The idea. Your normal story follows a series of characters and they usually start fairly stick, developing into complex ones along the way. Usually. What if it happened in reverse?

The story follows a series of characters in a character waiting room scenario where they are main characters in a long running series. They are fully developed and complex already, but they start to notice that their fellow characters are starting to lose personality traits and motivations as the story goes on.

Being in the book is like a job and they are actors in this grand play, as is the case in most of these sports of set ups, but behind the scenes, they imagine there is a creature stealing their personalities, or maybe one of he minors trying to take a leading role by making the mains all dull. They don’t know and are trying to figure it out before they turn completely intuitive stock characters.

In the end, of course, they find its nothing so sinister. Heir writer, after having written so many books and desiring a chance to write something else, has a deadline approaching with this book and is a little blocked.

And hats the idea. It will need a few years to mature, but I rather like it as a base. Although I hope I don’t keep up he trend of interesting ideas while in pain.

Author:

Lesson: The plot is very different from the story.

Alice in Wonderland is a very familiar story for the most part. A girl goes to another world and eventually returns from it. The plot has changed from iteration to iteration, the events changing time and again, leaving in only a few key bits throughout the instances. The confusion between Wonderland and Looking Glass has almost made it so that they are better thought of as one book rather than two.

But there seems to be a big disconnect between the plot of Alice in Wonderland and the story of it. The plot is that in every chapter, Alice finds something new in Wonderland, talks to it, gets confused, then parts from it to never speak of it again. This proceeds throughout both books until she leaves at the end of each. As near as I can tell, the plot doesn’t even seem to give her a motivation in this. She is simply in Wonderland, walking, and then she leaves. Not terribly compelling, honestly, though it does give you a nice chance to look at the set pieces.

The story of Alice in Wonderland, however, is a different beast all together. After reading it for the first time, I remembered it as the story of a girl plunged and lost in a fantastical world trying to find her way back home. The internal logic was the only thing that made sense and she had to figure out their riddles in order to get home. Upon rereading it, the plot didn’t have many of these elements in it, but that was what I took away and the story that I remember.

The plot consists of only the events that actually happen in a work. The story is what we interpret those events into, from the motivations of characters to the way events link together when it’s not explicitly stated. And the story, if done right, can turn out to be an entirely different beast from the plot. It’s not a bad thing in the least, but it’s interesting to see happen.

Author:

Lesson: The games of royals can get rather tedious.

I was lent this book after mentioning that I wanted to check out the sequel¹ and it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I thought it would be steam punk, but instead it’s a bit of a split between a Victorian aristocracy and a strange, metallic fantasy prison, each world containing a different main character and the two main characters slowly working their way to one another.

Except I was only drawn in by about half the book. Finn, the prisoner in this strange fantastical land with no memory of his previous life where he was probably a prince, now trying to survive and escape his situation, was interesting and I wanted to see him succeed. Claudia, the young woman who was being forced to marry the delinquent prince and looking at things as a power struggle and “Playing the game” of the aristocracy just seemed tedious.

Honestly, I didn’t care at all about her struggle. She didn’t want to marry this prince, she wanted the real one, which she found in the prison. She didn’t seem to even care about the real prince outside of him being the real one. She was doing it because… I’m not even sure. Because he’d be nicer than the other guy, I suppose. It certainly wasn’t out of love, instead out of some desire to screw up people’s plans for her. Sure, she says that she cared for him, but there was little to none of that showing.

Her side of the story is important, granted. It just wasn’t as entertaining as the stuff with Finn. She was bred to be stoic and cold so that she could handle court life, but it distanced her as a character and the court stuff is all political intrigue, which isn’t terribly exciting to me when there’s a whole fictional world where metal starts to replace organic material when they run out.

1. I wanted to read Sapphique originally because the cover was really pretty, but she told me that it was a sequel. Thanks Cait!

Author: Madeline L’Engle

Lesson: Religious references really stick out.

A friend of mine got me A Wrinkle In Time years ago for my birthday, along with the rest of the series.¹ The story of how a girl, her brother and her neighbor meet three strange women and go off to save her father is a bit of a strange one, including talk of math and diagrams to make the explanations a little easier.

While the book was all right overall, but there was one thing that stuck out when I was reading it. They reference Jesus and God, which struck me as odd in a book that seemed to be about math on some level. Considering I tend to find science and religion to be at odds for the most part, the references stood out like they were written in blood on the page.

I couldn’t understand why aliens were singing about God, for one thing. I’m pretty sure aliens don’t really factor into Christianity, so I’m not sure what they were doing at all. Also, saying that both Jesus and Buddha were special disciples was… confusing.

If a character is religious, fine. If the world is based in Christianity, fine. Just don’t mix a Christian world with hard science fiction. They just seem to be directly in conflict with one another, regardless of whether or not it actually is. It all just stuck out oddly after reading it and it threw me out of the story.

1. Yes, it’s a whole series. There’s four books all together, and they talk about the whole family.

Author: Dianne Wynne Jones

Lesson: Be wary of those last few pages.

The book itself was all right, though lacking in that sense of wonder I like from a young adult novel involving magic. It’s about a man who inherits a house from his grandfather to become the new guardian of the strange little county that has more than it’s fair share of odd magic. A child comes to the house looking for his grandfather and he takes the boy in as the fae folk start moving in.¹

But we aren’t talking about the whole book here, just the last few pages. Now, I have seen so many articles on the importance on the first five pages, the first chapter and the first line, but almost nothing about the endings. It makes sense. To get published, you need someone to read past the first chunk of the book to get into the meat of the story. But the ending is what’s going to stick with your audience, and it needs careful consideration.

In general, the book was fine. Until the last chapter. See, they had just banished the fae folk to an alternate dimension using powers that came out of nowhere and our main character was settling down pondering how lucky he was to be getting married to a woman he had no chemistry with when the faerie king managed to get a letter to him. In this letter, he essentially finds out that the boy is not his fourth cousin, as previously implied in the story, but actually his uncle. Apparently his Grandfather was sent a troubled underage girl² who was also his second cousin to try and fix and knocked her up.

This was a bit of a major reveal that sort of ruined the book for me. It was a bit dull, but generally all right before those last few pages and that note. With that, the kindly old grandfather became an entirely different character and the fact that our lead just accepted it without a second thought, indeed while going to tell his soon to be bride of some young age that is never actually mentioned,³ made me even more annoyed with the lack of surprise or wonder from any of the characters.

I couldn’t see a reason why all this was included at all, but that it happened right at the end left me with a bad impression of the book overall. I could have easily overlooked most of it entirely,  but dammit if those last few pages didn’t put a whole different spin on the story. And it bothered me.

So remember, while the first five pages might be important to getting your work published, you last five pages are what people will probably remember when they read your book. Try to make them good and skip on the major reveals that change matters a whole lot.

End note: To all you angry Dianne Wynne Jones fans, yes, I know she died fairly recently. I’m sorry to say her death has not made my opinion of the book change. I’m sure the rest of her novels are lovely, and I do like what I’ve seen of Howl’s Moving Castle, but I do not find this book to be very good.

1. Admittedly, it’s been a couple weeks and two books since reading this, so the terminology isn’t accurate to the novel.
2. The young boy’s mother
3. Which is something that didn’t occur to me until then, either.

Author: Robert Liparulo

Lesson: Show, don’t tell

Okay, so it’s an old one, but man this book made me realize how important it was. The story is about a family who moves into clearly haunted house and discover that it’s not haunted, but there are several doors in a locked attic that lead to other worlds and times. So it’s a magically teleporting house, since there’s another door that just teleports them to school.

The thing that irked me about the book, though, was the main character. We are told that he is a teenager. We are told he makes movies. We are told that he left his girlfriend behind and didn’t want to move. None of his actions reflect any of this at all.

I kept thinking, how hard would it be to have him call his girlfriend back home? He’s a kid in modern times. Cell phone. Just call her. You can do loads of exposition there and cut that part out of his life entirely after that, since he never mentions back home again, nor does he even think to call anyone back there at any other time in the story. It all felt like exposition that was there because the author felt like it’s what teenagers should do, but none of it was acted out so I didn’t believe any of it. Like when that friend’s aunt tells you her daughter you’ve never met has a lovely singing voice. Nod, smile, hope something interesting starts soon.

It is also not hard to have him with a camera in his hands from the beginning. Or if he’s just got it on him more often than randomly in the latter half of the book. The only reason I even remembered he wanted to make movies at all is because that point bothered me so much at the beginning. He could be working on a script between the weirdness of the house, even, or trying to talk his brother and sister into being cast and crew.

Long story short, if I don’t see it, I don’t believe you. Show, don’t tell.

I’ve eliminated Youtube¹ and hosting it myself using the JW-Player.² This leaves the two other places I have accounts: Vimeo and Blip.

I know quite a bit about Blip, but is anyone out there very familiar with Vimeo? Is it a good place to do the vlog thing?

1. Just not a fan of the quality on it when I upload my other videos
2. I would probably use up all my webspace in a couple videos.

Author: J.M. Barrie

Lesson: Read the Classics

Peter Pan, in it’s original form, would never have ever been published today and it’s amazing the parts of the story that get completely omitted in modern retellings. Like, did you know Peter actually kills the lost boys when they get to be too old? And that the whole thing about believing in fairies to save Tinkerbell happens on one completely random fourth wall breaking page and is completely forgotten about for the rest of the book until Tinkerbell herself is completely forgotten?

It’s interesting to see how stories age. Peter Pan is very much rooted in it’s time period and doesn’t do a lot of the things normal convention tells us to do. Things like stick to a coherent plot and don’t let the narrator interact with the characters in a hypothetical manner. And have your title character have at least a couple redeeming qualities instead of making him a very cocky, arrogant boy that thinks only of himself.

And if he keeps taking Wendy’s female descendants, how would the one from today react? Probably pissed off that she’s being kidnapped to clean a place with no wi fi reception. She’d probably refuse outright having to go clean someone else’s place because she’s not his damn maid. Oh, modern children.

Needless to say, read the classics. It’s interesting to see what used to be popular and the habits that used to work really well in fiction that have since died off a little. Plus, you’ll be amazed what’s actually in there that didn’t make it into the Disney movie.

Lesson: Similar isn’t always bad

This is the second book I’ve read where a young travelling musician is orphaned after his entire troupe is killed, goes to live as a thief in the city and learns magic of some shape or form with some intent of taking revenge, and yet end up living a quiet life in some out of the way place hoping not to be bothered again. The other one I will eventually get to, but that whole segment of a plot line just stunned me in it’s similarity.

There are going to be similarities in books regardless, though. I doubt Patrick Rothfuss has ever even read Peter and Max and would argue that there is quite a bit of difference in them. I would quite agree. Just because the two books have very similar base outlines and use very similar logic to explain their skill sets, the stories are quite different beasts entirely.

On top of that, I found myself enjoying the story enough that I only really noticed the similarities when it started to drag in parts. And even then, it was more fun than anything else to see how the two writers approached the concepts differently or similarly.

Though I suppose this is a redundant message. When something is popular, it gets copied and, inevitably, there are two good works amidst the cash grab. Although I still find all vampire romance novels to be more or less identical in plot and structure.¹

So what I’ve taken from it is this. Just because it sounds really similar to something else that’s out there, go for it anyway. Write it and enjoy the first draft. If it is too similar, you don’t have to edit² it afterwards.

1. Please note, I haven’t actually read a vampire romance novel since that summer in high school several years ago, when I went through a phase and read about twenty of them in a row.
2. I still hold that you should write for yourself and editing is done for your audience.

About the narrative, though, because I do love some weird narrative, this project looks like a lot of fun and I can sort of understand how it would work.¹ Beyond the initial story you get from the toys in the first place and hints to switch the pieces and choose which ones to interact with which ones first, you can get updates on your phone to get the next part of the story.

Personally, I hope this does well because it looks like a damn lot of fun. I also hope that more people start experimenting with this sort of augmented reality story telling because damn it looks like it would be fun to play around with.

1. I have not done any research on it, only looking briefly at the site to see if I could get those in Canada and if the app required to play was available or Android.