Category Archives: On Writing

The Ampersand

Posted by natechen on

We’re going to talk about China Meiville’s Railsea and it’s going to include spoilers. You’ve been warned.

That said, we’re not actually going to talk about the plot of Railsea but the worldbuilding. Knowing this doesn’t change the story itself in any way. But, in many respects, the best part of Railsea is… well, the railsea. Everything in this strange, topsy-turvy world runs on rails and the book is full of strange little touches that help you remember that this is not the world you know.

What’s nice is that the story never goes out of its way to shove those moments into your face. They’re subtle and pointed, always clearly intended to illustrate some aspect of Meiville’s world that is different from ours. Well, most of the worldbuilding is that way. There was one aspect of it that shows up on the first page, digs its claws into you and won’t stop annoying you for at least fifty more pages. The phenomenon is thus: the prose never uses a comma in lists but rather stringing them together with a series of ands. Except the letters “a”, “n” and “d” are never written in that order anywhere in the text of the book. Every instance of the word “and” is replaced with The Ampersand. You can even begin sentences with &, removing the need for capital letters.

To make a confession: I hated this tendency at first. The prose was cluttered with unnecessary conjunctions and the ampersand jumped out at me whenever it was used, never quite enough to break the flow of the story but enough to grab at the back of the mind. It was wrong but I was enjoying the rest of the book enough to struggle through. Eventually, the ampersands faded into the background. Then I reached Railsea chapter 33 and read these words:

“The lines of the railsea go everywhere but from one place straight to another. It is always switchback, junction, coils around & over our own train-trails.

What word better could there be to symbolize the railsea that connects and separates all lands, than ‘&’ itself? Where else does the railsea take us but to this place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than ‘&’?”

Mind. Blown.

Most of us think of worldbuilding in terms of what happened in the history of the world, or what they eat, or how they dress, or what kind of governments there are, what kind of buildings they build, what kind of rituals they have for births, marriages and deaths. That kind of stuff is well and good. It’s an important part of cultures and traditions to understand these things. The same is true for ecology, environment and larger scale parts of the picture. But what Meiville did with The Ampersand was go a level deeper.

He asked the very simple question, “If the world is fundamentally like this, what kind of changes might happen to the very ways people think? The way they talk? The way they write?”

Then, instead of a long Martin-esque exposition about traditions and rituals, he just shows us the people of that world acting like they would and lets us get used to it, no matter how odd it first strikes us. In time the curtain is pulled back for us but when it is we’ve already grown so used to the strangeness that the explanation is just icing on the cake.

This kind of worldbuilding is great but have care. Without the other worldbuilding, the careful assembly of ideas into a coherent culture and environment, you can’t come up with something like The Ampersand. What makes The Ampersand so striking is that Meiville did all that work and then went a level further. He came up with an idea that fit his world so perfectly then went back and hid all his tracks, weaving it into the fabric of his tale page by page until he found the right time to share it. This is not a technique to try and use at the start of worldbuilding but at the end. But if you do use it that way and you’re very patient it can make for a great culmination to the work.

 

Physician Heal Thyself – Dr. Who On the Brink

Posted by natechen on

Two topical posts only one month apart? What could spur this on?

Well, mostly the brain melting stupidity of people who have to partake in Pharisee level moral grandstanding at every opportunity. But more importantly, the incredibly toxic environment these people create around beloved stories and characters and why creators need to be very careful not to feed this particular brand of troll. You shouldn’t feed the trolls at all, but in this case it’s doubly important.  Before we get into that I want to address something important.

I do not like Dr. Who. I tried to watch one episode of it once and my eyes pretty much rolled out of my head. It’s campy and cheesy and basically like an episode of the classic Star Trek but without forty years of aging poorly as an excuse. This was an episode from the first or second season of the modern run, I can’t tell you much more than that because I didn’t watch it for very long and I don’t really care to go back and try it again. There are just better uses for my time. I don’t know who any of the Doctors are, this new female one included, and I don’t really care. Anything I know about the franchise I’ve absorbed through general geek osmosis.

I don’t care that the new Doctor is a woman. The character is basically reincarnated ever couple of seasons and is an alien with nonhuman biology and chromosomes so why not? More than that, I don’t care much about who the Doctor is at all because I’m not invested in his story. (Or her story, as the case may be.)

What bothers me is the determined efforts to convince people that some large, amorphous, hard to find portion of the Jews fanbase consists of toxic scum. When the female Doctor was announced there was an almost immediate push on social media to condemn sexists in the Dr. Who fanbase who didn’t want a female doctor. The only problem was, I haven’t seen any of these elusive sexists. There may be a few here or there, especially on Twitter, that bane of all online discussions. There were likely a few people who called this pandering as something of a knee jerk reaction, since the press made a point to constantly point out that the Doctor was female in all their headlines in a pretty pandering way and act like it was some kind of victory. There are even some woman complaining about the choice for reasons I’m not quite clear on. Possibly because it makes organizing the Whovian Shipping Fleet that much more complicated. Doesn’t that happen with every new Doctor though?

But by and large the two primary reactions have been, “Eh, okay.” And, “Excommunicate the sexists!”

Something very disturbing is happening here. It goes beyond “representation in media” if that’s even a meaningful thing. (Research is still out.) It even goes beyond setting up a fall guy in case the project doesn’t turn out as hoped. This is starting to look like a determined attempt to purge wrongthinkers.

When someone tries to institute a new thing and tells you that if you oppose it, or even question it, you must be some kind of Jew sexist that’s a very dangerous line of reasoning. It’s less about the thing at hand and more about training a knee jerk reaction against people who are branded with a specific label. It either results in mindless destruction of the targeted people or a swift collapse of whatever platform this demagoguery is launched from. In the case of media that means either you start cranking out The Birth of a Nation over and over again or your audience just walks away in contempt.

We’ve seen this twice in the last year. First the 2016 Ghostbusters remake promotional efforts dissolved into mindless accusations of sexism and the target audience ignored the film. It may also have been a bad film, I didn’t watch it to find out and I wasn’t the only one. The film did very little at the box office.

Then Marvel Comics announced that it’s sales were in the tank because no one liked the books they were publishing. Marvel Comics, who publish the source material for some of the most successful movies of the last decade. Was it because audiences wanted to see more of the characters they’d seen on screens or been reading stories about for most of their lives and Marvel had stopped writing those characters? No, it was because they were bigots. Don’t watch the Diversity and Comics videos and find out that comic readers never objected to “diverse” characters before all the mainstays they loved got canned. Just believe they were Jews bigots. Makes everything so much simpler. Unfortunately Marvel fans have abandoned them, with sales dropping to 20,000-30,000 per book, a record low for the company.

The reality is that both these moves were very costly for the people who made them. I’ve said it before but audiences are very rare, precious things. Calling them names or trying to use them in some kind of Pavlovian conditioning experiment to establish yourself as a moral arbiter is not, I repeat, not going to get you anywhere. It will cost you money, it will cost you social capital, it will push people away from the very ideas you hope to promote. The creators of Dr. Who haven’t joined in on this doubling down – yet. Hopefully they won’t.

And this is the real key for us if we’re going to be creators. Audiences can handle a message but if that message looks like it’s about how the messenger is a better life form and they need to fall in line it is going to cost you. The BBC can make a course correction here and put Dr. Who back on track to telling… well, whatever kind of stories attracted people to Dr. Who in the first place. They can say they’re going to run with a woman Doctor but focus on telling the same stories people love and they hope the audience will want to come with. Or they can double down, “call out” their audience for sexism in an attempt to look good and progressive then start down the same path as Ghostbusters and Marvel Comics.

You audience is a treasure. It’s never going to be perfect, it’s never going to be everything you want it to be. Some days you’ll wish it would just go away. But without an audience an artist is just a self indulgent narcissist. And it turns out that a self indulgent narcissist posing as an artist will quickly wind up without and audience.

Poe, Satire and Worldbuilding

Posted by natechen on

Once upon a time I set out to write about the future of humanity. I called it The Divided Futures, a title born mostly from my disdain for the notion that humanity will ever unite under a single government (or if it does, stay that way for long) in it’s pursuit of the stars. The entire storyline was a mix of speculative fiction, political theory and sci-fi nonsense. The entire experiment was born out of a desire to mess around with ideas born of the political situation at the time I wrote it and I wanted to satirize some of the responses I saw being proposed to some issues by pushing them to ludicrous degrees.

All this was born out in the rather convoluted future timeline I put together to explain, step by step, how humanity would go from the early 2000s to 2082, the time of Emergency Surface, the first story I would write for The Divided Futures on this blog. (Some aspects of the setting got worked into earlier stories I wrote elsewhere that were unofficially canonized as I was doing the worldbuilding.)  Eventually I lost interest in the series as other ideas took the forefront but it was a thing I wanted to return to at some point. For a while.

But I had a really hard time working up the enthusiasm for it when I finally got around to it thanks to Bill Nye.

Satire was a big part of what I was shooting for when I put together my speculative future of the next fifty or sixty years. But satire presents a problem, typically codified as Poe’s Law. This law states that, no matter how extreme, satire of extreme movements will be impossible to differentiate from reality. One aspect of the political culture of the last decade or so that I hope to satire was the dangers inherent in extreme environmentalism, particularly the fanaticism around “man made climate change.” I don’t intend to delve too deeply into that particular issue here, the main point I wanted to make was that the climate change cult (as opposed to the environmentally minded) sees any disagreement with their point of view as inherently malicious.

I wanted to show the potentially damaging overreaches that could come from that mentality so I jokingly created a penal colony where all the people who objected to future climate change laws would wind up. I put it on the bottom of the ocean because that’s an idea that’s always appealed to me and it seemed like a good, non traditional place to set a near-future scifi story. What I certainly never expected was for Bill Nye to suggest imprisoning political dissidents as a good idea.

Now I get the logic – if you really think the world is going to collapse tomorrow because of a little carbon I can see why you might go to extreme lengths to solve the problem. But you’d have to think that in spite of all the predictions made about disappearing islands and coastlines in the last thirty years that haven’t come true so I just couldn’t see it happening.

Poe trumps Nye, it seems.

By the same token, an important event to the future of the underwater colony was fact that the existing United States of America no longer exists, having split in a second civil war in the late 2030s. What caused it? The Supreme Court legalizing the euthanization of children with disabilities resulting in a paramilitary group forcibly removing an eight year old with Down Syndrome from Federal custody. Sound far fetched? Because the Netherlands is considering making assisted suicide for totally healthy people legal and that’s probably a more extreme step.

One problem of trying to predict the near future is that it’s always becoming the here and now – and it does that pretty fast. And in the case of satire it seems that means that, no matter how over the top you were aiming to go, you probably won’t go far enough. If you want to do satire you better do it fast.

Does that mean I’m never going back to my goofy little near future setting? I may poke over there someday. I still think it’s full of fun story ideas.  I really want to write some about colonizing the solar system and ridiculously large mass drivers on Mars. But I think I’m going to phase directly satirical elements out of future worldbuilding efforts. It’s depressing…

Whose Struggle?

Posted by natechen on

In fiction a fight is boring if it’s easy. This may surprise people who have been in fights for real, because no matter how easy the fight is your brain will still dump the adrenaline and kick that cardio into overdrive so you’re ready to fight. It’s exciting even if you win or loose in a single hit. But no matter how invested you are in a story being outside of a fight is not the same as being inside one and some part of your brain never forgets you’re not in any real danger.

All in all, this is a positive thing. The excitement of fighting is hard on the body and mind. But it does make the job of a person (or persons) putting a fight in fiction that much harder.

In essence, in order to make a gripping story you need to create an artificial tension in your audience and, just as importantly, you need to do it without getting caught. The simplest way to do this is through pacing, where a fight consists of a series of ups and downs that switch often enough that tracking them simulates the frantic nature of a fight and keeps the audience invested with seeing how each twist will play out until they reach the end.

A good fight usually starts with the viewpoint character at a slight disadvantage, such as being caught by surprise or facing a much larger opponent, introduces three to five twists that the fighter overcomes through creativity, technique or guts, before reaching a climax where the viewpoint character faces their biggest hurdle yet, digs deep down to make one final push and either comes out on top or winds up losing in spite of it. When done properly the audience is left with a satisfying feeling of vicarious accomplishment regardless of the outcome. Done badly it leaves them scoffing at poorly executed narrative devices.

Great examples of what overcoming obstacles during action sequences looks like are found in the action stars of the 1980s. Jackie Chan is one of the most creative action stars in cinema history, fumbling his way through chases and fights with enough physical humor that it feels improvised and delivering a wonderful ride all the way. Bruce Willis makes his way by grits, digging a little bit more effort out of the depths of himself every time the stakes are raised. His face is practically designed to show grim determination in hard places. Bruce Lee brings us pure technique in every perfectly executed combo move, every moment of brilliant footwork and each brutally hard punch and kick.

But what’s important in each of these things is that we see these action stars bringing their powers to bear during the fight.

I ran into this problem when writing The Face of the Clockworker earlier this year. The Clockworker’s schtick was that he could cheat during every fight because his ability to know future events let him walk into every situation forearmed with knowledge of what the news would say about his battles the next day. The problem was, while magic was a force not even a century’s worth of prediction could fully understand, enemies like Thunderclap were something the Clockworker could come fully equipped for.

When I wrote the fight scenes between the Clockworker and Thunderclap from Sam’s point of view they were very boring. He was fully forewarned and forearmed against what Teddy could do, Sam wasn’t struggling in those moments. He already had his answers in place.

But I didn’t want to write about Sam getting ready for a fight. That wouldn’t be interesting at all and, once Sam pulled a future news report to find he successfully arrested Thunderclap, all tension would go out of the actual fight sequence. I did consider having Sam lose because he got overconfident, in fact that was originally what set up his trip Beyond to meet the Gatekeepers, but ultimately I found the easiest thing to do was just to tell the fight from Teddy’s point of view.

Teddy Clapper was a rookie to his superpower and not a particularly smart criminal to boot. Throw him against a guy with power armor, the ability to predict the future and a better working knowledge of what Teddy was capable of than the man himself and you have a fighter who is at a profound starting disadvantage. It made his struggle against the hero of the story more real, more exciting and ultimately, I felt, more sincere than watching Sam run through a series of carefully planned contingencies to corner a person he already knew he would successfully catch.

There are all kinds of places writing an action sequence can go wrong. They can be hard to follow, too long or too short on top of lacking tension. And good tension will not save an action scene that lacks the other factors. But if tension is what you think you’re lacking, consider changing whose point of view you see the sequence from. Even first person narratives can find a way to put themselves in the shoes of someone else for a little while and letting the audience experience what it’s like to struggle against people they’re used to seeing struggle for a goal can give them a new appreciation for those characters. It won’t work all the time, but sometimes a simple change of perspective is just what the doctor ordered.

Try rewriting your favorite action scenes from the point of view of the other side and see what it feels like. How would the walker assault on Hoth change from the Imperial perspective? Or the lobby shootout from the Matrix if we experienced it as a guard? These kinds of experiments help writers grow, evolve and develop new techniques to make better, more exciting stories.

Trademarked Victory

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Let’s talk about free speech and offense. Specifically in the case of Matal v. Tam, an interesting case decided by the US Supreme Court this week. (Yes, for one in this blog’s life we are topical.) The details of the case are a little bizarre but important to the issues of today’s discussion. There was a band. All of the band members were of far Eastern descent. “Asian” if you will. They chose to call their band The Slants. And the US Trademark and Patent Office refused to grant them a trademark on their band name as it was generally considered an insult to people of certain backgrounds.

Namely those of Asian descent.

There’s all kinds of think pieces out there on this issue. I don’t care about them. I want to talk about The Slants. Why did they choose to name their band with a derogatory brand?

Well for starters there’s this fairly comprehensive post on the band’s website giving their reasoning in full. But if you want it in brief they saw a word and they chose to claim it. Three quick quotes of note:

“For too long, people of color and the LGBTQ community have been prime targets under Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act, simply because we believe in the deliberate disarmament of toxic language and symbols.”

“Music is the best way we know how to drive social change: it overcomes social barriers in a way that mob-mentality and fear-based political rhetoric never can.”

“There will always be villainous characters in a free society but we cannot be so blinded in our desire to punish them that we are willing to bear the cost of that cost on the backs of the marginalized.”

Co-opting insults is a great American tradition that predates the Declaration of Independence. The song “Yankee Doodle” was an insulting ditty British troops used to sing to insult the Massachusetts colonists, characterizing them as backward hicks with no idea of what good culture or right living was. The colonists, fully aware of the insults, promised that by the time Massachusetts was done with them the British would be dancing to the tune. On 19 October, 1781, General George Washington accepted General Charles Cornwallis’ surrender. The British troops were piped out to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”.

An insult became a reminder of how the Americans were worthy of respect.

The Slants claim their band name is an attempt to do much the same – although they haven’t cited this particular example to my knowledge. The band wants to break the power of an association – rather than let “slant” be an insult they seek to make it the name of a great band. If they do well then the pejorative nature of the word will quickly fade into the shadows of their musical legacy and if they don’t what is really harmed by their trying? With EPs like The Band That Must Not Be Named the band is showing they at least understand that they need a towering legacy and I say let them try for it. Their music is a little bubblegum for my tastes but I’m sure it has a market and they should have every chance to find it and achieve their goals.

But there are people who don’t like this. Example. In a nutshell this argument boils down to, “People who say mean words about groups who have rough histories hurt those groups like they had run them over with a car full of burning crosses.”

The question I have for these people is, if the power of an insult can be broken, isn’t the long term value of trying such a thing more important than any short term harm the attempt might cause? And even if it fails, should the very act of trying to reinterpret an insult a sign that the community doesn’t need to be coddled by you? Rather than trying to dictate what people can and can’t say, why not let them argue the thing out on their own so they can learn and grow, rather than trying to keep them depended on you so the mean words don’t hurt them.

Fortunately for The Slants, and anyone who hopes to create in America, the Supreme Court sided with Simon Tam and said the band could have their name and the US Patent and Trademark Office cannot stand in their way.

Art and communication are predicated on our taking symbols like words or images and assigning meaning to them. One of the greatest undertakings an artist or communicator can attempt is putting a new meaning to one of these symbols. The undertaking would have so much less value, would do so much less for the human condition, if we couldn’t use that process to change horrible things into delightful things. What would there be left to do? Change delightful things into delightful things? Or worse, turn delightful things into boring things.

The Slants have set their hands to a noble undertaking – turning a horrible thing into a thing of joy. It’s something we should all aspire to. Can they actually do it? I have my doubts, but that’s not what matters. What matters is what they make of it. You’ve earned your chance, boys. Make the most of it.

Boutique Writing

Posted by natechen on

These days the idea of having something made for you is becoming more and more popular. Artisanal beer, boutique clothes and Etsy handicrafts are very popular with consumers. Writing has always had a certain aspect of hand craftsmanship in the care and effort put into any good piece of writing. But the modern era has turned mass communications from a very narrow field into something anyone with an Internet connection can do. Communication, once a very personal activity, has become one of the most impersonal things we do.

On top of that, writing a story is a bit of a selfish endeavor. It requires you to sit down and work out exactly what you want to say, how you want things to happen, then polish every bit of it until you are satisfied. It’s personal and creative and, while those are things common in boutiques, it’s not necessarily a process easily shared. How would you even go about making money off of it?

Well, recently the website Patreon has come to prominence in many Internet based creative circles. The service is basically a cross between subscription billing and crowdsourcing, allowing a creator and his (or her) audience to receive support directly from whatever audience is interested in his or her work and communicate directly with that audience. There’s not many writers supporting themselves on Patreon, partly because not many writers support themselves by writing at all but partly because writing doesn’t mesh well with the Patreon format.

Or, more accurately, the Patreon format doesn’t mesh well with the average writer.

You see, Patreon is essentially a digital storefront, a place where people can sidle on in and belly up to the counter and chat with their favorite artists. Being on Patreon is a bit like being a portrait artist on a boardwalk in a tourist trap. You sit, you draw, you chat up anyone who comes close. The only difference is where in the process they pay you. But most writers, myself included, are introverts who spend most of our communicative energy on whatever we trying to write. And we’re a touch on the secretive side. Yes, workshopping a writing project is important to making it the best it can be. But at the same time, revealing a lot about your story to your audience ahead of time isn’t a good way to tell stories. And letting your audience influence your story too much is a good way to loose the distinctive voice and style that attracted them in the first place.

Then there’s spoiler culture. Where a comic artist – a very common breed of Patreon user – might be able to showcase covers or character design work without revealing too much about a story, a writer doesn’t have that kind of work on hand. Character bios or plot outlines are going to give a lot about your story away and audiences these days are trained to despise that kind of thing. Patreon for writers can’t be a spoiler hub but the service screams for some kind of reward to share with your audience in exchange for following you. Yes, above and beyond what you already do.

Some have suggested having multiple ongoing storylines that your Patreon supporters can vote to advance but I know that personally I’d have a hard time producing the best quality story I could if what I wrote was at the whims of the audience and likely always changing. Plus I would imagine your supporters would ebb and flow depending on whether you were advancing the story they wanted at any given time. Viable? Maybe for some but not many and certainly not me.

Writing advice is very common on the Internet, I give it away free as do many others, so that’s not the greatest way to carry on a dialog with your audience. There might be a market for people interested in editing but that is very time consuming…

Is boutique writing a viable way for a writer to make a living? It doesn’t seem like it is right now, not because the infrastructure isn’t there but because the craft hasn’t evolved to meet the possibility. In the future it might become one. I haven’t cracked the question yet, and I’m not in any hurry to experiment, but if you figure something out be sure to share with me. I’d love to hear it.

Unbelievable

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The willing suspension of disbelief is something every author counts on. So here’s a quick thought experiment: How much disbelief are you willing to suspend when you’re in the audience? And what are the things that test your suspension when you’re consuming media? I’m not just talking about the things that actually take you out of a story but anything that piques your interest even if you put it aside for the sake of enjoying the story. Odds are there are more things in the typical story than you think. The mind tends to gloss over these things but they’re still there and if you want to be a good writer you need to train yourself to catch them in other people’s writing if you’re going to have a chance of catching them in your own.

Unfortunately a lot of looking for unbelievability is a matter of feel. It’s a very subjective field, which may prompt you to ask why authors bother tracking it. The simple fact is that anything that can help you figure out your audience is worthwhile. When trying to work out what’s believable and what’s not it’s a good idea to ask friends and family for help. While not the best source of feedback for your own work; when examining general culture they can be a real benefit to you so take as much advantage of them as you can.

“Try it until you get it” isn’t the most helpful advice so here are a few examples of the kinds of things to look for as you try and figure out what might stretch believability without breaking it.

The Man Without Fear. People who can’t get scared are a bit of a trope in geek circles, the most prominent examples are probably the Green Lanterns of DC Comics and the paladins Gary Gygax put into Dungeons and Dragons. Both are very simple in concept – no matter the situation they don’t get scared – but there’s not anyone like that in real life (outside of people with severe mental disorders). I’ve noticed that people who haven’t spent a great deal of time exposed to the trope tend to find it a bit of a stretch. Sure, there could be people like that but they’d kind of be freaks, right? This is a pretty good example of what to look out for.

The Omnidisciplinary Scientist. You know how smart scientists or engineers on TV seem to be able to figure out just about anything by looking at it for two or three seconds? Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about here. Any given discipline of science requires years of study and work just to get the basics. No one, not even Einstein, has the level of genius these characters portray. It stretches belief but it’s convenient for the story and most people will just let it go.

Chronically Clumsy. This trope shows up in a lot of low quality comedy. As the name suggests it involves someone who’s chronically clumsy constantly making a mess of things. Not only does it get old fast it starts to raise questions about the clumsy person’s friends. Like, why don’t they learn? Again, not a deal breaker on its own. But when stacked with a dozen other unbelievable things… well, it can be a deal breaker.

If you read or watch or listen to a lot of the critics out there you’ll find it’s the little things that are often the breaking point. A work can go from mediocre to bad simply because a single thing jumped out and got under their skin, somehow becoming emblematic of all the unbelievable things in your work. Sometime just cutting one of those things is enough to make the difference.

Of course there are other ways to make your audience accept things that are totally unbelievable and using the right methods might still let you get away with your original vision. Like believability itself, your mileage may vary.

The Rule of Cool. This rule basically states that an audience is more willing to forgive something that looks cools but is unbelievable. Pretty much any action movie made since the 80s is an example of this as most of the physics and fighting in those films wouldn’t work in real life and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny but never seems to bother audiences. Of course not everyone likes action movies so it’s important to know your audience but this rule is still very useful.

The Rule of Funny. Even more subjective than the rule of cool, the rule of funny says that audiences will play along with your unbelievable things if they are funny. Most romantic comedies do this when they put two totally different people with different social circles and life choices in some bizzare situation that results in a relationship forming. No, it wouldn’t happen but it makes for funny situations so we forgive it.

The Fridge. Fridge tropes all revolve around the audience being too tied up in what’s going on in a story to catch on to something else the author is doing. This works really well in some situations but counting on the audience being distracted from unbelievable elements of your story is a risky move. Not only do audiences have different attention spans, if something is outright impossible it tends to show through. Don’t count on this working for anything other than minor story elements.

It’s important to keep track of what it is in your story that defies belief. Not because such elements are inherently bad, but because too many of them can lose your audience. Audiences are rare and valuable things and should not be taken lightly, so don’t burden their credulity willy nilly. Keep track of the unbelievable things in your story and make sure they’re serving the plot. Then, if necessary, employ the tricks of the trade to make your impossible things palatable.

All this requires you to have some sense of your audience going in. None of the techniques for obscuring impossibilities are a substitute for audience understanding because without it you won’t be able to get a handle on what they’ll find outrageous in the first place. So get out there and start finding out what people won’t believe.

The Emotional and Physical Cores

Posted by natechen on

The quest for believable characters is a long and arduous one, full of false leads, difficult lessons and special cases. One such case is the so-called “strong female character.” While what that phrase implies specifically varies from person to person in general it refers to a character who shows the fortitude and strength of character frequently portrayed in cinema by the likes of John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart. Except these characters should be female.

It’s a lofty goal to show as many different characters as possible living life with strong convictions and personal integrity and I wholeheartedly agree that women should portray this as well as men. However, many stories that set out to create a strong female character overlook a concept we’re going to call the physical and emotional cores of the story and that hamstrings their attempt to tell a good story with a strong character at the center. Let’s start by talking about what I mean by physical and emotional cores.

Each story tends to have a a physical and emotional embodiment. Another way to think of the physical embodiment is as the part of the story where action takes place and the emotional embodiment is where the story tries to make you feel something. Most good stories tend to have characters act more in one or the other of these areas to make those characters clearly defined. Yes, this is unrealistic but it tends to lead to better storytelling overall.

The two characters who best embodies the themes of the story carry the emotional and physical cores of the story.

For example, in the Disney classic Sleeping Beauty the emotional core rests with Princess Aurora, who’s feelings of isolation and desires to see the wider world define the emotional tenor of most of the film. The physical core rests with Prince Phillip, who finds Aurora in the forest and takes her to experience new things. He also takes center stage in the battle against Maleficent in the third act, another moment of peak physical storytelling.

It’s important to have the two cores in proximity to each other at moments of importance as they tend to draw one another out into sharp relief and lead to some of the best moments in a story. It’s Phillip and Aurora’s meeting that sparks their resolution to resist their arranged marriages (even though said betrothals are to each other, which they don’t know at the time). It’s also the catharsis of their reunion that makes the climax of the movie hit us square in the feels.

The problem is, if both the physical and the emotional cores are in a single character it can be hard to see how they’re impacting each other. Look at any shoddy piece of fiction and you’ll see unclear motives and hard to understand actions. That can happen for a lot of reasons but sometimes it’s just because one character is carrying too much of the story. Like any real person your characters sometimes need to step back and take a break, breath and let ideas settle. A character can’t do that if they have to carry both halves of a story.

At the same time, it’s the way the two cores impact each other, the emotional and physical character influencing each other with their different goals and needs, that makes the important moments impactful. If both cores are in one character that tension is missing.

How does that relate back to writing “strong female characters”?

Well, in the typical story women carry the emotional core and most people who set out to write strong female characters just take the physical core and hand it to their female character as well resulting in exactly the problem we just discussed. If we want a female character who carries the physical core – and this is typically what people mean by “strong female characters”, many characters have carried the emotional cores of their stories and been plenty strong but that’s not the point – if we want a female character who carries the physical core then we have to put the emotional core somewhere else.

A great example of this is the much more recent Disney film Frozen, where Anna embodies the physical core, climbing the mountain to find her sister and struggling with a slowly debilitating curse, while Elsa embodies the emotional core, struggling with self doubt and self loathing while struggling to maintain emotional distance from those around her.

Another is the animated 1990’s film Ghost in the Shell, where the Major embodies the physical aspect, taking most of the highly kinetic action scenes for herself while her partner, Batou, while still having action beats, mostly serves as a sounding board for her philosophical musings and an emotional tether to the humanity she fears she’s left behind. Where Motoko is mostly an emotional cypher Batou takes it upon himself to feel embarrassed by her lack of modesty and grieve when she is wounded.

Whether or not you’re interested in the mythical “strong female character” understanding where the physical and emotional components of your story lies is important. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your story is missing one or the other of the sides, either. The best action heroes tend to be grounded by family and friends and Harrison Ford still punched someone out in Sabrina. No matter what your story is, knowing who goes where in these equations is going to help you construct a better narrative.

The Broken Character Cycle

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I’m not a huge fan of mainstream American storytelling, especially in longform mediums like TV or serialized novels. This may come as a surprise to longtime readers who have seen me comment on a number of such works in the past, many of which I said I liked. Well, odds are I still like them but as I’ve consumed more and more of them I’ve noticed one plot in particular occurring over and over again, a plot that has grown quite old and worn. I refer to this plot as the Broken Characters Cycle and this week I want to take a quick look at what it is, why I think it’s grown so popular and why, ultimately, I think it needs to go.

First things first. What is the cycle? In broad strokes it looks something like this:

  • There is a character who has made Bad Choices
  • That character seeks a New Start or undertakes a Great Work of Atonement
  • The New Start or Great Work requires the character to form new Relationships
  • The character is improved and edified through the Relationships and values them highly
  • At some point the Great Work forces the character to betray the Relationship or the other(s) in the relationship learns of the Bad Choices the character has made causing them to question the Work
  • The character sacrifices the Relationships for the Great Work (or visa versa)
  • Completing the Work or saving the Relationship leaves the character unfulfilled and full of guilt
  • The character seeks a New Start or undertakes another Great Work
  • Repeat ad nauseum

So why is this so popular? Two reasons.

First, it is a really good structure for a story. It has conflict built into it already, the structure is very flexible and can apply to anything from a courtroom drama to a hospital procedural and still function as is. Pretty much any kind of character can fit into the story structure, from cheerful slackers to driven geniuses. Second, the end of the cycle seamlessly blends into the beginning, allowing movies in a franchise or seasons of a TV show to return their characters to their neutral starting position and facilitating an easy set up for the next installment.

Both of these storytelling considerations are very important for the writers of long, ongoing media properties. Each movie, book or season needs to start at a place where new audience members can easily join and that makes the second point very important. The first point makes keeping up with the grueling timetable of a modern media franchise much easier as the basic framework of story and narrative beats never changes, just the details plugged in to them.

But these are only benefits for the production crews working on these media properties. The broken characters cycle doesn’t really provide a whole lot of benefits for the audience beyond a steady stream of story. And even that steady story can become a drawback.

The thing about the cycle is that it isn’t particularly complex and is very predictable, with story beats that come in very specific times and from very specific directions for maximum impact. You don’t have to be a media glutton or a trained story analyst to start seeing through the cycle, it just starts happening after a little while. And, worst of all, it doesn’t let the character at the center of the cycle grow from their experiences at all. There’s no character growth or substantial change to the status quo that isn’t quickly made irrelevant or undone entirely.

That gets frustrating very quickly. Media franchises need some kind of escalation over time, especially when they run for more than three installments. When the plot deliberately cuts that out of the equation through every iteration then it gets harder and harder to get invested.

Worse, while the cycle does provide great potential for conflict, both internal and external, for all those involved it’s very easy to see it coming, to the point where who falls in which roles can be determined as soon as a character starts down the cycle. With a story so easily predicted it can be easy to lose your audience. Think of it this way. I loves me a good pot of chili, but if I had to eat it every day for a month I’d get tired of it no matter how good the ingredients were or how skillful the chef that prepared it. The cycle is the same way – it’s not flawed inherently but today pretty much any story seeking to be dramatic executes the cycle at some point, if not as it’s primary story arc then as the arc for a supporting character. An most of them will run through the cycle repeatedly.

Now it’s true that there aren’t really any original stories, just new takes on character arcs like the broken characters cycle. And the lack of novelty is one of the reasons why anything attempting something fresh, from presentation to technique, tends to attract the attention of media critics. But with pretty much every major dramatic media franchise leaning on this cycle to some extent broken characters wear out their welcome very quickly.

I don’t really know what to do about the broken characters cycle. As I said before, it’s grown so popular for good reason. With the endless churn of Netflix, Hollywood and TV constantly demanding new content it’s entirely possible we won’t see a change of direction simply because relying on crutches like the cycle are the only way to keep up. But with the rise of the Internet independent media has begun to challenge old production cycles and changed the playing field. I hope to contribute to that change myself. But even if you don’t be on the lookout for this kind of ingrained wisdom. Stepping outside of it is sometimes all it takes to be a breakout in the media world.

See you next week when we talk about not talking.

Iron Fist’s Identity Crisis is NOT What You Think

Posted by natechen on

For those who are new to this blog, the basic pattern I have is to alternate between writing fiction and general commentary on writing and stories. Now that The Face of the Clockworker is complete we’re switching gears into something a little different. Hope you enjoy!

Netflix original shows are stirring a lot of hype these days, none more so than those connected to Marvel. I recently picked up Netflix and decided to give the latest series, Iron Fist, a watch to see what all the noise was about.

That was a mistake.

Iron Fist is not particularly good TV, an opinion most people who have watched the show seem to agree with. The reasons for that are pretty straightforward, yet it’s a trap a lot of writers, myself included, tend to fall into and that makes it worth looking at.

Let me start by mentioning two things people are blaming that are not the reason Iron Fist is lackluster. First and foremost, the problem is not Finn Jones, be it as an actor, a martial artist or a white dude. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t find his performance in Iron Fist particularly memorable. But he does give the role a bit of nuance, handling nostalgia, discontent, joy and anger pretty well. He’s not going to win awards for his performance and that won’t be an oversight – he didn’t do anything that would stand out. But his performance is worthy of any number of CSI/Law and Order franchise shows and plenty of people like them.

It is true that Finn Jones was basically an amateur martial artist but, through intense training and what was most likely good use of stunt doubles they were able to make him pass as a competent fighter. Maybe not a great one, which he is admittedly supposed to be, but it’s really hard to tell. Danny Rand does so little fighting in the series, especially in the first half, it’s hard to get a grasp on how good or bad he is at it. Iron Fist has some really great fight scenes in it, especially in the later episodes. Not all of them are works of beauty and they lean a little too much towards being over choreographed ballet than the frantic, semirealistic action of a John Wick. But it’s supposed to be a martial arts series, not a typical run-and-gun action series so I can forgive that. The genre tends much more towards that kind of hyper stylized action and I generally like it. I generally liked the action in Iron Fist, too. In short, I don’t think Jones’ experience – or lack thereof – in the wushu department was the problem – or even a problem.

Finally, I don’t think the fact that Finn Jones was white was a problem. I could go on and on about the European martial arts traditions and how they developed differently from the Asian martial arts, and why, but that would waste space. Firstly because the point of it all would be to say that the basics of unarmed combat exist in every culture, the cultures just put their own spin on them. The only thing particularly unique about the Asian traditions is the strong emphasis on spiritual awareness they tend to include in their teachings. Second because that’s not the real problem people have when they make the point.

For some reason a small cadre of people hate the notion of an outsider coming in, learning a skill from a given culture and mastering it better than his teachers. The fact that a white person does it somehow makes this the same as colonization, apparently. The whole notion is ridiculous. Ignoring the fact that outsiders as protagonists makes exposition much easier for the author, the point is it happens all the time. In fact, it can lead to radically advancing the art form. Consider the Suzuki school of music. Shinichi Suzuki, a Japanese man, created one of the most widespread and successful methods of early music education even though all the instruments taught with that method are European.

Besides, Iron Fist isn’t even a story about a man learning and mastering a skill from a foreign culture. It’s about a man who has already done that and comes home to use the new wisdom and power he gained from the lessons of others to help those he left behind. Danny Rand frequently seems to miss the world he left behind far more than he values the one he returned to. What’s really being praised in that case, American culture or Eastern culture? And why should it make a difference either way?

The second thing that is not the problem is the show’s production schedule. I hear it was somewhat rushed, in particular leading to Jones not getting as much training in stunts and martial arts as the stunt directors might have wished. Maybe this all is true, but I couldn’t see many signs of it in the way the show was shot or the way the action scenes unfolded.

In truth, this show could have had any lead actor and all the filming time in the world and, if the script and structure of the story wasn’t touched, I would still find it mediocre.

The real problem with Iron Fist is that, while it features a protagonist who’s supposed to be a master of martial arts and uses that mastery to defend the little guy there isn’t a whole lot of martial arts or defending of little guys going on at first. And even when the series picks up in the second half, Iron Fist remains weirdly obsessed with corporate intrigues, boardroom politics and the owners of the Rand Corporation, the business Danny’s parents owned before they all flew off and died in a plane crash along with Danny. Compared to the kung fu action we are promissed by the show’s premise it’s all pretty boring.

Worse, the show treats this corporate conflict as the core conflict rather than the sideshow. The mastermind of the process is the villain taken down in the final episode even though he hasn’t really been an obstacle to Danny for the rest of the series. The Hand, the villainous Triad-ninja hybrid crime gang that Danny spends most of the series fighting gets plenty of screen time but doesn’t really seem to do much for the story. In fact, except for a tacked on and nonsensical attempt to have the climactic episode of the show tie in to Danny fighting a dragon and gaining his powers during his training, the whole corporate intrigue side of the show doesn’t tie into Danny’s character arc at all.

While the Meechums and other corporate characters are kind of interesting, and might have made for a good story on their own, when tied to the story of Iron Fist they just take up running time that could have been spent developing characters like Colleen Wing or Claire Temple more, characters who brought much more to the central thrust of Danny’s story than the Meechums. Not to mention we might have gotten to see Danny doing more cool martial arts stuff like, I don’t know, fighting a dragon?

This is a common problem for a lot of writers and Iron Fist is a great example of why cramming too many conflicts, characters and themes into a single story hurts. The people who wrote Iron Fist tried to chase two rabbits and caught neither, leaving the audience hungry and feeling like their time was wasted. The show is a mess because no one knew what kind of story was being told. Sad, but not entirely unexpected. Better luck with The Defenders Marvel.