Be an Author: Worsening · 3:23am Nov 9th, 2018
Worsening: Your sister broke her leg. You get her to the car and reach into your pocket. No keys. Ugh! Go to the house. It's locked. Of course it is; the keys are inside. You crawl through the open front window. Get your sister into the car and start the engine. Try to. It won't start. No gas. You bang the wheel and grab your phone, dialing press 911. When the operator answers, your phone dies. You hit your head against the wheel and look up. The police are racing down the block toward you. Of course, 911 GPS’d your location! The officers screech to a halt and jump out, guns drawn, having responded to a burglary-in-progress.
Could it get worse?
Probably.
Worsening is a time honored plot device that adds a dose of reality, or comedy, to a story. The difference between a wish fulfillment story where everything works out and an exciting story where the protagonist must earn the win is the drama of the character’s best efforts going wrong. In real life, we rarely get what we want. No matter how well we plan, our solutions never work exactly as we hoped. People block our ambitions. Sometimes a snow storm or the lack of money gets in the way. Add that to being in a hurry, or desperate, and all good solutions fail.
The basic idea is to have your character solve a problem. They either fail for reasonable circumstances—or succeed and suffer consequences. Remember, everyone your character encounters has their own agenda. Even the most careful capable character cannot escape worsening. They shouldn’t. What makes all Mission Impossible movies tick? Repeated cycles of worsening turn your stories into a nail biters.
To Where and Back Again uses classic worsening to advance the plot all the way to the end. At one point, Starlight escapes the changelings who replaced the mane 6’s by casting a spell I call in my stories, “Don’t See, Don’t Look, Don’t Hear.” She operates at the best of her ability in this episode. She allies with Discord, who ought to be able to solve any problem with the snap of a claw. Except Chrysalis is protected from all magic. It turns Discord into a nuisance instead of a solution.
Sweet and Elite is another a great example. Rarity wants to thank Twilight for being able to stay in a Canterlot ivory tower. She gets the idea of making a birthday dress to thank her. Distracting Canterlot life, recognition (whether or not deserved), and a whole pack of lies repeatedly worsens her chance of thanking Twilight until she will likely insult her, and she learns a lesson.
Think of other episodes, and discuss them in the comments.
Try this exercise: Select a character you understand well. Pick a goal for the character. Place your character in space or capability as far away from that goal as possible. Start writing. Every time your character does something to reach their goal, have the attempt turn into a set back, or, if it succeeds, uncover a worse issue to overcome. Rinse. Repeat. Keep the end of the story in mind and write. In the example at the beginning of this article, the character’s goal is to get their sister to the hospital. A thumbnail sketch like the précis of Sweet and Elite is all you need to start writing.
So... start writing.
You may like reading:
Yeah, that sounds useful but some care has to be used.
If too many bad things happen too closely, then it feels like a comedy.
I've seen it in other shows like The Flash and Salvation.
Salvation does this a lot and it can get jerky. But they have multiple plotlines so it doesn't feel so bad.
A meteor is coming to destroy the Earth!
Oh wait, someone has a design of a satellite that could nudge the meteor to a safer trajectory.
Oh no, the engine works, but we need a rare mineral.
I know where the mineral is, but I have to steal from my rich uncle who taught me everything.
Every time they have a solution, they find a new problem.
Of course they have to space it out or folks will be expecting something bad every time things look like they're are going forward.
Viewers start anticipating bad things.
Okay, you guys finally got that fixed, can you please move on!
NO, don't pull another problem out of your butts again!
4965391
Thank you. Good point. I appreciate your magnifying my post's too brief warning statement that the technique "can add a dose of reality, or comedy." It is a plot device. As my opening, and your too-the-point examples demonstrate, over-use is abuse.
The SF great Connie Willis (Lincoln's Dreams, To Say Nothing of the Dog) taught me at Clarion 98 the technique as something of an antidote to the rambling plotless experimental fiction of the time. She pointed to the movie, Romancing the Stone as a great example* of worsening (and foreshadowing). In fact, my wife and I rented the movie after I returned from the workshop, after I explained to her the technique of worsening. She said I ruined the movie because you could almost guess what would happen next! (It's kind of a Daring Do plot.)
And that's the problem with using this or any technique mindlessly. In a short story, you have to use it but sparingly. In a novel, once a chapter or so, interspersing failures with successes that lead to further problems is a guide. The author must be fully aware of what they are doing, and ensure they don't jump the shark. Comedy has different parameters!
* She loved, loved, loved this movie, but Connie admitted it had to do with the stars in it.
4970758
One time I insisted on rolling up a hobbit sorceress (an oxymoron if there ever was one) in a campaign of Middle Earth Roleplaying—to the rabid-Tolkien-fan GM's horror and chagrin. As an author, I could sense the drama in it. Over the next year of Sundays, our band of misfits accumulated much experience and fatal-to-attempt-to-get magical treasure. (An author paired with rocket scientist engineers may be a bit OP as players.) We were no Aragon or Gandolf, but then after just barely escaping Mount Doom with campaign completion points beyond imagination, the GM first threw a nazgûl (a ring wraith) at us.
Worsening. EYep.
By dumb luck, the fighters managed to stun it and my Myruinril rolled back to back 100s on her lightning strike with impossible amulets to multiply her ep. The die was cast (pun intended).
The GM admitted defeat. Karma baby.
You do bring up the subject of game balance in your comment. That's a topic for another article, but your examples show the difference between a comic book movie and a "normal" SF adventure. Lack of balance is like giving the reader the middle finger, same as your GM. Not only should an author take care not to attribute unrealistic or unsubstantiated abilities to a character, they should avoid impossible situations that in the real world imply a failure for the protagonist and require a miracle. Yeah, it might be sweet to win in the end, but the reader knows that couldn't happen unless the enemy does something stupid, and we readers know in our gut it wouldn't happen that way. (See my Be an Author: Plot Advancement by Stupidity.)
Your advice is sagely: rewrite to remove the unrealistic or foreshadow enough to prepare the protagonist realistically. Ignore that advice and risk having your work being regarded as candy without messages or lessons the reader will take with them to remember you by.
4970973
My GM (may he rest in peace) was more blood-thirsty: he intended to kill us off, but as a rocket scientist engineer (Boeing retired), he could not stomach an unrealistic no-damage nazgûl. Pity. And we had no choice to fight or die. The campaign ended anyway because we’d played through all of MERP that could be played by high-level characters.
Ah, One Punch Man. Yep, that’s OP3 and a challenge to write for and make at all relevant. As for Worsening, can’t get much worse than that, but not taking the bait neatly reversed the GM’s plans. Kudos.
4971116
How very interesting. I'd never heard of that before, but in the early days of personal computing, before the XT, when Darpanet was a very limited Internet, many of us nerdy types used timeshare computers and modem-connected terminals. We played "Adventure." It was against a very primitive program. A puzzle really, probably written in PL/1 or BASIC, that took simple commands. What you describe feels like a live action version, some sort of cooperative story creation on the fly! I'm guessing the GM still had a scenario and you had rules you had to interact using, but probably less of a "command set" and more of a real social interaction. If the GM basically played the environment and NPCs and the players asserted what they wanted to do without dice... When everyone cooperated and it worked, it must of been very fun. The output on the screen would have been novelistic. If the GM didn't cooperate, well I can see why you used that as an example of worsening gone wrong. While what I played was played around a table, it wasn't on a board but that's a small difference. Hand made maps, ocassionally. I'd love to have had a better record. I've written a couple of shorts in an SF universe I concocted to allow certain spell effects. Maybe I should look back into that again... (Speaking of the non-writing things that can spark creativity!)