A. Lee Martinez's Blog, page 45
July 19, 2013
External Characterization
I’ve been pretty busy on the blogging this week. Guess it’s because I have so much on my mind with both the release of Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest and Pacific Rim, a movie I really, really liked.
Speaking of which:
My tenth book is out in stores now, Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest. It’s really, really good, and you should buy it. If you already have, I can only offer a sincere thank you, but with a caveat. Have you talked your friends into buying it? Maybe that’s a bit too much to ask, but, hey, nobody said being in the A. Lee Martinez Action Force wasn’t going to come with certain responsibilities. So maybe you don’t have to put any pressure on your friends, but if you should happen to drop my name in conversation, all casual like, it’d be much appreciated. Though, as always, your level of commitment to the Action Force is entirely up to you.
Also, in a less self-promotional moment, you should really go see Pacific Rim. I know I keep pushing this movie, which is unusual for me, but it just hits so many of my sweet spots (kaiju, giant robots, original material, fun, and heartfelt) that I can’t stop myself. I won’t dwell on it too long, but I will say Del Toro is a true master of filmmaking in a way even many talented filmmakers aspire to be. The guy understands story, characters, action. And even more rare, he gets special effects. He neither fears them nor slavishly fawns over them. Del Toro instills even his giant robots and monsters with more personality than most filmmakers can manage with flesh-and-blood characters.
The whole thing reminds me a bit of why I enjoyed Real Steel so much. We’ve been taught to think that characterization is an internal process, that to truly give someone life we must know what motivates and compels them. And it’s a good rule of thumb. But there’s also another kind of characterization that is too often overlooked. Let’s call it External Characterization, and it boils down to what a character does and how they do it.
This is why the robots in both Real Steel and Pacific Rim brim with so much life. Though they are machines and not even technically intelligent machines like Transformers or Wall-E, they exude external personality. It’s in stuff as basic as their posture, the way they move, their silhouettes, how they’re put together. It is one of the most undervalued aspects of storytelling.
It is one of the big advantages visual storytelling has over the pure written word. I love that when I write novels, I am unconstrained by the visual aspect, but the visual aspect is a great tool for making a great character. I can play with that certainly, and if I’m paying attention, it is an important part of the character. But I can also ignore it if I choose and sometimes play that to my advantage.
Not so in movies, comic books, etc. The visual is such a vital tool and yet so often overlooked. External character development can give your characters a hell of a lot of life, and it can so at a glance, which is a powerful tool available to the storyteller. Using the Pacific Rim example, because it really applies here, just having the bulky brawler Cherno Alpha standing beside the sleek, gleaming Crimson Typhoon, you immediately get a sense of how these two characters (for lack of a better word) function and fight. And that’s not an accident. That’s a very deliberate choice.
It is an underrated and often overlooked element of visual storytelling, and it is what marks Del Toro as a master of the art form. He gets just how important visuals can be, how they can inform when done right, and how, while talking is a great way of exploring characters, it isn’t the only way. Sometimes, the best way to get to know a character is to watch them in action. It’s just too bad that we often overlook this because we’ve been trained to assume that dialogue is all important.
But, really, actions can speak louder than words. And I don’t care when Superman pouts in the crumbling ruins of Metropolis if five minutes later, he’s all chuckles and one-liners. The action defines him, not how much he says he feels bad about it. To put it another way, “Don’t have your characters just say how they feel. That makes me feel angry.”
Of course, the problem with actions is, ironically, they often get ignored in favor of what a character says, and that’s not much different than real life. It seems as if it’s often better to have a character say something about his emotions than to display it in their actions. Having a character say, “I feel sad” is hard to miss. Having a character actually be sad is both difficult to portray and often irritating to the audience. As a professional novelologist, I’ve grown to accept this, and I’ve even taken to putting more effort in outright declaring what my characters are feeling in hopes of avoiding be perceived as shallow. Strangely, it feels more shallow to me to have a character just outright say what they’re feeling, but then I realize it’s not a question of more or less subtlety. It’s just about being sure the audience notices what you’re putting out there, which is kind of the point of telling a story in the first place.
So, yes, if you have a choice, always say what the character is feeling. It’s just going to work better. But there’s no reason to neglect the unspoken aspects of the character, and perhaps the best synergy of this is found in stories that do both.
Overall, I feel positive about that notion.
Keelah Se’lai
Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,
Lee
July 17, 2013
Simple, Not Stupid
So just in case you haven’t figured it out by now, I really, really, really liked Pacific Rim. If you haven’t seen it yet, you really should. But perhaps if you take some more convincing I can share some insights into why I liked it so much. Believe it or not, it has a lot less to do with my love of the kaiju genre than you might think, and it’s a great chance to talk about my perceptions of modern audiences and the failings of much of modern storytelling.
Failings is too strong of a word, but there’s no doubt that there are trends in storytelling that I think mark us as a less sophisticated culture in terms of what we’ve come to expect from movies. Ironically, it isn’t about stupid or smart, but about the perception of stupid and smart.
I hear too often that a story is “predictable” or that it lacks depth when often it’s unjustified. We seem to have entered into this cultural expectation of overly complicated stories with the assumption that a simple story told well is somehow easy to do when it’s really the opposite. A needlessly complicated story is relatively easy to make seem intelligent because it seems smarter by virtue of its complexity. It’s like comedy versus drama. Comedy is more obvious when it fails, and the same applies to simple stories.
To clarify, I’m not using the word simple to mean stupid or easy. Instead, I’m referring to stories that are lean and easy to digest. What is it about such stories that leads us to dismiss them so readily? We know that good food should taste good. We enjoy a lot of things because they are enjoyable, and it is a mark of a good song that it’s catchy or a good video game that the controls are easy to grasp. But if a story is easy for us to understand, if it is less interested in obfuscation and more interested in being approachable, it’s deemed slight, less worthy of our respect.
Pacific Rim is a perfect example of simple storytelling done right. It introduces its setting, its characters, their conflicts, and the larger story conflict smoothly and efficiently. This isn’t a film that feels the need to leave us in the dark for half of its run time, only portioning out the backstory in labored flashbacks like precious treasure we should be grateful to get. Instead, everything is clear from the start (with a few small exceptions), and it’s not hard to see the struggles our characters are going through or the greater story obstacle they must resolve.
When exactly did this become a bad thing?
Was it The Sixth Sense that convinced us a good story is supposed to surprise and shock us? Was it before that?
There are a hell of a lot of stories out there, and there are a hell of a lot of ways to tell stories. Not every story is a mystery. Not every character needs to be motivated by dark secrets. Not every plot needs a last minute twist. And a hell of a lot of stories suffer for having to cater to a style of storytelling that imposes such restrictions.
This need to be mysterious is why so many stories are told in out-of-order fashion today. It creates the illusion of complexity, but really all it is usually doing is making the story difficult to follow. Last year’s John Carter imposed an unnecessary backstory on our hero (slightly annoying) and chose to reveal it only about halfway through the film (much more annoying). The Lone Ranger saddles Tonto with his own tragic past because apparently a character who is motivated by anything other than guilt is beyond us. Or perhaps simply because a mystery had to be imposed, and this was the easiest way to do it.
Even before being abused, I was never a big fan of non-linear storytelling. It too often seemed like a cheat. It can work, but only when it’s deliberately designed to work that way. Memento is non-linear (or perhaps anti-linear is the more appropriate word), but it does so because it genuinely is the absolute best way to capture the perspective of our protagonist. But if it isn’t absolutely essential, it’s just a way of creating false mysteries.
(I used the non-linear storytelling style in my previous novel Emperor Mollusk versus the Sinister Brain so perhaps I’m being hypocritical, but I chose to do so for very specific purposes. Whether it works or not is always up for debate.)
The thing I absolutely adored about Pacific Rim was how resolutely uncomplicated it was. That doesn’t mean it was stupid. It’s certainly less gimmicky that way, and if an audience has been trained to expect mysteries and obfuscation (I really like that word in case it wasn’t obvious), it can come across as unsatisfying or even flat. But for me, great writing isn’t about surprising the audience. It’s about giving the audience a story they can enjoy, even if they see the ending coming from a mile away.
This is why I didn’t particularly enjoy Super 8. It wasn’t its predictability. It was its attempts to be mysterious while being completely predictable. Another Abrams film, Star Trek: Into Darkness, succeeds at being unpredictable, but only by discarding any semblance of plot logic in favor of reveals and shallow surprises. When I write my novels, I tend not to worry about surprising the audience. Surprise is thoroughly overrated. Surprise usually only works if the writer is cheating in some way.
No doubt, my criticism of Abrams is pointless. The guy is more successful than I’ll ever be, and I think he’s even very good at what he does. It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and say negative things about his work, but the guy makes popular media. Any complaints I lodge at him can sound more like sour grapes than anything else.
But that’s why a film like Pacific Rim deserves more respect than it generally gets. It is not complicated. It’s direct and to the point. The story is not an attempt to throw you for a loop. There’s no sudden revelation that everything you’ve been told up to this point is a lie. The characters’ motivations are obvious (as they usually are in real life) and the conflict is up front. The film relies not on gimmicks or narrative tricks, but on a hope that the audience will invest in a story because it is worth investing in, not because they need to be convinced it is more complex than it is.
This beautiful simplicity is also what makes the battle scenes a joy to behold. Rather than attempting to impress you with how he can swoop the virtual camera or how many jump cuts he can splice between punches, Del Toro elects to give us a view of the action that we can follow. He assumes, rightly or wrongly, that a giant robot punching a giant monster is pretty damned cool, and we don’t need to be convinced. We only need to be allowed to see it happen.
It’s an underrated mindset, and one that I hope makes a comeback sooner than later. The new generation of filmmakers love their swooping shots, their shaky cameras, their rapid jump cuts. Maybe there’s no coming back from that, but Pacific Rim reminded me how much I love a story I can actually follow without a flowchart and a battle scene where two punches can be thrown in a row without having to change camera angles.
That’s a beautiful thing, and just as I appreciate writer who isn’t trying to drowned me in vocabulary words and an artist who is more interested in capturing the moment than in the number of stitches he can draw on the superhero’s costume, I love a director who respects me enough to get out of my way and let me enjoy the film, rather than stepping in front of me every ten seconds to remind me he’s there.
That’s just one of the reasons Pacific Rim is a great film, and probably why a lot of people will dismiss it as fluff, too. But if you take a moment to think about storytelling beyond the gimmicks, beyond the obfuscation (again, love that word), you just might realize how all those tricks make an ordinary story seem better than it is while right in front of you, another great story is being told well without gimmicks.
Keelah Se’lai
Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,
Lee
July 16, 2013
Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest
Well, the day is finally here, Action Force. Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest is out in stores now, and if you haven’t bought it yet, I suggest you give it serious consideration. If you buy only one book this year where a minotaur fights a gang of weekend biker orcs in an amusement park, this is definitely the one I recommend.
I’ve already posted a few bits and pieces about the story on the site in the past few weeks, and if I haven’t sold you yet, I don’t know what else to tell you. But you don’t get ahead in this biz by not learning to promote yourself, and seeing as how this is my tenth novel, I’d really really love it if it sold like gangbusters and finally bumped me up from low mid-list to maybe high mid-list.
Granted, if you’re reading this the odds are good you are already a member of the A. Lee Martinez Action Force in good standing, and your support continues to mean a heck of a lot to this humble novelologist. But maybe you’re on the fence, and I certainly can’t blame you. In this day and age, there is so much media vying for our attention, it can be hard to work up the motivation to try something different. But it’s worth doing, if only for the chance to experience something fresh and unexpected.
Like all of my previous novels Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest is a standalone novel with no relation to anything I’ve written before. It shares certain commonalities. Like Divine Misfortune, it’s a world nearly identical to our own with a fantasy element placed up front and center. Like Monster, it’s about regular people (more or less) forced to deal with cosmic forces. And like The Automatic Detective, there’s some monster punching and close calls. But it is still a book with its own fantastic sensibilities and an attempt to explore some fictional tropes I haven’t touched upon before.
In this case, Epic Road Quest is meant to be my own take on the ubiquitous Hero’s Journey idea. If I can be honest, I’ve never been terribly enamored of the concept that there is a meta story formula that should be adhered to. It’s not that I don’t think there’s some merit to the Hero’s Journey. It’s just I hate the idea that things must follow a preconstructed track and that, in the end, all we’re looking for is certain satisfying beats. Honestly, my only real dilemma with the Hero’s Journey idea is how many great writers I’ve seen it ruin, how it has taken many interesting and challenging ideas and hammered them into a one-size-fits-all formula. I don’t think that was the intention, but too often, it seems the result.
I wouldn’t call Epic Road Quest a subversion of the classic Hero’s Journey. The more I write, the more I read, the less fond I am of the idea of subversion and deconstruction. When done properly, it can be a great way to tell a story in a new way. When done poorly, it only comes across as missing the point and winking at the audience. I much prefer sincerity to subversion. This is why I often get annoyed at being called “funny”. It almost always comes with the implication that I don’t care about my stories or my characters.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I love Helen and Troy. I think they’re terrific characters, and I loved all the time I spent with them. I think you will too.
At the very least, Helen fights a cyclops and punches a dragon. If that doesn’t sell you, I don’t know what else to say.
Keelah Se’lai
Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,
Lee
Mailbag: Male Subversion
I was reading reviews on good reads and no one seemed to point this out. Was this switched gender bias intentionally done or was it just that the witch was the main focus and it just fell out that way?
The short answer is that no, there is no intended bias. While I’m very glad you liked the book, I must admit some disappointment that you found Wyst to be uncomplicated. But since you brought it up, let’s go ahead and talk about it.
First of all, I never strive to write strong female characters. Or strong male characters. Or strong sexually neutral characters (which I have created one or two of). I strive to create worthy characters, and some of those characters are women. Some are men. At least one is both depending on what she / he feels like doing that day.
I have never believed that writing a protagonist of the opposite sex should be as hard as people seem to think. Maybe it’s because I write about a lot of weird stuff, and after I write about robots and space squids, writing a human female is relatively easier to grasp. It’s not that it’s easy. Writing good characters is never easy, but it isn’t the extra level of difficulty that many seem to believe. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
I won’t deny that the witch of A Nameless Witch is the more fleshed out character of the story. She is its protagonist and its narrator. It is clearly intended to be her story. Wyst is important, but the story is from her perspective, and it is her journey, first and foremost. Still, I try very hard to instill all my supporting characters with enough vitality and personality to make them worth knowing.
In any case, I would never attempt to subvert gender bias by reversing it. Such attempts ring hollow to me more often than not. Also, Wyst isn’t meant to just be a romantic object, but a character who could just as easily be the protagonist of his own story. Whether or not this works for you is always up for debate, but no subversion was attempted.
Thanks for the question.
As always, if you have any questions or comment reach me at: @aleemartinez, on Facebook, or even through good ol’ e-mail, Hipstercthulhu@hotmail.com
Keelah Se’lai
Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,
Lee
July 15, 2013
Mailbag: Characters versus Plot
It’s been a busy couple of days, Action Force, but I finally found the time to answer a question posed a while back. Let’s reach into the ol’ electronic mailbag and see what we have here.
Do you ever envison a scene in your head and then write a story to host that scene? IE: Valkyries descending on a modern field of battle to take the chosen to valhalla (yes, it’s all mine and I’m working on it) Or do you create a character and they drive the story?
It’s never quite an either / or situation. One thing I’ve learned from doing this for ten years is that there isn’t a clear moment of creation. Ideas are always simmering below the surface, waiting to be discovered, and when they finally take shape, they can do so in countless ways.
But, if I were to make a guess, I’d say most of my stories start with a character first. I usually begin with a character I find interesting and then drop them in an interesting situation to see what happens.
This isn’t always true though. Sometimes, it’s the opposite. For my novel Monster, I had a very loose idea for Monster and his character, but the story really didn’t take shape until I started with a scene where a yeti is eating ice cream in a supermarket. In that case, the second protagonist of the story, Judy, happened almost completely by accident. She wasn’t intended to be a major character, just an introduction to the world. She quickly took on a life of her own, and after that, the story became very much about her.
My current work in progress starts with the last man trying to save the last cat from a killer robot. While I knew our hero, Felix, would be the protagonist, I honestly didn’t know a lot about him or his world (aside from the broad strokes) until I actually sat down and started writing.
But, usually, it’s the character that comes first. Everybody’s different, and I’ve learned from years of writing and hanging out with writers that everyone has their own way of doing it. If it works, then it works. Results are what matter, and if someone manages to finish their story and get it out there, how they do it is a personal process.
And a follow up to characters: Do they seem to run off and do things, say things and generally run off in a different direction that you planned them to?
Yes. All the time.
This might have to do with the fact that I am not a serious outliner or that I don’t do a lot of character prep work before starting the story. I tend to have a general idea of the characters before beginning the story, but it’s more like a sketch at that point, subject to change. Like real life, you really don’t know what a person is like until you’ve spent some time with them in multiple settings.
Some writers do it differently, and if it works, that’s great. But for me, I find that when a character goes another way, it is usually the right way to go. It isn’t always the easiest way to go, but easy isn’t always the most interesting way usually.
Keelah Se’lai
Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,
Lee
July 12, 2013
Go See Pacific Rim
I saw Pacific Rim last night.
I’m going to see it again later today.
I’ll probably see it again in a day or two.
More importantly, you should see it too.
I know that in this age, it’s hard to get excited about something not based on something you already are familiar with or that isn’t a sequel to something. I know that there’s a lot of competition for your attention, your money, your time. I know all about the pressure from outside and ourselves to deem action adventure flicks of the Summer as empty calories, as worthy of only ironic admiration. I know, too, that the kaiju genre (aka giant monsters) doesn’t get a lot of respect.
I know all of this, and I am urging you to put all that aside, to go see this damned movie, and to feel free to thank me afterward.
Seriously, Action Force, you’ve been great support for me over these last few months, but now, I’m asking you to mobilize for something I have nothing to do with. Go see Pacific Rim. Just go see it.
Need more convincing? Fair enough.
Pacific Rim, besides being a testament to skilled filmmaking in particular, is just a great, great film in general. It’s lean, engaging, energetic. It never mistakes grit for maturity. It doesn’t feel too cynical for itself. And it isn’t trying to prove it’s better than its source material. It has heart, and in the age of the overly complicated, overwhelming, often accidentally (or intentionally) gruesome blockbuster, Pacific Rim is something you just don’t see very often anymore.
It’s just a damned great film.
It’s safe to say, if you’re a fan of mine, you’ll like this movie. But even if you aren’t (you are still welcomed here. Thanks for dropping by) this movie deserves to be seen if only because it is a movie that actually dares, that takes chances, that feels like a work of passion by people who love the genre they’re paying homage to and want you to love it just as much as they do.
Seriously, a robot rocket punches a giant monster, and it is approximately 1000 times cooler in the actual film than in the preview. The battle scenes are spectacular, beautiful, never bloated, never overwhelming. This is a film too where our heroes disobey orders to save 10 people on a boat. Just 10. When even Superman can’t be troubled to keep Metropolis from crumbling, this movie understands that the stakes can be as small as 10, even in a giant monster film.
Most importantly, this is just an excellent film. You might not love it like I loved it. Okay, you probably won’t love it as much as I loved it. But you’ll still have an enjoyable couple of hours, and you might discover something new, thrilling. Something unexpected. Heck, isn’t that what a new A. Lee Martinez book is all about? And shouldn’t that be what a great movie is too?
That’s it. Nothing else I can think of to say to convince you. If I haven’t yet, I probably never will.
But do yourself a favor and see it anyway.
You’ll be glad you did.
Keelah Se’lai
Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,
Lee
July 10, 2013
Getting It
Just because I’m not enjoying your story, it doesn’t mean I don’t “get” it.
Take Man of Steel. (Don’t worry. I won’t harp on it too long.) I get that the filmmakers’ goal was to make a more “realistic” version of a Superman origin and to “humanize” Superman by making him fallible and uncertain.
I just didn’t care for it. It’s safe to say I thought it was completely the wrong direction, and that it is pretty much the opposite of everything I would want to see in a Superman story. But the same could be said about James Bond and Skyfall, a movie that received heaps of praise even though I found it plodding and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF ITS CHARACTERS dull and uninteresting.
One guy’s opinion. Feel free to ignore it.
In both cases, I understood what the filmmakers were going for, and I even understand that they succeeded at least on some level for many people. But for me, not so much.
But we’re all different people, with different ways of looking at the world, with different emotional needs, and heck, even those needs change on a daily basis. I can’t imagine ever being in a place where I’m looking for a bleak Superman story, but who knows what I’ll want in five or ten years?
Though I am pretty sick of bleak at this point. Granted, I’ve never been much of a bleak guy. I seemed to have never gone through my awkward teenage phase where I yearned to read a story where the Marvel superheroes all become flesh-eating zombies or where the Lone Ranger fights cannibals. Maybe I just missed it and never caught up with the rest of the world. Maybe my love of unapologetic fantasy tinged with optimism is the sign of an immature mind. Heck if I know.
But just because I’m not into grimdark and deconstruction, it doesn’t mean I don’t understand them. It just means I find them generally uninteresting, and often, I’m in the minority on that. That’s cool. Whatever floats your boat.
It just doesn’t float mine.
Keelah Se’lai
Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,
Lee
July 9, 2013
Sexy Beast
Hey, ALM Action Force, send me questions, and I might answer them. My semi-regular feature, Q&A Friday, has now become Question A Day. Ask me a question. Any question. And if I have nothing better to write about on this blog, I’d love to answer them.
You know the drill. You can reach me on Twitter (@aleemartinez), on Facebook (A. Lee Martinez), or via e-mail (hipstercthulhu@hotmail.com). So send your question today, and be filled with wisdom tomorrow.
Today’s question:
Is writing sexy?
No.
Honestly, not at all.
Writing is, basically, not much difference than office work. I sit at a computer. I type stuff. There’s nothing glamorous or especially cool about the way I do it. I don’t even really have a proper study. Just a space I’ve reserved for my laptop where I sit down and force myself, through sheer force of will, to not waste too much time perusing the internet for funny cat videos. But perhaps you’re asking not about the act of writing itself, but about the inevitable adulation a novelologist gets from all his adoring fans.
I’ll let you know when that actually happens to me.
I have my fans, sure, and some of them can even be somewhat adoring. But I’m mostly obscure mid-list, and most people, even people who have heard of me, don’t get all that excited to see me. In fact, if I had a dollar for every time I was in a room with a fan, and they didn’t even recognize me, much less adore me, I’d have a few bucks in my pocket.
Authors are not famous faces, of course. We toil in obscurity, and unless you’re J.K. Rowling or Stephen King, you aren’t anything like an actual celebrity. There’s almost no glamor to this business, and while I knew that getting into it, I have to admit I was hoping for a little more at this point in my career.
But, hey, I get paid to write, so I guess I can’t complaint too much, right?
Keelah Se’lai
Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,
Lee
Storyteller’s Design
Here’s the thing about fiction.
It’s fake.
Well, it’s not really fake. The stories themselves are created, but when done right, the emotions and the experience is very real. My life has been shaped by powerful fictional moments. Before I lost anyone I cared about, I felt real loss with the death of Ironhide in the original Transformers animated film. I felt a sense of power and triumph when The Mighty Thor overcame Hela’s death curse after an epic struggle against his greatest enemies. I learned about zen from Kung Fu Panda, and I still get a little lump in my throat when I think of Wall-E joyfully dancing with EVE through the void of space.
These are all fictional moments. None of them really happened. As a writer who struggles to be perceived as more than just a fluffy artist, it probably doesn’t help my case to use these moments. Yet they illustrate my point perfectly because as fantastic and clearly imaginary as these examples are, they have had a profound effect on who I was, who I am, and who I will become as time goes on.
This is the power of stories, and it is undeniable. It is so potent that we often talk about stories as if they are real events, as if they actually happened. Such debates can certainly be interesting, but they are founded on our ability to completely ignore (or even outright forget) that fiction is constructed. It’s made by humans.
I’m reminded of a great article I was reading about Man of Steel where the author said debating whether or not Superman would kill someone was silly. Superman doesn’t exist. He’s only an idea. If someone wants to write a story where Superman kills, then he does it. Superman himself (and his world) is merely a puppet of someone else, and as much as we might argue about Superman as a character, he has no will of his own. So arguing whether or not Superman would kill is NOT a debate worth having. Instead, the discussion would be better served by asking WHY the writer chose to have Superman kill or not kill.
Man of Steel fails for me, for example, not because anything implausible happens in it. Well, nothing implausible for a Superman movie anyway. But because, on a core level, the creators of the movie and I do not see eye-to-eye on what makes a good Superman story. Right or wrong has little to do with it. It’s just a question of perception and emotional resonance.
What’s interesting to me is that whenever I try to have the debate over whether or not Superman should kill, the most common response is that “he had no choice.” This is again testament to the power of storytelling. Characters are only saddled with the choices the writer gives them. The circumstances are a creation of the artist, and while good writing allows us to play along, it doesn’t change the fact that everything that happens in a story, EVERYTHING, is a choice by the creator.
Looking at writing like that, it can break the illusion sometimes. I know that as a writer, I sometimes get lost in my own stories. It can feel like the characters and situations take on a life of their own. But in the end, if I choose to push them in a certain direction, they have no choice but to go that way. Though I try to avoid pushing them too hard. But every story has multiple choice moments where many things can happen, and in most stories (time travel stories excluded), the writer has to pick one outcome and go with it. Often the choices are all valid as possibilities, but the tone or themes determine where it goes.
This is why I can’t get behind a story where Superman kills. I believe a writer should always choose another outcome when confronted with this possibility. My reasons are actually pretty simple. I rather like Superman as a character who finds a better way. Also, a Superman that is willing to kill is just too unstoppable. Without an absolute moral code to keep him in check, how the hell could he ever lose?
That’s my perspective. The writers of Man of Steel chose a different path, and that’s their right. They weren’t trying to tell a Superman story about an ideal. They were trying to tell a more “realistic” Superman story, and their version of realism involves moping, the deaths of thousands, and a Superman who is willing to kill. I might even respect that choice if the movie didn’t basically cop out at the end by tacking on a happy ending that ignores all the carnage and negativity it created to tell its more “realistic” version.
But again, that’s just my opinion, and I’ve seen plenty who disagree. The validity of a story choice isn’t necessarily about realism or even, strangely, tonal consistency, but about what emotions the creator is trying to stir. If they succeed, then good for them. In the end though, the creator is manipulating the audience through the story.
I’m not suggesting that every story need be dissected by what it might say about the storyteller. Just because a person writes a serial killer story, it doesn’t mean they’re wrestling with their own subconscious desire to kill. And if a writer creates a sexist character, it’s always risky to assume they’re sexist themselves. If writers only wrote characters they could relate to, they’d very quickly run out of ideas. And stories are just as often about exploring ideas outside of ourselves, our own experiences.
Perhaps that’s another thing I dislike about Man of Steel. I don’t want to experience a Superman I can relate to in a world that seems very much like our own. I go to Superman stories for other reasons. Yes, the exact “unrelatable” complaint that I hear from so many Superman detractors is exactly what I find appealing about the character. But, again, not everyone is looking for something like that.
As a writer, I struggle with those choices sometimes. I know that I would be taken a lot more seriously if I killed more of my characters, if I elected for less positive endings. There seems little point in denying that at this stage. Most writers do seem to love doing that. To be truly literary, you must be willing to kill characters you like, and while people might be upset by that, they also know it marks you as a “serious” writer, whatever the hell that means.
But I really don’t like doing it. And I really don’t like doing it now because there’s just too damn much of it. In an age when even Superman isn’t given the luxury of being an ideal, I just don’t find much appealing about writing stories where people die just to prove I’m more than cotton candy. But let’s be honest here. It’s a choice on my part and not without consequences.
I’m not suggesting the audience should always think about the storyteller’s intentions. Such micro-analysis usually falls flat and misses the point. It’s like that old joke where the student writes a thesis on the metaphor of the blue curtains when all the writer was trying to say was that the curtains were blue. But when we start talking about things like whether or not Superman would kill someone or if the plot of Star Trek: Into Darkness makes a lick of sense (spoiler alert: it doesn’t), we need to move the debate from what happens on the screen to why someone choose for it to happen in the first place, what they were hoping to trigger within the audience, and why they succeed or fail.
Such debates will be highly subjective, of course, but they’re a good deal more productive toward getting us to relate to each other in a way fiction often allows best. And that’s always worth doing.
Keelah Se’lai
Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,
Lee
July 3, 2013
Fun and Games in a Geocentric Universe
Hey there, Action Force.
Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest is due out in stores on July 16th. If you’re going to only buy one book where a minotaur fights a cyclops in bicycle shorts, this is definitely the one. But if by some chance that isn’t enough to convince you, let’s talk about some other stuff.
The story takes place in a world very similar to our own. Historically, it’s mostly parallel with our own and much of the cultural norms remain the same. But a lot of the things that seem like our world are slightly different once you look underneath the surface.
Probably the most notable difference, aside from the presence of magic and monsters, is the complete absence of guns. This isn’t because they lack the ability to create them, but because the gods of this world, who are much more interventionist just like the gods of myth, decreed that such weapons would never be used and their mere possession could be subject to a sudden and harsh smiting. Any attempt to actually fire a gun was met with inevitable retribution, and it’s hard to win wars when your army is decimated by lightning bolts.
The gods didn’t make this decree to curb the world from senseless violence, but because they much preferred watching people stabbing each other up close and personal. It was even considered at one point to impose a divine ban on bows and spears, but in the end, the gods decided they were amusing enough to keep. In every other respect, Helen and Troy’s world is technologically on par with our own.
Cosmologically, their Earth is actually the center of the universe ala geocentric theory. The stars really are just lights hanging in the firmament, and the sun does go around the world. The gods exist in a semi-material plane just beyond that. For that reason, there’s no such thing as a space program though an attempt was made by the island nation of Atlantis to launch a manned rocket into the heavens in ’61.
As you probably suspect, it didn’t go well.
While most of the laws of physics still apply, there is also magic to throw a wrench in the works. Magic is a somewhat mysterious force, but just as science has marched forward in our world, so has magical understanding in this one. While technology is more reliable and easier to use, there are still experts in the field of study. Helen’s minotaurism is a treatable condition with the help of modern magical understanding, and there are enough fantastic elements running through this world that it isn’t considered unusual to see a little bit of it on a daily basis.
Magic is, in fact, why this world parallels our own in so many respects. The Sahara Dessert came about because of the slaying of a dragon. World War Two was an epic struggle, ala every fantastic mythical war you’ve ever seen, and only ended when a magic ring was thrown into a volcano. Mythology is history with some of it being quite accurate and other parts being mostly exaggeration or misinterpretation, just like real history. The magical history of this world is a mix of our own, myth, and its own fantasy elements. It’s a bit fuzzy in how it all works together, but if you’re looking for detailed explanation of how it works, you’re thinking too hard. Just remember it’s our world unless noted differently.
One of the completely irrelevant elements (but still kind of interesting) is how they view their stories. Since the the world is culturally parallel, they have a lot of the same shows and movies we do. But in this world, the more science fiction a show is, the more “fantasy” it is considered. It’s a reversal that makes perfect sense. In this world, things like a solar system, spaceships, and extraterrestrials are deemed (rightly) pure escapism with no basis in reality. Star Trek exists in this world, and it’s a popular show. But the “science” behind it isn’t taken remotely seriously, and Star Wars, in many ways a classic fantasy, is actually considered harder science fiction than Trek. If a story has a guy running around throwing fireballs or using a magic sword, it is far more believable than if he’s telepathic or got superpowers from exposure to radiation.
This is the world of Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest, similar enough to be easy to jump into but different enough to be worth visiting. I think you’re going to like it.
Keelah Se’lai
Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,
Lee
