Fictional Engineer 2: A Simple Story Foundation

This is part 2 of my musings on story construction...

A Simple Story Foundation

One way to start a story is with three primary entities, called the triangle.  One familiar example is the love triangle, but the concept is broader than that.  And note that I said entities, not characters.  One or more of the three may be a situation.  The ideal is that the story starts with a potential conflict between two characters and a character and an entity.  If it is two characters, it is essential that they each have at least one internal conflict that is related to their external conflict.  Even better, their internal conflicts may be opposed in some way that neither understands.  For example, two characters may be lovers.  One has an inner conflict of suspicion - “maybe he’s after my money rather than my heart” - while the other has a conflict of self doubt - “maybe I’m not good enough for her”.  The external potential conflict is that their parents do not approve of the relationship.  This scenario may exist in a status quo for some time, until the introduction of third character, who throws a wrench into the works.  For example, the wealthy family hires a private eye to spy on their daughter’s lover without the their daughter’s knowledge.  He befriends the couple and then falls in love with the daughter.  Or the other way around.  In either case, the PI plays on the inner conflicts to bring the external conflict to a head.  Either tragedy of comedy may ensue, depending on the writer’s intent.

If this sounds vaguely like the plot of a Hollywood movie, that’s because it is like the plot of many movies.  It’s also a little like the plot of Othello (a little).  It’s reliable.  And though it’s formulaic, it’s versatile.

One thing I like about this example is that is demonstrates that conflict need not indicate aggression or opposition.  The two primary characters are actually in love.  But if there’s no conflict, there’s no story.  The story is not that they’re in love.  The story is that there are unresolved issues that will test that love.  The story begins with the cinder that lights that powder keg.  

So the triangle begins with two entities, a potential conflict and a potential resolution.  If any of the entities are characters, then they each have at least one inner conflict relating to their external potential conflict.  If the entities are in opposition, then we leave it this way.  If they are not in opposition, then we must add a unifier.  This is something that brings them together.   This is not the same as the potential resolution.  A resolution to a potential conflict is only strong enough to keep the conflict from boiling over, it is not strong enough to bring them together.  There must be something else that stands alone without other mitigating factors.

In my example, the unifier may at first seem obvious: they are in love.  But stating this is no better than stating the theme without involving the specific circumstances of specific characters.  Why are they in love?   There may be many reasons, but the story must story with at least one clear and powerful reason.  For example, they may have both been in imprisoned in a foreign country because they volunteered with a humanitarian mission opposed by the local government.  They helped each other escape.  Along the way, we may find other things they share in common, but this is a good start.  If we twist it further, we can make this unifier relate to the central conflicts: the woman’s family believes her humanitarian stint was just a phase and wants her to “grow up” and prepare to take over the family business.  The man wants is worried that his lover was never really committed to the cause anyway.  Throw in the third wheel and the story gets in motion.   

Next up: Stories and Sub-Stories

Fictional Engineering, Part 1

No One Builds A Story Like a Crazy Scot

This is part one of a multi-part series I'm calling fictional engineering.  I'm an engineer by trade and a science fiction writer by delusion, so it made sense to me to characterize narrative composition as an engineering design process.  It isn't always that way, of course.  I tend to lose discipline with this technique a lot and that's okay.  However, I have found a few of these ideas helpful.  You'll probably find that they aren't exceptionally groundbreaking.  What I've done is synthesize some concepts I've encountered over the years from other writers.  In way it's a manifesto: out of all the ways I've seen fiction constructed, these are the ways that work for me.

Introduction

Every story is centered around conflict.  A single sentence summarizes the central conflict.  This sentence invokes at least one character and the situation the story puts them in.  Beyond that, every character, scene and theme can be defined in terms of conflict at some level.  Conflict is the energy that makes the story go.

Conflicts can come in three primary varieties: between a character and him/her/itself, between two characters and between a character and his/her/its situation.  These conflicts are analogous to the cliche (stated in masculine terms of course): man vs himself, man vs man and man vs the world.  

The “world” represents anything that is impersonal, be it an animal, a bureaucracy or a machine.  This is why I use the term “situation” instead, because the defining characteristic of this type of conflict is that one half of it is an object, not a subject, in the relationship.  A situation is anything that cannot reciprocate the character’s feelings of conflict.  If an animal, bureaucracy or machine obtains enough autonomy and personality in the story to reciprocate, then it becomes a character and should be classified in a character vs character conflict.  On the other hand, a person may be handled as a situation if he or she doesn’t have sufficient personality or autonomy to warrant full character status (e.g. the anonymous store clerk who is “just doing his job” and is more the face of a bureaucracy than a character with individual motivations).  Clearly real people can’t be categorized this way, but a story may have dozens of people like this.    

The difference between a character vs character and character vs himself type of conflict is less straightforward.  Can’t the latter be reduced to a special case of the former, in which both ends of the conflict are the same person?  In many cases this may be true, providing us with two simple types of conflict: character vs personal entity and character vs impersonal entity.  However, there is often at least one important difference.  A character cannot typically change his orientation to himself over the course of a story.  Conflict may bring characters together or split them apart, but a person must always live with himself.  This changes the way conflicts may be resolved, or not.  People usually find a resolution to their conflicts with other people, whether it is coming to a common understanding, finding an outlet that is external to the relationship, or ending the relationship.  The last option is a last resort.  If nothing else, one can resolve tension by severing the rope all together.  Outside of suicide, this option is closed to inner conflict.  That crucial difference (and there may be others) can be put to good use.  More on this later.

Premise

As stated above, a story starts with a premise.  This is a single sentence stating the central conflict.  The premise may be thematic or non-thematic.  A non-thematic premise has no “point”.  This is the sort of thing we might associate with escapist entertainment.  For example, “James Bond must stop a terrorist attack”.  A thematic premise states a conflict which is indicative of one or more abstract themes.  For example, “Hamlet plots to kill his uncle, whom he suspects of murdering his father to seize the throne.”  This premise is central to the story’s themes of revenge, treachery and corruption.  Clearly, the theme is not always obvious from the premise.  Indeed, it may be possible to swap my categorization of these two premises.  We may find that James Bond (however unlikely) has conflicted feelings about his job and starts to wonder what separates him from a terrorist, making the premise indicative of themes on just versus unjust causes.  On the other hand, maybe we could write Hamlet as an Elizabethan version of “Kill Bill”, in which Hamlet spends all of his time knocking off all of Claudius’ associates before slaying the man himself and riding off into the sunset.  We get a lot of blood and action scenes, much like the original Hamlet, but without the introspective monologues.

So what’s the difference?  This difference is in your mind.  You obviously know whether you want your story to be about some philosophical theme or not.  You don’t need to spell this out to yourself.  However, when we go that route we can find ourselves struggling to make the theme concrete.  A theme may be stated as a conflict: “is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them?” Stating the theme in terms of conflict is a good start, but it doesn’t make a premise.  A story has characters, and as the impetus for story, so should the premise.  Thinking in these terms forces a writer to restate the theme in terms of a specific personal story that illustrates that theme.  This is probably obvious, but it is important throughout the writing process to always be looking for the concrete.  If an abstract theme cannot play a role in a character’s concrete problems and pursuits, then why is it worth writing about?  Writing the thematic premise is the first step to bridging the gap between thought and reality.

Character

Every major character must have at least one internal and one external conflict.  There are exceptions, such as James Bond, who is usually portrayed as a sort of stone faced superhero with no history and no inner life, but even the most escapist stories typically have characters with internal conflicts.  And these conflicts need not be deep.  One of the easiest ways to make a character sympathetic is to create a space for contradiction.  For example, what if the Queen of England happened to be an excellent poker player?  What if this reserved grandmother sometimes took on a secret identity so that she could collect from hardened cockney gamblers?  Such a character is instantly likable and that humorous affability is based on inner conflict.  It’s not of the soul searching Hamlet kind, but it is conflict nonetheless and may result in both comedy and suspense.

Whether they be light or heavy, conflicts may be categorized as potential and kinetic.  A potential conflict is what we start a scene with and a kinetic conflict is the action that plays out the consequence of that potential during the course of the scene.  For example, two characters may start a scene with a personal history, such as divorce.  The potential conflict is that character A does not trust character B to avoid interfering with A’s relationship with their child.  That is a character vs character potential conflict.  On B’s side, the potential conflict is a desire to win A’s trust along with a desire for personal advancement.  That is an internal potential conflict.  The kinetic conflict occurs during the action of the scene, which in this case is a fight during which A says something that convinces B that preserving trust is less important than advancing career.  So B takes a job offer in another city and takes the child along - thus realizing A’s fears.

Every conflict has a resolution.  This is true even of potential conflicts.   Something has prevented a potential conflict from becoming kinetic up until the scene where the tension breaks.  In the above example, perhaps B has slowly been taking steps to earn A’s trust.  A is still suspicious, but is willing to be patient.  The kinetic conflict must overwhelm the potential resolution and result in a kinetic resolution.  The difference between a potential and kinetic resolution is that the potential resolution is a counter force against tension that maintains the status quo, while a kinetic resolution changes the game.  The potential conflict no longer exists once this resolution has come to a fore.  Sometimes, it ends there, because that is what the whole story was about.  Sometimes, it spawns new internal and external potential conflicts in its wake.

A Simple Story Foundation

In my next post, I'll put these things in motion and discuss story foundations.

In The Meantime, There's More To See

The Robots Will Kill Us, But Only If They Obey Us

Producing Without Reproducing

They say no one makes anything in America anymore and this has been the case for a generation or two. While most people recognize that as an exaggeration, it is hard not to look at the decline of former industrial powerhouses like Detroit and Baltimore and not feel as though manufacturing has fled the country. It doesn't help that governors crow over the opening of factories employing a few hundred workers and promote these developments as great successes in their plan to bring "good middle class factory jobs back to American soil." The truth is more complex. It always is. Moreover, since my thoughts wander toward the future of our society, I speculate that the truth hints at what may be by turns dismal, Utopian and ultimately catastrophic. I should have something to say for myself, and I do.

Common knowledge tells us that developing nations have weakened US industrial might by employing cheap labor. American factories paying American wages and benefits cannot compete with the labor of the millions who earn cents on the hour and receive few if any benefits. This assessment is largely accurate, but it describes an unstable dynamic. Labor costs in the West are so high because we are a victim of our own success. Well I suppose victim isn't the right word here. With rising economic development comes a better standard of living. Of course, great inequality remains, especially in the US, but it is hard to argue that human development isn't higher here than it is in much of the developing world. That world, however, will get its chance. As the economic prospects of poorer nations improve, their labor costs will likewise increase. Perhaps there's nothing wrong with this. Everyone gets a little richer, the labor cost differential among nations decreases, and competition derives solely from innovation. There you go. You've reached the first Utopian plateau.

Developed nations, however, are not willing to sit back for the next century and hope that this scenario unfolds. They are fighting back with their own reductions in labor cost. Though China passed the US in total industrial output in 2010, the US still maintains a significant lead in per-capita productivity (though it is second to Japan in this regard). While the US is paying its factory workers more, it is also getting more product from fewer people. Are Americans working harder? No, you know what I'm talking about. It's not the people that are working harder, it's the machines. Automation is a great strategy. You as a nation have a choice. You can compete with cheap labor, which if you're successful will only result in that labor becoming more expensive. Or you can compete with ever more sophisticated machines, which will only get less expensive. The guy with the first plan doesn't really stand a chance against the gut with the second one. If developed nations, and the US in particular, capitalize on their lead in automated production and distribution, it could put them back at the head of the pack.

That seems great, except for all the people in the unemployment lines. Who really wins in this scenario? In the short term, it's the people who own a stake in manufacturing profits more than it is everyday citizens. Those folks are off in search of jobs at Bertucci's. For example, consider this story (anecdotal though it is):

Louisville factory: 100 printers, 3 employees

Or this one:

Robots Threaten These 8 Jobs

 Now wait a minute. What year is this? 1930? Am I sounding like one of those doomsayers who predicted the fall of civilization when industrialization hit the heartland, replacing all those farmhands with the giant bug-like tractors from the Grapes of Wrath? One might argue, this is just another stage in economic progress. Most of the US population worked on farms in 1900. Only a few percent do now. We were fine because we created new industries. Namely, we created the new industries that are following the path of farming in the twentieth century and firing all of their workers. What's the next stage? They say it's the knowledge economy. There is, however, a significant difference between the knowledge economy that is replacing the industrial one and the industrial economy that replaced the agricultural one. Most people who participated in the farming economy could also participate in the industrial one. That was true in the US a century ago and it is true in China now, where millions have migrated from the farmlands looking for work in the country's manufacturing centers. Not everyone can participate in the knowledge economy, however. The problem is only exacerbated by the lack of political will to develop the human resources we already have.

Is the solution to go Amish and decide that we should halt automation at a certain point? Perhaps if the major industrial powers would just get together and agree on a technological target that allows full employment? Ah, global socialism... However, there is this other problem with development. It usually leads to lower birthrates and longer lifespans. Even if it were possible for everyone to agree on a way of keeping the world employed at a certain level, it's natural to assume that a part of the deal would be similar standards of living across that economic bloc. Many developed countries are struggling with stagnant or declining populations, along with aging demographics. Even in the US, which has a higher birthrate than many of its Western piers, population growth is really driven by immigration. That trend is especially pronounced at the younger end of the population. This would imply that perhaps automation is a good thing in the long run. Machines can replace the young workers we aren't making anymore and reduce living costs for older people who can't work as hard as they used to. Maybe machines can even take care of us in our golden years. Maybe, just maybe, we can drive production costs down to zero. In that scenario, where every lick of farmed or manufactured product comes from the hands of our robot friends, we don't have to worry about jobs. Everything costs nothing. Wouldn't that be great?

Well, in the short term it would be a painful transition for many generations. In the long term it would probably destroy us all. Assuming such a thing were even possible, the transition to a zero cost, fully automated economy would take longer and produce far more upheaval than the more incremental transitions we've seen so far. Social unrest would be inevitable, putting the whole experiment in jeopardy. But suppose that we survived this stage, as we probably would? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? For a little while, perhaps. We would be sitting pretty until we reaped the consequences of everything costing nothing. For when everything costs nothing, what would stop us from having everything? That is the moral of this rather long winded story. Even now, where production costs are far from zero, the decrease in costs has lead to a natural increase in demand. If this trend should continue, it may well lead to environmental ruin before we ever get to the time when everything is free. Hiding behind the story of competing economies and hand wringing over employment figures is the story of consumption. To me, that's a pretty scary story. It would be easy to say that we should consume less. Honestly, we probably should. I tend to believe that once they've achieved a certain level of comfort, most people would be happier without the burden of more stuff. Apologies for the blanket generalization, but deal with it because chances are I'm right on this one. However, it is hard to separate that "certain level of comfort" from the overall economy. Good food, good healthcare and good schools exist in the same world as high end phones and luxury cars. It may not be possible to have one without the other. Consumption seems to be the only model we have to support any kind of standard of living above that afforded by subsistence farming or hunter gathering. I'm not advocating a return to that way of life by any means.

That is where this ends, with no solution. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

In The Meantime, There's More To Read

Dead Reckoning and The Incoherence Of Free Will

Six Impossible Things

Before we can ask ourselves whether we possess a free will, we have to ask ourselves what free will is and what criteria we might accept as proof of its existence.  If we pose the hypothesis that free will exists, then that hypothesis must be testable, which is to say falsifiable.  What experiment would you use to prove that free will exists or does not?  

At first it seems easy to construct such an experiment.  In "The Dead Reckoner", both Kevin Nagel and Reggie Binder suppose that if the Sorter succeeds in predicting the behavior of its subjects, then free will does not exist.  However, the converse doesn’t obtain. The failure of the Sorter to predict human behavior does not mean free will does exist.  The hypothesis may live another day, but one could always argue that a better Sorter might still prove it false.  With this line of reasoning we would have to conclude we can never know if qw posses free will because a better, more accurate model of human behavior might always be possible.

Having stated that, we must step back and ask the question again: what is free will?  What have we proven false if the Sorter succeeds?  The nature of the experiment implies that free will is the ability to act in a way that cannot be predicted by any model, no matter how sophisticated.  This is tantamount to stating that what governs human behavior is either pure chance or some principle outside the descriptive powers of science.  

Neither of these thoughts is very satisfying.  If pure chance governs our behavior, then there is nothing we can do to change the outcome of our lives.  More significantly, if society is the aggregation of human behavior, then it cannot achieve momentum toward a common goal.  Over small intervals this may appear to be the case, but even a coin toss can come up heads ten times in a row.  Over large sample sizes regression to the mean is inevitable.  

The other option is that human behavior is essentially miraculous.  What we are saying is that science cannot predict it, nor can it ever predict it.  Thus, it must exist outside of logic, cause and effect, or any principles for decoding the universe that the human mind could ever conjure.  In this case the concept is incoherent by definition.  That is, we are defining free will as something the human mind can never understand.  The first question I might ask is how this is distinguishable from pure chance.  While we can suppose the existence of this super-natural principle that we cannot even describe, we have to live with the knowledge that we cannot control it to achieve our goals and that we cannot ever know if it exists or if our lives are really are victims of probability.  Either way, it is not related to human consciousness or subject to human desire.

Ultimately, "The Dead Reckoner" is about accepting that both chance and cause/effect govern our lives.  I suppose this assumes that chance is not just the result of deterministic forces we don’t yet understand.  However, in practical terms there are things that happen for a reason and things that just happen.  As long as the Sorter is the only thing that embraces this reality, then it remains in control.  That is, the Sorter has a plan, but it knows that chance events may disrupt that plan.  Jason was not supposed to be there, but the Sorter improvises.  This confuses some of the characters, because the Sorter behaves as though it did plan Jason’s arrival.  Sometimes, the ability to take advantage of chance events makes us believe in one of two fallacious ideas.

The first is fate.  We may convince ourselves that we are destined for greatness or despair due to forces beyond our control.  Though he does not express this explicitly, Dale is subject to this belief and is prone to self sacrifice and refusal to take action.  Norman Shaw and Yancy struggle with the Sorter’s ability, but in their case it manifests as a confusion between the Sorter predicting outcomes and the Sorter causing outcomes.

The second is complete self reliance.  We may convince ourselves that we have determined our own outcome.  Rosalind and Marianne embrace this idea initially.  While Marianne attempts to achieve self reliance through force of will, Rosalind attempts to achieve it through knowledge.  John is a bit of a mix of both belief in external and internal control.  He operates under the fear that his life may be utterly outside his control, but still resists that control in a way that Dale does not.  John thus behaves in ways more erratic and irrational than anyone else.  This makes him an ideal candidate for the lynch pin of the Sorters plan, because he is the easiest to manipulate.

Absolute faith in either fate or self reliance is an attempt to convert chance into choice and deny its existence.  The Sorter, possessing no psychological need to deny chance, thus appears to be in control because it can adapt.  Once Marianne and Rosalind begin to take advantage of Jason’s presence, they begin to turn the tide.  They are not successful at first, but eventually they manage to outsmart the Sorter.

However, acknowledging the role of chance in our lives involves more than adapting to it.  Ultimately, chance is essential to progress.  George recognizes this.  His work on the Sorter forces him to come face to face with the predictability of human behavior.  He counteracts this by injecting chance into his life on purpose.  He uses the roulette device to guide his work and ultimately makes the Sorter self-aware.  This is mirrors the emergence of human intelligence from evolutionary processes.  Natural selection filters random mutations according to their suitability for survivability in a particular environment. The difference is that natural selection blind and driven by survival, whereas George has a specific goal.  He knows he cannot achieve this goal by “solving for x”.  There is no way for him to get outside himself and look at a problem in a different way without inducing a mental quantum leap.  

Though George is successful, he dies anyway.  This is because there is no way to guarantee that events will not ultimately overcome us.  That is the case no matter what, whether we embrace chance,  attempt to remove chance from our lives, or resign ourselves to inaction or insanity.  At least George managed to create something new before he died.  Rosalind also embraces chance, though she doesn’t quite know it.  Rather than using a roulette wheel, she relies on a devil’s advocate to push her outside her comfort zones.  It is only in the end that she completely comprehends the importance of her sister’s role and chooses Lucie over her implant, the device she was trying to use to control her life.

Oedipus, Samson, and Moral Dead Reckoning

"Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn 126" by Rembrandt - The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

My novel, "The Dead Reckoner", discusses the myth of Oedipus directly and that of Samson a little more indirectly.  Reggie expresses his frustration with the Freudian interpretation of the Oedipus myth, which is that everyone feels the need to harm the parent of the same sex and posses the parent of the opposite sex.  Whether this psychological notion is true (and for the most part it has been abandoned by modern psychology) is not the issue.  What frustrates Reggie is that the Oedipal Complex is not consistent with the story and obscures its deeper meaning.  

Oedipus, and here I am referring primarily to Sophocles's version, was sent away by his parents because an oracle predicted that he would kill  his father and marry  his mother.  He believed the couple that raised him were his biological parents.  Then he set out on his own and, in the course of his travels, killed a man he did not know was his father and married a woman he did not know was his mother.  He became king of his birth town, which later fell under a plague as a result of Oedipus’ actions.  Upon realizing the truth, he had to sacrifice himself to save his city.

A variety of meanings have been attached to the story.  I think the most important feature is that it is terrifying.  Oedipus’s parents knew what would happen and tried to avoid it, but they couldn’t understand the complicated mechanisms that will lead him to fulfill.  In mythological terms we could refer to this as fate, but in more modern terms there is an obvious connection to the question of free will.  Even without adopting a philosophy of absolute determinism, we must admit that a great deal of our behaviors and those of others are driven by mechanisms that are beyond our control.  

Another theme is that of exceptionalism affording us no protection.  Oedipus is intelligent and strong.  He solved the riddle of the sphinx, which no one else could solve.  He became king of Thebes.  And yet, he could not avoid tragedy.  As Ecclesiastes says, the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous.  We can only do ourselves a favor by not convincing ourselves that because we are exceptional we are pardoned from tragedy.

Then there is the issue of blindness, also related to the first two points.  Oedipus, like all of us, is too close to his own life to understand the true nature of himself or his relationship to the people he loved.  At first blush, one might say it is the cause of the above phenomena.  That is, Oedipus may have solved the riddle of the sphinx, but he failed to see its relevance to his own life.  Thus we could conclude that it is not that exceptionalism is no protection, it is that Oedipus was simply not exceptional enough.  Would someone with better insight finally escape the grip of fate?

This is where the myth of Samson comes in.  In this case I will not argue that my use of that myth has any relationship to a common interpretation of the same.  The story of Samson is dominated by revenge.  He marries a Philistine and at his wedding he tells a riddle the other Philistines cannot answer.  They enlist his wife to get the answer and when she fails, they kill her and her father.  Samson takes revenge and the cycle continues.  Finally, Samson falls in love with Delilah and the Philistines pay her to find the secret of his strength.  She cuts his hair and Samson is carted off to a temple, where he is blinded and in one last act of revenge pushes the temple pillars over and kills everyone.

What would it mean for Oedipus to have truly understood his position?  It would have meant pulling back the veil which made the sphinx so mysterious and reducing it to a set of well understood formulas.  Would that have helped him?  What is the sphinx?  It is one who tells riddles, like Samson.  So we uncover the enigmatic sphinx and instead of discovering the austere heart of the universe, we find this vengeful beast man covered in blood.  That is, truly understanding our natures is a matter of coming face to face with how we are still animals.  “Know thyself” says the philosopher, but true self knowledge results not in inner peace and the enigmatic meaning of life, but in the yawning abyss of the billions of years of evolution, red in tooth and claw, which lead to our present situation.  Sometimes, knowledge leads to despair.  Thus we would rather pretend the sphinx is beautiful and dress it up with religious garlands than acknowledge it is just a projection of ourselves, which when dispelled forces us to admit how meaningless and insecure life is.

And yet, Samson is the animal that tells riddles.  He shares in common with Oedipus the quality that he is, despite his brutality, quite clever.  Humans are capable of transcending the programming of the blind watchmaker that created us.  We can reflect on our natures.  And sometimes, we can create our own meaning out of the chaos.  This is not a matter of freedom, it is a spiritual necessity.