How can it get any WORSE?

[Peat]

For me, I just don't think that a lot of new writers carry their ideas far enough. I think they come up with a premise....

Ohhhh, a teenager gets stuck in a living maze and they have to get out.

And then that is it. They don't push themselves, or the story, or the character to do any more than that... And then what are they left with? Something pretty bland and generic. Sure, sure, you can include monsters and danger and blood and guts and maybe a romance, but it will always be sort of shallow and straightforward.

Make it worse forces you to dig deep. That's why I force myself to think of ten things, then ten more. Forcing myself to do that up front makes me really mine the the potential of the story idea so instead of something generic I end up with something really new, full of themes, conflict, choices, etc.

I forget who told me never to settle for my first idea, but to keep pushing for the fourth or fifth, but they were right.

And... having read some of the thread, and some of Heliotrope's excellent posts in it, I'd say that to me:

"Make It Worse" is *wonderful* advice for writing scenes.

It has its flaws as a way of plotting though. But I think I misunderstood the original post entirely and no one was ever planning to do that.

 

[Sheilawisz]

You have to settle for the story idea that really makes you happy, excited, fascinated and eager to start writing and telling that story as soon as possible. It does not matter if the idea in question is your first, or fourth, or seventh... It's the moment when a story just Clicks with you that matters.

In other words, you need to have a real connection with the story that you are telling.

Sometimes things just have to get worse for the characters and events in your story, that's true. My point is that following Make it Worse as a general advice instead of listening to what your story is and wants to be, is a recipe for trouble. We cannot force stories to be something that they are not, and if we do that anyway then the result is not going to be good.

My recommendations are:

1- You need a story that really connects with you.
2- You shall have a good idea of what the story is and how it ends, even if you do not know every detail of it.

3- Allow the story to be what it is.
4- Do not add any more complications beyond what the story needs.
5- Get ready to be surprised when the characters and story act on their own against what you were planning at the start of everything.

The thing with Storytelling is that we are not the true designers of stories. It's more like we are reporting about something that really happened, like we were witnesses of the characters and events that we are talking about.

 

[Penpilot]

Wow this thread grew fast.

Make it worst, IMHO, is great advice. The way I see it, it's the heart of scene-sequel structure.

In scene-sequel, there are two types of scenes, the action scene (aka scene) and the reaction scene (aka the sequel). The action scene consists of a goal, an obstacle to that goal, and an outcome.

There can be 4 outcomes to an action scene, yes the goal is achieved, no it isn't, yes BUT something bad happens as a consequence, and no AND something bad happens on top.

In a story, the first outcome of achieving the goal without consequence never happens until the end of a story. Why? Because it kills all the tention and leaves less inscentive to read on.

After the action scene comes the reaction scene, as the label suggests, it's where the characters react to the outcome of the action scene. For brevity, I'll leave out some details here, but at the end of the reaction scene, a new goal is set. Rinse repeat.

This may seem like a formula, but this only deals with one plot thread. Once you mix in multiple plot threads, the flow and placing of story can be altered quite significantly. Action/Reaction scenes from Plot 1 can be interrupt by Action/rRaction scenes from Plot 2 or Plot 3 in a variety of ways.

The different plots can pile on and Make things Worse.

From my experience every book, TV show, and movie I've seen/read and made a point to study, uses this in one form or another.

 

[Russ]

And no, I do not agree with that. Conflict and tension are necessary in a good Fantasy story, but you do not always have to keep them increasing with every chapter until you reach the greatest moment. In many of my stories the conflict, difficulties and tension grow for some time, then they decrease a lot and then they may increase again.

Other stories work better with the model that increases tension constantly until the big moments arrive, but there are other ways of creating and telling a story.

You seem to be reading more into this idea than is really there. I did not suggest it needs to be done "every chapter" (though James suggests that that) or "constantly" but rather that "overall" (my actual word) the tension needs to increase towards the climax.

You also seem to suggest that making things worse necessarily increases complexity. That is not true either. If my hero is trying to lift 500 pounds over his injured dog, and another hundred pounds get added, the situation is not more complex but rather simply worse.

Too much complexity, too many characters, or plot holes are not necessarily outcomes of "making it worse" any more than a broken thumb or windows are a necessary outcome of using a hammer.

 

[Caged Maiden]

Sorry, I wrote this last night, but evidently passed out without posting it. Too bad, because it would have been more pertinent before the conversation moved on:


To me, "make it worse" is less about an obstacle in a story, and more about a writer pushing their mental process.

I wanted Cedrick to go chase some undead creatures, so my first inclination was to make him enter a pub and overhear a conversation about some people who were fleeing their home after undead attacked.

It was a lame scene.

I made it worse.

I made him enter the pub and then the people looked road-weary, so he bought them their dinner, which prompted them to be friendly, and as they all talk, it comes out that the undead attacked their village.

Still lame. Convenient. Not immediate.

I made it worse.

Now, Cedrick rides into town and decides he'll save his coins, so rather than pay for an inn room and supper, he goes to the local temple (wearing his religious symbol of course, to let them know he's a temple resident somewhere else), and he begs their hospitality. So they invite him in for a free supper and bed for the night. But before he can actually eat a bite, the door flies open and a group of villagers enter, and one of the women is visibly sick, showing signs of necrosis. SO they tell the priests what happened, that the woman was attacked by undead...and THAT'S what sets Cedrick out on his journey.

I still made it worse, but didn't present him with any harder challenge, I just made it more immediate, abandoned my first couple ideas and asked what would be worse. Well, a woman whose fingertips are rotting off is certainly worse than a group of haggard travelers with a story to tell. Sort of makes the character feel a little more like he'll be saving folks if he deviates from his journey home.

Make it worse is a phrase that can be taken different ways. Sure, you can sentence a character to a trial, rig that trial, then he takes his last choice, trial by combat, but all his friends abandon him. He gets lucky and scores a champion, but the champion dies horribly, and then he faces death (and now that I know his brother let him escape, I'm more disappointed, because that could have happened in the beginning of the issue, but still I appreciate how i was not given the happy, neat conclusion I originally wanted). I mean, that's certainly one way of making a situation literally worse for the character. And it's a tactic that really works to drive up the drama. But for me, I still need to work on the other interpretation, that of taking a situation I wrote lame and didn't maybe put a ton of thought into, and I need to spin it, color it, connect it to my story and character in a way that makes it have more impact and more gravity.

But I have a lot of respect for any writer who can deny me everything I want, yet keep me hooked. And if things work out too happily in too many situations, I can honestly say that I don't remember what happened in the story I just got done reading. So maybe I'm just shooting for memorable? Not more shocking or more brutal. There's enough of that, and personally, I consider it a cheap tactic if it doesn't mesh with the story's overall tone. Yeah, I'm going for honest, real, and raw. I want to deny readers the neat little scenes they thought they wanted and instead give them something they'll remember, even if it means they didn't like it because it made them mad or uncomfortable. That probably sounds counterintuitive. I think it's brilliant. It's been a long time since I felt this feeling inside of being in love with my tormentor, in a sense. But now that I'm feeling it again, I remember all the books I read that I loved because they made me laugh or gave me a satisfied joy. And those were nice. But there were only a few, maybe five, that I'll love forever because they were the opposite. They punished my dreams and made me watch. They killed that character I desperately wanted to live. They took a characters dreams and threw them into the sea, making sure she could never have what her heart desired. And yet, I loved those books and will never forget them. Those characters in some ways felt more real to me. Because we had suffered together.

And all I'm saying, is that right now, my characters won't do that for a reader. My plots won't. My stories won't. They might be complete, with a beginning, middle, and ending, but they're not gripping. They have good parts, scenes that blow people's socks off, but overall, they fall short of being memorable. So that's why I need to up the ante, make it worse, and push the envelope. Make the conflicts more weighty. Make the characters more unique. Make the situations more intense.

 

[Miskatonic]

I recall a movie screenwriter seminar I watched that treated the story like a roller coaster track, or if you want, a sign wave with highs, lows, mids, with varying degrees of tension. The teacher had a good quote to describe what the average movie should have as far as tension or disasters. I'll try and see if I can find it.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Make it worse will work in some cases. It will also completely destroy a story in other cases. This is where the art of story telling comes in.

Look lets just look at Stephen Donaldson. His first trilogy of Thomas Covenant, lots of tension, beutiful prose, a compelling world build, wonderful characters, and a story that naturally flowed. Lovely work with just a hint of the bleakness which came in later.

Then he started following this grimdark / make it worse meme, and you can see the progression in his work. The second trilogy of Thomas Covenant. The mirror of her dreams duology. And ultimately the Gap series. Each one progressively darker / worse than the last. In each one the heroes were put through more and more shit. And what happened? His readership changed. Large chunks of those who loved the first Thomas Covenant trilogy couldn't stand the Gap series. I stopped readiong him about then despite the fact that as I have said repeatedly, for my money he's one of the best fantasy writers in the world. Those who took up reading the Gap series often didn't like the original Thomas Covenant.

And here's the thing. The reason I stopped reading the Gap series was simply because it had been made so much worse that there was no light left for me at the end of the tunnel. His characters were all so horribly damaged by the first part of thesecond book, that even if they had survived, found true love, infinite riches, becomes lords of all and achieved every goal imaginable, they would still have been better off killing themselves long before.

The upshot is that you can go too far with any meme. Make it worse is just as vulnerable to being the genesis of a literary disaster as any other.

And as for the reality meme - as in "it's more real because it's darker and shit happens in real life" well that's shit too. Yeah people survive being robbed and beaten. How many people do you know who get robbed and beaten, then a week later get raped, the month after that watch their mother be butchered, then the house burns down etc etc. It's fiction. It's no more real than anything else.

As for Game of Thrones, it suffers for me because of this meme. As a reader I want to identify with characters. I want to cheer them on. Yet every time I found one I could do that for he ended up dead - usually horribly. And there was this overirding theme through the books, if you have any moral decency you're going to suffer and die. Only the sick and twisted win. Ignoring the obvious issues I have with this theme, as a reader who wants to identify with characters, I am not going to identify with sick, twisted little shits, and I'm not going to cheer them on. So if you've killed off all my heroes and corrupted the rest, why am I going to keep reading? And the answer is I won't.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[FifthView]

this grimdark / make it worse meme

I really think that the discussion in this thread would not veer toward strong antagonism if we could dispense with this false conflation.

Maybe grimdark has its own particular form of "make it worse" — although, when everything is so bad and new layers of bad keep being added, with no break, perhaps the very sense of "making it worse" is dulled for a reader. If I see no hope in sight and can expect with some certainty that very few threads of light will appear in the uniform darkness, I might not feel that any new terribleness that occurs is a worse condition; maybe, it's only an expansion, an extension of the already-terrible condition. All of one cloth.

I have this feeling that some anti-GoT/ASOIAF sentiment is clouding this thread.* While considering the limitation of GRRM's approach can be a good thing, he is not The Father of Making It Worse. He doesn't define "making it worse." So I don't believe that arguing against the usefulness of making it worse is necessary to prop up anti-GRRM sentiment. (I am not saying that disliking ASOIAF is a bad thing, but only that conflating its nature with "making it worse" as if that is all "making it worse" means, is a poor approach in my opinion.)

*Edit: More generally, disliking a particular approach like "making it real" is also off-base, for the same reasons.

And as for the reality meme - as in "it's more real because it's darker and shit happens in real life" well that's shit too. Yeah people survive being robbed and beaten. How many people do you know who get robbed and beaten, then a week later get raped, the month after that watch their mother be butchered, then the house burns down etc etc. It's fiction. It's no more real than anything else.

The real point is that people who are NOT repeatedly raped, robbed, beaten, etc., still have ups and downs in their lives, obstacles before them that must be overcome—surprise, unexpected obstacles, even. Maybe not daily, true. But many stories simply aren't written about people drifting along with nothing of particular significance happening. Nor, about people living in perpetual Pleasantville.

So I'm reminded a little of this:

 

[Heliotrope]

Yeah, I really think some people are misunderstanding the term. Make it worse does not mean rape, or murder or body count. Make it worse means "make it worse for your character".... particularily in regards to choice.

Maah's asks you to make a list of the ten things your character could never do. Or, a list of ten worst things that could happen to your character other than death. There are many things that could be worse than death or rape for a person. For example, for me:

- Having to choose between my two children terrifies me. What if there was a fire in my house and I could only save one? That would be worse than death for me.

When my little girl was sick with meningitis at 8 weeks they made me leave the hospital room so they could perform the spinal. That was terrifying for me. I sat in the waiting room and cried because I felt like I had abandoned her. I took those feelings and realized they had great story potential.

I was able to develop a character, a Cheiftess. This Cheiftess was head of a vast nation of people (based on the First Nations people of my region). It had been the worst and longest winter they had ever seen and when the people caught a terrible illness they didn't have enough of the medicine they usually use. The people were dying. Her infant girl, only a few days old was dying.

These people were also at war with another tribe, who, because of their location along the mouth of the river had more access to trade from other regions. They had medicine from all over the world.

So what did the woman do? She choose to leave her dying daughter and hike through the snow and ice to trade for medicine with a tribe she was at war with, with the one thing she knew they couldn't refuse. Herself.

She turned herself, and her people as slaves over to the enemy, just so she could take some medicine back to her little girl in hopes that she might survive.

Tough choice.

But dang, that kind of stuff makes for great story material.

There was a WW2 story a few years back where a little Jewish girl who was being taken from her home had to choose between staying with her brother and have him be taken too, or hide him. She made the choice to lock him in the cupboard in her room, thinking she would come back for him. She never did. The entire book was based on the reprecussions of that choice.

These are some heavy choices! And that is what Maah's is trying to get at. Be brave.

For anyone more interested in this stuff, and pushing your characters further in order to create more compelling stories, here are some great worksheets for brainstorming from Maah's:

http://www.writersdigest.com/wp-content/uploads/BreakoutWorksheets1.pdf

The link for the other worksheet isn't working, so I could only get the first one.

 

[FifthView]

Yeah. I think that if someone encounters the phrase "make it worse" and thinks it means "make it grimdark," then I can understand why they might say that making it worse is horrible advice. What they are really saying is make it grimdark is horrible advice. Many great stories can be made that are not grimdark.

But it clouds the discussion. (Even though, yes, the grimdark approach can be looked at, in addition to other approaches, when discussing making things worse.)

 

[Heliotrope]

Oh, gosh, another example of "make it worse"... a true story... but probably one of the most beautiful stories of my life...

I have a friend (older), very religious... homophobic. What would be his worst fear?

You guessed it.

His son wrote him a letter explaining his sexuality on his eighteenth birthday.

Make it worse,

The eighteen year old boy had a heart attack that year when on a run.

Nothing makes you readjust your priorities and change your tune like that does.

My friend had to to a total 180. It was hard. It was gut wrenching. It was the most amazing story of love, compassion, and forgiveness I have ever seen.

That stuff makes good stories.

 

[FifthView]

I take it he survived the heart attack? So, yeah, there can be silver linings to the dark clouds.

Back to the written form...

A couple days ago I started reading The Lies of Locke Lamora for the first time. The first two chapters, about their scheme to snare money from Don Salvara, are filled with resounding success. The only minor glitch happened in the first chapter, when a patrol of guardsmen was going to pass the alley where they'd set up their "stage" to trick Salvara into "saving" them. But the young character Bug interceded and had to run off chased by the guards. The glitch was so minor, I resist calling it a case of "make it worse." Otherwise, the two chapters are an example of building up and highlighting the competency of the Gentlemen Bastards. No making it worse. And I love it.

This is something I do particularly like when it is done well: Having a character or set of characters display extreme talent, genius, and so forth.

I presume that later chapters will throw some wrenches into the works. But please, no spoilers.

 

[Ireth]

I have a few examples of this in my novels. One from WINTER'S QUEEN come to mind.

- Vincent and Dom, the father and uncle of the MC, are hiking through Faerie in search of her when they come upon a band of goblins.
Worse: The goblins are not friendly, and their idea of "play" is to run the men down and torment them once they're caught.
Worse: Night is falling, which means Vincent and Dom can't see very well, but the goblins can just fine.
Worse: Vincent and Dom are separated and can't protect each other.

Worse for Vincent: He's caught by the goblins, disarmed and tied to a tree, while they hit him with fruit and destroy his belongings.
Worse: Once the goblins leave (and he's still tied up), a Leannan Sidhe marks him as her target to drain his energy.

Worse for Dom: He falls down a hill and runs into toxic brambles, which paralyze one of his legs so he can't walk well, and certainly can't run.
Worse: The goblins abandon him, knowing that a Redcap is in the area which will surely kill him if it finds him.
Worse: Redcaps have magical immunity to iron, and a cast-iron frying pan is Dom's only weapon.

 

[Heliotrope]

Yeah. He survived.

So in LLL I'm wondering what the stakes were? Having high enough stakes can be a way of "making it worse", and readers will read through all kinds of stuff, even if not too much is happening, if the stakes are high enough. Does that make sense?

That is something that Maah's talks about alot, private as well as public stakes. There needs to be both. If the stakes are high enough you don't have to throw too much action at the reader.

Plus, creating interesting (I won't say likeable, we've been down that road before) characters is highly important to having high stakes.

 

[FifthView]

So in LLL I'm wondering what the stakes were? Having high enough stakes can be a way of "making it worse", and readers will read through all kinds of stuff, even if not too much is happening, if the stakes are high enough. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I guess that might be a case of making the initial conditions worse, like already discussed in earlier comments.

In the lengthy and, for me, enjoyable prologue, it's very well established that some people within the city cannot be robbed, in order to keep the peace. (Authorities turn a blind eye.) If the wrong people are robbed, that would bring mayhem down on the thief class, so even the thieves self-regulate.

But Locke's targeting one of those untouchables, and the payoff will be extremely huge in comparison to anything mentioned in the prologue. So the reward is great and the potential punishment is also great.

I remember one book I tried reading last summer that went about it wrong. The book was so horrible on so many levels, I'm tempted to break my normal rule and name it and the author both. But I won't. In this book, the author obviously wants to build up the band of adventurers, make them seem highly competent. So basically, very quickly into the book, chapter after chapter after chapter is nothing but one long battle drawn out, with new opponents and situations arising. Yeah, death is a potential "punishment," but meh. And there's no establishment of a great reward. The whole thing played out like one of those video games where, as soon as you complete one stage, a new set of opponents emerge in the next room/on the next street. There was almost no character development. I only made it through a handful of chapters, once the battle started, until I gave out.

 

[Heliotrope]

Yeah, and that's what I mean when I talk about how this works in planning...

I want them to rob a guy.

Make it worse.

Maybe this guy is unrobbable? How would that work? (World building in progress...hmmm, maybe certain people can't be robbed? Why....? More world building... )

Make it worse

Hmmm, what would the punishment be? Maybe he will be thrown in jail?

Make it worse

No, that is lame. It has to be worse than that. What could be worse? He could be killed?

Make it worse

No, that is lame too. How can I increase the public stakes? How can I make this worse than just his own life? Maybe it would affect all the theif class.. maybe it would destroy his friends and everything.... hmmmmm... more world building....

Make it worse

Video game story plot makes me insane too.

So as I mentioned before, Maah's notes that the #1 reason they reject manuscripts is because of lack of tension. This does not mean too low of body count. They mean the stakes are just not high enough (or the stakes are just death... which is boring. Find something worse than death). There is not enough going in the world to compell the reader. There is not enough going on in the heart and mind of the character to compell the reader. It may be lots of episodic action, but it is shallow.

 

[FifthView]

Incidentally, perhaps this "making initial conditions worse" idea works at the granular level too.

So suppose you want to show the competency of your assassin MC. He could just slip through an open window, avoid servants going about their business, slip into the bedroom of the lord of the manor, and slice his throat while he's sleeping.

Or, he could have to scale the exterior of the manor while guards and guard dogs are patrolling below, walk a narrow ledge around to the side of the manor, leap to grab a stone gargoyle, and haul himself up to a window that is locked. He could succeed marvelously doing all this, so no "making it worse" by dropping one of his tools and hitting a guard dog on the head and so alerting the manor's guards. But the stakes are a little higher, the risk inherent in his activity is greater.

To amp things up a little more, perhaps he has to kill the man not for some heavy coin purse (a normal business transaction for the assassin) but because this minor noble had kept his young apprentice assassin in chains for a weak, torturing the poor lad, and had gained information about the assassin that simply cannot be information known to anyone with the ear of the king.

Edit: Hah, I was typing the above when you posted your last comment. So maybe we are on the same track.

 

[Heliotrope]

You've got it.

 

[Heliotrope]

That's what I consider the inherent tension of a story. The tension that's built into the story itself. When you gave the character sisters you immediately added inherent tension. Public stakes. If you have enough inherent tension you don't have to have a ton of action.

 

[Chessie]

Yeah. I think that if someone encounters the phrase "make it worse" and thinks it means "make it grimdark," then I can understand why they might say that making it worse is horrible advice. What they are really saying is make it grimdark is horrible advice. Many great stories can be made that are not grimdark.

But it clouds the discussion. (Even though, yes, the grimdark approach can be looked at, in addition to other approaches, when discussing making things worse.)

Good point. I'm glad this was brought up, because there's totally a difference between making it worse and grimdark. SUB GENRE.

I was thinking about this thread last night as I was writing, and something came to me. Recently (as of like, just the past few months), I've been thinking more about genre expectations and reader entertainment. I say reader because audience is just too big of an idea to me.

But to make a story worse for the characters isn't just to keep conflict and tension in the story, it's for readers to become emotionally invested. If you're not challenging your characters, pushing them to become changed people, then...what's the story again?

Readers pick up a book to FEEL something. The challenges characters go through in the course of a story allows the reader plenty of chances to jump on the magic carpet of emotion. They become invested in the outcome because they need to know what happens.

So genre is tied directly into this because HOW you make things worse/challenge your characters depends on the genre, which is directly tied into reader expectations. In a cozy mystery, there's gotta be more than one murder so the sleuth is pressured to solve the crime before more people die. In our fantasy genre, making it worse could mean the dark lord captures the princess and holds her in a tower, challenging the prince to a battle which will decide all of their fates. Just another thing to keep in mind.