An intelligent book index

Recently (here and here for example) we've listened to some of the Deep Dive podcasts that Google's NotebookLM can generate. Fun as they are, I didn't want anyone to go away with the idea that's all NotebookLM can do. As a friend who uses NotebookLM for work put it, the audios are just a party trick. What's much more useful (and reliable) is the ability to get it to read a bunch of source texts and then answer questions about what's in them.

I'll give you an example. A few years ago, I was part of a team working on an adaptation of Jack Vance's Lyonesse setting to the Mythras RPG system. I was responsible for the chapters involving the Ska, an austere race of invaders, and the city of Ys. The first thing I did was go through all the books, which I'd been given in digital form, to pull out any references to Ys or the Ska. So I ended up with fifty pages of notes like this:

Fifty pages is a lot to wade through. Four years on, how much easier it would have been with the help of NotebookLM. I uploaded the three Lyonesse books and then asked, "What do we know about Ska warships and naval tactics?"

Each of those numbers opens a quote from the source text. The first note, for example:

"The Smaadra, unable to outrun the Ska ship, prepared for battle. The catapults were manned and armed, fire-pots prepared and slung to booms; arrow screens raised above the bulwarks. The battle went quickly. After a few arrow volleys the Ska moved in close and tried to grapple. The Troice returned the arrow fire, then winged out a boom and slung a fire-pot accurately onto the longship, where it exploded in a terrible surprise of yellow flame. At a range of thirty yards the Smaadra’s catapults in a leisurely fashion broke the longship apart. The Smaadra stood by to rescue survivors but the Ska made no attempt to swim from the wallowing hulk of their once-proud ship, which presently sank under the weight of its loot."

You can see how much time that would have saved me and the other Lyonesse designers. Dedicated large language models like NotebookLM are going to be indispensable to writers, especially if you're working on an ongoing series or doing the worldbuilding for an RPG or videogame. A lot of people protest about the use of AI in creative fields (just look on social media; there are more Dunning-Kruger AI pundits there now than there were overnight "experts" in immunology during the covid pandemic) but by that argument it's cheating to have an index or contents page in any reference book. The truth is that the time the LLM is saving is just the drudge work. It's essentially doing a researcher's job, which leaves the writer more time and energy to be creative. And I call that progress.

The image is Mick van Houten's painting for the cover of The Green Pearl.

Over the crump-holes and far away

Something a bit different this time. A movie producer friend asked me to help out with a story pitch. I’m sure he has other writers he can turn to, but I’m an old pal so I’m cheap. Well, free. The story he’s developing has to do with fantasy and war – maybe simply so he can say it’s “Game of Thrones meets 1917” – and because those are subjects that might also be of interest to readers of this blog, here’s what I told him.

The best place I can think of to start answering the question is with the five elements that Aristotle said every story consisted of. This is nothing to do with the thirty-six dramatic situations or the seven fundamental plots or any of that how-to-write malarkey. These five elements are the fundamental building blocks of any story: Plot, Character, Setting, Theme and Style.

A story outline should cover all of those for your story.

You say you’re developing a story where some soldiers in World War One look out of the trenches and see that on the other side of the mud and fog and barbed wire is a shining otherworld.

That's a setting (at least half of one, the real world part) and the beginning of a plot. Plot is the bit that really conveys the high concept. High concept movies are strong on plot, soft concept are strong on character. A compelling plot premise is what makes people buy a book (Sleepyhead: a serial strangler isn't actually trying to murder his victims, he's deliberately paralysing them for life) or go to a movie (Flightplan: a woman wakes up on a plane to find her child missing, but everyone else denies she ever had a child with her).

Theme is what gives the story depth and a through-line the audience connects to. If plot is the reason you pick up the book, theme is the reason you take it to your heart and recommend it to friends. Theme also guides you in developing the plot beyond its basic premise. McKee recommends exploring the Theme, the Negation of the Theme, and what he calls "the Negation of the Negation".

So if the theme is Love, you'd contrast that with Hate (the opposite of love), Indifference (the negation of love), and Hate masquerading as Love (the negation of the negation). Those are all valid explorations of the core theme, each digging deeper and giving a more visceral twist as you find the antithesis that most strongly contrasts with your theme.

In your story, perhaps the theme is fantasy itself. Fantasy can ennoble mankind and make our solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short lives worth living. I’m talking about fantasy in the broadest sense here – poetry, music, literature, art in general. Not goblins! In exploring that as your theme, you could contrast it with the negative side of fantasy: escapism. Escapism just says things are crap so let's pretend they're not real. The "Negation of the Negation" is when we take our bad experiences and impulses into the realm of imagination and end up sullying it with them. In your story that could be by the characters bringing disease and war into the pure otherworld they’ve found.

Now you can populate the story with characters. Who are these guys sheltering from an artillery barrage? Let's say you've got a door-to-door notepaper salesman, a communist automobile worker, a conscientious objector medic, and a chorister who got into the army by lying about his age. The story will take each of them on a journey that has some resonance. The notepaper salesman has made a living out of selling the raw material on which a million people write their dreams and hopes, for example. Sometimes the plot and the theme suggest characters, and those characters change your first idea of the plot, and so on.

That gives me some idea where you might take the plot. Say that the fantasy world is a utopia, but your protagonists find only children living there. Later it turns out these are all the millions of children who will remain unborn because their fathers were killed in the trenches. So they are literally the hopes and dreams of those men that live on despite the existence of suffering and death.

Obviously to "squeeze the lemon" you will then have to have one of the characters meet the son he is destined never to have. He refuses to go back and die in the trenches, but that causes his son in the fantasy world to grow sick.

However, I wouldn't expect the story outline to set in stone how the plot was going to develop. That's something most writers would want to allow to develop organically. The outline should set out the plot premise ("a man is chained to the wall and the hacksaw next to him isn't sharp enough to cut through the chain") and only needs to sketch out where you would then go with the plot.

Once you've sketched out the theme and direction of the plot, you start to see where the style might borrow from. In the case of this storyline, I'd look at the war poets, and also at the Utopians like H G Wells and what they wrote after WW1 about building a better world. Why not style the otherworld on that? (A bit like Priestley’s imagined post-WW2 utopia.) Those are ideals that are still around today and would give the reader or viewer something to connect to.

The synopsis should be a few pages outlining who the characters are, where they are, what happens to them, why and what is the style/tone. Some people like to begin with a guide like this one:

1. Once upon a time... 
2. And every day... 
3. Until one day... 
4. And because of this... 
5. And because of this... 
6. Until finally...
7. And ever since that day...

So:

1. Bill, Fred and Jim were in the trenches
2. And every day the guns pounded
3. Until one day the gas drove them out
4. And they ran into a magical utopia
5. And they brought war to the utopia
6. Until Bill saw that to save the purity of the place he'd have to go back and die in the war.
7. And over the years, as Fred and Jim grew old, they could still see that utopia just across the fields at dusk.

These are just f’rinstances, of course. The writer you hire will take it in another direction, hopefully much more interesting that what I’ve come up with in the space of a few minutes!

I'll just add one caveat. A good story outline is a nice thing to have. It really does help you make a sale to the studio, network, or publisher. But in striving for the very best story, you can get distracted. Like, you know that steak they sell in supermarkets? It's bright red-orange in colour but that isn't what the best steak looks like. The best steak is hung for a week or three until it goes dark brown. Supermarkets dye their meat orange because that's what people think fresh meat ought to look like. And in the same way, having a good story isn't the most important thing for reaching an audience. They only get to see the story once they’ve bought their tickets. To grab their attention in the first place you need a hook. Fantasy and the Great War both seem at first glance to be a very long way from our lives today. Yet you have to make people stop and think, “That’s a story about me.”

But we’re talking about your story, not mine. And all this is free advice. So I’ll leave it there.

Two heads are better

Gilbert and Sullivan. Lennon and McCartney. Lee and Ditko… In many successful creative partnerships you can perceive two quite different impulses at work, impulses which might be expected to pull in opposite directions and tear the project apart but in fact the result ends up being something greater than either might have achieved on their own.

It's the underlying principle of the Hegelian dialectic. Start with thesis, move on to antithesis, and in the fusion of those you might make something original and meaningful. (Luck plays a part too, but I don't think Hegel covered that.)

Thesis and antithesis is pretty much how Can You Brexit? came about. While sketching out the planned structure of the book, I'd only dimly considered what the style and tone of the writing would be. I wrote an opening that was surreal rather than laugh-out-loud funny -- more Theatre of Cruelty than Spitting Image -- and I envisaged the pinch points in the narrative being increasingly disturbing episodes between sections that would be largely informative.

But then when Jamie Thomson came in as co-author, he reminded me of something I should never have forgotten: if you want to keep people's attention you need to entertain them. Jamie rewrote the opening with the sort of comedy flair that gets audiences laughing helplessly at the best political satires. Where I'd have gone New Statesman, he took it in the direction of Private Eye.

You might think these two different sensibilities could not coexist. On the one hand a serious analysis of political and economic reality, on the other a fast-paced and funny narrative with twists and turns to keep you on the edge of your seat. They mesh because we each share some of the other's approach Jamie can drill down into political detail with just as much rigour as me. And when we write a script, I come up with as many of the gags as he does. It's just that each of us takes the champion role for one of those two things That's what makes the difference between creative conflict and creative cohesion.

Comedy doesn't mean a work of art can't be serious; it just stops it being sombre. Something can be thought-provoking without becoming dry and boring. When you can get people laughing you're waking their minds up too. So a reader who you are entertaining with the writer's whole orchestra, everything from intellect through passion to humour, is a reader who'll give you their full attention. That's a lesson more politicians could do with learning.

Talking of which, if you live in the United Kingdom you'll know we have local elections coming up next week. Brexit remains the issue that will probably have the greatest impact on the country over the rest of my life, so I'll be voting on the basis of what the parties have to say about that. But whatever criteria you use, do go and vote. If nothing else, it's how we earn the right to have a grumble.


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Creative doctrine for Frankenstein's Legions

I alluded last time to the fact that, in developing any creative project that entails a group of people, you have to do an awful lot of work that won't appear on the screen or the page. Today I'm posting the "design doctrine", an evolving document that shows everybody what makes the show, game or (in this case) comic they are working on unique.

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Frankenstein's Legions: creative doctrine

First and foremost: they're not zombies.

Zombies you can get elsewhere. Everywhere. There's no shortage. What Martin McKenna and I thought when we looked at the original Frankenstein: "This is science fiction."

So it's not about undead, it's about conquering death. The "lazarans" or "revenants" brought back by the Frankenstein tech, they are living men. That's the tragedy. Because other people don't treat them like living men. They treat them as soulless monsters, despised and feared. We know that humans don't need much of an excuse to put a label on others, to dehumanize and enslave them.

That's part of it. The other part is how you would feel, yourself, brought back from the dead. Physically there may not be any reason to feel differently about yourself. But say it happened next year. You die in an accident, you're on a slab for a couple of weeks, and then some new technology brings you back. Your family would already have begun the grieving process. Think they'd welcome you back? Think you'd feel the same as you did before?

How about those guys who have a hand transplant, or a face transplant. They're still the same person. But they need counselling not to want to cut a piece of themselves off. And this is the 21st century. Think what it'd be like in the mid-1800s, if you've been ripped apart on the battlefield, stitched back together from the body parts of your buddies, and jolted back to life. That tattoo on your new arm, that's the name of your best mate’s wife - the arm was all that was left of him. As for the souls of the dead, who knows where they are. People tell you you're a monster now, a second class citizen whose only home and family now are his battalion.

Some thoughts arising from this:

The emotional charge in the story is about the anguish and despair of living. Frankenstein's Legions is about the unbearable position of the monsters - about the terrible and very personal things that have been done to them, the awful things they themselves have done, and about the power and violence that only fantasy lets you resort to, as a vent for your frustration. These monsters are heroes of pain.

So the stories need to get inside their heads, sympathising with their stories, understanding their disgust - at humanity and at themselves - and then letting all hell break loose in righteous, visceral wrath. It's a story for the outsider in all of us. If you look at the green "vat monster" painting: I asked Martin for the image of two scientists, staring in horror at what they've achieved. And then you notice the reflected eyes in the glass and you realize that you are the head waiting to be attached to that torso in the background.

There are two levels of horror in Frankenstein's Legions. The first is the body-horror of the pieced-together abominations that we’re looking at. The second is the individual's moral horror at what they have done and what they are forced to do. Imagine a tortured soul who has had an awful life, finding himself woken in a monstrous body, dragging himself around because he must, loathing himself and everything around him... The life the monsters are forced to live is just unbearable.

For me, a big inspiration is the early Hulk stories. I'm talking about right back at the beginning, the Kirby issues, where it was all about this tortured nightmare self. A lot of that probably came from stories like the Karloff Frankenstein movies. We don't have to be sappy about making the monsters likeable. They can rip off innocent heads like daisies. That only makes them more interesting. They are entitled to treat "the living" (us) with savagery, when you look at how they have been treated.

So don't let's have the noble savage who just wants to be left alone to love. Let's have the men who, loathed as monsters, will take every chance to act as monsters. The dirtiest dozen you can imagine, the Inglourious Basterds turned up to eleven. And make the reader side with them so that we, too, despise "the limps" who expect us "stiffs" to fight their wars for them.

About the imagery: Gothic has been way overdone. Castles, dungeons, darkened labs... we can't make a brand from clichés. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at the end of the Age of Reason. The Georgians built geometrically regular houses, very modern in their tastes. Napoleon held conferences on river boats. Ballrooms would be well-lit, brightly painted. This was not the Dark Ages. I say that because when a lazaran platoon marches onto the lawn of a chateau, the intrusion of the horrific into everyday, orderly life will be all the more shocking.

We should decide: is this to be set in 1830s Europe? It could as easily be set in 1860s America, Victor Frankenstein's notebooks having been brought over by Clerval's family fleeing the wars in Europe. And just when one institution of slavery is being abolished, suddenly a new and more widely acceptable version is found...

All the above is my vision for what makes Frankenstein's Legions stand apart from other interpretations of the genre. I'd like it to shake up the Frankenstein story the way District 9 shook up SF movies. Not to be Van Helsing or The Wolfman, another tired retread of that whole played-out Gothic horror vibe, but to bring something fresh, visceral and at the same time thought-provoking.

Story development for Frankenstein's Legions

For the last couple of weeks we've been looking at the Frankenstein's Legions game design document, which dates back to the late '90s when I was working alongside Martin McKenna on a bunch of games at Eidos, notably Plague, which later became Warrior Kings.

About a decade after we dreamt up Frankenstein's Legions, Martin and I had a go and rethinking the idea for comics. This got a little further along, and you can even find a link to part of the script here, but we soon found that the artists whom the comic book company had hired were not familiar with our Napoleonic Wars setting. Instead it was all massive Civil War sideburns and zombies torching Atlanta.

Well, if we learned one thing in big development teams it's how to be flexible. And, short of waiting for the long-promised Temeraire movie to come out, we couldn't see any way of bringing the (American) artists up to speed. So we started thinking about how we could move the whole caboodle over to the US during the 1860s. Here's the first of two story development documents that might interest you if you want to find out what a lot of iceberg goes under the surface of the comic book, movie or game that you get to see.

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Frankenstein's Legions: US Civil War story notes

In the treatment, the setting was Napoleonic Europe and there were two distinct threats. First, the left-wing revolutionaries of the French government (kind of Khmer Rouge extremist communists, if you like!) were willing to use the Frankenstein tech in really horrible ways: grafting human heads onto giant eels, dog heads onto human bodies, etc. In real life, those were the same guys who invented industrialized executions 150 years before the Holocaust, so it makes sense they would blithely authorize experiments that would horrify any normal person.

I wanted that because we have a world in which horrific things are happening - the dead being brought back to life to serve as slaves and soldiers. So pretty soon that becomes the new status quo and we need something even more horrific, like creating hybrid monsters, to define our bad guys for whom fanatical logic dictates the unthinkable.

Secondly I had Napoleon as a personified bad guy. The French revolutionary government sent a commando team to bring his body back from St Helena, where he died in a British prison. After being restored to life, he had to be kept in a tank of preservative chemicals because he'd been in the grave a while. He was slowly recovering his memory, so whereas the fanatics thought they'd just acquired a kind of military strategy computer, they didn't reckon on him hatching plans to overthrow them.

I needed both those elements, the fanatics as a group and Napoleon as an individual, because the story couldn't just be "the Brits are good, the French are evil". Both sides use the Frankenstein tech, and the villains are individuals or creeds who go a step further. I think you'll need to keep this idea in the Civil War version. Most Confederates were not evil racist autocrats; most Unionists were not fighting like paladins with the lofty goal of emancipating the slaves. There is good and bad on both sides. You may need an equivalent mythic figure to Napoleon (perhaps from the War of Independence? though I guess the world has had few dictators of Napoleon’s calibre) and an equivalent to the extremist fanatics of the French revolutionary government. It needs to be a creed, not just a few mad scientists. Maybe a crazed cult who believe God has authorized a new Eden on Earth and it's okay for mankind to play around creating abominations.

Incidentally one of the key ideas in Frankenstein's Legions is that you aren't just brought back to life by the technology. When you get off the slab, you don't know who you are. It's a new you. Like Frankenstein's monster - he didn't think, "Oh, my brain came from a criminal who was hanged" or whatever. The brain got rebooted, so in a sense it's a newborn person getting off that slab. Lazarans are like amnesiacs in that they know the skills they had before – how to shoot a gun or play the piano, how to speak – but specific personal memories are lost. The tragedy is that they may encounter their loved ones, but they don't remember them. There may be snatches of memory, that's all.

So the search to recover memories is one way a resurrected character may go. Another might want to shun anything to do with who he used to be: "today is the first day of the rest of my life". Interesting character tensions.

As far as the artwork we've seen so far, it's important that the lazarans don't look like zombies. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of Civil War zombie books out there already, and we need to be brandably distinct. A resurrected guy may have scars if he was stitched together from separate parts, so some of the ones who've been resurrected many times could be quite monstrous: hands or arms out of proportion, different skin tones, asymmetric bodies, etc. Others who died a clean death could look almost normal. Almost. Here is Mary Shelley's description of the original creature:

I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they  were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

I like the idea that such a face, with skin taut on the veins and muscles, could be both ugly and beautiful at the same time. In some cases, the yellowish skin colour (caused by their differently colored blood) might be the only sign at first glance that the person is a lazaran. Most certainly they aren't undead – the opposite, in fact: full of vigor, intimidating to ordinary men because of their raw energy and animal strength. They are the homo superior of their time, and it's only a matter of time before we see a lazaran Magneto, or even some people who are willing to kill themselves in order to get the enhanced strength, speed and senses that come with resurrection.

Okay, so back to that prologue. A raid on a remote farmhouse where lazaran hybrids are being created? Or perhaps a cult who have their own unique interpretation of Revelation 20:6:

Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of the Lord and will reign with him for a thousand years.

So these cultists are deliberately committing suicide, performing surgery to enhance the bodies, and resurrecting each other as the new "chosen ones" who believe they're going to reign for a thousand years. (Obviously you'd need to have some normal, sane preachers on the good guys' side to show that this cult is a definite aberration!) We start with a small band of Civil War deserters looking to raid a remote homestead. They sneak inside, bit of banter, the place seems deserted – then they are picked off one by one, fast like Alien, and that pre-title sequence ends with the last of them being leapt at by a horrible hybrid: human head, wolf-like body, serpents growing out of its back or whatever. Let Martin have some fun here! Then cut to the opening we have already, a quieter scene with a family pushing the body of their loved one in a cart.

Spark of genius

I wonder if it’s fair to blame J R R Tolkien for all the really bad fantasy? Those oriental monks rubbing shoulders with European knights. The elves in sports bras. It’s enough to drive you back to Ivanhoe. As Tolkien himself said: “Fantasy can be carried to excess. It can be ill done.”

Tolkien had a quality that his imitators don’t even see. There’s a creative unity to his work. He doesn’t keep throwing any old rubbish at you, he'll never perpetrate the incoherent text. He asks just that you accept the axioms of his world and the rest all falls into place.

To create something on the scale of the Lord of the Rings movies, involving a team of a thousand people over more than two years, is remarkable enough. To do it and maintain that cohesive vision is sheer genius. And only possible because, at the heart of the project, there was the novel itself.

It’s more than a question of having a core design document. You can’t build anything until you have a plan of what you are trying to build. Tolkien’s novel is the design document of the movies, but it’s also more than that. It lights the way for any new artistic work set in Middle Earth. It’s the creative Flame.

Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens (the scriptwriters) became keepers of the Flame while they worked on transforming it for the screen. Peter Jackson took it over while directing. Throughout the project, all of his team had that Flame to refer back to.

That’s because the process of good creative design isn’t the dictatorship that some people seem to fear, with “the guy in charge” coming up with rules that everyone must slavishly follow. Nor is it a case of committee thinking, with everyone pitching ideas into the stew.

It’s more like proselytizing a religion. The designer or author is the prophet. He or she lights the Flame, is its keeper, and brings the team to it. Once you see the light, you can go off and do your own thing and the work you do will have unity with everyone else’s.

Movies like Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit - or The Amazing Spider-Man, or Star Trek - show that it’s possible for a team of a thousand creative people to share one dream. A handful of man-years to write the novel – and it lit the Flame for a two thousand man-year project. Doesn’t that sound like a bargain to you?