Tag Archives: hurting characters

February 28, 2012

Character and conflict in The Liveship Traders

By Ellen Gregory

I’m currently reliving Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders trilogy during my commute to and from work in the car. (Have I mentioned how much I love audiobooks?) I first read this amazing fantasy trilogy back in 2005 and it has since resided firmly near the top of my all-time favourite novels/series. Even so, I’ve previously read the trilogy only the once. Reliving it again now is a delicious treat – so much so that I find myself deliberately opting for peak hour, just so I can drive in the worst traffic and have 10 minutes longer each morning and evening with this brilliant story.

The Liveship Traders tells the story of the Vestrit Trader family, whose fortunes are derived from trade conducted by their liveship, Vivacia – a ship built of wizardwood, whose animated figurehead holds generations of family knowledge – and their struggle for survival in a world that is rapidly changing.

Unlike most ‘epic’ fantasy novels, the books do not have a single ‘all-powerful’ antagonist. Rather, the story relies on the life-and-death struggle of a cast of well-drawn and disparate (and desperate) characters in conflict with each other.

Some characters are more sympathetic to the reader than others, but even the ‘nice’ ones are supremely flawed. All are filled with conviction, and each character’s individual story is compelling and believable. Each acts according to his/her nature and the resulting events reflect cascading collisions of motive and desire.

In my view, The Liveship Traders is about the struggle for survival. The first book, Ship of Magic, focuses primarily on the struggle by several characters for mastery over the Vestrit family’s liveship, Vivacia (symbolic of life):

  • Althea Vestrit – Upon her father’s death, Althea learns that her beloved ship has been bequeathed to her sister and detested brother-in-law (Kyle Haven), who throws her off the ship. She vows to recover Vivacia through proving herself as a sailor and out manoeuvring Kyle.
  • Wintrow Vestrit – The son of Kyle Haven in training to become a priest, Wintrow is dragged from his chosen life by his father and forced to live aboard Vivacia and become a sailor. He battles his father’s dominance over him, while reluctantly coming to love Vivacia.
  • Ronica Vestrit – Mother of Althea and the business brain behind the family, Ronica needs Vivacia to be profitable to prevent an ancient family vow from committing her granddaughter in marriage to pay the liveship debt.
  • Captain Kennit – A notorious pirate, Kennit longs to be crowned king of the pirates and sail in his own liveship. Vivacia becomes his target.
  • Kyle Haven – Married to and ‘responsible’ for the Vestrit family, Kyle believes it is his role to save the family from ruin. (Kyle is the least sympathetic of all characters, and undoubtedly plays the role of ‘the villain’ in this first book for both Althea and Wintrow.) He attempts to turn the family fortunes around by using Vivacia to traffic in slaves.
  • Brashen Trell – Disowned by his Trader family, Brashen is struggling to ‘make a new life’ as a common sailor and dispel the taint of his youthful indiscretions. He alone of the major characters has no vested interest in Vivacia; his story is entwined with Althea’s, as he provides unconditional friendship, love and support for her.

Thus is Vivacia the bone of contention in Ship of Magic: loved and desired by Althea, resented and reluctantly loved by Wintrow, used and abused by Kyle; coveted and ultimately captured by Kennit; the vessel of hope for Ronica. The symbol of life thus becomes the object that threatens to tear apart the lives of these characters.

As a writer, I learnt a lot about character and conflict through reading this series. I love (and am in awe of) the way Hobb sets up a large cast of characters, gives each of them such strong, believable goals and then pits one character up against another. Because they have directly conflicting desires, each sees the other as an antagonist. Even Kyle (whom I detest) – misguided, foolish and cruel – believes he is acting in the best interests of his family.

Even more impressive to me is the way Hobb escalates the story through the trilogy and broadens her focus to reveal just how trivial the battle for Vivacia really is.

But the best thing about this series (and Hobb’s writing in general) is the way she makes me feel when I’m reading. I laugh, I hate, I love, I cry when I’m reading these books. Her characters are among the best I’ve ever encountered.

Which books have affected you most powerfully? Fellow writers: What’s the best writing lesson you’ve learnt from reading?

14 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Book Review, Craft, Reading, Reflection

July 21, 2011

Robert McKee Thriller Day – part 2

By Ellen Gregory

So, in the previous post I only got as far as the introduction in my summary of the McKee Thriller day. Here is part 2, in which the crime is committed and the protagonist victimised . . .

Antagonist is key

When writing crime stories, it turns out you always start by creating the perfect crime (and then work backwards). And when you’re talking about the psychological thriller, that means beginning with the antagonist ­– who turns out to be the most important character of all.

McKee advocates that the antagonist’s character, motive and goal need to be defined first, because the antagonist (who holds the balance of power, remember) dictates how events will unfold. Thus the thriller antagonist (often a sociopath) gets everything in the attribute stakes: mental prowess (typically high intelligence, strong willpower and no conscience), physical or institutional prowess, and the spirit of evil*. Also, quite often, a degree of natural charm.

But to this despicable creature, violence is divine, a transcendent experience – albeit a means to an end. The cold-blooded antagonist typically has a Great Project, the perfect crime, greater than themselves. They cannot be bought off; their price is the victim’s soul. They often like to brag about their proclivities, convinced of their divine right to inflict terror.

* The ‘spirit of evil’ was defined as the capacity for doing harm and taking pleasure in suffering; also the desire to reverse nature and make the victim beg for death/hell/damnation.

Creating the crime

Once the antagonist is created and their motives and goals defined, it is time to invent the crime(s). This needs to be a ‘perfect’ crime, that can’t be figured out, that you could conceivably get away with. Then you need to try to outsmart yourself and find a flaw in the perfection. (The flaw should never be built in, because that would be too obvious.)

Alas, McKee didn’t tell us how to find the flaw – I guess that comes with experience and a lot of reading – but he did give some tips on how to create and plant the clues (including a comprehensive checklist of how information can be gathered, sifted, used and concealed):

  • Write out all the aspects of the crime (means, motive, execution etc) and break them into clues.
  • The clues need to be distributed in the story out of sequence, with any causal and temporal relationships concealed.
  • Each clue should encourage misinterpretation the first time it is discovered; the true meaning of the clue should be hidden and inconspicuous.
  • Even when the right meaning of the clue is discovered, create red herrings to mislead the audience.

The key to a good clue/crime is the plausibility of all possible clue meanings, and a sense of inevitability and/or revelation when the truth is finally discovered.

Pushing the protagonist to the edge

The other key character in the mix is the underdog protagonist. Here it’s a matter of stacking as much conflict against them as possible:

  • External conflict – The antagonist preys upon the protagonist using lies, deception and violence, intending to incite terror (extreme fear) and horror (extreme revulsion). (There may also be natural/incidental physical and social obstacles unrelated to the antagonist.)
  • Internal conflict – The protagonist may already have issues they’re trying to deal with; these may be related to the general trauma of life.
  • Psychological conflict – The various pressures inflicted start to play havoc with the protagonist/victim’s mind and they begin to doubt. They may start questioning reality, their judgement, the meaning of life, their identity and purpose . . . right up to the point they start to question morality (right v wrong).

Ultimately the protagonist (and the value at stake) needs to be pushed to the edge, to the very limit of human experience.

To achieve this, the character of the protagonist needs to have great capacity to be hurt. It was suggested that characters with large imaginations can be made to suffer more than those who don’t. The writer needs to establish the potential for great depth and breadth of suffering, and then inflict it on the protagonist. (This takes ‘hurt your characters’ to a new level . . .)

The greater, more complex and powerful the forces of antagonism, then the greater the protagonist must become in order to rise above. The protagonist ultimately has to choose between conscience and survival, and often must be moved to commit violence – to use evil to escape evil.

The most powerful stories are those involving ‘the negation of the negation’. If the protagonist represents a positive charge towards the value at stake (e.g. survival), then the antagonist represents a negative charge. If the negative of survival is death, then the negation of the negation would be damned (for example). The antagonist should push the story – and the protagonist – towards this for greatest impact.

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Links to part 1 and part 3 in this series.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Conventions, workshops & seminars, Craft

May 18, 2011

Bad decision vs stupid decision

By Ellen Gregory

One of the undisputed rules of storytelling is to hurt your characters: the protagonist must either fail to achieve a goal and in so doing make things worse, or achieve that goal at a cost that outweighs the benefit. If the writer is doing it right, in most cases things spiral out of control because of decisions and resulting actions from the protagonist.

However, there is nothing worse than having characters act stupidly as a plot device. Call it stubbornness, or impetuosity, or bravado . . . when your protag gets themself into an avoidable situation it can be pretty hard to convince a reader that they aren’t just plain dumb. (We’ve all read novels where we’ve rolled our eyes and cringed.)

The thing is that of course the protag is going to make a bad decision — it wouldn’t make a good story otherwise. And it may be for one or more of those reasons. But the author has to establish first that the protag could not possibly have made any other decision, whether it’s to do with the core aspects of their character, some form of coercion, ignorance or whatever. The reader needs to believe as the ensuing disaster unfolds. They need to empathise with the character’s choice, not label him/her an idiot, which totally undermines the story.

What is interesting — and increases the writing challenge — is that different readers have varying levels of engagement with characters and hence have different tolerance levels for ‘bad’ decisions. 

So what is the ideal balance between bad, stupid and acceptable when it comes to character decision-making?

2 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Craft, Reflection

February 23, 2011

‘What if?’ and the art of pessimism

By Ellen Gregory

One afternoon recently, I found myself contemplating ‘what if?’, and it struck me that my thoughts were tending towards the pessimistic. (What if I let the dog off the lead and he ran onto the road? What if I chopped my finger off with the secateurs through carelessness? …)

But then I realised that this is what we do as storytellers: explore the impact of choices and actions. For an effective story, the outcome of these needs to be bad – whether the result of chance or a poor decision. So we run all the scenarios in our mind until the worst outcome eventuates, and then we inflict these on our characters. The more we hurt them, the better.

I am not naturally a pessimist — I’ve always been more of the ‘glass half full’ mindset. As a result I’ve had to work quite hard at hurting my characters (I’m rather soft-hearted too). So when I find myself having these negative ’what if?’ daydreams, I start wondering whether honing my writing craft is changing the way I think on a daily basis.

How much of a writer’s personality affects their ability to tell a story? It’s widely accepted that experience counts for a lot — writers with dark or troubled pasts have more grist for the mill and a wider range of emotional experience to draw upon. But basic personality? Perhaps a dash of pessimism helps when it comes to thinking up disasters. Yet I’d hate to think there wasn’t room for optimism and hope as well.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , | posted in Craft, Reflection

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