Saturday, January 06, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Supporting Characters
These fall into Four basic categories: Protagonists, Antagonists, The Chorus, Extras.
They’re called supporting characters because they exist in the service of the Hero. It’s that simple. The Hero is the sun around which all other characters orbit in some way. This is why some literary theorists describe the Hero as the pivotal character.
Supporting characters give your Hero and Villain something to work with. They help define your main characters and advance the plot. They define your characters by revealing their sides, as we discussed in relational characterization.
If a character serves no purpose in a story, they shouldn’t be there. You don’t want unnecessary distractions. You don’t have the luxury of that, especially in comics where the amount of space available is always limited. So choose your characters wisely and get the most value out of them.
We don’t have all the facts at our disposal in life. Neither do your Heroes or Villains. The supporting characters exist to supply the Hero or Villain with information, advance the story, and/or support the premise in some way. Here’s a definition of the types.
Protagonists: These are the sub-heroes of the story. Like the Hero, they’re fighting for the premise. They are against the Villain. They either help the hero on his quest or are fighting along side of him for the similar reasons. They may be friendly competitors, even. We root for the Protagonists. Sometimes we may be tricked into thinking they are the Hero, as we did in South Pacific, so we’re surprised when they die. Basically, they exist to help the hero in some way by providing information or the lucky breaks he needs to succeed. They can also be the love interest. In super-hero team comics, the other members in the team are the protagonists. The Hero is the one character around which that particular story revolves.
Antagonists: They are the Villain’s accomplices, his minions. Sometimes, like the Protagonists, they work on the side of the Villain, but not with him. They may be friendly competitors or they may be helping him without their knowledge. Like the Villain, they don’t have to be a real person, they can be a concept or a force of nature. Whatever they are, they add to the conflict. They are in opposition to the hero.
The Chorus: In Greek Plays these characters served to provide commentary on the action in the story. For our purposes, the Chorus is any character who exists to provide information in the story. Examples of a Chorus character include: The scientist who provides the Hero with technical information he needs, the street informant the Hero shakes down for leads, the store clerk who tells him where the phone is, etc.
Extras: These characters are basically window dressing. They help enhance the mood or feel of a scene. Examples include the filthy bum panhandling for change, the waiter at a restaurant, the sexy girl who flirts with the Hero, the angry mob.
For all intents and purposes, the supporting characters are devices to advance the story. But they should never seem to be anything less than real people. It should never be obvious to the Audience that these characters are just there to serve the plot. To avoid this you should create strong motives for them being where they are and knowing what they know. Believability is critical.
It’s possible to put supporting characters in orbit around each other to help define them. Since each character pulls on a different aspect of another, this is a sound way to define their dimensions.
The same rules of characterization apply to supporting characters, but you don’t want to make extras complex unless they come back in another story. Extras are there as eye candy or to create mood and polarity. You want to focus on the hero and the villain in your story and only expand on the other characters as relevant to your tale.
So try to bring life to the supporting cast without going overboard.
If you’re writing an adventure story it’s not a good idea to let the supporting characters steal thunder from your hero. You don’t want them to make your hero look bad, or too dependent on them. You want them to only support him as they’re needed. If the Hero needs their advice or counsel too much, he looks weak. Furthermore, if they think too much for him, figure out too many things for him, the Hero looks dumb. So be careful.
REMEMBER: Every character must have a purpose. Supporting characters support.
Friday, January 05, 2007
24: So Good It’s Scary
I’m really looking forward to the new season of 24. It starts soon. And according to Entertainment Weekly, it rocks.
Most viewers of 24 will want to know one thing above all others: Is the upcoming season of Fox’s groundbreaking experiment in serial TV (father of Lost, grandpappy of Heroes and Jericho) as good as last year? Let me put it to you this way: There are more thrills and suspense in the first four hours than most series can pack into a single season. Or an entire run of show, for that matter. I got those four episodes from EW Central Command and planned to dole them out over the course of maybe a week. Instead I ended up watching all of them that same night. Day 6 (at least so far) is like a book you can’t put down…even though there are times when you may want to.
Glad to hear it. The last two seasons were a lot of fun, but you had to wonder if they could keep it up.
Secrets of Writing: Characterization part 3
UPDATE: Someone pointed out I double posted the last one. So I have posted new content below.
Archetypes
You may have noticed that human personalities seem to fall into categories. Some people are clownish, some are mean, some are serious, some are childish, some are bland. There are several basic human models that everyone recognizes. These are called Archetypes. From these models you can extrapolate a personality and build on it, since no one is 100% archetypal. Men and woman can be a combination of any of these archetypes.
The Hero: Athletic, confident, handsome, successful, a leader. A model of what everyone wants to be, but most people are jealous of.
The Saint: Pure, noble, kind, humble, understanding. Usually a religious figure.
The Lord: Aloof, regal, into presentation and appearances, usually well educated but not necessarily intelligent, usually wealthy, has high standards, expects perfection, well mannered, easily turned off. Tends to be cold.
The Nice Guy: Kind, thoughtful, helpful, sympathetic, sweet, unthreatening, easy going, dependable, a real pal.
The Harlot: Earthy, flirtatious, wanton, wild, instant mood swings, want’s fun all the time, easily bored, non-committal, freewheeling, looking for a free ride.
The Drunk: Can’t deal with reality, looking for escape, wants to get high, stoned, drunk, laid, anything to take their mind off the pain they’re carrying around inside. Sticks to light conversation, irresponsible, self destructive. Usually insecure.
The Cheerleader: Bouncy, cheerful, positive, grinning, happy, cooperative, an organizer, a shill, a back patter, often touchy-feely, wants to be your friend, is always UP!
Mr/Ms Sensitive: Wants to get involved with causes, self righteous, judgmental, ideological, cynical, passionate, tends to demonize opponents, is prone to zealotry, can be demagogic and polemical, considers themselves torch carriers for “values”, thinks they feel empathy but are really only capable of sympathy.
The Clown: Comical, never serious, always trying to get attention, a buffoon, happy-go-lucky, usually unreliable.
The Egotist: Usually intelligent, but over bearing, self absorbed, self centered, insensitive to other people’s feelings, a know it all, a braggart, talks about themselves a lot, free with their opinions, but doesn’t have much interest in anyone else’s, thinks he deserves everything he wants, basically a spoiled brat.
The Dreamer: Intelligent, lots of aspirations, low drive, daydreams a lot, generally inactive, easy going, usually set in their ways, capable of doubt, but addicted to denial and rationalization, always expects to win the lottery, good hearted but frivolous, generally a nice person but is often irresponsible.
The Drone: Bland, responsible, doesn’t rock the boat, keeps head down, plays the game, low confidence, slow about everything they do, waiting for retirement. Dependable. ]
The Masochist: No self esteem, a weakling and a coward, thinks he’s bad, feels guilty about everything, feels he deserves to be treated bad even though he doesn’t really want it, often keeps these feelings to himself, but radiates the above vibes even so. Often gives off strange sexual vibes, like they’re a voyeur in need of a show.
The Professor: Extremely intelligent, non-aggressive, generally asexual, lacking in social skills, little attention paid to appearance, scholarly, generally unassuming, introverted, extremely focused on pet interests, odd sense of humor.
The Dejected: Depressed, weepy, miserable, gloomy, unhappy, or all of the above. A half empty type person. Never satisfied, nothing pleases, always looking for the fault in things, distrustful of any altruistic gesture, always looks on the dark side.
The Boss: A workaholic, driven, a bottom liner, cuts to the chase, no time for protocol, wants it yesterday, doesn’t care about your feelings or problems, demanding, serious, cheap.
The Grouch: Brooding, angry, paranoid, distrustful, a loner, a shut in. Usually a mean old man.
The Shark: Opportunistic, selfish, conniving, manipulative, heartless, charming when necessarily, cold the rest of the time, greedy, ambitious, driven, always HUNGRY for more.
The Villain (also known as The Sadist): Spiteful, vicious, sadistic, power mad, egotistical, cruel, greedy, out for blood, plays games, sick sense of humor.
Everyone has met a version of these archetypes, so they have powerful resonance in a story. That is why you see these characters in fiction all the time. But no one is a pure archetype. Usually, qualities of the others are mixed in.
Some archetypes are actually masks that people have chosen as their persona. The Clown and The Cheerleader are usually fronts for deep pain or insecurity. The same rule applies to the Grouch. The Grouch is often a good person inside, who is afraid of being hurt by other people, so they take the persona as a defense. The Cheerleader is often the Shark or the Grouch in disguise. The Clown is often the Grouch or the Egotist in reality. The Saint is often the Boss or the Shark. The Hero is often a great looking, lucky version of the Boss or the Drone.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Constructing Characters Part 2
Any person’s life, from a fictional character to yourself, your dad, your best friend, every person’s life and their experiences are defined by the choices they made. And those choices often reveal a lot about a person’s character. How smart are they? How foolish? The clothes they choose to wear, their hair style, what they eat, all of that defines a person. More than they realize. People judge others by these things. And readers will judge your characters by these things.
Choice is a tool of characterization.
The Power of Choice
Imagine a restaurant full of people. A gunman bursts in and starts shooting. Most will dive under the tables or hit the floor. Some will just cower there until they are killed. Some will try to escape. Some may even try to fight the gunman. Some will scream to God. Some will lose control of their bladders. Some will laugh hysterically. Some will cry uncontrollably. There are all kinds of possible reactions to this situation and what your character does, or chooses to do. These reactions will define what your character is like at that moment in the story.
We are all defined by the choices we make in life. People form impressions based on how they see other people act, dress, and live. You choose what kind of clothes to wear. You choose your hair style. You choose to either be fit or fat. You choose to be lazy or industrious. You choose to be friendly or obnoxious. You choose to be honest or lie to yourself and others. You choose to be good or bad. This defines your character.
Many people act a certain way because of programming they’ve done to themselves over the course of their life, which was influenced by their environment, culture, family, friends and experiences. So much of their behavior is instinctive, rather than conscious. Even so, it is a clue to who they are and where their head is at. At some point, we chose to make ourselves the way we are.
People may choose to be lazy or mean, unconsciously, but it’s still a powerful indicator of their psyche. Because it’s saying they don’t care enough to change. Or they lack the will. Or they are unable to see themselves in an objective light. And this can be very instructive and useful in a scene.
When you construct a character, you need to take these things into consideration. But to make your job easy, remember to think of the choices your character would make in the course of the story. Choices in clothes, choices in appropriate behavior, choices in verbal and emotional response.
Many writers mistakenly write their characters from the hip, basing the character’s choices on their own idea of how to act. Or on clichés that this character is “supposed” to be like. This leads to one dimensional characters, and thus, to unmemorable fiction.
It’s important to think about the character’s choices when you have him respond to another character’s action or dialog. When you have him walk into the room and announce themselves. When you have him choose something to eat in a restaurant.
But more importantly, there will be times where they will have to make critical choices that will have a major impact on the story. It will become very important to understand the nature of these critical choices. We will discuss this later..
REMEMBER: Choice is one of the most powerful tools of characterization.
The Rules of Choice
Choice behaves by certain rules. If you ignore these rules, you run the risk of offending your audience. Characters must be give logical choices which are not absolute. In other words, choices like: “Eat a bowl of ice cream or shoot your mother!” are not choices anyone is going to take seriously. Obviously, you would eat the bowl of ice cream. If you hated your mom that much you would have killed her by now.
A choice between right and wrong, good and evil isn’t a worthwhile decision in fiction terms. If a hero makes an obviously wrong choice, the audience will lose their empathy for them and that is fatal to your story.
Therefore you need to create a third choice. And each choice should have attendant risks and benefits attached. They should be hard to choose between.
Example: Let’s say you are forced to do a favor for a mobster or your best friend will be killed. The Choices are:
A: Take an unmarked package onboard a plane.
B. Steal secrets from your employer that will help the mobster rob him.
C: Refuse.
Choice A seems like the safest choice, but the risks are obvious. Packages are scanned by detectors before being allowed on planes, dogs are used to sniff them for drugs. You may be arrested if it’s contraband. And if you aren’t arrested, you’re still probably smuggling something bad. Then again, it could be innocent contents. This choice is morally ambiguous.
Choice B seems like a bad choice because it means stealing, and helping the mobster get more powerful. But it would also keep your friend alive. It also has less risks attached. But it’s also morally inferior to the first choice. This one seems immoral.
Choice C: The morally correct thing to do, but it would mean your friend’s death and maybe your own. The audience would hate you, because no one likes a morally inflexible person. But you may want to say you refuse first, just to see if the mobster really means what he says. Then you could change your mind. Maybe.
You need to create choices with inherent risks, but they should also have benefits attached, otherwise, there is no motivation to do them. The benefit of A and B is that they will buy some time for your friend’s. The benefit of C is you remain a morally correct person. Choosing A or B is more selfless and heroic. Choosing C would make you look like a person who cares about your morals more than other people’s lives. It’s not an empathetic position to take.
Most people would choose A as the most intelligent (unless they hated their boss, then they might gleefully choose B). Your audience will be choosing alongside your hero and hoping he makes their choice. This will increase their empathy for your character. They will find your character smart if he chooses what they thought was the right answer. But you then have to show them what the risk was in taking it. It can’t just be that easy.
For choice A, let’s call the hero Bob. Bob goes to the airport with the package the gangster handed him, sweating blood as he passes through security. Every cop seems to look at him with distrust. As the package goes through the X-ray scanner, Bob watches as the cops look at the video screen, then stop the conveyor belt so they can examine something that catches their eye. They turn to look at Bob, coldly. Or so he thinks. Bob frets, but tries to hide it. Suddenly, they let the package go on through. As Bob walks to the plane, some DEA agents are coming toward him with a big dog on a leash. The dog looks at Bob and starts to make noises. But the DEA men don’t notice. They’re too busy talking about last night’s football game. Bob hero gets on the plane, fastens his seat belt and lets out a sigh of relief. He made it. The package must be okay.
But, as the plane gets ready for take off, Bob notices a man two seats up on the left. He’s a bitter rival of the gangster who made Bob take the package. Suddenly, he realizes the package could be a bomb! The gangster sent him on a suicide mission to kill an enemy. Oh, no! The plane starts to take off. It’s too late to leave. Now what?
This is how you keep the story moving. Choice opens doors and allows your audience to participate in the story with the main character. But you don’t stop with one choice being made. You create problems that force the character to make other choices as a result of their first choice.
If you do one of those stories where a character has to choose between three doors, one of which means freedom and the other two mean certain death. You’re giving the audience a blind choice, where anything can happen. This tends to be unsatisfying because it feels random. This is why writers usually leave clues as to which door is the correct one, so the Hero can make an informed choice. It’s not just a blind decision.
As we discussed earlier, people like a sense of order in their stories. They don’t like randomness unless it’s shown to have been part of a causal chain later in the story. For now, remember that characters must be given hard choices. Not obvious ones. And every choice must have repercussions.
If there are no stakes involved, the audience has no reason to get excited. No reason to care. This is why gambling is so popular. Every game involves making choices, each with risks and potential pay offs. People love the excitement and the promise choices can offer them.
Emotional Choices
When we’re feeling emotional about something we may behave out of character for the moment. A normally thoughtful person might make snap judgments when they’re angry. A reckless person may be cautious when they’re scared. It’s important to think about the emotion of the character in a scene before you decide what they choose to do.
Remember the rules of choice, but also remember that audiences respond to emotions very strongly. Emotion has more resonance than logic. Logic is cold. Logic is somewhat impersonal. Emotion is very personal.
But you can’t expect emotional empathy from the audience unless you’ve led them to feel that way first. Showing a person crying doesn’t make the audience cry unless we’ve first been made to empathize with their struggle and pain.
You have to do that carefully, building up to those moments where you have emotional payoffs. An audience will understand a stupid choice if the character was in an emotional frame of mind where they’d be reckless. But you have to first convince the audience that this emotional state was arrived at realistically. People who suddenly change emotions at the drop of the hat are usually nuts. The term “Wacko” is applied to such people. Wackos don’t create empathy in an audience. We can laugh at them, or disapprove of them, but don’t expect too much sympathy.
REMEMBER: Make sure your characters have reasons to be emotional when they make emotional choices.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Constructing Characters: Part 1
PERSONALITY
Personality comes in five basic flavors: Boring, funny, sexy, interesting, and scary. You need to determine which version of the latter four you want your characters to have, because boring is the last thing you want a character to be.
Of course, there are times you will want a boring character for the sake of contrast, or to make some kind of point. But even then, you have to make them interesting enough to keep our attention.
Think of a small party of people. Notice how some people seem to always stand out in a crowd. They seem to get all the attention. As a writer, you’ve got to figure out what they’re doing right that makes them interesting to others and use that to your advantage.
Of course, popular people are often shallow and superficial to talk to. They might be popular because of their looks, or money. But a lot of the time, it’s because they are very careful about what they say, and now to manipulate other people’s egos. A lot of the time, popular people are also funny. Maybe not to you, but to their friends. A person’s sense of humor can tell you a lot about them.
Popular individuals are often favored because they retain mystery about themselves. They don’t reveal their inner pain or their personal problems. At the same time, they uplift the mood of a scene. The “life of the party” is always someone with a sense of humor, a schmoozer who knows how to please. Depressed or angry individuals are a turn off, even if they are mysterious.
Human beings are attracted to positivism, not negativism . Successful people tend not to mope around or act depressed. Even if you may be like that, if you want a character to be appealing, you have to think of a way to make them more positive and dynamic than you are.
So creating a personality that is positive and somewhat mysterious should be your main goal. Your hero cannot look like a wimp internally, even if they do externally. You can peel away the layers of mystery as the story unfolds. But never tell us too much about a person right off the bat.
If your hero is popular to others, then they need to behave in a way that’s believable. If they’re not popular, they need to be empathetic.
It’s one of the first things a person learns about dating. Never tell the other person everything about yourself. It will inevitably bore them or put them off. The less someone knows, the more they need to find out. That gives them something to work for. It’s like a carrot on a stick. We need motivations in life. Nothing has value unless we struggle for it. So relationships that have the most appeal are always the ones involving a chase. We chase after what we think we see and want. The less we know about someone, the more we can project our fantasies and ideals on them.
The great psychologist Carl Jung proposed a theory that we project our inner most desires on people we are attracted to. We make them what we want them to be in our minds. They are never truly what we believe them to be. And if we see that demonstrated in some way it’s very disappointing and hurtful. Character personas are idealized human personalities. We create clear individuals we can understand. So it’s necessary to reveal what we want the reader to know at that point in time, so they will form this idealized model of the character in their minds while reading.
A character’s personality needs to grab our attention. They have to light up every scene. Naturally, the Hero is the main bonfire. We don’t want the supporting cast to get to steal the show, though it can happen. Make sure the Hero and Villain keeps us spellbound. Their personality needs to outshine the other characters in the story.
Scary personalities are the kind crazy people have. It can range from homicidal to disturbed. They make us worried that it could rub off. Or they remind us of that old adage: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Scary characters are great for spiking the energy of a scene. The Frank Booth character in BLUE VELVET really grabbed our attention every time he was on camera. But you have to be careful with these kind of characters because they can lapse into parody very easily.
Components of a Persona
The human persona can be broken down into three main components. Intellectual, Emotional, and Habitual. Some people are more prone to reason than emotion. Some are the opposite. And many people have unconscious habits which are displayed randomly or most of the time. These habits can indicate certain neuroses or psychological traits that can be used for characterization purposes. When constructing a character’s persona it’s not a bad idea to keep these three things in mind and see how they can be used to your advantage.
Personas, Masks and Facades
It’s important to understand that for many people, their personality is something they constructed as a tool for interacting with society. It’s not who they really are. It’s a mask. The real person is far more complex. If you could read people’s minds, you’d see their true persona hiding behind the facade.
We all know that how people act under normal circumstances is misleading. We can never be sure of a person’s true intentions, even if we know them well. There’s only one way to really get to see the inside of someone’s head and that’s when they are put under pressure. The cowards run and the heroes let the fists fly when it all hits the fan. When the Audience knows where a character really stands on an issue, they can be more comfortable with them.
In life, this is how you find out who your real friends are. When they are tested by the cruel twists of fate. The term “Fair Weather Friend” is known to us all. We’ve seen who sticks by our side when things get rough and who doesn’t return our calls.
In a story, you need to put a lot of pressure on your characters. They need to be tested, put through the fire. We need to see what kind of person they really are, what they are truly made of. And that’s what the Audiences want to see.
Pressure
Pressure can come in many forms. Through relational characterization, we can show how a normally cool character becomes flustered when his mother is around. By using choice as a tool, we can present the character with problems where the solution they choose determines their moral backbone. We can also cause the character a world of hurt to see how they react to it. The Villain can force them to do something against their will, and we can see how they deal with it.
Pressure is another critical force in storytelling. No pressure, no conflict, no story.
No one cares about people who have an easy time. We might get jealous, but we won’t be impressed. You want your hero to impress us.
There are exceptions, of course. James Bond seems to have an easy time doing certain things. But if you watch the movies, you’ll notice the best ones are the stories where he was under the most pressure to succeed. Ultimately, James Bond’s ability at cards or seducing women isn’t the skills that matter. It’s not how he overcomes the Villain. He does that using his wits and his brawn and usually, they are put to the test.
The job of a plot is to put pressure on the characters so we can see who they are and what they’re made of. Until that happens, your hero is just another citizen.
REMEMBER: True character is revealed under pressure.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Archetypes
You may have noticed that human personalities seem to fall into categories. Some people are clownish, some are mean, some are serious, some are childish, some are bland. There are several basic human models that everyone recognizes. These are called Archetypes. From these models you can extrapolate a personality and build on it, since no one is 100% archetypal. Men and woman can be a combination of any of these archetypes.
The Hero/Heroine: Athletic, confident, handsome, successful, a leader. A model of what everyone wants to be, but most people are jealous of.
The Saint: Pure, noble, kind, humble, understanding. Usually a religious figure.
The Lord: Aloof, regal, into presentation and appearances, usually well educated but not necessarily intelligent, usually wealthy, has high standards, expects perfection, well mannered, easily turned off. Tends to be cold.
The Nice Guy/Girl: Kind, thoughtful, helpful, sympathetic, sweet, unthreatening, easy going, dependable, a real pal.
The Rake/Harlot: Earthy, flirtatious, wanton, wild, instant mood swings, want’s fun all the time, easily bored, non-committal, freewheeling, looking for a free ride.
The Drunk: Can’t deal with reality, looking for escape, wants to get high, stoned, drunk, laid, anything to take their mind off the pain they’re carrying around inside. Sticks to light conversation, irresponsible, self destructive. Usually insecure.
The Cheerleader: Bouncy, cheerful, positive, grinning, happy, cooperative, an organizer, a shill, a back patter, often touchy-feely, wants to be your friend, is always UP!
Mr/Ms Sensitive: Wants to get involved with causes, self righteous, judgmental, ideological, cynical, passionate, tends to demonize opponents, is prone to zealotry, can be demagogic and polemical, considers themselves torch carriers for “values”, thinks they feel empathy but are really only capable of sympathy.
The Clown: Comical, never serious, always trying to get attention, a buffoon, happy-go-lucky, usually unreliable.
The Egotist: Usually intelligent, but over bearing, self absorbed, self centered, insensitive to other people’s feelings, a know it all, a braggart, talks about themselves a lot, free with their opinions, but doesn’t have much interest in anyone else’s, thinks he deserves everything he wants, basically a spoiled brat.
The Dreamer: Intelligent, lots of aspirations, low drive, daydreams a lot, generally inactive, easy going, usually set in their ways, capable of doubt, but addicted to denial and rationalization, always expects to win the lottery, good hearted but frivolous, generally a nice person but is often irresponsible.
The Drone: Bland, responsible, doesn’t rock the boat, keeps head down, plays the game, low confidence, slow about everything they do, waiting for retirement. Dependable. ]
The Masochist: No self esteem, a weakling and a coward, thinks he’s bad, feels guilty about everything, feels he deserves to be treated bad even though he doesn’t really want it, often keeps these feelings to himself, but radiates the above vibes even so. Often gives off strange sexual vibes, like they’re a voyeur in need of a show.
The Professor: Extremely intelligent, non-aggressive, generally asexual, lacking in social skills, little attention paid to appearance, scholarly, generally unassuming, introverted, extremely focused on pet interests, odd sense of humor.
The Dejected: Depressed, weepy, miserable, gloomy, unhappy, or all of the above. A half empty type person. Never satisfied, nothing pleases, always looking for the fault in things, distrustful of any altruistic gesture, always looks on the dark side.
The Boss: A workaholic, driven, a bottom liner, cuts to the chase, no time for protocol, wants it yesterday, doesn’t care about your feelings or problems, demanding, serious, cheap.
The Grouch: Brooding, angry, paranoid, distrustful, a loner, a shut in. Usually a mean old man.
The Shark: Opportunistic, selfish, conniving, manipulative, heartless, charming when necessarily, cold the rest of the time, greedy, ambitious, driven, always HUNGRY for more.
The Villain (also known as The Sadist): Spiteful, vicious, sadistic, power mad, egotistical, cruel, greedy, out for blood, plays games, sick sense of humor.
Everyone has met a version of these archetypes, so they have powerful resonance in a story. That is why you see these characters in fiction all the time. But no one is a pure archetype. Usually, qualities of the others are mixed in.
Some archetypes are actually masks that people have chosen as their persona. The Clown and The Cheerleader are usually fronts for deep pain or insecurity. The same rule applies to the Grouch. The Grouch is often a good person inside, who is afraid of being hurt by other people, so they take the persona as a defense. The Cheerleader is often the Shark or the Grouch in disguise. The Clown is often the Grouch or the Egotist in reality. The Saint is often the Boss or the Shark. The Hero is often a great looking, lucky version of the Boss or the Drone.
REMEMBER: Archetypal characters should never be fully archetypal.
Monday, January 01, 2007
Secrets of Writing: The Villain
Also known as the Antagonist, the Villain is usually the champion of the counter premise. The Villain is often the center of evil in the story. It is from him that the conflict arises. He’s usually behind the dilemmas facing the hero and he’s in direct opposition to the hero obtaining the Grail. Because he stands in the way, he’s usually a lot closer to the Grail than the Hero is.
Unlike the Hero, however, the villain doesn’t have to be a person. It can be a force of nature, or merely something as abstract as life itself. The Villain can be the Hero’s insecurities, it can be an addiction, it can be poverty, or an illness.
Remember our discussion of SOUTH PACIFIC? In that story the villain was bigotry. Nellie Forbush didn’t want to marry Emile De Becque because he’d been married to a South Seas Islander and has two children of a mixed race. Nellie was from Arkansas and was raised by a bigoted mother, so it was hard for her to shake her upbringing. Lt. Cable didn’t want to marry the island girl for similar reasons. He loved her, but he knew society back home would ostracize him and he didn’t feel good about that. Later, when on his mission, Cable decides to stay on the island after the war and marry her anyway. But he gets killed before that can happen. His death shows Nellie how pointless bigotry is and how it stands in the way of love between all people. She overcomes the Villain of the story and marries De Becque.
SOUTH PACIFIC broke all Broadway records in its day. It was Rogers and Hammerstein’s most successful work. But generally speaking, the audience prefers human villains in their stories. Or humanoid, if you will, since a lot of the villains in comic books can’t really be called human.
Villains don’t have to be evil, or even bad. They can be well meaning individuals. After all, some of the worse crimes in history were caused by well meaning individuals. The Inquisition was supposed to weed out the sinners, the Missionaries tried to save people around the world by destroying their culture, the U.S. Government interned Japanese Americans during World War II to make our country safe. We know now that all these people were wrong, but at the time, they had “good” intentions.
Most “Villains” in real life think of themselves as the good guy. They think they are doing the right thing. If you’re a liberal, you might see Rush Limbaugh as a villain. If you’re a conservative, you might see Jesse Jackson as a villain. And if you’re a centrist, you might see them both as villains. A Villain is anyone who is not on “our” side. When you decide who the Hero of the story is, you’re telling the audience which side to take. You then have to make the audience root for the Hero and boo the Villain. But the Villain does not have to be evil. He can even be sympathetic.
Most of the evil in our world is caused by stupidity or greed, not by willful destruction. When you create a Villain, it’s more instructive to the Audience to see one that represents problems they can relate to. People generally don’t relate to an alien who wants to rule the planet because they’re BAAAD. But give them a Villain who wants to steal from them or make their life miserable because it serves his own personal gain, and the Audience can see truth in that. Most of us have been victimized at some point or another by such people.
You also make a Villain more believable when you reveal their inner pain. Most criminals are doing ill because that’s what they’ve been taught all their lives. Or they’re trying to get some pay back for perceived injustices. Or they’re trying to get ahead the fast way because their lives are terrible and they can’t take the pain. They’re addicted to the rush of trying to win through danger.
Your villain must have a strong reason for what he does. He can’t just be doing it because he’s evil. There must be something in it for him. The stakes for the villain should be just as high as they are for the hero. That way, the story becomes more exciting as it builds toward the climax. Failing that, you should at least create some reasons why the villain must succeed. As the champion of the counter premise, his side demands equal time.
The Villain should be as believable as your hero. Maybe more so. After all, the hero in a story is only as good as the Villain. The Villain creates the conflict. If you have a weak Villain, you have a weak conflict. Then your hero doesn’t look heroic.
Villains are Superior!
The Villain should always have the upper hand until the climax of the story. If the Villain isn’t winning, you lose the conflict. Say good-bye to the audience at that point. Ever notice how people start walking out of the theater before the credits roll, because they know the movie’s ended? They don’t call it the climax for nothing. Once people have their fun, they’re outta there!
The Villain is the pull, the driving force behind the conflict. You need the Villain to be powerful. The Villain has to put the hero on the ropes. The Villain can never show weakness in the story until the climax. Otherwise, people will lose interest. Guaranteed.
The Villain must be superior to the hero in some way. In SOUTH PACIFIC, the Villain was a powerful psychological force that prevented the heroine from truly opening her heart to the one she loved. The Villain was winning up until the end. In TERMINATOR 2, the T-1000 was an unstoppable force right up to the last scene. In Jaws, the shark was relentlessly kicking Roy Schieder’s butt until he got lucky.
Nobody cares if your hero can beat up a weakling. That isn’t heroic. The Villain has to be superior in a way that matters. If not brawn, then brains. If not brains, then skill. But the Villain must be superior.
REMEMBER: Weak Villain, weak story.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
The Secrets of Writing: Heroes
Hero: Also known as the Protagonist. The hero is the center of good in the story. He is the person you root for. The Hero doesn’t need to be good in the purest sense. In fact, people nowadays relate better to characters like themselves, flawed individuals trying to do the right thing. People who try to do good.
The key word here is try. Most people have an idea what “good” is, but not everyone agrees on what that is. Most people think of themselves as basically good. Even the most sordid criminals don’t see themselves as bad. Defining who the hero is in a story is based on one or more of the following factors:
1. The consensus of positive characters in the story ultimately take the side of your hero.
2. The hero is a constructive force in the story, whereas the villain is destructive.
3. The hero, as champion of the premise, is vindicated when the premise is proven.
A good example of how a hero can be a villain or visa-versa, depending on the premise, can be demonstrated in Romanian Folk Tales about Vlad the Impaler, also known as Count Dracula.
In Romania, Vlad is a folk hero, despite the fact he butchered thousands of people. In neighboring countries, he is a monster. Even though both Romanians and their neighbors tell the same stories, Vlad changes from hero to villain depending on where the tale is told.
One story relates how some visiting dignitaries from Turkey came to visit Vlad at his castle. They didn’t take off their hats in his presence. When he asked them why, they said it was a custom in their country never to remove their fez except when sleeping. Vlad then ordered his soldiers to nail the men’s hats to their heads so they would never be tempted to disobey their custom.
In the Romanian version the story’s premise is “Foreigners should respect the customs of the land they visit.” The tale is used to show how Vlad taught those damn Turks a thing or two about manners. How dare they be so rude to a Romanian lord! Whereas in neighboring countries, the premise is: “Romanian lords are a bunch of psychotic despots.”
Or take the O.J. Simpson trial as an example. One section of the country felt he was an innocent black man unfairly persecuted for marrying a white woman. While another section thought he was a murderer who was treated with kid gloves because he was a rich, famous black man and the city of L.A. was afraid of another riot.
The people who thought he was innocent considered all the evidence against Simpson to be planted and made up. The people who felt he’s guilty thought the system was stacked in his favor because the defense could say whatever they wanted and didn’t have to prove it. Whereas the prosecution had to go through strenuous evidence hearings before they could present their data.
This is why the story of Simpson dominated the media so strongly during the time of the trial. The conflict between the premise and counter-premise was extremely hot. You could also choose your heroes and villains easily. The players looked bad or good depending on your side. Johnny Cochran was either a smart, honest lawyer out to save his friend from
the cruel jaws of society, or he was a sleazy con man out to free a rich pal he knew, in his heart-of-hearts, was guilty. Marcia Clark was either a sharp, determined, underpaid civil servant battling corrupt attorneys out to free their wealthy client, or she was a vicious, cold
bitch of a prosecutor, out to put away Simpson at any cost, just to advance her career.
In reality, it’s not so cut and dry. Cochran could have been sincere and still be wrong. Clark could been a bitch and still be right. In a good court room drama, these characters would be fleshed out so you’re never completely sure about them until the conclusion of the story. This way the counter premise is able to give the premise a tough battle, making the story strong.
Unfortunately, the end of the trial did not answer anything for either side. No one’s opinions were changed. Life and fiction are not the same. As we said before, fiction is our way of making sense of the senseless.
In fiction, you need to decide who the hero is and work from there. The hero must be the underdog in every story. If the hero isn’t battling insurmountable odds, they don’t have a real conflict. No conflict, no story.
When the hero has too easy a time winning the Grail, the story has no punch. It’s flat and anti-climactic. Nobody is interested in reading a story where there are no stakes. And nobody is interested in a hero who doesn’t do anything special. The conflict is what makes the hero interesting. The way the hero deals with it, and their ability to overcome the conflict, is critical. So you have to make the stakes high or the story and your hero are going to be awfully boring.
Empathy, not Sympathy
The Hero must be empathetic to the audience, not sympathetic. We must feel for him as an equal, even if we disagree with him. Empathy makes you feel for someone in a way you can relate to. Empathy is something you feel for an equal. For someone you see parts of yourself in.
Sympathy is a more distant emotion. It’s what you feel for someone you feel sorry for. You don’t really see him as an equal. You don’t see yourself in that person, but you feel bad for them anyway. You may feel sympathy for a wino begging for change, but you don’t feel empathy for him. Not unless you see him as a peer.
Empathy is created when we see the hero of a story as the center of good. We know that, of the characters in the story, he is the one who is trying to make things right. He is trying to create order out of chaos. If the story is constructed properly, the audience will root for him as he journeys on his quest.
People, by nature, want to find the good in others. You create empathy by revealing a character’s positive sides. Even when you’re dealing with anti-heroes.
Anti-hero stories work when we feel empathy for the main character, despite the fact that he’s a rotten bastard. Your Hero doesn’t have to be Joe Perfect. He can be a crook. But we must feel empathy for him or you’ve lost.
REMEMBER: Empathy, not sympathy!
Choosing the hero
In some stories, we don’t know who the Hero is at first. Sometimes we’re given multiple protagonists to root for. By the end, one of them is the survivor, or is proven to be the winner of the Grail.
This technique is often used when you need to kill a protagonist to make the point of the premise stronger. A good example is in the musical SOUTH PACIFIC. The story starts when a young navy lieutenant, Joe Cable, arrives on a south seas island during World War II. Cable’s reporting for a secret mission. He needs to convince an expatriate Frenchman, named Emile De Becque, to help him sneak onto another island De Becque knows well. The island is held by the Japanese and Lt. Cable’s mission is to spy on them.
De Becque doesn’t want to do help Cable. He’s middle-aged, successful, and in love with a young American nurse named Nellie Forbush.
It seems clear right away that the Lt. Cable is the hero of the story. But we discover later he really isn’t. The true hero is the Nellie Forbush. The Lieutenant only serves as a device to validate the premise of the story. The Villain is preventing the Nellie from marrying De Becque. The same villain prevents Lt. Cable from marrying an island girl he falls in love with. Because both De Becque and Cable are losing to the Villain, they decide to go off to do the mission against the Japanese. Cable gets killed. This event helps Nellie defeat the Villain and marry De Becque in the end. Who is the Villain? More on that later.
Every story can have multiple protagonists, but usually, there is only one character who is the real hero of the story. They are the Grail winner. They will be the one to walk away with the glory at the end. But that doesn’t mean they have to survive. As we’ll discuss later, there are three possible endings to a story. And you decide which one makes the point better. The hero can win the Grail in a whole lot of ways. Not just by victory.
REMEMBER: The hero is the champion of the premise, whether they like it or not.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Secrets of Writing: Characterization Pt 1
WHAT IS CHARACTERIZATION?
This may surprise you, but characters are superior to real people. The reason is, characters are clearer. They’re works of art.
Because they are knowable, you can understand characters better than real people. Real people are a mess. They’re confused. Unpredictable. Even the person who think you know can turn on you and do something unimaginable. . We alternate our personas due to a mishmash of upbringing, attitude, world view, and neuro-chemical fluctuations. Real people are complex. Even boring ones.
This is why characters are much more appealing than real people. You can rely on them to be who they’re supposed to be. And if they aren’t you know it’s the writer’s fault. Or his intent.
If only people were that solid.
But to make good characters you need to understand the principles that make people what they are. Your goal isn’t to imitate life. It’s to refine it. To improve on it.
A character is a distillation of human traits. You can either distill 100 proof hard liquor, that blows the brain cells out the back of your skull, or you distill some watery swill no one will want to swallow. It’s up to you.
Characters in a story are not independent of the plot, just as we are not independent of reality. We can’t just snap our fingers and stop time, or decide that the sky will be green today, or decide that we don’t like the existing government so everything changes the second we feel it should be different. We all have to deal with reality as it comes to us. So do characters in fiction.
This does not mean that characters in a story should just go with the flow. People have the power to change the course of events, and your hero in particular, must affect change in some way. Otherwise there’s no point in doing the story. If everything would proceed the same way without your hero’s involvement, he’s redundant.
The same holds true for the Villain. If the Villain has no impact on the events of the story, he isn’t a real antagonist. He’s unimportant and thus, disposable.
As we discussed earlier, conflict is the crux of every story. And conflict is transformed by dynamic will of the characters. When the will of the hero is pitted against the will of the villain it serves three purposes.
1. The conflict heats up and makes the story more exciting.
2. The character’s are more thoroughly defined by their choices.
3. The premise is tested via its conflict with the counter premise.
But there is much more to characterization than the mere actions of the players. In order to make a character believable, you have to understand the principles of character dimension.
Character Dimensions
You’ve heard the term “two dimensional character”, which is often used to describe a person without any depth, or a clichéd character in a story. None of us want our characters to come off as two dimensional, so there are certain criteria we need to understand. Let’s explore the meaning of the term “character dimension.”
A one dimensional character is a single minded individual with one noticeable personality trait. A hero, who is good. A villain, who is evil. Their personality is the same in any given situation. They just want to do what they were created for. That’s their only purpose in life. You could call them plot robots.
Bad fiction is populated with plot robots. They’re basically props in the story.
Two dimensional characters have one contradiction that makes them more complex than a one dimensional character. They are heroic, but are afraid of the dark. They are evil, but have some guilt. There isn’t much more to them than that. But they have the illusion of depth because of their additional side.
Three dimensional characters, or more appropriately, believable characters, have many contradictions. Simple examples are: A dictator out to conquer the world, who cares deeply about the preservation of his culture, but seeks to destroy others. He’s a vegetarian, an artist, but has books burned he doesn’t approve of. He’s heavily for the advancement of science, but dabbles in mysticism and the occult.. There was a real person like that. His name was Adolph Hitler.
Or how about a housewife who is a good mother, but cheats on her husband, is a closet homosexual, likes bondage, and practices Buddhism, is a peace activist who wants politicians to die.
Of course, these are extreme examples, but you get the point. Realistic characters come off as complicated as real people.
But it takes more than a list of contradictions and characteristics to make a realistic character. The character’s choices need to reflect their personal world view, their usual behavior and beliefs. There’s also the matter of relational characterization which we’ll discuss later.
When writing three dimensional characters, choose your actions carefully at first. Once you get to know them, they will write themselves.
It’s important to understand that every character in a story can’t be three dimensional. Some character’s roles are incidental, and making them too memorable could steal thunder from your main characters. So these walk on characters should be two dimensional in a non-cartoony way. Unless you are going for a cartoon quality in your work.
The Power of Choice
Imagine a restaurant full of people. A gunman bursts in and starts shooting. Most will dive under the tables or hit the floor. Some will just cower there until they are killed. Some will try to escape. Some may even try to fight the gunman. Some will scream to God. Some will lose control of their bladders. Some will laugh hysterically. Some will cry uncontrollably. There are all kinds of possible reactions to this situation. These reactions define what your character is like at that moment in the story.
We are all defined by the choices we make in life. People form impressions based on how they see other people act, dress, and live. You choose what kind of clothes to wear. You choose your hair style. You choose to either be fit or fat. You choose to be lazy or industrious. You choose to be friendly or obnoxious. You choose to be honest or lie to yourself and others. You choose to be good or bad. This defines your character.
It’s also possible that you don’t consciously choose any of these things, but you do them anyway, and that defines who you are. Other people look at you and base their opinions on a range of qualities. This is also true of a reader of a story. They perceive the characters to be a certain way, based on how they look, how they act, what they wear, what choices they consciously, or unconsciously make.
Many people act a certain way because of influences in their life from an early age: their environment, culture, family, friends and experiences. So much of their behavior is instinctive, based on their responses to things that happened to them as they developed. Their actions are reactive rather than conscious. Even so, it is a clue to who they are and where their head is at. At some point, we chose to make ourselves the way we are. We can also choose to change ourselves. And these choices go a long way to defining us.
When you write a character, you are defining that person for your readers. You are telling the reader, in effect, how they should perceive that person.
When you construct a character, you need to take these things into consideration. But to make your job easy, remember to think of the choices your character would make in the course of the story. Choices in clothes, choices in appropriate behavior, choices in verbal and emotional response, they define the character. But the choices they make in a particular scene can affect the course of the story, so they are doubly important. .
Many writers mistakenly write their characters from the hip, basing the character’s choices on their own idea of how to act. Or on clichés that this character is “supposed” to be like. This leads to one dimensional characters, and thus, to unmemorable fiction. You need to step outside yourself when writing characters that aren’t supposed to be you. Everyone’s head is in a different place. Your characters may not agree with your politics, or taste in music. But that’s the point. They are not supposed to be you.
REMEMBER: Choice is one of the most powerful tools of characterization.
The Rules of Choice
Choice behaves by certain rules. If you ignore these rules, you run the risk of offending your audience. Characters must be give logical choices which are not absolute. In other words, choices like: “Eat a bowl of ice cream or shoot your mother!” are not choices anyone is going to take seriously. Obviously, you would eat the bowl of ice cream. If you hated your mom that much, you would have killed her by now.
A choice between right and wrong, good and evil isn’t a worthwhile decision in fiction terms. If a hero makes an obviously wrong choice, the audience will lose their empathy for them and that is fatal to your story.
Have you ever seen a film or read a book, where you liked a character, but then they did something you really disapprove of, so you stopped reading, of you just lost interest in the story? That’s the principal of character choice in action. It’s a very powerful tool and you need to think about it.
You need to learn how to create a third choice. A surprising choice. As long as you understand that every choice has attendant risks and benefits attached.
Example: Let’s say you are forced to do a favor for a mobster or your best friend will be killed. The Choices are:
A: Take an unmarked package onboard a plane.
B. Steal secrets from your employer that will help the mobster rob him.
C: Refuse.
Choice A seems like the safest choice, but the risks are obvious. Packages are scanned by detectors before being allowed on planes, dogs are used to sniff them for drugs. You may be arrested if it’s contraband. And if you aren’t arrested, you’re still probably smuggling something bad. Then again, it could be innocent contents. This choice is morally ambiguous.
Choice B seems like a bad choice because it means stealing, and helping the mobster get more powerful. But it would also keep your friend alive. It also has less risk attached. But it’s also morally inferior to the first choice. This one seems immoral.
Choice C: The morally correct thing to do, but it would mean your friend’s death and maybe your own. The audience would hate you, because no one likes a morally inflexible person. But you may want to say you refuse first, just to see if the mobster really means what he says. Then you could change your mind. Maybe.
You need to create choices with inherent risks, but they should also have benefits attached, otherwise, there is no motivation to do them. The benefit of A and B is that they will buy some time for your friend. The benefit of C is you remain a morally correct person. Choosing A or B is more selfless and heroic. Choosing C would make you look like a person who cares about your morals more than other people’s lives. It’s not an empathetic position to take.
Most people would choose A as the most intelligent (unless they hated their boss, then they might gleefully choose B). Your audience will be choosing alongside your hero and hoping he makes their choice. This will increase their empathy for your character. They will find your character smart if he chooses what they thought was the right answer. But you then have to show them what the risk was in taking it. It can’t just be that easy.
For choice A, let’s call the hero Bob. Bob goes to the airport with the package the gangster handed him, sweating blood as he passes through security. Every screener and cop seems to look at him with distrust. As the package goes through the X-ray scanner, Bob watches the screener look at the video screen, then stop the conveyor belt so they can examine something that catches their attention. They turn to look at Bob, coldly. Or so he thinks. Bob frets, but tries to hide it. Suddenly, they let the package go on through. As Bob walks to the plane, some DEA agents are coming toward him with a big dog on a leash. The dog looks at Bob and starts to make noises. But the DEA men don’t notice. They’re too busy talking about last night’s football game. Bob gets on the plane, fastens his seat belt and lets out a sigh of relief. He made it. The package must be okay.
But, as the plane gets ready for take off, Bob notices a man two seats up on the left. He’s a bitter rival of the gangster who made Bob take the package.
Suddenly, Bob realizes the package could be a bomb! The gangster sent him on a suicide mission to kill an enemy. Oh, no! The plane starts to take off. It’s too late to leave. Now what?
This is how you keep the story moving. Choice opens doors and allows your audience to participate in the story with the main character. But you don’t stop with one choice being made. You create problems that force the character to make other choices as a result of their first choice.
If you’ve seen one of those stories where a character has to choose between three doors, one of which means freedom and the other two mean certain death. The writer is giving the audience a blind choice, where anything can happen. This tends to be unsatisfying because it feels random. This is why writers usually leave clues as to which door is the correct one, so the Hero can make an informed choice. It’s not just a blind decision.
As we discussed earlier, people like a sense of order in their stories. They don’t like randomness unless it’s shown to have been part of a causal chain later on. For now, remember that characters must be given hard choices. Not obvious ones. And every choice must have repercussions.
If there are no stakes involved, the audience has no reason to get excited. No reason to care. This is why gambling is so popular. Every game involves making choices, each with risks and potential pay offs. People love the excitement and the promise choices can offer them.
Emotional Choices
When we’re feeling emotional about something we may behave out of character for the moment. A normally thoughtful person might make snap judgments when they’re angry. A reckless person may be cautious when they’re scared. It’s important to think about the emotion of the character in a scene before you decide what they choose to do.
Remember the rules of choice, but also remember that audiences respond to emotions very strongly. Emotion has more resonance than logic. Logic is cold. Logic is somewhat impersonal. Emotion is very personal.
But you can’t expect emotional empathy from the audience unless you’ve led them to feel that way first. Showing a person crying doesn’t make the audience cry unless we’ve first been made to empathize with their struggle and pain.
You have to do that carefully, building up to those moments where you have emotional payoffs. An audience will understand a stupid choice if the character was in an emotional frame of mind where they’d be reckless. But you have to first convince the audience that this emotional state was arrived at realistically. People who suddenly change emotions at the drop of the hat are usually nuts. The term “Wacko” is applied to such people. Wackos don’t create empathy in an audience. We can laugh at them, or disapprove of them, but don’t expect too much sympathy.
REMEMBER: Make sure your characters have reasons to be emotional when they make emotional choices.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Secrets of Writing: Truth in Fiction
Truth is subjective, not objective. We all don’t recognize the same truths.
All men are created equal? There’s a lot of people who disagree with that.
God is love? Tell that to someone with cancer.
The earth is round? Scientists say it’s oval. Some people still think it’s flat.
In fiction, the writer’s job is to establish truth. We have to show what truth is for the world of our story. Convince your Audience and you’ll not only validate the premise, you may even make them feel good. Fail, and you’re going to be laughed at, your story tossed in the trash heap of history.
So, if truth is subjective…meaning we all see it differently, then how do we establish it in the story? Well, this series tells you various means to achieve that. But since the goal is to make story structure simple to understand, I’ll boil it down to a few simple maxims as an appetizer for the main course.
We all understand certain truths from our own experiences. We may disagree on a lot of things, but we can all agree on one fact.
Life doesn’t happen exactly the way we want it to. Even billionaires have bad days.
This is why conflict is so important to making a story work. Conflict stands between us and our goal. We relate to it. We understand it. And we want to beat it!
Truth is established by showing the best way to overcome that conflict. We do this by systematically testing and rejecting every action until we arrive at the point of the story, the premise. Every scene serves that purpose. No scene should be empty of purpose. Scenes test the premise in one way or another. When all the tests are completed, we arrive at our conclusion.
But the tests have to be valid. They have to be something we can believe in. They can’t be illogical or nonsensical. And more importantly, they must have emotional resonance for us. Logic and emotion must be married in a story for it to develop the kind of power it needs. When logic is married with emotional resonance, we create meaning.
Stories create change for the characters through conflict. But, because truth is subjective, we arrive at truth when it has meaning for us. So make sure your story creates meaningful truth.
REMEMBER: Don’t preach. Convince!
SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
All writers are liars. Good liars can convince you of anything.
No story is true, even if it’s based in fact. Things inevitably get left out. All stories are one sided, even when they try not to be. Someone always wins. Someone always loses.
So, you must convince your Audience that these fables you’re spinning are the gospel truth. Obviously, they’ll know better. But they want to believe. People desire entertainment. Our minds seek to escape for awhile. So you have an opening.
The balance of the Audience’s willingness to be sucked in and your ability to keep them off guard is where technique and structure come in. As we discussed, people expect reality to come at them a certain way. Classic story structure imitates life as people see it. But the flow of the action isn’t enough. The action has to be believable to them.
To do this you need to create plausible, empathetic characters. You have to create a Milieu they can believe in and enjoy. And you have you present information in an unobtrusive, interesting manner. If you fail to do any of these things, you are going to find yourself with a bored or disenchanted audience.
When the Audience is on your side, they’re your friend. They’ll love you. They’ll praise you to the high heavens. But when they don’t like your work, they’re your enemy. They will bad mouth you and your stories to anyone who will listen. So it’s extremely important that you try to win them over. Their good will has a lot to do with how successful your career is going to be.
Your job is to seduce them. You want them to get in bed with you and stay there until you’re finished. So remember the four rules of story seduction:
1. Create believable, empathetic characters.
2. Create a fascinating, credible Milieu.
3. Tell them what they need to know. No cheap surprises.
4. Respect the Audience. Don’t treat them like idiots.
Copyright © 2008 James D. Hudnall. All Rights Reserved
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