The ongoing saga of David D. Levine's writing and other adventures.
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I'm a geek, fan, and writer who lives in Portland, Oregon.
For more information about me, please see my
web page. If you have questions, comments, or just want to chat, you can send me e-mail. Or you can post a comment on my LiveJournal. |
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Just got back from a writers' get-together at Kris & Dean's. Talked with folks about how to handle multiple viewpoints and subplots. Mike Moscoe recommended The Peshawar Lancers by S. M. Stirling as a good example of multiple viewpoints, and The Honourable Company by John Keay for information on the English East India Company. Kris Rusch recommended The Bone Collector by Jeffry Deaver, and gave me a copy of her own first novel The White Mists of Power. She also said that the alternating timelines outline I've been considering, which many folks have said will be too difficult for the readers to keep straight, is worth tackling if I think it's the best way to tell my story. "You're a good writer," she said, "don't listen to anyone who tells you you can't do something." Also talked with Nancy Boutin, who is a doctor and recommended a friend of hers who is an infectious disease specialist as someone I might talk to about how epidemics work.
Posted 01/26/2003 21:36 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
I just finished reading Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass and in it he points out that the most memorable novels emerge from the author's strong convictions. "I feel it is beneficial to work in advance on the moral forces moving underneath your story, but I do feel that such work generally involves strengthening what the people in the story believe rather than what you, the author, may feel. ... To avoid a preachy tone, it may be helpful... not to grapple with theme on a global scale, but rather first to examine individual scenes for ways in which they each can be made sharper and more impassioned."
Maas recommends an exercise: write down a character's internal motivations for doing something in a particular scene, in order of priority. You will probably find that the most immediate motives (physical/emotional requirements) are at the top of that list, with higher motives (search for truth, thirst for justice, whatever) further down. Now try rewriting the scene with the priorities reversed: higher motives at the top, immediate motives at the bottom. "Motivating your characters according to higher values... adds passion to action." But don't overplay it. "Understatement and restraint are the watchwords."
How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N. Frey also suggests that you should have a theme, or mission statement, for your book. Several other writers about writing have said the same thing. Right now I'm thinking about how to incorporate my feelings about the impending Gulf War II into my novel-in- progress, without having it be "about" the war. I have in mind a theme along the lines of "don't let yourself be railroaded by the mob" or "control of information is control of reality". This is not a Message to be stuck into the book... it is a tool to help focus my attention as I outline and draft.Posted 01/22/2003 11:48 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
I've been thinking that this novel can comment on current trends in society, specifically the loss of personal privacy. In the world of the novel (If This Goes On) privacy as we know it will have completely evaporated. The young people will have grown up in this environment and will have a culture that seems very strange to their parents and grandparents (us; in 2051 I'll be 90). Hacker Culture has a lot to say about the relationship between the Hacker Ethic (Information Wants To Be Free) and the secrecy technologies that the hackers of the 60s and 70s made possible and the hackers of the 80s and 90s made necessary.
Speech recognition technology makes universal phone tapping possible, so attractive in fact that it's nearly inevitable. The same technology makes widespread real-world eavesdropping a possibility; millions of tiny radio microphones, monitored by computer, could be scattered everywhere. In this world, the anti-Tauran terrorists/freedom fighters may adopt sign language to avoid being eavesdropped (is this plausible? yes, sign has not been the subject of nearly 100 years of human research as speech recognition has, and the Taurans don't have or won't share gesture-recognition technology). The irony is delicious.
I'd also like to talk about the media, how they obscure reality and get things wrong. Not because of any kind of conspiracy, but through simple ignorance and arrogance. Example: there was a big media kafuffle about SATAN (Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks), even though a less powerful version of SATAN had been available for years and it probed only well-known and easily-fixed security holes. But it was the right moment for a story about a horrid automated hacking tool so it took off. Another example is the misinterpretation of Al Gore's "claim to have invented the Internet." Once a bad idea takes hold it's hard to stop.
People are sheep. Feh.
Posted 01/10/2003 11:47 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
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