Quantum Storytelling

An odd name for a post title I admit, but it’s the best I could think of… I’ve been struggling to come up with ideas for a certain part of my story for many weeks now. Last night I stayed up a little too late playing some Hitman: Blood Money. When I’m creatively stuck there’s nothing like running through some well designed play challenges. It’s a bit hard to explain, but I’ll try anyway.

The levels in Hitman are well designed because they offer many opportunities to progress or succeed in the level. Take for example, a suburbia level where your goal is to assassinate a former mafioso in the witness protection program. His house is patrolled by FBI agents, there are security cameras, and even a disguised truck outside the house with two FBI men inside observing everything. The place is a fortress. Make a wrong move, and they call in two extra carloads of FBI agents to gun you down.

In the game, just as in real life, a situation like this seems almost impossible to overcome. But the designers have left a few opportunities for you. Across the street from the house is the home of a veterinarian. You can steal some tranquilizers to be used on people or the guard dog. Chloroform can be used to knock out people. There’s even a sausage out of the garbage that can be used to sedate the dog. Another neighbor has a child’s treehouse in the back yard. In the treehouse is an air rifle. The air rifle can fire the tranquilizer darts. By themselves, these individual components are useless, but if you explore enough to find both elements, you’ve got a recipe for a plan.

There’s a birthday party going on in the house of the mafioso. A clown has been hired, and goes to and from his car for party supplies. You can knock him out, steal his clown outfit and enter the house that way. There is a caterer, and you can do the same with him, using his catering tray to sneak in your weapons of assassination. You can knock out the garbage man, and take his uniform. This allows you access near the house without raising suspicion.

As you can see, the design of a game level in Hitman is all about opportunities. This isn’t that much different from plotting a story. The goal is the same. As the storyteller, what you’re trying to do is to both create opportunities for your villains and your heroes. You’re trying to establish circumstances that push the characters forward into action because, given the opportunities, they will be naturally motivated to do so.

For characters to seem resourceful, you must give them resources to exploit or at the very least things they can stumble upon. Think of your characters as opportunists. To succeed all they need to do is recognize opportunities in their environment that they can exploit. From that perspective, your job as the writer is more like a designer. You design situations and conflict that inherently present non-opportunities and opportunities.

For example, if your character had to sneak into a well-guarded building you have a simple goal with an obvious conflict; The character can’t just walk in the front door. The solution then becomes a process of elimination. Back door? That’s guarded too. Window? All shut and locked. Close off the possibilities until they start to become more interesting.

• Could the character pose as a pizza delivery girl?
• A building repair man?
• Knock out a guard and take his uniform?
• Climb to the rooftop of an adjacent building and jump across?
• Crawl across a narrow ledge, fearful of falling at any moment?

Suddenly you’ve got a whole host of interesting things to work with. The question then changes from “What can I do?” to “What CAN’T I do?” and your problem has morphed from not having any choices to having too many!

I lost a little sleep playing games last night. But when I woke up this morning, even though I struggled to get out of bed, I had a fresh well of creative energy to draw from. With a little coffee, the tumblers of my mind started to turn over and I couldn’t stop myself from cranking out a few ideas for my story.

When you’re stuck sometimes all you need is to see things in perspective of opportunity. Lose a little sleep over it. Make up for it by overdosing on a little coffee. In the spirit of opportunism; Use whatever works. With any luck, you might find a little foggy momentum.

I recently watched Hard Candy. When the credits rolled, I was angry. I felt ripped off. I felt like the writer’s only goal had been to deceive the audience. This came in the form of a twist at the end. I won’t spoil it for you if you care to watch it, but I will say this; There were no likeable characters in this movie. For a while the movie pretends to have a villain and a hero, but in the end all lines are blurred and you feel like the two central characters are both rotten pieces of garbage. Personally, I felt like I had wasted two hours of my life.

The experience reminded me of Bret Easton Ellis’s Rules of Attraction. I liked American Psycho, because at the very least you can sympathize with the anti-hero Patrick Bateman. Rules of Attraction, on the other hand, seemed to have a cast of completely unsympathetic characters whose purpose was Ellis’s central thesis that people suck. The story consists of weak, pathetic, closed-minded, horribly flawed characters doing awful things to each other and treating each other without respect or dignity. End of story.

Hate is a strong word to use when judging a story, but I feel fair in using the word here. I hated these stories. Why?

I want to root for someone. They don’t have to be perfect. They can be flawed. They don’t even have to be ‘good.’ They can be serial killers or hitmen. Culture is rife with anti-heroes, and I enjoy many of those stories. But the reason I enjoy them is because I can identify with the characters in some way, even when they’ve done wrong I still want them to win.

But when you create a character whose only purpose is to illustrate how bad people can be, with no rhyme or reason other than to bask in cruddiness of human nature, you’re going to alienate the audience. If alienating your audience is the goal, then go right ahead.

It’s easy to see how many writers do this to try and make an artistic statement. You have to understand the tradeoff though. Your desire for artistic expression is put first before the audience’s satisfaction. In other words you don’t care how the audience will feel or react. You’re just expressing your own negative feelings about human nature. There are times when you simply need to do this to justify a character (good or bad), but I still think you need someone for the audience to root for.

Just understand what you’re doing when you create unlikeable characters.

P.S. Another movie is Match Point, though enough people seemed to enjoy that movie so maybe I’m in the minority here.

I’ve been pondering this since last week. I can write til the cows come home. Write, write, write. It’s not a problem for me. Ideas are. If I could generate ideas as much as I could write, I’d have 30 novels by now. Okay, maybe not 30, but you get the idea. And I doubt many of them would be good.

Ideas are a very slow process for me. I have to think of a question, or a problem, then let it soak. Sometimes I have to bask in a problem for a week or more and suddenly an idea appears. We could call this an incubation period. The problem is if you add incubation periods for every idea, then a decent collection of ideas takes months to evolve.

I’ve only found one thing to speed this process up, and that’s talking about my ideas and idea problems with other people. Picking their brain, and finding out what they think about your problem. You get a kind of point counterpoint going, a dialogue. That dialogue helps you to clarify and refine your ideas. The limitation is that there’s not always somebody around for you to share your ideas with. Another might be that you don’t want to share your ideas with anyone.

Do you have tricks for getting ideas faster?