Misdirection for emotion

I just saw a heartrending scene on TV (Law and Order, actually), which would be devastating anyway-- parents identifying the body of their slain child. But the scene made it even more excruciating. When the cover was drawn back, the mother breathes a sigh of relief and says, "It's not my baby." For a moment, there's this hope... and hope, you know, is the most dangerous emotion of all. The husband looks at her, and embraces her, and his face tells the truth-- it is indeed their son.

I'm wondering if that moment of misdirection is something we can use when we designe scenes, as long as it fits and doesn't seem contrived. (In this case, of course, we understand that the mother might wish so hard she sees what's not there, or doesn't see what is there.) The misdirection gives another moment of suspension, a gathering of dread and hope-- and then the emotion that results is that much more intense.


How can we postpone the emotional denouement to increase the power? It's all in scene design.
Alicia

Poll results

We recently polled our readers about a common twitter practice seen from authors.
Here are the results.

An author followed you on twitter, and you followed them back. They immediately DMd you a link to their amazon page. This is:

Smart marketing, and I will click the link.   2 (1%)

Acceptable marketing, and I will not click the link.  6 (4%)

Something I delete without further consideration.  31 (21%)

Bad netiquette, but other than temporary annoyance, I let it slide.  82 (56%)

Unacceptable, and I unfollow them, and maybe report the spam.  25 (17%)

Of course, this isn't a scientific poll, but I think we can safely assume that sentiment runs against this particular PR practice. If the poll is accurate, this means DM spam is 12 times more likely to result in an unfollow than in a clicked link. About three out of four people find it bad or unacceptable, and only 5% view it as smart or acceptable. Even if these numbers are off by a wide margin, that margin won't be wide enough to reverse the trend. In fact, given that many of our readers are authors who are on twitter and looking for ways to promote their books there, I tend to suspect any error is in the other direction. I tend to suspect self-promoting authors are more tolerant of author self-promotion (even bad self-promotion) than the general public might be.

In any case, this all leads me to ask one question. If sentiment is so strongly opposed to this kind of self-promotion, then why in the world would anyone continue to do it? Is it mere ignorance, or are we missing something?

Theresa

Forgot to Mention--

I had a post last Friday at Romance University, and I completely forgot to link it here. Blame my forgetfulness on the combination of the holiday and a virus that just won't quit. In any case, here's the link. The post is about the four aspects of "mateability" that we look for in a romantic hero.

Coincidentally, after the post went live, I pulled out my old copy of Leslie Wainger's Romance for Dummies -- which is a very smart book, notwithstanding the title, and probably the best all-around guide to writing romances I've ever read. I still had a page flagged in this book leftover from my study of Lost in Austen. Under the subheader, "Heroes are for loving," Leslie writes:

Think of your hero as a prize, the prize the heroine wins after all the conflict is resolved. (By the way, just so you don't think I'm being sexist: Make your hero realize that the heroine's love is the prize he wins.) 

This echoes Propp's fairy tale structure derived from Russian wonder tales, which ends with a wedding as a symbol of victory and as a reward for vanquishing the baddie. Yet more evidence to support the notion that genre romance follows fairy tale structure.  One difference, though, is that Propp seemed to operate on the idea that the hero won a bride, but in genre romance, the hero and heroine win each other, as Wainger notes.

Theresa

Another Monomythic Structure

I was reading the October issue of the Journal of Popular Culture (yes, a little behind on my reading), and I stumbled across this gem in a paper about the Omen trilogy.

Jewett and Lawrence have argued that the classical monomyth is not a common pattern in American popular culture. In the United States, mythic consciousness has evolved into a distinct form that highlights redemption rather than initiation. It dramatizes the Judeo-Christian redemption discourse that emerged early in American culture to produce a narrative in which "[a] community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil: normal institutions fail to contend with this threat: a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task: aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisal condition: the superhero then recedes into obscurity" (Jewett and Lawrence, American Monomyth xx). In this mythic narrative, helpless communities are redeemed by a Christ figure who is never integrated into the community, but leaves at the end, remaining a perpetual outsider. He or she has an unchanging moral perfection and a strong capability for action while the community is changeable and must be saved through the violent action of the hero.

The author is Neil Gerlach, and the paper is "Antichrist as Anti-Monomyth." As you might imagine, this paragraph has grabbed my interest. I'm deeply interested in the ways these various monomyths might be useful to writers. So I hopped onto my university's library site and ran a quick search, and from this preliminary scan, it seems Jewett and Lawrence were primarily concerned with comic book narratives and characters, though they did apply some of these concepts to news stories about modern warfare.

Before I pursue this line of inquiry further, I thought I would ask if any of you have looked at this American monomyth, and if so, did you find it useful?

Theresa

When grammar elements go out drinking.

Jenny sent this along from a FaceBook post by Jeff Blackmer--

A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
A dangling modifier walks into a bar. After finishing a drink, the bartender asks it to leave.
A question mark walks into a bar?
Two quotation marks "walk into" a bar.
A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to drink.
The bar was walked into by the passive voice.
Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They drink. They leave. 

More on Book Country

Here's an article quoting a few self-pubbing heavy hitters about Book Country, Penguin's controversial new vanity/direct branch. Penguin was given the chance to respond, but to my eyes, their response is thin. "You can avoid line spacing issues in the finished e-book." Um, okay, but if I hire a typesetter, any typesetter at all, I expect to avoid these kinds of issues. And other typesetters are cheaper by a mile. So how exactly does this translate to added value? In fact, you can easily run down the list of benefits in the Penguin press release (on page two of the article), compare those to places like Createspace, LSI, etc., and see for yourself whether it's a good deal. And if you think this is the best deal you can get, then by all means, take it.


Theresa

Interdiction

If you've been hanging around writers circles at any point in the last fifteen or so years, you have probably run into the concepts of "call to action" and "refusal of the call" from the hero's journey. There's another pattern which is something like the flipside of this call/refusal pattern, though, which centers around the concept of what is forbidden to the protagonist.

As a brief reminder, the call/refusal comes in the early part of the structure referred to as the hero's journey, the quest myth, or Campbell's sun god monomyth. This is a powerful and enduring story structure which begins with an extraordinary character, unaware of his true nature, who has been stashed in an ordinary world for safekeeping (or for some other purpose) during his youth. The call to action is the first major step in this character's evolution. An external force intrudes on the ordinary world and makes some request or demand of the protagonist. Whether due to fear, uncertainty, or a general feeling of unreadiness, the hero refuses this request or demand. Ultimately, of course, the hero changes his mind and does it anyway.

Some story analysts have suggested that the refusal of the call -- more specifically, the way that this refusal allows the protagonist to demonstrate humility, uncertainty, insecurity, or other less heroic emotions -- is necessary to allow the reader to bond with the character. Without it, the hero might seem foolhardy or arrogant. With it, he seems more moderate or tempered. So this might be the purpose of this refusal to do something we all know he'll end up doing anyway.

This particular story structure is naturally well-suited to action/adventure, fantasy, some scifi, and can be adapted to other story types. But there are other structural models, and one that I talk about quite a lot is the fairy tale structure which lends itself well to horror and romance. (By the way, if you've ever wondered why paranormal romance works so beautifully as a subgenre, but scifi romance is a trickier marriage, it may have something to do with these structural tendencies.)

In fairy tale structure, we start with a virtuous character in a hostile or treacherous world. (Virtue, by the way, doesn't mean sexual innocence in this context. It means the characteristics which we most value in that type of character.) Frequently, the hostility or treachery in the environment follows the loss of a key family member -- think about what happens to Cinderella when her dad dies.

But there might be another aspect to the hostility or treachery of this world, and it comes in the form of what Vladimir Propp (who analyzed a wad of Russian wonder tales much the same way Campbell analyzed all those sun god stories) calls an interdiction. This just means that someone in a position of authority -- or perhaps, an authoritative entity -- has officially banned some act. There might be legitimate safety reasons for that interdiction. "Don't go into the woods at night." Well, we all know what happens when you ignore this rule and go into the woods at night anyway. Freaky bad stuff.

But hey, we're going into the woods anyway, right? Because that's the next step in the structure. Just as the call to action is met with a refusal, the interdiction must be violated. If Cinderella is banned from going to the ball, you'd better be sure she's going to find a way to get to the ball. The ban must be broken, and the forbidden must be experienced. Yes, there will be problems. But those problems will test the heroic traits in a way that proves them to be true and worthy of reward. So, even though we might think it's bad for a "virtuous" character to break the rules, really, it's all part and parcel of that virtuous nature. (This technique, if not this exact structure, is sometimes used in "rebel cop" stories, too. Anyone want to discuss the difference between using this as a mid-scale character technique and using it as a structural element?)

Theresa

Setting up the punchline

Sometimes when I'm reading a manuscript, I come across a passage or a scene which has a punch of some kind at the end-- humorous, emotional, or suspenseful-- that doesn't really pack the force it should.  The problem is usually that the writer cut to the quick, giving the punchline or disaster or surprise without sufficient set up. The reader needs some time, some development, some prep, to fully experience that "punch" in the end.

Good scene design helps here. Here's a kind of simple set up:
Context or status quo (the "before")
Change event
Big change momen
Results
Contrasting punch

For example, this is kind of a humorous sketch, not very funny, but it's just an example.

Billy discovered a new species of marmoset!

A year later, it went extinct.

There's the bare-bones of it. (And that is pretty much what I've seen in a couple contest entries this month! Good idea, poor execution.)  Have you ever heard a 5-year-old tell a joke? It's like that. Just the punch line.

But the reader doesn't experience in a bare-bones way. The reader probably needs some additional context, some process, some transition. So here's a sketch of how I'd suggest fleshing out that bare-bones treatment:

Set the context: Billy was such a loser! (Maybe an explanation or example here.) He was the sort of kid who read the encyclopedia from A to Z, and would later bore dates by reciting the particulars about different animal species.
Change event: Finally, after failing miserably at school and profession, he found a job surveying the rain forest for resort development. Unfortunately, it was in Madagascar.
Big change moment: One day, while searching for his sextant, which he had dropped in the brush of the forest, he saw a quick little animal, the likes of which he'd never read about in the encyclopedia. He took a photo with his camera, and went back to his tent and emailed the picture to his friend the zoologist. A new species!
Results: Billy became the toast of the zoology world, giving speeches and powerpoint presentations to students and faculties throughout the world. (More here... women zoologists wanted to bed him, men zoologists wanted to shake his hand...)
Punch: Of course, a year later, the species went extinct.

That's just a sketch. But see how by setting up the "loser" context, guiding the reader through the big event and the results, we've given the switcheroo (back) at the end more power.

Our job, at base, is to give the reader an experience, not an outline. Anyone, frankly, can tell the punchline or jot down the turning point event. It takes a -writer- to make it into a joke (or a scene). Execution is all in creating a reader experience, and that goes beyond mere plotting of events into presenting not just the events but the context and process and consequences... and in the most effective prose too.

No, it's not easy. But deciding to do it well is the first step to doing it well!
Alicia

Twitter Opinion Wanted.

I've added a poll to the sidebar (http://edittorrent.blogspot.com in case you read this through a feed reader) asking for your response to a common marketing practice on twitter. Please note: I'm not asking whether you as an author engage in this form of marketing. I'm asking what your most common response is when you receive this from another author. Please be honest about your response. Don't answer with how you hope others might receive your marketing, but with what you typically do when you receive this yourself. It seems feelings run high on this subject. I'm looking for a measure of response to this practice, not for a defense or condemnation. Okey-dokey?

Thanks!
Theresa