Category: character

The answer to that question, according to Hitchcock, is your paycheck. He was talking about actors, but there’s a bit of truth in there for writers, too.

So, a while back a friend of mine asked me to look at a script he’d been working on. It was pretty darn solid, overall, but right in the beginning I noticed something that struck me as a bit odd. Our hero’s renovating a large home and has been told one area of the estate is off limits. Don’t go through that door. Well, as tends to happen in movies… guess what?

It was how it happened that got my attention, though, and not in a good way. Just a few pages later said character is slamming his shoulder against the door three or four times until it pops open and he can explore a bit. Which was odd, because up until now this guy had seemed like a straight-shooting model citizen. Now suddenly he’s breaking and entering just to satisfy a mild sense of curiosity.

Here’s another example (not from my friend’s script). Let’s say Bob is hanging out with a female friend, they decide to go out, and she heads off to her room to get changed. It says one thing about Bob if, when he heads to the bathroom, he happens to catch a glimpse of his friend naked through the door and has a momentary “Wow.” It says another thing if, as soon as she walks off, he casually finds the angle that lets him stare into her room. It’s a third thing altogether if he pulls out his cell phone to use the camera and take pictures. On the surface, the same thing is happening–Bob is seeing his friend with no clothes–but these are three very different scenes because of his intentions in each one (innocent, lecherous, and kinda creepy).

Y’see, Timmy, motivation is one of the keys to storytelling, because it’s one of the keys to great characters. It’s why everything happens, and why someone’s doing something affects how they do it. People can be motivated by greed, survival, anger, hatred, fear, duty, love, lust, zealotry– any number of things. Everything a character does has to come from some type of motivation. Everything. Unmotivated characters will just sit on the couch for 300 or so pages, and nobody’s interested in that. We all know people like that in real life. Why read about it? More to the point of this week’s little rant, it’s the writer’s job to make sure motivations make sense and are consistent for both the characters and their world. When they aren’t, that starts chipping away at suspension of disbelief.

Now, hands down, the biggest and most common problem is when the writer confuses their motivation with the character’s. The big battle can’t happen if Wakko doesn’t do this, so he does this. I need Yakko to say something so we can get to chapter seven, so Yakko says it. Granted, this is how all writing happens, but if you’ve already established that Wakko would have a strong aversion to doing that and Yakko would never say this, the reader’s going to wonder where these choices are coming from. Just because the writer has ultimate power over the characters does not automatically mean anything that gets written is “right” for the characters. Even when you’re behind the wheel, you have to drive certain ways in certain places. If you doubt this, try shifting into reverse next time you’re on the freeway.

Probably the most common place for this kind of motivational mistake is dialogue. The writer comes up with a funny or cool line and needs a character to say it. Any character. Someone has to say this cool line! Suddenly Father Mike is cracking sex jokes and Sister Hannah is cursing like a sailor. Still great lines, but would these people really use them? The need for explanation can also lead to unmotivated dialogue and make monosyllabic characters start lecturing like college professors. This is a two-fold problem, because not only does it weaken the suspension of disbelief, as mentioned above, it also breaks the flow of the story.

Motivation also becomes a problem when the writer is trying to hit certain benchmarks or requirements with their work. Gurus exhort people to hit this point by page nine, have this action by chapter ten, or make sure this happens X number of times before Y. Fledgling writers follow these rules as a rigid gospel, make their stories and characters twist unnaturally to meet them, and often the result is just a bunch of false drama. In Hollywood, where they refer to elaborate stunt or effects sequences as set pieces, it’s not unusual for producers to hand the screenwriter a laundry list of set pieces to fit into their script– or to write the script around. Robert Towne’s script for Mission Impossible II is, alas, an example of just such a thing. Throughout it, stuff just happens. No reason for it, it just happens because the director, producers, and star wanted it in the script. Don’t even get me started on Wanted.

In all fairness, some times those requirements are self-imposed. Like that cool line of dialogue I mentioned above, the writer comes up with something they just can’t let go of. Maybe it’s a certain action sequence, a clever homage, or some odd wish-fulfillment being expressed on the page. Regardless, it usually ends up with some unmotivated decisions, violence, or romantic encounters.

Another common mistake, on the flipside, is to give the motivations for every single thing that happens, including characters or actions that… well, that just aren’t all that important. Odds are I don’t need to know that the woman at the bus stop ran away from home at age thirteen or that the long-haired waiter doubles as a male stripper to pay for med school. As I’ve mentioned before, if it doesn’t have a direct effect on the story being told, don’t waste time with it. It may feel luxurious and literary, but more likely it’s clumsy and confusing.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying these characters and actions shouldn’t have a motivation. Everything in your story needs a motivation, but the reader doesn’t need to know it all. They just need to see the consistent results of it. At no point in Casablanca is it ever brought up or discussed why Rick suddenly decides to be generous to the young couple trying to win money for an exit visa. People comment that he did it and it’s very out of character, but why he did it is never mentioned. Does it need to be? No, of course not. Anyone paying attention to the film can explain why Rick has this sudden turn of heart.

Now, there is another school of though in writing that unmotivated action is the best. Life is random after all. Much as we don’t like to think about it, people often suffer setbacks that have no deliberate machinations behind them. They get dealthly ill. They’re involved in fatal car accidents. In the real world, stories don’t always get happy endings and neither do people. Things get left unresolved and mysteries go unexplained. So doing this in your work can only make your writing more realistic and believable, yes?

No.

I’m calling shenanigans on this one, and on every professor, critic, indie filmmaker, and self-proclaimed guru who pushes this viewpoint. If you take this approach in your writing it isn’t artistic– its lazy. Things like that happen in the real world, but we’re talking about fiction. Nothing on the page is coming from the randomness of the universe, it’s all coming directly out of the writer’s mind. It’s a created world, and as the writer it’s your job to resolve the issues you’ve created. To have readers invest their time and emotions in a character which the writer then kills off just for the heck of it is cheap. When doing so leaves conflicts unresolved, it’s a cop-out. It’s the kind of pretentious excuse made by people who don’t actually want to put any real effort into their work.

Nobody here wants to be that kind of writer, right?

Good.

Next week, before we get further into the sparkly holiday season, I want to talk about some stuff that really sucks. No, seriously.

Until then, hopefully this has motivated you to go write.

It’s like a radio–a radio tuned to the frequency of evil!

If you get that reference… God, I pity you.

So, I’ve talked about different genre issues here a few times before. With the upcoming holiday, though, I thought it would be nice to pause and talk about one that’s near and dear to me.

To be honest, I wasn’t always into horror. As I noted on a friend’s website recently, it wasn’t until my college years that I really embraced the many forms of the genre. Before that, I was terrified of more things than we’ve got room to list. Yet I eventually hit the point that I started selling original horror stories of my own and was even asked to become a dark god and crush the hopes and dreams of mortals.

But that’s a story for another time…

The different forms of horror is what I really wanted to talk about in this week’s little rant, though. Anyone who’s dabbled in the genre knows that, alas, when you tell folks this is your field you tend to get lumped into this vague slasher/ vampire/ Satanist category. Either that or earmarked as someone working through childhood issues. Most folks don’t realize horror can be broken down into many different sub-genres, just like comedy, drama, or other art forms like painting. Being under the same umbrella of “horror” doesn’t mean Dracula is anything like Hostel, and neither of them resembles Resident Evil. As a wise man once said “I am nothing like Family Guy!!”

The catch here (and there’s always a catch, or you wouldn’t be bothering to read any of this, would you?) is that a lot of fledgling writers aren’t sure where their stories fit under the umbrella, either. They’ll start off with the trappings of one sub-genre, move into a plot more fitting a different one, wrap up with an ending that belongs on a third, and have the tone of yet another through the whole thing. They have a specific name for this problem. It’s called Plan 9 From Outer Space.

It’s important to know just what you’re writing, for two different reasons. One is so you’ll be true to it and don’t end up with a sprawling story that covers everything and goes nowhere. You don’t want your slasher pic to degenerate into torture porn, and if you’re aiming for cosmic-level evil it’d be depressing to find all the earmarks and resolutions of a common supernatural story. You also want to be able to market your story, which means you need to know what it is. If you tell an editor it’s not torture porn when it plainly is, at the best you’re going to get rejected. At the worst, they’ll remember you as “that idiot” when your next piece of work crosses their desk.

So, here’s a few different panels of that umbrella. Some of them are established sub-genres which have already been debated to death. Others are just things I’ve noticed on my own that I feel are worth mentioning. Use them a lot and maybe they’ll enter the lexicon.

Supernatural stories

This is one of the easiest ones to spot. It’s your classic ghost story. The phone lines that fall into the cemetery. The girl out hitchhiking alone in the middle of night. The mother who wishes on a monkey’s paw that her dead son would come home.

There are a few key things you’ll notice about these. One of the biggies is that the protagonist rarely comes to harm in a supernatural story. Their underwear will need to go through the wash three or four times and they may not sleep well for years afterwards, but physically, and even mentally, they tend to come out okay. If anyone suffers in a supernatural story it’s usually the bad guy or some smaller character. Also, these stories tend not to have explanations– they just are. There aren’t any cursed objects or ancient histories at play. Things happen because… well, they happen.

Even with it’s clever twist, The Sixth Sense is still a great example of a supernatural story, as is “The Signalman” and “A Christmas Carol,” both by that populist hack Charles Dickens.

Giant Evil stories

These are the grim tales when the universe itself is against you. Every person you meet, every thing they do–it all serves some greater, awful evil. H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard wrote a lot of giant evil stories. The Omen is another good (so to speak) story of the universe turning against the protagonist. And any fan of Sutter Cane will of course remember the reality-twisting film In The Mouth of Madness.

Personally, I would toss a lot of haunted house stories in here, because the haunted house (or ship, or insane asylum, or spaceship, or whatever) is essentially the universe of the story. Not all of them, but a decent number. The reader or audience doesn’t see anything else and the characters don’t get to interact with anything else. The Haunting of Hill House, The Shining, and Event Horizon could all be seen as supernatural stories, but their settings really elevate them to giant evil stories.

Thrillers

Thrillers also stand a bit away from the pack because they tend to be the most grounded of horror stories. No creatures of the night, no dark entities, far fewer axe-wielding psychopaths. The key thing to remember is that a thriller isn’t so much about what happens as about what could happen. It’s more about the ticking clock, the killer hiding in the closet, or the booby trap that’s a razor-width from going off and doing… well, awful things to our characters. There’s a lot of suspense focused on one or two characters and it stays focused on that one character for the run of your story. A thriller keeps the characters (and the reader) on edge almost every minute.

Alfred Hitchcock was really the master of thrillers, although much of his work came from other sources. How many folks have actually read Robert Bloch’s Psycho, for example? Silence of the Lambs is another great thriller, both the book and the film.

Slasher stories

Slasher stories are really about one thing, and that’s the body count. How many men, women, and fornicating teens can the killer reduce to cold meat? Note that there’s a few distinctions between a slasher story and a torture porn story (see below), and one of them is usually the sheer number of people killed. There’s also often a degree of creativity and violence to the deaths, although it’s important to note it’s rarely deliberate or malicious. Often it’s just the killer using the most convenient tools at hand for the job. The original Friday the 13th film series has pretty much become the standard for slasher pics, and it’s what most people tend to think of first when you mention the term..

A lot slasher stories used to have a mystery sub-element to them, and often it was trying to figure out who the killer is. These days it’s more often a twist, and often not a very well-done one. You’d’ve never guessed she was the killer, would you? And the reason you never guessed was because she has no motivation, there was no foreshadowing, and it makes no sense whatsoever within the established story. Slasher films, especially, developed a bad habit of falling back on the insanity defense and got stereotyped as “psycho-killer” movies. Which is a shame because some of them are actually very clever and creepy.

Monster stories

The tales in this little sub-genre tend to be about unstoppable, inescapable things that mean the protagonist harm. They’re rarely secretive or mysterious, but they do have an alarming habit of tending toward unkillabillity (new word, just coined, take that Shakespeare). The emphasis here is that nothing your heroes (or the villains, police, military, or the innocent bystanders) do can end this thing’s rampage, and any worthwhile rampage tends to involve people dying. There may be blood and death, but the focus with a monster isn’t finding it or learning about it– it’s stopping it or at least getting as far away from it as possible. Of course, how far is far enough with something that doesn’t stop?

The original monster story is, of course, Frankenstein. Godzilla is a monster, in a very obvious sense, but so are zombies and even Freddy Kruger. I still hold that the reason Jason X is so reviled by fans of the franchise is that the filmmakers turned it into a monster movie, not a slasher film like the ones before it.

Adventure Horror stories

To paraphrase from Hellboy (which would also fit in this category), adventure horror is where the good guys bump back. While they may use a lot of tropes from some of the other subgenres, the key element to these stories is that the heroes are fighting back. Not in a weak, flailing, shrieking cheerleader way, but in a trained, heavily-armed, we’ve-got-your-number way. Oh, it can still go exceptionally bad for them (and often does), but this sub-genre is about protagonists who get to inflict a bit of damage and live to tell the tale. For a while, anyway. To quote an even wiser man, even monsters have nightmares. Or bothersome irritations, at the least.

Brian Lumley’s Titus Crow novellas are a great example of adventure horror stories that are set in the world of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, as is the short story “Blood Bags and Tentacles,” by D.L. Snell. The Resident Evil franchise is horror adventure with zombies, just like my own Ex-Heroes. Some of you may have seen Dog Soldiers, and several of you have probably seen Army of Darkness.

Torture porn

Paul Verhoven once commented that the reason Murphy is killed so brutally in the beginning of Robocop was because there wasn’t time at the start of the film to develop him as a character. So they gave him a horribly gruesome death, knowing it would create instant sympathy for the character, and then they’d be able to fill in more details about his life later on in the film. That’s the general idea behind torture porn. Minus the filling in more details about the characters later.

I’m not sure if Stephen King himself actually coined the term “torture porn” in his Entertainment Weekly column, but that’s the first place I remember seeing it. Before then, I was referring to these as “uncomfortable stories.” Torture porn, at its simplest, is about making the reader or the audience squirm. If you can make them physically ill, power to you. The victims are usually underdeveloped, unmemorable, and doomed from the moment they’re introduced. It’s not about characters, it’s about the visceral things being done to the characters. They’re getting skinned, scalped, boiled, slowly impaled, vivisected… and we’re getting every gory detail of it. As I mentioned last week, porn is when you show everything and this sub-genre is about leaving nothing to the imagination. They are the anti-thriller, to put it simply. This is where you’ll find the Saw and Hostel films, and many of Rob Zombie’s movies.

A key element to torture porn is the victim is almost always helpless. They’re bound, drugged, completely alone or vastly outnumbered. Unlike a slasher film– where there’s always that sense that Bambi or Candi might escape if they just run a little faster or make a bit less noise– there is no question in these stories that the victim is not going to get away. That hope isn’t here, because that’s not what these stories are about.

In closing, I’ll also toss in the free observation that it’s very difficult to merge two of these subgenres because a lot of them contradict each other by their very nature. Not impossible, mind you, but very difficult. If you remember the jumble that was Freddy vs. Jason, a big part of the problem there was as the script stumbled back and forth between a monster movie (when it focused on Freddy) and a slasher film (when Jason was on screen). You can’t have a film that focuses on chopping up teens one moment and just terrorizing them the next. It’s also why the film stabilized a bit, tone-wise, in the second half when it settled into a straight out monster-mash.

So, that’s enough of that. Feel free to dwell on these points while you’re munching on the ill-gotten gains you scored via your candy beard. Yeah, all of you with kids, you know what I’m talking about…

Happy Halloween. Don’t forget to get some writing done.

Looks like no one’s been reading lately. That’s okay. I’m used to people not listening to me.

And now you’re probably all at Horror Realm.

Bastards.

Then again, maybe I just need to rant about better topics.

Speaking of which, we were going to discuss that ever-growing backside of yours. And when I say backside, what I really mean is backstory. They’re pretty much interchangeable, because nobody wants to look at your backstory unless it is just perfect.

A few months back there was a response here from loyal follower #11 (who has since moved on to read Craig Mazin’s very informative blog, The Artful Writer) that rather than getting tighter, he often found his manuscripts growing as he did draft after draft. The characters became more nuanced, the story filled out, and the page count went up. I’ve had this happen, too. I think it was the second or third draft of The Suffering Map that introduced Theresa, the cleaning woman who overheard many things that took place at the Memory Lane antique shop. And I’ve also mentioned police detective Barroll and his partner, Lt. Cheryl Vacha.

Y’see, Timmy, a lot of stories get bulked up on backstory, because people keep introducing stuff in draft four, eight, or fifteen and assume this is essential material simply because it’s in a later draft. After all, I said a while back that by your sixth draft you should be more or less solid, yes? So by my own words, anything in the sixth draft must be essential, right?

Wrong.

What I eventually came to realize was that these weren’t later drafts of The Suffering Map. This was still me working on the first draft. I hadn’t figured out who these people were, what their motivation was, or why they all looked at each other nervously at a mention of Uncle Louis. What I thought was refinement and polish was still just me getting the raw materials together. The serious cutting hadn’t even begun yet.

The real problem with backstory is that it means moving back, and you want your story to go forward. Every page of character history means two pages you have to write to get the story to a new point. God help you if you decide to start with ten or twenty pages of backstory, because that means you’re in the hole on page one.

Not to mention the fact that so much backstory is completely unnecessary. At least four or five of you keep reading this collection of rants even though you have no idea what my brother’s name is, the name of the first girl I kissed, or what the first story I wrote was about. Does it keep any of you from absorbing or mocking what I say here? Not at all. It’s unnecessary.

It all comes down to what the reader needs to know. I gave the example once that no one talks about Masada at any point during Raiders of the Lost Ark because that film has nothing to do with Masada. In a similar vein, we don’t need to know how Ferris Bueller got his two-tone leather jacket, what Atticus Finch’s mother was like, where Hannibal Lecter studied for his doctorate, or which mission the Colonial Marines were on before the events of Aliens.

Keep in mind, I’m not saying that these aren’t interesting stories. In the hands of skilled writers, many of them would probably be very entertaining. The key thing here is all these stories were in the hands of skilled writers, and those writers chose not to include any of this. I was reading a film review a few weeks back and the critic, Nathan Rabin, made the very keen observation that stories like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings saga succeed despite their elaborate, epic backstories– not because of them. Backstory can be an amazing, powerful thing if it’s used at the right time and in the right quantities.

If it helps, think of being a writer like being a bodybuilder. One of the skills of being a competitive bodybuilder is to develop all of your muscle groups equally. You can’t ignore your shoulders while you do constant abdominal work, and your legs will suffer if you focus too much on your arms. More to the point, we’ve all seen the people with the unusual physiques who do these unbalanced workouts. The folks whose arms hang away from their bodies or whose shoulders always hunch forward. The ones with no neck. These people developed one muscle group so much it overpowers others and distorts the overall image. They’re phenomenal muscles, don’t get me wrong , and they could probably crush my flimsy writer hands with… well, whatever part of their anatomy you picture we’re talking about… but they fail as bodybuilders because they’ve developed things in the wrong proportion.

If Mr. Berenson the grade school teacher suddenly displays an amazing aptitude for wiping out ninjas and hijackers with nothing but a stapler and his bare hands, it might be worth mentioning he spent seven years in the Special Forces and how he ended up teaching kids the right way to use an apostrophe. However, if the PTA meeting got snowed in and they’re just sitting around waiting for a plow, telling that same story is now just a bit of excess padding.

There is a flipside to this, of course. To stick with the bodybuilder analogy, it’s when the writer doesn’t put in anything and the characters are left looking like anorexics. The readers are left wondering who all these characters are, why this action is happening, and why everyone speaks cryptically about “The Omega.”

Your characters need a backstory, believe me. It has to be there, and you as the writer should know it backward and forward. But that doesn’t mean you need to tell all of that backstory and nuance to the reader. A lot of it’s going to be irrelevant. Some of it you’re going to want to keep shrouded in mystery.

And, yes, some of it you’re going to need to tell.

Next time, it struck me that I’ve been ranting for ages about stuff that goes into stories, but I’ve never really said anything about the stories themselves. So let’s hope the deadline gods are kind to me so I can pontificate about that for a bit.

Until then, go write.