Ambrose & Elsewhere

What is the “truth” about the “Titanic” (if that was its real name)?

For more “truth” if you can “handle ‘it'” see the official website for the Titanic Truth Movement.

(Glommed from eeknight‘s LiveJournal.)

This week’s Writer’s Five, answered for Morlock again.

1. Does your protagonist have a hobby?

He makes things. But it’s more like a vocation than an avocation.

2. Does your protagonist have a best friend or a confidant of sorts, someone he/she can turn to for advice or just to talk through a tough time?

No. And if he did, he probably wouldn’t.

3. Does your character have a quirk not dictated by the plot?

He gets seasick easily and would never travel by water if there were another option.

4. Does your protagonist like their job?

Morlock isn’t employed in the usual sense of the word. When he needs money he makes some.

5. Where does your protagonist go when they’re down and out? (i.e. a favorite dive bar, a friend’s house, a cave in the mountains)

He goes somewhere else. (He moves around a lot.)

A while ago I was trying to plot a story which was (and is still) giving me some trouble and suddenly my brain plotzed. I had one of those mental crises where I realized I didn’t know something I thought I knew.

What is a plot?

Dictionaries are useless for this sort of thing, of course. Here’s the OED: “The plan or scheme of a literary or dramatic work; the main events of a play, novel, film, opera, etc., considered or presented as an interrelated sequence; a storyline.” So if I take out the non-main stuff, what remains is the plot. Sort of like defining a statue as what’s left when all the non-statue marble has been removed. Thanks, OED Rex!

Aristotle’s Poetics is a little more help: “the plot being a representation of a piece of action must represent a single piece of action and the whole of it; and the component incidents must be so arranged that if one of them be transposed or removed, the unity of the whole is dislocated and destroyed. For if the presence or absence of a thing makes no visible difference, then it is not an integral part of the whole.” There’s more about the plot–what’s a good one as opposed to a bad one, etc.–but it’s mostly focused narrowly on tragedy.

And anyway, I didn’t even look at that stuff until my crisis was over. I got up and walked around muttering to myself, my preferred way of resolving any issue. (It makes me very popular on transatlantic flights, or so I am willing to believe.)

Plot, I decided, isn’t just a set of events, even significant events. It has to be a sequence of events that are causally linked somehow. But even that isn’t enough. If I want coffee, I make it or buy it, and the events in that sequence of actions are causally related, but they’re not especially significant, even to me: it’s the end result that matters. If some significant events happen in the course of acquiring the coffee (e.g. I find a silver dollar while ransacking the house for change; I have to kick my way through a pack of wild spotted dogs to get to the door of the coffee place; etc.) so much the better (for storytelling purposes). But what really matters, what distinguishes a plot from other event-sets, is that it is a significant series of causally linked events. The events may or not be significant, but their cumulative effect must be.

Significant to whom? is the salient question. To the audience, certainly, but more immediately to some character in the story. This isn’t actually necessary. You could write a story with a lot of ironic force where the events, meaningless to any viewpoint character, matter to the reader. But usually it’ll be the other way: the reader measures significance by the impact on some character or characters in the story.

With that out of the way, I stopped plotzing and went back to plotting.

queenoftheskies mentions The Writer’s Five, a new LiveJournal community that posts five questions for writers each week on Wednesday. I feel a pressing urge to post something here besides YouTube videos, so I’m in.

These questions are all about a character, so I’m choosing Morlock Ambrosius, only continuing character of mine that’s made it into print.

1 – What is your character’s favorite color? Does he own anything that color?

Morlock’s favorite color is probably red, but he can’t wear it and doesn’t own anything in that color.

2 – Your character wants to read a book or rent a movie – what would he/she choose?

Morlock would read a book, I think. His only interest in a video player and TV set would be in taking them apart to see how they work.

3 – Does your character have any siblings? Do they get along?

He has two sisters in his birth family and five brothers in his adoptive family. He’s pretty detached from all of them, but probably closest to one of his sisters.

4 – Has your character ever had a hangover? How did it happen?

Morlock is a drunk, with increasing and lengthening periods of sobriety in middle age.

5 – What is your character’s main mode of transportation?

Mostly he walks. But at one point he acquires a horse named Velox (seen here in the foreground).

I know it seems like this blog is becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of YouTube, but a friend brought this video to my attention, and since it is both useful and beautiful– Oh, no it’s not. But it is the 24 books of the Odyssey, summarized fairly well in about a half-second per book.

A mash-up of the 300 trailer, transforming it into family fun for all ages. I would pay big money to see this movie.

This meme has popped up in a few places that I know of. Steve Goble’s recent resurrection of it inspired me to make my own (not especially original) list.

Things I Never Want to See Again in Fantasy Fiction

1. Vampires. Particularly vampire lovers of moody vamped women. (Isn’t there some new metaphor for exotic doomed romance out there, waiting to be used? Were-panthers? Piratical walrus ranchers? Corrupt but dashing accountants? Enough with the vampires!) Offending authors to be locked in a glass cage with a cloud of mosquitoes to experience the sensual pleasure of bloodsucking parasites at first hand. (Somehow this line seems to good to be original. Whoever I stole it from is free to complain that I am a literary vampire; they certainly have my sincere fangs.)

2. People who are famous without having done anything. (Heroes have to earn their bones.) Offending authors to be sentenced to endless, increasingly disturbing fanfic.

3. Names with apostrophes: F’fiff’le’frr’f or the like. (Self-explanatory.) Offending authors must study phonetics until they can do it right.

4. The Hero Is The Chosen One Who Will wompfle-pompfle-yompfle. (Heroes have to earn their bones; they can’t inherit them from destiny, Aeneas.) Offending authors will be forbidden the use of capital letters.

5. Evil Dark Lords of Evil. (Evil rarely marks itself that conveniently, not if it has anything on the ball.) Offending authors to be compelled to read Melville’s The Confidence Man until they get it.

6. Fluffy harmless dragons. (Dragons can be for or against the protagonist, but they should not be merely nice.) Offending authors will be immersed in a vat of Beanie Babies until they acknowledge the horror of commercialized cuteness.

7. Novels that don’t fit into a single volume. I realize there are many stellar exceptions (Lord of the Rings, the Aubrey/Maturin series, etc.), and I’m not against sequels (a different matter) but I’m inclined to believe that most people continue their story past the first volume because they don’t know how to end it. Much as I don’t know how to end this paragraph with an appropriate punishment.

8. Killing secondary characters–with or without the involvement of refrigerators–just to lend a false similitude of danger and/or emotional depth. (You’re not fooling anyone, you know.) Offending authors to wear red shirts whenever they beam down to the planet.

9. Fake deaths. (It’s one thing to have a character who is believed to have died but actually has not; a character who has actually been killed should not be brought back for the convenience of the storyteller.) Offending authors to confront their own mortality.

10. Characters who don’t see the obvious. Offending authors to spend a week in a shopping mall wearing a Captain Obvious costume, constantly confronted by people who say, “Isn’t it Obvious?”

Howard A. Jones, Managing Editor for Black Gate, has set up a LiveJournal for the magazine. In the first entry he sketches some sword and sorcery musings. Looks like it might be a promising venue to kick some ideas around.

…is the music of Altan on St. Patrick’s Day, or St. Hubert’s Day, or any particular day.

Bo Mhin Na Toitean /Dark Haired Lass

Ta Mo Chleamhnas A Dheanamh

In a recent post Sean Stiennon mulls over the perennial issue of showing vs. telling with his usual wit and concision.

What he said got me thinking, and one of the things that occurred to me was that the oft-cited commandment “Show, don’t tell” is absolutely correct, but sometimes wrong. Sometimes it’s better to tell than show. Narrative should be as vivid as possible (showing) but exposition should be sneaky and quick as possible, which is where telling comes in. It’s unfair to the readers to clutter exposition with all sorts of vein-popping detail when they (hopefully) want to get on to the battle scene where Velfnarth the Embittered smites the Evil Master of Zeppelins with his Pointéd Stick. (Or on to the heart-wrenching scene where Velfnarth gives up his dream of vengeance to save a helpless kitten, or on to whatever the story is going to be about.)

I have a bad example of showing and a good example of telling from the same story, Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. In the second part of the novella, Conan Doyle wastes 15000-some words drearily documenting the backstory of the murderer and his motive, when he could have sketched in the motive in a few dozen words. “Showing” is no good unless it serves to bring the narrative forward. For shame, Doctor! In the last chapter of Study, though, the murderer sketches in his motive in a few dozen words (“It don’t much matter to you why I hated these men…; it’s enough that they were guilty of the death of two human beings — a father and daughter — and that they had, therefore, forfeited their own lives.”). A lesser writer might have wasted 15000-some words on this project. Bravo, Doctor! When I read that chapter I thought this Conan Doyle and his detective hero might really hit the big time, and I think someone mentioned to me recently that they did.