Movie Review: Brave

From the moment my brothers and I first saw the trailer for Brave, we knew we had to see it. We figured any movie that A) is about Scotland and B) contains lines like "We'll expect your declarations of war in the morning" and "No weapons on the table" (which sounds remarkably like our house) was worth our attention.
So one afternoon when we all got off work, we drove into town to see it. It was well worth the trip, and we loved it.
As a nice change of pace from the romance movies flooding the market today, Brave is actually a lovely mother-daughter story. Of course, I was a bit edgy about that too at first, considering Pixar's less-than-glorious track record of botching parent-child stories (case in point: Finding Nemo). However, I was surprised and delighted to discover that in Brave, they actually did a good job handling the development and struggles in Merida's relationship with her mother. The way they executed the final turning point had me ready to stand up and cheer, simply because I was so happy to finally see a Disney movie with a moral of humility and admitting when you're wrong.
The music was wonderful (you can't really go wrong with bagpipes and fiddles), the animation was incredible, and the story itself was delightfully entertaining - a great way to get my Scottish blood flowing.
A few things to be aware of:
One, I wouldn't show this movie to very young children. Mordu, the giant bear Merida faces, would be pretty scary for a little kid.
Two, there is some brief partial nudity at one point, when all the men get stranded on the roof of the castle and tie their kilts together as a rope to get down. I admire their resourcefulness, but still... yeah.
Three, one of the castle maids is rather well endowed by nature, shall we say, and wears a very low-cut dress that makes the issue rather difficult to ignore.
Four, magic plays a key role in the story. Merida sees will o' the wisps, meets a witch, asks for a spell to change her fate, etc. The lessons Merida learns over the course of the story subtly emphasize that magic is what got her into trouble in the first place, which I appreciated seeing, but the presence of magic as such might be a problem for some families.
Aside from that, as I said before, this was a delightful movie that I definitely plan on seeing again. And for anyone of Scottish heritage who plans on seeing this movie in the future, be warned: you might be surprised by how vividly some of your own personality traits show up in various characters. ; )

Face to Face

As writers, we see and know our characters as clearly as if they're real people. We know what makes them laugh, what makes them angry, we know what their voices sound like, and we know what they look like.
As readers, if a writer has done a good job developing the characters in a story, we know much of the same information about their characters.
But have you ever noticed that characters don't always stay inside the story where we first met them?
On multiple occasions, I've seen a movie or read a book and thought that a particular character was just like a character from another story or movie. Sometimes, I've read about a fictional character who was just like someone I know in real life.
A few times, I've written a character... and then met them in real life.
The first time it happened, it really scared me. I mean it really, really gave me a serious case of goosebumps. I was at an open house party and met a young woman who was an absolute dead-ringer for one of my characters, and I thought 'Oh my goodness, this cannot be happening! This is terrible!'
You're probably thinking that that's kind of a strange reaction to have. In my defense, the character the woman looked like happened to be an extremely evil and terrifying sorceress. So I think I deserve a break on that one. (And, as it turned out, the lady at the open house party was neither extremely evil nor a sorceress, so it was all okay in the end.)
A few years after that, I met a man who reminded me very strongly of someone, but I couldn't think of who. I was just sure I knew him from somewhere, though. Then it dawned on me that he looked just like a character from a story idea I have on the back burner, waiting for me to get to it and write it. I dug out the notebook where I have the story idea written down and re-read the physical description of that particular character. It fit this guy to a tee. And the more I got to know him, the more and more he reminded me of my character's personality.
I catch glimpses of my other characters from time to time--singing in a choir during a televised concert, ringing little bells outside Wal-Mart at Christmas time, jogging down the sidewalk, or selling books at a home schooling convention.
There's something magical about that moment. We writers carry so many different people inside of us, and even though we know they're fictional they seem real, they feel real, they are real--to us, if not to anyone else. When we suddenly stumble upon one of them face to face, in the real world, I don't think there's any way to avoid feeling a connection to them. Our minds start screaming 'Hey, that's _____! She's right there, for real! Go talk to her!' And then we have to remind ourselves that it's not really our character--which isn't always an easy thing to do.
I know I've had to fight off the urge to whip out my notebook and start bombarding a total stranger with questions about their deepest desires and secret motivations or why they refuse to get their act together and do what needs to be done. I admit it, I've shamelessly come up with excuses to strike up conversation with someone who looks like one of my characters. I might have even dropped a casual question or two... just in case.

What about you? Have you ever met or seen any of your fictional characters face to face? How did you react to it?

Arming Your Hero - Part 1

A great deal of the time, especially in fantasy fiction, weapons are very important to a story. Whether a particular weapon is the key to the hero becoming the hero, or the hero just happens to use weapons throughout his adventures, the point is the same: the average fantasy hero needs to be well-armed, and as the writer it's your job to arm him.
So where do you start? Is it enough to just hand your character a sword and send him on his merry, swashbuckling way?
Not really.
Personally, I've found that a character's personality and mindset have a great deal of influence on the type and number of weapons he carries. For this reason, I include questions about weapons in every character sketch I write. Here are some of the things I like to take into consideration:

What is the character's motivation for carrying a weapon? Is he a 'professional warrior' type (such as a soldier, knight, or bodyguard) for whom carrying a weapon is just part of the job? Is he a business man who keeps a weapon on hand simply to protect the security of his establishment?

What is the character's mindset about using his weapon(s)? Is he a bodyguard who will use his sword at the first sign of a threat to his charge? Or is he more likely to draw his weapon and hope that the sight of it will have the desired effect so he doesn't actually have to use it? Is the use of weapons his first response or his last resort?

Is there a certain effect your character is trying to achieve with his weapon choice? Is he all about practicality, or does he go in for the look of the thing too? This question works particularly well for arming the villain of your story. Does he want a weapon with swift, silent deadliness, or does he want to make a show and work off of the intimidation factor?

How much training does the character have with his weapon? Is he a knight who trains for hours every day, or a farmer who is content just knowing he has a weapon on hand?

Does backstory play a part in the weapon(s) your character carries? Is his sword one that's been in his family for generations? Does the weapon have a story of its own? Is your character's mindset about weapons affected by his backstory? Is he intimidated by weapons because his family was killed when he was a child, or is he motivated to have a weapon at all times because his family was caught unarmed and murdered?

Learning the answers to these questions will help you figure out how many and what kind of weapons your character carries. For instance, a farmer who only carries a weapon in case he happens to come across a venomous snake or wild dog probably won't be carrying a sword belt or battle axe while plowing the field. A professional fighter like a soldier or knight will probably have more of a combat preparedness mindset and carry more than one weapon.
When it comes down to choosing the right weapon for your character, though, there are dozens of options, and it's an important decision. In the end you very well may decide to stick with a basic, nondescript sword. On the other hand, though, you just might want to go in for something a little different. So in the next few posts, I'm going to be showcasing and discussing different types of weapons you may be familiar with, or perhaps weapons you've never even heard of.
Feel free to join in the conversations--that's what the comment box is for!

Meanwhile: How do you choose a character's weapons?

When Characters Can't Take It Any More

On the "Acknowledgments" page at the beginning of the book Eragon, author Christopher Paolini thanks his family, the editors who helped him with the book, you know--all the usual people. But then he also gives a 'thank you' to his characters, for bravely enduring all the things he puts them through. It made me smile.
We writers really do put our characters through some horrible stuff, don't we? And the experts are always telling us to take it up a notch, to increase the drama and tension and misery until we've driven them absolutely to rock-bottom. Fair enough. After all, what good is a story without drama? What good is a hero/heroine who doesn't have to struggle and fight to become the hero/heroine?
But our characters are human too, and a person can only take so much before emotions start getting backed up in the system and they've got to come out sometime... especially if the character in question is a girl. The result is what my mom would refer to as a 'meltdown'. (By the way, best meltdown ever: Rapunzel's little episode in the movie Tangled!)
Not too long ago, I read somewhere that in most cases your heroine shouldn't cry more than once over the course of the story. I understand the sentiment behind that statement--no one wants to read about a character who's so weak emotionally that she breaks down and sobs over everything--but still, I'm not sure I entirely agree.
I'll use one of my stories as an example: if I were to allow the heroine to cry only once over the course of this particular story, I would have to make some very tough decisions. Should she cry when her whole life's dream is ripped out from under her, or should she save it for when she loses the only family she has left? What about when one of her country's soldiers, whom she has been friends with for years, dies in her arms? Or, should she wait until her country is invaded by a demon-possessed army and she is forced to flee? Which of these events can she not cry over without seeming utterly cold and heartless?
I don't doubt that if I wrote in a huge emotional ordeal for the heroine following each of these events, the pages would begin to get soggy and readers would lose interest. But I don't think I'm going to take it so far as to allow the heroine only one round of tears over the whole story, either. My goal is to get a good balance of realistic tears when circumstances call for them, but only one big 'meltdown': that pivotal, rock-bottom moment that changes the course of both the story and the character's arc.

What are your thoughts on character meltdowns? How do you balance piling on drama and misery with keeping characters' emotions under control?
Anybody have a favorite fictional meltdown?

Where's the family?

After Monday's post, I was still thinking about children as characters in fiction. I realized that the vast majority of the time, in order for children to be central characters in an adventure plot, their parents have to be 'disposed of' in some way or other by the author. Killing them off always works--orphans have all kinds of adventures--and sending them away on the proverbial long trip is usually sufficient to allow the kids to have some thrilling adventure.
But then it occurred to me: what has happened to the family unit in fiction? I've read books about kids having adventures without their parents around, and I've read books about parents without their kids around... but I couldn't think of a single book about a family unit--parents and children--having an adventure together.
I understand that 99.999% of the time, a story has to have a main character, one person that is focused on, and who changes and grows over the course of the story. But the cast of central characters surrounding the main character most often consists of friends, maybe a sibling here and there. Why do fictional people never have adventures with their families?
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if perhaps this is yet another manifestation of the American culture's disregard and even disdain of the traditional family unit. The political incorrectness of parent's authority could be playing a part in it too.
Having realized and thought about this, I would really like to see some fiction that casts a family unit, parents and children, together as the central characters of a story. I don't have a problem with one person, parent or kid, being the main character, but I want the main character's family to be the central characters surrounding them.
What are your thoughts on this issue? If any of you creative geniuses out there are writing fiction centered around a traditional family unit, I would love to know about it. Even if you aren't writing it yourself, if you know of any fiction centered around the family, please share it!

Children as Main Characters

I want to start off by making it clear that I have nothing against children as main characters in fiction. I love them, in fact. The Chronicles of Narnia, The Secret Garden, Princess Academy, and Emily of New Moon are some of my favorite books, and they all have children as main characters. I think that in a lot of ways, children actually make better main characters than adults do, because adults can often make things more complex. Children are more straightforward, willing to see things just as they are without making them overly complicated.
However writers, I must plead with you on one point: if you are writing a child character, please make their adventures and exploits believable!
I'm sure everyone at some point or other has seen at least an episode or two of Lassie. The show could be a textbook for writers on how not to write a child character. If I had a child who got himself into half the trouble that innocent little Timmy manages to get into, he would spend his life in his room where at least there would be no landmines, hot air balloons, dynamite, cougar dens, wild boars, uncovered wells, burning buildings, nuclear weapons, or infectious diseases. And I would probably keep an eye on him myself, instead of leaving it up to the dog.
My point is, children can have adventures too, but writers need to be careful and make sure the adventures and the roles children play in them aren't completely beyond the bounds of realism.
I'm as guilty of this as anyone--or was, in some of my early stories. My mom harasses me to this day, every time I say I've got a new story idea, about "The poor fifteen-year-old girl who dreams of going to medical school but has decided to give it up and remain at home to care for her fourteen younger siblings since her father has been called away to war and her mother has been ill since the birth of the triplets and she must single-handedly care for the 3000-acre farm." In my defense, this is a shameless exaggeration on Mom's part. There were only eight younger siblings, no triplets. And the farm was only 800 acres.
Personally, I think that when C.S. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia he also wrote the textbook on how to put children into epic adventures as main characters, and do it well. I also see it as another exquisite layer of the Narnian allegory. With the exception of the cab driver and his wife in The Magician's Nephew, the only people ever to come to Narnia from our world are children. And remember what Jesus said about children and the Kingdom of Heaven?

What are your thoughts on children as main characters in fiction? Do you have any in your own writing? How do you go about putting them into extraordinary adventures believably?

Role Models in Writing

I know what you're thinking--and you're wrong. This post isn't going to be about great writers to pattern yourselves and your writing after. This post is about role models to pattern your characters after.
Now, I'm not talking about copying other writers' already-developed characters or basing all of your fictional characters on real people. Both of those plans are recipes for big-time legal trouble. What I'm talking about is learning from example what people in certain roles or circumstances are really like, and basing your characters on those true-to-life facts.
The idea dawned on me this week while I was snowed in after last week's blizzard (and to think--I used to fantasize about living in the Arctic. I'm officially over that now!). Since going outside wasn't an option, I spent an unseemly number of hours sitting in front of the fireplace watching episodes of Combat!, a '60s TV series about WWII (fabulous show, if any of you need something good to watch).
How, you may wonder, does this pertain even remotely to the work of a fantasy writer? Well, I'll tell you. Several of the central characters in my novel-in-progress are very high-ranking military leaders. To be honest, I've had trouble writing characters who are down-to-earth and humble while still maintaining and exercising their authority--and doing it all convincingly. My characters seem to be either all humility and no authority, or all authority and no humility. Where is the balance? How does a man exercise his authority without 'lording it over' the other characters?
Those questions weren't even at the forefront of my mid this week while I was watching Combat!. But as I watched the main characters (a Second Lieutenant and a Sergeant) interacting with the men under them and with the officers ranking over them, and developing a tentative friendship in spite of their differing ranks, my problem with my leader characters suddenly came to mind. "Oh..." I thought, "So that's how they do it!"
While their personalities were completely different from those of my characters, the characters of Combat! demonstrated the balance of authority vs. humility and friendship vs. getting the job done that I was looking for in my characters.
So now I'm thinking--if it worked in that circumstance, it would work in another. Having trouble developing a convincing character in a position you don't know a great deal about? Find characters (real or fictional) in a similar position and learn how they do it, what it's really like.
What are your thoughts? Have you used a similar formula to develop your characters, or do you have a completely different method?

A Little Test of Character

Anyone following this blog doesn't need to be told the utmost, earth-shattering importance of character development, so I won't repeat what you already know. (But just on the off-chance that you don't know: IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT!!!)
We've all spent those long hours studying a character's nervous tics, or their accent, or the way they choose their words, or the reason they have that aversion to certain things. That's all important stuff to know, too.
But today, try something a little more fun:
Empty your pockets. I'm emptying mine on the computer desk right now. Let's see:
2 pocket knives
1 cell phone
1 cough drop
1 ponytail holder
1 2GB flashdrive
some little balls of styrofoam stuffing that leaked out of my lap desk earlier and are now static-stuck to absolutely everything
Got your pockets emptied now? Good. Now, empty your character's pockets (If your character doesn't have pockets for whatever reason, then empty her purse or his saddle bags--you get the idea).
What do you find? Is it all pretty ordinary, just the kind of things you would expect such a character to carry around? Are you surprised by anything your character shells out? Is there a particular item that he or she is embarrassed or reluctant to show you? Is there something they're carrying that is unique to them--something that only they and no one else would have? What do the contents of their pockets tell you about their personality, backstory, desires, or fears?
As always, feel free to share your finds or thoughts!

Beyond Character Developement

"Strong writing requires an intimate knowledge of humanity."
~From Creating the Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It's true: elaborate, detailed character development is important, but it won't get you anywhere without deep, familiar knowledge of human nature. A writer has to know and understand the workings of the human mind and apply their knowledge to their characters in order to effectively transport a reader into that character's thoughts and struggles. A reader cannot identify with a character on a deep level if that character's mind doesn't function like a realistic human mind.
So that leaves us, the writers, with the task of learning and studying human nature. You'd think it would be totally easy--after all, we're humans, aren't we? Of course we know how we think!
But it's not always that easy. We tend to take our human nature for granted; it's part of us, so we don't think about it that often, just like you probably take your right leg for granted. Have you ever just sat down and studied your right leg, the way the muscles fit together, the way the tendons flex and move when you bend your knee, the way the components of your knee joint work together? I'm going to venture a guess and say that most of us probably haven't. So have you ever sat down and analyzed your own thought processes and mental gear-grinding?
A warning: don't become over-analytical! You don't want your writing to become bogged down with the minute details of every character's thought processes, nor do you want to get so into the habit of analyzing yourself that you spend all of your time analyzing potential decisions rather than actually making them!
The microscopic details of characters' thought processes aren't what's important. What's important is the understanding of the character's nature that you bring to the page. Even if you don't openly display your understanding in a lengthy dissertation on why Character A made this particular choice, if you have that deep, intimate knowledge of human nature and the workings of the human mind, it will show. And if you do it well, the reader will benefit from it without even realizing that it's there.

Maybe we're not crazy!

As writers, I’m sure that all of us have at one time or another had a friend or relative lovingly suggest that we are completely insane.

“If you don’t want that character to die, why don’t you just change the story so that he lives?”

“What do you mean you didn’t see that coming? You wrote the story!”

“You’re laughing at something your character said? You’re the one who wrote what she said!”

“Your character isn’t cooperating with you? Seriously…”

“You’re the writer – just make the characters do whatever you want them to do!”

Yes, I suppose we can all admit that to a ‘normal’ person, we writers are just a little weird. However, weird though we may be, perhaps we’re not crazy after all! Here is my theory – a scientific explanation – as to why we writers can’t always control what our characters do, and why they sometimes surprise us:

When you meet a new person – a real one, say, at church or at work – the first thing you get is a visual of their physical appearance. You introduce yourself and start a conversation with them, usually asking questions pertaining to the immediate surroundings and/or circumstances (Are you new in town? What brought you to this church? Have you worked here long?).

Then you start asking broad, generalized questions (Where are you from? What do you do for a living?). Then you begin moving on into more personal questions, learning opinions, etc. while still keeping a bit of distance (What kind of movies do you like? What did you think of the election results?).

Gradually, as a relationship develops, you can begin asking more personal, intimate questions, learning who the person is at their very core (What is your deepest desire? Your greatest fear?) and as they begin to learn to trust you in return, they will often share their deepest, darkest secrets with you.

Once you know a person at this level, you can begin to predict with some accuracy how they will respond to given situations. Have you ever had someone tell you “So-and-so did such-and-such,” and you knew in your very heart that there was no way on earth that story could be right? That is because you know that person, and you know how they respond.

These stages of getting to know a person work much the same way for writers getting to know a fictional character. For me at least, the first thing I get from a character is their physical appearance. I start asking questions, then, starting with broad, generalized questions, and moving on towards the deep, intimate questions, until I know who that person is at their very core.

My theory is that your subconscious mind does not know the difference between a fictional character and a real person.

Think about it: you have given your mind the same information and stimuli with the fictional character as you would have with a real one, starting with physical appearance and moving on into who the person/character really is in their heart of hearts.

Just as your subconscious mind allows you to ‘just know’ what your best friend will do in a particular situation, it allows you to ‘just know’ what your character will do. To change it would be to force them into doing something out of character. When you write a line of dialogue or action for another character, your subconscious mind can process all of that information and make a prediction as to how your main character will respond. The result is that witty line of dialogue that you find so hilarious; that recourse that you really don’t want the character to take but that they are bound and determined to take anyway; that action response that you never saw coming, but that makes perfect sense.

And that is why a fictional character can feel so real to us, just like they were a real person.

So, while we writers may still be eccentric and weird according to our friends and relatives, maybe we’re not completely insane after all. What do you think? Does this theory sound viable to you? Or do you have your own theory about why the writer’s mind works the way it does?