Category: real

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.

            I’m writing up this post as I levitate upside down in my office.  Which—cool thing about this new house—exists in an orbiting satellite that’s only accessible through a teleport array we found in the attic.  Really cuts down on the commute to work, let me tell you…

            Okay, we’ll get back to that.

            I wanted to expand a little bit off something I touched on last week, and that’s the idea of context within a story.  When we talked about it before, I was using it to show how I can’t pull random elements from that story, copy them into my story, and expect them to work the same way

            Quick semi-related question.  What does it mean if I walk up and smack someone?  Full on, five fingers, hard across the face.

            Well, it could mean any number of things.  It could mean they’re a complete jackass.  Or maybe I am.  Maybe they deserved it.  Maybe they’re in shock and I’m trying to bring them around.  We don’t know enough about the circumstances, the background, the existing relationships between me and the person I smacked.

            What if I just walked up and kissed them?  Or slapped their ass.?  Kinda the same thing, right?  We don’t know enough.  Maybe I’m a complete sleaze.  Maybe this is my partner of several years.  Hell, this could mean different things depending on where it happens. Doing it at the office could be extremely inappropriate, but in the locker room this could be a congratulations, and in the bedroom it might be foreplay.

            All of this additional information—the stuff we don’t know in these situations—is the context.  It what makes actions creepy or exciting or exciting in that other way.  As I’ve said before, there can be many different interpretations of the same thing depending on all the other things around it. 

            This becomes extremely important in genre fiction, because one of the big aspects of genre is that we tend to tweak the world a bit.  Maybe superheroes are real.  Or dragons. Or cybernetic implants.  Maybe they’re not just real, they’re common.  Boring, almost.

            For example, take my opening paragraph.  It probably made you smile, because it’s absurd in two or three different ways, right?  Complete nonsense, because we all know how the real world works and I am, no matter how many times I’ve wished otherwise, part of said real world.

            In a genre story, though, all of that could easily be true.  Then it isn’t laughable—it’s setting.  Possibly important plot elements. 

            Charlie Jane Anders made a wonderful observation a while back about how some of her least favorite stories were the ones that got pitched as something like “it’s a world just like ours, except everyone can turn invisible.”  The problem with these stories is that if everyone could turn invisible… well, the world would be completely different.  Views on privacy would’ve changed massively, possibly in different directions depending on how long this power’s been available.  Social views would be different, because anyone might be listening.  Heck, traffic laws would need to be adjusted because what if an invisible three year old wandered into the street?  Technology would be different, because there’d be whole-new priorities in this world.

            And if none of these things have changed… well, that just doesn’t make sense, does it?  Try to think of an aspect of your life that wouldn’t be different if there could be two or three invisible people in the room with you.  Any room.  At any time.

            Context lets me know what is and isn’t possible in this world.  By extension, it lets me know when people’s reactions are appropriate or wildly inappropriate.  If my story doesn’t explain what the limits of my world or characters are–or if I don’t give my readers enough to figure it out—it’s going to limit their investment and immersion in the story.

            For example…

            I watched this movie a while back where a guy hires a live-in maid (occupations and genders may be changed to protect… I don’t know, surely somebody deserves it).  Nothing weird or unusual there, right?  Except when the maid shows up, she’s kind of… well, unnatural.  Pallid, almost gray skin.  Dark circles under the eyes.  Blank stare.  Never speaks.  Tends to move in a kind of slow, lurching way.

            You can kinda see where this is going, right?  Zombie maid.  Clearly.

            But here’s the thing.  Our protagonist and his roommate don’t notice anything unusual about her.  They act like she’s totally normal.  One of them even thinks she’s kinda hot.  Same with other people who stop by.  They all just treat her like… well, the maid.  Or, at the very least, the woman staying at Yakko and Wakko’s place.

            And let me save you an assumption.  This wasn’t a comedy movie.  It bordered on melodramatic horror, really.  Except… nobody was horrified. 

            Well, maybe me…

            So what was going on?

            I watched the whole damned movie and I still don’t know.  Was she a normal woman who just happened to look and act like a zombie for some reason?  Maybe?  But if that was the case, wouldn’t people comment on it?  Since nobody in the movie ever mentions that the new housekeeper looks like one of the walking dead, it seems like this might be, well, a common thing.  In fact, there are two or three scenes where the characters pretty much treat her like an appliance, even putting her in a storeroom at one point.

            But if she wasa zombie maid, shouldn’t that come up?  Heck, even if it’s the most normal thing in this world to have undead people cleaning your home, you think someone would mention it.  And plus… the rest of the time they’re talking to her and acting as if she’s a completely normal person.  Hell, like I mentioned before, the roommate’s even mildly obsessed with “how hot she is” and more than once talks about trying to get her in bed.  Which is a bit odd if she’s supposed to be a zombie.  At least worth a small discussion, yes?

            The real problem was that I couldn’t tell how to feel about any of this.  Were the guys being jackasses who objectified their maid—which would imply I shouldn’t like them, right?  Or was this a normal reaction, the way you or I would treat the vacuum cleaner when we weren’t using it?  Was the roommate’s desire to have sex with the maid kinda weird?  Full on creepy?  Hell, maybe even normal?  I don’t understand the world, so I don’t have any context to base these reactions in.

            And just to be utterly, completely clear—there’s nothing wrong with a story about zombie maids.  That’s the basis for a very cool story.  I’d never say otherwise.  Heck, it’s the basis for Fido, a really fun movie.  But if this is the world I’m setting my story in, I need to be clear this is… well, the world my story’s taking place in.

            Now…

            All that said, it’s really common to start off with a story set in “the real world”  and then it suddenly veers off into the realm of magic, aliens, and/or elder gods.  We’ve all seen it.  If you like hearing about three act structure, this kinda thing is a common way the first act ends.  Again, nothing wrong with this.  Like I said, it’s really common and I bet we’ve all got a favorite story or six that does this.

            Why can they do it?  Well, if you look at these stories, the big reveal that zombie cyborg lizard men are secretly running Wall Street is pretty much always structured as a low-level twist—it doesn’t alter the context, it enhances it.  These reveals force us to look at a lot of earlier story events in a new light.  They don’t actually contradict anything we’ve already seen in those first two or three chapters.  And since they happen early in the story, they’re not asking us to rethink a lot of assumptions or beliefs about these characters or the world they live in.

            There’s also another way to pull off this context shift, and it’s one that you’ve probably seen done a couple times.  I do it in Dead Moon.  Heck, J.K. Rowling copied it from the original Predator.  No seriously.

            Okay, not seriously.

            Just tell them right up front.

            Most people tend to forget, but Predator begins with an alien spaceship doing a fly-by of Earth and launching a landing pod as it zooms past.  That’s the very first shot in the movie.  Seriously.  And then it’s half an hour of Arnold and Shane Black shooting guys in the very real-world jungle before we see another hint of the alien.  Same with Harry Potter.  Sure, there’s all that stuff about Harry’s miserable childhood with the Dursleys, but the first chapter’s all about magic cats and a flying motorcycle.  Rowling all but openly says right up front there’s a magic world the Dursleys are desperately trying to ignore, despite their clear connection to it.

            What this does is establish right up front these are genre worlds, no matter how normal they may seem as we ease into the story.  When they take their sharp turn, it isn’t out of nowhere. It’s just a reminder of what we’ve already been told.

            Y’see, Timmy, without this context, my readers are left in a kind of “anything goes” situation.  Which it makes it really hard to have stakes.  Which means they won’t be able to make any kind of investment in either the plot or the characters.

            And no investment means no reason to keep reading.

            Next week is a double-header for me.  It’s Valentine’s Day and I have a new book coming out.  Have I mentioned Dead Moon?  Two or three times?  Today?  Okay, just checking.

            Anyway, I’m going to be busy on Thursday.  But I’ll probably put something up earlier.  In the spirit of the holiday, I’ve been thinking it’s about time we talked about… you know.

            Until then, go write.