Peeves on a Leash

It startles me that, in this modern and enlightened age, I have read professionally published novels with Deus ex Machina endings. I mean, there are still editors, right?

I once heard an author at a convention say that one of the big things that gets people into trying to write professionally, for whatever medium, is when they look at something and say “I could do better than that!”

Generally, I suspect they find that writing well is harder than it looks. But at least they know which mistakes they are not going to make.

So what are your pet peeves when it comes to storytelling? What tropes drive you nuts? Me, I’m getting awfully tired of the idiot listening to loud music through headphones who fails to hear the carnage and screaming from right behind him. We’ve all seen that movie, right?

And I don’t like it when a character makes a promise and the reader knows instantly that the story will be set up to make him or her break the promise.

And the Deus ex, of course. Any contrivance so old it’s name dates back to classical antiquity should be probably be avoided.

But it’s all personal taste, isn’t it? There are some tropes that I’ve seen as often as the idiot in headphones and they still work for me every time. 

Crafting a story is  an art based on choices, on making decision after decision after decision. And consciously or not, the tricks you’ve seen before are in your head, part of your storytelling arsenal.

Use them wisely.

The Two Deaths of Andrew Dolbeck

There are two types of character death in fiction. (No, actually there are probably thousands. But there is a division of two that I would like to discuss. And while we are being parenthetical, today’s writing lesson can apply to more than death – feel free to substitute any dramatic plot event.) Let us call them the story-driven death and the reality emulating death.

The story-driven death suits the story. No surprise there. The deadly event occurs at just the right point in the plot, it fits the themes of the work, it advances the progression of the surviving characters.

There are many classic examples – the person who has done wrong, seeking redemption, dies saving the lives of others. Or, for a twist, the pure and good hero dies saving the person who has done wrong, adding value to their redemption quest. And let us not forget the mentor figure who dies in the middle of the classic Hero’s Journey. Or the passing of the sword from one generation to the next. In horror movies, the character that invents or unleashes the evil force is typically on the to-be-killed list.

You’ve seen these stories before – you know the drill.  And that’s part of the problem. Story-driven deaths can be effective and moving, but they can also be predictable.

I personally favor action genres, with cops and detectives and space pilots and characters who, for no reason, wear bright spandex costumes while fighting crime. These characters operate in dangerous worlds. In such worlds, death should strike unexpectedly. It should not be predictable.

Which brings us to the reality emulating death. The argument here is simple: people die. In real life, no one dies to suit the plot. Death occurs on its own time. 

There are benefits to having this kind of death in your story. In most fiction, a certain degree of willing suspension of disbelief is required. Having people dodge bullets all day without consequence doesn’t exactly make that suspension any easier.

The reality emulating death also makes a statement about hazardous environments. In war people die. People die unfairly and unexpectedly in space, in unsanitary conditions, and in the bad part of town.

And once a well loved character dies unexpectedly, outside what we believe to be the rhythm and structure of the plot, all bets are off. No one is safe. Anything can happen.  And that’s a fun place for the author to have the reader.

On the other hand, we don’t always want our fictions to be as haphazard and meaningless as our real lives. Character deaths that do not sync with the story may seem arbitrary and forced. Or, depending on the story, too harsh.

Of course, every reader will have a different opinion. In the end, as always, you need to weigh carefully what suits your story.

Because your readers certainly will.

Genre and Convention

There is a notion about genre that it exists mostly for the convenience of bookstores.  The idea is that they can sell books by grouping them – if you liked that last book, you’ll probably look for more like it.

The underlying premise to this notion is that authors should not feel constrained to fit their stories into tiny boxes that exist merely as a shelving aid.

There is also the problem of defining genres (and the endless sub-genres they seem to spawn). Once, at a convention, I watc hed two intelligent people have a frustrating discussion because neither seemed to realize that they each defined Magical Realism differently.

While I certainly agree that stories should be free to be whatever they need to be, I think genre conventions can be a useful tool to the writer. They create expectations in the audience that the author can fulfill or playful deny.

I recently saw a pair of interesting genre movies. One was a superhero film and one was a gritty, mean streets detective story (probably film noir, but I don’t want to argue about exactly what that term means). Each had a twist – the superhero movie (Silver Hawk, starring Michelle Yeoh) was also a kung fu movie. The detective movie (Brick) was set in a high school with all the major parts being teenagers.

The thing is, neither of these movies was a parody. There were some humorous moments in both films derived from the whole odd mix-and-match, but ultimately each film succeeded by meeting the conventions of its chosen genre.

Secret identities, evil villain with henchmen and a lair, a dastardly plot involving orbital mind control lasers? Check.  A hard and lonely man with a shady past, doing the best he can in a cruel world? Check.

I think maybe genres have been built up because something they are doing works. Like any other author’s tool, they can be used, and used well, when it suits the story.

Originality Blues

Pop quiz: I thinking of a school. It's a special school, a training center for young people with special gifts that set them apart from the mundane world. What school am I thinking of? You have ten seconds. Go.

Now for the scoring. Did you say Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters? Camp Half Blood? Redhurst Academy? The Isle of Roke? The Invisible College? Something else entirely? Doesn't matter. Give yourself two points. Did you know that the phrase "Devil take the hindmost" comes from an old folktale about a school for magicians?

The reason I ask the question, I mean aside from the chance to show off my geek lore, is to demonstrate that there is no one answer. It has been argued that there are no new ideas, no new plots, no new stories. I'm not sure I agree.

But I am fairly certain that it doesn't matter. How you present an idea, how you tell a story -- these things can make all the difference. Does it matter if your special people are magic, mutant, psychic or bionic? Of course it does! But what really matters is how well you tell their stories. Whether you make us care about them and the challenges they face.

So don't worry too much about whether your core idea is shiny and new. Worry instead about what you can do with it. Where it can take you. And the funny thing is, this is true even if you do have a truly new idea. An idea by itself is not a story. You still have to do the work.

Mary Sue Jumps a Shark

Nobody writes in a vacuum. Orson Scott Card wrote a short story, "Unaccompanied Sonata," about a musical prodigy intentionally raised with no exposure to music so his compositions would not be influenced by the entire history of musical development the rest of us take for granted. It's an interesting notion, but its purely speculative fiction.

These days, it is easy to be information saturated. A couple of weeks ago I was looking stuff up online while in the middle of a parking lot.

So we might as well learn from it all. There are fan communities out there for just about anything. And they overlap, Star Trek fans posting on Battlestar Galactica sites (blasphemy!), mystery readers complaining about romance novels. People naming genres and sub-genres and sub-sub-genres -- magical realism, urban fantasy, dark fantasy, dark urban fantasy... Half the web comics out there have wikis, live journals, forum groups and more. Did you know there were Girl Genius groups in Second Life, including a crew of Jaegers? Then again, how could there not be?

I'm not advocating the idea that you have to read everything, but I think there is a benefit to developing a sort of cultural awareness of modern fiction. We can argue all day about whether it would be better to work uninfluenced, like the hero of Orson Scott Card's story, but I don't believe it's possible. But before you get accused of being a Mary Sue, shouldn't you know what one is? Knowing is half the battle, right?

There's a flip side, though. Should your work really be accountable to the opinions of the Internet hordes? Maybe you are well aware that you are rehashing an idea so old that it has five pages on www.tvtropes.org. Maybe that's the story you want to tell. And maybe you can tell it so well that nobody cares.

I'm just saying that there's a potential learning curve here outside just the craft of writing. Right or wrong, there's a world of critical opinion and thought (some of it admittedly not worth the paper it isn't even printed on) out there. Shouldn't we at least be aware of it?

How Delightfully Cliché

Today is a good day... to Blog. We've all seen them -- the little, clever phrases that become so popular. "Today is a good day to die," for the macho set, "Who are you and what have you done with..." when someone acts out of character, and, a good one for today's post, "think outside the box."

These little phrases are popular for a reason. They are concise and witty. When I first heard the phrase "24/7" I knew instantly what it meant. No one had to tell me 24 of what. And if you can adopt one of these phrases early enough, you get the added bonus of sounding hip and in tune with the times. Of course we want to use them. But alas, so does everyone else.

Many of these turns of phrase have a limited shelf life. They can date the work in which they are used. Sometimes, that's a good thing. A tale told in the sixties might benefit from words like "groovy." But it's not if you want your tale to be timeless. And be careful of anachronisms. I recently saw the movie The Boat that Rocked. I liked the movie, but I found its use of the phrase "Think outside the box" jarring for a story set in the early days of Rock 'n' Roll. I'm old enough to remember that there really was a time before the box.

Of course, it's harder to be clever on your own. But hey, if good writing was easy, everyone would do it. You'll notice, I trust, the cliché I used in that last sentence. Don't sweat it too much. They are part of our language and can't be avoided entirely. But like everything else, you get the best results when you think about what you are doing.

It's possible to turn a popular phrase around and make it your own. If your story takes place on Jupiter, for example, you can have events going on 10/7.