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.