Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, Volume 1

James D. Macdonald said:

Q. What do angry mice send each other on Christmas?

A. Cross mouse cards.

Click to expand...

My soul now hurts.

caw

James D. Macdonald said:

Q. What do angry mice send each other on Christmas?

A. Cross mouse cards.

Click to expand...

Gah! This from a man who I've followed through 7500 posts because he's a professional.

Merry Christmas anyway, Uncle Jim!!!

James D. Macdonald said:

Q. What do angry mice send each other on Christmas?

A. Cross mouse cards.

Click to expand...

Is it sad that I had to read that three times to get it?

Alas. Merry Chrismass, and Happy Chanaka to all.

Merry Cross Mouse, all!

Hey, everyone! Merry, Joyous, and Happy, as appropriate.

Now it's time for Christmas Challenge 2008, Part Two.

By now everyone has a complete plot outline and character list for a best-selling and/or award-winning novel.

Now: Retell the story with one of the minor characters as main character. It's the same plot. The same events happen, but your main character only knows about the events that he/she witnesses. At the same time, that character will have events happen to/around him/her that weren't in the original book at all. (Some characters will vanish; simultaneously you'll need to create other new ones.)

Think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or The Wind Done Gone.

At the same time: Change all the names, and change the setting. (E.g. if the novel you chose was set in a hospital in the American south in 1967, set the re-imagining in a Spanish cloister in the 17th century. Extra points for changing genre (e.g. murder mystery to romance).)

You don't need to actually write the novel, but you should write a strong outline. Your deadline is January 6th.

Ready, set, go!

What, did everyone get stunned into silence?

James D. Macdonald said:

What, did everyone get stunned into silence?

Click to expand...

Hi Uncle Jim,

I've just been busy tweaking my story, attempting to create the picture of a spoiled rich girl without making her sound whiny and immature. I failed the first, I don't know. . . three tries, I'm going to see if this works. Then I have two other stories in limbo. Happy Holidays!

I could do that for my book Hatchings - it might be fun to try to tell the story from the POV of a minor character who turns traitor to the hero and gets gunned down by assassins trying to kill the hero in the climax. It might also be interesting to tell the story from the POV of the hero's super-agent sidekick/mentor or the mentor's rival agent or even the POV of the guys who kicked the whole disaster the hero finds unfolding around him while trying to do something that would benefit the whole world.

Decisions, decisions...

How does this exercise differ from fanfiction?

(Which, having been said, I hereby confess to be working on not one, but two novels narrated from the standpoints of secondary characters in famous classic novels; one is about half done, the other about 15,000 words along. Both currently suck.)

caw

I'm still here...

James D. Macdonald said:

What, did everyone get stunned into silence?

Click to expand...

I have given this some thought, trying to work out the point of the exercise. I'm not sure I understand where you're going with this. It seems an awfully convoluted way of coming up with an outline for a book. I think it might be more useful to move one step back from the original and extract the essence (action) of each chapter. This could then be used as a structure for a new book with totally new characters and a new plot, maybe?

I watched Die Hard 4 on TV yesterday or the day before. That film would convert into a total page-turner of a book (thriller) and its structure could be a useful framework for a thriller.

blacbird said:

How does this exercise differ from fanfiction?

Click to expand...

What is fanfiction? I have written two short stories in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Is this fanfiction? or is it something else?

PS I am presuming that I can never get those two stories published for reasons of copyright (even if I change the names of the charaters). Is that correct, Jim?

euclid said:

What is fanfiction? I have written two short stories in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Is this fanfiction? or is it something else?

PS I am presuming that I can never get those two stories published for reasons of copyright (even if I change the names of the charaters). Is that correct, Jim?

Click to expand...

Holmes is in the public domain. Fred Saberhagen did a whole series of Dracula (also public domain) books, and in a couple of them, The Holmes-Dracula File is the one I remember, has Holmes vs. Dracula.

Brian

euclid said:

I think it might be more useful to move one step back from the original and extract the essence (action) of each chapter.

Click to expand...

We already did that in the first part of this exercise (see 6 December).

This could then be used as a structure for a new book with totally new characters and a new plot, maybe?

Click to expand...

That's what we're doing right now. As to new plot ... I don't know. Are there any new plots?

blacbird said:

How does this exercise differ from fanfiction?

Click to expand...

We don't have the same setting, and we don't have the same character names.

I think you'll find that giving the characters new names, putting them in a different time and place, and looking at the adventures of a minor character will give you something that's uniquely yours.

bpmann said:

Holmes is in the public domain.

Click to expand...

There's a minefield here. If I recall correctly only some of the Sherlock Holmes stories are PD, so you can't refer to characters, items, or events from the later stories. Also, huge amounts of material that everyone thinks of as Sherlock Holmes don't come from the stories at all, but from movies which are still under copyright. (An example of that is the Calabash pipe. The Holmes of the stories smoked a short black brier pipe.)

For an example of a Sherlock Holmes story set in a different time and place with different character names, see Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Holmes and Watson

James D. Macdonald said:

There's a minefield here. If I recall correctly only some of the Sherlock Holmes stories are PD, so you can't refer to characters, items, or events from the later stories. Also, huge amounts of material that everyone thinks of as Sherlock Holmes don't come from the stories at all, but from movies which are still under copyright. (An example of that is the Calabash pipe. The Holmes of the stories smoked a short black brier pipe.)

For an example of a Sherlock Holmes story set in a different time and place with different character names, see Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Click to expand...

In my stories, I have named the characters Soames and Wilson. Their housekeeper and the police inspector have new names, too. Is that enough to get around any copyright difficulties?

It would be obvious to anyone reading the material who the main characters are. For example, Soames says things like: "Elementary, my dear Wilson." My sister read one of the stories and said: "It's much too like Sherlock Holmes."

Name of the Rose

James D. Macdonald said:

For an example of a Sherlock Holmes story set in a different time and place with different character names, see Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Click to expand...

You must be kidding! I would say the only similarity is that you have a detective with a sidekick and a deductive process. Why do you say it is a SH story?

I've just seen part one of the exercise now, so I'm way behind.

I'm using a book that keeps getting recommended to me and that I end up getting annoyed with every time I try to read it. (It's rather in love with its own voice, and I get frustrated by the preciousness of of its poetry)

Interestingly, even though I'm only half way through the first chapter, I'm amazed at how this writer makes every character (even the minor ones) so fleshed out and rounded. Certainly, if nothing else, I'll have learned something there.

I'm still reading (this thread, that is) but I'm working 52 hours this week plus preaching, so regrettably I won't be able to complete the assignment.

As far as the assignment goes, my own understanding of fanfic is something written using someone else's characters and world. If you do the exercise and don't change the setting or character names, I'd class it as fanfic. If you do change the setting and character names, but extract the plot and basic characteristics of the characters, it's a derivative work.

By that standard, if you write a story about Sherlock and Dr. Watson, regardless of whether it's public domain or not, it's still fanfic in my opinion, because you're using someone else's characters and someone else's world.

I'm not one of those who believes that writing fanfic is necessarily a bad thing. It's the way a lot of beginning writers hone their skills before moving on to something truly original, just as fantasy writers of my vintage often started off with Dungeons and Dragons stories.

It may not be publishable, but then, most first novels (and second and third) aren't.

euclid said:

I would say the only similarity is that you have a detective with a sidekick and a deductive process. Why do you say it is a SH story?

Click to expand...

A detective named William of Baskerville, as in Hound of the Baskervilles. The story is told by Baskerville's companion, Adso (i.e. (W)atso).

euclid said:

In my stories, I have named the characters Soames and Wilson.

Click to expand...

As in House and Wilson (from the TV series House)? (House=Holmes, Wilson=Watson in that series. Instead of being detectives in Victorian London, they're doctors in a modern American hospital.)

Read these two sentences together:

"It would be obvious to anyone reading the material who the main characters are. "

"Is that enough to get around any copyright difficulties?"

I think you have your answer.

For another example of Holmes under a different name, see Solar Pons.

My sister read one of the stories and said: "It's much too like Sherlock Holmes."

Click to expand...

I think your sister has a point. What are you bringing to the table that Sir Arthur didn't already serve? Try calling them Younger and Reynolds, and putting them in Berkley, California, in 1967. See what that does for your story.

Yeshanu said:

If you do change the setting and character names, but extract the plot and basic characteristics of the characters, it's a derivative work.

Click to expand...

To one degree or another any novel is a derivative of other novels. All art is in conversation with other art.

euclid said:

What is fanfiction? I have written two short stories in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Is this fanfiction? or is it something else?

Click to expand...

That's not exactly the same as Fanfiction.

Fanfiction is simply a fictional work written inside an established work using its established characters and settings by someone who isn't the original author. These are things that can't be sold for profit because they're under copyright, but people do it for fun, a tool, a hobby or an obsession.

Don't like the way a TV show ended? Easy... rewrite it.

Have a favorite minor character in a movie that you would have loved to see fleshed out? Do it.

Read a book that you think would have been served better by a different POV? Cool... give it a shot.

Check out fanfiction.net if you want to read some - they have divisions for Movies, TV, Books, etc.

Personally, I've found it's a great way to work on writing techniques. If you need help establishing a "voice", pick a character that you're familiar with from TV or a movie and try writing about 5000 words with them, then post it for feedback. The readers will tell you if you're Out of Character or not, and once you've got a handle on keeping a consistant voice, you can apply that to your own writing.

The same holds true for plot development. I had a few plots that I wanted to road test, so I fit them to an existing "fanverse", subed the verse's charries / locations for mine and checked to see if there were any noticable holes. I took the feedback I was given, scrubbed off the attributes from the copyrighted work and put them back into my own WIP. (Of course about a dozen of the "ficcers" jacked one of my original characters but at least that means they liked him.)

I'll warn you though, most "fanfiction" is drivel ... on a good day. It's often written as Mary Sue wish fulfillment fantasies by people who want to engage in relationships with a fictional character (or actor, singer, whatever) they fantasize about.

Cyia said:

I'll warn you though, most "fanfiction" is drivel ... on a good day.

Click to expand...

That's one of the reasons I recommend reading fifty stories in a row from Fanfiction.net to simulate the slush-reading experience that agents and editors go through.

James D. Macdonald said:

I think your sister has a point. What are you bringing to the table that Sir Arthur didn't already serve? Try calling them Younger and Reynolds, and putting them in Berkley, California, in 1967. See what that does for your story.

Click to expand...

Too predictable. We'd know what Younger/Holmes was smoking in his pipe.