WorldBuilding - Trunk-ated

This is an exercise in WORLDBUILDING.

This exercise takes off from my blog post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/paradigm-shift.html

followed by my blog post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/paranormal-romance.html

The theory is to select the story you want to tell, then wrap the world around it. Create the background and backstory to support what you want your story to say.

What your story says is your theme.

Take the following opening scene, use Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet (which works for novels as well as for films) and create the rest of this plot in single line, half-sentence, or even single word entries in the beat sheet.

http://www.blakesnyder.com/tools/ is where to download the beat sheet. It's currently item #2 in the list there. There is an example of a famous movie fitted into this beat sheet lower down that page.

Write a couple of paragraphs sketching the Worldbuilding around the plot.

For example: if your beat sheet calls for Trish, the lead female, to die and return as a ghost to haunt the guy who killed her, your worldbuilding notes would say that ghosts are real and can communicate with the living, maybe give rules for how a ghost could affect the solid world.

Post the result as a comment here on this blog.

---------Story Opening ------------
Title: Trunk-ated
by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Permissions: Use Freely to do this Worldbuilding exercise


Trish clenched her fists which were tied behind her and kicked hard with her legs tied at the ankle and knee. Her face inched closer to the open lock of her car's trunk. Her nose entered a shaft of sunlight.

She squinted up at her captor who smirked down at her. When her captor's attention flicked aside, she spat her chewing gum into the lock and prayed.

Back turned, her captor slammed the trunk lid which caught with an odd thwunk sound.

She lay in the pitch dark, smelling every pizza she'd ever carried in the trunk of her 1962 Cadillac and blessed the writers of the TV Series Forever Knight. Finally, she heard the crunch of gravel under booted feet, then silence.

She calmed herself then summoned a sparkle of power to her fingertips. She twisted her fingers until she had a bit of rope between them. With a tiny, delicate push, she burned the rope, scorched her flesh, burned some more and severed the rope.

Nearby, a truck engine turned over with a ragged cough. The truck gunned onto the highway and dopplered away. Silence. Not even one passing car.

With a heave and a squirm, Trish freed her hands, burned through the ropes at her knees and ankles then levered her back up against the trunk lid. She bounced the Caddy on its shocks to free the latch. She thought she'd suffocate before it gave, made a mental note to get the interior catch release changed, and finally, the lid swung up trailing a long strand of gum.

She ashed the gum with a flash of power, slammed the lid and strode the length of the car, one hand trailing the upswept fin. Local urban legend had it this car had two hundred fifty ghosts under the hood and vampire blood in the tank. It was a whole lot more than that.

---------End Opening--------------

HINTS: Answer the questions raised as you read this opening.
a) who is Trish?
b) who tied her up?
c) who put her in the trunk of her car?
d) why was she left beside a deserted road instead of killing her?
e) how did she come to drive a 1962 Caddy - and is it REALLY just a classic Caddy?
f) does she do "magic" or is her fire just ESP? Is there a demon or familiar involved?
g) does the Caddy conceal an A.I.?
h) is Trish actually human? Or an alien from outer space? Alternate Universe? Elf?
i) was that actually chewing gum?
j) if she has such "powers" -- how and why did she let herself be captured and tied up?
k) was there an accomplice lurking behind her captor? Had they captured someone else when they captured her? Was it the someone else who was being kidnapped?
l) what will Trish do about the guy who tied her up?
m) what is her internal conflict? Her external conflict? Is her captor really her enemy or a double agent she didn't want to uncover?
n) what is her objective? Will she succeed?
o) maybe change the title to fit your theme

Note how this and many more questions are carefully NOT answered but only raised by this opening. This is a demonstration of the technique I have discussed on the Alien Romance blog which I call Information Feed. First make the reader curious; then provide answers dispersed amid the action.

Yes, you may rewrite this opening for this exercise. But you'll learn more by doing the exercise based on this opening. What is not-included in this opening is easily as important as what is included. The lack of certain information is as important as the presence of what is there.

Playing with this exercise will sharpen your ability to create this kind of open textured springboard for a story with a complex backstory and background.

You may post your "beats" of the plot and your Worldbuilding paragraphs in the comments section of this blog where others may comment or post other visions of what this story could become.

You may do one version of this story as SCIENCE FICTION and another as FANTASY and/or another as PARANORMAL ROMANCE -- or even SCIENCE FICTION ROMANCE.

See how the same story can scroll out against the different backgrounds and end up qualifying in another genre.

You may decide to do this exercise and not post the results here but instead use it in your own novel.

After you finish the exercise, take a universe that you know well and have fleshed out in detail and write a story opening patterned on this one -- designed to spark questions in the reader's mind by not-saying many of the most important things about your universe.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/

Dialogue - Description Excersise

This is an excerpt from my post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on Tuesday Feb 3, 2009:

Expletive-Deleted & Tender Romance

"But First! -- Linnea stole my thunder by quoting me and the point I'm making in this post in her post that comes right before this one.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/you-dont-understand-she-shouted-angrily.html
Linnea said: Real people ramble on with loads of 'umms' and 'yunnos' and 'dudes' and 'uhs.' Characters should keep those kinds of things to a bare minimum. Good dialogue goes for the vital organs, which in this case should be the reader's heart and brain. In that way, it's not unlike poetry or song writing. Good dialogue has impact ...

Linnea goes on to point out how handy a good argument is for sprinkling in crushed-expository-lumps so the reader doesn't notice them.

Anger is a good special case of the general key to great DIALOGUE.

ALL DIALOGUE IS CONFLICT.

That's a principle. Dialogue is generated by PLOT, and the basis is conflict. Every scene must have "rising action" (the tension, anticipation of plot-movement, and the movement of the plot must graph from a low to end on a HIGH NOTE). That's a stageplay writing principle that works on TV and in books.

Even sex scene dialogue is generated by conflict that is resolved at the climax.

If the scene does not encapsulate this principle -- conflict/ resolution -- then cut it. All dialogue must carry the conflict. Anything characters say to each other that isn't CONFLICT gets cut, summarized, happens off stage, is overheard in fragments, or referred to in another confrontation.

One thing people revert to when inarticulate with rage (angry enough to let you insert backstory) is invective, and other words that don't say anything but take up precious space in your story.

So today I want to discuss the interjection and expletive in dialogue, whereas in my post -- http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html
-- I was addressing the general problem of creating the illusion of reality, using dialogue as an example because I assumed everyone reading this blog had mastered dialogue.

The principles I discussed in "Versimilitude vs Reality" actually apply neatly to Kimber An's comment (on Linnea's post on dialogue) that Kimber An sees IMAGES and can't do the description well, but has no trouble with dialogue. And I answered in the comments section that when you can't write the description, the problem is in the dialogue. When the dialogue FAILS, the description can't materialize.

That's extremely hard for anyone to grasp who hasn't taught writing, hands-on, with beginner's manuscripts. Most editors can't do this either. But when a story falls off the conflict line at the half-way point, the problem is not at the half-way point, but probably on PAGE ONE -- or possibly PAGE 5. When an ENDING fails to meld properly with the final climax, the problem is very likely at the 1/4 point, or possibly the 1/2 point.

It's kind of like chiropractic medicine. The patient comes in and says "My knee hurts." -- and the doctor pokes and says, "Ah, your neck is out."

A body is an organic whole, a thing of a single piece. The location of the cause and the symptom may not coincide.

Likewise a story is also a work of art (humans are G-d's artwork), and an organic WHOLE, much greater than the sum of the parts we've been discussing. Thus if a problem surfaces at one point, the cause is likely at some other point -- or in some other technique that's not in the writer's tool box.

EXERCISE: Write a radio script -- or a vignette to play out on a limbo set (against total blackness). Or two prisoners in adjacent dungeon cells. Absolutely not one word of anything but dialogue. If you want my analysis of this exercise, post it to http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/ Readers should read this dialogue and post on editingcircle.blogspot.com what the dialogue MADE THEM VISUALIZE.

Click comments below this post and post your exercise. (HINT: write it in a text editor like notepad, turn off wordwrap, then copy and paste it into the comment box.)

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/