T.R. Neff's Blog, page 8

Can Anyone Help Me Identify These?

I’ve had these for over 20 years, a present from a (now-ex) boyfriend, and they’ve been little more than a decoration. Maybe some of you can help me.

It’s a pair of claws and a pair of matching bracers.

I’ve been told they are “Cantonese Tiger Claws” which is fine, except there’s nothing to say what that actually means. Any search for tiger claws ends up showing me the weapons of the real beasties, or the company that makes martial arts equipment. Others believe they are theater pieces which sounds reasonable enough. There were* linen pieces lining in both sides of the spiked bracers, and there were skewers for the bracers but none for the claws.

The second claw, palm guard opened Interior of one of the claws, showing the joints and a better view of the chain links An overhead shot of an unfolded bracer with the spikes, the curled metal lips

* Were being the key word, as water had damaged them and they peeled away, so I assume they were glued in.

Yes, I’m a Bad Kid. But wait… there’s Blip McFinn, Space Captain!

Yup, that’s me. I seemed to have gone on a hiatus without letting anyone know. Honestly, I’ve been neck deep in my revision of two large project and have been trying to get my focus there, besides everything else that goes on in normal life. And especially now that sumō is over. Terunofuji won yet again, but the whole thing was really weird, with all lower-than-ozeki rank hanging around at the top of the scoreboard for the longest time.

The first of the two has been a major P.I.T.A.–Umbra 2. As much as I love the story and I love all of the ideas I have written about/presented in the draft, I really hate how it’s not going together in a way I find cohesive. So much so that I ended up writing an additional 50k words for it, and now have to go back and decide which of the ideas have to go (or at least get relegated to the back burner for a while, maybe to resurface again in a later story).

The second of the two has been another ongoing thing, a collection of inter-connected short stories in a dark fantasy realm, with possible novels to follow (which are written, but alas, also need to be revised). The “ancient evil” antagonist borrows more from Lovecraft than Gygax (oh yummy, there’s plenty of body horror!). “Magic” is not the typical fantasy Dungeons & Dragons magic; it’s less “I’ve got a spell for that,” and more of an extremely limited manipulation of the elements, and is innate rather than learned. If you happen to possess such “magic” and you aren’t “registered” with the powers-that-be or belong to a protected group, then you are hunted down. What they do with you when they catch you, well… no spoilers.

When I get too frustrated with Umbra 2 and feel like I might be doing more harm than good to the manuscript, I step away so I can come back with fresh eyes. But if I step away from writing for too long, I feel guilty (yeah, I know…) so I work on revising them as well. As they are shorter stories within the whole, I can revise them faster. As for the covers, I’m hoping to get a group of covers made for each series, as I’m realizing that a cover is less about accuracy of story and more about being a marketing tool to grab the potential reader (and the reason why all those novels in the 20’s and 30’s had the scantily-clad women lounging around lusting after their men on the covers, and not a single scene coming close within the text. Sex selling and all that.). Anyone know of a good and relatively inexpensive cover artist they can recommend?

BUT… I’ve gone and added another possible project, one that takes more of my artistic skill than writing skill (I know, I know, we creative types are weird). This one is–so far–lighthearted and fun. Introducing: Blip McFinn, Space Captain!

Alright, so he’s not much now and it’s a low-res scan from a doodle on a lined notebook paper. You can even see his name there, written in blue before I gave the head/helmet a body. He started as a doodle while I was watching or listening to something, probably right after I cleaned my fish pond and had my finned critters on my mind. I’ve got a few others of his crew I’m working on, just letting my pen do the walking to see what it comes up with. As for his name, my grandmother had this nearly three-foot long goldfish I called ‘Bloop’ and this character almost had that name attached, but I thought Blip sounded more futuristic. And the McFinn part, well, let’s just say that most if not all of the characters will have some punny or on-the-nose names. Lighthearted, right? This is wholly an exercise for my fun as much as it is supposed to be fun, and an attempt to stay very family-friendly.

Anyway, I’m going to keep playing around with it and when I have enough panels drawn up with a bit of a story behind them, I’ll start publishing them. It will give me a reason to play more with my XP-Pen, and keep the creative juices flowing. Does anyone know of any comic-strip plugins that are really good? Drop me a line.

Back to sticking my nose in a manuscript and hoping to unravel the mess of Umbra 2. Until then…

Story to Film and Back Again – A Poll

Before we get to the Lord of the Rings question and other assorted Dark Lords, I have to address a different kind of a ‘lord’ of a different kind of ring–sumō. So… Mitakeumi was pushed out of the running for the Emperor’s Cup, so no reaching yokozuna for him. The two who remained behind, Takayasu and Wakatakakage*, however… whoa! They both lost to their final opponents, so there was a playoff, with Wakatakakage emerging as the victor! In any case, it’s over, so I will sulk around in the evenings until the summer tournament (just kidding–a little).

Oh, and I stand corrected re:Ross Mihara not getting in some of the more colorful interjections. He called Ichiyamamoto a “bottomdweller” (possibly referring to his 5-7) but the best was the zinger he pulled with “We have liftoff!” (at around the 3:30 mark) when Tochinoshin lifted Terutsuyoshi by his mawashi and marched him right out of the doyou.

Alright, now on to other things.

I’m using The Lord of the Rings since it’s practically universal.

Yes, there’s a reason I’m asking. It’s my opinion a lot of extremely popular intellectual properties now have very polarized fandoms–those who go by the movies and those who keep with the canon of the books.

Lord of the Rings is at the forefront because Amazon is on the verge (or already over the edge) of butchering Tolkein’s masterwork to appease a woke crowd. Somehow, even though had all kinds of “flaws” that Amazon had to “fix”, it managed to garner a near universal following unrivaled among popular IP. Now, though, it’s “broken”. I won’t link to anything to feed them the traffic, but you can go watch their brave and stunning (and completely ratioed) trailers for their upcoming show. Dead in the water garbage.

LOTR is far from being the first case, but is just another property being polluted by the SJW agendas. In the case of Marvel and DC, for example, there are those of us who loved the comic books (I was–still am–a comic book nerd) and were interested in the movies only to be let down by most of them. Completely. I walked out of the theater during Captain America. I must be weird too because I liked the old Punisher movie with Dolph Lundgren**, but even have to admit he had virtually nothing in common with the character I’d loved***. I’m sure I’ll be in the minority opinion here but the Avengers had a great first film and progressively got worse with all the “stronk wahmen” who are just so awesome and brave and stunning. Barf.

Star Wars prequels didn’t look so bad compared to Disney’s abominations, where the first film is nothing but a sad reboot of SW:ANH. They turned out to be horrible beyond belief: the lead Mary Sue is just so good at everything right away, be it a ship or a light saber or using the force in ways never ever seen before! Without a struggle, too! Of course she’s better than all of the men (a theme carried throughout the trilogy). Coincidences (like buzzing all the way through the deserts of Jakku–::cough::Tatooine::cough::–just to end up in the one place where the one artifact/weapon that can help you out happens to be. [I’d say SPOILERS ahead but those idiots that directed the three Disney films already spoiled the movies to the point where they aren’t worth watching more than once, let alone the eighteen million times like the first three]. Let’s also discuss:

We’re supposed to be smart but we make decisions with zero tactical sense (yeah, I’m talking about you, Admiral Women’s StudiesLet’s not forget Chewbacca having an opportunity to just shoot the evil weirdo threatening his partner. Maybe it was because the weirdo was about as menacing as a paperboy. I kid, I kid. The paperboy was more threatening.We have to kill off or castrate all of the old heroes, because they’re toxic, masculine, heroic men.While we’re at it, we don’t need to learn from the old wisdom, because we were born awesome and know everything better than all the men and elders!Anytime a character acts in a way that may make their potential sacrifice meaningful, the act will have its weight yanked out like a rug from under their feet, followed by a shitty “ha-ha, fooled you” emotional manipulation. (Rose Rico and C-3P0’s come to mind).Incredible feats of coincidence that serve the main character instead of making problems worse are encouraged. Like finding that assassin’s dagger, or finding the perfect spot for the perfect alignment between the dagger and the death star fragment.

Yes, it sounds like I am ranting and I got off on a bit of a tangent. I do that, and am entitled to do that as part of my First Amendment rights. But to get back to the point of the poll: while the fandoms are bifurcated for the most part, I believe there are a lot more of us who look to the books and the elder properties, who’d like to see the heroes remain heroes, those who must struggle to shed their flaws before they are entrusted with the prize, and we can thereby learn something from what they go through and emulate the best qualities while learning how to diminish the bad. In other words, real heroes are MADE, not born.

I am striving to reach that in my own stories, and I am sure I have a lot of work to do.

*And they all just LOVE to say his name. Over and over. Waka-taka-kage. Waka-taka-kage. It IS fun to say.

**It probably didn’t have anything to do with Dolph’s being nude in it. Nothing at all. That’s my story.

***Frank Castle’s in the process of being gutted by the wokety-wokes too. They changed the Punisher skull to “own the Right” or something stupid and seem to be taking away his guns. Are you serious? At least I still have my old issues, including one from 1974 when he made his debut in The Amazing Spider-Man.

“A Little a Little Late” is better than “Nothing Sometime in the Future”.

This is going to be a short one, mainly because I spent most of my morning doing something other than writing or revising (for a good cause, not just because I was screwing around or procrastinating).

I’m still watching sumō, and cheering on Mitakeumi (8-1 as of last night, 21 MAR 22), but none have taken down Takayasu so far. Kotonowaka and Wakatakakage are putting up a glorious show. Terunofuji bowed out due to some injuries to his knee and heel*, and there are some great rookies out there competing as well. It gets pretty nail-biting sometimes, with some really glorious takedowns**. Overall, I am rooting for Mitakeumi to take the Emperor’s Cup, and get closer to getting upgraded to yokozuna.

My mom and I watch it together***, and while I don’t have much trouble with the Japanese, we have our own nicknames for some of the rikishi. I call Hoshoryu “Ed Chigliak” because he reminds me of my favorite character in the Northern Exposure series. According to my mother, Ichinojo reminds her of a neighbor she had from long before I was even born (and may have shared the same country of origin. My childhood neighborhood was as ethnically diverse as it got in my town).

I’m being lazy here and not linking a whole lot of what I’m sharing. Maybe I’ll come back to fix it some day. Anyway, I have some revising to do; finishing up a short story for submission, and then it’s soul-deep into my revision of Umbra 2. I think I’ve given it enough time to grow in the dark, and either it will be an edible fungus or just another toadstool.

*I’m being nice here, uncharacteristic, I know. He probably got miffed over two losses after being undefeated for so long. Or the injuries are just really effecting his performance, disappointing the grand master.

**No, I’m not familiar with all of the names of the 80+ moves except for oshidashi, the “frontal push out” which is just about as common and almost as boring as the Rhonda Rousey arm bar. Yawn.

***Yeah, my mom watches sumo and fights and likes action movies and video (and the old arcade games, back before we were the first family in the neighborhood to buy an Atari gaming system). She could kick your butt into oblivion with a bunch of different titles. Coolest mom ever.

Sumō!, or The Primal Art of Striking Each Other

NAGOYA, JAPAN – JULY 21: [Then] Sekiwake [As of this post, Ozeki] Mitakeumi celebrates after winning the tournament after day fourteen of the Grand Sumo Nagoya Tournament at the Dolphin’s Arena on July 21, 2018 in Nagoya, Aichi, Japan. (Photo by The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images)

The Spring Tournament has begun!

If you’ve been reading my blog posts for a while, you already know I’m a huge MMA fan. I’ve been in love with the culture of Japan since I was old enough to sit up and watch the anime cartoons (Star Blazers, Voltron, Robotech being some of the earliest ones to which I attached myself, and I REALLY wanted to grow up to be a ninja. Seriously.) but my appreciation of sumo has been rather recent. Born of a desire to watch television but avoiding all of the woke garbage out there, we turned on NHK* during a tournament and began to watch.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for like forever, you have an idea of what sumō looks like: two extremely large men wearing ‘diapers’, stomping around in a tiny ring and throwing each other for a loop. It’s more or less true, except for the diaper thing***

I got enthralled. Yeah, it’s been treated like a comedy in this country, complete with goofy suits (not an affiliate) you can put on and slam one another around in a faux tachi-ai**.

Mitakeumi was the most recent recipient of the Emperor’s Cup and BOYOBOY was that exciting to see him take down Terunofuji, who they were hoping would be the first rikishi in 180 years to win three in a row. If Mitakeumi (a fantastic sportsman on top of being a spectacular rikishi) wins the next tournament and passes all the other criteria, he’s eligible to become yokozuna.

One of my favorite aspects is when the yobidashi (ring announcer) calls the name of the winner. My personal favorite is when Endo wins, and they stretch his name out all the way across the Pacific and back again. Endooooooooooooooooo!

Sometimes people get some unintended up close and personal with the rikishi. Think Gallagher but the whole fruit smashing you in the face with the Sledge-o-Matic behind it. They get tossed out of the ring and end up steamrolling a bunch of spectators, which has resulted in injuries. I think, If I ever get the chance to see a bout in person, I’ll sit a couple of rows back, thanks.

I also love hearing the unusually staid reporters from NHK Newsline not only get excited to be reporting, but also come up with some of the more colorful phrases, “clean his clock,” or “ate his lunch” or “threw him under a bus!” (I’m a huge fan of Ross Mihara but I have to admit that Morita Hiroshi and Raja Pradhan have a far more interesting repertoire.)

Sumopedia provides some insights for those interested, and they also show up as a short segment at the end of the half-hour after Grand Sumo Highlights.

I could go on forever. And I’m still learning a lot about it, but one thing I know for certain right now–a primal man-to-man fight where the champ can be upset at any time is always exciting.

*Which is mostly safe, but the woke agenda has been creeping into their programming as well.

**The real force of the tachi-ai can measure up to two tons. Boom-Ouch!

***It’s a loincloth called a mawashi, is a silk sash about 30′ long, wrapped around the rikishi. Can you imagine the chafing!? I find it incredible that some of them can still move, let alone hustle around in the ring. Some rikishi attach superstitious significance to the colors they wear as well as when/how often they launder it. Um… ew.

Bloody But Unbowed

So I’m back after a hiatus. Seems some health issues were catching up with me (and everything seems to be fine now, thanks for the prayers and good thoughts), but I still managed to finish the first draft of Umbra 2 and have made decent headway into Umbra 3 as well. Umb2’s* got to percolate for a little while before I dive back in for the big revision, but hopefully (this is the part where we cross our fingers) I’ll have it knocked out in good time, and will give the first heads-up in my newsletter (don’t forget to sign up HERE) when it’s ready for primetime.

I’m currently shopping around for covers as well, so if you know of any good graphic designers with a portfolio, feel free to drop me a link at Admin@overlordmpress.com. If you’re the first one to e-mail me and I use your recommended artist, I’ll throw you a free copy of the book!

I know I’m off my normal schedule, but I will be going back to Tuesday to make my regular posts. The next one will probably be about sumo, since that starts in a few days. YIPPEEE!**

*Yeah, it’s weird, and it’s only temporary since the titles will change along with the covers, but I would rather it be clunky than confusing with U2. For some reason I stopped listening to their new stuff after Zooropa, and wasn’t really thrilled with their forced-upon-you-via-Apple album.

**Yes, it’s probably weird that I love watching sumo, but it’s really not all that far off from MMA. Pared down, it’s just man versus man. Very primal. Maybe I’ll write a sumo story some day, or integrate them like I am working on doing for MMA by fusing it into a fantasy setting. Slowly. In case you didn’t know, that would be with Ennid.

Story Sprawl and the Downfall of Umbra

Soon-to-Be OLD Cover and Title for Umbra

It’s not as dramatic as all that, but it’s causing me more than a little grief in the scheme of what I have been writing, which is the sequel to Umbra: A Post-Apocalyptic Mystery*. I finished the first draft of the so-far-title of Umbra 2 and while it was percolating in its pre-revision phase, I started on Umbra 3. As of today, I am one-third of the way into the first draft, and making good progress.

WAS making good progress. See, something happened when I started playing “Question and Answer” to get an idea of how to shape the ending. All but a tiny smattering of my targets to aim for are pretty good and currently I could use any one of them I chose. Until I started to write down my endings for… SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVEN’T READ UMBRA… the unit.

With a massive groan, I realized I skipped over a WHOLE lot of meat, and what I realized I was writing now was not Umbra 3, but Umbra 4, and there could be an entire novel, with minimum revisions, that built up a lot of my world and the important conflicts between the others, sitting in between UAPAM and Umbra 2.

So… I’ve pretty much decided to finish writing Umbra “3” (which will really be “4”) and go back while that one is fermenting into a palatable brew while I write the real Umbra 2.

Oi, my head.

But, you may be asking, “T.R., what does that have to do with the title of your blog?”

I generally have story sprawl (as opposed to story creep which can get you derailed), and I should have known this because I had that very thing happen while I was writing the first Umbra (first one in its present incarnation, not the one I wrote in 2011 that now only minimally looks like its descendant). My original draft took it from… SPOILER ALERT TERRITORY… Vera and Shaw meeting the kid, chasing him all across the Circuit, ending up in a bad place and everyone being redeemed, yada yada. But as I was writing that story, I realized they left Hinge far too quickly and there was something going on there that fed into the overall danger of the world, with plenty of hints dropped all throughout the narrative. It smacked me in the face before, and it’s smacking me now, as I moved the characters off from Point A to Point B without so much as a second sentence to describe the motion and now I’ve realized I went far too thin on that one. So I have to go back and turn that little trip into a whole new story. Sprawl.

It kept me from writing short stories and keeping them in the word count limit for, say, magazine submissions. I had these HUGE worlds, like an entire galaxy of planets swirling within me, and I want to explore so much of it that I turn what should be a short story into an epic. I also know I sprawl during revision, adding a lot of meat to the bone (not fat, not fluff. Meat) so that I know when I end a draft with a word count I can expect it to grow by at least 30%**.

As for the “downfall” bit? That’s the “plans” part. This one will be completed first, and then I will get to the next, which (it pains me to say) puts off my planned publishing schedule a little more. My plans were to have a secure date in place for a release and announcement for preorders. “Planned” being the key word which is laughed at by God and Men alike. And we all know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men…

Have you ever had this happen to you, when you hop headfirst into a task with unbridled enthusiasm only to be met with the realization that you’re missing a whole lot of groundwork that had to be in place? Did it kill your enthusiasm and make you abandon the whole thing, or did you finish the current task as far as it needed to go and then go back and address the foundational issue?

*Which will be undergoing some plastic surgery with a title change and a new cover, date of release to be announced when I get the others finished.

**I’ve since written short story first drafts with that count in mind to rein it in. My revised stories are currently being submitted, within the proscribed word counts. Wish me luck.

The Price of Magic

So often in all of the entertainment media (movies, tv shows, books, comic books, video games, etc.) when anyone with an aptitude for “magic” does something magical, they are conjuring the magic from… nothing. It just happens for them and the cost is negligible. They wiggle their fingers, utter a spell, wave a wand, etc. and the thing they want to happen happens. Sometimes there are screw-ups for magical effect. One of my favorite examples, even after all these decades, occurred during the adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s novel The Last Unicorn, where Schmendrick accidentally turns the tree into a… woman-tree. While he’s tied to it, no less. And guess where his face ends up? Hilarity. Without getting into spoilers with that one, his amateur grip on magic does have a cost–to someone else.

Dungeons and Dragons (DnD or D&D to you non-geeks out there, and referring to the tabletop role-playing-game) always had a method of keeping the game balanced by giving magic a cost. Either you had so many spells you could memorize a day, and when you used them up you had to rest to recover them. When video games came out, they used a “mana* pool” that would slowly replenish over time, or could be hastened to recover with the use of potions. Diablo was one of the first in my memory** that had a literally globe of the “blue stuff” that depletes when you have your character spam the bad guys with Blizzard or Fireball or what-have-you. Practically all of them make use of this “limited reserve” now.

But what does this mean for the writer? It’s a cheap cop-out when your characters can just “magic” their way out of anything. Being pursued by the Big Bad and ran out of spellpower? Just avoid him long enough to replenish your supply and you can teleport you and your friends to safety.

In other words, a cop-out, deus ex machina, conflict-killing boring non-story.

What if there was a different kind of cost? Two writers I can think of off the top of my head that approached this idea are Orson Scott Card and Holly Lisle.

Orson Scott Card postulates this very question in his book How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, sharing a story about a class he taught (if memory serves) where one student came up with “Blood” as the cost. Whose? was the next question, and that lead to some pretty interesting–if horrifying–costs. But those costs mean excellent conflict, that someone who craved power would do some pretty horrendous things, expending others’ blood, to get what they wanted.

Holly Lisle has several works that use this kind of cost-accounting, but the one that sticks out for me is Diplomacy of Wolves, first book in the series The Secret Texts. It’s the same kind of dire cost, using your own life force to power your magic (if you’re moral) or the life force of someone else (if you’re immoral), rather that the old DnD fallback of “this spell and its use are evil, this spell is good, this spell is neutral” blah blah blah***. I won’t go into details so as not to spoil the story if you haven’t read it, but the handling of the magic and its costs are irrevocably intertwined with the narrative.

Come to think of it, wouldn’t that be a good litmus test? If I could remove the magic part of my story or replace it with gadgets/science, is it really necessary for my story in the first place, or am I just using it as a cop-out because I can’t think of some other way to get my character out of their corner? I have to think this through all the time, and for the most part, I’ve come to prefer writing without the magic, although I’ve got one story I’m planning for that has a MASSIVE cost to use the “magic” and I am rubbing my hands together to get to writing it. But that one is going to be a little while in the writing, as I’m finishing up my Umbra series at the moment…

The TL;DR is this: if you want to write magic, in order to keep it from becoming a solve-all and blowing up your story, think long and hard about the cost, what and who powers it, and who or what pays that price. You never know, you may just come up with some seriously awesome conflicts to throw at your character.

*Not to be confused with “manna”, or “what is it?” which was the edible dew-residue substance from heaven, meant to be made into bread, that God gave to the Hebrews wandering in the desert meant to be gathered for six days out of the week, for sustenance. They got sick of it, and begged God for something else. And boy did He give something else to them… (Exodus 16 and Numbers 11)

**Seeing that my memory is what it is, if you can think of any earlier examples of how the “blue means mana” in a video game, let me know. I’m curious.

***Don’t get me wrong: I love DnD and have ever since Chainmail (I still have my copy, silver foil cover battered all to crap and black comb missing half of its teeth, original nerd players will understand), and I miss DMing, but a game mechanic is one thing, and a basis for good conflict in a novel or story is something else entirely.

Artificial Intelligence – Why or Why Not?

Artificial Intelligence, a staple of science fiction from the first days of the genre, has the talking, thinking computer that has essentially a mind of its own. Some of the more recognizable examples are (and WARNING! There may be spoilers if you haven’t read up on your AI stories):

The Old Man in the Cave, an episode of Twilight Zone (the original one, don’t know if it was done in the “newer” ones, nor do I care, because the latter don’t even exist). This one was working for the benefit of mankind, whether or not they listened to him,HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This one thought it knew better than mankind, and did what it did for their own “good”*,Cyclops from The Postman (the book, it never shows up in the movie),President John Henry Eden from the video role-playing game Fallout 3, and Mister House from Fallout New Vegas,GlaDOS from Portal,Many others

Though the above tend toward the massive, blocky, faceless computers, there are some android examples, given sometimes very human features for various reasons:

Android examples are of course C3P0 (R2-D2 being non-android, though ironically with more personality than Threepio),David from Artificial Intelligence (to become a surrogate child),Synths from Fallout 4 and Wasteland 2 (with a mention of one in the original Wasteland Game, Irwin John Finster**),CSM-101 from Terminator,Rachel among others from Blade Runner,Ash from Aliens (all three of the above for more sinister reasons).

Maybe we’re not at that level, but we are getting there. Anyone use Siri? Alexa? Cortana? There you go. They listen, they learn. Yes, they use a massive database and their “intelligence” comes from that connection to the larger whole, but just like the supercomputers of yesterday being city-blocks-huge just to perform a fraction of the abilities that our pocket-sized computers can do now, so too will that immense “database” be condensed to work in the size of a human brain.

So, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Neutral. Just like any tool that can be used for good or evil, it’s a neutral tool, with no emotions (yet) of its own***. Unlike tools, those that can learn will start to blur the line between what makes a man a man (his physical, natural-born body, his mind?) and an emulation of that that is good enough to pass for human may start to be considered human, and all kinds of ethical questions will arise from that. My opinion? It’s not worth it.

We’re already seeing what programmed brains are doing to damage the world. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that a lot of those uses of AI in fiction take place in a post-apocalyptic world.

*I’ll be the first to say here that HAL 9000 is no different than the politicians of today who think (are programmed to “think”) they know better how to steer our lives than we do.

**I guess they like their triple names.

***Although, like with my ex-boyfriends, emotions can be faked…

Rejection of Conflict = Awful Stories

Conflict. No one really likes it. Civil people go to great lengths to avoid it, in many cases, choosing paths like “compromise” or “diplomacy” instead of head on aggression. But conflict isn’t always about fighting in hand to hand combat, or two people screeching at the top of their lungs at one another. It can be something that stands in the way of us getting what we need, what we desire. Sometimes it’s a sentient kind of conflict, like our mother telling us no cookies until after dinner. Other times that conflict arises from Acts of God: the wheat farm we were well on our way to whipping into a profitable venture gets wrecked by a single nasty hail storm, destroying all of our hard work. That handsome guy you see on at the shooting range only has eyes for his Taurus Judge, so how do you make him notice you?

You may have heard about the “Man versus” kinds of conflict back when you were in school, such as:

Man vs. ManMan vs. MachineMan vs. SupernaturalMan vs. NatureMan vs. Himself

Not that these are the only kinds of conflict, to be sure, but they all have that thing in common that keeps “Man” from getting what he needs or desires.

So why are so many new writers coming up with fiction that eschews any kind of conflict? The stories seem to be less about characters and more about puppets that “happen through” circumstances. The characters end up being stale, flat, unlikeable “Mary Sue” or “Gary Stu” or whichever name you prefer (Although I think it ought to be renamed for that awful Rey from the *puke* new Star Wars movies). They all boil down to zero character growth, an incredibly dull story and, honestly, little reason for the story to exist in the first place*.

BOB: “You hear that WonderDude caught that bus of school children when it veered off a cliff?”

BILL: Yawns. “WonderDude does what WonderDude does.”

I’m going to take a stab here and say that there are two things that may be culpable for this lack of conflict.

The first is one all authors are guilty of to some degree. We have these characters that we have grown to love writing, and are loathe to put through any permanently scarring events or hurt them. Maybe we can’t hurt them because they’ve got to carry a whole series of books, so we do as little harm as possible, but this makes for coma-inducing stories because nothing happens. We remove all the stakes, we destroy the value of what happens to our characters. Like parents who coddle their children, keeping them safe from the outside world.

Which brings me to my next point: that a lot of younger, new writers have no knowledge of conflict because they’ve never experienced it. I personally know of one couple who made it their mission to never say “No” to their child. Guess what? She quickly turned into an obnoxious brat. When the mother and very young daughter visited my home (unexpectedly, this is important, because my home was not childproof) and the daughter started to get into places she shouldn’t, and was just about to do something that would get her hurt, I told her “no”. Pretty sharply. That got her attention, but guess what happened? The girl had a blubbering meltdown encountering such a mean old word, simply because her parents had coddled and soothed her by giving in to her every whim. Needless to say she became a horrible and ill-tempered brat in short order and unless something big happens in her life, will probably be that way into adulthood**.

There’s a generation out there that throws tantrums when they don’t get their way, and there are also plenty out there who have never had to work for anything, in every sense of the word. Lawnmower parenting*** is destructive to the child and the parent alike, but worse for the child who never has to face challenges or consequences for their actions. What happens when mom or dad isn’t there any longer to help them? There’s an episode of Night Court (remember that show? Boy, I feel old) where the lecherous lawyer Dan falls in love with an awkward daughter of a millionaire, but if the romance continues, her father will cut off her money. She can’t go through with a romance without money, and professes that she “ran away” once (had their chauffeur take her to another home they owned) and “almost died” because she couldn’t use the can opener. Lawnmower parents are like the girl’s rich father and his money. She can’t operate without it. (That episode is “Married Alive” if you’re interested.)

People who grow up without any consequences, without conflict can’t write conflict. Why? Because you can’t know what you don’t know. How do you fix that? I hate being the one who brings up a problem without a potential solution or two, but on this one I am stumped. I went to college as an adult and heard the most whining from kids right out of high school, and thought to myself “the real world is going to chew you up and spit you out.” But I guess the opposite happened, and they bullied the world around them into behaving the way they want it to, to accommodate them whenever, wherever and however they liked. Their character (personality sense of the word, not fictional being) was not shaped by the overcoming of adversity, and they are stuck in the terrible infant phase. I’m not sure you can fix that.

But! But the fiction can be fixed. We authors can introduce lots of conflict to shape their characters’ (in the fictional being sense of the word, as well as their fictional being’s personality) growth arcs, the bettering of their humanity if you will, by throwing them up against obstacles that help them to face the flaws that stand in their way of getting what they need and desire. From my previous examples, the child could either defy the parent and get to the cookies themselves (more of the tragedy, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I route), or exercise patience and mother rewards them with more cookies than expected. Should that Act of God destroy everything, a terrible infant would throw a tantrum and demand insurance pay for it all, but the man of character reassesses what blessings he still has, praises God that neither he nor his family were harmed, picks himself up by the bootstraps and starts over, blooming into a man of courage, strength and determination. What about getting that guy who worships the Taurus Judge? Well, maybe you brush up on your own skills and knowledge about a large range of firearms (bettering yourself) and a different guy who has real respect for the skill and safety asks you out (turns out the guy with the biggest weapon may not be the best the most impressive, and was just there to show off anyway).

Conflict. Don’t run. Fight. Make it a story worth reading.

*Unless you’re just writing fan fiction to please yourself and practice the craft. Unfortunately most of the garbage being published by the big companies and made into movies is just that–fan fiction that distorts existing characters into something unrecognizable to suit their particular desires/demographic.

**Let’s hope she’s not out there writing stories, but if she does, I won’t be surprised if she included some mean old witch that told her perfect protagonist “no”.

***Steamroller parenting might be more accurate, because a lot of people get crushed when their kind runs over them.