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Three Storytelling Lessons from John Carter

Today I want to talk about John Carter. Not the Disney movie and how it’s apparently taking a bath at the box office (which, as a Burroughs fan, I find depressing), but the original Barsoom pulp stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The first John Carter story, A Princess of Mars, was published as a serial in 1912, then re-published as a novel in 1917. The follow-up novel, The Gods of Mars, was published in 1918, followed by The Warlord of Mars in 1919.

While the first book is decent enough in its own right, the story takes off with Gods of Mars, and it’s that book I want to discuss. Like A Princess of Mars, Gods was serialized in The All-Story in 1915, released in five parts over a period of months.

There’s plenty about the John Carter stories that’s a little dated now — the Martian environment, the series of helpless princesses in need of rescue (I kid you not, Gods of Mars has three different damsels, all of them scantily clad, all in distress at one point or another). Like many products of the early 20th century, it has a couple uncomfortable race issues, and, like most pulp stories of the period, more than a few story-saving coincidences that an author could never get away with now. But a modern writer can still learn a lot from Burroughs.

The protagonist has strong, clear goals.

At the beginning of Gods of Mars, John Carter is fighting for his life. He’s dropped into a deadly situation and must fight his way through a hostile environment — escaping first from deadly creatures and then from captivity. About halfway through the story, Carter finally gets home — only to find his wife, Dejah Thoris, has gotten herself captured again. (Cue sad trombone.) Carter spends the rest of the book chasing after Dejah Thoris and mowing over everyone who stands in his way. Sure, along the way he meets a son he didn’t know he had, topples a religion, starts a war with three different factions, and sends a would-be goddess to her doom, but that’s all incidental.

Every chapter features a setback.

Carter never gets a break. At the end of every chapter, he’s tossed down a pit, clapped in irons, outnumbered by bad guys, facing down a dozen monsters. No sooner does he rescue some princess or another than she’s snatched away again. Granted, the Barsoom stories are straightforward pulp adventure, and thus focused on non-stop action, but there’s something to be said for the way Burroughs structures his stories. Even when Carter has some downtime, it’s simply a breather before he starts pursuing his goals again.

The stakes get raised.

As Gods of Mars progresses, the protagonist goes from being lost in hostile territory, to uncovering the secrets of a fraudulent religion on a planetary scale, to toppling a goddess and becoming a fugitive from his former allies, the Red Martians. Burroughs keeps raising the stakes, and each minor goal Carter achieves just puts him in a worse position. If you want to examine the principle of “move the protagonist further from the goal until he finally reaches it,” Gods of Mars is a good example of how to do it right.

Some elements of the Barsoom stories may seem a bit dated to modern sensibilities, but some storytelling principles are timeless, and there’s a reason Burroughs’ work is still being retold a century later.

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Outlining for Fun and Word Count

Photo by landschaft on Flickr.

Until recently, I was not big on outlining. I believed that making things up as I went along was vital to the creative process, that it kept things fresh and unpredictable, that it prevented boredom. I believed that outlining somehow sterilized the process and rendered it artistically inert.

Wrong.

Now, I’m not here to tell you that you need to start outlining right this minute to be a professional (or, god forbid, “real”) writer. As always, you do what you want. But I’m going to tell you why outlining works for me, and about the significant positive results I’ve had.

The Why

I started my first serious outline while working on a very un-serious project for a friend. It was a casual piece of fiction that got out of hand (like so many casual projects do). Originally intended as a small-scale piece, the cast of characters swelled to gargantuan proportions, and the plot with it. (This happens to me all the time. I seem incapable of sticking to a small, concentrated cast of characters. But that’s a story for another day.)

To keep track of these characters and the emerging and labyrinthine plot, I started making a rough outline. The rough outline became a spreadsheet, which eventually became several spreadsheets. One handled scene order and timing. Another tracked characters through chapters. A third listed personality traits, goals, and ambitions at a glance. For the record, I recommend starting with the first of these and seeing how that goes.

I hadn’t yet considered outlining my more serious work, which is why I think this knock-off story became such a breakthrough for me. I had no hangups about this piece. It was intended for a tiny and personal audience, and I’d never have to worry about salability. That unstrung a lot of my issues and let me start outlining, rather than fretting over some abstract and ill-defined notion of artistic purity.

The other big “why” came out of that great pantsing Mecca, National Novel Writing Month 2010. That year, I wrote the second book of a series I’d been working on for a while. Midway through, I created a whole bunch of new characters, a new secondary plot, and took the story in a whole new direction.

That was a mistake. I later realized that I’d only gone in that direction because I had no idea where the main story was headed. I’d written thousands of words on some new story that didn’t have those problems, hoping that when I got back around to the main plot, I’d somehow have an answer to its nagging issues.

As you can guess, that didn’t work. I ended up throwing away a lot of work and wasting a lot of time — all of which could have been prevented with an outline.

The How

When outlining, I tend to start simple and work toward complex. Since story for me is always centered on the characters, I start with them. I begin with something like this:

That tells me their most basic arc. I do the same for the other major characters. Then I start defining their relationships with one another. Once I figure out the character’s ambitions, story goals, and motivations, it’s time to start blocking out scenes. My scene spreadsheet looks something like this:

I generally include:

  • The scene number
  • The POV character (color-coded for easy reference)
  • The details of the scene
  • Word count
  • Date written
  • Notes on what purpose the scene serves
  • A field for whether or not the scene’s been written (so I can skip over something and come back to it without Ruining Everything Forever)
  • Optional: day of the week (for watching timing issues)

Sharp-eyed readers will recognize this as a variant on the Snowflake Method scene sheet. I use it because it’s served me well in the past.

The important thing to remember when writing an outline like this is that things will change. All the time. The whole point of the outline is not to create a rigid, inflexible flowchart. It’s more like a roadmap showing where all the turnoffs, construction work, and washed-out bridges are. Looking at the notes in my scenes, I can instantly tell which ones are weak and need revising or cutting.

As you write and develop the story, you’ll find problems. You’ll see things that don’t work. You’ll move scenes around. This is good. It means the outline is working. Don’t get hung up on following the outline no matter what. The outline is not the story. At best, it’s a Frommer’s guide. It’s Cliff notes. So don’t sweat it too much.

The Results

After trying the outline on for size, I made a point of tracking how much faster I wrote with an outline in hand.

When simply improvising my work, I averaged anywhere between 500-1500 words a day before I’d burn out. At most, I’d write two or three scenes.

My record when working with an outline was over 6,000. My actual average was somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000, usually an average of four or five scenes.

A dramatic difference. In terms of numbers, there’s no question that outlining works better for me.

But what about enjoyment and spontanaeity? Actually, that’s measurably better as well. Knowing what purpose the scene is there to serve, and its place in the greater story, leaves me free to play around more with the prose without worrying that I’ll get off-track. It’s like being in a theme park where all the entrances and exits are clearly marked. You can still ride all the rides, but you don’t have to wander around looking for a way out afterward.

So, pretty demonstrably, outlining works for me. Does it work for you? Does it not work for you? Tell me your story.

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Zen in the Art of Bradbury, Or, Buck Rogers Needs Blood to Survive

Whenever someone brings up the subject of Westerns (which is pretty much never), I tell them that my favorite three Westerns are Tombstone, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Unforgiven. I love them not only for their inherent awesomeness, but because collectively, they cover all the Western narrative bases. Where Tombstone is a straightforward, rollicking adventure, Unforgiven offers a bleak, raw deconstruction of our assumptions about the traditional Western hero. I find Josey Wales occupies a nice space in between, rounding out the trinity with a balance of grit, verve, and snappy quotes about rock candy.

I have a similar trio of books on writing. My bookshelf fairly groans with books about writing. I love reading about craft. I love reading about how other writers work; their inspiration, their frustration, their process. Of all of these, three stand out as my personal trinity of essential works: Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, for its dry and unsympathetic mechanical advice; Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, for its mix of practical craft advice and fond sentiment; and Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, for its infectious and totally unselfconscious passion.

Most writers, I suspect, have a handful of quotes or passages that sum up how they feel about their writing — something that inspires or haunts, possibly even mocks from time to time, like that obnoxious voice that wakes you up in the middle of the night after you’ve just killed twelve hours with a Two and a Half Men marathon and asks, hey, how that novel’s coming?

I have a heap of such passages, hoarded away in my consciousness like stacks of old newspapers in a shut-in’s hovel, but Bradbury’s words tend to haunt me like no other. His book opens with what I consider one of the most concise and cutting essays on a writer’s self-doubt ever written:

Sometimes I am stunned at my capacity as a nine-year-old, to understand my entrapment and escape it. How is it that the boy I was in October, 1929, could, because of the criticism of his fourth-grade schoolmates, tear up his Buck Rogers comic strips and a month later judge all of his friends idiots and rush back to collecting?

Where did that judgment and strength come from? What sort of process did I experience to enable me to say: I am as good as dead. Who is killing me? What do I suffer from? What’s the cure?…

Part of the answer, of course, is in the fact that I was so madly in love with Buck Rogers. I could not see my love, my hero, my life, destroyed… It was like having your best all-round greatest-loving-buddy, pal, center-of-life drown or get shotgun killed. Friends, so killed, cannot be saved from funerals. Buck Rogers, I realized, might know a second life, if I gave it to him. So I breathed in his mouth and lo! he sat up and talked and said, what?

Yell. Jump. Play. Outrun those sons of bitches. They’ll never live the way you live. Go do it.

Bradbury is talking about writing, of course, as much as he is Buck Rogers. Few writers make it through life without a generous helping of friends and family who are ready to inform them that they’re wasting their time. That no one reads, that writing doesn’t pay, that writing isn’t an honest trade or even a respectable hobby. If you’re really lucky, they might smugly quote Ghostbusters at you: “Print is dead.” Surely no one can argue with Egon, the fictional mad genius who once tried to drill a hole in his head, which would have worked if no one had stopped him.

Like Bradbury, we must judge these people idiots if we are to survive — or, to be a bit more charitable, acknowledge that they might mean well, but that their well-intentioned advice must be ruthlessly discarded as the insidious toxin it is. People can be smart, brilliant, and loving, and still give you advice that will lead you down a miserable path. To Bradbury, this was literally a matter of life and death, summed up succinctly in a single, unrelenting maxim: “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you… not to write, for many of us, is to die. “

There are many days when I envy Bradbury, not for his talent or his success, but for figuring this out so early in his life. Simply put, my own personal Buck Rogers lay dead for a long time; a withered corpse who would wheeze to brief life a few times a year, only to be felled by the first unkind word or gnawing self-doubt that floated my way. It took decades to gather the mojo necessary to rouse him back to vibrant life and keep him there. Some days he still teeters, like a marionette whose strings are half-cut, and I have to nurture him back to health with some quality time at the keyboard.

And that’s the thing, of course: Buck Rogers can’t make it on his own. Neglected too long, he’ll just wither away again, a harrowed revenant wandering the bleak hills until he drops dead unloved on some blasted Lovecraftian heath. When it comes to our creative selves, love is not enough. We have to keep them fed. Buck Rogers needs blood to survive.

Which brings me to the other Bradbury quote I like to keep close to my heart. It’s a short quote about the necessity of writing, frequently and regularly. Like so ideas in Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury frames it in a breathless imperative:

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour’s writing is tonic. I’m on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.

While I’m familiar with the delirium Bradbury describes here, I’ve become skilled at ignoring the madness that boils up when the writing urge goes unattended. It’s all too easy to let the insanity dwell there, like a buzzing mosquito in the back of my brain — constantly annoying, but too small to really hurt. There’s probably some sort of belabored, hoary metaphor about malaria I could make here, but I think I’ve done enough damage for one day. Fighting that laziness is vital to keeping Buck Rogers plodding along.

I’ll have a lot more to say about Zen in the Art of Writing in the future, I’m sure — his chapter on “How to Keep and Feed a Muse” is partially responsible for the name of this blog, after all — but that’s a story for another time. Suffice it to say, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, I pick up Bradbury’s little white book and let his wild, unrestrained glee infect me like a joyous malady. Hard-nosed advice and stern essays on craft are all well and good, but sometimes you just need to remember why you love your shambling, undead Buck Rogers.