Tag Archives: On Writing

I Hate Zombies – Themes That Eat Your Brain

Posted by natechen on

It’s part two of I Hate Zombies week. Here’s part one, in case you missed it.

If you were wondering, this post is not another screed of geeky nitpicking on why zombies are stupid, lazy plot devices that exist only to create irrational fear in the back of your mind. All that is true, but it’s kind of true of all plot devices and anyway it’s not what I’m on about today. Also let me say that it’s not related to my intense, longstanding, deep seated hate towards vampires, even though vampires and zombies probably share their origins in the bizarre behavior of people afflicted by rabies. I hate vampires for totally different reasons than those that drive my hatred of zombies. Maybe one day there will be time for I Hate Vampires week.

But this week, we look at zombies.

I’ve already hashed all my problems with zombies as the plague on Wednesday, so I’m going to ignore all the things that make zombies patently ridiculous. Anyone who’s seen a solid action movie knows that the patently ridiculous can actually be a selling point of a good story, so the real question is less, why are zombies ridiculous? And more, what keeps them from having redeeming value?

I’m going to pick on The Walking Dead again, or really a lot of the people I’ve heard talking about The Walking Dead. These people, from the reviewers on the internet to the guy I share my apartment with, insist the story is not about the zombies or fighting them, its about the characters and how they survive.

I’ve also noticed that The Talking Dead, a talk show which follows The Walking Dead, always contains a one to three minute slow-motion recap of all the zombie deaths that occurred in an episode. I take their assertions with a small salt shaker.

Now I’ve not watched this show, but I’ve read a volume or two of the graphic novels they’re based on. I’m hardly an expert on the series. But I’ve noticed that, just like most zombie stories, the general rational for people’s behavior is: “They do what they have to in order to survive. It’s a different world.”

And if you pay any attention to these stories, anyone who tries to stand on anything higher than pragmatism tends to wind up as zombie fodder quick. And as survival becomes more and more the goal of the characters they loose perspective, loose the ability to plan for anything but the next zombie attack, where their next meal is coming from. Sure, the logic holds up but what does it really offer the audience? It’s nifty that the writers have thought of all these ways to stay alive in unrealistic circumstances but you’re not really bringing anything relevant to day to day life and the typical zombie story doesn’t really uplift the audience, either, but leaves them with a grimmer, more selfish mindset.

Yes, the central characters of these stories often try to behave with generosity and decency. But by the end, nine times out of ten, we’ll find they’ve “accepted” the reality of the situation – everyone’s going to be a zombie in the end. Even if you die a natural death most zombie stories don’t let you stay down. Everyone’s just an enemy waiting to happen, and you can only coexist until they turn on you.

Which brings me to the next thing I hate about zombies, and that’s the blatant encouragement of violence. Now I love action movies as much as the next guy, and I’m particularly fond of stupid kung-fu flicks due to the pure athleticism the display, so I’m not saying violence has no place in storytelling. But the violence in zombie stories? It’s in a dimension all its own.

Beating zombies in the face with road signs until eyeballs fly, stabbing them through the mouth and into the brain with a sharpened wooden stake, blowing their skulls into fragments with a shotgun – zombie violence is brutal. Now you can say that they’re just dead bodies, not people anymore (and you’d be wrong, because your body is a part of you, whether it’s functioning or not) but the fact is this violence inevitably spills over onto the living people as arguments arise or people betray the group. Witness the brutal violence between the Governor and members of the central group in The Walking Dead, particularly the emasculation that takes place in the comic version. It doesn’t take long for the philosophy that everyone’s just a zombie waiting to happen to pour out into violence. Witness the brutal final fights between the newsies and the conspirators at the end of the Feed trilogy. And these are the examples from zombie fiction at it’s best. These are the stories that try their hardest to have some kind of meaning on top all the other mess. I’m just not sure it carries convincingly over the din of violence and nihilism, that it’s really worth hearing we’re just zombies waiting to happen, but at least before we become the rotting dead we can do something that the living will remember fondly for a time.

And perhaps that’s ultimately the thing I hate about zombies. It’s the implication that we’re all just mindless drones waiting to happen, at worst tearing one another down and leaving nothing but suffering and emptiness in our wake, or at best leaving a hollow happiness for a short time, that I really dislike about zombie stories. I write to try and make people a little more aware, a little more thoughtful, a little more devoted to God and one another. Could you do that with a zombie tale? I don’t know – maybe. But the tone and conventions that seem to run through them makes me doubt it.

Word Building: Twenty Things About Dragons

Posted by natechen on

It’s a given that our dragons are different. The word dragon was coined way back when dictionaries were laughably impractical – no consistent spellings, no printing press, abysmal literacy rate – and concepts generally spread by word of mouth. Obviously, no one had any clear idea what the word was supposed to mean when it was created, a situation that continues to this day.

Why should Terra Eternal be any different from here? Even with worlds-spanning political/cultural influence, sufficiently analyzed magic and a really weird sense of style, they never managed to sit down and rigidly define all their terms. But then, why tell you about it myself when they could do it in their own words?

  1. When I first encountered one of these beasts “dragon” was what the locals called it. I’ve since expanded the term to include anything over a certain size and scaly. The students of animal husbandry back home complain but never seem to want to go on one on my excursions to other worlds themselves, so for now the term stands. -Veronica Locke, A Treatise on Creatures of Dream and Nightmare 
  2. They turn their head to the side like that? They’re not curious about something, just hungry. -Sean McLean, dragon hunter
  3. The locals insisted we take an interpreter with us to speak to the Lord of the Mountain. I wasn’t sure why, as several people  in our group spoke the local phoneme quite well. When we got about half way up the mountain, working our way along what looked like an enormous ridge, we heard something that sounded like a rockslide near the peak. Then our interpreter told us the Lord of the Mountain wanted us to kindly step off his tail. We determined that doing as he instructed was the best course of action. -Praetor Quentin Barton, Caldera Mountain scouting report
  4. I don’t care if it’s head and legs are covered in feathers. It’s larger than a dog and partly covered in scales. The zoological guidelines say that makes it a dragon! -Sopher Lawrence Nelson, in an argument with his colleague Sopher Ulrich Mann, just before the two had an opportunity to experience a dragon attack first hand
  5. To speak is the surest mark of the soul. Those that speak have a heart that they would share with others. To listen is the surest mark of wisdom. Those that listen value knowing others more than airing their own needs. To be kor’aj is to master both. –Thrinaveous, Kor’aj of the singing dragons of Lienz Mount
  6. Don’t trim the fat off the meat, if you do the meat turns leathery and tasteless when you cook it. You don’t want to try and eat a lean dragon – they only get that way if they’re sick. –15 Ways to Prepare Dragon, a Terra Geodesia cookbook
  7. Hev’anti winds between the worlds, Gigas holds up the sky, Jormungand lies within the earth, Dav’i churns within the depths. Such are the dragons that shake the worlds, order the earth and rule the nations of men. -Translation of a pottery fragment excavated from ancient burial grounds on Terra Interdictus
  8. “When the Swamp God cries, rivers will rise.” Another common saying in these regions, it serves more to illustrate the size of the swamp dwelling dragons than as an indication of their supposed supernatural power… -Sopher Novick Sanderson, Superstitions of the Swamplands
  9. The large horn on their head serves as a repository for chemicals extracted from the swamp plants they eat. These chemicals are siphoned down into sacs in their mouths and, when mixed together with the air, they burn. The creatures ducklike mouth also allows it to spread it’s flaming spittle across a wide swath, making them quite dangerous. But if caught and placed on a diet other than their natural one they loose the ability to spit fire and become quite harmless. – Sopher Emilio Rivera, Unusual Physiologies of the Brownland Swamps
  10. Hear that crashing sound? They’re not claiming territory or warning off others. Not even looking for mates. That’s their stomach rumbling. -Sean McLean, dragon hunter
  11. Undertaker’s Friend -slang for dragon hunters on Terra Incognita
  12. The Mountain cannot bow to cattle any more than the waves be stopped by sand. -The Lord of the Mountain, before the Three Day’s War
  13. Terra Interdictus was a world of firsts. It was the first world we found thinking creatures that were not human, and, in fact, the first world where we found intelligent dragons. And it was more than intelligent, it wielded magic and ruled a nation. Most of the humans and other thinking creatures lived under the tyranny of the dragons, and Vesuvius ultimately decided that we had no call to challenge their power. Thus it also became the first world we are forbidden to travel to and, in time, the first world to declare war against us. – Veronica Locke, Worlds I Have Seen and Known
  14. To the northwest of the city there’s a twenty foot tall gold statue of a lizard breathing fire in the direction of the city walls. Dozens of human statues about as tall as my hand are scattered on the ground, although we’re not sure if they’re prostrated in worship or if they’ve been killed. -Preliminary scouting report detailing the Screaming City on Terra Garrisoned
  15. The worst thing about the fliers is their landing. Smashing buildings, crushing the innocent underfoot, scaring animals into stampeding… and all that flying really works up an appetite.  -Sean McLean, dragon hunter
  16. New field guideline: Do not argue around dragons. -Sopher Ulrich Mann, to his colleague Sopher Lawrence Nelson, after surviving their first dragon attack
  17. We reached the top of the mountain only to discover that the dragon had dammed up a river there, creating it’s own private lake. I don’t know if it drank from it or relieved itself in it but I do know that it clearly intended it to have a second purpose – washing away troublesome visitors. The crater at the top is where the water used to sit. -Justinius Polonius Verica, Regulus Decima, reporting on his decima’s role in the Battle of Caldera Mountain
  18. Don’t know what it’s doing? It’s probably hungry. -Sean McLean, dragon hunter
  19. Hide. If you can’t, then run until you can. If you can’t get to a hiding place before you’re caught, try and cover yourself in something that tastes bad. At least they won’t enjoy your last meal. -Instructions on what to do during a dragon attack, as related by a Terra Incognita wilderness guide
  20. Some have suggested that I fear dragons because of their resemblance to Dagon, and thus remind me of the cult that tried to sacrifice me to him. Dagon, they tell me, was a Power, an incarnation of bruja magic, very different from the frequently mindless creatures of appetite we know most dragons are. The question that bothers me is, why can a thing not be both? -Veronica Locke, A Bestiary of Two Worlds (Fourth Edition)

For those wondering, “sopher” is the rough equivalent to “doctor” or “professor” in Terra Eternal’s vocabulary. Since it’s not covered in the last Endless Horizons world building post.

Broken Homes – A Series in Transition

Posted by natechen on

Normally I take this section and ramble about writing. Technical tricks, what I’ve been doing, what I think about the male gender, that kind of thing. Today, I’m going to talk about a subject I first introduced in my Wednesday segment: Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London novels. 

If you haven’t read any of these excellent books let me just warn you –

There Will Be Spoilers 

– so if you’re not into that kind of thing then maybe you need to go read those books (or at least the first four, since you may be reading this in 2020 when there are considerably more books in the series.) The kind of discussion I’m aiming for today can’t really dodge around spoilers and still make sense, so I beg you to read the books or accept that going beyond this paragraph may ruin many things for you. Okay? 

Okay, so what’s this all about? If you’ve made it this far you undoubtedly already have a grasp on the themes and characters of Rivers of London and are wondering what, exactly, I’m going to go on about with this whole “series in transition” title and whatnot. It’s actually pretty simple. In Midnight Riot (Rivers of London for those of you across the pond) we’re introduced to all the major players in Peter Grant’s world and the general formula of the series is set. Said formula is (so far) thus: 

  1. The discovery of a body is described to us in fairly clinical detail. While Moon Over Soho and Whispers Underground don’t begin with this, things happening before the discovery of the body basically amount to a prologue. 

  2. Peter winds up on the case. In the first book this is a sizable chunk of story, since Peter isn’t yet a wizard-cop in training. In the other three it’s usually just a matter of getting the call from somewhere and showing up to get the rundown from the officers on the scene. 

  3. Investigation takes place. 

  4. Peter is drawn into unrelated matters pertaining to the balance of power in London’s supernatural community. 

  5. Investigation and politicking cross paths a couple of times. 

  6. Peter learns new spells! 

  7. There is a break in the case. 

  8. Peter puts all the pieces together and confronts the criminals. 

  9. Everyone lives weirder ever after. The level of weirdness keeps escalating, presumably because Peter isn’t a fully trained wizard yet. Although if his boss is any yardstick to measure by, full wizarding credentials doesn’t mean weirdness stops increasing. 

I don’t want to waste too much time breaking this formula down, and I know it’s very loose and not everything fits nicely everywhere. What I want to show is that, magical nonsense aside, the formula of a Rivers of London novel is much closer to a police procedural than the typical urban fantasy or even paranormal investigation novel. That’s important, because, with Broken Homes, the series is starting to make some changes. 

It’s been most apparent in the way Aaronovitch is building his myth arcs. The biggest arc, of course, revolves around the eponymous rivers. While the Thames is the biggest river in London it has a myriad of tributaries that run into it, and each river has an anthropomorphic embodiment that Peter and Nightingale have to deal with. The scariest of them is undoubtedly Tyburn, who is both magically and politically powerful, and ambitious. Exactly what her ambitions are is kind of unclear, even at this point, but it seems like the wizards of the Folly could be in the way. 

But the rivers were always going to be an issue. You could tell that from the first book – even if you read the American version, which was titled Midnight Riot rather than Rivers of London. What’s more interesting is how the other long-running elements in the books are snowballing into bigger and bigger hurdles. 

The first book introduced Mr. Punch, the embodiment of riot and unrest. He was the culprit in Peter’s first case with the Folly and, as a metaphysical manifestation of an abstract concept, he was not arrested and sent to jail but rather dragged deep into the Jungian unconsciousness of the city and staked to the ground. Later, in Whispers Underground, while Peter is buried in a collapsed subway station, he wanders into the past again and hears Punch still wailing in misery. One of the old riverine spirits warns him that the time will come when Peter will let Punch go of his own free will. Ominous, no? 

But Mr. Punch is far from the only recurring villain in the series. In Moon Over Soho we were introduced to the Faceless Man, a wizard who somehow learned Newtonian magic without getting the government’s blessing and is now using it in horrible, evil ways. He starts as a sidestory to Moon‘s primary plot, the investigation of jazz musicians who are dying mysteriously. But the two narrative threads converge when the Faceless Man tries to recruit the Jazz Vampires responsible for the deaths Peter is investigating. His involvement in Whispers Underground is less pronounced, but by the time we reach Broken Homes  things have changed. 

And this is what I mean by the series being in transition. The first three books were straight up murder investigations. Sure, they went all over the place because real people have messy lives and working out which part might have killed them can be a real headache sometimes. Worse, Peter wears many hats in his little department of two, and he has many responsibilities outside of the murders he looks into. But Broken Homes, while it opens with a body being found just like the first three, is never really about solving the murder. They never get any proof of whodunnit but by the end it’s pretty clear to everyone involved. 

Broken Homes is not about the who, it’s about the what. The Faceless Man is shaping up to be an honest to goodness supervillain, and the story this time around is less about whodunnit or how you’re going to prove it and more about running down the Faceless Man’s schemes. It’s kind of troublesome. 

If you remember Disappointment Deconstructed, we’ve talked before about how audience expectation can factor into how they receive a story. This is a perfect example. People who have read Rivers of London are used to a police procedural with paranormal elements. What we’ve gotten is closer to a traditional urban fantasy. The story itself isn’t bad, per se. But it’s not what I was expecting. 

In many ways, Broken Homes is a great example of how to introduce a major change in the direction of your story, in direct contrast to Out of the Dark. That said, if things continue on this path Rivers of London will slowly become less a police procedural with wonderfully quirky paranormal elements and more the traditional intrigue fueled urban fantasy. There’s nothing wrong with that, except the first is much rarer than the second. Only time will tell.

Writing Men: Compartments

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Welcome back to Writing Men, a look at what things a writer should keep in mind when writing male characters in fiction. Previous segments include the introduction, goal oriented behavior and axioms. Up to date? Then let’s get cracking! 

One of the best pieces of advice for women seeking to understand men that I have ever heard is this: When you’re dealing with men, it is important to understand that they are not women who are failing to communicate properly. Men have their own ways of dealing with ideas and emotions and they are just as correct and just as dangerous as those used by women. A perfect example of this is the way men compartmentalize. 

We’ve covered the way men are goal oriented and the fact that they amass a set of rules and principles that serve as the foundation of their behavior. To this point, the behavior of men is fairly straightforward and easy to understand, even if you’re not a man. From here on out, things get a littler murkier, even if you are a man. 

See, men tend to disassociate one object from another, devoting the entirety of our energies and thoughts to one thing at a time, where women frequently try to connect everything to everything else. I’ve heard this described as “waffles” vs “noodles” where men’s minds are a grid of separate and independent boxes and women’s minds are a dizzying mess of ideas running haphazardly into one another. We could dissect both these systems of thought, but our focus here is men and that means compartmentalization, a system of though that has effects on male behavior which are baffling to everyone involved, except possible the man doing the decision making. 

Let me give you an example. In the Firefly episode “Trash”, Malcom Reynolds decides to team up with a swindler, one both he and the audience have tangled with before (in the episode, “Our Mrs. Reynolds”) even though the last time they crossed paths Mal and the crew of Serenity almost wound up dead. Why does Mal decided to do this, in spite of the obvious dangers involved? 

It’s because the last, near-death encounter was a different situation. Mal and his dubious partner will be allies this time, not adversaries, and there is a whole lot of money to be made. Yes, there’s no trust between these two, but they both want a payday. Further, Mal is dealing with a known quantity this time. He doesn’t trust the swindler, sure, but at least he knows to be prepared for the double cross. 

While it didn’t happen right away, Malcom built an entirely different frame of reference around different goals and axioms than those he used on his first encounter with the swindler and used it to asses the playing field during their second meeting. The result was his agreeing to take the deal and try his hand at a heist. 

This is the same kind of behavior you see from kindergarten boys, who will be calling each other names during lunch break and then turn around and play soccer like they were old buddies. Women do not usually indulge in nearly this level of paradigm shift when their circumstances change and unless they train themselves to identify and work with it they’re going to be frustrated by the men in their lives quite a bit. 

But this is not a relationship advice column, this is a column on writing men in fiction. So what does this mean for the male character you are writing? 

First and foremost, it’s important to point out that the fact that men compartmentalize does not mean men don’t interconnect the areas of their life. Rather, interconnectivity itself is a kind of axiom, a rule that is applied or ignored as circumstances dictate. If a man doesn’t see a need to switch on the interconnectivity node, he won’t. This means that, at least eighty percent of the time, he’s not actively building connections between what he’s doing and whatever else might be on his mind. But he can do it if he thinks he needs to. 

Second, the scope of a man’s thought may be narrow at times, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t nimble. One of the benefits of compartmentalized thinking is it’s very easy to shift from one paradigm to another. Men can dance through several different mindsets in a short period of time, allowing them to adapt rapidly to changing situations or sending them dashing off after random side thoughts to the annoyance of everyone in a conversation. (Good luck getting them back on topic, since that bunny trail is going to be the total focus of their thoughts for the next five minutes.) 

But, by the same token, a drawback of compartmentalized thinking is that building new paradigms to switch to takes time, effort and significant fine tuning. Sometimes a man will just take a paradigm they already have and that looks like it fits a situation then run with it, without taking the time to really test their assumptions. In military strategy this is called fighting the last war. In social situations, it’s called putting your foot in your mouth (in the best case scenario.) If a man’s done this a lot before, he might instead ask a number of clarifying questions to make sure of the situation he’s dealing with, which might make him come of as obtuse when he’s just trying to cover all the bases.

Finally, men can be accused of switching off or suppressing their feelings because of compartmentalization. While sometimes this is true, far more often they are acting as they think the situation dictates – and all the while feeling something quite contrary to what their actions suggest. The classic example of this is courage, or the ability to ignore fear to do what needs to be done. Not all compartmentalization is courageous, of course, but it does all take an emotional toll that is rarely appreciated and poorly understood. If we leave these emotional conflicts unsorted for too long, it can take a great toll on relationships, personality and eventually sanity. You, the writer, should exploit this for all it’s worth.

Like all the things I’ve talked about in this examination of writing men, compartmentalization is not unique to the male gender. But it is something that is far more definitively associated with them. As always, I don’t pretend to assign values or reasons for this, only encourage you to look at it carefully, assess the corresponding strengths and weaknesses, and try to write your male characters accordingly. Good luck!

Vox Protagonist

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We’ve talked about voice before, in an abstract sense, but today let’s take a look at one very specific aspect of it – personage. Or, in other words, what person your story is written in. What they are, strengths and weaknesses and why you might choose a specific viewpoint for a story are all things to consider.

So a quick overview of the three ‘persons’, or viewpoints, of storytelling. A first person story is told from the viewpoint of a person who actually takes part in the story. The narrator is a character, refers to his or herself as “I” and tells what he or she saw and heard from other people, or learned from inanimate sources or just plain guessed from thin air.

First person narrators are not always the most trustworthy of people. We can only know what they know.

A second person narrative is a story told about what you are doing. The author seeks to put you in the shoes of a character in the story, tells you what you’ve done and why you might have done it, and generally comes of as really stilted or stylized unless you’re really careful with it.

A third person narrative just talks about what’s going on. The person telling the story, if there can really be said to be a ‘person’ telling this story, plays no part in events and only reports what is going on. They may report just the events experienced by, and thoughts of, a handful of main characters (first person limited) or report all details going on in a scene and/or the narrative at large (first person omniscient).

Hopefully you already know what these viewpoints  are or that’s enough for you to go on. If not, there’s a more detailed breakdown of these viewpoints here.

Now, why would you want to use a particular viewpoint?

Well, let’s start by dealing with the elephant in the room. If you’re going to use a second person viewpoint, the odds are you’re writing a Choose Your Own Adventure book or Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas. And someone’s already done one of those two options, so that leaves you with the adventure books.

Really, second person is a very limited voice, I haven’t seen it used effectively in serious storytelling before – excepting the frog pajamas – and I wouldn’t recommend your trying to crack the code now. Second person is a very effective way of communicating suggestions or instructions but there’s not been many really good uses of it in fiction. Feel free to disagree, but this author doesn’t think that will change any time soon.

First person, on the other hand, is incredibly flexible. First person stories are engaging, conversational and very interesting. They let the personality of the narrator come through very strongly, although this is a double edged sword because if your narrator is too disagreeable or just plain boring your readers could wind up disliking an otherwise serviceable story. First person stories also allow for a lot of narrative tricks on the part of the author. A first person narrator cannot (or at least should not) tell the audience anything the character doesn’t know. This lets the author build suspense by keeping information from the reader in a totally acceptable, believable way.

A story written in the first person makes the most out of its medium when it sticks with strong characters, fast moving plots and carefully controlled suspense. On the other hand, while a first person story can have more than one narrator, it has to be careful not to go overboard. Any more than two or possible three viewpoints to juggle and it might be better to go with something else.

A third person limited viewpoint lets the author spread his focus more without sacrificing the limited information of a first person voice. You can think of a third person limited narrator as someone who heard a bunch of stories from a group of people and wove their individual stories into a coherent whole. He’s still limited to knowing what the characters knew and thought, what they heard and said, but by smoothing over inconsistencies in their viewpoints and, more importantly, by toning down the personalities so they are less in your face, the third person narrator lets us focus more on what’s happening in the big picture.

The third person limited voice lets us hear a larger story in a more complete way without drowning us in a schizophrenia of different personalities and viewpoints. When written in a particularly Lemony style the narrator can even maintain a personality of its own.

Eventually a story reaches a scale where the audience cannot learn everything they need to know just by relying on a few voices. Then third person omniscient steps in. By the time you’re dealing with a third person omniscient narrator, facts, events and plot structure is starting to supersede the individual thoughts and characters in the story. While it’s still important that these characters be strong and interesting, you use this voice when their interestingness is secondary to the interesting nature of what is going on around them.

First person stories are very popular today for their experiential nature. They suck you in and drag you along like an enthusiastic friend dying to tell you all about the awesome thing that happened to them yesterday. It’s a particularly effective tool for engaging the short attention spans of some people in this day and age. (ASIDE: These people exist in all age groups, so that’s not a dig at the YA crowd. Although YA writers in particular seem to love first person narratives.) On the other hand, the personality of the narrator can become a distraction from the story at large.

Third person stories give the author more distance, making exposition easier to work into the story, but they can also be a crutch for much the same reasons. If you wind up telling more than you’re showing in your stories you may want to switch to writing in the first person for a while, just to hone your showing chops a little more.

Ultimately, the viewpoint you choose for your story should reflect the scale and nature of your story and your strengths as an author. You should probably experiment with all three (and by this I really mean first person and third person limited or omniscient since I can’t recommend second person under any known circumstances) for each story you attempt. Don’t get locked into thinking that a YA story has to be told in first person simply because so many successful young adult series use that viewpoint. Harry Potter is written entirely in third person, after all.

Most importantly, choose a viewpoint that lets you have the most fun. Because if you’re not enjoying your writing, your audience won’t be either.

Genrely Speaking: The Amateur Detective

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Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, where we talk about the genres of fiction and what they mean when they’re mentioned here at Nate Chen Publications. Genres are a slipper thing, as much based on the whims of whoever is doing the classifying as any specific criteria. That also means that creating a new genre is almost as simple as saying, “this is a genre,” and then mentioning it as much as possible. If it catches on, great, if not, that’s no real loss.

Today we’re going to invent a genre.

You won’t really find much if you Google amateur detective stories, other than to find that sometimes the protagonists of detective stories are amateurs and not professionals. And in the very broad, general sense that’s true. But if you read the Gernely Speaking post on detective stories you’ll find that, when we use that term here, we’re talking about stories where the main character is a detective to the bone. A story with a protagonist who’s never solved a crime before is not what those stories want. Besides, amateur detective stories have their own standards that must be met.

What standards, exactly? Well by now you know that’s what we’re here to talk about.

  1. An amateur detective is not normally a detective, but has attributes that will prove useful in solving a mystery. Amateur detective stories are still detective stories in the end, there’s going to be some kind of mystery that needs unravelling and our protagonist is going to be leading the charge. As such, he needs to be equipped to handle the problem but not with years of experience and savvy, but rather a set of skills that will give him a unique and fresh perspective. One classic example is Miss Marple, the matronly old lady who stars in a number of Agatha Christie stories, solves problems using logic and an incredibly shrewd insight into human nature honed after years of being a benevolent busybody. Another example would be Ellis Peter’s Brother Cadfael, who is a monk who serves as apothecary to his cloister and the nearby village. As a soldier and man of learning in the dreary middle ages, Cadfael is well equipped to solve murders and has a sense of right and wrong that burdens him to do so.

  2. The amateur detective usually stumbles into his mystery by accident. Where as the protagonists in police procedurals and detective stories will often be sought out or called into an investigation, amateur detectives tend to just get swept up in the course of events. They’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they know someone who was, or they just have a friend who tends to fall into bad company – there’s as many excuses as there are stars in the sky, really. But, while the hero can, and perhaps should, be a man of upstanding moral character he is not, by nature, a person who seeks out and challenges injustice on a regular basis.

  3. The amateur detective survives by cunning and occasionally luck, but not skill. This doesn’t refer to how the protagonist solves his mystery but rather how he deals with the frequently manifold dangers solving a crime will present him with. Since amateur detectives aren’t used to dealing with criminals they probably hasn’t been put in significant physical danger at any point in their lives. There are possible exceptions, of course, but for the most part amateur detectives will have to get out of tight scrapes using something other than skilled gunplay or fisticuffs. In fact this wild improvisation is frequently part of their appeal to the audience.

What are the weaknesses of the amateur detective story? Unlike other detective stories you can’t write a series of amateur detective stories – at some point the protagonist’s amateurish characteristics will stop being appealing and start making them look kind of lame. Thus most of these stories have a one-and-done kind of a feel. There’s nothing wrong with that from the writing perspective but it may make your audience and/or publisher less willing to invest the time into the story – long running mystery series are some of the biggest money makers out there, they’re popular with people and thus with publishers. But people really want them to go on, not come to a stop.

And for the writer the biggest pitfall is letting too much hinge on happenstance. Your protagonist is already (most of the time) involved in the story at least partly by coincidence, and will probably need some measure of luck to survive a scrape at some point. If you let your protagonist skate by on nothing but luck your plot starts to look a little bit thin. On the other hand, take fate completely out of the equation and your protagonist may wind up looking a little too much like Batman to be believable.

What are the strengths of an amateur detective story? The biggest is simply that the protagonist is much more relatable than most in the mystery genre. Let’s face it, the average reader is not Sherlock Holmes, nor does he understand the chemical or biological sciences of an experienced CSI tech. She might get the basics of the psychology behind interviewing witnesses and tricking or forcing information out of them but there’s a good chance readers won’t be entirely comfortable with those things.

Neither will an amateur detective. This isn’t what they do, after all. As an outsider to the game of crime and punishment they are just like us. This is part of the genre’s great appeal. While everyone wants to see justice done when we are offended; few people want to actually get their hands dirty doing it. Finding the truth of a situation is often unpleasant and makes you a lot of enemies. But the amateur detective is driven by something greater than their personal comfort or satisfaction, and that is often the only thing that sets them apart from us. They can be more than a little inspiring to find, and make us want to be a little more like them. That alone makes them worth our time.

Graveyarding

Posted by natechen on

 I think I’ve mentioned once or twice the practice of sticking various story elements in my “graveyard” once I determine I’m not going to do anything more with them, at least in the form they were in originally. What sends a story to the graveyard varies, anything from writer’s block to needing extensive research to confirm details can result in this treatment. I’ve even had ideas for good scenes that just don’t fit anywhere and reluctantly found myself sending them to the graveyard. This is where many of the short stories I write come from.

And that brings me to the subject of today’s post: Graveyard management. The first thing to recognize is, when you find something that doesn’t work, killing it doesn’t mean it’s gone for good. You’re a writer, not a surgeon. You are constrained only by your imagination and vocabulary in the language of your choice. If you set something aside it’s only gone for good if you can’t remember it. So it’s less important to fret about cutting ideas you like and much more important to take solid steps to insure you remember those ideas.

So why call a file of unused stories a graveyard?

Mainly because they’re rarely going to come back as you remember them. That particular idea may be dead but you can use it as the foundation of something new, or weave multiple story ideas together creating a veritable Frankenstein’s Creature of a story. With cut and paste, we have the technology to lay the ground work for such a thing quickly. You can make it better, faster, stronger… you get the idea.

Project Sumter itself is one such creation. The characters take their cues from an old set of short stories I worked on, where Circuit was just a megalomaniac fronting a global network of technologically savvy insurrectionists, Lethal Injection was his mentor, not his first victim, and Helix was an intelligence agent who knew something was going on but had no idea what. Superpowers were something the story was supposed to explicitly reject.

Obviously, that didn’t work out.

Project Sumter, as I said a couple of weeks ago, was supposed to focus on the American Civil War. It was only when I started trying to work out all  the possible interactions of Corporal Sumter and his Confederate rivals into the existing timeline of the Civil War that I began to appreciate exactly how complicated a those stories would be. So the early phases of Project Sumter went to the graveyard.

There they bumped into the old technothriller stories and sat for a few months, stewing. The results are still playing out, but hopefully they’re enjoyable.

And that’s the beauty of the graveyard. If you properly maintain it, glancing over it every so often so that the ideas in it stay fresh, you will eventually find a home for all those stray thoughts, fun characters and snappy dialog. You don’t have to call it a graveyard, of course, you could call it the pot, the top shelf, the cutting floor, whatever you want. But if you’re going to be a writer it’s important to conserve your most important resource – the writing you’ve done. So whatever you do, don’t ever let any of it slip through your fingers!

Out of the Dark – Disappointment Deconstructed

Posted by natechen on

Every Wednesday we sit down and you get to hear about something that I think is cool. Usually, it’s a book or series of books because, hey, I’m a writer and books are what I do. Sometimes it’s movies or theater but a lot of my cool things are books or their distant cousins, graphic narratives (which is like a graphic novel except it applies to things that are not novels as well as thing s that are.) While reading good stories is great for a writer we can’t read good stuff all the time. Bad stuff is going to sneak in sooner or later, it’s a statistical inevitability. Normally when I encounter something bad I just don’t talk about it.

Not today.

There’s a lot a writer can learn from writing we find bad, but only if we take the time to dig into it and seriously ask ourselves what we don’t like about it. Let’s walk through that process today by looking at the novel Out of the Dark by David Weber – but before I start I want to warn you that

—->There Will Be Spoilers<—-

so if you’d rather not read them stop now. Normally I wouldn’t include spoilers but it’s impossible to really discuss what I felt was most disappointing about this book without them.

My disappointment with this book actually begins before I picked it up. David Weber writes a military scifi series known as the Honor Harrington books that focus on a female starship commander in a space operaesque setting. (I haven’t covered military scifi in Genrely Speaking yet, but it’s coming. For now, think of it as space combat with carefully analyzed tactics.) I’ve had Honorverse books recommended to me a couple of times before but I’ve avoided the series simply because it’s so large – thirteen novels in the main storyline, not counting spinoffs which add another sixteen published works to the universe. But I’ve been told it’s good.

So when I saw the name David Weber on a stand alone novel I had high hopes, since the overanalysis that goes into military scifi is fun from time to time. And to be fair, Out of the Dark did deliver, to an extent. At it’s core Out of the Dark is an alien invasion tale, where a race of overlarge doglike aliens invade for the purpose of stealing all of earth’s heavy metals and enslaving it’s people. They make a lot of miscalculations in building their strategy, some because of general genre blindness, some because of cultural unfamiliarity and some just because hey, invading a planet is a big logistical undertaking.

One of the best ideas Weber plays around with is that humanity is advancing much faster than the aliens are used to seeing. While only one race invades Earth, they represent a much larger group of aliens called the Hegemony. The Hegemony fist scouted Earth during the Battle of Agincourt (literally, the scouts took a lot of footage of the battle but apparently never did a solid analysis of what it might mean about humans both tactically and in general disposition) and show up in the modern day expecting a much lower level of technology to deal with. Drawing on their collective history the invaders determine humanity has been advancing several times faster than they would normally expect. The invaders have come with an invasion group equipped to suppress a civilization tinkering with steam engines, not one putting satellites in orbit.

The unexpected tech level, cultural and historical differences all result in the aliens loosing several rounds early and their invasion getting off to a slow start, but the promise of a race that could put them ahead of their neighbors on the technology curve is very tempting. But ultimately human resistance goes on much longer than the aliens expect. Even with all the major human cities bombed out of existence guerilla groups continue to harass the invaders and take a terrible toll. Eventually the alien commander decides to bioengineer a virus to wipe humanity out, deeming subjugating them to be too costly.

Now so far the book is decent but not exceptional. David Weber is a popular military scifi writer for a reason and he does a great job setting up believable exchanges between scattered human irregulars and semi competent alien invaders. (And again, to be fair to the invaders, competently invading a planet inhabited by creatures you haven’t studied much is pretty much impossible. Or at least it would seem so.) The characters aren’t compelling but the tactics and ideas are fun and I was legitimately wondering how he was going to dig humanity out of the hole it was in. After all, with most of it’s population centers gone there would be no facilities to try and create a vaccine for the alien’s virus.

Pretty much the only option would be to destroy the lab making the virus before it was deployed, a great opportunity for more scheming and great tactics, ploys and moments of breathtaking personal sacrifice, the stuff that is the bread and butter of the typical military history (and thus, military scifi.) At least, that seemed like the only option to me. It turns out Weber had another one in mind.

Vampires.

No, really.

Vampires come out of hiding among normal humans and wipe out the invaders.

I never finished Out of the Dark, in fact this “plot twist” (coughdeusexmachingacough) actually made me so mad I closed the book, put it face down on my desk and didn’t touch it again except to take it back to the library. It really felt, to me, like Weber had written himself into a corner and just made something up to get himself out of it.

To be totally fair Weber does provide a little foreshadowing for this twist but even the idea of vampires isn’t introduced until the last third of the book. It feels tacked on. And I feel, as a writer, that it’s really the only thing wrong with Out of the Dark. It could be a great military scifi/alien invasion story if it just didn’t cheat. Worse, by using vampires – and not something like the traditional folktale vampires but the uberpower vampires of modern myth – it feels a lot like deliberate pandering to a new audience, as if Weber was making a play for the Twilight crowd.

My deep disappointment with the book, so deep that I did something I rarely do and quit reading it before the end, stems from three things. First, I went in with high expectations. There’s not much that I, as a writer, can learn from that other than beware overhyping yourself. But it’s still worth noting that I expected something I didn’t exactly get, namely a book that was military scifi to the core.

The second thing was the lack of consistency. Vampires and aliens from outer space? Yeah, you could put them in the same book. I get it. We actually have more evidence supporting the existence of vampiresque creatures than aliens. There are stories of bloodsuckers in pretty much every cultural tradition in the world, dating back thousands of years, while stories about aliens are rare and recent. (Let’s not go into ancient alien astronauts, m’kay?) But military scifi often leans very heavily towards the hard end of the scale of scifi hardness, trying to stay away from too much phlebotinum. Vampires, on the other hand, are pretty much made of the stuff.

Weber tried to take two incredibly disparate things – hard, well analyzed tactical military scifi and vampires-as-superheroes – and mash them together. If he had put as much work into that as he obviously did in all the human vs. alien encounters in the book it might even have worked. But it really feels like he was just hoping the rule of cool would make it work. And it doesn’t.

The third thing was he didn’t set up his biggest plot point enough. I said it before and I’ll say it again, we don’t see any hints of vampire activity until we’re approaching the climax of the book. That’s just too late to introduce the thing your entire story basically hinges on. In fact, if it doesn’t come up until then it’s probably not what your story is about and you should save it for another story entirely. There’s nothing wrong with that. It should have happened in Out of the Dark but it didn’t.

In short, I think that David Weber had a potentially workable story idea. But I think he put it in the genre he was comfortable with, not the genre it actually wanted to be, and it wound up being a worse story for it. Definitely a pitfall all writers should look out for.

Writing – A Love Letter

Posted by natechen on

Happy Valentine’s Day! I hope you all will enjoy celebrating this august holiday with your paramour. If you live in the Fort Wayne area I highly recommend your celebrating by taking your significant other to see The Princess and The Goblin tonight. I will be performing in it, and thus not celebrating romance with the rest of you, for the Arts are a harsh mistress.

Yes, that’s definitely the reason.

Well. Partially.

But mostly, it’s the Arts. The Arts are what define a society. They call us on to greatness, they take our ideas and paint them in bold colors across a canvas that stretches across the hearts and minds of an entire society. The Arts, my friend, embody a romance that goes beyond sentiment and passes on into the very fabric of our thoughts and lives. They are not merely professions of beauty or adoration. No, they are, in a way, the foundations of that admiration.

Writing, it would seem, is the least of the Arts. It is so old, so ancient. Surely it is surpassed, in this day and age, by others. The Arts, after all, embody so much more than just words on a page. A picture is worth a thousand words. They say that Music hath charms to sooth the savage beast, and with radio and the Internet to help spread it Music has a reach and impact like never before. Theater, the Art that claims me tonight, can draw on Music and combine it with the nuance and power that comes with the dynamics of audience and performer to drive story and draw people in. Film looses the power of that bond but offers the opportunity to craft the perfect performance on the cutting room floor and duplicate it time and time again.

And yet I am drawn back to Writing. It captivates me, demanding my time and my energies as jealously as any romance.

The empty page is the greatest promise of all, full of untapped potential, crisp and fresh and pure. In time it will be marked and marred and scrubbed over, mistakes made and imperfectly erased, or simply crossed out. There is nothing  in the world like flipping back through the pages, running your fingers over the words and reading, over and over again, the thoughts that shape your life. The written word cannot suffer for being spoken poorly, cannot be forgotten by the mind of an actor.

And for all its simplicity, you will find that Writing is the Art that underpins all the others. There can be no Music without a score, no Theater without a script, no Film without a screenplay. Writing is at the center of all the other Arts. Its simplicity is its strength.

Writing endures. We have films dating back to the creation of the medium, music from a few hundred years ago, plays from the time of the Greeks. But the oldest written words may be twice as old as the oldest play, if not older, and have survived because they embody ideas that are essential to understanding the human condition. (Also because they’ve been written down.) Writing has gone from tablets of stone to the hides of animals, the pulp of trees to pixels on a screen and it will undoubtedly continue to transform itself as long as there are people with ideas they love.

So today, this is my Valentine. May Writing long endure.

Genrely Speaking: Paranormal Investigation

Posted by natechen on

Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, the part of the show where we look at various genres and dissect exactly what is meant when they’re mentioned in this blog. Today’s subject is the paranormal mystery.

This is kind of a fine distinction, and once upon a time I would have just lumped this in as a subgenre of urban fantasy. But after some reading I’ve come to be of the opinion that the paranormal mystery is distinct enough to qualify as a genre of its own. What defines it? I’m glad you asked.

  1. An aggressive mixture of traditional investigation techniques and mystical or magical methods of detection. While urban fantasy is about the blending of the supernatural and the mundane, paranormal mysteries are about methods of investigation – they’re a kind of ‘what if’. A great example is Alex Hughes‘ Mindscape Investigation novels, where a powerful psychic serves as a consultant for the local police. He can read minds and, to a lesser extent, emotional echoes from locations, but the evidence he gathers is only admissible under some circumstances. For the most part, while the main character can generate leads, the police still have to do their share of legwork and deduction. See also Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series for a similar take. The X-Files, on the other hand, is about trying to understand the paranormal using human science, with the characters bringing varying levels of faith in the paranormal to the table, but it still fits into this genre. There’s many different ways a paranormal investigation can work to strike a balance, but they all have to have a balance between the paranormal and normal aspects of the investigation in order to count – paranormal abilities can’t let the detective cheat or be the only angle the investigators pursue.

  2. An emphasis on the paranormal as strange and unpredictable, even to those  who have spent their whole life working with it. While most paranormal investigators have a concrete problem their trying to solve, like a murder or mysterious disappearance, the very paranormal forces they’re dealing with tend to be opaque and not entirely understood. Whether no one’s ever used magic as an investigation tool before or the nature of the Masquerade makes it almost impossible to find the goblin witness detectives need to interview, the paranormal forces at work can be as much a hindrance as a help to investigators. While a particular book/episode in a series may deal with a specific paranormal crime, the difficulties of the medium serve as a unifying arc. Laura Anne Gillman’s Paranormal Scene Investigators series provides a good example of this.

  3. A mix of paranormal and mundane sources of trouble. This is part of what justifies keeping regular investigation methods around. While a powerful psychic may hypnotize people to extort their money he probably has to launder it or otherwise keep it safe using normal banking methods. Or, conversely, a powerful mob boss may be keeping evidence of his mundane crimes suppressed by hiding them behind magical illusions. A ghost haunting a hospital may turn out to be the victim of a decades old murder that has to be solved before the spirit will rest. Regardless, both mundane and paranormal methods of investigation will be necessary to solve the problem.

What is the greatest weakness of a paranormal investigation story? Probably the incredibly delicate balancing act involved in keeping your mundane and your magical angles of investigation relevant. Lean to far one way and there’s no need for ghosts and goblins in your story at all, lean too far the other and there’s no need for normal forensics or deduction at all. Worse, because of the many ways the paranormal can enter into stories, from fairies in the attic to wizards killing with curses, there’s no short list of tropes writers can turn to for reference, at least not yet. Time may ease this difficulty.

What is the greatest strength of a paranormal investigation story? Probably it’s incredible diversity. As I mentioned in the police procedural post, and again in my post on the detective story, mysteries are in no small part about their characters. And that’s good, I’m for anything that encourages strong characters. But there are only so many ways you can dress up a robbery or a murder with mundane tools, so many ways to execute a kidnapping or make a ship go lost at sea. Adding a plethora of new paranormal tricks, or new paranormal creatures to conspire with or paranormal obstacles to overcome this genre can bring a new feeling of freshness or just give a story new directions to go in.

Paranormal investigations are kind of a young genre, one of the earliest examples of it would be the 1965 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and even that only lightly touches on the possibilities of the genre. I’m not sure where it’s going yet, but I think I’m going to getting there.