Save the Cat: Blake Snyder on the role of The Board

In Save the Cat! Blake Snyder talks about a writer needing the beating ability –he describes it as a battle cry of Let's beat it out!

What's with the beat?

It's about structure, Blake says: something he learned only after writing screenplays for years:

It's a skill you must know... The craftmanship it akes, the patient work, the magic of storytelling on film, all come together in how you execute and realize structure.

He tells  how he came across Syd Field's Screenplay and found something that saved his career:

Oh! Three acts! Imagine  that? And yet, it was not enough. Like a swimner in a vast ocean, there was a lot of open water in between those two Act breaks. And a lot of empty script space in which to get lost, panic, and drown. I needed more islands, shorter swims.

His solution was to develop the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet – click here to see the actual beat sheet. As the number of pages in the average script runs at 110, there are 110 beats (pages) in the Beat Sheet, divided into 15 parts.

The Blake Snyder Board

How do you get to the beat sheet? You use The Board.

The Board lets you see what goes where, which character does what, and whether you need all the scenes or need new ones.

The Board is a blackboard or corkboard or notebook that divides the screenplay / book into 4 equal parts: Act One, first part of Act Two, second part of Act Two, and Act Three. In Blake's words:

It is the workout space where, using index cards, pushpins ... you can try your best ideas and see what they look like, and then begin to winnow them down. If done right, you'll end up with 40 scenes that make a movie ...

A similar approach is taken by Jennifer Jensen in her article Storyboards Help Track Plots and Subplots, and in the article The Board by Isaac.

So if you want to make your lot as a writer much easier, buy Save the Cat! and use Blake's Beat Sheet.

You might be pleasantly surprised by the results this discipline imposes on you.

Another version of The Board:

The Board

Your Adams & Eves: We needed you – the Venetian

Gondola in Venice

Our man in Venice ended up taking on a life of his own, and we found ourselves simply having to follow him as he lead us through the canals of his home city.

Our Venetian character in Obelisk Seven is one of the minor characters, but the role he plays supporting the Big Three (Nick, Kate and Gliffy) is an important one. 

As soon as we decided that we wanted our novel to climax in Venice, we realized that we needed someone there to act as the conduit for the information dumps we had to add to the novel to move it along.

Our visit to Venice had been a real highlight of our train tour. 

Neither of us had appreciated the powerful position that Venice had occupied for so many centuries, and the unique nature of her democracy.

As soon as we set foot for the first time in St. Mark's square we lost our hearts to this wonderful city.

And then we lost them again when we glided beneath the bridges on our gondola, and walked beside the canals, admiring the ancient palaces that still exist, despite Venice's periodic floods.

So Lorenzo made his entrance, and came with a five hundred-year history, his own palace, and his very own Mouth of Truth.

And he arrived early on in our novel, and stayed until almost the very end.

A very welcome character.

St. Mark's Square, Venice

Venice from the sky

Venice Carnival Mask

Mouth of Truth in the Doge's Palace - reformatted

Glassblower's Art from Venice

A hint - Dan Brown's Seven Points for Writers

In 2005 Lisa Rogak published The Man Behind The Da Vinci Code – An Unauthorized Biography of Dan Brown. 

She describes the outline for Seven Powerful Tips used by Dan Brown on his website (but since scrubbed from that site). 

She writes that the outline provides a revealing look at how Brown "plans and crafts the flow of his own novels."

Here, briefly, are his Seven Powerful Tips:

Setting – reveal new worlds to your readers.

In and out scene building – keep things moving.

A sole dramatic question – use a single brick for your foundation.

Tension – create it with the clock (fast passage of time to speed the novel); the crucible (apply your heat to your constrained characters); and the contract (make promises to your reader and keep them).

Research – learn the specifics you will need for your novel.

Weaving of information - dole it out in small bites.

Revision – go back and play with your first draft.

If you would like to read about Dan Brown hanging upside down in gravity boots while writing, click here.

Hallie Ephron on Pacing your Novel with a Pacing Table & Dotty Pictures

Hallie Ephron

I was lucky enough to attend the presentation by Hallie Ephron at the Surrey International Writers Conference on how to pace your novel. 

Raised by screenwriters, author of six acclaimed novels, crime fiction reviewer for the Boston Globe, and author of the how-to book, Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel: How to Knock ‘Em Dead with Style, Hallie sprinkled gems during her lecture.

One thing really grabbed my attention: her use of a Pacing Table for analysing the pacing in a novel, along with a graphical representation of the creation and release of tension.

The Pacing Table has three columns.

In the first one you block out the scene by describing the action taking place in the scene, using simple words.

The next two columns each have columns numbered 1 to 5, with the first column headed Slow (being 1) to Fast (being 5), and the third column headed Easy (=1) to Tense (=5).

The Pacing Table

Description:	Slow				Fast	Easy				Tense
	1	2	3	4	5	1	2	3	4	5
	1	2	3	4	5	1	2	3	4	5
	1	2	3	4	5	1	2	3	4	5

You use simple words to describe the action in the description column, and then you circle a number in the second and third columns, depending on your calculation of the speed and tension in that action.

Once you've done this for every action  in the scene, you are ready to portray the results graphically. To do this you turn your page sideways and connect the dots in columns 2 and 3.

Voila! There you have it: two graphs, one showing how the pacing of the scene's component actions changes from slow to fast and back again,  and one showing what happens to the tension (easy to tense, with tension rising and being released).

Now you can sit back and consider whether those two graphs represent what you the author want the scene to do. If you think it needs to be slowed down, you do that; if you need more tension, or a release of tension in a different spot, you do that.

It's interesting to see just how much information you can glean from the two graphs (after all, isn't a picture worth a thousand words?)

Some other snippets from her Pacing your Novel presentation. There is no direct correlation between speed and tension – even slow scenes can be tense. Tension is important, because it's the force that pulls the reader forward.

You can add tension to a fast scene by slowing it down – take a fight, for example: think cinematically, and slow your writing down as if you were shooting the fast scene in slow motion, as we see so often in movies. The slow motion actually makes the scene faster!

One key takeaway from Hallie was that EVERY scene had to have an arc – rising tension followed by a release of tension. The rise and release need not be dramatic, but there must an such an arc or else the scene is flat, listless and boring.

A few pointers from Hallie's bag of pacing tricks:

• you introduce characters slowly, with detail but no big detail dumps (they slow down the story)
• arguing? happens fast
• you can write a scene fast and slow it down in reflection
• staccato rythms create speed
• underwrite a scene to create speed
• verbs, verbs, verbs in a row create speed
• questions raise tension
• stop time with sensory descriptions
• longer sentences slow things down and vice-versa
• humor reduces tension
• conflict increases tension.

A lot of info, crammed into a short hour and a half.

Thanks, Hallie!

Has your Hero got a Thousand Faces? How myths a better writer doth make

Wanna write a novel? Go back five thousand years for your inspiration. That's the message from Joseph Campbell, the author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell's work inspired Christopher Vogler, who wrote The Writer's Journey, a book highly recommended by Robert Dugoni.

You can find an outline of The Hero's Journey at this site.

Vogler tells the story of the original seven-page memo that was the foundation of The Writer's Journey - "The Memo that Started It All" - which he wrote to capture his understanding of the analysis of ancient myths by Joseph Campbell. Vogler was working as a story consultant for Walt Disney Pictures, and summarized his understanding of how one could use Campbell's analysis of the hero in ancient myths to structure a screenplay.

The Memo was an instant hit, and he handed out copies to several people, who swooned over it:

I had the vision that copies of The Memo were like little robots, moving out from the studio and into the jetstream of Hollywood thinking all on their own... Feedback started coming in that suggested I had hit a nerve... A junior executive had taken off my title page and substituted his own name as author, and then submitted it to Jeffrey Katzenberg, who read it and pronounced it a very important document at a meeting of his development execs, making it required reading for the entire staff. Fortunately someone at that table had already read The Memo and knew I was the true author.

In The Memo, Vogler says that Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces was having a major impact on writing and story-telling, but above all on movie-making, influencing Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Coppola:

The ideas Campbell presents in this and other books are an excellent set of analytical tools. With them you can almost always determine what’s wrong with a story that’s floundering; and you can find a better solution almost any story problem by examining the pattern laid out in the book.

There’s nothing new in the book. The ideas in it are older that the Pyramids, older than Stonehenge, older that the earliest cave painting.

Campbell’s contribution was to gather the ideas together, recognize them, articulate them, and name them.  He exposes the pattern for the first time, the pattern that lies behind every story ever told.

The Memo summarizes the Hero's Journey as follows: 

The hero is introduced in his ORDINARY WORLD where he receives the CALL TO ADVENTURE.  He is RELUCTANT at first to CROSS THE FIRST THRESHOLD where he eventually encounters TESTS, ALLIES and ENEMIES.  He reaches the INNERMOST CAVE where he endures the SUPREME ORDEAL.  He SEIZES THE SWORD or the treasure and is pursued on the ROAD BACK to his world.  He is RESURRECTED and transformed by his experience.  He RETURNS to his ordinary world with a treasure, boon, or ELIXIR to benefit his world.

Vogler wrote that the Hero's Journey is populated by archetypes - basic functions you find in every story – they are recurring patterns of human behavior, symbolized by standard types of characters in movies and stories (Heroes; Shadows – villains; Mentors – the Hero's guide or guiding principles; Heralds – the person or event that brings the call to adventure; Threshold Guardians – opposing forces; Shapeshifters – representing change or ambiguity; Tricksters – clowns or mischief-makers including our own subconscious; and Allies).

Look who else was rejected! Some lessons for Writers from The Drunkard's Walk

Can a drunkard give you hope? The answer is Yes! Scratch the surface of any writer and you'll uncover a deep fear of rejection. Your lot as a writer seems to depend on others, and every single day you think of the high odds against you, and of the next rejection – by an agent or a publisher.

But there is some good news for you, if you are prepared to learn some lessons from The Drunkard's Walk, Leonard Mlodninow's magnificent book on how randomness rules our lives.

Leonard makes the point that we "habitually underestimate the effects of randomness". And his dissection of the impact of random events on our lives should give every writer who wants to break into the Big Time hope.

Take this obeservation from his book:

Suppose four publishers have rejected the manuscript for your thriller about love, war, and global warming. Your intuition and the bad feeling in the pit of your stomach might say that the rejections by all those publishing experts mean your manuscript is no good. But is your intuition correct? Is your novel unsellable?

Loraine and I just love his reference to a manuscript about global warming – that man is psychic, make no bones about it!

Leonard goes on – and writers the world over should memorize these words and recite them as a mantra every time they wake up, look in the mirror, and fear rejection:

Could it be that publishing success is so unpredictable that even if our nevel is destined for the best-seller list, numerous publishers could miss the point and send those letters that say thanks but no thanks?

J.K. Rowlands

He goes on to give a list of published authors who were rejected, with some quotes from the thank you but no thanks letters. Sylvia Plath was rejected for lack of enough genuine talent. George Orwell was rejected because animal stories would not sell in the U.S. Tony Hillerman was rejected by an
agent and advised to get rid of all that Indian stuff in his manuscripts. John Grisham had one manuscript rejected by 26 publishers, and 27 publishers rejected the first book of Dr. Seuss. Even J.K. Rowland had her first Harry Potter manuscript rejected by 9 publishers before she got that all-important Yes.

For a list of 50 famous writers who were rejected many times, click here.

And now for the kicker – Leonard's conclusion on your chances of getting published and winning fame and fortune. His good news? You do stand a chance:

There exists a vast gulf of randomness and uncertainty between the creation of a great novel ... and the presence of huge stacks of that novel ... at the front of thousands of retail outlets. That's why successful people in every field are almost universally members of a certain set – the set of people who don't give up. A lot of what happens to us – success in our careers, in our investments, and in our life decisions, both major and minor – is as much the result of random factors as the result of skill, preparedness, and hard work.

Thelma Toole

As a writer clutching a just-finished manuscript in your hot hand, you probably need to learn how to become a Happy Loser, as Clotaire Rapille, the noted archetype psychoanalyst and ethnographer, calls successful sales people:

Salespeople sometimes say to me, "I don't like that you call me a loser." But that's not what I mean. Happy losers are people who see rejection as a challenge. If 95 percent of the time you are rejected, you have to ask yourself, "Why did I choose this kind of life?" The happy loser likes it because 5 percent of the time, he wins. And all those times he loses, he sees as getting to the win.

This lesson from The Drunkard's Walk came too late for author John Kennedy Toole, who lost hope and committed suicide at the age of 31 on an isolated road outside Biloxi, Mississippi, by connecting a garden hose from his idling car to his cabin; his mother kept seeking a publisher for his manuscript and eleven years later A Confederacy of Dunces was published – testimony to a mother's unwillingness to give up.

Our Next Novel: Born in a Crowded Basement

Where do the ideas for a new book come from? Are there Book Fairies who float around, like Tooth Fairies, circling around those seeking ideas for a new novel, and swooping down to tap them on the nose with their wands?

If there are, there must be a flock of Book Fairies living in the crowded basement of what must be one of the most wonderful bookstores on the face of the earth.

That bookstore is Macleods, on Pender Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Macleods, Vancouver, BC, Canada

From the outside it looks rather drab, with its entrace facing a city parking lot, and its windows barely keeping the books lined up behind them from bursting out into the street. But step inside and an organized madhouse greets you. Set up in 1982 by owner Don Stewart, there are more than 220,000 books inside – crammed into floor to ceiling shelves, piled helter skelter in the aisles, flowing along the sides of the stairway leading down into the basement.

One day I made my way downstairs, and stood stunned. Every shelf was full. And in the centre of the open spaces between the various groupings of bookshelves were huge piles of books, pyramids rising five or six feet high.

A book lovers dream come true. Thousands and thousands of second hand books, just waiting to be picked up.

At the bottom of the stairs I turned to the right, and ducked down to check what was on the lower shelves. It was the section on the Second World War, and soon I was clutching a slightly battered copy of Munich: The Phony Peace, by Henri Nogueres, published in 1963. On the bright red and white cover were four separate photographs of Hitler, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Mussolini, and the French President Daladier: each man had a pen in hand and was signing what came to be known as The Munich Agreement.

I took it home with me and was lost in it – 423 pages later I put it down with a satisfied sigh.

Diana & Unity Mitford

From knowing vaguely about Chamberlain's trips to cut a deal with Hitler in 1938, I was now more familiar with every meeting and every manufactured crisis of those desparate days. I fell in love with the tension that crackled through the words on the pages of the book, feeling myself drawn into the incredibly strung danger of the times.

The thought was born: could I wrap a thriller around these three meetings between Hitler and Chamberlain?

I dived into some research about the times and the people involved, and when I came across a black and white photograph of two of the Mitford sisters giving the Nazi salute, I was won over.

 I had the setting, and some of the characters. Now what I needed was a plot, a hero or two, and a villain or two.

Thank you, Macleods.

Your Adams & Eves: Of Villains & Villas

James Bond

Do you have a worthy villain? Is your Bad Guy bad enough? How do you measure his 'badness'? It's no good just to people your novel with good heroes; you also need villains of substance.

Blake Snyder puts it well in Save the Cat! – he has a title Make the Bad Guy Badder. He writes that we don't want to see nobodies onscreen, we want to see heroes. And he argues persuasively that there is a win-win correlation between your Hero and your Bad Guy:

And making the bad guy badder automatically makes the hero bigger. It's one of the Immutable Laws of Screenwwriting. Think about James Bond. What makes him James Bond is Goldfinger, Blofeld, and Dr. No... He needs someone bigger to play with to make his own heroism bigger. He needs an antagonist whose powers match his own ... The point is that the hero and the bad guy are a matched set and should be of  equal skill and strength, with the bad guy being just slightly more powerful than the hero because he is willing to go to any lengths to win... So if your hero and your bad guy are not of equal strength, make them so, but give the edge to the bad guy.

We ended up with three themes (global warming, the obelisk quest, and the Tough Bug); we also ended up with two sets of Bad Guys, one for the Tough Bug theme, and one for the other two themes.

One of the Bad Guys we located in a palace on the Grand Canal of Venice. The Bad Guy family we modelled on a real family that had been a powerful force in Venice for many generations:  the Cornaro family. For centuries this wealthy family dominated the city state of Venice, commissioning palaces, theaters and other buildings, and contributing members to the political elite.

We saw many palaces as our gondolier sculled us past them, and one in particular popped up when we needed a place for some climactic skullduggery – a five storey building with a curving exterior staircase.

The 'Gitti' Palace in Venice

This gave us our setting: a dark night during the famous Carnival of Venice, a gondola moving soundlessly through the waters of a canal, and the voices of late-night revellers drifting over the lapping water ...

Three Themes for our Foundation

There is no Planet B

Do you think it easy to lay a foundation for a novel? Think again! Every novel needs a storyline, but it also needs a theme – a basic, bedrock, underlying foundation. 

We struggled for a while because we had two themes, but really needed one foundation for Obelisk Seven. 

Our two themes were the obelisks, which came first when we decided to write our thriller, and global warming, our controversial topic (click here for more on this choice).

But try as we might we could not link these two themes into one unified whole.

So we spent many days doing some brainstorming.

Tardigrade or Water Bear

And then one day we stumbled across an article about designer microbes, and we had our third theme, which linked the first two: an engineered microbe that could create mayhem in the little world we had designed, and enable us to bring the three themes together in the climax.

And, naturally, with three themes, we found that we could not work with only two lead characters – we ended up with one for each theme: Nick for the global warming challenge; Gliffy for the singing obelisk quest; and Kate for the search for the new microbe that was eating carbon in oil and coal deposits.

Three themes, three characters, and one story.

The Goddess in the Darkness

Where do you get your ideas? We are often asked that, as are most writers. And sometimes it's a difficult question to answer. How we get the ideas is easier: we look for them; we put ourselves in places and situations where ideas might suddenly spontaneously appear.

Michael Slade (pen name of Jay Clarke), prolific author of police novels, gave a lecture entitled Where do you get your ideas? for the Surrey International Writers Conference (SiWC) and listed 40 topics covered in his many novels, including voodoo, headhunting, the London sewer system, Hitler's bunker, the history of hanging and plastic surgery.

Michael Slade

Sometimes you experience a place or an event, and later, when you're sitting down to write a scene or plan the plotline of a novel, that experience or scene manifests itself and demands to be heard.

We had one such experience when we visited the Karnak Temple in Egypt.

Our energetic guide took us off to the left side of the temple, through an empty field, until we came to some old buildings. Inside them, he told us that there was a statue of the goddess Sekhmet inside, alone in the darkness, and that we could commune with her, alone or in small groups.

Loraine did so, spending several minutes alone with the goddess in the darkness, and when we came to write Obelisk Seven, we included this scene in the novel – click here for more details in our website.

Sekhmet

The reality kick: A Bride, 28 carloads of Bones & the Pantheon Obelisk

Sometimes reality sneaks up behind you and gives you a kick in the pants when you are writing. You sit waiting for your Muse to gift you a scene, or a character, and nothing happens. Then suddenly a thought swirls in the back of your mind – perhaps a dredged up memory of a vacation or a cup of coffee with someone – and keeps coming back until you just have to deal with it.

And you find that you have the scene or character you were looking for. Thanks, Muse!

Wedding buggy at Pantheon, Rome

A photograph we took of a buggy with a horse in front, waiting patiently while a bride and groom were being married inside the massive Pantheon in Rome, gave us our opening scene for Obelisk Seven. Plus, we felt a little kindred spirit with the bride and groom, because we were married on a beach ... another unusual setting.

This huge temple was built in 27 BC by Agrippa, the son-in-law of Emperor Augustus, whose name is on the facade of the building, and dedicated by him to all the gods (hence the name Pantheon). It was rebuilt in 123 AD by Emperor Hadrian, and much later was converted into a church, because its vault and round shape lent itself to this purpose, by Pope Boniface IV. To consecrate the church, the Pope brought twenty eight carloads of bones of martyrs from the catacombs and placed them beneath the altar.

With a history like that, and an obelisk before it, plus a bride and buggy, we just had to use it to open our book. And so our lead character, Nick, sits in the rain along with the patient  horse, and meets our heroine, Kate.

Audrey Hepburn

Throw in Audrey Hepburn (she starred in Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck in 1953, and ordered champagne at a trattoria close to the one we were sitting at in the Pantheon square during our vacation), and we had the unsual setting we wanted for our first meeting of our heroes.

The Dissection of Silent Lips by Anne Perry at the Surrey International Writers Conference

The doorway is guarded by two SiWC volunteers, and you need to show them your "passport to pitching" to get into the large hall. Inside, agents and publishers are seated at small tables on the left and right sides, waiting for hopeful writers to make their pitches. The writers sit at the front of the hall, in two lines, waiting for their ten minutes.

Anne Perry

At the back of the hall are the Blue Pencillers. These writers and agents are there to give you advice on the structure of whatever you have brought – a few pages of a novel, a handful of poems.

Anne Perry waved me to a seat and held up her hand to stop me passing her the few pages I had selected from an old novel, stuck in a dusty drawer for a little over a decade.

I don't read segments in these sessions, she explains. Talk to me about what your novel is about.

I launch into a discussion of The Silent Lips. Title taken from the famous poem by Emma Lazarus on the plaque of the Statue of Liberty. Before being shipped to New York in 1885, parts of the statue were exhibited in Paris. The words that gave me the title for this old novel of mine are stirring:

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Statue of Liberty head 1885

The story is set in a New York which has had a ring of steel thrown around it to stop the spread of a disease that sprang from one man's experiments to save his friend from sickle cell (using himself as a test tube, and crossing the species line by using chimpanzees). Frantic experiments take place in the ParkLab as scientists – flying in on one-way tickets to help the stricken city – try to find a cure. They overstep boundaries in their desperation,  lead by the military commander of the ParkLap, while B52 bombers trace lazy contrails in the sky above, waiting for the order by the President to solve the problem.

What causes you concern about your story structure, Anne asks.

The flow, I answer.

She leans forward, and talks for several minutes. Your risk is that your novel might sound like a documentary. You might want to personalize it more.

Take your lead character and see if you can make the story more about him/her, and drop any details you do not need.

I sit back, thinking.

 Ten minutes with a highly skilled professional, and an uncanny insight given to me which solves a niggling problem I had – a problem which lead to The Silent Lips being thrust into the back of a drawer and hidden out of sight for so many years.

Time well spent.

No wonder this woman sells so many novels!

I leave, and another hopeful author takes my seat at the small table. Anne Perry leans forward, waving aside the proffered pages.

Speak to me, she says ...

Why obelisks?

Why on earth do we have obelisks in our thriller? We blame Dan Brown for this. When we finally bought a copy of The Da Vinci Code in the Da Vinci airport in Rome, we took turns reading it. As we wrote in our website, Obelisk Seven:

When we finished it, we talked about how Brown wove interesting facts – the where, the who, the what - into his thriller, and suddenly we both had the same thought: why not use some of our wonderful memories of the cities we had just visited in a thriller of our own?

And so Obelisk Seven was conceived. Two and half years after the conception of that idea, after a lot of research and hard work and tons of sheer fun, our novel was finally born.

Then we had further discussions about what kind of a novel we would write, and how we could do what Dan Brown had done:

We liked the way he slipped little bits of information into the novel, and loved thinking back on the places we had seen which he included in it.

Then it struck us: we had noticed something very interesting in London, Paris and especially in Rome. It seemed that everywhere you walked in Rome you came across huge granite blocks of stone erected in ancient Egypt many
centuries ago. Later we learned that the obelisk pope, Sixtus V, had deliberately restored many of the obelisks in Rome in places where they could be beacons to the many pilgrims coming to the city. As in: Go down this street, turn left at such-and-such an obelisk, then right at the next one, until you come to ...

Could we use these ancient obelisks in a thriller?

So we dived into the history of the obelisks, and found out some fascinating things about who made them, who moved them, and where they now were. Of the 33 remaining obelisks (hundreds were carved out of rock in Egypt since the first one some 4,600 years ago), most are still in Rome.

And there might still be more obelisks buried in that city!

We discovered that the Egyptian name for obelisk is tekhen, which means mystery, and that it was a symbol of life and light. Used as a type of triumphal column, to record the glories of a pharaoh, another thing struck us forcibly about the obelisks when we visited them in London, Paris, Rome and in Egypt: the ones taken from their homeland seemed lonely to us.

Egyptian obelisks were never designed to stand on their own, but were harmoniously integrated into the monuments they graced, and often erected in pairs. These solitary obelisks in the heart of the busiest cities of Europe and America had been wrenched out of their rightful environments, and banished to lonely existences.

We read a description of the obelisk in the heart of London, England, which really caught our fancy. The writer called it a 'solitary heathen stranger' in the city of London. A pretty accurate description, we think.

'Solitary'. Can't argue with that; just take a long, hard look at it on the Thames Embankment. It was designed to be twinned in front of an ancient Egyptian temple, yet there it stands, all alone.

'Heathen'. It belongs to the dim twilight of the human race, as one writer put it. It predates most religions, never mind just Christianity.

'Stranger'. You cannot disagree with that description. Look at it carefully. It does not fit into that wet, grey country. It belongs in a desert, where the sun is worshipped for all the seasons it brings and life it gives.

The gap between the London of today and the temple at Heliopolis which it came from is not just a geographic or time gap - it is a gap between civilizations so far apart that we struggle to bridge the differences in our own minds.

No wonder they intrigue so many people. They are just that - mysterious.

Jack Whyte and Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud

Continuing our quest for a publisher for Obelisk Seven, our thriller, Loraine and I attended the Surrey International Writers Conference. It was our first time at this annual conference, which has been held for 18 years.

The motto of the Surrey conference is to "inspire, educate and motivate aspiring and experienced writers alike", so we expected something unusual.

And something unusual we got.

The conference had arranged a superb roster of presenters, and the quality was of a high order. Then on Saturday night, at the close of an interesting evening, a brooding Scot with a deep, deep voice made his way to the podium, while five hundred expectant writers and aspirant writers suddenly hushed themselves, and watched the slight figure expectantly.

Jack Whyte was born in Scotland in 1940, and migrated to Canada in 1967, where for twenty years he earned his keep as a professional singer, an actor, a musician, advertising man and an entertainer, including a one man show on Robbie Burns, which he took on tour throughout Canada.

In 1978 Whyte figured out the mystery of the sword in the river, and from that came a desire to write about King Arthur. This lead to the Knights Templar Trilogy, and more than one million books sold, just in Canada  alone!

Jack inherited his stubborness and determination from his father, who was blinded in the Second World War and told that he was only fit to weave baskets – his father disregarded this advice and wound up as a successful physiotherapist. Click here for Jack's own blog.

As for Jack, he is a disciplined writer, as Fiona Morrow wrote wrote in a 2009 Globe & Mail article:

He works nights – from 8 p.m. until 2 a.m. – a habit he picked up when he held
down an office job and Beverley worked the dinner-shift front-of-house at a local restaurant. He says his family, friends and business acquaintances all know not to phone him after 8 o'clock, or, he adds, rather disconcertingly, “I'll rip their face off.”

His trademark is deep research, and dollops of detail about his characters and the history of the times:

Research, for him, is paramount. “Once I have a thorough understanding in my own mind of the political, regional and international situation at the time, and I've captured the central historical characters and their interaction,” he says, “only then do I tell my story.”

His characters, he says, are everything to him, and for them he draws on his own moral centre. “They have the same family values, the same basic integrity. All that is pretty much me,” he says, before taking a deep draw of his stogie, years of practice having riven sharp creases into the skin of his jaw. “Even the villains,” he grins ...

On Saturday night we waited, along with the other five hundred writers, as Jack made himself comfortable in front of the mike, sipping from the water glass at  his elbow.

A booming voice burst out of the slight figure hunched over the mike, as Jack launched into the Hippopotamus Song.

When he sang these two lines:

The hippopotamus was no ignoramus
And sang her this sweet serenade

the audience, with one voice, joined in the rousing chorus:

Mud, mud, glorious mud
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood
So follow me follow, down to the hollow
And there let me wallow in glorious mud.

And so it went – a verse by Jack, and a joint chorus ringing out. Five hundred writers enjoying this Surrey tradition: no fat lady singing to end their conference evening, but a smallish Scot crooning about a love-smitten hippopotamus on a river bank.

No wonder hippos are reputed to be one of the strongest niche markets for Jack Whyte's novels!

Back to Jack for his views on his place in Canadian  literature: Does the lack of critical recognition bother him?

“Only when I think about it,” he responds with a half-hearted laugh, before stubbing out his cigar. “Yeah, I think it does bother me.” He starts rooting around for another smoke. “Why am I not part of the CanLit scene? I've been wondering that for years. I'm not recognized by the literary community in Canada,” he says. “Although there's not too many people dare say it to my face.”

Be that as it may, Jack Whyte stalks the halls of the Surrey conference like a true demigod of successful authorship, as well he may. If you measure success by a ripping good yarn, millions of books sold, and a following that buys book after book after book, then this man leaves countless CanadaLit heroes in his dust.

And the man can sing!

A Plotting Primer – Creating One

You've decided to write your thriller. Now, out of the whirling mass of nothingness you have to create the lifeline for the book, the skeleton along which you will be packing the flesh of events, of characters, of description.

You need a plot.

No plot, no book.

How do you go about it?

Let's find out from a few different sources.

The Save the Cat! Man
 

First we turn to Blake Snyder, the Save the Cat! man we met earlier on.

Snyder says he has a Turn-rule for plots for screenplays, and its basis is:

The plot doesn't just move ahead, it spins and intensifies as it goes ... And the rule is: It's not enough for the plot to go forward, it must move forward faster, and with more complexity, to the climax ... More must be revealed along every step of the plot about your characters and what all this action means.

That's helpful – we know we will re-read his suggestion once we have worked out the plot. But his suggestion is about the speed of the plot, the plot's complexity. What about the other elements of a plot?

Help from a Snowflake


Perhaps you might wish to turn to the science of fractals for inspiration. Fractals are those wonderful pictures we get when mathematicians reduce their calculations to images. It seems that the closer you look at things, the more you spot the patterns of fractals that go to make them up.

Randy Ingermanson

One fractal is the snowflake one. And that concept of a series of steps making up – one by one by one – a whole inspired Randy Ingermanson to come up with his Snowflake Method of building the lifeline of a novel – how to plot the plot ...

Randy describes himself as a physicist, an author and "probably dangerously disturbed". He has authored six novels and one non-fiction book. He also publishes the world's largest electronic magazine on the craft of writing fiction – the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

The Snowflake Method based on the Koch Snowflake fractal – see wikipedia for a gif which expands one step at a time to create a snowflake fractal.

Niels Fabian Helge von Koch was born in Sweden in 1870 and became a mathematician, giving his name to the Koch snowflake fractal, one of the earliest fractal  curves to be described.

The Snowflake Method's main recommendation is that it is a way to systematically add one layer on top of another, until the combined layers provide you with "deep snow" for a good working plot. Breaking the task into smaller segments is a tried-and-proven way of tackling many complex problems, so by all means look to the snowflakes for inspiration!

How does the Snowflake Method of building a plot work?

Here's a brief summary (you can find the detailed article on Randy's site).

A fractal

Randy believes that designing your novel's structure before you write it leads to a better result. The Snowflake Method works one step at a time, with each succeeding step adding more complexity and detail to the design. As Randy puts it:

I claim that that's how you design a novel -- you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story. Part of this is creative work, and I can't teach you how to do that. Not here, anyway. But part of the work is just managing your creativity -- getting it organized into a well-structured novel.

He breaks the Snowflake  Method into ten steps.

Step 1 is to take an hour to write a one-sentence summary of your novel – click here for my  earlier post on the logline or hook.

Step 2 is to take another hour and expand the sentence "into a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel." He uses the three disasters plus an ending structure for his novels. 

Step 3 requires another hour to write a one-page summary sheet for each character, describing them in detail (that's one hour per character). Details needed are character's storyline (click here for a discussion of the arc of a character), motivation, goal, conflict, epiphany (what they learn), and storyline.

Step 4 needs you to spend several hours expanding each sentence of your summary paragraph into a full paragraph. According to Randy:

All but the last paragraph should end in a disaster. The final paragraph should tell how the book ends.

The result is a one-page skeleton of your story.

Step 5 takes one or two days. You write a one-page description of each major character and half a page for the minors.

In Step 6 you spend a week  expanding the one-page plot synopsis into a four-page synopsis – the product of Step 4 goes from paragraph to full page.

Another week is needed for Step 7, to expand your characters with lots more detail about each one, emphasizing how each one changes by the end of the novel. The week could expand into a month – you will know when you are finished. You are now ready to write a proposal for your novel and to send it out to agents/publishers.

Now you need to convert your four-page synopsis into a spreadsheet in Step 8. You list the scenes – one line per scene. One column shows the point of view of each character. Another column tells what happens. Randy's spreadsheets end up about one hundred lines long, one line per scene of the novel. He updates his spreadsheet as he writes his novel.

Randy no longer does Step 9 – expanding each line of the spreadsheet in his word processor to a small paragraph describing the scene, adding "cool lines of dialogue you can think of" and spelling out the conflict in that scene. No conflict? You have a problem. 

Now you move on to Step 10 – you write the first draft of your novel.

A word of encouragement from  Randy about what happens in Step 10:

You will be astounded at how fast the story flies out of your fingers at this stage. I have seen writers triple their writing speed overnight, while producing better quality first drafts than they usually produce on a third draft... This stage is incredibly fun and exciting... I've lost track of how many people around the world who have emailed me to say that the Snowflake helped them get their novel on track. So it works for a lot of people.

And now for something completely different ...

On a lighter note, waste sixty seconds of your time by anwering the 6 questions of the Conflict Test, found at this site, with a score of 1 for the correct answer and 0 for a wrong answer. If you get 0-4 then the site's recommendation is:

0-4: You are too nice a person. Watch the evening news, go stand in line at the post office, or try to go through the express line at the grocery story with too many items. You must learn how to truly torment your characters properly.

Menwithpens with advice ...
 
Now let's turn to one of the very interesting series of articles for writers prepared by menwithpens. Menwithpens is a web design and copywriting agency haling from Montreal, in Quebec, that in-again out-again province of sleepy Canada.

This is how the article defines a plot:

Menwithpens

Plot is the nitty-gritty that gives your characters something to do. You’d be shocked at how many people leave this step out of their story. They’ll invent a great, well-developed character with a personality anyone could sympathize with, they’ll come up with a kick-ass backstory, and they’ll place the story in a beautifully described, poignant setting. Then nothing happens... But there won’t be any conflict. There won’t be one driving element that propels the story forward. In essence, there won’t be a plot.

There is a difference between action and plot. Things happening to people in your novel is action, not plot.

The plot, according to the menwithpens article, is simply this:

The plot of any story can more or less be summed up thusly: Your protagonist wants something. He or she is unable to achieve it, for whatever reason. He or she achieves what was desired or fails to achieve it at all. That’s it. This is the plot of almost every story.

They add another important element – motivation of your hero:

What do your characters want? Once you’ve established what your characters want, you need to establish why they want it. These things go hand-in-hand... This helps readers know what’s propelling characters’ actions throughout your story. Either characters support your protagonist in their quest for whatever, or they get in the way somehow.

Noah's advice ...

Our next source of inspiration, Daniel Noah, makes a similar point:

At the center of every good movie there is a single driving force around which all other elements gather. It has the rage of a hurricane, the focus of a cougar, the horsepower of a Lamborghini...  It is deceptively simple, so sly and stealthy you don’t even know it’s there. It’s a question... This is the “Major Dramatic Question,” or MDQ for short. Every good story has its unique MDQ. Think of it as the story’s nucleus. It’s a centrifugal force that propels the story along its path of action,  accelerating it steadily and breathlessly toward a climactic conclusion. And once the MDQ is answered… the story is over.

Noah says the MDQ has three primary parts – the protagonist, the goal that keeps the protagonist on a directed path, and conflict – obstacles between the protagonist and his or her goal.

Noah's article is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Gotham's book on screenwriting, Writing Movies. The Gotham Writer's Workshop teaches more than 7,000 students a year, with aspiring writers joining the interactive online classes from all over the world. You might want to check them out.