5 november 2016

(A table of contents will become available at the end of the series. Recent additions can be found in the meantime in either the posts by pear or the relationships tags. This series will remain open for additional posts and the table of contents up-to-date as new posts are added.)

Part Twenty: Conversations with Antagonists

Sooner or later, your characters are going to meet up with your antagonist for a conflict. Maybe it’s only during the climax, maybe there are meetings peppered throughout; whatever your structural choice for your narrative might be, we’re all facing one inevitable fact: Our antagonists will speak. Those lines of dialogue, those conversations your protagonist has with them may be the most difficult to nail and nail well. There are so many factors at play–style, character, goals, narrative needs, not to mention the pressure you’ve been building up about this person throughout the entire story!–that writing the dialogue well when it comes time is one of the most daunting tasks.

Avoid constant vague and/or ominous lines, including one-liners:

Let me make myself clear from the start: It’s not that you can’t have any vague, ominous, and/or one-liners, but that you should use them sparingly and judiciously. Constantly being vague, ominous, or quippy leads to a fundamental problem with the antagonist: melodrama. In fact, melodrama is exactly what your antagonist opening their mouth, ever, must vigilantly steer away from. They are the one character who has the uncanny ability to come pre-packaged in melodrama.

Last summer, we spent some time talking about handling characters’ emotions, and part of that is wrapped up in melodrama. I suggest checking out the post to find out more about spotting the beginnings of melodrama in your writing.

The allure of vague, ominous, and witty one-liners is clear: We want our antagonists to seem threatening, to feel as though they have knowledge the protagonist doesn’t have or doesn’t want them to have, to appear smart, smarter or at least more wily and cunning and 100% capable of either having or gaining the upper hand against the protagonist. After all, isn’t that the point of an antagonist?

If an antagonist only speaks in quippy one-liners, they are only ever responding to your protagonist, never initiating the action themselves. If an antagonist is only vague, they are only ever talk, never action. If an antagonist is only ominous, that sense of doom and dread becomes normal, the protagonist acclimates, and it becomes ineffective.

For your dialogue between your antagonist and protagonist to feel genuine, to feel as though they are real people rather than cardboard cut-outs, it sometimes helps to stop thinking about the interactions as having such high stakes. I know that when I’m trying to write these moments, I often find that I get too wrapped up in what the scene/conversation has to do for the story, what things I have to reveal, how much or how little should be unveiled now vs. later, further cement the antagonist as an unlikable person and the protagonist as right and virtuous. I lose sight of the characters in the midst of plot and devices.

Try to bring your thinking out of the mire of plot and back into these characters, who they are, how they speak, what their agenda within the conversation is. They’re just people, trying to do something within the scene. If this were another person who happened to be in their way (a construction worker whose ladder is in the way, or who can’t let them into a room while they’re putting in the carpet, whatever), how would your characters react? Without the knowledge that this is their Big Bad, their #1 Enemy, their Most Hated Rival, how would they navigate the scene? Distancing the characters a little bit from their archetypal story purposes may help you focus better on writing good dialogue and maintaining your characters rather than shoe-horning in the information just for the sake of it.

Avoid extreme emotional reactions:

If you’re one of those writers who can more or less see your story animated like a movie in your mind, you may have experienced the moment where a character says, does, or reveals something, and that ominous beat of music plays–ba-doom!–and the scene cuts to black. Something big, something revolutionary, something the audience needs time to process just happened and a commercial break just played in the metaphorical episode of your tale. Moments like that are great in TV and movies, but the only version of that available in story-telling is to start a new chapter. If all of your major moments and reveals require a new chapter, you’re going to wind up with a very choppy book. Many of us recognize that and turn to other options to cue the audience in to the intensity and importance of what’s been said or done. One of those tactics is, of course, using our protagonist’s and other characters’ reactions.

The classic responses include:

“No!”

“I won’t let you!”

“That’s murder!”

“You can’t do that!”

general crying,

screaming/yelling,

a general outpouring of emotion

Among the problems with all of these go-to reaction tendencies is melodrama, certainly. It throws characterization out the window in favor of emphasizing the plot/actions that have occurred, all while under the guise of maintaining and furthering characterization. That’s what makes these reactions so popular: They seem as though they are reinforcing the protagonist’s goal and mission against the antagonist, reinforcing their character. Instead what they do is insult the intelligence of your audience.

If you’ve written your protagonist well, these lines and emotions toward the actions of the antagonist become redundant and don’t necessarily further or develop new facets about your characters. Your audience knows they don’t want the antagonist to do The Thing™, that’s the whole point! That’s what you’ve been building to this entire time! So of course they’re not going to let the antagonist do That; of course they’re upset about it.

It may also be an out-of-character reaction, worse of all. If your protagonist hasn’t been prone to emotional outbursts throughout the story but instead handles things going wrong with snark, outward calm, and a sense of just-get-things-done-cry-about-it-later, then an emotional breakdown at this moment doesn’t follow in line with what you’ve established about the character. “But it’s showing the stress they’re under and the heightened sense of impending danger! Their goals are in jeopardy!” you say. True, but it’s also probably not what your character would do.

We feel strapped in to these reactions because they’re what happens in movies, TV, and a thousand other books. These are the reactions that must happen in order for things to be “right” and fulfilling. In truth, they’re archetypes of emotion that come hand-in-hand with the antagonist/protagonist relationship. It’s time to break away and write real reactions from our characters, ones they would really make.

Unknown

IG: kau_ssar

(2/2) —starts with a flashback (growing up and falling in love) and then followed by the present day (tension and awkwardness to slowly falling in love with each other again), and you could see the connection between the past and present. Also, it kind of slowly shows what their relationship was/is without giving too much away in one go. But I’ve seen people say things about using flashbacks and it made me rethink doing that. What should I do?

I think this sounds like an amazing story, and thank you for messaging me about it! It’s always an honor to get to hear about a story in the works. I can say completely honestly that I would love to read a story formatted in this way. 

Writers are warned against flashbacks because they’re too often used to fill in holes in the plot when really there would be a better way of telling that plot point. For example, you may not need a flashback to tell about a fight between a parent and a child in the character’s youth when you could imply the fight in other ways. 

One example I can think of off the top of my head is the movie The Judge:

The main character got into a car accident with his brother in the passenger seat. While he was left uninjured, the brother was hurt so badly that he never recovered and his future as a professional baseball player was forever compromised. The father always blamed the son who was driving. 

This event was never shown in a flashback, and a flashback was never needed. Instead, we have it implied:

The would-be-baseball-player’s son finds his dad’s yearbook and says “wow I didn’t know you played, Dad!” and the adults all look at each other and change the topic

They watch a home video where they say “future MLB player” about the kid who was injured

Someone asks “how his arm is” 

There’s pictures in an old newspaper of the car crash

etc. 

The point being: it was more mysterious and more satisfying to learn this story slowly than it would have been to throw a flashback at us and simply give us the whole tale. However, your case is different. It isn’t just a flashback, it’s a lot more like framed story (read more about them here). Essentially, you’re telling two stories: the story of them falling in love and the story of them falling back in love. 

I’d recommend two things: 

Read The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks which does, quite literally, what you’re saying: it starts in the middle and shows the current day story of two lovers who have been separated falling back in love over dinner, and then flashes back to tell the story of how they fell in love the first time. And I know, The Notebook is a cliche by now you don’t have to be a Nicholas Sparks fan, and you can go ahead and keep thinking he’s cheesy after you read it if you like, but the book is different than the movie, and it’s a very good study for pulling off this sort of tale.

Watch The Last Five Years, a musical that shows a couple’s path toward break up. The woman starts at the end and tells their story by going backwards in time, while the man starts at the beginning and tells the story going forward until they meet in the middle.

So I’ve been reading a lot of amateur writing lately, and I’ve noticed what seems to be a common problem: dialogue. 

Tell me if this looks familiar. You start writing a conversation, only to look down and realize it reads like: 

“I’m talking now,” he said. 

“Yes, I noticed,” she said. 

“I have nothing much to add to this conversation,” the third person said. 

And it grates on your ears. So much ‘said.’ It looks awful! It sounds repetitive. So, naturally, you try to shake it up a bit: 

“Is this any better?” He inquired. 

“I’m not sure,” she mused. 

“I definitely think so!” that other guy roared. 

This is not an improvement. This is worse. 

Now your dialogue is just as disjointed as it was before, but you have the added problem of a bunch of distracting dialogue verbs that can have an unintentionally comedic effect. 

So here’s how you avoid it: You mix up the dialogue with description. 

“Isn’t this better?” he asked, leaning forward in his seat. “Don’t you feel like we’re more grounded in reality?” 

She nodded, looking down at her freshly manicured nails. “I don’t feel like a talking head anymore.” 

“Right!” that annoying third guy added. “And now you can get some characterization crammed into the dialogue!” 

The rules of dialogue punctuation are as follows: 

Each speaker gets his/her own paragraph - when the speaker changes, you start a new paragraph. 

Within the speaker’s own paragraph, you can include action, interior thoughts, description, etc. 

You can interrupt dialogue in the middle to put in a “said” tag, and then write more dialogue from that same speaker. 

You can put the “said” tag at the beginning or end of the sentence. 

Once you’ve established which characters are talking, you don’t need a “said” tag every time they speak. 

ETA: use a comma instead of a period at the end of a sentence of dialogue, and keep the ‘said’ tag in lower caps. If you end on a ? or !, the ‘said’ tag is still in lower case. (thanks, commenters who pointed this out!) 

Some more examples: 

“If you’re writing an incomplete thought,” he said, “you put a comma, then the quote mark, then the dialogue tag.” 

“If the sentence ends, you put in a period.” She pointed at the previous sentence. “See? Complete sentences.” 

“You can also replace the dialogue tag with action.” Extra guy yawned. “When you do, you use a period instead of a comma.”

So what do you do with this newfound power? I’m glad you asked. 

You can provide description of the character and their surroundings in order to orient them in time and space while talking. 

You can reveal characterization through body language and other nonverbal cues that will add more dimension to your dialogue. 

You can add interior thoughts for your POV character between lines of dialogue - especially helpful when they’re not saying quite what they mean. 

You can control pacing. Lines of dialogue interrupted by descriptions convey a slower-paced conversation. Lines delivered with just a “said” tag, or with no dialogue tag at all, convey a more rapid-fire conversation. 

For example: 

“We’ve been talking about dialogue for a while,” he said, shifting in his seat as though uncomfortable with sitting still. 

“We sure have,” she agreed. She rose from her chair, stretching. “Shall we go, then?” 

“I think we should.” 

“Great. Let’s get out of here.” 

By controlling the pacing, you can establish mood and help guide your reader along to understanding what it is that you’re doing. 

Relationships, especially in beginner writer’s works, have a tendency to feel forced. Even in some popular and famous works of fiction, the relationship doesn’t feel natural. It seems like a boring afterthought which the writer added in at the last minute. Far too often, I find myself completely indifferent to a character’s romantic life. A good romance in a story will give the reader a bit of second-hand infatuation. They’ll root for the relationship, beg for it. If the romance is well written, you can make a reader smile and blush just by reading a few sentences. When done properly, it can even compensate for a weak and cliché plot.

But first, decide whether the romance is needed. If you’re adding a character to the plot simply for the sake of being a love interest, it’s probably not a needed romance. You can still add it, of course, but it will be much harder to keep your story focused on the central plot.

Step One Make sure the characters have chemistry.

The characters should compliment each other’s personalities. If he’s loud, stubborn, and aggressively opinionated, a more tranquil and soft-spoken love interest would suit him well. Two headstrong people wouldn’t be likely to have a lasting relationship in real life, unless they (impossibly) agreed upon every subject. But, there should be some similarities. While opposites do attract, polar opposites will not and the whole relationship will feel forced. The characters should have something in common. It could be morals, a parallel backstory, the same motivations, whatever. As long as there’s a reason for them to be drawn to each other, there’s potential.

Step Two Slow burn ships are fantastic.

Don’t make your characters fall in love right off the bat. There can be attraction, of course, but genuine feelings of true love don’t happen instantly. Your characters should become closer as people, feel at ease around each other, and truly know the other before they fall head-over-heels. The readers will crave the relationship far more, like dangling a treat right in front of a dog’s nose, but keep pulling it away. Teasing is a beautiful thing.

Find ways of showing (NOT TELLING) the characters are falling for each other. Have them stand up for one another, be protective. Have them break their own normal routine for the other. For example, a callous, guarded character could lower their walls for a moment if their love interest needs emotional support. These scenes can be awkward for the character changing their typical behavior and that discomfort can demonstrate how much they care for the other, altering their own selves for the other’s benefit.

Howeve, make sure that you combine these cute emotional moments with distance. Make the characters deny their true feelings or even distance themselves from their love interest upon discovering their feelings. The more the characters long for each other, the more the reader will long for them to be together. Build barriers between them for your characters to have to work to knock down. Keep them close, but maintain that distance until the moment is right.

Step Three “_____” translates to “I love you”

The first example of I think of when I think of this is The Princess Bride, where the male protagonist tells his soulmate “as you wish” when he really means “I love you.”

This falls under the category of show, don’t tell. Hearing a character say “I love you” has become so boring. Unless it’s done in a surprising confession or unique way, it’s boring and stale.

Come up with a phrase that you can repeat in moments throughout the story until it has a meaning of love for the characters and both know exactly what the other means when it’s spoken.

Step Four Taking a break can help create tension.

You know you loved someone if you leave them and feel awful. Apply this into the writing. Your characters can break up, then get back together in a joyous reunion.

Step Five Not every couple has a happy ending.