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writing-prompts-for-friends · 4 years

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Notes on Stephen King’s “On Writing” 09: Finding the Courage to Push On

Where is the final segment of this book going? I think that many writers struggle justifying why they write. I certainly do. Even though we don’t really owe anyone an explanation as to why we write, some of us feel a certain guiltiness for some of the following reasons:

We have been told that the life of an artist is thankless and poverty-stricken

“Daydreaming” is not productive

We have been told by people we trust/respect that our works will never get us anywhere and it’s a waste of time

We believe that we lack talent or inspiration

We (mistakenly) believe that imagination and artistry do not contribute to society like working a 9-5 job does

I’m sure there are more, but these are the ones that I grapple with from time to time.

Stephen King ends his book detailing the accident that nearly killed him, and how writing was what pulled him back from the brink of despair. It was intensely painful for him to sit for prolonged periods, but he forced himself to bear the pain and write, and that was how he managed to climb his way back to his old self. He details the first time he tried to write after the accident and multiple surgeries:

“There was no miraculous breakthrough that afternoon, unless it was the ordinary miracle that comes with any attempt to create something. All I know is that the words started coming a little faster after awhile, then a little faster still. My hip still hurt, my back still hurt, my leg, too, but those hurts began to seem a little farther away. I started to get on top of them. There was no sense of exhilaration, no buzz--not that day--but there was a sense of accomplishment that was almost as good. I’d gotten going, there was that much.

“The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.”

So why do we write? What urges us to put pen to paper and show our dreams to others? What good does writing bring us?

“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Some of this book--perhaps too much--has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it--and perhaps the best of it--is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.

“Drink and be filled up.”

Source: King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Hodder, 2012.

Final Words

Write because you have something you want to say, be it serious or trivial. Write because you need an escape. Write because you think others need an escape. Write because you feel it is your calling. Write because it brings you joy.

You need no justification to write other than it makes you happy.

So pick up that pen and don’t stop. ❤

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writing-prompts-for-friends · 4 years

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Notes from Stephen King’s “On Writing” 08: Research

Disclaimer: This book was originally published in 1998, before the massive internet boom. There are a lot of valid points here, but take some of it with a grain of salt.

“We need to talk a bit about research, which is a specialized kind of back story. And please, if you do need to do research because parts of your story deal with things about which you know little or nothing, remember that word back. That’s where research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it. You may be entranced with what you’re learning about flesh-eating bacteria, the sewer system of New York, or the IQ potential of collie pups, but your readers are probably going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.”

When King sits down to write his first draft, the one he doesn’t show to anyone, he doesn’t care about whether things are factual. He just makes up the stuff he doesn’t know. Who cares if the Pennsylvania State Police don’t actually follow the protocol you’ve specified? It’s the rough draft. You can figure out the right stuff later.

When I read this section, I got the feeling that King likes to write with as little outside interference as possible, even if that “interference” is research. In other words, he likes to dump the whole story out onto the paper and then tidy up the mess afterwards.

I feel that this method is both good and bad:

Merit: You are less likely to get sidetracked by the bottomless rabbit hole that is Wikipedia, and will in theory be able to write quicker without less distractions that arise from research turned into web-surfing.

Demerit: If an important part of the story hinges on something that winds up being incorrect/impossible upon further research, you could find yourself in a heap of trouble and looking at a lot of revision.

Personally, I’m the kind of person who wants to know everything about everything (as if this tumblr or my main one on Japanese weren’t evidence enough lol). Especially with the temptation of google, I often find myself spending hours researching minor details of stories. Did I have to spend 5 hours reading about galleons (the ships, not the coinage in Harry Potter) to write that one chapter that had a fight on a pirate ship? ...No. No, I did not. Lol.

I think the only time I personally advocate a very thorough stint of research is when you are writing about a character that actually existed and you want to maintain some historical facts about them. I spent umpteen hours of research on Vlad the Impaler, Romania, the Ottoman Empire, and the Romanian language itself for a particular story, and I feel like it paid off. I had fun doing it too.

“The tale I have to tell in Buick Eight has to do with monsters and secrets. It is not a story about police procedure in western Pennsylvania. What I’m looking for is nothing but a touch of verisimilitude, like the handful of spices you chuck in a good spaghetti sauce to really finish her off. That sense of reality is important in any work of fiction, but I think it is particularly important in a story dealing with the abnormal or paranormal. Also, enough details--always assuming they are the correct ones--can stem the tide of letters from picky-ass readers who apparently live to tell writers that they messed up.”

Mood, Mr. King. Big mood. After having done all that research on Vlad the Impaler, I got ripped apart by a reviewer by saying, “How dare you say that Dracula would kill his wife upon turning into a vampire. He was a diehard romantic and his wife killed herself upon his death.” Well, certainly that is how Bram Stoker wove his tale of Vlad and his wife in Dracula, but the truth is that his wife remarried after he was executed, as was common of nobles in those centuries. Go look at Wikipedia. And in the story I was writing, my Dracula’s character was based more on the true life events of Vlad than of what Bram Stoker fabricated. Dracula was a pretty nasty mean dude full of anger when he was turned into a vampire, and I had him seek out all of his betrayers as soon as he became a vampire. Because that’s what I thought he would have done, if he had actually become a vampire just before his execution. Sue me.

In this age of the internet where anybody can become a self-certified know-it-all of any topic, it’s nigh impossible to avoid catching shit from someone because we’ve written something incorrect. Whatever. A story is a lie made to tell a truth. Of course you’ll have some little lies peppered in there (intentionally or unintentionally) that will get noticed. No one is perfect, and that’s okay.

Source: King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Hodder, 2012.

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writing-prompts-for-friends · 4 years

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Notes from Stephen King’s “On Writing” 07: The Revision Process

Next, King walks us through his revision process. He makes it clear that this method is not the only method. It is merely a method.

How Many Drafts?

“For me, the answer has always been two drafts and a polish (with the advent of word-processing technology, my polishes have become closer to a third draft).”

King admits that this number of drafts is not the golden rule. Kurt Vonnegut rewrote each page of his novels until he got them exactly the way he wanted them. This meant that when the manuscript was finished, the book was finished. (I certainly am not that big of a perfectionist, nor am I that patient lol.)

For beginner writers in particular, King offers the following advice:

“Let me urge that you take your story through at least two drafts; the one you do with the study door closed and the one you do with it open.

“This first draft--the All-Story Draft--should be written with no help (or interference) from anyone else. There may come a point when you want to show what you’re doing to a close friend because you’re proud of what you’re doing or because you’re doubtful about it. My best advice is to resist this impulse. Keep the pressure on; don’t lower it by exposing what you’ve written to the doubt, the praise, or even the well-meaning questions of someone from the Outside World. Let your hope of success (and your fear of failure) carry you on, difficult as that can be. There’ll be time to show off what you’ve done when you finish...but even after finishing I think you must be cautious and give yourself a chance to think while the story is still like a field of freshly fallen snow, absent of any tracks save your own.”

Basically, King just wants you to get it all out onto the paper, with no external forces influencing you (for better or for worse). Just get that first draft out, and then open it up for closer examination both to yourself and others.

Let It Breathe and Then Dig In!

Okay, so you finished writing the first draft! Celebrate! Rejoice! Maybe cry!

...And then throw that manuscript into a drawer, lock it up tight, and don’t look at it for a minimum of six weeks. And in the meantime, do something totally unrelated to what you wrote. Get into knitting. Write a short story that is nothing like what you just finished. It’s consumed you for months now--so give your mind and imagination some time to reset and chill.

King recommends a minimum of six weeks, but even longer is okay. Resist all temptation to peek at it. And once the six weeks have passed, do the following:

“Take your manuscript out of the drawer. If it looks like an alien relic bought at a junk-shop or a yard sale where you can hardly remember stopping, you’re ready. Sit down with your door shut, a pencil in your hand, and a legal pad by your side. Then read your manuscript over.

“Do it all in one sitting, if possible. Make all the notes you want, but concentrate on the mundane housekeeping jobs, like fixing misspellings and picking up inconsistencies. There’ll be plenty; only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, ‘oh well, let it go, that’s what copyeditors are for.’

“If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layover to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings than it is to kill your own.”

You’ll also be on the lookout for any glaring holes in the plot or character development. And if you spot any of these big holes, you are forbidden from feeling depressed about them. Don’t be hard on yourself. Everybody makes mistakes, and they can all be fixed.

Generally King goes through the first reading fixing all the superficial issues, like typos and unclear antecedents. But as he’s doing that, he’s also asking himself the Big Questions:

Is this story coherent?

If it is, what will turn coherence into a song?

What are the recurring elements?

Do they entwine and make a theme?

What’s it all about?

“Most of all, I’m looking for what I meant, because in the second draft I’ll want to add scenes and incidents that reinforce that meaning. I’ll also want to delete stuff that goes in other directions. There’s apt to be a lot of that stuff, especially near the beginning of a story, when I have a tendency to flail.”

I can understand what King is saying here about the flailing at the beginning. Because I do not plot when I write, I have ideas that crop up halfway through that would require being introduced earlier, for example. Or perhaps as my understanding of the characters evolved as I wrote more, I realize that they behaved out-of-character earlier on. This is certainly one downside to not plotting. But isn’t is also kinda liberating to be able to take detours and wind up at a different but equally interesting destination?

Okay. So go ahead and fix all of the issues you found, and your first revision is complete.

Second Opinions and the Second Revision

“Do all opinions weigh the same? Not for me.”

Now you’re done with the first draft. You’ve patched over any plot holes and smoothed out those typos and grammar mistakes. You’ve polished the symbols and themes until they shine.

Once this is done, King gives a copy of work to his wife and several close friends (4-8) to receive detailed feedback. In other words, he has several close friends beta for him.

“Many writing texts caution against asking friends to read your stuff, suggesting you’re not apt to get a very unbiased opinion from folks who’ve eaten dinner at your house and sent their kids over to play with your kids in your backyard.

“The idea has some validity, but I don’t think an unbiased opinion is exactly what I’m looking for. And I believe that most people smart enough to read a novel are also tactful enough to find a gentler mode of expression than ‘This sucks.’ Besides, if you really did write a stinker, wouldn’t you rather hear the news from a friend while the entire edition consists of a half-dozen Xerox copies?”

What he gets back is 4-8 very detailed and different analyses of what he wrote. What’s very important to remember is that every reader looks at a work through a different lens. If half of them say a character’s portrayal is far-fetched but the other half say the opposite, than their feedback regarding that point has balanced out. However, if the majority of them say that something doesn’t work, then King goes back and sees if he can improve it.

Also, different readers pick up on different details. This is the age of internet and now we are able to check facts whenever we like, but it is still nice to have something of a subject matter expert on hand, because they are liable to pick up on details that the writer may not.

For example, I often beta fanfiction for anime. I am fluent in Japanese, live in Japan, and have studied Japanese culture and history. While I would never claim to be a “subject matter expert” on Japan, I am able to make certain corrections regarding, say, the type of kimono a character should be wearing, that the writer would not have considered.

It’s very easy to accept feedback that deals with facts (i.e. a beta corrects you on the standard procedures for CPR). However, it’s much harder to handle subjective feedback (i.e. “The ending felt inconclusive.”). Having put as much work as you have into creating this, it can feel like a personal attack because this story is a very dear part of you. What do you do if your beta tells you something like this?

“Subjective evaluations are, as I say, a little harder to deal with, but listen: if everyone who reads your book says you have a problem, you’ve got a problem and you better do something about it.

“Plenty of writers resist this idea. They feel that revising a story according to the likes and dislikes of an audience is somehow akin to prostitution. ... But come on, we’re talking about half a dozen people you know and respect. If you ask the right ones, they can tell you a lot.

“Do all opinions weigh the same? Not for me. In the end I listen most closely to [my wife], because she’s the one I write for, the one i want to wow. If you’re writing primarily for one person besides yourself, I advise you pay very close attention to that person’s opinion. And if what you hear makes sense, then make the changes. You can’t let the whole world into your story, but you can let in the ones that matter the most. And you should.”

I think, especially in the age of prolific fanfiction in which the author usually updates as they write the story, the author feels a lot of pressure from their readers. Readers chomping at the bit for the main characters to have a naughty scene, or demanding to know about that one secret thing that you keep alluding to. A lot of fanfic writers struggle to tow the line of “writing a good story based on reader feedback” and “pandering.”

My advice to fanfic writers out there is to tell those thirsty readers to read a one-shot if they’re looking for a quick fix of smut, and to have some goddamn patience. You’re trying to tell a story, one that builds and progresses, and that takes time. Don’t give in to those “OMG MAKE THEM KISS ALREADY” reviews. But if a lot of readers say something like, “I feel like this character wouldn’t do that,” then perhaps you should re-evaluate that.

On Pace and Reducing Glut

“Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.”

So now you have your first draft done. You have your feedback from your trusted betas. And now you need to go and make the final changes.

King states that you should rely on your most trusted betas to gauge whether or not your story is paced correctly and if you’ve handled the back story in satisfactory fashion. “Pace” is the speed at which your narrative unfolds.

”There is a kind of unspoken (hence undefended and unexamined) belief in publishing circles that the most commercially successful stories are novels are fast-paced. I guess the underlying thought is that people have so many things to do today, and are so easily distracted from the printed word, that you’ll lose them unless you become a kind of short-order cook, serving up sizzling burgers, fries, and eggs over easy just as fast as you can.

“But you can overdo the speed thing. Move too fast and you risk leaving the reader behind, either by confusing or by wearing him/her out. ... I believe each story should be allowed to unfold at its own pace, and that pace is not always double time. Nevertheless, you need to beware--if you slow the pace down too much, even the most patient reader is apt to grow restive.”

So how can you strike a happy medium? Rely on your most trusted betas and their input. King says, “Every story and novel is collapsible to some degree. If you can’t get out ten percent of it while retaining the basic story and flavor, you’re not trying very hard. The effect of judicious cutting is immediate and often amazing. You’ll feel it and your betas will too.”

On backstory, King issues some opinions and advice:

It’s important to get the backstory in as quickly as possible, but it’s also important to do it with some grace.

A reader is more interested in what’s going to happen instead of what already did.

Even when you tell your story in a straightforward manner, you’ll discover you can’t escape at least some backstory.

“The most important things to remember about backstory are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don’t get carried away with the rest.”

Source: King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Hodder, 2012.

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writing-prompts-for-friends · 4 years

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Notes from Stephen King’s “On Writing” 06: How to Create Symbolism and Themes

Symbolism

“Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create a sense of artificial profundity.”

Having been an English major, I can’t even count how many times I’ve had to “analyze the symbolism” or “identify and discuss the themes” of a work. It seems that any classic, any “Good Book” must have themes and symbols. So how do we go about weaving those into our stories?

If you set out with a plot, it would be easy to calculate the best places to insert those symbols and build theme. But if you are like Stephen King and you don’t plot, what do you do?

Rest assured, he’s explained his method to us.

“Mostly I don’t see stuff like [symbolism] until the story’s done. Once it is, I’m able to kick back, read over what I’ve written, and look for underlying patterns. If I see some (and I almost always do), I can work at bringing them out in a second, more fully-realized draft of the story.”

I had a very similar experience with one of my own works. I started writing a story based on an idea and just let it take me where it wanted to go. It ended up being a bit over 200,000 words when it was all said and done, and when I read through it afterwards, I realized that the whole thing had essentially been about me trying to grapple with my identity and isolation as an outsider, being a white girl in Japan who is fluent in Japanese. There were certain symbols and themes that I had unknowingly sprinkled through the story. A second draft would help me hone and polish those.

“Symbolism doesn’t have to be difficult and relentlessly brainy. Nor does it have to be consciously crafted as a kind of ornamental Turkish rug upon which the furniture of the story stands. If you can go along with the concept of the story as a pre-existing thing, a fossil in the ground, then symbolism must also be pre-existing, right? Just another bone (or set of them) in your new discovery. That’s if it’s there. If it isn’t, so what? You’ve still got the story itself, don’t you?

“If it is there and if you notice it, I think you should bring it out as well as you can, polishing it until it shines and then cutting it the way a jeweler would cut a precious or semiprecious stone.”

So just go ahead and write your story. Don’t get too bogged down in having to create symbols and theme and deepness. Once you’ve put your pen down and the dust has settled, see what you can find within the story. Symbolism can help to focus both you and the reader, creating a more unified and pleasing work. So if you can find the hints of it within your first draft, during the second draft work on bringing it out more.

Theme

“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”

King approaches theme in much the same way he approaches symbolism in his works. He writes the entire book, reads it again, and asks himself why he bothered, why he spent all that time, why it seemed so important to him.

“It seems to me that every book--at least every one worth reading--is about something. Your job during or just after the first draft is to decide what something or somethings yours is about. Your job in the second draft--one of them, anyway--is to make that something even more clear. This may necessitate some big changes and revisions. The benefits to you and your reader will be clearer focus and a more unified story. It hardly ever fails.”

Personally I balk at the idea of making big changes to what I wrote. It’s a reason why I never went back and revised the above story I mentioned. I knew that if I went back and changed a few things, I could have made the themes more evident and flowing, but...well. I was tired lol. And I had no intentions of publishing it anyways. Though if I really do want to publish something someday, big revisions are an unfortunate but necessary aspect of writing.

A Caution About Theme

“Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.”

Everyone has their own beliefs, interests, and concerns that have arisen from their experiences and adventures in life, and King encourages you to use them in your works. However, he does not believe that you should start out with a theme and build a story around it.

To be honest, I’m not sure that I agree with King on this. (I know, who am I to disagree with him?) But hear me out. I’m a big Neil Gaiman fan, and during his MasterClass course, he spoke about how he had a particular experience that made him want to create a children’s story with the message of “Being brave means doing something even when you’re scared.” The story that was born of that theme was Coraline.

I think that if you have a theme, even if it is a rough one, in mind when you set out to write a story, it could help direct you and your characters. Then again, I’ve never had a single book published, so I respectfully digress haha.

Source: King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Hodder, 2012.

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writing-prompts-for-friends · 4 years

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Notes from Stephen King’s “On Writing” 05: Description, Dialogue, Creating Characters

Description

"Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's."

We all know that too much description robs the reader of their imagination and bores them, yet too little description leaves them confused and scratching their heads. So how can we strike a middle ground with confidence?

"Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how to, you see; it's also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing."

King says that he personally doesn't like to provide detailed descriptions of how his characters look. He would rather have the reader supply their faces, builds, and clothing. To exemplify, he says:

"If I tell you that Carrie White is a high school outcast with a bad complexion and a fashion-victim wardrobe, I think you can do the rest, can't you? I don't need to give you a pimple-by-pimple, skirt-by-skirt rundown. We all remember one or more high school losers, after all; if I describe mine, it freezes out yours, and I lose a little bit of the bond of understand I want to forge between us. Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's."

Maybe it's because now more than ever we are obsessed with visual media, be it TV or film or social media, but I personally feel a need to give detailed physical descriptions of my characters. Does anyone else feel the same? But what King said really made a lot of sense to me--by keeping the descriptions of the characters non-distinct, we allow the readers to fill in the gaps and make a character that is even more relatable to them. I think that's genius.

On the other hand, King feels that locale and texture are more important to the reader's sense of actually being in the story. Describe the region the story takes place in (but don't go full Tolkein on your readers, please). Paint a picture of the house and town in broad, distinct strokes.

"For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else. In most cases, these details will be the first ones that come to mind. Certainly they will do for a start. If you decide later on that you'd like to change, add, or delete, you can do so--it's what rewrite was invented for. But I think you will find that, in most cases, your first visualized details will be the truest and best. It's as easy to overdescribe as it is to underdescribe. Probably easier."

So let's say that you want to use a certain real-life restaurant as the setting of a scene in your story. This is a restaurant that you have actually frequented. Now close your eyes and picture that place. What are the first 4-5 things that come to your mind? Could be how to looks or smells, what sort of clientele is usually there, anything. Take those 4-5 details and only use those to describe the place in your writing. Let the reader do the rest of the work.

"In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling."

Oh man, I really agree with this. I quit reading LotR because I just couldn't force myself through another description of goddamn rivers and valleys.

On the Use of Similes

"When it's on target, a simile delights us in much the same way meeting an old friend in a crowd of strangers does."

When we compare two seemingly unrelated objects, we are sometimes able to see an old thing in a new and vivid way. But you have to make sure that the simile makes sense and isn't cliched. Don't use "he ran like a madman" or something. Come up with your own.

"The key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary."

There are a lot of authors that do a great job describing things like king says, but there is one specific line from Neil Gaiman's Coraline that stands out to me. Coraline has just discovered the hallway that leads to the Other House, and the sentence describes the hall.

"It smelled like something very old and slow."

Simple vocabulary, yet very fresh. I love this sentence and its eeriness.

Dialogue

"It's dialogue that gives your cast their voices, and is crucial in defining their characters--only what people do tells us more about what they're like, and talk is sneaky: what people say often conveys their character to others in ways of which they--the speakers--are completely unaware."

You can explain through narration or backstory that a character didn't do well in school or didn't finish it, but you could also demonstrate that through dialogue. Conversely, you can show just how smart they are, or how honest/dishonest, lighthearted/serious they are through dialogue alone.

Have you ever read dialogue that makes you think, "Man, nobody talks like this!" because it feels so stilted or forced? I'm certain you have. So how can we prevent ourselves from crafting dialogue that feels inauthentic?

"Dialogue is a skill best learned by people who enjoy talking and listening to others--particularly listening."

Picking up the accents, rhythms, dialect, and slang of various groups helps give your writing a certain veracity that readers pick up on instinctually.

A Word on Political Correctness in Dialogue/Characters

"As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty."

King says that not a week goes by that he doesn't get an angry letter accusing him of being foul-mouthed, bigoted, homophobic, murderous, frivolous, or downright psychopathic, and usually the people writing these letters are upset about certain lines of dialogue within his stories.

Sometimes you are going to have a character that holds unpleasant opinions and uses unpleasant words to get them across. That doesn't necessarily mean that what the character believes/says is what you believe. And, in my own opinion, I think it is important to have these non-pc characters in our stories. How can we combat ignorance if we do not draw attention to it? Sweeping it under the rug does nothing but prolong the problem.

So if a character is prone to swearing, don't substitute their expletives for words like "shoot" or "dang." Have them say "shit" or "damn." If a character is a homophobe, have them vocalize their sentiments if the scene deems it appropriate. Don't censor your characters.

Building Characters

"The job of building characters in fiction boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth about what you see."

Take note of the people around you. Many fictional characters are drawn piece by piece from people in real life. For King, what happens to his characters as the story progresses depends solely on what he discovers about them as he goes along. Sometimes their character grows only a little. But other times, their characters grow a so much that they influence the course of the story instead of the other way around.

"I think the best stories always end up being about people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven. Once you get beyond the short story, though (two to four thousand words, let's say), I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character study; I think in the end, the story should always be the boss."

Most readers want to see not only a progression in plot, but also in character development, so trying to have both of those is important.

"It's also important to remember that no one is 'the bad guy' or 'the best friend' or 'the whore with a heart of gold' in real life; in real life we each of us regard ourselves as the main character, the protagonist. If you can bring this attitude into your fiction, you may not find it easier to create brilliant characters, but it will be harder for you to create the sort of one-dimensional dopes that populate so much of pop fiction."

King goes on to explain how when he wrote Misery, a novel about a crazy nurse who holds her favorite author Paul Sheldon hostage in her remote house, he went to great lengths to give the reader a view of the nurse Annie Wilkes' perspective. To us, she seems psychopathic. But to her, she seems perfectly sane and reasonable.

"If I can make you understand her madness--then perhaps I can make her someone you sympathize with or even identify with. The result? She's more frightening than ever, because she's close to real. If, on the other hand, I turn her into a cackling old crone, she's just another pop-up bogeylady. In that case, I lose bigtime, and so does the reader. Who would want to visit with such a stale shrew? That version of Annie was old when The Wizard of Oz was in its first run."

What is really boils down to is making sure that each of your characters are three-dimensional within your own mind. As long as they feel like real people in your head, capable of making rational decisions and feeling rational emotion (as fits their unique nature), that should be able to be seen by the reader as the story unfolds.

On Creative Liberties

“Try any goddamn thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t toss it. Toss it even if you love it. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch once said, ‘Murder your darlings,’ and he was right.”

Write however you want. Use whatever techniques you want. Have fun with it. It’s yours before it is anybody else’s. And you can’t please all the readers all the time, but if you can come out happy with the end product, surely you can please some of the readers some of the time, and that is enough.

Source: King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Hodder, 2012.

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Notes from Stephen King’s “On Writing” 04: How to Write Your Story: Choosing Genre and Plotting

What Should You Write About?

“Anything you damn well want. Anything at all...as long as you tell the truth.”

“Write what you know,” is what we’re always told. But what if we want to write about space ships or a serial killer, neither of which we (hopefully) have no firsthand experience/knowledge of? Remember that while you may not have firsthand experience of what you want to write about, the extent of your knowledge does not end with what you have done all your life. The heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Also, Google.

What genre should you write? Whatever genre you like most, of course. Even if it’s niche.

“What would be very wrong, I think, is to turn away from what you know and like in favor of things you believe will impress your friends, relatives, and writing-circle colleagues. What’s equally wrong is the deliberate turning toward some genre or type of fiction in order to make money. It’s morally wonky, for one thing--the job of fiction is to find the truth inside the story’s web of lies, not to commit intellectual dishonesty in the hunt for the buck. Also, brothers and sisters, it doesn’t work.”

So don’t write the next Twilight because you wanna make big bucks. Write the next Twilight because you have a thing for iridescent chupacabras and your heart is begging you to bring the love story of “Everyday Girl” and “Angsty Mysterious Sexy Iridescent Chupacabra” to life in the page.

Also, if you want to write in the style of one of the Big Authors, like, say, Stephen King or John Grisham or J.K. Rowling because they made it big and you want to make it big, King invites you to rethink that.

“Stylistic imitation is one thing, a perfectly honorable way to get started as a writer (and impossible to avoid, really; some sort of imitation marks each new stage of a writer’s development), but one cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what that writer is doing my seem. People who decide to make a fortune writing like John Grisham or Tom Clancy produce nothing but pale imitations, by and large, because vocabulary is not the same thing as feeling and plot is light-years from the truth as it is understood by the mind and the heart.”

Write what you like and make it your own creation by imbuing it with life and your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. But just remember that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story.

Plotting

"Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest."

I was incredibly surprised to learn this, but King does not plot out his books. He distrusts plots for two reasons:

Our lives are largely plotless

Plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren't compatible.

Basically, King believes that stories create themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow.

In an interview for The New Yorker, King told the interviewer that he believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground.

"Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it's enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.

"No matter how good you are, no matter how much experience you have, it's probably impossible to get the entire fossil out of the ground without a few breaks and losses. To get even most of it, the shovel must give way to more delicate tools: airhose, palm-pick, perhaps even a toothbrush. Plot is a far bigger tool, the writer's jackhammer. You can liberate a fossil from hard ground with a jackhammer, no argument there, but you know as well as I do that the jackhammer is going to break almost as much as it liberates. It's clumsy, mechanical, anticreative. Plot is, I think, the good writer's last resort and the dullard's first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored."

I feel like a lot of what King said in this section is controversial, but I personally was delighted to read it. I have never been able to plot stories. Knowing what lies ahead takes all the joy out of writing for me. But I had always thought that writing a story was like building a house--you needed a blueprint before you could start. This made me feel that my writing was inferior, because here I was just running around building houses without a blueprint and sometimes forgetting to add doors to rooms and making steps uneven.

So how does King go about writing these novels of his if he doesn't plot? He relies on intuition, mostly. He comes up with a certain situation. Then the characters materialize, flat and unfeatured at first. Once those two things are fixed in his mind, he starts writing. He puts that group of characters in the situation and then watches them try to work free. He believes that his job is not to help them work their way free or manipulate them to safety--those jobs require the jackhammer of plot--but to watch what happens and then write it down.

Sometimes he has an idea of where he wants things to go, but most of the time the outcome is something that he did not expect.

"If I'm not able to guess with any accuracy how the damned thing is going to turn out, even with my inside knowledge of coming events, I can be pretty sure of keeping the reader in a state of page-turning anxiety. And why worry about the ending anyway? Why be such a control freak? Sooner or later every story comes out somewhere."

I love King's laid-back approach at storytelling. I'm biased, though, because it is identical to my own, and I feel incredibly validated by it. Every story I have ever written has started with a scenario or "what if?" question that popped into my head, and then the characters appeared, and then I began writing it. Most of my works are novel-length, about 200,000 words or more (if I finish them). Just like King, I often have an idea of how I want things to go, and I usually have a vague ending in mind, or a few scenes that I know I want to put in, and I just let the characters do their thing and lead me there. Sometimes it goes how I expect, and other times it doesn't, and that is what makes writing fun for me.

As I have learned firsthand, the downside to not plotting things, however, is that ideas spring up in the middle of the story that require foreshadowing and inlaying in previous sections. Serious polishing is required after writing a story in this manner, and King says that each novel was smoothed out and detailed by the editorial process. (More on that later!)

Source: King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Hodder, 2012.

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Notes from Stephen King’s “On Writing” 03: How to Write

Now that King has laid out the tools before us, he sits down and tells us exactly how he goes about his craft. He acknowledges that everyone writes differently, and that how he writes may not jive with you, and that is okay. He is just walking us through what he does, and you can take what you want and leave what you don’t.

How to Summon Your Muse

“There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.”

Read a Lot and Write a Lot

“We read to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us to recognize those things when they begin to creep into our own work, and to steer clear of them. We also read in order to measure ourselves against the good and the great, to get a sense of all that can be done. And we read in order to experience different styles.”

Man, I probably can’t even count how many times I’ve seen this piece of advice. But the fact that I’ve seen it this much means that it must be right, I guess. In particular, King advises us to read bad books, as the bad stuff is usually more glaring than the good, and we can learn from that.

He also says that reading bad things can provide us positive inspiration.

“Most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?”

Certainly, I have to agree with him.I remember the first time I was deflowered with bad fiction.

King also advises us to read good books, because we can learn about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling.

On Finding Time to Read

It’s not that we don’t want to read, it’s that we just don’t have the time to read when we’re working and have other obligations and also want to write. So how do we find the time to read? King says:

“The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows.”

Especially with the advent of e-books, it is easier now than ever to have a book on hand at all times. Read in waiting rooms, in transit, in the checkout line, on the treadmill, and the bathroom. Read when you have an hour to yourself on Sunday. Just read when you can.

On the Importance of Reading

“The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing. ... Constant reading will pull you into a place (a mindset, if you like the phrase) where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness. It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn’t, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen.”

This makes a lot of sense. From personal experience, even though English is my native language and I love reading and writing, I stopped reading English for leisure when I moved to Japan. I poured all of my free time into learning Japanese, and I consumed only written Japanese media for about three years. When I went to pick up a pen again, it felt like a foreign object in my hand. My prose was clunky, the words were stop and start, and I was forgetting words. Especially since I spend a good 90% of my day in Japanese now, I make it a point to come home and read in English every night, and I have seen an improvement.

How Much to Write?

Okay, so we know that we have to “read a lot” and “write a lot,” but let’s quantify that. (This is the specificity that I really love in this book.)

King prefaces this section by making it clear that all authors work at different paces. James Joyce sometimes wrote just seven words a day. There was this dude Anthony Trollope who wrote for 2.5 hours every morning before work and stopped even if he was mid-sentence when time was up. If he finished writing a book before the 2.5 hours was finished, he would close that manuscript and start writing the next one. What a machine.

Also, just how many works must a person write to become a Real Writer? Harper Lee only wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. (I know a sequel has been released since King’s book was published, but don’t we all want to forget that sequel exists anyways?) This guy John Creasey wrote five hundred novels under ten different names.

So how long your works are and how many works you have is your choice. You do you. But if you’re good at it and you love it, don’t put down that pen!

Writing Schedule

King writes in the morning, takes naps in the afternoon, and spends time with his family in the evenings. That sounds like a dream come true to most of us that are still working a 9-5 and writing on the side. But that’s what he does now.

To put things more concretely, he says that he has a strict 2,000 minimum that he must write every single day. Even if it’s like pulling teeth, even if it takes longer than he hoped, he does not stop until he has 2,000 new words on the page.

King also believes that the first draft of a book, even a long one, should take no more than three months to write. (Personally I feel that could be difficult for everyone to do unless they have the ability to commit a certain amount of time everyday to writing no matter what.)

How to Keep Good Writing Habits

King gives us this advice.

Have a “writing room.” For King, this was the cramped laundry room while he wrote Carrie and Salem’s Lot. He isn’t telling you to add a room onto your house. Just have a space that is yours and free of distractions. Have a space that is designated for writing and nothing else, and make sure you can close the door to it.

Set a daily writing goal for yourself. Even if it’s as low as 100 at first, that’s fine. Just write every day no matter what. He says you can take one day off a week at first. But only at first.

Eliminate all possible distractions while writing. No phone, no TV, don’t even have the windows open (unless your view is boring). You can have music on if it helps filter out the outside world.

Have a schedule. Dedicate a certain time before or after work that will be “writing time.” Let’s say mine is 8 pm to 10 pm every day.

Don’t wait for the muse. In King’s words, “Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ‘til noon or seven ‘til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making his magic.” Sidenote: King’s muse doesn’t match muse stereotypes lol.

“I think we’re actually talking about creative sleep. Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. You schedule -in at about the same time everyday, out when your word goal is on paper - exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go. In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. You can train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.”

The above quote put a lot of things into perspective for me. I had never thought of writing like dreaming, but really, that is what it is. I have a desk that was meant for writing, but is actually for everything now. Eating, chatting with friends, surfing the web, and writing. It is very far from distraction-free. I also just write “when I feel like it,” which means that sometimes I have months-long or years-long dry spells. And that’s nothing but a shame.

So now I’m looking at getting another smaller, simpler desk to put in my bedroom, upon which I’ll put a tablet with no internet connection and a wireless keyboard. Maybe a notepad. Maybe. I’m not much of a note-taker. But I’ll put that in my bedroom, which really has just a bed and clothes, not even a clock, and I’ll push myself to write more every day, right there, from 8 pm to 10 pm.

Source: King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Hodder, 2012.

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Notes from Stephen King’s “On Writing” 02: Unpacking the Writer’s Toolbox

King begins the second half of his book with a story about his uncle’s toolbox, which had been built by his grandfather. It was so heavy that he couldn’t lift it as a boy, and when you opened it there were three tiers of tools, with the most commonly used tools on the top tier, and the least common at the bottom.

King says:

“I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you. Then, instead of looking at a hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work.”

Tool 1: Vocabulary

“Use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.”

What are writers without words? King cautions us that a writer’s vocabulary size does not equal the size of their talent. He shows us some godawful prose from various books, so chock-full of verbiage that they are hard to get through. Then he shows us the opposite: several examples of prose that are bare-bone yet beautiful.

King says, “One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.”

Obviously, if you are writing a Sherlock Holmes-like character, you will have to have a wide vocabulary on hand to match his character, but there is no point in dressing things up just for the sake of dress-up. After a certain point it feels artificial and forced.

King also recommends the use of phonetically rendered street vocabulary in dialogue, like “gonna,” for example. In using these strategically, you paint a better picture of the characters.

Tool 2: Grammar

“Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it’s the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.”

How many of you heaved a sigh at seeing the word “grammar” just now? lol

I actually didn’t take many notes about this section because I used to be an English teacher before I became a translator. Grammar is what my life has revolved around for the past decade or so now.

To broadly summarize, King says:

Learn the basics of grammar, please oh please.

You can use sentence fragments for impact. These can be one of your tools, but be careful not to overuse them.

Avoid the passive voice at all costs.It distances the reader from what is happening.

Limit the use of adverbs. In his words, “With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.”

In particular, King says that we should never use adverbs when describing dialogue. Just stick to verbs like “said,” “shouted,” “asked,” and let the scene and the characters (literally) speak for themselves. King also makes it clear that his favorite form of dialogue attribution is “said.” You should try to use it as much as possible.

Tool 3: Elements of Style

“Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.”

Grab a novel off your shelf--preferably one you haven’t read--flip to a random page, and take a look at the pattern. The lines of text, the margins, and most particularly the blocks of white space where paragraphs begin or leave off.

You can tell how easy or hard the text is by that alone, right?

King says, “Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as for what they say; they are maps of intent.”

Regarding the construction of a paragraph, King says that they should be neat and utilitarian. In expository paragraphs, we start with a topic sentence followed by others which explain or amplify this. This is how we are taught to write those awful essays from elementary school, after all.

However, in fiction, the paragraph isn’t as structured. Your words should flow like music on the page, having their own distinct rhythms and pauses that are natural within the melody you create. The more you read and write, the better you will get at finding this melody.

King believes that “the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing--the place where coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words.”

I think most writers think of the sentence as the basic unit of writing, so this was a new way to look at things for me. I like it, though. I have always paid attention to how the words look on the pages in the books I read and write. This is the extent of my visual artistry, but just as varying sentence length can add variety and spice to your writing, so too can paragraph length.

Source: King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Hodder, 2012.

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Notes from Stephen King’s “On Writing” 01: Selections from the First Half

The first half of King’s book is autobiographical. His childhood was very interesting to read about. Of course, even from a young age his mind revolved around writing. While the latter half of the book is where King shows us his toolbox of writing and how he practices the craft, there were still some gems of advice and inspiration to be found within the former half, which I will quote here.

Pg. 29, in regards to story ideas:

“Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

Pg. 46, on his feelings when a high school teacher found one of his sci-fi short stories he was circulating about the school and asked him whey he’d “write junk like this in the first place” when he was so talented. Why would he waste his abilities like this?

“I had no answer to give. I was ashamed. I have spent a good many years since--too many, I think--being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.”

☝ This really meant a lot to me. I started writing when I was in the second grade, and it wasn’t until I was in high school that I found an adult who encouraged me. My parents told me it was a waste of time, I’d be poor my whole life, that what I wrote was “weird.” Of course it was all garbage back then. I was in elementary school. To this day, as much as I love writing, I am too scared to share anything I write with anyone in my family. Maybe someday I can get over that.

Pg. 65, on striking a balance between being “artsy” and “meaningful”

“Good writing can be simultaneously intoxicating and idea-driven. ... Why shouldn’t writers be able to go bonkers and still stay sane?”

Pg. 66, his wife Tabitha explaining the meaning behind one of her poems:

“...Mankind [has a] troubling and wonderful habit of dreaming the right dreams at the wrong times.”

Pg. 77, regarding his wife’s constant support:

“Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference.”

Pg. 82, what he learned from writing Carrie:

“The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s. Running a close second was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing to do is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”

Pg. 117, a caution to would-be writers:

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair--the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. you can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page. ... If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you close this book and do something else.”

In my next post I’ll get into his knowledge and advice on writing.

Source: King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Hodder, 2012.

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Lessons Learned From Stephen King’s “On Writing”

In my ongoing quest to learn more about the craft of storytelling and improve my own writing abilities, I picked up Stephen King’s book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. It’s half-autobiography and half-solid advice. His tone is casual, as if my English professor invited me to his office after class to discuss a lecture topic further over a drink.

I started reading King’s works when I was in elementary school (not entirely sure why my mother handed me Carrie before I’d even had my first period tbh), and while I haven’t read all of his works, I have read a good handful of them and seen many film adaptions, and enjoyed them thoroughly.

Having read The Stand and It, neither of which are particularly brief books, I was expecting something much denser than the 351 pages in rather large print. It took the better part of a Saturday to read it, highlighting what I found enlightening, and ruminate over it after the fact.

King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Hodder, 2012.

Right now I’m also working my way through Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. I’m about 3/4 of the way done with it. I am finding both of these books incredibly helpful, but for very different reasons.

McKee’s book provides me so much technical information about exactly what goes into a good story and when and how it goes in, that at times it feels like a recipe book.

King’s book feels like my dad standing beside me in the kitchen, having me learn how to measure the ingredients with my hands and eyes and sense of taste.

Both have their merits, no doubt about it. McKee’s book is longer and gives the reader a wealth of information on the art of storytelling. There is a lot to learn, and it is easy to understand, but I often find myself reading and thinking, “Hmm okay, but how do I practically implement this knowledge?”

Whereas only half of King’s book actually provides his advice on writing and is much more vague than McKee, there were many times I thought to myself, “Ah, so that’s how I can go about this!”

I was also shocked to learn that my own writing process resembles King’s. He doesn’t believe in plotting. He starts with a situation, and then characters form, and then he sees what those characters do in that situation, and he lets the story go from there. That’s exactly what I do, with everything I’ve ever written. I have attempted to plot, because I understood this is what Writers do, but the moment I saw what would come to be listed out in bullet points, the fun of writing the story drained away immediately and I never touched the story again. For me, the joy of writing is close to the joy a reader feels the first time they pick up the book. I don’t want spoilers, I don’t want to know what happens next--I want to be surprised by what comes out of my pen.

So knowing that I’m not some savage, or at least that I have good company as a savage, was heartening.

I’ll be making a couple posts here in the near future summarizing the points of King’s book that I found helpful. I hope that they prove useful to you as well!

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Notes on Robert McKee’s “Story” 22: How to Create a Riveting Plot

There are five parts of any story:

The Inciting Incident

Progressive Complications

Crisis

Climax

Resolution

I covered McKee's advice regarding the Inciting Incident in my previous post, and today I'll be focusing on the next part: Progressive Complications.

This section relies on your understanding of the concept of "The Gap," which I covered in this post. I highly recommend you take a look at it.

This is the arc of events that starts with the Inciting Incident and brings us to the Crisis/Climax of the final act.

To "complicate progressively" means "to generate more and more conflict as they face greater and greater forces of antagonism, creating a succession of events that passes points of no return."

Points of No Return

When the Inciting Incident happens, the protagonist starts on a quest for a conscious or unconscious Object of Desire to restore life's balance. At first, he takes a minimum, conservative action to provoke a positive response from his reality. But the effect of his action is to arouse forces of antagonism from inner, personal, or social/environmental Levels of Conflict that block his desire, cracking open the Gap between expectation and result.

When the Gap opens, the audience realizes that this is a point of no return. Minimal efforts won't work. Henceforth, all actions like the character's first effort, actions of minor quality and magnitude, must be eliminated from the story.

Just imagine your standard superhero comic/film or action anime and you'll quickly see what McKee is saying. Let's use Captain America because I'm feeling patriotic. He starts off fighting small fries, right? Slowly proving his strength and his capability. He goes up in rank, taking on more dangerous missions at the risk of losing his life and the lives of his comrades, and the fights escalate one after another until he is finally against his nemesis Red Skull.

If Captain America went from defeating an entire warehouse full of Nazis and then suddenly had to do the same thing again, with no added risk or challenge, what would be the point of it? What new risk is there? What progression in the character is there? It'd just be the same situation with different faces.

This is also why we see so many cool action anime series peter out after the end of their great big boss battle. We watch the characters progress, fighting progressively stronger battles, with progressively greater risk, and then they finally manage to defeat their arch-nemesis. The audience feels that the protagonist has gone on a journey and it has come to a well-deserved end. But then the manga publishers or whoever look at the dollar signs and say, "Well you can't stop now! Come up with another bad guy!" And we are forced to watch this character somehow start from scratch again, and more often than not, it feels artificial.

"A story must not retreat to actions of lesser quality or magnitude, but move progressively forward to a final action beyond which the audience cannot imagine another."

"How many times have you had this experience? A film begins well, hooking you into the lives of the characters. It builds with strong interest over the first half-hour to a major turning point. But then forty or fifty minutes into the film, it starts to drag. Your eyes wander from the screen; you glance at your watch; you wish you'd bought more popcorn; you start paying attention to the anatomy of the person you came with. Perhaps the film gains pace again and finishes well, but for twenty or thirty flabby minutes in the middle you lost interest.

If you look closely at the soft bellies that hang out over the belt of so many films, you'll discover that this is where the writer's insight and imagination went limp. He couldn't build progressions, so in effect he put the story in retrograde. In Act Two he's given his characters lesser actions of the kind they've already done in Act One--not identical actions but actions of a similar size or kind: minimal, conservative, and by now trivial. The writer is recycling a story and we're treading water.

The only way to keep a work's current flowing and rising is research--imagination, memory, facts.”

The Law of Conflict

☝ I tell you what, most live-action adaptions of manga/anime really suck, but the live action Rurouni Kenshin movies are better than the anime. Seriously, the fight scenes were AMAZING. 10/10.

This is a rule that many of us were taught in high school lit classes, but allow me to restate it:

Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict.

“Put another way, conflict is to storytelling what sound is to music. Both story and music are temporal arts, and the single most difficult task of the temporal artist is to hook our interest, hold our uninterrupted concentration, then carry us through time without an awareness of the passage of time.

As long as conflict engages our thoughts and emotions we travel through the hours unaware of the voyage. ... The pictorial interest of eye-pleasing photography or the aural pleasures of a beautiful score may hold us briefly, but if conflict is kept on hold for too long, our eyes leave the screen. And when our eyes leave the screen they take thought and emotion with them.”

McKee stresses that the Law of Conflict does not apply only to literature; it applies to our own lives.

“Story is a metaphor for life, and to be alive is to be in seemingly perpetual conflict.

We live in time’s ever-shrinking shadow, and if we are to achieve anything in our brief being that lets us die without feeling we’ve wasted our time, we will have to go into heady conflict with the forces of scarcity that deny our desires.

Writers who cannot grasp the truth of our transitory existence, who believe that life is easy once you know how to play the game, give conflict a false inflection. Their scripts fail for one of two reasons: either a glut of meaningless and absurdly violent conflict, or a vacancy of meaningful and honestly expressed conflict.

The former are exercises in turbo special effects, written by those who follow textbook imperatives to create conflict, but, because they’re disinterested in or insensitive to the honest struggles of life, devise phony, overwrought excuses for mayhem.

The later are tedious portraits written in reaction against a conflict itself. These writers take the view that life would be really nice...if it weren’t for conflict. Therefore, their films avoid it in favor of low-key depictions to suggest that if we learned to communicate a little better, be a little more charitable, respect the environment, humanity could return to paradise.

Writers at these extremes fail to realize that while the quality of conflict changes as it shifts from level to level, the quantity of conflict in life is constant. Something is always lacking. Like squeezing a balloon, the volume of conflict never changes, it just bulges in another direction. When we remove conflict from one level of life, it amplifies ten times over on another level.

Life isn’t about subtle adjustments to stress, or hyperconflicts of master criminals with stole nuclear devices holding cities for ransom. Life is about the ultimate questions of finding love and self-worth, of bringing serenity to inner chaos, of the titanic social inequities everywhere around us, of time running out. Life is conflict. That is its nature. The writer must decide where and how to orchestrate this struggle.”

Complication Versus Complexity

At the surface level, both “complication” and “complexity” appear similar in meaning. But in the context of writing, they are two different technical terms, defined thus:

Complication: Refers to which of the three levels of conflict (inner, personal, or extra-personal) that are in the story.

A work that has complication has only one of the three levels of conflict. One that is Inner Conflict only would be a stream of consciousness work, free-form. A work with only personal conflict is a soap opera. And a work with only extra-personal conflict would be action/adventure, like James Bond.

Complexity: Refers to when all three levels of conflict are present in a work, often simultaneously.

Most of the stories we have read and movies we have watched have had complexity. Increasingly, we demand complexity of our characters. We want each character to be three-dimensional, with their own inner and personal conflicts, on top of extra-personal ones if applicable.

However, “complexity” doesn’t necessitate a cast of hundreds or scenes that span continents, per se. McKee gives us this advice when setting out to create a complex story:

“Design relatively simple but complex stories. ‘Relatively simple’ doesn’t mean simplistic. It means beautifully turned and told stories restrained by these two principles: Do not proliferate characters; do not multiply locations. Rather than hopscotching through time, space, and people, discipline yourself to a reasonably contained cast and world, while you concentrate on creating a rich complexity.”

Source: McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. York: Methuen, 1998. Print

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Notes on Robert McKee’s “Story” 21: How to Create a Great “Hook”

Today we’re going to delve into “the inciting incident.” You might also know it as “the hook.” It’s The Big Bang that kickstarts your story. Buckle up because this is an important (and slightly long) post.

The World of the Story

Before you start writing anything, you need to have a crystal clear idea of what your setting is. McKee talked extensively about setting earlier on in the book and I covered it in a post. I also created a World Building Questionnaire with over 100 questions to help you think deeply about your world before you begin writing. So I recommend that you check them out.

06 Setting and Avoiding Cliches

Questions to Help World Build

A couple more things you should consider about your setting are these:

“What are the biographies of my characters? From the day they were born to the opening scene, how has life shaped them?

What is the Backstory? “Backstory” is the set of significant events that occurred in the character’s past that the writer can use to build his story’s progressions. We landscape character biographies, planting them with events that become a garden we’ll harvest again and again.

What is my cast design? Each role must fit a purpose, and the first principle of cast design is polarization. Between the various roles we devise a network of contradictory attitudes. Ideally, each and every character would have a separate and distinctively different reaction to any given event, from something as trivial to a dropped glass to a death in the family. When characters act the same, you minimize the chance for conflict.”

The Inciting Incident

When you come up with your Premise (a.k.a. that spark of an idea that makes you want to write this new story), it doesn’t necessarily need to be the Inciting Incident. Maybe your Premise is the finale, or just a scene somewhere in the middle of the story that you need to build towards. So ask yourself: How do I set my story into action? Where do I place this crucial event?

Here are the necessary qualities of any Inciting Incident, as stated by McKee:

An Inciting Incident must be a dynamic, fully developed event, not something static or vague.

The Inciting Incident radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life. Before the Inciting Incident, the protagonist is living a life that’s more or less in balance. But this incident radically upsets the balance, throwing it into either negative or positive.

In most cases, the Inciting Incident is a single event that either happens directly to the protagonist or is caused by the protagonist. He is immediately aware that life is out of balance for better or worse.

The protagonist must react to the Inciting Incident. Even inaction in and of itself is a reaction, though the protagonist cannot remain inactive forever, because there would be no plot otherwise.

The Inciting Incident arouses the protagonist’s desire/need to restore balance, and this leads them to determine an Object of Desire: something physical or situational or attitudinal that he feels he lacks or needs to put the ship of life on an even keel.

The Inciting Incident propels the protagonist into an active pursuit of this object or goal.

*Bonus* For those protagonists that we admire the most, the Inciting Incident arouses not only a conscious desire, but an unconscious one as well. these complex characters suffer intense inner battles because these two desires are in direct conflict with each other. No matter what the character consciously thinks he wants, the audience senses or realizes that deep inside he unconsciously wants the very opposite.

The Spine of the Story

The energy of the protagonist’s desire forms the critical element of design known as the Spine of the story (a.k.a. Through-line or Super-objective). It is the deep desire in and effort by the protagonist to restore the balance of life.

No matter what happens on the surface of the story, each scene, image, and word is ultimately an aspect of the Spine, related, casually or thematically, to this core of desire and action.

If the protagonist has no unconscious desire, then his conscious objective becomes the Spine. The Spine of any James Bond movie, for example, can be phrased as: To defeat the arch-villain. James has no unconscious desires.

If the protagonist has an unconscious desires, this becomes the Spine of the story. An unconscious desire is always more powerful and durable, with roots reaching to the protagonist’s innermost self. When an unconscious desire drives the story, it allows the writer to create a far more complex character who may repeatedly change his conscious desire.

By looking into the heart the protagonist and discovering his desire, you begin to see the arc of your story, the Quest on which the Inciting Incident sends him.

Design of the Inciting Incident

An Inciting Incident can be random, casual, coincidental, or on purpose. A wife could be the random victim of a mugging, inciting the husband to seek revenge. It could be on purpose, too: perhaps a child runs away from abusive parents.

While the the inciting incident for subplots do not have to unfold before the reader, the Inciting Incident of the Central Plot must be seen and felt directly by the reader for two key reasons:

When the audience experiences an Inciting Incident, the work’s Major Dramatic Question, a variation of “How will this turn out?” is provoked.

Witnessing the Inciting Incident projects an image of the Obligatory Scene into the audience’s imagination. The Obligatory Scene (a.k.a. Crisis) is an event the audience knows it must see before the story can end. This scene will bring the protagonist into a confrontation with the most powerful forces of antagonism in his quest, forces stirred to life by the Inciting Incident that will gather focus and strength through the course of the story. The scene is called “obligatory” because having teased the audience into anticipating this moment, the writer is obligated to keep his promise and show it to them.

Can you imagine the outrage you’d feel if you read all of the LotR books, all of them building up to destroying the ring, and instead of describing them casting it into the caldera, the book just cuts to them being back in the Shire and saying, “Man, it was hard but I’m sure glad we managed to get rid of the ring.” Fin.

Wouldn’t you just implode?

Locating the Inciting Incident

In other words, when should you insert the Inciting Incident? McKee’s book is about storytelling, but specifically through the medium of film. Therefore, he talks about this mostly in minutes. However, as writers, we need it in pages, chapters.

He states that the first major event of the Central Plot must occur within the first 25 percent of the telling, no matter the medium. However, the later the Inciting Incident, the higher risk you run of having your audience grow bored.

“Well okay, so I’ll just have the Inciting Incident happen in the first chapter and no worries,” you may be thinking.

For some stories, that is fine. But for others, you need to establish characters before the full impact of the Inciting Incident can be understood.

Take the movie Rocky, for example. Its Inciting Incident happens a full thirty minutes into the movie, when he agrees to fight Apollo Creed for the heavyweight championship of the world. In the thirty minutes leading up to that Inciting Incident, we are engaged by the subplot of his romance with Adrian, and we also learn more about who Rocky is, what an underdog he is--and it is thanks to our understanding of who Rocky Balboa is that the Inciting Incident is so gripping. “Oh my God, there’s no way in hell that Rocky can win! But I want him to win!” If the movie had started out with Rocky challenging Apollo, we would have thought it was just another wrestling match, with nothing at stake.

“Bring in the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident as soon as possible...but not until the moment is ripe.

An Inciting Incident must “hook” the audience, a deep and complete response. Their response must not only be emotional, but rational. This event must not only pull at audience’s feelings, but cause them to ask the Major Dramatic Question and imagine the Obligatory Scene. Therefore, the location of the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident is found in the answer to this question: How much does the audience need to know about the protagonist and his world to have a full response?

If it arrives too soon, the audience may be confused. If it arrives too late, the audience may be bored. The exact moment is found as much by feeling as by analysis.

If we writers have a common fault in design and placement of the Inciting Incident, it’s that we habitually delay the Central Plot while we pack our opening sequences with exposition. We consistently underestimate knowledge and life experience of the audience, laying out our characters and world with tedious details the filmgoer has already filled with common sense.”

A Caveat for Fanfiction Writers

Fanfiction is such a huge genre now, and as a long-time writer of it, I wanted to throw in my own two cents about Inciting Incident and fanfiction. Generally, we post our stories one chapter at a time, either scheduled or whenever we manage to get a chapter done. With fanfiction, it is my personal opinion that the Inciting Incident must be in the first chapter.

Even if you’re writing an AU, the readers will still know the characters and the barebones background information at least, so there is no need to build up who these people are, like in the above example of Rocky.

Because fanfiction is a free, nigh limitless commodity, readers are spoiled (myself included). If the first chapter doesn’t immediately pull them in, what incentive do they have to follow the story?

We’ve also seen this shift in music. It used to be that the “hook” of a song could come at the chorus or that BADASS solo halfway through the song. Scroll through your playlists and take a look--how many contemporary songs start off with the “hook?” I guarantee you it’s more than half. This is because in the age of streaming, we are no longer forced to listen to the entire song on the record or tape or radio. We can give a song a few second’s listen and skip it. Sadly, fanfiction is going down the same path.

The Quality of the Inciting Incident

“Henry James wrote brilliantly about story art in the prefaces to his novels, and once asked: ‘What, after all, is an event?’ An event, he said, could be as little as a woman putting her hand on the table and looking at you ‘that certain way.’ In the right context, just a gesture and a look could mean, ‘I’ll never see you again,’ or ‘I’ll love you forever’--a life broken or made.

The quality of the Inciting Incident (for that matter, any event) must be germane to the world, characters, and genre surrounding it. Once it’s conceived, the writer must concentrate on its function. Does the Inciting Incident radically upset the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life? Does it arouse in the protagonist the desire to restore balance? In a complex protagonist, does it also bring to life an unconscious desire that contradicts his conscious need? Does it launch the protagonist on a quest for his desire? Does it raise the Major Dramatic question in the mind of the audience? Does it project an image of the Obligatory Scene? If it does all of this, then it can be as little as a woman putting her hand on the table, looking at you 'that certain way.' "

Creating the Inciting Incident

Okay, so now you need to conceive and write the Inciting Incident. McKee states that the hardest part of any story to write is the Climax, but the second-hardest part is the Central Plot's Inciting Incident. This scene is re-written more than any other.

So before you begin penning the Inciting Incident, ask yourself these questions:

What is the worst possible thing that could happen to my protagonist? How could that turn out to be the best possible thing that could happen to him?

What's the best possible thing that could happen to my protagonist? How could it become the worst possible thing?

I wrote an absolutely horrible novel when I was 13. Now that I'm older and all-around better and more experienced in writing and life itself, I want to tear it all apart and rewrite it. The new inciting incident I have in mind currently is this:

Three years prior to the start of the story, the protagonist's mother vanished into thin air. She drove off to the store but never came back, and they found her car crashed down a ravine on the side of the road, but she was gone and the car had no blood in it. The protagonist's father locked himself into his study that night, and has not emerged from it since. The protagonist was 15 at the time, and in the three years that have passed since then she has grown independent. She lives in the house with her father, makes him meals and puts them on trays outside his study. Sometimes he takes them, other times he leaves them untouched. They have zero communication. In many ways, the protagonist feels like she lost not one but both of her parents in that accident.

Then, one day, she wakes up to get ready for school and sees that the study door is wide open for the first time in three years.

So now I have to ask myself the above two questions.

The worst possible thing that could happen to her is if her father has finally gone mad in his isolation and they are unable to restore their bond. How it could change for the best: She could commit him to a facility, allowing him to get professional help and allowing her to move on with her life.

The best possible thing that could happen to her is if her father emerges, sound of mind and body, and picks up his life with her again. How it could change for the worst: They both wish to reestablish an relationship, but an external force separates them, this time permanently.

“A story may turn more than one cycle of this pattern. What is the best? How could that become the worst? How could that reverse yet again into the protagonist's salvation? We stretch toward the 'bests' and 'worsts' because story--when it is art--is not about the middle ground of human experience.

The impact of the Inciting Incident creates our opportunity to reach the limits of life. It's a kind of explosion. No matter how subtle or direct, it must upset the status quo of the protagonist and jolt his life from its existing pattern, so that chaos invades the character's universe. Out of this upheaval, you must find, at Climax, a resolution, for better or worse, that rearranges this universe into a new order.”

Source: McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. York: Methuen, 1998. Print

#creative writing #creative writing methodology #creative writing theory #writing #writer #writeblr #write #author #writing inspiration #writing inspo #robert mckee #writing novels #writing fantasy #writing fiction #writing fanfiction #plotting #story plotting #novel plotting #writing prompts for friends notes on story

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Notes on Robert McKee’s “Story” 17: Essential Qualities of a Protagonist (and Other Characters)

Today we cover McKee’s rundown of the essential qualities of the protagonist, a.k.a. The Main Character who does The Thing. That’s the dictionary definition; trust me I have a Bachelor’s in English. Because Thor is the best my favorite superhero, I’m going to see if he (in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) ticks all the boxes of McKee’s qualities of a protagonist. Warning: all the spoilers. Additional Warning: Long post.

The Protagonist

Usually, the protagonist is one person. However, sometimes stories are driven by a duo, such as THELMA AND LOUISE, or a trio or more. These are called Plural-Protagonists.

For two or more characters to form a Plural-Protagonist, two conditions must be met:

All individuals in the group share the same desire

In the struggle to achieve this desire, they mutually suffer and benefit.

So we can say that THE AVENGERS has the Plural-Protagonists of all the Avengers. They seek to defeat Loki, regain the Tesseract, and save the world from the Chitauri invasion.

A story can also be Mutliprotagonist. Here, characters pursue separate and individual desires, suffering and benefiting independently. We could use the unfortunate film Thor 2: The Dark World as an example. (Do you remember it lol?) Loki and Thor are forced to work together to defeat the Dark Elves, but each for very different desires and benefits.

Other examples of Multiprotagonist works would be PULP FICTION and THE BREAKFAST CLUB, just to name a couple more examples.

Multiprotagonist works often result in Multiplot stories. Rather than driving the telling through the focused desire of a protagonist, either single or plural, these works weave a number of smaller stories, each with its own protagonist, to create a dynamic portrait of a specific society. PULP FICTION certainly displays the Multiplot at work well.

Also, as I’m sure you’re aware, the protagonist doesn’t need to be human. Bugs Bunny is the protagonist in Looney Tunes. Hamtaro is the protagonist in Hamtaro. Thomas the Tank Engine is a sentient train.

“Anything that can be given a free will and the capacity to desire, take action, and suffer the consequences can be a protagonist. It’s even possible, in rare cases, to switch protagonists halfway through a story. PSYCHO does this, making the shower murder both an emotional and formal jolt.”

Now let’s dive into the hallmark qualities necessary of all protagonists.

1. A Protagonist Is a Willful Character

“Other characters may be dogged, even inflexible, but the protagonist in particular is a willful being. The exact quantity of this willpower, however, may not be measurable. Quality of willpower is as important as quantity.”

Thor is perhaps one of the most willful characters of the Avengers, second only to Captain America. His sense of justice and responsibility as protector of realms demands that he make bold decisions and act for the greater good. His desires are always clear because he is transparent, the polar opposite of his brother.

However, not all protagonists display their willpower. Take the character Groot, who may appear to be passive particularly in Endgame when he is going through his rebellious teen years. Yet when he offers a piece of himself to become the hilt of Thor’s new weapon Stormbreaker. It is clear that despite his outward apathy, he has not lost the desire to assist his friends and stop Thanos.

McKee cautions us that:

“The truly passive protagonist is a regrettably common mistake. A story cannot be told about a protagonist who doesn’t want anything, who cannot make decisions, whose actions effect no change at any level.”

2. A Protagonist Has a Conscious Desire

In each of the Marvel films, Thor’s outward desires have been somewhere along the lines of “Protecting the Nine Realms.” The protagonist’s will impels a known desire. The protagonist has a need or goal, an object of desire, and knows it. For many characters, a simple, clear, conscious desire is sufficient.

3. The Protagonist May Also Have a Self-Contradictory Unconscious Desire

Thor’s outward desires have always been the altruistic “Protecting the Nine Realms,” but in his deep character, from the very first Thor film to Endgame, Thor has struggled to find himself worthy in the eyes of his father, of his people, and, at his very core, in the eyes of himself. In contrast to his outward desires that are self-sacrificial, deep down he has always felt the uncontrollable wish to be deemed “worthy,” not only by Mjolnir, but by his father, Loki, Jane, the people of the Nine that he wishes to serve, and ultimately by himself. Having grown up as the first son of the Allfather, the throne is his by default and everything in life has been handed to him. Yet he has always sought to prove his worthiness is not from birthright.

McKee states:

“The most memorable, fascinating characters tend to have not only a conscious but an unconscious desire. Although these complex protagonists are unaware of their subconscious need, the audience senses it, perceiving in them an inner contradiction. The conscious and unconscious desires of a multidimensional protagonist contradict each other. What he believes he wants is the antithesis of what he actually but unwittingly wants. What would be the point of giving a character a subconscious desire if it happens to be the very thing he knowingly seeks?”

Excluding his battle with the frost giants in Jotunheim at the beginning of the first Thor film when he was brash and immature, Thor has never gone against an enemy in order to prove his worthiness. When he fails to stop Thanos, he comes to the conclusion that he is worthless, and it is only thanks to Frigga that he realizes that not only is he still worthy; he has always been worthy.

4. The Protagonist Has the Capabilities to Pursue the Object of Desire Convincingly

“The protagonist’s characterization must be appropriate. He needs a believable combination of qualities in the right balance to pursue his desires. This doesn’t mean that he’ll get what he wants. He may fail. But the character’s desires must be realistic enough in relationship to his will and capacities for the audience to believe that he could be doing what they see him doing and that he has a chance for fulfillment.”

In the first Thor movie, Odin exiles his son to Earth until he has proved himself worthy as his successor to the throne. Thor, as brash and confident as he was at the start of the movie, convinces Jane and the audience that he will be able to retrieve Mjolnir immediately. This is proven not only by his unshakable confidence, but also by the way he destroys any and all opponents who stand in his way. The audience feels the same confidence as Thor, that it is just a simple matter of walking in and taking back what is rightfully his.

Yet to our dismay we see that he is not yet worthy when he is unable to regain Mjolnir.

5. The Protagonist Must Have at Least a Chance to Attain His Desire

“An audience has no patience for a protagonist who lacks all possibility of realizing his desire. The reason is simple: No one believes this of his own life. No one believes he doesn’t have even the smallest chance of fulfilling his wishes. But if we were to pull the camera back on life, the grand overview might lead us to conclude that, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” that most people waste their precious time and die with the feeling they’ve fallen short of their dreams. As honest as this painful insight may be, we cannot allow ourselves to believe it. Instead, we carry hope to the end.

Hope, after all, is not unreasonable. It’s simply hypothetical. ... We all carry hope in our hearts, no matter the odds against us. A protagonist, therefore, who’s literally hopeless, who hasn’t even the minimal capacity to achieve his desire, cannot interest us.”

When Thor is unable to retrieve Mjolnir and Loki tells him that his return to Asgard has been forbidden, he truly hits rock bottom and becomes hopeless. Both he and the audience feel that there is no way to realize his desire of returning home and taking the throne.

But then minutes later, both Jane and Dr. Selvig show up to rescue him from detention, and from there hope is found in his newfound friends.

6. The Protagonist Has the Will and Capacity to Pursue the Object of his Conscious and/or Unconscious Desire to the End of the Line, to the Human Limit Established by Setting and Genre.

“The art of story is not about the middle ground, but about the pendulum of existence swinging to the limits, about life lived in its most intense states. We explore the middle ranges of experience, but only as a path to the end of the line. The audience senses that limit and wants it reached. For no matter how intimate or epic the setting, instinctively the audience draws a circle around the characters and their world, a circumference of experience that’s defined by the nature of the fictional reality. This line may reach inward to the soul, outward into the universe, or in both directions at once. The audience, therefore, expects the storyteller to be an artist of vision who can take his story to those distant depths and ranges.”

Just look at the character development we see in Thor from the first movie to Endgame. An immature, hot-headed, entitled boy has matured into a man willing to make any sacrifice, to expend every last drop of sweat, blood, and power not to prove his strength, not even to prove his worth, but to restore balance and justice to the world.

7. A Story Must Build to a Final Action Beyond Which the Audience Cannot Imagine Another

“In other words, a film cannot send its audience to the street rewriting it. If people exist imagining scenes they thought they should have seen before or after the ending we give them, they will be less than happy moviegoers. We’re supposed to be better writers than they. The audience wants to be taken to the limit, to where all questions are answered, all emotions satisfied--the end of the line.

The protagonist takes us to this limit. He must have it within himself to pursue his desire to the boundaries of human experience in depth, breadth, or both, to reach absolute and irreversible change. This, by the way, doesn’t mean that your film can’t have sequel; your protagonist may have more tales to tell. It means that each story must find closure for itself.”

It’s 2020 and fanfiction is now mainstream. But not all fanfics are born from dissatisfactory endings. Rather, many of them are born because we yearn to fill in all of the little in-between moments and what-ifs that arise unbidden in our minds because of our love of the work and its characters.

While I wonder how Thor will continue his life without Asgard, without his people, and most of all, without Loki, a sojourn seems like the best way for a man who has grown up within the confines of court decorum and lofty expectations to find out who he wants to be. And most importantly, Thor has come to terms with the fact that he is not meant to be a leader, and that he is worthy--not necessarily of the throne or of anyone else’s respect/love/loyalty--but that he is worthy of self-respect. To me, this is a satisfactory ending for his character in MCU.

8. The Protagonist Must Be Empathetic; He May or May Not Be Sympathetic

“Sympathetic means likable. Tom Hanks, for example, in his typical role: The moment he steps on screen, we like him. We’d want him as a friend, family member, or lover. He has an innate likability and evoke sympathy. Empathy, however, is a more profound response.

Empathetic means “like me.” Deep within the protagonist the audience recognizes a certain shared humanity. ... There’s something about the character that strikes a chord. In that moment of recognition, the audience suddenly and instinctively wants the protagonist to achieve whatever it is that he desires.”

To be honest, as a MASSIVE Thor fan, the first two movies stayed pretty true to the traditional comic Thor, who was serious, spoke in Ye Olde Englishe, and was such a lofty, justice-driven hero that he was hard to relate to. The Thor of the first two movies wasn’t exactly for everyone.

However, his complex relationship with Loki is what, in my opinion, managed to make him and Loki in particular empathetic to the audience. To love someone while knowing they are poison, to continue giving them chances when you know full well that it will likely end up harming you, and yet still refusing to give up hope on them, is a bitter battle that many of us face.

Ragnarok in particular is what cemented Thor’s empathy, but also his sympathy more than anything else. They dropped all of the old-timey speak, got downright silly, and let Hemsworth’s comedic talents shine through to brilliant effect.

Not only did Ragnarok make Thor one of the most beloved characters in MCU, it also shows Thor’s acceptance of Loki for the trickster that he is. He no longer desires to “fix” Loki, and Loki, who desires acceptance more than anything, finds a new respect for his brother. This makes Loki’s death all the more poignant later, when it seems that the two brothers have finally become able to coexist.

On Audience Bond

“The audience's emotional involvement is held by the glue of empathy. If the writer fails to fuse a bond between filmgoer and protagonist, we sit outside feeling nothing. Involvement has nothing to do with evoking altruism or compassion. We empathize for very personal, if not egocentric, reasons. When we identify with a protagonist and his desires in life, we are in fact rooting for our own desires in life. ... The gift of story is the opportunity to live lives beyond our own, to desire and struggle in a myriad of worlds and times, at all the various depths of our being.

...Empathy, therefore, is absolute, while sympathy is optional. ... Likability is no guarantee of audience involvement; it’s merely an aspect of characterization. The audience identifies with deep character, with innate qualities revealed through choice under pressure.”

Thor had a weak audience bond in the first two Thor films, but Ragnarok changed everything. While I’m sad that we veered away from Ye Olde Speche version of him because I have a thing for that, and i will never ever forgive them for cutting his hair because I also have a thing for that, Ragnarok is one of the best Marvel films yet in my opinion because of how much it managed to make Thor empathetic to the audience.

Anyways, thanks for letting me use this post as an excuse to rant about Thor haha. I hope that using an example like him make these points clearer.

Source: McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. York: Methuen, 1998. Print

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Notes from Robert McKee’s “Story” 11: Character Versus Characterization

What is the most important aspect of a story: plot or character? This is something that has been debated for centuries, as far back as Aristotle. However, there is no answer, because, as McKee states:

“Structure is character; character is structure. They’re the same thing, and therefore one cannot be more important than the other. Yet the argument goes on because of a widely held confusion over two crucial aspects of the fictional role--the difference between Character and Characterization.”

First, let’s define things.

Characterization: the sum of all observable qualities of a human being, everything knowable through careful scrutiny: age and IQ; sex and sexuality; style of speech and gesture; choices of home, car, and dress; education and occupation; personality and nervosity; values and attitudes--all aspects of humanity we could know by taking notes on someone day in and day out. The totality of these traits makes each person unique because each of us is a one-of-a-kind combination of genetic givens and accumulated experience. This singular assemblage of traits is characterization... but it is not character.

True Character: it’s revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure--the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.

In other words, characterization is who the character is on the surface. But true character is who the person is at their core, who they become in the most harrowing moments of their lives.

McKee states that the only way to divulge true character is to witness the character make choices under pressure to take one action or another in the pursuit of his desire.

“As he chooses, he is. Pressure is essential. Choices made when nothing is at risk mean little.”

If a character chooses to tell the truth where telling a lie would gain him nothing, the choice is trivial, the moment expresses nothing. But if the same character insists on telling the truth when a lie would save his life, then we sense that honesty is at the core of his nature.

McKee provides a brilliant example that I’ll give a portion of.

“Two cars motor down a highway. One is a rusted-out station wagon with buckets, mops, and brooms in the back. Driving it is an illegal alien--a quiet, shy woman working as a domestic for under-the-table cash, sole support of her family. Alongside her is glistening new Porsche driven by a brilliant and wealthy neurosurgeon. Two people who have utterly different backgrounds, beliefs, personalities, languages--in every way imaginable their characterizations are the opposite of each other.

Suddenly, in front of them, a school bus full of children flips out of control, smashes against an underpass, bursting into flames, trapping the children inside. Now, under this terrible pressure, we’ll find out who these two people really are.

Who chooses to stop? who chooses to drive by? Each has rationalizations for driving by. The domestic worries that if she gets caught up in this, the police might question her, find out she’s an illegal, throw her back across the border, and her family will starve. The surgeon fears that if he’s injured and his hands burned, hands that perform miraculous microsurgeries, the lives of thousands of future patients will be lost.”

The scenario continues, but you get the idea. How these two people act when under pressure will strip away the mask of characterization and then we can see their true characters.

Character Revelation

The revelation of true character in contrast or contradiction to characterization is fundamental to all fine storytelling. Life teaches this grand principle: What seems is not what is. People are not what they appear to be.

If you write a character as a kindhearted mother, and by the end she is still a kindhearted mother with no secrets, no dreams, no hidden passions, it’s certainly a realistic character. Such people do exist in the real world. But they are boring, and we don’t want to read a whole book about them.

We need to see who our characters really are, and see a contrast between their characterization and their true character.

Character Arc

“Taking the principle further yet: The finest writing not only reveals true character, but arcs or changes that inner nature, for better or worse, over the course of the telling.”

It’s probably easiest to see character arcs in coming of age stories. We start out only seeing their characterization, and then slowly the layers are peeled back as the plot progresses, choices become more difficult, stakes get higher. By the end of the story we can see not only who they were at the beginning, but the person they have changed into by the end of the story.

Structure and Character Functions

“The function of STRUCTURE is to provide progressively building pressures that force characters into more and more difficult dilemmas where they must make more and more difficult risk-taking choices and actions, gradually revealing their true natures, even down to the unconscious self.

The function of CHARACTER is to bring the story the qualities of characterization necessary to convincingly act out choices. Put simply, a character must be credible: young enough or old enough, strong or weak, worldly or naive, educated or ignorant, generous or selfish, witty or dull, in the right proportions. Each must bring to the story the combination of qualities that allows an audience to believe that the character could and would do what he does.”

Structure and character are interlocked. If you change event design, you have also changed character; if you change deep character, you must reinvent the structure to express the character’s changed nature.

Climax and Character

Structure and character seem almost symmetrical until the climax of the story. If the finale fails, the entire book will be for nothing.

“Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time. Storytelling, therefore, is temporal art. And the first commandment of all temporal art is: Thou shalt save the best for last.”

Basically, McKee believes that the success of a story hinges on the success of its finale. And in order for the finale to be successful, we must believe that it is a choice that the character would make. Any aspect of the character that undermines or goes against their ultimate choice in the finale needs to be cut away or rethought.

So does this mean that you need to have the climax planned out before you start creating characters? No, not at all. Honestly, because structure and character are so interwoven, I think you have to have a character in mind before you can determine the climax. But if during the long path of writing your story you decide that the climax does not match the character, then you must change one or the other, and go back and change what you have already written accordingly.

Source: McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. York: Methuen, 1998. Print

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