Posts in the "Heroes & Heroines" Category

• That Sexy Beast Spock

  Heroes & Heroines

  I remember vividly the first time I ever thought about the characteristics inherent to an appealing main character.  It was Halloween 1981.  I was five years old and my Mom, a school teacher, was complaining that most of the boys in her school came to the Halloween party dressed up as Darth Vader, a few came as Han Solo, and nobody dressed up as Luke Skywalker.   Now I know that Luke makes a great main character in that he provides an introduction to the world of Star Wars, serves as a catalyst for action on the grand and small scale, and further that he shows character growth, a weird bit of love interest and ultimately achieves peace with himself and his world.  But nobody wants to be Skywalker.  They want to be the all powerful Darth Vader who gets to stalk around killing people that irritate him or else Han Solo, the sexy funny space cowboy.  I’d still rather be Yoda.  That’s the costume I was sporting in kindergarten.  I like doing funny voices.

  It’s the same in Star Trek.  Captain Kirk really can’t be other than he is, the every day adventuring man who time and again dutifully and campily serves as a love interest, action catalyst, plot focal point and naive guide through the strangely garbed worlds of the Trekkies.   Spock is the one everybody loves for his reserve, his snarky comments and his cool intellect, but even more so when he breaks character and raises the rare emotionally-fraught eyebrow.  It’s certainly not for his haircut.  If you have any esteem for Leonard Nimoy or his portrayal of Spock, under no circumstances should you click this link.  DON’T DO IT! (Did you do it anyway?  Haha.  Now it’s stuck in YOUR brain too.  Sucker.)

  I think a review of the literature will show that it is exceptionally hard to have a main character that does all the jobs of a main character and yet is still someone people might like to go have a beer with.  That’s why so often it’s the Hans, Spocks, and Ron Weasleys of the world that people relate to and fall in literary love with.  If you haven’t read Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces then I highly recommend it for an interesting dissection of the role of the archetypal hero in mythology.  He does a much better job in the book than I could do in a blog post so I think I’ll stop here.  Hope you all had a happy Halloween!

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• Heroes and Heroines

  Heroes & Heroines

  I’m never quite sure what makes a hero, which I think is probably the key to knowing what makes a hero.

  I look at it this way: if being a hero was easy, everyone would do it. But it’s not just that being a hero takes work or sacrifice…on the contrary, it takes knowing what to do to remedy a grievous situation, or at least prevent it from getting any worse. That’s actually a really tall order for most of us.

  A hero is somebody who’s willing to get the knowledge necessary to understand what can be done without screwing up the world even worse than it’s screwed up. That doesn’t mean all protagonists are heroes — far from it. Many, even most, might have some heroic qualities…especially in adventure fiction. But that doesn’t make them heroes.

  Incidentally, I’m not talking about real-world heroes, because this week I can’t bear to. Let’s just talk about fiction, and I’ll be mildly apolitical for once. My righteous rage just went on vacation.

  To me, the most interesting characters have always those heroes who screwed something up royally themselves, and are trying to make amends. This comes, I think, from my interest in the noir genre — but you can see it in many places. It’s typical of Westerns. It’s frequently seen in horror. It’s the underlying theme of Star Wars (though I would assert that Star Wars does it pretty badly). Darth Vader turns out to have basically screwed up the universe, and the entire pair of trilogies is (supposedly) about him getting his shit together. Way to go, Darth! Could you maybe have figured that out before you screwed up the universe?

  That’s one of the reasons heroism as a concept doesn’t always translate to the real world. When someone commits heinous crimes (They killed the younglings!!) and then is all, “Whooops! Where did I get that idea!?!?” they shouldn’t get a free pass…not in the real world, or Sammy Gravano would be running the FBI. (more…)

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• Grubby Little Hearts

  Heroes & Heroines

  Holy crap, it’s Thursday AGAIN? This is kinda getting out of hand. I propose no Thursday any week after a convention, okay?

  Heroes and heroines. I haven’t read my fellow Night Shade authors posts on the subject this week – been kinda busy catching up from my World Fantasy Convention week’s vacation – so forgive me if I repeat what’s already been said.

  When you’re dealing with modern fiction and modern protagonists, I think it’s important to make sure that your characters are possessed of enough darkness to make them believable. Strange, most people proclaim that they believe in the innate goodness of humanity, but when it comes to buying into the reality of a character, the opposite is true. Why else shy away from the Mary Sues and knights in shining armor? (BTW, my mother is named Mary Sue. For reals. Magna cum laude, homecoming queen, debutante, professional working woman, mother. Skinny. Seriously. I’m not making this up. I guess her big flaw was that she loosed me on the world. Muwhahahaha!) I think this is one of the reasons that in the last hundred years, you see countless examples of the rise of the antihero, where the protagonist works contrary to what most would think of as the heroic ideal.

  Digression: While at WFC in San Diego, I got into a conversation with some other writers who were opining why humanity tells stories and why we have a predilection for those with happy endings, or, at least we do when dealing with formative stories, those tales told to children. Afterwards, I thought about it for a long while. You could say, “To teach them right from wrong,” and that would be a pretty good answer. It’s possible that we tell stories because that’s the way we’re wired, we’re storytellers by nature. It’s the way we grapple with language. Stories strengthen our ability to communicate, even if it’s only through reference. That sounds pretty good, too. Both are probably right. But sometimes I think truth held in our collective, grubby little hearts is that we tell stories of goodness, of rightness and truth, to convince ourselves we’re not actually the monsters we’ve proven ourselves to be, over and over again. We’re brainwashing ourselves to believe we’re not the villains. End Digression.

  It can work both ways. A “good” protagonist who’s done bad things in his or her past, or the “bad” protagonist who’s gradually revealed to have redeeming qualities. Six in one hand, half a dozen the other. But real people don’t go through life not making mistakes, doing bad things, and many of them have conflicting feelings about their past deeds afterward: guilt, shame, remorse, regret, other words that start with RE-. Probably why there’s so many sparkling vampire stories, or novels told from the “monster’s” point of view. Filling your characters with darkness complicates the gameboard, but that’s why we get paid the big bucks, isn’t it?

  Holden Caulfield, Joe Christmas, Mattie Ross, Huck Finn, Henry Fleming, Jay Gatsby, Esther Greenwood, Rabbit Angstrom, and hey! Even Bull Ingram. Dark and conflicted.

  So pour a little coffee in your cream and write some emo-riddled, conflicted, dark characters.

  
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• I like my heroes like I like my wine: dark and complex

  Heroes & Heroines

  

  It’s probably no secret that I like stories with dark undertones, and I’ve talked a bit about the characters I gravitate toward. I use words like serious, dark, complex. This is true of any writer, I suppose—we all want our characters to be complex—it’s just a question of degrees.

  One of the things I used to wonder about is the difference between YA fiction and adult science fiction or fantasy. I’m talking about the content of the story here, not the age of the protagonists. I used to think it was subject matter, or the (un)willingness of author or editor to put in violence or sex. But YA has gotten very dark over the last 10-15 years, and there really isn’t much of a difference in that respect. It’s more the themes that run through the book and the concerns of the characters, which tend to be more self-centered, or maybe “closer to home” is a better term here. What I mean is, the interests, and so concerns, of teens tend not to be as wide as those of adults.

  There are, of course, exceptions, but I think this is why I tend to write more epic tales with (mostly) adult characters. It’s because I like to explore wide-ranging problems. I like to make my characters make decisions that will have wide-ranging effects. And those things aren’t easy. Such decisions are never cut and dried, which is why I tend to shy away from black-hat villains and white-had protagonists and quests that aim to do away with the world’s great evil once and for all.

  (That’s not to say that I haven’t read my fair share, and enjoyed them; I just don’t choose to write about them. Then again, maybe this is something I should challenge myself with one day. I’m a fan of playing opposites just to give myself a challenge, and maybe this is one I could explore in a short story…)

  In any case, this is a roundabout way of saying that I like my heroes and heroines to be complex. They are, after all, proxies for their culture or religion or political party. I don’t think of them in this way while I’m writing, mind you, but it’s an inevitable byproduct of their formation. After all, if you want to portray opposing points of view, those view do not come to the characters fully formed. They are an amalgam of their upbringing and their environment and their personal experiences and their leaders—be they religious, political, sexual, cultural, or otherwise.

  Now, the flip side of this is that you can’t just make a character some distillation of a particular belief you’re trying to portray in your story. Characters are individuals, and they won’t simply subscribe to everything the movement (or religion or whatever) they believe in says. They will have their own take on it, based on their own lives. They will disagree in some ways, perhaps to their detriment. They will go against orthodoxy, even if it’s hidden away in the recesses of their mind, or in the trips they take to some foreign place, or in the way they act when no one they know is watching. This, to me, is how to make complex characters. You start with the cauldron of their world (however big or small that may be) and you add particular spices and herbs to alter their flavor—perhaps subtly or perhaps boldly. In this way, we might end up with an avatar of sorts, some exemplar to a particular set of beliefs. Or we might end up with a pariah, an outcast for their beliefs. Or even an anti-hero or the leader of a rebellion.

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• White Hats with a Bit of Muck on Them

  Heroes & Heroines

  Sorry about yesterday. World Fantasy Con kind of threw off my sense of time, I’m afraid. Anyway, I’ll get to the point: heroes and heroines. What makes them interesting? Courtney mentioned flaws. I agree. Perfection is a big turn off for me. Perfection not only comes off as author-wish-fulfilment, but it’s also dead boring. (Superman is my least favorite comic book character.) Multiple layers of conflict is best–internal and external. Also, I’m good with the main character making mistakes. (We all make them.) But it’s better if they make smart mistakes rather than stupid ones. Also? The character needs to learn something. As a reader I’ve very little patience for repeating the same mistake over and over without any sign of improvement. What all this means is that I’d like to be able to relate to the main character. I’m not perfect–not even close. In addition, a personal code of honor, even if that code doesn’t have to do with the normal standards of good and evil, will win me over every time. It’s another potential source for conflict. It’s even better when they have a sense of humor about themselves.

  So, it’s easy to understand why my favorite fantasy hero is Terry Pratchett’s Commander Samuel Vimes. He’s an ex-alcoholic with a really ugly temper. He wasn’t born with every advantage. In fact, he was born without just about any of them except determination. He makes something of himself anyway. (To be honest, Liam has a bit of Vimes in him.) On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s Dexter. (The books are great.) Again, here’s a character with so much potential for evil and yet, he struggles to be good. In Dexter’s case, he’s the Tinman who is always in search of a heart. Another favorite character of mine is Sten Duncan from C.J.Cherryh’s Faded Sun series. Within the story, Duncan’s talent is the ability to seamlessly adapt to foreign cultures and people. He is ordered to study a mysterious, dangerous warrior people (the Mri) in order to help his government defeat them, but the plan backfires, and he eventually adapts too well and becomes one of them. (After three years intense study of Irish culture, I can relate to that.) Neat stuff, that.

  I have a tougher time with heroines for some reason. I can name a million of them from film and TV that I think are wonderful, but in prose? There’s Granny Weatherwax from Discworld, of course. (I want to be her when I grow up.) However, I’ve no interest in the long stream of kick-ass fems lining the shelves these days. I’ve tried them out. I really have. But they ring false. You see, in my mind, they can’t exist without the wires helping them leap 50 feet into the air or the stunt men who turn away from their blows and make it look like they’ve been kicked across the room. That’s not empowering. That’s depressing. That’s competing with males who let you win because you’re cute. It says to me powerful women can’t possibly be real. They’re too perfect in every way, no hair out of place, dressed in designer clothes, and crazy sex appeal. Much as I enjoy James Bond stories, I don’t like those aspects of Bond at all. I like the gadgets, the cars, the gun battles, the villains, and the foiled evil plots. I prefer Daniel Craig’s Bond–gritty, down to earth, and emotionally screwed beyond belief. Is there a female equivalent? I suppose. I’ve just not met her on the page of a fantasy book yet. These days, fems seem too caught up in either being men (See Smilla from Smilla’s Sense of Snow, and Lisbeth from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Although, Lisbeth is closer to what I want to see.) or too wrapped up in being with a man. I want them to be strong for who they are–no matter the situation and independent of men as Granny Weatherwax is. I want them to be real people. I guess I’m tougher on female characters. There are a few outside of SFF that I like very much–just not within SFF. It’s possible I’m forgetting someone at the moment. (My brain isn’t 100% recovered yet.) Regardless, I’ll keep reading and searching for one I really, really like.

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• It’s All About the Conflict

  Heroes & Heroines

  This post will be short and sweet, since I just got back from the World Fantasy Convention (which was AWESOME, btw), and have spent the evening trick or treating with my 2 year old instead of doing writerly things.

  When I think of what makes me love a book’s protagonist, two things come to mind:

  1) Flaws. They’ve gotta have some. As Ian pointed out in his great guest post yesterday, internal conflict is a wonderful thing. Saving the world is all very nice, but seeing someone overcome personal demons to do it makes the story that much more compelling. I tend to get annoyed very easily with characters who are too perfect to ever make a mistake (or characters whose mistakes are all of the “her only flaw is that she cares *too much*” variety). I’d far rather read about someone who struggles with darker impulses, who slips and falls and crawls back up, than someone who sails along free of temptation. (more…)

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• Checkerboard Heroes and Motley Protagonists

  Heroes & Heroines

  Ian Tregillis lives in New Mexico, where he consorts with writers, scientists, and other unsavory types.  He is the author of Bitter Seeds and its forthcoming sequel, The Coldest War (July, 2012).  

  I like my heroes a little bit gray. Mouse gray, elephant gray, charcoal gray, a mottled chiaroscuro soul… that’s the hero I’ll cheer.

  Why am I drawn to shadowy heroes? People are complex! And I enjoy it when fiction reflects that. It can be to the benefit of the story, too– human complexity
  naturally gives rise to tension and all sorts of goodies.

  Nobody in this world is 100% good or 100% evil. Sure, some folks are better than others, but we all have great days and terrible days. Days when we hope nobody’s watching too closely. We all have mottled souls (some more mottled than others). I’m not saying we’re all on the verge of kicking puppies and eating kittens, but sometimes I wonder about people. I really do.

  As you can tell, I have an optimistic view of human nature. Which is another reason why gray heroism appeals to me. I like to be told it’s possible to conquer our nature, even if only briefly.

  So I’m won over by people with a sense of honor, even (or especially) if it’s a tarnished kind of honor. My favorite fictional detective, Philip Marlowe, fits this category. I like Marlowe not because he always solves the case, and not even because of his wry wit. He’s great because he is, in the words of Raymond Chandler himself, a “shop-soiled Galahad.”

  Cheering for a saint is too easy. Isn’t it more fun to cheer for people who have to overcome their own faults, their own pettiness and weakness, in order to achieve good things? Unless they’re mightily entertaining in their own right (I’m looking at you, sorely missed Middleman) saints are pretty boring. But somebody struggling to overcome a personal demon or two? That’s interesting. Struggling with the basest part of one’s human nature? That’s entertainment.

  On the other hand… (more…)

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