R.W. Krpoun's Blog, page 32

Motivation in writing

Motivation is a big deal with actors, if talk shows are to be believed. They are important to writers, but often an overlooked aspect in the action genre. Often it is enough to portray ‘gotta survive’ or ‘asskicker by nature’ and go on.

But to my way of thinking you need to describe or refer to the man (woman, teen, whatever) before the action began to put the reader in tune with the character. In the epic Black Company saga Croaker’s obsession with The Lady, the history of the Company, and the survival of the Black Company set the entire tone of the series. In my novel The Zone, (a searing tale available for a very reasonable price) despite being in the midst of a zombie outbreak Martin’s mind is still on the incident that ended his career, and on his failings as a father.

Nor does motivation have to be literally explainable. In The Zone and in Payload, both Martin and Marvin cannot clearly articulate their basis for choices because a large portion of the reasons are pure emotion. Martin tries to explain it as the result of his parenting and his need to be his father’s equal, but falls short. There are things that are understood or felt ‘in the bone’, and I do not think it is wrong to express that. I believe most readers will understand the concept.

In my Phantom Badger series (a gripping read starting at 0.99 for the first novel) I spend a great effort to detail the whys of how the Badgers became Badgers. Some are very heroic or complex reasons; others are quite ordinary. Never fear the ordinary; not everyone has to be an ex-SEAL CIA Black Ops nuclear physicist. Ordinary people are capable of very extraordinary things, as history shows us.

As always, I like to look to history for examples: Abraham Lincoln was a fairish small town attorney and politician before specific events led to him becoming President at the cusp of our nation’s darkest time. Adolph Hitler (not a role model, but certainly a biography which should be reviewed) was homeless when he joined an obscure fringe political party. Dwight D. Eisenhower was a penniless young man working to put his brother through college (the plan was that each brother in turn would support the other’s education costs) when a friend advised him of free education via the military. He applied for either West Point or Annapolis, and was accepted to West Point.

My point is that being at the right time with the right drive can cause people of ordinary backgrounds to achieve incredible things (both good and evil).

So look to your motivations in your writing. It isn’t a bad idea to keep an eye on them in your real life, as well.

Touched up The Zone, and various thoughts

Re-read The Zone over the weekend, and re-submitted the text to Amazon to clear up a couple minor plot glitches, a couple mis-spellings that got past editing, and caught the use of ‘insure’ where ‘ensure’ was required. I also re-wrote a paragraph in Chapter One to make it clearer, and changed a word here or there for smoother reading. I also moved the cover artist’s logo to the front.

The Zone was a deeply satisfying book to write; while I enjoyed writing Sunstone most of all, The Zone let me express some pent-up feelings that had been bothering me for some years, and said expression put closure to the events.

Each book (or series-to me the Phantom Badgers are just one long book) has had a special meaning for me. Sunstone was a bucket list item of sorts: I have dreamed of writing a historical novel for decades, and while Sunstone is not quite a historical novel, it comes close.

Chains of Honor was a stab at an epic novel in which the story covers a vast, nation-spanning event; Dark Tide benefitted from the experience and became my truly ‘epic’ work (which is why it costs you $2.99: you don’t get epic on the cheap, bucko).

I wrote City of the Way not long after Desert Storm (as one reviewer cleverly noted); it started out as a rather negative work expressing my frustrations with the military, but mellowed into its present form during the re-writes.

The Payload-Rolling Hunger series are just a ‘fix’ to my zombie addiction, and my endless fascination with how such an event might transpire.

The Dream series started after reading several novels of gamers in a game setting. I literally thought “I could do that“, and so I did, with the third in the series chugging along to date. Dream was a fast, easy write that I figured would never make a sale, and it turned out to be my best-seller to date, along with Dream 2.

The Phantom Badgers and Chains of Honor represent my love of the fantasy genre and of world-building. I started writing those in the 1980s.

Just a few thoughts. I’m not very good at this blogging business.

A personal experience

80% of mass shooters commit suicide. That is a fact that has always struck me as significant: to me, a man who sets off on a one-way action to shoot up a school or movie theater would be inclined to go out in a blaze of glory. After all, terrorists such as the shooter in Orlando certainly were willing to go ‘all the way’.

A while ago I attended tactical training for active shooter response, and at one point I was selected to play an active shooter holed up in a room.

Crouching in a room with only one entrance, my actions strictly determined by the scenario script, I pondered the role I had been given: that of a Columbine-style school shooter gone to ground with the arrival of the police. I probed at the mindset of this role, both from professional interest, and as an author.

I was in a room with only one doorway, which would allow me to engage the responding officers from advantage, but just as certainly their superior firepower would result in my ‘death’ (which is exactly as it played out).

Crouching there, I came to a realization as to why so many active shooters kill themselves: at this point I had already run up my toll of unarmed (imaginary) victims as high as it could go, I could hear the police advancing in tactical formation, and I knew that the die was irrevocably cast.

I realized that they kill themselves because the waiting was unbearable. Even though the weapons on both sides were loaded with paint rounds I found my stress levels climbing with every passing second as the inevitable drew closer. A mass shooter would, I believe, want to end his life on the (I assume) feeling of insane satisfaction from his murderous deeds.

I don’t know if this revelation will be useful in future story arcs, but it might, and it certainly gives me another insight into the madmen who carry out these sort of deranged behavior.

This goes back to my earlier posts that an author should seek out new experiences to better the descriptive quality of his or her writing.

Bad Memories

Not all murders are the same. All involve a tragic loss of Human life, but one or more habitual felons cashing in their chips in an illegal transaction gone bad is a lot less likely to impact an investigator than a young person killed for little or no reason.

The motivations of murderers are many and varied, and can be seen in the news virtually every day; there are at least 15,000 murders a year in the USA.

But any investigator can tell you that there are a few cases that stand out from all the rest. Cases that mark the viewers, cases that haunt all who come into contact with it. Cases that will affirm that evil exists in the world as a very real force. Classic examples are the Zodiac killings, which took a heavy toll of those who investigated, and the Green River Killer cases, which likewise used up officers, prosecutors, and media personnel who dug into the morass of violent acts.

There are those murders that stand out, ones when you walk the scene you feel the breath of the beast. It is always the deaths of the helpless and the harmless, for evil never fights on even terms. Once in a while you catch the actor, and end up in a small room looking into the eyes of something that isn’t Human anymore.

If you want to know why every culture has its legends of shape-shifters and vampires, meet one of these killers and you will see the kernel of truth that exists at the heart of every legend, the inhuman basis that could only be rationalized by creating the description of a monster.

The motivations of villians

(Disclaimer: I am not advocating, denying, or excusing any evil act or action; this post is intended as a guide for the authors of fiction for the purpose of depicting villains)

I strongly recommend you watch the TV series Breaking Bad. Not only is it quality entertainment, but it will show your character development done right.

So, nearly every story needs a villain. Fantasy has it easy because Good or Evil is an overt choice and in some cases a racial predetermination. Other genres are tougher, especially if you are inclined to show the villain in reflection and decision-making. But lets be honest: to have a good story, you need a good villain.

In other posts I have recommended seeking out life experience to give your writing more depth, but in this circumstance I recommend against it. I have had the opportunity to be exposed to a broad variety of bad people, up to and including serial killers, but that is a situation that is not open to most writers, and need not be pursued.

So let’s go over some basic rules I have for villains:

Determine the core nature of the villain. Is the villain immoral, insane, unsettled, or evil? This is a crucial distinction which needs to be explored.

An immoral villian, for example, is generally over-supplied with anger or resentment, has poor impulse control, and often a propensity for violence. They might have no respect for other people’s feelings, or the concept of personal property. But the important thing to remember is that these people will have boundaries beyond which they will go only if truly pushed. They may beat a stranger senseless for flipping them off, but they wouldn’t kill them. They might steal everything that comes to hand, but would never harm a child. They might con a stranger out of their life’s savings, but would never employ personal violence (but they would arrange it done via proxies, perhaps). The important thing is they have limitations on how far they will go, very real limitations. An excellent depiction of this type of villain is Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad: he saw himself as a good guy, and while he talked tough he only engaged in violence when pushed to extremes. Yet he had no compunctions with distributing life-ruining narcotics, and very poor impulse control. A more sophisticated example  from that same source is Joe, who was capable of very terrible acts purely for money; a closed, dispassionate man whose prime motivation appears to be that of a professional for hire.

An insane villain operates under a completely different operating system than the rest of mankind. They may be viewing a completely different reality in which, for example, they are being persecuted by terrible forces, while most people are aware of the conspiracy and overlook it. This type person is at war with unseen forces, and while to an outsider it will appear that he is a few clowns short of a circus, if taken in context to his altered reality his actions would make sense. If in his reality all postal workers are conspiring to kill him, for example, it would not take much to justify actions against postal workers. Another useful (for a writer) form of insanity is the coping technique. If an individual believes that the only way to keep the Dark Men (Elder Gods, Reasonably Mature Eldritch Beings, etc) from destroying Mankind is to disembowel a hooker every third Tuesday, then how can he stand by and let Mankind be snuffed out?

Unsettled or obsessed. This is a broad category meant to fill in the gaps. Basically it is a subject who has become so obsessed or convinced that he becomes a danger to others. Good examples of an obsessed individual are the shooter in the recent Orlando attack, or Timothy McVeigh: men whose obsession with something became so pronounced that they were willing to wreak devastation and even die to accomplish their point. They are not insane by clinical standards, but their obsession has reached such a point that their actions became perfectly logical to them. McVeigh wanted to punish the Federal Government for Waco and Ruby Ridge, so he blew up a building full of bureaucrats in Oklahoma; Omar registered his faith’s tenants by shooting up a gay bar. To the average onlooker the obsession and the action are completely out of sync: Omar could have just sprayed graffiti on gay bars, McVeigh could have protested or maintained an anti-government blog. It is impossible, I believe, for a person to grasp the degree of obsession that such actions require, but a writer will need to try. Such a mental drive is all-consuming, and becomes that individual’s central reason to exist.

Convinced or fanatical subjects are similar in mindset to obsessed, but they are goal-driven. Gustavo from Breaking Bad is a perfect example of the convinced mindset: his entire life was neatly and precisely organized to a very limited number of goals. Hector was another good, if limited, example.

Evil. The big E. I know a lot of people associate the idea of good and evil with religious matters, but in this case I am just using the word as the best one for the task at hand. These are people who are not clinically insane, nor obsessed, nor deeply motivated; instead, they just enjoy doing harm for harm’s sake, for the ability to savor the thought of their victims limping through life with the scars of what they have inflicted upon them. Some have specific forms of harm that they prefer to do, such as some serial killers or rapists, some arsonists, and so forth. But in the main these are people who go through life inflicting as much harm and suffering as they possibly can. The whys of these subjects escape me, but if you ever meet one who is showing his or her true colors, you will never forget them.

A point I call the Jesse Pinkman rule is that most villains consider themselves to be good people. Often good people forced to bear a terrible burden, but they rationalize away their own actions.

Just some thoughts on characters and motivations. I do not claim that this is complete in any way, but I think it has some use, at least to me.

 

Wrapping it up: ending stories

Ending a story has always been a challenge for me. Some stories were fairly easy; City of the Way, Chains of Honor, and most of the Phantom Badgers series had natural story arcs which lent themselves to logical conclusions.

When I wrote The Zone I was faced with a genre which did not lend itself to tidy conclusions, and I had a desire to push the limits of my ability as a writer; I wanted to do something that was deeper than just action. I wanted to try to explore some on the things I felt as I grew older, the events I had experienced and the friends I had lost. I was not completely satisfied with The Zone’s ending; while it was deeply satisfying to me on a personal level, I think I did not do a sufficient job of explaining why Martin did what he did, or his intent. Still, I learned a great deal and I do not consider the book a failure.

Sunstone is my favorite book to date, in part because I feel like the last chapter did what I had hoped for The Zone: to put larger events and personalities into perspective.

In the Dream series I have been called abrupt in regards to my endings, and I can see the point. In the original Dream I wanted the ending to convey an emotion, a finality to a long series of events. In Dream 2 I had the challenge of where & how to interact with Dream 3, and in the end I chose to make it a clean break.

Writing is a series of choices, value judgments that to me are much harder than the actual crunching of words. Do I throw in a love interest? Can I write a book without a love interest and if so would anyone read it? Did I write too much about weapons (Yes, I am aware that I love weapons a little bit too much)? Did I put in too much detail? Not enough? Is this incident funny or stupid? Is the villain doing too poorly? Are the heroes doing too well? It is a never ending process. So the ending of Dream 2 was a compromise I made, and only after a great deal of pondering.

I am working on improving my endings, but I think part of my problem is that to me, the characters are alive. I see them in my head so clearly, and once I end the story and start the mundane work of proofing and editing, they begin to die. Endings are even tougher on me than killing characters; in that regard I do not understand how GRR Martin lives with himself. I suppose with his skills characters are easy to come by.

I was thinking of closing this entry in mid-sentence to be funny, but I decided that it would just be lame. In writing it is always down to choices.

 

Thanks to all my readers

My sales are thriving, and I feel it is important to extend a word of heart-felt thanks to my readers. I’m earning about seventy cents off each e-book (nearly a buck forty off the high rollers who read Dark Tide), so I’m not writing to get rich. I am proud that my sales have paid for the props I use in my covers (not the firearms or edged weapons-I owned those already); to be in the black is pretty satisfying, even if it is just in the mid four-digit range.

What really motivates me is the knowledge that people are reading my books. I have enjoyed the work of so many authors that the idea of my work dealing out some small measure of entertainment is thrilling.

I need to extend a special thanks to all the favorable reviews I have received. I get around one review per two hundred books sold, and these affirmations that people enjoyed my books really touches my heart. When I write my novels I give it my all, and while I have no illusions as to my ‘greatness’ as a writer, I do feel I can honestly claim a certain degree of craft in my books. To have this modest faith affirmed is a tremendous boost to my morale.

So again I would like to extend a sincere thanks to my readers. Your participation in my small contribution to the written word is much appreciated. I hope my efforts have been entertaining.

Violence and the author

(Disclaimer: I am not endorsing violence in this post. I’m merely discussing its inclusion in fiction)

Writing in the zombie and the fantasy genre means that violence is if not a core aspect than at least a frequent occurrence. Which means that the author must both describe the actual event of violence (which I have touched upon in other posts), and the protagonists’ response to the violence.

Many authors get around the issue by having their protagonist be a battle-hardened veteran (a technique I have used myself, although I try to shy away from the SpecOps / CIA/ secret agent backgrounds), but that isn’t always practical or desirable.

In both the zombie and fantasy genres you have outs in that in the former they are no longer Human, and in the latter you have an inherent racism built into the genre itself in which various races and monsters are simply evil. I’m not knocking either viewpoint-they certainly make things easier as a writer.

The Walking Dead (TV series) is making much of the burden of taking lives on certain characters, and the emotional impact of loss of loved ones (although Rick certainly bounced back quick after lopping off the arm of his latest squeeze, didn’t he?). Being not oriented towards angst myself, I have difficulty portraying it in my novels. This is a weakness as a writer, but it is a weakness I have recognized and worked to overcome, so I think you should read my books anyway.

One strength I do have is that I have engaged in a broad spectrum of personal violence, spent my life in the company of persons who have done likewise, and interacted with numerous victims of violence. There is no stock reaction to violence, either performing the act or being its recipient, but over the years I have formed some opinions on how people react and cope/fail to cope when exposed to the reality of violence.

The first point is belief; I have known several police officers who made it through the training, application process, field training, and onto the street while somehow preserving the attitude that they will never really have to hurt or be hurt. Their first experience of violence tends to be devastating, whereas veterans of the military, contact sports, or tough upbringings already have a more realistic expectation and better coping skills.

My second point is expectation; persons unfamiliar to serious violence see themselves in the Hollywood mode of dramatic action, dynamic results, and clear-cut incidents. The reality is far from that; the first time they end up rolling around with a felon trying to gain control with Academy-taught techniques that never work like they are supposed to is a severe dose of reality. In addition, when in a serious act of violence the Human brain shuts down its higher functions, operating almost entirely off short term memory, which means a much more efficient fighting machine. However that means that that afterwards the person will find gaps in their recollection because short term memory is not completely efficient in storing memories.

A third point is that a person who is not trained will be shocked at how far they can go and what they are capable of. Violence is utterly honest-there is no falsehood in it. A person will discover things about themselves in their first encounters with violence that can never truly be learned elsewhere. Techniques can be perfected and experience improves, but those first few encounters  will bring them face-to-face with a part of themselves that they had never encountered before. What they see is never pretty.

The fourth and final point ties to the third: that for many, violence is exhilarating. Entering into a situation in which one’s health and even life are placed at risk is a rush that motivates more than a few people. This can be disconcerting to discover, even unsettling, but it is real. This does not mean that the person becomes a berserker or serial killer, of course. It is simply a variant of the impulse that causes  people to climb mountains, jump out of perfectly good airplanes, walk tightropes without a net, or marry women with red hair.

Now, the above genres do not simply incorporate violence, but violent death as well. We have discussed reactions to violence, but now we will examine the impact of repeated acts of killing. In both the zombie and fantasy genre, as mentioned above, we have the ‘target less than human’ belief system giving the author an easy out. In other cases I personally strive for the ‘meat plant’ approach: a new employee manning the air gun on the killing floor of a meat packing plant will never forget his first day spent sending a steel rod shooting into the skulls of cattle. Six months later he will do it by rote while listening to an MP3 player because repetition strips events of their mystery and horror. He goes from killing cattle to simple the operator of a machine in an assembly line. Just as the nose can become indifferent to the odors of a place commonly occupied, so can the Human mind shrug off the effects of unpleasant tasks. A first-time mother may gag and shudder changing a newborn’s diaper, but a mother with her third child will swiftly perform the deed while talking on her Bluetooth.

Such are my rambling thoughts on the portrayal of violence in fiction.

 

 

 

The many influences

It is amazing what influences you when you are a writer. Most things are not even readily apparent to you, although there are many you can pick out. One of my earliest influences was my family’s (first) visit to the Little Bighorn battlefield when I was around ten. The scattered white markers standing out sharply from the dun-colored grass started a fire within me that has never extinguished. The image of men fighting against desperate odds has remained we me ever since, be it Custer’s last blunder, the Alamo, the Winter War between Finland and the USSR…the list is endless. It affected my future writing because reading about those battles made me understand that wars are not won by Sergeant Rocks, but by ordinary men who are willing to undergo the unspeakable, to rise above being ordinary.

When I was in high school, I stumbled upon Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier, the story of the author’s service in the German Army (the Heer) in WW2, fighting on the East Front. I did not understand what Sajer was trying to say in the book, and was disappointed in his rather minimalistic descriptions of combat, but as I have returned to his work as the decades passed I have gotten the message. His book also sparked a lasting interest in both the East Front (a topic never covered in my school history classes) and in the war from the German (and later, the Japanese) point of view.

My sister loaned me the Lord of the Rings trilogy in high school, which introduced me to the fantasy genre. I have spent countless hours trying to achieve the same level of world detail as Tolkien since (see my Phantom Badger series and the stand-alone novel Chains of Honor which share a common world) and failing.

Just out of high school I watched an animated movie called Wizards, and for the first time in my life (in an era without VCRs) I saw a movie two days in a row. It sparked something in me that I have never lost; it somehow put the fantasy genre into perspective for me in a way I had never been able to see it before.

In the Army I stumbled upon two authors and more importantly two books which shaped my writing styles forever: the first was the start of a decade-long affair with Glen Cook’s The Black Company series, and the second was Tim Power’s Drawing of the Dark, a book I have read countless times.

There have been countless inspirations large and small in my life, but the above are the high points, the life-changing events that steered my modest skills into the channels they have followed.

 

 

 

The author’s challenge in the Zombie genre

Zombie novels are, at least to me, interesting. I’ve got three published so far and have several more in the pipeline. The tough part of the zombie author is to control the transition of the cast from scared & confused refugee to Apocalypse Warrior Demigod. A lot cheat by making their hero a Navy Seal, CIA special agent, or the like, but I think that eliminates a lot of potential reader interest. Look at The Walking Dead: ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things.

Another tough issue is the danger threshold. How do you make the zombie threat level remain terrifying while the cast climbs in ability? Some choose to have internal dissention within a group cripple its capabilities from within, or throw in added Human threats from outside.

I think an overlooked issue open to writers in these situations is logistics. It is said of military operations that amateurs discuss tactics, while professionals discuss logistics, and it is true. Before World War One disease killed as many or more soldiers than combat did in many wars. An adult requires a gallon of clean water each day in temperate weather (some can be included in food), plus a quantity for hygiene. They will need a steady supply of rations, minor medical supplies (searching, fighting, hiking…all take a toll), soap, socks…the list is endless. Living off the land the survivors will have to devote a lot of time to foraging.

Then there is the aspect of carrying gear. Unlike The Walking Dead survivors will want to carry water, food, spare ammo, and medical gear on any expedition; and if they are on the move they will have to carry everything they need: clothing, sleeping gear, weather gear…it adds up. Eighty pounds is not an unheard-of load for an infantryman, and that is exactly what a survivor in an apocalypse is.

A survivor has to fight the weather, terrain, supply issues, diseases large & small, and medical issues to survive in addition to zombies and hostile Humans. Never lose sight of the need to overcome these issues.