Tag Archives: On Writing

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.

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.

Nate Hates Vampires

Posted by natechen on

It’s come up before. Now it’s time to actually talk about it. I hate vampires, and Halloween sounds like a great time to talk about why; because if there’s one thing this blog does well it’s overanalyze silly fantasy concepts.

I just don’t understand why people are so interested in vampires. Traditionally they’re villains and they’re not actually very good ones. For starters, in terms of raw intimidation power, they’re middle of the pack. Sure, they drink human blood and that’s just plain weird, and historically they have super strength and no heart beat. They don’t show up in mirrors, they sleep in coffins and killing them requires half a carpenter’s workshop but really, in terms of legendary monsters, that’s nothing special.

On the flip side of the coin, vampires have more holes in their defenses than a colander. For starters, there’s the well known stuff. They can be warded off with crosses or sometimes the Star of David or some other holy symbol. They can’t enter a residence without an invitation. They can’t cross running water. If they don’t sleep in their native earth, they don’t really get rest. They BURN UP IN DIRECT SUNLIGHT.

That’s right. 50% of the normal day is almost INSTANTLY FATAL TO THEM.

And that’s just the more commonly known stuff. A lesser known weakness of vampires is arithmomania, a burning need to count large numbers of similar objects. Yeah, you know how Sesame Street’s Count von Count counts everything? Yeah, all vampires do that. Well, except for the thunder and lightning bit whenever they laugh. Toss a bag of marbles on the floor and they’ll be far too busy counting them to defend themselves when you stab them with a pointy stick.

Now it could be argued that vampires have plenty of strengths to balance out their encyclopedia of weaknesses. But honestly I have my doubts about that. The traditional depictions of vampires tends to represent them as just very strong and hard to kill. There is the association with bats and wolves but that’s still not a fantastic power – any falconer or dog trainer can have trained attack beasts at beck and call. The mental abilities of vampires, things like mind control/hypnosis or controlling humans by blood, are not part of the traditional power set of vampires. I’m not sure if Bram Stoker introduced these abilities or just made them popular but before Dracula there’s not a lot of indication that vampires really did anything of the sort, nor can I see any reason to assume what is essentially a glorified cannibal should have fantastic mental abilities.

Now I know that it’s okay to put your own spin on an archetype. But for the most part I feel like a lot of those abilities got added simply because the stock vampire lacked punch and needed something that actually made it feel like it was menacing. The loss of free will is certainly menacing, so the end goal was accomplished, but the fact that such a thing seemed necessary indicates how lame they were originally.

The final aspect of vampires that I think attracts people to them is the way they’re frequently portrayed as mysterious and aristocratic. But any villain can be affably evil and in the case of vampires it’s, once again, not even a good fit. Traditional vampires were horrific creatures of appetite, not creatures of restraint. They were so filthy and caked in carrion that they reeked. The proper use of garlic was not to ward them off but rather to mask the smell so you could fight them without retching all over the place while trying to keep them from biting out your throat.

You see I agree with the theory that vampires, like zombies, are an attempt to explain the behavior we see in rabies victims when they finally flip out and go feral. Hydrophobia and fear of bright lights are both symptoms of rabies and canines and bats are both carriers of the disease, which might explain the connection vampires have with those animals. What rabid people are not is suave and charming.

So the modern use of vampires has nothing to do with the traditional folklore that they tend to come from. So what? We don’t need explanations for rabid people anymore, we understand rabies! That leaves the vampire mythos open to new ways of using it! PROGRESS! The new abilities and power level represent these things! Now vampires fill totally different places in modern stories than the traditional ones!

Yes. Yes they do. While traditional vampires are pretty much terrible villains for a story, the modern vampire is a thing of pathos and temptation. They’re not always villains and when they are they’re the likable, charming one that you can almost get along with. Only rarely are vampires a villain to be dealt with, like in Dracula.

So while on one level my objections to vampires are just a bunch of superficial griping about slapping together a bunch of weird stuff that seems totally unrelated and calling it a monster my most basic problem with vampires is one of themes. On a fundamental level vampires in modern fiction are being used to push forward themes that are very disturbing to me, and at times I wonder why they’re not more disturbing to others. Come back on Friday and we’ll talk about that some more.

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

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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.

Writing Men: Daniel Ocean

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This segment has talked a lot about the components of writing men but it hasn’t really analyzed a male character and broken down the elements that make them work, what makes them distinctly masculine and well written without falling into the traps that tend to characterize the gender wars. Since the point of this segment is examining what goes into writing a realistic male character, that’s kind of an oversight and it’s one that’s about to be remedied. But before we do that, if you haven’t watched the 2001 version of Ocean’s Eleven you might want to do that.

Today we’re going to discuss the character Daniel Ocean and how he embodies the male thought patterns and behaviors that we’ve discussed so far (and one we haven’t but we’ll get to soon.) I’m not going in the order I’ve discussed them in but rather the order we see them in the film.

To start with, we see Daniel Ocean alone.

Yes, I know that he’s technically in front of a parole board but all we see is him, sitting in that chair and he’s talking about the things he thought about while he was essentially isolated from all his connections and usual lifestyle in jail. With Danny leading a team of eleven, plus the villains and miscellaneous other characters, there’s just no time to leave him alone at any other point in the story so this is our glimpse into his inner workings and how he feels he’s been inadequate in the past. He explains what he did to go to jail and he explains what went wrong. And in those few moments we get a pretty good idea of what the movie is going to be about, although we don’t really know it at the time. In other words, we get solitude refining Daniel’s understanding of his own objectives and, in the process, passing that understanding to us.

But like all good foreshadowing, we don’t see it at the time.

Once out of jail Danny moves on to find Rusty, his right hand man, and confronts him over a game of poker. Here we get our axiom for the movie in an interesting kind of reversal delivery. Rusty is in the middle of teaching a bunch of Hollywood actors to play poker when Danny arrives. The undercurrent here is that Rusty doesn’t want Danny pulling him back into the conman-thief lifestyle that they clearly enjoyed previously. What’s going on?

We get a clue when Rusty asks his poker players what the first rule of the game is. The answer: “Don’t bring personal feelings to the table.”

Then Rusty proceeds to misread Danny’s hand entirely and looses the pot. The lesson for the audience? Personal feelings are on the table. In fact, this whole thing is personal. That’s the axiom Daniel will live by and is living by. Sure, the job they’re about to pull is going to make everyone a lot of money but that’s not what Daniel Ocean is interested in. It’s really just there to convince all the people he needs in his camp to go along with him.

Next we see Danny and Rusty recruiting their team. As the film title suggests they wind up with nine other people but we’re only really interested in the last one of these for the purposes of examining Daniel Ocean, the man. That character is Linus Caldwell and he’s a pickpocket. When we first see him, Danny comes up and picks his pocket – right after Linus has just picked the pocket of a wealthy Wall Street business man.

This brief moment of competition establishes Danny as more skilled than Linus and sets up Danny for another classic masculine behavior – mentorship. This is the part we haven’t talked about much so I’m going to leave it sit for the moment, but only after I point out that this relationship works in part because Danny establishes his credibility in such an obviously male fashion – by proving he can one up Linus. That makes him the logical mentor for Linus and gives him the figurative muscle he needs to push Linus into growing his skills in ways he otherwise might not have.

Linus also introduces us to Danny’s true objective, as Linus is the character to introduce Tess, Danny’s wife. Tess wasn’t aware of her husband’s scheming, thieving lifestyle when they got married and when Danny was inevitably found out she left him. Now she works with, and is romantically involved with, the owner of a Las Vegas casino – the casino that Danny and his crew plan to rob. For the crew, it’s about stealing money. For Danny it’s about stealing his wife back. The objective isn’t business, it’s personal.

Which brings us to the one aspect of writing men we haven’t discussed yet: Sacrifice.

The whole movie is about what Danny is willing to sacrifice for Tess. Terry Benedict, the man they’re robbing, is ruthless and heartless but he hides that from Tess. If he ever finds out Danny was the man who robbed him, Benedict will have no problems finding them and having them killed – financially or morally. Danny is risking his life in a last chance bid to warn his wife of the kind of man she’s turned to and beg her to come back to him. At first glance it looks like desperation. On some level it is.

But deep down, it’s courage. Tess has become Danny’s highest priority and he just can’t find it in him to put anything else higher. Not the rules of his old profession. Not the risk of loosing the esteem of the people he’s worked with or of loosing his parole and going back to jail. Not even the fear of death at the hands of Terry Benedict.

In his own way, Daniel Ocean is a man on fire, just like any action movie hero. And in his portrayal we see the defining elements of writing good male characters.

Worldbuilding: Deep Space Terminology, An Overview

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World building is a complex and demanding process. I’m not an expert on it but it is fun to share all that work from time to time and for me, one of the things that means is sharing the dictionaries and lexicons that start to accrue over time as I write stories and come up with new concepts.

This week’s world building log is on The Divided Futures, a series of stories about humanities future and what kinds of challenges it’s going to come up with for itself. Specifically, here are some common terms from the Extrasolar age, the age of interstellar colonization and increasingly difficult national relations. Terms like:

biocomputer – A kind of upgrade to the human brain that works in two ways. First, it allows the human brain to enter a state similar to the fight-or-flight reaction people already possess. They experience time and a much slower relative speed, usually seeing things moving at one half or one quarter the normal rate. Digital computers can also coopt the incredible processing power of the brain to carry out their calculations with, sending the person who’s brain serves as the biocomputer into a sensory deprivation state. The most invasive versions of this technology allow people to experience time at 32x – they perceive time at 1/32nd normal rate – and function as the core of incredibly powerful processing engines. But the human brain cannot adapt to the most advanced forms of this technology past a certain age. This used to be around the age of twenty but, as the changes biocomputers impose on brain matter and function grow more and more pronounced, that age has fallen to fifteen.

cetacean ballet – The term for large space vessels moving in precise patterns via tesseract technology (see below). It generally refers to either the traffic patterns of large passenger or freight ships around a spaceport or the movements of large war vessels engaged in a pitched battle.

CMD – Stands for Cochran Mass Drivers. It’s an unofficial unit of measurement for mass driver technology that still finds widespread use in U.S., Russian and Chinese colonies. One CMD is equal to the amount of mass the Cochran mass driver on Mars can launch from the surface of the planet into orbit in a single firing. Because of it’s age the Cochran mass driver tends to be pretty weak by modern standards and most colonies have local planet to orbit launching systems that average 2-4 CMDs per firing. Constant retooling and upgrading by the Cochran Foundation means that the value of the CMD is almost always in flux, which is just one reason why it’s not an officially recognized unit of measurement.

CODSpace – Slang term for the U.S. Combined Orbital/Deep Space forces (see below), primarily used by other branches of the U.S. armed forces or English speaking foreign militarizes.

ComODS – Slang term for the U.S. Combined Orbital/Deep Space forces (see below), primarily used by people within that branch of service and the media.

downwell – Refers to moving towards the center of a gravity well or magnetic field. Usually attached to a descriptor if there are multiple large gravity wells or magnetic sources in the area. “Downwell Jupiter,” for example, means, “I am moving towards the surface of Jupiter” as opposed to towards one of the gas giant’s major moons. The opposite of upwell (see below).

Exo – Pronounced like the letters “X” and “O”. This refers to an atmospherically sealed suit built around a self propelled exoskeleton that allows people to move and work more effectively in super low pressure environments. They range from simple exoskeletons that give a person enough strength to move components massing twice as much as they do to complex armored weapons of war used by soldiers in low microgravity combat.

hash – Refers to an area where gravity’s effect on spacetime distorts it to the extent a tesseract drive can no longer create folded space. This is usually found in the center of a gravity well such as that created by a planet or a Hawking reactor (see below). Gets its name from the way the relevant space is hashed out on most realtime space charts.

Hawking reactor – A method of generating power created some sixty years ago and widely accepted by humanity, a Hawking reactor uses Unified Field Theory to create a microscopic flux in spacetime – essentially creating a miniature black hole. It then harvests the resulting Hawking radiation to create power. Physicists assure the public that black hole evaporation will prevent these singularities from ever becoming true black holes and that they vanish even if the reactor is not shut down safely, but some people view them with a large measure of distrust regardless.

McGee – US ComODS slang for microgravity (see below).

MGI – MicroGravity Infantry, refers to a ComODS branch that specializes in fighting ship to ship, repelling boarders, boarding and seizing hostile ships and making space to planet assaults. The last doesn’t technically take place in microgravity but the name still makes more sense as calling a fighting force in space Marines…

microgravity – Refers to regions of space where no large stellar object, like a planet or a moon, is close enough to produce gravity noticeable to humans. The effects of an object’s gravity never really disappear, they just become so minuscule as to be meaningless, hence the term microgravity is usually preferred to zero gravity, even though they are functionally the same in most cases.

rad cloud – The heavily concentration of stars near the galactic center, a place widely considered too dangerous for exploratory work, much less colonization.

spacetime – Refers to a mathematical construct that unifies space and time for the ease of higher mathematical functions.

tesseract drive – A method of “propulsion” that folds two distant points in spacetime together and allows a vessel to pass from one to the other in effectively no time at all. The “speed” a space vessel can reach is only determined by how much distance can be covered in a single folding of spacetime and how quickly its generators can recharge the drive and repeat the process. Tesseract drives have existed for nearly one and a half centuries but that doesn’t mean they’re trusted technology. The fact that process of folding spacetime leaves it distorted for several minutes or even hours afterward, to the point that a ship cannot tesser again until it “clears it’s own hash (see above),” is frequently used as an argument that the technology might be permanently damaging spacetime in ways not yet understood.

Unified Field Theory – Often shortened to UFT. A mathematical system that has succeeded in relating three of the four “universal forces” in quantum physics, namely gravity, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. The strong nuclear force continues to resist physicists efforts to bring it into the theory with the other three. UFT serves as the foundation for many modern technologies, including artificial gravity, tesseract drives and the Hawking reactors that feed it all.

United States Combined Orbital/Deep Space Forces –  The branch of the U.S. Military charged with securing the spacelanes and defending U.S. Exoplanetary States and Territories from foreign threats. Considers itself the most powerful vacuum-ready fighting force in existence, although the British and Indian space arms both have their own thoughts on that.

upwell – Refers to moving away from the center of a gravity well or magnetic field. Usually attached to a descriptor if there are multiple large gravity wells or magnetic sources in the area. “Upwell Jupiter,” for example, means, “I am moving away from the surface of Jupiter” as opposed to away from one of the gas giant’s major moons. The opposite of downwell (see above).

So there you go. You’re probably not ready to jump in and navigate the space lanes just yet, but at least if you wind up frozen in a block of ice and get thawed out three hundred years in the future you’ll be prepared to talk the talk, if not walk the walk. Best of luck!

Genrely Speaking: Thrillers

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Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, where we discuss what we mean when we reference genres in discussions at Nate Chen Publications. While others may disagree with the way genres are defined here they’re often so poorly defined as to be open to a great deal of interpretation, one of the reasons why I started this little feature in the first place.

Today’s topic is thrillers, a characteristic genre, and one that’s become more and more popular as modern storytelling techniques have evolved. Thrillers need almost no introduction as we’ve all seen or read more than one or two, but in addition to defining the goal of Genrely Speaking is to analyze and help develop a deeper appreciation for what genres have to offer writers. So let’s take a look at this popular genre, shall we?

  1. Thrillers deal with immediate and visceral threats to the wellbeing of the central character. Which is to say, they are always games of life and death. Whether it’s the life of the central character or someone they care about or the lives of everyone in a city or planet, thrillers are always playing for keeps. They offer simple, straight forward threats to the protagonist even though the solutions to those problems are almost never simple.
  2. Thrillers feature focused and tense pacing that leaves the audience little time to see far beyond the immediate danger to the character. While the narrative still varies it’s pacing (at least in well constructed thrillers) it never really lets the audience forget that the characters are facing dire threats. There may be romantic or comedic interludes but the threat to the characters is always nagging away in the back of the audience’s mind. Incidentally this is a major reason so many thrillers impose time limits of some sort on their protagonists. It helps give the narrative that urgency.
  3. Thrillers keep the audience guessing. Whether it’s about how the characters will pull off what they’re planning, or how their plan will go wrong, or who the traitor in the group is, every thriller has at least one mystery that will persist through ninety percent of the story, from very early on until the very climax of the narrative. While every story has some kind of mystery to it thrillers need big, attention grabbing ones that will hold an audience for the bulk of the time they’re engaged.

What are the weaknesses of thrillers? Well, for starters they’re really popular and they engage well with human psychology so a lot of them tend to get made and that creates two problems. First, originality starts to dwindle quickly. A successful thriller gets made and people follow the pack. That happens to an extent with any kind of success and not just in writing or entertainment. The bigger problem, for writers, is that in thrillers it’s the execution that makes them great and not the characters or the trappings of the plot. Unfortunately when people knock off thrillers they tend to copy the characters or the plot and not deliver the tight, gripping pacing needed to really make a thriller work. They bungle foreshadowing and ruin the mystery, fail to make the danger to the protagonists feel imminent or just can’t get the pacing right and everything feels off.

Second, thrillers are vulnerable to fridge logic – even very good writers can get so caught up in the excitement of their story they don’t see plot holes coming or, worse, they cross their fingers and hope the audience won’t notice. In the Internet age that’s a pipe dream. Discovering you accidentally gutted your magnum opus with a stray plot thread is no fun but it won’t be nearly as bad as the roasting your audience will give you when they catch you out on it. Always write with care, but that goes double for thrillers.

What are the strengths of thrillers? If one of the greatest weaknesses of thrillers is fridge logic and fridge horrors one of their greatest strengths is fridge brilliance. The moment when your audience is frying up eggs and suddenly clicks together all the little hints you left behind in your story and realizes, “Oh, he was the protagonist’s father!” Or, “That dirty information broker was playing both sides!” Or even, “She was in love with him and that’s why she sacrificed herself!”

Of course many thrillers won’t trust their audiences that far and will just brain them over the head with whatever thing the author wants them to walk away with. But when a creator takes the time and care to hide all the clues but makes sure that you’re too wrapped up in the main story to pick up on them the moment of realization after the fact almost always as much greater impact than simply having it spelled out in the story for you.

Of course the ultimate strength of a thriller is it’s ability to grab the audience and run with them. It’s human nature to want to know, it’s human nature to empathize and it’s human nature to want to come out on top. By giving us a protagonist who feel a very visceral threat we can empathize with, who we want to see come out on top, and then keep us guessing as to how it all happens, the thriller offers a solid formula for keeping the audience with you every step of the way. You have to execute the formula correctly, but then that’s true of any set of instructions. In short, the thriller is just plain good at getting and keeping your audience.

At first glance thrillers do not feel terribly exotic, although that is in no small part because they tend to stand on their own rather than be combined with an aesthetic genre. Part of that is simply because the pacing makes the world building aesthetic genres want much harder to do. But also, aesthetic genres tend to put a little more emphasis on characters and plot elements, things thrillers don’t particularly need to be effective.

But that doesn’t mean the thriller is a narrow genre. On the contrary, no other genre demands more from the author in terms of pacing and careful plot construction. Studying thrillers carefully will help you to master those aspects better and maybe one day you’ll be able to blend a thriller with your favorite aesthetic and make a new genre of your own.

Everybody’s a critic

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So criticism is good for you, whether it’s criticism of your work or someone else’s. The next logical question is, what critics provide useful feedback? There’s a lot of critics out there, ranging  from Michiko Kakutani, literarian extrodinair, to Noah Antweiler, the Spoony One. What are their relative values and weaknesses?

Well, in short, it really depends on what kind of aspect of a work you want to examine.

In general, highly literary critics are going to grapple with issues like theme and symbolism. Many works are crammed full of tiny subtleties that are all designed to point the audience to a single conclusion about a work, many of them so subtle or so vague that the audience either misses them or isn’t sure what to make of them. When you add in creators who add symbolism without bothering to consult with an expert on what it’s supposed to mean (I say this with tongue firmly in cheek) or who add symbolism for the express purpose of muddying the waters, it’s easy to wonder how much value there is to reading that kind of highly literary criticism.

The answer is, a lot. As I’ve said before, many creators are building their stories with all the care of a master jewel thief planning one final heist. Careful examination of that kind of work is definitely beneficial. But all but the most patient and painstaking minds will find that it grows dull after a while (and not a long while at that). I try to read one or two works of serious literary criticism a year – currently I’m working through “Reading Joss Whedon,”edited by Wilcox, Cochran, Masson and Lavery. Also, this is the kind of criticism you only tend to get from books and journals, the kinds of things it’s better to get from a library (cheap) or dedicated research database (expensive) than try and dredge up online, so access to it is not as easy as the next kind.

You see, below literary criticism but above the layman’s criticism is the criticism you get from people who spend a lot of time exploring stories and have become experts on narrative structure and examining the craft of writing. We’ll call this semi-literary criticism. There’s a lot of people out there these days that dabble in this kind of criticism. Already mentioned are reviewers like Kakutani (who I believe has done some true literary criticism as well) and Noah Antweiler (who has done no literary criticism and has the motto “Because bad movies and games deserve to be hurt back!”)

While Spoony can be both excitable and crass he does put a lot of thought into his critiques and takes the time to thoroughly, sometimes too thoroughly, explore his points. It might be tempting to write him off, since he doesn’t have any background education in writing or film, but the fact is you don’t really need much beyond reading comprehension and a nose for lazy writing to be a good semi-literary critic and Spoony has both in spades. Spoony has examined the plots of a number of video games as well. While that’s still kind of useful for a hardcore writer many of his critiques are not going to translate to other mediums directly.

Doug Walker, The Nostalgia Critic, is a movie critic and leading member of the League of Super Critics and his work is very good. While he is a movie critic first, and thus addresses issues such as the strengths of an actors performance or the technical level of a film’s cinematography, there’s still more than enough said in his typical review about plot and characterization to inform attentive writers watching his work.

There’s very few to no video reviews or podcasts for written fiction that I know of – Linkara’s Atop the Fourth Wall for comic books on Channel Awesome, liked with the Nostalgia Critic above, coming the closest that I can think of – but a good way to find in-depth analysis of a book is to hit up Goodreads. I don’t recommend doing this with a book you love as the Internet has absolutely no regard for the things you love and that will probably hurt. But if you had a title you thought was mediocre, chances are the people on Goodreads have analyzed why it’s lousy or not lousy six ways from Sunday and there’s a lot you can learn from reading that kind of thing.

And, of course, I have also dabbled in semi-literary criticism right here, and hope to continue doing so for a long time.

So we come full circle back to you. Yes, you too should indulge in criticism. The more criticism you read the sharper you mind should become and the sharper and more insightful your abilities to pick apart writing and analyze it should become. Practice it as much as possible on your own so when you disagree with other critics you’ll be equipped to talk about why. Who knows, you might eventually be able to make your living as a literary critic yourself! Don’t worry, we won’t hold it against you if you do.