More Thoughts on "The Disruptors": Characters, Relationships, Terrorism, False Flags and Art

I haven't done much on my "The Disruptors" story idea for a while. This week I had a few ideas on how to overcome some of barriers I face.

Characters and Their Relationships

One mistake I've made with some of the stories I've worked on was not to put enough thought into the characters and their relationships. This is something I've been aware of for some time, but It has risen up in my consciousness in the last few weeks.

I think the work I did on my Doc Savage story, "The 89th Key" helped me realize that.  (see http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/stories/the-89th-key/).

What drove it home for me this week, was a comment in an interview about the Doc Savage convention. http://blogs.evtrib.com/nerdvana/comics/get-your-doc-savage-on-at-doc-con/107605/. Jay Ryan, one of the event’s original organizers, says that what attracted to him to the stories was that the stories, while adventure stories, were really about the characters and their friendship.

When I wrote my Doc Savage story, I found it much easier to write than many of my other stories, because the characters helped write the story. I hadn't thought of the characters in these stories as having much depth or reality. In some ways they are superficial. Never the less, they are distinct characters whose behaviour is predictable and consistent.

What is more important, as Jay Ryan points out in his interview, it is the relationships between the characters that make the story come alive. While I have tried to create characters for my stories, I usually make no effort to develop the relationships between the characters.

With my "The Disruptors" story idea, the plot I started to sketch out doesn't give much opportunity for relationships between the characters. I'm a little unsure about how I fix that. My initial feeling is that I should develop the characters and their relationships before I try to develop a plot.

Terrorism, False Flags and Performance Art

In my story, the protagonists' primary objective is to disrupt terrorist groups. I've struggled with just how the would do that. I know there are techniques to influence people to change their views, but I have trouble understanding them well enough to depict them in a way that makes a good story.

I've read several articles that ask the question: Does terrorism work?" Here's one of them: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/05/does-terrorism-work/394028/

The bottom line is that terrorism rarely, if ever, a successful tactic. This must be apparent to the terrorists; so why do they take this route? As I see it, terrorism is an act of desperation. It is the only tool a small group, with no broad support, have available. Small is a relative measure; a thousand terrorists is a big group, but on the world stage, that is a very small group.

Many conspiracy theorists claim that some terrorist attacks are "false flag" operations by the secret government to manipulate the population. I feel that terrorism is, in essence, always a false flag operation. Since these are small groups with little support, their objective is to appear to be larger, more effective and have broader support than they actually have.

In this view, terrorism is a kind of performance art. The objective is to provoke a response. They need to have their enemy over react to their threat. If the dominant power does what the terrorists want, they will attack the broader group the terrorists claim to represent and drive them to side with the terrorists. This, they hope, will eventually allow them to adopt tactics that are effective.

How does this help me develop the methods that my protagonists need to disrupt the terrorists? The most obvious objective would be to convince the terrorists that terrorism is unlikely to help them achieve their goals. I think it doesn't make sense to try to get them to give up their goals. Rather, we want them to find less violent ways they can work toward their goals. If their goals have broad appeal, they may succeed. If not, they won't.


I think these ideas are very helpful to me. There still remains a lot of effort to convert them into a workable basis for the stories. That is still intimidating.



This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

4 Things I Learned From "The 89th Key"

I feel that "The 89th Key" was a good learning experience for me. I've organized some of  my thoughts about what I learned.

The Outline

I have used outlines for most of my stories and all of my movie scripts. With "The 89th Key" I put more effort into the outline. I think I put as much effort into it as I did into the first draft and the rewrite.

This extra effort paid off for me. It made the first draft go much smoother. I feel that it is at the outline stage that the hard work of writing happens. One way to look at it is that the outline is the real first draft of the story, and the first draft is a rewrite.

If you can work out the structure and action at the outline stage, then you can focus on the actual wording when you come to write the story. Many of the problems I ran into were because I hadn't done enough work on the outline.

I want to work on how I create an outline. I have in the past developed a grid in a Excel spreadsheet to help me develop my outline. With "The 89th Key" what I wrote was more like a treatment or short story version of the tale.

Character Definition

One thing that helped me a lot was that the characters in Doc Savage are well defined. They are not necessarily complicated characters, or even very realistic. But, they have distinctive characters and I found it easy to imagine how they would behave in different situations.

This definition of character made it much easier to write the story. At times the characters seemed to come to life and all I had to do was type out what they did.

I realize that most of the characters I create are not as well defined. I can feel it when I have to force generic characters to do something. There are exceptions; the characters in "The Barrier" are all quite distinct.

I want to develop a check list of the types of things I need to define for each character. In the past I've focussed on general descriptions and didn't go into depth. What I think may be a better approach is to consider how they would behave in different situations. For example, if some one attacked them, would they fight back, surrender, run away or try to reason with them.

Relationships between Characters

This is something I've never given much thought to. A good example in the Doc Savage books is the relationship between Monk and Ham. Their rivalry is a bit cartoonish, but it adds something to the stories.

When I develop characters I need to consider how they relate to one another. Do they like each other? Do they trust each other? Do they hang out together after work? What do they talk about when they aren't talking about work? What do they have in common?

These relationships can add colour to a story, but can also help drive the story forward.

Like with the characters themselves, I want to come up with a check list of the types of relationships that characters can have. As I develop each character I can work how they relate to the others.

Number of Characters

The Doc Savage books have six on-going characters. Seven if you include Doc's cousin Pat. There is usually one main bad guy with a bunch of nameless subordinate bad guys. In contrast I usually have just the hero and his sidekick, plus an equal number of bad guys. "The Barrier" was an exception to this.

What I noticed was that when I had more good guys to work with, it was easier to come up with things to happen in the story. On the other hand, I found it hard to give some characters anything to do.

I think that while you can have too few characters, you can also have too many. What the best number of characters is, I am not really sure. If I planned to do a series of stories, I would want to have a few extra around that could play a bigger role in later stories. For a stand alone story, they would just be in the way.

I'm sure that there is more for me to learn, but I really feel that this little project has been one of my more fruitful projects.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

The Seven Character Theory of TV Shows

Many years ago, long before I got serious about writing, I came up with what I called “The Seven Character Theory of TV Shows.” It came from my observation of the TV program Gilligan’s Island. What I noticed was that there were seven regular characters on the program and I wondered why.

My explanation was that the number was a compromise between two forces. The lower limit is set by need to provide a variety of possible relationships between characters, since stories are about relationships. If you had too few, the number of stories would be limited. The upper end is set by the number of characters that people can recognize. If you had too many, then it would become harder to differentiate them.

I read someplace that people’s minds have a limit of seven pieces of information that they can actively consider at any one time. Since this fit my observation that there were seven characters on Gilligan’s Island, I concluded that this was the ideal number.

Of course, once I started to look at other TV shows, the theory started to fall apart. While there are many shows that did have seven regular characters, there were many that did not. As a recall Batman had six and Get Smart had four or five. Mostly shows had fewer characters. I tried to rescue the theory by assuming that the shows with fewer regular characters relied on more guest stars, which brought the effective number up to seven. This didn’t even convince me.

I hadn’t thought much about the theory for a long time, but recently I’ve given it some more thought. My original theory is much too rigid. Basing it on Gilligan’s Island may not add much weight either.

However, I do think there is some merit to my idea. There is a need to provide more characters to bring variety to the stories, and there is a limit to the number of characters you can have without confusing the audience.

In the stories I’ve done of late, I have sort of followed this rule. In The Glencoe Project and The Gladstone Barrier I have 8 or 9 characters, although a few of them are minor. For The Crying Woman I only have two. I do have a couple of other characters that interact with the characters, but these are minor. Even so, that only leaves me with four characters.

One of the comments I had about The Glencoe Project and The Gladstone Project was that they were a little too complicated. That may be related to the number of characters in the story. I felt that one of the problems with The Doorman’s Sacrifice was that I had far too many characters.

I guess that in the end, you do need to carefully consider the number of characters when you create a story. If you find that you need too many, that might be an indication of a problem with the story. I am not sure just how many is too many. Maybe it is less than seven.

I also wonder: do you need an odd number, or can you use an even number?

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog