Author: Bob

I wrote a scene and reviewed it the next day. Though clear in my mind, no other reader would see the setting. The descriptions lacked details the reader needed. Time for an analysis before a rewrite or two.

The gist of the scene is that one person is running away from two others. The scene takes place at night and in the woods. That should be simple enough to convey. The first sentence includes mention of a bright moon, so it is obviously night. Unfortunately, there is no other mention of night or how that affects the various characters or the pursuit.

There is a mention of a clearing and some trees. That’s the end of the details for the woods. Does it need more? I think so. Will the reader care? That depends on their understanding of woodlands.

I spend a lot of time in wooded areas. There are densely packed areas of young trees spaced so closely that it is hard to get through. In other places, pine boughs are so close together that they block out nearly all the light. One park in Iowa has a place where the trees are spread enough that the hilltop is mostly just knee-high grass. One of my favorite places has briars so dense that they form mazes through which one must carefully navigate or risk tangling and ripping of flesh. To someone familiar with “woods” as a concept, the details matter.

The different types of woodlands affect how the characters move. The scene starts with a chase, so terrain and plant cover determines how fast the parties can move and how well they can see each other. Lots of undergrowth will slow everybody and make plenty of noise. Less undergrowth will allow all parties to move, but it also may allow the pursuers to see their prey.

Do the branches grab the clothes of the runners? Do running feet trip on gnarled roots? Do thorny vines bite the flesh? Are the tree trunks spaced far enough to run between? Do fallen limbs form barriers at random?

The season matters as well. Spring has less undergrowth and fewer leaves, so moonlight will shine on everything. In summer, the leaves may obscure the light, making dappled patterns that disrupt the visible shape of everything, turning the forest into a fun house. When autumn comes, fallen leaves crunch under foot, giving away the location of everything that moves. Winter snows reflect the moonlight, but hide any tripping roots or open burrows underneath.

That is a lot to think about, so I went back to my mental image and tried to place myself there. I walked around and made notes of the things I saw.

The scene takes place in mid September in a broadleaf forest. Autumn has not really started yet, but sits ready. The moderate undergrowth is lush and grey in the moonlight. The undergrowth hampers running, but the pursued character is following a deer trail that leads between a couple of larger trees and into the clearing. There are a few other deer trails leading from the clearing. For those of you not familiar, small deer herds will find an easy-to-walk path around their eating range and, over time, stomp down a narrow path where nothing grows.

There is a crispness in the air on mid September nights. The ground is hard but not too dry, making a soft thud with every footfall. The plants of the undergrowth, nearing the end of their lifecycle, are dry but not completely dried out. They crackle only slightly with abrupt contact. There is a type of late-summer dust in the air; it fills the nostrils and covers the tongue, leaving a dry, earthy taste.

The nocturnal animals prepare for the coming winter. Raccoons, opossums, and skunks scurry around, running at the sound of the chase. In the distance, one may hear a great horned owl establishing the borders of its territory with its call. These are things that are in the vicinity of the scene, though only as the occasional rustling of leaves as they duck for cover.

There may be geese flying overhead, but I didn’t see them in the scene.

Now I’m getting somewhere. I’ve paid more attention to the scene; I can provide the sensory details to immerse the reader. With a more concrete image of the location, the rewrite starts. I can hit all of the senses for greater impact. The only trick will be to explain all of that without disrupting the dynamism of a chase scene.

The pandemic provided plenty of time to proceed with projects, but I also need breaks. A local television station shows the old Bewitched program during my lunch time. Watching the show brought up some good questions about why the witches and humans have the relationships that they do. That made me wonder: how does that relate to my characters?

Bewitched was a program from 1964 to 1972. It centered around an advertising executive, who was a human, being married to a witch. The husband, named Darrin, opposes the use of magic. The wife, named Samantha, tries to adhere to his wishes. His wife’s family is offended by his bigotry against the wife’s nature. The humor of the series comes from Darrin as the straight man forced to deal with the absurdity of the magic, usually because the inlaws are up to something.

Within the show, Samantha does not tell Darrin that she is a witch until after they are married. It seems like something she should have mentioned earlier. The mother-in-law, named Endora, meets him shortly after and is angered by his opposition to witchcraft. She resists turning him into an artichoke, but they are hostile to each other from that point forward.

It is obvious that the witches are extremely powerful. They are shown to alter the nature of reality practically on a whim. The in-laws may be nicer to him out of respect for Samantha, who seems to love him, but the witches have all the power needed to do anything they want to the entire mortal world.

So, why do they not do whatever they want?

Humanity is probably a big threat. If we look at primitive humans, we can see the danger they pose. Any single human is a clawless, barely-fanged bag of Tiger Chow. It’s never the individual that is an issue. Humans have three characteristics that would make them a serious threat even to the witches of the Bewitched world.

First, humans are persistence hunters. Most animals are designed to conserve energy. When threatened, the prey may fight a little, or they may run out of the immediate danger area, but they want the conflict to end quickly. Conflict uses energy. Humans, with their highly efficient bipedal walking, can just keep walking toward the prey. A gazelle can run away easily the first few times, but constantly having to run away really wears them out. Before too long, the humans come over the rise and the gazelle just doesn’t have the energy to run. Humans just don’t stop.

Second, humans tend to swarm. An individual or even a small group may be easy pickings for a powerful enemy or predator. Then more humans come. We build mobs, tribes, and armies, all larger and more dangerous. Breeding-age humans are always in heat and can produce more humans at an extraordinary rate. It takes a while for the new humans to be fully functional, but they will contribute to those armies. Human groups that do not get along will set aside their differences temporarily if they have a common enemy.

Third, humans are tool builders. We figure things out and build tools to exploit what we learned. We went from stick, to pointy stick, to stick with pointy rock, in a relatively short time for a species. Now we have pointy intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. If humans find out about the witches in an official capacity, there would be a witch autopsy in no time just to figure out how they work. The witchs’ advantage with magic would soon be met with a human-built thaumic cannon in short order.

During the series, the witches bother Darrin, but they are very careful to keep their witchcraft secret from other humans. It seems very important to them that humanity does not know witches exist. Given the danger posed by the human species, that is in their best interest. Humans are horrifying.

How does any of this apply to my characters? The current stories involve different species, but they are really just variations on humans. Over time, the variations divided the types into distinct groups with their own characteristics. It is important to look at the histories of these groups to determine why they are like they are and how that affects their behavior.

How did their environment shape them? Do they have a greater resistance to some aspect of their home, such as extreme heat or cold? Do they have less resistance to the opposite? How does history affect the morphology of the new subspecies?

After exploring those questions, the next step is to ask how these differences play out when members of the different groups interact. Does one group fear the other? Is there distrust? Does one group believe something ridiculous about the other group that simply isn’t true?

Obviously, Bewitched is a very successful series and there is much that can be learned by studying it. We should always try to learn from others as we hone our own craft. We should also take the time to know where our characters come from.

I’m writing a short story set in a world I’ve played with for years. It seemed a good story with relatable characters. I started. Part of it made sense to me; I know the back story. The average reader wouldn’t know that, so it needed detail. Now there’s this other thing, and another thing, and so on. The short story is no longer short.

This happens often. It is difficult for me to crank out a short story, despite my inherent laziness. Instead, my brain builds elaborate histories for everything. I see economic systems, language shifts, religious development. Even the tiniest vignette has an encyclopedia of facts around it.

One option: simply make notes elsewhere and leave them out of the story. In some cases, that works. My brain doesn’t like it. There will be some detail from the story world that makes the story just that much better, and the rest of the world comes with it. Sure, oatmeal is good, but how about with cinnamon? How about with cinnamon and honey and blueberries and cream and…

Occasionally, the needed pieces are just things not originally conceived. If the main character does this action, will there be a reaction? Consider a kid who not only stands up to the bully, but hurts the bully in the process. Is that the end of the story? Are there witnesses or authority figures? Does the bully have friends? Despite what some parents tell their kids, many bullies won’t stop because you stood up to them, and if you hurt that bully, you better have crippled them or they are coming after you. So a short story about a kid standing up to a bully is likely to grow into a longer story about that kid running from the butt-kicking of a lifetime.

In the short story I was working on, there was a similar scenario where the weaker party was trying to escape from a stronger group. Without giving away too much, the stronger group is sent packing with the message that they better not come back. That seems straightforward.

The problem is, there was already a context for the stronger group. They were a tiny arm of a much larger group. The much larger group would be unlikely to accept the threat, choosing instead to retaliate.

This apparent antagonist was not intended to be the primary antagonist of the story. They were supposed to be a passing part of the set up and then fade away. This was one of those situations where the character tells you what they are going to do despite the prepared plot. The temporary bad guy went home and got buddies, making the story longer and more complex in the doing.

This won’t be bad for the tale. The planned antagonist will now have some competition, and this only aids the protagonist. Before this, I wasn’t entirely sure how my protagonist was going to pull off the miracle of getting away from the planned bad guy, but now the villain has something more hostile to deal with.

When I get around to retirement, I will have to get all of the stories for this fictional world out of my head. In some cases, it will just be a matter of finishing off the started-not-finished pieces from the past decades. In others, I may do a paper on the economic systems of this world and their effect on the interactions between the various peoples and their prejudices. For now, I will still try to write things as small as I possibly can. Maybe I can keep each short story to just a couple of volumes.

I have a story from the same world as the last two that started with Cordell’s Rebellion. The main character was a side character in Hour of Consequence. The story arc is complete. Unfortunately, there is no character arc. Oops!

What do I mean by this? In most interesting stories, the main character has an emotional connection to the activity and there should be some change in that character as a result. We map the change from the starting state all the way through to the end state. Right now, my character is simply an artifact passed around by other forces in the story. That’s not good.

Why can’t I see the character arc or his internal actions? I don’t know his motivations or his life experiences well. I’ve not spent enough time with people like him to have an understanding of their world view. In the previous story, he was mysterious to good effect, but that won’t work for a lead character.

I could try to find people with similar life situations and find out more about them. That wouldn’t be creepy at all. I could do some research and read quite a bit, but that’s not quite the same; it would feel like a copy of a copy.

Another option would be to change the character into something so unique that no one could compare him to anyone else. He would also be unrelatable. It would destroy everything he was in the previous novel

It may work to tell the story from the point of view of a different character. This would still leave my hero flat with no emotional connection. What’s more, I think it would be disrespectful to the character and to the real-life humans who are similar to him. This just isn’t a good option.

For now, I think I will set this story aside and work on something else. The tale has a lot of potential, but only if it can be done honestly. At the moment, the honesty does not manifest.

The blank canvas
The empty notebook
The unshaped clay
In plaintive voices

They call
Soon, I may have time
Soon, duties will diminish
Soon…
Soon, I can turn to my passions
Hours spent with brush or pen
The clay knife, sculpting, shaping
Breathing life into the creations that for now
Wait
Weep
And call for release from their emptiness