Archive for category Capsule
How To Tell The Future
Posted by DLThurston in Capsule, Setting Thoughts on August 13, 2012
Today I came across this article, posted by fellow CVS member Linda Adams on Twitter. It’s a quick look at where forward looking science fiction got things right when predicting what was then the future, but is now the present.
Those who have followed me for awhile, especially those in my writers group, know of a novel on my back burner called Capsule. The novel takes place in the 2080s, and so I made predictions about the course of history and technology over the next seven decades. Occasionally, Capsule alpha readers send me articles that make it sound like I knew what I was talking about.
I say this not to pat myself on the back and claim any great ability to predict future trends. Instead, I’m here to say if I can do it, anyone can do it. So here are my tips on how to be the author seen as a predictive sage in some future present. This is going to involve a little more “in my unpublished novel I…” than any one post should contain, but hang with me, there is a point to be made.
Tip #1: Follow the trends. This is why I follow coverage of Apple and Microsoft keynotes with such interest, why I read sites like Gizmodo, Engadget, and io9. When it came to crafting the world of Capsule, the trick wasn’t prediction it was extrapolation. Choose one or two areas of technology that have the potential of being the next big thing then make them even bigger than that. When I started Capsule, augmented reality was just starting, now with Google Glasses inching towards the market, implants that interrupt the optical nerve to put augmented reality directly into your vision seem 5% less weird.
Tip #2: Look for the concept products. It’s not just car manufacturers that come out with concepts that will likely never be reality. None of the concept cars from the 1970s are on the road today, and likely none of the concept tech goods that are proposed in drawings and videos will ever make the market. These are fantastic jumping off points for technology. The Nokia 888 concept, for example, became the origin point for wrist wrapped computers in Capsule.
Tip #3: Exaggerate the annoying. Future based science fiction, when really executed properly, is about the period it’s written in, not the period it’s written about. So find those elements of modern life you want to highlight, and blow them out of modern proportion. Within Capsule that meant a continued thread about technology that brings far flung people together creates walls between people much closer at hands.
Tip #4: Rely on psychology. Alright, this is actually the point of this blog post. Predicting the near future is a skill that is similar to psychic cold reading. Which is to say it’s not a skill at all, but a carefully crafted magic trick intended to fool the audience. In either instance, the underlying requirement of the trick is the trust of the audience, bringing them into a narrative that they want to participate in, even as a rational portion of the brain may understand it to be a fiction. If they like you enough, they’ll remember only your hits, not your misses.
When presented with how prescient Snow Crash feels to a reader twenty years later, Neal Stephenson is quick to point out just how much he got wrong, such as his prediction that some virtual real estate would be far more valuable than the rest. Star Trek has its cell phones, though far later than in reality. It also had a third world war happen in 1990s when eugenically created super men took over the world and plunged it briefly into a new age of feudalism. Blade Runner correctly posited we’d one day have umbrellas with light up canes, but where are my damned replicants and Los Angeles ziggurats? We don’t focus on those misses, however. We focus on the hits. Even in a project that exists only as two thirds of a rough draft, people remember only the hits.
So the real trick to predicting the future in your science fiction? Extrapolate, exaggerate, but then tell a compelling story. Make the reader want to read the whole book, so they’ll see all your predictions. It improves the chances of them finding the one thing you accidentally got right, and that’s the detail that will stick with them.
State of the Writer: November 2011
Posted by DLThurston in Capsule, Home Brew, Nickajack, Post Apocalypse, State of the Writer on November 1, 2011
After an interminable summer, October absolutely sped past. Anticipation of Capclave and Flashathon likely spurred much of that. Looking back, both feel like they were more than a few weeks ago. Someone needs to harness time’s ability to speed past while being experienced but dilate when being remembered and turn that into a viable method of time travel.
October turned into a great month of micro-production. The week of the 22-28th alone I wrote 15 bits of flash fiction, something I wasn’t entirely sure was possible. At least four of those are stories that I can get longer, or at least better polished, pieces out of. I call this an absolute victory. I’ll probably take some time in November to sort them out, and give them a more prominent place within my flash fiction Scrivener database.
The month opened with me working on one novel project, ripping apart the tangled novels Capsule and Post Apocalypse, and ended with me ramping up another. I talked about that yesterday in my Nanowrimo Eve post, so I’m not going to rehash that here. I hadn’t thought about it while writing it, but that really ended up scooping a lot of my typical State of the Writer post. Half an hour a day working with my wife on the project, probably another half hour translating that into Scrivener, and poking around the flash pieces I want to turn into short stories. Sounds like pretty good goals for the month.
October also delivered to my email a proof version of one short story and an edited version of another. So anthologies are moving full steam ahead.
I want to get meta for a moment and say I like these State of the Writer posts. The same writers’ group discussion that gave rise to Friday’s post about mission statements as writers drove home the need to keep abreast of what you are doing, and what you want to do. That’s what this series is about, a monthly chance to really look at what I did the month before, what I’m hoping to do next month, and what direction I’m moving with my writing. They’re a way of keeping me focused, and they’re a way of keeping me honest, since I’m putting them out there for all to see. Or all who care to see, at least.
So the state of the writer? Anticipatory. I’m getting back into novel production. I’m starting a project I’ve been churning for several months. And I’m seeing if I can work a novel and short stories at the same time. Should be an interesting month.
State of the Writer’s Blog: Anyone who has been following these State of the Writer posts knows I’m trying to collect views from all 50 states. The numbers are dwindling. At the end of September, I only had North Dakota, Arkansas, and Delaware left to collect. This month saw the first visit from Arkansas, leaving just two. I’m hoping to wrap up all 50 by the end of the year. That’s just one a month. That’s not so hard, right? October was also the 4th straight month of blog viewership growth, fueled largely by Flashathon.
State of the Writer’s Beer: Still working through a backlog of suds before I get the next batch going. Might brew at some point this month. Pulled out bottles of both batches for the Flashathon crowd. Mustache Cat got generally positive reviews, Lazarus Ale was more of a specific taste. Responses ranged from hatred to asking for seconds.
So join me as we move into another month. Tomorrow, it’ll be another trip to A Writer Reviews focusing on, of all things, apples. Bonus points to anyone who can guess which two television shows that’ll cover.
The Limitations of Reverse Outlining
Posted by DLThurston in Capsule, Outlining, Post Apocalypse on October 13, 2011
The process of carving Capsule apart is slow. Slow and mentally exhausting. I’m averaging about three chapters per night before my brain and eyes stage a coup and leave me insensate. Something about staring at my own writing and trying to reverse engineer it into an outline dries my eyeballs. Or maybe that’s just all the dust being kicked up by the kitchen renovations taking place on the first floor while I write in the basement.
Something about using the phrase “while I write in the basement” as part of a blog post. Nevermind.
The process is slow, but I’m pushing on, largely for the sake of the novel that will still be called Capsule. The toughest part about transitioning from the conjoined story to the split novels is pulling out the murder motivations, which entirely belong to the frustrated cultists who’ll land in Post Apocalypse. So I need everything about the murder plot that I can salvage, so I know where to start weaving in entirely different characters and motivations. It’s that age-old question: Why would someone commit murder in the 2070s if not for the influence of Tezcatlipoca? I’d like to think Shakespeare and Hemingway dealt with this same question when working on King Lear and Old Man and the Sea, respectively.
My companion and friend on this road was and is Scrivener for Windows, and thank Lit & Latte for that. I’m not drilling as much as I could with the tool, but the constant presence of a little note card beside the chapter I’m currently dissecting is keeping me sane. No hand written notes, no flipping between programs, just a friendly little note card. Pulling this novel apart is teaching me a lot of the features I’ll be using to stitch Frankenstein back together at the far end. I’ve got the file broken into chapters, but not into scenes, just because I’m not going to do the kind of rearranging in this file.
At some point I’m going to reach the end of how useful the reverse outlining is, well before I reach the end of the conjoined draft. The farther I get away from Chapter One the more I drift afield from the eventual plot of Capsule. After that I’ll probably carve out all the dream sequences that will get adapted into Post Apocalypse, and then get to outlining the two new novels. That’s probably my November project, as I doubt I’m doing Nanowrimo this year. Maybe next year with the next of the three outlines in the queue. After the post on Writers Block and Nano, I’m serious about not tackling the challenge again without a full outline ready to go.
For now, I need some eye drops.
Outlining Outlines
Posted by DLThurston in Capsule, Nickajack, Outlining, Post Apocalypse on October 10, 2011
I have a very real feeling this blog is going to turn from a focus on writing to a focus on outlining over the next few months. Especially after crafting my last post about Writers’ Block #5 and using outlines to counter it I can’t help but think about the three novels churning in my brain. The longer they stay up there, the more essential it feels to get them into some solid form, to get them outlined.
But do you want to know my dirty secret?
I’ve never done a full novel outline before.
I’ve done partial outlines, section outlines, but never felt moved to outline a novel from opening to closing scene, touching on everything in between. So I’m also going to be doing a lot of learning about the process, reading up on it, studying it, finding the tools and the methods that work best for me. In terms of tools, Scrivener for Windows looks like the clear early winner in terms of software, especially with the full release finally coming out on Halloween. I’ve been doing some poking around with it the last two weeks, going through a process akin to reverse outlining as I pick apart the manuscript that was Capsule to turn it into two new outlines. Outline one will still be called Capsule and will include all my near-futurism and the murder plotline. Outline two now has a working title of Post Apocalypse and will include all the Lovecraftian dream elements, kidnapping, and frustrated doom cultists.
Outline three will be the joint project I’m working on with my wife, a steampunk adventure novel we’re calling Nickajack, a name that I’m seriously intending to keep.
Being that I’m new to this whole outlining thing, I’m not sure how long to expect it to take. I’m hoping to get a rough outline of each of the three done by the end of the calendar year, so that I know which needs the most focus. Post Apocalypse is the most time sensitive of the stories, so might get priority for that.
I’d love to know anything you have. Articles. Books. Recommendations. Suggestions. Tools. Methods. I’m going to do my own research, but I’m stepping into a world that scares me, ground I’ve never really walked on before, and any and all guidance that can come from my blog readers is one step closer to making these novels actually work, and not just wither and die in my grey matter. Help me tell these stories!
State of the Writer: October 2011
Posted by DLThurston in Capsule, State of the Writer on October 1, 2011
Another month. September absolutely sped by. Here in the DC area it was a hell of a month with earthquakes and flooding, and on a personal end included getting a new sewer line finally installed at the Casa Del Thurston.
What it didn’t include much of was writing, unfortunately. I’ve been working on a steampunk short story located on Venus that has a lot of promise, but needs better direction than it currently has. In the end it’s one story that could be told in two different directions, which is interesting considering my upcoming project for October.
After the blog post I made a few days ago about my conjoined novel, I’ve been thinking more and more about the status of Capsule. The final conclusion is that it is, and always has been, two novels. The final straw was reading Kraken by China Mieville. It’s a story that goes in a lot of different directions, but at its heart it remains a heist story. Capsule? It’s gone in not only different directions, but has transitioned from being one type of plot line (murder conspiracy) to another (cult kidnapping) with only the most tenuous of ties between the two. It’s had this problem as long as I’ve been writing it. On one hand, I wish I could have seen this sooner, on the other I’m glad I was able to see it at all.
So this month, the process of division starts. I’ll track it in the blog, as I suspect it’ll make for an interesting case study. Scrivener for Windows is going to be my tool of choice, identifying which pieces go in novel A (still called Capsule) and which go into novel B (working title: Post Apocalypse). Really, the entirety of the process will be broken into three parts:
- Identifying the pieces that go in each novel.
- Identifying what needs to fill in the missing pieces from each half.
- Outlining.
- Writing.
In an ideal world I’d have one outlined enough to be a Nanowrimo project, but I highly doubt that’ll happen.
Two other big October features:
Capclave! As I’ve attended other writers conventions, the local one here in DC still strikes me as my favorite and the best I’ve attended. If you’re a genre fiction writer in the DC area and you haven’t been to Capclave…why the hell not?
Flashathon! There are still some details to leak in the coming three weeks, and then the event itself three weeks from today. October 22nd. I’m hoping to get a nice turnout for the event here on the blog. I’m hoping even more for some fantastic mental exercise and inspiration.
State of the Writer’s Blog
Blog viewership continues to grow, for which I am eternally grateful. In the ongoing quest to reach eyeballs in all 50 states, I entered September needing six more states. During the month, this blog got its first views from Montana, South Dakota, and Louisiana. That leaves only North Dakota, Arkansas, and Delaware to go. I’m not sure what the next goal is going to be after finally collecting all fifty, but I’ll figure that out when I get there.
State of the Writer’s Beer
No news. Haven’t done any brewing or much drinking this month. Means that bottles we have are that much better aged. Been meaning to crack another bottle of Lazarus.
How Many Novels Am I Writing?
Posted by DLThurston in Capsule, Editing on September 16, 2011
Ah, Capsule.
Anyone in my writers group knows my long struggles with this novel. They’ve seen me start it, stop it, restart it, walk away from it, return to it, circle it, and just generally futz with it for about three years now. And still, it’s only a shell of the story that I had in my mind when I started writing it. Bits and pieces of it have made their way into short stories, some intended to be related, some entirely unrelated. It’s led me to make a series of blog posts about where technology is going, and read the Popol Vul. It frustrates me, and excites me, and leaves me absolutely bewildered.
It has largely taken a back seat to my burgeoning career as a short story writer. And that may have been for the best in the long run, though I’m now going to avoid rehashing my Unleaded post this week about the dangers of getting into a novelist-only mindset.
However writing that post has got me pondering just what the hell is up with Capsule. And after picking some pieces apart I’m starting to wonder if the whole problem is that it’s two novels that I’m trying to write simultaneously. If it has too much story, if I’m trying to do too many things.
On the one hand it’s a novel about someone trying to solve a crime in the 2070s committed by people living off the grid in a society that has forgotten that they’re on the grid. On the other hand it’s a novel where a father is trying to save his daughter from an apocalypse cult that is disappointed that the world didn’t end in 2012 like they were promised. Those are both stories that I’m enjoying, and that I think could be novels. But more and more I don’t think they’re the same novel.
Just writing that sentence feels good. I don’t think they’re the same novel.
Where it all started to fall apart for me is when I tried to make the one novel turn into the other novel, when I shifted from a murder investigation to a kidnapping plot. Where just because both stories relied on a fanatic underground element that they had to be the same fanatic underground element.
My wife, ever wise, suggested that maybe I should put it all into Scrivener, that picking apart the pieces, summarizing the scenes, figuring out where the plot pieces are, that maybe it’ll help rebirth Capsule and get it to work in its current form. I’m going to do that, in a large part because it will also help me dissect the two stories from each other, attempt to pull apart these conjoined twins without killing one or the other. If that surgery is needed, it won’t be easy, but who ever said writing a novel was?