Archive for October, 2009
The Challenge of Description: First Impressions
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Previously I mentioned that I was having trouble with my new introduction for Shazemar, protagonist of my fantasy poem The Winds of Winter. I had a pretty decent description of him as an individual character — of the things that distinguish him from other Debroans, and give some sense of who he is; but I was having a hard time packing enough clues to Debroan culture into the description, because it was getting too long. And if you don’t get the culture, you don’t get the character.
Well, I could add the cultural stuff afterwards, couldn’t I?
Probably not to the best effect.
If you look at books from the Middle Ages, you’ll discover something that seems odd to us: they’ll happily put Hector and King David in medieval armor, as if they were 13th-century knights. That’s because medieval people had often heard stories about earlier cultures, but, unlike us, they mostly didn’t get to see illustrations of earlier peoples in their own dress. They filled what they didn’t know with things they were familiar with.
Modern people have seen many more pictures than they have, but still think exactly the same way. You can’t tell your readers everything; you haven’t enough room. Where you left a blank, they’re likely to fill it in — with something they associate with the details you did tell them.
If you’re a modern American, and the only thing I tell you about a character is that she’s got her hair in cornrows, odds are you’re going to picture her as black. You’ll fill in her hair color, her eye color, her skin color, and (in part) the shape of her face.
If I put her in hiking boots and a backpack, you may not only picture her footwear, but the trail she’s walking.
If I put her in a suit-jacket and pumps, you may move her to an office.
She could have worn hiking boots to the office. But odds are you’ll expect her to be doing typical things in typical ways, unless I give you enough information to make you imagine otherwise.
When I introduce you to an important character, I want you to form two impressions:
- A quick idea of the surface things about her: gender, age, race, era, and place in society. If I’m writing about a culture you’re at least somewhat familiar with, I may be able to present such an impression in a sentence, or even a phrase.
- A glimpse into who she is as an individual. What sets her apart from every other woman who shares the same superficial characteristics?
In most stories, I need to give you the surface elements early.
Why early?
Because I don’t (usually) want you to form the wrong impression of the character. If I write in such a way that you’re picturing a young woman, and then two chapters later you discover that the character you’ve been seeing as twenty-five years old is really sixty, the sudden, drastic revision you have to make may jar you out of the story. Most often, I want to give you a substantially correct (if necessarily incomplete) idea of the character, and then I’ll deepen it as I continue writing.
In writing, there’s an exception to practically everything. There are stories where the author intentionally misleads the reader about a character’s superficial characteristics, often by playing to stereotypes and associations. At the climax of the story, the author reveals that the associations the reader has made by habit are wrong: the character is of a sort the reader didn’t expect to see in that role.
And there are stories where the characters themselves intentionally play to stereotypes to mislead other characters.
But I’m not writing a story like that. I need my readers to form an impression of Shazemar that isn’t drastically wrong.
“Booking the Future”
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
I had a root canal today. I’ve got another article on description mostly written, but I’m not up to finishing it tonight. So here’s a particularly interesting post on future publishing:
Booking the Future, by Ransom Stephens
Is the book dead? Can the Six Sisters of publishing rescue books? Will publishers find a new profit model? Can bookstores survive the internet? Can writers make a living? What about e-books? Is Kindle the beginning and end of the revolution? Will Google Books be literature’s savior or executioner? Where does Scribd.com fit in?
Though the role of publishing has not changed – connect readers to writers – the revolution will not be led by an established publisher. To date, no established player has prospered through, much less led, the transition to the digitally-based economy. What’s left of the recording industry is still pursuing the fascinating how-to-best-prosecute-our-customers business model. No one was better positioned to profit from the web-based economy than Sears, with its legendary catalog, but Amazon all but killed it. Even IBM barely survived the computer revolution.
For some reason, even when entrenched companies can see the iceberg they can’t turn the ship.
There’s some interesting economic thought in this article. It lacks the naiveté displayed by some digital revolution proponents, and it’s also free of the reactionary “Everything in Publishing is Going to Stay the Same Because Our Way is the Right Way” of most critics of said naiveté.
The Challenge of Description
Monday, October 26th, 2009
A few weeks ago I was working on a late scene in The Winds of Winter, and it wasn’t coming together. I was wondering whether I should introduce an element that Shazemar (a sorcerer, the main character) deals with in my imagination, but which I hadn’t written into the story so far.
Somewhat coincidentally, I came across the Story Structure posts at Storyfix.com, and decided as a result of reading them that, yes, I did need to introduce that element, because pacing in the late scenes demanded a turn in the story rather than merely the progression of foreseeable events. But if I don’t set this element up early, it feels forced and arbitrary when I work it into the late scene.
I also could improve the story if I structured the beginning so that it posed more questions not immediately answered.
Both of these things indicate that I need to add material to the beginning.
Currently, Shazemar’s introduction is some ways in. The introductory scene is good. I wish I could move it right after “The Incantation of the Dragoness,” the opening scene, but both the action and the plot-significant remarks in it can’t happen any earlier. And I need to cover some of what Shazemar’s up to before. So I need a new scene.
Thing is, Shazemar’s introduction is the scene that presently contains the ‘who are the (west) Debroans?’ material — the descriptions that give some idea of who they are, as a race and as a culture. The character description in this scene is in two blocks: first, of the group that’s travelling, so you get a general idea of the Debroans; then later of Shazemar as an individual. So it’s broken up. I don’t have one long chunk of description that makes the reader’s eyes glaze over because it’s too much to assimilate at once.
I tried writing a new earlier scene in which Shazemar is alone, and I’ve been having a problem with it. My description of Shazemar as an individual is good, but it doesn’t have adequate cultural cues, and I’m having a hard time working them in, because it makes the description too long. In my experience, you can ask people to focus on 3-4 elements of a description to form an impression. But if you start adding more than that, you have more an inventory than an image: the mind doesn’t form a coherent impression of so many items. I haven’t successfully licked this problem in this new scene.
I have an idea for a different approach to it, which I’m going to start on now. We’ll see if it works.
On other matters:
I still have more root canal work to be done, and I have a sinus infection. I will be updating, but not very efficiently. Look for a new section of Sigurd this week.
Next post will probably be about cultural cues in description. (Actually, the next post in the series turned out to be about first impressions in description).
Marketing Fiction and Poetry 2
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
Continued from a previous post discussing differences between buying fiction and nonfiction, in which I noted that my experience as a bookbuyer suggests that some marketing techniques that work for nonfiction won’t work as well for fiction.
There’s one more thing I realized before I put this site up, back in May:
Poetry Is No Longer a Popular Consumer Art Form
“Huh?” some readers will say. “There are poetry sites all over the web. It’s probably the most popular art form there is, in the sense that it’s written mostly by ordinary people who’ll never be professionally published.”
Yup. That, precisely, is the problem.
Writing good poetry isn’t any easier than any other sort of imaginative writing, and most amateur writing is bad. Sometimes it’s very bad. Good amateur poetry exists, just as good amateur prose fiction exists; but it’s often hard to sort through the vast quantity of bad stuff to locate the good.
But something else — something worse — has happened with poetry.
Byron’s Commercial Success
In the early years of the 19th century, Lord Byron originally wanted to refuse all pay for his poetry; but he had debts to settle, and thus ended up accepting remuneration for his work —
Wait.
How does one make any money worth considering with poetry?
Two things:
- He wrote good poetry. Sometimes he wrote great poetry.
- Poetry was a popular consumer art form back then, as novels are now — that is to say, enough people were interested in reading professionally-written examples of the art that you could make significant money at it. Byron sold 10,000 copies of The Corsair on its first day of publication.
There are still good poets about. Some of them sometimes write really good poetry.
But #2 is no longer the case. There aren’t enough people interested in reading professionally-written examples of the art for poets to make significant money at it.
Why is that?
First, poetry and prose fiction both face competition from visual storytelling. The appetite for stories hasn’t diminished, but people can now watch stories, practically whenever they want, on television. And it generally costs less to do so than it would to buy enough books to fill the same hours.
In spite of that, prose fiction is still commercially viable. Poetry isn’t. So what’s different about poetry?
Baghdad Pups
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
The SPCA needs donations now to rescue dogs and cats U.S. soldiers have adopted in Iraq.
More and more troops are coming back, and they’re not allowed to bring the animals they’ve adopted on military transports. The SPCA needs help to fly the animals home so that our soldiers don’t have to face the stress of being forced to abandon their pets, as well as the stress of combat.
On another topic: I haven’t been updating the blog or the web page because I’ve had to have emergency dental surgery. I’ll be back to updating comparatively soon.
Visualizing Your Characters: FaceGen
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
Here’s what I’ve been up to over the last week (well, part of it, anyway): modelling in FaceGen.
FaceGen Modeller is 3D software that allows you, with some tweaking, to build your character’s face, assuming they look generally human. I want to buy it ($300), and I want to buy the Customizer package so I can build my own props (another $300). Problem is, last time I shook my wallet, only moths flew out. I guess they ate my money.
So I’m using the free demo, which goes a fair way to showing you what the software can do. You can’t export your 3D model from the demo, and the selection of props (that’s basically hair and eyeglasses) is tiny. But if you’re handy with Painter or Photoshop, you can save a 2D image, get rid of the SI on the forehead, and draw in the hair.
This is my best effort at rendering Shazemar, main character of The Winds of Winter, to date. It shows you the model and the first control panel. Shazemar’s hair is grey, not chestnut, and it isn’t that long, especially in back. If I could afford a license and the Customizer, I could go into another 3D package and model the correct hair to import. Since I can’t afford it now, when I’m really happy with my model, I’ll tell the program to render without the hair, and add hair of the right color and length in Painter. (I see the Debroans as a brachycephalic people whose facial characteristics probably would suggest a mixture of European and Asian ancestry, if they lived on our Earth.)
Shazemar modelled in the FaceGen 3.3 Demo
Unless you start from a photo (I didn’t have a suitable photo), Generate tab is where you set the most important characteristics of the face. You’ll then individualize it with the Shape and Texture controls (and there are a lot of them!), and you may use the Tween and Genetic tabs to refine it. The Morph tab, by the way, doesn’t do what you probably think if you’re not used to 3D jargon — you can use it to create facial expressions and lip positions for speech. I haven’t done anything with the View and Camera controls, since the defaults are pretty good, and since you can grab the head and drag it to different orientations in the viewport.
Some more models (and I’ve done very little to individualize these; they’re close to the ‘default face’):
East Indian woman, smiling
Southeast Asian woman
African man
Older European man, no hair, photographic texture
The program can’t automatically generate realistic wrinkles with the age slider, but the demo comes with some photographic textures you can use that are helpful particularly for older faces. Hairstyle can change one’s impression of the shape of the face and head, so having only two available in the demo can throw you off if you’re not used to thinking of headshape without hair.
There are a lot of sliders in the Shape and Texture panels, which can be overwhelming until you get a feel for how they work. Your most important sliders for shaping a face are the age, sex, and race in the Generate tab, Head (thin/wide) in the Shape tab, and Skin Shade in the Shape tab. After that, it’s Shape: Mouth (wide/thin), Mouth – Lips (thin/thick), Nose – bridge (shallow/deep), Nose – bridge (short/long), Nose (short/long), Nose tilt (down -up). Then, in Texture, all the Eyebrow sliders: that’s how you shape the eyebrows. If you get the head width, nose, mouth, and eyebrows somewhere near where you want them, then you can start refining the head with the other parameters.
Save intermediate results often. The program has never crashed on me, but I have often wanted to go back to an earlier version of the model, after making changes that took me down the wrong path. Also, remember this: faces that are considered the most attractive are often close to the human average. If you’ve made a mess of a face by making some part of it too extreme, you can sometimes get back to a better model to work from by moving the sliders that are farthest from zero back toward it.
Avoiding Blogging Burnout
Monday, October 12th, 2009
I spent two of the last five days researching freelance writing options and approaches. I spent the other three largely avoiding the computer. Comes a time when I don’t want to see a computer screen, don’t want to stay in the comparative dimness of the house, and want to get away to look at something else.
I went to the library, and I spent three hours out on the porch, watching night fall. Happily for me, I live in a pine forest, so I can commune with nature by walking out the door.
When I wasn’t avoiding the computer, I was playing with a program called FaceGen, which I’ll tell you about in the next post.
Links page update
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Today I updated the Links page to include my how-to articles residing on other sites, and to add the rest of the Rules of Writing posts to the index.
I’m probably going to find a permanent place to put the #writechat blog directory soon, but I figure I’ll pick up more entries in chat this week, and for the time being it’s convenient to have it in a web post so people can request a listing by commenting. That may entail some reorganization of the pages, and I’m not sure what I’ll do yet.
How to Write a Shakespearean Sonnet
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Also on Hubpages: How to Write a Shakespearean Sonnet. Which covers sonnets, pretty much. I hadn’t intended to start posting about poetry over there — I was thinking of something more commercial — but I got a request.
Now that the blog addition requests have slacked off, I may have time to visit people’s blogs myself.
Later: I took this one down too.
How to Write a Petrarchan Sonnet
Monday, October 5th, 2009
I decided to try my hand at writing Hubpages. “How to Write a Petrarchan Sonnet” is published there. I analyzed Milton’s “On His Blindness” as an example.
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