Yeah, Write

First you create your protagonist, then you create an antagonist to prevent them from getting what they want. That’s one of the basic tools of character-oriented writing lessons. This makes it easy to write lessons, but hard to write really good fiction, because your protagonist’s most constant enemy is him/herself.

This is particularly true of continuing dramas, though it’s a relatively recent discovery. Many modern TV dramas¹ understand that the old-fashioned “anthology” technique (where each show can be shown in reruns in any order because the main characters never evolve) isn’t nearly as satisfying as the “soap opera” technique where what happens in this episode is crucially dependent on the events of last episode. Modern characters must arc over the course of a season and a series to become real.² What do they arc over? Their flaws.

Super-villains won’t save you

The problem with the “super-villain” approach to fiction is that bad actions don’t all come from bad people. On the contrary: they have the most meaning when a good person is caught in a moment of weakness or high emotion and does something rash. We are frail, we are victims of our own emotions. When I’m angry, I say and do things that are beneath me, and I know this as soon as I’ve calmed down. These actions cause me regret and guilt, but there is no way to make them right. For a writer, there’s gold in them thar hills…

Consider this sequence: a good person, in a moment of weakness or heightened emotion, does something uncharacteristically bad which cannot be undone (the course of life has been irreversibly altered), and spends the rest (or at least a good portion) of the story trying to undo or make up for the action. Spiderman failing to stop the robber who kills his uncle Ben is still shaping his character hundreds of comics and three movies later.

Fear and guilt are very powerful emotions, especially for people considered “good” by society. Other people stick up for you when you are accused, which makes you feel more guilty, knowing their trust is misplaced.

In praise of thorny questions

Is one failing enough to damn a person forever? This is a thorny question. If a man cheats on his wife, but she forgives him and he never does it again, is he still damned? Even if they stay together fifty years? If a person kills in a fit of rage, can anything they do in their subsequent life redeem that? If a man murdered a colleague with premeditation and got away with it, but later discovered a cure for cancer, do the scales even out?³ Sometimes this sort of character is called an “anti-hero” because they’ve got bad laced through the good inside them, but I think we all have some anti-hero in us, and all three-dimensional characters should, too.

This was one of the main sub-texts of Buffy and Angel: can Angel and Spike, who have done horrible things in the past when they were “not themselves” redeem themselves with enough conscious good deeds? Faith addresses this when she says, “Have you thought about how many people we’ve saved? Gotta be thousands, right? I think one innocent bystander still leaves us in the positive column.”

Easy questions with easy answers don’t help us a damn. It’s the thorny ones, with difficult, complicated, even impossible answers that we can spin into timeless tales that stay with the reader.

Thickening the plot

Most of the evil in a character-driven story about comes from people being weak. We’re not all weak, and we can be very strong in the main, but when bad things do happen, it is because of the emotional failings of the characters. Someone failing in the face of temptation is an excellent engine for a story.

Even if you’re a “plot-driven” writer who leans more toward James Bond and less toward Jane Austen, your car chases and crime scenes will be heightened and your series character more compelling with a healthy dose of self-destruction.

Not everybody has to be “broken”; that’s probably overkill. But everyone has flaws, and as the saying goes: character comes from action and action comes from character. That note in your character sketch that says “Bix has a terrible temper” doesn’t mean anything until she blows her stack in a scene.

But as long as a plotline stems from someone being weak, even for just a moment, you’ve got something to work with.

1. Buffy, Angel, Grey’s Anatomy and Galactica are personal favorites [↩]
2. Not that I consider soap operas to be the best example of good characterization. [↩]
3. Remember, the things we want in life generally doesn’t match the things we want in fiction. [↩]

Everybody seems to be talking about marketing these days. As a programmer, we always took Dilbert's "Welcome to Marketing: Two Drink Minimum" attitude about marketers as a breed, but I've run across at least two gurus of the art that make it seem not only credible as vocation, but interesting, entertaining and potentially profitable. Seth Godin is one, and Malcolm Gladwell, author of THE TIPPING POINT, is the other.¹

Malcolm Gladwell's head resembles nothing as much as a tiny black-powder explosion...

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1. This is a really long post, so I'm experimenting with a "jump". Bear with me if it all goes wrong. [↩]