Supporting Spaghetti

Oh, back again so soon? Well, I guess that’s as much on me as it is on you. But I did have another thought I wanted to bounce off you.

This is something I’ve seen several times in books and in bad B-movies, but it only recently struck me what was actually going on. How the storytellers were twisting things in a really unnatural way to solve a problem. So this may make you (and me) look back at some older posts I’ve done in a slightly different light..

But first, let’s talk about pasta.

I got into cooking during the pandemic. Started watching lots of cooking videos. Trying some things that were kind of new and daring for me. Maybe some of you did too. I’ve found all the prep and cooking kept my mind off other things but still working in creative ways. And now I can make really good stir-fried noodles.

Speaking of noodles, you’ve probably heard of the spaghetti test. When it’s cooked properly and ready to eat, you can throw a strand of spaghetti at the wall and the moisture and starches and, I don’t know, pasta epoxy will make it stick. If it isn’t done cooking yet, it just falls off or does a slow downward tumble like one of those Wacky Wall Walkers.

There’s another phrase you may have heard which grew out of this spaghetti test. “Let’s throw it at the wall and see what sticks.” It shows up a lot in the development stages of all sorts of things. We’ve got thirty ideas and we don’t know which one’s going to work? Well, let’s just do all of them. We throw all the spaghetti at the wall—the whole pot—and everything that sticks is good and ready to go and whatever doesn’t... isn’t. Sound familiar?

I think most of us have tried this sort of blunt, brute force approach on something. I know I’ve rewritten conversations severaltimes to see if it works better with Yakko taking the lead, or Dot, or Wakko, or Phoebe, or... who’s that guy? Let’s see what happens if he takes the lead in this. Same thing with names. Holy crap, Murdoch in Terminus went through sooooo many different names. Sometimes for whole drafts, sometimes just for a page or three. But then I found Murdoch and it was perfect.

Thing is, there’s a weird sort of flipside to this. Or maybe an inverse? Freaky mutant bastard offspring? Anyway, I talked a while back about shotgun art, and I think this is what’s going on here.

Sometimes, in books and movies, we’ll see storytellers who just pile on the characters. One after another after another, many of them with only the thinnest connection to the main plot. It’s the cousin of the best friend of a supporting character in one plot thread. Or, y’know, even less than that. I read one story where we spent two whole chapters with a character who’s only purpose was to bump into one of the main characters in a third chapter. That was it. She served no other purpose in the story except to be that two page delay in his day And, y’know, fill out the page count a bit.

What struck me a few weeks back is when storytellers are doing this—layering on dozens of simple, almost stereotypical characters and conflicts—is they’re taking the spaghetti approach and just throwing everything at the wall. Rather than developing any of these characters or elements to any degree, they’re just giving us lots and lots of quick, shallow ones. I mean why spend time making a complex character when I could just create five characters with only one character trait each? It’s so much less effort, right? I mean, ex-wife, former best friend, alcoholic rival, pregnant woman, aggressive military guy—there’s got to be something there that strikes a chord with my reader, right?

That example I gave up above? The woman who served no purpose except to bump into one of the protagonists? She was late for work. That was it. That was her entire character. I mean, she had a name. She had some dialogue. She had a pet in a tank in her apartment (some kind of lizard, I think). But that was it. The only other thing we knew about her—her alarm didn’t go off, she overslept by almost two hours, and she was late for work. We never learned why her alarm didn’t go off (power outage? forgot to set it? sabotaging pet lizard?). We never learned why she was so tired she overslept by two hours (drastically overworked? got blackout drunk? a wild hookup that left her exhausted?).

Heck, weird as it sounds, we never even found out why being late was a bad thing (on the verge of being fired? abusive boss? big presentation?). We just knew she was late, had to get showered and dressed fast, had to get to work, and that was supposed to be enough for us. Anything else would require more thought about who she was, what she wanted out of life, and what she was actually getting.

And this book had over a dozen characters like her. Seriously. It spent a significant amount of time with people who could be 100% completely summed up with things like “Wakko needs some drugs,” “Dot’s worried about her dog,” or “Yakko is a no-nonsense soldier.” That’s it. That’s all of who they were.

One place you may recognize this from (tis the season after all) is old slasher movies. Okay, and some modern ones. Most of the cast is one note characters with just barely enough depth that we can tell the machete went through them. They’re the bulk filler of the plot. The serious woman. The goofball. The jock. The nice girl. The drunk/ stoner. They just exist to be minor obstacles between our killer and the one or two survivors.

Now, again, the idea is that the reader (or the audience, if this is a B-movie) has to find something more-or-less relatable in these broad stereotypes. I mean... you’ve known somebody who’s late for work before, right? Or was a jock? Or a serious woman? Okay, well... I bet you knew someone who was worried about their dog at some point, right?

I think people do this for two reasons. One is that they’re nervous about creating complex characters. Maybe they don’t think they’ve got the skill to do it, or possibly just not the skill to do it in the number of pages allotted to it. Perhaps they think their plot can’t function with only three or four threads. Or possibly they’re worried about having such a limited number of viewpoints.

I think the other reason is they’re worried about having characters with no traits. Like that woman running the register at the gas station. She doesn’t even have a name tag. She’s just there to sell the protagonist gas and a couple snacks. She’s got no arc or backstory or tragic flaw. That doesn’t seem right. We have to give her something, right? Maybe she could be, I don’t know, late for work or something?

Thing is, no matter what my reasoning is for this flood of one-dimensional characters, this always ends up leading to one of two things. Either we mistake their lack of depth for deliberate avoidance (“Hmmmmmm... why isn’t the writer saying why she was up late last night? Is she the murderer???”) and then we get frustrated when this goes nowhere. Or we recognize these characters don’t actually serve a purpose and get frustrated waiting to go back to someone who’s actually going to affect the plot in some way.

I also think it’s worth noting the three traits of good characters I’ve mentioned here a few dozen times—likable, believable, relatable. And yeah, I’ve also mentioned that supporting characters can sometimes get away with only two of these traits. Catch is, when characters are this flat and undeveloped, they almost always end up unbelievable—their actions and reactions just seem ridiculous because there’s no depth to ground them in. So we’re down one good trait already! Then my shotgun approach means they’re going to be randomly relatable at best, and lots of folks fall back on “snarky jerk” as a default personality, soooooooooooooo... Not a lot going for these folks.

Y’see, Timmy, burying my story in simple characters doesn’t work because it’s forgetting a basic truth of the spaghetti test. All those noodles that didn’t stick to the wall? I don’t sweep them up off the floor and put them back in the pot. The whole point of doing it all was to see what did and didn’t work—to figure out what shouldn’t be in my story.

So said noodles definitely shouldn’t be part of my finished entree.

Everyone gets the food-book metaphor here, right?

Anyway... next time...

Wow. Already halfway through October. I guess next time I could do the obligatory horror post. Or maybe talk about NaNoWriMo? Any preferences?

Either way, go write.

Hatching The Plot

I haven’t had to come up with an idea in weeks because all of you keep asking questions. And I’m really grateful because my attention’s been split, like, nine different ways lately so having one task where I’m just being told what to do is kind of relief. Seriously.

That said... we did the Writers Coffeehouse at WonderCon again this year (many thanks to Sarah Kuhn, Stephen Blackmoore, Fonda Lee, and Greg van Eekhout for taking part) and tried to answer a lot of your questions about writing. But after we finished recording, I realized someone had sent a question I hadn’t seen. Probably because social media algorithms tend to be jerks. Anyway, Tomasthanes asked...

”How did you learn how to plot? Did you take a course? Did you work through 50+ spreadsheets? Are you ‘gifted’ and just do it? What does the product of your plotting look like?”

Personally, I think there’s a bit of a mystique element to questions like this. Some of you may remember I’ve talked once or thrice about the difference between the textbook ability to write and the ability to compose a narrative. A simple analogy I’ve used is the difference between being able to cook and being a chef. It’s something I think a lot of us come to realize on some level when we start really examining this whole writing thing in a serious way.

However—and this is just my thoughts on this, don’t take them as gospel truth—I think this realization can also backfire on us for a bit. Some folks assume there must be some specific “pro level” they need to achieve for every aspect and element of writing. They must absorb the life-energies of ten other writers and then they'll know how to pick the grade-A ideas and create master-class characters and have, I don’t know, gold star spelling ability.

Truth is, most of these skills and tools work the same way on the expert levels. It’s just that those folks have more experience using them. It’s like thinking chefs get some kind of special knife that lets them chop faster or make interesting cuts. It’s not any different than the knives you or I probably have. They’re just more experienced with it and have learned a few tricks that work well for them.

And when it comes to plotting... the truth is, most of us already know how to plot. We learned from comics and cartoons and movies and fairy tales yes maybe even from books (wilder things have happened). We understand the basic chain of cause and effect that makes up every story.

So I don’t think it’s so much learning how to plot. It’s just figuring out how to get better at it. Finding a workout routine that works best for us, whether it be working through 50+ spreadsheets or... something else.

Anyway, here’s an easy something else for you to try.

Think of a story you loved as a kid. Not in the YA range, but more single digit. Maybe it was a book or a comic, possibly a movie or TV show. Something you know you loved.

Here’s the catch—it needs to be something you loved then, but you’ve since revisited and discovered it’s not as great as you remembered. Maybe it feels a little goofy or simplistic now. I mean, it might just be flat-out stupid. A plodding structure, a complete lack of worthwhile challenges, painfully obvious clues for the transparent "mystery.” I bet if you’re the type of person who reads these little rants, you can think of at least one story like that, right?

(I know I can)

So... think about how that story’s bad. Why is it silly or goofy? What would need to change, structure-wise, for it to be better? Something more suited for an older, somewhat more savvy audience?

Does it begin at a good point, or does it need a new one? Is there some sort of antagonist? Should there be? Are there real stakes? If not, what needs to be done to the story to increase them? What did our hero do to accomplish their goals? Were they actually challenged? Is there a satisfying ending? Or at least, satisfying in terms of the story I'm telling?

If you can explain why alongside any of these answers, even better.

A lot of these tweaks will probably also mean making adjustments to my characters. They might need to be a little more complex to justify some of their decisions and actions in the story. And that means they may end up having an arc of some kind, a story, and well, I’ve talked about that feedback loop. Plot pushing story, story driving plot, which lead to the plot again having an effect on the story...

Whoa! Hey, look at that. We’re plotting stuff. Just like the professionals do.

Will this be perfect? No, probably not. Like I said up above, there is an experience aspect to this as well. Some folks might have a knack for it, others may need a little more work, but none of us are going to be phenomenal at it right out of the gate. Maybe not out of our fifth or sixth gate. But it’s not because we don’t know how to do it. It’s just because we’re still figuring out our way of doing it.

And speaking of doing it...

Next week I’ll be trying to finish a huge pitch document for this new project, so I’m probably not going to have a post for you. Unless one of you gives me a really amazing question that I feel compelled to answer as soon as possible. But check in here anyway and I may have a cartoon or quick thought for you.

Then after that... clowns. Probably.

Until then, go write.

Good and Bad Conflict

Sorry I missed last week. Taxes. As I mentioned earlier.

A few weeks back, during my usual Saturday geekery, I had a sudden epiphany about Asylum movies. Even though, technically, it wasn’t an Asylum movie I was watching. I feel safe saying whoever made this film studied at the feet of the mast... well, at the feet of the Asylum producers. And it’s a problem I’ve seen in a lot of book manuscripts. So I made a note of it and told myself I’d have to do a post on it sometime soon.

And then last weekend’s geekery gave me a trio of movies that suffered from the exact same issue. So I thought, wow, serendipity. Definitely a sign of... something. So sometime soon became this week.

Once or thrice here I’ve talked about the ideas of plot and story. Plot is what happens outside my characters, story is what happens inside my characters. The basic idea of a narrative is that conflicts (of many different types) will drive that plot forward, and the plot and story will work together and feed off each other like some beautiful alien symbiote that bonds with you and manifests as bio-armor under times of stress or when you summon no, wait, that’s the plot of the Guyver. I’ve talked about how plot and story work together before. Stick with that, forget the Guyver. For now.

What I wanted to talk about was the conflicts, all those roadblocks that pop up between the beginning and end of the story. The things that get in the way of my characters getting what they want. Because some of these things are great and some are... not so great.

As I mentioned above, I have conflict in my book to drive the plot. My character has to overcome social pressures, financial constraints, power structures, ancient death traps, and a variety of other obstacles. Dealing with these things (or failing to deal with them)  forces my character to grow and change internally (sometimes called a character arc) while at the same time usually subjecting them to greater pressures/constraints/death traps. That’s dramatic structure. Who my character is at the beginning of the book starts and shapes the plot. Who they become at the end helps them resolve the plot.

Here’s a cool way to think of it. Picture a staircase. Every time we climb up a stair, it feels like we’re on level ground, but we’re actually higher than we were before. As we keep climbing stairs, we keep going higher. That’s conflict moving the plot. Climbing stairs moves us higher. Make sense?

Now, the problem I was seeing is that some storytellers had lots of conflicts popping up—but they didn’t actually do anything. They didn’t affect the plot in any way. They’d encounter a new obstacle, deal with it, and then be... right back where they started. Nothing gained. Nothing accomplished. Nothing learned. Our characters haven’t moved any closer to the end of the plot, haven’t grown or changed in any way. These conflicts were so self-contained we could just snip them and lift them out and there wouldn’t be any real change. Heck, we probably wouldn’t even need to stitch things together on either side.

If you wanted to use that staircase analogy, at this point the steps have kind of fallen over and become more a line of peaks. Every time we go over one, we’re just... right back at ground level. Not to mention, they’re all kind of the same peak. None of them stand out, and we realize pretty quick it’s just going to be that same thing again and again.

A term I’ve brought up here before is episodic. Yes, like TV episodes. Its when the conflicts resolve and the plot and story basically reset to where they were at the beginning. Our characters don’t grow or change in any way, they gain nothing, they just... go to the next episode. Which is exactly the same.

Neat thing to think about—because of that “reset,” it doesn’t matter what order we watch a lot of older shows in. We can go from episode twenty-three to episode fifteen to the eighth episode of season four and... you can’t tell. There’s no change because there’s no actual goal. The characters aren’t really trying to accomplish anything past the particular obstacles of this single episode.

When this happens in a larger story—say a novel or a movie—the storytellers are just dropping in these episodic conflicts because... well, we need conflict, right? So we’ll get a flat tire, spend ten minutes changing it, and then we’re back on the road. Or we’ll get caught in a super-embarrassing, borderline scandalous situation at work that nobody remembers or comments on the next day. Or we’ll find ourselves going out to rescue Wakko again and drag him back home because he just won’t stay put during the zombieapocalypse. These events are there. They fill pages. But they have no repercussions. No lasting effects. They don’t spark any changes in the way anyone thinks or acts.

Y’see Timmy, there’s conflict that advances the plot and conflict that just prolongs the plot. It isn’t there to help develop the characters or their stories, it’s just there to keep us from reaching the end too soon. So people get flat tires. Or wander out of their house during the zombocalypse. Or—no joke—fall off the Great Pyramid of Giza.

And absolutely nothing happens. No one suffer any consequences from these events at all. None.

Now, this isn’t to say nobody can get a flat tire in my manuscript. Flat tires are a real thing that happen to all of us. But I should think about why this flat tire’s happening. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m the all-powerful Creator-of-your-choice in the world of my story. Nothing happens here except by my choice and my will. So why is this flat tire happening? What purpose does it serve in my story? Is it advancing the plot? Giving someone a moment to expand their character arc?

Or is just happening to keep them from getting where they’re going too soon?

Look over some of your story points. Are they advancing your plot? Or are they just stretching it out?

Next time... I had a new idea I wanted to talk to you about.

Until then, go write.

It's Not Christmas Without...

And here we are, at that wonderful time of year when a young man’s thoughts turn toward... Nakatomi Plaza.

I wanted to do a holiday-ish post, and then (while watching a favorite seasonal movie) it hit me I could address a fierce debate that’s surged up over the past few years. And maybe I could even make it semi-educational. From a writing point of view.

Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

Now, let’s be honest. If you’ve got strong opinions about this, I’m not going to change your mind. But if you're somebody who cares a lot about stories (and if you’re reading this, I’d guess there’s a semi-decent chance you are) maybe this week’s little ramble will make you look at Mr. McLane’s late December adventure a little differently. And maybe some other stories, too.

With that disclaimer out of the way... let’s start by talking a bit about the difference between an element and a genre. I’ve mentioned this before, so I won’t go into it too much. Simply put, there are a lot of labels we can slap on both story elements and genres, but the presence of one doesn’t automatically create another. For example, there’s a strong romance element in Bloodshot, the Vin Diesel movie that came out earlier this year. It’s also got a few funny moments. But I don’t think any of you would be surprised to learn Bloodshot isn’t considered a romantic-comedy. Romance, comedy, suspense, mystery, horror, sci-fi... all of these things can be in a story that’s not in that same-named genre.

So let’s talk about Christmas as an element and as a genre.

As an element, Christmas can be a couple things. Easiest is the setting—it’s a specific timeframe that pretty much everyone on Earth knows and can understand to some extent, even if they don’t celebrate the holiday themselves. Also worth noting that Christmas is one of those (if you think about it) rare holidays that has a very fixed date, unlike lots of other that slide around the calendar a bit each year.

Christmas is also in the details and descriptions. Christmas trees, wreaths, presents, garland, lights, a Santa on every corner and a snowman in every yard. These are things I can mention in my story (or show in my movie) and they create an immediate association for people.

It’s also a mood, and a lot of traditions. If I’ve got a story set at Christmas, it’ll probably show up in dialogue. Let’s face it, people interact and talk a little differently in December, no matter which way they feel about any particular holiday. Scrooge is a little nastier. That super-peppy woman at the coffeeshop is almost scarily happy and peppy.

I think there’s a lot of movies and stories out there that get marketed as Christmas tales, but really just have a few random elements tossed in. We could move said movie to Memorial Day weekend or a random bank holiday and nothing notable would change. The romance would have the same meet cute, the comedy would have the same awkward moment at the dinner table, the zombie movie would have the same stupid montage of our protagonist fighting the horde witha baseball bat.

And this would bring us to Christmas the genre. There’s a lot of thoughts on defining genre (I’ve shared some too) but I think one notable thing is how abundant those elements are. Eventually the romance or the comedy becomes a dominant aspect and we think of this story as a romance, a comedy, or maybe a romantic comedy if it’s got both. The horror or sci-fi elements are so intrinsic to the plot my novel would crumble without them. 

What marks something as part of the Christmas genre? The setting, absolutely. Sometimes the characters. It’s really hard to do a movie where Santa or Rudolph’s a main character and not have it be a Christmas story. And we see a lot of common themes in the Christmas genre. Joy. Peace. Happiness. Love. Togetherness.

Simple, right?

However...

There’s another aspect to this, and it’s something I hinted at up above and once talked about with (shameless name drop in three... two...) Shane Black. Christmas, maybe more than any other Western holiday, is an amplifier. Everything hits a little harder at this time of year. Romance is great, but Christmas romance is even better. Friendship is wonderful, but being with your friends at Christmas is fantastic. Family squabbles can be funny, but during the holidays they’re even funnier. And, yeah, puppies are great, but have you ever seen CHRISTMAS PUPPIES?!?

(seriously, you just grinned at the thought of Christmas puppies, didn’t you? See?)

And, yeah, this goes the other way. If something’s tense, it’s three times as tense at Christmas (scientifically measured). When something horrible happens, it’s even more horrible because it happened at Christmas. And to touch on a serious issue, depression’s never great, but depression during the holidays is just awful.

So I think it’s fair to say there are stories that may lean heavily toward non-Christmas elements, but the Christmas setting amplifies these stories. It inherently makes them more than they would be without it. Not a coincidence how many Christmas stories involve finding true love or reuniting with your family. And there’s a serious glut of Christmas horror movies. No, seriously. They’ve been a thing for decades.

Now... keeping all that in mind... let’s talk about Die Hard.

Die Hard is loaded with Christmas elements. I mean, 90% of it is set at a Christmas party gone very bad. And it’s a high-end party so decorations are everywhere. Really, look at a lot of these scenes and check out how often there’s a wreath, a garland, a Christmas tree, something. I’d bet half the scenes in this movie have a direct, visual tie to Christmas. And the music! It’s all Christmas music. All of it.

Plus, this setting is a big driver for the plot. John’s out in LA to see his kids and maybe patch things up with his wife. The Christmas party is why there are so many people conveniently in the building after hours to be taken as hostages. The watch she got as a Christmas gift from her boss is a point of contention (and a great Chekhov’s gun). When the FBI wants to shut down power to the building, the main reason there’s a fight is because it would mean shutting off the electricity to ten blocks of LA on Christmas Eve. Hell, John’s last minute surprise for Hans Gruber and his Huey Lewis look-alike pal? Remember how he pulls that off...?

Finally... the amplification factor. Realizing your relationship is collapsing is always bad, but on Christmas Eve? Sweet jebus, that’s a gut punch. Getting taken hostage absolutely sucks, but when it happens at the company Christmas party? And issuing ominous threats to the bad guys is badass, but when you get to tag on Ho-Ho-Ho...? Seriously, it’s one of the most memorable moments in a movie filled with great moments.

And so many of those moments get cranked up five or ten percent higher ‘cause we’re constantly reminded... it’s Christmas. 

So... is Die Hard a Christmas movie? I mean, I think it is. And if you want to argue it isn’t then I think there’s a lot of other movies (many of them with Christmas in the title) that we’d have to toss out as well. ‘Cause if we’re saying hitting all these benchmarks doesn’t matter... well... 

Look, nobody likes a grinch, okay?

With that, speaking of grinches, I give you one last shameless capitalist reminder that you can give people ebooks as last-minute gifts, and I happen to have a ton of them out there. 

I hope this long weekend is wonderful and peaceful for you, no matter who you are, whatever you believe, and whatever you celebrate this season.

And maybe we’ll squeeze in one more chat before 2021.

The A2Q Master List

Hey, since I’ve been asked about this a few times now...

When I did the A2Q how-to-write-a-novel thing at the start of the year, it was every other week, and then every week, and trying to find those posts now, in reverse order, can make it a bit troublesome. So here’s a master list of more or less the whole thing. Now I can just point folks here, or you can just save the one bookmark. Y’know, if you felt this was bookmark-worthy.

Part One—The Idea

Part Two—The Plot

Part Three—The Characters

Part Four—The Story

Part Five—The Setting

Part Six—The Theme

Part Seven—The Outline

Part Eight—The First Draft

Part Nine—The Editing

Part Ten—The Criticism

Part Eleven—The Revisions

Part Twelve—The End
 
For the record, there were some other posts I slapped the A2Q tag on—the supplemental material, if you will—but I didn’t include them here. They’re useful, but most of them were afterthoughts and they’d feel a little jammed in, I think, if I tried to work them in here where they should be. When I someday bind all this into an ebook, I’ll make sure they’re all incorporated from the start.

Next up, rocks. And right after that, I’d like to do one holiday tradition a little early.

Now go write.

A Few Basic Things I Should’ve Mentioned...

I  was glancing back over the whole A2Q thing I did a few months back. I admit, I’ve been toying with the idea of combining the posts, expanding on some aspects, and offering it as a cheapo ebook (at all interesting to anyone?). And it struck me there are a few aspect of writing I kinda skimmed over and others I barely touched on at all.

So I thought it wouldn’t be a bad thing to add in a few basics about forming a plot, shaping my structure, dealing with characters, that sort of stuff. A little less how-to (“press your foot down on the gas pedal to go fast”) and a little more but-keep-in-mind (“don’t go ninety in a school zone while a cop’s parked there”). Make sense?

I’ve mentioned most of these ideas before, so they may feel familiar. Also, since I’m loosely tying this back to the A2Q, I’ll use my character examples there rather than my standard Animaniacs references. I don’t want anyone to think I’ve abandoned Yakko, Wakko, and Dot.

Anyway...

First, I should be clear who my protagonist is. In my head and on the page. If I spend the first five chapters of my book with Phoebe... everyone’s going to assume Phoebe’s the main character. The book’s clearly about her, right?  So when she vanishes for the next seven chapters and I focus on Luna or Quinn... well, people are going to keep wondering when we’re getting back to Phoebe.  Because she’s who I set up as the main character.

Now, a lot of books have a big cast of characters.  An ensemble, as some might say.  That’s cool.  But if my book’s going to be shifting between a bunch of characters, I need to establish that as soon as possible.  If the first four or five chapters are all the same character, it’s only natural my readers will assume that’s going to be the norm for this book, and it’ll be jarring when I jump out of that norm.

Second, speaking of jumping and jarring, is that I need to keep my POV consistent. Even with a third person POV, we’re usually looking over a specific person’s shoulder, so to speak. Which means that character can’t walk away and leave us behind.  Likewise, we can’t start over Phoebe’s shoulder and then drift over so we’re looking over Luna’s.

It’s cool to switch POV—there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it—but I need to make it very clear to my readers I’m doing it. They need that stability and consistency. If they start seeing things from new angles or hearing new pronouns, it’s going to knock them out of the story and break the flow. And that’s never a good thing.

Third, while we’re talking about peering over other shoulders, is that I should be clear who’s part of my story and who’s just... well, window dressing. I probably don’t want to spend three or four pages describing Doug, hearing his backstory, reminiscing about his workday, and then discover he’s just some random guy at the bar. Phoebe serves him a drink and then we never, ever hear about him again.

Names and descriptions are how I can tell my reader if a character’s going to be important and worth remembering or is they're just there to show Phoebe’s doing her job. Three paragraphs of character details means “Pay attention to this one.” So if I’m telling readers to keep track of people for no reason—or for very thin reasons—I’m wasting their time and my word count.

Fourth is I need to have an actual plot before I start focusing on subplots.  What’s the big, overall story of my book?  If it’s about Phoebe trying to fins out the secret of the super-werewolf, I should probably get that out to my readers before I start the betrayal subplot or the romance-issues subplot or the how-could-mom-and-dad-have-hidden-this-family-secret-from-us subplot.  After all, they picked up my book because the back cover said it was about fighting super-werewolves. I should be working toward meeting those expectations first.

If I find myself spending more time on a subplot (or subplots) than the actual plot, maybe I should pause and reconsider what my book’s about.

Fifth, closely related to four, is my subplots should relate to the main plot somehow.  They need to tie back or at least have similar themes so we see the parallels.  If I can pull a subplot out of my book and it doesn’t change anything it the main plot in the slightest... I might want to reconsider it. And if it’s an unrelated subplot to an unrelated subplot... okay, wow, I’m really getting lost at this point.

Sublots face a real danger of becoming, well, distracting. People are showing up for that sweet werewolf on werewolf action, and I don’t want to kill whatever tension I’m building by putting that on hold for  two or three chapters while I deal with inter-hunter rivalry and politics at the werewolf-hunting lodge. It’s like switching channels in the middle of a television show. What’s on the other channel isn’t necessarily bad, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the show we’re trying to watch.

Sixth is knowing when I need to reveal stuff. Remember how much fun it was when you met that certain someone and there were all those fascinating little mysteries about them? We wanted to learn all their tics and favorites and secrets. Where are they from? What’d they study in school? What do they do for a living? What are their dreams? Do they have brothers or sisters? Where’d they get that scar? Just how big is that tattoo?

But... we don’t want to learn those secrets from a dossier. We want to hang out with these people, talk over drinks, maybe stay up all night on the phone or on the couch. The memories of how we learn these things about people are just as important as what we learn. And it’s how we want to learn about characters, too. Just dumping pages and pages of backstory actually make a character less interesting. It kills that sense of mystery, because there’s nothing left to learn about them.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with me having incredibly fleshed out characters. But I might not need to use all of that backstory in the book. And I definitely don’t need to use it all in the first two or three chapters.

Seventh and last is flashbacks. Flashbacks are a fantastic narrative device, but... they get used wrong a lot. And when they’re wrong... they’re brutal. A clumsy flashback can kill a story really fast.

A flashback needs to be advancing the plot. Or increasing tension. Or giving my readers new information. In a great story, it’s doing more than one of these things. Maybe even all of them.

But a flashback that doesn’t do any of these things... that’s not a good flashback.  That’s wrong.  And it’ll bring things to a grinding halt and break the flow.

And that's seven basic things to keep in mind while I’m writing my story 

Now, as always, none of these are hard-fast, absolute rules.  If I hire someone to paint my house, there’s always a possibility this particular painter doesn’t use a roller. There can always be an exception.  But I should be striving to be the exception, not just assuming everyone will be okay with me not following all the standards. My readers are going in with certain expectations, and I need to be doing honestly amazing things to go against those expectations. 

Because if that same painter also doesn’t use a brush... or dropcloths... or a ladder...

Next time, just to be different, I’d like to explain something else to you. But I’m probably going to skim over most of it, if that’s okay.

Until then, go write.

A2Q Part Six—Theme

Hey, everybody. Hope you’re all safe and, y’know, not bored out of your mind. Social distancing can be a pain, but it’s better for everyone in the long run.

Time for the A2Q again. Thanks for following along so far. At this point, we’ve talked about plot, story, characters, and setting. I want to go over one last thing before we dive in.

And that thing is theme.

Yeah, you just felt a chill, didn’t you? I think we all have a kinda instinctive revulsion to theme because of high school classes where it was sort of parroted out to us and not really explained. Or explained very poorly.

I’ll also be honest—I almost didn’t include theme in this little series or workshop or whatever we’re calling this. Theme is tough. It can be hard to grasp. It’s also one of those things that sometimes happens even if we’re not thinking about it. Likewise, some folks think about it too much and end up driving their story into the ground.

So... how to explain theme?

Okay, look at it this way. You know how I’ve talked about plot versus story? It’s a topic that’s come up here once or thrice before, and I’ve discussed both of them in earlier parts of the A2Q. Plot is outside your characters, story is inside.

Simply put, in the Venn diagram of plot vs story, theme is where they overlap. It’s the common bond between external and internal that ties things together in my manuscript. If you asked me what my story’s really about, my theme would be the answer that covers the most bases.

F’r example... some of you may have heard of Solomon Kane, an old Robert Howard character who’s been in books, comics, poems, and even a pretty solid live action movie—which is what I’ll talk about here. Kane’s a bloodthirsty pirate who finds out he’s actually damned to hell, repents, and ends up becoming a devout Puritan with a vow of pacifism. Problem is... he keeps finding himself in situations where the good guys really need somebody nightmarishly violent and ruthless on their side. So he has to go back to his old ways to try to stop assorted bandits, warlords, evil sorcerers, and even full-on demons.

So we can say the theme of Solomon Kane (the movie) is “fighting evil,” or maybe a better way to say it would be “fighting against the darkness.” Kane is constantly battling evil in the world, in all its many forms. But he’s also battling the evil within himself, trying to redeem himself and not fall back into old habits and attitudes.

Of course, it’s easy to identify themes in things that already exist. Trying to make them from scratch, to weave them into this story I’ve been planning... that’s a lot tougher. I mean, this is serious writing stuff now.

But it really isn’t. Honestly, I think one of the reasons we all kinda fear theme is because it’s been made into this sort of literary boogeyman—this thing that looms over the story , and also over the author. What themes is the writer trying to explore? Does this book have a simplistic, common theme? Should we discuss the novel’s theme? At length?

Deep breath. It’s not that bad. Really. In fact, it’s a lot easier than your sixth grade English teacher made it seem.

(yeah , that’s right Mrs. Goodell—I’m calling you out)

Here’s a couple things I think we should keep in mind while we’re talking about theme.

First, at this early stage, it’s okay to only have a general idea what my theme—or themes—are going to be in this book. It shouldn’t be too hard to come up with one or two. Just look at a lot of the elements we’ve been gathering up so far and see what the connections are between them.

In fact, doing this as an exercise can be kind of a test. Or maybe an early warning system. I might have a bunch of really cool elements, but if I can’t find any connections between any of them... well, that means I’ve got a bunch of unconnected elements. Which is, y’know, sort of the opposite of a book. So I might want to reconsider some things.

Second, I should be aware my manuscript might have multiple themes. Not a problem. I mentioned before that there may be multiple stories within my book, so it only stands to reason they’d all intersect the plot in slightly different places on that Venn diagram.

Look at Solomon Kane again. It has the theme of fighting against darkness, but there’s a good argument to be made that it also involves the theme of redemption. It’s an active plot element as Kane tries to make up for his past, and it’s also a story element as he realizes that A) he needs to redeem himself to save his soul and 2) his redemption may need to take a more aggressive form then normal. And that plot-story overlap is a theme, so... hey, there it is.

Third is kinda the flipside of that first one.  Again, just my opinion, but... don’t worry about theme too much right now. Definitely have it in mind. Don’t willfully ignore it. But also don’t stress over it. Just write your first draft. Worry about balancing the plot and story you want to write. When I put a lot of advance work into my theme, I run the risk of structuring things to the theme. The plot and story stop being neck and neck out front and the theme becomes the priority. Which is when my theme starts turning into more of a message. And messages can get awkward and heavy-handed really fast.

Again, just my personal opinion, your mileage may vary.

Once that first draft’s done, guess what? The manuscript exists now. And it’s easy to identify themes in things that already exist, remember? I can look back over my first draft and I’ll probably see a theme or three poking out.

Now, again, I don’t like to do too much beforehand, but... let’s look at our werewolf book.

I can probably guess survival is going to be a major theme in the book, or perhaps “what are we willing to do to survive.” After all our main character, Phoebe, hunts werewolves for a living. And her little sister Luna is a werewolf, a fact she’s trying to hide from Phoebe and their lodge on the off chance they, y’know, kill her. And there’s also survival in the larger sense, that both of them have been doing a lot of things to try to hold their lives together, as individuals and as a little family. And we’re probably going to find out that the lodge is thinking about what they’ll do to survive, too—in the sense of both humanity’s ongoing struggle against werewolves but also the lodge itself as an institution.

Phoebe and Luna are also both going to be dealing with the idea of family a lot. It’s a motivation for them and a regular thing they’re dealing with—something they’re acting on that’s also acting on them. There’s also this family legacy hanging over them, and the fact they the two of them are the broken remains of a family since their parents’ death.

Which leads me to one last possible theme. The idea of moving on with your life, of getting past things. Both of my main characters want their lives to progress—Luna wants to head off to college and Phoebe wants to get her own life back on track. As I’ve mentioned before, Phoebe’s struggling with a lot of repressed resentment, too. And they’re also going to need to get past a lot of the baggage and preconception their parents left them with if they’re going to deal with Luna’s ahem condition and how it affects both of them.

Again, though... I’m not going to worry about this too much up front. I’m just making the observations now for the A2Q. I’m probably going to worry more about plot and story on my first draft, and later I may come back, look at these early thoughts, and see how they may shape later drafts.

And if you want to think more about these things now, that’s cool, too. As I’ve often said, we all have our own way of working, and what works for me may not work for you. The important thing, for now, is just to be aware of it and have it in that pile of ingredients in your mind before we start cooking.

Speaking of which... it’s probably time we start arranging all these ingredients and get ready to start cooking. So that’s what we’ll do next time. Yeah, next time—let’s just go straight to the next part of the A2Q (unless somebody has serious objections and wants to see something else first)

Until then... go write.

A2Q Part Two—The Plot

Hey, here we are back with the A2Q. Sorry this is a day late. Yesterday was a big day for me, and it ended up eating a lot of my time. In a good way.

Anyway, last time in the A2Q we talked about ideas. How to find them, collect them, and clean them up for later use. Now I want to talk about plots. We’ll go over what they are, why we need them, and how to put one together using that big pile of ideas we’ve gathered up and had sitting on our desk for a few months now.

In my mind, a plot has three basic parts. It establishes a norm. It gives us some kind of conflict. And then we resolve that conflict. Again, just me, but I think if my plot doesn’t have these three identifiable components, it’s going to be tough to get anyone interested in it.

Let’s go over each of them.

First, we need to establish what passes for “normal” in the world of my book. Maybe it’s the modern world as you and I both know it. Maybe it’s the historical world of the 17th century. Perhaps it’s a future world where planets settle all their grievances and negotiations with gladitorial games. Or possibly it’s the modern world but werewolves exist and everybody knows about them.

I know a lot of folks push for diving right in as quickly as possible, but there’s a reason this step is important. If I don’t establish what’s normal and natural in this world—or at least what my characters think is normal and natural—I can’t have anything unnatural happen to them. This can be a little tough if “normal” means living in a world with space elevators and moonbases, or a Victorian steampunk world, or a modern world where werewolves are real, but I really believe it’s vital. If I don’t establish what’s possible, everything that happens in my book becomes questionable, as do all my characters’ reactions to it.  Yeah, you and I might freak out to see a werewolf run in front of our car tonight, but for the residents of WereWorld this is just another Thursday. It’s normal.

Second, we need to establish some kind of conflict. Whatever that norm is our characters are used to, something has to break it. By its very nature, today should be something out of the ordinary, because if this was a regular, day-to-day challenge our characters would already know how to deal with it, right? And if they know how to deal with it, it’s not that interesting. We want to see the day things change, the day our characters have to deal with something that knocks them out of their comfort zone and forces them to impress us somehow.

Now, throughout the course of our book, there may be a bunch of challenges my characters need to deal with. If a werewolf murders my character’s lover but nobody believes in werewolves, she could have a ton of people after her—the police, the FBI, her psychiatrist, maybe even a werewolf hunter who thinks she was bitten. But there should be a main, overall conflict that’s driving everything. In this particular case, it’s our character trying to prove werewolves are real and she’s innocent. Almost everything builds off of that.

Third, we need to resolve this conflict. We can’t tell our readers there’s a ravenous werewolf storming through my hero’s hometown killing everyone it can and then just... never refer to it again. If Dot’s dream all this time has been to ask out the cheerleader, then she needs to ask out the cheerleader (or at least address why she doesn’t need to ask out the cheerleader anymore). A big part of any book’s success is how we tie things up at the end which means... well, we need to tie things up at the end. When was the last time you or someone you know praised a book for not resolving anything?

Something else that kinda needs to be addressed. When the conflict’s resolved, it needs to be my hero who resolves it. I don’t want to follow Wakko for 300 pages and then have Phoebe step in to save the day at the end. All that tells me is we should’ve been following Phoebe all this time. Which means I write a book about the wrong character.

Now, with all that in mind, let’s talk about how we can fit a bunch of ideas together to make a plot.

And before we get into that, I want to go over something I mentioned last time. It’s one of the early obstacles we need to overcome in this book-writing process. And that’s understanding that one idea won’t become a book. An idea is just a single, lonely thing, and we need a couple of them together to make a plot.

F’r example, let’s go with this idea— There’s a werewolf in the forest.

Now, I bet your brains are already hopping with this, right? Thinking of ways it can go. Well, that’s just what I mean when I say one idea isn’t a book. We all immediately, instinctively understand there has to be more than this. I just mentioned that a plot has three parts, so it stands to reason that it needs at least three ideas. A lone idea should force us to consider other ideas. Is it a hungry werewolf? Is it intelligent? Is the forest close to our characters? Are they in the forest? Do they know about the werewolf? Does anyone else know about it? Are they hunting the werewolf? Is the werewolf hunting them?

This is where we shall deploy our most powerful plot building tool... conjunctions! Yes, just like in that old Schoolhouse Rock cartoon? Am I dating myself with that? Never mind, you all know what conjunctions are.

When I’m assembling a plot, I’m going to be stringing ideas together with and, but, and sometimes or. Think of one of your favorite books or shows or movies. If I asked you right now to explain it to me, you’d end up using lots of conjunctions describing it as the ideas stack up.

We’re out for our evening walk but there’s a werewolf in the forest and the werewolf’s terribly hungry for human flesh and the forest is right on the edge of town and the werewolf is a time-travelling cyborg and the werewolf is also a Sagittarius  but there’s still a chance we can stop the werewolf. We just need to get some silver bullets and shoot the werewolf with them or the werewolf will kill us all and getting killed would be really bad.

Let’s talk about that little pile of ideas I tried to make into a plot..

First off, hopefully you can see what I was talking about. Each little bit is a separate idea. On their own they’re not much, but as we tie them together they become part of the larger whole. I established a norm, I introduced a conflict, and I’ve floated at least two possible resolutions. It’s very basic and no frills, but it’s a pretty solid plot.

Second, plot is almost always about doing something. To be more specific, the attempt to do something. My characters are doing something. The werewolf is doing something. Plot is active. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our plot is going to boil down to “X is trying to Y.” Kamala is trying to balance superheroics and schoolwork. The Mandalorian is trying to protect the Child. Benoit Blanc is trying to solve a murder. Detective Pikachu is trying to find Harry Goodman.

As I mentioned above, the thing our characters are doing should be something out of their wheelhouse, something that puts them in an uncomfortable place. If everyone knows werewolves are real, Phoebe’s a professional werewolf hunter, and she’s out there in the woods with a quiver full of silver crossbow bolts... again, this is just a Thursday night in WereWorld. But if she puts three of those silver crossbow bolts straight through the werewolf’s heart and they do nothing... well, crap, what’s she supposed to do now? She only really had the one trick and that werewolf looks very much still alive and super pissed now.

Third is taking that second point a necessary step farther. Plot is almost always (again, about 99% of the time) about the attempt to deal with an external problem. Enemies. Society. Corporate banks. Androids. Aggressive jocks. Harsh professors. Werewolves. They’re external things that affect our characters, and simultaneously they’re things our characters need to deal with or address, one way or another.

Also, just because somebody always takes things too literally, when I say external, I’m referring to the characters as people—their consciousness, not their physical forms. If Wakko wakes up with a bomb implanted in his stomach or Phoebe gets a sudden case of super-lycanthropy, yes these threats are inside their bodies, but they’re still outside forces. They’re things that aren’t part of them, that they have no control over. We’re going to get to internal things later, don’t worry.

Make sense? Okay, lemme throw out two more plot-related things. A warning and a consideration. And I’m going to use a different metaphor for each one

First is a warning. Last time, while were talking about ideas, I said we could think of ideas as puzzle pieces. Like building puzzles, we need to get a sense of what ideas fit best where, and also... which ones don’t fit at all. With puzzle pieces, we can look at the tabs and the slots, as well as what’s on the puzzle piece itself, and get a good sense of what goes where. The piece that’s all off-white moon and the piece that’s all night sky most likely don’t connect directly to each other. There’s going to be one or two pieces between them. Heck, maybe a lot of pieces. And that one with the flat side is clearly an edge—it’s not going to end up in the middle somewhere.

Likewise, that smaller bright green piece with grass on it and the notably smaller tabs... well, odds are prety good that’s not even part of this puzzle. We can see that it doesn’t belong and get rid of it pretty quick. We don’t want to spend a lot of time wrestling with something that clearly isn’t going to fit anywhere.

Look at my sample plot up there. Two of those plot points probably stood out to you. One is the werewolf being a time traveling cyborg. I mean, it’s a cool idea, but does it belong right there? Should it maybe be something we know from the start, or something we figure out at the end? Just dropped in right there it feels a bit jarring, yes?

Still, not as bad as the werewolf being a Sagittarius. It’s a funny bit, but funny doesn’t really fit with anything else there, does it? Maybe if the tone of the book was kinda different. But as is, it feels a little too goofy alongside talk of a flesh-eating werewolf charging out of the forest. I may really need to think about getting rid of it. Or changing some other things to make it fit better.

Plus, let’s be realistic—any decent monster is a Scorpio.

This is a really tough thing to get a handle on—the idea that an idea can be good but not good for my book. We tend to think that a good idea is good no matter what, and in a way that’s true. But we’re not talking about ideas as individual things. We’re talking about them in that greater, interlocked pattern that’s our plot. And sometimes a really cool idea just doesn’t fit. No matter how amazing that little piece of green grass looks, it just doesn’t go with the other pieces in this puzzle.

Now, here’s my other thing for you to think about—a different way to consider plot.

Raise your hand if you’ve played Dungeons & Dragons. C’mon, we’re all geeks here. If not D&D, I’m sure you’re familiar with some sort of pen-and-paper roll playing game. Gamma World? Vampire: The Masquerade?

Okay, since some of you are still feeling shy, a common element here is for a Dungeon Master (aka “the DM”) to draw out a map of the town/castle/catacombs/crashed spaceship our adventurers will be exploring. The DM draws out every room, tunnel, antechamber, hidden staircase, and so on, usually with a few extra details about what can be found in each area. This is the rough framework of the adventure.

This framework is very similar to how we build a plot. Lots of conjunctions, right? The adventurers will travel through an archway and a hallway and a thick oak door and a room and a hidden door behind a tapestry and a tunnel or a staircase and then a vault. Each element we add takes us further along the path, moving us toward some kind of conclusion. Hopefully one where our rogue, Yakko, doesn’t end up dead again.

Now, with this metaphor in mind, let me ask you this. Have you ever sat down for a night of D&D with that person who’s just a little too enthusiastic that they finally get to DM? And they’re going to design the most amazing dungeon ever? We hit that first room behind the thick oak door and there’s twenty skeletons and they all have +2 swords and +3 shields and there’s a werewolf and she has a +4 flaming axe and the helm of disintergration and the floor is really a giant Trapper and the ceiling’s a Lurker Above and...  

I’m guessing most of you are familiar with this kind of DM, in theory if not in personal experience?

Here’s what I wanted to point out. Notice how this version of the dungeon has just as many conjunctions, but it doesn’t actually go anywhere? After all those conjunctions, we still haven’t moved past the first room in the dungeon. We haven’t progressed at all.

This is something we need to watch out for. Not all of the ideas in our big pile are going to be part of the plot. Some of them are going to be details, and we don’t want to confuse details for plot points. My conjunctions shouldn’t all pile up in one place, just building and expanding this one area. They need to keep moving us into new rooms and new halls, all of which are leading us, again, toward that eventual end. We can add a lot of things to our plot with conjunctions, but do they actually move the plot along? Do they force our characters to make decisions and take actions?

So, to sum up a few points. My plot establishes the norm, introduces conflict, and then resolves conflict. It’s more than one idea, all with solid connections. It’s an active attempt to do something, and that something is almost always going to be some kind of external issue. And plot is moving our characters through the book.

After all this, you’ve probably guessed what I’m talking about in the next A2Q. Characters. How we come up with them. How we develop them. How we fit them into our plot.

But that won’t be for three weeks—next time here I want to talk about an old favorite, and the week after that is a little Valentine’s Day advice. And then back to the the A2Q for maybe two sections in a row.

Oh, and if you somehow missed it, my latest book, Terminus, just came out as an Audible exclusive. Go check out that beautiful landing page they set up on the other side of the link. It’s got a bunch of clips, a video chat between me and the narrator—the wonderful Ray Porter—and of course the book itself.

So until next time... go write.