Category Archives: Reader Investment & Empathy

Serialization: Pros and Pitfalls

Gregory D. Little Plot Structure Reader Investment & Empathy No Comments

As I work on the sequel to Unwilling Souls, I find myself having to confront the question of serialization versus episodic storytelling. My admission up front: I love serialized stories. Aside from sitcoms, I don’t really watch any television that doesn’t feature at least some element of serialization. While I realize there’s a certain comfort to be had in procedurals or episodic series, they will never be my first choice, precisely for that reason. Very little ever changes.

The idea that each installment of a story builds into something greater has always appealed to me. And in today’s age of serialized TV and prestige series, it’s hard to remember there was ever anything else. But networks used to look down on serialized storytelling. And if you do a little digging, it’s not hard to see why. In this post, I’ll take you through three series’ attempts at serialization across a couple of different timeframes, what worked about it and what didn’t.

The X-Files: You might call this a proto-serialized drama, or at least a drama with a central mystery at its core. For cave-dwellers or young people, the X-Files featured FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully assigned to solve the paranormal cases the FBI normally tried to downplay or ignore. Most episodes fell into a sort of “monster of the week” episodic pattern. But several times each season, including the beginning and the end, the series’ overarching story would come to the forefront: that of Mulder’s obsessive quest to uncover the truth behind alien abductions and the government’s cover-up, including the abduction of his sister when they were both children. Early on the series’ run, I (and most) enjoyed the “monster of the week” episodes but really looked forward to the alien storyline, eagerly awaiting each new installment’s advancement of the central mystery.

As the series aged, however, it became more and more apparent that the showrunners didn’t have an overall plan for the mystery, and were just dragging it out as long as possible, allowing it to grow more and more elaborate and nonsensical. By the time the lead actors were bowing out of the show save for guest appearances, it was the monster of the week episodes that still maintained a semblance of quality, while the serialized overarching story had become a mess that would obviously never reach a satisfactory conclusion. That’s the major advantage episodic TV will always have over serial TV. Each installment has a beginning a middle and an end, all neatly contained in an hour of the viewer’s time. Serialized stories have to work extra hard to give installments the feel of a miniature story arc while simultaneously advancing the overarching plot. It adds a dimension of complexity to the writing.

The X-Files finale was all but incomprehensible, and while the recent short 10th season proved the actors still bring chemistry to their characters, the alien storyline remains as opaque as ever. Ultimately, the X-Files serves as a cautionary tale to future shows about being careful with open-ended mysteries. The lesson of the X-Files: A mysterious series mythos requires, if not exact planning to the last detail, at least some forethought unless you are a virtuoso of retconning.

Lost: Though this isn’t in chronological order, The X-FIles leads us naturally into Lost, the show that learned the most from the X-Files. Lost begins with a plane crash which a seemingly miraculous number of people survive. The tropical island onto which they’ve crashed is filled with all kinds of strange, wondrous and terrifying things, like polar bears, mysterious hatches buried in the jungle, and the eerie people already living on the island, creepily known only as the Others. Like its spiritual predecessor, Lost builds its show around a central mystery: What is the Island? Unlike the X-Files, while there are episodes that don’t advance the main plot, quite a few of them in the first three seasons, nearly every episode takes place on the island itself, so there’s no forgetting the main, serialized plot.

Lost’s first season was utterly captivating, introducing us to the characters by giving each one or more episodes focused on them and their backstory while simultaneously advancing the plot. The problems didn’t really arise until Season 2 and then, even more, Season 3. It turns out that the show-runners (the show was conceived by All-SFF Team Producer J.J. Abrams but he was not involved beyond the pilot episode) did not have any more idea where the story was going than the creator of the X-Files did or, perhaps more importantly, how long they would have to stall giving out answers to their mysteries. But they learned from history.

By the time the third season was floundering in stall-tactics designed to drag out the mysteries toward an unknown series end date, the producers made the bold decision of approaching the network with a proposal to last three more 16 episode seasons and then end. Given the fact that the show was a ratings juggernaut, give props to ABC for agreeing to the schedule. From that moment on Lost became much more focused and fast-paced. Gone were the stalling episodes of Jack getting a tattoo. Each episode now drove the plot inexorably forward, and though the ending of the series was controversial to many, no one can deny that it was an ending. The lesson? If you’re telling a serialized story, plan for it to have a beginning, middle and end so that you pace correctly.

Battlestar Galactica (2004 Reboot): Speaking of controversial endings, BSG was heavily serialized from beginning to end, almost without exception. Rare was an episode that could be called truly standalone. Like Lost before it, the show was built around a relatively simple premise. The Cylons (human-hating robots, some of which are indistinguishable from humans) have destroyed human civilization in retaliation for decades-old mistreatment, and the entire remains of the human race comprise rag-tag fleet of spacecraft looking for the last habitable world in their records: the mythical colony of Earth.

From the beginning of the show, things like resource conservation, the problem of governance when your entire governmental apparatus is destroyed, and “the enemy within” became staple elements of the show’s plot. Every episode relentlessly drove the main story forward … with one exception. During Season 3, Syfy (then mercifully known as the SciFi Network) tried to make the show more viewer friendly, which translates to more episodic. See, the reason networks used to hate serialized stories is that while they tend to keep early fans watching, they make it difficult for new fans to get into shows because of all the backstory they’ve missed. SciFi wanted Season 3 to be easier to get involved which, resulting in a season which, while it has some major highs (New Caprica and the Adama Maneuver, anyone?) it also resulted in some disjointed episodes that feel unfocused and unconnected to the larger story.

If this had been the series modus operandi from the start, nothing would have seemed amiss. As it was, the change was jarring. Fortunately, the fourth and final season was allowed to close out the show (once, again that this was the final season was planned in advance) on the show-runners terms. For the record, I enjoyed both BSG’s and Lost’s controversial endings. The lesson we can take from this is that whatever precedent you set between installments, it is best to keep to it throughout the run of your series.

 

A serialized approach to storytelling is a great way to grab viewers (or readers) early and make sure they stay invested. That said, there are pitfalls to the approach as well as benefits to working in some episodic elements as well.

About the Author: Gregory D. LittleHeadshot

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (sometimes during) classes. His first novel, Unwilling Souls, is available now from ebook retailers and trade paperback through Amazon.com. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens, A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology, and the upcoming Dragon Writers Anthology. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their yellow lab.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com), his Twitter handle (@litgreg) or at his Author Page on Facebook.

 

 

Much More Than Meets The Eye

Character Mary Pletsch Reader Investment & Empathy The Writing Life No Comments

MTMTE3Most people who grew up in the US (or Canada, the UK or Japan) in the 80s (or 90s or 00s) will recognize the names Optimus Prime and Megatron.  The iconic Transformers hero and villain have regularly appeared on toy store shelves, in cartoons and comics, and in licensed merchandise for over 30 years.

Over those years, the toy line has spawned a vast number of characters, most of whom are known only to those who collect vintage toys.  These characters appeared only briefly in cartoons–or only in comics–or only in UK comics–or existed solely as biographies on the boxes of their toys.

So why are these “D-listers” the stars of More than Meets the Eye, an ongoing comic book that’s won a Comics Alliance Award for both  Continued Excellence in Serial Comics and Outstanding Writer for its author, James Roberts?

More Than Meets The Eye doesn’t rely on the nostalgia factor to keep its readers coming back each month.  It’s the character work that makes the story shine:  casting alien robots as people, with very human flaws, each one with their own reasons for ending up aboard a spaceship on a quest into deep space in search of the Knights of Cybertron, who may hold the key to a better future.  May.  Assuming they even exist.  And assuming the crew ever manages to find them.

The quest is an archetypal framework; the real story is in watching the characters interact..  This is where D-list characters come into their own.  With very little in the way of pre-existing character development as constraints, the characters grew and evolved to suit the story–and, indeed, much of the plot comes about as characters make decisions and their actions in turn affect others.  There’s Brainstorm, the erratic “mad scientist” (always in competition with Perceptor, the rational scientist) who’s prepared to build a time machine and stop the Great War before it starts…not for philosophical reasons, not for personal power, but in the hopes of rescuing an unrequited love.  There’s Tailgate, who lay forgotten through the entire war, and fabricates his own history in his search for attention and friendship–of course it’s only a matter of time before his lies catch up to him, and even in the second season he remains vulnerable to the manipulations of someone who hopes to use him to further his own schemes.  There’s Swerve, metallurgist by trade, who would rather spend the quest running the ship’s unofficial bar and who struggles against his private depression.  And there’s Chromedome, a mnemosurgeon who can read and alter memories (at great risk to himself) and his troubled but ultimately loving relationship with Rewind, the ship’s historian.

MTMTE5More than Meets the Eye is a comic that’s genuinely funny, deeply touching, sometimes tragic, always hopeful.  It works because we genuinely care about these characters, wonder about their motivations, worry about their fates.  This character work is possible because the creative team were freed from the constraints of what Transformers has so often been about–Optimus Prime and his heroic Autobots fighting against Megatron and his evil Decepticons in an endless robot war–and given the opportunity to explore what else the franchise could be.  Over the course of the last few years we’ve seen the origins of the Great War, how it changed the characters, and how its aftereffects continue to shape the lives of beings who’ve spent so much of their lives in conflict.  More Than Meets The Eye develops an alien society, with its own political movements and social classes and private concerns, and all this background comes out of how these factors affect the characters in the present.

As of Volume One, the war is over and a bunch of nobodies (with a few semi-familiar names:  Rodimus, Ratchet, Cyclonus and Ultra Magnus) are heading off into space on a fool’s errand–this is where the story begins.  It doesn’t require much familiarity with previous iterations of the franchise, and indeed, for those who can set aside the fact that the concept began as a toy-based property, you may discover the best sci-fi comic you haven’t been reading.

A familiar name is not, in itself, reason to care about a character.  Neither is a cool concept, an action-packed plot or a setting rich in possibility.  It’s character development that turns names into people–flawed, struggling, believable people, each with their own scars from their pasts and dreams for their futures.  There’s more to all of them than one would guess at first glance (hence the delightful suitability of the title) and as the story progresses, those layers are revealed.  When we see characters as people, people we come to know, we become invested in them and their stories.  When we see that their actions not only affect the plot but drive it forward, we care about what they do.  And when we wonder and worry about what will happen to our favourites, we keep coming back–issue after issue, year after year.  After four years and counting, More Than Meets The Eye‘s nobodies aren’t nobodies any longer.

About Mary:

Mary Pletsch is a glider pilot, toy collector and graduate of the University of Huron College, the Royal Military College of Canada and Dalhousie University. She is the author of several previously published short stories in a variety of genres, including science fiction, steampunk, fantasy and horror. She currently lives in New Brunswick with Dylan Blacquiere and their four cats.

Walter White, you monster.

Character Emily Godhand Reader Investment & Empathy 2 Comments

Everyone loves a good anti-hero, right? Maybe they have limited…moral inhibitions, but we root for them because ultimately we believe that even if their methods aren’t right, they are. The thing we wish we could do if only we weren’t constrained by things like “propriety” and “conscience”. The anti-hero becomes a sort of escapist fantasy where the reader or viewer can be a badass who gets what they want (or what ‘needs to be done’, you know, whatever they tell themselves to sleep at night) vicariously through the protagonist.

And they’re memorable characters for that, sure. Yeah. Of course.

…but let me tell you about a villain protagonist. A sociopath who is good at manipulation. You root for him to overcome obstacles because he was a normal person like you. A seemingly loving and attentive father who wanted a place in his family’s hearts. A teacher and brilliant chemist who wanted his contribution to his field to go noticed and appreciated. A victim fighting against life’s unfair cruelty that left him with terminal cancer and against a system that would let him die because he wasn’t rich enough to afford to live.

But with each new murder, each new atrocious act he rationalizes to assuade his own self-guilt, he asks more, and more, and more of your sympathy and support, until you have nothing more to offe-

Wait, you’re saying that Walter White was a compelling and memorable character until the very end?

Once he’s in the criminal underworld, even though he had many chances to quit and turn back, he doesn’t take them. He wasn’t in too deep. There was a way out. But like the Greek tragedies, he had a fatal flaw that lead to his downfall. His perception that he’s sunk so much of his life and savings and good-will into this that he can’t stop now, no matter how much he promises and thinks he can, is overshadowed by the insight that he…he likes it.

What’s more, he can justify his own behavior to himself. He believes himself, in the beginning at least, that he’s the victim, that he is doing what needs to be done to provide for his family before he’s gone. That the alternative is for him to die thinking he’s lived a meaningless life and his family in debt and grief.

But he likes what he does. He likes the taste of power when he previously felt powerless. He likes the recognition for his talents and skills when he felt he had fallen from grace after his contributions weren’t acknowledged and the people he worked with made a lot of money off HIS ideas. Money he really needs now. He had done everything “right”, and he still didn’t have what he wanted.

Now? Now he has nothing left to lose, he feels, because he’s already a dead man, and he can have one last shot at everything he wanted.

The ‘sunk-cost’ fallacy that explains why humans tend to “throw good money after bad”, also applies to the viewers as well. We’ve invested so much emotionally in this character ourselves, we’ve identified so much with them, that we want him to be redeemed…or at least see his goal through.

Because ultimately, as much as we want to be the powerful professional who is finally recognized for their talents, whose name puts fear in the hearts of our enemies under the illusion that that will protect our prestige and authority, as much as we want to be the one who knocks…

We want to know that it was all worth it. We want to know there’s an escape from our own mistakes. Because the character has become a viewer-insert, we begin to rationalize their actions on their behalf. Even an atrocious murder is a victory for us, because it was a victory for that character.

We want redemption to be possible for us, because the character was written in a way that we think, “But for the Grace of God goes I.”

And even if it is a tragedy and the main character goes out in a blaze of glory, we find comfort in the thought that we won’t forget their name, or the legacy they left behind.

Monsters in All Their Forms

Character Craft & Skills POV Reader Investment & Empathy No Comments

A friend and I were sitting in a brewery last weekend, killing time before meeting our wives for dinner. A wide-ranging discussion of pop culture touched on the concept of monsters in fiction, and what we want and expect out of them.

There are as many types of monsters as can be imagined, and as the quote from A Beautiful Mind goes, “man is capable of as much atrocity as he has imagination.” But fictional monsters can be loosely gathered up into two categories: those with a backstory and those without. Think of them as “evil because,” and “evil just because.” Each of these concepts can do the job of terrifying the reader or viewer, as long as it is consistent with the goals and tone of the story being told.

Monsters with no backstory are easy to find. Look no further than John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece Halloween or the much more recent instant horror classic It Follows. In Halloween, six-year-old Michael Myers transforms from a seemingly normal child into the brutal murderer of his own sister in the films opening moments, filmed chillingly from first-person perspective. From then on, he never speaks a word and barely moves a muscle until fifteen years later when he breaks out of his mental ward and begins killing again.

The monster of It Follows, despite the film’s slasher sensibilities, isn’t even human. Rather, it’s a malevolent force that kills whomever has been afflicted with it. Spread through sex, the entity follows its victims at the same maddeningly slow pace wherever they flee. If it catches them, it brutally kills them, then begins working its way back down the line of the cursed, seeking next the person who passed the curse to its now-dead victim. Once afflicted, you are never truly safe again, even if you pass the curse along. Only the afflicted can see the entity, which takes the form of random people, sometimes a stranger, sometimes people they know. Whatever helps it get close.

In both these films, our inability to relate to or understand the monster is a large part of what makes them scary. You cannot reason with Michael Myers or It, just as you cannot fathom why they are doing what they are doing. Despite later films’ ill-advised attempts to tie Michael Myers to a pagan, druid ritual involving the holiday that would become Halloween, any attempt to explain this sort of monster to the viewer robs it of some of its power. No attempt at all is made to explain the curse of It Follows, and that is to the film’s benefit. These monsters are forces of nature, and they are frightening specifically because they recall the fear, buried deep in our DNA, of being preyed upon by creatures that would never offer mercy and could never be reasoned with. Creatures that saw us only as food.

For examples of villains with backstories, look no further than George R.R. Martin and Thomas Harris. A Song of Ice and Fire is replete with human monsters of both the “evil because” and “evil just because” variety, but where Martin really excels is establishing the protagonist family of the Starks and setting them against the antagonist family of the Lannisters. Very quickly the reader is led to hate the Lannisters, and at some point in the story each member of that family commits monstrous acts, either against the Starks directly or just in general. But over the course of the series, Martin masterfully peels back his onion layer by layer, and we are shown the inner worlds of the Lannister characters and the reasons (very valid to them) why they do awful things. Tyrion we sympathize with from the beginning of course, but no one was more surprised than I when Martin made me like Jaime Lannister. Even with Cersei I could find a measure of pity if not any warmth. If you delve into The World of Ice and Fire, you can even learn a bit of what Tywin Lannister, the main architect of his children’s misery, endured as a younger man that shaped him into the man he later became.

Few books I’ve ever read chilled me as much as Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon. The first of the Hannibal Lecter books, this features a plot similar to the more well-known Silence of the Lambs, but with a different FBI investigator trying to catch a different serial killer. This killer, Francis Dolarhyde, is a singular creation in fiction. He murders entire families at the behest of an alternate personality he calls the Red Dragon. Much of the book is told from his perspective, and it’s the most effective example of getting into the head of a deeply disturbed individual I’ve ever read. We come to learn that Francis, born with a harelip and a cleft palate, was abandoned by his mother and raised with brutal cruelty by his grandmother. This treatment ended up warping Francis into the monster he becomes, and the reader feels anger, horror and pity all at once for the character.

If done effectively, this kind of monster awakens a very different kind of fear. Rather than worrying what lurks beyond the firelight, waiting to eat us, the “evil because” monster forces us to look inward, to see the monster lying dormant within each of us (and our fellows). We look and we wonder. Everyone has heard the quote “There but for the grace of God go I.” If we were perhaps less strong or even just less fortunate, if the various circumstances of our lives had combined in the perfect (or anti-perfect) way, would we end up as warped as these characters? Just how far beneath our surface does a monster lurk?

Each of these kinds of monsters can be used effectively in your writing. However, care must be taken to avoid combining traits of the “evil because” and “evil just because” monsters into a single character. It accomplishes nothing but to muddy the waters and confuse the reader, dragging them out of any sense of immersion you’ve built. The key, as always, is in figuring out the kind of story you are trying to tell and what tools need to be pulled from your toolbox to perform the work.

Don’t worry, the rest of the monsters will still be there, waiting for you, when this particular story is done…

 

About the Author: Gregory D. LittleHeadshot

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (sometimes during) classes. His first novel, Unwilling Souls, will be available later this year. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens and the upcoming Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their yellow lab.