Category: empathy

            Y’know, while I was pulling links for this post, I realized something kind of amazing (and I’m glad I caught it).  This is the 300th time I’ve posted on this page.  Three hundred ranty posts about characters and dialogue and spelling and structure. Wow.

            I’m kind of surprised we’re all still here.
            But let’s get back to it…
            Odd fact—I’ve probably fired more types of handguns and rifles than anyone reading this.  You might be a firearm enthusiast, you might be former military, you might be in the military now… but there’s a very good chance I’ve got you beat.  I once compared notes with an Army weapons specialist and it turned out I could name almost twice as many firearms than him that I’d used, including a few obscure ones he’d never even heard of.

            The reason why I can do this is all my time in the film industry.  With the different procedural and crime shows I worked on, it was very common to have a new murder weapon every week, along with a red herring weapon and possibly some random thug weapons as well. Pistols, shotguns, rifles, bolt action, lever action, pump, semi-auto, full-auto…  And every one of these that was actually used on screen had to be test fired by me and then by the actors. 

            Even with some common weapons repeating, over the course of fifteen years… I fired a lot of weapons.

            Now, with all that being said, even though I’ve worked with a ton of weapons, I would never consider myself any kind of marksman.  Definitely not a sniper.  Because there is much, much more to being good with weapons then just being able to pull a trigger.  An AK-47 might seem like a ticket to badass-dom, but not if I don’t know how to load it. Or hold it.  Or turn the safety off.  I’ve heard some great (and kind of awful) stories from soldiers about gunfights with people who don’t know how their own weapons work.

            I bet a few folks reading this have an acquaintance who buys nothing but the most expensive, top-of-the-line tools yet still can’t put an IKEA bookshelf together.  Most of us have heard stories about some guy who spends a quarter-million on a car and then wrecks it within a week because “the car outperformed the driver.” Heck, we’ve all seen proof that giving a director access to grade-A actors and millions in film technology is absolutely no guarantee of a decent movie.

            Y’see, Timmy, having high-level tools doesn’t automatically make me skilled.  They’re two entirely different things.  Sure, I can keep jabbing at that bookshelf with my $300 DeWalt Max XR  20 volt hammer drill, but if I just need to tap in a few finishing nails it’s not going to help much. And the parts the drill would actually work for… well, a Phillips head screwdriver would do the same job.  It might even work better, all things considered.  DeWalt’s are great, but they can kind of suck when you need to work in tight spaces.

            Anyway… where am I going with this?

            I’d like to share something with you.  As I’ve mentioned once or thrice before, I used to work on a text-based online game, what some of you might know as a MUD.  Because it was text-dependent, it was a chance for some people to really show off their skills.  Or complete lack thereof.  A friend of mine still works there and sometimes she shares things with me.

            So, check out this sentence…

            (names have been changed to protect the horribly guilty)

“Lashes aflutter like the wings of a satin bird, Phoebe sets glaukosphaerite lagoons on the newcomer, a smirk glissading across twin folds.”

             WTF…

            Now, I was going to try to sift through this sentence and break down all the places it went wrong.  To be honest, I did.  And I had a page and a half of notes, which is a lot more negativity than I want to have here.  So, instead, let me break all of that down into four simple rules for your writing arsenal.

            And yes, these would be rules, not advice.

            Know what words mean—It doesn’t matter how much my reciprocal saw cost if I keep trying to use it as a butter knife.  An elephant gun is not a sidearm.  And diffuse and defuse mean two entirely different things.

            This is the most important of these rules.  If I want to make my living with words, I need to know them intimately.   Not more or less what they mean or a general idea of how they’re used.  I cannot say words are the tools of my trade and then get repeatedly stumped by vocabulary questions on Jeopardy!. I’ve been doing this for many years, full time for over eight now, and I still pick up the dictionary once or thrice a week to make sure I’m using a given word correctly.  Because I have to know what they mean.

            This is also one of the worst rules to get wrong because it’s a mistake that’s hard to catch.  I won’t catch it because, well, I don’t know I’m using the word wrong.  My computer won’t catch it, because computers are idiots and will only tell me if a word’s spelled right, not if it’s being used correctly. Which means the readers will probably be the ones to catch it… and it won’t give them a good opinion of my skills as a writer.

           

            Don’t overcomplicate—Stephen King once said that any word you go looking for in the thesaurus for is the wrong word.  I’ve mentioned a few different versions of this rule at one time or another.  I’m not saying my writing can’t have some clever bits to it, but I should never confuse (or equate) overcomplicating my writing with complexity in my writing.

            If I have metaphors for metaphors (like using lagoons instead of pools because I don’t want to use eyes), I am pushing my audience away from reading and into analysis.  This is the kind of thing that destroys the flow of my writing.  And that’s the kind of thing that gets my writing set aside in favor of something else.

            Know how things go together—Remember that AK-47?  It’s not going to be half as effective after I force a lot of shotgun shells into the magazine.  They’re two powerful items that do not work well together.

            Know what words mean—Did I mention this one already? Well, it’s probably worth mentioning again.  It is the most important of these rules after all.  And the one most people will ignore, because I need to be able to admit I don’t know stuff before I can learn new stuff.

            Have a big arsenal of words because you need it and you can use it.  Not just because you think it makes you look cool.  I can spend twenty minutes looking up glaukosphaerite and making sure it’s spelled correctly (because it won’t be in the spellchecker), but I could also just use green and then finish this whole page in that same amount of time. 

            And more people would understand what I was trying to say.

            Next time, I wanted to tell you about something I’ve felt for a while now…

            Until then, go write.

            Late again.

            But I’m keeping lots of other schedules, if that matters.

            Anyway…

            I’d been playing around with the basic idea for this post when I was scooped by Welcome to Night Vale.  If you’re somehow not familiar with it, it’s a fantastic podcast that purports to be the community radio show from a very, very odd little town out in the desert (although not as odd as those jerks in Desert Bluffs).  If you follow them on social media, they occasionally toss out little Night Vale-ian sayings about life, death, horoscopes, janitors, and so on. A week or so back, there was this one…

           

            Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.

            Which is a funnier way of saying what I wanted to talk about.  See, I was going to tell you about the dinner I had the other night.  It was one of those nights where my girlfriend and I just decided to scrounge up meals for ourselves rather than make an actual meal together, and I’d been having odd cravings for scrambled eggs.  I’d also been feeling a little nostalgic because—silly as it sounds—we didn’t eat breakfast Christmas day.  And I’d been thinking about the breakfasts my dad would make on Christmas mornings when my brother and I were kids and we still lived at home.  It was a small, simple tradition, but it was something I’d been thinking about.

            So… That’s what I had for dinner.  Breakfast.  I sliced some kielbasa—yep, kielbasa as breakfast sausage—scrambled three eggs, added a few mushrooms and a bit of cheese, and cooked it all together.  Which I ate while watching an old episode of Home Movies. The ren faire episode, if you care.

            It was a wonderfully satisfying dinner.

            Well, it was to me, anyway.

            What am I getting at?

            There’s a Mel Brooks quote I’ve paraphrased here a few times before.  “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”  It’s usually used to emphasize the comic aspect, but I think it works well in reverse, too.  Many people fail to see that what they consider great, powerful drama is actually, well… not.

            I’ve mentioned before—several times before—that for screenplay contest readers one of the most dreaded scripts is one that comes with a “based on a true story” label.  And the reason for this is that most of us live pretty average lives.  Yeah, even the dramatic parts. We have great successes and miserable failures.  We get knocked down and we pick ourselves back up (or not, sometimes).  We lose people we care about and we find new loves.

            So a lot of these “based on a true story” scripts tend to be… well, dull at best.  Tedious at worst.  Neither of which are labels we want on our writing

            Y’see, Timmy, my life feels special to me because, from my point of view, I’m the main character.  So lots of elements of my life may seem exciting. boring, hysterical, or tragic to me, but that doesn’t automatically mean they will to you.  Or to him.  Or to her. 

            Honestly, quite a bit of my life is average.  Many of you would probably even call it boring.  And I recognize that, which is why I rarely use me as a reference.  Or as a guideline for what most people should know or how most people would react.

            One of the skills we all need to develop as a writer is the ability to sift good ideas from bad ones.  Or common ones.  To recognize that just because something hits me hard doesn’t mean it will have the same resonance with everyone else.  It’s an empathy issue, something I’ve brought up many times before.  If I have trouble honestly seeing the world through different people’s eyes, I’m just not going to be good at this.

            I don’t want to tell you my story.  My story is boring.  That’s why I want to tell you St. George’s story.  And Danielle’s story. And Mike’s story. And the story of how Eli and Harry met three times before they ended up traveling together.

            What story are you going to tell?

            Next time I’d like to talk about firearms, power tools, sports cars, and other expensive things people spend money on for the wrong reasons.

            Until then, go write.

            Sorry for missing last week.  When I should’ve been posting this, I was at the San Diego Comic-Con, hanging out in the Geek & Sundry lounge and watching the Welcome to Night Vale panel (I even got to ask a question about writing).  And the G&S folks gave me a free copy of the Zombies: Keep Out! board game and a card game called Love Letters.   And Felicia Day smiled at me once as she walked past.

            Y’know, in retrospect, I’m not really sorry I missed last week.

            But I am finally caught up on my sleep. I was exhausted for a while there.

            Speaking of which…

            I write a series set in a post-apocalyptic world.  It was first put out by a small press that specializes in end-of-the-world fiction, and I’ve met a bunch of authors who work in that genre and related ones.  Needless to say, I’ve read a lot of these books and stories.  I’d have to guess close to a hundred in the past five years.

            I have seen a lot of people die on the page.

            I’ve characters die of disease or injury.  Seen them shot or stabbed.  Some have been crushed.  Many have been torn apart by zombies—both classic slow ones and the runners.  A few people have gone peacefully and with no pain… but not a lot of them. 

            On a semi-related note, for a long time there was a joke in comic circles that no one stayed dead except Bucky and Gwen Stacy (who’ve both been resurrected in recent years).  It’s one of the things that made some folks point to comics as low-brow, pulpy writing, because villains and heroes would always return with elaborate tales of how they’d avoided death… again.  The new term tossed about is death fatigue.  Readers are just plain bored with overhyped “deaths” that are reversed in twelve issues or less.

            What I’d like to blab on about this week is sympathy fatigue, also sometimes called compassion fatigue.  It’s a medical term that refers to when doctors, nurses, and caregivers have become so drained by the death and suffering they see that they just… well, can’t feel sympathetic anymore.  Constant exposure has desensitized them.  I had the (very awful) experience once of visiting the “death row” of an animal shelter, and the woman who mass-euthanised the cats and dogs admitted she didn’t even look at them anymore.

            Readers and audience members can feel sympathy fatigue, too.  After watching countless people die, the carnage just fades into a background hum.   It no longer carries any emotional weight.  How often have you watched a horror film with an audience and, after a certain point, people just start laughing? Characters on screen are stabbed, tortured, crushed, and decapitated, and you and your friends are giggling.  Maybe even cheering.

            How do I keep people from laughing?

            Let me get to that in a kind of roundabout way…

            A bad habit I’ve mentioned before is naming every character.  I think some time in the past an MFA professor or writing coach offered some advice about names and it went through a dozen iterations of the telephone game.  Now there’s a (thankfully small) school of thought that says every character should have a name.  That guy at the bus stop.  The cook behind the counter.  The woman in the leather jacket.

            When I give a character a name, I’m telling the reader that all these people are important.  There’s a reason she’s Phoebe and not “the blonde” or “the woman in the leather jacket.”  A name tells the reader to take note of this person because they’re going to affect the story.  If it turns out Phoebe has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, it means I’ve distracted the reader.  And distractions kill the flow of my story.

            When this idea gets mixed with death, it creates a pattern you’ve probably seen before in stories.  We’ll get introduced to a random person, be told a bunch of character stuff about them, and then, eight or nine pages later… they’ll die.  Usually their death will be connected to the larger threat, if not the larger story.  Giant ants, Ebola, vampires, terrorists–whatever the actual protagonists are dealing with, these poor folks will stumble across it and be wiped out.  In some books, this can happen four or five times.  Introduce a character, kill ‘em.  Introduce a character, kill ‘em.  Introduce a character, kill ‘em.  Introduce a character… well, you get the point.

            The idea here is that I’m showing my readers the widespread nature of the threat, or perhaps the ruthlessness of the killers.  And it should carry emotional weight because I spent a couple of pages making Phoebe or Wakko or Dot feel like real people.  From a mathematical, by-the-numbers viewpoint, this is all good, right?

            Catch is, though, my readers are going to notice this pattern really quick.  Just like they’ll notice that I’m naming background characters who have nothing to do with the plot, most readers will realize I’m just introducing characters to kill them off.  So they’ll stop investing in these characters as a way to save time and effort.  It’s a defense mechanism.  They just stop caring.

            And once the reader stops caring, well…

            Perhaps the worst thing this means is that once my readers have been conditioned by all the meaningless deaths, they’re going to be numb to the important ones.  One of my leads will make a heroic sacrifice or that jerk supporting character will finally get what’s coming to her, and my readers will gloss over it the same way they barely registered the last six or seven deaths.  My whole story gets lessened because I’ve lessened the impact of death.

            Don’t get me wrong.  It’s okay to have people die.  I’m a big fan of it.  But I can’t use cheap tricks to give these deaths weight.  I need to be aware of who my characters are and what their deaths are accomplishing within my story structure.  If I just need someone to die gruesomely to set the mood or tone, I don’t need to make them a major character—or to convince my readers he or she is a major character.  And if I’m going to kill off one of my major characters, her death shouldn’t read just like the nineteen deaths that came before it.

            Because when I kill off someone important, I want you to care.

            Next time, I’d like to offer you all a simple choice.

            Until then, go write.

            I went back and forth over the title for this week’s little rant.  It felt too easy to go this way.  Hopefully you’ll find it in your hearts to forgive me.

            I wanted to take a few moments to talk about redemption tales.  Someone asked about this a while back—a long ways back, I believe—and I thought it could make an interesting post.  Redemption is tough to qualify, though, and it took me a while to put my thoughts into some form that, well, anyone else would comprehend.

            That happens to me a lot.

            Which brings us to today.

            One key thing I’ll be bringing up a lot for this is empathy.  A good redemption story relies heavily on me knowing how my readers will respond to various incidents and actions.  If I don’t have a good idea how something will go over, it’ll be easy for either end of my redemption tale to seem pointless, confusing, melodramatic… or all of the above.

            A redemption tale can either be the main thrust of my whole story or it can just be part of a single character’s arc.  Either way my story has to hit a couple of points.  Not in the sense of “introduce the motivating incident by page 17,” but more in a general “let’s talk about the story and the characters” way.  If I don’t have these points in mind, there’s a good chance that my “redemption” story is going to earn some rolling eyes and a hearty laugh or three.

            So… with all that in mind.

            This is one of those “obvious” things that far too many folks mess up.  If I’m going to tell a redemption story about Yakko, he needs to do something that requires redemption.  This is step one, and it’s kind of bothersome how often I see people who miss this point. 

            I’ve seen more than a few folks who try to structure big redemption moments around characters who haven’t done anything wrong.  It’s really great that Yakko wants to sacrifice himself to make up for his past sins, but if he doesn’t have any past sins… well..  That’s not redemption, it’s just a pointless sacrifice.  Yakko needs to have something in his past (or do something early in my story) for which he needs some form of honest redemption.  For most of this post, I’m going to call that the key event.
            That “past” aspect is important, but I’ll get to it in a few minutes…

            This is my first big empathy moment as a writer.  If I can’t predict what actions (or lack of actions) my audience will see as redemption-worthy, this story can get silly pretty quick.  Yakko should not be going on a ten year penitent crusade around the world to make up for feeding his cat tuna instead of chicken.  If he’s really guilt-ridden about that nickel he picked up off the sidewalk when he was six… again, I’d better be writing a comedy.

            What was Yakko’s key event?  Did he sneak a peek at his roommate in the shower?  Write a bad check?  Get someone fired?  Rape or murder someone?  Maybe lots of someones…?

            That brings us to…

2—Can they be redeemed?

            Somewhat related to the first point.  There are certain acts that are unforgivable.  That’s true in any society, past, present, or future.  Sometimes people do things that are beyond redemption.  It’s really tough to imagine anything a serial child rapist could do to make up for what they’ve done in the past.

            Yeah, I’m sure some of you are thinking “they could die,” but that’s not redemption, is it? That’s vengeance, and that’s not what we’re talking about.  And I’m going to talk about death in a little bit.

            So when I’m writing Yakko’s redemption tale, I need to really think about what he’s done.  Again, some of this is going to be an empathy issue.  Will my readers think his key event is a redeemable act? 

3—Do they want to be redeemed?

            Again, this may sound obvious, but I can’t force redemption on someone.  That’s not how it works.  Yakko needs to want it.

            And maybe he doesn’t.  Maybe Yakko doesn’t feel like he did anything wrong.  Perhaps he paid his fine or wrote his apology letter or served his time and considers the matter closed.  Or maybe he knows it was wrong and just doesn’t care.  Some people are like that.  If Yakko’s one of them, it’s going to be tough for me to write a redemption story about him.

4—Why haven’t they done it before?

            Okay, in order to explain this point, I want to toss out what I think is a fairly firm rule of thumb…  Feel free to agree or disagree down below.

            In a good redemption story, a notable amount of time needs to pass between the key event and the redemption for that event. 

            Y’see, Timmy, in my opinion one of the main elements of redemption (from a story point of view) is guilt over the key event.   If I don’t feel guilt, then why would I want redemption (see above)?  And if I’m taking care of things immediately after the key event, this isn’t so much redemption as it is… well, cleaning up.  Yakko may feel horrible about having to do this clean up, but does he really feel guilty?  If I hit someone with my car, it’s the difference between calling 911 and sitting with them until the ambulance comes… or switching my headlights off and speeding away.  I may feel bad in both situations, but they’re two very different situations.

            That being said…  Why didn’t Yakko stop immediately? What made him run from his key event?  What’s kept him from admitting it or doing anything about it until now?  Denial?  Fear? 

            Which brings us to a two-part point…

5A—Why are they doing it now?

            If I accept that Yakko has tried to disavow or hide that key event for weeks or months or years… why is he looking for redemption now?  What’s changed for him as a character that he’s decided to acknowledge this and make amends somehow?

            This is another big empathy moment because this is a big decision for any character, and it goes against what they’ve done up until this point.  If this isn’t a believable change of heart, my whole story’s going to fall apart.

5B—Why are they doing it now?

            From a story structure point ofview, why is this happening now?  Odds are Yakko’s going to start looking for redemption in this story, because I write about active characters who actually do things.  So, as an author, why have I included this?

            Am I just looking to round out Yakko a bit as a person?  Is this the main plot of my whole novel?  Either way, this decision and the repercussions from it need to fit into the structure of my story and into Yakko’s arc as a character.

            Last but not least…

6—Does it balance the scales?

            At the end of the day, every redemption story comes down to this.  Does what Yakko did now make up for what he did then?  Does he believe it does?  Do other character think things are even now?  Even more importantly, are my readers going to think this is a fair trade off, or is it going to come across a little thin or forced?

            It’s worth mentioning death.  All too often writers try to use death as the ultimate balancing agent.  It’s seen as the automatic “redemption now” act.  Sure, Yakko raped, killed, and pillaged his way across three continents, leaving thousands physically or emotionally scarred in his wake, but in the end he died saving those two campers from a grizzly bear.  And that makes it all okay, right?

            No, of course not.  In fact, if not handled just right, death can come across as a “he got off easy” situation, cowardice, or even a cop-out on my part.  I don’t have to deal with all these complex emotions and repercussions if Yakko takes a trio of bullets in the chest, but I can still be praised for my artistic handling of the situation.

            That’s the idea, anyway.

            On a related note, a redemption story where the character doesn’t redeem themselves in the end is just… well, kind of pointless.  It may have been very pretty from a vocabulary-metaphor-symbolism point of view, but it isn’t a redemption story.  Or much of any story, to be honest.  I may feel it’s beautifully tragic and ironic, but I think most readers are going to find themselves wondering why they just wasted the past few hours following a guy who doesn’t accomplish anything…

            And there you have it.  A few questions I need to ask myself if I’m trying to do a redemption story.  And if I don’t have some positive answers for most of them, well, maybe I need to look again at how I’ve set up my story.  Or my character. 

            Because there’s a good chance they’re not on the road to redemption.

            Next time I’d like to work backwards a little bit.

            Until then, go write.