Mixed Media

Like the quest for the perfect mousetrap, new ideas bring new challenges which often threaten to overtake them at the onset.  What's worse, I feel like I've been playing the Eastern Bloc in this latest literary arms race.

There's a conundrum I've been wrestling with that hasn't yielded much in the way of ground gained:  the puzzle of adding music to a written (and therefore soundless) medium.

Naturally, I'm not talking about clipping a midi file to the spine of a paperback (although with e-readers, the concept is quickly becoming less outlandish).  I'm referring to adding the presence of music to a literary work on the part of the setting and characters as part of the story itself.

It sounds easy:  "so-and-so softly strums his guitar to the delight of his lightly inebriated patrons."

But anyone who works in music knows that a song is much more than the act of playing an instrument or even the lyrics of a song.  Anyone who listens to music knows that music makes you feel something that the spoken word often falls well shy of.

There are several layers to enjoying a piece of music:  the simplicity, the complexity, the challenge, the audible skill involved, the beauty of its crafting, the sense of its structure and flow (much like with a story itself), the emotion portrayed, the way the pacing starts to drive your own pulse ahead of it like a crazed cattle driver...it all blends together into an ever more evasive gestalt that is really, really hard to portray in silent, unspoken words.

In in its simplest form, writing about music is no different than writing about a gorgeous vista or beautiful sight. With no colors or graphics (at least, in most novels), you have to tell your reader not just the details of what they're seeing ("a sun setting over the far horizon") but the feel of the thing ("loosing its last angry flash before being dragged across the edges of the sky.").

The same is true for music, except that you're not depicting a note or even a phrase, you're not depicting an instrument or the shape of the strained musician wrestling to keep pace with her own fevered playing.  You're also detailing the flow of the piece, the different movements and flow, the way it teases the expectations of its audience and the overall crescendo that brings you to the edge of your seat, desperate for the final note.

...Clearly, I'm something of an audiophile, which I can only assume is complicating matters infinitely more.  Someone who adores the interplay of shadow and light in oil painting or the delightful reshaping of the cubist movement might have as much trouble describing things in the visual, but my crux appears to be music, and I suspect I'm not alone.

The first instinct, it seems, when trying to write about playing music is to try and include it all:  the what, the why, the how-it-feels; to glut the narrative with more technical detail than your readers will understand, more intention than they will appreciate and more emotion than they should have room for.

Naturally, this is completely wrong.

But what's the golden ratio?  How much can the average reader be expected to comprehend and how much emotion will goad them into sympathetic appreciation without overloading them with tearful fanboyishness that merely leaves them laughing, and not in the good way.

Generally I find that the technical details should be kept to the visual elements we all know, and perhaps the occasional tidbit to add a little mystery for the average reader and a sense of verisimilitude for a more experienced audience:  adjusting the knobs to tune a string instrument, fingering the keys on a flute or sax, the interwoven double-strokes of a drumroll.

In addition, try to limit the specifics to the start of a given phrase; the lead-in time before the music has really started to form itself, or when it turns suddenly and takes on new life.  Highlighting the working of the musician's fingers or lungs helps emphasize the shift, as well as reminding the reader that music is a thing being made and the challenge, strain and raw emotion that goes into every vein of it.

The emotion itself, both of the musician and of the listener, is where I feel the majority of the text should come from.  There's a third source, the instrument itself, which to any non-musician sounds immediately like overly poetic sentimentality, but the truth is that any reader can identify with a personified instrument.

Take a separate example:  in westerns, gunslingers often have tales about their sidearms, naming them, talking about their predilections, their wants and their will.  Truckers who always use the same rig start to talk to it, identify with it and make it its own person.

The same is true for instrument.  When you start with the player's internal struggle and then move to that of the instrument, it blends them together into a team, something immediately more compelling to your reader.

By bringing out the instrument's "human" qualities during the song rather than right from the start (where the focus on technical detail very much defines it as a thing), you give the impression that the player is bringing the instrument to life.

Blend that in turn with the audience and their reaction, whether individual or, more often, as a faceless collective, and you can extend the same tacit metaphor:  the player and her instrument are bringing the audience to life, as well.

When it comes to the music itself, however, there's little hope in getting your average reader to understand more than the basic terms of "refrain" and "crescendo."  The subtle queues that clue a knowledgeable reader into what the musician is doing are a very specific jargon that doesn't present itself often.

Most people would think 'adagio' is a type of cheese.

Instead, use the same language you use when expressing a beautiful image.  The music, like the image, is meant to evoke something:  anger, torment, longing, joy, triumph.  Use those words to build your image. Conjure up in the mind of both musician and audience the very moments that, for them, define the intended emotion.

A sad song to an old farmer may bring to mind of his son, lost in the war, as if the music is calling out for him to return.  A bouncy, lilting phrase reminds him instead of the harvest dance, with the musician's fingers across the strings forming their own little foxtrot as they go.  Keep the imagery rooted in reality and make it personal, make it matter, if only to the musician herself.

Or at least, that's what I intend to do.  I can't say that words written will ever be as powerful emotionally as words sung or notes played, but I like to believe that they can be.  If nothing else, I like to believe that we can live through the characters themselves and thus savor the way the music we cannot ourselves hear makes them feel.

So here goes nothing.  And a one, and a two...

Traditionalist

My first manuscript is finally on its way to an actual professional publisher.  I have four more copies to send in this first batch of pubs to try and gauge interest in something as outlandish as a post-apocalyptic western, but I suppose there are stranger things on the market.

In short, here goes nothing.

Given that the full work is about 600 paperback pages, I decided to polish up the first three chapters and send them along, with an explanation that the work is finished should they be interested in receiving the rest.  My hope is that a thinner docket may have a greater chance of actually being read in full, and at worst it costs me a lot less in postage to get it there.

Win-win.

It does strike me as funny that, despite the death of Borders, the rise of the Kindle and my own personal penchant for going electronic, I was adamant with myself about sending a hard copy to each potential publisher.

Despite working in computers and being an Internet geek in my spare time, I still find it more relaxing to read on paper than online, and I suppose I expect the same of most publishers (or at least their intake copy-editors).

It's funny to be a huge supporter of online communication, having made it the lifeblood of my day-to-day connection to both local friends and the world at large, and yet know full well that reading is something I consider best done offline.  Emails and status updates I have no problem with viewing in their native pixelated format, but when it's for-pleasure reading, I want to hold something in my hands.

There's an oft-lauded quality to paper copies that I suspect will one day be the turn-dial radio to our plasma TVs.  Books, in the physical sense, are becoming every bit as treasured, honored and at once as misunderstood as oil paintings and black-and-white films.

In a purely pragmatic sense, there are only a few reasons to prefer paper copy to the ease of the electronic equivalent, and most of them have to do with world-ending events better suited to the fantastic worlds they describe than any genuine discussion of value.

Yet at the same time, they will always be a raw thrill to the scent of old paper and ink, to the feel of holding rough parchment in your hands or hearing the light crinkle of a leather binding.

That's not to suggest that every Harlequin romance or urban fantasy tripe gains some intrinsic artistry simply by living in paper form, simply that the books we love are so often made more lovable by the true expression of time; like the Velveteen rabbit.

But there's another reason why books often beat out e-readers, in my estimation:  the sense of disconnecting. The presence of silence.

When you hold a book, you can disappear into your own little world, casting aside all former ties and obligations in favor of a fictional fantasy that envelopes you.  Many e-readers offer the same, if they are e-readers alone, but in our app-frenzy craze, it's rare to find any electronic device not already coupled with social networking sites, news updates, Flash games and every other modern distraction bombarding our every moment with a fresh reminder of an ever-changing world.

The many pop-ups and push notifications are like little messengers constantly stopping at our door to deliver new news before rushing out again, never pausing to chat or smell the flowers or enjoy the bright, sunny day.  It makes it difficult to simply unplug and enjoy a few brief hours of solace and solitude, surrounded by the denizens of your latest literary adventure.

Even when the device itself doesn't prompt you with endless updates, knowing that such apps are only a finger-swipe away can test the discipline of even the best of us when it comes to setting aside our busy lives.  For as much as I adore the instant and infinite connectedness of the online world, the last place I want to see it is when I'm knee-deep in a thrilling epic about sorcery, love and betrayal.

The point, in my opinion, of for-pleasure reading is escape and discovery, two quests best performed without interruption.  If we can grant ourselves the discipline to craft e-readers that remain, in every sense, purely e-readers, then I see no reason why the world of online literature shouldn't largely supplant at least modern hardbacks as the standard in new literature.

Hard copies will always exist for the unique collector's value and our own inexplicable joy at holding a beloved tome in hand; and because somewhere, in the backs of our minds, we know that one day the zombies will come and threaten the sustainability of our national power grid.

And that is precisely when you need a proper Robert Jordan anthology to fend off the coming apocalypse.

Going 'Round in Circles

With the advent of Google+, it seems oddly appropriate to talk about the importance of character circles.

In the simplest stories, circles are generally invisible, largely because they're usually only one, so it's no surprise that they generally go unnoticed as an important piece of story design.

In simplest terms, a character circle is a complete unit of colleagues or directly associated characters.  Hero, love interest, villain is your classic case of a character circle.  All the characters have direct ties to each other by way of the plot and a large portion of their interactions are shared among most or all of the characters in the circle.

The hero courts the love interest, the villain taunts the hero, the villain threatens the love interest, who taunts back, and the circle continues.  By and large, they focus on each other, like a close group of friends or a set of coworkers.

Your average author will stop there.

A large number of stories can be told with a single circle and a few floating outliers hanging on here and there. That said, adding additional circles to any story adds a layer of depth and completeness that can otherwise leave a story feeling flat and overdone.

Think about real life:  you have your family, your friends and your coworkers, for starters.  Within each of those groups are different levels of granularity:  you have your immediate family, and then the larger family with uncles, aunts, cousins and grand-things.  You have your friends from college, your friends you met online, maybe even your neighbors.  Then there's your current coworkers, the guys you still talk to from your last job, and your guild on WoW.

Think about all the people in those circles.  Each subcircle itself can make up a full story without any real interference from the others.  But that doesn't mean the others don't have a place in the same arc.

When it comes to translating this to your characters, there are a lot of advantages to including multiple circles.  For one, you can include perspectives and styles that don't otherwise fit in your world as it stands.  For instance, if a character's work life or love life is in jeopardy and thus high-drama and serious, you can use their online friends or oblivious family to add a bit of levity (and possibly some caustic insight) to their otherwise-dour situation.

In addition, multiple circles can let you include more necessary characters without stretching the boundaries of realism for your audience.  If all your characters form one massive circle around your main hero like spokes on a wheel, your hero becomes almost too popular to be attainable.  It's the perfect time to pinch off parts of the circle and turn your hero into the onlooker for a change.

Remember that your ancillary characters are heroes in their own right:  they have their own friends, their own families, their own circles.  If all we ever see is them interacting with the main character, it's difficult for the story not to feel repetitive (and your hero quickly becomes a prime Mary Sue candidate).

Sometimes the circles will be completely independent and operate with no knowledge of each other, all connecting to the hero in a sort of narrow Venn diagram model.  For an added layer of complexity, however, I recommend letting the circles intersect:  introduce them independently, and then bring them together to help illustrate that the story, that your world, doesn't all revolve around one person.

A great way to do it is with friends and coworkers.  On the surface, these two groups have the most in common, and yet some very key distinctions that can create delightful tension and humor in any story.  Coworkers won't likely know as many intimate details about a hero, while friends won't get the chance to see the hero really shine in their day job.

Bring the two together, and both sides have the opportunity to gain some perspective on the hero, as well as meshing together to form a sort of friendly enemy for the same.  If the hero has a crush on a coworker, bringing him or her into view of the hero's friends can lead to all manner of delightful awkwardness, not to mention the well-meaning scheming of the hero's matchmaking friends.

Similarly, if the hero in an adventure gets captured, the love interest can go to his family and convince them to "come out of retirement" to help break their son/daughter out of this predicament.

Blending circles without the direct involvement of the main character lets you highlight the heroic qualities of your ancillary characters, and often helps prevent any of them from catching the sidekick label dead in the face.

The trick, of course, is managing all these circles.  A sheer volume of characters is already a tough assignment, although most of us wind up making more than we ever intended to quite by accident.  To help navigate the circles of characters and prevent one large pile-on, so to speak, just remember to treat each character as their own person.

And part of being your own person is being part of a circle yourself.

Each secondary character (or at least the ones you like) will have their own circle.  Not all of their circles will matter (just as not every hero's family necessarily features in the story), but they're all there.  You don't have to outline the membership, but outline the different circles by rough definition, and you'll quickly find common veins to link that secondary character with other secondary characters for a feeling of a larger, connected world.

It may be best to think of the circles as characters themselves.  Meta-characters.  A group of coworkers has their own collective bent, just like a given family has its quirks and lovable qualities.  For circles you don't intend to spend as much time on, you can save yourself a good bit of effort by using its members to symbolize given personality traits of a single, larger character.  It's important to avoid stereotyping, but if all we see of a given group is the occasional brief dialog, there's no problem with archetyping.

One of the other unsung advantages to having multiple character circles is that your secondary characters can quickly become as popular or more popular than your mains.  Within their own circles (or by combining character circles together), you can give any particular secondary character their moment in the sun as a hero.

Don't think small.  If a character's boss suddenly has a "moment of bad-ass" and saves the company, they quickly become beloved, even if the story doesn't center around the hero's place of business.  If one of the hero's friends finally gets the guts to ask out another of their friends, you wind up with a wonderful romance that you can freely view from the outside (where most relationships are adorable) without having to delve into the individual characters' deepest feelings for each other.

When you create these secondary heroes, you wind up with a great opportunity:  creating a story not about a person, but about people, about friends and family and loyalty and cherishing each other, something that can be difficult if it's all about how one hero saves everyone all the time.

When the story isn't just about the hero, it also becomes easier for all of us to relate, sitting on the edge of our own little circles in a sea of other people's circles that we just happen to be in.  While they may be a little work to maintain, character circles always add a feeling of depth, realism and belonging to nearly any story.

And that can be a major plus.

Humor.

Before I take two steps into this topic, I want to be clear:  I have no intention of instructing anyone on the nature of humor.  Not only could the discussion easily range into a library's worth of data without hardly trying, the thought of pinpointing the concept or craft of humor at all is much like trying to draw lines around the notion of true love.

Your humor, my humor and a toad's humor are all going to be unique, so any attempt at exhaustive analysis is just plain silly.  After all, some people find Tosh.0 hilarious.  That said, there is merit in the simple discussion of how to approach, where to insert and how best to replicate in written fiction, humor.

...And I won't even be covering that.

The truth is that if we knew what other people found funny, we would all be effortlessly popular.  Those of us who experience a modicum of success in garner a regular giggle or two might occasionally come under the delusion that we should "do comedy," but the truth is that many such jokes (among friends, family, coworkers or cellmates) are so ruthlessly mired in obscure situational factors that they have less than no merit in any other context.

Consider the classic example:  a friend hurries to tell you the story of a wonderful joke they coined, extemporaneously, just that afternoon.  They fly through the setup like a caffeine-addle howler monkey before arriving (like the Hindenburg) at the punchline of which they were so proud.

On the off-chance they've managed to set the scene with any grace or completeness, you too often find yourself sadly underwhelmed at the retelling.  This, of course, leads the age-old excuse:  "You just had to be there."

Situational humor makes up fully 99% of all amateur comedy.  When making the mistake of trying to move from your group of friends (with whom you have your own unique cultural collective to draw from) to the world at large (stand-up and its iteratives being the most common form), this is a major issue, and tends to be something of a rude awakening for those who make the hapless venture.

Thankfully, in writing, situational humor is something of a natural transition.  The trick is that you have to write both the setup and the punchline.  You're not just you:  you are now your friends, the scene and the world that oh-so-naturally creates the perfect gem out of random chaotic happenstance (which you must now meticulously design).

As with most things in writing, I find it easiest to work backwards.

If you're specifically looking for a punchline, or at least a good line, it can help to start with the line, or at least a line prototype.  If you know the sort of joke you're going for, start with the line, the moment, the frozen instant of time around which all the giggle is based, and then graft it onto an otherwise natural, unassuming scene.

Mechanically speaking, take a line like "I think I'll have the soup" and try to weave it into a scene.

The setting is fairly obvious:  a restaurant, or some food-giving occasion.  Since we're going for humor, it's safe to assume that "I think I'll have the soup" is a grand understatement, hinting at either something spectacular about the soup, or something awful about the alternative.

The negative is generally the safer bet, since it affords us the chance to describe how horrible the salad (or other non-soup alternative) is.  All comedy comes at someone's expense:  in this case, the other patron, who may or may not be a main character.

Now we've worked ourselves to the meat of the scene:  a character other than the one saying the line orders the salad.  Something then goes horribly (and loudly) wrong with said salad, which alerts all the other patrons of the same area to the issue.  As the original violent event is tapering off, another patron off to the scene of the center attraction glibly tells their waiter:  "I think I'll have the soup."

For added effect, make the reaction to the salad have nothing at all to do with the salad itself (which is fairly logical anyway, since salad's are the least villainous of all foods, with the possible exception of the Caesar).

Our character orders the salad, and then something entirely unrelated happens:  someone "spikes" the salad with concentrated pepper oil; a large, green spider hitches a ride on a prominent bit of lettuce; the ghost of the character's lover who has been dogging them for three scenes finally decides to play poltergeist to get the hero's attention, whatever it may be.

The outside effect is the same:  other patrons see a salad arrive, and then the patron at the same table reacts frightfully as if in response to the leafy greens themselves.  The assumption is obvious, and only we the audience know the truth.

Enter dramatic irony.

It's not unknown that irony is the heart of comedy.  If your high school English class didn't teach you that, then here is the dime tour.  Irony is the essence of the unexpected, the unintended or the unspoken.  It is, at its core, two paradoxical things:  one stated, one known.

Here, the patron jumping out of their seat and flailing about in a panic is stated, leaving the other patrons to assume something is amiss with the salad.  The audience knows, however, that the patron just swallowed a mouthful of hotsauce the likes of which God himself has never seen.  The result, for whatever reason, is generally accepted as "funny."

True to its dualistic nature, of course, irony can be used for some of the greatest and best examples of humor, and the greatest and best examples of tragedy and soul-crushing failure.  Funny, that.

Back to humor, not ever joke needs a punchline, but punchlines do serve their purpose.  For one, they're repeatable, which any fan of Joss Whedon can tell you is its own marketing device.  When you hear three friends all guffawing over the same five-word phrase and feel on the outs, it's all the more incentive to get yourself "in the know" as quickly as possible.

But that dark motive aside, punchlines are a signal to an audience well trained by years of the same that the scene is over and ready to transition to something else.  They become a sort of punctuation on the segment itself, which in literature (where scene changes do not come with strong visual cues) can be invaluable, or at least comforting to your reader.

That said, don't feel limited to a line.  Plenty of hilarious scenes can't be isolated to a sound byte.  At times, the situation itself is humorous, if not in the laugh-out-loud manner we too often isolate ourselves to.  The awkwardness of a first romance, for instance.  The little dance an otherwise strong, stoic character might do the second the door is closed on the eve of their first date is source for endless warm-feeling humor.

Even better is setting up the illusion all along that the main character is the one eager for a romance that works, and then segueing directly from their private victory dance to their counterpart, a love interest till now only viewed from the outside and seeming altogether "with it" and suave, until we catch them shimmying all the way to their car, revealing just how human an otherwise iconic character truly is.

Often the trick with humor in your writing is keeping track of two worlds:  the world your audience knows, and the world the other characters see.  Sometimes the audience knows more, sometimes less, but it's in the disparity between that you can sneak in the humorously unexpected.  The greater the gap and the more sudden the reveal, the higher impact the comedic moment will be.

Sometimes the best place to start is in making human that which we otherwise confuse for supernatural or divine.  Showing a world leader as an uncertain, clumsy (but well-intentioned) bumbler, or revealing the tough, stoic thug to be a caring and loving father (by having him carry his daughter's My Little Pony backpack in public) is a gateway to somewhat more terrestrial forms of subtle humor between what the reader expects (or what the characters assume) and what the truth actually is.

In literature especially, dispelling or otherwise interrupting the notion of well-formed intellectualism or the high-fantasy world of florid prose is another key way to break and otherwise serious scene into unexpected humor at the meta-level.  When the person defying audience expectations is not the characters, but the narrator, the chances of anyone finding the humor rote and overdone are far less likely.

For an example, rent yourself a copy of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.  Within the first ten minutes, you'll see about five examples of the disparity of information between characters and audience, between characters and characters, and between audience and narrator.

Take notes.

If nothing else, don't be ashamed of simply being light-hearted and/or goofy if the situation calls for it (or even if it rather explicitly doesn't, depending on how much of a shock factor you're going for).  Generations pass, and we still get very attached to the notion of a stupid cute thing that makes funny noises.  Throwing the same critters (for no other moniker can be as aptly applied) into stark opposition to the seriousness of your other characters can create a comedy all its own without too much effort.

Just avoid going full-on Jar-Jar.  The less actual words being used, the better.  Dialects (especially intentionally hampered dialects) risk being annoying and offensive more than cute and humorous.  Gibberish, on the other hand, we never seem to get tired of.

Naturally, I wanted to end today's post on a pithy punchline of its own, but the ironic thing is that an article about humor is actually a terrible lead-in for any kind of one-liner you can imagine, since you've just finished tearing down the curtain to reveal the little man and his microphone.  The most you can hope to accomplish is the literary equivalent of breaking into random vaudeville.

So instead let me leave you with this:  you will undoubtedly, unerring, inescapably fail to make people laugh at every joke.  Humor is as subjective as love (if not more so) and there's only so much width you can hope to span across the various schools of thought before you give yourself an intellectual hernia.

For that reason, never put all your eggs in one joke, don't beat yourself up if a line falls flat and, most of all, don't try to make it perfect.  Imagery, climactic tension, pivotal character moments, all these merit a fine attention to detail and a tenacious quest for flawlessness.

Humor needs spontaneity, variety and a little effortless chaos.  Best of all, humor needs to ignore itself.  The worst thing you can do with a joke is wait for applause.  Sprinkle them like candy across the page in small doses and cap things off with a zinger, but do not stop:  trudge right on into the next line, scene or moment in time so quickly that your readers do an actual double-take when they realized what they just read.

Even if you fail to have people holding their sides and rolling on the floor, the endless flow of light-hearted positive energy is enough to get most people chomping at the bit for more.  Return to the notion of ewoks:  there is no single moment in Wicket's existence that makes us cackle outright, but the more he and his compatriots babble incoherently, the more we want to watch.

Falling short on humor still leaves you at "happy," and happy is a hell of a fallback plan.

Failing never felt so good.