About a hundred rounds of “What if?” later, I knew I had something. My rescuer had become a pair of unlikely allies, each with a different reason for being in the tunnel, and I’d set up not one but a series of “getting knocked sideways,” not only back in time but across alternate histories. On the way, my pair picked up more companions (including the ghost), outwitted some nasty pirates, and ended up in the clutches of an alien scientist. So far, so good. But not good enough.
I wanted something more at risk than just “not getting home.” What if (those magic words) getting home meant something else happening, something really terrible that affects much more than just these few characters? What if the alternate future in which they don’t get home was the best one?
At last, I had the makings of a story—four characters with different, not necessarily compatible goals, and a dilemma each of them must face. I have conflict between characters (and cultures) as well as within my primary characters, not to mention some spectacular scenery and a ticking doomsday clock.
Now we’re cooking!
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It’s Only Fiction
At the best of times, I’m mildly schizophrenic about my story-telling. Actually, that’s an inaccurate use of the psychiatric term. I mean, inconsistent and of two contradictory minds. On the one hand, I think it’s essential, even life-saving, to tell the truth about who we are, how we feel, and what we have experienced. I’m struck over and over with how telling our personal stories has the power to transform not only our own lives, but those of the people around us. On the other hand, I also believe that good fiction operates on somewhat different principles than real-life one-event-after-another. It has a beginning, middle, and end that give it shape. I’m far from original in saying that good fiction is more true than life, not because it is more credible but because it requires an emotionally coherent story arc.
“Write What You Know” may be good advice in terms of emotional veracity, but useless and counterproductive when it comes to gigantic silver slugs with space-faring technology, magical systems based on music, or boarding schools for wizards. Such beings and such worlds come about as a marvelous alchemical blend of research and imagination.
Like other fiction writers, I work hard to create characters that aren’t me and situations I’ve never experienced. As a result, I’m not alone in having some reviewer or even fellow writer (who should know better) assume that I’ve drawn heavily on autobiographical material for my characters. (This did happen to me, and I can assure you that Kithri from Jaydium is entirely made-up.)
Things can be emotionally true without being literally true. I can remember how it felt to be in such-and-such a situation or having done this-other thing. Like many (most, I daresay) writers, I love hearing other people’s stories, and I am as guilty as the next person of taking mental notes about adventures and experiences that are different from my own. So although this-particular thing never happened to me, this is how I imagine it felt like, having listened to someone it did happen to. If I do my job as a writer well and bring a writer’s sensibility to the problem, then I can end up with a story element that rings true.
The other side of this coin is what to do with my own life story. Keeping my experiences secret is one option (not a very healthy one, in my opinion), and telling them only in certain private settings is another. Putting them down as a memoir is yet another. Like lots of other people, I’ve had the impulse to turn mine into a work of fiction. Half the people I mention this to think it’s a wonderful idea and the other half warn me not to even try. Most of the time, I am not at all sure it’s a good idea. I suspect that the very things that were pivotal for me, the things that moved or shook or inspired or devastated me most, don’t fit well into fiction. So I’d have to be willing to “kill my darlings,” not just the prose bits but the sequence of events and in many cases, the events themselves. My fear is that in doing so, I will come perilously close to lying about what happened to me. It’s often been a struggle to delve deep enough to discover my own truth, and I wonder if fictionalizing it will eviscerate its meaning for me. I still haven’t come to a resolution about this and would welcome any thoughts.
There’s another way to look at all this and that is to take those critical moments and to use them as kernels of fictional moments. I may bedeck them with completely different circumstances. I may make sure the characters involved in no way resemble those in real life. I may situate them in a plot arc having nothing to do with “what really happened.” I may change all these things in the service of crafting a story. I may even change the pivotal moment itself but use its emotional energy as a driving force, a lens through which I focus the momentum of the story. So far, that’s worked the best for me: passion and tears poured out on the page.
In the end, all stories are made up. All stories are true. They are, after all, only fiction.
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Not Just Another Funny Forehead: Creating Alien Characters
All too often, television and films have depicted alien races as either shapeless blobs bent on wholesale destruction or else human actors with wrinkled noses or pointed ears. Alas, printed media have not proved immune to such generic and often salacious depictions. Fortunately, enough science fiction (and fantasy, if elves, talking dragons, and the like are “aliens”) authors have either the scientific training or the resourcefulness and imagination to do careful research. Both genres abound in well-crafted, intelligent, nonhuman species. Much has been written on the topic of “how to design a really alien alien,” and it is one of my favorite convention panel topics.
When I set out to create an alien race for Jaydium, however, I hadn’t participated or listened to many discussions. At that time, aspiring writers were encouraged to use check lists in developing alien races and their cultures. I find check lists singularly unappealing! They remind me of a conversation I overheard while standing in line to register for my first convention: a person was holding forth (quite loudly and in excruciating detail) about a world he had created. My reaction was twofold: first, that I had never and could never design such an intricately-described place; second (which kept me from utter despair about my own writing) that there was no story there.
My aliens arose from my writing process. That is, I started with the forward momentum of the story, the characters under stress, the unstable setting, the cascading sequence of events that led inexorably to a climax. Only when I understood the demands of the story did I know what questions to ask. I realized fairly early in the writing process that the mineral jaydium was the result of the destruction of a wonderful civilization, a sort of cataclysmically-metamorphic rock with special properties. I wanted my characters to be faced with a choice of attempting to save that civilization (at the risk of there being no jaydium, and hence no way to get home) or to let the tragic events unfold. This led me to ponder, What kind of civilization? Created by what kind of beings?
Since I loved invertebrate zoology in college, I used the gastropod family as a model. In doing so, I violated a slew of biological realities (including the structural limits on size of creatures that don’t have skeletons, internal or external, as well as the limiting rate of oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange). And yet, what I did worked. No one, not even my professor (to whom I presented a copy) railed at me for scientific idiocy.
Part of the reason, I believe, is that although my gastropoids were far from technically perfect, they formed an integral part of their world. I made them partly-understood, neither completely divorced from the reader’s experience nor too-explained, too-familiar. I’d thought through how their secretions are used as building materials, their aquatic and dry-land functioning, their reproductive biology and its affect on their individual relationships, and their mode of communication.
However—and this is crucial—I didn’t bash the reader over the head with everything I’d worked out. The gastropoids and their culture are experienced through the eyes of our
human castaways, who of course are not going to be handed a textbook of alien physiology. As our viewpoint characters interacted with the gastropoids, I gave the reader enough information to understand what is going on, but not an overpowering, indigestible treatise.
Lessons: Respect your own creative process, whether organic or tightly planned. Respect your reader’s intelligence and patience. Cut to the chase.
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Villains, Evil, and Otherness
Writers and readers love bad guys. More often than not, they’re more interesting—not to mention sexier—than the good guys. Of course they’re attractive. They’re dark, dangerous, edgy—in other words, forbidden fruit. Even Jane Austen’s naughty boys have a certain intoxicating allure.
Bad guys are also more likely to be complex in interesting, tortured ways, and to be charismatic and cunning but with fatal flaws that prevent them from being heroes. They possess the capacity for grandeur, except for . . . But you know all this. You’ve read the rewrites of classics told from the point of view of the villain. You know every villain is a hero in his own story, it’s just that his goals don’t align with those of the protagonist, but none of them get up in the morning and say, “Evil! Evil! Rah-rah-rah!”
Why do we keep coming back to having villains, as distinct from flawed heroes or misunderstood monsters? Aha, you say, to provide conflict, to place obstacles between the hero and his goals. Sure, you say, because there are really only three plots: Man Against Nature, Man Against Man, and Man Against Himself. (I think this is an oversimplification, and I’m not at all sure it’s true, but the point is that conflict between characters is one of the enduring themes in story-telling.) Once upon a time, all you had to do was put a man on a black horse or in a black hat, give him a mustache and a name with too many consonants, and everyone would understand that he had no redeeming qualities (and bad dentition). Later, it became desirable to give him a few aspects to admire and to play around with expectations. Then it became fashionable to portray him as not-really-bad, but wounded or misinformed or warped by his culture. Science fiction and fantasy, not to mention the whole of English literature, abounds in examples.
If we want a character (our hero, protagonist, viewpoint person) to struggle against something outside himself, we create an obstacle, a menace. No matter how we clothe the obstacle-character in nifty-stuff, his or her function remains to make things difficult. The more dangerous, resourceful, and recalcitrant the obstacle is, the more dramatic the conflict. Who wants an obstacle that is sympathetic, compassionate, reasonable, or helpful? Courage and intelligence are fine, as long as they’re in the wrong cause. But kindness? Loyalty? Humility?
We do the same things in our minds with our villains that we do with our real-world enemies. We selectively enhance those characteristics that make them less like us, less understandable. Less human. We transform them, we demonize them, and eventually we see them not as fellow men and women, but as “the other.” We eliminate all possibility of an “I-Thou” relationship, substituting an “I-It” of the most pernicious kind. In many ways, I prefer Cthulhu to human villains. It’s absolute and terrifying and utterly incomprehensible. I wonder if the original vampires—not the sexy, sparkly ones—were so scary because they had the outward semblance of humanity, but their nature was antithetical to life. What’s even scarier is when we start thinking about “those people over there” in the same way.
Then there is the problem of evil itself. Whether or not we begin with a belief in a universal force of corruption and harm-seeking, we will surely create it in our own imaginations by this process of turning an adversary into “the other.” But aren’t there people—and characters—who do terrible, terrible things? Aren’t they evil? I think we use the word in different ways. If I said Hitler or Pol Pot or Stalin was evil, I would mean that they caused such horrendous suffering and committed such heinous crimes, that words fail me. It’s shorthand for horror so great it will take generations to heal.
Evil in story-telling, on the other hand, can be a force in its own right, the distillation of everything that makes the hairs on your neck stand on end and your mouth turn dry, and the worst thing is that there is no reasoning with it, no way to bargain with it or earn its respect. None of the things that are important to us—integrity, generosity, fidelity, altruism, for example—avail against its implacable, relentless power. It will overcome and corrupt us no matter what we do. This is, I think, the shadow that has haunted Western civilization for a long, long time. If I picked any particular era, I’d have half my historian friends on my case, so let it rest as “a long time.” My point is that it’s influenced how we see those obstacle-characters, and how we distort the enemy-of-the-moment.
Regardless of our politics, as writers it behooves us to be mindful of how we portray our antagonists. I’m not suggesting that all quarrels can be resolved with a little touchy-feely therapy and a cup of tea. We want our protagonists to have something substantial and competent with which to strive, and we want the consequences of failure to be terrible indeed. But that doesn’t mean we have to perpetuate hateful stereotypes. If you want your hero to wage a battle against Evil Incarnate, then make it a gloriously inhuman element. If you want your antagonist to be human, then make him or her gloriously human.
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Revenge and Retaliation
Human beings have a tendency to lash out in retaliation. To take revenge for a wrong (whether actual or imagined), and to focus all resources toward that end. Such single-minded dedication makes for dramatic fiction. It is, after all, a form of self-sacrifice for a greater good—the righting of wrongs, the punishment of the wicked, the service of justice. It also presents a wealth of possibilities for action and for exaggerated emotion.
It’s also a natural and, dare I say, universal human impulse. When someone hurts us, our first and automatic reaction is anger. I think this is true, no matter what our religious beliefs, our social conditioning, or our meditation practices. These things influence how we express our reaction, but I don’t think they can eliminate it. We want to strike back. Anger can be immensely helpful in energizing us to life-preserving action. It also has the result of temporarily numbing both physical and emotional pain. In the natural course of events, however, this reaction is brief in duration. We humans—and the characters we create—run into problems when we become frozen at this stage. Then our brains start thinking, “I’ve got to make her pay,” or “That’ll teach him.” Armed with righteous justification, we start planning out our revenge, distorting our lives to creating suffering in others.
In fiction as in life, actions have consequences. As writers, it behooves us to understand the difference between natural consequences and created or artificial consequences. If Character A is an habitual liar, the natural consequence is that anyone who’s had dealings with him will become distrustful. People may also be angry and resentful if they’ve been harmed in other ways. A created consequence might be someone slaughtering A’s favorite guinea pig and hanging the carcass outside A’s door. The distinction here is not only one of appropriateness but of scope. Cheating at poker has natural consequences within the game (and its financial obligations); fire-bombing the cheater’s home town escalates the conflict to an entirely new level.
This is useful to understand when we’re looking at a character’s motivation. It’s all too easy to set up:
A harms B or someone/something B cares about
B dedicates himself to revenge
B sacrifices all other aspects of his life in pursuit of this goal
B achieves his aim
B lives happily ever after.
If we break it down to immediate/natural vs created reactions, we can add a few twists:
A harms B
B is hurt, furious, incredulous, desperate, despondent; other characters react to B’s plight
B dedicates himself to revenge in a way that makes his reaction different from that of an
y other character because it’s shaped by his own history, values, etc. This can be done coldly and with calculation, or unconsciously, or in a delusional way; B can be manipulated by those with other agendas and reasons for wanting A eliminated.
B sacrifices all other aspects of his life in pursuit of this goal, despite many possibilities of taking some other action. The conflict assumes a larger scale, with other characters being drawn into it or affected in powerful ways; perhaps B has moments of awareness of the price but is, like an addict, unable to change; perhaps B wrestles with his decision, thereby gaining inside into himself and A.
B achieves his aim or B changes his mind as a result of what he’s suffered.
B comes to terms with the full impact of what he has done, for good or for ill.
I think that’s a much more interesting story.
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First Person Perils
Every writer I know has an opinion about Point of View (POV) and a personal preference as well. It’s rare to hear someone say she enjoys writing omniscient third every bit as much as first person. We’ve all got our quirks, shaped by our personalities, our experiences as readers, and what books on writing we’ve read or teachers we’ve studied with or editors we’ve worked with.
Writers do not agree on POV. There is no “party line,” no singular truth about “which is better.” (See my first point.) The obvious explanation is that different POVs are better suited to different types of stories. The less obvious explanation is that POVs are subject to cycles of popularity. Today the publishing world values the 3 i’s: immediacy, intensity, and intimacy. This hasn’t always been so, and may not continue to be so. The Victorian writers embraced omniscient third, and saying that their work was therefore inferior is a bit like saying Baroque music isn’t as good as Romantic because it has more ornamentation.
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