Review: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Posted on March 18, 2013 by David Sheppard

PerksOfBeingAWallflowerJust to let you know where I’m coming from right up front, I watched this movie on DVD last night, not knowing what to expect, and then watched it again this morning. The first time through, I didn’t know if I could trust it, which I could have, and the second time through, I wanted to watch it without the anxiety.

Also, I want to say that this movie is so profoundly good, that it’s one of my favorite movies of all time, regardless of genre. It has one scene (involves a kiss) between the young high school freshman protagonist, Charlie (Logan Lerman) and a senior girl, Sam (Emma Watson) who is his friend that just simply is the best and emotionally truest I’ve witnessed on the screen in a quite a while, possibly ever. And I’ve been around a while. It’s not the only amazing scene, it’s just the one that blew my heart away.

Stephen Chbosky

Stephen Chbosky

The director is Stephen Chbosky, who also wrote the screenplay and the semi-autobiographical novel from which it was adapted. Although he’s been writing for a while, this is only his second directorial outing and his first since 1995. It seems these days that you have to say first what stupid things the movie doesn’t do. It doesn’t have a lot of ignorant made-up conflict that infects it with embarrassing scenes. It doesn’t have a stupid gross-out hook upfront that leaves a bad taste in your mouth the whole movie and spoils memories of it later. Everyone is not against the main character. Universities teach that in screenwriting and all fiction writing actually, the only thing of interest is conflict, and of course that simply isn’t true. All our main character’s friends, and Charlie has many, are on his side and care about him. So is and so does his family. My God what a

Logan Lerman

Logan Lerman

concept! And still the story has a deep conflict running through it that holds the story together perfectly, and makes for a much more emotionally felt and intellectually compatible narrative. Truly remarkable.

The story concerns a young high school freshman, who has just returned from time spent in a mental hospital. He’s apprehensive of his first day at school and with good reason. No one who has known him before in middle school will have anything to do with him. And then at a high school football game, he meets one of his classmates, Patrick (Ezra Miller) a senior, who befriends him, introduces him to Sam, and takes him to a party afterward. Thus begins Charlie’s saga with this little band of

Emma Watson

Emma Watson

wallflowers. Logan Lerman is excellent as Charlie, and Emma Watson is just simply breathtaking. I had the feeling Ms Watson had never been allowed to reached her potential as Hermione in the Harry Potter series, and wow! Was I right. Ezra Miller is also simply amazing as Patrick.

Ezra Miller

Ezra Miller

Although about high school students, this is an adult movie that will be enjoyed by anyone from the age of 12 through senior citizen. Sit back and enjoy yourself. You can trust this one.

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How I Found The Hobbit

Posted on December 13, 2012 by David Sheppard
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings

J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings

I suppose everyone has a story about how they came to read The Hobbit. I’m no exception. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have been a part of my family for the last forty-four years. I ran onto it by chance. I was attending Stanford University at the time and working on an MS in astronautical engineering. My wife, Betty, had given birth to our second child, a daughter, the previous summer and was still struggling with postpartum depression. One day before I left for class, she asked me to pick up something light for her to read, a novel, perhaps a fantasy.

It was the summer of 1968, and I remember entering the Stanford bookstore and browsing the shelves. I pulled out a few books in the fantasy section, can’t remember what, but rejected them. I then pulled out a little volume by someone named J. R. R. Tolkien. The three initials sounded a little pretentious, but I took a look at the cover. The illustration was like something from The Wizard of Oz, a promising sign. It was a Ballentine paperback, and on the front cover, it said, “The enchanting prelude to The Lord of the Rings.” This sounded interesting because if Betty liked the first volume, she’d have three more to occupy her time. I turned it over, and on the back cover it said,

In this delightful and enthralling tale, J. R. R. Tolkien first created the imperishable world of fantasy called Middle-earth–the Hobbits–whose adventures are continued in The Lord of the Rings.

They had used the magic words: “world of fantasy.” Just what I was looking for. It cost 95 cents. The three volumes of The Lord of the Rings were in a boxed set right next to The Hobbit. If Betty liked The Hobbit, I’d return for the boxed set. I took The Hobbit to the lady behind the counter and bought it.

I headed up to the Aero/Astro Department library. It was a small, dark room with bookcases lining the walls and a couple of tables for students in the center. The Department was quite small in those days. I took a chair and started to study my textbook. I was taking a class in Complex Variables, and although I was interested in the math class, the little paperback I had just purchased had peaked my curiosity. I pulled it out and thought I would read a couple of pages to get a better idea as to whether I thought Betty would enjoy it.

About that time a couple of my classmates joined me, and I remember being a little ashamed to be reading fantasy in an engineering library. They asked me about it, and I told them that I had picked it up for my wife, and explained the situation. I read a couple of pages out of The Hobbit, smiled and read some more. I watched my fellow students out the corner of my eye to make sure they hadn’t noticed that I was still reading it. After all, it was a children’s story.

By the time I got home that afternoon, I had read the first few chapters, and I was reluctantly quite excited about the story. I told Betty a little about it over dinner, and she said she’d take a look at it before bed. I also told her that if she liked it, I could get the three extra volumes the next day.

As I remember it, Betty read on after I went to sleep that night. The next morning she said that she’d devoured a good number of pages. Over breakfast, we talked about the chapters I’d read and how much we both enjoyed the story. She said that I should take a look at the other three volumes, and if they promised to be as good as The Hobbit, I should buy them.

The first thing after class that afternoon I went back to the bookstore. I was a little afraid that someone might have bought the boxed set out from under me, but there it was still on the shelf. I pulled out the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, and on the back it had this quote from Loren Eisley:

These are sure to remain Tolkien’s life work, and are certainly destined to outlast our time. They stand as a major creative act.

I didn’t know of him at the time, but Eisley, an archaeologist and author, was to also become one of my favorites writers. I bought the boxed set.

In the coming days, we’d take turns reading it and discussing which part of it we liked the most. We thought Gollum was an unbelievably great character. And how about that magic ring? We started reading to each other after we got the kids in bed. The dragon was an amazing character himself. We finished The Hobbit in short order and plunged into The Fellowship of the Ring. I remember getting to the Bridge of Khazad-Dum first and waiting for her to catch up. Could Gandalf really have died? We were devastated. We charged on through The Two Towers and The Return of the King. I specifically remember reading several times the part where Eowyn kills the Black Rider. And when the ring was at last disposed of in Mount Doom, we both dreaded for it end. Four volumes were not nearly enough.

In the coming years, I would revisit Middle-earth from time to time. I reread it from end to end another time or two. And then when our kids were old enough, I started with The Hobbit. My son was three years older than his sister, but she’d come into his bedroom while I read to him and fall asleep while we read on. When I came to The Lord of the Rings, I had to paraphrase rather than read word for word. They just weren’t old enough. But in the years to come, they were both to read it for themselves. My daughter, the most avid reader, used to reread it every year. I’m not sure but what she still does.

And so it was that Middle-earth stayed with us until Peter Jackson decided to take on the task of putting it on the big screen. It’d been tried before and failed, but for some reason we thought he just might be the one to do it justice. How right we were. We have our beefs with him concerning some of the compromises he made, and in a few instances can’t forgive him for what he did to some characters, but overall, we love the movies.

We have the best of hopes for Peter Jackson’s version of The Hobbit. It really is a children’s story, so I’m not so sure it’ll go over as well with the public as did The Lord of the Rings. But I’m sure kids will love it. I’ll certainly be in line to watch all three when they first hit the big screen.

I still read the books. I reread The Hobbit earlier this year, and I’m currently almost finished with The Fellowship of the Ring. It’s been quite a ride, and one I expect to never end.

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Pricing Your eBook

Posted on April 25, 2012 by David Sheppard

Factors to consider when pricing you eBook. Provided by Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.

How Data-Driven Decisions *Might* Help Indie Ebook Authors Reach More Readers

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Verisimilitude of the Author in Fiction

Posted on December 28, 2011 by David Sheppard

Verisimilitude of the Author in Fiction

Samuel Coleridge once observed that when writing fiction, the author needed “to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” [Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817, Chapter XIV] Once this is accomplished, the reader has the advantage of immersing her/himself in the fictional story that s/he supposed, for the moment, to be the truth. Many successful authors resort to rather extreme artifices to accomplish this. Women historically resorted to pen names as did men at times to add stature to the author’s persona.

But authors have gone much further than this to attain credibility and provide a sense of verisimilitude. In Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the author opens her story with an introduction, which consists of a tall tale of a visit in the year 1818 to the Sybil’s Cumaean cavern near Naples on the coast of southern Italy. There she describes locating a forbidden passageway and discovering the Sybil’s hideaway, and even more importantly, an ancient text written on leaves. Her story is then supposed to be a translation of the actual text written by the Sybil concerning events thought through prophecy to occur in the year 2073. She and Percy Shelley did visit the ancient site at the time she noted, but she fictionalized the finding of the ancient text, or so we believe. This mingling of personal experience with crucial fictional elements serves to provide the reader with a means whereby to accomplish Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief.” Mary’s is an apocalyptic novel detailing the end of the human race.

One might be led to believe that such authorial shenanigans are unethical and wouldn’t be tolerated by major publishing houses today. However, one has but to read the wildly popular Illusions and The Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach to realize that publishing suffers from no such moral dilemmas. Many of Richard Bach’s books contain a mingling of personal experience and fictional elements so cleverly disguised that where truth leaves off and fairytale begins is not easily discerned.

Another example is the over-the-top popular The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. This smallish novel starts of with a chapter titled “The Beginning,” which is a fictional account presented as fact of a meeting by the author with the children of a middle-aged couple who supposedly had an affair back in the 1960s. The rest of the novel is an account of the extra-marital indiscretion. The man involved in the illicit affair was supposed to have been a National Geographic photographer. So taken were some readers by the seeming-reality of the story, that many enquired of National Geographic magazine concerning in which issues they might locate this character’s photographs. Of course, the story and its characters are entirely fictional, but the popularity of the novel illustrates how important verisimilitude in fact is.

So then we come to me as an author, and the lengths I’ve gone to creating this poetic faith involved in the suspension of disbelief. I have for the past year or so been involved in an experimental project concerning writing fiction under the influence of the psychologist Carl Jung’s psychic process called Active Imagination. Although Jung envisioned this process to be used for therapeutic purposes, I’ve adapted it to writing fiction. Specifically, I’ve used it almost exclusively to write a vampire novel. [See the Iris of Time.] No, I haven’t pretended that the vampire world I’ve created is a part of this reality; however, I have taken some liberties with the origin of the story. I’ve assumed a persona, what would be called a pen name in some writing circles. But I’ve gone them one or two better. I’ve written a biography for my fictional author, given her a blog, and had her blog about her life in the real world, and I’ve created this fictional author-material also using Active Imagination. It’s another fictional element that separates the reader from the author. I’ve stepped back and removed the appearance of myself totally from the work. This young fictional woman’s life is as much of interest to me as is her novel. I’m assuming no one has an interest in a vampire novel written by an old man of seventy from America, but they just might have an interest in one written by a nineteen-year-old girl from Romania.

But let me add another reality twist to this picture that won’t occur to most people. To practice Jung’s Active Imagination, I first clear off a part of psychic space and wait for images or voices to spontaneously appear. I do this mostly at night, in the dark, writing on a notebook computer with its screen and keyboard light turned off. The practitioner of Active Imagination then engages in conversation the psychic personages who spontaneously come forward. For me, this means that I have my surrogate author come to me and tell the story. I but take dictation. Some professional Jungians will tell you that the personages met in psychic space during Active Imagination are as real in that world as we are in this, that the process involves the complexities of the soul. This then makes the author of the vampire novel a real entity and not a fictional presence. Other Jungians might say that this is no different that what actually happens when any author writes a “fictional” story. It all comes from a place Jung called the Collective Unconscious. Accordingly, terming such a story “fiction” is denigrating and not an accurate portrayal of what takes place during the creative process.

Am I channeling a nineteen-year-old girl from Romania? Absolutely not. Am I channeling a psychic presence that wraps the storytelling material in a cloak that represents such a young psychic presence? Of course.

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Pixar’s Near Fumble with Toy Story

Posted on November 6, 2011 by David Sheppard

Conflict with its many ramifications can make or break a story. It should be ever-present, but at the same time, it can destroy the story if it doesn’t fit both the proper mood and the characters it engages.

Walter Isaacson in his biography Steve Jobs talks about Pixar avoiding a potential problem when it allowed Disney to get involved in the evolution of Toy Story. The big problem was Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Disney’s film division.

The two main characters went through many iterations before they ended up as Buzz Lightyear and Woody. Every couple of weeks, Lasseter and his team would put together their latest set of storyboards or footage to show the folks at Disney. … At each presentation by Pixar, Katzenberg would tear much of it up, barking out his detailed comments and notes. And a cadre of clipboard-carrying flunkies was on hand to make sure every suggestion and whim uttered by Katzenberg received follow-up treatment.

Katzenberg’s big push was to add more edginess to the two main characters. …he kept pushing for what he called “edge,” and that meant making Woody’s character more jealous, mean, and belligerent toward Buzz, the new interloper in the toy box. “It’s a toy-eat-toy world” Woody says at one point, after pushing Buzz out of a window. [page 286]

After many rounds of notes from Katzenberg and other Disney execs, Woody had been stripped of almost all charm. … As Tom Hanks, who had signed up to be Woody’s voice, exclaimed at one point, “This guy’s a real jerk!” [page 287]

The story and characters were in such a mess that Disney stopped production. Lasseter talked Disney into letting him taking Toy Story back to Pixar to be reworked. They took the “edge” off the characters, made them work together, and produced an endearing story, satisfying to both children and adults. Jobs had to use personal funding to keep the project going because of the rework. When it was finally released:

…Toy Story opened to blockbuster commercial and critical success. It recouped it cost the first weekend, with a domestic opening of $30 million, and it went on to becoming the top-grossing film of the year… [page 290]

What I wish to point out is that continuous, mean-spirited conflict is not what sells a story. And yet, the statement that “in fiction, the only thing of interest is conflict ” contains more than a grain of truth. But mean-spirited conflict can destroy characters, as Pixar learned with Woody, and other avenues of developing conflict must be explored to allow bonding between characters. Sometimes characters are in conflict over their concern for each other.

I have discussed this more thoroughly here. I also warned against this in my book Novelsmithing [pages 32/3].

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John Lasseter on Story

Posted on November 5, 2011 by David Sheppard

The following excerpt is from this NY Times article, which is a question and answer session with Pixar’s chief creative officer John Lasseter:

Question:
I was curious as to how many movie ideas don’t make it to the big screen and how you know when an idea is movie-worthy. — Ramin K, Mission Viejo, CA

Lasseter:
We do have quite a few ideas that don’t make it to the big screen. Some you hear about, some you don’t. It’s very common in the development of motion pictures.

For me, what I look for early on is first where the heart of the movie is going to come from. The heart comes from the main character and the growth the main character has through the film.

Second is the setting. Where is this movie taking place. Is it someplace I would love to go, and I would love to spend time in this world? We know what computer animation can and can’t do, and we always try to find subject matter that lends itself to our medium.

Those two things. As we develop a story, the plot changes dramatically, characters come and go, but two things you can’t change later are the heart of the film – that’s like the foundation of the building, you’ve got to get that right upfront because everything builds off that. You can’t add that later. You can’t punch up the heart. And then the setting. You can’t just pick the story up and move it to a different world with a different set of characters. So that’s what I look for.

What surprises me is that Lasseter, one of the best storytellers of all time, seems to find this “heart of the movie” by instinct rather that knowing that it is the theme of the movie and comes from the nature of the central conflict. Yes, it does come from the main character, but more specifically, it comes from the conflict between the main character and the antagonist. The nature of this conflict (even if it is internal to the main character) is the premise and, therefore, is the heart of the story. It contains the story’s DNA and is the seed from which the entire story will grow. I believe his stories would stay better focused if he knew more about premise. But then undoubtedly he knows more than he could convey in a quick answer to an online question.

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How to Prepare for NaNoWriMo

Posted on October 25, 2011 by David Sheppard

How to Prepare for NaNoWriMo. (Updated 18 Oct 2012)

You’ve really got to try it once at least, don’t you? Sure. And you’re not going into it cold because that would just be plain silly. So what should you do to prepare? Well, I have some suggestions.

THE IDEA

First of all, you must have an idea for a novel. Something that has been lying around for quite a while, either sketched out on paper or floating around inside your brain is perfect. It could even be a short story that you wanted to expand into a novel. But it may be none of these. Something may have just popped into your head, and you can’t resist following it down the rabbit hole.

So let’s say you’ve identified that idea, and now you’re all set to play NaNoWriMo. Here we go!

THE PREMISE

First of all, identify your protagonist and antagonist. Again they must come from the idea you identified above. You know that these two characters are what your novel is about. You also know that they are in conflict with each other. That’s why we call them antagonists. They may or may not want to fight with each other, but they will eventually because their desire to prevail is stronger than the desire to walk away.

Once you have these two characters identified you should look at the nature of their conflict. And by the way, this conflict will be the central conflict and will determine the overall structure of the novel. But the other thing you should know is the nature of the conflict. What is the conflict over? And also, what is the conflict about? They can be two kids fighting over a marble, or two countries fighting over the future of the human race. It can even be an internal conflict raging inside the central character, which means s/he is both the antagonist and protagonist, sort of Raskolnikov if you’re into Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or a Gollum character if you’re into Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The nature of that conflict is the theme of the story. It is the overall philosophical question posed by the work. Now, don’t get too upset if you can’t state all this in words right up front, but you should have a good shot at the answer to the theme question. If you can’t answer the question of what the conflict is over, then you should take a good hard look at the idea for the novel because it’s still half-baked, and you need to give it some more thought.

Okay. So now you have your idea, identified your protagonist and antagonist, and uncovered the central conflict, what it’s over, and what it’s about. You should also take a first guess at the outcome of the story. I know. I know. I can hear some of you screaming and hollering your lungs out. But theme dictates ending, and you can’t just leave it up to the elements completely. Besides, it’s all very simple and many times can be boiled down to just three words. For example:

Love overcomes hate.

Or

Hate overcomes love.

Or

Author overcomes procrastination. (internal conflict)

The topics and possibilities are infinite. The first word relates to the protagonist, the third to the antagonist, and the second word describes the conflict and indicates the ending of the story. You must know what you’re writing about. So at least give your ending a good first shot, realizing that it’ll probably change by the time you get there. By the way, this is called the Premise. All that we’ve determined up to this point is the premise of the novel. Every story needs an angle and this is it.

NARRATION

Before you can write even the first word of your novel, you have to determine which narrative technique you’ll adopt. You have a multitude of choices, but the simplest for first time authors is First Person. This means that the protagonist tells the story as if s/he were in the room talking to you. For other techniques you could see Burroway’s Writing Fiction, or you could visit my website (novelsmithingblog.com) where I discuss the subject in some detail.

You also should decide on sentence tense. Some stories are told in present tense (I go…), while others are told in past tense (I went…). This is many times decided easily by the novelsmith because s/he has hooked up with a voice that tells the story, and that voice has already decided for itself. If you’re undecided, take a look at a few novels of each and see which you prefer for your particular story.

PLOTTING

All right. We’re finally ready to plot the novel. And yes, you do need to do this, particularly for NaNoWriMo because you can’t afford to stall out wondering where your novel is going. But where to start? With the central conflict, of course. And the first thing you’ll want to know before you can start writing is: How does the conflict get started? Another way of saying this is: How did the protagonist and antagonist get into this mess in the first place? So the first thing the novelsmith has on her/his agenda is to set up the conflict. To do this, the novelsmith must first lock the conflict. This is the point where the conflict starts, and really, the story itself begins. Because the truth is that conflict is what story is all about. That’s the reason in television programs like Law and Order, Bones, or Castle, the writers lock the conflict before the titles roll. They always find a body, or on House, someone gets sick. From then on it’s the cops against the murderer or doctors against the disease, etc. It’s also the reason that at the end of each program they catch the murderer or the doctors cure the disease or possibly the disease kills the patient. Anyway, at the end of the story the conflict is resolved. So there it is: the beginning and the ending of the story. Here’s the summary:

Beginning of story: Conflict Locked
End of story: Conflict Resolved

So that’s it, right? Beginning, End. Story over. Right? Right? Right?

Well, not quite. What throws most beginning novelsmiths is the in-between stuff. And this is where plotting gets difficult unless you’ve had a little experience either analyzing stories or you’ve written a few. This is where we come to things called “plot points.” Plot points are the major changes in the central conflict, and they are amazingly few. Stories do vary, but most contain five plot points. If you can identify these events in the central conflict, you have your story outlined. It’s that simple. Well, yes, it’s also that difficult. Let me first tell you what they are (again almost all stories have them), and then I’ll discuss each separately. The good news is that we’ve already talked about two of them.

Plot Point 1: Lock the Conflict
Plot Point 2: Major Conflict Escalation
Plot Point 3: Mid-Story Reversal
Plot Point 4: Point of Realization (Anguish of Choice)
Plot Point 5: Resolve the Conflict

The first thing about plot points is that they divide the novel into four equal sections. By splitting the novel up this way, they provide the pacing for the story. Since we’ve already talked about locking and resolving the conflict, I’ll concentrate on Plot Points 2, 3 & 4.

PP2 is where a major change in the conflict occurs. It can be a dramatic escalation or a revelation that changes the nature of the conflict and exposes it in all its ramifications. Generally, it will expose the seriousness and true nature of the conflict. As an example, in the movie Groundhog Day, this is where Phil wakes up to learn that Groundhog Day is repeating. The movie follows that pattern with Phil’s varying responses to the repetition until the end of the movie.

PP3 is where the central conflict experiences a reversal. This is a plot point that is generally left out of other attempts at story structure based on the three-act play. But trust me, this is at least as important as the other plot points. What this reversal accomplishes is that it keeps the tension building and prevents the mid-novel sag. Generally, if the protagonist is chasing the antagonist, this will be the point where the antagonist starts chasing the protagonist. If we imagine a story where a detective is chasing a serial killer, this would be the point where the serial killer starts chasing the detective. In the movie Jaws, the fish chases the people for the first half of the movie and the people chase the fish for the second half of the movie. In Cameron’s Titanic, the ship floats during the first half of the movie and the ship sinks during the second half of the movie. Practically all extended narratives have this plot point right smack dab in the middle.

PP4 is where the protagonist learns something that will either make her/him or break her/him. I have called it the “Point of Realization” because many times the protagonist will get what s/he needs at this point to give her/him an edge on the antagonist. It will also probably be the point of what is known as the “anguish of choice,” which is where the protagonist makes the difficult change that will either make her/him or break her/him.

So there you are. You’ve locked the conflict, explored that conflict through the dramatic changes, and then resolved the conflict. The only thing that comes before locking the conflict is a short introduction to set up the story by possibly identifying your principal characters. The only thing that occurs after resolving the conflict is that short period of time during which you show the aftermath of the conflict. This is called the denouement.

CHAPTERS

And there you have it. You have accomplished the first level of plotting. And this may be enough to get you started. If your idea is really hot in your mind, you may want to just jump right in at this point and pound away at it. However, some authors will want to get deeper into the intricate details of plotting, so I’ll provide some additional suggestions for those who like a more structured writing environment. Even if you don’t want to do this much legwork up front, you might want to read on so you’ll have a more intuitive feel for what you are up against if your narrative starts to go off the rails.

So what’s next? You do certainly have a lot of work left to fully plot your novel. You’ve yet to set up all the scenes and separated them into chapters. Since you have four sections to your novel, you might consider a multiple of four to estimate the number of chapters. You should be able to tell from the nature of your story how long it will be. According to NaNoWriMo you’re writing a novel that you anticipate will be about 50,000 words. At 250 words per page that’s 200 pages, rather short but your publisher will love you. At 10 pages per chapter, that’s 20 chapters, and 5 chapters to each section between plot points.

From here, you should be able to identify what each chapter will be about, and you can start filling in summaries to see how the story progresses. Once you’ve done all of this, you’re ready for NaNoWriMo. Of course, you can still do some of this while you’re writing the initial chapters, and much of it will change as you go along even if you have done all of it, but the more you accomplish up front, the easier it’ll be to keep going.

MORE ADVICE

The only other advice I can give you is to always just tell the story and keep it simple. Yes, you’ll have subplots, (each of them will also result from a peripheral conflict) but keep them to a minimum. You may be able to figure out an intricately plotted storyline, but chances are you’ll confuse your reader. This is particularly true of you because you are writing 50,000 words, coordinated words in clear sentences that tell a coherent story in 30 days. All stories are more complex for the reader than they are for the novelsmith. Remember that your reader has to figure out what you’ve written. You see it all in your mind before you put it into words. The reader sees the words and tries to construct the world you intended.

Well, yes, and one more piece of advice. If you seem to run out of creative energy, take your story to bed with you and think about it just before sleep. Think of it again if you wake during the night, and don’t let any other thoughts intrude. When you wake in the morning, your first thoughts should be about your novel. This just might get the creative juices flowing again. I’ve used this technique for the last thirty years to fight writer’s block, and found it to be foolproof. So there. No excuses.

If you prepare yourself in this way, the really, really good news is that you won’t write 50 pages and stop because you don’t know where your story is going.

If you’re interested in reading more about this “Novelsmithing” technique, go to my website NovelsmithingBlog.com and you’ll find every chapter of my book there for free. If you have to have a paperback, you can find it on Amazon. If you’d like an eBook, you can find it at most online bookstores. But remember, it’s available in its entirety at NovelsmithingBlog.com for free.

Good luck and don’t give up. I’ll be watching from the bleachers.

David Sheppard
http://dshep.com

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Review: The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson

Posted on October 6, 2011 by David Sheppard

High Energy and Full of Surprises *****

This is my first Maureen Johnson novel, and I was thoroughly pleased with it. I’ve been reading more young adult the last few years, and this one I would consider a literary thriller, and the writing quite sophisticated. It’s gratifying that such a large number of young readers are digesting literature of this quality.

The protagonist in the story is a young woman, Aurora (Rory) Deverourx, who is from a small town outside New Orleans, Louisiana. Rory is on her way to London, England for her senior year of high school at Wexford in the East End of London, a two-year boarding school for seventeen and eighteen year olds. The story opens with a sort of “prologue,” a third-person narration of a nurse scurrying along the streets of pre-dawn London. The woman is late to work and in a terrible hurry. She stumbles over something in the dark and soon discovers that it is a body with the throat slit and the head almost severed.

At the beginning of Chapter One, which is told in Rory’s first-person narration, we learn that she will attend Wexford, while her parents, both lawyers, are on sabbatical from Tulane to teach law at the University of Bristol, east of London two hours by train. Rory arrives at the airport, where an old man picks her up and drives her to Wexford. On the way, she learns of the murder that same morning, which is characterized in the media as a Jack the Ripper copycat. Back in 1888, Jack had brutally mutilated five women prostitutes, the first on Friday 31 August and the last on Friday 9 November. This then locks the story’s central conflict. It doesn’t take a very astute reader to realize that this young woman will eventually become embroiled in the hunt for the killer who is repeating all of Jack the Ripper’s murders, after all, Wexford is in “Jack the Ripper territory.”

All this is good stuff, and initially the reader becomes engrossed in Rory’s trials and tribulations as she meets new friends and adversaries and struggles with her classes at Wexford, what is for her, an exotic and demanding educational environment. At this point, it is sort of a fish-out-of-water story. New murders occur on Jack the Ripper schedule, and it becomes certain that the girls at Wexford are particularly at risk. The tension is palpable, and teenagers do crazy things, are inherently risk-takers, and fuel is really on the fire. But right in the middle of the novel, the story changes. I won’t give away the plotline, but what happens, for me, really lets the air out of the tension balloon.

In the beginning of the second half of the novel, we experience a twist in the storyline that produces new secondary characters, and the old ones at Wexford sink in the background and are not, although peripherally present, developed further. The story quickly falls back to earth where it languishes for a couple of chapters. With a lessor author, this turn of events could be catastrophic, but Maureen Johnson is an amazing storyteller with writing talent to burn, and this twist soon recaptures the reader’s interest, and we’re off on an even more exciting ride.

The ending of the novel is thrilling, exceeds all of our expectations, and the reader comes away satisfied with having read a well-told story. And just when you think it’s all over, the last scene in the novel will set you to thinking again, and make you quickly turn to twitter to urge Maureen Johnson to write faster, faster, faster, because obviously this story has a sequel. I checked it out, and I believe that this is Volume One of a new series titled Shades of London. Can’t wait.

Review of the eBook format:

I actually hate to go into this, but it seems that publishers should get credit where credit is due, and when not, well… If this eBook is any indication, G. P. Putnam’s Sons/Penguin Group Inc. has a ways to go before they can put out a good one. This one looks more like something a self-published author without much technical savvy would put together. First of all, I read this by jumping back and forth between my second-generation Kindle and apps on my iMac, MacBook Air, and iPhone, all nicely synced by Amazon. The cover used in the eBook is actually the black-and-white frontispiece of the hardcover edition. Granted on my second-generation Kindle (no color) that didn’t matter much, but on the other devices, it did. All the devices I used besides the Kindle have color, so why not have that beautiful cover image? Once you’ve bought the book, all you get is a tiny color thumbnail in your list of eBooks, in which the title isn’t even discernible. Once inside the book, you never see the real cover. Even if you click on the contents link titled “Cover,” you don’t get it. The cover is the symbol of a book, even sells the book in many cases, so why not have it available? Even self-published authors do this.

Secondly, the eBook’s navigation has its own problems. The novel doesn’t start with Chapter One. As I mentioned above, it has a “prologue” of sorts (titled DURWARD STREET, EAST LONDON AUGUST 31 4:17 A.M.) that actually kicks it off, which is fine. But that “prologue” isn’t listed in the Table of Contents, so if you ever return there, you can’t get to the beginning of the story without backtracking several pages. Also, it’s becoming standard for each chapter heading to be a link back to the Table of Contents, but not in The Name of the Star. The eBook also has a few formatting errors (e.g. at the beginnings of Chapters 22, 24, and 31), but these are small annoyances. One bizarre error concerns a reference within the text to a website called “RipperFiles.com,” which is highlighted and an active link provided to… nowhere. All in all, a rather amateurish eBook for a major publishing house, especially when you consider that it sells on Amazon for only a few pennies less than the hardcover, the price set by the publisher. I downloaded the free sample on Apple’s iBooks and found the navigation situation with the “prologue” even worse.

The title, The Name of the Star, is still confusing to me. The words come up in the text, but the connection never quite makes sense, in my opinion. Publisher marketing generally reserves the right to specify the title.

Still, an excellent novel by Maureen Johnson. She is truly a marvelous writer. Too bad her publisher, one of the best in the business, can’t keep up with the times.

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Review: Being by T.R. Mousner

Posted on September 13, 2011 by David Sheppard
Being by T.R. Mousner

Being by T.R. Mousner

In Being, T. R. Mousner’s imaginative and well-written science fiction novel, a highly advanced civilization on another planet in a far-away star system is, and has been for some time, watching and studying Earthlings. Young elite extraterrestrial pilot EBN-Reyoz-X, a Guardian of the Sky, is on what should be a routine reconnaissance mission from her home planet, Pharallax, that ends in catastrophe. Marooned on planet Earth, EBN’s biggest problem is that she has injured herself following the crash of her spaceship, the Protectorate’s Surety. She must get first aid, hide the damaged Suretyfrom military patrols, and request rescue while trying to conceal her identity, all tasks that grow increasingly difficult as her health deteriorates and her very presence signals that she’s not from this world. Wildflowers spring up in her footsteps, and she, being telepathic, has the bad habit of responding to people’s thoughts rather than their actual speech.

The planet Pharallax is in the star system Xionin, which turns out to be Bernard’s Star and some six light years from Earth. Pharallax has short, rapidly changing seasons and several species of human-like and not so human-like extraterrestrials. Although Pharallax is in many ways an ideal world, it has its share of problems, and EBN and her aristocratic, politically powerful family end up right in the middle of them. Mousner’s descriptions of this exotic world are vivid and yet the detail doesn’t get in the way of the narrative.

Being is necessarily told from three points of view, two in first-person, the other in third-person, in alternating chapters. The first is that of the young female extraterrestrial astronaut, EBN (Eee-ben). The second point of view is that of a thirteen-year-old adolescent Earthling, Shale, who stumbles upon on EBN, not knowing she’s from another planet. The third point of view is that of EBN’s younger brother, Aix, who is back on Pharallax, where he gradually uncovers evidence of the highly unusual and disturbing circumstances surrounding EBN’s mission to Earth. Mousner further distinguishes the first-person narrations of the two aliens through the use of tense. EBN’s narration is in past tense, and that of her brother in present tense. This provides a subtle difference in narration for each point of view and enables the reader to intuitively and easily negotiate what could otherwise be a confusing narrative. The reader never misses a beat.

On a personal note, in a pervious life I was an aerospace engineer with forty years experience in the profession and also taught astronomy at a university. I’ve been reading science fiction for fifty years. I appreciate that fact that Mousner understands the science of space travel, solar system planetary dynamics, and presents plausible, though fictional, technology. She demonstrates an uncommon understanding of technical subjects and is able to project this into the possibilities of an advanced alien world. All this, and she is also adept of delving deeply into the psychological states of her human and alien characters. Some of the themes that run through Being are: family, compassion, betrayal, love, jealousy, loss, political intrigue, species-species prejudice, and environmental pollution.

By the end of Being, we find that TR Mousner’s storytelling is just beginning to gather steam. She is a terrific new author, and I can’t wait for her next novel.

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The Author’s First Novel

Posted on April 21, 2011 by David Sheppard

[Might want to reference my chapter in Novelsmithing titled "The Psychology of Creativity" before reading the following.]

I’ve been reading Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, and last night I ran into the following quote:

The “personal unconscious” must be dealt with first, that is, made conscious otherwise the gateway to the collective unconscious cannot be opened. [page 62]

I found this to be a startling statement. A little further on, Jung discusses a dream where reaching “the seventh” references climbing a stairs. Jung says,

“If this interpretation–that the “seventh” represents the highest state of illumination–is correct, it would mean in principle that the process of integrating the personal unconscious was at an end. Thereafter the collective unconscious would begin to open up…” [page 63]

A well known phenomenon in publishing is that an author’s first work is generally a coming-of-age novel and autobiographical. This is certainly true of me. My first complete novel was The Escape of Bobby Ray Hammer. It is set in my hometown and during my high school years. It’s a first person narration. The main character is much different from me, and yet, also very much me. I wrote this novel during my five years of psychotherapy. I had started the novel as an exercise for a creative writing class taught by the poet Renate Wood who had suggested that we write a short piece about someone as different from ourselves as possible. Of course, that immediately opened me up to my personal unconscious, my shadow. I was in a really “hot” psychological state while writing that assignment, and I expanded it into the novel I recently published. I’m rather certain that writing that novel is what threw me into psychotherapy.

Shortly after completing therapy, I lost my job and instead of finding another, I elected to stay unemployed and immediately began planning a trip of several weeks to Greece. I’d felt that my therapy was somehow incomplete. I had been introduced to Carl Jung’s writings (again by Renate Wood), and I thought that constructing a personal mythology might bring it all to a close. At the end of three years from the time I got laid off, I complete my travel journal that I titled Oedipus on a Pale Horse.

I then set to work on another novel titled The Mysteries, A Novel of Ancient Eleusis. But the point I want to get across is that this new novel was not about me. It was a historical novel set in Ancient Greece. I believe that, just as Jung stated, I had integrated my personal unconscious, and that my collective unconscious had begun to open up. I believe all novelsmiths go through this process in one form or another. Our first works deal mainly with leftover stuff from childhood, and our later works deal more with archetypal phenomena. My belief is that we are always dealing with a mixture of both the personal and collective unconscious, but that we deal more with the personal in our early works and the collective more so in our later ones.

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