Advanced Brilliant Writing: Make Your Plots Wider and Your Characters Deeper (Go! Write Something Brilliant) (4 page)

(from the Caldron of Cost and Reward)
What do you really want?

How much are you willing to pay for your freedom? To achieve a goal or dream? To save a loved one? To win love?

Every story we write has an arc, a journey, driven by the protagonist. But what drives the protagonist?

What is he or she after? Why? Does the reward justify the cost? In other words, why is it worth it?

When you put the cost against the reward, and stir it together, you discover the crux of the heroes’ journey: their true desire.

In
Braveheart
, William Wallace considers the cost of war and the lives of Scotland's men worth the reward of freedom. But when he looks deeper in his heart, he's fighting for justice and to avenge the death of his wife.

We talk a lot about "Why?" in My Book Therapy. Why does the character want to do this or that, why is it worth the fight, the loss?

At some point in the huddle, the characters are going to
say, “Why are we doing this? Sure, we see a state title within our grasp, and we’re angry that our quarterback has just been sidelined by a late hit and we’re playing the team that beat us last year in the finals—but why?”

This is where true change begins to take place. It’s not about the fears or rewards . . . it’s about the people they want to be. When a character looks inward and asks, "What do I truly desire?" then we see true change.

Honor. Our football players are fighting for honor. For Manhood.

In
Eagle Eye,
Jerry Shaw has just about had it. He isn’t going to go a step further until . . . he finds out the son of the woman is in jeopardy. And, that his brother wasn’t a traitor . . . that in fact, he was a hero. And Jerry is given the chance to be a hero too, if he’ll stay the course. So, Jerry looks at the cost—losing his ho-hum life (and perhaps his life) and the reward (saving his country) and it requires him to ask what does he really want?

He wants to be a hero, like his brother.

It’s as simple as . . . when your character comes back to the huddle, asking, “What do you really want?”

In a lot in the manuscripts I read, the answer is
love
. He wants to find love.

Well, that's noble and universal, but why? Finding true love is a noble journey, but will not make for a very interesting book. How much does he want true love? Why is true love important?

Let's say our hero, let’s call him, Dragonslayer the Third, wakes up one morning, sees a beautiful day and says to his Man-in-Waiting, "Alfred, today I want to find true love."

Well, off we go. He spies his first Beautiful Damsel. He approaches. "You, there, gorgeous woman so fair. Hark, and come with me. I want to love you and make you my Queen."

"What? Fergetabboutit. You're too pretty for me." 

Dragon turns to Alfred, "She turned me down. How rude!"

"My Lord, she must be a twit."

"Certainly, well, it's lunch. Shall we dine? And what fun shall I have for tomorrow?" 

Dragonslayer has no reason to pursue true love the moment he faced his first obstacle. He needs a reason, and hopefully something beyond 1. True love is grand or 2. His mother abandoned him as a baby.

If you’re having trouble figuring out what your character truly wants, try this:

What was the one moment in his life that he was truly happy? (In
Eagle Eye
, we actually see a glimpse of this in Jerry’s memory, when he’s playing baseball with his brother, and he clearly adores him). Usually this moment reflects something of what your character truly desires. It’s this desire that is at the root of his motivation.

In the movie
Titanic
, Rose wants true love but she also wants freedom from her mother, from societal expectations. When she meets Jack, she discovers the courage to change her dreams. We see that this is her desire when she has the courage to stand on the bow, let Jack hold her, and she says that she is flying.

What about Lucy in
While You Were Sleeping
? She falls in love with Jack, the other brother. But the family she's fallen in love with wants her to marry the responsible older brother Peter. If she confesses her feelings, the cost is almost too great. She'll lose this wonderful family because she lied. She'll lose the man she loves. But her happiest moments is when her father and her dreamed of going amazing places. She wants a man who will give her the world, not security.

Getting to the bottom of your character’s desire is the first step in creating true character change.

 
Book Therapist Question
:

• What is your character’s happiest memory?
  
• What about that memory would he like to recreate or hold on to?
  
• How can you turn that memory into his greatest desire?
  
• How does that motivate him to pick himself back up and dive back into the fight?
  

Once is not enough!

So far, we've covered our hero's goal and desire, he's calculated cost versus reward and he's attempted to achieve his goal. And failed. Hopefully, miserably!

Now, we have to let him win. Something. One game. One touchdown. One completed pass. Enough for our character to feel like they’ve accomplished something.

My husband and I recently learned to swing dance. For a guy who claims he has no rhythm, he does a great job keeping the beat and leading me around the dance floor. I tried to tell him this, but alas, he couldn’t hear it.

Still, because he wanted to make me happy, he decided to take us dancing at a local venue’s
`
50’s night. After three songs I managed to coax him to the dance floor. He stayed in the basic step for about fifteen measures, then led me in a turn. Then another. Then another. The dance ended with him smiling and saying, “Hey, I did it!”

Yes. The victory was enough to convince him to stay on the floor for the rest of the night, and later earn the esteem of a couple ladies who commented on what a great dancer he was! (Another taste of victory!)

In
Eagle Eye
, Jerry Shaw experiences the taste heroism as he evades his captors—of course under the direction of the computer that continues to call him—still, with each heroic step he’s forced to take, he experiences a taste of the person he wants to become.

In
The Patriot
, Benjamin Martin is victorious against the British—even outwitting them in their own fort, and causing the General’s Great Danes to love him. His tactics, although brutal, are winning the war.

The
Attempt
and
Mini-Victory
happens early on the in the Second Act—early enough to leave room for what is called . . .
Training for Battle.

Or, what I call . . . the fun and games.

Your character isn’t going to literally “train for battle,” but rather, be put through a number of tests. Interpersonal challenges. Physical foibles. Through which, we’ll see him have to look inside and make changes.

You’ve Got Mail
is a great example of this
Training for Battle
concept. Remember when our hero is about to meet Kathleen Kelly for the first time in the coffee shop, and he realizes that it’s his nemesis from the “shop around the corner?” (We discussed this scene in the Cost portion of the journey.) He then tells her in the next scene that he has a project that will need some “tweaking” before they can get together.

The next forty-five minutes or so of the movie are about that tweaking. He proceeds to “woo” her because he’s realized that once she finds out who he is, she’ll hate him. So, he must make her fall in love with him in the flesh, so that she won’t reject him as her online friend.

This is the guts of the book. And the part of the story that is most easily mis-plotted. We’ll get to how to plot this portion in section two, but for now, follow these principles:

1. Every obstacle your character faces must make the journey more difficult, causing them to dig deeper and find a character trait that they didn’t have before.
   
2. They will get “better” at the skills they are developing—whether it be better at completing the tasks the computer tells them to do (Eagle Eye), or better at keeping the cell reception and finding the bad guys (Cellular), or better at fighting battles (The Patriot), or better winning football games, or better at winning the heart of the heroine.
   
3. Each time they get better, they become more the person they hope to be, a bigger glimpse of hope. So, give them a glimpse of something they long for. Let them kiss the girl, win the division championship, outwit the bad guys, or figure out why the computer wants to destroy the world.
    
   

Sure, your character will have some failures during this section. Some slammed doors, maybe some cuts and bruises, but eventually, they will grow stronger, wiser, more handsome.

Eventually, they’re going to feel so empowered that they think they’re on top of the world, they’ve solved the problem, they’re on their way to sure victory.

Then, you’re going to rip the rug from under them, and push them right into their
Black Moment
.

In my book
Nothing But Trouble
, my character, a wanna-be PI struggles with jumping to conclusions that lead her down rabbit trails. But, during this “growth” phase, I have her get a

number of things right, and use her sleuthing skills well, until she thinks she’s practically Sherlock Holmes.

Of course, that’s when the
real
bad guy shows up.

During the Training for Battle stage, I recommend having three to four big events, either physical or emotional, that challenge them. If you have my book
From the Inside . . . Out: discover, create and publish the novel in you!
, then you know I recommend a process called
The D’s
to plot this portion—I call them
Disappointments
—but they could get progressively worse (Here’s my plug for Brandilyn Collins’ book,
Getting into Character
, the first person to use the D’s for plotting):

• Disappointment
  
• Disaster
  
• Destruction
  
• Devastation
   
  

Think like this: For every victory, your character must have a loss—something that makes it worse. Perhaps they leave a trail for the villain to find them, or the they are setting themselves up to have their heart broken, or perhaps they are getting deeper into a lie. Whatever the case may be, you want to find situations that lead them to a place where there is no turning back, and no hope.

We’ll talk more about plotting in the
Plotting
section of the book, but for now, begin jotting down ideas of how to train your characters for battle.

Book Therapist Question
:

• Ask yourself going into each scene during this section:
  
  • What losses can they have?
    
  • What victories?
    
  • What does my character learn in this scene that makes him/her a stronger/better person?
    
• How do you give them another Glimpse of Hope, this time in themselves?
  

Act 3: It’s all about the change!

It was after midnight, on some turnpike south of Pittsburgh when my husband declared he wanted to set our house on fire.

Of course, our “house” was a twenty-eight foot motor home that we lived in as we traveled around the United States during furlough as we raised support to head out on our second term on the mission field in Russia. We had just spent six days living in a tent in a campground while a repair shop fixed it. We’d also spent our last six hundred dollars.

And fifty miles down the road, with the kids sleeping in the bunks in back, the motor home started to smoke. We drifted to the side of the road. Got out, and as my husband stared at the cracked head gasket, he said, “Do you think the insurance will figure it out if I set it on fire?”

Black Moment. It’s when life feels overwhelming, when your character’s worst fears come true, when things can’t get any worse.

When Frodo succumbs to the ring in Mt. Mordor.

When Gabriel dies in Benjamin’s arms.

When the Titanic goes down.

When Jerry Shaw realizes he’s going to be the villain instead of the hero.

When your character realizes that everything they’ve tried to do has failed, and that they can’t ever be the person or have the dream they longed for.

If you
started with
How to Write a Brilliant Novel
, then you know that when you develop your characters, you discover their greatest fears, and why they had them, and then used them to create the Black Moment. Every character’s Black Moment will be different, uniquely crafted to suit them and bring them to their lowest place. 

Why is this Black Moment so important?
Because we want them to examine
why
this is their lowest place, and confront the beliefs, even perhaps a Spiritual Lie that has pushed them through life to this dark place. Or maybe they just need to accept the situation, and figure out how to go forward.