Tag: amwriting

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Too Good To Be True

If something, or someone, is too good to be true then …

You know.

Why then, are so many protagonists in best-selling novels so unbelievably good?

I have been writing a thriller, a broad sort of genre that means I am focussing a lot on a plot that is fast-paced. Characters are still important, though, especially as every thriller needs a good conflict or two and characters are our windows into all conflicts from geo-political bust-ups to a scrap between neighbours.

As I am supposed to read market-oriented thrillers because I am sort of trying to write one (it’s one of the rules you see all the time), I’ve spent some time grappling with a variety of protagonists with whom I am having some trouble.

Often, I am expected to care about a character who is presented as being rather impossibly … well, good. Rugged survivors, brooding yet humourous, tough but fair, patriotic (if they’re American but then they also have to have some kind of background in the military or love guns or both), dog loving, an imperfect parent (because that’s the only kind), insightful, thoughtful yet spontaneous, there they stand, signalling their virtue with every every line they utter, every observation they make.

Also, to my horror, authors use the word “savvy” to describe them.

Don’t get me started about that word.

Anyway, I must also point out that we are usually shown just a wee flaw that we don’t have to look too hard to see. They have a blemish or even two. Not arrogance, because arrogance does not seem to be a blemish, given its ubiquity in pop culture heroes.

My stomach is getting unsettled just thinking about them. And they crop up in the work of best-selling authors all the time. Actually, it’s probably one of the reasons the books sell so well.

What does that say about the writing problem, meaning the fact that it’s easy to write but hard to get someone to read what you’ve written?

Do my protagonists have to be so dang-nabbed good that I hate them and myself for writing them?

Self-loathing is not why we get into this game, at least not most of us. But the sort of self-loathing that sells has to be on the page, not simply a result of having written. What good is cringing dark hatred of oneself if it doesn’t bring in a royalty cheque?

I know I am being unfair. There are lots of loathsome anti-heroes, quirky unreliable narrators and fundamentally, fatally flawed protagonists out there. I am just not sure how they ever got published.

How about a protagonist who is mostly sympathetic but makes big mistakes and is conflicted all the time about hard choices? Someone who dwells in the space between the rock and the hard place and makes character-based mistakes in judgment is surely more interesting than someone who simply confidently faces problems in succession and makes the best decisions based on the information they have while punching, escaping, or otherwise outsmarting bad guys.

Naah.

Give ‘em what they want.

Troy Storm, veteran of a forgotten foreign war, PTSD survivor, runs a non-profit dog-rescue, step father to an adored eight-year-old girl whom he teaches to shoot a pistol (only in self-defence of course), partner of a savvy no-nonsense kindergarden teacher who kick-boxes to raise money for orphans in El Salvador, moonlights as personal security to visiting foreign dignitaries … .

From there it writes itself when you factor in a really bad guy.

See Bad to the Bone.

Done.

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Bad to the Bone: Social Determinants of Literary Bad guys

I am not good at evil.

My bad guys are not bad enough.

Not only are they not born bad enough, I do not make them bad enough.

But as I age, I get darker. Many writers can go truly dark and explore the monster within but the good ones stop short of evil and make the bad guy bad.

We hear words like “evil” and “monster” and “animal” from politicians who like to paint opponents, especially those driven to extreme forms of protest or even violence, in the simplest and most negative terms. The podium thumpers then signal their own virtue, as a representative of civility and decency, and put together the angry mob that will by means either of legislation or torches and pitchforks snuff out the bad guys.

Literary bad guys must be different, though. They must believe in themselves. They must be convincing characters. They have to have backstories that give us some insight into them even as we root for the protagonists.

Biological bad guys, monsters who simply obey their nature, don’t interest me.

So, if we’re making a bad guy, not simply accepting that evil exists, where do we start? Here’s a few places.

Childhood trauma. That’s a big one, as it opens the doors to all manner of compromised people who have been victimized by parents, siblings, friends, institutions, and of course, random strangers. Disney likes to kill the mothers of their characters. That’s sure to traumatize most of us, but, for some reason, Disney characters don’t become bad guys when that happens to them. It’s probably more traumatic to have a mother who hates you than one who has passed away, and it’s sure to create a better bad guy.

Adult trauma. The environment strikes again, but is more difficult to craft in a satisfying way because we have far less empathy for adults than for children. People seem to choose to be bad, which they might actually be doing, but which is not as much a challenge as character development. I also intensely dislike the characterization of anti-heroes as people who have just had an exceptionally bad day and go off an emotional cliff. It’s dull.

Desire. The root of all unhappiness is desire, we are told. It’s a good point. Desire is also the root of a lot of backstabbing, megalomania, gaslighting, and car chases. Money, Sex. Power. Powerful motivators all, but are they interesting? Mixed with some other character traits, positive and negative, and with some good backstory they can be. But they’ve been done a lot.

Individualism and collectivism. Both these ideas drive antagonists. The absurd idea that freedom is being able to do whatever you want to whenever you want to do it, and the cult of individuality that goes along with it, makes a simple canvas on which we can paint many characters. Its opposite, the equally absurd notion that the essence of goodness is to obey, to sacrifice everything for the common good, to remove individuality entirely in pursuit of the social or religious or political truth, is also an easy place to start.

Privilege. This is one of the more interesting places to go as it leads naturally to an antagonist who is convinced of their own rightness. It is no longer fashionable to say that one is privileged, but it used to be all the rage. In the days of hereditary privilege, the very point of social endeavor was to exercise privilege. Later, when privilege could be earned through the accumulation of wealth or actual achievement, it indicated the pinnacle of success, of social validation. The beauty of privilege in all its historical and contemporary forms is that it not only motivates an antagonist, it blinds them to the consequences of their actions. History is full of odious people who merely let the chips fall where they may. And let there be no doubt, they ARE bad guys.

Other social determinants, like education and income, have interesting relationships with the bad guy personality. The obscenely rich and the impossibly erudite often have little empathy for others, but lower levels of wealth and education are also relevant. Ignorance has long been the root of hatred. Poverty, and the need to overcome it, motivates a great deal of both pro and anti-social behaviour. The mad scientist (a relative rarity) is over-represented in fiction, especially movie fiction. The already-rich greedy investor (so prevalent as to appear normal) has been done to death.

And these days, social media makes everyone evil. That has to be added to the list.

So, if adding up these characteristics might make my evil characters better, I guess I should develop a new character, a bad guy for 2027, which is the earliest I might finish another novel. Here we go. Consider a biotechnology/AI research scientist, stripped of laboratory privileges because he (it has to be a man because I don’t much like men) won’t follow someone else’s rules. He’s had to go it on his own because his mother hates him (and always has) because he reminds her of his father, long dead and gone. He marries into an aristocratic family and gaslights his wife until she signs the ancient estate over to him for safe-keeping. He starts a Facebook group for white supremacists and gives them land to organize a militia. And on the way to the hospital to sign the papers committing his wife to involuntary care, he trips on the stairs, some poor kid having left a skateboard in the way. A really bad day. Boy, does he get mad.

Next stop, a plot to eliminate all the teenagers in the world by spreading a biological virus through Snapchat. And he’s just getting started.

There. A bad guy is born. 

Made, really.

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The Most UnKindest Cut

All of the best lies are those we tell ourselves.

Julius Caesar thought that his wife’s portentous dreams, the soothsayer’s babblings, and the bad weather were all nothing, that the Ides of March would come and go and he would continue on his path to absolute rule with the help of his good friends in the Senate.

Because my life and goals are rather smaller than Caesar’s, so are my lies. 

“This is happening,” I think to myself as I pass the 10,000 word mark in a new project. “It’s real.”

“No doubt about it,” I say at 20,000 words. “Voice, plot, setting FIRMLY established. Stay on course.”

“One third done,” I think at 30,000 words. “At this point it’s almost time to consider the next project as I bring this one to its inevitable conclusion.

I was at this point recently when I slowed to a crawl, writing nothing, editing bits here and there. It was then when I began to inhabit my own private way-station, a place where fictional characters wait in anxious queues shuffling from gate to narrative gate in search of a destination worth the trouble of the journey. It is a place I cannot write my way out of, where my characters go not to die, but to languish unfinished, their thoughts, their wants and fears forever unexpressed for the simple reason that they are just not making the grade.

It’s not their fault. They’re good characters. Well written, you know, with back stories and lives and voices and relationships. But something has happened that has prevented them from taking over the novel. They are not driving the action, forming their future and leaving narrative wakes that sweep readers along with them, behind just far enough to pique their interest.

And so it begins. The slaughter.

Descriptive paragraphs disappear, chapters are deleted, sub-plots evaporate, settings melt, and characters are proscribed.

“Look, with a spot I damn him,” I say to myself, except that it’s with a keystroke. Shakespeare always comes in handy when there’s deadly work to be done.

Building Rome is hard. Changing Rome is messy. 30,000 words quickly become 20,000. But when the bloody business is concluded, I am free to go new places, free to make new decisions unbeholden to old ones. I may end up in a better place.

If you think about it, if Caesar had made a few more well timed cuts, his ending might have been happier, too.

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Unbearably Ubiquitous

Humans are defined in part by their tools. We’re pretty good at the whole business, to the point that our tools sometimes occupy too large a part in our stories.

Good storytelling should not be about tools, whatever their purpose. If they take too large a role, the entire narrative can be about nothing but access to tools.

Consider the Big Two. Guns and smartphones.

First, shootin’ irons. The gun culture that pervades media, especially American television and movies, has spawned a few cliches that have become as unbearable as they are ubiquitous. Three come to mind easily. 

The first is that in any conflict, they who are simply better armed, who have greater access to firepower, win. Dull. Predictable (same as dull) and lazy. It’s as if people crave that idea that the solution to big problems is as simple as Ronald Reagan thought when he said, “We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.” 

Making no judgements about how he dehumanized millions of people and their country (of COURSE I am), that sort of simplicity is unforgivable in a fictional narrative. Even in the relatively uncomplicated good vs. bad world of Star Wars, George Lucas had the cute little Ewoks in The Return of the Jedi kick the tar out of Imperial walkers. Devoted space-opera nerds didn’t like it, but it wasn’t lazy.

The second tiresome trope is the reveal of said firepower. It has gone from a custom-built case and a three-piece rifle to a storage locker full of a grab-bag of gun-metal black automatic assault weapons, to a full-blown walk-in closet packed with ordnance, enough to arm a small army. And directors deal with it like it’s the reveal of treasure. 

“Ooooooooooh,” we’re supposed to say when we see it. “Y-a-w-n,” is more like it.

The third is more subtle. Bad guys, good guys, everybody seems to keep a pistol on the table, and the last thing they do before leaving a room is pick it up and shove it in their waistband behind their backs. We can’t go anywhere unarmed, right, so that makes sense. Guns are tools that, in American film, no self-respecting criminal or cop can do without.

Today, now, there is a newer tool, and another cue for writers or actors and directors to follow as they make transitions. It’s the smartphone. In film, the smartphone is out everywhere – at home, in the restaurant, in the car, in the bathroom, and the last thing anyone does is to pick it up, pocket it, or tuck it somewhere.

The smartphone is the new pistol. You can’t go out without one. Losing it is almost a death sentence. A newer, bigger one is likely to get you out of jams the older ones could not. Like a pistol, the smartphone adds a layer of complexity while at the same time making things too simple. As a gun undoubtedly does, a smartphone changes a power dynamic, but does so in a different way, by providing information almost immediately. Its narrative flaw is that it can make discovering an important fact or idea far too easy. In the same way, a gun waved in someone’s face simplifies a relationship between characters to the point of boredom.

For the writer of novels, the smartphone presents huge opportunities and pitfalls. A smartphone can be wielded by anyone, even those characters for whom guns would be anathema. Now characters must be disarmed from time to time, having batteries run out or coverage unavailable just to force them to use their wits. Someone can be intimidated, stalked, even terrorized using smartphone communication, but so long as that thing is connected to a network, help is available.

An easy fix is to write historical novels. A wired telephone could not be carried out of a room in a waistband. In the 1960s, you had to leave it behind when you went out to investigate that curious heavy breathing in the back garden. Even better, in the good ol’ days telegraphs had to be hand delivered. In some places you had to tip the messenger boy. And it was one-way communication written with as few words as possible, which always introduced a pleasing ambiguity of interpretation. More fodder for the reader’s imagination and the protagonist’s perceptive powers.

Perhaps if we go further back, new possibilities might arise. More than 5000 years ago, Gilgamesh the King, fashioned by the gods to be one-third like them, builds the walls of Uruk. One sunny day (they had WAY too many of those, by the way) Goddess of love and war, Innana, is really pissed off because the temple priests have been skimming more than their share of sacrifices for themselves. Our hero Akadi, which is a name I made up just now, must summon help before the whole city is destroyed by the goddess’s wrath. He uses his cuneus to press 𒀂𒀇𒀧𒀳𒀸𒁐 into a tablet of wet clay and then throws it over the city wall. The tablet lands in the middle of a beach volleyball match between Gilgamesh and his stalwart friend Enkidu (they only play each other, as no one can beat them singly let alone when they play as a team). Anyway, Gilgamesh sweeps his long hair off of his chiselled cheekbones and reads Akadi’s dire warning.

Let the narrative begin! 

I know, my ancient Sumerian sucks. But Gilgamesh has a friend, not a gun, and wits, not a smartphone, but even if he had both and even though he is one third god, the two thirds part that is human will either save the day or not. The flow of the story, the inevitability of the resolution will come from him.

As it has been written, so shall it continue to be done. Even when 10G hits, and we’re communicating with chips that High Leader Elon has implanted in our brains for $459.99 per month ($549.99 for no commercials). 

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Who AM I?

There was once a clever guy called Shakepeare who wrote about a lean and hungry Roman who asked his friend, “Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?” After giving it a good try, his mate Brutus says, “No Cassius, for the eye sees not itself but by reflection, by some other thing.” Cassius goes on to be Brutus’ mirror, laying it on a bit thick if you ask me, but the point is made that we have a hard time seeing ourselves, in knowing who we are. 

As is their prerogative, readers like to make inferences, personal ones, about authors based on what they’ve written. And how writers write about people, no matter how real or made-up they are, will be used against them. Verisimilitude will only increase a reader’s predisposition to make such leaps. 

He MUST be an axe-murderer because he writes about them so well!

I was giving this more thought after having written a book about the interwar period, a time when there were a lot of lefties wandering about questioning why so many men had died in the war and then why the survivors and their families had to suffer through the Depression. One of my characters is one of those lefties, so the novel has a flavour of that time. I offered the book to a publisher who immediately rejected it but directed me to a press which is very left-of-centre and exists for social purposes as much as business ones.

But I just wanted to write an entertaining, convincing book. Does it come across that I’m selling something, specifically lefty-ism? Do I come across that way, like I’m on a mission from Marx?

Everybody says that writing is a solitary occupation. We sit all alone in our respective garrets and live in our heads and some of what we think about spills out onto a paper or is punched out onto a keyboard. Now, the landlady won’t let us put up mirrors on the walls and ceilings, so we have no idea ourselves of even our appearances let alone the cumulative impressions we convey with thousands of words of plot, character, and place, the inescapable conclusions readers make about us given how we begin, the method of our middling, and the nature of our ends.

My way of beginning the novel was a relatively sympathetic, blow by blow portrayal of Bloody Saturday during the Winnipeg General Strike. Does that make me a Bolshevik in people’s eyes today? Most people haven’t a clue about that time (all the more reason to write it) or its dramatic climax (there it is again – reason to write). Does just writing sympathetically about the strikers brand me somehow?

Maybe, maybe not. I guess I need a mirror.

Where’s a Cassius skulking around when I really need one?

The thing is – it’s easy writing stuff, but getting anyone to read it all the way through? Almost impossible. If Cassius were gonna fill my head with how terrific I am, he’d probably have to do it on the basis of a synopsis. Who has time for much else?

So, he’ll get it all wrong, too.

I might have to just go with the flow. Or, in this case, the revolution.

Too bad khaki brings out the green bags under my eyes.