Crowning moment of Awesome vs. Dramatic jeapordy

[sociotard]

How do you find a balance between placing your characters in dire trouble and giving them crowning moments of awesome?

As a reader, I need the former, or the story won't be interesting. At the same time, a big reason for my Dresden Fandom is that it makes my inner 14-year-old happy when I get to live vicariously through his crowning moments of awesome.

For those who don't know what I mean, here is the moment I got in Cold Days:

(click to show/hide)

I'm riding on the back of a renegade cop's motorcycle, which is also a flying black tiger because I'm leading the wild hunt itself. I have Santa Claus flying wingman on one side and the Goblin King doing the same on the other, and I'm charging to the one battlefield on earth with which I have a psychic connection. This is my Boomstick!

Even in that one little part, I knew things were going to go south soon, but for those few pages I was on top of the world.  How do authors find that perfect balance?

[The Deposed King]

When doing awsome you have to run like a mad man away from the pit trap of bestowing upon your characters 'Phenomenal Cosmic Power!'.  Either to let them do the awesome or what they get after doing the Awesome.

Dresden does lots of big awsome!  But he's a tank, not an atomic weapon.  too many people make their characters the chosen savior and a demigod manifest among mortals.  Whereas Dresden is a mortal functioning amongst demigods.

By avoiding this pit trap.  When your character does his awesome coolness.  Neither before, during or after are we the reader ever left feeling that just because this game has been won the war is now over and done with.  Its a crushing victory on this one single battlefield.  By giving your readers the sense that there are other battlefields both smaller and larger you give perspective and allow for a natural Dresden like growth in strength, guile and cunning over the course of multiple books.

Hope I'm making sense?  We want our wins and our victories and some of them need to be definitive but its the 'struggle' that makes the awesomeness we write about so satisfying.



The Deposed King

[Wordmaker]

One piece of advice I like to follow from author Janice Hardy is, whenever you're writing, think "how can I make things worse for the hero?"

A guideline (not a rule, but rather a way to measure yourself) is to effectively have your hero lose, repeatedly, until the very end. If they win a fight, have the authorities come after them. If they find a valuable piece of information, have them captured. If they outsmart the villain, injure them. If they beat one of the villain's agents, hurt, or even kill, a loved one. Make every victory, no matter how small, cost them something. That way you keep them mortal in the reader's eyes.

[Aminar]

One piece of advice I like to follow from author Janice Hardy is, whenever you're writing, think "how can I make things worse for the hero?"

A guideline (not a rule, but rather a way to measure yourself) is to effectively have your hero lose, repeatedly, until the very end. If they win a fight, have the authorities come after them. If they find a valuable piece of information, have them captured. If they outsmart the villain, injure them. If they beat one of the villain's agents, hurt, or even kill, a loved one. Make every victory, no matter how small, cost them something. That way you keep them mortal in the reader's eyes.

I've never enjoyed stories that go this route.  I prefer instead to have the characters voice some of their worries about what those things are, and then have success and failures throughout with a goal put in at some point earlier.  Because everytime I read a book where things just keep getting worse for the character they either A: could have probably averted that problem if they'd thought about things or B: don't feel like their in control of their own story.  I just get depressed when every time something goes right it makes three other things go wrong.

So Character gets to resolve problem A, but problem B is getting worse, and he royally messed up problem C, but the solution to problem A has moved him closer to problem D.  Where A is turning an enemy into an ally, B is other characters trying to kill said Enemy to ally, C is romantic tension, and D is the characters main goal for the book.  (As an example.)

[Sir Huron Stone]

One piece of advice I like to follow from author Janice Hardy is, whenever you're writing, think "how can I make things worse for the hero?"

A guideline (not a rule, but rather a way to measure yourself) is to effectively have your hero lose, repeatedly, until the very end. If they win a fight, have the authorities come after them. If they find a valuable piece of information, have them captured. If they outsmart the villain, injure them. If they beat one of the villain's agents, hurt, or even kill, a loved one. Make every victory, no matter how small, cost them something. That way you keep them mortal in the reader's eyes.

Now, there are series where this is used very effectively, and then there are series where the author takes it too far. Like the Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb. The way she makes Fitz feel worse, and worse, with no real victories, betrayal and pain at every turn, is just way too far. I haven't even finished the second book, because it puts me in such a bad mood. Yes, the main character has to get beaten up, yes he/she has to lose. But you've gotta throw in some wins! Some actual wins!

[Wordmaker]

As I said, it's just a guideline, not a hard and fast rule that can't be broken.

It's easy to fall into the trap of letting your hero win at every turn and never suffer any setbacks. But look at any book or movie. How many heroes achieve victories through the course of the story that never lead to increased challenges down the line?

Take Iron Man 2, just because it came to mind. Early in that movie, Tony Stark beats Ivan Vanko in Monaco. But that victory leads to Justin Hammer breaking Ivan out of jail to build an army of drones.

In Star Wars, Princess Leia is rescued from the Death Star, but Obi Wan Kenobi is killed and the tracking device on the Millenium Falcon leads the Empire to the Rebel base.

In Grave Peril, Harry Dresden pulls off his most powerful spell yet and destroys a vampire masquerade, but Susan Rodriguez remains a captive of the vampires.

If you do it right, the reader won't even consider it a failure, but will still feel the increased tension that comes with the hero's increased jeopardy. Absolutely, you don't want the reader to feel depressed or angry, so you want to strike a balance between the hero achieving something and facing greater and greater threats. But even if you do go a little far and the reader gets riled up, it's better to have some kind of emotional reaction than to leave the reader feeling bored because the hero never fails.

[The Deposed King]

Yeah I try to ascribe to the theory of two steps forward one step back.  Although at times I like to make it appear that everything is lost for our plucky young hero's.  However Wordmaker is right in as much as you have to keep throwing your hero off the deep end and watch if he sinks or swims.

That said its like with the Dresden files, every book he's using his Wizard knowledge to circumvent some minor or particular part of the plot and IMO indulging in a little gloating about the whole matter.  For instance he hid behind a veil and gloated that he had been practicing or he used little chicago to help him find something with divination that would have been impossible before and he makes sure to pat himself on the back.  Not inconsequential acheivements.

As for being prepared and ready for stuff the universe throws at you, with my Jason character I do this by having him be paranoid in the sort of 'their all out to get me' kind of way and so he takes steps to defend himself.  Alas he's not perfect and often times the threats he'd identified were different from the ones he'd previously identified.  That doesn't mean his preparations are worthless, merely.... less effective than they might have been.



The Deposed King

[Wordmaker]

Yeah, a lot of Harry's personality traits bug me. Especially since, by the current stage in the books, you'd expect him to be a little less smarmy and prone to guilt-tripping himself.

Lesson? When your hero pulls something off, try not to have him be so aware of his own awesomeness too much. 

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

It's an interesting question, and i think one angle on it that doesn't get talked about is relative scale of story and setting.

If you take the original three Star Wars movies, the story in those pretty much encompasses the setting.  It's Light vs. Dark for the fate of everything we have met on screen, and it comes to a climax that defines the fate of that story's universe.  (One of the things that doesn't quite work for me about the Star Wars expanded universe is that if your fundamental story template is "small band of heroic rebels taking on overwhelmingly larger evil and defeating it", having to keep saying either "oops, the evil wasn't defeated after all" ot "oh look, here's a new and even bigger evil" gets a mite silly.)

On the other hand, in the DF, at least up as afar as Changes, Harry is a fairly small player in a big complex setting, dealing with different threats, but on a scale where there is always clearly a much bigger picture beyond what he's aware of and engaging with.  His story may for all we know be headed for a Star-Wars scale of saving the entire setting, but it hasn't got there yet, and thus far the DV has always had new and interesting things to throw at him that don't feel contrived.

The more setting you establish from the get-go beyond your protagonist's horizon, the more room you have to draw new complications from later on.  The more significant what your protagonist does is to the fate of the universe, the harder, IMO, it is to go on from there unless you want to change the shape of the story entirely.  (One of the things I like about how the DF avoids power bloat is changing the scale of the challenges; in SK and DM both, Harry is averting worst-case catastrophes that could bring down civilisation and might exterminate humanity; rather than try to escalate from that BR gives him a much smaller-scale but more personal and emotionally weighted conflict.  Likewise going from the celluloidy action-adventure of the end of DB to the challenge of personal maturity and taking responsibility for an apprentice Harry engages with in PG.)

As for the pacing of how much your protagonist wins or loses during the story (I do not think in terms of heroes, all that much; unreservedly sympathetic characters are dull, and a conflict is much more interesting to me if there are elements on both sides to sympathise with) what I personally find most compelling is the incidental victories along the way that shortly turn out to not actually be victories; because the hero has, for example, triumphantly defeated the troll king, and only then finds out that the troll king had ancient treasures in his vault that his dark wizard advisor knows how to use to endanger the world, but had not actually been able to use while the troll king was alive because the troll king was in the way.

Also, establish your characters as smart and competent from the get-go.  Use what knowledge you already have; if you're a martial artist, you can probably write martial arts better than most people. if you're a programmer, you can probably get the computer details right.  Harry being smug about his ability to finally cast a decent veil works because at that point we've had ten books of him gradually getting better at magic in general, and ten years in which he has put lots of time and effort into learning his craft and we've seen a goodly chunk of the process. All of that sort of build-up is there to earn your Crowning Moments of Awesome; without it they just fail into deus ex machina.

The thing about authors who explicitly think in terms of making everything worse for the hero is that the longer that goes on, the narrower the space between continuing to plausibly challenge the hero and not breaking them irrevocably becomes, and there are only so many times a hero can slog through 99% Of What It Would Take To Break Me That I Just Barely Survive before it starts to feel contrived. 

Oh, and giving your protagonist Phenomenal Cosmic Power can work - I'd point at Mike Carey's Lucifer as a very good example of a character who is the second most powerful being in existence getting 75 issues of impressively tense adventures.  It's just really tricky.