Why the World Needs Superman

                I had planned on this being a post about what makes something “Iconic”, in terms of creativity. What makes one character or building or work of art, iconic while another is merely famous? But when I plan out in my head what I wanted to say on the subject, it keeps coming up Superman.   I was going to talk about how diluted and overused the term has become. How it describes the front of a Mustang and the back of a Porsche.  It covers Marilyn’s white dress and Bruce Lee’s yellow jumpsuit.  I was going to talk in some depth about how an Iconic character had to be the embodiment of a concept or belief much greater than himself, but after the events in Aurora, Colorado last week, I’ve really been thinking a lot about Superman.

                Superman is unarguably Iconic in the best sense of the word. His symbol is immediately recognizable in almost any corner of the earth. In any language or culture the character embodies the very best of qualities. Courage, Strength, Compassion, Self-sacrifice.  When we talk comics, my friends don’t really get why I like Superman so much. They say he’s too powerful, that he’s too much of a boy scout, that his stories lines have become stale.  They think he’s become irrelevant to modern readers. God I hope not.The day Superman becomes irrelevant; we are well and truly doomed.

                You see, the thing that Superman is the embodiment of, the thing that makes him “iconic” is us. Superman is us on our very best days, the way we should try to be every day.  He is Brandon Fisher from Pennsylvania who pounded through 2000 feet of rock with his Pneumatic Quad-hammer drill to rescue 33 Chilean miners.  He’s every fireman who ever ran into a burning building to bring someone out alive. He’s the pilot who put that passenger jet down on the Potomac with no lives lost. He’s Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn and Alex Teves,  who used their bodies to protect their girlfriends from gunfire in that Colorado movie theater.  They had lives and plans and families who loved them. They had every reason to say every man for himself and scramble for the door. A lot of people did. But they had courage, compassion, and the strength to lay down their lives doing what was right. 

                I look at the world around me, and I can no longer believe as I did in my youth that it is mostly a good place. I think the bad people outnumber the good. I think the lazy and selfish and apathetic outnumber them both.  You have only to connect to the internet to see that cruelty and bigotry and snide insults have become the natural response for everything from politics to natural disasters to youtube kittens. It seems like there are so few people actually trying to do good.  They’re holding the world together with both hands, and the rest of us are just hanging on or actively making it worse. 

              I know I’ve wandered from my original mission statement of better writing . It’s just late, and the news coming out of Colorado has me a little brokenhearted.  I will say only this; As writers you have a forum. You have the opportunity to influence your readers, even if only a little bit for good or bad.  You can show them that qualities like bravery and self sacrifice and helping one another for no other reason than its right , are characteristics worth having. Or you can present that sort of thing as outdated, lame, naive, and no longer relevant to the modern reader.  I just think a good story is one that in some way makes you want to somehow be a better person. And the world needs every Superman it can get.

Writing a Story with Heart

           Any good story will illicit an emotional response, it’s the reason writers do what they do. No criticism will ever sting you as deeply as indifference.  Stories can be sad, or funny, thrilling or thought provoking, but not every story that creates an emotional response in the reader, can be said to have heart.  What is heart? Why do some movies leave you with a warm glow inside and a feeling of hope for the future, when others that try to tell a similar story whiff terribly?  I find that the stories that resonate most deeply with an audience are the ones that take us home.  Heart is a grubby little boy in patched overalls and a gap-toothed grin offering to let Charles Foster Kane ride his sled because he looks sad and no one can feel bad when they’re sledding down a big hill.

                Life has a way of breaking you down over time. You start to lose yourself a piece at a time.  There was a time you believed in true love. And then the ugly breakup happened. There was a time you were going to play for the NFL, and then your knee went out.  There was a time you planned to do something really meaningful with your life, like join the Peace Corps and build schools in Africa, and then your student loans came due and you had to take a job, and when you looked up ten years had passed.  That’s just how life goes, and after a while you get used to that piece of yourself that used to be so important being gone.  The pain, when you feel it, is the phantom ache of a lost limb. Something to feel melancholy about on a rainy afternoon.

                Now imagine someone walked into a pawn shop with a briefcase full of money.  Pawnshops, the elephant graveyards where forsaken dreams go to die.  There, on the walls and on the shelves, amongst the dvd players and the waffle irons, are the treasures that someone used to love gathering dust.  So he cleans them out.  He buys the Fender Stratocaster and the engagement ring, he buys the 21 speed Schwinn and the Japanese Cooking knives.  Then he goes looking for the original owners.  “Mrs Johnson” he says, I think you might have lost this ring somewhere.  I get the feeling you’re going to need it really soon, .  And then he’s off to the next house, and it’s “Dude! We’re getting the band back together.  “and You and me buddy, Tour de France 2013.”  This is what writing a story with heart is about. It’s finding the misplaced part of your reader’s soul where the hope, and the happiness and the self respect used to live and bringing it home to them.  It’s showing the jaded divorcee that sometimes the ugly breakup is what brings you to the place you need to be to meet the love of your life.  It’s showing the “could’ve been great” college footballer that the NFL dream didn’t happen because he was always meant to be a professional surfer.  Sometimes people do stand up for what’s right. Sometimes teachers do make a difference.  Sometimes love does last a lifetime.

We read your stories, and for a while, we remember who we were meant to be.  We realize that maybe that person didn’t die. Maybe they just got lost for a while. And sometimes, if we’re very lucky, we do something about it.
                                                                 

It's not as bad as you think.

Just a short post today to share this gem I stumbled across on Youtube.

There are a few lessons to be learned here.  One, whatever weaknesses there may be in your writing, you're probably better than these guys, so don't despair, you're at least part of the way to where you want to be. Two, do your homework. As Billy Crystal says, it's probably a good idea to know what they call the thing the captain talks into on a submarine. If you're going to use it in a story, know how it works. Three. Loyalty is a wonderful thing, but when it comes to reviews, honesty is what helps your friends become better writers. Constructive honesty. Calling someone an idiot doesn't help anything. And remember, a Writer writes, always.

The Probem of Diversity in Writing

This is going to be kind of a long post, and one that takes a position some may consider controversial, but I hope the reader will bare with me.  I’ll try to be as clear and concise as I can be.   Today I am going to talk about the problems inherent in the belief that  a story must have a diverse cast of characters drawn from  various races, genders, religions, sexual preferences and economic strata, or be considered bigoted.  I’ve seen good writers called racist because they didn’t have the whole set of humankind, all presented in a positive manner.  This is not a notion I hold to.

                The idea of true diversity in a written work is a lot harder than it might initially seem.  If the idea is to make everyone feel represented in your story, race is only the beginning.  Let’s take just the African American segment of our ambitiously inclusive story for the moment.  We need both a clean cut good looking educated professional type, and a tough, street savvy type.  In a tv show they might be played by Blair Underwood and Ice-T respectively.   We also need a least one black woman, preferably more than one so we can have a professional type, and a hard working single mother. At least one of the characters should be religious. At least one needs to be gay.  In this case we can probably get away without having a republican, but we really should have at least one. Some poor and some well off, some athletically gifted, some not, some young, some old.  We’re looking at somewhere around five or six African American characters all portrayed positively, and some pulling double duty as both athletic and gay, or professional and religious, ect .  Now we have to do this again for the Hispanic, Asian and Middle Eastern characters with the added complication of cultural origin and religious sect. You can’t represent a Peruvian with a Columbian. There’s bad blood there.  You can’t represent a Shiite with a Sunni or an Indian with a Pakistani. 

               You can see how if we tried to write this story, we’re already dealing with a cast of 30 or 40 characters, all of which require development and attention and screen time.  It’s not really a viable scenario. The most you can hope for in terms of diversity is to pick your battles.  What kind of story are you telling? Is it better served by having a gay character or an Asian? Or even a Caucasian.  Maybe you’re Tyler Perry.

                So let’s say you’ve decided to write a story, and you’ve cut back all your diverse groups as deeply as you can without getting pestered by those Berkeley critics.  You’re writing a story about a commercial flight that goes down in the Himalayas where this small group of survivors must work together to make their way to civilization.  We’ll say we have a 35 year old white engineering consultant on his way to a project in Asia somewhere, a black marine lieutenant retuning from leave where he met his new daughter.  A Hispanic lady doctor on her way to a clinic in India, a 47 year old Japanese salaryman with Sony, and a 21 year old Egyptian Muslim woman who works as a photographer for a Newspaper in Cairo.  This is a suspiciously diverse group with no repeats, but let’s role with it.  Given what you know about these people, how well can you write them? Does each of them have their own unique voice and presence? Do their thoughts and actions and dialogue match their cultures and backgrounds, or are they really just white people whose physical descriptions are Asian, Hispanic or Black?

                About 12 years ago give or take I stumbled onto a fanfiction writer named Chris Dee. Note the name. She writes the Cat-Tales series which is based on the DC comics Universe and centers on the relationship between Batman and Catwoman.  We eventually became friends and even collaborated on some graphics projects, but when I first spoke to her after reading a few of her stories I paid her the immense compliment of not knowing she was a She.  You see, in those first few stories I read, I perceived an insight into the way I thought as a man that I had not formerly encountered in fanfiction written by women.  I think that if you are going to be a good writer, you owe that level of insight to all of your characters.  That can be a problem, because I don’t know very many writers who can write a young Muslim woman from Cairo working in a man’s profession so well that young Egyptian women will be surprised that you are not one of them.   I think your story is better served, and your readers in turn, by writing characters that feel natural to you. When a character comes to you organically from the needs of the story, everything comes more smoothly; the actions and dialogue often write themselves. Shoehorning characters that aren’t right for the story for the sake of diversity will disrupt the flow of your creativity.  Imagine poker night with your buddies. Imagine the cigars, and the beer, and the nachos, the boasting and the dirty jokes. Now imagine your wife made you let your mother-in-law play.

                I am not saying that diversity should not be a part of your writing. I’m saying write the characters that work best for the story, no matter what they are. There wasn’t a white guy in sight in Slumdog Millionaire and I could care less. I loved that movie. It’s a deeply human story, and I’m a human being. That’s enough for me.  That is the golden rule of writing for me. Tell a human story, and the rest will take care of itself.  

                Diversity in and of itself is a good thing. It brings fresh perspectives, new ideas and a greater understanding of the people we live with. It makes us more fully human.  There is something ugly however in the way it is being pushed into the arts though.  It is the expectation that your reader can not rise above his prejudices and should not be expected to.  It’s like segregation for empathy.  “Don’t worry about those characters sir, well find you someone who looks like you to care about. “ That’s one of the things that drives me crazy about the scholarly journals that discuss the shows of Joss Whedon .   There’s always someone who says “Joss covers a lot of themes of female empowerment, and has positive feminist role models, but his lack of characters of color means he fails on Race.” To this I say if you can watch an episode like “The Body” and not empathize with Buffy because she’s white, then Joss Whedon is not the racist in the room. Also you should call your mother.  Believe your reader can be better than that.   Believe that if you write a human story, the innate humanity within your readers will find it’s reflection within your characters no matter what they look like. People will surprise you sometimes if you just give them the chance.

Usually I like to include some kind of picture or video to help illustrate the theme of the article, so here’s a video of people from every corner of the earth just being human.

                                                                               

Timing Attacks and You

                                

                It sometimes surprises me, when I’m trying to think of a good way to explain something , how often Starcraft  comes to mind.  Starcraft for those of you that aren’t familiar with it is a strategy game that pits three different races each with its own strengths and weaknesses against each other in a Scifi setting.  It’s been described as a game that requires the mental focus of a chess master and the manual dexterity of a concert pianist. The very best players are capable of performing between five and six distinct, premeditated actions per second, sometimes keeping that pace up for over an hour.  This impressive feat is made possible by an intimate familiarity with every unit in the game, every structure, every map and a running mental clock that is keeping track of when it is mathematically possible for something to happen.  One common strategy that these expert players will employ is called a “timing attack”. I would describe it as seizing a window of opportunity, based on your race and the buildings and upgrades you have researched, where the advantage in battle has swung in your favor.  These players have it down to a science, having their army arrive at the front of the opponent’s base precisely as their advantage comes into play, thus maximizing the time of advantage before the enemy can counter it. In other words, their units are what they need to be, where they need to be, when they need to be it. In this way Starcraft is like a well written character arc.

                There are a lot of tools you are going to want to develop as a writer, but a well honed sense of timing is going to be crucial to take your writing to the next level.  For instance, there is the timing built into dialogue for effect.

 Sally:  “Yes! Oh! OH god! Yes! Yes! YES!!!” 

 (pause one beat for effect)

 Older lady at next table to waiter:  “I’ll have what she’s having.”

                Another type of timing is built into scenes to create drama or comedy, such as an interruption that occurs just as the hero of the romantic comedy is just about to tell the heroine how he really feels about her, then the moment is lost and she stays with the jerk boyfriend till the third act, or the Scene in American Pie when Jim’s dad walks in just as Jim is finding out if third base is really like warm apple pie.

                The most important timing for a well constructed story though will require you to keep track of the big picture the same way a Starcraft professional is keeping track of how much money he has, how many bases his enemy has,   what types of units the enemy can be building at 10:45 into the game and how long he has left on the cloaking upgrade, all while moving his tanks two spaces to the left so they can cover a bottleneck better.  When writing your story, you have to know where each of your important characters is going. How long it will take them to get there and what needs to happen before they do.  Luke Skywalker fighting Darth Vader in Star Wars just dies. He’s not ready. Luke fighting Darth Vader in Empire has to run for his life. Still not ready. It’s only after he’s been tempered by everything that happened throughout all three movies, the training, and the battles that he can meet Vader on equal terms at the end of Return of the Jedi. Imagine if Lucas had gotten so  caught up in the Han Solo/Leia storyline that he forgot Luke until about 40 minutes before the end of Return of the Jedi? Now he has to cram in a scene before Endor where Luke somehow massively powers up. he has to obviously and clumsily alter the flow of the story so that we can believe Luke can hold his own against Vader.

 Keeping a sense of where your character is in the big picture will allow you to make adjustments to his development without disrupting his character arc and costing you momentum.   Without this awareness, you often find your characters out of position and with little time or space to get him back on track the change is jarring and obvious.  You should strive to make your direction changes fluid and seamless like a flawlessly executed aikido throw, not like a freshman in drivers  ed attempting a three point turn. In this way your character arrives at the climax of the story in the best position possible.

                                                                       

Deep Water

George was the undefeated champion of the West Coast Racing circuit, but Willow Rosenberg, rising phenom of Team Hellmouth auto racing thinks she has what it takes to beat him. But why did he have to be so darn cute?

                                               

……….Yeah……ok, there’s about 20 things wrong with that whole concept, but chances are you’ve waded through dozens of these just to find something good to read.  This is something I’ve seen a lot of over the years. Writers who take the characters from a popular series and change almost everything about them so they can be shoehorned into some story concept that they have no business being in. It makes me kind of wonder if the writers were ever fans of the series at all. If you like Harry Potter, then I can only assume you like the things that define him as Harry Potter.  Why then change everything about him so you can write a story about a British Punk Band called the Scarheads with a lead singer whose name is Harry Potter , but whose chain smoking and tattoos belong to Sid Vicious.

 I feel like there are two kinds of fanfiction writers out there.  There are writers who love a particular storyverse, who feel a connection with the characters  and want more from that universe than the creator can reasonably keep putting out.  Sometimes they want to “fix” things they feel the author did wrong.  Sometimes they just want to explore divergent paths that the writer did not take. Ie.  “What if Peter and Olivia raised alternate Universe Olivia’s baby together.”  The characters however are recognizably themselves.

There are other writers however who should really be writing original stories. I feel like using established popular characters has become a crutch that some writers use because their afraid nobody will like their stories if they don’t already love the characters.  I think it’s entirely possible that someone could take the example above and write a very acceptable Romantic Comedy about a woman trying to make it in the intensely male dominated world of Auto Racing, and having a love/hate relationship with the reigning champ marked by lots of witty dialogue and dramatic tension in the races that mirror the state of their relationship. But the woman behind the steering wheel should not be Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen or even Buffy Summers.  

 It’s like there is this invisible barrier that we feel separates us from the “Real Writers” That somehow the Steinbecks  and the Hemingways of the world are part of a different species , Homo-Sapiens Writewellus, and we could never in a million years do what they did. That somehow it’s too hard.  Why is it too hard? Because books are long? I know a Batman fan fiction writer who has turned out almost six novels worth of story.  I saw a Harry Potter story the other day that was just a few thousand words short of being War and Peace. Maybe it’s because real writers can weave a deeply compelling fabric of imagery and metaphors and they did that foreshadowing thing they told us about in middle school, and then they shined the light of truth on some aspect of society.  Those are just tools available to any writer who cares to use them properly.  What is Art? That really depends on who you ask.  I can tell you that I’ve read most of the classics from Homer to Hemingway, and I’ve never found “ literature” that has affected me more than the best of the fan fiction  that I’ve encountered.

Using someone else’s successful characters to prop up your story is kind of like being one of those ancient sailors who always hugged the coastline because the thought of what lay in the deep blue terrified them.  It’s kind of safe. There will always be someone willing to transfer the goodwill they feel for the characters onto your race car story.  I think you’ll find though that your best writing, the hardest and most rewarding writing you’ll ever do is waiting for you to point your boat into the deep waters, where there are no guarantees, limitations or copyrights. Also, this is the only writing anyone will pay you for.

Writing the Love Story

                When you consider that the vast majority of amateur/fan fiction involves a romantic pairing of some sort, I suppose it would be remiss of me not to cover that subject.  I’ve thought about what might be the best way to talk about what makes a compelling love story, and what I’ve come up with is several “case studies” I guess you would call them of relationships that worked for me and maybe one or two that didn’t.  I’ll give each one its own post so I’ll have the space to go into detail.

                The first one that I want to talk about, I consider perhaps the great love story of my generation. There was no “will they?won’t they” dance. They weren’t star crossed lovers separated by opposing destinies.  There was no witty banter worthy of a Carey Grant romantic comedy.  In fact, by the time the story starts, she’s been dead for 7 years.  I’m talking about Adrian and Trudy Monk.

                One might ask “How can you tell what their relationship was like if you never saw them alive together?”  Because the exit wound of losing her was just ghastly.  I’m reminded of a kind of famous story in comics. There was a mystery where a superheroes pregnant wife is attacked in their home and brutally murdered. I remember the hero whose power was a super malleable body physically breaking down as he tried to give the eulogy, literally losing the ability to hold himself together in a form that was recognizably human. That was monk.  For the man for whom symmetry was everything his other half was lost.  If that were all there was too it , it would be enough for me to know much monk and his wife loved each other, but that’s only the beginning of the story.

                A year or two ago, there was a video going around the internet called “the Last Lecture”.  It was given by a professor dying from terminal cancer to his students.  Among the words of hope and encouragement he had for them there was one thing I remember very clearly.  “Very soon now” he said,” My family is going to take a hard fall and for the first time I won’t be there to catch them.  But I can start making nets. “I loved that idea. That the love we give in life is a physical thing. That it has mass and weight and inertia. That even when we have stopped, our love can keep going. It continues to comfort and protect the people we love.  We see this throughout the entire run of the show, that even though Trudy was gone, for Monk she is never absent.  There are so many moments I could talk about, where we can see her influence on monk. The way she helps him cope with his fears, makes him brave, keeps him honorable.  There’s one in particular though. It was one of the most powerful moments I’d ever seen on television.  Monk had gone to New York to confront the man who had put the bomb in Trudy’s car on his deathbed.  Despite being on morphine drip to control his pain the bomber was able to give them a partial description of the man who hired him to build the bomb. Then monk asked for a moment alone with him. 

                Bomber : “You were the husband?

                Monk: “I am the husband."                                                                    

                Bomber: “Forgive me?” 

                Monk: “ Forgive you??......This is me turning off your morphine.

I was stunned. This was the meekest, most phobia crippled man on television so absolutely furious he was willing to torture a helpless and repentant cancer victim.  And then this happened.  As the pain began to set in and you could see the fear and despair in the bombers eyes,  monk continued..

                …...and this is Trudy, the woman you killed turning it back on.

We all have better angels. Adrian Monk married his.

                                                                            

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Mine is an Evil Laugh

When I think back to the stories of my childhood, the cartoons and a lot of the books aimed at kids and teenagers, I realize that as much as I enjoyed them, and have fond memories of them, they weren’t very well written. They didn’t have to be, because their target demographic was kids who could pester parents to buy action figures. They weren’t required  to be sophisticated; they just had to wow us with cool imagery.  The villains of these stories didn’t have particularly clear motivations, usually something as basic as “taking over the world”. Why do you want to take over the world Megatron /Mumra/Cobra commander? Because I’m evil that’s why!?! Why are you evil? Because I’m trying to take over the world. Enough of these insolent questions. Decepticons Attack!

                As a writer you may have heard the expression, “No one is a Villain in their own minds.” Or similarly,  “there are two sides to every story.”  The question is, how do these concepts manifest themselves in your writing?  If you were writing the story from the villain’s side of things what does he believe in? What motivates him to get out of bed at the crack of dawn to practice evil martial arts? What keeps him up late at night tinkering with his Doom Ray, when he’d really rather be making a run at Grandmaster on the Korean Starcraft server?  It’s not enough to say your villain is a bad guy because he’s simply evil natured, or sadistic. There’s no meat on that bone.  Cruelty or savagery is more of a how than a why.  One might say Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones is evil.  Her actions directly harm innocents. She arranges multiple murders and betrayals.  You could say the way she carries out her actions is selfish, and arrogant, and even somewhat sadistic. She does take pleasure in meeting out humiliations over and above simply beating those she sees as enemies.  Her motivation though is to keep her family secure and in power, and if innocents suffer, better them than us.  Her actions would be considered evil, and her way of carrying out those actions callous and cruel. You could contrast that with the Machines from The Matrix.  From our perspective they are evil. The enslaved all mankind.  Used us as batteries.  Wiped out the free ones periodically.  From their perspective, it was simply a logical way to survive.  It wasn’t about anger or revenge. It was simple necessity that did not allow for compassion or compromise.  

                So why is it important to know what drives your bad guy? What makes him seek out power to oppose your hero? What turned him from a presumably innocent child into the monster he is today?   Because when two people who believe absolutely in incompatible things face off against each other, the stakes are much higher.  It’s more than revenge, or justice, or saving the princess.  It’s a clash of ideologies as fought by champions who will determine which will rule the world of the story.   It is Voldemorte’s “Power is its own justification” versus Harry Potters “You don’t bully the weak” Losing doesn’t just mean you failed. It means what the other guy believes in prevails.  Maybe that means  Space Nazi’s rule the Universe in your story or maybe all it means is douchey fratboy instructers at the ski  school get the girl instead of the lovable goofballs therefore it is better to be a douchey fratboy. In any case there should always be more to  your villain than “Because I’m Evil”

                                                                             

A Girl With a Nose

                When you’re writing original fiction, or at least original characters for fan fiction, one of the first things you are going to have to decide, is what they look like.  This is not as easy as “tall, dark and handsome” or “She had more curves than Sandy Koufax and eyes you could see your grandchildren in”.  Think of the role each character is going to play in your story.  If you were casting the story as a movie, who would you get to play your character?  Adriana Lima is hot, but you wouldn’t get her to play the soccer mom of the three adorable tykes that Vin Diesel must protect from Terrorist. Joe Pesci is funny, but he’s not getting offered any roles as the Marine Captain storming the beaches of Iwo Jima. Why? Because appearances have implications.  Your audience will assume things about your characters based on their appearances whether you intended them to or not.

                Appearance will always be linked to back story, because either your history shaped your appearance, or your appearance shaped your history. Sometimes it’s a bit of both. Someone with good genetics for an athletic build, clear skin, and a great smile, is going to exit high school on a different trajectory than a kid with a glandular condition that tends towards obesity and acne. His looks made him popular, his popularity made him confident and successful, and his confidence and success gave him charisma. He’s looking at better jobs, faster promotions and more attractive girlfriends than his classmate.  If you see a guy like this walking down the street, in an expensive suit, you are going to subconsciously make a lot of assumptions about him based on your own life experiences, and you probably won’t be too far off. Cliché’s are cliché’s for a reason.

                                                                           

                From the other direction, if you grew up in a Kentucky coal mining town, where your father and grandfather and older brother worked the mine until it collapsed and the company closed it, your hands are rough, your clothes are practical and durable and cheap because you know how hard your parents had to work to pay for them. You’ve never had a Justin Bieber haircut in your life. Even when you leave to find work in the city, who you were shapes who you are.  People will look at you, and though they won’t know everything about you a lot of your past will be implied by how you look.

                I say all that to get to this. There is a subtle but very important difference between being attractive and being appealing. Paris Hilton is attractive, but how much time would you really want to spend hanging out with her? Once you get past the looks, she’s not very appealing. You want your readers to want to hang out with your characters, and this is done by making us feel connected. Most of your readers are not supermodels. Even the ones, who are lucky enough to be good looking, are aware that they aren’t perfect, so when you describe your character as a flawless Adonis, we don’t feel like he represents us at all. He represents the star quarterback who sat at the cool kids table in the cafeteria and dated the head cheerleader that you had the worst crush on who signed your yearbook, “Have a great summer Kenny XOXO” , but your name wasn’t Kenny, and she should know that, you’ve only had like  8 classes together.  Making your character perfect eliminates a lot of your opportunities as a writer. How do you make your character grow if he’s already where he should want to be? How do you write a convincing love triangle if no woman in her right mind would choose the other guy?What do you get for the man that has everything?

                The trick is to make the character attractive enough to be appealing, but with an imperfection or two that humanizes them.  To this end, I like a girl with a bit of a nose. 

A girl with a nose has an interesting face, a face with character. One that warrants a second look and on that second look, you decide it’s not really a flaw. It’s something about her that you could see yourself being kind of fond of in a girl you were dating. The nose implies back story.  For a guy this is a girl that might have dated you in high school. She wasn’t that cheerleader who only dated quarterbacks.  Maybe she skateboarded to school; maybe she was in the theater club or on the soccer team.  She was cute, but not so gorgeous that you made a fool out of yourself when you talked to her.  For a girl she’s the friend you grew up with who didn't graduate middle school, get her braces out, and stop talking to you when the cool kids decided she was one of them.  She’s probably still your friend even though she went to a different college out of state. So a nose that may be a shade too long, maybe a jaw that's more strong than petite. Something to humanize them.

                The point is people write fan fiction because the characters feel like old friends and we’re not ready to let go. The more your characters feel like people that we know, people that we would want to spend time with, and are unwilling to let go of, the more appealing they will be, even if they aren’t traditionally beautiful.  The things they say and do will be the larger part of who they are,  but it all begins with appearances.

Writing a Human Story

Of all the idea’s I wanted to talk about when I started this Blog, I think this may be one of the most important.  It’s about giving your story a universal appeal.  Once you’ve finished your story, and launched it into the world, you never know who is going to read it.  It’s a diverse group of readers you have out there. They will come from different races, and countries, and economic backgrounds. They may be gay or Buddhist or even Republicans. There is only one thing you can be certain of, and that is, excepting certain nosey cats with no respect for boundaries, every one of your readers will be a Human Being.  That is why it is important, when you are writing, to speak to what it means to be human.

                I remember very clearly the first time I really thought about what this meant.  A friend of mine had introduced me to a manga series called Maison Ikkoku written and drawn by a woman named Rumiko Takahashi.  This was many years ago, back in the days before the bookstores had become oversaturated with the stuff. I remember reaching a certain panel and being surprised.  I was surprised because what was happening on that page, I had felt exactly like that before.  The circumstances were a little different, but the way the character felt was me, and how did the writer know that? How did a middle aged Japanese woman from Tokyo writing about fictional Japanese characters offset from my timeline by a decade know how I felt well enough to put it in her story?  Of course she didn’t. She simply wrote a human story, and the essential humanity within me recognized myself within them.

                All of the labels that we use to identify ourselves such as race, religion, gender, and politics are really quite meaningless in comparison with what makes us human.  We obsess about these superficial things, but even though they have meaning and shape how we look at the world, they are not the most powerful things in our lives.

                Here’s an example of a human scene in a very human story.  Watch this and imagine yourself on that bench.  This is the moment, when the thing you hoped for, and prayed for, and poured your heart and soul into no matter how hard it was, and thought would never happen finally does, and the surge of emotion that rises up is so powerful you can only weep.

                                                                                    

                This isn’t just about someone getting into the college he’s been fighting for when no one believed in him. This is the same moment when a cancer test comes back negative after chemo. It’s a pregnancy test coming back positive when you thought you couldn’t, it’s finding out your brother wasn’t on the casualty list after a bad day in Iraq.  We have all felt what he’s feeling, and it binds us together.

             So think about this when you’re writing.  What about your  story is going to resonate with the reader? What will make someone in Tokyo ten years from now look at your story and say “That’s me.  How did he know how I felt?”

Don't Let Bad Yeti Happen to You

                A few days ago, I was watching “The Mummy 3” Don’t ask me why, some things cannot be explained.  I was watching the Mummy and I came upon this scene.

                                                                             

………….I know, right? What was that?  You have to ask yourself, how something like that made it into a 145 million dollar movie? What really bothers me about this scene, other than the way it damages the movie, is that it’s painfully, obviously bad, and someone made a large amount of money for writing it , while some of the best storytellers I’ve ever read, will never be paid for the work they do.  I’m not sure what is more terrifying; the idea that a Yeti Field Goal was in the original script and no one cut it, or that it wasn’t in the script, but someone said “the third act needs punching up, you know what this movie needs ? A sweet Yeti field goal!! Hell Yeah!  Or the fact that in the months that it took to model, texture, animate, render and composite this sequence into the movie, the idea that it was stupid, and hurt the movie never gained traction. What the Mummy 3 really needed was for someone to say no.

                This is why you need a good Beta reader.  A Beta reader serves many useful functions. They give you valuable feedback on your story. They might spot opportunities that you missed or have an alternate way of saying something that makes your scene funnier, or sadder, or scarier, but perhaps the most important service they provide is to give you one more chance to stop something bad from getting into the world.  When all people remember of your story is the stupid scene with the Yeti field goal, your reputation as a storyteller has been harmed. They may be unwilling to give you another chance.

                The best thing your Beta reader can do for you is to be ruthlessly honest with you about what they feel works and what doesn’t. Their reactions will probably mirror your readers. The best thing you can do for them is not take criticism of your story personally. When they tell you something doesn’t work, it’s not a slam on you. It’s not calling you stupid or saying you’re a bad writer.  It’s not about you, it’s about the scene, and if it’s not working, it’s better for you to know now than when the Ebola monkey of a scene has escaped into the wild. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to thank them in the author notes. They spent their valuable time to make your story better, so mentioning their input is just the classy thing to do, and as Ron Burgundy says, you should always stay classy.

Strength not Aggression

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before;

                Harry strode confidently into Dumbledore’s office, his dragonhide boots echoing ominously on the flagstones.  His piercing green eyes scanned the office, missing nothing.“Harry my boy, what a surprise” Dumbldore said, his eyes twinkling, “I don’t believe we had an appointment , but perhaps I could spare a few minutes…”“Shut up you old fool!” Harry snarled as he backhanded Dumbledore to the ground “I’m on to your bullshit!”  “Potter! “ Harry turned to face professor Snape . “I’ll see you expelled for this! You’re just as arrogant as….”Harry never got to learn who he was as arrogant as because he had already summoned his custom enchanted Glock 19 pistols carved with the Goblin runes for Bad Ass Mother Fucker” and shot the Slytherin in the knees. “If I wanted your opinion Snivellus, I’d beat it out of you” Harry stated as he sat in Dumbldores chair and propped his feet up on the great wooden desk. “We’re doing things my way from here on out. Anyone got a problem with that?

                If you’ve read any amount of fanfiction, you’re bound to have run into a few of these.   For some, they might be a guilty pleasure, because where else will we see Draco swallow a hand grenade? But there’s just no getting around the fact that these stories are bad, and there are some very good reasons not to write your hero like this.

                First, and I do not want to understate the importance of this, this hero sounds like a prick. The reader is supposed to like your hero, to empathize with him and to want good things for him, but how are we supposed to do that when he acts like such an arrogant bully? The only audience who might get behind this kind of character is these guys.

                                                                                 

                Aside from the fact that these sorts of protagonist come off as jerks, they make life harder on you as a writer. Remember, that your job is to convince the reader that your hero can lose.  If we’re not worried for him, we’re not invested in him, and we’ll probably move on to a story where we are invested. How do you create drama by putting your hero in jeopardy when he’s such a total badass that nothing can stand against him? The hero really has to be up against the ropes before he can make his comeback and give the reader that all important “Crowning Moment of Awesome".

                The important thing here for a writer to realize, as he decides how his character will approach the world, is that aggression is not strength. Strength is strength.  What does Harry have to prove in the story above? He killed a giant Basilisk at twelve, Drove off more dementors than anyone thought was possible.  Saved his friends lives, faced a Dragon, ect. Does he really need to bolster his self esteem by making other people feel small?  The truly accomplished, the Olympians, the Nobel winners, the great artist, don’t feel the need to throw their superiority in everyone’s faces. It doesn’t do anything for them.  They know who they are and what they’re worth. What other people think about them doesn’t really matter that much. And that confidence gives them presence.  Presence is what you should be going for in your hero, not bluster.  The arrogant, bullying character that throws his weight around is usually the one who gets his ass kicked when the quiet, taciturn hero whose calm, even friendly exterior, hides an iron will and unlimited capacity for destruction against those who cross him.   

           When I think of the tough guys I grew up watching,  not a one of them wasted time showing off what badasses they were, that just naturally came out in the course of doing what needed to be done.  Even well past the prime of their lives they’ve got this look about them. You say, “ ehn, he’s old, what could he do? Then they turn that cold steely gaze on you, and you suddenly remember that thing you had to do across town just now. That’s presence.

                                                                           

The Sam Gamgee Principle

                 In the course of writing a story, most authors are going to focus their efforts on the main character.   Their actions are the ones that drive the story forwards. They have the love interest and the Arch Enemies and the snappy dialogue, so naturally they are going to get our A game while what is left gets divided up amongst all the secondary characters.  Frequently these second tier characters only purpose is to give the Hero someone to talk at, rescue, or bounce exposition off of, sometimes they’ll die so the hero can find the motivation to beat the bad guy.  I feel this is a wasted opportunity.

                The thing about heroes is that the exceptional qualities that make them so interesting to read about separate them from us.  They inspire and amaze us, but because we know deep down that we can never do what they do, most of us will never even try.  Even when we feel connected to the hero on a level, such as when Spiderman struggles to make rent there is always that ability gap that excuses us from following his example.  This is why, even though the Hero gets the bulk of your efforts, you should not neglect the sidekick. Circle back for him. Develop him. Give him something real to say and do, because ultimately, the Sidekick is your reader.

                Most of us probably have times when we do not feel like the heroes of our own stories.  We are not gifted athletes, or prodigies of any sort. We rarely feel like the coolest person in the room.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, how chaotic would the world be if everyone was an Alpha type? But what are the qualities of a good sidekick?  They are loyal. They are frequently braver than they ever thought they could be. They stand to be counted, even if what they have to contribute to the cause isn’t much.  When the hero falters, as he will at some point if he has any depth at all, when he loses faith or hope or confidence, the sidekick encourages him and gets him through it. When the hero has exhausted his last reserves of strength, the sidekick says “Take mine.”

 When you think about it, these are not just the qualities of a good sidekick. They are the qualities of a good friend, and they are all things that I can do even though my abilities are not exceptional.  A Hero can inspire you. He can give you hope and purpose. But a sidekick can teach you how to be a better person, and that’s not an opportunity a writer should miss.

                                                           

Your Hero is not an Edgar Suit

                                                                              

           Some of you may remember Edgar from the 1997 Blockbuster “Men in Black”.  He’s here to help me talk about a mistake a lot of amateur authors make when writing their protagonist.  I say amateur authors because writers who do this rarely get paid for it.  When the character says the words you put in his mouth and performs the actions you lay out for him it can be easy to see him as a sort of avatar.  He becomes a second skin that you put on to interact with the universe of the story.  The hero becomes your Edgar Suit.  You’ll see this happen in a lot of stories that are characterized as “Mary Sue” or Mary Stu’s”.  When the story stops being about the journey your hero takes and becomes about wish fulfillment for you, then you’ve lost the ability to make the reader truly care.

                An actor can wear a characters skin and inhabit the story without ruining it. Even an actor who is also the director as Mel Gibson was in Braveheart can keep the character real. But in the Universe of the story, the writer is God. What happens then, when the character is really the writer? The character is also God, and there can be no real drama.  This is something I may circle back to in the future, because it’s that critical. One of the most important jobs you have as a writer is to convince the reader that the hero can lose.  A hero’s worth is determined by the difficulty of the challenges he faces, but when you feel like the hero is representing you, you have a conflict of interest.  Can you convincingly batter the hero down? Humiliate him? Have him rejected by the love interest in favor of his hated rival when you’re doing it to yourself? The better story would have you bring the hero low so that it’s that much more inspiring when he digs down deep, summons up all his courage and finds a way, even though he’s just hopelessly outgunned, outnumbered and outclassed.

                I believe it’s best for a writer to find a balanced perspective to tell the story from. You need to be close enough to know what happens, and to care about it enough to convey the proper emotions to the reader, but far enough to keep your ego out of the equation.  That way when the girl next door goes to the prom with the quarterback stud instead of the hero, it’s not you standing in the rain in your powder blue rental tux with the soggy bouquet of flowers.  The epic opening monologue from the movie Conan the Barbarian is a perfect example of good narrative distance.

Between the time when the Oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryus

There was an age undreamed of. And onto this, Conan

Destined to bear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow.

It is I his chronicler alone who can tell Thee of his saga.

Let me tell you of the days of High Adventure!

                In other words, I saw this. It was awesome. Let me tell you about it.  Be Watson to your heroes Holmes.  Keep your distance so you can keep your objectivity, and don’t steal your hero’s glory fixing his fights so you can feel like a winner. It will make you a better writer.

In conclusion;  Edgar suits, good for Intergalactic Cockroach Bounty Hunters bad for writers.

Writing From the Bottom Up

                A very long time ago, long before stories were written down, in fact before there was much in the way of language at all, there was a caveman. His name has been lost to the mist of time, but perhaps it was Bob. Bob was out hunting as he had every day since he could hold a spear when out of the depths of the forest primeval lumbered a terrible bear. Not a small, relatively tame modern bear like a Grizzly or a Kodiak, but a horrible prehistoric protobear , superior in every way to its smaller cousins.  Until today, every caveman who had ever encountered a bear before had dropped their spears and run for their lives. Some lived, some died but all ran. Until today that is. For today something took a hold of Bob,  call it Fate, call it madness, perhaps it was misplaced rage because a similar bear had killed his hunting partner just a week before his retirement, but Bob didn’t run.  Hefting his lucky spear Bob howled his challenge at the bear and charged to meet his Destiny.  Later, sitting by the fire, with a brand new bearskin to ward off the chill of the encroaching glacier Bob showed off his sweet new scar, and for the first time ever,  in the primitive language of the cavemen, the Tale of Small versus Large was told. His cave man buddies gave him primitive high fives, and his cave woman mate was like “I am so hot for you right now”

                A couple of ice ages later,300 Spartans and some Thespians held the narrow pass at Thermopylae against several hundred thousand Persian soldiers.  And though they had little in common with Bob there was something in that battle, an echo perhaps of the caveman’s epic battle against the bear. The fear, the courage against dire odds, perhaps a sense of awe that they were actually doing the impossible. Though the Spartans all died their sacrifice had saved Greece.  All about the country the Tale of Small versus Large was told once more and Athens was like “I’m so hot for you right now Sparta”

                Again and again this story is told and though the names and faces change and the battles take many forms, from wars for independence to lawsuits against giant corporations to boxing matches against enormous Russians who couldn’t possibly be in your weight class they are all the same story, and they are all powerful.  The story of Small versus Large has endured all of these years because it is powerful.  It is powerful because it strikes some chord within all humans. Perhaps because we have all been small at some point and have felt threatened by the powerful the idea that sometimes small can stand up for itself and win is infinitely appealing.

                If you look for them you will find so many of these powerful stories that keep recurring throughout history and have found their way into modern fiction.  We have three of them in our Declaration of Independence.  How many great stories have been built on those eternal quests that drive mankind? Survival? Freedom? The chance to find Joy or at least peace in your life? The Shawshank Redemption had all three.  This is the secret to writing from the bottom up.  Look for the stories that really affect people. Chances are once you get past the details, they are the same stories that moved your grandfather and his grandfather, and his grandfather before him, because the Human stories endure.  The times change, and the fashions change, and new technologies replace old, but what makes us human remains as it ever was,  and always there are the stories. 

        When you figure out what it is that makes these stories so appealing, build your story right on top of that. It almost doesn’t matter then what the details of your story are, because this epic tale that has survived thousands of years of fans and critics is doing the heavy lifting. I call this writing from the bottom up because the energy of the story is welling up from Bob the caveman , through the Spartans, through David with his sling, and the Alamo, the Battle of Britain and Rocky Balboa and it’s just sitting there, waiting,  all that potential energy looking for an outlet through your story.

                When your story is sitting on top of one of the great stories, you have to work very hard to make it bad.  If you had never watched a Pixar movie, and all you knew about them was a synopsis would you ever have imagined that they could be as good as they are? Living Toys? Clown Fish? Rats that want to cook. Are the things you want to write about less plausible than those? Pixar movies are great because they’re telling Human Stories.  There is absolutely nothing stopping you from doing the same.