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About Lance Schaubert

Lancelot Schaubert has sold his written work to markets like The New Haven Review, McSweeney’s, The Poet’s Market, Writer’s Digest (books and magazine), Poker Pro, Encounter, The Misty Review and many other similar markets. He reinvented the photonovel through Cold Brewed and was commissioned by the Missouri Tourism Board to create a second photonovel — The Joplin Undercurrent — that both fictionalizes and enchants the history and culture of Joplin, Missouri.

Recent Posts by this author:

  • A Defense of Spoilers
  • Working Titles
  • Talecraft
  • Old Books > New Books
  • What Cliché Is
  • Fallacy: The Primer for Surprise
  • What Dungeons and Dragons Taught Me About Story Conflict

    • A Defense of Spoilers

    By

    For a culture so obsessed with “enjoying the journey,” we sure do hate a ruined ending — isn’t that contradictory? A ruined ending — and the subsequent spoiler alerts that follow — belies our secret obsession with the destination: to enjoy the journey, we need to know how it ends. We don’t want to know how the story ends because we like to be kept in suspense to see if we’ll actually arrive at… well somewhere, we’ll know when we get there. And yet we tell one another endlessly that we must enjoy the journey. The truth is, there’s more than one way to ruin the ending of any story — indeed to ruin the ending of any life — and the easiest way is to ruin the vision for where you’d like to end up.

    The ruined ending actually encourages us to enjoy the unknown journey all the more because we know where we’re headed. I think of all the flights and train rides that delighted me precisely because I knew where I was heading: anticipating the destination made me all the more aware of the details of the trip, of how we got there. The Medievalists understood this. Dante for them was great precisely because he riffed on Virgil’s endings in a new and bold way. Julius Caesar rewarded the Elizabethans precisely because they knew of the plot and assassination in advance. You can almost hear the echo of their whispering how Romeo and Juliet both die at the end and the follow-up questions from a theatre-departing mob who wondered what kind of world would lead to the death of two children in love? A world filled with Montagues and Capulets. If there was any sin to the narrative mind of the Medieval man, it was that one of his friends might spoil the beginning. The start of a story is the seed of the end and the slightest variations in what is sown prophecy that wild variety of crops that will later fill our narrative harvest house.

    You see this at work in the “spoiler alert” memes for historical fictions. For Titanic, spoiler alert: the boat sinks. For Pearl Harbor, spoiler alert: the base is bombed. For Sully, spoiler alert: he lands the plane in the river. For The Passion of the Christ, spoiler alert: he dies and rises.

    If the power in any historical drama is not what happens in the end but how and why and when and where and, especially, for whom it happened, then the power in any story at all could be the very same. In fact the worse crime would not be spoiling that the ship sinks in the end of Titanic but rather spoiling that the historical Titanic ever set sail at all. Why do I say that? Because that’s what happened during the rerelease of the film at the 100th anniversary of its sinking: tons of kids took to Twitter baffled that such a historical event ever occurred, which added historic insult to historic injury. The kids knew the boat sank in the movie. What they didn’t know was that a hundred years prior, 1,517 human souls really were lost to the sea. In refusing to spoil the ending, they spoilt the entire tale of 1,517 actual lives.

    We must know the ending to know our place in the journey. [Read more…]

    Working Titles

    By

    If writing a novel is like having a baby, then titling it is like naming your kid. And parents fret over the names of their children. Big time. Have you seen the sheer number and size of baby name books these days? Not to mention the power of a tool like my beloved BehindTheName.com — if titles are baby names, then a quick manual on how to title a work might come in handy. Today I want fill your titular arsenal with multiple arms that will level up the caliber of your titles. Then I hope … [Read more...]

    Talecraft

    By

    You don’t write with your keyboard. You don’t write with your pen or your hands. You don’t write with your typewriter, your chisel, your audio transcriber, your fancy new app, gadget, or journal. Most people find this strange since, for instance, the field goal kicker for the St. Louis Rams kicks primarily with his leg. But not the storyteller. “Writing” is one of those rare more-than-actions for our more-than-physical world. See this is the problem with most journalism about fiction … [Read more...]

    Old Books > New Books

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    It took the seventh Harry Potter for me to realize I had it backwards. I remember driving all over the Rancho Santa Fe and Camino San Bernardo hoods of San Diego with that cinder block of a book propped up on my steering wheel during my morning commutes. Finished it in three days alongside all of my friends, some of whom introduced me to John Granger. John has explained Harry Potter by way of classic literature and Latin. The Aeschylus quote Rowling includes at the beginning of book seven … [Read more...]

    What Cliché Is

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    Cheating. No really, the cheating factor is why so many people get irritated when they spot cliché. Leftovers are boring. There are micro and macro versions of cliché, even global versions of cliché, but regardless of their severity, your clichés end up as little more than cheating, leftovers, microwaved vittles pulled from some unnamed dead guy’s fridge. I cannot begin to tell you how not-on-board I am with eating microwaved leftover vittles yanked out of the molding chest of some dead guy’s … [Read more...]

    Fallacy: The Primer for Surprise

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    Today’s return guest is aspiring novelist Lancelot Schaubert. Lance has published in markets like McSweeney's, The 2016 Poet's Market, Poker Pro, Encounter, and many others. He is currently shopping out his first novel and lives in Brooklyn with his attack spaniel and "the grooviest bride in the world." We like the way he thinks about story, and we hope you do, too. You can learn more about Lance at lanceschaubert.org and on Twitter. Fallacy: The Primer for Surprise In the middle of … [Read more...]

    What Dungeons and Dragons Taught Me About Story Conflict

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    Today's guest is aspiring novelist Lancelot Schaubert. Lance has sold work to markets like McSweeney's, Poker Pro, Scars, Encounter, Brink, and many others. He wrote, produced, and directed Cold Brewed which reinvented the photonovel. Currently, he's finishing his first novel in between large batches of various soups (today's soup, for the curious among us, is white chili). His essay for WU, which draws comparisons between conflict in novels and in the roll-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, … [Read more...]