Month: July 2022

Reblog: 7 Writing Tips from Dune — Justin Kownacki

Dune was one of my favorite movies of the past couple years. The book is a sci-fi classic with clear opportunities for a blockbuster Hollywood treatment, but over the decades we’ve only gotten a couple…flawed…attempts to adapt it to the large and small screen.

For me, the Denis Villeneuve movie finally hit that sweet spot where it follows the book, but isn’t afraid to make the story its own. All the pieces fit together. It feels like Dune. I can’t wait for part 2 to release.

I found Justin Kownacki’s blog recently, and I love the way he digs deep into storytelling. In this article, he provides a phenomenal analysis of Villeneuve’s Dune, and points out several elements that make it work so well.

Special effects aren’t the only reason why Frank Herbert‘s 1965 sci-fi novel Dune has been so notoriously hard to adapt for film or TV. The first book in Herbert’s epic saga introduces readers to a complex story world that spans across multiple planets, political conflicts, alien technologies, and secretive religions. Squeezing it all into one film — even at 2.5 hours long — was always going to be a tough job.

The 2021 adaptation of Dune by writer-director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriters Eric Roth and John Spaights solves this problem by cutting the story of the Dune novel in half. Although this choice angered some critics who feel like the movie “just ends in the middle of the story,” it actually ends at a point that satisfies the script’s central question. So while this choice may not be satisfying in the traditional “what happens next” sense, it does work in the “what change is this film trying to document” sense.

But in order for Dune to work at all, its screenwriters had to tell a lot of story at a relatively brisk pace. (In fact, while I thought pacing was one of the places where Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 fell short, I’d say he just about nails it in Dune.)

So, why does Dune work so well as an adaptation?

Let’s look at seven ways Villeneuve, Roth, and Spaights solved some of the biggest problems in any epic adaptation: exposition, story structure and the pace of information.

Check out the rest over at Justin Kownacki’s blog!

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 13

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

The End of Act I

Chapter twelve finished the first part of Christopher’s story, and this chapter finished the first part of God-Speaker’s. Christopher’s chapters will continue in the same linear time, while the God-Speaker chapters are going to start time-hopping.

In terms of three-act structure, I’m now moving out of the beginning and into the middle. I’ve set up the two main characters and their settings. I’ve tried to set up their motives and some of the themes that will continue throughout the book.

The end of Act I is an inflection point. Big things happen, and the direction of the story shifts. For Christopher, this means finding people after weeks of being lost and alone. For God-Speaker, the opposite is true—it looks as though he may be permanently separated from his tribe. Christopher has succeeded in his goal to find people. God-Speaker has failed to guide his own people. Now both of them need to take stock of where they are and ask themselves, “what next?”

This chapter is also especially meaningful because in many ways it’s the inciting incident for the entire book. Chapter one may have started with Christopher’s plane crash, but this moment when God-Speaker finds the voices under the mountain is what drives the whole story, and will be important later on.

Into The Middle

As I move into the middle of the book, my focus is going to shift from building up the main characters and the world. First, some of the big mysteries of the book will come into focus: what’s going on around Razor Mountain, and how does God-Speaker’s story tie into Christopher’s? The middle of the book will flesh out these mysteries and eventually reveal the answers.

The other major task I need to tackle is expanding the characters’ internal conflicts and tying them to the external conflicts they’re experiencing, so that when we get to the end of the book, the biggest events can answer some mysteries as well as providing resolutions to external and internal conflicts in a kind of catharsis mega-combo.

No More Simple

This chapter also marked the last chapter where I use simple writer as an aid for simplifying the writing style. God-Speaker’s story is jumping ahead through time.

I originally started doing this because I wanted a short-hand way to suggest that God-Speaker’s tribe were human, with familiar human feelings and thoughts, while also having a more limited capacity for communication and lacking more complex or nuanced ideas that built up over thousands of years of human history.

I read Clan of the Cave Bear, and one of the stylistic choices that really turned me off from that book was the way the authorial narration used ideas and comparisons from modern times while describing paleolithic neandertals and humans. It wasn’t anachronistic exactly—the characters themselves weren’t having these ideas—but it took me out of the headspace of those characters, and out of that setting. I wanted to avoid that here.

I’m not sure the simplified language accomplished everything I set out to do with it in Razor Mountain, but hopefully it did help, in some small part, to make the setting resonate.

It also added an extra annoying layer to the revision process, where I had to decide if I wanted to keep certain complex words that fit my meaning, or if I wanted to replace them with simpler words that didn’t quite have the impact of the originals. I don’t mind admitting that I am happy to not do this anymore.

Next Time

That’s it for this chapter. Next chapter starts Act II, and all the excitement of new characters and settings. I’ve also got some summer vacation coming up, which hopefully means I’ll have a lot more time and energy to spend on writing in the next couple weeks. See you next time for Chapter fourteen.

Razor Mountain — Chapter 13.2

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

He buried the pieces of the stone god as well as he could with the snow. He knew that the spirit had left the stone when it broke. It would not favor God-Speaker after he had failed to keep it safe.

Deep in the canyon of ice, there was only one way to go. The sides were steep and slick, and he was tired and hurt. He found his way down to solid ground, though he could not tell if it was ice or earth or rock. He stood and limped forward. He did not know what direction he was going. He did not know if he was walking toward his people or away. He could only hope that there was a way up to the surface somewhere ahead.

Instead, the crack grew deeper. It split, again and again, but each path looked the same: dark walls of ice and rock and a dull sky above, filled with snow.

The world took on an unreal quality. Faint reflections stared back at him, and shadowy shapes loomed in the ice. He felt again that he was on the edge between his world and the world of spirits. Perhaps he was. Perhaps he was dying.

As he limped onward, he began to feel the truth. He was walking toward the mountain. Just as it had called down the storm, it shaped the ice. It pulled him to it. The deep, unreal blue of the ice dulled until it was black. Along the sharp edges, where it caught the light, it glowed deep purple.

The air took on a sharp, foul scent. It felt heavy and thick. God-Speaker held out a hand, and along with the snowflakes, black dust began to collect on his palm. A gust of wind from high above swept over him, blowing his hand clean. Black smoke swirled in the air ahead.

Finally, he reached a place where the sky above went dark. He didn’t know if it was night at last, or if he had gone completely under the ice. The snow and wind fell away, so he supposed the ice must have closed over him. He kept limping forward. There was nothing else left for him to do.

When he had gone down into almost complete darkness, he heard voices once again. They were stronger, clearer. He felt that he should understand them, but the words were always just beyond his reach. The path took him toward the voices, into complete darkness. He felt the walls on either side, and they no longer felt like ice. They were warm stone.

As he continued, his eyes adjusted. Faint purple light came from the stone itself. It was just barely enough to see the twists and turns by variations in darkness. Even so, he nearly stepped into a crack that cut across his path.

He stopped at the last moment and tried to look down. Nothing but pure blackness, a gash across the purple-black of the cave. A gentle breath of air came up from somewhere far below. God-Speaker held on to the rough walls on either side and reached a foot across to find the far side. He didn’t have to jump, he just took a long, careful step across the gap.

The walls came together, pressing in on either side. God-Speaker had to get down onto hands and knees and crawl to fit through. He no longer thought about getting up and out. He would never be above the ground again. Those voices still called to him.

He came to another gap and reached out across it, finding a ledge on the other side, a little higher up. He forced himself over and through, squirming into a gap in the rock. On the other side, the cave opened up.

The purple light was stronger here, but it didn’t help him see. It made his eyes hurt. It throbbed in unison with his heart, in time to the pounding pain in his forehead. He could see it even with his eyes closed. The rock walls of the room were too smooth, too perfectly curved. The room had no ceiling that he could see. It rose forever into blackness, but tiny lights appeared above as he stared upward. The voices came down from those lights.

They fell upon him like a torrent, like a rushing river of whispers. He lost track of his body, and even the pain fell away. He knew now that they could hear him. They could understand him. He could hide nothing from them.

What surprised him was that they, too, were completely exposed. The voices were as open to him as he was to them. So close together, there were no barriers between them.

The voices were old, so old he couldn’t imagine it except by the context they gave him. The idea of Braves-the-Storm or Makes-Medicine being old was laughable in comparison. The lifetimes of the biggest, most ancient trees God-Speaker had ever seen were mere seasons to the voices. They were true gods. They were like the mountain, built up slowly over ages.

They dove into the shallow pool of his memories: the few places he had been, the little group of people he had spent his entire tiny life with.

They were witness to things he could not imagine. He saw landscapes stretching out and out and out, until they curved back into each other. He saw tribes growing into peoples, into societies and cultures and nations and beyond.

They delved into his knowledge, into the worlds of people and spirits, into magic and medicine, into the ways of napping flint into tools, of curing hides and weaving nets and cutting spears into a fine, fire-hardened point.

They knew that these simple (so simple!) tools could grow with the people who fashioned them: tools to make tools, more people specializing into smaller and deeper wells of knowledge.

The voices saw the vast span of time and space and knowledge. They lived lives beyond anything he could comprehend. But even they did not know everything. Even they were subject to great catastrophes. Just as he and his people had journeyed in their small way, the voices had journeyed.

Once, they had a home. They were comfortable. They lived endless lives, minds passed down generations, living endlessly. Then they passed through the void, to find a new home. They would continue, as they had always continued. They would continue in God-Speaker.

They were laid bare to him. He could see, just as they could see, how they had continued endlessly for so long without dying. He could feel, just as they could feel, that something was wrong. God-Speaker’s thoughts were close (so close!) to the shape of their thoughts. More than any of the others. Still, they couldn’t quite fit. They wanted to wash over him, subsume him into themselves, but they couldn’t. They wanted to live as they had lived before, but they couldn’t. They were trapped, at their journey’s end, deep inside the mountain, unable to accept death but unable to live.

God-Speaker could see into them. They knew so much. In mere moments, he felt the world expand around him. It was so much more and so much less than he had thought it was. He could feel his own mind expanding. It was a chaotic blur of images and ideas.

He lay on his back in the center of the chamber, exhausted, broken, unable to move. The purple light washed over him. He was so utterly different from them, yet there was one thing that bound them tightly together.

Like them, he did not want to die.

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