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Available Articles:
A Good Bad Guy: Or How to Take Your Villain Out of His Cardboard Box and Make Him 3-D
It's My World: How Perception Affects Action 
Hurts So Good:  Making Your Characters Suffer to Heal Them 
The Power of Structure

As a reminder--everything in these articles is opinion, not necessarily fact.  Just because a technique has worked for me doesn't mean it's THE WAY to write or that it'll work for you.  Becoming a writer is an ever-evolving process.  I keep learning, so it's possible that I may contradict myself in different articles.  As always, take what works and drop the rest.

A GOOD BAD GUY: Or How To Take Your Villain Out Of His Cardboard Box And Make Him 3-D
by Sylvie Kurtz

When we set out to create a story, we don't want to end up with something black-and-white filled with cardboard characters that the reader will forget five minutes after putting down the book. We want a full, blooming story that pops with color and will live on in the reader's mind. We spend a lot of time working on our main character, on conflict, and plot. But the bad guy often gets the short end of the plan. He's a bad guy and bad guys do bad things. What's so hard about that?

That lack of planning can lead to a character that's all evil, which, despite his easily recognizable over-the-top badness, makes him boring.

I'm not saying that you need to turn your evildoer into a loveable mutt you want to take home. But to snap him out of his flat two-dimension, you have to understand him as well as you understand your hero. Like your hero, he needs a concrete, specific, and worthwhile goal to pursue. Like your hero, he has to really want this goal. Like your hero, he needs some sort of motivation that fuels his desire. He may want to steal all the gold in Fort Knox, but deep-down, it's not the money he needs, it's the sense of security that much gold represents, it's the self-esteem he'll gain by pulling off the impossible heist, it's the glory of providing his love with all she desires, because how can she possibly reject someone who can give her the world?

Most people aren't born evil. Your bad buy doesn't wake up in the morning wondering who he'll kill today. He most likely has a mother, sister, girlfriend--someone--who loves him. He has reasons for what he does. In his world, he's the good guy. He's the one who's not understood. He's the one who's been victimized. He's the one who's right. He may spend all day carefully torturing a man to give up his secrets, and come home to play with his kids with just as much patience. He can function as a respected executive, yet go home and beat his wife because she missed a spot in the sink. He has likes and dislikes that appear normal--and maybe a few that don't. He's an avid cyclist, a collector of Jazz albums, a wine connoisseur. He doesn't like his peas to touch his mashed potatoes. He's allergic to roses. He knows a thousand ways to break a bone.

His need, like ours, is to survive in this harsh world. What he does to survive makes sense to him, even if the rest of society shrinks in horror. He doesn't just take out his gun and shoot at anything that moves. More often than not, he has a set of principles values he follows and values he lives by. It's okay to walk into a house and steal everything, because the door was unlocked. It's okay to use a knife, but not okay to use a gun, because the dying have a right to see who kills them. It's okay to kill a man, because a man can defend himself. His view of compassion or justice or love may not match ours, but it guides his every move. He's stalking her, not because he wants to scare her, but because he loves her so much.

He would reveal himself. Soon. But he wanted her to know the depth of his love first. When he pulled away the veil of mystery, she would say, Of course, it had to be you. Then she would smile and walk into his arms. (Honor of a Hunter)

You can often find the seed of his motivation in how he's been hurt in the past. What happened to him to make him hurt? What painful lesson has he learned time and again? What does he do to avoid a repeat of that pain? How does his pain skew his perception of himself and the world? How does that need to avoid pain lead to protect himself by hurting others? What makes him angry? What stresses him? What makes him lose control? How does he feel after he hurts someone? How does he hide his dark side? When does it come out? The more you can get his motivation across, the more his actions will make sense, and heighten the horror of what he does for your reader.

One hand cradled her jaw. "If I can't be with you on earth, then I want to be with you in heaven." (Honor of a Hunter)

What the bad guy doesn't do is back down. Unlike the hero, he doesn't change. He doesn't grow. He doesn't overcome his flaw. He's stuck in his mode of survival, because he can't see another way out. Even if he engineered the successful destruction of the world, he still wouldn't be happy, because that still wouldn't fill the thing missing inside him. Because he can't change, the outcome for him leads to decay or death.

Your job as a writer is to understand your bad guy and all his weird and twisted ways, even if you don't share his beliefs. Before you start writing, leak your story plan to your bad guy. Let him call you up. And when he says, "Listen, you got it all wrong…," take notes. The complexity of his personality will allow you to add depth to his character and a greater sense of danger to your plot.

IT'S MY WORLD: How Perception Affects Action
by Sylvie Kurtz

Mary Poppins and Sherlock Holmes enter a house. Mary sees the sharp corners, the ungated stairs, and the unprotected plugs that could hurt a child in her care. Sherlock notices the broken window clasp, the barely visible footprint on the freshly vacuumed carpet, the disturbed papers on the desk, leading him to conclude that someone had entered the house and taken something. Who's right?

They both are. They viewed the house through the filters of their perceptions.

We all tell ourselves stories. If I ____, then I'll ____. Because of _____, I _____. Fill in the blanks with your own (or your characters' filters.) We make snap decisions about who's a foe and who's a friend based on our past experiences. A dark parking garage is just another garage to a hulk of a weightlifter, but a minefield of danger to a petite woman wearing high heels. Because the weightlifter doesn't perceived the dark garage as dangerous, the sound of footsteps behind him may not even register. The same sound most likely would make the woman palm her keys as a ready weapon, wish she'd worn sneakers and taken a karate class.

What we don't realize is that we draw boxes around ourselves that limit us. These limits affect how we engage in the world. This truth applies to your characters, too.

Every character whether he lives in a mansion or in a cardboard box, wakes up with unseen assumptions about his world, about how to survive and how to get ahead in a place of limited resources. The frame of his mind defines and confines him. Every problem, every dilemma, every obstacle appears unsolvable within his specific point of view. How he gets himself out of his box is by changing the borders of that box to allow for new opportunities.

What is his daily reality? What are his borders? How do you force him to change those borders? Those types of questions will get you to the meat of your character, show you how he'll act and react to the obstacles you place in his way, and point the way to creating organic conflict that keep your story moving forward.

Mary, Sherlock, the weightlifter and the woman all acted and reacted to their situation from the base of their perceptions. The answer to a great internal conflict that complements your outer conflict is all in how your character sees his world.

HURTS SO GOOD: Making Your Characters Suffer to Heal Them
 by Sylvie Kurtz

According to James Bonnet, a main character's arc is like a spiral. If it spirals upward, he ends up at a better place than at the beginning of the story, taking him closer to paradise. If it spirals downward, he ends up worse off than where he started, miring him in hell.

The way to create an arc that resonates with the reader is to start with a flawed character. If you make your main character perfect, then he’s not interesting. Every one of us is broken or wounded in some way. None of us are perfect, and we don’t like our fictional people to be either, because it’s hard to empathize with someone who’s perfect. Our favorite characters tend to have dents and cracks. Your main character needs a flaw that gets in his way--even if he doesn’t realize that it is.

The first hint of this flaw usually comes from an event or series of events that happened when the character was young. Why? Because, according to brain researchers, when we’re young, our brains operate at a lower frequency that closely resembles a hypnotic state. That's so that we can learn quickly how to survive into the environment into which we're born. We're downloading a tremendous amount of information in a short period of time. Think of babies and how much they learn in those first few years. We take everything literally and our parents' and caregivers' behaviors and beliefs become our own. That’s also why someone can easily break us. We haven’t yet developed the ability to distinguish between real and perception. Imagine those tender years filled with the message that you're stupid or that you're not good enough or that you'll never amount to anything. Those messages go straight to the subconscious who'll make sure that those beliefs prove themselves to us time and again, and those beliefs become the truths that unconsciously shape our behavior.

As we grow older, outside programming becomes less of an influence, but by that time, information already fills our subconscious about how the world works. So the situation that starts the main character's flaw usually happens in the formative years (birth to twelve) and, as she grows up, other experiences “prove” that the flaw is good protection against the pain of this world.

Effective flaws come from fear, which in turn come from some kind of hurt that the person doesn’t want repeated. If you then take this flaw and force your character to face it, you'll create all that beautiful conflict a good story needs. This flaw becomes the thing around which everything else in your story revolves.

One way to get to the flaw is to look at the character’s backstory. What kind of things made him into who he is? Filling out a character dossier with hair color and food preferences never worked for me, but looking at his psychology gives me an X-ray of his personality and something meaty to work with. Why? Because that's where you're going to find the motivation that drives him to do the things he does and make them sound logical--at least to him. Although your character won't state his fear so clearly, because he's probably not fully aware of it, the thought process runs along the lines of: If I do X action, then I can prevent Y pain.

What happened in the past to give him his view of life right now? What decision did he have to make that influenced how he sees the world? How does he see himself? He's going to show these perceptions of himself and the world in his behavior in the present. And this is what you can exploit to make your story stand out.

The more you can force your main character to face his fear during the course of the story, the more he'll have to alter his way of acting. At first he tries to hang on to what's always worked in the past. Then bit by bit he changes. One last test shows him that he can't ever go back. This allows the new and healthier habit to better his life. (Or, if you're into tragedy, then he doesn't learn and ends up an even shallower shell of himself.)

Logic doesn't drive the human mind. The most primitive part of the brain is pure emotion--fight or flight or freeze. Protect yourself and live. As human beings we’re programmed for survival. And we respond with primal emotions. Analyze your characters' fears, where they started, what behaviors they cause, how those behaviors are keeping him from reaching his goal. Then force them to face the thing they fear most.

If you choose a universal fear, the reader can't help empathize with your main character's plight, cheer for him as he faces each new obstacle, and celebrate his success, (or mourn his failure.)

Those stories that touch us, touch our emotions, and you can trace those primal emotions to that fear, that flaw the main character uses to protect himself from the pain of the world, helping you create a character arc that fuels your story conflict.

THE POWER OF STRUCTURE
by Sylvie Kurtz

Story has many definitions.  For John Truby, author of The Anatomy of Story, a story is "a speaker telling a listener what someone did to get what he wanted and why."  For Michael Hauge, author of Writing Screenplays That Sell, a story enables "a sympathetic character to overcome a series of increasingly difficult, seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieve a compelling desire."  For Jerry Cleaver, author of Immediate Fiction, story boils down to an equation, "CONFLICT + ACTION + RESOLUTION = STORY."

According to Joseph Campbell, our souls are born craving stories.  It’s part of our genetic makeup.  It’s how we understand who we are and how we make sense of the world around us.  He spent a lifetime studying the stories of the world, from creation myths to fairy tales, and discovered that no matter where you're from, your basic stories all distill down to the same basics.  Our brains are wired to look for the pattern of a story, and if we don’t find it, we end up feeling dissatisfied.

And the number one rule of successful story writing is to satisfy the reader.  Each genre comes with specific expectations.  If a reader picks up a romance and there's no relationship, she'll be disappointed.  If he picks up a mystery and the sleuth fails to interpret the clues and solve the case, he'll be disappointed.  If Joe Average fails to conquer the monster, if the knight fails to slay the dragon, if the action hero fails to conquer the evil villain, the reader will be disappointed.  The power of structure is its ability to assure satisfaction for your reader.

Every profession has a baseline of some sort.  A house starts with a plan.  A painting starts with a sketch.  A cake starts with a recipe.  Even our own incredible bodies have a skeleton on which to drape the flesh.

Successful stories are no exception.  They all have certain elements and, for soul satisfaction, those elements appear in certain places.  Ugh, I can hear the cries reverberating through cyberspace.  "That sounds like formula, and formula is bad.  Formula doesn't allow for creativity.  Formula gets you cookie-cutter stories."  So change the word to structure.  Structure gives you form.  Structure gives you solidity.  Structure saves you from reinventing storytelling with each new story.

Stories are foremost about people.  So the first thing your story needs is a main character through whose eyes your story will unfold.  That main character is going to want something concrete and specific, and want it desperately.  That main character isn't going to be perfect; he's going to be flawed--like all of us, so that we can identify with him.  He's going to have a fear/attitude/belief of some sort that will keep him from being all he can be.  To make the story interesting, we're going to throw an opponent in his way--someone who's going to put sticks in his wheels and poke at his flaw.  We're going to make this opponent create an event that will force the main character to look at his flaw and make a decision that will change his life forever.  Because we want him to overcome his flaw, we're going to give him an ally of some sort that will help him through his journey.

How do you play these elements in their most effective way?  Through the various signposts that create forward movement along your main character's journey.

For me, what works best is dividing the story in four sections that roughly cover one quarter of the story.

In the set-up, I introduce the main character, the opponent, the ally and any other important story character.  I give the reader of glimpse of my character's "ordinary world," then I throw that world in chaos by introducing an event that changes the balance of his world and throws him into conflict.  I let the reader know what the main character wants, what he fears, and what he risks losing if he doesn't choose to change his ways.  At the end of the set-up, I force my character to make a decision that will propel him into action.

In the second quarter, the main character tries to solve his problem using outdated methods.  He tries to restore his balance to where it was before and fails.  He tries and makes things worse.  He may win something on one level, but he'll lose something on the level that would take him forward on his growth.  I end this section with a mid-point event that gives the main character a glimpse of what his reward for change could be, then have him fall back on old habits because of fear.  I make this event emotional, and if possible, reiterate the theme of the story in a metaphorical way.

By the third quarter, he knows he has to change or he'll lose what's important to him.  He's taking steps with a new mindset.  It's hard, but he perseveres.  Then at the end of this section, I force him to have to make another choice.  I test his resolve.

This decision is going to yield to disaster that will start the fourth quarter.  It's going to look as if he's going to lose whatever he's after.  He's at his most vulnerable.  Motivations that he might not have understood were pushing him come to the surface.  He can now act by making a conscious choice.  He makes some sort of sacrifice that shows he has changed and will not go back to his old ways.  He now deserves the prize.

For me, life's too short for an unhappy ending.  I get enough defeat in real life.  When I take the time to read (or write) a story, I want the hero to get what he wants or something better.  And if he doesn't end up with his prize, I at least want to know that he's changed for the better.

The power of structure is knowing I have a solid skeleton in place.  This allows my mind to spend its energy on finding creative ways to attach the flesh that will yield a fully formed story that will, I hope, provide my reader with a satisfying experience.

May 2008

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