Writing - part xx401 Writing a Novel, the Plot of Stand on Zanzibar

7 November 2020, Writing - part xx401 Writing a Novel, the Plot of Stand on Zanzibar

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 21^st 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

Ideas.  We need ideas.  Ideas allow us to figure out the protagonist and the telic flaw.  Ideas don’t come fully armed from the mind of Zeus.  We need to cultivate ideas. 

1.      Read novels. 

2.      Fill your mind with good stuff—basically the stuff you want to write about. 

3.      Figure out what will build ideas in your mind and what will kill ideas in your mind.

4.      Study.

5.      Teach.  

6.      Make the catharsis. 

7.      Write.

The development of ideas is based on study and research, but it is also based on creativity.  Creativity is the extrapolation of older ideas to form new ones or to present old ideas in a new form.  It is a reflection of something new created with ties to the history, science, and logic (the intellect).  Creativity requires consuming, thinking, and producing.

If we have filled our mind with all kinds of information and ideas, we are ready to become creative.  Creativity means the extrapolation of older ideas to form new ones or to present old ideas in a new form.  Literally, we are seeing the world in a new way, or actually, we are seeing some part of the world in a new way. 

I’ve worked through creativity and the protagonist.  The ultimate point is that if you properly develop your protagonist, you have created your novel.  This moves us on to plots and initial scenes.  As I noted, if you have a protagonist, you have a novel.  The reason is that a protagonist comes with a telic flaw, and a telic flaw provides a plot and theme.  If you have a protagonist, that gives you a telic flaw, a plot, and a theme.  I will also argue this gives you an initial scene as well. 

So, we worked extensively on the protagonist.  I gave you many examples great, bad, and average.  Most of these were from classics, but I also used my own novels and protagonists as examples.  Here’s my plan.

1.      The protagonist comes with a telic flaw – the telic flaw isn’t necessarily a flaw in the protagonist, but rather a flaw in the world of the protagonist that only the Romantic protagonist can resolve.

2.      The telic flaw determines the plot.

3.      The telic flaw determines the theme.

4.      The telic flaw and the protagonist determines the initial scene.

5.      The protagonist and the telic flaw determines the initial setting.

6.      Plot examples from great classic plots.

7.      Plot examples from mediocre classic plots.

8.      Plot examples from my novels.

9.      Creativity and the telic flaw and plots.

10.  Writer’s block as a problem of continuing the plot.

Every great or good protagonist comes with their own telic flaw.  I showed how this worked with my own writing and novels.  Let’s go over it in terms of the plot.

This is all about the telic flaw.  Every protagonist and every novel must come with a telic flaw.  They are the same telic flaw.  That telic flaw can be external, internal or both.

We found that a self-discovery telic flaw or a personal success telic flaw can potentially take a generic plot.  We should be able to get an idea for the plot purely from the protagonist, telic flaw and setting.  All of these are interlaced and bring us our plot.

For a great plot, the resolution of the telic flaw has to be a surprise to the protagonist and to the reader.  This is both the measure and the goal.  As I noted before, for a great plot, the author needs to make the telic flaw resolution appear to be impossible, but then it happens.  There is much more to this.  Here’s the list of plots I’ve looked at already:

1.      Redemption

2.      Detective or mystery

3.      Messiah

4.      End of the World

5.      War

6.      Anti-war

7.      Revenge or vengeance

8.      Revelation

9.      Zero to hero

Here is the list of classics that everyone should read.  What I want to do is evaluate this list for the plots. 

This is the plan.  Let’s look at each novel and try to pull out the plot types, the telic flaw, and the theme of the novel. The ultimate point is we can glean plot ideas and types to add to our list.  Part of this evaluation, we can try to identify the zero and the hero of the protagonist.  All this might help us define plots and perhaps help us to develop plots for our own novels.  This is kind of like looking at art as an artist and figuring out what makes a picture successful.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury – Best modern novel in English.  

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible – Most important book to understand Western culture.

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 We The Living – Ayn Rand

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Dune – Frank Herbert

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – better to see as plays

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 The Cadwal Chronicles – Jack Vance

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Green Pearl Novels – Jack Vance

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchel

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 Starship Troopers – Robert Heinlein

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand

37 The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu

38 The House of Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne

39 The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 Dracula – Bram Stoker

43 Till We Have Faces – C.S. Lewis

44 Le Morte D'Arthur - Thomas Malory

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand

51 What Katy Did - Sarah Chauncey Woolsey under her pen name Susan Coolidge

52 A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett

53 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling

56 Kim - Rudyard Kipling

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 Beowulf – Unknown

60 The Odyssey – Homer

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins

64 The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett

65 The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Robinson Caruso – Daniel Defoe

69 The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes

73 Heidi – Johanna Spyri

74 Hans Brinker - Mary Mapes Dodge

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

77 The Big Sky – Arlo Guthrie

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 The Black Arrow - Robert Louis Stevenson

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson

83 The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

84 The Miser – George Eliot

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemmingway

87 Tarzan – Edger Rice Burroughs

88 The Death of Socrates – Plato

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 I, Robot - Isaac Asimov

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 Huckleberry Fin – Mark Twain

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift

96 Matilda – Roald Dahl

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

101 The Once and Future King – T.H. White

102 The Deerslayer – James Fenimore Cooper

103 The Black Book of Communism – Various

104 Ben Hur – Lew Wallace

105 The Robe – Lloyd C. Douglas

106 The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan

107 The Histories – Herodotus

108 Lives – Plutarch

109 The Call of the Wild – Jack London

110 Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner

111 The Shockwave Rider – John Brunner

112 The Aeneid – Virgil

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner is a modern age science fiction classic set in an experimental wrapper.  Where James Joyce and many of the Brockism and Cubist writers and their novels of the beginning of the Twentieth Century are worthless pikers with nothing to tell us, Brunner took a glimpse of the future and showed it to us in a wonderfully entertaining novel.

Stand on Zanzibar was written and published at the end of the 1960s, in some ways it is dated, in other ways it is prescient.  One of the reasons I have included two of Brunner’s books in the list of classics is because of all science fiction authors, he is the only one who seemed in touch enough with history and future tech that he actually predicted some technology.  Where almost every science fiction writer had their astronauts and scientists using slide rules well into the 3000s in space flight, Brunner actually predicted the use of computing devices.  This is true of all the technology Brunner describes. 

I’ve taught classes in technology development.  I don’t think it is that difficult to predict the evolution of technology.  It seems to be a difficult thing for many writers and others to accomplish. 

What we see in Stand on Zanzibar is a prediction of the movement of the world.  This in itself might be too much to ask, but reflects the true future.  The world is growing smaller.  Trends and events tend to merge due to travel and technology.  Social media and computers are forces brining the world closer together.  In Stand on Zanzibar Brunner missed this future tech, but reflected it through television.  His insights on the use of television and future technologies involving television are predictive.  We are seeing some of this movement today reflected in his novel from over 50 years ago.  The use of television also provides an irony and satire.

This is less visible in the novel because of its tone, but you can see the satire and the irony presented by Brunner.  Brunner is a master of satire and hidden irony.  What I mean by this is that Brunner used a gentle and beautiful exaggeration in all of his novels to bring out his themes.  We see this especially well done in The Sheep Look Up, a novel that deal with pollution.  Exaggeration is a common tendency with science fiction and a problem with much of science fiction.  The wise author presents either a full on exaggeration to provide satire and irony or gives a less exaggerated view to provide a more realistic future tech.  Brunner seems to have this in balance, giving just enough exaggeration to predict and not too much to miss the actual future of technology. 

Stand on Zanzibar is just such an exaggeration.  It is predictive, but also makes too much of current ideas and technology which then exposed give us a better view of the past than of the future.  How did people think of the world in the 1960s, Stand on Zanzibar gives a look at how people thought as well as how they thought the world of the future might be.  Again, the future in the hands of Brunner is a much better guess than most science fiction authors.

About the plots in Stand on Zanzibar.  They are almost too varied to describe.  Stand on Zanzibar is an epic and worldwide novel.  Perhaps it is better to just hit the high points of the major plotlines, there are two in the novel, but by extension, all the various storylines combine to give us the whole.  This is also a great skill of Brunner.

First, there is no redemption in Stand on Zanzibar.  The novel is cut off from normal humanity because it is dystopian before the term was used for literature.  There are many mysteries in the novel.  Not all to be solved.  The tension is cold war.  The enemies are varied.  Communist China is one of the many.  The person of 1960 could not see the end of the Cold War or the end of the Russian Communist State beaten by the West. 

We have revenge and vengeance plots many dealing with groups as well as individuals.  Ditto to betrayal in a similar manner.  This is a revelation novel and a discovery novel with progress of technology and science.  Travel plays a large role in the plotlines.  There is some romance.  Achievement plots dominate.  There is a miscommunication plot.  We see a totalitarian plot.  There is a fated component and a psychological component.  Mix with that horror, crime, and immorality. 

The world of Stand on Zanzibar is large and diverse.  Although the message is that the world is moving closer together in many ways—it is still much larger than the world of Logan’s Run or 1984.  There is no real hope like we see in historical classics like We the Living or the Gulag Archipelago.      

Let’s mark the board.      

Here’s the list of plots.  I’m going to amend the list as we noted. 

1.      Redemption – 16i, 7e, 22ei, 8  

2.      Detective or mystery – 54, 1e, 1

3.      Messiah – 10

4.      End of the World – 3

5.      War – 19

6.      Anti-war –2

7.      Revenge or vengeance –3ie, 3e, 42, 1

8.      Revelation –2e, 63, 1i

9.      Zero to hero – 27

10.  Romance –1ie, 38, 1

11.  Achievement – 14e, 19ei, 4i, 42, 1e

12.  Article – 1e, 45

13.  Travel –1e, 59, 1

14.  Coming of age –1ei, 25

15.  Progress of technology – 4, 1

16.  Discovery – 3ie, 54, 1

17.  Rejected love (rejection) – 1ei, 20

18.  Miscommunication – 7, 1

19.  Love triangle – 13

20.  Betrayal – 1i, 1ie, 43, 1

21.  Totalitarian – 1e, 6, 1

22.  Blood will out or fate –1i, 1e, 25, 1

23.  Psychological –1i, 43, 1

24.  Horror – 14, 1

25.  Magic – 7

26.  Mistaken identity – 16, 1

27.  Money – 2e, 26

28.  Spoiled child – 7

29.  Children – 23, 1

30.  Historical – 19

31.  Legal – 5

32.  Adultery – 18

33.  Illness – 1e, 18, 1

34.  School – 11

35.  Self-discovery – 3i, 12

36.  Guilt or Crime – 30, 1

37.  Anti-hero – 6

38.  Immorality – 3i, 7, 1

39.  Proselytizing – 4

40.  Satire – 9, 1

41.  Reason – 10, 1ie

42.  Escape – 1ie, 22

43.  Knowledge or Skill – 25

44.  Camaraderie – 19

45.  Parallel – 4

46.  Allegory – 10

47.  Curse – 4

48.  Insanity – 8

49.  Fantasy world – 5

50.  Mentor – 12

51.  Prison – 2

52.  Secrets – 20

Who is the protagonist of Stand on Zanzibar?  Donald Hogan and Norman Niblock House are the shared protagonists of this novel.  You aren’t going to like their telic flaws, and I definitely recommend you don’t write novels with ambivalent protagonists.  Brunner got away with it, but this is a really different and entertaining novel for many different reasons.  You won’t be able to write a novel like this because it’s a one off and done kind of like e.e. cummings and capitalizing as well as punctuation. 

In any case, both Donald and Norman are involved in complementary ideas government managed by industry and genetic engineering.  These are achievement plots and telic flaws.  They combine in the end to give an industrial gov power over all people—truly dystopian.  

I placed as the internal telic flaw and plot a revelation plot.  This is very unusual in our list.  The reason is the author wanted to get his idea of the place society was heading—technology, in his mind would lead to greater industrial control of people and their ideas.  With the manipulation of social media, this might be a good revelation.  The problem is we don’t see collaboration with gov as much as gov rejection of social media control.  The people generally seem wary of social media control as well.  I don’t see industry gaining control as much a losing more of it with their attempts to manage markets.  We saw something similar with television, and I think Brunner missed this point of technology development. 

In any case, we have an external achievement plot by both protagonists and an internal revelation plot by the author as well as the protagonists.  That’s what drives this novel. 

I also should mention, I skipped Lives and The Histories because they are not fiction.  They are necessary reads for the modern person, but not fiction or novels that we can evaluate for plots and themes.

In the end, we can figure out what makes a work have a great plot, and apply this to our writing.     

  

Let’s start with the idea of an internal and external telic flaw.  Then let’s provide it a wrapper.  The wrapper is the plot.       

      

The beginning of creativity is study and effort.  We can use this to extrapolate to creativity.  In addition, we need to look at recording ideas and working with ideas.    

    

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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