You’re writing a book about a candidate trying to join the Navy SEALs. If his quest gets too hard, he can always walk away. That’s a lousy plot. There’s no consequence for failure! If failure is an acceptable option, we probably won’t care whether the character succeeds. You can make this story more dramatic by adding personal urgency. For example, perhaps the SEAL candidate had a brother or father that died as a SEAL and he sees it as his life’s mission to finish the job.
Here are some other suggestions to keep your characters in the story.
There is nothing to return to. The Empire killed Luke’s family. (Careful, this is a bit cliche).
Too much is at stake to walk away. In The Day After Tomorrow, the protagonist doesn’t have to trek from Philadelphia to Manhattan, but it’s the only way to save his son. Alternately, the characters in LOTR have no choice but to fight their genocidal enemies.
The character physically cannot walk away. If your character is in prison, he can’t avoid the local thugs. His only choices are submission and resistance. Alternately, she may be trapped on a spaceship with a killer alien.
Given a choice, try to find cause and effect. One event happens because of something else we’ve seen — ideally, something the hero himself has done.
Instead of having the hero accidentally overhear a key conversation, get him actively trying to listen. Or have an interested third party steer him in that direction — perhaps for his own reasons. At every juncture where a reader could ask “Why did that happen?”, try to have an answer that isn’t, “just because.”
CADET DAVIS ADDS: The most contrived plot I can think of is Heroes season 2. Please consider the following…
In the last two minutes of the first season, Sylar is nearly killed by a crowd of ten heroes but somehow slinks away into a sewer. No one, including a psychopathic MPD victim or the police officer who was seriously wounded by Sylar, thinks to make sure that he’s dead or otherwise accounted for.
The Company captures Sylar and keeps the formerly-superpowered serial killer in a zero-security facility with a single attendant that is tasked with restoring Sylar’s powers. There’s no reason to suspect that Sylar would have made a good employee under any circumstances, but how were they hoping that this would turn out?
Sylar kills the attendant and walks out of the facility. He tries to return to the US to find Suresh, but he drops of famine along the side of the road. The first person to come across him is Maya, another superpowered person that’s looking for Dr. Suresh’s father. What a lucky break! Sure, why not come along?
In spite of being wanted for murder and presumably not wanting to attract suspicion, Maya and her brother take Sylar along. Do not pay attention to the gringo in the back seat!
Peter’s failure to consider the possibility that Adam is evil starts out as implausible and gets so unbelievable that it strains the suspension of disbelief. Peter knows the following facts: The Company has held the virus for 30+ years without using it. Shortly after Adam escapes, the virus is unleashed. If you’re wondering whether Adam’s escape is related to the release of the virus, you’re already 5 episodes smarter than Peter.
One of the easiest ways to create comedy is to use a double act. You set up a comedic conflict between two characters– usually, one character is sober and the other is crazy or one is savvy and the other is clueless. This is a very flexible setup that can handle most genres. For example…
Many villains do gratuitously bad stuff to remind us that they’re EVIL. For example, the nerdy antagonist in Live Free or Die Hard coldly executes his hackers even though there’s surely enough money to go around (ahem… hundreds of billions of dollars). Not only was it unnecessary for him to kill the hackers, but it was also out of character (he didn’t seem otherwise psychopathic). There’s no reason he should have been that evil– it didn’t gel with his main objective, which was to show his old agency that it was wrong to cast him aside.
Authors usually write their villains as gratuitously evil to make them badass. That rarely works. Except for Dark Knight’s Joker*, superevil villains are rarely as badass as their more restrained peers (such as Darth Vader, Dr. Octopus, Naomi Novik’s Napoleon and Dr. Doom). Why are superevil villains insufficently badass? A villain that feels more evil than his plot requires is probably cartoonish. In contrast, a badass villain is almost always serious and sober.
*In case you’re interested, I argue below the jump that the DK Joker isn’t unnecessarily evil.
Tobias Buckell gathered some data describing how much authors make on their first advance. The median author in SF or fantasy makes $5000. The average in both categories is slightly higher (about $6500), but that’s probably distorted by a few superstars that skewed the distribution curve.
He also broke the data down by agented vs. unagented submissions. The median advance for an unagented manuscript is $4000, compared to $5500 for an agented manuscript. You might think to yourself “aha! I will make more if I have a superior negotiator on my side!” That’s probably true, but please also consider that a novelist that is good enough to convince an agent to work with him is probably better-than-average to begin with. In addition to that selection bias, you’d also have to factor in the agent’s share of the advance.
That said, I think an agent can be a powerful ally and (all things considered) one that will probably pay for himself.
If you’re interested in writing about thieves at the top of their game, you might find it interesting to know how the super-wealthy protect themselves. For example, a German shepherd from a security services firm will cost $40,000. What kind of face-ripper does that buy you? Here’s what one customer says…
In Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Clark Kent is written to be an idealized Red-Stater and Lois Lane is an idealized Blue-Stater. What I love about her, compared to the average damsel in distress, is that she adds something. She completes him. Usually, fictional stories write love interests as cardboard characters designed to show that the protagonist has “arrived.” The love interest is usually a status symbol without any endearing traits. If the love interest is developed at all, it will be in terms of how desirable a status symbol she is: she’s really beautiful and super high-class! Enter Eragon, stage right.
On Fiction Addiction, literary agent Jeff Kleinman offers a few ways to protect your plot ideas. I have nothing against copyright registration (although it is unnecessary for novelists), but I wouldn’t recommend getting hung up on fears that someone is going to steal your ideas. Most novels excel based on their execution rather than their original content. An extraordinarily well-written story will stand out even if its premise is time-worn.
For example, His Majesty’s Dragon has a premise very similar to Harry Turtledove’s Into the Darkness. (Humans use dragons to fight Napoleon or a thinly-veiled fantasy Hitler, respectively). HMD is drastically better, not because its plot is original but because its characters are far better-executed and its writing is snappier. If someone writes a book with a premise similar to yours– and that will almost assuredly happen to superhero writers– you will probably have to compete with them for readers by demonstrating superior style and execution.
I will leave you with this cryptic cartoon about the dangers of relying too much on an unusual concept to sell a book…
Homo superiors are characters that are like humans but better in every conceivable way. How would you describe how Superman differs from a human? “Well, he can do anything a human can, but a hundred times better.” He even looks like a human. Homo superiors are usually aliens or elves, but sometimes a human with enough superpowers or enhancements.
A homo superior is usually not merely better at fighting than everyone else, but also more sophisticated and savvy. If he has a character flaw, he’s probably arrogant because he knows he’s so much better than everyone else in the story.
Why Homo Superiors Wreck Stories
Homo superiors are usually undramatic. Superman never really struggles to do anything, because he’s the best at everything. But a struggling character is what makes stories interesting. If a police officer is in a standoff with a hostage-taker, that’s dramatic because we don’t know if the police officer will succeed. The police officer will only win if he’s wittier and craftier than the criminal. Perhaps he convinces the criminal to surrender. Maybe he convinces the criminal to lower his gun and then shoots him in the face. In contrast, Superman just uses his superspeed or eye-rays and stops the criminal. That’s quite boring, especially after you’ve already seen it a few times.
Homo superiors also usually lead to overpowered characters, which can make the plot feel unbelievable. Let’s say you want to write a fantasy story with a dragon rider. But why would the dragon take a rider? What does he think he gets out of having a puny human on his back? Why is Superman willing to jeopardize himself so totally for humans? I couldn’t imagine myself being so charitable to ants and, from his perspective, we must seem something like smarter ants. Why would an elf be willing to join a ragtag band of adventurers? Etc.
Fixing the Problem
The best way is to try to explore ways in which the character is either mediocre or inferior. Maybe the elf, so elegant and well-spoken, completely goes to pieces in high-stress situations like combat. Maybe a dragon is relatively vulnerable to humans, so he feels that having a human rider might make it easier to avoid needless battles. (Also, dragons might think that a rider is sort of like a servant, so it might be a status symbol).
Here are some other ways in which a character might be different and/or inferior.
If you are (or want to be) a credible writer, hopefully your sentences are free of spelling, grammatical and punctuation mistakes. No one will take your website seriously if you write like you’re texting a message. With that in mind, please check the last five comments that users have left on your blog. Do any of them meet the level you set for yourself? Even on the writing sites I follow, the comments are poorly written, sometimes so poorly that they reflect poorly on the website. Even intelligent comments are often hidden behind grammatical nonchalance. Here are some suggestions.
You should only use the word “insure” if you’re talking about buying or selling insurance policies. The word “ensure” should be used when you want to guarantee an outcome. For example, “please ensure that you don’t make that mistake.” Unfortunately, Fox News hasn’t gotten the memo…
Fox News: “We expect Russia to insure that all lines of communication and transport, including seaports, airports, roads and airspace, remain open for the delivery of humanitarian assistance and for civilian transit,” Bush said.
No, Fox, no! You will rot in the deepest, hottest bowels of grammatical hell. Devils will stab you with semi-colons until you beg for death’s sweet embrace.
If you have a list of links in your sidebar or site-map, test the links once a month. It amazes me how often we change the permalinks without updating the sidebar. The monthly link-test is easily the most productive minute I spend on website design.
