How Star Wars impacted my thinking on stories

AuthorAppleton on September 7, 2015

I was probably around nine years old. I remember sitting in my grandfather’s living room, my eyes glued to his television. He had an extensive collection of VHS tapes and he was fond of science fiction. That day he played Star Wars: A New Hope… and with a few swings of his lightsaber Alec Guiness convinced me that Ben Kenobi was the coolest sort of hero.

Yep, I’ve been a fan ever since! I love looking back at that moment when I saw Star Wars for the first time. I can recapture that sense of amazement experienced only in that first moment of discovery. I already loved stories. I read extensively and wrote quite a few of my own fictional pieces, yet up to that point I think space opera and fantasy had not entered my realm of creative thinking. My first brush with anything close to it had been Pilgrim’s Progress, an allegory of the Christian life that feels fantasy-ish.

In Star Wars I recognized the value of different strong personalities in story. Han Solo of course would not let anything water down his swashbuckling attitude. He opposed everyone on his team and loved everyone at the same time. Ben Kenobi took every perilous encounter in sober stride, wisely weighing the consequences of his actions and of those around him. He was feeble yet in his eyes was a playful, indomitable will. He would not be denied. Even R2D2 and C3PO possessed unique personalities that made them generationally memorable.

To my young mind these characters were the catalyst for an amazing array of story possibilities. I remember staying up late at night telling my own Star Wars spinoff stories to my brother and sister. In childish fun these spinoffs often degenerated into silliness. (I remember one particular tale where Princess Leia met up with Emperor Palpatine and turned her own powers on him, thoroughly decimating him).

Looking back I realize that all of those silly spinoffs were the continued growth of my creativity.

Star Wars stories helped me realize that storytelling has no limits except those that we place upon it. What you imagine, you can create. What you fear, you can face. What you aspire to be, you can become. Strange places that don’t even exist, you can visit.

The imagination is limitless and its power is exploration to reveal to us the elements of story that matter to us. The elements of story that define the choices we make. The characters whose interactions help us understand how we want to interact with people in real life. The characters that help us understand why we find certain people more interesting than others.

Q: How did the stories you enjoyed as a child impact the person you are today?

 

Choices and Your Destiny

AuthorAppleton on August 31, 2015

You are the sum of your choices, not the victim of your circumstances. Some folks attribute the person they become to the way they were raised, the opportunities they had, who their role models were. But history is replete with people who came out of nothing, even out of bad circumstances, and  rose to greatness. The truth is more challenging than that and understanding it enlightens us as to how heroes come to be.

What separates the average person from an individual who stands out is the choices they make. This is key in writing. You cannot root for a character that wallows in self-pity, yet you can root for one that rises above the muck to follow conscience and vision.

When I was growing up I refused to let discouragements push me away from my dreams and my spiritual convictions. My parents always told me to dream big and to never stop believing that I could fulfill those dreams. I failed many times, of course, yet God would always put me back on track when I made the right choices again.

I hit a rough patch when I left home to join the work force. Starting when I was sixteen the people I spent hours with at work each day did not share my Christian values. Many of them were good people yet they did not understand my convictions. Constantly my convictions were challenged and I discovered that people really do try to pull you into fellowship with their sins. Otherwise you make them uncomfortable. Many times others offered to pay my way into a strip club or go and get drunk. “You don’t know unless you try,” they’d say.

I do not recall these things to build my esteem in your eyes, but rather to remind and warn. Choice governs our destiny. I made some poor choices during that time that set me back spiritually, but thank God I also made better choices that strengthened me to continue growing toward the type of man I wanted to be.

Many young Christians fall during that transition, even fall away from the faith. It is a time of testing to see if the convictions they voice are a conviction in their souls or merely a carry over from the way they were raised. They allow failings to strengthen discouragement until the pattern of their life is a spiritual defeat. I have seen many hearts turned wholly to the world instead of to seeking God.

The world defines someone as a hero if they “follow their heart.” If they stand out as different from the norm with strange, revolutionary thinking. This is especially true if they depart from tradition; historical and Christian values. Little do these folks realize that the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. It can be led astray and must be guarded.

A true hero meets those moments when culture challenges them and they stand firm in conviction. In faith and action they demonstrate a desire to grow in favor with God, not with the world.

We are the sum of our choices. Our choices can be guided by wisdom or by the desires of our heart. It’s a hard battle, yet with each right choice we fashion our habits and our destiny in favor with God.

In some ways you could say that true heroes are made, not born. Or, rather, that true heroes are born of their choices. They live with a healthy fear of the God who made them.

Q: To what destiny are your choices guiding you?

How to preserve your story ideas

AuthorAppleton on August 24, 2015

It seems like I’ve been coming up with story ideas since I was a little kid, and I feel that it is true. Digging into my childhood memory box will reveal a small treasure trove of hand-drawn picture books I created for my siblings, as well as creature sketches, and lists of the numerous books I was reading. The box of story ideas began back then.

I remember working on a story about a mouse family. My brother drew pictures to go along with the story because he loved it so much. The concept was a family of mice in an abandoned house who get caught between warring factions of living toy soldiers. I still remember that story… Yet the material has been completely lost. The idea is there. Even some of the details stick in my memory, yet much of it will be a struggle for me to regain.

I wish I had had an idea file in a computer back then.

Nowadays those ideas are most often thrown into computer files. I like the security this affords. I can store the idea, then refer back to it at my leisure. The files have grown over the past twelve years. The idea behind them is that they are ideas that I do not have time to write, at this time, yet I intend to get to someday. There are new fantasy novels, science-fiction, mysteries, historical fiction, even a romance or two.

But I would be remiss if I did not mention my notebooks. Writing on paper has always given me my greatest story ideas. Much of the core material behind The Sword of the Dragon books was hand written. There’s nothing akin to sitting outside enjoying nature, the fresh air, with pad and pen in hand. No rush, simply enjoying the process. My preference has bounced between ruled paper and sketchbooks. Each offers a different feel that fuels creativity. Ruled paper allows me to feel more structured, especially for outlining ideas. Whereas sketchbooks feel like a clean slate I can fill with my tiny handwriting.

The writer’s imagination is always gathering ideas. It would be career suicide to throw those ideas out. Even if the raw idea is not ready for publication, its premise or an element of it may stick to create something memorable. A few times I have found I end up incorporating them into existing storylines. The Sword of the Dragon series has benefitted greatly from the use of ideas from these files.

Q: Do you have a system to file your story ideas?

Creative Conflict (an author’s meditation)

AuthorAppleton on August 17, 2015

Stories running deep as an ocean,
Ideas warring within the mind.
Where one thought arises another follows,
As a story solidifying, it raises new questions.

Conflict at the heart of a good story,
The force beginning to strengthen it.
One thought seen as an opportunity,
A moment in which to explore possibilities.

Story creation is full of conflict,
Some ideas falling to ruin.
Each idea discarded allows growth,
The best ideas remaining and growing.

Allowing the conflict to rage inside the mind,
Allowing it to eliminate the weaker ideas.
Favoring ideas with the greatest promise,
Conflict always exists in the writer’s mind.

The writer is at the heart of the conflict,
Sifting through the ideas,
Knowing that nothing great is created easily,
The writer embraces the conflict.

How to avoid cookie-cutter characters

AuthorAppleton on August 3, 2015

Cookie-cutter characters kill fiction. Weak villains and weak heroes, characters that we can easily forget. How do we avoid this to strengthen the books we write?

Remember that childhood tale of the Gingerbread Man? Oh yes, he was cut out of cookie dough and ran away from the little old woman, shouting, “Run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!” He ran until he came to a river and there the sly fox fooled him and at the last ate him.

The story is simple by design, yet it gives readers and incredibly memorable impression of the gingerbread man. Why? Because in a short time you understand the gingerbread man’s primary traits. Namely, he is over-confident and brainless. He is so consumed by his desire to escape everyone that wants to eat him that he jumps into bed with the devil himself.

Create memorable characters by focusing on the traits that make them themselves. What makes them tick? What makes them different from their peers, or do they follow the crowd? What strengths can they use to rise above their circumstances… or what failings will we see bring them to a miserable end?

It was said of J.K. Rowling that she created 3rd dimensional characters in her Harry Potter series, and I quite agree. The characters had personality. They had depth. We could feel what they were feeling, or at the least understand the motivations behind their actions.

All great fiction stories are like this, even if they are plot-driven rather than character-driven. Weak characters will kill any good story. If you mold them in the image of known characters the readers will resent it, or at the least find it forgettable. But if you fashion a new individual with their own set of traits and deep-rooted motivations for the actions they take, you will create a story worth re-reading. One that one generation will treasure for the next.

Q: What stories have you felt use too many “cookie-cutter” characters?

Divinity and accountability in Fiction

AuthorAppleton on July 27, 2015

When writing I have often pondered the futility of leaving God out of the story. His presence, whether embodied or as a distant spirit-being, omnipresent and omniscient, is necessary even in fiction. Without an ultimate accountability characters lose their punch.

All stories need a level of good versus evil. Characters make choices between right and wrong. Humanism would have us believe that we do not need God to explain the choice between good and evil, whereas the standard of morality we know is completely dependant on Him.

Western society is founded on the moral system passed down by Judeo-Christian values. Without a Common Standard of morality society is left to the whims of its individual members. One person may say that stealing is wrong, but another may say it is not because they believe in survival of the fittest.

Why is sin always sin? Why believe in truth and falsehood? Because we do have a standard in the laws passed down by God through Moses and the prophets and Jesus Christ.

This is pivotal in writing. Literature needs to reflect that God is the same always, whether in the past or in the present or in the future. An eternal being whose standards are not dependant on our desires, whims, or failings.

Without that standard a story becomes dependent on the characters’ perspectives. But when that standard is used the story gains coherancy because all actions, whether good or bad, have consequences temporal . . . and eternal.

Freedom of choice does not mean your characters can escape the fact that they are created beings.

Question: How does accountablity to God factor in the fiction you read and write?

How to Create Memorable Villains

AuthorAppleton on July 13, 2015

Most good stories that stand out in my mind as extremely memorable involve an extraordinary villain. One of my favorite films is The Black Hole, an old Disney science-fiction film. All of the characters in that movie are dramatic actors and the villain (as played by Maximilian Schell) is extremely memorable. He is a brilliant scientist and brooding. Every moment on screen he manages to drive deeper into your mind the threat he poses.

I remember when I was a kid sitting at my grandfather’s house and watching Star Wars: A New Hope for the first time (back then it was on VHS tape). The duel between Vader and Ben Kenobi fixated my attention like nothing else. I was intrigued. Who was this Vader? Why had he changed into a “master of evil” as Kenobi put it? These questions are the type that any good villain will raise in the mind of a book reader or a movie viewer.

Often a fiction writer focuses on finding ways to make the reader relate to the hero in the story. They show the character’s weaknesses and show how he/she overcame them in order to mature into the protagonist you’ll love. But too often the antagonist is a “cookie cutter villain.”

In the Harry Potter books Voldemort was glimpsed from his youth and shown as a ruthless man. In Tolkien’s The Silmarillion Melkor was revealed as being a corrupter of all good things… My point? There are many ways to approach villain creation as long as you take the time to develop that villain’s history.

When approaching the villains in my stories I try to remember that the characters’ histories will enable the reader to care about what happens to them. For example, when I wrote the opening for Swords of the Six I had to make the reader care about the villains so that they would want those villains to pay for their crimes, but I wanted the reader to be intrigued and ask questions as to why and how the villains had become the characters seen in the story.

It is imperative that you ask yourself:

  1. What kind of childhood did this villain have? An orphan, an only child, or one of many children. A happy home or a depressed one. All of these considerations make us care about the villain even if we are rooting for their destruction.
  2. Who mentored this villain, or whom do they look up to? Parents or the lack thereof and the mentors they look up to will shape the person you become. Understand how your villain thinks by understanding what mindset those around him have encouraged.
  3. What motivates them in their villainous deeds? Often the motivation is power, yet the quest for supremacy is not motivation enough. There is an ideology behind each villain and reasons that they have forsaken a moral code. Know what motivates them and you will understand how they can change through the story in their encounters with other characters.

In The Black Hole the villain is an insane but genius scientist. He is both indispensable to the protagonists and at the same time they cannot allow him to continue.

In writing a villain we need to understand the personality’s impact on the fictional world and also what drives that personality. Adding depth to the character enables greater risk and greater reward when said villain is defeated or converted. Creating memorable villains is hard, but oh so worth it! In Swords of the Six I had the opportunity to show several types of villains, each with different motives, and the result was a story that leaves me the writer eager to explore the villains in depth and be more creative in determining their demises.

Q: Which villains stand out to you and why? 

Sleep, Reflection, and the Writer

AuthorAppleton on July 6, 2015

My mind is like an engine running overdrive. Ideas are pouring in all the time and I’m running with them. The visions I have for the future are pending realities I’m striving to bring to pass. This last few months has been crazy busy. Work, writing, website maintenance, travel, and now moving. Like it does every time after I run on burnout for so long, my mind has crashed. It reminded me how important balance of sleep and work is in the life of a writer.

Push, push, and push harder! It seems I fall into this trap again and again. Yet one thing is certain, that drive to achieve has been a great asset in my life. When my wife and I were first married I was working a decent-paying job at a factory. Then I finished my first novel and we spent, it seemed, every free hour driving to some bookstore or library to promote and sell my novel. I wanted it to succeed and, it did, but only after I quit my job and we hit the road for about five months. We hit around eleven states from New Hampshire to Georgia and I signed so many books that my hand cramped on multiple occasions.

That trip was a leap of faith. We had a vision for what God could do with my writing and we followed it. It was a scary thing to do at first, but the longer we stuck at it the greater the impact we had. When that first book tour was finished I remember feeling rather burned out.

This month we moved from Connecticut to South Carolina. Again, following the vision God has given me for our family. I feel burned out now. My creativity is a bit drained. Yet I know that I am reminded that I can return to that same productivity level if I persist and create a routine that achieves my goals.

It is easy to stay up until all hours working on various projects, but without sleep the mind reaches a state of exhaustion. When that happens we lose our ability to produce our best work.

Reflection is also important to the process. When I was a kid I had no responsibilities outside of the home. The result was that I had time to sit and read, time to ponder life and its intricacies. Reflection as to what kind of stories I wanted to write, what kind of man I wanted to be.

It is often in the silence, often in the stillness that we refresh our creativity. Our present society rushes from one thing to the next. Little if any value is placed on sleep, reflection, stillness. We can either become casualties of our own drive, or we can look at our future over the long haul. If we consider the effect it will have on our relationships and our physical needs we will prioritize proper rest and strive to take quiet time to reflect.

The writer cannot afford the cost of working overdrive non-stop. Take value in slowing down your life. Enjoy the moments. Enjoy the memories. Step back and let your engine cool before you take it on the road again.

Q: Do you give your mind the rest it needs in order to maximize creative flow?