Category: story

            Despite the title, you might like this little rant…

            We talked about characters for a while at the Writers Coffeehouse this past Sunday.  Mostly about my long-standing (but sometimes contentious)  three necessary character traits.  And I figured I’d already threatened all of you with a character post, so we could spin off in a slightly different direction here…
            I can’t have a story without characters, right?  Should be obvious.  Oh, sure, I’ve seen one or two clever pieces that are just elaborate settings with no actual people in them, but I’m going to say 999,999 times out of a million no characters means no plot, no story, no nothing.  They don’t need to be human.  They don’t even need to be alive.  But if my reader doesn’t have someone to focus, I’m going nowhere fast. 

            For all of us, the goal’s to create characters that seem alive on the page.  People a reader can identify with and picture in their mind.  Characters will make or break my writing, which means they deserve attention. 

            A mistake I see again and again and again, however, is writers who give their characters too much attention.  Their writing becomes all about character and not about anything else.  These characters never get off the page because… well, they get buried alive there.

            A couple of good rules-of-thumb.  As always, your mileage may vary, but these seem to be pretty solid and common, in my experience.

            I shouldn’t describe characters in exacting physical detail.  I’ve mentioned this before.  We, the audience, don’t need to know someone’s precise height, weight, waist, inseam, shoe size, cup size, hair color, eye color, or how much of what they shave and how often.  We really don’t need to be told the exact tie pattern he’s wearing, where her skirt hits her thigh, if he likes boxers or briefs, if she likes thongs over bikinis, how many fillings either of them have, the name of her first pet, the state his parents grew up in, how they both did on that third grade geography test, and precisely what they had at the restaurant last night for dinner–including condiments.

            I don’t need any of that in my writing.  I promise.  Because these sort of long descriptions bring things to a grinding halt.  The longer the description, the louder the squeal of brakes. And the harder the crash. 

            When I do this, I’m doing an infodump.  I’m throwing out a pile of information at a time the reader wants action and forward motion (which is—for the record—always).  It’s wonderful to know that, as Phoebe steps out into the street, everyone notices her D & G bag, Yves St.Laurent jacket,  eel-skin boots, platinum wedding band with matching engagement ring (not to mention the size of that rock—three carats, easy), the small St.Christopher’s medallion she wears outside her emerald-green satin blouse, her meticulous eyeliner, and her $300 hairdo that’s starting to sag, giving her one loose strand that hangs loose over her face in a kind of sexy way as she puffs and swipes at it with her free hand.

            You know what’s far, far more interesting than all of that, though?  Why’s Phoebe stepping into the street?  Is it a crosswalk?  Is she getting into a limo?  Throwing herself in front of a bus?  She’s been frozen there in mid-movement while the writer (in this case, me) prattles on about her clothes and hair.  Heck, after all that description, did you even remember she was outside?

            There’s another simple reason to not spend time on physical descriptions, whether I’m writing a novel or a screenplay.  Silly as it sounds… I don’t have much say in what this character looks like.  When we read, we all form our own mental images, and they’re usually pretty different from the ones written out.  An example I’ve mentioned before, from Dan Abnett’s excellent Ravenor books, is the  character of Kara Swole, who I always picture like my friend Penny from college.  Their descriptions don’t really match up (well, they’re both female gymnasts, but that’s about it) yet this is how I picture Kara as I read each chapter.  Something just clicked in my mind and that’s what she looks like.
            But my Kara probably doesn’t look like your Kara.  If you read the books, maybe you picture her more like Melissa Benoist.  Or Zazie Beetz.  Or that cashier at the grocery store you were kinda crushing on.

            So extensive, super-elaborate physical descriptions are probably going to be a waste of everyone’s time.  I should use broad strokes and only fill in details where I really need to.  Pick three or four good descriptive words for the character (not their clothes), and stick with them.  Their dialogue and actions will bring them to life and my readers will fill in the rest. 

            In the novel I’m finishing up right now, one of the main characters is a tall, dark skinned woman with frizzy hair who wears the same uniform/jumpsuit as everyone else.  You’ve got her in mind just off that, don’t you?  Without anything else.  Yeah, a hundred people are going to interpret that description a hundred different ways, but you’ve got a solid image in your head, yes?  Which means I’m now free to go talk about her new Caretaker job on the Moon and how it goes horribly wrong when that meteor hits out at Hades Cemetery and the dead start to rise and hey this is already more interesting than a long list of personal details, isn’t it?

            Now, as far as the mental/ emotional/ historical side of my character goes, if this stuff is important, of course it should be included.  If my romantic lead has lost everyone he’s ever cared about, if my adventurous heroine suffered from asthma as a child, or if a knowledge of rural New England history will be critical to resolving this mystery, then there’s a chance these things need to be in my writing.

            However, there’s a good rule of thumb for all of this stuff, too (so many thumbs).  Is it critical to what’s going on within these pages?   My audience is going to assume if I’m giving all this information, it’s because they need this information.   After my fourth or fifth exhaustive description of a given character’s childhood traumas, college love life, or medical history, my reader’s going to make the natural assumption none of this is going anywhere and start skimming.  First they’ll skim paragraphs, then pages, and then over the bookshelf or television listings to see what else could be filling this time…

            Now, there’s an argument to be made that any event in someone’s past affects their present and every single decision shapes a person’s life to some degree.  As a wise man once said, we are the sum of our memories.  Thus, anything I choose to include is relevant to the story on some level, right? 

            Well… sort of.  A point I’ve tried to hammer home many, many times before—this is not real life.  No one wants to read about a character’s personal or family history that doesn’t have any bearing on what they’re experiencing right now.

            Again, for example…

            When I was five years old I saw my dog, Flip, get hit by a car in Maine.  That same year I got stabbed in the eye with a pair of sewing scissors.  I got my heart horribly broken junior year of college, to the point that several friends thought I might kill myself.   A year after graduating from UMass, I decided to move to California on a whim, quit my job on the spot, and spent two weeks quietly terrified that I’d made the worst decision of my life.

            All formative event that still affects me to this day?  Absolutely. 

            Do they have anything to do with the tips, rules, and suggestions I post here? 

            Not really. 

            But they build character, right?  They all expand the vast tapestry of my life. They tell everyone here a little bit about me and make me more human.

            So what? 

            I’ve got an actual story, don’t I?   I don’t want to waste your time with stuff that has no bearing on the writing advice you’re here for.  If I want to focus on one thread in the tapestry of my life, I should choose one that shows them how my life relates to this.  

            I’ll tell you about how annoyed barely-a-teenager me was when a doctor casually told me that writing wasn’t “a real job.”  I can explain how thrilled high school-senior-me was when I got a personal letter from Tom DeFalco rejecting my Marvel Comics story but including some tips, a Marvel submission guide, and a full copy of one of his Thor scripts for reference.  I can give you the wonderful visual of me in a panicky, cold sweat sitting outside Ron Moore’s office, waiting to pitch a few Deep Space Nine stories I’d come up with.  And maybe I can break the rule of threeand finish it off with the story of financially-desperate megetting an offer to write some bonus material for Audible just when I reallyneeded the money.

            See?  That’s all relevant.  You’re reading that and saying “Wow, this guy’s been serious about writing for a while now, hasn’t he?”

            That’s the kind of stuff I need to put in my writing.  The relevant description and backstory.  The stuff that matters to the story I’m telling.

            And you’ve forgotten my dog’s name, haven’t you?  No, don’t worry about it.  He’ll always be important to me, but I understand why he’s not important to you. Especially in this context.  

            No, really, I do.

            Build fantastic characters.  But don’t build unnecessary stuff. Or, at least, don’t put it in your story.

            Next time… well, I’m on a deadline so you may just get something quick from me.  or maybe a guest post.  We’ll see.

            Until then… go write.

            This title might sound familiar, but I’m going to blab about something a little different this week.

            Also I may be using the words “narrative” or “tale’” a lot this week, just to cut down on confusion.  You’ll see why as I go on.  Trust me, it’s easier this way.

            I’ve talked about plot and story here a few times.  You may remember the idea that plot is what takes place outsidemy character, story is what takes place inside my character.  Plot affects the world while story affects my character.

            I’d like to add to that a bit…

            I was writing up a post a few weeks ago and found myself second-guessing a statement I made. Paraphrasing, I said that everything my character does, the decisions they make, the actions they take, is plot.  And I pondered that for a few minutes, then even discussed it with my special lady-friend. After all, aren’t there decisions that fall under story?  Aren’t their actions that could be considered part of the story?

            Maybe not…

            I think story tends to be a bit more passive than plot.  While plot results from a character’s decisions and actions, story tends to develop from their experiences and observations.  Plot develops from what they’re doing, story develops from what’s done to them.  Story is character development, their arc.

            No one decides to fall in love, or to learn to trust again, or to shift their political views.  There’s no single moment where Ebenezer Scrooge decides to give up his miserly ways and be a better person.  We may come to realize these things have happened, but that’s after the fact.  The change kinda happened on its own as we were exposed to new facts and new situations.  Simple truth is… we rarely change by choice.

             Even if I have a narrative where someone doesmake an active decision to trust again, that usually isn’t their story.  Think of any successful tale where someone makes an active decision to change—the end lesson they learn, their big realization, is almost never about that change.  If I decide to lose fifty pounds, I’ll find out I do have the willpower to do this.  Or that ultimately looks aren’t as important as happiness, and Phoebe’s really shallow for thinking otherwise.  Or that I secretly have pyrokinetic powers which have been activated by the sudden metabolic increase in calorie-burning.

            But a narrative where I decide to lose fifty pounds and then I just lose fifty pounds?  That sounds boring as hell, doesn’t it?

            There’s a good phrase to remember, and I’ve already used it a few times– “…comes to realize…”  If I’m using this, I’m implying something already happened and my character’s kinda getting caught up. A lot of the time, when I’m talking about Phoebe coming to realize she’s hated her job for years or Wakko coming to realize he’s been pursuing the sexy nurse when he’s really in love with Phoebe… that’s a huge part of their arc.  That’s their story.

            Yes, Batman can also come to realize the Riddler’s been behind this all along. That’s a different kind of realization.  Don’t get pedantic on me.

            And it honestly just hit me while I was writing that Batman joke, this might be why so many “story” heavy narratives end up feeling a bit shallow.  To me, anyway.  If I accept that story develops from things happening to my character—that this is where their arc comes from—then how can they have a story without a plot?  If today’s just another day in my characters life where nothing different happens… why would they change?  And any change that did happen to them would feel really unmotivated because…well, there’s no motivation for it. Because there’s no plot.

            So when I’m trying to find that plot-story balance in my work, maybe I should keep this aspect of it in mind.  My character can do things to affect plot… but the plot needs to have an effect on the story, too. Despite the title of this little rant, it’s not really plot vs. story, so much as it is the two of them in this sort of mutually-symbiotic relationship where they feed off each other and grow stronger together.

            Next time… I’d like to talk about horses.

            Until then, go write.

            It’s come up once or thrice that I’m a lover of bad movies.  Partly for the laughing aspect, partly because I think you can learn as much from bad storytelling as you can from good.  Partly because I need to justify my drinking, and some of these movies make it reeeeeally easy.

            A while back I tossed out a list of really basic things a lot of these movies messed up.  Film school 101-level stuff that people were getting wrong.  Even though some of them went to film school.  And I wondered if it might be possible to do something with stories in general.
            Kristi Charish (of the fantastic Kincaid Strange series—book two coming soon) recently mentioned this idea (for a different topic) in a much better way—the invisible handshake.  It’s sort of an unofficial, unspoken contract between the author and the reader. If you’re picking up my book, there are certain automatic assumptions you’re making about what I’ll be providing you with, and I should be meeting these assumptions.  Basic things about plot and structure and character that are just… well, basic.
            At the end of last year I read a book that fumbled that handshake.   Fumbled it bad.  It was like that awkward moment with someone at the end of the night where you’re not sure how to say goodbye, so the two of you make a bunch of half-moves toward different things.  Do we hug?  Shake hands?  Peck on the cheek?  Write an awful book? 

            We’ve all been there, right?

            I ranted a bit about said book on Twitter, but even then I was thinking I should revisit a lot of those issues here.  And while said book was very rant-worthy, I’ve been .trying to keep things a bit more on the positive side here.

            So, a few general things I need to keep in mind when I’m writing.  I’ve mentioned most of them before, but I thought a general, all–at-once

            First, I need to be clear who my main character is.  If I spend the first four chapters of my book with Yakko… everyone’s going to assume Yakko’s the main character.  This book’s clearly about him, right?  So when he vanishes for the next seven chapters… well, people are going to keep wondering when we’re getting back to him.  Because he’s the main character.

            Now, a lot of books have a big cast of characters.  An ensemble, as some might say.  That’s cool.  But if my book’s going to be spending time between a bunch of characters, I need to establish that as soon as possible.  If the first three or four chapters are all the same character, it’s only natural my readers will assume that’s going to be the norm in this book.

            Secondis that I need to keep my point of view consistent.  This kinda goes with the first point—being clear who my main character is.  Even with a third person POV, we’re usually looking over a specific person’s shoulder, so to speak. Which means that character can’t walk away and leave us behind.  Likewise, we can’t start over Wakko’s shoulder and then driiiiiiiiiiiiiift over so we’re suddenly looking over Dot’s.

            Again, it’s cool to switch POV and there’s nothing wrong with it, but I need to make it clear to my readers that I’m doing it. If they start seeing things from new angles or hearing new pronouns, it’s going to knock them out of the story and break the flow.  That’s never a good thing.
            Thirdthing I need to do is be clear who my actual characters are.  Who’s part of the story and who’s just… well, window dressing.  If my two protagonists go out to dinner, there’s going to be other people in the restaurant.  But I shouldn’t describe them all. Or name them all. 

            Names and descriptions are how I tell my reader a character’s going to be important and worth remembering.  Three paragraphs of character details means “Pay attention to this one.”  So if I’m telling the reader to keep track of people for no reason, I’m wasting their time and my word count.

            I want to note a specific way people do this, too.  I’m calling it “describe and die” (trademark 2018).  This is when the author introduces a character, spends five or six pages describing them, their history, their goals, their loves, their life—and then kills them.  We’ve all seen this, yes?  Here’s Yakkoshiro, a twenty-nine year-old salaryman who spends all his free income on Gundam models and always wears long sleeves to the office because he won’t stop wearing his fathers watch, even though nobody wears watches anymore and looking behind the times like that could hurt his chances at a promotion so… long sleeves, never rolled up, even when the air conditioner dies (which happens a lot). And tonight he has a date with the beautiful woman from the Gundam store, who he’s exchanged nervous banter with for months now and, oh, he’s dead.  A kaiju stepped on him.  Now, back to our heroes…

            Don’t do that.

            Fourthis that I need to have an actual plot before I start focusing on subplots.  What’s the big, overall story of my book?  If it’s about Wakko trying to save the family car wash, I should probably get that out to my readers before I start the romance subplot or the backstabbing partner subplot or the Uncle Gus has cancer and wants to travel around the world before he dies subplot.  After all, they picked up my book because the back cover said it was about saving the family car wash or escaping that Egyptian tomb.  I should be working toward that first—meeting those expectations.

            If I’m spending more time on a subplot than the actual plot, maybe I need to revisit what my story’s actually about.

            Fifth, closely related to four, is that my subplots should relate to the main story somehow.  They should loop around, tie back in to the main plot, or at least have similar themes so we see the parallels.  If I can pull out a subplot out of my story and it doesn’t change the main story in the slightest… I probably need to reconsider it.

            And if it’s an unrelated subplot to an unrelated subplot… okay, seriously, I’m wasting pages at that point.  Not to mention this all starts getting, well, distracting.  I don’t want to kill whatever tension I’m building in my main plot by putting it on hold for eight or nine pages while I deal with… well, something completely unrelated.  It’s like switching channels in the middle of a television show. Nobody’s saying what’s on the other channel is bad, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the show we’re trying to watch.

            Sixth…

            Okay, this is an odd one.

            Remember how much fun it is when you meet someone you’re interested in and there’s all these fascinating little mysteries about them?  We want to learn all their tics and hidden secrets.  Where are they from?  What’d they study in school?  What movies do they like?  How’d they develop a taste for that?  Why do they have that accent?  Where’d they get that scar?  Just how big is that tattoo?

            But… we don’t want to learn those secrets from a book report.  We want to hang out with these people, talk over drinks, go on road trips, maybe stay up all night on the phone or on the couch.  It’s how we get to know real people… and it’s how we want to learn about characters, too. Pages and pages of backstory often makes characters less interesting because it leaves me with nothing to reveal about them.  It kills that sense of mystery, because there’s nothing left to learn about them.

            There’s nothing wrong with me having all that backstory, but I don’t need to use it all in book.

            And I definitely don’t need to reveal it all in the first two or three chapters.

            Seventhand last is flashbacks.  Flashbacks are a fantastic narrative device, but they get used wrong a lot.  And when they’re wrong… they’re brutal. A clumsy flashback can kill a story really fast.

            A flashback needs to be advancing the plot.  Or increasing tension. Or giving my readers new information.  In a great story, it’s doing more than one of these things. Maybe even all of them.

            But a flashback that doesn’t do any of these things… that’s not a good flashback.  That’s wrong.  And it’ll bring things to a grinding halt and break the flow.

            Seven basic things to keep in mind while I’m writing my story.

            Now, as always, none of these are hard-fast, absolute rules.  If I hire a pastry chef for my bakery, there’s always a possibility this particular one doesn’t use a whisk.  There can always be an exception.  But I should be striving to be the exception, not just assuming everyone will be okay with me not following all the standards. My readers are going in with certain expectations, and I need to be doing honestly amazing things to go against them.  

            Because if that same pastry chef also doesn’t use a spatula…  Or butter… Or flour…

            Again—the invisible handshake (trademark K. Charish, 2018). 

            It’s a legally binding contract in forty-two states and four Canadian provinces.

            Next time, I’d like to tell you about something that happened off-camera on a TV show I worked on years ago.

            Until then, go write   

            Just want to thank you all for your patience while I was off at (and recovering from) SDCC.

            Now, back to our usual rants about storytelling…

            I’ve mentioned once or thrice before that I like watching (and commenting on) bad movies.  Sometimes I find a hidden gem.  Most of the time, though, they’re just fodder for these little rants. Much like when I used to read scripts for screenplay contests, if I watch three or four bad movies in a row I almost always find some common flaws and teachable moments.

            So I saw a Dracula movie recently… 

            He’s arguably the most commonly-filmed fictional character on Earth.  It’s not that big a surprise I stumbled across one.  Actually, it was a three-Dracula geekery day, if memory serves.

            Anyway, this one was set back in the 16th Century and went the ancient-noble-prince route.  It’s a not-uncommon take on the character (Fred Saberhagen wrote a whole series that used it). Dracula used his supernatural powers to protect Transylvania and had this whole warrior code and all that.  And I’m kind of guessing 16th century.  Vlad Tepes lived in the 15th, but these people were actually dressed in a more medieval-fantasy style.

            Except… we also had this huge biblical subplot, where vampires are all descended from Cain and can only be truly killed by descendants of Abel.  Which, I mean, I’ve heard stories that tied vampires to the bible before.  So it wasn’t really an outlandish, crazy thing.

            Except… we also had the romance.  You know the one.  Mina is a near double/reincarnation of Dracula’s long-dead princess.  Long scenes of wistful staring and passionate confusion ensue.

            Man, that’s kind of a lot for a ninety-odd minute movie, isn’t it?

            I think one or two Saturday geekeries later I ended up watching this twisty-turvything about dead children and stalkers and swapped identities and second marriages with creepy undertones.  That could all balance out kinda cool, right?  But there was also this whole parallel plot about guardian angels and angel sex (no, seriously) and sin and redemption.  And the plots didn’t so much as dovetail together as butt heads for a while and then have a high-speed impact (which also involved some fatalities…)

            What’s my point here?  Well, I have two, believe it or not.  They’re kinda related, but still—bonus tips for you.

            I’ve talked about this problem a few times before—where a plot or story is just overpacked with ideas.  And what tends to happen is the plot will overwhelm the story, the story will smother the plot, or sometimes they’ll just collapse into this mess of well… random plot and story points.

            This is a really tough idea for new writers to grasp, because it feels counterintuitive to everything we’ve been led to believe as storytellers. If the idea’s good, how can it be wrong for a story?  Thing is, sometimes a really good idea just doesn’t work in the story I’m telling.  If it’s not driving the plot or motivating the characters, if it’s pulling us too far off course or just filling space that could be used for something else… it probably doesn’t belong there. 

            I got to interview Kevin Smith a few years back, and we talked for a few minutes about his legendary hatred of ad-libs. He was quick to point out that he didn’t hatead-libs. His problem was that ad-libs rarely fit into the final story. Sure, they might be hysterically funny at the moment while filming on set, but then you’d get to the editing room. Now they had to fit in with the tone and pacing of the overall movie.  And more often than not… they didn’t.  It’s not that they weren’t funny or clever, they just didn’t fit. And then Smith even made a point of praising his then-leading man, Seth Rogen, for the ability to fire off lots of funny lines that were, as he put it “very germane to the discussion.”

            Y’see, Timmy, when we come up with these really cool ideas for a new take on werewolves, some really hot and sexy dialogue, or an incredibly cool way to describe the feeling of a knife piercing the flesh… well, we want to use them.  That’s our job, after all.  To take cool ideas and make cool stories out of them.  But sometimes—a lot of the time—our job is really knowing when to take the cool ideas out.  It’s being able to cut away the excess, to figure out what our story’s about and what parts are just wasting time and space.

            Which brings us to my second clever point…

            There’s a general idea  I see crop up a lot that stories can be any length.  Any length at all.  I can make the story whatever it needs to be—fifty pages long to five hundred pages long.

            And while, in a general sense, there’s some truth to this, the stark reality is that there are a lot of limits on how long a story can be.

            Look at screenwriting. We all acknowledge that movies are generally ninety minutes to a little over two hours.  It’s just how it is.  When a movie’s only seventy-plus minutes… we feel kinda cheated.  It can be really good, but almost always there’s a response of “That’s it?  Only seventy-one minutes?”  Likewise, when a film stretches out over two and a half hours, it usually feels pretty excessive.  There are a few really great just-shy-of-three-hour movies, but there are a lot of really bloated, desperately-in-need-of-editing ones.  So if my screenplay doesn’t fall in the 90-130 page range… I might get some folks to look at it, but not many professionals are going to take me seriously.

            And if I’m publishing… well, paper costs money.  And shelf space in book stores is precious.  Most publishers don’t want to see a massive, beef-slab of a book unless they know they’re going to sell a lot of copies of it.

            Ahhh, I say, well I’ll just publish it myself, then nobody can turn it down for financial reasons.  True, but a lot of the POD sources still work off page length to calculate costs, and they’ve got much more hard ranges. Just a few pages this way or that can mean a price jump of three or four dollars per copy. And somebody’s got to eat that cost.  It’s not going to be them, so it’s either me or my readers.  This is why I had to cut almost 30,000 words out of my book 14 –the small publisher couldn’t afford to have it stretch into the next page-range.

            Heck, even if I just give up on print altogether and go with epublishing only—check the numbers. Shorter books do better as ebooks, especially from self publishers.  The vast number of folks who’ve had any degree of success with ebooks are doing it with books under 100,000 words.  I think many of them are under 70,000. The “why” of this is a whole ‘nother discussion we could debate for a while, but for now we just need the simple numbers. Ebooks tend to do better as shorter books.
            Y’see, Timmy (yep, a double Y’see Timmy—haven’t had one of those in a while) what all this adds up to is limited space.  Those pages are precious.  My words are precious. I don’t want to waste them on irrelevant things.  I want them to be moving things along for the plot and for my characters.  I want the ideas to work for the story, not to be flexing and contorting my story to accommodate some ideas.

            A while back a friend of mine was working on a Frankenstein-esque story, and he had this super-cool idea for a detail about the monster’s origins.  And it really was a cool idea.  Thing is… his story was all structured around the idea that we never really learn much about where the monster came from or how it was built.  That was part of the mystery.  There wasn’t anywhere to use this idea, but he was soooo determined.  Even when it made no logical sense for this detail to be revealed, he kept trying to force it into different chapters. Because it was too cool an idea not to use… even though the rest of his story was suffering because of it.
            You may have heard that old chestnut—kill your darlings. This is kinda like that.  I may have the coolest line of dialogue, the neatest way to explain something, or the most fantastic description of a giant robot ever, but if it doesn’t work in my story…

            And if it doesn’t work—if it’s not adding to my story—then it shouldn’t be there.

            Next time, unless someone has some other ideas, I was going to toss out a few quick little tips about genre and devices.

            Until then… go write.