Writing - part x815, Writing a Novel, Changing World and Changes in Writing

1 April 2019, Writing - part x815, Writing a Novel, Changing World and Changes in Writing

Announcement: Delay, my new novels can be seen on the internet, but my primary publisher has gone out of business—they couldn’t succeed in the past business and publishing environment.  I'll keep you informed, but I need a new publisher.  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 29^th novel, working title, Detective, potential title Blue Rose: Enchantment and the Detective.  The theme statement is: 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.  

Here is the cover proposal for Blue Rose: Enchantment and the Detective. 

Cover Proposal

The most important scene in any novel is the initial scene, but eventually, you have to move to the rising action. I am continuing to write on my 30^th novel, working title Red Sonja.  I finished my 29^th novel, working title Detective.  I’m planning to start on number 31, working title Shifter. 

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 30:  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 31:  Deirdre and Sorcha are redirected to French finishing school where they discover difficult mysteries, people, and events. 

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

          

Today:  Why don’t we go back to the basics and just writing a novel?  I can tell you what I do, and show you how I go about putting a novel together.  We can start with developing an idea then move into the details of the writing. 

To start a novel, I picture an initial scene.  I may start from a protagonist or just launch into mental development of an initial scene.  I get the idea for an initial scene from all kinds of sources.  To help get the creative juices flowing, let’s look at the initial scene. 

1.     Meeting between the protagonist and the antagonist or the protagonist’s helper

2.     Action point in the plot

3.     Buildup to an exciting scene

4.     Indirect introduction of the protagonist

The protagonist is the novel and the initial scene.  If you look at the four basic types of initial scenes, you see the reflection of the protagonist in each one.  If you noticed my examples yesterday, I expressed the scene idea, but none were completely independent of the protagonist.  Indeed, in most cases, I get an idea with a protagonist.  The protagonist is incomplete, but a sketch to begin with.  You can start with a protagonist, but in my opinion, as we see above, the protagonist is never completely independent from the initial scene.  As the ideas above imply, we can start with the characters, specifically the protagonist, antagonist or protagonist’s helper, and develop an initial scene. 

Let’s look at a subject that is really ignored in the modern era.  I’m not certain how much this can help your current writing.  I would argue that theoretically, this subject can really help those who write historical and futuristic fiction.  It depends on how your write your historical and futuristic fiction.  There are two ways to write historical fiction—let’s look at this.

The first and most common way to write historical fiction is to write a novel that projects modern ideas and history as historical ideas and history.  In other words to present modern ideas and historical ideas as the same.  I think this is perhaps the most egregious and perverse means of presenting a false view of history.  The author is either completely ignorant of the past, is intentionally attempting to education people in a false view of history, or both.  The real historical world is very different both culturally and socially from our current world.  The true author attempts to convey this in historical writing.

The second and less common means of historical writing is to actually incorporate the past into a novel to convey the actual way people thought and acted in the past.  This approach actually goes back into time to give a complete view of the way the people thought and acted.  To this end, let’s look at how the world changed and how people thought in the past.  This is more of a historical look at the world for the purpose of understanding how the world worked in the past and how people thought and acted.  We’ll use historical information to see what concerned affected their lives. Here is a list of potential issues.  We’ll look at them in detail:

1.   Vocabulary

2.   Ideas

3.   Social construction

4.   Culture

5.   Politics

6.   History

7.   Language

8.   Common knowledge

9.   Common sense

10. Reflected culture

11. Reflected history

12. Reflected society

13. Truth

14. Food

15. Weapons

16. Transportation

17. Communication

18. Writing 

Literacy brought about perhaps the greatest change in thought.  You can see that directly out of literacy, the ancient Greeks invented the three ways to know truth.  We use these ideas to record history, continue rule of law, create science and technology, develop mathematics and philosophy, and basically progress human invention and society.  There is much more that came out of literacy.

Writing as mnemonics was pretty much the rule until the availability and number of books, scrolls, and letters began to increase.  Slaves were always expensive and people are always looking for ways to decrease costs and improve efficiency.  Ancient writing realized there was an issue and even knew how to solve it.  In the late 200s to 300s AD and perhaps earlier Greek writings for teaching children began to be produced with spaces between the words.  This was an innovation that took the literary world by storm.  With the availability of less expensive paper (papyrus) and inks and the invention of slates and chalk, spaces between words allowed people to read documents without memorization and without book slaves.  The ideas were widely applied, but still not well received—they were for children and the inexperienced, but you didn’t need a book slave.  Anyone who could read, could pick up such a document and make heads and tails of it.  Thus the first great innovation and the first great movement to the modern concept of reading.

I’ll let you in on some obvious but not well known ideas from the age of ancient literature.  First, no one read mentally.  All reading was done out loud.  Second, reading was not an individual action.  Reading was accomplished out loud usually for a group or audience. It was akin to the reading of the Torah or Tanakh scroll in a synagogue.  Scrolls, codexes, and letters were considered so valuable, they were given a high standing in society and cultures.  The idea of the silent monk reading a scroll would be completely out of character for the ancient world.  Third, anything worth writing down was considered valuable.  This is why Paul in his letters consistently recommends all writing and not just Jewish or Greek religious writing.  The next stages of writing came directly out of the transition from mnemonics to actual writing that could be read cold.

The next step was to regain some of the phrasing, chunks of ideas, and emphasis from the writing.  This meant breaking the writing into not just words, but also phrases (sentences), blocks of thought (paragraphs), and whole ideas (chapters).  It actually started with chapters and moved the other way.  The inventors were trying to gather the method of the recitation with the reading.  This is called punctuation.  However, there was a very difficult problem with Greek and Hebrew and this new method.

Ancient Greek is always written as a logos (logical argument) to an unstated telos (conclusion).  Breaks of phrasing and blocks of ideas don’t fit ancient Greek at all.  The best example is the philosophical dialogs or the Greek plays.  Both a dialog and a play move forward until the finish.  The dialogs are logical arguments to the unstated telos (conclusion).  The plays are logical constructions to the unstated telos (conclusion).  This is very different than our method for writing and the Latin method for writing.  We and the Romans write in the style of introduction, body, and stated conclusion.  This kind of method was completely foreign to the Greeks…and it is safe to say, although the Romans venerated the Greeks for many things, they just couldn’t fully grasp the Greek way of writing.  For example, the Greek Aesop’s Fables in Greek don’t have any moral written down at all.  An Aesop’s Fable is a logos to telos, and the conclusion is unstated.  The Romans added the morals to make sure the readers didn’t miss it and because that was their style of writing.  A good Greek would have never been caught dead stating a conclusion.  This is why so many of the Greek documents seem so foreign to us—they are not the style of writing we are used to.  Hebrew is similar.

Ancient Hebrew is not written in a logos to telos style—it is written in a synopsis, body style.  Ancient Hebrew first gives you a synopsis of the contents and then the body of the contents.  Thus for both Greek and Hebrew, we have styles of writing that are confounding to cultures and people who are not used to it.  You can’t read a Greek or Hebrew document translated into English or Latin for that matter and expect to fully comprehend the document especially when the phrasing, ideas, and punctuation for the original are unknown.  Unknown because they only existed in the mnemonics memorized version and no one today knows exactly how they were understood at the time.  That doesn’t mean we can’t tease the meanings from them, but it should tell you that such a work of translation is very difficult and that understanding of ancient Greek and Hebrew documents requires significant refocusing of your mind and thinking.  Here’s my favorite catchphrase: history is never a bumper sticker.  

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  

fiction, theme, plot, story, storyline, character development, scene, setting, conversation, novel, book, writing, information, study, marketing, tension, release, creative, idea, logic