The Unfinished Symphony

"Steve, you have GOT to see X," my friend said.

He didn't say X, he said, "Battle Star Galactica." and later he said, "Lost" instead of X.

Battle Star Galactica was on a channel that my cable company didn't carry. So, he could tease me with what I was missing. And for a couple years I felt I was missing a lot.

The story was a little different from Lost. I missed out on the first few episodes. So, I figured it would be available in reruns, on Instant Netflix or something.

Before Lost finished, Battle Star Galactica did, and from what I heard online and from friends, it had a sort of politicized, lame ending. I heard they made it a metaphor for President Bush's foreign policy or something equally political.

Eye roll. The bottom line is that it didn't finish as well as it started.

About that time I started hearing people say about Lost, "how are the writers going to do it." The general consensus was that the series had written itself into a corner and getting out was seemingly impossible. And as it turned out, Lost ended poorly.

Neither of these are as incredibly lame as Dallas that resurrected Bobby by making the entire previous season just a dream, a horrible dream. (Happily, this did set up the best series finale ever a few years later when Newhart mocked Dallas.)

Mindful of the fact that I knew the endings of Battle Star Galactica and Lost would be unsatisfying, I decided never to watch any part of them. I feel a little good that I managed to skip the whole thing.

I've mentioned before that the absolute worst thing you can possibly read is a story that's in-between. If you pick up a story that's a horrid, no big loss. You figure out real quick that it sucks and then you put it down.

The longer it takes for you to find out the story is unsatisfactory, the worse it is. BSG & Lost cost me zero time. Thank you.

I mention this now, because I read a novel I really loved. And then I read its sequel. I really loved that, too. It was like when I burned through all the C. S. Forester Hornblower novels in a week or so. Or all the Ellis Peters Brother Cadfael novels that I read all of them in a month. I figured it would be this way with this series of six novels.

I was at the half-way point through the series when I got on Amazon to buy the fourth novel in the series. On a lark I read the reviews for the unread novels of this series. Then I noticed a whole passel of one-star reviews of the last novel.

If you'll allow a slight digression in service of my main point, I also want to remind you of the movie Coca Cola Kid. I never saw it when it came out in 1985. But when it came out on Instant Netflix, I gave it a watch for nostalgia's sake. It was a passable romantic comedy with a twist at the end. They just put these words in a graphic just before the ending credits: "A week later... while cherries blossomed in Japan the next World War began."

What? In? The? World?

Where did that come from? What did they mean by that?

The gist of my remarks is that endings are important.

And let me tell you now, I'll never, ever consume anything written by the idiot responsible for that
ending graphic. It completely changed my mild disappointment in a movie with a weak 3rd reel into cold fury. Nowadays, I have little else to think about the film but that.

By the way, my review of Coca Cola Kid: Passable story with a weak 3rd reel and a total WTF at the end. 0-stars. Avoid. You won't get those 98 minutes of your life back.

Where was I?

When you write a series of novels, it's important to finish strong. They say that the last chapter of each novel is where you sell the next novel. And in the case of a series of novels, the last one establishes your reputation. Goof up the ending of one series and you'll hurt your sales prospects for everything else you'll write.

In C. S. Forester's Hornblower series he starts out with Midshipman Mr. Hornblower being horribly mistreated. He barely survives, but he overcomes adversity. Whereas others may get the credit and reward, he makes friends of his peers and the reader. He falls in love with a girl, but she's married and he's in a loveless marriage. As Hornblower accomplishes more and more, his competence and faithfulness becomes impossible to ignore. Tragedy strikes and his wife dies, but it also clears the way for him to marry the girl he loves. He starts getting rewarded and recognized. Promotions follow and his career advances. When you get to the final Hornblower novel, he's Lord Admiral Hornblower, happily married, and living in a huge manor house.

All the prior hardships are forgotten and we feel our friend has received a well-deserved reward. And we regard Hornblower as a friend because he suffered so as a lad. If you make a character too perfect, the reader can easily hate him like Jim Rockford hates Lance White in the Rockford Files. The pattern is adversity and unfairness at the beginning of the series, tragedy in the middle, and contentment at the end.

Reverse this pattern, and you risk angering your readers so much that they start talking about the Coca Cola Kid.

The Art of Illiterates

After Labor Day in Grand Rapids, MI the "next big thing" is ArtPrize. I've commented on it before. This usually gets me thinking about art qua art. (And saying hifalutin words like "qua.") My wife remarked at breakfast this morning that one of the profs (who teaches movie-making) repeated this quote: "Film should be looked at straight on, it is not the art of scholars but of illiterates."

I believe the point he was trying to make was that film naturally puts few demands on the viewer.

Keep in mind that illiterates are not necessarily stupid. There have been some very clever people who never get around to learning to read or write.

Film, by presenting brute imagery and sound to the consumer, is consumed without necessarily engaging the higher cognitive functions.

I suppose this means the screenwriter must strive to represent the mythic or iconic in her screenplay, because that is how it will be best consumed.

Conversely, the author of Russian novels realizes her readers have strong arms and great upper-body strength to lug around those long, heavy tomes. The author of Victorian novels realizes her readers have long attention spans. And the contemporary author expects her readers read at at least a sixth-grade level.

The gallery viewer of walls-sized canvases brings different expectations to the art than the comic book reader who sees virtually the same thing.

When you produce art, there's more than just "the medium is the message." Each medium brings a different audience.

The different audience brings different eyes and ears to the work depending upon their expectations. We all should work to understand our audience and work with their expectations as opposed to against them.

There is a time for the mathematics lecture that you can find in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. And there's a time for breathless action scenes as you can find in Larry Correia's Monster Hunters International. Your job is to sense who is buying your books and produce the time they are expecting.

Apology: i fear you might draw the wrong conclusion from my choice of pictures from Roy Lichtenstein and Tony Abruzzo. Though I question the intelligence and common sense of those who spend big bucks to fill modern art galleries, I do NOT want to demean any comic book readers and intended no slight toward Mr. Abruzzo by juxtaposing his art with a derivative copy.

Get On The Train

I had lunch with one of my more successful friends who spoke of writing and what editors look for. He related that you want to get readers INTO the story and keep them there.

There is a real sense that reading transports the reader from where they are to where the story is. The reader finds a comfortable chair in her study, begins reading, and finds herself hurtling between Earth and Mars.

At least this is what the writer is trying to do and the editor is looking for.

It is painful to give up on a story. It is also painful to stick with a story that sucks. When you hear me gripe about throwing William Faulkner against the wall, you know it was as painful for me as it was for Mr. Faulkner. And it's more painful when I get to the end of a miserable novel and say, "I won't get that time back."

That's why editors see themselves as gatekeepers. They seek to spare the reading public pain. This should not be mere altruism, because readers who buy one book from an author will look to buy more books from him/her. A successful imprint will spare readers pain. A superior imprint will establish a reputation of consistently bringing readers prose they want to read.

I have seen that the best stories define a world alien to the reader and puts her in that world. And I'm not just thinking of Mars or Mordor, but of the way Tom Clancy put you inside the Reagan Military Industrial Complex, or the way John Grisham puts you inside a high powered legal practice.

OK, sounds good. How do you do that?

And that's where my conversation with my friend took me. He related three things. I'll do an imperfect job of representing them, so bear with me if you've heard them elsewhere:

• Description/Setting
• Character/Emotion
• Plot/Ideas

One of the best compliments I've received in my writers group was, "I felt I was there." I described a scene where Mycroft Holmes is sitting on a lonely Victorian train platform a little nervous because the last train for London should, but might not, be along shortly and was late.

At every moment of our lives we are inundated with sensa. Millions of details impinge upon us, and somehow we ignore all of them save for the sound of wind rustling in the trees, bicycle tires crunching on gravel, and a bird squawking in the distance. Light filtering through those trees dapple cars, tents, and travel trailers while children call out to their siblings.

The writer selects those details most significant to the story and paints them with words. It takes a good grasp of the language, an awareness of how perception works, and an artistic sense to guide what details to include or exclude.

The purpose of this work is to take the reader out from in front of her computer and into P J Hoffmaster State Park. If you were there two paragraphs ago, I've succeeded. If you're someplace else next time you read "It was a dark and stormy night," that writer has succeeded.

Then there is character and/or emotion. We are people who are all the same and we're all different. Others attract us and fix our attention with their beauty, whereas others are more like the cobra who paralyzes his prey. I used to wish someone would kill Darth Vader in the very next scene, until I realized that he was as important to the story as a worthy antagonist as the young hero opposing him. The similarities within us to elements within Jane Porter or Tarzan attract us to them. The differences hold our interest as we wonder what it would be like to be raised by the apes and consort with animals. Or to love and marry an English Lord who is prone to savage violence, yet nonetheless civilized.

The characters you can devise and populate your stories with is one thing, but the acid test is making them real to the reader. I say to avoid superlatives, because in our lives we encounter superior people, but we never meet THE BEST Olympic high jump champion (because he's at the track practicing). Yet we encounter fellas who can jump higher than we imagine possible. And that superiority is (in real life) the result of talent, learned skills, and relentless practice.

I find it most annoying when a character is described with certain attributes useful to the story, but without any of the antecedents of that attribute. You're the Empire's greatest swordsman. And you're the Empire's greatest pilot. And you'r the Empire's greatest Admiral. So, how much time do you spend in the gym practicing? Or on the flight simulator? Or writing memoranda justifying the next quarter's budget?

The reader must find your characters and their interactions believable. If two women want to sleep with the same man, they are likely to feel some hostility toward one another.  Or if they are contending for the same promotion at work. Is the subordinate unusually loyal to his boss? Maybe the reader should know the boss saved his life in Afghanistan. Or showed up at the hospital when he had cancer surgery.

This requires the writer to be a keen observer of psychology.

Finally, there is plot or ideas. This is what I love about an Agatha Christie novel. Each mystery is a puzzle story for the reader to figure out. Is Lord Peter Whimsey the most interesting detective? No. Is Harriet Vane a bit too bitchy for my tastes? Yes. Ah, but look at how they work together to break a Playfair cipher? Some readers are as crazy as I am and we will eat it up when Neal Stephenson interrupts his novel to write a chapter of mathematics text. Note that many more readers will skip this chapter like I skipped twenty pages of John Galt sermonizing. The idea must be interesting to most people, not just crazy people like me.

If you've got a "wow" idea you're at risk of putting that idea ahead of the story.

If you are a Social Justice Warrior, you may want The Message to take priority over story. That's your right, and I'm sure lots of editors out there will oblige you. But keep in mind there are politicians, talk-show hosts and reporters out there better suited to bringing out cutting-edge propaganda.

Since I'm none of the above, I want to give the story priority. And I'll seek out editors of whatever politics who'll put story over message. It's important that you do not insist too much on political agreement, because only totalitarians insist that everything is political. Our shared humanity is more interesting than today's two-minute hate.

Whatever the idea, the writer has to be an expert in it so that s/he can capture the details that other experts will expect and that non-experts will subconsciously sense are missing. You can fake it a little, but if you get caught faking it, you risk alienating the expert-readers who would otherwise promote your work with great passion.

They say you shouldn't mix your metaphors and so far we've had this metaphor of the train where you want to entice readers to get on and make them want to stay on for the ride of their lives.

But I've been talking as much about what you the writer want to do as much as you the reader want to experience. And I think that you-the-writer should have a different metaphor when you are thinking about your skill-set. In American baseball, the pitcher can throw the ball in different ways. There's what's called a fastball where the ball is thrown hard and straight and fast. The ball must be past the batter before he can get the bat around to hit it. Then there's the curve, it's a slower ball that bends in flight. The batter swings and misses because the ball "broke" in an unexpected direction. Finally, there is the change-up, a ball that appears to be a fast ball, but is much slower than the batter expects. The batter swings before the ball gets to the plate. (There are other pitches, but we'll ignore them for this metaphor.)

A baseball pitcher won't get to the major leagues without mastering at least one of these pitches. He'll be able to consistently get batters out if he can master two of these pitches. And if he can master three of these pitches, he stands a good chance of being a hall-of-famer.

You, gentle writer, should improve what you do best--be it description, character, or plot, but you should also be aware of, and try to improve those other attributes of writing that bring a reader into the story and keep her there.

You Have Been Disqualified

This happens in episodic television enough for me to notice, but it also works with any franchise.

Or maybe I should say doesn't work. Because I'm thinking of a story-killer. Something that takes your reader out of the story, moves him/her to close the book, then throw it out the nearest window.

A friend mentioned a TV series I do not watch and described something the heroes does which is revolting. I won't tell you which show, so I'll describe something similar.

Do you remember in Huckleberry Finn, where Huck is describing a steamship accident? A boiler exploded, but "nobody was killed except for a couple n------s." At that time, using the n-word was as common and as accepted in the South as it is between black people today. However, were I to use that word in this post even for illustrative purposes, it would attach a taint to everything else I might write.

Suppose you're watching a story and the hero sort of cavalierly suggests killing the black guy to advance the plot. You'd be outraged and you'd rightly disqualify everything else the writer had to say. In my friend's case, she's a cat person, and the TV show rather callously dispatched a feline. Now, my friend hates the show.

When you write something that is a disqualifier, you convert your readers from either a fan or someone who's indifferent into an enemy. If you want to turn me from a fan of your TV show into an enemy, dishonestly or ignorantly malign Christianity. For my friend, it is cruelty to cats.

A fan will say "yeah but" when someone points out something stupid in a story. I watched a lot of really crappy Star Trek Next Gen episodes, because I was such a fan of the franchise. And my wife would point out how stupid things were, and I'd say, "yeah but." I had this lingering love for the Star Trek franchise that caused me to make excuses.

My friend, on the other hand, is now an enemy of the show. It can't do anything right. Every weakness in the writing is a glaring omission to her. When you hate something, anything and everything associated with it gets seen in the worst possible light.

Suppose you don't care that Third-World Bohemian Have-Nots hate your story. Then you can go ahead and malign them in your writing.

If they cannot generate sympathy for their cause, they make a great punching bag. That's why Christian businessmen are great villains. Everyone knows, or knows of, a Christian who's been a jerk toward someone. Don't believe me? Three words: Westboro Baptist Church. And nobody feels sympathetic towards businessmen, unless they're the victims of bigger businessmen. (E. g. Old Man Potter in It's a Wonderful Life would be a sympathetic figure if someone opened a Walmart at the edge of Bedford Falls.)

But in the main, you want nobody to hate your story.

Trouble with that is many writers are oblivious to the things they write which disqualify. If you aren't a cat person, you may not appreciate how passionately a reader will react when you feed tabby to a monster. OK, then we'll just feed the black guy to the monster. Right?

Last week I saw a Bollywood movie, Kambakkht Ishq wherein Sylvester Stallone makes a cameo appearance in the 3rd reel. The scene is a satisfying actioner: The guy drives into the wrong neighborhood and is stopped and threatened by toughs. A fight ensues and he tells the girl to run. Despite having done a great job in the first two reels of literally cutting up Akshay Kumar, she runs and screams. The bad guys give chase with bad intent. Until they run into Sly who proceeds to beat the bad guys senseless.

Though the girl's flight and rescue is quite acceptable to an Indian audience, I can imagine my feminist friends' heads exploding. The girl is helpless? She is potential victim in need of rescue? Disqualified!

I know a fellow in my writers' group who is perpetrating a perfect trifecta of suck. He has a story with an unsympathetic protagonist. This guy is a tormented captive, but he responds in a weak and passive way. And then gets rescued. And then he turns into a woman. And then gets captured and tormented again...

Wait. HE TURNS INTO A WOMAN? What's with that? And then gets raped? And doesn't undergo any sort of character development? Oh, and did I say the story has all kinds of vaguely wrong biblical symbology?

What editor in this or any century, in this or any world would say, "I think this will sell."?

There are certain expectations one brings to a protagonist. They don't kill babies or innocent animals. They don't passively go along with victimization.

The story was laughably flawed to begin with, but once the protagonist changed sexes, the ick factor took over. Maybe, a writer who is a transexual could pull this character off, but not a straight white man. Once the author indulges in the shark jumping BS it brings to light all his other other problems. 

I call this category of writing mistakes "disqualifications." They are immediate shark-jumps. You absolutely must avoid them. And the only that you are going to avoid them is by being sensitive to people and how they respond to your prose.

That includes being sensitive to people who are not like you.

Wedding Pact

Occasionally I'll see a movie and feel disappointed and/or unsatisfied afterwards. Then I'll ask myself why. And this is what happens.

Wedding Pact is a romantic comedy. And I've blogged about romantic comedies before here.

The set-up is pretty cool. A guy and girl find they've reached the end of four years of college, having known and liked one another, but never actually dated. At a graduation party she points this out and asks him that if they still aren't married after 10 years, why don't they marry.

I really, really loved the premise, but it hides a terrible secret the casual viewer might not catch.

And so as you'd expect 10 years elapse and they're both single. He learns of this and embarks on a road trip to find the girl and remind her of the promise to marry.

We then learn that he has carried a torch for this girl since he first met her on the first day of college. In any story you should see character development. In this story the character arc should be obvious. Something is lacking in this guy's character that prevents him from successfully romancing someone, anyone. And since the girl never marries either, there's something in her character that should similarly sabotage her romantic success.

Whoever wrote this movie never got around to thinking these thoughts. As a result, it sort of stumbles around and ultimately uses a deus ex machina (in the form of a biker gangster) to force a happily ever after.

So, gentle reader, let's suppose you've been called in to script-doctor this turkey. Suppose you agree that the premise is sound. Now, here's an assignment for the reader: devise some creative solution to explain why 14 years elapse, they like each other, he doesn't marry someone else, she doesn't marry someone else, but they don't marry each other.

The cool thing about answering this problem is that it can drive the plot into some really interesting (as in fresh and original) ground. Obvious solutions: he's caring for a sick aunt or she's obsessed with her career should be avoided b/c they are so UNORIGINAL.

I played this game with my wife and she suggested that his older sister and her husband died right after graduation leaving him to care for his twin 8 year old nieces who 10 years later grow up and gone to college. My suggestion to her was that he's afflicted with some kind of narcolepsy so that every time he is stressed he falls asleep. And every time he's about to tell a girl he loves her he nods off, whereupon she breaks up with him.

We could fuse these two ideas by giving her the nieces to take care of. Then the nieces and the narcolepsy can create complications in the second act. Particularly, if the nieces believe some false report about the guy. Meanwhile, he's had a decade to understand his narcolepsy handicap and to devise a clever technological solution (involving a dead-man's switch and a videotaped explanation)--that will malfunction to create a Dark Moment. But the nieces feel bad for their earlier interference and they save the day somehow.

Sadly, the movie Wedding Pact did nothing even close to this. He starts out the movie as a loser, which creates initial sympathy, but he never really outgrows being a loser. He never asserts himself, but passively accepts the help of the deus ex machina character.

I think it is safe to assume that you should expect each romantic comedy to start with two potential lovers who each have some character flaw that they have to overcome in order to find love. Then it is the job of the storyteller to put them in situations where they each identify and fix the flaw. Unless you're writing a tragedy...

Bracing and Jigs

It has been a while since I wrote about scaffolding. But just recently I built a treadmill desk. I spent some time Friday designing the unit and obsessing over details. Then Saturday I assembled the front and the rear of the desk. Then I ran out of wood, because I failed to plan as carefully as I ought to have. So, Sunday after church I bought the wood I needed.

In the mean time I found a few extra boards and I was tempted to use them. But I did not, because I needed them for bracing. The front and the rear could be squared up and assembled while lying on the floor of my basement.

However, when I went to put the sides on, they had to stand up. And they had to be leveled. My son helped by holding things in place while I used the level, but at some point human arms grow tired and the attention wanders. If you've ever done anything like this you'll recognize my next step. I grabbed some clamps and extra boards and I clamped those boards in place. This gave me quick ways to engage and release these bracing boards and I was able to level and square everything.

Once things were leveled and squared, I could permanently affix the side boards to the framework. With a nice rigid framework I could mount the plywood top and I was nearly finished.

If you look closely at the two photos you'll see a discrepancy. The bracing boards in the first picture as well as the clamps are gone. Of course, after I'd mounted the side boards and gotten them perfect, the bracing boards were redundant. I released the clamps and put aside the bracing.

I've taken several pictures of my completed desk, and I've spread them around to my friends showing, "look what I did." And when friends come to the house, I show them the desk and I'm duly proud.

But I don't show the clamps and the bracing boards. When I worked in a factory, we had jigs that held parts together during assembly and welding. We never shipped those jigs to any customer.

I don't know how you write, but a lot of people have to work out a lot of backstory and details about
their characters before they can really "come alive." The trouble is that when an editor, or God forbid, a reader trips over this massive block of prose that does not directly advance the story, s/he may skip ahead, or worse, set aside your work.

You want people turning pages, not turning aside. You have to set the hook and keep them in your story. Which means that the beautiful character study you just wrote that gives you those deep insights into your character's psyche SHOULD NOT BE PUBLISHED. Or maybe it should be kept under wraps until after you've so thoroughly addicted people to your work, that some will want to read that formative background information.

By all means you have to write these scenes if that's the way you work things out, but by NO means do you have to include them in your story. It's like those braces you see in the first picture that have been removed in the second. This means you should write like the wind, and then edit with a keen awareness of where your story starts, what parts belong in and out of the story, and when your story ends. The stuff that you cut out aren't necessarily bad, they may simply be bracing.

Marketing Versus Publicizing

I was at the local Jot conference and I heard something that's wrong about "marketing." This bears on my earlier remarks about the business conversation between successful writer and editor.

When you're writing and hoping to make money doing so, you hear about an author's platform.

I think we make a mistake to focus exclusively on author's platform, and we make a mistake to call that "marketing."

Well, yeah, it's getting your work in front of the people with money who might spend it on your work. Those people are called a market. And you want them to know what you have for them.

But it's telling, not listening.

The writer should think of marketing as a dialog. When you speak, but not listen, it is not a dialog, it is a monologue, a speech, a sermon. Maybe you ought to do some listening.

I want you to imagine you've got all the people who buy books in a comfortable sitting room. (More likely a stadium, but please suspend disbelief for a moment.) You know that book buying people are hungry for something cool to read. They've got money and they want to exchange it for a way cool story.

Some of those people will say, "I like C. S. Lewis or I like Robert A. Heinlein," so you can get their money by simply being that guy. And after you're established as a famous author, you can get people's money by just being you regardless of what you write.

But since both of those guys are dead, and the people in this imaginary sitting room have read all their books, you want to find other things they like. You can only find out what they like by LISTENING to them.

Do those people in this virtual sitting room like sparkly metrosexual vampires? OR are they sick of them and want someone to stake the twee nitwits?

Most likely both answers are yes. Learn what folks like, and if you don't naturally grok the market, talk to someone who does. I'm not suggesting you write trash just because the public demands it. You know better than anyone what you can do a good job at, and if you're like most creatives, you have more ideas than you have time to implement them. I'm suggesting that listening will improve your target selection.

Inside Baseball

I was reading Larry Correia's blog when I saw him write this about a discussion with his editor, Toni Weisskopf:

I bounced several things off of Toni to see what she wanted me to focus my energy on next, (Having a ton of books under contract to be written is a really good problem to have) and she really wants to see this epic fantasy that I’ve been talking about for years.

This is a glimpse into the relationship between a successful author and editor. It struck me how businesslike the conversation was. Here's the deal, Mr. Correia and Ms. Weisskopf have a common goal: make gobs of money by selling books.

Mr. Correia has a good idea of how to put words on paper that make awesome stories. Ms. Weisskopf has a good idea of the sort of people she can reach and sell books to. Neither one of them have the whole picture, so they compare notes, brainstorm, and try to find out which stories will do better than others.

It's every bit as much a business conversation as one between a General Contractor and a Realtor about building a spec house. I know a few small businessmen and this glimpse of Mr. Correia makes a lot of sense when seen through this lens.

Contrast this with the depictions of authors in the mass media. You never see Richard Castle or Robin Masters talking to their editors like this. The popular conception is that the writer is some kind of free spirit whose creative outputs drop from his fingers in an arbitrary and capricious fashion as his muse takes him.

NO, the successful author is a successful businessman who builds things on spec, if s/he doesn't have a book deal, or to spec if s/he does. Most businessmen are normal people who relate to their vendors and customers who also happen to be normal people. And unless there's trouble, normal people conduct business with each other in a pleasant and cooperative fashion.

Once you've figured out how to devise a cunning plot, fill it with dazzling characters, and render your stories in breathless prose, think about how you can be a reliable business partner. This includes communicating clearly, meeting deadlines, and exceeding your partners' expectations.

How To Write Non-Binary Gender Characters

It became patently obvious to me that I was taking this business of non-binary gender characters in Science Fiction completely wrong. And I thank the delightful Sarah Hoyt for this insight.

In simple easy to understand terms the answer is: Don't write Cardboard Characters.

Now, if you are unable to understand what it is to be a human being, and what it is to reflect the multiple internal tensions at play in the typical human heart, then you cannot depict the manly man who has a soft spot in his heart for his mother's knitted hat.

If you can't depict a character as humans are in real life, then you have to create some mash-up of all the stereotypes associated with the victim group you're trying to bean count. Oh, i need more gays in my story, so I'll make one of the women a softball player, and make one of the guys a hairdresser. I've railed against this sort of insulting stereotyping earlier.

While writers I follow were having too-much fun writing about non-binary gender characters in Science Fiction, I was writing a story wherein the POV character has to deal with an astrophysicist named A. Dankhopf. As you can probably guess, this sets up the POV character who expects to meet a German man, when the character later proves to be an Indian woman.

The mistaken identity trick has been done by writers since well before Shakespeare, probably the Ancient Greeks.

Then it occurred to me how Schrodinger's cat can help the Science Fiction writer in search of a non-binary gender character.

If you nodded off during Quantum Mechanics class, you may have missed a gedanken experiment wherein a sealed box is populated with a cat, a vial of poison gas, a hammer, and a radioactive source. Then some fiddly bits are added to cause the hammer to break the vial when the radioactive source emits a particle. The magic of Quantum Mechanics is something called "superposition" wherein the cat is both alive and dead until you open the box and look in.

Now, you'd think that, nine-lives notwithstanding, a cat is in a binary state of being either all alive or all dead. But in this experiment the cat is half-living and half-dead until you observe the system. I used this gimmick in my anthology Finding Time.

In this same Quantum Mechanical sense I was writing a non-binary gender character because until the hero observes A. Dankhopf, s/he is half-boy and half-girl. I feel so Politically Correct.

You can, too, just put your manly man in a girly hat, maybe name him Jayne, and until that character is actually observed, you can rely upon quantum superposition to maintain that you have a non-binary gender character.

Painted into a Corner

 Arthur Conan Doyle had it easy. He was tired of people pestering him to write Sherlock stories so he invented Professor James Moriarty--Sherlock's equal in every way. Then threw them together in a to-the-death battle that culminates at the Reichenbach Falls.

Two years later Doyle resurrects Sherlock with a story of climbing a sheer cliff while a sniper is taking pot-shots at him. And it makes sense because that same sniper is the villain nabbed in The Adventure of the Empty House.

Not so the swells at the BBC who altered the climax of Season Two with Sherlock taking a dive off a multi-story building landing on the sidewalk for the physician John Watson to find.

I must confess that I put some thought into how Sherlock could fake his death in this fashion. And I further confess that my solutions were unsatisfactory.

To put it bluntly, the writers had written themselves into a corner--much like the fellow painting a floor finds that he's painted everywhere he might step to exit the room.

Which brings to mind tribbles. One of the cleverest episodes of Star Trek the original series was "The Trouble With Tribbles." In this story Kirk matches wits with a shady space trader, an annoying bureaucrat, and the evil Klingons. We know they're evil because they wear the same makeup as Emperor Ming The Merciless.

After Star Trek went on to syndication Gene Roddenberry went on to make movies with bigger budgets for makeup and he improved the look of his Klingons to be much less offensive to Asian audiences. They were bigger, meaner, and looked more like aliens than Mongolians.

This was highly successful and several movies spun off several new TV series. One of which, Deep Space Nine (aka Melrose Space), had a Klingon named Worf. So far so good. Somehow a plot device hurtles all the main characters of Deep Space Nine back in time to the same space station where The Trouble with Tribbles takes place.

All the DS9 humans look at the Emperor-Ming lookalikes and then at Worf and they say, "What happened?" Worf can't come out and say, "Gene had more budget for makeup." The DS9 writers had written themselves into a corner just as surely as the Sherlock writers had.

What to do?

As you know, any show as popular as Star Trek and Sherlock will generate chat groups and message boards where plot points are discussed. Audience members will posit likely solutions to plot problems such as these. The writer will have a hard time coming up with a solution that's better than any of those offered online.

On Star Trek, they had the human cast members pepper Worf with suggested explanations for the appearance discrepancy. And some of them sounded relatively plausible. Worf replies, "we don't talk about this," and ends the discussion.

It's a cop-out, but it's funny, and it works better than a lengthy exposition that doesn't quite work.

I ran a story past a friend of mine who noticed a glaring flaw in my plot. He provided a couple reasonable alternatives, but then he said, "hang a lampshade on it." And by this he meant to embrace the flaw and make it into something that told the reader you'd noticed and that you were playing it up.

Sherlock handles the same problem differently. It shows a half-dozen different explanatory scenarios ranging from bungee cords to airbags to dummies. The clever big is that after the germ of the idea is presented to the audience, one of the characters proceeds to debunk it. I can almost imagine the posting/reply cycle on an internet message board.

In the end you never get a 'canonical' explanation for Sherlock's survival. It's a cheat, but it's creative and it almost works. Or let's say that it works as well as a Dr. Who episode.

Yet Another Vacuum Story

If you are writing stories about near term space operations, there are some well known hazards that drive a lot of stories. It can be almost formulaic:

• Someone's in space. 
• Something goes wrong. 
• Survival situation ensues. 
• Someone bodges together something.
• Some, maybe not all, survive.

My friend Martin Shoemaker calls these "vacuum stories." And he laments the fact that the grand masters of science fiction have written all of them. I counter that you can probably recycle the basic plot and have a ripping good yarn by insinuating fresh characters into the story.

But Martin has a second complaint in these stories and it bears on that second step "Something goes wrong." Too often the thing that goes wrong is really lame:

• Someone does something stupid
• Someone evil throws a spanner in the works
• Something easily anticipated is overlooked.

I have recently complained that stories with smart characters risk having them do something stupid that the reader can see is stupid, but the story requires him/her to do it.

The premise here is that if you've got people going into space, they're going to be smart people. Ignoramuses don't go into space. They stay in North Dakota and plot to kidnapping schemes that go wrong.

Now, I have had smart characters do stupid things for the sake of the story, but I justified the stupidity and used the character's awareness that he was compelled to do something wrong to increase tension.

But in a vacuum story, astronauts aren't stupid and you ought not make them do something stupid just to create an inciting incident.

However, they can do something that should be OK, but cascades into something very wrong. Imagine a really complicated piece of equipment that has a little fan that's not used very often. In the times before when it's been used there's been no problem. Nobody's stupid. In fact the smartest engineers in the world have made this system. But the fan is inside an oxygen tank. Though the fan is insulated, this time it sparks and the tank explodes. The explosion takes out the equipment bay.

As we saw in Apollo 13 a trivial malfunction can easily escalate into a survival situation.

Here's a great way to show the reader how smart the characters are in your story. Really smart characters will plan for failure. They'll eliminate opportunities for trivial mistakes and have contingencies ready when things go wrong.

But there are limits for what can be anticipated and planned for. When an airliner crashes the investigators generally learn that no one thing brought the plane down, but a perfect storm of multiple malfunctions.

Devising these perfect storms of interlocking failures may tax the ingenuity of the writer, but it's a lot more original than having some crazed snake handling fundamentalist release a bunch of snakes on a spaceship.

Stupid Genius

I like stories with a smart protagonist and a smart antagonist, but there's a risk.

Recently, I had occasion to see The Bletchley Circle on Instant Netflix. The premise is that a quartet of female boffins, who used to break Nazi codes, have gone on to civilian lives, BUT one of them notices a pattern in the news of a series of murders.

And she gets the band back together to do some sleuthing.

Great premise.

I love working with smart people and I never worked with a smarter bunch than when I was part of the Puzzle Palace. So, the prospect of seeing these brainiacs in action was most appealing. I was even able to ignore the RELENTLESS ANTI-MALE SEXISM of the story. (The only males who aren't rapists, murderers or both in this story are father-figures representing the benevolent Socialist government.)

It was an absolute joy to see the alpha geek chick giggling about figuring something out, but in the context of a horrible crime. Not an appropriate time for giggling, but that's what geeks do. My delight with this story started very high and it suffered a monotonic decline as the story left off the mathy bits and delved into the psychology.

But what got me to write this down was an instance of something I saw that has been often repeated in stories with smart protagonists. Let's suppose you have Sherlock or his smarter brother Mycroft in a confrontation with a bad-guy, the hero can't do something stupid. The hero has to see what the reader sees before the reader sees it.

In Bletchley Circle, the girl meets the killer alone in a darkened building. She doesn't know the guy is a killer, but every viewer who's paying attention realizes everything about him fits the profile she's just assembled of the killer. Eventually, he's shown smoking the same brand of cigarettes as were found at the murder scene, and even the slow members of the audience put two and two together. And a little bit after that she reacts so that the viewer sees she realizes what most of the audience already knows.

She's supposed to be smarter than you are. Smarter people don't take longer to figure out things than the audience. If you're going for the suspense thing where the audience feels jeopardy while the protagonist is blithely waltzing into danger, you've got to have a reason for it that's better than your super-genius didn't think of it. She could be setting a trap or she could have a gun in her purse aimed at his heart unbeknownst to the audience.

Conversely, when you have an normal-intelligence protagonist and a stupid villain, this risk goes away. Raylan Givens doesn't wear his star because he breaks Nazi codes: it's because he can pull his weapon faster than the other guy. Boyd Crowder isn't a criminal mastermind because he's three chess-moves ahead of the Detroit crowd. It's because he makes things blow up and people die.

With normal-intelligence characters minds move at a pace where you can see them come to realizations. Low-intelligence characters are useful in villains because their violent impulses can be expressed unpredictably.

Though it is is tempting to make your characters super-intelligent, you have to be very smart to not write them doing something stupid when the story needs it.

The Mysterious Opening

I like a certain pattern of story that begins with an incomprehensible inciting incident, then the rest of the story consists of disclosing clues the reader can use to figure out what happened. Because this requires patience of the reader, the writer must make the incomprehensible thing particularly compelling. It has to be life-or-death.

What was with that opening scene with the fire? Why is the girl running from the police?

Two stories come to mind with this structure: Get Low, and Safe Haven. And the television series Longmire does this somewhat, too.

As the story proceeds you can either leave that opening scene alone completely or you can provide a series of cut-scenes that provide clues. If you take this approach, you can use ambiguity to good effect.

Safe Haven opens with a hooded figure fleeing an apparent murder scene and making her way out of town with a policeman in Javert-mode is in hot pursuit. Facts come out in a way that at first confirm the reader's supposition that the girl has committed murder.

This provides a bit of tension that keeps the story a bit more interesting over the course of introducing the other elements of the story as the girl meets a widower and unpacks her emotional baggage.

Similarly, in Get Low, a house bursts into flame and a shadowy figure is seen fleeing the scene. What's with that? In a subsequent scene, Robert Duvall who plays a notorious hermit meets with Lucas Black and Bill Murray to arrange his own funeral.

Food, sex, and death. These are three obvious hooks you can put in an opening to pique the reader's interest. And once you have that interest, it's incumbent upon the storyteller to make the reader care about your characters. With your readers caring about your characters you can tell your story and disclose what that incomprehensible incident means.