Eric Lake

Chaos Theories #3: Threequelitis August 13, 2010

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Most third installments in a series or trilogy–threequels, as they are starting to be called–suck. So when a fantastic piece of storytelling like Toy Story 3 comes out, the word you should call it isn’t a threequel, but a miracle. What elements make a threequel a satisfying story and a superb conclusion to the trilogy?

Toy Story 3 is a masterpiece, arguably surpassing its predecessors. As I watched, I realized you could write an entire book on writing solely from the techniques used in this film. You can immediately tell the craft placed into its construction. It’s meticulously designed, and everything Pixar sets up is paid off in the end. It’s tear-inducing, it’s amazing, and it’s one of the most fantastic threequels in the realm of film.

How can you pull this off?

Step 1:  Show something your audience hasn’t seen before. This is the easiest area for a threequel, especially in film. Some threequels feel like they’re just an excuse for an awesome set piece (I’m looking at you, Pirates of the Carribbean), and it falls on its face. It’s far too tempting to rely on this rule of cool, but at the same time, you can’t retread the same ground the past two installments had. In Toy Story 3, the prison escape feels similar to the rescue sequence in Toy Story 2, but that isn’t the new. The new comes at the finale. It didn’t appear in trailers, so the new here is unexpected and excellent.

Step 2: Correctly identify what people liked in the previous stories, then give your audience more. It’s entirely antithetical to Step 1, but in addition to breaking new ground, you have to give your audience the things they liked in the first. The previous entries in your series are like a promise to your audience, and that promise sets expectations. Don’t let them down.

Identifying what people liked before is a big problem in writing sequels or threequels, but let me simplify things. Hopefully what people liked was simply excellent writing. The Pirates of the Carribbean sequels made the grave error that people wanted more supernatural stuff and more Jack Sparrow—both valid observations—at the expense of telling a tight, concise story. I firmly believe Dead Man’s Chest could have surpassed its predecessor, but the filmmakers needed to chop off a half hour of fun stunts that had nothing to do with the story you are telling (so, pretty much all that stuff on the island in the beginning. Fun, but ultimately superfluous). Story comes first. If there’s something new you want to do, it better enhance the story.

Step 3: Tie everything together. Draw from the themes in your previous works and address them in ways people don’t expect. Give your characters a satisfying conclusion to their arcs. If you can, have world elements in the first installment have payoffs in the future. This is yet another problem in the Pirates trilogy: ultimately, none of that Aztec treasure stuff from the first film made a difference at all later on. You don’t have to tie together all the world elements. Certainly Indiana Jones didn’t, and The Last Crusade was superb. But Indiana Jones’ stories were episodic; you can get away with it there. The Pirates sequels weren’t episodic, they were one story across two installments, thus ruining the adventure feel. As a result, the Pirates sequels felt tacked on (which they were) and the trilogy seems disjointed.

Sorry, this is supposed to be about good threequels, not how much I was disappointed in the Pirates trilogy. The most important part of a threequel is to tell an amazing story, as I said before, so let’s get some good examples of that. Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy is close to my heart because its world elements weave perfectly into the character interactions and the plot. It’s a perfect example of tying the steps I outlined into one cohesive whole. The effect at the end of Hero of Ages dazzles the mind.

On the science fiction front, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy develops a trilogy the proper way. We have the first book, Foundation, as the setup: Hari Seldon is going to create the Second Galactic Empire after one millennium, instead of the thirty millennia of barbarism that would happen otherwise. The second book gives more challenges, but goes above and beyond by asking, what could go wrong with Seldon’s Plan? The third book takes these elements and creates a masterpiece with them.

Sanderson’s epic shows how fantastic a trilogy can be when the author writes all the way through the whole thing before it is published—you get an excellently tightened, consistent story. Asimov’s Foundation is more organic, and feels just as amazing. But these two both realized that in order to write a great threequel, they needed story first.

There are plenty other superb threequels, Hollywood not excluded. The Bourne films. The Lord of the Rings.  Toy Story 3 earned the right to exist on such a list, because it didn’t forget to tell a good story, and at the same time it played with the themes of Toy Story in a way that made it feel not only a welcome addition to the Toy Story franchise, but a nigh perfect one.

Did I write a good threequel with this article? Maybe, but I probably I get knocked for having it delayed so long.

Chaos Theories #2: Magic Systems 101 March 8, 2010

Posted by Eric in Chaos Theories.
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“Magic is what makes fantasy fantastic,” you say, “you can’t apply rules to them or else it loses wonder!” I respond, “Sure, but if you want to write them you will certainly want to know how they work.” Writing is all about execution, and I find applying some basic laws of physics to magic systems make them more understandable and realistic. Here, I’m going to outline my basic method for developing a magic system.

Granted, you may find that my approach destroys the sense of wonder. I can imagine, though, that really do need help developing something unique and cool. They need some framework to start. Having an idea is one thing, but it is another thing to execute it with style. Readers will invariably try to guess what is happening in your books, and one way to surprise them is with your magic system. It shows that you can be smarter than them. However, in order for it to not feel like a deus ex machina, you need to think your magic out moreso than the readers will and properly foreshadow that. So, if you seem to think “my magic system just feels flat”, I can help with giving you a frame to jump off. Don’t worry, it’s not one of those building frames you jump off of and commit suicide. That would be uncool, and I have it on good authority you will live through this article.

First, you need to think of three basic, crucial things. Cost, action, and source.

The action (or effect) of your magic should be something definable and measurable. When I started out, I thought, “wouldn’t it be cool if this magic system could do anything?” The more a magic could do, the cooler it would become, and the more interested the reader will be. And having something cool is, well in a tautological sense, cool. The rule of cool gets people excited. It’s a great starting point if you have writer’s block (or maybe worldbuilder’s block). Just put the coolest thing you can think of and roll with it. This cool thing will principally be the “action” of the magic system. Maybe I have this idea for a scene which involves a shark with laser eyes burning through their tank and all their fleshy masters. The action is, naturally, the laser eyes.

It’s important to note that I picked something specific: laser eyes. Questionable physics aside, I know what sharks with laser eyes are probably going to do. If I chose something more general, like, “sharks that can create anything”, that is too broad. What would a shark create? Titanium teeth? Impenetrable armor? Would it form laser eyes? An army of sharky minions it controls with its mind? Or, if the shark is a fantasy fan, maybe it just wants to magically form “A Dance with Dragons”. I think its safe to say if sharks could read, they would read “A Song of Fire and Ice”. But maybe that shark is a physicist and creates a black hole right on your main character. Well, what do you do now! I sure don’t know.

The lesson: be extremely careful what that “effect” of your magic is. Not only is it easier for your head to grasp, but now you don’t have to come up with inane “rules” which prevent that shark from destroying the world instantaneously. There’s a lower probability you will write yourself a plot hole.

Plus, by having a specific action, you can extrapolate easily. Perhaps one of the younger sharks always gets picked on because his laser eyes are just about as deadly as laser pointers. Assuming this shark isn’t going into the field of academia and giving lectures, this probably won’t be very effective. Then again, maybe that shark is an intellectual, and his final character climax does result in him becoming a professor. Who knows? By playing around with something specific, you can come up with neat things that you would never have thought of otherwise.

But now that you have laser-eyed sharks, you have upset the balance of everything. The whole oceanic ecosystem may quite literally be toast. Now your sharks are starving, because they’ve murdered all the fish. You realize that as a writer, perhaps giving sharks the ability to laser anything to oblivion may not have been the best idea. What do you need? You need to give your magic system a cost.

For one, if your main character–say, a shark–can use magic indefinitely, your story has lost a lot of tension. The readers will be wondering, “Oh, what’s he going to laser eye now?” Then, when his wife leaves him in the middle of act two and he gives him a little piece of laser action, your readers will sigh. When every problem is solved the same way, with impunity, the story is boring. Laser eyes should never be boring!

There are many kinds of costs. The first is biological: just after the shark finishes roastin’ someone, he can no longer swim for a few crucial seconds. This type of cost is fantastic to read if it is serious enough. You start to worry what is going to happen if he uses his laser eyes in a fight. Instead of magic deflating the tension, it increases the tension through a significant cost. Now when your shark roasts his love in cold blood (or would it be hot blood? Whatever.) you may have to worry about her father, not too far away, who will attack him in revenge while he’s weak. Boy, not only is your shark going to have to deal with the emotional damage of murdering his one true love, he is also mortally wounded, if he lives at all! That will not be a good day for him tomorrow.

Which brings me to the next, more subtle kind of cost: cultural. This isn’t actually ingrained in your magic system explicitly, but result directly from it. Don’t forget these! Once you introduce a change into the natural world with magic, everything changes, so you need to think of many different ramifications. These will make your world feel more fantastic since no one else your magic system. You get more “fantastic” elements despite having explicit rules. In fact, it is because of the rules that the magic works well. Its these ramifications which can also give your characters an added dimension, or an extra conflict, too.

In all practicality, once you’ve extrapolated your magic out, you have plenty of seeds for story ideas. You’ve defined all the characteristics, so thinking about the potential conficts that can arise becomes much easier. Perhaps one group of sharks do end up disrupting the ecosystem. What will the other sharks think? Civil war! Now you have a story.

But stories also need mystery. If your magic is cool enough, it will interest the reader more. So eventually, that magic system has to have some mysterious elements in it. Not only must you extrapolate forward, but backwards as well. Where did this magic come from?

Now we’re getting into an area which may not be directly necessary for your story. Typically, the origins of your magic system will come with some deep in-world mythology. It isn’t right for every story to reveal the entire depth of your worldbuilding, so this stage may not be right for your story. I find, however, that thinking about the source of your magic is as essential as thinking about the magic’s action or cost. You as an author better know more about your world than your readers, or else it will seem like you are making things up as you go along. You instead want to be much smarter than your reader, so the readers end up rewarded for their efforts in learning your magic system.

There can be a lot of different sources for your magic system. Fantasy likes to use magic that’s derived from some mystical or seemingly divine source, but science fiction thinks about where its technology comes from, too. Spice comes from Dune, which makes that planet important. By thinking of the source, it continues to flesh out your setting. Perhaps your laser eyed sharks were created by some mad scientists, so its some bizarre biotechnology. It could also be a spiritual magic. Who knows? Feel out what is right for your story and roll with it.

The source is rewarding to think about because you can link it with the costs for your magic system. If your sharks have magic biotechnology, it seems rational that utilizing it would have some biological consequences. In this case, we’ve come up with a logical reason for our cost that we came up with above: that they can’t swim. Now instead of the cost seeming random, we have an in-world explanation, so your world feels consistent. By knowing the source of your magic, you can also come up with new costs for your magic. Maybe your sharks will eventually fight humans, and the scientists have a way to control the lasers. The sky’s the limit.

And this wouldn’t be Chaos Theories if I didn’t talk about something about math and physics, so here you go: the Law of Conservation of Energy. I suspect many of you know this already. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, just transferred (note that since mass and energy are equivalent, there is incorporates Law of Conservation of Mass). If you’re scientific like me, you can use this in thinking about the source of your magic. For every ounce of energy your sharks beam out (okay, not ounce, but Joule. Regardless…), there had to be equal amount of energy lost from somewhere else, because you can’t make energy out of nothing. So, for the biotechnology route, perhaps your sharks need to eat more.

Typically, magics will utilize the boring “it makes you tired” concept. Magic uses energy from your body, so by using magic, you get tired. While this has the benefit of summing up two of three elements I’ve talked about in the article (action, cost, source) in one sentence, I personally find it ridiculous. It lacks depth, and makes little physical sense from the Law of Conservation of Energy. Human bodies–or sharks, for that matter–don’t really have a lot of energy to waste in the form of giant beams of death. It’s sort of important for the body to use that energy to, you know, live. So if your body is directly being used to power massive magics, you better be dead nearly instantly. Which would probably deter most everyone from using magic at all.

“But Eric,” someone says, “mass and energy are equivalent! E=mc^2! You get a lot of energy for a tiny bit of mass! Can’t I lose some of that fat around my stomach to power my fireball spell?” Sure, but if you have the power to convert mass into energy instantly, willy nilly, then why aren’t you just making your opponents explode? Just saying, it wouldn’t take much to make your enemy turn into thermonuclear dust. It’d probably be more effective than using your mass to power some esoteric magic to hurt your opponent. I think making stuff explode at will is a lot more cool than laser eyes.

This is why you could use magic that is powered from the soul, or from some divine source, because at least you don’t have to die every two seconds to do some amazing feats by expending some that sweet power. Though, now you get to the issue of asking “Well, where did those gods/God/mystical forces get their energy” by wondering about the Law of Conservation of Energy, and you will go insane. At the very least you’ll get Worldbuilder’s Disease trying to explain that away.

So, I think for our shark example, having their laser eyes come from a divine source doesn’t make much sense, which means we are forced to use more natural means. It’d look a lot like a fatigue based system, which normally I would hate. But you also have to realize that sharks are awesome. When Eragon uses too much magic, he eats some plants and calls it a day. When a shark uses magic and gets hungry, he eats Eragon, every farmboy orphan hero in existence, and their families and old mentors, too, if they are still even alive. Science note: sharks aren’t actually that dangerous to humans. You are more likely to be struck by lightning than eaten by a shark. Of course, those aren’t magically enhanced sharks who are enraged that their lasers make them hungry. These sharks are probably in an eternal bloodlust because of that, so watch out.

If you can take anything away here, know this: it’s all about how you apply your magic. A small, carefully defined action can be made awesome. Mundane costs, like fatigue, can even be made into something cool. Those sharks have probably conquered all the oceans, destroying all human ships, with their laser-eyed bloodlusts. There’s plenty of great story material there.

Ultimately, that’s what your magic system is there for. Not to be cool, but to feed you story ideas.

P.S. Another science note: in the interest of full disclosure, it takes a lot of energy to focus lasers into something that could rip through ships, or even be lethal at all. There are probably a lot more efficient ways to empower sharks to conquer us all.

Chaos Theories: Logic in Fiction December 12, 2009

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I’m starting a column at www.timewastersguide.com, home to the Reading Excuses forum (of which I am a moderator), as well as many authors’ forums, such as Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Eric James Stone, and Howard Taylor. I’m quite excited for this particular column to start! It’s called “Chaos Theories”, after my username on the TWG forums, Chaos2651. It will talk about math, science, and writing, hopefully spurring on some neat ideas for your speculative fiction works.

Chaos Theories will update weekly sometime on Saturday. I’ll be manually posting these here, as well as on TWG, mostly because I have no idea how quickly the administrators there post stuff out. More importantly, it shows you, the careful blog reader, that I am indeed alive.

So, without further adieu.

Logic in Fiction

Inevitably, people’s eyes widen, amazed when I tell them I am a math major. These people are mostly the ones in my writing group. Since I write and I go to college, I must be an English major, and they always respond with, “Wow, I could never do that.” The same happens in reverse: I can meet a new person, tell them that I’m a math major, and they are amazed I write. Why must these be two mutually exclusive things?

This reputation is not entirely undeserved, perhaps. The vast many of my math/science/engineering friends groan when they have to write a paper (this mostly happens freshmen year, when they have to take core classes unrelated to their major). There is just something mystical about writing, and it is a chore to slog through for them. The same principle applies to more liberal arts-type majors. I took an acting class this last semester, and the majority of my classmates told me that they simply could not do math. I’m making stereotypes, of course, for no person can or should be defined from their major–people are more complex than that.

So, it comes down to the question, how in the world can I enjoy writing so much and love the sciences, too? They are on opposite sides of the brain, logic and creativity, which certainly reinforces the stereotype that a person is one or the other. Yet, a lot of my favorite science fiction and fantasy authors came from an extremely scientific background. The example that pops in mind is Isaac Asimov, but it’s not only science fiction authors. Robert Jordan was a physics major when he was an undergraduate. Clearly, this divide between the left and right brain is grey. Many have straddled it before. How does one do it?

I can’t speak for Asimov or Jordan, but in my case, it is because I find logic and rationality in fiction. It’s less that I’m using my creativity more, I’m simply seeing how the creative process must be, on some level, a logical and rational process.

I’m sure some people are shaking their head right now as they read that last line. The method of writing isn’t “logical”, they’d argue. Imagination isn’t logical. Ideas come from this strange place which no one can really explain. And I agree with this line of thinking, wholly and completely. I can’t precisely place where my ideas come from. However, ideas are not stories. Stories have a structure all to themselves. The structure is subjective, but there is a structure. You can come up with as many ideas as you want; the novel won’t write itself. The important part of writing is putting these ideas to the page. That’s where logical thinking happens.

Postulate and conclusion. If I had my character do this, what would happen? If I had this new piece of technology, what would result? If I had this magic system, what would change? How much would the world change? It’s coming up with a premise, then seeing it through to its conclusion. One way to succeed as an author is to extrapolate these ideas further than your reader expects. This is actually what happens with mathematics. There are a select few things we assume, and we logically take these ideas further, proving theorems that wouldn’t really be apparent from simply looking at the postulates. I see beauty in both. Wow, I did not foresee that, but it makes sense. I can follow the justifications and come to the same conclusion. It’s awe-inspiring.

Really, that’s how I get my ideas. There is a small seed of an idea–this is the mystical, mysterious part–but in the process of extrapolation, there’s an avalanche of new ideas and conclusions that I never expected. Far more ideas are in the latter category than the former. I can see the rationality, the beauty, and the elegance of it. It is these ideas in the latter categories which have the biggest payoff. Ultimately, this is why I lean more into hard magic systems, because they give fuel to the fire of my imagination.

The best word I can use to describe Asimov’s writing style is cerebral. There’s plenty of dialogue, designed to make you think. What’s lacking, perhaps, is emotion. I’d imagine that this is because Asimov has a background strong in the sciences, and his writing reflects a more intellectual experience. This isn’t necessarily a flaw. I love a good character-driven story, yet cerebral stories can have similar effect. The stories I love the most inspire awe in me, and a method to do that–not the only method, I’m sure, but certainly [i]a[/i] method–is by pushing ideas further to places you didn’t expect, but still feel right. At its core, rational. Setting and plot ideas are the easiest examples to note, but character–the soul of story–can follow this same principle.

Because people, and therefore characters in novels, are rational.

There’s another fascinating stereotype, related to the left/right brain issue, only with genders. Males think of themselves as beings of action, problem solving, and logic, and there’s a notion that females are the antithesis of this: overly emotional, talky beings. Of course, from a female perspective, lots of men do idiotic things (We do. Sorry ladies) and women have the real answers. So there is mutual confusion on both sides. But if a guy actually listens to a girl and understand her point of view, hey! It suddenly seems really rational.

It’s odd that the stereotype is that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Both genders are perplexing to one another, but why make it a gender thing? Let’s just generalize that people are confusing to one another. Yet, I just proposed that people are rational.

I’m of the opinion that things happen for a reason. The world, on the macro-level, is deterministic. Causes lead to effects, which cause more effects. A lot of these reasons aren’t glamorously mystical. I went and ate food because I was hungry. That is a valid line of reasoning! It does make sense. Why would things happen any differently? Likewise, if I’m hungry and yet I don’t eat until three hours later, completely passing the time when the dining hall closed, forcing me to clean off my car and go to, say, Papa John’s for some food. Well, yeah, that was dumb and had a simple solution, but there is a rational explanation: I was working on schoolwork, it took a while, the dining halls close at an un-college student friendly 7p.m., it snowed the night before which forced me to clean my car, and it was a holiday, so only Papa John’s was open. See? Perfectly rational, and stupid at the same time.

Obviously, there are two types of logic. Not only the rational logic we attribute to sciences and mathematics, but there is, for lack of a better word, emotional logic. That previous example makes far more sense if you understand my frame of mind. There were indeed reasons for everything that had just happened, but from an outsider, they make no sense at all. The stereotype that men and women are fundamentally different is because they don’t understand one another. But just because you don’t understand that person’s reasoning doesn’t mean it isn’t there! You simply haven’t found the logic yet.

Good writers would be able to craft a character so that it feels real and distinct. I’m learning to do this now. The key is to understand that characters are, at the core, logical. Their past influences their actions now. Everything they’ve gone through puts them at a distinct place from another character, which gives different conflicts for different characters. Just like real people, different things matter to different characters. As a writer, you have to be able to understand the character and his or her logic. Then, like any other idea, you need to extrapolate the character to its logical conclusion. It’s all logic.

That’s why I write. Like a sculptor chiseling marble, I am chipping away at the story until a coherent whole, one which feels right. It makes sense. The process of discovery, where I have to find that logic, is the fun part. I certainly couldn’t tell you that when I start a book, that I know everything that’s going to happen. But I can’t sit around and hope the conclusions simply appear in my mind; I have to work at it. I have to chisel away the marble until there’s something elegant. I can’t help but think that a similar process is used in proving theorems in mathematics–a long, hard line of work. Of course, I don’t know yet. My proofs class is next semester. Either way, in my mind, math/science and writing are not nearly as separated as is usually suggested.