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.

What I Write

If you look through my stories, you’ll see there are certain things I try to provide. Here are seven of them.

“What do you want?”

–That’s such a marvelous question. It can be the seed to a beautiful memory, or the offer that calms a terrorist. It can delight, seduce, or reassure… and of course it can map out which of thousands of genres and styles each of us want to spend our nights curled up reading.

It’s also the defining question for a story itself. A quest, a mystery, or even a slice of life are all brought together by the struggle for some goal the characters want. (When someone writes a slice of life story, or just anything with a slow start, that’s the time to check Kurt Vonnegut’s blessed rule “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”) So saving a kingdom is not the same as unmasking one killer, or trying to make the person in the next cubicle laugh before the workday begins.

And when I start defining one of my character’s goals, I like to cut the ground a bit further out from under him:

In Shadowed, Paul was searching for the answer to his own mysterious power, and the hole in his memory that had him give up his ordinary life to live in secret.
In the Spellkeeper Flight books, Mark wanted to save the people he loved from enemy magic—but he’d also lived his life in the shadow of his best friend (she’s so much more capable than he is), his older cousin, and his criminal father. Not someone who’d see himself as a hero, even before the story took a few hard twists.

When my heroes want something, I try not to make it simple.

Struggling on All Sides

The one piece of writing advice that’s stuck with me more than anything is: a strong story leaves the character no choice except what he has to do.

(And that last choice is still the hardest he has to make.)

After all, the basic question of how we all get through our days is “What do I do next?” It unfolds into the step-by-step journey that makes a character unique, AND builds a plot that’s specific and convincing. What are the options, the allies, the limitations that someone’s world is made up of? How do they see its shortcuts, and what blind spots do they miss?

If my hero doesn’t try bargaining with the opposition, or avoiding them, or asking for help… then I want to think I’ve shown solid reasons why they wouldn’t. Which ways are closed off really can be what defines a strong story concept: the increasingly implacable enemy, the inescapable problem, or the isolation that forces a hero to struggle alone. And those blind spots of the answers that another person could have used, and this one took too long to see.

Or just in a single scene, how many arguments, ideas, or maneuvers can there really be, and how does the chess match play out? Including, how many moves does the other side have planned? A battle like the ones the Spellkeepers have (“this city’s not big enough for the four of them”) ought to be worth losing ourselves in the whirl of action, that always leads to the conclusion it needs to.

For Joy

Mark can fly. He only needs a moment to fling himself up past the rooftops, and every time he looks at his city from above, he sees something new. Even if it’s another pattern about where his enemies might be hiding.

Paul’s story is more earthbound, and Shadowed was mostly about looking into the darker corners of his world. But the core idea of that world is that power and hope can make a difference in people’s lives—even when there isn’t a conspiracy to fight. “A nice place to visit, and maybe I would want to live there.”

Paul has a long way to go before he understands that. (Though my followup short story for him “Passengers” is one moment of him getting closer.)

But whatever stage one of my stories is at, I try to look for moments of peace or pleasure. If I can’t immerse myself and the reader in how those moments keep a character going, the road ahead would look pretty dark.

Suspense

It’s in my motto: “Whispered spells for breathless suspense.” My favorite scenes are usually the ones where every twist and every image pull me deeper into the moment, until I’m screaming inside to know what comes next. I want that when I write, every time.

Some scenes are playful or restful, but I still want them to find something to tease the reader with, and make each moment flow into the next. The further I look into what makes suspense work, the more I see that the same twists work for any moment and any style.

And sometimes I have a man with a flying belt being forced down into sewers and grabbing one last desperate look at what ought to be familiar surroundings above ground. By the time Mark erupts back into the open air, we should all be soaring with him—and his night’s still just getting started.

What’s love got to do with it?

Many writers treat “paranormal” as one half of “paranormal romance.” But a writer I know once asked who preferred their love stories hot and who wanted a slow burn, and my answer was that I best remember the ones that take their time. Better yet, the stories that genuinely play their relationships against everything else at stake, and make us wonder which should be more important.

A mystery fan could “cherchez la femme” in my books, and find women and men at the root of some of the most powerful drives each other has. I hope you’ll like who the story ends up putting with who. But that doesn’t mean you’ll know how it’ll get there.

Mark would be the first to admit that knowing Angie has shaped half of his life. Paul and Sarah and Lorraine and Greg… it’s been complicated.

Nothing will be the same

More and more, I like a story to put some weight into the steps it goes through. True, I’ve written searches, chases, and confrontations that only reinforced what the story had already shown was going to be the challenge… but more and more, I like the moments that change that up.

Truths are turned upside down. Loyalties break. New strengths unlock. People die, sometimes.

So often, those are the moments we remember in a story. Again and again, I find writing comes down to building a tale around pieces that could truly tear something loose if they changed, plus the journey that makes them important. Then, being willing to push the detonator.

Is this the scene where things just got real? How many more of those can a story take?

I always want to find out.

To the Truth

Purposes and possibilities, joy and fierceness and heart and heartbreak… But like the philosopher cowboy on City Slickers said, all that really matters is “one thing,” meaning it’s all a journey to find what that thing is.

All my stories come down to some final truth, that I’ve been working toward from the beginning. It might be who can be trusted and why, or it might be what a character can trust in themselves. Everything else is exploring why that has to be the answer.

I like to think that makes the twists along the way more than tools for suspense. That the glimpses into the reasons why someone can’t take an offer, or how they look at someone they’ve never understood, might stick with a reader after the last page is turned.

If those are the stories you want to read, I hope you’ll click here and take a look.

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A Jessica Jones Experiment – Take the TMI Test

So Season 2 of Jessica Jones is out. And this time it’s almost perfect.

As a show, Jessica… how do I say this? Her first season was the only series that’s ever made me rethink Buffy The Vampire-Slayer (see my past rave) and remind myself it isn’t fair to anyone to compare Buffy’s seven whopping seasons of frequently-legendary storytelling to one thirteen-episode arc of focused perfection.

It’s also not fair to compare Jessica’s Season 2 to her first, if only because if it were any show but hers you couldn’t compare it to that first storyline without admitting that would be setting an impossible standard. And Season 2 does have pretty much all the things that made the first what it was:

What We’re Jonesing For

Krysten Ritter. Just enough doors ripped off hinges for a PI-slash-superhero story. Trish trying to be the only anchor in Jessica’s life. Krysten Ritter. Bitter monologues, bitter alcohol, and PI dialogue with more bite than the booze our hero swims in. Malcolm the neighbor (now in a new position), sweet and likable with his own issues. Lawyer Jeri being a greater force of self-destruction than Krysten Ritter’s Jessica, and that’s saying plenty. A world aware of superpowers, and with no idea how to deal with a woman who doesn’t wear a mask or want to be a hero. That jazzy, pumped-up theme sequence that any other show would kill for, if it was worthy of it. And always, Krysten Ritter.

And it took courage not to build another season around the Marvel villain who’s better than Loki—

Yes, I said it. Tom Hiddleston only plays the second-greatest villain in Marvel history.

So it isn’t the new villains themselves where I’d say this season made its one slip. With all the above in play, you can bet this is a show with more than just villainous charisma to offer. (Though of course the last season having all that and Kilgrave’s incredible, Jessica-heart-tearing arc gave it more awesomeness than most storytellers would know what to do with.)

This time: Jess investigating her powers’ history? cool. A connection to our so-reluctant heroine? it delivers one as close as Kilgrave’s ever was, once it becomes clear. Different threads tangling in different ways, so you never know which is going to be driving the story next? that structure works for most other Marvel Netflix shows, even though last time letting Kilgrave be at the root of everything worked so well.

There’s Always Something

Still, I think they missed something. With all due respect to Melissa Rosenberg and the rest of the magnificent people who designed this season, I think there’s a place where I expected them to do better. And I think it’s a lesson worth pointing out to all of us who write or care about quality storytelling.

Readers, you can test this yourself, with a little experiment. And yes, the instructions are completely spoiler-safe… in fact they depend on your not knowing too much too soon.

If you haven’t see Season 2 yet—

(And it really ought to be “yet,” if you’re reading this blog but haven’t seen the story already. Or if you’re not on Netflix, consider some math: Eight dollars for one month, divided by two thirteen-episode seasons of Jessica? At the rate most people tear through those eps once they start, you might have weeks left in that month to look at the other five-and-counting Marvel shows and Netflix’s other offerings, before you have to decide whether to drop another $8. No, Netflix isn’t paying me to present those numbers; they’re just something to think about.)

If you haven’t seen Season 2 yet, the “experiment” is:

See the first six episodes. But instead of watching Episode 7 (called “AKA I Want Your Cray Cray”), skip it until you’ve seen the next one or two. Because all but one obvious minute of that ep is all flashbacks, and it’s there solely to give out Too Much Information, too soon, about the characters and motivations of what we’ve just discovered. Instead, go straight to Ep 8 and maybe 9, and just follow how Jessica has to cope with her situation—without you getting that extra perspective on character that our heroine herself has to build on her own. Then go back and look at Ep 7.

Or if you can’t bring yourself to skip the episode (or you’ve already seen it all), imagine how the show would look without that one filling us in too soon.

It’s a basic belief of mine: the heart of a story is what the characters know and what they can do about it in that moment; their choice in each moment is everything. So any other-viewpoint scenes ought to be used to build suspense, not overshare about someone to the point that the viewer/reader is pushed back from that in-the-trenches challenge that the actual hero is slow-w-w-ly learning to cope with.

Great stories (like Season 1) live within those moments and their pacing. Easy flashbacks or other infodumps cheat us.

For those who have seen the season: I will admit this is a more logical storyline to use those flashbacks in than many tales might be. At the point where the flashes start (with that last word of Ep 6) the story’s just unveiled a huge change of our understanding of the characters, so that stopping to fast-explore it all is easier than working through it normally. I’ll also admit that the truth and the conflict they’re setting up are less about layers above anyone’s Deepest Truth than they’re about facing people’s sheer unpredictability, which means giving us an immediate peak at their contradictions still leaves us with the nitro-volatile questions of what they’ll do next.

But I say the storyline would still have been better if that Ep 7 info had been unpacked and laid out a step at a time, so that we took it in alongside Jessica. She’s the one who needs to deal with it, and we don’t want to jump ahead of her.

Try the season that way, or imagine it, by moving through that point flashback-free. See if you agree.

Too Much Information only swamps what the story’s trying to be. Even a story that’s still as stunning as Jess’s new season.

(One more thing: if you’re trying this, don’t tell Jessica. She’s really not a fan of “experiments” these days, and none of us want her ripping down our doors.)

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That Ultimate Buffy Scene – Willow’s Long Walk

What does storytelling mean to me?

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

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

“Things are about to get very interesting”

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

–Yes, that season. The big one.

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

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

And second chances are not. So:

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

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

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

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

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

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

One narrow escape from the Judge later, she does.

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

Why It Works

Meticulous buildup.

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

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

And then the second half of the two-parter.

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

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

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

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

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

But…

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

And THAT’S WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody writes quite like Joss Whedon.

But God knows we have to try.

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Photo by dbnunley

Video Gamers as Writers – Twitching Our Way Into Character

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fight Like a (Mage) Girl

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

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

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

One Giant Leap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Writer’s Confession: Kvothe’s Ballad

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

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

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

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

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

But for me it’s more.

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

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

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

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

But what if…

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

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

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

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

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

Step One: Varied Whos and Whys

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

What are characters made of? Goals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step Two: Varying them When

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And let’s not forget:

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all about motive.

And contrast.

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Been There Done That? Similar Problems with Writing Similar Scenes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what’s enough variety?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Medium and Message?

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

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

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

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

Or… Severus Snape.

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

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

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

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

So, can it work?

Holding Patterns Worth Holding

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

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

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

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

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

Setting Up the Setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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Darth Vader Missed It and Dracula Never Tried – Character Plot Twists that Matter

What single choice could make a story? Sure, we writers have dozens of strengths we might weave into a tale, but could there be one clear decision that pushes it to a whole other level?

It’s been on my mind lately, now that The High Road is out and I’m looking at a mix of blank screens and early drafts for Freefall and Ground Zero. What would the perfect keystone, first step, heart of a story look like?

I’ve got plenty to start with. The first book left Mark starting to master his flying magic, while Angie is… in case you haven’t read it yet, let’s leave her status up in the air (there’s always a flying pun available somewhere). He’s gotten to know a bit about his enemy, and he has old and new allies and a plan for the future.

Lots of next steps for them. So many ways to chase their enemy, from tracking his history to digging deeper in their own magic to forcing him to fight on their terms. So many ways he can push back. I could dive into those strategies and not come out for a dozen books…

Then I worry about Dracula.

Straight-up Adventure (plot twists as action)

We all know the original story… if you haven’t read it, look up the plotline and see how much of it you know anyway from what’s passed into clichés ages ago: The hero walks into a castle not knowing it holds a vampire (“Enter freely and of your own will,”) and barely escapes with his life. The Count comes to London and begins stalking pretty girls for blood and pleasure. Van Helsing leads our heroes to chase him down.

And, it drew all that from (or created) the basic steps of what a vampire wants, what he can do, and what that gives a hero to track him and fight him with. The twists of the plot are mostly what new clue or weapon or new target for the monster’s evil are revealed, and which moves will fail at what cost. (Poor Lucy, playing the original “bit” part.)

It’s a fine book, to this day, from its sheer energy and how inventive it is with its concepts. (Turn a vampire’s influence on a girl against him, with hypnosis? Cool.)

But… it’s basic. The cast mostly go from semi-fearless vampire survivors to fearless vampire hunters, except for the designated victims. All its twists still settle into the same steady push forward.

When people talk about “plot-centered” rather than “character-centered” stories, this is what it comes down to. The characters here are still at the center, but nothing about them breaks them out of what the plot forces them to become—and that means, half of what the tale says to our own vicarious sharing in it is “If I were there, maybe I could fit in that mold too.” Not so many options, variations, or revelations about human nature there.

Lord of the Rings has some of the same focus. A hobbit and a ranger may not see the quest the same way, but they all follow the same plan; half the books’ surprises come down to who yields to the ring’s influence and which way the one wild card (Gollum) will jump.

Does that make either story weaker? Not at all, not when they both choose their own territories and use them so masterfully. But, just what are those tricks they don’t use?

Plot Twists – Under the Helmet?

For one thing, those tales aren’t just sticking to “old-fashioned” simple heroism as if it were the best anyone could do at the time. After all King Arthur’s tale is many centuries older, and Lancelot and Guinevere actually act on that “forbidden love” and bring the kingdom down.

(Come to think of it, Tolkien used Eowyn to hint that Aragorn just might go off-script in the same way… but only a small nod to it, since he’d barely showed us Arwen at all. The LOTR movies set up enough more that we could at least see the possibility.)

Or these days, Harry Dresden’s torn between so many overwhelming forces you wonder if any side he allies with will let him protect the innocents around him. And anyone in Game Of Thrones is struggling so hard to survive that there are no sides that last (let alone innocents).

So what makes the difference? What does one kind of story make do without, and others sink their roots into?

It might be Star Wars that has the answer, just from comparing its first two movies. The original New Hope played a grand simple storyline better than anyone ever had… and then Empire let Vader blow it all up with four words.

(Or, it would have blown it up except the movies only gave us the buildup to that one shock, and then Luke simply recovered and decided he could save Vader. On the other hand, that “simple” first movie gets its real high point not from Luke finding the power to make that shot but from Han riding to the rescue first. It’s a basic but clear thrill from seeing who stands where, and why.)

Call it the power of rooting the plot twist in the people. Dracula finds different directions to throw the same threat at us, but there’s nothing in its heroes to make us wonder how they’ll respond; Star Wars gives us a limited amount of the same. They’ve both got brilliant buildup with Dracula floating about and Yoda warning Luke what he’s not ready to face, but the hunters only fight harder and Luke flinches for a few scenes before he begins re-twisting the plot back into line. Compare that to Lancelot and Guinevere following through with their failings, or Dresden selling only a bit of his soul but having to do it again and again each book, and the Game of Thrones parade of all-too-real changes…

By these lights, there are three chances to build a harder-hitting tale:

Set up the twists. Use everything from background to atmosphere to misdirection to fill the characters and the reader with a driving need to survive the threat, destroy their enemy, complete their quest… and then spring how the key to that is nothing like what they thought. The simpler tales live and die on a few surprises and a smooth path along the way; Dracula mostly plays with how to fight and what other lives are in danger.

That might be enough. It might not.

[bctt tweet=”A simple vampire-chase story could use a #plot stake *from* the heart. #writetip” via=”no”]

More: twist a character against himself. The deeper changes build on how a character honestly could choose something above the same struggle he’s been on. (And that means, how we readers don’t have to be in a swordfight to have been pulled in some of the same two directions.) Lancelot convinces his fans that true love might be worth risking loyalty and everything he’s built. Game of Thrones does some of the same with every new chapter, and usually tears that apart too the next time around.

And:

[bctt tweet=”If your #writing’s dangers hit the hero as rarely as a Stormtrooper’s blaster, you don’t know what you’re missing.” via=”no”]

Most: twist until something breaks. Every plot change is a chance to tease a reader with how much the heroes could lose, or win—or it can follow through and make real, lasting changes nobody can forget. Lancelot did it. The Dresden Files does it halfway since Harry wriggles out of so many compromises, but each one he makes leads to so many more. And Star Wars blinked, since in the end Vader simply came around… but imagine how unsatisfying that scene would have been it hadn’t cost him his life instead.

(Then again, a bigger miss with Darth Vader might have been back in the “setup” category: The movies made him one of the most iconic evil figures of all time, with zero balancing hints that he could be redeemed except Luke’s faith, but they simply went there anyway. And that’s not counting the prequel movies, that couldn’t make us care what happened to that version of Anakin at all. In the next few years we’ll see how well “Episode VIII” and “IX” touch those bases…)

So, put the story on a course where the upcoming twists make the biggest difference. Have them make the deepest difference by using what honestly could turn a person away from their path. And sometimes, let them actually turn.

Intriguing….

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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!