Writing - part x374, Novel Form, A New Novel, Plot and Climax from the Initial Scene, Aksinya

15 January 2018, Writing - part x374, Novel Form, A New Novel, Plot and Climax from the Initial Scene, Aksinya

Announcement: Delay, my new novels can be seen on the internet, but the publisher has delayed all their fiction output due to the economy.  I'll keep you informed.  More information can be found at www.ancientlight.com.  Check out my novels--I think you'll really enjoy them.

Introduction: I wrote the novel Aksinya: Enchantment and the Daemon. This was my 21st novel and through this blog, I gave you the entire novel in installments that included commentary on the writing. In the commentary, in addition to other general information on writing, I explained, how the novel was constructed, the metaphors and symbols in it, the writing techniques and tricks I used, and the way I built the scenes. You can look back through this blog and read the entire novel beginning with http://www.pilotlion.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-novel-part-3-girl-and-demon.html.

I'm using this novel as an example of how I produce, market, and eventually (we hope) get a novel published. I'll keep you informed along the way.

Today's Blog: To see the steps in the publication process, visit my writing website http://www.ldalford.com/ and select "production schedule," you will be sent to http://www.sisteroflight.com/.

The four plus one basic rules I employ when writing:

1. Don't confuse your readers.

2. Entertain your readers.

3. Ground your readers in the writing.

4. Don't show (or tell) everything.

     4a. Show what can be seen, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted on the stage of the novel.

5. Immerse yourself in the world of your writing.

These are the steps I use to write a novel including the five discrete parts of a novel:

1.      Design the initial scene

2.      Develop a theme statement (initial setting, protagonist, protagonist’s helper or antagonist, action statement)

a.       Research as required

b.      Develop the initial setting

c.       Develop the characters

d.      Identify the telic flaw (internal and external)

3.      Write the initial scene (identify the output: implied setting, implied characters, implied action movement)

4.      Write the next scene(s) to the climax (rising action)

5.      Write the climax scene

6.      Write the falling action scene(s)

7.      Write the dénouement scene

I finished writing my 28^th novel, working title, School, potential title Deirdre: Enchantment and the School.  The theme statement is: Sorcha, the abandoned child of an Unseelie and a human, secretly attends Wycombe Abbey girls’ school where she meets the problem child Deirdre and is redeemed.  

Here is the cover proposal for Deirdre: Enchantment and the School. 

Cover Proposal

The most important scene in any novel is the initial scene, but eventually, you have to move to the rising action. I continued writing my 29^th novel, working title Red Sonja.  I finished my 28^th novel, working title School.  If you noticed, I started on number 28, but finished number 29 (in the starting sequence—it’s actually higher than that).  I adjusted the numbering.  I do keep everything clear in my records. 

How to begin a novel.  Number one thought, we need an entertaining idea.  I usually encapsulate such an idea with a theme statement.  Since I’m writing a new novel, we need a new theme statement.  Here is an initial cut.

For novel 29:  Red Sonja, a Soviet spy, infiltrates the X-plane programs at Edwards AFB as a test pilot’s administrative clerk, learns about freedom, and is redeemed.

For novel 30:  Lady Azure Rose Wishart, the Chancellor of the Fae, supernatural detective, and all around dangerous girl, finds love, solves cases, breaks heads, and plays golf.

This is the classical form for writing a successful novel:

1.      Design the initial scene

2.      Develop a theme statement (initial setting, protagonist, protagonist’s helper or antagonist, action statement)

a.       Research as required

b.      Develop the initial setting

c.       Develop the characters (protagonist, antagonist, and optionally the protagonist’s helper)

d.      Identify the telic flaw of the protagonist (internal and external)

3.      Write the initial scene (identify the output: implied setting, implied characters, implied action movement)

4.      Write the next scene(s) to the climax (rising action)

5.      Write the climax scene

6.      Write the falling action scene(s)

7.      Write the dénouement scene

              

The protagonist and the telic flaw are tied permanently together.  The novel plot is completely dependent on the protagonist and the protagonist’s telic flaw.  They are inseparable.  This is likely the most critical concept about any normal (classical) form novel. 

Here are the parts of a normal (classical) novel:

1.      The Initial scene (identify the output: implied setting, implied characters, implied action movement)

2.      The Rising action scenes

3.      The Climax scene

4.      The Falling action scene(s)

5.      The Dénouement scene

             

So, how do you write a rich and powerful initial scene?  Let’s start from a theme statement.  Here is an example from my latest novel:

The theme statement for Deirdre: Enchantment and the School is: Sorcha, the abandoned child of an Unseelie and a human, secretly attends Wycombe Abbey girls’ school where she meets the problem child Deirdre and is redeemed.

Here is the scene development outline:

1. Scene input (comes from the previous scene output or is an initial scene)

2. Write the scene setting (place, time, stuff, and characters)

3. Imagine the output, creative elements, plot, telic flaw resolution (climax) and develop the tension and release.

4. Write the scene using the output and creative elements to build the tension.

5. Write the release

6. Write the kicker

          

If you have the characters (protagonist, protagonist’s helper, and antagonist), the initial setting, the telic flaw (from the protagonist), a plot idea, the theme action, then you are ready to write the initial scene.  I would state that since you have a protagonist, the telic flaw, a plot idea, and the theme action, you have about everything—what you might be lacking is the tension and release cycle in your scenes.

With a protagonist, a telic flaw, a theme statement, and an initial setting, I’m ready to begin a novel.  I’ll move to the telic flaw for the novel.  Since I am going to provide the first chapter as a teaser any way, I might as well show you the initial scene.

Here is the theme statement as a reminder:

Lady Azure Rose Wishart, the Chancellor of the Fae, supernatural detective, and all around dangerous girl, finds love, solves cases, breaks heads, and plays golf.

With a single scene—the initial scene (along with the characters, setting, and the telic flaw), you have enough to write an entire novel.  This was the wonderful discovery I made by the time I wrote my eighth novel. 

Let me pass on some examples.  My Aegypt (Ancient Light) novels were easy to write using the way I described.  That’s because they all had a historical premise tied to historical events.  The resolution and climax just fit into the historical events.  That’s part of the power of writing and authorship.  The novels that were a little more problematic, but still easy, are my Enchantment novels.  Let me point out a little about each one.  I’ll continue with Aksinya: Enchantment and the Daemon.

By Aksinya, I’d completely figured it out.  The initial scene begins with Aksinya invoking a demon from hell.  This is about as exciting a scene as you might imagine.  The protagonist, Aksinya, was already developed.  I took a long time to name, design, build up her history, her parents, her background.  The research was significant and took a while.  Aksinya herself was a very complex and nuanced character, but her background and family tree were even more complex.  I needed to fit together real historical figures and people to populate this novel.  Most of them are dead now either through age or the Bolshevik revolution. 

This brings us to the setting.  This required a large amount of research.  I needed a place and time fixed in history that fit the characters I wanted to use.  So all the elements of the history, people, and setting had to come together because I wanted my readers to be able to recognize all the historical elements.  Much of Aksinya as a novel depends on the history of the time.

Here is a little of the initial scene:

      The dank stone room was filled with shadows. Every corner oozed darkness. Within a pentagram that was encompassed by a circle stood a slight young woman. Fat yellow beeftallow candles marked the points of the pentagram and weakly illuminated only the area around her. A brazier of incense filled the room with the scent of myrrh along with an underlying smell that was indeterminate, but left a taste of blood in the mouth. The woman was dressed in a black gown that was much too large for her. Beautiful hand made lace cascaded down the front of the dress and decorated the sleeves. Thick velvet competed with black satin to form a perfect attire to greet a Tsar, but certainly not a commissar. The gown fell loosely away from the woman’s thin chest and small breasts. It looked odd draped on her body, like a girl playing dress-up from her mother’s closet. But this gown obviously came from the closet of a princess.

      Aksinya, the woman within the pentagram, squinted across the dark cellar. She was barely eighteen and much too thin for her age. She was petit; that was a polite way of saying small. And underdeveloped, that was a polite way of saying she didn’t yet appear much like a woman. Aksinya’s hair was dark brown and silky and beautiful, bound up in a long braid, but her face was plain and Russian, so Russian. Her voice was soft and sometimes too shrill. When she was excited it rose in strength and pitch, so she never sounded very mature or well mannered.

      Aksinya stood in the middle of the pentagram. She held a book in one hand, and the bodice of the dress in the other. It kept falling away from her chest and although there was no one to see, she felt uncomfortable and underdressed when it did. She squinted across the cellar again and focused back on the book. She knew the words and the pictures in the book by heart. She had memorized them long ago, but still she sought them like an anchor against the storm she was about to release. In the dark—she hadn’t thought about how dark it would be, she could barely read the text. Finally, she took up an extra taper from the floor and lit it from the closest candle.

      She had to hold the taper in one hand and the book in the other, which almost completely revealed her chest, but that couldn’t be helped now.

      Aksinya read from the book. The words weren’t Russian, her mother tongue, and they weren’t the French of the Russian Court. They weren’t the Greek their priest pounded daily into her head. The language was Latin. She had studied it secretly for years. She had memorized all the Latin books she had found hidden in the unused guesthouse at the back of the estate. With nothing else to do, she had spent every free moment teasing out the secrets of these books for just this moment. Aksinya was tired of being nothing and being helpless. She intended from this moment forward to never be helpless again.

      She read the ponderous Latin from her book. The cover was black, and a pentagram was worked into the ancient leather. The book was old, ancient. The pages were yellowed with age. In spite of that, the pictures and words were perfectly preserved as if time inside it had been slowed to a stop. The words of the book were dark and evil. Aksinya knew them well. She knew their meanings. She forced her lips to form them, but this wasn’t the first time she had forced her lips to make these dark words. For years and years she spoke them. She manipulated the world through them. She made the world obey her with these ancient words. She let her mind flow to the word—sorcery. Aksinya made magic. She had taught herself from the dark books she found, and here and now, she made the most horrible of magic.

      Her words called out an entreaty. She beckoned as gently and as enticingly as she could. She spoke carefully and pronounced the words exactly. She learned that early. She had a scar on her leg and cheek that had come from these dark words not pronounced correctly. She would not make that mistake again.  

This is the tension buildup in the initial scene and then we have a demon fully growed.  Here’s my point, in a novel with this type of initial scene, we are talking about hauling around a demon from the rising action to the climax and finally the falling action.  We know the possible ends:  the demon kills our protagonist or the protagonist gets rid of her personal demon.  The question is how do we get from one to the other.  This is the plot and the complexity of the writing.  There is all kinds of stuff we can put into the plot to get from the evocation of the demon to the end of the demon. 

When I first wrote the initial scene, I had no idea where I was going except to the end of the demon.  I did know I wanted to write an semi-allegory of the book of Tobit.  I used the demon from Tobit and the circumstances were kind of similar. 

I wrote the novel from the initial scene using the scene development method I listed above.  You can read this novel from this blog or my repost blog.  You will find annotations about the novel at both places.  This is my most documented novel.  

More tomorrow.

For more information, you can visit my author site http://www.ldalford.com/, and my individual novel websites:

http://www.ancientlight.com/
http://www.aegyptnovel.com/
http://www.centurionnovel.com
http://www.thesecondmission.com/
http://www.theendofhonor.com/
http://www.thefoxshonor.com
http://www.aseasonofhonor.com  

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