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Written by Paul
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Sunday, 02 December 2012 21:09 |
Cliffhangers are often held in low regard as a literary device, despite their ubiquity. The ending of an episode, chapter, whatever with an obvious DUN DUN DUNNN! moment is perhaps not a device of high art, even if it is a good way to keep people reading.
The problem is, I think, not with the device itself, but with how it is employed. We have all seen the "cheater" cliffhangers, where the hero loses his grip and clearly falls over the waterfall, but then when we come back from the commercial we see another cut where he is caught by his sidekick at the last instant - despite that we saw the "last instant" before the break. This kind of thing is a cheat, and I try to not do it. It is a bit more flexible when you are in the POV of a particular character, and they can be reasonably thought to have been unclear on what was happening for a moment or two. In an omniscient narrative you can't end a chapter with "Then he plummeted to his death." and begin the next chapter with "He caught a vine on the way down." - readers will revolt.
I think the best cliffhanger moments are like this one, where you have a moment that is not a car chase or a swordfight, but an interaction between characters and someone does or says something unexpected. It works because it is a character moment, not an action moment. You do not await the next part thinking "what is happening?" but rather "what is this character doing?" This is a much more interesting question, as it causes us to ask what we know about this character and what, in fact, might be going on in their head. That's drama there folks. Maybe cheap drama, but still better than fake peril.
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Written by Paul
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Friday, 30 November 2012 05:29 |
Description has come to be rather frowned upon in fiction. Odd to say, but true. The modern thrust is always to be moving the story along, always, even at the expense of anything else. You have to be moving from the very first page and keep moving no matter what, lest your audience get bored. Prologue, backstory, and description are all secondary to character.
Now I myself am not going to argue that character should ever be anything but central, as character and drama are essential. People don't read stories for logic or action, they read it for character. BUT, I feel that genre fiction in particular is going to bear a greater burden of worldbuilding, if only because the world depicted is so often not our own world. If you are telling a story set in a modern city, then you can afford to let a lot of detail pass you by - you don't have to tell the reader what a car looks like or what a Pepsi is.
But I feel like this ADD-like focus is detrimental because it necessarily violates the novelistic pace. I think a lot of the axioms that get bandied about are the result of editors saying what they would like, rather than what a reader wants. Editors, after all, read too much and get jaded and easily bored. When an editor pulls up your manuscript, you have maybe half a page before they get tired and stop reading, so a lot of this stuff is rules for how to write for editors, not actual readers.
In a genre piece you have to describe the world, because the world is different than what people see when they look out their window. You have to evoke the place and the time, or the image people will have will not be clear and vivid, but clouded and dull. The whole first part of this chapter is simply description of a journey, because we have not been outside the city as of yet, and so the countryside has to be vivid and detailed. Also, if we are to feel the journey was the right length, we cannot just skip over it, it has to have the proper narrative weight. I enjoyed writing Varian's journey, and I think it creates mood and a sense of place. It's not something I would want to skip.
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Written by Paul
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Wednesday, 28 November 2012 06:52 |
It can be difficult sometimes, because it has become kind of proverbial in fiction that Evil = Kinky. So the temptation is always to make the bad guys more pervy than the good guys. I mean, it's fun, right? The good guy gets captured and has to do the nasty stuff his captors desire of him, no matter what it is. But if all his evil captors desire is missionary and maybe some cuddling, then we are going to be a little disappointed, is what I'm saying. Where's the fun in that? So we want the Bad Guys to be kinky, we want them to be all about leather corsets and spanking and stocks and whips and manacles, we want the Evil Pirate Captain to peg the hell out of the good guy, we want the Evil Overlord to have a fully-staffed Fuck Dungeon, because otherwise, why are we even here, am I right?
The problem with this is it tends to equate KINKY with EVIL. After all, if the only people who voluntarily have non-vanilla sex are bad guys, then it quickly becomes causative, not just a corollary. And that is problematic, as kinky people already have plenty of problems with being seen as evil, sick, twisted, what have you. We don't need to keep reinforcing this trope out of habit. But a villain loses cred if they seem less kinky than the hero. Unless you are going for a joke, then you can't really go that way.
I think the important distinction is to make it plain that the sex acts themselves are not evil, just the people doing them. Kinksters are often more jaded and have a better relationship with what they like, which matches villains, because in fiction villains are often more self-aware than the hero, at least to start with. It can be a challenge to show bad people having sex that is not depicted as inherently degrading or immoral, especially if the whole degrading and immoral angle is part of the thrill.
Bottom line, this chapter features a coercive FFM threeway, but that's not to say that threeways are evil, just this one. Yes, we are contrasting a sweet, consensual hetero encounter with an exploitative, abusive bisexual encounter, but later we'll be doing a sweet, consensual threeway (several, in fact), and so I hope it all evens out.
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