Mastering Language in Stories

Words matter. They are the passports to fictional worlds. But, oddly, the first duty of the writer is to make them invisible. That means using the right words (not just close enough) for the intended reader. It means sequencing the ideas they convey in a way that builds and is logical. Mostly, it means doing the task without making readers reread.

Heinlein wrote about a class he took at the Naval Academy where a situation was presented to the students, and they had to write an order that was unambiguous. Each day, if the order had perfect clarity, the student passed. But, if another student could find a way to misconstrue the order, it meant failure.

I faced a similar challenge in my first job. I had to write detailed instructions on purifying valuable biological components (monoclonal antibodies and enzymes for genetic engineering) without any mentoring. The readers of these instructions were often people for whom English was a second language. I wrote over 100 of these, which was good training for clarity.

New writers get beat up over misspellings and grammatical errors, but I consider this to be borderline hazing. You should not turn in a manuscript with such errors. It makes people suspicious about your seriousness. But, ultimately, you can hire someone to make fixes, and, if you pay attention to their work, your spelling and grammar will probably rise to a professional level (unless you have dyslexia or a similar disability). Mechanics are low on the list, far below storytelling, character development, and graceful prose.

I’ll deal with storytelling later, and character mastery has already been covered in this series. Now is the time for graceful prose.

I have a bias toward hearing words. My father was in broadcasting for many years, and, as a speechwriter, I came to appreciate the value of what language can do when it’s heard. (It is immediately evident to me when a written speech was never read out loud before presentation.) I believe it is essential to read most works aloud as a check.

Now, with that in mind, many writers are not tuned to hear the difference between good prose and great prose. I think this is one of the things Stephen King recognized, and it led him to be a strong advocate for writers reading. My advice is to read more and dedicate some time to reading great, lyrical prose aloud. Include poetry in the mix, but also monologues and speeches. Read the Jaws Indianapolis monologue in isolation. Read the Glengarry Glen Ross steak knives speech in isolation, too. Read a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The listening mind picks up the rhythms. The listening mind (except when spellbound by the sounds) finds skips, bumps, and inversions in the progression of ideas. The listening mind finds opportunities for beauty, emphasis, and deepening emotion.

Mastery of Language 1: Learn to write for the ear (even when the words are not intended to be spoken).
Practice: Make a habit of savoring passages with beautiful language. If you read a lot of good work, you’ll probably notice glorious language. As a first step toward making it yours, just go back and read it out loud. (Notice the pauses. Notice how the words might be spoken differently.) As you strive to master the sound of language, memorize these passages from time to time.

I make a point of reading diversely. English is wonderful for that because, in addition to its being interpreted by different cultures, it has gone through wonderful permutations over time. I also try to meet a quota for reading out loud and reading or listening to poetry on a weekly basis.

Beyond the sound value is the image value of language. Use words that create visuals. This means specific,  well-chosen, clearly described descriptions. General words (beautiful) and ambiguous words (tall) create a blur. Too many words overwhelms. Every good visual is a poem that is cut to the right length. Comparisons, when apt, can help. Texture almost always adds because it combines the visual with the tactile.

Of course, an effective metaphor has power, too. It can grab a reader’s imagination and reference webs of associations and levels of experience. (A bad metaphor distracts.) Lean into metaphors and imagery that connects emotionally (first with you, then with readers).

Mastery of Language 2: Learn to write for the inner eye.
Practice: Exercise your visual imagination by recalling an image from your grade school years. See if you can describe it in a few sentences in a way that might evoke emotion. As a followup, you might create a description in your story in such a way that can stand poetically by itself. Finally, create a metaphor that fits a character, a celebrity, or someone you know well.

Thomas Mann advocated the view of the artist standing apart. He consciously worked to create a voice that was measured, almost scientifically objective, and unlikely to be noticed by readers. His was an amazing, deliberate achievement that, nonetheless, created a recognizable voice in his works.

I don’t believe that’s a problem. My guess is that the most compelling voice is the one that emerges in a calm state that is not self-conscious. Teachers love the show-off voices. Sometimes, they can be entertaining. But I think the most reliable voices tend to closely reflect voices we use in casual conversation.

Oddly enough, writing tends to bring out the pleaser or poser in many people. Amateur writers want to be seen as someone who is glib, smart, and “good.” They don’t even suspect that the hesitant, fumbling, flawed, truer self, the self the friends know, is actually both authentic and more interesting. So, it usually takes a lot of writing before a writer drops the instinctual defenses and speaks with a normal voice. It’s odd, but it takes a lot of craft to be natural.

Mastery of Language 3: Develop a unique, authentic voice.
Practice: Oddly enough, the best shortcut I know to sounding like yourself is to mimic other people. There’s something about doing pastiches of other writers that provides the tools needed to find your own voice. Writing in a lot of voices reveals how you say things naturally. I’ve also found imitating well tweaks something inside that wants to be authentic. (Enough of writing like Melville, Cather, Hammett, and Morrison,  just let me be myself!)

The best alternative I know is to dictate. It takes some getting used to. It feels odd. But, by speaking, most people are drawn to their natural voice, even if that’s not their intent. The reason is the faux voice is a lot more difficult to maintain when the pace is that of speaking, not writing. And when your whole body already knows there’s an easier way.

Of course, it’s fine to create more than one voice that’s distinctive, as long as it’s true. An obvious example is first-person narratives, where two different books coming from two different characters should sound different enough to seem to have come from different authors. But, even in traditional third-person limited narrations, a comedy should have a different voice from a tragedy. And usually the voices across genres have differences, too.

Next, I cover dialogue. Much of this post applies, but there are other elements to consider.

(More) Mastering Story Setting

 The last post was about the essentials of setting, but this one covers some of the skills worth mastering because they can set your work apart.

For instance, there’s a lot of energy that comes from changing settings as the story progresses. This is part of the fun of Midnight Run, Lord of the Rings, and other road/quest stories. Even when there is a return to a setting (e.g., with returning home Almost Famous), the adventures can make it feel different. It really isn’t the same place.

That’s a clue. Even if you need to reuse settings, there is a value to making them feel different each time. The inclusion of a new character can do this. Or changes brought by time. (Think of Tara in Gone With the Wind, which practically goes through its own character arc.) I often noticed changes in the decor of sets in Big Bang Theory (though Sheldon’s place on the sofa only changed once as I recall). To push this a bit further, the setting can reflect the internal state of a character, the peril or the change in status. (I love stories where the escalation in danger is reflected in revisiting a setting. It makes it more acute.)

Sitcoms, of course, tend to have a few unchanging settings. The same is true for some series dramas (like Hill Street Blues) that rarely break out of a few established locations. Often, this is because of cost, but it also may be to set reliable expectations (who might be present, what actions might occur) and audience comfort levels. In The Dick Van Dyke Show, the home included family and neighbors (and only occasionally people from work), the office did something similar. (Did Mel Cooley ever set foot in the Petrie home?) If you were in Alan Brady’s office, he was almost always there (and rarely elsewhere).

But comfort can be taken too far. I hate it when the same people and conversations occur in different locations and the reason is just visual relief. For most Seinfeld episodes, Jerry’s apartment and the diner are interchangeable. Friends suffers from a similar malady.

One of the things a like about Pleasantville is how it subverts sitcom settings. A lot of standard, familiar places shift and get reworked as the story proceeds. Think of the art in the diner. Or my favorite is “Honey, I’m home!” where the character doesn't get its standard responses.

It degrades setting to never refresh it. It takes a tool out of the storyteller’s hands.

Mastery of Story Setting 4: Return to your setting with something fresh.
Practice: The first step is to watch for effective ways stories with limited setting renew them. Then either look at a story that could do this better or your own work and see if there are good options for making each visit fresh. Will it be changed in an essential way by including a different person? A person who has changed (status, experience, needs, health) between visits? Changes to the setting’s condition or artifacts included?

We’ve all seen films with title cards that present setting material. Often, it’s time and place (London 1887), but it can be just time (Three Years Later). Audience are trained to read these, and, if brief) they tend not to intrude on the immersive experience. They offer the great advantages of economy and clarity. Maps are also used to show location. (Check out Casablanca  and Raiders of the Lost Ark.) Geographic travel can also be shown with visual travelogues. What can be done with regard to time? A classic is dissolving from one time on an analog clock to a later time. Or the pages of a calendar can be torn off or blown by an unseen wind to move the to future. I think action provides the most elegant approach.

2001: A Space Odyssey begins a sequence with a title card (The Dawn of Man) and ends with action (match cut of a falling bone becoming a satellite). How’s that for elegance? Flowers sprouting or dying have been shown. Weather (snow to spring) can cue audiences. Best of all is using an action to convey a change in time. Putting up Christmas decorations (or, for a more melancholy mood taking them down) can be visually interesting, evocative and connected with a character. How can you beat that?

Sometimes simple is best. A title card does not distract. But applying imagination to the job of establishing a new time can move beyond the utilitarian to provide a deeper sense of mood and character.

Mastery of Story Setting 5: Evoke the passage of time.
Practice: The best place to study how the passage of time is presented in films is to watch biographies that depict years (Walk the Line, Coal Miner’s Daughter) or epic films (Gladiator, Doctor Zhivago). Look for good examples to emulate. Could any of these have been done more elegantly? Then, look at your own work and, even if you love what you have, come up with a few alternative ways that are clear and contribute to the story.

In a film script, all the setting material is present in the scene header. And I’ve seen many novels (especially from the 1800s) that provide place and time in detail in a block of text (or even in pages of set-up.) For a film, this is usually mitigated in a shooting script where camera angles, titles, and character comments meter out the information in a sequence that doesn’t bring the story to a complete stop (and may even build tension).

Many contemporary books do something similar, taking advantage of the limited point of view of a character to sequence attention in a realistic manner without creating opportunities for readers to skip pages or put the book down. (I have a friend who takes advantage of contemporary approaches to hook the reader, then provides an 1800s approach in chapter 2 to add richness — very clever.)

The idea is to integrate setting (both time and place) into the rest of the story elements so attention is held and the pace doesn’t suffer. A less elegant alternative is to severely limit setting (and other narration). When I teach, I encourage students to highlight every bit of narration in the first chapter (or first 30 pages) and get rid of anything that isn’t absolutely essential. It makes it better, but integration can be both immersive and fast paced. It’s also very hard to do well.

Mastery of Story Setting 6: Integrate setting into the rest.
Practice: My biggest recommendation is to find an author you love who does this sort of integration and highlight every reference to setting (time and place) in the first 5-10 pages. Really fine writers do this well (which is not to say there aren’t engaging writers who don’t do it at all). The process of discovery can make their lessons real and more accessible. Seen in isolation, the techniques reveal themselves. 

Then, if you dare, try to do it in your own work. Ideally, it becomes a tune that gets stuck in your head, making the rhythms easy to emulate. I recommend writing five fiction pages on a new story, not trying to make an old work match this rhythm. It may be tough at first. Ten tries may still feel inferior to the work of your favorite author. But, once you own this approach, you can make it your own when the story call for it.

I’m done with settings, but I’ll have more fiction techniques to master next time.

Mastering Story Setting

In stories, “where” usually matters. “When” usually matters. And it goes beyond “a dark and stormy night.” The setting — both time and place — does at least five things:

1. It orients readers (and audiences). It’s difficult to connect with characters floating in a void, unstuck in time.
2. It sequences the story. I think of The Graduate. Ben Braddock needs to reach the woman he loves (Elaine Robinson) before she is married. His car runs out of gas, leaving him (what seems to be) miles from his goal as the clock toward “I do” ticks away. Even a flashback (if clear) connects moments ties to urgency and provides revelations that matter against the real time of the story.
3. It creates the mood. We feel differently about sunshine and blizzards. A jail cell is confining. A view from a mountain peak is freeing and maybe inspiring. Note: Often the writer’s voice provides a key contribution to adding mood to setting. Think of the dread that underlies Poe’s setting descriptions or the dark humor that permeates Joseph Heller’s Catch 22.
4. It provides context. We connect periods of history with assumptions of danger, etiquette, rank, and ignorance.
5. It exposes the characters. Personal items in a space often say things about who the character is or who he/she aspires to be (or maybe what the character wants to leave behind). But setting can also be used to show the values, emotions, and desires of a character by reflecting the interior or standing in contrast to it. Weather has often been used to suggest characters’ feelings.
   

Sometimes setting can even become a character. This is especially true for survival tales. Or it may create wonder and a sense of possibilities. Think of Oz. Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Yet, setting is often the most neglected part of a story. The mortal sin is a talking in white spaces scene. But almost as bad is putting people in a generic office. Or shoving characters into booths in diners. Or police stations that have plenty of stuff, but nothing distinctive. (A detailed description of a cliche is still a cliche.)

Overdoing setting can be just as bad. “Literary” writers seem particularly vulnerable to the temptation of painting pictures that don’t serve the story. Beauty in the service of nothing. Those paragraphs (or pages) often get skipped.

What’s too much? What’s too little? It depends. My preference is to do just as much as is needed to get the job done. Orientation is a necessity, but, in a longer work, it can often be evoked by context (following a pattern or suggested by the section before) or with a cue rather than reiterating details. Place and time may be entwined with a specific character or a goal. (In the film The Wizard of Oz, the first visit to the city of Oz is a full tour. The second visit jumps right to the Wizard’s hall, with Dorothy holding the singed broom.)

How much description is provided depends on the needs of the story and the expectations of readers. Mysteries need to plant clues. SF needs to present an unknown world. Historicals and romances have traditions of providing rich, sensual details.

Getting the measurements just right so they fit the story generally comes from rewriting, not drafting. Since it’s easier to cut than to add, overdoing it in a draft may be best. But if the words are flowing, with dialogue and action coming to mind at a speed almost too fast to write down, do what script writers do. Use headers before each scene.

The first three scenes from The Shawshank Redemption are set up like this:
INT. - CABIN - NIGHT (1946)
EXT. - CABIN - NIGHT (1946)
INT. - PLYMOUTH - NIGHT (1946)

While action lines develop these, scene headings provide the essentials — place and time — with economy.

Unless you skip the scene headings, it’s hard to get lost in a screenplay. But that’s just the start of making sure readers don’t get lost. In a story, other information is needed. Setting includes the people present in the scene. It’s irritating and distracting to come across action or dialogue from a character you didn’t know was there. Essential information needs to be included well before it becomes important. If someone is going to fall off a cliff, that bit of dangerous landscape can’t become an “oh, yeah.”

“As Marilyn backed up to avoid his embrace, her foot came within inches of the (oh, yeah) forty-foot cliff.”

Mastery of Story Setting 1: Orient your reader.
Practice: Go to a beloved contemporary story in a genre you know. Chances are, the first page or two will provide much of what is needed to orient a reader to the story. Check to see if you can pick out the following:

What’s the period, season, and time of day?
Whether the scene occurs inside or outside and at least three descriptive ideas related to place.
Who is present in the scene at the opening of the scene?
What’s the point of view? Usually, the setting is experienced through the senses and memories of one character.

Now consider how the author might have selected the details. To take this practice further, you might rewrite the scene to orient with different details. Or do this a few times with good stories and then look at your own first pages.

Note: In the 1800s, lots of novels begin with an omniscient point of view. This is less common today (except in literary fiction) because it tends to work against immersing readers in the scene. There’s nothing wrong with it and it can be fun to explore, but using omniscience may limit your audience.

A messy workspace. A collection of action figures. A cupboard under the stairs that serves as a bedroom. Often the settings we remember most clearly are those that connect to the values and circumstances of a character. It’s not just a place. It’s a special place. It’s not just a time. It’s a special time (birthday, exam day, the last day of freedom or exile). We experience stories through what they mean to characters, so it’s not surprising that memorable settings are intertwined with characters. This doesn’t mean they need to be congruent. Fish out of water stories depend on settings that become vivid because they are at odds with characters.

Mastery of Story Setting 2: Create a connection between the setting and a character.
Practice: Look at the work of fiction you admire or explore one of your own, and consider what about the setting matters to the character. A night owl might be grumpy in the morning light. A fancy ballroom might make a character feel underdressed. Machine gun turrets might dissuade a character who wants to rescue his or her beloved. See if there are missed opportunities to connect with the task at hand or goal. Find the element in the setting that is most emotionally engaging (fear, envy, anger, curiosity) to the viewpoint character. Depending on the story, there may be opportunities for irony. A character may be lured in by bait or act foolishly because he or she misconstrues what something is.

In addition to connecting to the plot and the character, a setting can engage readers because of its details. One reason people come to stories is to learn something new. Sometimes, it’s just fun facts to know and tell your friends. But it can be more basic, often arising from research. I find that the tools set out for a profession, the irritations of a workplace, the surprise (a Monet print hung in auto repair shop) can keep readers reading.

When all else fails, dazzle them. An apt, poetic description can hold readers even when it brings a story to a complete stop. But it has to be special. It has to become a set piece that enthralls readers so thoroughly that it will entertain despite interrupting the story.

Mastery of Story Setting 3: Make your setting engaging.
Practice: A great starting point is to turn to the work of a writer whose voice captures you every time, perhaps because the language is poetic (George R.R .Martin) or distinctive (Hunter S. Thompson) or full of personality (Austen). Focus on how setting (time, place, items and people present) is handled, and how the language adds to engagement rather than distracts. Once you’ve noticed alls this, put what you’ve learned to work. (f you have the facility to imitate a writer’s voice in a scene you create, that can be a great way to internalize high-level skills. Otherwise, just jump from your analysis to writing a setting for your own story.

For those with well-developed styles, a good exercise is to move beyond voice to details noticed. If you can write about the room you are in (and time and people present), no matter how mundane, and make is interesting and distinctive by picking out something new, that’s powerful.

One more thing: see if in a setting you can surprise readers (fairly). Surprises delight and raise questions that can keep pages turning.

These three elements of setting are unavoidable. They must be done well. Next time, we’ll level up with a few more focus areas that can help settings bring more to storytelling.

Mastering (Local) Worldbuilding

Could you bring the skills of Tolkien to your neighborhood? He made hobbits, individuals while giving them all attributes of their species. There are noble hobbits and silly hobbits and stalwart hobbits, but meals are important to all of them. Of course, the River folk are a bit odd, but hobbits just the same.

Hobbits, though parochial, live in relation to a larger world, both in terms of species (dwarves, elves, men), landscapes (caves, forests, plains), and histories and festivals and values. But Tolkien also tends to localize worldbuilding. Hobbits don’t go on quests very often. The go to pubs. They tend their businesses and estates. They celebrate birthdays. The warp and the woof of their lives is not adventures, it’s marketing and gossiping, and sleeping in a comfortable hole.

And therein is a lesson about writing any kind of fiction: Know the quotidian. Everyday lives provide the context from which the wonder and importance of special moments emerges.

When I lived in Maryland, I’d never seen a deer in the wild. So when I came across a small family of white tails, I remember clearly stopping the car so my children could get a good look. It seemed like a magic moment. Sadly, just the presence of deer would not evoke awe where I live now in New York. Here, they jam together for the chance to reduce my flowerbeds to stubble.

Even if you are not creating the kingdoms of Game of Thrones or a Federation of Planets, worldbuilding is your friend. My favorite example is Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty. Beers at the bar. Customers at the butcher shop. Spaghetti with Mama. Saturday nights.

There is nothing exotic, but it feels exotic. And not just because a neighborhood in America from half a century ago is rendered with such authenticity. What stands out within a world of buying lamb chops and dancing and budgeting are the relationships, rules, and constraints that shape the norm. These are deeply observed and reflected today, in terms of desperation and struggle, despite the years that have past. The same could be said of Jane Austen’s quotidian world, with its social expectations and the consequences of testing the limits. The human qualities that come to the surface when well-imagined characters face crises or opportunities that come into conflict with society can break our hearts, dazzle us, and bring insights that shape our lives.

Route 66 (co-created and written by Oscar winner Sterling Silliphant) did this magnificently week after week, establishing all the local quirks of company towns, camps, dockyards, farms, and more of American communities while still telling complete stories in 52 minutes.

One thing that’s often ignored is the physicality of the local world, including the details. This is obvious in survival stories like Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” And the humid heat of New Orleans puts the characters of A Streetcar Named Desire into a pressure cooker. But, sometimes, especially for places that have been settings for many other stories, authentic but unfamiliar details need to be brought out.

In West Side Story, the construction sites are surrounded by fences made of old doors. Posters repeat themselves on brick walls. The playgrounds are made of concrete and the buildings are adorned with fire escapes, and all of these matter to the story

Mastery of Basic Worldbuilding 1: Provide a physical environment that’s noticed.

Practice: First, find film or video (YouTube is helpful) that presents a place you’ve never been. Forget about the people and the message. Just look at the surroundings — natural or built — and list what’s fresh to you. Capture at least ten elements in enough words to communicate what caught your attention. Now, use that list as a model to make a similar list of elements about the place where you live. Strive to notice what you might ignore and to put what draws your attention into clear and interesting language.

Feel free to try this with a different time period. I’ve been watching silent movies lately. When they take place in neighborhoods I know, I often get so distracted by how things have changed, I need to watch them a second time to see the story.

Chances are good that your story will turn more on culture than nature. The rules, taboos, hierarchies, expectations, and conventions of your world will matter for an important reason: Most protagonist live (or come to live), at least partially outside their worlds. They push against the culture and get pushed back.

I love film noir because it often does this on two levels. The anti-hero usually defies the law in some way, meaning there is an assumed orderly, just society (in theory) he or she is in opposition to. Usually, that leads to the protagonist’s comeuppance in the finale. On another level, there is the gangster culture, which has its rules and raw power that ensures, for instance, that snitches get stitches.

But the forces in play because of the culture don’t need to be overtly violent to matter, as anyone who has watched a few episodes of Downton Abbey knows.

Mastery of Basic Worldbuilding 2: Create a consistent social system.

Practice: A great exercise is to delineate the unwritten laws of an organization. Every office, every school, every club of any size has written rules, but also etiquette, processes for diffusing volatile situations, topics that must be avoided, and informal measures of reliability. Think about privileges and responsibilities in an organization you’ve been a part of (or area a part of). Consider what can and can’t be said about race, religion, and ethnicity. How are personal matters (divorce, dating, grieving) handled? For these, is the authority (boss, teacher, principal) treated the same as peers? Are people with roles that more or less prestigious dealt with differently when something goes wrong? Who is not allowed at your lunch table?

In this post, I’m purposely reframing worldbuilding so it gets the prominence it deserves in mimetic fiction. An assumed world is an ignored world. And one that provides little but cliches to the story. Those who create whole worlds for fantasy, horror, and SF stories know how meticulous and consistent they have to be. They have to invent the norms and then, without violating them, surprise readers or audiences. If you are writing about a suburb in Florida or a shop on Sunset Boulevard, you are not off the hook. You need to discover what’s there (especially details), convey it to readers/audiences, and make it matter to the story.

Some people consider this to be part of developing the setting. That’s fine. I prefer to look at that story dimension separately, and it will be the subject of next week’s post.

Mastering the Actions/Reactions of Story Characters

We pay attention to what characters do. Sometimes their actions border on being contextual, when when their actions come with their roles or jobs. A waiter takes orders for food. A soccer goalie protects her goal and launches balls downfield. A father is expected to care for his children. A sniper shoots people. While, at times, these dimensions of a character may be incidental, most stories have characters doing things related to their jobs and roles. (Or, going against expectations, failing to live up to commitments.)

For most stories, there are tasks related to the story question. Often, these are apart from jobs and roles. In fact, a lot of the fun of stories is seeing people called to do unfamiliar task. Dorothy has nothing in her initial description that indicates she’ll have to kill wicked witches, but getting home from Oz requires it. Luke forms friendships and loyalties that lead him to take on the responsibility of destroying the Death Star.

And the jobs, roles, and tasks both describe the character and shape him or her, building the capabilities required to reach the story goal (or fail, in the case of a tragedy).

Mastery of Story Characters 7 - Put characters in motion.

Practice: Come up with jobs or roles that would make a character more or less ready for a goal. A Navy Seal might be better at killing wicked witches. A schoolyard bully probably would be worse. Now think of skills and attitudes required for jobs and roles and how those might be related to the ultimate goal. Luke is a farmer, but he also has piloting skills. And he doesn’t really want to get involved with the social conflict, which is something he has to get over. Somewhere, there probably is a connection to the flaw that must be overcome.

As another practice, come up with tasks that must be successfully done to achieve the main goal. Make a list of at least ten, more if your story is already drafted. Make sure some seem impossible. Also, connect them with flaws if you can.

How do we do the impossible? Sometimes, through training and growth. But most stories don’t have the space to really on that. Which is a good thing because it forces the protagonist to work with others. While not every story needs an Ocean’s Eleven team, most include allies with skills the protagonist lacks. Since  he  or she can’t do it alone, success requires cooperation and compromise.  

This helps the story in two ways. First, it broadens the range of characters, forcing together those in conflict and creating odd couples. Comedies often rely on this. And romances would be five pages long if the lovers did not have a reason to be apart and a reason to be together. Danny Simon said Sgt. Bilko worked because everyone on the diverse team had been drafted into the Army and they couldn’t just walk away. (When a follow-up series put them all at the same company, audiences had in the backs of their minds, “why doesn’t he just quit?”)

Beyond the bond, there is working though the differences. Characters need to bargain. They make tough trade-offs that both show their values and force them to change. (And often help them to appreciate the other characters.) In real life, I’d say the way I came to have deeper friendships most often was by working with other people. Including some I initially didn’t want to work with. For the inner conflicts, alliances show who the character is through sacrifice, loyalty, and commitment (or their opposites).

This is not to say that everything is win-win. Power disparities can be interesting, especially if they are dynamic. Often, in a love story, the one who is in control shifts from chapter to chapter (or even scene to scene). Lose (learn), lose (learn), win is a nice formula for empathy and delight.

Mastery of Story Characters 8 - Make characters dependent on alliances.

Practice: Write down the skills and capabilities your character needs but does not have. (This may mean taking strengths away from a too-perfect protagonist. Superman, without kryptonite, is boring.) Now give these to other characters in this story. (Expected characters, of course. But see if a few unexpected characters can be included.) Then, give these sidekicks or lovers or frenemies reasons to NOT share what they could offer. They could hold a grudge, be too busy, not see self-interest, want the other character to become self sufficient, or not clearly understand how they can help. There are a lot of reasons. Finding ones that add to the fun may be looking at alternatives or (my approach) interviewing characters.

Where there are limits, dependencies and vulnerabilities, it’s valuable to look at things going wrong. Very often, the stories we love most include a time when a friendship goes bad. So consider how the protagonist might be betrayed (or betray), how that relates to the story theme, and what happens next (healing or loss).

With all this action, reaction is inevitable. Actions are usually the results of decisions that are considered and weighed. Reactions tend to be in the moment, and are revealing in a different way. Part of actions is creating and supporting the persona — who we want to appear to be to witnesses. But reactions show the real person underneath. Whether a raised eyebrow or a punch in the face, creating a scene that elicits a reaction provides a marker for readers and audiences of how far the character has come in the story. A character who would have lashed out at someone else in Act 1 may very well have the skills to calm a situation or walk away by the end of the story.

Mastery of Story Characters 9 - Make characters react to challenges and surprises.

Practice: Think of a good, effective choice your protagonist might make to achieve the story goal (or complete a task). Now, put yourself in your antagonist’s shoes and counter that in the most calamitous way (even if it hurts the antagonist, too). How does the protagonist react? Think of both the internal response and the external response. Think of good responses and horrible ones.

Come up with surprises and revelations to hit your protagonist with (especially after an action). I used to listen to the Life of Riley radio show, and I always knew the best stuff would come after he said, “What a revolting development this is.” Make sure whatever is discovered or how badly things work out, that it really matters to the protagonist AND creates doubt s about success. (Usually, this will shatter self-confidence, if only for a moment.)

By the way, surprises and revelations are difficult to master. They can’t be arbitrary. They must make sense to readers and audiences, at least enough so they don’t feel cheated. And often, they need to be set up and hinted at earlier in the story. That could be by planning, luck (thanks to a generous subconscious), or careful rewriting. But for practice, it’s less necessary to implement these than to be able to come up with good ones.

There are more than nine things writers need to master regarding characters, but I’ll leave this here for now. Storytelling requires more elements, and it’s too easy to get lost down this rabbit hole. Besides, the other elements, in their own ways, relate to and expand on the above, potentially deepening the lessons. So, next week, I’ll have a new focus.

Mastering Discovering Your Characters in the Company of Others

Context is everything. In fiction, the heroism of a character is only clear if choices and actions are understood in the larger context of the risks in telling the truth, the attachments to others, and the dominance of the culture (especially the power dynamics.

An example: Though  Huck Finn is a trickster and a mischief maker, he only reveals himself to be deeply moral in relation to a prevailing culture. Slavery is accepted. Some people are the property of other people. Helping an enslaved person escape is morally wrong.

As readers, we find slavery appalling, but Huck does not question his culture. Yet, he makes the right decision. He chooses not to betray his friend, Jim. And it costs him.

“It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.” 

Seeing him break with his own code is cheering.  Seeing him condemn himself is heartbreaking and makes him heroic and memorable. But only because we understand the morality, law, and assumptions of Huck’s time and place.

We are social creatures, so our characters need to be. To go further into mastering characters, which is vital to engaging audiences, the cultural milieu (including power dynamics), interpersonal relationships, and the secrets kept from others, all are needed for the comprehending the story. This is especially true in terms of just how difficult the plot match-up is.

Plot-driven fiction often has cardboard characters, and it can even be successful. James Bond does not need to have much in the way of an inner life. He doesn’t need to be motivated by the wounds of his past or to struggle against a complicated moral code. This provides a good reminder that this Mastery Series does not claim that all writers need to master all these elements. But the more that are mastered, the more options for success are available, and this includes commercial fiction that may not even aspire to deep characters.

Personally, I look for compromise points. Even if I could get away with flat characters, I find it adds something to have go-tos that round them somewhat. I’m a big fan of flaws for all characters, not just the bad guys. When in doubt, I prefer the Seven Deadly Sins over the Minor Irritations (retelling bad jokes, not using turn signals, talking in theaters, snapping gum, standing too close, name-calling, and cutting the line). But I’ll take a minor flaw over perfection.

And even a minor flaw can be improved if it’s tied to a juicy secret. When a character keeps a secret, it says something about them, their values, and what the people around them care about. Also, the secret itself is a not-true-to-self element that sets up an inner conflict. And inner conflicts are the stuff of interesting characters.

Secrets need to be kept. Hiding information takes energy and forces bad decisions. And best of all, when secrets are revealed, things happen.

Mastery of Story Characters 4 - Create characters with secrets (and flaws).

Practice: Find five taboos in the world you’ve created and have one character violate one of them and keep that secret. (The violation can occur before story time begins.) Then give a character that matters the means to discover the secret. (In both cases, the more consequential the character, the better. For  romance, these characters are often the two lovers.)

Give a characters with a secret a reason to share it, but vulnerabilities that make such honesty difficult or apparently impossible.

Create a scene where a secret comes out.

(For any of these, noting where these occur in favorite stories is valuable and provides models.)

Having a good antagonists is one of the easiest ways to show who the protagonist is. In general, this means creating a villain and personalizing the relationship. Don’t resist the forces of evil. Resist one person in particular, like Darth Vader. And make the antagonist powerful and able. Make who the character is important. (Luke, I’m your dad.)

It’s also great to have friends who are alike but go too far. These point to limits on the protagonist. Or have characters who are opposites, which creates conflicts. Minions for antagonists can be valuable beyond plot. Their choices (and often their mistakes) reveal the limits and qualities of the antagonists. Making them distinct from one another (as is done in Die Hard) makes everything more intriguing.

Two more things to consider:

One is the utility of other characters. This is obvious in capers like Ocean’s Eleven, where each person on the team has a different, needed skill. They are all essential and need to deliver in that case, but it can be fun when they don’t deliver or almost don’t deliver.  

The second is building the personal relationships. Caring and disliking qualify. They complicate things. They make the protagonist’s task more difficult and reflect who he or she is.

Mastery of Story Characters 5 - Present characters in relation other characters.

Practice: Find a reason why it isn’t a satisfying ending if the antagonist having an aneurism and dying suddenly. Even if the story problem goes away. In other words, see what does not get tested or healed by the confrontation at the heart of the story if the problem is miraculously resolved.

Explore how a confidant reveals the protagonist. Holmes is less interesting and accessible without Watson. Or the confidant may be a sounding board for ideas (even pulling down the protagonist at times, as in Working Girl). Or a mentor (who usually has to disappear so the protagonist can succeed without all that help (see Obi Wan and Gandalf).

So much of who we are is determined by individuals around us and the society in which we’re embedded. (This topic bleeds into setting, which I’ll deal with later, but it’s worth a full examination here under character.) Values, framing, what we pay attention to, what we care about. what triggers us, rights, hierarchy, and power. These may be accepted, rejected, or modified inside us, but they cannot be avoided. The same is true for characters, which is why Huck Finn’s decision about Jim is so poignant.

What power does your character have or think he or she has, and how is the use of power modulated by others? What mob would your character join or avoid? What’s easy to say or do, and what takes real courage? How is non-conformity punished? Can your character get a pass for misbehavior by privilege, wealth, supporters, or a favor that’s owed?

Mastery of Story Characters 6 - Put characters in a social context.

Practice: Delineate five things related to your story that your protagonist can do easily and five that can’t be done easily. Think about how the easy ones might become difficult socially. Think through work arounds for the difficult ones. Find one possibility for courage. Then do the same exercise for the antagonist.

Write down a moral code for your world (even if it’s the one you live in) with regard to freedom, responsibilities, care for nature, charity, and authority. Are any of these challenges for you character? Can you illustrate the code being broken in your story or in your own experience?

One of the key decisions a writer must make is who the protagonist is. And an essential element of that, from the point of view of storytelling, is identifying or shaping the main character to fit the story problem. Usually, this means the character is deeply affected by the challenge, unable to avoid it, and forced to change in the confrontation. And, in general, the protagonist is not in the power position. Of all the possible characters in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien chose a hobbit. In the Bible, the fate of Israel as it faced Goliath rested on the shoulders of David.

Between this post and the last one,  the elements of Mastery provide the information about characters that can allow you to size them to the story problem. Sometimes, this may lead to tweaking a character from history or one who elbowed his or her way into an early draft. Sometimes, doing the work ahead of time can cast the role before the story is written. But, one way or another, this work needs to be done.

Mastering Introductions of Story Characters

If you’ve got a James Bond story, feel free to use James Bond as he is. The same goes for Ferris Bueller, who doesn’t change, doesn’t face serious stakes, and doesn’t make us fret about his well-being. With the right action, humor, or mystery, flat characters (usually satisfying wish fulfillment or intellectual curiosity) are just fine.

However, generally people are carried along in a story because they care about the characters. (This is especially true for a TV series.) We want to worry about characters, particularly viewpoint characters. I’d argue that we even take more delight in villains we can care about.

The easiest way to do this is to make characters likable. We identify with protagonists who have special talents, are wronged, or are funny (according to Damon Knight). We want them to win. Even more, we get emotionally involved when they lose.

It’s best if readers/audiences actually see what they are supposed to appreciate. From the first story, Holmes shows how he uses keen observation to identify facts and figure out what other people miss. Harry Potter left as an unwelcome orphan who sleeps in a closet under the stairs. Chaplin’s Little Tramp debuts with dressed strangely, with a funny mustache, twirling a cane and shuffling along with an awkward gait.

While likable characters create empathy, they don’t need to be likable for us to care about them. If their cause is great and one we believe in, we may root for them even if we would never want to meet them. I have a hard time liking Patton, but I want the Nazis defeated. Or they can be relatively good. Michael Corleone may be inhuman at times, but he’s better than the other mobsters in The Godfather.

Mastery of Story Characters 1 - Know how to create empathy for characters.

Practice: In most cases, humor comes from clowns. They are nonthreatening, and, often, readers and audiences see them in an inferior position. Usually, they have an obsession. The first appearance of the Little Tramp has him driven to get attention. Journalists are filming a soap box derby, and he keeps photo-bombing them. (That’s pretty much the whole story, but it created a career.) He’s a little guy who keeps trying, despite being driven away by larger men and facing the hazard of zooming derby cars. So create a character who is believable and faces risks repeatedly for a disproportionately small reward.

Talent is easy: A beauty. An athlete. A great artist. 

Try these to make your character stand out. Put the character in motion (and show the great achievement isn’t easy, if you want an internal trait). Add a quirk, like Rocky Balboa being a lefty. See if you can describe the character using a metaphor (which says more than mentioning physical features).

As for being wronged, begin with one of your own experiences of betrayal or abuse or being left out. Write that out. Then put it in terms that fit you story and the protagonist.

Above, I mentioned how the Little Tramp was introduced. He stood out. He looked on. He took a lot of camera time. There was no question about his being part of the race in any way.

The first line spoken can be powerful, too. James Bond literally introduces himself the first time the camera shows him, but it need not be so explicit. Much more revealing were Patton’s first words. "Be seated. Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." (Even before he speaks, the visuals tell you who he was and why you should pay attention to him.)

The first they they do or we see done to them matters. In Once Upon a Time in the West, Charles Bronson's character, Harmonica, plays a tune, drops his bag, and shoots three gunslingers before they get off a single shot. In Sunset Boulevard, our first view of Joe Gillis is him floating dead in a pool.
Of course, Hitchcock’s Vertigo uses setting, action, reaction, and horror to present the protagonist's titular weakness. Talk about a master.

The main thing to accomplish is to get the readers or audience to really notice a character (and this goes for more than the protagonists).

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is an essay on introducing a character (Sundance). None of the lessons should be lost, but one choice William Goldman included had to do was all about introducing Paul Newman’s unknown co-star. Just putting him first and letting the camera linger on him (less obvious than the talk and action) was critical.

And other characters? Ocean’s Eleven introduced the bulk of the heist’s participants in just a few minutes. They are physically distinctive, tied to actions and mannerisms, and capable in different ways.

Mastery of Story Characters 2 - Introduce characters with pizzaz.

Practice: Looking through stories you’ve written, see if you can create great first lines for them. Or actions they take when they first appear that tell a lot about them or the story. Or begin with an unfair situation that sets things up. (Branded didn’t make it as a TV show, but it does this well.)

This skill is critical. People go on a  journey with the protagonist, which is dedicated time. They can’t be allowed to confuse other characters. So the job becomes more than avoiding cliches. Having lots of options. Reworking and revising after the whole piece is finished. And getting the slightest pieces right. These matter.

Sergio Leone is so good at this the very beginning  of Once Upon a Time in the West is profligate in its introductions. He shows us three compelling characters and, with two, even creates silent movies about them that are revealing and intriguing. But none of these characters makes it to minute ten of the film.

When you get people to pay attention and not forget, the characters are memorable. This can be done in big ways, where you create a classic protagonist like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Or in small ways, where a character gets attention in act one, is forgotten in act two, and plays a critical role (assassin, savior) in act three. Whole TV series have come from one bravado performance in a film or as a guest in an episode. And, with all the star talent of Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin steals the show with his (highly) profane and memorable speech about closing sales.

The classic way to get something (or someone) stuck in someone’s mind is repetition, and this works in stories, not just ads. Often authors achieve this through tics, tags, and attributes, including catch phrases. A more sophisticated and engaging form of repetition is an action or statement (often a brag) that escalates. This can really work well in humor.

Mastery of Story Characters 3 - Make your characters memorable.

Practice: Take two characters and make them as different at possible. Chances are, unless they become stock characters (like the whore with the heart of gold), they’ll become more distinctive. A more subtle exercise is to differentiate people who are all of the same class, age, and ethnicity. For these, flaws and idiosyncrasies that reveal the inner person are worth trying. If you have a story like this, try giving each character one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Think of a brag one your your characters might make that could not go unnoticed. Once you have that, come up with elaborations that go to absurdity. Then see if you can do something like that for an action that could be repeated. (In The Honeymooners, Art Carney, as Norton, could make making a list into an elaborate production.)

Once characters are on stage, people need to know more about them and fit them into the story. That’s what the next post will be about.