A.R. Knight's Blog, page 15

The Sympathetic, Frustrating Character in Betty Draper

Every once in a while I’ll return, detective-like, to a TV series, movie, or book I’ve read before in hopes of gleaning a new understanding of it. Finding a new angle on a character, perhaps. Or a statement delivered that I didn’t catch the first time around.

Recently, my current target is Mad Men, streamable on Netflix. A show set, at least initially, in the 60s around an advertising agency and its cavalier collection of employees, the series is full of dubious characters that alternate good and, if not outright evil, acts that deserve a fair amount of side-eye.

One of the main protagonists is Betty Draper, an intelligent former model made through marriage and children into a housewife, though she’s still quite young (somewhere in her 20s, though I’m not certain of the age). Given the tendency of her husband – the show’s star, Don Draper – to flake out on evenings with the family in favor of fabulous soirees and affairs in Manhattan, Betty depicted early and often as a victim. A life ruined by the circumstances of the time. She is a casualty of the age.

Except, no. And this is where we can find fun in looking at how her character grows and reacts. As the show moves through its first and second seasons, Betty begins to take some agency. To start pressing her concerns. Push for the things that she wants.

Given the dire straits of her daily life, we, the audience, should be rooting for her. Should be clamoring to see Betty return to pursuing a dream, to strive in accomplishing something that means something to her.

Instead, the show colors these new developments in grays. We may want to root for her, but Betty doesn’t treat the others in her life, including her children, very nicely. She’s temperamental, conflicted. Often demands punishment greater than the crime, and sets strange, gossipy traps for friends. Envy and jealousy start to rule her daily life, and even as she takes stands for herself, we no longer see those moves as the triumph of an underdog taking their due.

Turning a character in a sympathetic situation, one who the audience should be supporting, into a challenging protagonist is no small feat, and Mad Men is a better (if less, at times, enjoyable show) for it. Stories stick with you longer when the characters are real, when they are fractured collections of emotions, dreams both broken and whole. Most often, people cannot change without consequence, cannot attempt to shift their position in life without causing ripples. Movements that won’t be appreciated by everyone.

Betty Draper drowns her agency in her discontent. Her flaws, not her successes, make her real. We may not root for her, we may not like her, but we can’t help paying attention to what she does.

And for a story, that’s what matters.

Surburbia and Organic Storytelling in a world of tiles

Last night, as I’m wont to do, I gathered around a coffee table with an assortment of ne’er-do-wells that I call friends and engaged in what, on the face of it, should have been the epitome of dull.

Suburbia is a board game about, yes, building a suburb. Generally regarded as the most boring places on the planet, a suburb is usually a haven of chain stores, manicured lawns, and evening walks well away from the “buzz” of city life. Suburbia, by contrast, is a compelling argument for why I, nor my friends, should ever be allowed near a civil engineering office.

Tiles are placed one after another, chosen by each player to add to their own “borough”. Theoretically, your little collection of tiles would network nicely with one another to create some semblance of a balanced town full of people, businesses, and parks. In reality, my brother had at least four airports by the end. My most profitable structure was a parking lot. Another player built so many housing communities with little else such that they were continually going broke.

One of the brilliant parts of board games is that they encourage organic stories. Whether we wanted to or not, our choices began to create worlds for our imagined citizens. As we placed our tiles, we argued about the benefits such things had to our citizens. Surely my choice to have two high schools with no elementary or middle grade education was a brilliant move – colleges only look at high school transcripts anyway!

Suburbia is an analytical game – the scoring and general turn-by-turn choices are driven by numbers. How much money you have, how many people you need, and what tile will do the best to boost your gains. Strip the name and setting from the game and you could just have a bunch of cardboard cutouts with values on them and have, at the core, the same game. Only you wouldn’t have the stories. You wouldn’t be able to visualize the messed up place you built. Your maze of freeways circling around a mobile home park and a factory. A series of museums trapped between airports and landfills.

And that’s where board games like Suburbia bring out their best parts. These are stories you’ll talk about later. These are tales that could be spun into actual fiction (if you want), but even in the moment, serve to draw people into the room with each other. We put down our phones, keep the TV shut off, and for an hour get lost in the gleeful creation of magical places.

World Transition – or moving into a new series and forgetting the old

There’s a strange sort of lag time when you finish a work – there’s editing, covers and formatting, and then uploading it to stores and finally a launch. All throughout that time, which could be weeks (or months, depending on your process and amount of caffeine), the writer (using myself as an example) might be off on a whole new adventure. By the time a book hits shelves, they’re thousands of words into a new universe.

I’m going to argue here that this is a good thing. You’ll hear from some prolific authors that they don’t remember entire books they wrote, simply because they’ve produced so many by this point. You’ll see or hear about others that appear to write very similar books over and over – all of this is partly because when you move onto a new story, you have to forget, to some degree, the one that came before. Otherwise you run the risk of influencing your work beyond what the characters would normally do. Alter circumstances to force things just to be different, rather than earning a new state of affairs.

Consider this:

A space opera in which a crew saves a ship carrying a data file essential for winning a war.
A fantasy novel in which a band of rogues ambushes a caravan and winds up with a captive that carries a secret to overturning an oppressive king.

At their core, these two plot elements are close. Writing one after another, the author might decide to change their story so as not to seem too close to the former. However, I would argue that keeping the second, if it fits the characters and world and narrative, is the better choice. In other words, don’t make decisions based on what has occurred in another book, in another setting. Provided you’re true to your characters, the end result will be different and have its own flavor.

As such, when I start a new series – note that you’ll want to be careful about repeating plot elements in the same series, at least in books neighboring each other – I don’t spend much time asking if I’ve written something similar elsewhere. Not consciously, anyway. A big part of the fun in moving to a new world, a new setting with new characters, is that freedom. The lack of chains and callbacks to previous events that you have to remember.

Instead, treat each and every series as its own creation beholden to nothing but itself.

And, eventually, you can reread your older works and they’ll feel like new again.

Moments of Levity

If you ever put a book up on Scribl, a venture that uses “crowd-based pricing” as an attempt to automatically put books into the slot for their ideal value, you’ll be asked a number of questions rating things like the level of violence, religious overtones, and the quality of llamas in the manuscript.

One of their questions concerns the humor element, and it veers, among its choices, between the deadly serious and the assertion that your book is essentially a long list of jokes.

I find myself choosing “Moments of Levity” for my stories. I’m trying to say that my characters do funny things. Sometimes they’ll laugh. Sometimes the reader is meant to laugh with, or at, them.

For most of what I write humor is a spice. Thrown in here and there, it adds flavor. Another dimension to the characters and/or the place. If my sinister villain drops an out-of-nowhere joke, then perhaps he still has some humanity. If the tough-as-nails protagonist chuckles at a bit of physical comedy, then that clues you in that he’s not some sort of doom-dealing robot. It’s awfully hard to find someone that won’t laugh at anything. That won’t quirk a smile at the right circumstances. To strip away all the humor from a work is to remove its reality, in my opinion.

Of course, you can also find humor woven into the lines themselves. Sardonic sentence construction that invites the reader to partake in a goofy series of events or ironic twist. These, I think, work best when you have a narrator capable of delivering the words in the way you want the reader to take them (see: The Hitchhiker’s Guide).

I’d be lying, though, if I said this was all for the reader. Writing, it turns out, can be fun for the writers too. While there are plenty of times when a whipsaw wreck of violence is what we’re looking for, or pages of detailed wanderings through a magical land, it’s also a good time to turn a phrase. To know that you’ve thrown your characters into an absurd situation and to have them recognize it. To toss a joke from one mouth into another’s ear.

There are, naturally, tonal pitfalls to watch out for. Your gloom-and-doom war story probably shouldn’t have goofball jokes or slapstick moments – though dark humor certainly has a place. Too many obvious winks to the reader will jerk them out of the story, or rob them of the emotional weight in a particular scene. So as always, make sure you’re reading your work out loud. You’ll catch those blips and know if they made you smile, or roll your eyes.

In short: laughter is good for the reader, good for the writer. Use it.

 

 

That’s One Way to Write A God – Neil Gaiman’s “Norse Mythology”

Putting a god of any kind into fiction, written or otherwise, is a difficult proposition – after all, these are supposedly beings with such incredible gifts that they are above anything humans could ever approach. Despite this, stories involving gods often write them with human concerns and motivations. As though the issues we face are the same worries an immortal being cares about.

Gaiman takes another path, and it makes Norse Mythology truly read like a myth. By that I mean the old style – the sort of tales wandering prophets would render alive around campfires in dusky twilights in the wilderness. Where the gods are the traits they represent, where they are beings of strange thoughts, reckless ambition, and creators of mischievous chaos. Thor is the brash hammer – and he brashly hammers away. Loki is the sublime trickster who, more often, runs afoul of his own cleverness. Odin may be wise and nigh invulnerable, but, as is the way of “old” gods, often fails to live up to his own greatness.

I said above that we often present gods as caring about what we humans do. Gaiman, along with the tales he’s recording in this tight volume, instead takes a greater interest in the failings of these gods. Thor may care about slaughtering frost giants, something most of us can’t relate to, but he often fails, in these stories, to perceive the full situation or think beyond the surface details – which is a very human fault. Loki creates schemes and plans that, at their outset, seem immaculate, but, thanks to an unnoticed variable, fall apart around him. Any one of us whose even attempted a project of any size can relate to that one.

My point for all this being – you characters, if they’re not human, do not need (or should not) have the same set of needs and desires as you and I. They should be different, because their frame of reference for the universe comes from a perspective far different from our own. However, they can still make our mistakes. I think it’s more fun when they do, as the consequences are often more entertaining. You trip and fall, you skin your knee. Thor trips and falls, suddenly you have a new mountain range.

In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed this set of tales and their odd assortment of fumbling gods and goddesses.

If you read it aloud, preferably at night, in front of a fire with a flagon of spiced mead close at hand, you’ll take a walk with gods and giants, and perhaps see some of yourself in both.

Days Too Full – Writing and Weddings

Planning a wedding is in many ways, according to those who have completed the process, a joyful experience.

To those still in the midst of it, putting together such an event (especially without the aid of a wedding planner) essentially requires taking all of the free hours on your calendar and, for months at a time, blocking them off. I use the black color. It makes the whole thing more dramatic. Occasionally I’ll leave an hour here and there blank, just to give myself the illusion of hope, and then something – be it wrapping gifts or plotting transportation schedules or trying to make the vows rhyme – will appear, as if by some dark magic, and sap away that time.

Now, unfortunately, reality does not take your predicament into account and politely suspend all other things until your wedding is complete. Bills, insignificant as they may seem in the face of such looming monstrosity as one’s nuptials, must still be paid. Work, the kind that pays you in dollars rather than love, must continue. Art must be produced. Sales must be run. Hours in the chair scrubbing passive-aggressive wedding commentary from the current novel must be spent.

So, how am I surviving?

Not perfectly, let me point out. I don’t think, with any major life event, it’s possible to happily continue on with your current schedule. If that was the case, my hunch is the event would not be considered “major”.

The first, and most important thing, is accepting a decrease in your productivity. You’ll be stressed, whether you’re the bride or groom, and the weight of all of the myriad things will make it difficult to concentrate. You won’t be able to jump into your story as quickly as before (or after). You won’t be able to wake up in the morning with the only item on your agenda the traitorous twist in chapter 23. No, you’ll need to arrange the timing for the late night snacks and what beers will be served during the cocktail hour. And how many of those delicious crab cakes you want for yourself rather than as passed apps.

Adjusting your schedule to accommodate the extra stress and work is crucial because otherwise you’re going to fall behind, and then you’re going to be stressed that you’re falling behind, and it’s just a vicious cycle. Believe it or not, weddings, so I’ve heard, are meant to be fun for you. If you’re an angry monster because your latest novel is going to take a few extra weeks, well, it’s not going to be much fun for your spouse.

Secondly, make hard lists of what you want to do every day, leaving room for surprises. This, of course, is something that’s worth doing all the time, but is especially necessary when your task list balloons from “Write the Next Chapter” and “Tweet” to fifty different things. I’ve found a lot of success by guarding those hours in the morning when I’m most creative and, yes, sacrificing afternoons and evenings (normally marketing time) to wedding stuff. This way, while I’m not doing everything I normally would, I’m still making progress on my books and I’m not stewing in a wordless hell for months.

Third, don’t stop writing. Above, I noted I saved my writing time. My word counts might go down, but I’m still writing every day. Even if it’s a chapter. Even if it’s a 1000 words instead of 5k. Heck, even if it’s a blog post like this. Point being – it’s all too easy to declare the battle lost and give up on your words. Don’t do it. Get what you can into every day, and then be satisfied with it, and move on. Put together that seating chart. Go to that dance lesson. Ponder which flavor of cake is the right one (carrot cake, obviously).

Anyway, I’m almost halfway through the next novel. A new series. It’s a blend of sci fi and thriller, with some other elements thrown in there because… that’s where the story went. I’m having fun, though, and that’s what matters.

Spirit’s End is out, and the Riven Trilogy is complete

The Riven trilogy is largely about a person who realizes that the action adventure life he thought he was living is far dirtier, more dangerous, and less clear-cut than originally intended. I could say the same about myself and the writing of it.

“Let’s go have fun fighting the souls of the dead!” I said to myself over coffee. Too much coffee, in retrospect. Or not enough. It’s hard to tell when hungry spirits play about the mind.

And that’s how it started. I’d recently read a couple books and explored a game set in a steampunk version of Dickens’ London and thought well hey, that might just be a fun setting to explore too. So I smashed them together and the characters went off on their adventures.

As usually happens, however, what I thought would be an entertaining cave turned into a gnarled cavern, with deep tunnels venturing to black pits full of creatures I hadn’t imagined. Some of these frights tormented the characters in physical ways – manifesting themselves and forcing a reliance on each other and skills barely learned to bring about victory. Others, and these were truly the lost ways I’d failed to see coming in my outlines, rose up within their minds. Tore at their notions of who they were and where they, and their world, came from.

After all, when confronted with terrors that have no point of reference in one’s daily life, how do you handle them? Do you run? Do you trust in what you know?

When all you’ve learned isn’t enough, what then?

I’m still new enough to this writing endeavor to find surprises in every book, and I hope that never stops, and there were plenty here. I set out to tell the story of the unintended consequences of war for those that have no part in it, and it turned into a fantastical, action-and-adventure roil through a doomed world. I’m happy to have told the story, and happy to move on from it to something new.

Carver, Selena, Anna and the rest – it was a pleasure getting to know all of you.

Thank you for the stories.

Spirit’s End is now available on Amazon, and will be out eventually on all other retailers.

 

A Definitive vs. Open Ending

Today I finished wrapping up the last book in the Riven trilogy – it’s going through the editing/formatting/cover and whatnot stuff now, but should be making it’s way out soon.

Beyond pesky things like genre and setting, the differences between my first trilogy (Wild Nines) and this one are, namely, that Wild Nines ends with room for the future. The characters still have additional arcs they could pursue, journeys to go on, etc. Spirit’s End, however, doesn’t leave as many paths for its characters to walk once the story concludes.

There’s a trend in writing today, borne out by that unfortunate necessity known as ‘economics’, that genre fiction authors should write in series. Series, in this case, not merely being trilogies but continuing stories that can go for a dozen or more books. Continuing on and on with new adventures for characters that readers love. A successful series is as close to a “sure thing” as authors have. You know, when you put out that next book, that the swarm of readers that read the last one are going to go after it. And that’s awesome. It’s fun to keep reading on and on about the exploits of characters and worlds we’ve fallen in love with.

However, that does present some challenges in how the author can construct a conclusion. Namely, they have to be careful with what happens to characters. To the setting. The writer may want to kill a character off, but if that character is a fan favorite, then they might lose a bunch of readers for the next novel. You might want to drastically alter the setting, or eliminate a major villain, but if you’re expecting the story to continue, there has to be somewhere for it to go. Your book can’t just end. There has to be a next.

If you’re ready for the fat lady to sing, though, a whole bunch of options open up. Now, as George R.R. Martin likes to impress on the people in his works, no one is safe. No place or object is sacred. You can surprise your readers, and a response that might have been negative (killing a favorite character) in an ongoing series might be a positive in the concluding volume. A powerful move that readers don’t see coming. Not that it has to be death either – simply wrapping up with a “Happily Ever After” might be nice after all the torment your cast went through.

As with most things writing, there’s not a certain type of ending that’s better than the other. Doing both is about the only way to find what ones you, as either a writer or a reader, prefer. I think the only thing to watch for is to make sure the ending serves the story – having characters miraculously escape again and again gets dull after a while. Just as having everyone conveniently explode to force a dramatic conclusion isn’t very satisfying either.

But, however you get there, actually typing out “The End” is one of the most satisfying things you’ll ever do as a writer. I never get tired of it.

Killing My Ending

So I have a confession: every word I write does not, in fact, come from finger to keyboard to published book in pristine perfection.

I’ve talked about my editing process before, and about how I outline (generally) in order to keep my characters somewhat close to the path they should follow to bring their adventures to something resembling a proper close. However, with the ending of Spirit’s End, I found that what I had planned fell flat. I wrote the whole thing. Ready to type “The End”.

But I couldn’t do it. The ending, as it was, wouldn’t be a faithful, earned conclusion for these characters and their world.

So I set about scraping it and re-writing. This was, uh, not pleasant. Nobody likes to throw away work, much less several days of it. However, as you’ll hear stated in just about any commercial entertainment, putting out a less-than-stellar product means you’re left with a less than stellar product. It’s marred, potentially forever. Putting in extra effort, even if it’s like flogging a hungover version of yourself with the world’s worst whip, might be worth it over the long haul.

Once I decided to do this, I went about it like so, which is a process I’ve cobbled together from what other authors have said and what I’ve found works for me whenever I need to rewrite sections:

Go back and find the last part that worked

In other words, start your rewrite where things went wrong. You may not need to scrap everything, but if you don’t go back to the “root” of where your story or characters lost their way, you’ll finish your rewrite and still be unsatisfied. It’s going to be unpleasant, but you’ll be happier you did.
Jot down a new set of scenes, preferably on paper or outside of your working document

Why? Because it helps to separate yourself from what you already wrote. You don’t want to be thinking of the scenes you’re tossing. Accept they don’t exist. Let your creativity flow without getting barred in by existing ideas. I take a notebook, write the ending I’m aiming for at the bottom of a page, and then write my way there. Take what you write and drop it into an outline. Or if you’re a pantser, well, now you hopefully have some idea of where you’d like to take your new ending.
Don’t delete the stuff you’re not using

I just told you it was trash. I lied. Sort of. You probably have some ideas or lines that you wrote that might fit your new storyline. Or maybe you dropped some revelations that you’d like to keep. I use Scrivener, and will drop the “trashed” pieces into a separate folder. Just make sure to remove it from the document before you publish (in Scrivener, particularly, make sure you remove it from your compile settings).
Don’t assume the rewrite is gold either, but don’t spend forever on it

If you’re an author, hopefully you’re going to write plenty of books. There’s no reason to get too hung up on any one of them. After you’ve done the rewrite, treat it with the same editing, inspection, and continuity check that you would do for any other part of your first draft (even though, technically, it’s the second). If it’s not absolutely perfect, consider the time and effort it would take to make things perfect, which is a subjective term, compared to what you could be doing instead… like writing the next book. Create the best ending you can, and then move on.

Ultimately, I’m happy I decided to give the rewrite a shop, even though it’s delayed publishing of Spirit’s End by a couple of weeks. Carver and the rest of them deserve a proper end to their frenzied journey, and it’s been a fun, sometimes frustrating, journey with them. And, really, that’s what’s important. That you put out a book you’re proud of.

But wow, am I happy to be moving onto something new…

 

Dunkirk and a razor-sharp story

Dunkirk, a rifle shot of a movie, takes a list of things it would like to show, feelings it wants to impart, and then slams them at you with unrelenting efficiency. There is very little fat on these bones.

While I enjoyed the film, especially in the all-consuming IMAX theater where I saw it (and I’d recommend a similar environment – in traditional Christopher Nolan fashion, there’s enough playing with time and sequence that you’re liable to get confused if you glance at your phone or computer every few minutes), Dunkirk is almost more fascinating as an exercise in story construction. And, really, in how to keep the focus on the central conflict to your tale. Below are a few, spoiler-free, observations that I plan to take into my own writing that I picked up from Dunkirk:

Every character ought to have a purpose – This is one that I’ve fallen afoul of before. Namely, creating characters that come into a story and either fall off the page later or achieve no specific objective. In Dunkirk, if someone is a focus of screen time for any length, they have a reason for being there that affects the story or the other protagonists to some degree. I’m not talking extras here, I’m talking named characters. They should make an impact. If you’re naming the shopkeeper, for example, then that shopkeeper better do more than just give the main character their change and be done with it. If something needs to happen that isn’t being done by the villain or the heroes, and you’re thinking a named character has to be involved, then make them meaningful. Give them something to be. Or a death worth dying for.
Don’t let the central conflict disappear – Sideplots, particularly in longer works like novels, will happen. They’re a great way to flesh out characters and keep readers from being exhausted by an ever-escalating set of main story stakes. However, the central issue in your story, the thing that’s driving your characters deep down, shouldn’t vanish for too long. Think about it this way – you’re not watching Sharknado for the love interests. It’s all well and good if sparks fly, but we’re watching the movie for the tornado full of sharks, if we’re watching it at all (which, let’s hope not). Dunkirk, by virtue of its setting, has its central conflict in view at all times. It overshadows all of the characters for every minute of the film, and we never forget the stakes.
Coincidence is good, until it’s bad – Dunkirk, along with many other movies and books, does occasionally use coincidence to get characters into trouble. Which is fine! Grand! Your hero should bet on the one horse that’s sick to win the race. A car should run a red light and hit your hero as they’re riding their bike. However, in every coincidence, Dunkirk‘s heroes respond with action. They save themselves, or at least make such an effort of it that we don’t mind the nudging of the gods in their favor. Your heroes should always make their own luck to get out of a problem, and lose it to get into another one.
If you have a device, use it consistently – Dunkirk, and this may be more Christopher Nolan’s directing and the script’s writing, uses small amounts of dialogue. It relies on the actors and their faces, along with the surrounding sounds, to give the audience an idea of the tense terror that is being under constant attack. The movie rarely deviates from this setup. It’s not as though the first half finishes and everyone suddenly becomes blabbermouths. Dunkirk‘s style is consistent throughout. If you’re using a narrative device, like consistent switching of P.O.V.s or large amounts of dialogue to move scenes forward, be consistent with it. Don’t veer in and out of different styles in the same story, or your audience will notice. And if they notice your work, then they’re not paying attention to your writing.
If it doesn’t need showing, don’t show it – For a movie about one army shoving another off a beach, you’d expect to see a little of both. Instead, Dunkirk barely shows anything of the Nazis. Some airplanes, but otherwise the German army is a largely invisible menace. Rather than reduce apprehension, the fact that you’re never quite sure where the enemy is, where they might show up, is a huge source of tension in the film. Just like the soldiers trapped on the beach, you don’t know where the next attack is coming from. In your story, consider whether characters or events need to be shown, or can be relegated to an ominous background. You could write a series of scenes showing tanks chewing through towns, or you could have your characters notice the quiet coming over their home. The increasingly panicked newspaper headlines. The rising cost of simple goods, and perhaps some unexplained disappearances. Compare which set is more effective at setting the tone you’re trying to achieve.

Anyway, after all that, I’d say that Dunkirk is a fun ride. Similar to, in my opinion, Gravity in that it’s an experience worth having once but not one I’ll be seeking out for repeat viewings. If you get a chance to see it in theaters, particularly IMAX, take it.