Category Archives: Better Fantasy

Dramatic Tension: What Went Wrong with Act III of Star Wars: The Force Awakens

29 Tuesday Dec 2015

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Unlike my last post, this one will have some spoilers. It’s been two weeks, folks. Information wants to be free!

In general, I enjoyed The Force Awakens when I saw it. However, I noticed during the climax at the end that the assault on the Death Star—uh, no, the assault on the Other Thing—anyways, it lacked a lot of the tension that characterized the original Death Star attack during A New Hope. I was discussing this with a friend the other day, and between the two of us I think we figured out the problem, and what JJ Abrams should have done instead.

During A New Hope, the first two attempts to attack the target failed. Worse, with every X-Wing that was shot down, it became increasingly less likely that the target could be attacked at all, until finally we are left with Luke, by himself, a sitting duck in Darth Vader’s gunsights. Dramatic tension was at a fever pitch, and then the Millennium Falcon arrives to save the day. Seconds later, the torpedoes go in, and we experience a massive rush of relief.

In The Force Awakens, first of all, the time limit has little impact on the viewer. We have seen this before, and giving us an exact (and arbitrary) time limit also drains away the tension until it returns in the final seconds, if even then. Second, the attacking squadrons immediately launch their attack on the primary target, and it fails without any particular explanation—or hope that the next one could succeed. Thus, we viewers realize, the X-Wing fighters actually don’t matter at all in the fight for dramatic purposes, and exist mostly to die gloriously.

So all of the attention is focused on our heroes on the ground—the same ones who have already planted bombs, and are in the middle of a dramatic character moment with a lot of emotion, and emotional tension, but not the tension you get from a race against the clock. At the final moment, time even seems to stand still, working against the larger sense of jeopardy the movie was supposed to create. All the pieces are working at cross-purposes.

What should the movie have done instead?

In the massive preemptive strike launched by the Super Weapon, it takes out multiple targets at once and then shuts down for a long period to recharge. This was a mistake, from a storytelling perspective. Only one of its targets was actually time-critical (the Republic fleet). Destroy that one first, and the others could be picked off at leisure. So what JJ Abrams should have done, is have the weapon fire once, every two minutes, continuously.

That way, every mistake the heroes make, every snag they hit, every obstacle they must overcome, means that millions more people die while they watch, each time the weapon fires again. Even better, it provides a better reason for the First Order to discover the location of the Resistance: when the X-Wing fighters make a panicked jump directly from their base to the Super Weapon, the bad guys can simply plot their path backward over the course of the next five or ten minutes. Then, after having destroyed several targets while we squirm in impotent horror, they can finally calculate the location of their hated enemies, and train their sights on the good guys, chortling evilly.

And then they can blow up.

That would have made for a much more effective Act III. And for the rest of us storytellers, it presents a lesson that sudden explosions are not necessarily better than explosions that we see coming, but cannot prevent.

Excerpt from My Current Project

21 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Politics, State Formation, Writing

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[I’ve previously written that I want to write a handbook for writers on how to handle politics and political conflict in our stories. Right now I’m working on a precursor to that handbook—a brief study of different types of political regimes, summarizing and commenting on the work of political scientist Samuel Finer. Here’s a short excerpt from my current draft, a fictional vignette illustrating what one example of the Palace polity would feel like:]

Amanukemba XVII yawned as he completed the last of the sacred rites for the day. The god-emperor had to placate the Ancestors, of course, but now that all of that was done he could pay a quick visit to the harem before finally meeting with his high council. They were a tedious pack of bores mostly, but it wouldn’t do to antagonize them too much or the bureaucracy would just make trouble. He would smile and nod, and then meet with his true advisors in secret later that evening. They were men more to Amanukemba’s liking, ambitious and driven, yet without high station and title—too weak to pose a threat, and totally dependent on his patronage. And unlike the paper-pushers, they got things done.

Which was good, for much remained to be done before the fall. The granaries needed filling, and that meant that the peasants needed squeezing. Yet somehow he had to free up enough men from his conscript armies to ensure a good harvest, without exposing his frontier to barbarian raids. Choices, choices.

The emperor hummed a happy tune as he passed between the eunuch harem guards, who bowed at his appearance. He would ask for Messarina today. She would almost certainly try to flatter him and distract him, and then at a crucial moment she would ask about affairs of state, about which she had no business asking. If Amanukemba were lucky, she would then whisper a suggestion for what he should do, and then he might discover which official had been bribing his eunuchs to gain access to the harem. Not to take liberties with the concubines, of course—it would be madness to risk death by slow torture—but to plot and scheme and do all those things court functionaries seemed to do with their time.

The whole thing was silly, of course. If they were smart, they would all realize that the surest way to wealth and power would be to please the god-emperor, Son of the Ancients. He was too wise and cunning to be taken in by such petty manipulations. Perhaps his grandfather had been, but not his father, and not he…

The Power of Guiding Metaphors

19 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Economics, History, Military, Politics, State Formation, War, Writing

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I’ve lately been reading The Axis Grand Strategy, a book published in America during World War Two. With only light editorial comments, it presents translated writings from German military theorists and officers about different aspects of warfighting. (The editors are presenting this material, in part, as a demonstration of Nazi perfidy; they highlight passages in which the Germans offhandedly note various breaches of international law—for example, that the invasion of neutral Belgium during WWI was conceived of a decade in advance.) The book is incredibly interesting from many points of view, and even as a historical artifact itself; I did not know, for example, that the Allied powers were calling themselves “The United Nations” even during the war.

One point that the book is reminding me of is the importance of metaphors in structuring thought. Over and over again, the German authors refer to the ideal military enterprise as a well-oiled machine, operating with incredible precision down to the smallest detail. To make such a machine possible took a stupendous level of planning and organization, which had to be carried out years in advance (and which the authors describe in great detail). This was one factor that pushed German doctrine to the conclusion that to have any hope for victory, they needed to decide upon war several years before actually carrying it out, and then to direct all of their government policy and grand strategy to support that decision. That is, once the German decision for war was made, it became largely inevitable that war would result even three or five years later—because German leadership believed that such decisions needed that much lead time for the planning process to be adequate, and victory to be possible.

To be sure, the “well-oiled machine” metaphor was not the only reason that German doctrine came to that conclusion, or even the most important one. But it surely played a role, because it presented an ideal towards which to aspire.

Lewis Mumford, in his Technics and Civilization, presents a similar argument about the development of vast hierarchical bureaucracies. He writes that the age of coal had dramatic impacts not only on our economy, but on the mindset of society’s leaders. Where previously, water-powered manufacture had been relatively decentralized, coal-fired steam power created tremendous economies of scale. The most efficient method would be to tie all of your machines into a massive central boiler; this also meant that they had to be standardized, coordinated, and operated without any sort of individual discretion or initiative.

According to Mumford, the success of centralized manufacture led thinkers to imagine that other centralized projects were ideal as well—massive bureaucracies, mass armies, central planning of the economy, and so on. These people had been conditioned by the guiding metaphor of coal-fired steam boilers, and the resulting hierarchical organization of mass factories. Many would even make the parallel explicit. Individual initiative simply made a mess; better to control everything from the head. The result was the age of totalitarianism.

Economist Richard Bronk, in his The Romantic Economist, makes a similar argument about the development of the idea of equilibrium markets in economics. He says that the guiding metaphor there came from thermodynamics; in an attempt to make economics into a mathematical science akin to physics, champions of quantitative economics proposed simplifying assumptions such as “utility” or “self-interest” that could transform economic behavior into something predictable, something that could be captured in quasi-thermodynamic equations. Bronk argues that such metaphors have been played out, and the further progress in economic thought needs to borrow metaphors from the Romantics—biological processes, or ecosystems, or webs of interdependence.

Today, we netizens are conditioned to think about networks, or crowdfunding, or robots. These new guiding metaphors have in turn produced new ideas of how governments should work, or how organizations should be structured. Some of these new ideas are even useful. But in any event, they are very different from the sorts of ideas that would come from a person accustomed to steam-powered factories.

The concept of a guiding metaphor is important if you are any sort of creative thinker, whether in business or government or the arts. If you write fiction, think about what metaphors influence your characters or even whole societies. If you have a business, think about how new metaphors can suggest new products or services. If you are in government, stop trying to bludgeon your society with models of coercive government that date from nineteenth-century proto-fascism.

If you want to create something new, try applying a different metaphor.

Politics for Writers?

10 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Politics, Self-Promotion, Writing

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This being November, I am once again participating in National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. Which of course has me thinking about one of my favorite topics, politics and fiction.

There’s a lot of “how-to” material for writers out there—how to write a compelling scene, create believable characters, and so on. But as far as I can tell with some random Googling, there seem to be few resources to help writers (especially fantasy and science-fiction writers) think about politics. As I’ve written about on this blog before, most writers have only a few mental models of how politics could work (fantasy medieval kingdom, evil galactic overlord, idealized democracy, and maybe one or two others); while there’s nothing wrong with any of these when handled well, the shortage of raw materials affects the kind of stories a writer can tell. As a political-science junkie, I find myself wishing for more variety.

What resources there are seem to view politics from the perspective of world-building, as an afterthought of things like culture and language. For example, Holly Lisle’s Create a Culture Clinic (which is otherwise a fantastic aid to fleshing out the richness of invented societies, and I highly recommend it) devotes less than ten pages to politics—and those are mostly asking checklist questions like “Who is in charge? How do they punish criminals? What rights are there?”

Missing is any discussion about what an author’s choices would mean for the story. Or, even more useful, what kinds of stories you could best tell in a given political system. Or, best of all, how the tensions within a given political system could give rise to powerful new stories. If I were a beginning author, I would want to start there—and once the plot is in place, then I would decide on the details that all the world-building resources deal with.

So it seems to me that there is a great need for a writer’s guide to politics in invented societies, and how to choose among political systems to help generate the strongest plots. But to write a guide like that, you would need to be an expert in politics who can cut through all the details and isolate the fundamental building blocks—the handful of key questions that are the key to rapid understanding. (As you can probably tell, I’ve been reading a lot of Timothy Ferris lately…)

As it happens, I am an expert in politics. And better, I’m an expert in Comparative Politics, which is the most interesting subfield within political science, if I may say so myself. And I’ve been thinking about doing something like this for a long time.

What I’m envisioning is a relatively short e-book that would describe each archetypical political system before distilling it down to a single chart of features, showing the most important actors in the system, the key points of stress, and the story themes that this system is perfect for dealing with. For example, a communist dictatorship would be a good setting to address themes of the individual versus the state, or property and communal need, or privacy in the face of constant surveillance. A monarchy would be good for looking at questions of loyalty, honor, the role of divine right, and so on.

There’s a lot more, of course, but the key here is that in a very few pages, you could learn how to build exactly the political system you need to form the backdrop to the story you want to tell—or you could discover new kinds of stories that never would have occurred to you otherwise.

If this is something that you’d want to see, be sure to fave this post, and I’ll get right to work.

Want to Write Flash Fiction?

17 Friday May 2013

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I’ve been quite busy over the last few weeks with my new book, The Best Congress Money Can Buy. Setting up the paperback edition and ordering copies has been exciting, as has been trying to publicize the thing. (I briefly got up to #3 on Amazon in the category of Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Political, which is pretty sweet!) And right now I’ve got other ideas for stories swimming through my brain that I’m trying desperately to fight off, at least until I clear out some of my other projects… But I just came across something I had to tell people about.

As I’ve mentioned briefly before, I’ve benefited greatly from writing classes I purchased from the excellent teacher Holly Lisle (whose name will likely be familiar to anyone who frequents the NaNoWriMo forums). Well, she recently rolled out a new freebie class for people who register for her site and opt into the mailing list. It’s titled “How To Write Flash Fiction That Doesn’t Suck,” and so far it is teaching me exactly what it says in the title.

I’d never really thought about doing flash fiction myself; I didn’t understand it, I didn’t know how to structure it or what the point was in writing it. Now that I’ve read Holly’s very first lesson in the three-session course, I’m a lot more interested. Not only does the form have possibilities that I never considered before, but writing lots of flash fiction is an excellent way to drill in the fundamentals of a good story: strong character, driving conflict, compelling needs and vivid description. I can’t wait for the next installment to come out!

This isn’t the only course of Holly’s that I am taking, not by a long shot. But I paid good money for the others, and this one is free—and it’s a brilliant summary of all of her techniques in a few short lessons. When I read the first lesson, I knew I had to spread the word. It’s just that good!

So if you want to learn how to write better stories, click on this link, register for her site, and then make sure to opt into the email list. (I think the opt-in button has a big picture of a dog wearing a hat, but don’t quote me.) It’s all free—but don’t be surprised if you end up taking some of the bigger classes. Lord knows I have!

When Do Societies Face Unrest?

02 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Economics, History, Politics, Revolution, Self-Promotion, War, Writing

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I have just read a recent journal article by the brilliant scholar Peter Turchin, in which he elaborates on his theory of the dynamics of social instability over time and tests it on the United States from 1780 to 2010. Put briefly, his theory holds that one can expect a society to suffer greater social violence (such as riots or lynchings, as opposed to routine crime) in a relatively predictable cycle. The larger “secular” cycle occurs every 150 years; a smaller cycle of violence occurs roughly every 50 years, superimposed on the secular cycle. Thus in the United States, we had peaks of societal violence near the years 1870, 1920, and 1970, with the Civil War being the peak of the secular cycle. Turchin forecasts that the next secular peak should hit sometime around the year 2020. Turchin’s previous work has detected the same sorts of cycles in societies from ancient China to revolutionary France.

Of course, detecting a pattern does not tell you what has caused it. Turchin’s theory for when violence intensifies depends on two major factors. Both of these factors might derive from excessive population growth; in the early version of Turchin’s work, he was focusing on agrarian societies in which population growth leads directly to food shortages. But now that he is considering Industrial societies, Turchin is focusing more on the immediate causes laid out below.

First, whether from excessive population growth or technological disruption or whatever, there emerges a labor glut. The average wage drops in response, leading to diminished standards of living. Thus you see larger segments of the populace who are in a precarious situation, with the potential for violent outbreaks such as labor struggles, or ethnic competition with minorities, or political upheaval.

Second, there emerges “an oversupply of elites.” This can happen for a few reasons, and Turchin focuses on the economic one. The low cost of labor means that it is easier for those on the top to become far wealthier than they might have done in a more normal setting, leading to the accumulation of vast fortunes and a polarization of society. A consequence of this is that there is much more competition for the leadership positions in society, such as control of government offices. Politics becomes more nasty and partisan, leading in extreme cases to violent rivalries between elite factions struggling to secure their hold on power. Such violence is made easier by the larger number of poor, desperate people in society who can serve as a demagogue’s muscle.

In Turchin’s research, he finds that oversupply of elites has the strongest association with societal violence. This is easy to understand when one looks at places like the Philippines, in which politicians routinely employ armed militias to attack competitors (a horrifying example was the Maguindanao Massacre of 2009), or the Congo, which has been wracked with coup after coup. But even in the United States, a surplus of would-be leaders will tend to produce extreme ideologies, such as militant unionism in the 1920s, or the present upsurge in eco-terrorism.

I think many people, writers among them, mistake the relationship between cheap labor and exploitative rich. Often, a super-wealthy class emerges as a result of lots of poor people, who make it easier to be rich—that is, to benefit from the production of lots of other people. This is not to say that an exploitative class won’t try to keep everyone else poor, once it emerges. But the dynamics are complex here, and societal violence is one of the things keeping them in check.

(How might such violence be averted? Full discussion will have to wait for another post, but I find it rather interesting that the Biblical institution of Jubilee, in which land was returned to its ancestral owners and debts forgiven, follows a 50-year cycle.)

(Have I mentioned lately that my new book is available on Amazon Kindle? It’s called The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Stories of Political Possibility. You can read the first story for free here, and then buy it if you like. Enjoy!)

Writing Better Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (Plus an Update)

27 Sunday Jan 2013

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It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here, so when I saw this post on the FuturePundit blog, I immediately had to post about it. It gives a number of tips on writing more realistic post-apoc fiction (which can therefore lead to more interesting fiction). Check it out, it’s pretty good.

On a side note, I’m presently editing a collection of short stories which I plan to publish shortly. I’ve posted excerpts of early drafts before on this blog, and there’s more to come as we get closer to The Date. I’ve also having a children’s story I wrote a while ago illustrated, which is a lot more fun than working with prose editors! Details will be forthcoming on this blog, naturally, and I’m thankful for your attention, dear readers.

[UPDATE May 17 2013: It’s published! Check it out!]

On Sovereignty, Trust, and Protectorates

04 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Economics, History, Politics, State Formation, Writing

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I recently read a journal article by Peter Haldén titled A Non-Sovereign Modernity: Attempts to Engineer Stability in the Balkans 1820-90. He writes to correct the conventional view that international relations in modernity is all about sovereign, independent states, and that the earlier era of protectorates, vassal states, or other such semi-autonomous regions ended with the arrival of nationalism. Indeed, the rationalist, modern Concert of Europe deliberately used non-sovereign zones several times in the Balkans area in order to control the outbreak of political crises.

The topic remains important for us readers today for a few reasons. First, understanding history is always good (particularly for budding fiction writers, who have a tendency to assume that all stories must be set in modern states or in absolutist monarchies, and thus impoverish their stories.) Second, non-sovereign states never really went away; they were just sleeping. Understanding the dynamics of non-sovereign states gives us a fresh lens to understand places like Kosovo, Chechenya, or even international organizations such as the European Union or the United Nations.

The power politics of the 19th century were marked by several themes, but two of the most important were the decline of the Ottoman Empire as a great power, and the rise of Russia which aspired to take its place. The fundamental problem facing the European powers was how to manage the fragmentation of Ottoman authority, which expressed itself in events like the Greek revolution, without causing a full-blown war between the Great Powers over the spoils.

Briefly, the favored solution was to take outlying provinces of the Empire and turn them into non-sovereign states, under the aegis of the Concert of Europe. These provinces would still nominally be subject to the Turkish Caliph and would pay tribute, and they would be prohibited from having free diplomatic relations with other states as an independent state would, or from having a military. But they would have civil militias and police forces for defense, they would be self-governing, and they could have diplomatic relations with the Concert of Europe as a body. Importantly, the Ottoman Empire would be forbidden to maintain troops in these non-sovereign states.

How does this help? In modern International Relations, states often try to set up buffer zones between them and some potentially hostile neighbor. These zones typically take the form of other, smaller, states. For example, China uses the totalitarian hell state of North Korea as a buffer between it and South Korea, or Japan. The “Low Countries” of Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg were used as a buffer between France and Germany, to their periodic detriment.

The idea is that if you don’t share a border with a potential foe, then there are fewer opportunities for friction that might escalate into a full-blown war. After all, it is hard to distinguish between positioning troops to defend your borders, and positioning troops to attack your neighbor. So the buffer state helps to cool down the temperature. The only problem is that when a buffer state is independent, it can rely only on its own force of arms to maintain itself. The history of the Low Countries graphically demonstrates how easily this can fail; moreover, the potential for a buffer state to become a full-blown military ally of one side or the other ensures that the situation remains tenuous.

A demilitarized nonsovereign territory, on the other hand, is not guaranteed by force of arms, but by the cooperation of the potential rivals under color of an international agreement. There is less likelihood of miscalculation or escalating tensions, and more opportunity for creative institutional design (read the article for some great examples); not all peoples are ready for statehood, after all, even aside from the objections of their current rulers. And there would be less competition between rivals such as Britain and Russia as there would be (and were) over who would dominate the policy of newly independent states, if the territories could only have relations with the international body as a unit and not with other states bilaterally.

For a modern parallel, we can look to the European Union, which began as the European Coal and Steel Community—a project to strip West Germany’s ability to produce war armaments without the cooperation of France, and vice versa. By effectively tying their own hands, the member states hoped to foreclose on the possibility of war between them, so they could focus on the vital task of withstanding the Soviet Bloc. Henceforth, relations between member countries would be based on partnership and negotiation, not power politics.

However, in the case of the Balkans, the stability of the protectorate arrangements for Greece and elsewhere depended crucially on the degree to which the Great Powers trusted each other. In the three cases that Haldén considers, the initial attempts to institute a nonsovereign territory broke down once Russia violated the terms of the agreement, and Britain could no longer trust the Russians to play nice. (I am oversimplifying grossly.) Indeed, the creation of new independent states from the former provinces of the Ottoman Empire was, in Haldén’s telling, a suboptimal outcome, forced on the Great Powers by the breakdown of cooperation and the increasing worry over Russia’s growing power. The independent states would have to fend for themselves, without the aegis of a Concert of Europe which was growing ever-less-concerted over time. No surprise that World War I kicked off in the Balkans; Serbia was one of these formerly nonsovereign states.

Similarly, arrangements such as the EU or the UN are hampered by the lack of trust between member states. Many predict that the current economic crisis may spell the end of the Euro currency, or of the EU altogether, because Germany will grow tired of footing the bill for its more spendthrift neighbors forever. Early aspirations for the UN to become a true world government, meanwhile, have run aground on the cold reality that Americans do not trust a body made up mostly of dictatorships to act with the public interest in mind.

Haldén also draws a fascinating parallel with the old free-markets/interventionism debate in economics. He writes that creating new independent states who would rely on their own armies for defense, and hoping that they can contribute to international stability, is comparable to the intent of the free market. Conversely, a managed protectorate under the oversight of an international body is similar to government control of the economy, under the theory that such control will lead to more manageable outcomes. Whether or not you believe that government control can lead to better outcomes in the abstract, it is clear that you will not desire actual government control unless you trust the government to play nice. If you do not trust the government, you will accept even the putatively suboptimal outcomes of the free market in exchange for keeping a measure of control over your own destiny.

Haldén apparently wrote a book exploring some of these themes, which I may want to read. For our purposes, we should remember that what we are familiar with is not everything that is possible. As well, if we want to build a new world, it is crucial that we trust the main players; otherwise, the world may turn out to be not what we expected.

Why Must Fantasy Always be Set in Huge Worlds?

09 Thursday Aug 2012

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One of the things that has struck me as I read fantasy is that when an author aspires to create an Epic Story, almost inevitably the story will involve lots of travel that will span the fantasy world, taking us between settings that are wildly different from each other, the better to convey that sense of yawning scope that we are looking for, and to showcase the depth of the story’s world (not to mention the cleverness of the author for creating such a world!).

As always, I hasten to note that this is not inherently bad. When such stories are done well, the vast distances traveled and massive shifts of setting will help to build a truly impressive story. (Off the top of my head, George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire does a good job here—as does, in a very different fashion, Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.) It seems that as far back as humans were telling stories, we associate physical journeys with spiritual ones, so that a character’s changes take on special emphasis when he or she is also journeying.

Still, there are perils to this approach. The most common one is that in our haste to create big worlds, we skip past the minor detail of making deep worlds. To take a ludicrous example, imagine a story in which there are several continents, each of which is ruled by a monolithic empire which is only distinguished from the next one by the color of its clothing, or the shape of its people’s ears, or somesuch. For a more concrete example, David Eddings’s Belgariad series features a series of countries each with overpowering national stereotypes, so that all Drasnians are cunning spies, all Sendars are plain country folk (including the king!), and so on. To be fair to Eddings, he was in part doing a send-up of genre clichés that date back to Tolkien at least… but still. My objection is this: in our haste to have vast worlds, we skimp on the details that actually make things interesting.

For myself as a political-science geek, one of the things that galls me is how often writers imagine that their fantasy kingdoms have no actual politics. Oh, sure, you can have your treacherous nobles or devious advisors, but what is their power base? Why are particular groups of nobles in one faction and not another? Where does each of the nobles live?

Consider, for example, The Wheel of Time. Robert Jordan, may he rest in peace, at least had the decency to include rebellious nobles in his story, which puts him head and shoulders above some other authors I could name; but the treatment of politics was boring. In each country, there were Loyal nobles, and Disloyal nobles, all of whom seemed to float in midair without any particular ties to geography, or concrete interests that might pull them toward one faction or another. And none of these conflicts ever spilled across borders! The factions that opposed our heroes never formed a broader alliance with each other, in stark contrast to all the rules of war and politics from time immemorial. No, they remained in their neat categorical boxes, country by country.

One ridiculous consequence is that no noble in WoT ever switches sides unless being faced with naked force, and even then only rarely. (In real conflicts, players are constantly trying to play both sides against the middle; for an example, just read up on any major Afghan warlord. James Clavell’s Shogun is a good fictional example of such maneuvering, albeit not a fantasy one, and notwithstanding the other objections you could make about it as historical fiction.)

For a while now, I’ve been toying with a move in the opposite direction: to have a fantasy story that takes place entirely within a single village. The characters no longer have the option of fleeing from their problems across the continent; the focus of the story would be on the intricate social conflicts between the village peasants, all of whom would naturally have to be identified by name and social position. I haven’t done it yet largely because it would be hard to pull off; all those family trees to work out, who’s married to whom and why it matters, the tangle of petty jealousies and feuds that mark village life, and so on. The biggest conceptual difficulty, I think, is how you could make a story of such constricted scope still have that vast fantasy feel. My current thinking is that the large-scale problems at work in the country as a whole would create fault-lines in the village, so that we still feel connected to the larger conflicts.

The attraction of such a challenge would be that the setting would have to be steeped in detail; indeed, only by having a rich texture in our setting would the story even be interesting. The characters would have to be well fleshed out, their relationships with each other would have to be compelling, the material facts of life in a fantasy village would have to be hammered out and establish the rhythms of the story. Compared to yet another world of flimsy cardboard countries, I think such a story could be a breath of fresh air.

For my readers, I would say that you have other choices besides a vast fantasy world stapled together from clichés. You might try a smaller canvas, with more care devoted to the individual brushstrokes, and see what that gets you.

Writing Interesting Characters with Transactional Analysis

02 Monday Jul 2012

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By now, every aspiring author has been thoroughly brainwashed that to write a good story, you need strong characters. When you browse the web for resources on writing, you will commonly come across all sorts of checklists or creation tools for developing detailed characters. (Examples are all over the place, but some good ones can be found here, here, and here.) But I’ve noticed something interesting about 99% of these checklists: they focus on a given character, in isolation.

Yet think about yourself for a second. At all times, do you behave the same way? Or do you evince different behaviors, different emotions, different patterns of interaction depending on who you are with? I know that I behave very differently when I’m around my parents than I do when I’m around my professors, or my brother, or my friends in the community. Each of those patterns of behavior comes from a part of me, to be sure, but they are so different from each other that a single global “character sheet” would be unlikely to capture all of them.

Yet very often, we find fictional characters who always behave the same, because their authors seem to think that the characters must at all times be displaying their Traits with a capital T. There’s nothing particularly bad about this, when done well; character archetypes are a staple of mythic stories from time immemorial. But as writers we can expand our toolchest if we remember that people often act out different personas in their different relationships.

Fortunately, there is a tool we can use to make such characters. It is a heterodox brand of psychology called transactional analysis, first introduced by Eric Berne in his excellent 1964 book Games People Play. This book introduced a number of terms that have diffused into common speech, such as “stroking someone’s ego,” and so is interesting if only from a sociological standpoint. But beyond that, it provides a powerful lens for understanding how people might change depending on who they are with.

Briefly, Berne argued that people’s childhood experiences leave them with certain psychic needs that must be met, by subconsciously seeking out certain types of relationships that confirm preexisting beliefs about the world and one’s place in it. Think of the woman constantly complaining that all the guys she dates are losers, or the man who can’t hold down a job for more than a few months before lashing out at his boss. Berne provides examples of “games,” or scenarios that the multiple players in a relationship enact in order to fulfill their psychic needs.

For example, in “Why don’t you… Yes, But,” person A presents some problem that he or she is dealing with (“People annoy me at work,” for example), and persons B through Z then list off a series of solutions. “Why don’t you ask for a raise?” “Why don’t you wear earphones?” And so on. To each of these suggestions,  person A responds with an endless litany of excuses for why the solution could not possibly work. However frustrating and pointless the exercise might feel to an outsider, the participants are on some level satisfied. Person A gets to combine the illusion that he or she is trying to fix the problem with the true goal of the game, “confirming” that the problem cannot be solved and so no attempt need be made. The others get to feel as if they are being helpful, i.e. superior. And so it goes on and on.

Other games can be found in the book or summarized in the Wikipedia article. Some good ones include “I’ve Got You Now, You Son of a B****,” “Look What You Made Me Do,” “If It Weren’t For You,” and “Look How Hard I Tried.” The point is that these are recurring pathological types of relationships between two or more people, which meet the unspoken and perhaps unconscious needs of the players thanks to various kinds of emotional harm that has marked their personalities.

I should note here that I am not a psychologist, and am not necessarily advocating the use of transactional analysis for therapeutic purposes. It may work for you or people you know, or it may not. Additionally, modern TA has gone off in several different directions, so Berne’s book should not be relied upon as the last word. Still, I am focused here on TA’s relevance for writing fiction, and for that it can be quite valuable.

How can you use this technique? Remember when writing your characters to consider how they interact with each other. Grunthor the Merciless might be gruff and unsympathetic to Lewellyn the Delicate, but be a devoted kind husband to Helga the Bonecrusher. The same person, acting out different patterns of relationships, based on how his particular impulses line up with those of the other person.

Still, there is a unifying thread between all of a person’s relationships, and that is the psychic needs of the person. Explaining this in detail would take me far afield; but suffice to say that this can provide the continuity between all of a character’s different interactions, allowing you to build a larger theme around each character’s relationships.

In short, think of your characters together, and not just alone.