Category: structure

Hahahhaaa… okay, so I had this post that I’d been working on for a while, but I never got it quite right and I kept pushing it back and pushing it back. And it just posted because, jeeez, mid-November? I won’t have to worry about that for a while.

Time is funny. Anyway… what I wanted to talk to you about.

A little earlier this year, I set down a book without finishing it. Might not sound big to you, but it’s big for me. It’s really rare for me to pick a book up and not finish it.  Don’t think it’s happened in over a year, easy, and I read around forty or fifty books a year, on average.

One of the big reasons I put it down is… well, to be honest, I’ve got no idea what’s going on. I’m more than halfway through and the plot in the book bears no resemblance to the one described on the back of the book.  Or anything  else really. When I set it down the other night, I described it to my partner as “watching a crime scene investigation where I don’t know who any of the people are, what their jobs are, what crime was committed, or what sort of legal system this is.”  There were things happening, but I had no idea what any of it meant or implied. It was just… stuff happening

Okay, I’m lying, I did finish the book. I have a problem,okay? I went back and read the last 117 pages and it went… I mean, pretty much just like I thought. We finally had the big reveal (which was the story described on the back of the book) and then had a minor twist to add a tiny bit more flavor.

Anyway, I thought it might be worth addressing this—the book’s problem, not my own compulsive need to consume bad things—because it’s something I’ve seen before. It’s an unusual issue because it’s a story problem I can only fully identify in retrospect.

So, quick recap on reveals and twists. I’ve talked about them here before a few times, so I don’t think we need more than that. I want to get to the heart of this particular issue.

The reveal is pretty much the standard way we get information across to our readers. New facts are presented to them, and depending on exactly what it is and what kind of ramifications it could have, these facts can have different levels of impact. We might just nod and accept it, or maybe it’ll have a ton of weight and impact.

A twist is a very specific type of reveal. Again, talked about them at length before, but the short form is that twists are information that the characters and the reader didn’t know was out there, and (importantly) this information forces us to look at a lot of previous facts in a new light. It’s also worth noting that twists almost always come later in my story because I need to establish those facts that need twisting. Make sense?

It’s the “later in the story” aspect of this I wanted to talk about. The issue I’ve been seeing is that a story will have a later twist, but it doesn’t establish any of the things its (hypothetically) twisting. I just tell you “Yakko is a redhead!” and expect that to have some kind of emotional or narrative weight. These stories try to tell us X is the reallyimportant thing, but they’d never really gone out of their way to convince anything else was important.

This is even worse in longer-form stories like novels or movies. We essentially go through two thirds or more of the story to get to “the good stuff,” but there’s nothing supporting it. There’s just been a lot of stalling and not talking about things until we get to that point.

Like… okay, imagine an old Twilight Zone episode where we see a spaceship land on a planet and they get out, wander around, and then maybe find a sign that basically says “hey, losers, you’ve been on Earth this whole time.” You know this episode, right? Is it even an actual episode? You know this archetypal story, right?

But here’s the thing—these stories have a lot more than that. They have assumptions and discussions about which planet this is and what did or didn’t happen here. Maybe even about who the astronauts are. We need to have strong reason to think this isn’t Earth for that twist to have any impact. Make sense? Up until that reveal everyone should be acting like it’s an alien world. Yeah, we’re going to find out the thing scratching at the door’s  just a beagle. But for now, before we get to that reveal… it’s a hideous alien monster. No, it can’t really hurt my characters, but they don’t know that. And they need to act accordingly.

I think a lot of this tends to come down to… well, not having an actual story. There’s nothing going on except that big reveal, so all my characters just sort of stand around twiddling their thumbs until we get to it. I’ve been so focused on what happens after the reveal that I haven’t considered what everyone’s supposed to be thinking or doingbefore that moment.

Just to be clear—I’m not saying mid-book twists aren’t cool. They’re super-cool.  They’re fantastic and I love ‘em. But y’see Timmy, there has to be a story before we get there.  Even if it’s all a bunch of misconceptions or faulty beliefs—my characters have to be doing something somewhat motivated in a world we can at least vaguely understand.

Have you read (or maybe seen) Wayward Pines? It was a fun series by Blake Crouch that became a pretty good television series. And it had a pretty solid twist quite a ways into it. A really perfect, made-you-reconsider-everything twist. But the main character, Ethan, is still doing stuff before then. He makes his own assessments of the small town he finds himself in, based off all the information he has, and he acts. He does things. Ethan treats the world he’s in like… well, the world he’s in, and not just a glorified waiting room until the “real” story begins.

I can have the cool twist. I can have a great reveal. But these things don’t stand alone. They need to be carefully woven into my story. There needs to be elements supporting them and guiding my readers to them.

Because nobody wants to read about a bunch of people standing around waiting for the big reveal.

Next time… well, we haven’t talked about how stupid I am for a while now.

Until then, go write.

Just a few quick thoughts this week. Well, not super-quick. It’s a simple idea, but it might take a bit to explain.

As some of you may know, I have a habit of watching B-movies on the weekend, and often tweet out my thoughts and critiques of them while I build up my armies of little toy soldiers. I recently had a brief epiphany about a common problem they have, and it’s a problem I’ve also seen in books, comics… really, in pretty much every form of storytelling.  And it kinda grows off something I’ve talked about before.

A common problem in B-movies (but as I said, it shows up in all story formats) is trying to figure out who I’m supposed to be rooting for. The story gives us protagonists who are dull, completely unrelatable, offensive, or just plain annoying. Heck, sometimes it’s not an “or” situation but an “and”—the storytellers double down on just how bad a lead character that can have, on several levels.

And I find myself wondering how this happened. How did the storytellers settle on that person as their protagonist?  They don’t hit any of the benchmarks of being a hero—either in the protagonist or heroic sense. They’re not even a good character in a general sense. So why are we spending all our time with them?

Which is, I realized, the key problem.

When we end up with protagonists like this, it’s the storytellers falling back to default mode. We’re not making any changes or adjustments of our own, we’re just going to pick up the story and run with it as-is.  It’s factory-settings storytelling, so to speak.

For example, our protagonist should be the character we spend the most time with, right? Well, we’re spending the most time with, uhhhhh, that guy. So he must be our protagonist, right? Yeah, definitely our hero. I mean, there’ve been six chapters about him so far.

But there’s more to someone being my protagonist than just awkwardly being the center of attention. They have to be an active part of the story. Really, they need to be the active part, because if I’m focusing on them it’s their story.  And, seriously, why would I focus on them if there was another character doing more to drive the plot forward? If somebody else is doing more, it’s probably their story and I should really be focused on them.

And even that’s just the nuts and bolts structural stuff. There’s still all those stories where it’s assumed just because Wakko is our hero-by-default that everything he does is automatically, well, heroic. Every line of dialogue he speaks and every action he takes must be good because its the hero speaking/taking them. That’s the very definition of the hero, right—what they do is flawless and heroic!

But again… there’s more to it than that. To be a good hero, someone needs to be a good character. Sure, they can have some flaws, but they should have some strengths, too. As A. Lee Martinez once pointed out, there’s more to be being a good person than just not being a bad person. In the same way, there’s more to being the hero than just not being the person in the background.

Y’see Timmy, the default settings can work, but there’s nothing special about them. In fact, they’re usually not that great. Adequate at best.

And we all want to be better than adequate, right?

And it’s time to slit their throat. Or watch them die from an awful disease. Maybe even have a zombie horde devour them.

Killing characters in a story is a delicate thing.  I don’t mean this in some artsy, poetic way.  I mean it more in a “stitch up that major artery up before he bleeds out” way. It’s something that has to be done just right for it to work. And just like stitching up an artery, if I’m only going to do a quick, half-assed job with it… I mean, why even bother?

Here’s a couple of loose guidelines for killing someone…

First off, if I’m going to kill a character… well, I need a character, right?  A real character.  I can’t expect there to be a lot of emotional impact from the death of a paper-thin stereotype.  I mean, killing paper-thin stereotypes is cool if I just want to drive a body count, but it’s not going to drive a plot and it’s not going to motivate anyone on a personal level.  It’s not going to affect the reader, either.  I can’t create Phoebe on page fifty, kill her on page fifty-one, and think it’s going to have any emotional weight—with the other characters or my readers.

Second, this death needs to drive my  plot forward.  That’s what good story elements do, right?  They keep the narrative moving—not necessarily upward or into positive place, but forward.  Killing a character who’s well-developed but has no connection at all to the plot doesn’t really do anything.

We’ve probably all seen storytellers who create unconnected charactersjust to kill them off a few pages later.  The plot’s heading into act two and we pause to meet Phoebe.  She’s thirty-three, blond, likes to wear combat boots with everything from jeans to her little black dress to her bikini on the way to the beach.  She’s been seeing a great guy for a couple of months now and she really think there’s a good chance she’s going to get a promotion (and a raise) at her job with OH, she’s dead.  The zombies got her.  Now let’s go back to the plot for a few chapters before I take a moment to introduce you to Wakko.  He’s a college dropout who went to work for the park service.  He’s also been seeing a great guy for a couple of months now (not the same one as Phoebe) and he’s been thinking it may be time to give him a key so they OH, the zombies got Wakko, too.

This kind of thing works once.  Maybe twice.  But it gets old fast because we all understand these people, as columnist Rob Bricken once put it, are just collateral damage. The characters don’t really do much and their deaths don’t actually accomplish anything in the story. They’re just narrative window dressing to make things look more serious instead of… y’know, actually making things more serious.

If I’m going to kill a character and have it mean something, it needs to have an actual affect on my story.  It should up the stakes, or be a new challenge for my characters as far as succeeding at one of their goals. If the big goal is to distribute the zombie cure that Dr. Carmichael designed, and we’re just waiting for her to arrive because she’s the only one who knows the formula, well suddenly it’s a big “oh CRAP” moment when we realize she’s Dr. Phoebe Carmichael who wears combat boots with everything. What are we going to do now??

Now, this leads into a Second-Point-One or maybe a little outline sub-A. It’s a very specific version of this we all want to watch out for. You may have heard of fridging. On the off chance you haven’t, it comes from an awful Green Lantern comic twenty-five years back where GL’s girlfriend was killed and stuffed in a refrigerator for him to find later. When we talk about someone getting fridged, it’s usually a woman, often a less-developed supporting character, who suffer a violent, horrific, and sometimes abusive end for no purpose except to be an inciting incident for the hero.  And maybe to let said hero get in some grief-filled, character-building monologues. Her death is all about him.

Don’t freak out. Not every female death is automatically a fridging. But it’s a good term to know and keep in mind if I’m going to fall back on the whole describe-and-die device, because it can slip into fridging very easily.

Third is that this death needs to fit in my story structurally.  I’ve mentioned before, the dramatic structure of a story needs to be a series of ups and downs.  There need to be slowly increasing challenges, which require greater efforts for my characters to overcome, and help build tension.  If I’m going to kill someone off, their death needs to fit within this general structure.

To go back to the example I just gave, if Phoebe’s the only one who knows the formula for the zombie cure, this could be horrible. In a good way. I’ve just dropped a huge, last-minute challenge between my characters and saving the day.

But if we got Phoebe to the bio-lab on page fifteen and the zombies pounced on page sixteen… that’s not going to come across as much of a challenge. We’ve got the whole book to figure it out, after all.  It’s definitely not going to have the same impact as her dying on page 300, because tension rises as my story progresses. I need to think about how much impact I want this death to have and where that means it needs to happen in my plot. Which is going to affect how I structure things. And why, yes, it is a juggling act, thanks for noticing.

Now, all of that being said…

Some writers claim killing characters is no big deal.  They almost brag about randomly ending lives in their stories. These folks have no qualms about killing characters because it tells their readers that nobody’s safe! Anything could happen! This is how real life works, which means it’s how art works!

I personally find this to be a really counterproductive and stupid approach. 

For a couple of reasons.

One is that we’re not talking about real life, we’re talking about fiction. Real life is chaotic and structureless and, yeah, people often die for no reasons at extremely inconvenient times. But in the stories I’m writing… I’m God. Every single thing that happens in my story is my choice.  My decision.  It’s part of my divine plan.  And if it isn’t part of my divine plan… well, why’s it in my story?

Which brings me to point two.  I just mentioned the juggling act a minute ago. If my characters are dying at random, that means their death isn’t advance any element of the story, which means my story doesn’t have any sort of dramatic structure to it. I mean, how can it have a structure if I’m just doing things randomly?

Plus, if I’m ninety pages in and Phoebe, my main character, is randomly tackled by zombies and maybe joins the hungry dead… well, what happens now?  Seriously. Did the story just end? Is Dot the main character now? If Dot’s the main character for pages 90 through 445… well, why did I spend those first ninety pages with Phoebe? Maybe I should’ve just started with Dot?

And that’s my third point.  Odds are a random, unstructured death just means failure.  One way or another, Phoebe’s blown it big time—even if it’s not her fault.  She died with her boots on but failed to reach her goals (she had goals because she was a real character, right…). Which means my readers just spent a hundred pages investing in someone who didn’t win.  On any level.  We’ve been identifying with a loser with crap luck (she must have crap luck—she just got randomly killed by zombies, right?). 

I don’t know about any of you, but that isn’t going to make me happy.

A good death (if there is such a thing) is going to have real characters. Their death is going to help drive the plot and create challenges.  And it’s going to happen at a point in the narrative that makes structural sense.  If I’ve got two out of three of those, I’m probably in good shape.  One out of three… maybe not so much.

And if I honestly don’t know if I’ve hit two or three of those points… well, maybe I should hold off on setting those zombies loose.

Next time, I’d like to talk about the next book.

Until then, go write.

This shot is an over.

If you watch a lot of movies, too, you may have noticed most scenes break down into a pretty standard group of shots. Masters, overs, and coverage is what they’re called. Masters are those big wide shots where we see everything and get a sense of where everybody’s standing. Overs are that shot where we’re looking at one character, but another is still prominent in the foreground, like we’re seeing over their shoulder (get it?). Coverage is the close shot, just somebody’s head and shoulders—or maybe even tighter—as they speak or react to things.

And there’s a reason these shots are so popular and common. Masters help establish the scene and the dynamics between characters. Overs help us see the connection between them.  And coverage lets us get close and feel the reactions and emotion.

This isn’t to say things won’t go another way, of course. There are always exceptions, and I think it’s fair to say most great writing is built on exceptions. Some people bend the rules or break the rules or set the rules on fire with a flamethrower-armed drone and then launch those rules into a volcano.