Narrative Voice

The summer when I was fifteen, I was obsessed with Robert Ludlum. I never read the Bourne novels, oddly enough. It was his earlier novels, purchased for a quarter a piece at a thrift store that caught me. Having devoured three of his books in as many weeks, I went to an actual book store to buy a fourth. I can’t remember the name of it now, but I flipped it open with eager anticipation. Using my “give a novel 100 pages before you give up on it” rule, I plodded through the messy opening acts. Not only was it a bad book, but I was convinced within twenty pages that it wasn’t Robert Ludlum at all. Once my required pages were up, I did a quick internet search and found that it was, in fact, not Robert Ludlum but a ghost writer.

Authors like Ludlum, Stephen King, and (to cite an entirely different genre) Debbie MacComber have recognizable narrative voices. The same thing happened to me recently with King, and I think it was five pages before I realized that I was not reading his work. To me, that’s impressive, not because I’m a great reader, but because these writers have such a strong platform/market/brand/narration, whatever you want to call it, that a reader can tell almost instantly when it is not them.

So, how does an aspiring writer, sitting in her bedroom wearing pajamas after work hope to accomplish the same thing? Narration is a tricky business. Gone are the days when heavy-handed treatment of prose was in vogue. Writers these days don’t have the luxury of the witty and introspective asides that made Austen, Dickens, and Twain the oft-quote authors they are now. Instead, we are there without being noticeable. We wear black to the party instead of scarlet. However, we are still at the party. In fact, we are the host.

I think a great deal of this demands a reliance on instinct. We think and speak in our own way and that rolls over to our writing. However, once we have a “style” we must begin to put in an effort to control and maintain it. In my first novel, which was written in third person omniscient, I had a couple of long passages of beautiful, descriptive prose which had to be cut because it just didn’t work with the rest of the narrative. Likewise, in my more recent novel, I sometimes became too authoritative when the novel was written from the perspective of a meek, insecure heroine. I’ve just started my third book and I’m having a deal of a time tempering my own voice with that of the first person POV of the hero. It will work out, I’m convinced, but it’s difficult right now.

As an interesting aside, most of the people who didn’t know me and edited my first book, a medieval action/adventure, were convinced I was a man. They were shocked to find an eighteen year old girl behind the prose. Why I apparently write like a man is anybody’s guess, but nobody complained, so I don’t worry about it.

As a writer, how have you found your voice? Or, if you write in first person, how do you balance that with your voice?   

Could John Wayne be Famous Today?

Or Modern Ideals in Historical Fiction

John Wayne was the ultimate man’s man. He could wrangle a thousand head of cattle alone, draw quicker than any man in the west, out gamble his foes, and set ladies’ hearts aflutter all with a steely gaze and a laconic manner. He was Hollywood’s manifestation of a nation’s ideals of what a man should be and modern audiences still vote him one of the top 10 favorite actors every year. He is an institution. Imagine, though, if John Wayne was a young man now and Hollywood was pushing him at us in 2011 the same way that they pushed him in the Golden Age.

            Disaster.

            A modern film could never portray its hero dragging his wife brutishly through a muddy field as Wayne did in The Quiet Man. Imagine if the summer’s big blockbuster showed its hero spanking his wife with a coal shovel as Wayne did in McClintock. I think Hollywood would not only have created the biggest flop of all time (assuming that this last was not a bondage film because pop culture LOVES that sort of thing) but many people would be losing their jobs in a hurry and young John Wayne would be the symbol of the enemy of a social crusade.

            However, we continue to watch these old movies. We continue to love John Wayne. This brings me to my query: how much of old attitudes is a modern audience willing to tolerate?

            I write historical fiction, so this question is of particular interest to me. How do I write a story at least semi-realistically set in the 1400’s or the 1100’s while still garnering audience empathy for my characters? If I made my heroes bigots, racists, and sexists, nobody would like them. However, that is just what the majority of men would have been in those times. They weren’t necessarily evil men. They were products of their time, just as we are products of ours. I am convinced that future generations will look back on us and think how ignorant we were and how wrong and damaging some of the institutions that drive our culture were.  

            I’ve veered from my topic, though. How do I create an atmosphere where my female characters are respected so as not to alienate modern women, but where they are not running around in breeches, shooting guns, and swearing, making themselves completely unbelievable and thereby causing my readers to set down the books as I have done with so many novel? I suppose that one device that I and many others writers rely on is putting old-fashioned notions into the heads of supporting characters, but not as much in the main characters. This creates an atmosphere of reality, while allowing sympathy with the hero and heroine.

            One instance in my latest novel that I have greatly debated in my own mind is a line toward the end, where my hero tells his wife (and I am abridging this here), “It’s different for you. You are a woman. Women are meant to be protected.” A modern woman might rankle at this notion, but it is quite a natural one to the era and to this particular character. His wife does not argue the idea with him, further nailing shut the coffin I have created for myself. Have I insulted my readers? I don’t know, but I cannot write characters so modern that it pulls one out of the setting.

            This brings me back to John Wayne. If men and women can still watch his movies and overlook the differences between the heroes that he portrayed and, say, Edward Cullen, can they overlook the relatively few instances where I have chosen history over our own times? It’s a delicate balance. Maybe if Wayne’s movies weren’t so darn entertaining nobody would watch them. Maybe if a part of our society was not still rooted in the past, nobody would watch them. I don’t know.

            What I do know is that I can drown out the screaming feminist in my mind and enjoy watching The Quiet Man. Can you?   



Introduction

Hello All!

Welcome to a brand new blog by a brand new author. As I write this, my contacts in the internet world are pretty slim, but I hope to make plenty of new friends and network, network, network.

So, since I can't talk about you and this is an introduction, let me tell you a little about myself. When I was sixteen I decided that I could write a novel. After all, other people do it all the time and if Stephen King and J.K. Rowling could be millionaires, why couldn't I? Ah... the ignorance / arrogance of youth. But, I did it! It took me two years to get a first rough (very, very rough) draft. A year of editing followed. Then there was the year of queries. I can proudly show off thirty-two rejections letters. Bruised, but not broken eh? Hope appeared about eight months ago when I got this close to a deal with Penguin, but it fell apart.

What had I been doing in the meantime? Writing, of course. I now have a catalogue of two historical fiction novels and five screenplays. Did I forget to mention that I wanted to be a screenwriter for a while? Well, I'm kind of over that now. What I do want to do is learn everything there is to know about self publishing, e-books, and social media. My goal is that by this time next year, I can release my first novel in paperback and in ebook format.

We mustn't talk buisness all the time, though. You can expect book reviews, films reviews, random rants about things that annoy me, contests, and maybe even some lolcats over the next year while you follow me on my path to publication.

I think we're in for a good ride. If you're a writer extraordinaire with advice, a marketing guru with a tip, or if you just love costume drama and romance as much as I do, comment. As much as I could talk to myself all day (and sometimes do) I'd love a chat.