Category: character

Sorry I missed last week. Was up against a deadline (which I ended up sort of hockey-stopping past anyway). Plus, I feel like… I mean, is it just me, or in a way does it feel like we’re all relearning the internet right now? One of the biggest social media site in the world’s collapsing and people are trying to figure out what to do now. Run to a new social media site? Focus on the personal site? Abandon the internet and start training carrier pigeons on the roof of your apartment building?

That’s how it feels to me, anyway.

But it’s given me time to think about a few things…

I want to bounce an idea off you. Another way to think about plot and story. I’ve talked about these things once or thrice before. To go back to my oft-referenced Shane Black-ism, plot is what happens outside my characters, story is what happens inside my characters.

Today, I’d like to frame this in a different way, though. This idea crossed my mind, and the more I think about it, the more right it sounds and feels. To me, anyway.

Allow me to explain. And we’ll do it the best way possible. With a little story.

Let’s say I decide to lose thirty pounds. As of tomorrow, I exercise more, eat better, maybe cut back on the booze a bit. I do this for five or six months and wow—thirty pounds, gone.

So what’s happened here, from a storytelling point of view?

Well, simply put, I set out to do something and… I did it. It’s technically a plot, but not much of a plot. Not much story either. With no real conflicts or hangups, there isn’t a lot of room for self-discovery. So no real character arc.

Plot is conflict. It’s forcing my characters out of their comfort zones, into these fish-out-of-water sort of situations. And these are the situations where story happens.

So what’s story?

Well, if story’s what goes on inside my character, that would mean a character arc is a change in my character. An alteration of their views. Cowards become brave. The miserly become generous. The self-centered become sympathetic to others. Or vice versa—nobody said character arcs have to be positive. Lots of heroes have become villains, lots of good folks have been pushed to do horrible things.

Put another way, story is why I decided to lose 30 pounds. Did I do it for health reasons? For image reasons?

It’s very easy to have plot without story. Hollywood’s shown us that again and again. Hell, life shows us that all the time. I bet all of us here personally know one or two people who simply will not change their views—they won’t grow or advance in any way—no matter what they see, what they experience, what they do.

I’ve also talked once or thrice about “character-based” books and films, the ones that scoff at the idea of plot in favor of beautiful tales where… well, nothing happens. People sit around and have long talks and then… don’t change. Or they go through some very artificial, forced “growth.”

Thing is, nobody decides to change their views on their own. None of us ever wake up one morning and think “hey, maybe I should completely reverse my views on student loan forgiveness.” Nobody randomly decides to become a serial killer in the shower. We’re influenced by things outside of us. Around us. The people and events we’re exposed to, the things we endure, are what make us see the world in a different light. The external events motivate the internal changes.

Going back to my initial example. So I lost 30 pounds. Why? And why now? Obviously I’d been okay with my physical condition until now, so what made me suddenly decide to drastically cut my weight? Maybe someone died and made me realize I’ve got a lot of unhealthy habits that need to change? Perhaps I finally get to meet that online crush and worried what are they going to think of the real me? Maybe someone died and I realized I needed to become a rooftop-dwelling vigilante who haunts the night. What was it that got me thinking about losing weight?

I think plot tends to be active, but story tends to be a bit more reactive. We actively participate in the plot, but story kinda just… happens to us. We don’t have as much control over it. The reason so many of those artsy tales have poor stories is specifically because they don’t have a plot. There’s nothing new or different happening to encourage that internal change.

Y’see, Timmy, plot is the effect my characters have on the events, but story is the effect the events have on my characters. They push each other along. Like when I walk—pushing off the right foot lets the left foot move forward, pushing off the left foot lets the right foot move forward, and so on. if I try to move with just one foot it can get a little… erratic. And there’s a decent chance I’ll just faceplant.

Anyway, that’s what I’d like you to think about as you poke at your own manuscript. If I’m going to skimp on plot, what’s going to cause those inner changes? Do I have a real story, or is it just a forced, false change of view? And if all I’ve got is plot… why is anyone doing anything? What kind of arc do they have?

Next time…

Look, I’ll be honest. I feel like I’ve been rambling a bit and there hasn’t been a ton of feedback since pulling the ranty blog over here. Is everyone just happy with the rambling? Is no one reading this? Is it more of that online ennui I was talking about up top? Let me know something. Anything. A topic you might like or even one you’re sick of hearing about all the time. And if nobody says anything… maybe I’ll just talk about my trip to Egypt.

Until then, go write.

Not a great surprise, I’m sure, but I follow a lot of writers on social media. Other authors, screenwriters of television and movies, some game writers, some journalists, an essayist or three. I love reading their random thoughts about writing-related things. Because, as I’ve mentioned here once or thrice or dozens of times, there are always other ways to do things. New angles to approach problems from. Different ways to catch problems before they go too far or grow too big.

And that of course brings us to Q getting punched in the face on Deep Space Nine and Sherlock Holmes living in New York.

There’s a screenwriter named Robert Hewitt Wolfe who (odds are) worked on at least one of your favorite genre shows. A while back on Twitter he did a list of 25 things he’d learned about writing for television. It’s a really fantastic little thread and you should check it out. A bunch of it applies to storytelling in general, not just television.

One particular bit stood out to me. Wolfe mentions giving the good lines to your main characters, not the dayplayers—what you’d probably think of as the guest stars. The folks who are just there on set for a day or two of this particular episode. He also adds on that your main characters should definitely be the ones getting the last line before the show cuts to commercial. Which all makes sense, if you think about it.

But I think this applies in a greater sense, too. My main characters should be the ones doing things. They should get the funny lines, yeah, but they should also be the ones taking the risks. They should be the ones solving deadly puzzles and and capturing the scorpions and working up their courage to ask out Dinah from accounting. Nobody watches a show (or picks up a book) thinking “wow, I hope that cashier is a lot smarter than our protagonist, because there’s no way Yakko’s getting out of this on his own…”

This really sums up what was wrong with so many of the B movies I used to watch during Saturday geekery. They didn’t know who they were supposed to be focused on. They’d give the cool lines, the big fight, the horrifying death, or the dramatic sacrifice to… well, anyone except one of the main characters.

And that means all these things are immediately diminished because they’re not happening to people we care about. I mean, sure, on a basic human level we care that the mutant landshark just chomped Hiker #3 into bloody chunks but honestly… did it get any reaction from you? Maybe a chuckle? Definitely not any concern or horror. Hiker #3 was pretty much just there to die. I mean, if they’d killed Phoebe… holy crap, can you imagine?

Maybe even more to the point, if my supporting characters are the ones being clever, being brave, and getting things done… what are my main characters doing? Are they just standing there being less interesting? Less active? Hell, they’re not even pushing the plot along by dying. If the landshark killed Phoebe, we’d be screwed right now. But Hiker #3? My main characters don’t even know he exists. He’s somewhere on the other side of the forest, barely on the fringes of our story. His death is irrelevant.

And, yeah, sure, maybe it’s an ensemble piece. Maybe I’m writing a huge epic with twenty main characters. My WIP, the thing I’ve been calling GJD, has over half a dozen characters in it I’d consider protagonists. But even then… I’ve got my heroes and I’ve got everyone else. In any given scene, it should be one of said heroes doing things, noticing things, reasoning things out.

It’s not exactly uncommon in my rough drafts to have a scene or a chapter end in a way that just doesn’t feel quite right. Maybe the beat’s there, but it’s just not landing the way I want it to. And more often than not, when I step back and look at it, I realize the problem’s usually that the beat’s landing with the wrong person. I’ve let someone else—someone we’re not invested in—make the big reveal or get in that cool last line.

So as you’re going through your manuscript, take a look at who’s talking. Who’s doing stuff. Who’s drawing the reader’s attention with their dialogue and their actions. Because it should be main characters. Not always, sure, but the majority of the time… yeah. And if it’s not them, maybe I need to reconsider who’s talking. Or who my hero is.

And that’s my last word on this topic.

Next time… be ready for an argument.

Until then, go write.

Oh, back again so soon? Well, I guess that’s as much on me as it is on you. But I did have another thought I wanted to bounce off you.

This is something I’ve seen several times in books and in bad B-movies, but it only recently struck me what was actually going on. How the storytellers were twisting things in a really unnatural way to solve a problem. So this may make you (and me) look back at some older posts I’ve done in a slightly different light..

But first, let’s talk about pasta.

I got into cooking during the pandemic. Started watching lots of cooking videos. Trying some things that were kind of new and daring for me. Maybe some of you did too. I’ve found all the prep and cooking kept my mind off other things but still working in creative ways. And now I can make really good stir-fried noodles.

Speaking of noodles, you’ve probably heard of the spaghetti test. When it’s cooked properly and ready to eat, you can throw a strand of spaghetti at the wall and the moisture and starches and, I don’t know, pasta epoxy will make it stick. If it isn’t done cooking yet, it just falls off or does a slow downward tumble like one of those Wacky Wall Walkers.

There’s another phrase you may have heard which grew out of this spaghetti test. “Let’s throw it at the wall and see what sticks.” It shows up a lot in the development stages of all sorts of things. We’ve got thirty ideas and we don’t know which one’s going to work? Well, let’s just do allof them. We throw all the spaghetti at the wall—the whole pot—and everything that sticks is good and ready to go and whatever doesn’t… isn’t. Sound familiar?

I think most of us have tried this sort of blunt, brute force approach on something. I know I’ve rewritten conversations severaltimes to see if it works better with Yakko taking the lead, or Dot, or Wakko, or Phoebe, or… who’s that guy? Let’s see what happens if he takes the lead in this. Same thing with names. Holy crap, Murdoch in Terminus went through sooooo many different names. Sometimes for whole drafts, sometimes just for a page or three. But then I found Murdoch and it was perfect.

Thing is, there’s a weird sort of flipside to this. Or maybe an inverse? Freaky mutant bastard offspring? Anyway, I talked a while back about shotgun art, and I think this is what’s going on here.

Sometimes, in books and movies, we’ll see storytellers who just pile on the characters. One after another after another, many of them with only the thinnest connection to the main plot. It’s the cousin of the best friend of a supporting character in one plot thread. Or, y’know, even less than that. I read one story where we spent two whole chapters with a character who’s only purpose was to bump into one of the main characters in a third chapter. That was it. She served no other purpose in the story except to be that two page delay in his day And, y’know, fill out the page count a bit.

What struck me a few weeks back is when storytellers are doing this—layering on dozens of simple, almost stereotypical characters and conflicts—is they’re taking the spaghetti approach and just throwing everything at the wall. Rather than developing any of these characters or elements to any degree, they’re just giving us lots and lots of quick, shallow ones. I mean why spend time making a complex character when I could just create fivecharacters with only one character trait each? It’s so much less effort, right? I mean, ex-wife, former best friend, alcoholic rival, pregnant woman, aggressive military guy—there’s got to be something there that strikes a chord with my reader, right?

That example I gave up above? The woman who served no purpose except to bump into one of the protagonists? She was late for work. That was it. That was her entire character. I mean, she had a name. She had some dialogue. She had a pet in a tank in her apartment (some kind of lizard, I think). But that was it. The only other thing we knew about her—her alarm didn’t go off, she overslept by almost two hours, and she was late for work. We never learned why her alarm didn’t go off (power outage? forgot to set it? sabotaging pet lizard?). We never learned why she was so tired she overslept by two hours (drastically overworked? got blackout drunk? a wild hookup that left her exhausted?).

Heck, weird as it sounds, we never even found out why being late was a bad thing (on the verge of being fired? abusive boss? big presentation?). We just knew she was late, had to get showered and dressed fast, had to get to work, and that was supposed to be enough for us. Anything else would require more thought about who she was, what she wanted out of life, and what she was actually getting.

And this book had over a dozen characters like her. Seriously. It spent a significant amount of time with people who could be 100% completely summed up with things like “Wakko needs some drugs,” “Dot’s worried about her dog,” or “Yakko is a no-nonsense soldier.” That’s it. That’s all of who they were.

One place you may recognize this from (tis the season after all) is old slasher movies. Okay, and some modern ones. Most of the cast is one note characters with just barely enough depth that we can tell the machete went through them. They’re the bulk filler of the plot. The serious woman. The goofball. The jock. The nice girl. The drunk/ stoner. They just exist to be minor obstacles between our killer and the one or two survivors.

Now, again, the idea is that the reader (or the audience, if this is a B-movie) has to find something more-or-less relatable in these broad stereotypes. I mean… you’ve known somebody who’s late for work before, right? Or was a jock? Or a serious woman? Okay, well… I bet you knew someone who was worried about their dog at some point, right?

I think people do this for two reasons. One is that they’re nervous about creating complex characters. Maybe they don’t think they’ve got the skill to do it, or possibly just not the skill to do it in the number of pages allotted to it. Perhaps they think their plot can’t function with only three or four threads. Or possibly they’re worried about having such a limited number of viewpoints.

I think the other reason is they’re worried about having characters with no traits. Like that woman running the register at the gas station. She doesn’t even have a name tag. She’s just there to sell the protagonist gas and a couple snacks. She’s got no arc or backstory or tragic flaw. That doesn’t seem right. We have to give her something, right? Maybe she could be, I don’t know, late for work or something?

Thing is, no matter what my reasoning is for this flood of one-dimensional characters, this always ends up leading to one of two things. Either we mistake their lack of depth for deliberate avoidance (“Hmmmmmm… why isn’t the writer saying why she was up late last night? Is she the murderer???”) and then we get frustrated when this goes nowhere. Or we recognize these characters don’t actually serve a purpose and get frustrated waiting to go back to someone who’s actually going to affect the plot in some way.

I also think it’s worth noting the three traits of good characters I’ve mentioned here a few dozen times—likable, believable, relatable. And yeah, I’ve also mentioned that supporting characters can sometimes get away with only two of these traits. Catch is, when characters are this flat and undeveloped, they almost always end up unbelievable—their actions and reactions just seem ridiculous because there’s no depth to ground them in. So we’re down one good trait already! Then my shotgun approach means they’re going to be randomly relatable at best, and lots of folks fall back on “snarky jerk” as a default personality, soooooooooooooo… Not a lot going for these folks.

Y’see, Timmy, burying my story in simple characters doesn’t work because it’s forgetting a basic truth of the spaghetti test. All those noodles that didn’t stick to the wall? I don’t sweep them up off the floor and put them back in the pot. The whole point of doing it all was to see what did and didn’t work—to figure out what shouldn’t be in my story.

So said noodles definitely shouldn’t be part of my finished entree.

Everyone gets the food-book metaphor here, right?

Anyway… next time…

Wow. Already halfway through October. I guess next time I could do the obligatory horror post. Or maybe talk about NaNoWriMo? Any preferences?

Either way, go write.

Last week I mentioned an issue I’d seen pop up in the Saturday geekery movies once or thrice. This one also pops up a lot in B-movies, but I’ve seen it more than a few times in books as well. So I thought, hey, here’s another thing to talk about.

So let’s talk about cats and dogs and killing people.

Something I’ve brought up here once or thrice is saving the cat. It’s a screenwriting term, but I think it applies fairly well to all storytelling. Really simply put, it’s when a character does something simple that establishes they’re a good person. Or, at the least, a person we should be rooting for. It tends to come early in the story because saving the cat isn’t about changing our opinion of a character—it’s just about reinforcing it. If we thought they were pretty good… yeah, this just lets us know we had the right idea.

Not, the flipside of this is what I call patting the dog. I’ve talked about this before, too. This is when someone does an equally small, minor thing and it’s supposed to make us look at this character in a whole new light. Saving the cat is about reinforcing an opinion, patting the dog is about completely changing it. Because of this, patting the dog tends to come later in the story—we can’t have new thoughts about a character until we’ve had time to make old thoughts, right?

Now… I mention all that because I wanted to talk about killing supporting or background characters.

How many times in books or movies have we seen the person who stays behind to defuse the bomb? There’s no time and we’ve already admitted it’s next to impossible and everybody else is clear, but god damn it they can dothis. Or we know the wendigo is out there and it can mimic human speech and these are its prime hunting hours but god damn it what if that’s really a little kid in the woods? Or we’re sure the whole shelter’s been cleaned out and we can’t contain the fire any longer but god damn it Yakko’s heading back in to make sure we didn’t miss a cat in one of the cages…

And then, y’’know, they die. Doing something brave and noble. But also, like… really, really stupid.

When we see something like this, the storytellers are trying to up the stakes. They know it’s time for someone to die so the audience understands how real the danger/ threat is. But at the same time… I mean, we don’t want to kill one of our main characters, right? And it turns out we haven’t really developed any of our other characters past  “Redhead #2” or “Soldier with Hat” so it won’t mean anything if they die.

Unlessssssssss…

What we’ve all probably tried once or twice is to make the way someone dies get the emotional response. So it’s not so much that we feel for them, it’s that the writer’s created a situation where we’d have an emotional response for anyone who died this way. This is really common in the torture porn subgenre, where it’s not so much about the character as it is what’s being done to the character. No matter who they are, no matter what they’ve done, you have to feel sorry for someone who gets that done to their… well, look, it’s uncomfortable just making this up.

And that’s what a lot of these fake “saving the cat” moments are trying to do. It’s not about creating a character who does something brave or noble or righteous—it’s about creating a situation where anyone would be brave or noble or righteous. If Thanos runs back into that burning building to make sure there weren’t any cats left behind, we’d still go “Wow… almost a complete monster, but at least he tried to save those hypothetical kittens. He didn’t deserve to die like that. Goddamn shame, that’s what it is.”

The big catch, of course, is that these situations still have to make logical sense with everything else going on in my story. Oh, and even a flat stereotype of a character has to behave in ways we understand human beings tend to behave. If “Soldier with Hat” suddenly starts disobeying direct orders, this isn’t a sudden burst of characterization—it’s just someone acting unnaturally. And if they’re doing this in an unnatural situation… well… I can’t be shocked if the whole thing comes across as fake.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with killing characters. I‘ve killed tons of people in my books. Main characters and supporting characters. I don’t know how many background folks who never got a name or more than a word or two of description.

But I have to be honest about the weight these deaths actually bring to my story. Killing “Soldier with Hat” shouldn’t seem inconsequential, but it also shouldn’t be the dramatic linchpin of an entire chapter. The wendigo getting Redhead #2 is bad, yeah, but we can’t pretend it’s as bad as if it got Phoebe. I can’t manipulate deaths into being important or make characters noble and brave after the fact.

If I want these deaths to matter—really matter, in a way that sticks with my readers—I need to actually care about the characters. If I don’t have any investment in them, if I don’t wantthem to survive, then it doesn’t matter if they survive.

And I’ll look kind of silly for insisting it does.

Next time, I’d like to explain why that guy really doesn’t represent me. Or you.

Until then, go write.