Heroes, anti-heroes, and misaligned moral compasses

A degree or two off course doesn't lead you wrong at first.  At least, not too wrong that you can't self-correct.

But eventually that wrong course, that misaligned compass, leads one too far afield, and there's no way back to the place you thought you were going.

A misaligned moral compass can take your characters to interesting places, regardless of if you are writing heroes or anti-heroes.  Of course, then one of the biggest challenges you have is making it clear that you, as the writer, are not advocating said moral failings.  It's a story about a flawed person. 

Take, for example, Ken Connell.

Who?

OK, it's not the most famous example, but roll with me.

Ken Connell was the main character of the flagship title of Marvel Comics's fascinating failure, The New Universe.  The underlying concepts behind the New Universe were interesting, but much of the execution was disorganized and flawed. 

The Star Brand was essentially combining Superman and Green Lantern into one concept: a tattoo-like power source that could be given to another, granting the owner incredible power only limited by his or her imagination.  Possessed by the right man, it could be an incredible force for good.

Ken Connell is not the right man.  But he really wants to believe that he is.  He totally sees himself as a good guy who could do more and be great.

In other words, he's exactly the guy to buy into his own hero-destiny narrative.

In truth, Ken is kind of a loser.  He works in a auto-repair shop, and is constantly talking about how much smarter he is than anyone else around him.  He's got a lovely girlfriend who dotes on him, whom he consistently cheats on with a teenage girl who is so enamored of him that she happily slips out his back window in her underwear when his actual "girlfriend" shows up unannounced.  (It's worth noting that he hides the StarBrand power from his girlfriend, but tells the teenager on the side all about it.)

He's that guy who is constantly complaining that life never gave him "his shot", but even with nigh-infinite power he doesn't do much to change his life.  He does keep trying to do "good", in an abstract way, but he really isn't the good man he wants to think he is.  When confronted with an "unstoppable" villain-- a soldier whose body has changed to be indestructible, and has decided to just walk into Russia and wreck the place*, Ken tries to do the "right" thing to stop him.  But he can't stop him, so he just picks him up and flings him into space. 

And also, Ken destroys the city of Pittsburgh. Not out of malice, but because he was too lazy to fly all the way to the moon to do an experiment with his power that he knew would be explosively dangerous. 

But a lot of people believed that Ken was being presented as some sort of ideal, some sort of personal-avatar by then Editor-in-Chief at Marvel Jim Shooter.  This mostly because Jim, like Ken, is tall and from Pittsburgh, and also because a lot of people did not like Jim and wanted to paint him in a bad light.**

The New Universe failed for a lot of reasons, but I think partly because audiences at that time weren't interested in "heroic" characters who were so flawed, so ordinary.  It's funny, because plenty of stories like the New Universe and StarBrand have come up since.***   Characters who do the wrong thing for interesting reasons, and end up where they never wanted to be, and are only heroes in their own mind.

Ken is not a good guy, and is never presented as that.  He never understands that he's not the hero of the New Universe, but it's most dangerous villain.

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*- This was 1987.
**- In fact, having Ken destroy Pittsburgh was a decision made after Shooter was ousted, essentially a "Ha, we're having your hero destroy your city" pettiness.
***- Though, to be fair, with better overall execution and coherence of vision.

Fantasy Worldbuilding: Drinks and Weapons

All right folks, here's where I lift up the hood and show you the cheat codes...

Er, that metaphor is rather mangled.

The point is, I'm going to show you some inner-workings of worldbuilding, based on my research, to give you the simplest tools to set the technology level of your fantasy world.  With those building blocks, you can focus on more interesting elements.  That, in turn, should help you avoid "generic medieval" or "generic steampunk".

So, the course of civilizations has many, many benchmarks that you can use, but on some level, the easiest are what people drink and what they fight with.  With that, you can break down the pre-industrial era into six basic phases.

Phase One: Beer and Bronze.  Beer, of course, pre-dates bronze.  Beer is one of our oldest inventions.  The origins of beer and bread are intertwined; historians aren't even sure which came first, but both involve grains, yeast and fermentation.  But it does go hand in hand with bronze age, dawn of civilization stuff.

Phase Two: Wine and Iron. Wine comes about with the classical age, the drink of choice for thinkers of distinction.  But it also represents the point where civilization strives to be a bit more than just collective survival.  And it's good for a setting of "civilized" people who think they're above the "barbarians" around them.

Phase Three: Spirits and Steel. Transition from dark ages to Renaissance, this is what you have.  Probably the most traditional thing to use for a "fantasy" novel. 

Phase Four: Tea and Canons.  This is where you might transition to a "wider world" level of fantasy-- sea trade and expansion of thought. 

Phase Five: Coffee and Muskets.  A more civilized, controlled version of the previous version, but also more revolutionary.  Coffee was often connected with subversive thought, the drink of choice for folks who would stay up late discussing ideas away from the mainstream.  Well, that still hasn't changed.

Phase Six: Soda and Pistols.  This is simplifying things, but if you're going steampunk, don't forget that carbonated beverages were drank as early as the late 1700s. 

Now, of course, that doesn't mean that you can't cheat, cheat like CRAZY on this stuff.  Because that's how good worldbuilding surprises us: taking what we expect and subverting the hell out of it.    Don't just wedge your story somewhere between Phases Three and Four because that's what "fantasy" is supposed to be.

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Further reading, for the drinks side of things here: A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage.  Good worldbuilding research book.  Check it out.

Perils of the Writer: Heroic Support and Infrastructure

Most of what I write essentially involves one or two key characters who, through choice or circumstance, have to go out and do hard, heroic things.  Of course, sometimes these hard, heroic things aren't exactly heroic.  They might be self-serving or even downright criminal. But the key thing is the characters themselves believe in the fundamental rightness of what they are doing, no matter what else the world tells them.

However, in most cases, they can't do it alone.  Even the most die-hard of "loner" characters have a deep bench of help and support characters to get the job done.  Batman can't Batman if he doesn't also have Alfred, Jim Gordon, Lucius Fox, Dr. Leslie Thompkins, Barbara Gordon and Dick Grayson in the mix with him.

I've been thinking about the archetypes of these support and infrastructure characters, how I've usually expressed them in these works.  It's not been a conscious thing, a checklist of, "Oh, I need this"-- but when I look back at each works' set of dramatis personae*, I see most of the archetypes represented.  Of course, each of these things aren't limited to one character each: one character could fill many roles, and some roles can be fulfilled by multiple characters.  This is hardly a fully representative list of "this is what you must have". 

A Hero needs someone who knows the things they don't. Heroes that know everything are not particularly interesting.  It's good to have someone in their corner who gives them information they specifically need to figure out what do to.  Not necessarily someone to put the pieces together for them, but someone who can say, "Here are the pieces for you."

A Hero needs someone to tell them hard truths. Any hero that's worth reading about is going to stray from their path, get their moral compass out of alignment, or otherwise have a blind spot.  Someone needs to be there to smack them across the head and tell them the thing they won't tell themselves.  Things that they don't want to hear, but probably need to.

A Hero needs someone with authority. Much like the previous point is about keeping the hero in check, I think a hero needs to have to answer to someone, in one way or another, to keep them from just having carte blanche to do whatever.  An unrestrained hero is also uninteresting.

A Hero needs someone to patch them up.  This is twofold: someone to physically heal them when they get hurt, and someone to pull them out of the abyss when things go wrong.  The first is just common sense, and doesn't even necessarily involve a character so much as infrastructure.  But a specific character is probably more interesting.
 
Do not use this as a checklist: that would probably get you in a lot more trouble.  I may use the word "need" a lot in this, but take that with a grain of salt.  Above all, a story needs what it needs. 

There is one deliberate omission, something I was going to put, and then erased, but it's worth mentioning: Someone with loyalty.  I mostly erased it because, to a degree, that loyalty is implied in all the other elements.  But I also erased it because it implies that the loyalty to the hero is something that is deserved rather than earned.  The hero must earn that loyalty.  The hero must KEEP earning it.

Plus, the conflict that arises from a rock-like loyalty being shaken?  That's real juicy stuff to write.




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*- I always write up a Dramatis Personae for each book, mostly because I need a quick reference for the names of minor characters. 

Perils of the Writer: Writing on Shuffle

I am not a NaNoWriMo person.  I don't think it's a bad thing to do, per se, but I do think it sets an artificial ideal of breakneck pace over, you know, writing a good novel.  But I do think it's a good way to learn about your own writing habits and needs, and to learn how to write a novel. 

But you eventually reach a point where every month is a NoWriMo, and you've got to run that at your own pace. 

Which is what I've been doing with Banshee.  Since mid-September, when I really officially "started" it (I had had about 4,000 words and copious notes already), I've been writing 500 words per day as a minimum quota.  Every day*, I've written at least that, sometimes more.  Now, on no day did I write the NaNo minimum (1,666), but that's probably a good thing.  A. I've got other stuff to do, and B. that could burn me out.

Burn-out pace is no way to write. 

That said, I've hit several walls.  Several times I've hit points where, on any other project, I would get stuck, and spin my wheels, stare at a blank screen, etc.  But here?  I've been jumping around.

Now, I've jumped around before, but usually it's along the lines of, "I'm stuck here, so I'm going to jump ahead to THIS PART, and then come back to fill in the gaps between later" or "I need a scene where X happens somewhere down the road, so I'll write it now and figure out how to get to it when I need to."   In other words, I'll jump, but remain fairly linear in my jumping. 

This is not what I'm doing on Banshee. 

I am jumping ALL OVER THE PLACE.  I mean, I know the general outline, so I know how the plot goes from A to B to C to D.  And most of my shuffling has been between A and B.  So far A involves setting up a bunch of dominoes, and B involves rebuilding after knocking them all down.  Both are fun in their own way.  Both are frustrating and blocking in their own way.

So I'm jumping around. 

Which can be very helpful, because I can write something in B, and think, "Oh, I need to properly set this up", and slip it in something in A. 

On the other hand, it can be confusing, because I sometimes forget what I need to set up, or what I've already set up.  For example, last night, I started writing a bit where one character talks about needing to ask another character to do something.  Except I already wrote the bit where he asks, and that bit takes place before the bit I was writing.  It was utterly redundant. 

And that's where I run into trouble: I'm not quite sure, at this stage, when I'm reiterating or reinforcing a key point, or if I'm just repeating it. 

Not to mention, I get confused about how my main character feels about certain characters at any given point.  She has a fair amount of trust in one character at B that she wants nothing to do with in A... and sometimes I screw that up and the trust retroactively bleeds into A.  Whoops.

It's a rough draft, of course, but it's shaping up to be a far rougher rough draft than I typically write.  Which is okay.  That's what editing is for.


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*- To be fair, on Saturday I only hit 300ish words.  But I also was doing a ton of prep work and organization for a huge event on Sunday, while also hosting a house guest.  Frankly, only failing quota by a small margin under those circumstances was pretty damn impressive, in my humble opinion.

Perils of the Genre Writer: Prophecy and Inevitability

Given my frequent mentions of Edding as, if not an influence, at least an inspiration, it’s no surprise that I think about prophecy as a tool in the fantasy writers' box.  It's a troubling and challenging tool to use, of course.  Make prophecy too obscure, and you're filling the page with strange semi-poetic rambling which doesn't make much sense, often followed by a post-game debriefing where characters thread the needle of explaining how the prophecy made perfect sense, or otherwise telling the audience what the symbolism meant.*   Make it too direct, and you're just dragging the characters by the nose from point to point, with very little tension or doubt.

Some of my earlier storytelling attempts followed the latter approach.  To bad effect.

Prophecy can serve a lot of purposes, especially in a story where the relationship with the divine is more direct. It can be as literal as the gods themselves serving the Wise Mentor role, telling the protagonists what they need to do.  Or it can be a test from the gods, to see if the characters can figure out what they are supposed to do.

Now, being a bit of a classicist, I'm quite fond of the misunderstood prophecy.  Now, the most traditional form of this is one where someone hears a prophecy, and their actions to avoid it cause it to happen.  Oedipus's father leaving baby Oedipus in the forest to die being the most famous example.

But the other form of it is the one I really love, where the prophecy seems to be telling the protagonist the thing they want to hear; for example, Macbeth believes he cannot be defeated once he hears that "no man of woman born can harm Macbeth".

Of course, Macbeth wasn't being told he couldn't be defeated.  He was being told the explicit circumstances of his defeat:

MACBETH
                               Thou losest labour.
 As easy mayst thou the intrenchant air
 With thy keen sword impress as make me bleed.
 Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests;
 I bear a charmed life, which must not yield
 To one of woman born.
 

MACDUFF
                                         Despair thy charm,
 And let the angel whom thou still hast served
 Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb
 Untimely ripp'd.

Whoops.  Walked into that one.

Of course, the big questions you should ask yourself is, does your story need prophecies?  Or are you using it because it is an expected trope in fantasy?



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*- While the third season of Babylon 5 is largely excellent, there probably was no scene more awkward or painful than the bit in "Shadow Dancing" when a few characters hash out the imagery of Sheridan's dream, scene by scene.

Worldbuilding: Shortcuts for Language Building

When it comes to worldbuilding, especially fantasy worldbuilding, constructing a language is the sort of thing you sometimes feel you ought to do, especially since Tolkien set the standard by not only building several languages, but their historical evolution.

That's hardcore linguist stuff, and you shouldn't go there unless you've got love for it. 

And let's face it, the bulk of the constructed language stuff only exists for small percentage of purists in your audience. 

But, let's say you wanted to have that hint of the larger language-- just that hint of verisimilitude, so when you drop an "othered" word in your manuscript it doesn't feel like you threw a handful of Alpha-Bits on your desk to get your word. 

So, the easiest way to accomplish this is not to worry too much about grammar and vocabulary.  If you don't need to construct complete sentences on a regular basis in your manuscript, there's no need for it.  But what you can do, without too much work, is figure out what the building blocks of the words are, and use that to create a sense that the language has a consistent framework. 

One way is to familiarize yourself with the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is a simple, codified way to express about every sound the human mouth can make.   You don't have to memorize or master it (I certainly haven't), but get a sense of it. 

From there, you can figure out what phonemes and morphemes can exist in the language.  You don't need to come up with an alphabet, or even if the language is alphabetic (like English and Romance languages), syllabic (like Japanese) or logographic (like Chinese).  You just need to know what sounds are allowed. 

Now, devise a consistent way to express these allowed sounds.  In a way, this is creating the alphabet, but specifically you're creating the transliteration of your language, using the symbols you can readily type.  (You could just use the IPA, but that might frustrate readers.)   But it's important to make it consistent.  English can be a maddening language in that sense: "straight", "wait', "weight" and "late" all rhyme, but express the same vowel sound four different ways.  This can also minimize your own confusion when you go to make a new word.

This will also prevent you from making typical "fantasy language" errors-- namely, throwing in accent marks or apostrophes or excessive use of the letters "æ"or "y" to make it seems like a Fantasy Language word.  I'm not saying you can't use accent marks or apostrophes or the letters "æ"or "y", but if you create a clear set of transliteration rules, then they won't come off as random.  They'll be a consistent feature of the words of that language.

And that will make it feel more real, without having to invent the whole thing.

Dueling Query Letters!

This time around we have two variant query letters for the same project, courtesy of Amy Judd.  Let's see what we can do for her:

Version One:

Genieve Hart is about to grow up –but not in a way she expected.
              
Born one of the Marked, Genieve expected to learn about her gift in her home city-state. That was until a benefactor betrayed her to the Council. Wrongfully accused, Genieve faces incarceration or a fantastical escape with the help of sky pirates. Getting in contact with the Resistance was easy, as easy as falling face first into the middle of an uprising war. Haunted by strange dreams, and an all-knowing spirit Genieve begins to understand exactly what her Mark’s power is. In the meantime discovering who’s her friend and who’s her foe, but not before it’s too late.

Aleister Malakim is willing to sacrifice anything – or anyone to conquer the City-States.  Even if that means kidnapping, using his own Mark, or filling the atmosphere with falling air ship, all trying to cash-in on the bounty on Genieve’s head.  All he needs to make the Malakim Regime’s rise to power absolute is Genieve’s cooperation.

MECHANICS OF FATE is a Steampunk Fantasy novel, complete at 109,000 words. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,

Amy Judd

Version 2:

Dear Mr. Maresca,

Genieve Hart is about to grow up---but not in the way she expected.

Born one of the Marked, she expected to learn about her gift in her home city-state. That is until one of her supposed benefactors betrayed her unusual talents to the Council. Falsely accused of a terrible act, Genieve faces incarceration. She chooses instead to make an escape with the help of sky pirates. Getting in contact with the Resistance was easy, so easy that she fell face first into the middle of a civil war. As Genevieve is haunted by strange dreams and an All-Knowing Spirit, she becomes fully aware of her power designated by the Mark. Discovering who’s her friend and who’s her foe is important but it’s too late…

Aleister Malakim is willing to use anything or anyone to conquer the City-States even if that means kidnapping or using the power of his Mark. His ambition succeeds in filling the sky with air ships all trying to cash in on the excessive bounty on Genieve’s head.  What he needs to make the Malakim Regimes’ rise to power absolute is her cooperation.

Mechanics of Fate is a steampunk fantasy novel, complete at 109,000 words.
Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Amy Judd

In both cases, I think that first sentence is doing you more harm than good.  That sentence is almost a cliché, and even if your story is following that trope, announcing it right off the bat will probably shut more agents down.  Plus you should consider using that first space for a more personalized greeting of the agent in question.

FIRST PARAGRAPH (both versions) : I think you're trying to overpack a lot of concepts in here, that may go above an beyond what you ought to do in a query letter.  It's loaded with high-concept key words: Marked, gift, benefactor, sky pirates, Resistance, All-Knowing Spirit, etc.  It's a bit overwhelming.  Remember that you don't have to explain everything in the query.  However, while at the same time, there's a certain vagueness which can make the whole thing sound generic. 

Generic is the last thing you want. 

Case in point: "her city-state".  Does it have a name?  "Her gift", "her power".  Is this about magic, or something else?  "Resistance"-- who are they resisting, and why would Genieve find that useful?  Are they resisting "The Council", who are similarly vague in their nomenclature?  "A terrible act"-- what, exactly?  "All-knowing Spirit"-- what is that?

The second version is stronger-- "falsely accused" is a bit better than "wrongfully accused", for example (the former implies malignant intent, while the latter merely a mistake).  Same with "middle of a civil war". 

Also, "who’s her friend and who’s her foe" is a bulkier way of saying "who she can trust". 

SECOND PARAGRAPH- The way you've put this together, I'm getting the impression that you're going to be doing some sort of alternating-POV in this book: a chapter of Genieve,  a chapter of Aleister, and back to Genieve.  That's what I infer when I see two separate paragraphs about two different characters.  However, their stories are clearly intertwined, so you might consider dropping this format. 

In general, consider the merits of integrating the two paragraphs to represent the narrative flow a bit better. 

OVERALL:  I think the thing that's hurting this query letter the most is you're going for breadth over depth.  You hit a lot of elements in a generic way as opposed to a few in a specific way, and I think the latter will present a stronger hook.  From my read, these are the points you should focus on, as they represent the drive of the narrative:

• falsely accused
• escapes with sky pirates
• face-first into civil war
• price on her head
• haunted dreams
• who can she trust?

Hope this helps!

Anyone else have a query letter they want an opinion on?  Send it my way.