Wow lots to respond to.

Gallivan - What we're trying to do here is establish the overall shape, or basic plot outline, of your story. That's a very interesting beginning, but do you have any idea what the climax or moral of the story will be?

Wai - although the wording's a bit vague, that looks like a good act structure. :) Next step, a more detailed and specific chapter outline and come character descriptions.

Shadowrancher - Thanks for the kind words. :) My guess at the premise of Magic would be, "Illusions are lovable and addicting, but a stage magician's descent into insanity shows that preferring illusion to reality results in the destruction of the real important things in life (friendship, love, life itself)." I'll look forward to seeing your original stuff. :)

Cyansoft - logline is not bad. I might tweak it a little: "A man who has been conditioned to be misogynistic and paranoid starts to notice his conditioning and free himself from it; he learns to love and trust, but individual human honesty and courage cannot stand against the torture and brainwashing of a fascist government." I will look forward to your original stuff also. :)

[Edited by - sunandshadow on August 26, 2007 3:28:10 AM]

Alright, now to take a stab at this myself... K, the following is my brain puking out half-digested ideas very late at night. If it's incoherent, ignore it (although Wai, I am curious if you in particular have any comments).


Much of fantasy seems to have the unstated premise that wanting things to happen makes them happen. Rather that making this the way magic behaves and thus an unquestionable rule of the universe, I'd like to make it more testable by making it a belief of the main character. This belief can be expressed in two formats, one the inverse of the other: 1. No one should be prevented from doing anything they truly want to do. and 2. No one should be forced to do something they truly don't want to do.

The first part of the test is to put these two formats in conflict with each other: Character A really wants Character B to do something that Character B really does not want to do. Neither of these characters are the main character, the main character is the mediator between the others. The second test is to establish in what exceptional cases it is right to prevent someone from truly doing something they want to do because it would hurt someone else. The conclusion of this test must be the main character, after careful consideration, severely punishing another character (e.g. by castration (relevant to overall fertility and reproduction motif) or death).

A second facet of this issue which must be tested is the case where a person restrains themself from doing what they truly want to do. I will have to show people who don't restrain themselves, people who realize for the first time that it might be a good idea to restrain themselves, people who decide to stop restraining themselves, and people who restrain themselves too much. In keeping with the fertility motif the desire to engender a child is an appropriate example of a common strong desire often restrained because of practicalities. Duty, leading, and following are also relevant here - possibly a military motif.

If practicalities are opposing people's true desires, by the first set of beliefs this makes practicalities unethical. The overall questions of the book then becomes how to conquer practicalities in a way that satisfies everyone's desires. One way to get at this theme could be to split ability from desire: humans have all the desire, non-human shapeshifters have all the ability. Or, the apparent unethicality of the pragmatic universe might be shown to arise from ignorance of the universe (such as how magic works or a technological innovation). I don't know. But since I want a happy ending, the climax should show everyone's desires being satisfied, which requires both concord among the 'good guys' (itself requiring self-knowledge and communication/understanding between characters) and requires the 'good guys' to gain some sort of ability to conquer problems of practicality.

What kinds of ability are there? Destructive ability (including the ability to defeat enemies), Transformative ability (including the ability to look at things from different perspectives), Biological ability (survival, competition, reproduction), Innovative ability (philosophical epiphanies, technological innovations, founding of social customs and organizations, and evolutionary leaps), Charismatic ability (anything having to do with leaders, followers, friends, lovers, families, and social standing). Are there any other types or is that all of them?

[Edited by - sunandshadow on August 28, 2007 2:13:49 AM]

Re: S/S

When I read your list of abilities, I think the first ability is odd compared to the last one, because destruction can be done by the mean of the other abilities. So it doesn't read like an ability but a use of other abilities.

Hmm, that's a valid observation. I was thinking of destruction as being that kind done with primal force, such as physical force or elemental magic. Whatever kind of primal force pacifists lack in their personalities.

Also wanted to make a note for myself of one further thought, that prejudice fits in as an example of bad reasons for restraining others or oneself. (As shown in the P&P example.)

What is the prefered way of passing passages? Posts or MSWord documents?


The Road To Paradise

Characters:
1) The narrator - the one who tries to piece things together
2) The avatar - the one that represents of someone from the ideal world
3) The narrator's housemate - the representation of inertia, the reactions and actions of reality

Chapters outline:

01) Sudden Death
The setting is somewhat anachronic--a kendo dojo. At the end of practice, with everyone formally seated on the bamboo floor, the head sensei announced that a member of the dojo has passed away from an auto collision. The narrator describes how he felt, or more accurately, the lack of any emotion about the news. On his right, one of the other members couldn't hold his sorrowful tears. The narrator wondered whether there was something fundamentally wrong about himself.

02) Afterlife
The narrator and his housemate went to the library to look for books. A strange book caught his eyes. It was a book about the uses of human dead bodies. The narrator never really enjoyed reading, but he liked that book. He knew that it was not just the topics in the book, but also the style of the writing that was so simple and candid. The narrator thought that if he were to write a book, he would want to write like that.

03) Flying Islands
After a career advancement, the narrator revisited a game development forum. By chance, there was a workshop on writing. He looked into himself on everything that he had imagined about. Many had become distant as they no longer align with his emotions, but their images never go away. It seems that they never will unless they are expressed. The internal concepts of the ideal world, a paradise, wants to be expressed. Subsections: possession, communication, distribution, expansion.

04) The Wings of Paradise
The narrator tries to discover the events leading from the present to the ideal world. It is difficult, but the narrator does not want to give up. Then, he discovers a fallacy about his way of thinking: The paradise came not because people could foresee its form, but because the people have come to accept a set of principles. Paradise isn't an ending of the world's development, it is a state where people share a fundamental value about life.

05) Learning to Fly
Once the narrator has conceived the principles, he realizes everything in life that contradicts it. Within the fabrics of the modern world, it seems impossible to break out. The narrator accounts for the conflicts with his housemate that arise from changing himself. Subsections: what to buy, where to go, what to do.

06) Earthbound
The narrator sees aspects of the society that are already walking the same road. At the same time, he feels that he is too weak to adhere to some of the principles. Where is the line drawn between possible to change and impossible to change? The narrator prepares for a slow transformation.

07) Paradise Road
The road to paradise is so long, that no one would be the first one to walk the road, and no one would be the first one to get to the end. On a road made possible by those who walk it, no one expects their footprints to last. Yet, people often are compelled to stray from the path in order to leave a footprint. Prompted by a message from the avatar, the narrator prepares himself against a fundamental fear--a death to be forgotten--by visiting the cemetery.

Wai - oh, how interesting. I think that the sudden death of an acquaintance is a better choice than the terminal illness was, and I like the way the kendo introduces the idea of the past and an alternate philosophy and way of relating to other people than everyday life. It becomes clearer that the future you are interested in is not a future which is desirable because it has better living conditions, but the future to which the desire that one's life contributes to making the human world a better place applies.

One thing particularly catches my notice: "People share a fundamental value about life." Does this mean that in the future all people have the same philosophy? Does this reduce the variation among their personalities and ambitions? With an audience biased in favor of individualism you will have to carefully show that any reduction of diversity is not bad or (possibly worse) boring.

I found the Flying Islands section amusing. [wink] Maybe I missed it, but where does the Avatar first meet the narrator?

Overall, reminds me vaguely of Marge Piercy's _Woman on the Edge of Time_. Oh, and posts are preferable for short texts, preferably 3 screenheights or less.

The avatar first met the narrator before the narration begins. She was among the imaginations that were buried until they were uncovered in section 03.

Paradigms changes. It is common today to accept that slavery is bad. It wasn't. One aspect of the convergent philosophy that I was referring to, was "give more than you take." It doesn't contradicts individualism: people are still different in personalities and have different goals.

It can be said that the common mindset now is that of economy: how to give less and take more. There is nothing wrong with this concept per se (there is nothing wrong with using a lever to lift a 500 lb rock), the problems seem to come when such model is used against another person.

I think that this problem comes from the people not knowing how the society works, and not knowing the people from other parts of society sustains the society. When the world becomes complex and the people don't know how things are processed, they have no choice but to think only in terms of their own desires.

[Edited by - Wai on August 26, 2007 8:42:11 PM]

Impact Character is a Dramatica term, are you reading Dramatica theory or did you pull the term from my writing somewhere...? At any rate I would say Fats (in other words Corky's psychosis) is definitely the impact character. Fats may technically be an aspect of Corky, but within the story he counts as a different character. And the impact character is pretty much always whoever the main character spends the most time interacting with throughout the story.

(For a full Dramatica analysis: this novel is largely lacking the OS and IC throughlines, so it doesn't really have what Dramatica would call a protagonist and antagonist. Fats is not an antagonist but more of a combination Contagonist and Skeptic, while The Postman is a Guardian who represents Reason and Peg is a Sidekick (not obviously, but Faith does seem to be her major character issue) who represents Emotion. I wouldn't worry too much about the Dramatica theory though, I personally believe it has some useful concepts but also some big flaws.)

BTW I think you're totally right in what you wrote about tragedy in the workshop #1 thread. I've never studied tragic theory myself because I don't like tragedies. Well maybe that's one detail I would argue with a bit - I think people who dislike tragedies often do so self-defensively because they realize that reading tragedies makes them feel upset and depressed, and it's more useful to be optimistic and energetic. But at any rate I agree that the 'right path' is illustrated through its negative presence in the story, the fact that Corky keeps making the wrong choice over and over again. I did not know that about the bleating of the sacrificial goat. Which just goes to show that we are all playing catch-up with in studying fiction theory, because there is no universal agreement about what fiction is and how it works, and even if one gets both a BA in English and an MFA in creative writing there will be theories you will not be taught in any of those classes.


Okay, theme and premise in more detail... The fundamental motivation of fiction, both for characters and writers, is Disphoria, a dissatisfaction with the way things are (or were or might become) and desire to change them. A story can be regarded as an argument between two or three points of view, one of which must win in the end, and this dramatic presentation of the argument functions rhetorically to persuade the audience to agree with whatever point of view the story reaches at the end. Theme is the topic of this persuasive argument; the structure of a thematic argument is the underlying reason that plot structure exists, and theme could be regarded as meta-plot. Novels in particular are large and can have room to make a complex argument or several sub-arguments, and thus they may have several themes, but the one decided at the climax will be the main theme because it is the one the plot structure is built on.

The word theme may also be used in a more concrete way as a synonym for motif. A motif is the way an abstract theme is embodied in a series of related tropes. For example in my own writing the theme of authority is often embodied in an overt motif of military hierarchy combined with a covert motif of sexual dominance and submission. TCotCB uses nature-related disasters (earthquake, near-drowning, snowstorm, animal attacks and illnesses, and references to the glacier causing the whole ice age) as a major but subtle motif to make its argument about the superior survival value of an adaptable experimental mindset over a tradition and law-focused one. Magic of course uses stage-magic as its major motif, and wooden hearts and a wooden puppet as a minor but important one.

But let's go back to the idea of disphoria as the fundamental motivation. We don't necessarily write books because we want to persuade anyone of anything. Instead writing and reading both function as ways of escaping into a world where our problems can be more effectively and satisfyingly conquered, or in the case of tragedy where the problems get as bad as possible so that the audience can either face them head-on instead of hidden in shadowy possibilities of future disaster or current denial and avoidance, or see that their own real problems are not as bad. Now, the adult creation of commercial fiction is based on the childhood urge for pretend play. And pretend play is about simulating situations for the purpose of learning and practicing how to deal with them when they later occur in real life.

A study of children's pretend play revealed that sessions of pretend usually developed one of three fundamental themes: separation-reunion, threat-neutralization, and deprivation-provision. (One more which probably should be included here, but which the study did not mention because it never appears as a main theme, only as an episode in a larger session, is test-reward.) Common plot implementations of these themes include, for separation-reunion: death-rebirth, object lost-object found, person absent-person present; for threat-neutralization: danger-rescue, villain present-villain defeated, injury-healing; and for deprivation-provision: food deprivation-food provision, care deprivation-care provision. And there you have the essence of all the most common fiction plots. Georges' Polti's 36 basic plots and similar plot lists elaborate on these, and in particular the hero's journey plot has been extensively analyzed and theorized about. At the full extent of its modern adult complexity theme can be about general philosophical issues such as identity, ethics, or the afterlife, or specific issues such as capital punishment, the right to privacy, abortion, survivor's guilt, and basically any abstract philosophical issue an author feels strongly about and wants to explore by having their characters' wrestle with it.

A premise is the 'winning side' of a thematic argument, otherwise known as the moral of the story. A logline combines the premise with a brief description of the main character, the rising action, and the climax to convey the core of the story in 1-3 sentences. How are these used in writing a novel? Well, in several ways, because every choice made about a character, a setting, or a plot event prompts other choices about these 3 things. Identifying themes that resonate with you in other works of fiction helps you figure out what themes you want to write about. Knowing some themes you want to write about suggests possibilities for: character motivations, internal conflicts, and personalities; worldbuilding which can metaphorically put a particular theme center-stage in the story; your desired emotional tone is developed through the setting; a particular pondering by one character or argument between 2 characters about a thematic point may suggest a specific scene; and of course the moral you want the story to present suggests what must happen at the climax. There are probably even more ways than this that knowing what themes you are interested in and developing a premise and logline can be used as stepping stones to envisioning a blueprint for your story.