Plotting Part 6 - Foreshadowing

(Continuing with the Plot Structure Series. Still working on the opening "Set Up" section of the story. Check out Part 1 - Overview. Part 2- Opening Image.  Part 3 - Character Intros 1. Part 4 - Character Intros 2. Part 5 - Action Is Character. )

Today, I'm going to talk about foreshadowing and we're only going to talk about one movie here: The opening three or four minutes of Spike Lee's heist/mystery/thriller movie, Inside Man.

This is a movie I am going to probably follow throughout all the elements of plot, because it is a masterpiece of plotting, and the more I look at it, the more I find. I really recommend that you find it and watch it.

This is also going to be a little bit of a review, since we haven't talked about this movie yet -- but we're going to focus today on Foreshadowing.

Opening Image, Character Intro, AND Foreshadowing

Inside Man is a heist mystery.  The tagline for it is "You can't judge a crime by its cover."  This is the story of a perfect bank robbery that was designed to go wrong from the start.  Nothing about this crime is what it seems.

And the opening sets us up for that.  It's an incredible and efficient opening.

As with Fargo the filmmaker gives us a verbal opening that grabs our attention and makes us sit still through the images of the credits.

In this case, the picture actually starts before the opening image -- over the studio logos, we hear the music begin.  Unless you know the song or the language, it just sounds like some mournful, eery, Middle-eastern music.

Then bam, we are in close up on Clive Owen.  He's looking us in the eye, addressing us directly.  He is calm, precise, and you get the feeling he is a man very much in control.  He seems, in essense, like a master criminal or terrorist, filming a statement or manifesto for the world.

"Pay strict attention to what I say because I chose my words carefully and I never repeat myself."

He gives us the who, where, what, when. why and how of the story.  We understand that this is filmed in retrospect, from "what could most readily be described as a prison cell" -- but he tells us right off that even that is not exactly what it seems.

But I want you to watch more than that, because the credits themselves are a part of the story.




So... We have the opening imsge. We have an introduction of the antagonist of the story, though at this point, it is really unclear whether he might be the protagonist.  He's more than just a thief, but what, we don't know. That will be the puzzle of the story.

And he has already given us all the back story we need to understand what happens next: we're seeing the preparations for a perfect bank robbery.  We see the team being picked up by a gray van. We may not know yet that they are on their way to the robbery, but we know they're getting ready.

We see the setting.  Post-9-11 New York.  We start in Brooklyn -- I presume that is Coney Island, but not inside the park. This isn't tourist New York. This is diverse, real-people New York.  The city of immigrants.  The music we hear is Bollywood music.

Bollywood music with an orchestra added.  This is important because this is where "Foreshadowing" starts to come into it.

The Music

Throughout the credits, we get shots of sculptures and archetectural elements.  Nearly all of these are from one building: 20 Exchange Place, a gorgeous art-deco building down in the financial district. This building is standing in for the fictional bank that will be robbed.  Neither the fictional bank nor the real building is in Brooklyn -- but we start seeing these shots even before the van crosses the Brooklyn bridge.

So this is the target.  This is where they are headed.

We get a feeling for this because we know this is about a bank robbery, and we get a couple shots of the name of the bank -- including a medallion that says when the bank was founded.  This will be important but we don't know that.

But I said the music was important in the foreshadowing. It is.  When we first see these sculptures and plaques, the music adds a deep, ominous layer of orchestra: particularly brass and strings.  One note,  then two notes, then a mini-fanfare.  This ominous fanfare is used throughout the movie to represent authority.  Whenever the camera pans across the police presence, we'll get that fanfare.

Interesting. Hmmmm.

Because it becomes more and more clear that the robbers are the antagonists.  And they aren't nice guys and gals.  Furthermore, the hero of this story is a police negotiator.  And the police are universally displayed as imperfect good guys here.

But it's their side that gets the ominous fanfare.

However, that fanfare does not play for them as individuals. It only shows up when the movie shows them as an overall impersonal force. The police as an army.  The police as an arm of the powers that the bank represents.

(EDITED TO ADD: I just rewatched this and realize that the very first moment we get the fragment of fanfare is when Jodie Foster's name appears on screen -- which really seriously fits with this idea of what the fanfare represents.)

This is foreshadowing, at its most subtle and wonderful: the music is giving us this Pavlov's bell effect.  It's training us to remember and react to authority and power as maybe not such a great thing.


The Sculptures

There is more subtle foreshadowing in this credit sequence: like those monumental sculptures of the figures looking down, with the water stains that make them look like they are weeping.

I don't know the allegory they are supposed to represent, and I don't know which way Spike Lee intended to use them: but they look kind of medieval, don't they?  Almost ... old testament.  But whichever way you look at them, they are art deco -- representations of a mythic past done in the 1930's.  I suspect this is a subtle foreshadowing of some things revealed in the movie's midpoint, and I'll talk about that when we get there.


The Sign on the Truck

And another more obvious bit of foreshadowing, that you didn't get a clear look at in the clip, but there is a better shot in the part of the credits that were cut:

The side of the dusty gray van sports a bright red sign.  It says, in large letters:

"Perfectly Planned Painters."

Since the lead robber already said his robbery was perfectly planned, we know this is him being clever.  However, there is a slogan under that title:

"We NEVER leave until the job is DONE."

This is foresahdowing of what the mystery of the story will be: the robbers will prove themselves oddly uninterested in leaving. Furthermore, there will be another meaning to that by the time we get to the end.


Okay, that's as much as I have time for this week. Next week I'm going to talk about the rest of the first fifteen minutes of Inside Man, and also about some things I skipped over when talking about In the Heat of the Night.  This will concern a very basic kind of storytelling set up that Blake Snyder emphasizes: setting up "What Is Wrong" with the base situation of the story.

All of these other things we've talked about, especially the character introductions, will probably set up much of what is wrong.  But I do agree with Snyder that it doesn't hurt to think consciously about this element. It's the thing that will give form the others. And it will also bring us up to the thing that ends the "set up" and gets the story going - the inciting incident.  Because that, in some sense, is the Big thing that is wrong.

See you in the funny papers.

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Plotting Part 5 - Action Is Character

(Continuing with the Plot Structure Series. Still working on the opening "Set Up" section of the story. Chcek out Part 1 - Overview. Part 2- Opening Image.  Part 3 - Character Intros 1. Part 4 - Character Intros 2. Next week: Part 6 - Foreshadowing. )

"Action Is Character"  -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sometimes you'll hear writers argue character vs. plot.  What comes first, what's more important, yadda yadda.  This is a silly argument.  F. Scott Fitzgerald explained it famously and best when he said "Action is character."

Plot and character are inextricable.

Characterization is more than backstory.  It's more than just reactions, or how a character delivers lines and approaches plot points.  What the character does actually creates the plot. 

This is why I spent a little extra time on character entrances (and still didn't get to all I wanted to say): because character entrances are plot points.  They are also, very often "wows" -- or those exciting wonderful moments the audience bought the book or ticket for.

French Scenes

In drama they take entrances and exits so seriously, that one school of thought actually considers any entrance or exit -- even by minor characters -- as being a whole new scene.

They call it a "French scene."  Even if there is a continuous conversation going on between two characters, the coming and going another character in the background changes the dynamics of the scene - if only through changing how the audience sees it.  It's as though each character has a certain amount of gravitational pull on the audience's attention. And when there are two characters, the center of gravity falls between them.  When a third character enters, that center of gravity moves, because that third character also has some sort of gravitational pull.

This is something that actors feel acutely, even if it doesn't always feel overt to the audience.

Now, of course, in this context, when I say "character entrance" I don't just mean that first entrance where the character is introduced, I mean any time the character walks on the stage.  In a play, each character will probably have several entrances.

I should also add that, unlike a book or even a movie, with a stage play, the entrance of an actor has an additional special effect on the audience: the stage is a pretty static place.  Inspite of all sorts of techincal tricks these days, stages don't move much.  It's all on the actors to bring the thing to life.   So yes, any time a character walks on or off, it has a special effect.

In a book or movie, comings and goings of characters don't have quite as much oomph... except for the first entrance.

The fact is, the entrance of various characters can be one of the greatest ways to deal with a major plot point. 

It's for this reason that I do not believe in the old rule that you should introduce every character in the opening "set up" sequence of a story -- be it movie or book.

It's not just that certain genres or kinds of stories demand that some character be introduced later.  ALL stories can sometimes benefit from spreading out your character entrances.

Saving Character Entrances for Later

When I reviewed some of the films I've talked about in this series, and some I'm going to talk about, I notice that major characters appear all sorts of places -- sometimes well past the mid-point. 

For instance, in In The Heat of the Night, we don't meet the widow of the murdered man until the second act.  She actually appears at the start of the second act, and she changes the whole chemistry of the situation.

When I talk about "Finding the Wow" http://daringnovelist.blogspot.com/2014/01/creating-situation-game-was-easy.html , I played a clip from The Third Man, in which Orson Welles makes his first appearance in that flick.  That's just about halfway through the movie. And yes, you betcha, that event -- the appearance of Harry Lime -- is a huge change of direction for the story.

Of course that entrance is foreshadowed.  People talk about Harry Lime from the first moment of the movie, so you could say he had already made his entrance. (More on that below.)

But in Flashback, the buddy/road picture about the old hippie and the uptight young FBI agent, we don't get any hint of a very important character who doesn't appear until more than two thirds of the way through the picture. Her entrance is part of a key plot point -- "The Secret Is Revealed" -- that I'll talk about later.

So even though character introductions are a key part of your opening set up, you don't have to shoehorn every character into that segment. You don't always have to even get at all the important ones.

Generally, though, the most important characters -- the ones who drive the action of the plot -- need to be introduced in some way.  So I'm going to finish up by talking about delayed entrances: those times when you foreshadow a character's entrance, but let it happen later.

The Star Turn

Orson Welles called his role in The Third Man a special kind of Star Turn. (Or maybe he just said Star Role.)  He likened it to another Star Turn he played on stage many years earlier.  It was a character named Mr. Woo.

All throughout the first act of that play (and with a play, the first act tends to last a long time, maybe as long as half the story), the other characters talked about Mr. Woo.  "Oh, dear, I wonder what Mr. Woo will think of that!" says one.  "You just wait until Mr. Woo gets here!" declares another. They are in awe, afraid, eager for Mr. Woo's arrival.

Finally at the end of the act, we see a silhouette of a bridge in the backdrop, and a figure appears, and walks across it.  It's Mr. Woo! He has arrived!  And the curtain comes down for the intermission.

And the audience goes out into the lobby and talks about nothing but Mr. Woo.  They aren't even thinking about the other characters. They may even, according to Welles, exclaim about what a great performance the actor playing Mr. Woo has put on.

Of course, that comment is not really about Mr. Woo -- it's about Harry Lime.  Welles did a great job playing Harry Lime, but the role did the work for him.  By the time he enters, all he has to do is smile slyly, and it's one of the great moments in film history.

The Teaser

One movie I'll be talking about more is one I haven't introduced to you yet: Inside Man.  It's a wonderful, smart mystery thriller by Spike Lee.  (If you haven't seen it because you aren't into Spike Lee's arthouse flicks, do yourself a favor and rent it. It's very mainstream Hollywood heist flick, but twice as clever.)

In Inside Man, the Set Up section of the story is very efficient, and like so many smart mystery thrillers, full of foreshadowing.  Full of questions.  We meet the bank robber (Clive Owen). We meet the NYPD negotiator who will face off with him.  And we spend most of the first act getting the robbery underway and the police reaction underway.  But this mystery is truly a mystery. There is something else going on. A third force affects the course of the story, who will be personified by Jodie Foster.  But she won't enter until the end of the first act.

Instead we get a glimpse of what will bring her into the story: At the 13 minute mark (just before that key 15 minute mark) we meet the owner/CEO of the bank, Christopher Plummer.  He is dignified and far above it all.  He gets news that one of his (many) bank branches is being robbed, and he is properly saddened.  Then they tell him which branch it is, and he hesitates and continues with his polite, concerned-but-above-it-all demeanor... but as soon as he is alone, he drops into a chair and says "Oh, dear god."

That's it.  We don't know him. We don't know what's what.  We just know that there is another shoe to drop.  The center of gravity on the story shifts just because we've seen him and his reaction, even though it's another 15 minutes or so before we meet the person who he will send to deal with whatever he's so upset about.

The Disguised Entrance

Finally, I want to mention a kind of entrance that is very common in mystery, but which I don't have a movie clip for right off.  Sometimes you want to save a character for later, but you want the dramatic entrance to be a surprise.  In that case you don't want to build it up like Mr. Woo, or tease us with anticipation like the banker with a secret.

But you do want the audience to feel some satisfaction of a tied up loose end, and you want to engage in fair play by not bringing this character in out of nowhere.  In that case, you can introduce an important character as though they are not important.  The key to this technique, though, is that the character must be memorable even as you lead the audience to believe he or she isn't important.

A bad guy might be footling around as an annoying tourist who keeps getting lost.  Or that prissy schoolmarm who is annoyingly nosy turns out to be the undercover agent whose job it is to protect the heroine from harm.

Sometimes, though, you can do this without trickery at all.  Your hero meets a nice couple who help him find his way to where he's going. They are not in disguise, but they are also not identified.  Later, they turn out to be the key witnesses he's been looking for.  Or they may just be friendly folks he can turn to when he needs some help right at the key moment.

I would give one example of this from the children's story by E. Nesbit, The Railway Children.  The children wave to the trains going by and make distant friends with various passengers -- people they never really meet, just wave to every day.  Later, when they need someone important to help them, they call on a dignified fellow they call "the Old Gentleman" and ask him.  As it turns out, he helps them in ways far beyond what they expected.

This sort of misdirection is well-known to mystery writers, but all kinds of fiction can benefit from it.

The key here is not to think of these kinds of delayed entrances as a trick so mucg as to think of them as another kind of foreshadowing.

Well, that's enough for now. 

On Friday I'll talk more about the new Mystery Game.

And next Tuesday for the Plotting series, we still won't quite get to the end of the Set Up.  We'll talk about foreshadowing, and have a little bit of a review of what we've talked about so far when we look at the first few minutes of Inside Man.

See you in the funny papers.

Addendum to Character Intros - some books

Just an addendum to the previous post: I've been wracking my mind for an example in prose that handles a large number of characters in a way similar to Bad Day at Black Rock does in a movie.

I think one of the best ways I've seen this done is in non-fiction.  Walter Lord's book about the sinking of the Titanic, A Night To Remember, uses the voice of an omniscient reporter to quickly dip in and out of the point of view of many characters. While his prose can't move as quickly as a camera can in a movie, his technique is definitely a well-established one for giving us a relatively fast picture of many individual characters.

You can check out a sample of the Kindle edition at Amazon.  A Night to Remember.

That brought another book to mind, The False Inspector Dew, a mystery novel by Peter Lovesey.  Lovesey  borrowed from Lord's style to set up some back story to the book's mystery: the  sinking of the Luisitania. He actually has two set up scenes, so this one happens as chapter 2. This is also in the sample available online.  The False Inspector Dew.

I know there are many more. I suspect there are quite a few such scenes in various hard-boiled novels and in short fiction and literary fiction.  I think John Le Carre has also included such scenes (he's fond of interesting points of view like omniscient.)  But none come to mind immediately.  I remember the stories, not the styles.

ADDENDUM TO THE ADDENDUM: the first few comments here have got me thinking.  I'm going to make the next post about introducing a large cast of characters -- in a different way than Bad Day at Black Rock did.   This is the way books more or less have to do it: as individuals.

I will probably talk about one or another of Robert Altman's films.  (Probably Cookie's Fortune.) But here is where we can also talk about books -- mysteries and some kinds of romance in particular.  Georgette Heyer did both good and bad work with this sort of thing.  Christie didn't often have a huge relevant cast... but when she did, she did it masterfully. (Murder on the Orient Express, anyone?)

But I'll also talk about the delayed entrance, which helps with a large cast, but also is a dramatic technique that works fine with smaller casts.We'll see if that turns into more than one post....


See you in the funny papers.

Plotting Part 4 - Character Introductions 1b

(Continuing with the Plot Structure Series. Still working on the opening "Set Up" section of the story. Check out Part 1 - Overview. Part 2- Opening Image.  Part 3 - Character Intros 1. Part 4 - Character Intros 2. Part 5 - Action Is Character. Part 6 - Foreshadowing.)

So last week we started to talk about how characters first enter the scene.   We talked about the two lead characters from the 1967 movie In The Heat of the Night -- Virgil Tibbs and Chief of Police Gillespie.  These are a pair of characters who kinda come pre-introduced, in that their political and cultural surroundings pit them against each other regardless of who they are as individuals.

So to get started, we don't have to know anything about either of them except that Tibbs is black, and Gillespie is police chief in a small Mississippi town in 1967.

However, these two guys are not symbolic cartoons for a political drama.  The fact is, the story is an ordinary melodrama -- a murder mystery -- and our two protagonists are regular, complicated people.  The political message of the story is merely that the cultural situation surrounding them makes it a real challenge to do their jobs.

But that political situation also makes it really easy to get the story going, and get our interest in the characters before we really see who they are.

There is a risk to using this method however, which I'll talk about at the end of this post, after I mention two more pictures that use external conflict as a way of introducting the characters.


Flashback -- The Old Hippie And The Young Fed

Back in 1990, there was a little gem of a "buddy movie" called Flashback.  It starred Dennis Hopper as Huey Walker, an old hippie radica, and Keifer Sutherland, as Special Agent Buckner, a straightlaced young FBI agent.

Like In The Heat of the Night, this movie introduces the main characters by just telling us the key thing that puts them in conflict -- old hippie vs. g-man.  Unlike Heat, the characters are very comfortable in their roles.  As matter of fact, they are so comfortable, that they prefer the roles to reality.

That's a part of what this movie is about, and why it is interesting to talk about.  We have two characters who are overtly wearing masks: A Fed must remain professional and keep his authority to the front, never letting us see who he is, because that would make him vulnerable.  And all politicians -- even hippie radicals -- are at least one part conman. Their job is to charm and lie and do what's necessary to win people over.

And we know that these guys are hiding who they really are.

Somehow this allows the filmmakers to pull off something interesting: they don't hint much at where the story is going.  There are some great twists and turns, but I just rewatched the setup section, and there is actually very minimal foreshadowing here.

I'm going to talk about foreshadowing later, and I'll go into what I found in this flick then, but suffice it to say that in general, this picture doesn't find the need to keep use interested with hints of what will come.  Instead, the filmmakers have chosen to do something brave: they let the current situation carry itself.

I've said before how what keeps the reader reading and the viewer watching is that the story makes promises of great things to come.  There are many ways to do this.  In this case, the premise -- a cop transporting a fugitive -- makes all the promises we need.  The fact that the cop is holding to his official personna, and the fugitive is a crafty clown, adds lots of color to the simple fact that we know the fugitive will want to escape, and the cop will want to keep control.

That all by itself gives us a natural story, even if we never learn a thing about these characters. You can read a dry news story about a criminal escape and manhunt, and not know a thing about the characters, and still be fascinated by how it shakes out.

But this is still a story about getting to know these guys.  The opening sequence, their entrances, is all about the surface conflict of their personalities. (Unfortuantely, I have no clips about that.)  Neither takes the other seriously.  They spar.  Dennis Hopper chews the scenery, setting up jokes which others walk right into.  Keifer Sutherland holds his temper and sasses him back.  We see that these two are a reasonable match for each other.

Or at least we think they are.  We can't see beneath their masks, so we can't be sure.  We know were' going to see more.  We just don't know how or when, or if those faces beneath the masks are going to play a big part in the plot itself, or if it's just going to be the heartwarming character development subplot.

However, if youi're paying attention, you will get a clue from what happens at the 15 minute mark.  Remember how I said that is usually seen as a significant moment in movies?

In the clip I showed you of In The Heat of the Night, that was the moment when Virgil Tibbs decides to tell his story, to actively engage with Chief Gillespie.

The clip below is just about the exact same moment from Flashback.  (I couldn't find any earlier clips, but I suppose that's okay.)  It's a long clip, but I'm mostly interested in what happens in the first three and a half minutes. (However, watch until the end and you will see a classic Inciting Incident.)

The start of this is kind of a mini version of the whole movie until that point, at least as far as these two characters are concerned.  Huey (Dennis Hopper) is effusive and jabbers and jokes endlessly.  Buckner (Keiffer Sutherland) is unimpressed, reserved, official.

But watch what happens at the 2:30 mark in this clip: Huey decides to go after Buckner's mask.  He gets personal and says, "You like me."

And it works.  Buckner relents and tells us something about himself -- as proof of why he does NOT like Huey. 



Now, it's relatively clear that Buckner has not really let the mask slip here.  What he has done instead is held up a stronger form of defense.  Huey is all about emotions and sensitivity, so Buckner uses an emotional tool (and an old cliche "My father died in Vietnam to protect creeps like you") to shut him down.

The fact that this happens at the fifteen minute mark indicates it's not just another joust between characters who have been jousting all along.  But unless you're watching the clock while watching the movie, you don't necessarily realize that this is a clue to what the story is about. You really don't know that there is a mystery here and that the truth will get more and more interesting.

So for now, the moment passes and it just seems like the characters are jousting, and that Huey is using personal stuff to try to get under Buckner's skin. We don't actually need to know more.  What we're really expecting is the cop vs. fugitive plot to start ramping up.  And that plot is fun and very very straightforward and clear about where it is going, so we don't miss the mystery we never noticed is there.

Which is all a very long way of saying that you don't need to tell everything about a character to develop that character into something complex, deep and interesting.  It can be good to start with simple and clear, and let the audience see more as you go.

But you also can be complex and mysterious, if you want....


Bad Day at Black Rock

In the comments to last week's post, Steve Vernon pointed out another pot-boiler movie that begins with a train arriving in a town, carrying a catalyst character who will set the story in motion.

The train in Bad Day at Black Rock brings Spencer Tracy, a one-armed veteran just after WWII, who comes to a tiny tiny desert town on a mysterious mission.  And everybody in town is freaked out by his arrival.  It's not that they don't like strangers, or just that strangers hardly ever visit this town (though both of these seem to be true); no, it's something else. Something neither we nor Tracy know anything about.  I'ts just weird.

After a little hunting, I found a clip of the opening on YouTube.  The credits act as the "opening image."  A train races through the desert to loud, urgent music.  It has that inexorable feel of fate racing into the story (a little like Fargo's car in the blizzard, but less ironic.

(NOTE: the credits go on until the 1:20 point, if you want to click ahead. And  at the 4:15 mark, It SKIPS TO THE END OF THE MOVIE, so you may want to stop watching then.)




This story begins with nothing BUT mystery and menace.  We don't know what Tracy is there for, and we don't know why the town reacts the way it does.  All we know is that the very first things we see, other than the train roaring across the dessert, is that when the train just slows down, everybody in town steps out to look.  And not in a friendly curious way.

They aren't exactly scared either. They're suspicous, on edge, and they clearly think that the train stopping is just plain not right. The station agent is aggreived.  "Nobody told me this train was stopping!  And they ought to!"

We see just about every one of the characters even before he speaks.  However, we don't actually get to meet them -- and there are too many to remember at this point.

Now, the good thing about a movie is that when you have an opening like this, you see the actor's faces, so you get a sense of them each being different people.  Even if you don't know who Ernest Bourgnine or Lee Marvin or Anne Francis or Walter Brennan are, you see individuals when you see them.  So when they make their formal entrance, you have been set up to meet them.

In fiction you have a different advantage. A bunch of people sitting or standing outside in a western town are generally all dressed alike. You can't necessarily guess much about them. In a book, though, they have a label.  One guy is the doctor.  Another is a cowhand.  Another is the hotel clerk.

So you can still have that kind of introduction if you want it.  The problem is that it is harder to pull off.  With a movie, one shot can have three guys step forward, looking perplexed, and you don't waste time or focus on them.  With fiction, you have to either describe them, which takes time and draws undue attention, or you summarize to get the same effect, but then you don't see the individuals.

What it usually means is that you have to be selective about your details.  You might not even mention all of the characters, even in summary.  You mention as many as would give you a picture, and let the others be introduced later. 

As for how these characters are really introduced: they make their real entrances one or a few at a time, mainly in their interactions with the stranger or with each other.

But because their interactions are so mysterious, and at first they are all acting as a group, the person we mainly get to know is the stranger played by Spencer Tracy.  They don't want him to know anything about themselves. They put up a front....

So the first thing we learn is how Spencer Tracy handles this brick wall they put up in front of him.  Like Sidney Poitier, Tracy remains polite and vigilant, but his situation is different from Poitier's.  He has more natural power.  These people are wary of him, and so he uses their closed-in stubbornness against them. He steps around them.

Just after the clip, inside the hotel, the deskman tells him there isn't a room available, but the stranger just ignores and steps around him.  He signs in anyway, and he steps over and takes a key.

But then we start meeting the individual townsfolk as they each try new ways to get information out of him without giving any themselves.  And that's when we start to see them reveal character. Lee Marvin tries to bully him.  Walter Brennan is friendly but also doesn't have luck getting info.

BTW, this movie is relatively short, so you could say that it has two moments that are like the 15 minute mark.  Normally that would be about halfway through the opening act.  With this picture, that moment is about 11 minutes in -- and that is when the lead villain enters the story.  But we don't actually quite meet him.  We don't know that he's the lead villain.  He's just a guy in a truck with a dead deer on the front. 

He doesn't speak.  His sidekick steps into Spencer Tracy's path, but Tracy sidesteps them both and continues on his way.

The dead deer is clearly meant to be a symbolic detail -- a touch of extra menace in a town full of subtle menace -- but the thing that really makes it memorable and disquieting is subtle. The deer is not tied across the hood.  It's tied just to the driver's side, strangely off balance like it could slide off.  I suspect this is a clue to the fact that the driver here is the chief menace.  Even though his sidekick is big and belligerant and more menacing, it's the driver (who at this point seems nondescript and unassuming) who is the hunter.

We meet him for real just moments later as he goes into the hotel to meet with his people.  And by the end of that scene... it hits the 15 minute spot, and by golly something significant happens.

But I will tell you about that  when I get to inciting incidents.

Before I get to that, however, I'd like to talk a little more about introducing characters, and how they set up the story.  I was hoping to maybe do an extra post tomorrow, but the novel I've started working on is going great, so... I'm going to stick to the Tuesday schedule for these plot theory posts.

In the meantime, on Friday, I'll tell you a little about this Whodunnit/Mystery Plotting Game that seems to be working for me.

(NOTE: I posted an addendum to this post, just a quick suggestion of some books which introduce a whole community of characters.)

See you in the funny papers.

Plotting Part 3 - Character Introductions 1

(Continuing with the Plot Structure Series. Still working on the opening "Set Up" section of the story. Chcek out Part 1 - Overview. Part 2- Opening Image.  Part 3 - Character Intros 1.  Part 4 - Character Intros 1b. )


I didn't end up writing about what I thought I was going to write about.  I meant to write generally about how you introduce characters, different methods and techniques, how character entrance can be a "wow" (or memorable satisfying moment) in and of themselves.

However, I found myself riffing on a theme I started last week when I talked about opening images.

You know how I said last week that you can't immerse your audience in the story with just one paragraph or image, because there is just too much information for them to know before they actually can see the whole story?   So you've got to start simple, and lure them in, maybe with only one bit of info at a time?

Well, characters are like worlds. They are complex, they have surprises built into them, they have backstories and motivations -- some of which are obvious, and some of which even the character doesn't understand.

So introducing a character is a lot like introducing a whole story.  You start with something simple, usually the aspect that is most relevant to the story.  Or at least the element that is most relevant to the situation at the start of the story.

And with the three movies I'm going to talk about today, the thing that gets introduced first and foremost is conflict.  Even though I was going to hold off talking about the "Inciting Incident" that starts the story later, it happens that with all three of these movies, the inciting incident really is the situation itself. These characters start out in conflict, and the story has already begun before the credits end.

In The Heat Of The Night - again

Last week we talked about opening images of In the Heat of the Night.  In middle of a hot night, a train pulls in to a small own in Mississippi in 1967, and an anonymous black man in a suit gets off.

We don't really get to meet that man.  So is it really a character entrance?  Or is it more of a teaser of an entrance?  At this point, it sets the stage for something interesting to happen.

Then we get more stage setting: while we do meet most of hte most important characters in the next ten minutes, we start with secondary characters.  The counterman at the late night diner, the cop on the beat. They annoy each other, we get the feeling of a hot night and short tempers and we see a glimpse of the meanness we expect as the counterman lies to the cop about whether there's any pie or not.

Then we get a quick survey of town as the cop gets back in his patrol car and makes his rounds. We another character or two, in ways that reflect how they will be involved in the story.  Then the cop finds a body.

And then we finally meet the secondary protagonist: the Chief of Police (Rod Steiger).  In some ways, you could say that he is the first protagonist. He and his town have the most to learn.  But I'll revisit this because most of the plot points actually fit with Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) as the protag.)

We first meet the chief standing over the body, chewing gum like he'd like to chew off the heads of everyone around him.  He doesn't seem like a soft spoken guy, but he is reserved, thoughtful and keeps his voice low.  He is in charge. Everyone defers to him.  He asks immediately pertinent questions and gives immediately important orders.

This entrance is actually pretty low key.  Later we will see a man who is belligerant, and derisive.  That later image would be a stereotype of hte obnoxious small town Southern police chief or sheriff.  But the guy we see standing over that body, while he doesn't seem like a nice guy, is a professional dealing with a problem.

And the fact that we see this first gives us a sense that this is the most important aspect of his character. So we give him a little leeway when we meet him again....

In the meantime, we get a reminder of Virgil Tibbs -- our passenger from the train at the opening -- waiting in the trainstation, when the chief decides that the killer is likely to be someone passing through town, and he orders his patrolman to check out all the places a vagrant might be, including the pool hall, and the train station.

And that's when we finally meet the passenger from the train, but even then, we don't get to meet him as a person quite yet.  The cop (Warren Oates) sees a black man sitting in the depot, and he immediately pulls his gun and hauls him in.  Tibbs doesn't even say anything.  He is surprised, for just a second, disbelieving. But once he realizes what is happening he is completely correct, expressionless.

And he doesn't say a word or do a thing.  He's like the civil rights activists sitting at a segregated lunch counter -- exerting complete self-control and correct behavior.

And so we still don't know him.

All the same, we know enough.  He's a guy in a situation with a problem.  Just the fact that he didn't believe it for a moment when the cop pulled a gun on him tells us that he has nothing to hide.  But we know he has a lot to fear.

It's only when we bring these two protagonists together that we actually get to meet these two characters, to know who they are. 

Here is the scene where we actually meet the characters for real.  Especially  Virgil Tibbs.  He hasn't said a word until this moment. Nor has he done anything that tells us anything about him as an individual. Heck, he doesn't even move until about halfway through this scene.

And you could say the same for the chief of police -- he was reserved and busy with a crisis at the moment we met him earlier.  Now we can see him in his regular habitat. We can see the attitudes that Virgil Tibbs is disrupting.  He is now ornery and bigoted and not particularly likeable.  And yet, he is not stupid.  He knows when he has made a mistake.



The thing that is interesting here, is that the moment when Virgil Tibbs finally moves -- he sets down his suitcase and faces the chief and starts telling his story -- is at exactly the 15 minute mark.

The 15 minute mark in movies is generally considered a key moment. The inciting incident often happens there.  It's supposed to be the moment when we see the character's life is thrown out of balance, forcing him to act.  In action movies, which often have a longer set up, this is where the villain may make his entrance. (I believe that in Die Hard, this is where the ominous van appears on the streets, heading for the Nakotomi building where all the action will take place.)

In this movie, these characters really already had their lives thrown out of balance, but this still is the significant moment -- this story is about two protagonists trying to achieve something, in spite of all sorts of conflicts and forces working against them.  This is the moment when they both become fully aware of the other. 

I'll talk more about what happens next later.

And... oh crap, it's late, and I have more movies I want to talk about with this.  Different approaches to the same idea of stories that start with the concept of conflicting characters: Character Introductions 1b.

Well, I'll have to get to that on Tuesday.

See you in the funny papers.

Story Game - Let's Play!

At last! We get to the moment we've all been waiting for: we get to just play the game.  It's a lot quicker to play the game than create it.  Once you have the story materials in hand, you can play it over and over again -- adding to it, tweaking it or just using it at is.

To review: The series starts with an Introduction and an explanation of the concept of "Character Structure" which we use to create the game.  This game works better with a formulaic story, so we've created a game around the "Woman-in-Jeopardy" type of Romantic Suspense.   (We also talked a little about Erle Stanley Gardener's Plot Wheels, which inspired the game.)

But if you want to get down to the game itself, start with these posts:

*The Situation Worksheet - which we'll fill in using the story wheels.
*Heroine and Hero Wheels
*Villain and Nature of the Crime Wheels
*Titles and Title Words
*Theme

Today, I'm just going to play the game from scratch, and show you how it works for me.  I will tell you a little about how I solve various issues as they come up.

I rolled a story just before sitting down to write this post -- what follows is real-time brainstorming.  (As it happened, the rolls came out easy -- they don't always do so.)


So here we go... Let's Play!

Here are the Story Wheel results

Title Words: Kept, Melody, Justice, Scorch, Crossfire, Guitar, Duet, Breathless, Night, Know.
Theme: Insiders
Heroine Type: On a Secret Mission (such as: revenge; needs to retrieve something; investigative reporter; must prove someone innocent; etc.)
Hero Type: Mysterious Background Figure - Undercover Cop
Villain Cover Type: Authority Figure - Cop
Crime Type: Blackmail, Version 3 (person being blackmailed is the bad guy, third party the primary victim)

Wow, this is the most consistent roll I've done with this game.  Insider theme; multiple cops; and a heroine on an undercover mission -- this screams "Police Procedural."

And yes, there is a brand of Woman-in-Jeopardy Romantic Suspense which overlaps with police procedural (although it tends toward military right now I think) - but it's one I don't happen to read.  Furthermore, though I love to read regular police procedurals, especially regional ones, I don't feel adequate in writing them.

But that works for this blog series because I'm unlikely to write this story -- and that means I don't have to hold back for fear of spoilers or anything like that.  I can do this as a "writing in public" exercise.

(NOTE TO EVERYONE: if this roll and the ideas for it I come up with in this post excite you, feel free to write it.  Consider it an "Open Source" story idea.  We can all play with it if we like. Note also: I do mention some other stories I am actually writing -- such as "Hours of Need." If those idea inspire you, please change them enough so they don't seem like the same story I'm writing.)


Pushing Boundaries

An ideal story roll will push you a little bit where you don't want to go.  That's why we include some contrary choices and things we don't like on our wheels.  But it's also why you have Full Veto Power over any roll in the game. However, my rule is that you can't ditch or re-roll any element until after you have worked through the choices and found what actually is a stumbling block.

Since pushing boundaries is important though, I believe the best place to start is to glance over the worksheet to see where those most difficult spots will be, and then to really dig in and think about that.  Spend a little time to see if you can find a way to make the problems work for you.  You may not find it at once, though, so if you can't find a solution right off, look to the other elements to see if they have any hooks to help you out with this.

For example: The first roll I ever made with this game came up with an element I had thrown in to give myself trouble:  The heroine type came up "Secret Baby."  Ugh!  That element just does NOT click with me.  I don't empathize with the emotions involved in keeping a baby a secret.  However, when I'd rolled all the other items I found a hook into the concept that really worked for me.  The Theme was "self-sacrifice" and the hero type was "Mr. Perfect she runs away from." And a title words gave me "Hours of Need."  And the crime type was related to a clandestine affair.

All those elements pushed me to stick with the "secret baby" trope -- and so I pushed until I had a variation I could work with:  A young woman who runs away from Mr. Perfect because she has to take care of her dysfunctional family, a family where someone is always in their "hour of need."  The secret child is her wild younger sister's child -- and nobody knows who the father is.

And that gave me a character I could empathize with, so that story is on the shelf "in development" to actually write.

Fro this story, I'm going to start by thinking about the police procedural element:  How could I actually write a cop-centered story?  And even if I can't think of a hook that works for me up front, I'll keep a watch for options as I go through the rest of the items too.

My first thought is that two police characters doesn't a police procedural make.  I can make this a small town psychodrama (that is, a soap opera of the individuals in their personal lives, not about the police elements).  This is especially possible since the hero is the Mysterious Background Figure, so we don't have to be privy to his investigation.

I don't have to stick to that if I find another hook in the other elements, but as I look at my title words, I'm thinking there may be a hook that helps me along with this....

The Title Words

We've got no less than THREE music-oriented words in our title word choices: Melody, Guitar and Duet.  The rest are mostly evocative suspense or romance words which will work with the genre.  Great!  Unfortunately, after pausing to generate some titles with these words, I didn't come up with anything exciting.

My top three ideas were pretty simple combinations:  "Crossfire Duet," "Breathless Duet" or "Breathless Melody." But I'll hold out hope for something more resonant after I come up with the story.  (The Night Guitar, Keep to the Melody, Justice in the Night....)

But even if I don't have a title yet, the idea of "Music"gives me a hook into the subject of the story:  Instead of the story surrounding cop culture, it could be surrounding something to do with music.

The heroine could be a musician, the hero's undercover identity could be a musician.  The heroine's secret mission could be to clear the name of a musician friend/relative, or to find out what happened to a missing or dead musician friend/relative. Or she could be an investigative reporter, out to get the straight dope on a famous musician's dark past.  Or maybe there was a mishap covered up, when the "Singin' With The Stars" TV show came to town, and she's investigating.

The mystery/crime could surround a local night spot -- a tavern where there is live music or an open mic.  It could be the center of a local music community.  This could be a community of professional musicians, or just a community of enthusiastic fans.

So the hero and heroine could both be undercover as musicians, hanging out at this tavern.  And that fits with the "insider" theme.

Blackmail #3

Next problem: the villian is a cop who is being blackmailed, and the primary victim is the "third party" (the person the blackmailer threatens to tell), that's a tricky one.  That means the blackmailer is not the most relevant person.

Which means the blackmailer will be a red herring of one kind or another.  He or she could be someone killed before the story opens, which incites the story.  Or he could be a real Red Herring, in that he or she is lurking and doing suspicious things.  He could even be the hero: The heroine's investigation puts pressure on the situation, and that gives the hero an opportunity to put the screws to the badguy (behind the scenes).  This could take on a swashbucklery cloak-and-dagger aspect as the heroine is caught in a deadly game between these two men.

I think the key to this one, though, might be the Victim.

The crime we rolled, Blackmail #3, means that our villain's leading motive is to keep the information from the victim.  What could our cop villain want to keep from someone such that he's willing to become a full blown Suspense Villain over it?  And WHO might he want to keep things from?

This motivation doesn't have to stem from him being a cop.  It could be something completely personal.  However, seeing that he is in law enforcement, two obvious things come to mind: He's an elected official (sheriff) and he wants to keep politically unpleasant facts about himself from the public (with the Public being the victim). OR ... He helped cover up the death of a young music star during a local festival, and this person's mother or grandmother wants to know the truth.

I like the second because that gives our heroine an undercover assignment.  The grandmother asked her to look into it, or the heroine is a relative who is upset about her own grandmother's grief over a dead cousin.  They don't suspect the cop.  They suspect the other musicians. (Hence, the hero.)

Well.... that's a story concept right there.  But there's one more issue that itches at the collar...

What About That Hero?

If the hero is an undercover cop, what is he investigating?  Is he a member of the same department as the villain?  Does the villain know he's a cop?

The simple answer is that he's investigating the death too, for the same reason the heroine is.  (That does not satisfy me.  Too repetitive.)  Also, if this is a small town, it is unlikely that he's a member of the local police, because everybody would know the local cops.  So, if he's undercover, he's got to be a state trooper, or on a task force, or a fed.

And I'm thinking that he wouldn't be investigating a closed case that everybody thinks is an accident.  (And if this is a crime that has been successfully covered up, it needs to appear to be an accident.)  So I'm thinking he's investigating something else.  Something that will turn out to be what lead to the starlet's death.

And maybe, given that the theme is "insiders," the starlet was an outsider who discovered something, or an insider who wanted out -- maybe even someone who fought to become an insider, only to discover something she wanted no part of it.  And she was killed as a part of the cover up.

So she might be the blackmailer after all.

Furthermore, that means our heroine is unwittingly headed down the exact same path.

Now I think I have a story.


It's Never This Easy

I swear to you, none of my other rolls this far have gone this easily.  On the other hand, we haven't done an actual plot yet.  I don't know why the starlet was killed. (I may yet decide that she had an accidental overdose and there is some other non-conspiracy thing going on -- like a rich kid or drunk senator caused an accident.) I don't know what is going on with that tavern, who the people are.  They will be red herrings and helpers.

However, I am glad I changed the game from my first version, and I now hold back on dealing with red herrings and helpers until I get the story concept nailed down.  Creating them can go more smoothly once I know where the holes in the story are.

Other Problems

In the past I've often found I have to tweak the choices to find a story that works for me.  I might have to swap some characters, for instance.

For instance, in "Hours of Need" the villain rolled out as a young woman.  And I kept getting stuck on that. But when I swapped her with another character, that gave me the chance to create the concept about a younger sister with a chiild.  And in the current story I'm working on, "In Flight," I had to dump the title (secrets and journeys) and the theme isn't working out.  (The title words might make a good theme, though.) Also, I think I'm swapping some characters.

That actually happens a lot with a mystery.  It helps to create a twist.  You build a story on one person being the villain, but as you write, you realise this other innocent person also has a motive and could be a great twist.

The changes were good for the story but... with every element I dropped or changed, I did it only after I pulled a story idea together.  I changed them not because they bored me or I didn't like them, but because they got in the way of something good that was taking shape.

Creating More Wheels

One thing that I did with In Flight is make up some mini-wheels to help me move beyond blank spots.  For instance, the hero rolled out as the "Authority Figure - Non-Cop" type -- a guy who gets dragged into the story with her.

That option sounded like a great idea when I put it on the list, but once I was face-to-face with it, I realized that that was a difficult one to make work on a practical level.  But I wanted to make it work, so I had to break out of my "box" in my thinking.

So I broke it down, and came up with a list of kinds of authority figures it could be -- lawyers, trustees, estate managers, bosses -- and rolled a random choice from that. Came up with Boss.  Then, because I still had the issue of how he would be dragged into the story, I broke that down into different kinds of work/romance relationships. (Ones with a vibe I liked.)  He's secretly in love with her, she with him, both secretly with the other, neither notices the other, both hate the other.  Different kinds of bosses.  When I rolled it, I ended up with the kind of boss who barely knows she exists: the suit from the main office.

(I think I'll keep that wheel, by the way. It was a fun way to throw in more variations.)

After I finally decided those things, I was able to start playing with ideas of how he could be dragged into the story, and I decided that it was in his nature to get involved.  My imagination took off, and I realized the guy had a very interesting back story.

Moving from Concept to Story

Right now, I could take the concept of our musicians and cops and cover ups and make it a novelette, or a full novel.  I could make it serious or funny.  Though the hero is supposed to be a mysterious background figure, I could make it very romantic or more a mystery with a romance ending.

It will take another brainstorming session for me to get started.  I wouldn't have to do a whole plot before then...

However, I could also play this into a next game: a Potting Game.  Something like the one Erle Stanley Gardner created.

So over December, I'll be creating a new game, maybe even with Plot Wheels.  I might post one or two interim things in the meantime, but I don't expect to get to plot until January.

In the meantime, a lot of what I'll be doing with plot will come from the Movie-of-the-Week plot structure I talked about this summer.  You can check it out if you want to roll some stories and try outlining a plot.

See you in the funny papers.

Story Game: The Villain and Crime Wheels

Just to review what we're doing with these Friday Story Game postings: We're creating a game for brainstorming a pretty detailed story idea and plot.  It's actually a set of little games or exercises which can be used together or separately.  The first step is to create the game itself to suit the kind of story you want to tell.

We're creating a specific kind of "Woman in Jeopardy" type Romantic Suspense story as an example.  You can have fun with this game as is, or adapt it to suit whatever kind of story you want to tell.

Last week we created the random choice Heroine and Hero Character Wheels of our little game story.  This week we're going to talk about the key attributes of the Villain -- his disguise -- and the crime that drives the story.  (And also a little about the Victim, Helper and Red Herring characters.)


Villain's Cover Identity

One of the first things I noticed when I started reading romantic suspense is that the killer appears harmless and maybe even likeable and is the person the heroine confides in.  And for this reason, at least on the romance end of the spectrum, it's not at all hard to spot the villain. Sometimes he's the only other character than the hero.

But as I mentioned yesterday, in any kind of suspense (romance or not) the audience may well know who the bad guy is up front.  There will always be twists and secrets and surprises, but a suspense story isn't the same as a whodunnit. (Although they can overlap.)

However, suspense almost always hinges on the heroine not knowing who to trust.  At some point she will trust the wrong person, and not trust the right person.  And, IMHO, the strength of the story will rest on how much we agree with her motives for trusting and not trusting.

Furthermore, since this formula I'm writing is based on my own preferences within the genre, I gotta admit I'm partial to mystery.  I don't mind that the puzzle doesn't drive the story, and that the protagonist may be too busy running for her life to run a cold and logical investigation.  But I like it when I can be mentally flipping through the suspects and possibilities while the heroine is busy with  more urgent matters.

Therefore, I like the villain to be in disguise, even to me.


The Villain's Disguise

The key to the villain in this kind of story is that he/she blends in with the other character types.  In pure suspense, he could even be the romantic lead.  However, romance readers seem to dislike it when a woman is truly torn between two lovers, therefore the villain or any other romantic rival should  never be a real contender for her love, even if he does earn her real sympathy, friendship or general affection.

And because the killer is disguised as one of the other types of players, his wheel can be like a "Wheel of Other Characters."  Or if you were a writing a straight mystery a "Wheel of Suspects."

I am currently not happy with my villain list.  However whenever I run through the game, I never get stuck on the villain, so I guess it's good enough.  I might also roll the sex and age of the character if it is not defined in the item.

1. Woman (older mentor or helper type)
2. Woman (same age pal from school, college, childhood, coworker)
3. Woman (rival)
4. Non-romantic Guy Pal (gay)
5. Non-romantic Guy Pal (mentor)
6. Non-romantic Guy Pal (relative)
7. Romantic interest (flawed ex-boyfriend or husband)
8. Romantic interest (too perfect)
9. Romantic interest (poor schlub she'd like to dump but she doesn't want to hurt feelings.
10. Romantic interest (charming cad she knows better than to get tangled with)
11. Authority figure (boss or landlord)
12. Authority figure (cop)
13. Authority figure (town leader)
14. Apparently unconnected person (neighbor)
15. Apparently unconnected person (worker - cable guy, secretary, butler, lawyer)

The Victim -- and The Nature of the Crime

In a suspense story, the crime might not be murder.  There may be no intension of killing the victim.  Or the victim could be someone killed before the story starts.  The victim may even be the most boring character in the story. She's kind of a MacGuffin: she drives the motive but doesn't have to matter to the story or audience.  I call her she, because in my mind, the symbolic character for her is the wealthy dowager who can be tricked into signing over her bank account, or murdered for inheritance, or whom the villain has been sucking up to, and desperately doesn't want her to learn of his sordid past.

So I guess you could say that the victim is actually defined by the nature of the crime that drives the story.  Just as the Heroine is defined by what makes her vulnerable, and the hero by what keeps the heroine from trusting him, and the villain by his disguise.

Some crimes have multiple victims, so even if you spin the wheel and pick randomly, you may still have to decide which is the primary victim.  For instance in the scenario above:

A Gigolo is sucking up to the Wealthy Dowager, and is blackmailed.  You could make the blackmailer the villain, and the Gigolo the victim.  Or you could make the Gigolo the villain and if he kills the blackmailer, both the Blackmailer and the Dowager are the victims.  In that case I might prefer the Dowager as a victim -- because she's an ongoing victim. But in some stories the murdered blackmailer might be the prominent character -- someone close to the heroine.  And there is always the possibility that the Dowager herself is much more aware of what is going on, and she is the villain herself.  She might want to kill the blackmailer because she wants the gigolo to keep paying attention to her. (Agatha Christie was always good at pulling that twist off.)

So you could say that any blackmail plot is going to be defined by which of the three characters (the blackmailer, the blackmailee and the third party the secret is kept from) is the villain, and which is the primary victim.

I like blackmail as a crime for a suspense story, so I am going to break it down into several options so it has a better chance of being chosen.

So without further ado, here is my list for the "Nature of the Crime Wheel"

1. Blackmail (Blackmailer is the victim)
2. Blackmail (Blackmailer is the villain, blackmailee is the victim)
3. Blackmail (Blackmailee is the villain, third party is the victim.)
4. Blackmail (Third party is the villain, manipulating the blackmailer and blackmailee)
5. Fraud
6. Embezzlement
7. False Identity
8. Faked Will
9. Faked Death
10. Long term secret jealousy or passion
11. Bigamy
12. Smuggling
13. Forgery
14. Money Laundering
15. Professional Fixer (cover ups for drunk driving Senators, etc.)
16. Assassination
17. Long Term Love Affaire with Consequences
18. Protector of Reputation of famous figure
19. Kidnapped or Abandoned Child Returns
20. A Family Preserves Its Honor (keeping secrets in the midst of strife)
21. Hidden Loss of Family Fortune
22. Gaslight - Driving someone crazy to cover a search for hidden loot
23. Scooby-Doo (Campaign of harrassment to get someone to sell property.)
24. Competition for Hand of Heiress
25. Competition for Local Honors (Texas Cheerleading Mom, Top Churchlady, etc.)
26. Dirty Local Politics


Secondary Characters - Helpers and Red Herrings

If you wanted to completely automate the creation of this story, you could reuse the villain wheel to create the remaining characters. (After all, he's supposed to blend in with them.)  The question is.... should you?

I think you shouldn't.  Or at least not until later.  That's becuase, by the time you get done with all of these choices, you're going to have almost too much to to work with.  You're probably going to want to veto some of your more important choices. (We'll get to that in two weeks when we get to playing the game.)

With some stories, once you have those four basic characters (Heroine, Hero, Victim, Villain) and the theme/title idea starter, the additional characters may be obvious.  You will want to just fill them in.

Or sometimes you find that the main four characters completely cover the roles by themselves.  After all, the victim can be a helper or even a red herring, the heroine or hero can be victims, the hero can be a red herring, etc.

So you might roll the age and sex of these characters (along with the victim and villain), but hold them in reserve.  Then during brainstorming, if you find yourself in need of a new kick during brainstorming, roll these other "spare" characters.  Use the villain wheel, or if you want to, create a new wheel that suits the story.

Here are some thoughts on these last two character types to help you think about htis.

Helper

The helper character is incredibly important to the suspense story, for two reasons.  One is that the killer may disguise himself as a helper, so always having a good helper around gives more options to twist the story.

The helper doesn't have to be likeable.  The protagonist is isolated, so it's best not to give her a sidekick.  That's her problem -- she is on her own.  So if the helper is a grumpy neighbor who gives her constant shit about the condition of her yard, or the churchlady who firmly disapproves of her in every interaction, that's only for the good.

The helper is a bit of a utility player.  She (let's go with the churchlady) can be a gossip who can be counted on for good information.  She can be counted on to stick her nose in and hamper the villain at a key moment.  She can be a cop, or call the cops, when you need the cavalry.  She can provide shelter from the storm when your character is at wits end.  And she can be a secondary victim.  She can even be the main victim.

You might find, after you get the characters and story concept all worked out, that you can swap the helper with the villain for one more twist.


Red Herring

While the Helper is a bit of a utility player, the Red Herring is fully a utility character.  Basically, this character can be a second version of any of the characters as needed.  He can be a love-besotted swain who persues the heroine through rain and snow and sleet and a hail of bullets.  She could be the blackmailer who gets killed.  A sneaky sidekick.  The rival for the hero's affection.  Or a secondary helper who provides confirmation (or disproof) of key information.

Unless you're writing a full-blown whodunnit, though, this character is likely to be a bit player or maybe a sidekick to one of the others.  You may not even need this character at all. 


Next Week: Title and Title Words

Okay, next week we'll deal with the remaining two items on the situation sheet: Title and Theme.  I held them until last because they are simple, but also because they are fun.   The truth is, it's really common to use titles and themes or subjects as writing prompts.  And, imho, you could substitute any other kind of writing prompt for these items and come out the same.

Then in two weeks, I'm going to put it all together with a  post about the brainstorming stage.  I have played around with this, but I decided this week to actually formally roll a story, and see it through -- maybe a half-hour to an hour a day -- as a test run.  I'm dating the notes as I brainstorm, and I'll see if anything interesting comes of it.  I might post the development of the story -- spoilers and all.

See you in the funny papers.

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Here's a link to a list of my books.  And ... hey, look at that!  There's a donation link right below this sentence. (Donations are via Paypal)

Story Game: The Heroine and Hero Wheels

Just to review what we're doing with these Friday Story Game postings: We're creating a game for brainstorming a pretty detailed story idea and plot.  It's actually a set of little games or exercises which can be used together or separately.  The first step is to create the game itself to suit the kind of story you want to tell.

We're creating a specific kind of "Woman in Jeopardy" type Romantic Suspense story as an example.  You can have fun with this game as is, or adapt it to suit whatever kind of story you want to tell.

Last week we created the Situation Worksheet; a list of the major character roles and elements we'll have to chose for a basic story.  These elements are supposed to be filled in with random choices.

Now we're going to start creating lists for those random choices -- or the "wheels" as Erle Stanley Gardner called them with his plotting game.  He actually wrote his plot elements on cardboard wheels that he could spin to make choices.  Which you can do if you want. (Look up "Game Spinner"  or "spinning game board" on Amazon.)  But that will limit your number of options.  So I recommend just numbering the items on each list, and using Random.org to choose a random number.  (Or put them on slips of paper and draw them, etc.)

Of course you don't have to use the random lists: you can fill in the worksheet from your imagination. However, randomizing these genre-specific elements allows you to jump deeper into the story sooner. The idea is to brainstorm the genre-specific requirements just once -- for the game -- and then when you create a story from it, you can save your energy for the specifics of the story.

So let's get to it:

Today we're going to create wheels for the Heroine's Secret, and the Hero Type.  But before we do that, we have to think about the restrictions of the genre.


The Restrictions of Romantic Suspense

All suspense, romantic or not, is about an isolated protagonist.  An ordinary guy or gal who has to deal, alone, with extraordinary and threatening circumstances.

A romance, on the other hand, is about a pair.  It's about losing your isolation.  That's part of why these two genres work well together.  They have a natural tension.  The isolation is a natural threat to the romance, and the romance is a solution to the isolation.

But, in my opinion, the driver of the suspense story is the threat to the romance. The romance is the prize.  And since romance readers often consider different types of lovers to be different genres (young love, "second chance" older lovers, May December romance, gay or straight), I don't randomize this -- I just choose.  The romance genre is just too restrictive to mess with this relationship when you're also juggling the suspense.  And to keep it simple, I just picked the vanilla romance story: white, straight, around 22-35 years old. (You may pick any variation that floats your boat.)

Ironically, if I were writing a mystery suspense, and not worried about fitting it into category romance, I would definitely randomize the sex, age and/or race of the characters. Since this relationship is the key relationship of the story, cutting it free of category romance restrictions can really spark interesting ideas.  You could even do things like (gasp!) have less than attractive people as the main characters.


The Heroine in Jeopardy

As I said above, the key element of a suspense story is that the heroine is isolated in some way.  It might be physical isolation, like she's taken a job as a park ranger or a governess in a secluded estate.  It could also be an internal factor: anything from a disability to extreme self-consciousness. (As often as not over some tiny blemish she thinks is disfiguring but nobody else notices.) Or it might be social isolation: she's a member of a dispised class or disgraced family.

In most romantic suspense stories, there will be more than one factor.  However, for brainstorming we need to pick the most important one -- the one that drives the story.

For instance, if you had a character who was both a park ranger and was excessively self-conscious about some minor scars on her face, only one of those would really drive the story: Either she was so self-conscious that it hampers her entire life, and she took the job to get away from people; or she is an independant woman with a career as a lonely park ranger, who has this little self-consiousness problem.  In the first, the villain will be able to play on this self-consciousness to defeat her.  In the second, the self-consciousness will be like Indiana Jones and snakes; if the villain uses it against her, it will only piss her off.

This is not an action adventure story, though, so in either case, she will still be vulnerable.  It's just that in the second case it's external factors that make her vulnerable.

Okay, so now we make the list.

There are two ways to go about it.  You can really drill down and get detailed -- have choices for "Park Ranger" and "Governess" and "Suffers from positional vertigo" -- or you can just do categories, and leave the specifics to the brainstorming stage.

I prefer to go with categories, however sometimes to figure out your categories, you have to brainstorm the specifics first -- so go ahead and do that if you want.  Also, to create a great wheel, you need to think about your own inclinations and preferences.  If there are some tropes I really like, I'll get really specific on those so that there are more choices of that type.  That not only means the wheel will favor that trope, but it will also force me to think deeper to come up with variations on each variation.

The other thing I like to do is intentionally put a few items that I don't particularly like - just to force myself to work at it sometimes.  And sometimes to do that, I have to make an item very specific.  For instance, one of the items is "Secret Child." I'm not really fond of that as a story trope, but it's common enough in romance that Amazon actually has a browsing category for it.  So it's on there even if it is rather specific.

1.) Physical Isolation (isolated job, isolated living quarters)
2.) Social Isolation (servant, poor relation or step-child, lives in a country where she doesn't speak the language, etc.)
3.) Made a Terrible Mistake in the past
4.) Made a Terrible Mistake which was really someone else's fault.
5.) Made a Terrible Mistake that is directly related to the mystery
6.) Physiological Issues (scar, partially debilitating injury or disability, subtle condition like positional vertigo)
7.) Psychological issues (PTSD, Phobia, OCD)
8.) Hidden identity (heiress, movie star, princess)
9.) On a secret mission (revenge, needs to retrieve something, investigative reporter, must prove someone innocent)
10.) Convicted criminal (innocent of the crime, did something moral, or commited crime of weakness which she is working hard to overcome)
11.) On the Run from the law
12.) On the Run from bad reletionship
13.) On the Run from pressure of success
14.) On the Run from (fill in the blank)
15.) Secret Child

This is the second version of the wheel and still not done to my satisfaction. I'm not sure I like the "Terrible Mistake" trope that much (and the "Convicted Criminal" might be a part of that group) -- but yet I want to break it down for creative reasons. There are just too many cliches there, so I want to force myself deeper into sub-categories.  In the meantime, I might prefer to expand on the physical location variants more.

One way to handle the way I want sub-categories is to create a second wheel.  Have one slot on this wheel for "Terrible Mistake" and then if it comes up, roll the dice to choose one of several options.

Now, on to the dude....


The Hero Type in a Romantic Suspense

The dude is probably the single most important thing that defines where the story falls on the gradation from "romance with suspense elements" to "pure thriller with a romantic element."

In a pure suspense story, the hero might literally be no more than a lurking shadow.  He is a scary mystery, until at the end she finds out he's a good guy. In that case, the romance only begins in that last chapter.  On the romance end, he could be a full-fledged co-protagonist, with the mystery and suspense just being a subplot that complicates their relationship.

However, if she can rely on him to help her face the crisis, then it's not a suspense story.  To be an actual Suspense story, something has to isolate her from him, so that she faces the danger mostly alone.

So for me, the key element of the hero for a romantic suspense is what keeps the heroine from relying on him.

The problem for creating this list is that the relationship is going to change throughout the story.  For instance, he starts as a mysterious background character, but somewhere around the midpoint they get together.  I'm not worried about that, though, because I can throw plot twists at that. He can be called away. He can be fooled by the bad guy. Heck, I can even put him in jeopardy -- locked up, drugged, knocked out -- and she needs to rescue him as well as save herself.

So this plot wheel really applies to the premise -- the situation as it is set up in the first half of the story.  I can deviate from that at any major plot point.

Also because he isn't the protagonist, the "hook" into his character can be more colorful and interesting without throwing the story off.  Also, since he drives the romance, his "type" should be driven by your hero preferences. And as with the "Heroine's Secret" wheel -- throw in some options that you aren't so fond of to force some creativity.

Here is my list (still working on this one too):

1.) Mysterious Background Figure -- undercover cop
2.) Mysterious Background Figure -- on a personal mission to do with the backstory. (I.e. someone wronged, or seeking revenge.)
3.) Mysterious Background Figure -- a rogue or thief
4.) Innocent But Interfering Bystander (neighbor, handyman)
5.) Overt Suspect (person with best and most obvious motive, or a close associate or enemy of the victim)
6.) Authority Figure -- arrogant cop ("Stay out of this, Miss. It's dangerous.")
7.) Authority Figure -- boss or trustee of her estate
8.) Flawed Ex-Lover or Ex-Husband
9.) Mr. Perfect -- she ran away from him out of inner conflict, and he persues her because he's Mr. Perfect (thus she avoids him)
10.) Overlooked Friend (someone she doesn't think of romantically -- they grew up together, he was once married and now widowed or divorced, etc.  Too casual to confide in.)
11.) Idiot/Useless Boyfriend (he could really be loveable but useless, or he could be secretly very useful and she just doesn't know it -- as with the Scarlet Pimpernel or Clark Kent)

As you can see, I like the "Mysterious Background Figure" trope -- and that's because I like the mystery end more than the romance end. Also when I am on the romance side of things, I like the smoldering "Mystery Man She Can't Trust" trope.  I think I should expand on the Authority Figure options, though.  The friendly cop can still be someone she keeps secrets from. But then, of course, the reason she keeps the secret has more to do with her situation than his.  So I might actually come up with a different list depending on what kind of options chosen for her.

One thing to keep in mind with all of those characters is that at some point, the heroine is going to look on him with suspicion, no matter what category he falls into.  That's the nature of the story, that she is going to have to get paranoid, and trust no one.

That's enough for this week.


Next Week:  The Villain, and His Plot. 

Villain, the crime that drives the story, and we'll also take a look at the secondary characters on November 8.  After that we'll talk about generating Title and Theme, and then, finally, we'll actually play the game! (November 22

After that, we'll take a break.  I'll probably scatter a few individual game posts in December: maybe "roll" a couple of stories and talk about the brainstorming options.  Or I might take some famous romantic suspense movies and break them down in terms of the character structure.

But in January, I'm going to talk about the next phase of the game: the  4-Act Plot Structure Game.

See you in the funny papers.

If you read this blog, and find it useful or entertaining, buy a book once in a while, or make a donation. 

Here's a link to a list of my books.  And ... hey, look at that!  There's a donation link right below this sentence. (Donations are via Paypal)