In the preface to their recently published writing guide, Writer's Companion, Carlos J Cortés and Renée Miller state, “we set out to compile everything a creative writer needs to write well into a single reference volume.” Writer's Companion is chock-full of helpful writerly advice, and over the past few months, we have posted “The Nuts & Bolts," the first chapter of the guide, on Open Book: Ontario.
Be sure to also check out Carlos and Renée's online writing community, On Fiction Writing, a website that is “dedicated to writers who are serious about improving their craft and helping other writers to do the same.”
CONTEST: To enter our draw to win an e-copy of Writer's Companion, send an email to clelia@openbookontario.com with the subject line “Writer's Companion.” The contest closes on March 31st, and is subject to the following Rules.
Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve and Part Thirteen of "The Nuts and Bolts."
__________________________________________________________
1.6 Structure/Working, Continued
1.6.6 Synopsis Structure
We plotted our unlikely tale by listing a mixed bag of events, plot points, and twists to guide us through the writing.
1. Discovery of something odd in the Honduran Mosquitia.
2. Villain organizes a party led by his son.
3. The explorers disappear.
4. Two years later. Villain hears a Miskito Indian (Hero) giving a talk.
5. Villain recruits Hero.
6. Villain organizes a second party.
7. Hero lays down the law.
8. Second party hacks into La Mosquitia.
9. Second party disappears.
10. Hero recovers in a strange place tended to by IT.
11. Hero meets several other ITS.
12. Hero tries to escape.
13. IT nabs him and locks him up deep within their complex.
14. Hero learns the saga of the ITS.
15. IT and Hero develop a strange relationship.
16. A deranged Villain has had enough.
17. Villain bribes the Honduran Army to find out what’s happened in Ciudad Blanca.
18. The ITS sense an army is on its way and gather to decide what to do.
19. IT shows Hero a network of caves to escape.
20. The army deforests the area and Villain arrives in a chopper.
21. IT blows the place.
22. News reports on a small meteoroid impact in La Mosquitia. (To cover up the Honduran Army’s fiasco)
23. Hero returns to his village.
IT is not dead, but hiding deep and very much pregnant.
Perhaps (most likely) events will change; some characters might be promoted; other characters will be demoted, replaced, or shelved; and new plot points may crop all over the manuscript. This is normal because a structure is never cast in stone. Rather, it serves as a changeable guide.
Our manuscript finished, we’re ready to prepare a synopsis by condensing four-hundred pages into three or four.
If we were to start from zero, the task would be daunting (it still is), but we have our list, character files, and the notes we’ve collected on details, events, and other bits and pieces we scribbled on scraps of paper to use in the synopsis.
On pages 400 and 425 of this book, we review the technique of synopsis composition, detailing what should go in and, more importantly, what shouldn’t. We also analyze its format, length, composition, voice, and style. Here we are concerned with structure.
After much debate, we’ve settled on a medium-length synopsis of some 1,500 words, or six double-spaced pages, in an unusual format that includes a foreword and an epilogue.
1.6.6.1 Synopsis Structure Development
After drafting the original synopsis, we realized a little background was needed to ground the tale. Rather than weaving the details into the text, we chose to include a short foreword, 160 words with the historical background of the Ciudad Blanca.
Author’s foreword
In 1526, Hernan Cortes first mentioned the fabulous lost city of Honduras Mosquito Forest, one of the most impenetrable places on earth.
Over the centuries, rumors ebbed and flowed; explorers and adventurers funded expeditions to find it, and some thought they had. In recent years—after a vast undertaking by venture capital using SAR image enhancement techniques—the Honduran Government claimed to have found the scattered city remains.
But archaeologists remain skeptical of these claims. Every time the White City is found, events conspire to conceal its location before its existence is verified.
Local Indian groups have a different version of the lost city. Their legends cite the Ciudad Blanca, the white city created from lightning and thunder by the god Wata. Other writings and engravings show Ciudad Blanca as the origin of the human deity called Quetzalcoatl by the Toltecs and Kukulkan by the Mayas. This man-god and his disciples came from the stars. From a race of white-skinned people.
Historians are aware of legend’s fiendish nature. Tucked among tales passed through ages, lurk bits of fact, however improbable. The trick is to separate truth from fabrication, an often impossible task. The foreword details are historical, and we’ve used them to our benefit by distorting, adding, and changing at will, as befits the storyteller’s tradition. Wata and Quetzalcoatl we have appropriated to add a little “what if?” to our tale.
As we wrote, we used Ciudad Blanca to name the manuscript. Now we need a title and The Hive seemed appropriate; it doesn’t give much away but fits nicely with the core concept of the story.
the hive
Scientists charting Earth’s magnetic lines discover an anomaly in Honduras. The readings are consistent with low-grade ore deposits. Since the point is in La Mosquitia, the most impenetrable forest on Earth, they file the discovery away.
Sandor Gulyás, a wealthy ageing industrialist from Chicago, suspects the anomaly may be the fabled Ciudad Blanca, the White City. He recruits a group of jungle-trained mercenaries led by Miska, Sandor’s son, and an ex-Marine colonel to explore the point where the magnetic glitch occurs. Sandor stays in Chicago and follows the group’s movements beamed from cameras in their headgear. After difficult progress, electrical and electronic devices stop functioning. Their link with the outside world gone, the group disappears. Later, the base camp’s keeper will discover the team’s scattered remains; body parts excised with surgical precision.
Months later, Sandor attends a lecture on primitive people’s survival techniques by Fabian Andras, a Miskito Indian. Impressed, Sandor demands Fabian’s curriculum. Though lacking formal training, Fabian is a walking encyclopedia on the Mosquitia. Ten years earlier, when Fabian was thirty and tired beyond endurance, he miscalculated when navigating upriver. His canoe caught in an eddy. He survived, but his wife didn’t. After ten years of self-recrimination—during which he tended to his four children—he fell in love with a young woman from the same village. Only she has contracted a rare disease requiring expensive treatment at the Mayo Clinic. Sandor offers to finance an expedition to recover his son’s remains, cover the clinic costs, and still leave a small fortune for Fabian. Fabian agrees to lead a team.
When Sandor asks Fabian to wear helmets with cameras, he refuses. Fabian hates gadgets. On his expeditions, he’s never used electronics or firearms, but tools and weapons he can repair, craft, and replace from nature. At the end, he consents to carry a limited number of rifles, one GPS, and satellite phones.
Once in the field, the group reports to Sandor twice a day. Three weeks into the Mosquito Forest, their electronic equipment dies.
Fabian pushes on. One by one, the members of his team disappear. Alone, Fabian tries to retrace his steps, keeping high on the trees at night. There he encounters a jaguar. He kills it, but the great cat mauls him badly. He passes out.
He recovers consciousness in a white windowless room.
After a while, a strange creature enters. It looks human but there’s a feeling of wrongness about it; hairless, white skin, muscular, athletic, angular face, masculine and yet beautiful and feminine. Its name is Kokine.
During the months of his convalescence, Fabian meets Kokine’s aged and wizened family, Jaro, Poyta, Oitapi, and Margarola, their mother. The five creatures are the sole survivors of the Wata. Fabian learns that the Wata age slower, and have average life spans of 180 Earth years. They achieve sexual maturity at age forty and remain fertile for eighty years. Kokine, Fabian’s guardian, is the youngest at eighty-six; the others range between 120 and 150 years old. Margarola is two hundred. The Wata share an uncanny similarity, but what really excites Fabian is their power of extra–sensory perception and a bizarre detail: the Wata never lie.
One night, Kokine joins him in his cell and they make love. Afterward, Fabian is unsure about wanting to repeat the experience—in particular after he discovers the Wata’s origins.
The Wata inhabit a cluster of twelve planets in the quadrant of Proxima Centauri. To scout for habitable planets, Wata leaders sent ships to different points of the galaxy. The Wata spaceships, self-sufficient colonies capable of traveling hundreds of years, were heavily armed and equipped with terra-forming technology. Their weapons could depopulate vast areas to adapt the fauna to their particular biology.
While probes gathered information, their spaceships would remain in orbit. Eighty-five years after their departure, in the proximity of Earth, disaster struck. In 371 CE, after an explosion in the craft’s drives, the Wata spaceship crash-landed in the Mosquito Forest. From two hundred and eleven crew members, only forty-two survived: twelve males, twenty females, and ten gymale.
Communications gone, along with most of their equipment, they couldn’t return home. Their weapons and machines were destroyed.
The Wata have three sexes: gymale, male, and female. Gymales share the characteristics and reproductive organs of both male and female. On their native planets, gymales can adopt a female role and carry the offspring of a male or another gymale. As males, they can fertilize other gymale and the females of the species. In addition, gymales are capable of self-fertilization, but the product is a clone unable to reproduce.
The Wata used the remains of their ship to erect a containment building on the surface, a vast metallic structure that shone white under the sun. To protect their sensitive skins from the sun’s radiation, they built a colony underground in a network of natural caves. They could surface only between dusk and dawn. Though they tried to reproduce, the difference in gravity made fecundation impossible but for a few self-fertilizing gymales. Males and females died of old age until only gymales remained.
Through the centuries, the Wata gymales attempted to couple without success with the men and women of neighboring tribes. Eventually, they abandoned the practice and accepted their unavoidable extinction. They dismantled the surface buildings and retreated deeper into the network of caves. Margarola is the last of the fertile gymales. Her clones are unable to self-fertilize. They are the last of a race.
When Fabian asks what happened to previous expeditions, he learns that Kokine killed them, using Wata technology to destroy their electronic equipment.
Why spare him?
Unlike the warriors, he didn’t carry offensive weapons. The Wata respect tribesmen and identify offensive weapons with firearms or devices causing magnetic fields.
Fabian is dazzled. Fertile or not, the Wata reached Earth to conquer the planet. Had a biological fluke not prevented it, the Wata would have destroyed humanity, perhaps keeping a few tribesmen in remote areas as a source of genetic variety. After stealing a star map engraved in a strange metal and several small objects, he escapes in broad daylight. At night, Kokine captures him. Labeled a dangerous thief, Margarola orders his disposal. Kokine drives Fabian away from their complex and into an area of the caves with many individual penlike cells. Every few days Kokine brings him food and water but doesn’t communicate anymore. Fabian realizes that learning the Wata story was a poisoned gift. They will never set him free. Yet, he can’t understand why Kokine disobeyed Margarola and kept him alive.
Meanwhile, a frustrated Sandor offers millions to the Honduran government if they will send in the army. The press carries bogus rumors planted by Sandor about a drug cartel having a clandestine lab in the spot where the other expeditions disappeared.
The Honduran army defoliates a large swathe of the forest before sending in troops and heavy equipment.
Even though the Wata destroy the advancing army’s electronic equipment, it’s obvious they can’t withstand their push. Rather than risking capture, Margarola activates the colony’s demolition system. An explosion destroys their complex and obliterates the Honduran army.
In the cave pens, the explosive shock has created fissures. Fabian rummages through the debris for glow balls that impart dim lighting to the corridors. Then, he sets off deep into the caves to find water and a way out. Many days later, half-crazed from hunger and exhaustion, Fabian surfaces on the mountains north of Bonanza, almost twenty miles away from the legendary Ciudad Blanca that will now never be discovered.
This is the rough synopsis we will later polish by removing extraneous details and tightening the prose to half its present length. But there are a few loose ends, and loose ends beg tidying, hence an epilogue.
Epilogue
At the Mosquito, there’s peace after the cataclysm. The news desks have been busy with vague stories about a small meteoroid crashing in the jungle, a ruse fabricated by the Honduran Government to cover up the real events.
Deep in the cave network, Kokine has survived, and life stirs in its belly. The unnoticed genetic change, caused by a surge of radiation in 1945, has turned Kokine receptive to human fecundation. Not only will it give birth to Fabian’s baby but can now inseminate women.
Mother Margarola, Jaro, Poyta, and Oitapi sacrificed their scant remaining lives so Kokine could remain hidden. Kokine will rebuild a nest in the caves, harvest young women from the local tribes, and impregnate them. They will give birth to fecund Wata, strong Wata. Then it will be a matter of time and geometric progression. Kokine couldn’t kill Fabian, not the father of the new Wata. Kokine wishes Fabian a long and eventful life, but regrets having misled him. The Wata never lie, unless the survival of their species is at stake. They didn’t destroy their machines, or their weapons.
It occurred to us that we could use the Trinity tests of the Manhattan Project as the event that triggered the Wata’s genetic change.
Careful comparison of our original notes and the synopsis contents will highlight the many changes in the structure and development of the tale, down to several subplots, the ending, and plot mechanics. Had we actually written the book, the changes would have been substantial, perhaps altering the plot even more. This is an important detail to highlight. Structures, no matter how detailed, don’t impair the writer’s creativity. Quite the contrary. They serve as a springboard to greater creative freedom.
"The Nuts & Bolts" is an excerpt from Writer's Companion (2011) by Carlos J Cortés and Renée Miller. Reprinted with permission.
Post new comment