Writing: Avoiding the well-worn path
Always avoid rewriting versions of books that already exist, because those authors already did wrote them better than you ever can.
I was visiting Powell’s City of Books the other day, walking through the aisles, picking up books at random, and flipping through them out of interest. I came to the conclusion that all these books are the same. All the books across genres were written in the same way, using similar language to describe the events of the story. Granted, I was choosing books that I knew were going to be particularly middle of the road—no Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck, Neumann, Eliade, I was looking at the cartoonified modern book covers with some insignificant person on the cover, the completely insignificant titles, the uninteresting settings, uninspiring characters, and clichéd plot.
When flipping through, I noticed the language is all the same. Speaking mainly about narrative works, the language is very similar.
1. Overused dialogue: Said, replied, asked, whispered, shouted.
2. Basic action interaction words, opened the door, ran down the street, entered the room, sat down in the comfy chair.
3. Mundane Description, The sky was gray and raining, the house was old and dirty, the room was small and dark.
4. Uninspiring internal states, he was angry, he thought about ___, her heart raced.
5. Even the sentence structures are boring, there’s no rhythm, (noun) did (action) (adjective) (Object).
The same plot structures, that were once good, but have been rewritten so many times anything new coming out is completely mundane.
1. The “chosen one” Hero’s journey, where a person is picked for some reason—think hunger games, divergent, the giver, half of all YA fantasy. We could have stopped at Harry Potter and the world would be better off.
2. All the romance “plots,” love triangles, enemies to lovers, loving vampires, etc.
3. Some character that was supposed to be dead actually isn’t dead this whole time.
4. Evil villain explains his entire plot instead of killing the main character, leaving just enough time for him to escape.
5. Person gets powers and becomes good at everything.
6. It was all a dream.
7. Flashbacks that no person would ever have because that’s not how flashbacks even work, people get visions not a full description of everything that happened in a 10-minute timeframe.
These structures can be done correctly, but they have been rewritten so many times, the reader can easily recognize what kind of story it is, which kind of ruins the point.
I don’t even have a single finished product, so all I can say is I’m trying to avoid recreating the overused plot structures, and uninspiring descriptive language. Authors sometimes use the terminology “With a twist,” meaning it is essentially the same as another book, but slightly different in some way. The problem is you can only twist a plot so many times, before writing anything new becomes impossible.
One of my favorite series growing up was Artemis Fowl, which Eoin Colfer described as Die Hard with fairies. Looking back at it, the plot was still really good, I really liked the world building of the LEP recon, and the magical underworld, even though the character development of Artemis for example was very clichéd. Supergenius knows everything is very classic. My sense for why I liked that series so much was the immersion. I was there with Artemis and Butler, setting up the trap at the ancient Oak tree, with Holly as she woke up alone in the underground concrete cell, with Butler as he almost dies and comes back to defeat the troll, watching the Bio-Bomb as it sped towards Fowl Manor. It was really the immersion that carried the story. I as the reader, got to live inside that interesting world as the events unfolded.
Coming away from that, there is very little to do with the character that I go back to, Artemis is just overly smart teenager, and nothing more really. Butler is just big strong guy, also clichéd. What drives the story is really the reader’s immersion in the events of the story.
I really like this idea of immersion, taking the reader into this new world you’ve created for them, building visions in their mind as they work their way through the book. These visions I often refer to as themes, can be about almost anything, but come from straight out of my subconscious, and are recorded in my notes.
While writing this, I took a look in my themes folder and found a good one that might shed some light as to what I mean. The title of the Theme is “Knew the symptoms.” This is referring to the experience of someone who knows they are dying, in the throes of addiction, or disease, and there is nothing they can do about it. They logically know what these symptoms mean, before the inevitable happens. Its a powerful vision when articulated properly, and I can never do it justice, but visions like that happen occasionally. This one in particular happened while I was driving to work a few months ago. When I mentioned immersing the reader into the new world, I don’t mean merely a new physical world, Narnia for example, I really mean into the experienced world.
In the Maze runner, when Newt is screaming, begging Thomas to kill him, he is experiencing the actual hell of living inside your own mind, not in control as you destroy everything you see with your fellow cranks. The reader is immersed in Newt’s experience, not really in the dystopian hellscape around them.
This idea of immersion inside the experienced world is really powerful, and goes to the core of what good stories are really supposed to be about. How well does a story pull off the immersion, how well does it do the experience of the character, and how well does it do the world building? Anyways, back to writing my own story, that does none of these things at the moment. I will get there one day. Probably not with this story, but this is meant to help with the worldbuilding and language for a different story I want to take a couple years on. The plan is to finish this short story this year, and spend 2 years writing the story I want to actually publish.
In the editing process, I want to rewrite this story with a new created english dialect, I have some of the wording put together for later, but I’m focusing on getting the plot correct first.
Chapter 5:
The endless caves of ice had a way of pushing a man to his destination. The twisting, warping tunnels, forever closing in around Halliday and his sled, were pushing him to go faster, each bend in the cave he took almost sideways, rocketing through the developed trails towards his destination. Eventually, the work of the massive industrial shavers ended, evidently the miners didn’t plan on being in this area for more than a few years. This land was as a much lower elevation than where he had been in Fairview, and his ears were in the transition period, hurting, but not popping yet. Glancing around, he began to notice more intersections from adjoining cave systems, as well as peculiar air pockets pockmarked in the ice, extending from the floor, as if the air was trying to work its way higher and higher, and the pressure was slowly moving the ice out of its way until finally, it would reach the surface. John looked back in the direction he had come, only his own sled’s track was present on this trail, evidently no miner had passed this way in a couple of days, and the frost had been allowed to creep in and fill the markings made by a passerby.
About 10 miles left before the settlement, he would have to dismount and start on foot soon. Most mining settlements had one or two scouts roaming the caves a couple miles down the trail, the purpose was to get back to the settlement if any danger was approaching and warn the miners, so they could assemble into a significant fighting force if necessary. These scouts, John knew, would often set up a permanent spot watching one of the main trails, a couple miles out of town. They key for the approach would be to act nonthreatening and alone, and making it clear his only purpose was to trade with the mining settlement.
John dismounted and slid his blades into place, dropping into the trail basin with the precarious pack, hefting it to his shoulders. He approached the likely area where the scout would be camping quickly, flicking the walking attachment in and out expertly anytime he took a step uphill. Sutble changes in the trail told him he was nearing the location of the scout’s hideout.
Ahead of him, the trail rose abruptly for a couple hundred feet, the top of the incline was a full barrier. It was unusual, a full security checkpoint for this miner’s camp seemed like overkill, apparently they were keeping security tighter around these parts.
As John hiked up the hill, a growing sense of unease began to fill the cavern. No sound came from the checkpoint, no moving about, the gate was still locked. Lifting his pack over the gate, John stepped around to the man door, cracking open the door, gun in hand. The man lay facedown in a frozen pool of blood, his limbs stiff it had been some time since this gate was operational, at least a few days.
(More has to be added here, what exactly John does with the body I don’t yet know, I originally had John approaching and making coffee for a sleeping scout, but that was boring, and there had to be some significant upset in the miner’s camp on John arrival anyways. It made more sense for him to find the ambushed scout, haul him into the outskirts of town, get into someone’s house, and make the coffee in there. The scene starts off again when John is in town, after dealing with the body, he finds a house on the outskirts and enters it to get out of the biting cold.)
There was only one room in the place, that served as a kitchen, living room, and bedroom, a single gangly fellow, wrapped in a dirty burlap sack, sleeping off whatever festivities he had partaken of the night before. A loud wet snore echoed up the tunnel to the cave entrance, and John stopped trying to sneak into the room. The chance of waking anyone up was low, this man was clearly incapacitated.
John laid his towering pack onto the ice, and dug around for his stove bottom and fuel. The ride had been grueling, as soon as the developed trail ended, he’d been jounced up and down and sideways until his back and behind were badly bruised, his tongue tasted of blood. Taking care not to wake the drunken man, John built up a sizable fire, putting coffee on to boil, and sat back, considering. In his pack, he had brought many trinkets, tools, and tequila for the miners, a pelt of sealskin the miners would use for insulation, better flooring, liners for their waterproof jackets, and any other waterproofing-related use they could think of.
The coffeepot was starting to steam, not quite there, but John poured a cup nonetheless. It was just about strong enough to grow hair on a man’s chest, really make his eyeballs open wide. Another sizable scoop, that would make it just about right. The fuel was scarce, so when the coffee had finished, John replaced it with a frying pan, and began frying frozen strips of bacon. The crackling as the bacon fell on the pan woke the sleeping man, and he came off his bedroll with a shout.
Throwing his dirty sack aside, he jumped up, his half sleeping, drunken body shot full of adrenaline, eyes rolling. He ran at John, panicked, and stepped near the coffee pot, slipping comically on the ice, landing hard, and scrambling up. John’s chuckle filled the cavern.
“What’s the matter there friend? You seem to be a little unsteady..”
The scout was breathing hard, still staring wildly at John’s nonchalant figure, warm in front of the fire.
“Come and have a seat by the fire, coffee’s hot, and we’ll have a long ride waiting for us in an hour or so.”
He tried to make his voice nonthreatening and friendly as possible, but there were a myriad of reasons this man might just try killing him then and there. Shifting his coat slightly, John deliberately exposed one of the guns in his left shoulder holster, making sure his hands appeared far away from the firearm.
His beady eyes darted down to the pistol, then around his vest, evidently noting several other gun profiles through the blue cloak, and the single tied down pistol. The thoughts of killing this apparent trespassing saddle tramp left him gradually.
There was a common courtesy among men in the north, if you saw any fellow with more guns than limbs on their person, you tended to me a little more polite to said gentlemen. This man was no troublehunter, and he stared at John and his pistols warily.
“Just what you think you’re doing, sneaking in here? This is trespassing, I might have grabbed for a gun, or my lance.. Who do you think you are anyways? Coming in here uninvited..”
“I was told this was all property of Crawfield, its no more your property than mine, no offense…” John shifted onto his other side to warm it up better. “But I wasn’t sneaking, I opened an unlocked door, dropped my pack to the ground, and lit up this fire here. I even boiled a pot of coffee for us, supposing we can come to some agreement.”
The man’s breath jittered with suppressed shivers as he stood over John, his sealskin undergarments exposed to the cold outer air, the once warm burlap sacking in a heap on the ice. He stepped a little closer to the fire, reaching for his pack, putting on his insulated pants and outer coat quickly.
John purposely made no move to complicate the situation, this man was no fighter, and the adrenaline was already wearing off. He was coming to accept the new status quo, and would be unlikely to try anything rash so quickly. The bedraggled man in front of him was the worst kind of miner, a brooding, conniving manager, he would try to stick a knife in John’s back sooner or later.
“I came rode out here last evening from Fairview, selling the goods in my pack here. I’ve got tools, one doublejack, bits and the like, a pelt of skin, and some other odds and ends. I heard you were a wild bunch, and I’m not one to judge another man’s ways, but I’d like to sell my goods without getting my hide stretched, so maybe you could help me out, give me directions on where I should be going to sell this load of gear.”
The coffee and frying bacon evidently looked inviting, and the man could see no reason not to drink his fill. He slowly reached for the pot, filling a cup with the black steaming coffee.