Category Archives: On Writing

Sliding Scales: Idealism and Cynacism

Posted by natechen on

Let’s talk about verisimilitude, or how believable your story is. In general, a story has more verisimilitude the more it resembles real life and the more verisimilitude a story has the better and more timeless it becomes. As you might have guessed by the title of this post, we’re going to look at a particular aspect of verisimilitude, in particular the sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism.

Let’s just get this out of the way now: I hate this scale.

I’ve heard a lot of people talk before about how such and such a book/TV show/movie is so dark and how they love it and isn’t it great that we get all this dark stuff these days. I generally pick something epically ridiculous (current favorite: I, Frankenstein) and agree, since that was such a dark piece of work it’s truly noteworthy.

I get into a lot of arguments this way.

Now don’t misunderstand. The sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism exists for a reason. In the eighties and nineties it was pretty much against the rules to produce anything that left a bad taste in the mouth at any point in the story. It’s not clear if this was some kind of backlash against ubercynical works like Apocalypse Now or if there was just some kind of natural cycle at work in the entertainment industry, but the result was a selection of very, very idealized entertainment.

This doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. Shows like Family Matters or GI Joe live on in our hearts because they were very entertaining and well done. But they lacked something very important, something very vital to human nature. They lacked the kinds of persistent, sometimes very draining and always challenging difficulties that everyone faces in life. (No, Cobra Commander does not count.)

No one was addicted to anything unhealthy, even vices as harmless as overeating tended to be dealt with in the course of a single episode. Family problems were solved equally quickly and issues like not having a family were either ignored or glossed over with a bucket of industrial varnish and a heavy handed brush. It was an era of sitcoms, easy fixes and loads and loads of camp.

And because entertainment of that age lacked the serious challenges of life, it lacked verisimilitude.

It’s hard to pin down an exact turning point but you’ll find that by the early 2000s entertainment was dealing with these things in depth much more frequently. TV series like 24 were beginning to look at large, persistent problems that were not going to simply go away in an episode or even a season. Lost became a phenomenon in spite of presenting more questions than answers. Themes were getting, as many would put it, darker and grittier. There was a cultural trend, they would say, to putting more darkness into stories and thus making them better.

Which is total garbage, of course, and I’m getting to the why next week, but right now we’re looking at the sliding scale so let’s stick to that. Here’s the thing about the sliding scale – it makes you think that you can’t have both idealism and cynicism in one story. This is untrue and I will prove it using one of the most beloved TV series of all time.

I’m talking, of course, about MASH. If you’re not familiar with this series and its characters, a summary is far outside the scope of this post. But the odds are good you at least know that MASH stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, that the TV show is set during the Korean War and that it was, on its surface, a sitcom. So shouldn’t this be a case of a campy, idealistic show?

Yes, it kind of should. Should being the key word.

You see, as you watch MASH you’ll probably pick up all kinds of witty things to say, comebacks to use yourself and hilarious sight gags that will make you chuckle for days. But you’ll also remember the haunted looks of doctors who lost another patient, thousand yard stares of soldiers who’ve been to the front and the seemingly endless parade of wounded who you really never know anything about.

MASH is embodied by Hawkeye Pierce, the brilliant surgeon with the incredible regard for human life and unshaken hatred for the war who, at the same time, is an alcoholic, shallow, borderline misogynistic womanizer – most of the time. We see him at his best and his worst and the show never stints on either one. Interestingly enough, MASH was a sitcom but it grew to be as popular as it did because the comedy of every day life was contrasted with the extraordinary tragedy of war.

While it might be an exaggeration to call many of the difficulties most people face “tragedy” at least when compared to the shock and harm of life during and after war, what draws people to the story and characters of MASH is the honesty in presenting the characters. By the middle of the show’s run all one note characters are gone from the cast and in the next five seasons show them at their best and worst. It’s not idealized – but it’s certainly not cynical, either.

Perhaps it’s best described as honest.

So what can a storyteller learn from MASH and its honesty? Well, that’s something for next week, I think.

Writing Men: Solitude

Posted by natechen on

Return of a feature! It’s been a while since we’ve done this so it’s only natural that we stop for a minute and glance back at where we’ve been. In addition to introducing the subject we’ve looked at five basic components of male thought: Objectivity, Axioms, Compartments, Testing and Sacrifice. It’s time to examine some ways these thought patterns are typically applied.

As a reminder, the whole point of this exercise is to investigate who the male character is and how he should be written. (This reminder is as much for me as anyone, I feel I’ve been straying from this purpose recently.) Now that we’ve done a bunch of posts on how men think and what I feel are the biggest defining masculine traits, and how they express themselves, it’s time to take a look at how those thought patterns might result in uniquely male actions and what that might mean for your story.

Men seem to seek and value alone time much more than women. In fact, they’re masters of being alone even with other people – we’ll just sit around with each other and tinker with stuff or read books or do whatever with no need to talk to one another about what we’re doing or why. Some people think this is some sort of animalistic urge, the need of the hunter-gatherer to be back in his natural state. As a non-hunter-gatherer I tend to disagree with this outlook and instead attribute it to the natural outgrowth of the five male psychological principles we’ve discussed already.

So how do we know when a man might want solitude, and what would the purposes of a character seeking solitude be? There are some reasons here but keep in mind that this list is by no means comprehensive. Solitude is usually a man’s default first reaction to an unexpected situation. The male tendency to compartmentalization works best if he starts of fully compartmentalized, which means being alone among other things.

In a more practical sense this means male characters might seek solitude because:

  1. They’ve been dealt a setback. In particular this gives the man a chance to look over what went wrong and analyze the axioms applied, to see if a wrong paradigm was used, test the skills used, to see if the man needs to improve himself or something else before trying again, or determine if he must toss something out in order to achieve his goals and, if so, whether he’s willing to make that sacrifice.
  2. They are formulating a new objective or axiom. These two things are foundational to the man’s understanding of the world and must be examined from every possible angle in the best way the man knows how. This usually means while the man is alone. Incidentally, this is also why men tend to be so stubborn about things – men have personally examined every aspect of their core goals and maxims and thus have become very personally invested in them. It’s a great leadership quality and, at the same time, a pitfall when the man is working with bad objectives or axioms.
  3. The man needs to unpack. This has nothing to do with introvert/extrovert tendencies. Men simply don’t process experiences as well when there are other people around – that’s a situation where you’re creating experiences, not sorting them. Social activities tend to be their own compartment, separate from the other activities that take up the majority of the day. Most men need some alone time to knock everything into proper shape, file it and be ready to move on.

Men tend to view the tendency to solitude in a positive light, but it’s important to keep in mind that, just like the patterns of male thought, the actions male thought inspires are not inherently positive or negative. Rather, they are situational. Sometimes withdrawing from other people will cause more problems than sorting out what you did wrong will solve. Part of creating a well-developed character is showing them acting as their character dictates and growing from it. Most actions have positive and negative consequences and seeking solitude is no exception. When your story call for a man to go off on his own be sure he has a good reason for it, at least in his own eyes. But don’t be afraid to hand him some consequences for that decision either.

Language, Language

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If you’ve read this Monday’s short story you may have noticed that Dmitri uses the term “Palatinus” to refer to the high ranking official he turns his case over to once his work is done. I have to admit, I was leery of using this term for reasons that are at once very simple and very complex. But before I can talk about that, I need to step back and admit something about the way Dmitri talks and his home in Terra Eternal.

If you’ve read the two stories I’ve done on Dmitri – Monday’s and this one from last summer – along with the Terra Eternal world building posts – here and here – you’ve probably realized that Terra Eternal speaks a language with heavy Latin influences. I made this choice for very simple reasons. Generally, when you’re telling a story, it’s best to give the audience what they expect.

Yeah, sure, you can defy expectations but if its not something that’s central to your story then your failure to live up to them will just be a distraction. Popular culture today associates Latin with magic and fantasy, elements that are central to the ethos of Terra Eternal. Yes, I could have made up a bunch of words of magic, people do that all the time when building fantasy worlds. But part of the schtick is that Terra Eternal isn’t a totally different world, it’s another version of our world. The Endless Horizons are really just echoes of the same world with fundamentally similar people in superficially different circumstances. It’s logical that the languages would be similar as well.

In fact, Sophers that study language in Terra Eternal work by this principle. All the languages they’ve encountered fall into one of sixteen different groups based on the basic rules of sound and grammar involved. These groups are called phonemes (a real word I’ve given a different meaning, another part of writing in this setting) and most public officials like Dmitri understand the basics of at least two of them – their native phoneme and the First phoneme, which is the Latin equivalent of the Throneworlds. The only things that really vary from world to world is vocabulary and pronunciation. Barriers, to be sure, but not as insurmountable as entire different languages.

This is why terms like Regulus, Praetorian and Century are scattered liberally through stories about Terra Eternal. While an empire that touches all or part of fifty two worlds is bound to wind up with a melting pot of a language, and Terra Eternal has stolen a plethora of terms from other cultures as they were assimilated, the bones of the First phoneme is Latin in nature.

That brings me to palatines. I’ve mentioned once or twice that I work in a Genealogy department and one category of records we have is an index of palatines who came to America. When I started there I’d never heard the term before but I quickly learned from context that palatines were some kind of high born people and the word had a good ring to it, so when I started building Terra Eternal I was thinking of using it as a term for a high ranking official. But I wasn’t sure what kind of official they should be so I started doing some research into the term and I discovered I had heard the word before, just with a different pronunciation.

You see, most fantasy geeks would spell it paladin.

Palatines were officials in many European courts, but the most powerful of them was probably Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire. Some poet wrote a verse about who twelve of these palatines, the Peers of the Realm, and their great feats upholding the empire and this later became the archetype for the holy warrior, made mighty by his devotion to truth, justice and righteousness. I’m not sure whether the spelling was changed deliberately or accidentally but over time this particular meaning became associated with the spelling paladin until Gary Gygax basically enshrined it with his Dungeons and Dragons role playing game.

So what’s this all mean?

Basically, I’d adopted a linguistic conceit, that the powerful, magic-driven culture spoke a Latin-based language because it was what the audience would tend to expect. But the word palatine was closely associated with the idea of holy warriors by that same audience and that was a concept I wanted to avoid focusing on with Terra Eternal. On the flip side, palatine was a real word with concrete meaning and that’s a resource that shouldn’t be quickly cast aside. I wanted most of the basic social structure of Terra Eternal, the empire’s superstructure if not the local governments, to have Latin terminology and palatine was a part of that. But I didn’t want to give false impressions either – the palatines are just high level bureaucrats, not holy warriors.

Looking back on it the answer should have been obvious but as is so often the case it took me a while to get there. The actual Latin word is palatinus, which is different enough from paladin that I didn’t think confusion was likely. And that is how the character of Palatinus Sollenberg came to have his title and I came to wish that I’d chosen some other language for the basis of an interdimensional empire.

Like sign language.

The lesson for today? Worldbuilding has a lot more to it than you’d ever expect.

Genrely Speaking: Alternate History

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Welcome back to Genrely Speaking! Unless, of course, this is your first encounter with this running gag feature, in which case welcome! Genrely Speaking is where we look at genres, those loosely defined groups of literature that, in theory, frame any discussion about fiction we care to have. Since it’s important to understand what is meant by any given genre – or more specifically what any given person means when they talk about a genre – I’ve taken it upon myself to go through most of the genres I read and talk about and define them for your convenience!

Today’s subject is alternate history (or Harry Turtledove) a genre that skirts around scifi territory but really isn’t. While both are, in one way or another, about human ideas, alternate history does its best to stay within the bounds of, y’know, historical events. You can tell you’re dealing with historical fiction if the following things are present:

  1. A framework of familiar history. While some works of historical fiction can wind up very, very far afield (coughHarryTurtledovecough) they almost always begin with a distinct jumping off point, a moment in history that readers will already be familiar with or can become familiar with in fairly short order. For example, the novel Days of Infamy begins with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while Guns of the South begins in 1864, just as the Confederacy’s decline began to pick up speed.
  2. One huge difference. This is the alternate part. In order to be alternate history, something must be different from what we knew. Some writers will try and find the smallest possible thing they can change and still make an interesting story but usually it’s pretty big. In Days of Infamy the Japanese follow up the bombing of Pearl Harbor with an invasion of Hawaii. Guns of the South tells how Robert E. Lee actually manages to win the war.
  3. A careful and thoughtful examination of what might actually result if these things had been changed. Some of these can grow to absurd lengths. The complete breakdown of Guns of the South ran through four books, including the original, at a minimum. I haven’t read all of them, trying to hunt down all of Harry Turtledove’s work is an mammoth task.

What are the weaknesses of alternate history? There’s a lot of them. It can come off as dry, particularly if the author is trying to run down and explore all or just most of the fallout of whatever his big idea is. Like many scifi or scifi related genres, alternate history is in danger of drowning under the weight of its own ideas. It shows how invested the author is in his story but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s well told.

Worse, it can drown in its own scope and size. Alternate history authors tend to look at the big and the bold, not the small and the mundane. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that once you change one thing about history the changes snowball until your reader can feel lost and confused. Particularly since people who read this genre tend to be familiar with history already… and thus the new details can get mixed up with the old.

Finally, you see a lot of historical figures creep up in alternate history. Which is fine, but if not meticulously researched and carefully done they can come of not feeling quite right, or worse like a caricature of themselves rather than a real person. Granted, that’s all you can really get from reading a book – but the audience shouldn’t feel like that while they’re reading the book

What are the strengths of alternate history? Well for starters “what if” is one of the most basic questions of human existence, right up there with “why”, and everyone likes to try and answer it. Furthermore, “what if such-and-such had happened” is one of the most common forms of that question, whether it’s in regard to something stupid we’ve done or something stupid someone else has done. So obviously stories that revolve around  just that question are going to interest us.

Secondly, there’s a lot of room for controversy in how a person chooses to answer that question. The people who read a lot of alternate history are also the type of people to have reams of facts to draw on to test the author’s conclusions and will get a kick out of doing it. And then getting on the Internet and rehashing it with everyone they know and thousands of people they don’t. And they will do this at length and in excruciating detail.

While some of them may need a job, a girlfriend or some other aspect of a life they are lacking, they are an impassion fanbase and there’s nothing that will propel the growth and maturation of a genre like an enthusiastic group of people telling you what you did right and what you did wrong (but mostly the latter.)

Alternate history, like many scifi based or scifi related genres, is still young. But it’s also rapidly expanding its appeal and maturing. Sure, sometimes the plots are flat or unbelievable but scifi was the same way a hundred years ago and now… well, now its at least not as bad as it was.

Alternate history is a genre to watch, not only because its fun and interesting, not only because it’s changing from a genre just starting out to a genre that is starting to demand a place of its own in literary circles, but because reading it makes people more interested in real history, and trying to figure out the details of what they just read. What was based on real history? What did the author make up? To answer those questions they’ll learn more about their own past and that can’t possibly be a bad thing.

Adaptations: Kill/Edge

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The subject of turning a book into a movie is one fraught with strong feelings. It happens a lot. Some of the most anticipated movies of the last year (and the year to come) are based on books. But it never fails that something gets left out, some character gets left on the cutting room floor, you name it. There’s a lot to the process of adapting a book and you can never make everyone happy. So it was with some surprise that I learned that the movie Edge of Tomorrow was based on a book.

And not just any book, a Japanese novel called All You Need is Kill. Naturally, I had to see it.

Of course, first I needed to read the book, which took some doing, then I took the time to track down both the graphic novel adaptations. One was a Japanese manga, one was a traditional American graphic novel. Both were extremely faithful to the book, the only real difference was the art style and how much got cut (it wasn’t a whole lot in either version.)

So when I sat down to watch the movie I was kind of weirded out because I knew that it was going to be wildly different. Did I like the movie? Yes, I did. It was a good movie that entertained and said something simply but forcefully about human nature, both good and bad.

This is not a review of the movie, so I’m not going to give you a full length breakdown of the plot or what I liked and didn’t but that’s what I thought in a nutshell. Now I’m going to talk about what I got out of the movie vs. book in terms of adapting fiction for the screen. And, since such things are totally unavoidable in this context be aware:

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS 

Let’s look at what changed and why I think it worked.

Okay, obviously a lot changed from book to movie and I do mean countless things, large and small. The appearance of the mimics, the alien menace of the story, was changed from what were basically big green blobs to something that would look more impressive on screen. Keiji Kiriya transformed from a Japanese person to an American and got renamed William Cage (although Keiji does get the nickname “Killer Cage” in the novel so this is not entirely a departure.) Rita Vrataski is now a Brit rather than an American. Things take place in Britain rather than Japan. The troops are on an offensive operation rather than a defensive one. The list goes on.

Mainly, though, I want to look at the big changes and they start off about as big as it gets.

Theme 

Kill is about determination against despair. When Kenji gets trapped in his time loop it wears him down and breaks his spirit until his humanity is dubious at best. Rita pulls him out of it by offering him companionship and a way out but, at the same time, she has to at least suspect that only one of them is getting out of the loop. In the end Kenji escapes but is still alone. His humanity is still very much in question.

But in Edge the theme is much more about courage overcoming fear. A fair argument can be made that Cage fighting with the certain knowledge of a do-over if he fails doesn’t count as real courage but that is exactly why his loosing the power to jump back in time before the final battle is so significant. We see that, even with no safety net, Cage has transformed from a man who flees from what needs to be done to a person who passionately pulls others along in their duties. As Sergeant Ferrell would say, he has been purified in the crucible of glorious combat. He has become more human, more willing to stand by others and sacrifice for them if need be.

More than anything, this thematic change is what lets the film adaptation get away with all the other changes being made. Determination and resolve are a big deal in the East but often Eastern philosophy puts an emphasis on pushing through until you find out what you’re working towards. On the other hand, courage is knowing what you’re working towards and putting aside personal fears in favor of what needs to be done. It’s more universal, easier for American audiences to understand and, perhaps most importantly, healthier for the audience.

Main Character 

Keiji is a raw recruit about to go into his first battle. He’s untested but honest and he knows what needs to be done and fully intends to do it. Over the course of the story he becomes jaded, to the point where he no longer cares whether the people around him live or die. They’ll just come back the next time around, after all. True, meeting Rita gives him renewed purpose for a time but we’re not sure what he’ll be after the close of the story, with Rita gone and the burden of winning the war with the mimics on his shoulders.

Cage, on the other hand, is an Army Major, a ROTC graduate and a man of business. He’s also determined to avoid the front lines if possible – in short, he’s a coward. He learns to fight much like Kenji does, by going through countless iterations of one battle, but to a certain extent it looks like going through the motions. He does change in some ways. Like Kenji he gets colder as he loops, at least for a while, but he also learns more about the people in his unit and what makes them tick. Courage begins then. Sure, it’s Rita who comes along and fans it into a fire but, by the end, Cage is fully on board.

The character of William Cage is where the adaptation really shines. All You Need is Kill tries to be a coming of age story but it leaves us unsure of what the newly minted man is going to look like. But Edge of Tomorrow clearly defines the character at all points along the way – who he was, how he changes and what that man is likely to look like in the future.

Presentation 

In the book much of the iterative nature of the story is told to us. We’re given the framework of the thirtyish hours Keiji lives repeatedly and then the differences are spelled out for us. This is the right call. Prose is one of the clunkiest ways to tell an action oriented story so cutting out as much detail as possible is where you have to start, not where you need to end up.

But Edge of Tomorrow is a movie and it exploits the fact that it can show us five seconds of action four times in only twenty seconds. These rapid replays of events, showing us how Cage is adapting to obstacles, aren’t in the book because they’d just be too clunky but they work for the movie. In them we see Cage doing the same things over and over again in rapid succession to show us how his thinking works, then later we see him working with Rita to set up ever more complex plans, then finally we seem him start referencing events we’ve never seen but we can now clearly tell he’s lived through before. It all culminates when Rita asks, “What do we do now?”

When Cage says, “I don’t know, we’ve never made it this far before!” We laugh because we’ve seen all the meticulous planning happen and we know what happens when Cage reaches the end of it – he goes from a prescient supersoldier to somebody a lot like us. And that means things are getting interesting.

What I like most about seeing a half a dozen slightly different iterations of the same scene is that we can see Cage’s character growth spelled out in his face. He goes from being caught up in his own affairs to aware of the army around him, then his unit particularly and finally his partner Rita in particular. And as he gets more and more used to the idea that he can die he becomes more and more disturbed every time she does…

Ending 

All You Need is Kill doesn’t have a happy ending. Edge of Tomorrow does. There, I said it. Are you happy?

Because I was.

Yes, I get that, unless the main character dies at the end of a book, technically the story isn’t over yet. That means there’s no permanent happy ending to be had because life naturally has ups and downs. But it’s okay to end your story on a moment of triumph. People do get those in life and it is okay to celebrate them.

Keiji never really gets a win in All You Need is Kill. It’s sad, really. He puts in the time and does the work but still comes out behind. Yeah, I know some people think that’s how the world works but if that’s all your story has to tell you then it’s not very useful.

So maybe Edge of Tomorrow is a little pat. Maybe Cage is getting off easy, walking out with the aliens defeated and a legit shot at the girl he’s come to know and love. But you can’t tell me he didn’t earn it. He passed through the crucible and cast off cowardice, he was sure he had no chance to get back and enjoy any of the fruits of his labors and he still chose to suffer and die in the hopes that others might live. And in the end only two other people on the planet would believe his story if he told it. So it’s not like he’s a big shot hero. Just a guy with some unpleasant memories and a shot at a slightly better life.

In the end, All You Need is Kill and Edge of Tomorrow are both about character growth. But the film adaptation took some major gambles in changing the theme and main character to make, not a story better suited to its target audience, but a better story on the whole. And I am of the opinion that they succeeded. Not because they made the protagonist American instead of Japanese, or made his name easier to pronounce, but because they made him a person more worth trying to be like.

In my book, that’s always an improvement.

Introductions Are in Order

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Do you remember the first time you saw Captain Jack Sparrow? Of course you do. It looked just like this:

Before this you knew nothing about Jack. He’s not foreshadowed at any point in the film until this moment. But within a few seconds you understand the basics. He’s a pirate, he’s a little out of it and he possesses incredible poise and chutzpah. Just look at the way he steps off that crow’s nest and onto the docks. Odds are that’s exactly the first thing you think about when you think about Jack Sparrow.

And that is the power of the introduction.

Or, as you’ve probably heard ad nauseum, first impressions matter. How your audience meets your characters is a vital part of how their experience with your story will be shaped. A good introduction needs to tell, in a nutshell, who your character is, set the tone he brings to the story and signal his importance to what is going on.

So go back and watch that introduction again. What does it tell you about Jack?

Well, he may be a pirate but he has a solid, even handed understanding of what that lifestyle implies. He even has a kind of respect for those who have lived it to the natural conclusion. And he tends to be a big picture kind of guy – looks up and out instead of down and around, or he might have noticed his boat was flooding sooner. Oh, and the man has swagger. No getting around that. It’s a testimony to Johnny Depp’s skills at characterization that he lets us know all this without saying anything at all.

There, in sixty seconds of cinema, is a character in a nutshell. Purpose, a way of thinking with attendant weaknesses, defining personality trait. Don’t brush off all the thought that went into setting all that up – I’m not reading too much into things. This kind of characterization is the best of the best and ever aspect of it is planned like a villain orchestrating global takeover. You or I might never reach this level of skill, because it’s very hard and requires both talent and dedication to reach, but the first step is acknowledging it exists.

So find the very essence of your character and try and show it in just a paragraph or two and you’ll be on your way to a good start. Usually it’s best to show the character in his natural environment, as we see with Jack, but sometimes showing them out of their element is more effective. Really, the particulars of where and when we first meet a character should be chosen to best cast the character in the audience’s mind. More on this later.

The second thing you want from an introduction is tone. Jack Sparrow is the soul of Pirates of the Caribbean. His light hearted, irreverent and cocky attitude permeates the movie and, no matter what the mood is before he appears, as soon as we see him swaying his way onto the screen we find ourselves smiling. In part because this was the man who stepped directly from sinking ship to dockside without even a backwards glance.

Every character, even your main character, brings a certain tone to the scenes they are in, whether it be tension, fun, unease or calm. Now central characters are certainly multidimensional but even they manage to hit all the notes they need to in a tone that is unique to them. The tone you set in their introduction is the tone your audience will expect.

Finally, introduce your character in a way that fits their importance to the story. Not every character needs a huge introduction that hints at the strengths, weaknesses and hidden depths of the character. If you plan to expand them in a later story that’s fine – do it then. Sure, keep their introduction and all the rest of their screen time in step with your plans for the future but don’t turn a side character into a red herring.

Interestingly enough, Jack Sparrow is an example of what can happen if you aren’t careful with a character’s introduction and development. He wasn’t originally planned as a leading character but as a supporting character to Will and Elizabeth. Depp took the role with both hands and ran with it, resulting in the movie we have. That may not have been a bad thing but the point remains – Jack became a central character because he demanded it. If you have someone who shows up demanding a bigger role and you don’t give it to him change the way he shows up or your audience will be very confused.

Making your characters real in the minds of your audience is a very difficult task and it begins when a new character is introduced. So give them the best introduction you can.

——–

Now for an announcement! The first of my summer vacations starts this weekend. This is the longer of the two and I won’t have any time for writing this week so I’m not going to post anything either. Sorry.

But I’ll be back on July 7th with a new set of stories and a month-long feature on Wednesdays to boot! It’ll be worth it to come and check it out. See you then.

Investment Levels

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A man and his wife are sitting in their living room, on a sofa in front of the coffee table. An argument commences in the way most arguments start – with little warning about something that’s probably not important. After a few minutes the man stands up a bit too fast and bangs his shins on the coffee table. Cursing, he limps into the kitchen and pours himself a glass of wine as his wife straightens the coffee table out and gets it back in its proper place. The two are yelling at each other all the while. The man walks back into the living room, sipping his wine, the cupboard door standing open behind him.

The woman gets up and stalks past him, closing the cupboard door, while he turns his back and walks to the window, shaking his head in frustration. There’s a moment of silence as she checks the kitchen for messes and he stares out the window. They meet back at the sofa for round two. As things ramp back up again he moves to slam his glass down on the coffee table, she grabs his hand before it gets half way and gently takes the wine from him.

Aggravated, he lays in harder, gesturing wildly. She grows still, quietly answering each point until finally he traps her and triumphantly calls her out on a stupid discrepancy. She fumes for a moment, then flings the glass on the floor and storms out, leaving her surprised husband with wine and glass all over the floor, the sofa and his pants.

This is part two of a two part set. Part one is here. We’re talking about action scenes, what they look like and how to do them. What you see above is the outline of an action scene. No, it’s not a traditional action scene with chases, explosions or fisticuffs, but it’s still an action scene. It’s not that long, although with dialog it might be longer than you think, but then action scenes don’t need to be long, just engaging.

The most important thing here, at least in my opinion, is the viewpoint. It’s a third person story and that’s part of what makes it work. While we could spend all our time in the heads of one of these characters the way they’re arguing would steal much of the action – it’s the point/counterpoint of their actions, leading up to the twist when the orderly woman finally looses it and makes a mess, that gives the action drive, purpose and timing. Change the point of view to first person with either character and you get a very different scene, and one that would probably be much harder to play with the same sense of immediacy and drive that being a fly on the wall would give you.

We often think of first person as the most immediate and engaging point of view. This is not always the case, however. If you look at the scene that opens this post from the first person point of view you find that it looses a lot of the action. The characters aren’t looking at each other during most of the action and their thoughts about their circumstances and how the other person is acting are going to slow down the pacing.

The climax of this scene is where the woman, who has been obsessively keeping the room meat, finally breaks down and makes a mess. There’s wonderful symbolism about the state of their relationship tied up in that moment. But it’s not going to come through unless we’ve seen the full interplay between both characters, and for that we need a detached third perspective.

Have you ever been to one of those movies that uses a constantly jostling, tumbling camera perspective to try and create the feeling that you’re right there, in the action? Ever notice how it’s mostly just nauseating and makes the action harder to follow? Writing action from the wrong perspective can be like that. Not to say action from the first person is impossible – it can and has been done. But like with all writing choices you have to keep your audience and the ultimate goal of your writing in mind.

First person gives us an investment in the person telling the story, but third person transfers the emphasis to what is going on – and that’s the heart of the action sequence. Even some first person stories find ways to tell action from the third person point of view, that way the audience is invested in what is going on and how it will affect the characters they care about, not what the characters are thinking or feeling. There’s often very little time for either in the heart of unfolding events, so it’s better to unpack that later anyways.

It’s much better to show than tell, so some books with well written action scenes that I would recommend include The Horse And His Boy by C. S. Lewis (pay particular attention to the battle scene at the end), Madhouse by Rob Thurman (the Sawney Bean fights), Moon Over SoHo by Ben Aaronovitch (chasing the Pale Lady and Peter’s first meeting with the Faceless Man) and any of the Cobra books by Timothy Zahn for gravity defying parkour at its best. Can you think of any I’ve missed? Be sure to let me know!

And Action!

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At least half of all writing calls for an action sequence of some kind. We’re not just talking about a knock-down-drag-out slug fest here, anything from two kids chasing each other through the house to a particularly heated argument with fists banged on table tops and people pacing back and forth are opportunities for “action” sequences. With the right kind of writing a cross country race is not just a slog across back roads, it’s a gripping series of events that keeps the reader invested in what is happening to your characters.

If you’ve been to the movies on a regular basis in the last few years odds are you’ve seen a lot of action sequences so you already know that they have a lot of parts to them and can be done a lot of different ways. The construction of an action sequence is a big enough of a topic that I want to take two weeks to break it down, so this week we’re going to start with what an action sequence needs.

Action sequences all need a few basic building blocks:

  1. A character or thing that is taking action. You can’t have an action sequence based on a bunch of rocks baking in the summer sun. Ideally there will be a relatable character at the center of an action sequence, particularly if it’s early in the story, but compelling action sequences can also be built around an object or objects, like a coin being weighed and tossed about by the mechanisms inside a ridiculously complex vending machine. Or even better, a Rube Goldberg sequence that starts with that coin and ends with a bag of salted peanuts. While this sounds like a visual thing don’t underestimate how much a sequence of odd cause and effect events can interest readers, as well.
  2. A goal of some sort that everything will eventually lead to. Even if the whole point of the slip of paper making it’s way through 39 steps from the secretary who takes the message to it’s recipient is to introduce Luther Pendleton, Clockworker Supreme, when he picks it up out of his inbox, make sure all this action gets the readers somewhere. Action with no point comes across as frantic and quickly gets annoying.
  3. Things for the character (or thing) to react to. This usually comes in the form of an obstacle but can involve the character finding something unexpected and helpful, like a skateboard to use in the middle of a chase sequence. Remember, walking is an action. It doesn’t really become interesting until someone slips on a banana peel. Without something to react to, there’s no action.
  4. A sense of place. Where action takes place is as much a part of the action as what is going on. If you have any doubts about this I refer you to the clock tower sequence of The Great Mouse Detective. Your place doesn’t have to be quite thaaaat dramatic, but obviously you need something.
  5. A sense of timing. Just as with humor, in the action sequence timing is everything. You can’t just go from zero to hero in a couple of paragraphs or a few seconds of camerawork. Exactly how long is up to you but the ideal action sequence has something like fifteen to thirty ‘beats’ in it. (These are much like the beats in a beat outline, except each beat is a much smaller unit of time.) Like a plot as a whole your beats should ebb and surge, always building to the climax of your action scene.

On a very basic level, a plot is something happening. While it doesn’t necessarily follow that an action sequence, where more things happen than usual, equals more plot in a single scene it is true that people expect things to happen during a story. Unless, of course, your audience is the most elite of the literati, in which case things happening are probably actually a negative in your book. But for everyone else, a certain level of things happening is a must, and action sequences are a good way meet those expectations in a very attention getting fashion. Tune in next week and we’ll look at how to keep your audience invested in an action sequence.

Stumbling Blocks

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Writer’s block is widely viewed as the creative disaster and with good reason. When you sit down and. Just. Can’t. Write. It feels horrible. But rarely, in my experience, does the inability to write boil down to any one thing. Typically there’s a bunch of different things contributing to your inability to write and sometimes all you need to break the slump is to look at those things one at a time and determine if that’s your problem. By breaking things down writer’s block becomes a manageable problem. So here, in order of how often I find these things intruding in my writing, is a list of the typical building blocks of writer’s block and a suggestion on how you might deal with them.

  • Physical discomfort. Yeah, this is usually the biggest one for me. Sitting for a while results in cramps and sore muscles and getting up every so often to stretch, get the blood moving, ect, does wonders. Don’t discount hunger or thirst, either. While constant snacking while writing isn’t healthy, neither is starving yourself. A glass of water and a quick snack can do wonders to restore your concentration.
  • Stress. It’s an unfortunate truth that, while I enjoy doing theater or other such activities, juggling them all can often leave me too stressed or distracted to focus on writing. Now sometimes writing can serve as a bulwark between you and stress, allowing you to focus on something you enjoy while you recuperate for your next bout of stressful activity. But stress can build to the point where blocking it out for a time is not a healthy way of dealing with it. Sometimes you just need to slow down. Set writing aside and grab life with both hands for a while. Confronting the problem straight on, or slogging through a period of intense business with no distractions, is often the best way to get past this block. Constantly trying to write during times of high stress may make it harder to let go of the tension once the tough times are past, so it may be safer to just set writing aside for a while.
  • Lack of time (or sometimes laziness). This actually ties with stress in problems I have. Some stories need a lot of research, a lot of preparation and a lot of careful thought put into them. A case in point: If you’ve seen the Project Sumter Timeline you can see there are at least two major periods of time that are ripe for development. In fact, the story was originally supposed to focus on the Civil War, not the modern era. The early story ideas there just weren’t gelling because I didn’t know enough about the Western Theater of the Civil War to compile a good narrative. This situation is only nominally improved now. If a story needs more work than you’re putting into it and you don’t have the time maybe you need to simplify the story. Or maybe you need to shelve it and work on something else. Of course, if you do have the time, maybe you just need to focus more…
  • Convention. It’s very easy to get caught up in the idea that “this is how things should be”. For example, telepaths are almost always fearsome figures in paranormal fiction usually because they have ability to control people’s minds. How many stories can you do about that? How many different telepath characters can you create? But in Mindspace Investigations telepaths are feared more for their ability to directly manipulate the nervous system, knocking people unconscious with a touch or broadcasting pain so powerfully people keel over. The result is a  very different kind of telepath surrounded by different social dynamics and with different character quirks. Look over your story and make sure the tropes and conventions you’re using are empowering your story, not preventing it from going somewhere new and interesting. Because new and interesting is usually where stories need to go.
  • Original expectations. Sometimes you expect a story to go one way and it winds up somewhere else. Sometimes totally unexpected characters crop up in the background and start demanding attention. Under no circumstances can you let your original plot idea get in the way of where the story actually goes. Yes, make sure you stay on theme, but don’t be afraid of the extra work that comes with shifting focus to better suit the story you get rather than chasing the ghost of a story that may have never really existed.
  • Lack of ideas you like. Sometimes you can see stories places and just have no desire to follow up on them. Don’t force yourself. Instead grab a book, hit the movies or call up some friends and hang out and do something other than writing for a while. Give yourself a chance to recharge a little and soon enough your writer’s instincts will present you with something worthwhile. For me it usually takes fifteen minutes to an hour, but your mileage may vary.

Hopefully that helps you the next time you find yourself staring at a blank sheet of paper/word processor. Good luck!

Summer Plans

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This summer the plan is to write stories.

Shocking, yes, but I hope not entirely unpalatable to the majority of my audience. Of course, you may want to know what kinds of stories, how long they’ll be and things like that. Worry not! I have actually put some thought into that and I have plan. Of course, I had a plan last summer and things wound up going awry more than once. Hopefully this time things will work out better.

The current plan calls four a total of seven short stories, one of which was posted last week in honor of Memorial Day. Memorial to a Saint was a Sumter short but only one of two that I’m planning for this summer. The second will come at the end of the other five and will in no way serve as a prelude to Thunder Clap. Seriously, it’s related in only the most tangential fashion.

That gives us five stories to spread across three other sets of narrative worlds. We’ll start next week by going back to the divided futures and seeing what the crew of Erin’s Dream is up to and what Port Darwin looks like in a hundred years. Then we’ll jump a couple of hundred years further into the future and see how of the most powerful families on Mars lives. In three weeks we’ll be back on Earth, visiting a group of the Weavers of the Heartlands that live right here in my home city of Fort Wayne. Finally we’ll abandon Earth as we know it entirely and tag along with Dmitri Dostoevsky on the business of empire for a couple of weeks before we jump back to Project Sumter’s neck of the woods. Of course, with all that world hopping going on there’s no telling where in time we might come down, so be prepared for anything.

With all that out of the way it will be time to start the third and final novel planned for this visit to Project Sumter’s timeline. Thunder Clap is the culmination of all the work I’ve been putting into Circuit and Helix over the past couple of years and I’m excited about it. Further, there’s not much I could say by way of introduction that wouldn’t steal from the story itself so I don’t plan to write an introduction so we’ll be swinging straight into the meat of things. By my count that means that, if everything goes as planned (ha!), the first chapter of Thunder Clap will come out some time in early August. I hope you’re looking forward to it. I know I am.

In the mean time, please enjoy the short stories and let me know what you think!