I have to admit that I'm a secret fan of this cliché.* You know how it goes: hero devotes his life to defeating bad guy. Hero finds out he's related to bad guy. Hero undergoes serious mental trauma as a result. It's one of the oldest and most venerable fantasy clichés, with roots steeped in mythology.** And yet it endures to the present day. The appeal of this cliché is obvious. We like our protagonists to suffer, and what greater torment can there be than learning that you're closely related to the very thing you despise? That kind of discovery can only lead to self-examination, self-doubt and maybe even self-loathing – exactly the kind of internal battle we love a hero to struggle with. Not only that, but it's a battle we can relate to. We all have a sense of our own identity: a few fundamental characteristics that define us in our own eyes and underlie everything we do, like the pillars holding up a temple roof. Take one of those supports away and the whole edifice begins to crumble.
And, of course, there's still more to it than that. Deep down, I think we all fear that we'll turn into what we hate. Indeed, perhaps we hate certain things precisely because we have the sneaking suspicion that we could easily become them – because we know we have an affinity with the darkness. That's the undercurrent that flows between Skywalker and Vader. Between Holmes and Moriarty.*** It's the conflict between angel and devil that lurks in all of us. In that sense, the I Am Your Father cliché is successful because it speaks directly to our own fundamental anxieties. This is a cliché that has a valid psychological rationale behind it, and for that reason I'm sure it's here to stay. But like all clichés, it has to be used with care. The straightforward implementation that's exemplified by Darth Vader would probably seem too much of an obvious plot device to a modern audience used to such things. Put your own spin on it, though, and it will be one cliché that still has a genuine impact on the reader.**** * Well, not that secret, or I wouldn't have mentioned it online. ** Probably Oedipus. It usually is. *** OK, I'm not aware that Moriarty turned out to be Holmes' father, but you get the point. **** Particularly if you can avoid using the line 'I am your father/mother/brother/great-great-aunt …'
1 Comment
You may be wondering what's wrong with that. Surely having a beard is part of the very definition of a dwarf, just as being tall and ethereally beautiful is part of what defines an elf. But what I'm getting at with 'all dwarfs have beards' is one of the more unrealistic and frankly dangerous fantasy clichés: the notion that the members of any non-human race may be principally characterised by their homogeneity.
In fact, it's not the physical details that worry me. Every species has certain key physical characteristics: humans walk on two legs, eagles fly, dragons breathe fire. So as far as I'm concerned, the dwarfs can keep their beards. But with these physical details tend to come a host of behavioural and psychological characteristics that are much harder to swallow when applied to the species as a whole: all dragons are wise, all elves are brilliant archers, all dwarfs love their beer. And fantasy writers don't stop there. Some even generalise about their own species (does 'all humans are short-sighted aggressive destroyers of the natural environment' sound familiar?). Part of the problem seems to be a confusion between cultural and personality traits. Different human cultures have different traditions, beliefs and moral structures, so it's reasonable to assume that different sentient species would too. The framework through which a dragon views the world, for instance, is going to be very different from that of a human. But cultural standards are not the same as individual characteristics. The point about cultural standards is that the individuals who share them can examine them, question them and deviate from them to a greater or lesser extent. Giving an entire species a shared personality trait, on the other hand, assumes that everyone who is subject to the same cultural and environmental influences will end up the same kind of person – and that's where authors go wrong. It's perfectly plausible that all members of a religion might salute the sun each evening to ensure it rises the next day. It's not so plausible that all those members would be identical in their level of belief in such a ritual. Successful worldbuilding requires a careful examination and understanding of which features of a race or species are cultural, and therefore may justifiably be applied across the entire group, and which are individual and therefore can't. As I said at the beginning, not doing this is dangerous. Why? Because it leads to lazy characterisation based on stereotyping and generalisation. And just as we wouldn't (or shouldn't) accept this for different human groups, we shouldn't accept it for different fantasy races. I am ashamed to say that in the first fantasy book I ever wrote, I actually used the word 'quest' to describe what the main group of characters were doing. I may even have referred to said characters as 'questors'. In my defence, I was probably about twelve and had no idea what was a cliché and what wasn't. And at least I was being honest – because the Quest, in varying degrees of disguise, is alive and well in fantasy today.
The classic example is, of course, Frodo's mission to destroy the One Ring. And then there are the various quests to find a magical item that will enable the defeat of the Dark Lord – the search for the Horcruxes/Hallows in Harry Potter 7 being the most famous recent example. This kind of thing has perhaps become what many people think of when they think of fantasy. So has it been done to death, or is there still room for a quest or two? The thing about this cliché is that authors use it for a reason: it gives them a clear (dare I say easy?) structure to work with. The plot essentially becomes that of a computer game – reach these milestones and collect these tokens to win. In theory, this leaves the author free to concentrate on other things: complex subplots, perhaps, or incisive characterisation. For that reason, the best quests are barely recognisable as such – the quest simply forms the invisible core around which the real story is wound, like the stick at the heart of a big cloud of candyfloss. On the other hand, for the lazy or novice author the quest may be the be all and end all, and therein lies the danger. Because reading a simple quest story is very much like watching someone play the aforementioned computer game: it may be briefly entertaining and even visually flashy, but it's repetitive, shallow and involves no emotional engagement whatsoever. Despite this obvious pitfall, I don't dislike the Quest cliché nearly as much as perhaps I should. And I think the reason for this is that at heart, almost every plot is a quest. Because a quest is really nothing more than the desire to achieve something – and without that, you wouldn't have much of a story. In that sense, the search for a magical object and the search for an end to conflict and the search for love are all the same thing. It's the details that determine whether or not the quest feels old and tired, or transforms itself into something new. After a two-week baby break, I've managed to scratch out a bit of time for blogging again. (I wrote this one in a notebook while the baby slept on my lap and I gradually lost all feeling in my left arm.) So I thought I'd continue my series of posts on fantasy clichés with one of my favourites: the gratuitously uneven fight.
All fantasy fans enjoy a good battle, whether between individuals, groups or armies. And we also like seeing our heroes overcome the odds. There's no tension in a duel if the protagonist is by far the better trained and better armed. The Lord of the Rings wouldn't have been the same if the mighty hordes of Gondor had been facing Sauron's tiny ragtag army. We all appreciate a good underdog. Trouble is, it's easy to take this desire to weigh the scales against our characters too far. An author's thought process might go like this. Say we have a swordsman being set upon by a bunch of thugs in an alley and fighting them off single-handed. Obviously there has to be more than one thug to give the scene its edge – let's make it three. But then, even your half-decent swordsman can defeat three antagonists without breaking a sweat (or so some fantasy would have us believe), so make it five. No, ten. And it would be more impressive if the hero was incapacitated in some way, so let's give him a wound. And take away his sword so he has to fight with a knife. And hell, why not blindfold him as well? At some point, this stops being impressive and becomes ridiculous – first, because it's completely unrealistic, and second, because if the protagonist is so damn good that he can fight off ten men wounded, weaponless and blindfolded, then he's no longer the underdog. He's pretty much invincible. And invincible is boring. I'm not advocating getting rid of the unequal fight. They're fun to write and fun to read. But authors have to tread a fine line when constructing them. It has to be physically possible for the hero to triumph, while still being an extreme enough situation that the reader gets that sense of awesomeness when he does – and, of course, the outcome has to be close enough to the wire that next time a similar problem arises, there's still tension in it. This may all seem obvious, but achieving that delicate balance between dull and laughable is easier said than done. The Web is full of lists detailing fantasy clichés to avoid. Some of those lists have so many different items on them that it would be simply impossible for a writer to avoid them all – and, of course, there's a fine line between the clichéd and the pleasingly familiar. All genre fiction, by definition, contains a certain amount of cliché, and it's not so much what you do as how you do it … but I digress. Because the point of this post, the first in an intended series, is to examine a common fantasy cliché and consider what it is, why it exists and whether it can still work in current fantasy literature.
So to kick off, I've picked the mother, father and perhaps entire ancestry of all clichés: the Chosen One. We're all familiar with it as a plot device: ordinary person discovers he (or she, but it's usually a he) is the one person who can defeat the forces of evil. Think Harry Potter. Think Rand al'Thor. Think Neo from The Matrix. There's usually prophecy involved, noting the signs by which the poor sap can be identified; typically these culminate in the prediction that to defeat evil, the Chosen One must also die himself. (Though as we all know, foretelling is a tricksy business, and frequently it turns out that the prophecy can be read in another way that means our hero isn't doomed to die after all. Which keeps everyone happy.*) The main thing to note about the Chosen One cliché is that it tends to go hand in hand with a simplistic good-versus-evil morality structure. You can't have someone destined to save the world without also having someone or something it needs to be saved from. Where there is a Chosen One, there is also a Dark Lord. And although there may be shades of grey layered on top, the foundations of this type of plot remain black and white. There's never any doubt who you're meant to cheer for. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this. Despite the cliché, people like stories of good versus evil. They like reading about characters who turn out to be special in some way. And, after all, it's hard to get away from this cliché altogether. A POV character will inevitably be involved in whatever great events the story concerns – to the extent of playing a key role in their resolution – because otherwise he or she wouldn't be a POV character. No-one wants to read about a character who sits at home twiddling their thumbs whilst life goes on elsewhere. But the Chosen One is more than that. The Chosen One is drawn in not by choice, but by destiny. I think it's here we see both the main interest and the main drawback of this cliché. Personally I always enjoy reading about a character who is forced to accept a role greater than they could have imagined: how they come to terms with their own importance and the burden of a vast responsibility they didn't ask for. Yet at the same time, that's just it. They didn't choose it. As soon as words like fate enter the picture, an element of free will leaves. And maybe even more interesting than the man who is forced to accept his foretold role as the saviour of the world is the man who has no such guarantee that he will prevail, but sets himself against what he perceives to be evil anyway – not because a prophecy said so, but because he believes it's the right thing to do. * Except, presumably, the forces of evil. I'm currently reading a book – published by a well-respected and long-established publishing house – that I would class as pretty poorly written. It's not bad, in the sense of misspellings and grammatical errors everywhere, but nor does it shine. The prose is pedestrian, frequently verging on dull. The dialogue attribution is littered with unnecessary adverbs (and while I'm not averse to an adverb or two, you do start to notice them when they're used to modify every single speech verb). One of my favourite phrases so far is 'stared desultorily', which suggests to me that neither the author nor the editor understood the meaning of the word 'desultory' and the appropriateness, or otherwise, of applying it to a word so fixed and determined as 'stare'. And given all this, I can't help wondering: what was it about this book that was good enough to get published when so many others fall by the wayside?
The answer, of course, is the concept. Not even the plot – the initial idea. I've read an awful lot of YA books lately, and a large subset of them had two things in common. First, they each belonged to one of the two most popular teen genres at the moment, dystopian fiction or supernatural romance. And second, though none of them were particularly well written, plotted or executed, they all had an underlying concept that was sufficiently interesting for me to have picked up the book in the first place. Which, overall, makes me sad – all these books with so much potential, and yet it's gone largely unfulfilled. Obviously publishers are going to chase trends. I get that. If something is popular then any business is going to want to ride the wave of that popularity while they still can. And because trends are fleeting, and publishing is a lengthy process, perhaps a decision has been taken to reduce the amount of time and money spent on editing. But (and this isn't just because it's my profession) I can't help but see that as a mistake. If traditional publishing houses want to survive in the current world of DIY and ebooks then as well as being more agile, they surely also need to maintain their quality. They have to be able to show that they add value. At present, many people still take the view that it's safer to buy a book from a mainstream publisher than it is from a self-publisher, because they know they'll be getting a certain level of polish. But with self-publishers becoming more savvy, that gap is closing. Which means the one thing traditional publishers can't afford is to churn out second-rate books just to cash in on a trend. It's that kind of thing that will start people questioning what they're for. Having said all that, I suspect there may be another factor at work: namely, that what writers consider to be good writing isn't necessarily the same as what readers consider to be good writing. Unpublished writers have a tendency to gather in groups of like-minded individuals, where they spend their time getting picky over whether a sentence expressed one way is better than a sentence expressed a slightly different way. They swear religiously by rules like don't use too many adverbs and use one POV per scene. Yet most of the books I've read lately seem never to have come within spitting distance of those rules. And if that's the case, who are the rules for? Do most readers even care about the overuse of adverbs? Do we, the writers, have a duty to stick to our definition of good writing notwithstanding? Or are we just concentrating on the picky stuff as an excuse for why we haven't sold a million copies already, not realising that the publishers are right: concept is key? I don't have answers to any of these questions, but at the very least they're worth asking. You've spent a year working on the masterpiece that's going to catapult you to success as a published author. You've read every sentence five times. You've tweaked and rewritten, corrected the typos and filled a minor plot hole you didn't notice before. If you polished it any more then you'd only be changing, not improving.
The book is ready for submission. So what do you do with this piece of your soul that you've spent so much time and care on? You print it off any old how, stick it in an envelope and post it to your favourite publisher without even bothering to find out the name of the editor in charge. Why not? Submission guidelines are for wimps. The quality of the writing will speak for itself. It sounds crazy, yet it seems to be what many writers do. I've heard countless publishers and agents say, over and over again, that a large proportion of the submissions they receive don't follow the guidelines they set out. And what happens to those submissions? They go in the bin. There's no point even considering working with a writer who doesn't have the courtesy to follow simple instructions. I'm always amazed by these stories. I can't understand why someone would spend so many hours of their life writing a book, then not be willing to spend just one more hour making sure they're supplying it in the format required. And it doesn't stop there. People write covering letters with spelling mistakes in them. They produce synopses that are stilted and confusing. They don't even bother to find out which agencies and publishers are interested in their genre. All this is a mystery to me. It's like baking the world's best cake, then covering it in sloppy icing and presenting it in a battered old cardboard box. Why wouldn't you give your book the best possible chance to shine? Your chances of being picked up by a publisher are slim enough already, without giving them ready-made reasons to reject you. I've been talking about the traditional publishing route, but the same principles apply to self-publishing. Taking the time to create (or have created) a polished-looking cover, writing a blurb without errors, formatting your text so that it looks right on Kindle and epub as well as in print - all these things are part of showing yourself to be a professional author. Because that's the point. Whatever route we're taking with our books, or hoping to take, none of us like being thought of as amateurs who dabble in literature in our spare time. We're professional writers, and that means we ought to act accordingly. From how we behave in chat rooms to how we deal with rejection, we're presenting ourselves to the world in a certain way. And if we want other people to take what we do seriously, it's time we started taking it seriously ourselves. The A to Z Challenge continues tomorrow. Today is the last Sunday in March, which means we’re about a quarter of the way through the year already. (Tries to restrain sense of overwhelming panic that wells up at that realisation.) So I thought it would be appropriate to look back over the past three months and see how my plan to write every day has been going. In short, it’s not going great. The observant among you may have noticed that the number of days showing on my little homepage counter is slightly fewer than the number of days that have passed so far in 2012. There have been a couple of days when for various reasons – some more valid than others – I haven’t managed to write a word. And with a baby due to arrive in the family soon, I have no doubt there’ll be more of those to come. That’s OK. It’s the spirit of the thing that matters, not following it to the absolute letter. Still, you may be thinking, missing a total of three days in three months is pretty good. I must have got a lot done in that time, right? Well, no. And that’s the point of this blog post. To highlight some of the bad habits I’ve fallen into, so that maybe you can avoid them. (Don’t say I never do anything for you.) First of all, giving myself the goal of writing every day has allowed me to fall into the trap of thinking that if I write something every day, however little, I’m succeeding. So as soon as I’ve written a few sentences, a switch will be triggered in my mind that tells me I’ve done what I need to do. After that, if I’m not careful, it’s very easy to give in to the demands of some other claim on my time (even if that claim is something wholly unimportant, like – just to pick an example at random – singing along to cheesy love songs on the radio). Added to that, more often than not, there won’t be time for more than those few sentences. Because I tend to put it off. I come home after work and I’m tired, so I take a rest (usually in the form of Big Bang Theory and some chocolate). I eat my evening meal. I get sucked into watching a film with my partner or debating the relative merits of white versus cream tiles in the bathroom (we’re very good at spending hours getting all the information we need to make a decision, not so good at actually making it). Before I know it, it’s 10:30 and I’m falling asleep. At which point, I’ll just about manage to scribble a paragraph of some degree of coherence before it’s time for bed. And the next day, I’ll get up and do it all again. Weekends bring a bit more time. But even then, I’m way too easily distracted – mostly, it has to be said, by books. I’ll take a break from writing to have a snack, decide I need to read something while I’m eating, and three hours later I’ll still be reading. This happens even with books I’ve read before. (I probably shouldn’t keep a bookcase of fantasy favourites in my spare-room-stroke-office.) The annoying thing about that is there are plenty of things I could be reading that would be more useful – other writers’ works in progress that I’ve volunteered to give feedback on, or even my own stuff that needs editing. But it’s just not the same. Reading critically requires an entirely different brain from the one I use for reading as a distraction. The secret would be not to pick up the book in the first place, but somehow I just can’t help myself. As a result of all this, yes, I’ve been writing (almost) every day. But the amount I’ve actually got done hasn’t improved significantly on last year. I know the solution to all these problems would be to have more self-discipline. I ought to come home from work and hit the computer for an hour before I do anything else. I ought to get up first thing on a Saturday and get a chapter written before breakfast. I really have nothing and no-one to blame but myself. Yet I’m sure you know how it is. Having a full-time job and trying to be a writer is essentially like having two full-time jobs; sometimes a person just needs to relax and stop concentrating for a while. It’s an excuse, yes, but it’s not a totally invalid one. Still, I haven’t given up. I will try to do better. But if anyone has any suggestions as to how, I’d love to hear them. "Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing." – Stephen King, On Writing All of us, at one time or another, have probably sat through the same English class. You know: the one where the teacher got you to write a paragraph describing an everyday object in new and unusual ways. The one where the difference between similes and metaphors was hammered out as laboriously as your homework on a Sunday afternoon.* The one where you had to come up with better synonyms for overused adverbs like 'quickly' and 'loudly'. (No-one told you that in ten years' time you would come to look upon all adverbs as a thing of evil.) At the end of the lesson, you left with a head full of purple prose and the vague feeling that you'd never be able to look at a cloud again without seeing sky-sheep grazing on an endless field of cornflowers, but you'd also absorbed one key message. Description is Important. What you probably didn't learn at school – or at least, I certainly didn't – was when and where to use these new-found skills in a piece of fiction. Personally, back then I was under the impression that the right thing to do was start a chapter with a nice long description to set the scene, before launching into the action. And indeed, I can remember reading plenty of books at the time that followed that kind of structure. If the description was too long then I'd skim it (being more interested in plot than beautiful words in those days), but nevertheless I thought it was the convention. Write the opening description, write the following action, then stitch the two together. Whether that was true or not (and I think it becomes more so as you look further and further back in time), things have now changed. The move away from third-person omniscient and towards third-person limited – the tendency to stick to one character's viewpoint for the course of at least an entire scene, rather than hopping from person to person – means that this kind of description is usually no longer appropriate. The omniscient narrators of the past would describe a scene from their own perspective and with authorial asides to the reader; they had no problem intruding upon their own narrative. Today's writers, with close POV as their mantra, don't have that option. It feels artificial for a character to stand around describing the landscape for several paragraphs before getting on with whatever they're doing. Description has to be integrated into the character's other experiences and perceptions – and it has to be specific to that character. Of course, this doesn't mean being able to write good descriptions is no longer important. In fact, it means the exact opposite. Authors can no longer indulge themselves in two pages of clever wordsmithery about exactly how dark and stormy the night was. Rather than being separated from the characters, description becomes part of them. In a close third-person or first-person novel, good description is both brief and idiosyncratic. It gives the reader a mental picture of what's being described, but it also reveals something about the character whose viewpoint it's written from. And that's actually a lot harder than the kind of description we learned at school. These days, we can no longer treat description as being distinct from a character's thoughts, dialogue or actions. When writing close POV, all these things stem from the character herself. Anything that's described is described for a reason: because it's what was important or noticeable to that character at the time. Someone who's in a strange place will observe all kinds of details, particularly those that differ from his previous experience. Someone who's afraid for her life will focus on what might have an impact on her chances of survival. Someone who's deeply upset may very well be more caught up in himself to the exclusion of the world around him. And so on. As for comparisons, take this: there was a metallic scraping sound, like a sword being drawn from its sheath. All well and good, you may say … unless the POV is that of the archetypal farmboy who's never seen (or heard) a sword in his life. In that case, even if you know it's a sword, he'd be much more likely to compare it to a chinking bridle or a piece of machinery. In short, to all questions of description – what makes a good description? how frequently should I add them to my writing? how do I know if my descriptions are too florid or too sparse? – there is now a single answer: it depends whose viewpoint you're writing from. Know your characters inside out, and everything else will follow. * See what I did there? Write Every Day: tip of the week Take a short descriptive scene that's written from one character's point of view, and try writing it from the POV of another participant in that scene. How do the descriptions vary? Do the two people notice different things, or the same thing in different ways? Are the descriptions appropriate to their personalities and previous experiences? Sorry I'm late (again). In my defence, I've recently gone through a significant life change. Brace yourselves: I have just entered the last year of my twenties.
I know – shocking, isn't it? Well, actually it is shocking. I remember looking ahead to the distant day when I'd reach the grand old age of 30, envisioning all the things I'd have achieved by then. And now I have less than a year left before that milestone arrives. The question is, have I actually done anything I thought I was going to do? As always, it seems far easier to bring to mind everything that hasn't happened as I intended it to. (People are good at beating themselves up that way.) For example, when I was thirteen or fourteen I fondly imagined that by the time I was in my twenties I would be confident, poised, glamorous and outgoing. I had visions of myself swanning around in discreetly expensive clothes, displaying charm and wit and generally being wonderful. My house would be full of beautiful things and look as though it had sprung straight from the pages of a lifestyle magazine, and I would know how to deal with every social situation I came across without blushing like a radish and stumbling over my words. Cue undignified snort. Funny how when we're in our teens, we think becoming an adult will somehow give us a personality transplant. Truth is, I'm still the mildly awkward, scruffy geek I always was – only now I don't mind. I should never have aspired to all that superficial outward polish. I should have aspired to what I actually ended up with: pride in who I am. Maybe if we took the time to examine our longstanding hopes for ourselves and our lives, we'd realise how many of them come from outward expectation and social convention – from what other people think is worth having, rather than what we've chosen for ourselves. So let's set aside the things I thought I wanted, and cut down to the core: the things I'd still choose if I were to re-evaluate my ambitions today. When I look at that list, it turns out I've achieved more than I thought. I have a master's degree and a job that's genuinely interesting. I have my own house, even if it is a lot more, shall we say, cluttered than the one I envisaged when I was younger. I have a wonderful partner and a baby on the way. I have a lot. Yet there's one thing that still stands out, my first and deepest ambition: the only thing I really want beyond what I already have. And if you know me at all then you probably already know what it is. I want to be a published author. That's the killer – the one goal I haven't achieved and the one I've never stopped wanting. I've wanted it ever since I was six and wrote my first book (about a flying rabbit with superpowers). Of course, back then I thought it was going to be easy. As I've been climbing the mountain it's got steeper and steeper, the summit harder to reach, but I've also picked up the tools I need along the way. And I suppose that's the point, isn't it? When I was younger it was easy to set myself these goals, because I didn't have a clear idea of what they would involve. I thought I could reach the mountaintop armed with nothing more than a raincoat and a light snack. Over the years – as I've slipped and fallen, taken detours, and sometimes stopped for months at a time to enjoy the view – I've come to recognise the extent of my former ignorance. But I've also, slowly and steadily, equipped myself with the knowledge and experience I need to finish the climb. So there it is. I've still got a year to get to the top, and I think I'm ready at last to make the final ascent. Fingers crossed I'll see you up there. In the meantime, we could all do worse than take a moment to be proud of what we are, what we've already done and what we believe we'll achieve in the future. Due to birthday-related shenanigans, Write Every Day tips will be back next week. |
Archives
July 2016
Categories
All
|