September 5, 2019 / 1 Comment

It’s the Real Thing

So, I’m trying to plow through the end of some line-edits, which means I’m a bit short on time. But I really wanted to talk about something that’s come up once or thrice recently. It’s an old idea I’ve talked about a few times so… don’t be shocked if you smell a bit of recycling in here.
One thing we all (hopefully) work for in our writing is realism.  We want our characters, their dialogue, their worlds to feel real.  If my story’s set in the real world, I want it to have that level of detail you can only get with authentic knowledge and experience. If it’s a made-up world, I want every aspect to be as lifelike and believable as possible.
Because of this, we writers get a bit of a… a reputation. And it’s kinda earned.  We people-watch and eavesdrop and sometimes travel to weird places just to get an idea of what the air smells like. Some of us give our characters feet and ankles and knees of clay and overly-complex pasts.  Yeah, us.  I did this too.  We rewrite dialogue again and again to make it as real as possible. We sometimes add random events to the narrative—even major events—to give that broader sense of uncaring fate. Anything we can do to cover our story with a big, thick, oozing coat of reality.
There’s one problem with this, though.
Nobody wants reality. 

Seriously. 

Oh, they may say they do, but they’re lying. To me or to themselves.  My readers want fictional reality, not here-in-the-real-world reality.  They want characters who win (maybe not cheerfully or without scars, but they do win).  They want clean dialogue.  They want things to make sense and story threads to get tied up, preferably with a very neat, precise knot. Or maybe a bow, depending on how wide some of my plot threads are.

Let me give you some examples.

Before I wrote fiction full time, I interviewed a lot of people.  And one thing quickly became clear to me as I transcribed these interviews—real dialogue is a mess. When people talk in reality, they pause a lot and trip over their words and sometimes make false starts that they have to sort of go back over.  They can drone on for several minutes at a time.  They talk over each other.  If you’ve ever looked at an unedited transcript of a conversation, you know that real dialogue’s the worst possible thing for fiction.  Readers would claw their eyes out, and everything would take forever to say.
So we don’t write real dialogue. We write “real” dialogue, lines that seem like the kind of things real people would say. The dialogue gets cleaned up and tightened and measured out to make it sound authentic, even though it’s being crafted. And then people say,  “Wow, her dialogue felt so real.” 
You’ve heard that sort of thing before, yes??  The dialogue seemed real or  felt real or sounded real. Think of how often we all phrase things like this—which is pretty much quietly admitting we know it isn’t how real people talk.  Even though it feels like how real people talk. 
As I mentioned before—heck, I’ve mentioned it here a few times–I made this mistake.  When I was starting down my pro fiction path I copied real people’s real speech patterns into my first serious attempt at a novel. Then I had a couple of real editors mention that as a specific reason I was really being rejected.  It didn’t matter that it was real dialogue, because it wasn’t “real” dialogue.
Make sense?
Here’s another angle.  Weird, unbelievable stuff happens in reality all the time.  There are odd coincidences.  Unlucky circumstances.  Heck, humans have a bad habit of dying in freak accidents and leaving so many things incomplete and unresolved.

But we’re not talking about reality. We’re talking about fiction. And in fiction, all things are equal. I beat cancer, you got kidnapped by an Atlantean princess. It doesn’t matter if one of them is true or real, it just matters that it’s a good story or not.

Here’s another example I’ve used a bunch of times before (and will continue to use again)—Vesna Vulovic.  You remember her, right?  The flight attendant back in the ‘70s whose flight got bombed by terrorists so she fellsix miles to Earth. And survived. Not in the powderized bones/being fed through an IV sense—she walked—I repeat, WALKED—out of the hospital barely ten weeks after they found her, and lived into her sixties.

I mean, that story’s so amazing, look how many times I had to use italics.

The point is, though, what would happen if I tried to have this happen to one of my characters? It honestly doesn’t matter if it’s true, that it actually happened… does it? When it happens to Yakko, my readers are naturally going to call foul (“foul” if I’m lucky). That’s just ridiculous. Yakko got caught in an exploding plane and fell six miles… and survivedThat’s just nonsense. I’m writing nonsense at that point. Why not just put him in an old fridge and have him flung a mile or two through the air? That’s actually less ridiculous.

Y’see, Timmy, reality is a messy thing.  All of it.  The people, the way they talk, what happens to them.  And I don’t want my writing to be messy.  I want it to be clean and polished and perfect. To paraphrase Mr. Twain, the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. When I’m a writer I’m the God of my world, and if something doesn’t serve a greater purpose… well, I’m a really bad god.

And probably not much of a writer.

Even when I’m making it real.
Next time I’d like to talk about… well, look, it’s not really important who they are, okay? We’re just going to talk about them.
Until then, go write.
January 24, 2019 / 3 Comments

A League of Their Own…

            Sorry for missing last week.  Just had a couple of those jumbled days where I kept getting called away for other things.  And while I had a topic for this week, it never quite gelled the way I wanted it to in my head.  Although four or five others did, so I’m set for a while here.
            (topic suggestions are always welcome in the comments, though)
            Anyway…
            I wanted to talk a bit today about godlike characters.  Not just in the sense of robes and brilliant auras and hurling thunderbolts.  Sometimes it’s that rugged, locked-and-loaded man or maybe the tall, super-competent blonde.  Really, it’s anyone who is, for one reason or another, way beyond the level of every other character in the story.
            Which really means they’re out of everyone’s league.
            Quick segue.
            One thing that I see come up in discussions of different open-play, MMPORG type games is a balance between players.  For purposes of this discussion, it’s when the overall population of the game has hit a level where it’s essentially unable to support new players.  If everybody’s level 72, it makes it tough for anybody to interact at level one. All those 72’s are using their bigger, badder gear to go on bigger, badder missions, where they’ll face bigger, badder monsters and get even rewarded with even… well, you get the point.
            Meanwhile, I’m over here in the goblin village, poking at things with a knife and hoping I can get my dagger skill up to 65%…
            And if we actually have to fight each other?  Well, I don’t have a prayer.  I mean, we can argue that statistically there’s a chance, but really… there’s no chance.  And from the 72’s point of view, I mean, can we even call it a wasted three seconds?  Yeah, there may be some jerks who just like beating up the noobs, but for everyone else… yeah, this gets to be kind of boring, right?
            See where I’m going with this?
            Stories need this kind of balance, too.  We want characters to have a chance at achieving their goals, but we also don’t want it to be easy.  If the story leans too far one way or the other, it just gets dull.  For everyone.
            F’r example… 
            If my antagonistis all-powerful, my hero never has a chance.  That’s boring as hell.  There might be a few dramatic moments, if the writer really knows what they’re doing, but probably not.  We all know how it’s going to end, and if we know where it’s going… well, then this is all just noise.
            Plus, it’s discouraging.  We identify with the heroes.  That’s why we’re reading.  And to see someone we identify with get beaten down again and again by an opponent we absolutely know they can’t beat…
            Well, it doesn’t make for a lot of repeat reads, let’s say that.
            Keep in mind, too, my antagonist doesn’t have to be a seven foot-tall somebody in body armor and a chrome skull mask.  The high school mean girl, the abusive drill sergeant, even society in general– any of these can be the antagonist.  And, again, if there’s no chance whatsoever of beating the antagonist, my story isn’t going to hold most people’s interest.
            I’ll also point out that beating the antagonist doesn’t always mean bringing about their ultimate, final defeat.  But as far as our immediate story’s concerned, the bad guy needs to have a chance to succeed at their immediate goals.  No chance means no interest.
            Now, as I hinted above, the flipside of this is also true.  If my main character has absolutely no chance of ever being stopped or hindered in any way, that’s not very interesting either.  I’ve talked about this once or thrice before.  When Yakko can effortlessly deal with anything the antagonist, nature, or the universe itself throws at him, it gets boring really fast.  If Dot’s prepared and trained for everything, to the point there’s little or no chance of failure, that means there’s no challenge.  And no challenge means… well…
            An analogy I’ve mentioned before is me getting a glass of Diet Pepsi.  Not exactly something epic stories are built around.  You’re not going to see teams of people stealing ships, racing down city streets, or forming Fellowships around me as we undertake the great adventure of going to the kitchen and opening the fridge.  Because it’s mundane.  It’s easy. There’s absolutely no challenge in it.
            Even if something might be challenging for us, personally, it doesn’t mean we want to watch someone else do it with no effort.  I’m pretty sure if a zombie plague ever descended on the world, I’d be one of those folks gone in the first week or two.  But I don’t have any interest in reading three hundred pages of someone who walks through the undead apocalypse like it’s a guided tour.  Yeah, no matter how colorful the descriptions are of zombies being blown apart.
            Y’see, Timmy, if there’s no challenge—because either my protagonist or antagonist are too powerful—it means there’s not much of a plot.  As I’ve mentioned before, no plot makes it really tough to have a story.  And you may have noticed there’s not a big market for high-stakes character descriptions.
            I also want to toss out one other downside to nigh-omnipotent characters. Gods are boring as hell.  Seriously.  They’re tough to relate to, and if people can’t relate to my characters, they’re probably not going to make any investment in them.  Good characters have needs and desires and flaws, but godlike powers tend to nullify most of those things. 
            Even if it’s not actual powers, it can be dull.  When you have characters who can do anything and succeed at anything… it just gets boring fast.  We like reading about problems, not about potential problems that were planned for and avoided.
            True fact—one I worked very hard at.  My Ex-Heroesbooks have a super-competent character named Stealth.  She’s their version of Batman.  Every book in the series has at least one example of her demonstrating how she’s hyper-trained and/or four steps ahead of everyone else.
            But…
            Every book also has at least one example of something getting past her. Something she didn’t catch or didn’t think of or somebody else figures out first.  She’s world’s greatest detective, but she’s still fallible.  She not perfect.
            If you’ve got a powerful, competent character in one of your stories, take another look at them.  Do they need to be that strong?  Would they be more interesting if there were two or three scenarios they hadn’t been planning for over the past six months?  Isn’t your story going to be a bit more interesting if success and failure both seem like viable outcomes?
            I think it would. 
            But that’s just me.
            Next time I want to talk about something a little more campy.
            And maybe update the FAQ.
            Until then… go write.
October 14, 2011 / 4 Comments

God is My Co-Writer

So, a few years back one of my friends read for a religious-themed screenplay contest. And, when it got to the point that he was pulling his hair out, I pitched in and read a few scripts for him (I owed him money, anyway). It exposed me to a lot of stories about God, Jesus, various members of the heavenly host, and—to be terribly honest—a lot of really bigoted, small-minded people. Not all of them, by a long shot, but enough that it’s worth mentioning, unfortunately.

Two weeks back I asked for ideas, and one fellow (stand up and wave, Matthew) suggested the idea of approaching God, or any god, in a story. How can you do it without annoying readers while still doing justice to your chosen almighty?
And then, by yet another odd coincidence, on one of my favorite message boards, a few of us were recently batting around the film The Adjustment Bureau, which, in the big picture, is about… well, guess.
First off, a few grammar and spelling points. If we’re talking about the Judeo-Christo-Islamic deity, it’s always God. Capital G. This also holds if you choose to call him the Lord. It doesn’t matter if you or your character are an atheist or agnostic or whatever—this isn’t a religious point, it’s just standard, accepted spelling. This deity is considered the definitive article and as such his (if I may be so presumptuous) name is always capitalized. It’s a proper noun. The same goes for the Bible. If you’re referring to the religious text that encompasses the old and new testament, it’s the Bible. You only use lower case when you’re speaking about a generic book of absolute fact, like if I tell you that Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is my bible.
And, really, if you’re going to write about Biblical-era tales, check out the MLA Handbook, because there are a bunch of unique grammar and spelling rules that apply to these names.

All of which leads to point two. I’m not talking specifically about God in this week’s rant, because a lot of the folks reading this are just as interested in Greek gods, Norse gods, Egyptian gods, Chinese demons, and cosmic entities from beyond time. But when it comes to stories, they all deal with a lot of the same issues.

Now, speaking of definitive articles, I’d like to start with an analogy…
In Danse Macabre, King tells a wonderful story about hearing William F. Nolan (the writer behind Logan’s Run and the legendary Trilogy of Terror films) talk at a convention. Nolan explained horror in terms of a closet at the end of the hall in a creepy, old house. Maybe the hero or heroine can hear something bumping around in there from anywhere in the house, and every now and then it thumps as whatever it is in there knocks an item off a hanger or tips a box off a shelf. As he or she gets closer, perhaps they can hear it scratching on the inside of the closet door. Endless scratching, scratching, scratching…
Finally, despite all our silent urgings, the character reaches out, turns the knob, and yanks open the door to reveal a ten-foot tall cockroach!!!
Thing is, even with the screams and the hissing and the mood music blaring, it’s kind of a relief to see that oversized bug. A ten-foot cockroach is pretty scary, no question about it, but a twenty-foot cockroach… man, I don’t know about you but that’d make me wet my pants pretty quick. It’s kind of a defense mechanism. Once I know what X is, I can imagine a scarier Y and X is reduced by comparison.
In the same way that naming the unknown horror lessens it, deities are lessened by defining them. When a writer tries to explain or show the scope of a god’s power, more often than not they’re really just establishing the god’s limits. If you tell me your god burns with the light of a hundred suns, I can say mine burns with the light of a thousand. If yours is a thousand feet tall and moves mountains, mine is ten-thousand feet tall and moves continents. The more the writer tries to show me, the easier it is for me to imagine something bigger and better (or nastier).

A great example of this is The Omen. No, the original. We shall not mention the remake here. Without giving away too much (although, why don’t you know this story already?), The Omen is about a diplomat who adopts a little boy. The boy, Damien, might be the Antichrist. I say “might” because… well, the movie actually makes you wonder. There are definitely people who think he’s the Antichrist. There sure are a lot of accidents and disturbing events that circle around the little boy. But the thing is… he never does anything. His eyes never glow, he never speaks in a deep, stentorian voice, he doesn’t shoot flames or lightning from his hands. Damien comes across as nigh-omnipotent because it seems completely effortless for him to get to anyone, anywhere—and that what makes him all the more terrifying. Because he doesn’t actively do anything, how’s anyone supposed to stop him? And what will happen when he does start being active?
Y’see, Timmy, defining something in any way automatically minimizes it, because the moment it’s been defined we can think of something bigger. Think of the little kid who yells, “infinity” and immediately gets countered with “infinity-plus-one!”
That’s why it’s always best to leave such omnipotent beings in the shadows rather than dragging them out into the light.  By their very nature, they’re vast, undefinable beings.  Thus, the moment they get any sort of definition they’re being lessened.
So, here’s a few quick thoughts for including a deity in your story.

Don’t—The simplest thing to do. Is a personal appearance really required for this story to work? The members of Congress have a big effect on my life, but I’ve never seen a single one of them in person. Heck, the only messages I’ve gotten from them have been spam emails and robocalls. But it doesn’t mean they aren’t there influencing aspects of my existence, and it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be impressed if one of their aides gave me a call to chat about something. Which leads nicely to…

Minions—Gods of any type are impossible to fight, so including them on either side of the story equation really unbalances things. But I believe someone could beat cultists or demons or maybe even an angel. These are the beings my characters should be encountering. Remember, you can almost never get to the CEO because there’s a wall of flunkies, advisors, junior execs, and bodyguards in the way.

Silence is Golden—They used this one way back in It’s A Wonderful Life, when Clarence the angel would have one-sided conversations with the sky. Neil Gaiman did it in both The Sandman and the wonderful Good Omens (with Terry Prachett). Kevin Smith did it in Dogma. Mere mortals can’t hear the voice of God and expect to survive, so the Lord speaks through a number of mediums… or not at all. Keep in mind, to pull this off—especially the one sided conversation—your dialogue needs to be sharp and you can’t fall back on clumsy devices like repeating everything the silent person says just to make it clear what your god hates.

Comedy—People are a lot more willing to accept divine intervention (of one kind or another) if it has a comedy element. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because when the writer’s not taking the matter seriously, it’s hard for people to have serious complaints. That’s why George Burns and Christopher Moore get away with mocking the man upstairs and The Last Temptation of Christ gets months of picketing. But this tone has to spread through your whole story. You can’t have your deity be the only source of comedy, because then you’re mocking him or her in the bad way.

Minimal Miracles—D’you ever hear the old saying about being so tough you don’t need to fight to prove it? More to the point, have you ever watched a movie where the bad-ass hero just fights and fights and fights and fights and fights? It gets boring, no matter how often he wins. Your omnipotent beings shouldn’t be expressing their power just to prove they can, because that power will start to get boring and take all the challenge out of the story one way or another. If everybody who dies gets brought back to life, what are people even fighting for?
Simply put… gods are the ultimate “less is more” when it comes to writing. The more a god—or demon, or cosmic entity—gets defined, the easier it is to name god-plus-one.
Next week… well, I’m going to miss next week. I’m one of the guests at ZomBCon up in Seattle. But when I come back, I’m sure I’ll have all sorts of scary and horrific things to talk about.
Until then, go write.

Pop culture reference. First of the year…

Wow. Last week’s little rant must’ve struck a chord with folks. Almost double the usual number of hits. Hopefully it was the right chord.
Anyway…
One term that comes up a lot in gaming is “balance.” It’s important that the rules are fair and equal from all directions. No one player should have an inherent superiority to any other. Advantages in one area should come with disadvantages in another. And the players should have a fair chance against the odds themselves. If there’s only a 1-in-20 chance of this little piece of wargear working, it should be pretty darn impressive that 5% of the time it does.
Another term that comes up a lot in gaming is “broken.” It’s when a set of rules are so far our of balance that no one wants to play in that section of the game or against that particular piece of wargear. It’s just no fun to go into something knowing you’ve got no chance of success, one way or the other.
So, what does this have to do with being a god? More to the case, what does it have to do with writing?
Well, stories need to be balanced, too. We want characters to have a chance at achieving their goals, but we also want them to face a challenge getting there. If the story leans too far one way or the other, it becomes pointless.
If the antagonist is all-powerful, then the hero never has a chance. That’s boring as hell. There might be a few dramatic moments, if the writer really knows what they’re doing, but probably not. How long would you be willing to watch me stand in a field trying to will myself to levitate? We all know it’s not going to happen, so I’m betting not that long.
Keep in mind, the antagonist doesn’t have to be a guy (or gal) in body armor and a black cape. The high school jock, the bank officer, the evil drill sergeant, the abusive boss, even society in general– any of these can be the antagonist. And, again, if there’s no chance whatsoever of beating the antagonist, this story is not going to hold a lot of people’s interest.
I’d also point out that beating the antagonist doesn’t mean defeating them utterly. But as far as this main character is concerned, they have to have a chance to succeed at their particular goals. No chance means no interest.
The flipside of this is also true. If your main character has absolutely no chance of being defeated, that’s not very interesting either. Not many people are going to pay to see Mike Tyson pound on some nine year olds, and I guarantee the ones who do aren’t going for the fight. Would you pay to read a novel that’s all about someone who’s hungry and then they go out to dinner? Want to place any bets on Stephen Hawking solving third grade math homework?
Characters with godlike abilities aren’t interesting because they never get challenged. The reader (or audience) never gets the sense that there’s any sort of danger or threat. In which case, the whole story just became as interesting as me getting a glass of Diet Pepsi.
Consider The Matrix. It turns out Neo is a god, yes, but we only discover this in the last five minutes of the movie. Same with John Murdoch in Dark City. By the time they become all-powerful, the story’s pretty much over and we just get a few hints of what they’re going to do with their newfound godhood. In fact, when The Matrix turned out to be a huge success and they had to make sequel films, one of the first things the Wachowski Brothers did was try to scale back Neo’s abilities and say they were never as great as implied in the first film. Oh, he’s still powerful, yeah, but he’s no god. He’s a bit stronger, he can fly… but that’s about it.
Didn’t really help those sequels, though, did it?
This is, as a note, one of the problems many comic book writers have had with Superman over the years. How do you pose a believable threat to a hero who’s faster and stronger than anyone, and completely invulnerable to boot? A few writers, John Byrne probably chief among them, tried scaling the Kent boy way back, but other writers soon had the dial turned up past eleven again.
(Fun fact– Kryptonite wasn’t created to solve this problem. It was invented by the writers of the Superman radio show when their lead actor came down with laryngitis. They needed a way to explain why Superman didn’t appear in four episodes, so they had a kryptonite meteor hit the Daily Planet building without anyone noticing and end up in the same storage room Clark used to change. Bam–four episodes of the Man of Steel coughing feebly.)
There’s also another downside to nigh-omnipotent characters. Gods are boring as hell. They’re very tough to relate to, and if people can’t relate to characters there’s not going to be much in the story for them to invest in. Good characters have needs and desires and flaws, but godlike powers tend to nullify most of those things. All I need to do is snap my fingers and the Diet Pepsi is here. I didn’t even need to get out of my chair for it.
I read a script a few years back that was about two gods pinwheeling back and forth through history and assuming different identities in different times in an attempt to influence the development of mankind as part of some… I don’t know. A game? A random bet? A function of the universe? It was never made clear, but I can tell you I was bored out of my skull by page ten. If I wasn’t getting paid to read it cover to cover, I would’ve tossed it right then.
When Don Payne wrote his script for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, he knew there was no way a giant in Teletubby-colored space armor was going to work on screen and come across as a threat. Rather than try to make Galactus relatable (and diminishing him in the process), Don turned the Devourer of Worlds into an inhuman, completely unrelatable thing– a monstrous, nebulous entity–and in doing so he kept the idea that this was something too powerful to imagine. People give Don a lot of crap for that script, but they ignore that he did a ton of stuff right (seriously–this film is loaded with plot elements lifted right out of Stan Lee’s stories).
If you’ve got an insanely powerful character in one of your stories, take another look at her or him. Do they need to be that strong? Wouldn’t they be more interesting with feet of clay? Maybe even a whole leg of clay? Isn’t your story going to be a bit more interesting if success and failure both seem like viable outcomes?
I think it would. But that’s just me.
Next week I’d like to revisit last week’s post and go into another idea from that online conversation.
Until then, go write.

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