While the buzz of the book has been positive overall, it’s also been relatively quiet. I need to amp up the signal, get more people interested, ensure that the work I’m putting out is, in fact, worth the asking price. I need reviews! Even if they’re bad ones, at least it’d be something worth reporting. It’d be preferable to this silence.
So here’s what we’re going to do.
If you’re reading this, and you’d like to help me out, leave a comment telling me your favorite detective OR favorite vampire story, and why. Next week, I will select five comments and contact the winners, who will receive Cold Iron in a format of their choosing. It’s my hope that, after reading it, the lucky quintet would be willing to throw a review up on Amazon, Smashwords, their blog, or maybe the side of a 7-11 somewhere. No rules beyond that other than the obligatory one entry per person, and be sure to fill out the comment form with a proper e-mail address so I know how to contact you when you win.
I’ve been struggling to put together the sci-fi serial I want to start. I’ve come at some concepts from a couple angles, but they’ve been either too derivative or too preachy. My desire to brush up a tried-and-true aspect of the sci-fi genre should not have ‘fixing Star Wars’ as an end goal. The end goal should be to tell a good story, right? Right. So why sci-fi adventure?
I think my attraction to it, other than nostalgia, is my appreciation of its narrative simplicity. Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and John Carter are extremely similar stories in that an ordinary man is transported to an unfamiliar place and becomes an undisputed hero. They also draw very definite lines between good and evil. There’s a brevity to their construction I can’t help but appreciate. But at the same time, I realize that some of these tales are a bit too simple, and as much fun as they are for me, they don’t necessarily hold up.
I mean, let’s face it. I enjoy Captain America as an old-school adventure yarn, and personally find a straight-arrow character who’s unquestionably virtuous kind of refreshing in a cynical, morally gray world where every hero has to be tortured, conflicted, or shady in some way. However, I can’t deny that putting such a character up against a scientist so evil Hitler kicked him out of the Nazis is a bit laughable. There’s also the fact that his magical bottle superpowers don’t really cost him much, other than some friends dying or going missing, until he wakes up in the 21st century. He becomes, like Rogers and Gordon and Carter, a man out of his element, and sticking to his moral guns brings him into direct contact with many people around him. It’s a far more interesting and involving situation than the clear-cut black-and-white conflict that essentially created him.
The biggest problems with pulp, as far as I can see, are a lack of lasting consequences and the main character’s biggest flaw being they have no real flaws. If our hero is going to get flung across space and time, there should be culture shock involved beyond having to learn some new lingo. It also should not fall to the protagonist to suddenly be the entity to whom everyone turns to get their problems solved. Stories like Avatar (the movie), Dances with Wolves, and The Last Samurai all suffer due to this sort of character insertion. We also can’t have status quo being restored at the end of every week. As far as I’m concerned, in a good serial, the status is never quo. Even if there’s no immediate danger, there should be consequences that linger, situations that feel unresolved, words that go unspoken. How else can you keep the audience coming back for more?
I don’t want to base the story on concepts or gimmickry, though I’m certain the trappings will be there. I would like there to be a narrative through-line other than “Our hero wants to go home,” but I fear falling into one of the aforementioned traps. The shiny, adventurous atmosphere of the raygun gothic aesthetic still calls to me, but I can’t set out to fix what doesn’t work in other stories or try to transmit some kind of message. This needs to stand on its own, as all good writing does.
If you have any thoughts or comments on any of this, I’d love to hear them.
I’m a sucker for the fantastical and out-there just as much as any nerd. I grew up adoring the concept of giant fighting robots that disguised themselves as cars. I like faster-than-light travel, I love dragons, superheroes do not seem ridiculous to me, and I believe anything is possible when the human mind is set to a task.
That said, you have to keep it real in some way or another.
It’s one of the reasons I liked Nolan’s take on Batman so much. It completely divested itself of any sort of camp, far-fetched villains, or completely unbelievable science Batman would need to solve his problems. None of the solutions are magical. And while several characters from The Avengers are arguably gods amongst men, they are presented in such a way that they are still characters, using their powers and abilities as tools rather than being defined by them. “Take [the Iron Man suit] away, and what are you?” is a question Captain America could have put to Bruce Banner or Thor, and both of them would have had answers. They’re real characters, even if their powers make them much larger than life.
It can be a fine line to walk, though. You can’t ever let a special power become a one-size-fits-all answer to whatever problem is in front of your hero. Take, for example, the action-comedy-espionage TV series Chuck. For a while, the ubiquitous Intersect computer taking up Chuck’s poor brain is simply an encyclopedic database allowing him to provide vital intelligence and clues to his handlers. However, it later gets upgraded and allows him to, among other things, know kung-fu. After introducing a much more plausible and in-character means for him to step up to the level of the other two leads – a wrist-mounted computer that can hack anything, displays nearby floor plans, and could presumably be worked on by our hero – he’s handed a different means that is mostly used as a deus ex machina to get him out of trouble.
By contrast, consider Fringe. At no point in that show is an answer easily found or invoked to get our characters out of a situation. Choices must be made, actions always have consequences, and the status quo of the show is constantly in question. There’s no magic button to return everything to normal. While the show does have problems of the week, the resolution of the problem does not necessarily mean a happy ending.
It could be argued that Chuck is a comedy and Fringe is not, therefore the former does not need to be taken as seriously or given the same scrutiny, but that argument’s faulty. Giving your characters an easy way out through some artificial or magical means just smacks of laziness to me. If you make such things too prevalent or rely on them to drive your story forward, your characters are going to suffer. This is true no matter what the genre or medium is. Harry Dresden may be a wizard, but never do his powers allow him an easy solution, and all of his actions have consequences, sometimes deadly ones.
I’m in the third season of both Chuck and Fringe (thanks, respectively, to a friend’s DVD collection and Amazon instant video) and the disparity is pretty clear to me. As characters grow and tension mounts in Fringe, I feel characters becoming stunted and stagnant in Chuck. I maintain that you cannot let the trappings of genre and the coolness of powers or gadgetry overshadow the characters or stakes of your story. Even when you’re dealing with the most far-flung of fantasies, you have to keep it real.
When you publish your own work, you have a lot of balls to keep in the air. You have to keep writing, first and foremost, but you also have to keep up the sales work, illicit opinions and reviews, get a feel for how the work is being received, so on and so forth. As much as I like to travel, seeing new places and reconnecting with acquaintances, this can eat in to those other tasks.
I’ve made some progress on Cold Streets, and I have a fairly good notion on when I’m going to wrap the first draft. It’s important to set deadlines: you always want to have a goal to shoot for, and in my case, it provides a timeline to which I feel I must adhere. It can be difficult for me to manage my time properly, and establishing deadlines helps with that. I’m at the stage where I’m picturing certain key scenes in my head, and just need to fill in the blanks between them on paper.
Having made Cold Streets my primary writerly focus for the time being, other projects have been put aside but are still fairly important to me. I’ve been thinking about the serial nature of old-school pulp sci-fi, and since my idea for that genre hews closely to those sensibilities, I’m toying with the idea of posting the project serially here, or perhaps in a separate webspace, in lieu of these writer reports.
Leave a comment to tell me what you think of this idea. Would you be interested to read some slightly old-school pulp science fiction instead of this somewhat dry blow-by-blow of my writing progress every week? Or is it a bad idea to split my focus? I need your thoughts, Internet.
Some of our stories are hundreds or even thousands of years old. Every once in a while, a book or TV series will claim it has an ‘all-new’ story, but in reality most of the plot points and character turns have probably been told before. This is likely not a conscious decision of the writer, and it in no way dilutes the deeper truth the story strives towards, but it cannot be denied that the roots of most stories run very deep into our past.
Mankind has been telling stories since before language was something you wrote. Around fires and in caves, they relayed tales of great hunts, related how rivals were overthrown, and wondered about dreams and the world beyond what they knew. People wanted to learn about the triumphs and tragedies of others, and sharing these experiences enhanced them, gave them weight, and made them timeless. While more than a few of these simple, primal stories may have had some details forgotten, threads of them can be seen here and now, in the 21st century.
Themes and patterns such as the hero’s journey and good men struggling against their own natures as much as they do a rival or the elements persist because they still have something to teach us. Just as the ancient civilizations of the world found inspiration in their gods and champions, so too do we find it in big screen heroes and, occasionally, the actors who portray them. Myths have always been stories larger than life, speaking in broad terms to draw in as many minds as possible, and at the core of many you will find one of those timeless threads. The hero may be looking for his own identity in the face of a world that wants to redefine or obscure it. A good man is betrayed by a friend because of jealousy or greed. Tragedy causes someone to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of justice. None of these ideas are new, but the fact that they continue to captivate us means they are not without merit.
Our new myths connects us to the old, entertaining and educating and provoking us to think just as they have for thousands of years. Your message is still important, even if someone else has conveyed it before. What’s new about that message is how you convey it. Stories may share common elements but your voice is unique. Let it be heard. The new mythology needs new myth-makers, new storytellers to keep our stories going further into the future. Are you going to be one of them?
