Category: research

Okay, well… it’s been a while.

Again.

If you happen to subscribe to my newsletter, you know it’s been a weird, long summer that ended with me deciding to, well, go hide in the garage for a while. But I’m back and feeling, well, a little recharged. Let’s say not quite as overwhelmed by, y’know… everything

Anyway… let’s talk about writing. Haven’t done that in a while, have we?

So, just a few weeks before I went on this extended hiatus, Alex asked—

How do you go about writing characters with thought-processes considerably different to your own? Fundamental differences like Mike’s savant syndrome, for example, or ingrained stuff like Hector’s military skill. They both read as natural and believable depictions, and I’d kill for some advice on how to make something like that work.

Unless you secretly have savant syndrome and are an ex-secret military agent and are writing from the heart–in which case, props to you.

Are you even still here, Alex?

Funny, semi-relevant thing– after The Broken Room came out, I got a happy-but-puzzled email from a friend back east. She loved the book, loved the characters, but one thing she couldn’t figure out… If Hector knew how to do all these things—his skill with weapons, cars, people, tactical situations—well, didn’t that mean I knew how to do all of this? So where and/ or how had I learned all that?

As they say… let’s put a pin in this for a moment.

So, getting back to Alex’s question, the big thing here is we’re talking about characters. I’ve mentioned once or thrice before that it’s a big step for all of us when we start writing characters that don’t sound… well, just like us. We all do it when we’re starting out (yeah, all of us) because the easiest head to get inside is the one we’re already inside. So we write a lot of characters who have similar thoughts, similar views, and/ or similar experiences to us. I mean, everyone always say write what you know, yes?

It’s a big thing when we decide to start stretching out of that comfort zone, and it’s not unusual for it to bring things to a halt at first. Suddenly feeling around in someone else’s head can be… weird. A little invasive? Personally, I remember second-guessing myself a lot about writing characters who weren’t just, y‘know, me with a fresh coat of paint. Especially if these people happened to have different skin tones. Or genders. Was I just completely out of line trying to write the POV of a Black woman?

Here’s two things I did for these characters who weren’t me.

First, I did research. Lots and lots of research. Over the years I’ve researched scientists, soldiers, ballerinas, doctors, and government agents. I’ve researched high IQ people, people with missing limbs, people who run ultramarathons, and more.

A few key things…

One is that I tried whenever I could to actually talk with these folks. In person, on the phone, on video chats. Because I didn’t just want to know things, I wanted to hear how they talked about these things. People tend to respond a bit differently when they’re talking than they do when they’re writing out answers to emailed questions. You’ll also notice that professionals in most fields tend to talk casually about the things in that field.

Another is that I always tried to have follow up questions. How long did it take you to learn that? You always do this, but what would happen if you didn’t? One of my favorite questions is “but what’s the real way this happens,” because for a lot of things there’s the official way we’re all taught or trained, and then there’s how it actually gets done on the job site or out in the field. There’s the way they teach film making at film school, and there’s the way film making happens on set—they’re not the same thing. Heck, remember that part time job you had in high school or college with the silly training videos they made you watch? How to stock shelves. How to talk with customers at the register. Did anyone ever follow those to the letter?

And the last thing in this little subset… listen. Actually listen to people. Not just the things we want to hear, the specific facts we’re looking for, listen to all of it. Like I mentioned above, the way they talk. The tone of their voice. The points they’re sure to make and ones they sort of talk around.

This leads nicely into the second thing, which is empathy. I’ve talked about empathy here once or thrice before. Really simply, it’s the ability to put yourself in someone else’s head. To figure out why someone like that would do something like that. I really, truly believe this is one of the most important skill we develop as writers, and I think it’s really hard for anyone to have any sort of wide appeal if they don’t develop. I’ll always be able to find an audience of people who think just like me, but I’ll find a much bigger one if I can find people who think in different ways about different things.

The catch is, empathy isn’t something we can really teach. We each just need to sit down and figure it out. And that can be rough because sometimes, for whatever reason, we don’t want to put ourselves in that other point of view and take an honest look through those eyes. Maybe because it’s uncomfortable. Maybe it’s because it’ll make us see something uncomfortable in ourselves.

If I’ve got a character who’s radically different than me, I’ll spend a lot of time just thinking about them. What would they think of X? How would they justify Y? Would they ever Z? A lot of the time, these situations will have nothing to do with my plot– I don’t want to possibly get lazy and just give them a reaction that would be really good for the book. I mean, I want it to be good for the book, yeah, but I also want it to feel true to them, the actual character. If they’re just going to be a plot zombie I’m kind of wasting my time. On a few levels.

Let me give you a few quick examples, using the examples Alex asked me about.

When I was figuring out Mike from The Fold, I knew from the start I wanted him to be someone with a high IQ, but his defining thing became his memory. By all accounts, actual, comic-book level photographic memory doesn’t exist. Or at least, nobody’s been able to prove it exists. But I started wondering about what it would be like for someone if it did.

The big moment was at one point I was playing with the idea of ants as a sort of self-built mental structure. One group of ants carries thoughts, the other carries memories. But then, as I played with this, I had the thunderbolt realization that if Mike every toyed with this idea, he’d never be able to get it out of his head. And that’s when I realized true photographic memory would almost be a curse. It wasn’t about being able to remember everything– it was about never being able to forget anything. Never having anything slip your mind, nothing dulling with the passage of time.

Needless to say, this gave me a huge insight into how Mike would view and interact with the world. It also meant that, as the author, I wouldn’t be able to use a lot of common narrative devices like “it looked familiar” or “he couldn’t place it” or those sorts of things. Essentially, if Mike had ever been exposed to a visual, a concept, a sound, anything—it was right there, in perfect clarity. So this shaped his point of view even more.

As for Hector in The Broken Room… I knew from the very start that Hector was going to be a former secret agent who was living below the radar. Heck, he’s living below the radar in what he views as a hostile country. So he’s always watching everything and trying to stay one step ahead of everyone around him—knowing how they’ll react and how he can take advantage of that.

So really, this is just empathy dialed up to eleven. In order for Hector to believably manipulate this hotel clerk, I need to have the clerk act and react to things in a way that makes sense and will be believable for readers. But I also need to have Hector believably predict that. The less “baseline” their reaction is, the less likely it is my readers would accept him predicting it. Make sense?

Plus… okay, here’s the trick that gets completely overlooked when it’s done well. I’m the one writing this. I can tailor her reactions to his plans and make sure it all works out for maximum effect. So by being able to put myself in both characters’ heads, I can make these scenes even stronger and make Hector seem even more competent. Enough so that I had people who worked the desk in hotels writing to me to say “that absolutely would’ve worked on me” and a friend who’s known me for over thirty years wondering “but how do you know how to do this…?”

That’s it. That’s the whole secret to getting into the heads characters who are really different from me, the writer. Research. Empathy. Mostly empathy.

Next time…

Crap, it’s been a while. I should probably mention that God’s Junk Drawer is out in paperback in just a little less than three weeks. You could preorder a copy now. If you get the newsletter, you know there’s a way you could preorder a signed copy. Ho ho ho.

Next time, nothing’s happened in a while, so I’m going to talk about action. Unless one of you has some pressing topic you’d like me to address? I promise, I’ll get to it much quicker than I got to Alex’s.

Sorry Alex.

Until then… go write.

Oddly enough, not a Halloween-themed post. Although… maybe it is. It’s all perspective, I guess.

Since I first started taking this whole writing thing seriously, there’s been a general mindset I’ve seen bubble to the surface once a year or so. Maybe more in some places. It’s the idea that I can’t write about X if I haven’t personally experienced X. Can’t write it well, that’s for sure. If X hasn’t been an integral part of my life at some point or another, I’m just wasting everyone’s time by trying to write about it. Definitely by putting that writing out there. It’s a version of the old “write what you know” superball that gets bounced around. If you’ve never known X, you certainly can’t write about X.

Starting out in the horror community, I’d see this again and again. The folks who’d insist it just wasn’t possible to write horror without a horrific, awful background. You want to write horror? Real horror, not this weak “vampires and demons and zombies” crap? Well you better have fought in a war and had several people killed in front of you. Or had a horribly abusive family. All your pets better be dead, and most of your friends too, and if you’re not dealing with it through life-crippling addiction to something, you’re just a goddamn tourist who has no business in this genre.

Because of this, I’d see some folks get scared off from their chosen genre. Have I experienced real, soul-wrenching love? I mean, really experienced it? Maybe I shouldn’t be writing romance. My parents loved me a lot, I get along well with my brother, and I’ve got a bunch of really cool friends. Maybe I don’t have any business writing horror. And, heck, I’ve never even killed a human being before. I guess murder mysteries really aren’t for me.

At least, that’s what notorious serial killer Sue Grafton always said.

And a friend of mine recently pointed out this is such a pervasive idea that even some readers believe it. There’s no way I could write about a character that awful unless I myself am truly that awful, right? I mean, somebody couldn’t just make that stuff up, right? If one of my characters has sex more than twice, I’m clearly a sex addict (and let’s not even talk about what their chosen sex position says about me). Heck, I think I’ve talked before the weirdness that can happen when you name a character after a family member or friend without thinking about it.

Now, before I go any further… as I mentioned above, this has all been proven wrong again and again. Seriously. Yeah, there’s definitely some horror writers out there who’ve seen some awful stuff and I’ve known one or two folks over the years who’ve written intense erotica as an outlet when, y’know, no other outlet was available. There are some action writers out there who have very intense backgrounds in the military or private security, and a few sci-fi writers with pretty solid scientific credentials.

But I also know a ton of horror writers who had really nice childhoods and now live very happy lives, without a single dismemberment or traumatic beating or other ghastly event in their past or present. I know action writers who haven’t been in a single barfight or high speed chase or gun battle. I know people with no military experience  who write very successful military books. There are more than a few sci-fi writers who haven’t traveled in time or even left earth orbit once. And I know people who write sex scenes in their books who have, if I may be so bold, fairly vanilla sex lives. At least, going off all the pictures one of them showed me. Like, insisted on showing me.

That was a really weird brunch.

Anyway…

I think all of this ties back to a few things I’ve talked about here a few times. So I thought  maybe it’d be worth mentioning a few totally valid ways we can write about things we haven’t actually experienced. For example…

Voice—A big step for all of us is the day we realize midwestern grocery store clerks don’t talk the same way as third-generation bio-apocalypse survivors. Dwarven warrior queens have a different vocabulary than techbro CEOs. And fresh-out-of-grad-school schoolteachers don’t sound the same as battle-hardened Army sergeants. And getting that voice right, knowing how she’d say this vs. how he’d say it vs. how I’d say it is a big step in our growth as writers.

Research—seriously, we live in a freakin’ golden age of resources for writers. I’ve been doing this just long enough that I remember ads in the back of magazines for small press books about what it’s really like to be a doctor or a homicide detective . Or I’d spend hours in the library trying to find pictures of Paristhat didn’t involve the Eiffel Toweror a museum. These days, if I need to know something I have access to so many sources. I can find research papers or anecdotal accounts or heck, even actual people who will answer my questions or help me find the answers, and usually tell me some other useful things if I’m paying attention.

Extrapolation— I’ve never been shot in the knee, but I’ve had the meniscus behind my kneecap rupture (and collapse again and again and again). I’ve never done super heavy drugs but I’ve been very drunk a few times. I’ve never been able to fly, but when I was a kid there was a bridge in my hometown we all used to jump off into the river. Yeah, these experiences aren’t the same, but I can use them as building points. If this registers as a six, what would a nine be like? If it felt like this for ten seconds, what would it feel like after twenty? Or thirty? I stayed conscious here but would that much short out my brain for a few seconds (from pain or pleasure or excessive introduced chemicals)? It’s a basic creativity exercise. 

Empathy—I’ve talked about empathy here a few times, and I have to say once again it’s the most important trait a writer can have. Seriously. It’s what everything here really boils down to. Being able to put myself in someone else’s shoes. I’ve never had a parent die, but I’ve had friends who did. I’ve never served in the military, but I have family who did. I’ve never been married or had kids or burned dinner when someone’s coming over I really want to impress. But I look at my friends and family, I listen to them, I take note of what they’re saying and what they’re not saying, and I try to relate it to things I’ve gone through. I try to imagine how I’d feel in a similar situation, based off my own experiences. And I use some of that in stories.

In fact, let’s take this one step further and address one of the points that started this off. If I’m going to tell someone they can’t write great horror unless they’ve been through awful stuff (like I have)… well, isn’t that kind of implying I don’t have great empathy? I mean, think about it. I’m saying I can only write this because I experienced it, and I’m also admitting I can’t imagine being a person who can write it without experiencing it.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think that’s something I should be bragging about.

Y’see, Timmy, much like “write what you know,” this mindset assumes people can’t learn or grow or imagine anything. And if I want to be a good writer, I have to be able to do that. I can’t tell myself not to write about bank robbery until I’ve actually tried to rob a bank. Hell, where does that people who write murder mysteries? Or giant robot sci-fi? Or dark period fantasy. I mean, if you haven’t had sex with at least three people from the twelfth century, how do you expect to write medieval romance? I need to understand most writers research things, extrapolate feelings and reactions, get inside their character’s heads, and just try to have an honest sense of what someone else would feel in this situation.

Look, the truth is, if I’m doing my job right, you should feel like all my characters are real people in real situations. The janitor. The nymphomaniac barista. The half-human, reluctant cultist. The little kid with PTSD. The burned-out secret agent trying to forget most of his life. The world-ending cosmic event that they’re all tied up together in. And when we read a description of a real person, when we hear about the believable, relatable aspects of their life, it’s natural for us to assume they’re… well, real.

And the obvious real person is me, the author, telling you this story. So it’s not surprising some people think I must’ve experienced these things firsthand.

But I shouldn’t need to.

Anyway…

Next time, I want to throw a bunch of characters at the wall and see which ones stick.

Until then, go write.

 There’s a storytelling idea, sort of a method, I suppose, that I’d been batting around for a while as a possible topic. Something I see crop up enough that it was worth mentioning in that “something else to keep in mind…” way. I decided to add it to my list of topics here and then, in a weird synchronicity, said problem showed up in a TV miniseries I finally got around to watching and a book I was reading (some formats may be changed to protect… you know).

The miniseries I mentioned involved an aggressive computer virus. And it explained how the virus worked. In detail. It used a few specifics and a few generalities, but it spent three whole scenes explaining this virus, the logic behind how it worked and how it selected targets.

The problem was… even as I was watching this, I could see a bunch of holes in the explanation. Holes that were only pulled wider as the story went on. And my computer skills more or less peaked in the very early 00’s. But I still knew enough to know the virus wouldn’t work the way it was described. Couldn’t. If it chose targets this way, why didn’t it go after that or that? If it propagated like that, how had it reached here and here?

For a brief time I was wondering if this was some sort of foreshadowing that there was more to the virus than was being let on. Maybe some sort of AI or a living virus that had been transcribed but then… mutated or something? But no, in the end it was just a computer virus that didn’t make any sense.

Which was doubly annoying because the virus didn’t really need to be explained in this story. The plot was much more about the repercussions of this thing being loose on the web and how it was affecting lives, society, and so on. The explanation slowed things down.

And, yeah, sure—part of this is on me. Any genre story is going to involve a degree of suspension of disbelief. Nobody wants to be the guy picking apart the energy requirements of a lightsaber or arguing how the Hulk can’t be that strong because his muscle/bone density would mean he’d sink into the earth. And as for Mjolnir, look…

Okay, yeah… there are some people out there who love being that guy.

(looking at you, Neil…)

But here’s the thing. I couldn’t’ve picked it apart if the writer hadn’t put so much down in front of me. I wouldn’t’ve had anything to pick apart. I can’t complain about your wardrobe if you never show me your wardrobe. But this writer decided they needed a whole scene (three scenes, really) explaining the computer virus in detail. And the details didn’t match up.

So what does this mean for me if my story needs explanation? I mean, speculative fiction is filled with different forms of technobabble. It’s got FTL drives and magic systems and AI computer viruses and alien life cycles and bringing dinosaurs back with cloning and mutant superheroes and… I mean, I’ve got to explain it all somehow, right?

Maybe? Consider Jurassic Park. How much does Crichton (or Spielberg and Koepp) actually tell us about the process of recreating dinosaurs? No, seriously—what do they tell us? If you look back, it’s actually a pretty bare-bones explanation of what’s a fairly complicated process (especially twenty-five years ago!). In fact, it encourages us to fill in a lot of the blanks ourselves and make it seem more complete.

So here’s a few things to keep in mind as I’m writing out that long explanation…

First, be clear if the story really needs this explanation. Is this what the story’s actually about, or is this a minor element I can handwave away or just skip over? Back to the Future gets away with a ridiculously simple explanation of time travel because it’s not really about the time travel. It’s about actions and consequences, and becoming a better person. Time travel’s just the mechanism that lets it happen. It’s just short of being a MacGuffin. We don’t need that explanation the same way we don’t need to read about someone hitting every step on the staircase, how many keystrokes it took to log into their cloud account, or a list of every item of clothing they put on when they got dressed (in order). The reader will fill it in.

Second, if I decide I really need to explain this at length, it’s got to be solid. I’ve waived the right to say “just trust me, it works” and now I need to make this as rigorous and believable as possible. I need to do my research, double-check my logic, triple-check my numbers, and let it marinate overnight in plain-old common sense. Trust me when I say if I get a fact wrong or use garbage science or make a math mistake… people will let me know. I don’t even have to ask them. Not only that, but…

Third, I need to keep in mind the more something gets explained, the easier it is to punch holes in that explanation. Like in the example I first mentioned. As the characters went into more and more detail about the computer virus, the flaws in that explanation became more and more apparent. How often have we seen the person digging themselves deeper and deeper because they won’t stop talking? It’s soooooo tempting when we’ve done all that sweet, cool research, but I need to figure out how much explanation my story really needs and stop there. I’ve mentioned screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin here onceor thrice, and his idea that we experience stories in our gut, but we analyze them in our head. I never, ever want my explanation to drive people into their heads.

Fourth, closely related to the last one, is that this sort of explanation is almost always going to be exposition. Yes, even if I try to work it into a conversation or presentation or something like that. As we’ve talked about here a bunch of times, exposition gets boring really fast because so much of it is either things we already know or things we don’t need to know. For our purposes here, there’s a chance the reader doesn’t even want to know. So if I decide I need this explanation in my story, I need to make sure it’s going to be clever and engaging for the reader.

And that’s me explaining how to explain things.

Next time, I’d like to talk about if you should be reading next week’s post.

Until then, go write.

No, we’re not talking about an M-F-K type game.

I don’t know. Some of you are very clever and inventive.  Maybe we are…

Big surprise, I know a lot of writers. Honestly, I’m still surprised to be accepted into their ranks. Any time I’m at a signing or a con party, I kind of feel like Jane Goodall quietly being accepted by the gorillas…

(by which I mean I’m quietly waiting to be mauled)

However, there’s one writer I don’t have that problem with, and that’s the ever-wonderful Elena Hartwell, author of the Eddie Shoes mystery series. Elena and I have, we recently realized, known each other for almost a quarter-century. We met back in our early twenties when we were freelance electricians for various San Diego theaters, and we’ve been friends ever since.

Yeah, I’m not sure how the math works, either. Met in our early twenties, pretty sure we’re both in our mid-thirties now… Maybe it’s like Reaganomics. In that it doesn’t really work.

Anyway…

I got to attend a signing event Elena did recently in my neighborhood, and during the talk she mentioned a wonderful rule of thumb when it comes to research. More to the point, when it comes time to start incorporating that research into my writing. Tattoo this one on your arm.  Or commit it to memory.  Or maybe just bookmark it…

For her books, Elena’s talked to a lot of professionals in various branches of law enforcement and other public servants. And she noticed a lot of their answer to her questions tended to fall into certain groups…

“We always do this.  No matter what, this is a priority.”

“Well, you think it’d go that way, but the truth is… well, it’s a little more flexible than a lot of people realize.”

“That never happens.  There’s a couple different reasons why, but… it just doesn’t.”

This didn’t really surprise me. As someone who worked in the film industry for many years, I was very aware of those kind of divisions. Usually when dealing with people who had a lot of textbook ideas about how the industry worked. And then having to explain to them, “yeah, here’s how that actually goes.” Or, far more often, “ha ha ha, no, that never happens…”

I think most jobs work that way. There’s stuff that always happens, stuff that never happens, and then there’s that gray area where things aren’t well defined or nobody generally talks about it. The stuff that usually happens or, y’know… it’s not unheard of.

I talked to a scientist a while back about lab equipment. What happens to stuff from old experiments or discontinued projects? And I wanted to hear it from her because—like in the film industry—I was willing to bet there was the official, rulebook way that everyone gets taught, and then there’s… well, the simple reality of it. And she laughed and told me, yeah, there’s the expected rules, and for some things you follow the rules to the letter with no deviations. But for a lot of stuff… turns out people are a bit less concerned with what happens to that case of old test tubes or the laptop from 2006.

So, what does all this mean to you, fearless writer?

When we’re doing research, it’s really tempting to bend the facts to fit the story we want to tell. We have something we like, reality goes against it… so we just choose to ignore reality. I mean, that’s what fiction is, right? Just ignoring reality to tell a good story.

Not exactly.

When I sit down to do my research—be it books, bugging professionals, or even risking the internet—I should put all the answers into one of three categories.  Always.  Maybe.  Never.

If it’s always true, I need to get it right.

If it’s never true, I shouldn’t have it happen in my story.

If it’s maybe true, in certain cases…  now I can tweak according to what my story needs.

That’s it.  Simple and quick.

Y’see, Timmy, doing this will make my story so much stronger, especially if I’m trying to set it in the real world.  Because by doing this, I’m enforcing those real-world rules. Heck, even if my story’s set in the kaiju-infested dystopia that is 2217, I should be doing this with my facts.  It’s just me staying true to the rules of that world.

Always. Maybe.  Never.

Next time, I’d like to talk about bullies.

Until then… go write.

Always go write.