The Confabulator Cafe

Author: tboone

  • The Scene-tific Method

    A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was a graduate student trying to earn a PhD. During my studies I discovered something very telling about my character:

    I am an empiricist.

    I discovered that I could never truly comprehend an advanced theoretical discussion without grounding it in an observable environment. Equations and symbols meant nothing to me unless I could take them out of the sterile world of theory and dump a whole bunch of real numbers on top of them. Then I could sit back and watch what happens. If I could see the mechanics in action, I’d get it. If I couldn’t, I didn’t. My fellow students at the time thought I was nuts. I thought they were nuts.

    They were probably right. I never did get that PhD.

    Turns out I have the same issue when dealing with my writing style. When I write dialogue, I often find myself mumbling the words of each character while I’m writing them, complete with the proper accents and inflections. If I can hear it, I know if it’s right or wrong. Just seeing the words on the page doesn’t often work for me. When I write action sequences, my hands are flapping and my limbs are tensing and twitching as I mentally perform the same actions I’m choreographing for my characters. At group writing events, people will often see me bury my face in my hands, looking like I’m in agony. I’m not. I’m struggling to force my brain to accept an abstraction instead of leaping from my chair and dancing around the room like an idiot to act out a scene or converse with my imaginary cast of characters.

    There’s a reason I do my best writing at home by myself.

    So, how does my empirical approach affect the crafting of scenes? (more…)

  • The Sincerest Form of Flattery

    What’s that they say about imitation? Well, apparently I’m incompetent when it comes to flattery, because as far as I can tell my writing looks absolutely nothing like my favorite authors’ efforts.

    If I was the snooty type, I’d claim that the lack of similarities was intentional due to my artistic integrity, unique voice, particular point-of-view, blah blah blah. And…I guess I am snooty, because that’s true. Trying to project another author’s voice and tone into my own work feels phony to me. This goes to my answer to our future ephemera post related to fan fiction. I understand why people like to write fanfic—it gives the author an instant jump-start to their writing, and lets them create new tales about characters and worlds that they’ve grown to love through the original stories. But in order for me to stay inspired and motivated during the writing process, I need to create my own characters and worlds. Similarly, I very much want to craft my own writing style and voice.

    Another component to my lack of emulation in my writing is that I don’t have the proper training to pull it off. My favorite SF stories are always centered around cosmology, physics, rockets, and math, but I am not a trained cosmologist, physicist, rocket scientist, or mathematician. I’m no high-falutin’ scientist at all. Can I (and do I) write about the same topics I like to read about? Sure. Will I ever manage to write about them with the depth and expertise of my favorite authors? Probably not.

    All that said, I do try to borrow certain key traits from my favorite books and authors and let them guide my own creative process. Most importantly, I appreciate how my favorite writers don’t let their writing get in the way of the story. This approach really lends itself to my own natural style, so I’m constantly striving to write stories where the words disappear for the reader, and only the story is left. If I can manage that, I’d be a happy camper.

  • Pants are optional. Plans are not.

    I’ve tried lots and lots of different things in the pursuit of cultivating story ideas. As an avid NaNoWriMo participant, many of my manuscripts have been an exercise in pantsing, where the story develops while my fingers are typing it. However, I’ve found over the years that a pure pantsing technique doesn’t work that well for me. For one thing, my characters tend to lead me off in strange and unpredictable directions (a phenomenon many NaNo novelists experience in November), but those directions are often dead-ends, and boring ones at that. For another, when I approach a novel with absolutely no planning at all, the ending tends to be…not. No wrap-up, no conclusion, no sense of fulfillment. That’s less than ideal for both me and my prospective readers.

    The alternative to pantsing is careful, meticulous planning. Outlining every scene, detailing every setpiece, crafting thorough background stories for characters and extensive histories for your world. I know many authors absolutely love this process of world-building, and I’ve certainly dabbled in it and enjoyed it as well. I’ve taken online classes that explore theme, and the hero’s adventure, and story arcs, and all kinds of other very important things.I’ve filled a white board with color-coded index cards, and used Scrivener to map out every scene, character, and setting in meticulous detail. I’ve even gone so far as to try rigid plotting techniques like the Snowflake approach.The problem I’ve had with these methods is that by the time I get to the actual novel-writing, I’m bored. All the excitement of creativity is leeched out of me during the outline process, leaving me uninspired and disinterested. Clearly not the right mindset for tackling a novel-length writing exercise.

    (more…)

  • Blitzkrieg! (followed by inevitable Hibernation)

    Writing fiction has, for the most part, been a seasonal occupation for me, centered around the month of November when NaNoWriMo happens. During the month of November, I churn out something between 50,000 – 80,000 words. Sometimes that effort spills into December, and this year that effort has spilled into January (I should probably admit that it’ll be February, but my peer reading group will kill me if that happens).

    While I’m on my novel-writing binge, I write anywhere and everywhere. The office, the coffee shop, the library, my home office, the back patio. It all depends on my mood. Sometimes I crave distraction, while other times I need a quiet refuge. Certain settings will inspire me to churn out words, while others will provoke deep thoughts about particular aspects of my story. Sometimes I need the comfort of home, while others time I need to escape my cozy surroundings and force myself to experience my writing from a different, and often less comfortable, locale.

    Everything I write happens on a computer, and Microsoft Word has served me well over the years. I also usually cook up a pretty sophisticated spreadsheet that helps me track daily wordcounts, character names, scenes, plotlines, research notes, and any other information I may need outside of the actual manuscript itself. I keep Wikipedia open at all times to keep my thirst for quick-and-dirty research slaked throughout the process.

    While I’m writing, I often use music to inspire me and eliminate distractions. Wordless musical scores work best: sweeping orchestral pieces, somber trance music, spirit-lifting soundtracks. Sometimes, however, I find that music isn’t the answer, and that silence is golden. But on my best days I can sit in a noisy restaurant and let the clamoring voices of customers wash over me without effect, because I’m so lost in the zone that the outside world can’t penetrate the world I’m crafting in front of me.

    When I’m in that zone, what really matters is that I have hours (and hours…and more hours) to write every day. First thing in the morning, in between the classes I teach, before and after dinner, and then late at night before I collapse in exhaustion into my bed. Every hour of the day is a moment I could be writing, or thinking about writing, or fixing what I already wrote. It’s a consuming experience, which is why I’ve failed to ever keep it going beyond a month or two. But I promise, when someone offers me millions and millions of dollars to write books, I’ll stretch out my efforts to at least three months of the year.

    …Okay, two-and-a-half. Maybe.

    Is it time for my nap yet? All this excitement is wearing me out!

  • (s)

    Q: What’s your favorite book?

    A: I refuse to answer that question, on the grounds that it suggests there can be a singular answer

    Q (amended): What’s your favorite book(s)?

    Long A: Ahhh, now that’s more like it! See what magic can occur with the addition of two parentheses and an ‘s’?

    There are many, many books that have inspired me throughout the years. I took this assignment as an opportunity to reminisce about my experiences with the stories I’ve read throughout my lifetime that have shaped my current tastes and proclivities in fiction, as well as my own style of writing. The exercise was a fun trip down memory lane, and it was surprisingly enlightening for me, as well.

    I will skip over some of the required reading all children that love books will have read. Things like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, or C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, or Madeleine L’Engel’s A Wrinkle in Time. I read them. Of course I read them. And they inspired me and affected me like they did millions of other readers. But that also means that waxing rhapsodic about these books would be an exercise in repetition that I’m loathe to pursue.

    So, what are some stories that not everyone has read, that still profoundly affected me throughout my life?

    (more…)

  • What If?

    A few years ago, I stood barefoot in the middle of my back yard on an early June afternoon, curling the freshly cut grass between my toes. And I thought to myself while I cleaned up my lawn mower, “What if my entire property was just grass? No landscaping, no driveway or sidewalk, no house. Just pristine, green grass.”

    Then I asked The “What If” Question: “What if I lived on a property like that?”

    Six months later I wrote The Emancipation of Bartholomew Benson, the story of a possibly delusional, possible savior-of-humanity farmer, who is torn between raising dairy cattle and annihilating quantum artificial intelligences that threaten to take over the world right beneath our noses. Oh, and he lives in an underground bunker, covered by beautiful, luscious green grass. Of course.

    As writers, we all know that crafting fiction is hard. I think it comes down to the saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction.”  When writing a novel, the logic in our stories has to make perfect sense during every single moment and every single scene. The logic has to be even more believable than the real world. People around you act irrationally all the time in the real world,  but if a character in a story acts irrationally the reader often loses the story thread because they fail to comprehend or empathize with the actions of the character. Your characters can perform extreme acts (i.e. hunt AIs masquerading as utility boxes in people’s basements), but their actions have to follow a logical pattern that the reader can comprehend and accept.

    My solution to the uber-logical storyline constraint has been to keep my stories very simple, at least at conception. The simpler the premise, the simpler the maintenance of that thread of logic that the audience requires while reading my story. Reflecting back on my inspiration for my manuscripts, I see that the start of every story I’ve written has begun with one or two basic questions which I attempt to answer throughout the novel. These “What If” questions have typically fallen into three major categories.

    (more…)