Thanks for all the title help with my forthcoming novels about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain! I’m putting together a list of possibilities for my editor, and I’ll let you know the result, but it’s not too late. If title inspiration strikes, please let me know.<\/p>\n
On October 10, 2018, Superb\u2665Girl wrote, I have an idea for a story that has multiple themes: story-within-a-story; fish out of water; contemporary magic, etc. Something that is extremely important to the story is the sort of swashbuckling element I want to give it. But the thing is, I\u2019ve never really attempted to write anything action\/adventure-y before, and I\u2019m worried about it feeling blank. I don\u2019t want to write action\/adventure for action\/adventure\u2019s sake, but I want it to be important to the emotional aspect and the overall plot. I also want to give it sort of an old-timey feel, like romanticizing it with kindheartedness and chivalry. So, long story short (writing pun), does anyone have any tips for action-type themes?<\/em><\/p>\n Angie wrote back, I think that one way you can add the swashbuckling\/action element without it feeling like it\u2019s there \u201cjust because\u201d is to link it to some fundamental aspect of your MC\u2019s personality or past. (Perhaps her(?) father passed down a fencing foil and your MC learns about a secret life of danger that her father led, and this affects her own path and choices.)<\/em><\/p>\n For example, in The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya brought the swashbuckle to the story, and it was inextricably linked to his heart and character, as he needed it to avenge his father \u2013 his life goal. In The Three Musketeers, D\u2019Artagnon was determined to prove himself, and that manifested in daredevil, swashbuckling antics.<\/em><\/p>\n In my own WIP, my MC feels that she doesn\u2019t have any particular talent or outstanding cleverness, but she finds her place in protecting her friends because she is strong and quickly learns various defensive fighting skills.<\/em><\/p>\n If you can find the way that the swashbuckling, chivalry, and action is a part of your MC, I think you have every reason to include it!<\/em><\/p>\n And Poppie wrote, Superb\u2665Girl: I think you could have a lot of fun with that swashbuckling, action-adventure type of story! To help answer your question, let\u2019s take a look at this quote from the film The Princess Bride: \u201cDoes it have sports in it?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cAre you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles\u2026\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n That movie is very swashbuckling, and when in doubt, you can look at the quote and see what elements you could apply to your story. As an example, you would have to have some close-combat dueling in this type of story. Perhaps your hero gets into a fight with a criminal gang or his arch nemesis. He could use a sword, or martial arts, or magic (there\u2019s the \u201cfencing, fighting\u201d element to it). It could also apply to your hero\u2019s character. You mentioned a fish-out-of-water theme? Perhaps he comes from a city that promotes deeds of daring, and the city he currently lives in values quiet meditation above all else (there\u2019s a little world-building in that as well).<\/em><\/p>\n Something else that I highly recommend is reading books and watching movies in that genre to give you an extra feel to the world.<\/em><\/p>\n Great answers!<\/p>\n I\u2019m with Poppie that reading and watching the sort of books and movies in this genre will help. Specifically, you might try reading some contemporaneous Arthurian material. Here are two links to the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which dates from the fifteenth century: http:\/\/www.yorku.ca\/inpar\/sggk_neilson.pdf<\/a> and https:\/\/d.lib.rochester.edu\/camelot\/text\/weston-sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight<\/a>. There is a little hanky-panky going on, so maybe high school and up. And here\u2019s a link to the discussion on Wikipedia: https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight#Synopsis<\/a>.<\/p>\n A great read for charm and swashbuckle is Mark Twain\u2019s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\u2019s Court<\/em>\u2013one of my all-time favorites. Another I love is The Once and Future King<\/em> by T. H. White, a marvel of beautiful writing, among other things. Both, I think, are great for upper elementary and up\u2013worthwhile no matter how old you are.<\/p>\n Twain\u2019s novel was published in 1889 and White\u2019s in 1958. If we\u2019re going for old-timey, it helps to look at work that was created in an earlier period\u2013another reason to turn to contemporaneous sources. Being aware and a little\u2013unless we\u2019re really studying a period knowledgeable will give us options and will help with our world-building. Here are some questions we can ask ourselves:\u00a0How did people spend their days during the period? What were gender roles? Table manners? Diet? How did people regard children? How did they regard themselves? Did the idea of self differ between a lord, a merchant, a carpenter, a peasant? Did the idea of self differ between a lord and his lady, a peasant and his wife? I don\u2019t think we\u2019re going to find the self question resolved explicitly anywhere, but we can get hints. Then we decide what we want to keep and what we want to discard, using the complexity of what we learned. For example, we may decide to craft our MC in a contemporary mold for the sake of relatability, but we may make the lord of the castle pre-modern in his approach to everything.<\/p>\n Also, for movies, you might check out the oldies of the 1940s and 1950s that starred Errol Flynn, who could swash and buckle better than anybody.<\/p>\n One way to get the action\/adventure going is to make the scale big. My two books that fall most into the adventure category are my Bamarre books, The Two Princesses of Bamarre<\/em> and The Lost Kingdom of Bamarre<\/em>. Addie, the MC of Two Princesses<\/em>, is on a quest to find a cure for the Gray Death, which kills many every year. Perry, the MC of Lost Kingdom, is charged with freeing the Bamarre people from the oppressive Lakti.<\/p>\n The dangers in an adventure are real and physical. Addie has to face down monsters and for a while is held in a dragon\u2019s lair by a dragon who intends to kill her. Perry rescues children from a battlefield and is hunted by the wily and determined Lord Tove.<\/p>\n This doesn\u2019t mean there can\u2019t also be emotional and psychological struggles, too. Addie has to fight her shyness and timidity. Her father is a basket case of emotional frigidity and indecision. Perry is unbending and almost universally disliked. Her mother is cold and judgmental even though she loves Perry.<\/p>\n But contrast this with my contemporary novel, The Wish<\/em>, in which what\u2019s at stake is popularity. Popularity is super important to MC Wilma, and I think it becomes important to the reader, too, but it\u2019s all played out on a small stage.<\/p>\n We can use tone to make our action\/adventure work. Though every rule can be broken, and I don\u2019t want to get very prescriptive, in general, I think action\/adventure stories don\u2019t take themselves too seriously. Princess Bride<\/em>, cited by both Angie and Poppie, is lighthearted. Hamlet<\/em> has swordplay, too, but I wouldn\u2019t call it an action play or an adventure. In fact, it might be called a stalled-action play, and the tone is very dark. Just saying, there\u2019s neither swash nor buckle in making your girlfriend psychotic or killing an old man. I don\u2019t mean that an adventure story can\u2019t be serious, but there\u2019s a difference between serious and depressing.<\/p>\n In Hamlet<\/em>, the villains may be Claudius (the evil uncle) and Gertrude (AKA Mom to Hamlet), but they\u2019re not actively opposing Hamlet, the MC. They\u2019re more like the murderers in a mystery, trying to avoid discovery. However, generally in an action\/adventure, there is an antagonist\u2013human, fantasy creature, alien, natural force (like a fire)\u2013that the MC has to deal with. So when we build our action\/adventure, we can think about an antagonist.<\/p>\n I\u2019m with Angie that we need to consider the character of our MC. She doesn\u2019t have to be a derring-do sort at the outset, but she has to have that quality buried somewhere in her. When she\u2019s pushed against the wall and all her old, pacific tactics fail, she needs to be able to pull out the audacity she didn\u2019t even know she had. Or she can be a tough fighter from the start, but she can\u2019t be unbeatable, or the tension will collapse.<\/p>\n As for old-timey feel, I\u2019d use standard language if the story isn\u2019t contemporary and stay away from words like nerd<\/em>, geek<\/em>, rad<\/em>, and others that you know better than I do. But I wouldn\u2019t attempt terms that aren\u2019t in current use, like prithee<\/em> or dost<\/em>, and I\u2019d stick to modern spelling\u2013unless you have a Ph. D. in Elizabethan English and can get it exactly right. Having said that, it would be interesting to try thou<\/em> and thee<\/em> as the only deviation from standard English.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s summarize strategies, keeping in mind that every rule can be broken if the result works:<\/p>\n \u2219 Look at books, movies, and TV shows that exemplify the qualities we\u2019re looking for. Think about what we can take from them and use.<\/p>\n \u2219 Make the scale big and the stakes high.<\/p>\n \u2219 The most important risks should be physical and real (not emotional).<\/p>\n \u2219 The MC should have potential as a swashbuckler.<\/p>\n \u2219 The overall tone, the feeling that the reader is left with, shouldn\u2019t be depressing.<\/p>\n \u2219 There needs to be a tangible, external antagonist.<\/p>\n \u2219 The language in a not-contemporary adventure story should be standard English rather than colloquial.<\/p>\n And here are three prompts:<\/p>\n \u2219 Just saying, the expression \u201cchivalry is not dead\u201d is modern, so chivalry does still live. Write a chivalric, action story set in a climbing gym.<\/p>\n \u2219 This may seem like sacrilege, but take\u00a0The Diary of Anne Frank<\/em>\u00a0and change it from memoir to fantasy fiction by introducing one or more of these, or any other bit of magic: a dragon, a wizard, a fairy, a sword with magical properties, a flying horse, a cloak of invisibility. If you like, give it a happy ending. (Remember that the\u00a0Diary<\/em> is still copyright protected, and whatever you write can’t be published without the permission of the estate.)<\/p>\n \u2219 Pick a scene from Hamlet<\/em> and write an action spoof of it. Make the ghost, if he\u2019s in the scene, play a more active role. Think funny. Hamlet, in my opinion, is over the top, ripe for a takedown.<\/p>\n Have fun, and save what you write!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thanks for all the title help with my forthcoming novels about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain! I’m putting together a list of possibilities for my editor, and I’ll let you know the result, but it’s not too late. If title inspiration strikes, please let me know. On October 10, 2018, Superb\u2665Girl wrote, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[113,317],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1020,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019\/revisions\/1020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}