My least favorite question

I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating, my least favorite question isn't the infamous "Where
do you get your ideas?" I like that question, actually, and cannot understand how anyone could move through this world and not end the day with their pockets stuffed full of stories (whether they have the will or the wherewithal to write them down is another matter).

No, my least favorite question is "Which character is you?"

The thing I like about "Where do you get your ideas?" is that it has as its underlying theme a genuine understanding that this writing thing is something I could do if I could just understand how to get started.  The question of which character is me gets at a fundamental misunderstanding of what fiction is, much less how it is done.

I probably didn't help much by writing in character as Dr Deeds on Twitter. That isn't to say that Howard's mad science teacher doesn't have a lot of me in him, but no more or less than Howard, or Old Suit, or Erica for that matter. But none of them are Scott in disguise.

I can't think why I'd want to put on Groucho glasses and a wig and wander into my story. "Nothing to see here, author coming through, carry on, nothing to see..." what a distraction that would be.

Which isn't to say that authors never inject themselves into their stories. "Never" is a dangerous word and almost always the first word of a lie. Some writers do and I find it deeply annoying in much the same way that I've grown to hate the inevitable Stan Lee cameo in every Marvel movie. Let's step out of the story for a moment while we all acknowledge the creator of this fictional narrative we were enjoying before you interrupted it for an inside joke.

It can be done right, and carefully in the correct circumstances (Kilgore Trout springs to mind). But you don't serve your story or your reader by forcing your story to form around an ego trip.

That's the fundamental conceit of fiction that this questioner doesn't understand and a bridge that far too many have trouble crossing. The purpose of storytelling is to let both the reader and the storyteller live lives we'd never be able to live, to experience things we might never encounter, to feel empathy for people we've never met or never could.

All of these kids and mad scientists and government agents and robots and alien creatures are part of me, but none of them are me. We use stories to inject ourselves into other lives, other times, and other situations. To breathe humanity into dry history and to postulate very ordinary human reactions into extraordinary situations. None of it requires me to inject myself into the story as a thinly-veiled character and nothing would be served except my own ego by doing so.

Which character is me? All of them. And none of them.

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GETTING BACK IN THE TIME MACHINE:

Next weekend, I will be in Port Townsend, Washington for The Brass Screw Confederacy May 29-31st.  There will be writers panels, radio shows, and other shenanigans.

I hope to see some of my Seattle-area folks there!

6 Tips for Avoiding Sociopathic Storytelling

We are not always in the story we think we are and we are not always playing the role we think we are playing. Just as we are not always fully aware of the endings, the beginnings, or who the heroes and villains around us truly are. Stories are going on all around us all the time, and though we may fancy ourselves the hero of our own tale, we are mostly bit players in someone else's.

I think that's important to keep in mind when telling a story. It's so very easy to fall into a mindset that the only thing going on in the universe is the story you're telling. Every character springs into existence when they walk into your scene and ceases to exist the second they exit the page.

Even though there are moments when the most important thing going on in your world are happening in your story, that doesn't mean it's the only thing happening or the only thing that's ever happened in the lives of the people involved. When you get the feeling that it is, the world becomes smaller, shrinking until I stop caring about the outcome because the world you're trying to save is paper-thin.

Because I'm in the habit of naming things, I think of it as Sociopathic Storytelling Syndrome.

For the sake of keeping it all in my head, I created the acronym S.L.O.W.L.Y. to keep in mind the six things I want to know about every character that has more than a passing mention in my stories: Secrets, Loves, Origins, Wits, Learning, and Yearning.

If you know these six things about a character -- even if they never come up -- just having it in your head will bleed into their dialogue and their actions and breathe a larger life into your story. Because when that waitress leaves the scene, she's going somewhere, doing something, loving someone, or yearning for them.

And that's the kind of thing that brings a world to life.

1. Secrets:  Often what's unsaid forms us more than anything else. You should know at least a few things about the character that have nothing to do with the story: What are they passionate about? If you walked into their home, what would stand out about them? Are they shifty or a straight-shooter? Know the character's secrets and you'll know the character too.
   
2. Loves:  A character's gender preferences and relationship status would and should tie directly to how they interact with other characters. What or who does the character love? Are they in a relationship or are they looking?
   
3. Origins:  We are where we come from. Where was the character born? How were they brought up? What kind of family circumstances did they grow up in? Are they lonely or a loner?
   
4. Wits:  How smart is this character? This isn't the same as education and often more interesting if their smarts comes from a place of experience rather than academia, so you can tie 'Wisdom' in here too if you like.
   
5. Learning:  The demeanor of even the most incidental character will at the very least display how educated they are? Did they go to college? Drop out of high school? Home schooled? Hold advanced degrees?
   
6. Yearning:  Everyone has a goal, something they yearn for. What does the character want? What drives them? What are they willing to risk anything in order to obtain or defend?

Dr. Villainous Deeds: An Online Approach to Character Creation

Hidden somewhere in every narrative is the author that created it.  As Oscar Wilde observed "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

Which should probably alarm me, because one of characters that people best know me for is a mad scientist and self-professed evil genius.

Some people have an inner child, I have an inner mad scientist.

For those of you who have read Howard Carter Saves the World, you know Dr Villainous Deeds as Howard's mad science teacher (in every sense). But he's much older than that. Before he became comedy relief for that novel, he was 'tried on' for size in several ways to make sure I could embody that sort of silly/evil character in a believable fashion.

Before I could commit to writing a novel about him, I needed to get inside his scary, freaky, head and see how he ticked.

Under normal circumstances, I 'try on' new characters in a series of short stories or vignettes.  Each time the character appears in these short pieces, there are subtle changes as I learn how they move through their worlds and interact with the people they meet.  I find my way into their skin and fill it out until they become as real as ink on a page can be.  Only then do I commit them to a longer, more complex storyline.

I did this with Howard Carter and his friends, I did this with Ashleigh MacLeod, and I did it with a host of other characters that never grew into actual novels because what the short stories taught me was that I didn't want to live with them through 90,000 words.

Doctor Deeds called for an entirely new approach.

You Ruined It! :: Movie Adaptations of Favorite Books, Redux

The other day, a friend of mine pointed me to a news story about Tom Cruise being considered to play Lee Child's itinerant vigilante, Jack Reacher.

The outcry from fans was immediate and vigorous. Reacher is an unstoppable 6' 5", 250 pound, package of whupass. Cruise, generally speaking, is not. Child is on on record with the Guardian, saying "Reacher's size in the books is a metaphor for an unstoppable force, which Cruise portrays in his own way," Nevertheless, the cry went up from the halls of fandom: "You're ruining it!"

Every so often, this discussion rears its head and I've discussed it before in relation to Harry Potter as well as Where the Wild Things Are and Inkheart. And I'm on record as saying that there's no manner in which a movie adaptation can "ruin" a book.  They can screw up a story, they can make a bad movie, but nothing they do can have any effect on the book they were (allegedly) based upon... or can it?

A Rabbit Problem :: The dangers of writing the extraordinary character

Flashback Friday - This post first appeared on 1 July 2009.  Have you ever written a Bugs Bunny into your book?  Welcome to my world...

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I have a rabbit problem. Not in the garden, in my books. And if your characters are as capable as Jack Reacher or as smart as Sherlock Holmes or as beautiful as a fashion model... or in anyway presenting themselves to you as nearly super-human, then you have a rabbit problem too.

Legendary Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones also had a rabbit problem. He was possessed of a set of characters with the ability to bend reality to their whim in order to triumph over what seemed to be overwhelming odds. And at the head of the pack was a rabbit named Bugs.

"Golden Rule. Bugs must always be provoked. In every film, someone must have designs on his person: gastronomic, as a trophy, as a good-luck piece (rabbit's foot, which makes as much sense as a rabbit carrying a human foot on a key chain), as an unwilling participant in a scientific experiment [...] Without such threats, bugs is far too capable a rabbit to evoke the necessary sympathy."

-Chuck Jones "Chuck Amuck"

Take the above quote and insert "Sherlock Holmes" or "Jack Reacher" or "Calvin" from Calvin & Hobbes in the place of Bugs and you'll see the problem that Conan Doyle, Lee Child and Bill Watterson faced every time they sat down to write.

If you can take your lead character(s) and insert their name and gender into the above quote, then you're in the Radio Flyer wagon with Arthur, Lee, Chuck and me, staring around at the sea of rabbits. Welcome aboard!   The blonde kid with the tiger is in charge, so don't smart off.

If a drama is derived from ordinary people in extraordinary situations, is it worthwhile to examine the extraordinary person in the extraordinary situation? Of course it is. It's just a matter of how you go about it.

The first thing to remember is Chuck's admonition that the supremely-capable character acting unprovoked will elicit very little sympathy from the audience. The corollary to this is that watching someone who is smarter than the subject matter waltz through the story is boring to boot. The Rabbit has to meet a challenge worthy of his efforts and attention or I'm not going to read your story and most of the editors I've met won't either.

Incidentally, if your character is so talented and capable in every realm and situation, I humbly submit that you need to rethink the decisions that led to your writing a novel about Superman. (Unless you really are writing a novel about Superman, in which case good luck and Godspeed because I'm as big a geek as as the next guy.)

There's a trap that catches just about every writer early in their writing career: It's insanely easy to create a fantasy alter ego that is everything we ever dreamt of being. And because as a breed, writers tend toward the bespectacled introvert more than the opposite. (There's a fine line between being stereotypical and merely archetypal.) With godlike powers, we can make manikins of words that are smarter, faster and better than any human being could ever hope to be.

There are degrees of extraordinariness and I should take a moment to poke some holes in...

Contrary to what detective novelists and television have taught us, a genius IQ does not automatically come with a detective's badge, Oriental lineage doesn't come with a black belt in the local martial art and very few CIA employees ever get issued a Glock and a license to kill. Those things are all cliche's. That's not to say that there aren't any genius PI's, Japanese kids trained in Ninjitsu or CIA hitmen in the world, just that there's a fine line between stereotype and archetype and in a fictional setting the scales are too often tipped toward the wrong side of that equation. (mixed metaphor alert!)

The cliche has a place in writing and life and we should treat them in the manner that they so richly deserve: subversion. Playing against audience expectations is part of the fun of writing the extraordinary character.

Drag your Rabbits out of their element. Give them a reason to get involved and then challenge them by forcing them to act in a realm beyond their expertise. Play them against themselves and keep doing it or you're going to end up running afoul of Chuck's Golden Rule. At which point, you might as well lobotomize your rabbit and let the hunter catch him.

First Day Wrapup :: Scenes From a Space Helmet

Part One: A Robot Too Far is up on the site for you to read if you've a mind to.  Just click the title and you'll be whisked away by the internet djinn.


The first day of National Novel Writing Month has drawn to a close (at least for me) here on the west coast and my total stands somewhere north of 2,500 words.  Many of my friends rested their efforts around the 5,000 mark and I wish them well.  I'm a marathoner and I have a lot of long races under my belt and an innate fear of tripping myself up by outrunning my supply lines.

Mixed metaphor, party of one?

The folks at the Office of Letters & Light (our hosts) tell us that around 150,000 of us wrote about 55 million words today.  That's astounding. No wonder the site kept crashing today! 

The first complete section/chapter of the novel is posted and I'm happy with it overall.  You'll notice a distinct difference in the tone and delivery from past items I've shared, and that's on purpose.  I wanted to just sit down and talk through my computer, tell a story to an audience of friends... which is what we're all doing really, no matter what month it happens to be.

For me, NaNoWriMo is a time to experiment, to play with words and see what they're capable of.  To build giant robots and send them tromping across Missouri cornfields or send a young man hurtling back in time.

Because this is an homage to all the great science fiction I grew up on, the field is wide open and I intend to draw from the whole panoply of what came before.  In some ways I've thrown a pile of chits emblazoned with my favorite elements of science fiction into a hat and I'm pulling them out one by one and seeing if I can make them fun, funny or just silly enough to keeping you smiling while I reach into the hat to draw the next one.

The danger is that I'll end up with a meaningless jumble, or even worse, a horrible pastiche.  Of course, the danger of walking the edge is that you'll fall off.  The threat of failure is half the fun.

In the opening scene, an escaped android, an alien invader and a secret government agency were all introduced.  A famous author and a famous physicist were mentioned and a mad scientist or two hovered around the edge of things, waiting for their cues.  Tomorrow, we meet our hero and begin to get better acquainted with his world which is very similar to ours, and yet just different enough... well, you'll see.

Believe it or not, all of this makes sense and ties together before the end.  I promise.

In the meantime, enjoy the ride!

-Scott

Why Bother?

At least two people who've read only the brief description of the novel I'll be writing for National Novel Writing Month have asked me why I'd bother writing about boy geniuses and giant robots.

I find this approach simultaneously amusing and frustrating.  The idea that seems to be operating here is that in order to tell a new story, all of the characters have to be of a variety no one else has ever thought of before.  As if such a thing were even possible.

Entire forests have been expended in pursuit of young wizard's apprentices and orphans, yet that didn't stop JK Rowling.  She knew that even though she was walking in the footsteps of everyone from Charles Dickens to Craig Shaw Gardner, her book would be different because she wrote it.  And thank God she did too -- Harry Potter almost single-handedly reawakened the sleeping giant of midgrade and young adult fiction.

Because she wasn't afraid to take a comfortable idea -- the boy wizard -- and say something new with it.  In many ways, she rewrote David Copperfield for a post-Tolkien world.  She took almost word-for-word the  grafted on a lot of ideas that were floating around at the time and synthesized them into something that felt new even though nothing really new happened in those books.


I don't remember the last time I read anything that was literally unprecedented.  The Odyssey, maybe.  And Joseph Campbell assures us that Homer's epic mostly feels original simply because it's far enough in the dark and hoary past that we just don't know where Homer got his ideas.  While that's no excuse for not attempting do to something new, the best anyone (Homer included) can really hope for is to look at something with fresh eyes.

Which puts me in mind of something I read the other day...

"While the optimist tells you the glass is half-full, the hipster tells you they knew about the glass before you and it's not cool anymore." -Anonymous

The quote was unattributed when it crossed my desk, so I'm not sure who came up with it, but I find it very telling.

Tom Swift was the iconic boy genius.  Over a hundred books have featured the character over the years and almost every writer I admire from Asimov to Douglas Adams have pointed to young Master Swift as an inspiration. Talk about territory that's been thoroughly explored.  But just as Star Wars didn't signal the end of spaceships and laser guns (quite the opposite, actually) Tom Swift didn't bankrupt the storytelling power of the young genius. Walking that same ground has come have Encyclopedia Brown, The Mad Scientist's Club, Artemis Fowl II, Hermione Granger, Veronica Mars and Agatha Heterodyne.  My personal favorites among many, many others.

And while my young genius may be informed by all of those and more, and may have come out of a childhood spent absorbing the adventures of Tom Swift and Encyclopedia Brown, he's not going to be either.  Nor will he be any of the other young geniuses featured in the stories I've absorbed during my stay on this odd little planet.  It goes back to what I've said a thousand times about why ideas can't be copyrighted -- because if you and I set out to write a book from the same idea, the two books would not even remotely resemble one another.

Don't get me wrong, there are many stories that have been told a thousand times and characters that need a rest. Our culture likes to dry up a well before we move on to drilling the next one.  I'm personally rather sick of stories about vampires, werewolves and zombies, but that doesn't mean there's nothing new to say with those characters.


It may or may not be true that there's nothing new under the sun.  The greatest stories ever told all came from somewhere, but that didn't keep those writing them from licking the tip of their pen and getting to work writing them.

Howard Carter is a deliberate homage to the science fiction of the past and the unrealized promises concocted to brighten up The World of Tomorrow.  Promises written so deeply into our culture that everyone periodically gazes skyward and dreams wistfully of a jet pack or flying car.  (A phenomenon that is directly proportional to the amount of ground traffic around you.)  Even his name was inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's iconic character John Carter.  But this isn't an Edgar Rice Burroughs story, it's a Scott Perkins story.  And in some ways, it's going to be a story that looks at the 21st century we have and contrasts it with the 21st century we were promised.  (Yes, that's been done before too and I still don't care.)

There is a fine line between creating a pastiche and paying homage.  And don't think I'm not looking down at the wreckage of those who slipped and fell before me. The danger is half the fun.
- Scott

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Howard Carter Saves the Earth is my next novel, to be written in public by posting chapters as they are finished.  Subscribe to my Facebook page and/or follow me on Twitter to receive updates, links and free short stories.  You can also read "Tractors Aren't Supposed to Do That", a prologue posted here last Tuesday.

SideNote: I was delighted to discover recently that the earliest adventures of TOM SWIFT are out of copyright and available as free downloads via Project Gutenberg.  Just enter "Tom Swift" into the title search. Of course, all of these books predate modern sensibilities, so the usual caveats apply.

A Miscellany: The Ides of March, Looking for the Next Story, Keep An Eye Out for Characters and Practical Filekeeping... et al

It's March 15th. If your name is Julius, you might want to hide for awhile. And watch that Cassius, he's a skinny fella and skinny people tend to know a good deal about knives.  I don't know why that is, but Mister Shakespeare is not to be second-guessed.

I've said several times in recent days that I was looking for the next novel to write, but in all honesty, I generally have several projects in various stages of completion at any given moment.  The real question isn't "what book do I write next" but rather "which book shall receive the brunt of my attentions?"

Since I pronounced the book I'd been working on "Done" (but never finished) I've been shifting the piles of notes and character concepts and sundry whatnot trying to find the next story to receive my concentrated efforts.  I've spoken before of my habit of squirreling away every idea that springs to mind in one of two computer files.  Nascent story ideas are "Seedlings" and characters go into the "Cocktail Party" to mingle with other character ideas in hopes that they'll naturally form alliances, hook up, etcetera.

As you know if you've been following this blog for any length of time, I subjected myself to the insanity of NaNoWriMo and came out of it with fifty thousand words of a proto-novel.  By itself, this isn't really a great novel and the story I created that November by itself isn't a novel.  So I tossed it into the garden with the other seedlings and it got trampled on by the attendees of my character cocktail party and... well, I think I've found my next project.

Today's writing tip is as old as Julius Caesar's very bad day: Save every idea you have.  Write them down so you won't forget them.  File them away, let them mingle, grow, mutate, and do the things that are best done out of the sight of decent society.

I know I keep repeating that, but it's worth repeating.  I'm always amazed at how often they come out of the files stronger for having spent their time there.

And in case you doubt that talking to the people you come across every day has value, today I sat down next to an archaeologist who knew and acted as a sort of general factotum to Thor Heyerdahl.  I would never take his stories because that would be rude and I rarely turn people I know into characters wholesale.  But if there's not a story seedling or two there, I don't know where else to find them.

Ain't nothin' but a family thing...

Family fascinates me endlessly. The examination of familial bonds and the burdens and joys that they bring is a theme that runs through most of my writing.

Because America is an immigrant nation, that extends back in time to the patriarchs who made the long trek across the oceans to join our squabbling and rambunctious nation, grafting themselves on to our Family. I especially like how age can wash away scandal. "Great great grandpa Morgan was a bloodthirsty pirate" sounds dashing, whereas "Uncle Bob siezed an oil tanker yesterday and is holding thirteen crewmembers hostage" might not be bragged about so loudly. Yet, they're essentially the same thing, separated only by time. Romanticized by the historical context, the pirate of yesteryear is the movie hero and the pirate of today is the blood-thirsty terrorist.

Blame Hollywood, if you like. I know a lot of people do. But that doesn't change the fact that it's equally true of "Uncle Bob ran numbers for the mob back in the forties, isn't he sweet in that funny hat?"

The most scandalous hushed-up events of the past become the badges of honor worn by the present. I think of it as a sort of psychic recycling. Relations and families are the incarnate stuff from which any story could be woven. Links to the old country, scandalous forebears, mysterious family heirlooms, vendettas handed down from father to son... these are the stuff that dreams are made of. All of them real, all of it perfectly plausible hooks to hang a story on.


On our money it says E Pluribus Unum... "From the many, one." A singular unit drawn from the plurality. One Family of diverse elements. And like our country, our families don't always get along, and aren't always cut from the same cloth, yet instantly unite against external forces.

I tend to view history as a familial connection stretching back into infinity. Every man may not be my brother, but they are my cousin. And I think it's more interesting that way, that it makes what is otherwise dry historical information grittier and more immediate. I pepper my novels with characters whose familial connections are interwoven into the plot, whose ancestors aren't always paragons of virtue, but blood is thicker than just about anything else. Which is part of why I refer to the things I write (when I'm not moving giant robots across the landscape) as "Literary thrillers" than anything else. Thrillers, because these are characters in peril and the stakes are wide-ranging, but literary because it's ultimately about the interactions between the present and the past, the familial elements that make history matter.

And if there's not a career's worth of writing to be found in that, then I don't know where else you could look.

Finding Meaning

I try not to be didactic, but I believe that everything I write should be about something. That there should be deeper thematic elements at work than unmasking the killer, uncovering the conspiracy, defeating the badguy.

My plots are spun from the way that history has been carved up and commodified, bought, sold and stolen to the level where the black market in antiquities is second only to drugs for the amount of money generated.

There's plenty of fodder there to create a rippin' yarn, but not a memorable one. It's the characters and the characterization that make a story memorable. And much though I deplore the cultural commodities market, there's much more that a book needs to be about before I feel it's a good one. Because it's not enough to thrill a reader, I want them to think too. And if you don't empathize with a character, you will forget about them as soon as you close the book and put it back on the nightstand. Which is why a lot of what I write about here is about characterization.

Back in February I posted an extended meditation on what it meant to feel empathy for someone. Not the knee-jerk appearance of empathy like a bartender making sympathetic noises while letting a patron bend his ear, but actual empathy. Luckily for writers, I find that it's easier to empathize for a fictional character than it is with a real human being.

Empathy requires a certain amount of imagination and active listening skills to discover what the other person is up to beyond what you can see. In reality this is tiring and time-consuming, so we revert to surface impressions as an act of psychic self-defense. Understanding of what's behind the mask is easier in fiction because the writer shows it to you. In a book or even a play, I can show you the inside of a person's head. Even in a biography (a well-written one at any rate) there's greater scope to our understanding of the individual than we ever get in real life. And until our society shifts to allow extended soliloquizing, I suppose that's not likely to change.

The easy social framework of archetype and stereotype simplifies our daily interactions. At work or school, in traffic, or in the supermarket, we tend to skate across the surfaces of people, only troubling to dig beneath the surface for the sake of loved-ones and friends. Not so in fiction. In the fictional realm, a writer that skims the surface of characters is doing a disservice to the reader. Which brings us back to giving stories meanings deeper than the plot. Empathy is the handmaiden of complexity. And if my books are about anything, it's that most of our problems are the result of an insufficiency of empathy and a lack of complexity in how we view the people around us. Across generations, across the aisle or across the table, so much of the tumult in our world comes from reacting to an understanding (or what we laughably call 'understanding') that fails to scratch beneath the surface impressions.

My novels tend to be charged with social and religious themes and I purposely put people whose social and/or religious viewpoints conflict at the same table to deal with them. Because if all our artists, writers and filmmakers show us is people in conflict over these issues and never people of opposite views finding common purpose... what hope do we have?

There's no way to type that without sounding absurdly PC and quite possibly namby and/or pamby, but there it is.

While we might take advantage of archetypes and definable characteristics in our writing, I think it behooves writers to always remember that character runs deeper than plot. Literature is our one chance to step outside ourselves and take a trip inside someone else's skin. Be it Holden Caulfield or Atticus Finch, you're stepping outside yourself, viewing the world through another set of eyes. Even if you're borrowing the skin of Robert Langdon, you are outside yourself for the moments you spend in his world. Let's make the trip worthwhile.

Role to hit...

I learned to tell stories from my dad, who was quite the raconteur when the mood struck him. I learned to love stories by reading a lot of them. I learned about characterization and what made a story drag you to the edge of your chair by participating in them. As if I haven't already made it clear that I'm a nerd, today I shall remove any lingering doubts. Today we're going to talk about... (deep breath) role-playing games.

I'm sure I have a pocket protector around here somewhere.

A table in a basement surrounded by young men, soda cans and empty pizza boxes. This raucous gathering was sterotypically the smarter kids from their school who found common cause in their esoterica. Mostly young men, they gather to breathe life back into a faded mythos governed by obscure rules and the chance roll of polyhedral dice... role playing games. About the only legal activity in the high schools of America circa 1980 that had any air of mystery about it. Movies and news reports tried to link role playing games to all sorts of satanic pseudo-mystical nonsense while most of the players viewed it in much the same way their fathers viewed Friday night poker games.

Most people know about Dungeons & Dragons, but there were far more than that: Top Secret, Vampire the Masquerade, Ninjas & Super Spies, Shadowrun, Battletech... the list seems virtually endless and at one time or another and I played them all.

What does this have to do with storytelling?

Everything and nothing.

It's axiomatic that the story looks different from the inside than it will look from the outside. I can tell you stories about things that really happened to me in the back-country during my mountaineering and backpacking days and make you laugh every time. Stories that were frightening, uncomfortable and dangerous when I was living them. I can tell you stories about bad guys thwarted, secret plans stolen and dragons slain in imaginary games and get much the same reaction. But in neither case - the real or the imagined - will it be the same for your reader if you re-tell my story to someone else. It's inherently different because I was there. I was standing in front of that bear or staring over that ledge or slaying that imaginary dragon.

The dramatic tension comes from the experience. The story would not be the same had I not subjected myself to the whims of chance, the roll of the die. And since you didn't experience it except through my narrative, you will tell it differently and with less immediacy than I.

That isn't to say that I want you to run out and throw yourself in front of a bear, or get buried in an avalanche. You don't need to do that in order to write about them. Nor do you need to put together a role-playing game based upon the novel you're writing.

Roleplaying games taught me to have an experience that didn't really happen, to watch it unfold through the eyes of a fictional character. Even if I didn't know what it felt like first-hand to stare down the snout of a black bear or free fall into nothing on the end of a bungee cord, I could create a semblence of that experiencve because I've learned the skill of putting myself into the head of a person that does not exist.

In Telling Lies for Fun & Profit, Lawrence Block talks about how finite even the most compelling life is in terms of storytelling potential. Even if you lived a life of danger as an international jewel thief, you are still - as Block puts it - sitting on a raft in cold waters, chopping bits off the back-end to feed the fire you've started at the front. At some point you will run out of boat. Being able to live through the eyes of an imaginary person allows me to build a bigger boat, feeding the fires with imaginary planks.

One last thing about lessons role-playing games can teach us and then I'll shut up about them...

In Across the Crowded Marketplace, I dwelt on the definitive archetypes, the roles your characters play in the stories they inhabit and how important it is that your readers be able to recognize them on a cultural level. At the core of that is a crucial understanding of your character and what role they fill in the story.

Part of this is the ability to play them consistently through the entire story. If one ear is lower than the other on page one, then on page 220, those ears had better still be assymetrical. I keep track of this using something else role-playing games taught me... the character sheet. Height, weight, eye color, hair color, ethnicity, skin tone, education, distinguishing features, idiosyncrocies... all on an easy-to-reference sheet of paper. This sounds fussy and even anal, and I suppose that it is. It also keeps my legendary absent-mindedness from sidelining my writing while i search the manuscript for some tiny detail from the first chapter.

Role-playing games take place in worlds that are fully-realized entities apart from ours, a shared landscape of the imagination replete with maps, politics and adventures in the offing. they are a place where we can step into other skins and other lives. A similarly-realized world should unfold each time I open my laptop and type "Chapter One" at the top of a page.

I owe it to my world and to my characters to know them well enough to be able to tell their stories as if I'd been there too.

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Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines. Contact Me: swalkerperkins@gmail.com

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Across the Marketplace (Cross-Pollination Pt I)

Commedia del Arte is a form of theater designed to be performed by a limited number of actors in a setting that is less than ideal for theater: The Renaissance marketplace. Each actor wears a specific mask and adopts certain prescribed poses that are universal to the form.

The characters bear Italianate names like Pantalone, the unscrupulous and grasping old man; Capitano, the strutting braggart; Arlechinno, the clever and (more or less) innocent servant... The iconic masks, poses and well-defined characters allowed the actors to perform amid the bustle of marketplace and festival in a time before microphones. The cavernous noses of the masks have even been alleged to magnify the voices of the actors.

Even if you could not hear every word or see them clearly, you knew who was doing what. Even from a distance, there was no question which actor was playing which role, so well-known were the archetypes they portrayed. Even today you would recognize them whether you realize it or not. Harlequin came from commedia. Punch & Judy as well. Shakespeare borrowed shamelessly from his Italian counterparts. Your pants are called "pants" as a short form of 'pantaloons' named for the costume worn by Pantalone. In more theatrical and modern(ish) terms, The Marx Brothers, Monty Python and the Muppets all owe an enormous debt to their frenetic forbears in commedia del arte.

But lest I lose you, I didn't come here to give you a lesson in the history of Western theater. The reason I bring this up is that what Groucho, the Pythons and Jim Henson all understood is the power of the iconic character.

So too can the form translate into written fiction, comedy or drama. You don't have to be writing screwball comedy to learn from the masks of the commedia. Falstaff and Hamlet are both iconic characters that resonate on a cultural level.

When I was a kid, we were taught that all fictional conflict could be summed-up as "Man -vs- Man, Man -vs- Nature, and Man -vs- Himself." In the time I've been alive this has broadened quite a bit and become gender-neutral, but the central premise remains the same: even as broad as it's become, there's a limited number of frameworks within which we can fit a story.

Yet, if that's true, why do we all find it so difficult to sum-up our books in a paragraph when we're pitching them to agents and publishers?

Because we tend not to think about our frames, or (worse yet) imagine that they're not there. Recognizing them allows us to identify places we can push at them without it collapsing. Seeing beneath the masks our characters wear is one thing, but seeing the mask itself is important too.

There's a term bandied about quite a bit in New York and Hollywood: "High Concept" -- put in simple terms this means your story can be explained in simple terms. It doesn't mean you're necessarily telling a simple story or that the book is lacking in complexity. At it's best, it simply means that you made good use of the iconic.

That your characters and story can be recognized across the bustling marketplace.