Sure. An apptitutde for something always helps. But it appears it’s not enough. True expertise takes work. And those trying to help (i.e. parents, teachers, coaches) can hinder if they give the wrong kind of praise.
I wanted to share three articles reporting the results of a number of interesing studies on expertise which often appears as a skill level that seems unobtainable by normal, motivated individuals.
The Meadow Mount School of Music
This music school in the Adirondacks has “trained such luminaries as Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Lynn Harrell, and Yo-Yo Ma.” A number of researchers wanted to see what the difference was between the students who seemed most skilled and those who weren’t. They divided students “into three skill levels, including one the faculty had identified as having the best chance of becoming world-class soloists.” Then they looked at the differences.
According to the report, “the results were clear-cut, with little room for any sort of inscrutable God-given talent. The elite musicians had simply practiced far more than the others…Psychologists found a second attribute in elite players that is less obvious than sheer hours of practice. While most of us think of practice as the repetition of tough spots (and this is how many young people do practice), elite musicians, they found, took a different approach.” Read full article.
The majority of childhood prodigies never fulfill their early promise
Why? According to these researchers it’s because so many early-bloomers get warped by their experience and fail to develop perseverance. More here.
Praise that Undermines Achievement
It appears that how we praise achievement affects performance. Sometimes in large and startling ways.
You may think that it’s good to praise your child for being “smart” or “good” in some subject. But there’s growing evidence that giving kids such labels doesn’t improve or motivate performance, but actually reduces it.
Psychologist Carol Dweck and her team have studied the effect of praise on students in a variety of settings. “Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.” So what type of praise actually works? Read here.
When does genius bloom?
We often think genius must be tied to being precocity. After all, Motzart was doing musical flips when he was still a kid. For writers, however, it appears this isn’t the case. More here.
Back when Orson Card first started his online magazine Intergalactic Medicine Show, he wrote an essay in which he detailed how he developed the idea for one of the short stories he told in his Ender universe. Card’s essay is a valuable resource because he exposes his mental thought process, modeling how he approaches story development. It’s not often that an expert takes the time to expose his mental thought process while working through something, and there’s always a lot to learn when they do. Interestingly enough, it illustrates a number of the principles in the Story Development Framework.
How often he uses questions as he develops the story.
How story objectives influenced what he wrote. For example, why didn’t he write from Peter’s point of view, and how did he want to portray the mother?
How story principles guided his development. For example, what were the three ways to get an audience’s interest and how did that affect the story development?
What he did when his zing suggested he go another way. Did he end up writing the story he set out to at first? (Card listens to his Spidey-sense, what he cares about and believes in, quite a bit.)
What his first draft provided him. What does this say about using drafts to help you develop the story?
How he used the four-scene “plan” he sketched of the story. How did that outline help him? When he had that, was he finished developing the story?
How he uses improvising to continue the development as he drafts. What did he need in order to improvise? And what was he actually doing?
Did you notice the elements of the story–problem, character, plot, and setting? Did you notice how his development continued while working on the text (drafting)?
One thing I don’t think you should take away from this is that you must write exactly like Orson Card. That you must not include much setting. Or that your sketches of the plot, the “plan” of the story, needs to be just like his. You may enjoy more setting than Card. You may want more or less in your sketch. That’s fine. The goal here isn’t to suggest you follow his exact procedure and have his exact same objectives. It’s to see how authors use creative Q&A to develop a story, to make it come to life.
As a final side note, I would like to quibble with one thing Card says. A lot of folks talk about showing and telling in writing. The eleventh commandment is to “Show, don’t tell.” But I would like to suggest that writers actually never show anything. They can’t. It’s all tell, tell, tell.
Showing requires the original sensory input. So a movie can show. A stage play can show. Both can also provide raw auditory input. But all an author can show are marks on a page. Those marks guide a reader into imagining events, people, and things, but it’s telling–“imagine this, imagine that, now imagine this.” The author can tell in scene or summary. Both have their place. But it’s important to realize that we’re helping the reader imagine. I don’t have time to go into the implications of this right now, but try the idea on for a while and ask yourself what type of writing helps you imagine things more vividly.
Almost everyone reading this knows what they like in a car. We know what we want a car to do. We can talk about acceleration, voom-voom styling, and handling. Some of us could talk about how engines and transmissions and tires all work together to create those things. We could get really technical.
But how many of us could then go manufacture a tire? Or the paint we’re going to put on the car? How about a windshield?
No?
Well, what about one little bolt? Just a little bolt. Can you do it?
There’s a difference between knowing what a thing is supposed to do, how it works, and actually building it. A lot of people can talk about the first two topics and have no idea at all about the third.
It’s the same with stories.
There are three things we have to learn to write killer stories.
What a story is supposed to do.
How the 5 parts of story—character, setting, problem, plot, and text–do that
How to come up with and develop a story idea in the first place
We authors talk a lot about the second thing. You have books and blogs galore on dialogue, plot, characters, structure, grammar, world-building, setting—you name it. Heck, the big series I wrote last year about the key conditions for reader suspense was all about how story works.
Some of us talk about the first thing. And really there’s no point in blathering on about the how-to’s if we don’t know the what-for’s, which is why I tried to highlight one of the core what-for’s in my series on suspense.
But as important as those two things are, none of it matters if we don’t know how to put it to use. We’re not reviewers or editors. We’re creators. We’re writers—the ones that invent the story in the first place. And let me tell you, knowing how a story works and how to invent one are two very different things.
I didn’t know the principles of invention when I was first starting out. And that gap in my knowledge was one of the things that held me back for years. In fact, I almost gave up my dream of writing stories because of it.
Very early in my attempts to start a career I wrote a story that won an award and $2,000. I was flown out to Cocoa Beach, Florida for a week-long workshop with amazing pros. Was published. And then I went home, finished another story (yea!), and proceeded not be able to finish another thing for five years.
Five years.
FIVE. YEARS!
And I tried.
After five years of failure you begin to wonder if maybe you didn’t get the wrong memo (what am I doing at this empty warehouse?). Your family begins to wonder that as well. You realize life is short and there are a lot of other things you could be spending your time on. You begin to think that only an idiot would spend more time on this. And you’d probably be right.
Unless, of course, you realize that what’s keeping you back isn’t a manifestation of cosmic will. Rather, it’s just a lack of understanding.
That’s what happened in my case. Just a few days before I gave up on all my dreams, the light was turned on for me. I learned some key, but simple, principles of invention that I hadn’t known. You can read the whole story here. After I learned these principles, my production took off like a rocket.
And so what I want to do in this series is share those principles with you. Hopefully, this will unleash your abilities. You might find a huge audience for your stories. You might find only the family dog will stick around to listen to them. The popularity of your stories is a separate matter. But you can’t even find out how big your audience will be if you don’t know how to finish.
So let’s start. A lot of people think that creativity is about passion. When they think of creativity, they think of someone like this.
Look at him. Brushed velvet jacket. Beard. Rakish devil-may-care hair. And that gaze. Look at that gaze! It’s full of passion. It’s coming off him in waves. In fact, we all know his inner world is a vast tempestuous sea of passion that sends ideas crashing in great surges onto the rocky beaches of his soul. And those earthly forces cannot be contained. No, he must write them, write them, write them. That’s the face of a man who will channel fire onto the written page because if he didn’t, he would surely burn.
Or maybe not.
Maybe creativity is about being like this guy.
Hello, Malcolm Gladwell. Look at him. There are so many ideas in that great blaze of brains they trip over themselves trying to get out. There are so many they kinked his hair with their electric heat. Oh, fecund mind!
Or maybe not.
Maybe creativity is all a function of being blessed.
Or maybe it’s about alcohol (or some other chemical). After all, isn’t that how Ernest Hemmingway did it?
Booze Makes Ernie Reel Smart
Or it’s about being mentally unstable.
Or it’s about having the right personality type. I remember the day of woe when I learned that I was an ENFJ but that the “natural” writers were all ISFPs!
Alas, me being a blockhead was all scientific
Or it’s about being eccentric.
Patrick Rothfuss shows us the key is crazy beardage and an Alice in Wonderland chair
Or it’s none of that. It’s about being born to it.
I wrote my first novel when I was six
Right? All of those things are what creativity is about. And if, as so clearly demonstrated by those pictures, you don’t have passionate hair, well then, forget about it. Except here’s Larry Correia, a New York Times bestseller, who has no passionate hair whatsoever.
I keep guns in my basement
Huh?!
How could that be?
Here’s how. All those ideas above about creativity–they’re rubbish. Creativity has nothing to do with passion or hair or whether you wear Argyle socks.
Nothing.
Let me show you the face of creativity.
That is Warren Ellis. Warren is my brother-in-law, except when he’s not (do not ask me to explain this). One day our fridge started to drip. The freezer would cycle through its normal thawing, and all the water would drip down into the fridge and soak up our egg cartons and pool in the vegetable crispers. It was a mess.
We defrosted the freezer we weren’t supposed to ever have to defrost, but the problem persisted. So we called Warren because he fixes things.
Warren came to our house, looked the fridge over. He declared that the freezer’s drain tube was plugged. We thought up a few ideas for cleaning it out, none of which were any good, then Warren asked if we had an air compressor. We did and hauled it in.
Warren plugged it in, let it build up the pressure, and then held the compressor nozzle to the bottom end of the tube. The compressed air went in. The obstruction flew up and out and landed on the counter. The obstruction was a fat fly that had crawled in there, gotten stuck, and died.
We poured a quart of water into that freezer, and it all flowed down into the catch pan at the bottom. Warren fixed our freezer with an air compressor.
Folks, that is creativity.
What did Warren have? He didn’t have passionate hair; I can tell you that. No. He had an objective. He knew basically how fridges worked. And he came up with a couple of options to fix the issue.
Let’s look at another example. Here’s Ed Smylie.
Ed was like Warren. He ran into some problems. Actually, the astronauts in Apollo 13 ran into some problems. Ed was tasked to help solve them. One of those problems was the fact that the astronauts were running out of air.
Ed and the others designed the solution in two days. The ground crew relayed the instructions to the flight crew. The lunar module’s CO2 scrubbers started working again, saving the lives of the three astronauts on board. Of the experience, Ed said that he knew the problem was solvable when it was confirmed that duct tape was on the spacecraft. “I felt like we were home free”, he said. “One thing a Southern boy will never say is: I don’t think duct tape will fix it.”
Ed and his crew saved the day. The made a round peg fit into a square hole. How did he come up with such a creative solution?
Ed had an objective. He knew how the CO2 scrubbers and the shuttle worked. He knew about duct tape. He came up with options.
Let’s look at a few more examples of this. I know you’ve seen some of these.
That is creativity. So is this.
And this . . .
And this . . .
Or this, if you don’t need to go so fast . . .
Smaller size, for trolling
And this . . .
And this, which is officially called a Bumper Dumper . . .
Do you really want to dig?
These fine folks had a goal. They knew the basics of how things worked. They came up with some solutions.
That’s all there is to creativity. Three things. You need to have an idea of what you’re trying to do. You need to have a basic knowledge of how things work. And you have to know how to come up with some solutions to meet your objective.
Not so mystical, is it?
But I can hear some of you complaining. Writing is different. It’s a whole other world. It’s Fiction, which is so significant we must capitalize it. It’s passion. It IS mystical. This is a matter of the heart. It’s not a fridge or space ship or some dumb hotdog roast. You cannot compare these things.
Except I can because they’re the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to invent a different recipe like the folks at Cook’s Illustrated, or decorate your house, or come up with a way to keep the squirrels out of your bird feeders, or make people weep in a movie theater.
What I’ve found is that when we have troubles coming up with ideas, we probably don’t know what our objectives are. Or we probably lack some understanding of how fiction works. Or we don’t know the principles of generating options.
And so we conclude it’s a mystery. It’s arcane lore.
But it just ain’t so. Can you create a redneck toilet? Then you can write a story.
Now, it’s true that a lot of people feel their way through this. They don’t know what they’re doing, but they do it. I did that. Remember: I won an award. But then I couldn’t repeat it. Couldn’t find that groove I’d stumbled into.
I don’t want to stumble around hoping to get lucky. I want to make a living at this. And if I’m going to make a living, I need to produce. Regularly. I can’t be bumbling around, hoping to create something by accident.
The good news is that we don’t have to create by accident. We can create on purpose. There are principles to invention. When we learn them, our productivity will shoot through the roof.
Finding a solution to Apollo 13’s issues might seem impossible to us. But they weren’t impossible to Ed Smylie because Ed had an objective; he knew how things worked up there; and knew how to come up with options.
My intent is that when you finish this series, you’ll know what Ed Smylie knew, except for stories.
As new writers we want to do our best but because we haven’t yet internalized all the principles, we often want to create checklists of rules. We want to list out all the the aspects of a golden story and make sure we include them. And these lists can help.
Everything I’ve learned about building expertise suggests that experts have internalized guidelines, patterns, and concepts. But in the beginning we don’t have those internal constructs. And so we often are benefited by exetrnal support in the form of diagrams, lists, etc. Sooner or later we internalize. And what used to be conscious becomes automatic.
Case in point: Dean Koontz. In his book on how to write best sellers he states in so many words that you’d be in idiot not to have an outline. That was back in the late 1970’s. In an interview almost 30 years later about his Odd Thomas books, he says he never outlines. I suspect he’s so familiar with the form outlines are redundant for him now.
So lists can be good. But lists can also hinder us if we’re not careful.
For example, James Maxey, a great author, likes characters with dark secrets. He states: “One of my tricks for making my characters interesting is that the primary characters are usually motivated by a dark secret. Vendevorex in Bitterwood desperately does not want Jandra to learn that he killed her parents. Rail Blade in Nobody Gets the Girl doesn’t want anyone to know that she killed her brother with her superpowers in a moment of anger when she was still young. The key revelation for me is that the thing that the world most wants to know about a person is often the thing that a person least wants anyone to know.”
Dark secrets are kind of cool, right?
But if we then said, okay, a great story must have a character with a dark secret, and we put that on our list, that’s when we start to work against ourselves. The “must” is the problem.
Not because we don’t have tests and guidelines. Tests assume objectives. And I, for one, certainly do have objectives for my books as a whole an in their various parts. For example, I sure as heck want to make sure my opening chapter starts with a strong draw. I sure as heck want an ending that leaves me feeling some poignancy, cosolation, and a telescoping of possibilities. I most definitely want characters that intrigue me. I have some definite musts.
But any one of the techniques or elements we might list (dark secrets, 3 acts, 7 acts, the players in Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey,” characters with an internal problem, etc. and ad infinitum) are nothing more than options that might or might not serve any given objective. They’re not necessary (of course, monkeys may be necessary). And I don’t mean that in an anomaly way.
I’m not suggesting it’s counterproductive to say, well, I love characters [fill in the blank] or plots that [fill in the blank] and I want one in this novel. I’m saying if we begin to think that all (or most) good novels must have these elements, then I think we’ll end up limiting ourselves.
So when you find something that works, when you hear about a technique, or some writerly rule, put it on your list of option prompts. Not on your list of must haves. And then ask this creative question, which I got from another great author, Luc Reid: “Would I be more excited about this book if I…”
Another version might be: “Would I care about and believe in this story/character/scene/etc. more if I…”
Would I care about and believe in this story more if had a character with this [insert option]? Would I care more if this plot line had [insert option]? Would I believe the story more if there were monkeys hiding in the attic?
If the answer is yes, then add it. If the answer is no or maybe, then put it aside. That option can go back on the shelf for another time.
I think there are a few facets to the question posed in the title. But before we get to that, I think we need to define what a villain is.
A villain is a type of antagonist. Every story has an antagonist, someone or something that opposes the hero or heroine, even if it’s the setting as in Jack London’s “To Build A Fire” or the hero himself as in Jim Carrey’s Liar Liar. But usually the antagonist is another character in the story.
Antagonists vary in many ways. One way that’s important to the story is how sympathetic they are. The spectrum runs all the way from those who generate fear and loathing to those who generate just a little less sympathy than the hero. Note: we can never feel more sympathy for the antagonist; the moment we do, they become the hero in our eyes. The definition of the antagonist is the person we’re rooting against, the person who is working against the person we’re rooting for.
So a villain is a species of antagonist that generates fear and loathing in the reader. It doesn’t matter if they think they have good reasons for their acts. We still feel they are evil and dangerous. Examples include: Darth Vader, Sauron, the kidnapper in Mel Gibson’s Ransom, Commodus in Gladiator, or the Joker in The Dark Knight.
So here’s what I’ve noticed about effective villains.
VILLAINS & STRUCTURE
1) In a villain/hero story situation, the villain is key because the hero is reacting to the villain’s plan. It’s a total threat/danger plot.
2) So the villain has to be active. He’s the one who WANTS something. He’s the one that starts the whole story. A weak villain isn’t going after this thing whole-hog or doesn’t have the power to do it or has no urgency and will.
3) Strong villains are ruthless AND powerful. Villains also need to have some brains–we need to be worried for the hero, remember? We have to know that they’re they type of person that will take you out if you get in their way. Even if they have a well-spun way of making themselves sound ethical. But villains go beyond other antagonists in that we fear and hate them. They are evil.
4) The hero needs to be the underdog in the relationship, meaning less powerful, two steps behind, not as easily ruthless etc. The bigger the plan the more high stakes and high concept the story becomes. But it’s the villain’s plan that drives it. And they will be taking steps to counter the hero, will probably be two steps ahead most of the story.
5) As always, as with any character, the villain’s plan and motives have to be believable. Even if they are evil. The minute a villain becomes too far-fetched, they lose their power.
CHARACTER INTEREST
In addition to the role villains play in the story, there are a number of other things that make them interesting. However, these things are not anything new or different. They’re the same things that make any character (or person) interesting.
– Larger-Than-Life Attributes (as in experience, power, skill, success, position, or behavior)
– Eccentricities and Particularities
– Outrageousness
– Humor
– Beauty
– Surprise (as in against type details, reactions, motivations, or backstory)
– Inner Conflicts (as in the “ethical” dilemmas they find themselves in)
While danger and threat draws the attention, rouses interest, and can be sufficient to make a villain memorable, I think the factors mentioned above have a wonderful effect.
THE CORE QUESTION
The root question when considering villains is what pushes readers toward the fear and hate of others?
Of course, it’s relative. But there are qualities that engender these feelings in us. Selfishness, brutality, sadism, madness, cruelty, a complete disregard for others AND the power to carry their wishes out. It’s someone who poses huge, immediate, specific threats to me or those I care about and does it without any concern or with relish. The more intense these factors, I think the more we move along the spectrum towards fear and hate.
So people say the best villains are those who are the hero’s of their own story and with whom we can empathize. I don’t think this is accurate. The Joker in the Dark Knight was a great villain and may have been the hero of his own story, but never in a million years would I empathize with him. It’s true we can smpathize more with people who agonize and resist horrible acts. And some antagonists do show scruples. But not every story demands that type of antagonist. Sometimes what’s needed is someone who kills grandma horribly and says “so what” or “it was fun”–and engenders fear and hate.
One last point. “Villain” is a reader attributed characteristic, i.e. the reader is the one who labels the character. This means the person has to be a villain in the READER’S eyes, not necessarily a villain in the eyes of the culture in the story. For example, In Not Without My Daughter the hero subverted and violated the dominant story culture, and I cheered for her. The guy who was sustaining the moral order of the story culture was the villain.
ROOTING
From what I can tell, all rooting response is based on some innate sense of justice, of what’s appropriate in a situation. For whatever reason, we feel discomfort when undesireable things happen to good or innocent people. We also feel discomfort when desireable things happen to bad people. The reason why we root for someone is because they have a lack of happiness or a threat to their happiness AND we belive they deserve better. I can’t see anything else we based that deservingness upon except some inner sense of justice.
It doesn’t mean the deserving person is a goodie two-shoes. It just means that in the context of the story and what’s happening, we think the scales of justice tip, if only slightly, to the hero’s side.
Some may argue this, but I don’t think it’s possible to root for someone or against someone without a moral judgment. It’s true that not every antagonist needs to or does act immorally. In fact, the antagonist might be doing the right thing, the moral thing, in his or her particular situation, and it just happens to oppose the hero’s desires. The key however, is that the story guides the reader to feel the hero should win at the antagonist’s expense. And that it’s right for the hero to do so. That “rightness” is based on a moral stance of what’s good and desireable in the given situation. The farther along the spectrum of antagonists we move towards villany, the more clear that moral stance becomes.
I’ve experienced yet again the miracle of manure, of starting from scratch, and following the zing.
This last week I’ve been rewriting a beginning to a novel. It’s a bit tricky because I can’t just rewrite it without constraint. Such a rewrite would cause massive changes to everything else in the book. In fact, a complete, unfettered rewrite of a beginning might end up requiring a totally different book. But Tor bought the book in hand. Besides, I don’t have time for a total rewrite even if they did want one. So the new beginning had to fit into the rest of the current story.
At three different spots where this beginning needed significant changes I have had to write a pile of cow crap because it’s all I had in me at the time. I knew I couldn’t use those plops when I finished them. But there they were.
The problem was compounded by my reading the recent Time article about Stephenie Meyer and starting to listen to Empire by Card. I have a weakness for comparing myself to others, and this time the comparison yeilded some depressing results.
Then I asked myself what wasn’t working and how I might meet the goals of those scenes a bit better. I followed my heart. But in all three cases I had to stop trying to use the brilliant words I had written originally. Not the cow crap revision, but the original stuff.
I’m not talking about the general prescription that we writers need to “murder our darlings” because the darlings are usually bad writing. I find general prescriptions to be wrong much of the time and that one in particular to make no sense at all.
In this case one of the things I had to jettison was a beginning segment that had compelled 90% of the readers who glanced at it to read more. A beginning page that snagged agents and editors. A beginning page I still loved, even after reading it as many times as I had.
But it just wouldn’t fit, couldn’t fit with the new structure. When I tried to hang onto it, I wrote crap. Which was fine. There was some good stuff in the crap. But I eventually had to trust myself and come up with something else completely.
And while I don’t know if it’s going to suck readers in like the original, I think it’s pretty dang good. Back before Card’s boot camp I would have never made it to this point. I would have given up. But this is just the process for me now. It took some time to learn and trust it. But now I know that while sometimes I can write hot. There’s no reason to despair if I don’t. Sometimes it takes a few tries before I get to the good stuff.
As for Meyer and Card, well, it’s not my goal to be a one-trick pony, now, is it. 🙂
My first semester in college I earned a GPA of, ta dum, 0.68. How do you earn such amazing grades? Well, I’ll tell you: the super secret strategy is to get an F in everything except ballroom dance. In that you get an A.
I couldn’t squeeze any juice out of my textbooks, but I sure could fox trot.
And I wasn’t partying. Dope and beer bongs were never for me. I wasn’t skipping class. I was lugging this huge valise around with every textbook I had. I think it weighed something like forty pounds. I was stitting in classes looking studious and taking notes. Well, except for physics which started early. 7:30 a.m. if I recall. What kind of a nut job takes a class at 7:30 a.m.? I did. I tried really hard to stay awake. I know I saw the professor shoot a gorilla with a tennis ball once. But the rest of the time I was in la la land catching z’s.
A 0.68, and I was in the honors program.
Obviously, I didn’t know how to go about learning. I’m glad the university didn’t give up on me. They put me on probation and told me I had to take a class on studying. A class on how to take the reponsibility for learning into my own tentacles. A class that shared techniques that actually helped.
One of the techniques was taking breaks. You were to work hard for 30 or 45 or 50 minutes and then take a break. Why? Well, because studies had shown that someone who, for example, was going to study for two hours could learn more by taking a ten or fifteen minute break in the middle than someone who worked the whole two hours. Spending more time on studying actually meant you learned less.
I’ve found this method applies to more than just reading textbooks. It also applies to writing. My practice is to set a time for 45-50 minutes. My goal is to write as hard and fast during that period as I can. To be totally focused on the task at hand. And then, when the timer dings, to literally get up out of my chair, walk about, and take a break. Then come back at the top of the next hour and start another 45 minute session.
But I’m not the only one doing this. A lot of folks use this method. Author Annie Bellet writes about her use of it in The Quest for Productivity and shares some of the reasons why it helps her. Read what she says there. If you haven’t done a 45/15 or 48/12 session, give it a go. See if you don’t actually get more done in less time.
Oh, btw, as for my grades, not only did I NOT drop out (or get kicked out) and become a hobo living in a trailer by the river, I ended up getting a 3.8 in my masters of accounting program. I think it’s safe to say I figured that school thing out. 🙂
What makes someone gifted?
