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D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

BFF

7/25/2016

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“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
―
C.S. Lewis
 
Friends. There are few things more vital in life.
 
I was left to ruminate on this (among other things) after playing an Xbox game I’d picked up on spec a couple of weeks ago, a game titled Life is Strange. The player becomes the game’s protagonist, Max Caulfield, a female high school senior at a private school in Arcadia Bay, Oregon, who accidentally discovers she has the ability to rewind time and avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune we all encounter, beginning with the shooting death of her best friend, Chloe Price... except, as the game progresses, it becomes abundantly clear that messing with the past can lead to truly awful things instead. In fact, the new reality created by that tinkering can be far worse than the original. At the game’s climax, the player has to make a choice: save Chloe, or save Arcadia Bay. It’s a no-win situation, which was really what I was discussing in my last post, because if you save Chloe, the community is destroyed and its inhabitants die; if you save the community, then Chloe, your best friend, dies.
 
Now, given that choice for real, I don’t know for sure what I’d do --- it’s one of those life situations you fervently pray you never have to undergo, although writers and film makers love ‘em. (‘Course they do: such gut wrenching scenarios make for great drama in our stories... but they’re a helluva lot less enjoyable when you’re actually, really experiencing them.) However, when faced with the choice in the game, after a brief pause for outraged reflection, I threw my cares for the good of the greater collective out the window --- and saved Chloe.
 
Why?
 
Well, dammit, because Chloe was a close friend; we’d been through a lot together in the course of the story. (Apparently, I wasn’t alone in my choice, either: the game summarizes the choices other players made, and something like 46% of them also opted to save her.) And friendship can cause us to do all sorts of unusual things --- including ditching the mantra about “the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, or the one.”
 
Hold on there, you say, Chloe is just a character in a video game. That’s true. But regardless of whether we’re talking about books or films or video games, one of the things I want to emphasize today is that writers succeed with their characters only if we care about them. We need to identify not only with the protagonist, but with their friends and allies. We need to feel their joys and sorrows as our own. So if there’s the possibility they might die, we need to be able to agonize over that. In short, characters need to become --- at the very least, for the duration of our time with them --- real people, every bit as real and realistic as the folks we interact with in “real” life on a daily basis, and we need to feel like they’re our friends.

Friendship is a funny thing, isn’t it? It frequently starts in the manner of the quote at the top of this post: a warm feeling of camaraderie --- Hey, we have something in common! --- be it interest, hobby, mutual friends (or enemies), hopes, fears... whatever it is that makes us want to better know this other person. We don’t have to have everything in common --- many great friendships, literary and real life, involve people who are very different from each other (we call this aspect of the relationship complementary --- one person has characteristics the other lacks, and vice versa). But that only goes so far, because there has to be enough common ground between the two for them to want each other’s fellowship. And as I said earlier, going through common experiences together --- surmounting impossible odds and situations --- tends to strengthen the bonds of friendship. (Or destroy them... but let’s stay optimistic here.)
 
It annoys me that, in today’s hyper-sexualized world, so many writers seem to think two people cannot be close friends without there being some kind of sexual element to the friendship. Folks, they can, and to try and insist otherwise cheapens the whole concept of friendship. Two guys can be friends, two women can be friends, a man and a woman can be friends... and sex or sexuality doesn’t have to enter into the equation at all. If we’re not more than the sum of our hormones... then, really, what’s the point?
 
Loyalty, honesty, openness, trust: characteristics that great friendships have to have. There are many others, but I’d say those are among the most important. Think of Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings. In one sense, it’s not the most equal of relationships --- Sam comes across (more so in the book than in the films) as Frodo’s servant, and doesn’t seem to have quite the same intellectual awareness --- but he’s utterly devoted, to the point of being willing to give his life for Frodo if necessary. That’s friendship.
 
Let’s give the final words to something else Jack said on the topic in his usual brilliant manner:
 
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather, it is one of those things which give value to survival.”



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Nix The No-Win

7/18/2016

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The Kobayashi Maru, as every Star Trek aficionado knows, is a Starfleet training exercise. Introduced to audiences in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, it’s not your average training simulation, because it comes with a grim twist: it is a no-win scenario. Absolutely no way to beat it. You’re going to die at its end no matter what. (Unless you cheat, which James Kirk famously does after taking the damned thing multiple times. His rationale? He doesn’t believe in the no-win scenario. Right, Jim: that’s your story and you’re sticking to it.) Starfleet’s more sensible rationale for the simulation is that how we deal with death is every bit as important as how we deal with life, which I suppose is true.
 
In ‘real’ life, however --- Kirk’s assertion notwithstanding --- we’re often confronted with the no-win scenario. Sometimes the result is one’s life, sometimes it’s considerably less. But is it fair/right/justifiable/insert-your-own-label to do this to protagonists in stories? At the story’s climax? I ask this because I was hit with it recently on buying a quiet little Xbox game called Life is Strange.
 
(Now, I need to pause and quickly offer a disclaimer before losing all credibility: yes, I play video games from time to time. But I’m not: a hormonal teenager with lots of repressed anger or penchant for blood;  a moron; violently or passively misogynistic, nor socially withdrawn or inept. I’m aware a distressingly large percentage of people who play video games --- particularly males --- are some or all of those, but not me.)
 
Okay. Still here? Whew. Good.
 
So... back to Life is Strange. It certainly can be, and so is the story. You play the protagonist, Max (Maxine) Caulfield, a shy female high school senior studying photography at a private school in a sleepy coastal Oregon town called Arcadia Bay. And like any high school, there are both the usual bright spots and unsavoury blots on the human condition. Well, actually more, because after all, this is a dramatic story, so if everything was sweetness and light, there wouldn’t be a story, would there?
 
Your best friend is Chloe Price, a sweet girl deep down, but she’s developed a crusty exterior since life fell apart following her father’s accidental death. Chloe was expelled from your school. You haven’t seen her for years after moving away, but now you’re back, navigating the plotline together.
 
There’s a bunch of heavy duty issues in the story: a mentally unstable student with violent propensities, whose wealthy parents just happen to be major benefactors to the school and community (sigh --- some clichés apparently never go out of style); a missing female student; cyberbullying (which may or may not lead to a character’s suicide, depending on how you manage the situation); euthanasia; the usual assortment of kids practicing petty cruelties; and a psychotic, murderous teacher who turns out to be the surprise villain. Whoops. Did I mention spoiler alert? Oh well. Won’t be the last.
 
Oh yes... one more twist --- pretty major one, actually: early in the story, you accidentally find you have somehow acquired the ability to “rewind” --- go back in time to change events. You discover this by saving Chloe’s life as she’s shot and killed by the mentally unstable student. Yikes.
 
This isn’t a new plot device; years ago, a film called The Butterfly Effect explored the same idea: changing events in a timeline will have major impacts, and even good changes (saving someone’s life) can actually wreak havoc and cause terrible things later that are much worse than existed originally. But it works quite well here. Mostly. Until the climax.
 
Along with all other mayhem, there’s been a series of progressively weirder, more ominous weather phenomena --- and you slowly realize that somehow, it’s directly related to your rewind ability. (How? Dunno. It’s never explained. Just go with it.) So finally... at the climax... you’ve survived all the crap life has thrown at you --- Chloe in particular has died/been-saved several times, so you have really bonded --- and there’s a monster tornado bearing down on Arcadia Bay... and you have a choice to make (just as you’ve done throughout, directly influencing the story’s course). But this time, it’s way bigger:
 
You can save Chloe, or Arcadia Bay. Not both. Choose Chloe, and Arcadia Bay is destroyed, with hundreds dead. Choose Arcadia Bay, and Chloe --- your BFF whom you have literally been through life and death with over the story’s course --- dies. That’s it. Nothing else.
 
And I said... “Excuse me?”
 
I really didn’t want a ‘one or t’other’ at that stage. I’d met Arcadia Bay’s people and, on the whole, liked them. But I was also very invested with Chloe. And now I was supposed to just choose, like picking an ice cream flavour?*
 
Folks, you can’t do that to readers/viewers/players. It ain’t fair.
 
Yeah, I know... real life does it all the time. But as creators... we can inject a note of fairness life sometimes seems to lack. In stories, there are times when we seek --- hell, need --- some of the redemptive fairness we don’t always get in our lives.
 
I also know we often throw no-win scenarios at characters. I’ve done it myself in Gryphon’s Heir. But not at the final climax. Not when This Is It.
 
Imagine if, at the climax of Deathly Hallows --- after spending hundreds of hours plowing through seven books growing steadily larger and more complex, becoming heavily invested in all characters --- Rowling says to Harry/us, “Okay, here’s the choice: either Hermione dies, or everyone in Hogwarts does. No other options. What do you wanna do?”
 
People would put an Unforgivable Curse on her, that’s what they’d do.
 
So... just say no to the Kobayashi Maru... and leave it to Starfleet. Spock would disagree; he said the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. But Kirk, bless him, countered that sometimes, the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many. So there you have it.
 
 
 
 
P.S. By the way... I saved Chloe --- just couldn’t let her die.
Sigh. I’m such an old softie. Which leads us neatly into... next time.

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So Just Do It

7/11/2016

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Recently, I saw a quote on Twitter (Twitter is the 21st century successor of Bartlett’s Quotations): “Inspiration doesn’t respond to meeting requests. You can’t schedule greatness.” And I have to admit, I may have rolled my eyes. A time or six. Really? I thought. I can only be great when the Muse moves me? And I’ve gotta wait for her to come calling?
 
Now, I want to make it clear my intent isn’t to bash the quote’s author. It’s that entire mindset, so prevalent in both the artistic community subset and the human community in general, that I take issue with. Not infrequently, I encounter it in the classroom when I tell a bunch of scholars they have the period to write something --- essay, story, whatever the assignment may be --- and I’m collecting whatever they have at the end of the period. I tend to get murmurs of disbelief and maybe the odd muted protests that tend to boil down to variations of: it just happens to be a day when they’re feeling so uncreative, they couldn’t come up with a creative sentence, much less an entire assignment, if their lives depended on it. In other words, you can’t schedule greatness. To which I reply, well, look guys, if we just sit here and wait for greatness to show up, we may be waiting a very long time. In fact, for some of you, the rest of your lives. (Okay, I don’t actually say that last. But I might be thinking it.)
 
In class, I call these days Creativity on Demand (C.O.D.) days, and something might smell fishy, but we all experience such days --- all the time, in every field of creative endeavour. I tell my reluctant scholars they might just as well get used to it, because they’re going to have a great deal of these types of days, not just in school, but throughout their entire lives. And then I sometimes paraphrase Nike’s old (1988!) catchphrase, because it’s singularly appropriate: so just do it.
 
Whether we’re students or adults, we need to understand something:  regardless of what it is you’re doing --- writing or anything else --- you very rarely have the luxury of saying you’ll do this later, when you feel greatness upon you.  At least not if you want to get anything done. You’re being given time, or have time, to do this now, and now is when it needs to be done.  You have to be creative. Right now. And you may not be able to be great --- not always, at any rate, although greatness certainly awaits --- but you have to at least be good. It isn’t just your teacher or your boss who demands it; life demands it.
 
As far as writing goes (although this little checklist is also applicable to other creative forays) this is what I tell my students as they recoil in despairing disbelief at the terrible life truths I’ve just unloaded on them: let’s fill that blank page (and mind?) with something useful that will satisfy that awful taskmaster (teacher, boss, life) hovering over your shoulder. How?
 
First, deal with any pressure you may be feeling, and get past it.  You can do this.  Most of us are actually far more capable than we generally admit to ourselves.
Second, focus on the task.  Give it some serious thought.  What are you being asked to do?  Make sure you are clear in your mind.  In writing, do not start putting your thoughts down helter-skelter.  You want something intelligent here, not vague panic reactions.
Third, come up with some key words or ideas you can scribble down.  These form your rough notes (not a rough draft, which is entirely different). When writing stories, don’t expect that you’ll follow your outline in an ironclad manner. You might, but don’t expect it.
Fourth, start writing. So just do it. Many writers find actually starting to be the most difficult part, and we have to move on.  Tempus fugit. You can’t spend forever staring vacuously at a blank page.  So, just start.  That’s all there is to that.  Begin putting down words on the page (preferably in such a way that they make sense).  Even if you hate what you’re putting down on paper, keep doing it.  After a while, you will find your words start to flow more easily, and at that point, if you still hate the beginning of what you wrote, you can go back and revise it. 
Fifth, keep writing.  This sounds obvious, but in our Internet-caused Era of Extreme Attention Deficit Order, it’s not as simple as many people think. Don’t pad your writing just for the sake of it, but keep asking yourself what else you could add.  Think of details.  Use your imagination.  Push yourself.  You can do this.
 
Now, you may not be able to schedule greatness --- but the more you work on your craft, the more you work on being great, be it at writing or anything else --- the more likely it is that greatness will stop in and pay a visit. Maybe the Muse will stay only a short while, maybe she’ll stay for an extended period.
 
So just do it.

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Ask Your Characters

7/4/2016

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“I want to talk about dialogue today,” I said.
“Why?” you said.
“Shut up,” I explained.
And so it began.
 
Okay, a little background first. I’m currently hard at work on the second book in what I ultimately intend will be a series of books under the collective umbrella title of “The Annals of Arrinor.” (Hold on, I hear you say... annals? Why annals? Well, truth be told, I was inspired by the Chronicles of Narnia. But ‘chronicles’ has become, in my humble correct opinion, a very overused writing term in recent years, and so I thought, yikes, we need something a little different to separate my work from the herd. And ‘annals’ popped into my head, as it had a nice alliterative ring to it when you coupled it to Arrinor, the world of my protagonist. Yes, thank you very much, I’m quite aware that technically speaking, ‘annals’ refers to a year by year account, and yes, I’m also keenly aware the action of my entire first novel spans only several weeks. Stop clouding the issue with facts, please. As I said: nice, snappy alliterative ring to it --- again, in my humble correct opinion. Look, just go with me on this.)
 
But I digress.
 
So... where were we? Yes... working on book 2, whose current working title is Gryphon’s Awakening. (Book 1 was Gryphon’s Heir --- go to the Reviews tab on this website to see what Kirkus Reviews had to say about it .) And thus we finally make it to my train of thought for today: I foolishly went and got myself into a bit of a jam in book 1, quite without realizing it and certainly without intending to. You see, in pumping up the climactic sequence near the book’s end, I introduced a plot element (I’m trying not to be too specific) that had to be brought about through the actions of a previously unsuspected traitor. My characters didn’t know who the traitor was, and frankly, neither did I --- as a matter of fact, the issue is still unresolved at book’s end, which I smugly/naively thought was rather a nice little nagging touch. (Ah ha! I hear you crow: a pantser! Well, no, at least not completely. I do plan things out in my writing, just as I do in ‘real’ life... but just like real life, I don’t seriously expect things in my stories are always --- or sometimes, ever --- going to work out as planned. And... usually they don’t. Come on... are you going to try and convince me that your life always goes as planned? Puh-leese.)
 
Sigh. But of course, brilliant ideas always come home to roost, don’t they? And usually, in the process, they make us seriously wonder whether they really were brilliant, or we were just plain out of our minds that particular day... something to do with the lunar cycle or some such.
 
So it’s been weighing on me --- just as I know it’s been weighing on my characters --- who the hell is the traitor? And we’re approaching that point in book 2 where the characters are: 1) just about in a position to do something about it; and 2) definitely needing to. So this is something that couldn’t be left unknown/undecided very much longer.
 
I originally had this vague idea one of my main and most trusted characters would be the traitor... which has been, I suppose, standard literary fare even long before Agatha Christie used it to such great success in The Mousetrap. But who? The problem with my main and most trusted characters is that dammit, I like them. A lot. I don’t really want to think they’re capable of doing such a thing. And, just as importantly, what possible motivation could they have to commit such a heinous act as detailed in the book? Yes, I know, I know, people we least suspect often do really awful things... but seldom do they do so without really good reasons. And... I don’t see any of my characters having really good reason for turning on my protagonist like that.
 
Then...
 
I was writing away, ‘listening’ to a conversation taking place between two characters present when the betrayal took place who were in the process of explaining it to a third character who had not been. Please note I use the word ‘listening’ very literally and deliberately here. C.S. Lewis said, “I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say” and this is an instance where I understand exactly what he meant. Because the third character suddenly, and without any prior planning from me --- I certainly had no idea she was going to say it --- piped up with a “what about this?” kind of suggestion as to who the traitor could be.
 
And my jaw dropped. Because she was absolutely right. There was the solution. And she had given it to me, almost like a throwaway. That is a marvellous and magical moment for any writer, I can tell you, because in that moment, the character is as alive and real as anybody in ‘real’ life. She spoke it, and there it was. I could have kissed her.
 
You know, I’m at a loss as to why so many authors seem to have such difficulty writing good dialogue, but evidently they do. Sometimes I read dialogue in books and cripes, it’s like a game of 20 Questions or something: it’s wooden. Or so heavily laced with pontifications about Enormously Important and Philosophical Life Points, you wonder they can actually enunciate the words. Folks, people don’t talk like that. Even heroes and villains.
 
Here’s how dialogue works, in case you haven’t been paying attention to yourself and those around you every single day of your life: you say something; the other person responds --- usually immediately and completely off the cuff, because we generally don’t sit there thinking of our response for a minute or two --- and you take that gem and respond to it, also immediately and off the cuff. And so on. Each response builds on the last, answering, addressing, introducing new material, so the conversation keeps evolving. And when there’s no new material, or the old has been completely hashed over... the conversation ends. That’s how it works.
 
Do that in your writing. Especially, know your characters, listen to them, and most importantly, let them do the talking. It’s not hard, really: after all, it’s what you do every day.
 
And when you don’t know the answer to a question... ask your characters. Like you, they may not know the answer --- but I’ll be willing to state with conviction that they’ve got all kinds of opinions and ideas.
 
Just like any real person.

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    D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

    Author of The Annals of Arrinor series.  Lover of great literature, fine wine, and chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

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