Category Archives: On Writing

Character Sketching

Posted by natechen on

Okay, so we went all over world building last month/year. Worlds are an important part of speculative stories. But I, and many others with an interest in the category, feel that they are only a part of the story, created to help us examine the important questions. What is human nature, and what is our place in the world?

By showing a world that is different we get the opportunity to show the enduring nature of the human condition in what is hopefully a new light.

However, in order to do that we need something just as important as a good, believable and well imagined world. We need real, believable people to inhabit it. Unfortunately, building solid, believable characters is a much more challenging task that doing the same for worlds. As odd as it may seem, characters can be more complex than worlds. After all, people have free will, worlds don’t, at least not in the technical sense.

So how does one go about creating good characters?

Well, the answer is, it depends. Unfortunately, there’s no one magic recipe for making a wonderful character. The things people normally look at, things like back story, important figures in a characters life, defining events or ideas, are all important but not what really makes a character come alive. They’re the ingredients, but not the recipe. The key is that we relate to them, however those superficial circumstances make them seem different from us. Today, and on the next two Fridays, I’m going to look a little at how that’s accomplished.

Good, relatable characters have three things in common. They start off with little seeming relevance to what’s going on, they show growth and change over the course of the narrative and they make believable choices that hold up through the end of the story.

Let’s look at those ingredients through the prism of the classic film Casablanca. If you haven’t seen the film before, I highly recommend it. I’ll try not to spoil anything for you here, although if you’re genre savvy enough you might be able to guess anyway.

Casablanca starts with a MacGuffin, two letters of transit, being stolen from a pair of Nazis near the beginning of WWII. These letters work their way to the city of Casablanca, where many would like to use them to get passage to Lisbon and on to the United States. There, one Richard Blaine, an American with no political leanings, a self-professed tendency to stick his neck out for no one and who can’t return to the US, runs a night club.

Rick may sound like a very unlikely protagonist to exist in an era defined by its politics and sacrifice, much less to be placed in a story about an item he cannot use. But it’s those very things that make him so useful as a protagonist. He’s just trying to live his life, without all the headaches that stem from the investigation into the missing letters brings. We want to know more about him to find out why he’s avoiding the problem so studiously. Also, his avowed ignorance of the matter means everyone is trying to cajole and convince him – meaning the audience also gets to be cajoled and convinced. A protagonist who simply runs with anything set in front of him isn’t just kind of boring, he’s very hard to understand, as his motivations and reasoning is never likely to be expressed to the audience.

This applies to any character, not just protagonists. The best villains are those who’s goals are not immediately clear, who’s motivations are so dark we do not grasp them at first and who we may not even be able to identify at first. Supporting characters are often roped into their proximity to the protagonist or antagonist, and show us who and what they are in the way they deal with their friend/employer/whatever.

In short, to lay the foundation for a good character, you have to start with someone who makes the reader think, “Now who is this person and why are they here?” After all, they’ll never connect with a character if they’re never spurred to think about him.

Of course, one of the most important parts of learning about a character is looking at how they act. And that brings us to next week’s topic – characters who make believable choices. Hope you’ll drop by next week to hear all about it!

Writing Resolutions

Posted by natechen on

Hey, it’s that time of year again! That’s right, it’s a brand new year and that means people are girding themselves up and resolving to do new and exciting things like loose weight, eat responsibly and in general make it easier to make it to the next new year. But me, I’m a writer and healthy living is an area of contractual genre blindness for us. So I figured I’d come up with some writing related resolutions instead. What kind of resolutions? I thought you’d never ask…

  1. I will maintain this blog, doing my best to continue to post on schedule, no matter how many toothpicks I break keeping my eyelids open.
  2. I will not poke myself in the eye with a toothpick. It impedes the writing process.
  3. I will try to read less garbage in my continuing attempts to understand what kinds of stories currently drive the writing market.
  4. I will read more garbage with the intent to discover what makes bad writing bad and how to correct those flaws.
  5. I will remember that finding ways to resolve apparent contradictions helps a person become more creative and flexible, it’s exercise for the imagination and every writer needs more of that.
  6. I will continue to offer shameless critique of people who have succeeded in an industry I have not yet broken in to, as well as people who work in industries I know little about. If they want to sell me stuff, they better make it a worthwhile product.
  7. I will do my level best to get an e-book assembled and available for purchase from Amazon.com, so that my work can be held up for ridicule in the largest forum available.
  8. I will add as much suspense to my stories as is humanly possible, because day to day life does not contain nearly enough uncertainty.
  9. I will add more romance to my writing, because write what you know is more a loose guideline than a mandatory requirement.
  10. I will hire a person to stand behind me with a rolled up newspaper and periodically whack me over the head yelling, “Make with the funny!” This should keep my writing from being overly gloomy.*

So there you have it. My authorial goals for the year. If you have any advice for how I might live up to these goals, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Please feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments, as well.

*These resolutions void where prohibited. No exchanges, substitutions or refunds. Use only as advised. Keep hands and feet clear. Please resolve responsibly.

World Building: Start with the Basics

Posted by natechen on

Okay, so we’ve covered original vs. derivative in terms of world building. But whether you want to be completely original or mostly derivative, you’ve got to do some of the work yourself, otherwise your story will be a flat thing in a flat world (and I’m not talking about Discworld here.) So where do you start?

There are obviously a lot of things to think about when you’re building a world. What’s the geography like? What’s the climate? Who lives there, what do they want, how old is the world and what’s the current political situation, what events led to the current status quo, and on and on. To be honest, it can be more than a little overwhelming. It’s important to keep some basic principles in mind.

Build From the Bottom Up

Start with the basic ideas. Where did the world and the people come from? Is it a colony created by Earth around a distant star in the far future? Or is it on a disk on the back of elephants, put there by bickering lesser “deities”? And how much of the world’s origin is even known to the average person? If it’s not known, what are the prevalent theories?

Who lives there? Are there other races beyond humans? Are there humans at all, or is the average person an oddity there? How much of the world is actually explored and understood by the people who your story focuses on?

Frame the Rules of Enagement

What do you want to your world to be about? While in the real world science, exploration, political theory and standard of living were all linked in their advancement, there’s nothing wrong with your distorting your world slightly to bring one of those elements to the foreground. But if you’re going to do that, you need to know that you’re doing it from fairly early on, or you’ll have to go back and make significant adjustments to bring things in line.

Also, if you’re going to have magic, metahuman abilities like telepathy or telekinesis, nonhuman races or even stranger things like lurking eldritch horrors, you’re going to need to decide on that at this stage. Adding these things after the world is mostly set can result in story elements that are wildly out of place.

Set The Scene

Choose a particular part of your world to focus on first. Choose a country (or a city or a county) to focus on first. Build that place until it’s what you want it to be, then think about other parts. It’s true that no country is an island (unless, of course, the country is a literal island(s), like Britain, Japan or Madagascar, but that’s not what we’re saying here) and as you think of ways for that your first area of focus ties to other places in the world, go ahead and write them down.

Eventually, you’ll need to think about places outside where you want to tell stories, unless you want to convey the idea that you’re dealing with one of the last places on earth or a small colony in space or something. When the time comes, don’t be afraid to go back and edit what you’ve already written about your first place. It’s important not to give the impression that everything in the world revolves around that one patch of ground. But there’s nothing wrong with having a very firm idea what one place is like before you move on. If you’ve done it right, you can actually follow the lines of commerce, politics and money from place to place until you have at least a general idea what the entire known world is like!

Establish the Core Conflict

There’s a conflict inherent to every setting. When looking at the part of the world you’re working on, find out what that is. As your characters explore that world later, they’ll have to encounter it at least tangentially, or their life won’t look real. For example, in Asimov’s robot novels, it’s the struggle between Earth and the Spacer worlds that results in the murders that Elijah Bailey must solve. Bailey’s conflict is between himself and the murderer but the larger conflict in the world around him defines those smaller conflicts in dozens of ways, including the constant presence of R. Daneel Olivaw.

On the other hand, few conflicts are world wide. It’s fine if one area has one overarching conflict, such as the local equivalent to Prohibition and the resulting organized crime, while another area is wracked with conflict between a petty tyrant and la Resistance.

Identify Major Players

I’m not talking about the characters your story will be about (although they may be in your story, and they may even be your characters, the just don’t have to be.) Rather, decide who’s important in your neck of the woods. Who runs the government, who owns major businesses, who heads la Resistance (if there is one). Sooner or later, you’re probably going to need one of these people to help your story along, and it looks much better if you can show their influence from the beginning, rather than having a major player in the military-industrial complex simply appear out of thin air.

With these five basic rules to help you lay a foundation you should be well on your way to making a decent world. Getting the broad strokes down is just as important as all the other minutia, and the one won’t look nearly as good without the other. There may be another few posts on the subject of word building, but for the time being, I hope that will be enough to get the wheels turning.

Original VS Derivative: Original Worlds

Posted by natechen on

So last week I talked about the reasons why you, or the author of the book you’ve recently been bashing to your friends, might choose to write a book set in a world that is merely derivative, showing little in the way of original thought as far as world building goes. To summarize, there are plenty of good reasons to choose a derivative world over an original one. So why choose to build an original world at all?

Well, there’s several things in favor of original worlds.

For example, if the theme of your story is exploration it’s important that your readers share in the wonder and excitement of something new. The easiest way to do that is to make sure the reader has never seen the world(s) you’re exploring before, and the easiest way to do that is to build them yourself. While it’s nearly impossible to come up with totally new ideas that have never been done before (a lot of fiction is published every year, after all, and that’s without taking movies and television into account) there’s still plenty of room to innovate and combine unusual ideas. Sometimes all you need to do is take two ideas and combine them to find a totally different world waiting for you.

Another possible reason is that you are looking to really emphasize some particular aspect of human nature or society. A great example of this is if there’s some aspect of technology you want to put at the forefront (see Asimov’s robot novels highlighting AI, or any number of modern stories looking at genetic engineering or nanotechnology).

But the biggest reason is that it’s fun. It’s more fun for you*, it’s more fun for the reader. On some level all stories are about discovery. Discovering how things work, discovering how people think and feel, discovering how the story turns out. Discover is what keeps people turning the pages. When there’s nothing left to discover, the story is over. Having a world remarkably different from anything they’ve seen before gets readers excited and gives them another reason to keep turning those pages. Of course, like any aspect of story world building can’t carry the show on its own. Don’t count on your phenomenal story setting to replace good plot or good characters. But still, a vivid backdrop helps a lot more than having a bland one.

If you want to see some books with solid, original world building, I recommend Taylor Anderson’s Destroyermen series or any of the works of Timothy Zahn set in original world but especially the Quadrail series and the Conqueror’s Trilogy.

 

*Unless you don’t like writing all this stuff down. In which case might I suggest thinking about a different profession?

Original VS Derivative: In Defense of Derivation

Posted by natechen on

Okay, so this is really a big subject, and really when I sat down to poke at it I really meant to just talk about world building, so I’m going to restrict myself to that this time around. I did have some thoughts about this on other subjects, such as characterization and backstory, but I think I’ll leave that on the back burner for now. Who knows? Original VS Derivative may become a running theme. Or maybe I’ll just tackle the issue whenever I get to rambling about those subjects.

Also, as you may have already guessed from the title, I intend to continue this next week, and look at Originality.

So, what do I mean by derivative world building?

The most obvious example is fantasy world building because, as many people familiar with the genre are already aware, most fantasy world building from the 1970s to the mid to late 1990s (and even some today) is heavily influence by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, who’s Middle Earth is still the defining fantasy world for many people, including me.

The influence of Tolkien over fantasy is pronounced. For instance, one of the most ubiquitous antagonistic races in fantasy is the orc, creatures that first appeared as the shock troops for Sauron in The Lord of The Rings trilogy.  Magic rings, dwarves that are antagonistic to elves but can learn to be friends if they spend enough time with each other and rotund little people who just want to be left alone and live the good life – all of these are staples of the fantasy genre.

But isn’t relying on that kind of thing lazy writing? Shouldn’t a world builder take a little more pride in what they do?

Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that Tropes Are Tools*. Just because a work doesn’t strike you as original doesn’t mean it isn’t good. In fact, you’d have to look far and wide to find a truly original idea, most story and/or world building elements have been done before in some way, shape or form. It’s just that some patterns of them have been used more than others. So why are they so prevalent?

For starters, they give the reader a definite grounding point in the work. If an author is planning on spending a lot of time working with ideas of political or magical theory, they might not want you to have to try and remember all the details of a half a dozen new fantasy races, temperaments and class systems as well, so they just give you something they’re relatively sure you’ll already understand. It’s true that you, personally, might be able to follow all that, but you may not be representative of the audience as a whole.

Alternatively, world building tropes give the writer a definite grounding point in the work. Perhaps they feel that some part of the trope has been consistently overlooked, and needs to be explored. Perhaps they want to subvert the trope, showing what they feel is inconsistent or ill thought out about it by writing a story built around it. Or maybe the scope of the work doesn’t justify reinventing the wheel, as noted above. Readers aren’t the only one with limited headspace for dealing with a work of fiction, after all.

A third possibility is that the broad lines of a pre-existing world already provide what your story needs. Why reinvent the wheel when there’s already perfectly good framework to draw on? Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics are the starting point of most people’s A.I.s, and why not? Most people agree that it’s a sound theoretical starting point for their development (whether it can actually be implemented or not is another question, and has more to do with how hard or soft you want your sci-fi to be.) Once again, a big part of it is where the author wants to spend his or her time, world building or somewhere else. And let’s face it, there’s a lot of other places they could spend their time.

Finally, some people are actively trying to retell old mythologies in modern contexts. The appeal of old fairy tales, or Greek or Norse myth is enduring. You can’t be totally original and pay homage to those sources effectively. You can try, but you might be better off aiming for authenticity.

In short, when you stumble across what strikes you as a derivative world, don’t just dismiss it as a failure of creativity on the author’s part. Stop and ask yourself what they’re trying to do with their story, then judge it on those merits. You may find that the story still manages to be a good one after all.

*Follow the above link at your own peril.

Jargon

Posted by natechen on

Double Helix is a talent. That means he has an unusual ability that sets him far, far apart from the majority of other people. Specifically, he’s a heatsink, a talent that lets him reverse the normal tendency of heat to spread out, but only in a set area. He works for Project Sumter, a branch of the government that handles threats to the public safety from talents of all stripes. He works with getmen, tac teams, specialized equipment and dozens of other federal, state and local government organizations with their own names or abbreviations to keep straight.

Open Circuit is also a talent, one known as a fusebox, with the ability to feel electrical potential and force circuits open and closed, an ability from which his name is derived. In addition, he’s a computer savant, and fluent in all the accompanying techspeak that goes with that field of study, and an electrical engineer with an interest in hydroelectricity and the accompanying architectural challenges.

That’s a lot of terms to juggle, and that’s without bringing the other kinds of talents in Project Sumter’s archives into it, not to mention the fact that each individual talented person gets their own code name, which they’re supposed to use in place of their real name whenever they can. Not to mention the bureaucrat-speak that goes with anything run by the government.

Not to mention the legalese.

Now I love technical terms. Using them makes you sound smart, tends to impress people who know what they mean and can tell that you’ve used them correctly and generally lets you get away with using fewer words to describe a situation than you would otherwise. The problem with jargon is, not everyone knows what it means.

For a writer like myself who loves to jargonize* words, that can be a problem. You see, as often as not a reader who doesn’t know what most of the words in a piece mean tends to stop reading, rather than look them up.

Gone are the days when Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky would be something most people could enjoy. Now, it’s just meaningless garbage that people ignore in favor of their texting shorthand (infinitely more comprehensible, apparently). Not that I’m getting up on a soapbox here…

Ahem. Finding the right level of jargon to let readers follow along yet still let your characters sound informed, reliable and smart about the subjects they’re talking about is a challenge. Your best bet is probably to write the technical dialog out, define as much of it as makes sense in the current context, then try to cut the amount of jargon you use in half. Then run the whole segment by a test reader who has never looked at anything about your piece before.

Then cut the jargon in half again.

Hopefully, by that point you’ll be good to go!

Most importantly, don’t become over attached to any piece of jargon, whether it’s something you’ve cooked up or a real, technical term. Sometimes it’s more important to keep things comprehensible than to sound as authentic as possible.

 

*Jargonize: 1) Verb, the act of taking a word and assigning it an unusual and/or technical meaning.

2) Verb, to take a word and add a technical sounding suffix such as “ize” or “ium” to it, thus creating a technical term.

Story Ideas

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A lot of people think that the hardest part of writing is coming up with the ideas. After all, once you have the idea worked out the rest of the story should just flow naturally from that, right?

Well, if you’ve actually been a writer for any length of time you know that is pretty much the opposite of the way things really are. Most authors will admit that they have a lot more ideas for stories than they know what to do with. It takes months of careful thought, writing, editing, critique and rewriting to make one good, solid story. In the mean time, while not working on that story idea, you will probably have six to eight really good ideas for stories present themselves to you. That does not include the two or three dozen ideas you have that aren’t any good, sound vaguely interesting but really aren’t worth your time right now, require way more research or technical knowledge than you have the time or money to acquire at the moment, or otherwise don’t mesh with your time and talents.

In other words, if you’re a writer with a real investment in the art of story, you’ll see stories everywhere, and never lack for ideas to follow up on. On the other hand, if you’re not, it may seem like stories simply pop up out of nowhere for some people while you can never seem to get one started.

But not to worry! Finding story ideas is a skill that can be practiced, rather than a talent you are born with. So how does one spot a good story idea?

Well, the first thing you need to keep in mind is that all good stories focus on a compelling conflict. This doesn’t necessarily refer to a physical confrontation, but there must be at least two goals being pursued by a character or characters in the story, and achieving them must conflict somehow. It can be as simple as a man not having enough money to pay rent and buy a present for his girlfriend’s birthday or as complicated as a multisided dispute over territorial rites on a completely fictional world humanity colonizes after achieving space flight. It’s the working out of these conflicting goals that forms the backbone of your plot and gives your story its narrative drive.

The second thing about your story is that your conflict cannot have a simple solution. Even if the solution seems simple at first, there must be enough obstacles in place to make achieving the solution very difficult, if not impossible, otherwise your story will either be too short or feature characters who are painfully shortsighted. If it’s not possible to complicate your story’s solution, it may not be a good idea to pursue.

Lastly, your story idea must interest you, or you won’t have the drive necessary to slog through all the work necessary to turn the idea into a serviceable story. If the idea isn’t working for you, you shouldn’t work for it!

Keep these ideas in mind and sooner or later you’ll find yourself with plenty of ideas to play with. Then all that’s left is the outlining, drafting, character development, writing, editing, rewriting, ripping up huge chunks of plot and redrafting them then finally stepping away from the whole mess and calling it done before it ruins your life!

Enjoy.

Voice

Posted by natechen on

What’s the hardest part about writing for me? If you guessed “voice”, you probably stopped to read the title of this post! Voice is a weird art form, it involves picking and choosing the right words and patterns for your writing, in order to reflect your character.

Now for a person who uses third person omniscient narrative, that really only matters in dialog. You can describe events however you wish, developing a fly on the wall style or what have you, all while showing your writing abilities to their best advantage. You will have a narrative voice, but it will be all your own, and you don’t have to share headspace with anyone else while you’re writing it.

On the other hand, if you write from the first person perspective everything you write has to be filtered through your character, his or her likes, dislikes, personality, vocabulary and moods.

I normally write in the third person, so Heat Wave is something of a deviation from the norm for me. Part of the reason I avoid the first person is my difficulty with voice.

While I do like to tell stories, I often feel that there is one way to tell that story and then refine that method until the story runs like a well oiled machine. Yes, I stand in the shower and tell myself the same story over and over again, so that when it comes time to tell it for real I’ll be able to rattle it off just right, with solid delivery and no pausing. I can be obsessive like that.

While compulsive editing and revising is a good thing for a writer, in my case it has also made me very set in my patterns and habits. Differentiating voice is not always easy for me.

Of course, Heat Wave is told in two voices. As you can probably imagine, developing and maintaining distinct, individual voices for Helix and Circuit was and is challenging, and I’m not really sure they’re as distinct as I would like. While each character has a very concrete list of does and don’ts that dictate what kind of vocabulary, phraseology and tone they should strike, neither one is particularly close to my usual narrative voice. Maintaining their individual quirks and patterns is a constant challenge and requires both vigilance and careful editing.

If you’ve been reading for a while it should come as no surprise that I consider back story to be a big part of understanding voice. A person’s vocabulary and word usage is determined, in no small part, by their family and friends, the people they’ve listened to all their life, combined with their level of education and opinions of others. Their tone is an outgrowth of their personality and circumstances. Generally, once you have these two things down working out voice is just a matter refining, the catch is to keep the voice in mind.

People may look at you weird, but tell yourself stories in the tones and patterns of your characters. Don’t start with anything complicated, like trying to retell part of your novel in a new character’s voice. Just babble about the events of the day, or a funny commercial you saw on TV (assuming you watch TV) or even what you’re seeing at the moment. Then enjoy the weird looks and improved feel for voice!

Oh, and if you have the time, enjoy watching me try to keep Helix and Circuit straight. You wouldn’t think it, but it can be very difficult at times…

Writing History

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It’s one of the most absurd truisms of the modern age that the victor writes the history books. I’m not really sure how this idea got started. The original quote is typically attributed to Winston Churchill, although no one’s quite sure who said it first. My biggest problem with this idea is how vigorously actual history seems to contradict it.

Take the Peloponnesian wars. Thucydides wrote a history of them, one of the early scholarly histories. He was from Alimos, a small place just outside of Athens. But they lost the war, so Thucydides had no business writing history books about it, right?

Another example from antiquity is Josephus, the historian who wrote a history of the Jews while they were under the rule of Rome. The Jews would not have a nation to call their home for more than 1800 years, living an existence that was pretty much the total opposite of a victor, but Josephus still wrote the history of his own people.

Or, more recently, consider the American Civil War (or War Between The States, or what have you). In spite of the fact that no one has fired a bullet in that conflict in nearly a hundred and fifty years, no one can agree on the history of it. Was it a war of northern aggression? Was it a war to liberate slaves? Was it a war to protect the Union? Do they even mention protecting the Union in history books any more? How did the premier cause of the victors wind up getting so totally lost in the retelling? Weren’t these people writing the history books? And how did the South get away with creating the legend of the Lost Cause if they weren’t writing any of the history books?

There are other examples, to be sure. From monasteries on the British Isles writing records of being sacked by raiders to Masanori Ito’s book Fall of the Imperial Japanese Navy right up to the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, the defeated have been chronicling their own history and doing their best to both remember and learn from their defeats ever since the study of history first came about.

To me it frequently feels like this idea that the history books are written by the winners actually has its roots in a famous quote from someone on the other side of the English Channel from Churchill. Joseph Goebbels told us that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will come to regard it as truth. We’ve come to accept this as a truth, that if we can just get a platform to push out agenda loudly enough and often enough, we can make people think whatever we want about anything, even history.

However, in spite of telling his lies for 12 years, Goebbels is not now thought of as a great historian, a visionary thinker or a leader. He’s thought of as a liar.

Perhaps the real problem is the lack of scope in this way of thinking. There are no victors in history, there are only people who come for a short time and then quickly fade away. We don’t write history. Rather, history is written on us, its letters and words the lives of people and the traditions, values and literature they leave to their culture. History shows through how we live and what we do far more than what we say. After all, you can’t know the winner until everything’s over, and in history, the end has not yet been written…

Points Of View

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By this point you’ve probably realized that Heat Wave is told from two different perspectives: Double Helix, a member of Project Sumter, and Open Circuit, a wanted man. You’ve probably also noticed that so far, Helix has had more time in the driver’s seat than Circuit has. You can expect that pattern to continue, at least for the near future. But here’s a fun fact: When I originally had the idea for these two characters I actually intended for Circuit to provide most of the perspective.

Helix is pretty much an accidental viewpoint character. I never even intended to use him to provide perspective. When I first created him, Helix existed pretty much entirely to provide a foil for Circuit. So how did he wind up becoming the primary point of view?

Well, as you might already suspecte, it had very little to do with his character and a lot to do with Circuit, and a little bit with the needs of the story (Circuit and Helix existed in a number of forms before they found a home in the world of Project Sumter.)

The protagonists of Heat Wave started off in a series of unpublished short stories told from the perspective of Circuit that served to help me refine their voices and establish many of their important character traits. I hadn’t been working with Circuit and Helix long when I came to realize that, while Circuit could be fun to write and has a unique way of looking at the world, prolonged exposure to him steals much of his charm.

For one thing, he’s very superior and sooner or later your going to get the feeling that he’s looking down on you for something or another (which is understandable, because he is.) For another, he’s not very sympathetic to others, which also serves to make him hard to sympathize with. But most of all, he’s given to sermonizing on the importance of his own point of view, which can really get dull.

Worse, he wouldn’t be as effective a character as he is without those qualities, so I couldn’t simply sort through a box of writer’s tricks for replacement quirks. Circuit really needs to be a sanctimonious, arrogant know-it-all in order for Heat Wave and some of the ensuing stories to work.

In addition it quickly became clear to me that only showing things from Circuit’s point of view wasn’t really working either. The stories needed some kind of insight into how Circuit’s enemies were working against him to really be effective, and Circuit himself couldn’t provide that insight without introducing a whole new host of problems (like, how does Circuit even have trouble with Helix if he understands him so well?)

When Project Sumter was added to the mix to keep track of talents and serve as an the organizational foil for Circuit, it only seemed natural to have a point of view on that side of things. Helix, as the most thoroughly established character in the story after Circuit, was the natural candidate.

As the story progressed Helix came to take more and more narrative time away from Circuit, in part because he has the more interesting early parts of the story and in part because Circuit with time on his hands is truly obnoxious. If you enjoyed Circuit’s opening narrative, worry not! Once he has something constructive to do it will be safe to let him out more often. In the meantime, hopefully Helix will be able to keep your attention.