Clay Moore posts a quick little description of a way to approach writing your fiction.
What i am proposing is not that you throw out the Chapter system at all. Rather I want you to think of your story as a collection of scenes, as if you were playing out the movie of your story in your head. Each scene can then be completely mapped out. You know who are in the scene, and the goal is for each character in that scene. You get all the pre-think done, and then do the writing. I find that my characters are better behaved.
This scene technique has worked wonders with my own writing. When I have a complicated plot, this technique helps with keeping the plots straight.
Another benefit to this scene based system is that I can see where I am lacking in the book. A character may suddenly appear and I need a scene to introduce that character.
This approach is very similar to how I write my comics.
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Using the Scene writing method with Scrivener
John August is one of the latest to bring up the Bechdel test in his screenwriting blog.
Screenwriters: Think back over the scripts you’ve written, and ask yourself three questions about each one:
- Are there two or more female characters with names?
- Do they talk to each other?
- If they talk to each other, do they talk about something other than a man?
In my own recent stuff, Q-Burger fails, but I think The Winchcombe passes. Barely.
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Women in film
The Rule
A master gives a classroom lecture on story.
I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here—great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively].
This is the B-E axis. B for beginning, E for entropy. Okay. Not every story has that very simple, very pretty shape that even a computer can understand [draws horizontal line extending from middle of G-I axis].
Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick, so start your story up here [indicates top of the G-I axis]. You will see this story over and over again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted. The story is “Man in Hole,” but the story needn’t be about a man or a hole. It’s: somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again [draws line A]. It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers.
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Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard
Layers.com has a nice little article that sums up the problems that the dash and its variants present to the average writer and web folk.
After quotation marks, dashes are the most abused characters in the typographic stable. Dashes have visual, typographical roles as well as grammatical ones. These modest characters fall under the sway of both copy editors and typesetters, and using them correctly depends on knowing a bit of both disciplines. By the end of this article, you’ll be a bona fide dashmeister.
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The Art of Type: Dash away all
A great article from the Slate reviewing John Curran’s Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks.
The contents of the notebooks are as multi-dimensional as their Escher-like structure. They include fully worked-out scenes, historical background, lists of character names, rough maps of imaginary places, stage settings, an idle rebus (the numeral three, a crossed-out eye, and a mouse), and plot ideas that will be recognizable to any Christie fan: “Poirot asks to go down to country—finds a house and various fantastic details,” “Saves her life several times,” “Inquire enquire—both in same letter.” What’s more, in between ominous scraps like “Stabbed through eye with hatpin” and “influenza depression virus—Stolen? Cabinet Minister?” are grocery lists: “Newspapers, toilet paper, salt, pepper …” There was no clean line between Christie’s work life and her family life. She created household ledgers, and scribbled notes to self. (“All away weekend—can we go Thursday Nan.”) Even Christie’s second husband, the archeologist Sir Max Mallowan, used her notebooks. He jotted down calculations. Christie’s daughter Rosalind practiced penmanship, and the whole family kept track of their bridge scores alongside notes like, “Possibilities of poison … cyanide in strawberry … coniine—in capsule?”
Fascinating stuff.
Links
The Mystery of the Messy Notebooks – Why Agatha Christie’s method was utterly deranged.
Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making
