I may have mentioned that one of my goals is to increase
my writing output, increase my publication rate, and increase the relevance of my
writing. In my WRITING ADVICE column, I had started using an article my sister sent
me by Lisa Cron. She has
worked as a literary agent, TV producer, and story consultant for Warner Brothers,
the William Morris Agency, and others. She is a frequent speaker at writers’ conferences,
and a story coach for writers, educators, and journalists. I am going to fuse
the advice from her book WIRED FOR STORY with my recent trip to South Korea. Why? I made a discovery there. You’ll hear
more about it in the future as I work to integrate what I’m learning from the
book, the startling things I found in South Korea, and try and alter how I write
in order to create characters that people will care about, characters that will
speak the Truth, and characters that will clearly illustrate what I’m writing
about.
“Remember when Luke has to drop the bomb into
the small vent on the Death Star? The story writer faces a similar challenge of
penetrating the brain of the reader. This book gives the blueprints.” – David
Eagleman
OK – I haven’t
written on this for a while, so I’m going to start speculating on a series of
stories. I’m starting with a foundation from an essay I wrote on October 7,
2018:
1) South Koreans
are “space crazy”. They have started their space program from the same “rock
bottom” that the American space program started with.
2) As a rule,
South Koreans love their history.
3) South Koreans are science and technology crazy.
4) South Koreans (as clearly as I could gather it), have flipped the American paradigm of a house being the dream home, and an apartment a “way station” on the way to a home. South Koreans have had to build vertically both because of the mountainous geography and the “soft” stone geology – mountains are “low” but cannot hold the foundation of any construction steady. The apartment is the Korean goal; homes are passe.
5) South Koreans
are solidly rooted in a millennia-old culture.
6) Cheomsongmae is an ancient astronomical observatory that not only survived the southern advance of North Korea during the war, but is now a place Koreans visit. It has existed since roughly since 640 AD – about 1400 years.
7) South Korea is building at an incredible rate!
8) My son commented: “Koreans are aggressive drivers, but they’re not ANGRY drivers like Americans are.”
9) Ancient Korean “signature sticks” are now carved via a computer program.
10) A country with a population of 51 million (imagine the population of Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and the northern half of Texas…the area colloquially as Tornado Alley) squeezed into the southern half of Minnesota...South Korea has few murders, rape is unusual, and children can pretty much safely walk several blocks through a major city to school.
In addition, after
reading Lisa Cron’s book, I extracted 52 key ideas that I needed to incorporate
into my writing. That many ideas would be very difficult to work with and sometimes
the concepts overlapped, so I compressed and rewrote until I had condensed them
into 23 key elements to guide me as I write a story:
ACTION PLAN
1)
Story is how a
character reacts; to the plot which is what happens
2)
Grab
reader, something is at stake on the first page
3)
WHY
should they care?
4)
Every
scene moves to the ANSWER and pacing is the time between moments of conflict
5)
Plot
makes characters confront external & internal issues & CONFRONT THEIR
INNER DEMONS
6)
Prose
directly accesses character’s mind and what they want to happen
7)
Make us
FEEL
8)
Character has ONE objective
9)
Start:
character’s worldview is knocked down
10) Arc: begins one way, ends another
11) Character is action and anything they do makes
things worse
12) Poke the protagonist until they change, fling
them into the fray
13) Mislead don’t hide, lie, or keep secrets from
your reader, or hide the road to the end, (CHARACTERS can do all of these),
give information readers need to know
14) Nothing CAN’T affect the arc
15) Everything that can go wrong, should
16) No one should every give up anything they aren’t
forced to
17) Challenges start small and end huge
18) Threat should be active
19) Hero
becomes one by doing something heroic
20)
Anything that hints at being a pattern had
better BE part of it Setup implies future action
21) Payoff has
to be POSSIBLE
22) Subplots – MASH style – and mirroring
subplots are cautionary tales, validation, or fresh perspectives
23)Keep track of each character’s version of reality
Integrating these
two lists into a story produced the first of a series – who knows, maybe even a
novel. While I have never met any of the Korean SF community, a friend of mine
picked up a publication that’s an overview of that community. Maybe I’ll email
one of the members and ask them to read my current story in ANALOG (https://www.analogsf.com/current-issue/table-of-contents/).
In “Kamsahamnida,
America”, I’ve created the first block of a series I’ve been thinking about.
This essay will be my first attempt at laying out the storyline. From another
essay I wrote in September of this year, “In a story that will be in the
November/December issue of ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact, “Kamsahamnida,
America” (the first story in my Korean Solar Expansion (planned) series), I had
a great deal of trouble writing the end of the story because I somehow got
emotionally tied up in it.”
So, as I’ve done
before, I’m going to use the two lists above to sketch out an action plan.
First of all, I
can’t use the main character from the short story in ANALOG. I need to use
other characters. HOWEVER, I need to find a main character who is “me”. Working
as I do in a very diverse high school, I know I have no right to cultural appropriation.
I can have OTHER characters who come from other cultures (cautious to NOT turn
them into stereotypes), but I have to see the story through my own culture. The
first story was easy because the main character was me.
Now I need a new
character, and I think I’m going to use a combination of my grandson, granddaughter,
daughter-in-law, and son…
Japheth (“Call me Jay
– NOT JC…”), one of the sons of Noah will be his first name. Their last name doesn’t
have an ethnic origin I could find, so after poking around, it will be Karsten.
Clementine will be his middle name (no end of teasing, but his mom wanted it
and he wasn’t a girl, so there you go.) He grew up in South Korea, going to
schools there until his family moved back to the US. He enlisted in the Air
Force, became a pilot after going to college and getting his first degree in aerospace
engineering. He trained as an astronaut/engineer and spent a few months at the
expanded International Space Station, distinguishing himself as an invaluable go-between
when South Korean sent up a massive module and nearly doubled the occupancy
rate. Because of the relaxation of international regulations and the payment of
a huge bribe, their work on nuclear fusion continued and concluded with a working
fusion reactor which powered the station for an entire week without solar
supplementation.
He retired, married
a Korean woman he’d fallen in love with in high school, and settled in both Waegan
and Minneapolis where he worked with 3M as a materials engineer for advanced
spacecraft. He was 46 when his wife died without children. He was recruited by
the Korean Space Program…
And I’m going to
stop here except to say that HIS first story will involve dinosaurs and the
Korean space program…
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