Sí, adivinaste. Me quedé sin tema para hoy. Y ya que este blog trata de escribir ficción, supongo que hay que escribir ficción de vez en cuando….
Miró hacia atrás. Hacia el mar de papeles, las torres de Jenga en equilibrio de puntal de libros y los post it sobre post it con recordatorios de la semana ¿pasada? Este el cuarto donde había aprendido a pensar. El cuarto donde podía leer de revés. Dónde tenía su rueda de ejercicio y dónde los otros Hámsters enviaban sus mensajes en códigos que parecían sacados de una Enigma.
¿Para qué diablos quería un cuarto nuevo? Este cuarto y el otro, el de los techos altos, eran más que suficientes. Incluso tenía ¿uno?…sin terminar. Aquel que lo dejaba encerrado entre signos sobre la hierba y el cielo más azul. Pero no…¡quería más!
Revisó el equipo de inmersión. Cada vez que añadía un cuarto y quería entrar en él, tenía que usar el equipo. De otro modo se veía expulsado en cuanto ponía las patas dentro. Las ventosas de succión de las patas traseras estaban torcidas. Metió la pata delantera para ajustar la parte que pisaba mal del lado externo. Se ajusto las anteojeras. Si veía cualquier cosa en otros signos, se vería expulsado del cuarto.
Había que ser cuidadoso. C’est ça. Je suis sur la place. C’est une fleur bleu et une grosse abeille plus une grande balleine sur la mère… Je peut un mot de… quoi? pour le ciel… Blanche il est..
Un ruido del exterior. Apenas nada, un susurro nebuloso.
—Jenny…muosha exhi shar.
Sintió el chupón de la distracción en su espalda, que terminó por extraerlo del cuarto. Parpadeo desorientado, haciendo que el rostro del cuerpo que habitaba, buscará el origen de la distracción. Era el Hámster progenitor que quería algo…
Intentó escuchar pero no terminaba de ubicarse en el cuarto habitual…los signos le resultaban extraños. La inmersión había sido más exitosa de lo que suponía.
—¿Qué?
—Tú nunca sabes que quiero. Quítate…
Se quedó mirando al Hámster progenitor, de quién nunca entendía del todo sus mensajes. Definitivamente, la realidad no era un buen lugar al que regresar.
Drug…what’s a drug according to the not as almighty Merriam Webster[1]?
Drug. Noun. \ ˈdrəg \ plural drugs
1a: a substance used as a medication or in the preparation of medication according to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
(1): a substance recognized in an official pharmacopoeia or formulary.
(2): a substance intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, prescription drugs: drugs for treating high blood pressure
(3): a substance other than food intended to affect the structure or function of the body
(4): a substance intended for use as a component of a medicine but not a device or a component, part, or accessory of a device
2: something and often an illegal substance that causes addiction, habituation (see HABITUATION sense 2b), or a marked change in consciousness
Now, deviating a bit (by not standard measures) from this accepted meaning; I’ll take Chuck Wendig’s idea about characters: the characters of a story are the drug in it that makes the story addictive.
Aha…did he mean I must sow poppies in the garden and pop out a bit of opium derivates to suffuse the pages on them or….I must entertain my own flowerpot with green weed to fill brownies? More or less. To tell the truth, there are a number of recipes to do so and my recipe book is not exactly in the chef’s amount of expertise and yet…We can review those I know with transforming your characters into real peyote as goal.
All right. The same way, there are special mangas in the language learning section in book stores —right, to learn Japanese!; there are some that show how to create characters… As a matter of fact, many of the traditional mangas — include Korean and Chinese versions; portray a section of one or two pages depicting a profile section (the size may vary) with character’s blood type, s&m tendencies, birthday, favourite clothes, favourite food, if they like Line or any other messaging service. And this might be thought as creating a “type”. A simple perspective of individual… when a really addictive character requires even more detailing.
In Fitzgerald’s words (F. Scott):
“Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type, begin with a type and you find that you have created—nothing.”
In my unathorised opinion, a character ends being something CONTRADICTORY AND AT THE SAME TIME very PREDICTABLE. It has to be someone you know so well, but so well you already know if they might go back to save their family instead escaping alone. It has to be someone you know who will take the sword and sail to conquer the Holy Land….
They’re like Shrek and onions. They have layers. According to Wendig, it is much better if they become more and more complex every time. The character might look like deceptively simple at the beginning. They can’t be perfect. Remember; if they’re perfect they’ll never get themselves in problems and without problems, there’s no conflict. Chuck Wendig, Libbie Hawker and Cathy Birch agree that the character has to have serious issues.
Even the most unmovable and seemingly perfect characters are not so. Unless you want to end up with a plot you can’t move anywhere towards and you see yourself in the need to finish it ASAP with an extra sweet happy ending that never solved the problems derived from your original plot. Something I don’t like but can be very popular; specially for romantic stories. Such is the case of Eggnoid[2], a very popular webtoon at the moment; which sparked the problem of the notion to the right of eradicate the lives of human beings for the crime of destroying a planet and which main focus ends being the ultra handsome stud with a beautiful soul…who might never exist anywhere. Yet we need to drool over something, don’t we? No matter if the name is k-drama or romcom. Besides, diversity is something wonderful and can give birth to a great range of different plots that I don’t criticise it as evil or mediocre but as something that left me unsatisfied about solving the said problem.
Robert McKee stablishes the character as something that should evolve to keep our attention in order for the movie to stop being a summer screening and become a break from the usual patterns of storytelling. Just like Kinsye Millhone devours fast food inside a vocho (VW scarab) whose floor is more tossed wrappings than metal; and at the same time training her body to be able to run a life’s marathon. Seriously, Kinsye is all the time running away from the bad guys at the end of all her literary lives.
So far, you and I know that to make a peyote, molly, snow, cocaine character we need to:
Create contradiction so we can reveal its complexity along with the development of the plot
Make them trickily simple
Make them predictable to the point we know them better than we know ourselves. Consequently, we know exactly what they will do. What we don’t know is what we (the author) are about to #$%”$%& in their lives.
[1] Strangely enough, Spanish has Royal Language Academy which regulates everything happening to Spanish whilst English doesn’t! Yet the recognized? Dictionary to dictate the fashionable use of words is the Oxford. Tough I could only access either the Oxford reference or the Merriam Webster. Hence…
[2] To analyse what you think is good as well as analyse what you consider a failure helps to develope your own style and improve your narrative skills.
<<And the woman said to the serpent, «We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’»>>
<<Y la mujer le dijo a la serpiente “Podemos comer la fruta de los árboles en el jardín, excepto la fruta del árbol en el centro del jardín. Dios ha dicho, ‘No deberás comerla ni tocarla, o morirás’”>>
The bible of King James/Versión autorizada del Rey Jacobo
Comida. Ningún ser humano puede sobrevivir sin comida. De hecho, ningún ser vivo puede sobrevivir sin comida. Desde los hongos hasta los animales… A veces parecería que incluso los virus, excepto que los virus no procesan ninguna fuente de energía.
Nuestra relación con la comida es un asunto sólido de permanencia en el mundo. Y un asunto de transmutación en caso de tocar o comer aquello que no pertenece a nuestro mundo. Como la manzana del jardín del Edén. Lo que puede generar toda una serie de preguntas en apariencia estúpidas. ¿Por qué una manzana? ¿Por qué no dátiles, carne, miel o leche? Cualquier cosa comestible. Las naranjas son más bonitas. ¿Por qué no un carambolo con forma de estrella?
Bueno, como en todo buen cuento de hadas … había una vez un traductor al que le gustaban los juegos de palabras. Y que decidió usar la palabra malus[1] porque era a la vez, mal y manzana. Con lo que la “fruta” genérica se volvió roja, redonda y jugosa. Bastante más fácil de conseguir que una naranja y puesto que era una traducción al latín vulgar…había que volver el libro un éxito de ventas con un poco de copy writing inclusivo. Para que vean que las técnicas para contar cuentos de hadas no son cosa del otro jueves.
Y eso tan solo en la versión judeo-cristiana del mundo…pero ¿qué pasa en ambientes un poco más paganos? Lo mismo.
En Fávila, Graham Dunstan Martín alude a la comida del inframundo. Cuando Ewan busca a la niña del sacrificio para traerla de vuelta a la vida, Brincante le prohíbe tocar, comer o beber nada. Y Ewan se encuentra a sí mismo famélico después de algunos minutos en el mundo de los muertos. Se le invita a comer. Pero Ewan resiste. Tocar la comida o bebida del inframundo equivale a quedarse allí, a olvidar el mundo. De igual manera podría suceder si en vez del inframundo, se tratara del reino de las hadas.
Comer es un asunto serio pues. Lo suficientemente serio para convertirse en tema recurrente de los libros para niños.
“Many of these stories feature food as a temptation for the young protagonists, as a tool used to trick them into doing something wicked or mischievous, putting them in danger or dropping them into the clutches of an evil power. Sometimes, this tempting food is magical, offered by a witch or supernatural being. Food is often a weapon in fantasy literature, meant to lure children towards evil.”
#Muchas de estas historias muestran la comida como tentación para sus jóvenes protagonistas. Una herramienta para inducirlos a cometer algo malvado o travieso, poniéndolos en peligro o dejándolos indefensos ante un poder malvado. Algunas veces la comida es mágica, ofrecida por una bruja o un ser sobrenatural. La comida es un arma en la literatura de fantasía; con miras a atraer a los niños hacia el mal”
<<Nikolajeva suggests “meals in myths and fairy tales are circumlocutions of sexual intercourse, which, in its turn, is the necessary stage in a rite of passage”>>
<<Nikolaevna sugiere que “las comidas en mitos y cuentos de hadas son circumlocuciones del intercambio sexual, que a su vez, es un rito necesario de la adultez”>>
Nothing more delicious. Food as temptation in children’s Literature. Stephens Mary A. 2013. Electronic theses and dissertations.
Y eso que supongo que ni Mary Stephens ni Nikolaevna llegaron a leer Doña Flor y sus dos maridos; donde toda la tensión anímica y de tentación corre en los chorros de aceite de palma en los que freír los deseos, porque ése no es un libro para niños. Los que sí aparecen y seguro recordarás los pasajes relacionados con la comida son: Alicia en el país de las maravillas, Hansel y Gretel, Las crónicas de Narnia: el león, la bruja y el ropero[2].
Claro que en ocasiones, volverlo todo sexosamente Freudiano es bastante rebuscado y poco confiable. Lo que no excluye que las mentes de los autores tengan un poco de cochambre en alguna parte[3].
Sin embargo; es en nuestra relación con la comida donde está la metáfora. Aquello que relacionamos como infantil, adulto, pecaminoso o incluso amoral, termina relatando nuestra historia. O si no ¿por qué somos capaces de mostrar asco frente a un inocente murciélago vampiro que se alimenta de sangre, pero sentirnos excitados por la idea del vampiro con piel de porcelana tragándose los mismo glóbulos rojos? Esta es la idea que utilizó Bram Stoker para crear a su “monstruo” mientras que Coppola lo sexualizaba con Winona Ryder, despejando el camino para las Bellas y Edwards de este mundo[4].
En Japón, beber el café solo es un sinónimo de adultez. Los niños o los enfermos beben café con leche o azúcar.
Los cigarrillos, que no son comida pero requieren de una acción infantil (succionar) se asocian con la llegada de la razón… por razones económicas. Como en todo buen cuento de hadas con patrocinador.
¿Alguna vez has incluido un banquete prohibido en tus historias? Dale like, comételo, escúpelo, suscríbete…
[1] ¿Cómo no me había dado cuenta antes sí este es el nombre del genus del árbol de manzana?
[2] Lo leí pero no recuerdo la parte del turrón y el encanto de la adicción que se posa sobre Edmund al comerlo.
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?
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.
What do they want from life? To conquer the world every night? Live in Mars? To eat ramen in Japan? What??!!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Adrian himself since by wishing everything to remain the same, he negates himself the right to enjoy and adventure.
Rosy, whom in her elephantine chaos and destruction trail; takes Adrian to meet Sam, her father, Sir Magnus, Black Nell and other nice people.
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.
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.
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.
Los tallos en una mano. Brilla el acero en la hoja de la hoz. Swish canta el filo. Un haz de cebada…y faltan unos cuantos kilómetros…eh…Muchos kilómetros más por cosechar. Además de separar la paja del grano. Y separar los mejores granos de los no tan buenos.
Cosechadoras automáticas
Esto es lo que hace una cosechadora combinada. Automatizar el trabajo manual de segar, trillar y separar.
Claro que, como todo, las cosechadoras no empezaron siendo máquinas automatizadas. ¡Comenzaron jaladas por caballos! Poco después el vapor parecía una buena opción y cada país tenía sus ideas sobre cómo debía ser una cosechadora.
Hoy día, son tan versátiles que se puede cosechar diferentes tipos de grano (desde maíz hasta trigo, cebada, avena o colza) con la misma máquina. Solo hay que cambiarles un implemento llamado cabezal (al frente de la cabina) y que es casi como cambiarle el peine separador a la máquina cortapelo. Casi.
Pero eso tú ya lo sabías. Estás aquí para saber más de CLASS Tucano y CLASS Lexion. Las cosechadoras alemanas que trabajan mano a mano con las personas involucradas en la cosecha para mejorar el proceso desde 1936 y con ANSA como distribuidor exclusivo en México. ¿Verdad que sí?
