Category: first

            Running a tiny bit late.  Trying to get a bunch of stuff done before the weekend and dealing with many disruptions and distractions.
            Anyway…
            I’d like to start this week by talking about  college.  It’s something I bet most of us here experienced, so it’s a great analogy for my real topic.  I’m sneaky like that.  Sometimes.

            If you’ve been reading these rants for a while, you know I grew up in a very small town in Maine.  For high school, my dad got a new job and we moved to a somewhat large town (arguably a small city) in southern Massachusetts for four years.  And then I went to a giant state school for college.  No joke, my freshman dorm almost had more students in it than the entire school system I attended in Maine.  And I wasn’t even living in one of the larger dorms.  The college had a larger population than my hometown.

            It was, needless to say, a bit overwhelming.

            There were lots of orientations, of course.  Then I was introduced to tons of people in my dorm, and then people on my hall (we won’t even get into classes).  We all talked about ourselves a bit.  I think so, anyway.  It was all a bit of a blur.  For a while there were just the two skinny guys across the hall,  the woman with the short hair who smiled a lot, the big guy with the glasses further down the hall. But after a while details and names accumulated, these people became clear in my mind, and they became Mike, Jon, Karen, Henry, and so on. 

            Most of us can relate to something like this, yes?

            When I’m introducing characters in my story, it’s a lot like this.  Sometimes things are a whirl of action.  Other times, everyone’s just sitting around studying each other.  Some people stand out—either on their own or because of my own interests—and other people just warrant rough placeholder descriptions for now.

            Context is everything when I introduce a character.  In the middle of a firefight, Wakko may not notice much about the person who dives in to join him behind the barricade.  They’re wearing body armor and they have a rifle—score!  If he’s dealing with a job applicant, though, he’s got time to notice how sharp the creases are in the slacks, how the tie is knotted and the hair is combed, not to mention the smell of shampoo and the state of fingernails.

            Likewise, during that firefight, there’s not much personal info Wakko needs to know past “you’re on my side, right?”  In the middle of the interview, he can ask “what are the three worst jobs you’ve ever had?”

            And in either case, he might not learn about that tattoo or the special shirt or the naughty story behind her nickname.  Some things are only seen or discussed in more intimate situations.  These are all details that come out with booze or debriefing or sex or some combination of all three. 
            Y’see, Timmy, there isn’t a certain way or time to introduce characters.  It’s all a matter of context.  Context, and a bit of relevance.  I need to think of it in terms of my narrative and my main character (or the character I’m focused on at the moment). 

            At this point in the story, is there time to notice more than a few basic physical attributes about this new character?  Is there any one or two things about him or her that my point-of-view character might focus on for the moment?  Is there even time to trade names?  If there’s a lot going on, I don’t want to bring things to a crashing halt with a page of description or exposition.

            I think one of the problems some writers have is they keep seeing examples of bad storytelling and character introductions in television and movies.  There’s an all-too common belief that things need to be frontloaded, that the audience needs to know everything about someone up front.  How many stories have you seen that begin with the “let’s all introduce ourselves” scene?  We learn their names and how they talk and their likes and dislikes and usually some clumsy anecdote about them or a blatant example of I’M THE UNSTABLE ONE!!!  GAHHHHH!!!  

            These scenes almost always feel unnatural because this isn’t how we meet people in real life.  Most of the time, we learn things about them in bits and pieces.  A little here, a little there.  Sometimes we never learn a character’s name, sometimes it’s the first thing we learn.  Some characters are willing to spill everything about themselves, others don’t want to know anything about you because it makes the job simpler.

            Now, I mentioned relevance up above.  It’s a close companion to context.  My story may end up in a place where we can take the time to get to know someone, but that doesn’t mean I need to say everything there is to be said about them.  Yes, everything in a character’s life helps define them, rich tapestry, all that, but if it really isn’t relevant to the moment at hand, or the story as a whole, there’s a good chance it doesn’t need to be there.  Bob explaining that he had to slit the throats of sheep growing up on a farm is important when we’re choosing who has to fight in the wolverine pit, not so cool during speed dating.  And someone telling you their sexual fantasies might be very exciting on a third date, but it can be a bit creepy during a job interview (no matter who’s talking).  When someone does this in real life, it’s called oversharing, and it tends to make us uncomfortable because… well, we don’t need to know these things in this particular situation.

            This can also help me weed out characters that… well, might not need to be characters.  If their introduction doesn’t fit in context, and the facts about them aren’t relevant… maybe I should question why they’re in my story here and now.  Maybe their introduction—or the full extent of it—should be pushed back or pulled forward.  Or maybe they’re just delivering the pizza and don’t have anything to do with the story at all.

            It all depends on context.  And relevance.

            And speaking of introductions, next time I’d like to go one step further and talk about dating.

            Until then, go write.

            This week’s title isn’t so much a pop culture reference as a “good general advice” reference.  It works for real life, and for writing.

           (If this is the first time you’ve stumbled across the ranty blog, I try to have clever and referential titles.  I usually fail….)

            Anyway, I wanted to talk about first impressions.

            I read a book a while back that introduced one of the main characters while they were yelling at a server in a restaurant.  I mean actually yelling.  I’ll call said character Wakko (not his real name).  Something was wrong with Wakko’s lunch  order and Dot (the server) was apologizing and offering to go get it fixed.  But he wouldn’t let it go.  He just kept berating this woman over the food—something that really wasn’t even her responsibility—and she kept saying she’d get it fixed as soon as possible.  And we were inside this guy’s head, too, so we saw some of his rude thoughts and annoyance even after the server had walked away.  He just couldn’t grasp the idea that someone would’ve brought an imperfect order to him.

            Then his new food came, he ate lunch, and wandered off into the events that began the story.

            Thing is… I have to admit, I wondered why we were spending time with this guy. Was he going to be ironically killed off in that getting-to-know-the-victim way (which would be cool)?  Was he the villain?  When the lovely heroine first meets him and is immediately left a little weak in the knees, my only thought was “wow, you’re in for a shock…”

            First impressions matter.  In the real world and in fiction.  Maybe even more in fiction.

            This ties back to an idea I’ve mentioned once or thrice before.  You’ve probably heard it as three act structure, although that term gets misused and misunderstood quite often.  When we talk about three act structure in storytelling—any kind of storytelling—what we’re really saying is that every story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  As a writer, I establish the norm, I introduce conflict into the norm, and then I resolve that conflict.  Three steps.

            Easy, right?

            Y’see, Timmy, when I first introduce a character, nine times out of ten I’m establishing the norm.  This is what said person is like most of the time, without the added pressure of that conflict I’m going to be introducing in a little bit.  These first impressions is where my character arcs are going to begin. 

            Silly and obvious as it may sound, this is why we generally meet protagonists doing good things (or at the very least, neutral things) and antagonists doing negative things.  Because if I start with someone yelling at a waiter, they’re a jerk.  That’s all there is to it.  Especially if I don’t know what led up to screaming fit. 

            And it’s tough to get past that first impression.  Not impossible, no, but if I go this way with my character then I’m choosing an uphill battle as my starting point.  If your first thoughts are that my character’s kind of a rude bastard or just a general ass or maybe a bit creepy in a bad way…  I’ll have to spend a lot of time getting past those perceptions.  And that’s time I can’t spend getting to, well, the plot.

            Run through a list of some of your favorite characters from books or movies and think about how we first meet them.  How often are the heroes and heroines doing essentially decent things?  Are the villains usually doing something bad or disturbing when you first see them?

            Consider Lee Child’s hero, Jack Reacher.  Most Reacher books begin with him in a very quiet, subdued setting.  He’ll be on a bus or sitting in a roadside diner.  Every now and then he’ll actually be in a real restaurant with servers who he usually tips well.  Because that’s the kind of guy he is.  Despite his intimidating appearance, he doesn’t go looking for trouble.  He doesn’t like problems.  He just wants to travel around and see the country.

            Granted, if you screw with Jack Reacher, you are in for a world of hurt.  He’s a huge, dangerous man who has no problem doing what he needs to do to survive.  People can talk about honor and fair play, but Reacher will do what it takes to win, and he’s very, very good at winning.  But that doesn’t come out until Child introduces some kind of conflict.

            Now, to be clear, there are a few ways I could structure my story so I first meet someone a bit further along their arc, and that might change things a bit.  It’s also possible I could have a real twist planned, and it turns out Dot is actually the little girl from the 1993 flashback, just with glasses now!  And you know she’s just flirting with those guys as part of her revenge plan…  It won’t end well for them

            Even then, I need to have a consistent beginning, middle, and end to his or her arc.  As I’ve mentioned before, these elements may be in a different narrative order but they still need to make linear sense.  If good people are going to go bad (or vice versa) I need to see a clear, believable chain of events.

            And I still need to introduce an interesting and semi-likable character.  Or, at the very least, not an unlikable one.  If my readers don’t want to follow a character, there’s a really good chance they’re just going to stop reading.  And then they’ll never see that cool twist I set up at the start.

            So think about those first impressions.  Because you really want to make the right one. 

            Next time, I wanted to talk about something big.

            Until then, go write.

            This week’s topic is kind of timely because I just got notes back from my editor and he’s called me on this in a few places.  I’ve also recently read two books by other people that suffered a lot on this front, and it kept good stories from being really great stories. 

            So let’s see if we can work through this together.

            You might remember when your junior high school teacher would talk about  first person and third person.  And third person would get divided up, too, with phrases like omniscient or objective or limited.  If you’re anything like me, you probably erased most of that from your internal hard drive as soon as the quiz was over.  

            If we’re going to take this whole being-a-writer thing seriously, though, it means going back and re-learning this stuff and knowing how these rules work.  More to the point, we need to understand how they work so we can use them without confusing or frustrating our readers.  A lot of otherwise good stories I see get ruined by an erratic, irregular point of view… or by a complete lack of one.  They jump from character X to character Y to an omniscient point of view to Z’s first person point of view and then back to X’s journal. 

            For a reader, this is a lot like trying to watch a movie while riding a Tilt-A-Whirl.

            For those poor folks who didn’t get that last reference, a Tilt-A-Whirl is a carnival ride that spins the riders in one direction while moving them up and down on a circular track that’s spinning in the other direction.

            Let’s do a quick recap.

            First person is when the narrator is a character in the story, usually (but not always) the main character.  Everything I see or read in this story is filtered through that character.  I see what she sees, hear what she hears, feel what she feels, know what she knows.  That knowing bit’s important—in a first person story I’m getting access to all the narrator’s thoughts as well.  This can be very freeing, but very limiting and challenging as well.

            I’ve mentioned epistolary style here a few times.  It’s a form of first person where the writer tells the story through letters, journals, and other “existing” material produced by the narrator (or narrators).  Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an epistolary novel, and so are Tony Faville’s Kings of the Dead and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. 

            Second person is very, very rarely used, but I’ve seen it done a few times so I thought it was worth mentioning.  It’s when the main character is you and the writer projects all the action and emotion onto you.  “You walk down the hall and a feeling of unease begins to creep up your spine.”  Second person is tough to work in because I’m forcing my reader into the story and taking away all their control.  It’s not my story or Wakko’s story—it’s yourstory, and you’re going to do these things and feel like this and react like this.  That tends to be kind of awkward. 

            If you remember the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, those were usually done in second person.  And you may remember that they were a bit odd to read, especially if you picked one up later in life.  If you’re a bit geeky, second person is like having a dungeon master who takes control of the whole game.

            Third person is still the most common point of view for fiction, even with the rise of first person stories in the past decade or so.  It’s an independent, non-involved narration of the events of the story.  In a third person story, the reader is just a spectator.  There’s still a question of how much they see, though…

            In a third person omniscient story, the reader gets access to everything.  I see Yakko, Wakko, and Dot’s actions—no matter where they are—and I also see inside their heads.  I know what they’re thinking and how they’re reacting to things, even when they don’t show it.  I don’t have numbers to back it up, but off my own experience I’d guess most stories get written this way.

            A third person limited story keeps the reader as a spectator but limits how much they see.  I may decide we’re only going to focus on Wakko and not wander away to see what other characters are doing.  Or perhaps I’ll only let the reader see actions and not get access to what the characters are thinking.

            The trick with limited is that it’s like looking through a telescope or a pair of binoculars.  I can see certain things very clearly, but not other things—even if they’re very close.  And if I try to switch targets abruptly, it gets very confusing.

            So, it’s clear that a big part of storytelling is the point of view.  It affects how the narrative unfolds.  It also determines what kind of things the writer can tell you or explain during the course of the story. If I have an inconsistent point of view, it’s going to be jarring and break the flow of my story.  If I’ve chosen the wrong point of view, things may come crashing down around me right from the start.

            Now, I’m sure some of you are wondering how can there be a wrong point of view?  Sure, it may change the story a bit one way or another, but how can the point of view be wrong?  It’s just an arbitrary decision, right?

            Consider this example…

            Let’s say I’ve decide to write a mystery novel in third person omniscient.  I start off with my detective (let’s make her a female).  So for the first few chapters I’ve got access to what’s going on around her, what she thinks of the various people she meets, what they think of her, and so on.  Then we get to the crime scene and… well, hang on.  Maybe the murderer’s here.  If she is (yep, the killer’s female, too) the reader will know instantly because we’re seeing what’s going on inside her head.  I mean, it’s kind of a cheat  if the murderer’s here at the scene of the crime and not thinking about the murder, right?

            So maybe it’s better if we just never peek inside her head.  Of course, any savvy mystery fan is going to wonder why we’re seeing inside everyone’s head except Phoebe’s (yep, it was Phoebe all along), and they’re probably going to assume it’s because she’s the killer.  And they’ll be right.  In which case this isn’t a mystery anymore, it’s just withheld information… and poorly withheld at that.

            Of course, I could just decide to see inside Phoebe’s head from the start, but now this isn’t a mystery.  If we know she’s the killer from the start, this is more of a suspense-thriller.  And it’s a tricky one, because now the detective is going to be playing catch-up with the readers for the whole book.

            It’s worth mentioning that Alfred Bester pulls off a wonderful third-person omniscient mystery in his book The Demolished Man.  But it’s kind of a trick. The mystery in his story isn’t who the murderer is, but how he managed to pull off his crime in a world where all police are telepaths.

            So, choosing the right point of view is important in a story.  At best, the wrong one can mean a lot of extra work.  At worst, it means I might find I’ve written myself into a corner.

            Another important thing to remember is that my point of view needs to be consistent.  If ninety-five percent of my book is focused on Phoebe and her thoughts and her actions and what she sees, it’s going to be very jarring on page 324 when the narrative suddenly jumps into Wakko’s head for a few paragraphs.  If I switch viewpoints five or six times in the same chapter, it can get confusing real fast.  If I’ve been doing an epistolary novel for the first three-quarters of my manuscript, switching to third person omniscient for the last quarter is going to take some adjustment.  And as I’ve pointed out many times, odds are the way readers will probably deal with this is deciding to put the book down and get caught up on all those Person of Interest episodes on their DVR.

            If you want to switch points of view in your story, here’s a couple of tips that might help…

Chapters – Writing different chapters from different points of view has been a standard for centuries.  Mary Shelly did it in Frankenstein.  Faulkner did it.  Heck, even William Shakespeare did it.  It was fairly common for different scenes of Will’s plays to jump to different locations and focus on different characters.  If it was good enough for him… well, who am I to say that doesn’t work?

            In the Ex-Heroes series I switch from third person to first-person every third or fourth chapter.  That first person point of view is entirely contained within the chapter, though.

Markers – This is like the chapter method but on a smaller scale.  Stephen King uses this one a lot.  He’ll be writing from one character’s point of view and then use a set of markers or flags to make it clear a shift has happened. 

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            The readers continued to scroll down through the page, gleaning small clues and hints.  Some of the tips were subtle, other direct, and everyone took a little something different.  A few of the readers shook their heads and scoffed at the ideas being presented, convinced that they had a better grasp of what writing really involved and how it should be treated.  They mocked the idea of limiting creativity with rules or even loose guidelines.  But most of the readers saw the simple truths the blogger was trying to get across, and they got some useful tips from the post.

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            See how the narrative shifted there?  But you accepted it—both times—because of the markers.  They let you know what was coming next was different from what you were just reading.

            In a way, this is one of the oldest methods.  Lots of old novels were done in the epistolary style, and this gave the reader an automatic, familiar marker for the start and close of each viewpoint.  I try to use this method in the non-flashback chapters of the Ex-Heroes series.

Do It As Little As Possible—Some people think switching viewpoints is hip and edgy, so they do it as often as possible, in as many ways as possible.  There’s nothing wrong with this in theory, but—like flashbacks—there needs to be a real reason for it.  If I’m just switching viewpoints to switch viewpoints… well…  that’s going to get old really quick.

            Lots of books have three main characters and spend alternating chapters with each one.  As mentioned above, though, these characters rarely come in halfway through the manuscript.  It’s clear from the beginning that these are the points of view the book will use and it sticks to them.

Don’t Do It At All– this is a bit challenging, but if you can pull it off your readers will love you for it.  Just stay in one voice—one viewpoint—for the entire story.  No cutaways or cheats.

            There are certain drawbacks to this method.  If I never switch viewpoints everything has to come from the same direction.  If I’ve chosen to tell the entire story from Yakko’s first-person point of view, then everything that happens has to meet Yakko’s language, his experiences, his knowledge base.  But this can make for a very, very powerful story if done right.

            And there you have it.  A quick (well, not that quick) overview of different viewpoints, and a few tips on how to use them in your stories. 

            Next week… well, later this week, really… it’s Christmas.  I’m enjoying some time off, to be honest.  But maybe I’ll put up something about the year in review and we can all see how well my time was spent.  And maybe talk about yours, too.

            Until then, have some eggnog.  And try to write a little bit.

            Grab a piece of paper and write these things down real quick.  Don’t think, don’t second-guess yourself, just scribble down the first things that come to mind, okay?  I want you to write down a television show about an island, a number from one to four, a Disney princess, and a vegetable.

            We’ll get back to that in a bit.

            Every now and then you’ll hear some guru talk about Jung or the zeitgeist or collective subconscious.  They’re pretty terms, but I’d guess four out of five times the people slinging them don’t really know what they mean.

            I think it’s much simpler than that.  Nowadays we’re all watching the same shows and movies and listening to the same music.  A lot of us are reading the same highly-recommended books.  Through the wonders of the internet, we can spend an hour each morning getting news updates from around the country and around the world.  Plus, all of us can discover the same Korean rap star within a week of each other.

            I’d guess at least ninety percent of you reading this had a basic Western education.  Most of us probably went to college for a few years, too.  We’ve compared banks and apartment-shopped and made budgets for either work or the home.  Maybe both. 

            We all share a lot of the same experiences, and we draw on those experiences to make the same decisions.  Because of this, we tend to be drawn to the same things—especially when you start dividing folks into fans of different genres and styles. 

            This is why you should never, ever go with the first idea you think of.  Because the odds are very good that at least a thousand other people just thought of it, too.  And half of those people are going to attempt something with that idea.

            I’ve talked about screenplay contests and some of the recurring concepts that made me and other readers cringe.  One of those was the Current Events script.  It’s a screenplay based off a recent, high-profile story that got a fair amount of news coverage.  They’re almost always rushed and, more to the point, there’s usually at least half-a-dozen of them about the same event.  And that’s just what one individual reader sees, so odds are there are a few hundred  of these scripts floating around each contest, all based off the same event. 

            A few months back I started toying with the idea of a new book, one that could possibly be the start of a new series.  Almost immediately, I came up with something that I thought was fairly clever and very open-ended.  I mentioned it to a friend over Labor Day weekend, though, and she said it sounded familiar.  She whipped out her Kindle, browsed Amazon for a minute, and came up with a name and title for me.

            Well, I got home and started checking it out.  It turns out the other author and I had both come up with the exact same premise.  Our main characters had the same background, the same life-changing event with the same results (and requiring the same medical breakthrough), and the same changes in their life because of it.  Different plots, but the story of our main character was almost identical.  The other author had just come up with it eighteen months earlier than me.

            We all get exposed to the same input and process it in similar ways.  That’s why the first thing that comes to mind is usually the thing that everyone else thought of, too.  Even if I think I’m a clever and exceedingly smart writer, I’m going to make the same first choices as everyone else.

            Don’t believe me?  Remember those things I asked you about up above?  I’m willing to bet that most of you wrote down LOST, three, Cinderella, and carrots. 

            What did I get?  Three out of four right?  I bet I got four out of four for some of you.

            When it comes to plot, try to avoid going with the first thing that comes to mind.  If you’re feeling gutsy, avoid the second and third, too.  That’s what makes a good writer—going beyond the obvious.

            Next time, unless I get another really cool request, I’m thinking I might talk a little bit about characters.

            Until then, go write.