Recently, in her blog, fellow Doctor Who author Kelly Hale said that when she's writing something, she doesn't tend to read other books.
Different authors have different approaches - there's no right way and wrong way to do this - and I'm the exact opposite, throwing myself at crazy amounts of books.
Now, I quite understand a writer not reading while they are writing something of their own. But Kelly was celebrating the fact she'd finished writing and could get back to her stack of books. Any aspiring writer has to read, and read widely, for all sorts of reasons. You don't want to be able to boast, as Garth Marenghi does, that he's written more books than he's read.
Here's what I read in the four months or so I was writing The Eyeless, courtesy of the lovely and highly-recommended Library Thing website.
Reading List
Some of that is re-reading (I've lost count of the times I've read Name of the Rose, Kavalier and Clay and Casino Royale), very little of it is directly relevant to the book, some of those things are directly relevant to other things I'm working on. There are a couple of books in there that are pure research. And I was obviously on a James Bond and Iain Banks kick. Good luck trying to work out what The Eyeless is about from the list!
Tuesday, 12 August 2008
Monday, 11 August 2008
The Bit in the Middle
Having dealt with the beginning and end of a story, now I’ll talk a bit about the middle.
DWM in the early eighties was obsessed with something called ‘the dramatic W’. The articles that mentioned this mystical sigil seemed to think it meant that a series could veer wildly from something undramatic to something that was. Or something rubbish to something good. Which was actually quite a handy way of discussing Doctor Who in the early eighties, of course.
But I, and I’m sure a lot of other people reading, sensed that ideally writers should probably not alternate between great, exciting things and rubbish, dull ones. They should stick to ‘great and exciting’. So what is the ‘dramatic W’ and, more to the point, how can it help perk up your writing?
An example. Imagine a Doctor Who scene which starts with the Doctor exploring a lovely, happy garden and discovering the monster. The scene ends with the monster chasing him. Things go downhill, and so let’s represent that with this symbol: \ .
Or the opposite: the Doctor’s being chased by a horde of monsters, it ends with him getting out of danger, closing and locking the door behind him. Starts off bad, ends up good. Or, / if we felt the need to represent it visually.
Now that’s good for the Doctor, but bad for the monsters – but, remember, the Doctor is the protagonist, we’re charting his progress. His ‘desire’ in those scenes is that classic Shakespearean theme ‘not wanting to be eaten by a monster’.
Let’s imagine a couple of scenes between those first two.
So … after the scene where the Doctor finds the monster, we have a new scene which starts with him being chased. He dodges around, finds a safe cave. The monster doesn’t follow him in. Things are looking up for the Doctor. So: / .
But wait … in the next scene, the Doctor realises that the monster didn’t follow him in because it knew there was a horde of monsters in here. Run, Doctor, run! And things have gone downhill, so let’s represent that as \ .
Then we get the final scene where the Doctor escapes.
OK … what was all that forward-slash, backslash nonsense about? Well, if I put those four symbols in order:
\/\/
… and that’s the ‘dramatic W’. At the end of each scene, the Doctor is manifestly either better or worse off than he was at the beginning of the scene.
That movement is pretty much the definition of drama, and it’s often called a ‘reversal of fortune’.
‘Hang on’, you’re saying, ‘drama doesn’t just alternate wildly from scenes with characters doing well to scenes with characters doing badly’. And, of course, you’re right. ‘Reversal’ is a little bit of a misnomer.
Sticking with Doctor Who style action-adventure for a moment (just because what happens is usually nice and visible), you could imagine a sequence of scenes where the Doctor has to escape the monster which goes:
1. The Doctor is running from a monster and runs straight into the path of another monster.
2. The Doctor is now being trapped between two monsters. He leaps for safety … and finds himself in a nest of monsters. He is now being chased by four monsters.
3. The Doctor is now being chased by four monsters. He reaches a dead end.
The Doctor’s situation goes from bad to worse to even worse … but the point is that there’s progression. The alterative would be four very similar scenes where the Doctor’s just being chased by a monster.
The Empire Strikes Back is a movie where virtually every scene ends with the good guys worse off than they were at the beginning of the scene. Even when, say, Luke escapes the Wampa’s cave, the scene ends with him injured and in the middle of a deadly blizzard. There are slight upturns and good luck – but they’re often undercut. The Falcon escapes the Star Destroyers … but Boba Fett is following them. Luke finds Yoda … who refuses to teach him.
If you’ve ever written something that just seems to noodle along aimlessly, it’s probably because you’ve got scenes with no reversal of fortune. Things just sort of happen, characters just sit there, or are going around in circles. The story doesn’t progress. The telltale sign is that you’ve written something (either in the synopsis or the story itself) that says something like ‘after a day or so exploring, they still hadn’t got anywhere’ or which has characters sitting around waiting for something to happen to them.
Gareth Roberts once told me that he’d read a Coronation Street script with two scenes that started with the direction ‘Deirdre is still bored’, which is pretty much a textbook way to not go about things.
Now, you can do great things with boredom – the best episodes of One Foot in the Grave, for example, were often based around being stuck in one place. But things happened. Part of the joke is that even the tiniest things happening seem like epic victories and defeats. The post comes … but Victor discovers it’s a bunch of bills and junk mail.
Most writing – even with Doctor Who stories – is more subtle and small scale than the first example I gave. But it tends to work with reversals of fortune.
An important thing to note: 'good' here isn't an complex ethical question, it's simply defined as 'gets the protagonist closer to his goals'. You could have a movie with a murderer as a protagonist, and it would be 'good' if he evaded the security to get closer to his innocent victim. It would be 'bad' if the police brought him in for questioning.
The protagonist in Doctor Who is the Doctor. His ‘desire’ is, broadly, to find out what is really going on and put a stop to it with the minimum of casualties. If there’s a scene where he finds a book in a library that mentions that there were mysterious lights in the sky one night in 1737 and after that the moor got a reputation for being haunted it means he’s a step closer to that goal. Even though he's not in any immediate danger, even though it's a quiet, quite passive scene.
The character doesn’t need to know the exact significance at that moment, but it’s always best if the audience gets some kind of clue. The best moments are often the ones where fortune swings the wrong way: the last cliffhanger of The Horror of Fang Rock, for example, which has the Doctor declaring ‘we’ve not locked the beast out, we’ve locked it in’.
The reality is that writers don’t sit around drawing slashes to work out where they are on the dramatic W. They don’t usually sit around going ‘my Protagonist is’. Nor should writers do that – it sounds ghastly and mechanical. And the sad truth is that writing isn't as simple as knowing this stuff. I know the gymnast who just fell off the parallel bars in the Olympics shouldn't have, but that doesn't make me an Olympic gymnast.
But thinking about your existing story in those terms can often (not always) be a useful way of figuring out what’s not working.
What I hope the people who tried the Synopsis Challenge can do now is look at the last three posts here and go back to their synopsis. Is the Protagonist and what they want clearly defined? Do events happen because of the choices the Protagonist makes? Does each section have clear reversals of fortune?
If so, then I can pretty much guarantee that your story is going to be better than if not.
DWM in the early eighties was obsessed with something called ‘the dramatic W’. The articles that mentioned this mystical sigil seemed to think it meant that a series could veer wildly from something undramatic to something that was. Or something rubbish to something good. Which was actually quite a handy way of discussing Doctor Who in the early eighties, of course.
But I, and I’m sure a lot of other people reading, sensed that ideally writers should probably not alternate between great, exciting things and rubbish, dull ones. They should stick to ‘great and exciting’. So what is the ‘dramatic W’ and, more to the point, how can it help perk up your writing?
An example. Imagine a Doctor Who scene which starts with the Doctor exploring a lovely, happy garden and discovering the monster. The scene ends with the monster chasing him. Things go downhill, and so let’s represent that with this symbol: \ .
Or the opposite: the Doctor’s being chased by a horde of monsters, it ends with him getting out of danger, closing and locking the door behind him. Starts off bad, ends up good. Or, / if we felt the need to represent it visually.
Now that’s good for the Doctor, but bad for the monsters – but, remember, the Doctor is the protagonist, we’re charting his progress. His ‘desire’ in those scenes is that classic Shakespearean theme ‘not wanting to be eaten by a monster’.
Let’s imagine a couple of scenes between those first two.
So … after the scene where the Doctor finds the monster, we have a new scene which starts with him being chased. He dodges around, finds a safe cave. The monster doesn’t follow him in. Things are looking up for the Doctor. So: / .
But wait … in the next scene, the Doctor realises that the monster didn’t follow him in because it knew there was a horde of monsters in here. Run, Doctor, run! And things have gone downhill, so let’s represent that as \ .
Then we get the final scene where the Doctor escapes.
OK … what was all that forward-slash, backslash nonsense about? Well, if I put those four symbols in order:
\/\/
… and that’s the ‘dramatic W’. At the end of each scene, the Doctor is manifestly either better or worse off than he was at the beginning of the scene.
That movement is pretty much the definition of drama, and it’s often called a ‘reversal of fortune’.
‘Hang on’, you’re saying, ‘drama doesn’t just alternate wildly from scenes with characters doing well to scenes with characters doing badly’. And, of course, you’re right. ‘Reversal’ is a little bit of a misnomer.
Sticking with Doctor Who style action-adventure for a moment (just because what happens is usually nice and visible), you could imagine a sequence of scenes where the Doctor has to escape the monster which goes:
1. The Doctor is running from a monster and runs straight into the path of another monster.
2. The Doctor is now being trapped between two monsters. He leaps for safety … and finds himself in a nest of monsters. He is now being chased by four monsters.
3. The Doctor is now being chased by four monsters. He reaches a dead end.
The Doctor’s situation goes from bad to worse to even worse … but the point is that there’s progression. The alterative would be four very similar scenes where the Doctor’s just being chased by a monster.
The Empire Strikes Back is a movie where virtually every scene ends with the good guys worse off than they were at the beginning of the scene. Even when, say, Luke escapes the Wampa’s cave, the scene ends with him injured and in the middle of a deadly blizzard. There are slight upturns and good luck – but they’re often undercut. The Falcon escapes the Star Destroyers … but Boba Fett is following them. Luke finds Yoda … who refuses to teach him.
If you’ve ever written something that just seems to noodle along aimlessly, it’s probably because you’ve got scenes with no reversal of fortune. Things just sort of happen, characters just sit there, or are going around in circles. The story doesn’t progress. The telltale sign is that you’ve written something (either in the synopsis or the story itself) that says something like ‘after a day or so exploring, they still hadn’t got anywhere’ or which has characters sitting around waiting for something to happen to them.
Gareth Roberts once told me that he’d read a Coronation Street script with two scenes that started with the direction ‘Deirdre is still bored’, which is pretty much a textbook way to not go about things.
Now, you can do great things with boredom – the best episodes of One Foot in the Grave, for example, were often based around being stuck in one place. But things happened. Part of the joke is that even the tiniest things happening seem like epic victories and defeats. The post comes … but Victor discovers it’s a bunch of bills and junk mail.
Most writing – even with Doctor Who stories – is more subtle and small scale than the first example I gave. But it tends to work with reversals of fortune.
An important thing to note: 'good' here isn't an complex ethical question, it's simply defined as 'gets the protagonist closer to his goals'. You could have a movie with a murderer as a protagonist, and it would be 'good' if he evaded the security to get closer to his innocent victim. It would be 'bad' if the police brought him in for questioning.
The protagonist in Doctor Who is the Doctor. His ‘desire’ is, broadly, to find out what is really going on and put a stop to it with the minimum of casualties. If there’s a scene where he finds a book in a library that mentions that there were mysterious lights in the sky one night in 1737 and after that the moor got a reputation for being haunted it means he’s a step closer to that goal. Even though he's not in any immediate danger, even though it's a quiet, quite passive scene.
The character doesn’t need to know the exact significance at that moment, but it’s always best if the audience gets some kind of clue. The best moments are often the ones where fortune swings the wrong way: the last cliffhanger of The Horror of Fang Rock, for example, which has the Doctor declaring ‘we’ve not locked the beast out, we’ve locked it in’.
The reality is that writers don’t sit around drawing slashes to work out where they are on the dramatic W. They don’t usually sit around going ‘my Protagonist is’. Nor should writers do that – it sounds ghastly and mechanical. And the sad truth is that writing isn't as simple as knowing this stuff. I know the gymnast who just fell off the parallel bars in the Olympics shouldn't have, but that doesn't make me an Olympic gymnast.
But thinking about your existing story in those terms can often (not always) be a useful way of figuring out what’s not working.
What I hope the people who tried the Synopsis Challenge can do now is look at the last three posts here and go back to their synopsis. Is the Protagonist and what they want clearly defined? Do events happen because of the choices the Protagonist makes? Does each section have clear reversals of fortune?
If so, then I can pretty much guarantee that your story is going to be better than if not.
Thursday, 31 July 2008
Decisions, Decisions
This one's a bit long. Sorry.
All right, then … this post follows on from the last, where I made the rather expansive claim that ‘a story is the set of choices its protagonist makes’.
What does that mean, what implications does that have, and why is it directly related to why some – misguided, wrong – Doctor Who fans don’t like Tinkerbell Jesus?
Protagonists want something. Often the most sophisticated stories have protagonists with the most simple desires – ‘revenge’ or ‘true love’.
Robert McKee makes a useful distinction between Conscious and Unconscious desires. In the standard Hollywood formula movie, what the hero SAYS he wants invariably turns out not to be the thing he ACTUALLY wants. Indeed, many Hollywood movies are precisely about the revelation of what the Unconscious (and invariably ‘true’) desire is.
The busy executive doesn’t really want the money and status he’s working so hard to earn at the start of the movie, he really wants some special time with his kids – and the movie is about him coming to realise that he’d rather see his kid’s baseball game than get that promotion. (I’d pay good money to see a movie which ends with a businessman saying ‘stuff my kids, I choose the money’, by the way – that is, after all, the choice all the Hollywood execs have made).
A story is basically about the Protagonist pursuing his object of desire - with varying degrees of application, luck and success.
Now … in a running series, the emphasis is a little different. Sherlock Holmes wants to solve the case in hand, Batman wants to track down the supervillain, the Doctor wants to defeat the monsters. They want the same thing next time. And the next. And the next. There’s no psychological progression. The stories are variations on the theme, the best ones are the ones rich in imaginative detail.
We’ve got a taste for heroes with more of an inner life these days, and so authors of running series tend to concentrate a lot more on the psychology than they did when the characters were created. Batman writers over the last twenty years have wrestled with the question ‘what sort of man would dress up as a bat to fight criminals?’. The problem they have is … er … no-one would do that. It’s a barmy thing to do, and by definition, you’re not going to make any great insight into human nature by asking the question. The character just can’t bear the load. To paraphrase Charlie Brooker, it’s not a good idea to do a story where Postman Pat goes postal. It’s why The Killing Joke is Alan Moore’s least successful work. In my opinion.
Did I mention I wrote a book about Alan Moore?
But the Doctor has a desire, it’s perfectly conscious and it’s ‘find out what the monsters are really up to and defeat them’.
During the story the Protagonist has to make choices to attain his desire. Big choices and little choices. He doesn’t always realise at the time which are the big choices and which are the little ones. The recent Doctor Who episode Turn Left is a great example of a story where a trivial decision has literally universe-shattering consequences. If Donna turns her car one way, she meets the Doctor. If she doesn’t, she doesn’t.
Often the hero is the hero precisely because they have insight – folk tales commonly have the hero realising that the smelly old tramp is really a great warrior or god in disguise. Captain Kirk, Batman, Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor can all walk into a room and realise that an everyday item that’s been on public display for years without anyone paying it any attention is actually some amazing and unique item that’s the key to winning the day.
But real life isn’t like that very often, and most stories don’t work quite like that. Usually stories feature a choice that you probably won’t be faced with, but might – you find a bag of money in your back garden … do you keep it? Do you tell your partner? How do you spend it without anyone noticing? What happens when the owner shows up? Hitchcock’s movies were brilliant at plunging normal people into increasingly perilous situations because each sensible choice they made exposed them to more harm.
Soap operas basically have an engine that throws out a dozen decisions an episode – very simple moral dilemmas, usually, like ‘should that character have an affair?’ or ‘should that character steal that money?’ or ‘should that character reveal a secret?’. The choices are all laid out, they’re usually ‘yes/no’ decisions’ and they’re all simple to understand.
If you watch the soap, you know something about the characters – that character’s a bit thick, that one is always unlucky in love, that one is one bad day away from becoming a drunk.
And those two things – simple decisions, made by well-defined characters - mean that millions of people watch the soaps, and millions of people can kind of see everything coming, and millions of people shout out at the telly things like ‘don’t do it, he’s a love rat’ or ‘don’t do it, you’ll hurt your best friend’.
Not all writers will consciously do this – every writer is different. But I think even the most sophisticated or literary writers, by accident or design, use this technique. They just dress it up in posher clothes.
Right … here’s the key sentence of this article: ‘for a story to work, the reader has to understand the decisions the protagonist is faced with, and why the protagonist makes the choices he does’.
If you get that right, you’ll write a good story. And if you bash the piano keys in the right way, you’ll be a great concert pianist.
The audience doesn’t have to agree with the decision the Protagonist makes, it doesn’t have to be the decision they would make. The audience often know more than the character (‘don’t marry him … he’s only with you for the money and he killed his last wife!’ – if the Protagonist had that information, you’d hope they’d factor it in to their decision). The audience do have to find it convincing that the Protagonist made the decision.
The hardest decision for an author to make convincing is often the very first one. The biggest choice is what Joseph Campbell terms The Call to Adventure. There will come a point in most stories where the protagonist is, well … basically invited into the story.
When a horror movie starts with a group of teenagers deciding that, gosh, the most sensible thing to shelter from the rain is go into the spooky house where all those teenagers got killed ten years ago that very night … the audience groans. Horror movies still tell those stories, but invariably make a postmodern joke about what a stupid decision it is.
In Star Wars, Ben asks Luke to come with him to Alderaan and learn the ways of the Force. Luke, of course …
... refuses.
Campbell notes that most heroes refuse once – the pull of their ordinary life is too strong, or they need a better incentive to take a risk. George Lucas is a devotee of Campbell. I’d go as far as to say that you can’t really understand Star Wars unless you’ve read ‘The Impact of Science on Myth’, which is a 1961 essay that basically says ‘someone really needs to invent Star Wars’ (One Star Wars fan I said this to hasn’t spoken to me since, because he hasn’t read it and felt I was calling his very Star Wars fanitude into question. It’s not as though it’s difficult to find). Having read his Campbell, Lucas has Luke refusing the Call to Adventure and deciding to stay on Tatooine … then his aunt and uncle are murdered, and he realises where his destiny lies.
In Doctor Who there isn’t always a call to adventure – it’s implicit in the series. When the villager says ‘oh Doctor, these Daleks came along and they’re hurting us, can you help?’ … the Doctor doesn’t exactly agonise about the decision. This is unusual – James Bond and Sherlock Holmes usually start by being offered a mission or case. They always decide to take it, but they do consciously decide. Even Superman usually gets a line like ‘looks like I’ll be a few minutes late for dinner with Lois’ as he swoops in to catch a bad guy he’s spotted.
All these choices lead somewhere, and that’s the end of the story. Now … I’m going to skip to that. I’ll do the middle bit next time.
The key thing that audiences always like at the end of a story is a sense of justice. Not necessarily a happy ending, but an ending that fits the story. Protagonists have a desire. The story ends with them reaching a level of understanding about their desire – usually they win the girl, defeat the bad guy, solve the crime. That sort of thing. Unhappy endings see their desire thwarted or revealed as futile or unsatisfactory.
I got in terrible trouble with my Doctor Who book The Gallifrey Chronicles, because it ends before the Doctor defeats the monsters. I knew I would get in trouble when I wrote it. We know the Doctor will win, but we WANT TO SEE HIM DO IT.
Audiences used to like to see the Protagonist get handed the reward he deserved. Plays and novels ended with good, kind characters suddenly inheriting a great deal of money, or being married off to someone good looking who was barely in the story up to that point, or facing some sudden form of external justice and being dragged away.
Even that seems naturalistic compared with Greek and Roman plays, which often ended with a god coming down and pointing at each of the main cast in turn, making definitive pronouncements on who was to get what reward and what punishment.
So in Orestes, the play’s going about its business until suddenly, at the end, literally without warning, the god Apollo appears and says (after a deep breath, one assumes):
‘Menelaus, calm thy excited mood; I am Phoebus, the son of Latona, who draw nigh to call thee by name, and thou no less, Orestes, who, sword in hand, art keeping guard on yonder maid, that thou mayst hear what have come to say. Helen, whom all thy eagerness failed to destroy, when thou wert seeking to anger Menelaus, is here as ye see in the enfolding air, rescued from death instead of slain by thee. 'Twas I that saved her and snatched her from beneath thy sword at the bidding of her father Zeus; for she his child must put on immortality, and take her place with Castor and Polydeuces in the bosom of the sky, a saviour to mariners. Choose thee then another bride and take her to thy home, for the gods by means of Helen's loveliness embroiled Troy and Hellas, causing death thereby, that they might lighten mother Earth of the outrage done her by the increase of man's number. Such is Helen's end.
But as for thee, Orestes, thou must cross the frontier of this land and dwell for one whole year on Parrhasian soil, which from thy flight thither shall be called the land of Orestes by Azanians and Arcadians; and when thou returnest thence to the city of Athens, submit to be brought to trial by "the Avenging Three" for thy mother's murder, for the gods will be umpires between you and will pass a most righteous sentence on thee upon the hill of Ares, where thou art to win thy case. Likewise, it is ordained, Orestes, that thou shalt wed Hermione, at whose neck thou art pointing thy sword; Neoptolemus shall never marry her, though he thinks he will; for his death is fated to o'ertake him by a Delphian sword, when he claims satisfaction of me for the death of his father Achilles. Bestow thy sister's hand on Pylades, to whom thou didst formerly promise her; the life awaiting him henceforth is one of bliss.
Menelaus, leave Orestes to rule Argos; go thou and reign oer Sparta, keeping it as the dowry of a wife, who till this day ne'er ceased exposing thee to toils innumerable. Between Orestes and the citizens, I, who forced his mother's murder on him, will bring about a reconciliation.’
You don’t see that sort of thing on EastEnders. The characters don’t all shout out ‘push off, we’re in the middle of something, here’, they accept the judgement and the play ends.
The god appearing at the end to pass judgement was as much a convention of drama then as things like opening credits sequences are now. The audience knew to expect it, it was a highlight. There would be mechanisms that allowed the god to make a spectacular entrance – they’d float down or spring up, or appear to materialise. It was all about the special effects, even then.
Hmmmm … a god came out of a machine. Or, in Latin, ‘deus ex machina’.
It’s a dirty word, now. It’s come to mean an ending that comes out of nowhere – a quick solution suddenly appears. In the end of the Day of the Triffids movie, it turns out Triffids dissolve in salt water. In Superman: The Movie, Superman suddenly acquires the ability to turn back time. It feels like a cheat if some external force just arrives to solve the problem – like that bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where they’re being chased by a cartoon monster and the animator suddenly drops dead and the monster vanishes. HG Wells just about gets away with all the Martians dying of the flu in The War of the Worlds, but it’s not entirely satisfying. It feels too easy.
Some Doctor Who fans have complained that the end of The Last of the Time Lords was a ‘deus ex machina’ ending. The Doctor literally descends as a god and passes judgement. I don’t think it’s a fair criticism (I think what happens doesn’t come out the blue, it’s engineered by the Doctor using elements that have been set up previously in the story. Russell Davies plays tricks with the convention – just look at Journey’s End, where character after character pulls out artifacts of amazing power that represent an easy solution … then they don’t work) … but the reason the fans don’t like it is that they think it feels like a cheat.
Nowadays we like stories where the fate of the Protagonist is down to the choices we see him make.
Modern audiences like the Protagonist to win his own battles. He can recruit allies, he can pull things out of his hat. The Protagonist can cheat … but his author can’t. Writers have to explain who the Protagonist is, the choices he faces, the skills and tools he possesses and why he makes the choices he does.
So, after all that, a bit of writing advice:
When you’re planning or writing a story, always look at the choices your Protagonist is making. Answer these questions:
1) Is it clear to the reader what the choice is and what the potential consequences of the choice are?
2) Is it clear how the Protagonist came to the decision they did? Is it consistent with what we’ve been told about the Protagonist? Is it consistent with what the Protagonist desires?
3) Is there a better choice to be made, and if so, why isn’t the Protagonist making it? (One question I often find myself asking is – ‘why don’t they just get help?’. It’s a joke in the Doctor Who episode Blink – nine times out of ten, characters in contemporary drama never call the police when they ought to).
Now … real writing isn’t like a checklist. Go on instinct. Write the damn story. But if something isn’t ringing true or working or feels forced, or too sudden, or unconvincing … take a step back. Look at your Protagonist, what they desire, the choices they are making. If you know who your Protagonist is and how they reach the decisions they do, you’ll find that getting your story to work is a lot easier.
All right, then … this post follows on from the last, where I made the rather expansive claim that ‘a story is the set of choices its protagonist makes’.
What does that mean, what implications does that have, and why is it directly related to why some – misguided, wrong – Doctor Who fans don’t like Tinkerbell Jesus?
Protagonists want something. Often the most sophisticated stories have protagonists with the most simple desires – ‘revenge’ or ‘true love’.
Robert McKee makes a useful distinction between Conscious and Unconscious desires. In the standard Hollywood formula movie, what the hero SAYS he wants invariably turns out not to be the thing he ACTUALLY wants. Indeed, many Hollywood movies are precisely about the revelation of what the Unconscious (and invariably ‘true’) desire is.
The busy executive doesn’t really want the money and status he’s working so hard to earn at the start of the movie, he really wants some special time with his kids – and the movie is about him coming to realise that he’d rather see his kid’s baseball game than get that promotion. (I’d pay good money to see a movie which ends with a businessman saying ‘stuff my kids, I choose the money’, by the way – that is, after all, the choice all the Hollywood execs have made).
A story is basically about the Protagonist pursuing his object of desire - with varying degrees of application, luck and success.
Now … in a running series, the emphasis is a little different. Sherlock Holmes wants to solve the case in hand, Batman wants to track down the supervillain, the Doctor wants to defeat the monsters. They want the same thing next time. And the next. And the next. There’s no psychological progression. The stories are variations on the theme, the best ones are the ones rich in imaginative detail.
We’ve got a taste for heroes with more of an inner life these days, and so authors of running series tend to concentrate a lot more on the psychology than they did when the characters were created. Batman writers over the last twenty years have wrestled with the question ‘what sort of man would dress up as a bat to fight criminals?’. The problem they have is … er … no-one would do that. It’s a barmy thing to do, and by definition, you’re not going to make any great insight into human nature by asking the question. The character just can’t bear the load. To paraphrase Charlie Brooker, it’s not a good idea to do a story where Postman Pat goes postal. It’s why The Killing Joke is Alan Moore’s least successful work. In my opinion.
Did I mention I wrote a book about Alan Moore?
But the Doctor has a desire, it’s perfectly conscious and it’s ‘find out what the monsters are really up to and defeat them’.
During the story the Protagonist has to make choices to attain his desire. Big choices and little choices. He doesn’t always realise at the time which are the big choices and which are the little ones. The recent Doctor Who episode Turn Left is a great example of a story where a trivial decision has literally universe-shattering consequences. If Donna turns her car one way, she meets the Doctor. If she doesn’t, she doesn’t.
Often the hero is the hero precisely because they have insight – folk tales commonly have the hero realising that the smelly old tramp is really a great warrior or god in disguise. Captain Kirk, Batman, Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor can all walk into a room and realise that an everyday item that’s been on public display for years without anyone paying it any attention is actually some amazing and unique item that’s the key to winning the day.
But real life isn’t like that very often, and most stories don’t work quite like that. Usually stories feature a choice that you probably won’t be faced with, but might – you find a bag of money in your back garden … do you keep it? Do you tell your partner? How do you spend it without anyone noticing? What happens when the owner shows up? Hitchcock’s movies were brilliant at plunging normal people into increasingly perilous situations because each sensible choice they made exposed them to more harm.
Soap operas basically have an engine that throws out a dozen decisions an episode – very simple moral dilemmas, usually, like ‘should that character have an affair?’ or ‘should that character steal that money?’ or ‘should that character reveal a secret?’. The choices are all laid out, they’re usually ‘yes/no’ decisions’ and they’re all simple to understand.
If you watch the soap, you know something about the characters – that character’s a bit thick, that one is always unlucky in love, that one is one bad day away from becoming a drunk.
And those two things – simple decisions, made by well-defined characters - mean that millions of people watch the soaps, and millions of people can kind of see everything coming, and millions of people shout out at the telly things like ‘don’t do it, he’s a love rat’ or ‘don’t do it, you’ll hurt your best friend’.
Not all writers will consciously do this – every writer is different. But I think even the most sophisticated or literary writers, by accident or design, use this technique. They just dress it up in posher clothes.
Right … here’s the key sentence of this article: ‘for a story to work, the reader has to understand the decisions the protagonist is faced with, and why the protagonist makes the choices he does’.
If you get that right, you’ll write a good story. And if you bash the piano keys in the right way, you’ll be a great concert pianist.
The audience doesn’t have to agree with the decision the Protagonist makes, it doesn’t have to be the decision they would make. The audience often know more than the character (‘don’t marry him … he’s only with you for the money and he killed his last wife!’ – if the Protagonist had that information, you’d hope they’d factor it in to their decision). The audience do have to find it convincing that the Protagonist made the decision.
The hardest decision for an author to make convincing is often the very first one. The biggest choice is what Joseph Campbell terms The Call to Adventure. There will come a point in most stories where the protagonist is, well … basically invited into the story.
When a horror movie starts with a group of teenagers deciding that, gosh, the most sensible thing to shelter from the rain is go into the spooky house where all those teenagers got killed ten years ago that very night … the audience groans. Horror movies still tell those stories, but invariably make a postmodern joke about what a stupid decision it is.
In Star Wars, Ben asks Luke to come with him to Alderaan and learn the ways of the Force. Luke, of course …
... refuses.
Campbell notes that most heroes refuse once – the pull of their ordinary life is too strong, or they need a better incentive to take a risk. George Lucas is a devotee of Campbell. I’d go as far as to say that you can’t really understand Star Wars unless you’ve read ‘The Impact of Science on Myth’, which is a 1961 essay that basically says ‘someone really needs to invent Star Wars’ (One Star Wars fan I said this to hasn’t spoken to me since, because he hasn’t read it and felt I was calling his very Star Wars fanitude into question. It’s not as though it’s difficult to find). Having read his Campbell, Lucas has Luke refusing the Call to Adventure and deciding to stay on Tatooine … then his aunt and uncle are murdered, and he realises where his destiny lies.
In Doctor Who there isn’t always a call to adventure – it’s implicit in the series. When the villager says ‘oh Doctor, these Daleks came along and they’re hurting us, can you help?’ … the Doctor doesn’t exactly agonise about the decision. This is unusual – James Bond and Sherlock Holmes usually start by being offered a mission or case. They always decide to take it, but they do consciously decide. Even Superman usually gets a line like ‘looks like I’ll be a few minutes late for dinner with Lois’ as he swoops in to catch a bad guy he’s spotted.
All these choices lead somewhere, and that’s the end of the story. Now … I’m going to skip to that. I’ll do the middle bit next time.
The key thing that audiences always like at the end of a story is a sense of justice. Not necessarily a happy ending, but an ending that fits the story. Protagonists have a desire. The story ends with them reaching a level of understanding about their desire – usually they win the girl, defeat the bad guy, solve the crime. That sort of thing. Unhappy endings see their desire thwarted or revealed as futile or unsatisfactory.
I got in terrible trouble with my Doctor Who book The Gallifrey Chronicles, because it ends before the Doctor defeats the monsters. I knew I would get in trouble when I wrote it. We know the Doctor will win, but we WANT TO SEE HIM DO IT.
Audiences used to like to see the Protagonist get handed the reward he deserved. Plays and novels ended with good, kind characters suddenly inheriting a great deal of money, or being married off to someone good looking who was barely in the story up to that point, or facing some sudden form of external justice and being dragged away.
Even that seems naturalistic compared with Greek and Roman plays, which often ended with a god coming down and pointing at each of the main cast in turn, making definitive pronouncements on who was to get what reward and what punishment.
So in Orestes, the play’s going about its business until suddenly, at the end, literally without warning, the god Apollo appears and says (after a deep breath, one assumes):
‘Menelaus, calm thy excited mood; I am Phoebus, the son of Latona, who draw nigh to call thee by name, and thou no less, Orestes, who, sword in hand, art keeping guard on yonder maid, that thou mayst hear what have come to say. Helen, whom all thy eagerness failed to destroy, when thou wert seeking to anger Menelaus, is here as ye see in the enfolding air, rescued from death instead of slain by thee. 'Twas I that saved her and snatched her from beneath thy sword at the bidding of her father Zeus; for she his child must put on immortality, and take her place with Castor and Polydeuces in the bosom of the sky, a saviour to mariners. Choose thee then another bride and take her to thy home, for the gods by means of Helen's loveliness embroiled Troy and Hellas, causing death thereby, that they might lighten mother Earth of the outrage done her by the increase of man's number. Such is Helen's end.
But as for thee, Orestes, thou must cross the frontier of this land and dwell for one whole year on Parrhasian soil, which from thy flight thither shall be called the land of Orestes by Azanians and Arcadians; and when thou returnest thence to the city of Athens, submit to be brought to trial by "the Avenging Three" for thy mother's murder, for the gods will be umpires between you and will pass a most righteous sentence on thee upon the hill of Ares, where thou art to win thy case. Likewise, it is ordained, Orestes, that thou shalt wed Hermione, at whose neck thou art pointing thy sword; Neoptolemus shall never marry her, though he thinks he will; for his death is fated to o'ertake him by a Delphian sword, when he claims satisfaction of me for the death of his father Achilles. Bestow thy sister's hand on Pylades, to whom thou didst formerly promise her; the life awaiting him henceforth is one of bliss.
Menelaus, leave Orestes to rule Argos; go thou and reign oer Sparta, keeping it as the dowry of a wife, who till this day ne'er ceased exposing thee to toils innumerable. Between Orestes and the citizens, I, who forced his mother's murder on him, will bring about a reconciliation.’
You don’t see that sort of thing on EastEnders. The characters don’t all shout out ‘push off, we’re in the middle of something, here’, they accept the judgement and the play ends.
The god appearing at the end to pass judgement was as much a convention of drama then as things like opening credits sequences are now. The audience knew to expect it, it was a highlight. There would be mechanisms that allowed the god to make a spectacular entrance – they’d float down or spring up, or appear to materialise. It was all about the special effects, even then.
Hmmmm … a god came out of a machine. Or, in Latin, ‘deus ex machina’.
It’s a dirty word, now. It’s come to mean an ending that comes out of nowhere – a quick solution suddenly appears. In the end of the Day of the Triffids movie, it turns out Triffids dissolve in salt water. In Superman: The Movie, Superman suddenly acquires the ability to turn back time. It feels like a cheat if some external force just arrives to solve the problem – like that bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where they’re being chased by a cartoon monster and the animator suddenly drops dead and the monster vanishes. HG Wells just about gets away with all the Martians dying of the flu in The War of the Worlds, but it’s not entirely satisfying. It feels too easy.
Some Doctor Who fans have complained that the end of The Last of the Time Lords was a ‘deus ex machina’ ending. The Doctor literally descends as a god and passes judgement. I don’t think it’s a fair criticism (I think what happens doesn’t come out the blue, it’s engineered by the Doctor using elements that have been set up previously in the story. Russell Davies plays tricks with the convention – just look at Journey’s End, where character after character pulls out artifacts of amazing power that represent an easy solution … then they don’t work) … but the reason the fans don’t like it is that they think it feels like a cheat.
Nowadays we like stories where the fate of the Protagonist is down to the choices we see him make.
Modern audiences like the Protagonist to win his own battles. He can recruit allies, he can pull things out of his hat. The Protagonist can cheat … but his author can’t. Writers have to explain who the Protagonist is, the choices he faces, the skills and tools he possesses and why he makes the choices he does.
So, after all that, a bit of writing advice:
When you’re planning or writing a story, always look at the choices your Protagonist is making. Answer these questions:
1) Is it clear to the reader what the choice is and what the potential consequences of the choice are?
2) Is it clear how the Protagonist came to the decision they did? Is it consistent with what we’ve been told about the Protagonist? Is it consistent with what the Protagonist desires?
3) Is there a better choice to be made, and if so, why isn’t the Protagonist making it? (One question I often find myself asking is – ‘why don’t they just get help?’. It’s a joke in the Doctor Who episode Blink – nine times out of ten, characters in contemporary drama never call the police when they ought to).
Now … real writing isn’t like a checklist. Go on instinct. Write the damn story. But if something isn’t ringing true or working or feels forced, or too sudden, or unconvincing … take a step back. Look at your Protagonist, what they desire, the choices they are making. If you know who your Protagonist is and how they reach the decisions they do, you’ll find that getting your story to work is a lot easier.
Monday, 28 July 2008
To Sum It Up In A Sentence ...
OK … so what elements build up to make a story?
There are probably writers who’d baulk at that question. Then again, there are certainly guidebooks for writers that make it seem like all you have to do is assemble a couple of prefabricated Epiphanies and Inciting Incidents and then Bob’s Your Uncle, you have a story.
Over the next few posts, I’ll talk about a few things common to virtually all stories. I don’t want anyone who is hoping to be a writer to think that these are a set of magic keys that will enable anyone to tell a great story. They aren’t, but they are things to think about. If, when you’re planning or writing a story, you keep what I say in mind, it’ll help you. I hope.
There are only five types of story. Or seven. Or four. Or is it ten?
Types of Stories
Well … I think there’s probably only one type of story. Every story ever written can be summed up in a sentence: ‘someone doesn’t get what they bargained for’. Or, as fellow Doctor Who author Simon Bucher-Jones once put it: ‘Surprise!’.
Basically, every story is about someone encountering something new and the story is about the implications for that someone as they deal with the new thing. It doesn’t have to be a Faustian pact … but most stories have at least some element like that, a deal with the devil where something that seems to give easy satisfaction turns out to have dire consequences. Science fiction is often – not always - about someone living in a world with a new piece of technology. A love story is about someone meeting a new potential lover. A thriller features someone discovering a new plot against their government. Most stories have someone going about their everyday - perhaps slightly too mundane - existence, then being thrust into a far more exciting, dangerous place. It doesn't have to be physical danger (although that certainly helps if you're writing a Doctor Who story) or on a grand scale.
This will either sound deeply profound to you, or such an incredible generalisation that it has no real value.
So … in order to be practical, let’s talk about that ‘someone’.
Every story needs a protagonist. The protagonist is simply the main person whose story we’re following. The person whose story it is. The ‘hero’ … although they don’t have to be heroic or even remotely likeable.
I probably don’t need to give examples of heroes in stories. Often, the author helps you along by naming them in the title. There’s no great mystery who the protagonists of Gulliver’s Travels or Tom Jones or Hamlet or Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are.
There are multi-protagonist stories – at various times in, say, Pulp Fiction we’re following a different character. Even there, it’s always pretty clear that this is the Vince Vega bit or the Butch bit. There are stories where the protagonist changes from scene to scene, so the term becomes pretty meaningless. A good example of that is the TV series The Wire. Which everyone should watch, because it’s great:
Charlie Brooker on The Wire
In some stories, it’s not always clear who the protagonist is. Who's the hero of The Phantom Menace, for example? The poster makes you think this is Anakin’s story, loyalty has you backing Obi Wan, Qui Gonn’s in the most scenes, and it’s probably Amidala’s ‘story’, in the sense that it’s her world being invaded. Ultimately, the clue’s in the title again, and it’s Darth Sidious. The big reveal of the movie (so big that a lot of people apparently don’t see it) is that every single thing the good guys have done, every victory they have won, has only strengthened Sidious. So it’s no wonder people were confused, particularly when the protagonist of the original trilogy is so clearly defined, central and heroic as Luke Skywalker.
Although, of course, now we’ve seen all six, we know that the protagonist of the whole series is Vader and Luke’s ultimate role is just to be in the right place at the right time to cry out for mercy – Vader had a prophetic dream in Revenge of the Sith that’s about Amidala … but which doesn’t actually come to pass until the very end of Return of the Jedi.
OK … I digress. Anyone can come up with a ‘hero’ for their story. I think, unconsciously or not, a lot of would-be writers think that coming up with the protagonist is a bit like generating a role playing character – you pick their appearance, special skills and so on. It’s the easy part, in a way. It’s also fun. The bane of a lot of SF writing is stories with amazing, colourful, eccentric characters … who then get slotted into rubbish, generic stories.
What’s interesting about Doctor Who is that you’re forced to do things the other way round. For Doctor Who authors the protagonist is – to the first approximation, anyway – always going to be the Doctor. Which means you spend your time trying to come up with silly and thrilling things for him to do, not agonising about what his magic sword is called.
In Doctor Who the companion is often nearly as important. Sometimes – very rarely – they are the protagonist. The protagonist of the episode ‘Rose’, for example is … well, not difficult to guess from the title. Some fans, on first viewing, felt the first episode was a very light Doctor Who story … well, yes it was. It was about Rose meeting the Doctor, not the Doctor fighting Autons.
But most Doctor Who stories have a subplot. A subplot is what it sounds like – basically a secondary storyline that runs alongside the main one. It’s usually there to compare and contrast with the main plot – so in Pride and Prejudice, say, we see what happens to the other sisters. In Doctor Who, the typical story involves the Doctor and companion landing on a planet where there’s a conflict and splitting up. The Doctor ends up with one faction, the companion with another. That way, we see both sides of the conflict. Often the Doctor is off dealing with the cause – the monsters who’ve invaded, say – while the companion is down on the ground and witnesses the effects – the suffering the monsters are inflicting on the native population. It’s a neat way to do things.
It also allows a writer to break up the tone a bit and just ... well, cut away from the main action.
Instead of talking about what makes a protagonist interesting, let’s think about what the protagonist is there in the story for.
Here’s the key sentence of this article, so memorise it:
‘A story is the set of choices its protagonist makes’.
This sounds ridiculously reductive. It is. You can’t really sum up the whole of human literature in a sentence. What you can do, though, is bring clarity to your OWN storytelling if you keep that sentence in mind.
So mull on that a while. In the next post, I’ll give some worked examples.
There are probably writers who’d baulk at that question. Then again, there are certainly guidebooks for writers that make it seem like all you have to do is assemble a couple of prefabricated Epiphanies and Inciting Incidents and then Bob’s Your Uncle, you have a story.
Over the next few posts, I’ll talk about a few things common to virtually all stories. I don’t want anyone who is hoping to be a writer to think that these are a set of magic keys that will enable anyone to tell a great story. They aren’t, but they are things to think about. If, when you’re planning or writing a story, you keep what I say in mind, it’ll help you. I hope.
There are only five types of story. Or seven. Or four. Or is it ten?
Types of Stories
Well … I think there’s probably only one type of story. Every story ever written can be summed up in a sentence: ‘someone doesn’t get what they bargained for’. Or, as fellow Doctor Who author Simon Bucher-Jones once put it: ‘Surprise!’.
Basically, every story is about someone encountering something new and the story is about the implications for that someone as they deal with the new thing. It doesn’t have to be a Faustian pact … but most stories have at least some element like that, a deal with the devil where something that seems to give easy satisfaction turns out to have dire consequences. Science fiction is often – not always - about someone living in a world with a new piece of technology. A love story is about someone meeting a new potential lover. A thriller features someone discovering a new plot against their government. Most stories have someone going about their everyday - perhaps slightly too mundane - existence, then being thrust into a far more exciting, dangerous place. It doesn't have to be physical danger (although that certainly helps if you're writing a Doctor Who story) or on a grand scale.
This will either sound deeply profound to you, or such an incredible generalisation that it has no real value.
So … in order to be practical, let’s talk about that ‘someone’.
Every story needs a protagonist. The protagonist is simply the main person whose story we’re following. The person whose story it is. The ‘hero’ … although they don’t have to be heroic or even remotely likeable.
I probably don’t need to give examples of heroes in stories. Often, the author helps you along by naming them in the title. There’s no great mystery who the protagonists of Gulliver’s Travels or Tom Jones or Hamlet or Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are.
There are multi-protagonist stories – at various times in, say, Pulp Fiction we’re following a different character. Even there, it’s always pretty clear that this is the Vince Vega bit or the Butch bit. There are stories where the protagonist changes from scene to scene, so the term becomes pretty meaningless. A good example of that is the TV series The Wire. Which everyone should watch, because it’s great:
Charlie Brooker on The Wire
In some stories, it’s not always clear who the protagonist is. Who's the hero of The Phantom Menace, for example? The poster makes you think this is Anakin’s story, loyalty has you backing Obi Wan, Qui Gonn’s in the most scenes, and it’s probably Amidala’s ‘story’, in the sense that it’s her world being invaded. Ultimately, the clue’s in the title again, and it’s Darth Sidious. The big reveal of the movie (so big that a lot of people apparently don’t see it) is that every single thing the good guys have done, every victory they have won, has only strengthened Sidious. So it’s no wonder people were confused, particularly when the protagonist of the original trilogy is so clearly defined, central and heroic as Luke Skywalker.
Although, of course, now we’ve seen all six, we know that the protagonist of the whole series is Vader and Luke’s ultimate role is just to be in the right place at the right time to cry out for mercy – Vader had a prophetic dream in Revenge of the Sith that’s about Amidala … but which doesn’t actually come to pass until the very end of Return of the Jedi.
OK … I digress. Anyone can come up with a ‘hero’ for their story. I think, unconsciously or not, a lot of would-be writers think that coming up with the protagonist is a bit like generating a role playing character – you pick their appearance, special skills and so on. It’s the easy part, in a way. It’s also fun. The bane of a lot of SF writing is stories with amazing, colourful, eccentric characters … who then get slotted into rubbish, generic stories.
What’s interesting about Doctor Who is that you’re forced to do things the other way round. For Doctor Who authors the protagonist is – to the first approximation, anyway – always going to be the Doctor. Which means you spend your time trying to come up with silly and thrilling things for him to do, not agonising about what his magic sword is called.
In Doctor Who the companion is often nearly as important. Sometimes – very rarely – they are the protagonist. The protagonist of the episode ‘Rose’, for example is … well, not difficult to guess from the title. Some fans, on first viewing, felt the first episode was a very light Doctor Who story … well, yes it was. It was about Rose meeting the Doctor, not the Doctor fighting Autons.
But most Doctor Who stories have a subplot. A subplot is what it sounds like – basically a secondary storyline that runs alongside the main one. It’s usually there to compare and contrast with the main plot – so in Pride and Prejudice, say, we see what happens to the other sisters. In Doctor Who, the typical story involves the Doctor and companion landing on a planet where there’s a conflict and splitting up. The Doctor ends up with one faction, the companion with another. That way, we see both sides of the conflict. Often the Doctor is off dealing with the cause – the monsters who’ve invaded, say – while the companion is down on the ground and witnesses the effects – the suffering the monsters are inflicting on the native population. It’s a neat way to do things.
It also allows a writer to break up the tone a bit and just ... well, cut away from the main action.
Instead of talking about what makes a protagonist interesting, let’s think about what the protagonist is there in the story for.
Here’s the key sentence of this article, so memorise it:
‘A story is the set of choices its protagonist makes’.
This sounds ridiculously reductive. It is. You can’t really sum up the whole of human literature in a sentence. What you can do, though, is bring clarity to your OWN storytelling if you keep that sentence in mind.
So mull on that a while. In the next post, I’ll give some worked examples.
Tuesday, 1 July 2008
Behold My Awesome Psychic Powers
The cover for The Eyeless has been released, and it looks a little something like this:
I love that cover. It's striking, dramatic, the Doctor looks exactly right for the story. It'll really stand out on the shelf, I think.
Now ... one thing that has changed since the olden days is that the cover is now approved by the Doctor Who production office before the author gets sight of it. Nothing terribly sinister or surprising about that, to be honest - Doctor Who is now a multi-million pound business, and all the various books and toys and DVDs and so on have to have a house style and - above all else - someone has to make sure things aren't clashing with each other. I suspect the actors involved have to approve their likenesses and so on, too.
I've always written the blurb (the words on the back cover), and I did still do that for The Eyeless. It's about a hundred words. A lot of writing is a balancing act, where the writer has two things to do and needs to negotiate between them. With the blurb, it's a balancing act between trying to tell the reader what the book is about without giving away the whole of the story.
So ... anyway, prepare to be dazzled by my amazing psychic powers.
I was wondering about the cover, and I doodled a sketch. I'd had no contact with the cover artist (Lee Binding), and presumably he worked from my synopsis - he couldn't have worked from the finished book as I hadn't delivered it at that point. Just as I finished my sketch, I got an email with the cover on it.
Here's my sketch (I've mentioned in a previous post my inability to draw):
and just to remind you:
Isn't that extraordinary? It's like when Uri Geller gets someone to put a drawing in an envelope and then uses his amazing telepathic powers to literally read the mind of the person, then draws the same thing. Which is always a house.
So I can't draw, but I am one of the Tomorrow People. Awesome.
I love that cover. It's striking, dramatic, the Doctor looks exactly right for the story. It'll really stand out on the shelf, I think.
Now ... one thing that has changed since the olden days is that the cover is now approved by the Doctor Who production office before the author gets sight of it. Nothing terribly sinister or surprising about that, to be honest - Doctor Who is now a multi-million pound business, and all the various books and toys and DVDs and so on have to have a house style and - above all else - someone has to make sure things aren't clashing with each other. I suspect the actors involved have to approve their likenesses and so on, too.
I've always written the blurb (the words on the back cover), and I did still do that for The Eyeless. It's about a hundred words. A lot of writing is a balancing act, where the writer has two things to do and needs to negotiate between them. With the blurb, it's a balancing act between trying to tell the reader what the book is about without giving away the whole of the story.
So ... anyway, prepare to be dazzled by my amazing psychic powers.
I was wondering about the cover, and I doodled a sketch. I'd had no contact with the cover artist (Lee Binding), and presumably he worked from my synopsis - he couldn't have worked from the finished book as I hadn't delivered it at that point. Just as I finished my sketch, I got an email with the cover on it.
Here's my sketch (I've mentioned in a previous post my inability to draw):
and just to remind you:
Isn't that extraordinary? It's like when Uri Geller gets someone to put a drawing in an envelope and then uses his amazing telepathic powers to literally read the mind of the person, then draws the same thing. Which is always a house.
So I can't draw, but I am one of the Tomorrow People. Awesome.
Wednesday, 18 June 2008
Practicing Prestidigitation on Pretend Pachyderms
In the comments section, Neil Shurley asked:
"So. About this 1000 word synopsis. How close do you end up sticking to it? Walker Percy, I believe, made a comment once (seriously paraphrasing here) about writing being no fun if you already know in advance where it's going. But most folks, I think, benefit from having an ending in mind. But, anyway, all that being said, I'm curious about how much you end up drifting from your initial synopsis over the course of writing the novel. I suspect it differs from project to project, but I also wonder if you're contractually bound to follow the synopsis you've delivered."
This is a good question, and touches on a number of things.
Contractually, I have to deliver a book that’s like my synopsis. In practice, as Tolkien put it, ‘the tale grew in the telling’. There’s a major character in The Eyeless who’s not in the synopsis at all, another who does all the same things for completely different reasons. I dropped one big thing about the monsters: they were going to have a strict caste system, with strictly defined roles. I had it all worked out and had drawn pictures of the various castes and everything. I dropped it not because it’s an SF cliché and invariably rubbish, but because it just didn’t really go anywhere when I came to write it down. They spent far more time explaining the caste system than doing anything with it. One bit that I thought would take up chapters and chapters ended up being half a chapter long. When the title changed, I decided I needed to introduce the Eyeless themselves a little earlier. The ending hits all the same basic beats and points, but is quite different from the original plan. Justin Richards – Series Consultant/my editor is a writer, an extremely prolific one, and knows that these things happen. So ‘like’ doesn’t have to mean ‘identical’. There’s no doubt at all that the synopsis and the final book are ‘like’ each other. And, in the end, no editor worth his salt will ever say ‘that works at every level and doesn’t clash with our other plans … but isn’t like the synopsis, so change it’.
Now … the rules are different when you're writing for a series with lots of different authors, particularly one based on a TV series that the books are running alongside. If you’re an established author writing your own standalone book, with your own characters and so on, your publisher probably won’t require you to write a synopsis.
But The Eyeless is one of three Doctor Who books coming out on the same day, and that’s the day after a television episode. It’s the thirtysomethingth book of the range. The tenth Doctor books aren’t a ‘series’ like the New Adventures and Eighth Doctor books, which told an ongoing story – they’re all self-contained adventures … but they are all part of a range, and lots of people read them all.
The synopsis is a quick way to make sure that the stories are all sufficiently different. In a series that’s been running as long as Doctor Who, it’s very easy to come up with an historical character or setting or type of monster that’s been in a story before (it's harder not to, at times). All series and genres have formulae and only tell certain types of stories – Doctor Who is a great deal more flexible than most (Paul Cornell once said ‘the format is there’s no format’), but I don’t think I’m being massively controversial when I say that there are some old stalwarts – the alien invasion; the base under siege; the planet that seems nice but is secretly ruled by aliens; the everyday object that turns deadly as part of the invasion plans; a shipwrecked alien having to kill to survive. In any given year, the Doctor will face evil insects, evil robots and aliens disguised as people. There will be stories set in the past, present and future. It’s the rules.
Individual writers, though, won’t know what the other writers are up to. Not at first. Now, obviously part of my job is to come up with something … well, let’s be polite and call it ‘original’. It’s not original in the true sense of the word – it’s more like coming up with something that you assume no one else will be doing at the moment. If the editor has a synopsis he can say things like ‘don’t end it with a big shoot out, a lot of books recently have done that’ or something like that.
Once the book is commissioned, the synopsis is very useful to the various marketing and sales people. The cover has to be designed while the book is still being written, so the artist has to work from the synopsis (I’ll be talking about my cover soon).
There may be people – other writers, even – who read that and think that novelists shouldn’t be worried about commercial stuff. Surely, they say, novelists are artists and should be free range and organic and dancing around meadows, and so what I’ve just described makes me the writing equivalent of a battery hen. No wonder these books end up in supermarkets.
Well, they’re wrong for any number of reasons, but let’s just pick one: once it’s been approved, the synopsis actually frees me from all the ‘commercial stuff’. I can get on with my writing, confident that all the marketing and publicity and editorial people know what they’ll be getting and are happy with it. That’s all sorted out before I’ve written a word my readers will read.
But …
I also think there are at least two obvious advantages to having a synopsis whatever you’re writing. I think new and aspiring writers should at least try writing a synopsis before they set out trying to write a novel.
Firstly, it's much, much easier to change a synopsis than a novel. This is obviously true physically - if you write and rewrite and edit 10,000 words, then throw it away and write another 10,000 words ... that all takes time – weeks, at least. But I think the main advantage is an emotional one: you can get very fond of your writing. There’s a bit of description you really love, or a joke, or a character … but that section of the book isn’t working. Instead of biting the bullet and throwing it away and starting again, you get the urge to tinker and juggle things around and rework. It becomes all too easy to throw good money after bad.
It's very hard to get emotionally attached to a synopsis. The ending doesn't work? Come up with a different one. In the end, you’re changing a couple of sentences, not a couple of chapters. And the prose is usually pretty functional.
Secondly ... it's easier to see the problems. Novels are big and complex and take months to write. You make thousands of little decisions, all the time, and it's very easy to end up drifting a little off course. Sometimes you'll end up in a more interesting place - often, though, you'll just be getting lost.
But even before you set off, if you have the plot laid out in front of you, you can see where the problems are likely to be. There are always weak moments. Bits where you write ‘she decides to trust the Doctor’ when there’s no real reason for her to do that other than you need them to work together now, or ‘the Doctor suddenly reveals that’, where what you’re really saying is that the Doctor doesn’t earn the knowledge, he’s kind of known it all along.
Top tip: when you’re plotting something, if the word ‘suddenly’ appears, you’re probably doing something wrong. I’ll explain why in a later post.
The trick isn’t always to eliminate plot holes, it’s often to understand where they are and hide them. Authors use the same basic trick as stage magicians – distraction. Look at my right hand. My right hand is doing something really interesting with a handkerchief, ooh ooh, look at my right hand. While you’re busy looking at that, my left hand is slipping the playing card into your pocket. Telling a story is exactly the same sort of thing – controlling and limiting the information the audience is receiving. Getting you to ask the wrong question, withholding the one piece of information you really, really need to see what’s really happening.
There’s a massive plot hole in the greatest movie of all time, Star Wars. A stupid one. One that defies all logic. One that you’ve probably never noticed (although the writer of the radio version did and tried to plug it). Our heroes escape from the Death Star, Princess Leia says that the escape was too easy, that they’re clearly being tracked and then says … let’s got to the Rebel base. The one that the Imperials have spent the whole movie looking for and have no other way of locating. They lead the Death Star to Yavin. And know that’s exactly what they’re doing. Which is pretty dumb.
Now, George Lucas is a genius. Yes he is. If you don’t agree, leave – we don’t serve your kind in here. He distracts the audience with the space battle, the mourning of Ben, Han teasing Luke about Leia. That bit of the movie works brilliantly as a nice, short gap between the action of the Death Star escape and the big space battle at the end. Even though it’s people just sitting around, it moves so fast, there’s so much else going on, that you’ve seen that movie loads of times and never noticed the ‘plot hole’. Although I’d wager a lot of you will be telling your mates about it now.
It is, in the end, basically the same trick that Arnie uses in Last Action Hero when he’s surrounded by an army of mobsters – he points behind them and shouts ‘look – an elephant’, then runs away while everyone’s looking for it. Writers point at a lot of imaginary elephants.
The synopsis allows an author to see the story laid out without the distractions, allows him to see if there’s stuff that doesn’t work. There’s then the choice of either fixing it, or burying it. In the case of Star Wars, getting the Death Star to Yavin for the final act was the important thing, and made for a much better story than any alternative way of doing things.
I saw a lot of synopses for the New Adventures when I was researching the Virgin version of A History of the Universe. Some writers, like Andrew Cartmel, sent in vast chunky things – I think the one for Warchild was about thirty pages, complete with dialogue samples and so on. He clearly preferred to have it all mapped out before he started. Gareth Roberts and Ben Aaronovitch preferred two or three pages, get the strong basic idea down, then build on it.
Writers all write differently. They all have their own tricks and ways of getting the job done. Kelly Hale recently said in her blog that she never reads when she writes … I do the complete opposite, almost pathologically. Some authors swear blind that they just start writing and don’t know where the characters will take them. That sounds reckless and crazy to me, like jumping off a cliff and then trying to work out what to do next.
In the end, the reader never sees the synopsis. In the end - while it's often preferable - it doesn't matter if the creators of some story all got along, or whether the writer had fun doing it, what matters is the end result.
"So. About this 1000 word synopsis. How close do you end up sticking to it? Walker Percy, I believe, made a comment once (seriously paraphrasing here) about writing being no fun if you already know in advance where it's going. But most folks, I think, benefit from having an ending in mind. But, anyway, all that being said, I'm curious about how much you end up drifting from your initial synopsis over the course of writing the novel. I suspect it differs from project to project, but I also wonder if you're contractually bound to follow the synopsis you've delivered."
This is a good question, and touches on a number of things.
Contractually, I have to deliver a book that’s like my synopsis. In practice, as Tolkien put it, ‘the tale grew in the telling’. There’s a major character in The Eyeless who’s not in the synopsis at all, another who does all the same things for completely different reasons. I dropped one big thing about the monsters: they were going to have a strict caste system, with strictly defined roles. I had it all worked out and had drawn pictures of the various castes and everything. I dropped it not because it’s an SF cliché and invariably rubbish, but because it just didn’t really go anywhere when I came to write it down. They spent far more time explaining the caste system than doing anything with it. One bit that I thought would take up chapters and chapters ended up being half a chapter long. When the title changed, I decided I needed to introduce the Eyeless themselves a little earlier. The ending hits all the same basic beats and points, but is quite different from the original plan. Justin Richards – Series Consultant/my editor is a writer, an extremely prolific one, and knows that these things happen. So ‘like’ doesn’t have to mean ‘identical’. There’s no doubt at all that the synopsis and the final book are ‘like’ each other. And, in the end, no editor worth his salt will ever say ‘that works at every level and doesn’t clash with our other plans … but isn’t like the synopsis, so change it’.
Now … the rules are different when you're writing for a series with lots of different authors, particularly one based on a TV series that the books are running alongside. If you’re an established author writing your own standalone book, with your own characters and so on, your publisher probably won’t require you to write a synopsis.
But The Eyeless is one of three Doctor Who books coming out on the same day, and that’s the day after a television episode. It’s the thirtysomethingth book of the range. The tenth Doctor books aren’t a ‘series’ like the New Adventures and Eighth Doctor books, which told an ongoing story – they’re all self-contained adventures … but they are all part of a range, and lots of people read them all.
The synopsis is a quick way to make sure that the stories are all sufficiently different. In a series that’s been running as long as Doctor Who, it’s very easy to come up with an historical character or setting or type of monster that’s been in a story before (it's harder not to, at times). All series and genres have formulae and only tell certain types of stories – Doctor Who is a great deal more flexible than most (Paul Cornell once said ‘the format is there’s no format’), but I don’t think I’m being massively controversial when I say that there are some old stalwarts – the alien invasion; the base under siege; the planet that seems nice but is secretly ruled by aliens; the everyday object that turns deadly as part of the invasion plans; a shipwrecked alien having to kill to survive. In any given year, the Doctor will face evil insects, evil robots and aliens disguised as people. There will be stories set in the past, present and future. It’s the rules.
Individual writers, though, won’t know what the other writers are up to. Not at first. Now, obviously part of my job is to come up with something … well, let’s be polite and call it ‘original’. It’s not original in the true sense of the word – it’s more like coming up with something that you assume no one else will be doing at the moment. If the editor has a synopsis he can say things like ‘don’t end it with a big shoot out, a lot of books recently have done that’ or something like that.
Once the book is commissioned, the synopsis is very useful to the various marketing and sales people. The cover has to be designed while the book is still being written, so the artist has to work from the synopsis (I’ll be talking about my cover soon).
There may be people – other writers, even – who read that and think that novelists shouldn’t be worried about commercial stuff. Surely, they say, novelists are artists and should be free range and organic and dancing around meadows, and so what I’ve just described makes me the writing equivalent of a battery hen. No wonder these books end up in supermarkets.
Well, they’re wrong for any number of reasons, but let’s just pick one: once it’s been approved, the synopsis actually frees me from all the ‘commercial stuff’. I can get on with my writing, confident that all the marketing and publicity and editorial people know what they’ll be getting and are happy with it. That’s all sorted out before I’ve written a word my readers will read.
But …
I also think there are at least two obvious advantages to having a synopsis whatever you’re writing. I think new and aspiring writers should at least try writing a synopsis before they set out trying to write a novel.
Firstly, it's much, much easier to change a synopsis than a novel. This is obviously true physically - if you write and rewrite and edit 10,000 words, then throw it away and write another 10,000 words ... that all takes time – weeks, at least. But I think the main advantage is an emotional one: you can get very fond of your writing. There’s a bit of description you really love, or a joke, or a character … but that section of the book isn’t working. Instead of biting the bullet and throwing it away and starting again, you get the urge to tinker and juggle things around and rework. It becomes all too easy to throw good money after bad.
It's very hard to get emotionally attached to a synopsis. The ending doesn't work? Come up with a different one. In the end, you’re changing a couple of sentences, not a couple of chapters. And the prose is usually pretty functional.
Secondly ... it's easier to see the problems. Novels are big and complex and take months to write. You make thousands of little decisions, all the time, and it's very easy to end up drifting a little off course. Sometimes you'll end up in a more interesting place - often, though, you'll just be getting lost.
But even before you set off, if you have the plot laid out in front of you, you can see where the problems are likely to be. There are always weak moments. Bits where you write ‘she decides to trust the Doctor’ when there’s no real reason for her to do that other than you need them to work together now, or ‘the Doctor suddenly reveals that’, where what you’re really saying is that the Doctor doesn’t earn the knowledge, he’s kind of known it all along.
Top tip: when you’re plotting something, if the word ‘suddenly’ appears, you’re probably doing something wrong. I’ll explain why in a later post.
The trick isn’t always to eliminate plot holes, it’s often to understand where they are and hide them. Authors use the same basic trick as stage magicians – distraction. Look at my right hand. My right hand is doing something really interesting with a handkerchief, ooh ooh, look at my right hand. While you’re busy looking at that, my left hand is slipping the playing card into your pocket. Telling a story is exactly the same sort of thing – controlling and limiting the information the audience is receiving. Getting you to ask the wrong question, withholding the one piece of information you really, really need to see what’s really happening.
There’s a massive plot hole in the greatest movie of all time, Star Wars. A stupid one. One that defies all logic. One that you’ve probably never noticed (although the writer of the radio version did and tried to plug it). Our heroes escape from the Death Star, Princess Leia says that the escape was too easy, that they’re clearly being tracked and then says … let’s got to the Rebel base. The one that the Imperials have spent the whole movie looking for and have no other way of locating. They lead the Death Star to Yavin. And know that’s exactly what they’re doing. Which is pretty dumb.
Now, George Lucas is a genius. Yes he is. If you don’t agree, leave – we don’t serve your kind in here. He distracts the audience with the space battle, the mourning of Ben, Han teasing Luke about Leia. That bit of the movie works brilliantly as a nice, short gap between the action of the Death Star escape and the big space battle at the end. Even though it’s people just sitting around, it moves so fast, there’s so much else going on, that you’ve seen that movie loads of times and never noticed the ‘plot hole’. Although I’d wager a lot of you will be telling your mates about it now.
It is, in the end, basically the same trick that Arnie uses in Last Action Hero when he’s surrounded by an army of mobsters – he points behind them and shouts ‘look – an elephant’, then runs away while everyone’s looking for it. Writers point at a lot of imaginary elephants.
The synopsis allows an author to see the story laid out without the distractions, allows him to see if there’s stuff that doesn’t work. There’s then the choice of either fixing it, or burying it. In the case of Star Wars, getting the Death Star to Yavin for the final act was the important thing, and made for a much better story than any alternative way of doing things.
I saw a lot of synopses for the New Adventures when I was researching the Virgin version of A History of the Universe. Some writers, like Andrew Cartmel, sent in vast chunky things – I think the one for Warchild was about thirty pages, complete with dialogue samples and so on. He clearly preferred to have it all mapped out before he started. Gareth Roberts and Ben Aaronovitch preferred two or three pages, get the strong basic idea down, then build on it.
Writers all write differently. They all have their own tricks and ways of getting the job done. Kelly Hale recently said in her blog that she never reads when she writes … I do the complete opposite, almost pathologically. Some authors swear blind that they just start writing and don’t know where the characters will take them. That sounds reckless and crazy to me, like jumping off a cliff and then trying to work out what to do next.
In the end, the reader never sees the synopsis. In the end - while it's often preferable - it doesn't matter if the creators of some story all got along, or whether the writer had fun doing it, what matters is the end result.
Tuesday, 10 June 2008
Become A Published Author **Guaranteed**
Some discussion on The Forum Formerly Known as Outpost Gallifrey about 'the Challenge'.
http://www.doctorwhoforum.com/showthread.php?t=183189&page=2
The 'challenge' is, as I say there, the challenge I faced, writing the book. If people want to try taking on the challenge, please feel free. But I'm not asking people to write a whole novel in six months.
It would be a fun exercise for people reading this to try writing the 1000 word synopsis now, though. Better still, when this blog ends on Boxing Day, it might be fun to try again. Hopefully you'll do a much better job second time around because of all the wonderful things you've learned.
I think a week to ten days is a perfectly sensible timescale for those 1000 words. So ... if you're going to try, try getting it finished sometime next week.
Now ... what I've done here is lay out the guidelines I was given. There were no sealed orders to be kept away from the eyes of muggles or whatever. You've been told what I was told.
I already know what most people will get wrong. The guidelines are very simple, but people will ignore one or more of them. I've said, for the purpose of the exercise, that you use Donna as a companion. Someone, somewhere has decided they don't like Donna, so they'll use Martha. Well ... send that into Justin, he'd reject it out of hand. Or, if he was feeling kind, ask you to rewrite it for Donna. Someone's decided that they're doing it for fun, so they've put the Daleks in it ... well, again, instant rejection. Or, if the idea's great, a very swift email saying 'try doing the same story, but with new monsters'. If it was a good Dalek story, that should be almost impossible.
The rules are transparent. The things I set out in The Challenge post are the non-negotiables. If you find yourself negotiating with them, you're doing something wrong.
Writing a novel isn't a thought experiment. It's a series of concrete choices. You decide to do one thing, not to do ten others. The end result isn't a vague set of ideas about what your story should be, it's the story.
Which is great ... because the great enemy of the writer is the idea that writing is what you are, not what you do. You wouldn't call yourself a plumber if you had vague ambitions one day to do some plumbing. You're a writer if you write.
These days, it's never been easier to be a writer. Hell, I'm being a writer just now by typing away. Here's my gift to everyone here: reply to this post and become a published writer. Assuming I don't moderate the comment, so try not to libel any comics creators.
What's more difficult is to be read.
Over at www.despair.com there's a great T-Shirt reading 'More People Have Read This Shirt Than Your Blog'. It is probably true of most blogs. Oh, and they also sell this, http://www.despair.com/pessimistsmug.html,, which is great.
I'm hoping to offer some really useful tips to improve your writing and storytelling. But above all, I hope to be able to show that the real art is in being read.
http://www.doctorwhoforum.com/showthread.php?t=183189&page=2
The 'challenge' is, as I say there, the challenge I faced, writing the book. If people want to try taking on the challenge, please feel free. But I'm not asking people to write a whole novel in six months.
It would be a fun exercise for people reading this to try writing the 1000 word synopsis now, though. Better still, when this blog ends on Boxing Day, it might be fun to try again. Hopefully you'll do a much better job second time around because of all the wonderful things you've learned.
I think a week to ten days is a perfectly sensible timescale for those 1000 words. So ... if you're going to try, try getting it finished sometime next week.
Now ... what I've done here is lay out the guidelines I was given. There were no sealed orders to be kept away from the eyes of muggles or whatever. You've been told what I was told.
I already know what most people will get wrong. The guidelines are very simple, but people will ignore one or more of them. I've said, for the purpose of the exercise, that you use Donna as a companion. Someone, somewhere has decided they don't like Donna, so they'll use Martha. Well ... send that into Justin, he'd reject it out of hand. Or, if he was feeling kind, ask you to rewrite it for Donna. Someone's decided that they're doing it for fun, so they've put the Daleks in it ... well, again, instant rejection. Or, if the idea's great, a very swift email saying 'try doing the same story, but with new monsters'. If it was a good Dalek story, that should be almost impossible.
The rules are transparent. The things I set out in The Challenge post are the non-negotiables. If you find yourself negotiating with them, you're doing something wrong.
Writing a novel isn't a thought experiment. It's a series of concrete choices. You decide to do one thing, not to do ten others. The end result isn't a vague set of ideas about what your story should be, it's the story.
Which is great ... because the great enemy of the writer is the idea that writing is what you are, not what you do. You wouldn't call yourself a plumber if you had vague ambitions one day to do some plumbing. You're a writer if you write.
These days, it's never been easier to be a writer. Hell, I'm being a writer just now by typing away. Here's my gift to everyone here: reply to this post and become a published writer. Assuming I don't moderate the comment, so try not to libel any comics creators.
What's more difficult is to be read.
Over at www.despair.com there's a great T-Shirt reading 'More People Have Read This Shirt Than Your Blog'. It is probably true of most blogs. Oh, and they also sell this, http://www.despair.com/pessimistsmug.html,, which is great.
I'm hoping to offer some really useful tips to improve your writing and storytelling. But above all, I hope to be able to show that the real art is in being read.
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