Category Archives: Ideas & Plotting

When Life is Larger than Life

Character Mary Pletsch The Writing Life Tropes & Archetypes No Comments

A writer friend of mine has cautioned me about borrowing storylines too faithfully from real life.  Her words of caution read as follows:  “Fiction has to make sense; reality doesn’t.”

If a story doesn’t hold together–if information is missing so that readers don’t understand why or how important events happened, if characters undergo situations without learning or growing or changing in any meaningful way, if the conclusion doesn’t leave readers with a sense of satisfaction–it’s considered a failure on behalf of the writer.  But these sort of things happen in real life all the time.

Readers who pick up a murder mystery story can rest assured that by the end of the book, they’re going to know whodunnit (and usually how and why).  Real life, on the other hand, is filled with examples of murders that were never solved, missing persons that were never found, and criminals who were never brought to justice.  These situations, while realistic (indeed, real), don’t make for satisfying murder mystery stories.

That’s not to say it’s impossible to write a successful story in which a mystery remains unsolved – I think of Minority Report, where the hero’s missing (and never found) child provides motivation for his decisions – but the plot of Minority Report is not centered on the missing son.

Another important factor to consider in fiction is suspension of disbelief.  If a character or plot point is too outrageous or implausible, it can shock readers out of the story.  It can make a serious story unintentionally humorous, ruining the tone and the mood, or it can leave the reader feeling frustrated and disappointed if they thought they were beginning one kind of story and ended up with another.  (No spoilers here, but I recently read a book which began as a realistic-seeming crime story and, in a daring move halfway through, a supernatural element was revealed.  I thought it was great, but afterwards I found mixed reviews, depending on the willingness of the readers to shelve their disbelief, accept the unexpected supernatural premise, and continue reading.)

So what do you do when your real-life example is so much larger than life that it stretches plausibility–even though it really happened?

Audie Murphy – the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War – later became an actor and played himself in a movie based on his autobiography, To Hell and Back.  Murphy himself was not the typical action-hero–he was shorter and skinnier than the archetypal figure–and though he filmed the movie as an adult, he fought when he was still a teenager.  Many of us are used to movies “based on a true story” containing gross exaggerations for dramatic effect.  In this cas,e though, comparison between historical accounts and the movie suggests that the film understated Murphy’s heroic deeds.  In a world where the usual formula is to overstate the fictional version to make a more dramatic story, To Hell and Back is an example of where real life has been toned down to make the story seem plausible to an audience unfamiliar with the actual history.

My writer friend, who is English, has been following with great amusement the saga of Rob Ford (the mayor of Toronto) over the past year.  From conflict of interest trials to admitted public intoxication and crack cocaine use, from lewd comments to investigation by police, and with videos of the mayor drunk, swearing and threatening people posted on Youtube, Mayor Ford is like a reality TV show playing out on the nightly news.  He’s real.  He’s all too real.  And he still intends to run for office again.

But my writer friend says, “You couldn’t make him up.”

You couldn’t make him up, because who would believe in him?  Who would believe that the mayor of a provincial capital would conduct himself in this fashion?  Try swapping Rob Ford for the leader in a military thriller or political drama.  How many readers would be able to suspend their disbelief?

Maybe you could get away with him in a screwball comedy or cheesy cartoon–the genres where viewers aren’t supposed to take anything seriously.

“But he’s real,” you say.  “It really happened.”

Now that it’s happened, while he’s still public knowledge, a writer could get away with a serious story involving a crackhead mayor.  Before the scandal broke–or in ten or twenty years when Ford is forgotten–not a chance.

Fiction is a craft.  By all means, borrow ideas or plot points or character concepts from real life, but be ready to revise them to suit the needs of the story.  In the end, the goal of fiction isn’t to provide an accurate historical account, but to tell a coherent and engaging story.  Sometimes that means simplifying events, adding explanations, and ramping up drama.  And sometimes…just sometimes…that means toning characters down, when real life is just too much “larger than life.”

The $80 Million Bank Heist (you’ve probably never heard of)

Jace Killan Storyline The Writing Life No Comments

I’m a sucker for a good bank heist flick and I enjoy crime drama television, though I started to notice that many shows reflect similar stories to those in the news. After Bernie Madoff, a number of series had an episode about a billionaire hedge fund guy screwing over an everyday Joe in some sort of investment scheme. There have been other examples where these series use popular and current news in their episodes like a kidnapping, a missing spouse, a serial killer, and so on.

I enjoy reading and watching fiction that is based in reality. I like it when a story takes me to the uncomfortable edge of “what if”.

And so I keep a look out for those fantastical stories that only reality can tell, vested in irony and karmic justice, or those dramatic tragedies superseded by the ultimate protagonist. Reality is awesome and I’m grateful to be a part of it. But sometimes it can be too strange to be believable.

BanditsI love heist films like Ocean’s 11 or Bandits; Inside Man was awesome. Maybe it’s because I can imagine just for a moment, the “what if.” Not that I’d ever rob a bank, but what if I tried, could I get away with it?

I was asked to spend a couple years researching and helping with a case involving an $80 million dollar bank robbery. Yes, million and that figure alone puts the story into my NOT very realistic category.

Well it wasn’t one bank; it was actually more than two dozen banks. Believable now? What if I were to tell you that this bank heist didn’t involve guns or hostages? It didn’t involve get away vehicles or hideouts or even a crew of specialized talent. Boring?

It was one guy that exploited a connection. From what I could tell, the “robberies” happened from 2002 through 2009 when he was eventually arrested by the FBI.

To make the story even more unbelievable, the banks wired him the funds. You see, they thought they were participating in loans made to a billionaire and other landowners.

As an example, one gentleman borrowed from our bank-robbing friend, roughly $6 million using some property in Hawaii as collateral. The heist involved oversubscribing the loan, meaning that this bandit reached out to four different banks to subscribe the loan that he had made to the land owner, indicating that each bank would be in first position (and of course he failed to disclose that three other banks would be just as involved and just as clueless to his scheme). The four banks wired some twenty four million combined unaware that this same individual had transacted with many other banks on many other properties in the same manner. He used some of the funds to make payments on older fraudulent loans so that he could keep the Ponzi scheme going.

He lived large for a number of years and I imagine that there are still some funds yet to be accounted for. I’m sure he’ll be watched closely when he’s released, but the writer in me wonders if there isn’t a closing twist in this tale involving a cache of money on a private island somewhere. What if?

I’ve read numbers as low as $60 million and as high as $135 million, but the court documents and FBI seemed to settle on $79.9 million. What’s a few million among friends?

At the end of it all, he was sentenced to 72 months in prison, I believe half of which was due to not claiming some of the monies on his income taxes that he transferred to his personal accounts. You don’t want to mess with the IRS. They expected their piece of the heist totaling more than $500,000.

I find it interesting that a man who robs a bank of $5,000 could easily spend a couple decades behind bars while someone that defrauds institutions of $80 million might serve just a couple years with good behavior assuming he pays taxes on the money he’s embezzled.

So I’ve thought about writing the tale but it seems to be stranger than fiction.

 

 

 

 

 

Stranger Than Fiction

Author's Perspective Nancy Greene Storyline Superstars Writing Seminars The Writing Life 1 Comment

We’ve all heard the phrase that “life is stranger than fiction” but what does that really mean? For me, it means that sometimes real life happens in such a way that if I were to use the event verbatim in a fiction story my readers would cry “implausible.” Think about that for a second. Readers accept vampires, zombie detective, purple unicorns, space ships, entire West Virginia towns going back in time to create an alternate universe, (speaking of which) alternate universes, evil twins, a series of coincidences that add up to a twist ending,,, and the list could go on forever.

So, how bizarre does an event have to be before it’s “stranger than fiction?”

Do the events have to be so coincidental that the odds of the event happening are astronomical? Does the main character have to be dumber than a fence post not to see the results of her actions? For me, I think the situation has to be so divorced from what we consider “normal” that we sit back and say, “no. No one (Nothing) could be that….” Judge for yourself though as we spend September exploring events that are “Stranger Than Fiction.”

Let me start.

Most of the things I’ve seen or heard as a lawyer I can’t repeat. Sometimes though it’s the other side’s client who does the unbelievable thing. When that’s the case there’s nothing that prevents disclosure. Still, I’ve changed names and occupation.

HOW TO BE YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY

???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????A husband and wife started an interior decorating business. Mary was responsible for getting and performing the work. John took care of the back office tasks – staffing, bookkeeping, banking, billing and the like. Years into the business they were doing well on a professional front (millions of dollars in gross revenue) but not so much on the personal one. Suspicion and distrust ran deep. A little deeper on one side than the other. Eventually, Mary accused John of embezzling. Mary hired an attorney (not me) to file for divorce and seek a court appointed receiver for the business. John hired an attorney (again, not me) to counter-sue for divorce and defend the theft allegations.

Mary alleged John would go to the bank every Friday with pizza for the bank tellers. In return, the bank tellers of a national bank would cash checks for John, andl hand him bundles of cash. The tellers would then create a false bank statements  that wouldn’t show the deposit (if the check had come from a company client) or the withdraw (if the check being cashed were a company one).  John believed that every gap in the checks sequence on the bank statements represented a check Mary used wrongfully withdraw the money from the company. She thought John stole millions of dollars this way. After all the company had margins of 60% so where was the money?  Mary’s definition of “margin” didn’t include most of the company’s salaries or overhead. Mary also thought John was stealing her paychecks.

The receiver (yup, this is where I come in) obtained copies of all the bank statements from the national bank (not the branch John was allegedly feeding) and payments from the company’s client. Like most businesses some of the jobs from a gross profit number were very profitable and others were dead losers. Once you took out the operating cost including a HUGE monthly payment for their house the company ran deeply in the red.  There was no proof of a national conspiracy. The checks…checked out. And those paychecks? They were deposited into a joint bank account. From the company’s standpoint there was no misappropriation of funds.

We met with Mary’s attorney for hours to explain the situation. Mary fired the attorney when she agreed with the Receiver. Mary hired another attorney to pursue the claim. He lasted as long as her retainer did. No amount of reason could shake Mary’s belief that John had robbed her blind. She accused the Receiver of being paid off by John (NOT) when the Receiver wouldn’t support her theories.

Mary threatened to report that the tax returns were false to the appropriate authorities when the Receiver wouldn’t amend the returns to show the “missing” income. We said she needed to do what she needed to do but we didn’t have any evidence to support her position. While there were substantial tax debt owed the various agencies had been mostly silent on collection since no one had any money. Ultimately, Mary called the governmental entity designed to ensure that people paid their taxes to report that John had under-reported the company’s income for years.  She didn’t think about the fact that she was listed as a 51% co-owner or that she would be deemed to have received 51% of the “stolen” money as a result.

Well, the taxing agencies were no longer willing to wait to see if the Receiver collected enough money to pay them. After all, Mary just advised them that the couple had vastly under-reported their income for years.  So, now Mary has some tax issues to deal with. And she still insists that John stole millions of dollars.

 

 

 

Welcome to the Supernatural MI6

Craft & Skills Nathan Barra Tropes & Archetypes 2 Comments

The RookI never thought living in the head of a paper pusher could be interesting, much less awesome, but Australian author Daniel O’Malley proves me wrong in his debut novel, The Rook. Granted, Myfanwy Thomas (pronounced like “Tiffany” with an M, since the Welsh reinvent phenoms as they please) is not your standard bureaucrat. In the opening scene of the book, Myfanwy “awakes in a London park surrounded by dead bodies [wearing latex gloves]. With her memory gone, her only hope of survival is to trust the instructions left in her pockets by her former self.” These letters lead her deeper into the rabbit hole, and back into her former life as a high-level operative in the Cheque, a secret government organization tasked with protecting the UK from supernatural threats. The thing is, the old Myfanwy foresaw her own end and left her future self a series of letters and an encyclopedia like binder detailing the milieu. Alone and with these scant resources, Myfanwy must re-integrate into her old life, rediscover her powers, learn about the supernatural world, and handle a barrage of supernatural crises, all while trying to root out the traitor(s) at the highest levels of the organization that had her erased in the first place.

Once the ball starts rolling, O’Malley spins a riveting yarn. In my opinion, his work has two major strengths. First, as a reader, I love the milieu that O’Malley has created. The idea of secret government agencies and the hidden world of magic are well-used tropes in this sort of fiction, but the elements that O’Malley chooses to emphasize make the whole experience seem fresh. Myfanwy is simultaneously a newbie and veteran in this life, and often feels the strain of trying to keep up when everyone around her assumes she’ll maintain her docile past persona. Though he spends much of his time in the day to day, O’Malley’s narrative style is at times laugh at loud funny, breathtakingly tense and peppered through with moments that lend the reader’s admiration and pride to his protagonist.

Secondly, I appreciate this book from the perspective of a craftsman. O’Malley exercises his gift for narrative in this novel, weaving a third-limited perspective of the present with a narrative of the past told in an epistolary style. Like most, he uses the past to clarify and resonate with the future, but where his true skill becomes apparent is when he uses the present to shed light upon the events detailed in old-Myfanwy’s letters to her future self. It takes real skill to make the trick work both ways without becoming bulky and distracting to the reader.

I have enjoyed this book twice now and intend to do a third re-read before the sequel, Stiletto, is released by Hatchette in Q1 2015. It is my hope that some of y’all enjoy it as much as I have and that you too are able to learn a bit about the epistolary narrative style while you do. It’s a while to wait for the second book, but fortunately my TBR list is long and colorful and has only been added to this month. I’ll leave you with the video that I found on Daneil O’Malley’s website while researching book 2. It’ quite entertaining and captures the spirit and fun of the book.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByWvG3KfOmo&rel=0]