It seems like so long ago that I was just learning about stories. I’d been writing non-fiction for many years, but when I tried to go into fiction, I quickly discovered that I didn’t know what I was doing. I could write the words, but I couldn’t weave the story. I churned out some pretty bad stuff back then, most of which I’d like to forget. In the time that followed, I soaked in stories. I read, I watched, I analyzed. I was desperate to understand not only what authors were doing but why it worked, or didn’t work.

Learning Pains and Leaving Normal

One of my favorite TV series at that time was Roswell, starring Shiri Appleby (Pizza My Heart), Jason Behr (The Grudge), Majandra Delfino (Celeste in the City), Brendan Fehr (The Long Weekend and CSI: Miami‘s Dan Cooper), Colin Hanks (Preston in the new King Kong movie), Katherine Heigl (now of Grey’s Anatomy), Emilie de Ravin (Lost), and others.

Roswell is a story of aliens growing up as human teenagers in Roswell, New Mexico. Think The X-Files meets Beverly Hills, 90210, half sci-fi thriller, half teen soap. This combination made for some really interesting story posssibilities and problems. And that’s why I liked watching it so much. I still believe that the best way to learn how to do something is to see it done successfully, not to see it done poorly. But in a show like Roswell, I got to see both juxtaposed. It was quite educational.

And that’s why sometimes it’s worth looking at story mistakes. Look at stories done well to learn how to do stories well. But for a real thrill, compare to those things that bug you, make you feel betrayed, make you feel like tuning out.

I first noticed this in Roswell in the fourth episode “Leaving Normal.” SPOILER ALERT! In this episode, Liz Parker (Shiri Appleby) starts out hiding, even denying, her feelings for Max Evans (Jason Behr), because he’s an alien who can heal people, and she’s not, and she wants to keep his secret, and… Well, as Liz would say, “It’s complicated.” Basically, they don’t even publically acknowledge each other, in order to maintain appearances.

Until Liz’s grandmother suffers a heart attack. She doesn’t know what to do or whom to call. So she calls Max.

Hi, Max…it’s Liz. I’m at the hospital. Something happened to my grandmother. We don’t know if it’s serious, but it seems really bad. I’m just scared. Look, I don’t even know why I’m calling you. I guess I just wanted to hear your voice or something. Now I just feel completely stupid. Look, don’t come here or anything because everyone is here. I’ll just see you in school tomorrow. Sorry for the weird call. Bye.

Now this taught me a valuable positive lesson: If you want your character to do something extraordinary, provide an extraordinary conflict. An extraordinary event, Liz’s grandmother’s heart attack, was the only thing that could cause Liz to change the status quo. And the more extraordinary the change, the more extraordinary must be the event that precipitates that change.

The episode finally ends with a heart-ripping scene between Max and Liz. Regardless, I thought, The cat’s out of the bag now. I mean, you can’t go back once you leave Normal, right? Well, actually, the very next episode, Liz and Max are back—I don’t know how. But they keep this on-again off-again thing going for almost the entire three seasons the show was on the air. It got very annoying very fast.

So, if you make a promise to your audience, pay it off. Let characters change. That makes the story interesting. And let those changes stick. Fortunately, the other characters in Roswell did change, and those changes did stick. Overall, Roswell was a good watch.

Harlan Ellison’s Soft Monkey

Famous authors sometimes commit sins you or I would have to sleep with someone to get away with. Let’s look at the opening to Harlan Ellison’s excellent story “Soft Monkey”:

Annie lay huddled in the tiny space formed by the wedge of locked revolving door that was open to the street when the document copying service had closed for the night. She had pulled the shopping cart from the Food Emporium at 1st Avenue near 47th into the mouth of the revolving door, had carefully tipped it onto its side, making certain her goods were jammed tightly in the cart, making certain nothing spilled into her sleeping space. She had pulled out half a dozen cardboard flats—broken-down sections of big Kotex cartons from the Food Emporium, the half dozen she had not sold to the junkman that afteroon—and she had fronted the shopping cart with two of them, making it appear the doorway was blocked by the maangement. She had wedged the others around the edges of the space, cutting the wind, and placed the two rotting sofa pillows behind and under her.

Now, this is a good beginning. But these are not the first sentences of the story. The first sentence does add something significant to the above scene, but it also lacks something needed in a beginning. Here’s the first sentence of “Soft Monkey”:

At twenty-five minutes past midnight on 51st Street, the wind-chill factor was so sharp it could carve you a new asshole.

Now, that’s shocking, certainly. And we need shocks in our stories. But shocks related to the story. At this point, this line is not related to the story. It’s a weather report! He might as well have started, “It was a cold and rainy night.” So it was ice cold and windy at 12:25 on 51st Street. Who cares? Annie cares, surely, but I almost didn’t get that far.

That said, “Soft Monkey” is an excellent story, which I highly recommend, as I do any of Harlan Ellison’s writing.

The Heart of the Matter

Some time ago I wrote a flash fiction called “The Heart of the Matter,” which you can read on my LiveJournal. One editor told me he liked the story, but my character wasn’t very sympathetic. This was actually an honor, to get concrete feedback from an editor. Editors are busy people, and it is not their job to shepherd novice writers. So to get an actual critique was quite a big deal.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know what to do about this advice. He said the character wasn’t very sympathetic and recommended I try telling the story in second-person to make it easier for the reader to identify with the character. I decided that second-person was not right for this story, and I was probably right. But I didn’t know what else to do, nor did I even understand what he was getting at. The story was published on Joel Miller’s Razormouth, back in the days when Razormouth was a full-blown commentary site publishing content from numerous authors, some well-known. In retrospect, now I see what the other editor was getting at and what I could’ve done to make it better.

The reason the story got onto Razormouth, a non-fiction, opinion-and-commentary publication, was that it’s a story that invokes a realization in the reader. When you read one of these stories, either you get it or you don’t. If you do, you think it’s cool. If you don’t, you think it stinks. This is the kind of story in which the situation for the character is the same at the end as at the beginning, but the attitude the reader has is perhaps different.

In “The Heart of the Matter,” our character’s past is picked apart by an underworld-type with a clipboard. How did he get all this information? And why does it matter? More importantly, the complaints leveled against our character are trivial. He cut cars off in traffic, wasn’t always nice to waitresses, and so forth. What about all the great things he did with his life? Aren’t those more important? No, actually. We discover that the interview is to determine whether or not he gets to meet Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates, or whether he goes to that other place, and that it’s the little things you do every day without thinking about them that truly matter, because they define who you are.

Reading this story now, years later, I still think it’s a cool story. But I see that my character falls flat as the LCD screen I read it from. What’s wrong with him?

I had been working under the assumption that by making my character an every-man, I’d make him someone most readers could identify with. I was wrong. To create a strong character, you have to give him some. He has to have a personality. In this story, I can give the character a history. Since the story’s in first-person, he can think thoughts, which he reveals to the reader. He can show his colors during the interview, unwittingly supporting the criticisms of the interviewer.

The most important thing I can give this character is a passion, something he sees as of paramount importance. In fact, this passion would contrast with the trivia the interviewer keeps harping on. We’d identify with the character and would have our own notions dashed, along with him, at the story’s end.