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 argues about whether it's plot or character that's the source of good fiction. Of course, it's a trick question: the real answer is that there is no real plot that doesn't derive from character and no way to show character except by their reactions to plot. But I'm starting to think both of these miss the point. The works I really and truly adore derive their succulent power from relationships.

My greatest writing hero is Joss Whedon. He's the creator and driving force behind 3 of my favorite dramatic series of all time: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly. The opening sequence of "Serenity", the movie extension of the tragically short-lived Firefly TV series, is a masterpiece of film-making on at least 3 levels: cinematography, economy of language and character development. Joss introduces his entire crew of eight characters,¹ tells us what they do on the ship, how they interact and what matters to them in probably the longest single camera shot since Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope".

Oh, yeah... and the whole time the ship is this close to burning up during re-entry.

How does he do it? A classic SF info-dump? Some ninety-second blast of exposition beginning with "As you know, Captain..."? A slow crawl of yellow type yammering on about trade agreements with the planet Naboo? Hell, no.

Arguments. Five of them in a row. Some of them no more than two sentences long. Each as distinct and beautiful as jade chess pieces. What Captain Malcolm Reynolds says to his pilot, his lieutenant, his muscle, his mechanic and the ship's doctor in that single sequence describes the entire dynamic of this crucible called Serenity. It also sets him up as a larger-than-life figure: anyone who can have a coherent argument with his entire crew is a man to be reckoned with. I've talked with people who'd never watched the series, had no idea what they were walking into, but by the end of that scene felt completely at home in the world.²

That scene wasn't an accident. The history of all three series³ bears out this credo: it ain't got a thing if the ensemble ain't got that swing.

Author Jenny Crusie has two brilliant essays on her website about the work of Joss Whedon and reading them really brought home for me why Buffy and Angel are so addicting.⁴

No man is an island. True. But even if one was⁵ there wouldn't be anything to say about them! People are only people by their relationships with other people. This is in part about conflict, sure, but people agreeing with one another can be a defining moment, especially when you can feel their hearts breaking as they do it.

Let's take Cordelia Chase, for instance. A minor character in the early days of Buffy, Cordy became a central figure for most of Angel's run. By the end,⁶she was my favorite of the cast and her swan song episode possibly my favorite of the run.

Taken alone, Cordy is a shallow, self-absorbed beauty queen that deserved all the loathing the Buffy cast lumped on her. But through her interactions with the other characters, her "layers" begin to show and she matures into a real hero and a real woman. Her perpetually-bemused relationship with Xander Harris on Buffy, then later with Grue on Angel forced her to face the fact that perhaps her goals in life "marry rich, divorce richer" weren't actually where her joy was after all. By the time her relationship with Angel begins to develop, she is -- and we are -- ready for it to be as powerful as it deserves.

The complicated relationship between Buffy and her Watcher/father figure/punching bag Giles is another example. By the legendary musical episode "Once More With Feeling" in the sixth season,⁷ he realizes his role as her surrogate father at almost the same moment that he must step aside in order for her to become a woman. His duet with Tara (who expresses similar torment over her doomed relationship with Willow) "Wish I Could Stay" peaks with the line "Believe me, I don't want to go... And it'll grieve me 'cause I love you so..." If that doesn't break your heart, you don't have one.

I could beat this into the ground -- it's possible I already have -- by talking about Buffy and Spike, Spike and Dru, Angel and Xander⁸ or Willow and magic. The examples are strewn across the Buffyverse like semi-precious stones. Joss didn't put them there as lessons, he put them there to tear your heart out and make you beg for more, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from him anyway.

The cult of conflict states: they must fight to keep our interest. Interest is not enough: it sells our creative birthright short by a mile. I say: it's how they fight that makes us fall in love.

1. The ship Serenity herself is the eighth [↩]
2. Let me take a few seconds to let my heart stop pounding. Honestly, the guy's a rock star. [↩]
3. Abbreviated as Firefly's was [↩]
4. My wife and I inhaled them on DVD, two and three episodes every night for months. [↩]
5. Tom Hanks in Castaway, for instance [↩]
6. I won't steal Ms. Crusie's thunder by discussing the last half-season. Read the essay. [↩]
7. Don't get me started; we'll be here all night. [↩]
8. No, that's not what you think; they're just both in love with Buffy [↩]