Time - It's Not Just For Fun Anymore: The Technology Edition

In 2006, there are a lot of things we take for granted. At any given time, you can find, within my tiny Michael Korrs barrel bag, an iPod, a palm pilot, a cellphone, a digital camera a stray cd, four tubes of lip-gloss, three stray receipts…Sorry, getting off the point a bit, am I? Things haven’t always been so, however, and it’s important to remember that when embarking upon an piece of fanfiction. Thus, I have taken it upon myself to inform some of you who may not remember when car-phone was not something that your grandparents called your Firefly, but a piece of luxury technology.

The Cellular Phone: A Brief History

The concept for cellular phone technology actually originated in the late 1940’s when it occurred to someone that you could break up radio-frequency into grids – or cells – and greatly improve telephone technology, but the cellular phone, in it’s current incarnation, didn’t appear on the market until 1984 – and when it did, it landed with a great big splash – literally.

The first cellular phone was manufactured by none other that Motorola, released in 1984, and weighed a whopping two pounds – but, for those with the liquid cash to shell out a cool $3,995, you could ensure 30 minutes of talk-time…if you could get reception. Until very recently – historically recently, not DaVinci as Karl Rove recently – cellular phones were not a commodity that just anyone could afford. There were no pick up and go plans and there was no hope of a signal in the back woods of Northern Wisconsin.

Upsides of the DynaTAC 8000X – if you were ever caught in a dark alley, your phone doubled quite effectively as a bludgeoning device.

The mp3 Player: A Broad Outlook
We all know what a new phenomenon the iPod is – overwhelming the world with it’s completely ineffective technology and, yet, it’s attachment to iTunes and proprietary format have entrapped buyers, like me, who simply cannot go without a personal mp3 player.

Born in the mid-80’s on the cusp of the CD revolution, I saw a touch of tape players and lived through years of scratched CD’s. With a brief forey not so long ago into the realm of the MINIdisc – a technology only recently reincarnated for the Sony PSP – my life moved seamlessly from CD to true digital media – the mp3 player.

The most important thing to remember when considering an mp3 player’s role in your fanfiction is that mp3 players didn’t come to be until 1997 when SaeHan Information Systems had a brilliant idea. What that means, ladies and gents, is that even if Draco is far more tech savvy than one can truly believe he is, he still couldn’t have gotten his hands on the device until the dreaded HBP.

Since the days of the humble 32MB portable device, mp3 players have grown to include massive 40G Archos players and tiny iPod Nano’s but you just can’t blur the dates.

Personal Computing: Viva The Revolution
Computers for home use have not always been as prolific as they are today and, even today, it is sometimes hard to remember that most US households are without PC’s. (Yes, a little piece of my soul dies every time that painful fact is brought about.) The first PC’s came to exist in the Apple II, the IBM 5150, and the Commodore 64 – 1977, 1981 and 1982, respectively – and, trust me, they weren’t cheap.

The PC that most adult geeks are quickest to remember, in truth, is the Apple IIe – the behemoth we’ve all come to know and love, released in 1983. How retro is that?

The Point
The point is this – part of writing, particularly fantasy, is to take yourself out of where you are, and so much of where we are is technology. If not because canon insists on it or because history demands it, at least leave this sort of thing out of your story for the sake of your self-respect.

Video Games: Truth and Lies
The closest the Marauders would have ever gotten to an X-Box would have been the original Atari console - which released in 1971 and still kicks unequivocal ass. My somewhat geekier friends tell me that the Atari 2600 is all that counts :) The next system anyone could have gotten their dirty mitts on would have been the advent of Nintendo. Proof that 1985 was a good year for geeks, girl and gaming varieties, Nintendo released the NES - a console that is still played in more mom's basements than you or I care to deal with. Other 80's contenders included the SEGA and the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System.) From what I can tell, and my gamer knowledge is a little fuzzy, the Sony Playstation hit European markets in 1996.

Since then, consoles have evolved a lot from the PlayStation 2 in 2000, the original X-BOX in 2001, to the X-box 360 release mayhem just last year.

Tech Tid-Bits

1. Floppy disks used to actually be floppy - like a piece of bologna.
2. One of the largest innovations in the Apple IIE from the Apple II was the advent of a system that supported both capital and lowercase letters.
3. The original cellular phone was not worth it's weight in gold.
4. The internet has not always existed but, yes, Al Gore did have a hand in it's creation.
5. Instant messaging was born, for engineers and academics, in the 1980's, but the first general messaging system was ICQ and didn't premiere until 1996.
   

What This Means For You:

1. Lily cannot call her friend Britney up on her RAZR and ask her to come to Gladrag's Wizard Wear
2. Harry - owner of no muggle money - would, likely, be unable to hang out with Ron and Hermione and show them the tunes he downloaded over the summer with his new fangled mp3 player.
3. James didn't send Lily anonymous e-mails declaring his love for her.
4. I remember Prodigy. Lily Evans doesn't. She did, however, probably play PONG
   

Aesthetics: Formatting

A banner can tell you a lot about a story – the feel that the author has in mind, their character concept and often times, if you pay enough attention, the type of characters you’re likely to find within, but a banner can’t make the experience of reading a story more pleasurable and a nice banner doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re about to read a story that was well thought out and from an author who put time, consideration, research, and original thought into the work they put forth. The titles and summaries that accompany every story and chapter are, again, illustrative and important, but they are temporary – they are merely the thing that you see on your way in the door. A nice foyer does not a Victorian mansion make.

Thus, we ask ourselves, what is the most important aesthetic choice I can make? If banners, summaries and titles bear relevance, but not the supreme relevance, what should I be focusing my time and attention on? After hours of deliberation (all right, minutes) and a long time with the site, I’ve come to theorize that the most important visual choice you can make is the one that determines how you plan to format your chapters.

Each chapter is a window into the world that you are attempting to create and the laws of grammar, as well as the restraints wrought by HTML, ease of use and carriage returns have to be balanced alongside that which makes your writing uniquely you – that which makes it identifiable.

Grammar: The Quiet Beast
My understanding of grammar and punctuation is sadly, remiss, but even my somewhat juvenile comprehension feels confident in venturing the following suggestions.

First, sentences and paragraphs should always be started with a capital letter.

Second, quotation marks, no matter how ‘boring,’ are the appropriate and socially accepted method of delineating when someone is speaking. It’s not nice to substitute an asterix or a hyphen or a backslash in their place. Yes, your method may be cuter, but it’s also jarring to the reader and it might inspire them to move on to another story rather than continue to struggle with yours.

Third, do not underestimate the power of the punctuation mark. Sad though it may be, many authors find that it gives their stories some sense of “self” to leave out the many periods, commas and apostrophe’s that might make their stories grammatically correct. While I’m not a stickler for grammar and I seldom notice a misplaced comma, it is important to use at least rudimentary punctuation when getting something ready to post. Periods to separate sentences are a must, at the very least.

Finally, learning to properly space dialogue is crucial. To learn how to do this, you might reference one of your favorite novels or even a book from the Harry Potter series…or, you might just consider carrying on reading this. When composing a story, many authors overestimate the importance of putting a complete thought into a paragraph. While that is important, construct provides that we separate characters dialogue into separate text clumps. Take the example below as an illustration.

Where you had expected friendly outrage, Paige stared resolutely at the rough wood and took another sip of her drink

“What?” Silence. “What?!”

Another sip.

“Nothing … I just …” Silence. “It might be a good thing.” Her voice was sheepish, quiet, and coy. Your eyes widened, and as she began to embark on her reasoning, you reached out for the nearby bottle and poured yourself another drink. “Look around, Alexis. You’ve got nothing in the Muggle world. We’re witches. I don’t have a choice; this pays the bills until I can afford to open my own shop, but you have a chance. You have an investment fund for crying out loud. Your parents will give you the money to open that little gallery you’ve been talking about.” Sensing your fury and the unmitigated look of shock, she spoke more quickly, letting her words slur together. “You only have one more exam before you’ll have your Auror certification and its Stealth and Concealment. If you finish that up, you could work at the Ministry for a few years and afford to open your gallery on your own. It’s just something to consider …” Paige added placatingly, seizing a push broom.

“Oh, screw it!” and with a swish of your wand, the floor was pristinely clean. “Lock up on your way out.” You said in as husky a tone as you could muster, heading for the door.

Note the way that when a new character speaks, a new paragraph is begun. You can include more than one ‘quote’ from a character within a single would-be-paragraph so long as it is not broken or interrupted by the speech of another character. Doing this correctly will work in the favor of your writing tremendously.

HTML – The Brute Force
HTML – the language with which your intentions communicate into your web browser – and those of your readers – is a force to be reckoned with. Where grammar has its preferences, there is no negotiating with HTML. What you see is what you get and you have no choice but to bow to its iron fisted rule.

The most crucial way in which HTML impacts an author submitting their works to our site is in their paragraph spacing. Grammatically speaking, it is almost tremendously inappropriate to format an article as I have done here – the gratuitous spacing would be frowned upon by your English professor and editor alike and, thus, one is inclined to think that it is inappropriate for this environment as well but the internet has its own sub-set of rules that impact grammar.

“Tab” is not something understood by HTML so the standard five-space indent that we are so accustom to using when we want to delineate between an old paragraph and the new one is quite a bit more difficult to accomplish than we might be used to. True, it can be done. HTML does understand a command for a ‘blank space’ and, entering five of these before the beginning of any new paragraph would enter an instruction that looks a whole lot like tab, but it is not only cumbersome to do, it’s not something most people are comfortable with viewing on the web. The best bet, instead, is to simply enter an extra return between each given paragraph as I have done in the formatting of this article or as you would do in the event of a forum post or otherwise.

In addition to the physical spacing which HTML impacts, it also presents you with additional tools of emphasis – most importantly bold and italic. The biggest thing to remember when using these is that they are tools – not toys. Now, I know, that seems a little extreme, but from your reader’s perspective, too many changes between standard format characters and bold, italic, underlined and center will drive them batty. It is common, in fandom as well as published literature, to use italics when one wants to point out a thought that the character is having, including their recollection of a memory. Note the way the intermittent thoughts as well as the larger “flashback” or memory is delineated using simple italics. This allows you to ensure that your readers notice what you are doing and do not get mixed up while reading without inserting an authors note that can risk taking a reader out of their environment.

Fourteen days. What’s another 182?

As the days passed, this was feeling a lot farther from anyone’s definition of ‘worth it.’

”Vogel!” An all too familiar voice was shouting to you from the path into Hogsmead. Instinctively, you flinched, almost losing your place in the novel leaning on your knees.

Soren James – one of the many among the privileged children of your mother’s friends. Soren paid your 14-year old self no more attention than an occasional nod or an obligatory smile during dinner since your first year and you returned them all with an equal excitement. He was, like most of the rest of the students at Hogwarts, little more than background noise that kept you from your studying. Not that you were particularly studious, only that it seemed one of the few things left to do when you paid no attention to your classmates.

“Isn’t it a bit cold to sit outside reading a book? Come on, a couple of us are meeting in the Three Broomsticks for a butterbeer before Honeydukes.”

One of the simplest principals of psychology is the science behind returning to your roots. It brings back memories; helps us to sift through our present by understanding our past. You weren’t great with ‘sifting’ of any kind…through anything… Sifting was messy. Sifting dragged up the demons. Sifting got your hands dirty.

Underlines are used somewhat less often. The most common “correct” use of an underline is something not often done in a fictional environment – to reference a written work. (i.e., to underline “Hogwarts: A History”) but they are also used in other instances as a means of emphasizing a statement.

The final, and most irritating method of use for HTML employed by authors who write each chapter from the perspective of several different characters. For them, it is common to give each character a combination of bold, italic, underlines and base text and issue a “key” along with the chapter that explains who is whom. While this is an arguably good way to separate the point of view of one character from another, it takes something away from the reading experience to constantly need to refer back to a key to determine who is speaking. In this event, I will reference a written and published work – Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins – as an example of a written work that does vary perspectives throughout the story, moving from a human character – Ellen Cherry Charles – and several seemingly inanimate objects. To do this, Robbins uses a series of symbols to break between the varying perspectives but does not note it with a change in text, font, or with a veritable authors warning. Instead, he relies on the intelligence of the reader (which really needs only to be rudimentary) to gather that the change has gone from one character to another. To get a feel for how to do this, I would recommend popping down to your local library and taking a glance at this novel.

End It On This

Recently, I've answered a lot of similar topics regarding story and chapter length and I thought that a quick piece on ending things was in order from the girl with the 600 word one-shot.

There is a point in every chapter where things come to an end. No, I'm not talking about the point where you have written 1527 words and your character has said

"I love him," she said, blushing.

"You love who?" A voice entered behind them. He was dark, handsome, and definitely didn't belong here.

"Oh my god - "

AN: TBC!! HAHAHAHA! Im so EVVVVVIIIILLL!

That is the point where you've left some retarded soap star cliffhanger as an effort to draw your readers back. As a brief aside, stop doing that. It's annoying and pointless. Rely on your prose, your plot, your characterization and your characters to bring them back for more. A cliff hanger is when you leave something in the story open and unanswered. That example - well that's just bad writing. And, yes, you can tell the people from Days of our Lives that I said that.

At this point, you have to ask yourself "What is the purpose of the ending?" because nothing should be in your writing without purpose. An ending is to give the reader a sense of finality, to tie up any loose ends and to give them closure. You should never be surprised to happen upon a stories ending - things need to come to their logical conclusion.

There are a ton of ways to end a chapter. I assure you, I'm not about to be horribly pompous, one of the joys of having stories of your own is that you've written them and, thus, you can use them and commentate upon them in whatever way you see fit without offending the author.

The Conclusion:
Just like in an expository essay, your chapters can have conclusions. From the afor mentioned, uber-short, one shot I wrote, Promises He Never Should Have Made, this passage ended the thing, revealing that the previous 500 words were nothing more than a memory.

As he boards the train today, the train that will take him back to Grimmuald
Place for another meeting of the Order of the Phoenix, hugs his daughter and
kisses his young wife, he can see her in the distance, hand in hand with her
prince charming, and he's thinking of all of the promises he never should have
made.

Few things we've done here - we've ended the storyline, not just the story. A lot of one-shots, and even multi-chaptered stories, can leave you wondering what happened afterwards. Did they ever get back together? Whatever happened to her mom? There's nothing wrong with that at all, it can be nice to leave the reader to imagine their own conclusion to a story, but if you're starved for a way to end something, a few sentences like this can make it a lot easier to do. The other thing we've done - and the thing that makes us certain that the chapter is over, is tied it back to the title.

The Real Cliffhanger:
At the risk of sounding insanely self-important, I like to think that the cliff hanger at the end of the first chapter of my story, Chronicles of Life, is what a real cliffhanger looks like. No stone in the chapter itself has been left unturned - no sentence cut off midway to hold the big reveal over until the next episode. The cliffhangers here lie within Who Soren James is, Why he is there, What he did to make her so angry, etc... rather than a great big "dun-duh-duh-duh!"

"Jamie. Jamie. Jamie." The room was noisy and, once again, all the freaks were out. "If you want another one of those," you gestured to his near empty rock glass, "you're going to have to quit trying to grab my ass every time I bring you a drink. Got it?" Jamie nodded, looking scorned, and you turned from the table.

Making it only a few paces before a strong hand gripped your wrist. "So, the next round is on you then?" Your voice was severe - deadly.

Attempting to wrench yourself free, the regulars watched as you turned on the brave soul restraining you.

There was the briefest moment before recognition settled in and as it did, the fire in your eyes intensified. In a mere second's contemplation, there was a crash of breaking glass, an intake of breathe, and the resounding crack of your palm colliding with his cheek.

Soren James was standing before you, a red welt growing on his face, but the expression of smugness, present since you'd known him, refused to fade.

The End:
Sometimes, you will meet a chapter that has neither a conclusion or a cliffhanger. True, every chapter does leave a reader with some sense of suspense - they want to know what is going to happen next - but when something simply reaches 'the end' it means that the author has done nothing to increase their sense of suspense from that of the normal. In the next passage, from the first chapter of Extempore, you will see that the chapter doesn't leave you with any particular sense of closure, but also not with any particular sense of dire need to know what happens in the future.

A particularly fragrant bunch of flowers caught your attention on the side of
the path. Before your mind could stop you, your arm was outstretched, snapping
the stem of a yellow daisy.

The motion was entirely instinctive and you'd managed it without dropping stride but now, nearing the Apparition safe point, you felt awkward and out of place with your daisy and the girl that wasn't yours. For what certainly wasn't the first time, you were reminded briefly of Lily. You had shared many such moments with her as a boy.

"I suspect Mad-Eye will want to hear the good news straight away," you said to break the silence.

"Probably." she added by way of reply. "That and I have to get out of these shoes before I fall. I think the charm I put on them is starting to wear out."You stifled the
unintentional laughter.

"I had rather wondered how you were managing." She grimaced and disappeared with a quiet Pop!

Just as with cliffhangers and conclusions, chapters that end in this fashion can have a wonderful appeal to the author and the reader as well. Endings of this nature are fantastic for "middle" chapters - after you have introduced your characters but before the plot begins to reach it's high point, a chapter that ends in this fashion can lend a story a much needed sense of calm which generally gives itself over to realism.

The Open-End:
Another very popular variety of ending is the open ending. Many authors employ this technique more unintentionally than not, but it is still a valuable option to consider in some cases.

In any story, thecomponentsy componants and many different questions raised. To use another sample from Chronicles of Life, this one from the final chapter rather than the first, you will see that while the story has come to an end and the ultimate goachieveden acheieved, the story as the reader knows it, may not feel final.

Note: In order to understand this particular sample, you may find it valuable to read the story in question which can be found here on harrypotterfanfiction.com.

The room had taken on a somewhat strange glow when you opened your eyes again,
rubbing the haze out of them. Soren's wrist lay uncomfortably under your neck and your stomach was growling even more painfully. Rolling over slightly to pry
yourself free, an arm wrapped around your waist, twining it's fingers lazily
over the contours of your waistline.

"Go back to sleep, Lexi."

When did it hit you that what you were feeling was love?

What the final sentance reveals is that she does in fact love Soren - but what this passage doesn't give away is whether she stays with him or leaves - whether they live happily ever after - whether she goes back to work or if she and her mother ever make peace. Employing an open ending can be a tricky thing. It invariably leaves any astute reader with a sense of longing - they want to know the answers to all of the unanswered questions but, at the same time, walking away from a story with a sense of unrest can makeprevalentlyore prevelantly in your mind.

Use caution, however, when employing this method. In order for it to work, you have to know quite clearly what your story is about. For Chronicles of Life, the story was never about whether or not she stayed with Soren, it was about her growing up enough and coming into her own to realize that she loved him. If it had been the other way around, an ending of this sort would have left the story incomplete.

As with all things, moderation and variety is key. You certainly can't end all of your chapters with a clear and finite conclusion and to end them all with a cliffhanger leaves an unbalanced and largely lop-sided story that is so wrought with suspense and going's-on that it begins to border melodrama. Combining the different methods of writing to achieve a balance will give your pieces - short, novella or novel-length - a sense of realism and cohesion.