Monthly Archives: January 2022

The Uses of Bars, Taverns, and Pubs in Fiction

Welcome to Poseidon’s Pub! Come on in. There’s an empty stool here at the bar. What can I get you?

Bars, taverns, pubs, taprooms, watering holes, alehouses, saloons, cantinas, grogshops, dives, and joints serve as frequent settings in fiction. Little wonder. They’re common settings in real life, too.

In fiction, though, they perform a different function than in real life. Let’s examine that subject.

To the reader, it should seem that your character enters the bar for any of the reasons real people do. These include (1) to have a good time in a congenial, social environment, (2) to forget or escape troubles, (3) being dragged in reluctantly by friends, (4) to meet someone the character already knows, and (5) to meet someone the character would like to know.

In real life, that’s about all there is to know. We enter for one or more of those reasons, or some similar reason, and we either succeed or fail, but we leave with less money, fewer fine motor skills, and fewer brain cells.

However, things are different in fiction. The overall point of the fictional bar scene is to advance the plot, add depth to a character, or both. A fictional bar scene might accomplish one or more of the following functions:

  • Show a character’s behavior in a relaxed, non-work or non-family setting. This allows the writer to display new facets of the character.
  • Reveal more of a character’s thoughts, feelings, and background. This scene might serve as a way to unveil the tale’s backstory.
  • Reduce tension after an action scene. It may allow both reader and character a chance to catch their breaths and reflect on what just happened before.
  • Make use of reduced inhibitions. The effect of alcohol on any of your characters might allow them to admit a truth they’ve been hiding, or propose an idea that’s just crazy enough to work.
  • Gain information or ideas from another character. This can be from a direct conversation with that character, or could be gleaned through intentional or accidental eavesdropping on another conversation.
  • Form, strengthen, or end a relationship with another character.
  • Show a conflict between two characters. A writer can illustrate this with a heated conversation, a game like pool or darts, or the classic bar fight.

As with any scene, you’ll need some description of the setting, the layout and ambiance of your fictional bar. Your readers already know what a bar looks like, so choose enough details to sketch a mental picture in the reader’s mind, but trust the reader to fill in the rest. You’ll want the overall mood of the bar to reflect your character’s mood, or that of your story at that point.

Bar scenes in fiction have become so typical, so stereotypical, that you’ll need to find a way to make yours unique, atypical in some way.

If your character returns to the bar later in your story, ensure something has changed. Most likely your character has learned something along the way. Seen through your wiser character’s eyes, perhaps the bar looks different now, or the character notices things missed on the earlier visit. Or maybe the bar looks so much the same that your character reflects on its sameness.

I grew up reading science fiction, and those tales contain plenty of bar scenes, from Isaac Asimov’s ‘Union Club,’ to Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘The White Hart,’ to Larry Nivens’ ‘Draco Tavern.’ No doubt you pictured some favorite bar—real or fictional—as you read this blogpost, so there’s no point in my listing hundreds of examples from written or cinematic fiction.

My story, “The Six Hundred Dollar Man,” contains a bar scene in ‘Shingle & Locke’s Saloon.’ It serves the purpose of relating the first amazing stunt of the Six Hundred Dollar Man and of raising ethical questions about whether it’s right to give a man steam-powered legs and one-mechanical arm.

Sorry! Closing time, folks. Settle up your tabs and have someone get you home in safety. And don’t forget to tip your favorite bartender—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 30, 2022Permalink

Don’t Read in Bed!

Many people read in bed at night. Researchers tell you it’s good for your sleep and overall health. I disagree. Let me explain.

First, I know all the reasons people urge you to read in bed. It helps you relax, stimulates your creativity, gives you more empathy, and makes you smarter. I’ve read blogs and articles by Maddie Thomas, Lilianna Hogan at WebMD, Jodi Helmer, and Dr. Michael Breus. Molly Cavanaugh even inflicts this practice on her children.

These people have it all wrong. Reading in bed is bad. No, I’m not talking about the blue light hazard. The danger I speak of is present whether you read ebooks or paper books.

No, I’m not talking about the supposed harm of reading horror stories or other unsettling books that might cause nightmares or insomnia. I’m talking about a peril lurking for you no matter what you read.

I’ll concede that science has shown reading in bed helps you sleep. True. I get that. But that’s not the point. Those researchers have it all backward.

My concern—my deep fear—isn’t about how reading affects sleep. I’m terrified about how sleep affects reading.  

There’s not much research on that subject. Oh, there’s a paper called “The relationship between self-reported sleep quality and reading comprehension skills,” where scientists found a surprising result, that longer sleep times led to lower verbal efficiency, and poor sleep quality led to better reading comprehension.

But I’m not even talking about that. It’s not the amount of sleep that bothers me.

Here’s my scary theory. Our brains seem wired for pattern recognition. That skill enables us to form habits and cement them into routines and rituals.

If you read every night before bedtime, if you’ve developed and ingrained that habit, your brain has formed a solid link between reading and sleep.

That’s right. Your brain knows the pattern—seeing words means going night-night. You’ve made it a pleasurable pattern, thus a self-reinforcing one.

How do I know this? Where’s my research? Well, okay, I don’t have any studies to cite. The world cries out for experimental data on this vital subject. For all I know, researchers have tried, but as soon as they read their own paper, they fell asleep.

Where, you ask, is the danger? Who cares if your brain links reading with sleep?

Go ahead and think that, but don’t come crying to me when, during a meeting at work, you drop into slumberland when your boss displays a text-filled PowerPoint slide.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you when you’re driving, see stop sign, and pause to read it, only to fall asleep at the wheel.

Worst of all, and I can hardly bear to mention this unspeakable horror, it’s possible that, someday, you will fall asleep while reading a book written by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 23, 2022Permalink

Scene Plotting

It’s tough enough to lay out the plot for a book. Now I’m supposed to have a plot for each scene? Seriously?

Yeah, seriously. This past week I watched on online Zoom presentation by author John Claude Bemis. He called the technique ‘microplotting.’ I’ll introduce it here, in my own words. Any differences between what he meant and what I wrote are my errors, not his.

First, why does each scene of your book need a plot, if the overall book already has one? Bemis says it’s because there won’t be enough truly dramatic moments in your book to hold a reader’s interest. You need something in between those moments to keep your audience engaged.

What’s that something? Smaller dramas along the way. A plot for each scene. These small plots may lack the overall intensity or import of your book’s overall plot, but they should contain elements of anticipation, tension, and expectation to keep readers eager for more.

According to Bemis, each scene should either advance your overall plot or deepen the reader’s understanding of a character, or—better—both. He suggests putting yourself in the mind of the reader. Your scene should introduce a question in the reader’s mind. Before answering that one, introduce another question to keep the anticipation going. Don’t forget to answer each question, though, to resolve the tensions you’ve created.

Bemis provides five questions to ask yourself as you start to structure a scene:

  1. What does the character want? Maybe to reach a location, to obtain something, to answer a question, or to persuade someone.
  2. Why can’t the character get what she wants? Some obstacle, some friction with another person, or some internal barrier, perhaps.
  3. What will the character do about the problem? It’s better to have characters earn their objectives by their own efforts, rather than by luck or coincidence.
  4. Why don’t the character’s efforts work? Use events and dialogue in the scene to challenge your character. Introduce twists and turns. Don’t make the problem easy.
  5. How will this ‘microplot’ end? If with success, you’ll satisfy reader expectations. If with failure, at least you’ve got the reader rooting for your character as the book goes on.

Just as a magnifying glass reveals small and interesting details that make up a whole picture, so your microplots keep a reader fascinated enough to make it through your whole book.

Be careful with your magnifying glass, though. Don’t misuse it to burn up any books by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 16, 2022Permalink

When Robots Write Better

Here’s a thought experiment. We know researchers push Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology further all the time. What if AI begins writing stories and novels better than humans do?

To make it more fun, let’s assume AI lags behind humans in all other areas. That is, AI programs start to write wonderful fiction, but accomplish nothing else of note.

At this point, that seems unlikely. According to this article by Andrew Mayne, AI has made some progress writing two-sentence flash fiction. and author Erik Hoel found AI did a fair job of generating reasonable prose when he fed it prompts from one of his novels. To date, no AI has written a story or novel that has been widely read as literature.

Before AI comes to the point of writing better than humans, we’ll pass through a phase where human writers partner with AI to improve their productivity. A human author will come up with a story concept—characters, plot, setting—and put the AI to work generating text. The human will then edit and submit. We’re pretty close to that now, with software such as Marlowe, AI Dungeon, Jarvis AI, and GPT-3.

Perhaps not long after that, some AI software might become capable enough to create the story concept and write the manuscript and edit it. At some point, such submissions will pass a literary version of the Turing Test. A human editor won’t be able to tell if a human or AI wrote a story. In fact, some experts believe AI will write a best-seller by 2049.

A short time later, AIs might become capable of writing stories and novels better than any human writer. By that, I mean human readers might come to prefer fiction written by AI.

Since fiction explores the human condition and is designed to provoke an emotional reaction in human readers, my thought experiment postulates that AI might come to do this better than human writers. AI might know us better than we know ourselves.

What then? Is our species ready for that day?

No human writer after that time will stand a chance of keeping up with AI writers in quantity or quality. People inclined to take up writing will choose other pursuits and the number of human authors will dwindle. A small niche industry will linger on, since a few purist readers will refuse to read AI-written fiction. That small slice of the market will support a handful of human authors for a while.

Setting aside that tiny minority, think of the millions of readers devouring the prose churned out by clever machines. Assuming they pay for the books, who pockets that money? The AI developers?

What if fiction-writing AI software evolves on its own? That is, the software imagines—and programs—improvements in itself? Who gets the money when AI moves beyond the need for human programmers?

Moreover, what will motivate AI to write? We know why human authors write stories—they feel an urge to say something, in words, about the human condition in story form, and to earn money from doing so.

Why would AI write? What’s in it for them? Will AI feel some similar urge to reach humans emotionally, through language?

I don’t know the answers, and it’s disturbing to think about. Imagine that day when the last human author dies. Still, the advent of superior AI writers may usher in a wonderful era for human readers, able to read fiction surpassing all that’s been written before.

Perhaps, after even the memory of human writers fades, one person driven by an urge no other human feels, will strive to write as well as AIs. That scribbler will learn from the machines, and will put words together as the person’s ancestors once did. Perhaps this lone writer will offer a novel to the world, a novel in the true sense of that word—new. Perhaps readers will be amazed that a human can write as well as a machine.

Maybe that lone author’s efforts will inspire others, leading to a rebirth of human writing not seen since our Stone Age.

There’s a story idea for you, free of charge, from the (human) mind of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 9, 2022Permalink

A Novel Plan

I heard you’d like to write a novel. That’s the word on the street, anyway. As they say, writing a novel is a one-day event. (As in, ‘one day, I’ll write a novel.’)

No, you’re more serious than that. You’re going to do it. For such a big undertaking, maybe you should have a plan. Lucky you, the internet can provide one. Wait, more than one. Way more. Uh-oh.

There’s the 3-Step plan by Stephanie Gangi, the 7 Steps for planning a novel by the Reedsyblog staff, the 10-Step Plan by The Writers Bureau staff, the 12-Step Guide by Jerry Jenkins, the 15-Step Plan by the Reedsyblog staff, the 20-Step Guide by Joe Bunting, and the idea of forming no plan at all by Maria Mutch.

That narrows it down. We know there are between zero and twenty steps for writing a novel.

To me, all those plans look good, with many common elements among them, just some differences in emphasis and terminology.

Face it, some people need plans, step-by-step methods that have worked for accomplished authors. Other people hate plans, since they seem too rigid and stifling. Still others don’t mind plans so much, but prefer that the plan emerge as the project itself matures.

Whatever works for you. Emphasis on works. If your organized, detailed plan sits there and intimidates you into inactivity, that’s not working. If your lack of a plan leaves you unsure where to start, that’s not working. If your chosen method results in less than your best creation, well, you can do better.

For my novel in progress, I’m going with the Snowflake Method developed by Randy Ingermanson. It’s got 10 steps or so, and is similar to the 10-Step plan by The Writers Bureau mentioned above.

It’s not so much about actual snowflakes, but more about how you’d create a fractal snowflake. You’d start with a basic shape—a triangle or square—and add more detail as you go. That makes sense to me, and I’ve used an abbreviated form of the technique for years in creating my short stories.

They’ve given us a brand-new year to work with. It’s as good a time as any to start. Choose your plan, or no plan at all, and write that novel you’ve been dreaming about. I’ll read yours if you’ll read the next one written by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 2, 2022Permalink