If you’re still here, give yourself a gold star. Better yet, give yourself two stars—one red, one just a bit to the blue side of white.
We’re past halfway now. On the home stretch. Once upon a time, I was fortunate enough to take a week long writing class from Algis Budrys. Algis, who was an editor for everything from Galaxy to Playboy as well as a prolific writer and critic, had a huge impact on my idea of not just how to write, but why to write. Listening to him talk was revelatory in a way that no college English class ever matched. He was both an artist and a craftsman, and razor sharp in his analysis.
Algis also purchased one of my early stories for his magazine, tomorrow, cementing his position in my mind as One of the Best Guys Ever. I miss him.
In one of his earliest lessons, Algis laid out a simple idea of story construction that involved seven elements. Every story, he said, is about a character, in a setting, with a problem. You want to get those points out there as quickly as you can —On Whetsday, Denny danced at the spaceport— the opening line for episode one of this book, was a very deliberate effort at crossing two things off this list.
As a story progresses, you learn more about the character and more about the setting, but you also see the character attempt to solve the problem… and fail. The failure is important. A story where the character knocks off the problem at first try isn’t likely to be 1) interesting or 2) insightful. It doesn’t give you any chance to learn more about the character’s motivations or of the true nature of the problem. Oh, it’s okay for the character to appear to succeed… but only if she really only succeeds in making the problem worse.
That’s the key thing here: the failure has to be one that provides clues to how the character might come at things in a different way, or how the problem is really of a whole different scope, origin, or nature than first expected. The character may try to solve the problem again, using her new insight, and may fail again, with each failure raising the stakes and the complexity. Eventually, the character will succeed. Tah dah! Problem solved! Crisis averted! Queue up a nice slide into warm sunset and a bit of cocoa.
Or, and here’s the tougher thing, the character can ultimately fail. That ant may discover that rubber tree plants really are beyond anty limits, or your character may learn that she’s been set up and the problem isn’t meant to be solved, or… a thousand other things.
You don’t have to succeed, but you do have to find validation. Think of validation as the part where someone explains the why. Why was this important? Why do we care if they succeeded? Just who was that masked man with a fiery horse anyway? Why that was… you get the idea.
Validation makes you feel like the story was worth reading, even if the result was failure.
We’re not to the validation point in this story. That’s still a few weeks away. And I’m not telling you how many times Denny is going to make a go at his problem. Problems. I’m certainly not going to spill the beans on the success / failure thing. It took me long enough just to get the problem on the board, but now that it’s out there, just go with Denny.
Let’s see. Where were we? I think we’d just learned that the world was going to end. Or at least, that the world might go blissfully on, but it’s going to do it without human beings attached. Real Soon Now. That’s a first order pickle, with a side of serious dilemma.
How is Denny going to tackle this? Come on in and see...