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Storytelling Class — Round and Flat Characters

Every week, my daughter Freya and I have a “storytelling class.” Really, it’s just a fun opportunity to chat about writing stories. This week, our topic was making characters.

We always start with two questions: What did we read, and what did we write over the past week?

What Did We Read?

The family had a day this week where just about everyone wrote some poetry, so Freya read everyone’s poems. At school, they’re reading “The One and Only Bob.” My wife is reading her “Wildwood” at bedtimes, and she’s still working through Harry Potter in her free time at school.

I read the remaining pile of Vertigo comics that my wife snagged for me at a garage sale. Last week, I read the first two volumes of Y: The Last Man, a critically acclaimed series that I found pretty uninteresting. This week I delved into two other popular comics series and enjoyed them both quite a bit. They were:

  • Fables: Legends in Exile (Vol. 1)
  • Fables: Fairest: Wide Awake (a side series, I guess?)
  • Unwritten (Vols. 1-4)

Fables is all about fairy tales come to life and magically transported to modern day New York, forced to shlub it up with us mundane people while keeping their magical identities hidden. The first volume is a murder mystery, with the Big Bad Wolf as detective. It doesn’t end with the most shocking twist, but it serves as a great framework to introduce some of the main characters and the world they inhabit. Moreover, I appreciate a short, self-contained little arc, since comics are so often sprawling arcs and cross-series tie-ins (something Marvel has now inflicted upon films).

Fables: Fairest: Wide Awake is another self-contained arc, but completely separate from the New York fables. This one tells the story of a few fables who come together by chance and end up in the sights of an evil fairy queen.

While I enjoyed the Fables books, I really fell in love with Unwritten. Of the random selection of series in this pile ‘o garage sale books, these were my favorites by far.

Unwritten is about a sad man named Tom Taylor, who just happens to have the same name as the main character in a series of wildly successful Harry-Potter-esque novels written by his father. The story starts with Tom making a pittance attending conventions and signing his father’s books, but he quickly gets pulled into a strange conspiracy that threatens his life. Odd occurrences start to stack up, and it looks like he might actually be the boy wizard from the books, and that the worlds of stories might be just as real as our own.

I liked these enough that I’m going to buy the other 7 volumes, and at some point I’ll probably write a separate post about them.

What Did We Write?

This week I wrote my usual blog posts and finished the rough draft of Razor Mountain Chapter 8.

Freya wrote another chapter of her story, Amber and Floria. She also wrote a poem for the ad-hoc family poem-fest.

Characters

The topic for this week was characters, specifically flat and round characters. These, like so many writing terms, end up being talked about as a sort of binary, but they’re really two ends of a spectrum.

  • Round, deep or complex characters are those with extensive back-story, with many and subtle personality traits.
  • Flat, shallow or simple characters are those with minimal back-story and little personality.

It should be obvious just from these definitions that there is a spectrum here, where characters can be more or less complex.

It might feel desirable to make every character as complex as possible, and this is generally a good instinct. However, it’s important to note that there are only so many pages in a book. Some characters will necessarily take up more of the story, and others will be inherently less important. So even if every single character is equally complex, they cannot be shown with equal depth in the text itself.

Round Characters

To make characters more round, figure out more details about their

  • Background
  • Personality
  • Strengths and weaknesses
  • Conflict (what’s their problem, and how do they intend to solve it?)
  • Growth (how do they change over the course of the story?)

Again, it’s fine to know more things about a character than you actually end up using on the page. Sometimes having a deep back-story allows you to hint at bits of their personality that don’t show through clearly, but still give the character a sense of being a complicated, living person.

Flat Characters

The flattest characters are usually purpose-built. They do something specific for the story. The danger with these kind of characters is that they look too much like a plot device and not enough like a real person.

For these characters, having a personality, goals and conflict are less important. In fact, they only matter in that they’re useful to make the character feel real for the short time they’re on the page. Sometimes, flat characters can be defined with a shorthand or handle: specific, interesting traits. These might be something physical, or a mannerism, an unusual mode of speech, or other memorable attributes.

Flat Can Be Okay

There’s a school of thought that says no characters should be flat, and especially not ones that are important to the story, but that’s not necessarily true. While we usually want the characters in the spotlight to be complex and interesting, there are certain types of stories and certain genres where relatively flat characters can be effective, even in a starring role.

In some comedy, especially cartoons and sitcoms, it’s common to see characters that are mostly static from episode to episode. These shows typically feature a problem at the start of the episode that is resolved by the end, which means that over time, the status quo is maintained. This allows an audience to “pop-in” to the show at any time, as long as they’re familiar with the characters. They don’t have to catch up on the two or three episodes they missed. When this works, it’s because the characters are largely treated as vehicles for a steady stream of jokes.

Similarly, in certain mystery stories, the detective protagonist may undergo surprisingly little character development. These stories are focused on the mystery: the clues, the false leads, the clever inferences, and the eventual satisfying conclusion. Again, the detective character becomes a vehicle, this time, for the mystery.

Some superhero comics are superlative examples of characters that can remain static and flat. I have a pet theory that superhero origin stories are almost always the most compelling, because the character has an arc in the origin story, but oftentimes becomes much more static after that, enslaved by a serial format that wants to keep selling issues indefinitely. (Of course, this is a gross generalization, but there are certainly examples you can point to.)

Point of View

For POV characters and narrators, who are the reader’s window into the story, having a deep understanding of the character is vital for understanding their voice. When the character is the POV or the narrator, their voice is the voice of the book (or at least the parts they are involved in). It affects what the reader sees and how the reader interprets almost everything.

Examples

As an example of the flat <==> round spectrum in action, Freya and I talked about one of my half-finished stories.

It takes place in a steampunk world where everyone can wield a tiny amount of magic via totemic items, but a rare few (called “hexes”) can wield greater magical power. The protagonist, Edward, is a hex and a former soldier and spy who once worked for the crown. After committing terrible atrocities in a world war, he quit and vowed to never take another life. He’s an emotional wreck thanks to the horrible things he’s done and seen, and he is constantly balancing his natural inquisitiveness and propensity for getting into big, violent trouble with his vow of pacifism.

Early in the story, he gets involved in a mystery and meets a man who calls himself Vociferous. Vociferous is huge. He claims to be a Hex, wears slightly absurd robes and works in a factory, supposedly casting spells as a part of the highly secretive manufacturing process. We quickly find out that Vociferous is a fraud, and not a hex at all. We find this out because Edward is a real hex who knows all about it.

Vociferous is a relatively flat character. We don’t find out much about his personality or past, we just know he’s faking it for money. He has a handful of characteristics to make him more interesting: his distinct look and strange name. His ultimate purpose is to give Edward good reason within the story to explain the way magic works (to another character, and to the reader).

Edward is a much more rounded character. The story follows his point of view. He has a backstory and history with other characters. He has friends and enemies. He has flaws and goals and challenges to overcome.

Next Time: Setting Goals

Next week is going to be a light class. We’re going to talk about goal-setting and growing as a writer.

Dialogue For Lonely Characters

I’m currently working my way through my serial novel, Razor Mountain. One of the challenges in the first part of the book is that the main character, Christopher, is trapped in the wilderness and completely alone. This idea of a character completely cut off from everyone else is not a new one. Disconnected characters can show up in different genres and styles of work, from the classic shipwrecked sailor to the lost astronaut to the post-apocalyptic horror survivor.

Humans are social creatures. Characters interact with one another, and this is a vital part of most stories. So when a character winds up completely alone, certain storytelling tools are removed from our authorial arsenals. Dialogue is a great way to externalize the internal feelings and thought processes of the character, and when they have no one to talk to, those feelings and thoughts are harder to get across.

Something I’ve been considering lately, dealing with my own disconnected character, are the ways to achieve some of the same effects of dialogue, even when the character doesn’t have anyone else to talk to. Here are a few forms of dialogue for lonely characters.

Inner Thoughts

The simplest answer is to get into the character’s head and view their thoughts directly. The character’s thoughts may be rendered in italics and written out in much the same way you’d write dialogue. That style can come off as pretty heavy-handed, and it isn’t as popular as it once was. Depending on your audience, your readers may or may not have much appetite for it.

A less in-your-face version of this is free indirect speech, where the character’s thoughts are described as a part of the narration. This can work in both a first-person and close third-person point of view, and gets the character’s thoughts across while giving the reader less of the feeling that they’re being internally verbalized within the character’s head.

Journals and Logs

I recently read The Martian, which is a master class in the use of many different viewpoints and narrative strategies. The protagonist, Mark Watney, is stranded alone on Mars and spends a large portion of the book with nobody to talk to.

The Martian makes liberal use of logs as a way for Watney to narrate these parts of the story (as well as a useful dramatic pacing device). Journals or formal logs are an opportunity for a character to describe what they’ve done, what they’re planning, and how they feel about it.

The obvious downside of journals and logs is that they have to make sense for the character and the story. For Watney, an astronaut, the use of logs make sense. However, he’s not going to stop and write a log entry in the middle of a frantic action sequence. If he’s going to describe that in a log, it will probably need to be after-the-fact.

Furry Friends and Mannequins

Humans are self-centered. We see ourselves in everything. We love to anthropomorphize animals, and will even anthropomorphize inanimate objects. A lonely character will often be all too happy to socialize with a dog, cat, or monkey if no human companions are available. Even if there isn’t a pet ready at hand, a character who is desperate enough may find an object to be their friend.

In the movie version of “I am Legend,” the protagonist, Robert Neville, has a dog that serves as his friend and companion. However, I thought the most interesting scenes in the movie are the ones involving the mannequins. Neville has posed them. He talks to them, and has even assigned them simple personalities. When he eventually finds them out of place, moved by some unknown person or force, he reacts as though they have betrayed him.

Similarly, the character Chuck Noland in Castaway is stranded on a desert island, where he eventually “befriends” a volleyball with a crude face painted on it. He names it Wilson, and is distraught when it is lost in an accident.

These strategies are interesting, but harder to pull off effectively. Most people are fairly understanding of a person who talks to their pets, but will start to wonder about the character when those conversations get serious, or the human seems to expect any meaningful communication back from the animal. A person who has too many serious conversations with inanimate objects will be seen as spiraling into delusion.

Sometimes, instead of looking outward for a conversational partner, we turn inward. Most of us have probably talked to ourselves here or there. Most of us don’t make a habit of it, however.

A character who talks to themselves now and then can seem relatively reasonable. A character who talks to themselves continuously tends to be seen similarly to the character who talks to the mannequins.

The Humor of the Situation

Injecting some levity into these conversations can help, as a way for the character to wink at the reader and say “Hey, I know this looks a little crazy…”

The fact of the matter is that humans are social. We need contact with other humans. A character who is completely alone for a significant amount of time, especially in a stressful situation, is reasonably likely to see their mental health deteriorate. That can be a dark place for the character to be, and a weight on the reader as well.

If the character can crack a joke here or there, do something silly or absurd, or even just blow off some steam as a way of acknowledging their frustrating situation, it can help to reset the mood, in a way that allows both character and reader to endure yet more suffering.

In The Martian, Mark Watney faces death on an almost daily basis, but he also complains about the bad TV shows and music left behind by his crew-mates. Those little jokes humanize him as much as his suffering and his ingenuity and determination.

Dialogue is Still King

It turns out your character doesn’t need friends to make compelling dialogue, but it sure does help. The options outlined here can help to fill the holes in the story when dialogue just isn’t possible for your disconnected character, but ultimately there’s no perfect substitute for the real thing.

Having to write a character who spends an extended amount of time alone has helped me to appreciate the powers of dialogue. Hopefully my protagonist, Christopher, will find his way back to civilization soon, if only so he’ll have someone to talk to.

Reblog: Green Herring: How to Camouflage a Villain in a Mystery Novel — Dimitri Vorontzov

When you’re writing a mystery, especially a classic murder mystery with a proper sneaky villain, one of the hardest things to do is keep the reader guessing. You don’t want your villain to be obviously evil, so the natural inclination is to make them appear as squeaky clean as possible. Of course, a savvy reader will instantly suspect the character who’s always helpful and nice. It’s a tough line to ride.

Dimitri Vorontzov coins the slightly silly term of “green herring” to suggest some solutions to this conundrum. It mostly comes down to treating your villain as a real character with flaws, good qualities, goals and conflicts. Even if some of those things turn out to be clever deceptions when the villain is revealed.

So, what’s more plausible than “a very good person?” That’s right: Essentially good, but flawed, imperfect person.

We can let such a character make dumb mistakes (which we may later reveal to be deliberate acts of sabotage); we can make him or her slightly selfish, or slightly dishonest (a tiny instance of dishonesty may prove their overall integrity); we can give that character some of the “seven deadly sins,” for example sloth or greed.

Anger works particularly well to prove the green herring character’s essential goodness, because when a good character is a little nasty, has a bit of an attitude problem—this sub-communicates that such a character is not hiding anything, not trying to come off as “nice.”

Check out the rest over at Writer’s Digest…

Storytelling Class — Scripts 101

Every week, my daughter Freya and I have a “storytelling class.” Really, it’s just a fun opportunity to chat about writing stories. This week, our topic was beginnings, middles and ends.

We always start with two questions: what did we read and what did we write over the past week?

What Did We Read?

I read the usual blogs, more of The Wes Anderson Collection, and Damn Fine Story. I also read the first two trade paperbacks of Y: The Last Man (found among a pile of random Vertigo TPBs that my wife found at a garage sale for a pittance).

Y’s main character, Yorick is the literal last man on earth when a mysterious event causes all other men to simultaneously die. The premise is fine, and the world-building is done well enough, but the story frustrated me (at least in these first two books) because Yorick just isn’t very interesting. He has trained himself as an escape artist, but we don’t really find out why he has this odd interest, and his only goal in post-apocalyptic life is to get to Australia to find his girlfriend.

What made this more perplexing is that all of the secondary characters either had odd and interesting personalities, or hints of strange backstory, or both. I felt like a version of the story from any of these other perspectives might be preferable to following Yorick around.

My bedtime reading to the kids this week has been Poison for Breakfast.

Freya continues to read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and her class, having finished The One and Only Ivan, has begun the sequel, The One and Only Bob.

What Did We Write?

I’ve been banking up some scheduled blog posts this week, working on Razor Mountain as usual, and revived an old half-finished story for my class “homework.”

Freya wrote for her school work, as well as her story “Amber and Floria.”

Homework

In previous weeks, we’ve done thematic homework that relates to the class topic of the week. That hasn’t really been piquing our interest lately, so we decided to change tactics this week. After all, this isn’t school. It’s just for fun.

From now on, our homework will be more free-form: we’ll just spend time writing some kind of fiction each week and then talk about it. If we want to tie it into the topic of the week, we can. But we don’t have to. Just as the best way to get kids excited about reading is to let them read the things that interest them, the best way to get a kid excited about writing is to let them write what interests them.

So, this week Freya worked on a story in progress called Amber and Floria, about two sisters who have to rescue their parents, whose plane crashed and stranded them deep in the jungle. Which sounds pretty awesome.

I worked “Understump,” a story I started writing for my children a year or two ago and set aside when I couldn’t come up with a satisfying ending. Time away from it has given me a fresh perspective, and I’m excited to work on it again. Kid-lit is definitely a new frontier for me, which is a good thing. It’s also the sort of story that could easily be the first in a series, which is a good thing too.

Scripts 101

After our third class, where we talked about turning ideas into stories, our homework was to come up with some new story ideas. Freya’s list included a couple ideas for homemade movies, and that got us talking about writing scripts.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am no expert on script writing. I’ve never completed a script. So this was an opportunity for us to learn a little bit together. What we covered in this class were strictly basics—the formatting and other differences between scripts and fiction.

Scripts, Scripts, or Scripts?

Not all scripts are created equal. Most scriptwriting advice I found was focused on writing for TV and movies. That’s probably what most script writers are hoping to write in this day and age, so it makes sense. However, there are other forms of audio-visual media with their own slightly different takes on what a script should look like.

Audio fiction was once a nearly extinct art form, a mainstay of radio before the advent of television. But podcasts went and reminded everyone that audio-only media is actually pretty cool, so “radio” plays are back and bigger than ever. Of course, this kind of script writing eschews camerawork and detailed descriptions of visuals, and focuses more on sound effects and dialogue.

Also, despite the best efforts of the pandemic, live theatre is still very much a thing. Stage plays have to work with the static perspective of an audience directly in front of the stage rather than flexible camera-work, and have more limitations on scene changes and special effects, thanks to being performed live by real actors and crew on a real stage with physical limitations.

Formatting

I found a pretty good Studio Binder page that describes the pieces of a script and their formatting, with an example script. We read through this and discussed the different parts.

Scene headings and character introductions are much more straightforward and terse than the typical descriptions of settings and characters in fiction. However, more attention has to be paid to the viewpoint of the audience from moment to moment: what are they seeing and hearing.

Length

Works of fiction get lumped together in rough categories like flash fiction, novella or novel by number of words. Scripts, on the other hand, are typically made to fit a particular format and hit a set length in minutes. Helpfully, the rule of thumb is that one page of script should equate to about one minute of on-screen (or in-ear?) time.

In the days when broadcast television was king, shows in the U.S. were written to fit in 30-minute or 60-minute time slots with a set amount of time dedicated to commercials, and perhaps a little extra set aside for an intro sequence and credits. Now we live in a world of network, cable, premium and streaming services, where commercial breaks may or may not be a concern and some shows even choose to have wildly variable episode lengths.

Movies follow similar rules, and much like streaming services you don’t need to worry about commercials. Movies typically run 90–120 minutes, but there are extreme exceptions like the Lord of the Rings movies, whose theatrical releases were close to 3 hours and whose directors’ cuts were even longer.

Structure

Script structure is an entirely different beast from fiction, and can depend quite a bit on the media format. How many commercial breaks? An intermission? Episodic series or one-shot? We didn’t get into this too much, because I don’t know much and it’s a big topic. If you’re serious about writing something to actually get made though, you’ll need to figure these things out.

Homework

As I said before, we’re stepping away from class-specific homework, so the goal for next week is to just do some fiction writing. Freya does want to make more home movies, but she has to wrangle her brothers into being the actors, and as we all know, actors (and brothers) are an unruly bunch who often don’t take direction well.

See you next week, when we’ll dive deeper into characters!

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 7

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

A Big One

This was a long chapter, clocking in at 5,100 words. It was also  split into several short scenes, which is not something I typically do very often. A side-effect of this is that I have more convenient places to split the chapter into blog posts, and this results in a bunch of smaller posts rather than a couple large posts. I don’t have a ton of metrics, but I suspect people will generally prefer bite-sized pieces when reading online.

I’m still using Simple Writer as a guide to make these God-Speaker chapters feel different in tone and style to Christopher’s chapters, although I can’t bring myself to cut all of the “less simple” words. One of the interesting side-effects of using this tool is that it tends to highlight adjectives and adverbs as naturally less common words. I end up cutting words that I probably ought to consider cutting anyway, even if I weren’t trying to simplify the language.

Wildlife Research

I continue to research wildlife from thousands of years ago, and bits of it creep into almost every chapter. Did you know that there were ice age giant beavers? Yeah, there were ice age giant beavers. Six to seven feet long. Mammoths are neat and all, but there are all these other cool kinds of megafauna that nobody really talks about.

Accidental Inventions

It’s interesting to realize that I didn’t really map out any of the interpersonal relationships between God-Speaker and other members of his tribe when I was outlining. They didn’t even have names until the point where I needed to write them. So much for outlining making the writing trivially easy. Even with an outline, you have to invent some aspects of the story on the fly, and they might still surprise you.

I think these chapters would be a lot duller without that interplay between people, even if I did lean more heavily on the people vs. nature conflict that is pretty natural for prehistoric people in a hostile environment. Besides, the people vs. nature conflict is already present in this part of Christopher’s story, and it’s good to have variety.

It also turns out that these relationships and conflicts help develop God-Speaker’s character in useful ways. They make sense of his background as we progress further into the story, and help to explain why he does what he does, and why he is who he is.

A Connection

It’s exciting to note that this is the first of God-Speaker’s chapters where Razor Mountain comes into view, and the mountain is the first thing that links God-Speaker’s story to Christopher’s (since it was also mentioned in passing in Chapter 3). Appropriate for the name of the book.

Thoughts Going Forward

According to the outline, I’m only about halfway through Act I, but it feels like I should probably be a little further along. I’m going to look into trimming from the act so it doesn’t feel overly drawn-out. I often find it easy to cut chunks out of chapters in editing, but I find it harder to make broader cuts that might affect whole chapters. However, it’s been a little while since I finished the outline, so now is probably a fine time to revisit it and see if it still makes sense now that I’m decently far into the book and have a little better idea of what it wants to be.

That’s all for this chapter. See you after chapter 8.

Razor Mountain — Chapter 7.5

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

The bald hill that God-Speaker had set as their target turned out to be larger than it had looked from a distance, but it was a very long, gradual slope. They came across no more rivers, only shallow streams that could easily be jumped or crossed with stepping stones.

Finds-the-Trail and Far-Seeing still walked together, as they always did, well away from God-Speaker. Unusually, they barely spoke. Braves-the-Storm walked by God-Speaker’s side, also saying very little, but that was more expected.

As they finally approached the top of the bald hill, Braves-the-Storm sighed deeply and said, “You did a good thing, saving him.”

God-Speaker looked over at the older man’s rough and weathered face. He stared ahead.

“I didn’t think. I just did it.”

“You acted like a leader,” Braves-the-Storm said, “but I worry that it will only make things worse.”

God-Speaker frowned. “Why would it make things worse?”

Braves-the-Storm sighed. “Think about how he must feel. He is a young man, a hunter who has always been fast and strong. His spear flies straight. He catches his prey.”

“All the things I am not,” God-Speaker said, almost to himself.

“I know things have been hard for you,” Braves-the-Storm said. “I have watched you for many years.”

God-Speaker felt a sting at the corner of his eyes, and a tightening in his chest. Just to hear this from Braves-the-Storm felt like it opened up something inside him.

Braves-the-Storm pursed his lips. “He has not felt that feeling before. The taste of it will be bitter. We should hope that he learns from it. But to him, who sees himself as the lynx or the lion, it may feel like being outwitted by the rabbit. He may not appreciate what you did for him.”

God-Speaker blinked. He had been so lost in his own thoughts that he had never even considered this. It showed the old man’s wisdom that he could see through the eyes of other men.

“You are a good leader,” God-Speaker said.

Braves-the-Storm shook his head. “I told you already, I am too old. I may not have it in me to climb another mountain.”

With those words, they reached the flat, bare top of the hill. It stood guard over a valley between two snowy peaks. Between them, the people could see far into the distance. Beyond the valley were a few smaller peaks, and beyond those was a huge swath of ice, glowing a deep blue in the sunlight where it shone through snowy patches.

They could also see beyond the ice. Stretching to the horizon was a wide land, green with grass and dotted with trees and lakes. The sun shone down warmly on those distant fields.

But off to the right, nearly hidden behind closer peaks, was a mountain. It had a jagged, uneven peak, as though it had been split. Its sides were streaked with black. Black smoke rose from that shattered peak, rising and mingling with gray clouds that squatted over it in the otherwise clear sky.

“That is a place of evil spirits,” God-Speaker said. But then he looked beyond it again, to that wide open land, free of ice and snow.

“That is the way we must go.”

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Razor Mountain — Chapter 7.4

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

The next morning, as the people ate smoked fish and young roots, Black-Eyes-Staring, one of the older children who would soon be a man, pointed across the water and shouted. The light of the rising sun illuminated the far shore and a cluster of trees on the basin slope. Prowling out to the water, they could see a group of huge striped lions. As if in response to the boy, one of them raised his head from the water and roared. It was the sound they had heard in the night.

God-Speaker saw that Far-Seeing and Finds-the-Trail did not say any more about the wonders that awaited across the water. They said nothing as they ate, eyes squinting against the sun after a tiring night watching for eyes in the darkness.

Braves-the-Storm soon set them to work with the long tree trunks. The people lined up along one of the trunks, setting one end into the divot dug the night before, and raising it up as a group, as though they were going to plant it back into the earth. As carefully as they could, they let it fall across the river, with the strongest of the men assigned to the end of the trunk that was in the trench. They held it down as well as they could, and the far end of the trunk struck the soft dirt hard enough to put a dent in the ground on that side too. They tested it, and it seemed to stay in place reasonably well.

They did the same thing with the second trunk, although this one bounced against a rock on the far side and landed well apart from the first. Several people had to carefully roll it until it lay firmly next to the other trunk, both of them wedged into the trench on the near side of the river.

Braves-the-Storm had them tie the logs together with a long strip of good leather, a precious resource. Far-Seeing, who was good at balancing along ledges and fallen logs, took another strip and walked across. He moved carefully, not quickly, and had no trouble reaching the other side.

“It’s slippery,” he said. “It’s already wet from the night dew and the spray from the river. The bark isn’t rough enough to grip well.”

He tied the second strip of leather tightly around the logs on the other side, and adjusted them as well as he could so they wouldn’t roll or move. Then the people had to cross, one by one. Some crawled, others walked. The youngest children were given to those with the best balance, and the children who could walk went hand-in-hand with another to guide them.

God-Speaker had to carry the stone god and his pack. When it was his turn, he stepped up to the bridge and considered walking, but he saw how slick it was and decided to slide across in a sitting position, balancing his heavy load with his legs dangling over the water. He could feel his heart pumping, and he scraped his thighs on the pine bark, but he made it across.

Last to come was Finds-the-Trail. He untied the precious leather strap from the logs on his side, to take with him. Then he stepped out onto the logs. He looked sure-footed and confident, but the logs were now slick with moisture. God-Speaker and Far-Seeing held down the logs on the far side as he stepped out over the fast-flowing river.

God-Speaker envied Finds-the-Trail and Far-Seeing. They were strong and agile, while God-Speaker always felt as though he were fighting against the clumsiness of his own body. God-Speaker watched Finds-the-Trail’s feet as his toes gripped the log. The muscles in his ankles and legs flexed as he walked. He wasn’t fast, but he looked confident.

God-Speaker noticed the piece of loose bark a moment before Finds-the-Trail stepped on it. It slid from the log as Finds-the-Trail put his weight on his left foot. His left leg went over the side of the log, while his right knee slammed down, throwing all his weight after his left leg, over the side of the slippery little bridge.

Finds-the-Trail managed to grab the bridge with his right hand, leaving more than half his body hanging over the edge. Even worse, the log he hung from was rolling and twisting over the top of the other log, no longer held in place by the strap. The toes of his dangling leg brushed the freezing water rushing below.

God-Speaker saw what would happen. One log would roll over the other, and Finds-the-Trail would tumble into the river. It would wash him far out into the lake. Even a short time in that cold water would sap a person’s strength. God-Speaker saw what would happen, and he imagined what it would be like to live in a tribe without Finds-the-Trail. The moment seemed stretched and thin. He heard the others suck in frightened breath, start to shout.

Next to God-Speaker, Far-Seeing was fighting to stop the logs from turning. Nobody else was close enough to do anything. God-Speaker pushed down on his own side of the bridge, pulling his legs into a crouch under him. Then he threw himself out onto the bridge. Without his weight on the end, it flipped completely. He landed hard on his chest at an angle, his legs hanging out over the opposite side from Finds-the-Trail. He clasped hands with the hunter as he slid off the log. God-Speaker felt that Finds-the-Trail’s grip was stronger than his own, but it was enough to hold him until other hands pulled them both back onto solid ground.

God-Speaker lay in the moss and soft grass, a rock pressing on his spine, breathing hard and staring up into the blinding blue of the sky. His stomach was streaked with red scrapes from the pine bark. Finds-the-Trail landed next to him, but jumped up as if he had been burned. He stood over God-Speaker, and stared down. God-Speaker saw different expressions flit across his face in the span of a moment. Then his face went blank, and he turned and walked away.

God-Speaker lay where he had landed. He heard the sounds of talking among the people, but they meant nothing to him. His mind was as empty as the cloudless sky. A bird soared in a lazy circle far overhead.

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Storytelling Class — Nonlinear Structures

Every week, my daughter Freya and I have a “storytelling class.” Really, it’s just a fun opportunity to chat about writing stories. This week, our topic was nonlinear storytelling.

We always start with two questions: What did we read, and what did we write over the past week?

What Did We Read?

I read the usual fiction blogs, and got about half-way through both Chuck Wendig’s Damn Fine Story, and The Wes Anderson Collection by Matt Zoller Seitz.

Wendig’s book on storytelling is a very in-the-trenches guide to good storytelling structures that can be easily and immediately deployed in whatever story you’re currently writing. It has the exactly same zany energy that makes Wendig’s blog fun, and while it mostly covers tried-and-true ideas about story structure, it’s a good review and packed with useful pop-culture examples.

The Wes Anderson book is a collection of interviews, photos and other Anderson-esque artifacts documenting the director’s work from his Bottle Rocket debut up to Moonrise Kingdom. It looks like the book has become a series as Anderson continues to make movies, so I may have to check out the Grand Budapest Hotel and Isle of Dogs volumes next.

I also finally finished reading The Lord of The Rings to the kids. Whew! It has been years since I read the whole thing, and I had forgotten a few things. It’s quite a series to read out loud.

What Did We Write?

I wrote my usual bloggery, and finished Razor Mountain chapter 7, which turned out to be a very long chapter. Freya didn’t write any fiction this week.

Nonlinear Stories

The main topic this week was nonlinear story structure. This was something that came up in our previous conversations that Freya wanted to know more about.

Linear stories show events happening in order. Nonlinear stories show at least some part of the story out-of-order from when it happened in relation to the other events. One could also argue that a story told in-order, but leaving some events out is also a form of nonlinear story structure.

Nonlinear structure is more effort for the reader to understand. Using too much of it, or not using it to good effect may end up frustrating the reader. If you’re going to use a nonlinear structure, do it purposefully.

Skipping Ahead

The simplest form of nonlinearity is skipping ahead. This is typically used to get past events that logically need to happen, but simply aren’t interesting enough for the reader to want to see them played out.

This can also sometimes be used to heighten excitement, often as part of a mystery, by leaving out some important event. In this case, it’s typically revealed later on, at the point when the revelation is most important. This can be dangerous because it can sometimes feel “unfair” to the reader that the knowledge was kept from them, especially if it was readily available to the characters.

Events Out of Order

A flashback is the most common way to show events out of order, inserting some previous events into the narrative near the point where they become relevant to the story’s “main” timeline. A flash-forward is a less common version of this, jumping ahead into the future to see some outcome that results from events in the story’s “main” timeline.

A frame story is a case where the bulk of the story is told as a flashback or “story within a story.” The recounting of the story is the “frame.” Examples of this are Scheherazade’s storytelling in the One Thousand and One Nights or the grandfather and grandson in The Princess Bride.

Parallel plots are often employed in stories with larger casts of characters, where individuals or groups have their own plots going at the same time. These stories will cover a certain amount of time for one character or group, then cut back to the start and show what happened during that period for the other character or group.

Events Disconnected

A more complicated nonlinear story may have many events out of their linear order.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind mostly consists of memories of a relationship, shown out of order. Memento follows a man with a brain injury that prevents him from forming long-term memories, starting with scenes at the beginning and end of the story, then going forward and backward in turns to eventually meet in the middle.

The video game Her Story tells a story through a series of interview clips, with the player able to discover different clips through play, and choosing the order to view them in.

Time Travel and Alternate Universes

Time travel stories almost always involve some nonlinear structures, and often complicate them with characters that go into the past and change the future, or muddle it with closed time loops where future characters participate in past events that contribute to the state of the future (their present).

Stories with alternate universes often use similar structures, with the added complication that similar events in different universes can have different outcomes, and at some point the alternate universes typically affect one another.

Homework

Freya and I both slacked and didn’t write anything for the previous class’s homework. This week, we’ll be playing catch-up. We’re both going to write something and either incorporate some non-linearity or use it to discuss beginnings, middles and ends.

Some of Freya’s ideas from our Ideas class were for homemade movies, so the next class topic will be script-writing 101. (I’ve never written a script before, so I’ll probably learn some things too!)

Razor Mountain — Chapter 7.3

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

The next day, the people packed their things and broke camp. God-Speaker made signs to the river and spoke quietly, standing apart from the others. He knew now that he was not really leaving her. He had seen how weak the barriers between the worlds could be. He could reach out and find her, if he had the skill. Still, it felt like a goodbye.

It was easy travel along the lake shore, a relaxing change from the hard scrabbling through the mountains. Their surroundings made it clear though, that this was only a break. There were more mountains in their path, regardless of the direction they chose. The sun was bright in the sky, and the snow on the slopes was melting. There were puddles in every little depression, and little rivulets running over the rocks everywhere. They crossed several small streams that had clearly only just started to carve their way through the soft dirt, growing moment by moment.

It came as little surprise then, when they came over a low hill and found a real river. It was at least as large as the river they had followed to the basin, the river of Makes-Medicine. It came over a great rushing falls far up the slope, visible by the cloud of rainbow mist, but barely a whisper of the rushing water to be heard from their place far below.

This river was not just from the spring snow melt, although it clearly had swelled in recent days. It followed a path carved deep into the rock, and it had a wide mouth that spread out well above the current lake shore. The level of the water was several feet below the lip of the river’s gorge. The water was deep and dark, and rushing fast. At its narrowest, it was too wide to jump, and though it was shallower closer to the lake, it was many times wider there. Though the weather had been warmer in the basin, it would be dangerous to wade through. Even if nobody was taken by the current, the mountain water was freezing. Pieces of ice came floating down, crunching against the rocks and showing the speed of the water.

“There,” said Far-Seeing. “Not even a day of good travel before our way is blocked.”

He squinted and shielded his eyes from the sun, looking across to the far shore of the lake. “It looks like easy terrain on the other side.”

Braves-the-Storm looked in the opposite direction, away from the lake and up the slopes of the basin, toward the falls. “The trees are better here. There is something we could try.”

The slope was soft rock, layered with rich black dirt and green with moss, grasses and shrubs. It was enough soil for a decent number of pines to find places for their roots to take hold. There were a few that rose straight and tall. They could provide enough wood for a few days of fires at least.

“Let us stay here for tonight,” Braves-the-Storm said. “This is a good place to camp, on the hill. We could not get back to the old camp before night anyway.”

“But we will go back?” Far-Seeing asked.

“Of course,” Finds-the-Trail said, leaning on his spear set in the soft earth. “We agreed to try this way and see if it was passable, and then go around the other way if it wasn’t.”

“Another day of travel will only make more rivers of these little streams,” Braves-the-Storm said. “As long as we are here, let us try to make a bridge.”

The people were used to traveling, but they usually went around obstacles like this, rather than crossing them. Many seasons ago, when they traveled along the shore of the endless ocean, they had made small boats. Now, the knowledge of making them was lost to all but one or two. They had some knowledge of bridge-building too, but it was a rare thing to build a bridge to only be used only once, and the people rarely stayed in one place for long.

While some of the tribe gathered wood for fires, and several of the hunters went off in hopes of finding more game, Braves-the-Storm directed God-Speaker and several of the older men to the straightest, tallest trees, and they took turns chopping with their broadest stone hand-axes. The trees were as thick as a hand’s length, from fingertip to wrist. It was fairly soft wood, but it was still hard work to chop through, and they had to be careful that the tall trunks didn’t fall onto anyone. By the time they were done, their hands and tools were sticky with sap.

As night fell, they dragged the two trunks to a flat place near the river. Braves-the-Storm had them dig a trench in the dirt near the edge of the river. Then they rested and ate.

The hunters came back without having caught anything, and God-Speaker could hear Far-Seeing and Finds-the-Trail complaining about the time they were wasting on the wrong side of the lake, and speculating about better hunting across the water. Everyone else, however, seemed happy enough to have good food to eat and less freezing weather for sleeping.

That night, there were strange noises in the distance: roars and yips. The fires were kept burning bright, and several of the hunters stood guard with their spears in hand. Nobody heard anything come close, or saw any predators’ eyes reflecting the firelight in the darkness. Still, it was a potent reminder that even in this seemingly peaceful valley, the world was dangerous.

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Razor Mountain — Chapter 7.2

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

The hunters and the fishers came back to the camp within minutes of each other. God-Speaker was feeding the fires, half lost thinking through his visions. The sun was behind the mountains, but still lent its light to the sky and the tallest peaks.

The hunters had stalked around the dam, and brought back a giant beaver and two of its young. The adult was as large as a black bear, and took three strong men to carry, slung across poles made from saplings. The hunters were more tired from hauling the creature than from the hunt; it had been felled with two well-thrown spears. The beaver young were much smaller, but still large enough to make several good meals.

The fishers had also done well. One of the nets had broken, losing most of the catch, but it could be fixed. The other two had come out of the river thick with fish. After weeks with hardly any fresh food, the prospect of so much made the people giddy. There was a flurry of activity. Some of them cut fillets of the fish and prepared them to cook or smoke on simple wooden racks. They scooped the roe from the bellies of the silver fish and passed them around. The bones and bits of leftover meat were put in waterproof skins and covered with fresh water. Then the people used fire-heated rocks to heat the mixture into a soup. Meanwhile, others flayed the huge adult beaver and the smaller young and butchered them with sharp stone knives.

God-Speaker volunteered to go back along the ridge and find clean snow and ice in the shadowy places where spring sun had not yet reached. It gave him more time to be alone with his thoughts.

The people cut up the meat and offal and wrapped it in skins filled with the clean ice and snow to keep it fresh and free of flies. It also lessened the smell of fresh meat, which could draw scavengers and predators, hungry after the long winter.

That night, they feasted on fresh fish, fish stew, and the organ meat of the beavers. The mood was festive. The fires were stoked with the deadwood strewn around the basin, and it sometimes burned with hisses and hints of strange colors, reminding God-Speaker vividly of his vision.

The hunters told stories of hunts in years past. The fires burned low and the moon fell behind the mountains, leaving a clear sky of bright stars. Braves-the-Storm spoke quietly about the journeys of the tribe through strange lands that the younger people had no memory of. He talked about the open sea in storm, and wild, crashing waves peaked with white foam. He spoke of icy shores in deep winter, and the booming of cracking ice underfoot. His low voice and the steady rhythm of his words were a sort of primal music.

They slept well, tired from hard work but full and happy and warmer than they had been on the mountain slope.

It was cooler the next morning, but still comfortable when wrapped in furs. There was plenty of work still to do, smoking meat and fish to preserve it, and taking in another, smaller haul of fish. The fires had to be fed, and the people now needed to go further and further to find wood. There were bits of old driftwood and long-drowned trees, but the only living trees in the basin were young saplings.

God-Speaker busied himself gathering wood and helping with other tasks here and there as he saw need. He had no particular skill in butchering animal or fish, or in preserving the meat or preparing the hides. Like any member of the tribe, he knew enough to participate in those tasks, but he had no names given to him for skill in these things as others did.

The people stayed at camp that day, but talk turned to travel again. As they took their mid-day meal, Braves-the-Storm sat near God-Speaker, Far-Seeing, and Finds-the-Trail. He chewed a piece of fish and nodded to God-Speaker.

“We followed the river to her ending, and she has given us a great spring bounty. We have new strength and we have good weather. We must give thought to the journey ahead.”

“We have only just arrived here,” Far-Seeing said. “Are there no more fish in the river?”

Finds-the-Trail smirked, but he said, “Fish are as good when your belly is aching from hunger, but I want more game to hunt. The animals are hungry after the long winter. They will come to the open water, but we will have to walk the shore to find them.”

Braves-the-Storm nodded. “There is the problem of wood, too. We cannot stay here and keep our fires lit. Already we must walk a long way to find wood. We might find another place like this further down the shore, with fish or game, and more trees.”

God-Speaker was hesitant to speak up, but he felt a tightness below his heart. The stone god hummed next to him.

“When we first came to this place…I had a vision,” he said.

Braves-the-Storm frowned. “Why did you not speak of this?”

“It was not urgent. There was much to do and I thought it could wait.”

“What did your vision tell you?” Braves-the-Storm asked.

God-Speaker pointed across the lake. “There is a hill there that looks like a bald head. It stands in front of a wide valley between those two mountains. If we travel along this side of the lake, we can climb that hill and see what lies beyond. My vision guided me toward that place.”

“That’s it?” Finds-the-Trail asked. “Go to the top of a hill and look around? I could have told you that the best place to see your surroundings is from a high place.”

“It is warmer here, near the lake,” Far-Seeing said. “Now is the time to stay and gather what we can. Fill our packs.”

“We can travel along the shore and still hunt and fish as we go,” Braves-the-Storm said.

Far-Seeing looked out across the lake. “There is another thing. Over along the opposite shore, I see more trees. The land looks like it makes shallower slopes. The streams from the mountains look small and easier to cross.”

He pointed down the shore on the left side of the lake. “This side looks more dangerous. There are fewer trees and that river looks much more broad.”

God-Speaker frowned. “It will take many more days to go around the other way to the bald hill.”

Braves-the-Storm took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “The streams from the mountains will run faster every day. Crossing rivers will be dangerous. We should avoid that if we can.”

God-Speaker’s vision had not been specific. How could he translate vague feelings into urgency?

“I do not know. I do not want to leave the river either. But I am called to that hill. If the rivers are growing with the melting snow, it may be easy to cross now, and impossible in a few days.”

Braves-the-Storm nodded. “You make a good point. Perhaps we should try the shorter path, along this side of the lake. If it proves unsafe, we can go back and try the long way.”

God-Speaker nodded in agreement. The two hunters frowned, but they didn’t argue. The matter seemed settled, for now.

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