Category: tips

Very sorry I didn’t get to post anything last week. Spent the time trying to hammer out a last few wrinkles in my current project… and hopefully succeeding. Guess we’ll know soon enough.

But enough about me and my problems. Let’s talk about your problems. To be more exact, let’s talk about the people who are causing problems for your characters.

The technical term for this person is the antagonist. He, she, or it is the entity that’s opposing your hero or heroine. Simply put, it’s the bad guy. There are cases where the antagonist is actually the good guy in the story, or at least the more respectable one, but those tend to be much larger, Shakespearean-level stories (well, when they’re done right) than anything most of us are dealing with. There are also cases where the antagonist and the villain are two separate characters (yes, it can happen– look at The Fugitive). So for ease of discussion, I’m just going to be tossing stuff out with the understanding that the antagonist is the bad guy for whatever story we’re working on.

(That title’s another pop-culture reference, by the way, but only the older geeks will get it…)

The bad guy can make or break your story. Whether it’s an enemy general, a high school mean girl, a homicidal sociopath, or even just the overbearing boss at the office, the bad guy has to be just as solid and well developed as your main character. How many books have you read or movies have you seen which failed because the villain was just a two-dimensional caricature tossing out random challenges and “threatening” lines.

So, a few things to keep in mind when crafting your antagonist. Like most things I toss out, they’re not all hard-fast rules, but I think if you look back over some of your favorite books and films, you’ll see that the most memorable bad guys tend to be…

Smart — No one’s saying the bad guy has to have a degree from Oxford, but if you’ve got a gullible character who has trouble opening closet doors and can’t string two thoughts together, it’s going to be tough convincing your audience he or she somehow rose to the position of being a real threat. There’s book smart, street smart, and even just plain old animal instinct. But the reader has to believe your bad guy has a brain in his or her head. Remember, few things are more intimidating than a villain who’s a step ahead of the hero–especially when that puts him or her a few steps ahead of the audience, too. In Die Hard, when Hans Gruber quickly assumes the identity of a cowering hostage, we all think John McClane is smart for asking his name and department… until we realize Hans assumed this would happen and already memorized the office directories.

Motivated — The hero has a believable motivation, and the bad guy should, too. There has to be a reason they’re doing whatever it is they’re doing. Robbing homes, starting wars, humiliating people, killing kids at a summer camp– none of these things are done just for the heck of it. In fact, one of the worst motivations a character can have is “just because,” which is probably the only thing worse that saying “because he’s insane!!” If the writer knows why these acts are happening, it helps flesh out the bad guy and make him or her more than a forgettable cut-out. The men who betray Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo all have different reasons for screwing him over, but every one of them has a solid motive for sending their friend off to prison.

The Good Guy – This one’s definitely not hard/fast, but it’s an important one to consider, especially when you look at the last one. Many of the best villains honestly think they’re doing the right thing, so their motivation is similar to the hero’s (even if their methods are a bit questionable). Magneto in X-Men saw one of his subsets of humanity (the Jews) almost exterminated in World War II, and so he’s determined not to let that happen to the other subset he belongs to (the mutants). The flipside of that is Josef Mengele in The Boys From Brazil, who honestly believes what he’s been doing is the right thing, even though pretty much every historian on the planet would disagree.

Doesn’t act like the bad guy — It’s easy to make someone the obvious bad guy. How many romantic comedies have you seen where the love interest starts off paired up with some who is so obviously not right for them? It’s easy to have the third leg of that romantic triangle be a jerk or a bitch. When the bad guy straddles that gray line, they’re a lot harder to write off. They also tend to be much creepier, because once their true nature is revealed it becomes clear how manipulative this character is. Consider Nazi Colonel Landa in Tarantino’s recent Inglorious Basterds. He’s a pleasant, polite, smiling goof who laughs at every joke…and yet the audience can’t help but be on edge around him because of it, wondering when and if the other shoe’s going to drop.

Calm – again not a hard fast rule, but like I was just saying, the quiet, friendly villain is almost always scarier than the shrieking, raging one. Just like with heroes, someone who’s calm is in complete control of the situation. Part of the eeriness of the original Jason Vorhees was he was slow and quiet. Never rushed, never crazed. Who was really scarier in the original Star Wars— Darth Vader who psychokinetically strangles a guy? Or Grand Moff Tarkin, who blackmails the princess with the life of a whole planet… and then coldly wipes it out anyway after she cooperates? And didn’t Vader jump up a few creepy notches in Empire Strikes Back when he calmly invited the heroes to join him at the dinner table? Heck, consider that when we first meet Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (either the book or the film) he’s meticulously pleasant, doesn’t make one threat, doesn’t raise his voice… and leaves us squirming in our seats.

Limited — When I talked about superpowers a few weeks back, I mentioned that the more believable tales tended to involve characters with limits. An all-powerful antagonist is just as boring as an all-powerful hero. Superiors, vulnerabilities, emotional weaknesses– there has to be something that convinces people from early on that the antagonist can be overcome. Every tyrannical office manager has to answer to a supervisor, who has to answer to a junior executive, who has to answer to a senior executive. Captain Barbossa had a few unlucky gold coins. Randall Flagg is nightmarishly powerful in The Stand, but most of his power stems from people believing he’s nightmarishly powerful. Bad guys need their own swords hanging over their heads.

Finally, one or two things to avoid. First, you don’t want your bad guy to be a dupe. It’s almost always frustrating on some level to get to the end and find out the bad guy has been blackmailed/ brainwashed/ manipulated into the role of the bad guy. If you saw the recent G.I.Joe film, you probably remember how silly and pointless it felt when it was revealed the Baroness was really a good woman who’d been hypnotized by… nanotech… or something. Not saying it’s impossible to make this little twist work, but it has to be played with carefully because it’s one of those elements that bad writers have pushed to the edge and now it’s teetering on cliché.

Also, you probably don’t want your bad guy to have some secret, hidden past ties to your hero. Ever since we found out Darth Vader was Luke’s father (and I would apologize for the spoilers but come on! Where have you been?) it’s been an easy out for writers to drop in this sort of thing as a weak attempt to flesh out characters. Janie and Megan were best friends back in grade school. Dillon and Dutch served in the same military unit. Jake and Mitch used to be in love with the same woman. These sort of reveals seem clever at first glance, but more often than not they’re pointless and have no real bearing on the actual story. If you’ve got some of these ties in your manuscript, try cutting them out and see now much they really affect the story. If you’ve got less than ten lines of rewrites to do after removing them, you probably didn’t need them.

And there you have it. Whether your bad guy is a bionic ninja warlord from the future bent on conquering the Earth or just Britta from fifth period English who wants to be prom queen no matter what, hopefully something in this little rant will strike a chord with you, one way or another.

Next week–and it will be next week, I promise–I’d like to rant a little about your backside. It’s getting a little sizeable, and not in that good way…

Until then, go write. Go! Who’s stopping you?

So, Booboo, this week’s title has two references. One’s pop culture, of course, but the other one hearkens way, way back to an article I read in Writer’s Digest when I was in my first year of college. This was when we were between sessions of the Continental Congress.

This is going to be a bit vague at first, so please forgive me.

The man contributing the article was a writer on a sitcom, and his boss had tossed one of his scripts back at him with the words “You have to earn the right to use the bear suit.” When the baffled writer asked for an explanation, he was told this story. I believe it was a Honeymooners episode in the original telling, but I’m not sure so I’m going to substitute in characters from another sitcom as I tell it to you. Trust me, it won’t make a difference…

So, Yakko, Wakko, and Dot decide they’re going to go camping up in the mountains. But Dot’s been a bit uppity lately so Yakko and Wakko come up with an idea. They get a grizzly bear suit and stash it in the car. When they get up there, Yakko will sneak away and put the costume on, then “attack” the campsite. Wakko will play along, Dot will get a good scare and get her comeuppance. Loads of fun.

Well, they get up to the campsite and Yakko heads into the woods with the costume, but he gets lost and can’t find his way back. Meanwhile, a real grizzly ends up wandering into camp and rummaging around. Dot is petrified and Wakko decides to have some fun with “Yakko” by making it seem like the bear is–

Look, do I really need to explain this any further? You’ve all seen this story at least a hundred times, yes? It was such a well-received gag everybody copied it. And continued to copy it. And they’re still doing it today.

The bear suit is a tired gag. It’s a cliché. It’s something we’ve all seen again and again and again and again, in books, comics, television shows, and movies. The two identical characters that confuse people. The funny new catchphrase or non-sequitor reference. The insane villain. The character who gets amnesia or loses their superpowers. All of these are things people have seen so many times they’ve gone past yawning and just roll their eyes.

Oftentimes, the bear suit is the path of least resistance. It’s the easiest way to deal with a need or problem in the writer’s story and the quickest way to create an obstacle. And a lot of people tend to jump at the first solution they can find, rather than look for the best solution.

And that’s really the problem. Since so many people jump at the bear suit, it’s common. It’s dull. Editors and producers have seen it a hundred times this month alone. If they’re going through your work and they find that dusty old thing laying around, your manuscript instantly goes into the big pile on the left.

Let’s try a little exercise. Here are three pretty standard plot devices.

–Two high schoolers get left alone in their palatial home when their parents go away for a week.

–Six teenagers head off into the woods to restore the old summer camp by the lake.

–A man completely focused on his career has to spend a long weekend with a flighty blonde who loves animals.

You probably got an immediate idea off each one. If your first thoughts were throw a wild party, get picked off by a serial killer, and fall in love, don’t feel too bad. What matters is where you go from there. Toss out that first thought and come up with another one. Then toss that one and come up with a third. Toss it again and scribble down a fourth.

Y’see, Timmy, this is one of those complicated points of writing where it’s hard to give a guideline. Often, when you’re writing, you want to go with your gut. You want your words to be honest and not have a lot of analysis and formulae and overthinking behind them.

At the same time, however, you want to be careful about going with your first thoughts, because odds are they’re a lot of other people’s first thoughts, too. This is also why serious writers have to read a lot, and why serious screenwriters need to see a lot of movies. If you don’t know what’s out there, you might already have the bear suit on and not even know it. Heck, yours may be completely moth-eaten and you think it’s going to scare someone in the woods.

Now, here’s the catch. As I mentioned above, you can earn the right to use the bear suit. If you’ve already got a solid track record, if everything around it is gold (or at least well-polished silver), every now and then you can get away with using the old gag. Christopher Priest used one of the most tired ideas in literature for the ending of The Prestige, but did it so well it still blew people away. Stephen King took the tired idea of the Indian burial ground and then took it past the first or second idea to very creepy and popular third idea.

Again though– that’s the exception, not the rule. If you want to do this writing thing for real, your first decision can’t be to reach for the bear suit.

Next week, I’m finally going to do a Michael Jackson memorial pop culture reference. I would’ve done one sooner but, well… I didn’t care that much.

Oh, and if you’ve got a few dollars to spare, I have been gently jabbed by mine editor to shamelessly remind you all Cthulhu Unbound 2 is now for sale. Check out the Amazon link over there on the side, pick it up, and feel free to mock my contribution to it.

And even if you buy it, shipping means you’ll still have time to go write this week.

So get to it.

Several months back a friend of mine was celebrating her birthday in the usual way (with too much alcohol and far too much karaoke) and I got to catch up with a couple of friends I haven’t seen in ages. Contrary to everything Castle has taught us, most working writers don’t have tons of free time, and as such I’m lucky if I get out socially once every two months or so.

We were batting around random stories about the film industry and one of my friends made a comment about last year’s WGA Strike (you may have heard about it). Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was Laura belting out Cake’s “Short Skirt/ Long Jacket” up on stage, or maybe it was just a poorly-emphasized word. Needless to say, I heard an insult and I snapped back a sharp defense of the writers and the strike.

My friend threw up his hands. “Dude,” said he, “you totally took that the wrong way. That is not what I meant.” Yes, he actually said dude.

I looked back over his chosen words, realized the good-natured joke he’d tried to make, and shamefacedly bought the next round as an apology for verbally leaping at him.

The lesson here is twofold. One, always make sure you can afford to buy a round if you go out with friends. Two, if it’s that easy to misinterpret someone’s words in person, face to face, imagine how easy it is to do on the page.

Getting misunderstood is sort of the core flaw of all bad writing. I thought this character looked smart, you think he looks like an idiot. I consider this bit action-packed, you consider it to be chaotic. I felt like the message was clear, you found it to be a muddled mess. Part of this is an empathy issue, but often it’s just a matter of clumsy writing.

Here are a few easy things to check on in your own work to make sure the reader is thinking the same thing you are. Or at least, what you want them to be thinking…

Spelling – I know, I know. I never give up on the spelling Probably because it’s the most common problem I see. I’m not talking about random typos, but words people have just plain spelled wrong or used incorrectly. Know the difference between plane and plain, their and there, corporeal and corpulent. You don’t want your mad scientist to unleash a deadly plaque upon the world, one that will cause mass history.

Alas, there is only one way to beat this. Shut off your spell-checker, pick up a dictionary, and learn how to spell all these words you’re using. Sorry.

Grammar – The British comedian Benny Hill (best known in the US as that late-night guy with the awe-inspiring Hill’s Angels) had a recurring skit about actors who muddled their lines because of an unpunctuated script. Usually they’d end up delivering such zingers as “What’s that up in the road–a head?” or the beautiful woman who asks her partner “What is this thing called, love?” One of my personal favorites as of late was a dedication that read “This book is for my parents, Ayn Rand and God.”

Commas, capitalization, verb-noun agreement– none of these were made up because editors had nothing better to do one afternoon. They make sure a reader knows precisely what the writer means. Which is why the writer needs to know precisely how to use them. Remember, it doesn’t matter if it makes sense to you. It needs to make sense to an absolute stranger looking at it for the first time.

Common knowledge – One frustrating thing most of us have probably encountered (I know I have) is when a term comes up in a story that the characters all understand but we, the readers, don’t. It could be a joke, a reference, or maybe even a key plot element. Point is, if the reader doesn’t know what the writer’s referring to, it’s just a stumbling block that will knock them out of the story.

If you’re using a term for a certain effect, make sure it’s a term most people know so it can achieve that effect. If I’m told “she’s as mean as a Catachan puffball,” does that mean she’s vicious or is it sarcasm? How many times can my characters refer mysteriously to “Omega” before the reader decides to fold laundry or make lunch? Before you answer, consider this– we’re barely twenty minutes into The Matrix when Morpheus begins to explain the mystery of what the Matrix is.

Sarcasm – We all know sarcasm. As mentioned above, it’s when someone says one thing but means another– sometimes the exact opposite. This can go wrong in real life, so on the page it can be a killer. It can be especially rough in screenplays, which are often so stripped-down that the reader has to make up a lot of the context on their own. If sarcasm is read wrong on the page, it can send the reader down a false path, and once they realize they’re on a false path… well, there’s that large pile on the left.

Be careful using sarcasm too soon in a story. Make sure the reader knows the characters before you risk confusing them.

Language barrier – I mentioned this a while back as a common script problem, but it happens in prose as well. Even when two countries have a shared language, there are colloquial terms that vary. Boot, bonnet, pasties, Macintosh, rubber– all these words mean one thing in the UK and something very different in the US.

Know who your readers are and make sure you’ve adjusted your vocabulary appropriately. Through the wonders of social networks and message boards, most of us know at least one person in another country. If you know someone who’s part of your target audience, ask them to take a look at your writing.

Double meanings – This one’s kind of close to the language barrier. There are a lot of words and phrases that can mean one thing in one context, but something entirely different in another. Which means when there’s not much context, they became dangerously vague. When my boss tells me she’s got an opening that needs to be filled, is she hitting on me or asking if I know anyone who’s not working? What if I see a couple birds twittering in a tree? Are they making noises or social networking? Is that antique ring something wicked (uber cool) or something wicked (pure evil)?

This ties back to vocabulary (which ties back to spelling). A writer has to know what a word means, and also what it could mean. If not, there will be more confusion. And that path leads to pain, suffering, and laundry.

So, there are six quick tips that might help achieve a bit more clarity in your writing. Or at least make sure it’s muddled in all the right places.

Next time I’d like to talk about going from A to B. Or from B to A. You can go both ways, really. We don’t judge here.

Until then, you need to go write. Clearly.

Sorry for the slight delay. Stupid work with their stupid assignments that let me pay my stupid rent…

Anyway…

Speaking of things getting in the way, a common writing term is the obstacle. It’s what stands between your characters and whatever it is they want. While opinions vary on the topic, in my opinion an obstacle is slightly different from a conflict because obstacles tend to be exterior, while it’s very possible for conflicts to be interior. I prefer to use the term challenge, personally. I’ve found that thinking about “obstacles” tends to guide the mind solely onto physical impediments, like parts of an obstacle course. While this isn’t technically wrong, it does tend to result in a lot of the same things.

There are tons of different things people can want, for a number of different reasons. They can want that foreign prisoner back in America. You can want to find the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis do. To get that alien implant out of their skull. Or to tell Phoebe O’Brien from sixth-period English you think she’s the most beautiful person you’ve ever known. These are all solid goals.

Likewise, there are even more things that can be between these characters and their goals.

A few tips on challenges…

A challenge must exist

Yeah, this sounds like a basic one, I know, but it’s surprising how often I see stuff where characters just stroll through a story with minimal effort. Looking for a clue to that mystery? There’s one over there. Need a boyfriend or girlfriend? Not any more. Villain waaayyyyy outclasses you? Good thing they told you about their Achilles heel and then left it open and exposed. This sort of thing shows up in fiction and scripts far, far more than you’d like to believe.

There needs to be some sort of challenge between your characters and their goals. If there isn’t, they would’ve accomplished these goals already. If I want a soda, I go and get one from the fridge– that’s it. Hardly the stuff great stories are made from, because there’s no challenge. If I want to drink my soda from a Faberge egg while Phoebe massages my feet… that’ll require a bit more effort on my part.

A challenge needs a reason to be confronted

If your characters are going to take on a challenge, they need a reason to do it. A real reason. Nobody sneaks or fights their way onto an enemy base just for the heck of it. They’re not here because there wasn’t anything else to do on Thursday night, but because millions of lives depend on the information this prisoner has and the enemy is torturing it out of him. You don’t tell Phoebe she’s beautiful for the heck of it, you tell her because you’ve wanted to for months and never worked up the nerve and now your parents are moving and you’ve only got two weeks of school left to let her know how you feel.

A big trick here is to make sure this reason is really there. It may be obvious in your head why the characters are going to undertake this challenge, but is it that clear on paper? This also holds for less physical things like Phoebe-confrontation, where the audience needs to understand why talking to her is such a big deal for this character.

A challenge has to be daunting

That base has over a hundred armed guards, attack dogs, barbed wire, starlight-scope cameras, and a minefield along the north perimeter. And if you think that sounds rough, Phoebe always has two or three friends with her, which means you’ll have to figure out a way to get her away from them, but they’re still going to know what you’re talking to her about. Characters should never want to deal with a challenge, because let’s be honest– we’d all love it if more things were just handed to us. That enemy agent. The alien brain implant. Phoebe’s heart (emotionally speaking).

Much as a challenge needs to exist, it needs to be something that gives the character (and the audience) pause, or else it isn’t really a challenge. Even John Carter, greatest swordsman on two worlds, would occasionally look at the odds he was facing and say “Oh…crap.”

Well, he was always a bit more eloquent than that, but you get the point.

A challenge cannot be impossible

If you’ve ever watched a boxing match, or any sporting event, you’ve probably noticed they’re evenly matched. NFL teams don’t take on pee-wee football teams. Rarely do you see someone like Vin Diesel beating on a person with a Woody Allen-esque physique. Well, not outside of high school, anyway…

The most boring stories tend to be the ones where the protagonists have no chance whatsoever of meeting the challenge. If you’ve ever watched a horror movie where the killer is merciless, unstoppable, and inescapable… well, that gets pretty dull after the second or third kill, doesn’t it? One of the reasons Jason Voorhees was always terrifying is that he never ran, he just sort of… marched (well, in the original films, anyway). You always had this sense that someone should be able to get away from Jason. Maybe if they could go a little faster…

The other risk to be wary here is if the challenge is completely impossible and your protagonist pulls it off anyway, it can look unbelievable and knock your audience out of the story.

A challenge needs a reason to exist

A combination of the first two points. If you’ve ever seen Galaxy Quest, you probably remember the mashing hallway which–as Sigourney Weaver loudly points out– serves no purpose whatsoever. We can probably all think of a book or movie where, for no reason at all, an obstacle just popped out of nowhere. Or perhaps it was there all along, but you couldn’t figure out why if your life depended on it. That’s false drama, and it just weakens writing.

Challenges have a purpose. They’re characters in their own right, or maybe obstacles other characters have (for one reason or another) set in your protagonist’s way. One of Phoebe’s friends can’t be a queen bitch just because the writer needs a bitchy character to thwart our love struck hero. Why would Phoebe hang around with someone like that? Think about why they’re doing this, and if you don’t have a real reason, stop for a couple minutes and re-think this particular challenge.

A challenge should be unexpected

This one’s not ironclad, but I’d still lean heavily towards it. If your characters are prepared, well-equipped, well-rested, and waiting for conflict, it’s not quite the same as when its sprung on them and they have to make do. It’s really cool to see the guys deal with sneaking onto the base, but it’s even cooler when they get there and what the #&$%!! Are those motion sensors? Why didn’t we know about those? Okay, everyone stay calm, here’s what we’re going to do…

A small bonus of the unexpected challenge is that it often gives your characters a chance to look clever. When they beat the unexpected challenge (even by the skin of their teeth) it makes them all the more likeable.

A challenge needs a resolution

If we see the set up, we have to see it resolved somehow. As Chekhov once said, if we see a phaser on the bridge in act one, we need to see it fire in act three. The squad needs to make it onto that base or die trying or at least they have to decide they can’t make it and that prisoner isn’t worth it. Once we, as writers, present a challenge to the audience it can’t be forgotten or ignored. We can’t spend the first quarter of our story pining for Phoebe and then never, ever address those feelings again.

Next week might be a bit tight again, as I’m heading into deadlines. But if all goes well, I’ll be here on time on Thursday. Don’t get me wrong, I’d much rather be working on this than some of the assignment I have.

Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk about next week. Not getting me wrong.

Until then, get some writing of your own done.