Theme

On more than one occassion, I have observed writers run screaming in the opposite direction when the topic of theme is introduced. They vehemently object to writing stories with a theme claiming that they just want to entertain with their stories and not send messages to their readers. It's as if theme can only apply to "literary" fiction and classical literature.

So, what is theme? It is the main idea, moral, or message of a story. It doesn't have to be a moral or a message, it can just be the idea behind the story. Another way of looking at it is what is the writer's opinion of the story or what is the writer trying to say. Some examples of theme are love conquers all, life's a bitch and then you die, good triumphs over evil, evil triumphs over good, death, racism, salvation, etc.

I think the reason that some writers vehemently object to thinking about the theme of their story is because it seems a bit arrogant as if they're putting themselves on the same footing as Shakespeare, Hemingway, Mark Twain, or Edgar Allen Poe. When in fact, all stories have a theme. Even Dr. Seuss' stories have a theme.

"The Sneeches" is about racism and prejudice. "Yertle the Turtle" is about opposing a dictator. "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" is about the overcommercialization of Christmas. Dr. Seuss did not write those stories to teach children a lesson or a moral. He wrote those stories to help them learn to read.

One of my favorite Beginner Books when I was a kid was "The King, the Mice, and the Cheese" by Nancy and Eric Gurney. To me, the message of the story is to think of the consequences before you act. The King loves cheese and gets infested with mice. His advisors bring in cats to get rid of the mice, then dogs to get rid of the cats, then lions to get rid of the dogs, then elephants to get rid of the lions, then mice to get rid of the elephants, and the King was right back where he started and came up with a better solution to the problem. It's an entertaining story with a simple theme and no one in their right mind would put them in the same category as Hemingway or Poe.

Theme: it's not just for great literature.

Snap is a Rock

A few days ago, I was surfing youtube looking for documentaries when I stumbled upon this fan video of Severus Snape set to Simon and Garfunkles "I am a Rock."



This is remarkably well done. The chosen clips match the lyrics of the song. An exception as most fan videos seem to be a mishmash of random images and clips set to the person's favorite song resulting in a total clash between sight and sound. *shudder*

Clicking through related videos, I stumbled across a rather alarming bit of Harry Potter fan fiction: Snape and Hermione in love. There's no link as I didn't see anything worth bookmarking or sharing.

I didn't know what to think about this. My first reaction was WTF? followed by "Ewwww... No! That's sick and twisted."

So of course, I had to go google it. Googling Snape and Hermione, I got a boatload of suggested completions. My search results turned up a whole community at fanfiction.net devoted to Snape and Hermione in love. And of course, mugglenet has about seven pages or more of Snape/Hermione stories. Apparently, there are quite a few people with this fantasy in their heads.

Which got me to wondering about fanfiction and how Rowling feels about this kind of thing. It's great that people love the characters so much that they envision other stories for them, but this line of story is contrary to the characters that Rowling created. And in order for it to work, the entire ending of Deathly Hallows has to be chucked out the window. It also removes Snape's motivation for everything he does throughout the series. And disregards the Hermione/Ron subplot.

I don't know why this bothers me so much. Maybe it's because these people have taken characters that I love and twisted them to fit their fantasy which is inconsistent with the way the characters are in Rowling's stories. And I really could have done without stumbling across it.

I don't have a problem with fan fiction that keeps the characters and the plots consistent with the authors intention. But fan fiction which has the characters acting inconsistently with the authors vision or rewriting the ending of the book, I can't get behind that. I think they should write their own story with their own characters.

What are your thoughts about this?

Nathan's First Paragraph Contest

For those of you who don't follow Nathan Bransford's blog, he is having a first paragraph contest with lots of really cool prizes for the finalists and the ultimate winner. Check it out here.

Go! Write! Win!

In the Jungle, the mighty jungle...

It occurred to me that most of my posts here are way too serious. A bleeping know it all is only a small part of my personality. I am much more like the dog in this youtube video: (If you haven't seen this before, swallow whatever you're drinking. Your keyboard will thank me.)

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Youtube won't let me imbed the code so you'll have to click the link to view it.

We now return you to your regular serious blog reading.

A Potential Market For Ereaders

Nathan Bransford is always going on about how much he likes his kindle and that ereaders are the way of the future. I tend to disagree with him on that as I really don't like reading stories or articles in an electronic format. Since I've been doing it since dirt was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth, it's not a matter of just getting used to the format.

Anyway, as I was writing my comment on his blog post of December 30th, a wild thought entered my head: What if ereaders were used to increase the literacy rate? A question I have been pondering ever since.

Back in the late 90's I homeschooled my son. If ereaders had been available then and etextbooks and classics in ebook format to go along with it, I would have bought one in a heartbeat for my son and had him read all his assignments on the ereader.

What I learned from trying to teach him is that everyone has a personal preference for acquiring information and experiencing fiction. If you take the same chunk of information and put it into print, audio, video, or computer text, a person will acquire that information faster from one of those mediums than the rest. My son's preference is for audio or computer text. My preference is for print and video.

I used to buy audiobooks for him instead of print books. He loved them. And when we were on long car trips, we played his audiobooks on the car stereo. But here's what's interesting, I could not follow the story. My mind would start wandering all over the place and when it would come back to the audiobook, I would have no idea what was going on. (I was driving so it wasn't that big of deal.) He liked Stephen King and Michael Crichton, so I know that if I had the print book to read, my mind wouldn't have wandered all over the place. It wasn't the story, it was the format that it was in.

Given that, it seems to me that we could get more people into reading and enjoying books if we got those people who "hate to read" to try reading ebooks. I'm guessing that a large number of those nonreaders will take to ebooks as they haven't print books, and that would mean more total books sales.

In other words, instead of trying to convert people who enjoy reading print books to reading ebooks, try converting nonreaders into ebook readers.

My wild thought for the day.

I wonder how I could go about testing this theory.

A Feel Good Moment for Me

One of the things that I really hate doing is sending out rejection letters. For Emerald Tales it was especially hard, most of the stories that I passed on were good stories, they just didn't quite fit the theme. I had to draw the line somewhere. I tried to be supportive and encouraging with those that I passed on, but it's hard to tell whether the recipients believed me or not.

Well, I got an email from Gail Taylor, one of the writers that I had passed on, thanking me for encouraging her even though I passed on her stories. She persevered and now has a collection of short stories out, "Tornado and Other Seasons: A Collection of Short Stories", published by Punkin House.

It feels good to know that my encouragement was received as intended and acted on. :)

Stupid Female Characters

I read a lot of thrillers and romantic suspense. One of my pet peeves is the stupid female character.

Here's the scenario: Female MC is a girly girl and, for the sake of this discussion, runs an art gallery. Male MC is a manly man and is a member of special forces, a navy SEAL, or similar bad ass. They're working together to find the bad guys. So, the bad guys corner them in a dark alley. The Male MC tells female MC to stay back while he deals with the bad guys. And then... stupid female MC GETS IN BETWEEN the male MC and the bad guys in order to protect HIM and screws up the encounter. At which point, I throw the book across the room and add the author's name to my do not buy list.

The reason for her doing this is because "she is just as capable of protecting herself as a man," and "she doesn't need a man to take care of her." Seriously, is the female MC crazy or stupid? This situation has nothing to do with a woman's ability to take care of herself. It's about making sure neither one of them gets killed.

If I'm in a dark alley with Steven Segal and we're confronted by bad guys, I'm staying behind him and watching his back. He's bigger than I am. He's stronger than I am. He has a black belt in martial arts. He has skills that I don't. That doesn't make me weak nor does it mean that I have to have a man take care of me. It means I am not stupid enough to think that I am better qualified than Steven Segal to confront bad guys with guns.

If I'm in that alley with Jackie Chan, the same goes. Even though I am bigger than he is, he has more skills and is stronger. I'm watching his back.

If you put Steven Segal and Jackie Chan in a dark alley facing bad guys, one would take the lead, the other would follow. They would NOT argue over who is stronger, better skilled, or who should take the lead. They would NOT get their knickers in a twist if the other one took the lead. They would work together as a team to defeat the bad guys, then go have a beer together.

If the female MC is a police officer, CIA agent, FBI agent, etc. and/or has martial arts training and is therefore equal or almost equal in skills to the male MC, then she can take a more active role including taking the lead.

Please spare me the girly girl defending the big bad Navy SEAL against the bad guys. sheesh

Ill Met By Moonlight - The Annals of Hypnosia

Heips!*

The January 2011 installment of The Annals of Hypnosia, "Ill Met by Moonlight", is now up! William Nonsyrname is on a quest in the Concealed Valley and encounters a mythic creature or two. Enjoy!

*"heips" is "hello" in Finnish.

Copyright Infringement vs. Plagiarism

Back in November there was a case of copyright infringement that got picked up by Neil Gamain and Wil Wheaton who tweeted about it and then all hell broke loose. During the course of the brouhaha many people mistakenly called it plagiarism.

Last week, the plagiarism case against J. K. Rowling was dismissed by the US Judge in the case.

Which leads me to talk about the difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Copyright infringement is when you take something someone else wrote and publish it in some format with the author's name but without the author's permission.

Plagiarism is when you take something that someone else wrote and publish it in some format with your name as the author.

The difference is in whose name is on the work. So if you published or sold the right to publish "Scribbles by the Scribbling Sea Sprite" without my permission, then you have infringed on my copyrights. If you published or sold the right to publish "Scribbles by your name", then you have plagiarised my work.

That's the basics. It gets more complicated than that and there are several books that go into it in depth: "Copyright Plain and Simple" by Cheryl Besenjak; "Literary Law Guide for Authors" by Tonya Marie Evans and Susan Borden Evans; and "The Copyright Permission and Libel Handbook" by Lloyd J. Jassin and Steven C. Schechter. I suggest purchasing those books and keeping them on your bookshelf.

What is interesting about the Cook Source's case is that recipes can not be copyrighted. The text discussing the recipe is and the name of a dish can be trademarked, but the recipe itself is not protected by copyright. If the editor had just published the recipes and written her own text, then she would have been in the clear.

As for the plagiarism case against Rowling, ideas can't be copyrighted. The execution of the story idea is copyrighted, but the idea itself is not. Why this is can be seen in Emerald Tales. Each issue has a theme or idea, and every story that I received was different from the rest. I don't have a single instance where two stories were similar enough to make me question the source of that story.

Off on a tangent because I don't want to write another post about facebook, I came across the following article about the pros and cons of facebook. The more I read about facebook, the less I like it.

Tension

Tension in a story is a good thing. In a book, it keeps the reader turning the page. In a movie, it keeps the audience on the edge of their seat. Can their be too much tension in a story and how do you know if you have too much. What is too much tension for one reader is just enough for another reader.

Back when I was studying the craft of writing screenplays, I learned that if you put too much tension in a movie that the audience will laugh when you cross the line into too much tension. It's like the human brain can only handle so much jeopardy for the main characters. When it gets to be too much the audience laughs to ease the tension they feel. The trick is to get to just that line and not go over it.

But what about for novels? I think that you can have too much tension, but where that magic line is can not be easily determined. Everyone has their own personal threshold for tension and fear.

I've read a few thrillers lately that I ended up flipping to the end of the book to see how it ends because I couldn't stand not knowing anymore. Most of the time, I flip back to where I was and continue reading secure in the knowledge that it will all work out in the end. In thinking about those times when I've flipped to the end, in every case all signs of hope for the main character were gone. It looked as if there was no way that the main character was going to survive. The deck was too heavily stacked against them.

But that is me. There are some readers who want to be taken to that place of hopelessness and tension.

What do you think? Can a book have too much tension in it?

Lisa Shearin

I love going to the bookstore. Since I read so fast, I am always in search of a new favorite author to add to my list. My habit is to walk... actually stroll... more like shift my weight from one foot to the other as I make my way down the aisle with eyes scanning the bookshelves until one grabs my attention. I stop, pull the book off the shelve, and read the back blurb. If it sounds interesting, I hold onto it. If not I put it back. Then continue walking... strolling... shifting from one foot to the other...

It was in this manner that I discovered Lisa Shearin three years ago. I picked up her first book, "Magic Lost, Trouble Found." I loved it. The prose was compelling to read. I couldn't put it down. The main character Raine Benares has an attitude that had me in stitches laughing. At the time, I was participating in a fantasy writers forum and raved about the book there.

Every trip to the bookstore after that included a search to see if she had published anything else. (And yes, I could have searched on Amazon or googled to find her earlier, but I like to browse in the bookstore. It doesn't take as long to go to the bookstore and walk up and down the aisles as it does to browse through the same number of books on Amazon.) At last I was rewarded with "The Trouble with Demons" which I also thoroughly enjoyed reading. I thought this was the second book she had written, but it turned out to be her third. And checking her website for this blog post, I see that she has five books out. I have "Bewitched and Betrayed". It's on my to be read pile. I'll have to order the other two.

And in the category of gee, it's a small world: when I read the acknowledgement page, her agent, Kristin Nelson, sounded familiar to me though I couldn't remember exactly why. It turns out, I've been following Kristin's blog, Pub Rants, for over a year. I didn't realize it earlier, because I've barely had time to keep up with my reading of blog posts, much less go through the links.

So, if you like reading fantasy and you like characters with attitude, then check out Lisa Shearin's "Magic Lost, Trouble Found." You can read the first two or three chapters of all of her books on her website.