Category: real

So, I’m trying to plow through the end of some line-edits, which means I’m a bit short on time. But I really wanted to talk about something that’s come up once or thrice recently. It’s an old idea I’ve talked about a few times so… don’t be shocked if you smell a bit of recycling in here.

One thing we all (hopefully) work for in our writing is realism.  We want our characters, their dialogue, their worlds to feel real.  If my story’s set in the real world, I want it to have that level of detail you can only get with authentic knowledge and experience. If it’s a made-up world, I want every aspect to be as lifelike and believable as possible.

Because of this, we writers get a bit of a… a reputation. And it’s kinda earned.  We people-watch and eavesdrop and sometimes travel to weird places just to get an idea of what the air smells like. Some of us give our characters feet and ankles and knees of clay and overly-complex pasts.  Yeah, us.  I did this too.  We rewrite dialogue again and again to make it as real as possible. We sometimes add random events to the narrative—even major events—to give that broader sense of uncaring fate. Anything we can do to cover our story with a big, thick, oozing coat of reality.

There’s one problem with this, though.

Nobody wants reality. 

Seriously. 

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

Let me give you some examples.

Before I wrote fiction full time, I interviewed a lot of people.  And one thing quickly became clear to me as I transcribed these interviews—real dialogue is a mess. When people talk in reality, they pause a lot and trip over their words and sometimes make false starts that they have to sort of go back over.  They can drone on for several minutes at a time.  They talk over each other.  If you’ve ever looked at an unedited transcript of a conversation, you know that real dialogue’s the worst possible thing for fiction.  Readers would claw their eyes out, and everything would take forever to say.

So we don’t write real dialogue. We write “real” dialogue, lines that seem like the kind of things real people would say. The dialogue gets cleaned up and tightened and measured out to make it sound authentic, even though it’s being crafted. And then people say,  “Wow, her dialogue felt so real.” 

You’ve heard that sort of thing before, yes??  The dialogue seemed real or  felt real or sounded real. Think of how often we all phrase things like this—which is pretty much quietly admitting we know it isn’t how real people talk.  Even though it feels like how real people talk. 

As I mentioned before—heck, I’ve mentioned it here a few times–I made this mistake.  When I was starting down my pro fiction path I copied real people’s real speech patterns into my first serious attempt at a novel. Then I had a couple of real editors mention that as a specific reason I was really being rejected.  It didn’t matter that it was real dialogue, because it wasn’t “real” dialogue.

Make sense?

Here’s another angle.  Weird, unbelievable stuff happens in reality all the time.  There are odd coincidences.  Unlucky circumstances.  Heck, humans have a bad habit of dying in freak accidents and leaving so many things incomplete and unresolved.

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

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

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

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

And probably not much of a writer.

Even when I’m making it real.

Next time I’d like to talk about… well, look, it’s not really important who they are, okay? We’re just going to talk about them.

Until then, go write.

Finally got this finished.

Endings are funny things, yeah? In a weird sort of way, we don’t get them much in real life anymore. We demand sequels to everything. Moving away doesn’t mean what it used to, not with Facetime or Twitter or any other messaging devices. Heck even death has been softened a bit, with social media accounts getting memorialized and lingering long after we’re gone.

And sometimes, people just throw on an ending because they can’t think of anything else.

Now, some folks are content to say “well, that sucked” and leave it at that.  But as storytellers we need to know why something doesn’t work.  Bad endings don’t always have the same root problem.  Sometimes the writer had a phenomenal way to start a character arc, but wasn’t sure how to wrap it up.   Or maybe they have a really cool idea for a story, but don’t know where to go with it past that initial idea.  Sometimes an ending just doesn’t work with the rest of the story.

And some endings almost never work, no matter what the rest of the story is. Endings like…

Let’s start with the basics.  My characters are supposed to have an arc.  Arcs end at different points than they began at.  If my last ten pages show the characters in the same place as the first ten, doing the same things, with the same people, and they’re not any wiser for what they just went through…  well, that wasn’t much of an experience, was it?  For them and probably not for my readers.  I’m not saying my characters need to have some gigantic emotional breakthrough or spiritual growth, but somethinghas to be notably different or this was all just wasted time. 

One type of story that does this a lot is the “slice of life” tale.  You know the one, just two or three average days in the life of two or three average people.  It’s hard to say this kind of thing is wrong in a general sense. Most of our lives don’t change radically on any given day.  I’ve spent most of today here at my desk writing, just like I did yesterday and probably like I’ll be doing tomorrow.  So it’d be a realistic ending if a story about me ended with me back here working at my desk. 

The question I need to ask myself is… why would anyone want to read about that? I know I sure wouldn’t. I already go through a slice of life every day where nothing changes.

The Heroes Don’t Do Anything

Every now and then, often enough that it’s worth adding to this list, I come across a weird story where the hero or heroes don’t save the day. Not that they lose they just… they aren’t the ones who bring the victory. Somebody else saves the day, hits the target, makes the big sacrifice, or what have you. Imagine we’ve been watching Harry Potter for seven books and then Seamus Finnegan leaps in to fling that curse back at Voldemort and kill him dead. Which, y’know, yay Seamus and wooo! Voldemort’s dead, but at the same time… why’ve we been following Harry for the last two thousand or so pages?

When I get to the end of my story, what’s my character actually doing? I mean, sure, pointing and shouting and worrying are all things you can do, but are they actually doing anything that’s directly affecting this outcome? Or is someone else doing it?  And if it’s someone else… have we been following the wrong person?

One of the biggest problems with ending things up this way is it gives my reader a sense the story was pointless.  They’ve just invested a few hours (or perhaps days) into this tale only to see it come to an unpleasant ending.  This can be especially frustrating if the reader comes to realize the character never even had a chance at succeeding.  It’s even more frustrating if my characters made a bunch of stupid decisions somewhere along the way. I mean, it’s bad enough when we have to watch the fifth person in a row decide to go check out the old Murderama Amusement Park where all those kids got killed last summer, but when that’s the point I decide to end the story on…? 

My protagonist doesn’t need to come through unscarred, mind you.  Heck, I can even get away with killing my lead.  But they need to succeed on some level.

The Left Fielder
This is the ending that comes out of nowhere. The quarterback finally gets his act together, aces his exams, convinces the cute girl from drama club that he really loves her, gets voted prom king but turns it down… and then gets hit by a bus on the last day of school. Our heroine stops international terrorists working with alien invaders, but in the end her girlfriend accidentally drinks the tainted Soylent and is devoured by necrotic nanites anyway. Or, as I experienced many years back, a friggin’ hilarious ninety minute sketch comedy show ends with a bleak monologue about racial inequality and prejudice.

No, seriously.  I worked on a stage play back in the ‘90s that actually did this. The director and producer rewrote the end to give it “meaning” and couldn’t figure out why nobody liked it.

In my experience, the vast majority of writers who use this kind of ending are trying to achieve art. It’s me attempting to show how this story flawlessly mimics a random and sometimes meaningless real world by having a random and meaningless ending.  It doesn’t relate to anything that happened because… it’s real.  And tragic.  And artistic.

Besides suffering from all the same issues as the “everybody dies” ending, the left fielder just isn’t that special anymore.  It’s become one of the most common conclusions in indie films and “literature.”  So besides making my audience roll their eyes so hard they sprain something, they’re probably going to see this “unexpected” ending coming for the simple reason that it’s just, well, expected at this point.

There’s nothing wrong or pedestrian about putting an upbeat ending on a story.  As I’ve mentioned before, nobody got hit by a train at the end of Slumdog Millionaire and it’s somehow still a good film.

The Y’see Timmy
This one’s a little odd.  I use this phrase here a lot, and it’s kinda an homage to the movie I found it in–Speechless (written by Robert King). This ending gets its name from the old Lassie TV show.  Little Timmy encounters some problems, works his way out of them with Lassie’s help, and at the end Mom sits him down and explains what happened and why.  “Y’see, Timmy, sometimes people get hurt or scared and it just festers down inside of them…”  Timmy and the audience learn a little something about life and we all go home as better people.

The problem is, in clumsy hands the Y’see Timmy quickly becomes “brutally beating the audience with my message.”  That’s why it’s on this list.  A great example is Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, where the 98 page monologue (no, seriously) at the end of the book recaps every single one of the subtle lessons that were shown in the first 800 pages, but all dialed up to eleven-point-six.  And if you know what I’m talking about,  I’m betting you probably ended up skimming and/or blotting out most of that monologue.  Just like everyone else did.  Except Paul Ryan.

I think I’ve mentioned once or thrice before that this is pretty much the worst ending you can have for a screenplay.  It isn’t much better in a book. This almost always feels like it’s tacked on ending to assure the reader that our hero didn’t just survive this story—they benefitedfrom it.  Immensely.  Yeah, you’d think clearing my name of murder charges, getting the girl, and killing Thanos would be enough for most folks to consider it a good week, but noooooooo… apparently I need acclaim and wealth and celebrity, too.

I think writers tend to fall back on this ending for one of three reasons (sometimes more than one of them). One is that it falls into that “write what you know” tip we’ve all heard for years and years. I know writing, so I’ll write about writing.  Twois that, because of one, this feels like a natural thing to happen, so it adds an element of reality to my characters and story.  And three…

Okay, I think three’s a sort of wish-fulfillment-validation thing, to be honest.  Work with me here. My character writes a book about how she used to be a international assassin and it becomes a New York Times bestseller, right? So, logically, my book about someone writing a book about how she used to be an international assassin should alsobecome a New York Times bestseller.  Right?

Probably the worst offender of all of these.  All too often the amazing tale of adventure ends with one of my heroes waking up on the couch or in a hospital bed.  None of the story my audience has just invested their time and attention in actually happened. Not even within the world of the story. We all just put ourselves into a story about a person who was putting themselves into a story. The end.

As I mentioned up above with Everyone Dies, this just tells the reader they made an investment for no reason.  How often have you read or seen a movie like this and immediately been able to pick out the moment things veer off into a dream?  My partner and I often watch shows or movies and find ourselves quickly declaring “Dream sequence!”

To Be Continued…
No, I lied. This is the worst offender. Hands down.

We all want to write great, sprawling epics.  Okay, maybe not all of us, but I’m sure a lot of folks here do. We want to write that massive series that spreads across at least six books and gets us an HBO deal. Starz at the least. But it just doesn’t happen this way.

There’s an ugly lie that races through writing groups and threads—the idea that publishers only want to buy series. First, that’s just not true. I know dozens and dozens of writers who’ve sold one-off books (myself included). Second… editors and publishers very rarely want a series. What they want is a book with series potential. A book that—if the preorders are good and word of mouth is great—I can easily write a sequel to. And another sequel. And maybe a fourth.  Or even a fifth.

More to the point, as a beginning writer I need to convince agents and editors that I know what I’m doing. That I’m able to bring things to a satisfying close.  So if my conclusion is “maybe I’ll end this in the next book”… well, that’s not going to score me points with anyone. Especially readers if that second book isn’t already a guaranteed thing.

So, there’s some endings that I may want to think twice about before falling back on them.  Again, I’d never say it’s impossible to do one of these and make it work.  But I am saying…I’d think twice before tackling one of them.

Next time… well, heck. we’ve been talking about the end. Whaddya say we just kill a few people?

Until then… go write.

But I gave you two this week to make up for it. Okay, so one of them was the updated FAQ, but it’s still an informative post.  Just maybe not the information you were hoping for.

So, one thing I’ve mentioned here once or thrice is the idea of believability. On some level, we need to accept this character or world as real, because that’s how their stories become real to us.  If a character or a world asks us to accept too much… well, we just can’t.  One too many coincidences or secret cults or hidden talents and… we’re out.  That willing suspension of disbelief gets shattered.

Of course, what’s “believable” is kind of tricky, isn’t it? I mean, we completely accept  a tavern with fifty different alien races in it when we’re watching a Star Wars movie.  But if I’m reading the latest addition to the Their Bright Ascendancy trilogy, well… that doesn’t work quite as well. And if this was an episode of Elementaryor even iZombie we’d just roll our eyes and talk about the days back when this was a good show.

(they’re both great shows, just to be clear—but not if they suddenly had alien bars in them)

When we start to get invested in a story, part of it is that we get a good feel for what kind of world this story is set in.  Does magic exist?  Or aliens?  Does everyone know about vampires or are they still living quietly in the shadows, unknown to the average person? Assuming they’re even real.

A big problem I stumble across on a semi-regular basis is when a writer tries to change the world too late in the story.  We’ve been reading about a story set in the real world and suddenly there are goblins and vampires.  Or it turns out we’ve all known about aliens since the ‘50s.  I mean, we teach about them in school.  In history class!

I was reading a book lately that was set in Victorian London (locations, names, and/or supernatural beings may have been changed to protect the relatively innocent). A take on “the great detective” trope, but it was fun and had a nice mystery aspect to it (hunting a Jack the Ripper-esque serial killer) and the dialogue and descriptions of London were just fantastic.  I was really enjoying it.  Until…

A little more than halfway through the book, maybe close to 60 or 70% in, we find out that the serial killer is actually the Frankenstein Monster, gathering parts for yet another attempt at electro-alchemically creating a mate for himself.  It just came out of nowhere  Not so much a twist (it wasn’t really set up) as a weird reveal.  And it kind of… well, it knocked me out of the story.  It was a cool idea, but suddenly this was a very different world than I’d been led to believe. The type of characters who could be in it had drastically shifted. I had to reconsider a lot of things, and one of the biggest was “does this story still make sense?  Is this world still believable?”

Needless to say, I had to readjust my expectations as far as where this story sat on the plausibility/believability scale.  Which meant I then had to go back and reconsider everything that had already happened.  Were all those earlier moment still believable, now that I knew they were happening in this world?

And this isn’t to mean I came to a dead stop and started checking things off in a plus or minus column. It was just one of those moments where an instinctive reaction forces everything up into my brain.  I stopped enjoying and started analyzing. I was much more in my head for the rest of the story.

It’s kinda like wandering through a pool on a hot day. You may be really enjoying the cool water, the feeling of being outside, being with friends, all of it.  It might feel fantastic. But then you hit a spot of water that’s just a little warmer—just that certain amountwarmer—and now that one small-but-significant change has made you very aware of the pool.  Who else is in the pool. Where are they?  Where were they?  Now you’re not so sure if the pool’s a great place anymore. Sure, it may be nothing, but it’s kinda in your head now, how much water is on your skin.

And that’s a small change.  Imagine if you bumped up against a dead rat in the pool.  Or a shark. How the hell is there a shark in the pool?  Was it there all long?  Was it invited to this party, too? Is it responsible for the warm spot?

We need to feel comfortable in the world of the story.  I don’t want my readers to feel confused or betrayed. Bruce Joel Rubin made a wonderful observation years back that we experience stories in our gut, but we analyze them in our head.  So the moment we go into our head, trying to figure out what’s up with that warm spot, we start to lose our readers.

If I had to put a loose rule to it, I think any serious world-change like this has to be the end of act one/start of act two moment.  It’s part of the easing-in process.  The Matrix.  Red Rising. Harry Potter.  In all of these stories, the discovery that the world was than what we’d first been led to believe comes fairly early.  It’s probably notable that it’s also what gets all these stories really going.  This discovery is, arguably, the inciting incident, as folks have been known to call it.

Now, this moment can come later, sure.  I’m betting everybody reading this knows at least three or four “We were on Earth all along” stories.  But when these stories work—and that’s kind of a rare thing if you think about it—it’s because this is a very carefully set up twist.  And like any good twist, it’s been set up so the big reveal makes things fall perfectly into place rather than scatter across the table and spill onto the floor.

I’d also add that just because we’re flexing that suspension of disbelief with one thing doesn’t mean another thing will slide off with no problem. Finding out the serial killer we’re chasing is Frankenstein doesn’t mean we’ll also accept that he leads a taskforce of steampunk cyborgs that protect the earth from alien invaders.  Just because there are vampires doesn’t mean I’ll buy that Abraham Lincoln really was a vampire hunter sanctioned by the Vatican.

So if halfway through my story I’m introducing an element that’s going to change how readers look at my world, I should take a good, long look at it.  How big of a change is it?  Is it very late in the story?  Is it coming out of nowhere?

Is it necessary?

Oh and hey, speaking of the Writers Coffeehouse (as I did way up above), there’s one this Sunday, noon to three, at the new Dark Delicacies in Burbank. There’s also going to be one at San Diego Comic-Con, one week from today, from 2:30 to 4:30, and that one’s going to have me, Jonathan Maberry, Delilah Dawson, Scott Sigler. and maybe some other folks, too.  Come hang out with us and talk about writing. Plus I’m also doing the dystopian book club at the Last Bookstore this Sunday, too.

Next time… well, next time is Comic-Con, like I said. I probably won’t have a post up next week, but I may have a few fun cartoons and such if you want to check back in.  And then maybe the week after that I’ll blab about cool camera shots.

Until then… go write.