Add a little sex, humor, and fighting to your Novel

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moderntimes
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Re: Add a little sex, humor, and fighting to your Novel

Post by moderntimes »

When I was in my early 20s, I had some wild times. One story, true.... I got involved with sports cars and sports car racing, worked on a team (public relations & advertising for a small racing group), and wrote coverage for a major newspaper.

This one racing shop was an after-hours hangout for random types, myself included. They had a vending machine that was free, vending cans of Coke or Sprite to customers, and on the bottom row for cans, beer. Bringing a 6 pack was essentially the entrance fee.

We'd sit around and talk racing, girls, movies, whatever. Now there was this big hillside behind the shop, and occasionally, we'd go out into the parking lot and shoot our pistols at beer cans on the hill. And some evenings, the local cops on the beat would stop by, and on one occasion, fired at beer cans themselves.

The occasional cop would come into the shop on an evening, carrying an empty Coke can. He'd say "I'm out of Coke" which was a signal. One of us would get up, "vend" a beer from the machine, and take it into the john. The cop would follow, decant the beer into the Coke can, and wave bye.

One evening, two cops were sitting drinking "Coke" while their car was parked in the shop's lot. We found that we were running low on beer, and so our race driver buddy got some money from the folks there (cops drank free) and started out to the lot to drive his Porsche to a nearby liquor store. But the cop car was blocking him, so he simply got into the cop car (keys were in it) and turned on the lights and siren, and zoomed up the street at high speed. Not long after, he came back, skidded into the lot almost sideways, got back out carrying the beer. "Nice ride," he told the cops.

True story. Stories like this are great to include in a novel.
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Post by aparsons »

I envy your life. The only exciting thing to happen to me was a near kidnapping when I was in middle school. I like the idea of scavenging out own life experiences to fuel the characters.
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Post by moderntimes »

Eeek, kidnapping? No fun there.

On the general subject, once in El Paso and once in Houston I "rescued" a woman being beaten and stomped by thugs. I was armed and they were not, I chased them off till the cops came. Scary.

But my -- mmm, "hobby" in firearms has helped me write more accurate incidents in my books, as I know quite well what it's like to shoot a pistol and how they work.

On the other hand, in my new 3rd novel, I wanted a change of pace for my characters, so my private eye's new lady love is a smart, tough trauma surgeon originally from New Zealand, and she enjoys recreational sailing. So I wanted her to have this nifty little sailboat on which romance is sparked.

Knowing zip, zero, nada about sailing, I spent days and days researching recreational boats, went to lots of websites for advice, and put her into a new Beneteau First Twenty boat, one of the most popular sailboats in the world. I studied the boat manuals and reports of this fine boat, and therefore was able to create a fairly accurate scenario.

Sometimes ya gotta do the bookwork.
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Post by aparsons »

That sounds really cool. Did you do any sailing yourself to do hands on research? I did some research on what the ancient Romans ate. I'm a little obsessed with food, and that was interesting. I'm just wondering how much I should be able to make up since I am creating a new world.
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Post by moderntimes »

No, no real sailing myself. I've been deepwater fishing several times, however, and know my way around a smaller vessel.

The stuff in the novel wasn't really that extensive -- it was background for the story and wasn't detailed, but I did want it to be accurate.

Being a "gun nut", I can write about firearms in my private eye novels and ensure that the depictions are accurate. I'm always irritated when someone wants to write a mystery thriller and doesn't get their firearms right. It's a really bad mark on someone who claims to be a writer of crime stories. That's like writing a medical novel and not knowing what blood types people have, or writing a legal story and not knowing what a voir dire means.

Regarding making a fantasy or SF story and dealing with food? I wish I could remember the story, but it was a book I picked up at random one afternoon while I was waiting for my girlfriend at the doctor, and it was a YA-level SF novel about this human chef who finds himself caught in a galactic civilization where he's creating fantastic gourmet banquet dishes for a competition.

I thought that the book was "okay" but I soon became a bit bored with the lengthy cooking descriptions, and thought that the author really created a very narrow audience to please. But hey.

Point being, an author needs to be careful when writing about specific favorite things by putting them into the book. Not everyone's that fascinated with minute details on what caliber pistol is best, what sort of car someone's driving, what characters are eating for dinner. A light touch is best, I think.

-- 16 Mar 2016, 11:59 --

To add a new "discovery", my newest mystery novel was edited and returned to me by my publisher a few days ago, the final galley proofs prior to publication, so I could make my final review.

The editors made a very few small changes, a comma added or deleted here or there, an occasional word change.

But, surprisingly (I was apprehensive prior to receipt of the galley proofs), all the violence and one sex scene were unchanged! The publisher / editors thought that what I'd written was just fine.

Of course, I write for adults, not YAs and my books are simply not meant for kids. And some readers who are perhaps reluctant to read a strong scene of crime violence may not like my novels. That's fine.

But anyway, I made 4-5 other minor changes and sent my approval back to the publisher, so the new novel will be out soon, all the gore still there, ha ha.
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Post by CrescentMoon »

Wow I love this post. This was really helpful. I love the advice about personal experience. I definitely think it is great to actually learn about whatever you are talking about and research it well and thoroughly so the writing flows well and sounds realistic.
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Post by moderntimes »

Research is essential if you're not totally familiar with the subject matter. Otherwise you can put unintentionally humorous stuff in your book.

As someone who's a mystery fan (and author), for example it's essential to get gun things correct. But I still read books where there are plenty of "gun goofs" -- the most common error is putting a safety on a revolver (they don't have 'em). Now that autoloader pistols are more common than revolvers, I see other problems. Lots and lots of gunsmoke, for example, when smokeless powder has been used for a century now. Or safeties on a Glock pistol (Glocks don't have safeties). We see this all the time on TV cop shows, when the cop or bad guy draws a Glock pistol and points it, and we hear a "click" of the non-existent safety being clicked off. Sometimes we see a bad guy (or good guy) pointing a pistol at someone, threatening them, and halfway thru the scene, the gun holder cocks the hammer back, apparently to show that he "really means it" -- but what this actually means is that the gun was essentially inert prior to this -- if a gun requires a hammer to be cocked before the gun can fire (some guns work that way) then before it was cocked it was harmless.

Now the average "non-gun" person might easily make these mistakes, but anyone who tries to write, say, a mystery or modern action thriller, had better get the firearms stuff right.

Likewise any other sidebar background, such as types of auto being driven, how computers work, how doctors or police or attorneys work, and so on.
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Post by aparsons »

I was told that since my novel idea is fantasy based, I can almost sell anything I want into it, but I understand how an expert in the field you are writing about might be put off by any screaming inconsistencies in your book. My husband always counts the rounds in shooting movies. :D
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Post by moderntimes »

Well, the problem I have with "high fantasy" is that often the author doesn't seem to care to make things consistent.

Even if the author is creating a totally fantastic universe, there still must be "rules" in how things work. Even magic must have rules, right?

If you've seen the TV series "Charmed" you see my objections. This is the series about 3 three "witch" sisters in San Francisco. Well, a demonic guy will pop up into existence and wave his hand and shoot out fire, and the sisters will wave their hands and block the fire, then another stronger demon will appear and force the sisters back, then an ally of the sisters will appear and the fight will go back and forth. And nothing gets done.

If the show were to rely on ONE magical thing per episode and then let the sisters deal with it, that would have been more interesting. But they got lazy and resorted to one spell defeating another spell and that spell being defeated, etc etc etc. A round table of continuous and increasing magic stuff, where the writers relied on flashy stuff rather than an actual plot involving humans.

If your fantasy characters are human, they MUST act as humans. If they're for example, demons, then even demons or fairies or whatever must have characteristics of their species. If their behavior isn't human (for example, they may have no sense of right or wrong) then if they're intelligent and not just monsters, they have to be capable of learning right from wrong and this can be a fine element to the plot.

What you cannot do in fantasy is say "anything goes" because there will soon be no logic and the readers will be lost without a coherent logical progression of events. Even if the characters aren't human and therefore don't think like humans, your human readers must be able to understand the logic of these characters.

And guns will kill you even if you're a monster, if you're made of matter and not flame or spirit force or whatever. So will an arrow if it hits just right. And if you have a magic wand that has certain powers, those powers must be defined and not just "whatever".

In other words, even if your fantasy created universe is magical and not very applicable to our own real world, you must still understand that your readers will be real world humans. So even a high fantasy novel must have a logical basis for its existence.

Understand, I'm not scolding. But the best fantasy allows just certain "rules" to be bent but never broken.
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Post by aparsons »

I agree with your idea about magic having rules. I've written pages of how my magic works and I'm really happy with what I've come up with. I'm borrowing a little bit from books I've already read, but I'm hoping that my system is at least new enough to be unique, but familiar enough to be understandable. I play Pathfinder a lot, and there are so many rules about spells and the like, and I think I'll follow the game's example. I think playing the game is helping my character development and storytelling.
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Post by moderntimes »

If the fantasy idea that "anything goes" is used, then there's no logical basis for the stories and they wander all over the place. Good SF and fantasy have solid rules for how the world works, and generally a cigar is just a cigar most times.

Fantasy writers, newbie authors, have to realize that even though their fantasy world has a different existence, the book will still be read my regular humans who live firmly on planet Earth. And so if the story departs from reality too far, the hold is lost and often so is the reader.

Think for example about Stevie King's "Salem's Lot" about the antique shop dealer whose pal is a vampire. Aside from the vampire and a few other things, everything else is real and solid and the scary part comes from how reality is warped but few people in the town believe, and the process of them realizing it's a real supernatural vampire is a difficult one. So we see everyday people thrust into a weird situation, which creates the tension.

King understands the value of setting the story into a regular, ordinary world, and then introducing the vampire. This makes the story more believable to the readers, who are after all, humans in a vampireless world.
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Post by aparsons »

That seems to be Stephen King's specialty, similar to Lovecraft I believe. I thought that was called "low fantasy". I really like "high fantasy", like Tolkien, McCaffrey or Pierce. I read those just as often as the other types of fantasy and I'm hoping to create something similar. Of course we can't mess with physics too much, I agree with you, but part of high fantasy I think is the creation of something new and shiny. I just hope what I make hasn't been done already.
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Post by moderntimes »

The terms low and high fantasy are unfortunate, because they imply that high fantasy is "better" but it's only different.

Low fantasy is where a vampire is savaging a community, or maybe an alien, and TV shows like "Supernatural" are low fantasy. The definition is that there is a normal world surrounding the scary item (vampire, etc) but except for that, the world is how we see it, cars and computers and whatever, being non-supernatural except for the monster being hunted.

High fantasy is where the author creates an entirely different world which may have swords and fireplaces but it's still set within a "universe" that is not ours. LOTR for example, whereas the Potter stories are technically low fantasy, because the wizards and so on exist in our "normal" world for the most part.

One thing I've never quite understood for high fantasy stories like LOTR or others is why the author insists on creating a static world with zero progress or advancement. It's as if the people living in Middle Earth were somehow mentally deficient, and unable to create, for example, anesthetics or modern medicine or maybe more advanced weapons, like firearms. But they're stuck with swords for thousands of years. Any halfway bright person might discover gunpowder or an improved metallurgy to allow internal combustion engines (trains and autos) and so on.

I thought it would be kinda fun, and unique, to have a high fantasy world where the bad guys or good guys are also making technical advances along with the magic, the two juxtaposed.
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Post by aparsons »

I think with LOTR we are only seeing a snapshot. What use do elves have for gunpowder or mass weapons? Traditionally they are happy-go-lucky, flighty and in tune with the natural world. We know that the King of Mirkwood has industry, he trades, he uses the river to transport the barrels out of his kingdom. How do we really know there is no advancement? We see the Hobbit, which is basically backpacking, and out of necessity they can't carry much. Tolkien never went into huge amounts of detail about the First and Second Age, but there could have been advancements for all we know. We know that the Age of Elves is over, so magic is leaving the world. Now it's the Age of Men, where they cannot rely on magic. They probably will advance. I mean, we see trebuchets, and the Grond in the Two Towers. These are all advances for war. I just don't think he really needs to show us every bit of change over the Ages.

I want my story to explore what happens when we ONLY have magic. I won't put this into the book, but I went into some detail about why there are no needles, or thread or sewing machines. The way my people wear clothing, they weave the magic into the fabric to adhere to body heat. That way everything is covered, it fits with my magical theory, but they don't need needles, or thread or machines to create their clothes! Rather, no electrical machines to mass produce their clothing. I could go deeper and deeper, but all that information doesn't help the story, it's simply background in a small piece.

I want to continue the exploration of a world without electricity. There of course will be technology, since technology is defined as: the collection of techniques, skills, methods and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives, such as scientific investigation.

Spinning wheels and looms are technological advancements, but not digitized. I suppose the power will be generated from the rest of the natural world, but the humans would be the conduits of the power, instead of wires, pipes or fans. Does that make sense?
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Post by inspiredbybooks »

Tracey, love your post.
You can stripe the hide off of someone's sense of worth with words a lot easier than you can with a sidekick.
This is so true! I grew up with 4 older brothers and my mom said all I had to do was use my words...and it cut them to the core :wink:
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