Monthly Archives: June 2024

Taking Readers on Your Vacation

When a friend or relative offers to tell you about their vacation, or show you photos of it, do you assent with enthusiasm and curiosity?

Pen and tire images from Pixabay

No, you do not. You agree out of politeness, while praying they give you a two-sentence summary. After all, you can’t be expected to experience their vacation.

Why, then, do we read travel books? We don’t even know these authors, yet we read with eager interest about a trip they once took. They don’t show us their cellphones, encouraging us to scroll through pictures. They offer only words, yet through those words, we feel like we’ve traveled to the place along with them. How do they do that?

I’ve read several travel books in recent years (maybe I’ll write one of my own—who knows?) and, though not all rank among the classics, each transports the reader to another place in a readable and intriguing way.

Contiguous 48 USA by Chris Dyer

Travel when you’re young, they say, and author Chris Dyer did so. Driving by car at age 25, he visited the forty-eight contiguous states while seeing friends and relatives (and bars, baseball diamonds, and basketball courts) along the way. His book includes helpful advice for those planning their own long trips.

Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck

A classic of travel literature, this book follows Steinbeck and his poodle in a camper across much of the country, searching for the essence of the nation. Steinbeck focused on the people he encountered, the general state of America, and the joy of being lost. He found America in the early 1960s differed from the America of his youth, but modern readers will find it’s changed even more since his travels.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

Among the quirkiest books on my list, this chronicles the author’s grim fascination with presidential assassinations. She toured many of the sites involved with these tragic events, a series of trips nobody else is likely to take. Throughout the book, her snarky humor keeps readers intrigued.

Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Half-Moon

Like Steinbeck, this author drove by camper over much of the United States, and wrote, for the most part, about the people he met and the history of the areas. He shunned the interstates in favor of narrower roads and smaller towns. A long book, it still succeeds in holding a reader’s interest.

Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson went to Europe and didn’t like it much, but at least he made some money from a book about his ordeal. He poked fun at the continent, and in a humorous way.

Better Than Fiction: True Travel Stories from Great Fiction Writers, edited by Don George

A nice collection of short essays by a variety of authors, this book will take you many places, some of them distant and exotic. The quality of the essays varies, but I enjoyed the book overall.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Many rate this a classic, but I almost dropped it from this list. It barely meets my definition of travel literature. Yes, Thoreau traveled to Walden Pond in Massachusetts and described the area well. But he concentrated on prescribing a different way to live. Not content to tell us about the wilderness, he urged us all to move there.

Lewis and Clark Expedition: A History from Beginning to End by Henry Freeman

Unlike the other books on my list, this one chronicles a trip the author never made. Written in a rather bland style, the book keeps a reader’s interest due to the nature of this famous historical journey of exploration. With our modern world mapped and accessible by plane, it’s difficult for us to imagine trekking with horses and wagons.

Roughing It by Mark Twain

More than most books on this list, Roughing It combines an arduous journey to then-unfamiliar places with sparkling wit. Nevada, California, and Hawaii are airline destinations for us, merely hours away. For Twain’s contemporary audience, those places seemed wild and remote. Still, the humor shines through even after a hundred and fifty years.

Summary

Most of us take a vacation, enjoy it, and that’s it. We fail in our attempts to share the experience with others through photos and verbal descriptions. A good author, though, can share a vacation with millions, using two techniques: (1) Paint a vivid word-picture of the locations, thus transporting the reader there, and (2) Write with a captivating style.

I’m sure you’ll want to read in detail about a vacation taken by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 30, 2024Permalink Leave a comment

How You Can Give Better Author Interviews

As an author, you can expect to receive offers from people to interview you. Such interviews can be in person, or remote by phone or email. The offeror might broadcast the interview on TV, radio, podcast, or publish it in print or online in a blogpost. Today I’ll provide guidance about how to make the most of these interviews.

Images of microphone and pen from Pixabay

The Hermit Option

You may refuse interviews, of course. Some authors remain elusive, hidden from the world. They have their reasons, and that’s fine. I’m not aiming this post at them.

My Experience

I’ve been interviewed six times, which isn’t bad. But I’ve conducted almost seventy interviews of authors, editors, and poets. I’ve done all of these through email and posted them on this website. Just search for ‘author interview’ to find them.

Purpose

You’re trying to entice people to buy your books. Simple as that. All other reasons for the interview remain subordinate to that prime purpose. Make every sentence of every answer support that goal. What follows are my tips for giving author interviews with the aim of selling books.

  • Author Photo

Unless the interview gets broadcast on TV or radio, the interviewer may ask you for an author photo. Use a photo taken recently enough that your appearance hasn’t changed much. Choose a photo that portrays you in a good light.

  • Taglines

When answering a general question about one of your books, like “what is it about?” use a pre-prepared tagline. I alluded to this in a previous blogpost. You should craft brief taglines about each of your books, and practice saying them until you can do so in a natural way without stumbling.

  • The Comedian Mindset

This tip applies more to written interviews where you have time to polish your answers. Though you should strive for honesty, you’re not undergoing a police interrogation. You’re trying to sell books, so reject the first answer you think of and go for the unexpected.

When I advise you to think like a comedian, I don’t necessarily mean to go for laughs. Comedians become skilled at considering several responses to a question and selecting the one they judge funniest. You should select the response you judge will attract people to your book. Consider the odd, the quirky, the answer with a punch or a twist.

  • Well-Edited Answers

Again, this applies to written interviews where you’ve got time to hone your answers. Don’t just jot down answers and click ‘Send.’ If you’ve used misspellings, poor grammar, incorrect references, or awkward sentences in your answers to an interview, why would readers want to read your books?

  • Brevity

I’ve saved the most important tip for last. In any interview, short answers beat long ones. Think like a poet—not to rhyme, but to pack a lot of thought into few words. Write your autobiography some another time.

With those tips in mind, you’ll do well on your future interviews, especially if you’re fortunate enough to be interviewed by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 23, 2024Permalink Leave a comment

The 10 Most Pioneering Vehicles in Literature

Imagine the joy of blazing a trail in your stories, writing about something nobody has attempted before. Consider the electric thrill when you’re creating, in fiction, a new type of vehicle for your characters (and, by extension, for your readers).

Vehicles hold a special place for all of us, don’t they? The machines that transport us also shield us from the harsh outer world while cocooning us in comparative comfort. They move along at our command, heedless of distance or obstacles, and some of them convey us through places in which our frail bodies wouldn’t survive.

Today I highlight the pioneering fiction vehicles, the ones first taking readers through a particular environment. Look elsewhere for a list of the most popular, or the coolest-looking, etc. Here I’m focusing on the first, the pioneers, and we’ll proceed in chronological order.

First Flying Vehicle

The Hindu text R?m?ya?a, dating from between 600 BCE to 200 CE, mentions gods and demigods flying around in Vim?na. These vehicles take various forms, including flying palaces and chariots. I found no evidence online that these vim?na carried mortal people, or that they traveled in outer space. Still, a flying palace seven stories high sounds great to me. Not all gods owned them, apparently, and some of these vehicles lacked anti-theft devices. Ravana stole one from Kubera, but Rama recovered and returned it.

First Underwater Vehicle

The same character—Alexander the Great—piloted the next two vehicles on my list. Though a real historical figure, Alexander also got fictionalized in a series of tales now called the Alexander Romances. Widely read and translated, they originated in Ancient Greece before 338 AD, but spread across Europe and Asia, changing with every retelling over hundreds of years. One of these tales took him underwater in a glass diving bell lowered from a ship. I’ve written my own fictional account of this trip in my story, Alexander’s Odyssey.

First Flying Vehicle for Mortals

Alexander the Great also flew in the air, according to another tale from the Alexander Romances. He harnessed two griffins to a chair in which he sat. He steered the craft by tempting the griffins with meat on skewers so they’d fly in his intended direction. You can never find griffins when you need them these days, forcing us to fly by airplane.

First Space Vehicle

The first purposeful aerial vehicle in fiction belongs, I believe, to Francis Godwin, who wrote The Man in the Moone, published in 1638. (I’m discounting True History by Lucian of Samosata, since his ship flew by accident.) In Godwin’s tale, his hero, Domingo Gonsales, trained a flock of swans and hitched them to a framework, allowing him to fly. Unaware that these swans periodically migrated to the moon, he ended up there. Little wonder his contraption didn’t catch on—he’s sitting on a slender pole.

First Time-Traveling Vehicle

If you’d care to travel through time, step aboard the conveyance from the 1846 novel Le Monde Tel Qu’il Sera [The World As It Will Be] by Emile Souvestre. This steam-powered locomotive flew through space and time. (And you thought the flying, time-traveling locomotive in the movie Back to the Future III was innovative!) The seat looks comfortable, but it’s atop the locomotive’s boiler, just forward of the smoke-stack—a rather warm ride.

First Multiple-Environment Vehicle

So far I’ve mentioned travel in no more than two modes–air and space, space and time. But the Terror from Jules Verne’s 1904 novel Master of the World combined boat, submarine, automobile, and aircraft. The police might catch you speeding and give chase, but they’d never be able to pull you over. Not available yet for purchase, but my name’s on the waiting list.

First Underground Vehicle

If you’d like to travel underground in style, you’ll need the Iron Mole from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1914 novel, At the Earth’s Core. Perhaps you’d better wait until someone develops a steering mechanism for the machine, though. The novel’s heroes couldn’t steer it and they dug down 500 miles and found Pellucidar.

First Intense-Gravity Exploration Vehicle

When someone asks if you’d like to travel to a neutron star (if I had a nickel for every time…) just say no. The intense gravity creates massive tidal forces within any approaching ship. The character in Larry Nivens’ short story “Neutron Star,” published in 1966 (before evidence of neutron stars existed) said yes to the question. He traveled in a spaceship called the Skydiver, a transparent, spindle-shaped vessel.

First Solar Exploration Vehicle

Most of us enjoy vacations where we can get a little sun. But we draw the line at traveling to the sun. I’ve heard of hot travel destinations, but that one melts the cake. The characters in David Brin’s 1980 novel Sundiver make the trip aboard a spherical vehicle called the Sundiver, which enables them to get close enough to the extreme heat. Seems to me they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by going at night.

First Cyberspace Vehicle

Traveling to the Matrix might seem difficult, but not if you step aboard Nebuchadnezzar, the hovercraft ship from the 1999 movie, The Matrix. In case you’ve forgotten, the matrix is the “simulated reality world” fed into human minds, a sort of dream world far different from the dystopian present. (Yes, I know the 1982 movie Tron included cyberspace vehicles, but they couldn’t travel between cyberspace and real space, as Nebuchadnezzar could.)

Conclusion

If I’ve left out a pioneering vehicle, or if a vehicle predates one or more on my list, let me know. To qualify, a vehicle must travel within an environment or element no other fictional vehicle has traversed before.

If you enjoy writing about fictional vehicles, don’t despair that it’s too late to write a story about a pioneering vehicle. See my blogpost about pioneers and giants. If you can’t be a pioneer, you can still be a giant. For a discussion about how to deal with fictional vehicles in your stories, stay tuned for a future blogpost by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 16, 2024Permalink Leave a comment

Shadow Theory—Use and Misuse

If you’re a fiction writer wishing to create vivid characters, you’ll like Shadow Theory. But beware of its major pitfall.

In your first attempts to write stories, you’re likely to invent characters without much nuance. Perhaps they’ll resemble common tropes or stereotypes. Even if you avoid that, your characters may lack the sort of quirks readers enjoy. The characters may seem flat, two-dimensional. Shadow theory can help with that.

Definition

In this post, author K.M. Weiland provides an outstanding, in-depth description of shadow theory. Please read her post, since I’m providing only a brief overview here.

Imagine your character as an impressionable child. She tries to be outgoing in an effort to make friends, but gets snubbed. Reacting to this, she adopts a more standoffish approach and remains aloof from others. This practice protects her from rejection. She has relegated her friendliness to the shadows. Though still a part of her, that trait is something she tries to keep hidden from the world.

The theory says this happens to real people, like you and me. We seek workable coping strategies and push their opposites to the shadows. However, the shadow remains attached, still available. If stress or other harsh circumstances require a change, we can switch to the shadow’s method, though we will find it difficult to break a long-held pattern and leave our comfort zone.

Use in Fiction

You see the powerful potential of this theory in creating fascinating, relatable fictional characters. A strong defining trait coupled with the opposite trait lying in the background—often the subconscious background, even as a suppressed memory—gives a character more dimension.

As your plot inflicts increasing pressure on your character and she finds her accustomed responses failing again and again, you can bring the opposite trait out from the shadows to win the day. This shift to shadow behavior won’t be easy for the character, and that difficulty adds to the drama.

Misuse

As I read Weiland’s post, I loved learning about this literary tool, but saw a danger. A hammer is a fine tool as well, but it hurts when you smash your thumb with it by accident.

If you’re clumsy in the use of shadow theory, you could confuse readers. You shouldn’t show a character acting one way throughout the book, then have her suddenly change behavior without explanation.

If a character acts out-of-character, readers notice and can’t help questioning the author’s competence.

Solutions

You can overcome this problem in a variety of ways, including the following. You could:

  • provide a flashback to show the shadow trait forming in the character’s past,
  • show the character’s thoughts as she realizes the shadow trait exists (She may wonder where it came from, and may even recall its source in her past, but it should still require effort to use the shadow trait),
  • show a second character (B)—perhaps an ally or love interest of A—who senses the shadow trait in A and helps A to see and use that trait, or
  • give hints of the shadow throughout, so the reader sees it but the character doesn’t until the dramatic ending (this may be the most difficult of the four).

If you’re like me, you write descriptions of your major characters before creating the first draft. Consider answering the questions asked by Weiland in her post as you develop these descriptions. You might devise your plot such that circumstances test your character’s accustomed behaviors but those behaviors produce bad, then worse, setbacks. Only when the character, through internal struggle, calls upon the shadow trait, can that character prevail.

As the old radio drama tagline put it—Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows…and so does—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 9, 2024Permalink Leave a comment