My “Except the Protagonist’s Name is Changed” project is more of an experiment in what self-publishing and the Internet allow us to do. I take public domain books and change the protagonists changed to something silly. (Though I don’t think I butcher these stories nearly as badly as Hollywood does.)
This is along the lines of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, although it is a more literal copying. And with googly eyes on the covers.
My process was to download the texts from Project Gutenberg, do a “Find and Replace” in a word processor (followed with more detailed review), create a cover (making use of Flickr’s Creative Commons licensed photos and other public domain images, and freely-licensed fonts from dafont.com), and then upload the CreateSpace.com (which will handle listing them on Amazon.com).
One of the keys behind good writing is “show, don’t tell.” The difference between “showing” and “telling” itself can be hard to tell, but it creates the difference between engaging storytelling and mechanical plot description.
Implied action and emotion can go a long way. Saying, “It was very scary” will let the reader know on a conscious level that the situation is scary. But to describe the details of the scary situation lets the reader fill in the gaps themselves with their own imagination. This strikes the reader at an emotional, rather than intellectual, level.
To demonstrate this, I’d like to present Emily Carroll’s excellent short comic, “His Face All Red”. I’d recommend you read it (which takes 5 minutes) on her website before continuing with this post.
While a format comic does make “show, don’t tell” easier to do since it doesn’t entirely rely on text, The following text has spoilers, so read the comic before continuing.
“His Face All Red” uses a lot of showing and only a little telling. Let’s look at each panel individually.
The panels show the isolation and lack of popularity of the protagonist. This is cemented by the line “This man is not my brother.” which emphasizes the lack of relationship (while at the same time implying that the man should be his brother). The story does not tell, “My brother is more popular than I am.” or “This man is an imposter.”
I converted all the monster/weapon/item/map data from CircleMUD (an old piece of MUD server software) to XML from it’s native, hard-to-parse text format. More info and download links on the blog post on my Invent with Python blog.
I’ve completed my next book, which focuses on the Pygame library and making graphical games in Python. It assumes you have a little bit of Python programming knowledge. The book is free to read online from http://inventwithpython.com/pygame and can also be bought on Amazon.com for $25.
Thanks to everyone who helped me out with this book over the last year and a half.
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