Tag: writing

Plot Device Obsolescence, Continued

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I’ve written before about how technological change has made some plot devices obsolete; and also about how social and cultural change have done the same.  Today’s blog entry is about another example of the second kind of obsolescence:  the changing fortunes of Forbidden Love.

Forbidden love has been a reliable plot engine at least since the day when Paris looked at Helen across King Menelaus’s dining-room and started a ten-year war.  That much, at any rate, has stayed the same – but what counts as “forbidden” keeps shifting, and an observant writer needs to keep an eye on the trends.

It used to be that writers could add the plot-energy of forbidden love to their stories with a simple “Alas!  Your/My parents would refuse their permission for us to wed!”  That particular old reliable (and the related “Our countries/religions/ethnic groups frown upon our love!”) has fueled countless tragedies and probably an equal number of romantic adventures, but the passage of time has deprived it of a lot of its juice.  Impatient modern readers are likely to say to the characters, “For heaven’s sake, you’re both over twenty-one; just go ahead and marry him/her already!  Your parents will get over it.  And if they don’t, you can always leave town.”

A similar fate has overtaken “Alas!  If only one of us were not already married!”, along with all its lesser included tropes, such as the mad wife in the attic.  So long as divorce was both difficult to obtain and a source of scandal, the lovers’ predicament could generate everything from romantic angst (the classic Arthur-Lancelot-Guinevere love triangle, for example, and all its fictional cousins) to murder (The Postman Always Rings Twice.)  Once again, a modern reader is going to wonder why the characters are making such a fuss over something that can be settled with a couple of visits to a good lawyer.

These days, not even “Would that we could acknowledge our love – but alas! we are of the same gender!” can be counted on to provide one’s plot with a forbidden love.  And a damned good thing, too; an increase in social justice and general human happiness is worth losing the occasional plot device.

But social and cultural plot devices, like matter, are neither created nor destroyed; they just change form.  My own candidate for the next likely source of forbidden-love plot energy is the workplace:   “Alas!  Would that we could acknowledge our love, but if we did so, one of us would either have to quit or request a transfer!”

It’s not quite as juicy as some of the oldies, but throw in a “Both of us are mission-critical personnel!” or “The only current job openings in my specialty are in Kuala Lumpur!” and maybe we’re getting somewhere.

Scum and Villainy

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Writing effective bad guys can be tricky.  You want them to be three-dimensional, not flat, and you want them to be worthy opponents for your protagonist, but you don’t want to go overboard and give them so many extra coolness points that they end up stealing the show.  If that happens, you might as well give up and give them the novel.  Relabel them as a “rogue” or “antihero” and pretend that you meant to do it that way all along.  The only thing harder than adding coolness points to a character who doesn’t have enough of them is removing them from a character who has too many.

But here are a few things you can try if (as is more common) your problem is a villain who’s not interesting enough:

Give them virtues to go along with their vices.  If they’re ruthless and ambitious, make them brave and capable.  If they’re dishonest, make them intelligent, or amusing, or kind to homeless people and stray animals.  Real people are never only one thing, and your characters shouldn’t be, either.

Give them actual goals that they’re striving to achieve – not just “I want to rule the world/make lots of money,” but specific stuff like, “I want to rule the world because once I’m in charge of all of it there won’t be any reason for countries to fight each other any more” or “I want to make enough money to go back home to West Nowheresville and buy up the whole town and ruin all the people who made my high school years a living hell.”

Grant them the valid points in their arguments.  Even in debates where one side is clearly Right and the other is clearly Wrong, the party of Wrong is still likely to have a couple of good arguments in their favor.  Let your bad guys score those one or two measly points before your good guy brings out the steamroller of righteousness and flattens them like smashed pennies.

(Science fiction, I’m looking at you.  As a genre, you have a long history of making all your conservatives sound like wild-eyed militaristic loons, or all your liberals sound like fuzzy-minded ineffectual do-gooders, depending upon the bias of the author.  Please stop.)

Resist the urge to make your bad guys even more villainous by sticking extra and unrelated bad qualities onto them like artificial warts.  Especially resist the urge to do this with whatever the criminal or moral bad thing of the moment happens to be.  If your bad guys are attempting to take over a perfectly adequate and functioning government, for example, don’t give them a sideline in clubbing baby seals just because everybody knows that clubbing baby seals is bad.

And, finally, remember that – with the memorable exception of Shakespeare’s Iago and Richard III – most villains don’t think of themselves as villains, and don’t wake up in the morning saying, “Now, what villainous thing am I going to do today?”

Look! A Link!

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My spouse and co-author, James D. Macdonald, has some new posts up over at his blog:

One on the start, a hundred years and two days ago, of the Great War, as they called it during the twenty years or so before it became unpleasantly clear that they were going to have to do it all over again, only louder and longer and with more atrocities.

One with a Smashwords coupon code for a free short story by the two of us.

A brief note on Yog’s Law.

And all you need to know about the plot of Great Expectations, in three stanzas.

Go.  Enjoy.

A Handy Trick

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Naming characters is always a hassle – I can’t get mine to settle properly in my head until they’ve been correctly bemonickered – and most writers have their favorite resources for the job.  Baby name books and web sites are always good, especially for tales set in contemporary consensus reality, and if your interest is more historical, sites like the Social Security Administration’s Popular Baby Names page will let you search for popular American names by decade going back as far as the 1880s.  I’m sure that other countries have similar resources; the SSA page just happens to be the one I know about firsthand.

If you’re writing science fiction or fantasy, though, you’ve got problems.  Good science-fictional names, if you’re going to put some thought into them, are part of the worldbuilding:  You have to make some complex calculations about the probable ethnic makeup of your future society, for example, and about possible changes in naming styles (the all-whitebread science-fictional future is, if not yet completely dead, definitely moribund, and a good thing, too; and while it’s not likely that we’re ever going to see a resurgence of multi-word Puritan-style virtue names of the Praise-God Barebones variety, there’s always the off-chance that some future society may produce dimpled tots named Respect-for-the-Rights-of-Others Herrera or Earth-is-not-the-Only-Planet Jones.)

But if you’re writing fantasy, at least of the pseudo-western-medieval variety, there’s at least one good cheap trick out there:   Grab a copy of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, or Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, and steal from there.  Go right past all the too-familiar major characters, and head for the ranks of (sometimes literal) spear-carriers, of which there are a good plenty.  This will give you lots of names which look vaguely western-medieval without belonging to any specific name-hoard, and which can usually be sounded out and pronounced by the average reader.

One More Day

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Tomorrow – 15 June 2014 – is the last day to apply for this year’s Viable Paradise Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Workshop.

So if you’ve been wavering back and forth all spring and part of the summer on whether or not to apply, it’s time to pull up your socks, format your manuscript, and get in that application before the deadline.

The jellyfish are calling . . . ask not for whom the lighthouse blinks; it blinks for thee.

Every Writer’s Nightmare

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The recent news out of Wisconsin is the sort of thing that keeps writers awake at night . . . the unhappy knowledge that once we’ve turned our fiction loose into the wild, we have absolutely no control over what other people may do with it.

Oh, we’ve got a certain limited amount of control over – or at least a fighting chance at controlling – other people’s attempts to make money from it, but the money isn’t where we get the real nightmare stuff.  The nightmares come from the thought that there’s no way a writer can stop it if somebody out there decides to like their work for all the wrong reasons – like Charles Manson liked the Beatles, or like those two girls in Wisconsin liked the manufactured urban legend of the Slender Man.

Nor does it help us to resolve to be good citizens and not write the sort of stuff that might cause other people to do bad things, because there’s never any way to tell what story might or might not interact with the contents of somebody else’s head in a toxic fashion.  Our cautionary dystopia may end up mirroring somebody else’s secret ideal; our careful exploration of the depths of the human psyche may end up validating somebody else’s long-suppressed and destructive rage.

And those are the cases that we know might get risky.  When somebody gravely and dangerously misreads something that we intended to be a bit of entertaining fluff or an adventurous romp, it makes us wonder why on earth we picked this of all ways to pursue art and earn a living, instead of going out on a lobster boat or washing dishes in Joe’s Open-All-Night Diner.

I don’t know of a solution to this problem.  All I can think of to say is, write what you want and write what you must – but be aware that you can’t always control the consequences.

A Friendly Reminder

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Applications for this year’s Viable Paradise sf/fantasy writer’s workshop close on June 15th.

VP is a one-week residential workshop, held annually in the autumn on Martha’s Vineyard – eight instructors and twenty-four students, all in it together for the whole week.  (Why one week?  Because not everybody who wants and needs the workshop experience is at a point in their lives where they can spare six weeks or a month away from whatever it is that they normally do with their time.  But just about anybody can manage to hack free a week if they absolutely have to.)

We’re also the workshop that features lighthouses and (the weather permitting) luminescent jellyfish.

Imposter Syndrome, in Full Cry

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To be a writer is to have imposter syndrome.

It’s not surprising, really.  Our vocation, and often our livelihood, depends upon convincing people whom we will most likely never meet to put credence in things which we have cobbled together out of our experiences and the experiences of others (if we have not, in the case of us genre romancers, made them up out of whole cloth – having first also made up the cloth as well.)  Small wonder, then, that we tend to lie awake in the grey hours before dawn, fretting that this time will be the time when our knack fails us, and the readers will see us for the shameless fakers that we are.

(The Anglo-Saxons had a word for that sort of grim insomnia: uht-ceare, meaning “the care or worry that comes in the period just before dawn,” or as a modern-day shrink might put it, “pre-dawn anxiety.”  Smart people, those Anglo-Saxons.)

This is why literary writers worry that they are writing for a narrow and diminishing audience, and their works will never find the wider recognition that serious writers got in times past; and why writers of popular and genre fiction worry that nobody is ever going to see anything in their work except the surface of it, and all their thematic and, yes, artistic concerns will go forever unnoticed and unappreciated; and all writers, everywhere, worry about money.

(This post brought to you by the short story rejection that arrived in yesterday’s e-mail, and by the concomitant necessity to nerve myself up for picking another potential market and sending it out again.)

Peeve of the Day

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(What can I say?  Storm-and-pollen weather makes me peevish.)

Today’s peeve is another entry in the Homonyms to Watch  Out For competition:  alter and altar.  Not the same thing, folks.  To start with, one of them’s a verb and the other’s a noun.  Beyond that—

To alter something is to change it.  The adherents of the Arachnophagic Heresy of the Cult of the Great Spider angered the orthodox Spiderians when they attempted to alter the liturgy.

An altar  is a table or flat-topped block used as the focus for a religious ritual.  The orthodox Spiderians disapproved of the Arachnophagists’ practice of setting up the main altar as a dinner table, with the centerpiece being a platter of deep-fried tarantulas.

It all ended badly, of course.  The attempt to alter the Spiderian altar resulted in the terrible and bloody Spider Wars of the Fifth Age, at the end of which the Cult of the Great Spider was no more.

Weather, Incoming

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Or perhaps not.

Today’s promised thunderstorms failed to materialize, leaving us with only high humidity, a falling barometer, and that waiting-for-the-shoe-to-drop feeling.

The resulting general disgruntlement reminded me of one of the classic errors of fiction writing, one almost guaranteed to induce a similar disgruntlement in the reader:  the failure to deliver on a promised thunderstorm.

This is how it goes (or doesn’t go.)  You have the reader, trustingly reading along.  You have your foreshadowings of trouble to come, draped all over the plot in a shadowy manner.  You have Chekov’s Gun, displayed in a place of honor above the mantelpiece.  You have your dramatic tension, wound up tight.  And then—

Nothing happens.  The foreshadowed conflicts fail to materialize – or worse, they are sidestepped or handwaved away.  Chekov’s Gun remains untouched by human (or inhuman) hands, and its presence in the story turns out to be merely ornamental after all.  And all that carefully-built dramatic tension fizzles out like a damp firecracker.

At that point, you’re left with a severely disgruntled reader, one who was promised thunderstorms and didn’t get them.