How many viable options does your protagonist have in any given instance? Can they just go out and do anything at this point? How on earth are you going to choose what they should do? Why should your reader believe that is the correct choice?

So it’s time to corner your character. How few options can you force on them? Can you narrow it down to two? By presenting minimal choices for your character, you are forcing to them to act but also you are establishing what kind of character they are.

Are they obedient or rebellious? Are they going to do what Uncle Owen says or are they damn well going to go into Tashi station and get those power converters? ;) By forcing a single choice, you establish those traits. Luke Skywalker is a good, obedient kid even though he pines for something else. Which means when the options expand: when it is fight the empire, take the reward and run, fly off on many adventures with Han Solo, or join the rebellion but not take a front line position, we have a fair idea of what he’s going to choose. We know what he’s like because the limited choices he has had previously have defined which way he is going to go when he has unlimited choices, he’ll follow the character that he has been forced to choose.

You start with few choices and grow to many to condition us to expect certain actions from your character without provoking disbelief because their might be better options on the table. By knowing already what the character is like, the audience doesn’t say, “but….”

This is also partly why protagonists tend to be more reactive in the beginning and more proactive toward the end because the reactivity shapes the proactivity in believable ways.

Again, we’re thinking about character focus. What is the essence of the character and what are the essential moments.

So, let’s suppose family is an essential part of your character’s story. Does this mean you want to have them chose between their mother and their brother? Possibly. But more likely what you want is the choice between family and something else. Mother AND brother vs. work. Mother vs. taking care of yourself. Brother vs. societal norms. Conflicts between categories are easier to decipher for a reader than conflicts within a category.

Over time in a story, you can set up the definitions of categories you will then use. Sticking with family and mother vs. brother, what you can set up is that this conflict is two different types of family. Say a mother to whom you owe obedience and a brother to whom you owe protection. Then you have set it up, once again as a category separation, as what type of family your character might want. One defined by obedience to a superior vs. one defined by protecting someone in your care. The trick is all in defining and setting up the categories and why they cannot be the same thing before you show the full conflict between them. Easily understood categories can be leapt right into, harder to decode categories must be explicated first.

It’s been a while, so for those of you new, life updates are purely personal posts with nothing to do with writing and are rarely the best of news. You are under no obligation to read them.

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The Tyrell motto in Blade Runner is, “More human than human.” And that is exactly what you are aiming for with characters and plotlines in a story. You are aiming to make it the highlight reel, the ultra focus, the good parts version. More real than real. Everything fits together and flows at a pace that encourages the reader to keep going.

This is what show vs. tell is really all about. And how you chose between them. What makes the story the most vivid? What makes the story the most vivacious? If you just tell what happened, does it make as deep an impression as if you show what happens? Alternatively, does showing the moment bog the story down and make it feel like the dull parts of life in between the interesting ones? By keeping the reader moving, you prevent them from picking holes in your plot or seeing the frames in your film. By moving just from important point to important point, showing those, while telling as quickly and succinctly as possible the in-between stuff you are making it more real than real because all you have is the stuff that feels like living.

Michelangelo said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

What makes an angel? No. Don’t go look up bible quotes or definitions or encyclopedia entries. What in your mind makes an angel? What are the minimum defining traits? Because your minimum definition probably won’t be someone else’s minimum definition.

For me, an angel is a divine servant, awesome (in the original sense that denotes fear as much as reverence), and yet much the same as us emotionally.

You’ll note no wings, no light, no music, not even a mention of heaven or the sky. No halos. No mention of a human shape. By boiling things like this down to their essence, it focuses me on exactly what I have to show to deal with angels in my fictional universe as well as opens up all sorts of possibilities for deviating from the pack.

Now a harder question: What makes your protagonist the focus of your story? What are the essential things about them, the defining traits, that make them the motive force for your story?

Victoria Lynn Schmidt suggests in her guide, Book in a Month, that the most powerful books boil down to a very small number of scenes. Note the suspicious lack of toilets in any given story, even when they do appear. Because it isn’t important. Mostly, bathrooms fail to highlight any trait that is essentially your protagonist. The important moments are the ones that show the essence of your character, good and bad. So when you have the minimum essential definition of your protagonist, you also have your minimum essential moments you need to have happen. Or vice-versa: if you know the essential moments, then you know the traits that you need to find in your protagonist. You have the focus of your story. 

So I finally finished Splitting the Difference: A Heart-Shaped Memoir by The White Elephant in the Room. It took me a while because I had to cry. A lot. But it is a beautiful book that is hard to put down except to cry and lives up to its billing of splitting the difference between pain and wonder amazingly well. What she’s done so masterfully is to boil herself and her experience down to the point that it really feels like you are living through that year with her. Well enough that I had dreams about her as if I knew her, down to speech rhythms, despite the fact that there is no actual dialogue quotes in the book. I’m not quite sure how else to explain the power of the book, other than that, of course, love and loss are integral to our lives and she puts both of hers on bright and shameless display in equal measure and shows us the world that she inhabits. It’s also just hard to review a memoir, especially if you know the author may very well see what you say. Don’t look. Don’t look ;) But, yeah, it’s good, it’s powerful, it’s a tearjerker but it’s got it’s fair measure of joy and beauty (and stupid stuff we do too) and yeah, you should read it.

This is Jane McGonigal’s TED talk on the ideas behind SuperBetter. I figure it does need a trigger warning for a brief mention of suicidal ideation and discussion of death but as it is her personal and shared solution to suicidal ideation and facing traumatic illness/injury, I’m not sure that the people who would be most likely to avoid the trigger aren’t the people who might most benefit from SuperBetter.

A lot of writers are writers to cope with trauma but ALL writers can benefit from these ideas.

We tend to think of writing as undemanding physically but one of the things I’ve heard from almost every successful writer I’ve heard speak is that writing, as a vocation, is physically destructive to your health and it is a requirement to counteract that destruction if you wish to both write and survive.

Additionally, I’ve heard several successful authors posit that it is the nonphysical activities that she describes that enable good writing as opposed to bad writing. Which is what made me think of this as a creative writing post, even though she never discusses creative writing. 

The overarching principle of magic is: “I am that.” I, the user of magic, am the artifact. I, the artifact, am the object I wish to affect. I, the object, will be as willed.

This is played out obviously in a poppet effigy. The will of the caster endows force on that artifact. The poppet is moved, cursed, or blessed. The person the poppet represents then moves according to the will of the caster, suffers the curse, or enjoys the blessing.

Less obvious but no less controlled by this principle is the aversive force of the protective charm. The charm, in effect, represents the world in comparison to the bearer of the charm. The will of the caster endows the charm with its own will to turn aside negative events. The charm then overpowers the negative events that would come to the bearer by the natural course of things.

This is why a specific charm against a specific harm for a specific person is relatively easy and a general charm against general harm for just anyone is spectacularly difficult. The latter requires the caster to set the world as a whole as the object to be controlled by nothing more than a simple token of their will, not even important enough to them to keep it for themselves or give it as a special gift to someone. The chances of the caster convincing themselves, “I am that,” are slim and therefore unlikely to work.

This provides the key to understanding the relative powers of magic users. Magic is predicated on what the caster can convince themselves they are. If the caster can make themselves believe, not just intellectually but down in their bones, that they are something, they can force it to do their will. If they can’t, no matter how well it has been documented that such a thing is possible, they will be incapable.

This also provides the reasoning behind artifacts. The artifact exists as an intermediary to bridge the gap. It is the necessary tool to convince the caster that they can be the object of their spell. This is why the artifact must mesh with the caster’s system of belief.

I, for example, can wave a dead chicken around all I want but nothing is going to convince me I am a dead chicken or that that dead chicken is something else. On the other hand, nothing is going to make me not believe that a good piece of writing doesn’t reflect reality. So when I write out a spell, describe the curse, make it fit my perceptions of justice, it soaks up magic like a sponge because it is tailored to my belief of what I am, what other things are, and how they interact.

- Braightwight, Ph.D. Msc.D., Natalie. Discovering Metaphysics. Wire Island: Isles University Press, 8n.e. Print.

A longer quote that I may pick off of at some point. Maybe. And a good summation of the underlying principles of how magic works in Knights of Day.

working off yesterday’s inspiration. A microfiction - 300 words exactly:

Of course his mother sobbed when she was handed him by the doctor and his future diary, barely big enough for twenty years, by the printer.

Having read the comparison of the small book of his life resting atop and dwarfed by the great tome of her own was not the same as seeing it. And forty eight hours is too little time to take in such a future.

His childhood was filled with the memory of his mother flipping ahead obsessively in her diary, trying to outwit the printers - as if anyone could deviate from their story once printed - and see his death written out so she could prepare, rebel. Her once impossible lifespan worn away by “This page left purposefully blank. Do not read ahead more than seven days.  Disaster may occur.”

Having witnessed it in his mother and having lived his life faithfully by it - as if anyone could deviate from their story once printed - the end was no surprise. Eighteen years after his own little story was printed he obeyed its last two instructions, tossing it into the fire and in the decades to come never once regretting that his life wasn’t written out for him.

So when death came, as it comes to all, it found him surprised in the middle of a more pleasant moment and later found her still flipping; looking for a sign, a guide post, a mention of reassurance at the end that lives were written out a certain way for a certain reason. The end was marked as marked in all diaries - because the most faithful and the most faithless alike can’t resist flipping to the last page - “This page left purposefully blank. Do not read ahead more than seven days. Disaster may occur.”