Exchange of Realities

Much though we’d love to be able to devote all our time to our stories, there’s this little problem known as the real world getting between us and them. Haven’t we all complained about it at some point? Go to bed late, get up early, keep the house in order, no time to write, nor to plot, nor to think… what’s a talespinner to do?

To be honest, I’m still figuring it out. But here are a few tips I’ve come up with to make sure I get at least a little bit out of what I have to give to Reality.

• Separate the mind and the body. Figuratively, of course–if your brain’s not getting any blood, it doesn’t matter how many muses are tapping on your shoulder. A lot of the time, you’ll be stuck with mindless, tedious tasks, whether what you’re dealing with is housework or paper-pushing at the job or something else entirely. Sure, you can concentrate on how it’s taking you away from your work, but that’s counterproductive. Instead, choose one of your current creative hangups and think about it. After all, the work is keeping you from being distracted by other questions. Never underestimate the value of a mickey-mouse task that requires little to no thinking!
• Mass transit if you can get it, particularly en route to work. Yes, it adds to your travel time, which may seem counterintuitive. But look at it this way: along with being good for the environment and for reducing your gas bill, it’s a place where it’s just you and your blocks, and (unlike with work) nobody to chew you out if you take the time to scribble your ideas down. In fact, one of my better characters, the demon-spider Akhterim, was the result of an unholy union between an impractically long commute, an equally impractically long lunch break, and John Sampen music on the ipod at the right time. And this blog entry was initially drafted on San Diego mass transit.
• Speaking of work, if the job’s too brain-intensive to let you work on your own projects, why not turn it into a project? Almost any job can be reframed into something more in keeping with our own worlds: desk jobs as some sort of ritual, for instance. It’s all in how you choose to look at it. Then, when you’ve figured out what you’re “doing”, ask yourself why. What are you preparing for, or defending against, or calling forth? In the rules of wherever you’re transposing this to, how does it work? More importantly, is it suggesting a similar sort of event for one of your projects? (This one I personally pride myself on: I wrote a short story not too long ago based on a concept I picked up when marveling at the ritualistic nature of aide duties at the Oakland Public Library.)
• Engage in or listen to conversations. As I write (or at least as I write the rough draft, a couple of people on my bus are finishing up a conversation about names and moving on to a riff on one of the local businesses. There are a lot of interesting people out there, with a lot of interesting things to say.
• Listening not quite your style? Try watching and speculating instead. Choose a person near you, and do character sketches–partly what you can see, partly the conclusions you can draw from what you can see. It’s good practice, and world-switching your conclusions a little gets you a bank of Instant Characters you can draw on if you need random passersby who don’t look like walking scenery. You can do the same improvising a history for things as well as people–buildings, trees, old-looking pieces of clothing, you name it.
• And carry a writer’s journal. This will help you retain what you pick up from all of the above exercises; moreover, I find its presence tends to tease ideas out of my mind. I personally recommend getting a pocket-size one; it’s lightweight, inobtrusive and, well, fits in the pocket.

You can’t run from the real world, but you can make it deal with you on something closer to your terms. How do you harness it in order to improve your projects?

Ravyn’s note: I am pleased to announce the return of The Generic Villain, mentor and adviser of fledgling Hands of Darkness everywhere, who after acquiring life and personality has graciously agreed to dish out wit and wisdom on serving the darkness and how best to further such goals every so often here. As yesterday was my first day of work, I rather appreciate having someone to cover for me, particularly someone in my own mind whom I can chew out with impunity if the writing isn’t good enough. So…. Take it away, GV!

Maybe you can’t find any redeeming qualities to it. Maybe you’re serving some dark god with really skewed priorities. Maybe you’re just completely insane. Either way, you’ve decided to go for world destruction rather than world domination.

As an experienced Hand of Darkness in the multiverse, a veteran of one failed world destruction plot in my world and another successful one in another one (don’t ask how I survived. It’s complicated), and a longtime mentor of troublemakers in training, I have one piece of advice for the evildoer considering adding the destruction of the world to his portfolio:

Don’t.

Yes, destroying the world is about as good as villain-cred can get, and impossible to top. Yes, it’s the height of ambition. But let’s assume for a moment that the plot succeeds. Who are you going to impress if everyone’s gone? How can you be satisfied if you’ve gone down with the ship as well?

Then consider the following: Destroying the world is a logistical nightmare. In nine situations out of ten, preparations for world destruction are very, very obvious, both in terms of existence and of purpose. Moreover, because it’s so flashy, not only are you going to get an unusual number of the standard goody-two-shoes meddlers trying to interfere with your plans, but even the most expensive and apathetic antiheroes are going to find a bone to pick with you. And don’t forget the people on your own side! Most Hands of Darkness have objectives that involve taking over the world, and it’s kind of hard to dominate something that doesn’t exist anymore. Particularly if you’re dead. This makes any Shatterer of Worlds into Obstacle #1. Now, hero-types can get away with being Obstacle #1, but they’ve got narrative protection. Do you really feel that lucky, punk? And even aside from that, there’s morale in your own camp—how many of your minions would knowingly try to execute a world-destroying plan? Be honest.

If you’re doing it because you hate the world, reconsider. We have the power to remake the worlds we inhabit in our image; it’s part of the contract. Certainly, if you’ve got the strength to destroy the world, you’ve got the strength to change it. And changing it ostensibly for the better confuses the living daylights out of those pesky heroes. Wouldn’t you love to see their heads explode in a fountain of shattered preconceptions?

There are alternatives. Find them. Use them. You’ll thank me for it later.

Inspired by StupidRanger’s original post and Donny’s response.  For those of you who don’t have time to read these posts, the basic idea of the first is that every gamer goes through several phases: Learning, overpowering the group, underpowering the group, and nitpicking the group to death, before settling on “It’s a game, let’s have fun.” Then Donny follows up with the idea that we learn style from the DMs we play under.

Both of them, however, are missing one important fact: The “Life Cycle of the DM” as defined by StupidRanger doesn’t always apply to people who came into the game as writers first. Certainly, I skipped most of the phases (okay, I might have had a Monty Haul phase back when I was running for my cousins, but that was while I still didn’t know how the game worked).

It’s mainly because many of us have already done this in our writing. We learn early on that nobody likes a story in which the players have it too easy. Then we figure out that too hard doesn’t always work either: unless you’re particularly good at this style, killing off characters regularly wreaks absolute havoc with the reader’s attachment, and making them perpetually helpless tends to result in reader numbness. (Like I asked in my riff on message fiction, have you ever read The Jungle?) And tedious minutiae—don’t even get us started. While it’s a bad idea to have someone with a quiver of twenty-five arrows fire twenty-six, most of our readers will respond to long, careful tabulations of everything possible not by being impressed by our skill with detail, but by getting bored and wandering off.

As a result, we tend to skip the steps in the Circle. This does not, however, mean that we don’t have our own phases. Gaming-first GMs often also run through this cycle, sometimes in parallel to the one detailed on StupidRanger. So here it is, for you: The Triangle Progression of the Writer-GM.

1. Learning the game. This is as much the purview of the writer-GM as the gamer-GM; after all, you have to start somewhere.

2. The Tyranny of the Railroad. This is back when we’re still used to being writers first and gamers second, and we don’t understand why anyone would want to deviate from our beautiful, carefully written plans. So instead, we make it impossible for anyone to run away from the plot. Enemies can’t be negotiated with, only fought. The PCs have to visit X locations in Y order to get Z items. In short, it’s rather like a retro video game with slightly more customizable characters.

3. DMPCing. This can happen coterminously with railroading, or on its own. It’s a similar issue, though: We have a really, really nifty character idea, and we want to show the people we’re playing with just how Nifty it is. LOOK AT IT! ADMIRE IT! This creates the DMPC, bane of many players: a character whose main role seems to be to show the group just how much Better/Plot-Important/Unique than them he is.

4. The Rule of the Players. This is usually a rebound from one of the above phases, or from having experienced a game in which the DM was in one of the above phases. We realize that no matter how lovely our world is, how well-written our plot, it’s not going to exist without the party. So we go out of our way to accommodate them, even going so far as to present our plot hooks as “If you could please look over here, this is a problem that you might be able to solve…” We adjust our styles to theirs, we look the other way when they create the PC equivalent of the aforementioned DMPC, we abandon entire plot threads because it’s not something they’re ready for.

5. The Puzzle Game: This is rather like the Rule of the Players, only a bit more passive-aggressive. We have plots we want to use, but we don’t want the group to feel like we’re going to push them down the path, so we go the other way and force them to try to figure out where they’re supposed to go. Often, we’re trying so hard to keep them from having an easy time of it that we forget that they don’t know everything we do.

6. Equilibrium: Around this point, we’ve come to a balance. We have plot hooks, but we know how to tailor them to the people we’re dealing with; we know when to cling to our plans, and when to let the PCs choose their own path. At this point, we reach the “Collaborative Fiction With Dice” phase.

As we grow and change, we find ourselves working through these phases—sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in sequence, sometimes skipping a few because we already know better. Where are you on the path right now?

So you’re planning to seed a conversation with exposition, and you’ve got the location, the participants, and the general framing. Excellent. Now we get to the hard part: actually planning out the conversation.

There are several important things to remember for this step. First, while you want to get everything across, you don’t want to infodump; it’s better to slip your hints in with a bit more subtlety. Second, you need to match the information to the character delivering it. Third, it needs to be an interesting enough to keep the attention of your audience. The following are the steps you’ll want to take to make sure all of these conditions are met.

The Plan

This is your first and most important step in delivering an expository conversation. In essence, what you’re trying to do here is make sure you know exactly what to say, then ensure that you say most if not all of it. Start by making a list of the details you want to get across. This way, you won’t miss anything. Then look through them, and assign them numbers from one to three, with one being vital information and three being optional but useful. This is your first run through the list. For your second run-through, mark each detail with the character likeliest to mention it, and possibly the second most likely if your conversational unit is a group rather than one or two individuals. On your third, note what sorts of subjects might feed into each of the details. You can allude to a famous legend by having kids argue over who gets to play which part in their game, for instance, or slip in a recent drought by having one of a farm couple gripe about how wasteful the other was during the recent hard times.

Adding Color

This is the part where we figure out how to hook the audience. For an interactive conversation, the easiest way is for one of the participants to be someone the main character/party either already knows or wants to learn something from; this provides a natural incentive to go over there and engage in the discussion. An overheard conversation can be a lot harder, particularly if the characters who are supposed to be learning from this chat aren’t prone to eavesdropping. In that case, the best thing to do is lead off with an allusion to something that matters to the listeners: a name, perhaps, or a furtive question about “that thing last night”. Being a character of interest can also do the job; if the conversationalist is suspicious enough, the group may be spying on him anyway. (A chat between someone who might be tied to an incident and a minor character trying to find out for sure could be a rather effective setup.) If you’re running a game, you can also take advantage of the metagaming principle by making the group roll to hear it; anything that they have to work for tends to suddenly become more interesting.

Now we need to make sure they stay interested. This means frequent intriguing details, decently fast pacing, or humor. If the audience is particularly observation-prone or curious about the people engaging in this chat, revealing less vital details about the participants might also be a good way to hang onto them. Having earlier hinted that one of those involved might know something useful can also help to keep the group’s attention. Figure out which tactic you’re going to use, and make sure you’ve got a way for your characters to implement it.

Contingencies (GMs only)

If you’re inexperienced with conversation-seeding and have to deal with living characters, you may need a little bit of further planning. If it’s an overheard conversation, you may and probably will wish to write a script out ahead of time. If it’s interactive, you’re not going to be able to do that quite as well, since you can’t plan for everything the group’s going to do. Instead, write the first five minutes or so, including points where you can give the players the opportunity to jump in, and for each first-priority detail you have, write yourself three or four potential sentences with the detail embedded. This will make it easier to slip it into the flow of the narrative; all you have to do is keep the conversation from getting too far off track. Once you’ve had more practice, you can start easing up on the scripts, or even the list.

Execution

And now you get to deliver the conversation. Start with your script, if you have it; if you’re improvising, just go with the flow. Make sure you have your checklist close at hand so you can reference it easily, and try to follow your priorities when seeding in details. While you don’t have to mark off each detail as you deliver it, it will make it easier to ensure you don’t miss any. If it’s an interactive conversation, use techniques such as dangling details to prompt the players to ask questions. And don’t be afraid to play it to the hilt! Personality is an important way to hold your audience’s attention. Once you’ve got all the details mentioned, you can either end the conversation, or take your cue from the audience on how much longer to go.

Good luck, and enjoy your chats!

Have you ever been stuck on a long trip of some sort and tried to pass the time by striking up a conversation with those around you? You’d be amazed at what you can learn from these sorts of conversations: on my last plane trip, I learned more about interesting places in Portland than I have from my last half dozen visits there. For us, this is useful: if we can learn this much from people who are just trying to fill the time, how much might we be able to get across with people whose topics we can choose?

Of course, this is an advanced technique. Specifically, we have to try to avoid people expositing for exposition’s own sake; that way lies “as we all know, Bob”, and we’re all better off if we don’t let Bob into our stories. He bores the socks off of everyone who comes near him. What we need to do is make this flow. Keep it natural.

Once you’ve got the flow of this, you’ll be able to do it on the fly, but that takes practice. For now, you’ll want to plan these things out before you execute them, just to start getting a feel for the offhand comments and clever insertions that make this trick work.

The logical place to begin is of course the background. Where are you delivering this offhand exposition? Is it going to be interactive for those who need to hear it, or will it merely be overheard? What kinds of people are going to be delivering it?

Where you can deliver this depends on the limits of your setting. For a modern setting, this is easy: Mass transit is an excellent opportunity to introduce people to the more talkative residents of your world. As the technology level decreases, though, mass transit becomes less feasible and therefore less of an option. Instead, we find ourselves working with more stationary situations. If you have gatherings for athletic events or plays, there’s plenty of opportunity for early arrivals to talk to each other (and plenty of reason for them to do so, as they all have something in common or they wouldn’t be there). The marketplace is also a good spot to disseminate rumor and information. There are also social groups you can use: while “The old men playing chess or cards on the lawn”, “the children with the odd hoop game” and “the ladies’ sewing circle” are cliché examples, they’re cliché because they work. (This goes double for the sewing circle; the purpose of those things, after all, is finding something to do with the mind and mouth while the hands and eyes are occupied.)

Then there’s the question of interactivity. In a book or a story, there’s really not that big a difference; after all, you won’t have to improvise answers whether the protagonist is involved in the conversation or not. In a game, however, there’s a serious difference between an interactive conversation and an overheard conversation. If the conversation is supposed to be overheard, sure, it’s easier for us to plan it ahead, but the situation is going to be us talking to ourselves where our players get rather bored. On the other hand, an interactive conversation will keep our players more occupied (if they’re into that sort of thing, anyway; this tactic is not recommended with a combat-first group), but it introduces an element of unpredictability, as the players might change the subject before we’re finished, end the conversation early, mortally offend the characters talking to them, or otherwise interfere with our ability to get across the information we need.

Beyond that is who, both personality-wise and role-wise. Most of the time, we’ll be using pretty talkative personalities, since they’re the likeliest ones to engage in a conversation our audience will be interested in. That isn’t always the solution, though. The perceptive audience will be at least as intrigued by someone who hardly ever speaks beginning to hold forth on a topic, particularly if they’re the ones asking the questions. Role is a bit easier: you’re not going to be finding too many village elders playing with the kids or teenage boys in among the sewing circle (and if they’re there, someone’s likely to ask why, providing a convenient hook), anyone at a theater or sporting event is probably either interested in what’s about to be shown or there because someone they know is, and the transit option allows for a grab bag of potential character types and personalities.

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss how to plan and deliver these conversations.

We’ve spent most of this week discussing how to develop a character through conflict. Enough telling, though; it’s time to actually get a decent demonstration. Since it’s been working so well, I’ll be using Ruby as today’s demonstrator.

When we first saw her, she was a hyper innocent working towards the end of the world, the primary bodyguard and assistant for her mentor Lirit, fully confident in her identity and her own ability to take on any problem. As noted on Tuesday, she’d already had her role a little bit shaken up by competition for Lirit’s attention and the right to be her bodyguard, and had to deal with an interloper who seemed to be going for the parts of what “spot” in the group she had left.

What shaped her more, though, were the situations she ran into over her time dealing with her new friends. It had begun simple, with the betrayal and murder of her ultimate overlord by one of said overlord’s equals. This was more Lirit’s crisis of confidence, but when your moral compass is someone else, and that someone else is starting to have doubts, it’s hard to stay stable. Ruby found herself in a fight she couldn’t win, but it wasn’t enough to shake her identity; the foe was way out of her league, so losing was all right.

What really shook her up happened later, in a conflict against Krata and Esemeli, the twin children of the plot’s major antagonist. In a span of about twenty-four hours, she’d been yanked out of her cabin on the group’s boat, pretty much overpowered by Krata (particularly embarrassing given that one of her old teammates, a bookish fellow whom Ruby could take in a fight without breaking a sweat, had made a considerably more impressive showing against Krata’s much scarier father), and then, scarcely six hours after making her escape, nearly lost Lirit to one of Esemeli’s attacks, then got reduced to a pulp again.

Essentially, the situation struck at a number of issues. One was a matter of confidence; her functionally perfect record was broken, and she hadn’t even managed to touch either of her foes. Another was that of her role. She’d been trusted to protect Lirit—the last instruction she’d been given by her overlord, the purpose she’d been given when she lost her old identity—and not only had both of them nearly been killed, but she’d had no effect whatsoever on the fight. Had the group not been neck deep in trouble, it’s quite possible that she would have spent the next week in utter self-pity mode once she woke up. Put simply, for the first time since Lirit had recruited her, Ruby was confronted with her own weakness; she had to think now, to plan, to make contingencies around the idea that she might fail. She couldn’t fight the problem directly, she certainly couldn’t run away from it, so she had to plan for it, and worst of all, her plan was something Lirit wouldn’t like. So she found herself having to stand up to her mentor in order to do her duty. The whole mess led to no small amount of tension between them, as their dynamic itself actively shifted to accommodate the new development.

Her other major turning point, not long ago, involved her difficulties with her cause. When she’d been recruited, her work hadn’t seemed that bad, as almost anyone who died by her hand or Lirit’s either went peacefully and something approximating happy, or richly deserved it. And this worked, even through Lirit’s crisis—that is, up until a spell backfire led to Ruby discovering what a large number of people simultaneously meeting an unpleasant fate sounded like. Instant crisis of morals. Again, her first step was to withdraw until talked through it by her friend Luath; that tends to be her default option when the situation doesn’t require immediate action.

Because of these situations, Ruby of now is more actively thinking through how she relates to the world and how to handle what goes on around her; she’s also a lot more independent and self-driven. As a result, and due to various other factors, I think I can safely say she’s the best-developed NPC I have.

Yesterday we discussed what might affect how people react to external events that threaten their worldview. Today, we’re going to discuss the general types of reactions exhibited in circumstances like this.

First is resistance and denial. In this situation, people can’t conceive of the possibility that something they believed all their lives might actually be wrong. Or the realization might be so devastating that to actually believe it would shatter them, so they avoid believing by whatever means possible. Some might refuse to listen, some might find ways to convince themselves that their sources are lying, somet will come up with increasingly convoluted ways of explaining away the things they don’t want to believe, some run away. Essentially, this strategy focuses on avoidance, whether it’s mental, social or physical. Since they don’t want to believe it’s true, though, they’re not going to do anything about it.

Second is breakage, the opposite extreme. Similar to the above, the realization is something that the character can’t handle and knows it. But for whatever reason–overwhelming evidence, less strength of conviction, being pushed almost to the breaking point by prior stress–they don’t find a way to resist it. Personally, I dislike this method when dealing with mean characters; it’s good in the temporary, but over the long term it leads to rather boring main characters. If you must do it, have some idea how to snap them out of it. A main character in states ranging from nearly suicidal depression to utter apapthy isn’t much fun to watch for more than a chapter or so.

Or they could choose utter opposition. This one is rather like resistance in that it is characterized by utter rejection of the offending issue. But unlike resistance, in which the character will not accept that the issue could be true, the character will not allow it to be true. Instead, she fights back. On the plus side, this is an effective source of conflict and motivation. The catch is that characters in a state of utter opposition can be rather stupid, sticking to their fights long after they should have given up.

Then there’s examination. This state can appear on its own or be paired up with any of the above, even resistance. In this state, the character tries to deal with the problem by making sense of it, whether it’s “This can’t be happening; there must be some other reason”, “How dead am I?”, “All right, how did this happen and how do we solve it”, or something else entirely.

Sometimes, a character ends up choosing dissociation.  Yes, the world-shattering revelation is true and inevitable, but as far as the character is concerned, it doesn’t actually involve her.  She might look at it as an academic exercise, or commiserate with those whom it does affect, but she will not accept it as a threat to herself.

Last is acceptance, which can come in any of a number of forms.  For some people it might mean embracing the new state of things and attempting to ensure it–this is relatively rare, though, and usually requires at least one other reason.  For others, it leans more towards agreeing that the revelation is true and grudgingly coexisting with it. For still others, it involves accepting the truth of the matter but resisting its continuance; this is rather like opposition, only with less of a bent towards foolhardy stupidity.  Acceptance is essentially the equilibrium point; most roads lead to it, and few lead away.

Note that these states are anything but mutually exclusive.  Even acceptance can combine itself with almost any of the other states.  Often, a character will transition between multiple states.  One might at first deny the truth of a world-shattering revelation, then be overcome by the evidence and shatter for a little while, then rebound and throw herself completely into preventing it from being the problem that it is, possibly learning everything she can about it in the process.  While this order is the most common, almost any sequence, permutation or combination is possible.  It mainly varies by character, as noted yesterday.

Yesterday, we discussed the kinds of internal crises that can occur when somebody’s situation is shaken up.  Today, we’re going to look more at people processing major crises and threats to their ideals.  The more deeply held the conviction is, the more the world moving in opposition to it shakes them up. But it’s how they respond to it that makes the difference between them and the rest of the world.

How people respond can depend on multiple factors. One is how used they are to having their beliefs questioned or shaken up and how they usually deal with it. A cynic whose beliefs have been picked at for years will take a lot more in stride than a relative innocent first discovering that there is darkness in the world. Someone who lives for arguments or looks for the underlying reasons in everything might tend more towards denial than one who believes most of what he’s told by those he looks up to. A more proactive sort, or one who still thinks she can have an impact on the world, will be likelier to resist or try to change the negative discovery, while someone who’s used to not being able to change anything is more likely to fold.

Another is how they came by the realization. Say you’re from a family with a bit of a bad reputation, and you’re trying to clean it up. Are you really going to believe it when one of your enemies starts leveling accusations of demon-worship at your kin? What about when it’s one of your close friends? Your main squeeze? One of your closest relatives who isn’t involved in it? A more distant relative who actually is? What happens when you see evidence of that sort of behavior for yourself? At what point do you admit it to yourself?

Then there’s the question of whether they can do anything about it. This is an important one, particularly for more proactive characters. In general, the more helpless they feel with regards to a certain situation, the likelier they are to deal with it by either running from it or blocking it out. Ability to deal with it doesn’t always result in a healthy solution, though. If the solution is beyond a character but she hasn’t figured it out, she may keep fighting against it long after the time to quit or despite the fact that it’s actually for the best. (For GMs: this is a particularly important situation to watch out for in your player characters, particularly if you run a game in which the PCs know they’re exceptional and capable of altering the plot. Impossible tends not to be in a PC’s vocabulary except when it applies to NPCs.)

Similar to the question of whether the character can affect the problem is the question of who the issue itself negatively affects. Many characters are more devastated by revelations or catastrophes that affect them than they are by those that don’t, and have greater issues with things that affect larger numbers of people than those that only affect a few. This isn’t by far the only possible result, though. Some characters are actually more affected by revelations that affect their families and friends more than the characters themselves, sometimes going to the extreme of wanting to take on the problem themselves to save their loved ones from it. Some consider a small-scope problem a bigger personal affront, or a sign of fate being against them.

The last variable, and the most unpredictable, is the people around them. Friends might mitigate the impact of a revelation by providing support, suggesting solutions, pointing out reasons why it isn’t as bad, or just showing the character that she isn’t alone. Enemies (or sometimes well-meaning friends pushing the wrong buttons) can exacerbate these problems. Others dealing with their own issues might end up being sources of inspiration, additional stress, or something else entirely.

Regardless of the character’s general response tendencies, there are a few general patterns the responses are likely to follow.  These can give you an idea how a character might be changed.  Tomorrow, we’ll look into the general responses.

Yesterday, we saw how a character can be affected by those around her. Today, and for the rest of this week, we’re going to look at threats to personal ideals and how they interact with characterization. Conflict is one of the greatest sources of character development.

No matter what happens, if there’s a crisis, there’s probably going to be some sort of internal ramification or complication. These situations can be even more difficult to work through than the external revelations and complications, but they can also make a more fascinating story. There is, after all, a reason why man vs. self is one of the major conflicts taught in most if not all creative writing courses.

Many of these sorts of conflicts fall into a few major categories, but character reactions to them tend to boil down to three major types: clinging to the self-image, clinging to the new image, or ignoring the issue/moving off in a different direction.

One is a matter of confidence. While most people are thrown into situations that make them wonder about their own ability to handle themselves, not all such situations are created equal. This is particularly true when dealing with a character who has never had occasion to doubt her own confidence or competence. It’s rather like going from being the star pupil of a small high school to being just one of many in a considerably more difficult college; circumstances are overwhelming enough to cause the character to doubt or even give up on the idea of her own ability to function. For this one, the three responses boil down into working extremely hard to regain the old position, making an effort to stay afloat and no more, or just allowing oneself to fail.

People don’t have to just lose confidence in themselves; they can also lose confidence in those around them, or even in all of humanity. Characters’ general reactions are making an effort to recover their faith in the people in question, losing touch with it entirely, or just going on with what they know and seeing what else they discover. Loss of faith is a common defining event for villains; they’ve seen the darkness in the humanity and are finding their own ways of dealing with it, whether by trying to bring it under their control, spreading it, or repudiating the worth of humanity because of it.

Another is the loss or lack of a major role. This one touches identity itself, and as a result is a common individual problem. Generally, what will happen is that the character identifies herself with a given role. This can have to do with function (“The one with the plans”, “the sneaky one”); with interpersonal relationships (“Kiara’s student”, “Tarisa’s mentor”, “Rilik’s girlfriend”); or just with how a character is viewed by those around her, or thinks she should be viewed by the rest of the world (usually these are one-word qualities, like “experienced” or “fearsome”). The role might be self-assigned or come from someone else, if it exists. Either way, it’s gone, if it even existed, and the absence is devastating. Often (particularly in the case of function-based roles), this will be either triggered or accompanied by a crisis of confidence. Characters in this sort of situation tend to have one of three classes of reactions: clinging desperately to their own role, trying to find a new one, or giving up entirely.

Another is the discovery that something they believed or worked towards is actually wrong or harmful. This one is one of the most insidious, as it rarely occurs alone; often it will trigger one or both of the above crises. Reactions to these can vary in an extreme manner, but still fit the three categories: a character might reject this discovery entirely and focus even harder on proving that her belief or project is to the world’s benefit; she might work to destroy the offending belief or project to prevent it from affecting others; or she might distance herself as much as possible from it, trying to avoid responsibility or condemnation.

Then there’s the loss of someone or something important. This probably deserves its own entry, but I’ll have to get back to it later. It still follows the three major categories, though: a character might deal with the loss by attempting to carry on the ideal of the lost one or search out the item, by going into some form of mourning or despondency, or by just blocking it all out and carrying on.

One of the most important ones is the conflict of ideals. For this one, the problem isn’t one being wrong; instead, it’s multiple ones being right. For instance, using yesterday’s demon example, what happens when loyalty to the family conflicts with an ingrained opposition to demon-worship in all of its forms? These can come in a lot of forms: truth vs. people’s feelings, right vs. easy, friendship vs. common sense, duty vs. much of anything, including other duties, traditions, survival, love, or almost anything else you can name. For this, the choices tend to be one ideal, the other, or something in between. This situation is often a motivator for villains’ lieutenants, as their loyalty or sense of duty may have won out against what was right; the fact that the scales can still be tipped is why these characters regularly end the story either with their redemption or their removal from the conflict.

Tomorrow: So now we’ve got enough conflicts, crises and ill influences to put any character through the wringer. How are the characters likely to react to these new developments?

Having a character built isn’t enough. It doesn’t matter how detailed the character is or how many nifty quirks she has; if she stays static, she’s still going to get boring. Fortunately, people don’t work that way, so there’s no reason not to let them change, and every reason to do so.

For a good part of this week, we’re going to be covering the kinds of forces that cause characters to grow, change, develop, and in general become more interesting.

One of the first forces to act on them once the story begins is the people around them. People can grow to be more like their role models, or find themselves disillusioned and try to distance themselves from them. They can learn to lean more on their friends, or try to strike off on their own. Rivals can cause them to dedicate themselves more firmly to an area of expertise, or to strike out in an entirely new direction. Sometimes, we even find ourselves needing to add new details to characters just to make sure they aren’t just like those around them.

Again, I’ll use our old friend Ruby as an example. When we last left her, she was the fearless bodyguard to her mentor and recruiter Lirit, but at the same time sort of the child of her group. She hadn’t quite realized what her service of death had gotten her into, or what she had originally been. And that’s about how she was when she met the protagonists, and the social dynamics began to change.

First, there were the protagonists themselves. They were what she’d been before she met Lirit, and they didn’t seem to have any problems with it. (Okay, two of them were. Make that three. No, four. No, wait—How many friends were they going to bring?) They were amusing, though, and they drove a couple of her more annoying friends crazy. Lirit seemed to approve of them as well, so Ruby decided they may as well be friends.

Then there were the further effects. There was Shadow, for instance, who seemed to have started courting Lirit, and counting himself as The Bodyguard. On the one hand, he was a good enough fighter to make a decent training partner, but on the other hand, he was competition, and his presence forced Ruby to start reevaluating her role. Her conclusion? He was okay… but if he was going to protect Lirit from outside threats, she was going to make absolutely sure that he was in no way, shape or form a threat himself.

And then there was Luath. He wasn’t the fighter the others were, but he seemed to identify well with her mixture of brute force and flashy magic, and he’d certainly done a pretty impressive job against the walking tin can the other day. And he could cook, and he liked her. This was definitely a new development; she’d never had that happen before. Maybe not being Lirit’s one and only bodyguard wasn’t so bad.

The other one who had a major impact on her was a latecomer by name of Lua, who was cute, and hyper, and had a rather childlike outlook on life, and was interested in Luath, and in short, seemed to be trying to steal her schtick. This ended up being as much a writer-side impact as a character-side. On the one hand, there was Ruby, being forced into being more direct about her own feelings on the matter because she couldn’t just stand aside trying to figure out how this stuff worked, but on the other hand, there I was, trying to find ways to make the separation between the two of them more obvious. This resulted in my playing up Ruby’s education, since Lua was utterly unlettered, and in Ruby’s interest in strategy games and similarly warlike pursuits. The result? Further characterization beyond “the hyper, energetic one”, and more obvious in-character exploration of her relationship with those around her.

The people around them aren’t the only force that affects characters. Tune in tomorrow for more ways to make them grow!