Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

Writing Meditations

Narrative Mode ~ #17 Byronic Hero

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Dark hero

The Byronic hero is different than other heroes.  In some ways he is similar to Hemingway’s code hero in that he does not fit in society.  However, Hemingway’s hero seeks acceptance and is humble in his difference, while Lord Byron’s hero is superior and deliberate in his isolation.  He is better than others because of his superior intellect and sensitivity.  His passion overrides his actions and supplies support to his intense attachment to whatever drives him: war, a woman, knowledge, isolation. 

In return for his active rejection of social mores, he is also rejected by society even though he is still viewed as great, but great with tremendous flaws that others see, but he does not or does not view as actual flaws.  He is misunderstood or perhaps even maligned in his youth and must live with the stamp of darkness or deliberately perpetuate it as a kind of medal of valor against what he views as inferior knowledge created by the society he rejects.
This character acts as a foil against a common heroic plot.  There are heroic actions he simply cannot do, and this influence on plot imposes distinct directions that the designated Byronic hero must take.

Example:

  • Common hero sees female in distress, battles with those attempting to harm her, saves her and returns her to her waiting family’s arms.  She falls in love with him, and they live happily ever after (once they have dealt with all the interference common to heroic love).
  • Byronic hero sees female in distress, battles with those attempting to harm her, saves her and (wait, here is the catch) returns her to her waiting family’s arms requesting first proper reward paid before they may have her back.  He will withhold her until he receives appropriate payment and will even reject payment if he determines he undervalued the prize.  She is strangely attracted and repulsed by him, perhaps even insulted by his lack of interest in her.  He may even desire her, but payment comes first.

Want to write a dark story, write with a Byronic hero in the mix.  He does not even have to be the main character.  But your readers will get attached to him, hoping all the time that he will change.  And perhaps, you will change him in the end, slightly anyway.

Seen any good Byronic heroes?  Wuthering Heights has Heathcliff.  Jane Eyre‘s Rochester is a gentler version that changes.  Written any?

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

Narrative Mode ~ #16 Romeo & Juliet

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Wherefore art thou Romeo

This narrative framework has been used by the best: Shakespeare and Banadello , so why shouldn’t anybody else?  However, though many are familiar with this story, it is often viewed as having a simple plot.  Sure Romeo and Juliet are the main characters, but the nurse, the friar, Benvolio and Mercutio are essential supporting cast that could become stories worth fleshing out more, even shifting the focus from the two star-crossed lovers to one of these four.  My students groaned when they learned we would be reading Romeo and Juliet, but they loved the sword fighting scenes and the word play between Mercutio and other characters.  Finding Benvolio to be such an honest, caring fellow was another benefit and examining the paired scenes in the garden between Juliet and the nurse kept them quite entertained.  The storyline runs well, especially when the other characters are considered.
  • Avoid the Shakespearian give away summary at the start and shoot straight into the story.  Two servants of the Montague family begin a street fight with two servants from the Capulet side. Their loyalty for the family requires this response and of course, they must get the other fellows to throw the first swing so the blame lands squarely on them. 
  •  Benvolio, best friend and cousin to Romeo, tries to stop the fight, but his actions are misinterpreted by hot head Tybalt Capulet who jumps into the fray.  Now the town joins in, and the Prince arrives to break up the fight and threaten to kill the next person to disrupt his peaceful town again.  This seemingly natural response on the part of the prince is the initiating action that leads to all the other conflicts.  Without the promise of death should a next fight occur, Romeo and Juliet would have never found themselves separated. 
  •  Romeo meanwhile is suffering from the standard teenage angst. He loves a girl, but she won’t even look twice at him.  Most people forget that he was nuts about Rosaline before he ever laid eyes on Juliet.  In fact, he won’t look at another girl until his cousin Benvolio and friend Mercutio drag him to a party they plan to crash.  Then he sees Juliet and forgets Rosaline in record time. 
  •  Of course, there is another meanwhile: Juliet’s father is considering betrothing her to the County Paris.  Juliet is expected to meet him at the party and determine if she could come to like him. 
  •  So you see there is a lot more going on than just two teenagers who cannot be together because their parents have an ancient feud between them.  At the party, Tybalt sees Romeo and determines that he needs to be taught a lesson, which brings us to the most serious hurdle the two lovers must deal with. 
  •  Tybalt in his search for Romeo runs into Mercutio and Benvolio.  Mercutio ends up in a sword fight with Tybalt which Romeo then tries to break up.  This only leads to the death of his friend when Tybalt presses his sword under Romeo’s arm and into Mercutio’s breast.  He dies cursing Romeo for getting in the way.  Tybalt and Mercutio were fighting a staged dual, all bluff to save face.  Now Romeo must fight Tybalt to make up for Mercutio.  In his anger, he kills Tybalt and too late realizes he has killed Juliet’s beloved cousin.  And that is the second event that tips the remaining dominoes. 
  •  How can Juliet love someone who has killed her cousin?  How can her family raise her from her grief?  How can Romeo give her reason to forgive him?  
  •  Juliet’s father’s response is to betroth her to Paris and plan the marriage for just a few days away.  Romeo is banished and has left the area.  Juliet acquires a potion from the friar which will cause her to appear dead, but Romeo does not get the message that would clue him in.  He learns instead that she has committed suicide rather than marry Paris.  And everyone knows what happens after that.  (My students would yell, “And everyone dies!”)

So let’s break it down to simple plotting:
·       Boy wants girl but can’t get her.
·       Family of boy hates other family.
·       Friends of boy drag him off to a party at the other family’s home
·       Boy falls for another girl in the enemy family.
·       Girl falls for boy
·       With the help of loyal servant, girl and boy plan to wed
·       Girl’s cousin goes after boy and kills his friend instead
·       Boy seeks revenge
·       Girl is expected to hate boy and love another
·       Boy must hide to avoid “justice”
·       Girl’s death is faked, but boy does not get the news and kills himself.  She awakens to find him dead and kills herself.
·       Family learns the hard way to get along

Two colonies on an alien planet.  Two companies in commercial competition selling the same product.  Two schools in the same city.  Two software programs in the same mainframe.  Two ranches in the old west.  Each applies it own influence on weapons, fighting styles, rulers, values, and how much the end will twist.

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

Not just sitting around

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Not just watching the flowers grow.

So I have not been preparing my Tuesday prompts and am not busy teaching, but that doesn’t mean I am just sitting around twiddling my thumbs.  I have been steadily working on two separate projects.  One is getting the second of my Student of Jump books (No-time Like the Present) ready for publication at the end of this month.  I just finished what is my pretend final edit.  The one I convince myself is the last one needed.  But in a week or so it will go through another which will no doubt result in finding so many errors I will be a basket case for a few days, losing all confidence before I do another edit which will do the exact opposite, and I will split the difference and feel fairly confident that I have taken care of all I can.  I have my absolutely wonderful beta reader tackling it right now, which will provide the impetus to make changes and edit again.

The other project is The Handbook of Narrative Frameworks for Novels & Short Stories.  This is a gathering of the narrative mode posts I have been doing since February 2013.  After pulling them together, I edited, added, and am currently creating worksheets that will help make use of the frameworks each one provides for novel and story writing.  All and all I have been busy and since school has let out, intensely content finding myself immersed in my writing, spending time with my family, and taking care of those little jobs that always wait for summer to come.

Narrative Mode ~ #15 Sleeping Beauty

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I like sleeping beauty because I always felt my own mother
lived a life that fit a large part of this framework. She was a classic good
girl who thought life as a secretary would be made to order.  It had some challenge, and she did well and
even did some modeling on the side.  But
life lost excitement, had no adventure for her. She did travel, but it was
basically from her parents to her grandparents. 
Boredom set in ,and she felt trapped, almost asleep while life went on
around her.  And then the dashing
engineer arrived interviewing for a position at the company where she worked.
They grew close and soon she was learning how to pilot a plane and traveling to
Cuba and other South American countries. 
After five years of adventuring, they married, had children and well,
lived  happily every after.
The basic plot is easy to lay out:

  • A girl is born and the family sees danger in her
    future.
  • They protect the girl by limiting her
    interaction with others
  • She is innocent of the danger and trusts
    everyone
  •  
    The dangerous situation takes place and…
  • She falls into a deep sleep due to the backlash
    of the measures taken to protect her. 
  •  Another stranger arrives and breaks through the
    protection to awaken her
  • She then lives happily ever after.

Simplest way to adapt this to a modern story is to make the
protection and its affects a metaphor. 
Imagine her innocence as a type of sleep.  She is unaware of life outside a set locale
and group of people.  The protection is a
valid and necessary one, and she will face that danger too, but she can also come
out of that sleep through an activity, through meeting someone or through a
physical or mental challenge.  She will
struggle to gain a sense of understanding and then finally reach the moment of
complete awareness.
This one is not particularly demanding as frameworks go, but
for simple bones and easy adjustments to bring in complications, it is a nice
one.



The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

Narrative Mode ~ #14 Arthurian Legend

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Okay, so I thought I was finished with the narrative frameworks, but it turns out I am not.  A few more have come to mind.  Arthurian Legend is a great one to consider as the mythology is quite fluid with a variety of shifts that change who is related to whom and the motivations behind their actions.  T. S. White did a lovely extrapolation of the story behind Arthur with The Once and Future King. But limiting yourself to just Arthur in the height of his kingship leaves plenty to work with, though the early days before he became king are also chock full of opportunity for creating a story about a young boy unaware of his parentage being cared for by a foster father and annoyed by his foster brother as he learns the rules of engagement, be it knighthood, business or modern politics.  However, I am going to focus on the adult Arthur as a framework.

  • A man strong in power and human understanding wants to bring peace to the hierarchy he leads.  
  • He has a beautiful wife and many trustworthy friends who will lay their life down to protect and support him.  They believe that he can shape their world into a place where they all can prosper.
  • But there are undercurrents, past deeds and associations which are at work to pull his kingdom (company, position of authority) down or at least replace him.  The child he had with another woman wants to be recognized as the true heir.  The child’s aunt would do anything to undermine Arthur, place the now grown illegitimate son in control and gain power herself through manipulation.
  • Then there is the faithful, most trusted among his supporters who is in love with Arthur’s wife.  Does she return the sense of connection or control her desire?  Does it get to be too much for them both?  Do they actually remain true to Arthur despite what others believe and their own strong feelings?
  • When Arthur is forced to face the fact that his wife and his best knight have a long term relationship (you define its actual limitation), he must respond as the others close to him expect and in the action also deal with the insurrection brought on by his son and his half sister.

There is plenty of room in this framework to write in most any genre.  In science fiction, Arthur can be the captain of a ship, the leader of a colony, a business mogul.   A romance novel could just as easily work.  The shift could be made to highlight the wife and the lieutenant as they work through their feelings and their loyalty to Arthur.   A contemporary novel could fly with it as well in the business world or on a ranch.

Key point to remember in the Arthurian Legend is the fact that he is a good man with a difficult job who honestly cares about the people he leads, and what makes him great is also what makes him vulnerable.  He would rather take the bullet than have someone else suffer.  It is his flaw as much as his finest quality.

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

                                                                                • Then there are the other men who pride themselves on their

Wrapping up Narrative Modes

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For the last thirteen weeks, I have been presenting the various modes one can design a story or novel around.

 

Using strong foundation stock.

Some are common traditional modes, such as the Heroic Journey, Faustian Legend, Cain & Abel, the Christ Figure, Coming of Age, the Dream Vision and the Frame Narrative.  There are others which are more directly related to authors’ well-known works: Hemingway’s Code Hero, Heinlein’s Three-stage Character and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  Fairy tales had a few to offer, and several more than I mentioned:  Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast the most common.  The prose essay format is a new form, most notably first used by Virginia Wolf.

The purpose in bringing them up and outlining them as I have, is to remind any writer that our readers often enjoy a tale as much for the author’s unique style and the genre as they do for the return to a format we love to read again and again in its traditional form or a modified version that surprises us with a new twist.  These narrative modes make great bones for our imagination to flesh out and clothe in fresh linen.

And mixing them up is not such a bad idea.  Throw together a Heroic Journey with Cinderella or write a Coming of Age novel in the form of a prose essay.  Those too are out there (take a close look at Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), and those mixes add increased complexity to the story and still maintain familiarity for the reader.