22 September 2022, Writing - part xxx085 Writing a Novel, Literacy
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 29th 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 30th novel, working
title Red Sonja. I finished my 29th 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.
For Novel 32: Shiggy
Tash finds a lost girl in the isolated Scottish safe house her organization
gives her for her latest assignment: Rose Craigie has nothing, is alone, and
needs someone or something to rescue and acknowledge her as a human being.
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: Let me tell
you a little about writing. Writing isn’t
so much a hobby, a career, or a pastime.
Writing is a habit and an obsession.
We who love to write love to write.
If you love
to write, the problem is gaining the skills to write well. We want to write well enough to have others enjoy
our writing. This is important. No one writes just for themselves the idea is
absolutely irrational and silly. I can
prove why.
In the first
place, the purpose of writing is communication—that’s the only purpose. If you want to write for yourself, you need
to invent your own writing and language that no one can and will
understand. It would be better if you
can’t understand it either.
The purpose
for writing is communication. It really
has no other purpose. You can give it another
purpose just as I can use your head as a hammer. A head as a hammer will do little for the
nail, the head, or the accomplishment of the work and the work of writing is
communication.
If you aren’t
using writing to communicate, you are using your head as a hammer—not good. In fact, irrational.
Languages turn
from proto-writing to actual writing when they make the next step into symbols
as consonant sounds.
With
Pantheonic paganism, we suddenly get literacy.
Why might that be. First of all,
we have proto-writing which uses symbols to denote things, numbers, and usually
religious ideas or things. These symbols
are pretty simple and become more complex over time. For example, a sheep starts as something like
a sheep, but eventually becomes stylized.
I suspect the next step in writing is the development of an alphabet, so
to speak. The cultures are still
thinking in terms of symbols, but they gain symbols to represent the consonant sounds,
and then someone begins to put together words.
Perhaps the symbol for a sheep started as the sheep sound, but then
turned into the sh or she sound. We don’t
know. What we do know is that at some
point the consonant sounds began to be used to form words.
These initial
words were still used to represent nouns and verbs, but all the nouns and verbs
were originally stuff that could be drawn.
The drawing was all on clay, in stone, or on the new invention of
pottery. We see this but not exactly the
point where the Egyptians began to use papyrus.
We just know they did. I’ll get
into the beginning of paper or papyrus writing in a little, but the most important
invention caused by writing and literacy is words for ideas that can’t be
pictured in any way. For example, love.
Love is a
noun and a verb. The problem with love
is you can’t draw a picture of it—plus what kind of love do you mean? In English, the term love can mean a lot of euphemistic
stuff. For example, I can love my cat,
my wife, my God, my food, my children, and all.
Each are loved in a different way.
Early cultures didn’t have these problems. In fact, there is no word for love in Hebrew,
not in the sense we know in English. In
Greek, there are about eight to ten words that are variously translated,
incorrectly, love, but none of them mean anything like the love we understand in
Western culture or English. In fact, the
term love means something a little different even in Western languages. This little fact seems to be missed by many
lovers in Europe—of course how you think about love is very different depending
on your culture, but language is culture.
It gets even
more interesting when you know that an illiterate person can never even begin
to understand love. Love can’t be pictured. It only exists in a culture as a result of
literacy—there is a word that means or symbolizes some idea termed love.
It gets worse,
but this is the next step in language and literacy—it is directly related to
religion. If a person is illiterate,
they have no way of even knowing about love—except for one little trick of
religion and literacy. We’ll look at
that next.
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.
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.
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
fiction, theme, plot, story,
storyline, character development, scene, setting, conversation, novel, book,
writing, information, study, marketing, tension, release, creative, idea, logic
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