Category: plot

            So, a few weeks ago I got to witness an all-too common event.  The person whining about how “they stole my idea!”  Who they were isn’t important.  Sad truth is, it was a nonsense claim, one we’ve all seen more than a few times.

            Here’s an ugly truth that all half-decent writers know.  Ideas are cheap.  They’re cheap, borderline worthless, because they’re common.  Ridiculously common.  I can say with absolute certainty that I have more ideas for books than I am ever going to be able to write.  Seriously, even if I live to be a hundred, I’m pretty full up.  And know what? I’m going to have more ideas tomorrow. And the day after that.

            Not only that, but a lot of time my ideas will line up with the ideas other people have.  This is called parallel creation, and it happens a lot.  Especially when you consider how many folks come up with ideas they never do anything with.

            Here’s an absolutely true story.  Throughout 2008 and 2009, I placed in a few screenplay contests with a script I wrote called Reality Check.  It was about the crew of a retro-style spaceship who slowly come to realize they’re actually characters in a 1950s serial. Eventually, they figure out how to escape into the real world—which turns out to be a far more terrifying and dangerous place than they’re prepared to deal with. Especially when one of their mortal enemies follows them through.

            If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should.  It’s got a lot of the same elements as John Scalzi’s Redshirts, a ridiculously fun book that came out about two years after I won my last contest with Reality Check (if memory serves, I got a free copy of Final Draft for that one). 

            Now, I’m sure some people would go nuts and start shrieking about plagiarism and lawsuits.  Heck, I was dragged into a court case a few years back which was pretty clearly just weak parallel creation, but someone decided to sue over it anyway.  And lost.

            Simple truth is, Scalzi and I have never met (I think we were rushed past each other once at NYCC, but I’m not even sure of that). To the best of my knowledge he’s never been a judge or reader for a screenwriting contest.  I have absolutely no reason to think he ever saw my story.  We’re just two guys about the same age with similar educations, backgrounds, and interests who happened to look at something the same way and both decided to do something with it.  I wrote a screenplay, he wrote a novel.  That’s parallel creation.

            There’s also a funny rule of thumb I heard a while back that I think is, alas, horribly true.  The level of worry someone has about their idea being stolen is usually an inverse ratio to how good that idea actually is.  In other words, people tend to get really paranoid about their bad clichés and tropes being stolen.  That court case I mentioned before?  It was based off some ridiculously common clichés.  I mean, embarrassingly common.  I actually laughed out loud when the lawyer told me they were part of the core basis of the lawsuit.

            Y’see, Timmy, we all have ideas.  And the simple truth is, there’s somebody out there with the same influences, the same education, the same resources as me who’s having the same idea.  Maybe even ten or twenty people.

            Now, let me bring up a related point to keep in mind about ideas. In fact, here’s another story.  Genders, genres, and other facts have been changed (or maybe not) to protect the semi-innocent…

            I was at a convention a while back and one of the other attending authors offered me a copy of her book.  My to-read list is so huge I generally don’t accept such offers, but she was insistent so I said sure.  And then it slowly worked its way through my to-read pile until it was at the top.

            Said book was a fantasy novel that was aiming for a Game of Thrones-type feel.  It was very big on swordfighting.  Sword vs. sword, sword vs. axe,  sword vs. two swords, sword vs. sword and a dagger… 

            It just went on and on like this.  Every fifth or sixth page had a sword fight. Or a flashback to a sword fight.  Or someone talking about what they were going to do to someone else in an upcoming sword fight.

            And every battle ended bloody.  No mercy in this world.  Everyone either loses a head or an arm or gets impaled.  Sometimes all three.  Blood and guts sprayed everywhere and got on everyone.  House of a 1000 Corpses looked clean and sanitized compared to this book.

            Needless to say… it wasn’t that good.  There were several places where the book bordered on awful.  I read about fifty pages and skimmed the rest.  More sword fights.  More blood.  A few beatings.  The non-stop actionwasn’t the only issue, alas, but it was the one that matters for today.

            Y’see, some of these battles were actually kind of clever.  They did things I hadn’t seen before in books or on screen. The way they approached a character or their training.  Some of the ways the fights went.  How some of them were described.

            But it’s not enough just to be original.  My book needs to be coherent, both in plot and in structure.  It needs to have flow.  These are the things that tie my ideas together and turn them into a story.

            I’ve mentioned before that ideas are rarely more than plot points, and a pile of plot points is not the same thing as a plot.  No matter how clever my idea is, it’s not going to automatically make my story into a good story.  Especially if… well, I don’t have a story.  And an idea without a story is…

            Well, it’s borderline worthless.

            Next time, I’d like to put a few thoughts on the block.
            Until then… go write.

            If any of you happen to follow me on Twitter, you know I have a habit of watching bad B-movies on the weekend–usually while I’m geeking a bit.  While I do, I tweet out random observations about the story, dialogue, plot points, and so on. More often than not… they’re not positive ones.

            There’s usually a lot of drinking going on, too.

            Maybe twenty minutes in, one of the civilians asked a grunt why they were all so dedicated to the sergeant.  And said grunt told him this two or three minute story about how, five years ago, they’d been stationed on Theta Sigma, things went belly-up one night on patrol, and Sarge was the only one who kept it together.  He got them out of that hell-zone on the death planet, and he even carried Bronsky for the last three miles.

            Then, maybe thirty five-forty minutes in, one of the civilian scientists asked the lieutenant why he was such a hard ass.  And he told her about how four years ago he’d been walking the perimeter, checking on his men, and he found some civilians in a restricted area. But he cut them some slack… and then the Lictors attacked. If he’d been hard then, if he’d sent them away as soon as he found them, those three people’d be alive today.

            And then someone sat with the Sarge for a while as he recovered from a wound (he’d been impaled right through the chest, and that put him off his feet for, y’know, almost six hours).  She asked how he could stay so positive, making jokes while the whole mission was turning to crap around them.  And he told her about how, seven years ago, he’d been on this bug hunt on Ceti Alpha Five…

            Look, you get the idea, right?  Do I really need to finish that story?

            Yeah, most movies don’t do it that many times, sure.  Still… that element’s kind of become a standard in a lot of military stories, too, hasn’t it?   The soldier/Marine/Amazon/Mooncop who gives us a flashback in dialogue to explain a strange bond, a weird character tic, or maybe even that scar she’s got that runs from her temple down past her jaw. 

            Here’s the funny thing, though. This never happens in Aliens.  Not once. Not even for a few seconds.

            Y’see, Timmy, in Aliens the story only goes forward. We don’t need to go backwards to learn interesting stuff about these characters.  We’re learning about them through how they react to things now, not how they reacted to them six years ago in Kazakhstan.

            If the only way I can make my characters interesting is by flashing back six or seven years… maybe I don’t have interesting characters.  Not now, anyway.  It’s possible they were interesting back then, but if they’re interesting now… why’s all their character development in the past?

            At the very least, I don’t have an interesting story.  If I did, wouldn’t there be  cool stuff happening now?  Stuff my characters could be reacting to and giving the reader a better sense of who they are, even as it drives the plot and story forward?

            If it’s only that recollection or flashback that’s making them cool… maybe that’s the story I should be telling.

            Anyway, just wanted to toss that out real quick.

            Thursday, our regularly scheduled post.

            Until then, go write.

            Okay, it’s been a while since we had some solid, deep, digging-in-the-gross-stuff discussion about writing. So let’s get back to basics, shall we…?

            A couple years back I had the fantastic opportunity to spend about an hour on the phone with Shane Black.  If you don’t know his name off the top of your head, he’s the writer-director behind (among others) Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3, and just recently The Nice Guys.  He knows a lot about storytelling, and during our talk he tossed out a dozen or so useful lessons, one of which I’d like to share with you.

            Yeah, I’ve talked about this before, but I came up with some new ways to talk about it, and I figured it’s a good refresher…

            Pretty much any book, movie, television episode, or short story can be broken down into two parts—the plot and the story.  The plotis the events and moments going on outside my characters.  The story is all the events and moments that are going on inside my character.

            Here’s another way to look at it—plot can affect lots of people, but the story is mostly going to affect my character.  A bomb going off is going to affect hundreds of people.  Phoebe marrying Wakko instead of me is mostly going to affect… me.

            Let’s go into some more detail.

            Plotis the external threats and goals in my book.  Most books tend to have the plot scribbled out on the inside flap (the jacket copy, they like to call it).  If I pick up a BluRay, they’ve usually got the plot of the movie or show on the back.  For example (using a book I’ve mentioned recently), the plot of Anamnesis is about a bottom-tier drug dealer, Ethan, who tries to learn more about a custom drug that’s appearing on the streets, and then has to try to save himself when he discovers some of the people behind this drug.

            After looking at a lot of books or movies from the storytelling point of view, one thing I noticed is that the plot is almost always an attempt to do something.  Win the big race, get the guy, stop the villain, save the orphanage, save the world.  As I mentioned above, the plot involves a goal, and any decent goal in my story is going to take some effort to achieve.

            Another thing I’ve noticed is that plot tends to get a bad rap.  A lot of artsy folks will scoff at the idea of “plot,” like it’s some crude tool that only hack writers use.  Which is just wrong–plot’s an essential part of storytelling–all storytelling.
            Now, in all fairness, there are a decent number of “plot-heavy” films and books out there.  The characters are kind of… well, irrelevant.  And these tales might be great to kill an afternoon with, but that’s all they’re ever going to be.  To anyone.
            As it happens, though, a lot of those artistic “character based” works of film and literature tend to meander and not really, y’know, go anywhere.  I think that’s because of the refusal to have a plot.  As I mentioned above, plot  means the characters are trying to do something, so “no plot” means the characters are… well… not doing anything.

            That brings us, nicely, to story.  Story is the flipside of plot. It’s all the internal desires and needs and struggles of my characters.  It’s a big part of the character arcand the reasons behind that arc.  Story tends to be what we tell our friends about when we explain why we like a character.  We enjoy the plot, but what we get invested in is the story. 

            To use Anamnesisagain, Ethan’s story is that he suffers from severe retrograde amnesia—for all purposes his life began just a few years ago when he woke up on a beach.  So the memory-erasing drug that appears on the street—and the people suffering from its effects—strikes a chord.  He feels compelled to help them, even though it’s really not in his best interests.

            Every now and then, you might hear someone say there’s really only seven plots (or six or nine or something) and there’s a bit of truth to that.  The reason there are millions of different books, though, is because of story.  If I drop two different characters into the same situation, I’m going to get radically different results, because they’re going to approach things… well, differently.  If Peggy Carter had gotten the super soldier formula instead of Steve Rogers, Captain Americawould’ve been a radically different movie, on a bunch of levels.  An example I’ve used before is Never Let Me Go and The Island, two movies with almost exactly the same plot but very different stories. End result–two very different movies.

            I’ve talked a few times about working on Ex-Isle, which came out back in February.  One thing I realized as I started the second draft was that I had a plot, but no real story.  What was going on inside St. George, one of my main characters, while the plot progressed around him?  And figuring out his story (his ongoing need to help people vs. how his position and purpose at the Mount was changing) helped solve some knots and eventually even changed the ending of the book.

            Now, let’s play with this a bit…

            Who’s heard of the Moonlighting curse?  It’s the idea that if you have a TV show with a strong “will they or won’t they” element, it’ll collapse as soon as they do. It happened famously with Moonlighting and more recently, alas, with my beloved Castle.

            But we’re talking about this as writers.  So… whydo these shows collapse at this point?

            The plot of Castle is that a wildly popular crime novelist (Richard Castle) ends up working with the homicide department of New York’s 5th precinct.  His personality grates on them a lot, but they can’t deny he has a quick mind and some amazing insights into human psychology and criminal motives.  Plus, he’s friends with the mayor… so they’re kinda stuck with him as long as he wants to be there.

            The story of Castle is about the developing relationship between many-times-married Castle and married-to-her-job homicide detective, Kate Beckett.  They each have a lot of baggage, but they also have a lot of chemistry.  And the chemistry kept growing even as they came to accept (and even admire) each other’s quirks and hangups.

            All sounds great, right?  But does anyone see the problem?  It’s something we’ve talked about before…

            See, the basic plot of Castle is pretty much infinite.  I think we can all agree there’s no foreseeable future where New York City is going to have a drastic shortage of homicides.  So that part of the series can keep going forever.

            But… the story of Castle pretty much ends once Castle and Beckett become a couple.  Our whole story was “will they or won’t they,” so once they do… that’s it.  Done.  My story’s over. Sure, in some cases we can stretch things out a bit with all the usual new-relationship stuff (early riser vs. late, snoring, family and friend approval, toothbrushes, how far is this going, etc.), but the longer a series runs, odds are a lot of that will already be established and resolved.  Hell, before the two of them ever kissed, I think Becket had celebrated three or four Christmases with Castle, his daughter, and his mom. 

            Y’see, Timmy, the plot of Castle was still going, but the story’d come to an end.  Which means the series either stumbled into that plot-heavy area I talked about up above… or it came up with a reason to extend the story. And as we’ve talked about in the past, that kind of artificial extension usually doesn’t go over well.

            So, plot and story.  Every good tale should have both.  They can overlap.  They can intertwine.  But if I’m missing one or the other, no matter how many excuses I want to make… my work’s going to be lacking.  And my audience is going to be able to tell.

            Next time…

            Well, next time is going to be a few days before Christmas.  And Hanukkah.  We’ll all have things to do, so I’ll try to do something brief.

            Until then… go write.

            I wanted to revisit a topic I discussed a while back. If you’ve been following the ranty blog for a while, this’ll probably seem familiar. And if not, well, I promise it’ll be as semi-informative as anything else I put up here…

            A few years ago, on one of the message boards I used to frequent, someone once accused me of being horribly biased against anything that’s “character driven” or lacks a plot.  I didn’t feel the need to address it there, but it did get me thinking.  Am I horribly biased?

            After wondering about it for a brief while, I realized… yes.  Yes I am.

            Horribly biased.

            Keep in mind what bias means.  We tend to think of it as something evil (especially during an election season) but all it means is someone has an automatic tendency to lean toward or away from something when it comes to judgment.  If I have the choice of watching a sitcom rerun or Agents of SHIELD, my personal bias is to watch Agents of SHIELD.  If one salad is made with spinach and one with kale, I’ll probably choose the spinach.  It doesn’t mean Agents of SHIELD beats every sitcom or that spinach is always better than kale—it’s just the way I roll.

            Unless the spinach is cooked, which is disgusting.

            By the same token, if I have the choice between a story where extensively-defined protagonists do absolutely nothing and a fun story with good characters and an arc… well, I’ll go with option B every time.

            So, yeah, I’m biased.  In fact, if you check the numbers, you’ll find most people are.  We like compelling characters, but we also want to see things happen.  Check out a list of bestselling books or films or plays.  How many of them involve people sitting on their butts for long periods of time?  How often do we look at a list of Academy award nominees and realize we haven’t seen 3/5 of them… if not more?

            The sad truth is, that kind of stuff just doesn’t sell.

            Please keep in mind before you leap to the comment section–I’m not the only one saying this.  People have been saying it for decades.  Probably centuries.  There’s a reason so much of Charles Dickens’ popular crap survived and most people can’t even name three of his contemporaries.  Stephen King has had a storytelling career for five decades now, but how many other authors followed him out of the 1970s?  People want to be entertained.  Silent film director Marshall Neilan humorously pointed out (about a hundred years ago) that there are two kinds of directors—the ones who make artistic movies and the ones whose movies make money.

            Are making money and popularity the only yardsticks of success?  Hell no, not by a long shot.  But they’re the common ones that most folks use.  If I tell you that I wrote a phenomenally successful book, you’re not thinking I made my dad proud, or impressed my tenth grade English teacher, or really touched three dedicated readers.  When I say “phenomenally successful” it means the book hit the New York Times bestseller list, sold a few million copies, and I’m writing this out for you next to my kidney-shaped pool while Jennifer Lawrence works a knot out of my shoulders.

            All that being said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with stories that focus more on character than on action.  There are a lot of character-driven stories that are just fantastic.  They’re vastly outnumbered by thebad ones, no question, but saying all such stories are bad would be just as lazy as the folks who dismiss all genre work as pedestrian and simplistic.  Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is far more a slice-of-life story than it is a courtroom drama.  Fiend is about drug addicts stumbling through a zombie apocalypse.  Contact is people studying and deciphering radio signals from the stars while figuring out what this discovery means for humanity.  The film (500) Days of Summer is far closer to a character study than a romantic comedy.  I’m sure anyone reading this can name three or four more.

            So, if I want to write something that leans far more on character then action, here are three tips for making it something people will still want to read.

            Somewhere along the line a lot of people got it in their heads that the only way a character can be interesting is if they’re seriously messed up.  This became the yardstick for “mature” fiction.  My character’s a drug-addicted, abuse-surviving, cancer-ridden, sexually-frustrated, self-loathing, dishonored soldier with a horrible case of Tourettes Syndrome currently working as a waiter at Denny’s.

            While such a person may have a great deal going on under the surface, you’ve got to wonder how my reader’s supposed to relate to such a character.  Or how they’re supposed to like them.  Even if this is some kind of redemption tale… how do I have somebody come back from going that far off track?

            If I’m going to make my story all about characters, I need to make it about characters my readers will actually like.  They don’t need to be perfect, by any means, but they also don’t have to be so flawed we wonder why they’re not in prison or an institution.  Someone facing an uphill battle is great, but someone facing a sheer cliff is just pointless.

            This is probably my biggest complaint with 99% of such stories that I read.  Nothing happens.  The week this story covers is the same week a few million other people have had.  Heck, it’s indistinguishable from the same week these characters have had fifty-two times a year.  Mundane.  Average. Unspectacular.  There’s nothing special or noteworthy about it in any way.

            Now, nobody has to fight off a killer AI android for a story to be interesting.  They don’t need to rob a bank or save the Ark of the Covenant from the Nazis or steal the Declaration of Independence.  But they need to do something.  If my characters don’t have a reason to aim a little higher while we’re watching them, then we’re seeing static characters.

3) Have an arc

            Once I’ve got a compelling character and I’ve got something happening, I need to have an arc.  By its very nature, an arc implies we end somewhere else.  Arcs that end in the same place are called circles, and there’s a reason you haven’t heard of well-structured character circles.  You’ve heard of people running in circles, though, haven’t you?  And that’s never a good thing, is it?

            The whole point of a story is to get from A to B.  People grow and change.  If there’s only going to be A, that’s just a plot point.  Plot points can be fascinating, but they also tend to sit on the page if they’re all alone with nothing backing them up.  Just as something needs to happen in the observed life of my character, something needs to change. 

            And that’s it.  Seriously.  It’s really that simple. Three tips to writing a character-driven story that will still make audiences cheer. 

            Because cheering audiences pay better.

            Next time…

            Well, I’ve got an idea for next time, but I guess we’ll see if I get to it or not.

            Until then, go write.