Why the why?

There's a blog I read, 'The Horror Digest... (and other stuff),' that covers scary movies, cool odds and ends, and how great sandwiches can be. The writer is one of those people who appreciates good, classic cinema whether it's flavored with adrenaline or cheese, so she's got my interest from the get go. I check in every once in a while, and so far I've been able to resist the compulsion to go back and read every-single-post. (But there's a quote from the Borg that is probably appropriate here) Today when I noticed an entry on one of my old favorites, I had to check it out.

'The Car' is another of the movies that I saw as a kid that I think really influenced the way I tell a story. Set in a small town somewhere in a Utah desert, it shows how one bizarre looking car carefully and sadistically goes about tearing apart all the bonds that keep the community together. With no driver behind the wheel, it runs over, crushes, and knocks off a cliff anyone it encounters, but in a strangely methodical pattern. The first pair to die are two kids, off on their own a mile or so from town. Next is a man hitchhiking by a house at the outskirts, leaving the family as witnesses. Each attack is more brazen than the last, until it runs people over right in the middle of the streets. Confronted with the growing realization that nothing they do stops it, we see all the protagonists' hope gradually become despair.

Yet through the whole thing, no reason for the car's vendetta is ever given. At the beginning of the film we see the car drive up out of the desert, and that's it. Now the blood can start to flow. When I showed the movie to my wife, her first question, and the question asked in 'The Horror Digest,' was, why? Was the town built on an Indian burial ground? Did an innocent motorist get killed on the streets? Is there a cursed artifact tucked away in someone’s home, brought back from a vacation in the big city? Why is this car here, hurting us?

Believe it or not, I have never asked that question, not even once. Maybe I'm just conditioned from too much TV in my earlier years to just swallow whatever gets set in front of me, but anyone who knows me or reads my ramblings can probably figure that's not how my head works. I'll take something apart down to the bare bones and then see just what those bones are made of, and if they really fit together as neatly as they seem to. I WANT to know the why, and all the whys behind it.

To me, the sort of why that would make the attacks logical doesn't fit the story. Some time ago I was looking for a particular scene in the film on Youtube, hoping that someone would have posted it. What I ran across was a video from a guy with a vlog who was posting about movies that he felt ripped off one of his favorites, Jaws. I got a bit irked at his opinion, but I can see a comparison, one that touches on my point. In Jaws, there's no reason given for why this three-ton tooth machine is suddenly here and dining on people. It's something about how we relate to this kind of predator that our heads tend to skip the logical questions about it and go straight to 'GET THE ---- OUT OF HERE!' The shark is a force of nature, one that we already have a very personal understanding with. To twist a quote from Jaws, you're on the beach and someone yells 'shark' and you panic. You're standing in the street and someone yells 'car' and you panic. Why? Because you already know you're vulnerable.

Right there is your answer. Maybe the feeling doesn't resonate as clearly as the film makers hoped, but the logic is the same. The car doesn't need someone to drive it, it doesn't need to refuel, and it doesn't need to worry about bending an axle or puncturing a tire. It kills people and shatters our belief in a fair universe because that's what it's here to do. It's primal, elemental, and as deadly and uncaring as a tornado, or a shark. If not fought and defeated it would kill everyone in sight, then knock over every building and crush every artifact of man's creation until there was nothing left but ruin. Then it would move on to the next town.

Spoiler: In the movie, after the car is defeated by burying it under half a mountain, what happens? The town is saved, the sun rises, and our heroes start to get back to their lives. Then we see the car pulling into a major city, ready to start all over again, because that's what it's here to do.

If you have any love for scary movies, thoughtful critiques, or appreciation for a picture of a polite British boy captioned with 'A naked American man stole my balloons,' then go check out The Horror Digest...(plus other stuff) at http://horrordigest.blogspot.com/. I've given up hope of not going through the whole thing, and am leaving its window open on my browser. So far I'm back to 2010, and still smiling, laughing, and occasionally cringing.

I'm also still writing.

Space

The final frontier.

Is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is.

Okay, this one may ramble just a bit. I need to describe space to the readers of my second book in a few choice paragraphs, and I'd like your thoughts about my choices of words.

By the way, if you actually need me to give you the sources of those two quotes above, please turn in your sense of wonder, because you're not using it.

This is the first science fiction story that I have written, though if chance favors me it won't be the last. What usually comes out of my pen are horrific stories about people, ones like you and me. If they seem to have one or two traits that make them different, hopefully by the end of the story it's clear that those variations are rather tiny, and that those people aren't that different after all.

This book is also about a person, and I've already bent your ear about the work that's going in to make him someone we can cheer for. Now I need to focus on the environment. It doesn't have voice, I can't describe it so that you associate it with that one teacher who was kind to you grade school or that dog you were always terrified of, and it sure as hell isn't going to have a sudden epiphany and become our hero's sidekick. But it's a character too, and I need to make you believe it's real.

I've got a small advantage, of course, in that this one actually exists. Real people, ones like you and me, have flown up and met it face to face. We've loaned it tools and toys, and gotten some of them back with little notes describing it's likes and dislikes. It's all around us, and there's more of it than there is of us, our home, or anything else. Whatever isn't something else, is it. It's the default.

But, as we've said, this is fiction. Reality is there for us to use, and we NEED to be selective in what facts we use, dishing out the ones that support our narrow points of view and tucking all the others under a loose corner of the carpet somewhere. If we don't, all we'll have is an amateurish documentary and the story will sound like a Monty Python skit where a character from last week's show seems to walk onto the set by mistake. We decide the attitude of the universe and everything in it.

Space is not our friend in this tale. It wants to kill us, in very unpleasant ways. We haven't mastered it, and we know it. We can hold it back, keep it from taking our heat, our water, and our air, but only imperfectly. It can feel every strength of our defenses, and every flaw. It has killed men, families, and entire rocket ships. Not through any intent, but just by being what it is, and through the simplest and dumbest circumstances possible: human error.

You forgot to check that seal on your air tank? Or you didn't check it again after the valve contracted from the colder outside temperature? Oops. Maybe you should just sit down and think pleasant thoughts. Think that little light built onto your helmet is enough for you to find your way back to the hatch after you're done with your work outside? I hope you're right, because the ships are big, don't have outside lights, and there's no sun to show you which way is which. Did the person who put your suit together break up with their spouse the night before they punched in to work and installed all that insulation? Hope they kept their mind on their job, because when hypothermia starts to set in you may or may not notice. Are there any holes in the layer of material that keeps out all those really nasty cosmic rays? Let's not dwell on what would happen if there are. Do you know how dry the near-total vacuum of space is? Dry enough to leach water out of your skin, from your eyes, and every time you open your mouth. How much water is in your body? How much can you lose before things get unpleasant? No seal is perfect, after all.

You did check the line that keeps you attached to the ship, right? If it breaks, you'll drift away an inch at a time, for eternity.

Maybe that's how I need to describe it: death by default. A reader would throw the book away if I wasted their time by describing all those little details in every single scene that could have them, so when I spell them out once or twice the first few times and then mention that so and so 'went through the drill' a couple of times after that, it'll seem normal. A few more pages, and a reader might have forgotten about them altogether. Then when someone we like suddenly says, “Oh God, my lungs are burning,” we'll remember and (hopefully) say to ourselves, 'Oh shit, I forgot about that.'

That's the main thrust that I want, that it is a threat, and the second you forget that, you're the example they'll mention to the next guy. If I can do that, and include some point of view descriptions that show how all that nasty potential has shaped people's feelings about it, that might be enough. That might work.

Thanks. It really helps to use you as a sounding board to bounce these thoughts off of.

Now I just need to write it.

P.S. Happy Veteran's Day!

Why do we want characters to change?

So as I'm beating my head against the brick wall that has 'In the Dark' painted on it (graffiti style), I'm slowly getting a better grasp of my protagonist. The first drafting set the framework of the story, but when I wrote it I was thinking about dozens of books and short stories that had the tone I wanted to capture. Now I need to make changes so that I'm playing the notes to produce those tones myself.

One note I realized wasn't right was the fact that my hero, who is not all cuddly and nice to begin with, is the same person at the end of the book that he is at the beginning. A change must be made, but, since knowing the reason helps guide the action, why? Why can't we let our good guy just go through the action, fight the bad guy and win or lose the girl, and then come home and go to bed early so that tomorrow he's ready to do it all over again? Why do we need this person to grow?

In real life, our views on change are selective. If we get a raise, rock on. If we find out our job is moving to the far east without us, well, that stinks. Change can be good or bad, but unless it's the exact kind we're seeking, we tend to view it with distrust. It's a huge, lurking unknown, and I've covered how we feel about that a few times now.

But this is fiction, in print or on a screen. The rules are different, and this fiction has to show us either what we desire or what we fear. For most of us, our lives are filled with struggles. Sometimes we fight to achieve something, but way too often we have to fight to keep what we already have or just to get through the day. We get up, maybe have some coffee and spend a few minutes with our family or the internet, and then we're off to work. The next eight or more hours are spent loading boxes, smiling at customers as they chew us out because they have to read the manual to know how to program their DVR, or whatever needs to be done to pay the mortgage. It's a struggle.

So when John McClean or Douglas Quaid has to fight to try to save some idiot about to get himself killed or find a way to live through his wife betraying him, we empathize. Most of us don't risk getting shot at while we're on the clock (some do. Please don't forget that), but the fact that we both have a fight on our hands gives us something in common with these heroes. It makes them someone we could sit down and have a beer with at the end of the day.

Way back when, my Texas history teacher taught us that one of the characteristics of the people of Texas is our strong work ethic. I think the feeling is not quite as simple as that, and I also think the point is valid for a lot of people, not just those from my home state. We don't just believe that we should work, we believe that if we work hard we'll be rewarded, and not just with our $7.25 per hour. We have faith that if we consistently give our earnest effort, we'll achieve our dream.

Now wouldn't it be great if we could see an example of that play out, right in front of us? If we could see someone who we identify with confirm our deeply-held hope? We could just sit there and nod, saying to ourselves, 'Yep. That's how it should be.'

Let me clarify that this isn't a blank check for our ego. It's safe to say that a lot of us think it would be awfully nice to have a bunch of people that we find attractive at our beck and call. Maybe we'd treat them like a bunch of pampered princes(ses), or maybe we'd keep them in chains and rags because that's what we think they deserve. (I see a future blog post about this) As a fantasy, it's fairly common. Try to make it a reality, and brother you'll open enough cans of worms to fish up every critter in the sea. If our hero doesn't just get the girl at the end of the story, but gets five or six of them, we may cheer and applaud, but we'll also be envious, which would cut back our empathy for him.

Note that this is a cultural attitude mainly of those of us here in the U.S., and that our friends in other countries feel differently. The French in particular seem to be able to be a bit more honest.

Also note that even though I've spoken about a guy through this whole thing, the same principles apply to the heroines in 'chick flicks.' Hope knows no gender, it's just that the movies that try to speak to women directly tend to have less sidekicks and explosions than those aimed at men.

So we need struggle, and we need change. Can we cheer our alter ego saving the farm, getting the girl, or taking the gold-medal for one-armed kayaking? All three? Absolutely. Would we cheer if he loses his home, is asked to be the best man when the woman of his dreams marries his best friend, or succumbs to stage fright just as he's about to enter the kayaking contest? Not unless the denouement shows us that he's learned something about himself. Maybe some day I'll be able to wrap my head around the appeal that tragedies have for some people, but I can't remember the last one I saw or read, and I don't think I've ever seen one willingly.

Damn I can type a lot when I get going on a subject, can't I? Enough pondering for now. Time to write.