Theme

An on line colleague, Estelle Harte, has posed an excellent question: what is theme? I suggest you read her blog before continuing here, she has posed some very cogent questions concerning theme. (See link at right) But feel free to eat the ice cream cone starting from the bottom if you like.

The concept of theme is something I have trouble with too. My idea of telling a story is to, well, tell the story. Let other people worry about what your theme is. My contention is that most of us don't consciously know what our story theme is until after we've completed enough of it to have an idea where it is all going. I know I certainly don't. That revelation may come at the concept stage, or the outline, or not until much, if not all, of it is written. Or even when you do the dreaded synopsis.

I remember reading a story about an SF writer, I believe it was Robert Heinlein, who once attended a lecture about one of his books. After the presenter had finished Heinlein (or whoever it was) spoke to him and objected saying, "I'm the author, and that's not what I meant at all!"

To which the presenter replied, "What makes you think you know what your story is about?"

How's that for a shocker? Do we really know what our stories are about, or does everyone see something completely different? A complex story has many different threads, and, like Luke Skywalker in the cave, which one we think is important/compelling/interesting depends on who we are and what we bring with us.

We all know you can read a YA and get something completely different from it as an adult than the intended audience does. I may read a technothriller for the tech, you may read it for the thrill, someone else may read it for the political stuff or the ongoing romance between the protagonists. Which is the 'real' story.

Recently at GLVWG (Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group) we had a local storyteller, Charles Kiernan, in for a talk about verbal storytelling and how it relates to writing. One of the interesting things he emphasized was, 'mutual creating.' (He had a better phrase, but I can't remember it.) The essence was that the audience, in our case the reader, enters into the story, and creates the scenes and actions in their imagination, and that too much detail (more for the written word, less for verbal storytelling) spoils the process and also spoils the story.

Well the obvious conclusion is that everyone is creating their own story as they read.

And that means they're creating their own theme too!

Oy.

I think I've come full circle.

Leave a message at the beep.

2 Renees 2

Today one of those non coincidence coincidences happened. At a meeting of... well, I'd better not name the organization...too many prying eyes. Anyway at this...meeting...there were two women named Renee. Now, you have to understand, Renee is not the most popular girl's name in the USA...ever. The year these women were born...but I'm getting ahead of myself. Don't get me wrong, they are both nice ladies, despite having been born in...there I go again. OK, back to the story. When One asked Two...I'm calling them Renee One and Renee Two to avoid confusion, you see. When One asked Two how she got her name Two said...get this...her mother got it from a novel she was reading. Imagine that? From a novel! Heh, heh. Anyway, One says, "So did my mom." Then she named the novel, it was...no wait, I can't tell you that, it would give away the year. Can't be too careful these days. So Two says, "So did my mom! When were you born?" and One says, "In 19..." No, wait I can't tell you that, security is really tight. Anyway Two say, "So was I!" Anyway, to make a long story short, it turns out One and Two were born in the same year, only a few months apart, in the same city! And there they were, together at a meeting of...sorry, I keep forgetting I can't tell you that.

Now I have to ask you, is that coincidence? Of course it isn't! It's a conspiracy!

And that’s why you have to keep this quiet, if they found out...well, I mean, you know.

Must have been one helluva book, though.

Bart

The Vision of Persistence

A very wise woman once told me, well, actually she told the whole class, but I was there so she told me too: “Many of you can write better than I do, but you won’t be published because you won’t be persistent enough.”

The last five days have passed in a fog. I caught a bad virus infection late last week, what we used to call a head cold. You know, that muzzy, stuffy, hot, headachy, stupid feeling? I didn't have enough functioning brain cells to write, or read, or even watch TV. And since you don't actually need functioning brain cells to watch TV, I must have been in brain cell deficit most of the time. In any case, Tuesday night at about eleven PM, I felt it break. You know the feeling, when the force of the illness is no longer on top of you; you are on top of it. It wasn't over, by any means, but I could feel it receding. The enemy was in flight.

That's how it feels when I overcome a block in my writing. I don't mean 'Writer's Block,' I'm not sure I actually believe in that. No, it's when I just don't know where to go with a story, and I think back to what that very wise woman said. Persist. That's it. Keep on keepin' on. So I do. I sit down (see 'application' blog) and start somewhere, almost anywhere. It may be another story, or another part of the same story, or maybe I'll flesh out part of an outline or a character sketch. Or go to my favorite writing place and scribble away as best I can. I do something. It may take days for it to 'break,' but eventually it does. And when it does, it is usually a dam burst that has me wondering where all the words are coming from. Where the ideas were all this time. It's as if a whole different world inside my story opens up, one that was there all the time, but I just hadn't seen yet. Like a vision. A vision of persistence.

It's not genius; it's perseverance.

Then I realized it is exactly like that virus. I take vitamin C and zinc, and lots of fluids and that helps, but…but…it is my immune system, persistent, consistent, hacking away at the virus day after day that eventually beats the enemy. And that's how I beat the block; persistent, consistent hacking away at it till it breaks. So here's the moral of the story:

Think like a leukocyte.

Bart

Animal Stuff

I love the country. Odd thing for a Brooklyn boy, but I’ve always loved the rural places. Anyway, over the course of several lifetimes I’ve seen some odd animal happenings.

Ever seen a duck land on water? They literally water ski in, using their webbed feet like skis. I’ve seen a duck get embarrassed when it tried to land on a frozen creek, and tumbled a** over teakettle down the ice. He (it was a drake) got up, looked around as if to say, “I wanted to do that.” But there were no other ducks close by to impress, so he shook himself off, preened a bit, and waddled off.

I saw a squirrel laugh when the cat that was chasing it got whacked by a car. There were a lot of squirrels and cats where I lived in Brooklyn. Don’t ask me how I knew it was laughing, I just knew.

I once had a ferret named Noodles. She liked to hide in furniture and nip people’s ankles. Funny thing, she only bit women. Never drew blood, though; I think she was just showing them who the alpha female was.

Noodles nailed a flying squirrel that had gotten in one night. The thing moved so fast I would have sworn there were three of them cavorting around our living room. Noodles waited under the sofa, then dashed out and grabbed the thing as it went past. Only one flying squirrel.

I’ve seen groundhogs play tricks on each other. One was sitting up eating some berries, when another walked up and shoved him. They squabbled for a bit then both went back to eating the berries. Like two kids in a playground. I know, I know, it was some kind of dominance display, but as I was watching it sure looked like a trick. I swear the second groundhog had a gleam in his eye just before he shoved the first one. I could tell what he was going to do before he did it.

Cats. Some will fawn all over you if you leave them alone for too long, some will turn their backs and pointedly ignore you. For days.

Smiling. Sometimes you can tell an animal is smiling, even though they don’t actually smile. I once worked in (shudder) New Jersey. The place was miles from any ponds or lakes, but every year a pair of ducks would nest in the shrubbery in front of the building. Remember, no pond. When it rained real hard, the parking lot would, of course, have puddles on it, no more than half-an-inch deep. The ducks would waddle out from their refuge in the greenery and plop down in the puddles, in the rain. They would happily sit there for hours.

I swear those ducks were smiling.

Bart

The Application of Writing Productivity

In 1987 a set of genius designers published a computer game called ‘Dungeon Master.’ Essentially it was automated Dungeons and Dragons. Unlike other games of the era, this one put you directly into the action, as if you were looking out of the eyes of the leader of your band of intrepid adventurers. The idea is to select a group of four heroes, some of whom were female, and enter a complex, 3D, multilevel dungeon where you fight monsters, solve puzzles, try to stay alive and, eventually, trap the bad guy. Weapons, amulets, potions and magic abounded, of course, but you also had to find food and water or your party would starve. Rich and complex, without complicated game-play, DM was far ahead of its time in concept, graphics, sound, playability and just plain fun. Fireballs exploded, skeletons clanked, giant crabs skittered and you could hear monsters coming from around the corner. One thing made a sound like wet concrete sliding off a steel trowel. My 10 year old grandson was totally taken by the game, for all of the above reasons.

What does this have to do with writing productivity, you may well ask.

I learned something from this game, something I always ‘knew’ but never had completely assimilated into my psyche. To tell you what I learned I have to tell you something about the game, specifically how your heroes grow and change. To start you must choose four out of twenty-four different characters, from a barbarian with a club, to small but powerful magicians, and everything in between. Each character has strengths and weaknesses, so choosing the right mix is important. Four magic users do you no good if there are five bad guys. The last one will bash your powerful, but depleted, magicians on the head and, voila, instant skeleton pile. So balance is the key.

And therein lies the basis for the lesson. In the beginning your (usually) two magicians are physically weak and vulnerable, but they’ve got those fireballs they can throw at the bad guys. Your physically powerful barbarians can protect them and bash any monsters that get too close. But even barbarians can do some magic. So a good tactic is to load the powerful magicians with fireballs (or some other really nasty spell) and use the little magic your barbarians have to keep the lights on. But they need to keep doing it, because the lights eventually fade and you will be left in pitch blackness, waiting for a purple worm to come along and eat you.

So when the lights start to fade, you have the barbarians work a magic spell to brighten them up again. After a while, the barbarians do so much magic, they gain a skill level and now can do a little more magic. And more. And yet more. Your magicians have to hold those fireballs to use on animated skeletons or poison rockpiles, so they don’t get to do as much magic work. Pretty soon you find the ‘barbarians’ have surpassed the magicians and are now the more powerful magic users, because they have been actually using magic, while the magicians are mostly on standby for emergencies. Sort of like muscles, if you don’t use them they atrophy.

Or your brain, if you don’t think much, it turns soggy and unresponsive.

Or writing. If you don’t do it, it goes away.

Which brings me to my brilliant insight: Writing productivity is the application of the seat of the pants to the chair.

Bart

Panning for Gold

Thoughts from a writer's conference.

She kneels by the stream, hands busy in the icy waters. The stream moves swiftly in spring. Fed by the winter’s snowmelt, it carries many things down from the mountain, leaves and branches and bits of detritus. Occasionally a dead insect or a mummified mouse floats by. But she is not interested in those things. She swirls the pan around and around, heedless of the numbing cold that makes her joints ache. The reward is worth it.

Sand and gravel rotate in the water as she patiently moves the pan in slow deliberate circles. Her crafty eyes probe through the rippling distortions for the sign. For the tiniest glimmer, the yellow gleam in the sunlight that signals success. There! Her fingers seem to take on a life of their own as they scrabble after the yellow lump. She pulls it dripping from the glacial water, examines it with a knowing eye--but shakes her head. No. She tosses it back into the roiling torrent where it barely splashes as it is swept away.

Undaunted, she picks up her pan and plunges it once again into the icy stream.

Such is the life of an agent hearing pitches.

Bart

Techno Bubble

That's Bubble, not babble.

I’ve come to the conclusion we live in a bubble. No, actually we all live in separate bubbles. Like that old movie, we seal ourselves off from each other using keyboards and display screens, not transparent plastic, but it amounts to the same thing. I’ve heard recently that when an editor/agent gets a manuscript the first thing they do is Google the author. If you don’t have a FaceBook page, Twitter followers and a LinkedIn network, you don’t really exist, and your credibility goes down the, uh, garderobe.

Forget a website, that’s way past passé.

Here’s the trouble. Just as identity theft can leave you destitute and devastated, identity augmentation (kinda like botox for your personality) can con you into believing Joe Schmo walks on water. That con does exist on the Internet, just go to any on-line dating service. You can make stuff up, reinvent yourself, create credentials and awards then create the institutions that gave you those credentials and awards, all without leaving your house, or even getting dressed. All it takes is one of those keyboard/screen thingies everyone seems to have, and a little tech savvy. Actually, you can copy everything you need to do this right from the Internet itself. Find a small college, copy their web site, change the name, move some pictures around, (you can get those from the internet too) and publish it as the web site of Joeschmo College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Voila, instant creditials, instant credibility, instant con.

Ever seen YAs (whatever age you identify as YA) texting? Ever notice when in each other’s presence they really don’t have much to say to each other? Why? Techno-Bubble again. These days everyone knows you give away an awful lot about yourself by actually looking another person in the eye. And every teenager knows this. I’m taking a class (on-line, of course) on making character emotions real. Some of the technique involves using involuntary body and facial movement and responses. The amount of emotional content in our faces is astounding, and what does every YA feel vulnerable about? Their emotions. So they text, IM, and email, avoiding the actual face-to-face thing with its attendant pitfalls.

We all do.

Don't get me wrong, I’m not anti-tech, far from it.

My entire adult career has been spent in the highest of technical fields, the emerging computer revolution. I write SciFi, love reading it and speculating about future technologies. I believe technology has made us, and especially women, (more on that later) richer, freer, safer, more comfortable, and given more people more options than any other time in human history.

I'm just commenting on human nature.

Well, bye for now, I have to go IM this to my on-line critique partners whom I have never actually met.

Bart