Writing Advice: Scenes and Sequels

So I've talked big for a few weeks, analyzed some books, and gathered advice. Now let's try and put some of this into work eh?

So let's start witht he before. For this exercise, I'm simply looking at the piece I wrote for Fiction Writing last semester. So here are the scenes as written:

1. Cat is learning to cast magic, she fails
2. Cat and Michael are walking home, get confronted by Sam about how they treat non-mages
3. Minister of Technocrats (non-mages) poison's Cat's mom in a meeting
4. She then dies
5. Funeral, Cat follows Sam to a Sim parlor
6. Michael and Cat fight over whether or not to go to war, Cat is banished
7. Cat is now on the mean streets, fights with a street urchin (Finn)
8. Cat's attacked by a technocratic platoon, saved by Michael
9. Michael convinces Cat to lead an attack on generators
10. Adrielle visits, offers living metal
11. Attack, Cat kills Sam (traitor)
12. Cat visit's Adrielle, Living metal in exchange for burning down the city
13. Cat burns down the city

In this story, I tried starting out with the last scene, and then working up to it from a discourse standpoint. This was largely a failure, and just left everyone confused. And because of my lack of sequels, everyone said my characters were a bit weak.

I realize that most of you won't have any idea what's going on here. This peice started out as a short story to set the stage for the 3rd novel in my series. The characters in the world are:

• Caitlin (Cat) Beltane - So I started her out as just a girl, a mage. Somehow during the inception of the story, she turned into a princess. Apparently I have problems with scope. Her power's fire.
• Michael Bordine - Cat's best friend / cousin. When she became a princess, he became a Lord. His power's water.
• Samuel Nits - A rival of Cat's, afaik no relation. His power's Shadow.

A couple minor characters as well. Living metal is this idea I've been playing with of a semi-sentient metal which can change it's shape to match the bearer's need. The idea was brought up in the first book, and during the second book, the antagonist stole it. The antagonist is the character who shows up in the end of the story, Adrielle.

The third novel takes place in a futuristic world, where the world has been torn apart by war. The mages and the mundanes (Technocrats) have been fighting for years, and it shows no sign of abating. The purpose of this short story was to set up this war. By giving the Mages the living metal, Adrielle has tipped the balance of the war, and the third novel will be, in part, about setting it right.

Sequels

So let's start by describing Sequels. A sequel is a chance for a character to react to the last Conflict (scene). According to Jim Butcher, a Sequel has 4 basic parts: 

1. Emotional Reaction - The character needs to react to what happened
2. Review, Logic, and Reason - The character reviews facts and works through to a conclusion
3. Anticipation - The character starts to think about their next step
4. Choice - The character chooses his next action, and this sets up the next scene

Scenes offer emotions to your story, add color, and affect the pacing of your story. Longer scenes, shorter sequels = action story. Adding in micro-sequels can warm up the tone of your novel (more emotional), in cool (e.g. classical PI novels), no emotions are shown outside of sequels. But they're always present. 

Scenes

So I haven't spoken about Scenes at all. We all have a basic idea of what a scene is. I've actually been trying to define them more solidly for my research. On one hand, you have a certain amount of locality, in terms of time, space, characters. I'll admit, this is what I thought going into Butcher's article on scenes. So I was wrong. Very wrong. Scenes are not just about locality, they're about conflict. A scene is where you challenge your character, while they try and get something they want.

A scene has 3 major components, though Butcher lists 4. The first, Point of View Character (POVC) is important, but I don't see it as a component so much as something to make note of.

The 3 components are:

1. Goal - Your POVC wants something.
2. Conflict (Scene Question) - Another character wants to deny POVC what he wants. While in lit classes, we learn that there are many types of conflict, Butcher maintains there's only 1, between characters. Man vs Nature or w/e is bunk.
3. Setback - POVC doesn't get what he wants. More particularly, there are 4 answers
1. Yes - Character gets what he wants. This can get boring
2. Yes... But - Character gets what he wants, but something goes wrong. Much more interesting.
3. No - Solid denial, also can be boring, but better than Yes
4. No, and Furthermore - He claims this is the most interesting. I might agree. Character doesn't get what he wants, and manages to mess things up for himself more.

Conclusions

So I've given a pre, and a segment about Scenes and Sequels. I intended to start the replotting process, but that'll have to wait for another time.

Writing Experiment: Scenes and Sequels

So I had this entire experiment planned. I started working on it, but it was harder than I expected. That being said, I still gleaned some interesting information.

As part of this experiment, I looked at the first chapter of two books: Fool Moon by Jim Butcher, and Haunted by Kelley Armstrong. The goal was to split the first chapter into scenes and sequels. I wanted to see if this Scene and Sequel idea transfered between authors. I also wanted to get an idea for how many scenes & sequels fit into a chapter. In my first draft, I tended towards the several (usually around 5), but I also had no sequels (leading to the common conception that my characters were flat and underdeveloped).

So both of the books I looked at seemed to have roughly 1 scene and 1 (short) sequel in the chapter. The second chapter was starting to look similar, but I didn't manage to go into more detail. Still, short entry and food for thought.

Writing Experiment: Characters

So I've posted a few pieces about writing advice. Let's try taking some of it, or at least using it. So let's take a look at one of my charactes from my book, and try and flesh her out a bit.

First though, let's see which portions I'm going to nab.

Goals / Motivation / Conflict / Stakes
This is a good first step, and I think it'll be a good start to the character.

Concept

I'll probably start with this one. Having a quick summary of the character can't hurt.

Tags & Traits
So i like the idea, but I don't know if I'll take it quite as far. One of the things I want is that Magic in my world will leave a sign, a Tell, as well as a tattoo of power. I got this idea from the RPG Sorcerer. So I'll include a tell and a tattoo. Since this is a fantasy novel, and there will be some martial conflict, I will also include a signature weapon, and the two main manifestations of her magic.

I might revisit Tags & Traits later, depending on how this works out.

The Character: Jeshi, the Bloodmage

For the purposes of the exercise, let's only try and stat her out in terms of the second book, since she's the narrator. I picked her, rather than the narrator of the first book, because I've a less clear picture of her.

• Concept - A girl lost her memories to chaos magic. Magic finds her and brings her back on the quest. 
• Goals - Find the lost city of Atlantis / Find the Crystal Sword / Find the cure for the sickness
• Motivation - Save her ex / Restore the royal bloodline
• Conflict - Adrielle is summoning daemons / Jeshi doesn't remember her own power
• Stakes - Kale's life / Rule of Chaos / Loss of the blood of Kings
• Tell - Fire-red eyes, hair turns to flame under strong emotion
• Tattoo - Fire on the palms of her hands
• Weapon - Spear
• Element - Fire
• Power - Blood (Can mimic another power w/ sample of their blood.)

Well, it certainly seems like a start. I'm not sure I could writer her any better now. Maybe tags and traits won't be a bad idea after all. But I've already spent a whole day on this, and so I should let the post stand for a moment and think about it. 

Writing Advice: Characters

While plot is an important piece of a story, many would argue that the characters are even more so. The biggest complaint about both my first novel and my piece for the fiction writing class was that my characters are weak, so how can I strengthen them up?

A couple things have been bouncing around in my head, but we'll get to that later. First let's see what some more successful people than me have to say about it.

Chuck Wendig
So I've talked about Chuck before. He's not a famous novelist, but he's published short stories and does a lot of work with White-Wolf (the people who make Mage, the game I'm so enamored with).

His advice on character building starts with a concept sentence. A sentence or 3 that boils down the characters to their essential purpose. His second big piece is a story arc for that character. How does she evolve or change over the course of the story? Then you list a bunch of surface details, what's the person's life like. Then you go deeper, and talk about why they are the way they are.

Jim Butcher
Jim Butcher takes a much more simplistic view for building characters, though he argues for interesting characters just as hard as Chuck. He argues for the inclusion of 4 simple pieces.

•  Exaggeration - The character has to have something that makes them more interesting than the average person. Shakespeare was also a huge fan of this one, from what I remember of HS English.
• Exotic Position - In addition to being out of the ordinary, your character should be in an exotic position. One of the examples included a young woman in a high orbit shuttle, or Mr Incredible working in the insurance company.
• Introduction - The character should be introduced in a manner which completely typifies who he is. This establishes the charcters personality right off the bat.
• Verisimilitude - They should act believably. This one isn't really a surprise, but he goes into more details about how this can be achieved.
•  Emotion - Reaction - Decision. - The character should excibit all three of these throughout the story
• Tags  & Traits - Tags are words that are only used to describe that character, and traits are characteristics, could be props or features, manarisms, anything. 
• Empathy - No real tips on how to get this one, but the hope is that if you hit the other 4, you have a shot at this one.

He argues that most of this work happens in Sequels (which are not just 2nd, 3rd, etc. books, but also the reaction to a scene (where conflict happens)).

Kelley Armstrong

I mentioned that I found her posts online, but this is the first one I've had a chance to write about. In her post Outlining 102b, she gives her own approach to making characters.

1. The first step is a variation on a Psychological model I'll talk about in a bit. A character needs 4 things:
1. Goal - What are they trying to accomplish?
2. Motivation - Why do they want it?
3. Conflict - What's stopping them?
4. Stakes - What happens if they Fail.
2. GMCS should also have internal/external manifestations. 
3. Rather than make exhaustive lists, she likes to just include a paragraph about what the person's like
4. Last step, take the plot and tell it from the POV of each of your major characters. Not the whole novel, just a quick synopsis. 

Other Models

There are lots of place to take other ideas. One of the ones I've been looking at recently, given my hobbies, is Tabletop Role-Playing games. While traditional games involve very external stats (strength, intelligence, etc.) some of the newer story-intesnive games have been trying to add mechanicial benefits for looking deeper into your character. 

(new) World of Darkness rpgs include Virtue and Vice as part of the character creation. The virtue is one of the 7 heavenly virtues that your character aspires to, and Vice is one of the 7 deadly sins that holds your character back. Doesn't mean you can't use all of them, just which typifies your reactions. In addition, merits and flaws let you state mechanicially how your character is different from the norm, very similar to tags & traits from Jim Butcher's work.

Burning Wheel is another game I've been investigating recently. This one attributes 3 beliefs and 3 instincts to your character. Beliefs can range from concrete goals to ideals. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the mechanics, but they're there.

The Savage Worlds system, in particular the Deadlands setting, ask you to list your characters worst fear.

There are many others that I just haven't played, so I can't comment much. 

Another option is to look at psychological literature. One of the models that shows up in psychology, computer science (especially embodied agents research), is a simple 3-part model: Beliefs, Desires and Intentions. This is very similar to the Goal / Motivation / Conflict model. Beliefs and Desires affect the goals, and Intentions describe the rankings of beliefs and desires, to handle the case when two of them are in conflict. 

One of my friends,Kim, has mentioned that she likes to talk about her characters fears, and what happens when they are pushed to the extreme. This hits bits and pieces of what has been listed before, but in different ways. 

My fiction writing class talked about using two types of descriptions: Physical and Personal. Physical descriptions are external, and Personal describes different pieces of their personality, as expected. I'm looking back over my decisions there and realized that I didn't actually use any of them. Not a single thing came into my story.

Conclusions

So those are the pieces of advice that I've collected over the past couple months. The funny thing is none of these are mutually exclusive. Taking bits and pieces of each one might make for a very complete character portrait.

Now that I've talked a little bit about different types of advice, I think it's time to put my nose to the grindstone and actually try some of these planning activities. Look for it in the next week or so.

Book Reviews

I've recently finished two books. 

The Magicians
The first one is The Magicians by Lev Grossman. The basic premise is Harry Potter meets Narnia. The protag is one of those pompus smart kids (Whether I am one as well or not is up for debate) who has this "I'm fed up with life" attitude. He's constantly looking for an escape. It starts off with escaping in reading, and then a harry-potter like school of sorcery.

The premise is pretty interesting, and well executed. The characters attitude and hedonism got to me a couple of times, but it brings up an interesting question: If magic lets you do anything, what do you do to keep yourself occupied? After graduating from school, there's another instance of world-hopping, which kind of threw me for a loop. One alternate / hidden reality is one thing, but two is pushing it for me.

The other interesting thing about the plot is the pacing. The antagonist is very absent throughout the story. The conflict in the novel is very much focused on the character and his search for the right escape. At first I thought it was an interesting pacing choice, but it yielded one of those "I am villain, hear me roar" speeches that seemed out of place.

Angelic
The second book was Angelic by Kelley Armstrong. I'm a huge fan of Armstrong's work, she manages to hit all the right buttons to make me enjoy a book. This work was a novella, from my favorite narrator, the Half-Demon/Witch Eve.

I love the character, even though SOMEONE (*coughcoughsushicough*) said she sounded like a Mary Sue. The plot's pretty simple on this one, a bag & tag for the Fates. Despite being novella-sized, however, there's some nice twists to keep you guessing. Dropping the dime on Jeremy kinda threw me for a loop, I didn't remember that in her other books, but it might have been in the Anthology I missed. Still great story, as always. Finding her outlining course online was a big win, thank's to Tez Miller for pointing that out to me. That will be given it's own post in a few days.