Ken Hughes's Blog, page 12

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Everything I know about evil I learned from Thunderbolt Ross

What does a villain want, or what drives character conflict of different kinds? Actually, with so many ways human beings can make trouble, we writers aren’t struggling to come up with a motive as much as choosing the better of many evils. So here’s one basic question I like to ask myself, as a first step to my Sides of the Dark Side questions: Who started it?

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Yes, we all know one thing that question leads to: how many people bully or attack someone because they think he did something to deserve it first. The trick is, that still has a useful difference from all the other characters who go after people for their own selfish reasons but think it’s the best response to an unfair world–many professional thieves, fanatics with their causes, or for that matter hotheads who make everyone suffer for their tempers.

Which brings us to Thunderbolt Ross.

Thaddeus Ross, in case you don’t remember the comic books and the movies, is the general who’s always led troops in pursuit of the Incredible Hulk, providing a constant supply of tank-smashing action for fans of all ages. He’s also become my favorite example of this point, when I discovered the character’s motives had changed a bit over sixty years:

Recently (such as, in the Avengers-era movies), Ross has been chasing the Hulk in hopes of dissecting him and creating his own kind of Army-green troops. But before that his goal was different: simply that the Hulk looked like a dangerous monster that needed to be destroyed. So that’s the question for writers to ask:

How much does a character see people as worth hurting to get what he wants, and how much is it that he thinks they have or might hurt him?

The one is the simpler motive, and can be as straightforward as “gimme your wallet” or expanded to a character whose goals ought to be harmless but can’t realize he’s putting others at risk. (Ross never seems to understand that Hulk-like creatures really can’t be controlled… but then, Bruce Banner took a few risks himself that led to creating the Hulk.) Or he might regret what he “has to do” and tragically do it anyway.

Those might be the keys to creating tension with these characters:

How aware is he of the damage he’s liable to do?
How much is at stake, both the trouble he’s causing and how close the good he’s trying to do (if there’s any) might come to balancing it? (A straight competition or rivalry might give both sides an equal right to win, though one side might be more deserving or just less nasty.)
For irony’s sake, how connected is the victim to the hero, and to the villain?

(From the last point: the simplest plot is someone who has to protect himself, while it’s more of a stretch to have to protect others, even more so if they’re close to the person at fault. The best mad scientists endanger their own sweethearts, or need to be saved from themselves.)

The other type allows for its own kinds of ironic unfairness: someone accused of what they didn’t do, or who has actual sins but is being chased well out of proportion for them–or even deserves his punishment but he’s been trying to atone on his own, or someone else needs his help first. It might be a combination of these, like the man who has to cover up a murder he didn’t commit for fear it would reveal the lesser crimes he has been part of. Or it might involve shadings of how unfairly other people see him: seeming dangerous, being any kind of unpopular misfit or shaking up society, or just being successful enough to stir up envy. (Strict jealousy, overprotectiveness, is even more obviously part of this than envy.)

Like those “I have to hurt them” enemies, the “You’re hurting us” foes can lead to plots of almost balancing the harm they’ll cause with the good they’re trying to do (in this case, the harm it might prevent or punish). And both have their own ways of escalating beyond the scale they started at: someone who’s willing to do damage can get more determined the further he goes, to be sure it wasn’t all a waste, while of course everything a “troublemaker” does except take his punishment only adds to the trouble he’s in.

So that may be the question, when you’re looking for a villain or other shades of antagonism: How much has the hero or victim done, or seems to be doing, to start the problem? As opposed to, how much could the villain want something himself?

Does he want to break the Hulk’s power, or take it?

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Divide the Plan by Two

For some of us, writing is a constant study in planning, in looking far down the road of a half-formed story arc or into a set of possibilities and defining what it’s going to be. For others, we work through the journey one step at a time… but we may still want to sneak a glimpse ahead or get a little help making a decision. And I’ve found there’s a way to plan any part of a story in simple terms, taking the organizing just as far as I want: dividing the plan by two, or more.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

It may be the simplest way to plan that there is, just taking whatever you’re working on and adding one wrinkle to it–though it could as easily be more if that’s what comes to you–then moving on to add other layers below that for as long as you want to keep going. It’s using “one thing at a time” to dodge the crazy-making of juggling too many issues, applied to defining the larger picture that going step by step can lose.

What does “dividing” mean? Well:

What do you divide? Anything you want.

You can divide the story into stages, whether it’s books of a trilogy or one moment’s description into several sensations.
You can divide the concept of a story into types–goals and obstacles, heroes and villains, triumphs and tragedies–and then decide how many of each you need.
You can break down a need for particular plot elements–again and again we find places where we need several examples of a thing to make a point, from naming the last few galactic wars to which bits of decor in a room to mention.

How many do you divide by? That’s the fun part: just see if “two” works. Turning one need into two contrasting types or stages or whatever is as simple as planning gets, but as often as not we come up with three or four right there.

Either way works. So many small things only need to be taken past a single point to reach a whole new level of life (“a tall man” is a rough image, but “a tall man with a loud voice” gains a lot more completeness from that second thought, even without making that thought much different from the first), or a more complex plan might start with picking two parts and then splitting each of them another time or two. And there will be plenty of times the mind goes straight to three or four or more examples that are more or less equal, or that all need to be there to interact… though if goes past five or six, it’s probably a sign that you’re already seeing some of the sub-parts that these should be split into next.

Just picking combinations like this can teach a lot about writing. Sometimes a thing just has two main sides that matter, and the rest are subparts within those. Or it might call for three steps, one thing that changes what went before and then how it’s resolved afterward (the famous “thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” or situation, problem, solution)–of course the mind loves thinking in threes just to appreciate that it’s more than just two things, and we writers certainly learn to think that way. Or some kind of reaction or buildup might be just as important, and “he said, she said, they agreed” doesn’t work as well as “he said, she said, he said, she said” or maybe “chitchat, he said…” Then again, it may not be the interactions that matter as much as nature of the thing; you might just know the hero’s going to deal with Doubt that he’ll win, Greed of the people in his way, and Guilt over what he does to do it.

 

A couple examples:

In planning my contemporary fantasy The High Road, I realized:

its first part would be my heroes Mark and Angie facing their most immediate challenge (a street gang with a vendetta tends to get your attention),
so that the second part would be a deeper understanding of the problem and how many other secrets the family magic is tied into.

That first part then had two main stages:

their first discovery of the magic and their enemies,
and then trying to deal with them.

And that beginning stage would be

the Blades’ threat,
then clashing against them with the magic,
then what else breaks loose during the immediate aftermath

–and I have my first three chapters.

Or, if I’m looking for possible images for someone leaving a building, it’s natural to think of the basic Sight Plus Hearing division. But if I’m looking for more detail I know there are five senses to consider.

Sights are easy to split up by direction:

above everything, the moon, but there’s little other light out,
in front, the empty parking lot and the pathway beyond it,
on the side, the streets heading off that he won’t take,
and behind him the town hall he’s left

–then I might further break down those directions by adding clouds against that moon, trees alongside the path, and so on.

To think of sounds I might run through the same directional check, or I might consider classes of things that make sounds:

people (back in that town hall, driving on the streets, etc.),
objects (does he pass the building’s whirring air conditioner?),
animals (birdcalls, rustlings in the brush),
and maybe the weather and so on.

Touch can also be a few position types: anything about the ground he walks on or the things he brushes past, and if the wind or cold or anything touches him, and anything about his clothes or any injuries or such he’s carrying with him. And suddenly I’ve got a sceneful of possible descriptions, just waiting to be put in place.

In fact, dividing by two-plus can lay out a whole book:

maybe four plot stages (or two halves with two to three substages each), each with
four-ish chapters (maybe two events of two chapters each), that might contain
two to four (or more) scenes.

Or a scene itself could have a certain number of points: steps people take in what they’re doing, places they move past, or subjects of a dialog. And dialog subjects can be made up of just how many lines people say, and so on.

 

Planning–or just glimpsing ahead–can be as simple as you want, just by taking it a step at a time and deciding how far to go before you have enough to move on.

Simple as one-two.

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What I learned from a Sex Scene — Beyond Any Story’s Details

The most useful writing insight that I ever picked up from the old “Should you write a sex scene?” question has little to do with steaminess. (Yes, that’s still a complex question that depends on the story and the writer.) Instead, this was a whole way of looking at fiction’s place in our lives–literally, as it’s about how to relate to what we’ve lived and what we haven’t.

It started with a bit of advice that sidestepped all the usual questions about bedroom scenes; this “expert” didn’t talk about genre and audience differences, style, authenticity or character revelation versus the dread “gratuitous” scene. He just said that sexual descriptions were meaningless to readers that hadn’t had similar experiences–and unsatisfying reading to anyone who actually had.

In other words, if the scene isn’t crippled by “sorry, you had to be there,” it’s “been there, done that, bored now”?

That advice is just plain wrong, but not only because of how its two halves together would block off anything that could be written. It’s easy to seem profound by making a glib statement about writing having opposite perils… the real question is why a story does value both what’s “familiar” to the reader and what’s “new,” and how do they actually come together.

Looking at one side, could it be that what readers most want is that sense of newness? That writing should take them out of themselves and show them something else, if it can lead them through it right and make it entertaining? Possibly. Of course every story is different from the reader’s life, and that defines what it has to offer. (For that matter, listen to how any fan can get into how well they “know” their favorite characters, or the “mythology” of a modern story’s background.) So what if it’s only that each reader has different tastes for how far from home to go, whether it’s just “exploring” a bit deeper into ordinary family and work, or finding wild ways to save the world?

But we all know that’s only one side of it.

Familiar story elements aren’t just about the reader’s comfort zone, they always have their own appeal. We’re all fascinated by a character that has the same job or background we do, at least if we don’t hate how that’s handled. Or if there’s a particular thing we know, it’s easy to say “Yeah, I’ve got an embarrassment in the family too. Mine’s just an uncle I don’t see too often, not an in-my-face brother, but I’ve used some of the same coping tricks…”

So, does the familiar help to anchor what’s new in a story? It’s certainly helped some. Or is it that newness spices up a story with a familiar heart? I’ve seen both… but I think there’s more than either balancing the other.

I think the key is that writing should bring some familiarity into what it explores. In fact, it should not only help the reader understand that new territory but use that new perspective to make the everyday things clearer. –Yes, that’s a known moment in the Hero’s Journey, when the hero comes home with a new awareness of where he’s always been, even if it’s simply Dorothy’s “there’s no place like home.”

The key might be extending “familiar” plot elements into universal points and show how they apply to more than the story. A well-developed story should not only explain why those exact things happened, but let part of every reader realize how it’s similar to their own lives and what it has to say about them.

Of course that’s no more than what critics love to say about their favorite stories anyway, but there are ways to build that bridge right. A scene may be as specific as an embarrassing relative, and it could be

just a nod to those readers with the right background to think “No, don’t try to shut the guy up, I’ve seen it only makes him worse.”

but it’s better if it really makes a case for the reader thinking

“Yeah, maybe that kind of diplomacy (like my cousin always uses) is worth the effort after all… wish it was that easy with my boss or the cabbie I yelled at yesterday, but maybe…”

By taking the story beyond its own moment, with a more universal sense of why whole kinds of things happen that way and what people might do about them, we’re connecting it more with every reader and every issue they may have. And it may all come down to doing justice to those details, but seeing past them:

John Grisham’s The Firm doesn’t need us to be mobsters or lawyers to follow it. It lays the situation out so well we find ourselves in Mitch’s head, feeling how hard it is to resist going along with it, from a mix of ambition and because he’s already dug himself in deep. We may learn a lot about legal billing systems along the way, but it’s all bringing us to moments we’ve all had a taste of at any good job or temptation, or just any time we make a mistake.

Even Lord of the Rings carries its simple hobbits through Ultimate Evil by capturing the sheer grinding strain of the journey, and how their homey memories and loyalties sustain them through it all. It may be a cliché to think “If they dare to save the world, I can push myself through school” but that doesn’t make it less true.

Of course, we writers probably don’t need to convince our readers to defend the whole planet (though Tolkien partly was, as a World War I veteran writing in the midst of World War II), and most of us aren’t advocating any specific choice in someone’s life. But still, it’s something to keep in mind: the more distinctive the situation is, the more carefully we ought to build those bridges into to understanding it–and the more familiar it is, the more we should try to lead out into exploring further.

Exploring. Not just into something new, but into something more universal, more human.

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More than a Scene

It’s easy to think of a story’s scene as being about the next struggle or problem, or else touching a different base that hasn’t been mentioned in a while. That “next” may a vital sense to have about it, for the logic that ties the scene to what’s just happened and what’s needed up ahead. But it can also be a trap, to think only of the immediate needs and miss our chance to build larger resonances with the whole story.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Classic example: we all know what a story’s first couple of scenes (or first minutes in one running scene) will probably cover, as far as the hero goes. They’ll include

something to give a sense of the character’s regular life, and
the “establishing incident,” the “call to adventure” that takes it in a different direction.

–Yes there are a lot of variations, like putting the change right in line one and then catching up with “why shoot at me, I’m just a…”, or someone with a “regular” life that’s as thrilling as possible but still complicated by this new twist. But these are the classic building blocks of a start.

But, how many more layers could you build with them? Everything has a past; there may still be one event that puts things on the story’s course, but how carefully could you set up the road they’d been on until then, so we really feel how sharp (or subtle) the change is?

Consider the start of the manga and anime Monster, by Naoki Urasawa. The story’s tagline is “What if the life you saved became a monster?”–but, the first scenes aren’t simply the good Dr. Tenma performing ordinary surgeries before they wheel in the dying serial killer. Instead, he realizes he’s let his boss send him to operate on a famous patient when it meant letting a more ordinary man die, and so Tenma is actually defying his hospital when he insists on saving that particular fateful life.

Now think about it: how many writers do you know that don’t consider a start or other key moment complete without that kind of ironic spin? Other authors may dislike overt twists like that, but they’ll look around for quieter hints that can make the effect they want. This is hard-hitting, ambitious writing that we can’t do if we think only of the simplest way to get from A to B. What’s the best way to get there?

And besides the big plot twist itself, when Urasawa chooses an obstacle of human schemes rather than say Tenma being in bad health or about to go on vacation, he also shows how corrupt the story’s world can be and how Tenma will have to struggle with his naiveté and ideals. Again, it can be too easy to fill a scene with the most obvious form of problem (or solution to it) rather than find the one that adds to the bigger picture.

Think of what could be called the “penultimate, penultimate Harry Potter action scene.” That is, the second-last book’s second-last struggle–which of course is why it could be such a key moment for suspense buildup. And even though it’s a movie-trailer favorite as “That Half-Blood Prince moment where a lakeful of zombies get torched,” the real center of the scene is much more specific. Namely, it’s Harry under orders to help his mentor Dumbledore put himself through ultimate agony to complete their mission.

The “fire”fight afterward is a much-appreciated release from that tension, but it only goes so far to relieve our sense of guilt, all amplified by how this is the first time in six books that Dumbledore has openly asked Harry to go into danger. Of all the things J. K. Rawling could have keyed that struggle around (and we know she can think of quite a few), she chose the one that leaves Harry with a deep need to make it up to Dumbledore… and what happens then reminds us the Potter books are so much more than Quidditch chases or good-crushes-evil.

That’s the principle, things resonating from their past or on to the future, and it shows up in many of the more powerful stories and some mediocre ones too. We all know scenes of some hero busy doing one thing while a supporting character shows off his dissent or incompetence; what makes some of them comic relief is that those conflicts doesn’t go anywhere further, while the other stories actually are laying groundwork for future changes or showing consequences for what’s just happened.

It works for obstacles, and characters, and it works for methods or resources. (In a sense, most of the story is either a method or an obstacle, plus the lessons learned from them; characters are simply the most important things to fit onto those sides.) If the hero has one way of solving a problem, it should be only a matter of time before the story explores how many ways that can go wrong, and how which ways he’s tried build a sense of what he still needs to explore or what he needs to keep his faith in.

One caution: it’s also easy to plan scenes completely from this viewpoint, placing certain things purely as a clue or an echo. This may add a lot to the larger picture, but scenes that also feel like they’re really connected to the story right now come off a lot better than those that whisper “Hold on and take this in, it’ll matter more later.”

All of these are the building blocks of a story. And building anything means being sure one brick fits with the next, but real architecture keeps the whole shape in mind. A scene can be the next thing, but are you choosing it to mesh with what came just before or some larger point?

Why stop at one?

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Facing the Blank Screen — the Scary Bicycle

 

No stalling today–let’s talk about the hard part of writing, the thing that separates ideals from reality and keeps lying in the way of every new plan we make. That is, the sheer effort it takes to keep doing all the work to get a thing written. Focus, perseverance, facing down everything from life’s distractions to our own doubts that that crazy idea is worth finishing… come on, is there any of us that doesn’t see ourselves here?

 

The most interesting thing I’ve ever heard about writing came from an article (and ohh, I wish I remember whose!), where a longtime author confessed that the best writing insight he’d learned in all his years was that:

 

“All writers hate to write.”

 

The more he actually talked to his fellow pros, the more they all admitted they hated the process of writing a thing out, and what they loved was looking back at a thing and know they “had it written.” –Go on, take five seconds for a Google search to see how many bloggers are confessing and debating that same problem.

 

Except, I think that author was overstating his point, or showing the glass half-empty to steel his readers for the challenge. We all know getting a thing written is hard and that our biggest enemy there can be ourselves. But from what I’ve lived and what other writers tell me, I’d put it as:

 

“Writers hate to start writing, and love it each time they get rolling.”

 

It might seem like our own daily Hero’s Journeys of challenge and reward, but I call it the Scary Bicycle: like with the proverbial bike, the skills we’ve gained in the past come back quickly enough each time we sit down, although writing seems more difficult until we actually settle in, maybe every single time. The results may be better some days than others, but honed skills are still honed skills, and the enthusiasm itself is generally right there waiting for us.

 

That may be what defines a writer more than anything else: just the love of what we do, even if it may take twenty or sixty minutes of awkwardness each time to get to that place. We recognize each other when we hear about that same crazy fascination with the process itself. So that just leaves: what can we do to get into The Zone?

 

Stephen King, of course, says you have to write every single day… and I think there’s a lot of truth in that. Both our skills and the discipline itself gain hugely when we keep them that fresh, and let’s face it, “every day” is simply the proverb for what rhythm makes something a part of life.

 

(Plus: just writing a page a day gives you a 365-page novel every single year. Doesn’t look so bad, does it?)

 

–Yeah, like I have time to breathe on a weekday, I hear a lot of us saying. True, life is life… more or less. But still:

 

Priorities. If writing matters to you–never mind whether you’re dying to have a New York Times Bestseller, just whether some real in-the-zone creating time compares well to ordinary TV or making a fancier dinner–it’s worth pushing at least some things down to make room. It’s just “life,” but you’re trying to keep it your life, right?
Rhythm. Some of us do great things with hours of intense writing on a weekend (after all, you only have to Start Up once) or a whole week of vacation; others follow King and make it a part of each day. There’s no simple answer to which to use, except: why not try some of both, and see how each gets you closer to who you want to be?
Finesse. No, our bosses just don’t care that we haven’t written our daily pages yet. But we don’t have to manage writing, or even life, in big blocks. Try setting aside one question about the next scene, or printing out a few notes or a page to edit, and pulling that out at the five-minute lull between things.

 

Most of all, the writing itself doesn’t have to slog along each word in the same sequence. Maybe the most interesting twist on the Scary Bicycle model I’ve heard was the friend who said it was harder to start writing when he created new pages, but easier to start and harder to continue when he was revising. So maybe the smoothest way to start a session is to review the things you’ve already written, to get you back in the groove.

 

(Two alternate approaches to that: As many people advise, try ending a session in mid-scene, maybe mid-sentence, so that’s where you can hit the page running next time. Or, one researcher says that the mind is best at creative and social functions in the morning, and just tired enough in the afternoon to be better at critical thought (or just resting)–after all, how many radio stations save their talk for the morning and settle into all music after lunch?)

 

That only scratches the surface, naturally. The more we each learn about our own writing processes, the more we can try things like writing an outside-the-tale debate between characters to get involved in a certain scene, or saving certain easy or hard scenes to write later. (Just never forget that gut check of “Wait, what does it mean that this scene’s boring me so much?”)

 

In the end it comes back to the numbers, pushing ourselves to get it all written. And maybe like other pushes, the key may be seeing past how hard it is to get started each time, and how we seem to pick up speed from there. “Hard work? Well, the first thirty minutes don’t count.”

 

Or to bring up what may be the best line I’ve heard on life (or at least on the limits of advice), take Ms. Buffy Summers’

 

“It’s hard, and it’s painful, and it’s every day.”

 

Literally every day? maybe. Or just, whenever you want to get to the fun parts.

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Viewpoint – In Praise of a One-Lane Street

A good viewpoint character just may be the best friend a writer has. And like most lifelong friends, we may have to warm up to a few inconveniences and quirks, before we start to appreciate how many ways a really compatible point of view character can smooth our writing along. Besides how it brings the chosen character or characters to life—and in the end, doesn’t all writing work through that?—using it can also animate all the supporting characters too, organize the world to keep it plausible and again to guide the whole description process, and even trim bulky pages.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

But somehow I keep seeing writers who are uncomfortable with it, who neglect it or even resent how it complicates some of their exposition. Yes, a strong viewpoint can make a few things awkward—but every limit there is also more than one opportunity, while almost nothing looks as amateurish as not sticking with whatever VP choice we make.

Just to line up the basic options, we have:

3rd Person Limited: Bill thought __ so he did __. Then the other guy did __. Bill thought __ and…
1st Person: I thought __ so I did __. Then the other guy did __. I thought __ and…
3rd Person Omniscient: Bill thought __ so he did __. But Joe thought __ and did __. Bill thought __ and…

(Plus, there’s the question of whether one of the first two methods will change viewpoint characters when a new scene starts.)

Let’s just get the Omniscient option out of the way—because, frankly, that’s where I hope most writers keep it. Being able to show any thought in the scene may make it a lot easier to reveal things… but that’s one of the main styles it’s used for, just trying to make the story easy. True, some of its other uses are to back away from individual characters to make their gestalt impression (the town, the human condition, whatever) seem more important than any one person, or to make direct contrasts between one thought and another, but pulling those off is a lot trickier than it looks. It also can’t be done without at least understanding each character’s view first.

So that leaves 3rd Person Limited and 1st Person, simply “he/she” vs “I.” Compared to the other option, these two are pretty much the same thing in terms of what viewpoint does. Their difference is really in tone: it’s just more intense to get through a whole tale of “I”s with none of a character’s passions and blind spots pushed back to “John hated to…” Some writers (or stories) work better with that bit of distance, while on the other hand I’d hate to read any of Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter books that didn’t throw me right into Dubious Dexter’s mocking little lines of thought. But extreme or subtle, any character can be done well in 1st Person—still, most writers have found the 3rd is more than powerful enough for them.

Either way, the good stuff involves knowing one of those two specific viewpoints. Which makes sense: stories aren’t read by gestalts, or by readers whose answer to “Will he give me that raise?” is to read the boss’s mind. (Much as we love to read about people like that.) 1st Person is simply how we live, and 3rd Limited is its more polite twin.

The basic value of a good VP, of course, is that this becomes the set of thoughts we can and should just show. Simple as that; as a writer, “you get one” mind to follow in a scene, so we make the most of it.

—Which is not to say we show every thought the character has, of course; that still depends on good pacing and the style we want, same as anything else. Then again, it works both ways, so choosing the right viewpoint character himself—or is it herself? choices, choices—ought to have a huge hand in defining how much of what to dwell on. Laconic, all-business VP characters are great for many stories, and a big effect of that choice should be limiting how detailed they bother to make their thoughts. Someone else might muse about everything he saw… or breeze past most things but slow down to wax lyrical about how to hack a computer, because that’s who they are.

(Special warning: if something would be on the character’s mind, don’t hide it from the reader just to play tricks. “They never knew I was the killer” may be the most infuriating last line you can ever write, if it blasts the readers with how dependent they’ve always been on your character telling the whole story. Yes, the plot may be all about why the character doesn’t know a thing, or there may be big memories that honestly haven’t come up yet, or the character can hint there’s something but flinch away from thinking it in detail at first. But don’t just cheat if we should know it’s there.)

Beyond what someone thinks, how does what he does and notices filter into that view? There may hundreds of things in a room, but by really following the character through it you get both a strong guide for describing it all and many more chances to characterize him. Does he just settle into the chair and wait to be told what’s up, or do his eyes pick out the rifle on the wall—and is it because he’s an appreciative hunter, a paranoid spy, or an author who remembers Chekov’s saying about guns?

Writers and readers often say characters are more important than plot. (I think their relationship is more complicated than that.) But there’s no question that anything we learn about that person’s mindset might affect any number of things to come, and beyond all that her attitudes are likely to connect with the reader more than the raw details of how a US President goes on the run from assassins. And every thought, action, and perception that crosses her viewpoint (or misses it!), plus what order she takes them in and how she perceives each, can be a chance to building that picture… and without slowing the story down. Because the pace of the story is how the right character is living it.

Consider: how different would a Sherlock Holmes tale be from Holmes’ own view, seeing all the possibilities at once rather than with a Watson who’s quickly led through them? Or from Inspector Lestrade’s, able to do his job but clueless enough to need a Holmes to do it right? Or from some ignorant servant’s view, or (evil chuckle) from Moriarty’s… If viewpoint doesn’t define the whole story, it certainly RE-defines every part of it.

I do like to think of it as driving in a one-lane street. A second lane to maneuver in might let me skip ahead and see more cars sooner, but staying mostly in one lane makes me so much more aware of each car, and especially how its speed matches my own. (Yes, that’s a sloppy metaphor; are viewpoint characters the cars or the lanes? But I’ll get the other reason I like the image.)

But, what about that viewpoint’s price, the key things right in a scene that a character doesn’t realize? (And those blind spots are, of course, some of the strongest ways to make a point about that person.) There, I think you have two choices:

Change viewpoint with the scenes. A whole book with exactly one viewpoint might be stronger, but we all love to split the narrative between a few characters that see different things. It might be because they wind up on different continents as the story plays out (we Game of Thrones fans know what I mean), or because using another pair of eyes in the same room shows whole other things (which is also Game of Thrones, come to think of it). But as long as the jumps between views are complete and not a new one every page, each view works in its own right, and the combination builds whole other shapes.
Or, get subtle:

Consider another “Lane,” namely Lois—a character who’s famously defined by the one thing she doesn’t know. Say you’re writing a Superman novel (or just any story where you want to state the characters as firmly), and you decide Lois needs an actual viewpoint scene of her at her best, grilling the latest Lex Luthor-wannabe about his shady dealing at a press conference. But this is also a villain that Clark Kent would be keeping an eye on, using all the resources that both his identities have… You could have Clark bumble his way through the scene and then later in his own scene mull over what he actually learned there. But you could also ;et Clark could get in one very good, penetrating question, and Lois could stop to think how she hates that a guy could have real reporter’s instincts sometimes but always be such a wimp…

(And of course, which one you use depends on which version of Clark Kent you’re writing, the “my God how does he keep his job” version or the “my God it’s just a pair of glasses” version. Characters fit the story.)

But there are always ways to make the reader notice something but hide it from the viewpoint character. If he doesn’t see something, what’s the reason for it: is he bored, trusting, impatient? Or even if it’s just him missing the elevator his girlfriend’s on, he can think a prominent “It can’t be that important” to make the reader suspect what it’ll really mean. It doesn’t have to be a strict characterization reason he misses something; just the viewpoint fact that he misses it gives the writer more than enough to hint with. Either way, the reason you’re hinting at is at least as entertaining as the fact itself, so all you have to do is use that, both to hint at the fact and to emphasize the larger truth.

Even when a character can’t know something, viewpoint isn’t a limit. It’s a twofer.

As to whether Lois Lane is really that limiting, the first modern “secret identity” story was Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, which is told mostly from the woman’s point of view…

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Shadowed is free to May 13

Thank you all, for giving me so much support for this site. I hoped the Unified Theory could add something new to the writers’ blogosphere, and it looks like it is.

As a way of saying Thank You (and celebrating my birthday today, and the start of my latest book–but more about The High Road some other time, he teased), I’m making a special offer: this weekend, May 12 and 13, the e-book of Shadowed will be available for free.

So if you want to see a few ways a story could be plotted by playing Reward, Cost, and Difficulty factors against each other, or just whether I practice what I preach, visit https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/130202 and enter the coupon code TY22R, this Saturday or Sunday.

Oh, and keep an eye out for a guy named Vernon: he gives our hero a lot of trouble every time he shows up…

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The Toolbox – what goes Around the Words

Choosing the words… picking which shapes to fit around your prose gems to really show them off, and when not to try as hard… It means juggling paragraphs, “said” tags, adjectives, punctuation, and yet still managing to be creative in the middle of it all. No wonder that, no matter how ready we are to write something, the biggest parts are probably still the actual writing and rewriting to get the words themselves into place.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

More, the devil’s in the details, so this is the final acid test to our skill: Do we come off as more wannabes that have fun ideas but whose words don’t quite “have it”? Or do we make that reader think “Not a bad line… okay… keeps moving… yeah, fun moment and… yeah… oh she needs to DIE—” until we’ve earned his trust enough to turn that page?

Honestly I think half the would-be authors who don’t pull it off are the ones who fail the Resume Test: give the reader some reasons to like you, but know it only takes one reason for him to put the paper down and go with somebody more reliable. One failed word, one aspect of weakness than runs on too long, and it can all be over.

–Bad blogger! Writers already know that, there’s no point in my reminding you all about how many things can go wrong, especially when dwelling on it can just freeze us all up. Besides, you’ve probably already learned the tools, and now you’re focusing on your sense of what makes your writing sing, with the precision slowly coming with practice, right? Good. That’s probably how it has to be.

Still, there’s no reason to let your options unsettle you. The more we all get familiar with what the structures for those words can really do, the more we can let them line the writing up in a better way, and maybe even make it come out easier.

Mind you, these will only be the highlights. For the real bible to most of this—yes, I’m going to say it—be sure you have Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style handy. (And if that sounds too nitpicky, consider that this is the same E. B. White that wrote Charlotte’s Web. They get it.)

 

Now: let’s say you have enough ideas in your head to start a scene. Whether it’s from planning or from trusting that your mind is open, you think you can give the scene a direction of suspense or fun or whichever it is. (In fact, I think “suspense” is a good model for working with any kind of scene; you can use the same kinds of hints and buildup even about whether a great pleasure or an ordinary thing is going to turn out a little better or worse. Anticipation is good for anything.) You have your characters, and the kind of things that might happen, and you’re ready to describe it all.

Now what’s the pace for it? Is this part of the scene the time to capture how your hero’s fingers notice the feel of the design in the coffee cup… or is the only important thing that you touch base by saying he “got to work eager and freshly caffeinated”?

Think of both what pace to start the scene at, and whether it’s best for the story to change speeds in midscene; maybe starting at a quick summary and slowing down when something important shows up, or after some details you run on a bit longer at a faster pace to stew over the consequences. Also, how much does your style depend on you mostly staying at one pace or another? (Hopefully if you love details, that means you also know how to reach the next thing before you bog down, or your fast-paced style includes enough twists that you don’t end the fun too soon.)

Actually, there are “pacing” questions about every level of writing, from chapters to syllables. For every kind of point we could add in to amplify or clarify something, there are options of trimming more away if you think those words are starting to distract the reader from the story, whether it’s an unneeded scene or one overly fancy word. Any seasoned writer knows much of the work is streamlining the words from how they first came out—even taking a whole scene they slaved over and replacing it with one mention in another scene that the thing happened.

“Stories fly like birds. Their wings are built with strong muscles and bones where they need them, but their bones are hollow wherever they can save weight. Build your bird right.”

(To be continued – paragraphs, tags, sentences, and other fun things)

 

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Character-Centered and Plot-Centered – Making Room

 

“Do you write plot-centered or character-centered stories?” is a favorite question between writers. But it’s usually asked just as a way to insist on strong characters, sometimes suggesting a mix but sometimes to claim a plot doesn’t even matter compared to the people in it. From my own Unified perspective, I always want to join the authors who hold out for balancing the two… except I keep seeing some hard facts in favor of the “Characters Rule!” approach that are hard to balance out at all.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Of course, “character” means different things to different people. Indiana Jones is an unforgettable guy, but not as much for the reasons most people think of when they really get into character-building. Yes, he’s an action hero who dares to be afraid of snakes, but that only goes so far as a “deep, realistic human being.” He’s great partly for adding just the right touches of humor and humanity to the thrills, but also because the overall film (from plot to lighting levels) coalesces around him to make him look great—“I love Indy” is partly shorthand for just loving watching his movies.

–Or is it the other way around? Maybe the character isn’t a tool for the overall story, maybe the story is a device to make us believe the character is possible. Not “possible” in that “If I get mugged someone will whip the thug’s gun away,” but meaning that heroism, facing fears, style, and all the rest of it have something to say about our own lives.

It’s not like we writers don’t know how valuable characters are. Loosely speaking, “plot” can be absolutely whatever comes into the story, and some tales are all about lingering over their people while others rush on to the next task to take on. But we humans are the proverbial social animal; we’re wired to notice anything about a Who more than we do about a What or How. So any time some hero’s about to duck a bullet through sheer skill, we know it would be so much more thrilling (and easier to explain) to say that it instead comes down to him facing his fears or realizing it’s the “friend” at his back who’s going to shoot him.

But is even that getting away from the characters? Many people think so; sometimes “plot-centered” is code for turning up their noses at any kind of genre fiction and any challenge or adventure that isn’t perfectly everyday.

The thing is, they’re partly right:

First Danger of Dangerous Plots: is what’s at risk so big that you’re skipping most of life’s questions of whether a goal’s worth struggling for, for the hero and everyone around him?

Once someone finds a killer hunting him or her plane goes into a crash-dive, they don’t have to resolve if that’s their priority now. That can be an advantage for higher-stakes tales—once you settle on a big threat, you don’t have to convince the reader it matters. But it also means those characters aren’t dealing with the ordinary choices about whatever’s changing has to compete with their regular lives, and how persuasive the easy thing and “What if I just walk away” are for all of us.

So, when we choose what kind of story we want to write, we need to see how much that’s limiting its ties to those regular challenges even if it’s adding focus to the bigger thrills. But it doesn’t mean a strong plot has to squeeze out some of our character choices.

One clue to that is that sometimes even small, adventureless tales end up being more plot than character anyway. A “career tale” can be purely about how to be a better accountant or rock star, or a romance can slip from the character issues of “Who’s right for me?” to plot twists struggling over “Can I get her alone in time to say I’m sorry?” But of course these tales still have one way they’re usually closer to character-based than the bigger-stakes tales:

Second Danger of Dangerous Plots: is what’s affecting the plot so different from ordinary life, so that how he copes with it doesn’t generalize as well to the reader’s own struggles?

(Yes, in my Plot – Just Three Tools? breakdown, this is drawn from the Difficulty tool while the other Danger was the Reward and Cost questions.)

One of the biggest reasons characters are fun reading is that anything about human choices has some meaning to everything else human. Most readers haven’t tried hunting killers, but we don’t even need to have had a demanding boss ourselves to relate to the hero biting his tongue and trying to listen hard for what he needs to keep his job.

Whatever the story’s plot is, here are a few ways to make the most of your characters:

Character is deciding What someone wants, not just How to get it. A romance could be “Can she get the promotion to face her boyfriend as an equal?” but it’s exploring character more if she can’t get it and has to consider if dating her boss is worth what it does to her self-image. –Of course, one thing both versions depend on is neither character losing their jobs so the problem disappears.
Character is visibly Caused by Characters, not just events. The less someone is forced into a position by big events (let alone “just born bad,” or good) and the more we see they’ve made choices to get as far as they have, the more we see the choices they have ahead matter too.
Character is Checking All The Choices. You can rush the plot along by showing there are only a few things to try doing next… or you can take a moment to show someone trying to consider every option, and/or showing their blind spots. Bad characters in danger never call the police, good ones realize they don’t have time—and great ones have reasons they hate to trust anyone (or they have a really well-presented Don’t Have Time scene).
Character is solving the How with the Why. You can do a great story of how a general wins a war on his maps and blasts through the enemy lines, but it’s so much more human to focus on his own weakness of being suspicious or impulsive, or learning to work with his superior. Biases and bosses, biases and bosses are always fun.
Character is Other Characters being free too. If you want to do justice to the hero winning a victory through human insight, don’t let the people he has to persuade or figure out have their own choices locked in. A cop who sees the hero chased by a murderer has a lot of choices, but not as many as a cop who only sees him get some threatening calls, or if the witness is only a neighbor who isn’t sure he wants to get involved. Real folks deserve a full range of real folks to deal with.
Character is Consequences, even to the plot. A strong plot often means finding a path to the end that you want… but it can lead to doing “character development” as various dead end things the hero tries that just lead to him getting back on course, supposedly changed inside but not really outside. How often have we seen a hero tempted to leave the struggle for others to take over, or to sacrifice himself for innocents, but events force him to do what the story needs? You can measure how much character affects story by how completely a “change” he goes through really changes where the story’s going and how his life stands now. (Or better yet, it puts him in a wheelchair, or teaches him to fly.)
Character might be a Plot After The Plot. Decide where your story is on the range between one main plot goal fed by a couple other threads, versus defining the tale as several separate goals. The more the story can completely finish one goal and still be about what’s next as much as it was about the last thing, the more clearly it’s like real life. Isn’t that the kind of thing Fitzgerald meant, about American lives that don’t have “second acts”?
Character is Character-ization. Going back to Indiana Jones again, he’s memorable partly for a great movie but also for the mix of little touches that constantly say what he’s like… that is, much of screenwriting a new Indy would be the three words “cast Harrison Ford.” There are whole posts’ worth of little things that even the fastest-paced tale can take a moment to include: gestures and extra actions, clothes (the hat!) and home, the right dialog style and thoughts. And yes, you can mention or even show what the hero’s doing an hour before the next plot-relevant scene, or a year before that. On the one hand it might slow things down, but on the other every glimpse is part of what he is, and you never know when some reader will fall in love with a character for a passing statement about how he paid his college bills.

–So by all means, let’s keep the classic question in mind: How does your hero do his laundry?

It’s all character. A strong plot can keep circling back to the character too, or it can be streamlined to carry him along but mostly interact with the world… it’s all degrees of focus, and knowing your options. Either way, the character’s still there in the center, and it all helps make the story.

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