Fate vs. Free Will

So about a week ago, the series finale of a really great kids show, Avatar: The Last Airbender, aired the whiz-bang 2-hour conclusion. It was pretty awesome. Now, I'm not going to spoil anything for you, but I will say this: the main character, Aang, is facing a very difficult choice at one point, and struggles with how to solve it. In the end, a series of coincidences and accidents aide Aang and basically make the choice for him.

Avatar may be a TV show, but it still has writing, and that writing is directed at young audiences. I had a problem with this particular bit of writing, and have discussed it with several other online buddies.

The problems are solved by fate. It's out of the character's hands, and therefore I have no real interest in the outcome and am more than a bit disappointed. If a writer has everything happen according to fate or destiny, his character's actions mean nothing, because no matter what, they are on a railroad to the inevitable outcome. So they can do just about anything, or nothing, and it'll all turn out as it should in the end. Yawn. Boring.

I like free will. I like consequences. I like things not going as planned and the character, and reader/viewer being surprised.

I didn't like the writers' answer to Aang's problems because Aang never made a decision. He had a decision handed to him, so he didn't grow as a character. He wasn't dynamic, he was passive. I mentioned this to my buddies and some of them replied "Well, he's a kid. sometimes kids just wait and see."

I'm not interested in the characters who wait and see. I want them to be decisive, to drive the story and events through their actions, not sitting on the roadside waiting for the answer to pull up. Kids are capable of making decisions, and since they're young, they are often the wrong ones. That's something any kid can relate to. Screwing up is just part of growing up. I will respect a character that has the balls to make a decision on his own, then live with the consequences. Even if that decision is really, tremendously stupid, if the outcome and fallout and the character's reaction are real, I am still on board.

I will not respect the character that hides and waits for his problems to solve themselves.

So if you are a writer, just say no to Fate.

Where's the YA Horror at?

So there’s a lot of vampire/werewolf type YA novels floating around out there right now. There’s also a lot of other stories that have monsters and other beasties lurking in their pages, but I’ve noticed a rather big gap in the YA field: horror.

I broached this subject on a writing forum some time ago and got a lot of responses. People said things like “Well I thought the Creature X in book Y was pretty scary!” Well good for you, but way to miss the point. Just because a book has a scary beast in it, or a scary scene doesn’t mean it’s horror.

The Midnighters series by Scott Westerfeld is a good example. It might sound scary at first: a small group of teens have the ability to enter a hidden 25^th hour of the day populated by shadowy, shape-shifting creepy crawlies that eat people. But it isn’t horror. It’s action/sci-fi/fantasy or some weird crossbreed. But not horror.

Here’s a simple break down of what I think makes a good horror story:

· Ordinary, every day people as the protagonists. If they have super powers or are ex-Navy SEALs, it’s not scary. This needs to be somebody that could be ME.

· A monster of some kind. The monster could be a crazed killer in the woods, a literal monster, or something else. Just so long as it has a sense of other-ness to it that is frightening and alien. It could also be a disease or something abstract.

· The ultimate goal of the protagonists is survival, plain and simple. The focus of the book is not on romance, or saving the world, and getting the Macguffin or plot coupon. The goal is to not die horribly or get your soul eaten. That’s the pulsing, meaty center of horror, that primal, instinctive, pitiful cry of “God I don’t want to die.” Good horror latches onto that, sucks you in and makes you face mortality in the form of the characters facing theirs. See how easy it is to die? See how fragile you are? Look at how quickly things can go from a pleasant trip in the countryside to being hunted like dumb beasts by some unspeakable shapeless thing hungry for your guts.

· And finally, the scariest thing of all that should be present everywhere, a sense of the unknown. This could be manifested in the monster, the setting, other characters, whatever. Being left in the dark, not knowing, is scary as hell.

I’m not saying a horror story can’t contain other elements, or must contain all of these, but my favorite horror stories always have. I’m going to use a bunch of adult books now as example, because I honestly can’t think of any YA ones.

In Stephen King’s The Mist, the main character is a somewhat dorky graphic artist who lives by a lake with his wife and kid. They’re stuck with a bunch of other very normal people in a grocery store, with all kinds of otherworldly, flesh eating monsters waiting to chew them to pieces outside. The scare-factor came from the characters all being normal folks, people I could know, people that I could see parts of myself in, people I could relate to. The monsters were creepy in their own right, but what added to the fear was that nobody really knew what was going on. Nothing was ever fully explained. We got hints, vague ideas, but nothing solid. And the goal wasn’t to save the world, the goal was that the dad wanted to save himself and his kid, and maybe a few others. Escape, survive. Nothing else.

Let’s look at another master of horror: Clive Barker and his amazing novella, The Hellbound Heart. Barker goes for the deep, psychological, visceral terror, where a man’s fondest desire becomes his ultimate hell. The characters are all normal again, no super soldiers or psychic powers going on here, just weak, flesh-and-blood mortals. They’re pursued by the Cenobites, other dimensional “angels” with a penchant for brutal self-mutilation, and a hobby of blurring the line between pleasure and suffering. The main character, a nice young girl, gets caught up in all this bloody nonsense and is in serious danger of being condemned for eternity to unthinkable torment, and her only goal is to escape that. It’s a very grim, dark book as one might expect. Barker is big into the whole idea of horror at one’s body, what it can become, what pain it can cause, and that’s a very primal thing that he taps into early on.

H.P. Lovecraft got a fear of the unknown down to a science, but his fault is that he would leave too much unknown. In his book Danse Macabre (which I will liberally paraphrase here), Stephen King talks about revealing the monster behind the door. Before the door is opened, the audience is terrified, but when it’s flung open, they’re relieved. “Oh thank goodness, it’s only a 10 foot bug. It could’ve been a 50 foot bug,” or something. And if you put a 50 foot bug behind the door, well it could’ve been a 100 foot bug, and so on. It could always be worse. However, if you never reveal what’s behind the door, the audience feels cheated, and this is what Lovecraft would sometimes do. His monsters were so horrible they couldn’t be described, so he wouldn’t describe them. What Stephen King suggests in his book, and what I agree with, is to open the door a crack. Let the audience see the shadow of the monster, a quick glimpse of the beast, and let their imagination fill in the dark gaps.

Horror is a tricky business. It’s easy to make a story with guts everywhere, but that is almost never scary. It’s cheap and it’s boring. Psychological horror is tougher, but if all the horror is mental, it lacks that visceral, simple terror that the threat of bodily harm can instill. I’m honestly not surprised there isn’t much, if any, real, good YA horror available. Deciding where to draw the line with a younger audience isn’t easy, and no such line really exists in adult fiction.

Well, I’ve said enough on this for now. It’s a subject close to me, and I’ve got a nice little horror story I wrote for NaNoWriMo last year that I may revisit. But if that never sees the light of day, I sincerely hope that some talented author will fill the missing horror piece in the YA world.

Character & Plot

Have you heard the term “High Concept” before? It’s something that typically comes up a lot in queries and the discussion thereof. Really, all it means is that if you have a “High Concept” novel, you’ve got a really good, creative idea for a story. I’ve seen this term a lot on agent blogs where the agent in question will write “I am really looking for a good, high concept novel.” Which means “I’m looking for a good idea.”

No shit. Really? Agents like good ideas? So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all these years, I’ve been sending agents bad ideas. I really wish somebody had told me sooner. Thanks agents, that’s ever so helpful.

Smarminess to agents aside, having a high concept, or good idea for a plot, is just common sense. But here’s where I’m sure I’m going to piss some people off and get gasps of amazement and shock: the plot isn’t the most important thing.

That’s right I said it.

Let me clear something up before I go on: story and plot are not the same thing. The story is everything: the plot, the characters, the language, it’s all of it, the whole mess. The plot is the series of events that move the story forward from point A to B to C or possibly Z to Y to X if you’re into the whole flashback thing or whatever.

And plot is vital to a good story, but I don’t think it’s the most vital. Which is funny, because as little as a year or two ago I would have said “Plot first!” and beaten anyone who disagreed into a red pulp.

So what is the most vital then, in my own obscure, humble opinion? It’s character. Who’s riding this crazy plot train? Are they the ones steering it?

If a character or set of characters is interesting or engaging enough, I will happily read a story about them going to the grocery store and buying eggs. However, if characters are boring, flat, and unrealistic, they could be on a mission to save the universe from Satan and his alliance of aliens robot ninjas and I couldn’t give a shit.

Let’s look at The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon. It’s a very simple story about a boy trying to figure out who killed a dog, and then later trying to find somebody. There is no high action aside from him getting on a train by himself, and he’s never in any serious danger. But the protagonist’s voice is so real, so engaging, and so wonderful that I, and many, many others, were sucked right in until the end. I finished it in a day I was so ensnared by Haddon’s character.

Now, look at something like The Revenge of the Shadow King by Derek Benz and J.S. Lewis. It’s got mythical creatures ripping into our world, poised to eat up humanity and make things generally terrible for people everywhere, but I didn’t give a damn the entire time because the characters are laughably bad cardboard cut-outs of the worst Saturday Morning cartoon I ever watched as a child. I was totally apathetic about what was going on in the books because the characters were stupid, boring, and cheesy in the worst way.

Now I know comparing these books is like comparing apples and oranges (and Haddon’s book isn’t even for the YA market either) but it illustrates my point: excellent characters will carry a relatively ordinary plot, but shit characters can’t save even the most thrilling of escapades.

I’ve got my claws out now and I’d love to rip into Benz and Lewis some more, but I’ll save it until they push out their next inevitable Grey Griffins series turd.

There’s the risk of writing a story that has nothing but character, and in which nothing happens, and those sorts of stories do exist. While I still value character more than plot, I will always hold plot up as another key component of any story. Characters are enriched and even more engaging when the events occurring around them are extraordinary. It’s fun to see what a well-fleshed out character will do when you throw a brain-sucking alien at him or her, or put them in the middle of the third world war, or something even more grandiose. I’d still be okay with watching good characters go to the store, but if the choice is between those same good characters going for groceries or fighting off super villains, my choice is obvious.

I’ll go into this more later, I’m sure, but that’s the bare bones of part of my writing philosophy for now. Take it as you will, internet.

Censorship vs. YA: Ultimate Fighting Smackdown XXXVIII

A friend’s recent blog post led me to this train of thought, so I’m going to ride on her coattails for today.

For as long as there have been books for kids, there have been nosey old women who probably need to get out more declaring what is and is not appropriate for other people’s children to read. That’s not fair, I’m sure there’s a lot of nosey old men out there too.

I’m pretty liberal when it comes to censorship in that I really hate it, find it creatively restrictive, narrow-minded, and generally stupid. While I’m not advocating we start putting hardcore XXX material in Dr. Seuss, I am saying that if the natural progression of a story involves sex, drugs, death, or one of those other taboo subjects that make aforementioned old women cluck their tongues and waggle their fingers, then it should be allowed and not squashed.

Allow me to illustrate:

In R.A. Nelson’s book Teach Me, main character Carolina falls for the hilariously named Richard Mann, her high school English teacher. Dick Mann falls for her too and the two of them proceed to do naughty things to each other. I didn’t really enjoy the book for several reasons: Carolina is an arrogant, snide girl who thinks she’s better than everyone, Mann is dull, and the conclusion is tacked on and hokey, but one of the main reasons was when and how the two lovers decided to finally do the deed.

There’s a lot of talk of unrestrained passion and forbidden love, etc etc. I’m inclined to think that a grown man willing to make out with his underage student in the back of his car wouldn't draw the line at just making kissy faces. Carolina and Dick do eventually consummate their relationship, but not until after Carolina turns 18, and Nelson is very careful and clear in pointing this tidbit out to the reader.

It just seemed to me like the characters had already thrown caution and societal norms to the wind. Mann is already risking his career and jail time just by getting to first base with Carolina. In for a penny, in for a pound, right? No, wrong. Mann and Carolina display uncharacteristic restraint by waiting until Carolina is nice and legal. Either Nelson is a total wuss, or an editor came in who was worried about what the local Censor’s Knitting Circle would have to say about this sort of thing.

The book still would have been predictable and otherwise irritating, but at least the characters would have made more sense. This is when I have an issue with censorship: when it ruins the flow of a story, the message, or the characters, and nine times out of ten it does just that. It’s also insulting to the audience by treating them like naïve toddlers or incompetents, which I’ve already expressed my feelings on.

Kids who are at a level to read young adult fiction probably already know about sex, drugs, and death. I was hearing about the latter two from my local D.A.R.E. officer back in second grade, and the former was officially introduced to me three years later, though I’d heard about it from some shady first graders ages before.

Censorship isn’t all bad, but I have a hard time coming up with examples of when it’s beneficial for a work of art, “art” being the operative word. If something is really a work of art, an expression, then a censor has no place messing with it.

Censorship isn’t always just about cutting out nasty swears or mention of drugs, and it doesn’t always come from an outside source. Sometimes an author can be their own worst enemy and decide to censor themselves. I’m a member of a message board that focuses on writing for youths ranging from pre-school to high school, and there’s always some good discussion going on somewhere.

However, the board’s population is mostly composed of moms and older women who write nice stories with cheerleader spies, or picture books about how important it is to share. Which is really great, honest. Those types of books are fine by me. But it means a guy like me with a somewhat darker, more mature style of writing is often at odds with the general consensus. One writer once said she felt it was our responsibility as authors to give our young audience uplifting stories that ended well and gave everybody hope and a smile.

Bullshit.

I wasn’t so blunt in person of course, but that’s some unrefined bullshit. My one and ONLY responsibility as an author is to tell a good story. Everything else is secondary. Conveying a meaningful theme, enlightening the reader, giving them hope for tomorrow, are all take a back seat to telling a good story. Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War is a very good story that ends on a very low note. He didn’t fail in his responsibility as an author because his main character is seriously down in the dumps by the last page. Making everything sunshine and gummi bears because you feel you have to is a form of self censorship. Don’t do it.

If your story naturally has a happy ending, awesome. If your story is very much a gloomy affair, focusing on darker and more serious aspects of life, and you just feel compelled to wedge your Brady Bunch conclusion in there, stop. Think. Don’t stop yourself from putting in a sad or scary ending just because it’s sad or scary. That’s you censoring yourself and having it mess with the flow and feel of your story. The end result is going to be a sub-par narrative, and a rightfully pissed off audience.

I’ve had to do this sometimes. I’ll be writing something for a young YA or older middle grade crowd and think, “Maybe this is too much.” So I’ll ask myself, is it in character? Does it make sense plot wise? Is it gratuitous? If the answers are yes, yes, and no respectively, it stays, even if it makes me a little anxious or unsure. I may come back later and fix it, but sometimes I just have to stop worrying what my mom will think if she ever reads my stuff and go with it.

To sum up, censorship, from outside or within, eats shit on toast most of the time.

And Richard Mann is a hilarious name.

Kids = Smart

So I’m reading a book That Shall Not Be Named, and I am really not enjoying myself, and am instantly intrigued. When I am not enjoying a book, I immediately see it as a learning experience as to What Not To Do in my own writing. It didn’t take me long to figure out what was irking me so.

The author thought I was a total idiot.

He spelled everything out, used extensive adverbs to let me know exactly how somebody said or did something, belaboring what I already knew. I mean, if somebody is calling somebody else a huge jerk, I can figure out that they’re angry with out the author adding “He said angrily.”

This was in a YA book, and reading the condescending, overbearing tone of the author was really pissing me off. So let’s get something straight about YA fiction and the YA audience in general, just so we’re all on the same page.

Kids are NOT dumb.

I can just hear all the bitter school teachers spitting in volatile rebellion at this notion.

Seriously though, kids are smart. Not ALL the time, but they’re smart enough to read a book and understand it without Joe McObvious Author beating them over the head with his prose. It is possible to make deep, meaningful novels for a young audience and people have done it and continue to do it. They are the good authors that understand and respect their audience. The bad authors think their audience is totally moronic and will be satisfied with an abundance of dick and fart jokes are laughably obnoxious prose (Hey look! It’s James Patterson and Maximum Ride!).

Making sharp, intelligent, engaging books for teens will help ensure that they go on to read sharp, intelligent, engaging books as adults instead of getting some pile of shit cleverly disguised as literature and developing an innate hatred for all books. That’s an exaggeration but not by much. As one who works in the field of education, I’ve encountered too many kids who have run afoul of books with the attitude that the reader is an inept pillock. They were young and impressionable enough for that feeling to persist and extend to books at large. And even if the reaction some readers have is never that strong, I’d still like to avoid treating my audience like a crowd of buffoons.

Of course, it’s just as bad to assume your readers are all in possession of multiple Ph.D.s, as you risk alienating them just as much, and coming off as a snotty, elitist prick as well. Still, I’d rather err on the side of my readers being too smart than too stupid.

In the end, if you treat the audience like it’s stupid, you’re the one who comes off looking dumb.

On Fantasy

Fantasy is probably my favorite genre. It’s a playground for the imagination where one can pretty much do whatever the hell they like. So I really love fantasy, but I hate most fantasy books. Out of all the fantasy I’ve read, for the YA and adult demographics (and that’s dozens upon dozens of fantasy books, mind you), I can list my favorites on one or two hands at most.

“So Mssr. Jay,” you may ask, “Why is fantasy your favorite genre if you can’t stand so much of it?”

Well, Dear Reader, probably because I like what fantasy is supposed to be. Fantasy is supposed to be fantastic. It runs under a lot of other titles, like high fantasy, contemporary fantasy, magical realism, weird fiction, and many others, but all of them have some fantastic element(s) that skirt the boundaries of science and go far beyond the mundane. Whether it’s about a boy and his sly, world-weary djinn (The Bartimaeus Trilogy, by Jonathan Stroud) or a young girl traversing a surreal archipelago where the time of day is determined by location rather than the passage of time itself (Abarat, by Clive Barker), as long as it’s imaginative in some way, I’m thrilled.

What I get sick of with the fantasy genre is how sodding derivative it can become. J.R.R. Tolkien was a great writer. He was a very smart, creative man and he wrote some fantastic books. I adored The Hobbit back in primary school. I couldn’t wait to see Bilbo get Smaug’s treasure. So yes, J.R.R. Tolkien was amazing, but we don’t need another.

I don’t need to have the Fellowship of the Ring given a new coat of paint and slotted into generic Middle-Earth knock-off #24C. That’s stupid. It lacks imagination and creativity. I’ve always been curious as to what sort of person would say “Yes please, I would love another rehash of the stereotypical group consisting of a token elf, dwarf, human, wizard, and some form of Halfling. I never get tired of THAT old chestnut.”

Likewise, I’m having trouble picturing the author who actually sets down and writes that book. There have been dozens, HUNDREDS, of these kinds of things: elves, dwarves, and wizards traveling through a pseudo-medieval Europe setting fighting trolls and orcs and goblins and a dark wizard king. Ugh. Sometimes, the author may really flex those creative fibers and throw in a dragon. Oh my yes, I've never seen that before. Good work you bloody pillock.

Given the infinity of choices when writing fantasy, why do so many authors pick the road that’s already been traveled, then traveled again, then paved and steam-rolled and turned into a five-lane highway? It’s Fantasy, man! Make something up! It’s difficult yes, but not impossible. Fantasy can be a wonderful, amazing thing, where, literally, entirely new worlds can be crafted from nothing, fresh ideas are everywhere, and even though it sounds like something from an after-school special, the only real limit is your imagination (ugh, I can’t believe I said that).

It’s a bit like watching a friend that you know is really smart fail all his classes in school, or get passed up for a promotion at work. You KNOW he could get it, but he’s just being a lazy git. You want to go over and shake him and tell him to live up to his potential but he just sits there and stares at the wall.

I’ve shuddered inwardly, and outwardly, at the recent deluge of sub-par fantasy that has been battering against bookshelves for the past few years. Eragon, by Christopher Paolini, remains the chief target of my ire, not only for it’s juvenile and atrocious prose style, but for its borderline plagiarism and blatant copy/pasting of the Star Wars plot and Tolkien’s Middle-Earth setting, as well as a dozen ideas cobbled together from other, better authors. I’ll save the lion’s share of my rage for when the latest installment comes out this September though. There’re others too of course, like the Revenge of the Shadow King, which is probably the worst writing I’ve seen outside of my sophomore level creative writing classes, or Grimpow for reasons I’ve already stated before, and more, more always more.

But thankfully, it hasn’t been all bad, and there has been quite a lot of good fantasy for the YA market. Harry’s come and gone, and the world is a better place thanks to him, I think. Clive Barker’s continuing Abarat series, though a bit rough at times, is still plugging along nicely. That clever scamp, Artemis Fowl, continues to concoct schemes, Stephenie Meyer has captured the hearts and minds of teen girls everywhere with her bestselling Twilight series, and many other new and talented authors are putting their collective best feet forward.

Fantasy is definitely my favorite genre. When I write fantasy, I feel very free. It’s like being a kid again, when those cardboard boxes in my garage would become whatever I wanted them too. Good fantasy is imagination unbound, it shows you something new, something unexpected. It gets off the five-lane highway and sets off into the shadowy undergrowth all on its own. It’s the places cartographers indicated on those ancient maps by drawing dragons and other unknown creatures, the place behind the wardrobe, over the ocean, down the rabbit hole, and beyond that.

I just think it’s time to leave the familiar territory behind and move on to someplace new.