Category: real

            So, recovery is going nicely, for those who care.  My brain’s been working a lot better. I can actually eat food again (only went seventeen days without). It’s all sorts of fun.

            Also, today’s the last day to sign up for a free galley copy of Paradox Bound. Head over to the PRH website and do that.  Only takes a minute.

            Anyway, I haven’t prattled on about characters in a while, so I figure we’re due…

            I may have mentioned once or twice before that characters are key to a successful story.  Non-stop action with flat stereotypes can be diverting in a film for a little while, but in a book (and in a good movie) characters are my bedrock.  If a reader doesn’t have someone they like, someone they can relate to, a story can be dead in the water by page five.

            One of the best ways to deal with this is reality. Let’s be honest, we love characters who feel real, even when they’re Jedi or Hufflepuffs or Inhumans or Amazons. Their dialogue, their reactions, their approach to things.  The goal is to make our characters—and our stories—seem as real as possible.

            Now, there are some common ways we all try to do this when they’re starting out.  I say “try” because all three are based off a simple misunderstanding of why certain aspects of characters work.  Let’s go over what they are, the problems with each one, and how you can work around it.

            The first method is for me to describe these characters in amazing detail.  I’ll introduce you to Wakko and tell you his hair color, eye color, height, and weight.  Then I’ll give you descriptions of his hairstyle, body type, the shape of his face, all his tattoos (even the ones we can’t see).  There’s a list of his measurements and shoe size.  In the next few sentences we get the name of his aftershave, the personal grooming tools he uses, and the make of his watch (yeah, he still wears a watch).  I describe Wakko in such exacting detail there’s no way you can picture him any way except how I envisioned him. And once that picture’s firmly in mind, they’ll seem as real as anyone else you know.

            The second way is for me to give pages and pages of backstory on the character.  I’ll scribble out lengthy flashbacks to Wakko’s first day of high school, his first job, his first fight, the first time he was dumped.  Maybe he’ll randomly start talking to friends, family, or complete strangers about the last time he went to the gym, the last time he had sex (that cute woman from the bar, whatshername with the hair…), the day he finally started working at ConHugeCo International, or the day he realized all he really wanted was to tell stories through interpretive dance.  Heck, sometimes these revelations won’t even be a flashback or dialogue–they’ll just be straight text in the narrative.

            The third way people try to do this is the least common.  But it happens enough I feel the need to mention it…

            Real people have quirks.  We sometimes speak in odd ways, do nonsensical things, and go against our best interests.  We have blind spots.  Sometimes we even up and die in awful, unexpected ways (statistically, most people do at least once in their life).  It’s the way we’re wired.  We’ve all seen people do things like this.  We’ve all been the people doing these things. 

            The logic here is if the writer has the characters act illogically, they’re acting more real.  If Wakko’s a bundle of weird and quirky behaviors, then he has to be believable.  It’s almost like I’m  daring my readers—“Real people do this, so how can you  say Wakko doesn’t seem real when he’s doing it?”

            Heck, if Wakko randomly gets hit by a car in the last few pages, that’s so much like life it almost counts as art, doesn’t it…?

            Now…

            Let’s talk about why these methods usually don’t work.

            The  problem with the first method, using tons of details to describe my character, is that it breaks the flow of my story.  The story and plot come to a screeching halt while I have this big infodump.  I mean, if you look back up there, I bet you started skimming just while reading the list of potential descriptions of Wakko, didn’t you?  If a list of general examples can’t hold people’s attention, what’s going to happen when it’s a list of specifics two or three times as long?

            The other catch to this method is something I’ve mentioned before.  A lot of the time, readers form their own mental images of what a character looks like.  For example, if you look over the past few paragraphs you’ll see I haven’t actually described Wakko at all, but—even if you don’t get the reference—at this point you’ve probably got some mental image of him when I use his name, don’t you? 

            If you know what this character looks like with nodescription, then isn’t two pages of description… kinda excessive?

            In a similar vein—when we’re talking about the second method–I can add in a dozen pages of personal trivia and anecdotes and it’s still not going to make a character seem real.  More likely, the story’s going to suffer from the same expositional infodump I mentioned above, and it’s going to come to a crashing halt again.  The problem is relevance.  While there’s no question these past events shaped Wakko’s life and the person he is today, my readers are going to wonder what do they have to do with this story.  No matter how good a particular element might be, if it doesn’t relate to the tale I’m telling it’s just noise.

            The problem with the third method, quirkiness and randomness, is that fiction’s held to a much higher standard than real life.  People do illogical, unbelievable things all the time in real life… but life isn’t scripted.  When I pick up a book, I know there’s a writer behind it.  There shouldn’t be any real randomness, because every word on the page was deliberately chosen.  And that means any apparent randomness has to be serving an actual purpose in the story.  Because if it’s not, well… why is it there?

            So, with all that being said… is there any way to make these three methods work? I mean, yeah, there’s always an exception to everything, but are these methods overall useless or what?

            The big trick to all of these, as I mentioned above, is relevance.  Like adjectives or adverbs, if character elements aren’t serving a purpose they shouldn’t be there.  Strip away all the noise and clutter and just give the reader what they need.

            For example…

            Let me tell you a quick little story…

            Wakko lives in a one room, roach-infested apartment, always buys groceries at the 99 Cent store, and almost all of his wardrobe is meticulously chosen from the racks of the Salvation Army.  He always has the latest iPhone, though, and an immaculate beard.

            And I’ve just told you a lot about him, haven’t I?  More than just the words on the page, too.  You’ve got a sense of who Wakko is and where his priorities are.  Maybe even a mental image of him.  All in just three lines.

            See, I don’t need a lot of details, just the rightdetails.  Did I need to tell you about Wakko’s thigh tattoo or how tall he is for that little character sketch to work?  I just need to pick the right details to create the image and imply the person I wanted you to see.

            Even the randomness issue is easy to deal with when you look at it in this light.  It’s okay for seemingly random things to happen in my story.  Key word—seemingly.  At the end of the day, I’m god in this world, and these events are happening for a reason which benefits my story. 

            My new book, Paradox Bound, recently got a review from Publishers Weekly (a starred review, he said with glee), and one of the thing they specifically mentioned was how great it was that so many seemingly early, minor things I’d added for flavor came around to be important plot points.  They all seem like random details and events at first, but each one ends up driving the plot and character development in a certain way and in a specific direction. 

            That’s the kind of “randomness” we want in our stories—the kind that serves our purpose as writers.  In the same way, we don’t want our characters to be “real,” but to make them virtually real.

            So make your characters real.  But really make them real

            Next time… well, I’ve chosen something interesting (and a bit frustrating) for next time

            Until then, go write.

            I’m sorry this is a bit late.  Well, four  weeks late.  That’s not a bit, that’s crazy-late.  I’m in the final weeks for this manuscript and I’m really trying to make it fantastic.  That’s pretty much been my main focus the past month or so, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

            Hey, speaking of which…

            One of the most common things that makes a character unbelievable is when they have no purpose for their actions.  We’ve all seen it.  The guy who decides to pick a fight over something petty in the middle of a crisis.  The person in charge who continues to ignore someone with key information.  The spouse who’s just a jerk.  The ninja who attacks for no reason.

            Nothing knocks a reader out of a story faster than people just randomly doing stuff.  There’s a simple reason for this.  In the real world, when people do things for no reason, they’re usually considered to be insane.  Not an interesting insane, either, but the “lame motivational excuse” insane.  If I run into a  burning house to save a baby or a dog, I’m going to be considered a hero whether I make it out or not.  If I run into the flaming house just because it’s there, I’m going to be considered an idiot.

            So here’s a challenge for you—try to picture that scene reversed.  Imagine if, at that point in the film, the Nazi colonel was insistent on performing the ceremony and Belloq said “no, no, I really think we should just take it to der Fuhrer and let him deal with it…”  It wouldn’t make any sense, would it?

            In the big scheme of things, most people’s motivations tend to be simple.  If you’ve ever seen a procedural show, they often talk about the common motives for murder.  Love, money, revenge—they’re very basic ideas.  The unspoken motive for the investigators on these shows is justice, or perhaps closure.  In Raiders, Belloq is looking for glory and maybe a bit of power (I think it’s safe to say he was secretly hoping he’d get all the benefits of that “hotline to God”).  Indy wants to stop the Nazis and save the Ark for a museum.  The Nazis want to obey the orders from their commander.

            In the book I’m working on right now, a major motive for the main character is infatuation.  It’s why he takes the actions he does that kick off the story.  But not very far in, fear and survival become big motivators for him.  His actions might not always be rational, mind you, but his actions fit who he is and what he thinks he can accomplish.

            Now, sometimes the story needs people to act a certain way.  It’s been plotted out and the characters need to do this now so that can happen later.  What some writers don’t seem to get is that this need doesn’t make a character’s actions more believable or forgivable.

            The reader has to be able to relate to my character’s purpose for doing things.  While characters might have very true and proper motivations within the context of their tale, those motivations still need to be interpreted by the chosen audience.  This is especially important for stories set in different cultures (Japan, for example, or India under the caste system) or perhaps in entirely fictitious ones (Barsoom, Diagon Alley, or the grim darkness of the future).  It’s common to hit this wall when the writer knows their chosen setting too well, or maybe had to build it from the ground up.  To me, it’s completely clear and understandable why a Thark warrior would act this way—why waste time going over it, right?  To you, though… this may not be so clear.

            Let me toss out one other thought about motivations.  Up top I gave a list of situations that many of us have probably dealt with.  The random aggressive person.  The jerk spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend.  The willfully ignorant boss.   These people really exist.  Hell, I had that higher-up boss for two years at one point.

            But…

            As I’ve said here many times, reality is not a story point.  It’s not part of a character sketch, either.  Once I put that boss into a story, my readers are going to expect there’s a purpose to him being there.  That there’s an actual reason for his behavior.  And if there isn’t… that’s on me as the writer.

            Look at the characters in your story.  Follow them for a few pages.  Can you explain their actions with one or two simple words?  Are they words most people will know?  Do these words relate to the character and not my outline?

            Then you’ve probably got some very driven characters.

            I’m not sure I’ll be able to post anything next week because I’m a “special guest” at WonderCon here in Los Angeles.  And I’ll be in the last two weeks before this new book is due.

            Or maybe I’ll just stop making excuses and write something.

            Until then… well, hopefully you feel motivated to go write.

            Pop culture reference.  Long overdue, and to bring even more shame on my household, it’s kind of a repeat.  Sorry.

            Before I dive into things, I must shamefully point out that the latest book in my Ex-Heroesseries got released this week.  The marketing folks are lovely people, but they’ll be upset if I don’t mention it.  Ex-Isle is book #5 and it’s now on sale everywhere.  Check it out.

            And now, back to this week’s rant…

            This is something I’ve been meaning to talk about again for a while now.  As I mentioned, I’m kind of in a rush this week (even more on that below), so I thought this would be a good time to add in what’s more-or-less a repeat post.  At least, it is if you’ve been here since 2008…

            That being said, let’s talk about “Darmok.”

            “Darmok” was one of the first episodes of Star Trek:The Next Generation‘s fifth season.   The Enterprisevisits an alien race, the Children of Tama, which has repeatedly brought first contact attempts to a grinding halt because the universal translator can’t make sense of their language.  The Tama language can be rendered in Federation English, yes, but the words and sentence structure make no sense.  Sensing the problem that needs to be overcome, Dathon–the Tama commander—kidnaps Captain Picard to a hostile world where the two must fight together to survive.  Through their trials together, Picard comes to realize that the Tama language is not based on ideas and concepts, but on stories and metaphors.  They wouldn’t say “I’m happy,” they’d say something like “Scrooge, on Christmas morning.”  They don’t say they’re relieved to see you, they’d say “Indy, finding Marion in the tent.”  It’s been impossible to translate the Tama language literally because the Federation doesn’t share their history and folklore.

            In a way, all of us do this every day. We reference movies, TV shows, pop culture events, and then we stack and combine them. Heck, that’s pretty much what memes are.

            We also do it on a smaller scale, though.  All of us have jokes that are only understood by our family or certain circles of friends or coworkers.  Some folks crack jokes from Playboy, others from Welcome to Night Vale.  These folks obsess over Scandal and these folks watch iZombie whenever they happen to catch it.  Some people like sports, others like science.  And all of us talk about what we know and what we like.

            I worked on a set once where people commonly asked “Where’s Waldo?”  A lot of my college friends understood when you talked about Virpi Zuckk, the third Pete, and nice shoes.  Some of my best friends and I make frequent references to Pod Six,  killing Jeff, and “the girl’s evil cheater magic.”    

            Heck, even this title is an in-joke.  It’s a reference to one of the first Adult Swim cartoons, Sealab 2021. But also, when two of my friends bought a house and decided to use their sunroom as a dedicated gaming room, we all sort of universally decided to call it Pod Six.  Because it’s where we all hang out and talk in weird references that only we’re going to understand.

            See where I’m going with this?

            A common problem I see again and again in stories is oblique references and figures of speech that the reader can’t understand.  It might make sense within the writer’s personal circle or clique, but outside readers end up scratching their heads.  Several of the writers responsible for this sort of mistake will try to justify their words in a number of ways…

            First is that my friends are real people.  Therefore, people really talk this way, and there’s nothing wrong with it.  Alas, as I’ve mentioned here many times before, “real” rarely translates to “good.”  Pointing to a few of my like-minded friends and saying “well, they got it,” isn’t going to win me points with an editor.

            Second is that I’ll argue common knowledge.  I’ll try to say this material is generally known– universally known, even– and it’s the reader who is in the feeble minority by not being aware of it.  This is probably the hardest to contradict, because if somebody honestly believes that everyone should know who the U.S. Secretary of State was in 1969, there’s not much you or I can do to convince them otherwise.  It’s much more likely, in the writer’s mind, that the readers are just uneducated simpletons who never learned the ten forms of Arabic verbs, don’t collect Magic cards, and couldn’t tell you the obvious differences between Iron Man and War Machine if their lives depended on it.

            Third, usually reserved for screenplays, is the auteur excuse.  I plan on directing this script, so it doesn’t matter if no one else can understand the writing (or if there are tons of inappropriate camera angles, staging instructions, and notes for actors).  The flaw here is that my screenplay will invariably end up getting shown to someone else.   A contest reader.  A producer.  An investor.  Someone out of that inner circle of friends who needs to look at my script and understand the writing.

            Y’see, Timmy, I can’t be writing just for my five closest friends.  Not if I want to succeed as a writer.  I’m not saying my writing has to appeal to everyone and be understood by everyone, but it can’t be so loaded with in-jokes and obscure references that nobody knows what I’m talking about.

            This is one of those inherent writer skills.  Something I just need to figure out how to do on my own, mostly by reading everything I can get your hands on.  I need to know words and phrases.  I have to know them and I have to be honestly aware of who else knows them.  Using extremely uncommon terms or words may show off my bachelor’s degree and vocabulary, but the moment a reader has to stop and think about what a word or phrase means, they’ve been taken out of my story. 

            And knocking people out of my story is one of the certain ways to make sure the reader puts my manuscript down and goes off to fold laundry.

            On an unrelated note… if you’re in San Diego and happen to be reading this just as it went up, I’m going to be at Mysterious Galaxy tonight (Thursday) talking and signing copies of Ex-Isle.  And on Saturday I’ll be at Dark Delicacies in Burbank doing more of the same.  Hope to see some of you there (and if not, you can call them and order books, too).

            Next time, I’d like to talk about how ignorant some of your characters are.

            Until then… go write.

            December has gone by way too fast for my liking.

            Anyway, before we all head off to watch Star Wars: The Force Awakens and get some final holiday shopping done, I though I’d talk about something completely unbelievable.

            No, seriously.

            There’s a phrase you may have heard called willing suspension of disbelief.  Simply put, it’s when a reader is willing to ignore or forgive obviously false things for the sake of enjoying a story.  They deliberately choose to ignore the impossible.  It’s why we can enjoy Lord of the Rings when we know there’s no such thing as elves, dwarves, or invisibility rings.  It’s also why we can enjoy Star Wars when our adult minds realize the Force, lightsabers, and hyperdrive are all a little questionable, logically.  And if there really was a hockey-masked serial killer taking out a dozen kids per summer up at the same lake… seriously, shouldn’t someone have caught on by now?

            Fantasy, sci-fi, thrillers, a lot of horror—the genre stories are the ones that we immediately think of when it comes to willing suspension of disbelief.  But the ugly truth is that any story can make a reader shake their head and toss it aside.  There is no genre, no point of view, no style of writing that is immune.  Sometimes a writer asks us to make a leap and… we just can’t.

            Why is that, y’think?  When was the last time you shook your head at something you were reading?  Has something ever happened in a movie or television show that just made you decide you couldn’t take it seriously any longer?  Or maybe you just shut it off?

            I have a few thoughts on this topic…

            One of the biggest things that’ll make a story believable—any story—is the characters.  I may have mentioned once or twice or thrice that good characters make for good stories.  I can’t have a believable story without believable characters.  It’s just not possible.

            Yeah, even if I slap “based on a true story” or “inspired by real events” under the title.  Once it’s on the page or on the screen, all anyone cares about is if it’s a good story about believable characters.  This is a common mistake—one I’ve made myself.  Whether or not they’re real is completely irrelevant.  If that’s my only selling point… I’m in trouble.

            If my characters are going to be believable, they’ve got to be consistent—or at least consistently inconsistent.  I can’t have them acting and reacting in whatever random way happens to move my plot along.  My readers need to see motives they can understand.  Natural-sounding dialogue.  Relationships that are somehow relatable to the average person.

            This is important because once my readers believe in my characters, they’ll believe in what happens to my characters.  If I believe in Phoebe and Phoebe ends up meeting Santa, then—by extension—I have to believe in Santa.  Stephen King is a master at this.  He gives us very normal, relatable folks, lets us get to know them, and then plunges them into nightmarish circumstances with inhuman, otherworldly threats. We believe there’s a weird clown-spider-elder god thing living under this small Maine town because we believe in the kids-who-become-adults who encounter it and decide to fight against it.  Just saying that up above—clown-spider-elder god thing—makes it sound kind of goofy and silly.  But millions of people were terrified by ITand completely believed in that creature… because they believed in the characters Pennywise the clown was terrorizing.

            Now, something I haven’t touched on yet.  How can I make someone believable in a completely fictional world?  Star Wars is set on other planets centuries ahead of our own, technology-wise (don’t be that person arguing about “a long time ago…”).  The Game of Thrones books are set on another world that’s arguably thousands of years behind us.  The Harry Dresden series by Steve Butcher is set on a different version of Earth.  The whole Marvel Universe (comic book and cinematic) may have been vaguely close to ours once, but is far off into sci-fi at this point, even right in the middle of Manhattan.

            A lot of this will depend on how foreign I make my world.  The more difficult it is for a reader to find relatable ground, the harder it’ll be to find something relatable in the characters.  And as I mentioned last week, being relatable is a key to good characters.

            Let’s consider Star Wars (no, don’t worry, no spoilers).  The first movie (episode IV if you want to be pedantic) starts with a battle between massive starships, but quickly shifts to a boarding party—one on one action where we see people being killed and captured.  And then it’s revealed this is a spy mission and the Empire is looking for some sort of stolen plans. Good so far—all of this is very understandable stuff.

            Our hero, Luke, works on his uncle’s moisture farm where he drinks blue milk and is expected to work on droids who will work on the vaparators.  This is all vaguely understandable, yes.  But, as quickly becomes apparent, Luke doesn’t want to work on the farm his whole life.  He’s suffocating here.  He wants to go off and do big, exciting things. And that’s something we’ve all heard before. Hell, a lot of us have probably felt that before, right?  So even though it’s set on spaceships and desert planets, Star Warsimmediately grounds us with familiar, believable characters and situations.
            Okay, so once I’ve got good characters, that whole disbelief thing is taken care of, right?
            Well… not exactly.

            Another thing that can mess up willing suspension of disbelief is if I get my facts wrong.  If I tell my readers there are only six countries in Africa, that the human heart is made up of just one cell, that Ronald Reagan was the 25th President of the United States, or that Hitler died in 1958… well, most people are going to see the mistakes there.  Even if they don’t know the right answer, they’ll know I got these wrong.  And that knowledge is going to jar them out of the story for a minute.  It moves us from experiencing the story to analyzing it.  We start lookingfor wrong things, and that pokes holes in our suspension of disbelief. 

            Again, the world of my story will have some say in this.  What we consider a fact in one story might not hold true in another.  There’ve been one or two successful stories where Santa Claus was a main character.  A fairly successful movie actually made the claim that Hitler died in 1958.  By the time it made this claim, though, it had already introduced average, relatable guy John Myers (and us) to the hidden supernatural world of the story.

            There’s also a flipside to this, one that takes a bit of empathy.  I can also blow the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief by using completely true facts that are unbelievable.  There are lots of things that are statistically possible, but that doesn’t mean they’re actually going to happen, or happen that often.  Likewise, there are tons of late night cable shows that will tell you about amazing true coincidences or billion-to-one events that actually happened.  If I’m basing a whole chapter—or a whole story—around these things, it could cause problems.

            I spoke with a documentary filmmaker years ago.  He’d just finished a film about the botched invasion of Iraq and the even bigger mess that came after it.  One of the most amazing things he told me, though, was how much he had to cut out of the film.  There were points of such complete incompetence in the year after the invasion that—if he had left them in the film—nobody would’ve believed them.  And he was telling me this three years later, when it was becoming pretty clear to everyone how poorly things had been thought out over there.  Even then, he had to cut some things so his documentary wouldn’t get dismissed as a hatchet job.

             If I present something that’s too hard to believe, even if it’s true, it’s still going to make the reader pause and shake their head.  As I mentioned above, nobody cares if it’s true or not.  There’s a phrase you may have heard that started with Lord Byron, passed through Mark Twain, and has even been used by Tom Clancy—the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.  And when it doesn’t make sense, it’s going to knock people out of the story and chip away at their disbelief some more.

            Y’see, Timmy, this is the big thing.  When our suspension of disbelief is broken, even for a moment, it breaks the flow of the story.  The more often the flow is broken, the harder it becomes for my readers to be invested in the story.  And soon they’re setting it aside to do something more exciting… like the dishes or thank-you cards.

            So keep it believable.

            Next time… Heck, next time is Christmas Eve.  Wow.  I may try to jot down something really quick for that morning, but I’ll understand if you have other plans.
            Until then… go write.

            Believably.