A Deep Bench of Tertiary Characters

I have to confess, there's a small part of me that cringes whenever I realize I need another character.  Or characters.  Especially a character with a name.  Because I know, each named character adds a new dimension of complexity, and with that, the risk of losing a reader who doesn't want to keep track of too many characters. 

Usually, such a character first comes into the story on a purely functional basis: I need someone for Colin to talk to in this scene.  I need Jeric to have a peer group among the Tarian initiates. I need Lesk to be building up his own crew of neighborhood flunkies.  Serving the mechanical needs of the story, keeping the gears moving.  This is fine, of course, but in and of itself, rarely dynamic. 

So I put myself in the frame of mind of my theatre roots: make every role interesting.  Think in terms of casting: what would a great character actor do with this part?*  How can I make it more than just functional, but without going off on a tangent that has little to do with the rest of the story? 

On top of that, it's often in these tertiary characters that the biggest surprises of the writing process is born.  Something that starts as functional blossoms into a more crucial role.

One of my favorite examples of this comes from Deep Space Nine**: Damar.  Damar first shows up in the 4th season episode "Return to Grace", and his purpose is entirely functional.  He's the guy on the bridge of Dukat's ship who speaks, so someone can say those "Target at four hundred thousand, sir" and "Phasers ready" lines.  He's the personification of Dukat's whole crew, and little else.  But over the course of the series, he stayed at Dukat's right hand as Dukat became the de jure leader of Cardassia under Dominion rule.   And once Dukat's madness removed him from that position, there was Damar: now the puppet in charge, and the slow cost that had on his soul became a key storyline in the final season.  

Not too shabby for a character that starts out as purely functional.

And that, I think, is the key aspect when bringing any new named character into the mix: investing them with the potential to become something so much more.  I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've started a new scene and realized that the best choice of POV character for that scene is someone I hadn't even considered existing when I drafted the outline. 

The other key aspect?  Keep the names dynamic.  I know when I'm reading a book-- especially a sci-fi or fantasy book-- and there's some minor character named Vesslin and another one named Vettlan I am going to mix up which one is which.  Heck, when I was twelve and tried to reader Lord of the Rings for the first time, I couldn't keep Sauron and Saruman straight.  They were both bad guys with S-r-n name constructions.***

Right now on Way of the Shield I'm working on a scene where a functional character exists to bring a main character from Point A to Point B-- in a literal, "get him on a carriage and deliver him somewhere" way.  In writing the scene, I asked myself, "Who is this guy, and how did he get this job?", and in asking that, I found a common thread between him and the main character in the scene, which then helps build his story, and does a bit of worldbuilding work in the process.

Again,  not too shabby for a character that starts out as purely functional.

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 *- An interesting effect of the success of the Harry Potter movies is how it managed to get some of Britain's greatest actors to do little more than oddly-dressed cameos. 
**- I do use Star Trek examples a lot, don't I?
***- Tolkien's habit of giving the same character multiple names didn't help me much either.

Perils of the Writer: Villains Made of Straw

One of the easiest traps a writer can fall into is making their villains just be wrong.  Especially if your story has some kind of political slant to it.

I mean, sure, it makes things nice and simple for you: bad guys are bad, so good guys win by being right and good and awesome.  High fives!  Also: boring.  Since your bad guys only exist to prop up arguments that you, the author, think are stupid, you'll frame the argument in the easiest way to knock down.  And since your protagonist's arguments are just so filled with your righteous rightness, they never face up to a real challenge. 

That's really easy to knock some holes into.

Case in point:  I recently was reading a handful of reviews for a SF book that takes a decidedly political stance.  There were, to be fair, many 5-star reviews, written by people who share that political stance, because the book validates their worldview.  But there were also many 1-star reviews, hammering the holes in the heroes political system, and how the bad guys were made to look like incompetent buffoons propping up an idiotic regime. 

Another case in point: Heavily armed Stormtroopers defeated by teddy bears with spears.

Yet another: The West Wing is now streamable on Netflix, and the strawmen don't get much more scarecrow-like than Gov. Ritchie, the Republican candidate Pres. Bartlet faces in his re-election campaign.  Ritchie is a stuffed shirt, and you learn all you need to know, all there is to know, in his response to hearing about a Secret Service agent killed in a random bodega robbery: "Boy, crime.  I don't know."  This is a guy who literally has nothing to say.   It sets up a satisfying slapdown*, but it doesn't create an adversary that's worthy of Jed Bartlet.

That's the key: nothing makes your heroes more interesting than giving them who is not only worthy of them, but who also can make a cogent argument explaining that they just might be right.  Give me a real, detailed antagonist that you, the writer, can believe in as much as your hero.  Then you've delivered something interesting.

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*- "For the record, 'Boy, crime, I don't know' is when I decided to kick your ass."

Wide Sprawling Epic Casts

It's the nature of sci-fi and fantasy to go big, and big means a cast of "main" characters in the dozens, and hundreds of minor characters.  And, as much as I love that sort of thing, it is in this very aspect that a lot of said big, sprawling epics just lose me completely.

Because the writer doesn't necessarily get me to give a good damn about who these people are.

I'm going to pick on a specific example, in that it was one that didn't work for me, personally.  I know there are plenty of people who love it, of course, but I'm not one of them: The Honor Harrington Series.  Now, I liked the first book fine, and several of the subsequent books.  But over time it lost me, and I think a large part of that was the enormous sprawl.  The shear volume of characters involved is incredible, and I salute anyone who can keep track of all that.   Frankly, there wasn't a character I really connected to, really felt endeared to, besides Honor and Chief Harkness.  Chief Harkness is a minor character, but he was a lot of fun, and in In Enemy Hands, he plays a key role.*   Whenever one of those two characters were center stage, I enjoyed things.  When they weren't, not so much.  And even though Honor is the main character, she is not center stage a lot. 

The following book, Echoes of Honor, is structured in alternating sections-- one section details Honor, Harkness and others on a prison planet, the other section just... other stuff.  Slogging through those sections was rough, because I just didn't care about who was on the ruling council of Manticore or the People's Republic (especially since those people were A. relatively disposable, B. easily interchangeable and C. by design, horrible and stupid.)  Now, of course, in both cases, these are the "bad guys" of the novels, for all intents, and you're not supposed to "like" them.  But you should be able to enjoy them, and I didn't find any of that.  And, frankly, many of the characters I was supposed to "like" I didn't find particularly engaging, either. 

So, for me, HUGE parts of that book, as well as many other books in that series, lacked any hook.  These people could live or die, and I really didn't care, as long as they never had another meeting. 

Now, why didn't I care?  Was this my fault as audience, or the writer's fault?  I can take some of the blame, and I don't want to attack Mr. Weber in any way, but I think a lot of it has to lie on his shoulders.  As for why, I think it ties into what I talked about on Monday-- when it comes down to it, I don't think he believes in his antagonists.  By this, I mean, he sets them up as strawmen to fail.  When they argue their positions, it's usually a flawed, if not downright stupid argument.  They enact plans that the narrative tells us is doomed to failure.  They're not just playing checkers while Honor and her allies play chess; they're just flinging the checker pieces at her king and don't understand why that doesn't mean they win.

I'm exaggerating for effect, but the point stands: they aren't people, at least I don't feel the author believes in them as people.  And if they aren't people, I can't invest in them. 

And this ties into where I was going wrong with Shield.  My two main antagonists were weak.  One was a strawman of wrongness; whatever your personal political leanings are, imagine an absurdist, reductive take on that.  And the other one was a cynical user of the first one.  He might as well have a tattoo on his forehead: "I AM USING YOU AS MEANS TO MY OWN END".  That's not what I needed to make Shield an interesting book.  I needed these guys to be the heroes of their own stories.

One of my favorite bits in Thorn of Dentonhill involves only the antagonists.  It works, in my humble opinion, because I did my best to make them their own characters.  I haven't-- yet-- succeeded on that same level with my Shield antagonists.  Maybe I need to figure out what's the story is that they are the hero of. 


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*- But even still, I had to go look that up.  The fact that the name of the character I liked the most who wasn't the title character wasn't in my brain signifies something.  It might be my failing memory.

Analyzing Flawed Arc Structure, Part 2

As I mentioned earlier, I'm analyzing a flawed structure as part of an exercise to improve my own writing, specifically using the third "Xindi Arc" season of Star Trek: Enterprise.

Now, let's look at the beginning section of the arc, the first third.  This would consist of the second-season finale "The Expanse" as prologue, and the first eight episodes of the third season: "The Xindi", "Anomaly", "Extinction", "Rajiin", "Impulse", "Exile", "The Shipment" and "Twilight".

In three-act parlance, which I'm not a big fan of, this is all Act I.  And, as far as I'm concerned, that's part of the flaw here: these episodes mostly serve to put the pieces on the board, and there really aren't that many pieces.

The Prologue set-up of "The Expanse" does its job relatively effectively, but it doesn't quite hold up to scrutiny.  Earth is the victim of a Pearl Harbor/9-11 style surprise attack, killing seven million people.  The attack comes from a single-occupant probe of unknown origin.  Here's where part of the problem comes in: rather than have Starfleet actual figure out its origins, at least in part, answers are  handed to Capt. Archer by an exposition fairy from the future.  And said answers, as they usual are from poorly conceived exposition fairies, do little more than nudge in the right direction.  In other words, the information they gain could have been gained in a less clunky way, and have been just as useful.  But "The Expanse" sets the tone, puts a name to the adversary (The Xindi) and a place to find the (The Delphic Expanse).  The Expanse, itself, is set up as the equivalent of the "Here Be Dragons" part of the space map: physical laws don't work right there, and it's so dangerous even Vulcans and Klingons steer clear of it.

The true "Act I" of those eight episodes serve to establish a few core elements: the dangers of the Expanse (tied to bizarre spacial anomalies), which may be connected to a mysterious sphere; the stakes for the crew of the Enterprise, personally and globally; the Xindi themselves.  The problem is, only three of these episodes really effectively achieve these establishment goals: Anomaly, The Shipment and Twilight.  The key points in play in this section are tied to what the crew needs and wants.  They want to find the Xindi, but they really don't know where to start looking on once in The Expanse. They need to keep the ship safe from the spacial anomalies they constantly run into in The Expanse.  For the latter, there is a running subplot involving Trellium-D, a substance that will protect the ship, but that solution isn't acceptable: Trellium-D is toxic to T'Pol, so they can't use it.

This ties into the only real character arc in this section: what is Capt. Archer willing to sacrifice to save the Earth?*  His morality takes a bit of a pounding here, at one point torturing a captive pirate to get the information he needs.  He's also willing to pimp out Ens. Sato to a mysterious alien in "Exile", though that's a sacrifice Hoshi volunteers for.  He spends much of these episodes at the end of his rope, because he really doesn't see the mission as anything more than a ridiculous long shot.  IF they can survive the Expanse, and IF they can even find the Xindi, then they'll still be outnumbered and outgunned.  This comes to a head in The Shipment, where they find a Xindi refining facility.  The materials made at this facility were used in the weapon of the initial attack, and Tucker, Reed and Hayes are all ready to start blowing things up.  Archer, instead, decides to get to know one of the Xindi, and reaches an understanding with a decent man who didn't know what his materials were being used for.  Two key things accomplished: The Xindi aren't All Bad, and Archer moral compass veers back towards where Trek's is supposed to be.

The final step in this part is in Twilight, a psuedo-time travel story that nails home the stakes of failure: Earth will be destroyed if the Enterprise doesn't succeed in their mission, which they don't due to Capt. Archer being incapacitated by on of the spacial anomalies.  It is a classic Trek "reset button", but one with a point.  It doesn't just give us craziness and then undo it.

Even still, the big problem with the arc in this part is it mostly just meanders.  It takes eight episodes to do the work of three or four.**  Extinction, Rajiin and Exile are largely pointless, serving only to provide us with funny make-up, cheap titillation and a poor Beauty-and-the-Beast homage, in that order.

When it comes down to it, the first section only really does the work of the first two parts of the Twelve Part Arc Structure, when it should be doing the first four.  Once the situation is Established in The Expanse/The Xindi/Anomaly, we don't get back on point until The Shipment/Twilight to incite the plot to really start moving.  That aimless wandering in between those points is where an audience is lost. 

Next up: the mushy middle of the Xindi Arc.

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*- The other character arcs set-up here are essentially minor bits of business.  Cmdr. Tucker is assigned the personal loss from the initial attack (his sister was among the seven million), but this mostly serves as an excuse to push him romantically towards T'Pol.  T'Pol's main conflict is resolved in the prologue: the Vulcan High Command don't want her on the mission, but she resigns from the High Command to stay on board.  Of the minor four members of the main cast, only Lt. Reed is given anything: bristling against Maj. Hayes, of the newly added MACO forces.      
**- I'll allow that "Impulse" does a fair amount of work of increasing personal stakes, and ties into what the Enterprise can do to keep themselves safe from the anomalies.

Villains with Clear Motives

This weekend I watched last year's premaquel* of The Thing.  It was... fine.  That's really all I can say about it.  It achieved its goals, given that its goal was to essentially be a widely release fanfilm about what happened at the Norwegian camp before the events in John Carpenter's The Thing. 

Now, I should say, Carpenter's movie is possibly one of my favorite movies of all time.  I don't get obsessive about it-- I really can't recall the actual characters' names**, nor am I invested in Who Got Turned When. But it's a fun thriller with damn cool practical creature effects, and it's a movie I can happily re-watch again and again.****

 But, that praise given, I've always been puzzled by the Thing itself, what its motivations are, what it's trying to accomplish, and how its actions further those accomplishments.  These questions pop out even more in the premaquel. 

For those who've never seen either (or don't recall the details), the creature has been frozen in the antarctic ice for millennia, and once its out, it's eating the occasional person or dog, and then mimicking them.  Why does it do this?  Because it can, of course.  That, and to blend in.  Until any particular iteration of The Thing doesn't feel like blending in anymore, and then it becomes all tentacles and teeth.

But this brings up questions: what does The Thing want?  There's some lip service to the idea that it might want to get to civilization so it can make all 4 billion***** of us into tasty cakes.  But I don't think that's the plan, because if it was, it makes terrible decisions.  (In the 2011 version, at one point there's a helicopter taking off to McMurdo station, and the thingified person in there goes into tentacle mode, making the chopper crash just a little ways out.  So "getting away" is hardly the plan.)  In terms of what it does, getting the hell off of Earth might be the real plan, since in the remake one iteration goes back to the ship and powers it up, and in the Carpenter version, one iteration is building a ship in the tunnels under the camp. 

The thing (ha!) that always jumps out at me is that The Thing is clearly intelligent, rather than a reactive animal, and in mimicking humans, is capable of holding conversation as a mimicked human.  So you would think that, once confronted it could go, "Look, I just want to go home.  Sorry about the mess." or words to that effect.  But it never does.  Once someone is revealed as being Thingified, they just go into full-on monster mode.  No more talking, no more mimicking-- just tentacles and teeth and SMASH EVERYTHING.  Which looks cool, but it reads more as Angry Alien Badger rather than Intelligent Alien.

Now, one can excuse some of that with the word "Alien": it doesn't think like us, so we can't understand how it thinks.  And that's fine.

But for villains that are human, you need clear answers.  What they want, why they want it, and how what they are doing helps to achieve that.  The minute you have them do something bad just "because their evil", you've lost something critical in the storytelling.

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 *- It's a prequel! It's a remake!  It's kind of both!
**- It's pretty much Kurt Russell, Wilfred Brimley, David Keith***, that guy from LA Law, and a bunch of other guys.
***- Or is it Keith David?  I always mix up which is which.
****- And, as of this writing, it's streamable on Netflix!  Just saying.
*****- This was 1982, after all.