Here are the materials for the presentations that I’m giving at LTUE this year. Enjoy!
2017 LTUE 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories
2017 LTUE 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories HANDOUT
2017 LTUE The Secret to a Story Idea that Works
2017 LTUE Banish writer’s fear doubt and block with cognitive therapy
In the last part in this series we discussed the idea that readers don’t want your characters to be happy. They want them to hunted, stressed, threatened, freaked, and nigh unto some horrible fate for 90% of the novel. At that point, after all that trouble, readers want the characters to pull victory out of the jaws of defeat, exhale a big sigh of relief, and enjoy a Slurpee . . . until the next book in the series.
All through the big worry, readers don’t want to know what WILL happen. They want to know or suspect what MIGHT happen and HOPE and FEAR about those possibilities. And then they want a cathartic resolution of all that hope and fear, all that dramatic tension they have felt.
But our readers won’t hope and fear for just anyone. They will only hope and fear for those characters who evoke sympathy and interest. And so the second set of Pareto factors focus on the things, the conditions, that do this.
Sympathy starts when we see someone in trouble. That’s not the only thing that’s required. Some people who are in terrible trouble only evoke pity or even antipathy. So there’s more to this than trouble, but trouble is where sympathy starts. So what kind of trouble are we talking about? I like the categories James Scott Bell uses. We feel sympathy for people who are:
When someone is in jeopardy, it means some significant aspect of their happiness is being threatened. Hum, sounds suspiciously like the first type of story problem I discussed in the last post, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. We have sympathy for people who are being threatened with death, slavery, drudgery, etc. We’re just wired for it. Likewise, we feel for someone experiencing a hardship. And a “hardship” is simply someone having to deal with a lack, the second type of problem we discussed. So we begin to evoke reader sympathy by just giving our characters significant problems to deal with.
And you can pile the problems on so that not only does our hero have to deal with the central problem of the story, but maybe he’s also broke and has nothing but one box of macaroni and cheese in the cupboard, or his car just got repossessed, or he’s just been dumped by his girlfriend, or he and his daughter are estranged because his ex-wife is pouring poison in her ear, or he breaks his arm, or he works in an awful job.
Do you remember Peter Parker in Spiderman 2? He gets fired from his pizza job, has no money, is losing his girl. Lots of hardship. And lots of reader sympathy.
But giving characters problems is not quite enough. Because if you recall, the readers want to fear for our characters. Nobody fears too much for someone else if we know that they can easily resolve any threat or hardship that comes their way. And so we need to stack the odds against the character. They need to be underdogs.
This means that the opposition starts off two steps ahead. It means they have more power, more resources, or more information. This is why strong antagonists make strong stories—they help the reader to fear for our protagonists.
Who worries about a Superman who is a hunk of burning love? Nobody. Unless he’s actually Clark Kent in other matters and stands to lose something like Lois. Or, when he is Superman, someone hangs kryptonite around his neck and turns him into a dweeb.
In this same vein, our characters need to be vulnerable. This means they can be squashed at any time. They can be shot, killed, ruined. Until the very end, the reader must know the characters can lose big. In the previous post, I said that problems have to be hard to solve, otherwise readers don’t worry. The things that make problems hard to solve are character limitations, ongoing and increasing troubles, conflicts, and surprises. All of those factors make characters vulnerable as well.
So, threaten your characters will all sorts of things, give them hardships, make them vulnerable underdogs, and we’ll feel sympathy for them.
Or will we?
There are some characters with problems who we don’t want to root for. Instead, we hope they fail. Villains, for example, have problems, but we root against them with vigor. In our minds, these folks deserve to fail. So you can’t rely on problem alone. There’s another quality that your characters must evoke if we’re going to hope and fear for them.
That other quality is deservingness.
All of us have an automatic scale of justice inside of us. We can’t turn it off. Nor can we ignore it. It’s very simple. If someone’s bad outweighs their good, then we think they don’t deserve good things. Conversely, if someone’s good outweighs their bad, we think they should be happy.
Don’t believe me? Fine, let’s test it.
A boy breaks his arm and he whines, whines, whines about it all day long. Tells his teachers he can’t do his school work because of it. Mopes at home in front of the TV. Steals his sister’s money to buy candy because he has this awful injury and he deserves it. Maybe he makes all his friends listen to him talk about how hard it is, and he just goes on and on and on.
You know exactly what you’re thinking. You know exactly how much sympathy you have for him, which is none.
Another boy has a broken arm. But this one doesn’t whine. In fact, when his dad falls ill, he goes out and with the one good arm, and in pain, mucks out the horse stalls. He does this because his dad was going to lose his job if he didn’t. Then the boy comes back in and cleans himself up and doesn’t say a thing.
You like that second boy? You want good things for him?
Of course, you do.
Problems aren’t enough. They’re only half the equation. For us to root for someone, we have to feel they’re deserving. Or if you like the term better, you can say they need to be “likeable.”
So what makes someone deserving or likeable?
That’s going to be slightly different for each person because our moral codes are all slightly different. If you feel it’s a sin to kill animals, you might feel conflicted reading a story about a rancher who needs to get his cattle to slaughter. If you feel unions do nothing but harm, you might throw down a book that’s about a union boss trying to force a corporation into compliance. Nevertheless, there are many virtues and vices that people hold in common. Usually, we feel people are deserving if they weigh more on the one side of the table below than they do the other.
| Deserving / Likeable | Not Deserving / Unlikeable |
|
|
We tend to like people more who show the characteristics on the left side. We tend to dislike people who show the characteristics on the right side.
Notice, a lot of this has to do with motive. In many instances it isn’t just the act that decides us for or against someone. It’s the act + the reason why they did it. Let’s go back to that example of the kid with the broken arm that mucked out the horse stall. We’ll love him if he made that sacrifice out of selflessness. We’ll feel something different if he does it only because it allows him to hide his and his father’s crime (maybe they killed someone and have temporarily stashed the body in the barn under the muck in a stall).
Furthermore, while we need to make the characters we want our readers to root for deserving, this doesn’t mean they have to be paragons of virtue. Remember that deservingness is weighed on a scale. Just as long as the characters tip the scales one way, we will feel they’re deserving. On the other hand, if they cross the line the other way, we’ll turn against them.
For example, let’s say your lead character is a thief who steals money from retired folks. But in your story she’s trying to save a kid from being kidnapped and sold into the sex slave trade. Yeah, our character may be a thief, but what she’s doing outweighs the bad, and we’re going to root for her.
Now let’s make our lead a child molester. He’s trying to capture a brutal drug cartel murderer who has just escaped prison. Along the way he has his way with a few children.
Who are you rooting for this time?
Yeah, me too. I hope the murderer finds the child molester and offs him. Or at least alerts the authorities to his crime and ties him up in a neat package for them to pick up.
So you don’t have to have perfect people as your leads. In fact, it’s sometimes more interesting to have someone with foibles just like the rest of us. But when those foibles turn into things we find despicable, we’ll turn against those characters.
And vice versa. For those of you who have read or watched Pride & Prejudice, did you notice how you rooted against Mr. Darcy when we interpreted his actions as smug condescension? The moment he changed, and we learned of it, we cheered for him. It was all a matter of deservingness.
If we want to hope and fear for our characters, they need troubles. But they also need to weigh in on the deserving side of our scale of justice. When they do, they become admirable, likeable, heroic.
In fact, heroes, the ones that make us stand up and cheer, are those people that put their own happiness at risk to do the “right” thing. They’re the very embodiment of deservingness.
So make your characters admirable in some way, if only just a little bit.
For more on the topic of deservingness, read How Inequity and Deservingness Propel Readers Through Story.
Still, we’re not done yet. We might have characters who are completely deserving, but they are so boring we can’t muster any interest in them. And that brings us to the third Pareto factor.
We want to hope and fear for a character for 90% of the novel. But will you stick around if the characters are utterly boring? Probably not. So you want to make your characters interesting. Heck, sometimes we don’t need much of a problem, but will read about someone just because they’re so dang interesting. Character interest is a key factor in a reader’s enjoyment of your story. It one of the things that produces the biggest bang for the buck.
The question is: what makes a character interesting? The answer: the same things that make real people interesting.
You’ll want to make your own list of things that make people interestings because what rocks you might not rock me, but I’ll share the types of things that spark my interest in other people below.
Your characters don’t have to exhibit all of the traits listed, but you might want to think of giving them at least one or three of them.
People who have power draw our interest. That power may be one of many varieties:
People with extraordinary skills or talents draw our interest. It’s why, in fantasies, we’re so interested in those that can actually practice magic. In fact, ability is a type of power. And just like those with the other types of power, these folks evoke wonder, respect, and sometimes awe.
The skills and abilities you’re interested in may differ from mine, but we are fascinated by those who can do things well or have some gift. Maybe they are expert at selling, or making money, or framing a house, or painting, or doing gymnastics, or reading, or hacking into computers, or skydiving, or firing weapons, or riding horses, or hunting, or getting people to like them, or making pancakes, or a thousand other things. Maybe, like Edna Mode in The Incredibles, they have the ability to design amazing super-hero outfits.
Even though your characters have limitations that prevent them from immediately solving the problem they face, you can still give them some kind of an ability that makes them admirable to us. Some gift or talent. And maybe it helps them solve the problem in the end.
People who are uncommon in some way draw our interest. In fact, if you think about those with power and ability, you see that they possess this quality as well. However, you don’t always need power and ability to be extraordinary.
Maybe you’re a normal guy in an extraordinary job. You’re a CIA officer, a smuggler, or a spy. Maybe you raise wolves or are a bounty hunter. Or you hunt bears with a pack of dogs and a horse. Or maybe you have some other uncommon hobby.
You might argue that these are special skills. They are. But who says my categories can’t overlap? Still they don’t have to be extraordinary in that way. Maybe you simply have extraordinary experience. You fought in a war, escaped prison, were a bank robber at one time. Or maybe you’re just outrageous, bizarre, eccentric, odd, or have some exaggerated quirk.
Maybe you’re a loud-talker, a mumbler, a guy who takes his three parrots with him where ever he goes, a farmer who loves pies. Maybe you’re super thin. Or a cab driver with glasses so thick his passengers immediately wonder if they’ll arrive alive. Maybe you have squeaky shoes. Or are always dressed to the nines and smell of lemons. Maybe you’re one of these people that walk around in their sleep or hold loud conversations with ghosts. Or you’re a coffee freak and drink a pint of black mud each day. Maybe you just have an uncommon name like the folks in the Netherlands who surname is, no lie, Born Naked.
Sometimes these extraordinary things affect the plot. Sometimes they don’t. The point is that the extraordinary captures our attention. When you’re inventing your characters, add something extraordinary. You’ll be surprised at how much more interesting they are to you.
People who are beautiful capture our attention. In movies we see a million bits of information at once. We can see the beauty and respond. But we can’t do that in text. And so we have to evoke the image of beauty in the reader’s mind. A few key details and the way others react to them should be enough.
Now you might think beauty is a superficial method for generating interest, but I think it’s a manifestation of something else more fundamental. If you think about a lot of the interest factors we’ve discussed so far–having special power, wealth, ability, or beauty–they all have a common element running through them. That element is wish-fulfillment.
We cannot help but be interested in characters who are, do, or have things we want. In fact, this is one of the main draws of fiction–experiencing something wonderful or cool, even if it’s vicariously. Phyllis Pianka states this so well in How to Write Romances:
“You cannot write an engrossing romance novel until you create a heroine the reader wants to identify with and a hero the reader can fall in love with . . . they are idealized; the heroine is someone women would like to emulate: nicer, prettier, thinner, more intelligent, though not necessarily all of those things. She will have a flaw but it will be a minor one . . . the hero is the ideal lover and husband and father . . . Above all, he must be the man with whom every woman would like to fall in love [bold font added for emphasis]” (30).
A lead you’d like to be like in some way. A hero you could fall in love with. Or at least feel attracted to. Remember, readers are hoping and fearing for the characters. How can readers hope for a woman to enter a committed relationship if the readers feel the man is completely unattractive, physically or emotionally? How can we males root for the man if we feel the same about the female character? It doesn’t mean they have to be perfect. Wish-fulfillment, like many things in writing, slides along a scale. But we’ll be more interested as readers the more we can participate in the same attraction and desire.
Someone might be thinking this is just for love stories, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. What’s one of the reasons why James Bond and all the other action heroes are so popular? Among other things, it’s because so many of us would love to live the adventures those heroes do. We would love to be the types of guys who know how to fight like Jack Reacher and get to use all the high-tech the gizmos and drive the deluxe cars. How many YA stories are about characters finding fairies or dragons or aliens? How much of fantasy is about having the powers magic grants? Wouldn’t it be cool! Of course. That’s wish-fulfillment.
So when developing a character, we can think of things we’d like to be, do, or have and give those things, or the opportunity for them, to our characters. Make them admirable or desireable in some way. Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t give your characters flaws, or that you can’t write about someone we wouldn’t want to be like. Our readers don’t have to want to be like our characters in every way, but a little bit of wish-fulfillment helps. It’s something to consider.
Also, as with anything, what’s desireable to you might not be what’s desireable to me. Maybe I’m interested in anyone who has served in the armed forces or lives with some kind of risk and adventure. Maybe you can’t stand that and are enthralled instead with horses. Maybe you’d like to fly airplanes, but I’d love to fly dragons. One guy is drawn to those with happy marriages full of laughter. Another is drawn to the freedom of single life. You write your stories, and I’ll write mine. But we can both make our characters more interesting by adding, when it fits, some element of wish-fulfillment.
We love humor. Love to laugh. And so anytime you can create a character that does this to the audience, they will be interested in them. It might be our characters have witty lines or comments. Maybe they’re humorous types or find themselves in humorous situations.
One note. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that making a character interesting will make them deserving or admirable. Humor, just like beauty, can be given to characters we root against. Maybe the character is funny, but it’s a cruel funny. Maybe the character is mind-stealing beautiful, but they use their beauty for terrible purposes. Sympathy and interest are different things.
Anyone who poses a threat demands our interest. This is one of the reasons why Darth Vader is so interesting. Criminals present threats of all sorts, which is why we’re always interested in them. Recall, however, that many aspects of happiness can be threatened. It doesn’t have to be a threat to life, limb, or property. For example, someone may threaten my relationship to my wife or my belonging to a group or community.
We’re also interested in those who are in danger. This ties back to the first story element of problem. In fact, the problem might be so interesting and threatening that we could cast anyone in the role and readers would go along with them. Do you really remember the leads in Jurassic Park, for instance? There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with a plain vanilla character. In fact, that might be exactly what your story needs. However, I would still see if it doesn’t improve things to make your character interesting outside the context of the story problem. If you do, you just might end up with an Indiana Jones.
We love mysteries. And so sometimes it’s wonderful to give characters secrets. It might be they present a bit of danger or have something to hide as Aragorn does when we first meet him in The Lord of the Rings. Or maybe they have a past they don’t like to talk about. Either way, we love to wonder about them and then have our questions answered in surprising ways. We like it even better when these secrets affect the deservingness of the character or our understanding of the situation the character faces.
We are intrigued by characters who play against type, if only a little. So maybe you have a plumber who quotes Shakespeare or William Blake to his customers. Maybe you have a mixed martial arts fighter who is a woman with three kids. Maybe the hero has a fear of spiders. Or the villain is a magnificent artist or tends lovingly to his bees or his daughter. Maybe the super rich businessman secretly goes to poor neighborhoods to find folks to help. Maybe the bearded and tattooed biker carries around a Book of Mormon and reads it during quiet moments. Maybe, like Michael in the series Burn Notice, the super spy loves yogurt. Anything that runs against, or just doesn’t fit, our expectations of the type. This includes motives as well as external character tags.
Finally, because we almost always deal with a cast of people in our stories, we need to make sure they’re interesting as a group. You will increase reader interest if you give each character some memorable and interesting trait, but you’ll get the most bang for the buck if you make those traits different.
For example, let’s say you have a team of characters who need to go behind enemy lines to find and dismantle a radar station. If every one of those team members is exactly the same–all wise-cracking blond farm boys from Oklahoma–we might find it funny and odd at first, but it will soon lose its appeal as they all say and do the same things. Compare this to a group where one is a silent-but-deadly farmer, another is a metaphysical mechanic, a third is a short woman’s man, the fourth is a wise-cracking American Indian. Maybe one joined the ARMY because he’s got first person shooter games dancing in his eyes, another because his father was a military man, another is there to conduct some kind of criminal heist, the fourth because he’s poor and needed help getting through college and supporting his wife and kid.
I know, I know, you women are probably saying the tall blond farm boys might not be all that bad. But after you finish oogling them, think of this: your readers might not all be into farm boys. Did you ever wonder why boy bands have a variety of types–the serious one, the good one, the bad one, the cutie? It’s because it broadens the appeal to a wider audience.
But it goes beyond that. Variety also avoids the problem of diminishing marginal utility. This is simply the idea that the more you experience something, the less power each experience provides. For example, the first time you hear a great joke it may be gut-busting funny. By the time you’ve heard it ten times the joke has probably lost its appeal. Imagine eating a meal that’s nothing but salmon or broccoli or fried okra or ice cream. Eventually, after twenty dishes of cheese, you will go blind. The same thing occurs with characters. This is why it’s always more powerful to have one villain instead of a hundred of them. One wise-cracking American Indian is awesome. Fifteen of them only water down the effect so that none of them are as powerful as the one could be all by herself.
And it doesn’t end there. There’s an even more important reason for giving your cast variety: it opens up possiblity for more conflict, surprise, and story. Maybe one of the lead’s team members turns traitor. Maybe one of the bad guys is thinking about doing his boss in. With some variety, you can not only write about the main problem, but you also add in subplots–a love story or a redemption plot. And both can complicate the central problem.
Vareity adds interest. Develop your characters–the major, minor, and bit roles, folks that help our lead and others who hinder or oppose them–but also develop them with an eye towards the effect of the cast as a whole.
Our readers want to hope and fear for our characters. They want to feel sympathy. But they also want to be delighted and awed by them. They want to feel admiration for them. They want to laugh at and with them. These are some of the key joys of the experience they come to us for.
The way we deliver this is by giving our characters troubles, letting them demonstrate they deserve to be rooted for, and making them interesting.
But we’re not done yet. Right now we’ve only talked about the problem and the character. That’s just the beginning. Remember, readers want to hope and fear and then feel a cathartic release. But you can’t feel catharsis if your worries don’t build up to a certain point, if they aren’t extended.
Form follows function.
Think about the itch deep down in your cast that builds and builds and builds over days. It’s amazing when you finally scratch it. Think about the time you couldn’t drink or eat for a day or two and how hungry or thirsty you were. Think about how good it felt to finally satisfy that tension. The experience of eating after a fast is so different from the one when you eat when you’re still mostly full.
You need to make your readers hungry for a release. They want to be hungry. And that takes time. So while a six-hundred word piece of flash fiction can evoke some emotion, it’s nothing compared to the emotion and experience a 100,000 word novel can deliver. Because 100,000 word novels allow you to build the reader’s hunger, their tension, their hope and fear, to a sharp point.
You build this tension with plot. And that will be the next post in the series.
In the meantime, if you think of other things that make characters interesting or sympathetic, specific examples of the factors I’ve talked about, or have questions, please post them in the comments.
A lot of the factors listed above that make characters interesting have to do with them being larger than life. If you want to read more on this, Orson Scott Card devotes a whole chapter to it in his wonderful book Characters & Viewpoint.
For those interested in exploring the factors that lead to sympathy, let me recommend Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. That link will take you the wiki about the book. At the bottom of that wiki are links to the actual text.
There are a thousand things to “remember” when writing story. New writers who make lists of these things soon begin to drown in them. But I’ve come to realize that many of these “rules” don’t matter.
They don’t matter because many ignore the function of story. And so you can’t know how and when to apply them, or if they’re even something you should apply in the first place. Furthermore, a good number that do tie back to function often have little impact.
The more I develop and write, the more I begin to see that the key is to focus on a liminted number of fundamentals. To focus on the things that matter most.
So what really matters when you’re writing a story?
I’m going to be speaking for an hour at the Book Academy tomorrow. It’s at Utah Valley University. The week after I’ll be presenting all day at the American Fork Arts Council’s autumn writer’s conference. I will probably write up all my thoughts and post them to my site at some time. But for right now this is where you can hear them.
I truly believe the Pareto Principle applies to writing. But you can’t go searching for those vital few factors until you know the effects they’re supposed to produce. Form follows function. And the function is something that happens in the reader.
Here’s a nibble. This quote from David Howard is an example of what I’m talking about.
“As we’ve seen, what the audience hopes for and what the characters hope for need not be the same thing. The same is true of our fears versus their fears. But how do hope and fear fit into the scheme of storytelling? Hope and fear are about the future. They derive from uncertaintly about future events in the story, future decisions the characters might make, future discoveries or revelations that might be unearthed, future outside forces and how they will influence the journey of the characters. When we discuss hope verusus fear in dramaturgical terms, this uncertainty is a function solely of the audience and its experience [my emphasis]. This is dramatic tension. We hope the man with the cobra in the shoe box won’t open the box; we fear he might and get himself or someone else bitten. We don’t know what will happen, but we know what might happen and therefore feel tension about those possibilities” (How to Build a Great Screenplay, 52).
Readers buy novels because novels provide a service. They provide something to the reader. They DO something to the reader. That’s why readers pay good money for them, and stay up late at night (well past smart bedtimes) with them, and spend hours of their lives reading them.
What do stories do? What are the key factors that have to be present in the stories for them to be able to do these things? How do you help readers hope and fear for what might happen?
I’m no story guru, but I do hope to share some of the vital few factors I see in the presentations I’ll be giving this week and next.
Here’s the second episode I recorded with the Writing Excuses guys.
In the first podcast we talked about putting and not putting ourselves in our writing and making characters who don’t all sound like the author. In this one, we talked about how to not repeat ourselves in ways that make the reader feel like they’re getting the same old same old.
As usual, the guys had some great insights. Check it out: How to Not Repeat Yourself.
I was introduced to Janci Patterson at a local convention by author Sandra Tayler (some may know Sandra because of her husband Howard who does the online Schlock Mercenary comic). Janci told me she’d just signed with a YA publisher. That was exciting. I asked her what her novel was about. She told me, and I immediately hated her because it sounded like such a fun idea, and I wanted to not only read it, but also write the story myself. Luckily I have a few scruples and did not pay the local Klingons to off her and drop her body in the Great Salt Lake for the brine shrimp to feast upon.
BTW, did you know that back in the day hucksters placed this ad in Boy’s Life magazine?
Look at that cute sea-monkey family. Look at the picture of the human family watching the sea-monkey family swim around a castle in a bowl. Click on it. See it large.
As a young lad, I, as every good Boy Scout should, subscribed to the magazine. I saw that ad over and over. Who wouldn’t want a sea-monkey? So I saved up my money, earned by watering plants and trees at a nursery in the hot Utah summer sun, and ordered me a family to put on my own shelf.
The aquarium came. It was not a bowl and did not have a castle. But, hey, there were real live sea-monkey eggs right there in the packet. They weren’t just fantasy creatures! I mixed in the water and salt and dropped the eggs in. I can’t tell you how excited I was. Days later the eggs hatched. And what did I have?
Brine shrimp.
BRINE SHRIMP!
I could have had my mom drive me to the lake where I could have scooped up a million of them. For free. That was, I believe, my first great disillusionment. The first great step from child to adult.
Alas, sea-monkeys . . .
Anyway, back to story. Janci was one of those Codex Writers who shared how she used Q&A to develop her killer story idea. She agreed to share it with you. Here’s Janci.
***
The idea for CHASING THE SKIP started with a game of existential questions. That’s like Twenty Questions, only with no question limit and much more confusing subject matter–like the Pythagorean theorem, or gas prices. My husband and I like to play the game on long road trips, since a really good round can take two or three hours to play out.
On this occasion, I chose a bounty hunter. It took Drew about five minutes to guess that one–not my finest subject ever. But after he guessed it, we started talking. I knew that bounty hunters still existed, but I had no idea how chasing down a fugitive could be a part of our contemporary justice system. Just what is it that bounty hunters did, anyway? How did it all work?
After our road trip, that question stuck with me, so I began to do some research. What I discovered fascinated me. A bounty hunter could legally chase down his mark because of the bail bond process. In order to be released from jail before a pending trial, an arrestee had to put up bail money as collateral, to ensure they returned for their trial. Since most people can’t afford to post the full bail amount, a bondsman will post it for them, in exchange for a smaller fee. When the arrestee skips bail, the bondsman is out the money–unless he can get bring the arrestee back. In fact, he’ll have that person sign away their constitutional rights to privacy in addition to paying the fee. He’s allowed to go find them if they don’t show up in court. He can even break and enter to do so–dragging them out against their will. But the bondsman is a busy man, so he signs those rights over to a bounty hunter, and off the bounty hunter goes, chasing down the skip. If a person is good at it, bounty hunter can be a legitimate career.
As I researched, I knew I had the beginnings of a story. This had all the elements–reality with a touch of danger, crime with a touch of justice. I wanted to make it work.
But I write YA novels, and no bondsman would sign on a teenager to go after his skips. That would have all kinds of negative legal ramifications, and even if it didn’t, no reader would believe it. Enter my Creative Q&A, the question I always ask when I’m doing idea development for a novel: where can I put a teenager in this?
Answer: she couldn’t be the bounty hunter, but she could be the bounty hunter’s daughter.
That posed its own problems, of course. No dad in his right mind is going to haul his daughter along on the road with him as he tracks down skips. (Or, in question form, what would make a dad in his right mind bring his daughter into such a dangerous situation?) I needed a crisis, so he had to bring her along, had to track down the skip, had to keep going with all of it, even when things got rough. And if I could work in some interpersonal drama, all the better.
And so it was that Ricki became abandoned by her mother, forced to ride along with her bounty hunter father, a man she barely knows, as he chases down a skip who is more dangerous than his usual mark. Why would he take this particular job with Ricki along?
Ricki would like to know that, too.
***
John Sez: ins’t that a great idea? I hate Janci.
While we’re hating her, did you notice that she got some random bit of zing playing 20 questions with her hubby? She followed it up by doing some research. After doing that, she had a lot more zing. She also knew she had a general topic for a story. She knew she had the beginnings of a story because her zing meter was going wild.
But she didn’t have a story yet. She had a vocation, which is nothing more than a bit of setting.
To have a story you need character, problem, plot, AND setting. So she whipped out her Creative Q&A tool to help her find a character. And the question she asked was one she’s found is very productive for her. It’s a basic question. But it’s an excellent question. And from that Q&A she started to develop the rest of the story parts.
The take away isn’t that playing 20 questions on road trips is the key to story ideas.
It isn’t that one question Janci asked, as fundamental and productive as it is.
It’s that the principles we’ve been discussing in these posts work. Develop the 6 Core Parts. Think about objectives. Start anywhere. Hunt zing. Generate your own zing. Use Creative Q&A. Work on the various parts using whatever tools you have until you have developed enough that the story comes alive in your mind.
I hope she sells a million.
For more in this series, see How to Get and Develop Story Ideas
I know a lot of authors who are trying indie publishing. Some are doing fabulously well. Most are not. I’ve talked to a lot of folks wanting to indie publish. Very often they have stars in their eyes, even though the vast majority of books don’t sell well. But does that mean indie publishing is a pipe dream?
Here’ is a perspective I agree with from Hugh Howey.
The fact that self-publishing provides better chances doesn’t mean great chances. The fact that self-publishing can be less frustrating than the query-go-round and the delays inherent with traditional publishing doesn’t mean that self-publishing is frustration-free.
Read more on Howey’s site. And here’s another by Dylan Hearn. With the Hearn post, I don’t know where he’s getting the “average book sells 100 copies” data. I don’t think that’s accurate. But his intent is to tell authors to have modest expectations, and I think having modest, realistic expectations is the most helpful way to approach this.
If we root against villains based on moral judgments, then how is it possible to root for heroes who are not just bad boys but down right criminal, e.g. hitmen, mobsters, thieves?
It’s a wonderful question that has a simple and revealing explanation. We root for these bad guys because they’re really good.
What?!
When talking about bad heroes, what we often do is:
1. Take them out of their context.
2. Focus on one or two negative traits, not the person as a whole.
3. Abstract them and miss what’s happening in real time as we process the story. We only have so much working memory and usually can only think about what’s being presented versus what we think about when we’re out of the story. What’s being presented in the story is mostly the threats to these heroes, not the consequences of their evil deeds. And if the consequences are show, it’s always modified by context (#1 and #2 above).
4. Confuse fascination with rooting.
When we actually look at what’s happening with the hero in the context of the story, what we find is that rooting is still based on moral judgments of who is good/right and who is not. We root for people we think are in the right (given their context) or are getting, undeservedly, the short end of the stick; we root against people who we think are in the wrong.
Here are some examples.
Thief. This one’s easy, I grant it. But it’s illustrative. I never once didn’t root for the boy. But I also never saw him as a true bad boy. He was nice. He shared the bread he stole with kids less fortunate. The guards were mean brutes. Jaffar was wicked and threatened the sultan and Jasmine who were good and innocent. was in a situation that provided some leeway for his behavior (alone, penniless).
1. Context. He’s fighting a much greater evil, someone we are rooting against.
2. Whole Person. He is a thief, but he’s also kind. Given his whole person, he falls on the side of good.
3. Processing. As we process the story we’re never shown awful consequnces of his theiving. Mostly just the good and courageous things he does. And the threats to his welfare.
Thieves.
1. Context. The movie starts with a heist and then a betrayal and murders by a traitor. Yes they’re theives, but we wittness a greater evil. The people they fight against are worse than they are.
2. Whole person. Except for the thieving, he’s a likeable guy.
3. Processing. We see few negative consequences of their actions to others, but we are constantly being presented with threats to them by guys who are committing greater crimes.
4. Fascination. I was incredibly interested in the scam–the plans, tech, everything.
Mob Hit Man
1. Context. He’s protecting a girl from other hit men. He’s fighting a bigger evil. He’s also taken advantage of by his boss.
2. Whole Person. He’s a hitman, but more time is spent on his kindness.
3. Processing. We see very little of the effect his hits have on others. Instead we are presented with threats to the girl and him.
Murdering vigilante
1. Context. He’s stopping guys who are doing terrible things.
3. Processing. We don’t focus on negative consequences of his vigilantism, but the threats from these really bad guys.
Scammers of the elderly
From IMDB “Roy’s private life, however, is not so successful. An obsessive-compulsive agoraphobe with no personal relationships to call his own, Roy is barely hanging on to his wits, and when his idiosyncrasies begin to threaten his criminal productivity he’s forced to seek the help of a psychoanalyst just to keep him in working order. While Roy is looking for a quick fix, his therapy begets more than he bargained for: the revelation that he has a teenage daughter–a child whose existence he suspected but never dared confirm. What’s more troubling, 14-year-old Angela wants to meet the father she never knew. At first, Angela’s appearance disrupts her neurotic father’s carefully ordered routine. Soon, however, with his own unique spin on parenthood, Roy begins to enjoy a relationship he never dreamed of having with his daughter.”
1. Context. Much of the time is spent his on his loneliness and issues with his estranged daughter.
2. Whole person. He steals, but we never see huge suffering from it. We see all the other issues he deals and have sympathy for him.
3. Processing. We’re focused on the threats to him, not the consequences of his one negative trait.
4. Fascination. I was fascinated by the scam and this pulled me along through the first.
What happened in all these stories as I experienced them was that the story carefully managed my view of the hero. He was always on the better side of the antagonists. He was always more good than bad, even if only by a little. And the story focused my attention most of the time on the bad/threats/consequences flowing from the antagonists, not the bad from the hero’s deeds.
What this shows is that you could write a story about a villain and make him the hero. In some instances it might be exceedingly difficult. For example, I think Hitler would be a hard sell as a hero, someone we’d root for. But the Neo-Nazis prove it’s not too hard a sell for some people.
I don’t think recognizing the fact that we can make “bad” people sympathetic means authors are “simply being clever” or “pushing buttons.” After all, to write well you must believe and care about what you’re writing about. YOU have to believe it. Nor do I think it undercuts the notion that we root for people based on a moral stance. It just recognizes the fact that moral judgments, in fact, the vast majority of appraisals of situations, happen quickly with the facts at hand, which are the ones in our working memories. The ones the authors are controlling.
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Thanks for sharing! You always have great stuff!
Thank you so much for sharing these John. Your seminars were the most helpful at LtUE 2017! Now that it’s all over, I’ll do my homework you assigned and keep you posted.
Glad to hear you find it helpful!
Looking forward to receiving it 🙂
I loved your sessions at LTUE 2017, just like LTUE 2016 they were the highlight of LTUE for me! I am going to put THOM R into practice on the two current books I am working on as well as doing the list generation exercise.
Thank you so much for sharing!
Glad to hear it! Please let me know when you’ve done the exercise and report the results.
Thank you for the great sessions and handouts!