1.Finished first draft of Lazy Summer, a novella.  This is the first novella I’ve written, second I’ve tried to write (first being a heinous experiment called God Hates Me, which didn’t end up being as fun writing as I thought it would be, so it was of course dropped) and it’s also the longest thing I’ve written at 25k words and some change.

2.Was published on iTunes.  Link to the iTunes podcast is here, link to the blog is here.  Story was originally around 1200 words, then I had to drop about a third of it to fit the word parameters.  The quality reflects that.

3.(Also on a note that doesn’t have to do with anything, I realized I’m a huge fan of lists.  I love making them, reading them…  Anyway.)

4.Finished short story Program, which I hope to end up selling to someone.

5.Read: Snuff, Fight Club, Rant (all by Chuck Palahniuk.), You Suck by Christopher Moore and The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño.

6.Started blogging.  Which is more fun than I thought it’d be.

My goals for the summer were to, well.  Only that top one.  And it is complete, for now, which means I have about a week (less than, actually, by the time this is published) to waste time.

Hello fair lady Xbox.

How I have missed you so.

In Fight Club, written by Chuck Palahniuk, we follow a no-named protagonist and Tyler Durden as they create Fight Club and later, Project Mayhem, together.

Another great technique used in Fight Club is that you learn.  You learn a lot.

Three paragraphs into the book, you’re learning why guns are so loud.  Second page, you’re different learning ways to home make explosives.  I read somewhere Fight Club is banned in some countries because you can learn these things from the book.  Third chapter, you’re learning about the movies, and projectionists, and how they do their job.

The reason this technique is so useful is, if you’re able to incorporate facts to correspond with the details of your story, you make it even more believable.

Third paragraph of Fight Club:

With my tongue I can feel the silencer holes we drilled into the barrel of the gun.  Most of the noise a gunshot makes is expanding gases, and there’s the tiny sonic boom a bullet makes because it travels so fast.  To make a silencer, you just drill holes in the barrel of the gun, a lot of holes.  This lets the gas escape and slows the bullet to below the speed of sound.

You drill the holes wrong and the gun will blow off your hand.

“This isn’t really death,” Tyler says…

I’m not sure if this is true or if it’s not, but it looks right.  I have no evidence saying this would be otherwise.

Adding facts like this, despite the fact it has nothing to do with the story (besides explaining the silencer holes statement), for novelists, using this technique more and more can totally up a word count.  The above paragraph, if we’re counting everything after the first sentence, which is where the author begins to talk about why guns are so loud, using this technique adds 57 words to the total paragraph.  And it’s even expanded to another sentence.  13 more words, which means that’s 70 more words than before. 

It also makes it more interesting to read.  Should Palahniuk have just went with, “With my tongue, I can feel the silencer holes we drilled into the barrel of the gun.  ‘This isn’t really death,’ Tyler says…”

No.  The above could work, but the higher above works even better.  Another example, this one from chapter three: talking about movie projectionists.

The old theaters that run a movie with two projectors, a projectionist has to stand right there to change projectors at the exact second so the audience never sees the break when one reel starts and one reel ran out.  You have to look for the white dots at the top, right-hand corner of the screen.   This is the warning.  Watch the movie, and you’ll see two dots at the end of the reel.

“Cigarette burns,” they’re called in the business.

After reading this, if you didn’t know this before, you’ll realize what those white dots were for.  We’ve all seen movies and seen the white dots.  I’ve thought, is something wrong with the film?  But no, that just means the projector is about to change.  Now, I watch for it.  I’ll tell whoever I’m with that the scene is about to change, when the first dot comes up.

Reading things and being able to relate to them, it’s another important part of story.  Lots of writing teachers will tell you; characters have to be able to be related to.  This is true.  If you have a character no one will be able to relate to, you have a bad character; you have a character that has no place being in your story.  But also, you have to make your world relatable to, along with your characters.  It makes a story ten times more real when the reader reads something and says, “Yeah, I’ve always wondered what those things were,” or “I see those things all the time,” referring to the last example of course.

Whether the facts presented in the story or true or untrue, they sound right.  They fit the story, and they make a little bit of sense.  You could see the facts being real.  You could see yourself reading about these things in newspapers, or magazines.  The trick to every story is getting people to believe in it, to believe it could happen.  Adding facts just adds a little bit more evidence.

Challenge: next story you write, try and think of your character’s world.  Explain something about it that’s important to the story.  Look at the above two examples if you’re unsure.

Rules about adding facts to your story: They have to be relevant (it doesn’t matter that your character knows how to sew if it has nothing to do with the story), and they have to be interesting (no one wants to read about the world of accounting).  Keep these things in mind when thinking about using this technique.

Next week: Fight Club and openers

Music, today’s, it’s horrible.  At least, what most of the people I know listen to, just bad.

Turn on the radio.  Do you hear that?  The crap hip-hop (and I do like hip-hop.  It’s just like everything else I listen to, I only like good hip-hop, ie., J. Dilla, Wale, Cannibal Ox).  The rock music could be the worst, though, and that may only be because that’s what I listen to the most.  Screamo/emo/whatever-you-call-Nickelback, Grime?  I don’t know.  Something beside’s horribly scary.  Then the pop crap.

(pop has always been bad.  idea of pop: not music, bite-sized commercial chunks of melody and lyrics.  but that’s what the song is nowadays, i suppose complaining would be useless)

Go ahead and turn the radio off.  That’s torture enough.

Today’s generation sucks, seriously.  Music-wise, attitude-wise.  And the worst part is I’m a part of it.  But there’s good new music out there.

This column (as implied by the number one up there) is modern music I deem good.  And most of it will be stuff found around the internet.  What I mean is, songs that haven’t already been covered by Pitchfork or sites along those lines.  Yes.  Some of these songs may be from dreaded Myspace bands.  Or blogs.  Other things.  We’ll see.

The song is called Hide Me, by the Golden Filter.  I have yet to encounter an album of theirs, which is sad.  Pop/Electronic/Techno maybe.  I’m no good at classifying music.  The first place I read about Golden Filter was on Katie West’s Tumblr.  She posted a  make-out video, basically, and it had a nice soundtrack.  Video above.

Next track here, because embedding didnt work.

Another good song from the web, by somebody cal led at Kongregate Collabs. This is a collaboration site, supposedly bringing together artists of all kinds to work on video games. This is a cool idea, hopefully one that’ll bring more fun products like this.  The the original page for this piece is here.

Sadly I couldn’t find a way to embed this piece.  The track is listenable here.

Last track for the day comes from another Tumlbr page, 5lights.  5lights was a lot of artists working on Warren Ellis’ ROTOR project idea.  Really cool text pieces, great looking art, lots of naked women in it’s last month.  All around a great product, this site.  The song is by Star St. Germain.

That’s it for today.

In Fight Club, written by Chuck Palahniuk, we follow a no-named protagonist and Tyler Durden as they create Fight Club and later, Project Mayhem, together.

Chapter six of Fight Club was originally written as a short story: an experiment to see if it was possible to cut from scene to scene, to tell a long story out of order and from multiple angles, and still have it make sense to the reader.  Turns out, it was possible.  And it worked brilliantly.

In chapter six of Fight Club, there are four scenes. 

In the first scene, we have our no-named protagonist in a meeting with Microsoft.  This is after Fight Club.  The character is bleeding in his mouth.  He “can wiggle half the teeth in his jaw.”

Second scene, its Tyler and our hero’s first fight.

Third scene, Tyler tells the Fight Club (who meets in the basement of a bar Saturday nights, after its closed) the rules of Fight Club.

Fourth scene, our hero fights.

The best thing about this chapter six, the short story, its told out of order.  If it was in order, it’d go, Tyler and no-name’s first fight.  Then, Tyler telling the Fight Club the rules.  Then, our hero fighting.  Then, our hero reflecting on Fight Club during a presentation with Microsoft.

How boring is that?

What Palahniuk does, he mixes it up.  He takes the chronological deck of cards and shuffles it.

The chapter goes like this: our hero is in a presentation.  The blood in his mouth reminds him of Fight Club.  First and second rule of fight club, you don’t talk about fight club.  Our hero reflects on that.  Our hero talks about his father, what fight club means, and he talks about fighting.  Next, its Tyler and the protagonist’s first fight, before they start fight club.  Then the protagonist is talking like its after a few weeks in fight club.  Then, he’s back in the presentation, and it’s the end of the chapter.

The ability to time travel (this is the term I use, meaning, to tell a story out of chronological order and still have it be effective) when writing is a technique that can be used to liven up almost any set of events.  Also, you can establish something far off in the story chronologically without having to wait for that moment to come.

In chapter six, our protagonist tells us how, in the real world, you see other members of fight club, and you nod to them.  Because you can’t talk about fight club.  It’s the first two rules.  If the starting point of him talking about is during the presentation, this action can be both in the past and in the future.  If the starting point is the earliest part of this chain of events (Tyler and the no-name fighting for the first time), then it will be in the future.

Challenge: try and write a short story out of order.  Or, write a short story chronologically, then go back and shuffle the whole mess up.  Print it out, cut it up, and shuffle up the slips of paper.  Fill in the blank of what it takes to make it work.

The fun part is, well, you’re telling a story without letting the reader know everything about it yet.  Don’t try to the full story till the end, but tell the story like the reader knows what’s going on.  And try to do so without annoying the reader.  Make it fun to read.

If you get it to work, congratulations; you just added another technique to your repertoire of writing skills.  You can never know too many ways to make stories more fun to read than normal

Next week: more Fight Club and incorporating facts.

Each one of the songs on Silent Alarm are stand alone.  Singles.  None of the tracks flow into the next.  No beats are fed.  No melodies consistent over four minutes.  Each song is a single, in the fact no other tracks are needed to make the sound full.

Thinking story-wise, what would a pop album look like?  Something like Tom Sawyer maybe, but less connected.  Stories about the same character/setting/idea, but instead of the basic short story collection, you have a novel.

One long story, told through stories.  Songs.  Chapters.

You’d have to have the song sets.  Things like ballads, love songs.  I can’t think of any other song themes.  But you get it.  More on this as it develops.

My brain doesn’t make any sense to other people, only to me, and for that I apologise.

In Fight Club, written by Chuck Palahniuk, we follow a no-named protagonist and Tyler Durden as they create Fight Club and later, Project Mayhem, together.

Using repetition in stories can be good for the work in a couple of ways.  It can 1) repeat a certain idea, or sentence, which you can find below, or 2) use a phrase and make it mean more than it would if only used once.  There’s plenty of other ways to use repetition, but these are the easiest to cover, and that’s probably because they’re most effective, so these are the two I’m going to talk about.

The repetition that is used in music, as choruses and repeated patterns of sound, and poetry, does the same thing, but to use them in stories is slightly less overdone than in the other two forms.  Using repetition in stories is a fantastic way to create an ever evolving story.

Palahniuk does this brilliantly in Fight Club.

Early in the story, the protagonist talks about old magazine articles.

In the oldest magazines, there’s a series of articles where organs in the human body talk about themselves in the first person: I am Jane’s Uterus.

I am Joe’s Prostate.

The protagonist goes on to using this same line, with subtle differences to describe his mood.

When the character is angry:

I am Joe’s Grinding Teeth.

I am Joe’s Inflamed Flaring Nostrils.

When the character is told something he already thought he knew:

I am Joe’s Complete Lack of Surprise.

The phrase is used all the way to the end of the book.  The reason the phrase becomes so amazingly powerful is the fact that it’s used over and over again in new ways.  Very few times, using repetition, does the exact same phrase grow to become more powerful than it would be if used only once. 

That’s not to say it couldn’t be done, as I’ve seen it work (I’m pretty sure I’ve even made it work) but repeated phrases become immensely more powerful when used right.  An example of this used in Fight Club:

On a long enough timeline, everyone’s survival rate drops to zero.

This phrase is told when the author decides to insert the fact that everyone dies, anyone could die, even our hero, the protagonist with no name.  It’s used multiple times throughout the story, and it’s powerful every single time.

The one thing you don’t want to do with a repeated phrase is end up over using it.  In a short story, or in one chapter of a book, the most a phrase can be used over and over is three or four times, and if used anymore than that, it loses its potential power.  Using a phrase over and over in a story is supposed to be powerful.  It should only increase what you’re trying to say.  You never want to come off obnoxious.  If you want to insert a phrase, but you’ve already used it a couple of times, or if putting it in would make the total selection less powerful, the simple rule is to not use it.  But that’s easily fixed if you go back in your story and move things around.

If you ever feel like your reader is going to read your repeated phrase and say: why does the author keep putting that, or, man, that phrase is annoying, don’t use it.  Only use repetition when it helps.

Another strong phrase used in Fight Club:

                You aren’t your family.

                You aren’t your name.

The phrase is used when referring to members of Fight Club, when instead of trying to figure out who they are, they tell who they’re not.  Who they become when they enter Fight Club.

Here’s a challenge: write a 500-1000 short story using one or two repeated phrases.  It really is harder than it sounds.  Some blank beginning phrases to get you going:

                The fact is…

                The truth is…

                The best part about this is…

                The worst part about this is…

Once you find a good phrase to use and repeat in a story, by the end of it, you’ll be amazed at what you just did.  You’ll giggle to yourself; look how much of a genius I am.  My story is all neat and full of power.  You’ll be proud of yourself, and you’ll wonder why you never tried this before.

And me?  I’ll be Joe’s Complete Lack of Surprise.

Next week: Fight Club and time travel.

•    Finish a round of ROTOR (or ROT, as it will probably end up being.  This will be published here on the site, maybe a few other places as well).  Is being worked on by both the illustrator and photographer.  Finished my part.
•    Finish creating If We Knew Any Better.  If this gets done, it’ll be put here as a PDF download, probably.  Is being worked on by cover artist.  Poem collection and editing complete.
•    Blog a little.  I have a few ideas.
•    Finish the first draft of Lazy Summer, which is going to end up being a novelette.
•    Finish a second and maybe even a third draft of Program.  Well, complete Program.

So basically everything I could do by myself.

I’m self-motivated.

Tomorrow begins Things I’ve Learned… publication.

I could just repeat what the blog says or quote it here.  I’ll quote it here.

What is Telling of Tales?

Telling of Tales was originally conceived as two things: Experience for myself as a vocal perfomer and – more importantly – a new way for unfairly unknown writers to connect with an audience. People don’t read as many books as before, but audiobooks and podcasts are still fairly popular as they combine information and art with the convenience of consumption on the move.

It’s really as simple as that. Writers can send in their short stories and have them read aloud to the audience of the podcast. In time, I hope we will be up to five readers so that we could read a story every day, meaning that I could feature more writers than if I keep going on my own.

Be here next Thursday.