Untrustworthy characters

I've been thinking about untrustworthy characters.  You know the ones: Han Solo, Captain Jack Sparrow, Dustfinger from Inkheart.  The guys the hero shouldn't trust, but somehow do anyway.

It occurred to me that one thing these guys all have in common is that they're highly motivated.  Take Han Solo in the first Star Wars movie (Or Episode IV if you count the prequel trilogy).  If he doesn't get lots of money quick, every bounty hunter in the galaxy will be after him.  Sure, he took care of Greedo no problem, but eventually superior numbers will get him.  To save his skin, he needs cash.  Rescuing princesses pro bono publica goes against his story goal.  (So does returning to save the Rebels from the death star instead of rushing back to Tatooine to pay off Jubba.  In fact, Han blows his story goal so badly that Empire Strikes Back ends with him in the clutches of a ruthless bounty hunter.)

Captain Jack Sparrow in Curse of the Black Pearl is equally motivated.  He wants his ship back, and he'll do whatever it takes to get it.  Sure he doesn't want to see Will and Elizabeth hurt -he's not heartless- but that doesn't keep him from using them as bait.

As for Dustfinger, he's pretty driven.  Not only does he betray our heroes early on, but when he learns that if he reaches his goal he'll die, the discovery doesn't actually change his mind, it just makes him a bit depressed.

I think what makes these guys come across as unpredictable is that they don't have the same goal as the rest of the heroes.  We know they're highly motivated, what we don't know is how far they'll go to get what they want.  Will they betray the hero to get what they're after?  Maybe they like the hero.  Maybe they make an effort to save him -but still betray his cause, then wonder what he's so grumpy about.  Or maybe they decide their personal goal isn't so important after all and put all their energy into making sure the heroes win.

If they decide to throw over their own goal out of loyalty to the heroes, it shouldn't be an easy choice.  After all, they've wanted whatever they want since before they met the heroes.  Letting it go now should be hard -hard enough that your audience doesn't know until the last moment which direction they'll go.  Maybe (as in Star Wars) that choice ripples through the rest of the story, causing future problems for the unpredictable character and the heroes.  Your heroes might have to decide if they're loyal back -or if their cause is more important.  If they decide it is, does their friend resent being hung out to dry?  And how does that affect his loyalty?  Or the other character's perception of his loyalty?  Will they still trust him if they know they turned traitor on him?  Should they?  

There are lots of possibilities as soon as you have a character with a different goal from your hero.  The guy doesn't even have to look shifty.  There may be lots of other things that make those wonderful, lovable rogue characters, but different goals is one that's definitely worth playing with.    

Camping

My family went camping in Pennsylvania over the beginning of the week.  We had a wonderful -and memorable- time.  Our campsite was right beside a stream.  There were enough boulders for the water to froth and flow around to make all sorts of interesting rills.  It would have been the perfect place for white-water rafting if you were a mouse!  One of the boulders was (to my best estimate, which admittedly isn't very good) about four feet above the water and I could just picture mouse adventurers standing up on the `cliff' and gazing down at the foam, bracing themselves for the trip down stream.

Our fire ring was iron but didn't have a grill, so my brother Justin fished some wide, flat rocks from the stream and a few smaller rocks for the flat rocks to set on, poured the coals around them, and cooked our burgers on top.  They were quite tasty, and of course the grease dripped off the rocks and made the fire burn hotter -which was fortunate.  We'd forgotten how much of a temperature difference there is, traveling a few hours north!  It got quite cold, especially the first night.  I usually like a bit of nip in the air, but there is a huge difference between the kind of cold you go out in before returning to a nice warm house and the oppressive sort of cold that remains heavy in the air when you sleep in a tent.

We visited the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon, which nobody around here has heard of.  Mom knows about it because she and dad stumbled across it on their wedding trip.  It's a beautiful, tree covered gorge.  It actually probably would have been more impressive in a few weeks when more of the leaves changed color, but we didn't mind billows of green.  We walked the Turkey Trail, which travels down the gorge in a series of switchbacks.  There were about two places where streams were flowing down the mountain (or maybe we passed the same stream twice) and divided into a dozen or so tiny trickles falling down among the rocks.  It made me feel like I was in a (rather chilly) rain forest.  Farther down we reached the actual waterfall. 

We had taken the scenic rout to the gorge (meaning we got lost) and so arrived right around lunch.  We ate before we actually started down the trail, which was nice since it meant we didn't have to carry our food for the entire hike.

The whole vacation was exactly what our family needed: a chance to just get away and enjoy God's creation for a few days.   

Bioluminescence

Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to spend a little time on the Patuxent River, one of the tributaries leading into the Maryland bay.  The awesome thing about being there this time of year is that the water is full of tiny  bioluminescent creatures that light up if they bump against anything.  

After dusk I went out, swished the water, and watched the sparks flare wherever my hands passed.  The creatures are so tiny you don't really feel them except every once in awhile, when a slightly bigger one bumps against you.  Those feel like blobs.  Watching them in the water is like watching stars swirling under you -or like watching fireflies, when it feels as if the stars decided to come down and play closer to earth, to dance in the woods and the flowerbeds and get caught just for an instant, glowing between your cupped hands. 

It can be like touching a miracle.  

The thing about these creatures is that you can't see them until after dusk.  It's the darkness that reveals the things that carry their own light.

Research and that sort of thing

Wow, my last real post was at the beginning of August, and now it's September.  I knew I was letting things slide, but this is ridiculous! 

I recently read Writing the Novel from Plot to Print by Lawrence Block.  One of the things he said made a lot of sense to me is that if you realize your subject is too far away from your experience to write convincingly there's nothing wrong with figuring out some way to bring the story closer to home.  

I tend to get frustrated because I'll come up with an idea and just know that no amount of research is going to make me able to write it convincingly.  I once mentioned a trunk novel where part of the story took place on a ship.  I've been on rowboats and motorboats, but I know nothing about actual sailing.  My plan was to take sailing lessons, only that didn't work out.  

Now, I could have look at diagrams and read old captain's logs and really get a sense of sailing that way.  But another thing I could have done was change the setting.  My story took place on a small island so my heroine would be trapped (the idea was to be Gothic) but surrounding a castle by an ocean isn't the only way to make it remote.  I could have set the castle on a crag, or in the depths of a dangerous forest or swamp.  

I think you have to have a certain amount of confidence in yourself to research a setting or plot point.  If in my heart of hearts I was convinced that I couldn't write my story without actually spending time on the water -if I didn't feel that I knew what I was talking about- how could I convince my readers?  

I had an idea for a story once that had me looking for information on crafting bronze swords.  I didn't feel like I had to take up sword-making in order to understand what I read.  I'd previously taken a couple pottery classes, which gave me a feel for what goes into hands-on work.  

When I first started pottery I was given a textbook.  There was a lot about glazes and chemical reactions, but all it did was show me that I knew even less about pottery than I thought.  It wasn't until I was halfway through the first semester that I had a clue what the writer was jabbering about.  If I'd tried to write about a potter based on text-books I would've gotten halfway through that book, then decided to give up and hide under my bed forever.  

Research is a tough subject because it varies from project to project.  How much you need is however much it take to feel confident in your work. 

 

Fundraiser

Sorry I haven't been very active on Blogger lately.  It's Canning Season, which is to say all the fruit and veggies come in at once this time of year and my entire life suddenly revolves around a paring knife and hot kettle.

Once again I'm participating in CareNet's Walk for Life fundraiser.  CareNet is our local pregnancy crisis center, and the idea of the walk is to get people to sponsor you to raise money for the center, but also to raise awareness of the needs of those facing unplanned pregnancies, and the fact that the center is there to help.  (Lets face it, they can't do a lot to help people if no one knows they're there.)   If anyone's interested in donating, here is a link.  If you'd like to know more about CareNet here is the homepage.  

I hope you all have a great week.

Thoughts on the Movie `Epic'

My family and I went to see the movie `Epic' this morning.  We didn't really know anything except that it was about tiny people, the cinema was showing it really cheap, and after such a rough couple weeks a movie seemed like a good idea.

I loved it.  (And I'm going to talk about it here, so if you don't want to risk spoilers now would be the time to bail.)

First off, the graphics were stunning.  Someone put a huge amount of thought into what a society of tiny people would be like -not just the ascetics but also the underlying logic of the world.  They made a war between what are basically flower fairies and the fairies of fungi believable.  That's hard to do.

Second, the characters are easy to relate to.  Even the villain has some humanizing touches, which shocked me in the best way.  I was expecting a Redwall villain -scary with no redeeming qualities.  It was nice to know even evil fungi fairies care about their family.  And the comic reliefs managed to be funny without being annoying, which was another pleasant surprise.  

The heart of the story is parent/child relationships.  The heroine is a human girl who has just come to live with her absent-minded-professor father.  She thinks he's delusional because he believes in tiny people who have an advanced society somewhere in the forest.  After a falling out with him, she gets shrunk and has to go on a quest to help the leaf-men (what they call the flower fairies' army.  The tiny people are never CALLED flower fairies, but some of the graphics are obviously based on the Victorian flower people).  It's the only way to regain her regular size so she can reconcile with her dad, who thinks she's run away from home.

The male lead is an immature leaf man who doesn't want to be part of the army.  His commander raised him when his father died in battle, and both of them have a hard time separating their working relationship from their personal relationship.  The fact that the commander hates admitting that he has personal relationships doesn't exactly help.

 It's amazing how many really good CG animation movies are out there: Tangled, How to Train Your Dragon, The Incredibles, Megamind, and now Epic.  I was around for the Golden Age of Disney, when The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Rescuers Down Under, and Beauty and the Beast all came out one after the other.  It's kind of like that again -as if the storytellers in Hollywood suddenly remembered, `hey, we don't have to talk down to kids!  We can create interesting characters and amazing stories!'  

I just hope it lasts.
 

Tomatoes

Today has been a day of tomatoes.  We had enough for me to juice about six quarts.  I always get annoyed toward the end of canning season when the bushels of fruits and veggies seem endless and my hand cramps to the paring knife, but here at the beginning of the season I find that a bit of kitchen work makes for a nice change.  

I've always enjoyed the tomatoes.  They look so gross in the big kettle, all red and pulpy.  Just as they're about to boil the surface of the stew seems almost to breathe before erupting into hissing, blorping bubbles.  It makes me feel wonderfully witchy.  When I was thirteen or fourteen I'd mumble `double, double, toil and trouble,' in my best creaky voice.  Now I usually just think Macbethian thoughts.