Category: character

Well, as the weekend approached I had great plans to get a piece done on writing romances. Then I was reminded that screenwriting contest season is coming up, and I had a few critical ideas…

Ahhhh, I’m a romantic at heart. Let’s go with that.

When was the last time you read something that was going along great and suddenly, out of nowhere, two characters started kissing and professing their love for each other? Or maybe a movie where the characters suddenly make dinner plans or randomly fall into bed? It makes people roll their eyes while reading books and it makes movie audiences laugh. Nothing sinks a story faster than a pasted-on love interest.

We all love a good romance. Yeah, even the guys. Because we all love the idea that there’s someone out there who’s an absolute, 100% perfect match for us. Even more so, we love the idea that we could meet this person while disarming warheads set by mad computers, fighting zombie pirates cursed by Aztec gold, or fleeing ninjas. Because, hey… think of the stories you could tell your friends. And that’s what we all want, right? To have a better story to tell.

So, what are some of the ways you can avoid that horrible relationship trap?

Okay, first and most important thing to remember. People get together because they want to get together, not because other people think they should be together. And “other people” includes the writer. If you’ve based your whole story around the computer geek and the cheerleader hooking up at a frat party, then you need a real reason for them to get together. And no, the reason can’t be “because they need to battle the dark overlord as a couple in chapter eleven.” Nor should it be “we want the actress topless in act three.”

This leads nicely into my second point. They’re almost one and the same. You can’t have real emotions without real people. And real people, oddly enough, act in realistic ways. I’m not saying rational ways, because love is one of the most irrational things most of us will ever encounter in our lives. If your characters are real, they’re going to have needs, desires, plans, and tastes. And it’ll stand out if they’re making choices that go against all those traits. Is that backstabbing, career-minded office bitch really going to see something she likes in the guy who cleans her pool? Will a blue-blood, British noble really find himself fascinated with a toothless hillbilly girl? What the heck are a professional mercenary and a Peace Corps worker going to talk about?

Yeah, opposites attract. They even have a lot of fun together. But if we’re talking about real emotions, the opposites will tend to have a lot in common. The mean-girl cheerleader isn’t going to make a move for the scrawny honor student kid. Unless she needs a book report done.

Or maybe, unless she’s a closet sci-fi/ action fan who desperately wants to talk to someone about last night’s episode of Chuck. Could be that she’s a lot smarter than she lets on, but is scared of not being popular. Or perhaps she was the ugly duckling until her second year of puberty and used to be friends with a lot of the AV club kids.

Even then, how far and how fast they take things should be consistent. Some folks live for the moment. Others like to wait and plan. People can be confident or nervous, experienced or awkward. Some relationships are established with a wild half-hour in a hotel room, others when two people hold hands for the first time. If your characters are real, their reactions should be, too.

My third tip would be this– hard as it may be to believe, there are just times when romance isn’t appropriate. As the man likes to say, there’s a time and a place for everything. Someone could be starving, terrified, or in a blind fury fighting for their life. At moments like these, it’s not terribly realistic they’d be noticing what pretty eyes their new partner has. If you’re writing an action/ sci-fi/ horror story, is there really time for an extensive relationship? It might be better to plant the subtle seeds of one and let your audience fill in the rest, much like James Cameron did between Ripley and Hicks in Aliens.

A quick story…

Late least year a friend of mine let me read the fantasy novel he’d been working on. There was a lot of good stuff, but one part lost me just a few chapters in. The main character, in the midst of looking for his abducted son, starts getting starry-eyed and bashful around a pretty elf he’s just met.

“Wait a minute,” I told my friend. “Jayme’s son has been kidnapped, missing less than a day, and he’s taking a time out to flirt wildly with some elf he’s just met?”

This bothered me far more than the fact Jayme had grown a set of functioning butterfly wings since arriving in the fae realm. It was, as I told my friend, the point I would toss the manuscript on the big pile to my left.

The last point, as silly and motherly as it sounds, is not to confuse sex with love. There are lots of times where it might be completely acceptable for two characters to have sex. It’s fun. It’s a stress-reliever. It lets you not think about other things. Heck, it can even keep you warm.

Sex doesn’t always translate to a relationship, though, in stories any more than in the real world. If two characters fall into bed (or onto a couch, or against a wall, or into the back seat of a car), make sure you’re clear what it means for both of them. Forcing something casual into something serious will just read as forced.

So go and spread the love among your characters.

Where it’s appropriate, of course.

Next week, some criticism for you.

Details are prickly things.

I prattled on about them a bit in characters, about how some writers will spend paragraphs on shoes, jewelry, spoken languages, or what have you. Details also came up a bit under the suspension of disbelief, and how getting them right or wrong can save or kill your story.

As it happens, both of these can be symptoms of a problem. This problem is a lot more common in prose than in screenplays, but I’ve seen it both places. It goes by the self-explanatory term overwriting, but I’m going to explain it anyway just in case. After all, if I didn’t, I’d have to go do the dishes and then nobody wins.

Overwriting is when a story gets bogged down with details. It’s when the author starts describing every aspect of a character or a set of actions. Each step of a walk down a hall, every single garment while getting dressed, each hand gesture in an active conversation. Some people may look at such overwritten passages and argue art or depth or beauty of language or some such. My rebuttal is those are all wonderful things when actually present, and there’s also a reason the phrase “starving artist” has stayed in the English language for so many, many decades.

The overwhelming majority of the time, overwriting slows your pacing and pushes the reader inch by inch out of your story. It’s information they don’t need or can figure out for themselves, and the other word for that sort of information, as you may remember, is noise. For example, while I’ve started writing this little rant I checked my email, switched to a different playlist in iTunes, had several sips of Diet Pepsi, talked to the missus, and scratched myself once or thrice. None of it was important to what I’m writing here, so none of it came up here. It’s all just useless details that do nothing to advance the information I’m trying to put forth and you’re trying to read. The same holds true for fiction, be it prose or screenplays. If it doesn’t need to be there, why put it there?

Let’s take a look at two interpretations of a scene and get a feel for which one conveys the required information.

“We’ve confirmed it,” said the voice on the phone. “It’s Mendoza”

“I’ll be right there,” said MacLeod. He hung up the phone and picked up his keys from the phonestand. He walked across the living room and reached for the doorknob. He opened the door, stepped outside, and closed the door behind him before locking the main lock and the deadbolt.

MacLeod walked around his house to the parking slot in the alley. He unlocked the heavy padlock and unwrapped the chain that held the gate shut. He pushed the gate open, got into his car and twisted the key in the ignition. The car backed out with a squeal of tires and a faint scrape from the front driver’s side brake pad that needed replacing. Then he got back out, pulled the gate closed, and re-wrapped the chain. The padlock went on with a snap, he sat back down in the car, closed the door, and shifted into first, switching smoothly into second as he rumbled down towards the main street.

At the end of the alley MacLeod downshifted as the car lunged out into traffic. He turned right onto Alpine, then flipped his directional and took a left onto Beech. He made another right, upshifting as he did, and roared up the Carver on-ramp onto the freeway, accelerating into the leftward-arcing curve with a gradual increase of pressure on his foot.

“We’ve confirmed it,” said the voice on the phone. “It’s Mendoza”

“I’ll be right there,” said MacLeod.

He hung up and left the apartment. Less than three minutes later his car was roaring down the freeway.

* * *

That’s a bit extreme, I admit, but it gets the idea across. They both tell you the facts you need to know, but the first one’s massively overwritten. There comes a point when a writer is just spewing out excess information, be it in their dialogue or in their prose (action blocks for all you screenwriters).

I was looking over an acquaintance’s manuscript a while back and came up with an interesting way of looking at it which may be clearer. “It’s the difference between a cooking show ,” I explained to him, “and a show someone cooks on.” If you flip on the television, on one hand you’ve got folks like Emerill, Martha Stewart, or Bobby Flay. On the other hand there’s Luke and Sooky from Gilmore Girls. They’re all cooks. They all usually have food with them when they’re on screen.

However, you don’t expect Emerill to spend half his show talking about how his date went last night with the woman he met during an open house at his daughter’s school. Likewise, something’s wrong if Luke spends fifteen minutes in the middle of each episode explaining how to make a perfect grilled ham and cheese or why you should always cook french fries in vegetable oil with a few shakes of salt in it. In one case, being a cook is the sole point of the show. In the other, it’s just one small element of the show.

As you’re writing out chapters and scenes, be aware of what they’re actually about. If it’s about an obsessive-compulsive, maybe you do need the list of every dry cleaner bag in his or her closet and the shapes of all seventeen Tupperware containers in the fridge. If it isn’t, well… maybe things would move along a little without all that stuff.

Go look at your writing and see.

You can’t have a story without characters. They don’t need to be human. They don’t even need to be alive. But if the reader doesn’t have someone to focus on you’re going nowhere fast.

For all of us, the goal is to create characters that live, ones a reader can bring to mind and identify with. Most of us could picture what Harry Potter looked like long before we’d heard of Daniel Radcliffe. In Casablanca, without even seeing what happened in Paris, we know enough about Rick to guess why Elsa’s arrival is having such an effect on him. Even though we’ve never seen it, we can all extrapolate how Darth Vader would deal with someone having a loud cell phone conversation in a restaurant

However, for every character that leaps off the page or the screen to be remembered forever there are a dozen who languish in obscurity. And for every one of that dozen, there’s a couple dozen more who never even made the cut. They were so flat on the page they couldn’t catch anyone’s attention.

Characters will make or break your writing, which means they deserve attention. The mistake I see again and again, though, is writers who give their characters too much attention. Their characters never get off the page because they’ve been buried alive and crushed there.

Some rules-of-thumb and reasons I’ve pasted together over the years…

Don’t describe characters in exacting physical detail. Your audience doesn’t need to know someone’s precise height, weight, cup size, skin tone, inseam, hair color, nail polish, and eye pigment. They don’t need to be told the exact tie pattern he’s wearing, where her skirt hits her thigh, if he likes boxers or briefs, if she likes thongs over bikinis, how many fillings either of them have, or precisely what they’re having at the restaurant for lunch down to drinks, side dishes, and condiments.

You don’t need any of that in your writing. Honest.

Long descriptions bring the reader to a grinding halt. The longer the description, the louder the squeal of brakes. You’re performing, as some folks like to say, the infodump. The writer is throwing out a pile of information at a time the reader wants action and forward motion (which is—for the record—always). It’s wonderful to know that, as Jane steps into the street, everyone notices her Prada bag, Yves St.Laurent jacket, eel-skin boots, wedding band with matching engagement ring, the St.Christopher’s medallion she wears outside her midnight-blue silk blouse, her sapphire eyeliner, and her $300 hairstyle that’s starting to sag, giving her one loose blonde strand that hangs loose over her face in a kind of sexy way as she puffs and swipes at it with her free hand.

You know what’s far, far more interesting than all of that, though? Why is Jane stepping into the street? Is it a crosswalk? Is she avoiding someone? Getting into a limo? Throwing herself in front of a bus? She’s been frozen there in mid-movement while the writer (in this case, me) prattles on about her clothes and hair. Heck, by the time I got back to her you’d probably forgotten she was even outside.

There’s another reason to not spend time on physical descriptions, whether you’re writing a novel or a screenplay. Silly as it sounds, you don’t have much say in what this character looks like. When people read, they form their own mental images, and they’re usually pretty different from the ones that were written out. In Dan Abnett’s Ravenor books, I always see the character of Kara Swole looking like my friend Penny from college. Their descriptions don’t match up at all (well, they’re both female gymnasts, but that’s about it) yet this is how I picture Kara. For that matter, in the same books, I always see Harlon Nayl as Jett from Cowboy Bebop. As you refer back to your extensive description, you’ll jar the readers out of the flow of the story as they think What? Blonde? I thought Jane had black hair? Jar them one too many times and they’ll start to get resentful, and then they’ll start to read something else.

If you’re writing a screenplay, this is even more telling. It’s really cool that you’ve described Lynne as 6’3″ with raven hair, blue eyes, alabaster skin, the physique of a pro bodybuilder, and half a page of further description. Then Jessica Alba expressed interest in the part and suddenly Lynne was a 5’6″ tanned brunette with a body built along very different lines. So you just wasted half a page and messed up the timing of your script for nothing.

So… extensive, elaborate physical descriptions are a no-no. Use broad strokes and fill in details only where you need to. Pick three or four good descriptive words for the character (not their clothes), and stick with them. Their dialogue and actions will bring them to life and your readers will fill in the rest.

In the novel I’m working on right now, for example, the antagonist I’ve just introduced is a pale man who’s bald with tattoos on his head. There’s hundreds of ways to interpret that description, but you’ve got a solid image in your head just off that, yes? Which means I’m now free to go talk about what he’s doing with that AK-47, the ultimatum he’s issuing for his boss… and he’s already a bit more interesting and solid than Jane up above, yes? In about half the space.

Now, as far as the mental/ historical side, if this stuff is important, of course it should be included. If our main man has lost everyone he’s ever cared about, if our heroine suffered from asthma as a child, or if an encyclopedic knowledge of rural New England history will be critical to resolving this mystery, then these things need to be in your writing. Again,though—no infodumps. If you introduce me to Robin and then explain how her hometown got its name, the name of her first pet, who she took to the prom, the state her parents grew up in, how she did on that second grade spelling test, and why she loves pink… there’d best be a damn good reason for all of that being in the first two pages, and it better all be important in the next 298.

That’s the best rule of thumb for all of this descriptive stuff. Is it critical to what’s going on within these pages? Your audience is going to assume if you’re giving all this information, it’s because they need this information. After the fourth or fifth exhaustive description of a character’s jewelry, lunch time eating habits, or genealogy, your reader is going to make the assumption none of this is going anywhere and start skimming. First paragraphs, then pages, and then over the television listings to see what else could be filling this time…

Now, you can make an argument that any event in someone’s past affects their present and every single decision shapes a person’s life to some degree. Thus, anything you choose to include is relevant to the story on some level, yes? Again, though—this is not real life (please look back a few posts to resolve any confusion). No one wants to read about a character’s personal history that does not have a direct bearing on what they’re experiencing right now.

Again, for example…

I hate ketchup (and catsup). Honest and for true. Cannot stand it. Loathe it. Not for any flavor or texture issues, but for color. When I was five I was eating French fries and saw my dog, Flip, hit by a car outside the dining room window. Happened more or less right in front of me on Rt 1A in Cape Neddick, Maine. I could show you the spot today. I still remember his scream. And my screams. My mom and my little brother freaking out. And I remember the blood. And I’ve never been able to deal with ketchup since.

A formative event that still affects me to this day? Absolutely. I’d never deny it. Does it have anything whatsoever to do with the hints and suggestions I post here?

Nope. Not in the slightest.

It has nothing to do with my writing here, for CS Publications, or my own fiction, which is why most people reading this have never heard of it before. It has no business being in any of this. In fact, unless someone’s writing a story where I’ve been replaced by an undercover agent/ alien shape-shifter/ android double and my girlfriend catches said doppelganger when he puts ketchup on his scrambled eggs– this is a completely pointless bit of information about me.

Oh, but it builds character, you say? Expands the vast tapestry of my life? Tells everyone a little bit about me in so many ways? Makes me more human?

(Feel free to read that out loud in a Stewie Griffin voice)

So what?

You’ve got an actual story, don’t you? If you want to focus on one thread in the tapestry of my life, choose one that shows the reader how my life relates to that story. Don’t waste their time with something that has no bearing on the book/ screenplay/ short story they’re reading.

Let the audience know how annoyed I was at thirteen when a doctor told me during a physical that writing wasn’t “a real job.” Explain how thrilled freshman-college-me was when he got a personal letter from Tom DeFalco rejecting my Marvel pitch but with hints and tips about how to improve and try again, plus a full copy of one of his Thor scripts for reference. Give them the visual of me in a panicky, cold sweat sitting outside Ron Moore’s office, waiting to pitch a few Deep Space Nine stories I’d come up with that had impressed a long string of script readers and story editors.

See? That’s all relevant. You’re reading and saying “Wow, this guy’s been serious about writing for a while now, hasn’t he?” That’s the kind of stuff that should come out in your writing.

And you’ve already forgotten my dog’s name, haven’t you? And the name of the road he was hit on? No worries. He’ll always be important to me, but I understand why he’s not important—or relevant—to you. Honest, I do.

Now, go write.