The Girl Who Took The Piss

Spoilers ahead? You bet.

Writers are very often sedentary, even intellectual types. If we didn’t like the world inside our heads better than the one out there, why would we write? Okay, there are notable exceptions. Hemingway liked to fish. Shakespeare preferred being on stage. But I’m just saying there’s a type. Jeans and a sports jacket. Whisky not brandy. Men (and women) of letters are a tribe apart.

This can cause problems, because obviously readers like stories they can believe in, but often writers have unrealistic and pretty unbelievable ideas about how the world works. For example, I was watching a movie based on a Stieg Larsson book. Let me tell you how I’d escape from Colditz if the rules of reality were like in the movie. First I’d attack a guard. He may shoot me a couple of times, but as long as it’s just a handgun I’m okay. Then the guards would carry me out to the cemetery. Maybe the officer even guesses I’m not dead (he’s used handguns before) but he goes ahead and has me buried alive. Maybe a shallow grave, just two or three feet, as it’s all I deserve. He thinks I’m done for. The fool. What he doesn’t know: I have the lid off a coffee tin in my pocket, and I can use that to dig my way to the surface.

It’s a story, you say? It doesn’t have to be realistic? Well, see, it does – realistic within the rules of the world you’ve set up in your story, at least. Road Runner physics is not kosher with Newton, but we understand and accept how the cartoon world works. In a thriller, if you have your hero shot and then buried, the reader is going to be on the edge of their seat. How the hell is she going to get out of this? Maybe her phone..? Her journalist friend could find her by ringing it, locating the sound, and digging her up. But no, the answer is simpler than that: she’s Supergirl. You sap, for ever supposing there would be a clever solution.

You may feel inclined to forgive the poor writer for not knowing about guns and burials and stuff. Again, I can’t agree. Here is a simple experiment that would have told him what he needed to know. Go to a garden centre (as the characters do in the movie at one point, funnily enough) and pick up a bag of soil. Man, that’s heavy, right? Now lie on the ground and get a friend to load a couple of those bags on your chest. Another couple on your head, your arms, your stomach, your thighs, your ankles. Now sit up. You see? You didn’t even have to leave the comfort of your chair; the thought experiment is enough on its own. (Einstein figured out the whole of relativity using thought experiments, so I don’t think it’s too much to ask that a thriller writer might give it a go for the sake of a story.)

Of course, in The Girl Who Played With Fire, the soil isn’t in bags. The character is actually buried in a grave with two or three feet of soil packed on top of her. But wait – she has a cigarette case, thoughtfully given to her, not by Q, but by her girlfriend. So naturally she digs herself out of the grave.

Right, thought experiment number two. Imagine yourself under those fourteen or so bags of soil. And let’s suppose you are equipped with an oxygen tank. And haven’t got any bullets in you, ‘cause after all it was just a revolver and they only do flesh wounds. Okay, you have a trowel in your hand. Now what? You can’t lift your arm. Ah, so you start with a kind of rotating motion of the wrist, working the trowel around. Visualize that. Close your eyes, smell the damp soil, feel the weight. Focus on that hand with the trowel. What’s happening as you work it around?

You don’t need to be Einstein to figure out that you’ll dislodge a bit of soil and another bit will fall to take its place. On the surface, you wouldn’t even see the minute depression created as the soil settles in above where you’re moving the trowel. What you are actually doing here – the only thing you’ll be able to achieve – is shifting the soil so that it’s more compact than it was to begin with. And, without leverage, you’ll never get your arm to the point where you can actually dig upwards – never mind that the soil has nowhere to go, so you can’t create any kind of a hole anyway.

Moles do it? Yes they do. They take soil from in front of them and they pass it back and pack it behind them. They’ve had a few million years of evolution to help out with that, not only with body shape but with tolerance of carbon dioxide too. And that’s tunnelling. You take a mole, shoot it a couple of times, and bury it in your garden, and that sucker is not coming back.

Writers need to put some thought into their stories, because they are asking us to invest our time and our imagination in those stories, to believe what is happening to the characters and to care. Life and death decisions are made, for stakes higher than we see in everyday life, and for the story to thrill us the writer must keep the contract with the reader. They must play fair. Invent a Superman, but invent Kryptonite too – and then stick to your rules.

Here's William Goldman - a writer who always does the work so that his surprises and reversals suspend disbelief without actually burying it alive:

ANNIE

When I was growing up in Bakersfield, my favourite thing in the whole world was to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons for the Chapter Plays.

PAUL

Cliffhangers.

ANNIE

I know that, Mr. Man! They also called them serials. I'm not stupid ya know... Anyway, my favourite was Rocketman, and once it was a no-brakes chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn't cheer. I stood right up and started shouting. This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn't fair! HE DIDN'T GET OUT OF THE COCK-A-DOODIE CAR!

Is it a story about me?

“Once upon a time there was a handsome young prince…”

“Was his name David?” Or (having the art to conceal one’s interest even at a tender age): “Did he have blond hair and a red pedal car?”

That stage doesn’t last long. As we get older, we stop expecting to be cast in the starring role, but we do want to be poured into the skin of the main character. No longer an avatar of our everyday selves, they become a persona we adopt. A channel for us to vicariously live another life.

The first thing an author has to think about, ahead of making a lead character likeable (which is overrated) or interesting (which is underrated) is to make him or her relatable. Without that, we can’t identify with his predicament. And if we’re always watching from the outside we’re never going to care.

Humans empathize, but they also fear otherness – a paradox for the writer. To make an interesting story, you must take the reader on a strange journey, in the company of the kind of character who would undertake that journey. Yet we need to see enough of ourselves in him or her to start with, or we won’t connect.

Does that mean the lead character has to be exactly like us? There certainly are Everyman figures in some of the most powerful stories. Think of Neo, too frightened to get out onto that window ledge. Or most of Hitchcock’s hapless heroes. But most of the time if a writer starts off with a character who’s just like the audience, it's with with the sole intention of whisking them out of Kansas as quickly and rudely as possible.

Interesting stories deliver their relatability in unexpected forms. In Essential Killing, Vincent Gallo plays a Taliban insurgent. What’s relatable about that? He’s running for his life! Another movie starring Gallo, Buffalo 66, introduces his character in a way I can guarantee everyone on the planet will relate to. If you haven’t seen it, take a look.

A story begins with something we can relate to and takes us towards a place we aspire to be. From farm boy to Jedi Master – or Man of Steel. Few of us prefer stories where the hero stays exactly like us throughout. Mostly we're willing to make some kind of imaginative leap to get into the character’s skin. Chances are plucky young Luke Skywalker was just a bit too much of a sap to be your hero of choice. Many found the bad-boy sneer and beat-up charm of Han Solo more to their taste. There was a hero in need of redemption. And more importantly he was cool.

Relatability means not just like us, but like we’d like to be.

If your audience is small and has very specific interests, you can trade on their fear of the Other to create a strong identity they will eagerly embrace. For mumblecore fans, the world is divided into twentysomething, white, middle-class slackers – and then there's everybody else, but they don’t count.

Yes, that’s a shockingly unfair and sweeping generalization just to illustrate a point. Here’s another: for sci-fi geeks, the hero simply needs to be an elf, vampire or hitman. Preferably all three. And clad in black leather. That’s all they're going to need. Cool is their revenge on the world that’s excluded them, and it’s sufficient to provide the hero with all the relatability he or she needs. Writing for that audience, you may not even need what Blake Snyder called a Save the Cat scene designed to ease us into empathy. A bar full of lowlifes, the door smashes down, and the vampire manhunter comes in with shotguns blazing – with that first scene the geeks are hooked, their popcorn forgotten. These are folks that don’t need any foreplay.

If you’re not an urban fantasy geek and what I just said makes you feel smug – don’t be. The rest of us are just as shallow. Often the only ingredient necessary for a character the audience wants to relate to is to make them a handsome prince or beautiful princess. There’s a reason that movie stars get paid a tenth of the production budget, and it’s not usually because you’d kick them out of bed. A recent movie review criticized Luc Besson for casting too beautiful an actress in the part of Adèle Blanc-Sec. Oh, wake up and smell le café. That would be valid only if the intended audience was a tiny hardcore of bande-dessinée fans (like yours truly). Monsieur Besson didn’t invent our preconceptions, he just has to cater to them. Personally I prefer the characterful and far from fragile Adèle of the comics, but I can see why a director with his eye on the broader market can't afford to think that way.

In Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman describes how he accidentally stumbled on the importance of relatability when he was asked to write an opening credits scene for his movie Harper. It’s a masterclass in making us care about a hero.

Now get what I’m saying. They don’t have to be likeable. Remember the parable of poor, well-meaning, young Luke Skywalker and shoot-first-and-never-mind-the-questions Han Solo. Jack Ember, the hero of Mirabilis, has a chip on his shoulder. The scene early on where he gets promoted, he is basically being as mouthy as hell and deserves everything he gets, good and bad. I see Jack as a young John Lennon. That way, he feels more real and hopefully you find his flaws make him more relatable. If I’d made him passively hard-done-by, a sentimental working-class hero wringing his cloth cap while gazing in envy at the uncaring privileged – well, ugh.

Of course, I didn’t write myself a memo: “Must make Jack relatable.” I prefer writing him that way. But I did stop to consider that the reader doesn’t know anything about my character to start with. I can’t just assume you’ll empathize with him. It’s my job as writer to create some scenes that show you why you should.

You may say, “Oh, but I just write for myself.” Sure, so does every writer worth reading. But unless you’re writing fanfic, you want to reach out to an audience of people who aren't necessarily like you. You aren’t just preaching to the choir. A craftsman finds a way to connect, not to willfully seal themselves in a niche and damn everybody outside. If you do that, you’re not an artist, you’re a cultist.

Relatability isn’t hard. It’s what we all strive to project every time we meet someone new. It’s only in zombie films that the entire human race wants to shoot each other the moment legal restraints are removed. In reality we desire that spark of connection more than any other, so we don’t stand sulkily in the corner expecting to be liked. We reach out. We engage. Assuming you’re not psychotic or prejudiced against the other person, you’ll try to find common ground. And that’s all you need to do with your lead character – just remember they are meeting the reader for the first time. And first impressions are the ones that count.

National Graphic Novel Writing Month - part 3

Okay, enough chit chat. If you're taking on National Graphic Novel Writing Month then you'll have already rolled your sleeves up and got stuck in. So we'll be running some practical advice over the next week or so - starting off with how you make your lead character(s) compelling enough to keep the reader's attention through 48 pages or more.

There are several techniques you can use to make people care about your character:

• make them resourceful
• make them brave
• have them be smart and/or funny
• show them doing a good deed ("save the cat")
• show them being unfairly treated (“kill the cat”)
• show them standing up against unfairness or injustice
• show them doing something we can relate to

There's nothing wrong with a character having more than one of these qualities! Just don't get lazy and have the character merely be strong or lucky. A smart character like Odysseus has to convince us with his solutions to obstacles in the story, whereas if he just punched his way out of trouble like Ajax then we know that's at the arbitrary whim of the author.

My favorite example of the last bullet point on the list (simple everyday relatability) is the opening scene of the movie Harper, as described by William Goldman in Adventures in the Screen Trade.

It's more important to make a character interesting than to make them likable. Very often you don't want them to start out likable because their redemption may be the point of the story. (Or even their downfall - think of Macbeth or Richard III.) Leaving aside stories, think about the people you know in real life. Isn't it true that you spend more time talking about the person who behaves outrageously or amusingly or unexpectedly or brilliantly, than you do paying attention to that really, really nice friend who is just a little bit boring? Come on, you can admit it - we're professionals here!

How do you make a character interesting? Simple. Show us the side of them that we can see will inevitably lead to conflict. The anticipation of that, and the desire to see how the conflict will play out, will keep your reader riveted to the page.

The illustration above is from my graphic novel Billy Graves, of which you can read the opening half of the first act online with fantastic art by Dan Strange. More about creating compelling comics characters on the Mirabilis blog. And there are truckloads of good general writing tips on Nail Your Novel.

Slaying the monster

Here's an early post revisited more than a year down the line. I thought I'd update it just to show the full evolution of a page from my scrappy sketches to the finished work of brilliance as crafted by Leo and Nikos.Like a lot of writers, I spend more time than is healthy musing on (read: fretting over) the whole creative process. And it always helps when you find something that reminds you other writers find that a long, hard road too - at least if they're doing it right. Thank God for a guy like William Goldman, who's always ready to jump into the foxhole and put a supporting arm around your shoulders. Which Lie Did I Tell? - that's my Gideon bible.

While obsessing about dialogue, which in comics has different requirements from both prose and screen, I came across this quote from Deborah Moggach on adapting Pride & Prejudice into a movie script:

'Film acting is all about reacting. It’s about the unsaid, and it relies on tapping into the heart of the story. For instance, in the opening scene, where the Bennet family is aflutter with news of Mr Bingley’s arrival, Elizabeth has little to say on the page. In the film, however, we can’t take our eyes off her because the camera picks up her reactions and holds on her stillness in the middle of a busy room.

'Films are deeply connected to the subconscious, and screenplays reflect this. It’s all subtext, and a good director and actors know what a scene is really saying. When Elizabeth bumps into Darcy at Pemberley they have the most stilted, dull exchange. “I thought you were in London.” “No, I’m not.”

'Watching it is almost unbearable, however, because they’re both in torment. Their faces betray their feelings. We’ve come on a long journey with them by this time, and the scene is poignant with what is not put into words. A novelist is terribly tempted to over-write a scene.'

That's the reason I draw my little sketch layouts before finalizing the dialogue. For us control freaks it's actually better than movie making, because you get to look at how your dialogue is working and you have total freedom to change it.

And then often I change bits of dialogue again when the art comes back from Leo, because he will have put in some nuances of performance that means a line of dialogue isn't needed after all.

Mirabilis is pretty heavy on dialogue compared with some comics. We mean it to be. We want this epic of ours to be a read with plenty of meat to it. A broad canvas kind of story with a big cast of characters and the room to introduce them all. We intend for it to be a series you'll keep and return to many times, each time finding something you didn't notice before. It's not the kind of comic you read once and forget.

And on that note we hope to have some very exciting news for you in the next couple of weeks. Don't go away.

Black dogs and blank pages

Confidence is the big issue this week. Of course, self-doubt has always been one of the barrier gods. Graham Greene said that a writer is one who knows the long despair of doing nothing well. As I move from writing Mirabilis to a completely different set of characters, genre and indeed century for rom-com Sweet, I wake up each day to find that long despair all ready for me. I have to find the speech rhythms, the new pace and style this story demands. It has to be funny, for God's sake! Consequently I'm like an actor stumbling ill-prepared into a role. The clothes don't fit. The walk is wrong. I have no business being out at the front of the stage when I'm barely fit to be a spear carrier.

The trouble is, when you’re writing, what you’re doing is always new. A blank page awaits at the start of every day. The difficulty is not in evoking each scene, not the words themselves. A spaceship approaches Europa, for instance: “The faint light of Jupiter fell across the ice, giving the landscape the look of long-weathered mountains seen in an Arctic dusk.” See, the painting bit is easy. But coming up with the scene in the first place, that’s the killer. That’s why, though I am physically capable of writing, say, twenty thousand words a day, I’m content if I get even a tenth of that down in the form of good prose fiction.

Take the first scene in Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Nick walks around his room leaving a funny phone message for his ex. That’s our introduction to both the character and his backstory. As a writing choice, it’s brilliant because it’s so simple and understated. It does the job perfectly. Okay, now just imagine how many scenes the writer (Lorene Scafaria) might have tried. Her pacing up and down probably wore a hole in the carpet. Doing all the work to make it look easy – that’s what a writer has to do every day. It’s not just a matter of sticking words on a page.

So… boo hoo, right? Well, I’m not looking for sympathy. Writing is preferable to digging ditches for a living. (Maybe – though who in the world chooses between those two options?) I’m explaining it because I think it’s interesting. No other job I’ve done is like it. Designing computer games, for example. There you’re faced with a blank slate and, yes, you need to be creative. But it’s a kind of directed creativity, more similar to solving problems in engineering or physics than to writing fiction. Once you’ve come up with the concept for a game like Spore or The Sims (take a bow, Will Wright) you don’t have that agonizing what-the-hell-now feeling. You pretty much immediately know what problems you have to solve and you already have a bunch of possible solutions in mind. Writing fiction, by comparison, is more like being dropped off in the Empty Quarter without a map. There are no routines, no algorithms, to get you out of trouble. Everything is from first principles.

Maybe I’m just making it difficult for myself. Deciding to write a rom-com like Sweet when my stock-in-trade is fantasy adventure would certainly fit the bill. But I’m heartened by the fact that most writers have chronicled their struggles with the demon of self-doubt. My wife Roz talked a bit about Steinbeck’s dark nights while writing Of Mice and Men. And I am always heartened by the fellow-feeling expressed by clever, creative, multiple Oscar-winner William Goldman when he says that half the time it takes him to write a screenplay is spent just building the confidence to do it:

You go into your office, and you know it's gonna suck, and you have hope. You hope you'll have a good day. Sometimes you have a great half-hour or an hour, and then you think, "What did I do that was wrong?" It's not a logical profession, and I think if you knew what you were doing, your career would be going much better. But we don't. It's a crapshoot. And we all have these terrible insecurities. I don't think anybody any good says, "It's gonna be terrific."

Goldman is right, of course, and that’s why I’m not grumbling. The stuff that comes easily is nothing to be proud of. Creative arts are like lifting weights. If it doesn’t hurt a bit, you’re not doing it properly. And when you come out the other side, when you’re not writing but having written… Then the self-doubt is all gone and you are filled with pride, if not outright arrogance. You made something totally new. A story that people will care about. Something that can move them to laughter and (if you’re really talented) to tears.

Above, some character studies by Leo for Sweet. Which I’ll now get back to with renewed enthusiasm, my self-doubt having been exorcised by this post. In fact, I've got a killer idea for the opening scene. I might just be a genius after all...