DOOM SPORE
Science-Horror
In the tradition of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Scary Fun: A Summer Movie in a Book Today San Diego, tomorrow the world: the fungal invasion is on, and it seems nothing can stop the Offensor spores from a hidden jungle island in the Peruvian Amazon. Lt. Linsey Simon of the San Diego Harbor Police, on loan to a secret Federal anti-terrorist agency, is the first to believe the story of a little boy and his cousin. Jimmy Mendez, and his cousin Maribel Walesky, both tell a horrifying story nobody believes. Their fathers, merchant marine sailors, shipped out on an old tramp steamer that returned from a journey to Peru—only the creatures who came ashore were not men. These were not the children's dads, but blank-eyed, loamy-smelling facsimiles who did not recognize their kids. Now it's up to Linsey Simon, her hard-hitting reporter-husband Jack Simon, and a small Federal agency to stop the Doom Spores before they take over the world. The only remaining hope is a mysterious Peruvian shaman whose people have kept the Offensor at bay for thousands of years…

Article: (Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

The Steepest Learning Curve: POV Some writers will claim that dialog is the hardest thing for writers to learn, but I disagree for one fundamental reason. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine that well-written dialog can be learned, whereas point of view is—well, a matter of viewpoint. You should never assume you are weak with dialog. Try hard, persist, and you may find that dialog floats into better perspective as you gain the necessary mastery of Point of View (POV).

The Chicken or the Egg? Here's a question one frequently hears: which is the most important element in writing fiction: plot, characterization, dialog, point of view…? The fact is that they are all important. When you are writing fiction, you are like a juggler. You have to keep all the elements in the air, simultaneously. The good news, of course, is that you can stop, walk away, think for a day, and return to the work. If a juggler stops, all the pins or balls come crashing down. Today, we'll focus on POV. I've already mentioned that good dialog depends, in part, on a good working understanding of POV. As we'll see here, 'good understanding' and 'good working understanding' are two different animals.

There is room for many paths in fiction (as my article last week on Romantic Fiction by Men suggests). A work of fiction or nonfiction can get by with minimal dialog, but POV is essential to any writing more formal than the proverbial note to the milkman. POV is as essential and irreducible a reality in writing as flour is a component of bread, or cement is a component of concrete (these two often being mistaken for one another; we never 'fall on the cement;' we fall on the sidewalk, or on the concrete).

Speaking of dialog (as part of POV), I was just re-reading an anthology of fiction by Jorge Luis Borges. This world-class Argentine author was one of those rare writers, now part of history, who actually helped redefine the boundaries of fiction in his unique, inimitable voice. Like Hemingway or Dashiell Hammet, for example, Borges is often imitated, but never effectively so (risking almost certain parody). That makes Borges' voice or form little more than an estuary bearing his name, rather than a vast Bay of Bengal to which many authors may aspire. However, the perceptive reader or writer will come away from reading Borges with new bottles of rocket fuel strapped to their imaginations. Borges manages to be engaging, while writing sparse dialogue. However, his mastery of POV is an essential part of what makes him so powerful. Hemingway uses dialog a bit more freely and personally, but his narrative control (POV) is strong as steel. Ray Bradbury's prose is often lyrical and poetic, in ways not all stuffed shirts 'approve' of, but his work has captured the imaginations of generations of readers from childhood forward. His critics will molder in their graves, with not even a footnote for an epitaph, but his work will continue to inspire millions in future generations. Bradbury's dialog is often as lyrical as his prose. It's 'easy on the eyes,' to borrow a popular U.S. idiom. Greatness we cannot control or predict. But we can and must control our narrative point of view. In many ways, it is an excercise in 'Know Thyself.'

Silly Me (A Note). Some years ago, when I was teaching my teenage son how to drive my stick-shift car, I was shocked to learn that I had to first learn how to teach him, before I could teach him. I had to first try and figure out what it is I do with one foot and two hands to drive a standard transmission auto. When I started to write this article, it quickly dawned on me how many years I spent learning this stuff, and what a huge subject it is. So I won't presume to capture the whole POV discussion in one week's article. Above all, be consistent. You introduce your story not only with a narrative hook to draw the reader's attention, but you create rules for the story. Some of these are implicit. Maybe neither you nor the reader actually signs a document, or recites a codicil out loud, or pauses for reflection about it. You, the author, are responsible for making a lot of that happen on the fly, instantly, as your story begins. POV is a good example of an unspoken, unwritten part of the agreement or handshake between you and the reader. The reader expects you to live up to the promises that these rules make for both reader and writer. Whatever choices you make (POV, narrative persona, etc.), be consistent, do not deviate, and stick with that to the last word of your story. Even if you pick two or more narrative POVs, which makes life a bit more complicated, and is not recommended for beginners, stick with the rules you have set up.

Voice and Diction, Necessary Detours. 'Voice' is a term that is sometimes applied to describe the driving force that lies betwen an author and his or her narrative technique. An author of unique power and message (e.g., Isabel Allende, Isaac Bashevis Singer) may write fictions in which Narrator A does this and Narrator B does that, but we speak of Allende's or Singer's voice in a way that describes the author and cuts across multiples of their works. I mention Voice because it is a beautiful and powerful concept, but has almost no relevance to the subject of Narrator or POV. You may learn POV, but you earn Voice. You must learn POV to write coherently and effectively, the way you learn to chew food properly as you eat, but Voice is a form of reader recognition. Every writer has a voice, to be sure, but few of us ever reach lasting, global status. Bottom line: don't worry about voice. Focus on POV.

Diction is a more technical term, referring to the word choices (often regional or cultural) that help anchor the characters, the narrative, and the dialog in the author's context. In Homer's work, for example, certain repeated epithets (metaphors standard to a region) often help suggest the origin of a certain part of Iliad or Odyssey to a particular region of Greece or Asia Minor in the original, pre-written bardic originals that were recited by wandering minstrels. It is usually a big mistake to try and write in 'dialect,' as for example Stephen Crane did in his 1893 (and first) novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. [Dialog example: "Run, Jimmie, run! Dey'll get yehs," screamed a retreating Rum Alley child. "Naw," responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, "dese micks can't make me run."]. Maggie, by the way, was self-published, and soon widely acclaimed as the first naturalistic novel depicting U.S. life at its rawest—replete with dialog that is uncomfortable to read today, as it probably was then. Crane wrote other acclaimed fiction, but is best known for his 1895 The Red Badge of Courage, in which the language is powerful and natural. As in all successful writing, Crane's POV is generally controlled and consistent. Bottom line: you are best writing naturally, in your own voice, using diction, inflection, etc., that come naturally to you. The flip side is: write as closely as possible to a standard, 'received' English that can be effortlessly read in India, the U.S., Canada, and other English-speaking markets. Writing an entire book in U.S. Afro-American dialect (Ebonic), for example, while a perfectly legitimate thing to do, can make your work obscure; not only for people who speak other dialects of U.S. English, but even for other Afro-American speakers. Clear, neutral diction is almost always the best recourse. You can salt in a few spicy terms at strategic moments to indicate the ethnic group you portray. If you come across "Oy veh!" or "What it be?" that is plenty of ethnicity clue for the perceptive reader. All of this fits into POV, but is not the main backbone of POV.

Helpful Note on Dialect in POV: Here is another important word on diction for historical fiction writers. While researching and writing my books Lethal Journey (noir thriller; fiction) and Dead Move: Kate Morgan and the Haunting Mystery of Coronado (scholarly analysis; nonfiction)—both based on a famous 1892 cold case that is both true ghost story and true crime story—I had no idea what diction to use for my 1892 characters. At first I was stumped. Should I invent some sort of stiff, unnatural speech pattern based on dubious old movies?

As it turns out: No. Many of those first talkies were made with actors who had been stage-trained (or pretended to be), which means they spent years sounding British-Shakespearean (a nonexistent dialect, as artificial as those cupcakes that ants will not infest at a picnic). Furthermore, it's clear those early Talkies actors tended to speak in a fake saristocratic U.S. English in which, for example, all the adventures were had by 'baws and gehls.' Today's dominant U.S. dialects were already well in place around Civil War times. This has received thorough scrutiny. It's important for actors to know, and we can cash in on all their work. So if you're writing fiction, which is set in the U.S.A. in the latter half of the 19th Century, just write naturally in today's idiom (but, duh…, avoid having your Civil War soldiers pausing at McDonald's on their way to Shiloh, or watching Mickey Mouse films with their burgers, and other anachronisms).

Dialog, Wrapped Up for Now. We discuss dialog at some length here, though tangentially, because mastery of dialog comes from mastery of POV. To render dialog in a fascimile 'as (fictionally) heard,' you have to have an ear for doing dialog in fiction, which means you have to know how to evoke each character's persona in the story. It means 'hearing' your characters from the soul outward, on the fly, as they interact in story time (we discussed plot vs story, and story time, a few weeks ago).

Two quick points: (1) dialog captures not real-life, on-the-nose (another film industry term) people talking, but what works in a story, which are two different things; (2) dialog very much depends on mastery of POV, because dialog is how your characters communicate with each other, with themselves (interior monologue), and ultimately, most importantly, with the reader. Dialog is a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say for now: dialog that works is dramatic, meaning it furthers the suspense of the overall work, whereas people 'just talking' isn't worth putting in your story, and lets the air out of your story's tires. Learning the difference, and applying it in some strong measure, requires an inborn talent for dialog. If you struggle with dialog, don't despair. You can still succeed if you figure out how to work around the problem. Give it a good try, a hundred good tries, and don't be discouraged. Learn your own competences and shortcomings as a writer, and write accordingly. POV is a necessary fundament that any intelligent author must tackle, and master—the sooner, the better. POV, if you are like I was in my beginnings, is one of those terms you hear about, and think you understand, and only later (sometimes years later) understand you have no idea how to apply POV in your fiction.

Telegraphing My Ending: Three Stages. Since I speak of grasping and then applying POV, I will give away the ending of this article. From personal observation, I suspect most authors go through three stages regarding POV.

First, they don't know how to do it, and only learn this once it's been pointed out to them (with much sweat and blood and disappointment).

Second, they start growing those POV muscles, and rigidly adhere to 'the rules,' with more sweat and blood.

Third and finally, they come full circle and realize that the author is the narrator in all forms of writing, and must retain that control while operating all sorts of puppet strings behind the scenery. The author who has done the work in stage two, sweated and labored and bled, will find this a relaxing and powerful stage.

Stage 3 is the stage where you have mastered the techniques of POV (though learning never stops). You may awe journeyman writers by making it look easy. They start asking you how you did it. That is your black belt, and it is typically a long way down the road if you are new to the writing game.

There is an old adage: the first two million words are just practice. For some writers it is more, for others a bit less. I'd say for me it was about two million. Though I have written and published dozens of books, stories, and articles, I still keep about ten unpublishable novels in a box in the garage. I have several file-feet of sometimes yellowed, hand-written stories and false starts, dating back about half a century. The oldest piece is a two page, hand-written Catholic grammar school exercise for which I received a red-ink A and a little note in Sister Paulina's light, appreciative hand, as if the spell of a walk on a winter's day (told by a precocious 8th grader) were still fresh in her senses.

None of that will ever be published. I keep it for the same reason we keep old photographs, in which nobody today knows who those long-ago people were. It's just stuff you keep, and strangers throw it away after you die. It's all good. Both my grammar school (St. Mary's on Prospect and Starr Streets, in New Haven, CT, now a tiny Yale University building) and Sister Paulina (lung cancer from too many unfiltered Lucky Strikes between classes) are long gone. We are lucky if anything of us survives, except in the memories of those who love us in life. That too is well and good. Life itself is an ultimate good that requires no questioning. Anyone can do it, if they get that far.

The first two million words aren't written to be thrown away; they just are. Writing them is as exciting to the writer as living the rest of life itself. We writers have the great fortune, for all the frustration and disappointment our vocation brings with it, of being able to live parallel lives within the richness of our imaginations, and often in far-flung places. Most people only live once. Authors of fiction live many lives, and are far richer for it. We are, borrowing on the adage about nine lives, the cats of the human race.

Crux: Narrator. A written work is 'told' by a narrator. Before we can discuss how to make that narrator strong, and consistent, we must learn what is meant by narrator. If you are, say, writing a learned article for a peer review journal, on the myco-toxicity of red-spur forest mushrooms in Lower Silesia (I just made that up), your narrator is essentially you. Not the you who brushed her teeth this morning, or the you who takes her twin babies for a walk in their stroller, but you as Frau Doktorin Professorin Jane Doe. I use the formal German to illustrate my point. Your narrator is a learned, all-business, no-teeth-and-no-babies academic professional defined, primarily, by your credentials and by your prestige (you hope) in getting a peer review article published in the Journal of Lower Silesian Red Spur Mushroom Study Group (again, a fiction I just made up). In a sense, therefore, the narrator is what is called a Persona in literary-academic circles.

In simplest terms, the POV is the story-teller. That's how you really should remember it. Who is telling the story? Or, more precisely, who is narrating the story. Perhaps the narrator is omniscient (as in some long 19th Century novels), meaning she knows everything from a God-like perspective. Or she is pretending to see the world as limited by from her character's POV (limited), in which case author and narrator are almost the same (but never, ever entirely the same, a point I will return to at end).

POV is not a Camera Angle in Fiction. POV is really the narrator's point of view. Don't mistake POV for literal camera, as in the film world, where POV is a camera direction. Just as dialog is not 'on the nose' (a film term for something taken straight from life, that lacks suspense or effect), so POV cannot be on the nose. I read a few chapters, years ago, by a young woman author who was studying under a famous, one-shot author who tragically had lost his mojo, and was trying (after years of living on the streets) to rediscover how to write, while teaching others mainly for the income. This woman wrote a fictional narrative that ran as if the narrator (first person, as I recall) were holding a camera and moving around with it glued to her eyes. I particularly recall a scene in which she described walking down the stairs in a cheap flop house in a city. I can almost still 'see' the stained tiles on the wall, the frayed rug, smell the stale coffe and cigarettes and long-ago alcohol barf, the overall aroma of crucifixion sweat and mortal desperation—but I remember nothing about the story itself, because I think she was so busy describing what her camera saw, from frame to frame, that there was no story.

Limited vs Omniscient: Spectrum.This brings us to our first, and most important point about POV. There are two ends of the spectrum. At one end, the narrator knows everything in the world. That would be pure omniscient. On the other end, for most purposes (except, theoretically, some experimental fiction, which the vast majority of readers and writers need not worry about) the narrator knows exactly what the POV character knows—nothing more, nothing less. Even within the latter, there is a fine distinction between narrating the story from the POV of a character after the fact (e.g., a deathbed revelation) in which the narrator better understands what happened to him or her during the action; or limiting the action to story time, or real time, meaning the story unfolds through the narrator (POV character) POV as it happens. In action or suspense drama particularly, this lends itself to a kind of breathless, suspenseful tunnel-vision whose ultimate expression is the thriller. Make the best choice, as you see fit, for the Narrator and POV that work best for your piece—just be consistent throughout in exercising that choice. Control your ride, or your story will fly off the tracks.

The latter story unfolds gradually, as it happens, from a limited POV. The more experienced author (not recommended for neophytes) may decide to write limited POV by bouncing around, as needed, among two or more POV character—no more than six, at most, is the rule of thumb, but thumbs are meant to be broken, so hammer away, once you know what you're doing. If you understand the difference (not just in theory, but after many hours of actual writing) between omniscient (narrator knows all) and limited POV, you're a good piece of the road toward understanding POV. Remember, 'understanding' POV (theory) is fairly easy, and extremely deceoptive. 'Understanding POV' as a practitioner of effective writing is quite a different matter. It's easy to 'understand' what a concert pianist does, without ever having a single music lesson. It's utterly a different thing to take lessons, practice and sweat and struggle for thousands upon thousands of hours over years, and finally end up being pianist with a major symphony orchestra. Here's one basic lesson that is most essential, and can be learned easily by anyone: Whatever POV choice you make for your narrative, be strictly and unwaveringly consistent. Don't stray. Don't deviate. Stick with your POV, whether single or multiple, limited or omniscient.

Wrapping Up This Week. The main thing you should carry away from this week's article is the fact that Point of View (POV) is a discipline that you learn by doing. For now, remember especially that you may write across a spectrum of how much the narrator knows, from limited to omniscient, as described above. Most importantly, be consistent throughout your story. It's about setting the rules for the reader in the first few paragraphs, and not disappointing or cheating the reader. As Anton Chekhov once wrote, "If there is a gun hanging on the wall on page one, make sure it goes off before the last page." In other words, don't hang that metaphorical gun on the wall unless it is an important part of the story. Otherwise, the reader will keep thinking the gun is important, and will keep waiting to see it go off, and will be highly annoyed with you if, on the next to last page, Character X finally pulls out a cavalry saber, and runs Character Z through with it.

Reading about POV is rarely enough to give the writer a working understanding. POV ranges across tense, gender, number, and other factors. I have written one novel (The Sibyl's Urn) in second person-singular-present tense ("you do this, you do that...") and a nonfiction book (A Walk in Ancient Rome, virtual tour guide, only authorized edition, to be released Summer 2011, Clocktower Books) in the first person-plural-present tense ("Walking on the Via Ostiensis (Ostia Road), we approach the city of ancient Rome herself...we see this, we see that along the way..."). I have written some stories and books (e.g., Mars the Divine SF) in the common first person-singular-past tense ("I crossed Mons Olympus in an airship, after which I did this and then I did that..."). I have also written my share of things in the standard third person-singular-past tense (e.g., The Generals of October mainstream suspense)—"David hurried to Tower 1 to tell Tory the news. On the way, he saw tanks lined up along the street..." Thus, I have done just about all anyone will do with POV, and more, so I write from actual experience.

Next Week: Part 2 of 2. We will wrap up our overview of POV next week. You are a magician, which is a commonly used metaphor for writing; and much more. We'll talk about various ways of narrating a story. Come back next week for the conclusion.

Sator Enigma: Ancient Roman Mystery Solved

The so-called Sator Square (also Sator Rebus, Puzzle) refers to a mysterious ancient text found on walls throughout ruins of the Roman Empire. Archeologists have found exemplars in such diverse ancient Roman locations as a government hall (aula) in Cirencester, Britannia; twice in Pompeii, pre-dating the city's volcanic destruction by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE; and in the distant frontier fortress of Dura Europos on Rome's Mesopotamian border with Parthia. Something about this strange, cryptic writing must have been so important that the Romans would post it in their government halls, public squares, and top military headquarters.

It is one of the most perfect palindromes ever created. A simple palindrome is a text that reads the same, backwards or forwards; e.g., "Madam I'm Adam" and ".madA m'I madaM". The Sator Square is a perfect four-way palindrome that reads the same left-right, right-left, up-down, and down-up. Nobody had a clue how to translate it, despite thousands of hours of research, hundreds of learned books and articles, and at least one Ph.D. thesis in Classics at Yale University.

John T. Cullen solved the puzzle in the summer of 2007, almost coincidentally, while continuing eight years of scholarly research for his nonfiction/Ancient History virtual tour guide A Walk in Ancient Rome, Revised 2nd Edition (Clocktower Books, Summer 2011). He had been aware of this baffling cryptogram from long ago, which has since become an object of superstitious reverence in certain Christian and Neo-Pagan settings. Suddenly, while taking a break from his Rome research, he looked at the Sator Square in a new way—and was able, within a few weeks, to both translate it and explain it plausibly. A production company for the History Channel has flown him to Yale University, from his home in San Diego, for an interview next to the exemplar from Dura Europos in modern Syria. The episode, in which he is capstone speaker, is to be aired across the USA and Canada by the History Channel.

Ironically, at the annual convention of International Thriller Writers, of which he is an Active Member, in New York City in July 2009, he was the only author present who had actually deciphered and explained a cryptic, ancient epigram of world importance—and lived to tell about it.