DOUBLE-DUTY: PUTTING A FACE ON CONFLICT IN AN SFR

I just got off the phone—literally—with author Susan Grant. I have no idea how she has time to call in between piloting 747s, writing her books, tending to her fur persons and dealing with two teenagers at home (the last, as I told her, is like having five children at home). But she’s a sweetheart and she calls to chat about writing and what’s going on, and one thing we both hit on was the importance of creating a proper villain in our stories.

She already has hers, lucky dog. I’m still working on mine.

Creating the antagonist (that’s the foo-foo writerly word for bad guy…guy being generic) has always been tough for me. Susan and I discussed the fact that so often in science fiction/science fiction romance, the antagonist is less a person/sentient and more often something like, like the Ubiquitous Evil Empire or Corporation. But even empires and corporations need someone to pull the trigger. And that trigger person has to have the same goals and motivations, fears and desires structured in as your protagonists do.

It’s even better when the antagonist is less the Evil Empire and more the crazed, wacko, jealous, bitter but deep down inside nice person craving love and affection kind of character. Who may or may not work for the Evil Empire but certainly has an agenda or his or her own.

Those are the more difficult characters for me to craft. I’m better at the minions—the characters who operate under the direction of the Evil Empire—than at the individual self-motivated, self-contained baddy.

However, in SHADES OF DARK, I learned just how much fun it was to write the self-motivated, self-contained baddy in the character of Captain Del Regarth. And that made me want to do it again.

Trouble is, not every plot line that leaps into my head comes complete with a self-contained baddy. SHADES did. It was likely the exception that proves the rule. So with my current WIP, I’m trying to create a self-contained baddy or two. Because they’re honestly more fun to write.

Del was hugely fun to write. I don’t want to get into spoilers for those of you who’ve not read SHADES OF DARK (and #1, why haven’t you? And #2, do read GABRIEL’S GHOST first). Del actually had some heroic moments. Del actually saves the day a few times. Del actually is sexy and almost endearing in some scenes.

He’s also selfish, manipulative, condescending and spoiled rotten. And very very deadly.

In my current WIP—the follow-on book to HOPE’S FOLLY and one which I, quite uncharacteristically, can NOT seem to come up with a title for—in this current WIP it feels like I’m going to have two rather self-contained antagonists. Oh, there’s still the Evil Empire looming in the background. But I want to have real faces to put on the conflict.

That means creating two characters as in-depth as I do my protagonists.
Don’t you always do that, Linnea? You ask.

Uh, no. I don’t.

See, let me explain something about writing cross-genre romance, and science fiction romance in general.

Every novel anyone writes has a plot (or should have). In a mystery novel, for example, it’s the whodunit. There’s the cop or agent or PI. There’s the mystery (the dead body, the missing necklace, the kidnapped grandmother). There’s the bad guy. The conflict is clearly between the cop and the bad guy over whatever the mystery element is. In a fantasy novel, there’s the prince, the kingdom to be saved, and the fire-breathing dragon who wants to toast the town. Literally.

Okay, I’m being simplistic but I hope you get the drift.

When you write cross-genre and/or science fiction romance, things get more complicated. You have the adventure or mystery plotline (can the destitute starfreighter captain rescue her friend from the evil alien kidnappers?) and the romance plotline (can the destitute starfreighter captain risk having her heart broken by the imperious military officer who’s help she needs to rescue her friend from the evil alien kidnappers?). Falling in love in the midst of the mystery complicates things. You essentially have two parallel plotlines to construct, work with and solve. (And yes, I’m obliquely dealing with my FINDERS KEEPERS plotline here.) You have the adventure plot. You have the romance plot. You have the emotional conflict between the hero and heroine in the romance plot. You have the physical conflict between the hero/heroine and the bad guy in the adventure part of the plot.

For a good part of your book, your hero or heroine may actually also function as antagonist as well as protagonist, in addition to your book’s other antagonist in the form of the bad guy.

Confused yet?

(Think that’s bad, you should have seen me struggling with GAMES OF COMMAND in which I had two sets of hero/heroines with romance plots to solve AND both male protagonists had valid issues where they could also be functioning as undercover agents for the over-arcing antagonist of the Evil Empire AND on top of that I had to have some actual “has a face” antagonists…phew! And people wonder why authors drink…)

So the author of any cross-genre romance essentially must do twice the work of any solo-genre author in constructing characters, conflict and plot.

Didn’t realize that, did you? (And—more food for thought—we must do it in the same word count allotted to solo-genre books. So we have to do twice the story in the same amount of space. And you wonder why authors drink…)

What I find happens with me is that after roughing out my protagonists in the romance part of the story—and figuring out how they’ll be antagonists to each other for a period of the book—I’m fresh out of ideas for a self-contained antagonist who will come up against my hero and heroine. Just to make life more difficult.

As I said (whined) to Susan Grant on the phone: can’t we just have Generic Bad Guy? Does he or she have to have motivations? Can’t he just be BAD?

Nope. You need a face on conflict.

Susan had one great suggestion: look to the news. The media is full of bad guy stories, from politics in any given country to the pirates in the shipping lanes over in the Middle East, from which to craft an antagonist. Real life examples exist all around us. Greed afloat, in the latter case. A little research into current events—and reading the news analysis of same—can give you a lot of background with which to plop into your antagonist’s character chart.

The other—for me—is simply to do a character chart for the antagonist(s). I’ve really not done them before—at least, not in any detail. (IE: in AN ACCIDENTAL GODDESS I knew what motivated Rigo and Blass at that point at which they appear, but I didn’t know anything about their histories.) Writing Del in SHADES changed all that.

So for me, putting a face on my conflict now means going far more in depth on my “adventure plotline” antagonist than I have before. It means doing a lot of backstory that will not show up in the book other than as motivations. It means forcing myself to give the antagonists some likeable characteristics. I read somewhere, “Remember: the bad guy is the hero in his own mind” and that thought is really what sparked Del and what I hope sparks the baddies in my current WIP.

That doesn’t mean at all that the Evil Empire as antagonist is wrong. For a lot of books—many of which I’ve written—that’s exactly where and what the baddie needs to be. Sometimes the greater threat must really feel greater and all-encompassing. Sometimes one bad-ass dude with a laser pistol just ain’t enough.

But when you need a self-contained bad guy, Susan’s suggestions of starting with news articles (or even history—if she has time to post I’ll let her relate the story about Hitler she told me) is a good jumping off point for your creativity.

Then spend some time working with that character’s backstory, as deeply as you do for your protagonists. Get in to the antagonist’s “But I’m a Hero too!” mindset.

It may not make your book any easier to write. But it will definitely make it more fun.

~Linnea

SHADES OF DARK, the sequel to Gabriel’s Ghost, July 2008 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: http://www.linneasinclair.com/

Chaz, Del is not the problem you perceive him to be.

Let’s see. He ambushes me on Narfial, blocks you, wanted to neutralize Marsh and then locks you away from me in some mystical woo-woo place that used to be a shuttle bay. In between all that, he has an annoying habit of calling me “angel” and “lover,” walks a very thin line between harmless flirtation and practiced seduction, and then has the balls to say I’m touchy. I have no idea why I think he’s a problem.

Addiction, Danger and Flaws, Oh My!

Continuing Rowena’s theme from yesterday, I’m going to yammer on today about the flaws in characters in SFR, not just because I think it’s a worthy subject, but because I think it’s a fun one.

Rowena’s right: we do tend to load our alpha (and other) characters with problems. There are a couple of reasons for that (and many of you probably already know them if you study the craft of writing fiction).

One has to do with the Mary Sue Complex (or Marty Sam, if you will). The Mary Sue/Marty Sam is the character that is too perfect—not only to be believable—but to be likeable. Remember the girl in high school who was not only the best cheerleader but she was the prom queen and class president? Her clothes never wrinkled, her hair never frizzed and she never once had a zit. Remember how much you hated her?

That’s why we don’t write Mary Sues/Marty Sams. Readers can’t identify with them (neither can authors—my hair frizzes and my clothes and my skin both wrinkle). Instead we create characters with flaws, quirks, foibles, follies, addictions and annoying habits.

You know. Like us.

The second reason we love flawed characters is that we want to see a character succeed and grow. If the character is already perfect, there’s no growth. It was either Jack Bickham or Dwight Swain (both are writing gurus and I’m not going to drag out their tomes to figure out who said it) who said that readers have a need to pass judgment on someone (ie: character). Part of that “passing judgment” means judging whether the character DESERVES to win the book’s stated goal. If that character already has everything, is perfect, then it’s likely the reader will find some other character in some other book more deserving.

The third reason is that—according to Dwight Swain—a character “must start a fire he can’t put out” in the opening part of the book. Perfect characters don’t start fires and if they do, they can put them out, perfectly. So the “can’t put out” is lost with a perfect character.

We want the warts and all with our characters.

Only one of my characters to date had a stated addiction to a physical substance—and that’s Sully (Gabriel Ross Sullivan) in Gabriel’s Ghost and Shades of Dark. His addiction was to a substance known as honeylace—a drug of sorts, illegal except when used in religious ceremonies. Sully’s addiction to honeylace was his means of coping with the pain of what he was: a mutant human-Ragkiril, a telepathic shape shifter whose powers were feared and hated by everyone around him. Including himself. It was a combination of self-loathing and self-preservation that made him indulge in honeylace. Honeylace kept his talents muted. He needed that to survive in a world that would otherwise deem him the lowest of outcasts.

But addictions aren’t only to substances. Rhis in Finders Keepers was, quite honestly, a power addict. He was the one no one dared say “no” to. Except, of course, Trilby. She became the fire he couldn’t put out.

Branden Kel-Paten had a number of addictions, not the least of which was his obsession with Tasha Sebastian. I mean, he had her followed—for years. He hacked into her transmits. He dictated long missives to her (that he never sent). He had a secret stash of photos and holos of her. We’re talking serious addiction. (And it has been rightly pointed out that many characters in present day novels would, if real people, likely be arrested and/or committed to psych wards. But that’s because fiction is larger than real life. And—as Jacqueline Lichtenberg has wisely noted, fiction is drama.)

Kel-Paten was also obsessive with his privacy, his ship and his fleet. He was a rigid individual in many ways (his cybernetics notwithstanding) because he found solace and protection in that rigidity.

Both Admiral Mack (An Accidental Goddess) and Detective Theo Petrakos (The Down Home Zombie Blues) were work-a-holics. A benign flaw in some ways and also in some ways an addiction. Both defined themselves by their jobs. And interestingly, in Zombie Blues, so did my female protagonist, Commander Jorie Mikkalah, zombie-hunter extraordinaire. Conversely in Goddess, the last thing Gillie wanted was to be defined by her job. She didn’t want her job at all (and she clearly stated that several times in the book. She wanted to be “just Gillie.” Not a goddess. Not a sorceress. Not someone to be worshipped.) So while I paired Gillie and Mack as opposites, I paired Theo and Jorie as two sides of the same coin.

Did I do this deliberately? Yes. Why? Because of something on conflict I read on Jacqueline’s site:

"What is keeping them apart" is the CONFLICT. Misunderstanding and distrust are minor and trivial complications. The CONFLICT has to be real, about something substantive. And it has to be both INTERNAL and EXTERNAL at the same time - reflected one in the other. And each of them has to have the OBVERSE of the other's conflict if you're going to do dual-pov. Take her internal conflict,
twist it 180 degrees, and that's HIS internal conflict. (You can get a more complex novel by twisting her inner conflict into his external conflict).

I had to read that over about a dozen times before I “got it” and I’m still not sure I totally have it. But it’s something I use to work flaws and addictions and obsessions and danger into my characters and my stories.

In Hope’s Folly, one of Rya Bennton’s inner conflicts is her overwhelming sense of being unworthy. Of not being good enough, pretty enough, thin enough, experienced enough. So I took that and slapped it onto Philip Guthrie’s external issues. I put him in a situation where his previously acknowledged (and in some cases, lauded) experience, expertise and reputation were shattered. His external authority was challenged while her internal self-authority caused her pain.

Rya saw herself as flawed. Philip was born with the proverbial and clichéd silver spoon in his mouth. But because of that, his personal expectations were also very high. And the higher you are, the more painful the landing when you fall.

They both fell…and fell in love.

Flaws and all.

~Linnea

www.linneasinclair.com

First Chapter Foibles

Since Cindy talked about prologues, I'll talk about first chapters. I know we played around with opening lines/scenes a few weeks back. We'll deal less with word choice here and more with content.

One of the biggest problems writers have is where and when to start the story. If you're like me, most of your stories emerge as a serious of scenes or conflicts in your mind--rather like a movie trailer with flashes of action, passion, problems. If you're lucky, the opening scene is in one of those flashes.

I'm rarely lucky. More often, I have to ruminate on the feelings those flashes have given me. I have to let what I see as the conflicts percolate, ferment. I have to get into my characters' skins. Then I have to decide where and when to start the story.

I learned that's easier to decide when I listen to the experts:

"You can start a story in any way and at any point and, regrettably, I've read the manuscripts that prove it," writes Dwight V Swain in his Techniques of a Selling Writer. "But that doesn't mean that some beginnings aren't better (read: 'more effective') than others." To Swain, the more effective technique involves change. "To start a story, a change my prove the trigger for continuing consequences. That is, it must set off a chain reaction. Responding to change, your character must do something that brings unanticipated results. He must light a fire he can't put out."

I love that last line: He must light a fire he can't put out.

"The story starts where the elements that will conflict to generate the plot first come together, eyeball to eyeball," says Jacqueline Lichtenberg on her Sime~Gen writer's school pages. "That contact starts the cause-effect chain which is the plot. The story can't start until that has happened. The story is the sequence of changes inside the character caused by his changing internal conflict. It is SPURRED by confrontation with the external conflict. "

Continuing consequences or cause-and-effect chain... it doesn't matter what you call it. But the impetus is the same. Something significant (to the character) and unexpected happens. This is where you start your story.

"Every good story starts at a moment of threat," writes Jack Bickham in his The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes. "Nothing is more threatening than change."

Now, don't be overpowered by the words here: conflict, threat, change. This does not mean you have to start your story with a car going over a cliff. Though that certainly is attention-getting. Threat and change can be small things. They only have to be big to your main character. Whatever the threat or change is must matter deeply to your main character. It can be something as innocuous as a change of schedule. Or a cell-phone mistakenly left at home that day. It can be a decision a character makes, believing it's the right decision. But it turns out to be very, very wrong. (IE: the road to hell is paved with good intentions...)

I like to think of the key ingredient of a first chapter as The Point of No Return. From here, your main character has nowhere to go except into more trouble as he or she tries to deal with the change or threat.

However you do it, what happens in that first chapter forces the rest of the book to unfold. It's critical to remember that because one of the more common errors I see in beginning novelists is to start with a lot of backstory, or a travelogue or paragraphs and paragraphs of setting description. They don't get to the change, the impetus for the conflict, until chapter 3 (and many an agent or editor will tell you that beginning writers' manuscripts can almost all have the first two chapters deleted and be the better for it--for just that reason).

"Fiction looks forward, not backward," Bickham writes. "When you start a story with background information, you point the reader in the wrong direction, and put her off. If she had wanted old news, she would have read yesterday's newspaper."

I've used exactly those techniques in every one of my published novels. In Finders Keepers, Captain Trilby Elliot's routine repairs on her ship are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of an enemy ship...that crashes. And presents her with a wounded survivor. In Gabriel's Ghost, Captain Chaz Bergren's daily fight to survive on a prison planet is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a former enemy--who she believed to be dead. In An Accidental Goddess, Gillie Davre wakes up in a space station sickbay--three hundred and forty two years later. In Games of Command, Captain Tasha Sebastian learns she's been busted down to the rank of commander and now must work side by side with a former enemy. And in The Down Home Zombie Blues, Commander Jorie Mikkalah arrives on a planet to find her undercover agent is dead and a key piece of equipment is now in the hands of the locals.

Each of my main characters handles the change by starting a fire she can't put out. Every one of these changes put my main characters eye to eye with the cause of the conflict.

Backstory, history and setting are all woven in as the characters act and respond. As they move from one problem to the next. As they take one step forward and two steps back. As conflict builds. Until by the end of the first chapter, the character has nowhere to go but into more trouble.

And the reader has no choice but to turn the page to start Chapter Two.

Take a hard and honest look at the first chapter in your unpublished manuscript or work-in-progress. Have you opened at The Point Of No Return? Or have you started with backstory, or have you left your character too many routes of escape, too many options?

~Linnea
www.linneasinclair.com