It was observed I missed my post this week. So a few words that I found. These come out of the short story collection Paradox Lost, collected from the publications of Fredric Brown. His widow opened the introduction:
Fred hated to write. But he loved having written.
I know I’ve been there. I’m sure you have. Nice to know others have as well.
Steve Alten has put together a sweeping story from the depths of the Sargasso Sea, Atlantic Ocean to the Highlands of Scotland, from A.D. 565 to 1330 to present day. Zachary Wallace, a marine biologist, the protagonist of Alten’s story is the typical flawed hero with family issues.
Unfortunately, the lack of imagination from the author begins with the names of his main characters: Angus, the father, as a trite name for a Scot, and Wallace, obviously taken from the famous William Wallace, hero of Scottish Independance. It continues with invoking the Knights Templar in the Prologue of the book and an attempt to explain Nessie.
The most interesting parts of the story deal with Zachary Wallace’s interactions with his fellow marine biologists in their quest for cryptozoological creatures and Angus Wallace’s womanizing. Neither of which are expanded upon enough to be a motivation or goal for either character.
Although the title of the book is “The Loch,” that is not the antagonist of the story. If so, one would assume this is a classic Man vs. Nature narrative. Instead, the story is very much a Man vs Self narrative with a flavoring of historical conspiracy theory and monster hunting thrown in as a back drop. A shift in focus several times in the story attempts to make a smooth transition from Man vs. Self to Man vs. Destiny and finally to Man vs. Nature, but the result is a loss of goal for the hero.
Alten’s dialogue is one of the saving graces of “The Loch.” His typical Scottish brogue is entertaining to read, but must almost be read out loud to understand in some cases. The banter between father and son is easy to read and quickly moves the story along. But, the use of the first person narrative detracts from the overall feel of the story and would possibly be better served by another point of view.
Finally, at the beginning of the chapters, Alten adds first hand accounts and eye-witness quotes regarding the “Loch Ness Monster/Nessie.” These accounts are most likely included to add to illusion of the monster haunting Zachary Wallace, but their inclusion belong in a cryptozoological anthology as they do not add or enhance the overall story of “The Loch.”
I give this story two flags, one for dialogue, and one for the effort.
I’ll admit, I’m a bit obsessed about checking blog stats over at my site. Numbers of visitors, hits, pages per visit, Google search terms, I eat it all up. The other day one of the Google results stood out: “what were the two reasons that north carolina entered into a period of transition?” It looked so much like a homework question that I put it back into Google. Right as rain, I came across the textbook that the question came out of, as well as sites such as Wiki Answers that had the same question posted. That put me into Grumpy Old Man David mode, so I looked up the questions two chapters further on, and decided to write a post that had entirely wrong answers for all of them.
And then on Saturday I got a hit for one of the new questions. Awesome!
I tell you that story not to gloat about catching a middle school student doing their homework on Google (bah, punk kids on my lawn), but to pass on something rather accidental that came from the exercise. When I first answered the questions, the answers were unrelated to each other. For example, I said that the two actions Congress took at the beginning of WWII that affected North Carolina were ceding the state to Germany and then immediately invading to practice for D-Day. But that didn’t work with any of the previous questions. So I went back and changed the answers until they formed a single narrative.
At which point I realized what I was doing. World building. Specifically alternate history world building. Now I want to write a story in the world I created, which is a dieselpunk time travel story with a little bit of secret history built in. It was such an unintentional thing, but it turned out to be a really fantastic approach.
In my case, I got questions out of a middle school North Carolina history text book, but that was only because that’s what got me into it with that original Google hit. I’ve not yet tried branching out, but I suspect that middle school books might be the right level for this exercise, as they focus on broader looks at history. High school history focuses on tighter details. And while I did this with a history book and turned it into an alternate history exercise, I suspect it might work with a biology or geology textbook for the purposes of different planet world building.
I’d be interested in seeing if other people have tried this approach, or might give it a try in the future, see if it’s something where I got lucky and ended up world building, or if this is a legitimate approach.
The image here is from Becky a young “English Lit geek” in London. She scribbled down some thoughts in her moleskine, took the photo and uploaded it to Tumblr. And wow did it get a response. Although I am well aware that many phrases come from Shakespeare it is something else to see them all written down in one place. Can you find your favorite? Which one is it?
