It’s Autumn in Oxford, leaves tumble from trees, the night air chills, and University staff prepare their annual ritual of running around while shrieking ‘The new students all look twelve years old.’
I can’t let this month go without a newsletter so I wanted to mention my time at WorldCon in Dublin where I spoke on a panel about virtual reality and storytelling. Outside the occasional foray into the Elite: Dangerous Universe I’ve hardly touched virtual reality, but I researched the history of film. Practitioners like the Russian Kuleshov developed a grammar for storytelling; they created meaning with edits and zooms, and my contribution outlined how virtual reality needs a similar grammar.
My belief is that we will develop the virtual reality tricks needed to tell stories in VR, but we need research and experiments and a healthy attitude to risk. Watch the small-scale indie game sector for future developments.
‘Lightmaker’ is shaping up well. I’ve done little beside editing this year, but it looks like the choice of editing technique is important. Twenty years ago I took a programming course. Students often spent ages staring at the screen while bug-hunting, but the tutor suggested we print out our code, and bugs miraculously appeared. A doctoral thesis might investigate our ability to process information on paper versus screens, but I suspect we enter a ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ mode when reading on line; we huddle under a deluge of information these days so we’ve trained ourselves to skim read. You’re probably reading this on a screen, so you might have skipped this part.
I printed my manuscript out and made corrections in pen. Problems like overwriting or unclear passages showed clearly on the printed page; my manuscript crawled with ink afterwards but I’d stripped out over a thousand words of excess and re-written troublesome passages for clarity. This technique may not work for you, but right now I’m smiling even though I’ve had no tea for hours.
The current plan is to complete corrections this weekend and use the Jericho Writer’s editing service to unearth any problems; as a rookie writer I may miss those subtle nuances which impede storytelling. If there aren’t too many corrections the novel reaches the proof readers in early November, and I’m hoping to publish around Christmas.
I don’t have a book of the month award set up, but I’ve read Donald Maass’s work ‘The Fire in Fiction’. Fabulous stuff, and great for spicing up your writing. One topic covered is the need for complex characters; a novel’s antagonist should be more than a bag of evil. He suggests adding some redeeming characteristics to a baddie: have him offer tea or pay compliments. Adding these subtleties to my major antagonist added a streak of realism to the whole work. ‘The Fire in Fiction’ deserves space on your bookshelf, even a virtual one.
Watch this space.