How To Write Magical Words: A Writer's Companion Read online

  "Aye, sir," Butler said, moving back and forth on his feet like a child that has to pee. Here again is an action that shows us more of Butler. In explaining the action, I not only create a visual that adds to the character but I use it to describe both action and character—"like a child." "Um, a question, sir."

  Worthington ignored the man and stared at the fog. Worthington’s reaction to Butler establishes their relationship and adds to both characters—he is capable of ignoring Butler and Butler doesn’t appear to take offense. Their enemy, His Majesty’s frigate Osprey, had not suffered serious damage and would not be sinking anytime soon—it just left. Why? They had killed Captain Taggart. They had blasted an enormous hole in the Annabelle’s side—a little lower and the brigantine would have sunk. Why leave with victory so close? This last paragraph gives us Worthington’s thoughts. Like contrasting, showing thoughts can serve more than one purpose. Here, we get more of Worthington’s character by seeing how the man thinks in contrast with how he has spoken, but we also receive worldbuilding and even get a bit of plot.

  The key, then, is to make each sentence carry as much weight as possible, and to realize that the readers will fill-in enormous chunks of detail if you point them in the right direction. Look at that excerpt again and pay particular attention to the character of Butler. Nowhere is he physically described. All we get is a little voice and two actions—all showing, not telling. The more he appears in the story the more opportunities exist to flesh him out further, but by placing him in contrast to Worthington and by carefully crafting his speech, he is already real enough to imagine. If the reader can imagine him, the reader starts filling in the details. Pretty soon, between the two of you, a full character is born. And that’s the ultimate goal.

  §§§

  Faith Hunter

  I totally agree. Character description info dumps work only seldom, as in police procedurals, where you know the main character has been trained to view all people in a specific manner, as if taking down details of a crime scene or criminal suspect. And even then I get sooo tired of, "He was five-five, blonde and green, and walked with a limp."

  "She was six-two, dark-skinned, mixed African, close-cropped hair, maybe a skinny 150."

  "She was average height, two hundred pounds overweight, black and brown, and breathed like she had a leak somewhere."

  Oy . . .

  Edmund R. Schubert

  I’ll add to this conversation by mentioning that Stuart’s point about the reader filling in their own images is SO true that you have to be careful with it. Precisely because they fill in their own image so quickly, if you add physical description of the character too late in the story, it frequently ends up contradicting the reader’s mental image, which is jarring and counter-productive.

  David B. Coe

  This is a terrific essay, Stuart, and I love the story opening. You manage to convey so much so quickly. Well done. I could use that kind of economy in my own writing. That said, I would like to respond to Faith by rising in defense of detailed character descrip-tions. I love reading them and I love writing them. I have a description of a key character in the new book that goes on for a while, and I think it is absolutely essential in filling out who she is and how she figures into my MC’s life. A good character introduction can make the difference between a person readers visualize and one they carry around with them all day long, even when they’re not reading the book.

  Hello, Mary Sue! Goodbye, Plot

  Misty Massey

  Perfect characters are boring as hell.

  Really, they are. Think about it . . . when the main character is physically gorgeous, runs faster, jumps higher, knows every trick, can pick a lock with his nose while blindfolded and never loses a fight, why bother reading any further? The excitement of reading a good story is the thrill of not knowing what’s around the corner.

  The trouble for some writers, in the beginning, is the love we have for our characters. "Look at this fabulous person I created!" we think. "She’s so amazing, she must be able to do everything I wish I could do in real life." It’s okay to feel that way. Ask any mother if her baby isn’t the most perfect creature ever born. *laughs* But loving your character isn’t what makes a story great. The best characters aren’t the ones who sail through the events of the story as easily as they might walk down their hallway. No, the characters we stick with are the ones who make mistakes, trip over branches, lose their way, get thrown in prison for crimes they didn’t commit and worry about whether they’ll live through the night. A character who has no flaws can’t change and grow. Did you read Gone With the Wind? Whose story was more compelling—Scarlet’s or Melanie’s?

  I fell into the trap myself, some years ago. I was writing Kestrel as a Mary Sue—a character who could do everything better than everyone else, and couldn’t be defeated. When I finally started digging deeper, looking for the feelings Kestrel must have been feeling to drive her on her journey, I was amazed at how much better the story became. These days, I watch carefully to make sure none of my characters are superpeople. They’re jealous, quick to anger, grumpy in the morning, superstitious, impatient and greedy. My friend, writer Lisa Mantchev, was talking about this very thing, and challenged us to share our character’s flaws. So today I challenge you—and I’ll begin.

  Kestrel, a pirate, a fighter and a beginner in the use of magic, is FLAWED.

  • She is slow to trust, and quick to believe the worst in people

  • She is fearful of magic, even though it’s a natural part of her.

  • She is stubborn, sometimes to her detriment.

  She doesn’t believe she’s worthy of love or admiration.

  §§§

  David B. Coe

  Besh, one of the lead characters in The Sorcerer’s Plague and The Horsemen’s Gambit, is an older man, widowed, drawn out of the comfort of his final years by a catastrophe that he can’t ignore. His faults?

  • He’s terribly stubborn.

  • He’s judgmental and has allowed this trait to create a rift between himself and his daughter’s husband.

  • He refuses to accept that he is limited by his age and the decline of his physical strength.

  • He is moody and not very good at concealing his temper from those he cares about.

  Faith Hunter

  You are an evil woman, which is why I love you.

  Hmmm. Character flaws.

  Thorn St. Croix, stone mage:

  • Her gift makes her open to the minds of all other mages, and therefore incapable of being near any of them without hating them all and probably going insane

  • She is lazy and hasn’t bothered to attend to her mage education or her swordplay.

  • Self pitying, self destructive, little twerp

  • Raised with humans she fears and, though she has won the love and friendship of several humans, she has hidden her true nature from them.

  Man. She’s a mess at the start of the series.

  C.E. Murphy

  Oh, jeez. Well, Joanne Walker is terrified of commitment and re-sponsibility and caring about people, and Margrit Knight thinks she can take on the world without ever asking for help, and Belinda Primrose . . . well. She’s a psychopath. If you want to call that a flaw.

  The Great Satan: Part 1 (Antagonists We Love to Hate)

  Faith Hunter

  Subtitles:

  . . . The Axis of Evil

  Or . . . The enemy of my enemy is my friend

  Or . . . The BBUs (Big Bad Uglies)

  Despite the subtitles, this is not a post about religion or politics. I was brought up Southern and as my mawmaw used to say, "We don’t talk about things like that, Punkin . . ."

  (Which is one reason why slavery, the genocide of the American Indian, and government approved racism were permitted, and a thousand lesser evils took/take place. No one talked about the pink elephant in the room. But really. That is not what this post is about.) This post is about the believable bad guy, the antagonist,
the "quiet guy next door" who keeps to himself, grows beautiful azaleas, and kills children on weekends. Bad Guys in my world are referred to as Big Bad Uglies (BBUs). These antagonists are taken from the concept of conflict: man against nature, man against man, himself, etc.

  Culture shapes how we see evil. The evil character as viewed by someone in ancient Greece is going to be different from the evil character as viewed by someone from the same time period but living in Central America. Their cultures were vastly different so their vision of good and evil (right and wrong, social and antisocial) were different. Similarly, albeit not quite so spectacularly, the readers of different genres will view antagonists differently. The overall literary market leads and/or follows current culture and shapes what kind of BBUs will and won’t work in our books.

  Why should writers of fantasy and UF (urban fantasy) and other fantasy subgenres care about the BBUs of other genres? Because they all have attributes in common, and understanding some of the aspects of other genre’s antagonists create a clearer vision of the antagonist in fantasy.

  Mainstream literary fiction may have no human BBUs. The antagonist in the novel can be mother nature, diamond mines in Africa, ghosts from the beyond, current culture, some aspect of the MC’s personality (the refusal to give up anger, hatred) etc. The antagonist in literary novels can also be the darkness in a human soul, not an entity outside of the MC (main character). Less often is the conflict between humans: man against man.

  My AKA, Gwen, writes mysteries and thrillers. The antagonist in mysteries are formulaic only from the standpoint that they remain unknown to the reader until the end of the novel. One quick note—there are as many subgenres in mystery as there are subgenres in fantasy. I’ll concentrate on the traditional mystery, which is well encapsulated by Agatha Christie novels and the TV show, Murder She Wrote. Someone dies and the non-police sleuth solves the crime. It’s a simple formula where keeping the reader guessing is paramount.

  If we look at the traditional mystery BBU in terms of four specific questions we get:

  1. What makes them work? The traditional mystery BBU may have several motives for the crime committed, but he needs only one motivation. Of course, he must also have opportunity, means, and the will to do evil. Usually this motive is simplistic—money, revenge, money, romance, power, and money. The genre of traditional mystery is perfect for television because the plot isn’t heavily layered and the BBU isn’t multifaceted. A lot of the individual Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows were mysteries cloaked in urban fantasy (UF) clothes. A crime was committed (a human was drained of blood, for instance) and Buffy had to find and dispatch the evil one.

  2. How do we keep them from becoming formulaic? To keep the BBUs from being formulaic, murder mystery writers use two main devices: an unusual form of a murder (being pickled in vinegar, drowning in a vat of beer, exposure to a rare poison, accidentally falling on a stake meant for another vampire), and bait and switch. In bait and switch, they offer the reader two or more possibilities of characters who might be the BBU. All are eliminated through the course of the story, leaving the one guilty BBU. Then they sometimes do one last bait and switch and reveal the true BBU. It’s a puzzle shared by writer and reader.

  3. What mistakes do we as writers make that allow them to become formulaic? BBUs are characters who believe they deserve all the goodies. In traditional mysteries, they believe they have the right to perpetrate whatever crime has been committed. When we writers make it too obvious who the BBU is, and/or make his motivation too multifaceted, the mystery is no longer just a mystery. It is the simple nature of the conflict that makes a novel a traditional mystery.

  4. How do we as readers contribute to the success or failure of the BBU? By picking up a mystery, the reader accepts the premise that a crime will be/has been committed and the bad guy will be identified and caught (sometimes punished) by the book’s end. The genre tells us this will happen. If we read a mystery we are therefore partly responsible for our own willingness to accept the crime committed, no matter how bizarre, and our own suspension of disbelief. If we are smarter than the writer and figure out the puzzle, we won’t enjoy the ride nearly as much. That said, figuring out who the BBU is and beating the writer at his own game is half the mystery’s fun! So it’s up to the reader to play the game that was set in motion by the writer and be willing to be led along his literary puzzle path. If you are thinking about this suspension of disbelief in terms of fantasy, you begin see to why the BBUs in all literary forms have some similar characteristics.

  Thriller BBUs are tougher to write and tougher to analyze because:

  • The level of inherent violence is higher.

  • The BBU often is known to the reader.

  • The BBU often is known to the MC.

  • The pace must be tighter and the BBU is usually on a deadline to achieve his evil ends.

  Thriller BBUs must have strong, believable motivation(s) for the reader to accept the rising suspense and the rising level of violence. I like writing and reading thrillers because the plot can take such delicious twists and turns and the BBU can be fully fleshed out. He becomes a well-rounded, four-dimensional character, unlike a lot of traditional mysteries where the BBU is often a two dimensional character, known mostly by his motivation. Like the MC, the BBU in thrillers can have a past, a current life, personal needs, personal failings and strengths, good and bad aspects to his character. He may rescue cats on Saturday and kidnap the children of politicos in Argentina on Sunday. He may be married, attend religious services, work a fulltime job as a doctor, veterinarian, town councilman, or any other upstanding job.

  And yet he is a BBU. His need to do the evil in the book must be clearly laid out and justified (to him at least), though the reader has to believe the BBU will act in a way contrary to society. If the BBU is a contract-killer, he needs to be humanized, even in the face of the crimes he commits. Hannibal Lector’s justification was that he was smarter than anyone else, so he belonged at the top of the food chain. He was clearly a psychopath with a taste for human flesh. It was enough for the time. But current readers have had a belly full (I know, I can hear the groans) of Hannibal look-alikes. Today’s thriller BBUs have to be more. And this is where the characteristics of thriller BBUs begin to cross the lines into some subgenres of fantasy.

  §§§

  Stuart Jaffe

  Wow. This is a lot to digest. Thank you for taking the time to write this up.

  At one point you were discussing how time/location/culture/etc can alter the nature of a BBU. That made me think of the Russians. Growing up in the 70s and 80s in America, the Russians were often depicted as the BBU (in thrillers especially). But when the Cold War ended, there was no unifying BBU. That lasted for several years until 9/11. Nowadays, Muslim terrorists tend to be the BBU, but because they lack the structured organization that the Russians had (no KGB, for one), modern thrillers have had to alter the way they approach telling the tale. You can’t just "find & replace" the word Russian with Muslim terrorist. The entire story has to be restructured—particularly because of #4—what the reader brings to the experience.

  Faith Hunter

  Stuart, that is so true, and it meant an entire subgenre of mystery disappeared overnight. Robert Ludlum went from absolute king of the thriller genre to nobody. Until that time he was the highest paid thriller writer in the biz. It took him years to figure out how to write in the new world.

  The Great Satan: Part 2

  Faith Hunter

  BBUs of mysteries and of thrillers share many similarities, yet have some distinct differences. Many of the differences can be said to apply to other genres, like the traditional romance genre. The romance BBU usually tends to the simplistic bad guy, the BBU with one motive for his evil and not a lot of character development. As in: "I want the castle and lands and will kill your intended to get them!" Or: "I must have an heir and I have chosen you for the vessel. Mwahahahahaha."

  The plot in romantic suspense is mo
re layered, similar to thrillers, though it’s usually pretty easy to pick apart by an astute reader. Romantic suspense tends more toward the thriller BBU: a lot more development, though seldom is he quite as layered or as developed as in thrillers. After all, the reader wants a little excitement with his cup of romance, not the other way around.

  SciFi, from space opera to first-contact stories like the TV series V, tends to fit into one of the mystery categories. It may be the more simplistic BBUs like in the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold or the BBUs attacking the Earth in Independence Day, or they can be the more multifaceted BBUs of Lost, with its concomitant multilayered (can we say five-dimensional?) plotting. We can start the argument about Lost later. What argument? The: Lost is not SciFi! Yes, it is! No, it isn’t! Yes, it is! . . . that argument.

  Fantasy has its own BBU possibilities, taking us into new realms, with new species and new potential for conflict. (Conflict is what makes a book work. We read for character, but if the character doesn’t have conflict(s) to resolve, it’s not a story. And only conflict creates the emotion reader’s crave). Let’s look at tradi-tional fantasy, which can cover swords and sorcery, epic, coming of age fantasy (the "Look ma! I can do magic! Oops. What’s THAT? Oh, crap! RUN!" books like the first Harry Potter).