Hello, writers. Our fearless leader SensibleShoes, author of several books for young people (under a couple of different pen names, durn the publishing era that seems to require this), notably the Jinx trilogy
Jinx was among the purchases made by President Obama at a D.C. area independent bookstore on the 2013 Thanksgiving weekend Small Business Saturday.[8]
is away doing authorial and fun stuff at WorldCon, so here’s a link to our recent Write On! sessions, and next week, August 25, Write On! will be hosted by Strawbale. Sensho says, “If anyone else can do either of the two weeks after that (September 1 and 8), please let me know ... Many thanks to [the volunteers].”
“Micro-photograph of Broccoli, showing fractal structure.”
Uploaded as a “DK Official Image” (whatever that means) by kosak Mark Sumner. I love broccoli as a food (yes, I hear that’s unusual), and now as a visual, too!
For tonight, I was thinking about the way readers expect genre fiction to feel identifiable familiar, yet engagingly unexpected, and also satisfyingly inevitable. Whew! But how? In a way, the answer to that is part of what we talk about each week.
Science has a thing called fractals or/and self-similarity (ya GOTTA see the gif video at the top of the latter wikipedia page: click on the gif there to get it full-screen for full impact!) in which a key trait is that, up close, the individual components of a structure look a lot like the whole structure itself.
It got me wondering if this translates to genre fiction as a method for seeding a story with recognizable, empathizable {sp?} phrases in dialogue or description … components familiar enough that the reader immediately grasps them, but used in original ways to convey new significance. It feels kind of related to that thing about humor that goes something like, we enjoy it because it grabs us in being truthy (or even true) at the same time as being so incongruous that it takes us happily by surprise. Sometimes a writer needs to signal to the reader, “bear with me while I develop the elements of this story a little bit — I promise pretty soon you’ll find it well worth your while.”
Another fractal example: “This is a plot of the Julia set of a Poincare function (linearizer) for the beta fixed point of a postcritically finite quadratic polynomial. The linearizer is normalized in such as way as to ensure that its Fatou set consists of a single completely invariant attraction domain. This file (in the resolution provided) is licensed under the creative commons attribution license - that is, you may use it as you like, as long as you acknowledge me [L rempe at wikimedia commons].” ...as I said, I do not get the math or physics...
There’s hardly a novel more genre-y than the one titled in just this way: “Once is Not Enough”, a 1973 Jacqueline Susann novel that I hear is not what it seems like it means .. and yet sort of is: a key character used to love the protagonist but doesn’t now, and says something like, “I did love you once,” to which protagonist character protests, “Once is not enough!”
A stock expression turned on its ear in an original way. Probably we can’t get away with it if the phrasing is too clichéd, but maybe lines just enough in the common parlance, or equally quickly grasped, are entertaining enough that readers bear with us, and by the end of the sentence or paragraph that gives context with the turning on ear, the expression has proved its value by meaning more/new things the reader appreciates.
Possibilities for what tonight’s diary subtitle means were already floating around in your mind, right? One tweak away from the most straightforward expectation could be:
“Everyone who loves you dies,” he said, pressing harder as blood seeped from the bullet hole she’d put in his shoulder.
“Don’t flatter yourself.” She looked down at him contemptuously, the gun never wavering.
“Ambulance here in five,” the uniformed LEO called from the door.
Or, for instance:
“Everyone who loves you dies,” he said. Tears stained his nine-year-old cheeks and the letter in his hand. “Then they’re gone and it’s nothing but words. They don’t mean it, anyway. They just say it all the time, to make you trust them, or get you to act the way they want, or because it’s their job.”
“Have I ever said it?” the shelter therapist asked him, but more gently than if he’d been even a few years older.
Or:
“My whole semester grade depends on answers to that?” She was outraged.
“ ’Everyone who loves you dies,’ ” he said again. “You were absent about a quarter of all the class sessions, and you turned in maybe four out of five assignments, so, yeah, it kind of has to, don’t you think?”
“But right here and now?”
“Right here and now.”
“Okay, okay. Give me a sec … okay, so, first, everyone who loves you dies, because they’re human, not immortal.”
“That’s one,” he agreed.
“Second, everyone who loves you dies, because they’re mortal, but you’re mortal too, so you might die before some of them, and then it wouldn’t seem to you like ‘everyone who loves you dies’ because they hadn’t all yet. See what I mean?” She searched his face anxiously, but there wasn’t much to read from it.
“Fair enough. That’s two.”
She hid a breath of relief. “How many do I need?”
“Five should do it.”
“Five? Are you kidding?”
“Were you expecting three? Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears or the Three Billy Goats Gruff ?”
“Split the difference, make it four. Or count that last one double. It really was two answers. C’mon, you know it was.”
“You’re not in much of a position to negotiate. And it could never have been three. Philosophy 101 is just a bit more sophisticated than that.”
“More like ‘sophomoric,’ ” she muttered.
“No, It’s freshman level,” the annoyingly sharp-listening professor said, as he leafed through class papers. “You’ll be a while yet before earnestly quoting Sartre and Camus.”
“But not Simone de Beauvoir?” she retorted bitterly.
“I’ll count that,” he said. “Three down, two to go.”
I tried to put a whole bunch in this attempt:
Quaffing flagon after flagon of root beer to quell impatience, Cal waited at the Startled Duck for Stou to report back on progress with the financing their current quest. Journey food like frozen chocolate-chip cookie dough, to double as barter or bribe in a pinch, did not come cheap. Rope ladders to scale the dreaded Tower of JungleJim had to be top quality or doom would follow. What was keeping Stouey?
Finally Stouey arrived, lugging the feudal bookbag encasing their quest proposal. But shouldn’t the Quest Allowance Seneschal have kept it to peruse at leisure? A proper mid-evil manuscript, after all, illuminated with demons and heroic figures and flowery vines along all the edges, in every gold, silver, prussian blue, emerald and vermillion crayon left in the box.
Resolutely quashing all qualms, Cally bounced off the bench and demanded, “Well, what kind of a mood was the Seneschal in? How do our chances for financing look?”
“Mood? I’d say it was dark. Our chances, too. Gimme a root beer.”
The valiant companions sat side by side, drowning their sorrows in drink, until Cal came up for air long to enough to ask plaintively, “But our manuscript? Those illuminations colored perfectly inside the lines!”
“Nine misspellings, four wrong words, run-on sentences and commas in all the wrong places... C-plus at best, Mom said — I mean the Seneschal said — a C-plus manuscript predicts C-plus duel-ability with dragons and ogres. We’d have our hair burned off and our heads bit off by the end. A C-plus manuscript predicts a failed quest, she said. It doesn’t cut the financing mustard.”
“All those crayons, wasted! Did we at least get enough allowance granted to buy more and try againl? Now we know what’s wrong, we could manage a B if we just— ”
“Not a dime,” Stouey said dolefully.
“Gee, it’s like you need crayons just to get crayons.”
“True.” Stouey heaved a massive sigh. “Our heroic future is not looking very.”
“At the rate we’re going, by the time we get a shot at a quest’s allowance, we’ll be too old for this stuff.”
“You’re not kidding,” Stou agreed, fretting at a rip halfway down one nearly-outgrown jeans leg. “See that? Even the Seneschal said the knees are the first to go.”
“Dumb street!” Cally declared, thudding the empty flagon down for emphasis.
“Dumb street,” Stouey echoed, reaching for the root beer bottle. But their luck was out again: the bottle was empty.
The challenge: using characters and settings of Togwogmagog, and/or of your own devising, write 50 to 500 words each for one or two (or three!) ways a familiar-feeling expression or phrase of description or dialogue means something different in each context and different than a reader might ordinarily predict. Have “at” any of the phrases I used, compose your own, or pick from these, modified or as is:
◼ a case of scotch ◼ (I’ll/she’ll/they’ll) just be a minute ◼ refill/renew the prescription/ subscription ◼ meeting of minds ◼ deliver the goods ◼ wide place in the road ◼ so thoughtful ◼ when all is said and done ◼ quick change artist ◼ because she said so ◼ close (or distant) relatives ◼ give it some/a little time ◼ yellow dog contract ◼ both feet on the ground ◼ down the hatch ◼ what's a little (fill in) among friends ◼ rhyme or reason ◼ more than fair ◼ the rest is silence ◼ lost in thought ◼ big time operator ◼ sweetheart deal ◼ cut and run ◼ the more things change ◼ don’t look now ◼ where have I heard that before ◼ to each his own ◼ one foot in front of the other ◼ bull fiddle ◼ next thing you know ◼ fire and ice ◼ half the battle ◼ speak of the devil ◼ if you know what’s good for you ◼
Familiar phrases also at this link.
Alternate challenge: stock phrase or cliché used in any way that does solid yeoman work for your story.
Write On! will be a regular Thursday night diary (8 pm Eastern, 5 pm Pacific) until it isn’t.
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