DeAnna Knippling's Blog, page 68

Rock, Paper, Scissors, Internet

I think I’m going to let my Bon Appetit magazine subscription go.

It doesn’t cost me much:  $1 an issue.  And shelf space, and reading time.  I like the content (although I’m still annoyed about Conde Nast picking Bon Appetit over Gourmet).

I have a new issue on my desk.  Open the front cover, and…there are four double spreads of ads.  Then a brief features TOC.  Then an ad.  Then a slightly more thorough TOC.  Then an ad.  Then yet more TOC.  Another ad.  An advertisement for Bon Appetit online (Twitter, specifically).  Then another ad.  The Masthead.  An ad.  Editor’s letter.  Ad.  RSVP (reader-requested recipes) for a page.  Ad.  This continues until page 90:  No two sequential pages are content; the magazine is over 50% direct advertising content.  The well is full of content, with no direct ads (this is the travel issue, though, so plenty of indirect advertising here) until page 138.  Solid ads until page 150.  151-152, content.  153, ad.  154, content.  155-157, ads.  158, recipe index occupies 1/3 of page, rest is ads and advertiser listings.  159-161, ads.  162, a short closing interview with Alain Ducasse.  Inside back cover and back cover, ads.

One hundred and sixty-four pages:

TOC, Masthead, recipe index: 4 1/3 pages.

Content: 83 pages, many of which advertise restaurants, their owners, or products you might be interested in for purchase.

Ads: 77 2/3 pages (approximately).

I’ll read the issue.  But I’m paying someone to let them advertise to me.

This is not content that I couldn’t meet or beat elsewhere, for free, on the Internet.  The advertising in the magazine doesn’t fit me, as a consumer (the @#$% does Chanel No. 5 have to do with freaking cooking?  It’s a $1-an-issue magazine: I am not the demographic.)

There are cooking magazines out there that would be worth subscribing to, say Lucky Peach, although I’d be far more likely to do it if I could get it autodelivered to my Kindle.  But I am paying someone to let them advertise for me.  It’s not that I mind the staff at Bon Appetit getting paid.  But the ads-to-content ratio is such that I can guarantee, that over the course of a year, that I can save $12 worth of time and have a richer, more varied, more informative (even prettier) food-porn experience by cruising cooking blogs rather than flipping past ads and bullshit pseudocontent in that magazine.

It’s one of those obvious things that’s been coming for a long time.  But I finally hit my tipping point.  I’ve subscribed for…maybe six or seven years now, and to Gourmet before that.  Ta-ta, Conde Nast.  Have fun.

Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference Folks Start Here

Hello!  You are probably here after having spoken to me (DeAnna Knippling) at the Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference (or saw me in babble mode and were kind of leery of speaking to me directly; I can’t blame you).

Here are some reasons you might be here:

I sent you here for free stuff.
You wanted to find out more about me.
You’re spying on me and are looking for blackmail material.

My always-free stuff can be found here.  You can also sign up for the newsletter, which includes free stuff when you sign up AND news about additional free stuff when it becomes available.  And, honestly, you can always ask me for a free ebook copy of something if you promise you’ll review it for me.  No rush.

You can find out more about me here.  This includes a bio, my freelancer rates, information about buying books, etc.

You want to blackmail me?  Cool, me too.  Here’s the plan:  You send me a thousand bucks, and I’ll bribe my husband to dig up some dirt on me.  He has ALL the photos.

Hasenpeeper Stew

 

Hasenpeeper Stew

1 box of instant chocolate pudding mix

2 c. milk

1 box (12) rabbit peeps

5-6 pieces of small candy per serving

Mix chocolate pudding according to package directions.  Pour into 6-8 serving dishes, about 1/4c. per serving.  Add one whole peep and two half-peeps to each serving dish.  Drop candy into serving dishes as decoration.

–I can’t say this was delicious.  But it certainly looked funny (and somewhat gross), which was good enough for us.

Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference Tips

Eh, I didn’t mean to write this.  I just ended up writing in the comments of someone’s FB post anyway:

Carry a small notebook for book recommendations and a to-do-when-you-get-home list that you can take, unobtrusively, to meals.  Wear the comfortable shoes unless you’re pitching, because this isn’t ACTUALLY a corporate job interview and the pros get that.  Find the backup toilet over by the Aspen Room.  Remember that you are an introvert and take a few sessions off to hide, and leave the mass of bar partiers when you feel like it, not when you’re about to burst into tears from all the extroversion floating around.  Eat to prevent constipation (sorry, but it’s true).  Be able to politely and briefly answer the question, “What do you write?” (name your genre(s); don’t necessarily pitch your book laboriously) and then remember to return the favor.  Don’t get into arguments–just treat disagreements as character studies–put them in your next story.  There will be people there who think they’re better than you are based on some arbitrary BS (published more, awards, where they went to school, etc. etc.)–again with the character study (everyone bootstraps).  When you hear criticism of a) your work or b) anything that sounds like your work, especially from agents or editors, ignore it (again with the bootstrapping–you don’t know what you don’t know, and the Little Miss Sarcastic of the bunch can shove her attitude problem about poorly written manuscripts up her @##).  Try the water with the floaty fruit bits; the kind over by the front desk is usually the best, and they fill that more often than they do the ones by the con areas.  Go outside, especially if it’s snowing:  there’s usually crabapple blossoms about con time, and the ones out front are gorgeous.  If possible, drive past the front entrance and park by the back door.  If you want a book signed, buy it right away in case they run out by Saturday; you can bring in already-purchased books and get a sticker on them to show they’re paid for.  Always go see the forensics/CSI talks:  Tom Adair rocks, but I haven’t seen a single one of them that wasn’t mindboggling.  If you’re worried about asking a stupid question, ask it at mealtimes.  You can always stop at someone’s breakfast table and say, “I have a quick question that I wanted to ask but was too shy to at your XXX session,” even if you don’t feel comfortable sitting at their table.  Some people will have their “professional” faces on all the time.  Some people will be excessively cliquey.  Mostly people are cool, even the pros.  The only people who’ve ever been outright snippy to me were agents (although the great majority of them have been perfectly wonderful, and the snippy ones generally don’t come back).  Volunteer to help out in the Green Room if it ever comes up.  Even just an hour of making sure nobody needs something is worth it.  You probably won’t need the handouts IN the sessions; you can always write, “See the handouts” in your notes.  Travel light and use a backpack rather than a crossbody bag if possible.  I don’t recommend bringing a laptop unless you have a room:  you just keep worrying about the damn thing, and paper notes are fine.  If you tweet, use the hashtag (which I can’t remember at the moment), so you can see what else is going on–often times juicy stuff gets passed around on Twitter that nobody else finds out about until days later, if at all.  When in doubt, trivia is a good conversation starter.  Most writers collect stupid facts the way a magpie collects shiny things.  If you haven’t seen Firefly, don’t admit it in public unless you want to start a 15-minute “ohyoushouldseefireflywhatswrongwithyou” guilt fest.  You will probably stutter/blather when it’s vital that you don’t; everyone gets that and will probably be going, “OMG THEY THINK I’M WORTH STUTTERING FOR SO CUUUUUUTE.”  Don’t try out new tech at conference.  Don’t bring it if you must run it off a power cord.  Don’t be the person whose question starts off with a rambling description of your book, even if your question is about your book.  If the person giving a session interrupts you, just let it go.  Promise yourself that you won’t even consider any criticism until after conference; just smile and nod and write it down.  Schedule it for later.  Recommend your favorite books.  Nobody’s read everything.  Smuggle in some good chocolate.  Don’t try to work unless by work you mean that you are going to get some wordcount in:  in fact, try to get some wordcount in if at all possible.  It’ll make you feel 1000 times more confident.  You’re not going to have the focus you need to answer emails or handle other people’s drama:  if at all possible, get everybody from the rest of your life agree to leave you the hell alone for the weekend unless they’re part of your recharge from all those writers.  I have to go home at night; otherwise I make myself sick.  When you’re around a group of writers, especially pro or semi-pro writers, be prepared for this weird pushing sensation to come out of them.  They’re (we’re?) ambitious, and a lot of sanity gets pushed out the window.  In some ways that’s good; in other ways, it’s extremely hollowing:  ”Buy my crap.”  ”Did you buy my crap?”  Etc.  Conference is good, but…real life is the truly satisfying part.  Although you may feel like you want to run away and join the writer-fairies after you leave on Sunday.  Eh, it’s a lie.  Nobody lives like they do at conference all the time.

And, dur, what sparked this were JT’s two posts on same:  here and here.

Sorting Stories by Essential Characters

Ray, my daughter, had been in the hospital since Friday.  She’s feeling better (and is home now), but I spent most of the first few days feeling drained and brain-dead and reading the Belgariad:  comfort food.  And watching cartoons:  more comfort food.  I think I’ve overdosed.  Nevertheless, I’m not up for anything stronger.  I tried to read some Chuck Palahniuk and had to bail after a few seconds.

Anyway, this morning, after ditching writing for several days, I woke up having dreamed about…sorting stories by number of essential characters.  The ideas here are not fully developed; it’s mostly just a starting point, I suspect.  But it struck me as bloggable.

The general idea is that the kind of story you can tell depends on the fundamental relationships between your characters…which in my dream was of UTMOST importance to group by the number of characters involved.  Not the total number of characters, but the number of essential characters–for example, the number of essential characters in a romance is either two or three, depending on whether a third character is getting in between the two main characters or not.  There are probably more characters in the story–and they have important roles in the plot–but, in the end, the story’s all about the two (or three) main characters.  There are plenty of characters who are important to the plot, but there are fewer characters who are essential to the story, and…you get it.

1 character:

Hero story.  Not all stories with heroes have only one essential character, but sometimes the hero is the only person who’s really important.  James Bond generally fits here.  The Die Hard series.  Bugs Bunny.  Ben 10 (he was in an id/ego/superego trio for a while, but has since moved on).  Richie Rich.  The Abhorsen series.
Antihero story.  For some reason, I keep getting stuck on Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” for this.  Pop. 1280 is another.  Hamlet…He hates his uncle, but his essential question is whether or not to kill himself.  ”To be or not to be…”
I’m not sure whether Alice is a hero or antihero, to be honest.  I’m tending towards anti.  I should probably dig deeper into the difference between the two.

2 characters:

Lovers.  Most contemporary romances fall in this category; there’s often some subplot that feels tacked on in order to make a point or extend the length–I suspect it feels tacked on because the writer’s trying to make it feel like it’s part of the main plot instead of a subplot (I hate it when the resolution of the plot all hangs on something that doesn’t really matter in the love story.  Pirates?  Really?!?).
Enemies.  Hannibal.   The Fugitive.  The Silence of the Lambs is a great film…but the bad guy has always felt tacked on to me.  He’s a McGuffin.  Samurai Jack (although some episodes vary).  Tom & Jerry.


Frenemies.  Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Ferris?  Is the antagonist of the movie.  He thwarts Cameron at every turn.  Cameron tries to lead a normal, boring life.  Cameron fails.  Dexter’s Laboratory.
Buddies.  Buddy stories are often almost Frenemy stories:  two unlikely companions must learn how to get along in order to…  The Fafrd and the Grey Mouser stories.  Of Mice and Men.  The Flintstones (although they have solid subplots revolving around the wives–that is also a buddy relationship).

3 characters:

Love triangle.  A note:  Ferris Bueller isn’t a love triangle story, because Simone is really just scenery with very little agency (a sexy lamp).  She could be dropped and you’d still have almost the same story.  Casablanca.  Gone with the Wind.
 Id/Ego/Superego.   Three very different characters try to co-exist.  The Powerpuff Girls.  Ed, Edd, and Eddy.  There is sometimes a trio like this hidden in the middle of a Scooby gang or a soap opera–especially in particular episodes–for example Buffy/Willow/Xander).

4-5 characters:

Scooby gang.  Often revolves around a main character (Buffy; Scooby-Doo) surrounded by a mismatched team that must learn how to work together.  If you could call Joss Whedon a one-trick pony, this is his trick.  Many superhero teams are a Scooby Gang.  When there are more than five characters in what looks like a Scooby gang, there’s often a traitor in their midst (e.g., The Matrix).   The Belgariad.  Cowboy Bebop.  The Hobbit.  The Princess Bride (even though it would make a GREAT sitcom or even a soap, had it been an ongoing TV show).
Sitcom Gang.  Like a Scooby Gang, a mismatched group of characters that revolves around a main character.  However, the main character is often the relatively normal one of the group rather than a leader, and the characters never really learn to work together (except during Very Special Episodes).  Bob’s Burgers.  The Cosby Show.
Transcendant.  One or more of the characters achieve godhood or transcend their mortal limitations.  Akira.  Generally, these stories annoy the crap out of me.

Lots of essential characters:

Superhero Soaps.   Sagas, multi-generational stuff, mythologies, “universes,” etc.  Lots of characters in episodic stories, that, in the end, become more than the sum of their parts.  Many smaller groups break out of this, for example, the Wolverine/Cyclops/Jean Grey triangle (which is both romantic and id/ego/superego) that operates within the Scooby Gang of a particular X-Men team.  There is no “main” character, when the entire “universe” is taken all together.  The Young and the Restless.  The Marvel Universe. Most MMORPGs.  The Eddings’ collected works.  Various mythologies.  The essence of these worlds is that fundamental relationships between characters can, and do, change over time.  Lovers might soon be enemies; enemies might soon be shoved in a Scooby Gang.  The Lord of the Rings. 

0 characters:

Utopia/Dystopia.  In a true utopia/dystopia, none of the characters matter (usually).  The main exception for me is A Clockwork Orange–antihero.  A lot of Kafka and HG Wells fits here.  Katniss Everdeen doesn’t–she lives in a heroic love triangle with a dystopian setting for color; it’s no Brazil.

I’m pretty sure I’m missing some fundamental divisions.  I also want to note that there are Shakespearean variants to consider for most of these, in which the main relationships are repeated or contrasted throughout intertwined subplots.

Another interesting example is Star Wars, which at first seems like a classic Hero’s Journey story that should be easy to pick apart…but there are so many essential relationships that shift in and out of importance (Luke/Scooby Gang, Luke/Vader, Luke/Yoda, etc.) that I’m going to say it’s a Superhero Soap…or perhaps a Space Opera  And when you pull back to the larger Star Wars universe, it is of course totally a space opera.  Likewise (for our purposes here) the larger Star Trek universe.

So:  let me know what I’m missing, and where you’d put various stories.  I doubt this is an end-all be-all kind of system, but it’s helping me explain why I don’t like some things:  for example, Ray and I watched some Bob’s Burgers yesterday, and it was great Sitcom Gang stuff.  But then we watched Ruby Gloom (kids’ cartoon), and it was terrible.  It was supposed to be a sitcom, but a) all the characters got along, and b) they really didn’t have strong differences between them.  Weak!

Update:  Dan Bressler asks about Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.  I’d say Roland is faced with a choice between becoming part of a Scooby Gang or playing the hero (or antihero).  To Scoob or not to Scoob, that is the question.

 

 

Review: Cold Turkey by Carole Johnson

Cold Turkey

by Carole Johnstone

I received a review copy of this ebook in exchange for a review.  Available via TTA Press, with additional links as I get ‘em.

Okay.  So there’s a short story in Stephen King’s Night Shift called “Quitters, Inc.”  I like it.  It’s about a guy who quits smoking. I thought “Quitters, Inc.” was all there really was to say with regards to quitting smoking, that is, the entirety of what needed to be said in the horror genre, possibly even the sum total of everything that needed to be said, fictionally, about quitting smoking in any genre.

No.

The writing in Cold Turkey is excellent.  You are not here; you are uncomfortably there, with Raym, teaching his dead-end teaching job at the same dead-end school that he went to when he was a kid, under the same Head.  You’re stuck in the same teacher’s lounge.  You’re with the same girl that he’s been with since University.  And they hate each other:  but why bother giving each other up?  They’re used to each other, after all, which is the sum of Raym’s life.  Until now.

Because Raym wants to give up smoking.  Cold turkey, as the title says.

Ah, but Raym’s brain isn’t entirely with the program.  Raym’s brain wants to keep smoking, thank you very much.  Raym’s brain wants to keep everything stacked up in its neat little misery.

Now, in the hands of any other writer, Raym and his brain would square off.  Sometimes Raym would be on top.  Sometimes his brain would be.  But in the end, Raym would stop smoking, all would be well, etc. etc.

Not so here.

Along comes the tally man, who counts up the number of cigarettes you’ve had, and…

But that would be telling.  Suffice it to say that the tally man counts, and that he counts very well; he counts very well indeed.

I can’t say that reading Cold Turkey would ever help anyone quit smoking.  Maybe it’s just for those of us who have to put up with smokers, quitting or smoking. I admire people who have quit smoking…but they are indeed self-justified pricks as smokers, and then whiny pissant assholes while they’re quitting, and this book captures both of those states very well.

An evil little git of a story with an evil little hook at the end.  I enjoyed this very much.

The Madness that is Plotto

One:  Plotto is a book.  It contains plots.  1,462 plots.  It is the TVTropes of plot books.

Two:  Don’t get the ebook.  Just don’t.  You will need all ten fingers and several bookmarks to read this book.

Three:  This book is madness.  Or a meditation.  Or both.

Four:  This book clearly states that it does not include all the plots.  I noticed a dearth of antiheroes and Scooby gangs.  But it does allow that new plots can and should be invented.

Five:  It’s dated, written in 1928 by a pulp mastercraftsman, William Wallace Cook, who once wrote 54 novels in a year (!) but now is largely forgotten.  So feel free to genderflip and ignore racial epithets.

Six: After the Foreword but before Plotto itself, someone helpfully tries to give additional instructions–”Plotto 101.”  Ignore these.  They are worse than useless.

Seven:  The author proceeds to give extensive but vague instructions.  Follow them.  Essentially, he tells you just enough to dick around with the book for a while.  Do so.

Eight:  Then follow the real instructions and exercises, at the back of the book.

Nine:  It feels like a party game at first.

Ten:  Then the next time you get stuck on a plot, go back to Plotto.  You will resist doing so.  ”Such a horrid amount of work.”  Nothing will suit.  Everything is not quite right.  Then you start following plot threads back and forth.  Certain numbers keep reappearing.  You begin to strip away nonessentials.  You get inspired, write three paragraphs, and the next day delete two of them before writing ten pages, as you add another block to your plot.  The ending reveals itself, then rewrites itself.  You cycle back through the beginning of the story to make sure the ending’s set up correctly, and there aren’t any major plot holes.  You are not stuck.  You can no longer imagine being stuck; you curse the business of your day that prevents you from fixing every story that you’ve ever abandoned because you got stuck.  This could work, you tell yourself.  This could work.

—

Example:

First iteration:

3a.  A lawless person.  18b. Rebelling against a power that controls personal abilities and holds them in subjection. 5c.  Emerges from a trying ordeal with sorely garnered wisdom.

B clauses for 18:

Misfortune (674)

Plots:

674 (622) (755) (1450) A loses his son, in whom all his ambitions were centered * A struggles against an overwhelming sorrow that proves an obstacle to enterprise and holds his abilities in subjection. (1053) (1056)

Hm…how about we skip the first section and just use the second, changing it like this*:

A, a lawless person, struggles against an overwhelming ennui that proves an obstacle to fitting in the ordinary world and holds his aesthetics in subjection.  

Moving to 1056 for more plot…

A hiding in a place where there is no food, steals from the larder of his nearest neighbor. * The neighbor, missing food from his larder, half believes it was taken by a “ghost” ** A, a supposed ghost, is caught in a trap set by the neighbor, and the neighbor proves to be A’s missing son. ***

Here I only want the first section, and I can change it like this:

A, attempting to break his ennui with the help of his cohort, steals all normalcy from his nearest neighbor in a perfectly contemptible fashion.

But 1056 is a dead end, no follow-on plots!  What to do next?  We could go back to the list of B clauses and add more, or we could look up plots as organized by the main character relationships.

I decide that Lawless Person A has been captured by the authorities by this point, and so go to A and male officer of the law, page 321.

Here’s a good one:  A, a fugitive from justice seekeing to avoid capture, finds himself in a tight corner with sherriffs apparently approaching him from every direction 651

Which hardly needs editing at all.

A, a fugitive from justice seekeing to avoid capture, finds himself in a tight corner with the law apparently approaching him from every direction.

This leads me to plot 651, which says the same thing but leads me to 699b.

699b. A driven to bay by pursuers, takes refuge in an old house * A is rescued from pursuers when the old house in which he had taken refuge is blown away by a tornado.

Here I think I have a few edits, and then I think we can end:

A is driven to bay by pursuers, and takes refuge in an experimental government program. * A is rescued from his pursuers when the government program in which he had taken program is proved to be complete bunk.  

And then you wrap things up with the c (ending) clause:

5c. Emerges from a trying ordeal with sorely garnered wisdom.

In the end, A emerges from his trials with the knowledge that the normal world is just as criminal as anything he ever did.

–And there you have the plot for A Clockwork Orange.  Which is an antihero story, so I guess you can force an antihero if you want one.

*WWC notes that you can and should do this, changing everything to suit.

 

 

 

What is horror?

This is another Tim Waggoner-sparked post.

I was on a panel last night where we were trying to define horror.  My definition? Horror is a violation of reality.

I disagreed, because, well, that’s what I do when this kind of thing comes up, and made a brief response, which then got me thinking…

And what good’s a blog if you can’t use it to write up stuff that takes more brain-space than a FB post?

First:  Is Tim’s definition correct?

I have to say no; otherwise, all magical realism is horror, and it isn’t.  Hand someone Christine and tell them it’s magical realism and they’ll look at you funny; likewise, tell someone Like Water for Chocolate is horror and see how far that gets you.  Sure, on the surface, there are some superficial resemblances:  reality is violated.  And yet, in most cases, it’s pretty easy to tell whether something’s horror or magical realism, unless you’re reading some of Neil Gaiman’s darker short stories.

My point being that not everything that violates reality is horror, per se.

However, that word violate.

Does magical realism violate consensual reality, or does it do some other verb?  If you’re going to look at it like that, then…perhaps horror violates reality.

However, what do you call horror that doesn’t violate reality?  Just because there are no unreal elements to a horror story doesn’t make it not a horror story.  Another of the people in the thread suggested that “thriller” was the word for a horror story that didn’t violate reality, but I beg to differ.  Hostel is not a thriller.  Sure, it violates.  But it just doesn’t violate reality.  Neither does Audition or a thousand thousand other horror novels.

So what we have left is that horror violates. 

Personally, I don’t think that’s accurate, either.  Is all horror about violation?  Some of it is, right enough.  But is Dracula about violation?  Or is it about seduction?  Or is it about syphilis?  What about every other story about violation?  Is every rape story a horror story?  Every story about betrayal?

I think the idea that horror violates reality is a description of one of the things that horror does well, but not a definition of horror itself.  With stuff like that you can easily end up with ideas like “romance embraces falling in love” or “historical fiction defines history” or “science fiction explores imagination” or whatever, which gets people to thinking that any story in which people fall in love is a romance, etc.

Second, what’s a more plausible definition of horror?

Right, I realize I can’t be trusted to adequately critique myself.  But I am totally tied up in the idea that when you fit a book in a genre or subgenre, you’re vowing that the reader will have an experience that fits within certain guideline or follows certain traits.  Tim’s idea is a trait, fair enough, but I think it describes what Tim likes about the genre rather than the genre as a whole.

My idea is that when you’re talking horror, what you’re promising primarily is an emotion.  When you promise romance, you promise the feeling of falling in love, or sometimes falling back in love.  With the horror genre, you’re promising the emotion of horror.

Which begs the question:  what is horror, then?  We know it when we feel it, but what is it?

I take the tack that horror is an emotional condition in which we attempt to avoid unavoidable pain.

You have to experience acute pain, and you attempt to deny the reason for the pain, or even the pain itself, exists.
You have to fight/escape a threat that is much stronger than you are, even though you know that facing it down is your only chance for happiness or survival.
You have hurt a loved one and shift the blame onto the loved one or someone else entirely.
You have hurt someone who is justified in hurting you back, and try to deny that your behavior caused the pain or that your complicity contributed to the pain, but the other refuses to accept your explanations and irrationally, inevitably, pursues revenge.
A third party has caused someone horrible pain as above, and they try to re-enact the story upon you because of superficial resemblances, at which point you go back to the first and second points.
You realize that in a world of predators and prey, you are prey, and naturally expected to be hurt or killed by the predators; you refuse to accept it.
You realize that in a world of predators and prey, you only thought you were a predator.
You find that what most people consider normal, everyday life (or what externally seems like a minor change) is too painful to endure without increasingly desperate methods of denying it.
You find that the repercussions of a seemingly innocent act are too painful to face.
You find that the repercussions of what other people name an innocent act are too painful to face.
You find that the repercussions or ramifications of the difference between what other people say is true and what you observe are too painful to face.
You are forced to hurt someone for their own good or for the greater good, and it hurts too much for you to do so.

And so on.  What my idea about horror comes down to are two things:  1) something inescapably bad happens, and 2) it hurts too much to face it directly.  If anything is violated, and I think it is, it is ego.

Horror is a violation of ego.  But that’s just a trait of horror.  One I happen to prefer over violating reality, but still just a trait.

So here’s my shot at a definition:  Horror is a story primarily about avoiding unavoidable pain.  

The “happy” resolution of a horror story is when we confront pain, or at least confront the situation that causes the pain.  To my mind, the most horrifying stories are those in which we remove the element that causes pain without removing the internal trait of avoiding unavoidable pain (the TV version of “The Mist” is a good example here–removing the necessity of defending undefendable loved ones without changing the need to defend them).  You can have your Cthulus and your Kings in Yellow, in which the end of the story is, “And then, because they could not endure, they died, went mad, or were otherwise perverted or destroyed.”  Yawwwn.  To my mind, that’s the beginning of the story, not the end. 

Keep in mind, I’ve been screwing around with Plotto, so I may simply have gone plot-mad, but there you have it.  Horror can intersect with other genres (like thriller and magical reality), but to my mind the heart of horror is about pain and trying to run away from it.

(A note: fear is the emotion that there might be unavoidable pain, as in “I’m afraid of spiders” or “I’m afraid of cancer.”  When the spider is actually on you and you know that no amount of flailing or beating about with a newspaper will get it off and you have to touch it, that’s horror.  A horror story about cancer is E.F. Benson’s “Caterpillars.”  He died of throat cancer, by the way.)

Chez Moi: Decision Fatigue & Cooking

(Here’s me messing around with a cooking book idea.)

So I’m standing in front of a full fridge again and going, “I don’t want any of this stuff.”  I used to do this with closets, too:  a closet full of clothes and nothing I wanted to wear.  Or I’d be at a restaurant, looking at a menu for ten minutes and not know what to order.

I used to think it made me a bad, indecisive person.  Lazy.

Then I learned about decision fatigue.  Basically, I only have so much willpower to use any given day, and when I run out of it, I spin my wheels until I’m recharged.  Which looks a lot like indecisiveness.

The days that I stand in front of the open fridge door are the days when I have nothing left.  The days when I eat nothing but crap.  The days when I break down and make some chain restaurant solve my food problems.  I’m not lazy or indecisive (although I have struggled for years over making choices in socially fraught situations).

I’m tired.

We call it “stress,” but it often isn’t.  During the course of a normal day, doing normal tasks, it is possible to exhaust your willpower resources and end up too tired to make desicions.  Then we wonder why we’re such failures at reaching our goals.  Why couldn’t I just force myself to make better choices?

Add in some real stress…and things get worse.  Not only do we run out of willpower, but time disappears as your brain goes into forced shutdown mode.  When I’m stressed I will suddenly realize I’ve been on Facebook for two hours, with no idea what I’ve been doing other than skimming through posts.  I’ll read a book and have no idea of what I read.   I used to watch a lot of TV.  Same thing.

The first line of defense against having no willpower is to take the times that you have willpower, and plan ahead for the times you don’t.  When you make a to-do list for the day, that’s what you’re doing.

However, most people make crappy to-do lists.  I make horrible to-do lists.  I usually plan out an eight-hour work day with ten hours with of stuff.  I can’t help it.  ”Maybe…if I finish up early…I can slip in a few extra things…”

And of course I end up a) not accomplishing everything on my list, and b) psyching myself out so that I don’t finish the six hours worth of stuff (plus email and the same kinds of breaks that normal employees get) that I could have, if I set things up right.

Let’s not do that.

Let’s not plan to make a meal that takes two hours to prepare on a weeknight, just because we “should.”  (If you promise, I will, too.)  Let’s not even feel bad about it.

Let’s not even plan to make a ten-minute meal that takes ten minutes’ worth of willpower.  Because there are going to be days when, honestly, that won’t happen.  Some days I couldn’t make myself a cheese sandwich, because that would mean trying to find bread and cheese in the post-apocalyptic landscape of my fridge.

Here’s my suggestion for a starting place:

Figure out what you normally go out for when you have a zero willpower day.
Go to the grocery story and buy at least three premade meals of that to stick in your freezer or fridge (freezer for preference).
When you get low on those, replenish.
No blood no foul.

Your chosen meal can be really, really horrible for you.  It’s still better for you than going out–I can almost guarantee it.

Sure, you “should” worry about eating healthfully.  You “should” worry about a lot of things.  But for the days when you have nothing left, you have one choice:  eat that one thing.

At least I don’t have to decide what to have for supper.

It’s weird.  Once you have that in place, the little voice in the back of your head that tries to make you into a Responsible Adult ™ gets a little quieter.  For me, it started with burritos.  Horrible, horrible freezer burritos.  Now it varies.  It could be freezer burritos of varying quality, it could be pizza, it could be french onion soup.  But there is always one thing in the freezer or fridge that is “the no-brainer meal.”

Some weeks we don’t touch it; some weeks it’s all gone by Wednesday.  But I’m not standing in front of the fridge feeling terrible about myself.

And that’s enough to start with.

 

 

How does your character try to solve problems?

Tim Waggoner said something the other day on Facebook:

Because stories are about people dealing with problems, the most important things to know about a character are how he/she responds to obstacles and handles stress. Even if you know nothing else about a character, knowing these two things will allow you to plot your story.

And I went, “yeah yeah yeah, I know that already.”  But my subconscious said, “Are you sure?  Are you sure you know that?  Now are you sure?  How about–”

So I stopped to think about it last night, because I couldn’t sleep (what with it being the Saving the Daylight/Murdering the Darkness changeover), and I got to thinking that mostly, writers don’t get this. Some really good writers don’t get this, or they don’t really get this for their main characters.

[Here I was going to add some recent reads that didn't do this.  And then I thought...nah.]

Someone who does this particularly well is Joss Whedon.

If you wanted to name Joss Whedon as a one-trick pony, this would be it: he assembles a group of flawed but relatable characters, and makes sure they stick to their flaws.

How does Buffy solve problems?  She looks for them, and then she charges.  How does she handle anything that can’t be solved by a full frontal assault?  She trains so she doesn’t have to think about it or goes to her friends to get them to solve it.  She gets all shouty and sarcastic…and whiny.

How does Mal solve problems?  Trust but verify.  Mal thinks to the next move ahead but is wise enough to recognize that the unforseen, unfair, and unjust happens–that life isn’t chess.  So when he can’t verify, someimes he trusts and sometimes he doesn’t.  And when he has verified, he just doesn’t have any second thoughts about the next move.  When he falls down is in situations where he can neither trust nor verify – all that emotional stuff – in which case he dithers, hoping that the situation will take care of itself.

Hulk smash:  a two-word character description.  ”Puny god” is funny because it was inevitable (Hulk smash) and surprising (…but even a god?).

Cabin in the Woods is all about the characters staying true to type…the reason the five main kids were picked (in the context of the story) was that they were so very good at staying true to type.

And so on.

Joss Whedon?  Makes a whole lot more money than I do.  So clearly I haven’t mastered this idea yet, and it’s a lot harder than it sounds.

And there are tons of ways to do it, too:  Right now I’m obsessing/studying The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits (which sadly got screwed by the use of a flowery, “girly” cover on a perfectly evil novel), and her main character handles problems by ignoring them.  When she can’t ignore them, she redefines them as Someone Else’s Problem, and then ignores them.  And so on.  All the while running madly about, trying very obviously to try to solve her problems, a hypochondriac of body and soul.

Gone Girl, which I had to put down, has its main female character trying to solve her problems by being the long-suffering passive female who needs to be rescued – the innocent – even when it means destroying innocence in order to do so.

The novel Somebody Owes Me Money is a Donald Westlake novel about a guy who just wants his money back.   That’s it.  A one-trick pony novel if I’ve ever seen one.

Terry Pratchett’s another guy who’s made his living off characters who stick to their flaws.  The more successful the character is, in fact, the more aware they are of their flaws…and the more they make sure their lives are framed around what they’re inevitably good at.

Harry Potter makes a good go of it, but doesn’t always stick the landing.  Even so:  still good enough at it that the books have become world-famous.

Edding’s Belgariad.  Stephen Brust.  Mark Lawrence.   Fruits Basket.  Fullmetal Alchemist.  Robert Crais.  Every mystery writer worth a damn.

And so on.

Over and over and over again, our favorite books are about characters trying to solve their problems the same way they’ve always tried to solve their problems.  And writing that really well is always trickier than it looks.