Ken Hughes's Blog, page 4

Flying Free – get The High Road FREE Through April 21

It’s a strange feeling, taking a book I’ve written and offering it for no charge.

After all my months of cramped weekends, all the times I finished a chapter and minutes later turned around to start redesigning it… and now I’m taking the result of those thousand-plus hours and throwing open the floodgates for everyone who wants to glance at it?

–Plus, all the times I remember I’ve summed something up with “It’s free, and you’ll get your money’s worth” are coming back to haunt me.

But, well… the book’s done. Written. I can’t change a word of it, not without paying editing fees every time I send a tweak to some of the services it’s available on (and that way lies bankruptcy). What The High Road needs now is to be seen.

And if writing is a strange, intense journey, sharing the work is a whole new kind of territory. One with no map, no roads, and no way to know which ad or strategy sparkling in the Used Publicity Lot can take me the distance and which will sputter out and leave me stranded half a mile out.

So, for the next three weeks, The High Road is free. But not quite free: I need—I hope—that readers will share their thoughts about it.

The system is simple. Go to https://storycartel.com/ and download The High Road in the format of your choice. Then start reading… and when you’re done, follow the link to leave a review.

But please, tell me the truth, whatever comes to your mind.

Are Mark and Angie appealing, distinctive characters, or is this a story you’ve seen before?
Do the action and thrills keep you reading?
Who’s the first other writer to come to mind? Jim Butcher for intensity, Ilona Andrews for action, Stephen King for suspense? (And how far do I still have to go to meet those impossible standards?)

The book’s available free through April 21st, with one more week to leave reviews. Or if you grab the book and take two minutes to see it’s not for you, that tells me plenty too—it’s the same gauntlet every writer faces on the websites and bookstores. As long as you take thirty seconds to let me know.

Of course there’s a flying pun for this too:

Is this an antigravity book you can put down? #free http://bit.ly/freeHighRoad
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In fact it’s two puns: your review could be putting it down as well. If it does, that’s one more thing I want to know. I have more books to write, and your impression might be the one that helps me take a closer look at something.

And… if you like what you see, I hope you’ll spread the word. Click the tweet above or tell your friends.

After all, you know they’ll get their money’s worth.

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Who’s On First – A Character System for Variety in Scenes

Are you using all your story? All the characters, all the possibilities and combinations that a tale has ready to unleash?

On the one hand, it’s a lifelong study—we writers try to make every book dig deeper or find a new angle on what “people in conflict” can come up with. On the other, even when the story’s starting to fall into place, there’s always the fear that some of the pieces will miss their turns in the spotlight. It’s almost inevitable: by the time we understand the story enough to get caught up in the best parts’ synergy, there always seems to be a valuable part of the picture that our favorites folks and plot twists start rushing the story on past. What would have been pretty cool stuff gets left by the written roadside.

Last week I promised a checklist, a quick way to look at the material in a story to watch if the scenes have the full variety that they could. So:

 

Step One: Varied Whos and Whys

What’s the main material a story has to work with? Characters.

What are characters made of? Goals.

I’ve blogged about that rule before—that most of a story is rooted in the different, conflicting drives that its people have. A classic hero needs a villain, a villain needs a reason to attack the hero or someone the hero will defend, and then each of those have their own motives and more characters attached to them. The more we know the variety within that, the better we can use it.

Say, even on a literal “Tarzan test” of being sure a hero is fighting different animals:

a lion’s a fierce foe, and it might also actually be there to eat someone, so it’ll keep prowling around until Tarzan stops it
a rhino’s not only bigger and clumsier, it just wants to be left alone—maybe a tougher fight but an easier one to break off from
or, one of the humans Tarzan’s trying to defend might have blundered into their danger, while another might turn out to be a poacher who’s come looking for trouble…

That’s the simple, one-goal look at characters; most usually have more than that, at least once the story begins prying their motives apart. The brothers on Supernatural are both pushing to save the world, but Dean’s always willing to break off the fight if it’s going to cost him Sam, and Sam can get tired of being “babied” that way. And “goal” doesn’t cover all the possibilities for conflict, if someone also has issues like a hot temper (on that show it would be both brothers) or a blind faith in a third character (sooo many candidates…).

A bonus opportunity is to contrast the goal with the character himself—meaning, with what we’d expect a person like that to be. Not just giving someone a strong arc but starting them in a position that doesn’t seem to fit, like I began The High Road with Angie’s own mother Kate having abandoned her daughter and is first seen working against her. It’s a way to imbed an extra layer of contrast in a concept and tease how much backstory has already reshaped them.

It’s that list of characters and goals that the story’s built from. The real trick is to line them up in contrast with each other.

 

Step Two: Varying them When

Here’s where the rubber meets the road, or the fingers hit the keyboard.

Are all those marvelous pieces of conflict actually being used? In the simple checklist sense, that means, is there a variety between scenes that are focused on:

the lead character
the most distinct supporting character (and the others)
whatever side character the plot wants to spend a moment with
the antagonist

Neglect the first point for too many scenes and you don’t have a story. Skimp on the second and the story misses much of its depth, all the other dimensions of what’s at its center. Don’t go into the third now and then, and the tale stays a bit narrow, when you could be using those people to do justice to one more side of what your hero’s dealing with. And without the last point holding its own, a story loses the energy of its core conflict.

Combined with that… one more dimension in this is just what “focused on” means.

Initiative scenes pause the flow of the hero taking the next action (or whoever’s been doing it lately) and stop to check how this character wants to take charge or go off on his own instead of following the others’ lead. This is the old rule that “everyone thinks this is their own story”—and again, it’s vital for villains, for a story to keep that sense that the hero’s got an active and unpredictable enemy looking for his weakness.

And, object scenes are the hero or other usual suspects still leading the scene, but they’re focusing their own efforts on understanding that other character.

In other words: sometimes it’s enough to have the hero dig up or slam into what makes someone else tick, while sometimes that someone else has to “grab the wheel” for a while.

In fact, that makes most scenes a chance to touch two character bases at once: the character who’s leading it and the one who’s being revealed. Though the “active” one often ends up revealing even more about himself, if where he stands about what he learns changes the story enough…

(Note, either of these scenes could be from the other character’s viewpoint, and that would certainly strengthen the contrast with other scenes. Then again, I’m one writer who rarely uses that—I like the intensity of staying close to my hero’s own journey.)

And let’s not forget:

most characters have more than one goal or issue, so even their own set of scenes needs contrast between those
most scenes have more than two characters, so they just might switch to whole other subjects in midpage

 

Those are the basic dimensions as I see them: alternating “who” (and their multiple “why”s) leads the next scene in dealing with who else.

When I’m still developing a story, having those motives lined up sets me up to dig deeper into just what happens in each scene.

A negotiation slowly unveils what another character wants, all played off of the hero’s own needs
A fight, same thing… all spelled out through who’s prepared what or takes how many risks for what they’re really fighting for

Or looking back at a story plan, the same layout can help me be sure I’ve got the right contrasts. If Mark has been taking the lead in scene after scene, I have to ask if he’s using that time to explore enough of Kate’s secrets, or what Rafe’s gang is really up to—and if I can go much longer without them trying to take over.

And once I know who deserves to be in a scene, all that’s left is using that who and their whys to keep each how different, starting with a Tarzan Test. When do Mark and Angie fight their lion (or is that an owl?) and when are they dodging a stormfront… and how is each scene distinguished by whoever sent that after them?

It’s all about motive.

And contrast.

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Been There Done That? Similar Problems with Writing Similar Scenes

There are stories that rely on their central concept to shape much of their plot into their favorite kind of sequence, and try to make it our favorite too. It could be:

a type of action the hero takes, building a book on swordfights or courtroom battles
or other ways to set up scenes—class after class at Hogwarts learning about the characters over a new spell lesson, or layers of looking deeper into a villain’s horrific past
or, speaking of villains, how often they take the initiative make the scene about the hero on the defensive. If the hero’s there at all.

But when I read or write, I’m always looking for more variety in those. Yes, I love a story that plays to its strengths, with a clear focus on a hero (and villain) who play to theirs—The High Road and its sequels are meant to keep a reader remembering what it’s like to fly. But I want more.

There are just so many angles to come at the next scene from. All the times our hero needs to try a whole different strategy, or how one plan can not just go sideways but in mid-scene turn a debate into a raid or a research session, or all three. All the other characters, friend and foe, that honestly see this as their story and try to get a jump on their rivals. All the sides that can make a story richer by taking their turns.

I’ve always struggled to make as much time for that as I wanted. On The High Road, I had to go through several rewrites until I was sure I’d explored how much Mark had to deal with besides flying. And now here I am again, firming up my grasp of Book Two (Freefall) and understanding Book Three, and I’m back to square one about drifting into patterns.

And I’m the one who wrote the Tarzan Test!

(The Test is, basically, don’t fight a lion and then another lion. And also to use the variety between those fights, and whatever else the story has, as a measure of how broad the story is and where it needs to dig deeper into what makes its pieces different from each other.)

It’s a humbling moment, to look back at a blog I wrote years ago and see it as proof that it’s a battle I need to keep fighting with myself, not a problem I settled back then. (Plus, the irony of having to revisit the struggle to keep my characters from revisiting theirs! Or, more than irony: repetition is one of the core parts of real life that storytelling wants to streamline.)

So, what’s enough variety?

Well first, enough for what, to add what to the story?

One great virtue is the sense of completeness, of using all the potential in the characters and the situation. The more often a hero tries a different tack, or the more time he takes dealing with other sides of his life and how they all feed back into each other, the more we accept that this guy is dealing with everything and trying all his options to earn his victory. Enemies who know how to blindside him are more menacing; worlds with more detail are more convincing.

And, there’s another advantage, in the dramatic impact those scenes have. By setting out more kinds of scenes, characters, and action, a story is setting out more varied examples of what’s at stake for those scenes. Which means, there’s more room for a scene’s plan to go wrong, or go very right or cross over and affect some other thread of the story, without cutting off or changing the entire flow of the tale.

A hero can only lose so many physical fights before he’s beaten to a pulp (or the reader’s trust is), but what about losing the job he spent whole chapters struggling to get—or winning that job just when he needs new contacts for other struggles? More variety means more stakes, and more chances to turn them into real, dramatic change without breaking the story.

There’s a checklist in this somewhere, and I’m just starting to sort it out. Next week, let’s see how it looks.

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Doctor Strange vs Iron Man movies – Beating Hearts and Blind Eyes

How could the coolest, most unique thing about a Marvel movie turn out to be the worst thing? Maybe because it was all that happened in Doctor Strange.

I was looking forward to this movie too.

After all, Benedict Sherlock Cumberbatch as our Sorcerer Supreme? It seemed like a redux of the insight that made Iron Man. A lesser-known but major player in the comics… actually someone who should be downright iconic, the Marvel world’s greatest wizard, same as Tony Stark is its greatest engineer? In fact they’re mirror images of each other, both scholars of power, ancient secrets contrasted with bleeding-edge tech. (They have similar last names and barbers too…)

What’s more, it seemed like this time Marvel would recreate some of the, um, magic, but with all their cards where we could see them. This time the whole moviegoing world knew how good Marvel Studios and the Marvel characters could be… and the lead wasn’t an on-and-off success like Robert Downey Jr. who’d never quite gotten his real shot, he was a cult superstar with almost more fans than Marvel itself.

What I didn’t expect is that it would be so much like Iron Man, but without the heart.

(To be clear: it’s not a bad movie. It covers the basics, with plenty of Marvel quality, and Cumberbatch and the rest do a decent job. It’s just more on the level of a Thor 2 or Iron Man 2 than a new Ant-Man or Guardians that holds onto what it wants to be.)

 

Stark Enough – not Strange Enough

It doesn’t help that Stephen Strange and Tony Stark have a lot of the same journey. They’re both studies in Pride—which they almost have to be, a character primed to become a super inventor or wizard ought to already be a genius and have a genius’s issues—who learn to care about more than themselves.

Except… Stark shows us that journey; Strange just gets dragged along.

What’s the thing we love most about the Iron Man movies? Their commitment to Tony Stark’s dysfunctional, irreverent, completely convincing nature as a man who can carry a nuclear weapon into a hellgate without really growing up.

He starts out a weapons-dealer caught up in the human cost of his trade, and rebuilds the industry to be more responsible… hasn’t that happened in real life? (Well, it should.)
He drinks, dances on stage, and fights with his teammates, even while he saves the world.
Even his views of saving the world might be as unstable as ever (Avengers Ultron, Cap Civil War). What’s more arrogant than tempting fate with the infamous promise “peace in our time”?
And yet… even with all those past and present ties of how broken he is, he keeps going.

The greatest pun in Marvel history may be that “Iron Man is powered by an ‘Arc’ Reactor.”
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Come to think of it, Tony’s character arc isn’t so much about moving forward as how he brings everything he’s been with him. It’s why he’s so convincing, that he finds his own ways to grow and twist instead of moving in straight lines. Plus, he always stays close to his own world, facing everything from ex-girlfriends to Sinister Senate Subcommittees that play on every part of the life he’s lived.

But Stephen Strange… we see a few scenes of him as an arrogant doctor (dazzling with one patient but refusing another because “You want me to ruin my perfect record?”). And then…

Car wreck.

Desperate for healing—for his own sake, of course.

Ancient sorcerer school. Wizard wars.

And… all his old issues just fade away, pushed back by the new struggles. Apart from needing some proof that magic’s real, he has one moment of “resisting the call” after his first fight (“I took an oath to do no harm, and I just killed a man”), and a minute later he runs straight toward the next attack. He fights one battle in his old hospital beside his Pepper, um Dr. Christine, enough to touch base. But where Tony shuffles toward heroism with one foot balanced in his past, Stephen just floats up to his destiny and leaves the rest.

It’s those ties to what the character has been that one movie revels in and the other could have gone after. Instead we have a first scene not of the fledgling hero himself (like Tony’s confidently was) but of the existing sorcerers battling. We have Stephen’s doubts about magic blasted away by the Ancient One knocking him out-of-body; later she simply tells him he needs to learn “it’s not all about you.” But we aren’t seeing that growth.

Or, compare to Captain America, who doesn’t change his good nature much but constantly shows us the struggle to hold onto it in a hard world. Or Thor, whose growth is clumsy but vivid with all of Asgard bringing the pressures on him to life. Stephen Strange may do his hero-ing under his own name, but the man he was simply disappears.

 

“Too Many Sorcerers”

So, what does Doctor Strange focus on? Dimension-folding special effects… that doesn’t even matter to the story, until it finally does.

One defense of the movie is that it has a whole world of magic to introduce, unlike how Iron Man builds on real technology and celebrity life. Of course Stephen has to leave the familiar to explore the supernatural step by step… and maybe that doesn’t leave time for as much of the old character.

–No time? More careful writing would steal time along each step to keep us aware of who this hero is (and this is a story that holds up time-magic as the ultimate power).

In fact, check out the animated film Dr. Strange – Sorcerer Supreme. In half an hour less than the movie’s running time it makes Stephen’s growth in the sanctuary much more powerful (“But I need my hands!” “No. You do not.”), and the action is nearly as good. Just less flashy. (Take a look at The Invincible Iron Man too; it’s a clever way to condense Tony’s story into eighty busy minutes, and the Mandarin too—yes, it actually uses him.)

Instead, the big movie brings us worlds that shimmer and fold whenever sorcerers fight in them… and that’s it.

Are there real plot issues with what could make those worlds bend, and how it affected who won a fight? No, the folding could almost be a side-effect of battle magic, and sorcerers jump around the twisting gravity like they do it every day. The real fighting’s done with energy whips, shields, and other contained spells that seem to have no relation to the mirror effects. (Until at the climax, Strange pulls out one forbidden warp-spell he’d dabbled in before, and uses it to outwit “the devil” with a heroic sacrifice to make it cooler.)

I know, “magic” takes work to put in a story. It can come off as the ability to do anything, the “there’s a zap for that” toolkit that destroys story challenges. A busy superhero story has always had trouble making us feel a sorcerer has limits… but if he does have limits, how is he different from every other super-guy? Maybe the movie did what it had to by embracing the unlimited scale of its subject, even if it didn’t use it enough.

Still, it’s an old writing challenge: if a character or plot device were removed, would it change the story? In Doctor Strange, the mystic background has replaced almost all of the character touches that could have made it more real… but in story terms, most of the effects that make up that setting could vanish and not leave a trace.

A pity.

 

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The Long-Running Series Part 2 – Other “Easy” Lessons from Role-Playing Games

Lesson Three: Room to Grow

Half the secrets of a long-running game or story (as I blogged last time) might be simply making it the best you can. The other half are more particular.

Anyone can write “save the world” as the summary of an adventure, and forget that may not leave anything to do next. –Except, most game systems won’t let you:

One of the built-in appeals of classic role-playing games is that the characters themselves grow in skill, and the game follows them. A swordsman starts his career by fending off one or two wolves (some say it’s a tradition), and gets stronger and more magic-laden until he’s facing down an archdevil.

Think about that a moment. Not just the characters’ changing strength, but the measuring system it implies. These games all but force the game world to provide small challenges and take its time bringing in the world-threats.

That’s a plan for keeping the fun from burning itself out.

Designing a campaign has to match that. Characters aren’t starting at 10th level, so the GM has to fill the landscape with simple orcs as well as the giants that heroes dream of fighting in the future.

—Because if the players are starting at Level 10, the orc dens become just sentries for the giants, and there have to be enough lich-kings further out to populate the years ahead, starting soon thereafter. And where can you go from there?

Games show that a story has more of a future if it starts on a small scale and does justice to that, so that each step from there is moving upward. And that can guide every part of the campaign, or the series.

Look at Lord of the Rings: the first half-book is a true Halloween-style suspense ride as Frodo creeps through evil trees and cowers from just a glimpse of a Black Rider, while by the end Aragorn’s leading armies of ghosts. Or a quirk from one version of Dungeons & Dragons, that only at high level does a wizard get real ability to burn through a demon’s magic resistance; imagine the slow gaming or writing buildups of a hero first being beneath demons’ notice, then becoming more and more afraid of attracting spell-proof enemies, but finally being able to take the fight to them.

Or take the basic ideas players bring for a given hero. One occasional hazard in gaming is a player walking in with the concept of playing “the lost son of a king,” or some other lottery-winner approach to character coolness, and probably to actual power. A good GM might talk him down (maybe with horror stories of the court-caliber assassins he’d draw) to being a simple baron’s bastard, then work to make that smaller scale of intrigue just as vivid as royalty. Better that the character struggles in the village, then the local castle, and works his way up to fighting for the king, instead of obsoleting years of plotlines from the start. The goal is to keep the story going, after all.

An author can take that “savor the small” approach too. Though I admit, many authors would rather make a character royalty and keep tight control on just what characters knew the secret, so that book after book teases readers with thicker intrigue and more threats of him finally being exposed. Both ways keep the story paced, though the second could be more of a stretch to keep believable.

And games encourage something besides scale: variety.

Managing a campaign has the extra challenge that it has more than one hero, and each main character has their own actual player at the table wanting their turn in the spotlight. That baron’s son (or king’s) might have a whole year of conspiracies to look forward to, but meanwhile the priestess has been waiting for two sessions to see if her home town has been overrun by zombies, and the wizard has just summoned—

More characters keeps more happening, whether it’s from a team of central characters or a well-established supporting cast of family, allies, rivals, and everyone else in their lives. Even a few thoughts on bringing a minor character to life and keeping them in our minds—or keeping more aspects of the major folks clear—can produce a whole new plotline. And each plot is a new chance to keep the story varied, both in where it leads and what happens along the way. (You might not dare to kill off the princess, but that leaves the pirate captain’s storyline free for a tragic ending.)

Best of all: with more plots, no one thread has to fear it’ll reach its end too fast. Instead it can run for a time, then attention shifts to another idea, then back to the first. Or else a tale can latch onto that thread and follow it straight through to a proper climax—without having to repeat itself—knowing there are many more plots in the wings. Suggestion: switch back and forth between storylines that are delayed and those that complete at once, to get both the thrill of resolution and the joy of anticipation.

A story arc might be only a chapter or two in its essence. But seen in more detail it could have dozens of steps, and if it’s mixed with more arcs the series can start creating possibilities faster than you can play it or write it.

 

Lesson Four: The Beginning of the End

With the right effort, a campaign or series can run forever. But is that what you want?

In games, the GM might not be making that decision. Since there are dozens of other game systems, infinite story ideas, and a tableful of people who’ve let you run the adventure for them every week, it may be only a matter of time before players start pushing for someone else to run a different game for a while.

(In fact: a GM who goes for three or five years without hearing that is receiving the greatest unspoken compliment there is in gaming. Those players are hooked.)

Writing doesn’t have quite the same outside pressure, but an author may find her series is losing popularity or a newer, hotter genre starts looking promising. Or editors might push for that change.

–Then again: in writing, finding forms of your own passion has proven time and again to work better than switching just because you think you can hit a new trend before it gets old (short answer: you can’t). And from a business standpoint, a series that’s “slowing down” may still have a momentum that a new one can take years to build up. (If you want hard numbers on that principle, look at this analysis for one of my favorite authors, Rachel Aaron.)

Or sometimes, we want a change. A campaign or story could start to:

Seem less appealing than our own new brainchild.
Move toward the grand conclusion it deserves.
Feel like it’s going back over the same plot ideas.
Or, we’re just tired of it.

In gaming, switching campaigns and GMs may be something forced on us, but it can also be the best thing for keeping the game itself fresh. The best cure for burnout—or heading off a revolt among the players—might be to plan for it before the pressure builds up.

(Plus, halting your own campaign means you finally get to hit something yourself again!)

It’s a good lesson for any writer too. It’s a rare author who’s blessed with a concept they want to write nonstop for the rest of their lives. Better to watch for the signs of Single Hero Fatigue, or bring out a side project or second series that’s clamoring to be done, than to think of your first writing plan as set in stone.

In a game, part of that “restart” will be starting new characters, who are usually just beginning the climb to power that the seasoned characters have. In fact, it might be that players only want to switch to simpler characters or fresh roles, without even leaving the campaign itself—why waste all that world-building when they can just see the same setting through new eyes?

That’s a powerful tool for writers as well. We can pick a favorite supporting character, a point back in someone’s backstory, or any other tangent that’s worth a story, and bring that to life. It could be an occasional short story for variety, a side novel, or a whole new but connected series that might become more important than the original. And because they tie in to the initial stories, they double as a chance to deepen readers’ appreciation for that “classic core” with their new perspectives. Plus, of course they come with the extra hook that fans of the first series are already nine-tenths sold.

Or… it might be time to walk away for real. If a grand storyline has come to an end or you simply don’t want any more of it, it may be time to archive those maps, or close the book on those books. A writer who puts her characters ahead of her own needs isn’t doing right be either of them.

(And hopefully the players or fans will understand. Though there are worse fates than having schoolchildren wearing black armbands in mourning for the Sherlock Holmes you created.)

In the end, it’s your world.

And the next one will be yours too.

 

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The Long-Running Series – Two of Four “Easy” Lessons from Role-Playing Games

(Reality check: This is written in the aftermath of the Great Los Angeles Rainstorm—and yes, this week that’s reality. All part of preparing to venture forth on the waterlogged streets to speak at Orccon gaming convention.)

 

Every Saturday for hours on end, there I was in the gaming group. Dungeons & Dragons, Champions, and other role-playing systems that kept me coming back for sprawling ongoing adventures that built from bandit raids to galactic invasions over time. Often with the same heroes.

Every Saturday. For years.

We That is, if games and books aren’t just too different to learn from each other.

One guess where I stand on that question. (Hint: I’ve written about cross-training them before.)

So, based on decades I’ve spent in gaming, writing, and trading ideas with the creative folks on both sides, here are four role-players’ tools to help a writer build a long-running series. (Or are they writers’ lessons for ambitious gamemasters?)

 

Lesson One-Half: Ready or Not?

Before I start on the four tools themselves, let’s take a moment to think about what we’re getting into. A three-novel series takes years of obsessive work to write, and one that’s planned as five books or to keep going as new ideas come is a whole order of magnitude beyond that.

The authors who do best at this have already honed their proverbial craft; check out George R. R. Martin’s trophy-strewn career before he launched Game of Thrones. A GM (that’s gamemaster this time, not short for GRRM) worth staying with for twenty character levels has probably been playing and running other adventures for years.

—Except the ones that haven’t.

If anyone asks what role-playing games are, I call them storytelling’s ultimate do-it-yourself kit.
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So naturally, many a GM has tried to run a game within weeks of his friends showing him those crazy rulebooks.

Tip: if a friend who’s only starting to game suddenly can’t stop trying to get you in their brand-new campaign… hear him out. It might be the start of something tasty.

Especially if this friend isn’t one of the more impulsive people you know, it’s someone with a creative side and the drive that they just might pull this together, even though it’s learning on the fly. Which are the same qualities that make a writer. (I know I’m not the only one lured onto the keyboard through a set of dice.)

So: gaming shows that experience is a fine thing for starting a series on the right track… but it’s not the only thing.

 

Lesson One: For Them

For all the hundreds of pages in a game’s rulebook, and how every storytelling technique in history has a firm place in it, more than anything a role-playing game is a social experience. A GM sits down with players and tries to entertain them… including letting them take their turns strutting their stuff to you and the rest of the players.

Which means: what do they want?

Yes, partly that’s the “Londo Question” I’ve blogged about lately, to get inside characters’ motivations and line up the drama. But gamers know, it also means how anyone can turn up at the gaming table. A poet out for a sense of grandeur sits next to the dude who pushes for a fight and takes half an hour lining up the team strategy, while the brothers in the corner trade jokes all through it.

So a GM with big plans starts with those personalities and builds the campaign to serve them. Action challenges by the carload, check—but save some time and energy for those artistic players, and even try to play their contributions off each other. (Why shouldn’t some of the coolest description be about explaining how frightening the villain is, and how treacherous the swamp is that’s about to be laid out on the mat?)

Obvious starts to a campaign would be simply asking the players what they want. But that also means learning to look closer; two players may ask for “excitement,” but they both mean battles and yet one turns out to want a complex tactical challenge while the other’s out for sheer epic scale.

And then there’s designing the characters themselves. A player controls their hero for the campaign; if a friend’s always wanted to follow the footsteps of a shy hobbit ramped up to become a hero, it’s gaming gold to know that and give them a home “Shire” and a set of conflicts to do it justice.

For a writer, same thing. Know your fans, by knowing what they already read—probably the same stories you already read and love, but now learn to see what readers like in them, and why that works. And, which approaches out there just aren’t your style.

Gaming offers its own lesson about a writer’s plans: they’re going to change. One of my last group’s favorite storylines was a throwaway victim character (Wendy McDonald, even the name was a drive-by pick at the time) that we promoted to my character’s girlfriend and weirdness magnet, and eventually became a new player’s own character. All completely unplanned.

Or… I sometimes think of Superman’s “neglected origin” (I’ve written about it before) as something that could easily happen in a game. A character starts out with a backstory, and yet the player just doesn’t care about alien misfit storylines or old-home enemies as much as playing out what it means to be a hero here. While in contrast, Thor starts with nearly the same origin but gets a lifetime of Asgardian plotlines and a villainous brother who’s more popular than he is. Sometimes a storyline zigs, sometimes it zags.

And a writer, like a gamemaster, can base those stories on what genuinely works for the reader, the player… the customer. As long as we keep our eyes open for what turns out to actually work, and what we want to do with that story ourselves.

 

Lesson Two: For You

GMs create for their players, but they’re still playing in a sandbox they build, with everything from the “sand” to the paint around the rim coming primarily from their own vision. That’s at least half the fun, knowing that someone else’s hunger for story is being fed by how you see it.

—And honestly, isn’t that how it should be? Writers and GMs simply put in more work than their fans do, to find and test what genuinely works for people. Henry Ford once said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Starting a campaign is one of the greatest indulgences you may ever have. Fantasy, space, horror… the quirkiest new rule system or the old standby… Players may not even like the words “D&D” when you first propose it, but again and again I’ve seen a GM pull reluctant players in and shows them what a concept can be done right. And that’s just the two most obvious decisions.

Writing is spending years locked in a room with our dreams. So, we ought to make sure those are our dreams.

(Does this being the second point mean the writer’s less important than the reader? No, it’s more that in a game it’s best to start with one part player interests before wrapping them in the GM’s own… and most writers already start as fans and ought to understand the difference.)

Whether an idea starts with a player/reader expectation or not, the GM or writer can promptly find their own forms to put it in. A hero’s personal reason to destroy the enemy? One creator can go all out on showing the villain’s villainy; another can start with the person closest to the hero and make it seem like his fault the Dark Side came whispering. Being a GM can be constant practice in looking into the faces of players who expect one plotline, and reading just how far sideways you can twist it. All in the name of surpassing their expectations, of course…

Or, look at the most visible part of any game system: the rules. Most of the published “game” itself is the whole structure for managing character skills, resolving battles, and all the other “how can we” questions that keep the game rolling. (So to speak; some games don’t even use dice for that.)

So what do many GMs do with those rules?

They write their own.

It’s one of the most appealing parts of a campaign: re-building parts of the rules structure to make house rules that are more detailed or more efficient or just more your own. And it’s no surprise that the favorite candidates for change are how a game defines its own magic and exotic abilities.

Writers do the same, with any paranormal system we let in our story. (That flying belt is mine, and Mark’s going to use it the way I say it works!) An outsider looking in at a campaign or story might be surprised at how much attention goes to those customized parts… until they see how much they inspire us to keep writing, and how much the game group or the readers treasure that signature. And the longer the storyline runs, the more that bond pays off.

Or one more example: A GM knows he’s the actual “God” of the game world, able to preserve the heroes’ lives and storyline—and yet push it to the limit—by playing with luck and reality to protect them. Writers have the same power, and the same risk of overusing it and bleeding away suspense.

When you create a world, you can make it what you want, and keep it what you want. As much as people let you get away with, anyway… and that can be all the wiggle room you need.

 

Next time: the other two lessons, some specifics on planning and sustaining the story.

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Loose Cannons can Lose Your Canon – WHEN Should You Shake Up Your Characters?

Why would a story that rips forward at light-speed pace take a whole first season for what seemed like ordinary short-term TV conflicts? When Babylon 5 does just that (with so much excitement to come), it makes me rethink why other stories protect their status quo so fiercely.

 

Medium and Message?

Sure, television. TV’s whole history has been shaped by coming into viewers’ homes night after night like some old friend—or at least a neighbor that gives that steadying sense of the familiar.

For decades it’s been easier to set up TV plotlines (and sell them) around a concept that can stir up conflict, laughs, or whatever else it wants and then end the episode with so little actually changed. At most the plan inches toward the season finale, and then next fall starts in with a new villain or Slightly Different Situation that moves through the same motions. I understand soap operas liked spreading their major arguments, seductions, and other big scenes out over two episodes so a viewer forced to miss one day can always feel they “saw” the big break-up, mostly.

It’s the model for classic TV… and not only TV.

On the bright side, it’s also called suspense. Done right, a story can hold our interest with just when something’s going to tear free and bring back that sense that anything could change. A show like Babylon 5 is more fun to watch with a few spoilers, knowing its first year’s “barely-contained hostility” won’t stay contained and won’t go back in the box afterward.

Or… Severus Snape.

One keystone of the Harry Potter books is the most vicious professor at Hogwarts, and his growing hostility to Harry and perhaps to the whole wizarding world. Every book we learn more about how much is driving him, but also how many other pressures are involved and we wonder if this will be the arc that actually unleashes him against our hero.

That and, we’re wondering the same thing about certain Dark Forces in the world at large.

(I’ll skip the spoilers here, for the few people who don’t know them. But if you don’t, or you think all you need is to hold your own in a Potter conversation or enjoy a few of the movies in passing… think again. Read the books, trust me.)

Plus, Snape reminds us, TV is only one place to find a semi-stable series. Any medium can use it, and most do.

So, can it work?

 

Holding Patterns Worth Holding

Basic storytelling would suggest, skip the waiting and start pushing the story forward hard. It’s easy to look at the big cable and Netflix hits and say, raise the stakes, forget the brakes.

But looking at those stories gives some powerful lessons on the other side.

Setup matters too. Change counts for more when we care about what’s changing. Remember the classic sin in horror, to start the killing before we’re rooting for anyone to survive. But Babylon 5’s traditional first season laid the groundwork that everything else tore up, and even Game of Thrones had one almost calm book/year before the heads started rolling.
If a character and plot arc aren’t moving yet, is there enough else to keep us busy? At its best, that means whole, worthwhile storylines that aren’t relying on how they “just might” trigger the Big Ominous or the Perfect Pairing. Harry Potter’s a perfect example—for all the hard-hitting arcs that take place, page by page it never runs out of sheer whimsy and variety.
No shortcuts. Snape is a pleasure to know because… well, he’s Snape. The sheer venom in him, and all the layers he gets, keep us going the way a major draw needs to. And delivering that is all the more vital because he doesn’t “do” anything for whole books.

If a slow-changing character isn’t written on a level that calls for an Alan Rickman to play him, he’s got nothing else to “carry his wait.”

But if it works… more of the fun reading Potter books is just knowing you’ve got three or four of them still ahead, and realizing Rowling is having too much fun with Snape to break the pattern too soon. It could be the best of all worlds: a busy story, simmering energy near the center, but trusting—hoping!—that part will drag on a little longer before messing with perfection.

 

Setting Up the Setup

Finally, it helps if the whole world of a story fits with why that arc isn’t moving yet.

Babylon 5 is an embassy, the classic place for enemies to “maintain hostility at the usual levels,” so we see why Londo and his empire don’t start their conquests without a push. (Plus, he and his people are a tired race, while his rival G’Kar is on the rise and angry, so more of the early gambits come from his side of the feud—more clarity!) Snape is an old-school British teacher, free to abuse the kids under him, up to a point.

That’s not only justification. It’s part of the whole concept of their stories. (C’mon, if you’re first hearing about a magic-school story, isn’t one of your first thoughts “Wow, how bad is a Teacher From Hell who can shoot hellfire?”)

–Or, imagine some of the early schemes Londo and G’Kar would get up to, if they were crime bosses instead of ambassadors; the peace wouldn’t last an episode! Or so many will-they-or-won’t-they couples that don’t have a reason besides sheer friction to ignore their supposed chemistry.

If a story wants a delaying tactic, those delays ought to work. Either find a better concept, take time to convince us that right now nobody wants change, or build that slow setup around just which characters there do have a reason to take their time. Make it believable.

Not just believable, it ought to glory in it! Of course a story here won’t be breaking out of its holding pattern too soon… and that pattern can be half the fun in itself.

 

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Babylon 5’s One Key to Character Arcs

One way.

There just might be one irresistible way to track and reveal how a character evolves—and make the most of how that arc drives the whole story.

In my last post, I said the key I found was setting up other characters as markers so we can follow a lead’s changes as compared to them. And, I dropped a fun little phrase we can ask our characters: “What do you want?”

On the one hand, asking that really can find the essence of what a character is. Especially, it can be the key to turning someone’s inner nature outward, where we can start matching that desire up against other characters that share the same goal. Or want some prize that puts them in our hero’s way. Or, they want the same thing and want all of it, or all the other degrees and combination of conflict that can come. (I’ve written about conflict types before, both a complex post and a simpler one, but so much of it does come down to What Do You Want.)

And on the other hand, that line is a catchphrase from a master class on storytelling: J. Michael Straczynski’s spectacular show Babylon 5.

After all, when a mysterious figure actually starts asking that question of a wildly varied cast, and then uses the answer one gives to start a galactic war..

 

Character Arcs – the Descent of Londo Mollari

Londo’s pretty much a clown. Just a washed-up, puffed-up alien ambassador who thinks his fading empire deserves more respect, and always scheming against his rival G’Kar from the world his empire had once enslaved. So when the smiling Mr. Morden asks “What do you want?” he growls “I want it all back, the way that it was!”

(You can watch his answer for yourself, here, including Morden’s reaction: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLijOyZ0GtN42ZtegVNYRV4aBRaTnZ0oVw)

Cue the star-spanning power grab.

But Babylon 5 isn’t about ships firing lasers (mostly). It’s about making us feel every step of the journey that Londo and others take. So if Londo wants his people to take power back from the other stellar empires, the story might chart his arc through characters like:

The obvious enemy that he escalates his conflict with.
Would-be peacekeepers who see he’s going to be trouble.
An unlikely friend who’s seen sides of him that others never do.
A confidante who stays near him but sees everything he’s losing…
His people’s leaders that give him everything he wants. At a price.

Otherwise known as:

G’Kar
Commander Sheridan (and most of the human cast)
“MIster GariBALDI!”
Londo’s assistant Vir,
and… well, a whole parade of backstabbing Centauri nobles, including the Emperor.

Brilliant.

Londo’s whole storyline is measured through his dwindling bonds with those people, in sequence. The further his goal of Centauri glory pulls at him, the more his conflicts with the earlier people of that list grow, and the more he’s dragged into the camp of the latter ones.

All because the first have the least in common with his goal, and the last ones have the most, at least in theory. And all the way Londo moves down that list, he (and we) can feel what he’s losing and what he’s risking to go on.

That’s the basic pattern of Londo’s arc, brought to excruciating life by how these people define it. That’s how simple it can be to pick stepping stones for a powerful story.

 

To B5 and Beyond – Crossing the Character Arcs

At least, that’s the basic pattern. Of course every step on Londo’s or any character’s journey is also another chance that they might see what’s coming and find the strength to pull back—but what would it cost them? Or, a writer could twist up something to change the pattern or someone’s place in it. A character could give up one goal for another, or find a way to reconcile them, or simply lose his reason to keep pushing. (Come on, fans will be talking for generations about Londo’s crazy friendship with Garibaldi, they can’t split those two up… can they?)

And a story would have more than one thread to tangle together. G’Kar has his own journey in their rivalry, and so do the shadowy forces Morden tempts Londo with, and I haven’t even mentioned their opposite number. Or almost anything about the human plotlines that actually are the series’s center, or the last seasons in the aftermath of all this…

–Trust me, Babylon 5 was Game of Thrones years before the first Game-move was ever played. And its people survived long enough to stand for something.

But any story can begin to build some of that power, with three steps:

Know a character’s goal.
Compare it to other characters, for who’s more in conflict with who.
Lay the plot out so that key character’s arc goes past the others, in a pattern of similarity and conflict.

Then twist that character’s course and combine it with the others.

 

Speaking of twists… One last thing about B5 is that its story didn’t twist, or even move, so much in the first season. (Yes, it did all of the above and more in four years, with one to spare just for setups.) Not the first season was weak, but it did have a whole different pace.

More like, say, the slower arc of Harry Potter’s Severus Snape.

 

Next time: To Arc or Not To Arc?

 

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Writing a Character Arc – Through Other Characters

If the heart of a story is the conflicts it puts a character through, and especially the choices he has to make… could there be a pattern underlying that to guide a plot into deeper insights and keep them clear all the way to the end? Working out my plans for The High Road’s sequels, I’ve found something that looks a lot like just that.

Looking at an unwritten book is enough to dizzy you with the possibilities. Maybe add more action, more scale, build the thunderstorms and the body count to a whole new level—or swing wider into the maneuvers people haven’t tried yet and just how different this hero’s options are? New characters unlike anything before (a hacker! there has to be one!). Or push back into people’s histories, with whole chapters crafting the perfect setup for someone?

Or, dig deeper. Take what a character thinks he is, and tear all of that apart until even he knows better.

A story can juggle all of the above—and the best ones do—but I’ve always found that last goal was the most inspiring. And the hardest.

After all, anyone can say their hero’s ultimately driven by guilt… or learns to put family over friends… or has to find his courage… We’ve all read books that picked a theme like that, and went through the motions until they fetched up on the ending they wanted. But what does it take to find what’s actually true for him, and develop it through a whole book into something worth reading?

And I don’t mean the Stephen King approach, not for how most of us work. I read The Shining in one frantic day when I thought I was going to be writing, but I’ve never wanted to build a story out of that kind of small, personal steps down someone’s journey. For us lesser writers it’s too easy to get lost, or bring the second ghost in two chapters early or not at all… no, I’d say most writers need at least a hint of how to know the story’s on track. Anything else could leave us as confused as our characters, and more terrified.

So, back to basics:

 

“What Do You Want?” (and does HE?)

A character starts with a need, I think we all know. A set of goals and desires, and they play out through the story. Like my character interviews show, my protagonist Mark started The High Road just trying to keep Angie out of danger (when he really should have known better; it’s Angie Dennard!), but in the later books he’s searching for some combination of safety, answers, vengeance, and something more.

And yet… chararacter means more than one person’s path. Another basic rule I’ve learned: absolutely anything in a story is stronger if I use one of the other characters to embody it.

Including that first character’s growth.

Friends? Yes they’re there to open doors the hero can’t on his own, but they’re also living reminders of how not only the hero but other people with different perspectives all have that need in common.

Until. They. Don’t.

For one example from The High Road, Joe Dennard is a former cop; in fact he left the force out of guilt for what he did with the flying belt that Mark and Angie find. He’s quick to protect them, but he’s also all too aware of how dangerous the belt can be to use. And then there’s Kate, Angie’s mother, who won’t trust anyone she cares for with it. They may be on the same side, but with Mark and Angie ready to use the magic, it was always only a matter of time until one of them is pulled away from the rest. The more the struggle edges beyond sheer survival, the more the new goals might leave one of them behind, unwilling to keep up—or trying to push the others back from something only they fear.

The more I look at that model of writing, the better it seems. Bring characters together based on their shared needs… and then move on to where those needs stop overlapping, so that friends step away, or seeming enemies turn out to have a common bond after all. Define those layers of a person using other people.

Call them human milestones, living reference points… except that all those “other” characters, being people, have the delightful habit of having their own layers too, and those layers keep changing. Just keeping up with those changes from both sides can keep a story arc twisting through multiple dimensions. It works for the story of a marriage fraying; it works for Lord of the Rings teaming up hobbits with heroes; it’s (one reason) why the Marvel movies’ most believable and beloved villain is Thor’s brother Loki.

And it’s given me a few ideas.

In The High Road, Olivia Nolan often seems like a “second front” to the heroes’ struggle with their hidden enemy, but in Freefall she’s willing to work with them… but that doesn’t mean she’s drawn by the same sense of outrage that they have. And I doubt her motives are going to stand still either.

Even the contrast between someone’s background and the way they actually act can let them enter the story in motion, and start us wondering what other changes they have in store.

That’s half the fun of writing Sasha Lawrence now. When a character’s been so close to the enemy, the last thing anyone would expect is for her to be as innocent as she seems. But even Nolan has to believe her—sort of.

 

So, the best way to reveal a character is with another character, and their own history. And whenever the contrast between the two shows they aren’t so similar (so as different) as they seemed, that’s a discovery worth making, and a plot point aching to be used.

In the next post, I’ll go further, to what’s starting to look like the simplest, strongest tool for keeping all those character conflicts on track.

 

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The High Road’s Book Trailer

I love book trailers… but I hate videos, or at least how easily they can end up padding themselves out without a real reason for the extra minutes. So that puts me in a fun place now that the time’s here to get my own trailer for The High Road.

 

Training for the Trailer

You don’t have to be a writer to see the logic that makes a trailer. Of course that’s what a trailer is: taking the arcs and the sizzle of storytelling, and arranging them so someone can “know” the story in a minute. It’s distilling the tale.

And I do love that challenge. After all, Shadowed has completely different back-cover and inside-cover copy (“Paul lives in hiding… the one person who knows…” vs “Open your mind… take another look”) simply because I got into writing both. So how many plot points does a trailer need? How many words, to leave how many pauses in a timeframe?

But then making the video itself? No way I’d do that.

I’d either lose weeks learning the software and hating the result, or lose weeks learning the process and love it too much to ever finish. I always knew I’d start with the script and then work with an expert to get the final result. So instead I studied trailers like Joanna Penn’s advice at http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2015/03/02/book-trailers/ and http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2011/01/07/how-to-create-a-book-trailer/ and looked at what could work. Then I went shopping.

The result?

http://www.kenhughesauthor.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/HighRoadTrailerV2.mp4

 

 

So what do you think? Do the skyline and cloud images, and how they alternate with fire and destruction, make the point about the joy of flying and the dangers Mark and Angie are in? Should more of the cityscapes have been at night (when most of the flying happens), or does the light/dark contrast work better on a visual level?

I think there’s a lot to like here.

Especially, I like that it keeps to 45 seconds instead of the two to three minutes of so many trailers—both book and movie. It always bugs me when a video fills up time with less inspired content, figuring that just making it visual means every second is earning its keep. (A lesson we writers are relearning with every line we write!) And a trailer isn’t like the recorded clips I’ve put up, for a fan who wants to follow a page of my writing with their own ears. No, it ought to hook, and re-hook, the viewer with every line.

 

Ahead on the Trailer Track

If you take another look at Joanna’s above, and compare, I think we did okay for our first time out. Similar lengths, and a lot of similar arcs and techniques.

Or there are longer, more detailed trailers out there, like for Hugh Howey’s classic Wool at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-ardca2IAg

Of course that one takes the leap to using custom-built images for every shot, from the View Outside to the computer readings… enough to make me pound my fists and wish for a bigger budget. But there’s no question the words and the images follow a story, the distillation of what we need to know about Jules’s world.

(On the other hand, Hugh himself has some thoughts about the art of trailer-making, and what might be shaking it up soon: http://www.hughhowey.com/this-is-only-the-beginning/ )

Or there’s the all-out cinematic approach, like some of Jim Butcher’s fans did for Skin Game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8ZUvrIQWuY

That’s a full three minutes with actors, staged moments, and everything else it needs to convince us this Dresden Files book is a film out there (well, why isn’t it?). Shifting storms, characters set up to show their conflicts with each other in a few shouted words… or a burning subtitle to introduce their roles in the heist Harry gets trapped in.

(If anything, the last glimpses on the trailer might be too fan-centric. You need to know the other books to see why Michael Carpenter defending his home is such a big deal, and you need to have already read this one to appreciate how that moment’s not part of the caper but the dread aftermath. Still, how could they not have referenced a scene that got as wild as that one, even if they stayed clear of the real spoilers…)

It all gives me a lot to mull over. I think I’m getting the hang of picking the words to tell a story in trailer form… the next step could be to go further in matching images to the pieces.

Should there be more moments, more pieces of words and story elements along the way?
Or less? (For more oomph for each.)
Onscreen text instead of voiceovers? Or a mix, like some of Joanna’s?

And then there’s the other trailer. The one Ilona Andrews made to make fun of trailers themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMxG1ayUAOw

“Cheesy,” it calls them. There’s truth to that; book trailers try so hard to say so much quickly, they do have a bit of absurdity to them. Then again, even a parody like this has to know what it’s spoofing… and a good skewer does help me remember what matters. Like memorable moments that (should) string together to imply the story, good visuals or phrases that hook in their own right…

Not quite so many cute kittens, though. Unless I could get a shot of a kitten touching someone and possessing him.

 

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