Lazy, Frustrated Action

Working on the new effort (BURIED), I notice one of the problems I had in the first draft of the last effort. As always, it got me thinking...

1st Principle of Action: Humans are lazy creatures. We don't want to work harder than we have to, even in pursuit of our heart's desires.

Or, in the words of the Red Dragon from BONE, "Never play an Ace when a two will do."

Every single character in your story, no matter their goal, will start by doing the least action to get the job done, as perceived by that character. To pump a guy for information, a barmaid might flirt. An affable detective might tell a disarming story about his wife's cooking while a hard-ass cop might start with 'you want to go to jail'. Marv from SIN CITY starts interrogating a hitman with a stab wound in the gut and the promise that death will be swift. For each of these, this is the quickest, simplest way to get the information they want. (In Marv's case, what's the point slapping a tough guy around for hours and making promises you both know aren't true?)

2nd Principle of Action: These actions will be frustrated. At least, they will unless you want the shortest, boringest (yes, boringest-- it's cromulent) story ever told. 'I tried something aand it worked' simply isn't a story.

Girl likes Boy. Girl casts shy glance at Boy in halls at school. Boy stops, asks Girl out. They date. The END.

Even The Little Engine That Could had more conflict and interest than that. Those first actions cannot succeed. If Boy walks past like Girl doesn't exist, she's going to have to do something else. You've got something started.

3rd Principle of Action: Action escalates. Both 12-steppers and business-seminar types agree, repeating unsuccessful actions is the very definition of insanity. I'm not sure I'd go quite that far, but it sure will kill your story dead.

Your characters want their goals, and they want them badly. Badly enough to do whatever it takes to reach them. In real life, we may take a few hesitant passes at shallow goals and quit. Those aren't the days you tell the grandkids about. 'Let me tell you about the time I joined a gym and went for three weeks' doesn't pack nearly the punch of 'Let me tell you about the time I avenged the death of the only person who was ever kind to me,' or even 'I remember when I was your age, I was crazy about this boy...'

As each action is frustrated, your character will make a harder, more difficult effort (as perceived by that character) to reach that goal. In comedy, those actions lead to farce. In action, to bigger and rougher fights. In drama, to difficult choices. And, of course, there's no reason a story can't be any combination of these, even all three.

But I digress. The point is, your character (heroes as well as villains) will keep plugging.

Boy ignores Girl's shy glances. She tells a friend, hoping to do that my-friend-likes-you thing. The friend likes him too and lies about Boy's rejection. Girl follows Boy, trying to figure out how to MAKE Boy like her. This creeps Boy out.

Will Girl get a makeover? Dive deep into Boy's favorite hobby so they have a common interest? Drink too much and make an ass of herself at a party? I don't know, not my story. But you can bet whatever she does, it'll top the last thing.

4th Principle of Action: In the immortal words of Less Than Jake, It Gets Worse Before It's All Over.

Your poor bastards are going to be stumped, stymied, blocked at every turn. Their best efforts sweep them farther and farther from their heartfelt desires. The poor, shy Girl gets teased for being creepy. Her lying-ass friend spreads cruel rumors. Boy thinks she's a stalker. Faced with rumors of stalking and possible Columbine-behavior, (how big of a bitch IS that friend, anyway?) school counselors get involved, and Girl is suspended.

How is she going to get Boy? I don't know, but you can bet she's going to have to dig deep, and do something she never would have though possible at the story's start.

It's going to be a time to tell the grandkids about...

Day 9: The Full-Throttle Daily Wordcount-O-Meter stands at 10,500 words.

On track and, actually, not working too hard. We'll see how I feel in Act II...

Danger State

CS Harris had quite the terrifying near-miss today. Odd creatures that we are, throughout the danger she's got her writer's hat on, posing this question:

So how do writers of books filled with shootings, explosions, chases, etc, avoid falling into cardiopulmonary hyperbole while still giving readers a realistic description of the effect of these incidents on their characters?

When the human animal is placed in perceived danger (I don't know about you, but my heart started racing when I saw that graphic up top!), two squidgy sacs on top of the kidneys dump adrenaline and noradrenaline (also called norepinephrine) into the bloodstream. For a good description of the physical effects: read this article. For a good description of the mental effects, you might try this one. Since this is neither an anatomy lesson nor a psychological one, I'm going to stick with write-about-able descriptions.

In my experience, there are three main sorts of perceived danger, each with different reactions:

Sudden danger: Anything from a car crash or mugging to someone jumping out of a closet and going 'BOO'. When you are in sudden danger, the adrenaline dump is sudden and complete. Time slows. Perception brightens and intensifies, but memory fragments and distorts. Pain ceases to exist. Our bodies may react without our brains being engaged. Or we may find ourselves unable to react at all. More on that later.

Do NOT write about the pounding heart in these moments. Yes, that noble pump is indeed working hard in these moments. Your blood pressure is likely to be through the roof. Thing is, you're not likely to be aware of it. Those of our ancestors who reacted to the bear attack by jumping into trees or yelling and swinging sticks survived to reproduce. Those who stood there going, 'wow, heart hammering in Ogg's chest' did not.

So what's a writer to do?

-Write instead about the time slow (a neurochemical effect).

-About the cold skin and numb lips (as blood flees the skin for the skeletal muscles).

-About the sudden bright colors (pupil dilation and neurochemistry both), or the way color will tend to blue at the edges of vision.

-I have often had black spots crowd at my periphery and the sensation of blood slowly thumping in my ears. Slowly? Yeah: my pulse might have been over 180, but with your time-sense shaved down to zillionths of a second, everything's going slowly!

Aftermath: Your body idles down. That sudden racing heart gradually returns to normal. Your brain reacquires the ability to perceive past and future (fear and rage are all about the present!) and struggles to make sense of what just happened. You begin paying your oxygen debt - with interest. And the shakes, oh yes, the shakes...

Persistent Danger: Think back to every child's favorite game of predator and prey, tag. Whether you're it or not it, you're in a heightened adrenalized state for an extended period. Your body adjusts, and it also feels the effects of the effort.

Chasing or being chased, be it in a car, on a sports field or through a misty wood in the middle of the night) our bodies are in a sustained and heightened adrenaline state. If Sudden Danger is the equivalent of nitrous oxide on our metabolic engines, Persistent Danger is like running at the top end of the tach in every gear. The effects are still there, but not as pronounced.

THIS is the place for that pounding heart, and that struggle for breath. Sudden Danger, you don't know what the effort cost until it's over. Persistent Danger, your body's having to pay as it goes, muscles starving for oxygen and drowning in their own acids. How much you can pay (how long you can stay in this state) depends on what kind of shape you're in. A professional rugby or soccer player can run up and down the field for two hours straight. An overweight and sedentary smoker might keel over running down the block.

Aftermath: Sore and burning muscles (those acids) and a milder case of the shakes are pretty normal. How much or how little depend on how prepared you are for these sorts of events.

Perceived Danger: Remember hide and seek? Hunkered down in your hiding place, knowing the predator was coming, knowing that at any moment you might have to burst into action?

Your metabolic engine was racing hard, but you were stuck in neutral. All that adrenalin was pinging around your system, but there was nowhere for it to go. Couldn't fight, couldn't flee. But you had to be ready for both.

Sadly, too many of us live in this state. I mean, it's one thing if you live in a war zone where snipers and land mines are a constant danger, but for most of us the dangers we work ourselves into a froth over are illusory: being late, not ticking off items on a 'to-do' list, anything that happens in an office.

Aftermath: In a way, this is the most dangerous possible adrenalin state. Your body is marvellously adaptable, and if you convince it that you are in constant danger, it will adapt, and you will pay. High blood pressure, ulcers and heart disease on the physical side and post-traumatic stress on the mental.

One more important thing about writing the adrenaline:

Personalities: One important word was perceived danger. Life prepares us for different kinds and levels of stress. The severity of our adrenalin boost is moderated by how badly we think we need it.

Also, some people simply react differently. Some instinctively fight, some instinctively flee. And some instinctively freeze and hide. I think evolution gives gives us this range, so that whichever is appropriate keeps the race going.

Training and repeated exposure can influence these reactions, turn what might be a big shock to one person into pretty normal for another. But when a new shock is faced, that primal instinct may kick in. A fireman running into a burning building will be in a heightened state, but (let us all hope) he or she won't be freaking out. On the other hand, that same fireman finds a homeless person frozen to death in their doorway, the reaction might be quite a bit different.

Stepping Razors - Life at the Edge

Serendipity: Charles' post today, combined with Peter Tosh singing Stepping Razor (a childhood favorite!) gave me this topic.

Fiction is about edges. Extreme edges. Nasty and jagged edges or so-sharp-you-never-feel-the-cut-til-you-see-the-blood edges.

If you've got your stakes right, your story happens at the exact moment, the edge, where one thing becomes another.

Sure, I write thrillers. Edges come naturally, since the stakes tend to be truly overwhelming threats. But imagine something a bit more... literary. A marriage in danger.

Betty suspects Joe of cheating. There have been little signs, nothing strong enough to confront Joe on, but tiny things adding up in the back of her head. Day to day, they go about their married life together with this tension between them. Every look, every gesture, Betty tells herself she's crazy to worry, or she tells herself she must be right. Betty is eating herself alive wondering if Joe is faithful.

Tension? Yup. Stakes? Sure. But there's no story here. Not yet. This is all the face of the blade, the flat of the sword. We have yet to reach the edge.

There's nothing happening.

To have a story, you have to push this situation to the breaking point. Betty finds someone else's panties in Joe's pocket. Or a matchbook from a gay bar. An adult movie company sends Joe a check or a strange woman shows up on the doorstep, belly swollen and pregnant.

That's where the story happens. Joe can turn out to be faithful or not. The story can be comedy, tragedy, adventure, whatever. But it doesn't start until you reach the very edge of the situation.

Can't you show any of that blade face? Sure. Exactly as much as you need to make the reader's heart race when she sees the edge. My usual rule of thumb is a chapter, maybe two. This is Life Before. After this, nothing will ever be the same....

Everybody up to speed with that? Okay. Because now I'm diving into the Full Throttle Toolbox of Cheap and Dirty Tricks!

Subtly amplify this sense of edges and stakes with setting.

Put your story in a coastal community, and set your scenes of greatest tension right on the beach, where water meets land.

Or a crossroads. A border town. A bridge. A place poised on the edge of becoming something else (torn down, built up, etc.).

Set a story in the last days of winter, so that it ends with a green and vibrant spring.

Set your story around a wedding, a birth, a festival.

Set important scenes at seminal times of day: sunset, dawn, high noon, midnight.

Combine any of these setting elements to add to the tension inherent (hopefully inherent!) in your stakes. After all, Frank McCourt's train gets in at High Noon, not 11:38AM.

And anything happening is more interesting in a border town before a storm front breaks a long and brutal heat wave, or at a sunset wedding on the beach. And standing in the crossroads at midnight?

Fuggedabouddit....

Constant Conflict

So I'm writing along, a variation on stranger-comes-to-town. I've got these six characters, each with his or her own agenda and all on a collision course. There's been one terrible crime 'out front' where we all see it, and others happening in the background, where even I'm not entirely sure. Before long, there'll be blood on the walls...

One reason I write 'full throttle' is that I really, really want to find out what's going to happen. What sorta sucks about writing is that I HAVE TO write my way, one word at a freakin time, up to the end.

Yesterday I wrote a phone call. Yup, a phone call.

My hero on this one's a bit of a drifter, so there's not a lot of point in him carrying a cell phone. He needed to reach out to another character, and it seemed worthwhile to show that he needs a landline. I know, I'm yawning already.

But I followed my golden rule:

Nothing, nothing without conflict.

My hero went in to the bar where he's working. I put the relief tender (ten words in a previous chapter) behind the bar, still on from the night before because the morning guy never showed. The low-key stoner stuck on a double shift wanted the hero to clock in. The hero wanted to use the phone and get the hell out.

The character he was calling saw the work number on her cell. She's pretending to be sick to keep from covering that shift too. I got a nice bit of three-way conflict out of that one phone call.

Somehow, I doubt that call will end up in the final draft. But I did learn a couple things about my characters by watching them handle this situation, and writing it got me through to the next scene. I also got to add in the extra layer of tension when the relief tender mentions that the cops are asking about what happened behind the bar last night...

Now, the hero and his coworker are having lunch. They've got conflict on several levels:

Overt: She has information he wants. She doesn't want to give it to him.

Covert: She's making like she has his best interests at heart. He's not sure he trusts her.

And deeper: She wants something bigger from him, and it makes him wary. I'm not even sure that she's being honest about what she wants.

And further: There's a three way love triangle going on as well. That way, just the fact of these two being alone together is a move against the woman who isn't there. And the two women hate, hate, HATE each other, for reasons I can only suspect.

One thing about this story: my characters aren't telling me much. My heroes usually don't. Male or female, I gravitate to quiet, tough characters who don't see a lot of point talking about their pasts. They're action-oriented for a reason, and that's as it should be.

This time though, everyone around the hero is dodgy. They tell me their motivations, and I don't believe them. Where the hero just isn't talking, these people are actively hiding and lying.

Just like the eventual readers, I have to look at what they're doing to see them with any honesty at all. It's maddening, intriguing, and kind of fun!

In other news, Butler Dynamo continues to help. Here he can be seen turning his hand to literary criticism...

I thought the book was more interesting than that!

Yikes

79,000 words

One thing I love about thrillers (and part of why I naturally gravitate to writing them) is that sense of doom, not impending, but hurtling at the protagonist at 100mph (or 180kph, since we're metric here...).

A thriller will have a built-in deadline to disaster, be it large (doomsday device, et al) or small (pay the ransom or we kill your child). The hero must struggle to get on top of a situation in which she's initially out of control and relatively powerless. The later the hero gets the upper hand, and the more her eventual victory looks in doubt, the more exciting the story.

A powerful way to keep the hero off-balance is to take that deadline and shorten it. Drastically. Move that countdown timer from 10 minutes to 10 seconds. Reveal that the kidnappers won't wait for the ransom to kill the kid; they're going to do it tonight.

One thing about my jump-in-and-write style is that in this first pass I'm often as surprised as anyone by the twists and turns in the story.

I should have seen the shortened deadline coming, but I didn't. And I didn't see how the stakes would suddenly ratchet up in so many ways as it shortened.

Sarah was supposed to have two or three days to get on top of her situation. Now she's got one night. She's going to need every resource she has to beat this. Now my heart's beating as a reader, but it's freaking jackhammering as the writer. I can't let her down, but I don't see how I can do it.

I'm going to need every resource *I* have to beat this. :-)

71,000 words (not counting stuff taken out)

Still chuddling along, and happy as Larry. Except last night.

Last night, I had to un-kill a character. Now, I liked this character, and wasn't exactly thrilled to kill her in the first place. But I needed a strong 'beat' to end Act Two, and that was it.

I'm glad to have this character back, even if she can be a pain in the ass sometimes, but it meant unravelling some darned good writing. One of the better scenes in the book in fact.

Them's the breaks. And the truth is, the end of Act Two should be one of the stronger scenes in the book.

Why's she back? Did I need her later? No. It's that the three act structure shifted underfoot in the process of fixing up my altest Sudoku Moment. So out that tension point had to come, which left my character alive again.

For those who don't know, most modern fiction more or less runs in three acts. The Ancient Greeks used five, I think, as do some of my favorite operas, but most books, movies and TV use three. I think of them as The Setup, The Chase, and Endgame, and each one has its own beginning, middle and end, just like it was a mini-story all its own.

Big difference is that Acts One and Two, the climax needs to be *right* at the end, and of a nature to propel the audience into the next act with enthusiasm. Act Three, the climax comes a leeeetle way back, so that we have a couple of chapters, or a few minutes of film, to wind down a bit, decompress after all those (hopefully) strong emotions. In TV, this often involves the series characters sitting around the set and having a pointless, feel-good joke before the credits roll. That little nubbin at the end is the denouement.

In Predator, everything with the commandos being deployed, exploring the jungle, being stalked a little bit (not a lot, but a few creepy sounds and the sight of the soldiers seen through some sort of IR/UV thingy), right up to the hanging corpses of the missing troops is Act One.

The story at this point is all about framing the problem. Arnold on the field? Check. Something rotten in the South American jungle? Check. The climax is the sight of those corpses hanging like trophy kills. It's the boost the ratchets up the tension and carries us into Act Two, in which We Meet the Monster.

This is The Chase. Except instead of Holmes tracking the Hound, or Bridget Jones chasing true love with the wrong man when the right one's under her nose (the movie here -- the book used Jane Austen's original, more act-y structure, and I don't want to get into that), we've got a mysterious presence (still haven't seen the Predator yet) hunting and killing a group of elite commandos.

The commandos try to fight back. They do intelligent things, gradually figuring out (at gruesome loos of life) that their enemy has weapons and technology far beyond anything they're ready for. There's so much blood and gore in this act that the climax *isn't* more gore. It's Arnold looking at some yellow drippy bits on a leaf and delivering the line, "If it bleeds, we can kill it."

And Act Three eases the tension off a bit, as Arnold and the mysterious creature prepare for what both know will be their final battle. Even sugar-hyped twelve year olds know this is the Endgame.

And the third act should be a series of climaxes. The first good sight of that Rick James-looking motherfucker, Arnold screaming his defiant challenge, the tripwires failing, the heat-vision revelation, one hell of a big fight. One right after the other, building on top of each other until the audience is on the edge of their seats. Or hopefully, anyway.

Of course, Predator also has about the shortest denouement ever. Maybe ten seconds of film with Arnold and The Girl in a helicopter headed home. But we do need that little bit...

Edge of Our Seats?

44,000 words (stitched-up corpse on the slab and thunderstorms a-brewin)

So last post I forgot to actually hyperlink the Ten Rules for Suspense Fiction. No idea why, none at all.

Seems to me, with a little bit of flexibility about the stakes, those 'rules' come in handy for all sorts of fiction. Any story where the author wants to ratchet up the tension. Which is most anywhere.

Sure, thrillers are easy that way: the tension is built into the stakes. Can Hiro Protagonist and Y.T. stop an ancient Sumerian virus from destroying all computers (Snow Crash)? Can Frodo and Sam destroy the One Ring before it destroys the world (LotR)?

But that sense of challenge, tension, escalating stakes and shortening timelines pop up all over the show. In Tom Joad's struggles to help his family survive (The Grapes of Wrath). In Little Nell's conflicts with Quilp and her grandfather's gambling problem (The Old Curiosity Shop). In the romantic misadventures of the sisters Dashwood (Sense and Sensiblity).

The real important thing there is the reader's ability to buy into the stakes. I've read all of the above at least two or three times, sometimes with varying reactions. Much as I love them, if I'm in the wrong mood, I can't even buy into a favorite work.

For instance, I've found myself asking, "So what if the Dashwoods have to (gasp) get jobs?" or, "I bet Samwise would be a fine dictator if he kept the ring. Why not?"

Food for thought, anyway...

While I'm at it, here's Ed Gorman interviewing the master of suspense himself. Ladies and gentlemen, Miiiiiiisterrrrr JOHN D. MacDONALD!!