Writing - part x993 Writing a Novel, Modern Reading and Writing

26 September 2019, Writing - part x993 Writing a Novel, Modern Reading and 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 websites 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. Money

16. Weapons and warfare

17. Transportation

18. Communication

19. Writing

20. Education

Fiction did not spring fully armed from the mind of Zeus.  It took a long time for human thought to really wrap around the concept of the empirical world and to realize there are concepts that are created from the minds of humans.

We live in the era of universal education.  The result of this is multifold.  The ultimate problem with universal education is that it is government controlled and does not result in literacy or education.  This is a critical problem for the modern world—or it should be.

The ultimate question for the writer is how does the era of universal education affect reading and writing?  This is a very important question.  It affects the vocabulary you use, the plots you use, the means of expression, and the genres of writing you use.  Then there is the screenplay culture in modern reading and writing.

First off, literature as a genre is dead.  If you look at major publishers this is very obvious, but if you look at the book market, very few novels based on what we usually call literary are accepted or published today.  This is a direct result of universal education, but screenplay mentality or culture has also caused this effect.

Screenplay mentality or culture has come about as a result of movies and television in our society and culture.  The initial result on literature was good—it was similar to the Romantic Era movement toward realism and showing. 

You know the adage “show and don’t tell.”  This came out of the Romantic Era and the “modernization” of writing through natural evolution.  I likely need to go over this again, so why not start now. 

The novel began with Daniel Defoe and Robinson Caruso at the end of the Enlightenment.  As I wrote, the end of the Enlightenment happened to coincide with the earlier wearing of cotton underwear and the subsequent availability of paper to make inexpensive books.  This led directly to the market and availability of novels.  The first novel, Robinson Caruso and all of Daniel Defoe’s novels were written in the first person, past tense, in a journal style.  This was the starting point for all novels.  The novel, you can see, was conceived as a stylized account of events in the life of the protagonist.  The protagonist was telling you his or her story through the use of an account of their lives.  This was just a natural evolutionary step.  In fact, it was the telic cause of the novel.  Biographical and autobiographical accounts of real lives and real people have been around almost since the beginning of writing.  The transition from autobiography to a journal type novel that is fiction shouldn’t seem to great a step, but fiction didn’t stop there.

The journal style was and is popular.  You can see the next step of novelists taking this style and producing wonderful novels, like Dickens and the Bronte Sisters, but these writers took their writing to another step in the evolution of writing—the narrative style in the third person.

The third person narrative allowed the author to step out of the shoes of the protagonist and show an idea, person, or place from multiple viewpoints all while staying within the confines of the setting and plot.  The third person narrative also allowed the author to express his or her own ideas and commentary from an omniscient point of view.  In fact, the point of view had moved from that of the protagonist, in the first person journal style to that of the omnipresent narrator in the third person narrative style.  This accorded well with classicism because it was the form of the Greek play.  However, something important was missing.

The early novelists didn’t miss the missing point, but they accommodated or appropriated another classical point from the Greek and other plays—dialog.  In the first person, journal style, dialog can exist, but it is all from the standpoint of the protagonist.  In third person narrative, the dialog is spoken into the setting of the novel—and here is where the evolution of the novel took us.  The writers incorporated the dialog similar to a play, but showed or told the reader the intonations and movements of the players.  This is the beginning of the screenplay style, and not a bad thing.  This led directly to the next stage of the novel.

Why use a narrative style when you can actually show the reader what is happening.  Novels made a slaw transition from the Victorian Era through the Romantic Era casting off the third person narrative to the third person dialog style.  With some refinements, this is the current style of the novel—third person past tense dialog style.  There is another refinement in the general style of the novel, but we’ll get to that. 

Almost all novels except the few first person ones we see today are in the third person past tense dialog style.  I note the few or unusual are not in third person—almost all are in dialog style and not narrative style.  To most modern authors, publishers, and readers, the narrative style is dead, but we’ll get to that.  

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