I finally finished my plot notes for the novel. I'd spent the last few days on it - almost a whole week, I think - and then I redid it again this morning. Actually, I shouldn't say that I redid the plot, but instead I trimmed the fat.
The novel was originally envisioned as a two-part story; the first part covered the training of futuristic soldiers, and the second showed those soldiers in combat. Again, it seemed to play on my recent obsession with Full Metal Jacket, which has that same broad layout. To remedy this, I went back and expanded the plot to have five parts that followed the hero almost through the entire war in the future.
But last night, shortly after finishing the five-part version of the plot, I found this to be unsatisfying. Two of those extra parts seemed redundant - I had three large sections devoted to fighting when one was good enough - and there was a section that felt dedicated towards why the soldiers are fighting at all., which felt as much a hit on the head as the History and Moral Philosophy sections that Heinlein wrote in Starship Troopers. I'm not saying that it's not important for soldiers to know why they fight, even if it's on the basic level of survival, but I think this can be woven throughout the narrative rather than bunched up in one corner.
Ultimately, what I found unsatisfying about the five-part version was that I felt it sacrifice thematic material. The central theme of my novel is violence and finding a sense of identity through it. As a writer, getting through that is my top priority. I already know that I have to fight to get my reader's attention to begin with. If they see a book a thousand pages long, they might get turned off by it before they look at the first page. But if I can get my point across, tell a good story, and do it for several hundred fewer pages, then my chances of success have greatly improved.
If you have a story that spans a great length of time, focus first on your theme, whatever it may be, and don't be afraid to leapfrog over the other stuff if it serves no great purpose for your narrative. Saving Private Ryan was a great story, but the whole thing would have dragged on and on if we had to watch Tom Hanks and the rest of the cast going through Salerno or North Africa rather than jump to Normandy.
No need to mince words. I assume you've watched Full Metal Jacket. If not, well, as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman would say, "Watch it now, numb nuts!"
I did forget to mention one thing. Because Full Metal Jacket is basically two stories back-to-back reinforcing each other, I'll explain how the plotting method works in both halves. And because there's no pot step for the hero, I'll come out and say that the story's hero is Joker, played by Matthew Modine.
Let's start with the seven key steps I laid out in my last "Truby's Plot" segment: weakness and need. As I said, it really should be called weakness, need, and problem. The problem is the hero's crisis, the dilemma that must be overcome. In Parris Island, Joker's problem is that he has been drafted into the Marine Corps. In Vietnam, he's been deployed to the war.
Next comes the weakness. The weakness is something that the hero lacks, something that keeps him from moving forward. It doesn't necessarily keep him from solving the problem, but it does make it more difficult. Joker's weakness throughout the film is that he is a nonviolent person. This is extremely clear at the start of recruit training, and even later on during the Tet Offensive, he tells a fellow soldier that he's not ready for a fight, even though he earlier voiced the rumor that the Vietnamese would try to attack.
There are two kinds of need, psychological and moral. The moral need isn't required, but it does make for a more interesting story. The psychological need, on the other hand, is required, but not difficult to come up with. Look at the weakness and ask yourself how it hurts only the hero. From Joker's nonviolence, we know that he needs to harden himself in order to become a Marine, and later on in Vietnam, we know that he needs to stop treating the war like a cruise, cracking jokes and bargaining with local prostitutes in Da Nang.
The moral need, on the other hand, is hurting other characters, not just the hero himself. Truby says that there are two ways to find a moral need, and both are used in Full Metal Jacket. The first way is to take a character's strength and turn it into a hindrance for others. In training, Joker's strength is his compassion, but this ends up harming others because he hesitates to resolve a situation violently.
The other, more straightforward method is to look at the psychological need and translate it in a way that hurts others. Joker's sense of humor may be good at diffusing tension, but in a setting like the Vietnam War, it's subtly lowering the guard of his fellow Marines, making them vulnerable to their enemy.
I seriously think that every writer ought to read John Truby's The Anatomy of Story. When I was in grad school, I tried to get it on the reading list one semester for me and my coterie of fellow students, but our adviser turned overruled me. I guess it was because Truby's book mainly used movies as examples of good plot. But I'm a child of the movies, and to me a, a good story is a good story regardless of whether it's on film or printed on paper.
Truby's book has a couple of wonderful chapters on plot, and what makes it such a great read is his discouragement of using his plot outline as a set-in-stone tool. He points out twenty-two steps that go into a good plot, but he also says that a writer doesn't need to include all of them and they can be rearranged to suit anyone's needs. "The twenty-two steps are not a formula for writing," he writes. "Instead, they provide the scaffolding you need to do something really creative."
So here I am starting a series of posts that will guide you through each of his steps, to explain how I understand how they work and what they might do for you. Because the fact is that I'm still going through the plotting stage for my own novel and I take some comfort reviewing the parts to make sure I know what I need to know.
I used Truby's method once before on my last big attempt at a novel, and the first thing I can tell you is that it will all probably change dramatically by the time you get a few drafts into the story. Like I said, this stuff isn't set in stone. At the very least, I would recommend using the method to get through your first couple of drafts. You probably have a big story in your head, and this will help make sense of it all.
As I go through the steps, I'll reference Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket. It's been on my mind a lot lately, and I honestly think it would be easier for you to rent it or borrow it from a friend, and spend a couple of hours watching it and following along with the blog series.
Although Truby says that there's a great deal of flexibility to be had in his method, there are seven steps that he insists are present in every good story: weakness and need, desire, opponent, plan, battle, self-revelation, and new equilibrium. I admit that I have yet to find a story that doesn't have one of these basic points.
The weakness and need focus on what's wrong with the main character. This step is broken into four smaller parts. The problem is the part that tells you what the hero must overcome. Finding your way home. Getting a gift for a friend's birthday. Studying for a test. These are all problems that must be overcome. Then there's the weakness, which is what the hero is lacking. Perhaps your hero has a tendency to lie, or is terribly shy. And then there's the need, which is broken into a psychological and a moral component; the psychological need is something harming only the hero himself, and the moral is an extension of the psychological that is hurting others. Roger's weakness is that he is very shy. His psychological need is that he needs to develop relationships to become more whole as a person, and morally his shyness is causing him to behave coldly, which in turn upsets others.
The next part - desire - is what goal the hero wants to achieve, and this cn be found by looking at the problem. If the hero's problem is that he's failing a class, his desire is to get a better grade.
The opponent is the character standing in the way of the hero. More precisely, it's a character who wants what the hero wants. If the two aren't competing over the same thing, there's no conflict and no story. Not every story has an opponent, however, but rather an obstacle. In the film Rain Man, Charlie and Raymond Babbitt may have friction, but they aren't competing with each other. Instead of an opponent to overcome, Charlie is faced with a mystery: why didn't anyone tell him he had a brother?
The plan is what strategy the hero will use to defeat the opponent and get what he desires, and the battle is the confrontation between the hero and the opponent. Again, if there is no opponent but a mystery, the battle is a search for answers rather than a fight.
Self-revelation is when the hero is when the hero goes through a change that gets him what he psychologically and morally needs. He understands what's holding him back in life, and what he has to do to make his life better. In the case of tragedy, this can be a negative thing, but I'll get into that later.
And the final step is the new equilibrium. Here, the crisis is over, the world has gone back to normal, but the hero has been fundamentally altered.
The other great thing about the Truby method is how organic it is and how each piece fits naturally with the others. This is certainly true with the seven key steps. If there's no plan, then the opponent can't be overcome and he wins. If there's no desire or problem, then there's nothing wrong with the hero's world, and there's no story.
About a week ago, a story of mine called Are You Proud of Me? - centered on an alcoholic artist named Andrew Ursler - was accepted and published in a new blog called Arts Collide. I have the link for it here. Arts Collide is a blog made by a friend of mine, Ashley Perez.
I talk about Are You Proud of Me? with a bittersweet sense. On the one hand, because it was accepted by a friend, the pessimist in me wonders if this was the literary equivalent of a pity-fuck. Then again, knowing Ashley, who is not one to give in to pity, I I do have to believe that the story had some merit to it.
Some people, I'm sure, have wondered whether or not being published through a blog counts as being really published, as if a blog is less prestigious than appearing on the home page of The New Yorker.
In short, the answer is "yes". Being published online does count as a writing credit. This is something I learned while in grad school. If it's posted online, it can be redistributed beyond the original website, even if that website takes it down. Even if it's something you post on your Facebook page can be considered a writing credit. The short rule of thumb is: if it's online, it counts.
The next thing some might ask is how much I got paid for Are You Proud of Me? And to that, I can say I got the mighty sum of $0.00. That's right. This story brought in not one red cent to me, and now I'm starting to think like some of my relatives; if it doesn't pay, it's not real work. That's bullshit!
Ray Bradbury's early career was one of all work and no pay, and when he did start getting paid for his work, the reward was barely enough to buy a sandwich in today's money.
There's one thing Bradbury said in an interview that's always stuck in my head: if you make one story accepted per year, it's enough to keep you going. And considering that Are You Proud of Me? is the first thing I've had printed in three years, I'm holding onto that high with both hands.
Today, I tweeted: "Is it better to write, drive around with a topless chick, or write about driving around with a topless chick?" At first, I thought, Oh, look at me tweeting about nudity. How clever I am.
Now, thinking it over, I know that I was trying to get something out subconsciously: there's a difference between writing, experience, and writing about an experience.
I can write. You can write. Even a monkey can write. We do this activity every day from jotting down shopping lists to scribbling down reminders to writing angry letters to the IRS. But the simple act of writing isn't enough for a writer. The words have to have meaning behind them. I write in a journal, mostly to help organize some of my thoughts like a lucid dream, but I can't ever guarantee that what I write in my journal is worthy of being reviewed by publisher. Hell, I know it isn't. That's why my journal is private.
Next, we come to experience, or driving around with a topless chick. Neil Gaiman once said that struggling writers should go live their lives if they haven't anything to say, that you should do something to take your mind off of the writing and then come back to it later. While this can help, and I do try to take time off myself every now and then, I think it can backfire. A person can spend so much time absorbing new experiences that the writing ultimately gets left on the side of the road. It's like research, which is great, but you can't forget that you must return to the typewriter or the laptop or the notepad at some point.
Finally, there's writing about an experience, and this can be firsthand experience or, more valuable to the fiction writer, this can be an imagined experience. With science fiction, I have to imagine the scenario. There's no precedence for space pirates or interstellar diseases. Even if it's not science fiction, there comes a point where you have to use your imagination. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde describes a murder. Now, if you're all about the experience, you would ask Wilde, "How did it feel to commit murder?" And Wilde would, of course, answer, "I've never murdered! Why would I do such a thing?"
That reminded me just now of something that Stephen King said, something to the effect that writing allows you to explore your dark side in safety; you could, through writing, commit murder without actually doing the act.
There's a part in Predator 2 where Danny Glover confronts the Predator and calls it "Pussy Face", and there's really no arguing with that nickname. Jaws wide open, the Predator really does look like it has a vagina for a mouth.
Watching Predator 2 the other day got me thinking about some of my favorite sci-fi movie aliens. In addition to the Predator, I'm also a fan of the creature from Ridley Scott's Alien and the Brain Bug from Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. And there's a consistent trait shared by the trio: they're all perverse. With the creation of the facehugger, the Alien writers had created a film that's essentially focused on inter-species rape. When discussing the design of the Brain Bug with his crew, Paul Verhoeven said, "Well, perhaps it should look like a vagina, or perhaps it should look like an anus."
Thinking about the aliens that I wanted to write about, in homage to those gross sci-fi movies I love, I figured there really was no reason I couldn't make a creature that looked like, say, a prolapsed rectum. 'Cause rectum damn near killed 'em!
Going into another round of thinking on my alien story, I thought I might be using too much logic. I had watched all these science shows on what alien life could be like, and I would base my thinking on only that material. I'm not saying that research is bad, but there are times when it can put a huge limitation on me. What I decided to do was reverse the process. Over the weekend, I came up with some pretty cool and disgusting alien concepts, and now I'm going back and filling in the gaps of stuff like what environment they live in, what kind of tools do they use, and so on.
The bottom line - and I think this is why I'm so excited about this new approach to the book - the bottom line is that sometimes it's more conducive creatively to go for something cool first and then employ logic to fine-tune it. Function is still there in the back of my mind, but like the first draft of a story, it's much easier to get ideas onto a page and then refine it rather than try and come up with something complete right from the start.
I've gone
through too many story ideas lately, all of which end up in the trash
can. The latest was one I carried for the last week, an attempt to redo
The War of the Worlds. It failed because I simply didn't care about what happened to people in the 1890s.
The
other night, I couldn't sleep at all. The fear of never having an idea
to write about left me restless, and when tossing and turning in my bed
didn't work, pacing back and forth in my bedroom became the next best
thing.
In
my bedroom, I have an old article from my high school newspaper. A
friend of mine used to write for the paper, and as we got ready to
graduate, he was able to get a piece written about me and my writing.
In retrospect, it was a bit of indulgence, but seeing as how graduates
were moving on to delusions of grandeur, it kind of fit the theme of the
final issue that year.
I'd written a 70-page story in my senior year. It was a crappy rip-off of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and I'm pretty sure no copies survived to this day, but it was significant in that it was the first thing I'd finished.
Later, in my last year of college, I took a class called "Major American Authors". I had a reputation among the English department for harboring creative aspirations, and convinced my professor to let me write some fiction for my final project, a story about soldiers raised in the future to fight wars so the rest of humanity wouldn't have to. Unfortunately, I broke my writing hand shortly after and simple typing became an enormous challenge for me while I healed. My professor let me turn in an outline for the story instead - you have to understand, I really couldn't write for a month.
My professor did press me to keep the concept alive and give it a shot. It fell by the wayside in the years that followed, but I did keep it in the back of my mind, filed away in the "make your professors proud" drawer.
My high school story didn't have factory-raised soldiers. My college story didn't feature a horde of alien insects. But the other night, as I paced in my room, the two ideas met, had drinks, and decided they liked each other. The best part was how excited I felt over the idea, the kind of excitement I haven't felt since I first got interested in writing.
And it only took some ten years for me to get the idea.
