Mar 03

Characters are like onions

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According to Shrek, ogres are like onions. They have layers.

But that’s not just true of ogres. Characters in general have layers, and how many layers we get to see is correlated–or rather, should be correlated–with how important the character is in the story.

Let’s dive down through the layers and see what we find.

0 – Background Characters

In a movie, these would be extras, hired cheaply for the day to stand or move around in the background, doing completely predictable things that don’t influence the plot at all, simply in order to make the world seem populated. In a Peter Jackson movie, many of them might be procedurally generated by a computer to perform the same function. They don’t say anything (unless they are a mob chanting in unison); they have no individuality; they are essentially human (or human-adjacent) scenery. In a book, they’re likely to be mentioned briefly with a collective noun, or even implied by a phrase like “the crowded streets”.

1 – Incidental Characters

These are the people who, in a movie, might be credited (if they’re lucky) as “Thug #2” or “Woman in Hat”. They have just enough individuality to mention in one or two sentences in a book, but they don’t have names, lines, or much in the way of plot function except as a brief hindrance or help to the more important characters, if that. Like the background characters, they do things that are predictable, completely in line with their type of character. Thug #2 will loom menacingly, draw a weapon, and get taken out by the hero in a second. Woman in Hat will go to cross the street just when the runaway bus is bearing down and provide a moment of extra tension as the hero snatches her out of danger. Or similar levels of interaction, depending on your genre and story needs.

2 – Speaking Incidental Characters

The movie makers will have to pay these characters union scale, because they have a line or two. They’re still fully predictable, with nothing to them that isn’t from either their character archetype or their role in the plot. Their lines will be unremarkable, conventional, and serve no more purpose than to move things along, giving the main characters a minor bit of information or a brief hindrance to their pursuit of their goals. They probably don’t get a name, just a brief description that assigns them to a type, and they would be interchangeable with any other character of the same type.

3 – Minor Characters

Here we reach the point where a skilled writer can start to shine. Someone like P.G. Wodehouse, Charles Dickens or Roger Zelazny can, sometimes in the space of a sentence or two, give us a minor character who is both a recognizable type and also an individual. You get the sense that they have opinions, a point of view, things that they want and care about; these might or might not have some direct impact on events, but they will drive the character’s behaviour. These aspects of their character are usually still entirely conventional–they’re like Tolkien’s description of the Bagginses at the start of The Hobbit: you can know what their opinion will be on any subject without going to the trouble of asking them. But in the best case, that’s a tribute to the skill of the writer in summoning up a character who is much less like a plot point and more like a person, rather than a reflection of the fact that the writer has just written a stereotype.

This level of characterization, then, is where you can start to tell the skill level of the writer. Some writers won’t show the ability to go any deeper than this; even their main characters won’t have anything to them that isn’t part of their archetype or necessary for the plot, and that makes the characters feel flat and predictable.

I’ve been reading a lot of early Wodehouse lately, and honestly most of his main characters don’t get a whole lot more depth than his minor characters, but his minor characters get more distinctiveness than most other people’s minor characters achieve; they’re instantly memorable. Usually, they have something particular about them, something that individualizes them within their type, whether it’s an oddity of their appearance, a mannerism, a skill, a preoccupation, or even a thematic association. For example, in Sam in the Suburbs (link is to Project Gutenberg, where you can read it for free), Mr Cornelius, the house rental agent, is introduced as follows: “He was a venerable old man with a white beard and bushy eyebrows, and he spoke with something of the intonation of a druid priest chanting at the altar previous to sticking the knife into the human sacrifice.” This druid imagery recurs each time Mr Cornelius appears. It has no relevance to his role in the story, which is to let Sam a house and also be the occasional backgammon partner of Sam’s neighbour and boss, and a secondary witness to some events, but it enriches his character and makes him memorable.

Giving minor characters something, anything, that isn’t directly relevant to the story goes a long way to flesh them out and make them feel like people with their own stories that just don’t happen to be at the centre of this story being told right now. I’m thinking of the medical examiner in the TV show The Mysteries of Laura, or for that matter the medical examiner in Elementary; either one could have just been a functionary, a mouthpiece for forensic information that the main characters needed in order to pursue their investigations, but both were enriched with hints that they had a life outside of work, personal peculiarities that didn’t bear in any way on the plot. It only takes a sentence or two of dialog to establish this kind of thing, and you’ll get a lot of payback from those couple of sentences in your reader’s engagement with the character.

Matthew Mercer of the streaming D&D show Critical Role is a master of the minor character. At one point, one of the player characters, who has a magical necklace that lets her speak to plants, addresses a clump of crabgrass in a location where events have occurred that the party wants to know more about. Apparently out of nowhere, Matt improvises Henry Crabgrass, and in no more than three minutes of interaction (starting here; spoilers for earlier in Campaign 2), creates a beloved fan-favourite character. One of the cast even dressed as Henry for the same year’s Halloween episode, when all the cast members dressed as characters other than the ones they played. Part of the secret is Matt’s voice-acting talent; he creates a distinctive voice for Henry. But he also creates a personality, a being who insists on the importance of consent before touching and who has a sense of wonder about his own awakening consciousness. It’s a masterclass in how to make a minor character interesting and memorable.

4 – Secondary Characters

Secondary characters are not protagonists, but they often show a degree of agency that shapes events, hindering or helping the main characters. The story is not usually narrated from their viewpoint, even if the viewpoint shifts around; but it can be, especially if they do something or experience something important in a scene that the main characters are not present in.

Because they typically play an important role in the resolution of the plot, and because of their clearly defined relationship with the main character–sidekick, foil, minor antagonist, or whatever it may be–a danger with secondary characters is that they will, once again, be nothing more than their archetype plus their plot role. Giving secondary characters their own arc of development, change, or pursuit of what they desire takes comparatively little extra work; it doesn’t require whole chapters, just a paragraph here and there. If you give them a viewpoint moment, you can include some interiority, some reflection on who they are, what they want, what they care about, why they are helping or hindering the main character. You can also do that in dialog, of course.

The skills you develop in creating memorable minor characters are also applicable to secondary characters, but what is a quirk or a fun fact about a minor character should be more than that in a secondary character; it should get a bit of development, even if it’s just two or three extra mentions that add context.

Secondary characters can even have contradictions within themselves, something that minor characters usually can’t sustain. We see enough of the secondary character that we can perceive the underlying unity that lies beneath the apparent contradiction, and believe that Ron Weasley can be both an intensely loyal sidekick and someone who can abandon his friends at a key point in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, or that Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities can be unable to improve himself for his own sake and yet will sacrifice himself for someone else. We see enough of the mechanism, the development and drive, the forces acting on the secondary character that we can tell why they would do two things that, in a minor character, would seem completely incompatible, and that gives us the sense, in turn, that this is a person and not just a cardboard cutout. Because people act in contradictory ways all the time; we see it in others and, if we have any self-insight at all, in ourselves.

That’s not to say that a secondary character can’t be completely consistent. Samwise Gamgee is only ever loyal; that’s his role (which makes it all the more powerful when Frodo, under the influence of the Ring, believes Gollum’s allegations that Sam has his own sinister agenda). Sam’s development is in what he is willing to do because of his loyalty, and what he believes himself capable of doing; from listening under the window of Bag End to fighting orcs and a giant spider and carrying his master through Mordor.

5 – Main Characters

Typically, we see main characters from the inside, at least to a degree; they have a viewpoint, either first or close third person, or (mainly in older books) the omniscient narrator shows us their thoughts, feelings, and motivations. That’s not possible in film, so main characters in movies have to have actions and dialog that clearly conveys who they are and why they do what they do, if the movie is not to break down into incoherence.

A main character wants something. They have opinions and preferences. Not every story will show them acting on those desires, opinions, and preferences in an effective manner that makes a difference to how things turn out (see my post on Genre Through the Lens of Agency), but if we’re to believe in them as if they were real people, we should see them making choices based on the interior forces that drive them, as well as the external events of the plot.

It’s perfectly possible, and in some genres (such as action-adventure) even expected, to write a main character without a lot of interiority. That’s not to say that characters from every genre are not enriched by gaining some interiority, and even some contradictions. I’m often disappointed when I read a book where the main characters have no more depth than a minor character, and less individuality than better authors’ minor characters; they’re barely described, any description is entirely conventional, and nothing about them departs from their basic character template. I sometimes dismiss highly conventional, completely expected books as “made from box mix,” and these characters are not only made from box mix but cut out with cookie cutters. They don’t have enough layers, to return to my original metaphor. They’re completely superficial, unexplored.

Again, in some genres you can get away with this; your readers are not looking for deep characterization. But adding a few layers to your characters is not an especially difficult skill if you’re an observer of human nature, and it can enhance your writing out of proportion to the number of words it requires.

Characters who are restricted to their types are not always flat, and sometimes (for example, in literary fiction or some forms of comedy) their inability to step out of their type, to individualize, exert agency over their circumstances, and go their own way, is part of the point the author is making. It’s a tricky balance to write a type-bound character who isn’t flat and uninteresting, and the usual way to do it is either to go all in on the oddities (the usual comedy approach) or else convey the intensity of the emotion they feel about their situation (the usual literary approach). If the comic writer fails to amuse, or the literary writer fails to engage the reader’s imagination, the result is failure. In other genres, there’s a much greater expectation that the main character will be able to transcend their origins and go beyond their stereotype, though sometimes (the blacksmith’s boy who is the hidden Chosen One in epic fantasy, for example) that is itself a cliché.

My point is that there’s always the opportunity to add another layer to your characters, whether that be making your minor characters memorable as individuals, giving your secondary characters an arc of development and some interiority or contradiction, or sinking a little deeper into the minds and emotions of your main characters and showing them being more than just their archetype.

Feb 16

Some Decisions

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My mother, who’s 94, is struggling with dementia, and I have been dealing with some practicalities around that. Inevitably, it’s got me thinking about my own mortality and posterity, and making some decisions.

Neither I nor any of my three siblings have children, and my wife’s nieces and nephews are in the USA. So decision number 1 is to work towards making it a lot easier for whoever has to deal with our estates and (if necessary) our affairs while we’re alive but not competent than it’s been for me and my wife dealing with my mother’s situation. So: clearing out unwanted junk (which will be difficult, since I’m not a tidy person and neither is my wife); getting enduring powers of attorney set up; leaving information and instructions about how to deal with things in general. I should be good at that; I’ve worked in IT for 25 years, I should know how to prepare for a handover.

Decision number 2 is what to do with my literary estate (if I can use such a high-flown term). My plan here is twofold. Firstly, I’m considering starting a digital archive of background material (notes, etc.) from New Zealand writers, to which they can release their data after their deaths for the use of future researchers. My alma mater, the University of Auckland, seems like a good place to hold this. I will need to have a discussion with someone or someones there about the possibilities.

Secondly, I’m currently planning to put a clause in my will that says if the material to which I hold the copyrights has not made more than $10,000 NZD in any one of the five years prior to my death, it all goes into the public domain. That’s my best hope of preserving it, rather than having it locked up for 70 years with nobody having any real interest in keeping it available, or even in existence. Public domain books are a treasure, and they’re more likely to be read and republished (and built upon by other writers – which inevitably will mean that my characters will be used in ways I wouldn’t approve of, but there’s a downside to everything).

Decision number 3 is about how to keep my mind active after I retire from work (hopefully more than 10 years away still). Rather than do the usual middle-class middle-aged guy thing and take up golf, which I have no interest in, I plan to take up Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve been watching Critical Role on YouTube, and 5th edition seems like a lot more fun than the modified 1st edition that I played with a bunch of wasters back in the 90s. It’s a reasonably complex game that involves mental arithmetic, planning, improvisation, and interacting with a group, which sounds like an ideal retirement activity. Of course, if I happen to find the right group in the meantime, I could probably carve out some time to start earlier, but for sure I want to make it a retirement activity, alongside gardening, cooking, and, of course, writing.

I’m still working on decisions about what I’ll do next in terms of writing. The immediate priority is to get the final two books of Auckland Allies out. I have my cover guy working on covers for them now, and once they’re ready to go I’m going to start rereading and annotating the earlier books so that the notes go on Goodreads. The hope is that that (along with some discounts) will drum up a bit of interest, translating to sales of books 4 and 5 when they come out. And then, probably, a box set.

I also recently reread my Hand of the Trickster books in the hope of completing that series. Meanwhile, I’m also reading some classics, many but not all of them comedic classics, to get my mind working in the direction of writing more comedy. There are enough grim and serious books. We all need a few laughs.

Jan 25

Do we still need villains?

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My wife and I just watched the movie Cruella, and it struck me that it’s the latest of several retellings in which classic villains – all of them women – are retconned out of villainy. Maleficent was another; Wicked was perhaps the first, or the first well-known, example, and provided the template.

What also struck me, though, was that Cruella moved the villainy just one step back, giving us a different female villain, a new character, who was pretty similar to how Cruella was originally portrayed. Maleficent straightforwardly makes the male hero of the original story into the villain. Wicked (which, let’s remember, is not a Disney movie like the other two) relocates the villainy in a somewhat more complicated way, to the Wizard (who was, if not an outright villain, at least a dubious character and a fraud in the original Oz story) and, to a lesser extent, other collaborators in the Wizard’s dystopic rule, some of whom are women. All three movies still have villains; they’re just not the same people who were the villains in the original stories. Elphaba in Wicked is not simply a hero, either, though she is a protagonist.

We’re currently seeing a redefinition of heroes and villains in history as well as in classic children’s stories. Statues set up to celebrate people (usually men) of an earlier age are being targeted for removal, based on the actions and attitudes displayed by those men during their lifetime. Other people you haven’t heard of before (usually women) are being newly celebrated. To be clear, I’m not saying that this reassessment is a bad thing, though I do think it gets carried too far by some of its proponents in a few cases.

There’s a certain mindset that always looks for heroes and villains in life, as in art. It simplifies the moral landscape, and lets us know whether we should be supporting or opposing someone. The problem is, following this mindset makes it too easy for us to support actions by our heroes that, if they were done by someone else, would strike us as villainous, and vice versa.

And it’s easy (though similarly reductive) to blame art for this. If the fiction we consume is always divided clearly into black and white hats, how can we break out of that mindset when thinking about real people? But there’s also the argument that the reason this is so prevalent in art is that it’s so prevalent in how people think in real life; it’s how we want to believe the world works. Probably cause and effect go both ways. Limited plaudits go to the writers of the movies mentioned above for calling into question exactly who is a hero and who is a villain, though the plaudits are limited because they still retain the hero-villain divide clearly and strongly; they’re not breaking down the divide, just moving people from one side of it to the other.

But do we need to have villains at all? Tina Turner memorably told us that we don’t need another hero; do we need another villain?

Now, I’m as guilty as anyone of putting straightforward heroes and villains into my art, though I hope that in recent years, at least, I’ve started giving at least the heroes more nuance, showing more of their flaws. They still choose to do the right thing, or what they believe to be the right thing, most of the time, but sometimes they’re tempted not to, and sometimes they yield to that temptation in a moment of weakness, and sometimes along the way they make an honest mistake that they and other people end up paying for.

My villains are less nuanced, in part because they’re usually off screen and never (as far as I can recall) get to be viewpoint characters. It’s something I’m aware of as a weakness in my writing.

I’m put in mind here of the brilliant YouTube comedian Ryan George’s “Pitch Meeting” videos:

“And what’s this character’s deal?”

“Oh, he’s evil.”

Hollywood (which is what George is satirizing) doesn’t need to dig any deeper than that. But what if we did?

It’s quite possible to have an antagonist without having a villain, especially if you show their point of view. I recently read an excellent book which goes some way towards this: The Mask of Mirrors, by M.A. Carrick. At least initially, the viewpoint characters all have agendas which are at cross purposes, and they are, at least partially, each other’s antagonists as a result, though none of them is unequivocally a villain; because we get their viewpoint, we see why they are doing things that we might not completely approve of. (At the same time, there are a couple of unequivocal villains in the book, and the viewpoint characters eventually unite to take them on.)

You don’t even necessarily need a personal antagonist to tell a good story, though it helps. We’re currently in the midst of collectively striving against a natural phenomenon, and that’s a powerful story, though somehow we manage to fight among ourselves about that as well.

The question I’m groping towards is: can we (can I) tell stories that show us a more three-dimensional set of characters, driven by personal flaws and incorrect beliefs as much as by their ideals, clashing in complicated ways? And can we (can I) do that without simply declaring morality illusory and writing an entire cast of grimdark alienated bastards?

While I’m at it, can it be funny? I’ve been reading a lot of early P.G. Wodehouse lately (not all of which was comedic), and appreciating his comic gift, and reflecting that I don’t necessarily want to write something dead serious just because we’ve always been told that serious books are more worthy. I don’t get paid much to write, so I ought to at least have fun doing it.

Wodehouse’s characters are often at odds, too, not because some of them are morally evil but because all of them are human. Also, in his later and better-known works, Wodehouse often pulled off the startling feat of making objectively very low social stakes among a privileged elite matter to the reader, but in at least some of his early work, there were characters who, by chance or even because of moral principle, found themselves in economically difficult straits and had to deal with that, and the unfair nature of the world, as best they were able.

I’m left wondering if I can create a fictional world where things matter, and where people clash, but nobody is unequivocally evilbadwrong and most people have a sense of humour about things, and maybe when the mix-up is sorted out we can all have a laugh together.

Nov 16

Letting Characters Be Themselves

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My wife and I have been watching the ITV Sherlock Holmes adaptations that were made between 1984 and 1994. We’ve watched them slightly out of order, because a few of them are longer and we left those to the weekends, so the last one for us was the final episode of the 1993 series. They didn’t end up adapting all of the stories; Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes, unfortunately died in 1994. But towards the end, the “adaptations” became less and less faithful to the originals, with more and more interpolated new material created by the writers from whole cloth.

I’m not sure why writers do this. It seldom works, because apparently it’s extraordinarily difficult for a writer to add to another writer’s work without distorting it out of all recognition (looking at you, Peter Jackson). In the case of the episode we watched at the weekend, “The Eligible Bachelor,” it was based on two different (unrelated) Holmes stories, but more than half of it was completely new material. That new material gave Holmes mystical theories; actual premonitory dreams; a scene where he put his arms around a woman to comfort her with no evidence of awkwardness; and a mention by Watson that Holmes very much admired the same woman’s mental abilities. It also had Watson betraying his Hippocratic oath (leaving an injured man, albeit a villain who Watson himself had injured while rescuing a lady, to be killed by a leopard). And it gave the rescued lady a cliched too-stupid-to-live scene where she went alone to confront a man who she knew had killed at least one woman before, without having told anyone – including her highly capable husband – where she was going, for no good in-story reason.

Holmes fanfic is the oldest fanfic, or so I’ve heard, and there’s a lot of it. A surprising amount of it – and I include the often enjoyable but occasionally clunky series Elementary in this – gives us an out-of-character Holmes of one kind or another. He’s kinder, more empathetic, more humane, romantically involved (often with Watson, fanfic being what it is), emotionally vulnerable… all the things that classic Holmes, Conan Doyle’s Holmes, is not.

I recently read not quite half of Dave Eggers’ The Every. I stopped because the humour, while well done, was too dark for me, and the story both dystopian (which is never to my taste) and deeply pessimistic about both technology and humanity (which is very much not where I am philosophically). One minor scene in the book, which is set in a successor to the current tech giants which has implausibly gained a monopoly over social media, search, e-commerce, publishing, the making of smart devices and basically everything else, involves a project in which people rewrite (by committee) classic novels. Research has shown the instigator of this terrible idea that there are certain spots where a lot of people stop reading these novels, often because they don’t like something a character does. So the characters are rewritten to be more likeable, more in line with current social mores. Less problematic.

In an atmosphere where it sometimes seems that anybody not conforming exactly to whatever this week’s orthodoxy is will be torn apart by a mob on Twitter, I can see how an author would fear this as an outcome. But the impulse, as the Sherlock Holmes episode from 1993 shows, is not new. We’re always inclined to want to revise characters to either be less flawed or else flawed in a way that’s more congenial, or at least understandable, to us. The Holmes of Elementary, for example, is a recovering drug addict (picking up on mentions in the original Doyle stories of Holmes’ use of heroin and cocaine while bored from having no good cases), has superficial sexual relationships, doesn’t get on with his father or his brother, and occasionally screws over his friends because he thinks he knows better than them. Modern audiences, especially American audiences (the show is set mostly in present-day New York, though Holmes is still English) presumably find this more relatable than the emotionally distant, erratically brilliant, relentlessly analytical Holmes of Doyle. The British modernization, Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch, is closer to that Holmes, giving us a Holmes who is, probably, non-neurotypical.

Elementary also gives us a Watson very different from the original, and I don’t mean because she’s an Asian woman; that’s a much less significant change than making Watson a competent detective, Holmes’ equal partner in most ways, rather than his loyal muscle and occasional conscience.

Now, far be it from me to speak against fanfiction of any kind, including the kind that people get paid for. These characters belong to humankind now, and what you choose to do with them is entirely your own affair. But I am raising the question about why we have the impulse to remake iconic characters in a more relatable mould, to make them easier to understand, to make their choices more like what we would choose, even if, because of these changes, there’s a strong sense in which they are no longer that character.

When I’m writing original characters, that same impulse is there, and I have to say I yield to it a lot (I’m criticizing myself here too). I think I’m most successful when I manage to resist it, at least to a degree. I’ve recently finished drafting the last of the Auckland Allies series. The character Tara, initially prickly, angry, and rude, has an arc through the series towards liking and respecting her colleagues more and acknowledging this to them, but her inner monologue doesn’t cease to include snarky digs at them. She just doesn’t let them come out of her mouth quite so much. Sparx still fails to land his pop-culture jokes most of the time, but he’s still trying (sometimes very trying). Dan, if anything, ends the series less admirable to the reader than he was when first introduced, because we get to see some of the compromises and flaws that lurk under his white-knight persona.

Iconic characters often become iconic because they’re out of the ordinary, not just in their abilities, but because they fail to fit with the world around them in some way. It’s worth considering why our impulse is to sand the rough edges off them, to make them more acceptable (whatever that may currently mean).

Oct 07

Why straight white guy stories are losing my interest

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Let’s start out without any misunderstandings: I am a straight white guy. But stories about straight white guys are getting less and less interesting to me these days. My annual best-books-I-read-this-year posts show the trend; more and more, the books I enjoy the most feature female protagonists (often, though by no means always, written by female authors). I’m also reading more stories with queer or non-white protagonists, and often those too are among the ones that make it to Best of the Year.

Why is this? I’ve been wondering that myself.

My conclusion is that the kind of stories that tend to get told about straight white guys are a lot more limited than the ones about other kinds of protagonists. The archetypal straight white guy story is “I pass a test to come into my birthright of power, respect, and the love of women”; the archetypal story for someone who isn’t a straight white guy is more “I battle to make a place for myself in a world that doesn’t want to fit me.”

Thing is, a lot of the time the test the SWG passes to come into his (supposed) birthright is pretty simple. Sometimes the payoff is almost handed to him as a participation trophy, just for turning up and being a SWG; other times, he only has to hit a few simple plot points. He can be reluctant, he can be foolish, he can be incompetent, he can be lazy, he can even screw up majorly with dire consequences for others, and still receive the prize. And often, other characters in the story – notably the woman whose love he receives as part of his payoff – are more interesting, competent, capable, and motivated than he is, and I wish I was getting their story instead. I believe the term “Trinity effect” (referring to the Matrix movies) is relevant here; I’ve also referred to it as the Wyldstyle effect, referencing The Lego Movie.

Let’s divert for a moment and talk about that whole “birthright” thing. If you’ve read much of my musings, you’ll be aware that I’m allergic to Chosen Ones, and part of the reason is that the Chosen One often doesn’t have to work that hard or exhibit much agency in order to achieve their plot goals. They can drag their feet, they can not put in the practice or listen to their mentor or even follow basic common sense, and the universe will distort itself around them to hand them unearned victory. This is what I call the Spoiled Protagonist. I say in the post I’ve just linked that the Spoiled Protagonist is often female, and I have read plenty of female examples; but the straight white guy is the spoiled protagonist that I sometimes don’t even notice, because there’s such a powerful cultural norm of SWGs getting handed things they haven’t truly earned.

Another big reason for my aversion to Chosen Ones, though, is that I don’t believe in the myth of the divine right of kings. Unfortunately, a lot of fiction does still act as if this myth is true, as if your ancestry grants you some kind of destiny. At one point in The Dresden Files (a series I love, by the way, despite its straight-white-guy protagonist) someone, I forget exactly who, traces the ancestry of Michael Carpenter, one of the wielders of the holy swords, to Charlemagne, and this is presented as part of what qualifies him to wield the sword. His character by itself is apparently not enough.

The thing is, Charlemagne died in the year 814 and had 18 children. Actually, the number of children is irrelevant; even if he’d only had one child, if anyone alive today was his descendant (which we know to be the case), then, statistically, everyone of European descent alive today is his descendant. This is because, according to statistician Joseph Chang, any person who lived long enough ago and who is anyone’s ancestor is eventually everyone’s ancestor. So of course Michael Carpenter, who has European ancestry, is descended from Charlemagne. So am I.

Likewise, when a 12-year-old girl traced the ancestry of all but one of the US presidents to the English king John Lackland (the exception being Martin Van Buren, who was Dutch), it was reported as if some sort of genetic destiny brought them to their leadership positions. But again, John died in 1216, more than 800 years ago. Everyone with any English or Scottish ancestry from before the 20th century – including me, and including most if not all of the people who stood for the office of US president and didn’t win – is descended from him by this point. It means nothing. (I say “from before the 20th century” because there are English and Scottish people whose ancestors all immigrated to those countries within the last 100 years.)

And, of course, if you go back far enough – and “far enough” may not actually be all that far – we all have common ancestors. If you want your cultural assumptions about how much “race” means challenged (even if you’re fairly liberal in your ideas), I highly recommend Angela Saini’s book Superior (link is to my Goodreads review).

So the idea that your ancestry, including your white ancestry, conveys any sort of superiority or qualifies you for anything at all is not only erroneous but, I believe, toxic. Likewise with male gender; read Saini’s earlier book Inferior for more on that. And if, at this point of the 21st century, you still believe that people who aren’t straight are somehow lesser because of that, I’m not going to waste my time arguing with you.

So the straight white guy is not in any objective way superior, but all too often gets treated as if he is. Not only in fiction, but in real life too. Let’s stick with fiction, though, for the moment, since that’s what I’m talking about.

The problem with the usual SWG protagonist is that, just because of who he is, he doesn’t face as many challenges, and a protagonist who succeeds without much effort is simply not as interesting to me. He doesn’t need to be capable to become a respected ruler, or attractive to gain the love of a woman who is, frankly, better than he is, or work hard to achieve his plot goal or defeat the antagonist. It’s his Destiny.

So what about the unusual SWG protagonist? Can he still be interesting to me? He can, though it takes a bit more work from him and from his author.

A kind and considerate protagonist is interesting. Straight white guys don’t, traditionally, have to be kind and considerate to get what’s coming to them, but if they are, that makes them more interesting to me. Bill, the protagonist of the early P.G. Wodehouse book Uneasy Money, is such a man, and it instantly made me like him. In my own work, Patient from Hope and the Patient Man is kind, considerate, and supportive of his beloved. When I’m looking for a romance hero, that’s what I look for, because their winning of their love feels earned.

It helps that Patient is also disabled. A straight white guy who has some genuine obstacle to overcome is interesting, as long as he doesn’t overcome it too easily. Part of the traditional SWG story is rags-to-riches, but it’s often because he’s the hidden prince or some such divine-right-of-kings nonsense, so he doesn’t need to work for his elevation. (Satirized in Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, where a captain and a foremast hand are discovered to have been switched as children and are therefore given each other’s positions.)

A protagonist of goodwill who is willing to sacrifice for others is interesting. Someone like the protagonist of Tim Pratt’s Doors of Sleep, for example (though he wins love too easily), or Tom Miller’s excellent The Philosopher’s Flight and The Philosopher’s War (which also put the male protagonist in the position of being the odd one out in a female-dominated profession). The sacrifice needs to be of genuine value, though, or it’s just condescension.

A male cotagonist with an equally capable, equally central female partner (romantic or otherwise) who he respects is interesting, as in the Magebreakers series by Ben S. Dobson.

And finally, writing with genuine depth of characterization or insight into humanity will always be interesting, regardless of who the protagonist is. What I really object to in straight white guy stories is not the straightness, the whiteness, or the guyness, but the fact that those identities often belong to characters who cruise through life too easily and, as a consequence, never develop any complexity. Writing an underdog character who has to struggle for a place to fit into the world and stand up for who they are is a lot more likely, all else (like the author’s skill, for example) being equal, to produce a story that’s interesting to me.

Authors, feel free to consider this a challenge.

Sep 30

Auckland Allies: the final chapter

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I’ve just finished the first draft of the final Auckland Allies book.

At the moment, it’s not quite 47,000 words, but I always expand when revising. And now that I check, that’s about halfway between the length of the second and third books. (The first is a bit longer, almost 55k, and the draft of the fourth book is sitting at 59k.) The total for the five-book series, in other words, will be in the region of a quarter of a million words.

They’re short; they’re pacy. I’d rather have people complain there’s not enough than too much (though so far nobody has, for the record, at least not that I’ve seen).

I’m happy with where the resolution ended up, and how I got there; I didn’t have to use any big coincidences, but drove it all with character agency. There are some cool moments along the way.

And, as I said a couple of posts ago, the door is left ajar for a follow-up series focused on the new set of characters I’ve introduced in this last book. My main characters have all had their arcs of growth and resolution, so there’s not as much potential in them anymore, but these new ones still have places they can go, if I think of any stories for them.

Plans, for what plans are ever worth: I’d like to spend my Christmas/New Year break revising the fourth and fifth books, hopefully get some beta readers (volunteers are welcome), and publish sometime in 2022.

After that… well, I’ve been thinking about the kind of books I like to write (and read). This is what I’ve come up with so far:

  • Fantasy – high magic, wizards
  • Motivated protagonist in a dynamic situation
  • BUT plot that doesn’t depend on action/violence
  • Sensawunda in the setting
  • Social change through technological change
  • Courageous, competent women
  • Kind, reliable men
  • Good intimate relationships
  • Adaptive coping
  • Ensemble casts
  • Protagonists without a lot of power in society (at least initially)
  • Humour
  • Some depth of reflection on human condition/society
  • Complex and evolving relationships

I don’t see myself writing something completely different from that. Don’t look for a dark, unrelentingly serious post-apocalyptic dystopian story of toxic relationships, maladaptive coping, and alienated slackers, set among the backstabbing nobility of a bad photocopy of Renaissance Europe, with a predictable steamy romance between repellent people, ending in inevitable tragedy, in a plot helped generously along by coincidence, convenient eavesdrops, and a prophecy in bad verse.

But I do want to lean more into the elements I’ve bolded in the list above for my future work.

Those are the parts I find hardest, of course.

Sep 20

Auckland Allies amulet design

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I just came up with this design, and wanted to share it.

It’s an abstract representation of the Auckland volcanic field as a series of triangles, the vertices being significant volcanic cones or (in two cases) craters. The Allies are going to use it to make amulets, since their power is linked to the volcanic field.

It looks to me a little like a knapped flint.

Sep 17

Auckland Allies update

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It’s been a while since I talked about how Auckland Allies is going, and last time I did, I speculated that AA4 might be out in the first half of 2021.

Clearly, it’s not. That’s because I decided in the end to hold onto it while I worked on Book 5, and then go back and pull both of them together into mutual coherence and probably release them close together, because these are the two books that complete the series.

I’m pressing on through AA5, which had the working title of Museum Heist, but as it turns out will need a different title, because the more I write it, the less heisty it becomes. At the moment I’m thinking Memorial Museum, because the museum is still an important setting; the characters just don’t pull a heist there. Or maybe War Memorial. The museum in question is the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and the fact that it’s a war memorial will be relevant to the wrap-up.

I’m trying to keep the two-word titles for continuity with the rest of the series: Auckland Allies, Ghost Bridge, and Unsafe Harbour. At the moment, AA4 is Wolf Park.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to finish. I have several elements that I’ve introduced but not developed, and I’m only at 39,000 words and already bearing down on the climax, so after I’ve “finished” the first draft I’ll still have a good bit of expansion to do. It’s urban fantasy, so it should move quickly, but the best urban fantasy is also about the characters dealing with stuff that’s personal to them, and while I have a good many scenes (where things happen), I don’t have as much in the way of sequels (where the characters reflect on what happened, how it relates to their goals, and what they plan to try next). Honestly, AA4 could probably do with some more of that too.

I’ve had some plot issues, too, and still have a couple of things that I’m puzzling over as to exactly how to bring them about in a natural way that flows with the rest of the story, and how much to reveal before the climax. I do have a reasonably clear idea of what happens at and after the climax, though. Worst case, I’ll go ahead and write that and then join the pieces together afterwards.

That 39,000 words doesn’t include what I think of as the Obligatory Pigeon Scene, which I have drafted but temporarily cut out because of a change in the plot. Pigeon is the craft name of the minor practitioner who acts as a fixer and a clearing-house for rumour and information in the small but intense magical community of Auckland; he’s a scuzzy little guy who hangs out in a run-down bar. In my daydreams, where Taika Waititi makes the books into a series of films, Pigeon is his character. Each of the books includes a scene in which the Allies go and intimidate the pusillanimous Pigeon into giving them some information that they need, and this one will be no exception, though he’ll be less helpful on this occasion. For some reason, the bad guys have stopped confiding in him, maybe because he’s totally unreliable and always tells everything he knows to the Allies as soon as they look at him funny.

I’ve introduced some new characters, too, who were minor and unnamed in AA4 but in AA5 are in training to become the next generation of the Allies in what may be a follow-up series. I have no definite plans, but I’m keeping the door open. And Kat, the owner of the New Age shop, who’s been a minor character in previous books, gets to become a little more in AA5. My dream movie casting includes giving this part to my actress friend Sarah James, who I think would be excellent for it.

For various reasons (not least continuity with the earlier books), these books are still set in 2016. I am bringing to them, though, a post-2016 reflection on people’s relationship with reality and truth. The New Age believers, who have figured in supporting roles before, come more to the fore in AA5, and I’m quite explicit in saying that their relationship with facts is a problem, but that they are, at the same time, wonderful people who you’d want by your side in difficult times.

Another aspect of post-2016 sensibility is that the Guardians, an organization whose mission is to protect the Secret of the existence of magic, are throwing their weight around, but the main characters are trying to convince them that that mission is outdated. Some people (such as the New Agers) believe in magic already and will continue to do so regardless of the evidence; others won’t believe in it no matter what you show them; and those in the middle won’t (as the Guardians have traditionally feared) start suddenly burning practitioners if they discover that they exist. That’s maybe a bit naïve, since there are always people who will lash out at anyone who is different, but they’re right that the great majority of people will be cool with it.

This book is unlike the others in that most of it is the Allies attempting to be proactive in preparing for the inevitable next confrontation with the evil Ennead, rather than reacting to the Ennead’s latest attempt to take over Auckland. They face plenty of obstacles along the way, but there aren’t any magical fights until later in the book. I’m mildly concerned about that in terms of pacing, but I think in the fifth book I can get away with it, as long as there’s plenty of other conflict. And that climax ought to be worth waiting for, both as a spectacular set-piece and also since I also want to use it to call back to the first book and show how much the Allies have grown and developed.

Overall, I’m cautiously optimistic, though I’m not going to make any foolish predictions about when it’s likely to be finished. I’m starting a major new project at work soon, which may well absorb a lot of my creative energy. Meanwhile, rest assured, progress is happening, and there should eventually be a conclusion to the Allies’ story.

Jun 14

Distributed Protagonism

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Quick placeholder until I have more thoughts and more leisure to write a full article in response to this piece in Uncanny by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton, which talks about how it’s not always been the case that stories have a single protagonist; it’s just the current fashion. And can we maybe write more books where teams and multiple protagonists and people who don’t have arcs, but do have agency, are present? Given that this is the world we live in, and we’re more and more aware of the fact? And that there are (as I’ve noted myself) big issues with the single special protagonist?

Writing ensemble books is a thing I’ve been doing for a while. It’s difficult, and I’m choosing a particularly difficult approach: I’m currently working (slowly) on the final Auckland Allies book, and the approach of that series is to take the first-person narration convention of urban fantasy, but have multiple first-person narrators, a team, of whom none is more central than any of the others.

The Uncanny piece gives me some directions to potentially explore in, including what they call “tapestry” (lots of POV characters, who are not necessarily protagonists with arcs, but can still have agency); “braid” (lots of POV characters, who do mostly have protagonism and arcs); and the now-old-fashioned but maybe-due-for-revival out-and-out omniscient narrator.

I get the feeling that maybe I need to read some older fiction and get to grips with what these people were doing, and then think about how it could be updated and re-skinned.

Feb 22

Where Next for Mike’s Writing?

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I’ve been in a writing slump lately.

Health issues starting in November have put me out of the habit of regular writing, and I’ve not made much progress on the books I was working on. Auckland Allies 4 still needs a polish-up before it’s ready to be published, and although I’m 20,000 words into the first book in my new Arcanists setting, it’s tough going, and I’m not really feeling it. I think I’ve taken the wrong direction with it somewhere.

I’ve been questioning where my writing is going in general, in fact. I celebrated a million words of published long-form fiction last year, and just as we often reassess our lives around milestone birthdays, I feel that a milestone like that calls for some reflection.

I recently read a book on Roger Zelazny (link is to my review on Goodreads; it won’t be published until May) that got me thinking. Zelazny is one of my favourite authors, and a direct inspiration for some of my own fiction, including several short stories that are among my most successful and that I’m most proud of. The book outlines how he had a brilliant, award-winning early career and was hailed (rightly) as an exciting and surprising new author with great potential, and then, once he became a full-time writer, was accused of having become “too commercial” and knocking out books with not enough development to explore his ideas to the full.

That’s not how he saw it, by the way. One reason, I think, that his books are so compact is that he decided early on that he wouldn’t overwrite or overexplain, that once he’d shown the reader something he wouldn’t go on talking about it but would move on to the next thing. To me, that makes his books concentrated, rich despite their typically short length. He also talks, in an interview included in the book, about how each book he wrote experimented with something that he considered a weakness, but that he tried to put in enough of what he knew he did well that even if the experiment failed, the book itself should still be able to succeed.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking about what I want to achieve with my writing. I’ve always wanted to produce something – whether books or otherwise – that will be of lasting value. A lot of the work I do in my day job is with technology that will be replaced within a few years; it’s likely, if I live a decent length of time after I retire, that none of the work I did in IT will survive me. I’ve come to terms with that recently, and decided that it can still be the case that things are worth doing even if they don’t last and aren’t remembered; they had worth at the time. (The fact that I’ve got into cooking, which is inherently short-term in its usefulness but is definitely useful while it lasts, has a lot to do with this shift in philosophy.) Nevertheless, I would like to write books that aren’t just things of the moment, that people will still be reading after I’m gone.

Now, there are a couple of different kinds of books that are “of the moment” but don’t last. One is purely commercial, what I sometimes refer to as “extruded fiction product”; produced to meet a market demand, just like thousands of other books, with nothing about it that distinguishes it or gives it longevity. The other is the kind of book that wins acclaim and awards at the time it’s published, because it captures the zeitgeist so well; but because it captures the zeitgeist so well, if it doesn’t have anything else going for it, it dates rapidly and falls out of fashion.

You only have to look at old bestseller lists and awards lists to encounter dozens of both types. I personally feel that a lot of books that are winning awards at the moment are of the second type. People are tremendously excited about them because they fit so absolutely perfectly into this moment’s (particularly US) political landscape, but when that landscape inevitably shifts, there won’t be much else to keep them in favour. It’s like what I often say about books that are marketed as humourous: if the joke falls flat, you still need to be telling a good story with well-rounded characters, not just ringmastering a trope parade with a bunch of silly names. So, for example, I think Ann Leckie’s work will endure, because even though it does mesh so strongly into current politics, it also tells a powerful story and tells it in excellent prose. Other books, which I’ll refrain from calling out by name, will be forgotten as quickly as they became celebrated, because really the only thing they have going for them is that people see themselves in them who are not used to seeing themselves in books. And, I sincerely hope, they will go on to see themselves in plenty more books that also have a lot more than that going for them, and then they’ll look back on these ones with a nostalgic pang but see, in retrospect, that they were hollow chocolate bunnies.

I’m self-published. I’m not selling a lot of books, because honestly I’m terrible at marketing and I don’t enjoy it (plus what I write is in neither the current commercial mainstream nor the current critical mainstream); but that means that I can do anything I like, pretty much. I don’t have a publishing house to tell me I can’t, and I don’t have a big, vocal fanbase demanding that I produce a specific type of book or be lambasted. That kind of freedom is dangerous – I could easily fall into self-indulgent tripe that only I like – but it’s also powerful. I can experiment. I can try new things that I might fail at. If I realize that I’ve failed, I don’t need to release it; it’s not under contract, and I won’t drop off the Amazon charts and lose a huge income if I don’t constantly release books. I don’t make my living from writing.

So I can write something I care about, something that’s difficult for me, something that resonates with universals of humanity, something that is like the books I most like myself: a propulsive plot, characters with depth who are doing the right thing against the odds, some reflection to provoke thought (without preaching), a fresh and fascinating setting.

That’s inherently hard to do. I know that not only because I’m a writer and know how hard different writing things are, but also because I’m a reviewer, and of the many books I see, only a few of them manage it. I think it’s a goal worth reaching for, though.

What I need is to figure out exactly how to do it and then execute it.

I’ve done project work of various kinds for nearly 30 years; I’m used to figuring out how to do hard things and then executing them. The trick will be to find something that draws me in enough that I’ll stick with it through the difficult parts, because, as already noted, I don’t have to do this. Nobody’s making me.

So, concretely: I’m very close to finished with Auckland Allies 4, and I feel like it’s sound. I plan to polish that up and release it during the first half of this year.

Next after that could well be Auckland Allies 5, which will finish the series. I think I can keep up the momentum and do that; I have an ending in mind, and it’s a heist story, which I love. The characters are already full of useful complications and have clear, distinctive voices.

After that? I don’t know. I may take a different tack and tell small, intimate, psychological stories for a while. I still feel that Hope and the Patient Man is one of my best books, if not the best, even though I wrote it years ago; it’s primarily a love story, with engineering and politics going on mostly in the background. Despite my love of ensemble casts, it may be time to focus on one or two protagonists striving for something they really care about.

It’s time, in fact, for me to be a protagonist, striving against the odds for something I care about: writing good books that mean something.

I hope I can.