Wordcraft -- Rollins on thrillers, part II

Last Monday, bestseller writer James Rollins spent much of his discussion of thrillers last month’s DFW Writers’ Conference describing a story’s hero -- the protagonist. But as important as the hero, is his or her antithesis -- the antagonist, the “dark mirror” of the hero.

(Because of the limitations of the English language, from here on I’ll speak of the antagonist as male, although we can all name a dozen great female antagonists.)

There was weeping and gnashing of teeth among thriller writers, I’ve heard, when the Soviet Union imploded. Because a good antagonist -- a good villain -- is more valuable than rubies. Which is why alternative history writers resurrect Nazi German, the Soviet Union, even Genghis Khan. And why writers of serial suspense only kill their bad guy stand-ins, never the ultimate bad guy, who’s too valuable to waste.

“The creation of the antagonist is as important as the creation of the main character,” Rollins emphasized. In fact, the “antagonist must be smarter, more resourceful,” than the hero. Just as the protagonist is the hero of your story, the antagonist is the hero of his own story. He “should not be bad for the sake of being evil. The antagonist, in his own head, should have a reason for what he does.”

Shakespeare’s Iago says he’s bad because he wants to be? We don’t believe him for a minute -- obviously he’s lying. He’s bad because he’s consumed by jealousy. And how do you tell when a character, good or bad, is lying? Well -- are his lips are moving? We all lie, if only to ourselves.

See last week’s discussion of heroes, write them in reverse, and you’ve got your antagonist.

So now you’ve got your protagonist, your setting, your antagonist -- you’re finally ready to start your story. But where?

“With action,” Rollins says. “In the first sentence, you want to set up a question in the reader’s mind.” Introduce your main character as soon as you can, ideally on the first page.” (Just don’t use a hook so powerful you, as the writer, can’t live up to it.)
And give your protagonist a personal stake in the outcome. “Saving the world is great, but saving your teenage daughter is more personal,” Rollins said.

And while we’re talking about writing tools -- just what is the difference between surprise and suspense? Rollins looks to movies for an example. If two characters are in a restaurant talking about dessert and their table blows up, that’s a surprise. If instead, in the same scene, “you show that ticking time bomb” under the table, that’s suspense, because the readers/viewers now know something the characters don’t know. And worry about it.

And because suspense is holds more powerful interest for readers than surprise, he recommends seventy-five percent suspense to twenty-five percent surprise in a story. That way, not only characters but readers are shocked when the event happens.

(Next Monday -- It’s hard to imagine a writer better versed in either surprise or suspense than Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road and No Country for Old Men, among other books. Guest blogger Dallas-area writer Jim Dolan discusses the Gothic elements in McCarthy’s fiction.)

Wordcraft -- Bones of a novel, part I

image: Wikimedia commons

On the last day of the recent FenCon writing workshop, workshop leader Lou Anders wanted to teach us to write screenplays. Why, some participants must have wondered, would Anders, editor for a press that publishes novels, want to discuss screenplays in a nonscreenwriting workshop?

Because when he taught it to other novelists, he said, their beta readers went from merely sighing to weeping aloud at the climax of their books after putting the principles of Dan Decker’s Anatomy of a Screenplay into practice. And maybe because Anders, who has taken Decker’s classes, is a former screenwriter himself. And he’s the guy you’ve got to please if you want to get published at the Pyr imprint where he’s the editorial director.

Having struggled with the structure -- rather, nonstructure -- of the fantasy novel I pulled out of my files for the workshop, I was willing to learn more. I’d read enough books on screenwriting to be a fan of adapting the three-act structure of screenplays to the longer format of a novel. But I’d struggled not only with the structure but also with character relationships.

Protagonist I could pretty well get, although it helped to hear Anders point out that the protagonist’s desire -- the overriding reason for the story -- must be concrete. “It can’t be ‘happiness,’” Anders said.

Okay, but why, when I picked out a bad guy, didn’t he (or she) always work the way an antagonist is supposed to?

Surprise, Anders said, clicking through the stills from classic films that illustrated his talk. The antagonist is out to prevent the protagonist from achieving his desire, but he’s not necessarily a bad guy. So in the movie Casablanca, the antagonist isn’t the Nazi. He’s “good guy” Victor Laszlo -- because Laszlo and protagonist Rick want the same thing -- Laszlo’s wife, Ilsa.

And when Anders mentioned a third party, the “relationship character,” most of us looked knowing until he told us, this person isn’t necessarily the romantic interest. Instead, the relationship character is the one who accompanies the protagonist on his journey, has often “been there” before, and is the person to whom the protagonist expresses the theme of the story. Or who may express it himself. So in Casablanca, the relationship character isn’t Ilsa. It’s Claude Rains’ Captain Renault, who insists that Rick is a sentimentalist at heart, and who stays with him to the end, even when Ilsa leaves.

Those less steeped in older classics might find Anders’ analysis of the Batman movies more helpful. The relationship character is the Joker -- he’s always there.

Now we had a triangle of character relationships -- protagonist, antagonist and relationship (also known as dynamic) character. Need to expand the list of characters to fill the needs of a novel-length work? Give each member of the trio her own corresponding triangle, remembering that every antagonist and relationship character is the protagonist of her own story, every protagonist is somebody else’s antagonist or relationship character. Happy writing!

(But wait, is that it? Where are the three acts? Coming up next Wednesday, in bones of a novel, part II.)


　

Where did the bad guys go?

I'm reviewing the submissions for a speculative fiction writing workshop -- that's fantasy and science fiction to normal people -- and am awed by the range of imagination in the nineteen submissions.  Not to mention that a few of the stories really knock my prissy little lace-edged Sunday socks off.  But something bothers me -- fewer than half the stories have an antagonist.  That's the person who opposes the protagonist, the main character.  Sometimes we call the main character the hero, although in modern stories he or she isn't usually very heroic.  By traditional story-telling standards, the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist is the heart of the book.  In this case, the workshop was for novel proposals, and the workshop leader asked us to submit a synopsis and the first five thousand words -- about twenty pages.  In more than half, no antagonist either appeared or was named in those first five thousand words or in the synopsis of the entire book.

So if there's no antagonist, what does the main character do?  Clock out and go home early?  Be assured, there is conflict in all of the stories.  Some are in subgenres that don't require a human antagonist -- make that sentient being antagonist.  This is science fiction, after all, where being human is not necessarily a requirement for characters.  In coming of age stories, for instance, the protagonist's struggle to find a place in society can be conflict enough.  A couple of the stories were also murder mysteries, and we all know the murderer isn't supposed to get named until the end of those.  But not even to mention the murder's identity in the synopsis?

Most of the apparently antagonist-free stories had a sort of group baddie -- a conspiracy, a computer network, a cadre of unnamed government agents or clergy.  But these people had no names, no personalities, no single individual who truly hated the poor protagonist's guts and was out to make his or her life miserable, maybe even short.  In real life, conspiracy nuts -- I'm not one, but I don't know about you -- can put faces on their fears.  Sarah Palin, President Obama, bin Laden, maybe even the late Chief Justice Earl Warren.  (You don't really believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone do you?  You do?)

Wondering whether I'm old-fashioned about this antagonist business, I spent a perfectly nice morning with a dozen books published by the company that employs our workshop leader.  I looked for the first reference or appearance of potential antagonists, cutting off the search at page twenty.  In that space, only four -- a third -- hadn't had an antagonist show up.  Even in one of those, the blurb inside the paperback cover promised an opponent for the hero.  Of the remaining three, two were murder mysteries and one was a Crichton-ish techo-thriller, so there's still hope for an antagonist to make an appearance.

It's too late for me or the other workshop participants to change our submissions.  We'll have to let the leader decide whether antagonists are a make or break issue.  But I'm going to plead for writers to consider using antagonists.  Bad guys need jobs, too.  Be warned, of course, that if you invite an antagonist into your story, she'll duct tape you to a chair, steal everything you have and set the house on fire.  But you're a writer.  What else is happening in  your life?