Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Why I Hate Deus Ex Machina

Posted: July 2, 2012 in Reflections, Writing
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In my last post, I mentioned that I’d lost power. So I was reading a book by flashlight, a book that I’d been looking forward to as it was the last volume in a really excellent sci-fi trilogy, and I was wondering how they were going to resolve the seemingly-unsolvable plot. What happens? No big battle; no jump into a black hole to stop the destruction of Earth; no combining of psychic powers in order to create a super-psychic power and save the world. Nope, just a deus ex machina, leaving me feeling a little cheated.

For those of you who don’t spend their time obsessing over terms like bildungsroman and deus ex machina, the deus ex machina is a plot device, usually a person or an object, that is inserted suddenly into a story in order to solve a seemingly-unsolvable plot. However, plenty of writers don’t like to use these plot devices, as they feel that they are not only cheating the readers out of a good resolution to the story, but also because the writers might feel they are cheating themselves.

You may be familiar with some famous deus ex machinas (I’m not sure if that’s actually the term’s plural form but whatever): the ending of Huck Finn is a well-known example. Lord of the Flies’ ending is also a deus ex machina, along with the ending for War of the Worlds. And I’m sure that if, given the time, I tried to look for more famous examples, I’d come up with a whole list of them.

Fortunately I don’t have the time. But if you want to put up your least favorite deus ex machina, and the emotional reaction you felt when you read/watched it, by all means tell me. I’d love to complain about it with you.

Snake: First Chapter Preview

Posted: July 2, 2012 in Living and Life, Novel, Progress Report, Scary Stuff, Writing
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I and most of Central Ohio lost power Friday, so I haven’t had Internet all weekend. Plus when I tried to use a public computer, the Internet was soo slooow that before I knew it, I had to be at my next thing before I could finish reading posts or checking my dashboard. Well, I’m making up for that right now, and I’m doing it by first writing this post, which has a small excerpt from my new novel-in-progress Snake.

I managed to write this Saturday night, using what little power I had left on my laptop. As I wrote by candlelight and computer screen, feeling almost like a modern-day Edgar Allen Poe, I felt the words flowing through me, from my fingertips to the computer. It was exhilarating, and I managed to finish the chapter before I had to turn off my computer to conserve the battery.

I hope you like what you read. If I find any time or if I get my electricity back by this evening, I’ll do a little more work.

~~~

(Warning: The following preview features some very bad words, so if you have kids, I suggest you make sure they’re not around when you read this post.)

 

Paul felt a buzz in his pocket and looked down. Through the fabric in his pants Paul could see the light from his phone shining through. Paul reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and dove into a little alcove where he could take the call in peace. Without checking the number he pressed the talk button and brought the phone to his ear.

“Hello?” said Paul; on the other end all he could hear was a deep breathing. Paul raised his eyebrows suspiciously. “Who is this?” He checked the caller ID, and saw only UNKNOWN NUMBER.

Suddenly the person at the other end of the phone spoke. “Men in your line of business have no right to be in a church, Mr. Sanonia.”

Paul stared at the phone, surprised. Glancing quickly around the church, he saw only three people, and none of them were on their phones. How did this person know where he was and how did he get his number? He looked back at the phone and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Who the fuck is this?”

The man on the other end laughed, a deep, hearty laugh that for some reason chilled Paul’s skin. “When your cousin James Sanonia died, he was shot in the head.” said the man, his voice deep and affected with a heavy Russian accent. “Then several bones were broken all over his body. He was then taken from wherever he was killed and thrown in the Hudson. Dockworkers saw his body floating and pulled him up out of the water. By the time they got him though, there was nothing to identify your cousin’s murderer. Except for one interesting detail, that is.”

Paul froze, his heart beating loudly in his chest. Who was this guy? How did he know all that? “And what was that detail?” he asked through gritted teeth.

The man spoke, and Paul froze. “You killed my cousin.” he hissed angrily. “You killed Jamie.”

“Horrible thing, wasn’t it?” said the Russian man. “I couldn’t get what I wanted out of your cousin. But I’m sure you’ll be much more helpful.”

Paul was only half-listening; he was looking around the Church, trying to find someone—anyone!—on a phone. One of the other worshippers, a teenage girl with a skirt too short for the cold February weather, got out of a pew while texting. Besides her, no one else seemed to have a phone.

“Where the fuck are you, you crazy shit!” Paul whispered into the phone. “Come on out and face me like a man!”

“But there is no fun in that.” replied the Russian man. “Besides, you’re so much more amusing to watch.”

Paul stepped out of the alcove, looking around the church. “Watch?” he repeated.

“Oh, didn’t I mention it?” asked the Russian man. “I’m right in the church with you.”

The Snake Outline: First Draft Finished

Posted: June 28, 2012 in Progress Report, Writing
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Lately I’ve been churning out on average a post a day. This never happened when I first started my blog. My, how times have changed…

Okay, before I go off on a tangent about posting and blogging, I’m going to get into the reason for this post. As you all know (or if you’ve become a follower in the past couple of days, are just learning), I wrote a novel called Reborn City and I am currently marketing it to agents. Not wanting to let my novel-writing skills diminish in the meantime, but not quite wanting to start RC‘s sequel yet, I decided to work on an unrelated novel, and held a little poll for deciding which novel out of two choices I’d work on. Now that the poll is long over, I’d like to announce that the outline for the novel (called Snake, if you haven’t already guessed that from the title of the post), is finished.

Or at least, the first draft of the outline is. Yes there’s a first draft. And it’s longer than the outline for RC, I’ll tell ya. 112 chapters! That’s five less than what I predicted, but still truly a sign that I’m writing a thriller. Thankfully there’s a smaller circle of main characters in Snake than in RC, so I didn’t have to put too much effort into writing out the small bios for each major character.

I’ll probably due a final draft next week. After that I’ll start a timeline so I have all the dates for the events in Snake planned out (trust me, a timeline would’ve been helpful when I was writing RC). After that there will come a little research, and then finally the writing, during which I shall post small snippets of Snake here on Rami Ungar the Writer.

Hope to have something for you soon. Bye!

Names, Names, Names

Posted: June 25, 2012 in Reflections, Writing
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You ever come up with a character, give them a background, a personality, give them certain scenes where certain character traits that you just admire and adore in them really shine? And then you realize this character of yours shares the same first name as somebody you know? Becuase it’s happened to me twice that I can remember.

The first time was in my early years of high school, when the vampire craze was still in full swing (or was it just taking off?). Anyway, I was writing this great character, a vampire desperately trying to find a cure to become human again and kill the vampire who’d turned him, but I realized he shared the same first name as a friend and classmate of mine. When my friend found out, he kept saying whenever the subject was brought up that I’d named the character after him, and when he found out they both had brown hair (but different shades and styles), that conviction only got stronger. Well, I decided to hold off on the story until vampires were in an in-between-bursts-of-popularity period so I wouldn’t look like some hack trying to hitch a ride on a bandwagon, but for a while it was annoying.

The second time involves Snake, actually. I had this wonderful character in mind for the female lead. I’d already planned out her role and her character traits, and wanted to find a name that began with an A to match her (she just seemed like an “A” person to me). It must’ve been three weeks after I’d settled on a name that a girl in my dorm whom I’m friends with shares the same name. Luckily, she hasn’t found out yet, creating no misunderstandings, and I’m not sure if she has my blog’s address, but it’ll be interesting if she finds out and asks if I based the character on her. To which I’ll reply, “Are you eighteen and a redhead?”

Has this ever happened to any of you? Please let me know if it has.

Ripple: Getting Published!

Posted: June 24, 2012 in Progress Report, short story, Writing
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Oh my God! Big news, ladies and gentlemen! I don’t know how many of you remember, but a while back I wrote a short story involving alien visitors to Earth called “Ripple”. This evening I got on my computer and saw that the editor of Nth Degree, a science-fiction magazine, had emailed me. He wrote he was going to publish “Ripple” as a featured story in the magazine’s online edition and would be letting me know soon when the story would go up.

Well, as soon as I read that, I started dancing in my room! I put on disco music on my computer and started boogie-ing down! I’m so happy write now, it’s hard for me to stay calm. Thank you to Michael Pederson, editor of Nth Degree, for accepting “Ripple”. I cannot wait to see it online!

If you want to check out the website–maybe submit something to it–the link is down below. Oh my God, so excited right now. I still can’t stop dancing! I’ll give everyone a heads-up post when the short story comes out. Have an awesome day, just like I’m having!

http://nthzine.com/

The “Snake” Outline

Posted: June 22, 2012 in Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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Okay, I’ve mentioned this before, but this summer I’m working on a new novel called “Snake”, and it’s about a serial killer. Right now, I’m working on the outline of the novel, becuase I prefer using an outline before starting a novel. I have to say, I’m not even done with the outline, but it’s already proven itself to be a learning experience:

For starters, while I’ve thought about Snake and what I wanted to do with him for a while, writing out the actual outline and planning out the rough draft of the plot has been kind of like going down a river: I’ve just gone where it’s taken me. Scenes I had half-planned in my head are becoming fully-formed, while other scenes are being created rifht at the moment I write them down and a few scenes are being dropped completely! It’s hard deciding what to put in, what to keep, and what to discard, but in the end I feel it’s making the story better.

Also, if you read thrillers you know that the chapters are often very short, which is because the authors want to keep the suspense up as much as they can. Learning how to do that myself has been very intersting, and I think I’m getting the hang of it. I mean, I’ve just finished Part III (these novels always come in parts) and the story is already 60+ chapters! That’s at least three times “Reborn City”! I wouldn’t be surprised if the final chapter count is in the hundreds! Oh, and did I mention that if this novel were a movie, the end of Part III would probably be about two-thirds of the way through the film?

I hope to have the outline done within the next week. By that time I’ll know what I want to do with my story and how I’ll go about doing it. So wish me luck! I’ll give you another update when I’m done with the outline.

The Lucky 7 Meme

Posted: June 17, 2012 in Novel, Writing
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Alright, here’s the latest on the blogosphere: apparently quite a few blogs are doing this thing where if you’re writing a novel or short story, you take your 7th or 77th page (depending on what you’re writing) go to the seventh line, and pull out 7 lines or paragraphs. A few of the blogs I follow did that, so I figured, what the heck? Why not?

So right now, I’m posting lines 7-14 of page 77 of Reborn City, the novel I’m currently trying to market to agents. At this moment of the story, my main character Zahara is getting a tattoo, even though she doesn’t really want to get one. Why does she have to get a tattoo she doesn’t want? I can’t reveal that here, but if you’re an agent and you’re interested, let me know and we’ll talk.

So here’s my Lucky 7 meme:

“Um…yeah, sure. Go ahead.” said Zahara. As soon as Frimms had turned his glance away from her, Zahara closed her eyes. Allah, the Most Merciful and Understanding, please forgive me for this transgression. When I leave the Hydras and return to New York I swear in the name of the Prophet that I will get this tattoo removed, she thought in Arabic. Tattoos weren’t considered cool things to have on one’s body in Sunni Islam; the Shi’ites were allowed to get tattoos, but for Zahara it was much more preferable to get henna tattoos. Zahara figured that if she asked these guys if she could get a henna tattoo they’d probably just laugh or give her a queer look and ask her why she’d want that.

Well, there you go, ladies and gents. I hope that at least whetted your appetites and made you a little more interested in Reborn City. All for now, so bye.

Meditating A New Idea

Posted: June 17, 2012 in ideas, Living and Life, short story, Writing
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I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it on Rami Ungar the Writer, but I’m into a form of Eastern meditation known as Sahaja Yoga. It was founded in the 70’s and the goal is to awaken the dormant spiritual energy inside you so that somebody can not just correct problems in their lives they may be having, but in order to achieve Self-Realization, a form of spiritual evolution. Sahaja Yoga is very popular and easy, and it has followers in over a hundred countries.

Why do I mention this? Because just today I had some trouble with an idea for a short story and I was able to overcome that trouble with the help of Sahaja Yoga. It happened like this:

Just this morning, I woke up with an idea for a short story in my head: what if someone had lived a life, but had forgotten that life through the interference of someone else, and started remembering their former lives after several years? I’m not sure if I’d dreamed that or if I’d come up with that idea while sort-of half-asleep, but when I was fully conscious it sounded like an excellent idea.

Just the one problem: how could I write an original, exciting story with that idea without sounding like I’d stolen someone else’s idea? I sturggled with the idea, unable to come up with an exciting take or angle to work with, until I went to meditation class today. As soon as we started meditating, my mind cleared and all of a sudden my mind was filled with ideas for the story. Eventually, by the end of the meditation, a half-formed story, with names, places, a plot, and even a few lines, was in my head. I could not wait to get home and work on it. but first I thought I’d write a post about it.

Anyone else interested in Sahaja Yoga now? If you want to, there are websites that can help you learn. It’s absolutely free-of-charge to learn, and the people who are apart of it are so nice. Oh and don’t worry, it’s not like a cult: it’s more like those clubs you went to as a teenager where people dressed up as their favorite Star Trek characters, only with potential health benefits.

I’m including a link for a website used among a lot of Sahaja Yogis, and a video where the founder, Shri Mataji, teaches you the first steps to learning to do the meditation. Try it out; you may find that it helps you in your work like it helps me.

http://www.freemeditation.com/

Writing In Summer: The Winner

Posted: June 10, 2012 in ideas, Novel, Writing
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Yeah, you heard it here first, folks; the poll is over and the winner for what novel I’ll be writing over the course of summer vacation (and probably beyond) has been decided. Of the 6 votes, 4 went to Idea #1. I don’t know how many of you are/were Math majors, but I’m pretty sure that’s the majority. And as having the most points gets you the win, Idea #1 is the winner! Somebody drop confetti from the ceiling!

Alright, for those of you just tuning into the Rami Ungar the Writer program, I’ve already written one novel–part of a trilogy–that I’m trying to market to book agents. However while I’m doing that, I’d like to be kept busy writing-wise. I don’t have short story ideas always on hand, and I don’t want to work on my novel’s sequel until after it’s been picked up by an agent. So instead, I decided I’d work on a different, unrelated novel over the summer. Problem is, couldn’t choose between 2 very good ideas, so I left it up to my readers to decide for me. The readers spoke, and I’ve got my summer assignment (lucky for me being a college student, I can decide whether or not I have summer assignments).

I already said in the post where I announced the poll, “Writing in Summer: What to Do” what the ideas were about, but I’ll give you guys a recap on the idea, with a little more information added in as a bonus. The working title is Snake and it’s about a serial killer killing off members of a certain Mafia family in New York City (if anyone reading this post is or knows someone in the mafia, I’d just like to say this is all fictional, none of the families I’ve created for this story are real, so PLEASE DON”T BE MAD!!!). The interesting thing is, you want to root for this serial killer, but why? And for what reason does he kill (don’t say psychopath, I can garauntee you that’s not it)?

Over the course of the research and writing process, I’ll be posting about the progress of Snake and even throwing in a short exerpt or two. Perhaps a literary agent or an editor in a publishing house will happen across this blog, get interesting in Snake–and my other novel, Reborn City, I hope–and get interested enough. Oh God, I hope that happens.

Alright, now that I’ve announced the winner, I think my first little present to you, my friendly readers, bloggers, and people-who-happen-upon-this-blog-through-sheer-random-websurfing-and-have-stayed-more-than-five-seconds-and-gotten-interested-enough-to-read, shall be a list of things I will research and who/what I might consult for this research (if you have any suggestions, let me know!):

1. An FBI profile of the serial killer (I think I’ll consult some professors versed in clinical psychology at OSU and other colleges; I don’t think the FBI BAU would like me sending them a fake profile, and I’m afraid my knowledge of my killer might get in the way of writing the chapters involving the investigation)

2. Streets/places/homes/apartments in New York City and the Hamptons (I’ll probably talk to a real estate or travel agent, they’d know more about this than I would)

3. The structure and history of various mafia syndicates (there’s gotta be a book on that somewhere, someone’s got to have gone to the trouble)

Actually, that’s it for now, if there’s something else I might insert in a post later. Gotta go now, it’s my brithday today, and I plan on writing a post about it after I’ve had my birthday fun. By the way, woo-hoo! I’m 19! I still can’t legally drink in the US, but it’s still awesome.

Thinking Up Stories

Posted: June 4, 2012 in ideas, Writing
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Well, it’s June 4th. Six days left for the poll I set up in “Writing in the Summer: What To Do” (once again, if you haven’t participated yet, please head there now and vote before June 10th; your votes will help me decide which novel I work on during the summer). And as it gets closer to the 10th, I find myself thinking about the current lead. Actually, I’m thinking about it a lot.

Why? I think the answer to that is obvious; writers write. But in order to write, we have to have an idea of what we want to write. And if there’s one thing in writing I can be one-hundred percent guilty of, it’s that I like to dwell on and come up with scenes and plot points and character issues and a whole plethora of other things for a single story…even when I’m not working on said story. I mean, for both choices in the poll, I have quite a few points in the story fleshed out in detail, from character names to life-shaping events, to individual scenes and plot twists, and on one of the stories I’ve analyzed over and over why I’ve given one character the name he has (trust me, his name says a lot about himself and about the people who may read this story in the future).

So yeah, I’m thinking about choice number one a lot. I’m coming up with certain scenes in my head, dividing up chapters, I even planned out two verbal confrontations between characters at different points in the story while taking a shower last night. I’m also thinking about research and the best options to go with (OSU’s Psychology Department; street maps of New York; interviewing a medical examiner who specializes in forensics), and the inner workings of each character, particularly my anti-hero protagonist.

And until I see choice number two leading in the poll, I’m still going to think about choice number one, though certainly not when I’m doing exams or something important. See you at the end of the poll, when I say who won and give you guys what would probably be the blurb on the end of the paperback version.

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