by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler
“Okay, good,” says Kurtzman blowing out a sigh of relief. “I’m going to choose to believe that this was a brilliant computer animation modeled by someone with an outstanding attention to anatomical detail. Because I refuse to believe that an alien teleported into this office.”
#
I tune out a little bit as Wollreich’s brain trust begins working that angle. Michel seems to think that it’s possible for the camera’s tiny transmitter to have been hacked, so that the images arriving at the larger wall transceiver were different than what actually happened in this office.
It’s interesting, but I’m doing a threat assessment, and it’s distracting. I do threat assessments all the time, they’re part of my job, but right now I’m assessing the threat to Mo, Barry, and I, and our jobs. I know that we didn’t fake anything, or take part in any fakery, but I can’t expect the scientists and game theorists in here to take our word for that. It’s only going to be a few minutes before they determine that a hack on the camera’s feed is only likely or manageable if the—
“Mister Cole,” says Michel. “
Outline of what comes next
Grilling Mo’s team. How was the camera hacked? Get a forensic computing expert in here to look at the file. Account for Mo and Cole’s movements during the last two weeks. Mo, Barry, and Cole surrender their weapons. (How paranoid is paranoid enough?)
The alien plan— Once personal security is disarmed, the aliens are free to attack, and everybody is in the same room. If security is NOT disarmed it’s probably because the message is being taken seriously. Win. Actually, the most likely scenario is that the message is disregarded. What would the aliens do then? Plan B is harvest humans directly.
BONEYARD
“Go on.”
“Well, if it’s a side-effect then the company is gambling several billion dollars on a bet that is suddenly a lot less sure. But more importantly, you know that if the technology exists somewhere, anywhere, to allow someone to materialize and dematerialize here in your office, then the information here in your office is exactly where it would be used. But that would only happen if the secret was out, and was far enough out that somebody with very, very advanced technology had gotten wind of it.”
Wollreich’s eyes widen as I speak. A mixture of fright and incredulity, like he’s been told a very believable ghost story.
“Cole, that sounds like science-fiction.”
“You’re the one cooking up the immortality drugs, sir,” I say with a forced smile.
“There’s a big difference between identifying a series of exploits in organic chemistry, and defying the laws of physics.”
“I’m not a physicist, sir. Maybe it was a hologram, or an induced hallucination. My point stands. If somebody out there can do it, and the existence of this secret is out, your office is where they’d use it.”
“Well . . . how do we proceed?”
“Address the most likely issue first. Get tested. I assume the private meeting with R&D each Tuesday morning is a physical?”
“It is. What do we do if I’m fine?”
“If you’re fine, then somebody materialized in this room, or created the illusion of materializing. They had unknown means and unknown intent, but we can surmise that they did not want to be discovered by me or my team. I’ll need some time to chew on that. Also, my team should introduce an additional external perimeter, and someone should remain with you at all times from here on out. I hope that’s okay with you.”
“Perfectly okay, Cole.”
“Outstanding.” I pause for a moment. I should have asked this next question earlier in this interview. “Sir, did you get a look at the guy?”
Wollreich locks eyes with me, and looks deep. I look back.
“Yeah. It was Death.”
WRITING EXCUSES 9.31
WORKSHOPPING AN HONEST DEATH
(Listen on WritingExcuses.com)
Brandon: The part of Dan will be played by a rowdy group of European soccer hooligans watching American football for the first time. And we once again have Eric James Stone joining us. Thank you so much, Eric.
Eric: Thanks for inviting me.
Brandon: We’ve done this with the other people in the Writing Excuses crew, where we each wrote a story and have critiqued them. Last but not least is our friend Howard. We will include in the book the draft that Mary, Eric, and I just read so that you can read the final version, read our critique, and have in front of you the original draft so you can see what we went through. It makes us feel much better if you’ve read the final version first, because seeing it in its glory and beauty—
Howard: Because one of the things that we’re going to talk about is the fact that what Brandon, Mary, and Eric have read really isn’t the whole story. I’m stuck and need help getting the characters, plot, and everything to one of the possible endings I had in mind.
Mary: The reason we decided to go ahead and do this with a partial story is that we know this is something that happens to a lot of writers. We’ll be talking about the tools that you can use to get yourself out of this spot.
Brandon: I’m just going to lead the discussion, as I normally do with these. Whenever I do a critique, I like to start with what’s working, because I don’t want the writer to “fix” what’s already working. So, what did we like about this piece?
Eric: One of the things I really liked is the main character, the security guard. I like stories about people who are competent.
Brandon: He was very competent, and that was shown to me. There was very little telling of that, which was great.
Eric: With a competent character, if they run up against something that’s outside their competency zone, that creates some good conflict. Now, this story has a really neat concept. With the impending immortality and then, is it Death? Is it aliens? What’s interfering here? I really liked the concept there and really wanted to know how it was going to end.
Brandon: One thing I want to highlight that was working very well for me was the pacing. The way that you included your scene breaks really enhanced the sense of pacing. You had a little zing at the end of most of the scenes. I was really engaged by the story all the way through.
Howard: I remember you actually cursing me when you got to the part of the document that said “Boneyard” instead of—
Brandon: Yeah. “What?!” You had indicated you didn’t finish, and I hoped that just meant you didn’t know what to do with the epilogue, like with my story. But no, it just stops, and I said, “Aaaaaahhh, Tayler!”
Mary: One thing I liked was the dialogue, particularly because you’re writing in first-person present tense. I like the immediacy that that gives, and I also like the character interactions.
Brandon: I feel you picked the right tense. It helps enhance the story.
Howard: That is very gratifying, because as I was first writing this I remember thinking, “I already used first-person present tense when I was writing the horror story for Space Eldritch. I should just go with straight third-person limited,” but I could not find the voice for the character, so I changed characters. The original pitch for this was that our protagonist was the CEO. But in that version of the story, he was just telling people what to do. And I thought, “This is boring.” Yes, he has to think a lot and do things, but all he’s doing is telling people things. So I switched characters and it still didn’t feel immediate enough, and then I switched tenses and that appears to be where my stride fit the pacing of the story. So I’m glad it’s working.
Brandon: I remember having brainstormed part of this with you, but—
Mary: I was still surprised by stuff.
Brandon: So that was working real well. I still don’t know what the ending is, even though we brainstormed the concept. I don’t know if this is an alien, or if it’s actually Death, or if it’s industrial espionage, and I love that about it.
Brandon: Let’s go ahead and look at what’s not working for the part that’s already here. Then after that
we’ll tackle this larger issue of “How do I end the story, can you guys help me brainstorm an ending?”
Mary: For me, his subordinates are too similar. I found that I was often confusing who else was there. I think it has to do with speech patterns, and also his assessment of where they fit in competency. Because everybody seemed to be of equal competency levels, doing the same kind of things.
Brandon: One thing that snapped for me was when I learned that “Mo” was short for Mohammed. That character suddenly became clearer in my head. It’s the whole Orson Scott Card thing, right? Where it’s not necessarily that he was an ethnicity, but the fact that he was now a longer name, different from the other ones and of a different— Orson Scott Card has said, “When you’re naming characters, try to make each name distinctive from the others in an interesting way.”
Howard: And that was exactly what I was doing. With regard to their extreme similarity—that is always a problem with me during first and second drafts. It’s not until I have the story shaped the way it needs to be shaped that I can go back in and tweak the dialogue so that the characters’ speech patterns identify them.
Brandon: Looking back at the start, you called him Mohammed the first time, but I wasn’t into the story yet. He was Mo for a long time, and then when you called him Mohammed again that’s the first time I grabbed onto Mohammed.
Mary: I completely missed it. It wasn’t sticky for me.
Eric: Yeah, it didn’t stick for me either. The one that did stick for me was the—
Howard: Failalo? The Polynesian name?
Eric: Yes.
Brandon: Talking about other things that didn’t quite work, I’m going to start larger and go smaller. I’ve got some text-based things, but we’ll get to those later. I felt there were a couple of places where the narrative got a little clunky for me. One was the maid-and-butlering in the scene with Wollreich and our protagonist. It was “As you know, we hired these people,” and there was a lot of information in there that as a reader I felt like I didn’t need.
Mary: I saw a lot of that too, and I went through and marked it in the text. For me, it was a lot of the stuff about how incredibly valuable this thing was. I just need somebody to tell me this is valuable, and I do not need them to justify it.
Brandon: In that same sequence we have the main character saying, “I’m thinking of stepping down,” which didn’t seem to work. I can understand him being shocked, but somebody needs to run security for this. It makes perfect sense that it would be him, but he says, “I’ve just realized my mission parameters are much larger than I thought. This is a big deal, and I’m overwhelmed.” There is this discussion of “I may need to quit, sir.” Is he going to hire someone better than you? I don’t understand that interaction completely. And it was part of the “Do we need all of this?” I’ve been presented with a character who says, “Tell me what I need to do. I’m going to take the next few steps.” And for him to then say, “Wow, you’re doing this awesome thing, okay. I will have to deal with that.” It felt like—
Howard: I’m going to have to figure out how to fix that. At least in the way I’m envisioning the further unfolding of the story, the corporate espionage angle here is pretty important. One of the principles behind protecting against corporate espionage is the value of the data and the value of the knowledge that the data exists.
Mary: But you don’t need to spend as much time on the page getting to that.
Brandon: Yeah, that’s what I feel. This is all good. In fact, I liked his conflict of “Am I capable of handling this?” It just felt there was way too much spinning of wheels in this scene for me. That’s my reader response.
Howard: No, that’s good. What I want to make sure of is that the thematic element isn’t the problem. It’s the way I’m overnarrating it.
Mary: Yes, it is.
Brandon: One thing I highlighted just to go back to is something like, “You know that inbound marketing team we created?” Why do we need to know about—what? They’re doing market research? I think in just a couple lines you could get across the idea of “This is how we’re going to profit on this.” With less back and forth. I was bored there.
Mary: Likewise. It was because I got it really early on. So I think you need to figure out—
Howard: Part of this is the worldbuilder’s trap of “I have figured out how the CEO and the board of directors are structuring this to protect the data as well as they can, and I want to share how clever I am with my readers.”
Mary: Yeah. You don’t actually need it for the story progression.
Howard: Dialing back the sharing of the clever.
Brandon: Though, on another tack, I’m not sure if it’s this way for everyone else or not, but I kind of want to know—if you’re going to mention, “We’ve discovered the secret to immortality,” should they just say that, or do they need to go further and say what the extrapolation of that is. I don’t know. Maybe this isn’t the right time for it. But at the end all he says is, “We’ve introduced an order of magnitude increase in human longevity,” and the guy says, “You’re sure this’ll work?” And the reader thinks, “What do you mean, you’re sure this’ll work? You only have two years.” Does it mean “Our cells are no longer breaking down”? I want a little line of proof.
Eric: I had some plausibility problems with that as well. You can say, “It’s working in mouse studies, and the original mouse who got it five years ago is still alive.” I don’t know how long mice live.
Brandon: I just need something. I don’t need all the technobabble, but I need him to offer our guy some proof.
Mary: Yeah, if you said, “On a cellular level, aging is no longer happening.”
Brandon: Yes, and that right there tells me what kind of immortality this is.
Mary: One of the places that I had a suspension of disbelief issue was that his team—granted, all hypercompetent and everything—would just happen to carry around bugging equipment on them when they’re doing a panic call. Because he says, “It’s about the size of a wall plate,” when he’s talking about the transceiver. Having the camera dot, maybe that’s just in your bag all the time, but what budget item was your secret bugging equipment on?
Brandon: My problem with the bugging equipment was that I didn’t have explained to me how it worked. You assumed I knew, and when they went in and said, “Let’s download the feed,” I said, “What?” I thought you were going to have someone watching a live feed on a screen all the time, because that’s how security footage works for me. I was very confused.
Mary: I also thought there was going to be a “We want live footage of him.” The problem with this is that it’s one of the places where you demonstrate their work as a team, so it’s important for the overall story structure. But in terms of getting us the next information we need? All you had to do was get rid of his prohibition against having the—
Brandon: I’m going to go a different direction on this. I’m going to disagree. I really like that scene. I think it’s easily justified by simply having him say, “I’ve been looking for an excuse to convince myself to bug his room for a long time now, and my men knew that. I had not gone forward with it because bugging my employer is not something I do unless I have a good reason.” There’s your answer right there.
Howard: Yep, that solves it. One of the reasons that it’s important to me is that on a story level the reader needs to be shown that the interloper, whatever he is—Death, an alien, whatever—the interloper already knows enough to know exactly where the camera is and to speak to the camera.
Brandon: Right, and the camera is not the corporation’s. It is our individual security team’s.
Howard: Now we’re swiftly running up to the corner that I’ve written myself into.
Brandon: Let’s address the big problem, which is that this story we were all really enjoying doesn’t have an ending.
Howard: Let me start by telling you the intended structure of the story. The easy, logical answer for w
hat’s going on is that our protagonist and his team are for some reason spoofing everybody with their camera and their tricks, and now this team has been brought into the full corporate secret. The bodyguards are there in a room full of the company’s brain trust, and the bodyguards are all armed. This is a situation the brain trust is probably very uncomfortable with, and their logical action would be to immediately demand that the bodyguards disarm themselves. Which makes perfect sense, it follows—
Brandon: If I were in this situation I wouldn’t do that. If I suspected the bodyguard I would play along immediately, and would say, “Wow, we need to do more research and investigation into this. Let’s set up a better surveillance and see if we can do this.” And then once the bodyguards were gone, then I’d deal with it. I don’t deal with it with them right there in the room.
Mary: When someone is in the room with you and they have weapons, you do not escalate. You defuse.
Howard: That works even better, because what they want to do is get the bodyguards out of the room. Which the interloper wants to have happen— And the interloper is playing everybody; that’s something that needs to be made clear as the story unfolds—this is a story goal. That is what the interloper expects to happen, that the bodyguards will be neutralized. And then the interloper and his interloper buddies will materialize in the room and murder everyone.
Brandon: Okay, so we’re on our last act of this story. This is the climax right here.
Howard: Yes, we’re heading straight into the last act.
Brandon: What do you want the interloper to be?
Howard: That’s the other trick, revealing this information in some way. The interloper is some sort of extradimensional alien species that has found a way to feed off energies released when people die. They can materialize in our plane and kill us, but when they do that they’re exposed to us killing them back, which is something they don’t want to happen. If we just die naturally, that’s awesome for them because then, “Hey, free food.” If we stop dying, they all starve. What they’re trying to do is set up a situation in which they can maintain the status quo, and for whatever reason this seems like the best strategy to them.