Tag: character

It’s All Character

It’s the absolute favorite word in storytelling. And the one least understood.

Ask writers or fans “Which is more important, characters or—” and you don’t even have to finish the sentence. People will answer “characters!”, eagerly, fiercely, and they’ll reference everyone from Samwise Gamgee to Hamlet.

But, what makes a good character?

My thought is: everything in the story, including parts that aren’t character at all.

 

Pieces of People

Are characters made by depth, by the sheer number of layers they have? Sometimes.

There’s a marvelous moment in Better Call Saul, where shifty lawyer Jimmy McGill confronts the mentor he’s always admired and resented for judging him so harshly. He offers to give up being a lawyer in exchange for one favor, and when his mentor warns that that would be coercion, he says “So coerce me! We both get what we want!” And we realize Jimmy really would be satisfied—besides getting his wish he’d finally make his mentor happy, and he’d prove to himself that that one unbending person actually will get down in the mud like himself when there’s enough at stake. (It’s inevitable, but a bit disappointing, that said mentor doesn’t budge from his high horse.) It’s a beautiful mix of different motivations all tangling together, and it’s only one moment.

Or it might be less the number of changes and layers a character has than facing the right changes for the story. Frodo is an appealing hero in Lord of the Rings, but he might come off as a bit ordinary if he’d shuffled all the way through his quest instead of proving at the last moment that he had only so much strength. Or if he’d gone home happy without doing justice to all the wounds from his ordeal. That side of the War of the Ring does so much to make it more than an epic for epic’s sake, and makes Frodo a deserving center for it. Even though it’s only a few uncompromising choices in the course of the story.

Sometimes it’s just how well characterization is shown. We all know a few stories where someone goes through a fairly simple journey, but their pain or love or rage comes off so fiercely we’re left shaking. Execution matters too.

Or it could be a tiny point, anything that just clicks with a reader. I’ve seen a smart, lonely orphan boy written as doing coin tricks on his knuckles and yelled “Yes! Of course that’s how he’s spent those years!” It could be a passing reference to what school someone went to that just seems right, or (this is one of my own that stuck with me) watching a man with a flying belt flinch as he’s being led underground. Of course that can be a reward for making everything about the character authentic, so nothing breaks the spell and every touch has more chances to catch the reader with how it fits.

Or sometimes a character shines from just being connected to quality storytelling, even more than the character himself provides. Nobody says Raiders of the Lost Ark was “saved” by Harrison Ford’s swagger; the movie’s real strength is outstanding action and adventure, and Ford’s performance simply added (plenty) to that. Indiana Jones is remembered as a superb action character, but in the end it would be more accurate to say he’s the hero in the ultimate adventure.

What makes a good character? Anything good.

 

For the Writer, for the Reader

So what does that mean for understanding a story?

A tale is what it is. It’s its own balance of character history, buildup, number of plot twists, and number of characters to play off each other.

Sometimes taking the space for a change that really goes to the heart of a character comes at the expense of being around other people that can explore aspects of what he’s going through. It might be the only way to make a point is how someone doesn’t say what would be obvious, because they simply never would. Or a story needs time to bring a fight or some tinkering to life, enough that we can appreciate the challenges he’s caught between.

All of it helps.

To me, “character” is a running count of how the whole story and backstory have worked to reshape each person, based on how each was different to begin with. “Plot” might be an abstract sense of one event at a time and its momentum, but “character” is the total effect of all the layers they’ve given someone, including that driving sense of what they might do next to break out of the box or crumble inside it. And it’s also how we feel we’d know how they’d live when the story ends, or if we met them in real life.

In the end, that may be the biggest distinction between the two. A story’s plot may leave implications – a claim that the more something like that happened again, the more history might repeat itself. Ambitions, lies, friendships, conspiracies and dreams might all line up the same way, yes.

But since we’re people, we remember the people who walked us through that lesson. Even the times when it wasn’t the characters who brought it to life.

On Google+

            h6

Photo by wayseeker2000

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?

 

On Google+

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.

 

On Google+

Photo by the euskadi 11

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:

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

Otherwise known as:

  1. G’Kar
  2. Commander Sheridan (and most of the human cast)
  3. “MIster GariBALDI!”
  4. Londo’s assistant Vir,
  5. 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?

 

On Google+

Photo by gilipollastv

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.

Allies? 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 can still 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.

 

On Google+           

The Two Laws of Backstory (and why Superman breaks both)

It’s one of the hardest moments in writing—knowing that even though you’ve picked a perfect character or an ideal plot complication, you have to write in so much more to justify it. But with so many kinds of backstory you could explain it with, how do you pick the one that fits? Or make it do more than fit, so it opens up new depth and possibilities to the story?

It’s not as hard as it looks.

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

Understanding backstory really comes down to two things, and they’re so simple that I thought I’d demonstrate them using a few of my favorite comic book heroes, just to show how big a curve we can grade “realistic” on.

We could call those two rules looking forward and looking further back from the time of the backstory idea you’re trying out… or we could simply say “does it do enough? does it do too much?” But I think I’ll call them “the seed” and “the worms.”

The Seed: does the backstory grow what you need?

You’ve got such a simple question to start with: what do you need this history to do? Then, find an idea that seems, logically or at least intuitively, like it relates to that.

Call the Superman origin a classic example of how not to cover things. Since these are comics, I don’t mean how hard it is to justify the raw amount of power he has. The goal is still to explain physical strength.

[bctt tweet=”What does being an alien have to do with picking up mountains? #backstory #Superman”]

No, if you want personal power, a better backstory would be someone trying to give himself personal power, like the experiments used for Captain America or the modern Hulk. (Come to think of it, the original Superman simply came from an “advanced” people, and he only lifted cars.) Wonder Woman or Thor make even more sense; we have thousands of years of storytelling saying the universe just makes gods that much stronger. The Flash does the same thing, tapping into a cosmic power source. Aliens, not so much.

Still, we all know “alien powers” can play better when they’re like Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy: focus on how different their tree- or flying- or whatever evolution is from human. (That and, give the creature whatever offworld training or enhancements you want to raise that to a real asset.)

But it depends on your story goal. Say, instead of needing raw personal power, your character can have a weapon or device that does the job. Now your choices might be anyone who builds those, meaning anyone with a brain and the drive to create. Hawkman doesn’t claim “alien=superpowered,” he simply uses his planet’s advanced gear; Green Lantern puts a human in the center by giving him the aliens’ weapon. And so many human heroes (and villains) invented their own arsenal.

And of course we’ve got Batman, whose “powers” are so limited that determined training and the Wayne fortune really are all he needs. (Plus, Batman Begins takes it even further to show that he doesn’t dream up his gadgets as much as discover and adapt tech that’s already out there. Then Dark Knight reminds us just how far he can adapt it if he’s desperate enough.)

–We’ve looked through types of power here, as examples of how to make a story’s facts able to do what you want. Let’s start shifting toward how to make characters want to do what the story needs.

Aliens do work best in Guardians of the Galaxy’s main tale of simply treating them as people; just people with more varied beliefs and homelands, plus better-than-Earth laser guns. They can be especially fun for an invasion, “abduction,” or exploration story that wants to contrast human motives and interests with a people that seems different—whether they turn out to be as powerful as H.G. Wells’s Martians or as vulnerable as E.T.

For Superman’s motives, though, his story works. To build a driven but optimistic hero, some salt-of-the-Earth role models like the Kents might be just the thing, while having his original home blown up at least gives Clark an extra reason to protect his new one.

But it isn’t always the scale of tragedy that makes it mythic; Batman’s drive goes much more into the “orphan” theme than Superman’s. It’s so spot-on it would be cliché if it didn’t have enough details to be specific:

[bctt tweet=”‘A crook killed his parents, so #Batman fights crime.’ Sometimes writing’s the art of the obvious. #OriginWin”]

Spider-Man has a tragedy that hits closer yet: instead of being helpless to save his family, he considers Uncle Ben’s death his own fault for not getting involved earlier. No punches pulled there. And the core of the Hulk isn’t fighting evil at large; he only wants to get through a day without being hunted for what he might do, and stop his enemies from exploiting his power. (I’ve called those the only two core options for creating character conflict.)

For real precision writing, though, take a look at the cinematic Iron Man. The first movie makes a decent case that Tony Stark didn’t invent a hundred comic-book technologies, he invented one, the game-changing power source that let him pump every other weapon up to a whole new level—at least when you’re smart enough and rich enough to build the rest to take advantage of it. He gets a precise motivation too: creating a one-man army calls for vastly more money and effort (and personal risk!) than equipping an actual army, which is what power brokers usually do… unless you’ve already done that and just had your nose rubbed in how you might lose control of any weapon you let out of your own hands. Face it, if you’d escaped that cave (yes, “with a box of scraps”) and you were as proud and gifted as Tony, what else could you have done?

Speaking of “what else,” there’s the other side of backstories.

 

The Can of Worms: what ELSE would the backstory mean?

Even if you think you’ve got a backstory that does the job, you’re just getting started. And the other step might be even more work, but it’s also the one that can unlock whole new dimensions for a story: ask what other ripples the idea could create.

[bctt tweet=”The basic #backstory test is: does this take the story where you want spend time writing?”]

Superman’s alien origin not only isn’t enough for his powers, it’s definitely too much to let the rest of his adventures happen the way the comic wants. A whole other planet, of god-strong beings, just blown away before the story even starts—what a WASTE of story material! Bringing out just the occasional General Zod, or a Lex Luthor grumbling about alien influences, doesn’t come close to what an origin like that ought to root the rest of the storyline in. Even the fact that he looks human… we chuckle at Star Trek’s “planets of the pointy-eared folk,” but this Strange Visitor blends in so well a human woman both idolizes and ignores him depending on his clothes?

All of these could have been glorious opportunities for a darker or more thoughtful superhero (a bit of X-Men, a bit of X-Files), but they all come down to the same way that they don’t work: they aren’t the story the writers wanted to tell.

Consider this: how often does a modern-day writer even use the word “alien” with a straight face? Sure, aliens work just fine in a story that’s set up to do it justice—-invasions, Roswell, and so on. But otherwise, we tend to save the word for the silliest of all silly ideas a character might spit out at random, and I’d say it’s just because the implications are too huge to take halfway. If we aren’t ready to handle a story idea’s implications, “from out in left field” just means “the idea’s going to get lost.”

Of course, standard comic books and their heroes are an odd place to look for backstory concepts. Ideas there rush by so fast you can find hundreds of promising thoughts, but how many other cans of worms do they take a pass on? It may be the number of ignored implications, more than the powers themselves, that make superheroes so different from the harder SF and fantasy they borrow from.

Still, I can see a few more careful examples we can learn from:

One alternate version of Superman has already hinted at what might be the perfect origin for him, in the Red Son comic: Make him a literal “Man of Tomorrow” by making Krypton the doomed future of Earth. It would have been so much more elegant, with less baggage from a missing planet and making him not such a total misfit around here… and amping up the pressure on the hero. Instead of knowing that “a” planet could destroy itself, he has to protect and inspire this world to change what might be its destiny.

(Wait, wouldn’t that mean that every planetary threat until then is guaranteed to fizzle out? We could crib from Star Trek and say Superman’s own passage through time attracted the “attention” of certain history-changing forces. So if Darkseid invades Earth it would be Superman’s fault for coming here first… Over to you, DC.)

Or, the Avengers movie gets more careful use out of its aliens. The Chitauri do bring a proper invasion, but only at the film’s end, so we don’t have time to ask the larger questions of why they’re after Earth or what makes them tick—instead we focus on Loki and their other allies. Once the battle begins, we don’t have to deal with too many questions either: since they invade through a dimensional gate (set up by our visible foe and a MacGuffin power source), they can only send so large a fleet, and no more once the door’s shut. This skips the classic Alien Invasion problems of “That was all a planet could send? And now, how long till the next wave, and the next twenty?” Instead the gate’s closed, done—for now.

(It doesn’t hurt that Joss Whedon has written his share of stories about demons. For many writers, the word itself is a perfect shorthand for “hordes that can only fully invade through their particular Hellmouth.”)

Batman does make a lot of this look easy (he does that for everything), with his down-to-earth heroics making fewer ripples. But even for him, The Dark Knight was one of many stories to look into just what a vigilante might mean for the Gotham public. (And, even with the Christian Bale Batman borrowing more tech than he built, it did have its fun with who might notice where those toys had been borrowed from. “And your plan is to blackmail this person? Good luck with that.”)

Look at how hard both film versions of Spider-Man worked to keep Peter Parker from being a web-inventing super-genius; the first had webbing as just another of his organic powers, the second stole it from the Sinister Lab that’s wound up with all the schemes. Meanwhile Iron Man 2 looked into how Tony didn’t create his Arc Reactor completely from a standing Stark (sorry), and who else might have been involved in it and have his own agenda.

For more about watching an idea’s implications, see Brandon Sanderson’s Third Law of Magic: “Expand what you already have before you add something new.” The master makes a fine point: doing justice to what you have is usually better than the work and the problems of adding whole new wrinkles on top of it. Best of all, keeping closer to home leads to a final picture that’s more complete and yet more elegant than just adding more.

One last tip: if you want a true master class in smart world-building, watch Stargate SG-1. Most of its off-worlders really are human (it’s all explained), their alien masters use human bodies too, and the blaster staffs actually have a reason they’re inferior to our machine guns. YES!

 

On Google+

 

Does your villain need more evil?

Is your story good enough?

In fact… you’ve probably been exploring and sweating to make your protagonist more real, more dynamic, and the supporting cast just as compelling as you need. But, could it be that what you aren’t getting the most out of isn’t the good guys, it’s the bad ones?

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

Villains can be frustrating folks to write, with so many of them already out there to make your idea seem unoriginal, if the word itself doesn’t sound cliché to you. Or you might think you’ve got a brilliant villain concept, but wonder if you’re making full use of it.

Well, I know I’m not pushing my villains to the limit, and most other writers aren’t either. But then, I’m not sure villains have a limit.

If “story = conflict,” that can make the opposition a whopping half of the tale’s very nature. The hero’s struggle may be at the center, but the villain is the root of it all, often the one who created the crisis in the first place. Neglect the villain and the hero has more and more moments when he’s struggling against empty air.

[bctt tweet=”A story is no stronger than its hero, or its #villain – whichever is weaker. #writing”]

(And let’s face it, a good villain stays with the reader. Heroes need to not be “boring,” but they’ve usually got a relatable balance of issues they’re sorting out over time. But the villain’s liable to make a choice and then “watch the world burn.”)

Watch the world burn

—Or your writing could be going for a different kind of conflict than Heath Ledger’s Joker. Still, every moment of human conflict can learn a few things from what we call villains. A protagonist still needs major obstacles, whether they’re “bad” people or well-meaning ones; and whatever’s making those people problems ought to be key parts of the story.

[bctt tweet=”All in all, maximizing a #villain is just: write him more like a human being.”]

(Except for tone, most of the time. We’ll get to that.)

How human? Hold onto your keyboard, it’s going to be a bumpy night:

 

Coming to the Dark Side

None of us want to write someone who’s “just a villain.”

—Okay, some writers do, and it can be downright liberating. But if you do, keep reading: a bit of the same balance can still strengthen them.

But: have you really given your villain enough of a reason for what he does? Could you push him harder? One good measure is K.M. Weiland’s challenge that “Maybe your bad guy is right.” Myself, I think it all comes down to, based on what the reader learns,

[bctt tweet=”“How much would a person like this just NEED to get in the way?” #Villains”]

Of course, “in the way” might mean anything from blowing up the world to a by-the-books teacher who won’t give a student an inch of slack. But whatever they’re creating that conflict about, what these people need is to make that motivation and its ties to the conflict utterly clear. Remember that marvelous Terminator line:

It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

Will. Not. Stop.

If you can give a human antagonist some of that momentum, for human reasons, you magnify everything about the villain. Which magnifies the whole story.

What are those human reasons? You’re probably got your idea there already, so I’ll settle for mentioning my Sith/ Seven Deadly Sins breakdown and my Thunderbolt Ross question as a starting point (is it what he wants to take from the hero, or what he’s afraid the hero will take?).

So what reveals those reasons? It’s usually how well the backstory, the evolving plot, or at least the story’s situation shows this person HAS to do what he’s doing. Possibly the best way is to plot in the way he might be fulfilling his goals without making trouble (bonus points if it’s as a friend of the hero, of course)… and the perfect chance to make that work… and it goes utterly wrong. You also want to choose a balance between the sense of a harsh world that makes that “fall” seem like something that could happen to anyone, and the intensity in this character that shows he’s better than most would be at embracing his fall—if it wasn’t a leap.

Keep asking that question: would this person NEED to get in the way? (The words you’re looking for are “Hell yes!!”)

 

Darker and Deeper

Once you put the villain on his path… is that enough?

Part of it is “narrowing” that path, finding ways to show that this villain isn’t out to do whatever “bad things” are available, he wants what he wants—meaning, what chances to do damage can he pass up because they aren’t in his interest? The more you show what things he’ll pause for, the less cliché he is and the more you’ve reinforced that the rest is where he will not stop.

(At least, he won’t stop for long. Some of the best villain “falls” happen in the middle of the story, with his missed chances to turn back happening at the height of everything else.)

All this means giving the villain chances to let people live, to clash with his lieutenants, whatever it may be—maybe because it doesn’t fit his plan, or sometimes even because he does have his softer side or other motives as well. It also means surprising the hero (or at least some less villain-savvy friends) with twists where the villain passes up one target to go after another, probably a nastier one. (If you were thinking that The Dark Knight seemed to ignore the last section’s tips about justifying the villain, you’re right. We never learned what made the Joker, but instead the whole movie used this method to demonstrate in detail just what he was.)

To really show things off, try letting the villain do good now and then, maybe allying with the hero if there’s something they both need gone. (“He can’t destroy the world, I need to rule it!” is always fun.) And of course the hero should be spotlighting the villain’s nature too, with every scene where he tries to predict, trick, frighten and generally outwit his enemy. (I’ve analyzed a few ways to do that.)

In fact… could the villain change? Star Wars and many other tales turned out to be about redeeming their villain. Or he could give up his evil world-view for a different and even more vicious one. (In its most overused form, “If I can’t have her…”)

Villains may be implacable at the right moments, but they need a sense of precision and even change as well. Because they aren’t forces of nature, each is something much more terrifying: a human being who’s actively looking for ways to get you.

Note that word, “actively.” That’s the next question for maximizing a villain: are the hero—or you—taking them for granted?

 

No Evil Autopilots

It’s a simple question: How often does your villain act on the story? That is, what proportion of your scenes are about his attacks, his control, his ability to get and stay “in the way” of your hero?

—Actually, let’s make that a more specific question:

[bctt tweet=”How often does your #villain *change* his plan, or adapt to the hero’s plan? #BattleOfWits”]

It’s a common complaint against even Lord of the Rings: a villain can cast his influence over everything in sight, and drive them all along his sinister scheme. But then… those forces stay driven, pressing closer and closer but always along the same overall plan. Impressive, but it misses the chance to show the villain doing something more.

One of the best tools in a writer’s arsenal is: what readers notice is the story’s changes. Heroes have their character arcs, and you’ve probably given yours those moments when they follow one plan only to find it a red herring or failure, just to show the hero can move on to a better one. Your villain deserves some of the same respect.

After all, a threat that keeps pushing in the same ways might as well be hostile weather; what’s scary (and real-life relevant) about a living enemy is knowing there’s a human mind out there that keeps looking for new ways to get ahead of you, and you always need to keep up. When your hero makes a move, look for ways the villain can counter it or try to come in from a whole new angle. Ask yourself, which is a better epitaph for that doomed first strategy of your hero’s:

  • “Guess that plan wasn’t good enough.” Or,
  • “He saw me coming.”

A serious villain forces the hero—and of course us writers—to look harder, hit harder, and never ever let our down our guard. And each separate time either side takes their game up a notch, the story gains another marvelous moment of tightening the tension.

(If you’ve got a less villainous antagonist, your options here are more limited. One rule of thumb is that “evil” is what we call someone with a goal that hurts us deeply, if too much of that motive includes a need to stop reasonable ways to work around him or compromise. We may hate the Scrooge types that don’t give extensions on mortgages, but it’s the ones that are trying to stop us from paying up that move into full villain territory.)

 

Keeping Score

Does your villain actually win, sometimes? You might ask how much your story develops using either:

  • Victories, the hero winning part of what he’s after or weakening the villain—“points” for the hero, with the villain on a losing streak that might undermine the story if it goes too long.
  • Defense, where the villain tries one counterattack or scheme after another and the hero blocks each—looks good for the hero, but the villain gets some credit for his efforts.
  • Pressure the hero isn’t holding back, but toward a goal of the villain’s that isn’t reached yet—strengthens the villain’s image, but only partway.
  • Defeats for the hero (or “tragic victories”), where the villain takes or destroys an actual person, place or thing the hero cares about in its own right—the dark moments that might do more than anything else to drive the story.

[bctt tweet=”When does your #hero win, or just stop the #villain? And vice versa? Each changes the tone.”]

Look at your favorite stories, and see how often the major parts of them are marked by a friend of the hero dying, or the hero losing a fair fight and needing a rematch… or failing a test, having an ally hired away, or other less bloody equivalents. There’s a reason these are often the cornerstones of a tale.

Of course, each story has its own balance of these, not only the overall “score” but how much it uses each and in what combination. Lord of the Rings is a classic heroic series of victories and defense, that builds power from a few well-timed defeats (mostly deaths) and the sense that Mordor and the Ring both have an infinite amount of pressure they’ll keep raising until our heroes reach their limit. Its darker descendant A Song of Ice and Fire (or Game of Thrones) is clear that the full defeats will outnumber the victories, partly to remind us it has so few true “heroes” at all.

 

And, Points for Style

We’ve looked at some of the biggest missed opportunities for villains, in character and plot. But, presentation matters too. How many chances do you have to remind the reader how dangerous the villain is, and also how he’s a specific rather than a cliché?

It might be as simple as a name. Some stories need a villain named Dr. Doom or Randall Flagg, and others really call for a Martin Smith. And that’s the general approach, before you look for particular images and sinister sounds. “Hannibal Lecter” sounds like a brilliant mashup of a ruthless general and a trusted professor, even before you hear what that first name rhymes with.

The first scene matters, when your Vader strides in and seizes the rebel captain’s throat, or your Saruman waits as the wise friend Gandalf comes to for help. Or you can use be moments the villain isn’t even in: Conan Doyle wrote Moriarty a whole page of Holmes himself describing how dangerous he was, and then only one brief but pivotal instant when we actually glimpse him.

Really, every scene of the villain’s ought to be a chance to push him further. We can’t imagine Dr. Lecter missing one moment where he could show off his wit and his sinister stillness. Or take Blue Velvet—its villain isn’t the smartest, but he’s Dennis Hopper at his absolute wildest, with our poor heroes trapped right under his thumb. Some villains radiate evil; others need their “kick the dog” moments as a fast way to hint at how vicious they can be.

Speaking of dogs, it’s all about hitting the right tone. The original One Hundred and One Dalmatians book was full of chapters of the dogs’ life and their struggles on their road, neatly spreading out the scenes with the elegant, sinister Cruella deVil that had more than the dogs wondering if she came by that name literally. The movie made her less like the previous Disney film’s Maleficent (who could have been her role model), and more… you know. –And yet, do you know any other trick to get away with a fast-paced “kids’ movie” about skinning puppies?

(Pause, take deep breaths.)

 

Whichever way your story’s going, even a hint of the wrong kind of “Disnification” to the villain can drag it down faster than anything. The villain’s providing a huge share of your story’s energy, for either your key moments or almost the whole thing, and he may well be the reason there’s any conflict at all.

But it’s all too easy to set that villain in the foundation of a story and then leave him there. Any time you want more conflict in the story, the answer may be as simple as finding the most dramatic, sinister ways that villain is human.

 

Quick: right after your villain’s first move, how many scenes does your hero have? Is he sort of trusting that he’ll have a little time to mourn or rest, and letting his guard down?

Now, are you going to let your hero get away with that?

Evil laughter echoes…

 

On Google+

 

The Prologue Checklist

“What’s past is prologue.”

–William Shakespeare, The Tempest

 

It’s only natural—you’ve got a powerful story to write, so you open with a prologue. It’s your chance to show off a clever idea, it guarantees the tale has a wider scope and maybe an extra viewpoint, and it’s traditional for everything from Lord of the Rings to every other horror movie made. Shakespeare used plenty.

Then you hear it: “I don’t read prologues.”

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

We can hear it from some readers, from bloggers, from agents that sound like they’re willing to slam the door on our best idea and maybe the whole story too. When I started hearing that, it’s hard to say which of my reactions was louder: “D’oh!” or just “That’s not fair…”

Yes, a lot of writers love prologues, and readers too. That might well be the cause of the Prologue Problem: for every marvelous example of the art, it’s easy to find case after case that doesn’t exactly push the writing envelope. And I admit, much as I relish their potential, more than once I’ve felt my eyes moving to skimming speed when I come across the P word.

To Prologue or not to Prologue?

It’s just too easy, to find ourselves writing a prologue without asking the hard questions it needs. My own latest, The High Road, has seen its prologue go through more than one total rewrite. But, I’m thinking the process comes down to:

 

#1: Is the prologue idea just a way to ease into writing this story?

Prologues are as natural as “Once upon a time,” especially if we’re still getting a handle on what the story is. Just start with a big picture or a contrasting part, and work our way over to the focus, right? Trouble is, “pre-focused” is exactly what the first pages of a story can’t afford to be.

How often do you revise your first chapter, and your first paragraph, knowing the whole story can be judged by how perfect those are? I’m betting it’s more than a few times—in fact, many authors decide their original Chapter One was a distraction and they’re better starting the story on Two.

[bctt tweet=”#FirstScene paradox: the one bit that you NEED to work is the part you wrote as you learned the story.”]

So ask yourself, could this prologue idea have already done its job, by helping you find some better scenes? Keep this in mind as you ask the next questions. (And if it doesn’t make the cut, “outtake prologues” are prime candidates for a Bonus Scenes section of your author website, so no scene has to be truly abandoned. DVD-makers figured that one out years ago.)

 

#2: Do you have the PERFECT contrast with the rest of the story?

This is the big one.

The one defining thing that makes a prologue different from a regular chapter is how it isolates part of the story from the rest: a character giving history, a young glimpse of the hero, something. And normally storytelling is about how much each part is integrated with the rest of the tale—so are you sure the best place for this thing is right out there in front, on its own?

Maybe the clearest prologue I know is in Pixar’s Finding Nemo (thanks to Feo Takahari for pointing that out). The bulk of the movie is Marlin struggling to, well, find his lost son, but it’s also him facing his own overprotective ways. And the fastest, clearest, most irresistible way to set that up was to open with a tragedy that gives him a reason to be so worried—and not just setting it on the day the rest of the story begins, but long before then. As a prologue.

Or: horror tales love prologues. Any time the story wants to follow an ordinary person slowly discovering the nastiness, but the writer still wants to make an early promise that the payoff will be worth it, an easy choice is to open with a glimpse of the monster. And a hapless victim, of course.

Fear vs finding confidence. Full-on villain vs slowly-alerted hero. See the pattern here?

A prologue that really pulls its weight zeroes in on the perfect element to contrast with the rest of the story. If that contrast is so vital that it itself should be the first thing you show your reader… so essential that it would cleaner to give that one thing a spotlight moment that shows off how it differs from the flow ahead… if you’re sure of those, you’ve got a prologue.

[bctt tweet=”Use a #prologue only if has the perfect thing to play off the rest of the story, and nothing else.”]

(If not… If it’s only a good piece of contrast but not a perfect one, it’s better off worked into a regular Chapter One or elsewhere. Or if you really want a sense of history or scale first, you could open with a snippet from a history book, news report, or letter, that doesn’t look like a prologue—in fact, you could weave bits of these into the start of every chapter instead of putting them in one place.)

One other thing: if any point is so vital the reader can’t appreciate the story without it, you can do a prologue but put it in Chapter One as well. If the prologue’s good enough, we can afford to be generous even to the prologue-haters.

 

#3: Size matters

Readers expect prologues to be small. You might have a marvelous concept for one that’s built like a midsized chapter, but it’s hard to convince the reader you’ve got true laserlike precision to set up a strong chapter when the prologue itself wears the reader out.

[bctt tweet=”If a reader reads your #prologue and takes a break before Chapter One– fail.”]

No, there are no rules about size, but I’ve heard “500 words” mentioned as a good high average. That seems about right; it should mean (at least with many print paperbacks) that the moment the reader turns the page once she’ll see the end on the third page, so she never has to wonder if the prologue is going to take two or ten more page-turns to get the job done. In fact, if you can hone a prologue down to two pages, or one, you can impress the reader even more.

To put it another way, a prologue is no place for just a slice of life. It might have a strong point combined with a slice of life, but you want to make it a thin slice.

(No, you don’t want to do a prologue for flash fiction. The second season of Arrow doesn’t count.)

 

#4: Are you giving the prologue what it deserves?

A good first scene can make your story; a weak one can certainly sink it. It’s no secret that you want any opening to be the best it can. But prologues have the same need, plus the added burden of convincing reluctant prologue-readers… and they have the sheer power of having such a focused goal.

So if you can make the prologue the best scene you’ve ever written, the rest of the story will thank you. Dig through your whole arsenal of writing tricks, from imagery to irony to a really unique point about the scene’s character, and how you could twist the plot up, down, and sideways just for the sake of showing off.

–And then don’t do all of them! You want to use your best writing judgment too, about the ideal central technique for what the prologue needs and how many more tricks can fit in around it without overstuffing it. (Well, without quite overstuffing it. Like any story’s opening, you still want to blow the reader away.)

Extra tip: if the prologue isn’t about the hero’s younger days or about the villain (and these may be the two best reasons for a prologue), consider killing off its viewpoint character right then. That saves the reader from wondering when he’ll show up again. It does also add to the risk that the reader will decide you’re abandoning the story’s best material, but a good prologue needs to invest the reader in what’s coming rather than just in itself. Besides, you can take a memorable prologue character as a challenge to be positive your hero’s even better.

 

One Thing

Maybe the best single advice I’ve heard for this comes from another movie: City Slickers. Granted, Jack Palance as Curly the cowboy was talking about how he simplified his whole life, and that’s more than most of us want to use his rule for, but it’s perfect for prologues:

“You know what the secret of life is? One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean shit.”

And the real secret the movie claims is that we all have to find our own One Thing.

Just One Thing

(Image credit: Sundayeducation.com)

A prologue works… if you have the right One Thing to make it about, and you keep everything else out of the way, and you make that thing worthy of the spotlight you’ve given it. (Okay, for a prologue it might be fairer to say the One “Thing” is “one contrast” between two elements in it, like a character and just who betrays him, and then how that combination contrasts with the rest of the story.) If you don’t have that one clean combination—if you can’t sum it up in one sentence—your story’s better off going straight to a full-sized Chapter One.

It’s a hard choice. Every character in a story (and ones that aren’t in it yet) might be whispering in your head why they should be the prologue viewpoint, and prologues may still feel too much like the default tool to work your way into the story. But, is this idea the One Contrast that the reader needs as a prologue, or not?

If it still is, you’ve won yourself a rare insight into what makes your story tick. An opportunity like that would be a shame to waste.

Now excuse me here. My own book’s start needs some more trimming… and I’ve got some prologue cynics I’m hoping to blow away.

 

“And, by that destiny, to perform an act,

Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come

In yours and my discharge.”

–William Shakespeare, The Tempest (the whole quote, emphasis mine)

 

On Google+

The Plot-Device Machine – Motive

A story is its people. We all know that, and that’s why Motive is different from the other Plot Device points. We’ve seen how Movement and especially Knowledge can organize the plot around the Strengths that will determine just who gets what they want… but Motive is what they want. And it doesn’t matter if the rest of the story is about fighting Dracula or diabetes; it’s plotting from the characters’ Motive that really brings it to life.

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

What counts as Motive? I’d say,

[bctt tweet=”Motive is what characters want or don’t, or some belief that ‘filters’ their choice.”]

In its simplest, it’s what goal someone could go after in the story. Fight or flight. The patriot’s war, the money-grubber’s deal, or the mother’s child. Family, love and friends, work, and coping with other problems are the common starting points (I’ve got a post on those options). And it isn’t only action stories that tend to make it “negative” rather than “positive,” on the grounds that saving a planet or a relationship (or at least rebuilding one) can make a more intense story than building it the first time. That’s just how we humans are wired, to react to threats faster than we notice opportunities.

Or Motive could shade into attitudes, expectations, or patterns that aren’t strictly “get this/ stop that” goals. This could be filters over charactrers’ actual goals, but one that’s just as key to what the people are and how we can use them: the company man who just won’t see what his firm is really doing, or the giver who’ll stick her neck out for anyone. Anything that affects the choices they make.

Why is Motive juicier than the other pieces of the story? I like to think it’s so fundamental it really is the part that the reader’s own life can share in. We just don’t connect a tale’s spotting a murder weapon lying in the corner (or even a time-saving accounting trick) to our own struggles, not the way we watch Peter “Bannon” in Hook missing his son’s proverbial baseball game and think of the choices we make every day. And it isn’t about kids, or any match between story subject and reader (though we all know it doesn’t hurt!), since so much of our lives are always dealing with other people. We don’t need to meet an alcoholic—or a vampire—to let a character with a secret remind us everyone has their private demons.

[bctt tweet=”Human nature: in the end we’re all fighting the same battles. I think that’s why stories work.”]

But… every writer talks about character and motive. Don’t I already have enough of that in my story?

 

Moments for Motive

One way to make full use of Motive is to check scenes, character layers and their conflict (for all characters), and larger contrasts. For instance:

  • Which scenes really hinge on Motive rather than Strength, Knowledge, or Movement? Star Wars might be crammed with shootouts and chases, but the loudest cheer in the theater always comes when Han and the Falcon drop in to clear out the Death Star’s trench after all.
  • How many Motives does a character have? “Depth” is a word we like to throw around, but can you count how many goals and beliefs each of your cast has that make a difference? We can tell a minor character by only having two or three… but if a side character has more Motive issues than the hero does it just might mean you’re telling the wrong person’s story.
  • How much do those Motives clash? Indiana Jones doesn’t slow down often to show off his issues, but he lets the Nazis (the frickin’ Nazis!) get a chance at the Ark’s ultimate power because he’s too much of a scholar to blow it up.
    • Still, build-up beats bigger stakes. For every story worth remembering, we’ve all seen way too many that announced everything was life or death, but didn’t take the time to establish why we should care. Has Michael Bay ever seen The Blair Witch Project, let alone read A Christmas Carol?
  • How many characters have layered Motives, complete with all the above? Even building the story around a multilayered hero shouldn’t hide the chance to make other characters the key to some some scenes, and to build up just how hard a choice they have to make. In fact…
  • What patterns do characters’ Motives form? This might be as simple as giving hero and villain opposite drives—or as careful as making the villain all too similar (the famous “Shadow Self”) to spotlight that one defining difference. It at least ought to mean sheer variety in the cast; what’s the point in giving the hero two friends if they’re both driven by revenge?
    • Answer: to show how two very different people can have that Motive in common. Or how two “similar” folks can become different.

Some of the best-designed stories out there can come from combinations of which characters seem similar but have a different Motive, or seem different but turn out to have something in common. Lord of the Rings gives us Boromir’s desire to save his people, that opens him to the Ring’s influence… and his brother facing the same choice and resisting. Meanwhile Frodo sees Gollum is actually another hobbit driven by the same hunger for the Ring that he’s coping with himself, until he can pity his enemy and make him an ally—and all the back-and-forth twists that that leads to, to make us wonder how far either of them can be trusted with this kind of power around. Or how much poor Sam will put up with.

[bctt tweet=”If you want a theme, compare two characters with their #motives. Or six, and their changes. “]

 

To me, that’s what writing is. It’s a chance to explore what kind of character has what in common with who else, or how different they can be—and then how the story can change those to show more truths underneath those. My Paul Schuman thought if he could stay away from his family he might have some kind of normal life again; Lorraine will fight for a complete life beside Paul’s brother, but still not tell Greg what she’s become part of. Mark Petrie wants to keep Angie Dennard and her father safe, but by getting them away from danger, not using the magic Angie wants to master, while Joe Dennard has his own reasons for avoiding it. Contrast, of Motives.

Well, the story’s that and pinning those Motives to the Strengths those people need to work for (and against) them, and spreading the storylines out with the evolving Knowledge of how they and the reader can only see so far, and the Movement that some of their “steps” to it mean they never know what might happen when they pass the next dark alley.

But it’s all there.

On Google+

 

The Plot-Device Machine – Knowledge

“You can run but you can’t hide.” It’s simple truth, that getting distance from a problem may be no match for how “Knowledge is power.” And that’s only one side to how “who knows what” defines the story; my first Plot Device post showed how you might move your characters around to control how the plot unfolds, but knowledge almost is the plot.

 

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

Think about this:

[bctt tweet=”Knowledge is the only side of the story that matches how the reader’s experiencing it. #secrets #writing”]

Unless you’re writing a travel guide, they aren’t following those movements; unless it’s a how-to they won’t be assembling the strengths the characters gain.

But knowledge means something, if the story can make us wonder “what’s really going on there” and let us share in the answer… because that answer or how to search for it always says at least a bit about our own lives. It could be

  • Specific: Bilbo solving each of Gollum’s riddles. Each time we figure one out ourselves, we cheer; each time we don’t, we sweat just a little for him.
  • Game-changing: the Green Goblin learning Spider-Man’s identity. (It’s not just what the hero knows!)
  • Layered: how much of a romance comes down to pacing what moments the couple are “getting to know” the chemistry they have, matched against thos False Impressions?
  • Or, bedrock: under all their twisting clues, mysteries can get their ultimate power from revealing just how vicious a killer was right next to us all along.

So the more of your story is tied to the revelations in it, the harder it can hit.

 

Knowing when to Know

It may be because information’s about blind spots, but I’ve seen (and written, sigh) so many moments where a plot misses one side of holding its mysteries together. A story can’t lose track of:

  1. What’s someone know, right now? And so, what does that make him think he needs to look into next—or not care about at all, so far?
    1. And, how do his assumptions play into it? There’s no better tool for a character arc than to find the facts he just won’t accept, then show how wrong he is.
  2. Then, how many ways could he follow that up? Talk to people, bring up Google, or track down a Dusty Tome? Run a test in a lab?
    1. One trick is to consider all five senses (or more, if you’ve got a cast like mine!) for what signs each fact might leave, including from looking back at its history. Detectives look for everything from footprints to strange sounds to glimpses in ATM cameras, and all the associates and back-story a suspect has. Can someone really run away from an enemy without coming back all sweaty? When you know what to look for, you know what ways someone might look for it.
  3. Also, which of those signs can he use best, to follow up? A hacker might dig through a dozen servers before he knocks on a witness’s door, but Sherlock Holmes will spot everything from calloused fingers to unscrupulous accounting at a glance—and he’ll know what the combination means, and how to shift to using a disguise to get the next piece.
  4. Check what all characters know, not just the main ones. Look at each step your central characters take (in investigating and everything else), and then ask who else is going to get a hint of what happened and start nosing around themselves—or just jump in and act. There’s just no comparison between Lois Lane being fooled by Clark Kent’s glasses and the thrill of Indy hauling up the Ark only to discover that the Nazis were watching him digging…
    1. Then ask what that tells the hero to look into, and keep things escalating!
  5. And, what are all those players doing for “information control”? Can they keep from leaving those traces (tiptoe past those guards), or erase them later or explain them away?
    1. Better yet, who can trick who with all of that? There’s the “moment of distraction” someone could use to tweak any moment in the story… and then there’s Holmes’s defining trick of pretending to set fire to a house, to make the blackmailer herself reveal her hiding place.
    2. On top of THAT, some of the best plot twists come when the villain (or hero) realize they’ve been tricked, and the tables start turning!

 

You can lay most parts of the story out in terms of how each scrap of knowledge lets the hero—and everyone else—move the plot forward, or else move off-track with your red herrings.

In fact, speaking of moving, it’s often literal! In many styles of writing, most of the pages are simply the combination of searching and moving. Whether it’s a grand investigation, sneaking past an enemy, or just describing scenery (whether or not real clues are hidden in it), they form the same pattern:

[bctt tweet=”Basic scene: everyone moves toward the expected next clue, sees what’s there, rinse & repeat. http://bit.ly/DevicesKnow”]

Think about it: how many ways are there that really vary from that? Yes, there’s when someone settles in to search in one place (through a process like reading or talking), or into a flat-out race or chase where speed matters more than scenery (but even then, things can come up in the environment to help them maneuver). There are Strength moments, from fights to change-the-tires scenes, that I’ll get to in the next Plot Device post. And you have other conversations, that can be their own mix of Knowledge and Motive, and maybe some Movement (or Strength) too. But mixing Movement and Knowledge might be the bread and butter of getting most sequences written.

In fact, part of the balance is how much you’ll let Knowledge obsolete Movement. Do characters need to go out to look at a site, or can they just run tests in their lab—or even skip gathering the lab samples if they can just talk to someone who’s seen it happen? (“Where’s my flying car? It’s called the Internet.”) Which means you can choose what clues call for legwork after all, and which dead ends the map won’t warn them about, to pick which discoveries get more emphasis… or just get more chances for complications.

And of course, the more amazing a character’s control of knowledge is, the more it reshapes the whole story from the start. (If you’ve ever played a video game with a secondary “radar display” to keep track of your enemies, you know how different it feels to see a bit further!) Many a story’s been built just around why the protagonist knows at least a little that the rest of us don’t: the psychic, the spy, or just the witness nobody believes. Or it could be the same advantage in reverse, being the invisible man or inside source that can hide in plain sight. Then you have the challenge of building the story around just how much more they can find, and what limits they still have.

(No, Superman, the missile control doesn’t have to be inside the lead box, that’s only the first thing where you can’t see what’s inside… oops.)

 

Knowledge, and Movement, can be the major tools for organizing a story. But then the other two Plot Device tools… Strength and Motive are the story pieces themselves.

 

On Google+

 

Worth Fighting For – choosing stakes for characters

When I’m first putting my sense of a story together, there’s one question that can turn the different pieces into a whole, sometimes faster than any other choice I make. And that is: what does a character want?

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

I don’t mean the deep study of how the world looks through his eyes, not yet. (And not the “What’s my motivation?” acting jokes—although any cliché like that was usually washed downstream from a good idea up somewhere.) No, I mean a simple decision about what part of the story keeps that person in the action, in terms of his own history.

Think about how you come up with a concept, and what ideas come to you first. You might start with a protagonist and build the world as you start to understand her; “What kind of person would try to hide her psychic powers to live an ordinary life?” Or you might begin with a sense of the conflict (“wizards at war!”) or the cause at the root of it, or just a setting you want to draw a story out of. So many ways we can go.

But to keep those pieces from pulling apart, we want at least a basic sense of which of them got our people involved. In some stories this may be less important than how the plot escalates (such as trying to stay alive), but even as a starting point it’s a good one. So I like to look for whether the character’s here for:

Family: The earliest, maybe deepest motive we all have. When Inigo Montoya says “You killed my father, prepare to die!” or a troubled teenager tries to keep her sister from following in her footsteps, we all know how much is going on. It’s especially good for bringing in the weight of the character’s past; half the story’s subtext may be her fighting for these few people to not see her as who she used to be.

Love and Friends: If family’s bound up with the past, these can start as casual and in-the-moment as Watson’s initial curiosity about Holmes—or as life-changing as Romeo catching a glimpse of his enemies’ daughter. It might be the most versatile motive of all because that other person could be anyone, with whatever bond to the character you want to build up, and they have all their own ways of changing and pulling people in deeper.

Work: The classic, if you want the story tied to how police work or ranching operates, or at least how Certain Events are complicating those. Harry Potter starts his adventure wanting to earn his place as a wizard, and the sheer weirdness of Hogwarts fills half the pages of the books. And like Harry shows, this choice can be all about the structure that job brings, but it can also be an easy string for pulling in characters you don’t want to give a separate supporting cast to—or to show off how someone like Harry doesn’t have any good people in his life, at first.

Accident and Entropy: Sometimes a killer just thinks your hairstyle is more fascinating than the others on the street—or you win a lottery, or wake up with a disease. The other stakes usually come with their own baggage, but here we can say “It had to happen to someone”… and then build the story from how that plays off the rest of the character. That random target becomes all about whether her ordinariness (and all the unique bits it came from) will help her survive; the lottery winner finds out what he really wants in life. If you want this kind of setup, you’ll usually know it.

 

Whatever else the story does, the better I know a character wants the right thing, the more the whole story hangs together. The High Road starts with a family secret, but making my viewpoint character Mark a friend of the Dennards keeps him a step back from their legacy to appreciate it a bit more. It spotlights his relationship to them but told me I had to show how specific his reasons for being there were, from his suspicion of the magic he’d glimpsed to his lack of a stable family himself.

Besides choosing a type of stake, here are three other things that choice can lead to:

Often the way the character sees that goal can be as distinctive as the thing itself. If you look at the Marvel movies, Thor and Iron Man both start their arcs as superstars who think they know everything about changing the world, while the future Captain America is a weakling who dreams of making a difference any way he can. One person might have lost someone and be driven by revenge or just stumbling around with a grudge against the world, but a different spin on the same concept can give you a character trying to make amends—either to the people he’s failed or to the different ones that are all he has left.

Or, the most impressive thing about stakes may be the combination of them, and how many you cover or contrast. Harry Potter comes to Hogwarts to train, but he also has his lost family to discover, and the friends he soon makes… and even touching all those bases makes any character more complete. Or look at the symmetry between Harry and the picture we form of young Voldemort: both Hogwarts students, both from nightmarish homes, but Harry’s honest friendships (and how easily he makes them) make it easy to see how different their lives will be. Just think of a classic mystery: half the story might come out of “the real killer did it for simple greed, while the red herrings have these flashy love and cover-up-the-accident motives.” Or how many stories are about changing a character from career-chasing to love or family.

Most of all, choosing someone’s goal ought to be a signpost to what to flesh out next. “For his father” is pure cliché if it just lies there pretending to be a complete answer, without detailing what that father’s like. Other characters may never mention their parents at all, but that only works for the ones that have whole different forces driving them. And the better you are at picking which of those basics each character depends on, the sooner you can fill in what they’ll mean for the story.

Besides, the heroine’s father might turn out to be the hero’s too, if you find you’re creating the next Darth Vader…

 

On Google+

Dialog, Plot, and a bit of Spock — Layers brought to life

Dialogue might be the most powerful tool a writer has. It’s absolutely the easiest one to lead in any direction you want, and yet… Just by keeping track of what pieces the story’s built from and what the character’s own viewpoint is, a writer just might find a line that plays several points off each other all at once, in such a bold combination the reader’s completely hooked. Just look at these lines, from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, between Saavik and Mr. Spock after meeting Captain Kirk (okay, it was Admiral Kirk at the time):

“He’s never what I expected… He seems so human.”

“Nobody’s perfect, Saavik.”

How much work do these lines do?

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

Well, let’s say you’re a viewer who knows nothing about Star Trek (a real stretch, I know) except that the two seem to be aliens because you notice their pointed ears (hmm, maybe a bigger stretch). That and you’ve just seen Kirk sweep in as the officer who’s inspecting Spock and Saavik’s ship. Even if you somehow don’t know the rest of the Trek story, it still captures a whole range of points:

  1. Kirk is Important, or famous, enough that Saavik has expectations about him. Enough expectations that she bothers to talk about them in the middle of an inspection, when she could have stuck to business.
  2.  Kirk isn’t what Saavik expected (laying the foundation for him surprising any number of other people too–not a bad thing to keep in mind for Kirk).
  3. Saavik’s concerned about “humanness,” out of all the things she might predict or notice about a person–
  4. and from Spock’s reply we see she wasn’t mentioning humanness to compliment it.
  5. Spock isn’t so impressed with humanity either, the two aliens agree on that in theory–
  6. but at the same time Spock is more tolerant of it, or at least of Kirk.

Six points, all leading up to how Spock’s respect for Kirk trumps all the rest. (In fact there’s a seventh point, since most viewers actually would know Spock and Kirk are longtime friends: the fact that Saavik dares to say this about her superior’s friend reminds us that even Vulcans military officers don’t let human respect keep them quiet, at least among themselves.) If this were a new universe it would be a magnificent bit of multipurpose exposition; in a franchise like Star Trek it puts the audience on notice that this writer gets the characters and the story’s only going to make better use of them from here on. Not too shabby.

In fact, this isn’t just a dialog point. It applies to any kind of characterization, and that means it can inform the whole plot of a story: how does a character really see a situation, and what’s he going to do there besides the obvious? Turn and salute the enemy he’s just viciously wiped out? Be the only person in the room who doesn’t believe the evidence, and so change the whole course of what happens next while the reader stops to think “Wait, I guess she would be the one who can’t accept it yet…”

One key to finding those openings might be to look at the story in terms of differences within its elements. What or who doesn’t fit with who, what’s grown stronger than what, who wants one thing and who wants something else, what options or tools have just stopped working–and where does a character stand on these? (“Differences,” of course, are another way to say “conflict” or at least the fun stuff that gets a reader’s attention.)

With the Saavik/Spock exchange, the gaps it points out are between Kirk’s achievements and his very human nature, comparing that with how she (as a Vulcan) sees that as odd and unsettling, all against how Spock–although he partly agrees–still has that tolerance for it. That’s a lot of bases to touch, about history and one man’s individuality, two different cultures, and Spock in turn bridging between them.

So, how many pieces is your story built from? And how many different things can you compare to each other, by finding the right character and the right moment to show a few of those differences all at once–or just the one that the reader will never forget?

On Google+