Category: zombies

October 28, 2019 / 1 Comment

Zombie Love

Hey, look! It’s even more bonus content! What the hell? This is turning into one of those blogs where there are semi-regular posts.

Hahahaa no it’s not. I’m just going to be really busy in November (for a couple of reasons) so I wanted to give you some extra stuff now while I had time. Plus, hey, it’s Halloween and I can always blather on about this sort of stuff a bit more. So everybody wins.

As a lot of you know, I worked on film crews for a lot of years, and then I wrote about filmmaking for another five or six years after that (there was a bit of overlap). This meant I got to interview a lot of screenwriters and writer-directors about their different projects, and some of them leaned into the spirit of this particular holiday season. And I still had some more of those sitting around so I figured, hey, why not share another one.

Some of you may be familiar with Fido, a wonderfully heartwarming (no, seriously) zombie story about a boy and his… well, pet zombie. It was also a nearly fifteen year labor of love for Andrew Currie, Robert Chomiak , and Dennis Heaton, taking them from film school to Lionsgate Pictures, where the movie finally came to be with a very impressive cast. I got to speak with Andrew back then, and we talked a lot about his creative process and how the story evolved going from an elaborate novella to a screenplay to a finished movie.

A few of my standard points before we dive in. I’m in bold, asking the questions. Please keep in mind a lot of these aren’t the exact, word-for-word questions I asked (which tended to be a bit more organic and conversational), so if the answer seems a bit off, don’t stress out over it. Any links are entirely mine and aren’t meant to imply Andrew’s specifically endorsing any of the ideas I’ve brought up here on the ranty blog—it’s just me linking from something he said to something similar that I’ve said.

By the nature of this discussion, there are going to be a few small spoilers in here, though not many. Check out the movie if you haven’t seen it yet. It really is wonderful. I mean, it’s a feel-good zombie movie about families. What more could you want?

Material from this interview was originally used for an article that appeared in the CS Weekly online newsletter.

What got you into filmmaking and screenwriting?

I guess just, from a really young age, being a fan of movies. I remember I was six years old and my dad took me to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the theatre. And I still remember just being completely blown away by the movie—obviously not understanding it, but the visceral impact of the images. And really being a life long film buff, a film geek I guess you’d say, staying up late watching horror filmsonce everyone else went to bed. The standard path (laughs).

You’ve written a lot of the stuff you’ve directed. Do you think of yourself as a writer or director more?

I think of myself as a writer-director. I generally write on most of the things I direct. I certainly have directed stuff I didn’t write. I just find that, to me, there’s that idea that there are three films; there’s the film that you write, there’s the film that you shoot, and there’s the film you complete in post-production. Those three phases to me are so fluid that they tend to all become one. The writing process for me is directing on the page quite a bit. I guess I find that being involved in the writing is fairly critical.

D’you think you’d ever write a screenplay without wanting to direct it?

Oh, I’d love to. (laughs) But God knows who would want to direct it.

Yeah, I’m not the fastest writer, and that’s another wonderful thing about collaborating. What’s exciting for me about film is that it’s collaborative, it’s bouncing ideas off other creative people. When we wrote Fido–Robert, Dennis, and I–we spent a lot of time in the story room together just bouncing around ideas. I think often that’s the most fulfilling way of working, because you become so much more inspired by working with collaborators.

You’ve worked with Robert a few times, yes?

Yeah, Robert and I have co-written a couple things. He’s wonderful, and he’s got that combination of having a wonderfully bizarre take on the world but also being a very pragmatic writer as well. He’s great.

Now, Fido was originally a short story by Dennis, yes?

Well, Dennis had written this… it was somewhere between a short story and a script. It was seventy or eighty pages, it was pretty long. It was about a little boy in a small town who had a pet zombie. The boy just fed him raw meat so he wouldn’t eat people. We all went to Simon Fraser Universitytogether for film school. Dennis and Robert did two years of the program, and I went for the whole four years, and when I graduated we all decided we wanted to write something together. It was one of those things where everyone brings five ideas to the table, and Dennis brought Fido. We just all immediately got excited by it and the potential for it. We actually wrote the first draft really quickly. A lot of the basics came really quick, but it really was nothing more than a world with zombies and Leave It To Beaver, cardboard cut-out characters. There was a lot of fun, but we also didn’t have much to say about the world.

That was back in 1994. We went off and did other projects, and I took the script out to the Canadian Film Centerin 1996 and worked on it out there, and then came back. We started working on it again in 2001, and by then we had all developed more as writers. We approached it much more from theme and character, and it made such a difference. The world became much more complex. And then September 11th happened and that started to affect the story in a political way as well. It just started getting layers that were really exciting for me as the director. You’re telling this absurdist comedy and you’ve got these other layers that you’re putting in, and whether people get them or not became an interesting debate for us. You can lay something in, but if it’s too subtle it just flashes past people.

You mentioned 9/11. There’s a lot of underlying paranoia and a very us-vs-them mood, even past the usual zombie movie standards. How much of that was very deliberate?

Oh, it was very specifically an allegory, but it’s quite subtle. You know, for example, in the beginning of the film Mr. Bottoms comes into the classroom and he tells the kids that he’s building the fences higher and there’s going to be security vans on every corner and he’s going to take everyone’s picture “just in case they get lost.” And that was very much referencing Homeland Security. What was really exciting was when we started thinking about the film in that way, it really started to affect the characters, namely Bill, the father. The idea of ZomCom– which is sort of the government and a corporation as an amalgamation– pushing fear within a community as a means of control, which happens (pause) in many, many places in the world. And Bill ended up becoming the embodiment of fear. He’s terrified of zombies and his goal in life, really, is to die and not have to come back, and he’s got this slightly absurd childhood trauma of having to shoot his father when his father turned. And the central irony of the whole movie, for me anyway, is that Fido is this dead creature who comes into the family and is more emotionally engaged in the world than the father.

So the allegory was certainly intentional. What we really wanted to do was, on the surface, just have fun and play with the idea of Lassie and the “boy and his dog” story, but then on the deeper level have that political resonance and then in terms of the characters, tying to that. Really, the theme we were writing from was “love, not fear, makes you alive.” Bill is the embodiment of fear and Fido is the embodiment of love. He brings this relationship into the family and becomes a catalyst for change within the family.

You did a short about a zombie, Night of the Living, a few years back, yes? Are you a fan of zombie movies?

Yeah. I saw a zombie movie, I don’t even know what it was, when I was really little. I remember being really traumatized by it. In a good way (laughs). Y’know, there are so many damned zombie movies out there, it’s a bit of a drag. When we started Fido in ’94 there weren’t that many around. Now I have to read some critic going “they’re just taking the end of Shaun of the Dead and turning it into a movie.” Which is really painful when we wrote it fourteen years ago.

For me, they make such great metaphors. I think what’s interesting about zombies is that they are so close to us. They are human in a way, and they tap into some primal fears in a really visceral way. The idea of death and dying and mortality and disease, they embody all of those things. A lot of monsters and creatures in horror are of the supernatural variety or completely inhuman, so they’re not as close to us in that respect. So zombies have a greater sense of dread about them.

There’s a lot of baggage that comes with the word zombie. Did it make it tough to sell people on this story?

It did. What was great about it was getting Lionsgate and having such big fans. They read the script and said they loved it, and let’s shoot it as it is. They were completely behind it. There were other distributors and there were concerns about the script. Those concerns were mainly “what is it?” Is it a family film, a horror film, a zombie movie? The majority of the people, and very happily all of the actors, got what the world was and the depth of it and the fact that it had this satirical throughline. But certainly for a percentage of people there was this sense of, how is that mishmash of genres going to work.

There’s a few things that it seems somebody would’ve started pointing at (the killings, Mr. Theopolis, schoolkids with guns, etc). Did you get a lot of notes from the producers or the studio about the script?

No, that was the great thing. I don’t think I got a single note. Everyone who was in on the film, Lionsgate, they were really big supporters. It was almost odd that people were just so supportive. I mean, I’d just made one feature before this called Mile Zero, which is a very character-driven drama, completely unlike Fido.

Did the R rating come as a shock to you?

Absolutely. I was quite disappointed with the MPAA and I had many conversations with them. I went into the editing room and we tried different things. In the end, what they needed to make it PG-13 just undermined the film in a way that just wasn’t something we wanted or Lionsgate wanted. So we decided we had to stay with an R. The thing about the MPAA is that they really got the humor and they said they were real fans of the movie. I think because children and the elderly get consumed in the movie, I started wondering if there was a moral compass at play. There’s so little violence, I was really surprised with them being so hard on it, especially in light of so many other films that are PG-13.

Was doing the script as a group, the three of you, was it very different, process-wise, than if you’d just sat down and done it on your own?

The process for Fidowas so unique in the sense that it went on for so many years. When I was out at the Film Center I was working on it for about a year on my own, and then I’d come back and we’d all work on it. It became a really dragged out process, and we got to a certain point, which was about a year and a half before shooting, where the three of us just did everything we could do and it was time for me to take it and start moving it towards production. So Dennis and Robert stepped off at that point. Screenplays can certainly exist just as screenplays, but there’s a point when they have to move towards the reality of being made and things change. Dennis and Robert were wonderful about it– I don’t want to sound like I’m insulting them. They stepped away and then I worked on it, finessing certain things, and moving it towards production in terms of the reality of creating the world and making it happen.

Do you have any solid habits or methods when you write?

I really believe in the outline. I always work from a beat sheet. In terms of the scene by scene, I just find it’s such a wonderful focusing tool for me. The way I write is probably quite a bit with the directing hat on, maybe more so than I should. I tend to imagine the scene, and then re-imagine it and flip it over and over in my head until it clicks and then put it down on paper. Even when I direct I work from a beat sheet, in the sense of what the real intent of the scene is and the character beats and the key moments. I think it’s important to keep those clear and present.

How is it for you when actors start asking for changes? Either actual rewrites of scenes or just adlibs on set?

I like and encourage improvisation at times, but the truth is sometimes if you allow improv just to start happening in an escalating way, what you can end up with is something that’s not nearly as coherent a story as it should be. I really believe in getting a script to the place where it really works and then having faith in that structure. Story structure works. Character arcs work. When they’re well written they really do fulfill the promise of the script. A lot of times actors will bring wonderful moments and wonderful bits into the process, and I completely support that, and love that, as long as the arc and the integrity of the structure is being honored.

August 20, 2019

Craig DiLouie’s OUR WAR

So, hey, random bonus interview!

Well, not exactly random. Tuesday is the day new books come out and one of them’s from my good buddy Craig DiLouie, who I crawled up out of the zombie trenches with many years back. We ended up seated next to each other at our first convention as writers (well, it was mine—not sure it was Craig’s and now it’s too late to ask for this), and we sat next to each other many, many times after that. At one point we had a combined sales pitch where we could talk about each other’s books to people.

Anyway, he and I were shooting messages back and forth last week, talking about publicity and visibility and authors helping authors. At some point during the back and forth it struck me we could just do it ourselves. I mean, I used to interview complete strangers for a living… surely I could interview someone I know and help them get a tiny bit more exposure. And maybe talk a little bit about writing, too.

So welcome to what may be a new regular feature, based entirely around my schedule, my friends’ schedules, book release schedules, and okay maybe it won’t be that regular. Semi regular. And before we go, here’s all the usual explanations/ provisos that I put on every interview I post here. Bold is me asking questions, the rest is Craig answering. I’ve dropped in a couple links, but this isn’t meant to imply Craig’s endorsing my views. It’s just giving you a handy connection when he’s said something that might sound similar to something I’ve said.

Our War is out today everywhere. Go pick it up at your favorite local bookstore.

We’ve known each other for eight years now, right? I think we first met face to face in 2011 at a Seattlecon, right?

It was around 2011, that’s right—Zombiecon. We were with Permuted Press in those years, churning out zombie fiction. It was an amazing time. At these cons, you meet all these great people, but sometimes, you run into a brother from another mother. You were one such guy for me and still are! We talked a lot of shop at that con, and I remembered thinking right off the bat that you were a writer who was going to go places. This was right about the time your novel -14- was in production. It’s incredible how much has

changed for both of us.

Right, We did Crypticon up there a bunch of times and I always forget we started with Zombiecon at the same hotel. And, yeah, I love that every time we get together we just instantly drop back into conversation mode and start talking.

Speaking of which (clever segue), let’s talk about Our War What’s your two or three line elevator pitch?

Our War is a dystopian thriller about a brother and sister forced to fight on opposite sides of a second American civil war. Recruited and radicalized, they eventually realize they must fight for each other and themselves if they want to survive. The novel might be described as Omar El Akkad’s American War meets Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo, both of which put a human face on the horrors of modern civil war.

I think I already know the answer to this, but other people might not– when did you start writing this, or playing around with the idea, I guess? Was it something recent you based off current events or one of those cases where reality started leaning into your story over time?

Why would I write a dystopian novel? Because they always say, “Write what you know!” Americais more divided than ever. The tribalization of American politics has always troubled me because there’s only one way it can go, which is worse. So I did what I often do when I start a novel, which is say, “Okay, let’s take this to its logical conclusion. What would it really look like?” No wish fulfillment, no straw man supervillains, no romanticism, no plucky patriots resisting tyranny. Just Americans living in different political narratives fighting over which narrative was true. While I was writing, real events started to feed me fresh ideas, making the story feel torn from current headlines.

Okay, you’ve actually given me lead ins for two things I wanted to ask you, because one thing I really liked about this was that you kept it grounded. This isn’t some over-glamorized epic, it’s very close and intimate. It’s a national civil war, but I really like the idea that it’s not a north and south thing, but individual cities that have split in half, more like gang turfs than enemy lines. Was that a key idea from the start or was it something you sort of found yourself working into to solve problems, this whole smaller-scale? I mean, for me there’s almost always at least one point in the process where I realize “geeez, this will all be so much easier if I just do this…”

Early on I planned this book out, I came to the conclusion that a civil war in Americawould look far more like the Bosnian War in the 1990s than the last civil war in the 1860s. Triggered by a Constitutional crisis, an armed national protest by the Right snowballs into a revolution. The resulting war is rural versus urban, not states versus states, and in that type of conflict, how could the military respond? Look at an electoral map by county, and you can see the battle lines drawn along the red, blue, and purple. This is a war in which everybody fights, and nobody wins.

By making two of Our War’s protagonists child soldiers—who didn’t want the war and barely understand it—we see the real victims of civil war. In this type of conflict, the innocent always lose the most. All the things Americans shake their heads at happening in other countries like Syriacould happen here. Early on, I wanted to focus on the child soldiers’ story and the people whose lives they touch—a UNICEF worker, a journalist, and a rebel militia sergeant—to show different perspectives but otherwise keep the war local. They all care about the big picture, who’s winning or losing, but they are far more concerned about what’s happening right in front of them. This makes the story feel both intimate and deep.

You actually write about kids and horror a lot. I mean, Suffer the Children had adult protagonists, but the story was all about their kids. One of Us. Now this. Do you always intend to write about children? Or, I guess, a better way to put it, are you starting with the core idea that horror/suspense is always creepier with kids (which it is) and moving forward from there, or are you coming up with your plot, your world, and at some point going “y’know what would make this really intense…” ?

It’s funny because it’s not my intent, it just turns out that way. I think a big part of it is being a father who is deeply invested in his kids. They really are the world to me and never far from my thoughts. In fiction, children are also an excellent lens to examine big issues from a fresh angle. In Suffer the Children, we have a vampire novel where the world’s children are infected by a parasite that requires them to drink blood in order to stay alive. The result is a horror story that is also an examination of how far parents will go for their children. In One of Us, the story is about teenagers who are part of a generation born with strange mutations, which became a way to examine prejudice. And with Our War, having two of the five protagonists being children, and joining the war by becoming child soldiers, shows the real cost of war and in particular civil war. The contrast of innocence with very real horrors I think punches the theme to a higher level.

It strikes me that you and I rarely talk about politics. We talk about story ideas and movies and publishing paths and a lot of stuff in our field, but I’m trying to think of any political discussion we’ve had that did more than skim issues. So, that said, there’s no denying this is a really political novel. Probably the most starkly political one you’ve written, yes? Or, at least, that I’ve read (maybe your submarine novels are super-partisan–I have to be brutally honest, I haven’t read them). I do remember us talking about Our War at one point while you were writing it and you laughing and saying “this is going to give everybody a reason to hate me,” or words to that effect. Now that you’ve had time to get some distance, do you still feel that way? Are you still nervous about this part of it?

I’m not as nervous as I was because the early reviews are saying good things about the novel being ideologically fair, which was my intent. Look, typically, when you have a second civil war novel, the author has three choices. They can choose an ideology and offer a wish-fulfillment story, they can avoid politics entirely and set the war far in the future to make it fantastic, or they can tear it from today’s headlines but try to be fair. I took the last path, which is the most challenging and risky. Challenging because I as the author I had to keep myself entirely out of the story, even though I have strong political convictions. And risky because when you strike the middle path in a polarized environment, you risk pleasing nobody.

With Our War, two of the principal protagonists are children indoctrinated into opposing militias, and while they grasp core ideas, the politics are gibberish to them. They are exposed to ideological viewpoints, and then the other protagonists have their own convictions the reader gets firsthand. So the reader is exposed to a palette of views from characters entirely convinced they are right, and I trust the reader to do their own thinking without me trying to force anything on them. The primary point of the book isn’t the politics, however, but the polarization itself that leads to civil war. In that, Our War does its job as dystopia by issuing a warning, and it fights political narrative with a different story of what happens when tribalization goes too far. And despite dystopia being kind of dark, I think there’s a lot of optimism in Our War, if readers come away with new energy to resist such a future.

It’s funny, you mentioning the wish-fulfillment option. I think we both probably saw a lot of that when we were doing a lot more in zombie circles. Do you think–I’m gonna step away from your book for a sec to ask a general question–do you think those books come from a lack of empathy, or just a disregard for it? I mean, any sort of wish-fulfillment story is going to have kind of a narrow, focused audience. So do you think people tent to write them because they’re choosing to aim at that niche, or because they honestly don’t realize it’s just a niche and not a widely held view?

I remember back when we were writing zombie fiction, I used to categorize zombie books as either wish-fulfillment to satisfy the Z Nationcrowd or exploring all possible consequences of TEOTWAWKI to please The Walking Dead crowd. As for the authors of both, they were probably writing what they wanted to read, or they had a good sense of what some readers wanted, or both.

I get what you’re saying about empathy and would say it’s probably a disregard for it. Not a bad kind of disregard, though, it’s more like setting it aside so the story can go where it needs to go. Personally–and this is just me without judgment on what other authors and readers like–I like consequences in my fiction and the fiction I read, and I want realism to make willing suspension of disbelief all the more satisfying. But that’s me as I’ve gotten older; when I was a teenager, I read every Robert E. Howard story I could get my hands on, wishing I was Conan and loving getting to be him for a short period of time.

When dealing with a topic like a second American civil war, the wish-fulfillment aspect takes a different turn into politics, which is what I was referring to in my previous answers. This is where say a plucky band of patriots resists a tyrannical Marxist government putting all Americans into concentration camps, a storyline I’m not making up as I read one exactly like this. This type of novel provides a wish-fulfillment experience for a certain type of reader while reinforcing their ideological worldview. Which is fine for people who want that, but for me, telling the story of a second American civil war demanded gritty, unflinching realism and an impartial approach. A story not aimed solely at a certain reader but at everyone.

Yeah, I remember you and I were on a post apocalyptic panel years back and one of the of the panelists very much had that wish-fulfillment/ideological reinforcement view. I think we talked about it for a while as a business path.

Hey, it just struck me this is going to be on my ranty writing blog, so let me ask you a few writing-related questions, and you can talk about Our War as a reference. How do you generally plan out a book? Do you like outlining? Notecards? Are you a little more of a pantser? How much do you usually have by the time you start writing?
I’m an absolute plotter, though there’s plenty of discovery and change as the novel progresses. In a given year, I produce a standalone novel for Orbit, several episodes in various self-published series, and a huge output from my technical freelance writing business. So for me, efficiency rules.

My main plotting tools are a four-act plot structure and character arcs. With a four-act plot structure, you have the inciting incident, which kicks off the central conflict; introduction to the normal; first plot point where something happens that changes everything; the protagonists react to that change; the midpoint; the protagonists are propelled to become more proactive toward the central conflict; second plot point; and then the protagonists go all in to win or lose. Character arcs can be fairly detailed, but in its most basic form, the protagonist has a need to change, a mis-belief preventing that change, an external goal with an opposing force, and personal transformation achieved through the resulting struggle.

For Our War, which is more of a character-driven work, I relied more on character arcs than major plot points to move the story forward. In this story, the first, mid, and second plot points marked major changes on the battlefield and resulting balance of power and stakes. These big changes in the protagonists’ world affected the dynamics and choices in their individual character arcs, which I also mapped out until I really knew whose these people were from the inside out. While I was sketching out these goalposts, I was “dreaming” the book–doing tons of research, taking plenty of notes, and otherwise allowing the story to percolate in my subconscious until it all hit a critical mass and I could start writing it. And while I had the goalposts set up before I started writing, the actual writing involved a lot of discovery, where I allowed the characters to develop as they needed to. The result is a story that is both planned and organic. In the end, even when you plan it, the novel will tell you what and how it wants to be.

Okay, follow-up question, because I think we both know people worry about this a lot when they start out. You’re a dad and you still have a full-time job. How much time do you actually get to write each day? Do you have set word counts you try to hit per day or per week?

I’m really lucky in that my full-time job as a journalist and educator in the lighting industry is at home. You know what they say about people who work for themselves: They can work anytime they want, but they’re always working. So it was always super busy–which is a good thing–but there was just enough time to develop my own projects. Over time, as I gained some success, I was able to treat my fiction as a client and give it the time it was due during my day. Over the years, the amount of hours I put in tuned my brain for writing, and I now produce projects fairly quickly compared to that first novel back in my early twenties, which felt like mentally climbing Everest.

So how fast do you turn a draft around? I mean, you’re writing a lot of stuff every year. Once you’ve got an outline, how long does it usually take you to get a completed first draft? Like, how long did Our War take, beginning to end, however many drafts you did?

These days, I can write a novel first draft in about six weeks. That’s actual typing time, during which I’m living and breathing the novel. Before that, there is maybe one or two months of planning and dreaming,note-taking and research. The beauty of working with Orbit is Bradley Englert, my editor, is both talented and kind at his job, and the long stretches of being away from the manuscript during the production process gives my brain some objective breathing space so I return to it fresh. Bradley’s edits always cut straight to the heart of what needs work, and then I spend another say four to six weeks on revising and editing. In all, the book is completed in two major drafts, with nothing rushed. By the time I hand in the final manuscript, I’ve read the book probably eight or nine times, endlessly polishing.

Three things have aided me in terms of speed. One is me constantly learning and internalizing craft, tuning my brain through practice, and having been at this long enough to discover my natural voice. The second is raw passion for the project, the joy of writing a novel I wanted to read myself and share with others; you have to love what you write, and if you do, that love will become infectious for the reader. The third boon to speed is the simple benefit of a contract, knowing at the end of all this hard work that a quality publisher was going to publish it if I gave them a good product on deadline.

We should probably stop now–we’ve been batting this back and forth all weekend. Unless there’s some last thing you want to get in. Your secret pet peeve? The one question you always wish you were asked? New projects?

Right now, I’m wrapping up a new supernatural horror novel for Orbit titled Mysterion, which is about a group of people who grew up in an apocalyptic cult and survived its horrific last days. Years later, they reunite to confront their past and the entity that appeared on the final night. Think Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House meets the Jonestown massacre. Thematically, it touches on trauma, memory, faith, and belonging. Stay tuned–this one is coming in the fall of 2020. In the meantime, I’ll also be launching a new self-published WW2 adventure series titled Armor, which follows the crew of a Shermantank from North Africa to Berlin. Readers can stay tuned at my website/blog at www.CraigDiLouie.com.

Thanks for the opportunity to visit with you, brother! I’m looking forward to my next Peter Clines read!

conventions diLouie interview outline setting zombies

August 15, 2019

The Body on Page One

Welllllll… guess there’s no putting this off, is there? In the end, this is where every story leads in the long run. I’ve crafted a fantastic character with some wonderful nuances and habits, and a detailed backstory. It’s a character every reader can picture in their minds and relate to on a personal level.

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.

Bricken character death protagonist stakes structure the end zombies

April 4, 2019

Shadow Agency

This week—requests are granted! Also, as you may have noticed, the majority of responses I got in comments/ tweets/ DMs/ etc were in favor of the new layout, so I’m going to stick with it for now.

A few weeks back someone asked about characters. How do I get a sense of who they are. How do I make sure when they do something it’s what they’d do instead of just what the plot (and by extension—I ) want them to do?

Okay, these are two related-but-different questions. Let’s look at each of them on their own, then figure out that relationship-overlap. Which I think is what we’re aiming for with this request.

Also, because there’s a lot to unpack here, expect a lot of links to previous posts. I don’t want to bury you in too much rehashed stuff. You’re here for exciting hot takes on the art of writing, yes?

First off, how do I get a sense of who my characters are as individuals? What makes them unique? What makes them stand out?

One thing would be their general backstory and personal preferences. If I’ve got a character—especially one of my main characters or important supporting ones—I should know a lot about them. And I’m talking about me, the author. For almost all of my characters, there are things I know about them that never make it into the books. Maybe it’s about their relationship with their parents, their worst class in school, or their favorite bands. It can be games they play, people they’ve slept with, or their first car. A lot of this sounds like weird stuff, yeah, but all of this says a little something about who someone is, which means it’s going to affect how they react to the world around them.

There’s also their voice. The way people phrase things and the words they choose. Their background will have an effect on how they act, and it’s also going to effect how they talk. This is one of the easiest ways to make characters distinct on the page (or in an audiobook).

Also, I could think about how people react to this character. Do folks wince at the sound of Dot’s voice? Do they instinctively lean away from Wakko? Do they lean toward Phoebe? And are people right to react this way, or is it because they know something else that we don’t?

All of this should give me a really good sense of who my character is. Again—I probably won’t use all of it. I may never see Yakko stumbling through a date or listening to music or reminiscing about his old VW Bug. But these are all the little elements that help move a character from a basic stereotype and into actual, memorable person-hood.

Okay, the second part of all this is about these characters making decisions.

There’s a term you may have heard around the interwebs called agency. It first appeared back in the 1700s, when people were having Enlightening discussions about philosophy and sociology. At its simplest, agency refers to free will. Can a person make their own choices and affect the world around them? How much does the world they exist in restrict that ability to make choices? If I can’t travel alone, vote, or choose who to love… do I have free will, or just the appearance of free will? Do people in prison have free will? Free will may have gotten them there—or maybe the conditions forced on them by society did—but now they have almost no freedom to make choices at all, so…? Is there a point where I no longer have free will?

Anyway, that’s all heavy stuff. It’s a little different (and easier) for us when we’re talking about agency in a literary sense. Fictional entities don’t have free will because they’re… well, they don’t actually exist. But as a writer, I need to make my readers believe these characters are real people who are having an actual affect on the world around them. They need to do things, and these things need to matter. If cowards are suddenly going to leap forward and be brave, there should be a clear reason. If a cold person falls madly in love, we should understand why and how. If someone decides to open the spooky mystery box after it’s killed half their friends… well, we should be with them on this, even if we don’t like it.

Yeah, sure, it’s possible to make inconsistent decisions or choices that move the plot forward. We’ve all seen it happen. The wonderful A. Lee Martinez(he of the Constance Verity books and the Save The Movies podcast) came up with plot zombie a little while ago to explain this. It’s when characters are only acting in service of the plot, not out of any actual developed or established character traits.

This is, just to be clear, a bad thing. Y’see, Timmy, my characters need to face challenges and need to respond to them. They need to make choices—ones that are consistent with who they are. And the results of these choices should have a real affect on how the story plays out. Because if they’re not… Well, then they’re not really doing anything. They’re just empty puppets. Not even the good kind of puppets. They’re just sock puppets that I’m using to try to convince my readers this is a real story.

So make your characters do things. In character.

Next time, I’d like to look at some things from a different angle.

Until then, go write.

action agency backstory character details motives sketch zombies

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