This is a simple question with potentially un-simple answers.
So, I’ll just ask it:
Why do you write?
More to the point: why do you tell stories?
I’ll hang up and wait for your answer.
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As always, if you want to ask a question that may be featured in this very space, go sally forth to the:
Ask page at the Terribleminds Tumblr.
Today, then, a focus on character, in which I field two questions that came winging into my inbox (not a sexual reference, but you can have it if you like it). Those questions are, drum roll please:
mstrimmer asks:
If you are aiming to make a character as three dimensional as possible, what is the best starting point for that exercise?
Kefirah asks:
Hey Chuck Love your blogs and tweets, and I have got scads of good advice from you over the year or so I’ve been following, but I don’t think I’ve seen a blog on how to describe characters/people in stories. Is there any big, massively effective way of doing this? Would you consider doing a blog about it? Thanks and love and all that Cath/ aka Kefirah
As with All-Things-Writing, I’d love to alight upon your shoulder like a weirdly-bearded bird and whisper in your ear the SECRET RULES TO WRITING GOOD CHARACTER, but in truth, no such rules exist. Writing works when it works, and sucks when it sucks, and what works for Mary Lou Monkeyballs doesn’t work at all for Big Danny Doucheballoon. Writing advice is only as good as the words you get from it.
Still, I can ramble and slur my way through some thoughts on how to build — and then describe — good character. And you’ll stay and watch because, hey, who doesn’t like it when I blog my way into a corner?
Also, I have you duct-taped to those lawn chairs. So, there’s that.
With character, we don’t have a blinky red button we can hit that Auto-Generates personas on the 3D printer we all have sitting to the right of our computer monitors (right?). Creating three-dimension in a character is an act of fortune and patience and heaps and buckets of thought.
But, I can give you a couple tips.
Use ’em, ignore ’em, blow ’em up with M80s. Your call.
First, ask yourself a handful of questions regarding the character.
What does she want, and why can’t she have it?
What is she afraid of and why is she afraid of it?
What made her who she is today?
Why the fuck do we care?
The first two questions are easy and form the scoliosis backbone of storytelling (scoliosis because it’s bent and wavy, not a straight line): every story is about status quo and the interruption of that status quo. Or, put differently, every story is a flat line heading in one direction until something changes, modifies, or halts that direction. The character generally is the one on that flat line, riding it the way Slim Pickens rides the missile in Dr. Strangelove. Except here the straightness and direction of the line is by no means inevitable.
Put differently again and this time with a refocus on character: every story is about a character who wants something and can’t have it. The “can’t have it” is the conflict of the story — the character is stopped from achieving his goals or fleeing his fears, and the story part of the story is about him finding a way to overcome. Or, in some more cynical modes, not finding a way.
Wants and fears and conflicts can change over the course of a story, of course. But we’re talking initiating factors here, and even when elements do shift through the course of the tale told, you can just go back to answering the same set of questions for each new “phase shift.” Or whatever you want to call it. (Just don’t call it late for dinner HAR HAR HAR *gun in mouth*)
Further, you can establish multiple wants and fears, though the “rule of three” here is good — going beyond three driving motivations for the character is just you muddying up the soup with too many ingredients. After awhile, it’s all just gross and brown. (You know what, here I’m going to be the bigger man and not engage in some kind of diarrhea-based humor. You owe me. You owe me.)
John McClane in Die Hard wants to be with his wife — with her in the smaller and larger sense. And of course, he has a number of things blocking him: the distance between NY and CA, the distance between he and his wife’s ideals and careers, and oh, right, A SQUADRON OF EUROTRASH TERRORISTS.
Onto the third question: what makes the character who she is at the inception of the tale?
A character is technically born out of nothing — but it can’t read like that on the page. They are who they are, just as we are who we are, because external events (abandoned by parents! attacked by robots! pooped pants during elementary school talent show!) and internal choices (addiction to a bad drug! loved the wrong person! betrayed one’s planet to the alien fungus!) conspire to create a quilt of who we are. And who we are equals the decisions we make — and the decisions we make further change who we are.
So: it helps to know where a character comes from. Suss out those external events and internal choices that lead to the character we see on the page or the screen. That doesn’t mean the audience needs to see all those events and choices laid bare — because, for real, fuck origin stories right in the ear — as a lot of story exists off the page and off the screen. A lot of story lives only in your head (and ideally, your notes). Again, to go back to the non-diarrhea soup metaphor: just because we can’t see an ingredient (say: salt) doesn’t mean we can’t taste it. It’s in there even if we cannot identify it by sight. Characters are like that. A whole bunch of invisible story is woven into the narrative DNA of each character.
Now: final question, and the hardest of them all.
Why the fuck do we care?
Critical question — because, if you can’t give the audience reason enough to care, we’re out. Character is everything in story (everything), and if we can’t muster a single squirmy fuck about the character in question, the eject button is within easy reach. Meaning, we turn off the DVD player, put down the Kindle, or banish the storytelling nano-cloud that delivers the tale to our neo-cortex with sharp spikes of narrative lightning (hey, whatever, just trying to stay future proof over here).
Asking why we care demands then we ask how we make the audience care.
Again, no easy answer, but why not try to stumble-bumble through out? Journey with me!
The audience wants to relate to the character. Meaning, they want to see some aspect of their own stories reflected in the story of the character. We need common experience shared. And here you’re (correctly) balking, saying, “Well, how can I ever tell a story different from the audience’s? Hell, how do I even know what the audience’s story is? The audience comprises a theoretical infinity of individual stories and interests and, and and–” Here your head goes BLOOSH. Wet goop everywhere. Delicious.
The point is to realize that the character on the page has his own unique story components, but those components speak to larger, more universal human elements of the human condition. The struggle of son versus father, the fear of death, altruism versus selfishness, whatever. No, we’ve never been a Jedi or a mob boss or a zombie hunter, but those struggles are emblems for other things.
The other way you make an audience care about a character is just by making her fascinating to watch. The character should be interesting. Not a dull everywoman with all the flavor of chalk dust but rather, someone who is fun, or funny, or weird, or ass-kickery, or some characteristic that makes us root for them and want to watch them for two hours or 300 pages. In short: fuck boring. Boredom is the enemy of story.
There exist other exercises, too, wherein you dig deeper into character and get to the heart of these questions: you might consider just opening a Word document and cracking open your brain with a metaphorical ice-hammer and blubbering into the word processor until you start seeing flecks of gold in all that muck. Which you then mine, discarding the rest as worthless dross.
You might also take the character for a ride on a narrative test drive: write a scene, a piece of flash fiction, a chapter from an imaginary book. All featuring that character, front and center. Doesn’t have to be something you’ll ever use or even show — but it just helps you walk around in that character’s skin for a while. It’ll be uncomfortable and itchy at first (and will chafe at the armpits and crotch), but over time, you’ll start to find the comfort there. You’ll start to know the character intimately (this is where I do my artsy writing teacher thing where I sweep my arms in a dramatic fashion and say loudly, You must learn to MAKE LOVE to your characters, you must lap at their love-puddles, you must spelunk into their darkest, moistest grottos.)
Final note on creating a fully-formed character?
The three-beat arc.
This doesn’t have to be a thing you stick to — as with any story-prep, no plan survives contact with the enemy — but it’s a thing that will help you get your head around the character and the journey she walks.
Establish three beats/traits/adjectives that mark the character’s journey.
A –> B –> C.
Selfish cowardly prick –> Goes to war; is tested –> Selfless heroic soldier. Or:
Angry –> Pushed to brink –> Finds tense peace. Or:
Robot –> Lives with new family –> Learns how to be human. Or:
Angry racist –> Jailed –> Reformed outsider (aka, American History X). Or:
Consider how the character of Coburn in Double Dead goes from Predator –> Protector –> Penitent. And three of the four sections of the book mark that journey quite plainly. There’s actually a fourth step in there (“Prey”), and that’s another thing to note: you needn’t be limited to three steps or stages. Insert as many as you need to map a journey.
Ultimately, this pairs well with expected and mythic character arcs, right?
Whether we’re talking childhood –> adulthood –> old age or its mythic counterpart, maiden –> mother –> crone (or prince –> king –> emperor), we’re charting and tracking change, whether that change is positive or negative growth. You can literally draw shapes from this.
Hell, at the end of the day, you might argue that character arcs like this always add up to:
Thesis –> Antithesis –> Synthesis.
Our lives work that way, don’t they? We feel a certain way during youth and adolescence, then adulthood tempers our expectations with quite a bit of pushback, then we move into our golden years as a summary of our experiences both positive and negative.
That’s character. Character lives in that space.
Now, to finalize:
How to describe.
Take your finger and thumb. Space them apart by two inches. In my mind, the character description on the page probably shouldn’t exceed that. Some authors refuse to describe characters at all, while others go hog-wild and give pages of description — I like a character to be painted in a few bold, notable strokes. What to define? Define what’s different and distinctive. Different-colored eyes. Strong nose. Ugly pants. Two penises wrestling for dominance. LASER NIPPLES. Whatever.
Again, cleave to the rule of threes if it suits you:
No more than three descriptive elements.
I go beyond this sometimes, but still: terse is good.
And you don’t need to lump all the descripty-bits into one section, either.
You can space them out throughout the first several chapters, if writing prose. (Just don’t wait until the end to tell us about the two-penis or laser-nipple thing. That’s a bit of information we should have early on.)
And that’s it.
My thoughts on character-building, in a way-longer-than-expected post.
Please to enjoy.
Living with a toddler is like living with a Ritalin-addled velociraptor. And as I’ve said in the past, every day is like that moment in Jurassic Park where the dinosaurs learn to open doors.
***
B-Dub now says a rather robust contingent of words.
Mom, Dad, Doggie, Truck, Girl, Boo-Boo, Puddle, Meow, Moo, Turtle, Tiger, Purple, Pop-Pop, Mom-Mom, Banana, Night-Night, Yeah, Hi, No, Tea, Teddy, Keys, Elmo, Popsicle, Orange, Red.
Some words get said five, ten times, and never return.
Some are permanent, and get thrown-around in daily use.
Next up, we’re angling for: Blue, chicken, milk, pogrom, pony, vodka, cigarillos, annihilation, Superman, orbital laser, and pterodactyl. So, fingers crossed, everybody.
***
Oh, when I say he “says” them, I didn’t always mean successfully. Truck is truh, or troo-ah. Girl is gee. Orange is oro. And so on. But see, now I get it. I used to meet people with toddlers and the kid would jabber some incomprehensible string of sounds (“Gobba goobey pee pee snerk florg waka waka”) and the parents are like, “Oh, sure, honey, you can have a sip of milk and then you want to go pee-pee and afterwards throw our G.I. Joes into the large hadron collider again? You got it, little person!”
And I was like, “How the fuck did you just decipher the flurry of clicks and beeps that came out of that fool kid’s mouth?” It’s because as a parent you just know. You start to draw the line between each piece of Lovecraftian gibberish and the object or concept it represents.
***
Trucks.
Goddamn trucks.
This kid? He loves trucks. He woke up the other night and on the baby monitor we did not hear him call for Mom, nor for Dad. No, in the sweetest, saddest voice he could muster, he called: “Truh?”
He loves trucks.
HE LOVES TRUCKS.
More to the point: he is obsessed with trucks. We literally have him flipping through truck magazines, like, the ones you find at truck stops and the like? Ads for tractor trailers and such? He flips through them at meal times like he’s actually shopping for a Peterbilt or some shit.
He’s got like, some kind of sixth sense for the things. He’ll suddenly jerk his head up, wide-eyed, and say, “Truh?” And you’re like, “No, weirdo, there are no trucks nearby–” But then you realize he heard a very distant sound of a truck on the road, or he caught sight of one of his truck toys on a very high shelf behind like, a stack of Hustlers or something, or he’ll totter over to a recliner and reach underneath to procure one of his truck toys. As if it called to him. Psychically.
***
Everyone thinks he’s two years old. He’s taller than some two-year-olds. We figure maybe it’s time for him to start smoking a pipe or learning how to drive stick or whatever it is that two-year-olds do.
***
He headbutts things. And then he says, “Bump” or “Bonk” when he does it. Which he thinks is endlessly hilarious. And it is, the first couple times. But a toddler running around and headbutting things — couch cushions, the floor, the dog, YOUR SHINBONE — stops being hilarious pretty effing quick. He might as well just run around and punch you. Which is probably next on the menu.
***
Toddlers throw some spectacular shit-fits. I mean, damn. Toddlers are like the genetic cross-breed between a howler monkey and a typhoon. The weird thing about the shit-fits is that they’re not always… a thing you understand. Nor are they necessarily predictable. Sometimes, sure. He wants something but can’t have it, meltdown. He’s really tired, hasn’t taken any naps, yes, a small psychotic break is incoming.
But other times, it just hits. Like lightning out of clear skies. Some tiny little grain of sand gets in his diaper and it’s suddenly, BOOM. His body becomes a writhing jumble of dead weight, and trying to pick him up is like trying to pick up a pile of grape jelly. He wails like it’s the end of the world. Spins around on the floor like one of the Three Stooges. And again: headbutting.
These aren’t super-common, but they happen often enough you’re ready to blame anything. Teething. Reality television. Climate change.
As a parent, you start to figure out ways to defuse situations like that. You misdirect or redirect (“Oh, look, a truck!”). You walk him around outside, though holding a struggling, meltdowning toddler is like trying to cradle a bobcat someone lit on fire.
Sometimes, though, you just gotta let ’em ride it out.
Let the storm go back out to sea from whence it came.
And at least the shit-fits make them tired.
***
Oh, and sometimes you can’t help it, but the shit-fits are so bizarre, you laugh. You really laugh. It’s like, he’s on the floor thrashing about like a fish on the dock and blubbering some word that makes no sense in this context (“PURRRRPLE”) and you crack up. You try to stifle it, but it’s hard, because the more you try to hold it in the harder it all wants to come out. Like a burp in church.
And laughing doesn’t help them. It only seems to aggravate the tantrum.
And that only makes you laugh harder.
Being a parent is cruel. But very, very funny.
***
He likes to hide things.
And when he does, he throws up his hands (as if to say, “THE ARISTOCRATS!”) and gives you a sweet and quizzical look. He learned this because we did it, of course, one time, and all it takes is one time. One time he hid something and we held up our hands and said, “Where did it go?” And boom, like that, it clicked.
Kids are sponges. Inconsistent sponges. You never know when they’re going to pick up a word or a behavior. Thankfully, he hasn’t picked up any bits of profanity yet — and we have started to officially curb the language. Last night we got away for a dinner without B-Dub and it was like a great balloon popping. We just sat in the car, cursing up a storm and laughing. I mean, some truly vile shit came out of our mouths. It would’ve melted his little tiny human brain.
Anyway, the lesson here is, if B-Dub totters up to you and makes the “ta-da!” gesture, it means he’s hidden something. Like the remote control, or your car keys, or your insulin. Good times.
***
Parenting seems a constant struggle between the easy and the difficult, and frequently, the easy path is the least advisable one to walk. It’d be easier to plop them down in front of the TV to let them zombie-out while you get some laundry done. It’d be easier to give them the crappy sugary food they’d much prefer than to try to find ways to get them to like and crave some goddamn broccoli. It’d be easier to yell, or walk away, or stick them in a box marked FREE CHIMP and put it out with the recycling.
It’s a thing you have to deal with daily, and it’s not always easy to, well, avoid the easy. Sometimes you just want to slide into poor decisions because they’re simpler, more straightforward, with far less effort.
But then you realize, well, if I wanted easy, I shouldn’t have had a kid in the first place.
So you do the hard thing because they’re better off, and that’s your whole purpose as a parent. To hopefully ensure they’re better off.
***
Some of this sounds kind of awful. Or like I’m complaining. Let it be said: this is furthest-flung from the truth. Toddlers are goddamn awesome. Babies, like, infant-babies? Boring as a sack of carpet samples. They just sit there. Punching the air and squirming. Cute! Very cute. But dull as a butter knife.
Toddlers are hilarious. Start to finish, day to day, they’re hilarious. They do things and say things you never expect, as if some strange person comes into their room late at night to teach them new things. They’re like having drunk people over for dinner every night — they wander around your house and do really weird things like headbutt stuff or hide their trucks in your shoe or see themselves reflected in the oven glass and then kiss their own reflection (seriously, B-Dub does this — the kid’s a bonafide Narcissist).
And they’re capable of wildly sweet gestures, too. A random hug out of nowhere is like, WUUUUUT. Or they’ll lean on you, or give you a little smooch, or bring you a present (like your insulin, or a mouse they killed when you let them outside). B-Dub will sometimes walk up to you, say your name or presumed title, then pat you on the hip or shoulder as if to say, “Good job, old horse. Good job.” He’ll give you a little nod and then totter off again to try to, I dunno, choke on a penny or fling himself from the top of the couch because that’s how he rolls.
Point is, it’s only when they get to be this age that you start to see the people they’re going to become. And it’s then that it all starts to really become worth it — like, the equation of your effort and frustration and sleepless nights start to yield a very real sum, and the sum grows every day as if it’s yielding a kind of emotional interest that you can bank and visit on days both great and not-so-bloody-great.
***
Oh, and since we’re gluttons for punishment, now we’re looking for a new doggy.
Wish us luck. Or, at least, grant us your sympathy.
Last week’s challenge — “A Game Of Aspects” — was so cool and so weird (and is still ongoing until noon) that I thought it was high-time to do another one. Or, at least, a similar one.
Once again, we’ve got three categories.
Slightly different this time:
Again, Subgenre.
Then: Setting!
Then: Element to Include.
We’ll leave theme/motif/conflict off the table for the time being, since some of these settings and included elements will have conflicts implicit.
This time, there’s a different prize.
Interested in attending the Crossroads Writers Conference in Macon, GA? October 5th through the 7th? Where I am, in fact, a speaker? (Who the hell let that happen?)
Well, I’m giving away — courtesy of the conference —
THE WORDSMITH MEGASUPREME PACKAGE.
Ahem. You get:
The full day of the Saturday conference with the Keynote Lunch, a swank room at the Marriott City Center, after hours access to Crossroads HQ, a T-shirt, a 2GB pre-loaded USB, a Crossroads travel mug, wristband, a reception on Saturday night and brunch on Sunday, plus they’ll throw in an extra night at the hotel (total of two) and a free pass to the Freelancers Summit on Friday.
Then there will be two runners up who can nab: a Pen & Paper registration package, which includes access to the Saturday conference, a Crossroads T-shirt and Keynote Lunch.
Here’s a link to the registration page and breakdown:
http://www.crossroadswriters.org/conference/?page_id=819
Further questions can be dropped into the comments or emailed to Chris -@- CrossroadsWriters.org.
Now, you can still participate in the challenge without throwing your name into the prize hat — after all, the prize won’t be useful to people who can’t make it to Georgia on those dates, right? Right. So, when posting your entry in the comments, please note whether you’re submitting to be included in the prize draw (which will be a random draw of those participating). If you don’t note your interest, I’ll assume you’re not.
If you know people who might like to take advantage of the potential prize, please send ’em here.
To play, you gotta write a story.
1000 words.
Host at your blog or online space.
Link back here.
Again, you can still participate in the flash fiction challenge without throwing your name into the prize hat, but the reverse is not true — you cannot throw your name into the prize hat without first participating in the flash fiction challenge. Dig? Dig.
You’ve got one week. Due by Friday, September 21st, noon EST.
Now, onto the categories:
Again, the coolest way to play this is to either roll a d10 for each category or to choose a random number between 1-10 using an online random number generator such as the one found at Random.org.
One from each, then write.
The categories:
Subgenre
Paranormal Romance
Cyberpunk
Splatterpunk
Ghost Story
Space Opera
Alternative History
Lovecraftian
BDSM Erotica
Murder Mystery
Superhero
Setting
A Brothel
A Space Station
Bottom of the Ocean
Inside a Massively-Multiplayer Game
Wal-Mart
Hell
The Hollow Earth
The Zoo
In a Vehicle Traveling Down the Highway
Paris, 1944
Element to Include
Weapons of Mass Destruction
A Funeral
Adultery
A Robot
Amnesia
A Fashion Show
A Dragon
Some Kind of Alien Virus or Parasite
Tattoos
Cloning
Mister Matt Ruff and I were like two ships passing in the night. He did an event at Mysterious Galaxy I believe the night before I did — and at that time, someone was talking to me about his new novel, Mirage, which basically flipped the events of 9/11 around in a fascinating alt-world switch-up. So, when it came time to host him here for an interview, well, uhh, hell yeah. I’ll let him tell the rest. Meanwhile, find him at bymattruff.com and on the Twittertubes @bymattruff.
This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.
I’ll tell you about the time when I was twelve and I nearly killed myself.
The neighborhood where I grew up in Queens had a freight line running through it, and if you followed the tracks and were careful not to let the cops see you, you could get onto other parts of the rail network that stretched for miles and miles all over the borough. So when we were kids, my friends and I used to go exploring on the railroad tracks.
One night after dark we were walking along a stretch of the Long Island commuter rail in Rego Park. The tracks ran along the top of a ridge; off to our right was a line of apartment buildings, and in between us and the apartments was this gulley. The bottom of the gulley was pitch dark, so we couldn’t tell how deep it was or what was at the bottom, but the slope down into it was pretty shallow.
We stayed on the tracks, and a bit further along we came to this funny little retaining wall that somebody had built along the edge of the gulley. I jumped up onto it and started walking along it with my arms stretched out, like an acrobat doing a high-wire act. I was clowning, pretending to lose my balance and then catching myself at the last second. I walked the whole length of the wall that way.
Then I came to the end and it was time to jump down, and I had to decide, which way do I jump? To the left was the track bed. To the right, all I could see was blackness—but I assumed it was that same shallow slope, so, about a foot-and-a-half drop onto slightly uneven ground.
I chose left. Later I tried to convince myself there was some sort of logic behind this decision—like, maybe I was worried about twisting my ankle on the slope in the dark—but the truth is, it was a random impulse. I could just as easily have jumped right, and if I had, I wouldn’t be here now telling you this.
About a week later I went back out there in daylight, and that’s when I found out that at that point along the LIRR, an abandoned spur of track passed underneath the main line. The retaining wall wasn’t a retaining wall, it was the top of a tunnel mouth. I’d been dancing on the edge of a 25-foot cliff.
It gets better. The residents of the apartment buildings had taken to dumping their trash in the gulley and on the abandoned track: refrigerators, stoves, stuff like that. Directly beneath the tunnel arch, right where I would have landed, there was this old black iron bedframe. The mattress had long since disintegrated, but the thing still had a full set of bedsprings, which, from above, looked more like a set of coiled, rusty daggers. So if I’d jumped right that night, I wouldn’t have just fallen and broken my neck, I’d have been impaled.
The thing that really freaked me out about this was not the fact that I’d almost died, because I’d had close calls before. What got to me was the realization of just how much could ride on a seemingly trivial decision. Jump one way, you get to grow up and maybe have that writing career you’ve been dreaming about. Jump the other, and you’re nothing but somebody else’s cautionary tale: “Don’t screw around on the railroad tracks or you’ll end up like that kid.”
Like most people who are happy with the way their lives turned out, I want to believe that my good fortune was preordained—that plus or minus a few details, things were meant to turn out this way. But there’s a hardheaded rational part of me that knows that that’s bullshit. I am where I am in large part because of a series of lucky accidents, and every time life has presented me with a chance to leap blindly off a cliff, I’ve just happened to jump the other way. So far.
“So far.” That is, unless I’m actually interviewing Matt Ruff, the ghost. Were you a specter, what would be the first thing you’d do on the other side of the veil?
A victory dance, or the spectral equivalent, to celebrate the fact that there really is something beyond this life and that I hadn’t just ceased to exist. Next would come a long series of practical questions—What did I leave undone, and can I still do any of it? Can I contact my wife somehow? Is there a way to rearrange this death scene so my corpse looks a little more dignified for the paramedics?—followed by another round of celebration: Whoo-hoo! Still here!
What happens after that would depend on whether dead people can get hungry, and if so, what sort of sandwiches are available.
Why do you tell stories?
It’s the way I came wired from the factory. I’ve wanted to be a novelist for as long as I can remember. Anytime I’m alone, or when I’m with other people but there’s a lull in the conversation, my brain flips into this default daydreaming mode that my wife calls “bookhead.” That’s where I do all my first drafts, in bookhead.
Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:
One of the most important lessons to learn is that you’re allowed to get things wrong. Fiction, even the stuff that’s categorized as “realism,” is, by definition, make-believe. The characters don’t exist. The dialogue is invented. Cause and effect is an illusion: Everything that happens in a story happens for the same reason, because the storyteller says it does.
So if it suits your purposes to have the sun go around the earth, or to put the March of Dimes secretly in league with the American Nazi Party, you can do that. Your readers may not all love you for it, but you can do it.
The key is to make deliberate decisions and know what your reasons are. When I wrote Set This House in Order, which is about a relationship between two people with multiple personality disorder, I knew I was stepping into a controversy. There are a lot of skeptics who think MPD isn’t real, and among those psychiatrists who do believe in it, opinions vary as to the exact nature of the condition, how common it is, and how it ought to be treated. I decided up front not to worry about who was right. I picked a model of MPD that made sense to me and focused on telling a believable, engaging story using that model. The end result may or may not be true to life, but I think it’s a really good novel, and that’s what matters.
With my most recent novel, The Mirage, I set different standards of accuracy for different elements of the story. In dealing with theology, especially Islamic theology, I tried to be careful to get things right. With the action sequences, on the other hand, I opted for Hollywood physics—so long as the car chase is cool and exciting, I’m OK with it not being entirely realistic.
What’s the worst piece of writing/storytelling advice you’ve ever received?
“You should be more practical.”
Actually I’m not sure if that’s the worst advice or just the most futile. I’ve been getting different versions of it for my entire life, and even when I agree, I can never seem to follow it.
When I was a kid, my parents were very supportive of my ambition to be a writer, but occasionally some other well-meaning adult would try to talk me into considering a more sensible career goal. They never got anywhere. I knew I was going to be a writer, and even if you could have gotten me to admit that I might fail, I’d have argued that it was better to proceed on the assumption that I wouldn’t.
Later, after I’d been published, I started getting advice on how to more practically manage my career: How I should stick to this or that genre, or at least make my next novel enough like my last novel so that marketers and reviewers would know what to do with me. The trouble is, the way I write, in order to successfully finish a book, I have to be obsessed with finishing it—to feel like I need to finish it. And while I’m trying to become more flexible in my obsessions, it seems as though at any given time, there’s only one novel that really fills that sense of need, and it’s rarely the novel a practical author would choose to work on.
What goes into writing a strong character? Bonus round: give an example of a strong character.
I’m not sure I can articulate exactly how I go about it, but my goal in character creation is to get enough of a sense of the character’s psychology that I can easily intuit how they would behave in a wide variety of situations.
Present the character with a problem—let’s say they need to get across town in a hurry, but they’ve got no ride and no money. What do they do?
Using myself as an example, in an emergency I’d be perfectly willing to steal a car, but it’d have to be an unoccupied car with the keys in it. I don’t know how to hotwire an ignition, and as for carjacking, even if I convinced myself it was morally justified—which I might or might not be able to do, depending on the circumstances—I suck at threatening people. Even if I had a gun, there’s a good chance the driver would laugh in my face and go “Screw you! You’re not going to shoot anybody!” (At which point I’d lower the gun and say, “Yeah, you’re right, and I’m really, really sorry, but if I don’t get to Tenth and Main in fifteen minutes, this whole city is going to be engulfed in a nuclear fireball. Can you please help me?”)
That’s the mark of a strong character, when you not only know what they will do and won’t do, you know what they think they’re capable of—and how they react when they find out they’re wrong.
Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!
I’m generally unimpressed by the storytelling in videogames, in part because the game and the narrative are so often at odds with one another. If I’m having fun playing, I don’t want to stop and watch a cutscene—or, God help me, read a wall of text—and if I’m really into a story, I don’t want to have to pass a hand-eye coordination test to find out what happens next.
One of the rare exceptions is Valve’s Portal series, which integrates the story into the play in a way that is seamless, so I never get the sense of being pulled in two directions at once. And the writing is fantastic! GLaDOS is one of the best villains ever, and the supporting characters in Portal 2 are hilarious.
You’re a man of many books — which, of the novels you’ve penned, is your favorite?
It’s a toss-up between Set This House in Order and The Mirage.
There’s a line John Crowley uses in describing his novel Little, Big, where he says it’s the book in which he discovered the extent of his powers as a writer. For me, Set This House is that book: my first fully mature work, and one that really raised the bar on what I thought that I could do.
I think The Mirage may be another milestone book, but I’m still too close to it to say for sure. There’s a sense in which my most recent novel is always my favorite, because it’s the one I’ve been thinking about nonstop for the last few years. It’ll be interesting to see how I feel once I’ve had time to get some distance from it.
Where did The Mirage come from? How is it a book only Matt Ruff could’ve written?
The Mirage grew out of a desire to tell a 9/11 story that wasn’t like other 9/11 stories. I’d noticed that American novelists and screenwriters were focusing almost exclusively on what 9/11 had done to us, while ignoring the people who were bearing the brunt of the War on Terror—the innocents on the ground in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. I thought it might be interesting to give those folks a turn in the spotlight, so I hit on this idea of taking a 9/11 thriller and setting it in an alternate reality where the U.S. and the Middle East had traded places. In The Mirage, the world superpower is a liberal democracy called the United Arab States and the terrorists are Christian fundamentalists from a fragmented North America. The heroes of the story are a trio of Iraqi Muslims who work for Arab Homeland Security.
The basic concept of The Mirage is one I think other authors might have come up with, but I’m probably one of the few crazy enough to actually try to write it, especially while the Iraq War was still going on. I also think most authors would have opted for either a purely plot-driven story or something with a heavy-handed Message. I’m a fan of tight plotting, but plot without character is hollow, and much of my storytelling effort is devoted to making sure I’ve got well-developed protagonists you care about. As for Messages, I’m very wary of them, because they tend to force both the characters and the plot to go in unnatural—and uninteresting—directions.
The other distinctly Ruffian touch is that I have knack for handling dark subject matter in a way that doesn’t make you want to slit your wrists. The Mirage is about terrorism and war and religiously inspired mass murder, and it takes those things seriously, but at the same time it’s a funny and ultimately hopeful story.
The Mirage turns the events of 9/11 into an alt-reality parable — did you intend for this to be politically subversive, or is this just the tale that came to be told? What is the value of subversion?
Well, given the basic setup, I knew it would be politically subversive, but I wouldn’t say that was the sole or the main objective. The point of creating a looking-glass world is to get a reverse-angle perspective on everything—politics, yes, but also history and society and religion and morality. The value comes from how that novel vantage point allows you to see things, even very obvious things, that you somehow never noticed before. One of the great powers of fiction is that it lets you try out different perspectives, different sets of eyes, and be entertained while you’re doing it.
Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?
“Uranus,” with the American pronunciation. And “cocksucker.”
Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)
Kahlúa. Alcohol, caffeine, and extra sugar: Yes, please!
What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable war against the robots?
Like a lot of lateral-thinking creative types, I have the power of the non sequitur. While the robots’ logic circuits are paralyzed, trying to figure out how the hell I got from topic A to topic B, I’ll be pulling wires and yanking batteries.
What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?
Unless some other object of obsession presents itself soon, my next project will probably be a novel called Lovecraft Country. It’s set in the Jim Crow era, and the protagonist is an African-American named Atticus Turner. Atticus is a field researcher for The Safe Negro Travel Guide, a publication that reviews hotels and restaurants that accept black customers. He’s also a pulp- and science-fiction geek, and as he drives around the country he gets caught up in a series of supernatural adventures. The joke in the novel’s title is that the biggest threat to Atticus’s safety and sanity isn’t some Lovecraftian monster, it’s America itself.
I love talking to people who have unusual paths into writing and publishing, and this here Nathan Farrugia has just that — so, I’ll step out of his way, but not before telling you that his website is: nathanmfarrugia.com and you can haunt him on the Twitters @nathanmfarrugia.
This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.
I have a confession to make. I was going to self-publish my first novel, The Chimera Vector. I’d even stalked an editor through the long grasses of Twitter. Little did I know he was the head of Pan Macmillan’s shiny new digital imprint, Momentum. The hunter soon became the hunted. But before you go all Konrath on me, I accepted the offer. Momentum offered me global ebook publication, sub $10 price tags and DRM free ebooks — all things that would’ve been met with laughter by the Big 6 publishers. Well, at the time anyway. They’re changing their tune now. So before I knew it, I found myself in the exciting froth that exists between traditional publishing and self-publishing. I like froth.
Why do you tell stories?
Because I can’t stop. No, serious, send help.
Plus, it completely legitimizes my early childhood imaginary friends. And by early childhood I mean early 20s. Film, television, novels, video games — I love them all. You can’t make me choose. If I could, I would bed them as my many wives. (Video games would get the most foreplay.) In my perfect fantasy world, The Chimera Vector movie would be adapted and directed by Joss Whedon, the soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the audiobook narrated by Gary Oldman, the graphic novel by the Wachowskis, the video game by Valve, the covert assassin vibrator set by — oh, wait.
Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:
Don’t let your plot hinge on the stupidity of your characters.
This was the first thing my literary agent, Xavier Waterkeyn, taught me. And it’s also the reason he rejected most of his submissions. The characters made choices that served only to move the plot forward. Their choices were illogical, nonsensical and often just laughably dumb. This can cripple an otherwise brilliant story. Example: Prometheus. The moment your character does something stupid because it serves your plot, a baby panda cries. And by baby panda I mean literary agent.
What’s the worst piece of writing/storytelling advice you’ve ever received?
Write even when your writing is crap and you aren’t enjoying it.
This is often suggested so that writers push through their writer’s block or procrastination or cry-wanking. I don’t know about you, but when I start writing crap, I immediately throw down the keyboard and slap myself. Because if I start writing crap then the chances are I will continue to write crap until I stop. And what have I accomplished? 2,000 words of crap that I will bin the next day. I don’t see the point in wasting that time. If I’m not in the groove and I’m just pumping words to meet a word count, then I stop writing and go do something else. Take a break, watch a movie that inspires me, listen to some music, read a book, do some karaoke. Joke. I can’t sing. I suggest you come back when you’re itching to come back. And if you’re not itching, make yourself itch. In the non-sexually transmitted illness sort of way.
A lot of writers moan about having full-time jobs and needing to squeeze writing into their spare time. I’ve actually found it works well. That full-time job you’re stuck with: it earns you shiny credits and gives you that itch to write. You can’t wait to get home and start hammering … the keyboard.
What goes into writing a strong character? Bonus round: give an example of a strong character.
I think a lot of people misinterpret a “strong character” as a protagonist who is tough, powerful, resilient. That’s great, but I see a strong character as someone who is strong enough to bear the load of a fully developed plot without collapsing under its weight. If your character shines, no, bursts through the most intricate, plot-driven narrative you can hurl at them, then congratulations: you have a strong character.
I can talk about any strong character here, but I’d really love to offer a female spin on Jason Bourne. Because I’ve wanted one for so long. After recently watching The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Colombiana and Haywire — all cookie cutter “woman wants revenge after rape or murder” stories — I’ve come up dry. I don’t recall Bruce Willis enduring sexual abuse in order to become a hero in Die Hard. So I’m going with an old favorite of mine: Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica.
Starbuck is a fighter pilot who frequently undergoes emotionally and physically demanding tasks such as, well, being a fighter pilot, assassinations, interrogations, drinking excessively, gambling, you name it. She’s tough and she’s arrogant and yes, she swaps a few feminine qualities for male ones. That’s fine, it’s consistent with the logic in her world and her character, but that isn’t what makes her strong. What makes her strong is she doesn’t float along with the tide of the plot. She has a well-developed personality. That alone sets her apart from most “strong character” cardboard cutouts, cough, Haywire. She is decisive, passionate and flawed. She takes risks. She believes in something. She cares about someone and someone cares about her. She is developed enough that she is more than simply a reactionary force to the plot. She is someone who can actually turn the tides of the story, preferably with a few added quirks of her own. If a character can’t even manage that, then they aren’t strong.
Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!
I’m going with a game. Half-Life 2.
Valve’s Half-Life 2 is almost ten years old and yet it maintains an intricately realized universe with memorable action, nuanced characters and spectacular narrative. This game achieved a long time ago what video games are still trying and failing to achieve now: to create an absorbing, rich world with an equally absorbing, rich story, and not to mention strong, individual characters you actually care about. Try finishing Half-Life: Episode Two without being brought to tears, I dare you. I can only hope that more game developers will put as much time and care into the narrative of their games as Valve do. (Minor hat tip to Deus Ex 1, I love you too baby.) Both of these games inspired me to write The Chimera Vector.
Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?
Sedulous. It means to be persevering. But sexy.
Elif air ab dinikh. That’s Arabic for “a thousand dicks in your religion.”
Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)
Warp core breach. I have no idea what’s in it, but it sounds dirty.
What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable war against the robots?
Electronic devices have a habit of going all critical failure when I’m around. In the inevitable war against robots this basically gives me superpowers.
Sell us on The Chimera Vector tweet-style: 140 characters.
Sophia is a former deniable operative with a few DNA tweaks and a penchant for stealing government research. #explosions
Where did the idea for the book — and for its insidious one-world government, the Fifth Column — come from?
The masterminds behind oppressive and ruthless secret governments or regimes in fiction tend to be secret societies, religious fanaticism and sometimes even aliens from outer space. While I found these fascinating, I was growing up contending with several family members who seemingly lacked a conscience, and so I spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out what made them tick. It wasn’t until I stumbled into psychopathology, which even to this day is horribly misunderstood by modern psychiatry, that it started to click. In 2003, I came across the research of a Polish psychiatrist who worked for the Polish Home Army, an underground Polish resistance organization. He survived both the Nazi and Soviet occupations and was involved in a covert Eastern European investigation of psychopaths in government. He was the only surviving member of the group to escape Europe with the research intact. Sadly he passed away a few years ago, but his journey was breath-taking and his research was probably the most important thing I’ve ever read. I applied his discoveries to the villains’ personalities in my book: psychopaths in suits who go their entire lives undetected. One thing I learned is when you have bad guys without a conscience running your world, you don’t need to invent a far-flung conspiracy.
Is the book all-digital? Will there be print copies available? Do you plan to do more releases like this, or will you lean more “DIY” or “traditional” in the future?
Digital is the focus, baby, er … Chuck, but it’s also published as print-on-demand on Amazon and Barnes & Noble etc for those who prefer the printed page. My publisher, Momentum, is Pan Macmillan’s new digital experiment, and I really love this hybrid DIY / traditional model. Momentum were happy to experiment with low price points, and in 2011 they even agreed to publish my book DRM free—something that at the time few publishers would consider. This month, all Momentum’s titles will be DRM free, which is very exciting. All my future manuscripts will be shooting into Momentum’s inbox for some digital lovin’. Mmm digital.
What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?
I’ve just returned from the Philippines where I was on vacation … er, I mean researching for the sequel. I’m in the middle of writing it now. I hear The Bourne Legacy also has genetically modified assassins and car chase scenes in the Philippines, so now I have to go back and add more explosions.
Later this year I will be hunted across Houston, Texas by ex-FBI and special forces trackers. If I’m captured, I will undergo “mild waterboarding”. So that should be fun.
I have grand plans for audiobooks, graphic novels and transmedia apps. And I’d love to write for film and video games. But all of this will have to wait. The Chimera Vector has only been out for a few weeks, but my readers are already telling me to hurry up and write a sequel. So, um, I have some writing to do now. Which I guess is what I’m supposed to be doing.
*throws smoke bomb and runs away, still clearly visible*
Oh, don’t run away yet. Hunted across Houston? If there’s a story there, you’re not getting away without sharing.
Because I enjoy doing things I later regret, I’ll be taking part in an escape and evasion course that focuses on urban environs. Alongside military personnel looking to improve their urban skill-set and executives who travel abroad in hostile locations, I’ll be learning how to survive kidnappings, escape and move in a hostile urban environment, use caches, disguises and implement a touch of social engineering. On the final day, I’ll be kidnapped, hooded, cuffed and taken somewhere dark and far away. I’m then expected to escape and, without any money or phone, will have to find my own transportation to the first cache location for the first in a series of assignments—all while being hunted by people who hunt, um, people for a living. So basically I’m screwed.
