The Fine Art of Caring

Someone recently asked me what my vice was. At first the question took me off guard. I mean, I can’t very well tell the guy that I’m an alien overlord on the planet Chogoth and that under my cruel tyranny tens of millions of innocents have died. I tend to like to keep that kind of thing under wraps.

So I hemmed and hawed for a minute before I came up with this gem: “I like watching scathing reviews of bad movies on the internet.” Which has the added bonus of being true.

I’m not sure why I like watching people scream about how bad a movie is. I only know that for me it’s oddly compelling entertainment. But last week, I watched one review in particular that really made me mad.

In this review Matthew Buck AKA Film Brain was lambasting 2012, the disaster epic directed by the famously infamous Roland Emeric.  Now if you haven’t seen this movie, trust me its dumb. It’s fun in its way, but it’s really really DUMB.

However I found myself taking issue with the reviewer over one particular point of criticism. He complained that a film about the destruction of the earth was too focussed on one particular family. Millions of people were dying like rats, but it only seemed to matter if this one family made it out okay.

At first this seems like a legitimate complaint. After all, we see buildings collapsing and cars falling from bridges and all manner of mass destruction, such that by the end of the movie it’s clear that billions are dead. In those kinds of circumstances who cares if one family made it out alive? But from a story perspective at least, I would argue that 2012 gets this one right.

Why? Because we don’t have the capacity to care as much about huge groups of people suffering and dying as we do for individuals. For any kind of disaster to have an impact on us we need to be close to it. The closer we are, the more it affects us.

For instance, several years back a huge tsunami crashed ashore on the rim of the Indian Ocean. Hundreds of thousands of people died. It was one of the worst natural disasters in recent memory. But I can tell you that the tornadoes that recently devastated an area of Alabama just a few miles from where I live impacted me emotionally more than the tsunami did. And if my own mother was to die in a car accident, that would affect me most of all.

Why? Because I have a personal connection to her. No, it doesn’t make strictly logical sense to care for one more than you care for thousands, but we aren’t strictly logical beings.

That’s why films like 2012 focus on families and individuals. Because those stories are the ones we care about. We connect to the world on a personal level. And the same is true with all stories. As writers we need to understand that.

All great stories are ultimately about individuals. And since we’re talking movies, I’ll tell you that my favourite example of this in recent memory is Inception. It’s a big budget action flick with mind bending twists and an eclectic cast of characters. But if you boil it all down its a story about one man trying to get home to his kids.

That’s all.

The fate of the world isn’t hanging in the balance. The earth is not being saved from destruction. But one of the reasons that Inception works is because it realizes that personal crisis matters more than global catastrophe.

That doesn’t mean that we writers can’t craft an epic story of global proportions, but we must always, always, always, remember that the personal story, the individual stakes, must matter more than the global stakes.

Give your readers a reason to connect with your protagonist as a person. Make them care about his struggle.  Everything else will fall into place.

Uncharted Territory

You know what my problem is? Well, one of my problems anyway?

I’m a hypocrite.

Remember all those posts from a while back about outlining and planning for your story to go somewhere? Well I have a confession to make. I started a new story few days back and I didn’t do any of that stuff.

And you know what? So far it has been awesome. I have been having more fun with this story than I can remember having in a long time, and so far my strategy has been to write every day until I came to a stopping point then come back and write some more tommorow.

This is not how it’s supposed to work. Somewhere in the back of my mind I know that I could easily run up against a brick wall plotwise. But my wordcount on this thing has been through the roof compared to what it was before, and part of me wants to keep writing to find out what happens next.

“Writing for discovery” someone called it once.

To which I responded, “Yes, but what if what you discover is crap?”

But at this point I do not care. At the beginning of the year I resolved to try to have more fun with my writing, and this story has finally helped me to achieve that goal. Maybe it won’t last. Maybe I’ll be hating myself a month down the road when I don’t know how to wrap this thing up.

I’m sure you’ll hear about it if that’s what happens.

In the mean time I’m on the road without a map, just driving along to see where it might take me.

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You may find this opposing view to be interesting as well.

Eat Your Lima Beans: The Importance of Becoming the Writer You Aren’t

When I was a kid, my mom had a rule at the dinner table: “Eat everything on your plate.” I was okay with it most of the time. Mom was a great cook who never failed to deliver a stunning meal even when she didn’t have much to work with. But sometimes…sometimes that rule was a tough pill to swallow. Especially when Lima beans were involved.

But what I didn’t realize was that mom was teaching me an important principle way back then: it’s just as important to do the things you don’t like as it to do the things you love.

As a writer I love the feeling of crafting a sentence or paragraph that works, words that flow into one another naturally and easily. It’s what makes the act of writing truly magical for me. But unfortunately that isn’t the only thing on my plate.

There is more expected of me as a writer than the crafting of powerful sentences; I also have to craft a powerful story. And crafting a powerful story involves planning and forethought. All the elements of the plot have to fit together in the same way that all the elements of the sentence need to fit together. Not only should they make sense, but they should move the reader at his very core.

But the problem is that plots like that don’t just fall onto the page naturally. They need to be planned. They need to be…deep breath, I can do this…outlined.

There. I said it. Outlining. I like it about as much as I like Lima beans. But recently I’ve come to realize that what I like doesn’t really matter. I realized I needed to approach my writing like I approached mom’s dinner. It’s fine to enjoy the good stuff, the stuff you really love, but sometimes you’ve got to eat some Lima beans too.

Which means when the time comes to start my next big work, I’m going to have to get out the sharpies and the 3×5 cards and start planning. It probably won’t be fun, but that doesn’t mean I can ignore it. There will be time for fun later on when I’m soaring through that first draft spinning sentences out of the raw aether.

This isn’t a post about outlining; it’s a post about doing what doesn’t come naturally. Maybe you love outlining. Maybe you go to town with those little 3×5 cards and a black magic marker and make that plot work baby.

But the odds are good there’s some other aspect of writing you fall short at.  And that is the thing you’re going to have to conquer if you want to become a truly great writer.

Doing what comes naturally is easy. We can play from our strengths all day long. But playing from our strengths isn’t going to make us great. If we aspire to greatness we’re going to have to learn to work through our weaknesses.

The writer we are is the core of our strengths, the essence of our love of the craft. But the writer we are isn’t enough. We have to reach out to the things we don’t like, the areas of the craft that make us wary and uncomfortable and learn to embrace them as well.

We have to eat our Lima beans. We have to become the writer we aren’t.

Plotting for People Who Hate Plotting

For most of my writing career I’ve fallen firmly on the “pantster” side of the writing world. For those of you who have been living in a cave without wifi access for the last five years (All the best caves have wifi now. Haven’t you heard?) a pantster is a writer who never outlines his stories ahead of time and just writes “by the seat of his pants”. I tried outlining when I first started writing, but it all felt so mechanical and forced that I just hated it, and by the time I finished writing the book I had pretty well run off the rails of what I had planned anyway.

I’ve spent the rest of my writing life just winging it, making up my plot as I go along. Sure, I’d give the my story a lot of thought beforehand, and I’d try to have a general goal of what I wanted to accomplish in the story mapped out in my head, but for the most part I never wrote anything down.

But life as a pantster can be hard. I’m getting ready to go into my final set of revisions for my story The Mulch Pile next month, and I’m already dreading the changes I’m going to have to make. Why? Because about two thirds of the way through writing the story I realized something vitally important about my main character that completely changed the way I looked at the first part of the story. I tried to go in and tweak things at the beginning so that they’d work with my new understanding of my character, but the truth is its going to take a lot more work to fix it.

The problem is this: if I’d made an outline and followed the outline, I never would have had the incredible breakthrough that’s making me go back and revisit all of my early scenes. The rigid form of outlining would have never allowed me to think about the story in such a different way. But yesterday I discovered a technique that combines the best of both worlds. The muntant hybrid of plotting, and winging it. And it was awesome.

Here’s how it happened. I got an idea for a short story while I was fighting off a terrible bought of hives (Yeah, my ideas come from the weirdest places). While I sat in front of my computer thinking about the story, I opened Notepad at a whim and just started typing stuff. Plot points, character details, whatever came to my mind, whenever it came to my mind. It looked something like this:

The itch

sisters

rivalry

hatred

Older vs Younger

mother’s affections

mother a witch

sister’s learning to follow in her footsteps

younger sister not as good at potions as older sister

older sister plays potion trick on younger sister.

younger sister decides she wants revenge

gathers wrong kind of mushroom/at wrong time of day (forshadow)

tricks older sister into drinking it.

itch intensifies to the point that old sister is cutting off skin with a knife

older sister dies from her injuries.

mother comes home and finds the carnage

Younger sister take shapeshifter potion to make herself look like her older sister using bits of her sisters blood

It ain’t pretty, I know, but it worked. Because that line at the end there, the one where the younger sister becomes the thing she hates to escape the consequences of her actions? That idea wasn’t in my head before. It came from the process of writing down all my conceptions about the story on paper. This way, instead of getting all the way through writing the story and discovering that I needed to go back and change something to fit the ending, I can write it with all the ideas I would have found through the writing process in my head already.

I know this approach to brainstorming is nothing new, but it was new to me, and I have a feeling it’s going to be a powerful weapon in my arsenal. Maybe it could help you too. If you’re an incurable pantster like me, and you hate the rigid confines of the outline, then give this free-writing exercise a try. The great thing about it is there’s no pressure. It doesn’t have to look like anything. It doesn’t even have to make sense. After all you’re not going to show it to anyone. (Unless you’re a total doofus and post it to your blog for the whole world to see.) And it might make a tremendous difference and save you a lot of rewrites.

If you’ve got a different way, let me know about it in the comments. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing it’s this: there’s always something else to learn about writing.