How I’m Doing--Not a Good Work Environment

(Sorry this is a day late (and a dollar short). It's been a long week.)

Have y’all read Chris Baty’s No Plot? No Problem!? It’s the official handbook for NaNoWriMo. Anyway, there is a section in the book about writing at work. At my job, I have a lot of empty time, and I’ve been trying to use it for writing, because, you know, what the hell? But it turns out? Not a very good place to get down to business with writing.

In the aforementioned book, one of the things they mention is that you shouldn’t get too involved into your story. Luckily for you, the work environment doesn’t allow for you to get any deeper into your work than they suggest. The phone will ring, your e-mail will ding, and your co-workers will be jawing. At the very least, though, typing away at a word document looks a hell of a lot more productive than surfing the internets.

It’s not that I don’t have the time to write here, or even that I can’t come up with ideas (though that is a distinct problem). It’s that I can’t really get my good words and turn of phrases out while I’m here, it seems. It may be okay writing, but it stinks to high heaven to me, which is less than encouraging while I’m working.

However, it has resulted in a higher rate of blog postings, since I can write them here and post them when I go home. :)

Empathy--How to Generate it for Your Characters

While it is a topic for another day, there is nothing worse than I hate in a story than an antagonist that is The Bad Guy. He’s so incorrigible, unlovable, and wholly Evil that you can’t help but hate his guts. Therefore, because you hate him for eating babies or whatever, you sympathize and root for the main characters that are going up against him in the name of all that is Good and Holy.

Blech.

I’m not going to go into why I dislike this so much today; instead, I would like to focus on the technique used here to make the reader side with The Good Guys. Here, the Bad Guy is used as a repulsion. Since you see the Bad Guy being Bad, you dislike him, which makes you side with the Good Guys. It’s like magnets. If one side pushes you away, the other will pull you closer. It’s a cheap and easy way to generate empathy in the reader for the main characters. Cheap, easy, and wholly unfulfilling.

The concept of the reader having to side with someone is born from the whole idea of having a protagonist and an antagonist. By definition, these characters are supposed to oppose each other in the main story conflict. Because of this, the reader feels pressured to side with one or the other.

There are always exceptions, of course. There are times when the two main characters have some conflict with each other and make themselves equally unsavory through their actions. An example is a recent movie I’ve seen, Bride Wars. The two main characters are best friends, but a mix-up at the wedding planner leads to them having to decide which of the two is going to relent and give up their wedding dream. At first, empathy is generated for both characters: one lost her parents in an accident, the other is a harassed teacher. But when the conflict begins between them, you are made to feel more empathetic to the character Emma, who is characterized as a pushover and even expected by the character Liv to give up her dream. Liv expects her to give up so much that she breaks their agreement to make wedding plans before one or the other gives up and begins designing her Save-the-Dates. Here, empathy is generated for Emma while empathy is lost for Liv, making Liv to seem to be the Bad Guy.

But this switches later in the film as they keep taking hits at each other until Liv’s bachelorette party at a strip club. Emma crashes it when attention is brought to Liv for being a bride, and effectively ruins it for Liv by winning the impromptu dance contest. Liv then drinks to make herself feel better, to the point where she wakes up late the next day for an important meeting at work. She even forgot that she, a lawyer, still had blue hair from her salon mix-up (caused by Emma) as she went into her meeting. Upon attention being called to it by a client, she breaks down, freaking out about everything going on with her wedding planning, her lost best friend, and the new fact that some of her blue-dyed hair is falling out. This results in her being dropped from the case, which would have been great for her career. This generates a lot of empathy for Liv and loses a large amount for Emma.

But, this is balanced out by the fact that Emma and her fiancé are having problems. He doesn’t care for her newfound confidence and even tells her to “knock it off”. This generates empathy for Emma and vilifies her fiancé, which gives Emma license at the end of the movie to call the wedding off in the middle of the ceremony (such as it can be called).

This method here of mixed empathy for two opposing characters is an exception to the protag-antag rule, and one that is used commonly: it often starts with the characters being close, having something come between them, and the two learning from the conflict and becoming even closer. But it is effective in creating empathy for both characters so that the reader (or, in this case, the watcher) does not feel like they have to take a side.

If you want your reader to side with a certain character, however, here are some techniques and examples:

• Introduce your protagonist before your antagonist. A technique that spawned the writing of this post, this is especially effective if you have two opposing characters that are well-developed enough to take the side they have. This will not work if you’re going with the old model of Bad Guys and Good Guys and Good versus Evil. Instead, imagine a couple where the wife would like to have a baby, but the husband is dead set against. The wife is ready to start a family and become a mother, but the husband is afraid that a child will complicate the relationship and tie him inevitably to the woman he married. Empathy can be generated for either character, though they are in opposition, and one will have to give in and “lose”. Here, empathy is better generated for the person introduced first. If it is the wife, the husband will likely be vilified, and vice versa, though the conflict is the same. This is shown in the second part of The Gods Themselves: one character is introduced first, then another, then a third. The first and third are in opposition about having their third child. The first fears that it will mean they will pass on soon. The third wants to feel fulfillment from having all three children. But because the first character was introduced first, you side with them, and can’t help but see the third as a selfish controller.
• Make the protagonist normal. This is useful if your story is a showcase of a different world or society, like in Brave New World or Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold! If the main character is more like you or me, we can’t help but empathize with him. In Brave New World, where people are born on an assembly into permanent classes and take various pleasure-pills, we have John the Savage, who is from an outsider to this society like we are as readers, and thus can show how alien he feels it is. Similarly, in Terry Brooks’s Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold!, the main character Ben Holiday purchases a kingship in a magic kingdom. He is directly from our society, rather than something similar, and thus gives us an even more descriptive account using our own concepts and understanding.
• DON’T make them a victim. This is number one the worst thing you can do. Instead of creating empathy for a character, you instead make the character seem wishy-washy, and then the reader will find them frustrating. They won’t want to continue on with the story. This often shows up in amateur fiction, or even in some YA, because the age-group can sometimes feel like they are out of control of their lives and thus can relate to the main character. If your plot calls for something bad to happen to a main character, focus more on how they will try to overcome, rather than how everyone feels sorry for them.

Of course, you have to make sure that it fits into your story. Don’t just make your main character a regular schmoe just because you want the reader to empathize with him. Don’t introduce your main character first if something is supposed to happen first. But keep in mind that for your protagonist to be the one your reader empathizes, you will have to make the reader care. They won’t just care out of kindness. Make them not want to put that book down.

BookRecSunday--The Gods Themselves

This week's book is The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov. I picked it up at the request of the husband that I read it when I was book shopping for myself around my birthday. I have read some other Asimov books (I, Robot, Foundation, and Asimov's Mysteries) with varying degrees of love, but love it was. There is something about Asimov's writing where he knows that not everyone reading his books is a brilliant scientist, which must have come from writing books in almost every category in the Dewey decimal system!


The Gods Themselves is definitely no exception to the understandable science either; I'm only about halfway through, and the first part (Asimov's books usually have parts like that) is alost exclusive getting to know some science with a touch of interindustry discontent. The first part makes you think a lot of his Robot stories or the stories in Asimov's Mysteries, where the science is explained in a dynamic way, but allows for a little speculation on the reader's part as to how it will be solved, using the previously explained science.

I'm in the middle of the second part, which is amazing. It's all about these three aliens, and the whole thing just hits you in the face that it's different. It doesn't make any allowances for humans that find the things they do strange. Their activities are described in ways that they would understand them, and you can't help but feel immersed in the whole thing. It's like as if you left the perfectly manicured sidewalks for tourists in another location and find a little Mom-and-Pop that only locals go to, and only they know the slang. It's much more immersive than, say, if the narration took a moment every few sentences to describe what's going on. This section has faith that you'll figure it out as you go along, and because of that, you do.

Like I said, I'm only halfway through. But I would recommend this or any other Asimov story to anyone who has considered themselves a fan of science fiction.

How I'm Doing--Avoiding Work with Other Work

As an extra attempt to keep up on this blog (and my own writing!), every Friday I’ll be posting how I myself am doing at my own writing. We could all talk genre and plot and structure and grammar until we’re blue in the face, but nothing really gets down to the business of writing that actually doing it.

As the title says, I have been avoiding my main writing project with another. That is not this blog, though others may argue otherwise. I have a main writing project that I had been working on in various incarnations for a long while. The current one was developed for NaNoWriMo ’06, and was an easy win. But after that, it fell by the wayside. The sense of urgency that NaNo brought that was translated into the flow of the story was inevitably lost. The story still progressed, but slowly, both in tale-time and real-time. A struggle with a single character acting outside what I thought she would do caused a several month halt. An initial ending was cast aside for a more climactic one, but the new one would require more development of a certain character and a relationship, and an upgrade from minor to major during the course of the story.

Needless to say, the story got all kinds of fucked up.

So, instead, I picked up another, more experimental story, in order to feel like I was actually working rather than avoiding the issue. This story is somewhat backwards and was born out of a conversation I had with an aunt by marriage (also a writer) about the way the popular culture’s veracity for franchises has led to the growth of the Deconstruction literary movement. Stories in books, movies, and even video games are no longer even concluded and given closure, because there is that possibility that it may prove successful and the creative power behind it pressured to release sequel after sequel in order to keep up the cashflow their distributer would like.

Fiction that falls victim to this Deconstruction starts out having a complete, final-feeling ending, but, because of success, destroys this feeling with more story. This can lead to the reader having a sense of betrayal: they feel duped into thinking that the story was over, but instead has only just started. It can also lead to plotholes, which in the Deconstruction literary movement become the goal, since they can be filled up with more story, which leads to more success.

The project I’ve been working on takes this unfortunate tendency and turns it on its head. Instead of going through the detail of how the world was saved, and then go into how it really wasn’t, I start out with the characters having already completed their first task of saving the world. So, instead of starting with a successful story and having to patch together a mediocre sequel for the fans, I’m making the “mediocre sequel” a hopefully good story on its own without any need for a prequel or sequel. In this way, the acts that took place before the story are instead backstory and are referred to in flashbacks, thoughts, and dialogue, but are not actually truly written out as its own story.

I did say it was an experiment, right?

Anyway, this experiment has been going for a while. For about 127,000 words so far. I know, I know. It’s a lot. I did say that this was work to avoid work, right?

So, that’s all about what I’ve been working on. Next week, I’ll likely go into deeper detail about what I’m working on.

Characters—A Cooking Comparison

Characters are the integral part of any story; they drive the fiction with their choices, interactions, and reactions. Most trouble that people have when writing, where they say they can’t quite get something right, is usually a conflict between what the characters want and what the writer wants to happen in the course of the plot. This is a good thing: if your characters are coming alive and refusing to fit in the cubbyholes born of your plot, then you know that they are becoming authentic people.

Unfortunately, for the ease of writing, some authors will use what are called “stock characters”. Stock characters are usually based on classical literature and stereotypes. However, using characters in this way does not fool a reader. He can see through these people as if they were made of glass, because they are simple, rather than complex. These simple characters undermine a writer’s authority; once lost, the reader cannot trust the writer to continue the story truthfully. Even if you are writing fiction—especially if you are writing fiction—the reader expects the writer to convince the reader that what takes place in the story is important. This is what we call a page-turner.

Consider a soup from a can. You can easily mix this with a can of water or milk, and have a passable soup. This is fair enough for your extremely minor characters, the ones that have a line or two, or are in only one scene, and are not prominent in the story. But even this soup sometimes needs seasoning: a dash of salt, or pepper, or even some sugar or a can of mushrooms. That innkeeper that your adventuring characters encounter when they stop for the night doesn’t have to have only generic speech or appearance. He can have an accent, or you could spend some time describing how his filthy apron does not quite match the meticulous décor of the barroom. Note that this is brief and should not become something to spend a paragraph or two on; instead, this adds a little something more that colors the world you created just a little more vividly.

For major characters, or even recurring minor characters, this is no good. No one wants to serve canned soup to a food critic (your reader) as a main course. In this case, you would want to make something from scratch, right? But you have no idea how to build up a character from scratch. This is where stock characters can be put to use.

Just for a moment, I would like to mention that you don’t have to reach into stereotype or mythology to find a foundation to build a character from. You can also look to the people you know, or even people from the books you like, or from TV. If you want to base your character on these, though, make sure to change many of the details. Make your father the uncle. Make that female cop a male cook. Make that dark wizard a grocery cashier. Taking here and there from established fiction is not plagiarism, provided that you don’t take the character’s every mannerism, word, appearance, and name. Basing a character on an unsavory relative is also not libel, granting that you change enough so they are unrecognizable. When in doubt, mix and match.

Stock characters should be approached from the same angle as chicken stock. You don’t just drink it straight from the box/can. You add some heat to it, thereby already changing it. And even this isn’t the most common way to use chicken stock. Spices are added, or meat and vegetables, or even noodles. You can even mix it with other types of stock, like beef, vegetable, or seafood. This seasoned, heated stock can also be used in the preparation of other dishes than just soup, like a base for a sauce, stuffing, or even a seasoning in its own right for meats, potatoes, and rice.

Use stock characters in this way. Take the stereotype of a Damsel in Distress and some heat: she’s in distress because she’s the general of a losing army. Or add some spice: she’s not in distress, but instead saves someone else from distress. Mix it with some other stock: she’s the personification of some human concept, like Time, and has the powers thereof. Mix in some other ingredients: make your Damsel a mother, an executive, or a student. Use this stock as a base for an idea: it’s a Damsel in Distress, but she is a he.

All in all, this is a good way to start off a character that you don’t know well. Spend some time considering who he or she really is: trying speaking in his voice, or freewriting about her. You could also consider their role in your story, and use that to develop them from their humble origins.

Remember, it is fine to use stock characters as a foundation, but you should always make some attempt to change it and make it your own.

BookRecSunday--First King of Shannara by Terry Brooks

Right now, I'm reading First King of Shannara by Terry Brooks. I'm almost done with it; I imagine I'll finish it tonight before bed. For Christmas last year, I got a lot of Brooks's Shannara series, but investigation showed me that there was a book that took place before his The Sword of Shannara. That prequel is this novel. I kept all those books in my book-waiting box until I could get that prequel novel, which I didn't until I went book-shopping after my birthday. There are two prequel series before this particular novel, I understand now: The Word and Void trilogy, and the Genesis of Shannara trilogy.

To be honest, it starts too slow for me. I'm really not a fan of "fighting orcs in the woods" fantasy, and this started off, and still seems to be, rife with it. Due to a new job, an engagement, and a vacation, I was not able to keep on reading it, because I didn't feel like I had the energy to plow through it.

Now, I still don't really like it. It is very Tolkienesque in that there is a distinct good and a distinct evil, without exploring why those who are considered "evil" are in opposition to the main characters. And the main characters are considered "good" simply because they want to stop the "evil" ones. This may work out in older fiction (and I'm well aware of the fact that the Shannara series is from 1977), but I would hope that we are smarter readers with higher expectations. I want the antagonists to have their own agendas that they think are for good reasons. I want the protagonists to not be in opposition to them just because it is the right thing to do.

With this being a prequel novel, it assumes a great deal that you've read that which it is prequel to. It depends on reader loyalty to push you through the high mountains of info-dump, and lends a great deal of importance to the appearance of certain characters in the story. Having not yet read The Sword of Shannara, I just find it irritating. Could he not just write it as a story in its own right, standing on its own two legs? Did it have to depend so much on the popularity of the novel he wrote before?

All in all, I'm not impressed. It's not really a page-turner for a newcomer to the Shannara series.

Books--Making a "To Read" List

I know, I know, it’s been a while. I’ve had a mostly busy summer and a lazy spring. That, and I have been in kind of a slump since April. Don’t really know why.

But that’s not what this particular post is about. In Tough Reads--Getting Through Books You Hate, I mentioned that a writer will read a book even if they hate it, in order to study why they hate it and avoid those reasons in their own writing. I forgot to mention the most important relation of reading and writing: Writers read. They write too, but if a writer doesn’t read, he/she can’t improve.

What? You consider yourself a writer but you aren’t in the middle of a book? You don’t have anything waiting to be read? Worse yet, you don’t know what books you should pick up and devour? THAT’S what this particular post is about: the best ways to accumulate a running “To Read” list.

• Authors you already love. If you don’t have a list of authors who you wish you could meet, even if they are dead, I wonder why you wanted to write in the first place. Most writers start off as people who love books. Find out who wrote the ones you like, then look up any other works by them. I’m not saying you’ll love those other works. I loved Jacqueline Carey’s Kusheline Legacy, but I’m lukewarm about her The Sundering duology. But it’s a good way to start that only requires a glance over your current book-stocks.
• Random Picks. Don’t be afraid to purchase/check-out that book you just picked up at the store/library! You may have only been attracted to the cover, the title, or even the author’s name, but the fact of the matter is that it’s in your hand. Read it. This is an especially good tactic if you’re visiting a used bookstore. Don’t have enough money to buy it from the store? Write down the name and author, so you can come back and buy it some other time. It may not be at the used bookstore later, but you could always go to a regular store and buy it, or turn to the Internet. If you’re looking for a specific genre or subject, go to that section first, then open your eyes to any book that stands out to you. Buy it. Check it out. Read it.
• Friends and Family. Sure, you could always ask them what they’re currently reading, what their favorite books/authors are. Those are both great ways to add titles and writers to your list. Another good tactic though? Actually borrow their books. (With permission of course!) This is a great way to save money and still get the reading in that you want. Of course, you’ll probably be stuck only borrowing one or two at a time, just to keep track of whose is whose and to give them back in a timely manner, and you won’t be able to display those particular “reading kills” n your own bookshelves (though, you wouldn’t be able to do that with library books either). This is an especially good tactic if you have a significant other. Have you read his/her books yet?
• Book Clubs/Writing Groups. A variation of the above. Ask the people in your writing group what they’re reading, and make note of the answers you get. If you’re in a book club, then ask what the next few books you all will read; there’s nothing wrong with getting ahead. As an aside, if your book club is a group of bored people that don’t really talk about the books you read, then it’s not a book club.
• Internet Book Recommendation Sites. Sites like What Should I Read Next and Good Reads can take the books you already have and love and match you with books that are similar. Good Reads in particular has lists of different genres of books compiled by registered users. The webcomic Unshelved, about workers in a fictional library, has book recommendation strips on Sundays. You can also traverse the Internet for book recommendation blogs, which may include reviews, such as Books on the Nightstand and Wedellsblog: Books.
• Amazon. Similar to above. Amazon uses cookies to look at your browsing history and recommend related products. You can also browse for books you already have or have read and see what was “Frequently Bought” with your book, or what “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”. If you are browsing for nonfiction in particular, you may want to go to the bottom of the page, where it will display “Books on Related Topics”. This website is also a good place to make you “To Read” list with their wishlist system. Or you can use wishlists to search for more recommendations, since every addition brings you to a page with similar products to the addition!
• This Blog! In an attempt to update this thing more than once a season, I’ll be posting short, spoiler-free reviews of the book I’m currently reading every week on Sunday. I may like what I’m reading, I may not, and I may be reading the same thing two weeks in a row, but I’ll let you all know what I think at that moment as far as I am. I’ll let you know about the author and any previous books in the series as well. So check back this Sunday!

It’s easy to say that you don’t have time to read, and even easier to say you don’t have time to write. But if you can’t make time to read, you won’t be able to find the time to write. And you may consider yourself a writer, even if you don’t read or you put down books you hate. But your writing may not improve very fast, or it may become stagnant. Reading is how writers try on new styles or techniques. Try to always have a book in progress—both writing and reading.