Posts by Lance Schaubert
For a culture so obsessed with “enjoying the journey,” we sure do hate a ruined ending — isn’t that contradictory? A ruined ending — and the subsequent spoiler alerts that follow — belies our secret obsession with the destination: to enjoy the journey, we need to know how it ends. We don’t want to know how the story ends because we like to be kept in suspense to see if we’ll actually arrive at… well somewhere, we’ll know when we get there. And yet we tell one another endlessly that we must enjoy the journey. The truth is, there’s more than one way to ruin the ending of any story — indeed to ruin the ending of any life — and the easiest way is to ruin the vision for where you’d like to end up.
The ruined ending actually encourages us to enjoy the unknown journey all the more because we know where we’re headed. I think of all the flights and train rides that delighted me precisely because I knew where I was heading: anticipating the destination made me all the more aware of the details of the trip, of how we got there. The Medievalists understood this. Dante for them was great precisely because he riffed on Virgil’s endings in a new and bold way. Julius Caesar rewarded the Elizabethans precisely because they knew of the plot and assassination in advance. You can almost hear the echo of their whispering how Romeo and Juliet both die at the end and the follow-up questions from a theatre-departing mob who wondered what kind of world would lead to the death of two children in love? A world filled with Montagues and Capulets. If there was any sin to the narrative mind of the Medieval man, it was that one of his friends might spoil the beginning. The start of a story is the seed of the end and the slightest variations in what is sown prophecy that wild variety of crops that will later fill our narrative harvest house.
You see this at work in the “spoiler alert” memes for historical fictions. For Titanic, spoiler alert: the boat sinks. For Pearl Harbor, spoiler alert: the base is bombed. For Sully, spoiler alert: he lands the plane in the river. For The Passion of the Christ, spoiler alert: he dies and rises.
If the power in any historical drama is not what happens in the end but how and why and when and where and, especially, for whom it happened, then the power in any story at all could be the very same. In fact the worse crime would not be spoiling that the ship sinks in the end of Titanic but rather spoiling that the historical Titanic ever set sail at all. Why do I say that? Because that’s what happened during the rerelease of the film at the 100th anniversary of its sinking: tons of kids took to Twitter baffled that such a historical event ever occurred, which added historic insult to historic injury. The kids knew the boat sank in the movie. What they didn’t know was that a hundred years prior, 1,517 human souls really were lost to the sea. In refusing to spoil the ending, they spoilt the entire tale of 1,517 actual lives.
We must know the ending to […]
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By Viewminder, Flickr’s CC
If writing a novel is like having a baby, then titling it is like naming your kid.
And parents fret over the names of their children. Big time. Have you seen the sheer number and size of baby name books these days? Not to mention the power of a tool like my beloved BehindTheName.com — if titles are baby names, then a quick manual on how to title a work might come in handy.
Today I want fill your titular arsenal with multiple arms that will level up the caliber of your titles. Then I hope to encourage you to arm yourself with several of them going into the final phases of publication. With a handful of solid titles ready, you’ll never get shamed over an editor’s lack of choices:
Thematic Quote — The most common practice you’ll encounter is authors who title their books using loose references to the works of other authors. Call it due deference, if you’d like, but sometimes you get the impression that an author simply liked the quote and has yet to read the work from which they derived the quote. The Sound and the Fury, And the Mountains Echoed, and Leviathan Wakes all use this. To do it yourself, call to mind your major theme, check The Oxford Book of Quotes, Goodreads, or The Dictionary of Anecdotes for quotes related to that theme, pare down the quote, and you’re golden. For instance, I’m writing a piece of Harry Potter Fanfic about feeling welcome in the midst of homelessness. I searched quotes on homelessness and found:
“Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it’s not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you’ve been to. I’m not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don’t have to be like anyone else. I’m walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.”
…and now my title is A Place in Your Mind, which also echoes one of Dumbledore’s key lines in the series. Leading us to:
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It took the seventh Harry Potter for me to realize I had it backwards.
I remember driving all over the Rancho Santa Fe and Camino San Bernardo hoods of San Diego with that cinder block of a book propped up on my steering wheel during my morning commutes. Finished it in three days alongside all of my friends, some of whom introduced me to John Granger. John has explained Harry Potter by way of classic literature and Latin. The Aeschylus quote Rowling includes at the beginning of book seven sealed John’s argument for me: Rowling really does pull from a “great compost heap of classic literature.” She wasn’t on her own. She wasn’t trying to be original.
She shoots for derivation.
More on that in a moment. For now, let’s say that many of you are a few books or dozens of short stories deep into your career, which may feel as disorienting as if you were a few beers deep. At every stage in this journey, you may take one of two postures. One is that of the learner who kneels to listen. The other is that of the combatant who takes up arms to strike down his competition. The latter won’t end well for you.
Here’s why:
Everything you create is not true creation. We are not creators. We’re makers. Tolkien taught us that in On Fairy Stories. At no point in this journey will you start truly from scratch. You’re using a borrowed language (English), with a borrowed form (narrative), amplified by borrowed tropes (genres), made fresh by borrowed subversions (humor, genre bending, etc.), magnified by a borrowed audience (you do not own your readership), and I could go on and on for days about paper pulp and the evolution of your genre and the publishing industry and so forth.
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Cheating.
No really, the cheating factor is why so many people get irritated when they spot cliché. Leftovers are boring. There are micro and macro versions of cliché, even global versions of cliché, but regardless of their severity, your clichés end up as little more than cheating, leftovers, microwaved vittles pulled from some unnamed dead guy’s fridge. I cannot begin to tell you how not-on-board I am with eating microwaved leftover vittles yanked out of the molding chest of some dead guy’s fridge. That’s how cliché tastes to the imagination. Go on and categorize cliché next to plagiarism in your mind, but remember that cliché is even dirtier. Why?
Clichés are public domain.
We’ll start with the global, as opposed to garden, variety.
Global cliché happens when a phrase is used so often it actually transcends language. Most often, when we mean “cliché,” we mean a metaphor or simile. The tricky part is this: all language at its root is metaphor. The phrase “make an ass out of yourself” is a metaphor so universal that there was graffiti in the second century in Rome of a crucified man with the head of a donkey. People in every language and culture throughout history have used the donkey comparison as insult. And that’s just a one-word metaphor.
Expanding our cliché cache to include phrases, every language has something along the lines of “don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.” It may be all your berries in one satchel or all of your barley in one barn, but the point’s the same — by using this comparison, you’re taking the lazy way out like the comedian who defaults to the “F” word before doing the hard work of noticing incongruences in his everyday life. You may not enjoy all of Jerry Seinfield’s humor, but you should respect him as a comedian because he never takes the dirty word shortcut like the young guys who try to make a name for themselves through shock. Jerry did the hard work of comedy and there aren’t that many comedians around these days doing the kind of hard chair work the old guard did. In the same way, neither should you cheat and take some clichéd shortcut along your chosen path of prose. Do the hard work of metaphor.
Macro cliché happens with culturally specific references. Adding the word “gate” at the end of a word to indicate scandal is a cliché now, enough that the meaning of the word “gate” is changing, unfortunately. “Beat around the bush,” isn’t so clear in other cultures, but in cultures where flushing out foxes and quail was common, it makes sense. When we depend on a culturally over-used metaphor like “beat around the bush,” we cheat. How? We have refused to work hard and unearth a good metaphor that can also mean “deal indirectly with the problem.” Inventing new metaphors requires sweat equity, especially if we’re trying to create a thematic unity in our work-in-progress. But like all sweat equity, the universe will repay you tenfold, it’ll just take longer. Clichés are as cheap as common bribes.
Micro cliché happens when you reuse a recent metaphor and it often happens when you use something […]
Read MoreToday’s return guest is aspiring novelist Lancelot Schaubert. Lance has published in markets like McSweeney’s, The 2016 Poet’s Market, Poker Pro, Encounter, and many others. He is currently shopping out his first novel and lives in Brooklyn with his attack spaniel and “the grooviest bride in the world.”
We like the way he thinks about story, and we hope you do, too.
You can learn more about Lance at lanceschaubert.org and on Twitter.
Fallacy: The Primer for Surprise
In the middle of the first Robert Galbraith novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, I found myself asking, “How do mystery writers do it? How do they surprise their readers?” I reflected on Chesterton’s Father Brown and Doyle’s Sherlock and Rowling’s Comoron and a weird idea came to me — for years I had been analyzing authors and their plots. I would think through an author’s knack for withholding information and how their plot would hit on every detail but the solution to the mystery. Wasn’t that the surprise?
Turns out I had started in the wrong place. The first question on the origin of surprise is this: What goes on in the reader’s mind the moment they’re surprised?
Story surprises happen not when a reader lacks important information that leads to the correct conclusion about story events, but rather when, through the abundance of misinformation, the reader is forced into wrong conclusions.
Said simpler, surprise happens when readers discover they were wrong.
For writers, this is good news. It’s our job to amplify and exacerbate bad ideas until they break. STORY author Robert McKee says:
STORYTELLING is the creative demonstration of truth. A story is the living proof of an idea, the conversion of idea to action. A story’s event structure is the means by which you must first express, then prove your idea… without explanation… [by showing] how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end.
WU contributor and UCLA writing instructor Lisa Cron calls the first condition of existence the “moment of misbelief” that must be corrected. Whatever you call it, you’re inviting your reader into fallacious thinking right along with your protagonist.
We’re talking about “gotcha” moments.
Read MoreToday’s guest is aspiring novelist Lancelot Schaubert. Lance has sold work to markets like McSweeney’s, Poker Pro, Scars, Encounter, Brink, and many others. He wrote, produced, and directed Cold Brewed which reinvented the photonovel. Currently, he’s finishing his first novel in between large batches of various soups (today’s soup, for the curious among us, is white chili).
His essay for WU, which draws comparisons between conflict in novels and in the roll-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, will speak to your “inner geek.” (Don’t pretend you don’t have one.) And if you really are questioning why D&D? Consider this: D&D is all about story and conflict.
You can learn more about Lance at lanceschaubert.org and on Twitter, or join the guild of renegade imaginations receiving his updates.
What Dungeons and Dragons Taught Me About Story Conflict
Confession: I spent way too much money on comic books, D&D dice, and video games in high school. Lucky for me, some of it came in handy for my career as a writer. Actually most of it came in handy, but this isn’t an apologetic for geek stores. It’s an article about conflict.
And conflict is strange. Really strange.
We literary types use the word “conflict” like business people use “synergy” and churchy people use “missional” and politicians use “foreign policy.” We use it so often, we have almost no freaking clue what it means anymore. I know I didn’t at first.
The first time someone told me, “Your story needs more conflict,” I wrote a battle scene into a non-battle story. Think: Matrix-meets-Sleepless-in-Seattle. Frustrated, they tried again to explain what they meant. I didn’t get it.
It’s because conflict has become our nonsensical buzzword. And we’re actually kind of proud of it, even if we’re clueless as to its true meaning. You might think it would be good to try another word, but we’re stuck with the word “conflict.” Dispute limits the topic to arguments. Sexual tension only works for erotica and certain scenes of romance. Fight sounds broader but still only includes interpersonal conflict and some forms of external conflict. Negotiation keeps us in the verbal and economic spheres but limits us where violence, pacifism, and forces of nature are concerned. Voyage takes care of the nature part, but limits us concerning still, small voices.
We’re stuck with the word, so I figured I might as well get to know it.
Robert McKee’s section on conflict in STORY helped me a bit:
Conflict is to storytelling what sound is to music… The music of story is conflict…. Writers who cannot grasp the truth of our transitory existence, who have been mislead by the counterfeit comforts of the modern world, who believe that life is easy once you know how to play the game, give conflict a false inflection. Their [stories] fail for one of two reasons: either a glut of meaninglessness and absurdly violent conflict, or a vacancy of meaningful and honestly expressed conflict.
I started to understand and then I remembered how conflicting dice rolls work in D&D. Now if you’re a women’s lit writer, hang with me – this will apply to you too, I promise.
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