Flying Free – get The High Road FREE Through April 21

It’s a strange feeling, taking a book I’ve written and offering it for no charge.

After all my months of cramped weekends, all the times I finished a chapter and minutes later turned around to start redesigning it… and now I’m taking the result of those thousand-plus hours and throwing open the floodgates for everyone who wants to glance at it?

–Plus, all the times I remember I’ve summed something up with “It’s free, and you’ll get your money’s worth” are coming back to haunt me.

But, well… the book’s done. Written. I can’t change a word of it, not without paying editing fees every time I send a tweak to some of the services it’s available on (and that way lies bankruptcy). What The High Road needs now is to be seen.

And if writing is a strange, intense journey, sharing the work is a whole new kind of territory. One with no map, no roads, and no way to know which ad or strategy sparkling in the Used Publicity Lot can take me the distance and which will sputter out and leave me stranded half a mile out.

So, for the next three weeks, The High Road is free. But not quite free: I need—I hope—that readers will share their thoughts about it.

The system is simple. Go to https://storycartel.com/ and download The High Road in the format of your choice. Then start reading… and when you’re done, go to Amazon or the site of your choice to leave a review.

But please, tell me the truth, whatever comes to your mind.

  • Are Mark and Angie appealing, distinctive characters, or is this a story you’ve seen before?
  • Do the action and thrills keep you reading?
  • Who’s the first other writer to come to mind? Jim Butcher for intensity, Ilona Andrews for action, Stephen King for suspense? (And how far do I still have to go to meet those impossible standards?)

The book’s available free through April 21st, with one more week to leave reviews. Or if you grab the book and take two minutes to see it’s not for you, that tells me plenty too—it’s the same gauntlet every writer faces on the websites and bookstores. As long as you take thirty seconds to let me know.

Of course there’s a flying pun for this too:

Is this an antigravity book you can put down? #free http://bit.ly/freeHighRoad Click To Tweet

In fact it’s two puns: your review could be putting it down as well. If it does, that’s one more thing I want to know. I have more books to write, and your impression might be the one that helps me take a closer look at something.

And… if you like what you see, I hope you’ll spread the word. Click the tweet above or tell your friends.

After all, you know they’ll get their money’s worth.

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Who’s On First – A Character System for Variety in Scenes

Are you using all your story? All the characters, all the possibilities and combinations that a tale has ready to unleash?

On the one hand, it’s a lifelong study—we writers try to make every book dig deeper or find a new angle on what “people in conflict” can come up with. On the other, even when the story’s starting to fall into place, there’s always the fear that some of the pieces will miss their turns in the spotlight. It’s almost inevitable: by the time we understand the story enough to get caught up in the best parts’ synergy, there always seems to be a valuable part of the picture that our favorites folks and plot twists start rushing the story on past. What would have been pretty cool stuff gets left by the written roadside.

Last week I promised a checklist, a quick way to look at the material in a story to watch if the scenes have the full variety that they could. So:

 

Step One: Varied Whos and Whys

What’s the main material a story has to work with? Characters.

What are characters made of? Goals.

I’ve blogged about that rule before—that most of a story is rooted in the different, conflicting drives that its people have. A classic hero needs a villain, a villain needs a reason to attack the hero or someone the hero will defend, and then each of those have their own motives and more characters attached to them. The more we know the variety within that, the better we can use it.

Say, even on a literal “Tarzan test” of being sure a hero is fighting different animals:

  • a lion’s a fierce foe, and it might also actually be there to eat someone, so it’ll keep prowling around until Tarzan stops it
  • a rhino’s not only bigger and clumsier, it just wants to be left alone—maybe a tougher fight but an easier one to break off from
  • or, one of the humans Tarzan’s trying to defend might have blundered into their danger, while another might turn out to be a poacher who’s come looking for trouble…

That’s the simple, one-goal look at characters; most usually have more than that, at least once the story begins prying their motives apart. The brothers on Supernatural are both pushing to save the world, but Dean’s always willing to break off the fight if it’s going to cost him Sam, and Sam can get tired of being “babied” that way. And “goal” doesn’t cover all the possibilities for conflict, if someone also has issues like a hot temper (on that show it would be both brothers) or a blind faith in a third character (sooo many candidates…).

A bonus opportunity is to contrast the goal with the character himself—meaning, with what we’d expect a person like that to be. Not just giving someone a strong arc but starting them in a position that doesn’t seem to fit, like I began The High Road with Angie’s own mother Kate having abandoned her daughter and is first seen working against her. It’s a way to imbed an extra layer of contrast in a concept and tease how much backstory has already reshaped them.

It’s that list of characters and goals that the story’s built from. The real trick is to line them up in contrast with each other.

 

Step Two: Varying them When

Here’s where the rubber meets the road, or the fingers hit the keyboard.

Are all those marvelous pieces of conflict actually being used? In the simple checklist sense, that means, is there a variety between scenes that are focused on:

  • the lead character
  • the most distinct supporting character (and the others)
  • whatever side character the plot wants to spend a moment with
  • the antagonist

Neglect the first point for too many scenes and you don’t have a story. Skimp on the second and the story misses much of its depth, all the other dimensions of what’s at its center. Don’t go into the third now and then, and the tale stays a bit narrow, when you could be using those people to do justice to one more side of what your hero’s dealing with. And without the last point holding its own, a story loses the energy of its core conflict.

Combined with that… one more dimension in this is just what “focused on” means.

Initiative scenes pause the flow of the hero taking the next action (or whoever’s been doing it lately) and stop to check how this character wants to take charge or go off on his own instead of following the others’ lead. This is the old rule that “everyone thinks this is their own story”—and again, it’s vital for villains, for a story to keep that sense that the hero’s got an active and unpredictable enemy looking for his weakness.

And, object scenes are the hero or other usual suspects still leading the scene, but they’re focusing their own efforts on understanding that other character.

In other words: sometimes it’s enough to have the hero dig up or slam into what makes someone else tick, while sometimes that someone else has to “grab the wheel” for a while.

In fact, that makes most scenes a chance to touch two character bases at once: the character who’s leading it and the one who’s being revealed. Though the “active” one often ends up revealing even more about himself, if where he stands about what he learns changes the story enough…

(Note, either of these scenes could be from the other character’s viewpoint, and that would certainly strengthen the contrast with other scenes. Then again, I’m one writer who rarely uses that—I like the intensity of staying close to my hero’s own journey.)

And let’s not forget:

  • most characters have more than one goal or issue, so even their own set of scenes needs contrast between those
  • most scenes have more than two characters, so they just might switch to whole other subjects in midpage

 

Those are the basic dimensions as I see them: alternating “who” (and their multiple “why”s) leads the next scene in dealing with who else.

When I’m still developing a story, having those motives lined up sets me up to dig deeper into just what happens in each scene.

  • A negotiation slowly unveils what another character wants, all played off of the hero’s own needs
  • A fight, same thing… all spelled out through who’s prepared what or takes how many risks for what they’re really fighting for

Or looking back at a story plan, the same layout can help me be sure I’ve got the right contrasts. If Mark has been taking the lead in scene after scene, I have to ask if he’s using that time to explore enough of Kate’s secrets, or what Rafe’s gang is really up to—and if I can go much longer without them trying to take over.

And once I know who deserves to be in a scene, all that’s left is using that who and their whys to keep each how different, starting with a Tarzan Test. When do Mark and Angie fight their lion (or is that an owl?) and when are they dodging a stormfront… and how is each scene distinguished by whoever sent that after them?

It’s all about motive.

And contrast.

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Photo by qmnonic

Been There Done That? Similar Problems with Writing Similar Scenes

There are stories that rely on their central concept to shape much of their plot into their favorite kind of sequence, and try to make it our favorite too. It could be:

  • a type of action the hero takes, building a book on swordfights or courtroom battles
  • or other ways to set up scenes—class after class at Hogwarts learning about the characters over a new spell lesson, or layers of looking deeper into a villain’s horrific past
  • or, speaking of villains, how often they take the initiative make the scene about the hero on the defensive. If the hero’s there at all.

But when I read or write, I’m always looking for more variety in those. Yes, I love a story that plays to its strengths, with a clear focus on a hero (and villain) who play to theirs—The High Road and its sequels are meant to keep a reader remembering what it’s like to fly. But I want more.

There are just so many angles to come at the next scene from. All the times our hero needs to try a whole different strategy, or how one plan can not just go sideways but in mid-scene turn a debate into a raid or a research session, or all three. All the other characters, friend and foe, that honestly see this as their story and try to get a jump on their rivals. All the sides that can make a story richer by taking their turns.

I’ve always struggled to make as much time for that as I wanted. On The High Road, I had to go through several rewrites until I was sure I’d explored how much Mark had to deal with besides flying. And now here I am again, firming up my grasp of Book Two (Freefall) and understanding Book Three, and I’m back to square one about drifting into patterns.

And I’m the one who wrote the Tarzan Test!

(The Test is, basically, don’t fight a lion and then another lion. And also to use the variety between those fights, and whatever else the story has, as a measure of how broad the story is and where it needs to dig deeper into what makes its pieces different from each other.)

It’s a humbling moment, to look back at a blog I wrote years ago and see it as proof that it’s a battle I need to keep fighting with myself, not a problem I settled back then. (Plus, the irony of having to revisit the struggle to keep my characters from revisiting theirs! Or, more than irony: repetition is one of the core parts of real life that storytelling wants to streamline.)

So, what’s enough variety?

Well first, enough for what, to add what to the story?

One great virtue is the sense of completeness, of using all the potential in the characters and the situation. The more often a hero tries a different tack, or the more time he takes dealing with other sides of his life and how they all feed back into each other, the more we accept that this guy is dealing with everything and trying all his options to earn his victory. Enemies who know how to blindside him are more menacing; worlds with more detail are more convincing.

And, there’s another advantage, in the dramatic impact those scenes have. By setting out more kinds of scenes, characters, and action, a story is setting out more varied examples of what’s at stake for those scenes. Which means, there’s more room for a scene’s plan to go wrong, or go very right or cross over and affect some other thread of the story, without cutting off or changing the entire flow of the tale.

A hero can only lose so many physical fights before he’s beaten to a pulp (or the reader’s trust is), but what about losing the job he spent whole chapters struggling to get—or winning that job just when he needs new contacts for other struggles? More variety means more stakes, and more chances to turn them into real, dramatic change without breaking the story.

There’s a checklist in this somewhere, and I’m just starting to sort it out. Next week, let’s see how it looks.

Doctor Strange vs Iron Man movies – Beating Hearts and Blind Eyes

How could the coolest, most unique thing about a Marvel movie turn out to be the worst thing? Maybe because it was all that happened in Doctor Strange.

I was looking forward to this movie too.

After all, Benedict Sherlock Cumberbatch as our Sorcerer Supreme? It seemed like a redux of the insight that made Iron Man. A lesser-known but major player in the comics… actually someone who should be downright iconic, the Marvel world’s greatest wizard, same as Tony Stark is its greatest engineer? In fact they’re mirror images of each other, both scholars of power, ancient secrets contrasted with bleeding-edge tech. (They have similar last names and barbers too…)

What’s more, it seemed like this time Marvel would recreate some of the, um, magic, but with all their cards where we could see them. This time the whole moviegoing world knew how good Marvel Studios and the Marvel characters could be… and the lead wasn’t an on-and-off success like Robert Downey Jr. who’d never quite gotten his real shot, he was a cult superstar with almost more fans than Marvel itself.

What I didn’t expect is that it would be so much like Iron Man, but without the heart.

(To be clear: it’s not a bad movie. It covers the basics, with plenty of Marvel quality, and Cumberbatch and the rest do a decent job. It’s just more on the level of a Thor 2 or Iron Man 2 than a new Ant-Man or Guardians that holds onto what it wants to be.)

 

Stark Enough – not Strange Enough

It doesn’t help that Stephen Strange and Tony Stark have a lot of the same journey. They’re both studies in Pride—which they almost have to be, a character primed to become a super inventor or wizard ought to already be a genius and have a genius’s issues—who learn to care about more than themselves.

Except… Stark shows us that journey; Strange just gets dragged along.

What’s the thing we love most about the Iron Man movies? Their commitment to Tony Stark’s dysfunctional, irreverent, completely convincing nature as a man who can carry a nuclear weapon into a hellgate without really growing up.

  • He starts out a weapons-dealer caught up in the human cost of his trade, and rebuilds the industry to be more responsible… hasn’t that happened in real life? (Well, it should.)
  • He drinks, dances on stage, and fights with his teammates, even while he saves the world.
  • Even his views of saving the world might be as unstable as ever (Avengers Ultron, Cap Civil War). What’s more arrogant than tempting fate with the infamous promise “peace in our time”?
  • And yet… even with all those past and present ties of how broken he is, he keeps going.
The greatest pun in Marvel history may be that “Iron Man is powered by an ‘Arc’ Reactor.” Click To Tweet

Come to think of it, Tony’s character arc isn’t so much about moving forward as how he brings everything he’s been with him. It’s why he’s so convincing, that he finds his own ways to grow and twist instead of moving in straight lines. Plus, he always stays close to his own world, facing everything from ex-girlfriends to Sinister Senate Subcommittees that play on every part of the life he’s lived.

But Stephen Strange… we see a few scenes of him as an arrogant doctor (dazzling with one patient but refusing another because “You want me to ruin my perfect record?”). And then…

Car wreck.

Desperate for healing—for his own sake, of course.

Ancient sorcerer school. Wizard wars.

And… all his old issues just fade away, pushed back by the new struggles. Apart from needing some proof that magic’s real, he has one moment of “resisting the call” after his first fight (“I took an oath to do no harm, and I just killed a man”), and a minute later he runs straight toward the next attack. He fights one battle in his old hospital beside his Pepper, um Dr. Christine, enough to touch base. But where Tony shuffles toward heroism with one foot balanced in his past, Stephen just floats up to his destiny and leaves the rest.

It’s those ties to what the character has been that one movie revels in and the other could have gone after. Instead we have a first scene not of the fledgling hero himself (like Tony’s confidently was) but of the existing sorcerers battling. We have Stephen’s doubts about magic blasted away by the Ancient One knocking him out-of-body; later she simply tells him he needs to learn “it’s not all about you.” But we aren’t seeing that growth.

Or, compare to Captain America, who doesn’t change his good nature much but constantly shows us the struggle to hold onto it in a hard world. Or Thor, whose growth is clumsy but vivid with all of Asgard bringing the pressures on him to life. Stephen Strange may do his hero-ing under his own name, but the man he was simply disappears.

 

“Too Many Sorcerers”

So, what does Doctor Strange focus on? Dimension-folding special effects… that doesn’t even matter to the story, until it finally does.

One defense of the movie is that it has a whole world of magic to introduce, unlike how Iron Man builds on real technology and celebrity life. Of course Stephen has to leave the familiar to explore the supernatural step by step… and maybe that doesn’t leave time for as much of the old character.

–No time? More careful writing would steal time along each step to keep us aware of who this hero is (and this is a story that holds up time-magic as the ultimate power).

In fact, check out the animated film Dr. Strange – Sorcerer Supreme. In half an hour less than the movie’s running time it makes Stephen’s growth in the sanctuary much more powerful (“But I need my hands!” “No. You do not.”), and the action is nearly as good. Just less flashy. (Take a look at The Invincible Iron Man too; it’s a clever way to condense Tony’s story into eighty busy minutes, and the Mandarin too—yes, it actually uses him.)

Instead, the big movie brings us worlds that shimmer and fold whenever sorcerers fight in them… and that’s it.

Are there real plot issues with what could make those worlds bend, and how it affected who won a fight? No, the folding could almost be a side-effect of battle magic, and sorcerers jump around the twisting gravity like they do it every day. The real fighting’s done with energy whips, shields, and other contained spells that seem to have no relation to the mirror effects. (Until at the climax, Strange pulls out one forbidden warp-spell he’d dabbled in before, and uses it to outwit “the devil” with a heroic sacrifice to make it cooler.)

I know, “magic” takes work to put in a story. It can come off as the ability to do anything, the “there’s a zap for that” toolkit that destroys story challenges. A busy superhero story has always had trouble making us feel a sorcerer has limits… but if he does have limits, how is he different from every other super-guy? Maybe the movie did what it had to by embracing the unlimited scale of its subject, even if it didn’t use it enough.

Still, it’s an old writing challenge: if a character or plot device were removed, would it change the story? In Doctor Strange, the mystic background has replaced almost all of the character touches that could have made it more real… but in story terms, most of the effects that make up that setting could vanish and not leave a trace.

A pity.

 

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The Long-Running Series Part 2 – Other “Easy” Lessons from Role-Playing Games

Lesson Three: Room to Grow

Half the secrets of a long-running game or story (as I blogged last time) might be simply making it the best you can. The other half are more particular.

Anyone can write “save the world” as the summary of an adventure, and forget that may not leave anything to do next. –Except, most game systems won’t let you:

One of the built-in appeals of classic role-playing games is that the characters themselves grow in skill, and the game follows them. A swordsman starts his career by fending off one or two wolves (some say it’s a tradition), and gets stronger and more magic-laden until he’s facing down an archdevil.

Think about that a moment. Not just the characters’ changing strength, but the measuring system it implies. These games all but force the game world to provide small challenges and take its time bringing in the world-threats.

That’s a plan for keeping the fun from burning itself out.

Designing a campaign has to match that. Characters aren’t starting at 10th level, so the GM has to fill the landscape with simple orcs as well as the giants that heroes dream of fighting in the future.

—Because if the players are starting at Level 10, the orc dens become just sentries for the giants, and there have to be enough lich-kings further out to populate the years ahead, starting soon thereafter. And where can you go from there?

Games show that a story has more of a future if it starts on a small scale and does justice to that, so that each step from there is moving upward. And that can guide every part of the campaign, or the series.

Look at Lord of the Rings: the first half-book is a true Halloween-style suspense ride as Frodo creeps through evil trees and cowers from just a glimpse of a Black Rider, while by the end Aragorn’s leading armies of ghosts. Or a quirk from one version of Dungeons & Dragons, that only at high level does a wizard get real ability to burn through a demon’s magic resistance; imagine the slow gaming or writing buildups of a hero first being beneath demons’ notice, then becoming more and more afraid of attracting spell-proof enemies, but finally being able to take the fight to them.

Or take the basic ideas players bring for a given hero. One occasional hazard in gaming is a player walking in with the concept of playing “the lost son of a king,” or some other lottery-winner approach to character coolness, and probably to actual power. A good GM might talk him down (maybe with horror stories of the court-caliber assassins he’d draw) to being a simple baron’s bastard, then work to make that smaller scale of intrigue just as vivid as royalty. Better that the character struggles in the village, then the local castle, and works his way up to fighting for the king, instead of obsoleting years of plotlines from the start. The goal is to keep the story going, after all.

An author can take that “savor the small” approach too. Though I admit, many authors would rather make a character royalty and keep tight control on just what characters knew the secret, so that book after book teases readers with thicker intrigue and more threats of him finally being exposed. Both ways keep the story paced, though the second could be more of a stretch to keep believable.

And games encourage something besides scale: variety.

Managing a campaign has the extra challenge that it has more than one hero, and each main character has their own actual player at the table wanting their turn in the spotlight. That baron’s son (or king’s) might have a whole year of conspiracies to look forward to, but meanwhile the priestess has been waiting for two sessions to see if her home town has been overrun by zombies, and the wizard has just summoned—

More characters keeps more happening, whether it’s from a team of central characters or a well-established supporting cast of family, allies, rivals, and everyone else in their lives. Even a few thoughts on bringing a minor character to life and keeping them in our minds—or keeping more aspects of the major folks clear—can produce a whole new plotline. And each plot is a new chance to keep the story varied, both in where it leads and what happens along the way. (You might not dare to kill off the princess, but that leaves the pirate captain’s storyline free for a tragic ending.)

Best of all: with more plots, no one thread has to fear it’ll reach its end too fast. Instead it can run for a time, then attention shifts to another idea, then back to the first. Or else a tale can latch onto that thread and follow it straight through to a proper climax—without having to repeat itself—knowing there are many more plots in the wings. Suggestion: switch back and forth between storylines that are delayed and those that complete at once, to get both the thrill of resolution and the joy of anticipation.

A story arc might be only a chapter or two in its essence. But seen in more detail it could have dozens of steps, and if it’s mixed with more arcs the series can start creating possibilities faster than you can play it or write it.

 

Lesson Four: The Beginning of the End

With the right effort, a campaign or series can run forever. But is that what you want?

In games, the GM might not be making that decision. Since there are dozens of other game systems, infinite story ideas, and a tableful of people who’ve let you run the adventure for them every week, it may be only a matter of time before players start pushing for someone else to run a different game for a while.

(In fact: a GM who goes for three or five years without hearing that is receiving the greatest unspoken compliment there is in gaming. Those players are hooked.)

Writing doesn’t have quite the same outside pressure, but an author may find her series is losing popularity or a newer, hotter genre starts looking promising. Or editors might push for that change.

–Then again: in writing, finding forms of your own passion has proven time and again to work better than switching just because you think you can hit a new trend before it gets old (short answer: you can’t). And from a business standpoint, a series that’s “slowing down” may still have a momentum that a new one can take years to build up. (If you want hard numbers on that principle, look at this analysis for one of my favorite authors, Rachel Aaron.)

Or sometimes, we want a change. A campaign or story could start to:

  • Seem less appealing than our own new brainchild.
  • Move toward the grand conclusion it deserves.
  • Feel like it’s going back over the same plot ideas.
  • Or, we’re just tired of it.

In gaming, switching campaigns and GMs may be something forced on us, but it can also be the best thing for keeping the game itself fresh. The best cure for burnout—or heading off a revolt among the players—might be to plan for it before the pressure builds up.

(Plus, halting your own campaign means you finally get to hit something yourself again!)

It’s a good lesson for any writer too. It’s a rare author who’s blessed with a concept they want to write nonstop for the rest of their lives. Better to watch for the signs of Single Hero Fatigue, or bring out a side project or second series that’s clamoring to be done, than to think of your first writing plan as set in stone.

In a game, part of that “restart” will be starting new characters, who are usually just beginning the climb to power that the seasoned characters have. In fact, it might be that players only want to switch to simpler characters or fresh roles, without even leaving the campaign itself—why waste all that world-building when they can just see the same setting through new eyes?

That’s a powerful tool for writers as well. We can pick a favorite supporting character, a point back in someone’s backstory, or any other tangent that’s worth a story, and bring that to life. It could be an occasional short story for variety, a side novel, or a whole new but connected series that might become more important than the original. And because they tie in to the initial stories, they double as a chance to deepen readers’ appreciation for that “classic core” with their new perspectives. Plus, of course they come with the extra hook that fans of the first series are already nine-tenths sold.

Or… it might be time to walk away for real. If a grand storyline has come to an end or you simply don’t want any more of it, it may be time to archive those maps, or close the book on those books. A writer who puts her characters ahead of her own needs isn’t doing right be either of them.

(And hopefully the players or fans will understand. Though there are worse fates than having schoolchildren wearing black armbands in mourning for the Sherlock Holmes you created.)

In the end, it’s your world.

And the next one will be yours too.

 

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