Overwhelmed by the vision

I've been suffering from a lack of "mojo" since early July because of a confluence of events. I talked about some of it in the crisis of confidence post. Another contributing factor was a beta pointing out (absolutely correctly) a big problem in Part IV. Then I wrote a chunk of Part V and it didn't help.

Paging the plot doctor... we need to do this again

Yes, I'm slowly recovering. Deciding to get out the chainsaw and fix Part IV helped a lot -- rather than letting the problems in Part IV hang around in an ominous cloud, I'm going to tackle them because they are in fact finite, fix-able things.

They are. I have declared it to be so.

Disciple is going through a dark phase. Its dark night of the soul. When you look into the darkness, the darkness looks back at you -- and we have a history, the darkness and I. The despair my characters feel infects me easily, since they are close to my heart.

And writing Part V will help a little in getting to the end of the dark night of the soul, but the dawn isn't going to break for a while yet.

My point being, though, that the story and the writer are deeply entangled. The emotions in one echo in the other.

The emotion that I would usually want to talk about, here, would be how a writer's confidence echoes into the story. I believe it does. Confidence impacts things as mundane as word choice and sentence structure, and as abstract as world-building. A writer who lacks confidence is more prone to passive verbs, roundabout descriptions, and trying to explain everything up front rather than assuming the reader is willing to trust the writer.

Because they are, you know. Readers don't usually open books against their will, so they're willing to give you a chance. This ties into a bit of advice I got at Viable Paradise: SIN BOLDLY. A novel is just a sin, inasmuch as it's a lie, but when you do it boldly... lying boldly is really just what we call "acting", isn't it? Skits and plays are lies too, but we believe the actors because they stride out on the stage believing it completely themselves. Boldly.

This also ties into the propaganda concept known as "the big lie" (I may be wrong about the exact term). It's also encapsulated in the old saying "Straining at gnats but swallowing camels." My own betas bear it out when they pick at the details of horse care or childbirth, but question nothing about, you know, the fact the evil empire fields armies of monsters -- what on earth do you do with them in peace-time? I hope it's because I project enough boldness, backed up with plausibility, to sin on the page.

(I have theories about the uses of minotaurs in peace-time :D )

But it's tougher to be bold when your mojo is tainted with your story's dark night of the soul. The bond between creator and creation a two-way street, and since we all love our characters so -- despite the horrible things we do to them, or maybe because of the horrible things -- we're deeply sympathetic to the plight that we're working so hard to get onto the page. How many times have your characters left you in tears? They do it to me too, and I'm usually a very even-keeled person, emotionally.

Housekeeping
The cover art for Disciple, Part I: For Want of a Piglet is in development! When it's ready, I'll be revealing it over at my book blog, Disciples of the Fount.

Next Week at Unicorn Bell

The Study Hall phase of the query contest at Unicorn Bell begins on Monday! They gave me the first posting slot, so I spent yesterday polishing that up rather than work on a blog post here.

I also spent yesterday finishing the first chunk of Disciple, Part V so I can put it aside and focus on publishing Part I for a while. And there was a birthday in there too.

Maybe I'll sneak in some revisions to Part IV in the meantime -- the feedback I got from the one beta has been weighing on my mind lately. IV's been suffering a bout of pile-of-crap-itis and it needs to be tackled and worked out. And I'll plot out the rest of Part V. It's good to be busy, but it's feeling more like stress now that I've decided to publish. :)

Need to work on my blog for the book, too! 

Hope your summer is going well -- keep cool!

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?