Jonas David's Blog, page 62

Rain on me

I’ve been writing a scene with rain, and so listening to rain sounds in my ears all day. The sound of rain and thunder is calming somehow, but also adventurous and somehow gives me a sense of potential, of mystery. What is out there in the rain and dark? What sounds could the pattering and rumbling be masking? It also brings with it a kind of sense of foreboding, or warning–though not necessarily in a bad way, but somehow a feeling that things are about to happen.

It’s interesting to me how much sounds and music can affect the ideas I have and how productive I am in my writing. Rain is definitely a good one, and I hope to find more. These sounds may become like tools in a chest or potions in a cabinet… can I find just the right one for each scene?

What do you listen to while writing, and what type of writing?

A good villain is a personal villain

Villains are problematic not only in that they are usually the more proactive character, while the hero is reactive, but also because they are often doing the more interesting stuff, moving the story forward. I have many times found myself sympathizing with the villain just because I want to see what happens when they complete their plan.

If you want your reader to despise your villain, then they have to cause personal pain or trouble to the hero. Abstract villainy is not enough. I don’t care if the villain is killing millions of nameless people to complete his goal–they aren’t real people, this is fiction everybody!–but if he is impeding the hero in a specific, personal way, or causing her pain in a specific, personal way, then I feel more anger and frustration toward him than I would if he was the most evil character in the world on a global scale. The personal is what matters.

An example. The book I’m reading now, Wild Seed, had the potential to have a villain I was more interested in than the hero. He is an immortal that spends his long life breeding people for special powers, deciding how many children they have and with who. Some of them he breeds to ‘feed’ on with his own special power that keeps him alive.

This is pretty disgusting. But, it’s also an interesting idea. I want to see where his breeding program goes, how it works, and so on. They aren’t real people after all, it’s just words on paper, and I, the curious reader, want to see what happens. I expect that the hero is going to try to stop him, and it will frustrate me cause I don’t get to see the interesting stuff he’s doing.

But then…

The villain makes our hero part of his breeding program, tells her who to sleep with, who to have children with. Threatens her, and her existing children with death if she doesn’t obey. Now I want her to stand up to this jerk and escape him. Now I’m cheering for her, whereas before, when it was just an abstract concept, I was more interested in the results of his experimenting. Now that it’s personal, screw him!

This is what makes a good villain–not some shadowy, far off figure that threatens the whole world, but an up close and personal person who affects the hero in an intimate way.

Give it a try if you find people liking your villain too much, I bet they won’t like him as much when he’s doing something personally terrible to your hero!

Good vs Evil is boring

People who are perfectly good, or perfectly evil, do not exist in this world. Characters who are such, are very hard to identify with, which in my opinion makes them bad characters.

For a character to be an interesting person, they should have their own desires (not be perfectly altruistic) and those desires should conflict with other characters, who are not evil straw-men. I don’t mean that the reader shouldn’t cheer for the protagonist, they should definitely do that, but we should understand the perspective of the people who disagree with her, and maybe even agree with them a bit.

Everyone is the hero of their own story, and the villain of someone else’s. If everyone unconditionally loves (or hates) your character, they become boring and eventually loathsome.

Start at the action!

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I’ve started a new book that you get to hear about for the next few weeks, Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler, and so far it’s great.

The story opens with an immortal character sensing another character with some kind of powers, seeking her out and meeting her. She leaves her village behind and follows him off to new things.

What I like about this is it’s not an ‘origins story’ as so many super-powered character stories turn out to be. We don’t have to read about the characters living their normal lives for chapters on end, slowly discovering their strange abilities. When we meet the characters in this story, they are already hundreds of years old and very experienced and powerful, ready to go off and do interesting things.

The problem with all these origin stories, is the story we want to read doesn’t start with discovering your powers and figuring out how to use them, and so on. The interesting part starts when the character meets, and/or decides to defeat the enemy or achieve some goal. Very often we get stuck with the first third or more of the story being totally cut-able, and the actual narrative beginning later.

Start writing where the story starts. The reader does’t have to learn about the character’s abilities at the same time the character does. I find it much more fun to have a fully developed character that I learn about as I see her encounter different obstacles and situations, instead of one that needs to learn about themselves for a huge portion of the story.

Looking forward to more of this book, I’m sure you’ll hear more from me about it!

 

Remembering old inspiration

Reading through these stories I wrote years ago, I remember the ideas I had, the inspirations that drove me, and the satisfaction of completing the work.

Even just remembering it is some motivation to do it again! No one really likes writing. Having written, though, is where it’s at. So keep plowing forward, once you reach the end you’ll receive your reward!

The below stories are still free today, check them out and leave me a comment or review on Amazon!

The Girl with all the Gifts by M.R. Carey

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I’m sure you’re tired of hearing me talk about this book in all my posts, so you should be glad to know that this is the last post about it! I finished it! And although it was creative, exciting, with well developed characters, interesting ideas and great prose–it also irritated me quite a bit.

Along with the other things that bothered me (scientist looking for the cure is the villain, zombies in general) one of the main characters was so annoying to me, that I was hoping for her to die or be injured for most of the book. Not because I disliked her or she was an awful person, but because she was so careless, and disrespectful of the danger around her and made such rash decisions that consistently had no consequence for her, that I found myself wanting her to learn a lesson.

Here are some of the things Miss J, a schoolteacher, does with no consequence (spoilers, etc):

Refuses to see zombie children as threats: In this story, zombies roam the earth, but for some reason the children are able to think and learn, although they still chase down people and gorge on their flesh like any other zombie. Miss J. teaches a class of these children which have been captured, as a way to study how well they are able to learn (she’s not the one doing the studying, she’s just a teacher, others study the results of her teaching.) The children are tied up in restraints during the class, because if they smell human pheromones they go berserk and have to eat it. Miss J seems to disbelieve this, and touches the zombies as if they are normal children, despite the soldiers’ shocked horror and warning for her not to. Several times later in the book, she tells soldiers “don’t shoot them they’re children!” even as the ‘children’ are attacking and eating other characters in the group. She herself is never injured by any of the ‘children’ though, which would have been very satisfying to me.
Attacks a scientist for trying to do experiments on child zombies: In a military base, the sole purpose of which is to research zombies for a cure, Miss J–whose entire purpose for being on this base is to help gather data about the zombie children, for the purpose of researching a cure–finds out that her favorite zombie child is about to be dissected. So she breaks into the lab and physically attacks the scientist in order to stop it, not giving any thought that this is necessary for learning of a cure, not giving any thought that she is on a military base, attacking another person, and will surely be locked up, and the experiment will continue anyway while she is locked in a cell. But once again, she experiences no consequences for her actions, because at just the right time the base is overrun by zombies and everyone has to flee.
Shoots a flare up in the middle of a zombie infested city street, while also being pursued by human enemies: Miss J’s favorite zombie child, which she’s brought along with the group (another crazy decision she forced on the group with no consequences, but that is kind of the whole story so I’ll let that one slide) has gone off into the night to search for food to eat, so that she wont have such a hard time resisting the urge to eat the other people in the group. Miss J gets worried that the zombie child is lost, and even though they are surrounded by other zombies that are attracted to sounds and lights, and also are being pursued by another group of humans who want to kill them, decides that it is worth it to risk the lives of the entire group and shoot up a flare so that her favorite zombie child can find her way back. This time, the soldier in the group pulls his gun and actually thinks about shooting Miss J to stop her–this is how emphatically it is explained to her that this is a bad idea. She shoots the flare anyway, while basically daring the soldier to kill her. No one finds them due to the flare. There is no consequences for this action.

All of the above is to explain that, as I read the story, and these instances piled up (there were many more, smaller ones that I won’t take the time to mention) I more and more found myself wanting bad things to happen to Miss J–one of the main characters of the story, who I presume I should have been rooting for.

Instead, the only time I found myself cheering was when doctor Caldwell, the ‘evil’scientist who cuts up zombie children, and who the other characters treat like shit for the entire book, finally lost it and took off in the tank-like vehicle they’d been traveling in, leaving the others behind to die. This was very satisfying to me because it was finally a consequence for Miss J’s actions. She was a real horrible person to Caldwell, and finally something happened because of it. Even though I got the impression I was supposed to dislike Caldwell, she was my favorite character in the story.

In the end, though, Miss J is the only one left alive. This was no surprise to me, as by this point I had got the picture that she was the writer’s pet and would never come to any real harm.

I’m doing a lot of complaining because this was actually a fun, exciting, interesting, and well written book. And when you are enjoying something so much, the things you dislike stand out even more. It’s an exciting zombie apocalypse story, where the science of the zombies is explained in a way I’d never heard before. Even though the scientist explaining it has to be a villain for some reason I can never understand.

Creative, thrilling and fun, give it a try!

In the Water: old stories by me

It’s been a long time since I wrote this. I feel like it has been ages and like I haven’t been doing much since, even though I know I have. Time is weird like that.

Well, it’s free again, so I hope some new people will read it, and possibly even comment what you think about it. I love hearing people’s thoughts on my writing.

This one is about aliens, consciousness, and adventure–It’s free today and tomorrow (saturday, sunday) so give it a go and let me know what you think:

STOP MAKING SCIENTISTS THE VILLAIN PLEASE

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I’ve had it up to my frontal lobe with this bullshit. It is 20 god damn 17, we should not be afraid of knowledge and learning anymore. We should not see a person in pursuit of understanding as an automatic enemy. What is wrong with all of you writers out there? Seriously, what is your problem?

I understand the distrust of the new that old people have, and I get that change is uncomfortable and makes you wring your hands and shift your feet like a child being told they have to do a chore they don’t like. But get over it. I am sick of your petulant fears showing up in all my fiction. Because I for one admire those on the frontier of knowledge. I look up to those explorers making the discoveries that save lives and make living easier. And I am so sick of them being the villain in every single popular story I read that I am ready to toss the book in the trash when I encounter it.

Please stop!

Even in the story of a zombie apocalypse(yes, the Girl with all the Gifts again), the lone scientists trying to find a cure is still somehow portrayed as a villain. She’s cold, heartless, (read: driven, determined) and we are supposed to instead feel for the murderous zombies she’s cutting up.

Can I please have a story where the person seeking knowledge and understanding is the hero, and the Luddite simpletons wishing for the status quo are the villains trying to impede her? Please? Can I please cheer for the hero of the story instead of the villain? Is that so much to ask?

This must be another reason I only read sci fi.

Screeching, hissing, and clicking sounds… must be a Hollywood monster nearby.

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It is a well known fact that across the galaxies, worlds and dimensions, all predatory life-forms invariably evolve to make the same sounds when attacking. These include very loud screeching, hissing, and or clicking noises. While at rest, alien life will make a deep, rumbling growl. These are the traits of all alien life, and are unbreakable natural laws of biology.

This endless prevalence of the screeching and hissing monster is another of my peevs. Even silent creatures, such as spiders, must hiss or screech when in Hollywood. This, ironically removes one of the creepiest parts of a spider. Utter silence coupled with stealthy speed is creepy. Much creepier than something that shrieks warning of its presence to you from across the road.

In the age of the jump-scare, though, silence is a lost art, drowned along with subtlety in the swamp of ever bigger action scenes and ever further over-the-top gore. Everything must slap you in the face with how terrifying it is, bellowing its approach with discordant violin music and ten-times-the-volume-of-the-rest-of-the-film howls. Horror in films is now all ‘tell’. We are told to be scared by the blaring music and the loud sounds that make us jump in our seat.

Is it the fault of lazy film makers? Or lazy viewers who can’t be bothered to pay attention long enough to be scared by something subtle? Either way, the silent, creeping creature is a lost art.

Or maybe it never existed.

All I know is, most the time when the alien or other creature appears, all I can think is ‘wow, that might be pretty scary if it wasn’t screeching and hissing so much.’

Will the undead ever die?

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I for one, am quite tired of this genre. Zombies, vampires, ghosts, and so on. They never go away. Even the current book I’m reading, ‘The Girl with all the Gifts’, turned out to be a zombie story– although they put a small twist on it. The story is good in spite of the zombies, not because of them.

Maybe I’m alone in wishing for new monsters. People do seem to be more comfortable with the familiar, in general, but I’m really just worn out by it. Zombies, dystopias, the ragtag group of survivors trekking through a broke-down world. When will the public tire of it? Will they ever? It’s been 60+ years of telling the same stories over and over and it hasn’t so, who knows.

Maybe this is why I almost exclusively read sci fi. It’s where the new ideas are. Stuff that hasn’t been worn so thin you can see right through it to the other side of the story before you even open to the first page.

I wonder what the next fresh idea to be ground to dust, pressed back together, and ground away again will be…