Choosing a Character who Sees Deeply

I really want to reveal the nature of my secret novel, before I make it so mysterious that it becomes a let down when I finally do reveal it.

That said, I’m not ready to talk details yet. As Scott Bailey mentioned in the comments on his blog post about outlining, it’s not so much because I’m trying to keep it secret as that I don’t feel comfortable jinxing it before I have a draft. So, for now, it’s still the secret novel.

That said, I’ll still discuss a problem in general terms, if I may. That’s choosing a character who can see deeply.

I have several characters already chosen for me, as it were, by the nature of the novel. I know who my four main pov characters must be, at least in broad strokes. I still have to make sure, however, that the personality of these characters is not only sympathetic enough to justify being a protagonist, but profound enough to have insights into their own situations.

This is tricky.

I don’t want the characters to be a mere mouthpiece for me the author. On the other hand, there are certain philosophical observations I would like my characters to be in a position to explore. I have to make certain I don’t make them all dingbats. At the same time, their pov is going to be necessarily limited by where they are and what they are allowed to see, so I mustn’t give in to the temptation to make them all knowing, either.

Unless I bypass my characters and write in omniscient.

I didn’t realize how tempting that would be.

Or… here is a strange idea. I could introduce an omniscient narrator who is actually revealed to be a character at the end of the book. This voice over could philosophize along the way.

Hm. Probably I should just avoid the temptation to philosophize altogether.

Is it important to you to have a character who sees deeply, who is intelligent and observant, or do you prefer to work with “naive” characters, who, while themselves innocent of what is really going on around them, allow the reader to see past them, into the real situatoin?

Running Out Of Future

Uh oh, is science fiction running out of future?

1984?
1999?
2001?
2010…

Are all the “cool dates” taken?!

RWA vs Epublishers

An interesting confrontation between the RWA and the world of epublishing, defended here by agent and author Deidre Knight.

RWA’s current stance on e-books is that a publisher must offer at least a $1,000 advance in order to qualify for legitimacy. Never mind that many digital authors far exceed that amount in royalties, or sell more than 5,000 copies of print editions of their e-published titles. The problem with RWA’s simplistic criteria is that it ignores one crucial fact. Our industry is changing radically, with traditional publishers seeking innovative models for overhauling their distribution and content.
…
Meanwhile, let’s talk about RWA’s position that e-published authors who make more than $1,000 in royalties are a rare exception. As an agent, I have seen a fair number of statements for clients writing for Ellora’s Cave and Samhain. The majority of these writers have passed that $1,000 benchmark within the first few months. I’m sure some of the smaller e-publishers sell fewer copies of titles, but lumping all e-publishers together and stating that most of their authors don’t earn $1,000 a title is misleading. It’s like comparing royalties earned at St. Martin’s Press to those from a tiny print publisher of romances. All print publishers are not created equally any more than all digital publishers are.

If RWA truly wants to protect authors, then it’s time to join the 21st century where the rules of the digital market are changing daily. As I write this, a new initiative between Scribd.com and Simon and Schuster was just announced, a partnership to bring digital content to members of this emerging community. Considering the priority that print publishers are obviously placing on developing digital content, for RWA to disavow e-publishers is a disservice to all their members.
…Consider, too, that e-publishing can be a tremendous beginning point for many authors, leading to even bigger careers with mainstream publishers. Within my own agency, I signed on e-authors such as Rhyannon Byrd, Dakota Cassidy, and Joey Hill, and in each instance, their track record in e-book format caught New York’s attention, as did the reviews they’d earned.

Not only did I sell digitally published authors to houses such as Random House, Penguin Putnam and Harlequin, but their e-readership followed them to print, launching them with a huge built in advantage in such a tough market. In many cases, authors who begin with e-publishers choose to continue writing for those companies, even as they forge ahead with traditional New York houses. Surely, RWA can see the value in these examples, and how e-publishing could potentially benefit their members.

As a third generation entrepreneur, I’ve learned firsthand that you either change with the times by adapting to the market or you are left behind. When the automobile first came along, buggy whip manufacturers saw themselves as being in the whip business, when they should have understood that they were in the transportation business. We are now in the literary content business, and the physically published book is only one of several delivery formats, yet another “device” to hold, much like the Sony Reader, the Kindle, or your iPhone. Like the buggy whip manufacturers, RWA must modify their organizational model or be left behind…their membership along with them.

Writing and Empathy

I think the basic substance of literature is the exercise of empathy. Some stories stretch our brains more deeply, but all offer the possibility of imagining other lives, other minds, and other points of view.

While I believe we humans create art for art’s sake (unlike ants) that doesn’t mean art doesn’t also enhance our existence in other ways.

We put ourselves into someone else’s shoes for the duration of the story. Research has shown “that merely imagining positive contact with members of an out-group can help improve attitudes towards that group.”

In an initial experiment, Rhiannon Turner and Richard Crisp had half of 25 students aged between 18 and 23 spend two minutes imagining a positive encounter with an elderly person, whilst the remaining students imagined an outdoor scene. These were the specific instructions for the imagined contact group: “imagine yourself meeting an elderly stranger for the first time. Imagine that during the encounter, you find out some interesting and unexpected things about the person.”

Afterwards, the students who’d imagined meeting an elderly person subsequently showed more positive attitudes towards elderly people than did the control group.

Of course, a lot of writing which attempts to do this too clumsily comes across as mere propaganda. And, speaking of propaganda, we know literature and other media can be used to whip up hate and bigotry just as easily as empathy.

Even if stories promote a good cause, the power of stories to model human behavior has always been a two edged sword, both coveted and feared by those who want to push a social agenda. For instance, another study found that watching tv can convince you to donate a kidney.

Participants were asked to watch a selection of episodes from popular TV dramas with storylines that included both positive and negative depictions of organ donation, and then complete surveys that assessed a range of factors related to how strongly the viewer had been influenced by the storylines (and no small potatoes here; more than 5000 people completed the House survey).

The results: viewers who were not organ donors before watching the dramas were more likely to decide to become one if organ donation was portrayed positively and if characters in the show explicitly encouraged it. Viewers who reported emotional involvement with the narrative were significantly more likely to become organ donors. And, finally, viewers clearly acquired knowledge from the content of each drama – whether it was accurate or not.

And that’s the “depending on how you look at it” part of this. The study is really telling us a couple of different things: emotional involvement with narrative affects the way people think, and supplies knowledge that may very well not be true. Most people would probably agree that organ donation is a social good, and if TV dramas encourage it then all the better — but, the troubling part is that the same dynamic driving the good can also serve up the bad with equal effectiveness. Pseudoscience, vaccine alarmism, and quackery of every flavor proliferates just this way.

This also opens a conundrum for writers. Is it important for your story to convey the “right” message, to model “good” behavior — to combat racist stereotypes, for instance, or teach people to think in a new way? Or is it more important to show the “truth”, even if it’s ugly or sets a “bad” example? Or do you want to deliberately shock and upset any conventional sense of right or wrong? Even if you do have a message, does trying to push it actually make the reader resist it? Even if you don’t have a message, can you really tell any story without conveying a message, whether you want to or not?

Blending Facts Into Historical Fiction

Back at work on my Secret Novel, I’m working in a new genre — literary (in my case, perhaps merely psuedo-literary) and historical.

By historical, however, I actually mean “1978-1998” so I’m also facing a new quadary. When I am writing a story loosely based on real people, what restrictions apply? My account is fiction and names and particulars are different, but is there a point at which historical research veers off into obnoxious intrustion into privacy, or even purgery? Is it gauche to base a fictional account on someone’s real biography?

How overgrown with fictional elements should a portait be before it is wholly itself? And yet, if it is too changed, does it not betray the realism needed to tell the story?

Randall-Sundrum braneworld

Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions


Scientists at Duke and Rutgers universities have developed a mathematical framework they say will enable astronomers to test a new five-dimensional theory of gravity that competes with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

Charles R. Keeton of Rutgers and Arlie O. Petters of Duke base their work on a recent theory called the type II Randall-Sundrum braneworld gravity model. The theory holds that the visible universe is a membrane (hence “braneworld”) embedded within a larger universe, much like a strand of filmy seaweed floating in the ocean. The “braneworld universe” has five dimensions — four spatial dimensions plus time — compared with the four dimensions — three spatial, plus time — laid out in the General Theory of Relativity.

The framework Keeton and Petters developed predicts certain cosmological effects that, if observed, should help scientists validate the braneworld theory. The observations, they said, should be possible with satellites scheduled to launch in the next few years.

If the braneworld theory proves to be true, “this would upset the applecart,” Petters said. “It would confirm that there is a fourth dimension to space, which would create a philosophical shift in our understanding of the natural world.”

The scientists’ findings appeared May 24, 2006, in the online edition of the journal Physical Review D. Keeton is an astronomy and physics professor at Rutgers, and Petters is a mathematics and physics professor at Duke. Their research is funded by the National Science Foundation.

The Randall-Sundrum braneworld model — named for its originators, physicists Lisa Randall of Harvard University and Raman Sundrum of Johns Hopkins University — provides a mathematical description of how gravity shapes the universe that differs from the description offered by the General Theory of Relativity.

Keeton and Petters focused on one particular gravitational consequence of the braneworld theory that distinguishes it from Einstein’s theory.

The braneworld theory predicts that relatively small “black holes” created in the early universe have survived to the present. The black holes, with mass similar to a tiny asteroid, would be part of the “dark matter” in the universe. As the name suggests, dark matter does not emit or reflect light, but does exert a gravitational force.

The General Theory of Relativity, on the other hand, predicts that such primordial black holes no longer exist, as they would have evaporated by now.

“When we estimated how far braneworld black holes might be from Earth, we were surprised to find that the nearest ones would lie well inside Pluto’s orbit,” Keeton said.

Petters added, “If braneworld black holes form even 1 percent of the dark matter in our part of the galaxy — a cautious assumption — there should be several thousand braneworld black holes in our solar system.”


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060525120118.htm