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Some thoughts about writing. |
| I had a thought about writing and nowhere to put it so... |
| A few weeks ago I was thinking about character building (I mean inventing characters, not taking cold baths) and I came across the OCEAN model. OCEAN seems to be a fairly widely known scheme for analysis of character (More info can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits). The letters stand for Openness Conscientiousness Extroversion Agreeableness Neuroticism and the idea is that any character can be analysed on these traits. It struck me that all but the last dimension are generally considered positive traits -- at least in Western culture, so I got to wondering whether a character could be ranked this way and what it would mean to do so. Since the last trait is negative I reversed it to Sense of Self which is kind of the opposite of Neuroticism. This gives SOACE and my idea was that characters who scored well on this scale would be perceived as heroic. (confidence would be better but I couldn't think of of an acronym). This way you can rate any character by the degree to which they have these 5 positive traits. So does it work? I rated a number of characters. Firstly from the Hitchhikers guide: Trillian struck me as having all five attributes and their scoring 5. Marvin is disagreeable, neurotic, closed minded and introverted but he is conscientious (he waits a hundred million years or so for Zaphod) so he gets -3. That seems appropriate as Trillian frequently heroically saves the day. Marvin also does so, but grudgingly, usually to make comic interludes. from star wars : obi wan: CEAS but not open so he gets 3. interestingly Vader I rated 3. he's open (he embraces the dark side after a life in the light) extrovert (can't see him sitting in his throne room worrying about meeting Tarkin) conscientious and secure in himself. possibly he is also agreeable if you do what he wants (he offers leia the easy way out). So I rate him 4 or maybe 5. maybe this is why he is so popular a villain. he's actually a great guy on the wrong side. Now Han Solo. He's often sarcastic (ie disagreeable) and insecure and he's hardly conscientious. i guess he's open to new experiences as he let's Luke and obi wan talk him into things. is he an extrovert? not especially. he seems to prefer hanging out alone or with certain wookies. All of which scores him about a -3. To begin with this surprised me. So what does one conclude? does Han prove the system is wrong? I don't think so. I think it shows that Han started off as a flawed character. Because he has the greatest character arc to travel, in fact, he is the protagonist of star wars IV. I think characters who score high on SOACE are cut out to be heroes, but risk being one dimensional. On the other hand the positive traits of such characters make them interesting balanced villains. For characters who score low the opposite applies. They risk being being stock villains but as heroes they are interesting as they must struggle to overcome their flaws. |
| I couldn't be bothered to get out of bed this morning and unfortunately the only book to hand was a battered copy of 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' that should have gone back to the library last month, though looking at it I don't much think the library is likely to want it back very much as most of the pages have fallen out. Notwithstanding Mr Carnagy's (he changed his name to con people he was related to the oil millionaire) deniable contribution to the wealth human civilization, it occurred to me his book could be a useful blueprint to authors. He tells us many traits required to create a likeable character. But what about a dislikeable character. Mr so-called Carnegie gives us some example but unfortunately no convenient summary. This was a deficiency I considered no longer sufferable and so I present Dale Carnegie's guide to creating horrible people. The Basics (if you don't do this you will be welcome anywhere) 1. Always criticize, condemn and complain. It keeps them on their toes. If there's nothing wrong this time then remember last time. If that doesn't help you might have to broaden your horizons. Maybe someone slighted you the last time you were in this city, this state thus country? Maybe that flunky could have some kind of ethnicity, speech defect or health problem? Keep in mind little people are all the same. Only genius differs. Reach out. Find your pain. 2. Remember to target the person not the behaviour. Maybe they aren't much of musician but don't criticize the music. Maybe they only started playing this year. Next year they may be better and then where will you be? The key here is to remember Mozart was recognized as a genius when he was four. You only get one chance to be a child genius and you missed it sucker. 3. Ignore the positive aspects of any situation. Lie if you have to. Don't be afraid to snot on the tablecloth yourself if you can't find anything else wrong. Focus on your own needs rather than those of the other person. What do you care if they need to get home to tend to a sick mother? I asked for pepperoni fuzzball! This is chorizo, darn it. On building relationships 1. Take no interest in other people. Don't ask whether that sick mother got better. These people are liable to tell you. Come to think of it his do you know they have a mother? Don't have anything better to think about? That big truss account? What colour leather in the new Lexus? 2. Scowl, frown and cuss. Kick things if you have to. 3. Never use names if you can avoid it. It gives people the impression they matter. Prefer demeaning terms and titles. Who cares if you knew this guy's father and grandfather? He's still technically a boy and he'd better not bump that case. 4. Never listen to what people say unless you think you heard a potential put down. Talk to bolster your own ego. Remember people are always more ignorant than you expect. They never do their homework. They probably don't know you have over a hundred twitter followers or that your one of the main opinion makers in the world of reticulated surgical trusses. Talking is the main way to demonstrate these things. How can they be expected to know how clever you are or what successes you had recently in the area of amortized secondary derivatives. They probably don't know you once got bumped off a scheduled flight in favour of The Don so be sure to name drop. Always remember though, be sure not to mention anything that the other person might be able to talk knowledgeably about. 5. Make the other person feel small and do it sincerely. If you can work in feeling worthless and suicidal then all the better. Make 'em weep baby. Do all these things and people will surely talk about you. Your name will get around. How to win people over to the right way of thinking 1. The only way to win an argument is to win it. 2. Don't beat about the push. Time is money. Get to the point. Tell the other person they're wrong as soon as you can. This sort of thing marks you out as the sort of dude who's not going to put up with any BS. 3. If you're wrong change the subject quickly and emphatically. If you can't then take a restroom break. Use the time for quiet reflection on your colleagues faults. If nothing crushing comes to mind then set a phone alarm for about two minutes. When it goes off rush out tossing careless apologies about how the CEO is probably busting your bananas to come and help her sort out the business plan. Again. 4. Don't be friendly. Don't smile. Conceal any human feelings you may still harbour. Such things only encourage unprofessional behaviour. 5. Give the other person no harbour. Don't allow that they might have handled the corncockle account well last year. The corncockle account don't mean diddly-squat today. You'll find them trying to fall back on these past victories as soon as you start showing them his wrong they are. Don't let it happen. 6. Do as much talking as possible. Remember when you are not talking you are not communicating and when you are not communicating you are not furthering your own agenda. What's going to happen if you let the other Guy talk? They're going to start addressing issues that are important to them. In other words, going off the subject. Be watchful. 7. Always ensure the other participants acknowledge that the good idea was yours. Even if they voiced it first. After all, credit where credit's due. If the idea came up at a meeting where you were present then it's your idea. You facilitated it. Ask yourself, is it likely these worms would have come up with it if you weren't their? Probably something you said triggered the idea. Your head is so full of brilliant ideas would you even notice? No. Nuff said. |
| I got a bad feeling about this Blog entry. I hoped to write it last week but didn't, partly because of the heat and partly because of various exigencies arising from the same. Rather like Sir Terry Pratchett's Sergeant Detritus, I my brain switches off around 25 degrees Centigrade. Normally I get round this by writing at 3am but this week 3am was no cooler. And then there those darn exigencies. For example one of my children crossed the road barefoot. Fair enough. Except over here in Ireland we apparently save money on tarmac by blending it with cheaper materials (either dark chocolate or liquorice as far as I can tell from the footprints on the carpet), which means that above about twenty degrees the stuff begins to run down the road. This isn't usually a problem as summer is invariably June 23rd and you can tell it's arrived because the rain is a couple of degrees warmer. I made up for not writing by reading Jill Chamberlain's book, the 'Nutshell Technique'. It's very good and I'll come to it in a moment. Before that I have to admit I have a problem. I've written a few short stories and some of them I'm quite happy with. But when it comes to anything longer I struggle. I know the theory; a longer work is just a series of related short stories each of which leaves at least one hook unresolved. The hero does this and that, and we close on a twist, but then what? I usually find myself adrift in a sea of possibilities. If only my pencil case contained a compass. There is no shortage of writing gurus keen to dispense their pennyworth on this matter, and I don't think it would be unfair to say, they fall on a spectrum. At one we have Blake Snyder who extols us to 'Save the Cat'. As I'm sure many people know, this is a fixed template of beats into which one inserts one's narrative events, a set-back here, a complication there. It's very similar to Lawrence Block's 'Master Plot Formula'. Unfortunately while these schemes might tell you where to put the ups and downs on your roller-coaster, they don't tell you how to get the cars moving. At the other the spectrum is the Dramatica program. I'm certain the people who created this work are extolling us to do something and it may well be a valid and worthwhile something. Every few months I return to it hoping to finally work out what it all means. Apparently some people swear by it. Mostly I swear at it. Maybe someone out there knows. Answers on a postcard please. A very, very large postcard I suspect. Anyway, what is the Nutshell Technique? I'm glad you asked. The nutshell technique is a way of ensuring a story has a powerful character arc. Now Chamberlain takes 220 pages to explain this, so hold onto your hats, this is going to be quite involved. Essentially, the way you create this character arc is by using a flaw in your protagonist's character to drive them from their existing comfortable life to the most extreme opposite position you can think of. One way to start is by picking the crisis you want your protagonist to experience towards the end of the story. Let's say you want them to realize the value of FRIENDSHIP. You could show that by having them come back to rescue their friends when they could choose to run away. So the strength the protagonist's will find by the end of the story is FRIENDSHIP. Now we need to choose an opposing flawed characteristic (there might be several). How about SELF-INTEREST? Let's have the protagonists journey from SELF-INTEREST to valuing FRIENDSHIP. Chamberlain's next most important concept is something she calls the setup-want. So what did the protagonist want? Whatever it is should be as far away from what they want at the crisis as you can think of. Chamberlain says that often you can't tell what it is until later in the process. I'm going to cheat and say they want to save their own skin (a selfish desire). Specifically they want to pay off the crime lord who's after them. The next concept is the Point of No Return. This idea is common to many plotting systems. Some people call it the break into 2, or plot point 1 or the first gateway. It's the point where the protagonist commits. You might think this would be a point of conflict. In Chamberlain's scheme it isn't. At plot point 1 the protagonist get's what they wanted (i.e. their set-up want). Let's say the protagonist gets a job that will allow them to pay off the crime lord. However there's a problem. There has to be. Chamberlain calls it the 'catch'. The catch and the point of no return must come as a package. You can't have one without the other. In this case the 'job' immediately brings the protagonist to the attention of the authorities. The catch must be chosen to create events that allow the author to expose the protagonist's flaw. In this case the ensuing mayhem eventually reaches a point where the protagonist must choose between SELF-INTEREST and FRIENDSHIP. In this way the arc is completed. There's more to it than that, but that's the thousand foot view. I expect the book is in Amazon. In summary, the protagonist wants something and gets it but there's a catch. The catch exposes the protagonist's character flaw bringing them eventually to a moment of crisis when they renounce what they originally wanted (irony) and find strength to overcome the forces against them. I'm just getting started with this method. Do any of you use it? Maybe you have something better? I'm interested to hear what people think. As for our protagonist who journeys from SELF-INTEREST to valuing FRIENDSHIP, I had a particular character in mind but I expect there are many who make similar journeys. I would be interested to hear of any you can think of. |
| In Alice in Wonderland -- around chapter eleven if I recall -- the White Rabbit is called to speak in court but doesn't know where to begin. `Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, `and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’ Fair enough, I suppose, but last night I binge watched old episodes of Johnathon Creek. What was I thinking you may ask? Indeed. All I can say is I had a vague recollection that some of the twists were quite clever. And yes, I do know it's pulp, particularly the later series. (I wonder whether the requirement for every episode to have an Alan Davis sex scene was written into the contract?) Anyway, I got to thinking what bad advice the King had given. At least for a mystery writer, the beginning is a bad place to start. There is nothing at stake. No-one has anything to hide. There is no back-story for the detective to uncover. Much better to start in the middle. The husband has been covering up his affair for years. The efficient PA has had just about enough of the overbearing boss. The charity trustees have got used to the millionaires patronage and will do whatever it takes not to lose it. Potentially interesting stories, yes. And the reader needs to know them to understand the work as a whole. So, I guess the king was right. Start at the beginning and stop at the end. Just don't do it in that order. |
| Why oh why oh why do we do it? Wake up in the morning I mean? What is the attraction? I admit I've done it myself. Every time I open a piece of writing and find the POV character in bed I feel a strong urge to sleep myself. It's such a static situation. In fictional terms I don't care about the niceties of dental hygiene or breakfast cereal. Very few successful books start with the character waking up. That has to mean something. One exception is the first Hitchhikers Guide where Arthur cleans his teeth and looks out the window at the bulldozer among his roses. Yellow he thinks. Not bad. Another is Richard Stark's the outfit. The POV is woken by a woman screaming. He wakes and rolls out of bed as someone puffs up his pillows with lead. A great energetic start. Which is the point really. If you're gonna start your POV in bed you better make sure the house is on fire or there's a rabid lunatic in the room with an axe. If not that then at least have the POV toss and turn all night agonising about the terrible day coming with the dawn; the confrontation with his boss, her husbands funeral, not being able to pay the rent. Whatever. There's one other book I dipped into recently that started in bed. It was a Star Wars Extended Universe tale. It starts, I kid you not, with a dark lord of the Sith throwing off the duvet and putting on his dressing gown. I laughed so much they threw me out of the library. |
| One thing I can never remember is when to use which and when to use that. So I made up the mnemonic which is the title of this post. You don't need which. You do need that. The point is that introduces a clause necessary to understanding, while which introduces decoration. 'The painting that looked fake had annoyed her terribly.' There is more than one painting. The one that had annoyed her is the fake looking one. The others are cool with her. The 'fakeness' is necessary in the sense that it defines which painting we are referring to. Compare with, 'The painting which looked fake had annoyed her terribly.' A painting annoyed her. This fact isn't necessary; it doesn't identify which painting we are referring to. We mention in passing that it looks fake. |
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