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Written by Paul
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Sunday, 19 May 2013 23:50 |
As a writer of adventure fiction of a rather pulpy variety, I have written a lot of villains, and one of the things every villain needs is an Evil Plan. Evil Plans are quite common in all sorts of fiction, but if you pay attention, they often don't really make much sense. Sometimes this can be handwaved by the fact that most villains are irrational, broken people who are not thinking logically, but sometimes they are thinking very logically. Sometimes their supposed brilliance is how they are sold to us as a great threat, and so their evil plan kind of has to make some kind of sense.
I take it as a point of pride that the villains in my stories have plans that actually make sense, and would - this is important - work just fine if the heroes would stop fucking them up. Too often, Evil Plans seem tailor made not to accomplish anything for the villain, but rather to present the hero with a steadily escalating series of obstacles to overcome, providing tests of his or her qualities and allowing for them to self-actualize in the most dramatic way possible. Nobody stops to think about what this plan is really intended to do.
Worst offenders are the plans like the one in Skyfall or - forgive me - The Avengers that depend on the heroes interfering. This is meant to give us a scare as we follow the good guys along and then the villain stops to laugh. "Ha ha, you fool! You played right into my hands!" Whoa right?
Except these plans could not possibly work, as they contain too many variables, too many ways the heroes could have totally screwed things up by doing something just sliiiightly different than what they ended up doing. Sillier is how detailed these plans are, and how they often depend on the hero ignoring common sense and even the orders of superiors to follow up on some incredibly obscure clue which then turns out to be the key to the whole thing - only later it is revealed this was part of the plan all along! I can only picture the villain sitting around bored waiting for the hero to figure out the secret code, decipher the puzzle, or match that tiny swatch of cloth. What would happen if they didn't get it?
This is why it helps to sit down and think out the plan from your villain's POV. What is he trying to accomplish? What would she achieve if there was no one to stop her? Your villain should be a person who wants something besides just to serve as a foil for the Designated Protagonist - ideally, they won't want to have to deal with some stupid hero at all. Remember your villain is a character, not a waypoint along the Hero's Journey.
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Written by Paul
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Friday, 17 May 2013 00:35 |
I am always wary and often contemptuous of the oft-lauded "twist" ending. This kind of surprise - when well-executed - provides a kind of thrill that people associate with quality, even though it usually is not that. It's just that it momentarily forces engagement on an emotional level with even the most dull and banal story, it also forces the audience to go back and think over the entire work to that point in light of what they know now. It invites the kind of examination not common to pop entertainments and thus the uneducated consider the entire work to be therefore deeper and more 'intelligent' than the general run. This is not true at all.
Because characters must have all the information before them if they are to make intelligent, dramatic decisions. Think if we had not known - for example - that Vader was Luke's father until the very end, confessed as he lay dying after the death of the Emperor. Think how that would have robbed the entire movie of it's resonance. Every decision Luke made in Jedi was informed by that knowledge, and springing it at the end, after it was all over, simply for the transitory glee of jumping out and yelling 'surprise'. That would be a low kind of storytelling.
So does that mean that every bit of information must be made plain from the very beginning? No, that's not what I mean. What I mean is that characters must have the information relevant to the choices they have to make. I don't mean necessarily factual information, but the emotional information important to them, as characters, and relevant to their situation.
Thus a big reveal like this one, which has to come at the right time. If it is too early or too late it is meaningless, but at the right time it sets the stage for everything which will come after.
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Written by Paul
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Wednesday, 15 May 2013 00:59 |
One of the most necessary skills for a writer (and in fact, any creative person) and also one of the hardest to master, is knowing when to listen. There are times, as an artist, when you should listen to other people's advice, and times when you should not listen to anyone. The hard part is learning to tell the difference between those times.
In this interval since I finished the last chapter of Queen of the Sky Frontier I have been working over the pre-production for Imperial Blood - our intended Vampire Epic. I wasn't far into the planning before I realized this was going to be harder than I thought. A story like that will demand a higher class of prose on a daily basis, meaning it will be more demanding to write. Also, everything about it is coming out highly symbolic and mythic, which requires the underpinnings to be absolutely rock-solid and the beats of the story to be carefully worked out. Further, it is going to be a much more drama-and-character-driven story than the kind of adventure fiction I usually do.
Naamah and I were going over it again and we just had to sort of stop and say "It's not ready, and it's not going to be ready in time." In order to stay on schedule, writing has to start this weekend, and the story is not going to be worked out enough for that to happen. It is tearing me up to make this call, because I am already rolling - I am invested, I am dreaming about this story.
But I'm not going into this particular battle only partly prepared. The book in my head deserves to be written as well as it possibly can be. It would be easy - temptingly so - to just lower the blade, downshift, and ram into it for the sake of being able to say "I beat you". That, however, would not serve the purpose of writing a good book.
So when Naamah told me. "Look, it's not ready and we need to go to plan B," I had to listen to her. This is one of those times. She knows me better than anyone, even me a lot of the time. I have learned to listen to her even when I think she is full of shit.
So Imperial Blood will continue in development for next time, and we will be commencing Throne of the Depths as our next book. This is the book I wanted to write, even if nobody else really seemed to get my idea. The point is not me getting my way, but me taking on a project I know we can do while we keep working on the next one. Sorry if this disappoints anyone, but this is just the way we have to do it. Our lives are kind of in an uproar right now, and I can't kill myself working on the next project, trying to rush it when it's not ready to go.
So, vampires get pushed back to November, and next up will be undersea Jules Verne-style adventure, with fucking. I hope everyone can get on board for that.
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