Author Archives: Evan Braun

Where the Rules Come From

Evan Braun Storyline The Writing Life No Comments

My love affair with board games began when I was a small child. Every once in a blue moon, our family would gather around the dining room table and play a board game. When I say “blue moon,” I mean it. It hardly ever happened, and I think the scarcity of these occasions was part of the draw. I was also fiercely competitive, which hasn’t changed much.

Back in the late 1980s, as I was coming of age, the first Nintendo console was brand new. Hot off the assembly lines. I thought Duck Hunt was fun, but oh my God was I bad at it. I always blamed it on poor hand-eye coordination, the same excuse I gave for being so dismal at baseball, football, soccer… well, any sport really, right down to miniature golf. (Turns out I’m not terrible at curling, only middling, but that’s a whole other post, which sadly will most likely never appear on this blog due to being so wildly off-topic as to be side-splittingly hilarious.)

So where was I?

Oh yeah. Nintendo. I was bad at it. I was one of those guys who struggled to get through the first world of the original Super Mario Bros. Those damned killer flower vines always crawled up at the worst moments, and don’t even mention the bottomless chasms. No matter how narrow the holes, I sent Mario and Luigi careening straight into them every time. It’s like riding a bike and trying to avoid hitting a tree while you’re staring right at it—harder than it sounds, trust me.

As I got older, gaming platforms got more advanced, but my aforementioned hand-eye coordination didn’t. I sat back while at my friends’ houses and watched Goldeneye tournaments drag on for hours. When they asked me if I wanted a turn, I politely declined, saying that really, no, I preferred to spectate.

What a crock.

So it was board games for me, but it was hard to find anyone willing to play them. And the selection wasn’t particularly sophisticated; on the top shelf of our hallway closet was a collection of ramshackle Monopoly and Payday boxes, the edges torn and the playing pieces scattered.

It wasn’t until college that I discovered board games could be awesome. My friend Tom invited me over to a games night one evening, and I learned about Settlers of Catan. I loved that game right from the start. I’ve played it probably a hundred times since—and only won twice, which is an ego bruiser, to be sure, but it never stopped me from coming back for more punishment. Today, I get together with my board-gaming buddies about once a month, and we’re always trying out new releases from overseas. It’s a bit pretentious and snobby, yes, and that’s how I like it. And sometimes I even win!

There’s a point to all this beyond a sprawling personal history, I swear.

For as long as I dabbled with games, I also dabbled with writing, but never did the two meet. They were unrelated activities. One had nothing to do with the other. After all, games had rules, and my gestational stories did not. It was years before I discovered structure. Half of the fun of writing was finding out what happened at the end. I suppose some writers still work this way, though at least they usually impose structure after the fact.

Well, games and stories had a lot more in common than I thought. If they’re not quite siblings, then at minimum they’re first cousins. They have beginnings, middles, and ends. They have characters (actual characters sometimes, at other times just players, though the two are analogous). They have probabilities, conflict, and suspense. They have surprises and twists.

Without gaming, I’m pretty sure I would have discovered the importance of narrative structure, eventually. But it would have taken me a lot longer. I’ve now been told that my handle on plot and structure is one of my greatest strengths as a writer, so maybe all those wasted hours watching my friends play first-person shooters weren’t quite as wasted as I initially thought!

In fact, I know they weren’t wasted. For me, games were a catalyst. They were the bridge carrying me from thinking of plot as just the things that happened in a story to seeing them as intentional machinations. The main difference between books and games is that as an author the rules aren’t imposed on me anymore. Now I get to make the rules, and it’s the sweetest revenge.

Can you imagine how good I would have been at baseball if the team with the most strike-outs won the game?

I can.

The Upgrade

Evan Braun No Comments

If you’re one of our regular readers, you might have noticed that we’ve really stepped up our game here at the Fictorian Era. For one thing, we’ve increased the amount of content we deliver to you-almost doubled it, in fact. This has allowed us to bring you a lot more guest posts and points of view. We think that’s a good thing, and our site statistics since March tell us that you do, too. Activity on the site has steadily increased ever since, with each month trumping the last.

Therefore, to serve you better and further our goal of delivering some of the best writing content on the internet (a daunting goal), starting today we are making some site upgrades. Hopefully, you won’t notice the effects at all and the transition will be invisible. That said, we don’t want you to get worried if things don’t work/look exactly the same way you have become accustomed to. Even if we go dark for a little while, the Fictorians aren’t going anywhere. We promise!

Over the next few days, the old version of our site will be locked down. The primary symptom of this is that you sadly won’t be able to comment on any of our old posts. That’s only temporary. When you try to access the Fictorian Era, you also might see a message that says our site is being moved. If that happens, just wait patiently or try again later. If you don’t see that message, great! It means that the transition either hasn’t happened yet or you’re already seeing the new version of the site.

Our regular content will resume tomorrow, with an introduction to a whole month of new posts on the theme of writing and gaming, and the various ways those two pursuits intersect each other. As always, we’ve got a great line-up for you to look forward to.

See you on the flip side!

Indiana Jones and the Great Test of Character

Character Craft & Skills Evan Braun Reviews 8 Comments

Raiders of the Lost Ark CoverI have a lot of favorite movies, so when Movie Month came along I had to think long and hard about what to spend my time writing about. I was torn enough that I couldn’t narrow it down to just one post, but there was no doubt in my mind that I would have to tackle Indiana Jones, which has been a big influence on me ever since my initial forays into writing. My first published novel has an obvious connection to Jones-it tells the story of a globe-spanning archaeological chase that has the potential to turn the tide of history. The same very broad premise could apply to any of the four Jones films. Well, at least superficially, which is the whole point of this post.

There’s just something so energetic about these movies. They’re action-packed, yes, but they also have their full share of insight and philosophy. There’s a delicate balancing act going on here, and from the first time I was exposed to these films I knew I wanted to create something that tapped into the same zeitgeist.

As the series goes on, the gaps between films gets longer and longer (eventually very long), and according to George Lucas, a large reason is that he struggled to come up with MacGuffins worthy of the Indiana Jones legacy. A MacGuffin is a writerly term referring to the object of a character’s quest. It doesn’t actually matter what a MacGuffin is, because its primary purpose is to kickstart the story and motivate the characters. In other words, it’s plot fuel. In the first Indiana Jones movie, it the Ark of the Covenant. In the second movie, it’s the Sankara Stones. In the third, it’s the Holy Grail-a hard object to one-up, which is perhaps why we had to wait twenty years for the next film. Finally, the fourth (and probably final) outing sent the characters searching for eponymous Crystal Skull. The argument could be made that the best MacGuffin was the first, that Lucas was never quite able to recapture the magic.

All month, we’ve been looking at lessons to be learned from cinema. Today’s lesson, however, looks at what the first Indiana Jones movie excelled-and the others didn’t. Ironically, if the MacGuffin doesn’t really matter, it’s odd that Lucas spent so much time obsessing over them. And even after almost fifteen years of obsessing, the fourth film delivered what is almost universally regarded as the weakest one of all. So what went wrong?

The magic of Indiana Jones isn’t in the quest. Yes, there has to be a great story, but the magic is in the character-or rather, characters. The second movie relied too heavily on the plot, the third relied too heavily on the humour, and the fourth relied too heavily on… well, perhaps mysticism (or perhaps nostalgia). Certainly all four films contain these elements, but I would argue that the first movie is the only one to showcase them in proper balance, a tricky feat.

For a movie that managed to so thoroughly entangle itself in the world of its main character, it’s interesting to note that the first movie-Raiders of the Lost Ark-doesn’t even have the main character’s name in the title, as each of the sequels would (though this has been retconned on modern home-video releases). The movie was about a flawed adventurer. He was brave and cunning, but also insecure and self-deprecating. He wasn’t good with people. He was scruffy, got into a lot of fights, and had crippling fears and copious hangups. He was not idealized. These qualities are backed up not through the character’s biographical details or infodumpy expository dialogue, but through nuanced writing and an inspired performance. I may be giving the first movie too much credit, but Harrison Ford had a sparkle in his eyes back in 1981 that wasn’t present later on; I still love the other movies, but his facial expressions tended more towards exhaustion (but at least they fashion the character’s exhaustion into a plot point).

Now, I readily recognize that there are as many different kinds of authors as there are authors themselves, but I’m one of those guys who turns the spotlight on the characters more than the plot, as often as possible. You need both, but if I’m writing a scene and have to choose one over the other, seven times out of ten I’m going to look for ways to say something interesting about the character at the heart of the story. The character isn’t the guy to whom the story is happening, but rather the guy who is driving the story. The character is not an interchangeable MacGuffin. No character = no story.

If you can take away the character without seriously damaging the story, I think that’s a bad sign. In particular, if you take the Indiana Jones character out of the second and fourth films, I think those movies can still survive. The third film fares better, though still gets the balance wrong.

The Take Home: The character and the story should be so enmeshed that they cannot be separated. Test this on your own story; try outlining your work-in-progress with a different cast of characters. It’s the rare kind of test which one hopes to fail!

The Art of Taking It Slow

Character Craft & Skills Evan Braun Reviews 4 Comments

Meet Joe Black CoverI first saw Meet Joe Black in my senior year of high school, and I hadn’t expected to enjoy it. A big group of friends had gathered at someone’s house on a day off to watch a movie and just hang out. I remember feeling a bit disappointed by the film selection because it had been chosen by the girls and it had the definite air of a chick flick. Just look at that cover! Plus, it was long-a VHS release split into two tapes! Who needs that?

But as the movie began to play, I found myself transfixed. (Without a doubt, a key ingredient was the amazing Thomas Newman score, which I happen to be listening to as I write this piece). Not only did I unexpectedly enjoy the movie, but I was deeply influenced by it. It taught me some big lessons which have served me well to this day.

Meet Joe Black is one of those love-it-or-hate-it kind of films. The critical consensus, according to Rotten Tomatoes is that it is “glacially slow, uneventful.” Though personally I think anyone who says the movie is uneventful simply couldn’t have seen the same movie I did. Maybe it has something to do with expectations. If you’re expecting a fun romantic romp, you might be enraged. If you’re expecting a deep and contemplative look at philosophy and mortality-or at least open to such an experience-then you’re in for a treat.

Here’s what Meet Joe Black does so exquisitely well: it explores characters in a way that I see usually reserved for novels. The characters are given long, extended sequences in which they get to really chew the cud. Uneventful? Not in my book. The film gives the characters time to mine the depths of who they are, what they want, their strengths, their flaws, their secret desires… and all of this in a deeply spiritual context.

This movie has a fascinating metaphysical premise. Death goes about his business, day in and day out, ferrying souls from the world of the living to whatever is on the other side (the movie graciously doesn’t concern itself with this detail), before deciding to take a holiday by entering the mortal plane to learn more about life and what it means-and why souls are so reluctant to leave it. To this end, Death takes the form of a recently deceased young man (played to perfection by Brad Pitt in one of his best roles) and assumes his life. But Death’s stay on the earth is temporary, for he has a job to do-collect the soul of a wealthy New York business magnate, Bill Parrish (Anthony Hopkins, also at the top of his game), who is about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday-before returning with his new charge to the River Styx.

That’s a loaded premise, and Meet Joe Black doesn’t take any shortcuts. It’s gonna take some time to explore this idea to the fullest, and the film, with a running time of over three hours, goes about its juicy task with proficiency, if not efficiency. So many stories are rushing around to get from A to B, to simplify big and complicated ideas into bite-sized morsels. Meet Joe Black demonstrates that you can take the time to smell the roses by investigating every aspect of your story, from premise to setting to character, without sacrificing anything.

One of the symptoms of this-which is either praised or maligned, depending on your opinion of the film-is that although the characters have long dialogue scenes with each other, they are not always talking. This movie doesn’t have much in the way of “chatter.” The conversations breathe. They have a unique cadence which I haven’t seen duplicated anywhere else. Sometimes the characters are silent for long stretches of time-but the communication that happens in those silence is enough to fill pages and pages. There’s so much subtext. For a film, it’s tremendously literate. There are scenes with dialogue that might be able to fill a single page of script, but the movie explores those beats for entire minutes. Yes, this should be uneventful on film, but instead it’s strangely masterful. It’s beautiful. It’s moving.

In the midst of my stories, I take this cue from Meet Joe Black very seriously. Sometimes you just can’t-or at least, shouldn’t-rush things. Let the moments play out, let the characters dance around a little bit, let the subtext take center stage. Doing so can take storylines that seem merely perfunctory on the surface and transform them into intensely meaningful examinations of human character.

The Take Home: From time to time, in this fast-paced writing market, don’t be afraid to take it slow.