Dwight V. Swain and Me

You will be familiar with my ongoing fascination with the wisdom of writing gurus who want to help you write better. First it was Blake Snyder, then John Yorke then I listened to the words of Michael Moorcock and Lester Dent. My latest find is Dwight V. Swain. I like his gnarly voice on the podcast I listened to. Gnarly has a different meaning in American I'm aware because one of the reviews for my stories said it was 'gnarly'. I think that was good. Yep, I've checked - it is good, and doesn't mean covered in knobs (well it does sometimes.

So, I am reading Dwight V. Swain at the moment. There are some very useful blogs about his technique. Check out Phillip McColllum's blog entry on Scene and Sequel  but also Katie Ganshert's post on "Motivation-Reaction Units".

I love a bit of jargon.

So I went over The Beast of Whitby and tried to get my Motivation/Reaction Unit in place and arrange them in Scenes and Sequels.

The benefit of this for me was that Blake Snyder and John Yorke and also Christopher Vogler (to a lesser extent) gave an overarching story structure. Yorke makes the point that Acts and Scenes are fractal - so that they should mirror the overall story arc.  Swain tells you exactly how to do that.

So, you have (Inciting incident) -> reaction -> dilemma -> decision -> goal -> conflict -> disaster.

And you repeat it. So each scene has that form, and each act has that form and the whole story is built from those bricks. This works well with John Yorke's idea of a five act structure being implicit in all stories.

I don't buy that every story is the Hero's Journey however, though I like Joseph Campbell a lot. There are lots of archetypal experiences that light us up - Leaving Home, Finding a Mate, Facing Death, Being Predated, Finding our Place in the Tribe's Pecking Order, Raising Young.

I don't know why I've given them all capital letters...

Peace dudes - be gnarly!

TW.

Lester Dent and Me

So this one was in response to people saying my previous ghost stories weren't scary enough. By that some of them clearly meant weren't horrible enough in a gory sense. I thought I'd write one that was, but of course you can be the judge of whether I succeeded. I was aware that this is a Monster in The House story, using Blake Snyder's genre typing. The main rule is "don't get eaten" which has an ironical meaning in this story. If you are familiar with Snyder's ideas, this genre is typified by someone being in a place they can't get out of due to physical or other impediments and a monster has been created by their "sin". They have to face their sin to resolve the issue.

I also wanted to try out Lester Dent's method for writing short stories. This is based on four parts each 1500 words each. I went over this word count in the rewrite by about a third, but I thought that was forgivable. +Karen Woodward  discusses this very usefully on her blog.  Dent was writing pulp action fiction so his is all about murders and fist fights. Clearly that wasn't going to work in a horror story where you don't want the monster to appear until much later, if at all - creating the atmosphere by hints rather than revelations. (Do revelations ever create atmosphere?). I also wanted to avoid laying too much pipe as Blake Snyder says - I didn't want much exposition at all. When I'd finished I found that I needed a little bit more.

I was also aware of +Michael Moorcock 's advice about dropping little bits of mystery in - even if you're not actually going to explain them at the end, though I think it all becomes clear. 

So, I did all that to the plan and I finished a story that I was 50% satisfied with. I wondered whether that was because it just wasn't tense enough to anyone, or it wasn't tense enough to me because unlike when I pantsed stories before, the story itself was a surprise to me and therefore tantalising or scary to me, I knew the bones of this one and so maybe it was too clinical?

I don't know. I'll wait for the reviews. My kids liked it anyway, but maybe they just wanted to sweeten me up so I gave them money?

Tony

Pantsing

I have just finished another story. Let me just get a link in here.

I think it was the hardest story that I've ever written. I had a few scenes in mind and I had the main characters in mind - Adam Meyrink and Midnight Blue - and I had the city in mind - Prague. But, it was the devil's own work to get the thing to come together. I felt like a butcher carving up a carcass and then realising I'd done it wrong. Maybe more like a person making a patchwork quilt, looking the the squares and thinking, 'nope'. But I have finally beaten it into shape, I think.

The shape is helped by Blake Snyder's 15 beat structure and the genre. I have written it like a Whydunnit? However I started pantsing it (as you can tell) and ended up plotting it. I wonder if you can see the stitchwork? Is it as obviously sewn together as Boris Karloff in Frankenstein I wonder?

Take a look and let me know.