Structure in paranormal thrillers

I went looking for a decent monster movie.

That's a tall order, unfortunately. A lot of monster movies are action- and horror-formula killfests with precious little introspection. To make matters worse, I didn't want alien monsters or scientifically created monsters. I wanted magical ones. Cryptozoology, if you prefer. Which shortened the list even further.

I wanted something to prod me into thinking about how people react when confronted with something they've long believed was mythical. Aside from reaching for a weapon, that is.

Out of necessity, I started moving toward what might be more accurately called paranormal thrillers. They were more thoughtful and more focused on the characters. I also started to notice structural similarities.

1. Gadgetry & denial: The main character arrives in a state of denial. Science is called in to explain the initial situation. Gadgets are deployed, tech-speak is thrown around, and surely science will save the day. 
2. Facile solution: Spooky things happen. A rational answer is found. The question seems to be resolved. We're done here, right?
3. The hook: No, we're not done. Something inexplicable happens that touches on the character's tragic past. More on this later.
4. Confrontation/Acceptance: Science and logic are abandoned. The main character starts reacting emotionally and/or intuitively, and the paranormal reveals itself. As a result, the character relives the past trauma and changes internally.
5. Fallout: Objective reached, the paranormal withdraws or is conquered. The main character has to deal with the emotional and practical consequences. 

Best of the three, IMO

The one thing I particularly noticed about the three pretty-good paranormal thrillers that I watched -- The Awakening, The Mothman Prophecies, and Oculus -- is that the main character in each is wrestling with the death of a loved one(s). Central to the paranormal revelation is the ending of the grieving process in which the character has been "stuck" for however long.

Interesting that being touched by death seems to be a prerequisite for being able to properly confront the paranormal. Having to face our helplessness against death preps us, perhaps, to face something else that's outside our control and understanding: the paranormal. Something which science can only do so much to stop. So in a way, stories about the paranormal are be stories about helplessness... which can be terrifying.

Naturally, having seen a pattern in these stories, I want to mess with the pattern. My character has already faced the death of a loved one (this is a sequel story) so he already partly fits the mold. I had not thought about this story in terms of his grieving process, though.

So maybe I succeeded in prodding my brain despite the deck being stacked with awful B-movie fodder.

Seen any good paranormal thrillers recently?

Flashbacks in the story structure

I've been blog touring for two months and neglected this blog... my intent is to get back to my once a week habit. 

Flashbacks are something of unknown territory for me. They've turned up on occasion but mostly as isolated incidents. Those are simple to handle: they're like info-dumps. My science fiction stories (there are three of them) involve a lot more flashbacks and uses them for character development and backfilling earlier plot points.

What function does the flashback have?
No scene should have only one function. That applies to flashback scenes too.

Plot elements: Since you don't have to start telling your story at the beginning of the traditional plot structure (the inciting incident), it's entirely possible that a flashback scene contains an earlier plot point. Why not start the story there? Maybe it wasn't all that dramatic of an event (and stories should always start with dramatic events, as we know.) Maybe the reader needs the context of later events to see the significance of this earlier one. Maybe it wasn't a good scene to introduce the reader to the story's world.

Character development: Flashbacks are a chance to show-not-tell the reader about important aspects of a character's personality.

Info-dumping: Chunks of world-building can be worked into flashbacks, of course. The entire scene can serve to explain how things came to be in a particular situation, in your story.

When does the reader need to know this?
Connected to "current" events: Flashbacks are like info-dumps in that they always need to be relevant to the story. The best advice I have on when to info-dump is "just after the reader absolutely needed to know this." So the same goes for flashbacks.

Taking a break: If your story has been running hard and fast for a while, you can let it coast a bit while you flashback to something relevant but slower paced. Since flashbacks are in the story's past, they tend to reduce the tension -- the reader already has some sense of what might have happened and you're just filling in the particulars. (That's not to say you can't pack in some surprises, of course.)

When in doubt...
...keep writing, because once you reach the end of the story everything will be much clearer. And you can always fix it in revisions.

Cutting the story flab

I've talked about major reconstruction of story lines before (here) but this one's a little different. I was revising a short story recently and had the feeling that it was longer than it really needed to be. It was clocking in at just over 9k -- which is a hard sell in the market, too -- and writing it had been kinda fraught with insecurities for various reasons.

Being a world-builder, I'm always itching to do it. My gut kept insisting that the gender politics needed more explaining... but this is just a short story. You don't have to explain everything. (You don't have to explain everything in a novel, either, but that's a different post.)

It's been a while since I've used my revision avatar.

Anyhow, I singled out one scene that could definitely be cut. Why? Because it's mostly me caving in to the world-building itch. My MC is being shown around and explained to, rather than doing/realizing/progressing. Onto the chopping block the scene went.

But: that's not to say there was no useful information at all. I didn't want to make a hole or leave readers confused.

What to keep
Before cutting the scene, I looked through it for:

• new characters met
• first descriptions of people or places -- a subset of world-building, true
• character arc moments -- questions raised, answered, realizations made
• plot developments -- usually the scene's being cut for a lack of these, but check for them anyway
• essential world-building -- see below

In my case, there were some detailed first descriptions and some minor character moments that needed to be salvaged. Then I tossed hundreds of words of tension-less world-building (read: infodumping.)

None of it was essential? Correct, because this is a short story. I was only introducing things that would be seen later, in my case. Were this a novel, that could be given a little leeway. This is a short story that's already on the too-big side, though. The reader can meet these details as they happen during a plot-relevant moment. Anything that doesn't happen during a plot-relevant moment isn't strictly necessary.

What to do with them
So I had a handful of scraps that I needed to work into someplace else. I went looking for:

• relevant conversations, or ones that can be steered toward the topic
• descriptions at more relevant moments that could be expanded a bit
• if there'd been new characters to meet, a better place or possibly drop the character entirely

Overall, I cut 1500 words and worked about 300 back in. Net savings: 1200 words. It's still big for a short story, but we'll see if there's any use for it.

Plotting scenes out: more recursion

Recursive plotting #3
Appropriately enough, this is a topic I keep coming back to. Original post here. Follow-up here. That makes this number three in the series.

Plot structure holds across a series of books, across a single book, and within the book too. I'd say it reaches down into scenes, but at this scale you're even less likely to actually see it from start to finish.

What do I mean by that? At any scale, the entire plot structure (inciting event, plot points building to a climax, resolution) needs to exist. That does not mean that the reader will see all of them. It's the literary equivalent of a photo of four paws being a photo of a cat -- you know the rest is there without seeing it. If the rest wasn't there, it would be apparent in something wrong about the paws.

Chapters and scenes have inciting incidents, points building to a climax, and resolution. Small ones, since they are themselves the building blocks of a larger plot structure. Maybe the reader doesn't see the structure start to finish, but the writer sees it.

An example
If it helps to look at an example, here's the entire first scene to Disciple, Part I. It's got pretty much the entire structure showing: inciting incident (Kate's teacher fetching her), points building (hints that something important is about to happen) to a climax (the king objecting to her presence) and a resolution (the king is overruled.)

End of scene. I could've continued into what happened next, but at that point the scene had done exactly what it needed to. Its structure had finished and it was a "complete thought." Therefore, the scene ends and we pick up again at the next scene.

That being said...
...all rules are, of course, made to be bent and twisted into balloon animals. (Don't break them. Broken balloon animals are no fun.) This is where voice, style, and pacing come into play.

Jacqueline Carey, author of the many Kushiel books, doesn't write scenes. Each chapter is a segment of the story cut off at a moderately comfortable point.

Stephen King has been known to write one-scene chapters -- where the scene is only a sentence or two long. (Salem's Lot, IIRC.)

There's a correlation between scene and chapter length and the perceived pace of the story. Carey's Kushiel novels are languid things, even in the middle of a war. King's older horror stories moved fast, even when not much was happening. Cutting a scene down to just the climax, if you can, totally changes its impact.

What if that first scene of Disciple had begun with the king identifying her and objecting? Starting with a confrontation puts a more violent spin on the story. It would raise questions about who Kate is and whether she's a victim or a danger. For some stories, that's a great place to start.

Conversely, if I'd started long before the inciting incident -- say, with Kate tossing and turning in bed, giving up on sleep, and dressing -- that would have been a quiet and slow beginning. It can be difficult to hook a reader with that sort of thing. That would require good language and very fast explaining of why she's too stressed out to sleep.

Do you pare your scenes down? Stretch them out? Juggle the structure?

Antagonist POVs

I'm close to the end of Hawks & Rams and I already know that I'm going to need to put it down and think for a while before I get into good enough shape to call it a first draft. (For me, first draft = first draft that I'm willing to show to anybody.)

One of the things I need to think about is my antagonist. I've had a habit, for some time, of my antagonists being organizations rather than individuals. In Disciple, it's a whole empire -- though one person does emerge to take point, eventually. In my science fiction novels, the "enemy" is also nonspecific. One of them is a heist, in essence, so the characters are up against a system rather than a person.

But in Hawks & Rams the antagonist is, most definitely, one person. And because I tend to under-write my first drafts, on my to-fix list is a proper introduction of the antagonist. I need to be sure the reader is clear on:

• Why he must be dealt with
• What he's capable of
• His motivations

Because antagonists are characters, just like any other. The tricky part will be getting this across through the interactions he has with my two POV characters.

There's a certain tradition of using the antagonist as a POV character... which works if you want the antagonist to be sympathetic and the story's dealing in shades of grey rather than clear lines of good and bad.

I've been leery of doing that myself because -- heh, this is kinda funny -- long ago I read The Shining, which includes the dad-who-goes-crazy as a POV character. Thing was, by the end of the book I thought his wife was a bitch and his kid was a brat and when he picked up an axe I was glad.

Yeah, the ending was a disappointment for me. I wasn't a very sympathetic character myself, as a teenager.

I doubt there's much chance readers would be upset by what happens to the antagonist in Hawks & Rams, admittedly. Maybe I should consider including him as a POV character. What are your experiences with antagonist POVs?

Sighting trouble early: tonal anomalies

I mentioned one scene that came to me when my current M/M romance story idea hit. There was a second scene that came along with that. I won't post my sketch of it because this blog is marked as non-explicit and I don't need to get in trouble with Blogger/Google.

Suffice it to say that this second scene raised big questions about the tone of the story.

Now, I don't have a problem writing explicit stuff. I've made no secret of that. (Both here and way back here.) But the events in the scene made me think about both how explicit the sex and violence would be, and how deeply entwined with each other they were. On one hand, I am very much against the "rape becomes romance" and I'm leery of the "you'll like this, even if you don't think you will" tropes... but I know that walking the line between consent and non-consent can be very... energizing.

I also had to think about those hazy borders between romance and erotica. There were several scenes in Disciple where I had to decide when, exactly, to close the bedroom door -- and a few where the door never did close. Hawks and Rams (working title) is a shorter, more compact story than Disciple and, now that I have an outline blocked out, there may not be so much sex in terms of total number of scenes... it just has the potential to be much more... hm, well, I guess the term I want is "memorable." Rather than "scarring." Erm.

Also, to some degree I should just write the darn thing and see what the characters are up for. They might solve the problem for me, if I let them.

Getting back to tone. So if I'm going to have this one explicit, borderline-violent, very sexual scene, the rest of the story needs to match the tone. Or at least not clash with it horribly. In no way should I pad the story with gratuitous violence or sex merely to keep this one scene from looking like it dropped in from some other book somewhere -- but. That one scene does look anomalous given the current outline.

Does the scene need to be that nasty? Will it be a turning point in the tone of the story? Can the rest maintain that level of violence? Maybe a certain unpleasant scene earlier should get nastier?

Have you ever had to deal with a scene that felt like an anomaly in a given story?

Thoughts on spoon- and force-feeding

So I posted a sizable brain download on Tuesday, and here's the upshot (lol, yeah, there's more.)

I've been wondering how much "spoon-feeding" the readers I can do before my gut starts yelling OMG SHUT UP. Not just muttering it. Yelling.

It has yelled OMG SHUT UP at other writers. The first time it happened to me was in the middle of Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose. Believe it or not, I had never skimmed through a section before that umpteenth dissertation about medieval philosophy. It felt like cheating.

More recently, I started reading Neal Stephenson and no, I don't feel bad about skimming anymore. I don't care about international monetary policy and he can't make me.

So many toys in the toolbox

But in the interests of pushing my own envelope, taking control of my own voice, using all the tools in my writerly tool-box, etc., if/when I do get around to that m/m fantasy romance that's burbling in my head I will try to slow down and see that the readers are better fed.

Logically speaking, it's a good place to try it. So far, the story is set in the Saints of War universe, but there's no connection to Disciple at all. It's shaping up to be a one-shot. It's already aimed at a slightly different audience, as an m/m romance, so it may well be the first book of mine that some readers see. (Whereas Disciple, Part IV probably won't be.)

Emotionally, it's a lighter... LOL, well, relatively speaking it'll be a lighter story. BTW, this is going to be horrible will still in effect. The pace will be different from Disciple, I can feel that much already, because the characters are different. I'm sure there will be blog posts about pacing while I work on this.

Meanwhile, feel free to complain about writers who force-fed you too much information. Did you stop reading? Skimmed until they got back to the story?

Link list: power and romance in the blogosphere

My fellow VPer Chris Gerwel (The King of Elfland's Second Cousin) has been posting over at Amazing Stories about the exploration of power in romance -- and along the way looking at how romance, fantasy and science fiction intersect each other -- and that has pulled me into an impromptu blog hop about power's uses in romance.

It caught my eye because of the strong romance element in Disciple, of course. My brain has been burbling about what power is, in my Saints of War universe, how it was defined by society, how that society was applied to Kate, Kiefan and Anders (in different ways, because of gender and social class)... and how things changed over the six parts of the story.

Part of me wants to write up an analysis, but that's problematic. I may not have the best perspective on Disciple, since I'm deep inside that particular forest. It would also be extremely spoilery to post such a thing, and I don't like spoilers.

For example, in many romances (and erotica, especially 50 Shades) the hero is the one who "educates" the heroine in "what she wants." The education (or corruption) of an innocent woman, if you will. This is a power structure: the hero understands the heroine better than she does, and he spends the book controlling her access to what she desires both by bringing her to an awareness of them and... by physical control of some sort.

I don't find that sort of story compelling, to be completely honest. I tend to be skeptical. But obviously it sells. And yet... if you tilt Disciple ninety degrees and look between the lines... there is actually a little of that going on. Backwards, I think. But that's a post for another time, and quite possibly for somebody else to write. It's interesting to think about, though.

I'd like to post a link list, because the link hopping has taken me to new blogs and I will probably want to look at them all again, later. If you know of more posts, please tell me! I'd love to expand this list.

Chris Gerwel's posts:
Romance - more powerful than you could possibly imagine
The power in paranormal romance
Science fiction romance - a niche before its time
Is this a kissing book? SFF's relationship with romance

DearAuthor.com:
Love is, indeed, a battlefield
(series continues?)

Something More:
Sex + power = ?
Objectification, Part I
Objectification, Part II

Any excuse to get lost in TVTropes.org

As a result of the dark night of the soul in my book Disciple, my main characters spend some time wallowing in despair. One of them is presented with the opportunity to do a Face Heel Turn (caution: TV Tropes link. There will be more of these.) and that required some thinking.

When I wrote the first draft of Disciple, Part V, I spent some time on  TVTropes.org looking at the many tropes involved in the dark night of the soul and recovery from it. Each of my three characters went into this part of the story with different motivations, reacted differently, and came out on different trajectories.

Very much like a slingshot maneuver across the dark side of a planet: when did they fire the engines, at what angle, how close to the atmosphere (danger!) did they skim -- ONOES, sci-fi metaphors applied to fantasy!

I classified this particular character's quandry as a Despair Event Horizon approach because of an Et Tu, Brute moment. Plus, the Corrupter makes An Offer You Can't Refuse. I also calculated this character's likelihood of turning with TVTropes' Sorting Algorithm (the instructions there are wrong: according to their examples, pick a score for each row, total and divide by the number of applicable rows.) This character scored a 3.1, pretty much dead center on "Who Knows?"

All of which helped clarify my thinking but ultimately left the answer up in the air. It's a question of character, after all, not a mathematical formula. My gut knew what it wanted to do -- this was all set-up for the big climax in Part VI -- but my brain demanded that we do this right. Set the patterns so they would remain consistent, keep the challenges real and serious, do nothing accidentally.

To tie this in with my upcoming book release, the character patterns involved hearken all the way back to Disciple, Part II.

Do you use TVTropes.org in your story planning? Not just getting lost in the site -- we've all done that -- but really used it? I've mapped out parts of Disciple in terms of their tropes, but doing the whole thing would be a butt-load of work. I've found some interesting insights, and the site does tend to drive home that there's "no new thing under the sun" when it comes to stories. It can leave you questioning your originality. Or you can see it as a near-infinite list of ingredients you can cook up a story from.

Subtle Things #5: Reminders vs. over-repetition

I can't watch TV shows that insist on reminding you what happened earlier in this episode by running a short clip with a color tint, or in black-and-white. I hate it when authors repeat themselves. I got partway into the second Mistborn book and put it down because of repetition. Jacqueline Carey only gets away with it because her language is otherwise so awesome and Kiefan is itching to go a few rounds with Joscelin.

When does a reminder become too repetitive? For me, it involved repeating a fact three times within 500 words... made worse by too-obvious pointing at the thing through dialogue or in the narrative (see: Thank you, Captain Obvious)... or by ruminating on the same thing for a page every chapter... this isn't a hard and fast rule, of course. The smaller the fact, the easier to repeat without looking like it's being harped on. But you can go overboard with repeating even the smallest fact -- single words, as in Subtle Thing #3.

The other end of this problem is that you do need to repeat things that you want your readers to remember. It could be something as simple as a character's hair color, or a unique vocabulary word for your world, or an important bit of backstory. If it's been a long time (what constitutes a long time...?) since the readers have seen a character, reminding them what s/he looks like may be in order. The same goes for facts, vocab words, etc.

This is as tricky to illustrate as it is to define.

Writing this post gave me a chance to check on a sneaking suspicion I had: that I talk about what my main character's heart is doing. A lot. It's quavering, it's aching, it's sinking, it's tying itself in knots. Yes, it's a romance story and the heart is an easy stand-in for strong feelings, but anything can be taken too far.

In Disciple, Part II, there is an important, 3200-word scene in which Kate's heart is referred to five times. (I'm not counting physical hearts -- these are emotion descriptions -- though they add to the repetition.) Other scenes contain one or two, and top out at three in another important, slightly longer scene. 24 out of 40 scenes have heart references.

Too much?

Is that too much? I don't know. I could nix a few without hurting anything, though. This is a situation where one has to rely on one's betas, because chances are you aren't going to notice it yourself.

An example of necessary, repetitive reminders for my readers, from Disciple: Saint Qadeem. He's seen once, in Part I, but that's very brief. The readers meet him for a slightly longer passage in Part II. We spend a whole chapter talking to him in Part III, but then he disappears again. It isn't until Part IV that he becomes a real presence in the story.

Saint Qadeem gets a physical description each of the times we meet him, in I - IV, and it trails off after that. I'm a sketcher, when it comes to physical descriptions, so these aren't long and they tend to emphasize what's relevant at the time. When we first meet him, in Part I, the most important things I wanted to get across were 1. he's ethnically quite different from everyone, 2. this is unnerving to a young girl like Kate, but 3. he's non-threatening.

Later, Kate is more openly curious about Saint Qadeem for a variety of reasons, and the most thorough descriptions come when she gets a chance to "study" him a bit. I hope that after fixing him in the reader's mind in Part III and IV, only slight reminders are needed.

How much repetition is too much for you?

Remembrance of lessons past: POV

I spent a week, around Christmas, at my parents' and went through what parts of my early writings remain. I was glad to find one particular manuscript, disappointed that there's no sign of another. Much of my early writing was on 3.5" floppies, in ancient word processor formats. Some of it exists only on typewriter onionskin. There are stacks of notebooks, too.

I was hoping to find the how-to-write-genre-fic anthology that included Bradbury's "Run Fast, Stand Still," but I didn't. I did find, though, an anthology called Points of View (ISBN #0-451-62491-2, revised version available at Amazon) which I remember reading most of. It contains examples of stories told from various POVs: interior monologue, dramatic monologue, letter narration, subjective narration, various forms of anonymous narration, and more.

This book gave me much of the POV definitions I work from, though I've gotten muddied over the years by wading through confused online debates. You've seen them: attempts to classify stories as "close third person" or "distant third person," how "omniscient" or "limited" they are. Points of View organizes the POV continuum (that's what it is, really) from interior monologue to anonymous narration -- from very intimate first person to very distant third person, which is just one step away from a scholarly summary.

The stories presented offer quite readable examples along the continuum. And for me to say they're readable... bear in mind that I have no use for literary fiction, in general, and these are all lit fic. The closest it gets to genre is Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." (Bless her, RIP, etc.) Oh, and there's one Poe story.

POV is one of those structural elements that underpins a story, and like a skeleton it has an invisible yet unavoidable impact on the appearance of the final creature. Looking at this anthology has gotten me thinking about the POV choices I made in Disciple, both consciously and on a gut level.

Disciple is written largely as an interior monologue, by this book's classification (aka first person narration,) with lots of gritty and intimate detail. I did that very much on purpose. I wanted that level of detail, to let Kate speak to the reader as to a close friend, to heighten the realism and immediacy.

The limitations of first person, as anyone who's written in it knows, had a huge impact on what parts of the story I could show the reader, though. In a few places, I had to bend things to get Kate a good reason to see things that had to be known, but on the whole she was a character in a good position to see and present the best parts of the story I wanted to tell.

What if I had written it from the POV of an anonymous narrator? An omniscient one? As a memoir that Kate wrote many years after the fact? It would completely change the voice of the story, the structure -- I dare say with an anonymous narrator the story would mushroom into a sprawling epic, like GRRM's massively multi-POV Game of Thrones.

But I didn't want that. I only wanted to tell Kate's story. One visceral slice of what was going on.

How do you choose your POVs?

Subtle Things #4: Thank you, Captain Obvious

(That's the snark I hear when I hit the publish button on my blog.)

I like subtle. I like writers who can lay out all the subtle clues on the table and then string them together into an interesting plot climax. Stories that rely on witholding some vital clue until the last moment don't have the same punch. I saw a good example of this, recently, in the movie Wreck-it Ralph -- who expects subtlety from Disney, right? Non-Pixar Disney, that is. Maybe because I didn't go in expecting it, it was a pleasant surprise.

Drama? Where?

What constitutes subtle, though? There's a continuum from the most blindingly obvious things like:

“Your foolishness will make you weak, and then there will be a winnowing.”

down to things that are only meaningful in hindsight, if at all:

I reached for him again, meaning to check his kir, but Kiefan handed me the book instead. “I am well enough, for now.”

Do you throw out plot clues subtly? Or should a character point a finger and announce: "He's trying to distract her with a book! That means he's fibbing!" It's a question of genre style and personal style.

What draws the reader's attention to things and makes them obvious? In an early draft of Disciple, Part I, one of my betas pointed out to me that something needed more emphasis. Here is the original text:

“’Twas your father who opposed?” Lady Lorcana weighed that. “But did not prevent, else you would not be here.” 

“The piglet died,” I said, and then had to go on to explain. “Father brought me home from the Order after my two years of learning, even though Master Parselev wanted me for his apprentice...

What deserved emphasis was the piglet's death -- the title of Part I is "For Want of a Piglet" -- and here it's kinda buried in the dialogue. So I revised the dialogue to single it out:

“’Twas your father who opposed?” M’lady Lorcana weighed that. “But did not prevent, else you would not be here.”  

“The piglet died,” I said.  

“A piglet?” Leix chuckled when she said it. “How did a piglet sway your father?” 

“Father brought me home from the Order ... 

The emphasis is provided by repeating "piglet" and asking a question that the reader might reasonably be thinking at that moment.

Some things that I've noticed writers can use to draw the reader's attention to things without blatantly pointing and announcing "This is important!":

• Repetition, but don't do it too much.
• Using formal, foreboding, "prophetic" language, as in my example about winnowing. This is on the less subtle side, and the more formal and stuffy the language, the less subtle it is. But this sort of thing can fit in well with the style/voice/genre of the story, or the character, so... use with care.
• Lavish description above and beyond other story elements. Be careful not to break voice or bog down the action, though. 
• Physically setting it apart, if it's an object or a person, so that there's nothing else to focus on. If this is an action or an event, then it's a relatively uncluttered one -- no interruptions, no ancillary plotlines involved. 
• Drawing the character's attention to it, through movement or some important detail. This is different from the narrative drawing attention to things -- if your (convincingly real, sympathetic) character pays attention about something, hopefully the reader will too.  

What techniques do you use? What would you add to my list?

Raising expectations vs. becoming ridiculous

Continued from this post. So I need to write a series of kick-ass magical duels for Disciple, Part VI.

I'd like to do something more nuanced than: Blast! BLAST! BIGGER BLAST! DESTROY EVERYTHING ... it's not easy. Defining a character's ability to kick ass always runs the danger of not impressing anybody. Therefore, the temptation is to go straight over the top -- but that will create its own challenges the next time you need a magical duel. How is this one more dangerous/exciting than the last one? Constant one-upmanship is its own problem.

Sure, Kenshin, you can do that with just a sword...

Which you will see if you watch enough anime. Case in point: the Ruruoni Kenshin TV series (which involved no magic.) After a ridiculously long and ever-one-upping series of katana duels with the enemy's pack of cronies, Kenshin was having to conjure miniature black holes through force of will and swordsmanship in order to create any sort of wow factor. It was falling pretty flat at that point, though.

Conventional wisdom is that tension must always increase as we approach the climax, and that subsequent stories (or scenes) must have higher stakes than the previous. We've all seen this happen: first the characters have to defeat a particular bad guy, then an organization of them, then an evil deity, then we have to save the entire universe and then... You've got to take a step back, at some point -- or pass the story to new characters.

But let's get back to kicking ass; so you want that emotional satisfaction of the good guys winning. You want all of your characters' hard work and sacrifice to pay of in a suitably -- within the parameters set by your world-building -- spectacular way. And maybe you need more than one of these scenes.

Raising the stakes works, up to a point. Survival is always a good goal. Saving loved ones. Working with handicaps. I need to keep realism in sight, though. I brought this up a while back -- don't stack the deck against your characters so badly that their success becomes implausible. Relying on luck or reinforcements arriving in the nick of time isn't as satisfying for the reader as a character overcoming personal fears, limitations, what-have-you, to succeed.

And yes, I'm having to fight the urge to make these a cakewalk for my characters. Maybe it seems like I'm tough on them, but I've got my squishy side too. So I'm thinking of these duels as graphs charting increasing power, increasing complications, and increasing risk. That's three dimensions, already.

I tend to think of stories as being a walk through a three-dimensional web, anyway, so that fits right in.

What examples of stories losing touch with realistic conflicts come to your mind?

Wall-to-wall action!

... is exhausting, to be honest. For the writer and, fortunately, for the reader too. Disciple, Part VI, is looming on my horizon and it's going to contain a lot of action. Part III also contained a lot of action, and I need to keep in mind the things that it taught me.

Writers and readers need to take a break from the action every so often, with the caveat that action is not the same as tension. Don't take breaks from tension. The action needs the occasional break in order to do some important clarifying and organizing.

Define the new situation
You've seen this in movies: our character stands on the littered battlefield, breathing hard, and looks around wondering who's survived? Use the moment to see who's okay and who's hurt, who's dead, what's been destroyed and what's still standing. Who's still in the game, and in what capacity? Did we win? What are the options now?

Not all stories need action sequences to accomplish their goals, but after any stretch of dramatic events it's good to take stock of what has changed. Sometimes it's obvious: the Death Star was destroyed. The villain kidnapped the girl despite our hero's best efforts. Or maybe it's something more subtle.

The two main variables here are the pace at which you define the situation, and how much of it you define. What does the reader needs to know right now versus what to hold back to raise tension later? Updates can be done in a very brief, up-front way -- an officer runs over and rattles off the casualties, the current troop movements, and off we go to the next part of the fight. In other genres, readers expect a more careful exploration of the results -- the characters need to discuss, do research, or travel someplace new.

Maybe all the implications of an event take time to unfold. That can raise the tension nicely in a story. Or maybe you want to drop an oh crap we're screwed bombshell. It's your roller coaster ride -- how do you want it to go?

How much you say and how much you don't say can be tricky for another reason. Readers are not stupid; if your character's mentor was killed, they can figure out most of the problems that's going to cause. If you write those out explicitly, it will look clunky and patronizing. It's better to point out only those things that are not immediately obvious, but are important to the story. But without being clunky or patronizing. That's a whole 'nother blog post, I think.

Regroup
New situations require new plans. New plans can require new resources, or at least enough of a break for everyone to lick their wounds, get some sleep, and prepare for the next assault. Perhaps we need to meet new characters and bury our dead.

I'm using battle terminology because Part VI is a war. Metaphorically speaking, this applies to Victorian comedy-of-manners romances, too. Drink some tea, collapse on the couch in the parlor, and strap yourself into a fresh suit of armor -- whoops, I meant "a new evening gown." Emotionally, these aren't as different as they might appear.

Caveat
As with all writing "rules," you don't have to do this when it suits the purposes of your story. If it's your intention to show the readers just how exhausted your characters are, don't give them a break. I tried to do this back in Disciple, Part I when my characters are harried by packs of monsters.

Did you let your characters catch their breath, or did you keep pushing?

Also: did you see my Goodreads giveaway?

The sin of prologue

Photo by Guenter M. Kirchweger,
available at sxc.hu

In Part IV, I committed the sin of prologue. Let's skip the attempts to rationalize, for a moment.

Why are new writers told not to write prologues? 
"This is irrelevant, but I'm going to tell you anyway." That's how prologues tend to come across. That's what a lot of them end up being. Because, honestly, if it was relevant to the story then it would be where the story began. If it wasn't a good place to start the story, it could be a flashback scene later on.

The "I'm going to tell you anyway" aspect makes a lot of prologues into an info-dump of sorts, and we've all read about the dangers of starting your story with an info-dump, yes?

But it's got lots of action and dialogue -- yes, but is it immediately relevant to the story? Does it introduce the reader to the main character? Maybe the reader does need to know that your character's older brother died tragically. But they don't know this is the character's older brother, yet; when they're reading the prologue, the older brother is the main character. And then he dies tragically. Now you want them to care about the main character and you promise you won't kill them too? (Are you GRRM?)

Why do people keep doing it?
Let's admit it: there are a lot of prologues out there. In published books. By good writers. Why do they get away with it when I can't?

Partly because they've proven that they know what they're doing, and I haven't. But he can't write his way out of a paper bag. No, it's not fair. I'm trying to rise above the dross of a vast, self-published market, so I have to hold myself to high standards.

Partly because it's hard to shake the feeling that this is important to the story, but it doesn't quite fit anywhere. It's some bit of character development, or world-building, or setting the tone of the story. It happened before the main event. Whatever the reasons are, the compulsion was there. Your gut demanded it, and as I've said -- trust your gut.

Do people read them?
I usually do, I'll admit, though I mildly resent them. Some readers skip them.

So why did I do it? 
Well, it is Part IV. It's not actually the beginning of Disciple -- we're a good 165k in by now. And the prologue ended up being larger than most chapters -- it would have been awkward to drop such a large chunk of flashback into the story later on. I did introduce a character I wanted the reader to care about, and I introduced something that will be increasingly important later on.

But this is all rationalizing. Why did you commit the sin of prologue?

Death and its story functions

The emotional impact of killing a character in your story can range from major trauma to a shoulder shrug. All deaths serve a function in the story, though.

Killing faceless crowds in a zombie-apocalypse story is expected. (Could you write a zombie-apocalypse story without that?) Enemy minions exist to prove the hero knows a thing or two about karate or gun-fu. Or to prove the bad guy is really, really bad because he kills his own minions. These sorts of deaths function as part of the background atmosphere of the story -- setting the tone and telling the reader how gory this will or won't be.

The deaths of major characters and secondary characters are more serious. I've been thinking about how and why characters die, recently, and yes they're all looking nervous and preparing cases for why they need to survive the story... here are some reasons I might kill them:

Noble sacrifice
These characters didn't "need" to die. They didn't do anything to deserve it, and they weren't obviously red-shirts. Yet they choose to step up and cover someone else's escape, or do something heroic that gets them killed. These can be real heartstring-pullers, when done well. A couple thoughts on getting these deaths right:

• The character will need some development and reader sympathy. Don't use walk-on, bit-player characters for this -- it won't have the same impact.
• Careful not to make the character "too good" before their sacrifice. It can be a give-away, it'll make it obvious that they'd do such a thing and it takes the edge off their nobility. At the same time, don't make it out of character either -- though a touch of redemption doesn't hurt.

The most recent example that comes to mind are the ship's pilots in Prometheus. They were not horror-movie idiots, and remained outside most of the drama that was going on. The writers gave them some good banter to develop a little character. And when called on, they made a noble sacrifice which -- given how the rest of the movie went -- was once of the few scenes that really touched me.

Love this photo, let's use it again: Parisian catacombs.
Photo by Atif Gulzar, available at sxc.hu

Too much guilt
A character seeking redemption makes a noble sacrifice as described above. This can be very effective, if it illustrates the fundamental character shift that's needed for a character to achieve redemption -- in other words, if the audience agrees that the character has earned forgiveness. However, the character cannot forgive himself, and his noble sacrifice is a form of suicide. If not, this can look like a cheat, a short cut, and get an eye-roll rather than a heart-felt sigh from the reader.

Perfection attained
This is sort of a Zen thing. It's not the easiest to grasp, as it seems horribly unfair on the surface. The most high-profile example of this type of death (that I know of) is Wash's, in the movie Serenity. The character's final performance (in Wash's case, an insanely difficult flight) displays such mastery and spiritual awareness that -- well, there's nothing more to reach for. Go directly to Nirvana, do not pass "Go," do not collect $200.

On another level, it's the tragedy of someone struck down in their prime. At the pinnacle of skill. It can feel like a cheap shot, to some readers, probably because we want to see people rewarded for perfection and not killed. So proceed with care.

Traditional mentor's death
Story-wise, mentors die because the student needs to make his own way now. They die to raise the tension by reducing the resources the characters have on hand. They die because having them leave would still allow the possibility of a return -- and if they do, they can cheat the story of a properly earned win. 

Mentors can include parents, uncles, anybody helpful to the character. Ever noticed how many stories begin by destroying the character's childhood home and family? Killing the mentor is such a staple, it's hard to give it the weight it deserves. The characters rarely have time to grieve, since the story's plot is taking up their attention. Or if they do have time to grieve, the plot needs tightening up... it's not easy. Some more thoughts on how tricky it is:

• Didn't have enough time to meet them properly. Therefore, they were only a bit-part character and their death has little impact on the reader.  To combat this, some writers pad out the first chapter or two with everyday life intended to introduce the parents we're about to kill -- wasting valuable story time.
• Death was not relevant to the story. Yoda died in Return of the Jedi, and... it meant nothing, really.
• Purpose unclear. Dumbledore's murder was actually perfectly reasonable and on the noble side. But because of how Harry Potter was written, that couldn't be shown to the reader at the time and his death was reduced to a cheap emotional shot that only made me shrug. 

The hand of God
In real life, people die suddenly in car accidents and the higher purpose is hard to see.  In stories, such things can develop a character or set a chain of events in motion. But sometimes a significant character's death is swept up in a larger action sequence and left unaddressed, or the death is "random" and has no real story function. These can really piss fans off.

I try to keep in mind that while I hope my readers are sufficiently immersed in my writing to think that random events are random, the truth is there's no such thing as a random event in a story. Everything is under my control. Every bullet flying in a Matrix-style shootout hits what I want it to hit. I believe that on a gut level, readers know this and they'll call you on it if a character's death doesn't have sufficient purpose.

Maybe writers think that by adding "random" events, they're increasing the realism of their story. Well... I would disagree with that. Unlike real life, fiction is supposed to make sense. And honestly, any "random" event in a story is ultimately the writer falling back on "chance" when s/he ought to be making every event a logical consequence of previous events. They're showing their hand. God does not show his hand.

"Random" deaths can be done, and can be done well. The example that comes to my mind is the death of Buffy's mother in Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- though no, it wasn't truly purpose-less. It was a chance for deep character exploration. And I would argue the writers had earned that "random" death through several seasons of establishing realism in the series.

What purpose did a major character's death serve in your story?

Earning that win -- emotionally

Continuing the topic of story characters earning their wins, some thoughts on character-dependent story elements. See the first part about physical challenges.

Character development accomplished
We've all seen stories where a character simply sets aside a lifetime's worth of habits, beliefs, or fears and fully embraces something they initially rejected or that their society believes is wrong. They cry a few tears, hem and haw a bit, and then they're OK.

As a lifelong fat woman who's ten years into recovering from what popular culture ingrained into my young mind, I find this annoying. Character development is tough.

Fears faced
Once bitten, twice shy. Not "once shy" or someone-told-me-it's-okay and the fears are magically overcome. Fear is a primal urge that makes people behave irrationally, and it's there to keep us alive. The more times a character faces their fears and fights to overcome them, the better developed they are and the more invested the readers will be.

The catacombs below Paris -- I'd love to visit, someday.
Photo by Atif Gulzar, available at sxc.hu

Biases overcome
I have known, all my life -- and experience has reinforced this -- about the universe's contrary nature. If you need a thing, you won't be able to find it. If you don't need a thing, you'll be tripping over it constantly. Things break when you really need them to work, and things only go wrong when you aren't ready for them. If things are going well, disaster is coming to fix that. And if the universe can publicly embarrass me along the way, all the better.

How much would it take to convince me the world is a wonderful, kind, magical place?

Yeah. So the next time a character just decides to see past their racism, sexism, classism, etc., consider how difficult it is to ignore things you know in your bones. This goes double in situations where characters have to suspend their belief in ordinary, reasonable things like "pigs don't fly" or "walls are solid."

Consequences weathered
If your good guys did something questionable, or risky, if they lost a bet and now must pay up -- this makes for excellent character development. It shows the reader what sort of honor this character has, their strengths and weaknesses, and what they'll do when they get desperate. Like facing fears, the more readers see a character putting in the work, the more invested they are in the outcome. A get-out-of-jail-free card is not the writer's friend. 

Redemption
I love a good redemption story, where a character works their way back to honor and dignity, pays for the mistakes they made, frees themselves of burdens they took on or were punished with. We all want to believe that if we put in earnest, hard work, we'll be rewarded. We like to see it happen to imaginary people, too.

It's a specific form of consequence, one where the character does not start out a "good guy" or penitent about what he's done. Realizing the need to face the consequences of past action is usually part of the character's development. There may be a great deal of disagreement on exact shades and precise amounts, but in general people will know when a character has paid for their past sins -- they're sensitive to when there hasn't been enough payment. Accordingly, writers tend to go overboard in the challenges they put before characters seeking redemption, just to be sure, and that's all right. So long as the character's success doesn't strain credulity.

Are there things a character can't earn redemption for? That depends on your audience and your personal biases. This actually leads into another blog post I'm going to write on the functions of death within a story -- because death is the only way a character can buy redemption, sometimes. What do you think?

Earning that win -- physically

I've brought up the importance of characters earning their wins, in a story, in risks being taken and work being done. Stories where solutions are delivered on silver platters don't interest me. Characters who sit on their butts whining and refusing to do anything useful are not people I want to read about. I have enough of those in my life already, thanks.

"Earning it" is defined differently by everybody, of course, but there are general consensuses. Erring on the over-working-your-characters side doesn't hurt -- a lot of writers do it, actually. Careful with the strained credulity, if you're planning to put your characters on a death march, though.

Physical barriers overcome
I'll admit, I'm biased toward character development being more interesting than physical challenges. I don't mean to slight physically-oriented stories -- they can be triumphant and a lot of fun, and fun is not to be overlooked as part of a story.

Earning a physical win involves making clear how difficult this is, what the potential consequences are, and putting the character through some amount of physical suffering in the process of reaching the goal. 

Mountains climbed
The simple, direct, physical challenge: your character must win a fight, survive what the environment throws at him, or build something. Whether success or failure results, give the effort the weight it deserves. Tell us about the preparations, the problems, the interesting things that happened along the way. OK, we're climbing Mt. Everest without supplemental oxygen -- why is that important? What could go wrong? What almost did go wrong?

Photo by John Evans, available at sxc.hu

Answers found
If your character needed more information before making a decision, or if The Answer is itself the solution to a problem, the reader wants to see it. Or at least, if the writer does not show us The Answer directly, demonstrate its impact clearly enough that we can guess at what it was.

Whether your character needed to climb a mountain to talk to the Wise Old Man or had to sort through mountains of dusty books for a bit of data, show us the work. Which leads us conveniently to the next point...

Journey made
Covering large amounts of time convincingly is difficult in any medium. On TV, you might get a two-minute training montage that's meant to summarize weeks, months, or years. It helps to have a yardstick for progress, whether it's an indication of time passing -- showing the reader seasonal changes in the background, for example -- or in the character's skills increasing -- being able to reach that brass ring their teacher set out at the beginning, maybe.

What are some stories of overcoming physical challenges that you've loved? At what point did you agree the character had earned their win?

Part 2 will be about character-driven "wins."

Positioning the camera: POV characters

Picking POV characters can be easy; if the story is mainly centered on one person, it they're sympathetic and/or interesting, then they're a shoo-in.

Whose story is it?

It can get trickier if your story isn't so focused. If there are several factions in play. If more than one character goes through major changes in the course of the story. Too many POV characters can dilute the story, though -- the story needs to be big enough to fit a large cast, and no that isn't an exact science.

I'm telling a smallish story, in the next Part of Disciple (Part V). In fact, it's so small and constrained that it's getting be a bit claustrophobic. And yet, I have four characters clamoring to be POVs. I don't think the story needs more than two, and I'm fairly sure that limiting it to one would mean missing out on too much. But four? Probably too much. So I've been weighing the pros and cons...

In the "for" column
Who's at the center of the action, if there's car chases and gunfights? (there aren't, in this story) Which character struggles to overcome the most important obstacles? Who has interesting things to say? Who would be good at explaining things the reader needs to know and/or would find interesting? And who do I find most interesting?

In the "against" column
How much overlap is there between this character and another potential POV character? How often will I need to decide who gets to narrate a scene because they're both there? Is this character's story important to the central, driving plot of the story? Would they just be a distraction? If it's not their story, are they sufficiently transparent to be a sideline narrator?

Control of information
POV characters are also a way to control the information the reader sees. This is one of the great advantages and disadvantages of first-person narrators. On one hand, you can spring stuff on the character because they weren't in a position to know about it. On the other hand, you're stuck with their eyeballs and sometimes you'll have to go through contortions to put them where they need to be.

POV characters are also a window into culture, since they bring their biases and opinions to the story. They work that information into their narration, and readers will pick up on it. That's another thing to assign a "for" or an "against" to.

I've mostly settled on which two characters I will use: one is kind of obvious, the other less so. A third one is still arguing her case. We'll see how it goes.

How do you pick your POV characters?

Beating a new horse

Query contest at Unicorn Bell! 

We're going to help you polish up that query letter for that finished manuscript you have, and then they'll be seen by our panel of editor judges. 

Check out the announcement page to see what the judges are in the market for.

Even if you don't have a manuscript ready, this is a great chance to work on query writing -- it's always difficult -- and get feedback on yours!

The plot doctor is in

You might remember my Plotter FAIL! of a couple months back -- it got a lot of hits.

The fix I came up with worked, more or less, but a small comment from one of my CPs suddenly undermined it all. To paraphrase her: The scene where [big event happens] is kinda rushed. It needs more weight.

The patch I put in because of my Plotter FAIL was what put the squeeze on Big Event Scene. The patch kinda turned into a Big Event itself in the writing -- which meant I ended up with four disasters in my story. This violates the Rule of Three. The patch was causing multiple problems.

It was a good revision session. Pic from Showtime's series Dexter.

So, taking my lead from Dexter, I hung plastic sheeting and prepared to fix the problem. Obviously, the patch and the Big Event needed to merge into one. Tricky, but do-able.

Continuity
One of the biggest concerns in moving events around is the impact it has on the characters. I was moving a scene to slightly earlier in the story, but whichever way you're moving you still need to be aware of where your characters are when the scene begins, how that will impact their reactions to the events, and where they will be when the scene ends.

This is true of any scene, and I think it's easier when you're revising because you can see the whole story more clearly. You are more able to ask:

• Does this make sense dramatically? What problems does it solve and what problems does it create?
• Is there anything the character learned between the two scenes that they won't know when the order of events changes? Or anything they will know, if you're moving an early scene to later? Characters should never act according to information they don't have.
• How does this impact the emotional sequence? Especially if relationships loom large in your story -- moving an event will change its impact. Sit down with your characters and consider all the repercussions carefully.

Logistics
Don't forget about the mundane stuff, either. Worry about the gear the characters have on hand, what they're wearing, how much of the city will burn down in this iteration, what to do with the time you've added or deleted by moving scenes around.

And after you've re-written the whole scene, realize that the city was still on fire at the end... whoops, somebody want to fix that...?

Adjust the fallout
Don't forget to adjust the downstream action to reflect the new sequence of events. Since everything is connected to each other, in a story, shifting a scene will always have some impact further along in the story. Often, that's exactly why you moved the scene in question -- but unexpected details can turn up, so be vigilant.

Have you had to move a major scene? What sorts of problems did that create?

Kickstarter UPDATE! 

I've changed the $100 pledge reward! Go take a look!

I'm running a Kickstarter project to fund the professional editing, proofreading, and cover artwork for my gritty fantasy romance, Disciple, Part I: For Want of a Piglet. There will be six parts in total, published over the course of the next few years.

I'm offering e-books, paperbacks, promotional bookmarks, and more at various pledge levels (ranging from $1 - $100). Check out the project page for my book trailer, budget, and production schedule.

Kickstarter.com is a fundraising platform for all sorts of creative projects. Artists post a profile of their project and offer rewards in exchange for pledged money. The pledges are not collected unless the artist's funding goal is reached within a set period of time. If the goal is reached, the artist receives the money, carries out the project and distributes the rewards promised. It's a fascinating site and easy to lose time in!