Build a Bigger Berry

You're in a restaurant supply grocery store, the kind with walk-in freezers and where you can buy 5 lb boxes of strawberries. The produce refrigerator, in which you're standing, smells like old broccoli. As you lift the box of strawberries to place on the cart, the lid pops open, and the biggest strawberry you've ever beheld falls to the gray concrete floor.

What do you do?

* Actual Size. Not part of this complete breakfast.
or, "It's dangerous to go alone. Take this!"

Nothing could be less interesting than a strawberry falling on the floor. Or so it seems. Yet the circumstances  for this event can shape important elements of story: the stakes, character development, plot, worldbuilding, and theme. The first three are essential, but if a writer does her job right, a minor strawberry-fumble scene should convey all five.

Stakes & Tension

This true story (which actually happened to me) only became interesting because of two factors:

1) A strawberry the size of my fist,
2) a floor of the sort my mother taught me never to even walk on without washing my feet afterwards.

The stakes were raised. Not a small berry, a big one. Not a clean floor, a nasty one.

Circumstances had set up a dichotomy for me. A difficult choice. I became fascinated with how I would meet this challenge. In order for your plot to be interesting, your choices must be interesting.

To increase stakes, you can tweak the circumstances. Is the strawberry large or small? Ripe or rotten? Is the character is starving? Was she commanded by the king to find the largest strawberry ever, on penalty of death? (The king will never know it hit the floor... right?)

Character Development

"I'm going to give you the choice I never had."
 Lestat, Interview with a Vampire

Choice defines character. Once you've given them a quirky laugh and a lopsided hat (characteristics), ultimately, your character is made by the choices they make.

If your character picks up the berry with a look of wonder, it tells us she is mesmerized by large berries.

If it's a normal berry and she picks it up, maybe she is a spendthrift and can't let anything go to waste. Or maybe she doesn't care about cleanliness.

If she leaves it on the ground where someone else can step on it and make a mess or even get hurt, maybe she's thoughtless or reckless.

If she puts the strawberry back in the box and places it on the shelf so she can buy a different box, we have all kinds of subtle, and potentially negative, indicators about her personality.

The results of one decision will still leave motives and personality vague, so a series of choices across scenes can compound to paint the broader picture.

Plot

A series of decisions constitutes plot. Events can occur randomly or coincidentally, but preferably, the result of the first choice should have consequences to start your plot-chain, each event a result of a previous decision.

Or better, events can be created by choices made by your other characters. Your characters should all have independent and preferably opposing desires. As they attempt to achieve their goals, they work against one another. That's how the plot thickens.

What if she picks up the strawberry, takes it home, and all is well until her child eats it without washing, and gets e. coli?

Or she leaves it in the fridge for three weeks and the whole box spoils, and that starts an argument with her partner?

What if she puts it back on the shelf and someone she admires spots her irresponsible behavior?

What if she leaves it on the ground and someone is injured by slipping on it?

What if she simply cannot stop thinking about the strawberry, and it turns into a blog post?

This is why readers read. This is what constitutes story.

Worldbuilding

Other details about each experience can show elements of your world without an info dump. In my example, the strawberry fell in a normal grocery store in the ordinary world. Or did it? ...

Show the rules of the magic or tech or culture through the decision and its consequences.

Maybe it's a magic strawberry and the character shrinks and has to live on it under the produce shelf where it's rolled until it gets all moldy and is carried off by a rat.

Maybe the character has a curse that she must eat every strawberry she sees, and a second geas binding her to never eat anything that touches the ground. Talk about raising the stakes.

Maybe it's a genetically engineered strawberry that kills germs. Maybe the floor is kept clean by robots. Maybe her species doesn't even need food and it's just a plastic strawberry.

You can give hints as to the behavior of your world through simple scenes like this. Just remember to keep the stakes and tension high by not eliminating all strawberry-floor problems with advanced technology.)

Theme

Why write a strawberry falling into the floor and not a beer spilling in a bar, or a dagger being pressed into the chest of an enemy, or a horse running away?

The props, events, and choices in the scene can reverberate and reinforce, either consciously or subconsciously, a larger, overarching feeling or meaning. Berries can represent many things: life, growth, food, color, freshness, waste, rot, fertility, goodness, sweetness, health, youth, agriculture, consumerism.

A scene with a strawberry, then a horse, then a memory about grandma's farm may conjure a theme of farming, youth, or health. Or all three.

A scene with a strawberry, then a rose, and then a wild sexy romp with a stranger shifts the theme to passion, hedonism, sensuality.

If you want to go with consumerism and decay, have another scene with an overflowing garbage can and a pile of unwanted Christmas presents.

Theme is how we make a story more than entertaining. It gives the story meaning.

Conclusion

If you've written a scene that's fallen flat, maybe you just need to tweak a few subtle elements to raise the stakes, to make the choice hard, to reveal elements of character, to build your world, and reinforce themes.

Just build a bigger berry.

Why Crazy Wins

These days there's a lot of crazy.  In all debates in the courts of public ideas, be they political, spiritual, moral, or cultural, the ideas most in the fringe seem to dominate.

In preparation for NaNoWriMo, I've been reading a lot about plot and story.  20 Master Plots and How To Build Them is an excellent resource, (as is Story by Robert McKee).  Every plot must focus on drama, on the tension of an unresolved problem, an unreasonable antagonist, a goal worth dying for, overwhelming passions, major strengths, massive weaknesses.  Unmovable objects vs irresistible forces.

Writers are encouraged to bring the tension to a tipping point; to make it seem like there is no way out, to stack the odds to the point where your protagonist is sure to lose (even if she wins in the end).

No matter the plot, there must be drama, or your reader will yawn and put the book down.

Frustrating conflict is great for stories.  But it's not so great for real life.  In real life, be it personal or political, drama leads to sadness, tears, hardships, and destruction.  On the grander scale, it can lead to lost jobs, hunger, crime, injustice, and even death and war.  In real life, it reaches a point where it is no longer entertainment, though it may seem so to viewers who watch it from afar.

All plots can be placed in two categories: Physical or mental, force or fraud, tragedy or comedy, outward action or inward movement.  Whatever you call it, all plots emphasize one of these, while the other takes a backseat or doesn't exist at all.  The action story will focus on physical resolution to tension.  The murder mystery or romantic comedy will solve it via the mind or character development.

Back to real life.  In the past, power was often won by force.  There was no such thing as the Bill of Rights to protect people, so whoever could suppress the people at the point of the sword, or who ever could kill the king, won the day.  Force is still very much a powerful tool, but in stable democratic nations, it is likely to backfire.  And so today those who seek power must resort to mental strategies.

Persuasion is much more humane than war and unjust imprisonment, and a well-argued appeal to reason is more likely to be the best position than a well-warred one.  But it comes at a price: Fraud is as or more likely to persuade.  And the masters of fraud are oh-so-good at it.

Today, wars are fought in culture rather than on the battlefield.  Even the decision whether or not to go to battle must be fought in the cultural sphere before we send out the first soldier.  That is why people were so upset when Bush lied about the WMDs in Iraq.  Few US Citizens wanted to go to war without a very good reason, and when that reason turned into smoke, people felt oppressed and betrayed.  But even this is far better than our alternative, when a leader had only to give the word to start a war.  The opinion of the common people didn't matter.

Fiction must have tension to keep our attention, and so, unfortunately, must the news.  Decades ago, political thinkers like William F. Buckley argued their points rationally, and it's a political temperament I'd love to return to.  Imagine, a world where two people of opposing opinions could sit down on national television and have a well-reasoned debate, where the drama from both sides was a question of who could out-wit the other, who could appear the most intelligent, who could back up their claims with the best facts, who could persuade.  Why have things changed so much?

Because William F. Buckley was boring.  Walter Cronkite and Paul Harvey droned.  It took too long to get to the bottom of things, to hear the rest of the story, to understand the issues, when you had to pay attention to rational arguments backed by facts.  It's easier to believe that a woman frivolously spilled coffee on herself and got McDonald's to pay an outrageous and undeserved sum, than it is to examine the real facts of the event.

Soundbites, for all their lack of actual content, are interesting.  Dramatic.  When a politician says something stupid, opponents get to rally their anger.  Those who support the same politician can rally their own anger to defend the remarks.  Everyone can get emotional, and it's better than watching Iron Man 2 or Avatar.

This pattern continues no matter what level of culture-war you look at, be it at the top rung during Presidential debates, or at the bottom where bloggers go back and forth.  And it happens even in non-political realms, like when Gawker blogger Alyssa Bereznak railed on Magic: The Gathering Champion Jon Finkel for going on a date with her.

There are people out there, right now, who sound more like William F. Buckley.  They lay out all the facts and make reasoned arguments.  Yet these don't draw the same attention as the crazies.  Because controversy attracts eyeballs and mouse-clicks.  Walls of text don't.

But that's not to say crazy actually wins in the end.  In the war of ideas, every strategy has its pros and cons.  Fringe emotional arguments of high drama are, in the end, weak.  They do not tend to stand the test of time.  And the most crazy people often believe their delusions, which makes them inflexible.  They are unable to adapt to changing times and movements, and those who blind themselves to facts and reason may not notice when those they hope to convince begin to run the opposite direction.

Crazy may still get the most airtime and rake in the most cash, but in a stable democracy, its grip on culture and power is (hopefully) short-lived.