Creating a Believable World

In the last post, I Love The Handmaid’s Tale, I maintain that the characters work because they are in a world which rings true. How is this created?

What makes a story believable?

Science fiction writer John Wyndham’s gift was a unique ability to consistently create complete worlds. He wrote Day of the Triffids where everyone is blinded. I wanted to stop reading (too scary—see rule) but I couldn’t put it down. Similarly, the Midwich Cuckoos (filmed asVillage of the Damned)is the chilling story of alien children set to take over the world.

Wyndham’s genius is to present the reader, early on, with one unbelievable event. The plants which blind people in Triffids or the birth of the alien children by human mothers—Midwich. If you accept that event, everything else rolls out logically as the characters adapt to the change. Gangs of blind people enslave the few sighted ones to lead them to food; the alien children are in a special school because they’re too brilliant for ordinary education.

And thus a compelling and believable world is born.

So how do you make your fictional world as gripping, even without aliens?

How to make your fictional world realistic

One approach is to creating a realistic world is covered in my post, Creating the Fictional World. Below is another which is similar but different enough to warrant mention.

It helps to have a picture in your mind of a typical scene in your novel, whether main street, Wall Street, or fantasy. Doesn’t have to be fully formed and don’t bother writing it down. Just have it there as we walk through the following discussion.

How does the world affect/influence your main characters?

Pick a few characters (not a lot) and decide how the world influences their behavior. Is there pressure to conform in your small town world? Does the protagonist feel he has to live up to the world’s mythic figures?
Think of a scene which would show this quality to the reader. Write it.
As the novel develops, ask yourself this question again and write the scenes which illustrate the world’s influence.

How do your key characters react to the world?

Consciously try to get into your key characters’ heads
Work through the major events in your novel and consider how each of these characters might react.
For example, in Handmaid’s Tale, June/Offred and other Handmaids are ordered to stone a man. How is Aunt Lydia feeling? Perhaps satisfied but also trying to suppress her underlying misgivings. How is June feeling? Repulsed by it but knows she can say nothing. How is another Handmaid feeling? Perhaps she has been completely hoodwinked and allows her most animalistic urges to find expression. They are going to act differently because they feel differently. How do you show that?

In this way, you can help to build a credible world into which your reader can sink.

Will this guarantee a compelling world?

I really, really want to say, “Absolutely,” but I know I can’t. Whether this works depends on a myriad of things—the setting you’ve chosen, the characters in it, the plot, your mastery of the craft of writing. In other words, the whole shebang.

But being aware that the world you create can and should affect your characters will help to create a continuous dream for your readers. What we all want.

April 3, 2020March 27, 2020

I Love The Handmaid’s Tale

I don’t pay to get scared—a rule I live by. I don’t go to scary movies, I don’t bungie jump, I don’t escape to escape rooms. Yet I watch the dark, creepy and scary TV series, The Handmaid’s Tale.

Why?

Well, aside from deep psychological reasons I won’t go into, because The Handmaid’s Tale portrays a completely credible world (Gilead) in which I must immerse myself.

I’ve discussed this idea in Creating the Fictional World. Here, I’ll discuss how the writers have created this believability.[1]

Two characters in the Handmaid’s Tale

I want to focus on two characters—Aunt Lydia and the Commander, Fred Waterford.

Aunt Lydia

Aunt Lydia, portrayed by Ann Dowd, prepares fertile women for their new and unwelcome role as the Handmaids to Gilead’s elite.

But Aunt Lydia is not a one-dimensional bad guy. She uses a cattle prod to keep the Handmaids in line but argues a disfigured girl should receive a treat. She demands the Handmaids stone a ‘guilty’ man but seems genuinely happy at a pregnancy.

Normally, in fiction, we have trouble with a character that possesses such opposing traits.

Despite this, the writers of the show have made Aunt Lydia credible and compelling. The character has bought completely into the Gilead system. Because Aunt Lydia truly believes what she is doing is righteous, any promptings to be human (compassionate, kind, empathetic) are sternly suppressed as shameful weaknesses.

This rings true because history shows that unbelievably cruelty is possible under the sway of an ideology. During World War II, SS concentration camp officers believed that killing Jews and others, while difficult, was nevertheless for the greater Nazi good.

Aunt Lydia, like the SS officers, does her duty—even if or perhaps especially when, it is distasteful (inhuman).

The Commander

But while Aunt Lydia is caught in a system not of her creation, the Commander helped to shape Gilead’s laws.

Joseph Fiennes plays Commander Fred Waterford, a high-ranking government official. Like Aunt Lydia, he believes in Gilead. But the rules are for the likes of her, not him. He acts as all elites have in history—providing themselves with exemptions not available to the general population.

Thus, despite Gilead’s credo that sex is for reproduction only, he takes his handmaid to a club where the elite indulge in sex for pleasure.

Yet at other times, he invokes the law. He has his wife’s finger cut off for advocating that girls should be taught to read. And is tremendously remorseful later while maintaining it had to be done.

You see, there it is again. Characters acting inconsistently. But it totally works.

Why does this work?

Some might be thinking, “Well, real people don’t always act consistently.” Absolutely right. But say in the novel you’re reading the protagonist is calm, reflective, and logical. Then she suddenly abandons her job and husband for a wild party in India. As a reader, you’d be taken aback unless the writer provides a credible reason for this personality change. Because fiction has rules, albeit often unspoken, that writers must usually respect to produce a story satisfying to their readers.

I think The Handmaid’s Tale works because the characters act in a world which itself rings true. And they act consistently within that world.

So, how do you create a believable world in which characters can live? Next post.

[1] For those who don’t know the story, IMBd has short summaries.

February 28, 2020February 7, 2020

How to Show Emotion

Showing emotion is often one of the toughest things to do—in the sense of having the reader feel and identify with the feelings of the character.

You can do it by “He was sad,” but that’s not showing the emotion—that’s just telling the reader your take on the character’s mental condition. Look at the image above. If you describe what the person in the middle picture is doing rather than labeling it, you might come up with, “He dabbed a handkerchief to one eye.”

While that description doesn’t necessarily tug at the heart strings, it could be the beginning of a more effective scene.

“I can’t believe she’d do that.” He was sad.

Versus

“I can’t believe she’d do that.” He dabbed a handkerchief to one eye.

See, there is a subtle difference. It is easier for the reader to connect with the character’s action than with the writer’s description of it.

Emotion is tough

Here are some thoughts about how to get better at emotion in your characters.

Be specific. As in the example above, describe the action rather than your interpretation of it. Not He was pissed but His lips straightened into a thin line.

Don’t name the emotion. In one of those perverse things that is just life, the most effective way to show emotion is never to use the name of the feeling you are going for. That is, you don’t say he’s bewildered, you show how a person would act in that state. It’s not always easy to do but if you can’t picture it enough to describe it, how can you expect the reader to get it?

Differentiate between you and the character. In order to have fully realized characters, you need to depict how the character feels in the situation not how you would feel. Your villain might chortle with glee when the heroine falls off the cliff; you might gasp. You want to avoid having your characters acting/feeling as you might—it makes for a homogeneous emotional landscape and is therefore boring.

Be in touch with your own emotions. This one follows on from the previous point. If you don’t have a visceral connection to your feelings, its lack will show up on the page in a mysterious way. If you are hiding you from yourself, it’s harder to create characters that have access to the full range of emotions. I know this is a big thing to lay down and then walk away from, but how you get truly in touch with your feelings is outside the scope of this blog. But is nonetheless very worthwhile pursuing, quite aside from the benefits to your writing. See, I told you this is hard.

You don’t need to do it all the time

When the characters’ emotional state is an important part of the story, then you’d probably be better off showing than telling. But when it is not, and this is likely to be the majority of the characters the majority of the time, you don’t need to. And in fact, an exhaustive description of how everyone is feeling will likely slow down the action and bore your readers.

February 21, 2020February 21, 2020

Creating a Page-turner when the Ending is Known

The stage musical, Come from Away shares a phenomenon with movies like Titanic, Apollo 11, and Argos. That is, from the start, you know how the story is going to turn out. The ship will sink, the astronauts will land safely, and the American diplomats will be rescued from the 1979-1981 Iranian revolution. In Come From Away, the airline passengers get safely home.

The problem is that a story often gets a lot of its uumph from the reader wanting to know how things turn out. Will the villain get her comeuppance? Will the lovers get together? Will Mary find her lamb? Who killed Cock Robin? (Sorry, got carried away a bit).

It’s tricky to write a plot with a known ending because you lack the element of surprise/satisfaction/ etc. at the climax. Readers can get impatient because they think they know where things are going.

This happened to me with Titanic. By the mid-movie, I was thinking, “Yeah, yeah. Sad story. Boo-hoo. When is the sucker gonna sink?” Also cut down on my empathy for Leonardo DiCaprio’s watery fate, as you can imagine.

So, it can be a difficult task to keep reader interest with one hand effectively tied behind your back.

Writing a page-turner with one hand tied behind your back

First off, you need all the regular story-telling skills I’ve been talking about in this blog. But now, you need to put in special effort to keep the reader entertained until she gets to the ending. Here are some ways to do it.

Tension in every scene.

You can focus on how difficult it was to achieve the end goal and/or how easily things could have gone off track. You can ratchet up the tension and rivet the reader by detailing these trials.

Fate of (fictional) main character unknown.

Often, even in a true story, the main character (let’s call him Tom) is fictional—inserted in the story as an anchor for the reader to identify with. This allows you to play with that Tom’s fate. He can be instrumental in achieving the end (rescue, safe landing, etc.) and still himself come to a sticky end. Thus, assuming the reader identifies with him—and if she doesn’t, we have a whole different issue—but assuming she does, she is going to want to know how things work out for him. And thus you have a more typical story with an unknown climax. ‘Course, doesn’t work as well for memoirs.

Surprise ending.

Quentin Tarentino did this in Inglorious Basterds. The commandoes plan to kill Hitler in a cinema by igniting the flammable nitrate film. Knowing that Hitler did not die this way, I was intrigued to see how Tarentino would pull off a satisfying ending given this reality. And then Hitler dies in the fire! Despite a niggle that millions of Tarentino fans will have a distorted view of history, changing the ending does perk up the reader/viewer.

Surprise interpretation.

In my novel, SCAM, four out-of-work Canadian actors pretend to be an intact British acting family to win roles on an American sitcom. It took on the feel of a heist movie—i.e. it isn’t one unless you have a heist. Similarly, there is no novel if they don’t get the parts. Since the reader knows this, I interpreted the events in what I think was a surprising way. Please read it to see if you agree! (ADV.)

So, writing a story where the ending is known by the reader before she starts the novel can be tricky. But it is possible to do so if you are aware of the special challenge you face.

February 14, 2020January 7, 2020

Come From Away—Straight-forward Story-telling

Come From Away is a Canadian musical which played on Broadway and toured extensively. It tells the true story of a small community in Newfoundland which had to cope with the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack in the United States.

Because of the attack, many planes were diverted to Gander, Newfoundland. This is the amazing story of the town housing, feeding, clothing, and even entertaining the stranded passengers.

As a play/musical, Come from Away has two writing characteristics I want to highlight: one here and one in the next post.

Technique: Straight-through story-telling

This technique is interesting, if only because the pure form isn’t seen that often. That is, the story starts at the beginning (the townspeople’s bucolic existence before the planes landed) and goes to the end in a straight line (the stranded passengers returning home). I know this seems kind of ‘duh’, but most fiction has diversions off that straight path.

For example, a passenger is the mother of a New York firefighter but doesn’t know what is happening to him. The playwright makes the interesting choice in allowing her to speak of her anxiety, but with no flashbacks to show their love. A flashback is as easy to do in the theater as it is in fiction writing—the mother and her firefighter son are in a spotlight and the dialogue shows this is the mother’s memory of her son.

Advantages of the straight-through

Well, for one thing, it’s the way we typically tell stories. What happened, then what happened next, etc. It’s a form we’re familiar with and can take comfort from as we would well broken-in slippers.

It is also more efficient because there aren’t any interludes which might impede the forward action of the story. While I don’t typically advocate for efficiency as goal in writing, when a series of events has to be covered in a limited period of time, you might realistically pursue a little efficiency.

Disadvantages of this approach

In particular, the use of flashback may be the opportunity to connect emotionally with a particular character such as I discussed above with the mother and her firefighter son. A flashback takes you from guessing or assuming what her love is to seeing it for yourself.

Scene setting can also be done in flashback. What if the musical started when townspeople were in the midst of their herculean efforts to help the stranded passengers? It would focus immediately on the central point of the play. How the townspeople got to that point could be done in quick flashbacks which give the reader/watcher the information about the setting or past he needs at the moment needed. This is rather than knocking off the explanations at the top when their significance may not yet be clear.

Which is better?

It’s all a matter of choice—straight-through or a more convoluted structure. One way isn’t necessarily better than the other—but it does shape how the reader/watcher experiences the event.

So when you have a story to tell, take a moment to think whether the familiar straight-through, soup-to-nuts approach best serves or whether you might want the soup at the end and dessert somewhere in the middle.