The Fights of Fantasy

What makes a good fight?

—In a story, of course, since in real life the best fights are the ones that don’t happen. But what makes a fictional clash worth reading?

And we do find them worth reading, watching, playing. Of course they’re a staple of storytelling since they’ve been all too real a force in real history. But, in a story they take on an extra kind of appeal.

Since I’m writing books like Running the Gauntlet, that starts with punching a hole in a wall, the question has me thinking.

Fighting Right

My Kindle is crammed with fantasy and science fiction. I have long boxes of some of the best superhero comic books ever written, and my movie picks keep an eye out for a really interesting monster.

Let’s face it, stories of the fantastic can be… fantastic.

And that’s one of the first things I look for in a story: the sense of what powers, weapons, and forces its people are dealing with. Give me a dragon-rider, a mindreader, a set of silver arrows and knowing they’re the only defense when the werewolf lunges out of the trees.

Except… anyone can make the action more flashy. Certainly anyone can write the same old fight and just say each super-punch leaves a bigger crater.

No, a really fantastic clash makes us believe a man can fly.

Give me a sense of what it means to sit on that dragon, soaring over canyons and racing to cut off an enemy who’s winging toward our unprotected town. How a telepath tries to read his opponent’s punches, but struggles to focus that power while keeping his physical guard up and his emotions steeled against his opponent’s rage. Or the razor-edged challenge of gathering every werewolf-slaying weapon and scrap of knowledge we can find and trying to herd a much faster, stronger creature into the one spot in the forest where we can get a clean shot at it.

I mean Chris Claremont, the revolutionary comic book writer whose X-Men were (among many other things) the first superheroes to feel like they understood how their powers really worked. Or Brandon Sanderson, creator of Sanderson’s Laws of Magic—and scenes like one in his latest book Rhythm of War, that’s a master-class in the long-standing question “How can one swordsman fight a dozen men?” (Short answer: very carefully.)

In this sense, it’s not the fighting at all that makes a scene work. It’s the imagination.

How does someone with flying or shapeshifting see the world? There’s nothing like a story that lets us walk in those shoes… or not walk, and why. And then the tale puts that whole expanded worldview to the test in strategic chess matches and split-second choices.

That’s the joy of gaming too: choosing our plans and watching whole new tactics or parts of the map get unlocked because of our choices, not just knocking down the next enemy in the line. Just this week I had a video game villain confront my character with all the killing he’d had to do to get by… and I took the chance to start investing in knockout blow and stealth abilities, because it seemed like the time for him to look for a gentler path when he could. A game’s story lets us explore those dimensions ourselves.

But that freedom comes at the price of a different experience: being led through the moments by a master storyteller.

Those scenes are some of the most compelling moments I’ve ever felt. When every step in a struggle, every choice, every twist, all builds the tension higher. Watch Indy force the snakes back from the Well of Souls, only to find the Nazis at the top grabbing the Ark anyway… or there’s a werewolf scene in Peter Morwood’s The Demon Lord that is so tense that…

There’s nothing like those times.

And no matter how much of that is a fight itself, it comes from using every tool the scene allows. Making the absolute most of that moment.

Right Makes Fight

Still, there’s another side to the best clashes: the fact that they are conflicts. That the “problem” each side is trying to solve is that the other guy needs him dead, beaten, thwarted, to win.

A good fight starts by making those stakes clear. A simple sparring contest still might be a merry rivalry, or a chance to show off. A good rescue is life and death, while catching up with a long-standing, well deserved enemy…

“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die.”

Stories are appreciating the choices people make. One side of that is getting into those decisions and how they shape the struggle now – but the other is that they’re made by people, by the sense of what they’ve already chosen and been shaped by.

Revenge isn’t the only emotion that’s “best served cold.” And even that one dish can go into so many flavors – one story could be a tragedy of an anti-hero’s obsession with vengeance for its own sake, another could use it as one of many markers about why the enemy continues to need stopping.

Better yet, what made those people enemies at all? How much of that conflict have we seen forming before our eyes? One enemy could share a mutual hatred with the hero, but another could be a former ally who’s watched our hero break more and more rules and feels forced to shut him down.

Maybe the most popular manga and anime in Japan’s whole vast, rich storytelling history is Naruto, and it’s hard to picture that tale without recalling how ninjas Naruto and Sasuke go from classmates to team rivals to a much deeper conflict. This is called not pulling punches, and having over a thousand chapters to tell it all.

If a fight embraces that… anything’s possible.

Let someone tremble with fear, and use every moment between punches wishing he was somewhere else. Capture how one fighter’s struggling not to win but to hold off her enemy, protecting something she truly puts above her own life.

Or the hope that if one can push the other into the right corner, he can prove that they don’t need to fight after all. Even though the story’s shown how many times they missed the chance for something better.

There’s always another chance, even in something as inescapable as a fight that’s already broken out. Because a good story uses everything.

Deals, Decoys, and Dirty Tricks for your Characters

Your hero’s trapped by his enemies, no way to run or fight—unless he can take what those goons really want and use it against them. Your villain needs to slip past the police lines to work his sinister plan, but how? Or even, what would it take to make those two stop and call a truce? It all comes down to knowing who you’re dealing with.

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

It’s the classic question, used by Mr. Morden to tempt the people of Babylon 5 and by cops to talk down hostage-takers: “What do you want?” Because once you know a little about what makes a character tick, you have four easy ways another character might use that to influence them… and better yet, deepen the story by revealing how well they and you understand them. Win/win.

The framework I use comes from comparing what we’ll call someone’s “Standard” action—let’s say searching a smuggler or attacking a hero—with the “Offer” of doing what our trickster wants instead. The options for making that Deal work come from either giving the Offer a better reward, or reducing the Standard’s reward. Or it might happen in negative form, where instead of changing the balance of the two “carrots” you change the “sticks:” reduce the Offer’s cost for taking it, or raise the Cost of staying with the Standard.

–Yes, the last is the classic “Offer you can’t refuse.” (In fact, part of the fun of that Godfather line is that it doesn’t mean “can’t resist the Offer itself,” the way most people use it. It really is the refusal side of it that it shuts down.) Or,

[bctt tweet=”4 ways to manipulate a character: hire him, get him fired, reassure him, or threaten him. #writing”]

Survivors and Smugglers – some samples

How does this breakdown work? Let’s take two scenarios: a smuggler trying to get goods past customs and a zombie-hunter who needs to keep a particularly large wave of undead away from a camp of refugees.

Offer’s reward: (aka, “the carrot”) This might be the simplest, and because it delves into people’s motivations directly it may add the most character depth to the story.

The zombie concept makes it simpler yet: just what draws them to attack people, and what part of that could be used to draw them away? Will a loud enough noise draw them from a distance? Or does it have to be about getting in close, running just ahead of them, and not heading into some (yes I’ll say it) dead end.

The smuggler eyeing the customs officer can get into more human territory. It means something if that guard is less interested in policing the border than in some extra cash—and is it for himself or his sick child? Or if he’s so shaken by a developing war he wants guns smuggled to those rebels.

On the other hand, even if the guard only cares about stopping crime, that could make him willing to trade for tips about a much bigger smuggling ring. Or just faking (or exposing) another smuggler nearby would make the perfect distraction, just as fresh meat can lead zombies around. Best of all might be if that smuggler can pose as an undercover cop.

Standard’s reward (reduced): (or, “no other carrots”) This plot twist may actually take the most work to pull off, but it does dig pretty deep into characters and their lives.

Zombies don’t give many options here. You’d need a way to make the refugees less appetizing, compared to the decoy; most worlds’ zombies being the tireless eating machines that they are, simply hiding the victims might be the closest thing that counted.

But the smuggler might get past a guard who’d given up on his work. If he can find the most burned-out inspector in the place, or even make that inspector lose his faith that anyone will listen to him, the inspector has no reason to put much effort into searching our smuggler.

(Or for a more thorough example, picture the army that bypasses the Impenetrable Fortress to take the capital beyond it. Even if the fort is vital in its own right, its defenders may have nothing left to fight for.)

Offer’s cost (reduced): (“carrot has no strings on it”) This is usually in the mix with other tricks and deals, part of tipping the balance the way you want.

For decoying zombies, it might mean keeping the bait from getting too far ahead or crossing any ground that’s hostile enough to zombies to make them turn back. If these zombies are afraid of fire, don’t go near burning buildings until you’ve finished drawing them away.

For the smuggler, it’s recognizing what bothers the guard about letting him through. Probably that he’ll get caught and expose them both, so the smuggler has to seem competent enough that the Offer is less of a risk. But it might not be that: if the guard has lost friends to gunfights and the smuggler switches from running booze to running Uzis, that smuggler may be in for a nasty surprise.

Standard’s cost: (or, “the stick”) This is the other simple tactic—really the simplest of all, since almost anything’s easier to harm than create. That means it might be a last-ditch toolset of quick and dirty options that say more about the situation than the character you’re leaning on… or they might show just as much insight as the best Rewards do. Plus, they might create the most conflict of all, since someone using them tends to make lasting enemies.

For zombies, it could be as simple as throwing up a wall of fire or some barriers to climb over, between them and the refugee camp. It won’t stop the horde, but it might be just enough to encourage them to go after the decoy instead.

The smuggler… You can probably guess: threats, ranging from exposing how much the guard’s already collaborated with him to targeting whatever the guard cares about.

Then again, sometimes the “stick” that character needs is already part of the situation, if you make the right part of it clear enough. If our smuggler is also sneaking children out of a ruthless dictatorship, and the guard takes a good look at them, the balance can shift on its own. (“It’s not a threat, it’s a warning, about who you’re working with…”)

That’s how I break down my options, when I have a character in a corner—or need someone to put him there—and want a plot twist that isn’t just brute strength. If I can either outbid or undermine the Standard reward one character was relying on, I can make a strong statement about what was driving him; meanwhile reducing the Offer’s cost keeps the plot twist on track; and, adding or finding costs in the Standard is another approach that might clarify character or might bypass it.

Something else you can see in these examples are that sometimes a tool works by changing one side of someone’s choice with the right offer or threat or other efforts, sometimes it’s deception (faking that same kind of change, or hiding one part of what’s in the balance), or else revealing the whole picture. If you look at my four Plot Device articles, you’ll see these are all ways to use Strength (or Movement) and/or Knowledge to affect a choice between two Motives.

It’s all about that pair of options you give that character, and the “What do you want?” (or don’t want) that lets you tip either side of that scale. Once you learn to look for those options, you can turn your characters loose to trick, bully, seduce… and even find grounds to make friends.

On Google+

Character-Centered and Plot-Centered – Making Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thing is, they’re partly right:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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