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dscooperbooks

~ author D. S. Cooper

dscooperbooks

Tag Archives: Writer’s solitude

Sixty Page Novels

30 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

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eBooks, Fiction Writing, Flight From Katama, Kindle, Novels, Self Publishing, Whom Fortune Favors, Writer's solitude, Writing, Writing projects

I once read that many neophyte authors get sixty pages into their novel before they find themselves lost in the labyrinths of storytelling and get discouraged. Sixty pages may be anecdotal, but it sounds about right to me, and I ought to know, because I’ve spent decades discarding stillborn books. Lord knows how many pages I’ve tossed into the recycle bin, but the bundles usually did seem to average sixty to one hundred pages.

After my accident I had plenty of time to write, so I rolled my wheelchair up to the dining room table and started writing scenes and dialogues for a novel, in no particular order, whenever inspiration struck. When I pulled it all together, the result was 1,760 typewritten pages! That technique got me past the sixty-page barrier, but the result was awful. I could have spent years polishing that manuscript as a no-name unpublished author, but instead I started writing shorter “quick-reads” to see what self-publishing was all about. My first book was only 15,000 words and used characters based on some of the kids I knew when I was living and flying on Cape Cod, decades earlier, to play off the Chappaquiddick Incident. Flight From Katama taught me how to finish stories and publish them on Kindle and Createspace. I’m not getting rich or famous, but I am enjoying the writing immensely.

So would you think that my days of not finishing a story are over? Hardly! Sometimes you just need to decide that a project isn’t working and move on to something else. The beauty of writing in the electronic age is that you can easily use some of those gems later, in another setting.

The key point, for me, is to keep writing something, every day.

When I was a teenager I’d get so enthused about books that I would write to the author. Every one of them wrote back, but only one offered to meet me. Dick Bach was a Flying Magazine editor and author of Stranger To The Ground, an aviation classic and a book that really moved me when I was sixteen years old. Dick lived in Iowa but he just happed to be in New York working on a new book about JFK Airport when we met for lunch. It was going to be an in-depth study of a major metropolitan airport, although he lamented that the Arthur Hailey novel Airport had just been made into a blockbuster movie, so he would probably put his project aside and work on something else. Then we spent a few hours talking not about airplanes and flying, but about metaphysical matters; self-levitation, suspended animation, walking through walls, and so forth. As far as I know, Dick never wrote the book about an airport.

Of course, Dick Bach was Richard Bach, and his next book was Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which shocked the publishing world and launched millions of people on voyages of self-discovery.

So we should all have the courage to put our pet projects on the shelf and launch onto something new.  We can’t go wrong if we just keep writing, writing, and writing.

 

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The 7-36-21 Challenge

19 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by Doug in D. S. Cooper Books, This Writer's Life

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eBooks, Fiction Writing, Self Publishing, Writer's solitude, writer's voice, Writing

It’s all been done before – let’s get that straight from the start. Google estimates that 129,864,880 books have been published in the modern era, with 62,000 new novels (by some estimates) appearing each year, worldwide. So for those of us who dare to write novels, screenplays, epic poems and comic books, coming up with something fresh and new isn’t easy.

Of course, readers like to know what they are getting when they open a book, so we mostly classify our writing into genres for marketing purposes, such as mystery, thrillers, romance and so forth. But the real driving force behind writing is our theme. What are we saying about courage, discovery, death, escape, love, loss, good versus evil, coming of age, or any other aspect of the human condition? How do we craft a plot and dramatic situations to express our theme?

While there may be a plethora of themes, English writer Christopher Booker has proposed that all fiction can be boiled down to seven basic plots. In his aptly named book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2004) Booker offers these categories of plots (with my examples):

(1) OVERCOMING THE MONSTER: Beowulf to Star Wars, (2) RAGS TO RICHES: The Prince and the Pauper to Cinderella, (3) THE QUEST: The Iliad to Lord of the Rings, (4) VOYAGE AND RETURN: The Odyssey to The Wizard of Oz, (5) COMEDY: A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Bridget Jones Diary, (6) TRAGEDY: Macbeth to Breaking Bad, and (7) REBIRTH: Beauty and the Beast to How The Grinch Stole Christmas.

That may be, you say, but surely there are an infinite number of situations for our characters, are there not? Isn’t this dilemma I’ve imagined for my protagonist unique?

Actually, no. In The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, Georges Polti (b. 1867- d. 1946) established an enduring list of dramatic situations, used by writers and playwrights to this day. Some examples are Ambition, Madness, The Enigma, Deliverance, Murderous Adultery, Conflict With a God, and Crimes of Love. The list is available in several places online, so if you keep it handy you will quickly recognize each situation in the writing of your favorite authors and in your own work. That way when you are writing a scene or a dialogue, it may be new to your characters, but deep down, you will know that a million other authors have written about the identical dramatic situation.

By the way, it was Crimes of Love (a Lover and a Beloved initiate a romantic relationship which breaks a taboo) that got me thinking about this, because my next book opens with a flashback of two teenage cousins getting randy in a the courtyard between their family homes. It wasn’t until I went back to review the text that I realized I just wrote  about a Crime of Love! How cool is that?

Now, I don’t pretend to be a literary talent, by any means. I self-publish simple eBooks and print-on-demand paperbacks, with a modest but faithful readership. What little I know about writing has come from a lifetime of thoughtful and voracious reading. So when I sit down at my station in the morning I know that it has all been done before. All I can do is try to write truthfully and clearly in my own voice, which is as unique in the universe as your own. I hope you do the same. It helps us both to know where the guardrails are; namely seven basic plots, thirty-six dramatic situations, and twenty-one letters in the alphabet to work with, every day.

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