Yeah, Write

I've recently joined a writing site: The Next Big Writer. It's devoted to writers submitting work-in-progress and exchanging reviews with an eye toward improvement. It's exactly what I've been looking for since I completed June Betrayals and I joined with high hopes. I haven't had other writers critiquing my work in a long time and I'm sure it will turbo-charge my writing. "This is your writing... this is your writing on Red Bull."

Only one problem. Criticism is enough to make you bi-polar.

I've received two kinds of reviews so far: "fanboy" and "where to begin?"

Fanboy reviews taste great: they're full of unabashed prose about what a wonderful job you're doing and how they'd probably buy it as-is if they ran across it in the bookstore. They can give you confidence that you've struck gold, but are useless when it comes to boosting the quality of the work, which is why I signed up.

Receiving a fanboy review is a Sally Fields Moment: "You like me! You really, really like me!" Once you've had a chance to cool off, doubt creeps in. Maybe they're kissing up to get a good rating and don't care about helping you improve. Maybe they like everything they read, which means their accolades don't mean much. Do I sound neurotic? Guilty as charged.

"Where to begin" posts usually butter you up a bit at the beginning, like a doctor saying "this will only hurt a little." Then they crack their knuckles and start pummeling you. Are you unaware passive voice is evil? Did you mean to imply that character X has inappropriate urges toward farm equipment? Is character Y dead (because they're lifeless as an old stump)? Can't your character just say things instead of having to "growl" and "chirp" and "bark" everything? Are we at the zoo?

These posts suck. No matter how politely they're phrased, how carefully they avoid making it personal, every line stings because it's something you could have noticed yourself if you weren't the lamest writer ever to violate a word-processing program with your dreck. You suck, your words suck, your computer and internet connection probably suck, too.

Just because these reviews hurt doesn't mean they aren't exactly what I need. Criticism isn't comfort food, it's medicine. Comfort food tastes good, finishes bad. I can't count how many slices of pizza I've eaten while saying, "I'm going to regret this later."

Criticism is medicine. Medicine tastes terrible going down, but it gives your body what it needs to get stronger and beat back what ails you. There's nothing noble about walking around hacking up phlegm and saying "I'm going to whip this thing on my own." You're just wasting your time and making the ones around you miserable.

The reason criticism works so well is that a different perspective is worth 50 IQ points. Just coming at something from a different angle with a different set of preconceptions and knowledge makes subtle things obvious. If two people of equal ability and experience exchange critiques, they each come off looking like geniuses because they see things in your blind spot with perfect clarity and vice-versa.

Healthy criticism makes healthy stories. But this is going to hurt a little.

What's wrong with this scene?

Sheryl tossed her rich, luxurious mane of raven-black hair over her shoulder, the late-afternoon sunlight filling it with highlights. "Kiss me," she said.

Rico took a long, leisurely sip of his Sumatran double-expresso, the half-and-half and two packets of raw cane sugar helping it slide down his throat like liquid gold. He set it back on the saucer and moved it slightly to make room for his elbow on the tiny, black powder-coated cafe table. "What if I don't want to?" he asked, flicking a crumb of his long-finished scone from the crease of his copper-colored silk trousers.

She laughed, long and low, her voice surprisingly deep for a slender, toned woman with a dancer's physique. A hank of her hair fell across one side of her face, casting it into shadow and making her look even more mysterious than she did already. "Oh, you want to," she said.

His gaze burned into her, his longing to kiss her visible on his face like a neon sign. People driving by the front windows of the cafe could tell how much he wanted to kiss her. Astronauts orbiting overhead could tell. He was terrible at hiding it. "There's no faulting your confidence," he chuckled, even though he really, really, really wanted to kiss her. She was so beautiful he couldn't think of anything else.

Need a hint? Here it is again.

"Kiss me," Sheryl said.

Rico flicked a crumb from the crease of his trousers. "What if I don't want to?"

"Oh, you want to." She let her hair fall across her face.

He chuckled. "There's no faulting your confidence."

What's the main difference between those two versions? Length, obviously. The first is most of a page: 223 words. The second is only 36. But why the difference in length? How to decide what to chop and what to leave?

The second version is 100% story. The only things left either advance the scene, express emotions in the characters or evoke them in the reader, preferably more than one.

The first version is drowning in detail. A laundry list of irrelevancies that don't do any of the above. What does it tell us that he drinks Sumatran coffee? Would he be a different person in any significant way if it were Brazilian? Do we care that the crumb is from a scone? Are muffin crumbs symbolically inferior? What about the color of the table?

Much of it is repetitive, as well. Her body is slender and toned and a dancer's physique. Commuters, astronauts and Rico know he wants to kiss her. Really, really, really wants to, in case you weren't paying attention.

It's noise. Static on the radio. Glare on the television screen. It feels like story when you're writing it, but it's actually interfering with our ability to read the parts that really matter.

So how to differentiate noise from story? The question to ask is always the same:

What is the purpose of this scene?

This is a flirting scene. Flirting is about the tension between desire and denial. Anything that contributes to the flirting should be kept. Anything that doesn't advance it is detracting from it.

What we leave are significant details. There are exactly seven:

• She tells him to kiss her. Not many women do that. What does that tell us about her?
• Instead of doing what he's told - as most men would - he plays it cool, flicking a crumb from his trousers. Again, that makes him unusual. Why isn't he responding? Is he not interested? Playing hard to get? Scared? Gay?
• He deflects her with a flippant question, taking control of the situation while teasing her, increasing the tension.
• Her reply further demonstrates her confidence. She isn't the sort of woman to be put off easily. More tension.
• The hair in her face ups the seduction. She's trying to break his resolve, and likely enjoying herself in the bargain.
• He acknowledges her ploys and charms with a chuckle, complimenting her without words.
• He finishes with a backhanded compliment, encouraging her while reiterating that things will progress on his schedule, not hers.

Easier to read, more powerful, and we've freed up 187 words that we can use to ratchet up the tension instead of wasting them on copper-colored pants and raw cane sugar.

So take a hard look at a scene that's been frustrating you. Ask yourself "what is the purpose of this scene?" Then take out your machete and start hacking, because I'd be willing to bet that in the center is a powerful, emotionally-charged story that only needs a bit of noise-reduction to really shine.

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. [↩]