Feedback continues to filter in for Cold Iron. It seems to be pretty positive, and I think I’m mostly at the ‘fussing’ stage of editing. Instead of worrying about big chunks of narrative or major character turns, I’m ensuring that spacing, spelling, grammar, and other tiny things are all in order. The time is fast approaching when it will be ready for public consumption.
To that end I’ve retained the services of a graphic designer. Now, I do have access to things like Photoshop. I can do some photo editing and image manipulation that produces passable to decent results. But there is no way I’m going to make my first true commercial fiction endeavor come off like amateur night. A professional photo shoot (which turned out extremely well, thanks to the talents of J.R. Blackwell) deserves professional design. I have a few tips on how to proceed after that process is complete, and I will admit to feeling a little nervous about the whole thing.
In the meantime, three major characters have been interviewed, an outline has taken shape, and soon actual prose for some science-fiction pulp-inspired adventure is going to start hitting paper. I may also start putting together elements for a Cold Iron follow-up (depending on how the rest of the test read process goes) and of course I’m waiting to hear back from Angry Robot on Cities of Light, which may get another round of edits & test reads regardless of what is said. So there are a lot of irons in the fire, as they say. Some loose ends to tie up. A few fingers in several pies.
I’m going to stop before I start mixing those metaphors.
It’s a narrative thread woven through many, many stories we tell. Ozymandias talks of great constructs of man all but obliterated by time. A lot of tales are set in times long after the collapse of expansive civilizations. We preserve what we can, but it is impossible to escape what comes for each and every one of us in time.
Death has been personified in many ways. We want to put a face to the inevitability of our end. We struggle to comprehend the finality of it. That there is nothing more in this world for us. No matter what may come after, if there’s more to existence than these mere dimensions we perceive or if there is nothing but silence and oblivion, our hands do no more work, our mouths never make audible sounds again, our eyes fail to see another wonder or another tragedy.
And yet, our stories do not end when we do.
Time will have her way with what we build and the lines we draw between one another. Our imaginations, however, are much more difficult to destroy. In those imaginations, we remember those who’ve left us behind, we tell their stories, we wonder and question and laugh and cry. And when we latch onto something, like the arguments made by the likes of Plato or Aristotle, the teachings of pilgrims from Nazareth or visionaries from Mecca, a tale about fairies or the faux history of the epic struggle of noble houses, the creator of the work lasts even longer in our imaginations. In rare cases, we’re given more than just entertainment and escapism. We are given hope.
I don’t necessarily mean hope for an afterlife or immortality or anything like that. In a general sense, we find hope for a better tomorrow. We know the world will keep turning even if someone we admire or love dies. And if the sun does indeed rise on a new day, maybe we can find, in ourselves and in what we and our loved ones leave behind, whatever it takes to make this day better than the one before.
There’s been a lot of talk back and forth about the trailer for the new Tomb Raider that came out of E3. Word has been that this new Lara Croft would be darker and grittier, just like everything else is in games and fiction in general these days. A beaten and desperate Lara has to fight, crawl, sneak, and struggle her way from setpiece to setpiece in the game, and through it all she gasps, grunts, screams, and cries. I, like Susan Arendt, admire Lara’s tenacity. I like that there’s a sense of realism to go along with all of the platforming and combat. What I don’t like is that this and this alone is meant to make her a “stronger” character.
Strong women are not devoid of emotions. I’m glad Square Enix gets that. But you’re a fool if you think the only means demonstrate the emotions they have is through the mediums of torture, tragedy, or the power of a magical healing (or cackling evil) dick. You may think it’s the height of drama to have a female character develop through a wince-inducing, heart-rending struggle to survive as she’s faced with evil malefactors at every turn, but just a moment’s examination should reveal how shallow this method is. If you want to make your story interesting, you do need to hurt your characters, but if all you do to your female characters is beat them down or sex them up, people are going to start asking questions.
So ask the questions yourself, first. Bounce ideas off of another human being. If you don’t have the good fortune to live with one who’s interested in your work, use the Internet to meet some. Solicit opinions in a coffee shop. Go to a library and make the librarian cross by asking random people about the inner workings of your fictional clandestine organization. You need to share your work, and you need to get feedback, even if it’s completely negative.
How else are you to face the fact that your work is incomplete? No manuscript bursts forth from the head of its author fully-formed and ready to top sales charts. They need to develop. They need to grow. Rampant growth needs to be cut down, plot points need to be clarified, and darlings need to be dragged out behind the shed and shot. If you think you can do every single step of that process on your own, I think you may be part of the problem. As it was explained to me, no writer thinks they’re a bad writer. Self-deprecating as I may be at times, there’s a part of me that thinks what I have to offer the written word is worth someone else reading. In some ways, I may be right, but in others, I’m definitely wrong. And I won’t know that for sure which is which until I let someone else have at my words.
Let’s circle back to Lara. As a character to drive a game about the exploration of ancient ruins, fighting off threats of both natural and man-made origins, and hunting down obscure and inexplicable artifacts of dubious power and desirability, we need to do more than just make her an Indiana Jones knock-off, as Uncharted already beat her to that. I’m not sure how much of her backstory is changing with this latest reboot, but Lara always struck me as a woman who did what she did out of a sense of adventure, shunning the life of upper-class aristocracy because it was too constraining. I’m left wondering who she left behind when she made this decision. Are any of her former friends still trendy and wealthy, now the subject of tabloid reporting? Does she ever see a familiar face on a magazine, happy at a wedding or with a child? How does that make her feel? If the same friend was seen after a nasty split with an abusive ex, what would her reaction be? Does she get lonely out in the wild? What lines does she draw between what she’ll do and what she won’t, and why? Any one of these questions, if answered differently from the previous games if at all, could make for an interesting story to be laid like a foundation under the structure of gameplay. All it would have taken was one person sharing the standing ideas with another, and that other person bringing up any of the above points.
But no. Let’s just break a few of her bones and threaten her with some unsolicited hard-ons. And this time, not just from her fans!
I could be making a mountain out of a molehill, here, but to me, if all the game does to develop Lara’s character is push her down multiple times just to watch her get back up, it will have failed miserably in making the character better. Brienne of Tarth is a formidable and towering slayer of men, but that isn’t all she is. Zoe Washburne is not just first mate of the Serenity. Alex Roivas went through a great deal in Eternal Darkness and was only directly threatened occasionally. Miriam Black is more than the sum of her trash-talk, hustling, sex drive, and special powers. Ripley doesn’t just slay angry penis-monsters from beyond the stars. All of them have histories. All of them have points of view. All of them have feelings beyond “Hey, ow, this hurts.”
Why should Lara Croft, or new characters written by me or another author, be any different?
I mentioned last week that there’s a notion kicking around in my head for my next project. I also mentioned that I want to ensure the story is about characters, not just the universe and any cool stuff that’s in it. As much as imaginations are captivated by things like Jedi knights, Sith lords, alien beings, and far-off worlds with radical ecosystems, if none of the characters are interesting or appealing you might as well forget trying to tell an actual story and just pitch the setting to a video game company.
You don’t just need characters. You need characters who will be the focus of the action, the ones to whom readers will relate, heroes to cheer for and villains to boo at. And they don’t just spring out of the aether fully-formed and ready to kick ass. They came from somewhere, have reasons for doing what they do, entertain doubts and hold on to dreams. These are all things you should know before you write the first word of your story.
In my case, I’m taking the time to interview my characters. I start out with some basic questions (name, profession, viewpoints on some of the galaxy’s fixtures) and get more personal from there. I’m not sure how many questions is enough – ten? Fifteen? Twenty? Any more than that seems excessive. Naturally, the most interesting part is writing the answers. It helps me nail down the voice of the character, gives me a peek into what makes them tick, and gets me excited to throw them to the wolves prowling around the plot I’m brewing.
As long as humankind has been able to lift their eyes, our imaginations have been filling the apparent void in the night sky. The heavens are full of all sorts of wonders, and the closer a celestial body is to our own, the more often it serves as inspiration. That’s part of the reason why Mars featured so prominently in early science fiction, and continues to captivate readers new and old to this day.
One hundred years ago, Edgar Rice Burroughs got into the serial business with his short stories featuring a man named John Carter. Taking a cue from Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court, Carter was a Civil War soldier transported to the surface of Mars where lower gravity gave him superpowers. While an immortal man traveling to another planet via astral projection may seem a bit odd by today’s standards, Burroughs’ work is consistent with the pulpy, unashamed adventure that was prevalent at the time in other works such as Tom Swift, Buck Rogers, and later, Flash Gordon. He was one of the first to truly popularize science fiction as a genre, and Mars was a big part of his work.
Likewise, luminary Ray Bradbury took us to the red planet. His Martian Chronicles were a bit more grounded than the adventures of John Carter, dealing with the necessary colonization of Mars after we as a species degrade and erode our home planet to the point of inhabitability. Speculative fiction often has the earmarks of cautionary tales, and the many short stories that link together to form the future history of our relationship with the red planet are no exception. The fact that Mars was inhabited long before humans showed up allowed Bradbury to examine the follies of historical colonization as well as how we as a species did, and continue to, face annihilation at our own hands. Just as Heinlein would use the moon to espouse his viewpoints, Bradbury’s tales of Mars communicate an unflinching view on human nature and the perils of xenophobia.
Even when Mars isn’t encompassing all aspects of a story, it still serves as an inspiration. The desolation and quiet peace of the planet makes one of the key scenes in Watchmen all the more powerful. The film Total Recall used it as not only an exotic location but part of the story’s questioning of reality and perception. As a world much closer (and, it turns out, more hospitable) than Venus, Mars often represents a clean slate for those willing to brave it, as well as presenting its share of mysteries and opportunities.
