Fiction Hack

As we come to the end of our series of NaNoWrimo special episodes, Ross admits, to Colin's horror, that he thinks this is a writing theory podcast! Then they go on to explore the difference between character and plot driven stories.

F. T. Kulpa and Wendell Mitchell Snow are both writers and NaNoWriMo enthusiasts. They have taken part several times each. In this interview they share their experiences about the process, how it is helpful and how to get the most out of NaNoWriMo.

Episode description not available.

Using theme and motif can be a great way to allow readers to enjoy your story on another level. It can also help focus your writing and add to that all-important NaNoWriMo word count! This week we discuss what we mean by using theme and motif.

Act structure is something that everyone talks and has an opinion about, but is it actually helpful when you are writing your story? No. No, it’s not. But maybe sometimes it is. Allow me to unlock the doors of the prison called “Act Structure” for you. It’s up to you if you leave…

Powers of Darkness is the recently rediscovered early draft of Dracula. Somehow, this early manuscript found its way into the hands of an Icelandic translator and was translated into Icelandic in 1900. For over a hundred years the Icelanders have been reading this book as Dracula, despite there being major, significant differences between the English version and the translated version. With a translation back into English, and a scholarly edition of Powers of Darkness now on the shelves, it is open to speculation as to the origin of these changes. Is this really an early draft, or just an embellishment of the original?

What was the first shared universe? The answer may be surprising (unless you listened to our last episode). Join us as we discuss the little-seen 1943 classic Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, as well as the following Universal Monster movies, and Ross compares Halloween as a kid in the US and the UK.

Why are the Universal Horror Movies important and why should we still talk about them today? Because believe it or not, the Hollywood movie industry is still making billions upon billions using the storytelling models that this specific series of movies developed that were kicked off over 85 years ago. Come inside and listen… if you dare!

Why are there so many Spider-Man Movies? I’ll tell you why there are so many Spider-Man movies! We do a box office and critical analysis of all of the Spider-Man movies up to the present day. Find out why the stories are recycled so much, why they keep recasting the character, and why he’s suddenly started showing up in the Avengers movies.

Who is Doctor Who? We continue to answer this question, covering the Third and Fourth Doctors played by Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, as well as Berry Letts.

Today we tackle and solve one of the eternal questions of humanity: what is truth? And what do we mean when we talk about truth and story? We have all the answers here for you guys. Seriously, we worked it out. You’re welcome.

So who is Doctor Who, anyway? It’s a fair question, and one that we have to travel 50 years into the past in order to answer fully. This week we pick up with the very first Doctor, mention very briefly “Dr. Who”, and blow through the Second Doctor–essentially all the black and white (and missing)episodes. Join us on a journey through space and time as we ask… who is Doctor Who?

Are you ready player one? Ross has read the book, Colin has seen the movie–can one convince the other to do the other? It’s a roundabout discussion that drifts into deeper waters as we question the value of nostalgia in the pursuit of truth.

We all think we know what we mean when we talk about protagonists and antagonists, but do we actually? Let’s dive deeper into the words’ origins… First up, as I hope I made clear, I am not using these two words in their conventional meaning. The accepted usage of “protagonist” today is simply “main character”. I think that this loses an important nuance, however, and one that we would have to invent terminology to redefine both protagonists and antagonists. Why go to that hassle when we can just use the old word in a new way?

What is the problem with Die Hard? It’s just a fun movie right? I mean, Bruce Willis is really good in it, Alan Rickman gives a career-making performance, and there are a couple cool explosions. What’s not to like? What’s the problem with Die Hard? Well… Full show note available on our Website: Fiction Hack: Episode 009

This week we are remembering Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, The Question, Rorshach, and much, much more. Just like the heroes he created and helped develop, Ditko was a mysterious, complex, and principled individual. Today we try to open a little of that up for you. Full Show notes available on our website: Fiction Hack: Episode 008

What’s this? Ross is the layman and Colin is the expert? Have we entered a mirrorverse? That would explain why both Colin and Ross are wearing dark goatees (Ross has a darker goatee on top of his beard–it’s weird). This week we talk Star Trek! Star Trek is massive. There have been 7 TV shows (including the Animated Series) totalling incorporating seasons, totalling 740 episodes. Additionally, there have been and a whopping 13 movies. I haven’t even tried to count the Star Trek novels. Here’s a list on Wikipedia, though.Star Trek novels have been published continually since 1967 and have had some pretty big names in SF associated with them. James Blish wrote the very first original novel called “Spock Must Die”, as well as episode novelizations. Multi-Hugo Award winner Joe Haldeman followed suit in the Seventies and since then Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Vonda N MacIntyre, and Greg Bear are more award winners who have penned ST novels.The best Star Trek novelisation that I’ve read is Star Trek: Federation by Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens. It’s a Original Series/Next Generation crossover which shows early Kirk scenes at the academy and also ties in the creator of the warp drive, Zefram Cochrane, and that’s who James Cromwell plays in Star Trek: First Contact, not Scott Bakula in Enterprise, that’s why I got confused. Anyway, 5 stars. I still like Star Trek: Generations, though. Doesn’t anyone else?Colin says that the Original Series’ (TOS) pilot, The Cage, is not canon, but that is not my understanding. Captain Pike appeared in The Menagerie episode of TOS, and no information given there conflicted with the pilot, in fact, much of it was confirmed. The reason that Pike did not appear later was not a story reason, but because the actor backed out. Pike appears in the novels and was recast as an integral character in the J. J. Abrams reboot. So there.Wow. There have been a LOT of fan-made Star Trek episodes and movies! By far my favourite is Star Trek Continues, both in conception and production. It’s a continuation of the Original Series, which works well being super low budget. They’ve even pushed the colours to match TOS, and the make-up and effects work is spot on. They even have a pretty good Shatner.Colin’s favourite episode is “The Inner Light” season 5, episode 25. The short story I couldn’t remember the name of is An Occurrence at Owl Creek by Ambrose Bierce. Read it. It’s good. It’s short.My favourite episode is season 6, episode 21 called “Frame of Mind”.

Marvel Studios is about to release its 20th movie, Ant-Man and The Wasp! As a long-time comic nerd, that blows my mind. Ant-Man is a very unlikely hero who has been around since the beginning and has a hard time keeping his own series. The Wasp has generally been a tag-along character to him. Along with Guardians of the Galaxy, he’s been one of the most obscure characters picked to headline his own movie. So who is Ant-Man and/or The Wasp? Who are they in the comics, and who are they in the movies? My Fantastic Four review site is called FF 1 by 1, and it is totally ongoing (even though I’ve been taking a break this year).The best info on comic characters (apart from me) is still probably Wikipedia. Here are the entries for Ant-Man and The Wasp.Peyton Reed isn’t a name you probably knew before Ant-Man, but he directed the first Bring It On (2000), as well as Yes Man (2008), and every episode of The Weird Al Show (1997). For those alone I will forgive him Down With Love (2003).My personal favourite tale featuring (the original) Ant-Man and The Wasp is Kurt Busiek’s 12 issue limited series Avengers Forever. Carlos Pacheco’s art is top tier and although it reaches deep into pre-90s comic lore, it’s friendly for a newcomer.I don’t know if I made it clear, but Hope Van Dyne did appear first in Marvel Comics, although not in strict continuity. MC2 (Marvel Comics 2) were a spin-off imprint from the late 1990s, created when Tom DeFalco (one of my personal favourite writers) was removed from marvel as Editor-In-Chief in 1994. Fan outcry (or, let’s say, demand) was such that Marvel gave DeFalco creative control over a small group of titles, MC2, which essentially showed how the key marvel characters would have progressed under his supervision. Spider-Girl, with Ron Frenz, was the forerunner success and became known as the comic they couldn’t kill after fan outcry (it really was an outcry this time) forced Marvel to rescind several cancellations–eventually going on to be Marvel’s longest-running female-titled comic, hitting 100 issues. Other titles were The Fantastic Five, J2, Wild Thing, and A-Next. Hope Van Dyne, as the daughter of Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne, appeared in issue 7 of A-Next as The Red Queen, leader of the Revengers, squaring off against Cassandra Lang (that name familiar?) a size-changing hero called Stinger.

As Russian playwright Anton Chekhov once said: “I’ve got a gun!” Why is this an important statement in the history of fictional narrative? And how does it relate to some sort of box that J. J. Abrams once got as a kid? (Hint: Alfred Hitchcock) The answers are inside… The Chekhov’s gun quotes are from Wikipedia: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.” Chekhov, letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev (pseudonym of A. S. Gruzinsky), 1 November 1889. “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” From Gurlyand’s Reminiscences of A. P. Chekhov, in Teatr i iskusstvo 1904, No. 28, 11 July, p. 521. The Hitchcock quote about suspense vs surprise can be found on Goodreads, but the book it is from is called “Hitchcock” by Francois Truffaut: “There is a distinct difference between “suspense” and “surprise,” and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean. We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!” In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.” The Damon Lindelof quote about Star Trek: Into Darkness is from Collider.com. I just found that it was originally from an interview with the LA Times: “[If I tell people who Cumberbatch plays, they know that they] would have a five-second rush of exhilaration followed by four months of being completely and totally bummed out that they can’t tell anybody else and that when it gets revealed in the movie, it will have been spoiled for them. That’s why they’re called ‘spoilers,’ they’re not called ‘awesomes.’” J. J. Abram’s TED talk is still up on their website, but I’ll also post it below. I’m still scratching my head about it. I don’t know, should I let it go?

This this episode Colin talks about why he does not have much time for Charles Dickens. Ross makes the case that while there is much to dislike about Dickens, there is also much to love.