So, I’m trying to read more. I need to do it for several reasons, but part of it is I want to write more consistently over here and having a weekly post where I write about what I read each week will help with that. So this will be a weekly thing, not necessarily replacing the normal posts, but perhaps a little more consistently published.
This week I finished three books– JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, and 826DC’s You Will Be Able To Say A Thousand Words.
So, we have setting, we have characters, now you want something to happen to them. These things that happen are plot and story.
When it comes to writing, your plot and story might develop concurrently, or you start with a plot and the story comes as you’re writing it, or you know what story you want to write and you try to write a plot around that. Basically, this is a disclaimer that while we will be talking about plot structure and discuss specific plot points in these structures, this discussion is more about theoretical frame work and thinking about how plot is structured in preexisting media than it is about how to create a plot. That’s not to say that you can’t use these as reference– think of it like a mac and cheese recipe. The overall product is recognizable, but maybe you baked yours in the oven as opposed to doing it on the stove top, or maybe you used Velveeta instead of actual cheese. The process that you use to get there is more important than making sure that it fits a specific outline. Furthermore, you’re not going to find a writer or storyteller that will tell you to sacrifice story for plot. Maybe you decide to throw bacon in with the mac and cheese, or want to try using blue cheese or feta instead of cheddar or Colby. If the story is pulling you in one direction, follow it. Even if you end up turning back later, you’ll have learned something about your writing instincts and what you want out of a story.
That being said, having an idea of where you’re going when you start can help guide that process.
I have wanted to talk about Ready Player One for a while, but I wanted the, for lack of a better word, “hype” to die down first so that there could be an attempt at a reasonable discussion. But there’s one more thing that I feel I should do before getting into the themes and problems with the film, and that’s to essentially deconstruct why it’s not actually all that special.
So there’s this movie, which is ostensibly about a corporation that is trying to take over a place in order to use it for commercial purposes. Doing so would disenfranchise a not insignificant portion of a marginalized population. But that is more or less background noise until the final fight– the main story is a mystery, where the main character searches for clues with the help of allies in order to solve it. Part of the gimmick of the film is the huge amount of references to classic media.
So there’s this movie, which is about a group of five kids that are promised a prize unlike any other. A mysterious man guides them through a place of wonder and horror and fantasy. Our main character is a boy who is rather unremarkable in most respects, but his intuition and understanding of what makes the place wonderful is why the mysterious man thinks he is worthy of receiving the ultimate prize. The film also condemns those who lie, cheat, and steal to get ahead in life.
Last time I wrote about character archetypes, I looked at specific archetypes pertaining to heroes and villains– the most common characters in fiction. This week we’ll be stepping away from that a bit, though still talking about major and plot-important characters. Because as important as your main protagonistic force and your main antagonistic force are, it’s often necessary to populate the story around those two forces. More often than not, however, these characters often come off as more functional characters than fully rounded characters.
There will be times when you have to have a functional character. Sometimes you need someone to give out exposition or technobabble and there’s not enough time to give them a personality. However, the closer the character is to your protagonist, the more rounded the character should be. Horatio has motivations and fully realized relationships, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, not so much. At least, until they do. A comic relief character can work very well, but if they’re the best friend of the main character and show up in several scenes, they’re going to seem rather one note.
These character archetypes can often come off as one note, as it is either particularly easy to write them as a purely functional character, or it is particularly difficult to properly write them. As you’re thinking about these archetypes, think about how they relate to your protagonist and antagonist, and what might make their relationships to the other characters more complex and realistic.
Building a character is an incredibly difficult part of any writing experience, even if you are just rolling some dice to get some stats. In any narrative work, having believable characters can make or break a production. Even in Science-Fiction and Fantasy, where, by all accounts, your entire cast could be non-human, if they don’t act and behave in recognizably human ways, that puts off an audience. Now, that could be your intention, and we’ll get into that a bit today, but there should be at least one character that your audience should be able to relate to and recognize their own experiences in.
But your characters also need to serve a function. From a strictly Doylist view, all characters are just people that plot happens to. Their function within the story can be categorized, and this is where archetypes come in. A character archetype is simply a category of character which describes the role that the character plays within the story. And with any category there are sub-categories and exceptions, but as with any type of categories, these are broad strokes. There is also the mistake that some writers make in that they start with the archetype and then never go anywhere with it. An archetype isn’t a character, it’s simply their function within the story. You have to give your character a personality and motivation and agency beyond their archetype to make them interesting.
So why use archetypes? Well, because it’s a pattern that you can follow. It’s a way to build your story and your character before you have a clear idea as to what your story and your character is. I mean, you probably have a good guy and a bad guy, they have a fight, Triangle wins. Triangle man.
(Also this is part one because there are far more archetypes than I’m going to list here, but here are a few to start out with.)
Character motivation is possibly the most important aspect of narrative writing. Without character motivation, there’s no plot. And while narrative art without plot does exist (just ask Dziga Vertov or Godfrey Reggio) most books, films, tv shows, stage productions, and other things that we tend to associate with the art of language (as opposed to visual or musical art) has some kind of plot. And the most basic of these plots? Character wants something, has to overcome obstacles to get it, and either succeeds or fails. Luke Skywalker wants an adventure, he leaves the planet, blows up a Death Star, and becomes a hero. Indiana Jones wants to find the Ark of the Covenant, he contacts an old girlfriend, flies to Egypt, and the Nazi’s faces melt. Prince Hamlet wants to avenge his father’s murder, he grapples with his mental illness, distances himself from his social circle, and then kills King Claudius, but dies in the process.
Character motivations can change over the course of a story, usually as a “be careful what you wish for” kind of thing. You also can have unmotivated characters that are notable in their lack of motivation. But most plot consists of the motivation of the protagonist coming directly into conflict with the motivation of the antagonist, or the motivation of society, or the motivation of the universe itself sometimes. Figuring out your protagonist’s motivation is entangled in the plot and conflict of the story.
I’m going to look at a few different stories with varying complexity in terms of motivations and how they work, because unlike my other writing advice, figuring out your own character’s motivation is individual to your character and story. You can list a million different stories that have a million different characters with a million different motivations. I’m looking at these stories, but there are plenty more examples to look at if you’re having trouble.
“When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen– they happen because of you.” — Peter Parker, Captain America: Civil War
Transtextuality is a part of just about every story that you can think of. In a sense, it’s how texts relate to texts. Like, sure, it’s references to other media, but it’s also how the text relates to itself. In the scene that introduces Peter Parker to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he says the page quote and you understand the phrase that they want you to be thinking of, even though he doesn’t actually say it. In Marvel comics, they even have a name for people who recognize certain versions of transtextuality– the “True Believers”. But it goes beyond comics, of course.
I want to talk about this because understanding how texts relate to each other is kind of my thing? Part of what I do here is look for structural resonances between disparate works and do what I can to reconcile them. lt can be as simple a visual reference or dialogue, and it can be as complicated as whatever the hell James Joyce’s Ulysses is. I use transtextuality all the time. It’s the language of a fictional canon that includes every story, song, and saying that anyone has ever heard.
Gérard Genette, a French literary theorist associated with the structuralist movement, split transtextuality into five subcategories: intertextuality, paratextuality, archetextuality, metatextuality, and hypertextuality. Some of these you might have heard of, some you might not, but I’ll break each of them down and explain how they work.
So I recently got a Nintendo Switch, and with it the flagship release game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I’ve been playing it a lot lately, but I haven’t really been doing much of the main quest. Or even too many of the side quests, for that matter. Mostly what I’ve been doing is plain exploring– unlocking shrines, activating towers, expanding the map. Breath of the Wild has one of the most free open worlds of the franchise since the original, and one of the largest maps of any game in any franchise. The map doesn’t feel empty, though, which can be a problem with an open world like that. Part of that is due to the sheer amount of stuff in the world, beyond the waypoints and major locations. All of this “extra” stuff that only seems to exist just to exist is a part of a necessary element of fiction and particularly speculative fiction called worldbuilding.
Worldbuilding exists in all kinds of fiction, not just speculative (Sci-Fi and Fantasy) fiction. Because all fiction is made up, the writer has to create a world where this fiction would make sense. Some of the greatest worldbuilders include Jane Austen and Charles Dickens– not because they were creating worlds whole-cloth, but because they captured the worlds that already existed and that they lived in like a time capsule. Some fiction even has that as its goal. Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame du Paris, better known in the Anglophone world as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, was originally written to advocate for the restoration and preservation of the Notre Dame cathedral after decades of disuse and abuse. But there’s also the classic cases like J.R.R. Tolkien, the master worldbuilder, who at times seemed to write his Legendarium less to tell the stories of Middle Earth and more to justify all of the work he put in to building the languages of Middle Earth. There’s a reason that all modern Fantasy owes a debt to Tolkien– he practically prefabricated several generations worth of settings already.
But different types of fiction require different types and levels of worldbuilding. Some are more extensive than others, but when done very well, they all require the same level of commitment and effort.
So, Game of Thrones is a thing that’s on television that a lot of people watch. I don’t, but I do know people and follow people on social media who do, and so I get exposed to some reactions to the show. A recent episode lead to this twitter thread:
It’s really funny how a work of fiction makes us tend to forget that the characters don’t make their own choices and absolves the writer.
The gist of it is that characters have no agency because the writer is the one in control of the whole thing. Now the argument of character agency is usually brought up when the writers are making bad decisions (see: any argument over the design of a female video game character). The truth is, no matter the in-character reason for a character’s decisions, there is always the hand of the writer behind that.
Okay, I’m hearing Star Wars, I’m hearing Harry Potter, Percy Jackson… Did someone actually say Disney’s Hercules?
All right, now name one with a female protagonist.
That isn’t Buffy.
(Leave your answers in the comments.)
Most Heroines– at least the ones of the past 30-ish years– don’t get chosen but rather choose their adventure. Mulan decides to take up her father’s sword and join the Army. Katniss volunteers in place of her sister for the Hunger Games. Merida’s entire story is about how she should have the choice of what her life will be. It’s hardly ever seen in Sci-Fi; Ripley isn’t a Chosen One, neither is Capt. Janeway or Dana Scully or the Doctor’s Companions (pointed stare at Moffat). Chosen Ones tend to deal with prophesies and mysticism and fate, things more often associated with Fantasy.
There’s also more to girls who are Chosen Ones than being princesses with curses, or being Buffy. They follow certain patterns, the same that the guys follow. There are essentially three different types of Chosen Ones; Type One, the kind that has an explicit prophesy attached to them; Type Two, the kind that is chosen by the gods/the universe’s higher power; and Type Three, the kind that simply has a unique power and is “Great Power, Great Responsibility”-ed into being the hero. Types One and Two are the easiest to write, but the hardest to write well due to just how many of them there are, and Type Three works best for serialized stories. I’ll talk some about each of them, with some of their higher profile examples, as well as some writing advice to nail the character arc.
09/18/2018
Weekly Readings: Week Ending in 9/16
valeriemclean1919 826DC, Casino Royale, Ian Fleming, JD Salinger, Reading, The Catcher in the Rye, Weekly Readings, Writing, You Will Be Able To Say A Thousand Words About Me, About Writing 0 Comments
So, I’m trying to read more. I need to do it for several reasons, but part of it is I want to write more consistently over here and having a weekly post where I write about what I read each week will help with that. So this will be a weekly thing, not necessarily replacing the normal posts, but perhaps a little more consistently published.
This week I finished three books– JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, and 826DC’s You Will Be Able To Say A Thousand Words.
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