Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter, and Formula Writing
April 15, 2012 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
I read all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars books back when I was in junior high and senior high school. After I read them, I kept them for many years (30 years plus). I had all the Tarzan books too. It was only a few years ago that I got rid of them all.
When John Carter (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401729/) came out, I got the yen to reread them. As I often say, I only get rid of things that I want to use later. I didn’t want to buy new copies to read and while some of them were available from the library, I didn’t really want to sign them out. The early books are in the public domain now and I could download them from Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ , but I was too lazy, so I downloaded the audio versions of three books from http://librivox.org/.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but from what I’ve read it sounds like they mashed together the first three books. The main villain in the movie doesn’t show up until the second book. Some of the changes appear to make in easier for modern audiences to identify with the characters.
Of course, part of my reason why I reread the books was to see if I could gain a better understanding of how to put together a story. The Princess of Mars was the first novel that Burroughs wrote. I suspect that he studied other works before he did this story. In one article about him, they note that he used of a variety of charts when he wrote. The use of charts says to me that he had a formula he followed in his stories.
Some others have noted that the first three Mars books have pretty much the same plot, with John Carter in search of Dejah Thoris. The details of the search vary, but the goal remains the same.
Last year I studied the formula used by Lester Dent, who wrote the Doc Savage books. I could see some similarities with Burroughs’ work. Dent says you need to have the hero get into a fight every 1,500 words. In Princess of Mars, the hero gets into trouble about every 2,600 words, although this varies from one chapter to the next. It isn’t always a fight. In one case, it is a rejection from Dejah Thoris.
I have a few of observations about the book. First is that the hero has a clear goal (Dejah Thoris) throughout most of the book. While in pursuit of that goal, he runs into one crisis after another. Even while he struggles through each crisis, he thinks constantly about Dejah Thoris. Many times he gets frustrated because a crisis diverts him from his main goal.
The second point is that each chapter ends with the onset of the next problem the hero must overcome. After he has just triumphed over one foe, the next one taps in on the shoulder. The poor guy hardly gets a chance to breathe. I’ve read elsewhere that this is a well-known technique to make a book a page-turner. The hero can take a break in the middle of a crisis, but never after a crisis has passed.
The third is how lucky the hero is. For example: Dejah Thoris just happens to be in the air fleet that the Tharks attack. Dejah Thoris just happens to be on the ship that gets shot down. Dejah Thoris just happens to be the only survivor. Just by accident he is always in the right place at the right time. I didn’t notice this when I first read the story long ago, and didn’t notice it this time until I thought over the stories later. It reminded me of an incident I had in a script I wrote. The incident was a direct description of something that happened to me several times. Several readers criticised it as implausible. Maybe implausibility isn’t quite as important a problem as some people think.
The projects I have are nothing like the interplanetary adventure/love story that Burroughs wrote, but I can see how I can use some of his techniques in my stories.
The Gods Conspired Against Me
July 13, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
Well, not really the gods and it wasn’t really all that bad.
My website got migrated last week. For some unknown reason the version they migrated was from two weeks earlier. I didn’t want to post a blog until that had been fixed. It wasn’t done until late Monday, so I decided to wait and post Tuesday.
Tuesday I decided to print some forms I needed before I did my blog. When I did, the printer got corrupted and I had to clean up the registry and reinstall the printers. That strained my limited technical expertise. The problem kept recurring and I spent much of the day fixing it. In the end I discovered that the problem would only crop up when I tried to print some PDF files. Other PDF files worked fine. The PDF files that caused the problem were created by my scanner’s software.
At least it gave me something to blog about. I haven’t made much progress on any of my projects.
I thought I’d finished the first draft of The Crying Woman, but it turned out that I’ve got about a third of it to do yet. I plan to rewrite The Gladstone Barrier first and get it published, and then go back to The Crying Woman.
With both these stories I used a variation of the Lester Dent Master Fiction Plot. I did a couple of stories, The Abattoir Project and The Glencoe Project and they were fairly easy to write. I find these two new stories are much harder to write. In part I think it is because his plot is an adventure story, while my new stories are not.
The Glencoe Project isn’t really an adventure story either, although I call it that, but it wasn’t so hard to write. I want to put more emotion and character into the two new stories and I find that hard to do. I know it is something I need to do, but I wish it were easier.
New Short Story Published: The Glencoe Project – A Transportation Planning Adventure Story
March 25, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
You can read my new short story at either of these two websites:
http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/The_Glencoe_Project.php
http://authspot.com/short-stories/the-glencoe-project-a-transportation-planning-adventure-story/
This story draws on my experiences as a transportation planner. Experienced writers always tell new writers to “write what you know.” That hasn’t been easy for me up until now. Several times I’ve set out to write a story with a transportation planning background, but I abandoned them all.
I took a different approach this time and it worked for me. If I get a good response to this story, I plan to write a series of them. Eventually I want to develop the ideas into a movie or maybe a novel.
My Transportation Planning Adventure and the Lessons Learned
March 12, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
I completed the first draft of my transportation planning adventure yesterday. I got 2,500 words written, which brought the final story to about 7,600 words. That is much longer than the 6,000 word story I had planned. I’ll need to edit it down quite a lot.
My brother suggested I read Kathy Reichs’ book Déjà Dead. I’m about a third of the way through.
She has much more description in her writing than I have in my story. I realized was that her descriptions are there to create mood. In the past I have concentrated on film scripts. In film, the mood cues are not needed in the script, since they are added in production or post production.
This causes a problem for my rewrite. If try to edit the story down to 6,000 words, I won’t be able to add any description. I’m not sure I want to expand the story to allow more room for description.
Like my story, The Abattoir Project: A Ken Walker Adventure, I created an outline inspired by the Lester Dent master fiction plot. I replaced the physical confrontations with verbal ones, but otherwise I used the same structure.
The outline is broken down into four sections, which are broken down into five “chapters” which are broken down into three “actions”. That gives me 60 actions for the story. While the idea is for each action to be about 100 words, in practice they vary from about 13 to 250. This creates a problem for pacing
Maybe I shouldn’t get too concerned about this. As long as the final story turns out OK, I don’t think it needs to accurately reflect the original outline. It does tell me that I have more to learn about what is needed in the outline. I’m sure that will come as I write more. Even in this second story, I found that I didn’t need to rework the outline while I wrote, like I did with the first story.
I am still worried that the stories won’t engage readers. Hopefully that will come with more experience.
A Move Forward on My Transportation Planning Story
March 6, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
Some of the people I used to work with have encouraged me to do a story about transportation planning, so I have tried several times to do that. Nothing has come together yet.
I started to write a movie set in a transportation planning office, but got bogged down in the details. That experience made me realize that I need to focus on plot before I get into any transportation specific details. After 30 years focussed on those details, it is easy to get caught up in them.
More recently, I decided that I should write a series of short stories as a way to develop my ideas, which I would later incorporate into a film. I need more practice telling stories too. Back in January I developed an outline for a story set in a transportation planning office. This week I started to write it. I set a goal of a 6,000 word story. I got just under 3,500 done and I’m less than half way through. At that rate it will end up at 9,000 words. I’ll need to do some severe edits to get it down to size. That can be a good thing for the quality of the story.
I started with the Lester Dent master fiction plot that I used for The Abattoir Project: A Ken Walker Adventure. In the master fiction plot, the hero gets in to actual physical fights. I was tempted to do the same thing in my transportation planning story, but decided that would be silly. Instead I had verbal arguments rather than fist fights. Maybe if/when I do another story I can have some real knock down melees. Another approach would be to make it a comedy.
In the master plot, the heroes and villains are black and white (or rather white and black), but I’m much more inclined to make them more of a dark grey/ light grey. The story is about a fight over a development proposal. My heroes are the City’s transportation planners, while the villain is a developer. A consultant is caught in the middle. That isn’t the only situation where transportation planners run into conflict, but it was an obvious place to start.
I’ll need to avoid the temptation to preach about how transportation planning should be done. That can be a bore, and I’m bad enough at that as it is.
The Abattoir Project: A Ken Walker Adventure
January 11, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
I finished and published my new short story.
A typical management consultant doesn’t need to worry that someone will try to kill him, but then, Ken Walker wasn’t a typical management consultant.
I used Lester Dent’s writing formula. It isn’t deep and the characters are a little thin, but I think you’ll find it a nice little roller-coaster ride.
If enough people tell me they like the story, I may turn it into a series.
You can read it on one of these sites below. The authspot website pays me more though.
http://authspot.com/short-stories/the-abattoir-project-a-ken-walker-adventure/
http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/The_Abattoir_Project.php
Text to Speech Proof Reading and “The Abattoir Case”
January 9, 2011 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
I rewrote my “Lester Dent” story three times this week and I have a new name for it: The Abattoir Case – A Ken Walker Adventure.
I used a text to speech program (Free Natural Reader) to help me with the proof reading. The program reads exactly what I wrote and it is much easier to catch errors. I did two readings, once with a woman’s voice and once with a man’s voice. I found that I caught different problems with each voice.
I found that when I listened, I could hear other problems with the writing that I didn’t notice when I read it. That helped make the whole story better.
The current version runs to 6,000 words, exactly. Not 5,999, not 6,001, but 6,000. I meant to publish it this week, but got onto something else. I have a couple more ideas for changes anyway. I should have it ready this coming week.
First Draft of “Adventure” Story Done
December 16, 2010 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
I finished the first draft of my story based on the Lester Dent Master Fiction Plot formula.
It came in at 6,463 words, or somewhat longer than the 6,000 words that the formula targets. I will need to rewrite the story to fix some inconsistencies, and I can likely tighten up the story when I do that. I have some other projects I need to take care of. That will give me some distance when I rewrite in a week or two. I don’t have a title for the story yet, or titles for the subsections.
I found the story easy to write; the outline made a big difference. It didn’t perfectly though, several times I had to modify the outline. I also had trouble with some details that I didn’t plan out in advance. I thought of them as McGuffins, so I didn’t put much effort into their development. That was a mistake. I changed my mind about a couple of them half way through and that caused the problem with inconsistencies.
What I’m not sure about now, is how readable the story is. I can’t evaluate my own work very well. The characters are not very deep and there isn’t much in the way of a message. However, the characters are very busy as they run from crisis to crisis, so casual readers may not notice those limitations.
I would like to try a similar approach to a different kind of story. A while back, someone suggested I do a film like Before Sunrise. My efforts in that direction haven’t gone very far. Maybe I could write a short story with a variation of this formula.
The Master Fiction Plot: http://altuspress.com/lesterdentproperties/the-master-fiction-plot/
MacGuffin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin
The Lester Dent Master Fiction Plot Test Drive
December 12, 2010 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
After I read over Lester Dent’s story formula, I wanted to try it out.
I developed a spreadsheet that I could use to organize the outline. I added some modifications of my own that I thought would help me write. This week I did an outline. I wanted to leave the project until later because I want to finish my Bright Freedom script first.
However, last night I decided to take a stab at it. The formula is supposed to produce a 6,000-word story. The formula is set up in four parts, each 1,500 words long. The longest short story I’ve done, Distraction is 2,700 words, so this would be considerably longer than any of the stories I’ve done so far.
It took me only an hour and a half to get the first part done. It came in at 1,703 words. That is a little longer than 1,500 words, but it needs some editing and that should shorten it down. I am a little unsure if I should finish this story or the Bright Freedom script first. I’m kind of on a roll with the formula story, so I think I will finish it first.
Links
The Master Fiction Plot: http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html
Bright Freedom: http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog/?cat=14
Distraction: http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/distraction.php
Comment (2011 February 22): I published this story here: http://authspot.com/short-stories/the-abattoir-project-a-ken-walker-adventure/
Doc Savage, Lester Dent, and Formula Writing
November 30, 2010 by James Morison · Leave a Comment
When I was young, I read every Doc Savage book I could get, and reread the ones I had several times. I learned later that the writer, Lester Dent, had turned out one 50,000-word Doc Savage book a month for over 14 years. Not only that, but Doc Savage accounted for about a quarter of his output.
Just the other day I stumbled across an article he wrote about the “formula” he used to write so much material. http://altuspress.com/lesterdentproperties/the-master-fiction-plot/
Since I aspire to be a writer, I cogitated on what he wrote. I wanted to avoid formula writing and I know many writers are critical of formulas. But, as I read more on writing, I start to see the value of a formula. Ultimately, I don’t want to be a formula writer, but I realized that it takes time to develop your writing skills, and a formula can help you develop those skills.
I also have a new view of what a formula is. Since my background is in the sciences, I tended to think of a formula as something very mechanical in nature. The writing formulas I’ve heard about are not really like that. I would describe them as structures. When people talk about formula writing, I think they have in mind the few standard structures that get used. Many other structures exist, but most writers rarely use them.
I found out that all the Doc Savage books are available for download: http://www.stealthskater.com/DocSavage_01.htm
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