Someone To Look Up To, Part 1 – Gaining Wisdom

 We’ve all got people in our lives that we look up to: parents, professors, adults who’ve invested in our lives since we were younger. These people – these mentors – invest so deeply in us that it’s hard to separate their advice and our daily actions. We look up to them and rely on them and trust that the advice they give is good.

Who are these people? They’re mentors. They’re all over our lives, and everyone seems to have at least one. Therefore, it would make sense to expect to see them in stories, right?

Of course, we’re all familiar with the idea of a mentor. If we’ve read a book or seen a movie, we’ve seen a mentor character. Classic examples include Obi-wan Kenobi from Star Wars, Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, and Dumbledore from Harry Potter. There are others, but these three give us good material to work off of.

In short, the mentor is a vital part to your story. Without them, you lose a bit of realism that your story desperately needs. I’d like to spend the next three Fridays talking about these powerful characters, and how to do them right and how to do them wrong.

The Vital Aspect

While all mentors should be different from each other (although in practice it seems they’re all very similar), there’s one aspect that they should all have: something to offer the protagonist. Look at the three I mentioned above: Obi-wan teaches Luke the beginnings of the force, Gandalf protects and guides and defends Frodo, while teaching him valuable lessons of mercy and trust, and Dumbledore basically shows Harry how to be the Boy Who Lived.

Mentors don’t have to be old men with white beards. The three I just gave you are the reasons why that prototype is a cliché now. They did it first, so we have to come up with our own ideas or suffer the mocking comparison. Mentors do, however, need a purpose. If they have nothing to offer their protagonist, they’re actually an Ally, for whom you can see my posts last September.

What is this that the mentor has to offer? Well, that depends on your story. Generally speaking, it’s some sort of advice, skill, or example. For Luke, he needed to know about the force (a skill). For Frodo, it was protection and knowledge (advice). And for Harry, it was all three.

What about your character? What does your protagonist need? For my characters in Agram Awakens, there are a variety of things they needed. For Bea, it was comfort, healing, and advice (provided by an elderly priest and his wife). For Deyu, it was a friend (provided by someone I can’t name because spoilers). Taynan needed skills and protection (provided by a villain, actually…), Gaream needed sage words of advice and calming (provided by his father), and Deng-el needed motivating words of encouragement (provided by his wife).

Notice how different these characters are. Many of them aren’t old men (Gaream’s father and the priest aside). In fact, many of them aren’t that much older than the protagonist (for instance, Deng-el’s wife is younger than he is). I’ve read a book (and can’t for the life of me remember the title) where the mentor was a young girl and the main character was a middle-aged man.

So what’s makes the mentor different from the ally? After all, an ally should have something to offer the protagonist as well, shouldn’t they? Well, yes. The difference is this: the protagonist cannot survive without the gift of the mentor. They can survive without the ally. It would be much more difficult and they’d have to work much harder, but they could do it in a pinch. The ally has their own story, after all, and their own goals. They just happen to be able to help the protagonist as well.

When a mentor enters the story, they become inextricable. Without them, your protagonist fails.

Creating a Worthwhile Wisdom

So. Our mentors need to be wise in some way. They have to be able to pass on this wisdom to the protagonist.

Cool.

Now what?

How do we decide what this wisdom is? We look to our protagonist, and we look to our mentor. What does the protagonist need? What is the mentor good at? Where those two things collide, that is where you find your wisdom.

However, you should never look just at the protagonist’s needs. When you do that, you end up with a flat mentor. Why? Because they become nothing more than a plot point. All characters should exist of their own right. The best way to ensure this is to develop your mentor separately from your protagonist. Never develop them with the protagonist in mind. Don’t make them a master at the sword just because your main character needs to be good at it. Make them a master at the sword because they spent thirty years in the army and have since been training new recruits. Make it an integral part of who they are before you make it what they pass on.

A Side-Note

This is something I wanted to address briefly before I finish this post. There’s this common trend in books for the protagonist to meet the mentor and/or the ally and/or the love interest during the book. Personally, I find this weak and distracting.

Why?

Because it takes time to form a mentor-mentee relationship. It takes months and months and years to form that kind of relationship. Not ten days riding horses together.

When a protagonist meets the mentor for the first time in the second chapter, then suddenly grows to trust and accept them as a mentor in t-minus 0.00002 seconds… it immediately stops feeling real to me. It’s not really a mentorship, it’s a thrown-headfirst-into-trust relationship, and those are rarely healthy in reality.

Anyway. That’s just a personal side-note that I thought might be helpful before I wrapped this thing up.

Mentors are powerful characters. They can sway the story one way or another. Without them, the protagonist fails. They fail miserably. But with them… with the help of the mentor, the protagonist and the story can fly.

Music is an Art, Part 1

There’s more to life than writing. There’s more to writing than art. There’s more to art than writing.

In fact, there’s so much more to art than writing that writing is one of the oft-brushed over arts. It hangs in the background, pulling subtle strings in all of the other forms of art. These other forms include almost everything you can think of: painting, dance, theatre, pottery, life, and on and on the list goes.

One that we always admit is an art but rarely hold it up to the same standards we require from others is music. I’m a lover of music, a lover of the story found in music. I know a lot about music, even though I don’t play an instrument. I’ve mixed live music for five years, and learned from guys who have played and mixed music for decades of their lives and so much of my appreciation from music comes from what they taught me.

Today, and for a few other posts in the future, I want to talk about the art of music, and the art of appreciating and listening to it.

A Word of Caution

I’m not going to pick on specific genres here. Each genre, I believe, has its place. Each genre has good songs and poor songs, fantastic artists and mediocre artists. Much like other forms of art, it’s easy to find the flaws in certain genres while praising others, but we’re not here to do the easy thing.

Every genre has its place.

Every. Genre.

Those repetitive, mindless songs every dances to? Dance songs? They have a place.

What that place is, however, can be quite specific because the art behind those songs comes not from the song itself, but what people do with it.

So don’t expect to come in here and help me bash certain genres, nor to have to defend your favorite genre to my scathing remarks. In fact, I’ll do my best to avoid using specific examples when I talk about poorly crafted music. I may use specific examples when explaining good music, but it won’t be in a “this is the only good kind of music and the rest is trash” way.

Now that that’s over, let’s really look at music. Today, I want to look at the way music is truly an art, and a little bit about creating that art. Later I’ll talk about ways music can be made well and made poorly, and then even later I’ll spend some time talking about the influence of that art on our lives.

The Art in Music

It may seem obvious that music is an art, but why? What makes music an art, and why do we automatically accept that? It’s not that we’re ever really trained that music is an art. By the time our education suggests such a thing, we already believe it. Music is art.

Let’s consider the definition I like to use for art: art has a story to tell. All art has a story to tell. Even art that tells that story poorly has a story. Now, I realize this definition is rather constraining, but follow me for a moment: what story does music tell?

You can find dozens of examples of songs that tell stories blatantly, but it’s easier to find songs that don’t. Consider the music that most people immediately think of when they hear the words “fine art”: classical or neo-classical, am I right? We think of orchestras performing things like concertos or symphonies or some other fancy word for music notes arranged in a certain order for a certain amount of time for certain instruments to play at a certain, arbitrary beat.

How do those tell a story? Most of them have no lyrics, they’re just pleasant compilations of notes.

Consider, however, what stories do for us: they create emotion. And consider what classical music does for us: when we listen intently, we find our emotions stirring. Those patterns of air vibrations create emotion in us. There’s an implicit story in lyric-less music, when you’re looking for it. One fantastic example is found in the soundtracks of movies. The way the music ebbs and flows, buildings and cuts off, sways and jabs, these things create emotion in us. Music can build dread, and the lack thereof can create a tense punch of reality. If you listen carefully to the soundtrack of a movie you know well, you’ll find that you know exactly what’s happening in the story at any time, based simply on the music.

That’s powerful.

Now, not all music is performed on stage by fifteen-ninety people. Some music is composed and performed by one person alone in their basement. Music contained lyrics, words that can be completely senseless and void of substance (at which point, is it truly art or just noise?) or deep and powerful and thought-provoking.

There are times and places for deep, hard songs; there are times and places for light-hearted, simple creations. The story, however, is much more obvious in these songs. For instance, “Gun Song” by the Lumineers has a very clear story told within it, and provokes fantastic emotions when you really pay attention. “Trees” by Twenty One Pilots also has a story deep within the lyrics, but it takes more time and effort and concentration to understand and truly see it.

Why Music Matters

We find music everywhere in our lives: it’s an art we can never get away from. It fills us with emotions and flits away in a moment, leaving us without giving us the tools to handle those emotions.

Music can be used to sway. The subtle way it creates emotion and stimulates a response allows it to have extraordinary control over us. What should our reaction to this be? Fear?

No. Fear is a rather useless emotion in many situations.

Rather, we should be aware of music and the power it has. Then, we can use it as it’s truly meant to be used: as an art, to be observed and appreciated and needed.

Prose Blip – Repetition

There are many stylistic choices we have to make, as writers. In fact, there are many stylistic choices we don’t even realize we make. They come to us as part of our voice, things we do unconsciously to make our prose different from your average textbook.

For instance, I tend to use random single-word paragraphs to add emphasis to certain concepts, and to build tension and emotion in the reader. In addition, the vocabulary I use fluctuates between simplistic word choices and spontaneous use of esoteric terms for no discernable reason.

One common stylistic choice is that of repetition. You’ll find it in movies, where a character action or short clip of movement is shown several times through the story to communicate a specific emotion or idea. For instance, in Gladiator, there are three or four (I can’t bother myself to actually go confirm which it is) times where the same basic clip of the main character running his hand through stalks of wheat as he walks through his field is used to communicate very specific concepts and emotions.

Today, I’d like to take a look at this specific stylistic style, and examine the ways it appears in the stories we tell and the powers and dangers therein.

The Character Repetition

When it comes to repetition and characters, there are two basic ways they work together: symbolic and developmental. The first is in the way a certain character represents something in several instances. A good example of this is Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. He’s repeatedly shown as a man of mercy and wisdom, as a way to create a theme.

The repetition comes in the similarity of the scenes where he is portrayed this way, because the scenes that show his wisdom and mercy are closely related and near-identical in layout.

The latter combination of repetition and character supports character development. You find this sort of repetition mostly in minor characters. We call these character handles, bits of characterization that we can identify them with: repeated use of a scar or a twitch of the eyebrow or the type of clothing they wear.

This sort of repetition is handy when we have a single-scene character who is never named but needs to be recognizable from the rest. It can be dangerous, however, to use this sort of repetition as sort of crutch: choosing to use character handles rather than actually developing characters.

Dialogic Repetition

Another sort of repetition, one that I feel is underused and a fantastic way to develop characters and your story world is that of repeated dialogue. Whether this is entire conversations or individual words, dialogic repetition has powerful implications on your story. Firstly, pay attention to conversations you’re a part of. You’ll find that people use a lot of the same words in many of their sentences. People have their “favorite” words, words they use a lot in conversation. Whether they’re actual words or some sort of pseudo-word that they use to mean something useful, they have those favorite words.

When a character has a word they use a lot, it shows their character. Whether it’s a beggar who uses “extravagant” a lot because it’s the biggest word he knows, or if it’s a Sicilian repeatedly saying “inconceivable”.

Another way dialogic repetition comes in handy is for showing worldbuilding. Many facets of worldbuilding – religion, politics, familial relations, economics/currency, and more will have words or phrases that are repeated quite often. Be it ritualistic words in a religious rite or a child calling their paternal figure “da” instead of “dad” or their aunt “sister-mum”, repeated use of these words and phrases can show a good deal of your worldbuilding without having to linger.

For instance, in Agram Awakens I have a religion that shows up repeatedly, and so I had to develop it. One thing I developed was the burial rites that people of this religion followed. This may seem odd, but considering the characters I had who followed this religion, this was extremely handy for my worldbuilding. I was able to use the ritual words of blessing along with actual burial practices to show a great deal about the characters and the world, all while maintaining the plot and pacing.

Word Choice Repetition

One of the subtlest and most powerful forms of repetition is that of word choice. This is one that requires a good deal of observation and experience to really notice, but once you can, those authors which do this stand out from the rest. Careful repetition of specific words can prime your reader to receive messages they couldn’t otherwise understand. I say prime because it’s unconscious unless they’re paying close attention.

It’s hard to fully describe this sort of repetition, because it is very subtle and unnoticeable. One of the best examples I can think of for this are the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. While his purple prose can be difficult to push through, but once you do, you find beautiful imagery and some of the bluntest repetition you’ll find. The Christian Bible is also known for the repeating of specific words in a passage to encourage the right mindset; Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller also uses repetition, though it’s less obvious.

In short, word choice repetition exams the goals of the story/novel/scene and attempts to find key words that can be used in multiple ways and contexts to prepare and point the reader toward those goals and the outlying themes around those goals.

All repetition has potential to be powerful, done right. Whether your repetition is character handles, dialogic worldbuilding, or theme developing, it’s useful in many ways. Many, many ways.