Category Archives: On Writing

The Fantastic

Posted by natechen on

It’s a strange word, no?

When you first hear it you probably think of it as a compliment. It means a performance that someone loved, and would want to see again. Something that sets you above the crowd, something that you absolutely loved.

Or at least, that’s one of the meanings. However, according to Merriam Webster, at it’s core it refers to something grounded in pure fantasy or something so extreme as to beggar belief. Something so eccentric that no one would ever expect to find it in their lifetime, or the lifetime of anyone else.

In genre terms, fantasy is a part of science fiction. I don’t agree with that (and sooner or later we’ll cover why, genrely speaking) but there is definitely some overlap.

However, if science fiction serves to illustrate the nature, weaknesses and strengths of human ideas, fantasy serves to illustrate the nature, weaknesses and strengths of humanity itself. There’s all kinds of subgenres in fantasy. High fantasy, low fantasy, political fantasy, urban fantasy, Harry Potteresque, most webcomics, most of the offerings of DC and Marvel publishing, the list goes on. However, one thing unites them:

Once you’ve finished a truly outstanding specimen you will sit back, totally sated, and think to yourself, “That was fantastic.”

There is nothing so extreme, so eccentric, so drenched in personality as the fantasy story. It’s no wonder David Eddings claims that fantasy writers crank out better stories, everything about fantasy is about pushing the limits to bring you the sharpest, best defined stories possible. Fantasy stories sometimes take the trappings of sci-fi, as in James Cameron’s Avatar, one of the things that contributes to the confusion between the two so-called genres. (The opposite can happen as well, sci-fi sometimes hides in the disguise of a fantasy tale.) But at their core, they’re about different things.

So if you’re going to write a fantasy story it has to have, at its core, something truly fantastic. And it can’t be something that market research shows is going to get a fantastic reception from the public, it has to be something you find fantastic or the story just isn’t going to come together. As an example, no matter how popular they are no vampire story I write is going to sell well. I just don’t like them for far too many reasons to go into in here. While vampires are hot stuff right now, no one is going to want to read a story I write featuring one because it’ll be halfhearted, and that will show.

(Note: It’s far more likely that you’ll find a random vampire getting steamrolled by my main characters. After all, the early accounts of vampiresque creatures suggest they were actually a lot more like zombies. Not that I like them either. In fact, don’t look for the undead in my stories period, save for perhaps the occasional ghost…)

Instead of trying to find some idea that everyone seems to love, find something that appeals to you and then push it and push it until it’s so great, so brilliant, so right that others can’t help but love it too. You’ll never get a 100% success rate, of course, but at least you’ll be creating something you love and enjoying it with other people.

The most fantastic image I have ever come across was from C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew. In that book, he introduced the Wood Between the Worlds and showed them a passage between the myriad incredible possibilities that existed beyond the two worlds his stories were focused on. With those possibilities came questions. Why couldn’t Jardis turn things to dust outside of her own world? What other ways besides the magic rings could one jump from place to place? With time flowing separately, how different could technology levels become?

Of course, many of these questions were firmly outside the scope of The Chronicles of Narnia. But still, I wondered. And over many years, the idea of a wood eventually turned into a sky. A single, unbroken expanse that stretched across countless worlds. If a person could just walk far enough or fly high enough, perhaps you could find a totally different world just beyond that endless horizon.

Worlds upon worlds to explore, full of interesting people, who knows what state of development, what could be more fantastic than that?

If you can’t think of anything better either, or even if you can, I hope you’ll join me on Monday to take that first step over the edge of the earth…

The Long and Short of It (Where It is Writing)

Posted by natechen on

One of the many things I’m currently juggling is completing the outline for Water Fall. It’s actually mostly finished, but my method of outlining has it’s own idiosyncrasies, which will undoubtedly be the subject of their own post some day soon. But today’s subject is more straightforward: Length. 

When you sit down with an eighty to hundred point beat outline in front of you the thought that you’re going to try and turn all that into a fully fleshed out novel/script/screenplay/whatever can be more than a little daunting. Water Fall is my third crack at writing a novel and the scope of the project is still intimidating, doubly so because it has to keep in mind, expand on and complete things started in Heat Wave. It’s a lot to keep in the air and I have a feeling that I’m going to wind up doing a lot more correcting and rewriting, just in the first draft, than I had to do with Heat Wave. That’s not a bad thing, but it can sometimes be overwhelming. 

But there’s nothing quite like the satisfaction when a long project is finished, and you can sit back (for about ten seconds, at least) and say, “Yes! I have accomplished something.” 

On the other hand, you might expect short stories to be much simpler to write. You just sit down and toss off a couple of thousand words and make sure you don’t contradict yourself in that short span of time, right? 

Well, not so much. For one thing, keeping a short story short is more difficult than it might seem at first glance. Two of the short stories I planned for this summer wound up far exceeding the length I expected of them – both #63 and Shadows and Brightmoor were supposed to be one installment. However, I really don’t want to publish anything too much over 5000 words in a single post, not only because I don’t want to overload people with the Wall of Text o’ Doom but because I simply cannot write that much, plus two other posts for a week, and get it out in good time with good quality. 

For another thing, short stories have little to no time to be leisurely. You can’t putter around when introducing your characters, setting or conflict. Things have to go from minute one or you’re going to wind up with a novella rather than a short story. Finding places to squeeze in all the detail you might want (or need) in your story can be daunting. 

Somewhere in the middle of that is the novella. I might try writing one of those sometime soon, but currently have no plans to work on one before the end of Water Fall sometime next year. But I suspect if you were to try it you’d find it to be somewhere between full novel and short story – just long enough to be intimidating, but short enough that you’ll still feel pressed for space. Fun, no? 

Writing is the use of words. You have to know them, use them sparingly and with maximum impact and keep with them until the job is done. No matter what the scope of your story, your building blocks are the same. There’s a saying among management circles at the library where I work: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” 

The same is true of all stories: They’re written one word a time. 

Keep that in mind, love your words and no matter what kind of story you’re working on, at least the work will be a joy. 

Small Picture, Big Picture

Posted by natechen on

By now you’re probably not at all surprised to learn that I like to put big ideas in my stories. From Circuit’s love of large projects to Helix’s complex family tree to the question of whether we as a society can deal with outstanding people who are outstanding in ways we don’t like, big ideas are the bread and butter of this blog. The problem with big ideas is they tend to take us over.

Say you read a new book, one you really love. How often do you catch yourself measuring everything by that book? Let’s say you took my advice a few months back and read up on Girl Genius. Then you went out and read Whitechapel Gods right after that. I can almost guarantee that you like one of those stories much more than the other, and what’s more, you probably measured them against each other.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Measuring ideas is something humans are hardwired to do, and comparison is one of the key tools we have to do it with. But the problem with running into big ideas is they often become our standard for everything, at least for a short time, and that can throw our perspective out of whack, especially if we keep going from big idea to big idea. Eventually we wind up kind of aimless, just sort of wandering from fad to fad with no idea what we’re doing or what’s really going on at all.

Oddly enough, one of the easiest ways to pick out a person’s big picture is not to walk up to them and ask, “What do you think is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?”

For starters, the cool people are all going to tell you, “42.” (So will anyone else who’s read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) But more than that, most people haven’t thought it over enough to actually give you a clear answer, or in some cases even realize that they have a big idea at all. (Note: In some circles, this blog included, not having a big idea counts as a big idea. It’s just not a great idea…)

No, the simplest way to work out a person’s big idea is to pay attention to their small ones. All ideas are interconnected, and your big idea defines how you look at all your smaller ones. With a lot of practice and a solid understanding of humanity you can start to extrapolate exactly what it is people are thinking about all the time based on what they’re thinking and talking about at any given minute. All the ideas are connected, even if the core idea is just, “Shiny!” (Actually, that one’s pretty easy to figure out.)

In the West, the study of ideas is called philosophy, and a lot of Western traditions think of philosophers as wise men and advisers, people who take a hand in advising their community and pointing out potential pitfalls and errors. They’re valuable men, but often rather mundane. In our fiction, they tend to be either well educated men who have devoted their whole life to learning; or people who have simply spent their whole life working, the people they meet and the tasks they carry out teaching them the value of some ideas and the weaknesses of others.

In the East, people who study ideas fall into a group best described as sages. They are men who live in isolation, taking part in community life only when it comes to them for advice or, at times, drags them forcibly back to civilization. Their ideas give them power, physical, political and often in fiction spiritual and supernatural. But the time, dedication, isolation and natural talent needed to develop a sage’s wisdom sets them irrevocably apart from other men. They tend to keep to themselves and associate primarily with other sages. A sage who steps into the world will change it in huge ways, at the risk of destroying one or both of them in the process.

The Weavers of the Heartlands are a group of people who live in the American Midwest. They are a collision of philosopher and sage, at once seeking to live in ways different from their community and shape it and nurture it.

Like the witches and wizards of fairy tales or the sages of Eastern traditions, they often eschew the stifling bustle of humanity that comes with cities, and that’s not surprising. Like those people, the Weavers have understanding and power that exceeds what most people strangely consider “normal”. However, these powers stem from the nature and depth of their thought, not from a natural talent or selective blessing. Rather it is the connection of things and ideas, and the careful analysis of those patterns of connections, that makes a Weaver powerful. And in turn, the ideas Weavers carry are carefully reasoned, vigorously defended and actively prosecuted, putting them in constant conflict with one another and with humanity at large.

Of course, the modern world looks poorly on direct conflict, and magic by any name has baggage of it’s own. So the conflicts between Weavers are a quieter thing these days.

But not gone. No, the Weaver’s magic is alive and well, and in the most unexpected of places…

A Correction to Yesterday’s Post

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It may seem strange to talk about making corrections to a work of fiction, but as big and complex as world building can often get, it’s easy to loose track of details and let little things slip through, especially when you’re playing against type.

In yesterday’s story, Captain Rainer tells Elizabeth to avoid using the term “space navy”. This is because The United States Combined Orbital and Deep Space Forces didn’t start as an outgrowth of the United States Navy.

Many sci-fi settings adopt a naval theme for their space forces because they envision large fleets of ships moving through interplanetary or even interstellar space, their massive crews working to keep the juggernaut of galactic space power moving forward. However, this overlooks the fact that military activity in space is likely to start with small ships, probably crewed by no more than a dozen people and much similar to the heavy bombers of yesteryear than the much larger ships of the Navy. Their mandate will likely have more to do with ensuring that hostile forces stay clear of strategic orbitals than forming large platforms for spaceborn firepower. The USAF handles many of those tasks already and, while it’s true that the Navy does similar things using carrier air power, the fact that the Air Force only deals with those situations makes them more likely to take the lead in developing space power. Once that development begins, bureaucratic inertia suggest they’ll keep it until the Orbital Force break free of the Air Force just as the Air Force once did from the Army.

What does all that have to do with yesterday’s short story?

It has to do with rank. You see, the Air Force was once a part of the Army, and thus uses Army nomenclature when referring to it’s enlisted men and officers. Among other things, this means that Captain Rainer is an O-3 like an Army captain, not an O-6 like a Naval captain, which is why he’s in charge of recruiting at an aging space station rather than commanding a larger garrison somewhere. But more importantly, it means there are no Chief Petty Officers. Rather, ComODS has Master Sergeants, the equivalent to Chiefs in Army, Air Force and Marine ranks. So Elizabeth didn’t get insider information on the application requirements from a Chief Computer Technician’s Mate, she got it from a Master Sergeant.

Naval Chiefs are handy for sci-fi writers for a number of reasons. One is that their rating is right there in the title, which is part of the reason why I accidentally used it in yesterday’s story. The rank also sounds very authoritative, which is nice. But most of all, it’s a naval rank, and space navies are the default for sci-fi writers.

I debated about going back and making the change. However, since my intended history for the Extrasolar Age has the U.S. space military tradition (and several others) founded in the Air Force, I have ultimately decided to go back and edit the story rather than letting it stand as is.

Now, I’m going to pause to consider whether effort expended was worth time invested. I’ve used over five hundred words to explain why I’m changing four. We must as we must, I suppose…

Genrely Speaking: Hard Sci-Fi

Posted by natechen on

Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, the part of the show where I come out and explain what I mean when I mention various genres and/or subgenres of fiction. I do this in no small part because everyone looks at classifications a bit differently and since I am always in need of content want to be totally clear about what I mean when I use these terms it’s best I spell it out so I have something to link back to rather than defining the terms each time they come up.

Today’s genre is “hard” sci-fi. This is science fiction for the thinking man, something that clocks in at 4 or more on the Mohs’ scale probably qualifies. You won’t find much in the way of laser swords or rubber forehead aliens here, hard sci-fi takes itself and its readers very seriously. The hallmarks of hard sci-fi are as follows:

1) A strong emphasis on technology and science as it works in reality (and thus, in the story.) Hard sci-fi starts with the premise that science fiction needs to have a strong grounding in science. Generally, this doesn’t just mean basic physics and chemistry. Any and all science used in the story must be explained to the reader and the scientific facts (or as-yet unproven hypothesis that the writer is betting will be proven) is important. The narrative will spend time explaining some or all of the high-level concepts the story deals with, be they quantum physics or alien biology. How in-depth this goes depends on the author and their goals.

2) A tendency to advocate a particular kind of technology and the social changes the author thinks it will bring about. In other words, many hard sci-fi writers want science to be doing specific things in our culture and write about what they think science doing those things would be like. There’s nothing wrong with this, in fact pretty much every story is a writer saying, “I’d like to see something like this.” However, in hard sci-fi creating a new tool to make the change come about is the story, or at least one major part.

3) Strong belief that humanity need simply progress scientifically to achieve better philosophy and life. The hard sci-fi author’s love of science borders on a bizarre kind of Messiah complex. Arthur C. Clark’s maxim that “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is probably the most blatant statement of this principle. Another is the way many aliens in hard sci-fi sound like they walked out of a cosmic horror tale (see this post for more on cosmic horror, although Lovecraft and Co will eventually get their own post, I’m sure). Not only are aliens made deliberately, well, alien to humanity they’re often much more technologically advanced and allowed to do inexplicable things simply because they’re technologically advanced. This point is allowed to contradict point one.

What are the weaknesses of hard sci-fi? Well that’s a difficult question. You’ve probably already gathered that I’m not the biggest fan of hard sci-fi. In fact, I said as much last week. So my critique might be a bit harsher here than it is in some of the genre write-ups for genres I really love. That in mind, here we go.

First, the tendency to explain all the science does horrible things to the flow and pacing of the story. Some hard sci-fi authors have great stories roaring along until they stop for five or six pages and expound on theoretical quantum physics. Once things start rolling again you’re just frustrated and need a break. Eventually the story will draw you back but you’ll probably never get back to the level of your first investment. You can avoid this and still get all that exposition in, but so few authors in the genre actually pull it off.

Second, the way hard sci-fi handles human vs. non-human intelligence is directly contrary to its core tenants. Humans are almost always running into weird aliens with more advanced technology that somehow can’t quite figure out human psychology and/or behavior. Yet humans tend to get a handle on aliens pretty quickly. There’s a huge array of reasons for this, from the desire to avoid rubber forehead aliens to the fact that the writers are human, and thus can only create aliens that make sense to humans (unless the aliens behave randomly, but that has a new host of problems.) This is a problem because hard sci-fi says that technology should be the defining element in advancement. Thus, aliens should have an easier time understanding humans than the opposite. On the other hand, a strong AI will probably understand humanity just fine but it’s creators will find it almost inscrutable.

Part of this is just because the story wants to keep the focus on the human characters, but then, why be so hard line on “hard” sci-fi? While it’s not something every reader will notice, it sometimes galls me.

What are the strengths of hard sci-fi? Hard sci-fi does have some great strengths. It’s the best genre for asking hard questions about what technology we’re making and what we intend to do with it. Serious philosophical issues underlay these questions and the very serious matter of technology and human development give these sometimes-abstract questions very immediate consequences.

Hard sci-fi is not a genre for everyone. There’s a reason laser swords and rubber forehead aliens are what define science fiction for most people – they’re fun. Also, the people who are telling those stories have spent huge amounts of time studying the art of story and making their stories as interesting as possible. Hard sci-fi writers are less invested in story or fun, but that’s not saying they avoid it entirely.

There’s also no saying that hard sci-fi couldn’t do both, make great stories and still carry most or even all of their scientific and philosophical emphasis. But it will take a lot of time, effort and skill. Right now, the genre is still defining itself. I find it worth a visit every now and then, but not something I’d want to read all the time.

Fiction, Science and the Divided Future

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Like many genres, science fiction is such a broad category as to be functionally useless. There’s at least three different subsets of what people generally consider “sci-fi” and many book dealers and libraries foolishly lump “fantasy” (another laughably meaningless label) into the category as well, creating a single genre with more identity issues than an entire middle school full of preteens. Since I’m running this blog and I get to define the terms, not to mention the fact that I am in constant need of content, I’ve taken it upon myself to set out and explain my own genres, including several that would normally be considered “sci-fi” in typical parlance. So far, the only one of these that I’ve touched on so far is space opera, although you can tune in next week for my thoughts on hard sci-fi. But that’s not exactly what I’m here to talk about today.

Today I’m here to talk about the new setting I’m introducing with next Monday’s short story Emergency Surface! Exciting, yes? Do I detect a lack of enthusiasm? -_-

Well, I guess that’s not surprising given that you know nothing about what’s coming up. As you may have already guess from the direction of this post, Emergency Surface is something of a sci-fi story set in something of a sci-fi world. The closest genre it falls into is hard sci-fi, but that’s a label that doesn’t really apply. To explain my reticence to use the term we have to step back a bit and examine the ideas behind science fiction as a whole.

As the name implies, science fiction is fiction where science (in the abstract), the directions science takes and humanity’s relation to science are all examined through the characters and plot. My problem with this approach is that pretty much every science fiction story assumes that science and technology will shape culture as they are introduced. Eventually some kind of technological turning point will be hit and humanity will be pulled together and all our differences will disappear, leaving us to deal with the new challenges of the space age as a mostly united group (sometimes this is called the “technological singularity” although that term doesn’t always refer to that sequence of events. Like most philosophical concepts, it means different things to different people.) Usually this breakthrough is something like technologically assisted group consciousness, nanotechnology creating infinite free wealth or some sort of free energy that is essentially the same as uberefficient nanomanufacturing. Once all our needs are met and we all think the same we’ll be able to join together and usher in a golden age!

(EXCEPTION TO THE ABOVE – Christopher L. Bennett’s Only Superhuman does a pretty good job of being sci-fi and yet showing how a culture will develop it’s own unique technological quirks, at least to an extent.)

Anyway, if you’ve spent any time reading this blog you know that I don’t buy that. (If you’re new, welcome! My name’s Nate and I’m a cynical grump.) Personally, I feel that the opposite is true – culture shapes the kinds of technology developed and the ways it is integrated into society. In short, just like a society gets the kinds of leaders it deserves, it will also get the kinds of technology it deserves (or fail to develop new technology at all , if it’s focused on something totally impractical.) In short, like all fiction, science fiction is about the human condition. In the case of science fiction, it is about the structure of our society and the products that our ways of thinking bring.

Technology cannot define humanity because the things that divide us are the very ideas that give rise to technological innovation. The value of a sci-fi story is in showing where ideas can go and asking the question, is this a road to take?

So. Emergency Surface is the first story in a very large sci-fi setting I call the Divided Future. You’re not going to find a world government, a human empire or aliens here. Those all detract from the emphasis on ideas and their influence on society. Likewise, no Strong AI to run our societies for us and no time travel for the convenient undoing of mistakes, part of examining ideas and their consequences is choosing something and living with the consequences. (NOTE: I do have stories that play around with these ideas but in the Nate Chen Genrely Speaking classification system these ideas belong in the fantasy group rather than the sci-fi group of stories.)

The Divided Future is the second largest setting for stories that I have, spanning over three hundred years. It begins in the late 21st Century with the beginning of the New Ice Age and progresses through the settling of the solar system and into the exploration of deep space. It’s a big world and I hope to have lots of time to explore it in the future, but for the first story we’ll actually be staying within Earth’s atmosphere. In fact, we’ll be farther inside it than most people will ever get in their lives.

Sound interesting? Then I hope you’ll tune in on Monday for Emergency Surface, a tale of deep sea survival! See you then.

Squeezing Things In

Posted by natechen on

Time management is the bane of most authors I know. In fact, it’s a real challenge for most people I know but authors have their own particular issues, which is what I’m going to talk at today. You see, writing eats up time. You can sit down with one good idea that you’re sure you can pound out in ten or fifteen minutes and an hour later realize you were planning to eat lunch in there at some point but now it’s time to get back to work (as in, your paying job). Even a writer in a full-blown spark induced fugue state can loose large chunks of time in exploring an idea, throwing out poor developments (or just poor word choices) and crosschecking ideas against other parts of the story.

As a result, many writers labor under the impression that writing anything is going to be a long and involved process and that they must set aside a large (sometimes an impractically large) chunk of time for in order to get anything done. I myself used to think of writing as a process involving five to ten minutes of focusing followed by an hour, minimum, of writing and twenty minutes of rough editing.

I can now confidently say that this was because I was a moron.

Not that I’m a whole lot better now, but I have at least reached the conclusion that the assumptions I had about the time required for writing were not true.

For example, at my job I receive two 15 minute breaks every day, in addition to my lunch break. I used to think that was too little time to do anything of value, writing-wise, and so that time was effectively lost to me. (Well, not entirely. I still used the time for reading, sketching and other activities that are good for me and/or ultimately inform my writing. But I wasn’t spending it on writing, which is the gold standard for being a, y’know, writer.)

Now, with a lot of focus and determination, I’ve managed to pull about ten minutes of writing out of that half hour of break time, at least when I’m planning to spend my free time at work writing. I still spend time at work doing those other things, because they’re good things, but I feel that getting another half hour to forty-five minutes of writing time a week is a good thing, too. If you’re prepared and ready to roll, even that little time spent writing can yield great results.

So what are some things you can do to get prepared and ready to roll? Well, here’s three suggestions:

1. Prime the pump. Think about what you want to write before you sit down to write it. Not just a little, a lot. If you have some sort of secretarial job or one of the dreaded customer service positions this may not always be practical for you, but try and find at least fifteen minutes a day, say on your drive to work or while you’re engaged in mindless lifting or filing, where you can think about something you want to write about. Turn it over and over in your mind, ask yourself questions about it, revise it and toy around with how it fits into the bigger picture. At the very least, you should be able to do this while lunch is in the microwave and while you’re eating.

2. Do some editing (but not a lot). When you open up your document or pull out the notebooks start by going back to the start of the last paragraph you wrote and rewrite it, focusing on clarity and word choice. Make bigger changes if you think they’re necessary. Hopefully that will get you in the mood to write and remind you of what you were saying when you left off. Sure, rereading does that too, but something about the act of writing things out really gets the neurons firing.

3. Bring the right tools. I didn’t really do a good job of writing on my break until I broke down and bought a tablet that I could easily take to work with me and cloudsync my files so that I didn’t have to be constantly retyping handwritten pages from work. I was very skeptical at first but the money invested was more than worthwhile. A corollary of this: Don’t use a Swiss Army Knife when what you need is an X-acto knife. If your tablet is a writing tool, don’t clutter it up with games and other distractions – keep it as a writing tool. With maybe e-mail and blog software on the side…

Hopefully you’ll be able to use the advice here to make some inroads into turning spare minutes into productive writing. Or maybe you already have. If so, by all means, please share! I know I’m always looking for more ways to squeeze writing into the cracks.

Genrely Speaking: Police Procedural

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The police procedural is a close relative of the detective story and the thriller. It’s a variety of mystery that focuses more on following the day-to-day work of a low to mid ranked cop on the beat as they go about their business, solving cases with persistence, connections and shoe leather more that brilliant deductive logic and the power of observation.

These days the definitive police procedural is probably CSI, which focuses on crime scene forensics and, like many mysteries, it focuses heavily on the crime of murder. Other crimes are frequently involved, murder rarely happens without some serious prompting to encourage it, and that prompting isn’t always legal either. But the CSI franchise works with the premise that the best mystery stories always wind up with murder involved somehow.

This isn’t saying that all police procedurals work like that. Some of the definitive police procedural TV series such as CHiPs, Hawaii Five-O and of course Dragnet rarely involved homicide, perhaps in part because Homicide is it’s own division in most police departments and the star characters would probably get shut out of investigating homicides they uncovered. Also, those were all shows with a shorter running time, so there may not have been time to brew up a good murder mystery.

So, with those basic ideas in mind, what are the hallmarks of the police procedural?

1. It’s an ensemble cast. While one character inevitably takes the lead, because human nature demands a focal point, police investigations are major team efforts. The one character simply cannot be on point for everything. Rather than one incredibly brilliant character who is constantly leaps and bounds ahead of one or two sidekicks who help him with legwork, the typical police procedural features a medium to large group of equals, some of whom are semi-regulars rather than appearing in each episode or book, in cooperation and competition, sharing work and success.

2. Things are character driven. A police investigation is actually kind of repetitive. There’s lots of interviewing people over and over again, picking over paperwork and staring at crime scenes and photos of those crime scenes. Police procedurals rarely have complicated, locked-room puzzles to crack, that’s not the strength of an investigation unit, but with less bizarre crimes to track it falls to the actual investigators and their personalities to keep us interested. Not that that’s a bad thing.

3. The rule of “fair play” cannot always be honored. Fair play is the idea that mysteries exist as much for the readers intellectual stimulation as their diversion. Some people feel that all the clues the brilliant detective uses to unravel a puzzle should be offered to the reader before the parlor scene reveals whodunnit, so the reader can have the satisfaction of seeing if he was right or wrong. But, of course, police procedurals don’t always have brilliant detectives or ingenious crimes. Sometimes all it takes to catch the crook is turning over the right rock and finding a document that makes everything as clear as day. Sometimes it’s obvious who’s guilty from minute one, it’s just a question of proving it to a judge. And frequently authors will hold facts back from the audience to help build suspense. As with the point above, that’s neither good or bad, that’s just they way the genre works.

What are the weaknesses of this genre? Police procedurals aren’t great at building longterm plots. While TV series can often get away with leaving one major, open-ended case as a running plot element the audience often gets frustrated if there is no real progress over the course of many seasons, or the larger case has no real bearing on most of the episodes, making it largely superfluous. This is because the status quo is god in many TV series, and the writers don’t want to mess with a working dynamic. If a major, overarching case is solved it tends to lead directly to an even bigger mystery to keep things moving along, which can quickly grow tiresome and unbelievable.

Written stories in this genre go to audiences who have an expectation of finding most things wrapped up by the end of the story. That leaves the characters themselves to creating large story arcs through their evolution and growth. However this also runs up against the wall of status quo – if you have a series going already, you and/or your publisher are probably going to be wary of tinkering with something that’s already working well. Striking a balance there requires a great deal of skill.

What are the strengths of this genre? Probably the greatest strength of the police procedural is character growth – yes, it’s very hard to do right and is frequently done badly. But if you do it right, the result is incredibly satisfying.

Also, the genre’s solid grounding in reality let you use a number of popular, believable and likeable archetypes to quickly draw in your audience. The naive rookie, the jaded cynic (with a heart of gold), the cranky doctor and the almighty janitor are all examples of the kinds of characters you might expect to find in a police procedural and, no matter how many times we’ve seen them before we’re likely to wind up rooting for them all over again.

Police procedurals are a kind of variation of the workplace comedy/drama that follow a simple formula: show us a bunch of strange, quirky people doing their jobs and let us build up a real affection for who they are and what they do. The addition of crime solving makes it easier to root for them and creates a thousand natural story hooks. It may not be your cup of tea, but at the very least the genre is a great example of how the basics of storytelling will always pay out. Worth looking at for the character building, if nothing else.

Heat Wave: Afterwords

Posted by natechen on

Early comic books have been described as assimilationist fantasies. That’s really not a bad summation of the era that brought us the catch phrase “truth, justice and the American Way.”

Many of the early comic book artists and writers were Jews, struggling to make ends meet and find acceptance in a country and in an era that were not particularly hospitable to outsiders. So it’s not surprising that the idea of being different permeates the early and middle era of superheroes. Superman and Wonder Woman were the ultimate outsiders, coming from totally alien cultures. Later, Marvel’s X-Men would take the idea of outsiders and move it to a slightly more human level. Of course, this tradition before the Second World War and the civil rights movement came along and changed many people’s perspectives on ethnicity and culture.

Now, everything is better, right?

Well, not exactly. You see, one of the things that was emphasized, and became overemphasized, in these assimilationist morality tales was that we are all the same. That’s a great sentiment, and on one level it’s certainly true. What makes us human or not human is not a matter of skin tone, culture or social standing. The problem is, while we’re quite confident about what doesn’t define humanity, we’re a lot sketchier on what does. Most people don’t give the whole issue a lot of thought and a lot of very smart people argue about it but it sometimes seems like today’s culture has chosen sameness as our defining characteristic. We’re all human after all, right?

So there’s a lot of hand wringing over making people “equal” where equal equates to us all having the same experiences. We want everyone to go to the same kinds of schools with the same ethnic mixes, get the same higher education and have all the same opportunities. The problem is, that kind of lifestyle is not very… shall we say, ergonomic?

From the moment kids arrive at school they’re presented with a number of boxes. Square classroom, square desk, square meals. Pile it all up for twelve years and you can move up to square cubicles in square buildings belonging to square corporations. And this might even be a great thing if people were invertebrates that could readily conform themselves to whatever environment they were put in. They could have total security and contentment for their entire lives. The problem is, people are individuals with very significant differences of circumstance and personality. Perhaps most importantly, they want to be different. It’s even possible that they were meant to be different, so that they could grow by understanding each other.

Some people will fit nicely into the square lifestyle our culture offers them. Some will be a tad cramped, but they’ll learn to adapt. However, there’s evidence of an ever-growing body of people who just can’t or don’t want to adapt to what culture offers them. They can’t keep up with it, or aren’t motivated by it and want to find meaning outside the existing structure. Once upon a time, that was fine. Many different kinds of societies flourished in America, from the Quakers and Shakers to various communes and the Moravians, all different kinds of social structures used to exist in America with little comment. Sure, they were ethnically similar and based primarily on European culture, but they lived and thought in very different ways.

In contrast, modern education places an emphasis not on giving people ideas to think about, but rather teaching them how to think. People from outside the cultural status quo, who don’t accept the ways they’re told to think, receive a kind of polite condescension, assuming they’re not view as outright freaks. (As a homeschooler I know of which I speak – people always seem so surprised to find I’m not a total social misfit or some kind of raving lunatic who’s trying to restore feudalism. “Homeschooled? But you seem so normal!” At first it was funny. Then it got annoying. I’m starting to worry that it’s a sign of serious cultural closed-mindedness.)

If you can’t hack it in school, you must need medication or new parents. If you don’t care to work for the corporations or the unions, if you want to work for yourself, then obviously you’re an antisocial isolationist. Herbal medicine instead of pharmaceuticals? How unscientific! And on and on it goes.

There could be, are being and have been many books on the subjects of education, business and culture, how the pendulum has swung so far away from individual thought and so far towards mandating a single culture of uniformity. Heat Wave is not one of those books.

Rather, Heat Wave is a dissimilationist fantasy – it creates a world where people are different in a culture much like our own. When they try to use their differences, they run smack into a world that doesn’t want them there. Some will try to change it slowly. Some will try to ruin it. And some will try to change it unilaterally, regardless of the consequences.

But all of them struggle with the same idea. The world they live in wants them to be the same. It needs them to be different; as much as they themselves need to be different. Of course, being different isn’t always a good thing, sometimes those different people will cause harm to themselves and others.

So there are people who are different. The society we have created doesn’t suit them, and sooner or later their incompatibility with it is going to cause problems. What do we do about it?

Well that, my friend, is a whole different story altogether…

Due Respect

Posted by natechen on

If you’re going to do anything with the idea of superheroes, and you live in the US, then the first thing you must do is decide how you are going to handle Superman.

The Last Son of Krypton is an American icon, famous around the globe for his unmatched strength, in body and moral character. This month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of his first appearance. Since then, the Man of Steel has been joined by legions of other heroes with extraordinary abilities, characters created by both his own publishing house and their rivals at Marvel. Every conceivable archetype has been filled – soldier, detective, mercenary, scholar, teacher, wizard and countless others. But in spite of the objections that his creed or powers or character are too simple,  Superman was, and in many minds still is, the first and most prominent superhero in existence.

Different stories with superheroes deal with Superman in different ways. The character was never created because there were real superheroes in the world already. The character was written about but is referenced only in passing. There’s someone with the abilities and character of Superman (a Superman analog) who exists in the world already, and thus the world didn’t need a fictional version. Or the story takes place before the Superman story existed or had enough popularity to be widely known. There are almost as many different solutions to the Superman issue as there are stories about superheroes. But if superheroes are your theme, then sooner or later Superman gets a nod of some sort.

Part of that is basic human nature. People want to see the things they like and they like to see those things in new and different lights. This is the origin of a thousand Star Wars vs. Star Trek and DC vs. Marvel geekfests. But it’s also due to the fact that there is nothing new under the sun. Many early superheroes have their origins in Jewish history and traditions, which are rife with decidedly superhuman goings on. But the American cultural legacy doesn’t include much in the way of superhuman activity- except, of course, for Superman and his ilk. So we expect something analogous to Superman to serve as the foundation for similar traditions in fiction.

And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that.

Superman is the embodiment of the flying brick archetype, founder of the garish superhero costume tradition and epitome of the hiding in plain sight tactics so many superheroes favor. When Siegel and Schuster first put Clark Kent together they created something truly enduring, and since the typical American will always associate Superman with superheroes in some way, if they plan to write in the superhero genre then they owe it to themselves and to their readers to be ready to say something about Superman.

In the Project Sumter universe Superman and other superheroes are problematic figures. While all the luminaries of the DC and Marvel lines exist there, for a myriad of reasons they’re not going to be referenced much by name. However, astute readers have probably already caught on to the fact that Helix, and many other talents, don’t like the portrayal of superheroes in American comics much, if only because they create so many untrue, and potentially dangerous ideas of what talents are and how they work. (There will be much more on this theme in Water Fall than there has been in Heat Wave. Assuming I remember it and can find the space.)

On top of the misconceptions many people will have about talents vs. superpowers, there’s the little fact that many superheroes are vigilantes, something that Project Sumter actively discourages. The government doesn’t just want private citizens to stay off it’s turf and not make them look bad – the fact is, a single individual, operating independently, is limited in their reach, their effectiveness, their knowledge of what’s going on and how to best deal with it and in their ability to contain dangerous situations and keep them from endangering others. Solo crime-fighting as a hobby just isn’t going to work very well, even if you do have a genius IQ and incredible funding. Vigilante crime-fighting teams are starting to look dangerously like an extragovernmental army and giving them all powerful and difficult to anticipate abilities doesn’t make things look any better.

As I worked on building Project Sumter’s world I kept pushing hard against the typical superhero ‘flying brick’ mentality. Most talents are as vulnerable as normal people to normal dangers and their powers have more limits and potentially bad side effects than those used by comic book superheroes. One reason was that I wanted powers that clearly acted as some poorly understood addendum to known laws of physics. But another was, the farther I was from stock superheroes the less I had to worry about fighting Superman’s shadow.

That’s not to say that he hasn’t gotten a nod or two. When you’re playing around in territory that has been heavily trod before you, the founders and trailblazers of that archetype in your culture deserves your respect. Part of that respect is finding your own way to tell your stories and part of that is giving you defining stories and characters their due respect.