Nice to meet you: The story begins.

As of writing this, I am 1,330 words into the novel.  Technically I’ve written more like 2,000 words. I had tweeted before that I had completed my first thousand words. However, those thousand words are gone, nixed, obliterated, banished to that dismal place where words go to wait resurrection at a later date. Word purgatory, as it were. Well, that’s okay because now new words have arrived and seem to be much more stable than the last ones put down. In other words, I think I’ve at the very least figured out where the story should begin and how it should begin. Like the Chinese proverb says, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” And I have no doubt that I’ll have to walk every inch of those thousand miles. I’m anticipating that this will be an extensive project. I don’t mean this just in the sense that it’s going to be a long novel, though I suspect it will, but also in the sense that I’m going to have to really dig deep into these characters. This is essentially their vehicle. In every writing project you do it’s important to have believable, multilayered characters but in this kind of story it’s particularly important because the plot is not what’s moving this story. If the characters don’t work then there really is no story. Essentially, this is a story about characters, it’s about drama or the internal struggles of characters, not so much about melodrama which would be the external struggles of characters. So, if there isn’t enough substance and depth to the major characters, the story is essentially a failure. As I’ve found out, inventing a person, one who isn’t cliche at this point, is actually pretty tough.

The novel I’m working on now begins with one main character, Otto, who has survived a very difficult past and who has not properly dealt with his experiences and the things he did to survive. Not exactly the most original backstory. We see these stories of survival and the cost of survival, whether bodily survival or mental survival, and the price it exacts all the time. Essentially it boils down to trauma. It’s because of this very basic setup that it’s so enduring. We all know trauma at some point in our lives so most people can relate to it. But because it’s been done so much there is a very high risk of just churning out cliches. This has been one of the difficult things with designing this main character. I have a strong affinity for him but his archetype as you could call it has gone through so many iterations that the cloth it’s made of is threadbare in many places. What I’m hoping is that I’m not maybe so much inventive enough but that I can be authentic enough that the character will come through as alive and real even if we have seen the archetype before. Part of what makes writing this character difficult, at least so far, is that I am constantly interrogating his motivations and character traits. I suppose that this goes along with writing a character that has components of such a well worn trope as this. However it certainly doesn’t make getting a consistent picture of the character any easier. Another thing I’m hoping to use to take a familiar trope and make it fresh is details. Tropes themselves aren’t bad. Just taking a trope and transplanting it whole and unrefined into a story is a terrible idea but in the end, every writer has to rely on tropes to some degree. After all, nothing is original. But it’s the details the writer chooses to add onto the framework of the trope that makes something appear original, very much like the way DNA makes each of us unique though we all share in common the four base pairs and we are all about 99.9% the same. It’s those crucial few modifications that give us our unique physiologies and characteristics. The choice of defining details is going to be critical in making this character stand out and be convincing.

Of course I could just be over-analyzing the whole thing and by over-analyzing it missing out on what could turn out to be a sympathetic main character. Only time will tell. The act of writing is clearing things up and I have a few drafts ahead of me before I am ready to put this out. In that time, I’ll surely be able to route out anything that doesn’t ring absolutely true to any of the characters. It’s actually sort of funny when I think about how every character I give this name to proves to be a problem for me. Though that’s more of the problem of not being able to properly express what I wanted to and actually fighting against the kind of story I wanted to write.

As long as I stay on track and keep writing, this problem will resolve itself. Creating these characters is like meeting someone new. You don’t know everything about someone the second you meet him or her. Even if this person gives you a complete biography from birth till the second you met him/her you still have only a bunch of facts. That isn’t what makes the person a person. It’s more about the stuff that isn’t obvious. And it seems to be the same in writing. You can’t know the character until you start to really get into his or her thoughts or you see the character in a tough situation that tests him/her in some way. I believe that there’s a lot to my character Otto that he hasn’t told me yet and may even hold back from me until the right situation. Characters tend to do that. They don’t always want to give up their secrets, even to the author. But that’s alright. In time and under the right circumstances they do and you learn something new, something you could have never planned about your character. It’s happened to me before while writing my novel for my English honors project. I realized there were things about my character I had never written into him but that just materialized seemingly while I wasn’t looking. And the best part was that those who read it probably supposed that I had intended the character to turn out the way he did when it was really almost beyond my control in a way.

Control is a big question in writing. Some writers need absolute control over a story and need to plot out exactly what will happen and when and how. Others start with a situation and run with it. Some even fall in between. I would be that last category. But I have to say that the more I write the more I realize that serendipity and chance plays a sizable role in creating a story and sometimes the more I try to control, the more I stifle my output. I often like to think that there is a connection between Zen and writing and this definitely sticks out as a subject where the two would be in agreement. You have to just go with it, be in the moment, and see where that takes you. Which is exactly what I’m going to try to do as I go forward.

A puzzle that wants to be assembled.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been talking about the novel I’ve been planning. It looks like it may finally be ready to move on to the next stage. I’ve said this several times before and each time I have had to eat my words. While this may seem like failure, all it is is a prelude for success. I’m not talking about becoming the next Hemingway but that small personal success that comes from really starting the writing process. How can I finally be sure that this is the one, that this is the story I’m finally going to bring to term? I’m not! You can’t ever be sure-sure, like 100%, without-a-doubt sure but I have a feeling that this is the beginning. And when I believe that’s all you get, a feeling. It takes a lot of faith to write. You have to have faith that you can accomplish your goal and that the story won’t suddenly sputter and die half way through. Nothing is a given but if you have a feeling then at least that’s something. And I have to say that the other reason I believe I’m ready to really get down to business is that I have found what makes me tick as a writer. I love character studies and I love to write them. Give me a grand conspiracy and tons of action and I’ll lose momentum before I’ve put a word on the page. Give me a room and two characters and I’ll sing for you.  This novel has more than two characters but I’ve dialed back the complexity to the extent that I can finally concentrate on what matters to me which is the internal situation of the characters.

Before I can truly begin writing this though, I need to write up the threads of each character. Luckily, I already know how they intersect and where they’re all going to collide by the time they finish their character arcs. The biographies of the characters are all done and check out in terms of consistency and I think provide each of the characters sufficient depth so that they can support complex motivation and a range of emotion necessary to drive this story to completion. What is not totally nailed down is the gooey stuff in the middle. But that’s not a bad thing. It means I have a ton of room, in fact three different universes worth of room, to explore. The thing is that the more I think about these characters, the more I can see them and the more they are becoming real. It’s sort of like in biology where you start out with one yeast cell and then you watch it bud into two yeast cells. At this stage, I’m beginning to feel the characters cleaving themselves from me. I’m sure that as I record my ideas and think more about the characters, they will become even more real and independent. And this will help me to fill in the middle part of the story since these characters will become co-authors with me and they will author their own stories. To a degree at least. I can’t let them get too far afield and end up derailing everything. As always, there needs to be a balance.

In the end, it is persistence as much as patience that is rewarded. And like a story, it isn’t so much about the ending as the story and the things you learn along the way. I’m still just getting started but on my way to this point, I’ve learned a lot about what it is I’ve got to say and how I want to say it. I suppose I’ve gotten a lot closer to finding my voice and maybe I have found it. I’m no where near the end of this journey and I already feel like I’ve learned a lot. I can’t imagine what else I’ll be surprised to find on the voyage to the final word.

 

Sculpting the story.

So, since last weekend, I’ve been spending something like 99.99% of my time studying for my NREMT test which is tomorrow but in the back of my mind, coiling and uncoiling, is the idea. The story is a living thing even though it’s just in its embryonic state. It’s still evolving and changing. And lately it has been doing a lot of that. Like I said last time about discovering my particular tempo for stories, figuring out what I actually have to say, I’m finding my previous idea for an action packed pseudo-Western to be increasingly untenable. This doesn’t mean that the entire thing is scrapped. I’m keeping all the character from the original idea, introducing some new ones, adding new elements to all of them, and putting a much higher emphasis on intense dramatic beats instead of action. So the idea is going from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly to something that is going to play a lot with the characters and their psyche. One of the ways I like thinking about this is a dissection, or, considering how the characters are supposed to be convincing enough to pass for real people, a vivisection. The original idea would have had me going for the major arteries, making a mess with big arterial spurts of action. With the new direction, I’m more interested in layer by layer peeling back the tissue of these characters so that by the end, you’ll know them down to the very marrow. I’m also considering making three intertwining stories that may not seem immediately connected but that all intersect. I’ve actually two ideas on how they could do so though I’m going to have to wait for the characters to actually start making decisions to see which, if either, of the these two possibilities will come about. But before that, I’m still planning things out.

A possible character beat that really interests me is the person who turns on his ideals. This was done very well in Marc Laidlaw in The 37th Mandala and I’ve had the idea for a similar character bouncing around in my head ever since. I love the idea of a trauma turning a person 180 degrees in the other direction from what they originally believed in and were passionate about. Kind of like Pavlovian conditioning. If you pair pain with something pleasant, the originally pleasant stimulus gets polluted with negative overtones. Only this goes even further than that. I don’t know if I could make it work or if I’d be forcing such a character into the story but I’d love to be able work with that kind of pathos. One of the characters may actually lend himself very well to such a thing. The other two main characters I’m considering following are a bit more settled in who they are. Though, to be honest, nothing is really settled yet. It’s more like, the other two characters are farther along on the way to crystallizing in my mind. But that still leaves a lot of opportunity for change and surprises.

Luckily, the center, the main hub these spokes will revolve around is pretty much solidified in my mind. That was actually the first thing I really got. And I got it from a dream something like half a year ago. Thankfully I put it down in a dream journal and when I looked back on it, I realized it needed writing. It seemed like the time was right. It’s just a matter of figuring out what story wants to be told from this kernel of an idea. I am getting much closer to actually putting words to paper (or in my case word processor) and soon I’m going to finally get to see my planning and patience pay off.

 

A small experiment leads to important results.

As I’ve mentioned, writing is a compulsion. You don’t just write for fame, profit, or groupies (though those are good too), you write because you have to. But when it comes to writing with the aim of publication, it’s just so easy to forget about the actual unhindered joy of writing. Writing without purpose or aim. Just writing a story because it’s on your mind. The other day, I wrote some flash fiction. Okay, it was a little longer than flash which is usually under a thousand words. But it’s not quite long enough to even qualify as a proper short story. Anyways, I wrote it for no one but me really. No one else will read it and that’s how I like it and how it ought to be. This was simply the act of a brain throwing down the gauntlet and saying “Damn it, we’re putting words down and nothing’s going to stop us.” Because of that, it hit notes I still can’t hit with something I know will be seen and judged. In short, I found a streak of honesty and genuineness that I have trouble tapping into when it comes to something I’d eventually like to see read by others. Its simplicity just doesn’t quite jive with what I think I should be writing to get people’s attention. However, as is often the case, I found that, in its simplicity, it held one of the most essential elements of a story, one of the things that makes me pick up a book and keep reading.

What I’m talking about is the simple human aspect of the book. When I cut everything back, what I found was that the story I ended up with could take place in one room with two people and it would work and work better than many of the other things I’ve been trying. It literally took place in one room and revolved around interpersonal problems, not any threat to the world or anything large scale. It was what stories really hinge upon: characters. It’s for this reason I love these little stories. They focus my attention on things and remind me of what draws me to writing. It’s all about people really. It’s about how they react and what they go through. And I have to give it to Einstein here,

Making things simple is true genius. Anyone can complicate things. But it takes patience, probing questions and creative thinking to simplify. Whatever problem you are facing it’s probably not as complicated as you think – but we often make it so. If you want to solve more problems, simplify them. The real genius is turning complexity into simplicity.

So I think what I’m saying I’m figuring out is that complexity is not an aim in itself. I know that we like twists and turns. We have come to expect them but for their own sake, they are just plot devices. Turns, real turns that impact us, come from complex characters whose motivations we don’t fully understand. I think that part of what I’ve realized is that the type of story I need to write is one in which the characters, not the plot, determine the flow of things. Not only that, I think that this little experiment has told me a lot about the kinds of stories I want to write or that I genuinely enjoy writing. For me, the character comes first and foremost and plot second. So with this in mind, I can mold the novel I’m working on now into something fitting this description. It may mean that I’ll have to go back on its basic structure but in the end, I know I’ll be happier for it.

An adventure begins.

So here I am, watching Jim Henson’s Labyrinth and eating yogurt and it just seems appropriate to write this post now. Don’t ask me why but it makes a strange kind of sense. Maybe it’s the dreaminess of the movie or something. Maybe because I’m embarking on an adventure. Realistically, I’m still at the point at which I’m gathering supplies, maps, and fixing my rucksack but nevertheless these are the first steps of an adventure, no matter how preliminary. But the promise of twists and turns and unexpected discovery is beckoning and I can’t wait to start out. Of course, I’m talking about writing and the novel which I am developing.

So, what is this novel? First of all, what is the genre? In short, weird and I mean that in the official sense. Think along the lines of Lovecraft, Grabinski, VanderMeer, or Mieville. However, I’m aiming for something a bit whimsical as well. Essentially, it’s going to be dark, a lot of it is going to hopefully be off in that finger-down-your-spine way that weird fiction can be. But I don’t want to lose sight of that feeling of whimsy. So strange locations, strange goings-on, strange people and things. And behind it all the feeling that something massive and threatening is lurking and just waiting. Why? Because that’s the type of story I’d want to read. Though beyond weird fiction, it’s also something of a western. I love the action and drive of westerns and the characters it allows me to work with. They are people who are beyond the boundaries of the normal. They are characters of the extreme and they allow me to push the boundaries of what they can do both in terms of their abilities and in terms of their psychologies. As much as it’s exciting to be working in a framework that allows for plenty of action, one of the things I’m looking forward to most is the character study aspects of the novel. I find that taking the time to explore the depths of a character is one of the most rewarding things about writing  novel. And in this novel, almost no one is clean. Almost. Let’s face it, not everyone can be a murderer or lunatic or fallen monk for that matter. But no matter who they are, like any of us, they are not always so easy to read and often are contradictions within themselves which is part of why I’m really looking forward to getting to know them.

But before I can get to that, I need to get some things straight. By that, I mean I need to do outlines, character biographies, and maybe some research. So far, I’ve been glomming ideas, just writing them down as they come to me. Pretty much I’m just letting ideas come into my head without any censorship. Any idea will do. I’ll sort through them later and see what can be stitched together and what needs to be disposed of. As I do this, I get a sense of what is possible and can start to consider what the rules of the world are. The more I think about it, the clearer the world of the story becomes and the more this world seems like something I’m reporting on and less like something I’m making up, a sure sign that I’m getting to where I need to be.

Speaking of where I need to be, I feel like I’ve finally exorcised a demon. The story that I had been struggling to write based on the picture has actually come to play a pivotal role in this story. I really can’t express how much of a relief it is to have that out of my brain.  But it has also showed me not to panic or the lose hope. Everything has a use, even if you’re not sure what it is at the time. It’s just a matter of having everything at your fingertips so that when the time is right, you can just grab it.

I’ll update again next week, maybe with more on how the story is coming or on another topic. Until then, folks!

A hard lesson to learn and a difficult practice to practice.

Well, I’m back. I was away last weekend visiting a relative and so didn’t have time to get my post up but your patience will be rewarded as I return this week with some new thoughts about writing. As you have had patience with this post, I regret to inform you that often you must have patience with your writing. I have tried to provide tips and tricks for making the process of writing less painstaking but this is a subject that really can’t be solved with anything other than sheer determination and pluck. Sometimes you’ll need enough pluck to defeather a goose, other times, only a small pullet hen. But this post is all about that wonderful virtue known as patience.

When I get an idea for a story, my first instinct is to hop into my comfy chair and start bashing the keys. I’m excited and ready to start exploring a world of my own creation. Sometimes I give in to this and the story goes somewhere.If I’m lucky, the story has enough internal consistency to hold together until I have to go around and edit. Other times, I start to write only to realize that something is amiss. For some reason the story isn’t adding up. Then I have to go back and figure out what when awry. Then there are the times when I know it won’t work and so I sit and try to make it work. In the latter cases, I still want to write and I can feel that there is a story that wants to be told. It’s like grabbing and object through thick cloth. I can’t quite tell what it is and I can’t get a hold of all the little details but there’s a form there, a particular combination of curves, angles, and bevels. It’s just a matter of keeping at it till something clicks and the concept emerges. And when it does, it can be a wonderful moment of epiphany. But until then it’s a hell of a struggle.

Don’t worry, there will be times when there won’t be any laboring, just more waiting.

 

Orson Scott Card said in his book on how to write fantasy and science fiction that it can take months or even years to perfect a concept.   That may seem like a long time but there is some truth in it which makes it imperative to develop the patience necessary to let a concept gestate. Writing is in no way a steady and simple process. Even in the best of circumstances, writing is tortuous, filled with dead ends and loops. In the development process, this is especially to be expected. Creativity depends on mixing different ideas together until something original finally catches your eye. Think of diamond cutting. You can’t just get the belt sander and start going to town. You have to take the time to examine and get to know that particular block of carbon. If you don’t it will shatter. Same with story ideas. You have to give yourself time to really consider every side and angle of the idea. Once that is done, you can begin to refine it. But all of this takes patience and time. For me, the less time the better but then again, this isn’t up to me. I am really just the mouth piece for ideas and if they are not ready, I can’t force them.

My current story is an example how patience slowly rewards the person willing to stick with an idea until it is ready. The original story spark has been sanded away over many months. I have toyed with different story ideas, character arcs, motivations, settings, and mythologies. At last I am arriving at a setting that seems to be remarkably close but not quite right. But as time passes, I also experience different things in my life. I see new things, think new things, and live through new things, all of which can be used as a jumping off point. But the key is that I’m giving myself time to really explore and determine what this story is. What kind of world do I want to bring the reader into? What characters will inspire the reader or make them sick? I’m not hurrying because in the end, if the story wants to be told, it will be. That is the important thing to remember. This isn’t a race. There is no reason to blast and blunder through. Instead give yourself breathing space. If the ideas don’t come now, they will later, they always do.

 

Fantasy: An exploration and defense.

Fantasy fiction is, more often than not, the first kind of fiction we are introduced to when we are young. Think about it. Fairy tales and tales of anthropomorphic animals are the types of things that parents read to children. Objects are given wishes and desires and set out on quests. My earliest memories of narrative are of this type and I highly doubt that mine is an aberrant case. Instead, I am quite confident in saying that out of those who have parents or a parent who read(s) to him/her, the majority are told tales of fantasy before any other type of narrative. However, there is still so much that is not understood about fantasy fiction. It is in fact a very difficult genre to properly define and as late as 1981, literature scholars couldn’t exactly define its characteristics (1). Yet it is still going strong as a genre and we have not seen interest diminish either in its readership or those who create it. I’m not here to really offer a complete and satisfying definition and theoretical framework for fantasy literature. Instead, I’d like to just share some of my thoughts on this genre and how it’s been changing and why. Also, I’d like to talk a bit about my thoughts regarding the accusation of fantasy being a purely escapist genre. I’ll begin with my thoughts on what constitutes fantasy fiction. Don’t expect that this will be the type of definition you can hang your theoretical hat on but it seems to work fairly well for me.

It can be argued that all fiction is fantasy though that definition is certainly trite and missing the point of what fantasy actually can be said to accomplish. It is equally problematic to say that fantasy is a matter of creating an internally consistent world that harbors a set of possibilities and potentialities exceeding those of the world we currently inhabit. This can equally fit science fiction which has socially, politically, and ethically complex worlds that rely heavily on technologies that greatly extend the possibilities and potentialities of the characters. This is possibly why both science fiction and fantasy have been subsumed under the banner of speculative fiction. I think that this higher order category does a lot to explain the nature of fantasy. Fantasy, like science fiction, is about considering what happens  when certain conditions from our normal world are inverted, warped, or totally excised. But again, science fiction does that through the introduction of new technologies and conditions. So there is still the problem of how to understand fantasy. And yet, to me, there are two differences, and large ones at that. Fantasy may have roots in the tradition of carnival (1). In the revelry of carnival, or Saturnalia as it was known in the Roman festival, the normal rules and hierarchies of the day were inverted. Kings became slaves, slaves kings. Women of the plebeian class got to look down on those of the patrician class. During this one day usually rigid and impermeable social membranes were dissolved. Fantasy offers similar permeability for expectations of reality and what constitutes the real. We would not regularly allow for the appearance of goblins, spirits, or other supernatural entities in the world but in fantasy, this expectation is relaxed voluntarily on the part of the reader. We expect that the world we venture into between those covers will deviate from the one we are accustomed to in particular ways. The supernatural, the atemporal, the aspatial, the irrational, and all other manner of aberration are permissible. There is a further condition of fantasy that ties into this expectation and anticipation of information that challenges our daily perception of what is real and true.

Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, discusses how epistemology is based on knowing of knowledge. Epistemology is essentially the study of knowledge and how we come to know anything. But as Hegel pointed out, and I’m paraphrasing, to know about knowing, our concepts and ideas must contain itself as a set. In other words, the set of all knowledge must have, in order to know about knowledge, in itself a complete replica of itself in order to satisfy the condition of being able to correctly understand its own nature. This creates an infinite, fractal, ad absurdum regression. Needless to say, Hegel, like Hume was a skeptic. Not only that, he was a skeptic of the truest and purest form (2). The ancient skeptics did not trust perception and believed it to be insufficient for describing Truth, if Truth was there to be described. However, because subjectivity is all we have our subjective world becomes a truth as opposed to a Truth since it is the only one we can possibly access but still lacks the absolute certainty we can not achieve. In the end, no assertion can be made about the condition of anything and no position can be taken for or against anything; the thing, the phenomenon simply exists and exists unequivocally and without underlying explanation since any explanation is another fabrication of the mind which cannot be trusted. (2). This is simply to demonstrate the difference in the way science fiction and fantasy handle truth. Where science fiction asserts the primacy of the rational mind, fantasy asks that we suspend such judgement and realize that Truth is just truth and that one world, even an incredible world, may be truthful. This is not to suggest that fantasy worlds are real in the physical sense or that worlds can be swapped but rather that in fantasy, knowledge is much more malleable than science fiction which transposes the rules of this physical world into the fictional world. So, where science fiction asserts it has Truth in the details, fantasy simply offers a series of possible truths since all truth begins in subjective fabrication. Yet, it is this marginalizing of Truth in favor of truth, in addition to another glaring detail, that has garnered fantasy criticism.

If fantasy fiction eschews a more conventional sense of realism and a faith in comprehensible objective reality, then necessarily it becomes a bastion for the mind that doesn’t wish, according to a society that has bought the primarily Western logical positivist doctrine, to confront the real world. In this case, the reader of fantasy fiction uses the medium as a way of escaping. But escaping into what? No one alive in this modern world needs a reminder as to the exponential growth of complexity in everyday life. Everything is multifunction, multicored, augmented, customizeable, upgradeable, and so on. It would certainly be understandable that someone would want to return to a more uniform, comprehensible world which is what a lot of fantasy does. Fantasy very often has medieval times as a setting or at least settings that are steeped in medieval atmosphere. However, this isn’t enough to really explain the reason why previous eras are returned to. Pre-industrial times were still complex after all. But distance in time allows for nostalgia to use the alchemy of imagination to romanticize these times into a period of straightforward intentions and motivations. Good guys are good and bad guys are bad (3). Gender is often similarly simplified (3). The helpless maiden trope has been done to death. Consumers of fantasy have thus been accused of wishing to return to a childish sense of innocence and ignorance. Fantasy provides an escape from the massive, complex forces of life. This is partially why fantasy fiction has so often been eyed with the same patronizing smirk as children’s fiction. Both have been construed as a form of verbal playpen designed to shelter the reader from the actual ugliness of the world.  Fantasy has also been regarded as the wish fulfillment of the author author who seeks to create a more manageable and sensible world (3). Gender roles also have been  the object of criticism with some pointing to how fantasy relies on a strict code of morals and ethics regarding sex. It is sometimes the case that the author may bowdlerize sex as much as possible  (3). In pulp novels, the trend may be reversed completely and sex may become a motivating factor for the protagonist though in many cases it is used in such a way as to spur retribution (4). But again, this speaks to a binary ethics system governing the story world. It also suggests the primacy of male worldviews in fantasy (5). This however may be more a concern for the traditional producers of fantasy fiction. Nevertheless, it represents another simplification of real world issues that are converted into a more identifiable and immediately assimilated ethics system. While these charges may or may not have ground, for the past several decades fantasy fiction has been mutating into something new and unpredictable. In its still changing form, we are seeing the previous critiques being addressed and conventional tropes of fantasy subverted.

The face of new fantasy is mortar and stone. This growing mode can be called Urban Fantasy and through it we witness the re-enchanting of urban space. This is something fairly new in this genre since much of fantasy, though it may include urban settings, never creates a character of the setting itself. However, in urban fantasy, the urban environment itself is a living breathing space and the prime space rather than a fringe hub that is devoid of the magical trappings of the surrounding world. Instead, it is as if the city breathes and exudes magic. This is such a radical paradigm shift in fantasy since most of fantasy is couched in pre-Industrial Revolution settings and morals (1). In earlier fantasy fiction, the shift from a more rural society to a mechanized, urban state in which complexity was compounded by complexity in an increasingly indecipherable mechanical social contraption, people went back to pre-Industrial Revolution for escape (1). This explains the over-saturation of fantasy taking place in agrarian, feudal settings. However, we, this generation, have no experience or reference for a pre-Industrial Revolution life so we don’t have recourse to these ways of living. Though sword-and-sorcery are still popular, we can’t pretend that in seeking refuge in these stories we are indulging in anything other than a highly processed simulacra. Since the materialistic, mechanized culture is now insurmountable we have reached a compromise by finding what in our surroundings suggests the existence of the mystical beyond itself. Or it could be exactly analogous to the seeking of simplicity and order in pre-Industrial Revolution time, This speaks to not only post-modern sensibilities but a post-physical state. We now find ourselves in an information based society that is still more complex than the previous stage of social evolution. Now we may find ourselves yearning for a time that was complex but at least less complex than the hyper existence of a digital world that is inexhaustibly mercurial and changing at a rate that does not permit habituation and that keeps us strung along on a constant drip of distracting flashing opioid stimulus. Whatever the case may be, whether the Urban fantasy of such authors as China Mieveille or Jeff VanderMeer is an updating and modernization of fantasy tropes or is another temporal regression to a time believed to be more pure or comprehensible than our current time, is debatable. What is quite clear is that the current state of fantasy is more than equal to accounting for the past discrepancies of simplicity and gender inequality. In the Urban fantasy I’ve read, female characters are not typical damsels in distress (though admittedly the damsel in distress and The Madwoman in the Attic trope come into play and are played with in interesting ways in China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station to some degree). But what is striking is that these stories, and others, feature complex worlds where morality is not binary and may not even be present. In VanderMeer’s Finch morality and sticking your neck out too far just makes life more difficult. In the end, higher ideals much be disregarded in favor of the basic necessity of survival. In the most conventionally, “moral,” of the books I’ve read so far, Christopher Moore’s A Dirty Job ,  we still have a main character who is a single father trying to balance a busy work life with raising a child. His profession? Being a death dealer in the city of San Francisco. This may not be a pure Urban fantasy but the city of San Francisco and its geography play a major role in the story which makes it close enough. But the point is it features a complex world situated in the urban environment. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere takes the real location of London and, like Moore’s book, turns it into an enchanted world by suggesting that the banal is simply a veneer covering a much richer world beneath it. So the growing trend to put fantastical worlds in either real urban locations or create elaborate worlds that prominently feature post-Industrial Revolution urban settings has, “corrected,” or minimized the issues some have pointed to. But can fantasy be justified? Does it need to be?

The lingering charge that fantasy is escapist fiction, to me, is sort of a straw man attack and one that I don’t see the justification for. There are a lot of implicit assertions made in such an accusation such as the we are running from an unpleasant to pleasant situation or that escapism is somehow negative and undesirable. These further charges are just as silly as the first. Why is escapism such a bad thing? Isn’t that why we read? To escape into a world, into a narrative that isn’t our own? Still, when escapism is mentioned it is with the assumption that the escape we seek is to a world where we can live out power fantasies that modern life makes impossible. Even if this is the case, and with pulp fiction is certainly is, I don’t see why this should be such a concern. Partially, the push of realism and the academic study of literature have made such pursuits into lowly and childish goals. This creates a circle back to those early tales of childhood when things were simpler. Part of the allure of fantasy is that it allows us to dream without closing our eyes. And part of what makes a dream a dream is the dampening of the super ego with its concern for society’s rules and the ascension of the id layers of ourselves. (I just use these Freudian terms as loose terms to describe certain drives and cognitive functions.) Part of what makes fantasy so seductive yet so frightening to those who would favor realism is that fantasy, by taking what we hide and putting it into the shared space of the narrative, is transgressive. It has the potential to trigger a return to a more primitive mindset. I don’t know about the rightness or wrongness of such states of mind but I will say that these states are, despite being dressed in fantastic and impossible garments of magic, quintessentially human. In a world where every day brings dehumanization in some form or another, fantasy can drag out the raw carnal power of human desire and imagination. This ties back again to the primacy of rational thought in this world. And I’m not criticizing such thought. It is only through such thought that this essay is reading you. However, just as the skeptics ended up turning a wonderful set of ideas and thoughts into a strict dogma, so to do we risk losing something human by putting all our eggs in one mechanistic basket.

In closing, I’d say that fantasy, in all its forms, is worth caring about and worth defending. For showcasing the amazing ability of the human imagination to create worlds that might of been, never were, or never could be, fantasy presents us with the beautiful and terrifying. Nothing so far has proven to be as polarizing as fantasy when I talk to people about literature. Those who enjoy fiction may say they can’t tolerate fantasy and those who totally write off fiction simply cannot understand why anyone would waste his/her time on it. That is why fantasy is still in need of defense, to show its merits and to dispel the idea that it is genre with nothing to offer.

1. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of  Subversion. London: Routledge,1981.

2. Forster, Michael N. Hegel and Skepticism. Harvard, 1989.

3. Hunt, Peter &t Lenz, Millicen. Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. London: Continuum, 2001.

4. “Rape as drama,” TvTropes, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RapeAsDrama.

5. Finder, “Women and Sci-Fi Television,” last modified November 5, 2002, GLBT Fantasy Fiction Resources, http://www.glbtfantasy.com/?section=essays&sub=wscifi

Death of the villain? Is the villain still relevant in an age of complexity?

One of the questions that has popped up in my head while planning my novel is whether or not a villain is still a viable character archetype. In this morally ambiguous world, can we truly suspend our disbelief for these figures who are single-mindedly malicious and seem to either be in short supply or devoid of positive attributes? I can only speak about my reactions to villains though I will try to discuss my perceptions of the masses reactions to and acceptance of villains. First though, I’d like to take a very short detour and talk about what the villain is and what s/he does.

In essence, the villain is the antithesis of the hero and serves to create situations that hinder the hero from accomplishing his/her goal and thus allowing us to understand more about who our hero is, his/her resolve, and even his/her short comings. The villain really is the impetus for the story, either because what s/he has done or threatens to do. For example, a classic villain is Darth Vader. Without him, our heroes would have nothing to do. It is his unyielding desire to crush the rebellion and hold the galaxy under the yolk of the Empire that spurs our protagonists on. Thus the villain is our hero’s polar opposite and serves generally to make a mess of things. But there is something that takes what would normally be just an antagonist and turns him or her into a villain. The villain must be, for lack of a better term, evil. This doesn’t mean that the villain should eat kittens for breakfast but the villain should be reprehensible and be definable as not just an absence of good but by the presence of a tangible wrongness and viciousness. So this briefly gives a sense of what the villain does and the villain’s main, even defining characteristic. Their motivations may be different but the thing that binds all villains together is their almost sociopathic lack of empathy for others and their willingness to do anything to reach their goal. So how well do these archetypes hold up?

Fiction is both truth and lie. It’s one of those paradoxical things in life. Writing requires that you take from the world around you and process it then put it back into the world according to your own vision. Then when we read, we look for a reflection, on some level, of life in art. It’s something of a cyclical process. Life to art to life. We want that tangential point where the world of the story touches for a moment our day to day existence. However, there are very few people (thankfully) out there who would be considered a villain in the strict sense of the word. And yet this becomes the central conceit of some stories: the villain and his/her villainous deeds the protagonists must struggle against. And now, possibly more than ever before, the world we inhabit is multi-faceted,  contradictory, paradoxical, and baffling. We are accustomed to considering multiple sides of every story and to taking into consideration extenuating circumstances. In such a climate, a simple “bad guy” may have trouble garnering our credulity. Can we really say that these characters relate to our own life stories? Despite the ways the world and our psychology have changed, I think that the villain still has a place in literature. I think this for several reasons. The first is a purely personal, visceral reaction. When I read a story or watch a story, in the case of a movie, that features a villain, unless s/he is of the obvious mustache-twirling variety, I still become absorbed. I do not think that it would be more interesting to learn why the villain is like this or try to find ways to, if not condone, then understand the villain. The only thing that matters is seeing the hero succeed. On the personal level, the villain still has traction. But why and is this just a personal thing or is there something to the villain that just won’t let us go?

As I said, most people don’t have first hand knowledge of villainy, opinions of your boss not withstanding. However, for much of human civilization, our myths have been  populated with characters and figures who display greater than human traits and abilities. Even though we may not regularly or ever encounter such super-human individuals, we have a reference point for them in our human history, even if they are only fictional or fictionalizations of real individuals. I suspect that this may have something to do with the archetypes shared between much of human kind. We can all, as living things, understand threat and the villain provides pure, concentrated danger. In effect, the villain is an archetype that affects us on more than the conscious level. The villain archetype engages the primitive instincts that keep us enthralled in suspense as we wonder if and how our protagonists can deal with the villain. In this way, realism or a connection to reality is both irrelevant and satisfied. It is irrelevant in that the villain comes to be seen as something of a fantasy construct. However, the reality clause is satisfied in that we can all identify with threat. No matter what, we all have felt the throbbing of adrenaline when we were scared. The villain comes to be identified with this threat. But that doesn’t mean that the villain has to be simple. For example, a villain who wants to kill everyone for no reason is not a terribly compelling villain.No one said just because the villain can be interpreted as an archetypal representation of danger and threatening forces, the Big Other, that the villain has to be generic or cookie-cutter. This bring me to the next reason I think the villain isn’t done for yet.

When a villain is done well, we should be able to have a clear understanding of his/her motivation. What does the bad guy want? A clear motivation is what makes a villain unforgettable. If we run with the idea that a villain is a sort of archetype, then we can use that to explore certain aspects of human nature. Greed, lust, hatred, cruelty. If a villain represents a certain worldview based on destructive or negative characteristics, we get to see what happens when certain emotions or ideas are taken to their logical and most extreme conclusions. It is this kind of villain that I think we’re drawn to as well because there is an inherent fascination with the extreme. Part of this may come from the fact that the extreme is mysterious. Since it goes beyond what is considered normal human experience, we have little experience with it and are thus vulnerable to it. The villain allows us to explore these most excessive regions of humanity and that is something that is intrinsically attractive. By going overboard it also makes us question the abstract nature of the trait the villain displays. In this sense, the villain becomes mythical as s/he provides, if not an explanation, then a representation or incarnation of a particular worldview which then allows us to deal directly with an issue that otherwise would remain abstract. By incarnating a particular thing such as brutality, treachery, or the like, we also make the inconceivable conceivable, thus giving us all a greater sense of power over such forces.

Finally, there is the fact that there are some people who really do qualify as villains. People who do not care about who they harm and may even enjoy the sense of power they gain from harming others. It is these people whose existence makes a strong case for there being evil in the world with a capital “E.” While not every story requires or is best served by having a villain, I think that stories containing well developed villains can still capture us for the simple reason that we suspect that there are people out there who are as bad as or worse than what can be imagined. Again, we get to vicariously experience something we would much rather have no personal dealings with. If you don’t believe  or resist the idea that such individuals exist, I present as evidence serial killers such as Ted Bundy and Andrei Chikatilo.

Literary styles have changed along with the world we inhabit. However, the darkness continues to call to us and we can’t help but be intrigued by its perversely interesting song. For this reason, I think the villain will continue to interest us and grab our imaginations by the heart for years to come.

Developing a story in 5 easy steps.

My last post described something I suppose would be akin to writer’s block. I had an image packed with a particular feeling but no story. As much as I dug for the story, it wouldn’t come forward. Luckily, after something of a breakthrough, I’m ready to start on turning what was just a vague idea into a novel. I’m predicting that I’ll end up with at least 100,000 words. My last novel, which was for my English Honor’s project, clocked in at about 73,000 and was nowhere near the scope of this project. But now that I have my main conflict(s) set mostly straight in my head, I can begin to organize things and get it ready for creating a rough draft. So, in this post, I’m going to outline the steps I’m taking or have already taken to get a novel ready for writing. My basic preparation philosophy follows that of film pre-production and so may seem kind of dry or tedious. However, it has worked in the past for me and can save you major headaches later. This list is mostly in order but I don’t necessarily go in order for some of it in practice. Still I’m going to put it in some kind of logical sequence that will prove useful when developing your own stories.

1. The terminal point of departure is getting the story. This is something that comes with practice. A situation is not a story. A scene isn’t a story. Sometimes the rush of discovery of an idea can make one fly off to immediately start writing. While you certainly may not lose anything by writing since all writing is practice and can be used to improve, it may lead to a narrative dead end. So, one must work on identifying what makes a story and I may dedicate a future post to this since it is a vital part of writing. The story must be able to sustain  tension and that will be derived from the overarching conflict. You can use a situation or scrap of an idea to build your story around or figure out how one of these smaller motifs can be converted into a story sustaining conflict but before anything else, you must have a sense of what the story is going to be about.
2. At this point you’re going to want to know who your big character is. Not the one with the good looks or the troubled past or the the burning desire of revenge. The other big, important character. The setting. By setting, I mean time, place, milieu. What they do in film is to do location scouting and I’d suggest doing the same thing. You don’t need to jump in your car necessarily and in fact, it may be impossible for you to do that, especially if your story takes place somewhere totally out of this or any world. However, if there is a train station or market or something like that in your story or you think there might be one and you have one close by, go there with a pad of paper and even a camera and start taking notes and photos. Note the sounds, the feelings, the smells. Everything. Even visit at different times of day and see how it changes. If you can’t get to the setting of your story in the flesh then that’s alright as well because that just means you need to visit it in your mind. Take an hour and do nothing but dream of a location. Don’t just get the obvious things like sights and sounds but try to imagine smells and feelings as well. Try to pick up on the little details too, like signs of usage, little imperfections, how things might be spatially in relation to each other and how they may affect each other. Then there’s the issue of time. When does the story take place? This may not be just about the story taking place “Long, long ago,” or far in the future though it certainly encompasses that. The setting of time concerns the period of time the story takes to complete which becomes important if there is a cause for haste such as an impending event or if the story takes place in the midst of an event that is happening in the fictional universe such as a celebration or calamity. Finally, there is the human element which creates the milieu. What is the civilization of the story like? Is it set in this world? What part of the world? What subgroup of people? What culture? How do they relate to other groups? What are the internal dynamics? This is all part of milieu and understanding how it exists in the world of the story gives your characters a believable, living world to inhabit. So, place, time, and milieu are all parts of the setting. You can always count on the first two but the third, if properly understood before writing, adds a further dimension to your writing that will further engage the reader. So understand the context into which you will place your characters and then set to work on the next step.
3. Put out a casting call. A story lives and dies by its characters. You could have a great plot but lousy, uninteresting, or unbelievable characters and that isn’t a position you want to be in. You want characters who live and breath, who think, feel, hope, hate, fear, love, everything. In other words, you want to have your world populated by characters who feel like they are real. But you also need to have characters who are up to the challenges or who can develop to be up to the challenges of the world of your story. So this is why it’s a good idea to take time to at least get your protagonist and, if you have one, your villain/antagonist fleshed out. Figure out who they are and what they want. A great and often times amusing way of getting a very good idea of your characters is to stage an interview or casting call. Literally write out a scene in which you talk to your characters about their pasts, their likes and dislikes. Even better, imagine you’re at a big diner with several of the characters. This gets all kinds of information out about your characters. How do they play off one another? What do they wear? What do their food choices reflect about them? How do they eat? Do they make small talk? This is also a good way to spot and avoid one dimensional characters. If your protagonist can’t talk about anything other than rescuing his damsel in distress girlfriend, chances are that he needs to be filled with more than just food. But the take home message is to experiment and find the characters your story will hinge and depend on and then dive into them and discover who they are. You may encounter character later in the story you hadn’t expected which is not only fine but great and when that happens you can do the same treatment to make them fully developed as well.
4. Now that we’ve got some of the specifics worked out, it may help to write a brief treatment. I usually do in some form or another. This can be in list form or can be in regular prose form. But you essentially want to get the gist of the story laid out. Start at the beginning and with broad strokes, highlight the important bits. What main fulcrum points will keep the story moving? Once you’re done, go back and look for where it falls apart. Are there plot holes, inconsistencies? Find these and plug them. This will save you so much time in re-writes and stress later. Plus, your readers will appreciate an air-tight story.
5. At this point you can either create a proper outline or just dive into writing. It depends on your style. I do a little of both to deal with more complicated scenes and chapters so to keep everything straight. There is an undeniable rush when you just jump into the story because it really is a process of exploring unknown territory. However, real life has shown that sometimes explorers do get lost and go missing, probably because they didn’t have a map. So mix and match to find the right balance of mapping where you are going ahead of time and feeling out the route for yourself.
6. Finally, and this is really optional but I find it fun and helpful to get an even deeper understanding of how the world of the story works, make a prop roster. What important things do you have in the world of your story? What does it or they look like? How do these things function? How do they change throughout the story? This isn’t always necessary but if you’re doing a sci-fi, action, or fantasy story it can help you develop objects and technology in your stories to a highly nuanced and detailed degree which will make the story even more believable to your readers.

So these are the things that I do before I start tapping out a story. The first five are steps I always go through to some degree (I always outline at least some of a story). The last portion may be most useful in a particular kind of story though perhaps you may find a use for it in a way I have not. I hope that some of my strategies will also prove useful to you as you begin to develop your stories.

 

A day late in more ways than one. Chasing an elusive story.

I didn’t manage to post this weekend. The reason was simple. I was embroiled in chaotic and dangerous affairs of such a sensitive and perilous nature, that even to read of them puts all of you in great physical, mental, emotional, and psychic danger. Kingdoms fell, alliances were forged and broken, and creatures from the darkest pits of Hell rose to do battle with the forces of light. This is long hand for my not being able to think of anything to say. Yup. I really had not a single thought in my head about what to post and I blame two things for that. First: I just got back from a wonderful vacation in Florida and now that I’m back in my northern situated home, I am feeling quite unhappy. (I just know that I’m going to go through a long mourning process for my tan once it deserts me and I return to looking like an anemic Casper the ghost.) Secondly, I have been turning my brain into a pretzel trying to develop a story that periodically comes into my head but has obstinately refused to be committed to paper. So I figure, this post will be a bit like therapy since it’s going to talk about my experience with this story which has become my Moby Dick.

It all started with a picture.

Two years ago, while I was at Clark, there was a writing contest. As soon as I heard about it I started looking for inspiration. Then, as if the Muses were expecting my sudden need of a spark, I came upon this picture. Immediately I was captured by it mystery and its fantastical nature. I knew I wanted to write a story surrounding this picture. I immediately set about brainstorming. I think I at one point had an idea for airship smugglers but I really can’t remember much else from my original brainstorming sessions. After a while, I gave up and went with another story. However, this image stuck in my mind. Even when I wasn’t actively thinking about it, the image was floating around in my brain like some kind of prion. And now, it’s wreaking havoc once again.

Unlike last time though, I’m pursuing this idea to its conclusion. And I’m using some new tools to get to a usable idea. First of all, one of the big things I figured out is that a picture, while a good starting point, is not a plot and not a story! At least not all the time. To illustrate, here is one of my thoughts as I wrestled with this story: “I want my story to contain zeppelins. There are zeppelins in the story.” The big problem with this is that there is nothing to go off of. The zeppelins are an aesthetic touch, not something you can write a whole story around. I think this might actually go back to my earlier post on using dreams in fiction.  It isn’t so much about using the imagery or sticking to the content of the dream, it is about exploring those deeper emotions and figuring out what it is about the dream, or in this case picture, that sparked your imagination in the first place. In this case, there is a feeling of solemnity and whimsy at the same time. There is the hinting of a world strange and grand, one that blends the old (Gothic cathedral and thick woods) with the impossible (flying ships). Now that I think about it, I think it’s these aspects of the picture that were so arresting and which I’m now trying to work into the story.

I mentioned before that I’m also making use of some tools in helping to develop the story. In truth there is one tool that I’m using for this early stage and another than I’ll be making use of a bit when it comes time to outline or get a sense of the shape of the story. Both of these tools are free to use and both are very helpful. The tool I’m using now is Freemind. It’s a free mind mapping tool that allows you to create idea maps so you can see how each idea connects and relates to the others. This is great for the brain storming phase of writing a story or novel and it may help you come up with things you might not have otherwise or help you see connections and patterns in the work. You can learn more about it here. The second tool I’ll use once I get to the next phase of writing this story is something called yWriter. It is a very robust and well designed program for creating outlines for your story or novel. It allows you to make bios and descriptions for your characters, outline places and props, and more. It also breaks down the story into chapters and then further into scenes. This can be very useful for getting down into the gears of your story and seeing how or if it holds together. More info can be found at its main site here. I’m really looking forward to getting to the stage where I can use that program. For now I’m still working on finding the story I want to write.

Since turning to the previous methods, I’ve come much farther than before in finding my story. Still there is one problem that I’m trying to untangle. I’ve got several possible scenarios and a few antagonists. The protagonist is taking shape quite well. However, one thing that keeps turning up is the take-over-the-world plot. There’s nothing wrong with that but I don’t know if it’s right for this story or if I want to use it. I would personally like a more circumscribed problem, something much more personal since I really like a story in which the problem is more directly connected to the protagonist. I’m not exactly sure of how to surmount this problem yet. Nevertheless, I’m getting closer as I think about it. Partially it’s about figuring out the antagonists and making them more human. Additionally, I am still figuring out what my protagonist needs and wants and how this will fit into the story. But I’m sure things will work out this time. I have many puzzle pieces and soon I will be able to put together an entire picture. This is one of the reasons writing is not for the impatient. Sometime you have to wait and struggle to get to the best ideas.