When she suddenly broke off their engagement, and then went and married her daughter’s father… Of course, we also understand what pushed her to this. Luke did. He was pushing her away, making her second place, being insensitive to her needs. I miss the old Luke, who was always there for Lorelai, no matter what. He’s always loved her, even before they were dating. And whatever problems they face, we know they’ll never be truly happy unless they find happiness together.

This might be the last season of Gilmore Girls. And what do fans like this do when their favorite show is about to be canceled? Answer: Everything they possibly can to keep it going. They don’t want GG to end at the current, seventh season. So there’s the “Great8Mandate” write-in campaign. And there are numerous online polls, which GG fans vote on in droves. There are petitions. And then there are blogs and forums, and almost every TV blog or forum out there has at least one comment on it begging for a Gilmore Girls season 8.

As I write this, there are only 4 episodes left for Luke and Lorelai to reconcile. And fans are getting very nervous. They want Luke and Lorelai to reunite. But how can they possibly do so in only a month? After all the bridges they’ve both burned? How do you get by all the anger and hurt, and find love and contentment, that fast? It just doesn’t happen. I tried to soothe their fears, reassuring them that Luke and Lorelai can indeed get back together, even get married, this season. I even described exactly what kind of thing would have to happen to make it work, and why. The only question is whether the writers go ahead and do it.

But fans are not writers. Our hero has gotten himself into a fix. And the fans think that he can’t get out, because they can’t see a way out. Of course, that’s what makes for great drama. Because when he does get out of the fix, free to save the world, we’re overjoyed. Fans don’t understand storytelling. And that’s why I pray the writers of Gilmore Girls ignore fans when it comes to the story. I pray they don’t let the fans tell them how to write a good story.

Because the fans keep saying we need to give Luke and Lorelai time to get back together. Amy Amatangelo, the TV Gal, reflects the opinion of many Gilmore Girls fans:

I am on “The Great8Mandate” bandwagon… We deserve a proper farewell. Or as TV Gal reader Rebecca put it an “unrushed conclusion.”

An “unrushed conclusion”? Okay, here’s the problem. An “unrushed” conclusion is a boring one. Like dialogue, pacing is not about what’s realistic. It’s about what’s plausible. And when fans say “unrushed,” they mean they don’t understand how Luke and Lorelai can possibly get by the China wall that currently separates them. In other words, if the fans can’t see how the conflict will be resolved. But if they could see how the conflict will be resolved then the suspense goes right out of the story. I can’t think of one top story that has an unrushed conclusion. They always have dramatic, mind-bending, tear-jerking conclusions that leave you saying, “Wow!” Unrushed conclusions suck.

Rushing the ending can make it all the more powerful. If it seems like Luke and Lorelai just can’t reconcile, doesn’t that make it all the more powerful when they do? And this is true no matter how unrealistic it is. It doesn’t matter whether the ending is believable, only whether it’s plausible. And whether or not it’s plausible depends more on the characters themselves than on real life. Once you have strongly sympathetic characters, as Gilmore Girls does, you can do almost anything you want in the story. And if the characters go along for the ride, the audience will, too.

When Steven Spielberg directed Jaws, the story goes, when he got to the end of the movie, where the shark dies– Peter Benchley had written the original novel and the screenplay. And Spielberg’s ending was different than the original ending. Benchley disagreed with Spielberg’s ending, because he said it was unbelievable. He said no one would believe that an air tank would explode like that or that it would explode a shark like that. Because none of that could possibly happen in real life. And as the Mythbusters proved, Benchley was right. The ending to Jaws could never happen in real life.

But Steven Spielberg said, he’s had the audience on the edge of their seats for 2 hours, and he’s going to give them a satisfying ending. He said the story was going to go out with a bang. And you know what? Spielberg was right. In theaters, when the ending came, audiences cheered. They not only believed the impossible; they exulted in it!

It has nothing to do with what would happen in real life. It has to do with the drama. It has to do with identifying with a hero who, being in an impossible situation, somehow overcomes, triumphant. It’s the plausible impossible. And that’s what I want to see of Luke and Lorelai.

What do you think? Is it better for a story to have a rushed ending? Are there case in which a story should have an unrushed ending?

-TimK

In a story, starting a fight is an easy way to make the mood tense. But conflict can do more than just make a story feel tense, suspenseful. Conflict engages the audience. It makes us sympathize with the characters and root for them. And it heightens other emotions in the story.

Conflict draws us in

Frequently, when the conflict makes the story tense, it’s actually heightening some other tension in the story. For example, C.J. West’s Sin and Vengeance is a true, page-turning suspense novel. The suspense comes not just from the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist, but also what we expect the antagonist to be capable of. He terrifies us.

This happens because conflict draws us in: Conflict enables us to feel sympathy for the underdog. In a Romance, the romantic parts are about love unrequited or passion unfulfilled.

Conflict enables sympathy

Tom Sawyer is a sympathetic character. Even though he’s always doing naughty things, getting into trouble, we don’t like to see him punished. And then when he develops a crush on Becky Thatcher, our sympathy increases. And when he witnesses a murder and Injun Joe is out to get him, our sympathy increases again. Our sympathy lets us feel for him, even feel the same way he does.

I also talked about conflict in the season-six finale of Gilmore Girls in another post. The reason for the strong reaction fans have to the finale is the sympathy they have for the characters. And this sympathy would not happen were it not for the conflict. The sympathy is so strong, in fact, that fans get upset because the conflict. (Is it possible to make a story too immersive?)

Romance unfulfilled

This Gilmore Girls episode also includes romantic elements that make us want to cry. This happens when romance is unfulfilled.

Casablanca is another example of a movie that makes some people cry. It’s because Rick is in love with Ilsa, but their love can’t be, then will be, then will never be.

Casablanca actually didn’t make me cry, though The Notebook did, as I mentioned in the last spotlight. Movie critics have described The Notebook as being a sappy romance story. But such a story works, for a simple reason, romantic tension. We have conflict; it draws us in, makes us feel what the characters are feeling.

How to do it

If you want to use conflict to create or enhance the feeling a story brings:

1. Decide which feeling the story should portray.
2. Choose a conflict that would make the protagonist feel that way.
3. Make the protagonist face that conflict.

An example

Last September, I wrote a short story called “Pine.” It was actually a project I did for a writing prompt. I had to write something inspired by a certain photo of a house. But I knew I didn’t want to write about just a house. Because no matter how much I dressed it up, that would be boring. I knew I needed a conflict. So I chose a romance story revolving around a first love.

Here’s the beginning of the story:

Each morning Jace walked by her house on his way to school. Each afternoon he passed it on his way home. Sometimes, he would also pass at other times. Occasionally he would catch a glimpse of the bright-faced girl with wavy blonde locks. She sat under the two conifers that towered overhead. But as far as he knew, she never noticed him.

The house itself, a grey Stick Victorian with brown trim, spoke of a happy family. Its expansive porch took a jaunt through the sweet-scented yellows and reds of the flower garden. Little gabled alcoves jutted into the world, embraced by the overall form of the structure, as if its gables were parents looking after their offspring. A squat wall of white stone stood before this all, making up in intensity what it lacked in stature, a formidable protector to all within.

But the trees were even more special, for under these Jennifer would read. Or sometimes she would just be sitting quietly or humming softly a tune Jace didn’t recognize. Jace paid her no heed, or else she might see his admiration. But out of the corner of his eye, he noticed her shapely form, and he fought to keep breathing. And in his imagination, he felt the softness of her pink cashmere sweater in his delicate hands. He felt her fingers running through his thick, dark hair. Her chocolate eyes and his ordinary brown ones got lost in each other. Perhaps his finger stroked the line of her eyebrow, following her face around softly-curved cheek and jaw, finally resting under her chin.

But Jace said nothing, made no motion out of the ordinary. He merely continued walking, as nonchalantly as possible for a big-footed, lanky teen in a grey tee and worn khakis.

You can read the whole story at my LiveJournal.

-TimK

This is the second part of a series, after Setting the Mood With Expectations.

Another mood-generating device authors use is milieu.

What is milieu

What I mean by millieu is the same thing Orson Scott Card means, when he talks about the 4 different types of stories. Briefly, Orson Scott Card talks about the millieu story, idea story, character story, and event story, depending on what story element is at the root of the story idea.

The milieu is the world surrounding the characters, not only the setting but also culture and society, governement and religion, family and traditions, everything.

Moody milieus

I’m not necessarily talking about using a milieu story to generate a mood. But I am saying that some milieus have their own mood associated with them. For example, cultural milieus frequently generate a strong feeling. The movie Moonstruck has a strong feeling about it, because it is about an Italian family in New York City. Similarly, Smilla’s Sense of Snow is set in Denmark, and Smilla grew up in Greenland. Someone recently told me the novel was the coldest story he’d ever read.

Your mileage may vary. Each of us is likely to react slightly differently to a given milieu, depending on our own histories and taste. Still, milieu is an important element. That’s why authors instinctively feel the need to build layers of complexity into their fictional universes.

In The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, on the island of Santorini, in Greece, especially in the novel, Lena always the artist is overwhelmed by the visuals of the island, the colors. (You get a sense of this in the film as well.) How the sympathetic characters react to the milieu will affect how the audience reacts.

In Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the characters live on the moon, and the society there is normal for them. When they visit Earth, you get a feeling of oppression, even though their Earth is very similar to ours. Humans tend toward neatly whitewashed evil. It’s all a matter of perspective. We get to see our society through their eyes.

By the way, calling on sympathy to manipulate the audience’s feelings is something well known to politicians.

How to do it

You can use the following steps to write mood into a story:

1. Identify the emotion you want the audience to feel.
2. Ask what elements of the milieu would invoke these feelings in the audience.
3. Write these elements into the story.

Sometimes, you don’t need to identify a specific feeling. Sometimes, you only care that it’s a strong feeling. Cultural milieus are great for this.

If you do have a specific feeling you want to encourage, consider using character sympathy to drive audience reaction:

1. Identify the emotion you want the audience to feel.
2. Ask what elements of the milieu would invoke these feelings in the character.
3. Write these elements into the story.

An example

Here’s a short piece that I intended to feel reminiscent. (By the way, this is based on my own memories of Longwood Gardens, in case you’ve been there yourself.)

A little dark-haired girl, perhaps 6 years old, ran by and almost knocked Jenna over. And Jenna smiled. A man called out after, but the girl wasn’t listening.

“Sorry,” he said to Jenna.

“That’s okay.” She smiled even more broadly. “I was a little dark-haired girl once, too.”

When she was little, Jenna’s family every summer visited this same tourist trap. But to her it was not just a tourist trap. It was a memory. As a girl, she romped down the same red-brick path. She smelled the same flowers, all red and purple and gold. The same hot sun radiated on her long, black hair. The same sweat beaded on her face, waiting for a gentle scented garden breeze to cool it. In the distance, Jenna could just make out the chimes tower signalling the hour.

She stopped a moment, letting the sun beat down on her. Then she sighed and continued on.

How do you write moody stories? How do you imbue your prose with overwhelming emotion? It’s all about manipulating the feelings of the audience. Over the next couple of weeks, I want to look at different ways to set the mood. This week, using expectations to set the mood.

Breeding fear

What I mean by expectations is that which the audience thinks could happen. It’s not necessarily what will happen, but it is what is being hinted at.

For example, in C.J. West’s thriller Sin and Vengeance, he establishes early on what one of the characters, Randy, is capable of. I was on the edge of my seat in terror of his shenanigans. And as the character further develops, I grew to fear him increasingly more. I felt helpless in the face of this character, and terrified for the protagonist, the sympathetic character, who must go up against him. This sets the tone of the whole novel.

Sin and Vengeance manipulates our emotions in order to give us a memory of a feeling. This, I think, is what “mood” really is, a memory of a feeling.

So one way to generate mood is to set expectations about what’s going to happen, or at least what could happen.

H.P. Lovecraft also did this well in his story “The Shunned House”. He builds up an image of this house as having something terrible: Anyone who lives there meets an untimely death. Lovecraft was a master of building up an horrific element and wrapping it up in the plight of the characters. In this story, we just know our characters are destined for something terrible, and we fear for them and with them.

The X-Files also did this well. We loved Mark Snow’s moody soundtrack. But music is an abstract art form. Alone it can’t set the mood. It can only enhance the mood. What set the mood was the fact that any moment, Mulder and Scully might encounter a horrifying and deadly foe. This especially bugged me when they split up to work on two different branches of a case. Even though being together never decreased the danger, I felt better not having to go into a terrifying situation alone.

Other emotions

We can also apply the same technique to other feelings. If we had a sympathetic character who was trying to accomplish something, for example, as he overcame a tiny obstacle the audience would share his feelings of accomplishment and hope.

Consider Laura Whitcomb’s excellent novel A Certain Slant of Light (about which I cannot rave enthusiastically enough). The main character is dead, a ghost, and as a ghost she can hear and see what happens in the world, but she can’t feel objects or smell or taste, and no one else can hear or see her. Then someone does see her and hear her, because he is another ghost living inside a human body. And so we have hope that our protagonist can find a fuller existence. She falls in love with this other person, and when she then finds a human body to inhabit, we experience with her all the great feelings of love and passion and fulfillment. And we also fear the day they will have to leave these bodies, even though she avoids thinking about that eventuality. And we hope they can find some existence together, either as humans or in some other afterlife. (If you don’t understand, read the novel; then you will.)

How to do it

You can use the following three steps to write mood into a story:

1. Identify the emotion you want the audience to feel.
2. Ask what expectations in a sympathetic character’s story would evoke these feelings in the character.
3. Give the character reason to expect these things.

Alternatively, you can make the audience feel for the character, because they know something the character does not or has a perspective he doesn’t have:

1. Identify the emotion you want the audience to feel.
2. Ask what future events in a sympathetic character’s story would evoke these feelings in the audience.
3. Give the audience reason to expect these things.

An example

(Note: I know I said in the podcast I’d write a couple stories to demonstrate. As it turned out, just the beginnings seemed to make the point.)

Here’s the beginning to a story that illustrates using the character’s reaction to set the mood. The feeling I want to evoke is fear. Establish a character who is afraid of something. Then make him face the thing he fears. Note that he can face it with bravery— Bravery is being afraid and doing it anyway. Still, the audience will experience the same tension they know is under the character’s tough exterior.

Logic did not matter. Ever since he was a young boy, ever since his black cat playfully reached out an grabbed him, as cats do, John had been terrified of dark passages and black cats. This was a deep-seated phobia.

Sometimes, people asked him why he became a zookeeper and why he loved the panthers. He wasn’t sure himself. Maybe it was a twist of fate. Or maybe it was his subconscious facing his fears.

Whatever the reason, just after the zoo had closed for the night, the panther had escaped, and now John was in charge…

-TimK

This week, something a little different, a dichotomy Kate Wilhelm mentioned in her book Storyteller. It has been mentioned on at least one other podcast. It’s not so much a dichotomy as two story dimensions. As Kate Wilhelm points out, both are important. I want to explore both, and I want to take this lesson and apply it to other story forms.

Two dimensions, both important

Being a storyteller or a wordsmith, these are two different ways to approach writing a story. They’re not mutually exclusive. They’re more like two aspects to any writer’s personality.

I once worked for a larger employer than I do now. One of the things you get with a larger company is that you can sometimes attend on-site seminars for personal and professional development. I was able to take a seminar on communication techniques. Part of this seminar was a “communication styles” evaluation, with which each of us could determine which communication styles he preferred. Some of us were more abstract, some more concrete; some of us were more logical, some more emotional. I fully expected that I would learn which ones I preferred and that then I would be able understand potential conflicts between my style and that of others. That’s not what it was about, though. Because the person who learns to use all four communication styles, each when the situation calls for it, he’ll go further, faster, and be able to accomplish more.

It’s the same way with the storyteller and the wordsmith. Both of these are necessary, and if you can master both, you’ll be able to write much better than if you only master one.

Here’s what Kate Wilhelm said about the wordsmith on one side and the storyteller on the other:

I think of it as surface and depth, with the full understanding that it is much more complex than that. But it was a starting point…

A good story is one in which the surface and depth are fused into one inseparable whole. Beautiful language, unique imagery, subtle symbolism over nothing is not a good story. Neither is a story obscured by bad word choices, awkward phrases that conceal meaning rather than reveal it, inappropriate symbolism or metaphors.

The Wordsmith

“The Dark Country” by Dennis Etchison is a horror-genre short story, something you would not usually associate with literary fiction. But read this, the beginning of the story:

Martin sat by the pool, the wind drying his hair.

A fleshy, airborne spider appeared on the edge of the book which he had been reading there. From this angle it cast a long, pointed needle across the yellowing page. The sun was hot and clean; it went straight for his nose. Overweight American children practiced their volleyball on the bird-of-paradise plants. Weathered rattan furniture gathered dust beyond the peeling diving board.

Traffic passed on the road. Trucks, campers, bikes.

The pool that would not be scraped till summer. The wooden chairs that had been ordered up from the States. Banana leaves. Olive trees. A tennis court that might be done next year. A single color TV antenna above the palms. By the slanted cement patio heliotrope daisies, speckled climbing vines. The morning a net of light on the water. Boats fishing in Todos Santos Bay.

A smell like shrimps Veracruz blowing off the silvered waves.

And a strangely familiar island, like a hazy floating giant, where the humpback whales play. Yesterday in Ensenada, the car horns talking and a crab taco in his hand, he had wanted to buy a pair of huaraches and a Mexican shirt. The best tequila in the world for three-and-a-half a liter. Noche Buena beer, foil labels that always peel before you can read them. Delicados con Filtros cigarettes.

Bottles of agua mineral. Tehuacan con gas. No retornable.

He smiled as he thought of churros at the Blow Hole, the maid who even washed his dishes, the Tivoli Night Club with Reno cocktail napkins, mescal flavored with worm, eggs fresh from the nest, chorizo grease in the pan, bar girls with rhinestone-studded Aztec headbands, psychoactive liqueurs, seagulls like the tops of valentines, grilled corvina with lemon, the endless plumes of surf…

And would you get to the point already?!

The storyteller

On the other side of the spectrum, we have The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the novel by Ann Brashares. It’s a popular, compelling story, but with a mediocre rendering. Here’s a snippet from early in the story:

The first thing was the front door. It was painted the most brilliant, egg-yolk-over-easy shade of yellow. Surrounding it, the house front was painted the brightest possible blue. Who could even imagine such a blue? Lena tipped her face upward to the cloudless afternoon sky. Oh.

In Bethesda, if you painted your house those colors, they’d call you a drug addict. Your neighbors would sue you. They’d arrive with sprayers at nightfall and repaint it beige. Here was color bursting out everywhere against the whitewashed walls.

“Lena, go!” Effie whined, shoving Lena’s suitcase forward with her foot.

“Velcome, girls. Velcome home!” Grandma said, clapping her hands. Their grandfather fit the key into the lock and swung open the sun-colored door.

The combination of jet lag, sun, and these strange old people made Lena feel as if she were tripping—hypothetically, of course. She’d never actually tripped on anything, except maybe a bad shrimp from Peking Garden once.

If Lena was glazed and stupefied, Effie without sleep was just plain cranky. Lena always counted on her younger sister to do the blabbering, but Effie was too cranky even for that. So the drive from the tiny island airport had been mostly quiet. Grandma kept turning around in the front seat of their old Fiat saying, “Look at you girls! Oh, Lena, you are a beauty!”

Lena seriously wished she would stop saying that, because it was irritating, and besides, how was cranky Effie supposed to feel?

We get to know the characters. We see how Lena reacts to the scenery, which is very important once we learn that she’s an artist. We also learn about Lena’s grandmother and her thoughts, which also become important later in the story. For now, it’s enough to know Lena’s thoughts, Lena’s reaction to these things. All these things are setting up a story arc. And even though there’s a fair amount of description, it’s not boring.

However, even though there’s a fair amount of description, look at what we don’t know. We don’t know how the air smells. We don’t know how the sun or air feels. We can’t hear any of the background noises. We know nothing, in fact, except what we can glean from the sense of sight. All the other senses are missing. All of these things Lena could be experiencing, and we could be experiencing them with her and further sympathizing with her, except that they’re missing from the narrative.

The storyteller and the wordsmith, together again

But you don’t have to choose one or the other. One of the best novels I’ve read is A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb, which I spotlighted a couple Thursdays ago.

Here’s how the novel starts:

Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensation if you’re dead. I was with my teacher, Mr. Brown. As usual, we were in our classroom, that safe and wooden-walled box—the windows opening onto the grassy field to the west, the fading flag standing in the chalk dust corner, the television mounted above the bulletin board like a sleeping eye, and Mr. Brown’s princely table keeping watch over a regiment of student desks. At that moment I Was scribbling invisible comments in the margins of a paper left in Mr. Brown’s tray, though my words were never read by the students. Sometimes Mr. Brown quoted me, all the same, while writing his own comments. Perhaps I couldn’t tickle the inside of his ear, but I could reach the mysterious curves of his mind.

Although I could not feel paper between my fingers, smell ink, or taste the tip of a pencil, I could see and hear the world with all the clarity of the Living. They, on the other hand, did not see me as a shadow or a floating vapor. To the Quick, I was empty air.

Or so I thought. As an apathetic girl read aloud from Nicholas Nickleby, as Mr. Brown began to daydream about how he had kept his wife awake the night before, as my spectral pen hovered over a misspelled word, I felt someone watching me. Not even my beloved Mr. Brown could see me with his eyes. I had been dead so long, hovering at the side of my hosts, seeing and hearing the world but never being heard by anyone and never, in all these long years, never being seen by human eyes. I held stone still while the room folded in around me like a closing hand. When I looked up, it was not in fear but in wonder. My vision telescoped so that there was only a small hole in the darkness to see through. And that’s where I found it, the face that was turned up to me.

Wow. That gives me a little shiver.

What is story?

Can we do anything with these two components besides writing short stories and novels? Yes. In any media, we can compare the story to the way the story is expressed.

Story is an abstraction. A novel, for example, is only a representation of the story told within. The story isn’t the words of the novel, either. Story is a concept, something represented by the words, behind the words. I like to say, story is where the writer meets his audience. It’s that part that connects with the audience, where the words disappear and all that’s left is immersive communication.

You must pay attention to the story, or you won’t have that channel of communication. By the same token, you must give that story an effective physical medium through which to be expressed, calling on every means at your disposal to accomplish this.

The storyteller and the cinematographer

Filmmakers, for example, tend to focus on the media of film, sometimes neglecting the story, just as writers tend to focus on the words, sometimes forgetting the story.

March of the Penguins tried very hard to bring us into the plight of the emperor penguins, but at the end of the day, it was just a bunch of penguins, and I don’t care about a bunch of penguins? They tried very hard to heighten the tension, to get me involved, by saying, “But this is not the worst they will face,” or words to that effect. Still, it was just a bunch of penguins, and I don’t care about a bunch of penguins. So a few of them died. Aw. Am I supposed to cry?

Now, if they had followed the plight of two particular penguins, Harry and Harriet, as they fall in love, have a baby penguin chick, and overcome the dangers that are claiming the lives of their friends and their friends’ families… That I would have cared about.

If you want both the storyteller and the cinematographer, check out Citizen Kane, The Godfather, or Smilla’s Sense of Snow. For the last, see my spotlight earlier this week. The plot starts to get weird near the end, but Siskel and Ebert gave the film “two thumbs up,” because even though things get preposterous, you don’t care! You’ve already been drawn into the story, into the life of this character, and even a ridiculous plot twist can’t pull you out.

The storyteller and the programmer

I remember an old adventure game called Zero Critical, by Istvan Pely. This game had an incredible story, but the game itself has bugs and weaknesses. The game was overall rated not-great, but I enjoyed it a lot.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have pure gameplay-games like Tetris, without any story. They can be fun, but they don’t inspire me.

Check out Psychonauts (and my review of it) for a game with strong gameplay integrated with a strong story.

The storyteller and the designer

Can we generalize even further? What about to story design aspects in general. The design elements in a story, if they serve the story, you won’t even notice them.

Plot devices, for example, are story design elements. But unless those plot devices are used to tell a story, they’re just plot devices. They can’t work in isolation. Still, if you use creative, original ideas, you’ll end up with a best story you can have.

-TimK

This is part 2 of “Anatomy of a Story Game”.

This week, we’ll complete the basic story design and discuss some implementation issues in various media.

A story state-diagram

A state diagram is something used in software engineering to design a state machine. We’re going to use one to design an interactive story. That’s a lot of 25-cent verbiage, but the concept is simple. We’re simply going to draw out the possible plots of our story.

Story state-diagram (PDF file)

In part 1, I wrote out a flash-fiction story. As a very short story, it has only a few opportunities for interactivity, but it does have a few. I started by writing the story in sections, similarly to the way you might write summaries of the sections of a novel on index cards so that you can arrange them visually and see the story flow, so that you can plan your novel.

In this case, we’re doing something similar, based on the same idea, but with a slightly different use of the idea. I’ve written out each of the player-events in the story (or summaries of them) and arranged them into a state diagram.

This state diagram represents an abstract view of the story. It does not necessarily correspond one-to-one with entities in the virtual world or narrative. Events, for example, include only things that the player does that actually move the story forward. Other things the player may do in a game, such as traveling back and forth through the game’s virtual world, do not necessarily generate story events and may not appear on this diagram. This state diagram is only an organizational tool to help us visualize the story.

States

In the diagram, each rounded rectangle is a state. A state is as if you were watching the story on a video tape and you hit the pause button. That frozen point in the plot is the state described inside each rounded rectangle. This is the point at which the player must decide what to do next, in order to progress the plot.

In our story, since it’s being written as a hypertext “choose your own adventure” type of story, the states themselves have no physical form. They simply represent the point to which you’ve read, where you’ve put the bookmark before deciding what to do next.

In interactive fiction and graphical adventure games, the player navigates through a virtual world, interacting with that world, manipulating objects in that world. In this kind of game, a story state may represent the state of various objects or characters in the world. For example, in a Myst-style puzzle-solving game, you might have a locked door. Before you discover the lock combination, the door is closed. That’s one state: “closed door.” After you unlock the door and open it, you’ve moved the story to a new state: “open door.”

Events

Each arrow in the diagram is a player event, something the player can do to push the plot along. Using the video-tape metaphor, this is the time during which we’re actually playing the tape, inbetween pauses, inbetween states. Events move the story from one state to the next.

In a hypertext interactive story, events correspond to passages that the user can read. These are the sections of narrative that I previously wrote. And you can see that the arrows are labelled with the headings of the narrative passages from part 1.

In interactive fiction and graphical adventure games, events usually correspond to cut-scenes. In the locked-door example above, when we unlock the door, we might watch a cut-scene showing the door open, after which time whenever we visit the room with the door, it will remain open.

Choices

During the plot, our character Martin (and thus the player) may face choices. Depending on which path he chooses, the plot will take a different path.

For example, after he asks Jane about the missing book, and Jane feels as though he’s accusing her, he can choose to state his accusation straight-out, or he can choose to backpedal. This story is so simple, each choice represents only a small diversion. But you could make the difference much more involved.

Concurrent states

Immediately after the introduction, denoted by the arrow coming from the “start” of the diagram, the story splits into two story threads. In one thread, Martin questions the guests from his dinner party in order to clue in on who might have misplaced or stolen his book. In the other thread, he searches his apartment, in case someone just misplaced the book, maybe put it on the wrong shelf or something.

These two threads happen independently, as shown in the diagram. At any time, both plot threads will be in force, and one state from each will be active. These are called concurrent states.

Again, this is a very simply story, with only two major sections, each of which has only two concurrent states. Typically, an adventure game will have at least three sections, each with at least three concurrent states, plus a “boss” sequence at the end (which this story also has).

Choices based on state

In the second part of the story, after Martin tries to trap Jane, the story goes one of two ways, depending on whether Martin had previously found the book. Whether Martin had found the book is part of the other story thread. So one concurrent state can effect choices made from other states.

This happens more than is actually shown on the diagram. I’ve simplified the diagram to make it more manageable. For example, in the first part of the story, when Martin talks to Jane, Pat, and Dory, he might have slightly different conversations depending on whether he had searched his apartment first and failed to find the book. This will affect the narrative, but not where the arrows point. If we were to draw this on the state diagram, it would be represented by a pair of arrows, each going between the same two states, but each with a different condition on it.

If you write such a story as a book or a simple web page, the number of pages you need to write quickly balloons, because each page could have multiple versions, depending on how many concurrent states you need to take into account. (The number of possible variations is 2^n-t, where n is the number of rounded rectangles in the other story threads and t is the number of other story threads. So if you had three threads total, each with three states, each thread has 2 “other threads,” which each have 3 states, and the number of variations is 2^6-2=16 possible variations.)

Fortunately, if you can write any software at all, you can get the computer to handle the variations by generating them on-the-fly. This is what I will do with this story. I’m still finishing up the implementation, but I’ll post it later this week.

What are story games, and how do they differ from other games? What about adventure games and interactive fiction? What are some of the issues that arise when writing story games?

This is the first part of two episodes that explain story games and how to write them.

What is a story game?

A story game is a game in which the stoy drives the game, rather than the gameplay driving the game. In general, if you can take the story out of the game without losing the game, it’s not a story game. But if the story is so tightly integrated into the game that you’d have to change the shape of the gameplay in order to take the story out, that’s a story game.

To design a story game, tell a story, but let the player cause story events. Make the story interactive. Traditionally, this is done with an external conflict. The things that the character needs to do to resolve the external conflict, turn these into puzzles for the player to solve. This is why adventure games are commonly detective or science-fiction stories.

Adventure games usually don’t have strong character-based stories, though there’s no conceptual reason why they can’t. In future episodes, I’d like to explore variations that make for strong character-based story games.

What’s the difference between an adventure game and a story game? Some adventure gamers will tell you that the puzzles are central to an adventure game. Others will tell you the story is central. Many games appeal to both of these perspectives by offering strong puzzle-based gameplay with a tightly integrated, driving story. But by “story game,” I mean to refer to any story-driven game, whether it has puzzle elements or not, and whether or not it has other gameplay elements.

At pinheadgames.com, you can play good, short, graphical story-based Flash adventure games, on-line for free. In particular, check out The Goat in the Grey Fedora, a humorous detective story in a film-noir style.

Plot branches

… or, a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

You have to give the player choices as to which plot-branch to take the story down. Otherwise, he feels led around by the nose, and this can destroy the illusion of reality. However, you really only have to make the player believe he’s choosing which way the story goes. He may just be choosing the order in which events are told, but not how they come together. Sanitarium did this pretty well.

These plot-branches can multiply exponentially, like rabbits. This can make the stories very complex. But we can manage this complexity by writing the story as multiple story threads. Each story thread proceeds independently as events affect it. However, story threads can spawn, join, and feed into other story threads. So they are independent, but related.

Think of how you might plot a novel. One common method is to write a summary of each part of each subplot on an index card, then lay out the index cards in story threads, so you can see how they go together. This is the same thing we do when designing a story game, except that we also take into account alternate storylines, where the player chooses one path or another, but not both.

Some story games have multiple alternative endings. I prefer a story with one good ending, rather than a story with multiple not-so-good endings. I first noticed this playing The Pandora Directive, which has a number of endings, depending on what you make the hero do and say. Whenever I played it, I’d Google for a walkthrough, a cheat, that would tell me at the critical stages exactly what I should do to get the ending I wanted. I did not consider this cheating, since I was not playing for the gameplay, but rather for the story.

The player is your co-author

A story games greatest strength is also its greatest liability. The player is taking part, indirectly, in the writing process.

As the author of the game, you must anticipate what the player will be thinking and what he will want to do, and you have to give him the ability to do it, or at least to try them, within the rules of the game. Otherwise, the player will feel like the environment is unrealistic, and the game will interfere with his suspension of disbelief.

Also, the player will tend to make mistakes beginning writers make. He’ll want all protagonists to be copies of himself. And he’ll go out of his way not to hurt the protagonist. Of course, writers know that you have to put your characters through hell, no matter how much you love them, in order for them to triumph over it. But the player isn’t going to want to do this, unless you give him a compelling reason or force hell on the character.

A sample story game

This is the beginning of a design to a sample story game, a mystery. I’m starting with rough story snippets, each of which corresponds to one of the index cards you might use to plot a novel. This doesn’t represent the whole story, and they aren’t all arranged in order. Also, some of these need to be tweaked, depending on which alternative the player chose earlier in the story.

Next week, I’ll enhance the design. I also hope to post a JavaScript or HTML version of the game, like an electronic “choose your own adventure” novel, just to demonstrate how this can work.

Part 2

Here is Part 2.

Conflict is what drives the story arc. It’s what keeps the audience on the edge of its seat. And it’s a fundamental aspect of story structure. If you want to see how a story arc works, just look at just about any novel or movie or story game. Let’s look at Disney’s Snow White.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

Snow White’s evil stepmother the Queen is envious of Snow White’s beauty, so she makes Snow White a maid. Snow White meanwhile meets a prince who would carry her away, which makes the evil stepmother even more envious. She orders a huntsman to cut out Snow White’s heart and bring it to her in a gold box. But the huntsman instead warns Snow White to escape into the forest and tries to fool the evil queen by bringing to her in the box the heart of a pig.

Snow White, meanwhile, finds the cottage of the seven dwarves. She cooks and cleans for them in return for lodging. But the evil queen finds out through her magic mirror that Snow White is still alive and still the most beautiful in the land. So she disguises herself as an old crone and creates a magic apple that will put Snow White to sleep forever. Only love’s first kiss will be able to wake up Snow White. She tricks Snow White into eating the apple. The dwarves discover this going on and chase the evil queen off a high precipice, from which she falls to her death.

But it’s too late. Snow White has already taken a bite of the apple and is dead. So the dwarves put her in a gold coffin with a glass cover. The prince happens along, discovers Snow White, kisses her, and she wakes up. Then he puts her on his horse and they ride off and live happily ever after.

The arc

A charming fairy tale, yes, but it follows a classic story arc. Here’s how the story arc works. Start with a conflict. In trying to resolve the conflict, things get worse for the protagonist. He tries once, twice, and then finally on the third try the conflict is resolved. And then there’s an epilogue that shows the new status quo after the conflict is resolved.

• The conflict is that Snow White is in danger and wants to find her prince.
• First attempt to solve the conflict: She meets her prince. This just makes the queen more angry. As a result, the queen tries to have her killed.
• Second attempt: Snow White runs away to the dwarves and the huntsman tries to fool the queen into thinking Snow White is dead. As a result, the queen sets out on a plan to kill Snow White personally. And she succeeds, at the cost of her death, yes, but that’s of no help to Snow White.
• Third attempt: The prince kisses Snow White, which wakes her up and resolves the conflict.
• Epilogue: They lived happily ever after.

Doing it ourselves

Our character gets laid off from his job, and now he’s out of work and needs to support his family. (That’s the conflict.) He has some unemployment pay and some severance. He tries for several months to get a job. (The first attempt.) But that doesn’t work, as he can’t find a job, and now they need to cut back, to economize. His friends at his church find out about his economic situation and invoke the church’s benevolence fund. (The second attempt.) This keeps them in food and shelter, but he still doesn’t have a job, and now he feels guilty for taking charity and inadequate as a provider. One of his friends has been urging him to try a career change, which he has been resisting. But now he does try it. (The third attempt.) It works, and he ends up making enough money to pay back the money he borrowed and contribute money to the church benevolence fund and the other communities that helped him through. And maybe he’s also has gained a new perspective on charity. (The epilogue.)

Variations

I like an abbreviated epilogue, rather than an epilogue full of inane banter. Just tell me what things are like after the conflict is resolved, and end the story.

The plot points are areas of great intensity in the story. Inbetween, there can be periods of relative rest. A story is like a huge boulder. Initially at rest, you have to give it a push to get it going, but then you can coast along, spend a little time looking at the scenery, before the next big push. The times of rest are not excuses to dump expository lumps onto the reader, but they are opportunities to look at relevant asides that would be uninteresting on their own.

In a complex story, there will be layers of story arcs. Consider a serial drama, like Gilmore Girls. The first 3 seasons of Gilmore Girls represent a unified epic story arc. On top of that are stories that stretch across multiple episodes. Then on top of that are individual episodes, each of which is a story of its own. The episode-length stories provide the surface for the multi-episode stories, which are built on the multi-season stories.

To resolve the conflict, the protagonist can conquer it, or the conflict can conquer the protagonist. Be careful with having the conflict win. I personally need the protagonist to win something, even if he also loses something. Maybe he wins a new perspective on life, as he yields to the inevitable. That may be bitter-sweet, but at least it’s not frustrating, as I found, for instance, A Streetcar Named Desire.

What do I mean by “story game”? After all, most games now have stories. What differentiates a story game from all the others? By “story game” I mean a game whose story drives the game. In most games, the gameplay is the central element, and the story is there to add flavor. But in story games, the story is the central element, and the gameplay is built around the story. As a result, the story is so tightly integrated with the gameplay that you cannot remove the story and still have a game left.

A brief history of story games

The story in games came from the Adventure genre. The earliest adventure games were text games, what we now call Interactive Fiction. The prototypical adventure was ADVENT, written on a PDP-10 by Will Crowther in the 70’s. Actually the game was called “Adventure,” but the operating system only allowed filenames to have 6 characters, so “ADVENT.” ADVENT is basically a puzzle game in which you must explore a great underground cave in order to find treasure.

This was also the idea behind Zork, the Great Underground Empire, the first adventure game published by Infocom, the pioneer adventure game publisher, now owned by Activision. The object of Zork was to explore the Great Underground Empire, solve the puzzles, and discover the hidden treasures. But Infocom also published many story-rich text adventures as well as did other publishers of that era. These were the progenitors of today’s Interactive Fiction.

Sierra On-Line, cofounded by Roberta Williams, now owned by Vivendi Universal Interactive Publishing, was the first to add images to adventure games, creating the first graphical adventure games, starting with Mystery House, a black-and-white mystery adventure. In a Victorian mansion, guests start being murdered, one by one, and you must discover who the murderer is before he gets you. Roberta Williams is best known for the King’s Quest series of games, just one of the “Quest” series, which are soon to be re-released. (Stay tuned to bethestory.com.) Jane Jensen joined Sierra in 1991 and became famous for the Gabriel Knight series there.

Meanwhile, at LucasArts, some of the most beloved story games were being created in the Monkey Island series and the games by Tim Schafer. After Grim Fandango, perhaps the best loved adventure game of all time, Tim and others from the team started their own studio, Double Fine Productions, and developed Psychonauts, a platform-adventure game and another story-gaming hit.

Now, numerous independent developers are trying their hands at story games, usually based on the classic adventure formulae. We’ll have to see what sticks. But I have a feeling that innovation in making the story more immersive is where the most notable progress will show up.

How are story and gameplay integrated?

I’ll cover this in more detail in an upcoming episode. Briefly, an interactive story is conceptually just like any other story. That is, there’s conflict, tension, and resolution, arranged in a story arc. As in any complex story, multiple story threads interweave, branching and joining and interrelating. Story events cause the plot to progress along each story thread, just as in any story.

Here’s where the interactivity comes in. The player can cause story events to occur. Traditionally, external conflicts are presented to the player as puzzles to solve. This is why adventure games are traditionally puzzle-based games with external conflicts in the story. It’s a tried and true formula. In a future podcast, I’ll demonstrate the formula and propose some cool variations on it. But for now, let’s look at a couple of my favorite classic story games.

Full Throttle

by Tim Schafer
1994 LucasArts Entertainment Company
Starring the voices of Roy Conrad, Mark Hamill, Kath Soucie

Full Throttle is one of the games Tim Schafer produced at LucasArts. It came between Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango. Full Throttle takes place in the future, in the desert, and on motorcycles. Our hero, Ben (Roy Conrad), no-nonsense leader of the Pole Cats, sets out to prevent an ambush of his gang, but instead ends up smeared all over the pavement and framed for murder by the evil Ripberger (Mark Hamill, Star Wars). Along the way, he finds an ally in Maureen (Kath Soucie, Rugrats), a mechanic with an awesome secret.

I like this game even more than I do Grim Fandango, because I identified strongly with Ben, not as much with Manny.

Let’s look briefly at the storyline as it begins. After refusing his gang’s services to escort Malcolm Corley to the Corley Motors shareholder’s meeting, Ben finds himself knocked out cold and stuffed in a dumpster. And he doesn’t have the keys to his bike. The first puzzles involve finding his keys and learning that his gang is in for an ambush. Instead, he finds himself in a huge, uh, accident. Fortunately, a reporter happens along, and takes him to Maureen, or Mo for short, who fixes his bike and him, too.

But she needs a little help getting it finished. The front forks were completely destroyed, so Ben needs to find new ones. Someone stole Mo’s welding torch, so Ben needs to find it. And the bike needs some gasoline before it’ll run. So that’s 3 more goals, and 3 more sets of puzzles. The forks he can get from the junk yard, but first he needs to get in, and he needs to do something about that Pit Bull. The torch is probably the easiest item to find, as it’s pretty obvious who stole it and where it is. The gasoline he might be able to get from the gasoline tower, if he can get by the security system.

The puzzles in Full Throttle are all pretty easy. The game also has some arcade-like sequences, which has ticked off adventure gamers. But the arcade sequences are actually puzzles. For example, on the mine road, you have to fight certain foes. If you approach this as a test of mouse-manipuation acuity, you’ll be frustrated. If you treat it as a puzzle, figuring out which weapon will work against each foe, you’ll find it easy.

The biggest complaint adventure gamers have about Full Throttle is that it’s shorter than most games. You can play through the whole thing in only a few hours. But the story has so engrossed me, I include it among my most favorite story games.

The Pandora Directive

by Chris Jones and Aaron Connor
1996 Access Software Incorporated
Starring Barry Corbin, Kevin McCarthy, Tanya Roberts
Directed by Adrian Carr

The Pandora Directive was the fourth in the Tex Murphy series, and the second 3D, FMV game featuring Tex Murphy. The Pandora Directive takes place in San Fransisco in 2043, a generation after World War III left the world a radioactive wasteland. Private Investigator Tex Murphy (Chris Jones) is hired by one Gordon Fitzpatrick (Kevin McCarthy) to find his lost colleague and friend Thomas Malloy (John Agar). But the search puts him onto the trail of a dangerous secret involving space aliens and government cover-ups. He must fend off the formidable government agent Jackson Cross (Barry Corbin, One Tree Hill) as well as Malloy’s sexy niece Regan Madsen (Tanya Roberts, That 70’s Show), both of whom are after this same secret.

One of the innovative gameplay features of The Pandora Directive is that the story turns out differently depending on how you play the game. This was intended to make the game more replayable, because you can play it through differently every time. But I sought out a suitable walkthrough, so I could always play the variation in which the hero wins and gets the girl and everyone lives happily ever after. In other words, I’d rather play the same good story over and over again than to play several different less-good ones.

The Pandora Directive, as some of the other Tex Murphy games, also has an Entertainment Mode (for story lovers) and an alternate Gamer Mode (with more puzzles). And it has an integrated in-game hint system, which can help you the puzzles. The Tex Murphy games do have a some contrived puzzles, put in there just to provide gameplay challenges. But the compelling storyline makes up for this defect.

The are lots of great books and other resources to teach you how to make good fictional character, but my favorite step-by-step guide is Holly Lisle’s Create a Character Clinic. Here’s an overview of this tool, with an example character description as we go through it.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

All character have compelling needs. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a great source for ideas. If you can’t think of a compelling need for your character, put Maslow’s need-pyramid on the wall and throw a dart at it. Wherever it hits, there’s a need you can explore to make your character come alive. There are 5 levels of need, from most to least fundamental:

• physiological – the need to breath, to eat, to drink, to dispose of bodily waste, to sleep, to keep warm
• safety – the need to be secure, to make a living, to be safe from violence, to be healthy
• love & belonging – the need to be love and belong, and the need to love others, friendships, sexual intimacy, family relationships
• esteem – the need to be respected and to respect others
• self-actualization – the need to do what you do best, to grow, to be “me”

Areas of Character Definition

The Create a Character Clinic begins with 7 areas of character definition. Each features a list of questions designed to stimulate creativity regarding your character. Here’s what I wrote for my character.

Need, Pursuit & Avoidance

CHARACTER wants a stable job and life, security for himself and his family. He wants to get up every morning at 6, shave and shower, get on the train, work until 5, come home, eat dinner, and so forth, a predictable routine. He has been doing this, working at the same job, for the past 20 years, since he was 23.

His first job after college was with a start-up. Things looked good for 12 months, then the company floundered. CHARACTER was one of the first to go, angry and bitter. He looked for work for almost a year before he found a job, this time with a large, inner-city firm. Size for him meant stability. And seniority and status meant stability. He worked toward management, showing his value to the company, even undercutting those around him if they got in his way. He promised himself he would never go through unemployment again.

Now, he is married with 3 children. He cares not only for himself but for his family as well. He is a middle manager. His company merges with another, and he fears being laid off, and his fears come to pass.

A friend and colleague, FRIEND, someone he knew from his first job and has kept in touch with, knows what he went through and how he feels.

Work & Play

CHARACTER acquired his current job when FRIEND interviewed at the company and decided the job wasn’t for him. FRIEND recommended CHARACTER, who eventually got the job. From there, he stepped onto the management ladder.

Now he leads a management team. He demands consistent results from those under him and works hard to get those results and to provide consistent results to his manager. He does this because he wants to look good and to show results, in order to further his career. His direct reports appreciate his effort, though he rubs some of them the wrong way. His manager loves it when he delivers, but hates it when his plans fall short, even though he always knows far ahead of the deadline whether his team will be able to make it.

CHARACTER has a natural talent for administration. But he needed to learn how to inspire those under him to get results. He also needed to learn how to communicate these results to his manager. FRIEND coached him in much of this, and CHARACTER’s determination gave him the energy to bear through mistake after mistake.

He also picked up a number of more unsavory skills, the ability to understand and to undercut his competitors when necessary. These he rationalizes as necessary to cut through the red tape. Unfortunately, he has also made some enemies in the organization, which is what ultimately gets him laid off, despite his ability to deliver results.

His interest in government politics grew out of his ambitions to climb the corporate ladder. At first, he read books on politics and warfare, and applied these lessons to his corporate life. But government politics is still a passion for him. He reads a number of newspapers and frequently writes letters to the editor. He also volunteers in local politics, when a candidate runs who especially excites him. The local political party has asked him to run for office, but he has always dismissed it, since he’s had seniority and stability in his job.

Past, Present & Future

In his first job, CHARACTER was laid off when his employer, a new, upstart company, went under. He was out of work for a year and came to loathe small startups as unstable. He also came to think of bigness, full of politics and beaurocracy, as a good thing. He worked toward moving up the ranks in that environment, in order to assure his own personal stability and success. He considered that to be positive. He learned to be an over-achiever, and he received both public recognition and private awards for his accomplishements. He never imagined that his aspirations would end up being his downfall.

Even now, having been dismissed from this position, he does not blame his own ambitions for his downfall. He rather blames those enemies he made within the company, with an obligatory jab at himself for “not seeing it coming.” He could improve his future chances for happiness by realizing that power is not all it’s cracked up to be. This is something that FRIEND knows, but CHARACTER is not yet ready to listen.

He is, however, ready to listen to his friends in government politics. If he has to start over again, it might as well be in the biggest, most stable organization of all. He is ready to take advantage of the opportunity. He believes he can win a local seat, moving from there in a few years to the state or national legislature. He sees himself becoming rich and famous, as well as successful. His associates in politics support him, of course, but his wife and FRIEND would like him to do something for himself for a change, instead of working for the great machine.

He’s worked and saved for many years, and his personal financial situation is solvent, so he could afford to take a few risks. But all he sees is the future.

His perceived failure, leading to his unemployment, still haunts him, though. Additionally, his lifestyle has taken its toll on his family life. He hasn’t spent as much time with his children as he should have. He’s worked very hard to provide stability for them, and a few nice things too, but they’d rather spend more time with him and see him happy, which he does not appear to them to be. They’d also like him to take a little time off to spend at home. He doesn’t even realize that this might be an important component of his life.

He will run for office. He will come close, but fail. Devastated and exhausted, he will question his own assumptions about what is important. FRIEND and CHARACTER’s wife will be a significant part of this.

Friends, Enemies & Lovers

CHARACTER hates the person running against him, more because this person threatens his future chances than anything else. The opponent just sees the race as a political race, not anything personal. CHARACTER’s hatred does come out in his political positions, but mostly he keeps his feelings under control, displaying them as passion for politics, not as a personal antagonism, knowing that this latter would mean political suicide.

He likes FRIEND, who was laid off from his first job, same as CHARACTER. They gained cameraderie while working together at this job, and remained close ever since. They have lunch or dinner occasionally, attend seminars together, and even visit each other’s households. Their personal and professional goals have diverged, but they know how not to step on each other’s toes, how to be constructive with their comments, and they cherish each other’s friendship.

CHARACTER loves his wife. He had always wanted a family, and she did, too. But she’s interested in spending quality time with her kids, even if it means they can’t have so many nice things. Ironically, this is the source of more than a few fights, but it also holds together the family. She dreams of making him happy, which irritates him, as he thinks he knows what he needs to be happy, to provide for her and the kids. He dreams of power (through which he will provide for his family), which irritates her, but she does not undermine him, at least not initially.

Life & Death

CHARACTER more than anything else is afraid of dieing in poverty. He also wants to be remembered, however, after he’s gone, and this was a factor in his wanting a family. He does not risk his life, but neither does he fear death, as long as he can continue to make a good living. But he unintentionally trivializes the limited time he has on Earth, which he could be enjoying and establishing deeper relationships.

Culture, Religion & Education

CHARACTER’s father was much like CHARACTER, valuing a stable work ethic, and seeing power and influence as success. These ingrained beliefs affect his friends and family as much as they do him. But CHARACTER’s father also knew how to work in moderation, to balance work with family, something the CHARACTER has forgotten.

After he graduated from high school, he went to college to learn business. His first job was in marketing. His parents were both proud of him, and they helped him stay on his feet while he was unemployed. But the long job search and odd jobs he picked up in the meantime wore on him. His education and disposition favored working a steady job in a larger organization. None of the things he learned in college prepared him for having a family or even for politics or leadership.

He is non-religious. He’s not an atheist. He doesn’t have time for religious arguments. (Maybe this is why he fails as a politician.) He does not discuss religion with FRIEND or his family, because they all have a spiritual life, and this would be a point of contention between them.

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Moral Stance

CHARACTER will do anything he thinks will get him further ahead. Usually, this means pleasing others, so he limits his behavior to that which is socially acceptable. Occasionally, this means stabbing his opponents in the back.

At the same time, CHARACTER loves his wife and family, though he doesn’t show it as practically as he ought. He is proud of the fact that he has a family, and he still feels for his wife. If it came down to it, he’d sacrifice himself for his family.

He values a strong work ethic, but he would be willing publically to say otherwise if it would help him get ahead.

Only Half-way Through the Clinic

That’s part 1 of Holly Lisle’s Create a Character Clinic. Now that we have a character description, part 2 covers ways to ask our fictional character about himself and his life. He can tell us with his own words and actions what it’s like. We can bring the character to life.

Part 3 is about characterization sins and how to do them right.

There’s a standard formula for romantic stories. Boy meets girl. They fall in love but pretend they don’t even notice each other. Finally, they declare their love and live happily ever after. This may sound a little corny, but most romantic stories are much deeper. Still they rely on the standard formula. There’s a reason why the standard formula is used so much. Because it works.

The Baxter

The Baxter is one of the romantic movies I watched recently. It follows the standard formula.

Elliot Wendall Sherman (Michael Showalter) is a “baxter,” a man who will never get married, because women always leave him for their one true love. This pattern repeats itself with one Caroline Swann (Elizabeth Banks), who leaves him at the altar. This is no spoiler, since we find out how the relationship ends at the very beginning of the movie. But this story is not about that romance. It’s about the romance between Elliot and another woman Cecil Mills (Michelle Williams).

Note that we have a lack of sympathy for Caroline, because we know that she’s going to leave Elliot and break his heart. Also, while they develop their relationship, we the audience get the rough treatment, the overview. So we feel no loved lost for their relationship.

On the other hand, every moment between Cecil and Elliot, we see into their souls, and we sympathize with them and root for them. But the situation is that Elliot is engaged to Caroline, and Cecil has a boyfriend. Standard stuff, but that means they can’t pursue a romance, prime fodder for an effective romantic conflict.

And it is an effective romantic conflict. The Baxter made a number of debatable story choices, and you can read about them at Amazon.com or IMDb. These choices mean you may or may not find it mediocre. But for all these choices, it is an effective romance. I definitely found it fun to watch, and I would watch it again.

Note, I’m talking about “romantic stories,” not just stories in the Romance genre. This includes even romantic story threads.

The Romantic Story Arc

What makes a good a romantic story? Firstly, it builds up sympathy for the characters. Though plot twists can contribute to a romantic story, romance itself is about people, and so romantic story threads are character-based. Often, one of the characters must overcome some personal obstacle in order to resolve the romantic conflict. The story builds up sympathy for the characters, and make them feel for each other. And it makes us feel deep inside the same longing that the characters have for each other.

The characters rarely tell us how they feel, but their feelings are evident for all to see. Generally, they should not say, “I love you.” In fact it’s better if they can’t say, “I love you.” Because that can be the source of the romantic conflict. Once we feel the longing, the story draws out the seperation between the charcters, making it less and less likely they’ll see their longings fulfilled. When they finally do come together, we can turn on the water-works.

This is the same story-arc pattern seen in every genre. For example, in an action story, the villian does something that makes the audience cry for blood, but the hero is powerless to satisfy. You have to keep the villian alive, because he’s the source of the conflict that drives the story forward. And he must grow in his evil power, or else the story will stagnate, or end. Only after the conflict reaches the crisis stage is the hero able finally to prevail. Likewise in a romantic story, pose a romantic conflict, then build it, build it, then: Bang! Our hearts turn to Jello.

Romance as a Human Need

Abraham Maslow developed a hierarchy of needs, published in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation. His theory is that humans have more basic and higher needs. After the more basic ones are met, they can seek to meet the higher needs.

These are usually represented as a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are physiological needs: the need to breathe, to eat, to sleep. After our physiological needs are met, we turn to our need for safety. This includes the need to be safe from violence, to be provided for and in good health.

Now, Maslow put sex in the first category, physiological needs, as the need to procreate. But some of the best romantic stories have no sex whatsoever. In fact, over the past week, I’ve watch three good romantic movies, none of which had any sex between the two main romantic characters. Romance is not sex. It is intimacy.

Intimacy is part of the Maslow’s third layer of needs: the need to be loved and to love others. This includes the need to have friends and family, to be accepted and to accept others, the need to be needed. Deny a character one of these needs, and you have a great romantic conflict in the making.

A Simple Romantic Storyline

Here’s a simple romantic storyline, incorporating the above ideas. I used parts of Holly Lisle’s Create a Character Clinic to stimulate some of these ideas.

CHARACTER has a need to love a woman and to be loved. And he feels this with a particular woman. But he’s not available emotionally. He wants to keep the relationship platonic, because he wants to avoid the pain of rejection. But he must suffer rejection before he gets to acceptance.

His pattern of platonic relationships instead of romantic goes back to his adolescence. On the one hand, he spent time with his sister and her friends. On the other hand, his first love broke his heart by rejecting him. So he established a pattern in his thinking: platonic good, romantic bad.

CHARACTER meets a woman with whom he develops intimacy. To her, this is romantic, and she tries to start a romance with him. But he rebuffs her, and she decides she just can’t do this anymore.

Meanwhile, his sister, whom he also dearly loves, experiences some tragic event involving a hospital. He realizes he needs the woman in his life and takes the first steps at repairing the relationship.

This would have to be fleshed out much more to become an actual story. But you can see how it’s starting to come together.

The idea for this episode actually came from a question someone posed on a writer’s board. How do you write short descriptions that still give the full picture of the setting? This question of course was directed at writing literature. But the answer, the storytelling principle, carries into other media as well. Describing where your story takes place is more than just listing its characteristics. It’s about making the audience feel like they’re really there.

How can it be the same for each media?

Whenever someone asks about how to shorten their descriptions, how to give a full picture of a place in just a few words, they’re clearly talking about literature. Not only does literature rely more on words than other media, but also do other media have other ways of describing a place. In film, for example, a director by framing a single shot just right can give an impression of the setting that would take paragraphs to describe in prose. In a video game, the virtual world is the setting, and exploring it is often part of the gameplay.

Even so, a deeply complex world is boring if there’s no reason for the gamer to explore it. In 1995, Spectrum Holobyte published a game called Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Final Unity. This is a classic-style, puzzle-solving adventure in which the Enterprise-D’s crew must embark on several connected missions, ultimately completing a boss mission that ties all the others together. The story was good, not great, but engaging nonetheless, and I enjoyed playing it. This game was marketed as having a complex, completely explorable world. In other words, a full universe was available to you, and you could decide where in the universe you would explore. Indeed, you did not have to accept the predefined missions, and you could go anywhere in the universe. But aside from fighting off Romulans (if you happened into Romulan space), exploring the universe was basically flying long distances through empty space in order to reach a destination and find… nothing. In other words, the game had a full, detailed world, but there was no motivation for the player to explore it, and as a result it all fell flat.

I’ve recently watched The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, so I’ll mention that in talking about film. One of the four girls, Lena, goes to Greece for the summer. It’s interesting that multiple reviewers complained that Greece is not really that white, not really that clean, and that as a result the setting was unrealistic. But according to the DVD (and other sources), these scenes were filmed on-location in Santorini. But that’s beside the point. The visuals in Greece were indeed beautiful, but they were important because of Lena’s relationship with Carlos and their grandparents’ age-old feud. These facts go together to create conflict. At least they do in that setting. In the U.S., the conflict would have been nonexistent. (In Gilmore Girls, Rory’s grandfather and Logan’s don’t particularly like each other right now, yet that doesn’t keep them from dating.)

(I do have Ann Brashare’s novels on my Amazon.com wish list. I promise. But I just haven’t gotten to them yet.)

In game and film, what gives a setting power, what draws the audience in and makes them feel a part of the setting, is that it is involved in the story. The same thing holds true in literature. Writers seem to be addicted to their beloved descriptions, though, resulting in the dreaded info dump, also called a core dump, exposition hell, death to all readers. (Thanks to Holly Lisle for that last one.) This was a subject of a recent blog posting over at the Kick-ass Mystic Ninjas, which inspired a post by me. (See the links below.) We writers have to get over our addiction. Generally, if you’re writing descriptions in your novels or short stories, stop it. Go cold turkey. Instead, integrate the setting into the story. Then just tell the story, and let the descriptions take care of themselves. This is a variation on moralizing without getting preachy. (See the links below.) In this case, we’re describing without getting expository.

Setting as part of the story

When other story elements interact with parts of the setting, the setting becomes a part of the story. The story relies on these parts of the setting. In fact, just telling the story naturally will involve the setting. The setting will come alive, because some conflict of the story relies on it.

Here’s a passage from Stanislaw Lem’s story “The Conditioned Reflex,” one the the Tales of Pirx the Pilot. At this point in the story, three astronauts are traveling by foot on the Moon.

Pnin guided them through this forest of petrified eruptions leisurely but infallibly. Now and then he would put his space boot on a slab; if it wobbled, he would stop and brood, then either proceed on a straight course or maneuver around it, untuiting by means of signs recognizable only to him whether or not it could sustain a man’s weight—sound, the warning signal of mountain climbers, being wholly absent here. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, one of the stone witches they had passed earlier broke loose and started down the slope, slowly and somnolently at first, then bouncing and ricocheting to touch off a stampede of stone, a furious rush of rock and rubble that was gradually enveloped by milky-white swirls of dust. It was a spectacle bordering on a hallucinatory vision—collisions without noise, a mute avalanche without tremors or vibrations, thanks to the inflated boots. When they veered sharply around the next hairpin bend farther up, Pirx beheld the trail left by the avalanche—a cloud of serenely undulating waves. Instinctively, with unease, his eyes scanned the horizon in search of the ship; it was safely parked in the same place as before, a kilometer or two away, its shiny hull and three hypenlike legs clearly visible. A weird lunar spider resting on the site of an old avalanche, on what only a short while ago had seemed so precipitous but now lay flat as a tabletop.

What do we learn about the setting? It’s dangerous and precarious. It’s also silent, there being no atmosphere. And they’re in space suits that insulate them even from vibration. There’s also reduced gravity, and dust clouds once formed take a long time to clear, there being no wind. We furthermore know that Pnin is the expert here.

All of these things we learn by being observing the implications of these characteristics of the setting. In other words, Lem showed us how the setting affected the characters. He didn’t tell us what the setting was, give us a laundry list of descriptive clauses.

Setting as conflict

Actually, Lem sometimes does give us long, descriptive passages. This can work if the setting itself poses a conflict, and Lem does use setting in this way. But rather than quoting again from Lem, let me instead give an example Holly Lisle provides from one of her novels Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood:

The corpse’s left eye squinted at me from mere centimeters away. Decomposition lent her face an increasingly inscrutable expression; the first time I’d regained consciousness, when I found myself tied to her, she looked like she had died in terror. After a while, she started leering at me, as if she had reached the place where I was going and took perverse pleasure from the thought that I would join her there soon. Now, having had her moment of amusement at my expense, she meditated; beneath thousands of dainty auburn braids, her face hung slack, bloated and discolored, the skin loosening. Threads of drool hung spiderwebbish from her gaping mouth. Her eyes, dry and sunken and filmed over beneath swollen lids, still stared directly at
me.

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The very idea of being trapped in an enclosed space tied to a corpse provides a conflict all its own. Just keep describing that setting, building it up, stretching it out in order to build the tension.

An example

As an example, I’ll rework a particularly bad passage from a story of mine, a story called “Proletariat,” which was never published and with good reason.

My room was large and thoughtfully furnished. Just inside stood a small conference table with several chairs. Next to the door was mounted a large dry-erase board, the opposite wall being filled with picture windows that displayed in the distance a forest of deciduous trees. Further in, bookshelves obscured the same wall and the adjoining one. Against the windows, facing diagonally, was a desk on which sat computer and telephone. From there I could easily gaze out the window or at the remaining wall, on which hung a watercolor, rich in blues and golds, of a girl cuddling a fluffy, white kitten.

I wrote this years ago, but not enough years for me to feel okay about it. Reading it now, after each sentence all I can think of to say is, “So what? Who cares about that?” Especially in a short story (like this was), read each sentence and ask, “So what?” If you don’t get an immediate, obvious answer, get rid of that sentence.

In this case, I could have gotten rid of this who paragraph without seriously damaging the story, such as it is. Then again, that story has other problems besides an overabundance of boring descriptions. Descriptions are like commercial advertisements; if you’ve established enough momentum, you might be able to convince your readers to bear through a short one with you. But it is an imposition to the reader, and you have to respect that.

Let’s disassemble and reassemble this paragraph and see if we can’t make something of it. First a bit of back-story. The main character is moralistic and over-worked, an entrepreneur who sleeps at the office. He just got a phone message that excites him and that he is anxious to return. Now, what are the elements of his office?

• a large room
• a conference table
• a large dry-erase board
• a window looking out into the forest
• a desk with a computer and phone
• lots of bookshelves
• a watercolor portrait of a girl and kitten

Lots of stuff here. And still, it’s missing a couch (on which he sleeps when he’s not going home to his nonexistant apartment).

What are the implications of the setting? How do we show instead of tell? Or alternatively do they imply anything about the character and the conflicts he faces?

• He sleeps on a sofa in the corner. There’s a book (from a small corner of one of the bookshelves, allocated to fiction, “fun”) on a small table next to the sofa. The book is marked where he finished reading the night before.
• He sometimes feels lost and alone in such a large office, except when there are others working with him. And even then, he feels like he’s pressuring his employees to work long hours as he does.
• The view through the window makes him pause as he sits at his desk. He’s having doubts about his way of life.
• The portrait is of his neice. He wonders if he’d rather give up his business and start a family.

Let’s put these into a new paragraph that defines the character and the conflict he’s facing, rather than describing his office.

I walked around the conference table on the way to my desk. The official reason for keeping a small conference table in my office was so that I could have business meetings in a convenient location. My employees hated me for it, I could tell. These surroundings pressured them. I stopped and reminisced at the notes on the dry-erase board covering the near wall. Having people near broke up the loneliness, like having guests over for dinner. I turned to look at the couch in the opposite corner. A novel lay on a small table next to it, bookmarked from the night before. I’d recently begun spending a few minutes each night engaging in fun reading and had even allocated to fiction a small corner of the expanse of bookshelves. My eye floated up to the portrait hanging above the sofa, a watercolor, rich in blues and golds, of my young neice cuddling a fluffy, white kitten. My sister’s family had given it to me two years ago for the holidays, and little Samantha was already nothing like the little girl in the picture. I had long given up the idea of having a family, however. It simply was not a priority. I turned and sat at my desk. My hand rested on the phone, but I simply gazed out the large picture window at a forest of reds and yellows and oranges, the autumn colors. For just a moment, a deep melancholy washed over me. Then I lifted the receiver and dialed.

A little better, no?

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.

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is one of the most endearing pieces of classic literature. Of the many literary novels extant, this is one of the ones that we actually want to read. Why is that? And what do we have to do to make our stories as endearing as Mark Twain did?

This is not a literary analysis. For literary discussion, see the Cliffs Notes. Literary questions provoke discussion because there are multiple correct answers. Authors don’t think about these fuzzy areas that generate more questions than they answer.

What follows is a story analysis. It’s the kind of analysis that helps us become better writers, by looking at what works in the fiction that we read.

Why do we want to read it in the first place?

Mark Twain starts with problems, not solutions. These problems, these conflicts build momentum. From the first words on the first page:

“Tom!”

No answer.

“Tom!”

No answer.

“What’s gone with that boy, I wonder? You Tom!”

No answer.

The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked THROUGH them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for “style,” not service—she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:

“Well, I lay if I get hold of you I’ll—”

She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.

This makes us ask questions. We want to read on to see what’s going on. What happened to Tom? Why does Aunt Polly want to find him? And why is she so angry with him?

Then the story layers these conflicts on top of one another, building complexity and even more momentum. Tom’s feelings for Becky Thatcher, the situation with Injun Joe, and other adventures overlap and even build off of each other.

And his adventures get more interesting as the story progresses. The first conflict is trivial compared to the rest of the story. It only holds our attention for a little while. But they increase in intensity as the story progresses. For example, when Tom breaks down and testifies against Injun Joe, we expect Injun Joe to be brought to justice. But instead he escapes, turning Tom’s moral predicament into a mortal one. Previously, he was afraid that if he spoke out about what he knew that Injun Joe would harm him; now, if Injun Joe gets his hands on him, he will harm him. By the end of the story, we have this story thread, the Becky Thatcher thread, and the lost-in-the-cave thread all coming together.

Three things you can do to engage your audience and make them want to read on:

1. Always start with a problem, not with a solution.
2. Layer problems on top of each other to build more momentum and to build complexity into the story.
3. Escalate conflicts. When one problem is solved, substitute an even worse problem. Better yet, turn a failed solution to a lesser problem into a worse problem, as Twain did with Injun Joe escaping from the courtroom.

Why do we find the story realistic?

In the preface, we read:

Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture.

Mark Twain wrote what he knew. Therefore, his story has an aire of realism to it.

For example, early in the story, Tom is whitewashing the fence. He doesn’t want to perform this chore, until Ben Rogers comes along. Then Tom learns an immutable characteristic of human behavior, that people will pay for what you cannot give them for free. That’s as true today as in Mark Twain’s day. Some consultants gain recognition as experts by charging for advice. To free advice no one wants to listen. But put a steep price-tag on the same advice, and people fall over each other trying to get in front.

We can write what we know not just to add realism to our stories but also to generate story ideas.

1. Take interesting characteristics from people that you know, and build them into interesting characters.
2. Think of the most embarrassing moment in your life, or the time you were most afraid, or the time you had an insurmountable challenge in front of you. These problems are great fodder for story conflicts.
3. Don’t build stories out of the good times. Conflict keeps us on the edge of our seats, not utopia.

Why do we identify with Tom?

Tom is not a good kid. He’s mischeivious, almost an anti-hero. But from early in the story, we sympathize with him. Because while he does get into trouble, he never hurts anyone, at least not anyone who didn’t deserve it. He eats the jam, and he gets into a scuffle, and he plays hookie from school. And we know he’ll be punished for these infractions. We even know that Tom is willing to take the punishment and not complain, which he does on two different occasions for Becky Thatcher. But he does not long to be punished, and neither do we long for him to be.

We sympathize with Tom not because he’s perfect, but because he’s imperfect. He’s a realistic boy and a realistic reflection of our own childhoods. But that’s not the whole of the story. This realistic character is put into realistic conflicts. While we may think we want him to be good, we don’t want to see him beat by his Aunt Polly. We don’t want to see him lose.

This is a variation of giving a realistic character a noble goal and an obstacle preventing him from achieving that goal. Later in the story Tom does have truly noble goals, such as saving Muff Potter from the gallows and rescuing Becky from the cave. Nearer the beginning, it’s enough just to have him oppressed.

So, combine conflicts (the first point above) with realism (the second point) to make sympathetic characters.

Creating sympathetic characters does not need to be mysterious. This week we’ll look a couple of unlikely sympathetic characters. And I’ll give you an easy, three-step technique you can use to build sympathy into your own characters.

Sympathetic characters are critical to a good story. That is, the audience must sympathize with your protagonist, must root for him, must want him to succeed. But if you ask three different writers how to create sympathy for /your/ characters, you’ll get 30 different answers. And you quickly conclude that before you get the real answer, you have to undergo some secret rite involving flaming coals and a billy-goat.

An unsympathetic character

Here’s a scene:

Nick carried the bottle of vodka up the stairs to his apartment. He could already hear the sounds of football on TV and of Keri entertaining his friends inside.

The outside kitchen door never opened smoothly. He wrestled with the lock, and let out a sharp “F” and “S” before hitting and kicking the door three or four times. He never counted how many. Keri undid the deadbolt, and he just missed whacking her in the face as she opened the door.

His friends greeted him with a hearty, “Hey! Nick!”

“Hey!” he exclaimed. “Gonna party!” He waved the bottle of vodka through the air.

Several collective grunts later, he set the vodka on the counter and got some glasses out of the cabinet.

“I’m gonna take off,” Keri said.

“No!” His voice was eager. “You can’t go. The party’s just starting!”

“Really, I think I should go.”

As she turned, he grabbed her arm and squeezed. His face was hard and his teeth clenched.

“Stay,” he ordered. “You gotta stay.”

Her mouth was perfectly straight. She gazed directly at him. With measured tones, she intoned, “Okay. I’ll stay.”

Nick is not a very sympathetic character. If he dropped dead in the next scene, we probably wouldn’t care. We’re sympathizing more with Keri than with Nick. But in a bit, I’ll show you how to make Nick a sympathetic character. In fact, everything needed to do this is already established in the snippet above.

Who cares about sympathy?

It’s very important to have a protagonist the audience can identify with. This is true even the protagonist is generally unlikeable, an anti-hero, or some other sort of hero one wouldn’t normally sympathize with.

Now, you don’t want a protagonist who has no flaws. Perfect protagnosts are boring and unsympathetic. We need a flawed human being, who faces struggles, as our hero. And you also don’t want characters that have nothing out-of-the-ordinary about them. You want rich characters, with new and different characteristics, people the audience has not met before.

But at the same time, the audience must be able to root for the protagonist, to get on his side.

The Godfather

Don Corleone, from The Godfather, is a protagonist you normally wouldn’t identify with. But from the first scene, we begin to sympathize with him.

In the first scene we learn Don Carlione is a powerful man, can obtain justice even when the law can’t, but people fear him, fear to be involved with him, fear they will get in trouble through their connection with him. He also values friendship and respect over money. He won’t be a mercenary, but is willing to give justice as a gift to a friend. He is careful about what he says, realizes there are people in the world who would have him arrested if they could. He is more concerned with making friends than with being right. He has a daughter, and she’s getting married. And he loves his family, even his son Michael, who is late for the wedding.

Then, we’re introduced to the first threat, the FBI snooping around outside the walls, taking down license plate numbers.

Inappropriate Behavior

The short story Inappropriate Behavior by Pat Murphy has another excellent protagonist you wouldn’t expect to be sympathetic. Her main character Annie is a very strange child, yet we feel for her and quickly get on her side.

Three steps to sympathy

Here are three steps you can take to make your characters sympathetic:

1. Give your character a noble cause to pursue.
2. Put some obstacle, either internal or external, in his way.
3. Give him a great love or passion, a humanizing element.

If you do these three, you can make almost any character sympathetic. And if you avoid them, you can make almost any character unsympathetic.

In the stories above

In Inappropriate Behavior, we see these three things, and develop sympathy for Annie:

1. A noble cause: To aid and rescue a shipwrecked man on the island.
2. An obstacle: The mechano can only do so much, and the other people in Annie’s life are too busy making demands on her to listen to her.
3. A great love: Her mother telling stories to her was very special, and we get the sense that she loves her mother.

Similarly in The Godfather:

1. A noble cause: Don Corleone is being asked to exact justice for a horrible crime.
2. An obstacle: He can’t be a mercenary, and he can’t be connected directly with an illegal act.
3. A great love: He loves his family.

As a result, we see him as just an ordinary guy who happens to have great wealth and power and is an underworld king-pin. Seriously.

What do we do with Nick?

Let’s add a part to the above scene with Nick that makes him sympathetic. What if his party attitude is really just a cover for the emptiness underneath? What if he feels sad and sees that he does things to make the people around him sad? And what if he wants to fix this, especially as pertains to his girlfriend Keri, but his attempts are unsuccessful?

1. A noble cause: He regrets his behavior and wants it to stop.
2. An obstacle: He can’t seem to control himself. (We don’t know yet the details or how he will conquer this issue.)
3. A great love: He loves his girlfriend Keri.

Let’s write the next part of the scene:

Nick released his grip, and Keri returned to the living room, where the boys were watching football.

Nick poured some vodka into a glass and swallowed. He gazed for a long time at the open cabinet. He swallowed again, a dry gulp.

“Hey! What you doin’ in there?!” Nick’s friends were getting itchy.

Keri walked up to him, gentleness and caution in her demeanor.

“Nick? Can I help?”

He did not look at her. “Why don’t you take off? I can take care of these guys.”

“Okay.” She picked up her purse and jacket and left.

“Hey! Nick!”

He grabbed the glasses with one hand, the bottle with the other. A smile stretched across his face.

“Here’s the party!” he shouted.

In the scenes that follow, we need to build hope. We need to have Nick try to find happiness and fulfillment, but only make things worse and worse, until finally he finds the answer.

The Investigation is a novel about strange occurences. Dead bodies start moving, by themselves. At first, it’s hardly noticeable. A corpse moves from its back over onto its front. Or it rolls off the table. People dismiss these occurences, when they notice them, as practical jokes. Then the bodies start getting up and walking, even going through great lengths to clothe themselves before going out in public.

The main character, Lieutenant Gregory of Scotland Yard, is tasked with solving these bizarre crimes. These are not mere body-snatchings. The bodies definitively appear to have moved themselves. And the incidents have strange similarities and coincendences running throughout. How did the criminal accomplish these crimes? What was his motive? Even the most basic questions fail any rational explanation.

As a result, a number of theories are proposed to explain these occurences. It quickly becomes clear, however, that more important than the investigation itself are the effects it has on the reader. Whether or not Gregory is changed by the investigation, whether or not he solves the case, the reader must open his mind in order just to grasp the meaning of the story.

This is compounded with a minor plot, which preys on Gregory’s mind. Gregory’s landlord, from whom he rents a room, is the subject of his own mystery involving strange noises that eminate from his room, continuing throughout the night. Gregory wonders what these noises are, and they become part of his dreams, affected by his investigation into the seemingly paranormal series of occurences.

Stanislaw Lem

Stanisław Lem has criticized most English-language science fiction as unimaginative and mediocre. I love sci-fi, but I accept this evaluation from one such as he. Lem is a master storyteller and a brilliant thinker and writer. Most noted for his novel Solaris, which was brought, after a form, to the big screen, I enjoyed some of his other novels better, including Peace on Earth, Chain of Chance, and The Investigation. Also, I highly recommend the two-volume set Tales of Pirx the Pilot and More Tales of Pirx the Pilot.

Stanisław Lem was born in Lwów, Poland in 1921 (now Lviv, Ukraine). His father was a physician, and he himself studied medicine at Lwów University, until World War II. In 1946, he returned to learning medicine at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. But he refused to take his final exams, in order to avoid becoming a career military doctor. He worked as a research assistant and started to write stories. In 1948, Lem started writing his first novel, Hospital of the Transfiguration, which is a dramatic (non-genre) novel based partly on his own experiences. This novel did not see the printing press, however, until freedom of speech was expanded in Poland in 1956. Before that, he published his first science fiction novel, The Astronauts.

Since then, Lem’s books have been translated into 41 languages, selling over 27 million copies.

Spoiler Alert

If you haven’t read The Investigation, I highly recommend it. I’ll be giving away some of the plot, so SPOILER ALERT! Still, I think the novel is worth reading, even if you know how some things turn out. (And I’m not giving away everything.)

Sciss’s Theory

Gregory, of course, suspects a human criminal, but some of the crimes he cannot reasonably explain. One in particular can only be explained if the corpse were actually moving by itself. Then there’s Sciss, a scientist with a theory, Gregory’s nemesis in his investigation. I say Sciss is Gregory’s nemesis not because Sciss tries to undermine the investigation, but because Gregory doesn’t like him and doesn’t believe his theory.

Sciss’s theory is that this is a natural occurence, which he has linked with various factors. This of course sounds like gobbledygook to Gregory. How can a natural occurence cause corpses to walk around and perform obviously intelligent activities? But Sciss explains his theory so convincingly. We don’t understand what causes gravity, either– Oh, we know that two masses attact each other. But what causes this attractive force? If pressed, eventually, we have to admit that we don’t really understand why an apple falls from a tree rather than flying upward. But gravity happens everyday; it’s a part of our lives. So we’ve learned to accept it. We don’t question it. If dead bodies got up and walked around everyday, we’d accept that, too. Simply because we don’t understand the root cause of an occurence doesn’t mean it’s not a natural occurence.

Gregory, of course, being a hard-nosed police investigator, doesn’t buy this. He also needs a human suspect in order to further his investigation. He’d sooner suspect Sciss than this bit about it being an unexplained natural occurence. And only after Sciss is cleared, cleared, and cleared again does Gregory relent in these suspicions.

In the end, they do come up with an answer to the occurences, though a scientifically unsatisfying one. And we are left with the knowledge and feeling that truth is in the eye of the beholder, just a fabrication of our own minds.

Lem did not preach. But he did engross me in a mystery that demanded to be solved. Then he presented me with solutions that required I change my world-view, however temporarily, to understand.

This episode I’d like to call “The Crunchy Shell and the Creamy Middle,” but I don’t think anyone would be able to figure out what I was talking about. Stories use two types of conflict: internal and external. Internal conflicts are resolved by something changing inside the character, whereas external conflicts are resolved in the world around outside the character. When these two work together, the result can be dazzling. And when they don’t, the result can be devastating.

Spoilers! Spoilers! Spoilers! This episode contains spoilers for Gilmore Girls season 4 episode 8, “Die, Jerk…” and for Philip Pullman’s novel The Golden Compass, as well as for the Roswell episode “Ch Ch Changes.”

Die, Jerk…

Gilmore Girls season 4 episode 8 is entitled “Die, Jerk…” (We’ll see why in a moment.) GilmoreGirls.org has a complete episode summary. For now, let’s look just at the “Die Jerk” story thread.

In the first scene, we learn that Rory wants to be on staff at the Yale Daily News, but first she must get a piece published in each department of the newspaper. She doesn’t think this is a big deal, even after she finds out that her review of a chamber-music recital never made the paper. Doyle, the editor, explains that it was “a bit of a yawn.” This thickens the plot, building on the first, external conflict, that Rory needs to get a review published.

She tries again, still with no luck. Doyle doesn’t just want facts. He wants opinions. She has one more chance. Her lifelong dream is to be a journalist. But by this time, she’s doubting her ability to make it as a journalist. This is an internal conflict. Her assignment now is to review a ballet. As she watches, we see the audience wince, and we hear the derogatory comments exchanged between Rory and her mom. But Rory does what Doyle asked. She writes what she saw and what she thought about what she saw.

The review gets raves. The ballet gets cancelled. The external conflict, that Rory needs to publish a review, is resolved. Her internal conflict is also resolved, as she’s proven her mettle as a journalist… Or is it?

We immediately discover that someone has painted the words “Die Jerk” on Rory’s dorm room door. We the viewers of course know at whom the sentiment is directed, but Rory and her roommates don’t. This is another external conflict, solving this mystery. They also don’t know whether this is an actual threat or whether someone is just acting out.

Fortunately, it turns out to be the latter, as Rory has a run-in with the devastated ballerina who had starred in the short-lived ballet. This leaves Rory internally conflicted, not only because she doesn’t like hurting other people, but also because she still doesn’t think she’s doing this journalism thing right.

Her mother is shocked at how harsh the review turned out in print. Her grandparents revel in the harshness of it; they’re very proud of their granddaughter. This serves only to conflict her further.

She decides to try to get a follow-up published, something that will help the ballerina, to try to balance out the damage she did in her review. This is another external conflict, as she’s trying to effect this change in the newspaper. She begs Doyle to let her review the ballet again, or to write a piece on the ballerina. We naturally can see right through her, as can Doyle:

DOYLE: I know what’s going on here.

RORY: What?

DOYLE: You’re feeling bad about the effect your article had on the people in the ballet.

RORY: No, that’s not it.

DOYLE: We heard about the dining-hall confrontation.

RORY: That was not really a confrontation. We were just chatting.

DOYLE: It goes with the territory. When I was your age, I reviewed a clog-dancing team that was really bad. I mean, even compared to other clog dancers. I was merciless.

RORY: But – but if I can’t re-review it, then can I just print the things that I meant to put in and didn’t have time to?

DOYLE: Hurting people’s feelings is what we do.

RORY: But when I become a real journalist, the people in my reviews aren’t gonna live in my building.

DOYLE: Doesn’t matter. When you write for the Yale Daily News, you are a real journalist.

RORY: I didn’t mean -

DOYLE: And if you can’t handle it, you should leave the paper.

RORY: I don’t want to leave the paper.

DOYLE: Good. Here. Your next assignment.

RORY: Thanks.

DOYLE: Knock ‘em dead.

And Rory smiles at the thought that she already has what it takes to be a real journalist. This resolves or negates all the conflicts. She now feels confident in her ability as a journalist. She also has come to terms with the damage she did to the ballerina, and she sees no need to publish a follow-up piece.

In the last scene of the episode, she listens for her next assignment to an especially bad musical performance. We see in her face the words that will eventually describe the ear-piercing cacophony. And we see that she’s okay with that.

Together And Separate

The story threads build off of each other, causing attendant conflicts and resolving them. External conflicts can generate or resolve attendant internal conflicts and vice-versa. However, they are still separate conflicts, and this affects how we perceive the story as its told.

We never find out, for example, how Rory feels about the “Die Jerk” graffiti on her door, because that’s an external conflict. It’s enough that Rory learns who put it there and why. We don’t have to understand how Rory feels about the mystery of it.

Similarly, two separate conflicts spawn from this resolution. Firstly, Rory is upset that she hurt the ballerina, an internal conflict. Secondly, Rory wants to publish a follow-up piece to offset the damage she’d done, an external one.

External conflicts, true, happen when the conflict resolves outside the character, even if the attendant circumstances are inside the character. Conversely, internal conflicts resolve inside, even if the situations causing them are outside. Even so, we need to understand what’s happening inside if it’s an internal conflict. Therefore, what’s happening inside will be brought into focus by a well-told story, in order to set up the internal conflict to be resolved internally. And we need to understand what’s outside, if it’s an external one, and so what’s happening outside will be brought into focus in this case.

The Golden Compass

Don’t you love it when an author grabs you by the nose, pulls you into his story, strings you along on the edge of your seat, and then lets you down with a lame ending? Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass is such a story. This is the first in the His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman expertly weaves a fantasy tale, draws you in, only to let you down at the end by resolving an external conflict with an internal solution.

In this fantasy story, a young girl named Lyra, a very special girl indeed, she finds herself on an adventure to the great white North. Throughout this adventure, she is always able, with the help of her allies, to accomplish what she needs to.

At the very end, the antagonist is about to open a gateway to another world– The way Philip Pullman tells the story, this does not come off as wierd or cheesy at all. By the time you get that far in the story, this all seems completely natural and believable. Pullman introduces his innovative creation, his world, to you so expertly that you never feel there’s anything strange about it.

The antagonist is about to open a gateway to another world, but this will kill Lyra’s best friend Roger. This is the ultimate climax. Lyra in this last great quest must stop the experiment and save Roger, and she has to do it on her own. And I fully expected her to, somehow, because that’s how the story was set up.

But she fails. The gateway opens. Roger dies. And Lyra, an eleven-year-old girl, devastated, with her dead friend in her arms, has a sudden change of heart and decides to follow the antagonist to the other world in order to… I’m not exactly sure. After 349 pages, the entire focus of the story turns around in the space of one more page, and I don’t know what’s going on. I guess I’m supposed to read the next book in the series in order to find out, but I don’t think I’m going to. I don’t like to be let down.

We all know about Deus ex Machina, God from the Machine. We all recognize that when the gods come down and magically make the hero’s problems disappear, that’s lame. This is similar. Maybe we can call it Deus ex Persona, God from the Character. Actors used to wear masks on stage to indicate which character they were portraying. This is as if the actor suddenly changes masks, and as a result all of the conflicts that mattered no longer matter. Deus ex Persona. How lame is that?

Ch Ch Changes

The third-season episode of the sci-fi series Roswell, “Ch Ch Changes”—and I swear that’s actually what it’s called—does the same thing. Liz is experiencing strange changes, and everyone’s looking for a way to stave them off. Suddenly, Liz accepts these changes.

Fortunately, Gilmore Girls never lets me down like this.

This is a list of opinions. My top three will be different from yours. But these three are important to me, and they are all things I sometimes see writers neglecting. Some of the points I’ll make are obvious. But obvious means overlooked, so I’ll mention them anyhow.

Give us a well-written story arc.

If I had to pick just one piece of advice, it would be this: In your stories, introduce us to complex characters who experience the extraordinary and will never be the same again.

I know that’s a mouthful, but that’s because it has a lot of implications.

Introduce us to the characters. Don’t just tell us about them. We want to see the characters live. We want to get to know them. We want you to poke them with situations, and we want to see them react, like subjects of an experiment, so that we can understand what makes them tick.

Complex characters excite us. Real people are rarely simple, anyhow. They have quirks and habits. They think without acting and act without thinking. They say one thing and do another. They have passions and impulses and great loves. When it comes to characters, we want people we can believe actually exist.

Extraordinary events are the only kind that can precipitate changes. Our hero needs to reach rock bottom before he can see the error of his ways. He needs to face an insurmountable obstacle before he can show his genius by overcoming it. He must undergo a devastating loss before he breaks down and shows us his true feelings.

Thus, he changes and will never be the same again. The critical moment leaves a lasting impression on our hero, and vicariously on us as well.

Grab our attention, and never let go.

There is room in a story for the boring parts. But first you have to establish momentum. We must be so engrossed in the story that the boring parts are no longer boring, because they apply directly to the story. We’ve been sucked in too far to notice. Beginning writers frequently have trouble with this, and published authors sometimes too.

A story is like a huge boulder. At first, you have to push long and hard in order to get it moving. But once it’s rolling, you can lay back, giving attention to other areas, just nudging the boulder from time to time to keep it going, or giving it another big push to pick up the intensity.

Give us superhuman heroes.

This does not mean perfect heroes. We do want flawed, believable heroes we can identify with. We want our heroes to make mistakes. We want them to be complex, a mixture of saint and sinner. We want them to be human.

But we also want them to be superhuman. We want them to overcome extraordinary obstacles. We do not want the gods of Olympus to disappear the obstacle for our hero. We do not want the hero to chicken out.

In the pilot miniseries for the new Battlestar Galactica, at one point, the Cylons were bearing down on the fleet, were going to destroy the last remnant of humans. Commander Adama made the hard choice, as it were, and decided that his ship, and any other ship that could jump to safety, would do so, leaving the helpless ships behind to be destroyed. I was sick to my stomach. I’d rather watch old Star Trek episodes; at least Captain Kirk always found a way to win.

Do I always want a happy ending? Not necessarily, as I loved the classic film Waterloo Bridge, which has a sad, shocking ending (though to be fair, Myra was not overcome by an external foe, but by an internal one). But I also hated A Streetcar Named Desire. Didn’t you want Blanch to snap, at a critical juncture, through insanity finding superhuman strength, and overpower Stanley, maybe throw him from the second-story window?

(Maybe I’m just in love with Vivien Leigh?)

Back to the new Battlestar. I know giving up is sometimes the most realistic way out. But in a good story, we don’t want realism; we want hyper-realism. And we don’t want heroes; we want superheroes.

This week, we enter the world of interactive fiction, and the possibilities it presents, by way of IFComp 2005. In this episode, we look at two of the top 4 winning entries.

Sometime, many years ago, longer than I would like to admit, I ran an early interactive fiction game on my Commodore 64 computer. I was greeted with a simple description

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

I typed the words, “Open the mailbox.”

Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.

“Read the leaflet.”

(Taken)

“WELCOME TO ZORK!

ZORK is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore
some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortals. No computer
should be without one!”

Yes, I was one of the thousands who got his first taste of adventure gaming with Zork I The Great Underground Empire, which was produced by Infocom before the term interactive fiction even existed. The paper-thin storylines of these earliest adventures, which involved fending off monsters, solving puzzles, and discovering treasure, are lost in our past but not gone from our hearts. And the tomorrow breed of adventure games promises so much more than we playing those early adventures could even dream of.

IFComp

IFComp is an annual interactive-fiction competition organized by Stephen Granade of Brass Lantern. Entrants must register by September 1, and judging happens from October 1 to November 15. Some authors begin working on their entries as early as May. For the eleventh annual IFComp, this year in 2005, there were 36 entries, up from 12 in the first competition in 1995.

The two games we’re looking at are Vespers by Jason Devlin and Beyond by Mondi Confinanti. Both of these games had strong points and weak points. Neither, however, took my breath away like Photopia by Adam Cadre, or All Roads by Jon Ingold, or any of Tim Schafer’s best games, Day of the Tentacle or Full Throttle or Grim Fandango or his latest Psychonauts.

Vespers

by Jason Devlin

Jason Devlin is a Biology student at Malaspina University in Nanaimo, British Colombia. He also wrote Sting of the Wasp, which won two XYXXY awards last year.

In Vespers, you play the Father of Saint Cuthbert’s, a poor, starving monastery, in which the brothers are going mad, after a plague has devastated the land, leaving dead bodies, decaying and fetid. A young woman arrives at the monastery cold and hungry, a woman with powers of divine insight. And then it begins, a death, charges of murder, and an assassination attempt on your life.

You can die in this game, and indeed you will die and will use the “undo” command.

The prose burns images into your mind’s eye. It’s very literary, in both good and bad respects. Occasionally, I didn’t know what I was trying to accomplish. The broader story arc was established, but the more immediate goals were not well enough defined. The answer was to explore. However, though reading vibrant descriptions is nice, it’s not as much fun as having some imminent reason for which to explore. Therefore, I had to explore without motivation in order to discover what I should do, or even what I could do. Looking back, now, I see that I did have at least one cue that could’ve tipped me off. But it didn’t. That’s why Jason should’ve made the immediate goals more explicit, either by giving multiple cues or simply by having some character state them.

At least one puzzle I had to solve by praying. Can you say, “Deus ex machina?” Others can be solved by praying to the right person, not God. And as Jason warns in the game’s forward, he may have gotten his theology wrong. Yup. And therefore it makes no sense, especially considering that the main character is a religious leader, at least not until the very end. But the plot must have a sense to it from the beginning, even if we find new meaning at the end. He would’ve done better either to tone down the divine intervention, or else to characterize the main character in other ways in order to have the strange theology make sense.

By the way, does the horse puzzle make any sense? Or have I just been watching too much Wildfire?

The in-game hint system is of the “give me another clue” variety. However, I repeatedly got stuck in ways for which no hints were available. Deciphering the walkthrough (which unfortunately only gives a list of commands, not a full transcript) showed me what I had to do in each case. And it didn’t make sense to me, even in retrospect.

Even poorly thought commands (“Smell the bed.”) give reasonable responses. (“The mattress smells like you in a nice, comfortable way.”) However, some commands, like “look” and “inventory” traditionally should be free; that is, time does not pass while you do them. However, in Vespers, these commands are not free, a fact which makes the game laborious to play in places. But…

One deadly foe, with a knife, was after me. What to do? Hide from him, but in a way such that I could knock him out before he could see me. But even after he was down, I wanted to make sure he was out, no longer a danger. So I hit him, which generated:

You raise your foot and slam it into his head. It gives, but only slightly.
So you jump. Up and down. Up and down. When you are done, he is little more
than a smear upon the ground.

A little more than I asked for, but okay. Now I want to search him for evidence. To which the game responded, “You can’t while hiding.” Oops. I guess the beta-testers missed that one.

My play time: 3 hours.

Beyond

by Mondi Confinanti
Concept and main story by Roberto Grassi
Programming by Paolo Lucchesi
Graphics by Alessandro Peretti

There’s a soft buzz, somewhere…
Behind me?
I turn around and touch the grey wall of this room.
There’s no one here.
No doors, no windows, no exits.
The room is lit, even if there are no light sources…
Another buzz, in front of me…
In the northern wall there’s now an open passage leading to another room.
Where am I?

The first character we meet is a girl, named Elena, who died as a fetus. Like all children who were never born, and thus never had the chance to learn and make life choices, she ends up in a spiritual reliquary. But first, she can choose whether to learn about the circumstances of her own death. She’s given this choice because she never had an opportunity to choose while she was alive.

The main character is a police detective named Maltelli investigating her mother’s suicide. Or is it a suicide? (Cue foreboding music.)

The cut-scenes are really cool, artistic, moving even. But the imagery only includes visual cues; it fails to engage all 5 senses.

The dialogue is a bit fake, especially in that it doesn’t flow logically from conversation to conversation. If there are several people in the room, all should be able to hear and take part in the conversation. But only the person you’re talking to shows any signs of consciousness. And later conversations with later interviewees proceed as though the former conversation had never taken place. This is unfortunately typical of this genre of game.

The clues are not always given completely, and sometimes sentences are logically incomplete. Depending on who you talk to first, you’ll either understand what’s being told to you, or you’ll need to note the misstatement and wait until a later conversation. You can’t ask your interlocutor to clarify. Nor does anyone else within earshot interject a clarification.

And conversations did not finish cleanly. Usually, there’s a “Thank you, I’ll talk to you later” conversation option. In this game, either conversations end suddenly or you just walk out on people if you want to stop talking to them.

There are a few grammatical errors, probably due to poor translation from Italian. Fortunately, they aren’t too distracting. But here’s a good one, too funny not to share: In a farm yard, “Below the last sunlight of the day all the farm life is thriving. Hens, chickens, ducks and chicks are running in and out from the hen-house…” I think whoever wrote that line was trying just a little too hard.

The parser and vocabulary are mostly okay. Once, I had to play hunt the verb. When I tried to climb on the garbage bins, the game wouldn’t understand me, even telling me I can’t see any such thing, when it just got through telling me they were right there. I needed to “climb bins” not “climb on bins.” Ugh.

One neat feature: Maltelli, the character, keeps notes in a notebook, which you can read any time during the game.

The in-game hint system, which you get to by typing “help,” is integrated into the game environment, as a ghostly, circular room. At first this threw me, because I didn’t know where I was or what was happening. But then I realized that the things I saw in this strange area corresponded to clues about what I should do to go forward in the game. (I didn’t actually need the hint system, but I did try it when I got stuck due to the “hunt the verb” problem I mentioned above.)

My play time: 2 hours 40 minutes, and I’m not done yet.

This week, we’ll look at a few entries from Alchera Project #39.

Writing prompts, if you’re a writer you probably think you should do more of them, but you never seem to have the time. Those who are not writers may have only a vague idea what a writing prompt is. The prompt is a starting point for a writing project, an idea, a structure, and a set of requirements, and you as a writer have to flesh it out into a complete work. As writers, we know these are great practice and great opportunities to expand ourselves. But we never seem to have the time to do them. Besides which, they’re a lot more fun to read than to write.

The Alchera Project is a monthly writing group run by Laurie Murray. Each month, she posts six writing prompts. There’s a “prose” option, a “poetry” option, a “free-write” option, a “list” option. Option Five is called “A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words”; it includes a photo, and you have to write something inspired by the photo. Option Six is the “grab bag” option; six words are listed, and you have to use at least 3 of them. Each month, Alchera members choose one or more of these prompts to write to.

Alchera began in November 2001 as a monthly collaboration project offering one writing prompt. Shortly after that Laurie became bored with just one option and decided to create “the buzz,” which included one or two writing options each week. But not many members had time to do a writing prompt every week. So, Laurie changed the format to five project options per month. The number of options has grown and shrunk over the years, but that’s basically still what we have today. This format makes the Alchera Project different from (and in my opinion, better than) other writing prompts on the Internet.

One of the things that intrigues me most about writing prompts is that each writer has a different interpretation of the prompt. Take Alchera Prompt #5, “A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words.” In project #39, for November 2005, we saw a black-and-white photo of a rocky beach at dusk. Cloud-filtered sun illuminates tiny ripples infesting the infinite sea. And silhouetted against this backdrop, almost out of the frame, is a person, someone, we don’t know who.

There were 16 entries for this option last month, and all are worth reading, Some were poetry. Some were stories. Some were creative essay. Some were about the sand inbetween your toes. Some were about memories. Some were allegorical or metaphorical. One, inspired by the black-and-white photo, had the world losing all its colors. I myself wrote a 130-word flash fiction about a woman meeting her loved one on the beach under strange circumstances. I won’t say any more about that. Instead, there are two other submissions I’d like to talk about.

The first is a creative essay, called “Sea Change,” by Elizabeth W. Bennefeld. It begins with the line, “Water was a central part of my earliest nightmares.” This is what writers call a “compelling lead.” It causes you to ask questions and keeps you reading to find out the answers. Even though this is a non-fiction essay, the effect really isn’t so different from the tension a good story arc invokes. A good essay will produce the same arc as a good story. In fact, some use an actual story as the basis of the essay.

I assume the events portrayed actually happened, because it’s written in the form of an essay. But for all I know, it could be a work of fiction. If it’s fictional, we call it a story. If it’s nonfiction, we call it an essay and put it in a totally different category. But the line between these two is thinner than we’d like to admit.

In fact, the events in “Sea Change” actually did happen. The author herself told me that.

Elizabeth Bennefeld is a freelance writer and editor from Fargo, North Dakota, with a website thewrittenword.net. She specializes in academic editing but has also edited novels, nonfiction, and professional articles. In college, she started by studying math and science. But in her junior year, she switched to the humanities, earning a BA in English and Philosophy. Then she spent over fifteen years in bank computer operations and a bit less than a year as a computer programmer before striking out as an editor and writer. Some of her favorite authors are William Sanders, Candace Robb, Julie Czerneda, Mindy Klasky, Wen Spencer, and Louise Marley.

In “Sea Change,” we feel the author’s horror of water, but also her romantic attachment to it, after she came to terms with the sea. It’s a short piece, moving and romantic.

By far the longest, most involved submission to last month’s Alchera Project was Nathan Nelson’s story “Midnight Mass.” Inspired by the same photo, it’s a story of a young man seduced by a gay vampire. This is not a story for kids, or even for the weak of heart. In the story preface, Nate writes, “One man’s smut is, I hope, another man’s allegory.”

I knew, however, that the symbolic meaning I saw in the story could not possibly be what he intended. But when I asked him what he intended the allegory to mean, he said:

I rarely intend anything when I write a story, or if I did intend something at the beginning, it didn’t turn out that way. This was a rare exception. I went into the story intending allegory, but I did not go into the story intending for the allegory to mean the same thing to everyone. I think the best allegory is the kind that can mean many things to many different people, and I think your understanding of what you read is likely more valid than any kind of preconceived intention I could tell you about. Allegory is more about the reader than the author, in my opinion.

Nate Nelson is a 21-year-old writer from Bridgeport, Ohio. Involved deeply in both faith and politics, he is also a contributing editor for the Catholic social justice blog Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, and he maintains a faith-based blog called Sacramentum Minimum.

In “Midnight Mass,” a vampire in Key West seduces a young man named Daniel, who is visiting over the Christmas holidays. He draws him in, into a hidden place where no one can get to save him. Daniel speaks as though he no longer has control over his own thoughts. As I read the story, I found myself horrified for this character, under the spell of the undead. I wanted one of his friends somehow to save him, but I knew that was not going to happen. This is a perfect picture, I thought, of the horror of being subjugated by one’s passions. The story is, after all, an allegory. We can’t control our feelings, true, but we can direct them toward the productive, rather than being dominated by them. However, once one allows himself to be caught in their grip, he might as well have lost his mind, as it’s not working anymore anyhow.

I am sure this is not what Nate had in mind. If you read certain pieces I’ve written in my LiveJournal, you may understand why I’d see the story from that perspective. If you read what he’s written, you’ll understand why his perspective is different.

Maybe he meant that being seduced by a vampire, becoming one of the undead– Maybe that’s sometimes a good thing, sometimes beautiful. “And they lived happily ever after,” and all that. In this case, the story would be a symbol of how sometimes what scares us is exactly what we need, and we need to surrender ourselves to it in order to be happy.

If that’s what was thinking, he needed to build much more sympathy for the vampire. The vampire is naturally inhuman; we need to see it as human. We need to identify with the character. Pat Murphy does this very well. In her novel, Nadia: The Wolf Chronicles, for example, she establishes sympathy for a werewolf. She achieves this within the first few chapters and never stops. She also does this in (at least some of) her short stories.

But in “Midnight Mass,” the vampire horrified me. As beautiful as Daniel said he was, I could only see Nosferatu. I could only imagine that Daniel was bewitched, not seeing what was really there, which only added to the terror I felt.