BUILDING THE CHARACTER INTO THE STORY
Now that you have defined the protagonist, you need to construct scenes that show these qualities and flaws in dynamic ways. Avoid just telling us about them. Instead, reveal them in an active way, showing the characteristics in action rather than in passive talking heads or monologue scenes.
LOIS GRESH
Story Endings: Where Monsters Lurk
LOIS GRESH is a six-time New York Times best-selling author, Publishers Weekly best-selling paperback author, and Publishers Weekly best-selling paperback children’s author of twenty-seven books and forty-five short stories. Her books have been published in approximately twenty languages. Lois has received Bram Stoker Award, Nebula Award, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and International Horror Guild Award nominations for her work.
You know what it’s like. You’re reading a fantastic story, but about halfway into it, you guess what’s going to happen. Sure, you like the protagonist, and oh yes, you love the setting and the fine-tuned prose. But none of these factors matter if you guess how the story’s going to end.
To keep the attention of your reader, you must keep him guessing. Something must pull him through the story to the very end.
Let’s look at what I think of as typical monster stories. I recently edited an anthology called Dark Fusions: Where Monsters Lurk (PS Publishing, 2013). Two-thirds of the submissions were typical monster stories, in which a kind protagonist—often a child with a single parent—confronts a lurking evil he can’t see or identify. But something’s wrong: The pool water’s too murky in bright sun, the grass is dark from an unseen shadow, the wind suddenly picks up for no reason on an otherwise calm day. As the story progresses toward the middle, perhaps a friend disappears or the protagonist finds a beloved family member dead by the murky pool (or in the dark grass or tossed by an inexplicable wind).
Quite often, the monsters take human form. For example, thriller novels feature human killers, as do space operas, military science fiction, and many other genres.
We keep reading a story because we care about the protagonist and how he’s going to survive and save the day. We’re hoping the author packs a punch at the end of the story and surprises us. Otherwise, if we can guess the ending (oh, the monster comes out of the murky pool and kills somebody), what’s the point of reading the story at all?
One thing you must do in a good story is make sure the protagonist changes in a meaningful way from the time the reader meets him to the time he encounters the monster. His actions at the end must reflect how he’s changed, and they must occur at great cost to himself or his beliefs. If you choose a final action that evokes great emotion in your protagonist, then your readers will be moved, as well.
Most typical monster stories end in one of three ways:
1. The protagonist finally sees the monster and fights it. Either the protagonist wins and kills the monster, or he loses and almost dies—or he does die.
2. The protagonist joins forces with the monster and also becomes evil.
3. The protagonist learns that there really is no monster.
No matter which of the three endings you write, the reader will be disappointed. So how do you get around this problem?
One solution is to change the monster in a meaningful way. Suppose the monster evolves and is no longer a threat. In this case, does your protagonist become the more evil of the two entities?
Or suppose the monster is not actually the creature or entity that the protagonist encounters at the end. Instead, the real monster still waits, ready to spring out and attack just when the protagonist thought he’d saved the day.
Or suppose the protagonist makes the monster suffer endlessly rather than supply a more humane method of death.
Or suppose the protagonist discovers that we’re all monsters, that this supposed force of evil is actually no big deal.
There are countless options, so there’s no need to opt for one of the three standard endings.
In my dark fairy tale, “Wee Sweet Girlies” (in my collection Eldritch Evolutions), a young girl must battle a terrible monster from the beginning of the story until the end. Does she kill the monster? Does she join forces with the monster? Does she learn the monster isn’t real? None of the above. Does she change in a meaningful way and do her actions reflect these changes? Yes. Read the story and you’ll see what I mean.
In Terror By Numbers: A Wall Street Thriller (Book View Café, 2012), a girl battles true evil in the form of a monster she doesn’t know exists until deep into the novel. Remember, in most thriller and horror novels, people die, and this requires a monster, often a human one. I’m not going to give away the ending of my thriller, but I guarantee it doesn’t use any of the standard three options. Hopefully, the ending will surprise you.
EXERCISE
1. Choose a short story or novel that you haven’t read yet. Halfway into the story, jot down how you think it might end. List all plausible endings that come to mind. Now finish reading the story. Did you guess the ending? If so, were you disappointed? If not, think about why the ending satisfied you. Did the solution surprise you yet remain plausible? Did the protagonist change over time? Did the ending affect you emotionally in any way?
2. Write 2,000 words of a new story of science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Make sure your story includes one monster, human or otherwise, that threatens the protagonist, her family, and/or her way of life. Make sure your protagonist will learn something about herself and grow as a human being over the course of the story. Now list all plausible endings that come to mind. Cross out the standard three endings. Choose one of the remaining endings from your list and write the rest of the story.
MICHAEL DILLON SCOTT
Begin at the End . . .
MICHAEL DILLON SCOTT is one of Ireland’s most successful and prolific authors, with one hundred titles spanning fantasy, science fiction, and folklore. His collections, Irish Folk & Fairy Tales, Irish Myths & Legends, and Irish Ghosts & Hauntings have remained in print for the past twenty years and are the definitive and most-quoted works on Celtic folklore.
Over the years I have met many writers, and I think I can divide them into two broad categories: those who plan their work, and those who do not. I am in awe of the latter—I simply do not know how they do it. They sit at their machines or before the blank sheet of paper and the story flows out of them.
However, in my experience, even those who do not plan their stories have an ending in mind and will work toward that particular conclusion. (And even as you are reading this, somewhere a writer is contradicting me and saying that he or she never knows how the story is going to end, that he or she is as surprised by the ending as the reader. Which just goes to show that there are as many ways to write as there are writers. There is no right way.)
There are more series in our genre than in any other. It began with the penny dreadfuls in the nineteenth century, where Varney the Vampire ran for two years and more than a hundred parts in magazine format before it was published in novel form in 1847.
Dickens issued most of his great works in monthly parts before releasing the hardbound novel. Readers quickly developed an appetite for revisiting their favorite characters.
Tarzan began as a series of short stories in All-Story Magazine in 1912 and the novel did not appear for another two years.
The great science fiction magazines, Amazing and Astounding, published short stories featuring the same characters, continuing the tradition of episodic stories featuring recurring characters. And this is a tradition that is kept alive in the cinema, on television, and in novels today.
Readers love series. Publishers are thrilled with series. And writers (mostly) love to write them.
But a writer beginning a multi-book series needs to be aware that they are looking at several years of writing. When I started writing back in the 1980s, trilogies were common, no
w it is quartets, quintets, sextets, and more multi-book series. These are big books too—the slender science fiction or fantasy novel is a rarity!
Recently, I finished the sixth book in a YA fantasy series. I started writing the first book in that series in 2005. It was published in 2007 and the last book in 2012. The Flamel series is now more than half a million words in print (and there is at least three times that amount in edits, rewrites, and pieces I’ve pulled out of the story).
The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel was conceived and plotted as a six-book series, and there is no way I could begin that journey without knowing the books in detail, knowing the climax of each book, and especially, knowing the ending of the series. I needed that destination before I began.
Before I started the first of the Flamel books, I wrote the ultimate ending—the final paragraph. It took me almost seven years to get there, but when I reached it, that ending slotted in complete and unedited.
So here is my suggestion (especially if you are thinking of a big multi-book series): Start with your ending.
All writing is a journey toward a destination, that final page in the story. Like any journey, it makes perfect sense to begin with a destination in mind. The entire story becomes a lot easier if the ending is written. Once you have your ending, you have your story, because you can then start working backward and asking yourself the great writing questions: “How did that happen?” and “What happened before that?” Eventually you will work back to the beginning of the story. And the process of questioning yourself and the story will expose the weaknesses in the tale and also allow you to discover its strengths.
The same process—beginning at the end—also works for characters.
Begin with the characters as they are at the climax of the story, then start working backward. By establishing how they are at the end of the story, this will allow you to determine how they should be at the beginning. If you discover that they are the same character at the end as they were at the beginning, then I am going to suggest that something is amiss. Every story changes your characters.
Beginning with the end has one other huge psychological advantage. You will never end up in that situation where you don’t know what happens next . . . because now you do!
EXERCISE
1. Take a piece of work you have already completed, and start with the finale. Summarize the last chapter/section in a few sentences on a piece of card—yes, an old-fashioned file card. Now, go back and do the same for the chapter before that. Work backward toward the beginning. Looking at your file cards: Does the ending fall naturally? Is it the natural consequence of all that has gone before?
2. Take a news headline as the final sentence in a story. By asking yourself, “And what happened just before that?” work backward to where the story began.
3. Create the same character in two different ways. First begin with a standard character biography, list the likes and dislikes, background, family, and so on. Now, begin with the same character, but fully formed and begin to work backward. What story elements have contributed to the character’s development?
HIGH STAKES AND TERROR
“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”
—GANDALF, IN THE HOBBIT, BY J. R. R. TOLKIEN
“What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”
—MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
WILLIAM F. NOLAN
Of Heroes and Villains
WILLIAM F. NOLAN is the best-selling author of nearly one hundred books. He has won top awards in three genres (mystery, sci-fi, and horror) and his works have appeared in some 350 anthologies and textbooks. He has taught college-level creative writing, and his books include Logan’s Run and the award-winning nonfiction volume Let’s Get Creative: Writing Fiction That Sells!
To achieve true heroism, a protagonist must perform heroic deeds. What constitutes heroism? Perhaps saving a squalling infant from a burning building? Maybe helping a crippled old lady survive an air crash? Or pulling a trapped child from the ruins of an earthquake? Saving the life of a drowning man? Yes, all these are genuine acts of heroism—but how much more dramatic, more exciting and satisfying to witness the defeat of a villain as strong (or stronger) than the hero?
Chester Bent, in Max Brand’s most famous Western, Destry Rides Again, out-fights and out-shoots our hero, but Destry prevails at the climax. An axiom of fiction writing could well be, “Strong villains make strong heroes, and, conversely, weak villains equal weak heroes.”
Seems antithetical, doesn’t it? Allow me to elaborate . . .
One example that comes to mind is Superman: Here we have an archetypal character of seeming ultimate goodness. Pure, righteous, upstanding; he has defeated a host of bad guys, but the chief villain pitted against him is Lex Luthor (an antihero if there ever was one) who seems not only malevolent, but indestructible as well. A strong villain indeed! Their ongoing battles are monumental, and the conflict they generate never fails to deliver.
Another example, this time from the cinematic world of director George Lucas’s Star Wars saga, is Darth Vader—a towering threat to young Luke Skywalker. In the original series, Vader is a figuratively (and literally) larger-than-life menace, determined to crush the Rebel Alliance, and subjugate everyone in the galaxy to the dark impulses of the Emperor.
From literature, we can examine Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, which are full of despicable characters who long to thwart the iconic British super spy: Goldfinger proved to be a worthy enemy, as did Dr. No.
Sometimes a villain is so much larger than life that it actually overshadows the hero, earning a special fame of its own. Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula is one such character, as is the sadistically evil Dr. Hannibal Lecter from Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.
As these examples amply demonstrate, as a writer, if you set out to create a work of compelling suspense, you must develop a villain that is truly real. Your scoundrel must be plausible; a cardboard menace is not going to elicit fear and belief in your reader. You need to make sure that he (or she) is a fully developed, three-dimensional character. Moreover, keep in mind that the battle between villain and hero must have its dark moment—a climactic point when all seems lost, and your hero finds himself on the knife edge of defeat. If your reader does not believe that the hero just might lose, then the element of suspense will be missing. In other words, don’t be afraid to give your hero a really bad time: Put him through the fire. The tougher you make the job of defeating the villain, the more the reader will identify with the hero, and therefore empathize with his epic struggle.
The task of defeating the heavy must always directly involve your protagonist, male or female. No falling rockslides or lightning bolts from the sky to get the job done (the ancients referred to this gimmick as a deus ex machina, or “god from the machine,” who would swoop in to save everyone if the writer couldn’t figure out how to; it’s a cheat, and an insult to your audience). Ideally, good should triumph over evil in your climax; in reality, however, not all stories end that way, so don’t be afraid to let the reader speculate. Neat resolutions can make for boring tales, especially for today’s jaded audience.
On another note, your evil creation need not always be human. H. G. Wells created wicked Martians in The War of the Worlds, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in The Terminator was a killer android. In my short story “Lonely Train A’ Comin’,” the menace is a living train that literally devours its passengers. My hero blows it to pieces, nearly dying in this act of destruction. Again, I had to make the train real; I had to convince my readers that such a train could exist. Otherwise, the story would have failed.
Finally, let me reiterate: Strong villain, strong hero; weak villain, weak hero. It’s all up to you, the writer.
EXERCISE
1. Create your own v
illain, in-depth. Make him or her (or it) truly frightening. Allow him to commit an evil act (or acts) to prove how bad he is. Give him a fully realized background. Where is he from? What is he capable of? Make him real.
2. When your hero first confronts the rogue, allow the hero to lose the first encounter. Maybe the hero loses twice. This sets up the final battle at your climax in which the hero prevails.
3. How does your hero win the day? Perhaps your menace has an Achilles’ heel that your hero can manipulate. If not, create one.
4. Try writing from the villain’s viewpoint: What nasty deed does he want to accomplish? What dark goal does she have in mind? How does it justify its behavior? Take us into your villain’s mind.
5. At your climax (a payoff to your previous suspense), have the final battle keep the reader guessing as to who will win and how, until, at the last moment, after nearly losing, the hero triumphs.
CHRISTINE CONRADT
The Eleven Tenets of Fear
CHRISTINE CONRADT has written more than forty indie films and made-for-TV movies in the horror, thriller, and crime drama genre. Her films have aired on networks like FOX, Lifetime, Lifetime Movie Network, and USA. She is the writer of SUMMER’S MOON, CHRISTIE’S REVENGE, MATERNAL OBSESSION, and HOTEL CALIFORNIA. She holds a BFA in film from USC and a master’s degree in criminal justice from Boston University.
I’ve been an avid lover of all things macabre since I was very young. My favorite holiday was Halloween; it was a time when I could unleash one of my creepy alter egos—an evil witch, Vampira, Bride of Frankenstein. One year, I wanted to go as a dead cheerleader. I was going to be deathly pale with bluish postmortem lividity and bleed profusely from a gash on my neck, but my mother nixed it, saying it was too morbid for the younger children. Ah, well.
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