Book summary: Writing Monsters

This is my (partial) summary for the book “Writing Monsters” by Philip Athans. It’s a book with advice and tips for fiction authors on writing effective monsters for your stories. Instead of following the book structure, I’m going to try to summarise a selection of its ideas.

Predictability is the enemy of horror

This is by far the most important idea in the book, and many of the tips stem from this principle. I have marked in italics everything connected to this.

What is a monster?

Uniquely strange creature that we instinctively fear. A distortion in appearance, behaviour or thought. Characteristics:

• Monsters have a disturbing capacity for violence.

• They are amoral and beyond our control: cannot negotiate with them, don’t seek or respect our opinion.

• They turn us into prey, sometimes isolating us and/or taking our weapons.

Note that shape, appearance (hideous to beautiful) and size (giant to microscopic) don’t matter!

A strange, terrifying creature might not be a monster once its behaviour is understood.

Uses of monsters

• Villains: Monsters don’t have to be villains, and villains don’t have to be monsters. If a character is both, build the villain facet first.

• As transformation: We’re afraid of what we can’t control, including ourselves and other people (werewolves, Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, etc). Our psychological well-being is as important as the physical, maybe more, because otherwise we’re expelled from society and civilisation.

• As “natural disasters”: They bring the best and worst in people. Useful to explore honesty, loyalty, vanity, etc., not just good/bad.

• As obstacles: Simply what stands between the protagonists and some goal. Note that “defeating” a monster might mean understanding it, helping/rescuing it, or sending it home.

Defining Your Monster

When defining your monster, define its offence (why it’s dangerous), defence (why it’s hard to get rid of it) and utility (features that gives it “colour”, like Blair Witch Project making stick figures and putting victims in a corner). Make rules for it, even if they’re never fully explained to the reader. You can use a monster form as a reference.

Archetypes like vampires, zombies, dragons, etc., are useful, but you need to define your own twist to them, see eg. 30 days of night and 28 days later. Otherwise, they’re unoriginal and, worst of all, predictable.

Describing Your Monster

Show, don’t tell! Describe the visceral experiences of the protagonists/victims (eg. use of “shuddering” instead of “being afraid” in Lovecraft’s Dagon excerpt on p. 142), the monster’s effects on people, and its possible intentions. Not knowing what the monster is, or not seeing it, is effective.

Think of all the senses. Limiting one, or all but one, can be effective. We don’t have to be turned away by appearance, smell, etc: sometimes predators use good smell to attract prey.

Revealing Your Monster

Monsters should be revealed in three stages:

1. Initial contact: Announces there is something. It’s fast (uses few words) and dramatic.

2. Build-up: Reveals aspects of it, takes the most space: increasing the threat, leaves reader wondering where does it stop. Reveal no more than necessary (our imagination makes them scarier), use “red shirts” (side characters who die) to show the danger.

3. Final encounter: Play with expectations and wait as long as possible to show the monster. Don’t actually show the monster until the end.

Conclusion

There’s much more to the book than what I’ve written here: I just included the parts that were more interesting for me personally. I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed with the book: it seemed messy, some of the ideas and examples I didn’t find enlightening or useful, and some ideas were repeated several times (didn’t feel like reinforcement, just messy writing/structuring). Maybe I had too high expectations.

That said, the book was interesting and useful, at least for a n00b like me. So I recommend it, just not wholeheartedly.

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Book summary: 2k to 10k

This is my summary of the book “2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love” by Rachel Aaron. It’s a very short e-book (also available as audio book) with tips for writers. It’s only $0.99 so definitely worth the money and the time if you’re looking for some writing advice and tips.

The book is divided in two parts: the daily process and the background work that allows for efficient writing. The second part is somewhat more subjective and personal and might not apply equally well for everybody.

Part one: Process

Many (competent, even!) writers equate writing quickly with being a hack. The author obviously doesn’t agree, and thinks that the secret of her method is that is removes dead times and waits. The method is based on three requirements. Improving any of the three is a win, but all three is the best.

• Knowledge: The most important of all three. Know what you’re writing before you do it. No macro plot stuff, but exchanges in an argument or very rough descriptions. Five minutes is about enough to cover all the writing for a day.

• Time: Record your word output per session for a while and figure out patterns. Do you write better/more when you write for at least two or three hours? At home? At the coffee shop? Without internet? In the morning or evening? Once you figure it out, try to make all of your writing sessions be like that.

• Enthusiasm: Write stuff that keeps you enthusiastic. If you didn’t enjoy writing it, it’s likely that readers won’t have fun reading it. When planning the writing for the day, try to play the scenes in your head. If there’s any scene that you are not excited about, change it or drop it. Similarly, if you struggle to write one day, reflect on what you’re writing and figure out if you need to change anything. The process should be enjoyable.

Part two: Tips for Plotting, Characters, Editing

Plotting in 5 steps

To decide which book to write, choose an idea from the pool if ideas you have in your notebook, blog, or wherever. Signs to tell if an idea is worth the time/effort required for a novel: you cannot stop thinking about it; it writes itself (related to the previous point); you can see the finished product; and you can easily explain why others would want to read it.

1. Get Down What You Already Know. Characters, situations, magical systems, settings. Scrivener mentioned as the best thing ever.

2. The Basics. Start filling out the gaps from the first step, enough to figure out the bare bones of characters (main characters, antagonists and power players), plot (end and beginning, in that order, plus twists, scenes and climaxes you already know of; also the kind of story this will be), and setting (magic system if applicable, basic political system, general feel of places: technology level, culture, power).

3. Filling In The Holes. You already have the plot beginning, some interesting middle points, and the end. Tips for when you get stuck in page 28. This step is finished when you can write the whole plot, start to finish, without skipped scenes.

4. Building a Firm Foundation. Make a time line, draw a map, write out who knows what and when, memorise everyone’s particulars, write out a scene list, do a word count estimation, and do a boredom check (go through the whole plot: if some scene is hard to visualise or feels slow, figure out why).

5. Start Writing! Remember that no matter how carefully you have plotted, the story and/or characters will probably change dramatically.

Characters Who Write Their Own Stories

Characters with agency (that can make decisions that change the direction of the plot) write their own stories. They will help getting from a point in the plot to the next. Examples in pages 36 and 37. Basic character sheet consists of name, age, physical description, what they like, what they hate, and what they want more than anything. It’s filled during step 2 above. The rest of the character development happens as the novel is written, like a braid: this gives easier and better results.

The Story Architect

Most stories follow a three-act structure (Act I, put your characters in a tree; Act II, light the tree on fire; Act III, get your characters out of the tree). Act II is normally the longest. Act III is the climax, the big event. It has a lot of tension, and it shouldn’t be too long because the tension will fade. Don’t forget the resolution at the end: readers need a closure for the characters, enjoy their victory. Does not mean having to end the book happily: the point is tension relief.

The Two Bird Minimum

Scenes should do three things: advance the story, reveal new information and pull the reader forward. Sometimes combining several scenes into one can be interesting and add tension, plus makes the story leaner.

Editing for People Who Hate Editing

Many people dread editing and think they cannot do it, but it’s just a skill that can be improved. Tips on approach:

1. Change the Way You Think about Editing. The final destination of editing is reader experience: polishing the text so it doesn’t just contain the story, but it’s nice to read, too.

2. Editing Tools. Three tools to identify the problems the text has: updated scene map (tip: mark types of scenes, like love, main plot, and secondary plot, and make sure their distribution throughout the next is not too uneven), time line (includes important things other characters were doing “off screen”; helps find timing problems, when action too loose or tight, lagging tension, etc), and the to-do list (list of problems you have found).

3. Actually Editing. Take the to-do list and start fixing. Always biggest/hairiest problems first, never first page to last. Then do a read-through, making a new to-do list (typos and small things can be fixed on the spot), and possibly more read-throughs if the to-do list was big. Finally, read one more time, but from the reader’s POV (tip: use a reading device, not the computer used to write the manuscript). At this point you can involve other people, never before. Remember that involving other people means more rounds of editing. At least three more rounds is normal.

Conclusion

Here you have a pretty compact summary of the book, mostly useful for reference and to get a sense of what the book covers. Note that I skipped the chapter with advice for new writers and some other minor stuff, though. If you like this, go support the author (seriously, it’s just one dollah).

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Book review: The Road

Lately I’ve been reading a bunch of books that were recommended by Scott Berkun in one way or another. The next book I’m going to review (slide:ology) actually falls into this category too, but basically I’m done with that batch so I’m reading other things now :-D

I don’t read that much fiction (except in comic form), but Scott’s review really intrigued me and made me want to read it. I should warn you, though, that his review is sort of a spoiler, not in the sense that it gives away the story, but in the sense that it talks about many the kind of things that you can think of while reading it.

I don’t want to risk spoiling anything, so I’ll only say that it’s a (very) dark survival tale involving a man and his son. It’s certainly not for everyone, but if you can cope with it you’ll most probably love it. Here’s two anecdotes regarding how dark and powerful the book is:

• After a couple of days I stopped reading it before going to bed, because the next morning, when waking up, I’d feel anxiety.

• I can’t remember when it was the last time that a book made me cry. The first time it happened with this book the page number had a single digit (namely, it was page 9). As I said I don’t read much fiction, but still.

The style of the book is really crude, and it matches the theme perfectly: there aren’t “chapters”, the characters don’t have names (they’re simply “the man” and his unnamed son) and he doesn’t even use apostrophes for negations (he writes “dont know” and “I cant”, never “don’t know” or “I can’t”). I found the vocabulary quite complex and I had trouble with a lot of words, but not enough to not be able to follow the story.

A couple of days after finishing the book I actually gave the film adaptation a shot (I didn’t even know there was one when I decided to buy the book). I have to say that, while I didn’t hold my hopes up for a good film, I actually ended up enjoying it quite a bit. It’s sort of a summary of the book (too much to cover in a film), but I think the end result was very good. So, if you’re lazy about reading the book, at least you can watch the film ;-)

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