Sime~Gen(tm) Inc.

Where Sime and Gen Meet, Creativity Happens

Workshop: Choosing a Protagonist

Workshoppers:

Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 16:01:40 -0500 From: Jacqueline Lichtenberg Subject: NEWS:Policy On Founding400

Dear Folks:

This is also for Workshoppers. (Karen: copy for Kerry et. al.)

When I started the Founding 400 ( http://www.simegen.com/FORM1.html ) list of character names for the novels, all I had in mind was NAMES. Because of the nature of novel writing, I can't accept biographies because - as I've been trying to teach our workshoppers - everything, but absolutely everything from the lampshades to the Officer Titles in a novel MUST BE DERIVED FROM THEME.

(1999 comment added: Or vice-versa -- the theme is derived from what these details have in common. JL)

People started sending me biographies to go with their names.

I started a Microsoft Word file that will become the back panel of 400 names in the book - and from which I can draw minor-character names. And I made it so that I could put in biographies.

But with so many so quickly entered, there was no way to organize it, so I started shifting it to a Windows cardfile file. But the biographies wouldn't fit.

Worse, some people began asking if they'd already registered, or sent in or discussed their character names late. Looking up and cross-indexing names is for databases not word processors.

But then I quickly saw that 400 of these things would be just an impossible workload.

So I changed a header in the database to Naztehr, and started entering character-names by the order listing.

But that crashed the database's report writing facility. I wrote a new report with the Wizard - and got the novel-ordered count. Whew! Hours of time spent on all this.

Now coming home from Darkover with another ten or more of these names and addresses to enter (which I haven't done yet because of another software woe that I just finished fixing I hope) I'm looking at this problem of the biographies and I have to be honest about this. It just isn't going to happen.

I have no use for the biographies. I might make one or two exceptions for creative reasons, but not because of the Founding 400 perq program.

When I write, I don't create the biography or characterization of a character FIRST and then write the story around that. I create the character as I go along, tailoring the biography and the description and the personality to fit the required parameters of the story-conflict-plot-theme.

Other writers may do it in a different order. How it's accomplished doesn't really matter. All that counts is that in the finished product, story- conflict-plot-theme-character is all of one piece - a single, integrated whole.

If I have in mind a character with a peculiar biography, and it's my character and I gave him that biography, I'm likely to change anything and everything about him as I write (including his name if it's too close to another character's name and it seems confusing). So I can't work with other people's biographies. I think I can manage the minor-character name list - but nothing "deeper" than that.

In my mind, absolutely everything in a novel (including the gender of the characters) remains totally fluid and absolutely changeable until the copyedited manuscript crosses my desk. After the copyedited leaves my hands , then every word is graven in stone and can't be changed (except for typos) because when you get galleys back the only thing you can change without being charged money for it is typos.

For those who don't know about how a novel goes through production it's like this:

1.Submission draft (which authors laughingly label final) 2. Editorial changes ordered by the editor (this can be 2 rounds; usually only one) 3. Copyedited - this time the ms comes back with book designer and copyeditor marks all over it, and flags with questions to be answered - continuity gliches, misused words, malapropisms and everything marked up. 4. Galleys

The contract SAYS you are to have suchandso length of time to go over the Copyedited and the Galleys - but you never do. So you should figure a 72 hour turnaround on copyedited and 24 to 36 hours on the galleys.

When one of those in-production jobs arrives, it's drop everything and do it right now.

And my most wonderful and indispensable proof reader, Katie Filipowicz- Steinhoff now lives on the other side of the continent from me and is starting a very demanding job and getting used to being married.

So, I will not keep track of any of the biographical material that's sent to me - just the names in the database. You'll find out about your character's biography and personality, if any, when you read the book. Since these will be minor characters, there would be very little on them in print - possibly not even gender - and after the book is published you all will be free to write fanzine stories based on that character using your choice of full biography.

Knowing that right through the copyedited point I have to be able to change anything about any character from anything to anything - that's the way it has to be.

So once again, if you have signed up for the Founding 400 and said you would pay $25 for a hardcover, then you are entitled to the perq of having your own name or persona name put on the list in the back of the book labeled The Founding 400 - just the name. All names on this list will be ambrov Zeor because they are founding the first Householding. There is no ambrov anything else at the time of the Founding.

I will use this list of 400 to draw the names of minor characters in the novel - and I will create the biographical details to fit the overall theme of the novel - which hasn't been chosen yet. Until the theme is chosen, there's no way to know what biographies would fit.

And remember, even the THEME can be changed at the last minute. It's hard, but I've done it before out of necessity - and might do it again, though reluctantly. But sometimes your subconscious is trying to say something other than what your conscious has decided to say - and to "finish" a novel, one must get the two to agree to say the same thing this time anyway! =========================================================================

Kerry says: (the person referred to throughout simegen.com as just "Kerry" is the Kerry Lindemann-Schaefer whose Freven stories and the novel made from them appear in Rimon's Library -- look in the alphabetized Listing for her name.)

Incidentally, I read your e-mail piece about how you tailor absolutely everything, even your characters, to fit the theme and the plotline. I don't take this approach, and I won't. I see the major characters first. The theme and plot comes from them. (Minor characters may be invented as needed, though.) I don't really care if this is a professional attitude or not. That's how I write, and that's where my ideas come from. If I couldn't do it that way, I wouldn't bother to write at all.

JL answers:

Kerry's attitude IS professional on this point. She has identified the element in her writing that comes up to consciousness in immutable form, and has learned to take that single item and DERIVE all the rest of the parts needed to tell an entertaining story from that single immutable ARTISTIC PRODUCT.

It doesn't matter which of the major elements you start with - and any writer who sticks with writing long enough will come to stories that START with something else than what they usually start with.

The thing that makes a work of ART usable to a wide and varied range of people - wide enough to allow for commercial distribution - is the COMPOSITION.

The path by which an artist arrives at a COMPOSITION that the general public can recognize as COMPOSED is ideosyncratic to each artist and each artistic medium.

And in writing, this target objective of producing a COMPOSITION holds true in "Creative Writing" or Fanzine writing, or Commercial writing. If it's designed to be read by anyone other than yourself, it must have a COMPOSITION that others can decode and understand.

But that doesn't mean that it has to have a PARTICULAR COMPOSITION. Each field and each target consumer group has a preferred composition - as well as acceptable variants on that composition.

Knowing what the preferences of each consumer group are, the Artist can take the idea that comes welling up and decide which COMPOSITION best showcases the idea - then package the idea by choosing a COMPOSITION that fits the idea and the target consumer.

The professionalism shows in how well the Artist selects the COMPOSITION to fit the IDEA, and creates the total package for the target market WITHOUT COMPROMISING THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE IDEA.

In order to accomplish this trick, the Artist must know the COMPOSITION REQUIREMENTS of a lot of markets as well as the subtleties about COMPOSITION that creates a response in the consumer.

What I've been trying to teach this workshop with the original PLOT exercise (which I hope you all are still doing incessantly because it's vital training) and then the CONFLICT exercise as one of the driving engines of PLOT - is how to train your subconscious to analyze and understand COMPOSITION - not yet how to achieve it, but just how to PERCEIVE it.

As a consumer of art, the less aware you are of the tricks the artist used to COMPOSE the piece, the stronger your emotional reaction to the piece will be.

As a creator of art, the less aware you are of the tricks you use to COMPOSE a piece, the weaker your consumer's response will be.

This learning curve is vertical at the beginning - and it seems to me there are only a couple of you who are about half-way up this curve, and the rest are bewildered by the entire concept of the novel as a COMPOSED PIECE OF ART . You are still thinking of the novel from the point of view of the consumer - not of the creator - which is why you have so much trouble getting the pieces you invent to GO TOGETHER into a composition.

Thinking of your Art from the point of view of the consumer is what I call the "Amateur Attitude".

To turn that attitude around and think from the Artist's point of view is to make the transition from Amateur to Professional - even if you have never sold anything. Once you become habitually sensitive to the COMPOSITION behind the art that evokes RESPONSE from the consumer, you have a choice about whether to create for the "conduits" I spoke of before - or fanzines or "Creative Writing" for Academe. You have CONTROL of your Art. Without that awareness you have no choice and when you produce a saleable piece, it's by accident not design. And when you produce a saleable piece by accident and get a contract to write a sequel, you really don't know whether you CAN do it or not (especially not to deadline) because you really have no idea what you did that succeeded in the first place.

Professionalism in Art is merely a matter of learning to do what you do ON PURPOSE by design. If you can learn this, then knowing exactly what you have to do - you therefore know exactly how long it will take (G-d Willing and The Creek Don't Rise).

What happens as you start up this vertical slope toward the transition point from Amateur to Professional (which is at the top of this curve) is that you suddenly lose all appetite for and delight in consuming the Artform you are learning to Create. In other words, you suddenly can't stand to read novels or watch TV if Fiction is what you want to learn to create.

This is so TRUE that it works backwards. You know you're finally climbing to professional ranks by that loss of appetite.

However, if you persist doggedly, sweat streaming, teeth grinding, up this slope, you come to the top. And you know you've reached that top when suddenly you are reading or watching TV and you WHOOP WITH DELIGHT and enjoy something again.

Once you get that feeling back and revel in it for a year or two, you come to a point where you can look back on the slope you've climbed and notice the difference in WHAT you enjoy about a piece. Not which kinds of stuff you do enjoy - that will change regularly with maturity and other taste determining factors but not with this learning curve - but with the kind of thing inside a piece that triggers the whoop of joy and delight and sensawonder.

And what you notice is that PERFECT COMPOSITION has become your delight- trigger.

Now that's why the Nebula Winners are very often different from the Hugo Winners.

The Nebula is the award of excellence of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFFWA - to which I have belonged since the early 70's). The Hugo is the award of excellence of the members of The World Science Fiction Society - the people who put on WorldCon. The members are those who buy a membership in the convention - and with that comes voting privileges for the Hugo. The members of WSFS are mostly fans (a goodly percentage of professionals attend the con and vote the Hugos - but they are a tiny minority of the entire Worldcon Membership).

So the Hugo goes to the most popular book among READERS/CONSUMERS - a lot of whom are trained critics.

The Nebula goes to the most popular novel among writers. Editors and Agents are members of SFFWA but don't generally have award voting privileges with that special division of membership. And they're a minority among SFFWANS.

Many - I'm not sure about most - of those professional SFFWANS have climbed this vertical curve I'm describing - some do it in childhood and don't remember, some bring the knack of it from a prior life as "talent" (on which I intend to do a whole review column one day), and some like me - a lot like me - have to learn it the hard way.

Still and all, to muddy the picture, there are a lot (I mean a lot) who haven't a clue about how they do what they do - and so they don't sell everything they write and they don't know why. When their careers are going well, they attribute it to their Art. When they reach the inevitable downturns in career cycle that life delivers, they get depressed. And they quit.

The professionals turn their skills to other sorts of writing and just keep on keeping on.

Then there's me. A category of one or maybe a dozen at most. I have a number of novels "in the can" and ready to go into production - and one huge one that's still in rough draft form. I stopped producing fiction only because I realized - in 1994 - that the fiction "conduits" were about to go into paroxysms of flux and that the opportunities for my kind of fiction would be on the Web.

My guess was confirmed in July of 1995 by the escalation of the demand for cardboard in China. (Nobody believes my derivation here - but I'm convinced . Jean Lorrah is likewise convinced but by (as usually with her and me) a totally independent and completely different logical paradigm. When she and I get the same answer on any analysis - watch out world - it'll turn out to be true no matter how bizarre it may seem at the moment.

So I've devoted my fiction-writing time this last year and a half to becoming web-literate. And now I've screwed up the courage to create a itty bitty baby website of my own to link to the Central Site that Robyn has crafted for us. (a work of art in its own right)

Building Sime~Gen in Cyberspace is only a little fan project on the side. The main objective is to learn the Web and the Internet in order to predict the size, shape, and target of the conduits that will develop here. Then I will create product for that pipeline. I have no idea whether I can do this or not, but at least I've learned how to darn winsocks.

If I can climb this learning curve, Sime~Gen will - with the help of all of you - become a shaping influence on the conduits that develop.

Where do you writers fit into all this? You will have to design and shape your careers for the Web delivery system. Being part of the conduit shaping influences will help you establish yourselves as leaders among fictioneers on the Web.

To find out what sort of influence I want to be, and the shape of the conduit I want to build, and thus to find out if you want to be part of my conduit project or maybe go off and found your own conduit project - go to (1999 - you will find the INTIMATE ADVENTURE article in 2 main versions, one is the first two installments in my column (at http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks   ) and the other is right here in the Workshop -- just check the index page.) and read the article INTIMATE ADVENTURE - about the new genre that I see emerging. It's a feminist magazine version of the occult- New Age version of the older general sf version. The general sf version was in a magazine published out in California that's now defunct. The New Age version was done for the first two installments of my Science Fiction Review column in The Monthly Aspectarian at http://www.lightworks.com  

The feminist version was never published until we posted it.

Reading all these versions in quick sequence will teach you something about how professional writers make a living - it's called "slant" and that's the nonfiction technical jargon term for what I've been harping on about conduits and shape and target markets and packaging. The same kernal idea can be packaged for different markets WITHOUT ALTERING THE IDEA AT ALL. Check it out and learn something.

LL&P JL

 

This Virtual Tecton site is owned by Sime~Gen Inc..

Want to join Virtual Tecton: The Sime~Gen Webring?

[Skip Prev] [Prev] [Next] [Skip Next] [Random] [Next 5] [List Sites]