Category: challenge

If I’m going to have a lot of rocks thrown at my character, I need some solid, in-story reason why they’re being thrown. Because after my characters lose their keys or forget the password or drop the flash drive or run into a third mugger… well, it starts to look less like coincidence and more like weak writing.

Because even coincidences have a reason behind them. Why this person showed up early. Why that battery isn’t charged. Why Dot forgot to bring the incredibly important goober that this entire mission hinges on.

Even when it’s less coincidence and more an active thing—if it’s the same mugger chasing my protagonist across the city and popping up again and again—I have to ask why. Why is Phoebe so obsessed with mugging Yakko? Why does she keep doing this? Or how does she keep ending up just where he is again and again and again. or why does Yakko keep ending up in places where he’s going to get mugged when it just happened to him the other day.

Get your character up that tree and throw stones at them. Throw boulders at them. And handfuls of loose gravel. But know, within the story, why they’re all getting thrown. Is there a real reason for it?

Or is the only person the reader sees throwing stones… me?

In other news, in case you missed it, the A2Q now has a table of contents, so you can find all of it quick and easy. Also, with everything going on in the world I made my usual Black Friday offer a little early this year, so if you’re someone who could use it, please get in touch with me.

Next time here on the ranty blog…

Holy crap, it’s Thanksgiving. How is this year moving so slow and so fast at the same time? The barriers have been shattered! All time is existing at once!

Seriously, though, unless someone’s got a specific, pressing question I’ll probably take the day off and maybe throw some Cyber-Monday gift ideas at you. And next time I’ll talk about binding agreements…

Until then, go write.

And throw some stones.

Y’know, I just noticed that there hasn’t been a single comment here in weeks. Not sure if that’s because more people are leaving comments over on Twitter when I link to these… or if I just haven’t been that interesting.

…let me know down in the comments.

Anyway, I’m a bit short on time—the past few weeks have been a bit crazy for me—but I still wanted to get something up here. And I realized there was a topic I hadn’t talked about in a while. Not in any detail, anyway…

One of the basic parts of storytelling is the obstacle.  It’s what stands between my characters and whatever they want. Maybe they want to save the farm, but they’re too far in debt and can’t raise the money in time.  Maybe they want the super-bedazzled mitten, but there’s a big purple guy with his own army who also wants it.  Maybe they just want to ask that cute barista if she’d like to, I don’t know, get some coffee sometime or… no, wait, that’s stupid. Auugggggh, I have to go hide for at least a year. And maybe change my name.

Anyway…

Personally, I think an obstacle’s slightly different from a conflict.  It’s just terminology, yeah, but exterior problems tend to be called obstacles, while interior ones are almost always labeled as conflicts. Captain Marvel wants to save Earth from an alien invasion (obstacle), but first she needs to come to terms with the fact that her adoptive alien race, the Kree, may have been lying to her for years about a lot of stuff (conflict).  See what I mean?

Because of this, I prefer the overall term challenge.  I find that thinking about “obstacles” tends to make me think more about physical things in the way of my heroes, like parts of an obstacle course.  And, again, while this isn’t technically wrong, it tends to lead to a lot of the same things in my writing.  This is when I get challenges with more of an episodic, low-end videogame feel to them.  My character defeats obstacle A then moves on to obstacle B, obstacle C and finishes up with D.

So here are a few thoughts about challenges, external and internal, that might be worth thinking about while I’m planning out my story—whether I’m writing a novel, short story, screenplay. or six-part epic somethingorother. I’ve mentioned them once or twice before, so if they sound familiar… good job.  You’ve been paying attention

First Thought– I must have a challenge

I’m sure we’ve all run into books or movies where people either sit around doing nothing or just meander through events with little to no effort.  If the character needs something, they either already have it in their backpack or it’s in the first box they open. If they need help, people are always  able and willing.  Any lucky break that has to happen does happen just when they need it to.  I know these examples sound silly, but it’s stunning how often I see this happen in screenplays and/or books.

There needs to be something between my characters and their goals.  If there isn’t,  they would’ve accomplished these goals already.  Look. I just got up and made myself a drink. I wanted one. I got it. Heck, if I hadn’t said anything you never would’ve known. That’s just not the stuff we see as bestselling, high-stakes drama.

Second Thought–My characters need a reason to confront said challenge.

If my characters are going to take on a challenge, they need a reason to do it. If I’ve spent the past four days walking through the desert, getting that drink is probably a life-or-death thing for me. Captain Marvel isn’t pursuing the Skrulls as a part time hobby—it’s her sworn duty as an officer of the Kree military. I need to make sure this reason is really there.  It might be clear in my head why the characters are going to undertake a challenge, but is it clear on the page?  This is doubly true for internal things, which can be a lot more subtle depending on what point of view I’m using

Third Thought—My challenge needs a reason to exist.

Like I said right at the start, I need to have some kind of challenge, but I don’t want a challenge that only exists to be a challenge.  It’s got no reason for existing in the world of my  story, no past, no future, no motivation.   It’s only there to serve as an obstacle for the protagonist to overcome.   We can probably all think of a book or movie where, for no reason at all, an obstacle just popped out of nowhere.   That kind of stuff just weakens any story.

Challenges have a purpose.  Whether they’re the driving force behind my story or minor distractions my characters need to deal with quick, they’re a kind of antagonist—something or someone working against my heroes. That oasis is the only source of water for a hundred miles in this desert, which is why the people who used to live here set so many guards to protect it. There’s also a reason the Skrulls are on Earth (they’re searching for a hidden lab) and there’s a reason they’re tough to find (they’re shapechangers). I need to think about why a challenge is in my story, and if there isn’t a real reason… maybe re-think it
.

One other note. I think it’s generally better if my audience (reader or viewer) has at least some idea why this challenge exists.  They don’t need to know all the details immediately (or even accurately), but I also shouldn’t be saving them for a last-page reveal.

Not only am I weak from dehydration and facing ten armed guards around the oasis, the actual spring itself is booby-trapped. Someone centuries ago built all sorts of pressure plates around the thing and I’m not exactly in the best condition right now to be tip-toeing and balancing through this spike-launching mine field. Plus, if Captain Marvel can’t find the Skrull agents on Earth, they could establish a foothold here, rebuild their strength, and endanger peace throughout much of the galaxy.

This may be a weird way to look at it, but challenges are things we needto deal with, but we don’t want to deal with. My characters don’t want to deal with this because they don’t even want to be in this situation. I think we can all agree things would be a lot easier if that challenge wasn’t even there.

But it is there, so… goddammit…

Fifth Thought—My challenge can’t be impossible.

Okay, we all write fiction. But even within a fictional world there are things that just can’t happen. Normal people can’t punch out gods or outsmart supercomputers. And if all those guards around the oasis have motion sensors, night vision goggles, and shoot to kill orders, there’s very little I’m going to get—holy crap there’s fifty guards? I thought there were only ten. And when did they all get machine guns?

If you’ve ever watched a horror movie where the killer is merciless,unstoppable, and inescapable… well, that gets pretty dull after the second or third kill, doesn’t it?  One of the reasons Jason Voorhees was scary is that he never ran.  He just sort of… marched? Lumbered?  It always felt like somebody could get away from Jason if they could just go a littlefaster. If it feels like there’s no chance, it’s not interesting. We already know the outcome.

There are two  other issues with the impossible challenge.  One is if I make my challenge out to be completely impossible and my hero pulls it off anyway, there’s a good chance it’s going to knock my audience out of the story. I’ve just shattered the rules of what’s possible in my story. That usually means it’s “throwing the book across the room” time.

The second issue is when I have challenges that seem impossible to my characters, but have painfully obvious solutions to my readers.  We just don’t like these characters, by nature of their stupidity, and that’s not going to win me any points.

Sixth Thought—Holy crap there are a lot of these
This was supposed to be a quick rehash of an old topic, but I keep finding things I want to add to this. I’ve got editing to do, dammit!

This isn’t a hill-I-will-die-on rule… but I’d be willing to fight on that hill for a little while. Once I admit that I need a challenge, it’s kinda the next logical step.

If my heroes are so prepared, so trained and equipped that they’re completely ready for this challenge… well, there isn’t really a challenge, is there? If they’ve covered all the angles, researched every possibility, how can they lose? And if they can’t lose… well, that’s kinda boring, isn’t it? We know the outcome again.

A standard part of so many stories—including Captain Marvel— is when something changes or goes wrong.  The one thing we didn’t prepare for happens. We learned something new that completely flips our goals and  understanding of the situation.  One way or another, the plan’s shattered into a million pieces. I beat the guards and made it past the booby traps and WHAT? There are albino crocodiles in the oasis? Wait, are these guys actually poachers?

But think about it—when this happens in a story, it’s almost always the moment we love. It’s when my characters get to look good and show how smart or clever or tough they really are.

Once I’ve set up a challenge, it needs to be resolved somehow. I can’t crouch on a sand dune outside the oasis for five chapters studying the guards and their patrol patterns, then just wander off back into the desert. It leaves a lot of dangling threads and unanswered questions. Who were all those guys? How did they get here? Why did I give up when I desperately needed water?? How did I wander away if I was weak from dehydration? Why did the author spend five chapters on this if I was just going to wander away…?

To paraphrase Chekov, if we see a phaser on the bridge in act one, we need to see it on overload in act three. And then either disarm it or watch it take out the Enterprise. Because if I just leave it there buzzing and getting hotter, readers are going to ask what happened. They remember this stuff.

And they will judge me on it.

Those are my way-too-many thoughts on challenges. Maybe take some time and look at the challenges your own characters are facing. Are there any? Are they challenging enough? Does your character have a desire to avoid them and a need to face them?

Next time, speaking of challenges, I’m going to do something I’ve tried really hard to avoid here for years. I’m going to go negative.

Until then… go write.

            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.

            Well, it’s that time of year again.  Time to cue up that playlist of holiday music and pick out your stack of favorite movies.  Maybe you go a little more unconventional with your choices, maybe you stick to the classics, but whatever your flavor is, I’m sure there’s a lot of them.

            Hell, holiday movies are pretty much a solid, dependable genre at this point.  Just between Hallmark and Netflix, I think there’s forty or fifty new ones just for this year alone.  I worked on one ten years ago and it still gets heavy circulation.  People go nuts about the “plague” of superhero movies, but seriously—Christmas movies are the real machine.
            Anyway…

            We laugh at a lot of these and roll our eyes because they often feature some kind of painful romance.  And that’s what I wanted to talk about.  Where that awkwardness comes from and why these stories kinda keeps us at arms length rather than pulling us in.
            The standard Christmas movie goes something like this.  A young woman (it’s almost always a woman) falls for a guy who’s a few weeks away from getting engaged, married, etc.  The two of them have chemistry, while his girlfriend/ fiancé rages away at her job or as a larval Bridezilla or maybe just as a generally awful, awful person.  Eventually the guy comes to see the error of his ways and our two impossibly good-looking people end up together just in time to kiss on Christmas Eve.

            I’ve talked about this general type of romantic triangle once or thrice before, and before we dive in at might be worth going back and glancing over that real quick—it sums up the ground rules of how and why these triangles work.

            Y’see, there’s a really basic flaw in how a lot of these holiday movies set up that triangle.  It’s why they always come across as a bit weird and the protagonists always seem a bit… well, wrong.  And I think it’s one of those things that’s really easy for me to avoid once I see it all laid out

            Let’s use that basic structure up above for our example.  Our test story, so to speak.  Amy (A) has a meet-cute with Bob (B), who is in a relationship with Kat (C, just to keep you on your toes).  Amy and Bob have chemistry, Kat is bordering on (if not openly) awful and clearly wrong for Bob.  And it’s Christmas because… y’know, that’s when this always seems to happen.

            Now, normally in a romantic triangle situation like this, our protagonist would be Bob.  Bob, after all, is the one who needs to make a choice here, right?  He needs to be active and decide if he wants to be with Amy or Kat.
            But…

            Our protagonist is Amy.  And the only way I can make Amy active in this situation is to make her… well, kinda unlikable.  If she does anything to improve things with Bob—all those standard romance bonding moments like long talks and quiet dinners and heartfelt discussions about shared passions—it kinda means she’s undercutting Bob’s relationship with Kat.  Which is a little rough, morally, no matter what we think of Kat.
            And geeeeez, if things get physical to almost any level, well, now they both look bad.  Amy’s making moves on somebody in a relationship.  Bob’s in a relationship and hooking up with someone else.  I mean, how bad does Kat have to be for us to be cool with Bob cheating on her?  And if she’s not that bad, then… well, yeah, he’s a jerk.

            And, yes—sometimes odd things happen between people in really specific situations.  Everybody reacts differently to stress and fear and all that.  Firm embraces may happen.  Maybe even a kiss or odd proclamation.  But that’s a reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally fine line.  Scary fine.  It’s so easy for that situation to go from understandable and excusable to what-the-hell inappropriate.

            Y’see, Timmy, when Amy’s this point in the triangle, she isn’t the one with a choice to make. Not a real one, anyway. She has two options. She can do nothing (which ends the story pretty quick) or she can try to disrupt Bob and Kat’s relationship. Those are her only paths, as far as our plot goes, and neither of them is a great one from a storytelling point of view.

            I think when writers do this, they’re confusing the outcome with the choices that lead to it. We’ve all heard “the ends justify the means,” but this tends to ignore the fact that the means I use also determine what kind of end I get. There are tons of ways Amy and Bob can end up together, but a lot of them can be paths that make one of them—or both of them—characters we don’t really like or care about. In some cases, we may even be actively rooting against them. Cause they’re horrible people.
           Don’t worry about outcomes. Outcomes are the conclusion of a story.  Think about the path to that outcome. The choices my character has to make in order to get there. 

            Because those choices are my story. They’re my plot.  And if there aren’t any real choices, or they’re all being made by supporting characters, or they’re the wrong kind of choices, or they’re just all bad ones… well…

            I shouldn’t be too shocked if people think it’s a bad story.

            Speaking of stories, here’ s one last reminder that books make fantastic holiday gifts, and to maybe check this out if you’re having trouble affording things this year.

            Next time, I wanted to talk a little bit about time.

            Until then, go write.