Relationships--mastering the art of the friendship

Let's say you have a story in mind: you've outlined the whole plot, have characters with backstories and premade relationships. Susie is Billy's girlfriend, but also the sister of the band leader Martin, who is Adriana's little-something-on-the-side. Many of these characters probably have intricate webs of acquaintances, best-friendships, loves, enemies, and even more minute deviations in knowing and liking.

After all this planning, you start to write a scene where two long-time friends interact, perhaps at a meal or some such. Let's look at an example.

"Good morning, Susie."

"Morning, Billy. That the newspaper?"

"Yep. Want a section?"

"Comics, please."

... By now I'm sure you see the problem. Let's make Susie and Billy acquaintances, perhaps people who work for the same company but have never really interacted closely before. The same exchange could take place, easily. Because of this, the dialogue doesn't seem to ring true. They're supposed to be friends, right? Boyfriend and girlfriend? So why is their interaction so... bland?

This is the real question for any writer. Why is it that, seemingly simple exchanges that could very well take place in real life fall flat in fiction? Let's say that you're up in an airplane, snacking on the pretzels you receive for free. They taste plain, even with the salt that is so visible on them. Your Coke tastes more like the plastic cup it is served in than the delicious high fructose corn syrup you were expecting. What happened? The truth of the matter is, depending on air pressure, the same thing that makes your ears pop and ache, your tastebuds require extra stimulation. This is apparent in the expensive meals onboard: they seem to have a flavor. The reasoning for that is because it is overseasoned to make up for this taste-sensitivity loss.

This relates in fiction more than most people know. The emotions and expressions of the characters must be a little more exaggerated to effectively communicate. Take, for example, the exchange above. The dialogue could be that of boyfriend-and-girlfriend in real life, or of co-workers, or acquainted customers of a coffee shop. The trouble is, for all of its realism, it lacks the history and emotion related to the relationship.

Most writers end up writing exchanges like the one above, and, upon realizing that the history and the feelings are absent, superimpose these in the narration. An example:

"Good morning, Susie." Billy was always so chipper in the morning, Susie thought with a grumble. Susie needed more coffee and sugared cereal to even come close to his demeanor. Which, of course, bothered her. Which, of course, he knew.

"Morning, Billy. That the newspaper?" Of course it was; what did she expect it to be, shredded magazine clippings? Her brain was not running on all cylinders. She couldn't even get out as many syllables.

"Yep. Want a section?" As if she was prepared to read about economic growth percentages and make sense of them.

"Comics, please." Billy smiled an knowing smile and handed her the top-most bundle; the only bundle to have been completely removed from the newspaper before her arrival to the kitchen. Susie narrowed her eyes. Was she as predictable as he, with his smug cheer? God, it irritated her.

... This is a perfectly all right writing sample for a beginner. This is a piece of writing that is written in pieces, and clearly so. The dialogue obviously was written first, mostly to be page-filler, squinted at by the author as not-quite-right, and then having narration come up from behind to add something extra to the dialogue that it didn't have before.

What the dialogue, narration, and scene should do is define the relationship. Even if you've written the characters over other scenes where they simply interact, you must still define the relationship. Relationships change on a daily basis. Not so drastically from enemy to lover, but one day two people may be more cautious with each other because of mood. The next, they may have a bit more simplicity to their exchanges. This is particularly true for characters who are supposed to be long-time friends. Two characters who have known each other for a long time have feelings that have been cultivated for longer than the writer probably can understand, having just met them himself. There is an easiness to their exchanges, messages in their silences, and a cruelty to their drama that is not as well play between acquaintances.

Let's try that exchange once more, with narration and description.

Susie blinked as she shuffled into the kitchen. Practically gleaming in the new sun, it pained her to even look around for any unlikely obstacles between her and the table. Even if her eyes weren't squinted, they would have been upon seeing Billy in his crisply ironed shirt and perfect tie, glancing over the stock page of their local newspaper. Susie growled under her breath: a quiet sound to her, but one that drew her boyfriend's attention away from the endless lists of numbers and arrows. With a shake of his head and a smile, he handed her a Garfield mug, filled with steaming bitterness offset by milk and sugar.

Susie took it from him and sipped greedily as she slipped into the opposite dining chair. After gasping for breath, she eyed the perfectly folded newspaper sections on the table. She frowned. Had he really gotten a paper from the grocery store, or was the paper-boy really so awful as to steal sections?

Billy crinkled the paper in his hands to lift up her precious comics section. He shook it a tad to get her attention. Her blue eyes widened and a smile tugged at her mouth. Susie held out her hands, as if begging for food or spare change, her brows straining to touch her hairline. With a sigh and another shake of his head, Billy folded the section and scooted it across the table to her. "You know," he stated, breaking their silence, "there are other sections of the paper you might be interested in. Classifieds, for example."

"Piss off. I don't need this now."

"Oh? When do you plan on--"

"Billy, please." Susie set the mug down, and covered her face with her hands.

When she said nothing more, Billy stood, scratching his chair in towards the table. Muttering under his breath, his heeled shoes clomped out of the kitchen, out of the apartment, perhaps even out of her life. Susie sighed and let her hands drop, crossing her arms. No. She wouldn't be so lucky.

...Here, the narration dominates, but only because the tension of the silence is laid over the scene, rather than depending on mundane dialogue to move a scene along. At the same time, you get that, while Susie and Billy are not exactly on good terms, they know how to push each other's buttons. Considering that I wrote that just now, it's not a perfect example of relationship interaction, but that's what the greats are for.

How do you develop a sense of relationship in characters? Glad you asked!

• Look to your own relationships. The best research is your own life. You have your circles of friends and acquaintances. Even people you see often but don't consider friends are good fodder for this. Anyone with whom you have inside jokes with, know how to irritate, stories about, or more than the most minimal interaction with is perfect. Analyze how you interact with them, how they interact with others in this environment.
• Freewrite with your characters. This could mean you interviewing them about themselves, or their relationships, or more detailed exercises. If the way you imagine your characters interacting is more on a level of acquaintance than the friendship you expected, it may be you. Imagine being with a friend and with a stranger at the same time. You're not going to act quite as you would if it was just the friend. Convince the character that you are a friend as well. Also, if you just superimpose a friendship between two characters, the relationship may need work on its own. Write the two characters interacting with something mundane, like grocery shopping or cleaning. Make them talk. Write out their inside jokes and little stories to tell about each other.
• Study camaraderie in fiction. With many stories focusing mostly on developing the ubiquitous romantic relationship, this could prove more difficult than it should. Some examples in fantasy of these relationships can be found in the works of Tamora Pierce, Anne Bishop, and Elizabeth Haydon, to name a few. Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic series takes nine books to develop the friendships of four young mages who start off as abrasive acquaintances but grow to become like family. Anne Bishop's Black Jewels "Trilogy" includes friendships that seem unsteady with the level of threats exchanged between close friends, but examine how Andulvar and Saetan, Lucivar and Jaenelle, and Daemon and Surreal interact. It isn't about love there; it's about the history of it all. Finally, Elizabeth Haydon creates a perfect relationship between Rhapsody, Achmed, and Grunthor in her Symphony of the Ages. "Siblings" by mutual adoption, the exchanges between them start rocky, but grow to be more like best friends with a closeness that makes them each easy targets for any of the other's insults.

In the end, what you're trying to accomplish is a realistic friendship like the ones you yourself have. Like Anne Bishop put, "Demanding and yielding, stubborn and considerate, arguing with one of them and defending that person in the next breath." Sound familiar?

Jordan--pissing on the man's grave

In September of last year, the speculative fiction world was shocked with the loss of one of its greats: Robert Jordan. Fans wept, authors made tributes, and the rest of the world said, "Who?" I'm sure most of you remember the backlash of emotion and anger. Mostly, this shock was due to the fact that his magnum opus, the Wheel of Time series, was still incomplete. Now, unless someone finds the technology to reanimate the dead a la Herbert West, that means that someone else will have to finish the series.

This post is not about that.

See, upon Jordan's death, I looked at my booklist and decided that I may as well read some of the poor bastard's work. I received the first book, The Eye of the World for Christmas, but did not get to reading it until just this past week. I started it on Tuesday, and finished it on Friday. "Great!" you think. "That must mean it was good!"

Au contraire.

I'm a big fan of George R.R. Martin. His thousand-plus page novels take me only a couple of days to read. This book came close in length, but my quick reading of it was not due to my enjoyment. Just the opposite. I couldn't stand it, and so I tried to get it over with quickly.

This novel starts off like a verbatim copy of Lord of the Rings, including the wise helpers that disappear for at least a portion of the novel, the hapless farm-dwellers upon whom the fate of the world depends, and distinctly evil creatures and persons involved to try to stop the illustrious band of do-gooders.

Gag.

I understand that a lot of authors want to rip Tolkien off. If you can say that your book series is still wildly popular fifty years later, you must be doing something right. And how better to do that "something" than to steal it. How did this shit fly in the early nineties? I understand ripping off another novel and being hailed as original in maybe the seventies or eighties, but the nineties, people. Robert Jordan thought that maybe no one would see through his "originality" as recent as that.

Upon finished this book, I discovered that it was actually a stepping stone of a pathway of ripping-each-other-offedness. Tolkien came up with some shit in desperate need of editing. Jordan took Tolkien's shit, tried to make a log exactly like it, and then populate it with stock characters and called it original. Now it gets interesting. I'm sure that Jordan's last page revelations were a big deal when the book came out. But I've read Terry Goodkind before this dead guy, so not only did I see it coming, it really only made me more upset. Granted, Goodkind came after Jordan, with Wizard's First Rule being released in 1994. So this really only meant that Goodkind ripped Jordan off.

And all three of these badly written series are psychotically popular.

I suppose some discussion about archetypes and classical stories talking to something primal inside of us would really just whisk this whole problem away and make me seem like a spoiled brat, but let's look at it from an objective eye.

Fantasy is genre work. That means that the people who write it are also those that read it. And those that read it are going to read other works in the same genre. At what point is being unoriginal considered a good thing when your target audience has read the exact same novel that you are ripping off?

I know I'm in the minority. How can someone call someone a bad writer when they are barely cold in the coffin? I try to separate the artist from the work, but I'm not always successful. I hate Metallica because their music sucks and they are assholes. Anne McCaffrey is off her rocker, but she can still spin a readable tale. Goodkind is a bad writer, and an asshole at that. I never looked into Jordan's handling of fans, or attitude toward life. But I can tell you right now that I think his writing sucks.

Go ahead and try to make me change my opinion. I spent four days this week glancing at the clock at the end of every page. In what universe is this considered the aim for the writer and the reader?

Writing Friends--overcoming shyness and reaping the rewards

My first writing friend was my best friend at the time. We spent one sleepover playing out a story on the fly with my dolls and assorted playsets. We were both so impressed with ourselves that we then spent a good month or two writing it out in prose, alternating at every chapter. It was cheesy and probably offense to more than one professional author and religious group, but we were barely into adolescence. We finished that story (with accompanying illustrations) rather quickly, and then began another with the same level of offensiveness, but without the structure of our previous playing to guide us. That one went unfinished and worked on for at least two years.

In NaNoWriMo 2006, I met a silly, fun group of writers whose imagery was outstanding to say the least. I only met up with them a few more times after that, and we all were so in love with our own stories. It was inspiring to listen to their choice sentences, to help them work out their own issues, to look over their notes with curious cooing. It was like a Lamaze class, where everyone got together to talk about the good and the bad of growing a baby, and the teacher was out to lunch.

This April, I gained a writing friend in my husband's aunt by "marriage", an English teacher at an area high school. I knew I had to go to her for my own writer's block, but that started a long conversation and countless e-mails about theory and philosophy and support.

I think about trying to write my stories and projects without these support groups, however diminished their influence now, and I feel totally isolated.

Writers are word factories, churning out sentences and paragraphs out of raw materials. These materials could be anything: the look of a shuddering tree upon first acquiring vision aids, a conversation overheard on the bus, a vivid dream. Commonly, though, they come from others. We meet an interesting person. We discuss our writing with others. We help other writers out with their own hurdles. We read starvingly.

It is all well and good to generate ideas from the material rather than the social. But there will come a time when you have to reach out from the usual and find gold in the unfamiliar.

Here's some ideas for meeting other writers, or at least allowing them to influence you in good ways:

• Don't be ashamed to admit that you like to write. You may occasionally get an asshole that will ask if you've written anything he might have read, but you will never find any other secret writers unless you let your own secret slip first. Think of it this way: Superman and Batman are both formidable people, but yet, they never would have become such a powerful team if they didn't know about the existence of the other.
• Read. Read inside your favorite genre, and outside it. Browse a new section of the bookstore or library each time you visit. Visit used bookstores to pick up handled treasures, and don't be afraid to converse with the shopkeeper; chances are, he or she will be just as interested in reading as you.
• Join a book club. I'm not talking those groups of middle-class women who skim through the Cliffs Notes of a novel in order to make slight commentary before gossiping about who is marrying who over bagels and cream cheese. Get your friends together, acquire a copy of a novel for each person (especially if they are cheap-wads), and give them an appropriate amount of time to read it. Then get together to actually discuss it. It may indeed open you up to analyzing your entertaining books a little more closely, which will allow you to keep a finer eye on your own writing.
• Take a writing class, or join a writer's group. I say either or because if you take a class, you will likely get the same benefits if you join a writer's group in that you will have a deadline to write some material, have to share it, and then absorb criticism. Make sure that the group is not just out to be mean, but take their words seriously.
• If you write poetry, attend live readings. This will open you up to the poetry community of your region as well as expose you to styles that may differ wildly from your own, or draw your ear to the subtle nuances of more similar works.
• Write a letter to your favorite author. This could be intimidating, but keep in mind that they may not even read it. Keeping this in mind may indeed make it easier to communicate your excitement about their work, an excitement they are likely to appreciate. Don't exhibit stalker behavior, however; I live maybe an hour or two's drive from that asshole Terry Goodkind, but I'm not exactly going to go and appear on his doorstep with a collage of his half-eaten food and toenail clippings. Be friendly, but calm.
• Barring all of this, join NaNoWriMo. Not only will you get a lot of writing done, but most regions have a ready-made group of interesting and excited participants. If you are wary of meeting people in real-life that you meet online, no worries; just communicate on the forums. If you do decide to go to a meetup or write-in, be cautious; take a friend and make sure the meeting is in a public place you can easily leave in an emergency.

It's very easy to just say that you prefer to keep your writing private. I understand; the actual act of writing should be relatively private. However, when you get writer's block, and want to rebound ideas off a friend, you may want that friend to also be a writer, or you may just be met with a lot of blank expressions.