Posts from the ‘Genre Observations’ Category

Dec 6

Earning/Maintaining a Reader’s Trust: Character/Narrator Consistency and Reliability (part 3 of 3)

NOTE: This is the third and final installment in a three-part series on earning and maintaining a reader’s trust. The first part focuses on earning initial trust just at the start of a story, while the second part focuses on how world-building, consequential plotting, and story structure/pacing affect the reader’s trust. This part deals with character consistency/reliability, and I know it’s long. I do apologize for that, but there’s really a lot to talk about here.

Consistent Characterization and Reader Trust

When we write, we create a wide variety of characters, each of whom has different degrees of complexity. Like real people, our characters’ choices, attitudes, personalities, and decisions are shaped by their experiences. The most memorable characters are those that are shown to be complex, to have foibles and flaws as everyone else. Readers appreciate flawed characters, but what matters is that their flaws and behavior are consistent with the events of the story. Some people claim that they like to be surprised by characters, but there is a big difference between letting the plot surprise us, and letting a character do so. Character actions should be an inevitable consequence of their natures, and their experiences before and during the story.

Every decision a character makes must logically follow from the experiences our reader has observed through the story. In Les Misérables, Hugo shows us the moral quandary that Marius Pontmercy finds himself in on the eve of revolution: should he join his friends on the barricades or escape with the love of his life, Cosette? Hugo establishes this as a real choice for Marius, one that forces him to choose between two equally “right” values (according to his own value system). As the reader, we understand that he can believably go either way on the choice. Which makes his final decision and the reveal both a surprise (either of the two options would have been) and satisfying.

The seeds of every major (and most minor) choice should be planted well in advance. The hard part, is to plant seeds that allow for branches of equal probability. If the character only has one plausible recourse, then where does tension derive from? This is one of my most frequent complaints about portal/quest fantasies, in particular those of the “prophesied monarch” sub-type. As I’ve grown older (and more curmudgeonly) I have found it very difficult to get any emotional tension out of this kind of story. They become predictable and dull, because I know a priori that every complication the hero runs into will at some point be resolved, and that every mistake he makes will be fixed by the end. The prophecy (which is all too rarely actually ambiguous) will take care of matters in the end.

By setting up characters who have real choices to make internally, and who have real conflicts amongst themselves, we maintain the reader’s interest in the underlying story – which is a prerequisite for maintaining their trust. If the character does something that was not adequately prepared for, something so surprising that it comes out of left field, then the reader may be shocked into losing all trust in the story.

Consider for a moment Star Wars. Would the story have worked if in Return of the Jedi Princess Leia betrayed the rebels to the Empire? No. It might have worked (though yielded a very different story) if Han Solo had done so (for money), or if Luke turned to the Dark Side. But Leia? There was nothing in her character to make such a choice remotely plausible. It would have been a bridge too far, a leap of faith that the audience would have been unwilling to follow.

However, this does not mean that characters need to always be reliable. In fact, one of my favorite methods of playing with reader trust is the use of an unreliable narrator/character.

Structures that Enable Trusting in Unreliable Storytelling

Whether it’s in film (Rashomon, The Usual Suspects, or Citizen Kane) or in prose (Akutagawa’s In a Grove, Nabokov’s Lolita, or Larbalestier’s Liar), I love unreliable narration/characterization. It’s a lever on which my entire understanding of a story can hinge. Executed skillfully, it offers an exponentially broader story experience. But how does the reader trust in a story when the storyteller is shown to be a liar? That’s a question that has been on my mind quite a lot recently, as one of my current WIPs deals extensively with the concept of deception.

In thinking it through, I think I’ve managed to identify five different modes of unreliable storytelling, each of which plays with reader trust in different ways. This list is by no means exhaustive, and I’d love to know other examples:

1	Implicit Unreliability
The narrative voice is strongly imbued with the characteristics of the story’s narrator, thus adopting the inherent biases, idiosyncrasies, or fallacies held by the narrator. These may include a childlike naivete, a desire to rationalize/justify morally reprehensible actions, or strongly held opinions that color the narrator’s perspective. What matters in such stories is that the narrative voice must go beyond the merely functional, and present a particularly close “lived-in” feel. The book’s character/narrator will likely be the most memorable aspect of the book, and this stems entirely from a reliance on the narrator’s voice. The source of the narrator’s underlying unreliability affects our emotional position vis á vis the character: we love Huck Finn or Evie Spooner for their childlike innocence, even as that innocence is shattered by their experiences. We love to recoil from Humbert Humbert, and his beguiling rationalization of his monstrous deeds. We judge Chaucer’s Merchant, and the Wife of Bath for the positions and opinions they hold. At no point in the story itself do we as the author insert ourselves and tell the reader about the veracity of our narrator’s statements. Our job is to present the story as if it were the narrator’s, with whatever inaccuracies or ugliness that entails. The success or failure of these stories rests on their ability to draw us into the character/narrator’s viewpoint. To aid in this process, such stories are often told in first-person to accelerate us into the reader’s head, though that is by no means a requirement. Typically, the reader’s enjoyment derives from a multi-layered interpretation of the text. On the one hand, we can enjoy the events unfold as we share in the narrator’s experiences. On the other hand, we have an intellectual and emotional response to our own interpretation of those experiences based upon our own value systems. We take the facts of the story as given, and generally we do not dispute them. However the moral and emotional implications will be drawn from the reader’s own values and opinions. So long as the narrator is consistent in terms of voice and characterization, the reader will trust that the narrator is supplying the basic facts of the events accurately. However, if the voice is distinct enough, the reader gains that degree of separation that enables that multi-layered interpretation. This makes apparent the fact that the reader is expected to have value judgments that are independent of the narrators’. As a result, the reader will supply their own emotional/moral “truth” , based upon the facts filtered by the narrator. In essence, the reader is expected to trust the facts of the story, but to question the narrator’s interpretation of those facts. The reader’s “trust” in this type of unreliable narrator rests entirely on that narrator’s voice, and its distinctiveness and attractiveness (even if the character is reprehensible). Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Judy Blundell’s What I Saw and How I Lied Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (in particular “The Merchant’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”)
2	Conflicting POVs
When we combine multiple implicitly unreliable POVs, the result is often an interesting structure which throws into doubt the facts of the story. Here, it is not only the moral/emotional implications which need to be supplied by the user, but the facts of the story as well. Most frequently this story relies on presenting a series of narrators, each of whom recounts the same or closely-related events from their own highly subjective perspective. This structure creates a more complex intellectual puzzle than most implicitly unreliable stories, as it requires the reader to parse and analyze what characters want, what they say, and what they do not say. By analyzing the gaps between what different narrators tell us, the reader can infer the “true” facts of the story. The facts of the story are themselves in flux in such stories, and will never be explicitly stated by any of the narrators. And because the underlying facts are ambiguous, so too are the emotional and moral implications of the story as well. This mode relies more heavily on a careful analysis of the details included in particular narrators’ versions of the story. Who includes what details, who mentions what, who justifies what actions, who lies, and when they do so are all vital factors that we need to have carefully mapped out as we write the story. The reader’s trust relies on the non-obvious nature of the “truth”. Because this type of story is a puzzle-box, readers who figure out or intuit the puzzle within the first couple of chapters may lose interest: their intellectual investment will have been wasted. To maintain the reader’s trust, balance must be maintained between all of the perspective characters, in terms of level of detail offered and the reader’s expected emotional investment. Ryanosuke Akutagawa’s In a Grove Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane
3	Explicit Unreliability
In many stories, we are explicitly told that we should not trust the narrator: that their words cannot necessarily be taken at face value. This may be because the character is a self-avowed liar, or is insane, or because a framing device tells us a priori that the story is untrue. In each case, this model puts the reader on alert that they are dealing with an unreliable narrator and forces the reader into a “problem solving” mode of story consumption. This model seems to be especially popular in speculative fiction, where a number of authors (Gene Wolfe in particular) execute admirably. When we read stories like There Are Doors or Soldier of the Mist, we question every statement (however banal) that the narrator makes. In essence, we’re playing a perennial game of gotcha with a chimerical narrator: it is only through the narrator that we can glean insight into the author’s intent, and by catching the narrator out we hope to deepen our understanding of the story’s thematic implications. This is my personal favorite type of unreliable narrator, as when done well, it leaves almost infinite room for conjecture. Books like Soldier of the Mist or Justine Larbalestier’s Liar leave us room for hours and hours of discussion and examination. These stories rely on a combination of factors to maintain reader trust: First, we must balance the narrator’s stated unreliability against the need to ground our reader in the story. This balancing act rests on the idea of uncertainty. In Soldier of the Mist, Latro’s interactions with gods and monsters may be a result of the head wound that gave him his anterograde amnesia. The character acts as though they are real, because he is unaware of this uncertainty. We as the reader need to choose which interpretation we believe: the explicitly stated, skeptical viewpoint? Or the character’s credulous one? We face the same choice, though further complicated, in Justine Larbalestier’s Liar where on the first page our narrator tells us that she is a pathological liar: I was born with a light covering of fur. After three days it had all fallen off, but the damage was done. My mother stopped trusting my father because it was a family condition he had not told her about. One of many omissions and lies. My father is a liar and so am I. But I’m going to stop. I have to stop. I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies, no omissions. That’s my promise. This time I truly mean it. We are at first told that the narrator is a liar, explicitly letting us know that she is not to be trusted. But a moment later we are told that from here on in, everything she says is the truth (“No lies, no omissions.”). At first blush, we might be tempted to believe this. But then two paragraphs further we find two short words which again make us doubt: “This time I truly mean it” (emphasis mine). This push-me/pull-you dynamic is characteristic of these kinds of stories, even when the narrator’s unreliability is more of a background condition (as in Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). In the stories where this explicit unreliability is effective and maintains the reader’s trust, there exists a thematic consistency that encourages dueling interpretations of the text. We can almost look at it has having two separate ways of reading the stories: one where we accept the narrator’s word, and one where we disbelieve most of it. If each interpretation wrestles with similar themes, and if each remains plausible based on the text, the reader’s trust will be maintained. By making the narrator explicitly unreliable, we are entering into a contract with the reader, promising that we will consciously play with “truth” in the story. This is one reason why I was disappointed by James Clemens’ The Banned and the Banished series: in the first novel, Wit’ch Fire, Clemens uses an interesting framing device to establish that the story we are about to read is (ostensibly) false, with hints that this stems from political revisionism. However, as we get into the meat of the story this frame becomes practically forgotten: the story devolves into a fairly standard portal/quest fantasy, with marginal attempts at exploring the ambiguity introduced by the book’s forward. For those of us who like unreliable narrators, ambiguity is like an awesome toy. If the author puts it on the table, we want to play with it. If it’s there, but we aren’t allowed to play, then we feel cheated. However, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Much as I admire Larbalestier’s Liar, I found the constant retractions and restatements tiring. When we craft an explicitly unreliable narrator, we’re asking our reader to pay constant attention to the various plausible interpretations we offer them. The more variants the reader must store in their head, the more tiring the experience will become. In most successful cases, the author introduces the narrator’s unreliability and then leaves us with just two ways of interpreting the story: either based on the narrator’s prima facie interpretation, or taking the narrator’s statements with a grain of salt. In Larbalestier’s case, her story rested upon a narrator who explicitly contradicted her story some twelve times (by my count). This created a swirling cloud of possible interpretations, with many fractal branches to consider. Of course, this was Larbalestier’s thematic goal. However, neither the voice nor the story’s underlying conflict were strong enough to justify the significant investment of effort demanded of me. This may simply be a question of taste, and my own ability to identify with Larbalestier’s character. Regardless of how much I might admire the book’s structural ambitions (which – unquestionably – Larbalestier delivers on excellently), the narrator’s voice was not quite strong enough to maintain my trust. Bottom line: for explicitly unreliable narrators, make sure that their unreliability relates directly to the story’s thematic concerns, be careful of asking the reader to keep too many plausible interpretations in their heads, and try to offset the inherent complexity through an engaging voice and conflicts. Justine Larbalestier’s Liar Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of the Mist Gene Wolfe’s There Are Doors James Clemens’ Wit’ch Fire Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
4	Revealed Unreliability
Revealed unreliability relies on a moment of anagnorisis or discovery regarding the narrator. While more commonly an element in film than in novels, this probably owes its origins to Agatha Christie’s classic mystery The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Stories with revealed unreliability rely on a twist ending where some fact is revealed about the narrator (e.g. their identity, mental state, etc.) which forces the audience to re-evaluate the entirety of the preceding story. Twist endings of this kind are very controversial, and difficult to pull off. Badly rendered twists (text: “It was all a dream!” author: Bahahaha!) are considered a trite cliché. Debate still abounds in the mystery community around whether Christie’s classic is good or bad. That book relies on a narrator who purposefully leaves out vital clues and inserts many red herrings to obscure the killer’s identify – up until the very end of the book, when the killer is revealed. As an early form of this kind of mystery, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is ostentatious by most measures. Even astute and experienced readers of the genre have difficulty figuring out the mystery before the killer is revealed, which is no doubt one source of readers’ frustration. Revealed unreliability has become much more accepted – particularly in the literary community. Nevertheless, it is a difficult feat to pull off effectively. To function properly, the author must take great care to lay the seeds of inevitability such that the “answer” becomes apparent on subsequent readings of the same story. Palahniuk’s Fight Club does this particularly well by establishing the tonal uncertainty of the narrator’s own mind: at no point before the reveal is the narrator explicitly shown to be unreliable, but the narrator’s own doubts as to his reliability create the possibility of the reveal near the end. From what I can see, a revealed unreliability is easier to pull off in film, where the use of visual images can rapidly communicate the revelation to to the audience. Because the train moves very fast, the audience doesn’t have time to feel cheated. Prime examples of this include The Usual Suspects, A Beautiful Mind, and Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. In revealed unreliability, it is very easy for the audience to lose trust at the moment of revelation. The reader’s trust relies on a sense of not being cheated. This relies on the author salting the preceding events with enough hints that before the revelation are innocuous enough, but after the revelation make it seem inevitable. Furthermore, the revelation must fit smoothly and plausibly into the preceding events. If it does not (“It was all a dream!”) then the reader will feel like the author pulled a fast one, and cheated them of a satisfying experience. Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club The Usual Suspects A Beautiful Mind

Everything Relies on Everything Else

In conclusion, everything about reader trust relies on consistently and smoothly introducing the story’s building blocks such that the reader does not notice. I think the train metaphor is a good one for that trust: If the reader can count the rivets on the train, then the train isn’t moving fast enough. The speed at which it moves is only partially a question of pacing. The train’s engine is stoked by the cultural touchstones it relies upon, the narrative voice it is told in, and the author’s precise use of language. It runs on rails of world-building, and story structure, and consistent plotting. And it’s driven by characters who are internally consistent, whether they are reliable or not. If they’re not reliable, then at the very least they need to be functionally unreliable, to have that reliability carefully mapped out by the author so that the reader’s trust is maintained.

This is Reader Trust

Many good stories fall short on one or more of these components. And that’s okay. Honestly, I can’t think of any “perfect” stories that nail every aspect of this. It might be impossible (at least by us mere mortals). But even if they’re not all equally solid, the components do need to balance and work together to earn the reader’s initial investment, to earn their trust, and to keep them turning pages. Which is ultimately the goal: readers show us their trust by turning to the next page.

Dec 3

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Earning/Maintaining a Reader’s Trust: World-building, Story Structure, & Consequential Plotting (part 2 of 3)

NOTE: This is the second installment in a three-part series on earning and maintaining a reader’s trust. The previous installment focuses on earning initial trust just at the start of a story, while this part focuses on how world-building, consequential plotting, and story structure/pacing affect the reader’s trust. The third and final installment dealing with character consistency/reliability ~~will be~~ was published on Tuesday, December 6th, 2011.

Early Days: The Importance of Accessibility

Getting the reader to turn past page one is only the start of the battle. Once we’ve got the reader reading along with us, the next step is to make sure that they stay engaged and gradually become more immersed in our fictional world. I think this rests on the concept of accessibility, and in speculative fiction that accessibility relates very closely to world-building.

When we read, we store all of the salient facts about the fictional world in our brains. We need them to put the story in context: they color how we imagine events unfolding, and they ensure that we understand what it means for the Dothraki to invade Westeros. Cramming all of that information into the reader’s head decreases the book’s accessibility, risks wearing the reader out, and gradually degrades the reader’s trust in the author’s skill. Which is why I believe that accessibility is a key virtue of maintaining reader trust: if the world-building, characterization, and plotting is presented in an accessible fashion at a rate that the reader can internalize without drowning in detail or florid prose (*cough* Umberto Eco), then the reader is far more likely to trust the author enough to keep reading.

Nevertheless, world-building and detail remain an intrinsic component of all fiction. Our job as writers is to strike an appropriate balance between our world-building and our story’s accessibility. If we throw in too much world-building, the detail might occlude the story (the literary equivalent of hiding a forest behind too many trees). On the other hand, if we withhold too many details then our story loses clarity. Both mistakes can lose the reader’s trust, which is why a balance must be struck between them.

Finding the Balance Between World-building, Detail, and Accessibility

We don’t read books for the setting, or for the characters, or for conflict. We read books for the underlying story, which we access through the characters, conflict, and setting. Just about any story can be told in a different environment or with completely different characters, and to maintain reader trust, we need to make sure that the details we offer don’t obscure the story that underlies them. The more details we load into the text, and the rate at which we pack those details into our paragraphs, the harder it will be spot the underlying story. But some detail is always needed, whether we’re writing a secondary world fantasy or a contemporary mainstream realistic novel.

As Charlie Stross points out in this excellent essay on world-building, every piece of fiction relies on a balance between what the author shows/tells the reader, and the reader’s shared experience of the world. If we’re writing a realistic piece of contemporary fiction set in New York City, our readers will open the book with preconceived ideas and experiences of what NYC is like. Even if they’ve never set foot in Manhattan and unless they’ve been living in a cave, they will have certain images and concepts taken (accurately or not) from movies, other books, and their own cultural background.

If we’re writing a piece of contemporary realist fiction, we can rely on their shared experiences and thus skimp (to some extent) on the details. We don’t need to define, explain, or depict a car or a traffic light for the reader to understand what’s going on. Since we can eschew detailed explanations, we can instead focus on how those objects act or are acted upon within our story. This shared experience establishes a certain baseline for reader trust.

Eric Flint, 1632, 2001

It is when our story diverges from the reader’s expectations (when we put the island of Manhattan on the Yangtze River, for example) that we risk that trust. Diverging from shared experiences makes it incumbent upon us to offer some sort of explanation for the new or unusual elements. It takes groundwork on our part to prepare the reader for that type of cognitive estrangement. This groundwork happens at many levels within the story, and it actually starts with the book’s marketing category and design. For example, the cover of Eric Flint’s 1632 immediately tells the reader that they’ll be dealing with some type of anachronistic story where armored knights on horseback encounter modern pick-up trucks. If the reader is expecting a completely realistic story, they know just from the cover to look elsewhere.

Unfortunately, we can’t rely on design and marketing category to do the heavy lifting for us (for one thing, traditionally published authors rarely have any control over either). The details we include in our text, the way we talk about our characters’ assumptions, the descriptions we offer of our setting, the words our characters use are the hammers, screws, and nails of our world-building. Consider what an innocent verb like “steamroll” implies about a world. Sure, it’s tempting in our contemporary context to describe an overbearing character as a “steamroller” or to say that character X “steamrolled” character Y. But if our story is set in a pre-industrial world, then “steamrollers” or even steam-rolling mechanisms for clothing likely wouldn’t (yet) exist. It is this kind of minor, precise detail of world-building which risks undermining a reader’s trust in the author and our world-building.

I suspect there are as many techniques for effective world-building as there are books. Regardless of what technique we apply, it is the consistency of that world-building which maintains the reader’s trust. In the previous installment, I quoted from the opening of Patricia C. Wrede’s Dealing with Dragons. Her first paragraph establishes that we are dealing with a secondary world (the fictional land of Linderwall, east of the fictional Mountains of Morning), that is quasi-medieval in nature (a feudal system with kings, queens, princes/ses, and knights), and magical (dragons and fairy godmothers included). This single paragraph establishes the entire context necessary for the rest of Wrede’s world to be imagined and understood. Were Wrede to introduce a new element into her story (witches, for example), it has to fit within that context. If her new element does not fit (e.g. airplanes), then without expanding the context to make it believable, it would create a dissonance that damaged the reader’s trust.

Because Wrede does an excellent job of concisely contextualizing the story’s environment in her first paragraph, she levels up and earns the ability to quickly introduce new elements into her world’s context. So long as she maintains consistency with that brief initial context, we won’t even blink at the introduction of characters transformed by witchcraft, or of magical forests. We are able to internalize them as rapidly as the author serves them up because of that consistency.

However, consistency does not give us carte blanche to infodump detail on our poor unsuspecting reader. Ultimately, it is the story that should determine the rate at which new details are introduced. In Dealing with Dragons, Wrede could have theoretically taken ten pages and written a description of her world’s geography, its politics, and the systems of magic that operate within it. But doing so would have halted the forward momentum of the underlying story, and given the reader too many details (however consistent they might be) to maintain the story’s accessibility. Story is key, and no amount of world-building detail should ever obscure it. When I think about this in my own writing, I think of it in terms of Hemingway’s iceberg theory: sometimes by consciously leaving details out of our text, we actually make both the world-building and the story more accessible.

The Use of Icebergs in World-building

As the creators of our worlds, we should know everything there is to know about them. Their historical background, their cultural environment, technology, idiosyncrasies, etc. In our heads, we should have a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge about our made up world. But that doesn’t mean the reader needs it.

An Iceberg in Profile, via Wikimedia. Created by Uwe Kils (iceberg) and User:Wiska Bodo (sky).

If we’ve done our homework, and if we’ve fully imagined our world, then even if we don’t explicitly include details in our text we will still write consistently within our context. That’s because all of that detail – from the shoes our character might be wearing, all the way to their fraught childhood relationships with neighbors – sits in the back of our brain and trickles through onto the page. The reader doesn’t need to see that, because it becomes the underlying detail that exists between the lines on the page. It’s what Hemingway called the iceberg effect, where only the top 10% of the story is actually shown to the reader. The rest remains in the author’s head. Even if we never show the reader those details, readers will still have the palpable sense that the details exist somewhere: that the author knows what they are doing, and that they will include only the necessary details in the text.

This ties into the concept of including details as demanded to by the story. If, lacking a particular detail, the story won’t move forward, then by all means include what’s necessary. If your character needs to leave on a space ship, you’ll need to introduce the minor detail of the space ship itself. But if you only include the information the story needs, and you make sure that information is consistent with a more generally established context, then I think you’ll go a long way to maintaining reader trust. Our job is to give the reader the details they need to understand what happens, and enough context to imagine the rest. So long as our world has some logical underpinnings, and so long as we consistently depict the extrapolations of our world, the reader will have confidence that we know what we’re doing. At least, that’s my hope.

The Accessibility of Story Structure

Just as a balance must be struck between world-building and the story’s accessibility, there exists a similar balance between story structure and its accessibility. Fiction is wonderful in that we can play many fun games with non-linear stories, jumps in time, jumps in perspective, etc. Our range of motion and range of structures are arguably limitless. But the more complicated we make our story structure, the more mental gymnastics our readers will have to perform to follow along.

Sometimes, we want a complex structure. Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler is multiply-recursive, extremely meta, and is half told in second person. It is a complicated puzzle-box of a novel. However, it remains a delightful (if challenging) book to read. Justine Larbalestier’s Liar jumps backwards and forwards in time, and wrestles with an unreliable narrator who at several points recants most of the preceding story. It too has a complicated structure, and challenges the reader to understand what is actually happening.

Both Calvino and Larbalestier employed complex structures because those structures helped accentuate the themes they wished to explore. They faced a trade-off between the degree of complexity (decreasing the story’s accessibility and risking reader trust) and the efficacy of their thematic goals. When it comes to story structure, I suspect the trade-offs are more numerous than that. Generally, I fall into the school of thought that says story structures should be simple unless their complication is thematically driven. But I know many others successfully complicate their structures for more tactical reasons: managing suspense, pacing, or side-plot resolution.

When working on story structure, I think every decision to complicate that structure needs to be carefully considered. If it detracts from the story’s accessibility, it should at the very least maintain the story’s forward momentum. Decreasing the story’s accessibility will gradually erode the reader’s trust, but losing that forward momentum is a much faster way of losing that trust. After all, they’re reading the story for the story. If your structure stops the story’s progress, then the reader is no longer getting what they’re looking for. And what readers want is a sequence of events where each event follows in some logical fashion from the events and choices that preceded it.

Consequential Plotting and Reader Trust

The very concept of story is predicated on events and choices having consequences. A description of unrelated events does not constitute a story: it is just a recitation of unrelated facts. When readers begin reading our story, they are investing effort to internalize our world and follow our structure because they want to see what happens. They make this effort because, if we’ve done our job right, they trust that we are giving them the salient facts and details which they need to maximize their enjoyment. If what they read on the first page has no bearing to what they read on the last page, then as writers we have betrayed that trust, and the reader is right to feel cheated.

This is why deus ex machina is so often deplored. It implies that everything the reader worked to get through is meaningless for the story’s conclusion. It makes the story a trick, misdirection, sleight of hand. If such misdirection is part of the book’s thematic purpose (as with Larbalestier’s Liar, for example) then groundwork needs to be laid throughout the story that makes it plausible within the story’s context. It’s the equivalent of setting up the prestige in a magic trick: all of the work that makes the trick functional happens before the trick itself.

In the movie Serenity, Joss Whedon killed off one of the series’ beloved characters to make an existential philosophical point. Many fans – myself included – felt betrayed by this event, because there was no groundwork within either the movie or the preceding television series to prepare the audience for it. Of course, Whedon’s point was that death can strike at any time and especially in situations of high danger. But at no point prior to this did he lay any groundwork for this thematic and tonal point. As a result, the atonal dissonance of the event struck many fans as an effect without a prior cause. This weakened (and in some cases broke) many viewers’ trust.

Compare this to the way that George R.R. Martin deals with the death of beloved characters in his Song of Ice and Fire series. At the end of Game of Thrones (the first book in the series), one of the principle characters gets killed. But unlike Whedon, Martin carefully laid the groundwork throughout the preceding pages for this event to be plausible within the context of his story. He put in the work to make the death consistent on a tonal, thematic, characterization, and plot level. Early in the book, one of Martin’s other characters – a young child – gets chucked out of a window by two other principle characters. If nothing else, chucking that kid out of the window established that this was a story where horrible acts occur to undeserving people. As the plot unfolded, Martin carefully made sure that his characters were put in varying degrees of real, consequential danger and discomfort. He balanced the motivations on all sides of the conflict. This stands in stark contrast to Whedon’s out-of-left-field “hand of Author as a Capricious God” moment in Serenity.

It is this consistency and consequence of story, plot, and character which maintains the implied contract between the reader and the author. And that consistency is equally important when dealing with the characters and narrators who tell the story, regardless of how reliable they may be.

NEXT: ~~Come back on Tuesday for~~ Check out the third and final installment on how character consistency and reliability contribute to managing reader trust.

Nov 29

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Earning/Maintaining a Reader’s Trust: Starting a Story with Cultural Touchstones, Narrative Voice, and Precision (part 1 of 3)

I mentioned last week about how I’ve been on a spy fiction kick recently, and all of the deceptions and double-crosses have left me thinking quite a bit about trust in fiction. Because really, every piece of fiction is a lie. And yet when we sit down to enjoy it, we’re willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt and offer some modicum of trust (on credit, of course). And this begs the question: why? How do writers earn that trust, and how can we manipulate it?

NOTE: This is the first in a three-part series of posts. This post is focused on initially gaining a reader’s trust with a story’s opening. On Saturday, ~~I’ll post~~ I posted the second installment focusing on how world-building, consequential plotting and story structure affect reader trust. And on Tuesday ~~I’ll post~~ I posted the final installment, focusing on character consistency and narrator/character reliability.

Reader Trust as the Foundation of Fiction

The act of reading is an act of profound trust: without ever articulating it, the reader tells us that they will approach our words as truth in order to derive some benefit (catharsis, enlightenment, etc.) at the end of the story. Coleridge called this a willing suspension of disbelief, and while I know many people have a problem with that phrase, I’ve always really liked it. When we read a story, we are giving the author the benefit of the doubt: we’re not scoring points and indicating every falsehood the author tells us. Instead, we’re accepting the author’s ~~lies~~ fiction at face value because we believe that at the story’s conclusion, the experience will have been worth it.

This trust is not automatic. Nor is it easy. Reading a story takes effort, and some (Italo Calvino, say) take more effort than others (Dan Brown). In speculative fiction, this trust is even more important because we ask more of our readers. When reading secondary world fantasy or far-future science fiction, the reader needs to internalize our world-building. To be immersed in our imagined environment takes more investment on the part of the reader (more new words to remember, more fictional context to internalize). When reading a locked-room mystery, the reader inherently trusts that everything will be explained at the story’s end. If the reader is to be emotionally invested in a character, they must trust that the character’s actions have meaning and consequence.

Trust is what gets the reader to read the next sentence, the next paragraph, to turn the page, and to read the next chapter. The reader needs to have confidence that the author will make their journey worthwhile: the moment they lose that confidence, the book gets put down and (at best) forgotten.

Reader Psychology, Reader Trust and Writer Control

Reader trust is only partially in the writer’s control. A reader’s willingness to trust an author is based partially in their own psychology, and partially in the writing itself. Obviously, a reader is likely to cut a much-loved author more slack than someone brand new to them. That’s because the author has built up a pre-existing level of trust, even if the text itself does not engender that trust. For example, I slogged through most of China Miéville’s Kraken despite the fact that I didn’t enjoy it because on past experience I trusted Miéville to make it worth the effort in the end. When the book didn’t satisfy, my level of trust in the author for subsequent books decreased (although so far Embassytown has been undoing the damage). Short of only writing books that don’t suck, there is nothing a writer can do about this: there will always be readers new to our books, so I figure it’s best not to stress over it.

The reader’s preconceived tastes are equally important. Many people know what they like and only read within that one particular genre or sub-genre. When reading outside of their comfort zone, their level of trust may be nonexistent. Someone who only ever reads police procedurals is likely to be a harder convert to Amish romance. As writers, we might deplore this kind of blinkered reading, but it remains a fact. And one that we can do very little about: there will always be readers who we can’t convert.

Equally important is the reader’s state of receptivity. While Frank Herbert’s Gurney Halleck might gripe that mood is a thing for cattle and love-play, the fact is that the reader’s state of mind affects how they read. Some days, I’m in the mood to be immersed. I want something fun, vivid, and escapist. Other days, I want the mental challenge of unreliable narrators and non-linear structure. And sometimes, I just want to read some dry non-fiction. If I try to force myself to read something I’m not in the mood for, my willingness to trust the author is decreased. However, the author does have some influence over the reader’s mood. Before the reader has even finished the first page, we have control over the book’s technical execution, its cultural touchstones, and the narrative voice. And all three affect the reader’s frame of mind.

Technical Execution: Sine qua non for Reader Trust

We’re always told not to judge a book by its cover, but the fact is that we do. When we see a book that is poorly designed, shoddily structured, or badly proof-read, the level of trust we’re willing to offer the author decreases. This, actually, is one of the issues I run into with self-published eBooks. When I see a traditionally published book, I know that a team of experienced people worked to make it the best book possible. That team worked for (typically) about a year after the book was finished to line-edit, copy-edit, proof-read, and design the final work. The fact that the editors actually acquired the book means that someone (actually a committee, more typically) thought the author worthy of their trust. Even if that book still has mistakes, even if it still has a lousy cover, the editorial team’s efforts contribute to increase my trust.

Many (and thankfully an increasing number of) self-published eBooks are well-edited, copy-edited, proof-read, and designed. But when compared to traditionally published novels, a greater share of self-pubbed eBooks are not. I have been burned so often by unprofessional self-pubbed eBooks that my level of trust for the entire category is (unfortunately) decreased by association. That may be unfair to those eBook publishers who work their butts off to execute well, but hey: that’s the capricious judgment of the consumer.

The quality of a book’s technical execution is the cost of entry to reader trust. A book can break all the rules of syntax (Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange comes to mind) and still be excellent. But there is an inherent difference between breaking rules by design and breaking them through inattention. That difference is precision, and the sense of the author’s ineluctable control over their words. If the reader cracks open the first page, and they see haphazardly misspelled words, broken clauses, and meaningless tense shifts, their level of trust will drop through the floor because we are asking them to work too hard to get to the story.

Language is the rail on which the story runs. Would you trust a train where the passengers needed to fix it while riding?

Cultural Touchstones, Clichés, and Psychological Baggage

Assuming the writing is technically well-executed, we still need to wrestle with the reader’s frame of mind. One of the tools for doing so is what I call cultural touchstones. Writers are told to avoid clichés like pestilential vermin, but I believe that clichés have a use in fiction. They are able to cast a concise and powerful spell on the reader, and used appropriately, they become a shortcut into the reader’s mental/emotional state. While they should not be relied upon to the exclusion of all else, they can be incredibly valuable for getting the reader into the desired frame of mind.

Imagine for a moment a preschool, where twenty toddlers (our readers) are running wild and screaming bloody murder. The teacher, a much put upon soul, claps and shouts “Story time!” All of the ~~readers~~ kids take their seats, and look up expectantly. In this idealized scenario, our brave teacher is able to shift her audience’s mental state just by giving them a practiced touchstone, a pair of words that establishes their expectations based on their past experiences. Clichés work the same way.

Consider the sonorous phrase “Once upon a time…” If we come from a western cultural background, this hackneyed cliché is steeped in history and associations. It brings to mind princesses, wicked queens, fairy godmothers, and wolves in the woods. It carries with it a host of psychological ~~baggage~~ associations, which we can use when we tell stories. If we start a story with that phrase, we set certain expectations in the reader’s mind. They can safely assume that we will be dealing with the tropes of fairy tale, that the story will follow certain conventions relevant to the subgenre. Unless the author subsequently shows us that they intend to subvert those conventions, we should not expect a cyberpunk dystopia to follow.

Famous clichés (“Once upon a time…”, “It was a dark and stormy night…”, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…”) only work effectively when put to use tactically and consciously. They are the literary equivalent of a cannon. If they sneak into our writing haphazardly, then our writing will quite simply suck. We will be pushing the reader’s emotional buttons not wisely, but too well. Used sparingly, they have the narrative effect of slamming the reader into the desired mental state. Their impact is fast and powerful, but lacks in subtlety and nuance. For more finely grained control of your reader’s mental state, consider using imagery as cultural touchstones and narrative voice as a modulator.

Cultural Touchstones and Narrative Voice without the Cliché

Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles are inherently concerned with the conventions of fairy tales, yet she has enormous discipline in avoiding the clichés of the sub-genre. Consider how she opens Dealing with Dragons, the first book in the series:

Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable. The climate was unremarkable. The knights kept their armor brightly polished mainly for show — it had been centuries since a dragon had come east. There were the usual periodic problems with royal children and uninvited fairy godmothers, but they were always the sort of thing that could be cleared up by finding the proper prince or princess to marry the unfortunate child a few years later. All in all, Linderwall was a very prosperous and pleasant place. Cimorene hated it.
Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing with Dragons, 1990

Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable. The climate was unremarkable. The knights kept their armor brightly polished mainly for show — it had been centuries since a dragon had come east. There were the usual periodic problems with royal children and uninvited fairy godmothers, but they were always the sort of thing that could be cleared up by finding the proper prince or princess to marry the unfortunate child a few years later. All in all, Linderwall was a very prosperous and pleasant place.

Cimorene hated it.

Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing with Dragons, 1990

Wrede does not use a single cliché, even though her subject matter is ostensibly fairy-tale related. Instead, she relies on imagery that is already associated with fairy tales (knights and dragons, royal children and uninvited fairy godmothers, etc.) to put the reader in a fairy tale frame of mind. But by avoiding a reliance on a hoary old cliché, Wrede also gains the space to employ the second tool for managing reader receptivity: narrative voice.

In her first paragraph, she describes a stereotypical fairy tale kingdom. But through the application of careful phrases she establishes a sense of whimsy (“…the number five was fashionable”, “knights kept their armor brightly polished mainly for show”). These images and concepts are not cultural touchstones the way dragons or fairy godmothers are. Instead, they are included to show the reader that the narrator has a sense of humor and acknowledges the inherent silliness of all fairy tales. This contributes to reader trust in two key fashions: juxtaposed against the fairy tale imagery, it establishes that the author is familiar with the conventions of the subgenre, which in turn establishes Wrede’s authority and instills confidence. Second, it undermines (though does not yet subvert) fairy tale conventions, telegraphing to the reader that the author intends to play with expectations. This second contribution sets the stage for Wrede’s masterful one-sentence second paragraph (“Cimorene hated it.”), where she packs characterization, theme, and pacing acceleration into three short words.

This use of voice draws the reader in through unity of character, purpose, and precise execution. Examining the text closely, every word serves a purpose. Even the design contributes to its effectiveness: we have three editions of this book in our house (and an eBook edition on my phone) and every single edition has the first and second paragraphs on the book’s first page. It is the totality of those two paragraphs that Wrede uses as a hook. If she dropped the first paragraph altogether, the second paragraph (the classically “interesting” paragraph with character and emotional engagement) would be meaningless and emotionally dull. It is that slow first paragraph that gives her second paragraph context, like a steep hill on a roller-coaster.

Timing and Reader Trust: When Should the Reader Be Hooked?

Just about every piece of writing advice tells us to hook the reader ASAP, preferably in the first sentence. Like all generalities, it is generally good advice. But there are alternatives available, which may potentially make more sense for our story. Wrede’s first sentence, while interesting, is not a classically interesting hook. It fails to introduce a character, conflict, dramatic action, or thematic factors. Yet the precision of its prose and the sense of whimsy communicated through the voice is likely to get us to the second sentence, which in turn brings us to the third, and so on. Until we get to the second paragraph, have finished the first page, and find ourselves thinking “Okay, Wrede, you’ve earned our trust (for now). Let’s see where this goes.”

When I write, I like to think of it as getting the reader to the next sentence, then the next paragraph, then the next page, then the next chapter. Every sentence and every paragraph is a chance for me to degrade, lose, or (worst of all) betray the reader’s trust. The more of their trust I’ve built up, and the sooner I do so, the better. If I can earn a page’s worth of trust in my first sentence, great. Sometimes, that is possible. But if not? Well, that’s not the end of the world. So long as I can identify the point by which I need their trust, and so long as the writing to earn and maintain that trust is precise, I’m ahead of the game.

I’ve read many stories that never really earned my trust and just meandered into the action. If you’ve read a lot of fantasy, you know what I’m talking about: front-loaded prologues offering backstory that only interests the author, epigraphs that I suspect most folks don’t even read, etc. Sometimes, slow beginnings are the best way to start a story. But the greatest tool an author has to get the reader through that slow start is the precision of their words. Nabokov pulls this off superlatively in Lolita, where even with a distancing framing device and an unreliable (and unsympathetic) narrator, every word follows inevitably and beautifully from its antecedent.

I generally don’t notice that precision consciously on my first reading of a text. When executed well, it should be invisible (if we can count the rivets on the engine, the train isn’t moving fast enough). But even if it’s not consciously noticed, it still affects how I perceive the story and the author. Precise control of language establishes confidence that the author’s expert hand is on the tiller, and thus builds reader trust. That trust isn’t limitless, and eventually the story must hook me. But precision will typically get me past the first paragraph, which in turn might earn the author the second paragraph, then the first page, and so on until I find myself immersed in the story. It’s a chain of chances, and precision connects the links.

Beyond the story’s opening, trust must be cultivated and maintained. In speculative fiction especially, that often hinges on how world-building is managed, or on the book’s plot structure, and the reliability/consistency of characterization and narration.

NEXT: ~~Come back on Saturday~~ Check out the second installment on world-building, story structure, and consequential plotting.

Nov 22

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Science Fiction Techniques in Spy Novels: James Bond and George Smiley

One of the upsides of spending two weeks traveling on business in Eastern Europe is that it really adds some perspective to spy fiction. For years I’ve meant to read more of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and to pick up John Le Carré’s George Smiley trilogy. So I worked my way through them and came to an interesting conclusion: both Fleming and Le Carré are science fiction authors. I don’t just mean that in the sense that they use fantastical conceits or gadgets. Instead, I mean that they establish cognitive estrangement for the same reasons and using the exact same narrative devices and prose techniques as speculative fiction authors.

Cognitive Estrangement and the Novum as a Defining Characteristic of Spy Fiction

Reading Fleming and Le Carré brought to mind Darko Suvin’s concepts of cognitive estrangement and novum. Suvin uses cognitive estrangement to describe the method by which science fiction establishes itself as operating in a made-up world where the rules of our humdrum reality need not apply. That estrangement contributes to both our sense-of-wonder and to the genre’s escapist label: it gives us a world that we can inhabit where the impossible becomes possible, and thus opens our horizons to as-yet unimagined concepts.

All fiction relies on cognitive estrangement to some extent: even when we read a contemporary mainstream novel, we accept its fictional premises. How many people do you know who live or speak like fictional characters? None. Effective dialog and effective characterization both rely on carefully considered pruning of reality. Writers are like Mister Miyagi, carefully sculpting his bonsai tree. The natural tree may still be interesting and beautiful, but Miyagi shapes it to underline that beauty. Fiction works the same way. But the difference between speculative fiction and realistic fiction is the degree of cognitive estrangement demanded of the reader. And here is where Suvin’s second concept of novum comes into play.

Suvin claimed that science fiction relied on incorporating something new, something different, something outside of the experience of the real world as a device to achieve a cognitive estrangement. It might be time travel, or aliens, some fancy whiz-bang technology – doesn’t matter. What does matter is that it is a marker that tells the reader “Here there be dragons” and thus puts the reader into the frame of mind for receiving a fantastical story. Reading the Bond novels and the George Smiley novels, I’ve come to the conclusion that spy fiction works in the exact same way.

In order for us to enjoy a spy novel, we need to inhabit a world that most of us don’t ever see: the world of espionage, and assassination, and skullduggery. Does this world exist in actuality? It’s naive to suggest otherwise. But as I’ve never been a spy, it is as foreign to me as Middle Earth or the planet Arrakis. Are there some authors who portray this world more realistically than others? I’m sure there are (I’ve heard rumors that actual spies tend to prefer Le Carré’s novels to Fleming’s, for example). But who cares? In each case, as long as it is fiction, all that matters is the ride that the story takes us on, and whether it is compelling. Just like with science fiction, this ride’s effectiveness is dependent on the story’s ability to establish cognitive estrangement: on its ability to take me into that fictional world alongside our own.

World-building and Character as Tools of Cognitive Estrangement

I’d argue that the techniques Fleming employs are very similar to those used by urban fantasy writers (particularly those who write episodic urban fantasy, like Jim Butcher or Charlaine Harris).

Much urban fantasy posits a “hidden world” alongside ours. We might go our whole lives without ever touching on the affairs of the supernatural that Butcher’s Harry Dresden deals with every day. The same holds true for the cloak-and-dagger world that James Bond inhabits. In both cases, the authors need to establish a degree of trust that we will buy into their reality. And they generally do so in similar fashions.

Like Harry Dresden, James Bond is an initiate. When we first meet him in Casino Royale (or in any of the Bond novels), he already knows the score. He may have more or less experience, he may be more or less jaded, but it is through his already-experienced eyes that we perceive his world. This is a classic device in episodic fiction (see my earlier post on episodic heroes), and it is one that works just as well in spy fiction as in urban fantasy or science fiction.

Secondly, Ian Fleming gives us a setting that while ostensibly realistic, is entirely outside most readers’ experience. Bond doesn’t go to work in a small town in northern New Jersey. If he did, I’d have difficulty buying into the story. Bond travels to exotic locales, places where I’ve never been or places where I’ve only been as a tourist. The result is that Bond’s environment is a priori new to me. I’ve never been to Jamaica, and so the setting Bond moves through is as new to me as Tolkien’s Shire.

Fleming uses classic fantastical devices to make this world real for the reader: he employs the tried-and-true science fictional method of salting his story with very small details that ground his setting and earn my inherent trust in his skills as a storyteller. He goes into painstaking detail about the planes, trains, and automobiles that Bond interacts with. He uses precise language to describe the settings where the action takes place. He doesn’t infodump that information: he just uses it like a dash of spice in his prose, and even though I know that at times it’s absolutely inaccurate, I accept it because it contributes to the story’s flow and the establishment of his environment. I see no difference between this approach and the way George Alec Effinger establishes the Budayeen in When Gravity Fails or how William Gibson assembles his cyberpunk reality in the Bridge trilogy.

It’s easy to see Fleming’s gadgets or his larger-than-life villains as being the primary novum that establish cognitive estrangement, but I actually think it is his world-building that really does it. If we had not already bought into Fleming’s fantastic slice of our world, then we would never believe in Bond’s gadgets or in his monologuing villains.

Neologism as Novum: John Le Carré and the Language of Tradecraft

In many ways John Le Carré’s George Smiley trilogy (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley’s People) are like the anti-James Bond spy novels. Bond is crystal clear in that he is on the “right” (British) side. Even in those books where Bond wrestles with doubts, it is a superficial wrestling and not one that really drives to the heart of the story. The heart of Bond is adventure. The heart of George Smiley is ambiguity (or as Kingsley Amis put it in The James Bond Dossier, anguished cynicism).

The Smiley trilogy is set in a world that more clearly borders on our own. Smiley’s adventures take place in London, Berlin, Hong Kong, Prague. These aren’t tourist wonderlands like Caribbean or the French Riviera. I can’t speak for every reader, but these are often places where I’ve spent a fair amount of time. Unlike Fleming, Le Carré doesn’t spend a lot of time with detailed descriptions of his settings or of the ingredients that make up those settings. His focus is on his characters. The setting, and the world that his characters occupy comes across, but it is always filtered through the film of his characters’ perceptions.

But even if he doesn’t salt his prose with telling details to make the setting seem real for us, Le Carré does use a different science fictional technique to establish cognitive estrangement: neologism. Like James Bond, George Smiley is an initiate: he understands the world of spies and secret service. And that comes through in the language that he uses, in particular in his reliance on the jargon of the trade. His fluency with terms like “tradecraft” and “lamplighters” and “mole” (a term which Le Carré actually popularized, based on a translation of the KGB term for a long-term deep cover agent).

These neologisms are employed to the same end as other science fictional neologisms (grok, hyperspace, warp, cyberspace, ansible, etc.). They establish a sense of cognitive estrangement without distracting from the story. Those of us who aren’t spies don’t use words like “tradecraft” or “lamplighters” in our everyday speech. But whatever our profession, I’m sure we’ve all encountered jargon before. It’s a very real and unavoidable part of life. Because Le Carré uses these terms so fluently, so sparingly, their use buys our belief in Smiley’s world and his perceptions of it.

Of the two techniques, I think Le Carré’s is the harder sell. It is a very fine line to walk between successfully establishing cognitive estrangement, and confusing the reader. But I think he pulls it off, and the fact that words he introduced (mole, tradecraft, etc.) can now be found on most any television show is a testament to his success at pulling it off.

Science Fiction Tropes in Spy Fiction?

If spy fiction relies on science fiction techniques, do the tropes of science fiction get play in spy fiction? Here, I think the answer is less clear. The two genres definitely share some common ancestors. Most spy fiction (in particular the James Bond novels) probably trace their lineage to the noir mysteries of the pulp era. The George Smiley books can probably be traced back to G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare or Conrad’s The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale. The same books often show up in science fictional lineages, but I’m not sure if the two genres share more than a reliance on the same techniques. It’s something I’m going to be thinking some more about, but I’d love to know what everyone else thinks. How are spy fiction and speculative fiction similar? How are they different? What methods and devices work in one but fail in the other?

Nov 15

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INTERVIEW: Jonathan Case and Steven Padnick

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of reviewing Dear Creature by Jonathan Case, a new graphic novel out from Tor Books. As the review probably made clear, I love this book – both as a story, and as a work of sequential art. So I invited Jonathan Case (its creator) and Steven Padnick (his editor at Tor) to join me for an hour or so to talk about comics, storytelling, and what went into bringing us Dear Creature.

Jonathan Case, Creator of Dear Creature	Jonathan Case writes and draws books in Portland, Oregon, as a member of Periscope Studio, the largest cooperative of comics creators in America. His work is featured in the Eisner award–winning Comic Book Tattoo, and has been lauded as some of the best show of new talent in comics. Dear Creature is his first book.
Steven Padnick, Editor at Tor/Forge Books	Steven Padnick edits graphic novels for Tor Books and writes for Tor.com. He has been working in book publishing for eight years. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

CHRIS: First off, thanks for joining me! It’s great to have the both of you here to chat about Dear Creature. To start things off, Steven, I was really wondering what caught your eye about Dear Creature? How did it show up on your radar screen?

STEVEN: This is going to the most boring story in the world, actually. Jonathan’s very good agent sent it to me. I contacted Jonathan’s studio – Persicope – asking “Hey, is there anyone there with a graphic novel proposal?” and then a day later I got a call from Judy Hansen saying “I’m sending it over!” and it was done. Which is unusual for a graphic novel, since they are usually sold to editors at the pitch stage, and then someone spends a year of their life drawing it. But Jonathan had already done that. So I got a pretty much complete graphic novel. That catches your eye.

CHRIS: So you got both the script, and all of the art as well?

STEVEN: No, this was a one-man show. Everything was already done: there wasn’t a script, just the book, pretty much as you see it. And I read it, and it’s fantastic. Most of the book was done by the time I got to it, so if you want to know what caught my eye about the book the answer is…the book. It’s a fantastic story. I finished it off pretty quickly. Obviously beautiful. I was getting a lot of pitches at the time, and so many of them sounded the same – derivative. This was like nothing else. At all times the story took turns that were both totally naturally for the story, but surprised me. Which is the best situation. Usually we get great art. Or we get a great story. This was both, by someone I had never heard of. At all. Someone no one had heard of.

Every review has said the same thing: this book is fantastic and I cannot describe it to you. I found myself staring at this book that was perfect – as a book. As a selling item, by a new writer, doing a new concept, with a new character, with a really hard to describe plot, the thought was “Well, this is perfect. But it’s hard to sell. But it’s perfect.” In the end, the perfection argument won out, and made me get this book. Now.

CHRIS: So that difficulty in describing it, how has that translated into the publicity and promotional efforts to get the word out about Dear Creature?

STEVEN: There’s no magic thing we can do. We do what we do with any prose book that’s new: We send it to reviewers, we believe in our product, and we do our best. Except for our personal pleas to close friends to pre-order the book, there’s not much more we can do other than what we do for every book. I wish there was some secret like “Oh, we slip a twenty to the reviewer at Amazon” but no, we just do what we always do. Galleys help. That’s the most important thing. Getting people to review it, and hoping that great reviews and word of mouth sell the book.

JONATHAN: And I’ll chime in here, too. I think Tor has done a good job of giving me as a creator opportunities to reach out to a growing fan base with either guest spots on other blogs or interviews like this one. Bookstore signings, that kind of thing. And granted, they probably do that for their other authors in addition to sending books and galleys as well, but in comics, you don’t always find that support. So for me as a comics author, it’s gratifying to have that. I have been getting more exposure and more great reviews than I would have if I’d gone with a lot of the other options that were available to me when I was shopping the book around. It’s worked out well.

STEVEN: Thanks!

CHRIS: That actually raises another question. In sequential art today, creators have so many options for how to commercialize their work – whether crowd-funded indie books, serialized comics, webcomics, etc. What sort of drove you to do this as a graphic novel as opposed to packaging the story in some other format?

JONATHAN: Well, that’s a big question for me. I always wanted to do the sort of work that would take advantage of what I saw as my various strengths. I didn’t know that any one strength that I possessed as a creative person would have really allowed me to succeed. I’ve been drawing since I was two years old. I’ve just gone through reams of paper, and I love telling stories, I love acting and the performing arts. Comics is a way of doing all of those things. If you talk to anybody in my studio that not only draws books for clients but has their own creative thing flowing – whether it’s their own original graphic novels or short stories or whatever it is – almost all of them have an interest in acting. Or a background in acting. It’s really kind of surprising. Around college I graduated with a degree in performing arts, and I was thinking I was going to go to NY or LA. Then at a certain point my life just took a different turn. And I realized I really wanted to tell the stories that I wanted to tell now, and comics is a way for me to do that in a way that I might not ever have had the chance to if I had gone and tried to be an actor or a screenwriter or something. And comics is also just a great group of people. There’s a great community here in Portland that I really connect with on a personal level. Kind of a family business, it feels like.

CHRIS: So with that kind of background in drama, I have to imagine that informed the “crustacean chorus” in Dear Creature to some extent?

JONATHAN: Oh yeah. The whole thing really. The fact that I have a monster that speaks in iambic pentameter, really all of it. My dad started taking us to see Shakespeare plays when I was probably four years old. I couldn’t really appreciate it at the time, but I was steeped in it from an early age. But I also knew how overwrought it could be – how tiresome it could be if it wasn’t done well. And that was the main reason why I put the crabs in there. You don’t want just a bunch of flowery verse with no release valve. I needed to be able to poke fun at myself sometimes. The heart of the book for me is this character that has the sense of something divine. Shakespeare is like Grue’s Bible. It’s his code for living. Its archaic and anachronistic and kind of weird to his peers – like these little crabs that are saying “What are you doing with your life?” But I think anybody with a sense of the divine butts up against that. So that’s how I wanted to connect with this monster story. These grand themes, these personal themes, and the B-movie stuff. That kind of mash-up was interesting to me.

CHRIS: In the press release I saw for Dear Creature, it mentioned the story being somewhat inspired by experiences off the coast of Mexico. Did you run into a teen-eating atomic sea monster out there?

JONATHAN: Well, they have the diablo rojo out there – not the giant giant squid, but the mini-giant squid. That’s kind of monstery. But yeah, I spent some time in Mexico with my parents. They retired early. My dad had the dream of getting to the South Pacific and to New Zealand on a sailboat. And so he bought a sailboat. We never got to the South Pacific, but we did toodle around the Sea of Cortez in a Steinbeck style and met a bunch of different people from all walks of life. This was probably when I was twelve to sixteen. Pretty formative years. And that experience fed into the book, not only in terms of some of the isolation themes. I was the only kid in a vast sea of expats – you know, middle-aged people. But it was also an experience broadening my horizons. All these different people from all these walks of life and dialects. It was a very inspiring time, after I got over the frustration of being the only kid on the block or on that corner of the dock for a few years. The cabin that the leading lady in Dear Creature is holed up in is modeled after the cabin that I would hole up in myself, where I spent hours drawing and dreaming and figuring out a way to escape from paradise.

CHRIS: Speaking of Giuletta, she is obviously not your proto-typical love interest. What drove you to create such an interesting and atypical character?

JONATHAN: I knew it was going to be a hard-sell to do a romance with an Elizabethean-minded monster in a modern world. There’s going to be a quirky person at the end of that rainbow. So I was interested in the idea of matching him up with someone who had probably never had a great love in their life, they were probably a little set in their ways, or a little bit crazy. Just a good match for the insanity of this sea monster marching around with all of his idealism. And early on I had this vision of how I would do my take on the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. If I had this sea monster sitting in a tree outside of a Spanish mission’s window talking to an older woman and making a love of words to her. That was a powerful image that I wanted to get to. So that was the target, I guess. And I worked on the book to get to the point where that scene would make any sense at all.

CHRIS: That raises a question about process. And this goes for the both of you, actually. What were your processes in working on this book at various stages in its lifecycle?

JONATHAN: For me it started out as a play. I wrote a thirty minute play as a senior project in college. It was all in iambic pentameter, and it was about this monster who falls in love with a girl. And the girl reciprocates, instead of being taken aback in horror. That was the genesis of it for me. From there when I decided I wanted to do a comic, I really was coming at it from the standpoint that I wanted the script to be really solid before I started in on something that was probably going to be a multi-year process. I spent about a year off and on – part-time – working on the script, sending different revisions to a friend of mine in LA. His name is Alex Kamer, and he’s a guy who I enjoyed working with in the past on different projects. So before I had Steven, he was providing me with editorial feedback on a really consistent basis. And that was hugely helpful. I was also showing it around to different in Portland when I was just getting plugged into the comics scene. All this helped me refine and figure out what was working, wasn’t working, what I was passionate enough about to stick to my guns on, and then what things I could reconsider. I definitely didn’t work in a vacuum and that was important. By the time I got to actually drawing the thing, I had it all laid out, rehashed, and combed over pretty well. So I felt confident that it was something I could dedicate that time to. Comics just take a lot of time to execute, so that was sort of my process.

CHRIS: So that ultimately led to you having a finished, completed graphic novel for Steven. So what happened when you handed that off to him at Tor? What was that editorial process like from there on in?

STEVEN: Mostly I fixed typos. And I think we had one art change. Also there was a character who I thought might have been killed, who we clarified was not killed. Those were the notes.

CHRIS: So a fairly light editorial process then?

STEVEN: Yeah. Other than acquisitions, which itself is an important part, this was not my finest hour as an editor. It was more of an hour as an editor. Easy fixes, like “A period needs to go here” or “I think this character teleported, you need to fix that.” That was about it. Everything else was done.

CHRIS: I imagine that is different from the graphic novels and prose novels you might have worked on previously.

STEVEN: So far, all the graphic novels have gone through very different styles. Dear Creature was actually fairly close to the way first-time prose novels are sold because most first-time prose novels are completed by the time an editor looks at them. They should be pretty close to good enough to print for us to risk the money on them. So it’s very different from the way I’ve done other graphic novels, but it is very similar to the other prose novels I’ve worked on.

CHRIS: I also have a bit of a question for you, Jonathan, on some of the differences in your experience working on Dear Creature – which is entirely your project – and Green River Killer where you were collaborating. How did those two experiences compare for you?

JONATHAN: They were very different. In the case of Green River Killer, I was getting scripts in chunks. Jeff [Jensen] was working on it and he had a solid direction that he was headed in. He had a detailed outline he’d sent me, so in general I knew the story but I didn’t know the details of how it was all going to fall down. In a sense, I just had to learn to trust him as a storyteller. And trust my editor at Dark Horse that we were actually going to be able to land the plane because I was drawing twenty or thirty pages at a time, and then I would get more script in another week or two, and then do another twenty or thirty pages. And we’re talking final art, not layouts as I did with Dear Creature. With Dear Creature I laid the whole thing out before doing final art, but with Green River Killer it was kind of shooting from the hip. I would get scripts, I would thumbnail it out quickly, go through a lot of reference that was already provided to me by Dark Horse and Jeff. And supplement as needed and then start final art. I cranked through at a pretty good clip. I’m still happy with the work, but it was a completely different process. The freedom of that was really exciting: to be able to work on something where I hadn’t had to divorce myself from all of the preciousness that you get into when they’re your own characters and your own plot points. I didn’t have to kill any of my darlings because it was all laid out for me. So we got it done at a pretty efficient pace and I’m really pleased with the way the book turned out. They did land that plane, and I’m indebted to Dark Horse for releasing a book at about the same time as Dear Creature. That has really paved the way for me as an author, as another comics creator. The two books have really been cross-pollinating a little bit so that’s definitely good.

STEVEN: Yeah, that struck me as the funniest thing about the difference between the traditional prose publishing industry and the comic book publishing industry. We had a finished book of Dear Creature over a year ago, and then we went through the process of selling it to the bookstores, and getting publicity, and doing all this stuff for it. And in the time between when we had the gotten the finished book and published it, Jonathan drew an entire book that Dark Horse published before Dear Creature came out. The traditional prose publishing industry has ridiculously long lead times before books go on sale, and the comic book publishers have none. As soon as they’re done with the book, it is out the door and on the stands. And maybe somewhere between the two is the right answer to how long it should take for a book to come out. But we definitely had both extremes with Green River Killer and Dear Creature.

JONATHAN: It was very surreal.

CHRIS: What’s your perspective on the current environment of the comic book industry. It’s clearly an industry heavily in flux, with graphic novels, webcomics, and digital all changing the playing field. What’s your perspective on that industry today?

JONATHAN: Steven?

STEVEN: There are more people making better work today than there ever has been in the comic book industry. If we don’t limit ourselves to one particular format of comics, whether we’re talking about graphic novels or single issues or webcomics or manga. If you look at all of that, you see an industry at a creative height or maybe heading up a further creative slope. As for the industry as a money-making venture, I don’t know. DC had an amazing month with their re-launch of their individual titles. At the same time, Habibi and Hark! A Vagrant are bestsellers in the bookstores and there are new webcomics popping up every day. Which of these paths comics are going to take in the future? I don’t know. I don’t even have an iPad. Yet. But clearly that’s another route for comics to take, too. So flux is scary, but I believe in the talent that exists today and I think the comics industry is going really big places. Soon.

CHRIS: Jonathan, what’s your perspective from the creator’s side?

JONATHAN: It’s an exciting time, though scary in a lot of ways. I’m glad to see a lot more graphic novels getting produced with the amount of care that I think they should have. I think a lot of publishers are looking at them more and more as complete packages. And I guess I’m speaking of graphic novels in particular, not comics as a whole. But as we move towards this digital distribution model that we’re still trying to figure out, it makes sense to me that when you put something into print you really want an artifact. You want something that has a nice weight, a nice feel, and looks good on a coffee table. And that hasn’t always been the first priority with published comics. In both the case of Dear Creature and Green River Killer, they’re both really good looking books. People want that. People want a counterpoint to the lack of physical object that digital distribution presents. So I think that’s a good model. That’s my ideal model as we move forward. I don’t know if that will stand the test of time, but I’m glad to see that these art heavy books get an artistic presentation, and are marketed that way.

CHRIS: That raises another question about the artistic style you utilized for Dear Creature. It’s certainly very distinctive, especially when compared against what many people think of as the superhero default of the comics medium. What drove you to work in that particular style?

JONATHAN: I didn’t grow up reading a whole lot of comics. So I guess I’m not beholden to some of the same tropes that a lot of people are used to. I was sort of reinventing the wheel, maybe a little bit more than I even needed to when I was starting out with Dear Creature, but I knew that I wanted to emulate the style that people operated in during the ’50s and ’60s – the era when the book is set. So I worked oversized to have that grounding. I worked at 14×20 or 21 inches or some crazy thing. So the originals are huge. And a lot of people ask if I worked that big to get more detail, but the answer is not really. I worked that big because I wanted to emulate people like Alex Raymond and some of those classic comic creators. My hand likes drawing at that size, and I think that when you reduce it down or just when you present it next to other comics – you can’t necessarily put your finger on it, but you can tell that there’s a little something different going on. And I also wanted to get rid of cross-hatching. I made the aesthetic choice that I was just going to use stark black and white, and there are reasons for that which are probably boring for anybody but the artsy types. But it worked out for me. I like how the book looks, and even if there are some panels where it was more challenging to work in that mode, I think there is a readability to it. Your brain registers things quickly when you see an image that is well-composed with just black and white. And the emotional immediacy of it appeals to me.

CHRIS: Did you feel that by going with this aesthetic style you were giving anything up? Were there any trade-offs you were concerned about?

JONATHAN: Maybe a little bit. But when you give yourself a creative limitation like that, it tends to help your focus. So problems that I would have had five solutions to, suddenly I only had one or two. So when you’re working on a project of this size, sometimes that is helpful just for efficiency’s sake. You can always find a solution, no matter what mode you’re working in. It’s just a matter of having to think about it a little more on the front-end, which is something that I think is good for comics. When you think about something on the front-end as opposed to when you’re drawing it, it helps with your storytelling.

CHRIS: Now to wrap things up, a couple of questions à propos of nothing. First up, what are some of the stories you guys absolutely love? What are the stories that you wish that you’d had the chance to work on themselves? New, old, whatever.

STEVEN: Are we limiting this to graphic novels?

CHRIS: Oh no! Any stories whatsoever.

STEVEN: I wish I had written Casablanca.

CHRIS: Ok…

STEVEN: Just flat out that is one of the best scripts. Ever. I wish that I’d written it.

CHRIS: Any others? Or Jonathan, any thoughts on your end?

JONATHAN: I like how Steven is editorially concise.

STEVEN: I have go-to answers.

JONATHAN: I love Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I love the characters in that book.

STEVEN: That’s a good one too.

JONATHAN: Yeah, it’s one of those stories where its reach almost exceeds its grasp. But you love it anyway. That’s definitely one of my favorites. Moby Dick, because that’s another weird book that works. I like weird things that work.

CHRIS: So what have you guys got on your nightstand now? Or on the top of your to-read stack?

STEVEN: This is going to sound like its self-promotion, but I actually read a lot of Tor books these days. I’m reading Ganymede, which is the third novel in Cherie Priest’s steampunk series – the Clockwork Century. The first one is Boneshaker, and the second is Dreadnought. They take place in an alternate history wild west where instead of lasting five years, the Civil War has now lasted twenty and shows no sign of stopping. And also there are airships, and also a disaster that destroyed Seattle and released a zombie plague on the US. They are fantastic, fun, rip-snorting adventures. The book came out a month ago, and it’s great.

JONATHAN: My wife makes fun of me for always having this copy of Don Quixote that I’ve never finished, the new translation. But I’ve been working on it, reading a little bit of it at a time pretty much ever since I’ve known her. And I’ve got this other book on grant-writing for artists that I’m reading through. Nothing too terribly exciting.

CHRIS: It’s actually funny that you should mention Don Quixote. Reading Dear Creature, I thought I was picking up a lot of quixotic elements in that story. As you’ve been working your way through Don Quixote, did you feel that filtering through into your work on Dear Creature?

JONATHAN: I was familiar with Don Quixote, but I hadn’t actually read the book when I started Dear Creature. But yeah, we have similar heroes doing similarly crazy things. They have their own ideas about what’s important and it doesn’t necessarily make sense to a lot of the world around them. So yeah, I can definitely see that connection.

CHRIS: Alright, so now what’s likely our final question: what’s some of the fun stuff you guys are working on now? What can we all look forward to seeing from you guys in the near future?

JONATHAN: Well, for my part, as we’re doing this interview I’m actually working on a page for Dark Horse Comics. I’m doing three different projects for them that are all starting up this month, which is kind of wild. Two of them are shorter pieces, and one is a longer piece that I’m doing with John Arcudi writing. So those will be some of my freelance projects. And I’ve got another book in the works that is another personal project, and doesn’t have a publisher attached to it. Nudging Steven in the ribs over the airwaves there. It’s kind of an adventure, getting back to things that I loved and appreciated when I was a little kid, a book geared to all ages, all audiences. So I’m excited about that. The stuff for Dark Horse, one is called House of Night and my little bit of it is Anthony and Cleopatra as vampires. The project with John Arcudi is called The Creep, which is a character he developed for Dark Horse Presents a few years back. Those are some of the things I’m working on.

CHRIS: How about you Steven? What’s got you particularly excited?

STEVEN: Out in stores right now, actually, are a couple of projects that I worked on. One is a graphic novel – written by Orson Scott Card and his daughter Emily Janice Card – called Laddertop which is a great all-ages sci-fi adventure. That’s out now – actually came out a month ago. Upcoming we’re collecting the webcomic Girl Genius in a very nice hardcover collection. It’s gorgeous, it’s going to be fantastic. After that there’s a graphic novel which I’ve had a lot more influence on called The Advance Team, which is written by Will Pfeifer who wrote Aquaman and Catwoman and is drawn by a Spanish artist named Germán Torres who drew Dr. Who and Speed Racer. The one sentence pitch is a young man discovers that his pop culture icons are in fact the advance team of an alien invasion and only he can stop them before the invasion happens, except while he knows that’s true, everyone else sees this young man going around murdering famous people.

CHRIS: Sounds fun!

STEVEN: He kind of has to somehow do this, and convince people he’s not crazy. It’s a lot of fun, total crazy action. Will has been plugging it pretty much once a week on his blog so you can already see some of the preview pages up. We got Tom Orzechowski to letter it, and the whole book looks fantastic.

CHRIS: Well, that’s pretty much it. It’s been great chatting with you, and thanks again for taking the time!

STEVEN: Thanks!

JONATHAN: Thanks, it’s been fun!

CHRIS: And as a final way of saying thank you, here’s the book trailer for Jonathan’s Dear Creature:

Nov 1

5 Comments

Leaping the Chasm of Imagination: Verisimilitude, Historical Fiction, and Speculative Fiction

The borders of genre are famously porous. Devices that start in one genre will get adopted, subsumed, and then modified in another. Then the cycle starts again, with the “new” device trickling back to its original progenitor. This tendency is why asking whether realistic or speculative fiction developed first is meaningless: anthropologists and fans can probably debate this ’til the heat death of the universe, and even then the answer won’t matter. But I’m curious as to how and why certain narrative techniques make this leap and others don’t.

Verisimilitude is the Heart of Storytelling

Every single genre – regardless of how speculative it is – relies on some degree of verisimilitude to enable comprehension. Sure, it’s theoretically possible to write a science fiction novel entirely in a made-up alien language with concepts for which there is no human analog…but who on this planet would actually read it? At the most basic level of language, we rely on mutually comprehensible words to communicate. This is the point where I call shenanigans on the pseudo-linguistic (read: intellectually irresponsible) school of critical theory that argues that text/words/language are inherently meaningless. If that were true, then we would not only never have fiction, we would also lose all written correspondence and spoken conversation. Community relies on communication: note their similar roots.

The sentence “John opened the door.” could appear in a hard science fiction story, an immersive secondary world fantasy, or in mimetic chick lit. Sure, we might need to replace the character’s name, and call John “Blaghosan” or something to maintain the illusion, but the act of opening a door can apply in any of these fictional modes. The richness of our lexicon and its corresponding flexibility enables us to assemble more complex, interesting, and layered sentences. But fiction (and any communication) relies on a shared ontological foundation.

At Viable Paradise (which I attended a couple of weeks ago), the amazing Teresa Nielsen Hayden said something utterly profound: “The subject verbed the object, and it was good.” The particulars might vary, but at the sentence level that basic principle underlies all communication, regardless of its realism. The fancy stuff (metaphors, similes, neologisms) that speculative fiction authors love is really a set of clothes hung on this incredibly flexible frame.

The Basic Devices of Fiction: Simile, Metaphor, and Neologism as Genre Markers

All writers use a certain basic arsenal in an infinite variety of combinations to communicate and manipulate their audiences. The most basic tools are such an indelible part of language, communication, and thought as to be near inseparable. But how we use them can actually be one of the markers of speculative fiction.

When we employ a simile (“John scuttled like an ant”) we are establishing a sense of apparency. The use of “like” indicates that John is not in actuality an ant. He merely acts with characteristics more commonly associated with one. Such a use of apparency can take place in any genre and is likely as old as language. Metaphor (“John was an ant scuttling across the floor.”) and neologism (“John the antyman scuttled”), however, are a little more complicated.

If we’re reading a work that is by definition realistic, then we recognize metaphor as a stronger way of evoking apparency. If we’re reading an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, we know that John hasn’t actually become an arthropod. But if we’re reading something speculative than lacking other markers in the text, our hero John may have suddenly literally transmogrified into an insect (hey, it worked for Kafka, right?).

When we come across a neologism (“antyman”) we now have to decode the new word and incorporate it into our lexicon. Its semantic meaning may be unclear, and needs to be gleaned from context. In speculative fiction, that context may support fantastic concepts (antyman – the hybrid of a human and an ant) or merely extend our realistic lexicon (like Shakespeare coining terms like “assassination”).

This decoding process is part of what we love about science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Decoding where a given work’s fantastic borders are is an intellectual puzzle that gives us no small degree of satisfaction (whether escapist or otherwise). Traditionally, literal metaphor has been the plaything of speculative fiction writers. Realistic writers might have dallied in it a bit, but it is only with the relatively recent rise of magical realism and literary fiction’s “discovery” of science fictional devices that this technique has been fully appropriated. A similar process has happened over the centuries with narrative structures.

The Many Structures of the Novel

While many hardcore genre fans might disagree, I would argue that most innovative novel structures first appeared in “realistic” fiction. Whether it is the epistolary novel, the framed narrative, stream of consciousness, or non-linearity it probably appeared first in the realm of realistic mimetic fiction. There’s a good reason for that: like speculative fiction, innovative structures require effort on the part of the reader to decode and process them. To expect the reader to decode an innovative structure and process the speculative elements is likely expecting too much.

Consider the history of the epistolary novel. When it first grew to prominence in the seventeenth century (check out Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister), we had to learn how to consume realistic epistolary novels before fantastical interpretations could flourish. As far as I know, it was not until 1818 that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus successfully introduced early science fictional elements into the epistolary structure, and not until 1897 that Bram Stoker’s Dracula did the same for the nascent genre of horror. I suspect these novels owe much of their continued longevity and relevance to being early examples of speculative stories that made the imaginative leap and successfully appropriated a mimetic/realistic structure.

The pattern is quite similar for other innovative narrative structures. Could Delaney’s Dhalgren have appeared without the innovations of Kerouac? Or would Effinger’s When Gravity Fails have the same resonance without Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett? As readers, we don’t need to have read the realistic taproot texts to experience and enjoy their speculative descendents. Because their structures are successful, they spawn a multiplicity of children: they become part of the cultural zeitgeist that soaks into our awareness.

This pattern actually holds even for the most basic taproot texts of literature. At the start of this post, I asked whether realistic or speculative fiction came first. And the answer is that they both appeared at the same time in the form of historical fiction. Wikipedia dates the first piece of historical fiction back to the 20th century BC. In those ancient days, there was little distinction between what today we characterize as “myth” and what they called “history”.

Even the earliest historical fiction had the same world-building challenges as speculative fiction. History is a foreign country we can never visit, and ancient Greece or Regency Britain are as foreign to our twenty-first century sensibilities as Middle-Earth or the Sagittarius Arm. The world-building techniques for the two genres are identical. Look at how Patrick O’Brian pulls us into his Napoleonic-era nautical understanding in his Aubrey and Maturin books. Then compare his methods to how Arthur C. Clarke introduces us to space-age technology in Rendezvous With Rama. The challenge is the same, and the craft to address it is the same as well.

Does the Pendulum Swing Both Ways?

With the rise of the modernists in the early twentieth century, we saw the fantastic get relegated to a pulp ghetto that we still struggle to escape. Yet even then, there were some “mainstream” authors who looked to fantastic fiction as a source of inspiration (Kingsley Amis and Shirley Jackson both come to mind). The last several decades have seen fantastical techniques gain acceptability within the realistic fiction community (provided they’re labeled “magical realism”). With post-apocalyptic texts like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or blatantly science fictional novels like Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel being published as “mainstream literary fiction” we may be living through the pendulum’s reversal as we speak.

Which are the fantastical devices that will now hop back over that imaginative chasm? What are – and what will – contemporary “realistic” writers learn from their speculative peers? That the cycle will keep going I have no doubt, but I’m curious what lessons realistic authors are learning from those of us who like to mess about with elves and space ships and zombies. Regardless of the genre, my own predilections suggest that writers who want to innovate structurally should read widely and extensively across genres to internalize others’ innovations wherever we come across them. T.S. Eliot nailed it when he said “Mediocre writers borrow. Great writers steal.”

What should we be stealing nowadays?

Oct 18

5 Comments

Why do we love science fiction, fantasy, or horror?

Over on the Absolute Write Forums, GreenEpic posted a fairly thought provoking question:

Does anyone have a theory as to why science fiction and fantasy are so popular?

While the thread there has a bunch of really good answers, most of them tend towards the anecdotal. And as this is the Internet, and I have a generalized opinion, I figured I’d share it for public consumption. Here’s what I think:

Science fiction, fantasy, and horror are all marketing categories. They loosely describe a set of fictional conventions that can be expected within a given work. Does a story have robots? Odds are it is science fiction. Does it have magic? Most likely fantasy. Does it have undead monsters out to eat your flesh? I’d guess horror. Of course, this is a gross over-simplification. As a lot of my earlier posts on genre observations suggest, the reality is a heck of a lot more complicated. But your typical reader or movie-goer isn’t terribly concerned with the minutiae of genre theory (which I think is unfortunate, but I’m both nerdy and pedantic). Why do so many respond – in one fashion or another – to speculative storytelling?

Psychological, Physiological, and Neurological Levels of Storytelling

Rational, Emotional, Physiological, and Neurological Responses to Storytelling

Levels of Response to Story

Experiencing a story affects us on both psychological and physiological levels. Have you read stories that put you on the edge of your seat? They tugged on your subconscious emotions to increase tension. That sensation of your palms sweating or your heart beating faster? The story, and the tension it engendered, elicited a physiological response. Or have you ever fallen into a story so lovely that the world around you and the passage of time faded into mere background noise? The story produced a neurological trance-state, not unlike meditation or hypnosis. Have you ever read a book and realized you might be wrong about something? The story’s rhetoric affected your rational thoughts and values.

There’s a connection between our brains and our bodies that good storytelling can powerfully manipulate. It is simultaneously a positive and negative feedback system, where if a story affects one aspect of our beings it has ripple effects that impinge on every other aspect. When a creator manipulates this system skillfully, the effect is transparent and immensely powerful. And here’s why this is important: a story’s marketing category has no bearing on the audience’s response.

That’s right. Whether we’re reading mainstream literary fiction, watching Blade Runner, or flipping through a comic book, our brains and bodies will still respond to the underlying story. When we participate in ludic reading (reading for pleasure), we are looking for a certain configuration of those four responses. Of course, we can’t possibly articulate what that configuration might be (I can’t imagine anyone looking for a story that produces a 40% emotional, 30% physiological, 20% neurological, and 10% rational responses). And the components of those configurations are likely to have fairly fuzzy borders, because they are greatly affected by our state of mind/body at the time of the experience. But when we experience a satisfying story, when a story has elicited a satisfactory configuration of responses, we know it. We say “That was a good story” or “That was fun” without trying to really take it apart and understand why. And a story’s marketing category does not affect how it manipulates our responses. Instead, it describes the conventions appropriate to correctly interpreting its plot.

Basic Modes of Storytelling

Put away your Northrup Frye. I’m talking about something much more essential than mimesis or myth. If we just focus on a story’s plot and how that plot is constructed, we find several different modes of storytelling. Each of these modes relies on a certain configuration of those responses I mentioned above.

For example, an adventure story is going to produce a certain kind of physiological response. Our heart rate might increase, our breath might grow short, we might be eagerly looking to see how the hero will get out of a particular jam. But a mimetic (for the sake of simplicity, let’s call it a representative or slice-of-life) story is unlikely to produce that kind of response. Instead, it is more likely to be quieter, slower.

Basic Modes of Storytelling, with Realistic & Fantastical Examples

These responses have nothing whatsoever to do with whether a story has fantastical elements or not. Consider two adventures: Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and Steven Brust’s The Phoenix Guards. They make for an interesting comparison, in that the latter is explicitly modeled on the former. But while Dumas’ most famous work has no fantastical elements to speak of, Brust’s novel is replete with them. Yet both stories produce similar responses in the reader, particularly if we are familiar with both works.

So if a story’s fantastical elements (or the lack thereof) has no bearing on the mode a story is told in, then why do some folks prefer speculative fiction over realistic fiction?

Gateway Drugs, Sense-of-Wonder, and the Multitudinous Genre

I believe that fantastical storytelling has an inherent advantage over realistic storytelling. There are no boundaries on what we can do with it. If a concretized metaphor (*cough* the one ring *cough*) adds value to our story, then why not run with it? Just because it isn’t realistic does not mean such images or metaphors are valueless.

Realistic storytelling is actually a subset of fantastical storytelling: by design, it chooses to limit its images and narrative devices to those which can be found in real life. If we love good storytelling, then it’s perfectly natural that we would love the speculative genres. Like Whitman, they contain multitudes. Every single realistic story, from Shakespeare to Joyce, can be presented using fantastical imagery. That a particular execution of a story remains realistic is merely the consequence of an authorial decision as to its ideal presentation.

Yet despite the fact that good stories do not need fantastical devices to remain good stories, plenty of folks out there read exclusively in the fantastic genres. Why? If they can find equally enjoyable stories among the “realistic” shelves, why stick with SF/F/H? I suspect it is because of a positive feedback loop imprinted on our brains early on. When we first consciously encounter storytelling, we look for patterns. It’s a consequence of our highly-developed simian brains. So if in those formative years, we learn that science fiction, or fantasy, or horror is statistically more likely to produce a particular configuration of responses that satisfies us, we treat it like a drug. We learn to love it, and to equate that particular marketing category with the pleasure it produces. And then sometimes, we never stray beyond that gateway.

This gate swings both ways, of course. The same holds true for many readers of realistic fiction, or for many movie-goers who never pick up a book. It’s all about the positive feedback loop that gets imprinted on our neurons at a formative age. I suspect (on the basis of absolutely zero neurological knowledge) that this imprinting can be changed as our experiences change us, but it remains a powerful driver of our experiences.

I suspect the tough-to-pin-down “sense of wonder” is actually a consequence of this gateway drug. If we are adequately self-aware, we learn to recognize (through a meta-cognitive experience), the response we are seeking. That recognition produces that scintillating sense-of-wonder fans of SF/F/H use to justify our genre habit. Speaking for myself, I can elicit that same sense-of-wonder reading outside of genre (Patrick O’Brian’s books come to mind, as do Yasunari Kawabata’s). I don’t believe wonder is genre-specific, although the experience is statistically more common among the fantastic shelves.

And this brings us to the core reason why the speculative genres are so popular: they are a marketing category that encompasses all of the basic modes of storytelling found in realistic fiction. You’ll notice there is no such marketing category as “realistic fiction”. If we want to balance “SF/F/H” we would need an equally broad “realistic fiction” category. But instead, the “realistic fiction” section is fragmented into literary fiction, thrillers, romance, mystery, historical fiction, etc. If you want to find a realistic story told in the romantic mode, well your odds are pretty small looking under literary fiction. If you want a piece of mimetic fiction that deepens your understanding of the human condition, you should probably avoid the thriller shelves.

Yet all of these storytelling modes can be found side-by-side in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror section. Fans of genre fiction need never wander outside of those shelves to find stories that satisfy their every need. And that’s why, as a marketing category, it is so popular. It contains multitudes. And those increase the odds that a story from that marketing category will produce a satisfying response. Of course, much as I love fantastical fiction, I still think folks should read outside of their beloved genres every now and again. But if they don’t, well that’s fine, too: speculative fiction’s got a lot to love.

What do you think? Why does speculative fiction push a lot of our buttons and keep our attention the way it does? Why does it produce such fervent loyalty on the part of readers and viewers?

Oct 11

4 Comments

REVIEW: Dear Creature by Jonathan Case

	Title:	Dear Creature
	Author:	Jonathan Case
	Pub Date:	October 11th, 2011
	Chris’ Rating (5 possible):
An Attempt at Categorization		If You Like… / You Might Like…
		Monster The Automatic Detective Level Up May Contain Traces of Magic Don Quixote The Best of the Spirit I Kill Giants

So in my brain, I had a great blog post all planned out for today. It was going to be a nice and meaty post about different schools of writing process, and the dangerous temptation of superstitious totemic twaddle that so many of us fall prey to. But then I went through my mail from last week, and found a review copy of Jonathan Case’s debut graphic novel Dear Creature. And then my plans went the way of all those of mice and men. I cannot stress enough how excellent this book is, as a work of sequential art, as a story, and as an exercise in writing.

I didn’t even mean to start reading it: I intended to put it on my to-read shelves, and to get to it maybe sometime in the next couple of weeks. But somewhere in the twelve feet between opening the envelope on my kitchen table and putting it on a shelf in my library (probably because I “just took a peak” at the first couple of pages), Case’s story sucked me in like a whirlpool. Dear Creature is the literary, quirky, heart-warming, and deliciously pulpy love story (yeah, I know, right?) of an atomic sea mutant named Grue. Living in a sunken nuclear sub, and to the chagrin of a crustacean chorus, Grue is no longer content to devour lustful beach-going teenagers. With his eyes and heart opened by pages of Shakespeare’s plays found in soda bottles, the lonely sea monster naturally tries to seek out whoever has been sending out these messages.

It’s tempting when reviewing a graphic novel to start with the art. After all, the art is intrinsic to a graphic novel’s storytelling. But what really set Dear Creature apart for me was the writing. While many people who write sequential art are uncomfortable drawing distinctions between comic books and graphic novels, I’m afraid I’ve never agreed with Douglas Wolk’s claim that the sole difference is their binding. A true graphic novel – like Dear Creature, or Gene Luen Yang’s Level Up – is paced and constructed very differently from a bound-up collection of serialized 24 – 32 page comic books.

Most prose novels, whether we’re talking about Dickens, Calvino, or Ian Fleming, cannot be split up into neat episodes without losing some degree of their resonance or storytelling unity. But a graphic “novel” that began life as a series of smaller comic books, like Allan Moore’s Watchmen, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, or Garth Ennis’ Preacher can never be more than the sum of its parts, however good those parts may be. That’s just the nature of the beast. But Dear Creature, while it is divided into chapters, coalesces by its very nature into a resonating, cathartic story that draws us in, makes us laugh, and satisfies us only when we have experienced its entirety. Case does not construct his individual chapters the way a comic book writer constructs particular issues: he constructs them the way a prose novelist constructs chapters, relying on the story’s over-arching flow, compelling characters, and emotional narrative to carry us along.

Case builds his characters through a flawless union of art and dialog. Grue, his lovelorn atomic sea monster, speaks in iambic pentameter entirely oblivious to its idiosyncrasy in 1962 California. With all of the book’s focus on Shakespeare, it’s tempting to try to find models in the Bard. But really, I trace Grue’s antecedents more to Cervantes than Shakespeare. Grue is like a modern day Don Quixote, in that for him the high drama of Shakespeare has applicability to every facet of his contemporary life. And if it doesn’t? Well, then by God it should! Case captures this touching quixotic earnestness in Grue’s every pose, centering our attention on his larger-than-life actions whether dramatic or comedic.

Grue is accompanied by a ~~Greek~~ crab chorus used to great comedic effect. If Aeschylus’ Oceanids in Prometheus Bound represent a “perfect audience’s” reactions to the Titan’s plight, then what do Case’s crabs represent? It’s not like they’re sympathetic to Grue’s concerns. Instead, they poke fun at the beleaguered monster and exhort him to return to feasting upon human flesh.

And Grue’s Dulcinea del Toboso? Like Aldonza Lorenzo, the woman who captures Grue’s deep and soulful heart with torn pages of Shakespeare sent into the briny deep is not your stereotypical love interest. First, she’s crazy, as in violently agoraphobic. And she is old (well, middle-aged) in the same way that Aldonza is plain. But just as Quixote looks past the simple truth in the interests of his higher truth, so too Grue simply does not notice. The love that forms between a man-eating atomic sea monster and a middle-aged agoraphobe is poignant, touching, and tragic.

Artistically, Dear Creature is equally clever. Case chose to draw it in a style that made me instantly think of Will Eisner’s The Spirit. Like Eisner, Case uses solid black shading to add depth to his panels, while relying on iconic lines to draw his heroes. This quasi-homage seemed most apparent and appropriate in the case of Henry Craw, a retiring policeman who particularly reminded me of an aging Denny Colt.

By combining excellent character development with superlative dialog, and a heartfelt emotional arc, Case has written one of the best novels I have read in years. And yes, that is novels as opposed to graphic novels. Yet since this book is structured so much like a prose novel, and with characters and writing that clearly trace their lineage back to classic literature, it did raise a question as I was reading it: does Dear Creature need to be sequential art to tell its story? Similar love stories, characters, quirks, and pulpiness have all been captured in prose by other authors before, and in particular this book made me think of A. Lee Martinez’ great books. But what did Case gain through choosing to tell this story visually? I think the answer speaks to Case’s prodigious and multifaceted skills and talents: by writing Dear Creature as a graphic novel, Case was able to get out of his own way. The use of sequential art in this book obviates the need for exposition. By relying on the art to show us what is happening, the dialog is able to stand on its own and remind us of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and classic drama undiluted by descriptive text. Which makes the story tighter, and in some ways purer, than it would otherwise have been.

I commend Jonathan Case for this excellent graphic novel. It is very rare to find a storyteller who is able to write something that is at once literary and meta-textual, while remaining touching and hilarious. To then combine that ear for dialog and prose with artistic talent is even rarer. If you enjoy sequential art, then hands down, you should pick up Dear Creature.

And I think that it should be on everybody’s short-list for the Eisner award.

Sep 20

8 Comments

A Theory of the Hero: Tragic and Anti-tragic Heroes (part 3 of 3)

NOTE: This is the third and final installment in a three-part series on heroic characters. This post will focus on how narrative timing and character choice determines the difference between tragic and anti-tragic heroes. The previous two posts respectively focused on agency, voice, and character sincerity and heroic story archetypes.

This past week I’ve been writing about heroic fiction, particularly focusing on heroic characters and their story archetypes. Every heroic story must take place within a moral universe (i.e. a universe where actions have implicit or explicit consequences). If the story’s setting were not moral, then it would be impossible to demonstrate the character’s heroic nature. But given that moral universe and the character’s heroic nature (which is intrinsically concerned with their value system), what makes some heroes “tragic” and others…not?

Can Tragedy Exist without Heroes?

No. Next question?

Okay, seriously: there are probably as many definitions of tragedy (in fiction) as there are critics. And I suspect that every one of them – from Aristotle to Hegel to Nietzsche – is probably right. But what most fail to point out is the simple fact that tragedy only happens to heroes. When we think of the characters who we would call “tragic”, all feature the same central concern with the hero’s value system. Whether it is Sidney Carton in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Moorcock’s Elric, or The Incredible Hulk‘s Bruce Banner: every tragic hero is centrally concerned with moral questions.

While every tragedy involves a heroic story, the converse does not apply. There are many heroic stories which both focus on heroic characters and adhere to the three primary heroic archetypes, but which we would nonetheless be hard pressed to call tragic. Consider Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Patricia C. Wrede’s Dealing with Dragons. Both stories deal with heroic characters, the former applying the aspirational archetype and the latter adhering more to the observational. Yet nevertheless, none of the heroes in either story can rightly be called tragic.

Choice: Making a Tragic Hero through the Exercise of Agency

Both Aristotle and Hegel (in particular) pointed out a key tenet of the tragic story: for tragedy to occur, the hero has to undergo some sort of reversal of fortune. That reversal may be externally mediated, the result of an opposing ethical force (a hero of different values, for example) or it may be an internal reversal (motivated by the hero’s evolving awareness or shifting passions). But in order to evoke catharsis, the hero has to reverse either some aspect of their nature or the trajectory of their experiences. That is exactly what heroic characters do when they transgress against their moral codes.

In heroic storytelling, the events of the plot, the story, and the character’s progression all come together in the hero’s choice of “right” or “wrong”. This choice may be shown baldly (e.g. Luke refusing the Emperor) or it may be concretized through dramatic action (e.g. Sidney Carton’s sacrifice). But if the hero makes the “right” choice (according to their own value system), the cathartic dénoument becomes a breath exhaled, the satisfaction of good triumphing over evil. If the hero makes the “wrong” choice, then we lament hypothetical paths not taken.

Because the hero is defined by his agency (see last Tuesday’s post), much of the tension in heroic stories stems from the question of how that agency gets exercised. Both aspirational and consequential archetypes are centrally concerned with the question of choice, though they derive their tension and their tragedy through entirely different methods.

The Tension of Expectations in Aspirational Storytelling

As they progress, aspirational stories derive their tension from uncertainty as to whether the hero will act in accordance with his moral code or transgress against it. In the moment of climax, when Katniss must choose between Peeta’s life and her own (in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games) or when Valjean holds Javert’s life in his hands, the hero teeters on a knife’s edge. Make one choice, and they stay true to their own ideals. Make the other choice, and they throw those ideals to the wind. And while that moral choice drives tension in the reading experience, it does not determine tragedy.

Consider two very different aspirational heroes: Frodo Baggins and Sidney Carton. From the beginning of Frodo’s story in The Lord of the Rings, we face the question: will Frodo have the strength to destroy the One Ring? As the story progresses, we watch him struggle with the Ring’s influence and triumph (barely and not without hardship) over Sauron and the Ring’s evil. But it is at the last moment, when he is standing above the Crack of Doom – when he is actually in a position to fulfill his quest – that he faces the climactic choice. And he fails. Frodo allows the Ring to corrupt him, and decides not to destroy it. Of course, the world is saved anyway because Gollum (Frodo’s mirror-image) bites Frodo’s finger off and falls into the flame. But regardless of that eucatastrophic moment, at the culmination of Frodo’s aspirational story, he transgresses against his own value system.

Sidney Carton, by contrast, represents an inversion of Frodo Baggins’ story arc. Throughout A Tale of Two Cities, he fails to live up to his own value system. From his story’s beginning, we watch Carton’s self-loathing rise in parallel to his love for Lucie Manette. And it is only at the story’s end, when he chooses to sacrifice himself for Charles Darney, that Carton’s acts finally align with his moral code. At the climax of the story, he chooses to do what is “right” – unlike Frodo, who chose to do what is “wrong”.

Yet despite the opposite trajectories of their respective aspirational stories, both remain tragic heroes. The source of that tragedy rests on an underlying tension between natural human meta-ethics and the consequences represented in the story. As social creatures, we are preconditioned to believe that doing what is right benefits us. While every grown-up would readily admit that life is more complicated than that, deep within our souls there remains a conviction that if we play nice, eat our vegetables, and go to bed early, our lives will be better. Aspirational heroes turn tragic when their experiences invert that expectation.

Frodo Baggins does wrong. He fails, and knows it. The fact that his failure is justifiable in no way diminishes the fact that at the last moment, he choked. In our hearts, we expect that a hero who fails and acts evilly should get what’s coming to him. Which is not to be accorded the highest honors of the land, or the love and respect of all the peoples. Yet that is precisely what Frodo gets. He failed: it is only through Gollum’s avarice that the world was saved. If it was up to Frodo, Sauron would have won. Who, really, could ever trust him with something momentous after that? Though he is exactly its opposite, he receives all the accolades of the conquering hero. He does not get what was coming to him.

Sidney Carton, by contrast, rises to the occasion. When it comes down to it, he does his “far, far better thing”. But what does his nobility get him? We want Carton to live. We want him to get the girl, and to find happiness. Instead, he earns himself a short trip to the guillotine.

Carton and Frodo are both tragic heroes because the consequences of their choices stand in direct opposition to our expectations of justice. Carton earns a respect that he never gets to experience. Frodo earns opprobrium that he never has face. This produces a disconnect between our experience and our desires which rests at the heart of aspirational tragedy. We want heroes to get what they deserve. And it becomes tragic when they don’t. Which – not insignificantly – is often how real life works.

Facing the Music: Dealing with the Consequences of a Choice

Consequential tragedy is produced in an entirely different fashion. Aspirational stories start far in advance of the hero’s moral choice, which comes to represent the climax of the story. In consequential stories, the moral choice has either already happened (e.g. most Elric of Melniboné stories) or happens very early in the events of the story (e.g. Shakespeare’s Macbeth).

Macbeth knows that it is wrong to murder Duncan, but he does it anyway. His actions may be inconsistent with his values, yet his value system remains unchanged. By choosing to act against his own moral sense, Macbeth exercises his agency to tragic effect. Macbeth is a loyal soldier scarcely interested in power. The witches dangle the prospect of regency before him, and he makes a morally bankrupt choice. The remainder of the play then deals with the consequences of that fatal decision. In order to maintain his grip on power, Macbeth has to constantly escalate and revisit his choice: the murder of Banquo (and the attempt on Fleance), the slaughtering of MacDuff’s family, etc. Macbeth becomes a tragic hero because his capacity for good gets dragged deep into the mud following his regicide. He knows his acts are evil, and that evil tortures him, but the die is cast and he is locked into his inevitable doom. Of course, the murdering SOB “deserves it” – but he still retains all the nobility of spirit with which he began the play.

Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné is in a similar boat. His Faustian bargains with Antioch and the demon-sword Stormbringer represent fundamental transgressions against his value system. The self-loathing that follows becomes the focus for Elric’s tragedy, and even though he wishes to be free of both, his entire saga depicts the gradual destruction of all that he loves at his own hands.

While consequential stories in particular lend themselves to tragic heroes, not all consequential heroes need be tragic. In particular, consequential heroes that are redemptive in nature avoid the trap of tragedy. Consider Jeffrey Ford’s hero Cley (from his amazing Well-Built City trilogy, starting in The Physiognomy). Initially, he is an evil (or at best, ignorant) man. But as the book and series progresses, he recognizes that he is not acting in accordance with his own implicit values, and sets out to seek redemption. His quest for redemption makes him a poignant and bittersweet hero, though one that never falls into the tragedy of his companion Misrix.

All this being said, I do not know if it would be possible to write a consequential story that is neither tragic nor redemptive. Where would the dramatic tension come from, if the character initially makes the “right” choice and no negative consequences follow? Seems like it would be a pretty dull story to me, though I suspect if someone were to pull it off they’d be sitting on an award-winner.

The Tragic versus the Anti-Tragic Hero

Have you ever wondered what the opposite of tragedy is? I sure have, and somehow “comedy” just does not cut it in my book. It has too many connotations of humor or slapstick. The Pevensies in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Taran in the Chronicles of Prydain, and the Brothers Grossbart in The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart are all heroic characters. They have agency, the narrative voice is compelling, and their moral values remain consistent throughout their stories. Yet none of them could rightly be considered tragic, nor could any of them be adequately described as comedic.

Which makes me long for something that is the opposite to the tragic hero, something I’ve taken to calling the anti-tragic hero for lack of a better term (yeah, I know…it’s a little ungainly: does anyone have any better suggestions?). Anti-tragic heroes can be found in any of the three heroic archetypes: aspirational (the Pevensies), observational (the Brothers Grossbart), or consequential (Cley). Some may be redemptive (Cley or Edmund Pevensie), but that is not at all necessary (e.g. the Brothers Grossbart or the remaining Pevensies).

The anti-tragic hero can be characterized as getting what we the reader believe they have earned through the exercise of their agency. Anti-tragic heroes generally behave according to the precepts of their value systems. The Pevensies’ values align well with standard Western values for good. The Grossbarts’ align well with standard Western values for bad. Cley – once he begins his redemptive quest – also aligns more with our concept of good. In each of these stories, the anti-tragic hero gets what the reader believes they deserve. The Pevensies, by their right and noble actions, become great kings and queens of Narnia. The Brothers Grossbart end up locked in a tomb – presumably for all time. Cley manages to make peace with his past sins and be reborn. Their fates align with our sense of justice, which may well be different from their own.

The Essence of Heroic Stories: Expectations, Values, and Choice

And this, I think, really distills the heart of what heroes and heroic fiction are all about. At the most basic level, heroic stories are all about values and expectations. When characters’ actions relate to their own value system, they become heroes. They may live up to their own expectations, aspire to the better parts of themselves, or struggle to live with their own choices. But they do so with the degree of drama and moral focus that defines them as heroes. Their actions elicit expectations on our part as readers: we want something good, bad, or ugly to happen to these heroic characters because we believe their actions have earned some measure of response. And the tension between the hero’s actions and their consequences within the story determines whether that hero becomes tragic or anti-tragic.

The Essence of Heroic Fiction

Works Mentioned / Used in this Post

Below is a list of the authors and titles that I found helpful in putting this together. It’s a list of pretty cool and interesting books, and I strongly recommend each and every single on of them for insight into the hero:

Non-fiction	Fiction
Aristotle Poetics A.C. Bradley Shakespearean Tragedy Joseph Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces John Clute & John Grant The Encyclopedia of Fantasy G.W.F. Hegel The Phenomenology of Spirit Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays Farah Mendlesohn Rhetorics of Fantasy Michael Moorcock Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy Ivan Morris The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan Friedrich Nietschze The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings Vladimir Propp Morphology of the Folktale Ayn Rand The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers J.R.R. Tolkien Monsters and the Critics	Anonymous (trans. Seamus Heaney) Beowulf: A New Verse Translation Lloyd Alexander The Book of Three Westmark The Kestrel The Beggar Queen Jesse Bullington The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games Catching Fire Mockingjay Glen Cook Chronicles of the Black Company Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities David Eddings Pawn of Prophecy Jeffrey Ford The Physiognomy Memoranda The Beyond Dashiell Hammett The Thin Man Robert E. Howard The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane Victor Hugo Les Miserables Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis and Other Stories Fritz Leiber First Book of Lankhmar Second Book of Lankhmar C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe John Milton Paradise Lost Michael Moorcock Elric of Melniboné Vladimir Nabokov Lolita Mervyn Peake Titus Groan Gormenghast Ayn Rand The Fountainhead Atlas Shrugged William Shakespeare Macbeth J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit The Fellowship of the Ring The Two Towers The Return of the King T.H. White The Once and Future King Patricia C. Wrede Dealing with Dragons

Non-fiction

Fiction

Aristotle

Poetics

A.C. Bradley

Shakespearean Tragedy

Joseph Campbell

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

John Clute & John Grant

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy

G.W.F. Hegel

The Phenomenology of Spirit

Northrop Frye

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays

Farah Mendlesohn

Rhetorics of Fantasy

Michael Moorcock

Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy

Ivan Morris

The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan

Friedrich Nietschze

The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings

Vladimir Propp

Morphology of the Folktale

Ayn Rand

The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers

J.R.R. Tolkien

Monsters and the Critics

Anonymous (trans. Seamus Heaney)

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation

Lloyd Alexander

Jesse Bullington

The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart

Suzanne Collins

Glen Cook

Chronicles of the Black Company

Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities

David Eddings

Pawn of Prophecy

Jeffrey Ford

Dashiell Hammett

The Thin Man

Robert E. Howard

Victor Hugo

Les Miserables

Franz Kafka

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Fritz Leiber

C.S. Lewis

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

John Milton

Paradise Lost

Michael Moorcock

Elric of Melniboné

Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita

Mervyn Peake

Titus Groan
Gormenghast

Ayn Rand

The Fountainhead
Atlas Shrugged

William Shakespeare

Macbeth

J.R.R. Tolkien

T.H. White

The Once and Future King

Patricia C. Wrede

Dealing with Dragons

Sep 17

7 Comments

A Theory of the Hero: Story Archetypes for Heroic Characters (part 2 of 3)

NOTE: This is the second in a three-part series on heroic characters. The previous installment discussed how agency, voice, and sincerity are used to determine heroic characters, while the third installment focuses on narrative timing and the tragic and anti-tragic hero.

This past Tuesday, I wrote about how narrative voice, and a character’s agency and sincerity determine whether they can be considered heroic. But in order for those three components to mean something, they must be embedded within a larger story and then expressed through the plot. Any heroic story – whether Tolkien, Howard, or Nabokov – is principally concerned with the hero’s value system. I see three primary archetypes for a heroic story, and makoto (a character’s sincerity to their own values) is central to each:

Heroic Story Archetype		Description
1	Aspirational	Will the hero live up to their own values? Or will they fail and transgress against them?
2	Observational	How will the hero apply their values within a particular set of circumstances?
3	Consequential	How will the hero face the consequences of their choices?

Different Strokes for Different Folks, and Different Stories for Different Heroes

The archetype that applies to a particular hero need not be the archetype that applies to the overall book/film. We talk about books having “a story” but really each hero gets their own story. Some books might have no heroes (Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis), others might have one (Nabokov’s Lolita), or many (I count nine in Les Miserables).

As a quick example to start off, let’s consider Star Wars (the original trilogy, naturally). Han Solo’s journey is entirely different from Luke Skywalker’s: though they share many experiences (though they go through the same plot), the choices, subtext, and meaning is different for each character. Darth Vader likewise has his own story. Luke’s is aspirational: will he stay on the Light Side or go to the Dark? Solo’s story – particularly in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi – is observational: how will he apply his values under trying circumstances? And Vader’s story is consequential, focusing on themes of redemption and the consequences of choices he made before the events of the original trilogy. Each of these characters could be the “star” of the trilogy: that Luke’s arc gets the focus merely reflects the creator’s choice.

The hero’s story archetype determines the emotional arc of the story, the subtext that drives us to invest in the characters and keeps us tense. The hero’s value system and their behavior relative to that system determine the story archetype and set us up for the Aristotelian catharsis at the story’s climax.

Aspirational Stories: Portal/Quest Fantasies and Children’s Fiction

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy has a great entry on heroes and heroines which outlines a pretty extensive (though not exhaustive) typology of heroes. Looking at this list, however, it is clear that not every type of hero can support an aspirational archetype.

The classic model of an aspirational heroic story is the coming-of-age tale. Since so much of middle-grade and YA fiction is about helping characters negotiate and articulate their value systems, it should come as no surprise that children’s literature is rife with aspirational heroes. Taran the Assistant Pig-keeper in Alexander’s The Book of Three, Garion in Eddings’ Pawn of Prophecy, or Wart in White’s The Once and Future King are all great examples of aspirational heroes.

Hidden monarchs, ugly ducklings, changelings, and people who learn better are classic character models for aspirational stories. What is essential to this archetype is an evolution in the character’s choices. Unlike the observational archetype (see below), these characters’ are still struggling with their value systems. The “right” and “wrong” of their story is implied in the text: the reader understands what Taran must do, the reader knows what choices Garion must make, but the character does not. As the plot unfolds, the character gradually catches up to the reader and becomes able to articulate and act on their implicit value system.

Portal/quest fantasies are the most frequent structure for aspirational stories. The plot’s quest becomes the device by which the hero explores and articulates their choice. Frodo’s quest to destroy the Ring is inherently tied up in his value system. The crux of his story hinges on the question of whether he will allow himself to be corrupted by the Ring, or whether he will stay true to his values and destroy it. The climax of this archetype is the moment when the hero makes that final choice: when they decide whether they will do right or not. That climax is the moment of maximum tension within the story, and it defines the hero’s success or failure.

One of the most satisfying aspects of aspirational heroes is that they often make the “right” choice. Aragorn, Luke Skywalker, and most heroes in MG/YA fiction all ultimately make a choice that more-or-less aligns with most readers’ moral codes. But that success is not necessary. So long as the hero’s moral code remains unchanging, whether he succeeds or fails to live up to that code has no impact on the story’s resonance. Failure can be just as strong a resonator as success.

For example, Frodo Baggins is a failure. Yes, he remains a hero, but standing over the Crack of Doom, he allows the Ring to corrupt him, and he cannot bring himself to destroy it. Tolkien’s use of eucatastrophe (Gollum’s convenient attack on the invisible Frodo) is the device by which the author wrenches a positive ending out of his principal hero’s failure. This does not weaken the story – in fact, I think it enhances it by adding a tragic dimension to the character of Frodo Baggins. Everything does not work out, certainly not for Frodo. For the rest of his life, Frodo will have to bear the knowledge that at that last desperate moment, he blinked. If Frodo’s story is aspirational, then at the end of the day he fails in his aspiration. Yet his story still resonates.

Observational Archetypes: The Classic Heroic Story

When we use the words “heroic fantasy” most of us automatically think of muscle-bound heroes along the lines of Beowulf, Conan of Cimmeria, or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. We think of the stories written by Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Glen Cook, etc. Typically, these are immersive fantasies where the world of the story is assumed as a given. The heroes in question already fully live in their worlds, and their value systems are fully-formed and clearly articulated. However, what sets these stories apart from their aspirational counterparts is that they focus less intensely upon the hero’s moral code.

The climax of an aspirational heroic story hinges upon whether the hero will or will not live up to their values. But in an observational story, the hero will always live up to their values. These values are typically idiosyncratic when compared to those of other characters. Whether we’re dealing with loveable rogues like Han Solo, utter villains like the Brothers Grossbart, or introspective brooders like Elric of Melniboné, the hero’s value system always features some difference to those of the book’s other characters. Reading these characters’ stories, we are less concerned with will they or won’t they stick to their guns, and more concerned with how they will do so.

Observational heroes tend to be what The Encyclopedia of Fantasy calls Brave Little Tailors, Duos, or Temporal Adventuresses. Many fairy tale heroes, in particular the “Ivans” of Russian fairy tales or the “Jacks” of the British variety, fall into this camp. So would most of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, where his sword-swinging Cimmerian broods and simmers…but always acts according to his (admittedly sometimes rough) moral values.

The typical observational hero never ages: he or she is almost always portrayed in the prime of their youth, as the story’s momentum hinges upon their ability to act with physical or magical strength. Aspirational heroes and their stories tend to deal earnestly with stark moral black-and-whites. Observational heroes, however, tend to see more shades of grey. For Frodo Baggins or Taran the Assistant Pig-keeper, there is no middle ground: either they do right or they fail. For Conan, or Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, their moral codes and the choices they face are more ambiguous, allowing for compromise.

This ambiguity creates a great degree of space for humor in observational stories. Whether it is Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Conan, or Han Solo, the ambiguity of the hero’s moral code and their situational application offers the opportunity to inject irony and sarcasm into the narrative. This kind of humor tends to be quite infectious, because it perhaps deals with moral choices more accessible to the average reader than those common in high fantasy. The choices our heroes face, while expressed in outlandish fashions, tend to have fewer world-changing or soul-destroying consequences than those found in aspirational stories.

Duos in particular are a common type of observational hero. While I have already mentioned Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, I think a far better set of examples can be found in the mystery genre. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson represent the classic ur-duo, and their stories clearly show the application of Holmes’ rational worldview. In Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, Nick and Nora Charles have a clearly ideosyncratic, “us-against-the-world” value system which they apply consistently. As in so many mysteries, the morality of their philosophy is not the focus of the story: instead, the focus is on how that philosophy is actively applied within the plot.

Generally, heroic stories whose narrative focus is on the action of their plot tend to skew observationally. These are the stories that are more exciting than earnest. Bullington’s The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart is a fun exploration of how a set of villainous moral codes can be applied across a variety of trying situations. Super-hero comic books in particular are another great example of this kind of storytelling: the hero’s moral code (remember Truth, Justice and the American Way?) is always a given, but decades of continuity explore how the hero applies that code to all manner of situations.

Consequential Archetypes: Living with Choices

The third and final story archetype for heroic characters returns to deal with the moral choices more earnestly than in most observational stories. Consequential stories focus on the hero’s actions after a moral choice has been made. By its very definition, this archetype tends towards the Aristotelian and the tragic. Typical heroes that fit this mold are the Knight of Doleful Countenance, or the sinner seeking redemption.

Often, the hero’s nobility is established off-screen before the events of the story. We know Macbeth is a noble hero because Duncan, his men at arms, and the sergeant tell us so before we ever meet the thane of Glamis. But Macbeth transgresses against his own moral code by killing his king, and the rest of the play focuses on him living with and facing up to the consequences of his evil act. Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane stories do something similar, where we first meet Solomon Kane as a puritanical zealot obsessed with meting out stern justice and stamping out whatever he considers evil, regardless of danger. Through the stories’ subtext, we gradually get the sense that Kane’s obsession is redemptive: that by stamping out evil, he may purge his own soul of whatever past sins may stain it. In Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné stories, the hero must live with the guilt of feeding souls to his demon-sword Stormbringer.

Consequential heroes and their stories may be redemptive or tragic. Darth Vader’s is a redemptive story, where he is able to return to the Light by betraying the Emperor. Macbeth or Othello, by contrast, are tragic: no amount of contrition on their part can ever expunge their guilt. Typical of consequential stories is a constant revisiting and escalation of the hero’s original choice: Macbeth is forced to one-up his betrayal of Duncan with the murder of his friend Banquo, followed by the slaughter of MacDuff’s family. Elric has to feed ever more souls to Stormbringer so that he can do what he feels is right.

By their very nature, consequential heroes and their stories are tragic: if aspirational stories end on “and they lived happily/sadly ever after” then consequential stories are what happens in the ever after.

Story versus Story and Mixing Archetypes

Like so many aspects of storytelling, the borders between these archetypes can be blurred. For example, Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné combines aspects of the consequential archetype (the exploration of Elric’s guilt) with the observational (constantly re-visiting his moral choices in new circumstances). It is also possible, though very difficult, for a single hero to progress from an aspirational story, to an observational story, and then to a consequential story. I know of few examples of this kind of progression, but those that do come to mind are almost always some of my favorite stories. Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark trilogy shows us Theo’s aspirational story in its first book, and then follows the pattern of a consequential story in the second and third.

In Hugo’s Les Miserables, Valjean’s story opens as aspirational, proceeds to observational, and ends as consequential. In Hugo’s case, this masterful progression is strengthened by pitting Valjean’s moral code against opponents who are elsewhere along the archetypal progression. When Valjean’s story is in its aspirational phase, his antagonist Javert is in an observational mode. By the time Valjean has entered the observational phase of his evolution, Javert has “regressed” to the aspirational phase. When Valjean is in the consequential phase of his life, Marius Pontmercy is in the aspirational phase of his.

Hugo is arguably the master of this kind of complex hero construction: reading his works (in particular Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) I suspect that every single hero archetype and every combination of their oppositions, tragic and anti-tragic, can be found. The next installment of this series (on Tuesday) will focus on this aspect of heroic storytelling. In particular, I will focus on how narrative timing affects tragedy in heroic fiction, and on the differences between tragic and anti-tragic heroes.

NEXT: Come back on Tuesday for the third and final installment which focuses on how narrative timing affects tragedy in heroic fiction, and for a discussion of tragic heroes and anti-tragic heroes.

by Chris Gerwel

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Works Mentioned / Used in this Post

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