Writing - part x881, Writing a Novel, Changing World and Still Cooking

6 June 2019, Writing - part x881, Writing a Novel, Changing World and Still Cooking

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 s 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 and warfare

16. Transportation

17. Communication

18. Writing 

Food in history is one of my most favorite topics.  The reason is that most people have no clue.  We all assume the worldview of our event horizon.  The real world of food—that is what people ate is a significant marker in human history.  Why can’t the writers get it right?

First of all, you need to look at how we cook and what we cook.  What are the basic foods, and how are they cooked?  Let’s make a list:

1.     Meat

2.     Fruits and vegetables

3.     Grains

4.     Milk

5.     Water based stuff

Methods of cooking:

1.     Baking

2.     Broiling

3.     Boiling

4.     Frying

So, now I have a cutting tool, fire, and a non-fire safe containers.  I can eat raw meat, broiled meat, dried meat, raw, broiled, and fermented fruits and vegetables.  This wouldn’t excite a French chef, but it’s a start.  There is a bit of a problem, you don’t get that much carbohydrates from meat, fruit, and vegetables.  Plenty of protein, fat, and roughage, but roughage is completely empty of calories—it’s indigestible.

As a historian and a writer, you should ask how long did this continue.  The answer to this is simple, basically until agriculture and after depending on the type of society. 

In the beginning were hunter gatherers.  Then with the domestication of animals there were herdsmen.  About the same time or a little later came agriculture with the domestication of wild grains.  All beginning agriculture started in alluvial plains.  The reason for this is soil depletion.  Without a seasonally flooding river bed, the soil becomes depleted and the people starve.  When you mixed animal domestication with agriculture, suddenly people could move agriculture outside of alluvial plains.  This is usually tied to the end of chariot warfare in the 1000 to 1500 BC era.  The reason was that militaries had bunches of horses that no one could ride, and governments need to get rid of them.  That resulted in animal waste being used for fertilizer and the invention of the animal drawn plow.  There is more to this story, but we’ll look at it in warfare.

People moving into agriculture need to stop moving.  This is when people began to congregate in cities.  The predecessor to agriculture is the domestication of wild grains.  Grains are a substantial source of carbohydrates.  To people fighting for calories, this is significant.  To get to the use of grains as a food takes a leap in culinary and human invention.  We do know that the earliest use of grains is through roasting.  The problem with grains is you have to process them somewhat to get to the kernel.  You have to process large amounts to get the calories you want, and you have to find a way to crack the kernels.  You need to crack the kernels to allow the body’s digestive system to get to the carbohydrates.  The meat of the kernel is digestible, the outside is not.  This is why you have to process and crack it.  Early people used flat stones next to a fire to roast kernels and ate them.  If this sounds inefficient, it is, but it was apparently the major means of grain use for a long time.  We see this means used in the Bible in the book of Ruth.  Obviously, people found a more efficient means of cracking grain—likely they began using ovens.

An oven isn’t far from a flat rock next to a fire.  You naturally want to get the fire all around the grain, so you put rocks around the grain, but a flat rock in the middle of a fire with rocks all around it is very inconvenient.  If you put the fire under the rocks and then the rocks all around the top, you have an oven.  If you build this out of mud, you have a more permanent structure that doesn’t require the right size and shape of rocks, but that comes later.  The big deal is that ovens were likely first developed to crack grain.  They could also be used to bake meat along with fruits and vegetables, but there is less evidence for this use until the invention of the fire safe container.  Meat and fruits and vegetables in an oven ends to make a mess—it was more important to crack grain for consumption.  Then someone got the idea that they could make flour from the cracked grain.

Who knows where this idea came from, but it was a great one.  The problem initially was milling the grain.  To mill grain you have to crush it.  You would further like to remove the husks.  In the beginning, roasting and then crushing was the thing, but early agricultural people realized that if they could crush the dried grain, they could more efficiently produce flour.  We still haven’t written about that flour.  In any case, you have to make sure your grain is dry before milling—and you have to have a means of crushing the grain.  Even today, you see primitive agricultural societies using stone mortars and pestles to crush grain.  This isn’t very efficient, but it works.  Most grain is dried today but not roasted.  Primitive people willow and dry it in the sun.  In more advanced societies obviously heating is accomplished by ovens.  The problem with roasting is the resulting taste of the flour. 

Now, we have flour.  To get there, we have a cutting tool, fire, a non-fire safe containers, ovens, and a mortar and pestle.  I can eat raw meat, broiled meat, dried meat, raw, broiled, and fermented fruits and vegetables, roasted or baked of all these things (kind of), and I can make flour.  What can you do with flour?                     

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