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Tag Archives: On Writing
The Rorschach Test
Steve Ditko was an Objectivist.
For those not familiar with the philosophy here it is in broad strokes: It was articulated in its modern form by Ayn Rand and views good and evil as absolute goals. Everyone is striving for one or the other with no shades of gray in between. It’s an atheistic philosophy and one that relies on men to have clear minds and clear goals, measuring their decisions against morality and their own goals to reach definitively good or evil ends. While people can (and do) act in confused or ignorant fashion in an objectivist world, their deeds can still be weighed as good or evil.
Objectivism is an appealing philosophy in many ways. It has strong moral principles, it places the power to make meaningful decisions in the hands of those who espouse it and it’s not so overly complex it breaks down on contact with reality, which is a common flaw in philosophical systems. If I were to site one flaw, it’s the philosophy’s dependence on men to parse good and evil.
In my experience, humans are terrible at that kind of thing.
Ditko, like Rand before him, had a lot of faith in the human ability to make moral decisions without reference to any higher level of morality. Again, that gives rise to a degree of nobility. Objectivism places a lot of value on individual autonomy and personal freedom as important parts of the moral order. This resonates strongly with most people raised in the Western tradition. Ditko tried to embody these values in The Question, a character he created and wrote in the 60s and 70s, who’s name (if not his principles) have gone on to live in the lore of DC comics. While the roots of The Question are largely forgotten his principles still live on in the character Rorschach, created by Alan Moore for his comic series The Watchmen.
That’s fascinating, as Moore considered objectivism an interesting idea in the same way you might consider the morality of a paranoid schizophrenic interesting.
To reiterate: Alan Moore was not an objectivist. He does not think good or evil are real concepts, much less pure concepts that could not be mixed. He wrote Rorschach as a bit of a madman. And yet many true Objectivists look at Rorschach and see a hero who fought for their ideals with courage and conviction. There are two reasons for this.
The first is that Moore found Objectivism in general, and the Question in particular, interesting. He disagreed with the ideas, but he did not hold them in contempt.
And as a result, we arrive at the second reason – he gave a true portrayal of Objectivism. Rather than dismissing it or worse, oversimplifying it to belittle the point of view, Moore allowed Rorschach to give a full throated voice to the ideas of Objectivism, to the point where many adherents of the ideology became quite fond of him. This wasn’t Moore’s intention. He thought he was making a strong case against the philosophy in his work. But he was so honest about what he was speaking to that he captured it regardless.
Moore isn’t the only one to do this. The movies Starship Troopers and Robocop were both trying to mock scifi action movies but they turned out to be such good scifi action films that audiences loved them. At the same time, Starship Troopers, the novel, was written by Heinline, a hardcore libertarian who was trying to depict a society to show the importance of getting people to buy into their own society, and how hard that would truly be. On the other hand, the writer and director thought they were mocking Heinline as a fascist. However, they were such excellent artists that the truth Heinline was trying to depict – ‘service guarantees citizenship’ – still shines through and is embraced by many.
It is obvious, then, that great artists must include truth in their work and that truth will then resonate with the audience. It is this resonance that, in turn, reinforces the integrity of the artistic work. That’s especially the case when the audience resonates in a way the artist did not expect.
That’s also one of the reasons many artists resist this kind of truth. The job of a writer is to manipulate the thoughts and feelings of the audience to a predetermined ending point so when things go radically off script it’s something of a failure for you, the writer. There’s a strong temptation to discard nuanced and realistic portrayals of viewpoints or ideas writers disagree with, so that they can get to that ending. The uncertainty must be controlled. While an outcome like Rorschach may not satisfy the writer, audiences can smell that oversimplification coming and will reject it much more often than accept it.
If you seek to tell a story with artistic and creative integrity, if you wish to appeal to and entertain an audience and if you believe truth is an important part of storytelling, you cannot always determine how your audience will react. Don’t let that deter you from investing in these things. Ultimately, you serve the audience. Let them react as they will. You focus on your duty to the truth.
Skin Deep Morality
We’re talking about the horrible toll contempt has taken on art in the last decade or so. There’s no area where there’s a clearer case of that than the way the topic of racism and racial oppression has eaten up such a huge part of every moral discussion in the last ten years. The history of this is pretty long and fraught, and definitely goes back further than 2011. But for the purposes of our talk today it’s not necessary to look back further than a week to see the evidence of this single factor mania everywhere.
COVID vaccine mandates? Currently being protested as racist by Black Lives Matter for their disparate racial impact.
Public school systems? Wracked by the critical race theory debate.
Problems at the border? Either racism against Mexicans or white genocide, depending on your point of view.
Pick just about any issue to discuss, even strained gender relations (caused, we’re told, by white patriarchy), and someone will insert themselves almost immediately to explain how race points us to the moral failings of the system. It’s tired, it’s boring, it’s repetitive. But it has one thing going in its favor: Americans hold racists in utter contempt. This is a relatively new phenomenon in America, and most of the world for that matter. It’s also the first major moral concept to find its beginnings in the United States. Both of these things are noteworthy in and of themselves, and taken in isolation I would’ve told you, as recently as 2014, that they were positive things.
The last seven years have convinced me otherwise.
Which is to say there was a time when I thought contempt for another based on their moral decisions was a worthwhile position. I still find the idea of removing race as an indicator of value worthwhile, but it’s like a shiny new toy that we’ve become overly fascinated with. To discuss this idea in more depth it may be worthwhile to step back and consider it in other terms. Let’s take a relatively nonincendiary example. Say we have a cannibal.
Wait! Wait! Come back!
I’m serious, imagine a character like Hannibal Lecter. He’s intelligent, suave, urbane, raised in a culture where we recognize cannibalism is inherently evil as an affront to human dignity, but he chooses to ignore the respect due to others and eat their bodies anyways. Often while they are, in fact, still alive.
Is this man not worthy of contempt?
And yet there is an entire body of literature, including Silence of the Lambs where we find Hannibal himself, that tells us such a man is not, in fact, contemptuous. We treat him this way at our own peril. Hannibal escapes from prison and menaces society once again because he is treated with contempt. The characters attempt to use Hannibal, a contemptuous action, and as a result they suffer the full brutality of his twisted nature. Hannibal is evil and we treat evil with contempt at our own peril. When we simply disregard evil rather than confronting it then it will return to the shadows and build itself up more and more.
The worst part of this is dismissing things with contempt is easy. We know that racism is evil and everyone who displays it is guilty of that evil. So we just dismiss them. But what actually needs to happen is the hard, careful and often fruitless work of reforming that evil through compassion, acceptance and renormalization. Dismissal forwards none of those goals. However, with the availability of such an easy seeming out, people become very tempted to simply plaster this one size fits all ‘solution’ onto everything.
So we find race seeping into every moral discussion. And anyone who can paint their opposition as racially motivated feels free to dismiss their opposition in contempt.
This is not healthy.
Solving this problem on the grand scale of American, much less global, society is far outside my abilities and intelligence. So I’m just going to leave the notion there. Let’s look at what the impact on story has been through the lens of a single example.
Falcon and the Winter Soldier is a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that explores the legacy of Steve Rogers as Captain America through the views of his two closest living friends. In theory. In practice it’s a sermon on race and power in the United States. Basically every event in the show exists to examine this question in some way or another and it processes everything through the idea of standing hostilities between white people and every other ethnicity on earth. This horribly distorts the story.
In theory, the MCU is in a state of upheaval as it recovers from the incredible disruption of losing half its population for five years only to have them inexplicably come back. Everyone has problems. Deep problems, complex problems, difficult problems. Everyone’s problems are incredibly pressing and require immediate attention because no one has anything in place to deal with anything like this. Falcon – Sam Wilson – has just been handed the shield of Captain America and tasked with carrying on the heroic legacy Steve built. Helping with these problems should be his priority one.
Instead, we get a long introspective introduction where Sam struggles with whether a white nation will accept a black superhero. Even though they’ve been accepting black superheroes for over a decade, since Rhody got a suit of combat armor from his friend Tony. Never mind that, Sam has to reset all that history and become the first one all over again. Then, when terrorists try to usurp the ongoing disaster relief efforts put in place to repair the blip, Falcon spends more time sympathizing with the terrorist ring leader than the people suffering from her actions. Because she’s not white, just like Sam. Because the things that driver her to chaotic violence are things Falcon has also experienced. And ultimately, because Sam finds himself holding the people conducting the relief effort in contempt.
Deep, complex, difficult problems are washed away in a very shallow moral judgement that makes a mockery of human nature and suffering. In the end we’re expected to empathize with Sam and join him in his contempt of the world relief efforts. But I found I couldn’t. Not just because I’ve tried very hard to put contempt behind me as destructive only to myself, but because in dismissing all the moral questions in Falcon and the Winter Solider except for race the writers blinded themselves to a host of moral issues that existed in their story and which they did not address. It was easier to dismiss moral questions with contempt for racism than explore them. But the story suffered for it. Suffered a great deal.
When homeless people were given homes owned by people who vanished where are those people to go when they reappear? When cities were abandoned because there weren’t enough people to keep them going who will help the people who reappeared there, all on their own? When business were closed and their goods given away because the owners vanished who will restore that livelihood to them when they come back? Falcon and Winter Soldier ignores all these questions and the stress, trauma and suffering they will provoke and replaces them with its contempt for racism.
It’s not fair. It’s not authentic. As a work of art, it fails its duty to truth.
There is no easy out to moral questions in art. This doesn’t mean that art cannot present us with people who think there are easy outs. This doesn’t mean art has an imperative to confront difficult moral questions, for art can still function without such a requirement. But once you have introduced a moral question in a story you must treat it with honesty and fairness or you will fail in art. That’s hard and uncomfortable and more than once I’ve set aside story elements because I knew I couldn’t deal with them with the kind of honesty the truth deserved. The first lesson from our culture of contempt is simple.
If a moral decision inspires contempt in an artist, that artist is unqualified to address it in art. Ignorance, hatred and love, all of these approaches can yield valid art on moral questions. But contempt cannot. So I will strive to avoid those issues which inspire it in me, and avoid all art where the two collide as well. Hopefully I’ve made a good case for why others should do so. But we cannot end there. We must go a step further.
We have to talk about Rorschach.
But not today, I think. Come back next week and we’ll tackle Alan Moore, The Question, and the legacy of The Watchmen.
When Art Turns to Contempt
The fundamental unit of Art is Truth.
A person can labor to create something but unless it is grounded in something true sharing that creation with another will be difficult if not impossible. The things that are true are the only things we can really share. Art that lacks truth has no shared threads to connect artist and audience and becomes an entirely subjective mess, something to argue about or project oneself onto rather than a vehicle to communicate the deepest concepts of the human experience.
It’s not impossible to express truth about something that inspires contempt. In fact, contempt is often born from a specific piece of truth that inspires disgust and eventually, yes, contempt in the people who learn it. The problem is that contempt then warps everything we know about a person. Perhaps we learn that someone’s car broke down because they never changed the oil in it. (I am changing the oil in my car every six months, dad, please relax.) Someone who hears this may begin holding this negligent fool in contempt, because obviously they don’t take care of their possessions and who can trust someone like that?
The problem is, while the negligence is true, there are other truths. A family member was in the hospital and all their time was consumed in caring for them. They were too strapped for cash to afford a visit to the mechanic. Their hospitalized family member was the one who was in charge of scheduling the car maintenance in the first place and they didn’t know where things were in the cycle anyways. All of this truth is overwritten by contempt. The psychological mechanics of contempt are undoubtedly deep and complex, and perhaps it has a greater purpose in our minds, but that’s not really the point I’m here to discuss today.
Modern art is driven by contempt.
From cinema to sculpture, painting to prose, all our cultural centers are populated by people who hold their fellow man in contempt. Our cultural betters are contemptuous of the poor, and will pay them to rot in their homes or on the streets, so long as they stay out of the way. They see the impact an expanding civilization has on the planet and assure themselves it would be better if people just stopped having children and families. Most recently, we discover they don’t even want to breath the same air we do.
The exact source of this contempt is hard to place and is probably as irrelevant as the mechanics and role of contempt because the real problem with all this contempt for art is that it warps a creator’s concept of truth. (There are other problems for society at large, of course.) When your sense of the world is badly distorted, to the point where most people you meet transform into jingoistic caricatures in the very moment you speak to them, you cannot put truth in your art. Yet such is the behavior of our cultural betters.
The result is art and story that looks like a funhouse mirror. We’re encouraged to refrain from judgement and look at the circumstances of a person and how they influence moral choices. But the only moral subject we discuss in fiction is race. We’re told people need to be in control of their lives and be strong. But in fiction we’re told that strength is mourning how we are victimized by forces beyond our control. We’re told it’s important to build our own identity. But many who attempt to do so are shamed for abandoning an identity they supposedly share with dozens of others strictly on a basis of genetics and place of birth.
Contempt has convinced our cultural betters they can simply talk down to us, telling us stories full of contradictions and nonsense, and we’ll eat it up. To an extent, they’ve been proven right. But their myopic vision is poisoning their art and it’s quickly falling apart under the strain of its own nonsense. We’re navigating a horribly depressing artistic world these days. But my purpose isn’t to spend a long time commiserating over the decline of our entertainment and culture. My purpose is to chart the dangers so I can effectively navigate around them. And I am a writer, so I write the process down and share it to help me understand what I am seeing.
So this is my thesis for the fall. Contempt has warped our culture and we must unpack all the damage it is doing so we can avoid it. What is it hiding from our view? What do we have to reinfuse to our storytelling to restore the balance? Hopefully we will come out the other side wiser for the exploration.
Writing Vlog 09-29-2021
My latest writing Vlog, ending one project and talking new ones:
Night Train to Hardwick – Afterwords
Well, after three and a half months we’ve reached the end of another one of Roy’s strange adventures. Hopefully you all enjoyed that smaller, more intimate tale. One thing that writing these pulpy stories has really clarified to me is how fluid the process of crafting a story is. I spent a lot of time jumping from one thread to another. You can generally break down a story into: characters, events and themes. As a writer I’ve always found events come the easiest to me, with characters and themes building out of them. I have occasionally started with an idea for a theme that birthed a scene I really wanted to write, and built the characters and events to go with that. But generally I assemble a story from a bunch of different ideas for scenes that coalesce into character beats and generate a thematic through line as they get refined.
A Roy Harper adventure presents different issues. While I’ve written a trilogy of books and used recurring characters before, the Sumter novels were planned ahead of time and the characters had defined arcs throughout and my recurring characters did fine on their first outing but I struggled with them afterwards. So telling a series of adventures that had separate settings, supporting characters and thematic elements to work with is a new challenge for me. Hopefully I’ve done alright.
Most people say you should start with one of the three factors I mentioned and of the three characters and themes are the most often sited. Events – or what many people would call the plot – are often a distant third in the trifecta of story. I’ve often felt like an anomaly among storytellers given my intense focus on them in writing although I recognize the emphasis on these elements may just be the influence of highly intimate storytelling mediums like movies and TV on the modern zeitgeist. Either way, I’ve persisted in my own style until now.
And I don’t expect I will change much. But I have gained a new appreciation for the care needed when working with an existing character. Roy has strong character elements like regret, a desire for penance and redemption, and a single minded focus on what’s in front of him. These grew as much out of what Firespinner needed him to be as any intention on my own part. However, as I put together the events of Night Train to Hardwick I found that many of the events clashed badly with Roy’s character. His natural response to them would draw him away from his strongest character elements and force me to ignore them, downplaying what made writing him and (hopefully) reading him interesting. Alternatively I could introduce new character elements to examine through the lens of events or I could modify events to suit Roy better.
Introducing new character elements risked diluting what I already had before Roy was firmly established in my mind and that of the audience. So I decided not to do that. Which really only left me with the option to modify events.
I didn’t want to the situation to suit Roy too closely, so as to avoid contrivance. In the end, I may have failed at that. However, the new series of events matched Roy much better and I feel we got a great chance to see his deepest foibles play out in new and interesting ways. Exploring the relation between the three big story elements was definitely fun but also an exercise in storycraft that I think was good for me as a writer. In all this I consider Hardwick to be a success not only as a story but as an opportunity to develop my skills.
My goal with the Roy Harper adventures is simple, fun storytelling. I hope that you enjoyed this outing with the character and that you’ll return for my next fiction project. In the mean time, as is my habit, I will be taking the next week off as I prepare my next project. There will be about a month of essays between now and the launch of that project, so if you like my thoughts on fiction there’s something to look forward to in the interim. Until then, take care!
Weekly Writing Vlog 05
Latest writing vlog from me – more rambling about upcoming projects.
Firespinner Afterwords: Roy Harper and The Gospel of Earth
We’ve reached the end of another tale, one I truly enjoyed writing and I hope you enjoyed reading! As always, here are a few closing thoughts.
As of late I’ve been exploring points of view in my fiction. This wasn’t intentional, it largely came about accidentally as I worked on the Triad World novels, themselves a kind of flash of inspiration that turned into a much larger project than I had expected. However, as I worked on Schrodinger’s Book and Martian Scriptures I found that my desire to use points of view to comment on each other was growing. This theme kind of made it into my comic project, Hexwood: Dust and Ashes, in the way the modern and traditional takes on magic fought a war over different visions of the future. However that story proved to be a bad forum for that discussion – comics don’t handle nuanced philosophical differences very well – and most of that debate got cut out.
Then I decided to write the novella Firespinner to run concurrent to Hexwood’s crowd funding campaign. Several missteps took place in that process but one thing that did happen, without my really intending it to, was that many of the themes cut from Hexwood started to appear as hints and suggestions in Firespinner. As I worked on that story, several new ways to approach those points of view, in both plot elements and narrative techniques, occurred to me. At this point I have ideas for several more stories focused on Roy Harper that I want to work on in the near future.
I also want to write a third, and probably final, Triad Worlds novel, The Gospel According to Earth, which will wrap up several of the major outstanding plot threads of the first two and put something of bow on the whole project. While I have some ideas what Gospel will be about, along with some ideas of what will drive the conflict and characters of the story, many, many of the particulars are foggy and I’m not confident I can execute on all of the characters correctly. I also have a short list of short stories I’d like to write at some point, but none of them tickle my fancy right now.
So while I work to sort out The Gospel According to Earth I’ve decided to continue with Roy’s story. I’m currently working on Night Train to Hardwick, a direct sequel to Firespinner. Since a lot of the flavor of Roy’s world is already built Hardwick is a story that will let me move some of the time I would normally spend on world building and establishing a setting over to doing those things for Gospel. I’m sure long time readers and new readers alike are wondering if stories featuring Roy have an overarching arc or are designed to stand alone. The answer is a little bit of both.
The Roy Harper Adventures (for lack of a better name) represent my making a foray into pulp formatting, creating a series of lighter, fast paced adventure stories with recurring themes and characters that one can pick up and put down in pretty much any order and still enjoy. Yes, there will be a chronological order to these tales, and sticklers can certainly go to the beginning and read them in order, but my hope is that the common threads will only serve to offer small payoffs and satisfaction for long time readers. They are not going to build in the same way the chapters of a book or the books in a tightly written series would. Hopefully that fits with your expectations, dear reader, because as I’ve written in this style I’ve found that I like it very much.
As is my wont, I’ll be taking a week off now that Firespinner is done, then there will be a month of essays between installments of fiction. After that month is over we’ll move on to Night Train to Hardwick and the further adventures of everyone’s favorite pyrokinetic Westerner. See you in two weeks!
World Building: Hexwood
At the core of the idea of a Weird Western is the desire to translate a specific period of time and its attendant cultural norms into something comprehensible to modern audiences. That’s a challenge all historical fiction faces but by switching in fantasy elements you can both simplify the process and slip in direct analogs to the present day. I find these kinds of mental challenges fun and engaging and I’ve written about my approach to world building before so I thought I would share a few takes from the Weird Western I’ve been working on.
Hexwood: Dust and Ashes started as a germ of an idea three years ago. I knew I wanted to tell a story about a gold rush but, instead of gold, I wanted people digging for magic. The initial pieces of the world fell into place quickly. The geography had the shape of the world of the late 1800s and the story would be set in what we know as North America but with different political boundaries. The culture would be dependent on digging up magic rocks to continue functioning. On top of the usual dangers of the Old West the ecosystem would be rife with supernatural monsters and killer trees. And there would be flying trains.
The flying trains were very important.
As is typical when I am working on the early stages of a story I found old ideas, some abandoned, some that I had intended to use in other ways, some that I intend to use again in much the same way, all falling into place as I solidified my ideas. Many ideas I had got cut and set aside for another time. And, in time, I had a complete tale to tell and a world to tell it in. While I can’t get too deep into all the things added and cut I thought I’d share a bit of my thought process as I addressed these issues in the hopes it will entertain you, and perhaps help you build a world of your own.
Here are how a few of the ideas in Hexwood developed.
Sulfurite
The world of Hexwood started with the idea of magic rocks. Well, truthfully it started with the name but the first element of the story I thought of was magic rocks. I liked the idea of miners delving deep for the essence of magic but, as I began to flesh out the idea, I quickly had to decide what kind of magic I wanted them to dig for. That was a bit of a problem.
A lot of things went out the window immediately. It couldn’t be fairy tale magic, which is mostly about transformations, illusions and curses. Those things are too immaterial to dig out of the ground. It also couldn’t be things like the magic of stars or lightning or the deep oceans. The stars and storms aren’t things you can find underground and the ocean, while terrible and mysterious, has its magical qualities whether it is underground or not. That basically left the elements of earth and fire or the powers of the Underworld.
The Underworld is overdone, so it went off the list.
That left earth and fire. After some deliberation I chose fire, in part because I thought it would be interesting to experiment with a mythos similar to that of Dark Souls. I won’t delve too deep into those ideas because the idea of setting Hexwood in a world after an Age of Fire got scrapped very early but it did push me to the core idea of most magic in Hexwood, which was Fire itself.
Yes, I decided early on that the simple act of something burning would be an expression of magic and when that magic was used on metals you would get a basic effect. Silver shape itself like a living creature, tin would push away from the source of heat, aluminum would counteract gravity, and so on. To make using magic in this way practical people stored the magic of fire in a special kind of rock called sulfurite. With the basics of what I came to call volcanic magic in place, and the name of my magic rocks decided, it was time to move on. How did I build a West to put them in?
Dolmenfall
In my mind the first hurdle to creating a world that paralleled the Old West was the influence of the American Civil War. While the Gold Rush started in 1849 and marks the start of the Old West in many reckonings most Westerns are set after the Civil War and incorporate the resulting changes to weapons, warfare and culture into their narratives. If I wanted to evoke the West properly there needed to be a similar defining event not too far in Hexwood’s past.
I’m not sure where the idea for Dolmenfall originally came from but I do know what I was avoiding when I decided on it. My goal with Dolmenfall was to create a devastating internal conflict in Columbia (the nation where Hexwood is located) without referring to slavery or race. Far too much time is spent in culture today dwelling on these topics, I wanted something different and fresh. But in order to really evoke the same kind of tensions as the Civil War it needed to have elements that provoked strong distrust on both sides, as well as a clear potential for power imbalances that needed to be reckoned with but ultimately wasn’t until violence forced the issue.
After some thought I decided that the theme of this conflict should be Old versus New. In many ways the Civil War was also a conflict of old and new ways, with slavery being one of humanity’s oldest institutions and America’s economic and cultural ideas of freedom still one of the newest ideas in culture and governance. But again, to avoid making this too on the nose, I chose to make it a conflict between old magic and new. Mark Pendleton, the protagonist of the story, worked best if he fought on the losing side and so he wound up a representative of old magic.
Sulfurite is a lot like coal, it’s something you dig out of the ground that makes fire. Granted, sulfurite is rechargeable and basically functions as a battery that holds fire rather than electricity but the general principle is actually not that different than coal and thus I’d been thinking of volcanic magic as a very industrial flavor of magic. New, a little untrustworthy but very powerful. Thus it didn’t make sense for Mark to use volcanic magic, or at least not exclusively, so he had to use a different flavor of magic that was preindustrial and at least somewhat philosophically opposed to mechanization. When developing my main character I decided I wanted his magic to feel more ecclesiastical, so Mark got incense and a dowsing rod. I knew he’d need more than that but the later changes to Mark’s magic powers had more to do with his character than the world building, and with two plant based magics as a starting place – Mark specifically burns mandrake roots to use his central power and dowsing rods are wooden – I found myself thinking of him as a druid. That perfectly fit the bill for a system of old magic that would oppose a more “industrial” magic so I settled on the “Civil War” conflict in the setting being a conflict between druidic and volcanic magics rather than a war over economies and slavery.
With druids in the mix my mind immediately went to Stonehenge. Now that monument predates known druidic traditions but what I really needed was something that would emphasize the Anglo nature of the druidic tradition and Stonehenge is a truly iconic English megalith. So I made stone circles like Stonehenge an integral part of the druidic tradition. Mark trained at one, called Moraine Henge, fought to protect it during the Columbian Civil War (not a name that stuck), and watched it destroyed when his side lost. The individual stone formations – dolmen – were smashed and the druidic tradition ended, at least for a time. The only thing left was to give the conflict a name – or better yet, two. The American Civil War actually has two names, after all (the other is the War of Northern Aggression, and yes some people still refer to it as such) and each illustrates how one side thought of the conflict. So in Hexwood you may hear some people refer to the Lakeshire War – a reference to where the war was fought, certainly, but also the people blamed for starting the conflict. Other people refer to the war by its outcome – Dolmenfall, a reference to the destruction of a treasured and irreplaceable cultural touchstone.
Raging Skies, Burning Stone and Arthur Phoenixborn
For the last five or six years the idea of doing something with the mythology of King Arthur has percolated in the back of my mind. Ideas ran from the Once and Future King returning to aid modern day Britain, as the legends promised, to a clash between the Knights of the Round Table and other equally legendary figures, such as Greek heroes or Taoist Immortals. Nothing ever came of any of those ideas.
So when I was trying to ground Mark’s druidic traditions back into a larger cultural context King Arthur came to mind quite naturally. It took a little massaging but I managed to work disparate parts of various Arthurian story ideas I had tinkered with into a unified system and installed it as the mythical framework for the nation of Avalon, the England of Mark’s world, replacing the increasingly incongruous Dark Souls style mythos. It also let me establish a cultural throughline that would otherwise have been very difficult to explain.
You see, the English cultural heritage that underpins American culture, including the Old West, is distinctly Christian in nature, trading on ideas about Kings submitting to laws, mercy as a component of justice, and the imperfect nature of man that only the Western Christian tradition has ever seriously tried to put into practice. What’s interesting about Arthur is that much of his mythos seems to be an attempt to assimilate those Christian ideas into the culture of the old Angles, with Arthur himself serving as a clear Messianic figure.
My original intent with importing Arthur into the world of Hexwood was just to give the nation of Avalon a suitably mystical feeling origin. But once I realized I needed to ground the philosophies of Avalon and Columbia in something substantial in order for them to ring true Avalon’s First and Forever King started to take on more significance. He died and came back, gaining the title of Pheonixborn (replacing our Arthur’s title of Pendragon, which sounded too much like Pendleton for me to use). He united the druids and founded the Knights of the Stone Circle to place their powers at the service of the people, rather than the other way around. And he picked up two guardian deities, the Lord in Raging Skies and Lady in Burning Stone, to emphasize the idea that even the King himself should submit to authority, law and other abstract truths in order to build a stronger nation. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a coherent religion it does go a long way to fleshing out the philosophical underpinnings of the world outside the town of Hexwood, where Mark and his friends live.
And there you have it. These were the first three major steps in fleshing out a world around my simply story about magic rocks. It barely scratches the surface of all the different things I tinkered with while building Hexwood‘s world and I’m sure more things will be added and subtracted in the days to come. But hopefully you enjoyed this little glance into the process and how just one idea can quickly spiral out into many layers of complexity if you just think about it for a bit.
What? You wanted to read a story in that world? Well, Hexwood is a comic, you see. It’s not quite done with production although I can share the cover art with you here:
But I don’t plan on publishing the script here. Still. Maybe we can work something out. Come back next week. You may be pleasantly surprised.
Genrely Speaking: Weird Western
Boy oh boy we have not done this in a while. Long time readers know that genres are a thing that fascinate me, they are at once an attempt to codify stories and make discussing them easier and, at the same time, somewhat arbitrary groupings that carry different connotations among different people. For whatever reason the standards, exceptions and idiosyncrasies of genre classification entice me to think about stories through new lenses as I try and narrow down exactly what defines a story and its thematic content. Now all genres are broad categories and they tend to spawn a bunch of subgenres that narrow the scope to an extent, which for the purpose of Genrely Speaking are counted as regular genres rather than some beast of their own. A subgenre is almost narrow enough to be a useful tool for analysis rather than just a section in the library.
That is, when it’s not just two genres pasted one on top of the other.
Enter: The Weird Western.
As the name implies this genre is built on a base of the Western. It has all the open horizons, independent lives and harsh consequences as that genre but it layers something… extra on top of that. That extra usually comes in the form of some kind of Space Opera or Low Fantasy (or, on rare occasions, some other Fantasy genre). On the one hand a Space Western can serve as a look at technology or social trends when they’re boiled down to just one or a handful of people surviving in harsh places. On the other a Fantasy Western takes many of the superstitions and traditions of the West and makes them real, living forces that the protagonists have to deal with on a daily basis.
Given the many facets this broad genre can take I’m going to confine “weird western” to the realm of the second half of the blend, the Western with Low Fantasy, and refer to the first half as a Space Western. Note that this doesn’t rule out the Weird Space Western for the truly ambitious writer (see: Jack Irons, the Steel Cowboy.) Given this context, what are the pillars of the Weird Western?
- Personification of the forces of change. This can take many forms, from clashes between Native American and European figures of myth to the personifications of railways directing expansion west to some kind of magical disaster driving people across the plains, some form of the supernatural will be involved in humanity’s move westward. This is true even if the Weird Western is set in some fictional world with no historical ties to the United States. One interpretation of this theme that I found particularly interesting was Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century, where zombies started slowly overrunning the West in a metaphor for the creeping dehumanization of mechanization.
- Magic as a treasure to acquire. The West was a place where people grabbed for a great many things. Land, water, livestock, transportation and precious metals to name a few. While all of those things still hold value in most Weird Westerns most of the players in the story are more interested in magic, which serves as a stand in that simplifies and streamlines the many different conflicts of a traditional Western into something a modern audience can easily understand. As modern culture has moved away from the kinds of work that defined the Old West fights over pasture or farm land and the relentless expansion of the railways have lost some of their immediate impact. Many Americans today don’t even own their own property, much less property that they use to sustain themselves. They are more used to wealth and prosperity in the abstract, in terms of bank balance, investment and the like. Magic in a Weird Western typically serves as an analogy to these more familiar landmarks of prosperity and survival and frames the characters’ desires in a format modern readers instantly resonate with.
- A focus on outsiders. While the Western has always had its love for characters from ‘outside’ communities, from the traveling gunfighter to the displaced veteran, they still tend to focus heavily on specific communities. High Noon, Shane and Tombstone all feature very, very local stories with mostly local casts adding maybe one or two outsiders to provide prospective or an audience vantage point. This makes the narrative a bit more grounded and lends the tale an air of believability (roving gunslingers were by far the exception in the West, after all). In Weird Westerns outsiders are often a much bigger part of the narrative, with large numbers of them roving the West in search of the things that make them powerful and effective. Or, on the flip side, the story may feature people who have been displaced from a quiet town or camp and forced into bigger, more mystical environments that they must then learn to survive in. This lends the Weird Western Genre a tendency to build casts of hunter gatherers, rather than farmers or miners. If not balanced properly it can undercut the Western feel of a story (see the novel A Few Souls More for an example of this).
What are the weaknesses of the Weird Western? It combines two genres that have a limited appeal. The most popular flavors of fantasy are some kind of Modern or Urban Fantasy and High or Epic Fantasy while Western is a genre few people pay much attention to at all. The tropes and archetypes that define the genre just aren’t as immediate and appealing to most people as they used to be.
The genre also runs a serious risk of doing too much to really excel at any one thing. Most Weird Westerns try to blend a magic system or two with building a realistic supernatural West, strong characters, historical events and real world cultures. They also need a good plot, the ability to write dialog that is at once snappy and somewhat archaic and a sense of the bittersweet nature of a vanishing frontier. The author needs to do all of these things while balancing them so neither half of the Weird/West balance overwhelms the other. It’s a hard genre to do well and not a lot of people will be excited even if you execute perfectly.
What are the strengths of the Weird Western? Like many forms of fantasy it gives us the ability to examine difficult questions at a bit of a remove. But more than that, when done right it taps into a section of myth that is powerful and currently quite fresh and new to the modern mind. The West is also one of the best settings to juxtapose modern knowledge and understanding with the conflicts of might and right, civilization and nature. Many of the conflicts we face today are the same as were fought in the West, and with the supernatural to personify the clashing forces there’s much you can say quickly and easily in the Weird West.
The biggest struggle in the Weird West is building a world that will hold both the supernatural and mundane human portions of the narrative. The West was a very specific place and time, as I’ve mentioned before, and you have to be careful how you introduce anything new to it if you wish to keep the defining elements of the Western present. It’s fun, for sure, but also a tricky challenge. There may be something to talk about there. Hm… maybe we’ll take a crack at that next week.
Nate Chen Publications 