characters – Page 3 – Blue Ink Alchemy

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Too Much Story

Storytelling is (sometimes literally) my bread and butter. I lean towards games with strong story emphasis. I often value story of spectacle in movies and television. I write stories in the hope they will be enjoyed by others. A question, however, has occurred to me: is it possible for a game or novel or film to have too much story?

I’m not talking about the content of a narrative, per se. Multi-volume epics like A Song of Ice and Fire or The Vampire Chronicles have a lot of story to them. That, however, is the medium of novels. In films and video games, audiences tend to expect more expedient segues into the action. Front-loading the running time of such media with exposition can lead to a negative audience experience.

This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with a tale that paces itself. 2001: A Space Odyssey may be a long-winded narrative that seems preoccupied with its own visual stylization, but at its core there is a thought-provoking story that is couched purposefully within those images. For all of its run-and-gun presentation, Spec Ops: The Line slowly reveals the thrust of its tale and the true purpose of the narrative without feeling rushed no matter how intense the shooting becomes. Pacing is important to good storytelling, just as important as developed characters, a nice sharp hook, and a payoff that is both satisfactory and leaves the audience hungry for more.

What I mean when I say “too much story” is the aforementioned problem with exposition. A storyteller that feels they have too much story to tell, even if they don’t realize that is their sentiment, will fill their character’s mouths with stilted, expository dialog rather than words that inform relationships, motivations, and emotions related to those characters. The characters in your story should exist for reasons beyond the advancement of the plot. No narrative through-line is so vital that you need to sacrifice your characters’ agency at its altar.

In some types of games, a little expository dialog is inevitable. Role-playing games have NPCs to fill the player or players in on their quests, the world in which they live, and what’s at stake. Even here, though, it’s important to flesh out those NPCs, to give them lives of their own, and make the world come to life for your players. Never forget that the word character is part of the NPC acronym. Like characters in any other narrative, the audience (in this case, players) should be enabled to make connections between and towards these individuals. The more you create these opportunities, the more chances you have for your narrative hooks to sink in nice and deep, and the better the experience will be for those you’ve ensnared.

It’s never enough for your characters to tell the audience or each other how important the story that’s unfolding is supposed to be. At best, this comes off as pretentious; at worst, it makes the entire proceeding drab and uninteresting as well. Man of Steel fell into this trap. It broke what many would consider a cardinal rule: Show, don’t tell. Your narrative is best conveyed through action and well-informed dialog, in subtext and purposeful characters following their motives in rational ways, even if those ways are only rational to them. In narrative fiction, let your characters inform the story; in games, give your players important choices; in both cases, let these variables shape the tale’s path to its outcome, even if you believe you know what that outcome should be.

Even if you outline your tale from start to finish long before you type the first word of the story itself, you should give the appearance of having no idea what will happen next. Hide your structure behind the masks of characters who come to life and events that will be difficult to forget. The more organically your plot points unfold, the less they’ll feel like plot points. Obfuscate the story behind its players; hide the strings upon which your characters dance.

This is merely a baseline guide for narratives, of course. Sometimes, genius comes from showing the strings – Slaughterhouse-Five comes to mind. However, if you feel like your story is mired in something you are unable to discern, try removing the structure from it and letting the characters guide you, rather than the other way around. You may be surprised at what you find; you may find yourself in a situation where you simply had too much story.

Let Your Characters Speak

May 13, 2014 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

“Because I say so.” How many times have we heard that phrase? Parents say it to children. Employers say it to their employees. Unfortunately, writers also say it to their characters. When a character does something that seems entirely unreasonable, or makes a sudden change to their behavior based on little more than impulse, or there is a drastic change in an adaptation between the original character and what we as the audience experience now, it’s because the writer says so. The plot or the writer demands it.

To me, there are few things lazier.

Letting the plot dictate the actions of your characters robs them of their agency. Without agency, your characters become even more difficult for the audience to engage with on a meaningful level. If your audience is disengaged, how are they supposed to care about the story you’re trying to tell? Just like a good Dungeon Master in Dungeons & Dragons acts more like a guide for their players than a dictator, so too does a good writer gently guide their characters rather than imposing themselves upon events, undermining the characters’ wills and reducing their significance.

Even more egregious, to me, is the writer who seems to preserve the agency of a character but railroads them into something that goes against their development for some author-centric reason. If you ever find yourself saying “This character wouldn’t do that” or “Why did this scene happen in this way? It makes no sense for them to do this,” you’ve seen what I’m talking about in action. I’m avoiding specific cases in the name of avoiding spoilers, but that’s what the comments are for! Let’s talk about some of these things, especially ones that piss you off.

We need to be on the lookout for this sort of thing. There’s no excuse for lazy writing. Not even a deadline is an excuse for a story that makes no sense or does not engage us. If you are writing to inform, to inspire, or even just to entertain, it is worth taking the time to get the words right, set the scene just so, and let your characters speak for themselves, rather than cramming words into their mouths that don’t necessarily fit.

Your characters are more than pistons in your story’s engine. Remember that, and your story will be that much better for it.

Assembling Good Characters

February 26, 2014 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

I’ve now seen The LEGO Movie twice, and I loved it just as much the second time around, if not more. The composition and action are clever and inventive, the aesthetic is charming, the humor is genuinely funny, and the theme is something I can jam on. But a thought occurred to me that I was not expecting:

There isn’t a single character I don’t like.

The primary audience for the movie is going to be youngsters. As much as it’s written at a level that parents can both grok the themes and laugh at the humor, it’s basically a kid’s movie. It would be terrifyingly easy for the writers to keep the heroes and villains simple, if not one-dimensional, to make sure there’s no ambiguity or confusion on the part of the young audience.

However, the writers of The LEGO Movie demonstrate a level of skill and an abundance of trust in their audience. The characters in their movie are nuanced and deeper that you might think. Emmett, our hero, has no real power or even imagination to speak of. What I like about his starting position and presentation is that you don’t have to be born with some sort of special power or destiny to do the right thing or to be heroic. This comes to fruition in the end when he’s talking to Lord Business about what it means to be special (or The Special if you want to get technical).

Speaking of Lord Business, it’s been a long time since I’ve sat in a family movie and realized that the antagonist is really only villainous in presentation. Sure, his methods for going about what he wants are pretty diabolical, especially in the visuals, but in the end, Business just wants things to be ordered and organized. This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. He is driven to get what he wants to an extreme, and that extreme leads to some real scorched-earth moments, but the amplification of this desire for order comes from a place where such desire might seem terrifying. I won’t say more because I still want to avoid spoilers (you really should go see this movie if you haven’t already), but suffice it to say that what the writers do with the main villain really struck a chord with me.

I mentioned that the message in The LEGO Movie isn’t quite as strongly delivered as that from Wreck-It Ralph, but I’m not going to be too hard on a movie this inventive telling kids to be themselves. Again, Emmett is encouraged to cultivate what is special about himself. So too is Wyldstyle. What impressed me the second time around is how much the girl whose name sounds like a DJ’s handle is struggling with her own identity. She’s tied so much of her desires and ambitions into the quest that Emmett stumbles into that she seems to wrestle with who she is as opposed to who she wants to be. It’s subtle, but the desire for definition of identity touches her as much it does any of the other characters.

Last but not least I want to talk about Bad Cop. In addition to just loving hearing Liam Neeson voice this character (and Good Cop… and Dad Cop…), this is another character that easily could have been one-note: the primary hench-villain. The switching between Good Cop and Bad Cop could have just been an inventive little gimmick in a movie full of them. And yet here, again, we have a character who struggles to define who they are and who they want to be. At one point, Bad Cop says a line (again, spoilers) that indicates he’s painfully aware of the better nature he could be following. He’s in a position where he has orders to follow, prides himself in results, and does not give up in pursuit of a quarry, and yet as an officer of law, he wants to do the right thing, not necessarily just what he’s told. Again, for what’s ostensibly a kid’s movie, this is pretty deep and interesting stuff.

I could talk about this for a while, about how Benny’s identity is perhaps the most one-note of them all yet he manages complexity of his own, or how Princess Unikitty’s brave-face facade reflects those of kids trying to pretend everything is fine when things are anything but fine, but I think I’ve made my point. The LEGO Movie is not just a two-hour sales pitch for plastic building blocks; it is a story about finding what’s special about one’s self and completely embracing it, because that’s how we make the best of ourselves for our own benefit and that of the world. For a family picture, one that could have skated by on pop culture references and physical humor, it’s obvious to me that this tale of LEGOs and characters and realms and spaceships was very carefully assembled.

Find The Flaws

December 10, 2013 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

Writers are human beings. With the exception of any NSA parsing programs or Google search generators or the like, readers tend to be human beings, too. And something that all human beings have in common is that they’re flawed. I’m sure some pundits and others would disagree, but every person on the face of the planet makes mistakes. As a writer, if you want your audience to relate to the characters in the story you write, your characters should have flaws, too.

A character with flaws is more believable, and it’s easier for the audience to sympathize with them as they can see their own struggles in the words and depictions, and exalt with the characters when they succeed (if they succeed). A ‘perfect’ character is a lot more difficult for people to relate to, and it’s a problem you can see in a lot of fiction out there. I’m sure you can think of some examples.

By way of examples of flawed characters, let’s look at Steve Rogers.

I know what you’re thinking. “Captain America? Flawed? He’s a super soldier! He’s a good person and a nice guy! How is he flawed?” His old-fashioned sensibilities make him relatively humble and willing to help people out, for certain, but he isn’t perfect. Those same thought patterns, habits, and viewpoints are out of sync with the modern age. In holding onto those aspects of himself, Steve shows that he can be a bit stubborn, even bull-headed, in the face of change and personalities that clash with his. He has a few moments in The Avengers where he has it out with Tony Stark, and if the previews for The Winter Soldier are to be believed, his optimistic view of how things should be is going to get him into a heap of trouble.

The thing I like about Cap’s flaws is that they’re surmountable. They open avenues for change. The great thing about organic, human characters is that they are not limited to a single arc. The problem with a lot of sequels is that they extend the story but do nothing for their characters. A good writer knows that keeping their characters from achieving perfection by the end of one story leaves the door open for future tales with the same characters. I’m a big fan of subtle sequel hooks, and these are some of the best ones a writer can employ. So the more flaws you can find in your characters, the better the experience will be both for your writing and for those who choose to read it.

What are some of your favorite characters with flaws? What’s a good example of a character overcoming a flaw but having others left to challenge them in stories to come?

Anatomy of a Hero

April 16, 2013 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

Last week we talked about the Chosen One. Specifically, we talked about how the Chosen One’s starting to look a little creaky and doesn’t hold up in modern storytelling. In all honesty, the divergence of heroes from the idea of them being the Chosen One is nothing new. Nobody would call Jay Gatsby, a ‘self-made’ man, or Holden Caufield, a disenfranchised youth on the cusp of adulthood, anything resembling ‘the Chosen One.’ But rather than diving into these great American novels (which you can do here and here, respectively), let’s stick with Harry Potter. Since we dissected the young wizard last week, let’s examine the anatomy of this would-be hero.

Also, while I refer to the main character as a ‘hero’, you can easily swap in ‘heroine’. These attributes have nothing to do with gender. Or species. But let’s get into it before I get bogged down in semantics.

First and foremost, as mentioned last week, Harry remains a human being throughout his arc. I don’t mean that he doesn’t evolve into a centaur or something; his emotions and thoughts and growth stay very grounded. This is essential for a would-be hero. Say what you want about Luke Skywalker’s whining or Steve Roger’s aw-shucks approach to others, they are part and parcel of the characters’ core and growth. Luke has to lose his innocense, Steve is faced with a world that cares nothing for his ideals, and Harry must overcome his initial adoration for the wizarding world to deal with the challenges to come.

What makes a hero a hero, in addition to being human, is a willingness, reluctant or otherwise, to put that humanity and their personal needs and wants aside for something greater than themselves. This is a conscious choice they make, a decision based on their situations and the abilities and resources at their disposal. Instead of it just being part of their destiny, the hero weighs the options in front of him and chooses the harder path, the one towards danger, the one that does not guarantee a happy ending.

And given that the hero is human, and that they made this hard choice, you can be certain things are going to go wrong. The machinations of the villains may not even need to become involved, either. Part of what makes a hero heroic is how they deal with adversity, and that includes their own fuck-ups. And the thing about human beings is, sooner or later, they are going to fuck up. The mistake can cause the hero harm, force the loss of progress, or even cost them the life of someone dear to them. But tragic or unfortunate as the moment itself can be, it’s the moments after that show us what a hero is really made of. Beyond any yammering about destiny or curses or fate or intervention, it is in these darkest moments that the heroes we remember, that we adore, that we idolize, shine the brightest.

These are what I consider to be the essential parts of a hero. Feel free to leave anything I might have missed in the comments!

Tag: characters (page 3 of 3)

Too Much Story

Let Your Characters Speak

Assembling Good Characters

Find The Flaws

Anatomy of a Hero

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