A fragment of a story

I had a dream once that I saw a mystical teacher and his three apprentices, all dressed in spartan, beige-colored habits and bearing closely cropped hair, jogging through a field. It was the half light of dusk and the field was of long brown grass that glowed a golden glow in the light of a sun sinking over the distant mountains. Their goal was a pilgrimage to a far away, high up temple of some vague ominousness, a dark place of uncertain evil. There the youngest of the three apprenctices, the initiate, would be put through a dangerous ritual, a purgation, wherein he'd be cleansed of evil. But along this path the four of them were being stalked, by a small but malicious creature that lurked in the long grass and sought to pick them off one by one.

I woke up at this point, but the question, which perhaps you can answer, is what was going to happen next.

I had a dream once that I saw a mystical teacher and his three apprentices, all dressed in spartan, beige-colored habits and bearing closely cropped hair, jogging through a field. It was the half light of dusk and the field was of long brown grass that glowed a golden glow in the light of a sun sinking over the distant mountains. Their goal was a pilgrimage to a far away, high up temple of some vague ominousness, a dark place of uncertain evil. There the youngest of the three apprenctices, the initiate, would be put through a dangerous ritual, a purgation, wherein he'd be cleansed of evil. But along this path the four of them were being stalked, by a small but malicious creature that lurked in the long grass and sought to pick them off one by one.

I woke up at this point, but the question, which perhaps you can answer, is what was going to happen next.

A fragment of a story

Creating good characters

A few years ago a Wisconsin-based film production company named RedLetterMedia started a series of hour plus long reviews on the Star Wars prequels. The purpose of these reviews was to carefully dissect what went wrong with these three films and the filmmakers went to a lot of effort to create a detailed analysis. It's not only an interesting exercise for someone in filmmaking, but it also touches on a number of issues relating to storytelling in general. For one, in the Phantom Menace Review the narrator, Mr. Plinkett, analyzes what it is about the characters from that movie that make them so dull. He asks people to try to describe the characters "without saying what they look like, what kind of costume they wore or what their profession or role in the movie was," as if you're describing them to someone who hasn't seen the movie. In short describe everything about the characters that makes them unique as a character. When you engage in this exercise, you find that people have trouble describing characters that aren't well drawn, whereas they have lots to say about characters that are well drawn.

This makes for a good writing exercise. Try and describe characters from stories you've written. Better yet have others read the stories and have them describe them. This latter can be helpful for identifying when it is that a particular characteristic that you were trying to convey wasn't memorable or highly noticeable. You can see this for example with the Phantom Menace, where Lucas clearly makes some effort to make Qui-Gon Jinn appear to be a rebel who doesn't bow to authority, but it doesn't really stick with audiences because the character development mostly consists of other characters describing him as a rebel, and doesn't actually involve him doing particularly rebellious things. We can starkly contrast this to the character of Han Solo from the original series. Even from his first introduction his character is clearly portrayed this way. They meet him in a bar described as a "wretched hive of scum and villainy," where he's willing to smuggle passengers, where he shoots Greedo, making a clever quip as he leaves. And this is just in the first few minutes of meeting his character. In fact, we should never underestimate the importance of a character's initial introduction to the reader in solidifying the unique characteristics of your character in the minds of the reader.

Now, what particular details make a character compelling? The Writer's Digest has a nice little article on How to Craft Compelling Characters, which opens by describing four main elements of a good character: ambition, secret, contradiction, vulnerability. It's a good list. I personally would quibble and say that it's really ambition (give your character driving goal or a dream or need) and vulnerability that are the most important and that a secret (an important something hidden) and a contradiction (having multiple characteristics that contradict on another) are potent but inessential. Additionally, we might also expand this list, such as the importance of giving characters small flaws people can relate to, giving them memorable idiosyncrasies, making them dynamic (they are changed by events) and so on, but I think this gets to the core of important elements of good characterization.

Such a list is a useful lens to help us further evaluate and improve characters from our own stories. For example, none of the characters in Phantom Menace have any defining ambition and they're not portrayed as fairly vulnerable. Sure, they're trying to achieve certain ends throughout the film, but they aren't portrayed as being really driven by a defining goal. Their goals are really just a function of the situation. It can also help us understand that classic saw of literary criticism, why the character of Satan in Paradise Lost is vastly more interesting than the character of Adam. The most important reasons are that Satan has an ambitious goal (he wants to mar God's new creation) and he is vulnerable (he's distinctly weaker than God, has been defeated by Him once, and is going up against Him again).

It goes without saying that the more originality you can put into developing these characteristics, the more memorable they'll be. Nonetheless, these are good starting points to helping you evaluate and improve your characters, and it's good to try to employ these exercises to improve a story.

A few years ago a Wisconsin-based film production company named RedLetterMedia started a series of hour plus long reviews on the Star Wars prequels. The purpose of these reviews was to carefully dissect what went wrong with these three films and the filmmakers went to a lot of effort to create a detailed analysis. It's not only an interesting exercise for someone in filmmaking, but it also touches on a number of issues relating to storytelling in general. For one, in the Phantom Menace Review the narrator, Mr. Plinkett, analyzes what it is about the characters from that movie that make them so dull. He asks people to try to describe the characters "without saying what they look like, what kind of costume they wore or what their profession or role in the movie was," as if you're describing them to someone who hasn't seen the movie. In short describe everything about the characters that makes them unique as a character. When you engage in this exercise, you find that people have trouble describing characters that aren't well drawn, whereas they have lots to say about characters that are well drawn.

This makes for a good writing exercise. Try and describe characters from stories you've written. Better yet have others read the stories and have them describe them. This latter can be helpful for identifying when it is that a particular characteristic that you were trying to convey wasn't memorable or highly noticeable. You can see this for example with the Phantom Menace, where Lucas clearly makes some effort to make Qui-Gon Jinn appear to be a rebel who doesn't bow to authority, but it doesn't really stick with audiences because the character development mostly consists of other characters describing him as a rebel, and doesn't actually involve him doing particularly rebellious things. We can starkly contrast this to the character of Han Solo from the original series. Even from his first introduction his character is clearly portrayed this way. They meet him in a bar described as a "wretched hive of scum and villainy," where he's willing to smuggle passengers, where he shoots Greedo, making a clever quip as he leaves. And this is just in the first few minutes of meeting his character. In fact, we should never underestimate the importance of a character's initial introduction to the reader in solidifying the unique characteristics of your character in the minds of the reader.

Now, what particular details make a character compelling? The Writer's Digest has a nice little article on How to Craft Compelling Characters, which opens by describing four main elements of a good character: ambition, secret, contradiction, vulnerability. It's a good list. I personally would quibble and say that it's really ambition (give your character driving goal or a dream or need) and vulnerability that are the most important and that a secret (an important something hidden) and a contradiction (having multiple characteristics that contradict on another) are potent but inessential. Additionally, we might also expand this list, such as the importance of giving characters small flaws people can relate to, giving them memorable idiosyncrasies, making them dynamic (they are changed by events) and so on, but I think this gets to the core of important elements of good characterization.

Such a list is a useful lens to help us further evaluate and improve characters from our own stories. For example, none of the characters in Phantom Menace have any defining ambition and they're not portrayed as fairly vulnerable. Sure, they're trying to achieve certain ends throughout the film, but they aren't portrayed as being really driven by a defining goal. Their goals are really just a function of the situation. It can also help us understand that classic saw of literary criticism, why the character of Satan in Paradise Lost is vastly more interesting than the character of Adam. The most important reasons are that Satan has an ambitious goal (he wants to mar God's new creation) and he is vulnerable (he's distinctly weaker than God, has been defeated by Him once, and is going up against Him again).

It goes without saying that the more originality you can put into developing these characteristics, the more memorable they'll be. Nonetheless, these are good starting points to helping you evaluate and improve your characters, and it's good to try to employ these exercises to improve a story.

Creating good characters

Creative Writing Exercises

One of my writing teachers gave us once a really great exercise for helping a writer to work on description. The basic idea is that you give yourself, or your students, a limited set of events, something that could be described in maybe a page or two, and have them write it out in fifteen pages. No dialogue, no internal monologue, just description.

The way he gave it to us, our story had to have these elements: 1) the protagonist wakes up on the second floor of a building 2) the protagonist goes down to the first floor 3) On the first floor is someone that the protagonist wants to avoid 4) That someone needs to be sensed without being seen (such as heard, smelled or felt) 5) The protagonist needs to exit the building and get into a vehicle of some sort; anything, as long as it produces some sort of noise 6) It needs to be 15 pages long (in other words, 4500 words) and 7) It can't have any dialogue or internal monologue.

The students in our class came up with all types of different stories, despite the limitations. One story was about a girl waking up in her boyfriend's house and hearing her boyfriend's mother downstairs, realizing she had to get out of the house without being seen by the mother. Another was about a guy waking up in a drunken stupor at the office and trying to get out without getting noticed. You could have a story of someone waking up a trying to steal. Mine was about aliens kidnapping a man for testing, and him waking up, severely weakened by the drugs and struggling to get out of the building.

The story that results will probably not be a good story. Since you'll be padding it out with so much extra description and expostulation, it'll plod along slowly, but it's good for forcing yourself to practice those techniques. And if you struggle writing 15 pages, then description might be something you need to work more on.

One of my writing teachers gave us once a really great exercise for helping a writer to work on description. The basic idea is that you give yourself, or your students, a limited set of events, something that could be described in maybe a page or two, and have them write it out in fifteen pages. No dialogue, no internal monologue, just description.

The way he gave it to us, our story had to have these elements: 1) the protagonist wakes up on the second floor of a building 2) the protagonist goes down to the first floor 3) On the first floor is someone that the protagonist wants to avoid 4) That someone needs to be sensed without being seen (such as heard, smelled or felt) 5) The protagonist needs to exit the building and get into a vehicle of some sort; anything, as long as it produces some sort of noise 6) It needs to be 15 pages long (in other words, 4500 words) and 7) It can't have any dialogue or internal monologue.

The students in our class came up with all types of different stories, despite the limitations. One story was about a girl waking up in her boyfriend's house and hearing her boyfriend's mother downstairs, realizing she had to get out of the house without being seen by the mother. Another was about a guy waking up in a drunken stupor at the office and trying to get out without getting noticed. You could have a story of someone waking up a trying to steal. Mine was about aliens kidnapping a man for testing, and him waking up, severely weakened by the drugs and struggling to get out of the building.

The story that results will probably not be a good story. Since you'll be padding it out with so much extra description and expostulation, it'll plod along slowly, but it's good for forcing yourself to practice those techniques. And if you struggle writing 15 pages, then description might be something you need to work more on.

Creative Writing Exercises

Fragments

Several years ago my mother, who is an elementary school teacher, got The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg as a book for class. She was excited about it and showed me. The concept of the book is that Harris Burdick approaches a children's book publisher with his portfolio which includes fourteen pages from various children's books he'd created. Unfortunately, Burdick disappeared before any more information was forthcoming and all that was left were this set of fourteen pictures with caption and book title. In short, it's 14 fragments of children's books. Van Allsburg wrote it in the hope that the various fragments would serve as inspiration, with kid's writing their own stories built upon the fragment, and my mother was planning on using it the same way, to inspire her kids to wrte stories. I thought the book was quite awesome, but was inspired quite differently, thinking it would be more fun to write a series of fragments myself, in my own style.

I remember in one of my classes on British Romanticism we covered the poetry fragment as an art form. The most famous poetry fragment is "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which was a poem that, according to Coleridge's account, came to him in an opium dream and was of some 200 to 300 lines in length. Upon waking, he began to write it, composing the 54 lines, but then was interrupted by the "Person from Porlock" who detained him for an hour. After that point, when he returned to the poem, he found that he couldn't reconstruct the rest of it. It's not entirely clear whether this account by Coleridge is a true story or a piece of fiction meant to add to the poem, but the poem is definitely comes across as incomplete. The intrigue of the fragmentary nature in general and of "Kubla Kahn" in particular is that it is only a part of a much grander vision, that the reader can vaguely imagine, and those vague imaginings will be much greater than anything tangible that could've been produced. Coleridge published another famous fragment "Christabel," about a victimized woman named Geraldine who Christabel helps and later discovers has some sort of dark, mysterious powers. Coleridge had some plans for how to complete it, but just didn't, perhaps because he was indecisive about how specifically to end it. But the poem was among the inspirations of Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian vampire tale Carmilla, which could be seen as almost like an attempt to complete the story (sort of becasuse Le Fanu isn't faithful to the fragment and takes it in a much different direction than Coleridge intended). In my Romanticism class we were encouraged to write our own poetry fragments, and I dabbled in this a bit.

Inspired by the Mysteries of Harris Burdick, though, I wrote about two dozen story fragments, along with several others that I started but didn't complete (so, I guess they would be called fragmentary fragments, or something). They were divided into three kinds: dreams, conversations and fragments. The dreams, were just fragments that were loosely based on dreams that I'd had. The conversations were simply sections of dialogue. And everything else I wrote was classed as a fragment. All three types were meant to be read as pieces of a larger story, which the reader would imagine, as if they were a page torn out of a novel, which had been lost. People can't help but try to fill in the tantalizing mystery, and there's no disappointment of a resolution to a mystery that turns out to be dull and banal since the reader resolves it according to their own imagination. I'd hoped for the same thing as Van Allsburg, that people would be inspired to build around the fragments and create things that were very different than what I would've imagined. So, I uploaded the few that I considered pretty good to my site. Time will tell.

Several years ago my mother, who is an elementary school teacher, got The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg as a book for class. She was excited about it and showed me. The concept of the book is that Harris Burdick approaches a children's book publisher with his portfolio which includes fourteen pages from various children's books he'd created. Unfortunately, Burdick disappeared before any more information was forthcoming and all that was left were this set of fourteen pictures with caption and book title. In short, it's 14 fragments of children's books. Van Allsburg wrote it in the hope that the various fragments would serve as inspiration, with kid's writing their own stories built upon the fragment, and my mother was planning on using it the same way, to inspire her kids to wrte stories. I thought the book was quite awesome, but was inspired quite differently, thinking it would be more fun to write a series of fragments myself, in my own style.

I remember in one of my classes on British Romanticism we covered the poetry fragment as an art form. The most famous poetry fragment is "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which was a poem that, according to Coleridge's account, came to him in an opium dream and was of some 200 to 300 lines in length. Upon waking, he began to write it, composing the 54 lines, but then was interrupted by the "Person from Porlock" who detained him for an hour. After that point, when he returned to the poem, he found that he couldn't reconstruct the rest of it. It's not entirely clear whether this account by Coleridge is a true story or a piece of fiction meant to add to the poem, but the poem is definitely comes across as incomplete. The intrigue of the fragmentary nature in general and of "Kubla Kahn" in particular is that it is only a part of a much grander vision, that the reader can vaguely imagine, and those vague imaginings will be much greater than anything tangible that could've been produced. Coleridge published another famous fragment "Christabel," about a victimized woman named Geraldine who Christabel helps and later discovers has some sort of dark, mysterious powers. Coleridge had some plans for how to complete it, but just didn't, perhaps because he was indecisive about how specifically to end it. But the poem was among the inspirations of Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian vampire tale Carmilla, which could be seen as almost like an attempt to complete the story (sort of becasuse Le Fanu isn't faithful to the fragment and takes it in a much different direction than Coleridge intended). In my Romanticism class we were encouraged to write our own poetry fragments, and I dabbled in this a bit.

Inspired by the Mysteries of Harris Burdick, though, I wrote about two dozen story fragments, along with several others that I started but didn't complete (so, I guess they would be called fragmentary fragments, or something). They were divided into three kinds: dreams, conversations and fragments. The dreams, were just fragments that were loosely based on dreams that I'd had. The conversations were simply sections of dialogue. And everything else I wrote was classed as a fragment. All three types were meant to be read as pieces of a larger story, which the reader would imagine, as if they were a page torn out of a novel, which had been lost. People can't help but try to fill in the tantalizing mystery, and there's no disappointment of a resolution to a mystery that turns out to be dull and banal since the reader resolves it according to their own imagination. I'd hoped for the same thing as Van Allsburg, that people would be inspired to build around the fragments and create things that were very different than what I would've imagined. So, I uploaded the few that I considered pretty good to my site. Time will tell.

Fragments