Category Archives: On Writing

I Got Timelines to Kill

Posted by natechen on

This is the second half of the big Alternate Timelines discussion! Part one is here, and you might want to read it just to figure out what I mean by some of the terms I’m throwing around. They came right off the top of my head not from reputable sources like TV Tropes and might not be familiar.

So today let’s ask a simple question: Are alternate timelines a good thing?

Any answer to this is going to be very subjective so for a moment I’ll speak just for myself and say: As a general rule I like them but only when there’s just one or, at most, two.

See, when we’re dealing with Baileiesque or Narnian timelines they’re really strong. Each serves a distinct purpose in the story and presents the answer to that powerful “what if?” question. Baileiesque stories keep the audience’s attention by highlighting one or two sudden, important changes to things the audience knew and had probably become complacent with. Narnian stories throw new wonders a the audience in rapid succession and keep the interest high, doing their best when each new element is distinct, both from everyday life and what the reader has seen previously.

In all, these two brands of alternate timelines are very effective narrative devices and their nature ensures they don’t get out of hand.

Since a Baileiesque world is a narrative device to spur character development it only exists as long as it’s needed – most of these kinds of timelines only exist as dreams or as a result of supernatural intervention anyway. I mentioned Star Trek’s Mirror, Mirror in my last post and that’s a great example of how even “permanent” alternate timelines can, for all practical intents and purposes, only be temporary narrative devices. The episode was great, gave good insight into Kirk and Spock and never had to be discussed again after it was over. That’s significant because the greatest problem with alternate timelines is that they present so many memory issues. With all the major characters and locations (and sometimes minor ones) duplicated keeping them all straight for a long period of time would be taxing. But Baileiesque narratives don’t require that so their value isn’t impacted by the complexity they could introduce.

Narnian timelines work because they assume one of the worlds is basically identical to our own. Usually, little time is spent exploring the mundane world in a broad sense. Instead the story spends the majority of its time in the Narnian world, letting the exotic and unusual work its magic on the mundane protagonists. In this way the potential complexity isn’t really that much greater than any other fantasy work.

Things start getting trickier with Ultimate timelines. Re-imagining an existing property comes with a lot of issues related to fanbase, expectations and changing cultures. Adding the idea of continuity with a previous timeline to the mix is frequently more liability than benefit. Remember the example of Star Trek: Into Darkness? Perfect case study.

One of the things I found most frustrating about that film was the complete recreation of Spock’s death sequence from Wrath of Kahn, except with Kirk and Spock switching roles. A lot of people loved it just because it was Wrath of Kahn with new special effects and the roles reversed but that ignores the larger context of the story. Consider just a few problems this created:

  • Both characters wind up speaking dialog that is out of character for them. Kirk’s speech is overly precise and slightly stilted, Spock’s is inappropriately emotional and comforting.
  • Where Spock repairing the engine in Wrath of Kahn made sense because Spock was a scientist doing precise technical work on precise technical equipment, Kirk fixing that same precise technical equipment by drop-kicking it is laughably absurd. Engines do not work that way.
  • Kirk is revived by Kahn blood. Science in Star Trek is rarely that shakey.
  • Spock goes on a rampage. On a rampage. Spock. COME. ON.

A weakness of Ultimate timelines is the feeling that the creators need to homage the past incarnation of the story somehow. When a crossover with the actual past timeline is slipped into the story it warps the story even worse. I’m not sure leaving Leonard Nimoy out of the J.J. Abrams reboots would have changed them for the better but I’m not sure the huge impact Wrath of Kahn had on Into Darkness would have been quite so jarring if the writers hadn’t been worried about making two Spocks work in that world.

Ultimate reboots can kind of work as a force to be reckoned with in and of themselves. They’re sort of a genre, sort of a framing device, and sometimes they can become really successful. Look at Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy or Naoki Urosawa’s Pluto. But those stories never tried to be anything other than updates of their source material. Connecting them narratively to the source material would have needlessly muddled the waters.

That leaves us with quantum timelines. And it’s time for complete honesty:

I only like the idea of a quantum multiverse in a story when that’s the heart of the story. Just throwing out the idea of alternate timelines that sometimes show up but aren’t always involved in the story is adding a huge, huge burden on the audience. They need to keep track of what characters exist in both universes and what characters dont, not to mention whatever all the other differences between the two worlds are. They need to keep track of what characters exist in only one universe or the other. They need to do both of those things for each and every quantum timeline that exists, because there inevitably wind up being lots of them. And they need to keep track of how and why people are getting around in this complex quantum multiverse. It’s a huge amount of information to keep track of and you can’t expect them to juggle it all if it’s not of constant relevance to the plot. On top of all of that, you have to find a solid status quo you can keep returning to, if the audience is constantly being shoved into the new and weird/wacky/fantastic worlds then sooner or later they get jaded. An occasional dose of “normalcy” as your worldbuilding defines normal is an important part of keeping audiences hungry for new stories.

You have to be a good author to do all this and make it work. (Surprise!)

Now when a quantum multiverse is the foundation for a plot and properly executed with the right amount of help for the audience, so they can keep track of what’s going on, quantum multiverses make for great storytelling. But not everyone uses them that way. In fact, they’re used that way only occasionally.

This whole discussion started because I was asked what I thought of comic books using alternate timelines as plot devices. Marvel and DC both use quantum multiverses to give them access to Baileiesque, Ultimate and regular old quantum alternate timelines. And they expect their audiences to keep track of all of that even though they only use the plot threads occasionally.

That’s bad writing.

Sure, you can cross over into a negaverse on occasion, so long as it’s the same one every time, or go exploring totally different, unique universes on occasion. But expecting your audience to track with five, ten, or fifty different timelines? No. That’s bad form. I’ve noticed that DC, at least, tries to do it less these days and that’s good. In general, that’s a trend I’d like to see continue. Maybe they could let some of the publishing space that frees up go to bringing the Blue Beetle back…

But anyway. That’s what I think of the alternate timeline plot device: It’s good when it’s used properly and not overdone to a confusing extent. Like all potent narrative devices, let the aspiring author handle with care.

An Open Letter to Sherman Alexie

Posted by natechen on

Mr. Alexie,

I’ve noticed a certain amount controversy in your recent selection of a poem by my friend and colleague Michael D. Hudson for the 2015 edition of Best American Poetry. Allow me a moment to congratulate you on your integrity on choosing to leave him in the collection. Mike is a dedicated poet who not only works hard on his own materials but teaches a class at the Allen County Public Library where aspiring amateur poets can bring their poetry for public reads and workshopping.

I haven’t read much of his poetry myself, but then as near as I can gather Mike’s poetry isn’t really germane to the discussion at hand, is it? The controversy over his appearance in BAP comes entirely from his use of a pseudonym and what that supposedly says about his character.

So let me tell you what I hear about Michael’s character from his use of the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou.

What I hear is a profound respect for the literary traditions of China. Yes, Mike chose his pseudonym because it increased his chances of getting published in an industry dominated by identity politics. But we don’t assume Benjamin Franklin used the pen name Silence Dogood as an attempt to steal something from someone else, but in an attempt to make his point rather than being ignored. I find it highly unlikely that Mr. Franklin would have chosen to represent himself as he did if he had no respect for the insight and intellect of women – and I don’t think Mike would have chosen to represent himself by a Chinese pseudonym if he didn’t have a respect for the literary traditions of China.

Let’s face it, Mr. Alexie. China has a rich, powerful and four thousand year old literary tradition. Said tradition is deep and nuanced, literary and poetic, philosophical and mundane. It has enough depth to support three of its greatest philosophers squaring off against three of Europe’s greatest thinkers in one of the Epic Rap Battles of History, surely it can stand a few people representing themselves by Chinese names. Rather than saying Mike took something from the Chinese tradition shouldn’t you say that Mike is now a part of Chinese tradition and will enjoy twice the scrutiny – that of Chinese scholars as well as that of American scholars? For that matter, what would the opinion of a Chinese thinker be on the work of Mike Hudson?

There’s a story I’m fond of, probably apocryphal but quite illustrative. The details vary from telling to telling but the essentials go like this: There was a fairly inexperienced American sports reporter at the Olympics who wound up standing next to a fairly prominent Chinese Communist official while observing one of the events. Teams were shuffling from one place to the other and there was an awkward lull things. The reporter felt like he should says something to fill time but he didn’t want to give offense by bringing up anything relating to current events and the strained relations between America and China. Flailing about frantically, the cub reporter quickly decided to introduce himself and ask, “What do you think of the American Revolution?”

The Communist official thought for a moment and then answered, “It is too soon to tell.”

The point? Chinese philosophy very often takes a long view. They view current events like a man standing at the edge of a rushing river. Yes, they seem to be moving very quickly but in the end what people are seeing is actually a very small part of a huge cycle that is endless and unchanging. The water flows to the ocean, rises as rain, falls on the land, flows into the river and rushes by the man on the riverbank on the way to the ocean over and over and over again. Chinese thinkers view the past as a huge cycle, repeating over and over again and only those enlightened enough to break the cycle and transcend it are remembered. The value of any author or poet is not seen in the present day but many, many generations down the line.

(As an aside: I am speaking in fairly broad terms here Mr. Alexie. I am aware that there are numerous traditions of intellectual thought in China. In fact, China is a nation composed of many ethnic groups of wildly different languages, histories and schools of thought. Trying to lump them together into a convenient label like “Chinese” is like lumping all the ethnicities and histories of Americans into a single group. It’s silly.

I noticed you characterized your response to Mike’s pen name as that of one “brown” man to another. If you put my father, who was born in Taiwan and had two parents who immigrated from the mainland, up against any typical person of European descent you’d have a hard time telling their skin tone apart. His whiteness, or lack thereof, is immaterial to who he is, what experiences he can communicate and the impact those things have on other people. The only reason it would matter is if there was some kind of quota for how many Chinese people/people of a given color there could be in a given place/event/publication at any given time and surely we don’t want that.)

Now you can think what you will of the value of the Chinese way of thinking. But it seems to me that said way of thinking precludes us judging a person’s artistic merit during their own lifetime, or even the lifetime of the civilization that spawned it. In that respect, Mike is the same as all other poets that are weighed in the balance of time.

And that’s the other thing I hear from Mike’s decision to submit poems under a Chinese pseudonym: He’s saying he wants to walk with us on the way to the end of time. If using a different name is all that takes then so be it. Michael Hudson hasn’t taken anything from anyone. He’s offered to be a fellow traveler with us as we explore the full depths of the American Literary scene. And for accepting his offer in spite of all that drove you to reject it, I applaud you, Mr. Alexie.

Sincerely yours,

Nathaniel Chen

Get Me to the Church on Timelines

Posted by natechen on

So recently I was asked for my opinion on alternate timelines and alternate universes, particularly as used in comics. This is really a big topic to tackle all at once so I thought I would break it down into two parts. This week I wanted to look at what kinds of alternate universes there are, just so we’re all on the same page, and then next week I’ll give my opinion on the usefulness of each in telling a story.

Let me start by defining what’s not an alternate timeline for the purposes of this discussion, namely anything like alternate history fiction. If we were to accept that definition then all fiction counts as an alternate timeline of some sort and the term just stops being useful. Yes, there are genres of fiction that are deliberately structured to be to our world as some of the following definitions of an “alternate timeline” are to fictional worlds but when you get down to basics you’ll realize all fiction does fit that description to some extent so you just have to ask how much the creators intended for that to be true. If that makes sense.

Let’s just move on.

For a story to have an alternate universe premise it must have two separate worlds that are somehow the same (a shared history, shared characters or something similar) and then make the characters of those two worlds aware of each other. That’s a little dense, I know, but maybe I can clear up what I mean by giving some examples of the four prevailing types of alternate universe.

The first, and probably best known kind of alternate universe is the Baileiesque alternate universe. This kind of alternate universe I’ve named for George Bailey, the protagonist of It’s a Wonderful Life. George’s story is one of the biggest, best known examples of the type in popular culture and most people probably know the story already, how George Bailey was contemplating suicide and callously tells his guardian angel that the people who know him would have been better off if he’d never been born.

So Clarence, George’s angel watchman, takes his charge to a twisted, darkened world where George meets people and sees places that should be familiar but seem to have been robbed of something that made them good and vital. It’s a world where George Bailey was never born.

Baileiesque alternate timelines are always defined by the person who visits them and exist to show them something about themselves. They’ve been used in everything from simple morality stories like It’s a Wonderful Life to iconic science fiction like the Star Trek episode Mirror, Mirror. These alternatives are narrative devices that let characters and audiences explore some path not taken and strive to make sure that both audience and character see as much as possible from their “home” world reflected in the alternative timeline.

The second kind of alternate universe is the Narnian alternate universe. These kinds of places are entirely different from the world as we know it, possibly even having different rules governing them from the beginning of time. As the name implies, Narnian universes are best embodied in C.S. Lewis’ fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia. They are places of wonder visited by (usually) more mundane people who become something more than they were as a result of their visit.

Unlike Baileiesque stories, Narnian alternate universes serve to build something new in characters, rather than reveal something that is already true about them. Narnian stories are hero’s journeys, rather than opportunities for introspection. As a result there’s as little overlap between people, places and histories as possible between most Narnian alternate universes and the homes of the characters who visit them.

The third kind of alternate universe is an Ultimate universe. The name is derived from Marvel’s Ultimate line of comic books, where that publishing house completely reimagined its heroes with modern backstories and a more tightly written continuity. Characters were reworked to fit new sensibilities or storytelling conventions. Then the whole thing eventually crossed over into the main Marvel timeline before Mainline Marvel, Ultimate Marvel and a few other Marvel ideas got mashed into an incomprehensible mess that’s supposed to be the new continuity going forward.

Confused? I am too.

Let me try and give a better illustration of the Ultimate alternate universe phenomenon. Get on Netflix and watch Star Trek, both the original TV series and the movie Wrath of Kahn, then the two recent J.J. Abrams films. If anyone accuses you of wasting time tell them it’s for science.

Back? Good. You’ve now experienced the Ultimate phenomenon in a very limited case. When Star Trek was rebooted the studio couldn’t resist using Leonard Nimoy to tie-in for all the fans of the classic series. But the way this reboot reinterprets the characters, particularly in the case of Uhura and Spock, and casts the entire crew of the Enterprise as misfits rather than the cream of Starfleet is done entirely to make the narrative more exciting for modern viewers. The very long shadow Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn casts over Star Trek: Into Darkness is another classic hallmark of Ultimate alternate universes and the existence of Nimoy-Spock solidifies the modern movie franchises as true alternate timelines, since they’ve interacted with the original.

Unlike Narnian and Baleiesque alternate universes, which exist primarily as narrative devices, Ultimate universes exist to allow a popular story that has grown out of hand or out of relevance to take the highlights and rebuild the story and characters into something new and easier for new audiences to get into. At least, in theory.

The final kind of alternate universe is the quantum alternate universe or the more commonly used term multiverse. You know how I said Baileiesque universes show how the world would be if one thing were different? Quantum universes assume that all the different things that could happen did happen and each has its own universe. Basically, a quantum universe is the ultimate attempt to answer “what if?”

Now the thing that makes multiverses tick is that lots of people travel around in them – there’d be no point, narratively speaking, otherwise. The alternate possible universes are open to everyone, so they don’t have a character building purpose as a set piece. Rather they are almost always the central lynchpin of the plot, the thing that makes everything else interesting and effective. The many alternate universes in a quantum universe is somewhere between MacGuffin and Deus Ex Machina, driving the plot forward and bringing it to a close.

So these are the four broad types of alternate timelines that exist in modern fiction. How good or useful are they? Tune in next week and we’ll hash that out – but if you want the short version it’s “depends.”

Genrely Speaking: Superhero Literature

Posted by natechen on

This is a genre. Seriously.

Superheroes are big right now and writing novels about them has slowly started to gain ground as writers interested in telling their own superheroic stories have realized just how difficult it is to break into the comic publishing industries. The two big comic publishing houses are reluctant to throw resources behind unknown characters/authors and the process of printing comic books, which the American market expects to come in color, is very expensive for smaller/independent publishers so not many new titles get started that way, either.

That pretty much leaves writers wanting to dig into superheroes but with no artistic skill of their own two options – find an artist willing to work with them and pursue the webcomic route or write a novel. Artists willing to work on these kinds of independent projects are hard to come by so we’re seeing more and more superhero literature turning up. To be fair, novels are capable of many things comic books are not and authors may also be drawn to that. So what are the signifiers of superhero literature?

  1. Superheroes. Or at the very least people with the powers of superheroes, going the whole nine yards and including costumes, codenames and the like is optional although the best examples of the genre that I’ve seen find very good reasons to include both (particularly Marion G. Harmon’s excellent series Wearing the Cape). Note that these characters do not have to be at the center of the story, they just have to be present. Carrie Vaughn’s End of the Golden Age features a completely normal protagonist and is probably the best-written example of the genre I’ve read.
  2. A strong emphasis on physical conflict. A direct influence of the genre’s original incarnation, superheroes have always been a bit of a power fantasy and the ultimate fulfillment of that fantasy is being able to stand up to danger in the most direct way possible. Whether it’s stopping a tsunami or battling a supervillain expect superhero fiction to have the protagonist right there on the scene, facing the opposition with their bare hands and whatever powers at their disposal.
  3. Analysis of the emotional and long-term consequences of the conflicts the protagonist are caught up in. This is what really sets the genre apart from comic books. Producing comic panels that accurately convey subtler nuances of emotion is difficult, as is having enough text space to really delve into a character’s psyche. Raw text allows much more depth to be explored and is much cheaper to produce. This is not a license for satire, the story must take the superheroics of its characters absolutely seriously and show people reacting to them in authentic ways. When it does, superhero literature is at its best.

What are the weaknesses of superhero literature? Setting aside the inherent ridiculousness of the concept the genre has a strong emphasis on sensationalism and wish fulfillment that, when not handled well, can make it feel very juvenile. Of the three points listed above #3 is the most important in making the story work – if the emotional depth or realistic look at consequences is missing then the willing suspension of disbelief will quickly fall apart for all but the most hardcore audiences – who are probably all reading comic books and not that interested in pure text.

Which is the genre’s other weakness. Superhero literature is for those who like the abstract idea of superheroes but have never found that idea taken in a direction they care for by most comics publishers. It’s not likely to be a point of contact between book lovers and comic lovers and we’re not likely to ever see a series of novels focusing on big name properties like Superman or Iron Man simply because those characters’ stories are already being told in another medium that fans like better.

What are the strengths of superhero literature? There are a lot of serious questions the idea of superheroes would raise in any society. Few of those serious questions are addressed in comics and, when they are, the constraints of the medium (25-40 pages of story a month in most cases) can really cramp comics ability to answer them. While some titles, like Irredeemable, have tangled with the these ideas a little and the upcoming Batman vs. Superman promises some of the same the societal implications of superheroes that are a running subtheme in Wearing the Cape, no other medium can go as deep as a novel.

Also, while superheroes are often presented to audiences as role models what exactly that means for people when those role models come up short is rarely addressed in comics. Both End of the Golden Age and Alex Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible offer interesting insight into what trying to be a heroic role model might cost heroes shouldering the mantle of role model – and those who love them.

Superhero literature is a very young genre, the youngest we’ve tackled so far, and as such there’s a lot to be desired in it. That said it does show promise in taking a very popular kind of story of the era and making it something a little deeper and more challenging. All in all, well worth a look every now and then to see how it’s developing.

The Whole Story is More Than You Think

Posted by natechen on

So here’s a post I’ve been thinking a lot about writing but so far put off. Once upon a time I wrote a post about nonfiction writing and the kinds of techniques a fiction writer can sharpen while writing real life events. I’ve been thinking about a follow-up based on some real life journalism I’ve seen in the last year or so but I’ve been struggling with how to approach it. After much deliberation I’ve decided that the direct approach is best and here we are. Today let’s talk about what fiction writers can learn from the recent failings of professional journalism. In particular I want to look at three cases where the press screwed up, what the consequences of that failing was and how writers (nonfiction and fiction) can avoid their mistakes and the related outcomes.

The stories of note for today are: The beginnings of #GamerGate, the Stephanopolous/Clinton Foundation situation and the Rolling Stone UVA article. Some of you may just want to stop now, since these are touchy subjects. That’s fine. But I think there are good lessons to find here and as writers we shouldn’t be afraid to look at them. Some of you have no idea what I’m talking about. That’s fine too. I’ll try and get you up to date.

That disclaimer given, let’s get started. #GamerGate started about a year ago, when long running murmurs about collusion and conflicts of interest in video game journalism broke into fullblown Twitter and Blogosphere rioting. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the accusation that a journalist had written articles praising the work of a game developer he was romantically involved with – without giving the public any indication of the relationship between them.

Now before we go any further – I am aware that #GamerGate has been tied to some harassment and a lot of critics and commentators in the video gaming world have been critical of those who use the hashtag (ironically their critical behavior is hard to differentiate from the things they decry in #GamerGate). Personally, I’m not interested in parsing all of that out. Far too much of the debate has turned into an us vs. them kind of a thing. Thousands of words could be used on talking about the good and bad things tied to each side of the movement but my main point here is about what sparked the outrage in the first place – conflict of interest.

Directly related is the Stephanopolous revelation. In short, George Stephanopoulos donated money to the Clinton Foundation and then proceeded to do numerous stories involving Hillary Clinton during the previous presidential election without notifying his employer (ABC) or the public. Once again, this is conflict of interest.

For those who don’t know, conflict of interest in journalism happens whenever someone has a connection to a story that could cause them to omit facts damaging to one side of a story (or worse, alter facts to make that side look better). Now in many cases conflict of interest is easy to deal with – usually just mentioning that the reporter is connected to one side of a story or the other in some way is considered enough courtesy to the audience. For instance, whenever a TV news story covers the parent company that owns them it’s considered good form to mention that connection. Most members of the audience will then know to read a little closer between the lines – most people (even journalists!) will hesitate to speak badly about their employers in a public forum so the story may bear further scrutiny. Discerning how much scrutiny is needed and where more information might be acquired is a responsibility that falls to the audience but letting the public know about the conflict of interest is the responsibility of the journalist.

In some cases, though, the stakes are too high and the format unsuited for a simple disclaimer to be sufficient. For example, George Stephanopoulos was slated to moderate a presidential debate on ABC. Given that Hillary Clinton is a candidate in that election and there is a real possibility that Stephanopoulos might go easy on her, or in some other way favor her in the proceedings, he was asked to recuse himself, stepping away from the proceedings and, to his credit, he agreed to do so.

Now the UVA case is much nastier than the other two in pretty much every respect. A Rolling Stone reporter named Sabrina Erdley wrote an article where she told the story of a woman, identified only by a pseudonym, who claimed to have been gang raped at a frat party. But almost as soon as the story came out the fraternity involved, Phi Kappa Psi, began bringing forward evidence that debunked the story. Huge amounts of damage was done all around – to Rolling Stone, UVA and fraternities everywhere. Sabrina Erdley’s errors in reporting is simple. She didn’t ask for the whole story.

Erdley didn’t talk to anyone from Phi Kappa Psi and in doing so ignored basic journalistic procedures. She never gave them a chance to defend themselves and also didn’t thoroughly check her facts. The result was a discredited story, a hit to the reputation of the press in general and Rolling Stone in particular and huge damage to the status of the University of Virginia and the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.

In all three cases we see that a failure of journalistic standards resulted in damage to the reputation of the journalists involved and the profession as a whole and furor was kicked up which obscured very real issues beyond the journalistic foul-ups. So, with that lovely journey through the failings of the press behind us, what are the lessons to be learned?

The first and most important is that personal viewpoint is a part of the story. For the gaming press and George Stephanopoulos the problem was that they didn’t talk about their personal biases. Now for fiction writers that may seem like an odd point to bring up. After all, fiction authors aren’t writing about themselves they are writing about fictional characters (except for those few times real people come up).

Problem is, fiction writers are striving for verisimilitude and they won’t get it if their characters don’t also have biases and preferences that are clear to the readers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read stories where the main character was consistently portrayed as near sainthood, impartially moving through the other characters and dispensing judgments surely meant to appear reasonable and fair but, to me, appeared very biased and strange. This undercuts the credibility of the character and your credibility as a writer. Far better to have a clearly biased character who struggles with or embraces their biases in front of the audience than try and pretend there’s no bias in your story. (There always will be. It’s human nature.)

How much and in what way you demonstrate that bias is going to depend on a lot of factors. Is your story told first person or third person? Is it comedic or dramatic? What’s the best time to reveal these biases? These are questions that you will have to answer over time but one good way to find guidelines is to reread stories you loved looking for moments when the biases of protagonists or other central characters you loved were revealed. Chances are there will be patterns for you to study and learn from.

Now you, the author, also have a bias but that’s actually a lot easier to deal with. A quick Forward at the beginning of your tale is usually enough to put it out in the open and let the audience get on with it.

Where #GamerGate and Stephanopolous were examples of the person telling the story leaving parts of themselves out of it, Erdley’s failure in the UVA story resulted from the author not telling both sides both sides. At first glance not telling both sides of a story would seem like its irrelevant to fiction since most fiction has a protagonist who’s story you’re telling and that should be the sum of it, right?

No.

Tell me, what do math and writing fiction have in common? Those who do them are expected to show their work. At least when it’s intended for the consumption of others.

Audiences have been trained to expect a distinct cause and effect relationship for events and character motivations in fiction. That’s not realistic but, oddly enough, if it’s not there then people start to find things unrealistic – just one of many odd contradictions in the art form. In the case of the conflict between protagonist and antagonist, in order for it to feel truly well developed the audience must be able to see it from both sides. The antagonist has to have a chance to make his or her or its case in some way. That may be through a scientist explaining the cause of a natural disaster, a monologuing speech by a villain to another character or just in a flashback to the circumstances that started the antagonist on his personal path. It can come in any number of ways but if the audience doesn’t get that look at the antagonist’s side of the story then your story is failing.

Like several things we’ve looked at this summer the necessity of telling the whole story boils down to the nature of fiction as a deliberate attempt to provoke a response from the audience but, at the same time, not let the audience know they are being manipulated with a specific result in mind. This is a very difficult result to achieve. One way to keep their suspicions low is to tell the whole story, completely examining both protagonist and antagonist, their biases and viewpoints, and let the audience draw their own conclusions. Which is ultimately what they’re going to do anyways, so why get in their way?

Putting that much work into a story is scary and hard, since you have to closely examine stuff that’s pretty potent. But if you don’t your audience will catch onto the fact that you’re messing with them and the blowback can be intense. Not as intense as in the examples we’ve glanced at today – the stakes are much lower in fiction after all – but intense none the less. If you value your story it’s worth the work to avoid it, in fiction and in journalism.

Mid August Update

Posted by natechen on

Hello all! It’s been a while since the ol’ blog went down to one post a week and I thought I’d bring you up to speed on where things stand. Party because August was when I promised to have an updated and partly because I’m vacationing this week and an update was a short thing to squeeze in before I left.

My future plans go like this: Continue doing one post a week for the rest of the year but switch to fiction instead of essays starting in September.

Yes, I’ve finally gotten tired of rambling about general writing ideas but editing the Sumter novels and work on the infamous Other Projects (everyone has them!) is still eating a bunch of my time. At the same time the fiction fairy visited me recently and I have ideas for a novella and other stuff floating around in my brain. So after two more posts on writing stuff I’ve been considering for a while we’re going to start on something I like to call The Antisocial Network. Currently planned as a novella, I hope to have this completed in four to six weeks. The Antisocial Network is a stand-alone work, not connected to any of the fiction I’ve written so far and may or may not turn out to be a work of satire. Stay tuned on that count.

If you’d rather see fiction based on stuff I’ve already written then worry not! The crew of the salvage submarine Erin’s Dream has consistently drawn the strongest reader response and I’ve been wanting to do another story about them for a while, it’s just taken some time to pin down good story ideas and assemble them into something cohesive. So after The Antisocial Network wraps up I hope to start on a story called Fish Out of Water and show you a little bit of what life is like in a former penal colony on the bottom of the ocean. If you want something to tide you over until then I strongly suggest rereading Emergency Surface and Code Red (Parts One and Two), as Fish Out of Water will be a direct sequel to those two short stories.

But for the moment I plan to enjoy the beach for as long as I can. See you next week!

Writing Men: Charlie Brown

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My last two Writing Men segments where I sat down and analyzed the application of male writing techniques in actual characters I started by introducing the character. I’m not going to do that this time because Charlie Brown is one of the most well-established comic strip characters in existence, in part because Charles Schultz was a genius and in part because Charlie Brown owns Snoopy, everyone’s favorite beagle. If, by some inconceivable circumstance, you don’t know who he is (yet still understand written English) you can read Peanuts, Schultz’ life work, here.

While Schultz’s Peanuts has many characters, some of whom are arguably more recognizable than Charlie Brown (namely Snoopy and Woodstock), Charlie Brown is undoubtedly the main character and he’s an interesting study in writing a male character for two reasons. First, he undergoes little noticeable character arc beyond a few small changes in his characterization in the first couple of years as Schultz nailed down exactly what roles he wanted everyone in the cast to fill. Second, Charlie Brown is a perennial failure.

It is that second attribute that makes studying Charlie Brown as a well written man so interesting. He never wins baseball games. He never gets the girl – or even gets within talking distance most times! Not even his own dog respects him. Yet he is, in his own way, iconic.

Now before we begin, I know that Charlie Brown is technically somewhere between six and eight years old. But one of the things that makes Peanuts brilliant is that its characters, while technically young, are also ageless in the issues they confront. None of the problems these “kids” face ever really go away, we just pretend that we’re over them and hope no one calls us out on the act. So I think analyzing them is a valid move. I also recognize that daily comic strips like Peanuts rarely have cohesive stories or overarching narratives. But Peanuts was written for over fifty years by a single man – there’s a level of clear, single minded character building in it that you will find nowhere else.

So what distinctly masculine traits define Charlie Brown?

Well the biggest one has to be his objective – Charlie Brown wants to be successful. Whether it’s at baseball, kite flying or romance, Charlie Brown wants to succeed. Not succeed well, per se, just succeed. Win one baseball game. Keep his kite out of the tree. Talk to the redheaded girl. While Charlie Brown is too young to have a clear idea of what succeeding at these things will do for him he definitely knows that they are things he wants to succeed at. Success will make him feel better about himself and make him look better in the eyes of others and this is definitely something he wants.

The second most notable masculine behavior of Charlie Brown is how much time he spends alone. Before the baseball game, trying to work out a strategy. After the game, lamenting his loss and trying to figure out why. At lunch, staring at the redheaded girl in agony, thinking of and rejecting hundred of different ways to approach her. Few characters spend more time in analytical self-reflection than Charlie Brown and none I can think of are as likable while doing it. Yes, most of his time alone is very self-critical but perhaps that’s to be expected – he so rarely succeeds.

His existence in a perpetual failstate lets him show an unusual side of compartmentalization. While Charlie Brown fails frequently he’s often accused of never learning – he’s always optimistic about his chances the next time around. I’m not sure this is fair. It’s true that Charlie Brown fails at the same task repeatedly but he never fails in quite the same way, showing incredible persistence as he locks away the pain of previous failures and presses forward towards his goal once again. Of course in it’s own way it also shows the two-edged nature of compartmentalization. Charlie Brown does have to suffer failure over and over again, after all. But then, I wonder, is that really any worse than simply living with one failure you never followed up on your entire life?

Axioms and sacrifice are not common parts of Charlie Brown’s life, one of the few concessions to his young age, but we do see him loyally putting up with a great deal of grief from his friends and even his dog simply because they are the people in his neighborhood who he expects to live much of his life around (at least for the next few years). The biggest gap in his character is a lack of a mentor. While Charlie Brown speaks of his father in very admiring terms Schutz’ approach to writing the strip precluded putting actual adults in the picture so there was very little chance for such a character to show up in Charlie Brown’s life.

Taken on the whole Charlie Brown is an excellent male character, one who manages to hit all the notes we can reasonably expect in a way that makes him fun and memorable. He also shows that male stereotypes and writing men don’t have to be the same thing. Very little about Charlie Brown is typical of male characters – he’s a timid, shy, naïve loser who’s best efforts towards success have left him at the bottom of the heap. At the same time he’s a man who sticks to his principles and who’s friends can’t bring themselves to turn their backs on him, no matter how frustrating he can be, because of the strength of his character. Just because his story unfolded at the top speed of four panels a day doesn’t mean he’s not a great example of how to write men.

Off With Their Heads?

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Here’s a simple question for you – should your characters die?

It’s a complicated question and one authors seem to disagree on a lot. J.K. Rowling made sure characters died as something of a regular occurrence in the Harry Potter books because death was a regular part of life as we know it. The counterpoint to that, of course, is that magic isn’t part of normal life but that’s in Rowling’s books so why not omit something that normally is a part of life while we’re at it?

Writers have bandied this question about for quite a while and we shouldn’t pretend to there’s a perfect answer since each work has a unique writer, audience and purpose in mind. What a writer deliberating over the fate of a specific character needs to do is consider all the reason to kill off a character and not to kill off a character (unless you’re one of those people who uses the “I was writing and found this person dead!” technique, in which case this whole discussion is probably pretty academic to you.) Yes, this is kind of cold-blooded but it’s also a part of the art and you’ll never be good at it unless you master this kind of decision making.

To Kill

Reasons a character may need to go under the bus include the following:

  • To provide finality to a situation. Sometimes you just want people to understand the story is over and killing an important character can create that understanding clearly. To a lesser extent character death can also signal going from one phase of a story to another as it provides a clear and distinct point of transition.
  • To distinctly show the consequences of an action or decision. Be it the execution of a noble freedom fighter for resisting an evil government or a drug dealer bleeding out in a warehouse after a fierce gun battle with rivals, death is the ultimate price for the actions a character takes.
  • To provide clear, understandable motivation for a character. These days this use for character death is pretty well-worn territory and probably not the best use under most circumstances. How many cliched characters are driven by the death of a parent, sibling or significant other? But the fact is, in reality people do draw powerful motivation from the deaths of loved ones.
  • Verisimilitude. Rowling’s argument holds a lot of water, especially in stories that feature a great deal of conflict or poor general living conditions. People die under some circumstances on a regular basis and telling those stories well may involve characters – even well loved ones – dying.

There are probably other good reasons for a character to die off in a story but these are among the most consistent and the strongest.

Or Not To Kill 

On the other hand, while most of the reasons not to kill of a character can be written around that doesn’t mean you should ignore them. Plus the work of setting up a character for their death scene can demand more than your story can support. Many authors have told of characters who were always meant to die but never found the right time for their exit… a testament to how difficult a character can be to kill off. So why not kill a character?

  • It can break immersion. People come to entertainment expecting it to provoke an emotion. But if your audience notices you manipulating them to get to that emotional payoff they’ll be yanked right out of the story and that’s bad. Many character deaths feel more like direct emotional manipulation than true moments of loss or catharsis and then the audience notices you messing with them and they drop you – hard.
  • It takes away future stories with the dead character. Of course that’s a big part of what death is, an end to all opportunity. But you’re a storyteller not a character so be careful not to dead-end yourself when a character winds up dead. While dead characters can still appear in stories through various narrative devices the fact is killing a character will still close many doors to you – even if you think you’ve told all the stories you want to using a particular character there’s always more you could do. You might not want to close that door.
  • It can cause problems for other characters. Sometimes you sit down to write a scene and realize that it’s going to do things to your characters that will totally sidetrack your story. Sometimes that’s fine but sometimes it’s more hassle than it’s worth. If you don’t want to sidetrack your story it’s time to ask yourself if you want your other characters to remain consistent to the character’s you’ve already created or change them drastically. There’s nothing wrong with a traumatic even changing characters in a story but if you do choose to do that you’d better commit or you’ll wind up with inconsistent and unlikable characters.
  • The audience may not like it. While I do feel that authors shouldn’t let their audience’s reaction to something prevent them from doing it I also recognize that entertainment is a two-way street. I don’t think you can make a solid argument for either authorial intent or audience interpretation reigning supreme in storytelling – they really need to meet somewhere in the middle. While an author does have an obligation to make his work as comprehensible to his audience as possible he doesn’t have an obligation to make them happy. On the other hand, authors do need audience investment to prosper, so this is a thin line to walk.

This Is The Question

A moment of real talk, if we may. Writing isn’t easy. I don’t think that comes as a surprise to anyone who’s tried to write anything meaningful. That reality applies to any decision a writer makes but in fiction but, just like in real life, death in fiction is a very permanent thing. (Less permanent than in real life, let’s be honest, but still quite permanent most of the time.) It’s fair to ask if you really need to kill a character to tell your story. It’s just as fair to conclude that you do. But if you do keep in mind that working out that decision in your story is going to put your writing under an even higher level of scrutiny and be prepared for it.

The Last of Them

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I was looking over my latest Reading List post and I noticed that four out of the seven fiction titles I’ve recommended have a central character who is the last of something. DCI Thomas Nightingale (Midnight Riot) is the last traditional wizard in England, Atticus O’Sullivan (The Iron Druid Chronicles) is the last Druid on the planet, Aral Kingslayer (Fallen Blade) is the last Blade of Namara and Aleksander Ferdinand (Leviathan) is the last of his lineage. So I thought I might write a few words about why authors tend to use protagonists who are the last of something, and what that might mean for us as writers.

First, the why. Aleksander is actually the prime example of this, even though the others might feel more ‘important’ in some way. You see, being the last of something, much like being an orphan (both of which Aleksander is) serves to help the character gain sympathy from the audience. Sympathy is only a step from empathy, a powerful component of audience investment.

Everyone’s felt like the odd man out and what’s a more clear cut example of that than being the last example of something on Earth? Nothing, that’s what! So a character who’s the last of their kind can automatically win a degree of sympathy from most audiences, putting them one step down the road to solid investment. A character who’s the last of their kind also provokes investment in another way, namely it makes the audience curious.

After all, if you have the last of something (let’s call it Spoon) you can immediately gather two things:

  1. There used to be more Spoons.
  2. All of those other Spoons are gone now.

Now I know that probably feels like a no-brainer but consider all the questions that this simple, two point premise immediately provokes:

  • What happened to all the other Spoons?
  • Is the Last Spoon in danger of having the same happen to it?
  • Can more Spoons be created to carry on the Spoony legacy?
  • How was it the Last Spoon survived when all the other Spoons met their fate?
  • What is the Last Spoon doing about its situation?
  • How does the Last Spoon cope with its change in circumstances?

And this list is by no means exhaustive. The questions raised by the existence of the Last Spoon also serve to drive audience interest and keep them guessing. Better yet, there’s no one formula to how the questions might be answered.

We know pretty much everything about the fate of Aleksander’s family from the get-go, the only real question the story addresses is how he will survive. On the other hand, while we know that Nightingale is the last wizard because they decided it was time to stop training them there’s no clear reason for the decision given beyond vague references to a place called Ettersburg. And Nightingale outlived his peers and became the last of them because for some reason he stopped aging (and in fact aged backwards for a while). That part has never been explained and we know Nightingale himself doesn’t know why it happened.

Being the last of a kind is a powerful technique for gaining reader investment, both because of the immediate sympathy it provokes and the enormous curiosity it brings with it. And it’s flexible enough to tell any number of stories well in the right hands. While such advantages can be squandered if you’re not careful and measured in what you do casting the Last Spoon as a central character in your story can be a real asset. Try it and let me know how it goes!

Pokemon, Spiderman and Enfranchisement

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Curious yet? Then let’s dive right in.

Pokemon is a video game franchise with a lot of well earned criticism leveled at it. The graphics are kind of cutesy, the games themselves are very simple and kind of repetitive and all the tie-in media makes it very easy to view as a cash grab. But with all that said Pokemon has succeeded and done so in spades for one very simple, straight-forward reason. It’s easy to learn and get invested in.

This is both the glory and downfall of the franchise. People new to Pokemon find it very easy to pick up and understand. But longtime fans frequently complain that the game itself never changes or grows – not entirely true but it certainly hasn’t changed much since the early days. There’s a lot of nostalgia power in Pokemon but other franchises have since come along and done the formula’s story better and the game itself offers only fair amusement for far too much time investment.

What’s the lesson we can learn? Well, it’s about enfranchisement – or how involved people are with a thing. All entertainment faces the hurdle of getting the audience invested, or enfranchised and Pokemon follows the KISS method – keep it simple, stupid, providing simple yet fun scenarios to play around with. But the problem with that approach is it quickly gets boring and then a little insulting. Audiences familiar with the premise want to see more from it than they’re getting and they’re not finding it.

The problem is if you keep a long running franchise going after new things for too long you start to build up a ridiculously high barrier to entry and new audiences will have a hard time understanding what’s going on. The result is that your audience stops growing, or growth just slows to a crawl as people are scared away from your franchise. So how do you keep your enfranchised audience happy while still attracting new readers?

Well, that brings me to something I’d like to call the Spiderman solution.

Back in the very early days of Marvel, when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were basically creating the brand from scratch they came out with this little character named Spiderman. Now Spiderman originated about a year after Marvel’s first big powerhouse title The Fantastic Four came out and it was particularly aimed at a young audience. Comic books were still “kids stuff” at the time but, after forty years or so, they were starting to find acceptance as mainstream entertainment and The Fantastic Four in particular may not have appealed to the young people of the 60s with its gritty (for the time) approach to superheroes. Thus, Spiderman was offered as an alternative for the wee folks.

Of course Marvel wanted Spiderman in its shared universe but, at the moment, the Fantastic Four were the keystone for that universe. How to show this without disenfranchising Spiderman fans who didn’t also read about the Fantastic Four?

Easy! Do it a little at a time. Things began with a stand-alone issue where Doctor Doom, the Fantastic Four’s greatest villain, showed up and caused trouble for Spiderman. The webslinger foiled Doom, of course, but this eventually led to his meeting the other heroes and learning what the score was. The problem of bringing the Spiderman audience into the greater Marvel fold was accomplished quickly and painlessly.

While neither major comic book publisher now uses the Spiderman approach to attract new readers – ie, create a new character in a new series and let new readers appreciate an existing world through their eyes – that’s mainly because the Big Two have refused to let any portion of their library fade to make room for new ideas. The methodology itself is sound and if you’re looking for a good way to bring new audience into existing work than by all means, avoid the Pokemon strategy and suit up with Spiderman. You’ll keep more audience in the long run.