Author Archives: Nathan Barra

About Nathan Barra

Though Nathan Barra is an engineer by profession, training and temperament, he is a storyteller by nature and at heart. Fascinated with the byplay of magic and technology, Nathan is drawn to urban fantasy and soft science fiction in both his reading and writing, though he has been known to wander off into other genres for “funzies.” He is an active blogger and posts twice weekly at NathanBarra.com. Nathan is always up for a good conversation, so please drop him a line through his contact page, or write on his Facebook wall (www.facebook.com/WriterNathanBarra).

The Choosing of Names

Business Marketing Nathan Barra Publishing 1 Comment

Let me tell you a secret. My name isn’t actually Nathan Barra. I chose to write under a pen name for two reasons. First, I work in a very conservative industry, and have written several internal and external publications under my real name. I’m worried that publishing fiction under my true name would damage my credibility in my day job. Second, I consider my name to be unGooglable. Pretty much everyone I have ever had read my name has mispronounced it, and anyone I have tried to dictated to has misspelled it. In this day of search bars in social media, that is unacceptable.

Regardless of your reason, picking the right name is an art. These days, authors sell themselves as much as they sell their books. So, if you’re going to take the time to choose a pen name, what does it take to choose a good one?

5. A good pen name is multilingual.
With the Internet and the global economy, an author’s words are no longer limited to a local geo-market. Something written on one continent can and likely will be sold on the others. Therefore, it behooves the author to pick a name that is easily pronounceable in most major linguistic families. Go to translate.google.com, type “His name is…” and listen to how the name is pronounced in a bunch of different languages. Is it still comprehendible, or even better, similar?

4. A good pen name matches the brand.
Authorial brands are built on names, so the name must fit within the brand the author is trying to establish. For example, in urban fantasy, where I like to read and write, many authors have two part names. Examples include Jim Butcher, Richelle Mead, Patricia Briggs, Larry Correia, and Jennifer Estep. I too chose a two part name to help me fit in and make it easier to design a cover that is clearly urban fantasy.

3. A good pen name is memorable.
John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt would make a lousy pen name for many reasons. Without the tune, I can’t remember it, and in fact had to Google the end of the name and the spelling’s. Though most publishers try to avoid it, there are still a number of books with the same or similar titles, only distinguishable by who wrote them. When someone recommends a book, they often will be recommending the author simultaneously. How can they do that if they don’t remember the name?

2. A good pen name is easy to spell.
The biggest problem with my real name is that even after shortening it, I’ve had it misspelled and mispronounced countless times. In this day of online retailers, search engines and social media, a name that is easy to spell is essential. I need someone to be able to search me, friend me, tweet me, and find me on Amazon.  I chose Nathan because there aren’t variations on that name. Barra is a bit riskier, as it can be spelled with one r or two, but in the end, the name is still simple enough that I don’t think it’ll be much of a problem.

1. A good pen name does not already have an online presence.
When I was choosing my pen name, I did a search to ensure two things. First, I made sure that NathanBarra.com was available, which it was. Then, I searched to ensure that there weren’t too many Nathan Barras on Facebook, Twitter and Amazon. Facebook had the most, but none of them seem to be particularly active in writing circles. The last thing I would want is for someone to search for me, and then find some other Nathan Barra talking trash and making me look bad. These days, a strong online presence is essential. This doesn’t look like it’s going to change.

Time is Taken, Never Given

Motivation Nathan Barra The Writing Life 2 Comments

I work insane hours. I will often spend as many as thirty to forty hours at a time on the job. One hundred or more hour weeks are the norm, not the exception. Don’t pity me. I knew what I was getting into when I took this position. In fact when I was recruited for this opportunity, I chose it over four others for the challenge it brought me. My recruiter was honest with me, and to this day, I believe that I went into that choice with my eyes open. I knew that I was committing to a lifestyle, not just a job. Even still, my work leaves me with precious little time for my two life goals.

First, I want to be an amazing father.

Next, I want to be a professional writer.

That’s it. If all that is written on my tombstone is, “He was a damn good father and writer,” well, then it would all have been worth it.

One of the major challenges of my life is making time. I gave up on finding it years ago. I’ve come to realize, that no one will ever make me a good father, or a professional writer. If I’m going to have the time for either of those things, I need to take it. Because of that struggle, what free time I do have is precious. The greatest gift I can give my loved ones is a small piece of the time that I carved out for myself.

There are a thousand things that demand my attention. Sometimes, it is easy to let all the noise of the world overwhelm my two life goals.  My job, along with everyone else’s work, exists to further its own existence. We all come to work to make money for the company, and in turn, take some of those earnings back home with us. My job will never make me a professional writer.  That’s not what we do. Achieving that ambition will never help the company’s bottom line. Because of this, my work will never give me time to write. If I’m going to have that time, I must seize it.

No one will ever give you time. No matter how much my significant other, my friends or my family love me and want me to succeed, they will never be able to give me the time I need to write. Because they love me, they want to spend time with me. Truth is, I want to spend time with them too. But at some point, I need to write. The very best my loved ones can do is give me space. That gift is a gift of love. What I do with that space is up to me. Do I take a nap? Do I catch up on my reading or those television shows I have been neglecting? Do I stare into the depths of my navel and think about writing?

Or do I work? Do I take that gift of love, that gift of space, and use it to make something?

In the end, one piece of advice that I can pass on from my own struggles is this: seize your dreams. No one will seize them for you. Even if they were so inclined, in so doing, they would be rendered meaningless. It is in the struggle that accomplishment translates into meaning.

Franchises: Buying In for the Long Haul

Marketing Nathan Barra The Writing Life 1 Comment

I remember reviews of the Wii that compared it to the Xbox 360 and the PS3, when all three consoles were shiny and new.  From a technical perspective, the Wii was an inferior console.  It lacked entirely in capabilities that its competitors were counting on as differentiating selling points.  Like millions of others, I still bought a Wii.  In fact, the Wii sold so well that it dominated the competition for a number of years after its release.  Why would a technically inferior console do so well?

Loyalty.

Nintendo holds a number of huge franchises that have always released a installment shortly after a new system’s release.  On IGN’s top 25 Videogame Franchises list, Nintendo franchises occupy the top two spots (Mario and the Legend of Zelda) and a handful of the remaining twenty three spots.

Authorial franchises start with a series.  With enough time, and if enough quality works are produced, the author’s name becomes the franchise, instead.  Even one series with the popularity of one of Nintendo’s flagship franchises, the Legend of Zelda as an example, is enough to build a very successful career on.  The question is, then, what can we learn from Zelda’s success?

#5. Successful franchises are cannon controlled.

To the best of my investigative skills, there has been neither a third party production of a Legend of Zelda game, nor a Legend of Zelda game produced for any system other than a Nintendo console since Nintendo started producing hardware.  Why would the license holder of such a huge franchise do this?  Isn’t Nintendo limiting their potential audience by not offering the game on PC or it’s competitor’s consoles?  The answer is two-fold.

First, Nintendo does not want anyone other than Miyamoto and Tezuka (the games’ designers) working on the franchise, lest they muddle the cannon.  The current prevailing theories as to the canonical timeline suggest at least three independent time streams.  This milieu and wealth of plot is too complicated for anyone else to handle.  One bad game, like one bad book, risks the entire franchise.  As to the second point, a gamer must do business with Nintendo’s hardware branch to play a Legend of Zelda game.  By limiting the availability of the game, Nintendo increases the profitability of all of its branches.

The Take Away: Upon establishing a successful series or franchise, it is essential to recognize the power of the IP represented therein.  I need to be very, very careful who I allow to work on it and how it is distributed.

#4. Successful franchises use iconic imagery.

TriforceTo me, the Triforce is indelibly linked to the whole Legend of Zelda series.  When I see that symbol, my mind automatically goes back to the games and how much fun I had playing them.  And you know, doesn’t those three golden triangles mean that this game is also a Zelda game?  Maybe I should stop walking through the mall and pay attention to that cutout in the window of the game store.

Point being, the Triforce is an excellent branding piece for several reasons.  First, it is strongly tied into the series, serving as a major focus for no less than six of the Zelda games.  It appears as a design element in many of the other installments of the series.  It’s a simple design that can be easily printed, embroidered, cast or otherwise incorporated into merchandise.  I am able to recognize it from across a crowded game store.  That’s some good branding.

The Take Away: If used properly, brands let me market my books, sell merch, and establish and communicate a reputation at a glance.

#3. Successful franchises inspire nostalgia.

The basic premise of a Zelda game is that a young boy from a rural village in Hyrule is called to save the world and sets out to explore a number of dungeons, killing monsters and collecting loot, until he faces off and defeats the ultimate evil of his time.  It’s a Hero’s Journey, every time.  Each game feels the same, and has the elements of puzzles and monster combat that I enjoy.  The familiarity is comforting.  Yet, there is enough variety in the storyline, treasures and items to collect, and milieu to explore, that it still feels fresh.  The learning curve from one game to the next is shallow.

Nostalgia also has value in that it can generate sales.  I remember, very fondly, my first game of the Majora’s Mask.  Because I enjoyed that game, I bought and played the Ocarina of Time, which I also enjoyed.  Each subsequent game has built up the nostalgic warm and fuzzies that I have for the Zelda franchise.  The release of a new Zelda game has pushed me off the fence about buying a new console before.

The Take Away:  Nostalgia is a powerful position from which to sell books.  If a consumer looks at my name at the bottom of a new release, and is flooded with a sense of nostalgic enjoyment, the book is likely sold.

#2. Successful franchises have staying power.

The Hero’s Journey is one of the essential story archetypes that speaks to the human condition.  It has resonated with people for thousands of years and continues to do so.  I want to start the game with Link and gain power enough to kill the ultimate evil of the day.  I can play, and read, that storyline over and over again, and never get bored so long as there is enough variety in other aspects.

Wise selection of archetypes is not the only element that can give staying power to a series.  One of my favorite things about a Legend of Zelda game is the underlying philosophy that serves as the theme for the game.  In Majora’s Mask, the world is destroyed at the end of the third in-game day, so you are forced to time travel back to the dawn of the first day repeatedly.  Whenever I play this game as an adult, I can’t help but ruminate afterwards about the nature of time, how I live my life and what I would do over if I had the chance.  In the Twilight Princess, the game focuses on the concept of twilight as the border of light and dark, and this imagery is dragged throughout the game’s other aspects.  To me, this speaks to the idea that the world is both bright and dark, and that, most of the time, we live in a world of moral greys.

The Take Away:  There isn’t one method to give staying power to a series, but it is essential for a series to have the endurance to become a successful franchise, none the less.

#1. Successful franchises have consistently high quality.

I didn’t start at the beginning of the Zelda franchise.  I started with Majora’s Mask, then went backwards in the release chronology.  I then follow the series to this day.  If Majora’s Mask had been the one bad game in the series, I would have done neither.  There are some other franchises which I started from the beginning, but ended up dropping mid-series due to a single bad installment.  When I build a franchise, what I’m really doing is building a brand, and for that brand to continue living, I must be sure that I deliver quality work, every time.

The Take Away: If I’m disappointed by the quality of a single installment, I may not come back.  Franchises trade on their name and upon garnered authorial trust.

 

Based on Your Best Selling Novel

Craft & Skills Nathan Barra The Writing Life 4 Comments

As a young bibliophile, I was often disappointed by movie adaptations of my favorite books.  Like many, I waited in dread and anticipation for movies I just had to see, hoping that they would live up to the works I loved.  I know of several authors who have gone on record as being reluctant to sell their other media rights lest “Hollywood mess it up.”  Then, I learned better.  I received some theatrical training in college and learned that movies and books are different by necessity.  After my experience in theater (both live and recorded performance ), I try to judge the movie on its merits as an adaptation rather than a carbon copy of the book.  Using this training, I try my best to keep my major projects adaptation friendly.

#5. Time Frame

Though the average length of movies seems to have been increasing in recent memory, a movie is considered to be long if it runs more than 120 minutes.  Conventional screenwriting wisdom states that one page of script translates into one minute of screen time.  This means that long scripts are only 120 pages long.  In the world of novels, this is about 30,000 words of equivalent space.  In a way, this is the primary motivating factor for cutting material from a book.  It is also the primary advantage of using a miniseries.

I read an article years ago that proposed that movies were limited to 2 hours in run time due to biology and human attention span.  Sure, at home, you can pause a movie for a visit to the restroom, but this cannot be done in a theater.  So, not only do books have more space for content, but they also have the flexibility to be put down and picked back up with greater ease.

The Take Home: When writing an adaptation friendly book, it is essential to have at least one single, continuous, strong, independent throughline.  Keep the complexity, subplots and backstory in your work, but be sure that your main plotline and characters are strong enough to carry the day even if you drop all the subplots and side characters.

#4.Special Effects

The limit of a book’s special effects budget is the limit of the reader’s imagination.  Epic magic battles with thousands of wizards, spells flying in all directions, dragons and huge armies clashing are really cost effective in the written word, but very difficult to arrange in the real world.  If you need to repeat the scene, such as in live performance venues, it becomes even more difficult to do this without breaking the budget.  Early on in my theatrical experience, we had to pump water up into a trash can in the black box theater we were using for an effect to be used in the play.  I thought it would be as simple as running a hose from a water spigot, but to my surprise, it was much more difficult.  It gave me an appreciation for the sheer logistical and practical challenges that come with even simple special effects.

Also, successful special effects artists are frequently very, very good at their jobs.  Hand in hand with such specialized talents comes high price points.  Granted, the price is often well deserved as the results, but it’s another factor to consider.  High quality special effects aren’t easy to pull off and require specialized software and training.  Another point to consider is that through the years, audiences have come to expect what magic and other special effects should look like.  This is a huge advantage for writers, because we have access to the same media that our audience is exposed to.

Say you want to write a space battle.  Pick a few really popular movies and TV shows that feature that aspect and watch the scenes with an eye to the creative style.  Then apply that filter to your own writing.  Not only does this make your novel adaptation friendly, but it also plays on audience expectation and takes some of the burden off your prose.

The Take Home:  Despite the ease of special effects in books, real world wonders require a great deal of time, talent and effort.  Consider using the common visual forms that have already been developed by the special effects community to keep your work adaptation and audience friendly.

#3. Spatial and Temporal Limitations

A skilled writer can tell a story with numerous exotic locations, spanning multiple generations or cover huge amounts of time.  Movies must pick a limited number of locations and a shorter time frame.  I remember reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in high school and having to stop to create massive family trees and pages of timeline to make sense of how everything related to everything else.  It was interesting and frustrating to try to dissect, but because of the necessity of all that effort, that book would be ineffective as a movie without significant work by a talented screenwriter.

Again, it comes down to cost and effort.  Finding good filming locations is only a start, the next step is to transport a variety of personnel and equipment to those locations.  You must be able to do this cost effectively.  If the locations are accessible by the public, controlling the space becomes a huge obstacle.  I participated in and lead a handful of film projects where we reserved public space, roped them off and put up signs that read “filming in progress, please do not enter.”  Whenever we did this, we had to have at least one dedicated member of the production staff enforcing the barricade.  I was shocked by the number of times people would walk up to the caution tape, stop, read the sign and then duck under the tape to keep walking straight through a scene being filmed.  Somehow, they were always shocked that they were actually interrupting something.  This is why there is usually a core of scenic locations used in most film.  Once you build the various parts of a spaceship in a soundstage, they can be used over and over again.

The Take Home: To be adaptation friendly, it is a good idea to have a limited number of core scenic locations that are easy for production staff to create and control.

#2. Dialog Only Writing

In books, we have the liberty of description, both in scenes and actions of the protagonists.  This is not the case for scripts.  One of the best ways to insult and alienate actors is to tell them exactly what to do, especially if you are the writer and not the director.  In all kinds of theater, there is as much art in how a line is performed as how the line was written, and often actors and directors will take great liberties with the script to make their vision come to life.  This means, that if you want your story told a certain way, you must write the dialogue in such a way that your intent is not only clear, but also the reasonable interpretation for your words.

Many writers neglect their skills with dialogue when developing their writer’s toolbox.  It isn’t intentional, but with all the skills involved in quality writing, it is difficult to cover everything.  To write adaptation friendly books, it is necessary to practice dialogue as frequently that is all that will survive the process of being transformed into a script.  The rest of the book will be handed to the production staff as inspiration for the costumers, set designers and directors.  Your audience, however, will be focused on the actors and what they are doing and saying.

The Take Home: Movie scripts must have strong enough dialog and direction for actors to properly interpret what they need to do to accomplish the intent of the scene.

#1. Show, Don’t Tell

Movies can’t tell.  They can only show.  Well, at least not effectively.  The closest analogue for a movie is the voice over, but that technique has to be used sparingly and skillfully as excessively visible narrators become grating quickly.  Again, it comes down to actors as they will be doing most of the showing.  Yes, the scenery and costuming will be showing as well, but the focus of most movies is on the what the people are doing and saying.

The ability to show a great deal of information quickly is one of the great advantages of movies over the written word.  As a writer, I often struggle with which details to include in my descriptions to keep effective pacing.  In movies, this isn’t that much of an issue.  Writers can spend pages and pages describing in exacting detail what everyone is wearing and all the foods being served at the feast.  All this information can be conveyed in a five second pan over of the room before focusing on the characters participating in the action.

The Take Home:  When writing books, be able to supplement the descriptions in  the book for production staff who are looking for inspiration and guidance.