Categoría: How to write fiction

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How to write fiction

How to plan your fictional character in 6 steps

sophisticated woman talking to a man inside an office
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Pantsing…is an untranslatable word to Spanish and I ignore if Libbie Hawker in

 “Take off your pants. Outline your books for faster, better writing”  is the only one to sue it as a homemade remedy for the blank paper: to stare at it until the story grows itself like weed does. And what some other author; yes one of those who matter since they’re published[1], describes as a daily routine of: seating on front of the blank page, write a bit, strike through, erase, crumble the paper, practice long shots with them into the bin. No idea if the guy recycles at all.  In my house, used pages end up with the grocery shopping list on them; tough that’s not precisely real recycling.

To some other authors, this pantsing business is like getting lost in the middle of the forest…Once in a lifetime, I got lost together with a group of Junior high school classmates in Chapultepec forest —…kinda small compared to the size of Central Park — and it is so true that you might end up anywhere. Specially if the wood is large and your inner compass is incompetent; which might have you getting lost in Pachuca and Irapuato, provincially small cities. Thus, writing a half decent novel is like getting yourself in Siberia. There are stories one doesn’t get out from. If you don’t happen to plan.

…which is a bad habit when writing more than one a book a year is your surviving meal ticket. Today, it is impossible to work without an outline o scene programme so Jump gets out every Thursday and you boast the insane number of 50 titles by the age of 35. Of course, literature jewels don’t seem to have been written that way… depending on what kind of jewel you’re. Humberto Eco wrote a book every ten years or so…in theory. Whilst some other authors are very, very prolific.

And while in the meantime you discuss with yourself what to do with your story, let’s review in a Merriam way what is it that Libby proposes for planning characters. If by chance you would like to take compass and map to the writing forest. )Remember, like, subscribe, share, let it be or do whatever you feel like doing)

Summarised, it isa ll about to know your carácter. So much, you can tell if they likes chocolate mint ice cream or if they would rescue a baby from a bus on fire. And what are they Machiavelli imaginations to get whatever it is they desires.

How to plan a character and conflict in 6 steps?

  1. Without regard to how much you plan on filtering to the reader; you need to know: height, weight, zodiac, favourite subject, favourite food, bathroom breaks’ schedule.  I mean, they physical and emotional being.
  2. What do they want from life? To conquer the world every night? Live in Mars? To eat ramen in Japan? What??!!
  3. Who is they rival? Is there a moustached evil laughter guy dressed up in military green who wants the same from life? OK, it doesn’t need to be THE villain but someone who wishes for the same and fights the main character for it, even in not so daring ways. It can be like with a said vampire of mine…who drinks tea and eats biscuits who happens to be his own enemy.
  4. This is a joke of mine… Does they have an animal guardian? Dragon? Racoon? Camelean? Every princess has their own sidekick[2]. Who is their helper? Does they have siblings, friends, lovers who might help in any way?
  5. Does they make it? Sometimes the best part is not if the character gets what they wants but the process. Sometimes their goal has to be abandoned in favour of something even better or they get destroyed in the way precisely by getting what they want. Accomplishing the goal or not is just the chatacter’s goal; yours as a writer is to have them frustrated.
  6. Does they have vices? Characters need to have fatal weaknesses that help us to get in their way. Weaknesses that take them to take bad decisions enough to get to situations, problems or places to work with. When a character only behaves sensibly…you can’t have an story. A character’s a drug[3] and you can’t have the reader to get stuffed on them. You have to dosify it to minimal dosis so the reader is still hooked in their stupidity.

Let’s study a case

Rosy is my family by Gerald Durrell.

  1. Main character: Adrian Rookwhistle, dark haired, disorganized, orphan of both parents in a  boring job with a boring life…until uncle Amos dies from cirrhosis and leaves him an inheritance of a slightly alcohol driven elephant.
  2. In the beginning, he wishes for emotion, adventure…but the moment Rosy comes into scene (of whom he believes to be a female drunken acrobat) and menaces to put everything upside down; he starts to desire everything as it was.
  3. Adrian himself since by wishing everything to remain the same, he negates himself the right to enjoy and adventure.
  4. Rosy, whom in her elephantine chaos and destruction trail; takes Adrian to meet Sam, her father, Sir Magnus, Black Nell and other nice people.
  5. He doesn’t accomplish his goal. Adrian comes to discover on the way that Rosy is his last living relative, that he is in love and that he doesn’t want back to his old job.
  6. Adrian is stubborn and overthinks. He lacks assertivity to take decisions, thus he is unable to take situation in control and avoit the small catastrophes coming his way.

[1] Interviewed in Laberinto, Saturday complement in Milenio Diario.

[2] That’s right Maui and Moana.

[3] At least for Chuck Wendig.

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How to write fiction

How to write fiction taking advantage of genre

books
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Tags…not everybody likes to be tagged. Generalising or not, being x, y or Covid generation. Hipster, bohemian, queer; the truth is every one of us would like to belong to one and only category of being ourselves.

Nonetheless, to the given case of fiction narrative, the genre tags are there to guide the reader/audience into the right decision AND an outline or instant guide on what is required to comply with the plot.

To Robert McKee, one should choose a genre and believe on it, stubbornly[1]. Why? Cause the correct genre helps TO STABLISH THE RIGHT EXPECTATIONS. The reader/audience knows what to expect and where to expect it. A bad choice of genre is like go buying Playboy and open the magazine to read religious stories… besides the naked models.

Such is worthy, even for novels. Even when your name is a niche in itself. Ray Bradbury is not someone to fit to a T horror, science fiction or any other genre you might catalogue him into. He is his own genre. Regardless, he is still within library code to find him among a bunch of books.

Yet…Yeah, I’ve got a case to destroy the genre argument. Asimov. A guy that must have adorable in his lectures, in the clubs he was member of and as an author in book fairs…He admired Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse —I like them both a lot too— which is why he included word games to humorize his stuff. He even has an essay “About humour”.

The problem lies in —I haven’t read a single one of his pieces in English — it isn’t funny. Not even with imagination aid and the defense of his honour by arguing how untranslatable is the joke to Spanish. Not to say the riddles of The black widowers are irking and arrogant and… in general, disagreeable to any under privileged mind[2]. To solve those, you need an IQ of over 100, belong to MENSA or to have read and remember every single Shakespeare line plus miscellaneous data[3]. Unlike the queen of mystery, whose craft needs only logic —and logic ain’t within my strengths. Still, I’ve been able to solve two of all the crimes I’ve read so far. 

The genre and its demands are not just a know-it-all-about-inside-out matter. It comes from affinity too. I read manga, manhua, manhwa and webtoon; particularly boy love. Why? Because shoujo genre uses to be cliché over cliché, in a way that seems that if you read one, you read them all. FAIRY TALES in which the characters get the flu, fall, need to be rescued… So the exaggeration applied to the same principles with masculine details used in boy love, made of this genre something fun and even cute. Till the genre little by little fell in a sort of slump similar to shoujo. And this doesn’t mean that shoujo or boy love doesn’t have its great exceptions. Sometimes, there is someone who thinks hard enough how to exploit better the conventions of the genre.

Ah..got lost, right? Cutting to the chase, if we match what I like reading with what I end up writing; you can see how genre goes hand by hand with natural affinity. I want to be serious; I end up being ironic and funny. Want to be cold, brainy and scientific? Magic and feelings come out. But never of the kind “read thread of destiny”… Whenever I want to be dignified and mathematical; I end up being Mozart writing to Nannette. Which takes me to Quino.

Quino hated being in people’s minds because of Mafalda. He wanted things like “Yo estoy bien y usted” to be also regarded as his. So maybe, maybe it isn’t a matter of just a conscious decision to know what genre suits us better. Perhaps we need to dig deep into our brain. And face on what comes from it.

What genre do you write?

[1] Story. Of scriptwriting. Robert McKee.

[2] Like mine, completely average.

[3] Note that Asimov is one of my writing models and I like many of his stories.

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How to write fiction

How to write fiction plagiarizing Historical moments

grayscale photo of old pictures
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History?  History is a science of just dates and happenings and boring stuff…it is a snob thing…It is for intellectuals… History repeats itself, it is boring…

Maybe….or not. Do you know what character from a very popular HBO hit is like the historical version of Maria de Medici and her husband, “le French rooster” who ended dead hunting? Did you know that the same character shares some features copied from the most popular version of Lucrecia Borgia[1] about her brother Caesar?

Wikipedia ain’t trustable? Sometimes…it is a start to knowing where our feet are. Historically speaking. Specially without time, connections or Historian friends. And it ain’t the only place. There are…documentaries. Yeah my little friend of a grasshopper comic drawer or scriptwriter, you can do that if reading isn’t for you. I know of someone who would complain with your complains about not wanting to read but…not everyone likes reading.

Not bad. Or worst. Anyway, not everybody likes video games or the same “first person shooting” type. Or watch the football (soccer if you’re a dude more than a chap). There are baseball fans out there too. So go…and seek.

Have you realized of whom am I talking about? I’ll give you a clue. Her name begins with C. And she cuckolds his husband with her brother…More? Are you starting to understand why History (in Spanish it is kinda confusing since an story is the same as history) is good for stories? So be it Bill Clinton’s too.

Asimov wrote Fundation the way he wrote it since he wanted to write a Historical book. Just that he wasn’t a Historian and he didn’t want to waste time looking up a History line that hadn’t been told. Thus, he invented his own with footnotes referrals to an imaginary  Encyclopaedia based in the Roman Empire. (And other civilizations maybe). That’s why you don’t need to be a historian, if you don’t wish to be, to become a historical writer but perhaps you might need to become a little fan of the H.

Julian Fellowes, scriptwriter of Downton Abbey, never wrote a documentary but a beautiful series about technological and ideological changes about 20th century that takes us around what could have been a frivolous plot about a count trying to marry off his three daughters without any male heir, if it weren’t because such changes get in the way of such feat.

1923, Honshu island twerks to music synched to an scale of 7.9 to 8.2 Richter grades. This movement caused any stuff: a tsunami, fire everywhere, genocide… and takes part of the ending of one of my favourite manga. Yumekui no kenbun by Shin Mashiba ends with this particular event that changes the characters´ lives into a living nightmare like the ones Haruko feeds from and the one provoked by the earthquake. Anyone can see how much of an impact the earthquake made in Japanese life but it takes someone who knows about History to make of it a superb story.

And for some who write historical novels and decide to run by the facts…they have to guide readers through dates, happenings and verifiable data. Decisions already made which might seem absurd to us, that weren’t at the moment. Those…those are able to turn Robert of Artois into nice guys.

To know History is part of the research to ambient our…narrative Frankenstein and plagiarize unpunished. No one will complain cause you have stolen the idea of a group of people stabbing the new tyrant on the back…Or will call you mediocre for creating someone Cleopatra like.    

If by chance I haven’t convinced you, I’ll try quoting Homo Deus by Nuval Yoah Harari:

“Science is not just about predicting the future, though. Scholars in all fields often seek to broaden our horizons, thereby opening before us new and unknown futures. This is especially true of history. Though historians occasionally try their hand at prophecy (without notable success), the study of history aims above all to make us aware of possibilities we don’t normally consider. Historians study the past not in order to repeat it, but in order to be liberated from it.

Each and every one of us has been born into a given historical reality, ruled by particular norms and values, and managed by a unique economic and political system. We take this reality for granted, thinking it is natural, inevitable and immutable. We forget that our world was created by an accidental chain of events, and that history shaped not only our technology, politics and society, but also our thoughts, fears and dreams. The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future. We have felt that grip from the moment we were born, so we assume that it is a natural and inescapable part of who we are. Therefore we seldom try to shake ourselves free, and envision alternative futures.

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn’t want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape – and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.”

And more imaginary worlds.

[1] I say popular versión since it seems that modern discoveries have made of her a less gossiped version without the incest and more real letters to discard people poisoning left and right.

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How to write fiction

How to write fiction stealing time from life

Tenet? No, this ain’t such a plot. It is something like a said about Argentinians: “sencillito y carismático[1]. Because when one writes, earthquakes come and happen…. I mean, things come unannounced. Life throws anything that can be thrown your way. Laziness included.  

To Cathy Birch, author of “The creative writer’s workbook” says that all of a sudden; doing the laundry, reviewing your twits, reading webtoon, going to May’s party or leveling up Manor Matters[2] becomes even more attractive or relevant than getting seated and write.

Plus, real jobs[3]. Then writing or designing goes to forth or fifth place. We just don’t have this inner drive to stare at white pages with better eyes than the ones we use to look at the dishes on the sink[4].

To Cathy, the solution is quite opposed to what Chuck Wendig and others propose. To place your a…amazing derriere on the chair and write the humongous amount of 25,000 words a day[5]. The other alternative being to sit down, scribble a little, tear it apart, compress it to a ball, measure the parabola of a trajectory  and throw it to the bin since you have no idea what to put down in paper. Cathy calls this pantsing, a term that has no translation to Spanish. Something to do with scene planning and blah blah…to deal with later.

So…none of the two above sounds appealing. I can’t figure out how to sit 7 hours a day staring at a white page. I feel like getting up and do something else. Having a job? Impossible. Do you have kids? Even less. Unpractical. So what to do? (Inner yelling).

We use a regular short slice of time….OK. Put aside 10 minutes a day to write. It can be 10, 20, 30 or as much as you can spare. WRITE. WRITE AND WRITE. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Is it appalling? Give a sh….shiatsu. Good, bad, whatever, writing a little at a time is much more than nothing. And when you believe you already have something that makes a bit of sense, then yes! Compare, expand, edit, explore. Immortal prose is to be born of doing, not from thinking if it is good or not. If it is good or bad, there is only one way to make it better….WRITING.

If you’re, like me, not familiar to work with self imposed objectives but those the company sets out for you; this helps a lot. But a lot. Our inner judge tends to make fun of our own tryings and; oftenly it will have us giving up because “we are not good enough”. Maybe we are not…so what? This is not the time to wonder, it is time to write.

Ready? 10 minutes in the timer, your behind on the chair, pen and paper (or smartphone). Go! Write. Think later. So like this, suscribe and do something for the sake of the universo.

[1] Simple and full of carisma; it is a mocking phrase about Argentinian carácter but the truth is they quite have reasons to be proud of themselves.

[2] She doesn’t say it quite like this, I’m adding some of my own “demons”.

[3] Something your nephew can do easily, right? In third world countries, these jobs are looked at as fancy stuff to do in your free time….Wait, even in powerful, technologically advanced countries, it is underestimated.

[4] For those of you with a dishwasher…this ain’t a trouble at all. But for us in the third world still washing dishes by hand…

[5] Can someone explain to me how to achieve such a feat? I belong to the minimalism about words. Almost, almost to the micro novel style. A paragraph is already a lot for me.

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How to write fiction

How to write fiction scared and being stubborn

Out there…out there are a lot of writers, scriptwriters, comic drawers. You can’t count them. There are those who are successful, those about to, those who gave up due to economy, those ho study and write once a week. A mob to compete with.

So you have on your hands your first new born (written one). You’re so proud of it, you start showing it to anyone who can read. In your imagination, it has the right to be seen or read by editors, juries and movie directors to be loved, prized and make money, royalties… a universal change. You send it to any contest and wait. Keep waiting. There’s no answer. Might the juries be blind as umpires are? The next step you take is to self publish or print a few ones to sell them. Making the massive offer of titles to chose from even bigger. And so in the HBO-Netflix era means just another title more in an ocean filled with big tasty fish[1] against you, little fishy soya flavoured. Popular. With tale telling skills above yours. Lightyear further.

Is it now the time to hive up? Maybe… There’s still the titanic labour of promoting that might make you reconsider if you’re a sales man or a writer. A job normally done by an editorial instead of the author and the reason why authors look up to be devoured by the bigger fish. They have more resources.

Are you still there?

Let’s go back to the beginning. Your first born comic-script-novel-short piece is awesome for the single fact of being finished. Others have given up before that. Which doesn’t mean it deserves to be published. Are you as good as Monterroso, Stan Lee or Ingmar Bergman?

You know the answer. If you’re still comparing yourself to them, you don’t have idea what you can really do or will be able to do. But if you have stopped comparing yourself…you have become an arrogant bastard, specially if no one publishes you yet.  Such a depressing thing, enough to smash self steems. Am I good enough?

No…not yet. You’re in the way to be. About to break through. Are you going to give up now? Now? A home run from winning in the ninth in? Take a few more beats.

Are juries-editors shit?

They might, they might not. There is an author with a Saturday column in Milenio Diario. He sometimes can be amusing and sometimes a prickly snob. Well, he says there are editors who have come to hate reading for the single fact of despising their job. Why? Because they read so many horrible writing that they can’t take it anymore. The momento I read that I thought that there is no way to know what is good if you don’t read.

There are mangas I wouldn’t have given a cent to the first ten pages and afterwards became relishing. Of course there are some that taste honey and milk from the first line or drawing. And those which start like soda pop bubling and end up in nothing. The same some movies earn their right to be left unseen.

An editor finds not one, hundreds of manuscripts. They have their own filters to deal with the straw. Filters that begin with marketing issues, no matter how good the content is.

A publishing house or contest gets a bunch of manuscripts. Not all from people who REALLY WANT to learn the craft. Some copies of soap operas with a youtuber speckle of pepper. (I’ve read things as such (reading habit I had to get rid off due to mental health issues and time being limited). Editors HAVE TO read that pile. They can’t just throw the manuscript away must cause they didn’t like it…I mean, John Dos Pasos couldn’t get me hooked whilst some editor thought he was great.

So they create rules for themselves and those in the trade. To get rid of whatever that is not in format, is bad spelled, lacks acceptable conflict. You are not a victim. You are an author. LEARN. RESEARCH. You’re here since you have one talent: to persevere.

Fear is out there for everybody. After a number of contests, rejections and self-publishing without sales. Remember: Harry Potter was rejected 20 times and even then, that first edition went to libraries to be read…an editor wasn’t doing his job properly[2].

The match isn’t over till the bell rings. If you have made it here, you still have seconds in the panel.

[1] Just two names to erase your self-steem: Game of thrones and Magpie Murders

[2] Out of gender bias perhaps?

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How to write fiction

How to write fiction, 7 reasons why to plagiarize opera

people performing in opera house
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Or the opposite. How to write operas plagiarizing fiction[1]…

Do you believe the opera is something old fashioned? Is it boring and expensive? Impossible to understand a snail what the bloody heck is being sang?

Yep, yep and yep. It ain’t as modern as musicals. It is expensive to go; in Mexico the opera programmes are offered only in the Auditorium and only to watch re-runs from the New York MET.  Stuff sang in long intervals is difficult to understand… specially if you don’t happen to spit in French or German. Above it all, if they’re modernized, they end up being even more incomprehensible.  Why would one want to sit down and watch an opera play then?

  1. It is related to the musical tradition of soundtrack…To anyone who has watched any copy-paste movie alike to Mision Impossible or Secret Agent X but without music of the same quality; this is more than obvious. A solid musical choice can and does highlight a persecution till we’re breathless. Or get our tender hearts to bleed with a bit of emotional blackmail. The shape of water by Guillermo del Toro is not as exciting without sound. Opera is made so we understand the story through the music.
  2. Music is capable of provoking feelings directly in our brain by modifying breath rhythm, heart pumping and/or our own comfort in space. No author can say they have mastered the “show, don’t tell” if they can’t say what emotion they’re feeling and describe it only by the physical reactions of their bodies.
  3. Opera plays have a proficient use of clichés. To compose Turandot, Pucini invented the “oriental music” by including piano melodies in which only the black keys are played. This has become our cultural reference about what we think should be oriental music. Robert McKee says we need to include every specification associated to a plot gender to satisfy our target. Opera has years doing so including pertinent associations to each story. Plus the music, of course. To learn more about opera you can watch “This is opera” (as you see opera can get percolated to bigger audiences).
  4. Some authors love to create characters who like opera. Such as Henning Mankell and Andrea Camilleri. To Mankell, Kurt Wallander sometime dreamt of becoming an opera singer so he carries around opera cassettes in his Renault. Camilleri describes Montalba whistling or humming Aida in euphoric times. Becoming an author deals with becoming a bit of an intellectual. An intellectual, not a pain in the…you know.
  5. There are TV programmes where they explain what and how a certain play works. Just in case you believe studying music is the next step then or that you need becoming a crammer to cultivate your mind. I know…not everybody can learn how to play an instrument and not everybody likes reading with such zeal. In Mexico the open channels 22 and 28 offer programmes of the kind. This is opera is offered some channel up or down F&A. If you know of some other programme like this in your country…will you help telling us about it in the comments?
  6. Not only Rigoletto seems a copy of Hernani; La Traviata is like an adaptation of La dame aux camellias to a musical. Did you believe the best writers never plagiarize anything? Oh, they do. Just that they do it better than using crtl+c/crtl+v.
  7. Just in the same way Greek myths are re taken and re kindled in webtoons as wonderful as Lore Olympus; an opera play can become a pretext for a spin off like the one of Nodame Cantabile. Where the content of The magic flute is the ordeal to create conflicts for the characters. Some as simple as…”The prima donna doesn’t fit in the dress and our budget is not big”

Have you been to the opera? What’s your favourite?

[1] Just in case I don’t speak about it again, it is said Pucini stole the idea of Hernani, by Victor Hugo to create Rigoletto.

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How to write fiction

Three ways exercise improves your writing

Ejercicio invisible

So writing means not to move from your desk/bed/table/working surface in your opinion?…yeah, maybe. Isaac Asimov loved his apartment studio in New York and he would have wished it to be the spatial environment of many of his stories: artificial lights, a self sufficient and closed environment, a steel cave. In addition to that, he had a working schedule to kill anybody: from 5 a.m. to the fungi knows when and EVERYDAY; he hated travel but he exercised walking briskly the streets. He exercised.

Chuck Wending of whom I haven’t read anything else but advices about writing and none of his fiction; says that the writer is condemned to be “chubby”. And being chubby speaking about micro motives is a reason to change careers. So, if you despise being unfit, you can’t be a goof writer.

Writers are like any other office worker. They have check in times and gotta work the eight…or even more hours of a working day. Sometimes they eat unhealthily… they have to write hundreds of bad stories to get out something half decent…there’s the cheating. We need to remember words, we need a tool that can react using a part of the body that swallows tons of energy and for such a feat, we need to keep the machine called “body” keeping up. What’s the use of having a body which only brings trouble?

Yeah, there are writers who have created magnificent stories despite their physical limitations. None was a vegetal (mindset stated). All of them have had an awesome brain that allowed them to create.

Did you know that the worst thing that can happen to you after a stroke ain’t to die but to end your days unable to bate a lash? Isn’t it scary to start doing something you truly love for a simple body malfunction that could be avoided to blow out the train’s derail?

Exercise a bit to get the rolls under control:

  1. Gives your brain a break. A break doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means to change activities and with it, you would be sending oxygen to your brain. More oxygen brings out better results.
  2. Resting, you have your brain working subconsciously. And if you’re literally stuck with an idea; it is possible that exercising brings inspiration to see that invisible even in front of your eyes.
  3. It’s kinda obvious: it generates experiences! Experiences are like the items you go around picking up in role morphing- They’re the writer’s ammo. Example: yoga is good to get rid of anxiety…tough I am as well balanced as a drunk elephant[1] (sober they are able to do a lot of stuff); thus I get anxious every single time I have to stand on one leg in fear of meeting Mr. Floor. So this becomes something like: Whilst everybody else in yoga class breathed calmly; Minerva couldn’t stop gasoing like a fish. The posture was giving her a headache and she saw the tiles even closer. Till the next thing she saw was the instructor’s face above her with a lemon wrinkled face.
  4. Outdoors exercise allows you to see what, otherwise; you might not be present at. Birds, squirrels, cats…flower receptionist who are pretty and drool with your smile, a sunset…
  5. And you don’t even need to be an Adonis, Hemsworth or Venus for your body to be better.  Just with being in the green zone of your average weight will improve your life by being lighter instead of carrying around your body as a dead weight. Climbing the chair up will be less of a bothersome struggle and you will feel better long term.

Exercising is cool, ain´t it?

[1] Rosy is my family. Gerald Durrell.

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How to write fiction

How to write fiction making a main character’s life hell

Do I let you touch my belly or not?

Once upon a time… Truth be told, there were many ones and many times… but this happened some years ago. When I didn’t know a dip of the craft but scribbling down in any paper or messing around in the computer—creating files to be finished later… When I shyly looked up in alleys to try and figure out the extraterrestrial nature of writing, without courses to rely on. That is when I found this blog entry.

I can’t even boast of being a professional but at least now I know a bitty bit more compared to then. And how I learnt teaching English: there is no better way to learn something than trying to teach it, even if you have no idea. You need to become an expert to do so. Or fail trying.

To summarise, I don’t remember the name of the blog, the name or the author or anything about but an idea…and so for an elephant’s (pigmey) memory is quite offensive. I start to bad mouth myself so I’ll cut to the example given by this author[1] : any character is like a ball of dough you throw against a wall. You write about its reaction when touching the wall.

A…ha? I didn’t understand then. I was missing something. SUPER IMPORTANT.

Let’s..talk about two characters. Your favourite characters from your favourite love story[2]… they’re getting married at last! You’re super happy. Now you feel like seeing all the details of their everyday life: the weight of the baby, how many bibs is they[3] drinking, the times the couple holds hands and watch TV together…the kisses.

I regret to ruin your fantasy…no, I don’t really regret ruining it. THIS IS NOT A STORY. It is a boring retelling. It is to brush your teeth before going to Spanish class first period, shave to wear a tie and go to the office on Monday eight in the morning traffic stuck, depilate your legs like every Sunday, marinate the chicken in ketchup the day before cooking it in the oven, to study five hours algebra the previous day to the exam. It is…routine. Who wants to watch something that they live every single day of their life as such?

Nope, nope, nope. I don’t mean that we can’t write about our character’s habits and “uses to”; no. It is something simple… but equally complicated. And for that I might use Ronald B. Tobías’ wise in 20 master plots with something of myself pepper-minting it.

Following the example of romance and routine…let’s have the boy meet __________ (fill in with the sex of your preference[4]). So they meet. He likes her or she likes him. So far we don’t have anything.

Wait a minute…she turns him down because he is an alcoholic. He moves to the International Space Station leaving him behind…She is Jewish and he…a neo-nazi. Worst, she is Jewish and she is…well, she.

HOUSTON, WE ARE IN TROUBLE! Voilá, now we have a story. We have a problem, then we have a story. Is he going to join AA to try his luck? Is he going to lose himself in booze? Will he train to become an astronaut or air-space engineer to pursue his beloved beyond the ozone layer? Will he leave Mein Kampf aside to plunge himself in the cultural shock? Will she abandon religion and culture to love freely?

The answer to these questions is the story itself. This is the mystery I was missing. The writer’s job is to stop the character from getting what he wishes for…. At least not that soon. AN STORY IS A CHAINED REACTION to the main character’s wish versus every single thing we put in their way to stop it from happening. In a few words, we’re the crazy bitches making hell out of the character’s life —that sometimes they make ours a pain in the neck…

This is what the author meant when he said the character’s dough thrown against a wall. The wall symbolizes the conflict or problem whilst the character reacts as dough either getting stuck to the problem or bouncing onto the floor. Now I get the metaphor. Do you?

What are your favourite conflicts? If it isn’t that much of a problem, use your power to like this or do something.

[1] If anyone sees it and recognizes the advice and knows who the idea belongs to, I’d really appreciate being told. This person deserves the acknowledgement as any author does.

[2] I know you have one under the bed.

[3] If Emily Dickinson used the “singular they”, why can’t  I to express it in neutral gender?

[4] Nowadays stories are not limited to boy meets girl. Today we can juggle boy meets boy, girl meets girl, girl meets alien? As a typically asexual hetero…

Categorías
How to write fiction

What is and how to differentiate a forda plot from a forza plot?

Brain or brawn?

All the genres and plots out there have something in common: the conflict. The conflict is what makes us to keep turning pages, move our fingers down up over the touch screen to pass as fast the webtoon scenes, bite our nails when the hero is about to die (but doesn’t) or the f…ver zombie gets caught in the speared fence about to tear off a piece of us.

It is in the nature of conflict that we can find the big difference about how to carry on with a plot; creating the two only possible plots parenting all the rest of them. As Ronald B. Tobías mentions in 20 master plots (chapter 3, after the conflict) the importance of going to the very origin of everything…

He places the origin of everything in “The divine comedy” by Dante…reason why I must trust in his word since no matter how many times I’ve attempted to read it. The number is the number of my failures. In spite of this habit of mine of reading whatever that came upon my hands, unlike my favourite police deputy (Salvo Montalbano) who will continue doing so; there are things my reading system[1] can’t admit. I can try again and again to get stuck exactly in the same page or some pages ahead to just convince myself the book no me piace and of the need to give it away. That I don’t like something doesn’t mean others won’t. I mean, a lot of Spanish speaking writers love The Quixote and I…don’t.

—Merriam, go back to topic—this is my consciousness’ voice reminding me I was writing aboyt plots… and conflict.

—OK

Thus, according Tobías, Dante splits sins in 2. The strength sins or forza and the fraud sins or forda. Translation: there are the sins of the mind and the sins of the body…Which are the sins of the mind? Which the sins of the body? How does that affect to the plot? PATIENCE.

A forda requires change. Personal change, internal revolutions, spiritual revelations. It requires…a brain able to solve puzzles or hyper tongue twisting moral/intellectual challenges. Of irony and jokes that take a bit more than gas being expelled by the guts. Human nature against or interacting with other human natures to create conflicts that happen INSIDE the head of the main characters.

On the other side, forza plots try to run after the event. Murder followed by terrorist attack plus the profiling, the hero catching the guy. Diamond robbery, treason within the thieves’ band, collateral dead…Fordas are easy to see miles away. And kinda hard to create since there are more of these since they’re more popular.  It is a MISSION IMPOSSIBLE to get Ethan out from jail with the same resources our grandparents have seen due to the fact of both plot types not being mutually exclusive. Plots in which the mind is important can’t help the once in a lifetime Line Agent being pursued in a Mercedes…just so they remain virgin. Neither the need to catch the beautiful assassin girl stop the detective to reflect with something different to the book’s weapon of choice….Nonetheless such is the border line. Is the main character a different person to the one at the beginning of the story[2]? This is a mind plot. A forda. Are they the same running after happenings on the rooves?  This is a forza.

Which do you like better? Do you prefer to mix? Don’t like it or subscribe if it wasn’t good enough. Do whatever you need to do.

[1] The digestive system in charge of fiction in my brain.

[2] Mentally speaking…transgender or aesthetic surgical procedures alone don’t count.

Categorías
How to write fiction

How to write fiction plagiarizing….lay outs

They look alike but they’re not

Are you sure you’re of a sound mind today? Are drugs finally legal in Mexico? Did you drink to your brim of margaritas and lost consciousness? Don’t you know plagiarizing is a criminal entreaty?

Before we go on…let’s chat about originality since…blank starts practically do not exist. The possibility to be able to create something out of nowhere is close to null. Why? Cause someone else beat us to invent Utnapishtim, Adam, Eve or Balam-Quitzé. I mean the myth of humanity, humanity as a concept, is more ancient than you or myself. And…we can’t re-invent it all, can we? Even if we were to think biblical characters did really exist…How can we know that Adam was Adam and not Esteban just so he donned the “first man” tag only because those jotting down god’s teachings didn’t like the name? It’s a humongous if….

So…why is that related to originality? All stories, even the ones in which the characters are talking little bunnies, deal with human concepts. That’s how and why it’s kinda harsh to be original. Love, revenge, rivalry, transformation and growing are human ideas. All stories are about what happens to human beings: sudden dead of the parents[1], dead of a beloved one, a wanted pregnancy with lots of risks[2], unwanted pregnancy without them but that places things upside down[3], adultery for justifiable reasons, adultery just because, jealousy, shotgun murder, political betrayal, unrelentless capitalism race…

And you still believe that no one, absolutely no one, copies from anybody else? At least a fraction of the idea?

“If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the <<Ode to a Grecian Urn>> is worth any number of old ladies.”

—William Faulkner

“Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him[4].”

—Mark Twain

 “Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.”

—Lionel Trilling

 “The immature poet steals; the mature poet plagiarizes.

—T.S. Eliot[5].

Every single one of us, who writes, designs, teaches or engineer; has a favourite thinker, engineer, designer or…a full apartment complex of them (mea culpa). Among those living in my apartment complex, there is a guy who wrote robots’ science fiction and his “Memories[6]”

In them (the last ones), Asimov more or less tells u show he startes copying the STRUCTURE of the stories from his favourite authors since, in his opinión, we all want to be like the best. Just saying, most of the living authors I have at least read the interview, mention a certain someone who used to live in La Mancha as their ideal…in Spanish. In English, they mention one of three: Stratford-upon-Avon, la Rue Morgue or Cthulhu.

It is from there that we plagiarize. The plagiarizing T. S. Eliot mentions is not the vulgar let’s see whom to steal ideas from. It is the study and imitation of the literary hero who wrote the bloody thing which inspired us to write until we learn how to create something on our own. That, or the will to see our nemesis down. What with Balenciaga buying Channel to undo them and better his own patterning? This is the plagiarize I talk about in the headliner.

Who inspired you? Have you tried to repeat what made their work a success? Are their literary resources ancient of minty breeze? Anyone who hasn’t taken anything from anywhere else for their own stuff…can throw the first stone of an absolutely pristine and devoid of inspiration from other art works’ very own fiction.

Oh…and about the other plagiarizing. I’m against it. About the one stealing other’s ideas.

[1] The most remarkable fetish of a certain animation house

[2] Steel magnolias,  American movie of 1989 I haven’t watched it yet.

[3] Jenny-Juno, South Korean movie of 2005 and quite, quite similar to Juno, American film of 2007.

[4] Maybe not as sure his wife had already said it…and the other way around.

[5] 20 Master plots. Ronald B. Tobìas.

[6] Twice in fact.