Finding One's Voice

I find it odd, this thing called voice.  I read quite a wide variety of authors, both classic and contemporary, and with the good ones, no matter the genre, voice is always king.

Fellow Pacific Northwest native Tom Robbins, of which I've spoken before, has one of the most distinguishable voices there is.  His voice is magnificent!  It rises from whatever depths necessary to envelop the reader with pearls of wisdom, still wrapped in the gooey funk of the underdeep.  He grabs the reader by the stack and swivels, and woos you face to face with his wisdom and wit, whether you like it or not.  He's the only author I know who shatters George Carlin's plea on writing:

The only story I know of where clouds are important was Noah’s Ark!

- George Carlin

Tom Robbins does better than that.  "A rank of ample black clouds had been double-parked along the western horizon like limousines at a mobster’s funeral. Rather suddenly now, they wheeled away from the long green curb and congregated overhead, where, like overweight yet still athletic Harlem Globetrotters, they bobbed and weaved, passing lightning bolts trickily among themselves while the wind whistled 'Sweet Georgia Brown,'" he writes in Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates.  And in another novel, I forget which at the moment, he describes clouds as "nuns having a pillow fight".

That's voice, folks, pure voice.  Few others can equal that ability to trick images to leap into our minds from a few carefully placed words on a page.  None can mimic that exact cadence and poetry he employs.  And even if he's just talking about the weather - something writers are constantly advised not to do - you want to keep on reading.

Robbins isn't alone in displaying a unique, discernible voice.

Stephen King has a voice.  So much so that people called him out on his pseudonym Richard Bachman, because after a few novels they had it figured out, just by the sound of the voice.  His voice is one of the things that sets him apart from other authors, and one of the main reasons I believe he's had so much success.

David Eddings had a unique voice as well.  So much so that one could easily identify the author just by reading a few passages of his character's dialogue.  His dry, sardonic humor seeped into his characters so well that it made them easily recognizable and made them react in familiar manners when faced with obstacles in the plot.

And that, I think, is one of the problems of having such a distinctive voice.  All authors put so much of themselves into their work that it shows through in every character, every passage of narration.  But by doing that, they give it a sense of sameness, of consistency.  And while this is good for the overall tone of the book, it has a tendency, as we've seen with some of Eddings' writing, to give all the characters a similar voice.  And if they all sound the same, it's hard to make them unique.

A certain adaptation to character is needed.

It would be nice to have a certain way of adapting to whatever voice was needed at the time, a kind of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse way of slipping into a character and making it your own.  To create characters with a sort of schizophrenia, allowing completely different personalities to seep into each.  This is why perhaps, a pool of writers such as in a television series allows a more diverse group of characters.  It's easier for different writers to focus on different characters, instead of pouring themselves into each one.

And it seems some characters lend themselves more easily to voice than others.  I have one in particular who is so insistent on being an individual that he stands out easily from the others.  He's less subtle, I guess, which helps.  He's a little harder to write because he's over the top a bit, and yet I don't want him to come across as too much so.  It would create too much of a caricature out of him, when what I really need is just the emotional energy he provides.

I think a distinctive voice comes down to two things, and both stem from copious amounts of writing.

The first is experience, simple time spend pounding the words into story.  The more you do that, the more your voice begins to take shape and the less it imitates your sources of inspiration.  You begin to see how to hone your writing, to delete excess words, identify overused words, and craft tighter sentences.  All of this lends to your voice, making it more distinct and more identifiable as yours.

The second thing necessary is an understanding of your characters.  The more a writer knows about a character, the more distinctive their voice becomes.  When they're loosely shelled out, with vague goals and moods, they're harder to define.  They have no substance, no value behind what they do and say; they're simply doing or saying those things to advance the plot.  When that happens, they fall short as believable characters.

In the end, it's just hard work.

It takes time to hone one's voice.  Time spent cloistered away from living companionship, lost with those who live only in your own mind.  It takes hours and days and months and years sitting there, crafting words, blowing them up, and crafting them all over again.  Even a cursory look at the great writers will show that they put their devotion to writing above all else.  They prioritized it, even when they had to work other jobs to put food on the table.

They say it takes 10,000 hours of doing anything to master it.  I think I've easily surpassed that mark, probably years ago.  But I think that's just the first tiny step in the longer journey of honing one's voice and mastery of storytelling.  There is always much room for improvement, and still so very much to learn.

Steve Hutchinson and the Deus ex Machina

Ok.  So everyone here probably already knows I'm a pretty big Seattle Seahawks fan.  And by "pretty big", I don't mean in a large-sized sort of way.  I mean it in an I'm going to have to get a bigger closet for all my Seahawks gear when I buy another jersey sort of way.  I live and breathe Seahawks.  Twenty-four friggin' hours a day.  Drives the rest of the House of Dalar up the walls at times, especially the times when there's a game on.  'cept the boy.  He's cool like that.  I'm raising him well.

The Greatest Place on Earth, © Jonathan Dalar

So when the news broke that left guard Steve Hutchinson would be visiting the Seahawks, I naturally assumed the Mayans were right about this whole "world is ending in 2012" thing.  The writer in me took over, however, and the first thing I did was start to think about plot twists in a story.  Well, no.  Technically that was the second thing I did.  I first checked the temperature in Hell.  Astonishingly, snow was not in the forecast.

For those of you who are not following, I'll bring you up to speed with a little back story necessary to understand why this would be so improbable.  Actually the back story is the story.  The visit is simply the climax at the end.

Hutch is an absolute beast, a high-caliber player that tremendously impacts the success of a team.  He's been to the Pro Bowl seven times, four of them with the Seahawks.  They picked him with the 17th pick in the 2001 draft, and he quickly became a cog in one of the best offensive lines we've seen in the NFL.  Between 2001 and 2006, he played beside Walter Jones, forming if not the best offensive line tandem in the game, certainly one of a select few great ones.  He was tremendously valuable to the Seahawks, and a big part of their trip to Super Bowl XL* after the 2005 season.  Ah, things were going well!

But then things went sour, and they did so quickly.  In 2006, Hutch was scheduled to become a free agent.  The Seahawks front office, then led by a somewhat discordant team of head coach Mike Holmgren and president and general manager Tim Ruskell, placed the Transition Tag on Hutch instead of the safer Franchise Tag.  The move saved the team $500,000.00, but cost them the ability to secure his services for another year while they worked out a long-term contract.

The Minnesota Vikings were quick to take advantage of that situation, and offered him a huge poison pill-laden contract, at the time an unprecedented amount of money for his position.  The poison pill was two-fold: first, the contract stipulated he had to be the highest paid lineman on the team (on the Vikings he would be; on the Seahawks, Walter Jones deservedly earned more), and second, he could play no more than a half a dozen games in Washington State (the Seahawks play eight home games a year).  If either of these provisions were not followed, the entire $49 million contract was guaranteed.  Of course, that made the contract impossible for the Seahawks to match.  They took it to arbitration, but lost, and Hutch became a Viking.

It was a divorce straight from the script of The War of the Roses.  Hutch, frustrated with the Seahawks' dysfunctional front office, had very little nice to say about the split.  Seahawks fans everywhere took affront.  Hutch instantly became one of Seahawks fans' most hated players in the game.  He was branded a traitor, and much worse.  "It was all about the money!"  "What a greedy, selfish bastard!"  "Huck Futch!"  The insults came hot and heavy, and sentiment regarding Hutch didn't really change, even as the years passed and memories faded.  His money-grabbing move crippled the Seahawks' front line, triggering the team's sharp downward spiral just a season away from the Super Bowl.  He took something away from us.  Seahawks fans had every right to be pissed.

Or did we?  Hindsight is 20/20, so they say, but we don't have the luxury of hindsight when we're in the middle of a story.  We read it as it plays out, and react accordingly.  But what we see isn't necessarily all that's going on behind the scenes, and it's only at the end that we start to figure out what's really going on.  This has never been more true than with this story.

Self, © beholder via Flikr

We fans were still quite enamored at the time with Tim Ruskell.  He'd come to the team at the beginning of the 2005 season, and a few key moves that year were what propelled them to their best season yet and a trip to the big dance.  It appeared he was the mad genius, the final missing cog that brought the team to glory from a rather dismal and emotionally draining past.  "In Ruskell we trust" became many fans' byline, almost overnight.

In the years since, that façade has crumbled away, as decisions made then did the exact opposite of what we expected.  The team plodded to back-to-back horrible seasons, mired as ineffective moves came back to haunt it.  We've come to understand that there was far more dysfunction and discord in the front office than we realized.  Ruskell, no longer the hero, was now judged by his track record, and it wasn't a pretty record at all.  The decision to assign the Transition Tag to Hutchinson is viewed by many as his worst, the fatal blow that ripped the team from playoff contention and mired them once again in mediocrity.

Since those dark days, the team has had an entire reboot.  An entire new front office was installed, and the team no longer has a single player from that magical 2005 season left.  Not one.  At least not until Steve Hutchinson re-signs.  It's definitely not your daddy's "Same Old Seahawks".

Re-signing Hutchinson may be just what the team needs.  He's older, but he's still a great player, and would make an outstanding mentor to the younger linemen on the team.  As an emotionally involved fan, I'm split.  I still vividly feel those feelings of betrayal and letdown when he scorned us for better pastures.  It still hurts.  But I also realize he'd be good for the team.  This is not the same Seahawks team he left, and there's no reason to assign correlation to the old front office.  Business is business in the NFL, and this is no different.

So how does this story apply to the concept of deus ex machina?  Simple: it's the perfect example of how to write a story and avoid having to use it.  Thinking your plot through a little deeper allows you as a writer the ability to create wild, unexpected plot twists, without having to sideswipe your readers with something out of the blue, something that only serves to shove your plot in the direction you want it to go, but can't get your characters' actions to get it there.

So what if that bad guy wasn't really that bad a guy after all?  What if actions earlier were done for completely different reasons and motivations than were assumed?  Suddenly the dynamics of your plot shifts naturally, without the need for a character epiphany, or sudden change of heart, or mandate from an outside force.  In Hutch's case, he isn't having an unexpected change of heart.  He's not repenting, coming back to a team he spurned before.  He's operating exactly the same way he always has.  He's staying in character, making a move that's aligned in his best interests.  This new front office is looking for a capable, talented guard, and he could well be the man for the job.  It makes perfect sense now, even if such an ending would have been viewed as completely absurd halfway through the story.

I don't know about other Seahawks fans, but I think I'd be willing to root for him again in blue and green.  The unlikely story will have come full circle.  What was once thought impossible is now possible, because things weren't quite as we once thought they were.  It's not exactly ironic, but it is about as unexpected a plot twist as one can imagine.

And is it just me, or is it poetic justice that it's all happening on the Ides of March?

Update:  So we don't get our happy ending.  He's accepted a three-year contract with the Tennessee Titans, reuniting him with former teammate Matthew Hasselbeck, at least for now.  Still, the sentiment stands. And of course, your story is your own.  You can write the ending any damn way you please.

Family Vacations and Research Opportunities

Just got back from San Diego, California where we spent a few days on vacation, visiting family and seeing the sights.  Had a great time, even though ironically enough, the weather in Seattle was better.  Not that it was bad, but it did give us a greater appreciation for the Pacific Northwest.

San Diego is the scene for much of my largest piece of writing, The Plexus.  Many scenes throughout the first three books are set there, and so visiting again gave me the opportunity to sneak in some more research.  I love doing research in person.  It's much more entertaining and gives a much better picture than research obtained via the internet or through interviews.

© Jonathan Dalar

Right off the bat I was thrust headlong into the right mindset.  I saw that shirt on the left in a boutique in Old Town and instantly thought of the Query Shark.  Some of you probably already know I follow her blogs on a regular basis, so it's not a stretch to think I'd think of that when I saw the shirt.  Yea, I know.  It's a geek thing, but I can't help myself.  I'm a writer.

Anyway, it seemed like a good omen.  It put me into a writing mood, even though I was on vacation with the family and didn't bring the computer.  A writing mood is a good research mood, and that's what I needed.

The Old Town District is a great place.  It's got real ambiance.  It's a touch of nostalgia that hearkens back to San Diego's earliest days.  A great place for doing research for a science fiction novel about time travel, wouldn't you say?

In fact, the whole place was like an instant time machine for me, except that it whisked me away to places in my novels, reminding me of scenes I'd written about and revised over and over again.

© Jonathan Dalar

The old lamp posts in particular were fascinating.  I must have taken a couple dozen pictures of them.  They're all great, but this one is probably my favorite.  I have several that might even make a good book cover some day, as they convey a lot of the mood of the books.

I can just imagine this type of picture blended with science fiction themes.  Maybe the sharp neon contrast of a jump craft in the street behind the lamp post as it blinks back into the past somewhere.  I think it'd make a great cover, but then again, it's probably not going to be up to me.

Spanish architecture is a theme that seems to have woven its way into these books whether I intended it to or not.  I think it's fascinating.  I very much enjoyed poking around in some of the older areas of Southern Spain when I lived there, and in fact, my memories of Cadiz very much helped me write the parts of the story I set in Havana, Cuba.  They have very similar architecture, I've been told, as the Spanish founders of Havana wanted it to resemble their homeland.

© Jonathan Dalar

Even though a lot of my story is set in the far future of San Diego, I think this old architecture will be preserved in some form or another.  Whether as a museum, refurbished, or completely rebuilt in the style of the earliest settlers, it is an essential part of what makes San Diego what it is.  It is also something that has made The Plexus that much more fun to write.

I tried to stay with the family and enjoy things from a vacation perspective, I really did.  And I think I did an adequate job of it.  We did have a lot of fun, but my mind was often a million miles (or a century and a half) away.  At least a lot of the time it was.

For me, the best part of our vacation wasn't Sea World, although we had a blast riding the Journey to Atlantis and getting drenched by the dolphins in the dolphin show.

It wasn't enjoying a plate of fish and chips and a glass of Arrogant Bastard IPA at an outside table along the waterfront of Seaport Village, although it was delicious and nutritious.

© Jonathan Dalar

It wasn't getting to eat at In-N-Out Burger again, something I haven't done in years.  That was something the whole family really enjoyed, but it wasn't the best part of the trip for me.

I might get in trouble for saying this, but it wasn't even the great time we had visiting family there.  It was being completely lost in my story.  Lost to the point where it felt like I was actually there with my characters.  Lost to the point where I felt it, not just remembered writing it down.

All in all, we had a wonderful time.  I had a wonderful time, both in San Diego and lost somewhere in the story of a time traveling misfit who was damned from birth to a life she didn't choose.

Bits of You in Your Work

Every author throws a little of themselves into their stories.  The main character may have similar tastes or habits or quirks.  The setting is probably somewhere very familiar to the author, or even if it's made up, it probably has similarities.

Stephen King is famous for doing this.  Many of his works are set in the areas of Maine he frequented growing up.  Even works like The Shining were influenced by places he'd lived or spent time in.  We see hints now and then of his jobs, such as in The Mangler, where he worked in a commercial laundry.

I know I do this.  Many of my stories are set in and around Washington State.  I grew up here, and it's easy for me to fall back on the area in some way, if not outright set my stories here.  Many times I find myself giving a character a background from the Pacific Northwest or some other ties to the area.  It's natural, because I don't have to do as much research to make it accurate and believable.

A lot of times I find the main characters tend to have a lot of the same opinions or views on life I do.  It comes naturally to write them that way.  It's easier to relate to a character that mirrors you.  It keeps you inside a writing comfort zone, and that often helps get words down on paper.

Those things are largely unconscious choices.  Sometimes it's intentional, but usually it just feels natural to set a story in a particular place or give the characters certain personal aspects similar to mine.  Usually it's just what feels right in the story.

Sometimes I do it on purpose.  Because it's fun.  I love to throw little bits and pieces of things into my stories that link them together.  When I can, I'll generally throw a reference to the Seattle Seahawks into stories.  It doesn't come up often, but it's fun.  Usually it's a main character with a background from this part of the country who happens to like the team.  Sometimes it's a more obscure reference.  Often I'll substitute the Mariners or another local team if it's easier or it fits better in the story.

The military, and especially the Navy is another one I'll throw in there somewhere.  With of the best years of my life running around the world courtesy of Uncle Sam, it's easy to see this one.  Sometimes it's background, and sometimes it's just a reference.  I don't write military fiction, so there's not a lot of it in there.  Just enough to spice it up every once in a while.

I put a lot of my own personal experiences in as well.  Not everything is taken from personal experience, even some things you might swear are, but when I can, I like to do this.  Oftentimes other people have been there with me or experienced the same thing, and to me it's fun thinking they'll get that little surprise familiarity reading it someday.  The anticipation I feel writing it is why I do it, knowing that someone out there is going to think, "I was there and did that exact same thing!"  That's an awesome feeling, and it makes writing the story all that much better an experience.

It all boils down to the readers.  It all boils down to the anticipation of their reactions reading my stories.  Knowing they'll relate in some way or another, and being able to shape that reaction based on what I write.  It's just one of the many little things that drive me to write.

Character Muses

How do you come up with your characters?  Are they based on people you know?  Do you make them all up from your imagination?  These are probably the most frequent set of questions posed to me by people who don't write.  The answers?  Um, a few different ways, no, and no.  Let me explain.

First, there are a lot of ways I come up with my characters.  Most main characters begin with an idea of the general type of person I want to go on the wild adventure I just dreamed about.  Most of them have a basic outline already in my head, a certain look and maybe some personality attached already.  From there, it's a combination of things.  Some of the time their characteristics come as amalgams of people in my life.  Not close enough so as you'd actually notice, but general traits.  Things like tenacity, stubbornness, sense of sly humor, are what I'm talking about here, not their looks, backgrounds and other more personal traits.  So while someone may have the same serious streak as one of my characters, overall they'll probably be so different a connection wouldn't be made.

From there, however, things go quite differently.  Once I've fleshed out the basics with my characters, they start to take on lives of their own.  And as the story continues, they continue to grow and evolve.  The background I've given them affects them, but their actions in the story also influence how they change.  It's important to do that, because it makes them more realistic, more believable the further into the story you get.  A character that changes allows for more personal conflict to develop, and become more intimately attached to the reader.  There's more at stake when you see the character develop naturally, as you'd do under the same circumstances.  So while there may have been a seed of inspiration from a living muse, by the time the character's life unfolds on the pages of my story, they are far more influenced by their own "lives" than by anything else.

Minor characters are sometimes a bit different.  I think I create them a little more arbitrarily than I do the major ones.  I think it's more out of necessity - more to create a specific character for a specific need - than anything.  I'll often form them as adaptations to particular needs of the plot.  This isn't to say they don't evolve themselves, though.  Sometimes they take on a life of their own and take over the story to such an extent that they're really main characters too.  That's not a bad thing, either.  Once again, it's a great way to bring them to life for the readers.

There's also a lot in a name.  Sometimes I change the name of a character to suite their personality or characteristics better, to make them more identifiable to the reader.  Of course, since this is terribly subjective, it's not much of a science at all.  For example, a name like Katherine can evoke very different images for different people.  Some may instantly think of Katherine Heigl, while others will associate the name with British Royalty, or simply a Katherine they happen to know.  And calling her Katherine will give the character a very different feel than calling her Kate, or Kitty, or Kat, or Kathy, or Katerina.  Each of those variants probably gave you a different image of what that character may be like.  Because of that, it's important to try to get as close as possible to the ideal image you want the majority of your readers to have when reading about her.

In the end, it's all pretty much a matter of choosing a couple of arbitrary details and letting the character tell you who they are on their own.  I may start with details close to my own life, it's the character's life that ends up coming through in the end.

Getting in your Character's Head

You've got a solid character in your story.  You've given them a name, a background, likes, dislikes, goals, motivation and anything else you can think of.  But what makes them really tick?  What's really going on inside that head of theirs?  Finding that out makes them less like a cardboard cutout and more like a real person.  In this post, I'm going to take one of my own characters - the antagonist - and dissect her a bit.  I've already interviewed her, in the 'My Work' tab here, but this time I'm going to really try and get in her head and show you what makes her do the things she does and why she reacts how she does to the other characters in the story.

So let's sit down and meet Camellia, shall we?

Before we do that, though, it's essential to go over a few things.  First of all, she is a young lady born in the year 2159, and she was born with a crippling handicap.  She was born without the nanobot-implanted atomic chipset allowing connection to the Plexus, the entire virtual world of communications, media, and every other type of social interaction imaginable.  The majority of communication is via the virtual world, so it's essentially the equivalent of being deaf or blind nowadays.  In 2186, the physical world and the virtual world are so interconnected that it is nearly impossible to interact in society without such a connection.  Legislation of the day makes such a connection mandatory, putting her in quite a difficult situation, and this is the one thing the medical community cannot fix.  The connections to the Plexus are created in the second trimester of pregnancy, while the brain is developing.  Once a baby is born without those connections developed, they cannot be added.

The easiest solution for her would be to consent to connection by proxy, where she would be implanted with data rods to allow rudimentary connection to the Plexus.  It would allow her to perform basic daily tasks, such as virtual communication, obtaining licenses and registrations, receiving a standard education, and the like.  It would not, however, make her normal, by any stretch of the imagination.  She would not see the virtual world as others saw it, and would have to input a proxy code at every step, instead of threading the connection to her mind, eyesight, and hearing like is normal in that time.

That is the root of Camellia's mental disposition.  She is proud, with a stubborn streak the size of California, and refuses to connect via proxy.  She would rather be a non-entity than to be so handicapped.  She would rather be non-human, so to speak, than to be sub-human.  It's a small distinction, but a very vital one to her.

Part of why she is so stubborn stems from how she grew up.  Her mother, a destitute Off-Plex herself, died and left Camellia to the streets at a very early age.  Her father was never in the picture.  Camellia was forced to grow up without ever knowing about the Plexus.  The only inkling she had of it was from watching other children she had occasional contact with.  She knew they were communicating in ways outside of what she could sense herself, but didn't know how to learn their methods.  She grew up mimicking them, at first to appear like she fit in, and later to mask the fact that she was an Off-Plex, and thus outside the law.

She's found a niche for herself, but it's come with a heavy price.  She secreted herself into the Institute of Dimensional Research and made away with a time strata jump craft, and makes a living jumping back in time to retrieve rare literature and sell it on the underground.  It goes without saying this is highly illegal, but as she's grown up under the radar her entire childhood, dodging agents trying to track her down is simply a part of life.  She's smart, she's confident, and she's good at what she does.  At times it almost becomes a perverse game for her.

She's almost completely an alias now.  Even her name is a pseudonym.  She was born with a different name and only began using Camellia as an attempt to cover up who she really was.  Now she is simply Camellia; her old self almost completely ceases to exist.

So it should also be obvious she's very cautious about trusting anyone, almost to the point where her distrust cripples her actions.  Trusting someone must be a conscious choice, and only after all options and possible outcomes are carefully weighed and considered.

In spite of this, she's very human, and maybe even more susceptible to the need for interaction than anyone.  After all, she's spent a lifetime trying her hardest to fit in, while still disguising the crippling difference that prevents her from being completely normal.

And that is perhaps her one greatest wish, to become normal.  Not to connect via proxy and be forever reminded she's different, but to really connect, as normal as the next person.  She would give almost anything to do that, but it's the one thing that is completely out of her grasp.

So that begs the question, why doesn't she just relent and accept the government's program of connection via proxy?  What would be so bad with that decision?  It's not like she isn't acutely aware of her differences now.  What difference would it make to just consent and live life as normally as possible?  Others older who were born before such implantation have had to make the adjustment.

Well, don't think she hasn't thought about it.  She almost did it a couple of times.  Came really close, as a matter of fact.  But in the end she just couldn't do it.  She knew she couldn't live with herself if she'd have done it.  And it's not that she couldn't have had it reversed on the underground.  Lots of folks have.  Of course, they're Monochrome.  That's what they call the crazies and conspiracy theorists who are far enough out there on the edge as to cut off fingers and gouge out whatever other body parts they know or believe have data rods embedded.  Some of them are even blind or deaf because of the extremes they've gone to.

And that is probably the number one reason she hasn't gotten connected via proxy.  She simply can't face the thought of becoming Monochrome, and everything that implies if she should change her mind, rather than just being an Off-Plex.  Besides, she's too all-or-nothing for that anyway, and with the success she's had eluding capture, she's more emboldened than ever.

But the more we get to know her, the more we understand this is all a façade.  She's grown up that way, putting on a front so others will think she's something she's not.  It's become almost second nature for her.  It's ingrained in everything she does, so much so, she'd be hard pressed to show anyone her true self.

As the story progresses, we find out that she's not the invincible, completely confident woman she appears to be.  There's more to her incredible luck and consummate skill at avoiding capture than meets the eye, and instead of being always one step ahead of everyone, we find she's narrowly avoiding disaster at every turn.

She's unaware of some of this, but acutely aware of it at times, leaving her wondering just how much is her skill and abilities, and how much of it is just pure dumb luck aided by the actions of others.  This further goes to eroding at her confidence while reinforcing her need for a tough, capable façade.

In the end, her efforts to remain an Off-Plex coincide with her sharp desire to connect to the Plexus in a perfectly normal way.  One would think offhand that would be an oxymoron, but it's not.  It simply reinforces the all-or-nothing mentality she has and causes her to stick to her course of action even harder.

But let's look at her personal life for a second before closing.  That plays a big part in her persona as well.  She's been ostracized and shunted to the edges of society, forced to hang out with Monochromes and other unsavory characters "like her".  And while that's largely because of choice, it doesn't mean it's had any less of an impact on her.  She still needs people.  She needs contact with other human beings, perhaps more so than normal.  She longs for it, even though her first thought is to push them away.  Her self defense mechanisms conflict strongly with her psychological needs for human interaction, as limited as that might be with her lack of connection via the Plexus.

So when someone comes along offering that much needed human contact, she's torn.  On the one hand, her defensive senses are tingling with the fear of opening up too much and exposing herself to danger.  On the other hand, she experiences feelings and emotions that although still quite foreign to her, are badly needed on a psychological level.

And she evolves as the story progresses.  Her interactions with the other characters, each with his own set of motivations and beliefs, cause her to rethink what she really believes in and how she views the world around her.  And because she interacts with people not only from her own time continuum, but throughout several centuries of history, their perspectives are very different, and cause more change in her than might have happened otherwise.

All in all, she's a very complex character.  Quite unpredictable at times.  And there's more to her than first meets the eye.  So much so that it takes quite a while for us to see the full extent of her emotional range as the story progresses.  We keep peeling back layers to find an even greater set of complexities until we finally reveal a person quite unlike what our first impressions of her were.  In the end, we're left with quite a different character than we'd started out with, and different still from how we'd perceived her in the beginning.  We see not only how she's changed, but how our perceptions of her have changed through the story.  She's gone from being the villain to being a sympathetic victim to finally being the hero, at least in our own minds.  And that part of her wasn't the part that changed.  What changed was simply her perception of others, and of societal norms.

And so in the end, we're faced with loving the character we thought was the villain when this all started.  We empathized with her from the start, but that should be the case with any good antagonist.  It was when we realized she'd made the gradual, subtle change from villain to hero that things got weird.  We saw her completely different than we did at first, and were faced with the realization that we'd probably changed more than she had throughout the course of things.

And that's not a bad thing, after all.

Plot-based vs. Character-based

This is an interesting discussion, and while I'd like to point out that a great story had better have both great characters and great plot, there is a definite difference between the two in storytelling.

Let me explain.  First, let's get the basics out of the way and describe what makes a story plot-based, and what makes one character-based.  The essential difference is seen when we look at what drives the story along.  In one that is plot-based, the plot itself is what drives the story to conclusion.  Point A naturally leads to Point B, which then uncovers Point C, which leads us to the eventual Point D.  Things that happen along the way are what point the tale in the next direction.

But how is that different than any story, you might ask?  That's what plot does, after all.  Yes, that is what plot does, but it's not always what drives the story.  In a character-based story, it's the characters' decisions, based on who they are as a person that drive the plot.  It's their interaction with each other that makes the plot come together, not just what they must accomplish along the way.

Well, that's fine, you say, but characters interact with each other.  It's kind of their job as characters.  Again, yes.  But in this case, they're what pushes the plot along, not the other way around.  Let's look at a couple of examples.

The first story we'll look at is J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.  While each character is unique, and brings a different perspective to the story, the story itself is plot-based.  There is a goal to achieve, and it really doesn't matter who is achieving it, the desired end result is the same.  Certain requisite tasks must be completed to satisfy the plot.  Sure, certain characters must do specific tasks, but it's still very task-based, not something that happens as a result of specific character interaction.  Frodo Baggins must return the ring to Mordor, and that is because of his unique character.  The thing is, anyone possessing that specific character trait would have made a fantastic substitute and the plot would have remained the same.

Now let's look at Alexander Nabokov's Lolita, a very character-based story.  The entire plot is driven by the interaction between Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze.  Sure, there was an end goal in Humbert's mind, but it was specifically the interaction between him and his Lolita that caused the tale to go as it did.  Substitute a different Humbert and the story would have been much, much different.  Substitute a different Lolita, and she would also not have reacted the same way Dolores Haze did when confronted with any of the situations she was.  And each of the characters in the novel brought a different twist of the plot into the story with the way they reacted to what was going on.  The entire story revolves around how they react to each other's desires and motives with their own.

There is a theme here.  Many stories of action, suspense, and horror genres are plot-based, while many dramas are character-based.  But that's not to say there's a line drawn in the sand firmly separating each into respective sides.  An action piece can easily be a character-driven story.  I'm writing one right now, and it's firmly in the character-based camp.

Sometimes it isn't really all that obvious which a story is until you think about it.  They do overlap.  The way a character acts often drives the plot as much as anything, and many times things outside the realm of a character's motives influence the plot.  It really didn't dawn on me my latest sci-fi time travel romp was character-based until well into the story.  You might not tend to think of science fiction action stories as being all that character-based, after all.

The television series Firefly was, though.  That story was all about how the characters interacted among themselves, and you know if you were to have substituted any other character for one of them, things would have gone quite differently along the way.  It's the epitome of a character-based story.  And when you compare it to Star Wars, for example, the differences between what drives the action in both stories are obvious.  "Defeat the Empire by becoming a Jedi Knight, destroying the Death Star, and confronting Darth Vader" sounds far different than "Our previous contact had some serious issues with how we handled the last job, and that is having a direct impact on our current job".

Now that's not to say that characters are simply interchangeable in a plot-based tale either.  Hardly so.  The Indiana Jones movies are all very much plot-based, and I dare you to replace that iconic figure with anyone different and have it turn out nearly as well.  One could argue that same point with a number of great characters in plot-based stories.  They're great characters for a reason.  They just don't drive the story, the plot does.

If it isn't terribly obvious which side a story falls on, take a look at what causes the conflict or action.  Many times a plot-based story relies on a plot device to cause the action.  Two characters are fighting over the same thing.  Two characters want different results for the same quandary.  Compare that to a plot that hinges more on the action and reaction of the characters based on who they are as characters rather than simply their goals.  Another way to think of this discussion is in terms of a story being motive-based rather than goal-based.

So what's the best type of story, plot- or character-based?  Of course that's completely unanswerable.  At least I think so.  They're both great in their own way.  I like characters with a little more meat on their bones.  That is to say well rounded, and less cardboard-y.  That doesn't mean that plot-based stories lend themselves to cardboard characters, and it doesn't mean a good plot that really pulls the story along isn't necessary for character-driven stories either.  Both are essential elements of storytelling.

My bottom line is I use whatever moves the story in the right direction.  If it's the necessity of getting from Point A to eventual Point D, then I roll with it.  If it's letting the plot flow based on the interactions of the characters, their motives and decisions, then that works too.

Go with what works for your story.  If you figure out which type yours most closely follows, you might have an easier time figuring out what to do if the story stalls, but in the end, it really doesn't matter much.  As long as something pulls the plot along and makes it go somewhere.