That Ultimate Buffy Scene – Willow’s Long Walk

What does storytelling mean to me?

Sometimes, I have to look back at the tales that make me glad to play in the writers’ sandbox. The moments, and the craft behind them, that have burned themselves into my brain as the best ever.

And there’s nothing like Buffy… and the longest, darkest school hallway walk in history.

“Things are about to get very interesting”

–That was a dialogue quote that played in the ads for the sweeps story of the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

–Yes, that season. The big one.

I would put a massive SPOILER ALERT here, but… well, I can’t imagine a dark fantasy reader on this blog who doesn’t know the turning point of that show-defining two-parter called “Surprise!” and “Innocence.”

But if you still don’t, readers all, you’ve had your warning. After all, omens are in the spirit of that storyline.

And second chances are not. So:

First glimpse is our heroine watching a dream of Angel, the world’s only vampire with a soul, being murdered… and fearing it’s one of the rare prophetic dreams that being the Slayer sends her. This is called establishing the, um, stake.

Especially since she’s in love with him. And how, in spite of having saved the world once already, Buffy Summers is very much a girl turning seventeen.

(Note, this was years before those books. The one word that can be spoken against Buffy is that it inspired Twilight as a pallid, pull-all-the-punches imitation of one piece of it.)

But the story isn’t only about her boyfriend. It’s got a few other threads too.

Willow, Buffy’s shy little friend, daring to ask an offbeat musician on a date, to their surprise party for Buffy. Sweet.
Xander, the long-suffering and all-too-human boy at their heels trying to get the snooty Head Cheerleader to admit how they’ve been sort of dating, between fights. Sweet and sour.
Computer teacher and ally Jenny Calendar getting a secret message revealing to us that she’s only been in town for one reason: to guarantee that Angel suffers. Especially by her removing Buffy.
And of course, the crazy-deadly (and simply crazy) vampire Drusilla receiving her own presents for her own party (why yes, it’s a theme). Namely, the severed pieces of an immortal demon called the Judge that can destroy anything remotely human with a touch, or build up his power to cleanse the planet. Dru’s first act when he reassembles is to let him vaporize one of her own vampires who almost one of his arms, and immediately squeal “Do it again!”

So all while our heroes are trying to slow down the assembly of the Judge, we can see Jenny picking some very clever moments to lead Buffy into a trap, or send Angel away on a solo mission (who else can hide the last piece of the Judge on the far side of the planet, and of course that means months away on a cargo ship…). And Buffy’s telling herself what many fans had been screaming from day one, that she should just take Angel to bed.

One narrow escape from the Judge later, she does.

And that’s what destroys Angel, and what Jenny had actually been sent to prevent: a hidden clause in The Curse that had been keeping Angel human, so that if his eternity of guilt was ever interrupted by one moment of real happiness, the soul the gypsies had forced back on him would slip away. Unleashing what an ancient vampire had once called “the most vicious creature I ever met.”

Why It Works

Meticulous buildup.

And, keeping so many threads fighting for our attention at once: we never did find out where Jenny would have taken Buffy if they hadn’t spotted those vamps.

All on top of the ultimate wish-fullfillment for the fans, turned inside out into the ultimate cautionary tale for any girl. (When Joss Whedon throws you a bone, it’s usually a grinning skull. One that bites.)

And then the second half of the two-parter.

All the right pressure points are hit: the first thing the restored Angelus does is to rip out a woman’s throat. The second is to join up with Drusilla, his creation, and letting the Judge find he doesn’t have one scrap of humanity to be burned with. (One guess why the Judge wasn’t written with simple weapons like poison or a thousand knives.) The third is to go back to the just-waking Buffy and rip out her heart… by keeping his secret and triggering every one of her teenage insecurities, finishing with “I’ll call you.”

So we know the world-burning demon is the minor threat now. Angelus is just getting started.

But all Buffy knows is she’s a total wreak.

Meanwhile her friends are scrabbling through the usual books, reciting more and more often how unstoppable the enemy they know about is: “no weapon forged can harm” and “it took an army.” But the guilt-stricken Jenny is nowhere to be seen. At least Xander and Willow are trying…

And Willow catches Xander making out with Cordelia, the Queen of Mean. “You’d rather be with someone you hate than be with me.”

But…

Just then, when pretty much the entire cast has been given a custom-built trauma, Willow is able to pull herself up and tell Xander they still have a world to save. And then Xander—hapless, helpless, all-heart Xander who’s always failed—Xander says “I’m getting a thought.”

And THAT’S WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT.

There’s Angelus, standing in the shadows at the far end of the hallway, casually calling Willow to him. She walks trustingly toward him… and when the episode premiered it felt like it took a full minute for her to cross that hall, and that was still too fast.

Because of every twist that Joss took to tighten the screws, again and again.

Because there had never once been only one plotline in play that would let us catch our breath.

Because every one of them was aimed where they’d hurt the most.

Because by now everything and everyone our heroes relied on has been stripped away… and just now teased with that one glimmer of hope, except that Willow’s walking into the grasp of the hidden monster….

And we know that with every step she takes, no matter what comes next, nothing in this story can ever be the same again.

Nobody writes quite like Joss Whedon.

But God knows we have to try.

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Photo by dbnunley

Why Wonder Woman is finally the Strongest Superhero (too)

So starting this week Wonder Woman is the ultimate superhero. We should have seen it coming.

Not just the movie’s pedigree; was it really a surprise that an Oscar-winning director like Patty Jenkins could deliver where the flashy but erratic Zack Snyder had misfired? Not only that there’s a big-screen superhero who looks like that “other” half of the potential audience.

I’ve got an observation of my own.

Small Wonder

Diana’s always had a rough time in the comics. More than one fan calls her the top-flight hero we never really knew.

Yes, everyone’s heard of her, but for what? DC Comics likes to point out that she’s the only female superhero to be in continuous publication since the 40s… when a lasso of truth would bring out how William Marston’s contract for creating her said that he’d regain the rights if she went out of print. They definitely don’t mention some of the sad, silly eras Diana has had to go through, like giving up her powers until Gloria Steinem rescued her.

Or how in the last ten years alone, both Joss Whedon (Buffy and The Avengers) and David E. Kelly tried and failed to keep Wonder Woman projects alive.

Even as a proper superhero, who’s her arch-enemy—the Cheetah, just a woman who jumps around swinging claws? Dr. Psycho (the name about sums that one up)? Out of seventy-six years (until the last week), point to a really lasting Wonder Woman story arc, her Dark Phoenix or Long Halloween.

And Steve Trevor. Just… why?

She’s a magnificent character. She’s had some great moments over the years. (Say, telling Batman “No, I said I cannot allow it.” Or how George Perez had her lasso defeat Ares by showing him he didn’t dare trigger a Final War.) But as an A-lister, Wonder Woman was always better known for just being there as The Super Hero-Ine among the boys and for what that meant she could do, more than for she has done.

What bothers me most is the most primal thing about a superhero, at least for one of the early DCs that claim to have staked out their place first. That is, what are her powers… with the emphasis on just hers?

It matters, because that core Justice League around her have some of the best abilities ever imagined, taken up to a level no other story even tries to match. The Flash is the Fastest Man Alive. Batman is the ultimate trickster. Green Lantern has the greatest ranged weapon, or the best “power” superpower, of all. And Superman is the incarnation of raw strength. Just try to picture a gathering of great heroes without those four assets at the top of the list.

And Wonder Woman is strong, like Superman. She deflects bullets, like Superman—but with her bracelets, right? She flies, like… there have been days I’ve wished they’d say Supergirl had crashed on Paradise Island and get it over with.

(Her outfit doesn’t help either. Where the others have a distinct solid red or being named for green or say “does it come in black,” she’s got Supes’s colors too, but mixed up with an American flag. And of course there’s never been as much of it as the boys had on.)

I don’t mean to tear the character down. The problem is that over the years she’s never been built up, the way the more accepted heroes have.

Superheroes rarely start out with a high-quality story; to earn respect they need years of good adventures (okay, mixed in with some awful ones that we get selective memory about). Even their powers tend to evolve over that time, until they pretend they were always that well positioned. Spiderman didn’t start out with spider-sense or even his signature agility; Stan Lee just drifted into that is his strongest power because it was the most suspenseful way for Spidey to fight. Superman didn’t fly, once.

But over the years, nobody’s ever thought Wonder Woman needed a niche of powers that were hers; as long as they could point to that lasso as one bit of variety, they were free to let her copy more and more of Superman. (Her costume too; Flash and Lantern had theirs redesigned a few times to reach the current perfection, but Wonder Woman doesn’t need to look unique, right?)

But now that she’s got a new spotlight, let’s take a second look at where she stands.

A Place in the Pantheon

If Superman is the biggest, the strongest, of the Justice League (which of course outpower any other superhero anywhere), he’s also considered a bit slow and awkward. Sure he’s got his own super-speed, but he’s still got a lack of aggression and training. He’s the tank or the battleship, the clumsy knight in full armor, the bulky battleaxe.

Of course Batman is the trickster, but he’s also got the least actual power. (At least, if he weren’t amped up so many favorite stories and fan love to demand he get the best moments.) He’s the recon plane, the spy you forget you sent out until he shows up in your tent with the enemy plans, the dagger.

The Flash? All speed and only so much else, like a fighter plane or light horseman, the rapier.

Green Lantern? Artillery, the bow. (Too bad Green Arrow’s a separate character; a cosmic bow would have been so much cooler than a glowing ring.)

And there’s no specialty left for Wonder Woman.

Because she’s got them all.

Maybe not as sneaky as Batman, but she’s a true strategist and trained warrior. Fast, and with her own weapons too. And strong… DC wasted a whole movie seeing if Batman could beat Superman, but with her skills and near-equal strength Wonder Woman should take the blue boy apart.

(And that’s without the lasso that brings up his vulnerability to magic!)

Wonder Woman might be the perfect balance, the center and the leader of the whole Justice League. The sword (she likes swords), of the true hero.

It’s just a thought, from looking at the iconology.

That and, right now she deserves to lead.

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Photo by earldan

Video Gamers as Writers – Twitching Our Way Into Character

Some writers hone their skills by a mix of soaking up lessons from the masters and researching specifics, from history to sentence structure. I’ve done all that… but one of my best tools is playing video games.

I’m a lifelong fan of role-playing games. I’ve written about that here once or twice, and the challenge of building a real story using a mix of other players and random die rolls. A campaign of D&D can do wonders for a writer’s eye for how different tastes merge, for adapting to the unexpected… making a story a lot like life.

But I’ve found there’s a different lesson in breaking out the PlayStation.

Mostly I play what are also billed as RPGs there; there’s no way I’d give up at least the feel of storytelling. Games like Final Fantasy and Mass Effect let me walk through a kind of Hero’s Journey, some with more richness than others. Where a tabletop game might let me build a story in shifts with time to appreciate my friends’ input, a console game is the simple pleasure of riding along in a story and helping the hero along… with simpler, non-creative help like how to shoot and when to check up on supplies. The fun of playing a part in the tale, without any pressure to write it.

–Alright, until a certain killer demon starts teleporting in and crushing me with one hit if I don’t dodge perfectly…

The thing is, it’s that simple “game” challenge where my PS has taught me the most about writing.

Most games might be only a joystick test wrapped up in the rough shape of a story. But that means there’s at least a hint of someone’s head to get into… and a whole game system to express what walking in his shoes might mean.

Fight Like a (Mage) Girl

One of the best times I’ve had was in Dragon Age: Origins, opening with the customized background adventure for a mage. A young wizard raised apart from society so as not to endanger them, and then her masters toss her into the demon-world to test if she can withstand their temptations? My character started to feel like a powerful but frightened girl, who used her initial spells of Slow and Flame in a frantic attempt to keep the demons AWAY until she could burn them down.

That was the key. For the rest of the grand Dragon Age storyline, I was able to look at Neria as a study in fear and slow-won confidence, and see how that led her master to protection and weakness spells rather than going for the kill. Or, how impressed she’d be with the rebel witch Morrigan as a teammate, who could teach her to wade into battle herself as a bear or bigger, If she was ready for it.

I still consider DAO the best epic adventure ever set to disk (discovering The Joining… or that mad voice in the tunnels calling “That’s why they hate us, that’s why they need us…”). But the finest edge of that pleasure was in letting those simple how-to choices show me what it’s like to be Neria.

One Giant Leap

Or today? Media tie-in games are usually a disappointment… actually they’ve all disappointed me except the Batman Arkham games. –Come to think of it, this principle might be one thing they’re missing: even if a game can play like being Frodo, I already know how Frodo thinks, and a Tolkien game probably won’t give me enough different strategies to discover him in his actions anyway.

Anyway, I stay away from the tie-ins. But this one was Attack On Titan.

How am I supposed to resist a game that even brushes against that ani/manga’s savage storytelling? Even though this game’s very crude in its nods to the plotline it lumbers through, just to set up more and more of the same school of battlefield challenges, it’s become quite a guilty pleasure.

Because this time I know the characters… and yet there’s room to distinguish them because the battles give more than one option. Like:

Eren Jaeger (hot-headed hero): I don’t play him on a mission unless I have time to cut down every Titan on the board, because there’s no way he’d leave one alive if he had a choice. Even the distress signals he might not notice until he killed any Titans nearby.
Armin Arlet (budding strategist): he’ll go after every rescue he can, partly out of kindness but also because he’s the best at deploying reinforcements. And I can see him working his way up from small foes to the bigger multi-Titan brawls… feeling for the moment he’s built up the confidence to go for the scenario-closing kill.
Mikasa Ackerman (stoic combat genius): As Mikasa I find I prefer targeting the bigger crowds of Titans, figuring the stragglers are what her less skilled teammates can pick off. And I rush for the final target as soon as it appears, because why waste time? (Assuming “protect Eren” isn’t actually in the scenario, otherwise boulder-sized heads are gonna roll.)

They’re simple choices that a game lays out for us, but the game gives us the ideal chance to explore them. And in that exploring, I remember: only some heroes charge in, or work in teams, or any other of a hundred shaded possibilities. It’s too easy to write a scene and let genre or a sense of the obvious pick the details of how a protagonist acts on his decisions.

“He just picks up the gun and shoots his way free”? Before you say that, try spending half an hour trying to play someone who’s offered a good, controllable pistol on one shelf, and a wrist-breaking Magnum on the other, and knows he’ll have to make that choice work based on how he sees a battlefield. Then try to feel just which twist of the fight will make him charge in, or fall back, or throw himself as a shield in front of his friends.

Or how he sees those friends, his goals, his triumphs and despairs. How he acts, down to the smallest detail.

It’s often said a writer should know how a character walks with his cane, breathes to savor the open air, and does his laundry. Gaming with my awareness open helps me build that feeling.

And it starts with how to kill giants. Not too shabby, no?

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Grappling with the Superhero Grapnel

How much of a comics nerd am I? I grumble about heroes’ grappling guns being unrealistic… at least for the superheroes that are claiming to be possible.

Meaning Batman. And Daredevil, and the idea that “skill over power, rooftop-dwelling heroes” don’t default to flying, they traditionally get around the city by swinging between the buildings.

Grapnels – the Same Old Line?

For one thing, Mythbusters busted even fast-grappling up to a roof. Yes, a gun can shoot a grappling hook (they used tripod-launched ones back on D-Day), and they do make “ascenders” to zip you up the line. But the simple spike Batman‘s used since Tim Burton’s movies to stick into any wall and hold his weight… what’s that supposed to be? And Daredevil’s got the worst design of all, a simple weight that always wraps around a target tight enough to hold him, and then comes loose a moment later.

It might not bug me so much… except that these “gritty, realistic” heroes are stealing moves from the guy who actually had a reason to pull it off, Spider-Man. When they’re supposed to be human.

Stop a moment: if you think about swinging from rooftops, what’s the first thing that ought to come into your head? One hint, that first Spidey movie scene where he tried to web-sling:

SLAM!

It’s all on YouTube. (Though they left out that moment where Peter’s limping home thinking “I really must be stronger than human, I’m still alive.” Or maybe with the George of the Jungle theme stuck in his aching head.)

That’s the basic problem of using a grapnel line to do more than climb: you’re throwing yourself at a wall. So there’s just no way a hero can swing far with one grapnel—he’d need two, to start toward one wall and zigzag off to another and onward, like that movie actually showed for Spidey’s second time up in the air. Plus, those lines would need just-not-human science to instantly attach to anything and to spit out line after line (without hauling much weight) so he wouldn’t be stuck in midair. Not something one billy club’s good for, Mr. Murdock.

Hooked on Grapnels

To be fair, the “heroic swing” probably started with movies about pirates (with ropes dangling from a mast) and swashbucklers (chandeliers), followed by Tarzan and his vines. Because if the setting justifies a—lucky!—hero finding a line already attached and dangling over open space… well, turning gravity itself into your propulsion looks cooler than just about anything.

And then comics, and then animation, built on how easy it is to draw a hero swinging along a hundred feet up. Plus, any kind of mobility is the fastest way to bring a hero into the action, with a one-panel nod to how visually awesome he is before the fireworks fly: “while on patrol, our hero spots—”

Yes, it’s comic book characters. Is there really a point to arguing about whether a human can cheat basic ballistics when he’s already likely to wade through five thugs with guns, and when the other heroes do actually fly? But… fists can hit faces, swinglines can’t not hit the wall they hang from, if it’s one line. If we lose track of the boundary between human and superhuman feats, it’s sloppy storytelling.

In fact, live-action superhero stories tend to show more respect. Of course that’s making a virtue of necessity; when every backflip from a flagpole costs effects money (and possibly blood) instead of ink, heroes like Daredevil and Arrow tend not to be so casual about it. Come to think of it, I don’t remember too many of those live heroes on a random patrol blundering into a major villain either; there’s more respect for good guy and bad both planning their moves and trying to catch up to each other on their terms.

Build a Better Grapnel (or Don’t Bother)

Could a grapnel work, at least for a single swing? I wonder if you could make one with a clamp, with teeth made of say industrial diamond, so you could fire it at a building’s corner or any kind of ridge and it dug into it on both sides? (The harder part might be building something into the clamp to work the teeth loose when you were done.) A hero could zip off the street, but not swing and keep swinging—instead of sweeping the city for crime he’d have to know where to look, like Batman’s skills and Daredevil’s senses already have covered. Still, the classic swing from one close-by building down through a window or warehouse loading bay could still panic a roomful of mobsters.

But, there’s a part of us that wants to blur the lines; even the Dark Knight Trilogy had a weakness for it. Christopher Nolan’s the best thing to happen to Batman in decades, but he does tend to be… generous with Bats’s mobilty. The Tumbler solves the Batmobile problem (what does the best car on the planet do in traffic? same as every other car, not a thing!) by letting Batman ram through everything on the road like one of his villains drives. And that gliding cape… it laid all the groundwork (so to speak) to making sense in the most awesome way, except that a cape just isn’t going to catch enough air to carry a man, and anyone who’s seen a hang-glider knows that. They were so close, couldn’t they have just said locking the cape into glider shape also unfolds an extra ten feet of cape, and we get an instantly-iconic image of “the Big Bat” in flight?

–And now we’ve got Attack On Titan giving soldiers rapid-fire grapnels they control with their sword hilts as they dive at maneating giants… okay, points for reaching a new level of sheer coolness. And no story with thirty-foot giants is staying that close to physics anyway; we’re just amazed the humans last five minutes in what’s normally a job for a giant robot. (Hint: they usually don’t last that long.)

Honestly, I’m starting to appreciate the simple Arrow approach to getting around. Oliver uses the occasional grapnel arrow (never mind how it sticks well enough to hold his weight), but his team mostly race around the city on something that can get where they need: motorcycles. Backed by a van, a simple unmarked van, as their mobile base.

Some things are cool. But it means something that I can believe this one.

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Photo by {Thud}

Life’s A Pitch – the Quiet Writer and the Book Fair

It’s one of the more humbling moments of writing. Sitting at a live event—yesterday it was the huge Los Angeles Times Festival of Books—and watching so many people walk by my spot in the booth, barely glancing at me after years of preparing the books I brought.

And the writers sitting next to me… we have some talented people in the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society, but it can be startling to see some of them working the crowd like they actually belonged there.

Like Leslie Ann Moore, A great writer I’ve known for years, but to watch her leading people through her book (“It started with the idea, what if Snow White was a revolutionary…”) and connecting with them again and again… humbling. Or Deborah Pratt, just as at home there and someone I wish I’d had more time to get to know. Or Gerald Jones, boldly calling into the passing crowd, “You like poetry?”

–Yes, poetry, in a crowded festival. His confidence would be painful if it weren’t so… poetic.

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

One thing I’ve seen again and again in my fellow writers: most of us aren’t the loud, pitchman type.

Q: How does an introvert warn his friend that there’s an extrovert about to break into their conversation?

A: “Outgoing!”

Most of us are more of the Homo Secludus species. We feel the same thrills and chills that other readers do at a good story, but we’re most likely the ones who stop chatting at the proverbial water cooler and go off alone to distill our own form of that magic. Spending hours and years locked away with just a keyboard sounds like a good deal for us.

And then the last lap of that journey is to come back and tell the fans we came from why we left them, and why they should pay our bills while we leave again. Irony of ironies.

For me and for most rising writers I’ve met, it’s the stage of the business we try longest not to think about. And that’s if we do treat it as a business; the traditional publishing model promises we aren’t, that we only have the same momentary brush with self-promotion that any other industry’s employee has to face. We get through one successful interview (bonus: in writing it’s all query letters and manuscripts, no being judged on your smile), and then just do the work while the company handles all that nasty marketing to make us famous.

If only. That’s ancient history even on the traditional route, and of course in indie publishing our taking over the market role is the price of admission.

So…

So where does that leave the silent majority of us writers who aren’t Leslie Ann?

Most of it might be in the same mantra that already put the book on the table: do the work. We keep pushing, building those muscles, and looking around for what methods can refine what we’re doing.

–And, also like the writing, half of it is tapping deeper into the sheer Awesome of what we create. If we can hold onto the thrill or warmth or detail of a story long enough to reach the last page, can’t we have a properly juicy answer ready for “So what’s it about?”

And also like in writing, most of marketing’s work habits are our own to create. We’ve got blogs we can lay out, and other writers and bloggers we can find who share a connection with us. There are ads, and contests, and promotions in a dozen forms that we can analyze and perfect for our story… and for our own strengths.

(Hmm, you don’t suppose the people in that booth were there because they were the ones who liked working the crowd…)

So, we’re writers. We look around, and steal—research!—from the best, and dig deep into what we want and what we know. And then we dig deeper.

At the end of the day I found myself sitting next to Leslie, singing a few lines from Julia Ecklar’s merry little tune:

Ladies and gents at the front of the tents

You will note there is naught up my sleeve…

I’m not a “One-Man Magical Show” yet, but I think The High Road has a song or two worth writing.

It might even be the perfect pitch.

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A Writer’s Confession: Kvothe’s Ballad

The following is a confession I wrote to myself some Easters ago after a session of reading, that I realize I’d never shared with this blog. It’s word for word as I wrote it then, so make of it what you will:

Today time stopped for me. I’d been wondering if it ever would again.

It’s that feeling when a scene in a book works beyond working, when you don’t just lose track of time, you regain enough awareness to become afraid that something will interrupt you and end the one perfect chance you’ll have to find out what comes next all in one sitting. When you hold your hand over the page to stop your eyes from moving down and killing the order of things. When you remember why you read.

The book was The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss; the scene was the culmination of fifty pages’ planning—or many more, depending on how far back you want to follow the threads—when our hero Kvothe had brought himself onto a stage with everything from keeping fed to music’s passion to a deadly rivalry to his first glimpse of true love all joining in what happens during his performance… But there I was, lying in bed not so long from having woken up, as my whole level of consciousness shifted yet again. And yes, this was Easter Sunday when I read it all.

I guess nobody has these moments very often, not in their full degree. But I’m a harder audience than most, because when I’m not scheduling my day strictly by which combination of stories I read and watch, I’m watering my palate down by filling in hours with whatever half-satisfying yarn I can grab from the library or the cable menu. The moments when I’m not just satisfied but enthralled are years apart, the kind of years when you know all along another moment may never happen in your lifetime.

But for me it’s more.

I say writing isn’t my life, it’s what I chose instead of even having a life. And yet here I’ve gone so many years reinventing the wheel with my questions on what genres mean… well, maybe I’ve invented a hovercraft, but I still spend all my time going in circles instead of making forays into one tale or another. Where’s the line between craft and cowardice, and how many years behind me did I leave it?

Or does it even stop with writing, is it the whole way Kvothe lived on the edge of possibilities, and my wondering if I can be true to anything if I don’t try to wrestle the same power out of every day? Waste, waste, so much waste…

Does it mean I stop making charts of how to plot and start figuring how to actually gather the ideas? or that I go through my weeks showing my scribblings to more people, anything to commit myself to putting one word after the next, or take the one or two non-writing things I most enjoy and cut them out of my life as the price of dedication? Or turn the other way and look for real adventure in every flesh-and-blood person I talk to, to build the other set of muscles about truths—or just to honor what I say I’ve come to see?

Sadly, I know what it probably means, and so does everyone else. Just another chance to leap to my emotional feet and begin the journey off the beaten track, only to tire and turn back again. Not even out of fear of the shadows ahead, or doubt that there are treasures to be found within them, but just too tired to try. No, too used to turning back to even have a chance to tire. That’s what we all do, even most of the writers who try to point the way beyond… We turn back. And I’ve done it more than anyone, writing the same thing or the same reasons not to write, and nothing’s changed that.

But what if…

[bctt tweet=”Today time stopped for me. #writing http://bit.ly/WritersConfession” username=””]

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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, go to Amazon or the site of your choice 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 21^st, 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:

[bctt tweet=”Is this an antigravity book you can put down? #free http://bit.ly/freeHighRoad” username=””]

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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Photo by qmnonic

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.

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.

[bctt tweet=”The greatest pun in Marvel history may be that “Iron Man is powered by an ‘Arc’ Reactor.”” username=””]

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 10^th 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.

[bctt tweet=”If anyone asks what role-playing games are, I call them storytelling’s ultimate do-it-yourself kit.” via=”no”]

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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Photo by Gurney5