Tag: Worldbuilding

Writing Exercise: Movie Retrospect

Erin Penn 1 Comment

Image courtesy of digitalart at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A friend of mine Facebooked a question of what movies to show to her teenage daughter. You often see these requests on social media.

It is an interesting exercise to see what you value. In previous writing exercises, I have suggested assembling a list of  childhood favorite books to see what common threads draw you into a story  and a review of things you have written to see what your personal writing style is, specifically what skills you use and what you need to work on.

Movies are a different medium than writing on several levels: (1) Writing usually involves one person (not counting the editor); (2) Dialogue can be nuanced with the voice in movies; (3) Visual really makes a difference. But at the heart, both books and movies are still about story and characters.

WRITING & READING EXERCISE: Assemble a list of movies which you have watched and would recommend to others for enjoyment, not educational purposes. What are their common themes? Do these match fictional books you enjoy and/or your personal writing style? What would you like to take from them to enhance your writing? How is your movie watching and your reading different?

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My initial recommendation to my friend: Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Bugsy Malone (1976), and Johnny Dangerously (1984). What do all these have in common? They created new and consistent worlds, had amazing characters and even more amazing dialogue, and solid humor based on just being alive.

Johnny Dangerously had some meanness to it. Another Michael Keaton movie also is humorous, character-driven, and crazy-worldbuilding, but the meanness crosses the line and I never really enjoyed it. You may have a different opinion about Beetlejuice, but I would not recommend the movie. Comparing these two movies side-by-side you can see where my personal line of “meanness in humor” is.

After my initial recommendation, I had a long drive and come up with several more selections:

GENERAL MOVIE: Beverly Hill Cop I & II (1984, 1987), Ferris Bueler’s Day Off (1986), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Cool Runnings (1993)

FANTASY/SCI-FI: Star Wars: A New Hope & Empire Strikes Back (1977, 1980), Indian Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Dark Crystal (1982)

MUSICAL: Sound of Music (1965), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)

Grouped together, the world building screams out. While I have seen several character-driven movies, I need world-building before character building kicks it into the next level. On the other hand, having an amazing world is not enough – if the characters and humor don’t work, for example, The Matrix is an amazing world but the characters and humor are lacking. As always creating a writer’s exercise has taught me a lot about what I value – upbeat, hopeful, smiles, and a working world.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Editing Rant: No One Is Stealing Your Idea

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of Sira Anamwong at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What a bundle of mess. No one is going to steal your idea – and even if they did, they can’t steal your story. Pirate it, sure, but only after it is written.

Okay, let’s just deal with some of the concepts and myths new writers and non-writers have.

If I share my idea, and you write with it, I get some of the money.

How many of you have been approached by someone with an idea for a story guaranteed to make a bundle? You do all the work, but the idea man gets half the cash in the deal. Writers don’t have a problem coming up with an idea – the problem is doing the work to bring the idea to fruition. If someone has an idea and wants someone else to write it and the idea man gets the money, that is call GHOSTWRITING. The Ghost Writer gets paid by the IDEA MAN who then owns the writing – usually the Ghost Writer is paid something up front and the balance on delivery.

So, no, if you are an Idea Man, you don’t get money for not working. I have several hundred ideas – some of which are partially fleshed out in flashes on this blog. And every writer I know is in the same boat with far more ideas than time to write them. We don’t need someone else’s idea, unless it comes with a paycheck.

I can’t share my idea; someone might steal it.

The bundle of irrational this myth has includes unwillingness to query an agent who might give the idea to one of their contracted authors and the unwillingness to bounce ideas off of people who might sit down and type out the seventy thousand words to make the idea a reality. Nope and nope. Again, all writers have ideas – no one needs to steal more, if they are a writer.

A writer, on the other hand, DOES need to bounce ideas off of people. So do this.

Now it may look like someone has “stolen your idea”. This is because there are times when certain ideas come to fruition in a society; the winner in the writing game in those cases is whomever writes those 70K words first and cleans them up for publication. Some of the books I’ve read have been like “dude, get out of my head”. I’ve never met the author, but they have taken one of the ideas that bounced around my head and wrote it out. I’ve seen at least four science-fiction military stories on school debt.

They all are different. That is the thing. No one can steal your idea, because even if everyone starts from the same point – you end up with different stories. With a writing group where several of the members were scared of someone stealing their ideas, I had everyone start from the same exact words: “He took to the list…” – the flashes ended up with a contemporary romance, a historical military fight, and a science fiction courtroom drama. Same exact starting point.

Pirating isn’t stealing.

Okay, this one someone really is stealing your story. Or maybe music or art. Fight it.

And you – you who goes “I don’t have the money to pay.” don’t do it! There is a TON of free stuff out there. Look at this blog – I have somewhere north of 600 posts about writing and free fiction. I’m making videos. I make memes to share. All I ask is my name to remain attached to the product if shared.

If you are a content creator and you pirate, shame on you.

The free stuff is free, but pay for the stuff that isn’t. Content creators need to eat. (Speaking of which, I got a patreon you can sign up for if you want to make sure I eat so I can continue making the free stuff. – https://www.patreon.com/ErinPenn)

Pirating is stealing. This is complete work, not an idea. Hundreds of hours. But this isn’t in the “someone will steal my idea if I share it” at all. Pirating is taking someone’s completed work and is a billion dollar CRIMINAL business. Criminals don’t like doing the thinking work, they just want the product to resell. So an idea – pheff – that is way too much effort.

Plagiarizing isn’t stealing.

This is another one where someone actually is stealing work. But again, the idea has been taken to fruition. The work has been done – they want to steal the WORK, not the idea.

And again, my fellow writers, don’t plagiarize. You think it would be obvious to grown ups, but noooo. 

And readers will find you out. Some of us read over a hundred books a year – someone is going to go … “wait a minute”.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, no one will ever steal an idea. Even people with similar ideas or starting points, when the WORK is put in, will create something completely different – because the creators are different.

There are CRIMINALS who will steal the WORK once it is complete, but ideas aren’t worth the paper they haven’t been printed on yet so the criminals don’t care.

In conclusion, bounce your ideas off of people to hash them out to the point you can do Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard (BICHOK). The WORK is what makes a writer.

Other Cool Blogs: Magical Words 10/6/2008

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of Phil_Bird at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A Post About Anachronism by David B. Coe is over at Magical Words. You know I had to be all over that one.

Anachronism is something out of time, such as my linen aprons with drawn thread embroidery circa 1530 being worked on 2019.

Mr. Coe warns about bringing anachronisms into a fantasy piece, which will throw a reader out of the story. The areas he focused on are worldbuilding, language, and dialogue. I’ve talked about this sort of thing before, mainly in Editing Rants complaining about fact-checking; Mr. Coe discusses it from the creative standpoint from inconsistent technology levels and POV observational limitations. Take a gander at it.  (“Take a gander” being an early 20th century phrase and should not be in a fantasy, an example of anachronistic language.)

Again, the link is:

This post can also be found at Mr. Coe’s website: https://davidbcoe.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/a-post-about-anachronism/

Writing Exercise: Belief Coins

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In May, I ranted about Belief Coins, how there is only so much suspension of belief with a reader. Some of the breaks from reality are “discounted” because of the tropes of the genre: happily ever after in romance, heroic hero of thrillers, and solvable mysteries in the cozies. But because a trope is accepted in one genre does not mean a writer gets to hand wave and have it work in a different genre. Insta-love can appear in science fiction, but there had better be a reason for it, such as genetic programming predisposition supported by the psychic hive-mind of the humans colonists created by integration into the planet’s biosphere. Yes, that long explanation carries a whole bunch of hand-waving … but it builds a frame to explain the insta-love trope which isn’t a free coin.

Another example is Superman. I wrote about my problems with a Superman movie a while ago – where I was thrown out of the story because of disbelief; my ability to believe the impossible had been destroyed because of my inability to believe the improbable. Between normals breathing underwater for screaming, established worldbuilding thrown out the window, and character development being ignored, The Man of Steel did not buy a single Belief Coin needed to support the magic of the superhero trope.

So how can a writer buy Belief Coins? By making as much of the rest of the story grounded in reality. A ghost story? Have the main character have groceries go bad when frightened away by the apparitions. My erotic-romance Honestly novella has insta-sex, but balances that with the parent controlling her screams so not to wake her child. Superman, impossible alien, was raised by a childless couple in Kansas. For every unreal action, follow it by the very real to anchor it.

WRITING EXERCISE: Where are you spending the Belief Coins in your work-in-progress (WIP)? How many of them are genre-trope related? Count them up. And where do you have items to buy those coins – what grounds your book into reality? Do you have at least one “buy” before each “spend”. Do you have enough buys?

Book Review: Space Prison

Erin Penn

Book Cover from Amazon

Space Prison by Tom Godwin

BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON

AFTER TWO CENTURIES….The sound came swiftly nearer, rising in pitch and swelling in volume. Then it broke through the clouds, tall and black and beautifully deadly—the Gern battle cruiser, come to seek them out and destroy them. Humbolt dropped inside the stockade, exulting. For two hundred years his people had been waiting for the chance to fight the mighty Gern Empire … with bows and arrows against blasters and bombs!

 

MY REVIEW

For a long while, after I got old enough to read big words for myself, my mother would pass books she thought were good to me – Robert Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars, for example. Eventually she approved me going into the collection directly and I worked my way through her shelves which included this gem from HER college years – first published in 1958. A book she loved enough to transport from one end of the country to another through at least four different moves.

I loved it too. Massive worldbuilding, MacGyvering, action. I reread it again and again. Now a group of sci-fi classic lovers have uploaded the book for free viewing on Kindle.

Note for the formatting – if you get the free one – it’s free, the page numbers are included in the text and there are a couple-few transcription issues. The overall result is fine though – especially free for a book which only had a 5,000 first run.

I reread the book in 2017, and the worldbuilding still remains amazing. The ecology of Ragnarok from its climate to its animals is breathtaking. Originally titled “The Survivors”, this book makes you feel the hell planet a group of colonists are dumped on by their enemies. The MacGyvering to survive and then thrive remains really cool – gems always have worth. 

Downside for modern times – no female characters of note. The women and children are a background group – dying but essential to survival. Mr. Godwin does show them working along side the men, doing the same sacrifices and more; much more, there are no old child-bearing women. On a 1.5 gravity world where reproduction is as essential as exploration, the explorers will be limited to the men – and those are the ones Mr. Godwin follows. The women stay home and die in childbirth. Not the exciting part of the story for the 1950’s readers. The author never demeans women or says they can’t do what the men can do, but because they can do something the men cannot do they are not a part of the story.

The story follows the colonists and their descendants for 200 years.

The main lacking in this story is character attachment, you sympathize with the characters but don’t empathize. Consider how many people die, not feeling each death personally is a plus. The initial two nights after the colonists arrival on the hell world makes George R.R. Martin’s Red Wedding look sedate.

Still a great worldbuilding story even after 60 years; definitely worth the space on your kindle if you like classic sci-fi.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Eric Flint, in conjunction with Baen Books, has collected many of Tom Godwin’s works into “The Cold Equations” (published 2003), including The Survivors/Space Prison and his famous short story “The Cold Equations”. While not free, like kindle edition linked above, it’s available in paperback so you can have it for your shelves.

SECOND ADDITIONAL NOTE: Side amusement, the cover of Cold Equations is for “Space Prison” story and has a person standing holding a crossbow and unicorn goggles (should be black), with a mocker on the shoulder and two prowlers – but, typical of early sci-fi, the person is a scantily garbed woman.

THIRD ADDITIONAL NOTE: Mr. Godwin did a follow-up to this story. Do not read it. Think Highlander number 2 and hopefully it will eventually disappear off the interwebs.