September 19, 2019

Revenge! For Wanda!!

Finally! At long last the day has come! Don’t act so surprised—you know what you did and you’ve known it would…

…you don’t? Oh. Well, this makes things a little awkward, doesn’t it?

Look, we’ve all been waiting for this for a while. Revenge. The moment Yakko finally gets his comeuppance for what he did to me and my friends. Today’s the day he learns just how big a mistake that was. He crossed the wrong guy that day.

Plus, let’s be honest. Revenge stories can be loads of fun. John Wick. Arya Stark. The Wraith. Okay, probably not the Wraith, for a couple of the reasons I’m going to be talking about here. Thing is, a well done tale of revenge can check off a ton of storytelling boxes and almost everyone is up for it. Seriously. There’s something just so wonderfully cathartic about them.

But… by the same token, a good revenge story is kind of a balancing act. Not too much of that, just enough of those, and that base has to be juuussssstperfect if it’s going to support this whole thing. If one of these things is off, my whole story can stumble pretty easily. More than one and… well, I’m probably going to faceplant. Hard.

It struck me that I’ve seen a lot of stories make that faceplant. Sometimes in books, sometimes on screen. Sometimes, while poking around looking for Saturday geekery movies, I come across some things where it’s clear just from the description that they’ve hit the ground hard. So I figured it might be worth going over a few of those key elements to keep in mind. Y’know, before we go out to seek revenge on those who wronged us…

And, as always, this is just me babbling on. There has been no exhaustive study of the canon and there are always going to be exceptions. But I’ve been mulling on this for a while and I feel like it’s a pretty solid checklist.

First off, right at the start, is this something that actually needs revenging? Yeah, we all understand why John Wick goes after the guys who killed his dog. But what if they’d called his dog ugly or stupid? There’s the bully who puts cigarettes out on Wakko’s arms, but also the one who shoots poorly-aimed spitballs in class. Someone can blow up my car, or they can blow up my car with my partner and cats trapped in it. Some of these acts deserve wild, hard-bitten revenge and others…
Well, I mean they’re still bad, but are they really revenge-worthy? Should I really dedicate my life to balancing the scales just because somebody torched my Yaris? Or stole my lunch from the break room fridge? That would seem a little extreme, yes?

In this sense, a revenge story’s a lot like a redemption arc. I need my reader-empathy set to high so I  have an honest sense of how this first, inciting act (ooooh, inciting act–doesn’t that sound all professional)  is going to be viewed by my readers. Will they agree it’s something that requires vengeance?

Second thing is whether or not my character is the person who should be getting revenge. To use an earlier example, if someone kills John Wick’s dog, we completely understand why he goes on his revenge spree. It’s an intensely personal loss for him… but it isn’t for the nice old woman he runs into on the beach sometimes who liked to pet the dog. She might be upset, even angry to hear the news, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense for her to go get revenge, does it?

Revenge is a very personal thing. So the more removed and unconnected my protagonist gets from that actual act, the less it feels like revenge and the more it feels… well, it could be a bunch of things as we get farther away. Maybe Dot hired a hitman to get revenge, so he might be administering the beatdown or pulling the trigger, but for him it’s really just a job. And that police detective obsessed with the case? Well, for her it’s more about justice than vengeance. So revenge tends to stay tight and intimate. Personally, I think it needs to be a family thing, even if you want to take the broader sense of family (in that I can consider my best friends or my teammates “family”).

My third point is very much my own, but it’s also probably the one I feel strongest about here. I think it’s a key part of a revenge story. The person or persons my protagonist is getting revenge against must know why this is happening. Yeah it’s really cool that my heroine’s picking off the folks who killed her family one by one with a sniper rifle. But if they don’t know why it’s happening, who this ruthless killer is… then isn’t this just a random killing spree?

I feel that a big part of a revenge story is that it’s kind of symbiotic, from a storytelling point of view. It’s a relationship between the revenger and the revengee, so to speak, and one sided relationships are always just… well, weird. They need to go both ways. Yes, we want Phoebe to get her revenge, but we also want Yakko to know why she’s doing this. Why is she coming after him? Why is she doing these things? He needs to acknowledge this, one way or another—even if he just dismisses it (“…but I’d do it all again, lady, whoever you are!”).

And the reason for this is that we understand, on some level, that if Yakko doesn’t know why this is happening, then he’s just a victim. Not an innocent victim, no, but still just a victim. It’s the difference between my character seeing their empire torn apart and them knowing why it’s being torn apart.

Which leads me very nicely to my fourth and final point. Revenge can be a messy business. Very messy. Blood is often spilled, property is usually destroyed. And we’re all cool with that. We like seeing people getting what’s coming to them. Maybe even with a little interest.

That’s where it gets tricky. It’s really easy in a revenge story to go too far with the blood spilling and the property damage. And when I do, that’s when my protagonist stops being the hero and becomes a monster in their own right. Yes, we understand why John Wick wants revenge for his dog being killed. But if his response was to go visit the families of everyone involved and kill theirdogs right in front of their kids…? Well, I don’t think most of us would be rooting for him quite as much. Likewise, if Phoebe gets revenge on the guy who killed her husband by… oh sweet jeebus she dissolved him alive in a lye pit? Seriously? And the crane just lowered him a couple inches a day? It took eight and a half days for him to die? I mean, at this point it’s essentially a torture porn story where we’re being asked to root for the killer.

In a lot of ways, revenge is like something I’ve talked about before—the bully balance. Once those scales tip, our mood is going to shift, too. We stop feeling good about the revenge and we start feeling sympathy for the people they’re exacting revenge on. Again, they become the victim and my protagonist becomes the aggressor. Which alters… everything. The whole tone of my story will change, and a lot of things will be questioned. Not in a good way.
Y’see Timmy, in the end a revenge story is all about the characters. Why are they doing this? How are they doing it? Are they managing to walk that tightrope between being a hero and being a monster?  Or have they fallen off it…?

Next time… I think I want to talk about something we usually don’t talk about.

Until then… go write.

January 24, 2019 / 3 Comments

A League of Their Own…

            Sorry for missing last week.  Just had a couple of those jumbled days where I kept getting called away for other things.  And while I had a topic for this week, it never quite gelled the way I wanted it to in my head.  Although four or five others did, so I’m set for a while here.
            (topic suggestions are always welcome in the comments, though)
            Anyway…
            I wanted to talk a bit today about godlike characters.  Not just in the sense of robes and brilliant auras and hurling thunderbolts.  Sometimes it’s that rugged, locked-and-loaded man or maybe the tall, super-competent blonde.  Really, it’s anyone who is, for one reason or another, way beyond the level of every other character in the story.
            Which really means they’re out of everyone’s league.
            Quick segue.
            One thing that I see come up in discussions of different open-play, MMPORG type games is a balance between players.  For purposes of this discussion, it’s when the overall population of the game has hit a level where it’s essentially unable to support new players.  If everybody’s level 72, it makes it tough for anybody to interact at level one. All those 72’s are using their bigger, badder gear to go on bigger, badder missions, where they’ll face bigger, badder monsters and get even rewarded with even… well, you get the point.
            Meanwhile, I’m over here in the goblin village, poking at things with a knife and hoping I can get my dagger skill up to 65%…
            And if we actually have to fight each other?  Well, I don’t have a prayer.  I mean, we can argue that statistically there’s a chance, but really… there’s no chance.  And from the 72’s point of view, I mean, can we even call it a wasted three seconds?  Yeah, there may be some jerks who just like beating up the noobs, but for everyone else… yeah, this gets to be kind of boring, right?
            See where I’m going with this?
            Stories need this kind of balance, too.  We want characters to have a chance at achieving their goals, but we also don’t want it to be easy.  If the story leans too far one way or the other, it just gets dull.  For everyone.
            F’r example… 
            If my antagonistis all-powerful, my hero never has a chance.  That’s boring as hell.  There might be a few dramatic moments, if the writer really knows what they’re doing, but probably not.  We all know how it’s going to end, and if we know where it’s going… well, then this is all just noise.
            Plus, it’s discouraging.  We identify with the heroes.  That’s why we’re reading.  And to see someone we identify with get beaten down again and again by an opponent we absolutely know they can’t beat…
            Well, it doesn’t make for a lot of repeat reads, let’s say that.
            Keep in mind, too, my antagonist doesn’t have to be a seven foot-tall somebody in body armor and a chrome skull mask.  The high school mean girl, the abusive drill sergeant, even society in general– any of these can be the antagonist.  And, again, if there’s no chance whatsoever of beating the antagonist, my story isn’t going to hold most people’s interest.
            I’ll also point out that beating the antagonist doesn’t always mean bringing about their ultimate, final defeat.  But as far as our immediate story’s concerned, the bad guy needs to have a chance to succeed at their immediate goals.  No chance means no interest.
            Now, as I hinted above, the flipside of this is also true.  If my main character has absolutely no chance of ever being stopped or hindered in any way, that’s not very interesting either.  I’ve talked about this once or thrice before.  When Yakko can effortlessly deal with anything the antagonist, nature, or the universe itself throws at him, it gets boring really fast.  If Dot’s prepared and trained for everything, to the point there’s little or no chance of failure, that means there’s no challenge.  And no challenge means… well…
            An analogy I’ve mentioned before is me getting a glass of Diet Pepsi.  Not exactly something epic stories are built around.  You’re not going to see teams of people stealing ships, racing down city streets, or forming Fellowships around me as we undertake the great adventure of going to the kitchen and opening the fridge.  Because it’s mundane.  It’s easy. There’s absolutely no challenge in it.
            Even if something might be challenging for us, personally, it doesn’t mean we want to watch someone else do it with no effort.  I’m pretty sure if a zombie plague ever descended on the world, I’d be one of those folks gone in the first week or two.  But I don’t have any interest in reading three hundred pages of someone who walks through the undead apocalypse like it’s a guided tour.  Yeah, no matter how colorful the descriptions are of zombies being blown apart.
            Y’see, Timmy, if there’s no challenge—because either my protagonist or antagonist are too powerful—it means there’s not much of a plot.  As I’ve mentioned before, no plot makes it really tough to have a story.  And you may have noticed there’s not a big market for high-stakes character descriptions.
            I also want to toss out one other downside to nigh-omnipotent characters. Gods are boring as hell.  Seriously.  They’re tough to relate to, and if people can’t relate to my characters, they’re probably not going to make any investment in them.  Good characters have needs and desires and flaws, but godlike powers tend to nullify most of those things. 
            Even if it’s not actual powers, it can be dull.  When you have characters who can do anything and succeed at anything… it just gets boring fast.  We like reading about problems, not about potential problems that were planned for and avoided.
            True fact—one I worked very hard at.  My Ex-Heroesbooks have a super-competent character named Stealth.  She’s their version of Batman.  Every book in the series has at least one example of her demonstrating how she’s hyper-trained and/or four steps ahead of everyone else.
            But…
            Every book also has at least one example of something getting past her. Something she didn’t catch or didn’t think of or somebody else figures out first.  She’s world’s greatest detective, but she’s still fallible.  She not perfect.
            If you’ve got a powerful, competent character in one of your stories, take another look at them.  Do they need to be that strong?  Would they be more interesting if there were two or three scenarios they hadn’t been planning for over the past six months?  Isn’t your story going to be a bit more interesting if success and failure both seem like viable outcomes?
            I think it would. 
            But that’s just me.
            Next time I want to talk about something a little more campy.
            And maybe update the FAQ.
            Until then… go write.
September 21, 2018 / 4 Comments

One and Done

            Okay, book edits have been turned in, but I never made it to IKEA.  One of our cats is sick and has been getting daily trips to the vet for fluids.  So the library and game room are still stuck in transition.
            Plus, I managed to squeeze a ranty blog post into all of this, only to realize at the last moment (just as I was inserting links and pictures) that I’d talked about this exact topic just a few months ago.  I mean, I used some of the same examples and everything.  I may be a hack, but I’m not that much of a hack.
            So let me skip ahead in my list of topics and talk briefly about killing people.
            A while back I mentioned a bad habit people have that I named “describe and die.”  It’s when an author (or screenwriter) gives us tons of details about a character in an attempt to make them likeable and relatable.  As a way to get us quickly invested. 
            And then kills them.
            Today I wanted to mention a little offshoot of this that I ended up talking about with my editor recently.  Call it a connected bad habit.  One I think grew out of necessity…
            This is going to seem rambling, but stick with me.
            One of the ugly truths about screenwriting is that so many things come back to budget.  I can write the most elaborate script with a broad palette of characters, but at the end of the day it’s going to come down what we can afford to do—especially in television.  I may have written dozens of little characters here and there to help bring the world to life, but the reality is they’re going to be cut and trimmed down to the bare minimum we need to move the plot along.
            Of course, most of us don’t see this.  We just see the final version.  And we tend to absorb some storytelling lessons from it.  Even the bad, unnatural ones.
            In screenwriting it makes sense that we’ll never, ever have a speaking role that isn’t important.  It costs almost a thousand dollars just for someone to have one line.  Seriously.  That actress saying “Your drink, sir”—she just paid rent for the month.  And she’ll get a sliver of the residuals, because she’s a speaking actor.  So Hollywood is reeeeeeeeeaaally conservative when it comes to handing out random lines to random people.  I’ve personally watched those parts get whittled away as new script revisions came out.
            Of course, that’s Hollywood.  Books have no budget.  We can have casts of thousands and dinosaurs and spaceships and all sorts of stuff.  If someone needs to speak, they can speak.
            But…
            Some folks still follow that minimal-character idea, not understanding it’s an element of budgeting, not storytelling.  And when I combine this with describe-and-die, it creates a really weird mechanic in my story.  Not only do I “create” real characters just to kill them off… they’re the only other characters I’m creating.  Nobody else gets a line of description or a few words of dialogue.
            Y’see, Timmy, now my story only has three types of people in it.  Protagonists, antagonists, and… victims.  Heck, depending on my story, I may not even have an actual antagonist.  Now all I’ve got is protagonists and victims.
            Which doesn’t feel like a very well-rounded world, does it?
            I’ve talked here a few times about the need to keep things tight, but—like so many things in life—this goes horribly wrong once it’s taken to extremes.  I don’t want to trim away every single interaction or description in the name of brevity.  A non-stop, breakneck paceis going to get exhausting really fast.
            I shouldn’t be afraid to have a little more in my story.  I don’t want my world to be cluttered, but I also don’t want it to be a stark, utilitarian framework.  Because the truth is… sometimes people are just there.
            Usually blocking an aisle in IKEA.
            Next time…
            Okay, look, my schedule for topics is a mess now, so if you’ve got something you really want to hear me blather on about, let me know down in the comments.  And if nobody does, I’ll just end up blabbing on about Sherlock Holmes or something…
            So until then—go write.
August 17, 2018 / 1 Comment

Last-To-Be Chosen Ones

            Day late.  Sorry.  Still recovering from the move.  It’s just this sort of ongoing project…
            Anyway, an idea crossed my mind recently and—after batting it around for a bit—I thought it might be worth sharing with all of you.
            A while back I talked a bit about a certain type of character—the chosen one.  That lucky person pretty much preordained for a great destiny.  Sometimes literally preordained.  Ancient scrolls and prophecies aren’t that uncommon, although there are also legendary parents and preternatural skills to take into account.
            The most common beginning for such a story is, after a chapter or two establishing their completely normal and mundane life, somebody shows up to collect said chosen one and whisk them off to that amazing destiny we were just talking about.
            And that’s kinda the bit I want to talk about.
            I think it’s very important to note that our chosen one’s story doesn’t begin because of some overwhelming threat.  It’s almost always for simpler reasons.  They’re finally the right age.  They found the hidden room.  They inherited that special book or locket or sword.
            You might be able to find an exception to this rule, sure, but let’s go over a few popular examples…
            Buffy Summers doesn’t receive her Slayer calling because the Master is rising in Sunnydale—the last Slayer died and she inherited the power.  That’s it.
            Harry Potter isn’t brought to Hogwarts to fight Voldemort—he’s only brought cause it’s his birthday and he’s old enough to start classes.
            Katniss doesn’t take her sister’s place to become the symbol of the resistance—she just happens to be successful in the Hunger Games in the right way at the right time.
            Luke doesn’t join the Rebellion to blow up the Death Star.
            Rey didn’t join the resistance to fight Kylo Ren.
            Jay didn’t join the MIB to stop an Arcturian Battle Cruiser.
            I think the reason for this is that if X is this overwhelming threat… all these training montages and bonding moments are going to seem like a horrible waste of time.  “Wow, Phoebe’s the chosen one—the one who was foreseen—who will save us from the murderous threat of the Yakkonator.  Even now it closes in on our city of three million people, ready to drain their blood and harvest their souls. But first… you need to practice your footwork for a few days.  Also, you and Wakko need to figure out how to be better partners—in every sense.  Focus on that for a bit.”
            One of the big tricks to a successful chosen one story is that it’s really two parallel stories.  It’s about Phoebe discovering her destiny/parentage/abilities, yeah, but it’s also about our heroes discovering, oh, crap, it looks like the Yakkonator is waking up now, not in 2021.

            These threads need to stay separate so they can each develop on their own.  Phoebe needs that time to train and grow as a character, because if all we need to do is toss a nineteen year old Banana Republic clerk in front of the Yakkonator—trained or not—to fulfill her destiny, then the Yakkonator isn’t much of a threat, is it? And if she absolutely needs training but the Sacred Order of Antiyakkination waited until the last possible minute to bring her into the fold… seriously, what’s wrong with these guys?  If you’re trying to fit six years of training into six days, maybe you just could’ve started six years ago?  These people just look stupid now.  And if she needs those years of training but pulls it off in days… well, aren’t we back at that first example again?

            So when I’m plotting out a great destiny to for my chosen one, I need to remember not to tie them immediately to that destiny.  Give them space to grow.  Maybe not hit them up with that ultimate evil in the first hour or two.
            Everyone’ll have more fun with it that way.
            Next time, I’d like to encourage you to take a few deep breaths.
            Until then… go write.

Categories