Writing Interiority: Too Much vs. Too Little

Recently I talked to some groups of writers about interiority, and the importance of balancing it out in stories. As I've been thinking about the topic some more, I wanted to do a follow-up post on the problems that arise when it is unbalanced.

(Not to mention it also seemed like a good follow-up to my recent post on the internal plotline.)

But first, let's go over what interiority is.

What is Interiority?

Interiority is everything that happens inside your character--typically the viewpoint character.

This includes the character's thoughts (introspection) and feelings that aren't externally observable, like a speeding heart or dry mouth.

Interiority is the internal experience of the character.

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Appealing to Wonder Powerfully in the Modern Age

You know that emotion we almost never talk about, unless you work in the speculative fiction industries? That awe-inspiring feeling you get when you see something new and cool and intriguing? It's like the way you felt when you first learned about star life cycles and dark matter or dinosaurs and the extinct Tasmanian tiger or studied how dreams and sleep affect our brains and how there are cases of people being hit on the head and mysteriously being able to speak an entirely different language after.

That's wonder.

But the way we perceive and when we feel wonder today isn't the exact same as it was even one or two hundred years ago, which is why I would argue that appealing to wonder powerfully today can be surprisingly different than it was before.

Some critics in the writing world have a problem with fantasy because "anything can happen." For those of us who read fantasy today, we'd probably argue against that statement. If anything can happen, then, of course, there is no tension. Almost always, fantasy needs to stick to its own rules and boundaries.

When discussing magic systems, Brandon Sanderson talks about how there is soft magic--magic that is not explained--and hard magic--magic that has specific rules. He's really great at explaining when and how to use which successfully, and you can read that article here.

Likewise, I would probably say there is soft wonder, and there is what I'll call medium wonder (I don't think I'd call it hard)

Soft wonder is when something wondrous is nearly completely unexplained or not understood. It might be a magical doorway into another world. It might be creatures we've never seen before. When I think of extreme soft wonder, I think of things like Disney's Alice in Wonderland--where things are strange and fantastical, but we have and get very little knowledge for why they are that way, how they came to be, or how they actually work. This extreme soft wonder was exactly the reason why I didn't like the movie as a child. It all just felt weird and had no reason to it. I know other people who still hate it. To be honest, when watching Alice in Wonderland as a child, I didn't actually feel a strong sense of wonder at all.

Earlier this year, I was watching The Men Who Built America: Frontiersmen. If you haven't heard of The Men Who Built America, you're missing out, because the series is freaking amazing (learned more significant information from it than my history classes combined. And when I saw Hamilton, I explained it to family members as The Men Who Built America as a musical, although they cover completely different people of U.S. history.) I like the original series better than Frontiersmen, but anyway . . . I was watching Frontiersman when I learned that Americans were afraid to go out West because of what may be out there, and even President Thomas Jefferson believed that mammoths and dinosaurs roamed those areas. In fact, that was actually one of the reasons he sent Lewis and Clark on the expedition, to look for mammoths. Later, he also sent Clark on another expedition strictly to collect "animal bones" (fossils).

Sounds really silly right? The president thought dinosaurs were in the West? But here's the thing. In modern times, we can't really relate to how people felt about traveling west. Today there is almost no frontier we haven't uncovered, and even those we haven't we still have a whole backlog of science and knowledge and a whole buttload of imagined concepts from movies, books, and video games that we've been exposed to. It hasn't always been that way. For most of the world's history, most people weren't even educated, let alone had access to knowledge at their fingertips. Most people couldn't even read.

In Jefferson's time, the concept that an animal could go extinct had only begun to surface. For most of the world's history, most of the feelings of wonder people felt were soft wonder experiences, because so much wasn't understood, and they didn't have the access to the knowledge we have now. Perhaps back in the day, you could write story after story of purely soft magic--of things just happening magically--and it was wondrous because that's how life was.

If you look at the best-selling, most popular fantasy today, I think you'll find that almost none of them are pure soft wonder. They may have soft aspects, but the fantastic elements are understood, somewhat. I'd argue that this is because the way human beings experience wonder today is different than it has been in times past.

A story with things that just are and just happen over and over isn't actually that interesting because it's so removed. Have you seen movie trailers like that? You know the ones. Where as you're watching the movie trailer, you are seeing wondrous thing after wondrous thing all in CGI glory and you can tell within seconds that the blockbuster-budget movie has no depth because all it focuses on is (what's trying to be) wondrous visuals? And it seems to have no great story or takeaway value? I could name a few specifically, but I think I won't.

We have so much access to knowledge, information, even imaginary concepts and ideas--far more than any civilization before us. We've seen aliens imagined twenty different ways. We've seen twelve different magic systems. We've seen 50 different magical worlds. When and how we experience wonder is different than it has been in times past.

So what makes something feel wondrous to the modern audience? Is it simply bombarding the audience with magical setting after setting, magical creature after creature, spell after spell?

No. Powerful wonder today is most likely to happen when audiences understand the magical somewhat.

Some element of wonder will always be the unknown, unexplained, and unexperienced--that's why it's wonder. But we feel wonder most powerfully when we understand something somewhat. Because that's how we usually experience it today. I mean, is there really anything in CGI that could really wow us anymore? Probably not much. (One I would argue for would be Interstellar because it provided the first ever visual example of what a real black hole looks like--but it was wondrous largely because it was based on actual knowledge and science.)

Sometimes when we are working with fantasy, we think the less someone understands about something, the more fantastical. But that's usually not the case. Furthermore, when we don't understand anything, we don't have enough context to feel tension which makes it difficult to become invested in the story.


Think about it. For us, wonder typically happens at this threshold between what we know (either through knowledge, understanding, or experience) and what we don't know. It's the cutting edge or the gateway to the unknown built off the known. It's something we understand that is somehow broken (the theory of relativity) or something we understand to an extent (dark matter).

An alternative is to work backwards. To encounter something we do not understand or relate to at all, but then to discover what it does relate to, how it works, its "rules" and boundaries, its history or how it came to be. That's what's interesting.

The spells in Harry Potter wouldn't be half as interesting if they didn't have boundaries, if they didn't relate to Latin. Middle-earth wouldn't be as meaningful to us if we didn't have its rich history. His Dark Materials wouldn't have been so riveting if its magic wasn't cutting edge. It's medium wonder.

Something entirely new and never seen before, doesn't need to be understood because it's so different than people's experiences--what they were even capable of experiencing, knowing, and imagining. (Previous audiences)

vs.

Cool concepts, new concepts, twisted concepts, that we understand somewhat. This gives tension. This makes the subject more wondrous for the modern audience.

You'll notice that in Disney's more recent Alice in Wonderland they incorporated more structure and boundaries--making more sense of what before was nonsense. This better suits the modern audience.

At least that is what I'm considering. Remember, today's generation of Millennials is the most educated generation of all time. How people experience wonder today is vastly different than in times past.

Wattpad

Hi everyone, over the weekend I set up a Wattpad account, so that I can post my writing tips on there. If any of you have an account and would like to follow or be friends, I'd appreciate it so that I don't have zero followers listed. Here it is.

Instagram

Likewise, I'm trying to revive my Instagram account for my blog, so if you'd like to follow me there, you can.

In any case, thank you so much for reading this post!

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8 Common Pacing Problems

"Pacing" refers  to how fast or slow a scene, chapter, or overall novel is relayed to the audience. It essentially refers to the speed of the story. Some stories have more of a leisurely pace. Others may be fast-paced. In most stories, you will have slower paced scenes and faster paced scenes. When to use what depends on the story you are telling, but one thing is clear, pacing can have problems just like any other writing element.

When I started working in this industry, I figured that problems with pacing mainly related to how many words were being used to convey something--too much or too little. And surely (I thought) fixing slow pacing meant we should always "cut to the chase" (as they would say when making movies in Hollywood), or if it was too fast, we needed to add words to slow it down, but I soon learned that pacing has a lot more layers to it than that, and while that's not always a wrong way to deal with pacing . . . it's more of a beginner's way.

And even then, it sometimes doesn't fix the problem.

Sometimes the problem with pacing is that it's too "fast," but almost always, I've found for the majority of writers, the problem is that it's too "slow." (Why are these terms in quotes? Because they may not necessarily deal with strictly adding or cutting words to change reading speeds.)

But here are some of the reoccurring problems I've discovered and how to fix them.

Problem 1: Not Enough Potential Conflicts To Feed Enough Tension

Pacing actually has a lot to do with tension. And tension and conflict are two different things. However, they work together, because tension is the anticipation or potential for conflict to happen. Conflict is the actual problem happening.

Dealing with one conflict (or potential conflict) at a time is rarely enough to hold the audience through a whole story. Sure, in some scenes, there may be one overarching conflict, but there should be multiple types of conflict--however small, however subtle--in each scene. It might be the viewpoint character having an inner conflict about how to deal with the overarching conflict. It might be the protagonist and his best friend having some tension between them--a disagreement that wants to surface. It might the heroine worrying she won't get through the desert without dying from dehydration, while the main conflict is trying to rescue her sister from some outlaws. But in a scene, there should almost always be multiple potential conflicts in order to create tension (which is the anticipation of conflict).

Sometimes you can have multiple important conflicts at once. Other times you only need small, tiny micro-tensions.

But because tension is often so important to pacing, you need enough of it to pull it tight. Lack of potential conflicts and tension often mean the pacing feels too slow and boring. So brainstorm how to add more, even if they are subtle.

Note: In some cases, rather than adding tension, you can add intrigue, or something intellectually stimulating, or make wonderful promises to the reader, or appeal to particular emotions more powerfully, but usually you should still have potential for more than one conflict.

Problem 2: No Hooks

Someday I'm going to do a post just on hooks, but today is not yet that day. Hooks can relate a lot to tension and even everything in that "Note" above. They can often relate to how those potentials are actually written or addressed on the page. It's sort of what I talk about in this post "Mastering Stylistic Tension"

Often (not always) hooks work by giving the audience something to dread or hope for. They may offer promises (at the line level). Like the note above, they may be intriguing and intellectually stimulating. They may promise if the reader keeps reading, they'll experience a particular emotion.

Sometimes the writer has the right concepts and content for the scene, but there aren't any lines that are actually written in a hooking way. Work on mastering hooks to keep the pacing tight.

Problem 3: No Subtext

I was once editing a manuscript that had all the right beats and emotional draws and even the plotting was turning out to be pretty good. But it felt slow and boring. As I paid attention, I discovered it was because it had next to no subtext, and therefore, as a reader, I wasn't intellectually invested in understanding and figuring out the text, and though the emotion was on the page, I didn't feel it because it was so direct.

In this case, subtext needs to be understood, mastered, and added. You can study all about subtext and how to write it here.

Problem 4: Showing AND Telling

Another problem happens when the writer explains everything and doesn't trust the audience to "get it." They might "show" something and then write sentences or paragraphs "telling" the audience what they already put together. They don't need the author to spell out that Suzy loves Donald--they saw their interactions, and it was clear that Suzy loves Donald, so to repeat that with a long explanation slows the pacing down. If you are going to tell about it after showing it, the telling needs to add new information and value and meaning, not just restate what the audience already knows.

You can learn more about showing and telling in this post: Breaking Writing Rules Right: "Show, don't Tell."

Problem 5:  The Audience comes to the Right (Obvious) Conclusion Long Before the Characters

This is not to be confused with suspense, where the audience knows both what the protagonist and antagonist plan to do and are anticipating, sitting on the edge of their seat, wondering how that's going to play out.

This is often a problem of using a common, overused trope without changing it in any way. One of the most common ones is the "prophecy" story line, where the protagonist discovers there is a prophecy about him defeating the antagonist, but even though the audience has seen this story line a dozen times, the author still writes it as if it were the first. They might make the prophecy a main focus in the plot, then drag it out so that the protagonist discovers the "shocking" truth at the climax. (This isn't to say you can never use any kind of cliche in your writing. You can, but you need to do it right.)

If the audience has figured something out, and the characters are still acting like it's a mystery for pages longer, it's going to slow down the pacing.

Problem 6: Misunderstanding What's Significant 

Sometimes the writer spends too much time (or words) on things that don't merit that kind of attention. Other time they may not spend enough on what deserves more. They are misunderstanding what is significant in the story.

The more words you spend talking about something, the more the weight of the story shifts in that direction. If you are putting a lot of "weight" where it doesn't belong, it can make the story feel too slow. If you are skipping over things that deserve more weight, the pacing may feel too fast in those spots.

This is a case where adding and cutting words can be the solution to your pacing problem. Just make sure in adding, you aren't simply repeating the same thing, but expanding or deepening the subject.

More on this and how it actually works here. And more on discerning what's significant here.

Problem 7: Misunderstanding What the Target Audience Came for and/or Cares About

Imagine a Jurassic movie where the main plot centered on two characters working at the theme park falling in love, with no dino terror until the end.

For most people who go to that movie, it's going to feel slow. Really slow. They'll walk out at after and say, "Nothing happened until the end!"

This is one of the reasons it's important to keep your target audience in mind. It's also worth keeping in mind that you can't please everyone. Someone who likes a lot of magical action may not actually like Harry Potter, which is more of a slice-of-life magic mystery. Why is your target reader reading your book? Are you delivering on what was promised?

This can happen on a small scale. For example, when editing last week, I came across some nice descriptions of a side character, and while well written, realized the audience doesn't care enough about that character to get that much description in that moment. They care about what's about to be revealed in the plot.

Putting in what your audience doesn't really care about slows the pacing down in all the wrong ways. Speeding over something your audience picked the book up for can make pacing seem too fast.

Problem 8: Not Enough Variety

Hitting the same story element over and over doesn't make it more powerful, it makes it less. And in the worst-case scenario, it makes it not only boring, but annoying. Contrast and variety make a good story.

Comedies that only try to be funny won't hold an audience for long. It's why comedy movies are short and usually have a life lesson weaved in. If it's always trying to be funny, it's not funny. It will start to feel long and slow and bloated. Make sure your story is balanced out. If it's funny, weave in something serious. If it's about love, weave in some heartache. If it's about dinosaurs terrorizing people, weave in moments of dinosaurs looking beautiful and amazing.

Variety strengthens pacing.

Intuition

The thing with pacing is that I think many writers eventually learn it intuitively. Often we can tell when pacing is off and sometimes even what to do to fix it, before we can consciously explain what's going on. This is one of the reasons why reading both published and unpublished fiction can be really helpful, because your subconscious will gain a better sense of pacing if you consciously can't put it to words.

I remember working on a short story in college, and cutting lines for pacing. I liked the lines, and they weren't bad, but I just knew that it would make the pacing better, even if I couldn't explain why.

Hopefully, though, this post will help by jump-starting the conscious part of your mind on what to watch for.

On Cutting

One of the reasons cutting is a good beginner's tool is because usually beginners write too much about the less significant stuff anyway, and you can cut and cut and it brings back tension into the story because there is less space between each tension line, each hook, and each moment of conflict. Therefore, you are getting more of all that on a page and condensing the story to the most significant, meaningful components.

More on Pacing

Today I talked about the overall problems of pacing, but you can break pacing down in more structural ways: chapters, scenes, sentences. Next time I'll talk about how structure affects pacing and how to use that to your advantage.

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The Most Important Part of Sequels and Retellings

You've probably noticed like the rest of the world that we are living in a period of entertainment where everything is or has a sequel, a reboot, a remake, an adaptation, or a familiar story source (fairy tales for example). People in the entertainment industries, especially Hollywood, have finally caught on to the idea that making an addition to an existing story or franchise is not only safer, but smarter--you are guaranteed to make money--because it already has a ready-made audience, and when marketing your material, you don't have spend money and energy educating the audience as much on what story you are selling. You make the tenth Peter Pan movie (too late, it's already in the works), and people already know what sort of plot they are getting. An added bonus (read: draw) is that it resonates with what audiences are already familiar with.

If you are like me, you are starting  for the 4th year continuing to wish Hollywood would put out more original stories and more standalones, even if you love series and fairy tales and superhero movies. I mean, wouldn't it be so refreshingly great to go to an amazing movie with a brand new story you haven't heard before? And then something like the Nutcracker is announced and you repent of your complaining, because I mean, oh my gosh, did you see the trailer?

Now that Hollywood and much of the world have discovered the power and (monetary) benefits of resonating closely with previous works (whether it be another installment or retelling) and the ease of having a ready-made audience, I don't think we are going to see an end to this phase any time soon, if ever.

And while I'm tired of the market being saturated with sequels, remakes, and reboots, the truth is, I love a story that stretches over several installments, and I even love retellings of stories I'm familiar with (though a little less now than previous because of saturation).

With all of these sequels and retellings (and me watching the new season of X-Files), I've been thinking a lot lately about what the most important part is to get right when writing one. After all, some of the remakes can seem widely different than their predecessors--different plot, different characters, maybe even different setting--and yet still be hugely successful. Others may still have those same components and fall on their faces.

This is because the most important part of continuing or revisiting a story is hitting the right emotional draws.

What were the original emotional draws in the previous installment(s)? If you are writing a sequel you need to hit those same emotional beats. If you are retelling a "classic," you need to hit the same emotional beats of that classic.

What are emotional beats and draws? They are the emotions that the story hits on. In a romance story, you need to have romance beats. In a horror story, you need to have horror beats. In a comedy, you need to have comedic beats.

It's obvious when we talk about them that way. But not all stories are as clear, and if you want to write a successful sequel, you need to go beyond generalities and hit the right kind of romantic beats. The right kind of comedic beats. All stories have more than one emotional draw. They may have one prominent one, but it will have others in it. Some have two, three, or four prominent ones, and still others.

There are some sequels that have different characters or settings (harder to pull off, but it can be done), but are still successful. Why? Because they hit the same emotional beats of the original.

If there is ONE thing that is MOST important about writing a sequel, it's including the same emotional beats.

Let's look at one of the highest grossing sequels of all time: Jurassic World.

You've probably seen it and will recall that the plot and characters were so-so. In fact, both the plot and characters were criticized and made fun of. But Jurassic World nailed its emotional beats. Nailed them.

The primary emotional draw for any speculative fiction, is a sense of wonder--that feeling of being enthralled and captivated, that sense of curiosity over potential possibilities, that sense of what if ____ could happen. Jurassic Park inherently has that, because of the subject matter: dinosaurs. But the film amplified it by having specific moments and shots that hit that exact beat, like meeting the Brachiosaurus. There is a lot of sense of wonder going on in that scene.

The secondary emotional draw for Jurassic Park is horror--something goes wrong and characters have to try to survive and outwit carnivorous dinosaurs. Whether it's the T-rex trying to get into a car, or the raptors getting through closed doors.

Then there are less prominent beats. Most horrors (there are some exceptions) tap into our primal need to survive. So Jurassic Park also has the same beats survival stories have. Likewise, a lot of wonder feeds into beats of wish-fulfillment. At on point or another, most of us have probably wished we could actually see a real dinosaur, and even if you take out that, most of us have wished at one point or another that we were on vacation at a theme park. Then it breaks down to even more beats, to a few comedic concepts and a few moments that relate to relationships between the characters. Then there are the intellectual beats that ask us to consider morals.

Jurassic Park has an extra oomph of power, because it's two primary emotional draws, wonder and horror, are actually opposites. And when you cross opposites in storytelling (as I explained in this big fat post 2 1/2 years ago), you get amplified emotional power.

Okay, so then Jurassic World came out. It's easy to be skeptical because this is the fourth movie in the franchise--I mean, what else can you do with it that won't be dumb? (Thankfully, they changed it up a bit (and amplified that sense of wish-fulfillment) by having the park be open and functional).

It was a huge success. Why? Because it nailed the same emotional draws of the originals: wonder, horror, survival, wish-fulfillment, a few comedic concepts, relationship moments, moral questions.

If Jurassic World did not hit wonder and horror, survival and wish-fulfillment, it would have not been successful.

This is why in some series you can even change characters, settings, or (to some degree, plot)--it's harder to pull off and not recommended for the majority--but what matters most is hitting the same emotional draws.

Look at Chronicles of Narnia. If I asked the average American who the main character is, most people would probably tell me Lucy--a few wise people might say Aslan, which goes into a different tangent for another post (main character vs. protagonist vs. viewpoint character). But if any of you have read the whole series, Lucy and her siblings aren't even in all the books. Lucy is only a principal character in three of the seven books, and a minor character in two others. You can argue that the books are all about Narina, I mean, it is called the Chronicles of Narnia, right? That may be true, but the first book The Magician's Nephew seems to take place in other worlds that are just as important as Narnia. It may be "about Narnia," but Narnia as we know it doesn't even exist until the end of the volume. Is it a failure?

No.

It hits the same draws: wonder, danger, spirituality, morality, allegory.

Same thing with the X-Files. When they started this new season on right now (no spoilers here), I knew the kinds of episodes it would have, because regardless of changes in plot or character dynamics--writer Chris Carter knows to hit all the same beats.


-There will be an episode about the overarching plot of the whole series, that hits the drama beat, with Smokey Man and the agents, Mulder and Scully, Scully and her child.

-There will be a standalone episode about a legendary creature or monster

-There will be a lighthearted comedy episode, that reminds you not to take the show too seriously and that the creators aren't afraid to poke fun at themselves.

-There will be a conspiracy episode, about something the government is testing on people. Mulder and Scully will work with those people.

-There will be an episode that relates to aliens.

-There will be an episode about someone who has supernatural abilities.

- At least one of these will have a horror feel, another will have a relationship draw, another will have suspense or thriller beats, another will have mystery undertones, another will capitalize on being creepy, and it goes on.


And while you might point to the fact that I mostly listed types of episodes instead of emotions--each of those types have their own specific draws.

Each individual draw may not appeal to everyone. This is why among X-Files fans you may hear some people complain about the drama beats because they only want monster-wonder ones, or some who will claim that the lighthearted comedy episode is the best one of the season while others are scratching their heads at it, or why some swoon over the relationship beats between Scully and Mulder (did you know X-Files is where the term "shipping" originated?) while others are waiting to get to the government conspiracy.

When the new season started, I had couple of family members say after the first two episodes: "Oh, this is gonna be like the old X-Files."

Yes.

Why?

Because the writers understand the franchise's emotional beats. They may do some things with the plot that you may find questionable or even . . . inaccurate. They may try to bring in other characters that most people don't like. But they know what all the emotional beats of the franchise is, and they will hit all of them by the end of the season.

They could narrow in and only do a few specific draws like most successful t.v. shows do these days--such as the overall plot with Smokey Man--but if they did, they'd be axing the viewers who love the legendary creature stories the most. They need to hit all the same beats.

And they will.


X-Files is interesting because it has a lot of specific niche beats inside of its primary ones, whereas Jurassic Park has more generalized draws (a more generalized wonder and horror--and also more primal draws). But even if you look at it, you will find some that do break down more specifically. For example, every movie in the franchise has a moment where a character is trapped in some sort of vehicle with a T-rex-like dinosaur trying to get in.

Which leads me to my next point--one of the biggest pitfalls of sequels: trying to do the exact same thing as the previous installment(s). This can go really flat with comedy in particular.

As one of my friends in college once said, "The thing with sequels is they try to do the same thing that was funny in the last movie, as if it's still going to be funny."

Sequels can easily fail when people confuse plot with emotional beats--which is easy to do.

See, the plot absolutely inherently affects, helps determine, and creates your story's emotional draws--but they aren't the same thing.

When it comes to sequels and retellings, people want the same thing . . . but different.

That sounds so vague, right? What the heck does that mean?

It means they want the same emotional draws and beats, not the exact same events and lines and contexts.

I don't want to hear the exact same joke in the sequel. I want to hear the same kind of joke.

In the sequel, you can take things from the original, and twist, tweak, flip, or invert it, to make it different, but the draws 99.9% of the time need to be the same.

You can take the last joke and build and twist it to make it funny again, and hit that same humor beat, but you can't do the exact same thing over and over again. It's annoying and falls flat.
 

Sure, the Jurassic movies always have a T-rex-like dinosaur trying to get in a vehicle where people are trapped, but each situation varies somewhat, and unless you are a writer, you may not even be conscious of how often this set-up happens over and over.

Jurassic has very generalized and primal emotional draws--things all humans can relate to. It doesn't need to be as varied in its installments as other franchises do. In fact, because of the nature of the story set-up (how many different ways can you put humans and dinos together in this age?), it can't be without falling on its face. It needs to stick to somewhat of a formula. A different franchise with more primal and generalized draws may have more freedom and need to utilize it in its set-up. For example, the Maze Runner movies have different set-ups each movie, but still the same generalized, primal draws. Wouldn't it be annoying if each movie really was the exact same thing, the exact same maze, over and over?

In order to hit the right emotional beats, the installments or retelling may follow a close pattern or formula, but that's not always necessary. What matter most is that they hit them.

The fifth Indiana Jones movie probably can't be a spy romance that takes place in New York City because it's very unlikely you will be hitting the primary beat of the franchise: adventure. And not just adventure, but the franchise's specific type of adventure.

Other times you may even have the same characters, setting, or a similar plot, but it doesn't hit the right specific emotional draws, and falls flat.

Again, this why it's so important to see emotional draws as something different than plot. They relate and overlap, but they aren't the exact same thing.

 A couple years ago, the new Ghostbusters movie came out. I haven't seen it, I admit, so I can't give my opinion on it. But I can tell you a fact: the trailer is the most disliked video in Youtube history--1 MILLION thumbs down, and only 302k thumbs up. Some people said it was because others were sexist, which could be true, but when I started listening to what the dislikers were saying, what they were really complaining about was that it had different emotional beats. That the trailers for the new version weren't hitting the same specific beats--particularly the more serious and sinister beats--that the original trilogy hit. People were even complaining that the theme song sounded too comedic and campy and dub-steppy, and when the original had come out, it had a somewhat creepier, sinister undertone. I haven't seen any of the movies for a long time, and think I'd probably actually enjoy the new one, and I'm sure you have your own opinion, but I'm just using this as an example to teach the point I'm trying to make.

Emotional beats are where it's at. They are the reason professionals in the industry tell you to pitch your novel by comparing it to other stories (for example, "It's X-Men meets The Notebook")--which drives many readers and fans crazy. This pitch method is used to quickly communicate the sorts of beats and draws your own story has.

You can even take this all a step further and include specific emotional beats to appeal to specific audience.

A couple of weeks ago, a family member called me on the phone, and then started talking about Stranger Things. "It's reminds me of Harry Potter," he said. Then after a pause, "Even though they are completely different. . . ."

Are they completely different?

In characters and plot and setting, they definitely are.

But the reason it reminds him of Harry Potter is because Stranger Things hits most of the same emotional draws and beats. I was going to list them out, but this article is getting rather long. So instead, if you want to test yourself and you're familiar with each story, I'll leave it to you to consider: What emotional draws and beats do Harry Potter and Stranger Things share?

Is it really so surprising that Stranger Things is the most successful show to grace Netflix?

In closing, I think it's important to leave a note that some retellings (not sequels) work off slaughtering the original beats--for example, spoofs do this. Perhaps you want to write a story where Cinderella is actually evil. People will be drawn to that story because of different reasons than the Disney version. And even if you go to the original recorded fairy tales, they are very different than what we have today. So part of hitting the right beats, is going off what today's modern audience is familiar with. And sometimes going against the previous beat is blatantly intentional, but for almost all retellings, and definitely almost all sequels, you need to hit the same beats.

***

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Inconceivable! Dealing with Problems of Unbelievability

There are a lot of things that can go wrong in a story, and I've found that perhaps some of the worst feedback to give and receive is that of unbelievability. There is a kind of stinging and feeling of foolishness that comes with the criticism. I've had it, and I've given it--multiple times each. Most often, this criticism is given to new writers.

Now when I say believeablitiy, I'm not saying your stories can't have any dragons or magic or advanced technology. Stranger Things Season 2 recently came out, and I've heard people complaining that KFC wasn't actually called KFC in 1984, or that no one had side parts until later years. Isn't it funny that we have no problems "believing" that there is a parallel world where monsters live and that a young girl can have psychokinetic abilities, but people can't believe that a character has a side part? What a funny life we live in our entertainment.

If you've been told that something in your story is unbelievable, there could be a few different reasons as to why. It might simply be that what you put in the story couldn't actually happen in the real world--if you are dealing with a real world setting. Or it could be because the mechanics of fiction is different than our reality. Here are the different reasons and routes unbelievable content manifests itself in fiction.

The Truth is Stranger Than Fiction

I recently read an article about a woman who got pregnant a second time, when she was already pregnant. It's weird right? That's not how nature works. However, this woman had a rare condition that allowed this to happen. Now, you can say this is a true story, because it is. But if you try to put this into your story, without proper explanation, or when you already have a lot of other unusual things happening in your story, it will probably ring false. Critics will say, "But what are the chances of that?"

This is because fiction works off rules of probability, not what actually happened. The less probable something is, the more likely your audience will be skeptical. It's even worse if you stack up multiple improbabilities into one piece. This is one of the reasons you may hear about the "one impossibility rule," which is the idea that audiences can only believe in one impossibility per book. Of course, there are ways to break this rule, and it is broken in many works, but generally speaking: one impossibility. And this works off the suspension of disbelief that audiences come to a story with, which is a topic all its own.

There are a few tricks to getting around the probability issue. One is validating the audience's skepticism, but it has to be done with care and not overused. Otherwise, it will still ring false.

But almost always,

Probability > Reality

Tension is More than Conflict and Spectacle

Another avenue unbelievability takes to get in, is through conflict and spectacle. This usually happens when the writer is trying hard to make the story "really good" by making it intense, skyscraping stakes, and putting in massive hooks. The story may start fine, but suddenly, conflicts are going crazy, and the writer is throwing in intense scenarios that don't actually fit the story or aren't portrayed with real-life consequences.

For example, you might feel that your romance story is getting a bit boring for the audience, so you throw in a serial killer. The protagonist knows about the serial killer, but has no problem walking home alone after midnight, or she encounters the serial killer, but decides (for no legitimate reason) not to contact the police, because that's not the direction, you, the writer, want to take the story. Or maybe your character gets accused of murdering someone (because crazy conflict is good, right?), but that's not actually what you want the story to be about, so you don't flesh that part out, and eventually get back to the main storyline.

These sorts of things happen because the writer thinks the crazier the conflict, the better. They might be afraid their story is too boring, and so they are trying to liven it up for the audience. What they don't realize is that tension is what keeps the reader reading, far more than conflict.

Tension doesn't necessarily need outlandish conflict. It doesn't need a spectacle to be interesting. Tension can happen in a conversation between a father and daughter. It can be present when a protagonist is deciding who to invite to a concert when she only has four tickets and six friends. Tension can be there in a job interview, where the characters are trying to appear cool and collected and professional, but inside are not.

Tension > Conflict

You don't need to throw in crazy conflicts to make your story interesting. You just need to learn how to take advantage of tension.

Now, if you want to throw in crazy conflicts, fine, but the consequences, facets, and ramifications of such things must be spoken to, to be realistic. Some things you just cannot turn a blind eye to. And don't forget to incorporate the probability aspect.

You can read more about tension vs. conflict here.

 Writing What You Don't Know

Sometimes something is unbelievable just because the writer didn't do their research. For example, if you were writing about the Mormon church at a part in your story, and you told me that Mormons worship Joseph Smith and have a golden Bible, as a Mormon, I'm going to giggle.

Look, the research part of writing is perhaps my least favorite part of writing (others say it's their favorite), so I understand that it can be annoying, especially when you just want to write the story. But sometimes you've got to do the research. And honestly, research has never been easier to do than it is to do today. You can find much of what you need online or in books. If you can't find that, you can find knowledgeable people to talk to or ask. Try not to feel stupid about asking questions. Most people you will talk to will probably want to tell you more than you want to know. And of course, make sure you are choosing reliable sources to get your information.

The other facet of this problem is inexperience, and in some ways, I feel that inexperience is its own topic.

Maybe you want to write about what it's like being a Chinese woman in the West, but you are a Caucasian teenage boy in a small town in the South. Maybe you want to write about an astronaut on Mars, but the furthest you got into your science career was high school chemistry and biology. Maybe you want to write a story about how a Christian helped convert an atheist--but you've never spent sincere time speaking with atheists about their genuine perspective and end up writing a two-dimensional caricature that turns a blind eye to the intricacies and complexities of the argument, "Is there a God?"

Really, inexperience can crop up in any number of things.

All of us are inexperienced in some way.

Does that mean you should only write about what you have lived? Of course not. That's ridiculous. You think everyone who has written a female character has been a female? Do you think only straight actors portray straight character? We're writers--we are imagining things we haven't lived all the time. It's likely we'll all write something wrong from our inexperience at some point.

In some situations, you can go out and gain the experience you need. If you've never been to the beach, maybe you can go to the beach. But if you've never been a Chinese woman, then maybe you need to speak and spend some time with one. And don't do anything stupid that compromises your moral standards just to gain firsthand experience.

Even if we don't have personal experience of something, we can sometimes draw from past experiences that may be similar or relate to said experience, and go from there. In some cases, for very specific set-ups or information, we can bluff it as writers, but it takes practice to make such bluffs believable. If you have access to someone who may have experience with whatever you are writing, you can ask them to read over your passage.

Convenient Human Behavior

One area in particular that audiences don't have a lot of patience for when it come to unbelievability, is human behavior. We will read about aliens and superheroes and not blink an eye, but when a character doesn't act human (or within the realms of whatever species he is, if you are writing speculative fiction), we won't believe it. In some beginners' stories, it may manifest itself in characters not having logical or probable reactions to certain things.

For example, if your protagonist's child dies unexpectedly, and then the next scene shows us the protagonist still moving forward preparing a holiday party with no sign of grief or distress, the audience is going to be skeptical (unless your protagonist is villainous and was the one who killed the child). This sort of problem usually relates to the tension/conflict problem. The writer throws something big into the story to make it more interesting, but then doesn't want to actually include the ramification of such a thing, so out of convenience, they continue the story without showing the character grieving. It's convenient human (or "inhuman") behavior.

Other times this happens because the writer simply doesn't know how to write a character who is in that particular emotional state. In my example, the writer may not know how to write a parent grieving for a child, and so, they don't. They continue on with the rest of the story. In that way, this problem can relate to the research and inexperience section too.

In some cases, it's not so much about a character not acting logically human as it is a character acting out of character--out of the boundaries the writer has already set. If your protagonist is a huge pacifist that believes in the sanctity of all human life and then goes and shoots an innocent bystander, without explanation or development, the audience isn't going to buy that. Maybe it was convenient for the plot, but it doesn't fit the character.

In general, problems in this area stem from the above three sections. However, unbelievability in human behavior can be so damning and so common, that I've put it as its own section.

Now go forth and write believable fiction!

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Selecting the Right Sentence Structure for the Right Emotion

Today's post builds off some other posts I've done:

Pros and Cons and Types of Third-Person
Point of View Penetration
Exactly How to Create and Control Tone
Writing Empathetically Vs. Sympathetically and Sentimentally
Let Your Reader Do the Work
Raw vs. Subdued Emotion: Getting Them Right in Your Story

But you don't have to read them to get something out of this one.

It's just that today's topic relates to deep point of view (the deepest point, point 4), creating emotion in your reader (instead of on the page), and controlling tone.

Hopefully if you've been following my blog for very long, you understand the importance of getting your reader to feel powerful emotions as opposed to just writing about the emotions.

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Exactly How to Create and Control Tone

I'm going to be honest, tone is something I struggle with in my writing. In some scenes, it can be a huge stumbling block for me. I get how it works, but sometimes I just can't find it. Those days are over (hopefully) because now I have a post (this one) written out that explains it to myself, which will be better and more accurate than trying to pull it from my head when I'm already confused. So if you've had trouble with tone, no worries, this article nails it all down.

I'm going to cover what tone is, how to create it, how to keep control of it, what to do if your tone goes sour, and how to actually change or juggle tones in a scene. I'll also talk about how the right tone will let you get away with just about anything.

Maybe you are like how I use to be: thinking that tone isn't really something you need to worry yourself over. It'll just happen, you think. You'll just write your story and whatever the tone is, is whatever the tone is. It's what came naturally.

It's not that this attitude is wrong--I've seen plenty of published writing where the author couldn't have paid tone any mind--it's that you are cutting yourself and your writing short by ignoring tone. Maybe you already have great writing skills. Cool. But you can make them better by paying attention and mastering the element of tone.

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Considering the Irrationality of Your Characters

In honor of The Hunger Games movies finishing up this last year, I re-read the trilogy (again), and realized (again) that when it comes to Katniss Everdeen, Suzanne Collins doesn't forget to consider Katniss's irrational side.

Often when we deal with characters, we spend a lot of time building their rational side. We look at their rational motives and try to make sure they are thinking logically for the story line. I know I have spent hours trying to brainstorm and pin down the logical thoughts in some of my characters' heads. But considering how your character can be irrational can provide plenty of ideas for you to play with.

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Raw vs. Subdued Emotions: Getting them Right in Your Story

Last week I talked about point of view penetration, and in that post I said that "Often I see writers who zoom in and zoom out of their character's viewpoint seemingly randomly. I'll see scenes written in distant third-person when it would be better in close third-person."

I pointed out that how deep you want to get into your character's viewpoint depends on the effect you want for your scene, what makes a better story, and how raw and tense the emotion is.

So today I'm going to give some pointers to help you discern when your character's emotions are (likely) raw or subdued.

Raw Emotions

Raw emotions are usually very intense. They're fresh, so the person feels them sharper, sometimes to the point of being irrational.

As human beings, we usually feel raw emotions in the moment. The temporally closer we are to the incident that incited those emotions, the more raw our emotions will be. If I just found out that a friend back-stabbed me, my anger would be sharp and somewhat uncontrolled (at least internally). But the next day, they will likely be more controlled, more subdued, as the situation "sinks in."

Here are some things to keep in mind to help:

The more severe the incident, the more raw the emotions.

The more unexpected the incident, the more raw the emotions. For unexpected incidents, people usually feel surprise or shock first. So, you might want to consider that when writing.

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Interstellar: Keeping Conflicts Unresolved

Today's post is short, but the writing technique is still strong and effective. I've been talking about what Interstellar did to have a powerful emotional impact. One way was to keep a crucial conflict unresolved until the very very end of the story.

When Cooper has to leave his family, and Murph refuses to say goodbye, it creates strong tension in the audience. See, if Murph and Cooper would have made-up before he left, that tension would have been released, but instead, the writers amplified it by leaving it not only unresolved, but by taking advantage of the parent-child relationship that was going on, and the unknown future of Cooper. All these things worked together to take the emotion to a new height.

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Interstellar: Gaining Incredible Emotional Power by Crossing Opposites

When I pressed "play" on Interstellar, I had no idea that I was about to have one of the most powerful emotional experiences of my movie-watching life. Sure, subconsciously I took into consideration that I would cry at the end of the movie. Maybe. I was not prepared to legitimately cry near the starting, in the middle, at the climax (multiple places), and at the resolution (in two places). On top of that, I was not expecting to experience emotion that was that raw. I don't know if I've ever experienced emotion that raw from a movie.

I was not alone.

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"The Emotional Range of a Teaspoon": Your Characters' Spectrum of Emotions

(Listen to this tip on Youtube.)

For the last month and a half, I've been rearranging and revamping a whole sequence of scenes in my novel. Moving stuff up, pushing stuff back, deleting this, adding this, and while I wasn't surprised at the time and work it took to complete this revamp, I was reminded about how a great novel should all interlock. So, by changing and moving things, I have to change and revamp other parts. Not just on a plot level, but on a character arc level, on a thematic level, on an everything level.

But what did surprise me was how I had to rewrite the emotional level of my characters. In that alone, in a way, I felt like I had to rewrite each scene. Because I had changed and rearranged plot elements, my characters were in different moods for different scenes. They had different emotional arcs in my scenes than what they had before. So for each scene, I had to get deep into my character all over again to convey his or her emotional status for the scene. And of course, in a lot of scenes, a character's emotional status changes throughout it. On top of that, I've been trying to do deep and thorough character edits anyway, making even their body language distinct from other characters.

Like real people, characters should react to, cope with, and manifest their emotions in individual ways. If your character hears that someone ran over her dog, what is her emotional reaction? Is she mad? Sad? Shocked? Devastated? Happy? Annoyed? Why? How she reacts emotionally reveals character. To take it to the next level, you ask, how is she mad? Sad? Happy? Etc. Does she try to hold it in? Does she keep her angry thoughts to herself and say something completely different outloud? Does she scream every profanity she can think of? Is it a cold anger that leads her into calmly seeking revenge on the driver?

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Dealing with Melodrama: What it is, How it Works, and How to Get Rid of it

(Listen or watch this writing tip on Youtube)

So you're writing your story, and your characters are getting really emotional--yelling, screaming, crying, overreacting. It's turning into a soap opera. And then you stop and wonder, "Is this melodramatic?"

That happened to me once. Thankfully it was just a first draft. 

Melodrama is defined as "exaggerated emotion." Alright. But what exactly is exaggerated emotion? I wondered, how do I know when the emotion is exaggerated? Because my characters are dealing with some emotional situations right now.

Well, I realized melodrama is like this:

Event < Emotional Reaction

The event is less than the emotional reaction of the character, meaning, the character is overreacting, over-emotional to the situation. In my case, my characters were kicking and screaming because another character looked at them funny (okay, it wasn't that bad, but you get the idea). Having someone look at you funny doesn't merit a temper tantrum. 

Looked at you funny < Temper tantrum = Melodrama

I realized I was running into these melodramatic problems because the event wasn't strong enough to hold the story on it's own. The plot wasn't strong enough. So, I was trying to make it better, more interesting, by amplifying my characters' reaction to it. Bad idea.

Instead, I needed to go to the root of the problem, to what elicits emotion: the event. I needed to revamp the plot and make the plot better, so it's stabilized.

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Characters, Emotion, and Viewpoint

Reads for Fiction Writers

I got this book from my sister-in-law Shallee McArthur, who told me she loved it.

I did too.

This is a must-have for every fiction writer.

When I first cracked open the book, I found myself reading a lot of info that I already knew... but then Kress delved deeper into characters, emotions, and viewpoints and illuminated aspects of each that I had never thought of.

The book leads writers through the process of creating a character and provides a diagram along the way:

Backstory --> personality/character traits --> wanting something (motivation) --> emotion (felt inside) + emotion (displayed outwardly)

Here is a little statement that sums the diagram up somewhat:

“Backstory creates personality/character, which in turn creates motivation, which causes your characters’ emotions.”

Kress outlines how characters talk about and show (or hide) their emotions. She examines instances where characters are straightforward about their feelings or deceptive about them. And she teaches how to write for both situations.

Kress also delves into complicated characters—how to create them and how to show your readers their complexity. She categorizes characters based on their motivations and changes. Often as writers we hear that we should have a character that has a goal and that during the novel, that character works to achieve this goal. It’s straight forward; it's simple.

But Kress takes this concept further. She explains there are—

1. Characters whose motivations don’t change during the story, and they don’t change either. They are still the same person by the end of the story, give or take.
2. Characters whose motivations change, but they don’t.
3. Characters whose motivations don’t change, but they do.
4. Characters whose motivations change, and they change also.

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