Preface to Communication

Excerpt from the book, A Few Words About Communication

Communication requires the transfer of understanding and/or passion from one person to another.  The process of communication involves both transmission and reception across a medium.  Whether intentional or not, this process self-organizes into a narrative form which is the framework upon which the information, be it logic or feeling, is conveyed.

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On "Master and Commander"

Just finished reading the first of the twenty Aubrey/Maturin novels, Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian.  One down, nineteen to go.  Fascinating are the extremely long and convoluted sentences that yet somehow work due to their energy, enthusiasm of subject and uniqueness of topic: sentences not unlike this one, meandering leisurely through verbiage and speculation and punctuation; a sentence including (like this one) both a colon and a semicolon.

Write Your Novel Step by Step (5)

Pulling It All Together 

In Step 2, you jotted down any and all story ideas you may have already had for your novel.  In Step 4, you probably generated a huge number of additional creative ideas for your novel.  (If not, repeat Step 4 until you do!)

Problem is, the resulting collection of notions for your story from Steps 2 and 4 probably ranges far and wide, resulting in a hodgepodge of interesting concepts and schemes, all out of order and jumbled up in something of a chaotic mess.

So, before we go on into future steps, we need to do a little necessary housekeeping lest things get out of hand.  Just as we boiled down your Step 2 ideas into a single log line, in this step we’ll pull together all the material you’ve created so far into a more manageable form: a synopsis of your novel,

A synopsis is like a map of the ground your story is going to cover, noting all the landmarks and important things that happen at them.  Just as we originally had you jot down any ideas you already had in Step 2 and then boil them down to a single log line in step 3, we’re now going to take all the creative concepts you spewed out in Step 4 and pull them together into a this single conversational description of your novel’s content.

The length of a synopsis is completely variable.  The shortest form would be a thumb-nail sketch, perhaps just a paragraph long – the minimum necessary to outline the key elements and scope of your story.  Typically, the longest synopsis is usually no more than a page or two, though can be far more extensive than that.

So, don’t feel compelled to write more than comfortably flows or to limit yourself to less than you have.   Tolkien, for example, created whole worlds, histories, cultures, and languages in synopsis form before putting any of it in story form.

Our goal here is simply to take that unwieldy shopping list of story elements from Steps 2 and 4 and to turn it into conversational language that, more or less, describes all the interesting people, events, topics, and stylistic flourishes you’d like to include in your novel, as if you were talking about your story to a friend, rather than actually trying to tell your story.

So, for this step, your task is to refer to all that you created so far and describe it as if you were telling someone about your story who was very interested in it and wanted to hear every juicy detail.

“My novel is about….”  There.  I started it for you.  Now, go to town.  Guided by your log line that describes the crux and center of your novel’s concept, write your synopsis of every interesting and/or essential thing that is going to be in it, based on the work you’ve done in the last step.

Sample Synopsis (from my own work):

Snow Sharks: Don’t Eat Red Snow

The government has been developing a new breed of shark that lives in snow rather than water for use as mobile land mines in places such as Siberia or the Arctic.  A transport plane carrying them crashes in a storm high in the Rocky Mountains, just above a high-priced ski resort for the rich.

Normally closed at this time, the resort was opened for a powerful client so that his college-age daughter and her friends could have a ski vacation.  The sharks gradually slither down from the heights into the bowl-shaped resort and begin feasting on the kids.

Characters include the handsome but stupid jock, the stuck-up daughter of the patron, a cheerleader, a nerdy science geek who is the tag-along token outcast, and the usual crew of stereotypical college kids.

Scenes include night skiing where the proprietors had installed disco lights on the ski run, so they light up and create changing colored patterns under the snow.  During the night skiing, we see one of the kids ski by, followed by a silhouette against the disco lights of a snow shark following him.  This is the first attack that alerts them that something deadly is out there on the slopes.

In a later scene, the jock trying to escape by out-skiing the others, leaving them to die, when the sharks attack.  He ski-jumps over a chasm, looks back and laughs, looks forward and a snow shark has also jumped the chasm by shooting down the hill on the other side and is coming right for him.   The skis land solidly on the other side of the chasm with nothing but boots attached, and bloody stumps sticking out of them.

The government sees this as a great opportunity to see how effective the sharks are and send in an agent to document but not interfere.  He ends up dying a horrible death that both divulges to the kids what the government has done and provides the idea of how to escape.

Ultimately, they learn the sharks can no longer live in water, only in snow, so they blow up a geothermal spring to flash-melt the snow above the bowl-shaped valley, ironically drowning the sharks, and barely escaping the floodwaters themselves.

Armed with this rather cliché example, it’s time to write the first synopsis for your own novel.  As we continue through our step by step method, we’ll pause after each major new creative effort to fold what you’ve just developed into a revised synopsis.  In this way, you have a story right from the beginning that is continually evolving, step by step, into your finished novel.

Next, in Step 6, we’ll stand back a bit to see the first draft of your synopsis just as your readers will, looking for any holes they might see.  Then in the step after that, we’ll begin to fill them.

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Write Your Novel Step by Step (4)

The Creativity Two-Step

In Step 3, we described methods for boiling your initial story concepts down into a log line: a single sentence that expresses the essence of what your story is about.

In this step, we’ll use your log line as a creative core in a method that will generate an expanding sphere of new ideas for your story.  In following this step, also draw upon the original story ideas you jotted down in Step 2.

The concept behind this method of finding inspiration is quite simple, really: It is easier to come up with many ideas than it is to come up with one idea.

Now that may sound counter-intuitive, but consider this… When you are working on a particular story and you run into a specific structural problem, you are looking for a creative inspiration in a very narrow area. But creativity isn’t something you can control like a power tool or channel onto a task. Rather, it is random, and applies itself to whatever it wants.

Creative inspiration is always running at full tilt within us, coming up with new ideas, thinking new thoughts – just not the thoughts we are looking for. So if we sit and wait for the Muse to shine its light on the exact structural problem we’re stuck on, it might be days before lightning strikes that very spot.

Fortunately, we can trick Creativity into working on our problem by making it think it is being random. As an example, consider this log line for a story: A Marshall in an Old West border town struggles with a cutthroat gang that is bleeding the town dry.

Step One: Asking Questions

Now if you had the assignment to sit down and turn this into a full-blown, interesting, one-of-a-kind story, you might be a bit stuck for what to do next. So, try this. First ask some questions:

1. How old is the Marshall?

2. How much experience does he have?

3. Is he a good shot?

4. How many men has he killed (if any)

5. How many people are in the gang?

6. Does it have a single leader?

7. Is the gang tight-knit?

8. What are they taking from the town?

9. How long have they been doing this?

You could probably go on and on and easily come up with a hundred questions based on that single log line. It might not seem at first that this will help you expand your story, but look at what’s really happened. You have tricked your Muse into coming up with a detailed list of what needs to be developed! And it didn’t even hurt. In fact, it was actually fun.

Step Two: Answering Questions

But that’s just the first step. Next, take each of these questions and come up with as many different answers as you can think of. Let your Muse run wild through your mind. You’ll probably find you get some ordinary answers and some really outlandish ones, but you’ll absolutely get a load of them!

  a) How old is the Marshall?

a. 28

b. 56

c. 86

d. 17

e. 07

f. 35

Some of these potential ages are ridiculous – or are they? Every ordinary story based on such a log line would have the Marshall be some common age from our example list, such as 28 or 35: just another dull story, grinding through the mill.

Step One Revisited

But what if your Marshall was 86 or 7 years old? Let’s switch back to Step One and ask some questions about his age.

For example:

c. 86

1. How would an 86 year old become a Marshall?

2. Can he still see okay?

3. What physical maladies plague him?

4. Is he married?

5. What kind of gun does he use?

6. Does he have the respect of the town?

And on and on…

Return to Step Two

As you might expect, now we switch back to Step Two again and answer each question as many different ways as we can.

Example:

5. What kind of gun does he use?

a) He uses an ancient musket, can barely lift it, but is a crack shot and miraculously hits whatever he aims at.

b) He uses an ancient musket and can’t hit the broad side of a barn. But somehow, his oddball shots ricochet off so many things, he gets the job done anyway, just not as he planned.

c) He uses a Mini-Gatling gun attached to his walker.

d) He doesn’t use a gun at all. In 63 years with the Texas Rangers, he never needed one and doesn’t need one now.

e) He uses a sawed off shotgun, but needs his deputy to pull the trigger for him as he aims.

f) He uses a whip.

g) He uses a knife, but can’t throw it past 5 feet anymore.

And on and on again…

Methinks you begin to get the idea. First you ask questions, which trick the Muse into finding fault with your work – an easy thing to do that your Creative Spirit already does on its own – often to your dismay.

Next, you turn the Muse loose to come up with as many answers for each question as you possibly can.

Then, you switch back to question mode and ask as many as you can about each of your answers.

And then you come up with as many answers as possible for those questions.

You can carry this process out for as many generations as you like, but the bulk of story material you develop will grow so quickly, you’ll likely not want to go much further than we went in our example.

Imagine, if you just asked 10 questions about the original log line and responded to each of them with 10 potential answers, you’d have 100 story points to consider.

Then, if you went as far as we just did for each one, you’d ask 10 questions of each answer and end up with 1,000 potential story points. And the final step of 10 answers for each of these would yield 10,000 story points!

Now in the real world, you probably won’t bother answering each question – just those that intrigue you. And, you won’t trouble yourself to ask questions about every answer – just the ones that suggest they have more development to offer and seem to lead in a direction you might like to go with your story.

The key point is that rather than staring at a blank page trying to find that one structural solution that will fill a gap or connect two points, use the Creativity Two-Step to trick your Muse into spewing out the wealth of ideas it naturally wants to provide.

Your goal for this step, then, is to apply the Creativity Two-Step to your original log line and follow your Muse as far as she can take you.  More than likely, you’ll end up with something of a mess – a disorganized mash-up of a huge number of story ideas of many different kinds for your novel.

In step 5, we’ll delve into the treasure trove of ideas you’ve generated and begin the process of organizing them into Characters, Plot, Theme, and Genre elements to be further expanded before we move into the Development stage.

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Introduction to Archetypes

Archetypes are not inventions, but representations of elemental human qualities.  In fact each embodies a family of qualities not unlike families of elements in the periodic table.  It is as if we put all the Rare Earth elements into one character and all the Noble Gasses into another.

This means that while each archetype has many component pieces, they all work in harmony to create a character of singular identity that we recognize as a facet of ourselves, made tangible, so that we might understand that aspect of our inner narrative.

Historically, students of story have identified a multitude of characters based on personality types that they have labeled as archetypes.  As useful as these are for creating characters based on relationships, or subject matter, true archetypes have no personality.  Rather, they are the fundamental processes of our own hearts and minds made manifest, incarnate as functions within a narrative just as they are functions within us.

As an example, there is a Reason archetype to illustrate how our intellect approaches the problem at the core of a story.  And in opposition, there is an Emotion archetype to exemplify how our passion comes to bear on the issue at hand.  In totality, there are eight archetypes, each composed of eight individual elements, working in concert to illustrate the broad stroke primary colors of our psyches.

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