Tag: writing tips

Letting Things Grow

“I was tending a garden – an immense garden. And it wasn’t for food or flowers – it was just about the health of the garden. I kept working and working to control it and contain it, and make it healthier… but the garden seemed to fight me at every turn. After what seemed like days of work I finally gave up in frustration – and as I stood there, doing nothing, the garden flourished before my eyes – growing and spreading in every direction. 

Because (I realized), the system that the plants were based on was not about me shaping and controlling. The natural system of plants is healthier when they are out of control – when they are free to spread, and intermingle, and cross pollinate, and mutate. 

Now, from a human point of view, that may not provide what I want. I get smaller fruit, and smaller flowers, and untidiness. But from the view of the plants, they grow stronger and much more resilient and resistant.”

This is the thesis statement of Obduction, an adventure/puzzle/exploration video game made by Cyan Worlds. [Spoilers for the ending.] In this story, you and other humans have been abducted to a bountiful alien place with no idea why. Cecil, one of the abductees, enlists your help to find a way back home. As you wander and uncover the backstory you begin to learn the intention behind these abductions; you were not kidnapped, you were saved. These characters were plucked from their habitats to preserve them from calamity. 

It’s a hard thing to realize for Cecil who has spent years trying to build a way back home to his family. Eventually you are given a glimpse of Earth and you see that your planet has been destroyed. You don’t know if it was a nuclear disaster, global warming, or something else, but you do know that there is no going home. 

The only thing to do in the wake of this discovery is to allow this new world to take the characters somewhere unknown. Rather than fighting the progress of nature, you let it happen and everything flourishes. The quote I began with is by Farley, another abductee who understands the purpose behind their new home before anyone else. She calls it un-gardening, the idea that maybe they have to let this change happen, that even if it’s different and scary, maybe it can be good, too. 

Now how does this apply to writing? Well, characters and plot need space, too. And when they’re given space to do what they will, the story gets stronger. I have a specific idea of what’s going to happen and how the characters are going to react to it, but occasionally I’m faced with the fact that no, Ana’s not going to respond like that. She’s going to respond like this, which changes the rest of the book. And I have to decide if I’m going to force a character to do something against their personality just to preserve my plans, or if I’m going to see where this new idea takes me. Every time, going for the genuine reaction is better. 

Something I’ve had to learn with people is that I can’t change how they feel even if it makes me uncomfortable. If someone is sad, I can’t make them happy. If they’re hurt by something I’ve done, I can’t make them not hurt. But I can acknowledge their feelings, I can validate them, and I can give them support. That’s a very real-world analogy for letting my characters respond to the story, but it holds up. I have to let my characters feel how they feel, not how I want them to feel. I have to let their choices matter and affect the world around them, otherwise why do I even have characters at all? 

This past week I started GMing a group of my friends in a Star Wars tabletop RPG. Having never been a Game Master before, I used the pre-written adventure that came in the rulebook and narrated the world and events as my friends narrated their reactions to these events. There was one crucial point where, according to the book, my party of adventurers should leave the cantina to tail a spy. This would lead them to a safehouse with some bad guys there would be a fight and it would further the plot. Instead, two of the players stayed at the cantina while the other two followed the spy. 

“This is fine”, I thought. The book provided an alternative for if the players stayed at the cantina, but not for if they split the party. I could use the alternative and tweak it a little. I spend a few minutes desperately hoping that my two players don’t start a fight on their own, and my hopes are answered/defeated when they split up again. One follows the spy and the other follows the gang of bad guys who were going to the cantina to confront the rest of the party. That means I have another thing to worry about, since the only player with decent combat skills is on the far side of town while the three low-strength players are about to get caught in a firefight. But my players had made their decisions and I was going to let them do that, even if it made things more complicated for me. 

(“Should I give up tailing the spy?” the player asks, noticing that I’m trying to direct everyone back to the cantina. I’m half concerned and half looking forward to the entertaining disaster, and I give her a toothy grin. “Do whatever your character would do!”)

I should have had more faith. The fight ended up better than I could have expected, with one player remembering that they could communicate with comlinks and calling the loner back, and another using the stun setting on her blaster to take care of half the bad guys. The loner showed up and took out the biggest bad guy in one hit with a nice roll of the dice, and they had victory. 

That wasn’t the only time in the three-hour game that they surprised me by going off the preordained path. A NPC (non-player character) was supposed to do nothing but dole out some relevant information; they bought her a drink and made friends with her. I’ll make sure their personal interaction with the NPC pays off later. But when I was reading through the adventure, I didn’t give that NPC a second thought after they had declared the things the players needed to know. The players saw a new potential friend and acted accordingly. Corralling the party to find the right plot threads was sometimes tricky, but they had the most fun when I gave them some space to breathe and be creative. It created some challenges for me as I made up dialogue and personality on the spot for the NPC and altered the bad guys’ strategy to force a conflict that needed to happen, but the story was richer for it. The players’ actions were affecting the world around them, their choices mattered in the grand scheme of things. It was dynamic, exciting. 

It’s interesting to watch four of my best friends faced with a situation in an RPG and see each of them react uniquely. One of them held back, observing everything and saying little, cautious and gathering information before she acted on anything, even just playing the game. Another was fully committed to her character in body and voice, both hilarious and a little touching as a droid who might want a bionic heart but would never admit it. Yet another friend was chatting up everyone she could, bringing (dragging) the other players together and making connections, while another was watching the action, picking up on the plot threads even as he was enjoying everyone else’s antics. Even though they were playing characters, it was very true to who each of my friends is. I’d like to include such a diverse array of personalities in my stories. 

I have a hard time thinking outside the box, so it’s a challenge for me to get into every one of my characters’ heads and figure out how they’ll react to the scene. I love stories that are really just character studies, I love deeply personal blog posts, I love all of those personality-typing tests, anything that will help me understand how other people think and look at the world. It’s useful for writing, but I also just like understanding people, knowing why they do what they do, even if it’s not what I would do. 

Appreciating, understanding, and celebrating differences are necessary if I want to have characters that are fully-formed. If every one of my characters thought and acted like me, it would be a very boring book, even to me. Some of the most dynamic ideas in my book were given to me by other people, things I never would have come up with on my own. My husband is an idea machine (and will heartily admit that he doesn’t sift good idea from bad, he just lets them all pour out) and will give me five alternates for every thought I put on the page. Sometimes it’s hard to stop looking at what I want to do and consider that another choice might genuinely be better, even if it means more work for me. If I change things I have to re-develop this scene or this character or this book, and that takes time. But if I take a step back, remove myself from the equation and give the story room to grow as it will, it starts to spread into what it should be. Just like life, sometimes I have to let go of what I think it should be and just let it be what it is. 

What I’m Listening To:

The Last Of Us is a deeply compelling video game, and its soundtrack is mostly acoustic guitar with a lonely, Western feel to it. It’s one of the albums I listen to a lot while writing Lionheart.

Three Writing Lessons from Star Wars: A New Hope

I’ve been watching through the Star Wars series recently, getting ready for the finale of the Skywalker saga. Star Wars has been a lifelong love for me, from my elitist childhood of ‘original trilogy only’, to unabashedly loving the prequel trilogy, and having a dodgy, critical relationship with the sequel trilogy. I’ve delved into the video games and books (mostly by Timothy Zahn; my elitism endures in some areas) and generally consumed as much of Star Wars lore as I could. It’s a story and a universe that has affected my writing and my sensibilities about storytelling. While some people always circle back to Lord of the Rings as the story that’s most important to them, I always come back to Star Wars. 

Star Wars isn’t without its flaws, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about. A New Hope remains fresh and interesting today because of a few things that it does very right, and that make it stand out from many modern films. These points are half about A New Hope, half about Star Wars trilogies in general. But I did try to focus them a little. 

The thing that strikes me when watching A New Hope is how little exposition happens. After the opening crawl no one’s trying to tell me the history of Tatooine, what the Empire does that makes it so evil, or even that much about Luke’s backstory. We’re shown that Tatooine is an isolated, backwater planet. Han’s brush with Jabba and Greedo show that crime is thriving and the Empire has little power in this part of the galaxy. Darth Vader’s killing of Rebel captives, and later the destruction of Alderaan, demonstrate all we need to know about the Empire; they value life so little that they’ll kill 1.5 billion people to squeeze information out of a nineteen-year-old. (I once read a truly boggling article that tried to say the Empire was totally excusable and wasn’t shown to be bad in A New Hope; I still hold a grudge.) Luke’s goal of becoming a pilot like his dad come up in a very normal dinner conversation with his aunt and uncle, and it’s easy to glean from the conversation that Luke’s felt stifled by Tatooine and the difficult farmer’s life for a while. His longing gaze at the setting suns and the galaxy outside of Tatooine shows us what he wants. 

All of it is storytelling that lacks self-consciousness. It trusts the audience to be smart enough to connect the dots. There are no clumsy ‘as you know’ conversations. The biggest chunk of exposition we get is from Obi-Wan, and by that time we’re almost halfway through the movie and dying for a bit of history. And it’s directly pertinent to the story. The Jedi, the Force, and Luke’s heritage, are all important to our understanding of what happens next. Some exposition is good, especially when we’re jumping into a new universe with new rules. But bogging the opening act down with a lot of explanations slows the momentum of the plot. I like that a lot of the Star Wars universe is presented to us with little description; we have no idea what womp rats are, what creature produces blue milk, or what the Kessel run is. But we can guess. It’s that restraint, that room for the audience to play, that captures my imagination so much. Maybe that’s because I’m a storyteller, and another person might appreciate a concrete explanation. But I never said I was going to be objective. 

The second thing that I enjoy so much about A New Hope is the characters and how immediately, obviously flawed they are. Luke is my favorite, so I’ve heard “But he’s so whiny!!!!!” a lot. My rebuttal is yes. Luke is whiny. It’s called starting your characters with flaws so they have something to grow towards. Luke is immature and reckless. Han is selfish and keeps people at arms’ length. Leia is angry and thorny. And through the course of A New Hope and the rest of the trilogy, they begin to grow from their experiences. There’s nothing wrong with having a character who is fundamentally Good, but they need to have some failings to make them human. 

Star Wars does a good job of having characters with traits and flaws that aren’t always likeable. Almost everyone finds Han to be cool from the very start, with his introduction where he shoots first after trying to smooth talk his way out of Greedo’s hands. But a lot of people find Luke and his relatable desire to leave his small planet and make something of himself to be obnoxious. Maybe it’s owed a little in part to Luke being so painfully earnest in everything he does, while Han struggles with emotional sincerity. Our culture loves to act like nothing matters, so Han and Leia, who are introduced as prickly, independent characters who need support from no one, are the more popular ones. But a lot of people miss that Han and Leia don’t stay those people. Their arcs center around learning to trust others, to stay and care when they’re afraid they might get hurt, and to risk themselves for what they love and believe in. And growth, especially upwards growth, is important for a story. A story that ends in hopeless, bitter tragedy, accomplishing nothing and destroying its characters, gives nothing to the world. A story that looks at its flawed characters and despairing world and says ‘maybe we can change this for the better’ gives some hope to the audience. Star Wars is primarily a story of redemption, so of course its characters have to have something to be redeemed from. Character development is important in every story, but is especially thematic in Star Wars. 

A little soapbox happened there. But the second point blends into the third, so we’ll keep going. Star Wars is a story about hope. And I know this is a very subjective point, but I like stories with happy endings. They don’t have to be 100% happy, and I love a good sad ending. Rogue One and Revenge of the Sith are very high on my list, even with their tragic ends. Gritty, dark, ‘realistic’ stories have been popular for a long time; Game of Thrones, Batman, modern Westerns, all of them hold up a nihilistic view of the world where nothing really matters and no one can ever be truly good. And yes, evil does exist. There are truly terrible people in the world, and awful things happen all the time. But there are also good people, and hope, no matter the odds. And I appreciate Star Wars’ commitment to good vs evil. Even when its theology of the Force wobbles on whether or not good and evil are opposed or sides of a coin, the story itself comes down squarely in the opinion that it is good vs evil. There is complexity–sometimes good people fall and sometimes bad people rise to redemption. But at the core, the story believes that what you do matters, and there is hope for a better world and a better self. 

This was a pretty self-indulgent post, but it’s my blog so I can post what I want. Star Wars, like I said, holds a special place in my heart. What are some stories that are especially close to you, and have any of them affected your perspective or your writing?