Necessary Stupidity

So many of these posts start out as discussions with my wife. We were having lunch today, I was shooting a story idea at her, and we ended up going back and forth about the stupid things that we see fictional characters do. It happens in pretty much all the different genre, but we see it in horror and thriller movies and stories primarily. The worlds where bad things happen.

For my two cents, we all have various degrees of empathy for our fellow human beings. We see them driving expensive cars, read about how many of them have lost their jobs, and see them begging in the streets. We can say to ourselves, 'That's life.' We move on. But sometimes something horrendous happens. The kind of something that shocks us out of our comfort zone.

Because newspapers and sleazy book publishers want to make money (and I can empathize with that, at least), they write about these horrible things, and they put a lot of energy into making us feel them. They give the details that make us cringe and shudder, but it's our reactions that I'll focus on here. I read Yahoo news a lot, and when I read a story where something bad happened, I'll often also read the comments that people post. A huge amount of them pick the story apart, finding little things that the victim did that they imply contributed to it. Some of them even post assumptions or guesses that do the same. Victim blaming? Yes. But why?

Back to scary books and movies. Nine times out of ten, the innocent people do something dumb. We see them go into the old, dark, house. They pick up the spooky artifact or read from the ancient book that's lying out. They split up. Again, why?

The characters in these horror stories may be dumb, but I don't think the people writing or producing them are. They want you to buy their product, so they put some thought into making it something that you would want to buy. Similarly, we can complain about how dumb people are in general, but most don't usually make dumb decisions that would put them in harm's way, and we know that.

Remember when I described how people create their own worlds in their heads? In order to be able to get up out of bed in the morning and fall asleep at night, most people convince themselves of something: that the world is basically a safe place, and that if they just play by 'the rules,' they'll be safe. Nothing bad will happen to them. They have to believe that.

Now maybe some writers do it on purpose, maybe some do it on instinct without being consciously aware of it, and maybe some do it just because that's what everyone else does. But the fact that so many people do it, leads me to think I'm on the right track when I say there is a reason for the stupid choices that victims in horror stories make. That gives our audience something to grab hold of and say, 'That person isn't me. I would never do something that dumb. The horrible things that I'm seeing can't happen to me.'

I advocated for the dumb heroine in an earlier post, comparing the mistakes we see that stereotype character make to what might happen in real life. But, as I pointed out at the end, she doesn't exist in real life. She's a part of something we read or watch for entertainment, and when that entertainment is horror a lot of us need a buffer between what happens to her (or him) and them. That way it stays entertainment, and doesn't become something to worry about. That way, it's something that we buy, and might remember later when we see something else by the same writer.

So now, let me go write something like that.

If you take the wrong road ---

Then it might not be a good idea to turn into the trees and tear a hole through the woods as you get back to the one you want. Claudia and I saw the new Riddick movie last week, and in the first few minutes they addressed a rather large pachyderm that was standing in the corner. The movie has our hero on his own again, without the female sidekick/love interest that Riddick never showed any love for because that would compromise his machismo.

(I'm not being sarcastic on that last point. If it's believable, not showing romantic feelings can be a really powerful component of characterization.)

But also absent from any contribution to the action are the million or so followers that our hero had acquired in the last film. That, as James Perfoy once said, is where the onion is.

They show us a quick flashback where our hero is trying to find his home planet, and the treacherous SOB from the previous film tricks him into going down to a desolate world and arranges an ambush. Riddick survives, but is not pursued because his attackers think he's dead. Now we can get on with the story we wanted to tell. Does it work?

Well, maybe. According to everything my psychic powers and the mighty internet tell me, there was a consensus that Riddick needed to be on his own for this new sequel. There's a reason my wife calls the Riddick movies 'Conan in space.' The similarities are many and obvious, and both heroes share the same type of appeal. They are inhumanly strong, deceptively cunning, and always do more good than they do harm. Both are incarnations of the same archetype, and a heavy component of that archetype is independence. Who does Conan/Riddick need? No one. Period. They'll spend some time with people that they can tolerate, and are quick to form alliances of necessity with good guys and bad guys. But at the end of the story, they're on their way to the next planet or town, and we already know that if they can't find some fresh trouble, they'll make some. Note that Riddick is a bit darker than our favorite Cimmerian. We never see him carousing in a bar, buying beer for his fellows and singing obscene ballads, and he doesn't hesitate to scare someone, male or female, if he thinks they deserve it. This may be due to the fact that Riddick is a more modern character, needing to build on R. E. Howard's legacy instead of just copying it.

Which might be exactly where the onion is. Howard only wrote a few tales in which Conan had won himself a crown, and if memory serves, most of them involve him needing to leave the palace either to defend his kingdom or because it's been stolen from him. Someone out on their own making their own place in the world has more appeal to us than a guy in a huge castle with swords, gold, and women at his disposal. So yes, a change of address for Mr. Diesel's character was in order.

But doing it all at once, taking the whole mass of people, firepower, and ships out of the equation in one big Whoosh, stretches disbelief. Was there no ally among them at all? How about some self-serving toady who knows that if this particular treacherous SOB takes over, he's going to get a one-way trip out the nearest airlock? Some blindly loyal, new member of the guard? No one?

So in a perfect world, it would still happen, but not exactly as we see it. Maybe a revolt, that our hero may or may not have seen coming. If he didn't really trust them, it would have a nice way of disorganizing them.

By the way, if I haven't said so before or recently enough, these little critiques aren't my way of shooting down other people's works. I write, and the point of looking at movies, books, and stories that are out in the world is to see what people watch and read, so that I get a sense of what has already been done, so I can write my own stories instead of copying others'. When I point out what I see as flaws, it's so I don't write something, let it sit while I go around thinking I've got the next Stoker award sewn up, then go back and read it and scream, “Oh hell, what did I do here?”

It's so I can write the absolute best stories that I am capable of.

The principle of Newton's Cradle as applied to a kick in the head

You all know what I'm talking about, right? That cool desk top toy with four or five steel balls suspended in a frame. You lift one at either end and let it drop. When that ball hits the others the energy is transmitted right through them, and the one at the far end swings out, falls back, and so on back and forth.

Now we're going to get into a bit of a rant here, but that's okay because -

A: this is my blog, and I can do whatever I damn well feel like with it, and

B: this ties into writing. Everything ties into writing.

My wife, who busts her backside at anything and everything she does, got 'let go' from her job the other day. It seems she finished an assignment (not her first), and was told they didn't need her anymore.

I love my wife. Take that as fact. You may also take my statement that she is not the sort of person to be satisfied with 'just doing her job' as a fact. Once she gets her feet under her, which doesn't take very long, she ends up finding better, stronger, faster ways of doing the work. This is part of the reason that no matter what the explanation, I'm not on the side of the people who cut her loose. Just not going to happen.

Now we come back to writing. I've read a lot of books over the years. Some were good, some were bad, and some were so bad that the publisher should have been sued and forced to plant more trees to replace the paper that was wasted printing the books. One of the factors in the latter is that the stories feel like they're taking place on a stage somewhere in an abandoned theater, being played by people who couldn't act their way out of a paper bag. The characters have no real passion. They have no spark as individuals, and they don't have that interactive spark that could make us identify with them as a group. When one of them yells, their next door neighbor doesn't bang on the wall, call the police, or come over to see what's wrong because that neighbor is offstage taking a smoke break. When the plot, such as it is, lifts one of the balls in the Newton's cradle and lets it go, that ball smacks into the next one with a dull thunk. Nothing else happens. Energy is destroyed.

Now let's get a more passionate response in there. After I found out my best beloved was canned, I tried to emotionally support her as best I could, and then the next day I told one of my co-workers that if he didn't start looking behind him when he backed up in a forklift, I was going to turn his head all the way around so that he could do it automatically. There's a little more to the story than just that, of course, and I'll put in a disclaimer here that I might be stretching a truth to tell a good story, but you see my point. The energy of what happened to one ball gets transmitted to the next one, and then that ball passes it along to the next. Energy doesn't disappear.

So that's how we make our characters a little more lifelike, and how we vent to the whole world that our spouse was treated in a way that we do not approve of.

And I'll write with that in mind.

Truth and Fiction

Something that I've believed for a long time now is that you're never too old for new experiences. I don't care if you manage to live to be a thousand, if you think you've seen it all, I suspect that most of what you're seeing is sand from the patch where you've stuck you head in it.

This relates to my chosen trade because it means that there's always more fodder for the next story out there. Getting inspired is a separate matter, yes. But there's always new material out there.

One of the stumbling blocks to tapping this vast resource is that truth (real life) isn't just stranger than fiction, it's only partially connected to it. The connection is primal, and strong, but it isn't all that wide. Fiction is clearer and cleaner than life will ever be, which is part of its appeal. Life is what we live, and it is not, nor has it ever been, simple and easy to orient a compass in. One of the reasons I have yet to like a true crime book that I've read is because people aren't characters, and to make them fit into that finely-cast mold you've got to skew some facts and throw others out the window. A look at which facts get chosen for which treatment usually reveals the writer's 'fingerprints,' their own feelings and prejudices, which don't belong in a book that's supposed to be giving us a slice of real life. The people who can't differentiate between where fiction and truth connect and where they don't often end up as the subjects of those true crime books, either as criminals or victims.

I spent this past weekend up in Dallas, at AnimeFest. My wife went up Thursday and I took a bus Saturday because I couldn't get the time off and because I needed at least one full night of sleep. Saturday night, after helping at the Pan-Gaia Designs booth until the dealer's room closed, I was a bit restless so I went down to the hotel bar for a beer. It turned out to be a sports bar, which is not normally my preferred place to spend time, but they had Shiner Bock on draft. (Well, they did until I drank the last of it)

I'm sitting at one of the counter tables near the bar itself, sipping my beer and reading an e-book, when two attractive young ladies walk in. Now, there's no shortage of attractive young ladies at an anime convention, but while I don't like stereotyping anyone, most young ladies do fit into certain patterns. Most are in costume to one degree or another, or in comfy, casual clothes. They travel in groups or with their significant others, as sadly there's no shortage of asshats at an anime con either. If they wear jewelry, it's simple, or something related to their favorite show or game. They also have an abundance of happy enthusiasm, if they haven't just crossed paths with an asshat.

The two ladies who came in weren't wearing con badges, they were dressed up nicely, and wore a bit more jewelry than is normal. They came in as a pair, and when they stepped into the bar they scanned the room. Not with the sort of look that someone has when they're trying to locate a familiar face, with the look you have when you're sizing up an opponent. They grabbed a menu from the bar, and sat next to me.

Now I like to think I'm good shape, but I'm in good shape for someone who's lived my life and has reached middle age. Unless there's a reason, I don't dress to impress. I dress for comfort. I had my e-book reader with me, but I don't think that these days that's an indicator that the owner has a lot of money. Have I also mentioned that the oldest I would put these two is in their mid-twenties?

The one closest to me smiles, holding up the drink menu, and asks if there's anything I could recommend. I ask if she likes beer or mixed drinks, and she just smiles shyly and says that she's a lightweight. Her friend, sitting on the other side of Miss Lightweight, leans forward and studies me with a serious look. If I was writing the scene, I'd describe the look as hard and calculating.

I say to the girl near me that she might try one of the beers, recommending Shiner. She smiles again, and asks me what I'm doing here. I change hands with my book so my wedding ring happens to show and say that I'm here at the convention helping my wife, who has a booth in the dealer's room.

Her smile changes to a polite one, and she turns away to confer over the menu with her friend. They catch a waiter as he walks by, ordering some nachos. Then they get up, and a few minutes later are seated at a table with two guys, and everyone's smiling.

I couldn't tell you just when in that chain of events that it dawned on me I was talking with, as Terry Pratchett put it, Ladies of Negotiable Affection, but the experience was a surreal one. Everyone has to make a living, and I don't place those ladies higher or lower on the 'scale of worth' than I would anyone else that I don't really know. But I can tell you that until that moment, I would have never written any scene like that. In the world I was living in, it just wouldn't happen. Now I live in a broader one.

Shortly thereafter, the bar ran out of Shiner. I went upstairs, and told the whole thing to Claudia. She laughed.

Still writing.

How to work a screwdriver

Contrary to what some people who know me might think, I don't just read horror. I also read about horror. This is not only fun, it also gives me insight into the heads of people who've been able to be successful writers.

(By the way, if you want to write good horror, don't read H.P. Lovecraft's 'Supernatural Horror in Literature,' Stephen King's 'On Writing,' or the introduction that Mary Shelley wrote for 'Frankenstein' where she describes her thought process as she came up with her ghost story, and talks about the need to 'awaken thrilling horror'. I don't need any more competition than I already have.

< End sarcasm>.)

Another benefit is that I get to hear about all the good stories that other people have read. Part of my ongoing education is catching up on all the classics that I skipped reading when I was younger. A short while back, I bought an e-copy of Henry James' 'Turn of the Screw.' My Kindle tells me I've gotten though about seven percent of it, and from what little I know of the story I think I've gotten a thorough idea of the introduction.

Note: I will try to not give away spoilers, but my first priority is to make my point.

Damn, that thing is solid. The initial setting, what I'll call the sub-setting, gives us a summed-up idea of the mood of the story, and a rough clue about who is going to survive. Then we start with the account of the real narrator, and she tells us who she is, where she is in her life, her thoughts on this new job, on the guy who hired her, and on the people she's going to be spending this next part of her life with. We even get that first little hint, the one that we recognize because we know we're reading a horror tale, but that our heroine ignores because that's what people do with little details in a situation like hers.

Here's our first lesson, a screwdriver is not a hammer. You don't start out by pounding with it. You place the screw where you want it, carefully fit your tool to it, and apply just a little bit of pressure to hold it in place.

Though it seems idyllic, our heroine's situation comes with a bit of pre-supplied pressure. She is out on her own for the first time, in the real world. At a tender young age, she is put in charge of property and children, something that would be daunting by itself. She dives right in, though, and sets her mind on steering the ship.

Then you apply a little more pressure, and twist.

Just as she is getting her feet under her, something unexpected occurs. Not something that has us screaming 'Ah-ha!' It's something strange, and we don't get a full explanation right away. Also, it really doesn't make sense, not according to everything we understand about this place and this people. I have a personal hunch it will end up making a lot of sense when we get a fuller sense of things, though.

This is actually my second attempt at this story. Right after I divorced, I became a steady patron of the library in the town where I was living, and they had a multi-cassette tape (remember those?) set of the book. I tried to listen to it as I puttered around my tiny apartment over a cold Thanksgiving weekend, but couldn't get past the first ten minutes. Maybe it was just the narrator's voice, which sounded very solid, stoic, and very British. It was too easy for me to shift it into the background noise.

I'm looking forward to reading more of this, and writing more stories of my own.

If I was head of PR for the church of Satan

Claudia has been off at San Japan this weekend, so I have the house to myself. I would love to say that I've been frantically pounding away at something the whole time, but I suspect my nose might knock a hole through my monitor. What I've been doing is wasting time playing Wow and watching some old movies that I appreciate seeing once in a while.

Bittermint is creeping along. I never realized how something gets set in my head until now. Doing a partial rewrite on a story or even on Roja wasn't this hard. I had the initial idea for it, and that idea stayed the focus until I had to change it to give the adventure a little more zing. Now it's like any time I have it in front of me and my fingers are about to press the keys to change some of the words, the me from all those months ago opens a time-portal right behind me and screams, 'What are you doing? Leave it alone!' Because when I write something, I will pound on it until I think it's pretty good. Then I think about all the stories that I really like, the ones that I re-read once every couple of years. Then I take a long, honest look at this thing that I've created. More often than not, I quietly close the web browser window where I was about to submit what I had written, then start ripping it apart again. It's hard to do that, so I don't stop until I can read the whole thing and not say to myself, 'Maybe it could be better there.' Not once.

That's not just a matter of principle. It's to keep myself sane. If I send something out, unless it's to one of the VERY few places that will give you a yes or no within a day or two, I have to sit and wait. I get up in the morning, go to work, and have a few hours after work before going to bed. The whole time, there's this little voice in the back of my head that's whispering, 'Did you fix that one comma? Sure, you thought about fixing it, but did you ever really get around to it? Also, now that you've had time to consider it, wouldn't that one scene sound better from the other guy's point of view? It wouldn't take long to fix it and send it in again. I'm sure they wouldn't mind.'

You get my point. When I send it, it's my brave little story, and it's ready to go out into the big mean world. I don't want to be one of those parents who hover, and then turn on the TV years later to hear all about how my little baby has driven a bus full of nuns into a wood chipper.

It could happen, I'm sure of it.

So that's how Bittermint Tea and Ironlace Orchids is shaping. Some point in the near future, I'll finish it, it will hopefully come out, and if I get it right, I'll be inspiring some of the same kind of hate that I felt for all the folks at TSR who wrote those AD&D modules when my character overlooked something that was staring me in the face the whole time.

Oh, the title of this post? One of the harsher facts about living in Houston is that we have quite a few folks down here who don't have a roof over their heads. Drive pretty much anywhere in this town and you'll see them standing by the side of the road, asking for money. We also have some people who stand there asking for money who wear clean clothes, who don't have a bag or bundle of their possessions tucked nearby, and who might be unshaven but never have that built up coating of sweat and dirt that you get when all you have to wash yourself with is some water and a cloth. These people are the ones who usually have a sign that contains the phrase 'God Bless.' Seeing a guy with one of those signs today, the same place I've seen him before, I got a seriously warped idea for a commercial. A picture would open with one of those guys walking up and down a line of cars waiting at a stop light. He holds up his sign, and then a man in an all-black suit with a blood red tie steps in to view, speaking right to us. He says, “Seems everyone who's down on their luck these days is a devout follower of you-know-who. But you never see anyone begging with a sign that says, 'Hail Satan,' do you? Have you ever wondered what we've got that the other guy doesn't? Why don't you stop by some time, and we'll talk.” He walks up to the first man, puts his arm around his shoulder, and they walk off. Fade out.

If you laughed at that, you're going to hell. Don't worry, I'll hold the door open for you.

Still writing.

Bacon is NOT the same thing as ham

Okay everyone, have a seat and get out a pencil and a piece of paper. Write down this formula: Something horrific = horror. Now is that right? It does look like it, I'll admit. 'Something' could be anything, and 'horrific' even contains most of the letters of horror. But I hope everyone here has the same feeling in their gut that I do, that there's more to it than that.

Straight up, in-your-face horror only scares us so briefly that the length of time might not be measurable unless you use one of those branches of math that's built on unreal and irrational numbers. The kind of horror that makes us feel better when it's over contains a measured amount of ambiguity and a measured amount of certainty, in the right proportions and added at the right time. To use a cooking analogy, something I'm just as qualified to use as I am to repair Model T's, the dish isn't dependent on the meat as much as it is on the spices and the preparation.

Let's compare two dishes. They both contain the same meat but follow two different recipes, and end up with two very different results. The meat we'll use will be something solid for this genre: the slow, agonizing death of a child.

The recipe in one story is from a movie my wife told me about that starts off with an exceptionally gruesome scene. An innocent little girl is trapped in a small space, and the space is flooded with wet cement. She screams for her daddy the whole time, and the scene cuts just before we see her die. She could be anyone's child, yours or mine.

I watched the whole movie, Walled In, and while the girl's death is mentioned later, there's no direct relevance. She isn't the only one to die that way, and that was the only scene that the young actress has. That whole gut-wrenching event was a throw-away.

The other recipe comes from the Japanese movie 'Ringu,' and its American remake. In this example, we see a little girl thrown into a well and left to die of exposure. Though the death is later explained to be slow and terrible, we're only given a few seconds of the attack and seeing her fall.

This little girl has supernatural powers, and those powers make life hell for the people around her. Her death isn't revealed until we're halfway through the movie, and the person who kills her is a family member driven to the act out of desperation. She's a central character and the protagonists spend the movie trying to find out just what happened to her. One item to note is that in the Japanese version, it's hinted that she might be of non-human origin, (and in a horror movie that kind of hint is pretty reliable) and that she kills a man with her abilities even before she becomes a vengeful ghost. This makes her something alien to us, and even though we cringe at seeing her killed, we can move on.

So set these two entree's on the table next to each other and compare them side by side. One has the meat dropped on top where it's the first thing you'll taste when you bite into it, and the other has it further in. Why does this matter?

In real life, the death of a child horrifies us, as it should. Whether we read about it in the news or hear about it in a conversation at the water-cooler, it means something to us. Using that connection when you tell a story, either on film or in print, is like using explosives to blast a tunnel through a mountain. You damn well better know what you're doing, or this shit will go off in your face. The meat needs to blend in with the rest of the dish.

The silly thing is that the throw-away wasn't needed in Walled In. The movie was good, with what I would call solid acting and a fairly good story. I'll guess that the girl's death was put in to shock us right off the bat. Well, it does that, but it makes the whole rest of the movie seem like it's waiting for the real action to begin. When you get the spiciest part in the first bite, the rest can't help but seem bland.

I loved The Ring. It's a good, well-paced ghost story that pushes the right buttons. It has the meat mixed in with the spices, and things blend. It leaves us wanting more of the same taste.

That's why we cook.

That's why I write.