Category Archives: Conflict

The following could constitute a class from your local business school, but it’s also used in great story-telling. In my work with organizations, I have seen group after group follow the stages of team development in their quest to become an effective team. These stages are Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing.

A group of individuals don’t simply meet one day and perform together as an effective team, just as a group of characters don’t start the story already performing at a high level of effectiveness. Great stories involve try-fail cycles and character arcs.

What I’m about to share is in a lot of movies/stories like Remember the Titans, The Martian, Apollo 13, The Incredibles, Dark Knight Rises, The Way of Kings (not a movie yet), and so many more, but I’m going to focus on The Avengers (2012).

FORMING – Nick Fury starts to form a group of superheroes namely Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and The Hulk. At first, the individuals were all about doing their own thing. They each had some experience in their element, but little experience in working as a team, especially with others as equally talented as themselves.

STORMING – Often Storming follows Forming though it may pop up from time to time. For example, Civil War is pretty much all Storming in a group that at the end of the first Avengers reaches the level of a Performing Team.

In the first Avengers Movie, Storming happens throughout a lot of the money and is based on the dynamics of characters interacting with one another in the group. Hulk doesn’t want to help. Thor wants to do his own thing. Iron Man’s too arrogant to ask for help. All of these and more prevent the group from developing into an effective team. “What are we a team? No, we’re a time bomb.” – Bruce Banner

NORMING really starts when the team thinks Agent Coulson was killed. Nick Fury uses this moment to inspire the group and get them all on the same page. In the following scene they stop trying to do it their way (individually) and start respecting each other’s talents and skills. Norming suggests synergies. As a team they are greater than the sum of their parts.

PERFORMING happens right at the end. The Avengers spent some time Norming, figuring out each other’s strengths and weaknesses. And then Captain and Iron Man really start to employ the others and work as a team.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nEo40Y-Qrc

The following is the culmination of the performing team and my favorite clip of the movie.

I live in Arizona with my family, wife and five kids and a little dog. I write fiction, thrillers and soft sci-fi with a little short horror on the side. I’ve hold an MBA and work in finance for a biotechnology firm.

I volunteer with the Boy Scouts, play and write music, and enjoy everything outdoors. I’m also a novice photographer.

You can read some of my works by visiting my Wattpad page and learn more at www.jacekillan.com.

Regarding the Humble Blowfish: A Guest Post by Frog Jones

April 16, 2016

fictorians

Character Conflict Craft & Skills Frog Jones Guest Posts POV The Fictorians The Writing Life No Comments

A guest post by Frog Jones.

In my day job, I’m a public defender. This means, among other things, that any time I am placed on panels at conventions, invariably one of those panels will be the “What Makes A Good Villain” panel. After years of giving this panel, I can say with a certainty that the question of how to build a really solid, evil character is one of the harder challenges in writing.

Because here’s the thing: humans don’t set out to be evil. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says to themselves “That’s it. Time to go dark. I am going to start the killing with…you.” Doesn’t happen that way. No, evil is a slow, insidious process of a thousand decisions, each one of which appears to be completely correct at the time, but the sum total of which is a monster.

I’m talking about villains, here. Not just antagonists; that can be any opposing force. I’m talking about truly evil people who want to do truly evil things. Writing someone like that who doesn’t come off as a mustache-twirling dude in a top hat next to a woman whom he has strapped to some train tracks is a real trick.

And this is why I want to talk about Walter White.

Walter is, in the beginning of the series, just a normal guy. He teaches high school students, has a wife and a disabled son. He works a second job at a car wash to pay the bills, and even then the family is just barely getting by. They cannot afford a new water heater. Still, it’s his pride to be the guy taking care of his family. He’s constantly under stress, but he takes that stress and bottles it down because, well, that’s what you do.

Fast forward to Season Five, and Walter White is a drug lord with no compunctions about murdering for his territory or threatening his family. He is, by anyone’s account, evil.

Now, I’m not saying you have to write five seasons of a television series to get a believable villain into your plot. But I do recommend that you figure out how and why your villain broke bad. And Walter White is a great model of the basic things you need to get there.

For Walter, the cancer triggered him. Once he knows he’s dying of cancer, he realizes he will no longer be able to take care of his family. And that right there? It’s the one thing he had. Oh, he’s not rich like his college buddy who didn’t sell his stock early, but he is taking care of his family. It’s the one thing he has to be proud about.

This pride? It’s normally considered a virtue in society. Walter wants to make sure that he’s the guy who provides, not someone else. Good on him, right? Way to stand up and take responsibility. Way to “be a man.”

So now we have a series of pressures placed on Walter. One is his financial pressure, because he never has enough money to provide for the basics of life. The next is his self-applied pressure to provide for the family himself. When the cancer comes along, it adds a ticking clock. Now Walter has to make a significant amount of money very, very quickly, because to do otherwise would be to fail in his responsibility to his family.

See what happened there? Not a bad guy. Just a guy put in a position where all the pressures on him forced him into a situation where the next choice seems perfectly logical. If you’re a professional chemist, and you need to make a lot of money very quickly, then cooking meth makes a lot of sense.

This right here? This is the point where you need to take your villain. It may be backstory, in your case; it certainly was in mine. But in the life of every evil person, and I know this as someone who spends his entire life working with evil people, there is a series of decisions that lead, inevitably, to damnation. And it starts with one.

Walter’s decision is wrong. But it’s perfectly logical. It makes sense. He’s going to die anyways, so the legal consequences aren’t really a big deal. He needs the money. Someone is going to sell meth to these junkies, and that meth will be laced with all kinds of other things, because they aren’t nearly as good at this as Walter.

This is the moment. The moment where your villain goes wrong. The moment where he or she makes the decision to do the wrong thing for all the right reasons. After that, it’s a slow and gradual slide into hell.

Not every story can or should be Breaking Bad. But everyone who wants to write an evil character should watch Breaking Bad, because it is a perfect case study in how a villain is born.

About Frog Jones

Frog Jones writes with his wife, Esther. After a ten-year vow to never show each other a word they had written, they eventually broke down and wrote a novel together. Together, they have published the Gift of Grace series from Sky Warrior Books, as well as short stories in anthologies such as How Beer Saved the World, First Contact Café, and Tales from an Alien Campfire, as well as many more.

The Joneses live on the Puget Sound in the State of Washington with Oxeye, who is twenty-five pounds of pure bunny. Frog’s works can be found at http://www.jonestales.com, and he also appears on the Three Unwise Men podcast at http://3unwisemen.com.

“The Most Successful Bankrobber Ever”

April 15, 2016

Kevin Ikenberry

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Jack Foley.

The first time I met Jack Foley was in Elmore Leonard’s novel Out Of Sight. Elmore Leonard was a literary genius and his approach to storytelling and dialogue are two of my biggest influences when I write. You’ve probably been aware of his work (notably Get Shorty, 3:10 To Yuma, and the television series Justified to name a few). When I read Out of Sight, I immediately liked Foley as a character. But when the movie came out, something incredible happened. The movie version released in 1998 and was directed by Stephen Soderbergh. It remains one of my favorite movies and, in my opinion, the best of Leonard’s novels turned into film (in a tie with Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown – which I’ll discuss next month!).

Foley’s career bank robber with a good heart escapes from the Glades Federal Penitentiary in Florida and promptly runs into U.S Marshall Karen Sisco. In the commotion of the escape, they end up in the trunk of a Cadillac as Foley and his accomplice, Buddy, run. By the time we see this, we’re already in love with Foley. He is smart, good looking, charming as hell, and always has a plan. In the trunk of the car, lit by the reverse side of the taillights, Foley and Sisco have a conversation that feels as natural as one that you and I could have. In the midst of the dangerous situation, sirens and flashing lights close by, we’re pulled into their discussion as naturally as possible. By the time they got out of the car, and the rest of the tale unfolds, we’re clearly following both of them and wanting them to get together at the end of the movie.

In the movie, George Clooney plays Jack Foley and Jennifer Lopez plays Karen Sisco. With Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Michael Keaton, and Albert Brooks as some of the stellar cast, the movie is very true to Leonard’s novel.

So what’s the big deal? Why is Jack Foley a memorable character?

Flash forward a few years and Elmore Leonard’s sequel to Out of Sight was released. Road Dogs follows Jack Foley after his release from prison as he tries to build a new life for himself but keeps running afoul of shady characters out for money and blood. From the book Out of Sight, which is one of my favorite Leonard titles, I liked Foley’s character. However, seeing him played by Clooney so perfectly, as I read Road Dogs, I could not stop seeing and hearing Clooney in the role. That’s where Foley transcended being a likable sympathetic character into something different. Clooney’s effortless performance as Foley indelibly attaches his “aura” to the character. The likable, memorable character has become something else entirely through the visual medium.

There are a few movies that suck me in when I find them one television. All of them have something in common. A sympathetic, regular guy protagonist with a good heart trying to get by. All of those movies have been perfectly cast so that the main characters are indelibly etched into our minds. Seriously – could anyone other than Tim Robbins have played Andy in Shawshank Redemption? Clooney’s performance as Jack Foley did exactly the same thing. When written stories become films, so many times the elements the make the books vibrant and alive are lost. Sometimes, we cannot see a character in our minds as clearly as the movies define them.

But when a likable, memorable character is played by the right actor or actress – wow. And you all know exactly what I’m talking about. But is it the actor or the character that is memorable? I vote character. No matter the actor’s talent, commitment to the role, or appearance, the character is developed on paper and is the vision of the writer/screenwriter that the actor is to bring to life. When it’s done perfectly in a book, it resonates with us. When we see that on camera, it’s more than memorable. It’s legendary.

Chaos For It’s Own Sake

April 6, 2016

Leigh Galbreath

Character Conflict Leigh Galbreath 2 Comments

When through-the-eyes-of-the-joker-jared-leto-talks-his-suicide-squad-method-acting-heath-led-874125 the topic of great characters came up, I really didn’t have to think very long to figure out who I wanted to write about. I love villains, and one of my favorites is the Joker.

Of course, when talking about the Joker, some narrowing down should be done. After all, he’s been with us just as long as his arch nemesis, Batman. His first appearnce was in Batman #1 in 1940. That’s over 75 years of insane villainy, and as one would expect with a comic book character t
hat old, he’s gone though a number o iterations. Add in television and film adaptations, and you’ve got every kind of interpretation you can imagine, from the downright psychotic to the ridiculously silly.

Since I’m not writing a book here, I’ll keep it simple and stick with my personal favorite, and probably one of the currently more well-known renditions — Heath Ledger’s depiction in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. It’s an obvious choice, I know, but completely ignoring the fact that Ledger’s work was so good that he won a posthumous Oscar for playing a supervillain, I’ve come to think of this character as one of my all time favorites because, unlike so many great villains, he is pretty close to an perfectly unbeatable bad guy.

The reason I say this is because of the character’s motivations. In the film, we’re given any number of ideas for what the Joker’s end game is. He wants to bring down the city by destroying it’s favorite son, Harvey Dent. He wants to destroy Batman. He wants to show the world that everyone is, in the end, just like him. He’s a gun for hire working for the criminals of Gotham. He wants to show the world that no one has control over their own lives. He just wants to watch the world burn.

Most of these explanations are given to him by the other characters. Nolan nicely shows us each of these as the story progresses. He turns Harvey Dent into Harvey Two-Face, but while he sends Dent out with a gun, he doesn’t seem to pay much attention to what happens after. He kidnaps people to force Batman out into the open, but then sends the whole city after the guy who comes forward to give up Batman’s identity. He sets up two ferries to kill each other to show that people are crappy when the chips are down, but while he seems disappointed when they don’t he doesn’t seem all that put out by it and proceeds to try and blow them up himself. He goes through the whole rigamarole with Gotham’s criminal underworld so he can get half their money, but then burns it all.

While that last one might support the whole watching the world burn hypothesis, the Joker never really commits to any of the ideas tossed around throughout the film, even the ones he gives himself.

In short, no one really knows what he truly wants except him, and he’s repeatedly shown to be a liar. He gives us multiple different stories on how he got his trademark smile. After the explosion that takes half of Harvey Dent’s face, he tells Dent that he’s doesn’t have a plan, he just likes creating chaos. But really, only an idiot could possibly believe the things he does are all spur of the moment actions. This man has a plan, probably many plans. We’re just not let in on any of them, and this is a huge strength.

One of the biggest blunders people can do with a villain is explain. We get origin stories, detailed psychologies, megalomaniacal monologues, and sympathetic backgrounds.

I don’t want to sympathize with a great villain. I don’t want excuses as to why they are what they are. I want to be afraid of the villain. I want to be seduced into thinking the villain will somehow come out on top. I want a villain that will make the hero work for every inch. And honestly, I so would not want to meet the Joker in a dark alley. Would you?

To get this reaction from the audience unpredictability is a major asset, and the Joker is unpredictability in all it’s face painted glory. He has no boundaries, is completely psychotic, hyper-intelligent, and most frighteningly of all, creative. And all the while, he’s having entirely too much fun.

To bring us back to why I think he’s a perfectly unbeatable bad guy is this — it doesn’t really matter why he’s doing what he’s doing. One of the things I love about many of Nolan’s films is his conscious decision to leave some of the story up to the audience. He did it with that contentious ending to the film Inception (is it a dream or not and does it matter?). He does the same thing with the Joker. He leaves the motivations up to other people, which is a fabulous choice, and one I’d like to see more often. I tend to go toward the trickster-ish agent of chaos turning everyone’s plans on their heads just to see what they do, but that’s just me. What could be worse that a character who doesn’t want to establish a new world, but rather simply wants the upsetting of the current one. Someone who wants to poke the hornet’s nest for the sheer joy of seeing the resultant chaos and watching how people react to it.

Can you really beat a character like? The idea intrigues me, and is one I very much want to explore.

So, anyone else got a favorite Joker or another fabulously unpredictable bad guy? Leave a comment and tell us why.