Category: story

Oh, back again so soon? Well, I guess that’s as much on me as it is on you. But I did have another thought I wanted to bounce off you.

This is something I’ve seen several times in books and in bad B-movies, but it only recently struck me what was actually going on. How the storytellers were twisting things in a really unnatural way to solve a problem. So this may make you (and me) look back at some older posts I’ve done in a slightly different light..

But first, let’s talk about pasta.

I got into cooking during the pandemic. Started watching lots of cooking videos. Trying some things that were kind of new and daring for me. Maybe some of you did too. I’ve found all the prep and cooking kept my mind off other things but still working in creative ways. And now I can make really good stir-fried noodles.

Speaking of noodles, you’ve probably heard of the spaghetti test. When it’s cooked properly and ready to eat, you can throw a strand of spaghetti at the wall and the moisture and starches and, I don’t know, pasta epoxy will make it stick. If it isn’t done cooking yet, it just falls off or does a slow downward tumble like one of those Wacky Wall Walkers.

There’s another phrase you may have heard which grew out of this spaghetti test. “Let’s throw it at the wall and see what sticks.” It shows up a lot in the development stages of all sorts of things. We’ve got thirty ideas and we don’t know which one’s going to work? Well, let’s just do allof them. We throw all the spaghetti at the wall—the whole pot—and everything that sticks is good and ready to go and whatever doesn’t… isn’t. Sound familiar?

I think most of us have tried this sort of blunt, brute force approach on something. I know I’ve rewritten conversations severaltimes to see if it works better with Yakko taking the lead, or Dot, or Wakko, or Phoebe, or… who’s that guy? Let’s see what happens if he takes the lead in this. Same thing with names. Holy crap, Murdoch in Terminus went through sooooo many different names. Sometimes for whole drafts, sometimes just for a page or three. But then I found Murdoch and it was perfect.

Thing is, there’s a weird sort of flipside to this. Or maybe an inverse? Freaky mutant bastard offspring? Anyway, I talked a while back about shotgun art, and I think this is what’s going on here.

Sometimes, in books and movies, we’ll see storytellers who just pile on the characters. One after another after another, many of them with only the thinnest connection to the main plot. It’s the cousin of the best friend of a supporting character in one plot thread. Or, y’know, even less than that. I read one story where we spent two whole chapters with a character who’s only purpose was to bump into one of the main characters in a third chapter. That was it. She served no other purpose in the story except to be that two page delay in his day And, y’know, fill out the page count a bit.

What struck me a few weeks back is when storytellers are doing this—layering on dozens of simple, almost stereotypical characters and conflicts—is they’re taking the spaghetti approach and just throwing everything at the wall. Rather than developing any of these characters or elements to any degree, they’re just giving us lots and lots of quick, shallow ones. I mean why spend time making a complex character when I could just create fivecharacters with only one character trait each? It’s so much less effort, right? I mean, ex-wife, former best friend, alcoholic rival, pregnant woman, aggressive military guy—there’s got to be something there that strikes a chord with my reader, right?

That example I gave up above? The woman who served no purpose except to bump into one of the protagonists? She was late for work. That was it. That was her entire character. I mean, she had a name. She had some dialogue. She had a pet in a tank in her apartment (some kind of lizard, I think). But that was it. The only other thing we knew about her—her alarm didn’t go off, she overslept by almost two hours, and she was late for work. We never learned why her alarm didn’t go off (power outage? forgot to set it? sabotaging pet lizard?). We never learned why she was so tired she overslept by two hours (drastically overworked? got blackout drunk? a wild hookup that left her exhausted?).

Heck, weird as it sounds, we never even found out why being late was a bad thing (on the verge of being fired? abusive boss? big presentation?). We just knew she was late, had to get showered and dressed fast, had to get to work, and that was supposed to be enough for us. Anything else would require more thought about who she was, what she wanted out of life, and what she was actually getting.

And this book had over a dozen characters like her. Seriously. It spent a significant amount of time with people who could be 100% completely summed up with things like “Wakko needs some drugs,” “Dot’s worried about her dog,” or “Yakko is a no-nonsense soldier.” That’s it. That’s all of who they were.

One place you may recognize this from (tis the season after all) is old slasher movies. Okay, and some modern ones. Most of the cast is one note characters with just barely enough depth that we can tell the machete went through them. They’re the bulk filler of the plot. The serious woman. The goofball. The jock. The nice girl. The drunk/ stoner. They just exist to be minor obstacles between our killer and the one or two survivors.

Now, again, the idea is that the reader (or the audience, if this is a B-movie) has to find something more-or-less relatable in these broad stereotypes. I mean… you’ve known somebody who’s late for work before, right? Or was a jock? Or a serious woman? Okay, well… I bet you knew someone who was worried about their dog at some point, right?

I think people do this for two reasons. One is that they’re nervous about creating complex characters. Maybe they don’t think they’ve got the skill to do it, or possibly just not the skill to do it in the number of pages allotted to it. Perhaps they think their plot can’t function with only three or four threads. Or possibly they’re worried about having such a limited number of viewpoints.

I think the other reason is they’re worried about having characters with no traits. Like that woman running the register at the gas station. She doesn’t even have a name tag. She’s just there to sell the protagonist gas and a couple snacks. She’s got no arc or backstory or tragic flaw. That doesn’t seem right. We have to give her something, right? Maybe she could be, I don’t know, late for work or something?

Thing is, no matter what my reasoning is for this flood of one-dimensional characters, this always ends up leading to one of two things. Either we mistake their lack of depth for deliberate avoidance (“Hmmmmmm… why isn’t the writer saying why she was up late last night? Is she the murderer???”) and then we get frustrated when this goes nowhere. Or we recognize these characters don’t actually serve a purpose and get frustrated waiting to go back to someone who’s actually going to affect the plot in some way.

I also think it’s worth noting the three traits of good characters I’ve mentioned here a few dozen times—likable, believable, relatable. And yeah, I’ve also mentioned that supporting characters can sometimes get away with only two of these traits. Catch is, when characters are this flat and undeveloped, they almost always end up unbelievable—their actions and reactions just seem ridiculous because there’s no depth to ground them in. So we’re down one good trait already! Then my shotgun approach means they’re going to be randomly relatable at best, and lots of folks fall back on “snarky jerk” as a default personality, soooooooooooooo… Not a lot going for these folks.

Y’see, Timmy, burying my story in simple characters doesn’t work because it’s forgetting a basic truth of the spaghetti test. All those noodles that didn’t stick to the wall? I don’t sweep them up off the floor and put them back in the pot. The whole point of doing it all was to see what did and didn’t work—to figure out what shouldn’t be in my story.

So said noodles definitely shouldn’t be part of my finished entree.

Everyone gets the food-book metaphor here, right?

Anyway… next time…

Wow. Already halfway through October. I guess next time I could do the obligatory horror post. Or maybe talk about NaNoWriMo? Any preferences?

Either way, go write.

Sorry I missed last week. Taxes. As I mentioned earlier.

A few weeks back, during my usual Saturday geekery, I had a sudden epiphany about Asylum movies. Even though, technically, it wasn’t an Asylum movie I was watching. I feel safe saying whoever made this film studied at the feet of the mast… well, at the feet of the Asylum producers. And it’s a problem I’ve seen in a lot of book manuscripts. So I made a note of it and told myself I’d have to do a post on it sometime soon.

And then last weekend’s geekery gave me a trio of movies that suffered from the exact same issue. So I thought, wow, serendipity. Definitely a sign of… something. So sometime soon became this week.

Once or thrice here I’ve talked about the ideas of plot and story. Plot is what happens outside my characters, story is what happens inside my characters. The basic idea of a narrative is that conflicts (of many different types) will drive that plot forward, and the plot and story will work together and feed off each other like some beautiful alien symbiote that bonds with you and manifests as bio-armor under times of stress or when you summon no, wait, that’s the plot of the Guyver. I’ve talked about how plot and story work together before. Stick with that, forget the Guyver. For now.

What I wanted to talk about was the conflicts, all those roadblocks that pop up between the beginning and end of the story. The things that get in the way of my characters getting what they want. Because some of these things are great and some are… not so great.

As I mentioned above, I have conflict in my book to drive the plot. My character has to overcome social pressures, financial constraints, power structures, ancient death traps, and a variety of other obstacles. Dealing with these things (or failing to deal with them)  forces my character to grow and change internally (sometimes called a character arc) while at the same time usually subjecting them to greater pressures/constraints/death traps. That’s dramatic structure. Who my character is at the beginning of the book starts and shapes the plot. Who they become at the end helps them resolve the plot.

Here’s a cool way to think of it. Picture a staircase. Every time we climb up a stair, it feels like we’re on level ground, but we’re actually higher than we were before. As we keep climbing stairs, we keep going higher. That’s conflict moving the plot. Climbing stairs moves us higher. Make sense?

Now, the problem I was seeing is that some storytellers had lots of conflicts popping up—but they didn’t actually do anything. They didn’t affect the plot in any way. They’d encounter a new obstacle, deal with it, and then be… right back where they started. Nothing gained. Nothing accomplished. Nothing learned. Our characters haven’t moved any closer to the end of the plot, haven’t grown or changed in any way. These conflicts were so self-contained we could just snip them and lift them out and there wouldn’t be any real change. Heck, we probably wouldn’t even need to stitch things together on either side.

If you wanted to use that staircase analogy, at this point the steps have kind of fallen over and become more a line of peaks. Every time we go over one, we’re just… right back at ground level. Not to mention, they’re all kind of the same peak. None of them stand out, and we realize pretty quick it’s just going to be that same thing again and again.

A term I’ve brought up here before is episodic. Yes, like TV episodes. Its when the conflicts resolve and the plot and story basically reset to where they were at the beginning. Our characters don’t grow or change in any way, they gain nothing, they just… go to the next episode. Which is exactly the same.

Neat thing to think about—because of that “reset,” it doesn’t matter what order we watch a lot of older shows in. We can go from episode twenty-three to episode fifteen to the eighth episode of season four and… you can’t tell. There’s no change because there’s no actual goal. The characters aren’t really trying to accomplish anything past the particular obstacles of this single episode.

When this happens in a larger story—say a novel or a movie—the storytellers are just dropping in these episodic conflicts because… well, we need conflict, right? So we’ll get a flat tire, spend ten minutes changing it, and then we’re back on the road. Or we’ll get caught in a super-embarrassing, borderline scandalous situation at work that nobody remembers or comments on the next day. Or we’ll find ourselves going out to rescue Wakko againand drag him back home because he just won’t stay put during the zombieapocalypse. These events are there. They fill pages. But they have no repercussions. No lasting effects. They don’t spark any changes in the way anyone thinks or acts.

Y’see Timmy, there’s conflict that advances the plot and conflict that just prolongs the plot. It isn’t there to help develop the characters or their stories, it’s just there to keep us from reaching the end too soon. So people get flat tires. Or wander out of their house during the zombocalypse. Or—no joke—fall off the Great Pyramid of Giza.

And absolutely nothing happens. No one suffer any consequences from these events at all. None.

Now, this isn’t to say nobody can get a flat tire in my manuscript. Flat tires are a real thing that happen to all of us. But I should think about why this flat tire’s happening. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m the all-powerful Creator-of-your-choice in the world of my story. Nothing happens here except by my choice and my will. So why is this flat tire happening? What purpose does it serve in my story? Is it advancing the plot? Giving someone a moment to expand their character arc?

Or is just happening to keep them from getting where they’re going too soon?

Look over some of your story points. Are they advancing your plot? Or are they just stretching it out?

Next time… I had a new idea I wanted to talk to you about.

Until then, go write.

Yes, there’s love in the air this weekend. Well, love and covid. Probably why I forgot to line up a holiday-related post.

Most folks enjoy a good romance because most of us have either been in love, are in love, or want to be in love. It’s a wonderful feeling. Heck those first few months of giddy romance are just fantastic, aren’t they? Love is great because we can relate to it.  We believe in it. For the most part, we enjoy seeing other people in love.

If those three traits sound familiar—relatable, believable, likable—it’s because I’ve mentioned them three or fourteen times as the traits of good characters.  So a good romance can be a powerful tool in a story, because it immediately grounds one or two of my characters.

However…

I’m betting most of us have read a book or watched a movie where, with no warning, two characters start professing their mad love for each other. No preamble, no chemistry, they just suddenly start flirting on page 108 and they’re making long-term plans by 200.

Nobody likes emotional fakery, and few things can weight a story down like a pasted-on love interest. It just feels insincere and artificial. We roll our eyes when it’s in books and laugh when it’s in movies. And probably groan either way.

Anyway, I figure it’s been a while so for this Valentine’s Day let’s revisit my patented** Rules of Love that can help you write a wonderful, believable love story.

**not actually patented

The First Rule of Love –As I was just saying, love needs real emotions, and I can’t have real emotions without real people. And real people, oddly enough, act in realistic ways. Maybe not entirely rational ways, granted, but still believably realistic.

My characters are going to have needs and desires, likes and dislikes.  And it’ll stand out if they make choices that go against those traits. Yes, opposites attract—they even have a lot of fun together—but if we’re talking about real people, odds are these two are going to have more in common than not. Wall Street hedge fund managers don’t usually have a lot in common with mural artists.

Also, how fast and how far my characters take things should be consistent with who they are. They can be confident or nervous, experienced or awkward.  Some people schedule every hour of every day, others don’t own a clock. For some folks it’s a major moment to have that first cautious, fleeting kiss on the third date, and some people are tearing each other’s clothes off in the hall closet half an hour after they meet.

Short and simple version, my characters need to be believable if their love is going to be believable.

The Second Rule of Love  –Show of hands—who’s ever had somebody try to push you into a relationship? Maybe it’s friends or coworkers. Hopefully it’s not relatives, because that’s always kinda… weird. Maybe it’s the person you’re on the date with and they’re talking weddings and kids before you’ve ordered drinks. Which is even more weird.

It might just be me, but I think in all these cases the result is we want to get away from the object of our potential affection. Nobody likes feeling forced into something, and so we don’t enjoy seeing other people forced into things. That’s just human nature.

Now, for the record, “somebody” includes me, the writer. Characters need their own reasons and motivations to get into a relationship. I can’t just have them doing things (or people) for the convenience of the plot. If I’ve based my whole story around the hedge fund manager and the artist coming together to save the art school (and discovering their mutual attraction in the process), then I still need a real reason for them to get together, because they’re real people (as mentioned in the First Rule). 

Again, people get together because they want to get together, not because other folks think they should be together.

The Third Rule of Love – This one also counts as real-world advice. We shouldn’t confuse sex with love. We’re all adults, and I’m willing to bet most of us have had sex with someone we weren’t madly in love with at the time. Or at any time later. There are lots of points in a story where it might be completely acceptable for two people to have sex. Sex is fun. It’s a stress-reliever. It can distract us from thinking about other things for a while. Heck, it can even keep you warm.

But sex doesn’t always lead directly to love. In stories or in the real world. If my two characters fall into bed (or into a back seat, or up against a wall, on a desk, etc), I need to be clear what it means for both of them. Forcing something casual into something serious will just read as forced (refer to the Second Rule).

TL;DR… sex and love are not the same thing.

The Fourth Rule of Love—This one can be hard to grasp because Hollywoodkeeps telling us otherwise.  How often in movies can you immediately spot “the love interest” as soon as they’re introduced? It doesn’t matter what kind of film it is or what’s going on, it’s easy to pick them out the first time they appear.  You may have heard of a certain moment called the “meet-cute,” for example

But y’see, Timmy, the simple truth is…  romance doesn’t always fit in a story. Somebody might be fighting for their life, in hiding, or so terrified they’re an inch away from a heart attack. Maybe they’re already in a relationship with someone else. Maybe they just have no interest in that sort of connection right now—emotional or physical.

Forcing a relationship in these situations also risks making one or both characters seem very unlikable. If I’ve already established one set of relationships, trying to force new ones can create a lot of… complications.

I mean, we’ve all been there. Sometimes… it’s just not going to happen.

So there are the Rules of Love. Now go forth this weekend and spread the love. Where appropriate.  Don’t be that guy. Really, just don’t be that person.

Next time, I promise… Cloverfield. It’s going to be fantastic.

Until then, go write.

Hey, since I’ve been asked about this a few times now…

When I did the A2Q how-to-write-a-novel thing at the start of the year, it was every other week, and then every week, and trying to find those posts now, in reverse order, can make it a bit troublesome. So here’s a master list of more or less the whole thing. Now I can just point folks here, or you can just save the one bookmark. Y’know, if you felt this was bookmark-worthy.

Part One—The Idea

Part Two—The Plot

Part Three—The Characters

Part Four—The Story

Part Five—The Setting

Part Six—The Theme

Part Seven—The Outline

Part Eight—The First Draft

Part Nine—The Editing

Part Ten—The Criticism

Part Eleven—The Revisions

Part Twelve—The End
 
For the record, there were some other posts I slapped the A2Q tag on—the supplemental material, if you will—but I didn’t include them here. They’re useful, but most of them were afterthoughts and they’d feel a little jammed in, I think, if I tried to work them in here where they should be. When I someday bind all this into an ebook, I’ll make sure they’re all incorporated from the start.

Next up, rocks. And right after that, I’d like to do one holiday tradition a little early.

Now go write.