My UK editor wants an essay for their blogsite.\u00a0 I’m working on it.\u00a0 I’ve been working on it since it was assigned.\u00a0\u00a0 It should’ve been easy; I thought it would be easy.\u00a0 It’s not.\u00a0 And it’s even a topic I suggested.\u00a0\u00a0 In the weird way that Lifestuff and Writerstuff sometimes intertwine, it got tangled in a discussion here, a discussion elsewhere, and my original thoughts on the matter.<\/p>\n
I’ve been mildly annoyed for years by reviews (of other peoples’ books–this is not a complaint about reviews of mine) that focus on whether there are enough nasty people in it.\u00a0\u00a0 Oh wonderful, some reviewer will burble: this book has delightfully nasty\/dark\/tormented\/vicious characters.\u00a0 I’m so tired of goody-goodies, the reviewer will say.\u00a0\u00a0 And then came a blog post not very long ago, in which the writer dumped piles of contempt on people who wrote good v. evil epic fantasy because this was always totally good boring stupid people against totally evil interesting complicated people.\u00a0 Oh, and smart.<\/p>\n
And I thought, “You shallow twit.\u00a0\u00a0 This is not a D&D game.”\u00a0\u00a0 Actually I don’t blame Gygax and D&D.\u00a0 I blame Tolstoy.\u00a0\u00a0 If you know anything about Tolstoy’s life, you know the man was weird to the nth degree.\u00a0 Apparently Orthodox Guilt is even more powerful (and oblique to) Catholic or Jewish or Episcopalian or\u00a0 Calvinist Guilt.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s Tolstoy who made that incorrect statement about happy and unhappy families that everyone quotes…but given his own craziness, I’m not surprised that he misjudged both happy and unhappy families.\u00a0 If he’d worked in an ER or in EMS or in a crisis center, he would have known better.<\/p>\n
Unhappy families are strikingly alike in how they get unhappy and what they do when they’re unhappy.\u00a0 They’re not creatively unhappy…they’re common garden-variety unhappy. \u00a0\u00a0 They all think they know who’s to blame (and they’re just about always wrong)\u00a0 and they continue to find ways to keep the unhappiness going. \u00a0 If it seemed to start with a layoff, they’ll such incredibly useful and happy-making behaviors as drinking too much, blaming each other,\u00a0 whining, yelling….etc.\u00a0\u00a0 Eventually someone will threaten or make a suicide attempt or someone will beat up on or shoot someone or commit a crime.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The same goes for any starting point: money troubles, sex troubles, substance abuse and frank mental illness.<\/p>\n
Happy families are weird, strange, unpredictable (and creative) because they find ways to be happy that no one else has thought of.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It’s not that they don’t have problems–everybody has problems–but they find balance where unhappy families don’t.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We were warned, starting out, that we would have problems (I’d been told that for years) because we were both brought up in single-parent homes.\u00a0 His mother was a widow; mine was divorced.\u00a0\u00a0 How could we possibly have a marriage that stuck, let alone that was happy?\u00a0\u00a0 We thought it was easier precisely because we weren’t stuck with the conventional model as the only way to have a happy family.\u00a0\u00a0 We could make up our own solutions (and we have.)\u00a0\u00a0 Happy families can be large, small, in between…headed by a man or a woman,\u00a0 or two men or two women, or a man and a woman–who may or may not have been married before to someone else.\u00a0\u00a0 Happy families can include children–or not.\u00a0\u00a0 An extended family–or not.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Who goes out to work, who doesn’t, who works indoors and who works outdoors–none of that determines which families will be happy and which won’t.\u00a0 For every background that produces a happy family…that same apparent background can produce unhappy families.<\/p>\n
So, dragging this back to writing books…someone asked, somewhere else, why I didn’t write more point-of-view “bad” characters.\u00a0 Why readers see my bad characters almost entirely (and sometimes entirely) from the outside.\u00a0\u00a0 That reader thought bad characters were innately more interesting than good characters\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And my first thought was “Write your own !**! books if you want to immerse yourself in that stuff.”<\/p>\n
But then…I started listening to people talk about this sort of thing and began to understand why people who think good characters are boring think that way.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The immediate simple answer–they don’t know how to read beyond the decoding level–is inadequate.\u00a0\u00a0 (They don’t, but that’s not all of it.)\u00a0\u00a0 Ever since the romantic era, the “dark side” has been romanticized…admired…praised.\u00a0\u00a0 So “good character equals dull, wishy-washy, rather stupid because must always do good even when it’s walking off a cliff” and “bad character equals fascinating, mysterious, intriguing, complex…because that looks like a dirty dark alley I can explore without getting killed.\u00a0 Maybe.”<\/p>\n
The writer spends more time with a character than readers do (trust me on this one)\u00a0 so this writer’s attitude is that if I’m going to spend years with a protagonist , it’s going to be someone that interests me<\/em>…someone I can stand to be in my head with for that long.\u00a0\u00a0 I wrote one book with a protagonist so badly flawed\u00a0 (completely inability to see himself clearly, admit his mistakes, make the best of who he was because who he wanted to be was just not in his makeup) that he caused great harm to many people over many generations.\u00a0\u00a0 Not doing that again:\u00a0 it was a very, very miserable experience.<\/p>\n Well…said yet another person at a convention…why don’t you write about more moral ambivalence?\u00a0\u00a0 And I thought (you know what) and struggled not to explain at great length why I don’t believe in moral ambivalence.\u00a0\u00a0 I think most people have a very clear view of what’s right and what’s wrong…when it’s being done to them<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There’s no ambivalence in a writer’s surge of emotion when someone cuts him off as he’s trying to merge into crowded traffic.\u00a0 There’s no mistaking which side of the line you’re experiencing when someone shoves past you on a stairway–or helps pick up the groceries you dropped when fumbling for your keys.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Most people (barring certain defined mental illnesses) know what’s right and wrong when they do it–but defend their wrongdoing with excuses to themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 They’re tired, they were sick, they just got mad,\u00a0 they were feeling down…there’s always a reason, but it’s covering up the knowledge that what I said to M.F. in high school was a mean thing to say, and I knew it…and didn’t know it.\u00a0 Luap’s flaw: the refusal of self-knowledge.<\/p>\n There can of course be doubt, and confusion, and uncertainty of the best course.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In this instance, which is the greater good?\u00a0 The worse evil?\u00a0\u00a0 If the pilot who managed to set his aircraft down in the East River so no lives were lost had–in the last moment–seen he was going to smash somone in a rowboat, should he have tried to pull up and killed everyone on the plane as a result?\u00a0\u00a0 If every life is infinitely precious…can you kill one to save hundreds?\u00a0 And how do you make such a decision in a split second, which is all you’d have?<\/p>\n So…are good characters necessarily perfect, boring, wishy-washy blahs?\u00a0\u00a0 Not to me.\u00a0 I have some really good friends, people I’ve known and been friends with for over 40 years.\u00a0\u00a0 None of them are perfect.\u00a0 None of them are boring.\u00a0\u00a0 Nor are they alike…except in being good people.\u00a0 The ones you can count on when your car breaks down to drive 20 miles to pick you up.\u00a0 Or more.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They have other friends who can count on them, too.\u00a0 They do good work in their occupations; they make good neighbors.\u00a0\u00a0 But boring?\u00a0 Predictable?\u00a0 No.<\/p>\n I saw a review of the original Paks books once that dismissed Paks at the end as “too good, it was all too easy for her.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And I thought very hard “You don’t know how to READ!”\u00a0\u00a0 Easy?\u00a0 No.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I didn’t say it, of course.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But it’s another error to think that “happy endings” are easy endings.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The happy family–the happy character–the good character–don’t get there by accident.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s work.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The whining and yelling and hitting and drinking and taking drugs are easy.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Not doing that, and doing something constructive, is work.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fighting the depression,\u00a0 struggling with the flashbacks of PTSD, coping with the realities that life throws at us all…that’s work.<\/p>\n And the struggle makes the story.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A far more interesting story (to me) than the bad guy ranting about how he was done wrong and now he’s going to hand out payback.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Better to have Paks–or Kieri or Dorrin or Arcolin or Stammel–in my head for several years than, for instance, Alured or Barranyi or Luap.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I have a life to live, not just a world to write about.<\/p>\n EDIT:\u00a0 Forgot to mention.\u00a0 My portable–the netbook–has apparently died or locked itself in a catatonic state.\u00a0\u00a0 So I won’t have anything with me in San Antonio for posting to this blog.\u00a0\u00a0 And so there will be a blank until I get back.\u00a0 I’ll try to get a post off early tomorrow before I leave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My UK editor wants an essay for their blogsite.\u00a0 I’m working on it.\u00a0 I’ve been working on it since it was assigned.\u00a0\u00a0 It should’ve been easy; I thought it would be easy.\u00a0 It’s not.\u00a0 And it’s even a topic I suggested.\u00a0\u00a0 In the weird way that Lifestuff and Writerstuff sometimes intertwine, it got tangled in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,5],"tags":[22,62,107],"class_list":["post-1495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-the-writing-life","tag-characters","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1495"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1497,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions\/1497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}