Curare: A toxic alkaloid found in certain tropical South American trees that is a powerful relaxant for striated muscles. 

That means it paralyzes you.

It's on my mind because my book is full of people who have lost all body language. They have dialogue, they have the occasional significant thought. But can I think of anything for them to actually move around and do? Not on your life.

Weird, huh?

I think I don't write blog entries because I get no comments. I can't hear you breathing.

And you don't write comments because I don't write enough blog entries. Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.

So, what are we going to do about this?

BTW, it's my birthday today. Something easy to comment on. Your choice if you give me good wishes or tell me to go stuff myself.

Much love!

Gail, aka DogmaWriter

Lather, rinse, repeat.





That's it. Go ahead. Write something now.

Get yourself and your story all worked into a lather.

Rinse away the icky stuff and leave behind something clean and fresh.

Repeat to write another story.

That's really all that it takes to develop yourself as a writer.

People insist on getting themselves tied up in knots though with all these damned writing rules. They're all looking for a quick fix to the problem. Silly people. Their quick fixes are tying them up in knots that can damned near incapacitate them as writers.

Just write something, edit it to learn from it, write again.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

I've been accused of having a lof of opinions on this topic. Lately I've talked about it in front of a few people and even seen some people blogging about it. I figured I'd weigh in on it too.

First: LATE critique. Only FULL critique.

I am a firm believer that writers who go after early, partial critique are doing themselves a world of hurt. If you want your self-editor to actually know the difference between good and bad, you have to give that self-editor a solid workout. Early crit just gives way too much "oh yeah, great stuff. Love it." It gives over too much control for the quality of your work to other people. Your self-editor just got flabby or flabbier. After your editing skills have gotten a workout, THEN you can test them against someone else's eyes.

And the whole concept of critting incomplete stories just sounds stupid to me. It's like Miss America sticking  one naked arm out from behind a curtain and folks saying "Oh yeah, SHE's beautiful." Way stupid. Stories are a gestalt. You cannot judge them by their parts. They aren't even just the sum of their parts. They are "out of many, one." They are a new singularity.

Second, what to put in a crit.

I've been reading folks say that the bad comments are more valuable than the good comments. Even that the good comments are frequently passed over. Yes, you definitely need the bad. What's failed needs to be fixed. And, only telling a writer that you loved the piece doesn't make it better.

But I think that you need to hear the good too. And I think that you need to pay attention to the good. The good is a marker of "Don't change this. It's working for me." That's important.

One of the best pieces of editing advice I ever heard was that you try to improve your work until you start to make it worse rather than better. (See above for your self-editor!) But, I think that you can take that too far. I think that you need to know when something's "good enough." While you might see where something can be fixed, you also need to see where making one thing better can ruin the rest. Change the antagonist for the better and you can introduce a new flaw in your protagonist. (See above for "story as gestalt.") Seeing the good along with seeing the bad is about seeing the WHOLE story because you are dead wrong to look at it as a piece of a story.

That's enough. I'm gonna pace myself on this whole blogging thing. I might need the words for later.

It's the Cannassiter family. No, it doesn't need to make sense.

This was born in a thread at Forward Motion. Since I'm not quoting anyone, and this lengthy treatise on Scene and Sequel is mine, I figure I'm within my rights to snatch it over here and put it into the recent void on my blog.

So, for your reading enjoyment, I leave you with Professor Dogma and her class on Story.

Books and authors used in this post:
Writing and Selling Your Novel by Jack Bickham
Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain
Scene and Structure by Jack Bickham

First, my anal retentive nature insists that I correct the title of the book. It's SCENE & STRUCTURE, not SCENE AND SEQUEL. I think it's easy to get caught up in sequel by accident when you don't keep the title correct in your head.

I think that the wisdom of the book is sound but I think that the message people take from the book is shaky. I think it's written above the grasp of most novelists who grab this book and try to implement its principles without giving themselves the time and opportunity to explore them. Without fully understanding the nuts and bolts and the interaction of these elements, you will, at a minimum, be confused with the technique in action in your work and, at worst, fail spectacularly.

I agree with you that this model of novel structure is the expansion of the stimulus-response or Motivation-Response Unit micro mechanism. I view this book as the advanced course that you shouldn't be reading until after you have read and absorbed either WRITING AND SELLING YOUR NOVEL by Bickham (for the condensed version of the material) or TECHNIQUES OF THE SELLING WRITER by Swain (for the expanded coverage of the topic). SCENE & STRUCTURE is, IMO, the most "master-class" of the readily available books on writing. If you don't fully comprehend that micro mechanism, you won't understand what sequel is on the macro level.

With that in mind, this post can only be the barest sketch of what really happens in this theory of novel structure

To try and contain the stimulus-response theory in a tight form so that we can all follow along in this thread, stimulus-response and internalization are the micro components of a scene. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response within the scene structure are the equivalent of scene, scene, scene in the overall structure of the novel.

That works for simple interactions where the the back and forth between cause and effect doesn't demand that the reader have to see outside what I'll call the pure logic of events leading into other events. Borrowing a Bickham example, if Joe proposes marriage and Cindy squeals a delighted yes, it's a simple transaction that doesn't tax the readers logical motion forward into the story. The logic of one event flowing into the next event is natural and uncomplicated. We can easily follow along with more stimulus-response as Joe orders a bottle of champagne, they get drunk, they go back to her place, and so on. Even if the next event is something of an oddball event, the logic of it still allows the reader to think "Yes, of course, this still makes sense."

Where you need internalization on the micro level and sequel on the macro level are those times when the story transaction is complex and the writer has to expand the reader's information and understanding in order for the story logic to remain in the reader's grasp. The story events here are getting slippery.

Borrowing another Bickham example at the micro level, what if Joe proposes marriage and Cindy throws a glass of wine in his face? The logic of the response doesn't match the stimulus and so some internalization is called for from Cindy. She embarks on her private emotion-thought-decision chain to clue the reader in on why throwing wine in Joe's face is in keeping with story logic. How dare he try to force marriage on her in order to gain control of her family's silver mine! This means war!

At the macro level, a sequel serves the same purposes when the story takes a turn that isn't immediately and obviously logical to the reader. As a quick and dirty sketch of an example (since I can't actually spend the words in this post to include the scenes and sequels of actual example), it might be the extended passage of emotion-thought-decision on the part of a character that indicates why the story will now jump from one plotline to another plotline. It might be the necessary inner workings of the main character that clue the reader in on why the MC is abandoning one story goal in favor of pursuing a different goal. Even Cindy's tiny sequel as she jumps between the proposal to the wine can justify a change in story motion from two characters dating to Cindy plotting the financial ruin of Joe.

As Bickham says, in an ideal Platonic model, scene and sequel would march through the story in a scene-sequel-scene-sequel-scene-sequel pattern. That's not saying that all novels actually follow that model. Most don't. I don't think Bickham makes that point clearly enough. It's entirely valid to have a novel of scene-scene-scene-sequel-scene-sequel-and so forth.

Also, I don't think that it's clear that while scenes are much larger building blocks than the smaller stimulus-response elements within the scene, sequels are not necessarily any bigger than the small internalizations buried within a scene. With that in mind, most writers have their sequel work take place on the fly within a sentence or paragraph or two that the reader doesn't view any differently than any other transitional passage. See what happened with Cindy above.

It's my opinion that the modern novel doesn't actually forego sequel as much as the modern novel wants rapid fire sequel. Readers on the whole, especially genre readers, prefer the lightning exchanges of dialogue or action and want to speed through the lengthy passages of narration.

Unfortunately, sequel lives in passages of narrative and internalization so, if you want the reader to read those necessary insertions, you better play it tight. You can't get away with boring, lengthy sequel like you could in the past or like you can in a more literary, internal novel. If it's not a fast expansion of the logic, that expansion frequently needs incorporation within action and dialogue so that it at least looks and reads like a standard scene.

That's really, really short but it's the most practical way I can talk about scene and sequel in contemporary writing. Sequel isn't a dead technique. I think it's an advanced technique because no one teaches it very well. That includes the fact that most people don't know how to recognize a sequel even if it punches them in the eye.

Gail, aka Dogma

~~~~~~Signature~~~~~~

"Time for some thrilling heroics." -- Jayne Cobb, Firefly

"I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it." -- Pablo Picasso

<object width="450" height="400"><param name="movie" value="http://goldencompassmovie.com/goldenCompass_blog.swf?id=57121"></param><embed src="http://goldencompassmovie.com/goldenCompass_blog.swf?id=57121" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" menu="false" width="450" height="400"></embed></object>

Yes, I took the plunge and helped escort a class of first graders through the art museum yesterday. My arthritis is killing me and my back aches but it was still a worthwhile enterprise.

The kids had their moments. I can't recall how many times I had to tell them to knock if off when we entered a room with a nude in it. Hands clapped over their eyes and the gallery echoed with "Ewww, that's gross!" They're too young to give them the head's up that, if they were teenagers, those nudes would be the first rooms they sought out in the museum .

What was good was watching how excited they got about the art that wasn't nude. It was fun to watch them participate in art. Watching them get between the projector that was flashing the art on the wall so that they could enter the work.

There was a writing lesson to be learned in there. The kids didn't know diddly about composition or balance or any of the high-falutin' artistic concepts. They just know what they like. They just know how to set aside everything but whether or not they are enjoying it.

Embrace their innocence.

Where Have All the Storytellers Gone?

I was reading another blog (damned blogs!) the other day and it was wondering about where the Asian American novelists were.

What I want to know is, where are ALL the Novelists?

I'm a firm believer that everyone owns the ability to write a story. You can't get out of the world alive without having been able to compose a moderately successful sentence. There's half the job right there. You can't live without your mind creating the most interesting dreams in your sleep. That's the other half of the job by having an imagination. You can put pen to paper and your brain works.

I think that storytellers who use the written word have been snuffed out. The love of story and the joy in sharing your vision of the world gets squashed in the supposedly higher interest of creating little grammatically correct automatons.

I've been skimming a book “Writing Alone and With Others “ by Pat Schneider. http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Alone-Others-Pat-Schneider/dp/019516573X

She is officially a very sharp cookie.

She's got a great example of what I think happens to kill the baby storyteller inside of them. I'm going to paraphrase her but I urge you all to turn to page 14 of the book and then maybe you'll see why the whole book is valuable.

Imagine that it's grade school again. You're starting the new school year with a new teacher and she lays an assignment on you. “Write a two page story about what you did on your summer vacation.”

Eagerly, you begin with a story about driving all the way from Ohio to Arizona to visit your favorite uncle and aunt. You talk about how you thought that Texas would never end. You tell how it made you worry that your dad didn't stop for gas when you saw the sign that said “Last fuel for 73 miles.” You say how much fun it was going to Mexico on a day trip and seeing little boys and girls a lot like you leading a burro around. You camped out one night and the wind blew so hard that you were afraid your camper was going to blow over in the storm. It was just like in the movies. You turn it in, proud that you relived an experience on paper that was in your mind. You shared something meaningful to you.

Then your teacher sends it back. You forgot to capitalize Tucson. You ended a sentence with a preposition. Your penmanship was bad. The little storyteller in you just took a blow to the head and the evil little perfectionist in you is puffing out her chest, getting all smug. You're a C- person no matter if you tried to tell the story of an A+ experience.

You get assigned to write a story in high school. “And don't think you can turn in anything like some science fiction story with green aliens and girl star pilots. I want something like the Salinger we're reading this week.” Another hit to the storyteller. What you love isn't good enough. What's good enough is a story that you apparently don't get because you didn't see the same themes in it that your teacher did. You have to be perfect at saying only what the teacher wants to read. You need those A's for college so you feed the perfectionist in you and make tearful promises to your storyteller that you'll be back for her one day real soon.

You really want to be a published writer so you go to college. You enroll in your first creative writing class. College is where you finally are free to chart your own course. Things surely are different here. Surprise! You have a whole host of problems that can happen to you. You could end up being taught by someone just like your high school teacher who tells you that what you love isn't as good as being important. You could find a teacher who hasn't ever been published by a major publisher but has a slew of credentials in scholarly periodicals that no one in the real world has heard of. Or you find a teacher who tells you that, now that you're practically stiff with the creative rigor mortis following the murder of your joy for story, you simply don't have what it takes to be a real writer.

Congratulations. You have learned a creative block that can kill you as a storyteller for the rest of your life.

All along, you were never taught to love your voice, your creativity, any of the things that were uniquely yours as a storyteller in favor of trying to be a cookie cutter writer. You were taught that technique and conformity were the marks of a writer. Well, that may be true if you merely want to put together a sentence but it's not true for a storyteller.

If you've managed to reach a place in your life where you are equipped with the time and the maturity to try and tell a story, you have in all probability lost the joy that will turn trying into succeeding. You'll be a shell of storyteller who remembers loving story but has been consumed by self-important perfectionism bugaboos.

It's time to become a child again. It's time to embrace imperfect words for the real truth behind them: a weak approximation of what goes on in our hearts. Remember that anything that you love will never turn out as well as your love demands. You're dreams are supposed to exceed your ability to bring them to life. And that's okay. Because your incomplete dream leaves room in it for the reader to fill in their own dreams. It's really okay. It's a very good thing to be imperfect.

Avoid losing the love of story. Avoid being perfect. That way lies madness. That way lies the death of innocent storytellers.

For a long time, I convinced myself to not have a blog. Then it became too indispensable to do without if I wanted to share big things with more than one friend. So I got a blog. I still feel like I'm playing with fire every time I want to write here.

You see, a blog is dangerous.

You can self-medicate your urge to write by talking about writing in a blog. That eases the pain of not actually writing but it feels like cheating to me.

I'm afraid of my blog because I'm afraid of my writing. When I'm blogging, I'm pretending to be a writer and so I'm letting perfectionism over my writing make me write blogs that don't mean as much to me as the stories and worlds and people I can create when I'm really writing.

 

My woe is that via blogging I will whoa my writing. (See, that wasn't a typo in the title. I was being clever. Slap me if your arms are long enough.)

My god, it's been forever since I started this thing and nearly forever since I posted anything here.

It's disgusting but it's exactly what I was afraid of when I started a blog. I didn't think I'd be very good at putting up new material on a regular basis.

Bad, bad Dogma!

What's new?

Umm, we survived spring break AND Easter.

I finally got some new words on the WIP with Dave and Flynn. It's titled IN THE BLACK in case you haven't heard of it before. Or maybe you just weren't paying attention.

I've been invited to try and reach 50K by the end of May. I'd be competing against Elle and Cat. I'd like to spin that challenge around and try to ADD 50K by the end of May but if this week is any indication, I'll be lucky to add 5K. That's pathetic. Must turn on the thinking cap and figure out a way or turn the thumbscrews and simply make it happen.

You've no doubt noticed that I changed the look of the LJ home. I needed a spot of color and a little more class than I had before. This will do for now. I sure wish I could find something that was really, really ME. But I don't want to turn the LJ into a time suck.  The writing is supposed to be the time suck.

And before I forget... It's Friday the 13th. Always one of my favorite days of the year. Never been unlucky for me so go out and have some serious fun.

Okay, consider yourselves updated.

Okay, I was threatened, wheedled and cajoled into starting this space and I'm not sure what I will use it for other than as a way for me to get to read more stuff on my LJ friends pages. All of you should be ashamed.

And afraid. Be very afraid. You never know what I might start to post now that I have crossed over to the dark side.