Category: motives

Y’know, I just noticed that there hasn’t been a single comment here in weeks. Not sure if that’s because more people are leaving comments over on Twitter when I link to these… or if I just haven’t been that interesting.

…let me know down in the comments.

Anyway, I’m a bit short on time—the past few weeks have been a bit crazy for me—but I still wanted to get something up here. And I realized there was a topic I hadn’t talked about in a while. Not in any detail, anyway…

One of the basic parts of storytelling is the obstacle.  It’s what stands between my characters and whatever they want. Maybe they want to save the farm, but they’re too far in debt and can’t raise the money in time.  Maybe they want the super-bedazzled mitten, but there’s a big purple guy with his own army who also wants it.  Maybe they just want to ask that cute barista if she’d like to, I don’t know, get some coffee sometime or… no, wait, that’s stupid. Auugggggh, I have to go hide for at least a year. And maybe change my name.

Anyway…

Personally, I think an obstacle’s slightly different from a conflict.  It’s just terminology, yeah, but exterior problems tend to be called obstacles, while interior ones are almost always labeled as conflicts. Captain Marvel wants to save Earth from an alien invasion (obstacle), but first she needs to come to terms with the fact that her adoptive alien race, the Kree, may have been lying to her for years about a lot of stuff (conflict).  See what I mean?

Because of this, I prefer the overall term challenge.  I find that thinking about “obstacles” tends to make me think more about physical things in the way of my heroes, like parts of an obstacle course.  And, again, while this isn’t technically wrong, it tends to lead to a lot of the same things in my writing.  This is when I get challenges with more of an episodic, low-end videogame feel to them.  My character defeats obstacle A then moves on to obstacle B, obstacle C and finishes up with D.

So here are a few thoughts about challenges, external and internal, that might be worth thinking about while I’m planning out my story—whether I’m writing a novel, short story, screenplay. or six-part epic somethingorother. I’ve mentioned them once or twice before, so if they sound familiar… good job.  You’ve been paying attention

First Thought– I must have a challenge

I’m sure we’ve all run into books or movies where people either sit around doing nothing or just meander through events with little to no effort.  If the character needs something, they either already have it in their backpack or it’s in the first box they open. If they need help, people are always  able and willing.  Any lucky break that has to happen does happen just when they need it to.  I know these examples sound silly, but it’s stunning how often I see this happen in screenplays and/or books.

There needs to be something between my characters and their goals.  If there isn’t,  they would’ve accomplished these goals already.  Look. I just got up and made myself a drink. I wanted one. I got it. Heck, if I hadn’t said anything you never would’ve known. That’s just not the stuff we see as bestselling, high-stakes drama.

Second Thought–My characters need a reason to confront said challenge.

If my characters are going to take on a challenge, they need a reason to do it. If I’ve spent the past four days walking through the desert, getting that drink is probably a life-or-death thing for me. Captain Marvel isn’t pursuing the Skrulls as a part time hobby—it’s her sworn duty as an officer of the Kree military. I need to make sure this reason is really there.  It might be clear in my head why the characters are going to undertake a challenge, but is it clear on the page?  This is doubly true for internal things, which can be a lot more subtle depending on what point of view I’m using

Third Thought—My challenge needs a reason to exist.

Like I said right at the start, I need to have some kind of challenge, but I don’t want a challenge that only exists to be a challenge.  It’s got no reason for existing in the world of my  story, no past, no future, no motivation.   It’s only there to serve as an obstacle for the protagonist to overcome.   We can probably all think of a book or movie where, for no reason at all, an obstacle just popped out of nowhere.   That kind of stuff just weakens any story.

Challenges have a purpose.  Whether they’re the driving force behind my story or minor distractions my characters need to deal with quick, they’re a kind of antagonist—something or someone working against my heroes. That oasis is the only source of water for a hundred miles in this desert, which is why the people who used to live here set so many guards to protect it. There’s also a reason the Skrulls are on Earth (they’re searching for a hidden lab) and there’s a reason they’re tough to find (they’re shapechangers). I need to think about why a challenge is in my story, and if there isn’t a real reason… maybe re-think it
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One other note. I think it’s generally better if my audience (reader or viewer) has at least some idea why this challenge exists.  They don’t need to know all the details immediately (or even accurately), but I also shouldn’t be saving them for a last-page reveal.

Not only am I weak from dehydration and facing ten armed guards around the oasis, the actual spring itself is booby-trapped. Someone centuries ago built all sorts of pressure plates around the thing and I’m not exactly in the best condition right now to be tip-toeing and balancing through this spike-launching mine field. Plus, if Captain Marvel can’t find the Skrull agents on Earth, they could establish a foothold here, rebuild their strength, and endanger peace throughout much of the galaxy.

This may be a weird way to look at it, but challenges are things we needto deal with, but we don’t want to deal with. My characters don’t want to deal with this because they don’t even want to be in this situation. I think we can all agree things would be a lot easier if that challenge wasn’t even there.

But it is there, so… goddammit…

Fifth Thought—My challenge can’t be impossible.

Okay, we all write fiction. But even within a fictional world there are things that just can’t happen. Normal people can’t punch out gods or outsmart supercomputers. And if all those guards around the oasis have motion sensors, night vision goggles, and shoot to kill orders, there’s very little I’m going to get—holy crap there’s fifty guards? I thought there were only ten. And when did they all get machine guns?

If you’ve ever watched a horror movie where the killer is merciless,unstoppable, and inescapable… well, that gets pretty dull after the second or third kill, doesn’t it?  One of the reasons Jason Voorhees was scary is that he never ran.  He just sort of… marched? Lumbered?  It always felt like somebody could get away from Jason if they could just go a littlefaster. If it feels like there’s no chance, it’s not interesting. We already know the outcome.

There are two  other issues with the impossible challenge.  One is if I make my challenge out to be completely impossible and my hero pulls it off anyway, there’s a good chance it’s going to knock my audience out of the story. I’ve just shattered the rules of what’s possible in my story. That usually means it’s “throwing the book across the room” time.

The second issue is when I have challenges that seem impossible to my characters, but have painfully obvious solutions to my readers.  We just don’t like these characters, by nature of their stupidity, and that’s not going to win me any points.

Sixth Thought—Holy crap there are a lot of these
This was supposed to be a quick rehash of an old topic, but I keep finding things I want to add to this. I’ve got editing to do, dammit!

This isn’t a hill-I-will-die-on rule… but I’d be willing to fight on that hill for a little while. Once I admit that I need a challenge, it’s kinda the next logical step.

If my heroes are so prepared, so trained and equipped that they’re completely ready for this challenge… well, there isn’t really a challenge, is there? If they’ve covered all the angles, researched every possibility, how can they lose? And if they can’t lose… well, that’s kinda boring, isn’t it? We know the outcome again.

A standard part of so many stories—including Captain Marvel— is when something changes or goes wrong.  The one thing we didn’t prepare for happens. We learned something new that completely flips our goals and  understanding of the situation.  One way or another, the plan’s shattered into a million pieces. I beat the guards and made it past the booby traps and WHAT? There are albino crocodiles in the oasis? Wait, are these guys actually poachers?

But think about it—when this happens in a story, it’s almost always the moment we love. It’s when my characters get to look good and show how smart or clever or tough they really are.

Once I’ve set up a challenge, it needs to be resolved somehow. I can’t crouch on a sand dune outside the oasis for five chapters studying the guards and their patrol patterns, then just wander off back into the desert. It leaves a lot of dangling threads and unanswered questions. Who were all those guys? How did they get here? Why did I give up when I desperately needed water?? How did I wander away if I was weak from dehydration? Why did the author spend five chapters on this if I was just going to wander away…?

To paraphrase Chekov, if we see a phaser on the bridge in act one, we need to see it on overload in act three. And then either disarm it or watch it take out the Enterprise. Because if I just leave it there buzzing and getting hotter, readers are going to ask what happened. They remember this stuff.

And they will judge me on it.

Those are my way-too-many thoughts on challenges. Maybe take some time and look at the challenges your own characters are facing. Are there any? Are they challenging enough? Does your character have a desire to avoid them and a need to face them?

Next time, speaking of challenges, I’m going to do something I’ve tried really hard to avoid here for years. I’m going to go negative.

Until then… go write.

This week—requests are granted!

Also, as you may have noticed, the majority of responses I got in comments/ tweets/ DMs/ etc were in favor of the new layout, so I’m going to stick with it for now.

A few weeks back someone asked about characters.  How do I get a sense of who they are.  How do I make sure when they do something it’s what they’d do instead of just what the plot (and by extension—I ) want them to do?

Okay, these are two related-but-different questions.  Let’s look at each of them on their own, then figure out that relationship-overlap.  Which I think is what we’re aiming for with this request.

Also, because there’s a lot to unpack here, expect a lot of links to previous posts.  I don’t want to bury you in too much rehashed stuff.  You’re here for exciting hot takes on the art of writing, yes?

First off, how do I get a sense of who my characters are as individuals?  What makes them unique?  What makes them stand out?

One thing would be their general backstory and personal preferences.  If I’ve got a character—especially one of my main characters or important supporting ones—I should know a lot about them.  And I’m talking about me, the author.  For almost all of my characters, there are things I know about them that never make it into the books.  Maybe it’s about their relationship with their parents, their worst class in school, or their favorite bands.  It can be games they play, people they’ve slept with, or their first car.  A lot of this sounds like weird stuff, yeah, but all of this says a little something about who someone is, which means it’s going to affect how they react to the world around them.

There’s also their voice.  The way people phrase things and the words they choose.  Their background will have an effect on how they act, and it’s also going to effect how they talk. This is one of the easiest ways to make characters distinct on the page (or in an audiobook).

Also, I could think about how people react to this character.  Do folks wince at the sound of Dot’s voice?  Do they instinctively lean away from Wakko?  Do they lean toward Phoebe?  And are people right to react this way, or is it because they know something else that we don’t?

All of this should give me a really good sense of who my character is.  Again—I probably won’t use all of it.  I may never see Yakko stumbling through a date or listening to music or reminiscing about his old VW Bug.  But these are all the little elements that help move a character from a basic stereotype and into actual, memorable person-hood.

Okay, the second part of all this is about these characters making decisions. 

There’s a term you may have heard around the interwebs called agency.  It first appeared back in the 1700s, when people were having Enlightening discussions about philosophy and sociology.  At its simplest, agency refers to free will.  Can a person make their own choices and affect the world around them?  How much does the world they exist in restrict that ability to make choices?  If I can’t travel alone, vote, or choose who to love… do I have free will, or just the appearance of free will?  Do people in prison have free will?  Free will may have gotten them there—or maybe the conditions forced on them by society did—but now they have almost no freedom to make choices at all, so…?  Is there a point where I no longer have free will?

Anyway, that’s all heavy stuff.  It’s a little different (and easier) for us when we’re talking about agency in a literary sense. Fictional entities don’t have free will because they’re… well, they don’t actually exist.  But as a writer, I need to make my readers believe these characters are real people who are having an actual affect on the world around them.  They need to do things, and these things need to matter.

If cowards are suddenly going to leap forward and be brave, there should be a clear reason.  If a cold person falls madly in love, we should understand why and how.  If someone decides to open the spooky mystery box after it’s killed half their friends… well, we should be with them on this, even if we don’t like it.

Yeah, sure, it’s possible to make inconsistent decisions or choices that move the plot forward.  We’ve all seen it happen.  The wonderful A. Lee Martinez(he of the Constance Verity books and the Save The Movies podcast) came up with plot zombie a little while ago to explain this.  It’s when characters are only acting in service of the plot, not out of any actual developed or established character traits.

This is, just to be clear, a bad thing.

Y’see, Timmy, my characters need to face challenges and need to respond to them.  They need to make choices—ones that are consistent with who they are.    And the results of these choices should have a real affect on how the story plays out. 

Because if they’re not… Well, then they’re not really doing anything. They’re just empty puppets.  Not even the good kind of puppets.  They’re just sock puppets that I’m using to try to convince my readers this is a real story. 

So make your characters do things.  In character.

Next time, I’d like to look at some things from a different angle.

Until then, go write.

            Okay as we inch closer to a happy Halloween, I wanted to take a moment to address something I see pop up a lot in horror stories.  Not only horror stories, but in my experience it seems the most common with them.

            Plus, as I said, it’s the season…

            Remember this story?  A bunch of people get mysteriously summoned to some remote location (often some kind of mansion), start getting picked off by some kind of ghouls or ghosts, and then discover—oh, crap!  We’re the descendants of the people who did this awful thing fifty/ a hundred/ two hundred years ago.  And now these ghosts want their sweet vengeance.

            I’ve seen a few variations off this, and you probably have, too.  Phoebe’s perfectly happy to live in everybody’s shadow… until she isn’t. Yakko’s seemed perfectly sane… until it’s revealed he’s been completely mad the entire time we’ve known him!  That statue’s sat quietly in the museum since the 19th century… until sundown today, when it opened a portal to hell.

            So here’s my important question for you.

            Why now?
            Why is this happening now?  What made super-shy Phoebe decide this is the week she has to ask Wakko out to the upcoming dance?  Why did Yakko’s mask of sanity finally slip away?  Why did the ancient portal open in the museum tonight?  Why did the ghost choose this weekend to send out the summons to its deadly party? 
            Why now… and not a dozen times earlier? Why not six days ago?  Or six months ago?  Or six decades, in some of these cases?

            The real issue here is motive.  Why is my character doing this?  And a big part of motive is knowing why they’re performing these particular actions at this particular time.  Even for things like ghosts or ancient portals, something has to be kicking them off.

            Let’s look at those ghosts again (it is Halloween, after all).  I mean, those ancestors did their awful thing a hundred and fifty years ago.  There’s at least five generations between them and my characters.  Has everyone been getting mysterious invites out to the old mansion?  How the hell did any of them ever have kids, then?  Or have the ghosts been really incompetent up until now when it comes to reaping sweet vengeance and none of my relatives ever bothered to mention it?

            And if mom and dad and grandma and grandpa haven’t been getting invites… well, what’ve the ghosts been waiting for?  Is tonight an anniversary of some kind?  A cosmic alignment?  Did one of the realtors spill an urn of ashes or unlock the attic or decide they’re bulldozing this place on Monday?

            I’ve touched on this idea before—plot being active while story is more passive.  Even if the ghost are my antagonists (and dead), they’re still characters with their own story.  What’s happened that’s made them finally spring into action?  Either they’ve been doing it all along—which would imply a history and a bunch of evidence from previous attempts—or something has changed.  Drastically changed, in some cases. What outside force has caused this story to happen now instead of… some other time?

            Y’see, Timmy, writing a book—any kind of book—is kinda like solving a crime.  I need to know all the motives.  All the answers to what and whyand how and when.  I may not have characters blatantly explaining them within my story, but they should definitely be there if people look for them.

            Because if they’re not there…

            Well, then I’m writing a really lifeless story.
            Next time…

            Holy crap.  Next time is November.  The year’s almost over.

            But more importantly (for some of you)… it’s NaNoWriMo.
            Have a Happy Halloween

            And go write.

            Okay, I don’t have a ton of time this week because I’m trying to get a draft done.  Had a great time at WonderCon last weekend (thank you all for coming out), but I probably did a lot more prep than I needed to and lost some time.  So this one’s on me.

            Anyway…

            I’ve been trying to read a lot more this year. Combined with my usual Saturday geekery movies, it means I’ve been digesting a lot of stories.  And I’ve noticed a bit of a recurring problem.

            In a lot of stories, we’ll see characters do cool things or have bit s of mysterious dialogue… but it’s kinda hollow.  There’s nothing behind them.  No inspiration or motive or…anything.  It’s just action for the sake of action.  Being cool or mysterious with no motivation except to try to be a little bit cool or mysterious. The story progresses and we never find out why these things happened.

            I mean, I can guess why they happened.  The writer or storyteller saw this moment in another story and tried to transplant it.  But they only transported the moment itself—not all the other elements in the story that support it.

            If I’ve got a completed story—mine or someone else’s—here are three questions I should ask myself.

What is my character trying to do?

Why are they doing it?

How are they trying to do it?

            I should be able to give an answer for all three of these, for any character in my story.  And I can ask these questions at any time.  Right at the start.  Top of the second act. Just as we roll into the third act. At any point in the story, it should be clear to me (the writer) what the character wants to achieve, why they’re doing this, and what they’re doing to accomplish that goal.

            And I may not always get the same answer.  What Dot is trying to do in the first 50 pages of my vampire kaiju novel may not be what she’s trying to do in the last 50 pages.  In fact, it probably won’t be.  It’s extremely common for goals to shift during the course of a story as my character learns new things.

            But there should always be an answer to these questions.  There needs to be.  If I can’t come up with an answer, it means my character is doing something unmotivated at best. At the worst, they’re not doing anything.

            Not only that, once someone’s gone through the whole story as a reader, they should be able to see the evidence of the answers in the story.  Once I know that Wakko’s trying to hide the fact that he murdered his brother, his actions in previous scenes should line up with this. Even if I didn’t understand his motives for doing something then, they should be very clear the second time through.

            Even before that, though, there should be some sense of why my character is acting this way or that.  Most readers aren’t going to sit through 200 pages of “just trust me.”  We need to have some sense of what the answers to those questions might be, even if it later turns out we completely misinterpreted them.

            Y’see, Timmy, there’s another way to think of these three questions. They’re my plot.  If my character has no reason for doing the things they do, or doesn’t do anything… maybe my story doesn’t have a plot.

            Flip through your story. Ask those three questions.  And hopefully… you’ll have the answers.

            Next time… it’s that time again.  Yeah, ewe know what I’m talking abut….

            Until then… go write.