Keep the Creativity Flowing

Some quick and (as always) free advice while you’re out editing your WIP. Make sure you make time to write something new.

This is crucial for any writer, but especially a novelist. As I’ve found, you can spend many months on the editing process; and if I find myself ignoring my advice, my edits start to get dull. Why is this? I’m not writing.

Writing something new keeps those creative juices flowing. It’s almost like creativity is a muscle. If you exercise and train it a lot, it will get stronger. But as soon as you neglect it, take it out of training, it will start to regress. The cure for that is to make sure you have a project you can work on while you are editing.

If you’re a novelist, then have another novel that you are working on. Before you sit down with your red pen, take 20, 30 min or so and just type away. You will find that not only will you have another novel done pretty quickly, but you will also be all warmed up for your edits! It’s a win win.

So, I need to make sure I keep heeding my own advice, and hopefully it will work for you as well.

Tell me, what experiences do you have with writing while you are mired in stacks of edits? Does it seem to help you?

Game Theroy for Writers part II. “No you go first, I insist.”

With this post I hope to give you another tool for you to demonstrate how intelligent your characters are. As writers, sometimes we are faced with having to write in a genius when we ourselves are not that smart. So how do we create an illusion of genius without having to devise the world’s greatest battle plan or business strategy? I think one tool could again be game theory.

In games, as in life, there are some things that you just naturally don’t want to go first in. One very good example would be rock, paper, scissors. If your opponent throws rock, well you’d be pretty stupid to not throw paper.

But then there are other games where going first has a distinct advantage. A great example of that would be a wild west shootout. If you get to shoot before the other person, then you stand a decent chance (assuming you’re not a horrible shot) of winning.

So now the question is how do we know when to go first (more specifically our game theory savvy genius of a character) and when to defer when the situation is not so obvious.

The answer is lies in the usefulness of information, and the chance of ending the game on the first move. I know this seems very basic, but please stick with me on this. Yes I know rock paper scissors and duels are done simultaneously, but that’s what makes these such clear examples.

So let us delve down into this idea. In the rock paper scissors example, there is a HUGE advantage of going last because 1) You gain the knowledge that allows you to make a winning move and 2) The other person can’t win unless you make a move. So that is pretty simple. Lets look at the shootout game. In that there is a HUGE advantage in going first because 1) You already know the other person is going to shoot at you, so you already know all the the information and 2) You can win without the other person having to make a move.

Now lets do something a little less obvious. Say there are two companies, A and B. They both have a new gadget, (say an mp3 player) that they think will revolutionize the industry. Now they both know that the other is going to release one of these and that there could be some bugs or features people don’t like. So introducing the second model would have the advantage of being better technically. But if you introduce first you can gain a reputation and market share that would dominate your competitors. So what do you do?

Obviously the answer to that is complicated and we would need a lot more information to solve this analytically. But thankfully we don’t have to because we are writers and we can make whatever we want happen. If your main character is the CEO of company A, you can have him choose either strategy, and you can decide if he succeeds or fails. What makes game theory useful is that you can SHOW the CEO thinking and coming up with their strategy in an intelligent manner yourself. Have them wrestle with this idea.

The same goes for a general in a battle. Sure you can make them appear smart by having them win the battle with whatever strategy you choose. But what I think would show their intelligence more would to have them go over these two variables and try to decide what to do.

Smart characters should be shown thinking to get the effect across, same as strong characters should be shown picking up boulders. If you want to demonstrate how physically strong your character is, you show them picking the boulder; you don’t just say the boulder was moved. Same goes with smart characters. You don’t have the smart general just win the battle by surprising the enemy. You show them weighing in these factors and deciding that perhaps we know enough about the enemy where we don’t have to wait first to see what formation they arrange themselves in.

Hope this helps.

Game Theory for Writers: Part I. Go Ahead and Burn That Bridge!

I had hoped to get this out much earlier, but later is better than never.

I also am going to have to do this in a couple different series since there is SOOOOOO much I could write about and don’t want to overwhelm all at once.

Now first, why do we care about game theory (GT) in writing? Well for one it helps you get a good grasp on what people would do in various situations. For second it will allow you to identify strategies that a smart character would use to win some sort of game (by game I could mean a game of checkers, or the “game” of taking over the world. Basically game just means a situation where there is some sort of competition). So hopefully you will be able to craft out a well thought-out plot that has your evil villain choosing the wrong strategy and going down in defeat because your hero was smart and picked the right one.

If that convinced you, now we need to get you grounded in GT. Basically all you do is write down the different choices the different players could make and the outcomes of those choices. So a real simple model game would be odd/even. This would be where player 1 (Bob) holds either 1 or 2 fingers behind his back. Then player 2 (Meg) tries to guess the number. Real simple.

Now lets say that when Bob chooses a 1 and Meg chooses a 1, then Meg gets $2 and Bob gets $1. If Bob chooses 1 and Meg chooses 2, then Meg gets nothing, and Bob gets $1. Now if Bob chooses 2 and Meg chooses 1, then again Meg gets nothing and Bob gets $1. Now if they both choose 2, then Meg gets $2 and Bob gets nothing. This is shown by the following chart.

Meg/Bob	Bob (holds 1)	Bob (holds 2)
Meg (guesses 1)	2/1	0/1
Meg (guesses 2)	0/1	2/0

So you can easily see that Bob should always choose 1, since his payoff is always going be be as good or better than if he chooses 2, and Meg, knowing this should also choose 1 every time. And since neither player can do better than this, both choosing 1 is called a Nash Equilibrium. Yes that same John Nash from A Beautiful Mind.

What does this particular game tell us about writing? Not much frankly, but that is notation that you need to know before we get onto the good stuff.

So the first thing I want to show you is why a smart character will eliminate one of their options in certain situations in order to gain an advantage. Yes that’s right, you can gain an advantage if you eliminate an option. So a businessman can gain an advantage over a competitor if he shuts down a factory, or a warrior if they burn their ships. Lets see how.

Lets take a business case. Say Sony and Microsoft are both existing in the business world. Microsoft happily making software, and Sony happily making TVs. Then one day both of them get the idea to make a gaming system, but then the market research folks come in and spoil the day. They conclude that if both companies enter the market, the competition for market share will be a drain on the company and they will both make $0 in profits. If both companies give up plans to make a gaming system, they will both go back to making $2 billion in profits. But if one company retreats, while the other company goes forward; the company making the gaming system will see profits of $5 billion, and the other will suffer from embarrassment and their customers won’t want their products. They will only make $1 billion in profits.

Here is the chart:

Sony/Microsoft	Microsoft (retreat)	Microsoft (go ahead)
Sony (retreat)	2/2	1/5
Sony (go ahead)	5/1	0/0

After many intense negations, neither company is willing to let the other be the only one with a gaming system, so obviously the best solution is for both of them to retreat. But then Bill Gates out of nowhere guts his software business and declares that from this day forward, Microsoft will focus only on their gaming system. They have essentially removed the option for them to retreat, and only the second column remains. Sony now has to choose between $1 billion in profits, or $0. Unless they want to sacrifice their company too, they will retreat and Microsoft will win.

So a warrior then who burns the bridges behind them and forces themselves to fight will gain this advantage. Same with somebody playing chicken who removes their steering wheel. Same with hostage negotiations when you have a policy where you can’t negotiate. The list goes on.

The one caveat with this is that the other player must know this. If not there could be disastrous results.

Now go out there and show off how smart you can make a character look by having them eliminate the safe option and take victory!

Character Motivation

I believe that character motivation is one of the most important elements in a story. It’s what makes the reader feel like a character is real, has feeling, and has an independent mind. Without this connection, it becomes very easy to see the strings dangling from the hands of the puppet master (the author).

What exactly does this mean? Well as a writer you have a plot in mind that you will guide your character through, and if the character is out of place, it will jump out to the reader like a flashing neon sign that the author does not know what they are doing.

For example: Say you have a Buddhist monk who has spent his entire life meditating, never killing a single thing; not even a mosquito. Then Rambo enters, trying to get away from the bad guys and asks the monk to help him out. If the monk starts fighting to help out Rambo; the reader is going to throw that book across the room. If for some reason you need the monk to start fighting you are going to need a REAL good reason to motivate this monk to forsake everything he’s ever believed in.

Pretty simple, but hopefully you get the point. Most cases it won’t be as obvious as this, and you as an author have to keep the motivations of your character in perspective, making sure that if you have them do something that they normally wouldn’t do, there needs to be a very good reason.

Another example would be a scene from the movie (I’ll try to use some literary examples in the future, but I think even in the writing community a there is a greater penetration for a lot of movies than most books.) The Shawshank Redemption, which just so happens to be based on a novella by Stephen King. So if you want, you can read a really good work by a skilled writer. But anyways, on to the example. One scene has the main character, Andy a former banker in prison for murdering his wife, on the roof of the license plate factory as part of a group of inmates chosen to do that work. At this point in the movie Andy is regularly being raped and does not really have any friends. Well he overhears one of the (notoriously violent and ruthless) guards talking about an inheritance he received, and how he’s disappointed that most of that money will be taken away by taxes. Andy approaches the guard and here is the transcript from that scene:

ANDY
Mr. Hadley. Do you trust your wife?

HADLEY (The guard with the inheritance)
That’s funny. You’re gonna look
funnier suckin’ my d*** with no
f***** teeth.

ANDY
What I mean is, do you think she’d
go behind your back? Try to
hamstring you?

HADLEY
That’s it! Step aside, Mert. This
f*****’s havin’ hisself an accident.

Hadley grabs Andy’s collar and propels him violently toward
the edge of the roof. The cons furiously keep spreading tar.

HEYWOOD (another inmate)
Oh God, he’s gonna do it, he’s
gonna throw him off the roof…

SNOOZE (One of the other guards)
Oh s***, oh f***, oh Jesus…

ANDY
Because if you do trust her, there’s
no reason in the world you can’t
keep every cent of that money.

Hadley abruptly jerks Andy to a stop right at the edge. In
fact, Andy’s past the edge, beyond his balance, shoetips
scraping the roof. The only thing between him and an ugly drop
to the concrete is Hadley’s grip on the front of his shirt.

HADLEY
You better start making sense.

Andy ends up explaining what Hadley can do and negotiates some beers for his fellow ‘coworkers’ in exchange for filling out the necessary forms. So now what can we extrapolate from this on Andy’s motivation? Well for starters most people would not have approached Hadley like Andy did, especially on a roof where ‘accidents’ could easily happen. But Andy could use two things. First he could use some favor with the guards; second he could use some favor with the other inmates.

This seems like a fine motivation for Andy; yet something seems wrong here. When Andy first walks up to Hadley, he insinuates that his wife is cheating on him. Now Andy is a pretty smart guy who would not do something like that on accident and here in-lies the problem that I have with this scene. I personally can’t find any motivation for Andy to do what he did there. If he wanted to die he could just jump off the roof; he would not insult Hadley and have him do it since Hadley hadn’t done anything to Andy. It makes no sense to me. Now granted it makes for a more dramatic scene, but when I was watching this movie it took a little of the magic out of it for me. Took away some of my suspension of belief.

To fix it so that the motivations of all characters are taken into consideration you could have Andy walk up to Hadley and just say, “I know how you can keep all of your money.” Then Hadley who is already in a rage could grab Andy by the shirt and push him over to the edge saying something like, “What are you trying to do? Get me in here wearing an number like you?” It’s not perfect but I think the scene would be a little more consistant as far as the motivation.

Anyways that’s enough for character motivation for now. My next entry will deal with some of the things I’ve learned while revising my latest novel.