What’s My Motivation?

I’ve been thinking about character motivation. I don’t think I need to sell anyone on the notion that believable characters act in consistent, understandable ways. That it is not good for a story when the reader says, “I don’t believe that character would ever do that.”

In life, however, we rarely know why anyone does anything. People don’t actually expound freely on their motivations, their decision making process. And some decisions can seem pretty strange.

It has also be noted that it can be good for a story when characters do surprising things.  So if characters can and should do the unexpected and if it is realistic to never truly know the motivations of others, it follows that the author shouldn’t really worry too much about characters behaving consistently, right?

Wrong, unfortunately. It would be a lot easier if the characters could always just do whatever the plot requires, but no. One of the things we do in life, perhaps as a survival mechanism, is try to get to know people. One of the pleasures of reading or watching movies and TV is using our getting-to-know muscles on fictitious people.

Authors have been known to speak about characters taking on lives of their own, making choices and taking actions outside the plot laid out for them. This occurs when the author has taken enough time in contemplation of the character to get to know them enough that certain choices seem, well, out of character.

And what’s really magic is when, through the character’s perspective, the author comes to choices and decisions that would never even have occurred to him or her otherwise.

When your characters want to jump a certain way, let them. Don’t force them in a mold to fit the plot. Because if their actions seem off to you, their creator, how can you sell them to an audience?

A NOTE ABOUT THE BLOG: I write this blog on the bus to work. Due to a (happy!) change in my employment circumstance, I will not be bussing to work much longer. I’m not sure what this will do to how often I blog. We will have to see what works out.

Working Backwards

In the last three installments, I played around with building a story out of various pieces – a setting here, a conflict there, couple of characters – with the intention of showing how none of the individual pieces were enough to be story by themselves.

Today I’d like to take another approach.  If the point of art is to express something, to make your audience feel, then why not start at the point? In stories this is usually done through conflicts, through the risks the characters take and the decisions they face.

There are some concepts (regardless of how they are presented – scenes, images, conflicts, etc.) that we can expect most people to respond to strongly. Children in peril, for example. There are other concepts that, human individuality being what it is, that different people will respond to differently.  Say a cold glass of iced tea. It’s great if the weather is hot and you happen to like tea.

You want to include concepts in your narrative that people will respond to. But it most stories aren’t all children in peril, all the time. But the less universal the interest point, the more you have to build around it.  If you want to focus on that glass of ice tea, for example, you should probably also provide the hot day (a setting element) and someone who could really use a cup of tea (a character element) and possibly even some additional background.

What we are doing here is starting with an interest point and then working backwards to insert the elements that help sell that interest to the reader. All stories are contrivance and all stories contain conflict but it is never good for your conflict to feel contrived to the reader.

So if you have a really good, interesting conflict, perhaps somewhere in between my child is in danger! and I could sure use some iced tea, the next step is to construct the narrative elements that lead naturally to that conflict so that it doesn’t feel like it’s just been dropped into the story like a falling piano in a cartoon.

Sure, there are events in life that feel that sudden to the people they impact, but remember that your characters are only one element of your story.  A bomb going off can be every bit as stunning as it should be to your protagonist, even if your readers saw the bomb planted by the antagonist several pages ago. And better still if we’ve spent enough time with the villain to believe he or she really would resort to explosives.

All of this is really a way of saying you can work backwards, if you like. Start with a scene you’d like to have and then consider everything that is required to make the scene work, building the elements from the needs of the story instead of drawing the story from the elements.

I have a tendency to work in both directions. But as I have said before and will no doubt say again, every author is different, so play around with the tools and find what works for you. No one cares what tools you use to fix the sink – they care if the sink works.

Setting, Situation, Scene… Part Three – The Conclusion

Once, as a child, I read a very forgettable book with a memorable bit in it. I don’t remember the book at all, but I remember this: one of the child heroes (it was a kid’s book, after all) was in the middle of a Lassie movie when the call to action came. When he whined about missing the end of his movies, one of his friends pointed out that we all knew how it ended. Lassie saves the day.

Yeah, the first kid replies, but I wanted to see how.

In my previous two posts, I pulled together the elements of a story. We have an interesting setting, some character interaction, an intriguing situation, and even some nice conflict.

Will our heroes risk their jobs and possibly even their position in time and space in order to expose their employer’s dangerous experiments? And how will the odd, one-sided romance angle play out?

If you think about it, gentle reader, you probably already know the answers to those questions. I mean, it’s not like you haven’t been exposed to stories before. Of course our heroes will pursue both the dangerous truth and the romance. Wouldn’t be much of a story if they didn’t.

But, if I write it all up well, hopefully you will want to stick around to see how they reach those answers.  To be a story, to be a good and satisfying story, beguiling the reader or viewer or audience with all the fun bits isn’t enough. It’s just a start.

But the story has to resolve. To reach a conclusion. To reach a good conclusion consistent with and worthy of what has gone before. And your audience has to care enough to follow you there.

And if I knew all the secrets to making that happen I’d be rich and famous. But I tell you this: it can be done.

Setting, Situation, Scene, Story (Part Two)

Today’s entry will make more sense if you’ve read Part One, which should still be available for review. Fair warning, and all.

So we have lots of samples of settings and situations, and even the start of a scene, but no story. But these are elements used in stories – so can we make a viable story from them?

I’d start with the scene because it has a pair of characters in it. Stories always involve characters. Always. Sure, I could tell the story of Olympic National Park, and I could tell it with conflict and excitement, but only if I can make you care about the park.  Make its successes and failures important to you.  At which point, it is a character. Never said they had to be human.

Our two characters from the previous blog are Frank and Angie. They’ve only just met, but she is madly in love with him. Awkward.  I need a place (possibly more, but let’s start with one) for their scene, and ultimately their story, to take place. Looking at the various settings I proposed before, I think I’ll take the weird office with the clones in the Mail Room.

I note that the reception staff are telepathic. So if I make Angie a receptionist, it starts to explain her falling for Frank before being introduced. But I also want something else going on, so they can explore their one-sided relationship in the midst of dealing with the crisis du jour.  From my list of situations, I choose the intriguing Charlie Brown lunch box on Mars.

But that’s a mystery, not a conflict. I need something that involves the characters and impels them into action.

How’s this? The weird office – let’s call it Mad Science Inc. – found the lunch box while doing commission work for NASA, processing Mars Rover data. Unfortunately, the lunch box got there due to an illegal and dangerous time/space distortion experiment conducted by, you guessed it, Mad Science Inc.

Frank is a low pay scale data guy who notices that the info being fed to NASA has been tinkered with. He gets to discover what’s going on, become involved in a cover up, and make a moral choice whether to risk his job by blowing the whistle (or maybe risk his life – there’s some strange and scary stuff behind the doors of our Mad Science company), and he gets to do it all while being trailed by a love-sick, telepathic receptionist.

That’s better. Conflict, character, moral decisions, action. Much better. Still not a story, though. We’ve got all the pieces, we’ve started assembling the puzzle, what’s still missing?

Join us next time for part three, the conclusion.

Setting, Situation, Scene, Story (Part One)

There are a lot of entertainments I concoct in the idle fancies of my delirious mind. I’m a fantasy guy, no question.

Sometimes I dream a world like our own, but somewhat askew. What would the world be like, I wonder, if there were licensed, professional wizards? How would they dress? What would we hire them for? Or, I ask myself, what would the world be like after some great, unexpected transformative event? And sometimes I work on a smaller scale, my wonders to create. What would be the weirdest job office I can think of? Where the mail room staff are all clones of the same person and the receptionists are telepathic.

And sometimes I’m more amused by setting up a mystery, or a puzzle. An unmanned Mars probe finds a Charlie Brown lunch box.  A homeless man in Detroit stumbles across a corpse that is not entirely human.

And, probably because I have script-writing experience, I spin out encounters and moments of dialogue.

   ANGIE: I just what you to know… I’m madly in love with you.

   FRANK: Uh, okay. Hi, I’m Frank, by the way.

  ANGIE: Angie. Pleased to meet you.

I could spin that into a full-blow sequence of events, with humor and clever interactions. I could easily waste an afternoon on it, if I had one to spare.

The  problem, from a writer’s perspective, is that none of these things are stories. They are, in order, settings, situations, and scenes. That they all suggest stories is wonderful. They are starters, if you will, story seeds.

But your audience, be they readers or viewers or listeners, didn’t come for the tease. They didn’t come for anything less than the full show.

So next time we’ll discuss how to give it to them.

Ella Sings

Does the world really need one more vampire story?

Before I answer that question, let me break into a seemingly irrelevant anecdote that will, of course, turn out to be a useful analogy.

I was sitting at my computer the other day and I decided to search for some music. I ended up on You Tube, like one does, and I found some old concert footage of Bobby Darin singing “Mack the Knife.” I noticed that one of the comments posted under the video, stating that only Bobby Darin could really do the song justice – other performers just didn’t get the timing.

I thought that was a particularly inane thing to say. The song in question has been performed by Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and, believe it or not, Jimmy Buffet. You honestly mean to say that none of these professional, established, highly accomplished and very talented musicians can get the timing on a song?

The point is, the other performers had their own ideas. They probably had the skills to do a Bobby Darin impersonation, but why would they do that? They chose not to be Bobby Darin (or, in at least some of the cases, Bobby Darin probably chose not to be them – I’m not sure of the chronology). I mean really, would you rather hear Ella Fitzgerald belt a song out of the park as Ella or hear her do a pale imitation of someone else?

Does the world need another vampire story? Or another romance novel?  Or another television show following the adventures of a starship crew?  Another urban paranormal detective?

It needs at least one more: Yours.

But only if it really is yours, and not a poor rendition of someone else’s work.  The world doesn’t need a Bobby Darin wannabe. Or, I guess, maybe a  Steven King wannabe.

Artists use the same tools.  Writers reiterate themes and genres and metaphors the way musicians cover songs.  No sin there. Sometimes it’s even good that the audience is aware of the conventions of the genre, familiar with the style.

But everyone has their own unique perspective, too.  Trying to be someone else is no way to succeed in art.  At best, it’s a useful learning exercise.  But I’m never going to buy an imitation when the original master is still publishing at the same price.  Who would?

Today’s inspirational message was brought to you by the letter M and the numbers one and three.

The Unwritten Stuff

It is a truism that writers tend to develop more information about their characters and setting than actually appears in the story.  And, it is said, this process improves the story, even though the missing data is never visible to the audience. That’s the mystery part – the characters and settings become more rich, consistent, and real, even though we don’t see everything they are consistent with. (And yes, I know I just ended a sentence with a preposition. I do that. I also start sentences with conjunctions.)

For my part, I hate working out detailed backstory. I prefer a more generalized origin story that can be summed up in a few sentences. That’s because I like leeway. I know that, as an author, I am not required to stick to the notes that my reader will never see, but I like the feeling of flexibility. I guess, really, I like not having the decision made until I know what the story demands.

Once a decision is made, it feels concrete, even though nothing is set in stone until the story is finished and the final edits are done. And even then you have to be ready for a publisher or an agent to request changes.

If I decide my character has green skin, by way of a simple, ordinary, down-to-earth example, then I tend to think of my character as, well, green. The character is subject to Kermit the Frog jokes and has an excuse not to eat broccoli. Of course I can re-write the character blue, and I will if the story demands, but it is harder than you would think, because in my head, green is the color.

I also find that detailed facts are often less interesting to me than personality. So when I do need a backstory, I don’t generally work out details like Bob enlisted as soon as he turned 18.  Instead, I tend to think what would Bob say if someone asked about when he enlisted. “Soon as I could,” maybe, or “When I was young and idealistic,” or, “If I’d know they’d move me out of Nowheresville, I’d have lied about my age and joined up sooner.” I learn more about my characters that way.

Anyway, that’s what works for me. Some writers used detailed outlines. Some write organically, looking to see what happens next. I think there is some benefit to having a road map, but maybe it should be a new-fangled electronic one that moves the landmarks as new data is entered.