Den Warren's Blog - Posts Tagged "fiction"

Perhaps you have convinced yourself that you "don't have a creative bone in your body". I totally reject the notion. I believe that anyone can be "creative" if they want to be. I don't think creativity comes from magic or your DNA. Sure, a certain amount of ideas spawn from a willing spirit, and you can't be afraid to bring attention to your ideas. But I challenge anyone to consider the following:

Using objective criteria you can come up with something that others will see as creative.

Let's use writing a story, for example.
First, you need to come up with a premise. You don't need a wild imagination. Think of all the types of stories, or genres you like. Make a list of them. Then pick two or three of them and try combining them. Keep working at it until you come up with something you find interesting.

Then throw in characters who have traits that you think are interesting. Make a list of them. Choose one or more who seem out of place with your premise, and especially with each other. The more conflict, the better.

Consider the goals of your characters in the setting. Make the goals conflicting. Make their personalities rub each other the wrong way.

If you get the premise developed well enough, your characters will write the story for you. It is like magic when the characters seem to come up with their own ideas. You can't believe you thought of a particular action or event. It may take you a few showers or waking hours in bed, but the actual plot will become evident. Perhaps a theme will develop.

Give tension to every page of your story and then add some more twists that make accomplishing the goals of your characters even more critical, even if some of them have to die. (See separate post.)

When it is all said and done, I think "creativity" in fiction can be summed up by choosing to write about unexpected alternatives.

My primary reader is great at guessing the ends of movies. I know I am doing well if she is worried about what is going to happen to my characters. If she is happy with the way things are going, I know it is time to shake things up.

Conclude the story by having something happen that gives one or more of the characters a change of heart about something.

Anyway, this is how I break it all down in the simplest common denominator.
Den Warren
Author of K-Tron (Superhero Humor)
Kings and Clans Trilogy (Dystopian)
and other stories.

To a Christian author, winning the soul of a reader to the Salvation of Jesus ought to be worth writing an infinite amount of lifetimes.

But it doesn't do any good to have a good theme or message in a book, only to cause the book to suck, which it will do if it reads like a Bible tract.

The idea is to weave the message into the story. Either as a side plot, or a main theme. I have done this in my stories a few different ways.

Here is a scene from K-Tron, a Superhero novella narrated by K-Tron himself:
Then we stopped at a random town in the mountains. We went into the small local hardware store. It was real small, but it had a bunch of different stuff besides your usual hardware. They had Bluegrass Gospel music playing on a sound system.
An old guy with long gray hair and beard was sitting at the cash register staring at us. From the harsh look on his face, I figured he would pull a gun on us. I went around looking until I got some white spray paint, and grabbed some chips. Then we went up to the counter.
The clerk said, "We used to use soap and toilet paper. Never spray paint."
Retaliator said, "Huh?"
The clerk said, "Halloween ain't 'till next month, right?" He picked up the waste basket and spit a long drool of his chew juice into it.
Retaliator said, "These aren't Halloween costumes. They're our uniforms."
The old guy said, "Halloween and lyin'; they're from the Devil."
"I'm not lying. I am the Blue Retaliator."
The store clerk said, "Retaliator, huh? Revenge is of the Devil. It is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Romans twelve, nineteen."
"Look," Retaliator said, "This is just paint for our van, okay?"
"Uh huh. If you want a sensible paint job, you could go see my nephew over at the auto body shop. He's real reasonable. But I guess retaliatin' Holloweeners don't really care much for that, do they?"
"This will be good enough. Thanks."
The clerk acted like he was annoyed when Retaliator gave him a credit card. He swiped it and said, "You boys ever thought about what would happen to your souls after you die."
Retaliator said, "Not really, we're just mostly trying not to die."
The clerk was staring and blinking his eyes for some reason. "Well then you probably ought to be thinking about your souls right away. You know Jesus is the sinless Son of God and paid for all your sins on the Cross. We all got 'em. Sins, that is. You need Him, and from what I can tell, right quick. You ought to seriously think about accepting Him ASAP."
"No thanks, I'm good," Retaliator said.
"You're never good enough. You need Jesus if you want to go to God's Heaven. We all do."
"Thanks, but I'll just be happy with the paint."
We hurried up and got out of there.

A couple of things about it. The Christian is not a perfect body image type that Christians usually portray themselves as. We are all sinners saved by the Grace of God. Another thing is that this is a side plot that doesn't take of much space and does not interrupt the flow of the story. Also, the superheroes did not accept Christ after the encounter. The important thing is that the reader considers the message.

There are a few other opportunities that I create for characters to hear the Gospel in my stories. The main way is after funerals. I do have a fairly high body count in my stories so I can always have a funeral for a key character. On another occasion, in the Kings and Clans Trilogy, a woman would not marry a man until he became a Christian. After a monster massacre in "Scorc Hunters" the main Christian character wondered about the eternal destination of some of the casualties. In an unorthodox situation in the novel Metahuman Wars, a woman held another woman at gunpoint while she lectured her, and told her about God's Plan of Salvation.

I believe it is the responsibility of all Christian authors to try and include God's Plan to their readers. Why would we write in such a way to impress them yet not care for their souls? I try to write my books so if a non-believer gets one as a gift, they may read . . . and believe.

If you would look at Amazon's listing of vampire books, you'd think that those vile bloodsuckers all go around looking for love with their shirts off and have an amazing sixpack. *Really?* Am I the only one who knows that vampires are lurking about trying to find an unsuspecting doofus to bite into their vein and suck out their blood.
To most normal and sane people, intense pain while getting busy would not suggest a positive outcome. Serious hemorrhaging certainly would not enhance a romantic encounter. How many people in the throes of passion want to get bitten by someone who is chomping into their flesh? Okay, you probably do know some. . .
But think about it; what about their breath? Blood breath cannot be good, right? Those blood farts got to be nasty as hell too.
So anyway, check out my vampires. They are your normal work-a-day undead who like to kill. They have werewolf problems. They make bad decisions. They have feelings too, you know. But they are definitely not all suave and can make the opposite sex humans swoon even though they are being mortally wounded. Sheesh.

Kings and Clans of the Midwest is the first book in a series set in a US that has totally collapsed because the dollar became worthless. It is a complex, diverse story, yet very fast moving. There is a considerable amount of information provided that is useful to preppers, but this book has a full plotted story, not just survival examples.

After I published this book, which did very well, I thought that all of my books would likewise be well accepted. I have written others that I think are just as good, yet this one remains the most popular.

Also, the sequel, Ayanna is one that is a favorite of young girls. It is a coming of age story where the protagonist is a very young girl who was rescued in the first book while living among a cannibal clan. She is raised up in a militia group but will not speak. She takes a liking to all things military.

Even the third book in the series, Independent States of America has done as well as the other books I have written which are not part of the trilogy. Since it did drop off in sales as compared to the first two, I finished the series. But maybe I need to return to that well-developed world that had thousands of readers.

Not many readers will give us indie authors very much feedback, but the star ratings for all of my works have been positive.

So I hope you will consider giving my writing a try. The best bargain is Kings and Clans Trilogy .