My Last, Best Hope for Mastering Structure

Evan Braun The Writing Life 5 Comments

Babylon 5 pic 1Earlier this month, I wrote about how Star Trek ignited my passion for writing and gave me the push I needed to start committing words to paper at a young age. Not all my early work, however, was Star Trek fan fiction; I also produced a couple of short original pieces, as well as a 100,000-word novel in ninth grade called The Investigators. What all these works have in common is that they were very terrible, though each one improved on the one that came before.

There are a number of failings in these first works, but the main problem is that I didn’t have a handle on structure. My understanding of plotting could be reduced to this: the plot is the sequence of events that occur over the course of the novel. I mean, you can’t get any vaguer than that. If you read my first novels (I don’t recommend it), this is evidenced by the overall sense that I was making the story up as I went along. There were so thematic underpinnings, the twists and turns came out of nowhere and served no purpose beyond surprise, and the characters did not progress through meaningful arcs. Lots of stuff happened, but none of it told a story. The plot points were random; I may as well have written some plot ideas on playing cards, shuffled them together, then wrote the novel based on the order of the cards with no thought towards what would make sense or provoke an emotional response in the reader. The plot was just what happened-and it could be anything.

In 1998, however, at the age of fifteen, I was washing dishes at the restaurant where I worked when a coworker, Carole, asked me if I’d ever seen Babylon 5. The two of us shared a passion for Star Trek, which is what we talked about most often, but I had barely heard of Babylon 5, even though the show had just about completed its five-year run by that time. Carole had the first couple of seasons recorded on VHS, so one day she came to work with a bag full of tapes for me.

I took those tapes home and began to devour them.

Much has been written about the unevenness of Babylon 5. Especially in the first season, the acting was rough, the effects were cheaply produced, and the writing was… bumpy. Awkward, even. And yet I immediately fell in love with the show, because it was the first time I encountered a television series that was unabashedly serialized. It was a show that was intended to be viewed in order. Though individual episodes had beginnings, middles, and ends, Babylon 5 told a larger story that could only be fully appreciated and understood in the context of many seasons.

Since that time, Babylon 5 has been followed by dozens of serialized shows, so many in fact that heavy serialization has become the norm. However, in terms of structure and planning, no show, in my opinion, has ever surpassed the high standard established by Babylon 5. The show’s creator and main writer, J. Michael Straczynski, personally scripted 91 of the 110 episodes, and wrote the last three seasons entirely by himself, with the exception of one installment. This resulted in unbridled consistency. From the beginning, he knew where the story was going. He had a full series outline. Many shows’ writers have claimed to have known the end from the beginning (I’m looking at you, Lost and Battlestar Galactica), but Babylon 5 is the only show I’m aware of that proves its structural integrity by directly foreshadowing its later twists and turns right from the very start. Rewatching the show, with full knowledge of how the show progresses and ultimately concludes, allows its genius to be fully appreciated.

Structurally, Babylon 5 taught me to think ahead. It taught me to think about consequences. It taught me to think about the significance of the events of my story, even the very small events. In fact, the very small events in my stories often end up triggering very large events down the road, something which Babylon 5 excelled at.

It could be said that Straczynski planned his show almost too well, with the effect of producing uneven episodes which aren’t always much fun when viewed in isolation. The plot momentum of that show, however, is pretty overwhelming-in a good way. When it comes to understanding the importance of structure, Babylon 5 provides a master’s course.

What If?

Guest Posts Reading The Writing Life No Comments
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Valois Tapestry

Every story had a question lurking just beyond its boundaries… What If? That question shaped the characters, setting, and plot of the tale told.

What If a farmboy left his home planet to join a rebel alliance (Star Wars)? What If all of the fictional locations of literature existed on a real map (Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica)? What If a wizard lived in Chicago (The Dresden Files) and What If a two-thousand-year-old druid lived in Arizona (Iron Druid Chronicles)?

Growing up, I found I enjoyed most the What Ifs with fantasy or science fiction answers. If the answer to a What If was “literary” or real world, I wasn’t interested.

And always, always, it was the characters of the story, how they answered the What If, who kept my attention. They were the reason I went back and bought another book by that author.

So when I started writing my own stories, answering my own What If questions, I started with a character. Later I learned to use the word “protagonist,” but in fifth grade, it was just the person I wanted to watch in the movie in my head.

Much later, like after college, I figured out most of my What If questions came to mind while listening to stories about other protagonists, and the answer was provided by a side character.

The short story that became my first sale required the opening line “In Pigwell, time is not measured by days or weeks but by the number of eighteen wheelers that drive by my house.”

My question became What If a yeti terrorized the town of Pigwell every winter and a ten-year-old boy couldn’t stop it? (See what I mean about fantasy and science fiction influences?) So while the “hero” called in by the boy fights the yeti, the story is from the point of view of the boy, a side character.

My first novel’s What If popped into my head when my boyfriend told me about an RPG he played which took place in a fantasy city. I have no desire to play an RPG (dice rolls make my eyes glaze over), but hearing about his character’s adventure as if it were a movie can be fun.

The side characters in that kind of game are often referred to as NPCs-non-player characters, like a centaur, who give out important quest information. In my mind, What If that centaur ran a bar in a city overseen by someone who hated non-standard (Human, Dwarf, Elf) races? In the world of the RPG, he was a side character. In my world, he had a larger role to play.

Characters define the point of view of the story. The reader sees through their eyes and through their actions, the reader understands the plot. Thinking of my protagonist as a side character is also a helpful way to start a bigger story, since other players with other motives are then waiting on the sidelines to make their presence known.

Some series do a great job of this, such as the Legend of Eli Monpress. The thief is the protagonist, and as the story develops over the five novels, the reader learns how small he is in the grand scheme of things… and also how vital.

Because side character protagonists are the center of their world. They have to be in order for the reader to care about what happens to them. And you want the reader to care, otherwise they won’t buy your next book.

Imagine looking at a tapestry that spanned the length of a museum wall-huge and detailed at the same time. By focusing on one part of the tapestry, deciding to write from the farmboy’s perspective instead of the emperor’s, you get a different What If to answer. And you still have lots of room to tell future stories that include the other people and places and plot threads in the tapestry.

While every story started with a What If in the author’s mind, whom they chose to be the protagonist defined the adventure that happened.

And side characters can have some awesome adventures.

*            *            *

Heidi Berthiaume is a side character in an epic story who writes, develops children’s book iPad apps, edits fan music videos, and has almost figured out what her own adventure will be. You can find out more on her website and on Facebook.

The Cunning Man

Craft & Skills Dylan Blacquiere The Writing Life No Comments

dylan2When I was younger, I had the fanciful notion that I would be a writer as well as a physician. Both of these were uncommon pursuits growing up in rural Prince Edward Island, and while both of these were viewed as fine goals, there were not many role models available locally for either of these. There was the kindly old family physician, of course, and he did in a pinch; in fact, it wasn’t until a significant chunk of the way through medical school that I decided upon neurology instead of family practice. But back then, I had an idea that his career would be someday my career. I would set out my shingle close to home and treat the locals. I had the idea that I would incorporate literature somehow into this-this was in the days before anyone had even thought of concepts like narrative medicine and patient stories-but I didn’t know how such a thing could happen. And I knew that I wanted to write things, perhaps even call myself a novelist, but I wasn’t sure how to make the two things fit together.

At the age of fifteen, I went to the local bookstore-I was already a voracious reader and spent my money there instead of on hockey cards, which was a Big Deal. While browsing, one paperback book caught my eye; the cover was a stylized portrait of a well-dressed man, a physician, holding a picture in front of him. But the picture was actually a chest X-ray, and the implication was that the sternum, rubs and clavicles were those of the doctor. Wound around the sternum, coiling between the intercostal spaces of the ribs, were two serpents, staring each other down in a semblance of the staff of Mercury associated with the medical profession.

The book was The Cunning Man, by Robertson Davies. The back cover told me that it was a memoir of a doctor’s life, and promised the story of a doctor who knew his patients’ souls as well as their bodies. This was exactly what the Fifteen-Year-Old Me needed, wanting to find a middle ground between my medical ambition and my interest in literature. I bought the book, and then spent the next several years buying every book by Robertson Davies that I could find. In the years since, I have constantly gone back to reread his novels, his essays, his letters, and they have always had something to say with regard to either-or both-of those worlds.

Many Canadian students know Davies through his Deptford trilogy; Fifth Business is required reading in many high-school English courses, though I was never so fortunate. His writing was very literate; you had to work to understand his stories, but if you did, you would be rewarded with the richness of his language, the depth of his characterization, and the breadth of his interests, everything from small-town theatre to Jungian analysis to academia. He could be wickedly, savagely funny, and he was not always kind, as many of the characters were thinly veiled composites of the pretentious and the stupid. But the writing was never preachy, or awkward; he was a writer who expected the literacy of his readers, and his readers, me included, were proud every time their efforts were rewarded with some sage bit of wisdom or some interesting jewel to share.

I devoured his novels, and even tried to ape his style in my own writing (of course it never worked!) but as I grew older I found more and more inspiration from his essays and his letters. Several books of essays and speeches were published after his death; in one collection, The Merry Heart, he published a speech he had given to medical undergraduates titled Can a Doctor Be a Humanist? This one went right to my heart’s core. He talked of how the truly great doctors didn’t just consult lists of symptoms or mindlessly offer pills, but took the time to listen, to let the patient’s symptoms tell the true story of what was happening. He also spoke of the background of the medical profession, and the mythology behind the staff we use as our symbol, and most of all how we can balance Wisdom with Knowledge to become a truly great humanist physician.

He died shortly after I discovered him-one of life’s many small cruelties-and so I have been left sifting through his writing and the words he left behind, knowing that there won’t be any more, but still finding jewels of inspiration every time I read his work. There have since been many role models, literary and medical, but none have bridged those two worlds so successfully. I am still very early on my path as a physician, and I am still trying to find a way to have literature and writing be a part of that journey, but I can say with conviction that had I not found that book all those years ago, I would not be half as good at either of those things as I am today.

Writing as Immortality

P.S. Demian The Writing Life 1 Comment

InfinityI’ve often thought about what my influences are in writing. Some people watch a movie or read a book and think “Hey, I wish I had written that.” Others think “Gosh, I could have written that!” In fact, some stories are so good, or so impactful and resonate so well with what is churning in your own mind, that you think “Gosh – I need to write MORE of that!”

I can’t tell whether exposure to literature and film created my worldview, or if some primeval dystopian conspiracist reincarnationist ideas were merely activated and given form by the media I was exposed to. In either event, I’d love to detail a few of the influences that inform my writing.

Old School
When I was in 6th grade I think it was, I was too young for my parents to let me watch a violent film like Terminator. And yet my best friend turned me on to it, by sitting in the library with me and explaining the plot, beat for beat, to me. (Am I the only one whose exposure to the Terminator myth began through oral culture?) The story resonated because of the time travel. But if you look at it, time travel is a great plot device to explore consequences of actions over time. And these consequences go down for the ages.

Of course another time travel movie became wildly popular in the 80s, Back to the Future. This movie explored not only time travel but also generations, how families grow over time and pass on their values, beliefs and culture. The juxtaposition of then and now serves not only to advance the story, but as a compressed-time metaphor for exploring how EVERYTHING that happened before now is leading up to THIS INSTANT and our actions within it.

One of my teachers, a Kenneth Haker, AP US History, had us watch a film. It was The Manchurian Candidate. It’s a cold-war film about mind control and sending soldiers back to the US who have been mentally reprogrammed to assasinate. We were told I think that Sinatra (who stars) was against it’s continued release in light of Kennedy’s assassination (there was no snopes.com at the time to disprove this false fact). This experience set me searching for other material about this. Even if you view swinging watches and queen of hearts and post-hypnotic suggestions as a bunch of hooey, the success of the advertising industry should tell you that mind control *can* work…

It Never Works Out
Of course like every high school student in America (I assume), I was exposed to Animal Farm at some point. It’s a great book, and my main take-away was that they change the rules over time. Lord of the Flies taught me that even in democracy, the majority will eventually vote to eliminate human rights. But Brave New World is by far the most impactful and influential of these novels to me. From it I learned that you will be rewarded, in our culture, for giving up your power of choice.

Going Back in Time
Now, when I was in my mid teens, I had an interesting experience. After some soul searching about what I wanted to do with my life, I became fascinated with the possibility of past lives. What if you somewhat unexpectedly and suddenly remembered with clarity and specificity, who you were in a past life? What if you had memories of just the same quality as your normal memories, experiences were just as profane or mundane as now? What if you could see how the incomplete projects you had started in your last life had simply spilled into your current life? This would certainly make you into somewhat of an oddball. You’d probably have some urge to talk to people about it, yet feel like you couldn’t. It’s not like you would believe in past lives – you wouldn’t. You would simply have memories, as vivid and detailed as your current memories, such as driving such-and-such a car, and being friends with so-and-so, and wanting to live in a certain part of town, but living in another part. You might even remembered how you died. Should you believe these memories? Ah, another film, Total Recall and numerous others in the amnesia-through-drugs-or-mind-control explores these tropes and helps us understand the answer to that dilemma. Around this time as well as later, I was also exposed to the Highlander movie and series. This theatrical device – an immortal, who sort of “hides out” and keeps changing identities – is another fantastic metaphor that touches on the problems of reincarnation without getting bogged down in ‘reincarnation’ or Samsara as it is understood in Eastern culture.

But how weird was my interest in past lives? I find some solace in the fact that today, on Earth, at least a billion people, perhaps 1.5 billion believe in past lives. And a few billion more – the vast majority – at least believe in future lives. (Source: CIA World Factbook. No joke, look it up.) Even the much revered and respected Dalai Lama knows that talking about his past lives may be too much for people, and he downplays their significance in interviews.

It’s a Conspiracy
I have read countless ‘rational’ and ‘skeptical’ articles attempting to debunk conspiracy. And yet, for every one of these authors, no matter how many individual fallacies they point out, I still think they are whistling in the dark. I think their approach to explaining the chaos of the world is to say it just isn’t that complicated, resorting to Occam’s razor and all that, glosses over the fact that sometimes the world IS dark and sinister and very, very complicated.

One of the earliest introductions to this fact was actually not fiction, but the true stories of American double agents in WWII Germany. I read about double agents; in this case, working for the British but trusted by the Germans, they had to let real Allied troops die, and had to give good, actionable intelligence to the Germans to build that trust. This fact made me realize that the game of war and of life really, can get so very existential and complex, that the loyalties can get so perverted and converted that you don’t know what to do any more. And it taught me that the real truth can, after a “reveal”, be startlingly different than what you thought it was.

The stark verisimilitude of LeCarré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the best spy novel of all time, only confirmed my sense of how the world runs.

My history studies of the 60’s contributed to this view. We know the Warren commission said it wasn’t. And we know that Bobby Kennedy’s death was yet another lone agent. And so were all the others. And after a while, after so many events, the rationalist will try to talk you down from trying to draw conspiratorial conclusions. “It’s a human need to explain things”, they will explain. “Your mind wants to make sense of all this, fit it into a pattern”. To hell with this rationalist. There is an order to this chaos. We know now about the FBI hounding MLK, John Lennon, anyone they don’t like. We know about Nixon’s lies.

Perhaps it’s not the lizard people, perhaps it’s not the UFOs, and perhaps it’s not the dirty dozen, but to deny the fact that evil men conspire to create evil effects in our world is to be in denial.

Why I write
The novels I am writing are reincarnationist, because I simply find it fascinating and under-explored in the fiction of Western civilization, and of course I’m weird. The novels I am writing are conspiratorial, because in trying to make sense of the chaos of the world and all the broken plans of man, my mind feels compelled to weave it into a logically consistent and explanatory conspiracy.

My exposure to Huxley’s Brave New World (and the irony of his dropping acid on his deathbed and trying to achieve some sort of agnostic spiritual ascent) informs my complex anti-drug spirituality.

Possibly the real reason I am writing about it because, like Woody Allen, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”

But think about your writing in this light. Immortality is a tricky thing to understand. Yet there are writers from thousands of years ago, whose ideas we still discuss every day. Greek philosophic ideas, various sacred testaments, and the Veda permeate and shape our culture, often more powerfully than the artists of today.

Who knows – perhaps that poem in school you hated having to study was something you wrote long ago!

But whatever you write, know that it can echo down the ages, affecting people, changing their minds, and imbuing them with the energy that was your life.