Adventures in Genre-Hopping: Dissection

"Mediocre writers borrow, great writers steal."

--T.S. Elliot

I think Pablo Picasso said something similar: "The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal."

I don't plan to plagiarize, here, just for the record. Writers steal all the time, and it's perfectly legal, if you know how to do it right. I'm not stealing other people's works or words and passing them off as my own.This is research of the market and of the genre. To be able to write a time travel novel, I need to understand a time travel novel.

Joanna Penn wrote on her blog: 

• Steal ideas. Read other people’s works, or look at other people’s art work. If you like an idea, ruminate on it, muddle it around in your brain and see where it ends up. Write the same idea in your own words and you can bet it will be a different story or a new angle on it. Steal other people’s experiences and write about them for plot. Steal their words as they speak to help your dialogue. How many books about the end of the world are there? How many unrequited love stories? How many quest adventures?

So I want to take some of my favorite time travel stories that I've read so far, and find out what makes them tick. Have you ever taken something apart and put it back together, just to see how it works? (Neither have I. I'm not mechanically inclined, but I hear some people do this.)

This involves the following steps:

1) Read books

2) Choose a few that are excellent

3) Read them again, looking for structural elements

4) Write those elements down

5) Analyze them. Do you see any patterns? Have these structures been used by more than one author? What works? What would you change?

So I'm mapping out a few stories. The notes I'm making (the parts that I'm "stealing") are things like: 

Mentor is in conflict with main character's Norm

Call to Action

Main character tries to return to Norm, but encounters disaster

etc...

So, for Back to the Future, I might start off my notes with:

Main Character in the Norm (good things and bad things) and receives object that will help later

Main Character is introduced to time travel

Main Character inadvertently time travels (without being fully prepared)

Main Character changes the future, which would destroy the Norm

Main Character seeks out Mentor

MC and Mentor use object to formulate plan

etc...

**Spoiler for Back to the Future I (you know, from 1985...)**

The Mentor is Doc Brown in this particular story, but it could be any knowledgeable character. The "object" is something I didn't even notice until I started paying attention to the structure of the story: it's the flyer that Marty gets from the crazed lady in front of the clock tower. That flyer has information on the lightning strike that will help get him home near the end of the movie. Marty only keeps the flyer because his girlfriend wrote a phone number on it (because why else would a teenage boy carry around a flyer to "save the clock tower"?)

****

Hopefully, I'll figure out a plot structure that is totally awesome and works for my characters and my ideas. Once I have my basic time travel ideas and characters created, I'll see if I can plug their particulars into these structures. It might work, it might not, but I'll be able to see my story in a new light.

Part of me thinks I should map out some good stories from other genres...maybe mystery or thriller. Thoughts?

For now, I'm going to let these ideas simmer on the back burner.

Do you ever think about the structure of a story? Besides structure and basic plot, what does a story need?

Adventures in Genre-Hopping: Practice

I'm still researching time travel and part of that involves practice. I wanted to play around with time travel on the page. (It's kind of like, I can study basketball and the game and the rules and even physics all I want, but if I never touch a basketball, I'll never be any good at it.)

So I've decided to write a short story anthology. My goal in 5 short stories.

So far, I've got two stories written, with basic revisions done. I have a beta reading them now. Hopefully, I'll get some good feedback and make some changes before writing my next short story.

These shorts won't hit the shelves right away. Once they're written and revised, I plan to submit each story to some scifi/fantasy magazines to see if they can get published. Hopefully, I can get some good feedback from the editors and maybe even readers of these publications, and of course, I'd love to make a sale if possible.

My first story (I'm calling it PROXY for the time being) is pretty short. It just explores a paradox of time travel: If you go back in time and kill someone vital to your existence, what happens? Why would you do that?

You see this all the time in time travel fiction: Marty McFly nearly un-makes himself by coming between his parents in the 50s.

Going back in time and killing your grandfather is a classic paradox of time travel theory. Some believe it can't be done. Others believe you'll create an alternate universe. I found a video of a physicist who explained the paradox using mathematics (which I thought was fascinating). His theory was that if you go back in time and kill yourself, you would cease to exist--as in, you were never born. (The nerd in me thought this was so freakin' cool.)

Whenever this paradox comes up, I always wonder: Well, why would you want to kill your grandfather, anyway? Or kill yourself?

So Proxy sort of explores that a bit. It's not exactly upbeat, but it was interesting for my little nerd brain to write.

The second story I wrote (which I'm calling TIME KILLER because I'm super-inventive like that) is about a serial killer with a time machine. The story follows a female homicide detective as she chases down a killer with a time machine. It's short. I mean, 6-8,000 words just wasn't enough to fully explore this situation. I may have to expand it into a novella or write other stories to really dig into this thing. It was SO much fun to write!

What short stories would you like to see in my time travel anthology?

Adventures in Genre-Hopping: Theory

Oh, man. I am such a nerd. I seriously love this stuff.

I figured, if I'm going to write science fiction, I should probably understand the science behind these stories, right?

I took a physics class in college: ONE class: Astronomy. It was a great class. My professor knew so much and he covered several topics within physics, including the theory of relativity. I understood a lot of the basics that Einstein explored, but the overall concept of time travel eluded me.

So I turned to wikipedia.

This information was familiar, but more in-depth. I took a lot of notes and tried to put this stuff into layman's terms for myself later. I think I get the theories, and I see where I'm going to have to fictionalize a lot of this stuff for the sake of fiction. But wow. It's just interesting!

I also found a cool website called World Science U, where you can watch college-level lectures on a variety of sciency subjects. They have time travel! Or at least the theory of time travel. I'm learning a lot from this guy, and he explains it in a way that makes sense, which is pretty helpful.

I'm not sure if this experience makes me feel smarter or completely out of my depth.

Do you have any questions about time travel and how it works? What should I know before I dive in?

Adventures in Genre-Hopping: Research

I want to dive into the genre of Time Travel. I love Doctor Who and Back to the Future, so this genre is exciting to me. Nothing is off-limits! I can travel back to ancient times, or I can go back to the 1990s. I'm not sure which would be scarier to write about, to be honest.

So, I'm thinking the first step would be research. I've gathered a bunch of different books and movies. Here are the titles I've gone through so far:

Movies:
Back to the Future movies (my all-time favorite movie trilogy ever!)
Somewhere in Time (an older time travel romance with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour)
The Time Traveler's Wife
Groundhog Day (If you haven't seen this comedy, it's one of my favorites)
Terminator series (which I had never seen before, but my sister was kind enough to get special versions of the entire series for me!)

Books:
Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card (very science heavy)
Timebound by Rysa Walker (young adult)
Remembrance by Michelle Madow (this was more of a reincarnation story)
Tempest by Julie Cross  (YA with multiple time streams--this plot could get messy in the sequels, but I'm intrigued!)
Nick of Time by Ted Bell (AWESOME middle grade adventure story with pirates and nazis!)

I'm open to suggestions. What are your favorites?

So there are different theories about time travel... difference approaches. 

In Back to the Future, Marty changes the past and immediately starts to notice changes in items he brought with him from the present/future. This is an open loop--anything he does can change history

In The Time Traveler's Wife, no matter what anyone does, the future is the future. There's nothing they can do to prevent things from happening. This is a closed loop.

Terminator did a mix of both, which I thought was really creative. It's closed loop at first, and everything Sarah Connor does eventually leads to the future she's familiar with.... until she changes things. Sarah deliberately changes the future and I LOVE that she was able to do that. A great alternative.

But I really (really, really) loved the way Pathfinder kind of took these two approaches and just tore them apart. The characters would receive a message from the future and change what they were going to do to prevent, say, a bar fight. The bar fight never happens. Then they sit and discuss whether or not they need to go back in time and warn themselves not to get in the bar fight. 

Well.... the fight never actually happened, so there's nothing to warn us about. Right?

They get into these deep philosophical conversations about reality and destiny, but it's all completely hilarious because the characters are just as confused as the reader. I'd just like to say that Orson Scott Card is a master of science fiction.

I'm not sure I can pull that off. Card has been doing scifi forEVER and he knows this stuff inside and out. The thought of tackling this level of time travel theory is really intimidating. 

But when it comes to open loop or closed loop, I'm DEFINITELY for open loop. What's the point in time travel if you can't change anything? I believe that people have the ability to do things for themselves, to change their destiny, and make their own paths. So, I think I'll write something closer to Back to the Future, rather than Time Traveler's Wife. (I just hated the sense of helplessness.)

I also liked Timebound. Not only did Walker explore one of the creepiest men in history, she made her character give up everything when she went back in time. As in: If I go back in time, my boyfriend won't know who I am when I come back home. I loved this! If you're going to time travel, that's a huge amount of power and responsibility. There needs to be a lot of risk and sacrifice.

So that's where I am right now. 

What should I read next?