So few writers had the impact and influence Hemingway had on prose of the 20th century. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1954 for the short fiction piece, The Old Man and the Sea. His short, athletic, to-the-point style would go on to define how later writers looked at sentence construction and formatting.
Married four times with the final marriage ending with his suicide, attributed to hemochromatosis. He left behind a legacy in the words of his famed characters and his globe-trotting life style. Hemingway ultimately ending up in Idaho, in the town of Ketchum.
His writings are constantly on the “greatest books” list time and time again. Many are considered classics and taught in institutes of education all over the country. With novels such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell To Arms, For Whom The Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, among his best known. Also a master short fiction writer, particularly with the stories, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Hemingway set himself a part and it is this particular method of pulling from his own experiences that gave his novels and shorter fiction breath and liveliness.
As a degree holder in journalism, I’ve been directly influenced by Papa (as he like to be called, among many other names) and his short style of writing. Even though he only worked a short while at a Kansas City newspaper before traveling to Italy, and farther developing it through his many publications, the style he developed is familiar with almost every reporter in the world.
The life Hemingway lived has also had a big impact on how I see the world. He was a man’s man. Though he was known to be an introvert, such as myself, he threw himself into wild adventures. He would venture outside his comfort zone so much that he ended up almost dying in plane crashes—Twice. Consecutively.
The image that he kept around him, of the war correspondent, the deep sea fisherman, and African hunter fire the imagination. As a guy who grew up in small towns, Hemingway is larger than life. But I must remember that the time in which he wrote and lived is much different than my own. And when I do a sense of sensucht comes over me. But I feel that happens to many of my generation and it is Hemingway that triggers it for me.
Hemingway has also influenced me with my own style of writing and because of that I feel I am a stronger writer than had I not had his influence.
He’s one of the reasons I have a fascination with typewriters and enjoy working on one. The clack-clack of the keys have brought me joy since I began taking writing serious as a pastime. The use of a typewriter for short burst of writing makes me feel good once I pull the final leaf through the machine.
As the first in a series about select authors and how they have influenced me, I felt Hemingway was an obvious choice to kick off this series.
His life was full of such detail and vibrancy, even towards the end when he slowly faded into the shadows of his former glory.
Recently I had a friend reach out to me. He mentioned that he had a lot of stories inside him that he wanted to get out, but he just didn’t know how to go about it. It’s a complicated process—getting these living things that are bounding around in your head to live their lives on the page.
Having written for the majority of my life almost continuously with minor breaks here and there, and genre flipping and market jumping because my curiosity got the better of me, I learned an important lesson: Write scenes and experimentation only helps you grow.
There is a lot of work that goes into a story, or can go into a story far in advance of actually writing it. For nonfiction writers, this is basically the whole book, everything needs to be boiled down and condensed to understand the material and relate it to your audience in an easy to digest nugget, think about all the Idiot’s Guide books on all manners of topics.
Historical fiction and period pieces also require a Herculean amount of research just to make sure all those nifty details that you are including in the work are correct. For example, outside of alternative historical fiction, President Lincoln wouldn’t be listening to the radio because he ended up six feet under in 1865 and the radio wasn’t invented until much later, though the mathematical proof of wave propagation came about with Maxwell in 1864.
Even things that we might take for granted—wifi for the younger generation—We have to clarify and understand when they came about less we really want to mess things up. And even then we have to understand how they might affect our characters. If you’re writing a piece and they are just getting a radio, to continue the example, they would be amazed by it. I raise this point to get to another, namely, that looking into journal and newspaper articles and how people actually reacted to the invention of the radio can breathe a deep flushing life to your characters instead of them acting as though you might have grown up with the radio and never known a time without it.
I’m glad he reached out to me. I have a lot of knowledge to share on the craft of writing.
I remember when I was younger and took up photography. I used an analog system for the longest. I felt that it allowed me to create the truest image possible because I used real halide. But, and here is the true draw back for many, shooting film is expensive.
Writing a book and doing it off-cuff because you think that’s how it works is a total joke. When people start to write books, the failed abortions that are stuffed in the back of a draw or tossed into the trash are rightly so, shit.
Doesn’t mean the idea was totally bad, just the execution. You’re too green, which brings me back to my original topic, write scenes. Learn what actually works and how you can bend the rules. But learn those rules before you do.
No one likes a pretentious writer claiming that you the reader didn’t understand what they were saying because it happens to be too high of a bar for you to get. This is total bullshit. You understood the story. The story was crap, the idea was okay, but it ended up bogged down and lost any edge it might have had long ago. Write scenes. Write smarter, not harder… That’s your editor’s job. Write scenes and see what you have. Who knows you might just stumble upon a really kick ass idea and already have the basics out of the way. And don’t think of scenes as chapters. Scenes can be anything from chapter long actions to a four line packet of dialog that tells the reader a lot about the characters.
But keep on writing. Write scenes, write trash, write anything you can think of, but get it out.
Writing is hard. Not as hard as editing, but still really hard. Every writer I know has a billion potential stories in their head, but for one reason or another they never make it to the page.
That’s okay.
The ones that do are still a struggle either way. But developing a plot for a story can’t be that hard right? Most stories follow a basic outline. This outline is generally known as Freytag’s Pyramid, and we all know the structure having seen it all our lives: set up, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, and finally the resolution. This plotting structure can be seen from Greek myths to Shakespeare, plays to movies. It is significantly prevalent in our media.
A month or so ago, as I puttered around on the Internet looking things up that would add a little real world structure to my current project I stumbled upon the Now Novel site. Before tripping over the structuring concept that I’m about to relate I had already plotted a good chunk of the project out.
For longer works, I take events from history and drop the patterns that they created into my plot line and stitch them together. This process is similar to what George R.R. Martin uses in his Song of Ice and Fire saga.
Doing this allows me to create as much action and as many subplots as I want. I feel this also does a lot of heavy-lifting in creating a believable plot. History is your best friend when developing a plot for science fiction writing.
Let’s jump into the PATTERN plotting concept.
The PATTERN concept helps answer questions that you might have as you start your project and allows you to develop what type of universe your characters will exist in. PATTERN is an acronym that stands for Physics, Adventure, Technology, Transport, Environment, Risk, and Neologisms. So lets break these down and how they can help you formulate a plot that is constantly engaging your readers.
The physics of your universe helps tie everything together much the same as they do in the real world. But as you look at the physics of your universe, you have to ask yourself a few questions.
The main questions you have to ask are: Do the physics of your universe resemble the physics of this universe and whether or not significant breakthroughs have been made in space travel. When asking yourself these questions one answer can impact the other and its degree of constriction to the characters and the universe as a whole.
The adventure of your story is the plot when it gets boiled down. Without it, there’s nothing there for the reader to explore or your character as it were. The penultimate question when it comes to adventure is where is the story set. The setting for your story can be located in one location, like a generation ship, or depending on the physics involved, on multiple planets or universes.
There has to be adventure, there has to be change, there has to be challenges for your character. And all of this can be hammered out as you ask yourself more questions related to adventure and your character’s actions.
The next set of questions you have to ask yourself are about the technology. It is after all technology that allows the universe to really exist in most ways. Looking at early science fiction novels such as 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, or Frankenstein by Verne and Shelley respectively, without the technology the story wouldn’t have went anywhere.
Without the Nautilus Captain Nemo isn’t traveling any of the seas and instead is just standing on the beach staring longingly at the water. As with Shelley’s Frankenstein, had Victor not created his machine to bring The Monster back to life, well, he would have most likely ended up in jail because of all the grave robbing going down.
This is the same function that technology has to play in your story as well. If the story can happen without the technology then it’s not very science fictiony is it? In Ben Bova‘s The Craft of Writing Sci-Fi, he covers the differences between different types of fiction where science is predominant and what separates soft and hard science fiction. It’s taught me a lot. So check it out.
The main question you have to ask yourself when developing your story is whether or not the technology that your characters have is ahead of, or behind our current technology. And even this question can lead to a lot of other questions that might produce something of a spacefaring-steampunk-post-apocalypse story that you never knew existed in you.
Along with technology, another big factor in your project will be transportation. Transportation is one of my favorite things to think about when developing a story almost to the detriment of the characters– there’s so much that can be explored with transportation. Just look at how our own transportation has evolved over the years as more technology is developed. The biggest question you have to ask, is how do the transportation types in your universe help or hinder your character and what can go wrong with them. Are they similar to what we have now, if not, how have they changed?
Environmentis the universe. For my current project, I know that my characters are going to be dealing with a large section of our solar system. Specifically they are going to have to deal with the environments aboard large ships, Earth, Mars, Venus and a few moons of Jupiter. This is where some of the hard science that I love so much comes into play.
Whenever I watch the show Futurama I always get a kick out of them visiting a new planet and just walking around on the surface with no protective gear and think to myself, man it sure is beneficial that the atmosphere is predominantly oxygen a good chunk of the time. Since I will be dealing with three planets of which we know the atmospheric conditions to a large degree I have to dig into all the information so as my characters can interact with it in a realistic manner. When designing your environment think about how your characters have developed it for their use. Are they still in the fragile first stages of colonization, or have they terra-formed it already?
The risk involved in your story affects everything but is also reliant on everything else. The easiest way to maintain the risk in your story is by asking yourself a simple question: How can things go wrong?
Though your characters might like living in a world where everyone is at peace and the universe is just one big happy family, but no one wants to read about that. I certainly don’t. How can you almost destroy their lives within the universe? In my current project I have everyone on a massive vessel traveling from Mars to a distant moon. What can go wrong during this time to put everyone at risk and force my main character into action? That’s the question I have to ask myself with each scene. How screwed-up can this get?
The last portion of the plotting concept is neologisms. Or how has language changed, or how has it developed in your universe. Many popular science fiction writer create new words to describe the world in which their story inhabits and you can do the same. Sometimes it will be required to do this as there just isn’t a current word that does the job. I suggest looking into Greek or Latin root words or even pulling out a dictionary and looking at the etymology of related words and go from there. Who knows you may well introduce a word that sticks around for centuries and becomes common.
Putting together the PATTERN concept will help you flesh out more about your story and even help you possibly create even more stories from a single universe than you had originally hoped for. I suggest giving Now Novel a click and seeing what other interesting topics you can come across as you develop your novel. You never know when something will set a story off that has the potential to be the next big sci-fi break out.
So few writers had the impact and influence Hemingway had on prose of the 20th century. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1954 for the short fiction piece, The Old Man and the Sea. His short, athletic, to-the-point style would go on to define how later writers looked at sentence construction and formatting.
T. Simpson Writes 