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Terra Nova: the fill-in-the-blank problem.

Blog - Reading and Reviews

Written by Sofie
Tuesday, 18 October 2011 00:00

 

I watched the pilot and second episode of the new sci-fi offering Terra Nova the other day. For the uninitiated: our world is royally screwed and barely habitable about a hundred (ish) year from now. Technology has surprisingly only-sort-of come to our rescue, in the guise of a "crack in time" that allows us to send people and objects 85 million years into an alternate past (note the key word "alternate" there - it's code for "now we can make up whatever the hell we want, and put Jurassic and Triassic creatures in the Cretaceous period. Woot!". It's a very special form of Handwavium.) So we recruit the best and brightest to send on a one-way trip back to live with dinosaurs in the hope that it''ll inexplicably help those stuck back on Pollutions R Us.

Because that totally makes sense.

 

Read more: Terra Nova: the fill-in-the-blank problem.

How not to write a novel #8 - the ending that doesn't

Blog - Writing Craft

Written by Sofie
Tuesday, 10 January 2012 00:00

 

This is the lastest instalment of How Not To Write A Novel, a series that began as a review (of sorts) of a book that was too terrible to be named, broken down into all the things it did that you Really Shouldn't Do. The series is broadening to encompass the howlers in other books I've read in the meantime, but to keep things simple (and avoid unnecessary tact and diplomacy) I'm going to refer to all of them as Nameless, as identifying which books are Doing It Wrong isn't really the point, here. Previous instalments are listed here (the early ones are down the bottom of the page).

The ending is the most important part of the book. Oh, sure, the first fifty pages will get your book picked up and purchased, but the ending is what you leave your reader with. If you nerf your ending, you have one very grumpy reader, who feels that the hours of their life they just entrusted to you were wasted, because the book all came to nothing. They're unsatisfied, they don't have closure to the emotional journey you put them on, and they may even feel depressed or angry without necessarily knowing why. But they almost certainly won't pick up or recommend any of your books.

For the moment, I'm not talking about epilogues - they're slightly separate to an ending, and I'll deal with how to muck them up in another post. But there are a lot of ways you can screw up your book's ending, but they mostly boil down to any, some or all of:

End your book at the wrong moment

The best example of this is actually a film - anyone who's seen The Return of the King has a foggy memory of the ending, or rather endings. The film culminates in about 5 or 6 endings (possibly more), each seemingly closing the story, fading to black and signalling to the audience that the story is over, before lifting the curtain once more to say - oh, wait, no, not yet! The result is a confused mess of emotion, as the audience keeps feeling that this is the final moment of tying things together before being reminded - but wait, there's more! 

Books can have run-on endings as well - endings that seem to just not get to the point, or perhaps find the point and hammer it into oblivion. But even worse is the book that ends before it's ready. Think back to Return of the King - what if it ended as soon as the ring was destroyed? No rescue mission for Frodo and Sam, no wedding or coronation, and even more importantly - no moment where the hobbits run the rangers out of the shire, proving once and for all (and to their own people) that they are heroes in their own right. (That ending had to be cut from the movie because it would have mucked up the pacing. That's why they have Aragorn and the entire coronation assembly bow to the four hobbits - it achieves the same emotional meaning of the hobbits having earned respect for themselves and their race.).

Nameless did this - ending the story three-quarters of the way through a train journey back to the character's home town, where she would have to finally face the choice and love triangle that's been plaguing her the entire novel. Instead of the character showing how she's grown and changed through her story, the story ends just before that moment (because the author wanted to save that final moment of change for the series ending, instead of the book ending. Unfortunately, she naffed that one up, too, but in a different way.) The result is a story that just stops, rather than ends. It feels cut off, like the transmission ended, rather than closing, and the reader is left looking for the point of the story.

Don't close the chief storyline

 A novel typically has two main storylines - the external one (Frodo's going to destroy the ring) and the internal one (Frodo's struggle with the ring's power). An ending has to tie up and close both of them - not just finish one and hope the other sort of works itself out. Internal stories are the most-often neglected here, where the character starts to grow and change but get stalled partway through when the external story takes over. All that's really missing are a few key scenes where the character can demonstrate their change, but instead we're left with a complete external story and a half-baked internal journey. 

The problem is, it's the internal journey that's the point; the external one is just the impetus for change. The real story is people; external stories are just Stuff That Happens, and it loses all meaning if the People It Happens To story peters out halfway. Imagine if Frodo carried the ring all the way to Mordor, through all the trials and tests, scaled the mountain struggling, then just dropped the ring in with a sigh of relief. Boooorriiiiing. That story has power because Frodo's character is inverted. He struggles with this mighty task, doing his best and taking the hard road because that's what will lead to completing it, and then at the critical moment, he fails. He can't give up the ring. This pure and good person has succumbed to temptation, and all is lost. The fact that Frodo's character has changed gives testement to how incredible his task and journey is - that's why we care. But he also needs to be redeemed from that moment - we need to see that once the ring has been destroyed, the goodness of Frodo returns. He can never be as he was - his innocence is destroyed in that moment of failure - but he can be reborn into something new.

Taking shortcuts to get to the ending

This is how the Nameless book above stuffed up the entire series. It's very similar to not closing the chief storyline, but the omissions happen before the story ends. In Nameless, we have a character (B) who has fought the notion of love for the entire three books. Love is dangerous, it makes you vulnerable, and she's not sure who she loves, how she loves or whether she's even capable of it. And that part of her character is pretty firmly sketched - she's clearly not someone who really understands love or herself terribly well. 

The ending of the series has her finally (apparently) loving one of the partners (A) from her love triangle, and him loving her back. But the problem is that these feelings of love occur over about two pages. We have two people, one of whom has been broken and brainwashed quite recently, and the other who's been broken the entire series. Not twenty pages ago, character A was arguably insane and trying to kill his former beloved due to brainwashing. And said beloved is utterly emotionally broken over the death of her sister and the gruelling journey she's been through, and never seemed to understand or accept love in the first place. But in the space of two pages, they're lovers and happy together.

It doesn't work because the key character change (learning to love for character B, redeption (from his insanity) for character A ) happens off-screen. It's told, it's summarised, and so it rings false. We don't believe it.

Crucial moments of your character's story must not be skimmed over. I find that series thoroughly depressing to read, because what I take from it in the end is two people who are irredeemably broken pretending to love each other because they don't know how to put themselves back together, in a world that's utterly shattered. Which is not, I suspect, what the author intended.

If we had seen evidence of their change - actions, rather than just words - it would be a different story (hah), but you must show the moments of change that your story relies upon.

Not following the character arc

 This is one that, I must admit, I kept running into when trying to plan my own novels. The ending works, drama-wise, but it's just not in keeping with the arc of your character. Imagine Frodo has spent all his energies fighting the ring's temptations and battling to get to Mordor, and when he gets there he has to fight with Sauron himself. Very dramatic, yes, but ultimately not really where the character arc was headed. Frodo's arc was about resisting temptation, staying true to yourself, doing the right thing despite fear. While you can fit 'battle giant evil lord' into that, it has too many aspects that weren't foreshadowed.

The climactic moment of the story should distill the internal journey down to its core - nothing but Frodo and the choice to keep the ring or destroy it. Otherwise your key moments are lost in the noise.

Tutorials 101: How to write a tutorial

Blog - Technical Writing

Written by Sofie
Tuesday, 17 January 2012 00:00

Well, this risks getting terribly meta, doesn't it - a tute on writing tutes. But I've been teaching myself Dojo lately (it's a javascript toolkit. Just nod and smile, there won't be questions), trying to combine a book that's about six versions behind with web tutorials that are one version behind, and I've come to a rather disappointing conclusion: very few people on the internet know how to write a good tutorial. 

I suppose that's reassurance that my day job has a real purpose, but it's rather disappointing that the basic fundamentals of education and communicating information are lacking in so many otherwise-clearly-very-intelligent people. The way our current online-society is going, it should really be something taught in fundamental education: communicating your ideas clearly and concisely, how to think from the point of view of someone who knows nothing about what you're teaching them.

So here's my Tutorial Writing 101: Entertaining Subtitle. (I'd like to claim that as being all meta, but really I couldn't think of a good subtitle that didn't involve swearwords. It's been that kind of morning.) In the interest of following my own advice (below), to get the most out of this tutorial you need to have:

• a high-school level grasp of lanauge, (your language of choice, and English in order to read this. Duh.)
• an ability to empathise with people who know less than you (not sympathise. Emphathise. As in, put yourself in their shoes.)
• basic language and concept analysis skills
• something you want to write a tutorial about. 

Read more: Tutorials 101: How to write a tutorial

Apparently you can copyright ideas

Blog - The Author Business

Written by Sofie
Monday, 30 January 2012 00:00

The old standard used to be that you couldn't copyright an idea, only the expression of an idea. So while I can't create a series about a school-aged wizard called Harry and his fight against the Dark Lord in a wizard school called Hogwarts, there's nothing stopping me from creating a series about a school of wizardry with some plucky young students who defeat evil magic by being brave, loyal, and generally Doing The Right Thing. This is something that artists of all kinds of survived on since the creation of copyright - similarity is fine as long as the actual works were created independently and originally.

That all just went out the window with one disastrous (and I feel the urge to say: idiotic) ruling by a judge in the UK: that works that are similar do infringe on copyright, even if the creation is wholly independent.

There was an original photograph of an iconic red london bus against a greyed-out london landmark. And then, someone else went and took another, very similar photograph at the same landmark, from a different angle, and greyed out the background in the same way. Same concept, two (similar) executions. The judge ruled that the second photograph was infringing the first as a derivative work, despite evidence presented that photos of red london buses on greyed out london landmarks are actually extremely common and worse, despite the fact that copyright is not about concept.

Taking a photo of a red bus at a london landmark and greying out everything but the bus - that's an idea. Other people can take as many photos of red buses with greyed out backgrounds as they want without infringing your copyright - what they can't do  is take your original photograph and (for example) invert the colours. That would be a derivative work. A similar execution of the same concept is not violating copyright.

Copyright is on the expression of a concept - the words you write, the picture you paint, the photograph you take, the notes you compose. A patent is what protects an idea - a method of doing something, for example. Copyright is automatic, patents have to be applied for, with fees and assessment of the validity of the patent taking many months. And there's a reason for that - because we've always recognised that awarding ownership of an idea is very dangerous - and in the case of culture and art, downright idiotic. Take this to its logical conclusion, and we can't have any more murder mysteries, romances, thrillers, political satires, science fiction, literature, or anything else that has already been done in some way, shape or form, which is pretty much everything, because it will violate somebody's copyright somewhere. Cory Doctorow has more to say on that notion.

I'm not kidding. If this is upheld, the legal ramifications are pretty much: no more art.