These are notes I took from a wonderful writing symposium called Life, the Universe and Everything. We have a lot of talented people in Utah and visitors with a great deal of knowledge. Any Misinformation is the fault of the note taker.
How do you use tropes and clichés to your advantage in your fiction?
– Like to use archetypes. When tear away overlying infrastructure get the fun idea.
– Take something they are expecting (girl tied to the railroad track) then change the result to be different such as the person wakes up. The dragon is too old to eat the virgin. The knight does not like dimples and doesn’t want to fight him.
– Shawn the sheep> video.
– UFO land on earth and collect sheep poop for fuel
– Kid goes to a fantasy world and assumes he is the hero with a promised destiny and then finds out that he is actually the villain.
Q: what techniques to draw the reader into the story quickly.
– Need to have a conflict better. Spiderman makes a better costume.
– It is a buffy beginning which means it is not the real reason behind the story.
– Start out with a bang. Start with the day the character changes.
– The story starts with a surprise. The story opens up with one boy asking the other while they are being shot with arrow> is this the fifth or sixth time this week?
– Pull the reader into a deep penetration into the head of the character with a plot point or cool description.
– Check out the book: character and viewpoint.
– For adventures how are they different by an audience between middle grades and adult?
– Kids don’t care about certain theme/ subject.
– Middle grade tends to be focused on individual character, friends, and family. The second the number of motivates and the complexity of motives and level of the grey area.
Q: favorite adventure stories and why?
– The Book of Boy by Catherine Gilbert Murdock is set in 1135. A year after the black plague
– Deep series, the last knight
– Dave butler adventures series. The girl in the plain brown wrapper A guy solves difficult cases.
– My diary from the edge of the world. The god Zeus is on CNN.
– Sight series by Neal sucherman> no one dies anymore.
– Tribology: Insignia Series by S J cancade.
– Advice for new writers:
– Find the place where your imagination and what readers like to intersect.
– Who are the people that will get what I am doing?
– What is the thing that your story will stand out from other books?
– Need to have fun with our own story and that will echo to the reader.
Q: elements to include making an adventure fun?
– Is there enough danger that someone is going to get hurt or not win? You level of peril does not exceed the jokes you make on it.
– Fun maybe through dialog
– Want to have cool fantasy elements. Fantasy brings in the troops of that world.
Q: how carry a level of adventures through to the end of a series or to the end of one book?
– The characters need to encounter all types of things along the way. Think of the examples of mini-adventures in Lord of the Rings to the two hobbits getting to Mordor. Something happened in book one. two. Three. If going on a quest> find things along the way
– What were all the individual things to do to for the heist in the movie Oceans 11 like the Mormon boys as part of the team? And there might be a challenge on each one.
– Got a hero. You hero has a problem. Tried to solve the problem. Does not succeed but fails. Have the hero fail miserably to solve the problem and almost destroys the hero. Hero has to rebuild themselves.
– Scott Meredith> skeleton plot outline fixes the middle. https://livesensical.com/writing-fiction-scott-meredith-algis-budrys-plot-skeleton/
– How to get around a lot of traveling. If the traveling serves a purpose then keep it, if not cut it and maybe just reference it. If the only reasons for traveling chapters to point a to be then cut it.
Q: how make plots go for the darker side?
– You know what a character fears, loves, hate. Understand their emotional stakes and then push them to the limit. I.e.: one kid has two people he can rely on and those two people re removed.
– What would be the real thing that would destroy them? It is something that is very important to you that get destroyed. Rapunzel discoverers her mother is not her mother. Or Frodo and Sam looking out at the obstacles they have to pass to Mordor.
– Can’t read text that is all downers for the long term. It exhausts the reader. If it is dark dark dark, long term, people bow out. Needs to stretch reader to edge and then bring them back from the dark.
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