Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 6

House Hunting

After that close call last fall with the cute house with the pyromaniac neighbor, I’ve resumed my house hunt, but there hasn’t been much I’ve liked on the market.

In late January, I looked at one that had a lot about it I liked. It had an incredible back yard with a greenhouse and fruit trees, and the rooms were a good size. It had some nice period touches. But it was also on a major road, with a driveway that went uphill, so getting on the road was a bit scary. Plus, the driveway was shared with the house next door, which had potential for problems. And the upstairs windows were wonky, just a bit awry in the positioning. From the inside, the placement made sense, but from the outside it was off enough to be unsettling. There was also just something about the house that made me uncomfortable, and I couldn’t tell what it was. Part of it was that the owners hadn’t finished moving out. The furniture was all gone, so the rooms were empty, but there was food in the fridge, junk in the basement, and laundry in the dryer (showing through the window in the door). My Realtor wondered if it was renters who’d cleared out, but some workmen who were on the property said the owners moved nearby and hadn’t finished moving. I couldn’t make myself get excited enough about it to put in an offer, and it took a long time to sell for something in that price range in this town. Part of it may have been that it’s technically in a flood zone. The creek that runs through the nearby park tends to flood down that street, so the basements on that side of the street get water in them. The city is redoing that creek area, which should stop or ease the flooding when they get it done, but there’s no way to know until they’re done and we get a heavy rain to test it. There’s a sump pump in the basement of that house, and we didn’t see any signs of water damage, but added to everything else, it was enough to keep me from going for it.

The listings that came up last month and early this month were mostly mid-century modern and very vintage, complete with pink bathrooms — pink tile and pink fixtures. I’m enough of a preservationist at heart that it would have hurt me to pull out those bathrooms and update them, but I didn’t think I could live with them the way they were. There were a few listings that looked possible, but when I drove by I felt really uncomfortable, or else they were farther out than I would like. I want to live in walking distance from interesting things.

Earlier this week, I looked at a house that was really cute, but strike one was when I saw that the house next door had a broken toilet sitting in the front yard. That might have been trash day, as it was next to the trash cans, but there was also a broken sink in the back yard. Then there was the big, scary dog in the front yard, behind a flimsy wire fence (in spite of the back yard having a wooden fence). The dog growled and lunged at the fence while I was standing on the porch of the house I was looking at. It was definitely one of those “I will kill you if I get to you” growls, not an excited bark, and the tail wasn’t wagging.

The house itself was nice. The kitchen was incredible and there was an amazing view of mountains from the back porch. But the house was a lot smaller than the listing let on. It included an upstairs room that would have been mostly useless. It wasn’t heated or cooled and had no light fixtures, and while there was a bathroom there, it was in an alcove without a door. The toilet was visible from everywhere in the room. I think the square footage also included the basement. When I added up the footage of the rooms on the main floor, the actual living space, it was smaller than my current apartment. I couldn’t figure out how I’d be able to put any furniture in the living room, it was so narrow. The owners just had a chair in there, and they had chairs and a TV in the room I’d have used for an office. I decided to pass on that house.

Then a listing came up Wednesday night that I initially dismissed because the layout was pretty weird and the rooms had to be tiny, given that it was 4 bedrooms in 1100 square feet. I couldn’t figure out how I could work with the space in the living room, as there were no solid walls. The house is built into the side of a hill, so the front of the house is on ground level there, with the back of the first floor under the hill, becoming a basement. The front half of the first floor is one big room, with a kitchen on one end, a bar as a room divider, and then the rest being windows and stairs. I couldn’t think of where I’d put a TV and sofa, and there was definitely no room for bookcases.

But then the upstairs is ground level at the back, with a big deck across the back, and sliding doors onto the deck from one of the rooms. I started thinking that this would make a good living room. When my Realtor sent me the listing this morning, I said we might as well look at it.

The rooms are small, but I think I could make them work. It would be cozy. I think I’d use the downstairs as an entry hall/dining room, maybe put a chair in there, but otherwise have a dining table. If I had people over, I could use that room for entertaining. The closets are small, but the basement is climate-controlled and insulated, so I could use it for storage. The house was built in 1945 but it’s been completely remodeled. New roof, new siding, new electric, heater/AC, etc. The downstairs is all new, with new floors and a totally new kitchen. Upstairs, it looks more like an old house, with the original hardwood floors, interior doors, wide baseboards, and window frames. The new things upstairs are the sliding glass doors in the room I’d use for a living room and the bathroom, which has been gutted and redone.

But the setting is what I like. The deck is beautiful, and the backyard is wooded, so it would be almost like living in the woods. I could do forest bathing in my backyard. There’s also an in-ground stone fire pit in one of the non-wooded areas. And all this is half a mile from downtown, one block off the main street. I’ve joked about my ideal house being a cabin in the woods on the edge of downtown, and this may actually be it. It’s on the end of a dead-end street, so there wouldn’t be a lot of traffic. And while there are hills, they aren’t as big as the one I currently live on.

It’s not the house I had in mind. It’s not what’s on my vision board. It’s also not the neighborhood I was looking at. But it may be what I need. After a sleepless night spent mentally arranging furniture, I told my Realtor to make an offer on it. I have another month in this apartment, so the timing is good for me to be able to get something and start moving. I’d have time to get a washer and dryer ordered and delivered (It comes with all the other appliances), gradually move in the stuff I’d move myself, with pros moving the big stuff somewhere along the way, then I could clean out the apartment before the lease ends. And then I’d get to decorate the new place. I’ve already spent way too much time looking around online and figuring out what could fit where.

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Tea and Fortunes

I recently read a book that was absolutely warm and delightful, perfect for if you need something that makes you feel good and believe that humanity may be worthwhile after all. I think a lot of my readers might want to check out The Teller of Small Fortunes, by Julie Leong.

The book is about an immigrant fortuneteller who travels with her mule and wagon, telling only small fortunes—not major events or big futures, but little things that might affect individuals in small ways. She’s been fine being alone, but then she finds herself traveling with others as they join up with her. There’s a former thief and his former warrior friend who’s searching for his lost daughter, then later an aspiring baker seeking adventure. They all team up to travel in search of the lost child, but then the fortuneteller catches the attention of the mages, who believe anyone with any power has to work for them.

This book has a lot of things I love in a story. There are great arcs for all the characters. There’s a lovely sense of found family, with strangers coming to form bonds and look after each other. People make good decisions. The ending is so satisfying. I got this from the library, but I think I’ll be buying a keeper copy because this is very much a comfort read kind of book. There is some tension, but it’s not uncomfortably stressful.

You may want to have baked goods and tea handy for reading, though. All the talk about the tea the fortuneteller serves and all the talk about baked goods will make you hungry for tea and rolls. You find yourself wanting to drink tea, eat baked goods, and hang out with these people.

This is essentially a standalone novel. Everything is wrapped up for these characters, but it looks like there’s another book set in this world coming later in the year. I’ll definitely be looking out for that.

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The Wonka World

A few weeks ago, I watched the recent Wonka movie that’s a prequel to Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (if you’re talking movies, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in book form, unless you’re talking about the Tim Burton version, which I kind of try to ignore).

I really enjoyed the movie and found it utterly delightful. My face hurt from smiling by the end of it, and there were a few moments that brought tears to my eyes. They did a good job of making it look like it took place in the same world as the 1970s movie, where it was ambiguously sort of European, but also with American touches, and no firm European setting. And I could see this Wonka as a younger version of Gene Wilder’s character. I could see this becoming a comfort movie (I need to get the DVD) because it definitely made me feel good, and there were parts that made my heart soar.

I have an odd history with this story world. The original Willie Wonka film remains the only movie I ever had to be carried out of because it scared me too much. I made it through all the Disney films fine, but when I was about 4, the scene where the girl turned into a blueberry freaked me out to the point my parents had to carry me out of the theater (ironically, I now eat blueberries just about every day). I didn’t see the whole movie until I was in my 30s. I wasn’t avoiding it or afraid of it. It had just never occurred to me to watch it until I was visiting my parents and it came on cable, and we all watched it (since my parents hadn’t seen the rest of it, either).

I had, however, read the books. My fourth-grade teacher had a routine of reading a chapter of a book to us every day after recess as a way of getting us settled down, and I think she must have been a fantasy fan because most of what she read us would fall into the fantasy category. She really must have liked Roald Dahl because she read a lot of those to us, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. I did my usual thing of getting impatient with the one chapter a day pace and checked the books out of the library to read for myself. I don’t think I knew there was a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory until she started reading that one.

So by the time I finally saw the movie all the way through, I knew the story and had my own mental images based on adding the parts I’d seen of the movie (and clips I’d seen over the years) to the imagery in the books, which made the movie weirdly familiar.

I’ve seen the Tim Burton one, but found it unsettling and not very much fun.

Now I kind of want to watch Wonka and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as a double feature and see how they fit together, but I have to admit that I still find the original movie a bit unsettling. It might be even more unsettling with the whiplash from the much sweeter and less freaky prequel.

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My D&D Adventure

The Dungeons and Dragons game was a lot of fun, though not entirely what I expected. Some of that may have been because some of us were pretty new, we were playing characters we weren’t familiar with, and we were all strangers. There was a woman about my age, her teenage niece, a couple of women right out of college (including one who just moved from the Dallas area after graduating from the University of Oklahoma—I swear, I run into someone from either Texas or Oklahoma at every event I go to around here), and the person running it was probably in her 30s.

I think part of my issue was that it’s essentially a storytelling game, so my writer brain kicked in, but it is a game that involves players taking turns and rolling dice, so an action event that takes a few minutes in story time can take an hour to play, and sometimes the play means we’re spending that much time in dealing with a secondary issue. Our group had to fight our way through a series of rooms, and we really struggled with the first one, with it taking a few rounds of turns before we got through. We got through the second one fast (mostly because I managed to roll a 20 on my turn, and I was the first to go, so my turn got us straight into the next room). And then it seemed to take us nearly an hour in the next room because nothing we tried worked.

I was playing a bard character (I used a pre-made character rather than trying to create one), and the time I rolled a 20, I was playing a lute to lull some monsters to sleep, so I had a vivid mental image of the Chris Pine character from Honor Among Thieves when he walked into a situation playing the lute as a diversion. My song worked so well that we just walked through the room.

I think the people who wrote some of the instructions of how the spells work also write IRS tax forms, and that was what took us a while, having to read and decipher what our characters might be capable of and how we might be able to use that in this situation. Aside from being able to put things to sleep, nothing I could do was all that useful for this campaign. Again, my writer brain kicked in and thought this character was a poor choice for the story.

But I think to some extent those kind of constraints could be interesting to work with in writing — identify exactly what your characters can do up front, then stick with that through a story. It would be a fun exercise that would force some creative solutions.

The main thing was the getting together with other people to do something fun. Once we got warmed up and into the spirit of it, we all loosened up a bit. I need to learn a bit more about it to understand how the game really works, but I’ll probably go the next time there’s an afternoon game. There’s now a big group chat of women in the area, so they’re organizing games at various times on different days. It’s a good way to meet people and spend time interacting.

I can also see how all the moral panic over this in the 80s obviously involved people who’d only vaguely heard of the game. From what I saw, it’s a lot of math and statistics. There’s nothing about how you do spells that you could take away from the game to try to use to do magic, just a description of what they might do in the game, and you roll dice to see how effective your spell is based on the statistics of the creature you’re using it on. I can’t see how you could go from this to summoning demons or worshipping Satan. I guess it might look like an obsession just because of how long it can take to get through a game and how much you need to learn to be able to play well, but it probably takes less time than playing golf. It all comes back to the geeks vs. jocks thing, where dressing up like a player on your favorite team to go to watch a sports game is cool, but dressing up like a character to go see a movie is weird. Spending an afternoon with friends hitting a little ball around is “normal,” but spending the afternoon playing D&D is geeky.

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D&D, Finally

I’m going to do something new this weekend that I hope will be fun. I’m going to play Dungeons & Dragons for the very first time. A group of women in town are meeting at the library Sunday afternoon for a one-shot campaign (so a short one that can finish in one sitting instead of an extended adventure that requires multiple sessions).

I’ve wanted to do this since I was in 8th grade and first learned about D&D. It sounded like what my friends used to do in elementary school when we ran around the neighborhood acting out various scenarios — we’re pioneers, space explorers, detectives, etc. — only more organized and set up so you couldn’t just claim you defeated someone else. I think the idea of sitting around a table with friends, doing something cooperative, also appealed to me. I tried playing regular board games but I don’t like competition. Something similar, but where it’s more about making up a story together, and it’s the whole group winning together rather than competing against each other seemed like a good compromise. Unfortunately, the friends I had at school who played lived in a different part of town.

Then we moved to a farm outside a small town in a very conservative area during the Satanic Panic when I was in high school. They had seminars about how all rock music was satanic and would lead you to the devil at churches in town, and they were convinced that D&D was worshipping satan and would lead to demonic possession. (These same people thought that yoga was satanic, said meditation was leaving yourself open for demons to take over, and later thought reading Harry Potter books would lead to kids practicing witchcraft.) If anyone in that town played D&D, I wouldn’t have heard of it, and I still would have had a transportation issue in meeting up with anyone.

In college, a lot of my friends played, but they were all pretty hardcore and weren’t at all open to dealing with a newbie. There was an ongoing game in the study lounge every weekend, but these guys had been playing the same characters since high school, and they were doing a really involved campaign. Some of them were into it enough that they wore costumes. They didn’t even like spectators. I got kicked out of the study lounge when I tried to watch.

As an adult, I ran into similar issues. There was a group at my old church that played regularly, but they’d been playing together since high school and didn’t have room for anyone else. Most people I hung out with either had enough scheduling issues that they didn’t want to try to get anything started, or they had a longstanding group. At conventions they sometimes did intro one-shot campaigns, but since I was at conventions as a speaker, I didn’t have time in my schedule to do anything like that. I seldom had more than an hour free at a time.

I get a bit jealous when I read about people’s gaming groups—the food they make, the funny things that come out of their games. Sometimes it sounds kind of like a lot of book groups I’ve known, so the game is secondary to getting together with friends to eat and talk, and I think maybe that’s what I’ve always wanted to do. In a way, writing fantasy novels is a kind of solo D&D, but without rules or dice to govern how things should go.

Someone started a Facebook group for women in this town who are looking to make friends, and most of the activities people have come up with haven’t appealed to me. It seems to be younger women who want to go to wineries or concerts. But then someone mentioned this, and I thought it would be fun. They do a D&D night once a month at a local brewpub, and there’s a gaming store downtown, so I figured there would be people in town who played, but I didn’t know how to find them, and I didn’t know if they’d be newbie-friendly. This group is mostly newcomers. I’ll probably be the grandma of the group, but at least I’ll have a chance to see what I think about it. It may be weird to me as a fantasy writer, dealing with someone else’s world and someone else steering the plot. At the very least, I’ll get to meet several other women in town, and maybe I’ll get even more of the jokes in that Dungeons & Dragons movie. Maybe I should rewatch that episode of Community to prepare myself. I also need to come up with a character. I wonder if I could base it on a character I’m brainstorming now and see if I come up with any ideas I can use.

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The Fantasy/SF Specturm

Last weekend I watched the new version of Dune, both parts 1 and 2. I read the book when I was a teenager, and I saw the 80s movie, but I didn’t get into the series. I never read any of the other books. I didn’t remember much, just the litany against fear, the stillsuits, and the hand in the box test. I don’t recall being too impressed by the 80s movie, but I rather liked this new one, especially part 2 (mostly the stuff about riding the sandworms).

I did feel like we were getting a circle of influences, though. It’s pretty obvious that George Lucas was heavily influenced by Dune when he created Star Wars. We had that corrupt galactic empire, the desert planet, the quasi-religious mystical order, the bad guy on life support, and the drug called spice. But these movies also seemed to be influenced by Star Wars in some of the imagery, especially the way the empire looked.

I think both Dune and Star Wars also fall into the category of epic fantasy in a science fiction setting. Although both stories take place in futuristic worlds with spaceships and high technology, the plots are more fantasy-oriented. You could move these stories to a more typical fantasy world without changing much about the plots. The stories revolve around things like prophecies, destiny, a chosen one, and that quasi-religious order with mystical powers. In Dune, one of the things that makes “spice” valuable is that it’s what allows faster-than-light navigation, but it mostly seems to be a McGuffin, a reason why people are in conflict on this planet, which opens the door for the prophesied Chosen One to show up. The story isn’t about faster-than-light navigation, it’s about the prophesies, visions, and a reluctant Chosen One coming into his power, which is more a fantasy story than a science fiction story.

It’s similar in Star Wars. The original movie is about a farmboy learning about his heritage and finding he has a supernatural power, then going to rescue a princess and using his power to defeat the bad guys — a classic fantasy plot. There’s never really much science fiction in Star Wars, and their attempts at doing science, like finding a scientific explanation for why some people are extra powerful in the Force, didn’t work. Even the entries in the saga that are less fantasy (the plot doesn’t depend on the Force) aren’t science fiction. Rogue One and Andor are more spy thriller in a science fiction setting, so would be space opera.

If you’re looking at it on a spectrum with fantasy at one end and science fiction at the other, you’d have something like Star Wars close to the fantasy end, then Dune pretty close to it. We move into space opera when it’s more about the society, the adventure, or the characters than about the science, but there aren’t any mystical or magical elements. That’s where things like Star Trek would fall. There’s no supernatural stuff or mysticism, like in space fantasy, but the actual science stuff is often pretty sketchy. You could move a lot of their core stories to a different setting and they might still work — make it about explorers on earth during the age of exploration. Then there’s science fiction that’s really about the science and technology where you can’t remove the science from the story and still have the plot work. These would be stories about exploring other worlds where they really have to deal with alien life forms and environments, not just humans with odd cultures or funny noses. Or stories about how the use of robots changes human society.

At least, that’s my classification method. I thought I liked science fiction when I became a Star Wars fan, and I do like some of it, but after years in a science fiction book group, I realized that what I like is more space-set fantasy and space opera. Hard science fiction mostly bores me, though I do like books that get into how an alien environment might work, especially if I like the characters.

Some people even distinguish between hard and soft fantasy, with hard fantasy having a more codified magical system with clear rules — magic as science — and soft fantasy being more about the mystical, with magical things just happening and no one’s entirely sure how it works. With soft fantasy, the magic is more part of the setting (like the futuristic world being the setting for space fantasy) while in hard fantasy the magic is a crucial element of the plot. I’m not entirely certain I buy that, but then I haven’t read a lot of the stuff that people call “hard” fantasy. For me it all comes down to whether I like the characters and enjoy spending time in that world. I don’t care about knowing the various rules of magic, other than that I do feel like some limitations are necessary to make the story interesting.

As for Dune, it may be time for a reread. I’m basing this assessment mostly on the recent movies since I don’t remember much about the book. I liked the book but didn’t get too into it. Maybe it’ll hit differently if I’m thinking of it as fantasy. And I’m sure I’ll have a different perspective on the book now than I did at sixteen.

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Idea Time

My newest Shiny New Idea is really taking off. I seem to spend about half an hour in bed every morning after waking up, just thinking and processing all the ideas that are coming at me furiously. So far, I have an opening scene, a good sense of the two main characters, and lots of background for the world and the setup for the current situation.

I’m still devoting most of my working time to the proofreading I need to do, but having something more creative to work on helps keep me from burning out from doing the tedious work. The brainstorming and idea generating is pure creativity. I’m not worrying about putting things into words or pacing or plotting. I’m just playing what if. It’s like when I was a kid running around the neighborhood with my friends, declaring what characters we were and what we were doing as we did a sort of extended improv. Or acting out stories with my dolls or those little Fisher Price people. It’s daydreaming, only I write down the good stuff I come up with. This is my favorite part of the writing process, and it’s a good kind of work to do alongside something more tedious and less creative because it balances it all out.

The trick is getting out of bed, since that time between waking up and actually getting up seems to be the maximum creative time. Some of it is thinking about and processing things that came to me during the night, but then as I’m more conscious I start building on those ideas, and the more I think about it, the more I come up with. I had somewhere to be this morning, and I woke up well before my alarm, but that was when my brain kicked into high gear and I was afraid to get up until I’d processed all the thoughts and ideas well enough that I wouldn’t lose them as soon as I got up. I ended up lying there for about half an hour after I woke up, then I had to hurry and get ready to be at a morning meeting.

On the way back from the meeting, I stopped by the library to pick up some books for researching this idea. But first I need to do some proofreading. The new idea isn’t anywhere near ready to be written. I’ve learned from long experience that the longer I let an idea marinate, the better the book ends up being.

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Another Shiny New Idea

I’ve mentioned the perils of Shiny New Idea Syndrome before. That’s when you’re slogging away at a book, often in a phase that’s less than fun, like the middle of a first draft or proofreading, and then a brilliant new idea strikes you. This idea is a guaranteed bestseller that will make your career, and it’s a fully formed book. You need to drop everything to write it.

And then once you start writing it and you get past the beginning, it becomes hard, and another Shiny New Idea strikes, so you abandon the project and start on that.

This is why a lot of writers who have great ideas and spend a lot of time writing never manage to sell a book. They never actually finish one because they’re always chasing that Shiny New Idea. I started trying to write novels early in my teens, but I didn’t finish one until I was in my 20s because of this. Not only is the Shiny New Idea a distraction, but it’s usually not fully formed, so if you drop what you’re working on to write the Shiny New Idea, you’ll quickly run out of steam so that you’re tempted by the next idea that comes along.

I’ve learned over the years that the Shiny New Ideas are a good sign. Creativity breeds more creativity. The more you write, the more ideas you’ll have. If Shiny New Ideas are coming to you, that means you’re in a good creative space. But that doesn’t mean you should abandon your current project to pursue them. It also doesn’t mean ignoring them.

When I get struck by a new idea, I do a brain dump and write down everything I know about it. Sometimes in this process I’ll find myself making up even more. I just keep writing until I’ve got it all captured. Generally, even in ideas I think are fully formed, I’ll only end up with a page or two of information. That brilliant, fully formed book is really just a situation and a character, maybe an inciting incident. Once all that’s out of my head, I can get back to the current project and finish it. I can add to the new idea as things come to me, and by the time I finish the current project, that new idea may be developed enough that I can start doing serious work on it, like fleshing out the characters and working on a plot.

I have a current case study for that. I’m proofreading a book, which isn’t the most exciting work. I was chatting with my agent and mentioned this notion I had. It wasn’t even to the level of an idea. It was a kind of story in a kind of setting. She asked what the story would be, where the conflict would be, and I had no idea. That night, the story came to me and I felt like I had a good foundation for a story. When I wrote it all down, I had about three pages in a composition book. A lot of it was backstory and setting, with just a hint of what the plot would be. The plot part was essentially that two-sentence description like you might see about a movie on a streaming service.

Then last night the opening scene came to me. As I lay thinking about it after I woke up this morning, I felt like the whole book was coming together. I got out of bed and wrote down everything — and I had a page and a half in the composition book. I had a good opening line and some things that could happen in the first scene, which contains some of the worldbuilding. It always feels more fleshed out in my head than it is on the page. I do think this is a viable story idea, but it needs a lot more work before I’ll be ready to start writing it. In the meantime, I need to finish that proofreading.

I have had one instance since I started doing this for a living when I did drop the current project for the Shiny New Idea. I was working on the book that became A Fairy Tale and was really struggling with it. It just wasn’t coming together. Then I got the idea for Rebel Mechanics and started writing down what I knew about it — and ended up with a nearly complete synopsis. I decided it was worth putting the struggle book aside and working on the new idea. I did a lot of research to develop the world, then I had a proposal ready to go to my agent within a few months of getting the idea. That book sold to a publisher, and I ended up independently publishing A Fairy Tale, so it was probably a good call.

Now we’ll see how this new idea develops. I have most of March’s work planned, but when I get two projects off my plate I’ll be ready to start something new, and then I’ll see which project in development is closer to being ready to write.

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Heroes and Villains

Some of the recent author discourse online this week has involved the nature of heroes and villains and the author’s responsibility in writing them. This stemmed from a statement from one of the writers of the TV series Breaking Bad about how maybe writers needed to think of the implications of what they wrote, after viewers seemed to have missed the point of that series. I didn’t watch it because it’s very much not my sort of thing, but I understand it’s a series about a high school chemistry teacher who finds out he has cancer and to provide for his family (possibly because insurance is bad and he won’t get good benefits?), he starts making and selling meth. Since he knows chemistry, his meth is superior to that made by trailer park junkies, and he becomes a sort of drug kingpin. This writer talked about how audiences saw him as a sympathetic figure who was doing what he needed to do to care for his family in an unjust system, but the writers thought they made it clear that this was just an excuse he used, while he actually ended up doing it for the power and money.

I have to say that this writer sounds pretty naive. You have a character in a respected profession that’s often seen as an underdog in society, dealing with something a lot of people can relate to (struggling with health insurance and finances), so people are going to sympathize with him and relate to him and try to justify his actions.

However, it doesn’t take a teacher with cancer dealing with health insurance for audiences to sympathize with bad guys. I’ve been around online discussion of various fictional things (TV, movies, books) since the mid-90s, and I’ve seen that it doesn’t take much for certain members of the audience to like and sympathize with the villain, even if they have to make up reasons to do so. You could have an unrepentant puppy murderer, and there would be people claiming he’s really just a softy, and he only murders puppies because the good guys were mean to him about his puppy murdering (especially if he’s attractive or charismatic). He could be saved and changed if only someone treated him right.

There’s what I call the hero/villain double standard. A villain doesn’t have to do much to be hailed as heroic. He just has to do one good thing, or sometimes even refrain from doing something bad one time. On the other hand, it sometimes seems like the most evil thing a hero can do is try to be a good person, so that even the slightest failure to live up to that ideal is worse than any evil the villain does. And yet, actually succeeding in being good makes him holier than thou and boring, and audiences want him cut down. The puppy murdering villain can be hailed as a hero for letting one puppy go, while the hero will be vilified for taking the largest brownie (but also criticized as holier than thou and too good to be true if he takes the smallest brownie).

But you can’t write for that audience because they’ll never be happy. They’re suspicious of people who try to be good and they think they can save villains.

I think writers may unintentionally feed into and encourage these views, though. While a villain redemption story can be satisfying under some circumstances, too many of them and you start to perpetuate the myth that all villains are actually good inside or doing their evil for selfless, good reasons. Writers like to redeem villains because it makes for a big, dramatic character arc — from selfish and evil to heroic. Meanwhile, the arc for a good guy usually isn’t so dramatic. At best, you get the farmboy to hero arc, where he’s not so bad at the beginning and all he really does is level up to deal with the situation he finds himself in. The way you get more drama is to tear down the hero and find his flaws.

In the world of series, especially long-running types of series like on TV, the structure of a series encourages the villain redemption arc. The villain is probably one of the more popular characters, but if you keep the same individual as the foe for too long, both the hero and the villain start to look incompetent if neither manages to defeat the other. You really can’t permanently defeat the hero of a series, but you don’t want to get rid of your most popular character. The answer is that you redeem the villain and bring on a new villain, so in later installments, the original villain is at first a reluctant ally with the heroes against the new villain, and gradually turns into a full-on hero. Viewers learn to look for the reasons that any villain will eventually become a hero, and as the villains and former villains remain popular characters among outspoken viewers, writers start focusing on them, sidelining the original heroes and not writing for them, so the heroes become more boring.

I’ve also seen people theorizing that Americans tend to go for underdogs who fight the system and challenge the status quo, but most of the heroes are defending the status quo, while the villains are the ones fighting the system (never mind that they’re often doing so for selfish reasons). I’m not sure I entirely agree with that, since there are way too many examples that go the other way around. In the Captain America movies, the most upright, pure of heart Marvel superhero is fighting the system and going rogue. He’s going against orders to do what he thinks is right, going against what he believes to be a corrupted organization, and even going against the other superheroes when he thinks they’ve sold out. (And, of course, a lot of fans vilified him when he finally made a selfish choice for his own happiness.)

Most of the Star Wars movies and shows have the heroes being rebels or resistance fighters against an evil system. The exception would be the prequel series, which was odd because the real villain was controlling both sides to undermine the system while the heroes were fighting to defend a system that they didn’t know had been corrupted. The least successful series so far, The Acolyte, was the one with the villains rebelling against the “good guy” Jedi system that was questionable. They find a middle ground in the shows centered around the Mandalorian, where the good guys aren’t really a part of the establishment and are sometimes in opposition to it while they’re also fighting outright villains, which puts them on the same side as the establishment.

And people still sided with the bad guys when they were the ones representing “the system.” I remember 1977, before Darth Vader had a sympathetic backstory, long before anyone imagined he’d be redeemed. In that first movie, he was mostly just a henchman supporting an evil bureaucrat, and he was an extremely popular character. There were “Darth Vader Lives!” t-shirts. Really, he was a cool costume and an awesome voice, and he had power he wasn’t afraid to use. Who hasn’t wanted to Force choke someone during a staff meeting? But none of the usual rationales for why people side with villains applied to this character in the original movie. He was mostly just intriguing and looked cool.

I think the answer isn’t to stop writing cool villains, lest audiences sympathize with them. It’s to write better heroes. Push audiences to sympathize with them. Don’t be afraid to make them human or flawed, but highlight where they’re good and heroic. Make them cool enough that people might want to be them. The writer has to like the good guys before the audience will.

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Out of Order

Last Friday, I figured I should celebrate Valentine’s Day with something somewhat romantic, but I wasn’t in a very romantic mood, so I ended up watching 500 Days of Summer, a somewhat anti-romantic romantic comedy. I’m not super-strict about my definition of “romantic,” so I’m okay with a hopeful ending, even if it doesn’t involve the main couple in the movie.

This is a rather unconventional romcom that questions a lot of the premises common to the genre. It’s told in a non-linear way, starting with a breakup and bouncing back to a first meeting, then ahead to an established relationship, then back to starting to get together, etc. Tom is a hopeless romantic who’s looking for “The One” who’ll complete him. Summer is a free spirit who doesn’t believe in love and doesn’t want to be tied down. Tom meets Summer and is sure she’s The One when he learns she likes his favorite band. They argue over the issue of love, and his hopes are dashed when she tells him she doesn’t believe in it, but then she kisses him, they start dating, and everything is perfect, until it isn’t and he doesn’t know what to do.

I recently saw some online discourse about the movie (which is probably why it caught my eye). Apparently there’s some debate over which of them is in the wrong and the bad guy. Is she bad for telling him she didn’t believe in love, then dating him anyway, or is he bad for expecting her to fall in love with him when she told him she wouldn’t? Is she a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or is he trying to cast her in that role? I would say they’re both at fault. She sent seriously mixed signals, saying one thing and then acting another way, but he was in love with an idea, and she happened to be the person he cast in that role.

But the main thing I like is the nonlinear structure that makes the audience have to piece things together, where we don’t see how it all fits together until toward the end. I love stories that do that sort of thing or that play with narrative structure in fun ways.

In the romantic comedy space, there’s Sliding Doors, which has parallel timelines — we see the heroine miss a train after losing her job, leading to her getting mugged, then because of that she gets home late enough that she doesn’t catch her boyfriend cheating on her, and her life becomes a struggle. But then we also see the heroine barely catch the train, so she gets home in time to catch her boyfriend, which leads to her starting her life over, starting a business, and starting a new romance. We cut back and forth between the timelines. Which one is the “good” one and which is the “bad” one, and how will it work out?

Or there’s The Very Thought of You, which plays with perspective. We see the same events multiple times through the perspectives of three friends who all meet the same woman on the same day, and we only realize what’s really happening when we put them all together and know what’s happening in the background of each of the scenes.

I’m With Lucy starts with the ending — the heroine is on her way to her wedding. She got there after a time when she said yes to every blind date. We go back to these dates and the relationships that came from them, jumping around a bit in time. Which of these guys is she marrying?

Getting away from romcoms, there are movies like Memento, which is told in reverse order, and Inception, with the lines between dream and reality blurred. The first season of Once Upon a Time had dual timelines, with flashbacks going mostly in reverse chronological order gradually showing how the present-day situation came to be, while the characters worked to resolve the situation in the present (the flashback format continued through the series, but it mostly became thematic, showing an incident in a character’s past that reflected the character’s present).

I haven’t seen it done so often in books, but there’s a time travel book by Connie Willis that plays with this, Blackout/All Clear. It’s a story in which time traveling historians from the future go to the time of World War II to study it, but something goes wrong, and they’re stuck there as the Blitz begins. But there were other previous missions involving some of the same people to different times in the war, and since they took on cover identities and the story is told using the cover name, we don’t know which characters are the same people at different times until later. There’s also the mix of what’s happening chronologically within the war era and what the timeline is in the “present,” which can mean that a person from earlier in the present might be later in the war than they are in the current mission that started later in the present. This is a kind of storytelling that would be less effective in a movie because it would be more obvious that they’re the same person. In the book, there are a lot of “ohhhh” moments of realization.

I have ambitions of writing something like this, either out of order or otherwise nonlinear. The closest I’ve come was my Christmas novella, which was similar to Sliding Doors, except the heroine was living both timelines and aware of both of them, so she had to figure out which life she wanted and how to stick with that one instead of living both of them. I have an idea that might fit into the nonlinear category, with flashbacks where you don’t know which present character is the person in the flashback, but the whole idea hasn’t really come together yet, and the concept is more ambitious than I feel up to tackling right now.

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