Character Design: Spontaneous

So some of you might forget that I am actually a professional writer, not just some chump with access to blogspot.com and a keyboard. I forget myself sometimes. I've decided to take a bit of time to stretch my writer's muscles every now and again. So I've decided to start up a recurring section looking at what makes a good character. Usually this will be inspired by whatever I happen to be indulging media wise at the time. Let's get started.

Good characters think on their feet.

Romantic movies and books always point out how women want men to be spontaneous, to do the unexpected. A cute thought, but not what I mean. Spontaneity is the notion of not settling into a routine. That is not, however, what we expect out of a hero. A hero needs to have a plan when there seems like there can be none.

Take Batman. Batman has contingency plans for everything. His main strength, however, is his mind and his ability to think. In his work, if a plan goes wrong, he will be able to think up how to come at the problem from a different angle. Even as plan A fails, plan B is being implemented, plan C prepped, and plan D going into beta. Thinking on his feet is the reason Batman can come out on top.

Now what does this mean for writers? It's all well and good to say that characters need to think on their feet, but how do you put that in as a writer. That comes through in the execution of sequences. Here's what I mean. When crafting a scenario where you the author knows something goes wrong, there needs to be a back up plan that the character can implement later. The mechanics for that have to be in the works before hand as well. That is your job as the writer.

When writing the scene, there can be little indication that there is other plans in the works. It's so tempting to drop little hints that, when looking back, give away what happened. This is a big thing in movies, and can be pretty cool. But most savvy readers can pick up on stuff like that, especially if it is in a suspense or mystery story. That ruins it for them and makes the plot predictable. The goal should be to execute the new plan in a way that seems organic. It should seem to flow from the failed first plot and round out the story.

Surprisingly, Scooby-Doo was great at this. Fred always came up with ingenious (and stupidly elaborate) plans to catch the bad guys. Typically something would go wrong and the monster would avoid the first trap. Then, Scooby and Shaggy would find a way to haphazardly catch the monster for the big reveal. These situations show that a secondary option can appear completely out of the blue as long as the writer understands how to make the character seem like they thought of it on the fly.

I'm still trying to figure out how they managed to screw up Batman's plan when he teamed up with Scooby.

Just something to chew on.