crackerjackjoe

05:36 pm: Scene Structure
Random Scene Structure Links
Prefect Scene
This guy uses the "scene" and "sequel" jargon, too.

From above link:

A Scene has the following three-part pattern:
* Goal
* Conflict
* Disaster [This is a melodramatic jargon word for a setback]

A Sequel has the following three-part pattern:
* Reaction
* Dilemma
* Decision


My favorite book divides Sequel into - emotional reaction, thought, plan of action

The general idea is that the Scene/Sequel structure is the basic structure and all novel writing is just variants on this theme.

My favorite book talks about MC goals, but also talks about a scene question. A scene question works better for me.
My working definition for conflict: something or someone that wants the main character to fail.

The very last scene of a novel won't necessarily have a disaster or set back. If it doesn't, then the writer is holding open an opportunity for a sequel, which in my opinion is just a weak ending.

My favorite book calls dilemma 'thinking'. A dilemma is a choice without good solutions. This is something of philosophical stand, but a writer controls the words, so he can choose that the character only considers a bunch of bad options. Try not to create a delimma that ignores obvious easy, good solutions. That just creates an unmotivated character, one of my pet peeves.

Speaking of lack of motivation, at a microlevel scenes get organized with cause & effect (I've also seen motivation-reaction). In a scene lots of visible things happen. Readers expect things to make more sense than they do in real life, so what ever happens, it needs a cause or a motivation. The motivation for a character is what they see or hear. The cause for anything is the answer to: "Why did that happen?"

What Scene/Sequel analysis doesn't usually mention is exposition. Exposition is neither scene nor sequel, it is piling on facts. Exposition seems to work best when you give the reader one factoid about the story world exactly when he needs it, and is biased towards leaving the reader in the dark about the details of how the world works. This I think is different from giving a reader a 2 paragraph lecture in how the world works, and different from giving the reader the 'cause' from a cause & effect structure.

Yet another article on Scene/Sequel This article is much wordier.
Review of my favorite book
Scene Structure Wasn't impressed with this article.

Yet another Scene/Sequel article
A pdf about scene and sequel

04:07 pm: Fuzzy Words
Fuzzy Word #1: Outline. An outline is an heirarchial list, something of the form:

A
   1 - Space station hit by meteor
   2 - New wing of station is built, but immediatly loses power, heat is 50% of normal, etc
   3 - Space station hit by tourism embargo
B
   1 - Revolutionaries take over administration building
   2 - Fire strikes two buildings on space station
   3 - Atmosphere scrubbers break
C
   1 - Election
   2 - Mayor wins re-election

If A means first part, B means middle part, C means end part, then the grouping is no more useful than an non-heirachial list, like:
1 this happens
2 that happens
3 the next thing happens
4 ...

Fuzzy Word #2
Plot. Things that happened.

Fuzzy Word #3
Hook. Things that got reader's attention. Unless it is a fish hook, I wouldn't recognize one.

Fuzzy Phrase #4
Move the plot forward. What this phrase is trying to get at is, "Does the scene help answer the story question?" A scene moves the plot foward if you can say, "Yes, that had to happen, becaue it was a prerequisite for the next, and the next and so on.

09:57 am: Day 7 of the Chicken Pox
This is one nasty virus. Mostly all I can do is lay around in dicomfort, drugged up on Stargate SG-1 episodes.

10:25 pm: Outlining
Terry Brooks says it is a good idea to outline. In theory, with a good outline a book can be written in one draft and one rewrite. An outline, according to Terry Brooks is not an heirarchially structured list, but like a paragraph or so for each scene. I think.

Prepare to see me thinking out loud about outlining the structure of a novel--

Hey, look I've learned how to do an lj cut! Chop chop!
( Read more... )

06:59 pm: A Tale of Two Birminghams
A song about the other Birmingham. (Flash, medium speed connection required.)

02:33 pm: Gee, I don't want to die painfully.
THREE NAMES YOU GO BY:
1. Sir
2. Mr.
3. Young man (although this is getting less frequent)

THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD:
1. CrackerJackJoe
2. The_areaman
3. -Real Name-

THREE THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. My superior level of evolution
2. My cosmic perfection
3. My radiance

THREE THINGS YOU HATE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. Insufferable humility
2. A tendency to understate
3. Ridiculous modesty

THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE:
1. German
2. Dutch
3. Swedish

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:
1. Dealing with people, especially crazy people
2. Public speaking
3. Public speaking in front of crazy people

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:
1. Coffee
2. Air
3. Email

THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:
1. Tie
2. White shirt
3. Brown business suit

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE BANDS OR ARTISTS:
1. Van Gogh
2. Vermeer
3. e. e. cummings

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE SONGS AT PRESENT:
1. Soundtrack to 'A Beautiful Mind'
2. All songs on XM Satellite radio station 'Lucy'
3. Simpson's theme song, plus most other Danny Elphman songs

THREE NEW THINGS YOU WANT TO TRY IN THE NEXT 12 MONTHS
1. New and improved Crest(TM) toothpaste
2. Red Hat Linux
3. Palm FX2008 wrist watch

THREE THINGS YOU WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP:
1. Girlfriend
2. A compatible personality
3. A joint purpose

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE:
1. 1+1=2
2. 2+2=4
3. 0=1

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS ABOUT THE OPPOSITE SEX THAT APPEAL TO YOU:
1. Their gender
2. Pheromones
3. J'ne sais quois

THREE THINGS YOU JUST CAN'T DO:
1. Think of something to write for #1
2. Write #3
3.

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES:
1. Playing with small electronic gadgets
2. Writing
3. Raising children (or is that a job?)

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW:
1. Visit the loo
2. Finish this list
3. Go the gym

THREE CAREERS YOU'RE CONSIDERING:
1. Monk
2. Database programmer
3. Small business owner

THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION:
1. Somewhere without an internet connection, reliable electricity or computers
2. Easter Island or Pitcairn Island
3. Paris

THREE KIDS' NAMES:
1. Charlotte
2. Arnold
3. Edward

(Odd, I'd rather my next kids were daughters, can't think of suitable names though.)

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE:
1. Write my will
2. Run up massive debts, just before the collectors start to call
3. Replace the dishwashing machine

THREE PEOPLE WHO HAVE TO TAKE THIS QUIZ NOW OR DIE PAINFULLY:
You
You
And you over there, yeah, I'm talking to you.

10:01 pm: Reforming NaNo & planning to do a more complicated NaNo
Why is NaNo such a broadly successful way of getting people to write a lot? I think it is because there are linear results to the word count part of writing a novel. Moreover, the work to do and the results are mechanically measurable. You write 10 words, you're 10 words closer to an objective finish, as opposed to the other nonlinear tasks, such as, outlining, wordbuilding, drawing a map, plot doctoring, for which progress is shadowy and elusive.

I wouldn't say that Nano is the way to write great literature, I leave the discovery of that methodology to the universities, but for amateur writers like me, writing by the numbers is no worse than amateur painters painting by the numbers.

From these fog of stuff to do on the way to a finished novel, can we isolate the parts that are linear? Then possibly, we could design a NaNo format that not only leaves you with a helluva long document, but doesn't have such a high risk of being a train wreck.

To win house rules NaNo: (That is *my house*)

Start & Entry Qualifications

1. You must have attempted NaNo at least once, otherwise you won't see the motivation for the changes in the rules and the sight of extra work will reduce you're odds of getting started.
2. House Rules NaNo starts any time of the year if it is thoroughly announced to friends, family, strangers on the net, etc
   
3. Fill out a variation on the contract with self as found in Jeff Baty's book, include all the measurable goals below with weekly deadlines.

Month 1- Prewriting NaNo
10 Story problems that the protagonist desperate cares about- Again quality doesn't count, just quantity.
10 potential endings paired to story problem- Quality doesn't count, so if the story problem is that the MC is going bald, an obvious ending is that his hair grows back.
15 days of practice writing of 'check in' length or longer (500+ words) for building up endurance and establishing the habit and schedule, of the same genre as the expected target novel.
20 Characters, including antagonist, protagonist and love interests.
100 Scenes.
1 Map with 20 places
+ any other countable prewriting activities that catch your fancy

You don't win if you don't finish the prewriting phase. If you decide to ditch 100% of the results of prewriting, then prewriting was just practice for generating ideas in a hurry, rather than a foundation layering process. Personally, I plan to use all my prewriting stuff.

Month 2- Same as Nano, except
You lose if you fail to write 12,500 words at end of the 1st week, 25,000 words at end of week two, etc.

Month 3-Triage at the site of the train wreck

1. Spell check (1 evening)
   
2. Resort scenes if they got out of order in writing (1 evening)
   
3. Reoutline book
   
4. Copy edit 12,500 words a week. A page has been measurably copy edited if it is covered with red ink and all pages are equally covered with red ink. This probably isn't good copyediting, but it is almost measurable.

The Nonlinear Stuff that Gets Skipped in House Rules NaNo
-Fill in missing scenes.
-Rewrite scenes.
-Plot doctoring in general. This takes a lot of thinking and inspiration, much harder to schedule or measure. Maybe a fixed ratio of the scenes can/should be rewritten.
-Announce novel as done. This also seems rather hard to measure, except by announcing that the end of the 3 months are up.

'A man, a plan, a novel' is not a palindrome. If I were making a canal in Central America, at least I'd have had a palindrome.

My next novel will be about the mayor of a space station. If it has a deep theme, it will be accidental. Literary is too hard to write on purpose.

03:21 pm: Writer's block? Poor word choice? Could be Alzheimers
Alzheimer's clue lay between the lines

IRIS MURDOCH’S last novel reveals the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease, according to new research.

Scientists focused on Jackson’s Dilemma, as well as her first published work, Under the Net, 1954, about a writer in postwar London and her Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sea, The Sea, written in 1978 at the height of her creative powers. They reduced the texts into word lists showing the frequency of each word by word type, to assess the vocabulary used.

They found that, while the structure and grammar of Murdoch’s writing remained roughly consistent throughout her career, the number of word types in Jackson’s Dilemma (90,004) was greatly reduced from those in The Sea, The Sea (209,085).

Now I've got myself a good NaNoWriMo excuse.

09:20 am: Not much here, my real blog is at matt.SuburbanDestiny.com. I use livejournal mostly to read & comment the blogs of people I've met at CVS.

09:11 pm: I just had to write something
I don't have a typepad blog anymore, I do have a wordpress blog at Suburban Destiny.

10:55 am: Blog Number Three
I now have three blogs, one from blogger, one from typepad, and one from livejournal.