Fictional Engineering Part 1: Premise and Character

This is part one of a multi-part series I'm calling fictional engineering.  I'm an engineer by trade and a science fiction writer by delusion, so it made sense to me to characterize narrative composition as an engineering design process.  It isn't always that way, of course.  I tend to lose discipline with this technique a lot and that's okay.  However, I have found a few of these ideas helpful.  You'll probably find that they aren't exceptionally groundbreaking.  What I've done is synthesize some concepts I've encountered over the years from other writers.  In way it's a manifesto: out of all the ways I've seen fiction constructed, these are the ways that work for me.

Introduction

Every story is centered around conflict.  A single sentence summarizes the central conflict.  This sentence invokes at least one character and the situation the story puts them in.  Beyond that, every character, scene and theme can be defined in terms of conflict at some level.  Conflict is the energy that makes the story go.

Conflicts can come in three primary varieties: between a character and him/her/itself, between two characters and between a character and his/her/its situation.  These conflicts are analogous to the cliche (stated in masculine terms of course): man vs himself, man vs man and man vs the world.  

The “world” represents anything that is impersonal, be it an animal, a bureaucracy or a machine.  This is why I use the term “situation” instead, because the defining characteristic of this type of conflict is that one half of it is an object, not a subject, in the relationship.  A situation is anything that cannot reciprocate the character’s feelings of conflict.  If an animal, bureaucracy or machine obtains enough autonomy and personality in the story to reciprocate, then it becomes a character and should be classified in a character vs character conflict.  On the other hand, a person may be handled as a situation if he or she doesn’t have sufficient personality or autonomy to warrant full character status (e.g. the anonymous store clerk who is “just doing his job” and is more the face of a bureaucracy than a character with individual motivations).  Clearly real people can’t be categorized this way, but a story may have dozens of people like this.    

The difference between a character vs character and character vs himself type of conflict is less straightforward.  Can’t the latter be reduced to a special case of the former, in which both ends of the conflict are the same person?  In many cases this may be true, providing us with two simple types of conflict: character vs personal entity and character vs impersonal entity.  However, there is often at least one important difference.  A character cannot typically change his orientation to himself over the course of a story.  Conflict may bring characters together or split them apart, but a person must always live with himself.  This changes the way conflicts may be resolved, or not.  People usually find a resolution to their conflicts with other people, whether it is coming to a common understanding, finding an outlet that is external to the relationship, or ending the relationship.  The last option is a last resort.  If nothing else, one can resolve tension by severing the rope all together.  Outside of suicide, this option is closed to inner conflict.  That crucial difference (and there may be others) can be put to good use.  More on this later.

Premise

As stated above, a story starts with a premise.  This is a single sentence stating the central conflict.  The premise may be thematic or non-thematic.  A non-thematic premise has no “point”.  This is the sort of thing we might associate with escapist entertainment.  For example, “James Bond must stop a terrorist attack”.  A thematic premise states a conflict which is indicative of one or more abstract themes.  For example, “Hamlet plots to kill his uncle, whom he suspects of murdering his father to seize the throne.”  This premise is central to the story’s themes of revenge, treachery and corruption.  Clearly, the theme is not always obvious from the premise.  Indeed, it may be possible to swap my categorization of these two premises.  We may find that James Bond (however unlikely) has conflicted feelings about his job and starts to wonder what separates him from a terrorist, making the premise indicative of themes on just versus unjust causes.  On the other hand, maybe we could write Hamlet as an Elizabethan version of “Kill Bill”, in which Hamlet spends all of his time knocking off all of Claudius’ associates before slaying the man himself and riding off into the sunset.  We get a lot of blood and action scenes, much like the original Hamlet, but without the introspective monologues.

So what’s the difference?  This difference is in your mind.  You obviously know whether you want your story to be about some philosophical theme or not.  You don’t need to spell this out to yourself.  However, when we go that route we can find ourselves struggling to make the theme concrete.  A theme may be stated as a conflict: “is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them?” Stating the theme in terms of conflict is a good start, but it doesn’t make a premise.  A story has characters, and as the impetus for story, so should the premise.  Thinking in these terms forces a writer to restate the theme in terms of a specific personal story that illustrates that theme.  This is probably obvious, but it is important throughout the writing process to always be looking for the concrete.  If an abstract theme cannot play a role in a character’s concrete problems and pursuits, then why is it worth writing about?  Writing the thematic premise is the first step to bridging the gap between thought and reality.

Character

Every major character must have at least one internal and one external conflict.  There are exceptions, such as James Bond, who is usually portrayed as a sort of stone faced superhero with no history and no inner life, but even the most escapist stories typically have characters with internal conflicts.  And these conflicts need not be deep.  One of the easiest ways to make a character sympathetic is to create a space for contradiction.  For example, what if the Queen of England happened to be an excellent poker player?  What if this reserved grandmother sometimes took on a secret identity so that she could collect from hardened cockney gamblers?  Such a character is instantly likable and that humorous affability is based on inner conflict.  It’s not of the soul searching Hamlet kind, but it is conflict nonetheless and may result in both comedy and suspense.

Whether they be light or heavy, conflicts may be categorized as potential and kinetic.  A potential conflict is what we start a scene with and a kinetic conflict is the action that plays out the consequence of that potential during the course of the scene.  For example, two characters may start a scene with a personal history, such as divorce.  The potential conflict is that character A does not trust character B to avoid interfering with A’s relationship with their child.  That is a character vs character potential conflict.  On B’s side, the potential conflict is a desire to win A’s trust along with a desire for personal advancement.  That is an internal potential conflict.  The kinetic conflict occurs during the action of the scene, which in this case is a fight during which A says something that convinces B that preserving trust is less important than advancing career.  So B takes a job offer in another city and takes the child along - thus realizing A’s fears.

Every conflict has a resolution.  This is true even of potential conflicts.   Something has prevented a potential conflict from becoming kinetic up until the scene where the tension breaks.  In the above example, perhaps B has slowly been taking steps to earn A’s trust.  A is still suspicious, but is willing to be patient.  The kinetic conflict must overwhelm the potential resolution and result in a kinetic resolution.  The difference between a potential and kinetic resolution is that the potential resolution is a counter force against tension that maintains the status quo, while a kinetic resolution changes the game.  The potential conflict no longer exists once this resolution has come to a fore.  Sometimes, it ends there, because that is what the whole story was about.  Sometimes, it spawns new internal and external potential conflicts in its wake.

A Simple Story Foundation

In my next post, I'll put these things in motion and discuss story foundations.

The Robots Will Kill Us All, But Only If They Obey Us

They say no one makes anything in America anymore and this has been the case for a generation or two. While most people recognize that as an exaggeration, it is hard not to look at the decline of former industrial powerhouses like Detroit and Baltimore and not feel as though manufacturing has fled the country. It doesn't help that governors crow over the opening of factories employing a few hundred workers and promote these developments as great successes in their plan to bring "good middle class factory jobs back to American soil." The truth is more complex. It always is. Moreover, since my thoughts wander toward the future of our society, I speculate that the truth hints at what may be by turns dismal, Utopian and ultimately catastrophic. I should have something to say for myself, and I do.

Common knowledge tells us that developing nations have weakened US industrial might by employing cheap labor. American factories paying American wages and benefits cannot compete with the labor of the millions who earn cents on the hour and receive few if any benefits. This assessment is largely accurate, but it describes an unstable dynamic. Labor costs in the West are so high because we are a victim of our own success. Well I suppose victim isn't the right word here. With rising economic development comes a better standard of living. Of course, great inequality remains, especially in the US, but it is hard to argue that human development isn't higher here than it is in much of the developing world. That world, however, will get its chance. As the economic prospects of poorer nations improve, their labor costs will likewise increase. Perhaps there's nothing wrong with this. Everyone gets a little richer, the labor cost differential among nations decreases, and competition derives solely from innovation. There you go. You've reached the first Utopian plateau.

Developed nations, however, are not willing to sit back for the next century and hope that this scenario unfolds. They are fighting back with their own reductions in labor cost. Though China passed the US in total industrial output in 2010, the US still maintains a significant lead in per-capita productivity (though it is second to Japan in this regard). While the US is paying its factory workers more, it is also getting more product from fewer people. Are Americans working harder? No, you know what I'm talking about. It's not the people that are working harder, it's the machines. Automation is a great strategy. You as a nation have a choice. You can compete with cheap labor, which if you're successful will only result in that labor becoming more expensive. Or you can compete with ever more sophisticated machines, which will only get less expensive. The guy with the first plan doesn't really stand a chance against the gut with the second one. If developed nations, and the US in particular, capitalize on their lead in automated production and distribution, it could put them back at the head of the pack.

That seems great, except for all the people in the unemployment lines. Who really wins in this scenario? In the short term, it's the people who own a stake in manufacturing profits more than it is everyday citizens. Those folks are off in search of jobs at Bertucci's. For example, consider this story (anecdotal though it is):

Louisville factory: 100 printers, 3 employees

Or this one:

Robots Threaten These 8 Jobs

 Now wait a minute. What year is this? 1930? Am I sounding like one of those doomsayers who predicted the fall of civilization when industrialization hit the heartland, replacing all those farmhands with the giant bug-like tractors from the Grapes of Wrath? One might argue, this is just another stage in economic progress. Most of the US population worked on farms in 1900. Only a few percent do now. We were fine because we created new industries. Namely, we created the new industries that are following the path of farming in the twentieth century and firing all of their workers. What's the next stage? They say it's the knowledge economy. There is, however, a significant difference between the knowledge economy that is replacing the industrial one and the industrial economy that replaced the agricultural one. Most people who participated in the farming economy could also participate in the industrial one. That was true in the US a century ago and it is true in China now, where millions have migrated from the farmlands looking for work in the country's manufacturing centers. Not everyone can participate in the knowledge economy, however. The problem is only exacerbated by the lack of political will to develop the human resources we already have.

Is the solution to go Amish and decide that we should halt automation at a certain point? Perhaps if the major industrial powers would just get together and agree on a technological target that allows full employment? Ah, global socialism... However, there is this other problem with development. It usually leads to lower birthrates and longer lifespans. Even if it were possible for everyone to agree on a way of keeping the world employed at a certain level, it's natural to assume that a part of the deal would be similar standards of living across that economic bloc. Many developed countries are struggling with stagnant or declining populations, along with aging demographics. Even in the US, which has a higher birthrate than many of its Western piers, population growth is really driven by immigration. That trend is especially pronounced at the younger end of the population. This would imply that perhaps automation is a good thing in the long run. Machines can replace the young workers we aren't making anymore and reduce living costs for older people who can't work as hard as they used to. Maybe machines can even take care of us in our golden years. Maybe, just maybe, we can drive production costs down to zero. In that scenario, where every lick of farmed or manufactured product comes from the hands of our robot friends, we don't have to worry about jobs. Everything costs nothing. Wouldn't that be great?

Well, in the short term it would be a painful transition for many generations. In the long term it would probably destroy us all. Assuming such a thing were even possible, the transition to a zero cost, fully automated economy would take longer and produce far more upheaval than the more incremental transitions we've seen so far. Social unrest would be inevitable, putting the whole experiment in jeopardy. But suppose that we survived this stage, as we probably would? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? For a little while, perhaps. We would be sitting pretty until we reaped the consequences of everything costing nothing. For when everything costs nothing, what would stop us from having everything? That is the moral of this rather long winded story. Even now, where production costs are far from zero, the decrease in costs has lead to a natural increase in demand. If this trend should continue, it may well lead to environmental ruin before we ever get to the time when everything is free. Hiding behind the story of competing economies and hand wringing over employment figures is the story of consumption. To me, that's a pretty scary story. It would be easy to say that we should consume less. Honestly, we probably should. I tend to believe that once they've achieved a certain level of comfort, most people would be happier without the burden of more stuff. Apologies for the blanket generalization, but deal with it because chances are I'm right on this one. However, it is hard to separate that "certain level of comfort" from the overall economy. Good food, good healthcare and good schools exist in the same world as high end phones and luxury cars. It may not be possible to have one without the other. Consumption seems to be the only model we have to support any kind of standard of living above that afforded by subsistence farming or hunter gathering. I'm not advocating a return to that way of life by any means.

That is where this ends, with no solution. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Raising The Minimum Wage Won't Cause Inflation, But You Don't Know That Because This Sentence Is Already Too Long For You To Handle

Lately there has been discussion about raising the national minumum wage in the US.  One of the more common arguments against it is that this will cause inflation and leave us back at square one.  That is, everyone will get more money and prices will go up.  On the surface this makes a little bit of sense.  Maybe.  However, logic doesn't really favor this conclusion.

Inflation is a complex phenomenon affected by many factors, including wage increases.  Say everyone got a 10% raise, whether by government mandate or printing money or some other cause.  In this case, it is reasonable to assume that currency value when measured as purchasing power would re-normalize to neutralize the wage increase.  That is, everything now costs 10% more so no one wins.  However, we're not talking about giving everyone a raise, we're talking about giving the segment of the population at the lowest income bracket a raise.  This accounts for less than 5% of the US population.

While it is true that the raise would have cascading effects beyond the lowest earners, those effects would be muted.  What I mean is that if an employer raises the wages of its lowest earning employees, it would probably also raise the wages of those in brackets just above those employees.  However, the impact of this effect would dissipate as you get further up the income chain and probably wouldn't be a linear curve (if for example you were to plot percent wage increase against original wage.  Maybe it would be logarithmic?  I don't know, I'm just guessing).  My point is that a 10% wage increase to the shelf stocker earning $7.25 / hr wouldn't cause a 10% wage increase to the accountant earning $30 / hr or the CEO earning a billion dollars an hour or whatever.

I think this at least partially addresses the other end of the argument, which is that in addition to increasing wages, we'd be increasing costs.  That is, wouldn't the cost of a hamburger go up 10% if everyone at the McDonald's now earns 10% more?  Wouldn't the company pass along the increased labor costs to its employees?  Maybe, but maybe not and even if they did it wouldn't be anywhere near 10%.  There are a couple of reasons why.  The first is that, as mentioned before, the increase in minimum wage to the lowest earning 5% of the population would not boost the wages of the remaining 95%, meaning that it is not as though everyone else has more money with which to purchase these more expensive products.

Producers would be warry of passing along all of their increased labor costs to consumers.  Another, perhaps more important, fact is that labor is only one part of a company's costs.  There is not a direct, 1-1 relationship between the labor cost of people earning minimum wage and the cost of the products they produce.  Various material and overhead costs (not to mention the wages of people earning above the minimum wage) tend to dwarf the costs of these workers.  The statistics bear this out.  Historically, increases in minimum wage have been linked to far smaller increases in the costs of goods.  Some increase does inevitably happen, but the ratio when compared to the percentage increase in minimum wage is more like 10-1 or higher. (Or 1-10; I forget which thing I'm putting in the denominator here).

I think the final, and perhaps most damning issue with the linkage between minimum wage and inflation is that the minimum wage actually lags inflation.  Because federal and state minimum wages can only be increased by legislative action, such increases tend to lag actual inflation by many years.  Unfortunately, increasing the minimum wage doesn't actually do much to improve the situation of the poorest class of people, it only keeps them from falling further behind then they already have.  Each year that inflation marches on (due to the many other factors besides minimum wage that cause it), people at the lowest income bracket get a salary cut.  If the world is racing on, you fall behind just by standing still.  Thus increasing their wages is more analagous to releasing back pay than it is to an actual rate hike.  Generally, the rest of the population has been seeing their salaries increase at a faster rate (which may not be very fast at all, but still faster than those at the bottom) and bringing the poorest 5% up to par won't hurt the rest of us.