Category: plot

            Hello, all. Sorry again for the delay.  I’ve been beating myself near-senseless against this new draft, and tax stuff, and prepping for a con (Texas Frightmare in Dallas/Fort Worth—one week from now!).  Plus I got selfish and decided to sleep for three hours one night…  I think we’re going to be back for the next several weeks with no problem, though.  I just focused a lot on the new book because I feel like there’s a lot riding on it.

            Speaking of which…

            If you listen to writer-types a lot, one term you’ve probably heard a few times is the stakes.  What are the stakes? What’s at stake? Something like that.

            Every story needs stakes.  Simply put, the stakes are the possible repercussions of failure or inaction.  It’s what’s going to happen if my characters don’t succeed in their various challenges.

            This may seem a little silly to say, but generally those repercussions are bad.  A common thing we see at stake is someone’s life—or maybe many people’s lives.  Maybe it’s the protagonists, maybe it’s the life of someone else.  For a lot of summer movies it can mean the fate of the whole world.  The old school/orphanage/watering hole is another common stake.  Freedom’s one, too.  Secretes being revealed.  And there’s always money (billions of dollars at stake!).  These are all great stakes to have in a story.  It’s also not uncommon for a story to lead us in by claiming X is at stake, only to twist things a bit and let us see we’re trying to prevent a much bigger Y from happening.

            Stakes can also be internal, more about my story than my plot.  Maybe Wakko’s sense of self-worth is at stake.  Or maybe his dream of being an astronaut.  Or of getting the girl.

            (…although let’s face it. If Beth is only interested in you because you can ski the K-12, maybe she’s not really worth it.  Have you noticed that cute foreign exchange student across the street?  She seems like a much better person overall…)

            Now, this brings up a key point.  You may notice a lot of the stakes in that last paragraph are kind of small.  Minor, you might even say.  And it’s true, these are small-scale stakes—for you and me.  For Wakko, though, these stakes are huge!  And in a small, personal story that’s fine.

            See, the thing about stakes is they have to be high for my character. That’s what matters.  Yes, it’s horrible if a husband/father might die in a taxi crash in New York, but stopping it from happening is going to mean a lot more to his wife and kids than it does to me.  If we were in the position, any of us would try to stop it—we’re all decent people—but none of us is going to have that sheer needto stop it that his wife and kids would.  For them, those stakes are much bigger.

            So, hey, let’s talk about this with a shameless Marvel movie reference…

            In Ant-Man, Hank Pym has a long talk with Scott Lang where he explains the whole situation with his shrinking technology, the balance of power, and his old assistant Darren Cross.  Scott listens, then very calmly says “I think our first move should be… calling the Avengers.”  And we all laugh, because this is a perfectly reasonable thing to say in the Marvel Cinematic Universe when someone has what feels like a big problem.

            The ugly truth is, though, in a world where AI robots drop cities out of the sky and fish oil pills can bring destructive superpowers or death… Hank’s problems are kind of small scale.  No pun intended.  And when he busts Scott out of jail and gets him involved so Scott will have a chance to repair things with his ex-wife and daughter, well… it’s still pretty small.  Keeping technology from falling into the wrong hands, a jailbreak, stopping the crazy apprentice, fixing my life so I can be with my daughter… these are all small stakes, in the big scheme of things.

            Thing is, that’s exactly why they work.  It’s completely believable that Hank will be obsessed with how the technology he invented is used.  With all the problems in the world, we wouldn’t buy it if the Black Widow or Thor showed up just to save this one guy’s daughter—but it’s very believable that Scott would do anything he could for his daughter.

            Another point, kind of related to the personal aspect.  Stakes need to be believable.  As I’ve said many, many times, storytelling all comes down to characters.  If I can’t believe in what my characters are experiencing or encountering, in their motives or goals, it’s going to be really hard for me to believe in the story as a whole.  I believe in the Infinity Gem creating some very high stakes in Guardians of the Galaxy—an entire story set against a cosmic, futuristic backdrop—but that kind of nigh-omnipotent power just wouldn’t fit in Ant-Man.  The tone needs to be believable, too.  Again, cosmic vs. small and personal, epic vs. intimate.  There’ve been numerous Muppet movies with high stakes, but none where the goal is to stop a serial killer or prevent a bioterror attack.  These stakes are high, no question, but they’re just not the right tone for a story starring the Muppets.

            There’s also a time factor with stakes—there shouldn’t be enough of it.  If Yakko has a deadly disease that kills people in thirty years, bare minimum… well, that doesn’t seem that urgent.  If Wakko’s daughter is kidnapped and they say they’re not going to think of harming her for six months… well, this is bad, but we’ve got time.

            If my stories have a threat, that threat has to happen now.  Not in a year, not in a month—now.  The window of opportunity for my characters should be closing fast, because if it isn’t… well, human nature, right?  Why put it off until tomorrow when I really don’t need to worry about it until August.

            August of 2068, just to be clear.

            This brings me to another small point (again, no pun intended).  The butterfly effect doesn’t really work when it comes to stakes.  If you’re not familiar, the butterfly effect is when very small actions lead to very large repercussions.  In the classic Ray Bradbury story “A Sound of Thunder,” killing a butterfly millions of years in the past changes a time traveler’s present from a progressive, Federation-esque world to a harsh, neo-fascist one.  It’s a common idea.  Changing A will result in B, which will give us C, only one short step from D, and after D then E is inevitable.  And nobody wants E to happen.

            Nobody.

            The catch is that it can be very tough to convey that.  Stakes need to be a little more immediate and personal and not quite so “long chain of events.”  I’ve talked before about keeping things close and personal for my characters—this is that kind of thing.

            Let’s look at Ant-Man again.  One of the plot points is how much damage Hank’s technology could cause if everyone had it.  If Hydra or the Ten Rings got hold of that tech, they could kill anyone with impunity.  Armies of 1/16” assassins.  Terrifying, right?

            And yet… the story kinda brushes over this.  It’s addressed, but after that it just becomes about stopping Cross from selling the tech.  We don’t need to deal with those further-down-the-road repercussions, we just need to stop him right now.  We put a face on it, because these are the stakes that are big to Scott, Hope, and Hank.

            So, my stakes need to be big.  More importantly, big for my characters.  They need to be believable.  They also  need to be imminent.  And they need to be very direct—the more separated they are from the characters and their actions, the less impressive they’re going to be.

            Easy, right?

            Actually let me toss out one last thought on this…

            Hollywood’s convinced a lot of people that everything needs to be huge. Epic-huge!  WORLD-SHATTERING HUGE!  If the stakes don’t involve at least five billion deaths and/or seventy billion dollars, they’re not high enough.  Producers push for this all the time, so these days a lot of screenwriters (and novelists) tend to lean this way automatically…

            Thing is though, those kind of stakes can be exhausting for everyone.  The readers, the characters… even the writer.  That’s one of the other reasons Ant-Man went over well with so many folks. After all the previous Marvel movies had saved the United States from being overthrown (three times), saved mankind from extinction (twice), and even saved the whole galaxy from a would-be god… yeah, it was nice to deal with a story where the stakes were a bit smaller and more personal.  Hell, figure one of the best- selling books of the past decade—Andy Weir’s The Martian—is about saving one guy’s life. One. That’s it.

            So make sure you’ve got your stakes set.

            Next time… we’re going to talk about something we haven’t discussed in a while. Using the rite words.

            Until then… go write.

            Geeky Star Trek reference.  I’ll explain as we go along…

            But first, a story…

            Back when I was a young man in college and our country had just won its liberty from the British Empire, I took a class on early American literature.  There were only two books to study, both from earlier that month.  It was considered an “easy A” course.

            Okay, that joke died pretty quick.

            Anyway, I was in my early American literature class and we were discussing Wielandby Charles Brockdon Brown, first published in 1798.  It’s considered an early American classic, the first noteworthy American novel, and its author died penniless and drunk in a snowbank.  Story is, his own mother wouldn’t even buy his books.  He was pretty much unknown during his lifetime outside of a small circle, which shrank rapidly after his death.  It wasn’t until the 1920s that he became kind of known and retroactively entered into the canon of great literature.

            I asked my professor about this.  Why was this book now being considered great literature?  It had failed then, and barely anyone knew about it now, how does it qualify?  Surely is it was great, people would read it on their own.  Why should we consider it relevant nowwhen the author’s own mother didn’t even consider it relevant then?

            Rather then telling me to shut up or tossing me out of his class, said professor congratulated me for bringing up a good point.  What’s considered “great literature” changes all the time.  Every time someone publishes a new paper on Longfellow, Irving,  Melville, or Dickinson… the canon changes.  A lot of what we consider “classics” were either ignored or thought of as populist crap in their time. A fraction of it was literature.  Almost none of it was art.

            Back in 1989 (just around the time I was questioning my professor about Brown’s book), Robin Williams gave an interview where he talked about a production of Waiting for Godot that he’d been in with Steve Martin the year before.  “I dread the word ‘art,’” Williams told the AP.  “That’s what we used to do every night before we’d go on with Waiting for Godot.  We’d go, ‘No art.  Art dies tonight.’  We’d try to give it a life, instead of making Godotso serious.”

            Believe it or not, the play sold out every performance.  People loved it.  They lined up every night hoping for no-shows and cancelled reservations.

            Williams knew something a lot of folks just can’t wrap their heads around.  I can’t make art.  No matter how much I try or how long I work or how many guides I follow, art isn’t up to me.  It’s up to everyone else.  And how they define art changes all the time.  With every new paper or critique or review, what’s art now becomes shallow and tired.  And the hack stuff that stands the test of time?  Well, suddenly that’s art.  Or maybe not.  Nobody knows.

            Y’see, Timmy, art doesn’t suck, but trying to make art really does.  And usually (not always, but usually, in my experience), the results of trying to make art suck.  It feels forced and pretentious.  There’s so much message there’s no actual story.  It’s so busy trying to be art that it doesn’t feel alive.

            Before I worry about art, I need to worry about my plot and my story. Do I have believable characters?  Will my readers identify with them and want to see what happens to them?  Do they have arcs?  Do they have good dialogue?  Are there interesting challenges for my characters to overcome?  Is the outcome ever in doubt?  Does tension build?

            If I don’t have a good story, art is irrelevant because no one’s going to read it.  I can have the most magnificent sentence structure and vocabulary ever committed to paper, but if my characters are boring it doesn’t matter because the reader’s going to put the manuscript down in six or seven pages.  Because boring characters are… well, boring.  That sounds painfully obvious, I know, but you’d be surprised how many people ignore that simple fact in the name of art.

            Somebody once said “don’t try to be a great man—just be a man.  Let history make its own judgments.”  And the same goes for my story.  It just has to be a story.

            Someone else will decide if it’s art or not.

            I shouldn’t be worrying about that.
            By the way, before I forget, there’s still about a dozen galley copies left in that pre-order promo deal I mentioned a few weeks back.

            Next time, I’d like to talk a little bit about talking a little bit.

            Until then, go write.

            Very sorry about missing last week.  Copyedits. And Thanksgiving is this week, so I know nobody’s going to be reading this on Thursday.  So I figured I’d get this up today and hope to break even.  Sort of…

            Anyway, this week I wanted to blab on about dating your work.  And I figured the best way to do that would be to talk about the Cat & Fiddle.

           If you’re not familiar with Los Angeles, the Cat & Fiddle has been a Hollywood landmark for about thirty years now.  It’s a little pub in the middle of Hollywood with a nice outdoor patio.  It’s always been popular, but I think it managed to avoid being hip or trendy in all that time.  Part of Casablanca was filmed on that location.  Seriously.

            Heck, there’s a reference to the Cat & Fiddle about halfway through my book, 14.  It was a landmark, as I said, and my story is very much about Los Angeles.  Why wouldn’t I refer to it?

            Except now it’s closing.  The landlord found someone willing to pay twice as much so, well, the cat’s out in the cold.  No more Cat & Fiddle unless they can find a new place.  Somewhere else.

            What’s my point?

            Just like that, 14 has become dated.
             Still, I’m not as bad off as James P. Hogan.  When he wrote his novel Inherit the Stars (first book in the Giants series) back in 1977, he envisioned the US facing off against the Soviet Union in a race to colonize the solar system (a race that gets interrupted by an amazing discovery, granted…).  Needless to say, the first three books in that series are extremely dated.

            When we say a book is dated, we mean it’s a book someone can look at and say “Ahhh, well this was clearly written back when…”  It’s a book that isn’t about now, it’s about then.  And when my book’s not about now, that’s just another element that’s making it harder for someone to relate to my characters and my story. 

            Remember in school when you had to read classics?  Some of the hardcore Dickens or Austen or maybe even Steinbeck.  One of the reasons they can be hard to read is because of the references in them.  They talk of events or customs or notable persons that are foreign to us.  Hell, half the time so foreign they’re just gibberish (bundling?  What the heck is bundling..?).

            When we hit these stumbles, it breaks the flow and makes the book harder to enjoy.  A dated book has a shelf life, like milk or crackers.  The moment it gets this label, there’s an end in sight.

            Because of this, there’s a common school of thought that I shouldn’t make any such references in my work.  My story shouldn’t mention current fads or events.  I don’t want to have references to celebrities or television shows or bands or music.  If I want to have my writing to have any sort of extended life—the “long tail” as some folks like to call it—it can’t be dated.

            And there is something to this.  I’ve seen metaphor-stories fall flat with readers less than a year after the events they’re referencing.  It was funny at the time, but if you watch Aladdin today it’s tough to figure out half the stuff the Genie’s riffing on (what the heck’s with the whoop-whoop fist thing…?).

            However…

            When the GOP shut down the US government last year, my friend Timothy Long pounded out a longish comedy short story called Congress of the Dead.  And for a few months it sold really, really well.  It’s not doing much these days (it’s still funny but not as topical), but he knew going in that it wasn’t going to be timeless and used that knowledge to his advantage.

            So, which way should I go?

            Well, here’s the catch.  My work is always going to end up dated.  Always.  There’s no avoiding it.  Stories get dated by technology and cars and geography. Things people assume will never change (like the Cat & Fiddle or the U.S.S.R.) end up changing. It happens all the time.  It can’t be helped.

            Consider this…

            Stephen King’s Cujo couldn’t happen today.  Cell phones undermine the entire plot.  Same with Fred Sabehagan’s Old Friend of the Family.  The entire plot of Lee Child’s first Jack Reacher book, Killing Floor, hinges on an idea that was obsolete six months before the book even reached stores.

            Let’s not even talk about speculative fiction.  How many sci-fi shows predicted events we’ve since caught up with and passed?  Buck Rogers left Earth on a deep space probe in 1987, and Thundar the Barbarian saw the world collapse in 1994.  Star Trek told us the Eugenics Wars happened in the 1990s, which was also when Khan and his followers were launched into space in cryogenic suspension (presumably using the technology from the Buck Rogers deep space probes).  According to the Terminator franchise, Judgement Day happened in 1997 (later adjusted to 2004).  Then there’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and it’s sequel 2010.  Heck, even Back to the Future is just a few short weeks away from becoming a silly, dated comedy.  It’s going to be 2015 and there are no self adjusting clothes or flying cars or Jaws XIX (it looks like we did get hoverboards, though…).  And, hell, supposedly in 2015 people are still using faxes as a high-tech method of communication.

            If I really don’t want to date my work, I can’t mention anything.  Cars, music, movies, television shows, networks, books, magazines, sports teams, games, cell phones or providers, Presidents, politicians, political parties, countries, businesses of any kind, actors, actresses… all these things and a few dozen more. All these things change all the time in unpredictable ways.  So if I want to be timeless, I can’t bring up any of them.

            The problem is, though, these are all things that are part of our lives. They come up in conversations.  They shape how we react to other things.  So if I’m writing a realistic character with natural dialogue… these things will be there.

            So what’s this all mean?

            In the big scheme of things… don’t worry about it.

            That being said, I  probably shouldn’t base my entire plot around readers knowing the lyrics to Taylor Swift’s latest single, and (much as I love it) I might not want to use a reference to the second season finale of Chuck as the big button on my chapter.  There’s a reason some things stand the test of time, some become cult classics, and others become… well, we don’t know, do we?  And I should never be referencing something no one knows about.

            There isn’t an easy answer for this.  I’d love to list off some rules or just be able to say “8.3 references per 50 pages is acceptable,” but it isn’t that simple.  A lot of this is going to be another empathy issue.  As a writer, I need to have good sense of what’s sticking around and what’s a fleeting trend.  What references will people get in ten years, which ones they’re going to forget in six months, and how blatant these references need to be to get the job done.

            Getting dated is unavoidable.  It is going to happen to my work.  And yours. And hers.  But if we’re smart about it, we can get the most out of it while we can and still make sure that date’s as far off as possible.

            Next time, I’d like to talk about dialogue.  And I’ll probably make a mess of it.

           I wanted to revisit something I blabbed on about a few years back.  I’ve kind of touched on it a few times since then, but I thought it would be good to just babble on about it more specifically.  So if you’ve been reading this for a while and you have a phenomenal memory… sorry.

            I see a lot of television shows that are getting rolled out and cancelled just as fast.  One thing that amazes me is how many of them don’t really seem like television ideas.  They’re cool ideas, yes, but many of them are very A-to-B sort of stories.  My characters have been presented with a single, overriding problem or conflict, and once they resolve it… well, that’s it.  Which is a great thing for a feature film or a single season, but very rarely works well with a long-running series.

            And I’d say that long string of cancellations kind of backs me up on that.

            Some story ideas are, as I just mentioned, pretty much straight line affairs.  There may be a few steps, but in the end it comes down to achieving a single goal.  There are also the broad ideas, the ones you tell people and they say, wow, that could go on forever.  In the past, I’ve referred to these, respectively, as limited and unlimitedconcepts.

            What do I mean by that?

            An unlimited concept generally has a very broad scope.  Sherlock Holmes uses deductive reasoning to solve mysteries.  Spider-Man and Batman fight crime to make up for the death of their loved ones.  Captain America and Superman fight to protect rights and ideals that they believe in.  Joe Ledger is a soldier turned cop turned super-agent working for the mysterious Mr. Church (or is it Mr. Deacon?).  The crew of the starship Enterpriseexplores the distant reaches of the galaxy.  Jack Reacher just wants to wander and see the country, but he’ll stop to help folks out sometimes.  Detective Kennex and his android partner, Dorian, investigate homicides in the future.

            A key thing to note.  When we talk about unlimited concepts, nine times out of ten we end up talking about the characters over the plot.  Sometimes it’s the setting, but usually it’s the characters.  An unlimited concept isn’t about a specific set of events, which is why it’s also sometimes also called an open story.

            A limited concept, as the name implies, can only go so far.  As I mentioned above, it’s an idea that has an end inherently built into the concept.  A road trip story is a classic limited concept—as I mentioned above, it’s A-to-B.  We’re trying to get (physically or metaphorically) from here to there.  The passengers of Oceanic flight 815 want to be rescued from their weird tropical island and the residents of Chester’s Mill want to be rescued from the big invisible dome over their town. Tom Jackman wants to find a way to control his dark half.  Mark Watney wants to find a way to survive on Mars for the years until a rescue mission comes.  The crew of the starship Voyagerwants to make their way home from the other side of the galaxy.

            In all of these cases, the characters have very clear, straightforward goals.  Once that goal’s reached, the story is over.  It doesn’t mean everybody in Chester’s Mill lives happily ever after or the Voyager crew never goes into space again, but those are all different stories which don’t have to do with the premise I mentioned above.

            Why am I babbling about this?

            If I don’t understand what kind of an idea I have, it’s very easy for me to mess it up.  Trying to play one as the other almost never works.  By their very nature, these concepts are very true to themselves.

            For example…

            Several years back I was part of the staff for an online game.  One time while we were brainstorming new quests for the playerbase, someone suggested taking one of the old ruined castles at the fringes of the map and making it haunted.

            “Okay,” I said.  “And…?”

            “It’s a haunted castle.”

            “Right.  So what’s the quest?”

            “It’s.  Haunted.”

            An unlimited concept is almost never a story in and of itself.  It’s almost always lacking any sort of plot or narrative structure.  I need to add elements to make it work as a story (or a quest).  A fair number of “art” films tend to be unlimited concepts—they’ve got fantastic characters, beautifully rendered locations… but nothing else.  Nothing happens because unlimited concepts don’t contain a conflict or goal for the characters to strive for.

            On the other hand, a common thing I see people do with limited concepts is to keep pushing the goal away to extend the story (or series).  It’s an A-to-B, which means when I hit B the story is over.  So some folks will swerve around B for a while, maybe go back to A because they forgot a few things.  Somehow we end up at 4.2 (no idea how we got here), then we get close to B and veer off at the last minute…  If I’m doing a Los Angeles to Boston road trip, think how annoying it would be to start circling Boston but never actually get there.  Or I suddenly find out I need to be in San Diego instead.  That’s what it’s like when a limited concept artificially extends itself.

            It’s also cheap if I pile on the limited concepts, giving my characters a dozen or three goals that need to be achieved—either all at once or one after another (see above).  In my earlier days, before I had a better grasp of structure, I thought this was how you filled a book.  I still see lots of writers do it when they start out.

            The truth is, it’s very tough for either of these concepts to work alone.  An unlimited one almost never does, but that hasn’t cut down on the number of art films or “experimental” stories.  A limited one might squeak by as what’s often called a “plot driven” story.  Neither of these tends to be very satisfying.

            For a really great book or screenplay, I need both working together.  I need to put that fantastic character (the unlimited concept) and give them a solid goal they need to achieve (the limited concept).  As I’ve often said, my story won’t succeed without good characters, but they also need to do something and it needs to challenge them somehow. 

            If I don’t have good characters or I don’t have them doing anything… well…

            The math isn’t that hard.           

            Look through that document of story ideas.  Or the file folder.  Or the notebook.  If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve got at least one of those.  Figure out if your ideas are limited or unlimited.  Because then you can figure out what they need to become solid stories.

            Next time… well, there haven’t been many comments lately, so I’m guessing none of this stuff interests a lot of you.  So next week I’ll try to redeem myself