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SEQUELS

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 07:30:00 GMT

SEQUELS

And no, we're not talking about book 2. We're talking about the original meaning of the word sequel--the part that comes after, the next in the sequence. In the scenes of a book, you're getting all your plot-pursuing and action-taking and choice-making done.

Now you get to the hard part.

Getting your reader to give a flying frack about it.

To do that, you've got to win them over to your character's point of view. You've got to establish some kind of basic emotional connection, an empathy for your character. It needn't be deep seated agreement with everything the character says and does--but they DO need to be able to UNDERSTAND what your character is thinking and feeling, and to understand WHY they are doing whatever (probably outrageous) thing you've got them doing.

That gets done in sequels.

Pay attention. This is another one of those simple, difficult things.

Sequels are what happens as an aftermath to a scene. They do several specific things:

1) Allow a character to react emotionally to a scene's outcome.
2) Allow a character to review facts and work through the logical options of his situation.
3) They allow a character to ponder probable outcomes to various choices.
4) They allow a character to make a CHOICE--IE, to set themselves a new GOAL for the next SCENE.

Do you see how neat that is? Do you see how simply that works out?

1) Scene--Denied!
2) Sequel--Damn it! Think about it! That's so crazy it just might work!--New Goal!
3) Next Scene!

Repeat until end of book.

See what I mean? Simple. And you can write a book EXACTLY that way. Scene-sequel-scene-sequel-scene-sequel all the way to your story climax. In fact, if you are a newbie, I RECOMMEND you write your book that way. You can always chop and cut the extra scenes (or sequels) out later, and you will have a solid bedrock structure for getting your book done. We'll talk a little about balancing them in a minute.

First, let's outline exactly what happens in a sequel--and WHY the basic outline I'm gonna show you works.

Here's the basic structure to a sequel. It's another little worksheet you can fill out when you're thinking about it ahead of time:

1) EMOTIONAL REACTION:
2) REVIEW, LOGIC, & REASON:
3) ANTICIPATION:
4) CHOICE:

And it MUST happen in THAT ORDER. Why you ask me? Because we're all human beings, and THAT is the order in which we respond, psychologically, to events that happen around us. Especially to big nasty events that bring out a lot of emotion.

Most of you have probably been in a car accident of some kind, and that's the model I'm gonna use. Even if it was only a little accident and no one got hurt, everybody reacts in pretty much the same way. Imagine it with me, if you will. You're driving and all of a sudden, SQUEEEEEERRRCRUUUNCH! Car accident. What happens next?

You react emotionally, on instinct. Maybe you sit there stunned and startled for a second. Maybe you feel a moment of horror (if it was your fault), or else seething outrage (if it wasn't). Maybe you yell and curse, or throw up on yourself, or break out into hysterical laughter. There are a whole lot of viable human emotional responses to that kind of stimulus--but the first ones on the scene are ALWAYS the most basic, instinctive, emotional reactions.

Next, your brain kicks in. (This takes a variable amount of time, depending on the person.) Your brain tells you things and you pay attention to it. Maybe it says "this accident was your fault, and if they catch you, you'll go to jail. Run!" Maybe it says, "Check to see if anyone is hurt! Call the police! Exchange insurance information!" Maybe it says, "Call so-and-so to help," or "Oh my God, I'm bleeding," or "Please God let me have my proof of insurance in the glove compartment." You think about things like how the accident happened, and what you could have done to avoid it, what's necessary to accomplish immediately--and then you get to think
about where you're suddenly not going to be.

(During your review, logic, and reasoning process, it is very human to realize or rediscover facts that bring on an echo of your emotional response, or which otherwise inspire an entirely new line of emotional response. If you realize that the guy who just slammed into your car ran a stop sign to do it, for example, it might inspire a radically different set of emotions than a moment before, when you thought neither one of you had a clear right of way.)

You can get as upset as you want, for as long as you want, but sooner or later you're going to have gone over all the facts of what happened a minute ago, and you'll start thinking about what happens NEXT. You anticipate the immediate future, based upon what you know and what your current options are. Maybe you've got a buddy who can pick you up and get you to work, and you'll only be a few minutes late. Or maybe you don't, and you've just lost your job. Maybe
you're going to have to find a phone to call an ambulance because someone is hurt. There are a lot of things that could be pretty obviously a part of your immediate future, based on your current circumstances.

And once those things have rolled through your mind, you've got to decide what you're doing next. Maybe you're just trading insurance information and getting back on the road. Maybe you're hiding the body. The point is, you've got a choice to make, and that choice is going to determine your next action.

Voila.

You've just had a sequel, a broad, archetypical human reaction to a sudden situation that goes radically out of your control.

YOUR CHARACTERS DO THE SAME THING.

At the conclusion of a scene, they've just had something go out of THEIR control. You know how I know this? Because you didn't answer YES to your scene question. Something went wrong, because you are a smart writer, and that's how you did the scene. Now your characters go through the same set of reactions:

1) An immediate emotional response.
2) A review of what happened, applying logic and reason to the events and why they turned out that way, and of what options are open to them.
3) Anticipation of what might follow the pursuit of those options. (Highly important, this one. Never underestimate the effects of anticipation on a reader.)
4) Your character makes up his mind and decides what to do next. IE, he makes a CHOICE.

Now, it's possible to SKIP some of these steps, or to abbreviate some of them so severely that you all but skip them. But you CAN'T CHANGE THE ORDER.

Emotion, Reason, Anticipation, Choice. That reaction is typical to people, regardless of their sex, age, or background. It's psychologically hardwired into us--so take advantage of it. By having your character react in this very typically human way, you establish an immediate sense of empathy with the reader. If you do it right, you get the reader nodding along with that character going "Damn right, that's what I'd do." Or better yet, you get them opening their mouth in horror as they read, seeing the character's thought process, hating every step of where it's going while it remains undeniably understandable and genuine to the way people behave.

Sequels, frankly, are what really make or break books. How you choose to show your reader your character's reactions determines everything about the reader's response to the events of the story.

Worse, sequels are very fluid, very flexible things to apply. You can do all kinds of tricks with them. Some sequels are all internal monologue. Some are conversations carried out with a character's best friend (or his all-in-black-id). Sometimes a sequel LOOKS like a scene, in the trappings anyway, but what's actually important is the character's internal reaction.

(Search your feelings, Luke. You know it to be true. *I* am your father. *NOOOOOO*. Yeah, that lightsabre fight looks like a scene, but at that point it isn't. It's a sequel.)

This is where, frankly, I think writers have the greatest fluidity, the most chance to apply their creative talents--which means, of course, we also have the best chance of screwing things up here. You can approach sequels from an almost unlimited number of directions. There are no limits to how you can lay out a sequel, except for your own imagination. Just remember:

1) EMOTION
2) REASON
3) ANTICIPATION
4) CHOICE

Get those in there, in the right order, and you'll be fine.

Let's talk, for a moment, about how you want to weight the various parts of the sequel, based upon your genre, what you want to accomplish, etc. The sequel is where you can put a spin on almost any story to make it more suited to a given genre. Each of the genres has its own bias towards a given part of a sequel.

Romance, for example, is VERY heavy on Emotion and only slightly less on Anticipation. Mystery and SF lean very heavily on the Reason portion of the sequel. Action novels go light on everything but Choice, and give you just enough sequel to get you through to the next scene. Horror loves to linger on Anticipation. Think about it for a while,and you'll start to see what I mean.

So, if you're writing a romance, you'll want to place extra emphasis on your character's Emotional reaction and on his Anticipation of what could come next.

Mystery writers had better be able to produce clear lines of logic in the Reasoning portion of their character's reaction. If you need the reader to be cozy with a character, put extra emphasis on that character's sequels. If it isn't necessary for another character, go light on the sequels, or skip them entirely.

If that wasn't enough, Sequel-to-Scene ratio is the single largest factor for controlling pace. Sequels have a unanimous tendancy to slow the pace of your story, while scenes have the opposite effect. If you've ever read a book and felt like it blurred by too fast and never seemed to touch on anything long enough, go back and look at it. You WILL find that the book's scenes took up a great deal more space than its sequels. If you've read a book that you thought was too slow, too cerebral, or that wandered back and forth while droning on and on, go back and look at it. You WILL find that sequels took up a hell of a lot more page space than scenes.

It's a balancing act, and how you stack up scene-to-sequel is going to depend on several factors, including your genre and your audience. Romance, for example, is really nothing BUT sequels with occasional scenes to make them stick together. Romance wallows in sequels, because that's what it's ABOUT--emotions, feelings.

If you write an action book, those emotional passages--not so much. You'll want to spend more time and effort on the scenes, and make sure that the sequels don't start to outweigh them. If you're writing for a more cerebral, mature audience, they have a much higher desire/tolerance for sequels than if you write for, for example, young adults. The older audience might well be more interested in the thought and emotion behind the plot, while the younger audience might want you to stop moaning and dithering and get straight to the point. You control that pace by balancing sequels with scenes.

Sequels also determine what I've always called the "warmth" of your novel. When people talk about a "warm viewpoint" what they really mean is that you're throwing in a lot of emotional reaction. Oftentimes, warm viewpoint novels (like the Dresden Files) toss in micro-sequels as a part of scenes. Any time you see Harry talking to someone, wanting to tear his hair out, forcing himself to control his temper and get back to the task at hand, you've just ridden through a micro-sequel with him.

"Cool" viewpoint novels, like the more classic hardboiled PI novel, downplay their protagonist's Emotional reactions--often skipping them entirely during a scene, and showing them only indirectly during sequels. They tend to emphasize the Reason side of things.

My God, there are so many things you can do with this stuff. Brainy, intelligent characters go heavy on reason--and then you cheat by going light on Anticipation, and keeping his Choice half-veiled from the reader, so that when he actually acts in the next scene he looks a lot smarter and more resourceful than he might have if you went step by step through the whole thing. ("Of course! He animated the T-Rex! Brilliant!") Characters who are balancing their loyalties up to some critical moment can get the whole sequel laid out, extra heavy on Anticipation, and then you deny the reader any info on the Choice until they're actually in action.

Get it? SEQUELS ARE WHERE YOU APPLY THE COLOR TO YOUR STORY. It's the best point at which to manipulate your readers' emotions. I've been working within this craft structure for ten years, and I feel like I'm only barely beginning to get a handle on it. Seriously. You've got to give this some thought.

Knowledge of how sequels effect your book's impact on the reader is damned handy in rewrites, too. If a character is coming off too flighty, all you have to do is add in a bit more Reason to their sequels. Character too dry and boring? Add in more Emotion to /his/ sequels. Someone comments that your character's motivations aren't clear? Go give their sequels a tune-up, and make sure his Emotion-Reason-Anticipation-Choice is in the correct order and consistant.

When you do it right, the reader knows exactly what is going through your character's head, and why. The /reader/ starts being the one anticipating along with your character, and when that happens, you pwn them. It creates forward momentum for the next scene, and it helps the reader /want/ to read it.

This basic structure for sequels is pretty much the ENTIRE secret of my success. I do it like this in every freaking book I write. I know it works because check it out. People like my books. They like them for some of the special effects, sure, and for some of the story ideas sometimes--but mostly it's because they find themselves caring about what happens to the characters, and that happens in sequels.

People don't love Harry for kicking down the monster's front door. They love him because he's terrified out of his mind, he knows he's putting himself in danger by doing it, he's probably letting himself in for a world of hurt even if he is successful, but he chooses to do it anyway.

Emotion. Reason. Anticipation. Choice.

Special effects and swashbuckling are just the light show.

The heart of your character--and your reader--is in the sequel.

jimbutcher @ 2006-12-29T15:28:00

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:28:33 GMT

For those who don't know it, I've stumbled into podcasting now. Well, technically, FRED has gotten into podcasting and I sort of stumbled along after him. The Butcher Block (Fred named it, not me) is going to be a quasi-regular podcast about my books and so on. The first one is all about the TV show, and addresses several fan concerns that have been raised as publicity and details for the show have been released to the public.

Check it out! :)

http://butcherblock.libsyn.com

Jim

Story Climax

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 08:08:53 GMT

Climaxes
********

Caveat, on this article as on all the others: This is not the whole sum of wisdom on writing craft, forever and ever amen. This is intended to be a place for aspiring writers to /start/, a little bit of foundation with which you can begin to develop your own style. If you work with this stuff here, it can be an immense aid to you in developing your skills to a professional level. I know it's true because this is exactly the stuff that I learned, and it worked out all right for me. It's a pretty good beginning.

Right then!

I've talked a little about beginnings and middles. What's left? Oh, right, right. Here we go.

CLIMAXES!

Stories are like sex: the buildup and the ride can be fantastic, but if there isn't a climax before the end, you might come away from the experience feeling a little frustrated.

So, let's talk about a story climax. What is a climax? Why is is important? How do you build a good one? And will the reader still respect you in the morning?

WHAT IS A CLIMAX?
*****************

A story climax is, in structure terms the ANSWER to the STORY QUESTION that we talked about earlier.

There, see how tidy that is? Simple! Again, not EASY, but simple!

For example, the overall Story Question of Lord of the Rings:

*************
When Frodo Baggins inherits the Ring of Power from his Uncle Bilbo, HE SETS OUT TO DESTROY IT before its evil can wreak havoc upon Middle Earth. BUT WILL HE SUCCEED when the Dark Lord Sauron and every scary evil thing on the planet set forth to take the ring and use it to turn the entire world into the bad parts of New Jersey?
*************

And the story climax of the Lord of the Rings:

******
Yep.
******

See? ANYBODY could have written Lord of the Rings!

Well. Okay. Maybe it's not THAT easy. But it is SIMPLE to write a good story climax when you bear in mind that ultimately, the story climax is, on its most basic level, the answer to a question. Will the Rebels overthrow the Empire? Will the hero win the heart of the girl he loves? THAT is where you begin. It is therefore kind of important that, before you begin writing said story climax, that you know the answer to that question.

WHY IS A STORY CLIMAX IMPORTANT?
********************************

Catharsis.

As I understand it, catharsis is some sort of toxin which humanity has never been able to remove from paperback book ink. It builds up in human fingers as they keep flipping pages, and if they get all the way to the end of the story and DON'T get a sufficiently satisfying climax, the catharsis toxins can drive them into a psychotic state, and bad things happen. The surgeon general has stated that catharsis is--

Oh. Oh, hang on. I just Googled it.

Huh.

Apparently, catharsis is actually only a regional threat. I guess it's only in the ink in Greece and around the Aegean... oh. Oh. It isn't a toxin and . . . I thought my wife was being /serious/ about that. I mean, she never smiled or /anything/.

Gosh, is my face red.

(Thank you folks, I'll be here all week.)

Remember earlier, how we talked about ways to hook your readers and get them emotionally involved in the story? Well, if we've done that right, then when you reach story's end, they are INVESTED in its outcome. They want to SEE what happens, preferably as vividly as they possibly can. By the time you've reached the end of a story, a good writer has got their readers on the edge of their seats, at 3:30 in the morning, and the pages are tearing every time they turn because the reader is so excited.

You've made an implicit promise by getting your reader so bound up in the story. You've /got/ to deliver on it, or that reader is going to freaking /hate/ you for doing that to them. They are gonna go away from that ride all hot and bothered and frustrated as hell. That's what catharsis is: the release of all that tension and sympathetic emotion that the reader has built up because of the writer's skill at weaving the story. Done right, your readers will cheer and cry and laugh out loud and dance around their living room.

EVERYTHING YOU DID IN YOUR BOOK LEADS UP TO THIS. Deliver on the climax or die as a working writer. Simple as that.

HOW DO YOU BUILD A CLIMAX?
**************************

The same way you do everything else. You start at its beginning. A climax officially begins where the Great Swampy Middle ends. To use an overly-simple metaphor, the Beginning of your story dumps the dominoes of your story out of your box onto the table. The Great Swampy Middle sets all the dominoes up into a neat pattern.

And the climax knocks them down.

Guess which is the most fun. :) For the writer, as well as for the reader. There's nothing quite as nice as flicking over that first metaphorical domino after several months worth of setting them up, let me tell you. :)

The Great Swampy Middle ends at the first of the story events that starts the dominos to toppling. In Dead Beat, for example, when Harry and Butters find the little keychain drive inside Bony Tony with the GPS coordinates in it, it sets off a chain of reactions that lead Dresden forward to the final confrontation. That little drive is the last domino to get set up and the first one to topple, and start the cascade.

The actual climax itself, the absolutely peak of it, though, is what I generally refer to as the Showdown or the Throwdown or the Beatdown, depending on my mood and testosterone levels at the moment. The most dramatic point is the actual confrontation between your protagonist and antagonist, where they are directly contending with one another, and where both of them know that the story question is about to be answered.

For THAT confrontation, there several structural components that you can use to organize it that will be really helpful, much like the components used in a Sequel, like we talked about before:

ISOLATION
CONFRONTATION
DARK MOMENT
CHOICE
DRAMATIC REVERSAL
RESOLUTION

ISOLATION: At the end of the day, your protagonist stands alone. That's why that character is the protagonist. Oh sure, there can be other people around, but the one who really COUNTS is your protagonist. The more alone he is, the higher the tension levels are going to be, and the more satisfying the climax is going to be for the reader. Ellen Ripley lands on LV-426 with a whole squad of marines and various others. After the first confrontation with the Aliens, only eight others are left. During the second confrontation, THOSE companions are whittled away, one by one, until Ripley is left to enter the lair of the alien queen--a nuclear reactor about to blow up, no less--ENTIRELY alone. Now THAT is tension and isolation.

CONFRONTATION: Your lone protagonist, determined to follow things through to the end, confronts the antagonist. Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

DARK MOMENT: The confrontation Does Not Go Well. The odds are stacked against your protagonist, or the situation swings out of his control, or he just plain gets outclassed. Everything looks like it is in genuine jeopardy of going to hell. It looks certain that the answer to the story question is going to be one that the reader is NOT going to like. In the recent Narnia movie, that moment was at the death of Aslan. The Great Lion is gone, the White Witch has made fashion accessories out of his mane, the bad,guys have them outnumbered and outgunned, and there's just no way to win the fight that's coming the next day--but the folk of Narnia need Peter to lead them. Which brings us directly to:

CHOICE: It always comes back to choice. The climax of the story is the acid test, the crucible, where the rubber meets the road and where the schisse hits the fan. Your protagonist has to CHOOSE whether or not to stay true to his purpose or to let himself be swayed by fear, by temptation, by weariness, or by anything else. In that Dark Moment, he has to make the call that ultimately reveals who your protagonist really is, deep down. And the choice has GOT to be
a BAD one. If it's an easy choice, there isn't any drama to it--no tension, no release for the reader.

"Use the Force, Luke," urges ghost-Kenobi's voice. "Let go, Luke!" Luke visibly makes a choice, turning off his targeting computer, putting his faith in the Force to make the shot that the whole galaxy is literally riding on, the way a Jedi should. He's alone, with the baddest guy in the movie hot on his tail, and even his friends are telling him he's nuts. "His computer's off. Luke, you've switched off your targeting computer! What's wrong?" "Nothing!"
says Luke. "I'm all right!" Not ONLY is he about to get blown out of the air by Vader, but he might miss the shot, too. Luke is about to do something INSANE. He's about to sacrifice his life to take a literal shot in the dark.

Which segues right into...

DRAMATIC REVERSAL: The intrinsic nature of the story or of the protagonist's character influences or causes the events of the confrontation to be changed in an unexpected way, causing an outcome that is in harmony with the principles of poetic justice. Luke is an idealistic young kid, brave to a fault, dedicated to a fault, and because of that he has made a choice that is Going To Ruin Everything. But that very idealism and courage have also touched the heart of a jaded smuggler, who, instead of running to protect his own life, has returned to throw in his lot with the rebels, and who has entered the battle at the absolutely critical moment of truth.

(A quick word on Choice and Reversal. Not all heroes MAKE the self-sacrificial choice. Sometimes, the hero falters and makes the awful choice, to save his own skin or indulge his own darker nature. In that situation, the reversal is still there doing exactly the same thing--only this time, the justice that gets handed out is BAD for the protagonist. There's a name for that kind of story: tragedy. See King Lear. See also Hamlet, Othello, etc, etc, etc.

This outline works for both tragic and happy/heroic endings. Those aren't the only ways to end stories, by any means. But they are popular ways to end stories, and they are fairly simple ways to end stories, and this article is aimed at beginners and aspiring writers. Trust me on this one. If you're new, just go for a happy ending or a tragic ending. Work on bittersweet open-ended thought provoking montage endings after you've practiced on some of the simpler ones.

And, to be frank, if you're wanting to write professionally, work your happy ending skills. Real life is full of the other kind. There probably are some, but I can't think of many full-time tragedy writers.)

Finally, we get to...

RESOLUTION: Time to hand out the medals, kiss the girl, go to the wedding, put the star on the Christmas tree, raise the curtain on the rock concert, attend the funeral, or otherwise demonstrate that with the conclusion of the story, some kind of balance has been restored. The catharsis is complete, the tension eased, and the reader can catch their breath now.

My advice to you on resolutions: Keep it short. Once you've gotten through the Showdown, write as sparingly as possible to get to the end, and don't draw anything out any more than you absolutely must. You've already kept your poor reader up until 3:30, your heartless bastard. Let them get some sleep before they have to rush off to their shift in two hours!

Then you get to type the most satisfying words in any book you'll ever write:

T H E

E N D

And there you have it! Story climaxes!

Was it good for you? :)