Category: point of view

September 14, 2018

A Little Context

Wow. A wild week with Dragon Con. And then a just as wild but far less fun week on the floor of the game room when I threw my back out the day after getting home. Just flopped there between the boxes and the brand-new couch I couldn’t make it up on to…

But I’m okay now. Well, much better… 80-85%.

I’m still in the process of moving into my new place.  Yeah, I’m going to keep talking about this for ages. And milking it for useful analogies.

I’m guessing most of you have moved, and you know how it’s not just about that one day. It’s a whole ongoing process—packing up there and spreading back out here. I mean, we’re here now, but there are still maybe twenty or thirty boxes scattered through different rooms, and we’ve kinda developed unpacking fatigue. That’s not even counting the library.

We’re also discovering that some of our stuff is just… well, bad, now. Things are in new configurations and combinations and some of them just don’t work. They look kinda weird or ugly. Sometimes, they actually don’t function correctly anymore. This shelf was short enough to fit well below my old office window, but not this one. Which leaves me with nowhere to put the printer.

We’ve got a fair amount of stuff that worked there but doesn’t work here. So it’s probably getting replaced. Which means more weekends putting furniture together in my future…

Funny thing is, this related to something I wanted to talk about.

What a coincidence, right?

I read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies. I take in a lot of storytelling, just on a week-to-week basis. And a common thing I see is people copying a beat or a character moment or some kind of set-up.

To be clear, I’m not taking about plagiarism. While there are some blatant rip-offs out there, and books that try to capitalize off other books, that’s not what I want to talk about here. Those folks have much bigger issues to deal with than we have time and space to discuss…

What I’m talking about is when people are using a moment they saw in a previous story and trying to get the same emotional resonance with the reader (or audience) as it did in that other tale. A key reveal at just the right moment. A fervent declaration of love (or at least lust).

And they accomplish this by copying that original story beat as close as they can.

Remember when the Hulk beat the crap out of Loki in The Avengers?  nd then did the exact same thing to Thor in Ragnarok? Funny as hell both times, right? 

So now let’s picture an adult man doing that with a baby. Holding it by one leg, swinging it up over his shoulder, and slamming it face-first into the ground two or three times. That should be funny, too, right?

No, of course not. Hopefully you were all cringing a bit just at the thought of that. It’d be nightmarish to watch, and for someone to actually think that it’d be funny…?

Again these shelves worked in my old office, but not my new one. Everything around them is different. The windows.  The angles. The carpet. The colors.

How about this one– watching someone undress can be sexy as all hell. Unbuttoning shirts. Sliding out of pants. Maybe just tearing open a coat if you’re both impatient.

But in a different context, those very same actions can be mundane, annoying, or depressing. Heck, even kinda creepy.

Yeah, someone doing that exact same little striptease can be creepy as hell. Because if I’m seeing it from outside the bedroom window, maybe with some leaves in the way, while I hear that rough breathing… Hey, we all know what that handheld POV shot means. We’ve seen horror movies. There’s a psychopath out there in the bushes watching that person strip! They’re probably wearing a weird mask and everything.

I mean, assuming the director’s not just copying this shot and doesn’t understand what it meant in other films…

And this may sound like extreme examples—talking about killing babies and stripteases—but it holds for pretty much anything. Seeing a building collapse can be terrifying.  Or exciting. Or frustrating. Heck, if I do demolition for a living it could be boring.

Y’see, Timmy, the problem with all of these examples is that sometimes people try to copy something they’ve seen in other stories without understanding why it worked in those stories. Yes it was exciting/scary/titillating/romantic over there, but that was over there in a certain context. The reaction it created isn’t something inherent to the elements themselves. It was a result of the combining narrative voice and character development and plot structure that led up to them.

Think about that striptease again. Think of all the different ways it could be interpreted by someone. It depends on when they see it. Where they’re seeing it from. How they know the other person. How that person knows them.

Think of all the different ways it could be interpreted by an audience.

And if I can’t think of any other ways… that might be part of the problem, too.

Next time, I’d like to bounce an idea off you.

Until then… go write.

            I’m going to IKEA again.  This time for bookshelves.

contextempathypoint of viewtransplants
July 12, 2018 / 2 Comments

I Don’t See Color

            I know, I know.  Asking-for-trouble title on this one.  Please just stick with me, though, okay?  There’s a good reason for it.
            Which I shall explain with this shocking revelation and a quick story.
            When I was in seventh grade, I found out I was color blind.  This may seem like a weird thing for someone to “discover,” but it makes sense if you think about it.  I’m daltonic (or deuteranomalous if you want to get super-specific), which means I can see most colors, but I have trouble with reds and greens.  I just kind of learned by filling in the blanks. 
            For example, leaves, Sleestaks, and the Hulk were green.  Grass is the same color as leaves, therefore grass is also green. The Lizard is the same color as the Hulk, therefore the Lizard is also green.  I just matched things up with what I learned from books and comics and Sesame Street.
            In other words… I learned just like everyone else did.
          Of course, it never occurred to me that what I was seeing might not be what everyone else was seeing. Why would it?  My vision was perfectly normal.  Nothing made this more clear than several determined childhood attempts to manifest either X-ray vision or optic blasts.
            (and maybe teen attempts)
            (…okay, last week)
            Then one day I got to Science class and the teacher had a slide show set up.  It was a bunch of those pictures-hidden-in-colored-dots things (an Ishihara test, if you were so interested).  Like that one right down there.  And much to my surprise… I couldn’t see anything in them.  Almost two-thirds of them looked blank.  Just like that one down there.  I can’t see anything in it. No pictures or patterns or anything.  If you can, feel free to say something in the comments.
            Anyway, I had a low-level, seventh grade freak-out about all the important stuff—Will I still be able to get a drivers license?  Will I have to get glasses?  What girl will ever want to kiss me knowing I’m color blind?!
          Once that was done, I spent the next day or two re-examining my whole world.  What did Sleestaks really look like?  That “grass is always greener…” thing had always seemed stupid to me, but did it make sense to everyone else?
           And that’s when it suddenly hit me.  How did everyone else see the world?  What was I missing out on?  I mean red, white, and blue Captain America looks really good to me, but how much of that was being told for most of my life that red, white, and blue were complementary?  How did everyone else see those red stripes?  I couldn’t imagine a “new” color that could fill that slot.  Would most people be horrified at what I saw?
            I spent weeks pondering this.  What were other people seeing?  How were they experiencing the world?  If red was the color of anger… was their anger different than mine?  Their envy?  What would alternate-green envy be like?  I was honestly second-guessing everything (which, granted is what most of seventh grade is, but this was on top of the usual stuff).
            Anyway…
            Once or thrice here I’ve talked about empathy.  Really simply, it’s the ability to understand what other people are going through.  If your friend has a hangover, goes through a bad breakup, or saves a bundle on car insurance with Geico, these are all experiences we can relate to, and we can apply how we felt to guess how they’re feeling.
            But really, empathy goes beyond that.  I still have both of my parents, so I didn’t know what it was like when one of my friends lost his.  But I could extrapolate from how I feel about my parents and from huge losses I have suffered.  Empathy’s being able to relate to people even when you haven’t directly experienced what they have.
            I’ve never had that ice-water in your spine moment what I realized I’m sitting in an office with a serial killer. I’m guessing most of you reading this haven’t, either. But our job is, quite literally, to convince people we have.
            Y’see, Timmy, I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say I can’t be a good writer if I don’t have empathy. If I can’t see the world through the eyes of different people—not how I think they see the world, mind you, but how they see it—I can’t have good characters.  And without good characters…
            Well, you know.
            Next week is… oh, holy crap, next week is San Diego ComicCon!  And I’m going to be there next Thursday, hosting a Writers Coffeehouse with Jonathan Maberry (he of Glimpse and V-Warsand the Joe Ledger books).  Plus I’ve got a couple of signings scattered through the day.  I’ll put up a schedule very soon.
            And next week, for the rest of you…
            Well, I’ll come up with something.
            Until then, go write.
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May 24, 2018 / 4 Comments

Jammed

            First off, so very sorry post have been irregular here as of late. Believe I’ve mentioned I’m juggling a few things.  One of which is the con I’m at right now.
            But we’ll talk about that in a bit…
            This week I wanted to revisit an idea that I’ve brought up a couple of times over the past few months.  I’ve heard it called a few different things, but my preferred term has always been flow.  First heard it that way from a wonderful author and writing teacher named Drusilla Campbell, and it always stuck with me.
            The visual I’d like to put in your head for flow is traffic. Regular old automobile traffic.  I’m going to go out on a limb and guess most of you reading this can drive, and the few who don’t have still ridden in a car.  And hopefully most of you have been to a city, or at least on a highway of some kind.
            So… let’s talk about the flow of traffic.
            Living in Los Angeles (and before that San Diego, and before that the greater Boston area), I’m very used to highway traffic.  Sometimes, often late at night, the highway is clear and wide open.  There’s barely anyone on the road and you can pretty much fly.
            Of course, even if there aren’t many cars on the road, something big can still create a traffic jam.  Major construction or a big accident can condense things down to one lane, and suddenly that very open road is densely packed and moving at a crawl.
            During the day it can be even worse.  When there’s a million people on the road (no exaggeration here in LA) one small problem can slow everything down.  A large one can bring things to a crashing halt.  Hell, there’s a big hill on the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass and it always causes traffic slowdowns, both ways, up and down.  I’ve been in traffic jams so bad you could actually shut your car off, get out, and stretch your legs for a bit.
            There are places where the very structure and layout of the freeway just naturally causes traffic jams. There’s no way to avoid it the way things have been constructed.  I know a couple stretches where—for no reason—the road goes from six lanes to three.  And then back up to five.  That mile of three lanes… it’s almost always clogged.
            Traffic patterns can even get messed up when people just start looking at the wrong thing. We’ve all been in massive slowdowns that are simply caused by people staring at something on the side of the road. Or sometimes on the other side of the road.  A big accident in the northbound lane can make everybody in the southbound lane slow down to take a look.
            Sometimes it works great, though.  Those million people can be on the road and it’s fantastic.  Everything works.  I’ve had times when I’ve been looking at all the cars on the road, but then looked down to realize I’m almost doing sixty-five.  We’re all going at almost sixty-five, in perfect sync.  I was just caught up in everything and didn’t even realize what was actually going on.
            But that flow can get disrupted so easily.  Again, one car going really slow.  One closed lane.  One distraction over on the shoulder.
            What’s the point of this little visualization?
            Reading a story is a lot like traffic.  It has a flow.  When the flow’s great, we barely notice how fast things are going.  We just zoom along and suddenly realize we’ve read a hundred pages and it’s dark out and where the hell am I?  A book that you can’t put down has great flow.  A book that you should love but you just can’t get into… probably doesn’t.
            Here’s a few things that have the potential of causing a traffic jam in my story.
Switching Tenses/Formats/POVs
            A friend of mine has a book where the main character slips into sort of a fever dream.  She’s sick, she’s been medicated, and now she’s… a bit out of it.  And so the next two chapters of the book are in stage play format.  It becomes a bit more separated from reality for the reader and we understand it’s more surreal for the character as well.
            Compare this to another book I read recently when, for no reason, maybe 15-20% of a page would suddenly be in screenplay format.  Dialogue, prose, prose, slugline, dialogue, stage direction, prose, dialogue.  It jarred me out of an otherwise wonderful book every single time, and the author did it every four or five pages.  I looked for patterns and tried to figure out if there was a recurring motif, but couldn’t find anything.  I loved the story, but I kept getting knocked out if it.

            There’s nothing wrong with doing clever things.  It’s highly encouraged.  But I need to have a reason to do them, because my readers are going to assume there’s a reason I did it. That’s natural, isn’t it? I made the effort to put it in the book, so there must be a point to it.  Bruce Joel Rubin once mentioned that when we stop experiencing stories in our gut, we go into our head and start analyzing them.  That’s when the flow breaks.  When we stop reading and start drawing mental diagrams.

Names
            I was reading this big sprawling generational family saga recently.  Not normally my kind of thing, but I’ve been trying to expand my reading umbrella lately.  And I’m overall glad I read it.
            But…
            One issue it had was that, by nature of being multigenerational, there were lots of people who were called “Dad,” and quite a few who were “Mom.”  And they were all Dad and Mom.  No “Pops” or “Papa” or “Daddy Dearest.”  No “Mum” or “Ma” or “Mother.”  Which got confusing because the book also jumped POV and timeframes a lot.  We might be in Yakko’s head for a chapter, then hop over to his granddaughter’s.  Which meant “Dad and Mom” is now referring to different people.  Some of them even had the same name, so there was a Yakko Jr. and a Yakko the III (fortunately grandpa had died)
            Anyway, what it amounted to was me going back to analyze the book every ten or fifteen pages to make sure the person behind this POV was who I thought they were.
            This is closely related to something else I’ve mentioned before—when lots of people have very similar names, especially when they all begin with the same letter.  We naturally lock on to that first letter to help keep things straight in our heads. If my story has a large cast featuring John, Jerry, Jacob, Jared, Justin, Jean, Jon, Jeri, Juan, Jenn, and Jess, people are (again) going to spend just as much time going backward to figure out who’s who as they are going forward to, well… read my story.
Vocabulary
            We work with words.  That’s a simple fact of the job.  And nobody wants to use common words.  We want to work with amazing words.  Exciting, sexy, awe-inspiring words that people will remember years from now.  Decades from now, even.

            But here’s the thing to remember.  The words don’t really matter. The story matters. The characters matter.  The actual words are just a delivery device.  They’re how I’m telling you the story.  As a writer and a reader, I don’t want to be focused on the act of communication more than what’s being communicated.  The words should be almost invisible.

            And the truth is… the common words are going to be a lot less visible than the uncommon words. As readers—as people—we notice the uncommon. It stands out. And in many cases… it’s distracting. 
            This isn’t to say we can’t use uncommon or obscure words. There should be a reason for using them, though, and that reason shouldn’t just be me wanting to show off the obscure word I learned on Doctor Who a few months ago.  They shouldn’t be stumbling blocks for my reader.  Again, they should be adding to the story, not the delivery device.
            That’s just a few things.  I’ve mentioned some others before.  Flow is kind of tough to get too specific about because something that causes a small bump for me might be slamming you into a metaphorical wall.  Or vice versa.
            Y’see, Timmy, that’s the biggest lesson about flow.  It’s an empathy issue.  It’s about being able to put myself in someone else’s shoes—a lot of other people’s shoes—and make an honest assessment about things.  Will this reference trip people up?  Is this structure confusing?  Is it easy to keep all these characters straight?
            Because if I can’t be honest about my work, there’s a good chance I’m going to jam things up.
            And if that happens too often, to stick with our traffic metaphor… people will start looking for alternate routes.  
           Next time, I’d like to talk about that opening chapter.  You know what I mean.  The P word.  Although, fair warning, next time might not be for two weeks or so.
            Oh, and hey—I’m at Phoenix Comic Fest right now!  Are you reading this? You should come find me. I’m that guy typing on his phone. And also talking on panels and signing stuff and all that.  Come by and say hi.
            And then go write.
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January 18, 2018 / 5 Comments

Down to Basics

            It’s come up once or thrice that I’m a lover of bad movies.  Partly for the laughing aspect, partly because I think you can learn as much from bad storytelling as you can from good.  Partly because I need to justify my drinking, and some of these movies make it reeeeeally easy.
            A while back I tossed out a list of really basic things a lot of these movies messed up.  Film school 101-level stuff that people were getting wrong.  Even though some of them went to film school.  And I wondered if it might be possible to do something with stories in general.
            Kristi Charish (of the fantastic Kincaid Strange series—book two coming soon) recently mentioned this idea (for a different topic) in a much better way—the invisible handshake.  It’s sort of an unofficial, unspoken contract between the author and the reader. If you’re picking up my book, there are certain automatic assumptions you’re making about what I’ll be providing you with, and I should be meeting these assumptions.  Basic things about plot and structure and character that are just… well, basic.
            At the end of last year I read a book that fumbled that handshake.   Fumbled it bad.  It was like that awkward moment with someone at the end of the night where you’re not sure how to say goodbye, so the two of you make a bunch of half-moves toward different things.  Do we hug?  Shake hands?  Peck on the cheek?  Write an awful book? 
            We’ve all been there, right?
            I ranted a bit about said book on Twitter, but even then I was thinking I should revisit a lot of those issues here.  And while said book was very rant-worthy, I’ve been .trying to keep things a bit more on the positive side here.
            So, a few general things I need to keep in mind when I’m writing.  I’ve mentioned most of them before, but I thought a general, all–at-once
            First, I need to be clear who my main character is.  If I spend the first four chapters of my book with Yakko… everyone’s going to assume Yakko’s the main character.  This book’s clearly about him, right?  So when he vanishes for the next seven chapters… well, people are going to keep wondering when we’re getting back to him.  Because he’s the main character.
            Now, a lot of books have a big cast of characters.  An ensemble, as some might say.  That’s cool.  But if my book’s going to be spending time between a bunch of characters, I need to establish that as soon as possible.  If the first three or four chapters are all the same character, it’s only natural my readers will assume that’s going to be the norm in this book.
            Secondis that I need to keep my point of view consistent.  This kinda goes with the first point—being clear who my main character is.  Even with a third person POV, we’re usually looking over a specific person’s shoulder, so to speak. Which means that character can’t walk away and leave us behind.  Likewise, we can’t start over Wakko’s shoulder and then driiiiiiiiiiiiiift over so we’re suddenly looking over Dot’s.
            Again, it’s cool to switch POV and there’s nothing wrong with it, but I need to make it clear to my readers that I’m doing it. If they start seeing things from new angles or hearing new pronouns, it’s going to knock them out of the story and break the flow.  That’s never a good thing.
            Thirdthing I need to do is be clear who my actual characters are.  Who’s part of the story and who’s just… well, window dressing.  If my two protagonists go out to dinner, there’s going to be other people in the restaurant.  But I shouldn’t describe them all. Or name them all. 
            Names and descriptions are how I tell my reader a character’s going to be important and worth remembering.  Three paragraphs of character details means “Pay attention to this one.”  So if I’m telling the reader to keep track of people for no reason, I’m wasting their time and my word count.

            I want to note a specific way people do this, too.  I’m calling it “describe and die” (trademark 2018).  This is when the author introduces a character, spends five or six pages describing them, their history, their goals, their loves, their life—and then kills them.  We’ve all seen this, yes?  Here’s Yakkoshiro, a twenty-nine year-old salaryman who spends all his free income on Gundam models and always wears long sleeves to the office because he won’t stop wearing his fathers watch, even though nobody wears watches anymore and looking behind the times like that could hurt his chances at a promotion so… long sleeves, never rolled up, even when the air conditioner dies (which happens a lot). And tonight he has a date with the beautiful woman from the Gundam store, who he’s exchanged nervous banter with for months now and, oh, he’s dead.  A kaiju stepped on him.  Now, back to our heroes…

            Don’t do that.
            Fourthis that I need to have an actual plot before I start focusing on subplots.  What’s the big, overall story of my book?  If it’s about Wakko trying to save the family car wash, I should probably get that out to my readers before I start the romance subplot or the backstabbing partner subplot or the Uncle Gus has cancer and wants to travel around the world before he dies subplot.  After all, they picked up my book because the back cover said it was about saving the family car wash or escaping that Egyptian tomb.  I should be working toward that first—meeting those expectations.
            If I’m spending more time on a subplot than the actual plot, maybe I need to revisit what my story’s actually about.
            Fifth, closely related to four, is that my subplots should relate to the main story somehow.  They should loop around, tie back in to the main plot, or at least have similar themes so we see the parallels.  If I can pull out a subplot out of my story and it doesn’t change the main story in the slightest… I probably need to reconsider it.
            And if it’s an unrelated subplot to an unrelated subplot… okay, seriously, I’m wasting pages at that point.  Not to mention this all starts getting, well, distracting.  I don’t want to kill whatever tension I’m building in my main plot by putting it on hold for eight or nine pages while I deal with… well, something completely unrelated.  It’s like switching channels in the middle of a television show. Nobody’s saying what’s on the other channel is bad, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the show we’re trying to watch.
            Sixth…
            Okay, this is an odd one.
            Remember how much fun it is when you meet someone you’re interested in and there’s all these fascinating little mysteries about them?  We want to learn all their tics and hidden secrets.  Where are they from?  What’d they study in school?  What movies do they like?  How’d they develop a taste for that?  Why do they have that accent?  Where’d they get that scar?  Just how big is that tattoo?
            But… we don’t want to learn those secrets from a book report.  We want to hang out with these people, talk over drinks, go on road trips, maybe stay up all night on the phone or on the couch.  It’s how we get to know real people… and it’s how we want to learn about characters, too. Pages and pages of backstory often makes characters less interesting because it leaves me with nothing to reveal about them.  It kills that sense of mystery, because there’s nothing left to learn about them.
            There’s nothing wrong with me having all that backstory, but I don’t need to use it all in book.
            And I definitely don’t need to reveal it all in the first two or three chapters.
            Seventhand last is flashbacks.  Flashbacks are a fantastic narrative device, but they get used wrong a lot.  And when they’re wrong… they’re brutal. A clumsy flashback can kill a story really fast.
            A flashback needs to be advancing the plot.  Or increasing tension. Or giving my readers new information.  In a great story, it’s doing more than one of these things. Maybe even all of them.
            But a flashback that doesn’t do any of these things… that’s not a good flashback.  That’s wrong.  And it’ll bring things to a grinding halt and break the flow.
            Seven basic things to keep in mind while I’m writing my story.
            Now, as always, none of these are hard-fast, absolute rules.  If I hire a pastry chef for my bakery, there’s always a possibility this particular one doesn’t use a whisk.  There can always be an exception.  But I should be striving to be the exception, not just assuming everyone will be okay with me not following all the standards. My readers are going in with certain expectations, and I need to be doing honestly amazing things to go against them.  
            Because if that same pastry chef also doesn’t use a spatula…  Or butter… Or flour…
            Again—the invisible handshake (trademark K. Charish, 2018). 
            It’s a legally binding contract in forty-two states and four Canadian provinces.
            Next time, I’d like to tell you about something that happened off-camera on a TV show I worked on years ago.
            Until then, go write   
characterCharishflashbacksplotpoint of viewstorysubplot

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