Category Archives: Setting

How to Construct a Fictional Vehicle

A good story can take your readers for a journey. Characters need to go places and readers yearn to ride along. A distinctive vehicle makes the trip more interesting and you can peruse Wikipedia’s list of the best-known vehicles in fiction. As a writer, how can you give some personality to your fictional vehicles?

Credit to fity.club for Odysseus’ Ship, ar.inspiredpencil.com for Pequod, moriareviews.com for Time Machine, hotcars.com for KITT, and Wikipedia for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Nautilus, Enterprise, and Batmobile.

Vehicles as Setting

A vehicle can serve as a means to move through the setting, from one setting to another, and as a setting itself. Most vehicles separate the inside from the outside, the moving from the static. They isolate characters from the exterior environment. Vehicles can provide a way for characters to shift settings in a short time, or to protect characters from a dangerous environment, or to perform a task.

Describing Vehicles

The general principles of describing settings apply to vehicles as well. If it serves the plot, readers need to picture the vehicle’s exterior and interior. If appropriate, convey the experience of being inside it using as many of the five senses as you can.

Familiar, standard vehicles like taxis, rental cars, or bicycles require little or no description. Also, once your characters have traveled in a vehicle once, you need not bore readers with details again, unless something about the vehicle, or the character’s perception of it, changes.

Resist the impulse to bog down the prose with long descriptions. You’re not writing an owner’s manual or trying to close a sale, so don’t slow down the story.

Vehicle Purposes

Vehicles serve different functions, and their design reflects that. Whether for exploration, warfare, transit, or specialty purposes like farming or construction, vehicles exist to perform a purpose. Your characters might use the vehicle for an unintended task if circumstances demand it, and that can add to interest and drama.

Unique or Commonplace?

If your character boards a standard city bus, the story gains little from a description of the bus. Your readers know what buses look like and wish you’d get on with the action. Unusual vehicles require more explanation, but you can insert bits of description in several places rather than lumping them together. Dialogue works well for vehicle descriptions, especially if one character knows the vehicle and another character doesn’t.

Attitude Toward the Vehicle

In real life, people develop feelings for vehicles, and characters can do so in fiction as well. Characters can love or hate their vehicle, and their attitude may change over time. You can use this attitude as a means of revealing the character’s personality, and the vehicle might even substitute for another character, in metaphor. (For example, he’s angry with her, but kicks his car’s tire.)

Characters also anthropomorphize their vehicles by naming them, just as we do in real life. This practice depends on the vehicle, and is more common with ships and spacecraft than with cars or aircraft. Odysseus’ unnamed ship and the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car stand as exceptions, but the practice of naming vehicles, and the name chosen, can reveal something of the character’s personality.

Bonding of Character and Vehicle

In some stories, a strong association of character with vehicle merges the two. A reader can’t think of one without thinking of the other. What is Captain Ahab without the Pequod, the Time Traveler without the Time Machine, or Captain Nemo without the Nautilus? In the TV world, where is Captain Kirk without the Enterprise, Michael Knight without KITT, or Batman without the Batmobile?

Vehicle as Character

Some stories elevate the vehicle to such importance that it almost becomes a character itself. By that I mean the story revolves around the vehicle. A reader might conclude the story is all about the vehicle and might consider the human characters incidental and forgettable. If you write a story like that, make your vehicle fascinating, since readers identify more with human characters than they do with vehicles. You can increase the fascination level by creating a first-of-its-kind vehicle. I dealt with those in an earlier blogpost.

Fate of the Vehicle

Like human characters, vehicles might change during the course of a story. Being mechanical in nature, they rarely improve, though. Parts wear out. Subsystems fail. Human operators, drivers, or pilots push vehicles past limits. Vehicles break down. They might even get destroyed in the end, by accident or on purpose, to suit the needs of the story. Whatever sort of degradation the vehicle suffers, be sure to show how that affects any character who’s formed an attachment (positive or negative) with the vehicle.

Thank you for riding along on the Blogpostmobile. This concludes our journey. Watch your step getting out. It’s been my pleasure to serve as your driver today. Once again, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 20, 2025Permalink Leave a comment

Depicting Monarchies in Fiction

Do you love stories involving queens and kings, thrones and castles, nobles and knights? Would you like to live under such a government?

Really?

An interesting Twitter thread inspired this blogpost. Author Ada Palmer responded to a tweet by Author Nnedi Okorafor. Okorafor stated how much she detested monarchies, and Palmer commented that fiction authors should be circumspect in their descriptions of monarchic governments, and show their disadvantages, not just their grandeur.

Often, in both fantasy fiction and science fiction, the story takes place against a backdrop of a monarchy presented as a fine and just government. Worse, some stories glorify the nobles, painting them as truly superior to their ignorant peasant subjects.

Palmer gives an example of a children’s tale where the simple commoners are confused and frustrated by some problem until the queen arrives to resolve the dilemma. Just as bad are the stories where a princess falls in love with a rogue, but alas, such a union is impossible until it’s discovered the rogue has noble blood, and only then can a wedding and happy ending ensue.  

To a certain extent, I get it. As children, we grow up reading monarchy stories. It’s an easy concept, well suited to kids. Obey the king and queen (stand-ins for Dad and Mom). Pretty basic government. Much easier for young minds to grasp than senates and parliaments.

The kingdom motif lingers on in our psyche even as we mature, well after we recognize no human family is more fit to rule than any other. Americans fought our founding war to overthrow a monarch, yet free U.S. citizens today fawn over the British royal family and stand in huge crowds to watch guards change shifts at a castle.

Someday, perhaps, young children won’t be raised on a literary diet of medieval feudalism. Only when they’re old enough will they study human history and laugh at the idiocy of past monarchic governments, shaking their heads at the primitive stupidity of their distant ancestors.

Helping hasten that day, Dr. Seuss expressed proper disdain for autocratic rulers in books such as Yertle the Turtle and Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Future children need more Bartholomews and fewer royals. Come on, writers of children’s books—give kids tales of wise peasants toppling corrupt kingdoms!

One respondent in the Twitter feed countered that a benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government. True, on rare occasions in history, kingdoms thrived under the leadership of wise sovereigns. Then the monarchs died, and their average or below-average heirs messed things up. Not a sustainable form of good government.

Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not cheerleading for democracies either. All forms of human government suffer from one fault or another. Winston Churchill stated, “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.”

Democracies don’t choose leaders by familial line of succession, but rather through popularity contests—no sure-fire method of obtaining a wise head of state. History provides few examples of democracies, but the ones that existed often devolved into autocratic systems.

I agree with Palmer and Okorafor, but I’ll venture further. As observers and chroniclers of the human condition, writers shouldn’t glorify any brand of government. Fiction that does so comes across to readers like a morality play, a sermon.  

Governments are systems for consolidating and legitimizing the use of power and force. As Lord Acton wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Therefore, governments—all governments—tend toward corruption.

But what do I know? I’m neither king, nor prince, nor duke or earl. I’m just—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 1, 2021Permalink

6 Things Story-writers Can Learn from Songwriters

Many songs tell stories. Can our musical counterparts—songwriters—teach a few things to prose fiction writers like us?

Many songs, perhaps most, just convey a mood or a thought. Today I’m only considering ‘story songs’ and I’ll define them as tunes having (1) one character with a problem, (2) a plot where the character struggles to solve the problem, and (3) an ending where, as a result of the character’s actions, the problem is resolved. That’s the definition of a story, too.

Songwriters have a few advantages over story-writers. They can:

  • set the mood of the story with the tune and instruments alone;
  • use melody, rhythm, and the tone of their singing voice to convey emotions and the up-and-down cycling of tension;
  • use pauses to delay a surprise ending until the time is right; and
  • can repeat phrases (say, in a chorus) without the listening audience getting bored by the repetition.

By contrast, story-writers must convey their tale using words alone.

On the other hand, songwriters operate under a couple of constraints not faced by story-writers. They must tell their story in a very short time (typically four to ten minutes), and most often they must do so in poetic rhyme. Due to the brevity of story songs, many of them resemble flash fiction stories, those with 1000 words or less.

From what I’ve gleaned in my research, story songs are more prevalent in country music and folk songs than in other musical genres. Also, certain singers are more drawn to story songs than others. Examples include Harry Chapin (“Taxi,” “Cats in the Cradle,” and “Flowers are Red”) and Johnny Cash (“A Boy Named Sue” and “One Piece at a Time”).  

Story songs tend to be somber, dark, or even tragic in tone and message. There are some humorous ones, such as Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and upbeat ones like “Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band, but these are exceptions.

Often, like most songs, story songs tend to involve young love, or lost love. Further, they tend to be about ordinary people, poor or middle-class people with troubles.

What can story-writers learn from songwriters?

  1. Set the scene with a few well-chosen words. Don’t start with backstory—you can fill that in later. In “Puff the Magic Dragon” by Peter, Paul and Mary, we’re only told the dragon lived ‘by the sea, and frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honahlee.’
  2. Introduce your main character early, and make that character compelling, someone with whom readers will identify. In Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana,” we are drawn to Lola, not because she’s a showgirl with yellow flowers in her hair, but because she and Tony ‘were young and had each other, who could ask for more?’
  3. Early on, force your character to face a difficult conflict, one that’s serious and will drive the plot. The very first lines of “Coward of the County” by Kenny Rogers are, ‘Everyone considered him the coward of the county,’ setting up an inevitable test of manhood. In “Stan” by Eminem, the narrator establishes early that he’s got an irrational obsession, a hero fixation that is messing up his life.
  4. Choose a few key details to describe things. There’s no need for complete descriptions. “Hotel California” by The Eagles is masterful, giving us mental images such as cool winds, warm smell of colitas, hearing the mission bell, lighting of a candle, etc. The song zeros in to give precise details about a few things, and listeners fill in the gaps.
  5. Resolve the conflict in a way that the character learns something, perhaps something unexpected. In “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffett, the song’s chorus keeps changing as the narrator learns who’s really to blame for his troubles. In “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman, the narrator thought a man with a fast car would drive her to a better life, but in the end tells him to ‘take your fast car and keep on driving.’
  6. Story ideas. Take your favorite song and convert it into a story. Twist it enough so you don’t violate its copyright, but you can channel the same emotions inspired by the song into your story.

About now, one of the songs I mentioned is stuck in your head, right? I better quit, since you’re busy humming a tune and no longer reading words written by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 23, 2021Permalink

Welcome Aboard the Nautilus

The submarine in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is one of the most amazing settings in all of literature. Let’s explore it.   

Before we do, I’ll invite you to write and submit a short story to an anthology I’m co-editing along with the esteemed Kelly A. Harmon of Pole to Pole Publishing. Twenty Thousand Leagues Remembered is intended for release on June 20, 2020, the 150th anniversary of Verne’s masterwork. Click here for details about submitting your story.

As a degreed naval architect and former submariner, I could write many posts about the design of the Nautilus. You can read this book or this one, or peruse this website for more information like that. My purpose today is to explore this submarine as a literary setting.

Before the publication of Verne’s novel, submarines were tiny and dangerous; they could only stay submerged a short time. In the public’s mind they were curiosities, odd little experimental toys. Moreover, electricity was new—a phenomenon with known, but unrealized potential.

At a stroke, Verne astounded readers with a submarine like they’d never imagined. He gave them a glimpse through the veil of the future. The Nautilus was far bigger than any real submarine to date, nearly as big as the naval ironclad surface ships of the time. With a maximum speed of fifty knots, the Nautilus could outrace anything at sea. Moreover, it could dive into any deep-sea trench and only needed to surface once a day for air.

At a time when people lit their homes with whale oil, cooked with wood, and powered ships with coal, Verne sparked their imaginations by giving them an all-electric vessel. “Electricity” was then still almost magical, and Nemo had tamed it for lighting, cooking, and propelling his vessel.

Verne alarmed his readers with a horrible new weapon of war. No longer would the seas be safe when an unseen danger could rise from the depths and cleave ships in two. It’s how the book began, with mariners terrified of a ‘sea monster’ that struck without warning.

Yet the Nautilus had another side, as Pierre Aronnax learned. It was a civilized vessel, with a vast library and a relaxing parlor or salon with paintings, busts, and display cases. Yes, even a pipe organ. Large portals opened to provide a window to the sea, making this submarine a vessel of exploration, too.

But Verne’s surprises didn’t end there. For the sailors of the Nautilus, the sea wasn’t merely their workplace. It was home. Unlike all previous humans, they lived their lives in the ocean, never making land, eating only seafood, and being buried in the depths.

For Conseil, Pierre Aronnax, and especially Ned Land, the Nautilus was also an iron prison from which escape seemed impossible. Before the phrase ‘gilded cage’ came in vogue, Verne trapped his characters within one. The scenes played out between metal bulkheads with characters caught in an odd dichotomy. Freer than anyone else to explore the vast oceans, they could not pass beyond the Nautilus’ steel hull. Were they guests, or prisoners, or both?

The Nautilus was, and remains, unique. Some literary scholars consider it a character in its own right. I don’t go that far, but this submarine makes for a remarkable setting. Many novels since have been set aboard submarines, but we must measure all fictional subs against the standard of the Nautilus.

That concludes our tour. Watch your step on the ladder and don’t hit your head on the hatchway. Please exit quickly; if Captain Nemo found out I’d brought you aboard, I’m not sure what he’d do to—

Poseidon’s Scribe

December 8, 2019Permalink

Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

My stories are set in lots of places. I finally mapped all of them to date.

Some anthologies and magazines ask writers to come up with a brief author biography. In my bios, I often state, “I take readers on voyages to far-off places.” I wondered if I could capture all these travels on a single map. Here it is:

On this map, green dots indicate published stories and red ones indicate unpublished stories for which I’ve written at least a first draft. There are some stories in which I don’t specify a geographical location, so I can’t show them on the map. In two of my stories, characters venture underground, and I just showed their departure and return points on the surface.

As far as coverage goes, things get cluttered in Europe and the United States. Obviously, I need to write some stories set in Russia, Australia, South America, and Antarctica.

Some writers feel they must travel to the settings of their stories and conduct research to give their tales a sense of credibility. That’s less common with science fiction writers, for obvious reasons.

I’ve traveled to almost none of my story setting locations, and I don’t think it detracts from reader enjoyment. Today’s readers care more about characters than setting, anyway. They crave stories that explore the mysteries, motives, fears, anxieties, and yearnings of the human mind. That’s much harder territory to depict on a map.

Even so, strange and interesting settings are fun to read about, and often the setting itself brings out all those character qualities. Many of us love ‘journey stories,’ and I’ve shown mine as lines on the map.

Well, enough of all that. Are your bags packed? Have you securely fastened your seat belt? Who knows to what extraordinary places you’ll go next with—

                                                            Poseidon’s Scribe

August 4, 2019Permalink

4 Rules for Assembling a Planet

Millions of my fans well remember when I first posted back on February 24, 2013 about assembling a planet. That seminal blog post dominated the news and captivated the world (our world, the real Earth, I mean).

Why revisit the topic, then? Has the process of world-building changed? Well, some links in that previous post don’t work, and it’s time for an update with some better information.

Pixabay.com, image #1275774

 

 

Here you are, ready to write a story set in a world different from ours, and you want to know how to do it. Or you’re partway through writing the story already, things aren’t working out, and you want to know where you went wrong.

You can get good information from reading the Wikipedia article on world-building. Roz Morris’ post on the topic encapsulates her advice into three rules. Ruthanne Reid posted a fine article discussing approaches to world-building. What follows is my view of the topic, but you should review these other sources, too.

Here are my four rules for creating a world for your story:

  1. Think through the consequences. You’ve thought of some interesting and original ways that your world is different from the real one…great. But have you thought through the ramifications? Think of Frank Herbert’s Dune and Arrakis, the desert world. Herbert thought through the implications of that type of climate on people’s behavior, clothing, lifestyle, and other animal life.
  2. Set limits on your magic or technology. Sure, it’s fun to imagine a world of amazing magic or super-advanced technologies. But add some constraints. If your protagonist is some all-powerful wizard, then she or he could simply wave a wand and resolve the conflict in the opening scene. Story over.
  3. Make your world clear to readers. Authors who set their stories in the real world have it relatively easy. They can assume readers understand the rules and norms. They needn’t spend many sentences describing the Earth we know. You don’t have that luxury. You’ll need enough (but not too much!) descriptive text to transport readers to your world.
  4. Be consistent. Sure, you’re thinking, you’ll remember the rules of your world as you’re writing your story. I wouldn’t add this as one of my rules if it were that easy. For some reason, there’s a tendency to forget and slip back into our own world.

Armed with my rules, you should now be ready to get out there and build your own world. It’s freely provided services such as this that makes millions around the world (the real one, our Earth) thrill to the mere mention of the name of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 16, 2017Permalink

Using the 15 Fiction-Writing Virtues

In a previous blog post, I explored how Benjamin Franklin, an early champion of self-help, might advise us on how to improve our writing. To recall, Ben identified weaknesses in his own character and flipped around those negative weaknesses into their corresponding, positive virtues, toward which he strived.

In that earlier post, I made a list of fifteen fiction-writing virtues, encouraged you to make a similar list, and then left you on your own. Today, I’m picking up where I left you stranded, and providing a structured approach for applying those virtues as you write.

benjamin-franklinBen Franklin took his list of thirteen virtues and focused on applying one per week. He kept a log of his success rate, noting when he succeeded and failed. That simple and easy method might not work for the fiction writing virtues, since the one you’ve selected might not apply to what you’re doing that week. Your virtue list, if it’s anything like mine, might be more event-based.

What you need is a mechanism for (1) remembering, (2) applying, (3) recording, and (4) reassessing your virtues:

  • Remembering means that the applicable event-based virtue will appear before you when that given event starts, so it’s a reminder to exercise that virtue.
  • Applying means that, in the moment of decision, you choose to act upon your virtue and do the virtuous thing.
  • Recording means that you’ll keep some sort of log or journal of your success and failure.
  • Reassessing means that once one or more of the initial virtues have become an ingrained habit, you strike it from the list, consider other weaknesses in your writing that require improvement, and add new virtues to work on.

From my earlier blog post, here again are the 15 fiction-writing virtues I came up with. Reminder—yours will likely be different.

15 Virtues

I had split the virtues into five Process virtues and ten Product virtues. Here are a couple of tables showing to which parts of the story-writing procedure each process virtue applies, and to which story elements each product virtue applies.

First draft Self-Edit Critique Submit Rejections
Process Virtues 1. Productivity X X X X X
2. Focus X
3. Humility X
4. Excellence X
5. Doggedness X

 

Character Plot Setting Theme Style
Product Virtues 6. Relevance X X
7. Appeal X X X
8. Engagement X X
9. Empathy X
10. Action X
11. Placement X
12. Meaning X
13. Style X
14. Communication X X
15. Skill X

Remembering. The best solution is to print the list of virtues and keep it near your computer or tablet when writing, and refer to it often. Over time you’ll remember to refer to the “Excellence” virtue before submitting a manuscript, for example.

Applying. This is the most difficult part. In any given writing situation, you must do your best to live up to the virtue that applies to that situation. You’ll likely fail at first, then get better with time, practice, and patience.

Recording. If you keep a log, journal, or writing diary, that is a good place to grade yourself each day on how well you achieved each virtue that applied that day. You may learn more from failures than successes, in recognizing the causes for the failures. In time, you will strive harder to achieve each virtue simply because you won’t want to record another failure in your logbook.

Reassessing. Your list of virtues should be dynamic. Whenever you believe you’ve got a virtuous habit down pat, you can delete it from the list. Whenever you find another weakness in your writing, you can add the corresponding virtue to the list. Perhaps you’ll find that a virtue is poorly phrased, or is vague, or doesn’t really address the root cause of the weakness; you can re-word it to be more precise.

If you faithfully apply a technique similar to this, and you find your writing improving, and you gain the success you always desired, don’t forget to send (1) a silent thank-you to the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, and (2) a favorable and grateful comment to this blog post by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 10, 2016Permalink

They Don’t See What You See

If you aim to be an author, you must observe the world as a writer does. You’ll write better stories if you do.

When I use the word ‘observe’ I mean it in the general sense of perceiving by one or more of the five senses (or beyond those five, even). I’ve blogged before about conveying the five senses in your stories, but here I’m referring not to your characters, but to you perceiving the real world.

Writer ObservationBefore we get to writers, let’s discuss observation in general. While acknowledging there are other epistemological theories, I’ll assume there is a single, physical world out there, and each person observes it differently. Those differences are due to observations taken from different physical locations, accuracy of senses, mood, previous experiences, and many other things.

Observation, then, is a combination of a signal from one or more senses, and the mental activity resulting from the signal. We perceive with our senses and our brains.

Early in life, we discover the universe is too big and filled with too much stuff for us to see every little detail, so we learn to filter some things out. We focus on the parts we find most useful.

We recognize patterns, and form mental models of how the world is. That way we can tell at a glance if something doesn’t fit, and we can fill in the details we can’t sense but assume are there. Some people hone their senses to a fine degree of accuracy through practice, and some do not.

What does it mean to observe the world as a writer does? A good writer:

  • Considers the world as a source of story ideas, details, and descriptions;
  • Sees places as potential story scenes;
  • Notices people and incorporates aspects of them in story characters;
  • Hears all talking as potential dialogue;
  • Watches people when they’re experiencing intense emotions, so as to pick out appropriate appearance, expressions, and gestures for story characters;
  • Tastes food with the intent to describe it as a meal in a story;
  • Picks out the most telling details in real places or people, so as to better describe scenes and characters;
  • Goes ‘people-watching’ and imagines background stories for the observed people; and
  • Practices observing with all senses to improve both sensing accuracy and the ability to describe in words what is sensed.

You might doubt this advice will help in your particular case. Maybe the scenes in your stories look nothing like the world you live in, and your novel’s characters are completely unlike anyone you know or see. That’s common when writing fantasy or science fiction.

Even in such cases, it benefits you to practice and improve your powers of observation. That ability to pick out and convey the right details, in a manner that transports the reader to your fictional world, will help you no matter how unusual your scenes and characters are.

For further study, I recommend you read this WikiHow article and also this post by Maria Popova.

If you practice perceiving the world and people around you, really strive to develop that skill, one day you might achieve the acute observational prowess of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 28, 2016Permalink

Fiction Elements by Genre

In earlier posts I’ve blogged about the various elements of fiction (Character, Plot, Setting, Theme, and Style). I’ve also blogged a bit about the various genres of fiction. Here I thought I’d explore how the various genres emphasize certain elements and de-emphasize others.

For the chart, I used the genres listed in the Wikipedia “List of Genres” entry. As the entry itself points out, people will never agree on this list. Even more contentious will be my rankings in the chart for how much each genre makes use of each fiction element.

Fiction elements vs GenreFor each genre, I assigned my own rough score for each fiction element. I’ve placed the genres in approximate order from the ones emphasizing character and plot more, to the ones emphasizing style and theme more.

Go ahead and quibble about the numbers I assigned. That’s fine. There’s considerable variation within a genre. Also, the percentages of the elements vary over time. If we took one hundred experts in literature and had them each do the rankings, then averaged them, the resulting chart would have more validity than what I’m presenting, which is based on my scoring alone.

But the larger point is that the different genres do focus on different elements of fiction. In my view, character is probably the primary element for all but a few genres. Theme is probably the least important, except for a limited number of genres.

Of what use is such a chart? First, please don’t draw an unintended conclusion. If you happen to know which elements of fiction are your fortes, and which you’re least skilled in, I wouldn’t advise you to choose a genre based on that.

Instead, look at the chart the opposite way. Find the genre in which you’d like to write, and work to strengthen your use of its primary fiction elements in your own work. You might even glance at the genres on either side of your favorite one and consider writing in those genres too.

I can’t seem to find online where anybody else has constructed a chart like mine. Perhaps the only one you’ll see is this one made by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 28, 2014Permalink

Formula for Success

Have you ever written formula fiction? Is it good or bad to do so?  What is it, exactly?

formula 2If your story re-uses the plot, plot devices, and stock characters of other stories, then you’ve written formula fiction.  It’s different from the term genre, in that genre fiction makes use of the same setting and style as other works within the genre, but genre fiction may vary plot and characters considerably.  I termed such writers formulists in a brief discussion here.

Although literary critics tend to dismiss formula fiction, there are so many published stories, it’s difficult to come up with entirely new plots and characters.

Usually there’s a good reason why a writer chooses a formula.  It works!  It’s a curious thing that readers enjoy reading formula fiction.  They’re comfortable with the character types, and although they know how the story will come out, they follow along anyway.  Readers can forgive a great deal if the author tells the story in an interesting way.

I’ll discuss plot types in a future blog post, but with formula fiction there’s no real attempt to vary from a proven plot line too much.  Just re-use what’s been done before, perhaps with slight deviations in setting or style, or specific plot events.

The use of stock characters frees the writer from having to include a lot of explanation or description.  After only a few words, the reader understands all there is to know.  Again, it’s possible to vary a bit from the standard character type, but there’s little need.

I said it’s a curious thing that readers would enjoy formula fiction, but perhaps it’s not so mysterious.  Before there was a formula, there was an enterprising writer (or oral storyteller) who conveyed the story for the first time.  It struck a chord.  It was successful.  After that, why not just do variations on a popular and effective theme?

Examples of formula fiction include romance, horror fiction, and space opera.  Each of these has withstood the test of time because each has appealing characteristics that really reach an audience, and keep on reaching generations of new readers.

In the case of romance fiction, readers enjoy the odd or awkward meeting (the ‘meet-cute’) between man and woman characters who seem opposite or ill-fitting at first, then they warm to each other, only to have a parting of the ways, and finally reunite in love at the end.  An overdone plot line?  Apparently not yet, since this formula sells more books than any other by far.

In horror fiction, at least the cinematic type, the audience sees a mixed-gender group of characters who are isolated in some way and face a horrible entity bent on their destruction.  One by one the characters are killed until only a lone female—the so-called final girl— is left to either defeat the entity or escape.  Another plot line that has not run its course.

For space opera, readers are treated to a heroic character in the distant future, somewhere in outer space, confronting a menace threatening the survival of the hero’s people.  The hero strives against the evil force, and just when it appears all is lost, the hero is able to defeat the menace.  This formula continues to work.

Despite what critics might say, there’s nothing wrong with formula fiction, particularly if you’d like to sell your stories.  There’s plenty of room within the constraints of the formula to display your creativity as a writer.  So, like a mad scientist (Mwahahaha!), go ahead and use your (fiction) formula to take over the world!  Good luck, says—

                                                            Poseidon’s Scribe

January 5, 2014Permalink