Blogging My Process: A Character in a Setting with a Plan

So, continuing the series of posts illustrating my creative process (read Part 1 and Part 2 if you want background):

To review: I wrote a set up, like Indiana Jones getting the idol. And now I've got to get on with the story. And we've established that I need my hero, Alex, to be proactive, because this is not a thriller, it's an adventure.

This brings to mind the definition of "story" that I got from Algis Budrys at Clarion so long ago: A story begins with a character in a setting with a problem. The middle consists of repeated attempts to resolve that problem, which fail, though the character learns something from each attempt. With the final failure the character learns the real nature of the problem and is able to resolve it. (Or learn definitively that he/she can't.)

A character in a setting with a problem has always been my mantra since then. It's particularly useful for those writing without an outline because problem drives the action.

However, that leaves too much room for the character to be too reactive rather than proactive. I've come up with a better mantra.

A character in a setting with a PLAN.

When your character has a plan, even if you don't explain what it is, even if its just subtext, the story has something that makes it MOVE. The audience can anticipate movement. Anticipation = good.

When the character doesn't have a plan, the story drags or even comes to a dead stop. You can heave the story forward by throwing problems at your character, but that doesn't give you momentum. When the immediate problem is over the energy is gone.

This is what I meant by complications which are like a string of beads. This is really common in "pantser" storytelling, because it's a natural way to imagine a story. So if your mystery plot is just the characters discover one clue, and then another clue and then another, until they have all the pieces and then they solve the case, that's a one-beat story. They're mystified, they're mystified, they're mystified, and then they know.

If your characters have a theory -- a plan -- then the plot moves forward. They investigate based on the theory developing it more as they learn each new fact, until they learn something that changes the theory radically. That will usually be at the end of an Act. And that info will be dramatic. So then they form a new theory and plan and move forward on that.

The problem Alex seems to have as he stands on that riverbank is also a one-beat problem. He doesn't know how to get home, and if he knew, he could just go. As a matter of fact, he probably will in the next few minutes, or perhaps in a couple of hours, because that's not the problem of the story.

My problem, as the writer, is to get the audience past that as fast as possible. But my instinct, when I'm writing off the cuff, is to see this as the audience does, and I mistake this problem for the main problem. So I get myself stuck trying to prevent him from going home, because going home is easy. All he has to do is jump back in the water.

He doesn't know that, but he has enough information to think it just might work. Sure, he has lots of reasons to fear that it will go wrong, but he's got guts and he's young enough to try foolish things. There is no really GOOD reason to keep him from trying it, except one.

Thorny is passed out, and the river nearly killed them a moment ago, so if jumping back in the water doesn't work, Thorny could drown. And job one is keeping Thorny from drowning. That's how they got in this mess in the first place.

But it's got to occur to Alex that this might work for two reasons. One is that it has probably already occurred to a portion of the audience, and it's aggravating when the character is dumber than the audience. Another is that the best way to move on from something it so settle it.

I was going to have Alex cleverly realize water could be a way to escape bad guys later on -- and be desperate enough to try it in spite of the dangers. But I need him to have a plan, and I need him to have it now. And I came up with two possible solutions. And here's what I mean by compounding problems rather than just beads on a string.

Option 1 -

Alex considers the idea that the ring and the water somehow interacted to transport them between worlds. He goes to the water's edge, looks in, and sees a double scene reflected back at him just as he did back in Michigan. He can see trees and a dorm from the banks of the Red Cedar, as well as the forest and rocks of the place he's in. He gets a hit of vertigo. He falls in.

And he comes up in the Red Cedar River in Michigan. Close to where he had gone in, but not the exact same spot. Wow! Cool! Oh, shit, he left Thorny back in that other world. He dives back in, and does indeed come back up in the river in Awarshawa -- this time exactly where he just dived in. And Thorny is not there....

This is generally what I think the main plot of the story actually is, saving Thorny. That's how it started. It was why Alex jumped into the river in the first place, and it's what heroes do. Especially when they feel semi-responsible for the predicament the other person is in.

Option 2 -

Not as good as the first, but it has some advantages: Alex considers the ring and the water, and also the danger of dragging an unconscious and drunken man into a dangerous river on the off chance it might get them home. He decides to wait until Thorny is awake and maybe sober and has have a chance of swimming to save himself if things go wrong.

Then he hears voices. He is jazzed about this whole deal and wants to know more about this place he has come to. He sneaks over to spy and sees some peasants talking. He recognizes the language he had always thought his Aunt made up. He even understands a few words, and realizes that these people are frightened. Thorny wakes up and joins him, and is too drunk to be freaked out about being in another world.

They may or may not interact with the peasants, but then the bad guys arrive, everyone runs, and Alex and Thorny have to run away from the water... and they also witness someone captured by bad guys, and Alex knows he must go to the rescue.

Okay, I said this was weaker than the first. In particular: until Alex decides to intervene, he still doesn't have a plan which leads him to act. Furthermore, he isn't an idle gentleman on holiday, so the decision to intervene doesn't feel right. This is the serious flaw of this second option.

The advantage of the second option is people. People are the stuff of drama. They ramp up the energy fast. They make things interesting. They provide conflict. The first option just delays the moment when Alex runs into people, and that weakens it.

Also, even tough Alex assumes he is in this country his Aunt told him about, assumptions do not constitute dramatic revelations. Hearing real people talk this language he always assumed was made up is a very dramatic revelation if he hasn't already been thinking about this.

Can I combine the options? Sure, I can even drag in more options. The point here is to make them build one on the other. Don't let them be beads on a string. He's got to get Thorny back home without drowning him. He's working on the plan when he falls in. Then he gets back to Awarshawa and finds that Thorny is gone. Option 2 then becomes something he can use to help him in finding Thorny and getting him back.

I originally wanted to go the other way for reasons of dramatic revelations -- learn something, have the villain enter, interaction with Thorny, some action, and then have things slow down again long enough for Alex to consider the whole water thing, and THEN fall in and come back to find that Thorny has been captured....

And I could work to make those events flow and build in tension, but I would have to do it artificially. If I start with option 1, they flow naturally one from the other.

I may simply have to distract Alex so that he hasn't really thought through where they are yet, so I can still feel like the moment he first hear people speak is dramatic.

**

So that's all I have to say about that right now. The question is, was this useful to you? Would you like an update on this story as it goes along? Would you like it if I posted the rough draft chapters as I went along, and then talked about the issues I had in writing it?

Doing this as I write is very different from doing it later. I remember things better, for one thing, but it can get long and boring.

In the meantime, tomorrow morning I will post another excerpt from from my other Ruritanian adventure story, The Adventure of Anna the Great. See you in the funny papers....

Blogging My Process: Hero Vs. Victim

This is a continuation of yesterday's post. It's kind of a "live blogging" experiment in which I go into detail on my creative process as I plot out the beginning of my W.I.P. This was spurred by a question, which I don't think I'll quite get to answering even in this post, so there will likely be a third post next week. (Although maybe I'll do an "extra" midday-Saturday post to finish this up.)

(If you didn't read yesterday's post, then you probably won't understand this one, but hey, it's up to you whether you want to go back and read it....)

So...

When last we left Alex the Misplaced Hero and Old Thorny the Drunken English Professor, they were laid out on the bank of a strange river, exhausted and confused after very nearly pulling a Lillian Gish. They were in Michigan only moments before, and now they are decidedly NOT in Michigan, and what the heck do they do next?

The story has come to a complete standstill. But the characters just came off a very exciting moment, and they can pause to catch their breath. But things have to move on very quickly.

One way to keep the momentum up is to simply pile on a lot more trouble.

Which is what I almost did. I was going to have soldiers waiting for them on the banks of the river to arrest them.

(Note about process: I have no idea which soldiers are waiting on the banks to arrest them. This is a country with many factions and it could be anybody. I'm plotting this by the seat of my pants. However, I'm not writing this by the seat of my pants. First I check out the options until I find a really good one, and then I write it.)

The advantage of having them arrested right off the bat is the same as the waterfall in the previous scene. Right now our heroes are still passive passengers on the journey -- one way to make them active is to throw problems at them. Furthermore, by having them arrested, they have an excuse for a certain amount of passivity while they figure things out. (Plus dealing with interrogation and such can give them the information they need to act, and it's always a good idea to bring human conflict into any story.)

HOWEVER....

You see this technique used a lot, where characters are swept along to keep the story moving while they get their bearings.

I don't really like this technique much, and I finally figured out why (just now, between writing the first and second draft of this post).

This is a thriller technique. It works very well within that genre. An ordinary guy is thrust into a situation far beyond his experience and at first he is helpless and overwhelmed. He might be passive, or he might be simply ineffectual, until he finally manages to escape by the skin of his teeth. Then things continue to get worse -- again out of his control -- until he manages to reach deep down inside himself and come up with the where-with-all to fight the Big Evil Badguys.

It works when Cary Grant is kidnapped by spies at the beginning of North By Northwest. It works with pretty much anything Jimmy Stewart appeared in.

However, it doesn't work for adventure. Not as well, anyway.

The difference is the premise. In a thriller, an ordinary guy is swept into a life where he doesn't belong. He may have the stuff of heroism in him, he may even evolve into a hero, but the fundamental problem of the story (the question asked at the opening) is "how does this poor schmuck get out of this and restore peace in his life?"

In other words, the character is thrown out of his element, and needs to get back to normal.

With an adventure, the hero is not out of his element. When James Bond is kidnapped, beaten up, shot at, chased and tortured, that's his job. He volunteered for it. You can combine both kinds of hero, but if you make him a victim rather than a volunteer, you confuse the premise. You weaken the story by making it harder for audience to see what they're rooting for.

This explains to me, at last, why I get bored in the beginning of many books and stories I actually like. I love stories in which ordinary people turn out to be real heroes. Very often, though, there is a very slow period at the beginning where they are swept up in the situation, go into denial, suffer confusion and angst, and then something kicks them into gear and the story starts. It can work, but if the writer is not a master who is fighting against this lost of premise the whole time, it stops the momentum of the story.

(Note: one way this can work in any kind of story is if it happens to a secondary character. Each character can have a different premise, as long as it's clear which is the main premise of the story. Maybe I'll write more about that next week too....)

But back to my story. Alex is an ordinary guy the way Don Diego Vega (Zorro) is an ordinary guy, or Sir Percy Blakeney (The Scarlet Pimpernel) is an ordinary guy. Or Rudolf Rassendyll -- the idle Englishman who takes the place of a king in The Prisoner of Zenda. These three guys, when you take them at face value, seem like they belong in a thriller. Silly, idle, party-boys who never have a serious thought in their heads. But when trouble comes their way, they volunteer to deal with it. "No problem, dude. I'm on it!"

In other words, when trouble arises, the main question that the audience is given is not "How does the hero get out of this and go back to normal?" but rather "How does the hero fix this terrible situation for others?"

Which is another reason why I like the waterfall problem for my story. It isn't just a situation Alex is thrust into, and he's not just floundering. He went into the water to rescue his professor, and though the situation got out of hand, he carried on with his duty.

So it's an adventure, but the waterfall was just a foreshadowing. The adventure story hasn't really begun. The heroes are there, but not with any raging need to be heroes. And I have two choices: I could simply present them with an adventure -- unrelated to themselves -- and let them deal with their own overriding problem as a subplot. OR I could find a way to make their central problem into the story, but I'd have to fight off that "thriller" aspect of it all the way through.

I got an idea for splitting the difference. And that, at last will get me to the part I was asked to explain more: how to compound complications rather than just letting them be like a string of beads. (And why stringing beads isn't good.)

I'll try to get to that last post early tomorrow (it should be shorter, but I don't guarantee it), because I want to continue with the "Sample Sunday" postings of fiction and excerpts.

My Live Real Choices, Beat-by-Beat, As I Write

In the comments on yesterday's post, A.M. Kuska pointed out that what I said at the end, about what I was writing, was uselessly vague. (Okay, she didn't say that, but it's the truth.)

The problem, when you are trying to talk about something you're currently writing is that you don't want to give spoilers, and the story's in flux, and there's a whole lot of background that you have to explain... so you end up being vague.

However, since this is the beginning of the story, I don't have to worry about spoilers. (There is something I call the "opening spoiler" and maybe I'll talk about that sometime. Or now. We'll see how far I get.) So I only have to worry about boring and confusing you. But that's your problem. Blame A.M. for asking.....

Here's the set up:

The story is called "The Misplaced Hero." The premise is that there is another universe which is much like 1920's adventure fiction and silent movie serials. Part (but by no means all) of this world is Awarshawa which I described a couple of days ago in a post about pictures and inspiration.

The hero of the story (who is indeed misplaced) is Alex, a Michigan State University student who doesn't know his family came from Awarshawa. He's rich, orphaned and aimless, but a good kid. All he knows is that his crazy Aunt Floria (or Flavia, if I really want to get referential) gave him a ring when she died and told him to be sure to wear it when he goes and jumps in a lake. The ring can create a magic passage between worlds out of reflective surfaces, .i.e. water, but Alex doesn't know that. (NOTE ALSO: Alex has heard of Awarshawa -- but he thinks his aunt was writing a fantasy novel and all her stories and maps and things she showed him were "world building.")

So the story begins with Alex bumping into his English professor, a burnt out cynic everybody calls Old Thorny. It's the end of the semester, and Thorny has just flunked him. Thorny is drunk, and the reason he is drunk turns out to be that Alex' paper upset him. Alex, being a smartass, wrote a paper on some modern lit based on his aunt's theories, which were all very swashbucklery and romantic. Thorny couldn't help but LOVE that paper, even if he's really angry because he's too cynical to believe in it. He doesn't believe in anything, even his own lectures, which he considers to be vaudeville performances -- two shows a day, every day for his whole life until he doesn't even know what he's saying any more.

In the course of the conversation, Alex tells him about the aunt and the ring. And he also decides to take the professor home -- and as they cross a bridge, Thorny takes it into his head (inspired by the story about the aunt) that jumping in the muddy river would be a good idea. He dashes drunkenly down to the river's edge, and Alex chases, grabs, and then the professor falls in and takes Alex with him.

And they come up in a very different river in Awarshawa.

What happens next, and how fast it happens is what I'm working on.

Three issues are foremost:

1.) I am not a great fan of excessive world building. I mean, I do like to read the heavy tomes now and then -- either science fiction, or regional or historical fiction -- which spend a lot of time on place and history and atmosphere. And I even like some books which combine styles. Many hard-boiled masters give us exposition and action together, for instance. But it's still just a style, and not the only style of story you can us to tell a story.

And it's not the right style for this. I want this to be like The Saint -- all bump and go, where the emphasis is on character and story, and the exposition focuses on that too, and the world is furnished only as far as it needs to be. (And the audience doesn't have to keep track of a ton of made up stuff. Only that which relates to the story. Which, when you get to the manor house mystery side of this genre, can be more than enough to keep track of.)

2.) The main character is thrown into chaos. How to sort out his immediate sensations and confusion from his expectations? I mean, the audience has the benefit of my external description. Heck, if I wanted to, I could withdraw and describe the scene from outside the river. Two figures erupting out of nowhere. If I had a character on the shore which I wanted to introduce at that moment, that could be a great option, but I need to stick with Alex. I also need to keep away from the "confused character thrown into another world" cliches.

3.) I need to tell the story in the right tone. That is, aside from juggling information and the character's reactions, I need to establish the kind of story it is. And this one will help with the others:

The first key is to realize that exposition can be on a Need-To-Know basis -- both for the character and the audience.

So, first I made use of that first chapter. Before things get confusing, I set it up with the conversation about the Aunt and the paper. And when Alex reaches to stop Thorny from falling into the river, he is mesmerized for a moment by the reflections in the water, and the audience is more prepared for magic. After that, information comes with the story events.

Oh, and there is a fourth problem:

When I first thought about this scene, I had them swim to shore and...oh dear. I knew one thing I did NOT want to do is have them stand around thinking, "Hey, this isn't Michigan. Where am I? What am I doing?" That is boring. A character who is paralyzed with confusion and unable to do anything about his situation is the most boring thing on earth.

So the next rule is; before the character even knows he is confused, give him something urgent to do. Let the Big Scary Issue of him being in a strange world be the secondary issue of the moment. He needs a bigger, scarier, but much more understandable issue to take his mind off he imponderables.

And that's where the need for telling the story in the right tone comes in handy. This needs the feel of an old movie serial.

As a solution I give you Lillian Gish!

Unfortunately, they disabled embedding on this clip from WAY DOWN EAST (1920), in which Lillian Gish nearly killed herself (and did permanent nerve damage to one hand) for the sake of movie history. For those who don't want to pause to watch a one minute silent movie clip -- she is unconscious on an ice floe and Richard Barthelmes hops across the ice just in time to save her from going over a waterfall. (Real waterfall, real ice, real movie legend -- not a stand in or dummy.)

I'm not using an ice floe in my story (although I'm not ruling it out). Icy cold weather would create more complications than I want. But the waterfall? Now that's comedy! ... er, I mean, that's a proper complication for exciting serial melodrama. There's no mistaking the kind of story we're in. (Which was foreshadowed in the first chapter with Alex's term paper -- but now is fully demonstrated, so there is no need to explain.)

Alex knows he's in a river. Current is strong, and even though he is confused about all the wrong signals around him -- clean water, colder, stronger current, rocky shore -- he knows he has to get Thorny out of the water. And furthermore, the sound and the rising mist a little further along is clearly a waterfall. He doesn't have time to ponder what a waterfall is doing on the Red Cedar River -- maybe some idle thoughts, but right now he has to get them BOTH out of that current.

So he has one problem -- getting Thorny out of the river -- which compounds because the river is more treacherous than he expected.

That's about the right number of problems all at one time. They are related and therefore not confusing. One leads to the other. Furthermore, the bigger problem -- the "where the heck are we?" problem -- doesn't go away. It just lurks for later. It is a promise of more to come. When we're ready. When it will be interesting.

Of course, once I get Alex and Thorny out of the river, they still are stuck on the shore scratching their heads. But it is a good time for Alex, as he flops onto the rocky beach, to realize that this has something to do with the ring. He's beyond the blithering with shock stage, and thinking logically.

Which is devoutly to be wished. Unless you are looking at a character from the outside, maybe someone who does a really good Cary Grant impression, blithering with shock isn't very interesting. NOTE: I could have Thorny blithering with shock at this moment, because he's a secondary character, but he's still drunk. Which is also a wonderful buffer between me and dullsville.

So now we have our heroes on the shore, scratching their heads but not blithering, and it's time to start the story. Because at this point, there isn't a story. Yes, we have a character in a setting with a problem, but the only problem, is "okay, how do we get back?" Which is a boring problem, and not a story. Especially since they got there through magic and no real effort of their own.

The actual problem of the story -- the one set up in the first chapter -- is that Alex is a misplaced hero, and Thorny is a discouraged romantic. THAT'S the story that has to begin. At this point, there are a million options. You could even say that in some ways, their problem has been solved by what happened here in the second chapter. Alex is no longer misplaced.

But that story doesn't begin until something happens. And that's where I was last night, dithering (but not blithering) over which thing should happen next, and finding myself with a surplus of complications to pile on Alex and Thorny, and realizing I need to space them out -- but not space them out too much.

Which is what I'll talk about tomorrow, as I consider the Passive Hero vs. the Proactive Hero.