Technology and Story-Telling

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Carol Buchanan

Novel-writing bothers me, even though I’ve written three novels of my Vigilante Quartet

Cover for The Devil in the Bottle

The Devil in the Bottle: Dan Stark faces his most desperate choice — whether or not to hang a man who has not committed murder.

and I’m working on the fourth. My problem with writing novels is that the chain of cause and effect is so linear. A causes B which leads to C.

Linear Writing

As I write along in the main story, I often think of what else is going on, with the antagonist, or the characters in Subplot B. Because they are active; their stories don’t stop just because another character is moving and talking and acting in the main story. But to work in Subplot B I have to interrupt the main story.

Then there’s backstory. The main character feels guilty about something in his past for which he wants to make amends. Without stopping the action, how do I clue the reader in (supposing I should clue her in)?

Maybe a piece of music puts the main character in a certain frame of mind, or foreshadows an event. I could print the words to the song, but that’s not as good as hearing the music. What if it’s not a song, but a snatch of Bach and it’s perfect for the mood but I’ll lose readers if I mention the “Adagio from the Sonata No. 1 in D for Violin and Harpsichord”?

For as long as people have told stories, they have proceeded in the order of cause and effect, tidily and clearly, so readers can “see” what happens. (Writing that sentence, I thought of Og telling hero-stories around the campfire in the cave at night. His audience does not sit quietly. Gog jumps up and mimes the beast attacking or throws spear-shadows on the cave wall. Mog sings.)

With HTML5 and CSS3, the structure of story-telling can change. It doesn’t have to, because we’re free to choose to stay with the linear mode if it bests suits the story we tell.

Oh, the possibilities, though.

The Meaning of All This for Stories

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the language of the World Wide Web (W3). It’s how website builders construct web pages and connect them in (we hope) a logical fashion. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) determines how the content of those web pages looks. Whether pictures have rounded corners, or shadows behind them. With HTML5 I can link one thing to another, open up web pages that do not belong to my own website. That’s old stuff, going back to the beginning of the W3, but what’s new about it is the ability to incorporate audio (music, explosions, etc.) and video into the story anywhere.

Think of the ramifications for story-telling. Suppose Dan Stark, my protagonist in all four of the Vigilante Quartet novels, slips on a frozen pile of road apples (horse manure) in the street. Instead of a long weary sentence that describes his whirling flailing attempt to regain his balance, a few frames of video show a swirling building settling down — on its side if he falls, straight up if he catches his balance. As he falls (or not) the reader is directly inside Dan’s mind, falling with him.

Dan’s grandfather has been the family tyrant all his life. Occasionally, Dan seems to hear the old man’s voice. Inserting an audio clip into the text, the reader can eavesdrop on the internal argument Dan carries on with his absent grandfather. Or perhaps during one of the hanging scenes in The Devil in the Bottle I had been able to insert audio of a crowd of men arguing over whether or not to hang the miscreant, chaotically yelling, screaming at each other. And then a deathly silence followed by weeping.

While writing , I came across the song by Hank Williams, Jr. titled the same. If I’d been able to have the song played in the story, I would have sought Mr. Williams’s permission to use it. (Titles are not subject to copyright, and I had thought of the title before I found the song.)

Or perhaps cast the novels in the form of games and let the audience choose the preferred mode of receiving the stories. The possibilities are, well, unlimited. Almost.

Web-based Stories

Stories enhanced by audio and video cannot be played on the dedicated e-readers like the first generation of Kindles or the early EPUB readers like the first Nooks.

They need tablets like the Kindle Fire, or other computer-based devices that will support them. Most of the technological advances will probably be beyond the reach of most novelists and short story writers because learning the skills and keeping up with technical advances comprise a full time job in themselves. Not only that, but novel-writing is a right-brain endeavor, and writing HTML5 tags and learning CSS3 is left brain. I find it very difficult to switch between the two sides of my brain to do something as simple as building my website.

I won’t soon be writing my own stories for the Web this way.

But oh, how I’d like to.

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Posted in frontier fiction, historical fiction of the West, historical legal thriller, Montana Vigilantes, technology in publishing | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

Exploring the Story Trail

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Carol Buchanan

Looking for the story trail

Looking for the story trail

In Twitter yesterday, March 6, #litchat writers discussed “Pantser or Plotter?” That question refers to whether writers develop an outline of a story before writing it, or write by the seat of their pants, i.e., wing it, dive in without knowing what will happen next. Me, I’m a “plantser.” I make an outline, but as the story goes along I change it as necessary.

The first draft is a journey of exploration and discovery. Stephen King’s famous metaphor for writing a novel is a journey on a dark road with only the headlights of your car to guide you. You can’t see very far ahead, but it’s enough to take you to the end.

For me, the metaphor is more of a trail ride across the prairie. Like the old postcard shown above, I often get off and sight into the distance to locate the trail of the story.

I envision that road as little more than a track through wilderness. It twists and turns, and I get a little lost. Sometimes the horse refuses to ford a stream, or take a right fork, and I can’t kick him ahead. Then an epiphany happens and the horse and I break through to a new and clearer understanding of where the story is going. That’s how I’ve written all my novels and am writing the current one, The Ghost at Beaverhead Rock. For example, the scene I’m working on now has Dan Stark, Martha McDowell, and her two half-grown children. Dotty is a month past her thirteenth birthday, and Timothy is sixteen.

Here’s what I wrote:
Dotty tossed her head. “Hmph.” A gleam in her eye gave Dan something else to think about. His flibbertigibbet stepdaughter, just turned thirteen, who had not before shown him a mind for anything beyond “pretties,” as she called the furbelows of ladies’ apparel — netted purses, ostrich plumes, and cheap beads — knew precisely what a decimal point was and how moving it changed the total. Good Lord, the child had not known how to read until January, when she started at Professor Dimsdale’s school.

Don’t look for those exact words, because another thing about first drafts is that they can be as bad as they need to be. A first draft hacks a trail through the wilderness of the subconscious to bring out the story. Hacking is messy.

What happens in that paragraph is a discovery for Dan and for his author (me). He realizes that Dotty is an intelligent girl, and his new understanding sets up his decision at the end of the novel.

Yes, I know what happens at the end. I think I know, anyway. It may turn out differently. I’ll have to keep writing to find out where the trail leads. :-)

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Posted in Ghost at Beaverhead Rock, historical fiction of the West, Montana Vigilantes | 4 Comments

The Peculiar Worlds of Historical Fiction

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Carol Buchanan
Bannack, MT TY, First Territorial Capital 1864 - 1865. Etching by Barbara Coppock.

Bannack, MT TY, First Territorial Capital 1864 – 1865. Etching by Barbara Coppock.

It may not look like it, but writers of science fiction and historical fiction have a lot in common. We both have to create familiar worlds for readers who may be totally unfamiliar with the era and setting of our stories.

Just ask Jacqueline Lichtenberg, science fiction writer extraordinaire, who has not simply created fictional worlds, but fictional universes. Although I don’t read science fiction, I have read two of her books in the Sime~Gen series, Molt Brother and The Farris Channel.

Searching the past

Searching the past

These two books are exceptionally good. Molt Brother convinced me to suspend my disbelief and sympathize with a female protagonist whose fangs dropped when she was irritated. And The Farris Channel has aspects of the traditional Western with riders who are not exactly human trying to capture a fort, mounted on beasts that are not exactly equine. Her books drew me into their worlds because the worlds in which the stories took place were convincing. Jacqueline is a master of building a fictional world in which even reptilian characters move the reader to sympathize with their problems.

She made the peculiar worlds of Sime~Gen believable.

Historical fiction portrays “peculiar worlds” also. Whether we write about the 1960′s, the 1860′s, or the 1160′s, we have to make the era familiar and comfortable to 21st century readers, just as a sci/fi writer has to make us comfortable with time travel or warp speed or scaly characters with human-like feelings. Like sci/fi writers, we historical fiction writers have the double task of providing the information to orient the reader and immerse him or her in the fictive dream without interrupting it.

My first four novels* take place in Montana Territory during the Civil War. In them, people are forced to make dangerous choices to combat a criminal conspiracy in the absence of all law. I enjoy telling readers, “I nailed the books as tight to the history as I could.”

I didn’t know it when I started, but I’ve had to study three main categories of the time in order to keep that promise to readers:

  • How People Lived
  • What Their Problems Were
  • People’s Attitudes

How People Lived

Oddly enough, discovering how people lived is the least bit of research I do. When I was 10, I lived with my parents in a boxcar set down beside the main line of the Great Northern Railway in northeastern Washington State. We had no electricity, no running water, and no indoor plumbing. Mom cooked on a wood stove, and we pumped water from a well, read by kerosene lamp, and went outdoors to the privy, a three-holer with bees in the summer and chilly butts in the winter. We had a chamber pot, but I was only allowed to use it at night. My parents did not use it at all, because we obviously had no servants.

What Their Problems Were

I write about the Vigilantes of Montana, who hanged 27 men between December 21, 1863 and October 31, 1864. The choices my characters grapple are, I think, some of the most difficult possible. The mining region of Alder Gulch (a real place) was the site of one of the largest Western gold strikes. An estimated $20,000,000 in gold was taken out of Alder Creek between June 1863 and the end of 1866 when the gold played out. Wherever unlimited quantities of gold exist, greed finds fertile ground, and so it was then. Add to that the character of many of the people who came to get the gold, and the climate of war they came from and brought with them to a degree.

Besides, there was no law. Because of an oversight by Congress, when the Territory was formed, no code of law transferred from any other territory to Idaho Territory, or to Montana Territory.

What People Thought About

There were no Civil War battles in Montana Territory, but that didn’t mean the people were oblivious to the War. Veterans and non-veterans came to the Montana gold fields, and they brought their experiences and their opinions with them. It took a lot of delving into the archives and the Civil War histories to begin to understand Civil War politics as the people living then would have understood it. Among the Union advocates not everyone was anti-slavery, and among the Confederate sympathizers not everyone was pro-slavery.

In this or any past era, although we might cringe at some of their attitudes, political correctness has no place.

All of these factors, then, go into the making of historical fiction: How people lived, What their problems were, and what they thought about.

The Vigilante Quartet

The Vigilante Quartet

* The four novels of The Vigilante Quartet. The first three are available on Amazon, Kindle, and as MP3 download from BooksInMotion.com. The Ghost at Beaverhead Rock will be out in 2014.

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Posted in Civil War, God's Thunderbolt, Gold Under Ice, historical fiction of the West, Law & Vigilance, Montana's Vigilantes, The Devil in the Bottle | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

A Pinch of Dust

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Carol Buchanan

A Pinch of Dust Front Cover

A Pinch of Dust front cover

My first ever Christmas story, “A Pinch of Dust,” is nearly ready. This is the story.

It’s Christmas Eve 1864 in Montana Territory. When a young girl, the daughter of a gambler, begs Daniel Stark for “a pinch of dust,” he is torn between his responsibility to his own family and his sympathy for this thin little waif. Just giving her the gold dust will not change her situation, but maybe he can beat her gambler father at his own game — five-card stud poker.

Martha, Dan’s wife, is outraged. For one thing, she knows he doesn’t always win. No one can. She scolds him, “Playing poker on Christmas Eve? For them no-account young’uns? When the Lord comes, you’ll be sitting in the seat of the ungodly.”

Or is Dan on the side of the angels?

It’s available right now as a free audio download on the Books In Motion website, and if I’ve done this cover right for CreateSpace, it’ll be available midweek in both paper and Kindle versions. I’ll be sure to announce it!

Merry Christmas!

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The Montana Festival of the Book (October 4 – 6, 2012)

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Carol Buchanan

Front cover of the Devil in the Bottle

The Devil in the Bottle

This annual celebration of literature typically has something for nearly everyone, and this year I met writers from as far away as Los Angeles and Chinook, MT, a distance greater in culture than in miles. The event had self-publishers like me and great writers like Ivan Doig, the main attraction. James Lee Burke presented a discussion of writing, which I couldn’t attend because I could only be there on Saturday.

Writers represented mostly literary fiction, because that is its emphasis, with a few genre writers mixed in. After a few intense hours, I came away with a sense of how vibrant is the literary world, in the broad sense. Writers came to listen and learn, and there was plenty for everyone, from the avant garde to historical fantasy, and poetry.

I appeared with four men on a panel titled “Publishing: The New Rules.” It was in a ballroom, and the audience must have numbered more than a hundred people. We all talked about our experiences with traditional publishing, and one of the men confided his reasons for self-publishing, which I’ll take up in the next paragraph. Directly afterwards, I read from my latest book, The Devil in the Bottle. A dozen people attended, including 3 family members, so that was in line with my usual reading experience, but I think they had all come to hear one of the other writers, though they applauded enthusiastically when I finished the reading.

Overall, my biggest impression from other writers was: panic. Those who have been building their careers with some of the bigger or most respected publishing houses are seeing their careers disintegrate. I heard stories of mid-career novelists whose latest books are not selling, although the agents are doing their jobs and the rejections praise the novels highly.

One woman said, “I don’t want to self-publish. I don’t want to do all that business stuff. I just want to write.” Her career has spanned about 15 years. But her latest book has not sold, and the agent is running out of places to send it. Don’t think she has written a bad book. Another writer vouched for her and her work: “Amazing.”

I sat next to another woman at the book-signing table who told me how happy she is with her publisher, a small literary publisher who treats her well. She doesn’t make a lot of money, but she said she’s content. She likes where she is. However, she’s not counting on that relationship to last a lifetime. If something happens, she thought, she might have to self-publish. It seems to me she’s hedging her bets. It’s a smart thing to do.

The man on the panel who had come to self-publishing after some years as a published writer had an explanation. When publishing houses were bought up by conglomerates, the literary landscape changed. Many of us haven’t appreciated that publishing is now a profit-making entity. It always was, of course, because out of profits come payments to shareholders and reinvestment into the business, in the form of authors’ advances, editors’ salaries, paying rent and light bills, etc. But similarly with the Borders situation, those who have bought the publishing houses or Borders, do not and did not understand the book business. They treat books as commodities, boxes of notepaper.

Those who come from MBA school don’t realize that literature is part of the entertainment industry, and what we really have to offer a reader is an experience. They don’t realize that they are providing the feeling readers get from our work, that if we do our job right, we touch our readers’ hearts.

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Posted in alcoholism, historical fiction of the West, Law & Vigilance, novel writing, The Devil in the Bottle, traditional publishing | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments