Babel Clash

It’s been a great time guest-blogging here for the past two weeks, and a cool way to ring in the new decade. For a final topic, one that’s sure to be uncontroversial, here are my detailed thoughts on the health-care debate — haha, right…

Here’s hoping everyone has a great 2010, and finds lots of good stuff to read!

Thank you again,
Patrick

Happy New Year, Morgan!  And everyone else who follows the blog!  Thanks again for letting me hang out here for a couple weeks!

I feel a little awkward directly plugging the book, but here goes:

The story follows Travis Chase, a man just out of prison and trying to start his life over in Alaska, far from everyone he knows. On a solo hike in the Brooks Range, he stumbles on an impossible scene: a downed 747, somehow undiscovered by authorities.

Travis finds the plane full of dead bodies, though they didn’t get that way in the crash. They’ve all been shot. What follows is a chain of events that Travis is not at all prepared for, surrounding the object that this aircraft was transporting. Travis is drawn into a secret, decades-long war that’s been waged over this object — a war that will culminate over the next few days.

Beyond the summary, I can talk about some of the things that drew me to this idea in the first place — hopefully those same things will make the book enjoyable for readers.

First, the hero is a relatively ordinary person, caught up in circumstances that are anything but ordinary. I always love stories like that.

There’s a lot of curiosity driving the story — what is the antagonist’s ultimate plan, and how will it play out? Curiosity always works for me, as a reader, and as a writer I have a lot of fun with it, too.

Last, I tried to make it feel as real as possible. Not the easiest goal when your book has alien technology at its heart. As I wrote it, I kept certain questions in mind: What would it be like if this stuff really existed? If humans really came in contact with this kind of technology (without meeting whoever had created it), how dangerous would that be? How unsettling? I wanted it to have the creepy feel of something that might actually be happening, in remote locations where the words “Freedom of Information Act” don’t mean all that much. One effect of this approach is that my characters, even the better-informed of the lot, have to admit quite often that they’re in the dark about much of what they do. It’s just the world they live in. I found it a pretty fun world to explore as a writer, and I’m hoping readers will, too.

We never really did come up with a name for the last decade. I have a suspicion that one will be adopted in retrospect (”the naughts” is an especially annoying, and therefore likely, candidate), and by the mid-20’s we’ll be explaining to kids that no one really called it that, back at the time, and they won’t believe us.

Today I found myself looking back on the decade, and trying to decide what my favorite books and movies were. I can’t say for sure that the following are my absolute favorites (how can you really know?), and I’m also not going to put them in order, but nonetheless, here are three books and three movies that I really loved in the… whatchamacallem’s.

Books:

THE ENEMY by Lee Child
A perfect example of what a lean, fast-paced book should feel like.  Makes great use of its setting, too — the inner workings of the U.S. military at the end of the Cold War, facing an uncertain future.  It actually takes place exactly twenty years ago this week.

BIG TROUBLE, by Dave Barry
People often describe a book as being “laugh out loud” funny, but it’s very rare that one actually has that effect on me. This one did, and at the same time it kept me turning the pages until five in the morning.

A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING by Bill Bryson
One of the funnest reads I can remember. Compelling and funny all at once.

Movies:

PANIC ROOM
Perfect, taut, suspenseful. Does not screw around for one second.

COLLATERAL
Feels more like a good crime novel than almost any movie I can think of. Javier Bardem’s speech about Santa Claus and Pedro Negro was the creepiest thing I saw in a movie until… pretty much every minute Javier Bardem was on-screen in No Country For Old Men.

ANCHORMAN
You’d think irreverent comedies would be relatively easy to do — or easy enough, anyway, that you’d see a few good ones every year. That doesn’t seem to be the case, though. Anchorman was the first one I liked since Airplane!, which I wasn’t even old enough to see in theaters, and only saw later on VHS.

I’m sure next week I’ll think of some movie or book that should’ve made one of these lists, but these are the ones that jumped out at me.

…actually has a point.

This thought hit me pretty much at random today. I was thinking of the great scene in The Matrix when Joe Pantoliano betrays the others, and he’s the only one awake aboard the ship (so he thinks) while everyone else is still plugged in. His explanation to Carrie-Anne Moss over the phone, about his motivation, is perfect: “You call this free? All I do is what he [Morpheus] tells me to do.” It works because you’re not able to roll your eyes at it. Instead you’re forced to consider his point of view. You don’t end up agreeing with him, but it adds a huge amount of realism to the story.

Here’s something obvious enough that I could’ve almost forgotten to mention it. Probably the most important part of the world of a story is the lens through which the reader sees it — the character. In a way, it’s everything.

How different would the Jack Reacher stories be if they were told from the viewpoint of a guy who was frail and terrified of confrontation? Well, I guess in that case the series would’ve ended about ten pages into the first book, and none of us would’ve heard of Jack Reacher. But we could imagine less extreme scenarios in which a still-very-different character lived out those stories. I just finished Sophie Littlefield’s A Bad Day For Sorry, and something tells me her heroine Stella Hardesty would manage to get through the life of Jack Reacher, one way or another. The ratio of bad guys who get shot instead of just beaten into a coma would probably go up a few clicks in Stella’s case, but it’s all good.

But beyond how events and details play out, the world of any story would take on a different look through different eyes. What a character notices about his/her surroundings, and what that character THINKS about those surroundings, can make all the difference.

A cantankerous old guy who fought in two wars and spent the rest of his life on the force might see his neighborhood in terms of what it used to be. South of Ten Mile it’s all strip malls and restaurants and gas stations now, but it was woods and farmland before they put in the turnpike in ‘72. A twenty-year-old in that neighborhood would have a starkly different take on the place. For that matter, a twenty-year-old raised in an upscale part of that town, and a twenty-year-old from a less-well-off district, would have widely divergent views from one another. These differences are as important to a writer as filters and lenses and aperture settings are to a photographer.

There’s something else special about letting characters’ viewpoints lead the way: the simple fact that they CAN lead the way. That is, if your character is distinct enough, and you’ve written enough from his/her point of view, you find yourself almost “discovering” how they react to new situations and turns of the story, as you write. Obviously they don’t really write themselves — that job falls squarely to you until the release of Microsoft Word 2036, with the AI add-ons — but the principle at work is still pretty interesting. It’s just that what you’ve already written can very powerfully suggest what you’re going to write. And I think that phenomenon is driven by a character’s unique view of the world. This is one of the things that makes writing fun (when it’s fun), not to mention a little easier than it might otherwise be.

I think I’m safely within the majority of novelists who’d do a backward somersault if someone decided to make a film version of one of their books. Obviously I’m a little biased as to whether The Breach would be a good movie. I could kick myself for cutting the subplot about the teenage vampires that can transform into vehicles, who get drunk during a bachelor party in Vegas and lose the groom.

While it’s not a book, it really merits a mention given the week’s topic, and given that tens of millions of people have experienced it during this same week, myself included.

It also serves as a great jumping-off point for discussing another means of world-building: forging parallels to familiar aspects of our own world.

Avatar takes place on a moon orbiting a planet more than four light years away from Earth, about a century and a half from now. Why, then, can we relate to it so easily? Because it’s a metaphor for Earth, and because its central story is one that’s played out right here, in real life, time and again.

(MILD SPOILER ALERT–Maybe catch the movie before reading more of this post, though I won’t give away too much.)

It’s the weak versus the strong. It’s patience and understanding versus arrogance and bullying. Everything about life on Pandora, both among the natives and among the human intruders, serves these overarching themes. In the human encampment, everything is metal and concrete and glass — hard and cold. Among the Na’vi, everything is alive and organic, swimming with bioluminescent color.

This clash is also reflected in the final showdown between hero and villain: two humans, each in control of larger and more powerful forms. The hero’s vehicle is a living body, which he’s naturally and organically synced with. The villain’s vehicle is a hard-edged, multi-ton metal machine. That showdown pretty much encapsulates the whole movie.

All of these details represent the processes of world-building and storytelling, perfectly combined. It’s impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. And while it’s true that world-building is a more obvious process in a movie than in a book (note that I didn’t say “easier”), since the filmmaker is showing you the fictional world in the background of every single frame… it would still be pretty screw-up-able, to put it mildly, in the hands of a bad storyteller. Suffice it to say that Avatar isn’t even remotely screwed up.

The point is just this: you can build a world and tell a story at the same time, and a good way to do it is to make your fictional world a strange twin of our own. If it’s similarity lies in some primal aspect of real life (weak vs. strong… evil winning because it’s unhindered by rules… good winning because it never has to question its motivation…), then you can let the finer details suggest themselves as means of supporting the theme.

I should probably mention that the book I have coming out takes place in the present day, right here on good ol’ planet Earth. But I read all types of fiction (well, almost all types) and hopefully my thoughts on the construction of imaginary worlds haven’t been too far off the mark. And obviously the world of my story is as imaginary as any other: it’s populated by people who’ve never existed, doing things that have never been done. Characters and circumstances are, by far, the biggest and most important aspects of the world you create. That’s probably why storytelling and world-building mesh so well: when done correctly they’re almost one and the same.

Speaking of world-building, I’d be in dereliction if I spent a week on this topic without mentioning Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide series. It may fall more into the category of galaxy-building, but I’ll try to make it work.

A nice, thorough analysis of how Douglas Adams actually created the galaxy (with many, many worlds) of his story would go really well right about here. Unfortunately I have no idea how to do that. Apparently, hardly anyone else knows, either, or else we’d have seen some decent rip-offs of Mr. Adams’s style by now.

Here, then, is just a random rundown of some of the things I really like in that series:

-Rob McKenna, the truck driver who doesn’t know that he’s a Rain God. He’s miserable because every moment of his life, wherever he goes, it’s raining. He has no idea that it only happens because the clouds love him, and stay constantly with him, “…to cherish him and to water him.”

-The strange life-form that crawls out of the East River, tells Ford Prefect that it’s just been created, and asks for general advice about the universe. (This happens in a dream, but in this series that counts.)

-The “speechless T-shape” in Chapter 26 of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

-The massive battle fleet that travels across millions of light years to attack Earth, only to suffer a scaling problem and be eaten by a very small dog.

-Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, an immortal being that travels the universe on a mission to insult every living thing in existence… in alphabetical order.

Douglas Adams’s world-building happens in just about every paragraph and line of dialogue in the series, and manages to be hilarious at the same time. I can’t imagine pulling that off. There is at least one interesting glimpse into his writing process, by way of a posthumously-published book called The Salmon of Doubt. Douglas’s editor, Peter Guzzardi, assembled the book from material found on Douglas’s computers, including several chapters of what would have been his next novel. Reading the material offers a view of his work in mid-stride. It also leaves you only wondering how the story would have ended; it would be impossible to guess.

The first Die Hard certainly had one of the all-time great villains. I think what made Hans Gruber scary was that he was very focused and smart. He didn’t take anything that happened personally; he had a clear goal and moved toward it relentlessly, no matter what was going on.

He also didn’t do a lot of grandstanding; the story didn’t seem to be an ego trip for him. He just wanted to steal six hundred million dollars and get away with it. Which gets to the heart of what made him compelling: he seemed, at least in the context of a movie, real.

Believability is probably one of the best ways to make a bad guy grab the reader’s attention. It’s scary when you find yourself thinking, as a reader, “There are actually people like this out there.”

(As an aside, this is part of what’s so gripping about true crime writing, except in that case you’re thinking, “These people ARE out there.”)

So, the more real, the better. That holds true even within stories that are wildly fantastic. General Woundwort from Richard Adams’s classic Watership Down comes to my mind readily.  Here’s a guy who, to human eyes, might have been a fluffy little bunny, but he pretty much embodied the worst qualities humanity exhibited in the 20th century (which is rather saying something).  But even Woundwort didn’t spend any time talking himself up, or behaving cartoonishly (nevermind that he ended up in a cartoon later on).  Adams infused him with the motivation and (lack of) morals of a ruthless dictator, and pulled no punches in doing so.   As a result, you can read that book as a grownup and still be scared as hell of that guy.  He’s intimidating for the same reason real-life dictators are: his thugs are everywhere, and even the innocent are buffaloed into cooperating with him, so that the good guys never know who to trust.

Imagine pitching that story to an editor: “So, the bad guy is a fascist rabbit… but it’ll feel real, I swear…”

Talk about giving the rest of us no excuse to let our villains lack believability.

Yeah, a dramatic pause can definitely go on too long. At which point it’s no longer all that dramatic. The obvious examples in baseball are batters repeatedly stepping out of the box. The literary equivalent is, no doubt, the overloaded exposition scene, the worst species of which involves the bad guy pointing a gun at the hero and smugly explaining the entire sinister plot, and how it was all working perfectly until that idiot McFinley went to the feds, though in fact the feds were in on it, too, well… some of the feds… since it was necessary to string them along until the shipment arrived… but you see, McFinley went to feds who weren’t in on it–

Oh, I must have dozed off there. Sorry about that. What was I saying? Oh, right, how to make sure nobody ever buys another one of your books.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a quick bit of exposition from the bad guy. I hope I can quote Die Hard without running into legal trouble:

McClane: “Why’d you have to nuke the whole building, Hans?”

Hans: “When you steal six hundred dollars, you can disappear. When you steal six hundred million, they WILL find you, unless they think you’re already dead.”

Not too shabby. Doesn’t make the audience roll its eyes.

And the lesson is…? Write a really good story that doesn’t need to be duct-taped together with implausible tedium in the final scene. Nothing to it, right? If I come across a surefire way to do that every time, without struggling through a dozen drafts, I’ll let you all know at once. (Wait, are you kidding? If I figured that out, I’d hoard it like a gold mine in the old west.)

In general, I’m sure the key to keeping dramatic pauses dramatic is to make them as short as they can be, and I think that applies at the level of action as well as overall storytelling.

I should add something to the above points about exposition. I think it’s only tedious and boring when it exists just to bridge gaps in an inconsistent story. Exposition can be great if it’s providing answers to questions that have been gnawing at the reader for four hundred pages. Especially if the answers are surprising. It also helps if the information is coming out in a plausible way: a cop explaining to a partner, a P.I. filling in a client, etc.