Category Archives: On Writing

Midseason Recap: Scorpion

Posted by natechen on

Hey, let’s talk about TV shows! I haven’t followed any TV shows in a long time but this season I’m watching four, yes four of them. Since it’s the time of year where most shows are on break for the winter (at least while I’m writing this, I think most of these posts will go up after the actual shows start airing again) I thought I’d take a little time to look at the shows I’m watching from a writing perspective. Let’s start with the show that I feel is currently doing the best, writingwise, of those I’m following. That show is Scorpion, which I’ve already talked about some here.

If you want a quick rehash of what the show is about and haven’t watched it, my linked recommendation serves as a good primer and I’m going to skip rehashing the premise of the show but I will talk a bit about format. Scorpion is an episodic show that deals a lot with the mechanics of hi-tech crime, at least in theory, and tries to wrap up each storyline within the course of a show. There are some exceptions, Walter trying to find a cure for his sister and Ralph’s dad coming back into his life for example, but for the most part each episode is a stand alone adventure. This is both a strength and weakness of the show but, as it’s been written so far, I feel like it’s more of a strength.

The fact that there’s no overarching plot in this first season means I’m going to skip an analysis of that so far and just talk about the characters, relationships and episodes I feel were best and worst in this series.

Favorite Character: Cabe Gallo

While Paige is our audience surrogate, the normal person in the herd of geniuses, Cabe is the heroic normal and he’s perfect in the roll. He’s competent, knowledgeable in his field and surprisingly tough for a grumpy old man. Although if Up and Gravity Falls have taught me anything it’s not to underestimate grumpy old men.

What makes Cabe so well written is how well he handles his team. He’s a stern leader when he has to be, and you never get the impression that he’s overly familiar or affectionate. But there are enough glimpses of the compassionate and caring person who values his job as a way to help people to ensure that we never see Cabe as just a suit or a handler. He’s a wise man and mentor of the group and he fills the roll to a T.

Least Favorite Character: Sylvester Dodd 

Now don’t get me wrong, I like Sylvester a lot. He’s funny and sweet and his neurosis remind me a lot of famous fictional detective Adrian Monk. And that’s my biggest problem. Other than age and mathematical acumen, Sylvester doesn’t feel a whole lot different from Monk in the way he’s presented most of the time. Sure, Sylvester smiles more but that’s about it.

Mostly, I feel that Sylvester lacks development. Hopefully as we learn more about his background and see him in new situations he’ll grow and become more interesting but right now he feels a little flat against all the other, louder characters in the group.

Favorite Character Dynamic: Happy/Toby

These two. Happy could just come off as a stereotypical abrasive, angry woman. Toby could just come off as another snarky man with a huge ego. The two together could just feel like clashing personalities in a boring, predictable relationship.

And okay, on occasion they do.

But for the most part the two complement each other well and they’re written with a light touch, not overused, and we see their good sides very often as well. It makes them fun to watch and gives an alternative to the much more vanilla relationship between Paige and Walter.

Least Favorite Character Dynamic: Walter/Drew 

I’m not sure where the relationship between Walter and Ralph’s dad is going, what Walter thinks of it or if we’re supposed to find it touching or disappointing or what. Walter seems just as conflicted about it so that may be intentional but I think it’s cluttering up the show when I’d much rather see the Scorpion team being fleshed out more in their own right. Just not sure this is adding anything to the show right now.

Favorite Episode:  Rogue Element (S01E09) 

This episode introduces us to Cabe’s ex-wife, fills in much of his backstory and lets us see how Cabe’s leadership of the team now is just an extension of who he’s always been. I really like the dynamic we see between Cabe and Rebecca, his ex, and I love the sense of longstanding partnership between the two. Rebecca is obviously a toughminded woman but still charming and thoughtful. It’s easy to see how she and Cabe would have wound up a couple and how Cabe’s regrets over their falling apart would mark him.

I also enjoy the clear signs that Cabe and Rebecca actually thought about what their relationship would mean for each of them as a result of Cabe’s career, avoiding what I like to call the Gwen Stacey Fallacy, but more on that another time.

Least Favorite Episode: Plutonium is Forever (S01E04) 

Did not care for the scenario, antagonist or general direction of this episode. While Scorpion has a theme of great intelligence not necessarily being a blessing, the way this episode tries to portray Walter as a personality waiting to collapse under it’s own genius just doesn’t ring true. Many of the plot points are predictable and the resolution lacks tension. Cabe walking out of the ocean is a really funny scene, though.

Other Stuff

Okay, so that’s the highlights and lowlights of the season’s writing for me, so far. Some other things I like about the show include it’s casting – only Elyes Gabel (Walter) and Katharine McPhee (Paige) fall into the typical Hollywood “beautiful people” range. The rest of the cast, while not unattractive by any means, feel much more like real people and not the over-stylized figures that you typically find in a TV show. Props for that.

Also, the heist-esque elements in many of the episodes are very entertaining, giving what could be a slow-feeling premise (dealing with cybercrime and security) a more lively feel.

On the other hand, the acting is not always all it could be. Robert Patrick (Cabe) and Eddie Kaye Thomas (Toby) do the best most consistently, in my opinion, and this is probably a big part of why I like their characters as much as I do. The other actors aren’t bad, but they don’t feel particularly inspired either. Hopefully as the cast gels more we’ll start to see more engrossing performances from them as well.

Scorpion has had a good first season so far and it promises to be interesting and fun come the new year as well so if you’re not watching it yet give it a shot. It’s good stuff.

Avengers Analyzed: Tony Stark

Posted by natechen on

The Avengers – most people in America can tell you at least a little bit about who they are, at least in their most well known incarnations that have been around in theaters for nearly ten years(!), and that’s really pretty amazing. Writers can always benefit from analyzing writing that’s successful and the most successful part of the franchise is undoubtedly its ability to craft memorable characters. So, as the Marvel Cinematic Universe builds towards the second touchstone movie in the franchise, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, we’re taking a look back at the first movie, Marvel’s The Avengers, to see what makes its characters so well defined. Today, we’re tackling Tony Stark.

Because it’s important to state biases I should note, before I begin, that I pretty much like Stark the least of the Avengers presented in this movie. That’s not to say that I don’t like him. I smile at his banter and I find him entertaining. But when I first watched the movie I suspected that he would begin to grate on me if I had to watch him solo and found that I was correct when I watched some of his stand-alone movies. I do like his character arc in this film but I don’t really love the character like a lot of people do. That said, his character arc in this film is really good.

Stark’s Background

Stark, as portrayed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the only portrayal that matters for the purposes of this analysis by the by) is a genius weapons inventor turned general industrialist. His change of heart came after he was kidnapped by terrorists in Afghanistan and forced to escape by inventing the Iron Man power armor that he now uses to fight injustice. He claims to have privatized world peace. His ego is larger than the Hulk’s enraged form.

The Conflict

Like his friend Bruce Banner, Tony Stark’s conflict in The Avengers is character against himself. (And yes, one day soon I will be talking about what all the basic conflicts at the heart of writing are.) In Stark’s case it’s a conflict between his expectations for himself, rather than his actual personality. One half wants to continue to be the high-rolling, easy-street-walking, devil-may-care egotist he’s always been. The other half wants to be a superhero. Tony thinks he can be both but the fact is, the two halves are at odds.

We Meet Tony Stark

“Like Christmas, but with more me.” – Tony Stark 

We are introduced to Tony when he’s completing Stark Tower, a massive testament to three things – Stark’s genius, as the whole thing runs of one of his arc reactors, his ego, in his comparing himself to a major religious icon, and his wealth and influence. These are the underpinnings of his character and we get them in less than fifteen seconds. Well done, Avengers. Well done.

As a side note, the choice of Christmas as the point of reference for Stark Tower is interesting. Why not the Fourth of July or, for something more in line with Stark’s character, a rock concert? Hang on to that thought for a bit.

Stark’s Starting Point

“Phil? Uh, his first name is Agent.” –  Tony Stark 

Stark’s biggest problem is that he’s lived an essentially selfish life up to the point he became Iron Man and, really, for a little while after he first donned the suit. He’s set himself a goal of being a hero but he doesn’t really understand what that means and his behavior towards most of the people around him is unbalanced.

We see this fairly clearly in the way he can’t seem to pay a straight compliment to Pepper and the way he spends most of the time he’s around Phil treating him like an annoyance at best and a nonperson at worst. And these are the people that Tony Stark really likes, the people who have done their best to help him become the hero he wishes to be. Our Anthony clearly still has a long way to go.

First Bridge

“Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.” – Tony Stark 

In a choice that is at once odd and probably inspired, Tony actually drops out of The Avengers for a good tenish minutes to give other characters a chance to breath. He’s had two films to the one the other superheroes have and it lets us get a good idea who the more restrained characters – Bruce Banner and Steve Rogers – are before they have to deal with the louder and more bombastic characters of Tony Stark and Thor.

But almost as soon as Stark comes back his conflict is at the forefront. He starts a pointless fight with Thor that Captain America has to diffuse but then he turns around and leads the charge to find the Tesseract while also privately offering Phil Coulson the use of his private jet to visit an offscreen love interest. Both modes of Tony are at full blast and causing problems.

Ever the perceptive leader, Steve Rogers spots the hypocrisy in Tony’s claim to heroism and calls him on it, precipitating another conflict of a much different type. As a soldier and a veteran of actual war, Captain America knows that you can’t win the fights that mean something without suffering casualties. Steve recognizes that Tony’s in denial about what being Iron Man will cost him and tries to confront him about it but Stark weasels out by trying to make it Steve’s problem, not his.

After all, Tony Stark has always been smart enough, rich enough and, thanks to Iron Man, strong enough to solve his problems without ever having to give something up. What possible need could there be for him to consider giving something up for the greater good?

Ultimately, though, not all choices are in his hands.

When the brainwashed Agent Clint Barton and his squad attacks the Helicarrier Tony has to play hero again and keep the ship in the air. And he does save lives. Lots of them. But in the process Bruce Banner goes missing, Loki escapes… and Tony looses a friend.

Stark Changes

“He was out of his league. He should have waited. He should have…” – Tony Stark 

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan introduced the term Kobayashi Maru to the geek lexicon. For those not familiar, the Kobayashi Maru is a training scenario for Starfleet cadets and officers in the command branch of the fleet, in other words those seeking to eventually command ships of their own.

The set-up is thus: The cadet being tested is placed in command of a mission to patrol a demilitarized zone between the Federation and their bitter enemies, the Klingon Empire. On patrol they receive a distress call from a freighter called the Kobayashi Maru that has broken down in the neutral space between galactic superpowers. The cadet must decide if they will go and rescue the freighter, thus risking a breach of the peace, or leave the crew of the freighter there to die. If the cadet does send his ship in to rescue the Kobayashi Maru Klingons attack and destroy the trainee’s ship.

In the course of the movie we learn that the point of the scenario is to see how cadets react to a no-win scenario and to help them mentally prepare to face such a possibility in the future. We also learn that Kirk cheated, adjusting the programming in the scenario to make it possible to succeed, and Spock went through the Academy in the science branch and thus did not take the test. Neither one had really faced death. Ultimately both characters will face a real, life or death no-win scenario of their own and the outcome will mark them for the rest of their lives and become a touchstone of scifi literature.

I mention all this because out of all the Avengers in this film, there’s one who’s never faced a Kobayashi Maru before. Just like Kirk, Tony Stark didn’t believe in no win scenarios. Sure, Yinsen died when Stark first made his escape in Afghanistan but Tony hadn’t really been friends with him and he hadn’t really been Iron Man either. Tony thought being a hero meant never having to loose something again.

He was wrong.

Phil Coulson was Tony’s Kobayashi Maru. A wake up call to seriously consider the cost of the heroism Iron Man was supposed to embody. A reminder that Tony Stark could do everything right and still loose.

And Tony is still so very, very far from doing everything right. But at least he’s thinking about it. And Tony Stark thinks a lot faster than most.

Confrontation With Loki

“His name is Phil.” – Tony Stark

Stark begins his character’s transformation and the change in course almost immediately throws him in the face of Loki. Almost.

In the larger context of the Iron Man movies Tony has a habit of dropping into funks whenever things don’t go his way. And things didn’t go his way in a big way. So he goes off to brood after Nick Fury gives the team a little push. It takes Steve Rogers to snap him out of it and get him back on track. By example and by his own involvement Cap is making himself something of a thorn in Stark’s side, reminding Tony of his own failings in a way that makes him distinctly uncomfortable.

Steve also pushes him to get in Loki’s head and deduce his next move. Romanov and Loki may have the most similar skill-set but in terms of personality Stark and Loki are the most alike. That makes Stark Tower a fitting location for their showdown.

The confrontation between Tony Stark and Loki is interesting for any number of reasons but I’m just going to discuss two of them. First, Stark confronts Loki when he’s not in his heroic element, at least most of the time. All the other Avengers do.

Why? Well, I suspect it’s to emphasize the transformation going on inside of him. Stark’s never been a coward but, unlike Bruce Banner, he fully accepts the tools he has for the job. When he needs to put the hurt on baddies he does it with the Iron Man suit. But his current suit is busted and he needs time to get the new one ready and that means confronting Loki under conditions that aren’t optimal.

Stark’s never done this before. (As an aside, I like the fact that a major part of Iron Man 3 is Stark hacking it as a hero even without the armor.)

So in Stark’s willingness to confront Loki without his greatest resource at his disposal and without waiting for the rest of the Avengers to show up and make life a little easier we see a growing maturity in Stark’s behavior. He’s accepting risk as part of the job.

And why? Well, that brings me to the second thing that’s interesting. Tony’s trying to intimidate Loki, he actually uses the word “threaten” a couple of times. He plays up the overwhelming nature of the forces arrayed against Loki. As a former arms merchant, Stark knows a lot about the value of displaying overwhelming force against an opponent and he’s a natural salesman. He does everything he can to sell Loki on the overwhelming nature of the weapons at Earth’s disposal. And what are they?

Two of the best trained spies in the world, a man with breathtaking anger management issues, a demigod and the greatest soldier the world has ever known. Plus one more.

Phil Coulson.

Tony Stark is nowhere on that list. Why? Is it because Stark was ashamed of himself for not protecting a friend and didn’t think he had anything to contribute? Possibly, but if so why bother going to Stark Tower at all? Did he feel his presence there was all the mention he needed to make? I don’t think so, he’s never passed on the opportunity to talk himself up before.

Instead, I’d suggest that Stark’s incredible high opinion of himself has been shaken. Oh, it will recover to be sure but, for the moment, he doesn’t really feel like a hero. His illusions of power and efficacy have been shattered and Phil Coulson, who’s actions objectively did little to directly hinder Loki, has risen to a place of prominence in his mind not through something he did but through the attitude he demonstrated. That’s fitting given Phil’s role in the story. More on Phil later, for now it’s important that during Tony’s confrontation with Loki he replaces himself with Coulson.

There’s a lot of other interesting things going on in the confrontation between Stark and Loki, not the least of which is Loki’s failure to dominate Stark’s mind, but from the perspective of Tony’s character arc the fact that he stuck his own neck out and did so in part because of the example of Phil Coulson are the salient points. The confrontation ends when Loki throws Stark out a window and the new generation of Iron Man armor goes after him, allowing Stark to take to the skies and grapple with the incoming alien menace.

Second Bridge

“JARVIS, have you heard the tale of Jonah?” – Tony Stark

Once again the focus swings off of Stark as the Chitauri army fills the skies over Manhattan and a huge brawl breaks out. Stark is first on the scene and throws himself headfirst into holding the gap, a purpose he fills admirably.

Of note is the fact that from this point onwards Stark stops pushing back against the leadership of Steve Rogers. The two characters have grown to the point where they can no longer really serve for foils to each other and, to the movies credit, it doesn’t try and keep them in this role. Tony follows Steve’s orders both because he has a new understanding of what Captain America, who has lost many friends in past battles, has gone through and because Cap is clearly the man for the job. The only thing of note that happens regarding Stark’s character is when he and his electronic co-pilot JARVIS are trying to figure out how to take down the heavily armored Chituari sky creatures.

Taking Jonah as an inspiration is an interesting choice. The obvious reason would be the most famous part of that prophet’s story, his time in the belly of a great fish. But more interesting as a part of Stark’s character development is the fact that Jonah wound up in the water because he volunteered to be thrown overboard. Why?

Because he knew that the storm threatening to sink the ship he was on was caused by his presence. He knew that by leaving the ship he could save everyone else on board even though it might cost him his own life. Again, why is this important?

Well, I’ve asked you to hold on to a few thoughts during this analysis, I guess it’s time we tied them all together.

Character Resolution

“I know just where to put it.” – Tony Stark 

Over the course of the story Tony has compared himself to two religious figures, Jonah and Jesus, both of whom have self sacrifice as a component of their story. He’s also outright replaced himself with Phil Coulson when confronting Loki, and Phil is also a character who made a sacrificial stand during the course of events.

Now if only one of those comparisons had taken place we could say it was a coincidence. Christmas fits the theme of a tower of blazing lights. Stark was mad about Phil’s death. Jonah did go into the belly of a great fish and the leviathan Stark was fighting looked a lot like one as well. But all three together? That’s too much to be coincidence. Three is a number human beings like, three is the number of acts in the typical story, three is the number of times the comparison is made. Not accidentally. Deliberately.

Joss Whedon wrote this script and he’s an incredibly literate, articulate and artistic man. He knew the significance of the words he was putting in Tony’s mouth and he knew the picture they would paint. Tony isn’t serious when he compares lighting up Stark Tower to Christmas. He doesn’t want a religion built around Iron Man, although he probably wouldn’t mind being seen as a more conventional savior.

But when Phil dies it exposes something that Stark lacks and he’s trying to figure out what it is. He thinks Phil had it and as a result the humble Agent Coulson becomes the biggest thing in Stark’s mind. Thus for a moment Phil takes Stark’s place in the Avengers, at least in Stark’s opinion.

Finally, when JARVIS suggests Jonah isn’t a good role model Stark ignores it and treats the prophet as just that. He’s gone from not believing in heroes to recklessly following in their footsteps.

When world leaders deploy a nuke against the Chituari and threaten all of New York Tony Stark is a different man than he was at the beginning of the movie. He’s prepared to, as Steve Rogers put it, make the sacrifice play and lay down on the wire. Rarely do those who fail the Kobayashi Maru get a chance to redeem themselves. When Stark finds his he’s more than ready.

For a man pretty much defined by his ego and selfishness, it’s an incredible journey.

Of course a big part of what defines Stark’s journey is the constant presence of a man who has faced everything Stark hasn’t, and more than once. It’s ironic that Tony Stark spends most of the movie clearly of the opinion that Steve Rogers is naïve and out of touch but, when things go south, we find that it was really the other way around. While Iron Man is the most charismatic and charming of the Avengers, clearly it’s Captain America who is fit to lead them.

So next month let’s take a look at the man who’s struggle is one of the most relevant to the Avengers as a whole and the other characters individually. Come back in January and we’ll look at Captain Steve Rogers and the question of purpose.

Genrely Speaking: Parody

Posted by natechen on

So last time around I talked about deconstruction and how it’s all about taking a genre back to basics. This month let’s take a look at another genre that’s very meta in it’s approaches to tropes, characters and story – parody.

Parody is a genre (metagenre?), like deconstruction, that is best when the creator behind it has a deep and abiding love of the foundational genre. While it can be done without that love, parodies that are just done to create a parody have a tendency to feel flat and lifeless at best or downright mean-spirited and petty at worst, frequently lapsing into the third metagenre, satire. Parody is closest to a characteristic genre, because most of it’s scenarios are drawn straight from the aesthetic genre being parodied while the characters toss around more lampshades than a discount furniture store.

The goal of all this nonsense is, of course, to illustrate the nonsense of the genre being parodied. Fun is the name of the game, fun had by pushing tropes to the limit and beyond to see how absurd they are then cleverly tying it all together to give the viewers the resolution they expect but not in the way they expected.

When you see the following, it’s probably safe to assume you’re dealing with parody:

  1. Lampshades. Big lampshades. Everywhere. Part of the humor in a parody is showing how the conventions of the parodied genre don’t actually make a whole lot of sense. And then, of course, allowing your characters to accept that absurdity as a part of their world and move on. In addition to being very funny it offers a valuable life lesson – much of real life doesn’t make sense to us but we still need to accept it to be able to function. Doing it with a bit of humor just makes it that much easier to do.
  2. Characters who are dangerously genre savvy. Since parodies tend to stack up tropes faster than Scrooge McDuck stacks money there’s a real need for the main characters to recognize and deal with the situations as fast as possible, otherwise the story either bogs down horribly or reaches the point where any believable resolution is impossible. Most of the time genre savvy is restricted to just one or two characters in a standard genre story – if more are demonstrating it odds are good you’re in a parody.
  3. As much flair and embellishment as possible. While most genres are trying to keep focus on their own central elements parody expects the audience to bring a functional knowledge of the central elements of its parent genre to the table so it can focus on making the tropes as big and over the top as possible rather than digging in to the depths of potential meaning the parent genre has.

What are the weaknesses of a parody? Probably the biggest is the basic investment parody expects its audience to have in the parent genre. A high fantasy parody expects us to understand the idea of rings of power or halflings and be ready to be entertained by them, it’s not going to delve too deeply into those concepts it’s going to be contorting them into new and weird shapes in an attempt to make us laugh.

On top of that, parody is a very loud and bombastic genre, very easily coming off as without reverence for the parent genre it is based on. And in some cases that’s true. A genre can suddenly skyrocket to popularity and detractors of the genre will try and show what’s wrong with it by using a parody – an attempt that pretty much always fails. Other times a creator’s idea of what would make a good parody doesn’t resonate with large chunks of a genre’s audience and the parody’s creator winds up loosing a lot of the audience he should be catering most too.

What are the strengths of a parody? As I said in the above point about lampshading, a good-natured attitude towards apparent absurdity is by no means a bad thing and parodies are very good at showing us how to maintain that. Also, the freakish gambit pileups that are often at the heart of parodies can be incredible showcases for creativity and fresh ideas, something genres can come up short on over time.

Most of all, parodies remind creators not to take themselves too seriously. Yes, being a creator is serious business. It’s very hard work most all of the time. It can be very easy to loose sight of the obligations creators have to their audiences, to loose touch with a spirit of fun that can make even the hardest messages more palatable. By bringing everyone, audience and creator, back in contact with that spirit the parody can do it’s parent genre a great service.

Writing Men: Mentors (Pt 2)

Posted by natechen on

Welcome back to Writing Men’s first two part section! Not familiar with Writing Men? A complete list of articles from the beginning until now can be found on this page. We’re talking about mentors and the mentoring relationship, starting last week with the general appeal of mentorship to men and continuing now with what mentoring might add to a story.

Mentoring can add one of three things to a story. A mentor can serve as an instigating party, as a source of character development or as a source of conflict. The truly ambitious will use it as a source for all three characteristics! The great flexibility of the mentoring relationship makes it incredibly useful from a writing perspective, meaning you probably see it turn up more often in fiction than it does in real life. So what are some ways you, an author, can use mentoring to develop the men in your story?

Inciting Incident – A way of starting the action off.

  • Mentors are in the business of testing their pupils to see what they’re capable of. Mentors can incite action in a story by setting a new goal or test your characters need to tackle. This can be a reasonable goal that excites your character or a fantastic one that intimidates him.
  • A character and his mentor can suffer a breach of trust, leading either character – or both! – to try and repair the relationship and return to a mutually beneficial mentorship.
  • If your primary character is a mentor he might be looking for some item necessary for the next stage of training and get sucked into an adventure looking for it.
  • The possibility of the student leaving his current mentor for a new one, whether of his own free will or because of the interference of family or circumstance, can result in all kinds of hijinks.
  • Finally, the death of one half of a mentorship – whether it’s the student or the mentor – is such a common inciting incident it’s become a cliché.

Some of these events could happen in other relationships, family for example, but the mentorship combines them all and allows you to employ them in just about any order as a part of a longer running story. This continuity is the perfect set up for the second thing mentors bring to your story, namely character development.

Character Development – Growth is Part of the Deal

  • Let’s start off with the easy stuff. Mentors are tasked with making their students grow. Cooking up tests that will stretch them in new ways and make them confront weaknesses is part and parcel of what mentors do. This is one of the most basic ways to bring character development out of a mentoring relationship.
  • A student might come to realize that the thing he’s been studying so long, be it medicine or music, sports or combat, may not be a good fit for him. Just as directing growth in his field of specialty is the mentor’s responsibility, so too is pointing out when his field is a poor fit for his students. The mentor helping a disciple reach peace with the limits of his abilities or realize that the student’s priorities have changed is another way mentorship helps character growth.
  • Of course, mentors don’t have a perfect grasp on their discipline either, just a much better one than their students. Sometimes the tables turn and students teach their mentor a lesson or two. This kind of character growth can also apply to areas outside the mentor’s specialty to give it a little more flavor.
  • Finally, most mentors and students eventually go their own way. The mentor has taught all he can and it’s time for the student to strike out on his own, with all the challenges and uncertainties that go along with that.
  • As an extension of the previous point, sometimes the mentor will arrange for former students to take on students of their own immediately, swiftly transforming disciple to teacher, a great kind of character growth to illustrate.

Mentorship brings a unique dynamic to character conflict. Unlike parents and children the mentor is generally someone the student chooses to entrust his own goals and desires to by asking for their instruction. While a man has no choice in his parents he does usually choose his mentor, or at least choose to trust him. While a romantic relationship or a friendship is one you enter of your own free will, both parties in it are equals. The obedience of the student and the responsibility of the mentor is not as significant a factor in either friendship or romance. These overtones shift conflict in the mentoring relationship in new directions.

Conflict – Mentor vs. Student, Student vs. Mentor, or one or both vs. All

  • Mentors and students most often conflict over how well the understudy is progressing. You can see this in a thousand and one stories about this relationship, most frequently in sports oriented stories. It’s also the one that’s most likely to occur in real life. This is usually an outgrowth of the competitive, testing nature of a male character and their desire to be capable of new things. This desire often skews the perspective of the student and avoiding it is one of the major reason to have a mentor. Not that men always pay attention to this.
  • Mentor and student can also disagree on the student’s end goals. Men are objective driven but that doesn’t mean their desires never change or just get reprioritized. A student may be trying to balance priorities when he needs to sacrifice one of them and the mentor should be the one that forces the issue.
  • On the other side of the coin, the mentor may have developed a skewed idea of what his discipline means. Usually this takes the shape of prioritizing advancing whatever field of study the mentor specializes in over moral behavior. In this case it may fall to the student to try and push his mentor back onto the right path – a challenge that will result in character growth for both mentor and student.
  • Finally, the as noted above, the understudy may just not feel the subject he joined his mentor to learn is valuable any more and his desire to change disciplines – and most likely mentors in the process – is a great source of character conflict.
  • Of course the student who strays from the path of righteousness is a common trope in storytelling as well, and can be done with just about any field of study with a little work. This is a good chance for delving deeper into the mentor character. Will he choose to compartmentalize, and say that the student has moved beyond his authority? Or will he see it as a test of himself as a mentor who needs to put his disciple back on the right path? Or perhaps we’ll discover that it’s an axiom of his that the mentor is responsible for all things about the student and he will just have to sacrifice whatever is necessary to improve his student, including his own sense of right and wrong.
  • Not all students are entirely free to choose their own mentors. In fact parents are often the major player in these decisions. If parents or other forces try to separate mentor and student then we might see a new dimension to both characters as they cooperate to show that they are, in fact, benefiting each other more than any other force could. On the other hand, parents may force an understudy to accept a mentor he does not like.
  • There’s the classic cliché of a mentor (or student) being killed and that provoking a quest for vengeance. Pretty much any relationship can spark this but loosing your mentor seems to be one of the most common, right after loosing your parents. For whatever reason it’s even more common than a character loosing their spouse!
  • Finally, as mentioned under character development, the mentoring relationship does eventually come to an end most of the time. Goals are reached or priorities change. But sometimes characters aren’t ready for that. Getting either mentor or student, or both, to accept that can be a battle in and of itself.

Whew! So there you have it. Mentoring – a relationship with deeply male overtones, brought forth from the male thought pattern and an excellent avenues for developing characters and growing stories. Put it to all the use you can!

Writing Men: Mentors (Pt. 1)

Posted by natechen on

Welcome back to Writing Men, where we talk about the art of writing male characters and what about them makes them particularly masculine. You can find the complete archive of Writing Men pieces here. If you’re not familiar with this segment I’d recommend starting from the beginning, everything kind of builds on itself here.

We’ve reached the point of talking about what kinds of behaviors the male mindset creates and today it’s time to talk about mentorship – from the side of the mentor and that of his understudy or student.

Now I know that, like with everything we’ve talked about in this section, the mentoring relationship is not exclusive to men. But, far moreso than just about anything else we’ve talked about so far, it’s a distinctively masculine endeavor. I’ve meat far fewer women in my life who could point to a female mentor figure than I could men and those that could almost exclusively pointed at their mother (or this one lady I know who has an enormous gift for it). Some women have male mentor figures but I can’t think of any men who have female mentors – I’m sure they exist but I don’t know any personally.

This topic is really very big so I’m going to divide it into two parts, the first today and the next coming next Friday. Today, let’s take a look at exactly what part of a man’s mental process makes mentorship attractive on both sides of the relationship.

Mentorships are curious things. On the one hand, students are placing a large portion of their future in the hands of their mentor, taking an awful risk that he will be fair, even handed and value the same things that the student does. On the other hand mentors give up a huge chunk of their time and freedom to their understudies, making themselves available to teach the other and revealing secrets about their successes and failures that might not be valued the way the mentor thinks they should. All in all, a very risky relationship. Why bother with it?

For the understudy seeking a mentor there are a lot of things about the relationship that are appealing. First, mentors are almost always people who have achieved the objective – or at least the understudy sees them as someone who’s reached it.

Furthermore, the mentor provides axioms readymade. While each person is different and most of the lessons the understudy learns will require some adjustment to apply fully to the student, having a mentor provides the understudy with a very solid set of basic principles to draw on when trying to reach his objective. To go with the axioms, the mentor also provides tests.

Mentors are like built in competition – not that the understudy expects to be his mentor’s equal any time soon. In fact, some understudies spend their whole life trying to equal their mentor, using him as a standard to strive for that they will never live up to. However mentors are not passive in this, frequently presenting their understudies with difficult challenges that will test their understudy to the point of failure. In fact, in the eyes of many mentors tests are better when they are failed than when the student succeeds, as it shows more about their weaknesses and how they might be improved upon.

These failures help the student examine the axioms they are learning and integrate them into the way they look at the world. The mentor frequently pushes the process along with hard questions and forceful demonstrations (in the best cases) or verbal and physical reprimands (in less ideal mentorships).

(An aside: While I’m far from an expert on women, a part of me has always suspected that this rather hostile approach to testing and “encouragement” is a big part of why women in mentoring relationships are so rare. At the same time, being male, I can’t really see a way around this component of it, either… A big part of testing is to push things to the breaking point and that’s not always comfortable. On the other hand, men frequently won’t entirely trust the things they’ve learned until they’ve gone all the way up to that breaking point.)

Finally, a mentorship is a small relationship, just two people in ideal cases. This lets it start as a very compartmentalized relationship, making it easy to manage. At least at first, if it lasts long enough the mentor expands in the students mind until his territory becomes advice on all topics. But the fact that it starts so easy to deal with is what makes it so likely to grow.

The mentor gets a lot out of this relationship as well. The first and most obvious is the emotional fulfillment of the relationship and the act of teaching. Mentoring is a very fulfilling relationship for most people, much like parenting or teaching, and it has a lot of joy and happiness to offer just from seeing someone who is growing and benefiting from being around you and hearing what you have to say. Not everyone will like doing it and not everyone is suited to doing it well but it can be a very positive experience in and of itself.

But on top of that it appeals to men in particular as a way to fulfill those goals that they themselves will not be able to accomplish. This can be both good and bad, offering student and mentor a goal to bond over or resulting in the mentor completely ignoring his student’s wishes and pushing them in directions they don’t wish to go. Regardless of whether it is good or bad it is a very masculine thing and something that frequently draws men to the position of mentor.

Finally it offers the mentor perpetuity. Rather than just having their skills or knowledge endure for a short time a mentor passes things along and builds a legacy that joins mentor and student together into a greater whole. Good mentors tend to beget good mentors, who are then equipped to pass these skills down again and again ad infinitum, allowing the mentor’s influence to continue as long as possible. This not only draws men to the role of mentor but prompts them to do everything they can to be good mentors.

Both sides of the mentor and student relationship have a lot to offer to the male thought process, in fact mentoring as a relationship seems to have been built by men for men. So it’s no surprise that using it is a powerful tool for developing male characters. How do you go about using it when you write? Well tune in next week and we’ll talk about it some!

Avengers Analyzed: Bruce Banner

Posted by natechen on

The Avengers: Age of Ultron is coming next year and I’m kind of excited. Not sell-my-soul-for-an-early-screening excited, but I’m looking forward to it. One of the reasons I’m excited is that the first Avengers film did a truly exemplary job of drawing its large cast of characters and making them dynamic, relatable and fun. Even if you’d never seen a movie from the Marvel cinematic universe you could enjoy the film – I’d only seen Captain America: The First Avenger before I sat down to watch Marvel’s The Avengers and I still managed to follow everything quite well.

The Avengers was a masterpiece of tight writing and character conflict and, in preparation for Age of Ultron, I’m going to take the next several months to unpack the great writing in the first film one story arc at a time.

The best way to understand The Avengers is to view it not as one story but seven and to analyze those seven stories by their basic conflicts. The largest story is the story of Earth, represented by SHIELD and the Avengers, against Loki and the Chituari. The conflict is character(s) against character(s). But within that story there are six other stories taking place, each of which makes the larger story richer and helps us understand each of the individual characters in the story much better.

For today we’re going to start with the character who I think people who watched The Avengers understood the least: Bruce Banner and The Hulk.

Banner’s Background

Bruce Banner was an omnidisciplinarian scientist who was trying to replicate the supersoldier serum that gave Captain America his abilities. Instead he created a formula that made him invincible and unbelievably strong when enraged. It also takes a lot of his conscious thought process away and replaces it with instinct.

The Conflict

Bruce Banner’s conflict is character against himself. Bruce sees the Hulk as a horror that he must suppress and control or the people around him will be threatened.

We Meet Bruce Banner

“I’m going to talk to Stark. You’re going to talk to the big guy.” – Phil Coleson

We’re first given an idea of what the Hulk is when we see Agent Phil Coleson sending Agent Natasha Romanov out to retrieve him. Phil says she’s off to see “the big guy,” a statement she initially misunderstands. When she realizes what Coleson means we see the first sign of genuine intimidation from her in the film. Remember that, before this, she’s performed a reverse interrogation on a bunch of bloodthirsty Russians who she then beat up and showed no reverence at all when talking about one of the most intelligent and wealthy men on the planet (hint: Tony Stark). Clearly, the big guy is someone special.

We finally meet Bruce as he’s washing up after a medical procedure in India. He’s helping the poor there, probably the “untouchables” who are the lowest rung of Hindu society. He follows a girl who begs for his help with no question and as fast as he can. From this we see both deep compassion and intelligence in Banner’s willingness and ability to solve medical problems amidst extreme poverty… as well as a tendency to plunge into situations without thinking that Romanov exploits to cause their meeting.

Banner’s Starting Point 

“The other guy spat it back out.” – Bruce Banner 

On meeting Banner, Romanov congratulates Bruce on not having an “incident” in over a year. The she asks, “What’s your secret?”

“No secret,” Bruce replies. This moment is important for two reasons – first, the idea that Banner has a secret is going to be tied back to his character progression at each significant point and second, this is the first sign of Banner’s problem, his unwillingness to admit The Hulk is a part of him. To Banner, the Hulk is literally another person, as if he’s Dr. Jekyll and The Hulk is his Mr. Hyde.

Now this is be a legitimate angle on Banner/Hulk taken with The Hulk in the comics but for the purposes of this analysis the comics have no bearing on this movie and I don’t think that’s the angle the script writers actually envision when thinking about Banner/Hulk so we have to understand Banner’s development as a conflict between one personality facet – The Hulk – and the rest of Bruce Banner.

Banner has concluded The Hulk is to be avoided and, if he does show up, fought back down until Banner is again in control. Banner is at war with himself, although he won’t admit to it.

Romanov and Bruce continue their verbal sparring, Natasha trying to manipulate him and Banner seeing through the game. Finally Bruce decides to give in but reminds Natasha that he’s dangerous and she’d better be ready for that and, at the same time, lets the audience know that ultimately lies and trickery are meaningless against The Hulk’s rage.

Remember that, because it will be important later.

First Bridge

“Oh no, this is much worse.” – Bruce Banner 

Since no one character can get anything like center stage in The Avengers, Banner fades into the background a bit while other things happen. But in this period of time we continue to see his genius for science applied and a total avoidance of things that might bring out The Hulk.

And again, Bruce does his best to ignore the elephant in the room. Aside from the occasional comment about air-tight, pressurized containers he steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that he’s unusual in any way other than maybe a bit smarter than normal. By the end of this quiet period Loki has been captured and brought aboard the Helicarrier, Banner has met Tony Stark and the two are tasked with finding the Tesseract.

Banner Begins to Change

“I’m a huge fan of the way you loose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.” – Tony Stark 

Most characters in The Avengers evolve in three steps – where they are when they start out, their pivot point and where they end up. Banner’s pivot point comes as Tony jabs him in the side and then congratulates him on maintaining control. Once again the question gets asked. “What’s your secret?”

Again, Banner answers, “No secret.”

Banner is still in denial but Stark has a perspective on Bruce’s situation that Natasha does not. Romanov is an expert manipulator but has no insight into the difficulties that come with suddenly have power thrust upon you – she’s fought her whole life to get what power she has – while Tony went through a similar experience to Bruce’s when he became Iron Man. Even Stark, with his enormous ego, struggled with what to do with himself after his time as a prisoner in Afghanistan. In some ways Stark had a harder time of it but ultimately Banner had to face a part of himself he found truly horrific which makes their experiences a bit different.

Fortunately Stark has enough people sense to see what’s holding Banner back and he suggests that the bizarre set of circumstances that has changed his life happened for a purpose and that, in point of fact, becoming The Hulk might actually have been a good thing. Banner can’t see what that purpose is but the thought has been planted in his mind and it changes the direction of his character from there on out.

Second Bridge

“Target is angry!” – Anonymous Pilot 

Most of the Hulk’s second bridge between characterization points is an action set piece but it’s bookended by some important events. First is the moment he hulks out for the first time. The Helicarrier is under attack, Romanov and Banner wind up getting hurt in the carnage and Romanov is trying to keep Banner calm by promising that he’ll be fine and he’ll get out of this. Then she says something she shouldn’t have. “I swear on my life.”

If you watch closely you might notice Banner was starting to shrink back down to a more normal size just before she says this. Now he surges back and forth a bit before finally Hulking up after Romanov says this so it may have just been him still in the midst of his transformation. It might be nothing. But the fact that he latches onto the phrase and repeats it suggests something interesting.

I don’t think Banner ultimately hulks out because he’s hurting, although his frank recounting of his suicide attempt at the beginning of his character arc tells us that could happen. Bruce becomes enraged because someone who’s already hurt and in a bad situation is offering to endure even worse problems in order to help others and Banner feels powerless to do anything about it. So he transforms into the Hulk, who does.

Not that the Hulk actually helps things, but that’s because Bruce is fighting the Hulk every step of the way. He still sees “the other guy” as a problem to be avoided rather than another talent, like his genius, which is helpful at some times and useless at other times.

Fast forward several minutes. Bruce is picking himself up off the ground in the rubble of a warehouse and a janitor is telling him he came down where he did, in a place no one was around, not by coincidence or luck but by design. The Hulk was consciously trying to land someplace no one would get hurt.

And for the first time the idea that The Hulk wants to help people just as much as the rest of Bruce Banner does enters the mind of our hero.

Banner’s Conflict Resolved

“That’s my secret, Captain. I’m always angry.” – Bruce Banner/The Hulk

When Bruce rides into Manhattan on the sweetest hero ride ever, the Chituari have already made a mess of it. New York needs help and the brilliant mind of Bruce Banner is not the best tool for the job. Captain America suggests it might be time for him to try something else. “It might be a good time to get angry.”

Banner isn’t in denial any more. The Hulk isn’t another person in his mind anymore. He has made peace with himself. Bruce wants to help the people of Manhattan and so does the Hulk. It’s he did it.

Bruce Banner is a man of compassion. Seeing people suffering at the hands of aliens they’ve never heard of and did nothing to provoke makes him angry. And so does seeing people sick and dying in poverty in India. And so does being lied to about the things SHIELD was doing with the Tesseract. In fact, he’s a smart enough man to realize that every second of every day something horrible is happening to someone, somewhere and he’s empathetic enough that the fact enrages him, even if it’s just the smallest bit. He’s never acted on that rage because he didn’t think it could make a difference.

That was before the Hulk.

And on the streets of New York it was time to finally admit his secret. It wasn’t that he didn’t get angry. The secret, of course, is that he always is. But now he accepts that he can use it for good, and he proceeds to do so.

Unless you’re the Chituari, of course.

Confrontation with Loki

“Puny god.” – Bruce Banner/The Hulk

Every Avenger in the story confronts Loki at some point during the story but the Hulk is special because he is the only one to confront the Norse god of Trickery after his character’s arc is complete. All the others confront Loki during their arc or at it’s the completion. So it’s fitting that The Hulk is the Avenger who ends Loki’s ability to directly influence the larger conflict – The Hulk is the only one who confronts Loki when he is fully invested in the greater conflict and not distracted by his own personal conflict. Thus The Hulk has the entire breadth of his terrifying strength to bring to bear on Loki and Loki alone.

Also, as I mentioned at the beginning of Banner’s arc, Bruce/Hulk is not stopped or even slowed by deception. He cannot have his conviction shaken, his confidence moved or his attention distracted. The Hulk is far too simple to be confused by fine speeches or deterred by illusions. In The Hulk Loki met his one natural enemy and was defeated in one of the shortest and most brutal curb stomp battles a supervillain has ever faced.

On the whole I feel that Bruce has a great, dynamic character arc that hints at his character progression without having to spell it out. Unfortunately with six other stories going on around him that subtle, understated characterization doesn’t play as well as it might if his was the only character arc going on. This caused a lot of people to miss it in spite of each major point along the arc being highlighted by the word “secret.” Banner is very secretive about his being the Hulk, in fact he’s the only one of the four “super” heroes in the movie that has a secret identity. Tony Stark is a prominent industrialist who announced his identity at a press conference, Captain Steve Rogers was a prominent war hero and now has an exhibit in the Smithsonian and Thor is a literal legend in his own time.

Banner starts out ashamed of who he is and fears what might become of others if his power is allowed to go unchecked. Note that Banner doesn’t want the formula that made him duplicated or improved upon which is a major reason he’s in hiding. He also doesn’t believe The Hulk can think about the good of others or cooperate with other people, at least at first. This is a possibility that, for all his intelligence, other people have to explain to him. He’s a flawed character and doesn’t understand himself that well sometimes, but these are things that make him more realistic and actually help what could have been an over the top, one note character fit into a realistically portrayed character progression.

So, for having a well thought out character arc that’s told deftly and with every step in his growth well demonstrated (and mostly by action or reaction and not words), I consider Bruce Banner/The Hulk to be the best written character in The Avengers. But I don’t think he’s the one who went through the biggest change. So next month I hope you’ll join me as we take a look at Banner’s fellow genius Tony Stark to get an eye full of one of the biggest character shifts I’ve ever seen from a superhero in a single movie.

Genrely Speaking: Deconstruction

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Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, it’s once again time to break down a genre and see what makes it work. And what better genre to break down than the deconstruction?

Tropes are the tools of writers. They provide readymade structure for a story, a character, a scene or an exchange of dialog. They set the standard and, although a story is pure mediocrity if the standard is all it achieves, tropes are still very useful if applied in a thoughtful and informed fashion. But.

All genres tend to have tropes pile up around them. All genres can become over-stylized, over-formalized, totally divorced from verisimilitude and meaningless as a reflection of the human condition. When this happens the genre stops serving anything other than itself and rapidly devolves into empty entertainment until, eventually, it stops being entertaining. Unless.

If a creator with a firm understanding of the genre itself and what purpose it serves in addressing the human condition comes along and carefully, lovingly takes all those extraneous tropes that have attached themselves to the genre like barnacles and pries them loose he can go back to the roots. By looking at the original purpose of the stories and breaking off everything that no longer serves to advance those purposes the creator literally deconstructs the genre as it is understood in modern times and leaves behind the core impact, revitalizing the genre and making it relevant to us once again. This is the deconstruction.

Deconstruction is mostly a characteristic genre, since the tropes of a genre that have the hardest time changing are those that revolve around the people populating the story. Genres tend to gain or loose favor as their themes gain or loose prominence in society while the aesthetics of a genre either change to fit or split off into new genres (as we see with the divergence of alternate history and steampunk). So how exactly do you recognize a deconstruction when you’re reading one?

  1. Look for an emphasis on normal, relatable central characters. The main character is where genres seem to build up the most tropes. Be it amnesia in action or fantasy stories, the grizzled soldier in war movies or the hardboiled detective in noir, fiction tends to wind up filled to the brim with characters who look nothing like real people. The first thing a deconstruction does is pull all of that away and rebuild the central cast as the most normal, relatable characters the creator can think of. Inevitably these characters will be defined by tropes and themes that the creator, and not necessarily the audience, can relate to (I’m looking at you Neon Genesis Evangelion) but the point is that the creator is trying to put the characters at the center of the story back in touch with reality.
  2. At least one or two supporting characters who are very much average or below average. Not to harp on this too much but we’re going to harp on it. Deconstructions are trying to take the genre aesthetics they’re founded in and bring them back in touch to normal life. That means not only bringing the leading characters back closer to normal but, given that most fiction is inherently a little unbelievable, it means making characters that are completely normal, who’s only tie to abnormality is their connection to the main characters, not only to ground the central characters but to give the audience a stronger connection to the story through more characters like them.
  3. An emphasis on real, believable consequences to character’s decisions, especially as regards their relationships with one another. In buddy movies the two central characters often forgive each other’s mistakes with little to no hurt feelings or anger. Fantasy stories often use magic to sidestep death or other realistic consequences (sci-fi sometimes does the same with technology). Many genres allow characters to achieve a significant degree of emotional intimacy in a short period of time. Deconstructions tend to eschew these shortcuts.

What are the weaknesses of deconstruction fiction? In and of itself, a deconstruction does not stand out. Many people will not be able to tell the difference between a deconstructed space opera and a regular one. In fact, this is ideal – deconstructions do not aim to change the genre they are deconstructing but rather bring about a sort of Renaissance in it, making the genre more relevant and vital to the culture of the times.

Also, a deconstruction is not a parody although sometimes it can be treated as such. That’s always bad for the work, since a parody seeks to playfully poke fun at the tropes at the core of a genre while a deconstruction aims to take out every element that isn’t the foundation of a genre. The two takes on a genre will actively work against each other and wise writers will avoid this. Worse, since a deconstruction aims at making a genre accessible to a new audience while a parody requires knowledge of a genre to make sense, parodying a genre you’re deconstructing can actually alienate the very audience you’re most trying to reach.

Finally, if it’s not done by someone who really loves and appreciates what the genre they’re deconstructing brings to the table there’s a real risk that the deconstruction will come off as mean spirited or just disrespectful. Yes, the point is to help a genre shed all the baggage it no longer needs and get a fresh start but, just like trying to do that with a person, if you don’t handle the genre in a loving and patient fashion you’re just going to make people mad.

What are the strengths of deconstruction fiction? First and foremost, it brings new life and new light to stories that could seem old and tired. As surprising as it now seems to us, given their wild popularity and the widespread imitation of them, Tolkien’s works were, in a way, a deconstruction of the Norse and Scandinavian myths that he loved so much. But instead of the fearless warriors of unparalleled skill that tended to populate those stories, Tolkien’s preeminent characters were… short, kind of portly people who loved gardens and good food.

For real.

Tolkien made the epic myth relevant to the people of Britain in his day by making the people who headlined those myths totally relatable and understandable to the people of his day.

But beyond that, deconstructions actually reinforce the central message of the genre. Mark Waid’s Irredeemable is a deconstruction of the superhero genre. While the Plutonian isn’t exactly normal, he doesn’t have the unflinching morals or sterling character of the Last Son of Krypton. He’s dysfunctional, neurotic and incredibly self-centered, unfortunately making him much like the cultural icons of now. His eventual self-destruction and descent into depravity is something we’ve seen from very many celebrities and seeing it raises questions about how our modern day society treats the people we idolize.

And yet in the midst of that Waid gives us Qubit. With every bit the unshakeable moral core the Plutonian lacks, Qubit holds up everything that is central to superheroes. Might for right. Protection for the powerless. Mercy, even for the worst. And in the end, we find that it’s Qubit who’s held the center, Qubit who’s set the example for his fellows and Qubit who’s refuted the idea that a man, no matter how far he’s fallen, can be irredeemable. And at the end of it, the poor man just wants to be remembered for doing his part and standing by his friends.

At it’s core, a deconstruction tries to do exactly what these two stories did. They try to take the old, the tired, the no longer comprehensible, and revitalize it by once more putting us at the center of the story and shouting out the importance of their messages straight into our lives.

Vampires and Themes

Posted by natechen on

So vampires. I hates them. But if vampires were just an oldschool monster that no longer seems quite so intimidating in the light of a modern understanding of biology and contagion then they wouldn’t bother me nearly as much as they do. In fact, they wouldn’t bother me at all because frankly mining old ideas of their themes and adapting them to the modern era is all writers really do. There’s no new stories, just new takes on them. It took a long time for me to work it all out but I knew from about the time I first watched Hellsing (the original anime adaptation not the more recent Hellsing Ultimate which I will most likely never watch) what exactly about vampires that no matter the context or the way they were presented, I would never like vampires and always find myself cringing when they were introduced as characters.

Let’s just start at the top and run down the bothersome baggage vampires have one point at a time. The first is parasitism. Vampires are parasites, pure and simple. We almost never see them building things or influencing people for the good, or if they do it’s handwaved off screen. Central vampiric characters are literal leeches. They tend to only contribute through their manipulative powers (more on this in a sec) but their abilities are fueled by stealing blood from people, usually involuntarily. Sympathetic vampires either justify their parasitism by turning it on their adversaries or feed it some way that they consider harmless like taking blood from the blood bank.

UNRELATED: The best introduction to the “vampires run blood banks to find useful food sources” idea I’ve ever seen is when Dr. McNinja tells the Clone of Benjamin Franklin, “Vampires run the Red Cross you know.”

And Clone of Ben Franklin answers, “Oh, my!”

This happens while they’re riding an elevator in the local Red Cross branch.

BACK TO THE MAIN TOPIC

While at first glance only taking blood from murderers or blood banks doesn’t seem so bad the fact is the vampire is still a parasite and unable to do avoid destructive actions. Murderers aren’t the only ones who need justice, so do the families of victims. They need closure and a sense of finality, things they’ll never get that if a vampire just randomly offs the murderer before it happens. (And let’s face it – encounters with hunger vampires are pretty much always fatal with one exception – which we’ll talk about in a second.) The fact that our existing legal system is bad at providing closure and finality for victims does not justify a vampire robbing victims of those things as well.

Likewise, blood banks exist for people who need blood transfusions and they are often dangerously low on reserves and that’s without vampires chowing down on huge amounts of blood and making the reserves even lower. Regardless of what they do, vampires are taking from the world around them and giving nothing in return.

Well talk some more about parasitism in a second but I’m going to talk about points one and two together and point two is that vampires are irredeemable. They are never cured. EVER.

On an intellectual level, I get that. Vampires are creatures that are already dead but, for whatever reason, keep having an impact on the living. You can’t just undo their death – in fact they’re often undead because someone tried just that – and so there’s no way to fix their condition unless resurrecting people is a part of your story’s schtick and that’s generally a bad idea because it’s hard to maintain verisimilitude when your actions have no consequences. So cheating death = bad plots as well as bad other things.

But on a thematic level it effectively removes free will from the equation. And that makes your characters puppets of FATE (or the author but, you know, that’s one of the things your audience isn’t supposed to think about while immersed in your story). Yeah, I know, the vampires have this hunger and they can’t continue to survive without it blah, blah, blah.

You know what I have to say to that? Human beings have starved themselves to death to protest things. Or set themselves on fire. Or just willingly walked OFF OF CLIFFS just because they chose to obey the orders of their general over preserving their own lives.

According to legend Alexander the Great actually intimidated a city into surrendering to him that way, by the by.

So the themes of parasitism and irredeemability come together to create a truly horrific message behind vampires, whether they be antagonistic or sympathetic. Basically, every time you put a vampire into a story, you say that people with problems cannot be fixed. Kleptomaniac? He’ll never get over it, you’ll just have to pay for the stuff he stole. Video game addict? Better just make sure he stays fed while he’s lost in his fantasy worlds. Drug addict? Make sure he doesn’t overdose! Violent? Better just slap him in jail.

Stop and think about this for a second. Vampires can only be dealt with in two ways. They can be allowed to exist as a burden on society, with the people around them trying to somehow keep them out of trouble regardless of the cost, or they can be destroyed if they can’t or don’t want to be controlled. You can be an enabler or an annihilator. People with problems have no way out.

It’s the exact opposite of the idea that a problem, no matter how hideous it may seem at first glance, can be overcome. It may take sacrifice and hard work and painful amounts of compassion, it may take a realistic attitude and acceptance of the fact that you can and sometimes (frequently) will fail, but it can be overcome. The two ideas are polar opposites, and of the two I will take the second immediately and always.

But there’s one more implication of vampires that makes their popularity in this day and age both surprising and disgusting. Unlike the previous two points, this is something that’s come into the vampire mythos only with their updating to the modern age. And in particular, with the vampire’s use as a “romantic” protagonist.

Let’s stop and think about this for a moment. Vampires are naturally horrific creatures. They drink blood and ruthlessly destroy people who come after them in an attempt to hold them accountable for their crimes. They manipulate people through telepathy or the use of their blood as some kind of a brainwashing drug. And, once again, they drain blood from their victims in order to gain power.

How is it possible, in the age of feminism and it’s many mixed blessings, advanced psychology and widespread literary criticism, that no one has realized vampires are directly analogous to AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP?!

How can we look at vampires, their physical appearance, their manipulative sexual maneuvering and their chemical and emotional manipulation of of their victims and only see an abstract symbol of “the forbidden” or “the other” or “the unknown” and not admit to ourselves that vampires are horrific abusive monsters? When we say it’s just the way they are or the romantic interest will change them or that the way the vampire cares for their romantic interest makes them different we are giving the exact same excuses battered spouses give for not leaving their abusive partner! It’s like culture as a whole has been sucked into an abusive relationship with vampires and we can’t admit to what we’ve stumbled into! Thousands and thousands of young people are reading stories that present abusive partners as not only acceptable but desirable! Where is the outcry?

It would almost be acceptable if the vampire in the story were an abusive partner who the romantic protagonist eventually broke up with. Except then we’re slipping into the first two thematic problems, the flaws of which I’ve already discussed. Yes, I believe even abusive spouses can be redeemed and healed. But doing it from in a romantic relationship is very, very dangerous and not behavior that should be encouraged.

But encourage it is exactly what every vampire love story I’ve heard of does. They show the POWER OF LUV changing the vampire protagonist, magically giving the vampire to control their urges and treat the other half of the couple in a way totally different from the way they treat everyone else. That’s great for creating romantic feelings in the readership but the message is that if you just stand by your partner, no matter how abusive, eventually your love will change them. Which, in real life, almost never actually works and is frequently traumatic and sometimes fatal for the people trying it.

It’s unhealthy, and I hate what it says about us as a society that we haven’t challenged this idea at all. When you take it as a whole, between the unfortunate message about personal problems being unsolvable, enabling being encouraged and abusive behavior being glorified I find vampires to be a pretty despicable addition to works of fiction. So this Halloween, consider taking your fake fangs and tossing them in the trash and forswear vampires and their horrible themes for good. There are plenty of better things to do with your time.

October Daye and the Hazards of Long Running Characters

Posted by natechen on

Consider this more of a rant than a real examination of writing as such. There’s nothing quite like a breakdown of what’s going on here, mainly because the character arcs aren’t resolved yet and the stories in them aren’t over. There’s holes in what’s going on and the picture isn’t complete. But the picture that I’m getting points towards some of the problems with managing your characters in a very long running series.

As you’ve probably gathered by the title, this is about the main character of the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire, which I’ve recommended in the past. I recently finished the most recent installment, The Winter Long, and it was mostly everything I expected of it. But it’s developed a problem I’ve noticed in a lot of long running series and rarely effectively addressed.

So for starters, what is the problem?

Basically, the problem is familiarity versus dynamic characterization.

We all know the feeling of coming back to the characters we know and love for another round of fun and hijinks. This is what makes TV shows, particularly sitcoms or some of the light hearted dramas, run for so long. They start with a bunch of people we know, they throw a new problem at them, and when the dust settles the problem is dealt with and the people go back to what they were doing before. Status Quo is God. There’s no problem with that, it’s part of the formula.

But in most books it’s taken as a given that characters, both the central cast and some or even all of the peripheral characters, need to change some over the course of a story. Given that books (and movies) are a format that allows for a much deeper and more extensive exploration of characters than even an hour long TV show; there’s more room for it to take place and we expect it. Regardless of whether character development is the focus of the story, it’s expected.

The problem that long running series encounter is that, as your characters are growing and changing, all those small changes are going to stack up and turn your cast into something that the readers are no longer familiar and comfortable with.

Now. There’s nothing wrong with this on the face of it. This brings into play the elusive quality of verisimilitude that all writers need to work into their stories. Real people change over time and, if you just check in with them every six months or a year instead of living with them constantly, you’re going to find them weirdly unfamiliar due to the ways they’ve changed and you’ll probably be made a little uncomfortable by this. The rare exceptions to this will be your friends for life but, and let’s face it, those are just as rare as the fiction characters who you will easily connect with at any time and in any place.

So as a general rule the characters that fill long running series tend to slowly warp into something other than the person we got to know. It’s just a part of the format. In fact, if they don’t they actually start to feel flat and unbelievable. But the opposite also poses problems.

The problem with this gradual change is embodied in the relationship between October, or Toby, and her liege lord Sylvester Torquill and his wife, Luna. When Toby first introduces us to these two characters they all have a good relationship, there’s real warmth between them in spite of a kidnapping incident that Toby failed to clear up, mainly because she’d been turned into a goldfish. It’s a long story.

Over time the relationship between them builds up problems. Sylvester and Luna have been keeping secrets from Toby – I’m not sure why this is such a big problem for Toby since the lives of all the characters are built on an interlocking series of secrets they keep from each other and the world at large. Regardless, Toby starts finding things out and wondering why Sylvester has been keeping them from her.

My problem with the way this has fallen out is this.

First, we never really see signs of the falling out between Sylvester and Toby until The Winter Long. We’re told Toby is having more and more questions about Sylvester’s behavior but she never does much to hash it out, at least not that we see. In The Winter Long Toby actually gets a in-her-face suggestion for why Sylvester’s behavior towards her is so favorable – along with another more subtle one she might not have caught. Yet Toby never gives this man, who has been supportive and kind to her since the day they met, the benefit of the doubt.

This is particularly bizarre as Toby has given several of her other friends that benefit, particularly the Luidaeg (don’t as how that’s pronounced), who have been under or are under a series of interlocking agreements and bindings that force them to talk in circles in order to get information across, when they can communicate information at all, or otherwise constrained by their magical nature. Sylvester is very old (McGuire’s fairies don’t age, although they can be killed) and he’s also fairly important in the grand scheme of things, yet Toby never stops to think that decisions he made hundreds of years before she was born might now be tying his hands regarding what he can or cannot tell her.

We don’t know that they do, but it’s very odd that the possibility never even seems to cross Toby’s mind.

Also, Sylvester’s biological daughter was abducted and missing for fourteen years, during which time the poor man was mad with grief. Now she’s a moderately psychopathic person in an induced coma. Sylvester can be excused for being a little over protective and secretive, not that Toby ever acknowledges that. And the relationship between Toby and Luna has been even more neurotic.

It’s like every volume of the series that comes out we find the two ladies on worse footing with little examination of why things are getting worse, other than Toby’s found she doesn’t know Luna as well as she thought. Rather than trying to come to a closer understanding of a person she claims is a friend, Toby avoids Luna and otherwise undermines Luna’s attempts to keep the Torquill family from dissolving under the trauma it’s sustained. And the worst part about this is, the October Daye series is written in the first person. There is literally no other side to the story.

There’s a lot of character arc going on and we’re not getting perspective on it. Maybe part of the point is that Toby finds these characters as strange and alien as we do, but my biggest gripe is she’s not reacting to these changes like she’d react if any other character started to display the same behaviors. She’s taking it very passively, and that’s woefully out of character for a woman who springs into action before reinforcements arrive half the time.

The worst part about it is, it feels like it’s dragging down the series. This really feels like something that needs to get wrapped up promptly, that’s the kind of action we expect from our heroine. But instead it’s just sitting there and casting a shadow over the series. There’s a better than good chance McGuire intends to resolve this at some point in the future but leaving characters that felt so very central to the early portion of the series out in the cold for so long is displeasing.

To summarize: Long running series, especially in the case of books and movies TV series that have to restart at the beginning of each season are actually better at this, have a bad habit of creating character growth in characters in one installment and then not giving the audience time to reacquaint themselves with those characters and where they are in life in the next. This tends to happen more with supporting characters, since they don’t get the same amount of screen time as the central cast, and it results in those once beloved characters turning into something strange and foreign when they do show up. And I’m worried that the treatment of the Torquills in Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series is going to fall apart as a result of this.

Do I see this as a potential problem? Yeah. Do I have any idea what to do about it? I’ll have to get back to you on that…

Story Tempo and the Average Writer

Posted by natechen on

Let me start by saying that when I talk about the average writer, I mean me. This is as much about my experience with trying to find the tempo of stories as it is anything, hopefully you’ll be able to glean some useful thoughts from my experience.

The tempo of a story is basically supposed to consist of a series of highs and lows that build steadily upwards and culminate in a climax shortly before the end, followed by a brief conclusion letting the reader decompress and process what happened during the story. I’ve talked some about this idea in my beat outline post and I don’t plan to rehash it much here.

Now this is no great revelation to most people. Standard story structure has been around pretty much forever, we see it in stories like The Odyssey and many of the other classical stories. But, as we so often find, the key to this is not in the concept but in the execution. You can structure the tempo of your stories perfectly but that’s just the beginning. Everything has a tempo.

If you’ve ever practiced music in the Western tradition you’re familiar with how beats can be subdivided. Each measure has a number of beats in it, each beat can be broken down into smaller and smaller notes, they all have a different notations and a huge chunk of musical theory revolves around the ways they compare and contrast. Oddly enough, writing has no such system for analyzing beats, even though tempo is horribly important to building a good story or even writing an interesting factual report. It’s true writing is more art than science, but so is music and it has a well regulated system for analyzing tempo so why not writing?

It is impossible to formulate a way to alleviate this problem quickly or without a widespread recognition of the problem on the part of the writing community. So for right now, I’m just going to make the case for why I think such a thing should exist.

Take a short story. It could be any short story but I’m going to use Emergency Surface, which you can read for yourself by clicking that link, as an example. There will be spoilers here, so you’ve been warned. The pacing of the story is thus:

  • In Emergency Surface, the story begins with the problem being introduced – a submarine, Erin’s Dream by name, is taking on water.
  •  Complications arise when the leaking compartment can’t be completely sealed and two compartments flood as a result. But they are sealed off in the end.
  • Unfortunately, those two flooded compartments are the largest on the sub and are putting huge stress on the ship. It will break up if they can’t be pumped out.
  • Taking the ship to the surface is a viable way to repair the hull, since the pressure there will be much less and allow the crew to work on the pressure hull safely and they run no risk of being crushed.
  • Erin’s Dream is crewed by a group of people who want to avoid being seen by the people who live on the surface. Not only does the crew not want to go there it could actually get them into trouble, not just with the surface people but their own people as well.
  • Duffy, the sub’s captain, decides to run the risk of discovery and sends the ship to the surface.
  • The amount of water in the hull is starting to become a real problem – the center of the ship is much less buoyant than the ends and the ship may snap in half before it can surface.
  • Herrigan, the sub’s salvage commander, leads a detachment of minisubs out to brace the center of the Erin’s Dream and try and relieve stress on the hull.
  • One of the minisub pilots panics from agoraphobia as he finds himself in the middle of the dark ocean with no fixed points of reference. He breaks away and sends his vehicle back towards the ocean floor.
  • At the climax of the story, Herrigan decides to break away from the Erin’s Dream as well in an attempt to rescue his wayward pilot while Erin’s Dream proceeds to the surface with what they can only hope is enough support to keep the sub from being destroyed in the process.
  • The problem is resolved when we find Oscar assessing the repairs needed with his crew – so far undiscovered on the surface of the ocean. Herrigan returns with his wayward pilot and the crew is reunited.
  • A short conversation about the dangers of salvage sub operations followed by a decision to visit Australia and see what the surface world has been up to provides a denouement and lets us know that the crew is, on the whole, back on top of the situation and planning for the future.

So there it is. Looks like a typical story pacing, right? There’s a problem, solutions that create problems of their own, a climax when the outcome for everyone is in doubt, a resolution and a brief unwinding period. Nothing groundbreaking here.

But if you compare it to the average “chapter” post I’ve been making as I hammer out novels, if you outline them by beats and events, they don’t match this pacing at all.

So the question that I feel writers need to analyze more deeply is, does every scene need a similar pacing to a short story? Should each beat of your beat outline itself match the pacing of a good story, with challenges, solutions, a climax and a resolution? It’s not impossible – short stories find that pacing in as many words all the time.

Should there be different kinds of pacing for scenes? How many? What should we call them to make discussion easier? Musical notes are infinitely divisible, how much can we dissect storytelling and still find the rules of pacing and tempo unchanged? How did one question for discussion turn into so many so quickly? I really don’t know.

This is an issue that I have no clear cut idea on yet, I’ve been struggling with it in my own writing of late.  It’s entirely possible that this whole concept has been hashed out before and I’ve just never heard of it, so I would love to hear of any resources you’ve found on the subject of tempo and pacing and how it might be broken down in the writing of stories. This is also a topic we’ll probably revisit in the future, so I hope you’ll look forward to it.