Month: February 2012 (page 3 of 5)

February 16, 2012 / 13 Comments

James R. Tuck: The Terribleminds Interview

Next up for the terribleminds interview — James R. Tuck, author of the recently released BLOOD & BULLETS, a Deacon Chalk story. James is the type to sell it straight and tell it like he sees it, so I’ll leave him to get right to it. Welcome him here at terribleminds, and you can find James at his website, JamesRTuck.com, or on the Twittertubes @jamestuckwriter.

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

“Respect your elders boy.”

The young man looked at him, eyes bloodshot, a sallow cast to the whites of them. “My dad left before he even knew my whore of a momma was knocked up with me. Hell, he was gone before his drunk wore off.” Long brown fingers stubbed out the joint delicately; white smoke wisping out the side of his mouth he leaned forward. “My whore of a momma didn’t even have the courtesy to take me to my grandma before she split. Hell, she was gone before her drunk wore off too. My grandma had to take the crosstown bus for over three hours to come get me from the hospital. I love my grandma. I would kill for my grandma. I say ma’am to her, dress nice when I am over there, take her to church every Sunday and the Piccidilly afterwards. I do respect MY elders.” The Glock appeared, pointed at Leon’s chest. A smile with no humor touched the young buck’s narrow, pock-marked face.

“The rest of y’all are just old.”

Why do you tell stories?

Because I love it. Everybody says to write the story you want to read and that is exactly what I have done. I’ve been an urban fantasy fan for decades now, reading stuff that fit the genre even before I knew there was a genre. I’ve also always been an avid reader, always carrying a book and reading whenever the moment presents. I had just finished an urban fantasy book that was supposed to be dark, violent, and kick ass. It was the lamest, tamest, piece of crap I had ever read. Now I picked this book up because the reviews for it were off the hook. Many reviewers actually saying they were uncomfortable with the darkness of the book, the didn’t know how the author had gotten away with writing something so violent, etc., etc., blah, blah, blahditty blah.

The book sucked balls. Not just balls, but big monkey balls. The ashy gray, wrinkly, and covered-in-tiny-hairs-like-wires monkey balls.

I put the book down and said out loud to myself: “I can write better shit than that.” So I did. That made me sit down and write what would become BLOOD AND BULLETS, the first book in the Deacon Chalk series.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Quit using so many damn speechtags. Seriously, speechtags are of the Devil. They are lazy, worthless little filler words. I’m not saying never use them, but never use them. If I see a whole page of he said, she said broken only by the occasional he exclaimed, then my eyes glaze over and I want to throw the book across the room. You can get so much more out of telling me what the character is doing instead of just telling me that they said something. Hell, that’s the job of the quotation marks. You throw those bad boys around some words and I just know they were said by someone. Double duty your writing and let me know something about the character who is speaking by having them do something or describing something. Ditching speechtags and making use of descriptors will not only boost your writing but you will discover a whole world of subtext that will give weight to what your characters are saying, punching a hole in the reality matrix and bringing them to life.

Get them out of the white room and make them do something. You can write a whole page on a character making a sandwich and if you do it right it will be gripping and compelling. Have your character make a banana and mayonnaise sandwich while they discuss killing someone, or divorcing their husband, or sleeping with their girlfriend for the first time. You can turn that sandwich into a load of character detail.

Not bad for two pieces of wheat bread, a smear of Hellman’s, and a banana.

(Don’t knock it, that shit is delicious.)

Oh, and free second piece of advice.

Pull your head from out your ass.

Quit thinking you are so awesome you don’t have to be polite to people. Seriously, a little consideration and manners will take you further than your talent will in some cases. Just take the two seconds to send a thank you email, or to repost the stuff put up by folks who help you out. Don’t be the dick author that goes to a blog, does your guest post, and then trots back off to your masturbatory abattoir (masturabbatoir?) until the next time you need something posted. Life is about the give and the take. You should give more than you take.

What’s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

I love being a writer. I love meeting fans and reader and people who think I suck. My favorite thing is being able to go up to writers whose work I admire and talking to them without seeming like a crazed fanboy. I can chit-chat on fairly equal footing with writers whose books I have enjoyed over the years. It’s awesome.

The suck factor comes in for me in that I have no idea how I am doing at any given time. The bottom line is, well, the bottom line. How you sell. That is what matters in the publishing world. Not your talent, not your art, not even your story. Just did the book make money. If you made money then you get to write again, if not, then you and Geno have a meeting in the back with a Louisville Slugger.

The Illuminati keeps those figures locked up in the vaults just to drive people like me crazy.

(Curse you, Illuminati!)

What do you love about the urban fantasy sub-genre, and what do you hate about it?

Urban fantasy is my great love in reading. It is tied with crime fiction. I have always been fascinated with mythology and religion so pulling that into the “real” world really works for me. It just gets stuff moving in my bloodstream. Monsters and guns, hell to the yeah.

The biggest problem I have with urban fantasy right now is the way a lot of it follows in trends and the way it pulls back from the edge, trying to be more paranormal romance.

Now the first part of that is it seems like: “You know what’s hot right now? Fairies. Vampires are dead, don’t write about them, write about fairies. Fairies sell.” Well, kiss my ass very much. I’ll write about fairies when I damn well want to and because I have a new spin to throw at it. I wanted to write vampires as the bad guys in my first book because they kick ass when stripped of their humanity and made into monsters. It’s a classic because it damn well works. I did hear that no one was buying vampires after the publishing world has turned against the Twilight franchise. People said to me. “Oh, vampires are over. Stephanie Meyers ruined them.” “I wouldn’t write that, vampires are so cliché.”

Don’t be an idiot. Write a good book. Shut the fuck up.

Vampires are over is just another excuse for you to not write a damn book. Hush now, the writers are talking.

And the proliferation of paranormal romance into urban fantasy is old news. Now I like a good paranormal romance and love is a huge motivating factor in characters. Love has a place in urban fantasy, hell yes it does. However, there is a thing with paranormal romance, one of it’s defining characteristics, in which the love story IS the story. All the other factors play second and third fiddle to the romantic element. If that is what you are writing, then go for it. Do it well and I will read it and enjoy it, but if you are going to write urban fantasy then write it. Give me monsters without redemption. Inject some horror in there. Make some characters who are totally screwed up, because if you had to deal with this crazy shit in real life you would be nine kinds of fucked up.

What’s it take to write great urban fantasy?

Brass balls. (Picture Alec Baldwin with a pair of shiny balls in his hand.)

Seriously, it takes a careful attention to character and propensity to write those characters getting fucked up. You need to be able to go there. Take the bus full of your characters and drive them to the heart of Weird Shits-ville and kick them out. Naked. You need to be able to see that if you were writing reality these people would be damaged. You also need to keep your sense of humor, because unrelenting horror is, well, horror and not urban fantasy. But if you are writing urban fantasy then do yourself a favor and don’t hold back. It’s your job to tell me about the piece of gristle stuck in the canines of a Were-wolf. It’s your job to imagine just how a vampire who drinks blood and never brushes his teeth smells when it is in your face talking to you. It is your job to crawl through the dark and bring me a damn story worth reading.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

I really like the word eldritch. I have since I first read it used by the late, great Robert E. Howard. It’s a terrific word that I don’t get to use nearly as often as I would like since I am not H.P. Lovecraft.

(Side note: How cool is it that Lovecraft is now a descriptive word in its own right? Lovecraftian. You call something Lovecraftian and you have just shortcut a ton of description to one word.)

Favorite curse word…..hmmm. If you read my first drafts it would seem like it would be fuck. I use that like it’s my last name when I am first drafting. But my favorite would probably be cocksucker, which I haven’t used in a story yet, but in book two my main character does tell someone to “keep your cock-holster buttoned.”

So, if Lovecraftian is a word that describes work that feels like it’s been written by Lovecraft, what would the future adjective “Jamestuckian” imply?

Dark, violent, bloody, and a propensity to use sentences where the action happens before the subject. I want folks to know what they are getting into when they see my name on the cover. It will really throw them off when I do write a paranormal romance. (Muwah-ha-ha) But I do think that my books will always have a high action content, even if they aren’t dripping blood from the page. I mean I’m 42. I’m not finding myself here. This is what I like dammit, and this is what I write. Trends can suck it.

**Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)**

I love me some Red-headed Sluts. Takes about 15 to really do a number on me, but they are delicious and highly recommended.

1 oz Jagermeister

1 oz peach schnapps

2 oz cranberry juice

Preparation:

Pour the ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice.

Shake well.

Strain into a shot or old-fashioned glass.

Of course if I am drinking straight then give me a nice bourbon, rum, or Southern Comfort. I hate beer, hate wine, and can’t drink straight vodka anymore. I will take a nice moonshine if you have it though, I mean I am Southern-born and Southern-bred, we don’t turn up our noses to the bathtub brewery.

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

There is no better film than The Princess Bride. Seriously, everything works in that movie. The perfect blend of acting, directing, storytelling, and unicorn blood. Virgin unicorn blood. That damn movie is infectious like a rhesus monkey in the CDC.

Book- The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The language in that book makes me weep in shame. True, the story is really not worth telling, you don’t know shit that is going on, and the lack of character definition can be maddening, but the LANGUAGE is just breathtaking.

I also love the book and the film for High Fidelity.

I can’t recommend a best comic book ever. I love comic books. I am a fanboy from way back in the day. I love comics like I love my spleen. Hello, spleen, good day to you, I love you so much. Closest I can come to a best comic ever may be Preacher by Garth Ennis. That is a comic book that is not for the faint of heart.

I can’t recommend a game because (gasp!) I am not much of a gamer. I play vidjah games to unwind about once every 2 months. I want a game that I can run and gun, no thinking, no figuring shit out. Just give me a lot of stuff to destroy and I can veg out for a few hours. To illustrate, the only game I have ever beaten was Devil May Cry.

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable zombie war?

I do carry a gun in real life and am a better than decent shot with it. My true skill though is a complete and utter lack of conscience. I could do the most jacked up stuff, the stuff you need to do to survive, and never once feel bad about it. I can be the go to guy for fucked up shit that has to be done to survive.

I am sure most folks here are watching the Walking Dead on AMC. Have you noticed how utterly badass Rick Grimes has become? It’s like that Dave Chappelle thing that gets stuck in everyone’s head: “I’m Rick James bitch!” has now, in my head switched to: “I’m Rick Grimes bitch!”. If this was zombie apocalypse I could make that switch in your head to: “I’m James Tuck bitch!”.

You like guns, huh? What’s your go-to gun in any situation?

My Colt .45 1911. I have one and it is, hands down, the finest handgun ever made. The pistol is absolutely intuitive. When you snatch it out of the holster your finger just slips over the safety in a gentle caress. If you carry it cocked, locked, and ready to rock (hammer back, safety on, one in the chamber for those of you who don’t know) then you can have your firearm ready in seconds.

Plus the gun is just gorgeous. I get it that some folks aren’t into guns but I am in a big way. To me, the 1911 is a work of art. You see it in movies a LOT because it is so damn cool looking. It’s a big, shiny handful of badass.

What do most writers get wrong about guns in their stories?

Same thing as Hollywood usually. They forget to count bullets. They have bullets flying and the characters not reloading.

Plus, it seems most writers have never fired a gun. You can tell when you read that most writers have never blown that black shit out of their nose after an afternoon at the gun range. And I have read a lot of odd mistakes. Safeties being flicked off of semiautomatics that don’t have them, hell, safeties being flicked off revolvers, hammers being pulled back on Glocks, that kind of thing. It’s fine if you write your character as not knowing about guns so you can skim some stuff, but there are basic levels of research that can’t be gotten online. Hell, if you are a writer and have a question about a gun drop me a line. Unless the floodwaters of deadline are sweeping away my house, I’ll answer.

You’ve committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.

The seared flesh of my enemies.

Or a really nice steak and a Dragon roll.

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

Crime. I am writing the 3rd Deacon Chalk book now and after that I have the 3rd Deacon Chalk e-novella to knock out. After that I am writing a crime novel. Something really dark and violent like Tom Piccirilli’s stuff. I want to switch things up with one Deacon book a year, which is urban fantasy, and one other book a year of my choosing. The rest of my time I want to fill with short fiction, comic book writing, and maybe some screenwriting.

But next up is crime. I have a list of crime fiction ideas as long as my freakishly gorilla length arm.

February 15, 2012 / 18 Comments

The Bait Dog Kickstarter Is A-Go

Atlanta Burns.

Teenage girl with a shotgun. Standing up for the used and abused, the bullied and the beaten. A little bit Veronica Mars. A touch of Raylan Givens. Add a dash of Charles Bronson in Death Wish.

Now, she wants a ride in her first novel, and so I give you: BAIT DOG.

Well, I don’t give it to you yet, I guess —

Because now BAIT DOG has a Kickstarter drive.

I’ve got all kinds of cool rewards cooking — not just the e-book but a hardcover and trucker hats and a copy of Fireside Magazine (with another Atlanta Burns short story in it, “Shotgun Gravy”) and, if you happen to be wealthy and/or insane, a chance to come visit me in Pennsyltucky and fire off the shotguns and shoot whatever the hell we can find. (I suspect nobody’s going to bite the bullet on that one.) Be advised, too — you do not need to read SHOTGUN GRAVY first (though you can if you so choose). With a successful pledge of the Kickstarter $5.00 and up, you’ll get access to all the information you need to know. BAIT DOG is a standalone novel; no previous knowledge required.

Also, for every $3000 earned, I’ll write a brand new Atlanta Burns novel. So, theoretically, if we blow past the 100% point (though the Devil only knows if we’ll even get to 100%), there exists the chance for not one but several of Atlanta’s adventures as a teenage detective-slash-vigilante to come into the light.

Atlanta as a character means a lot to me. She’s kind of the patron saint of kicking over anthills and whupping up on bullies who might think to put someone down because they’re different in some way.

Hopefully she’ll mean something to you, too.

As a sidenote, Sweet Sid and Marty Krofft it’s tricky business putting together a Kickstarter video. I mean, on the surface, it’s fairly simple: “Point face at camera and say smart things.” It’s that latter part I had trouble with. You know how many videos ended up with me mouthing off a machine gun chatter of profanity and then trying to bite the lens in half? I’ll give a conservative estimate of… mmm, ohh, 95% of ’em. At one point I really figured I might just post a video of me throwing up and then crying into my own sick on the hopes that I’d earn a sympathy pledge.

But then somehow it came together and I managed to post a video that was not altogether horrid.

Regardless, thanks for checking out the Kickstarter drive. I do hope you’ll take a look and spread the word and, of course, pledge. I don’t know if Kickstarter is the future for creative types, but it’s certainly a very interesting component of the present and I suspect it will be an entertaining and illuminating ride. Thanks for taking it with me!

February 15, 2012 / 4 Comments

The Providence Rider, by Robert McCammon

(Providence Rider art by Vincent Chong)

Here’s how I know that I’m connecting with a book — or, if you prefer, a book is connecting with me:

When I lay down at night to read, the book will generally nibble away at my awakened state. It’s not that the book is boring. It’s just, reading all those little words on a the page or the screen leaves my lids heavy. I start to drift off, my mind shutting down one synapse after the other. After a half-hour or so, I know I’m done.

That’s true nine times out of ten.

But around, mmm, 10% of the time, I find a book so good, my eyelids don’t get heavy. They go the other way. Hell, they get jacked up like the awning outside a double-wide meth-lab. And that’s what happened when I picked up a copy of McCammon’s newest, The Providence Rider. Now, to be very clear about all this, I’m a sucker for anything McCammon writes. I’ve been reading this guy since I was a teenager. His novel, Swan Song, is one of the scariest I’ve read. Boy’s Life made me want to be a writer. I am, without reservation, his target audience. I’m just that way with some authors — Joe Lansdale’s another one. Or Bradley Denton. Or Robin Hobb. Whatever I read of theirs I know I’m going to like.

Now, McCammon’s last novel — The Five, his trippy rock-and-roll horror terror opus — was great, but it was a slow go for me in terms of reading. I felt like I needed to take my time with it, to move cautiously through it, to pick apart all the musical riffs and let the cold septic creep settle into my bones.

My experience with The Providence Rider was the opposite — fast, fun, and frankly, all kinds of fantastically fucked up. (Sorry for the alliteration. It is what it is. Let’s move on.)

The Providence Rider is next in McCammon’s Matthew Corbett series, a pre-Revolutionary War set of stories featuring the up-and-coming “problem solver” (think detective but with a far wider purview). Each book has been a different creature than the one before it, which is a bold choice for a series — the first book, Speaks the Nightbird, has Corbett investigating a supposed “witch” in the Carolinas. It’s something of a meditation on good and evil, faith versus science, a story at the moment the times and tides started to turn for this country in terms of enlightenment. The second book, Queen of Bedlam, is a raucous gallop of an adventure, a thick meaty book that takes Corbett to the early days of New York City and sees him accept a position the adventure-having, problem-seeking Herrald Agency. Then came Mister Slaughter, where Corbett’s story turns into a gruesome manhunt for the brutal slayer-of-men, Tyranthus Slaughter. It’s not exactly a horror novel — but it’s pretty damn close.

And now, The Providence Rider.

Beginning with Bedlam, Corbett’s been tangled up in the schemes of the imperator rex of the criminal underbelly, one “Professor Fell.” Fell has been a distant player for the last two books, his influence keenly felt while he himself remained an elusive faraway figure.

Providence Rider changes that.

Fell comes calling. Though he’s been trying to kill Matthew, he decides that he’ll stay his executioner’s hand if Matthew will come to his private Caribbean island and, during a gathering of Fell’s top lieutenants, help Fell solve a mystery. I’m not big on writing spoiler-heavy reviews, so I’ll just say this: the book is chock-a-block with action and adventure. Continuing on the tradition of doing something a bit different with each book, Providence Rider is Matthew Corbett in a far pulpier tale. We get explosions! Boat chases! Cannon fire! Fights galore! The evil Irish Thacker twins! The mysterious knife-throwing Minx Cutter! Impossible automatons! A lost Indian princess! A giant octopus! A global criminal conspiracy! An earthquake!

It’s got everything. Humor. Sex. Action. Adventure.

(And it’s also got one of the grisliest decapitation scenes in recent memory. McCammon really knows how to skeeve you out during scenes like this — whether it’s the hand-go-bye-bye scene in Swan Song or this page-long description of a head being sawed off at a formal function, his descriptions will squick you out.)

It’s an interesting approach, isn’t it? I think as authors we assume that readers want the same from us again and again — we’ve got this comfort zone in our heads and expect that readers want to remain herded up and huddled together in this safe place where they receive something approximating the same thing each time. But McCammon disproves that — or, at least, he disproves it for me, and given the fact that more of these books continue to reach shelves I have to hope that it’s paying off in terms of sales, too. But it goes back to what I said earlier in my “Don’t Get Burned By Branding” post — what readers will ideally respond to is your voice as a writer, not the genre in which you write. Every author brings with him certain things, be they themes, motifs, character archetypes, unanswered questions, grisly scenes of limb dismemberment, whatever. The reader, in this weird way, wants to carry the author’s baggage — but that doesn’t mean the reader requires the same reiteration of story or genre. You don’t read McCammon — or Lansdale, or someone like Cherie Priest — and expect the same old recycled pap every time. What you can expect is a quality of writing and a another visit with those elements the author holds dear.

The Providence Rider was just what the doctor ordered. We have an infant in the house so it’s hard to carve out as much time for reading — and when I do, I don’t necessarily want something heavy. This book did the trick. It’s lean, mean, and wild-eyed — a Caribbean adventure with buckled-swashes and pulp-soaked goodness. I had a blast reading it, and I suspect so will you.

If you haven’t read any in the Matthew Corbett series, I might recommend jumping right in with Queen of Bedlam — then go back and read Speaks the Nightbird after the others as kind of a “prequel.”

The Providence Rider drops in May.

You can pre-order direct from the fine feathered folks at Subterranean Press (click here).

Needless to say, looking forward to the next Matthew Corbett adventure.

February 14, 2012 / 40 Comments

25 Things You Should Know About Protagonists

Ahh, the protagonist. The main motherfucker. The top dog. The mover-and-shaker of your story. Feels like it’s time to crack open the protagonist’s ribcage and get a good long look at his still-beating heart.

Another list of 25, incoming. Check your six, and please enjoy.

1. Prime Mover

The protagonist is the prime mover of the story. He shapes the tale and is in turn reshaped himself. If you can remove the character from the story and the story still happens in the same way, then what you’ve written is not a protagonist so much as “some schmoe who wanders through events like an old person lost at the mall.” Activity over passivity. The character should act upon the world, not merely react to the world. Put differently: the character is driving the car; the car is not driving the character.

2. Yo Yo Yo It’s MC Protag In The House, Motherfizzuckers

Generally, the “main character” and “protagonist” are the same — that isn’t an automatic, however. A main character can be the narrator telling the story of a protagonist. But, unless you’re a particularly talented writer, that’s probably going suck a bucket of bubbly hippo spit.

3. Wuzza Wooza Hero Buzza Booza Quest?

Yes, blah blah blah, your protagonist is a “hero” going on a “quest.” Strike this language from your vocabulary, at least at the outset. It’s not that these terms are wildly inappropriate — given certain modes of genre-writing, they are the hats the protagonist will wear. But for now, let’s pretend that a protagonist is more complicated and nuanced and sophisticated than the overly-simplistic “hero going on a quest” allows. Even characters existing in a fantasy realm or fighting, I dunno, space bees in space, should all be written as real people with real goals and real problems. Real people are not heroes. Real people do not go on quests. Let the audience call the protag a questing hero. You should dig deeper.

4. Replace The ‘K’ With A ‘V’

The old saying is that the protagonist should be likable. That we should want to go out and grab a beer with him and paint our nails and giggle as we rub our genitals together. Put that out of your head. Forget likable. Likable is not a meaningful quality. The audience says that, but they don’t mean it — otherwise, they wouldn’t be interested in the likes of Tony Soprano. Or Don Draper. Or Lisbeth Salander. (It’s harder to pull off an unlikable female protagonist, but that’s because we’re a fucked-up society who embraces flawed men but not flawed women.) Instead of likable, aim for livable. Meaning, we need to find this character compelling enough to live with them for the duration of the tale. I don’t want to get a beer with Lisbeth Salander any more than I want to get a beer with a Bengal tiger. But I’m happy to watch do their thing.

5. The Worst Crime You Can Commit. . .

…is create a boring protagonist. I’d rather loathe the protagonist than be bored by him. If your character has all the personality of chewed-up cardboard, I’m out, I’m done, I’m hitting the eject button. And don’t try any of those excuses — “But the world is exciting! The plot is zing! Bang! Boom!” No, no, no. You take those excuses and cram them in your pee-pee hole on the end of a rusty ramrod. The protagonist is why we stick around. This is the problem with the Everyman protagonist, by the way — recognize instead that we’re not all John Q. Who-Gives-A-Shit and that the Everyman is a false notion and embrace what makes each person interesting as opposed to what makes us all one slack-jawed superorganism.

6. Combat Landing

I need to know who your protagonist is right out of the gate. Don’t fuck around. It’s like a combat landing — drop hard and fast out of the atmosphere. From the first five pages of your book or five minutes of your script, I need to know why I care about your protagonist. Dally not, word-herder.

7. The Ability To Act Upon The World

I want to read about a character who can do something. I don’t want to read about some dude who has no marketable skills — “I’m really good at watching Wheel of Fortune drunk” is not a compelling reason for me to stick around. I don’t care if he’s a ninja, a lawyer, a detective, a doctor, a boat captain, or Captain Doctor Detective Stormshadow, Esquire — I want to know he is in some way capable. Who wants to read about an incapable ninny? (Be advised, however: capable is not the same as perfect.)

8. Standard Questions May Apply

The four cardinal questions: Who is she? What does she want? What conflicts and/or fears are standing in her way? And what is at stake (stakes as in, what will be won or lost) if she fails?

9. The Three Beats Of Doctor Protagonist

At the bare minimum, track the protagonist’s character arc by plotting three beats — these beats indicate change (positive or negative) in that character. Werner goes from self-destructive –> loses everything –> turns life around. Roy-Anne goes from cloistered farm-girl –> dragged along on crazy adventure –> world-wise but cynical. Bobo the Hobo has an arc of homeless otter whisperer –> half-robot hobo-machine –> destroys world in staticky burst of cybernetic rage. … okay, maybe not that last one. Point is, track the way the character changes for the better and/or the worse across the swath of the story.

10. Change Is More Interesting Than Stasis

Storytelling is the narrative accounting of how one thing becomes another. It is a fictional accounting of a change of state. The protagonist is the arbiter of this change and without change, we have a narrative structure that’s basically just a straight line with a period at the end of it. In your story, either the world changes the protagonist or the protagonist changes the world. But something must change.

11. The Two Faces Of Change

A protagonist either changes gradually over time as he encounters new events and other characters or he changes dramatically in response to a dramatic situation. The degree of change must match the degree of the events that urge that change — you can’t have a protagonist whose girlfriend breaks up with him and next thing you know he’s throwing babies into the shark tank at the local aquarium. “NOBODY LOVES ME NOW I HATE BABIES RAAAAR.” You must seek out believability by way of consistency — and, when consistency breaks, empathy. A protagonist who suffers trauma changes drastically because we expect and allow that change. We must accept it. To some degree we must even expect it.

12. Are You An Innie Or An Outie?

The protagonist tends to have an inner story and an outer story. The internal tracks the protagonist’s emotional, mental, and spiritual state, where the external story tracks the character’s actions and movements and corporeal health. The external story is obvious because, duh, it’s external. The internal story is hidden on purpose — exposing it to the light makes it feel twee, cloying, artificial. This is how we are as humans: our physical lives are plainly seen but our inner existence is guarded, concealed, hush-hush. The two stories also don’t need to go the same way: a character who karate-kicks all the villains to death reaches a positive outcome in his external story, but his internal story may be one of guilt and strife over the violence caused by his karate-wielding death-hands.

13. The Necessity Of That One Ass-Kicking Moment

We want to see the protagonist do something awesome. Sure, it can be some rad-ass karate bullshit, but it can just as easily be him telling off his villainous mother, or graduating high school when the odds were stacked against him, or saving a baby penguin from the slashing knife of a serial killer. A small version of that moment can come early (the Blake Snyder “Save the Cat” beat), but toward the final act of the story we need to see this again — crank the volume knob to Maximum Awesome.

14. The D&D Alignment Chart Is Not The Worst Thing In The World

This is overly simplistic, but bear with me — the D&D alignment chart (see this one for THE WIRE) can help get you started in terms of determining the shape of your protagonist’s actions. Does the character lean more lawful, or more chaotic? Is she neutral, or does she take sides on either side of the moral spectrum? WILL SHE DO BATTLE WITH THE CATOBLEPAS, OR THE DREAD MIND FLAYERS? Okay, maybe not so much with the Monster Manual stuff, but I think you get the idea.

15. Know Which Way The Character Will Jump

Some authors will go deep into a protagonist’s history and chart every breakfast she had since she was but a snot-glazed toddler. Do that if you’d like, but in my experience it’s best to dig deeper into the choices the character might make. In other words: know what way the protag’ll jump in any given situation. Who she was should work backward from who she is — at least, for you, the writer. Knowing how she’ll behave and what choices she’ll make will inform the history necessary for the protag to have gotten to this point. By the way, “protag” is short-hand for “protagonist.” All the kids are using it. Just yesterday a 12-year-old was like, “Hey, what up, Protag!” Or maybe I have wrong. Maybe he was like, “Hey, what up, you old bearded asshole!” Same thing. To-may-to to-mah-to.

16. Painting With Shadow: The Power Of The Antagonist

The antagonist opposes the protagonist not just once but throughout. In this way the antagonist helps define the protagonist in the same way you invoke a shape by coloring in everything but that shape. Note that the antagonist needn’t be another character — it traditionally is, yes, but any persistent conflict can be truly antagonistic. A looming house foreclosure, a cancer diagnosis, a tornado made of biting squirrels.

17. Lube Up For The Protagonist Gangbang

Yes, Virginia, you can have multiple protagonists. Multiple “main” characters just assumes that you have several characters pushing and pulling on the story. Any ensemble piece or story with strong multiple-POV characters could be said to have several protagonists. They should get equal time and have equal effect on the world lest they be demoted to the cast of supporting characters. AKA, “People who might get eaten by alligators or dispatched by Klingons somewhere in the story.”

18. Time To Practice Your Most Insidious Laugh

I like Moo-hoo-ha-HA-HA-HAHAHAHA — start slow and quiet and then go loud and fast. Which is also how I masturbate, just in case you were wondering. And you were. Anyway. My point here is, you have to hurt your protagonist. You really do. You have to be willing to cut them to the marrow physically, emotionally, spiritually — you know the protag well enough to know what and where his most vulnerable ~~tickle spots~~ pressure points are. This works because you’ve drawn a connection between the audience and the protagonist. The audience cares — or, at least, wants to remain compelled by the character’s journey. By fucking with the protagonist, you’re fucking with the audience. Which makes you sort of a dick, so, way to go. No wonder nobody liked you in high school. Jeez.

19. Fake-Out, Sucker

You can have a “false protagonist.” You set up one character as a protagonist, the audience buys into it, then you switch it. Often by killing that false protagonist and revealing the real one. It’s kind of a dick move but we’ve already established that you’re a dick. The key is to be an effective dick. Or something.

20. Theme & Character: Car Crash, Or Pubic Braid? You Decide!

The protagonist interacts with theme in one of two ways: intersection or interweaving. At an intersection, the protagonist crashes head-on into the theme in a perpendicular 20-car-pile-up. The protagonist is at odds with the theme and rails against it, eventually overcoming it, overturning it, or succumbing to it and proving it out. Or, the protagonist and theme are interwoven together, wherein each reflects the other.

21. The Definition Of “Mary-Sue”

You will find multiple definitions of a “Mary-Sue” (the male version is called “No Gnews is Good Gnews with Gary Gnu”) — what you need to know is that your protagonist should not be a pap, waffling, twee stand-in for your most perfect ideals. An unconflicted, untroubled, unrealistic icon of flawless goody-two-shoedness is a shitballs protagonist no matter what you call her. So, don’t do that.

22. We Love Characters For Their Imperfections

We want characters who have flaws. Flaws are interesting. We like to watch flaws. Maybe we see them as representative of our own damaged goods? Maybe we just like to watch awful stuff, like when a conversion van full of bees drives into a Kodiak bear stuffed with explosives and sticky honey. Further, flaws offer a practical component: they make for the source of excellent conflict — and, in fact, represent a nearly-perfect internal self-generating conflict because the flaw forces the protagonist to act as his own antagonist. HOLY POOPFIRE DID I BLOW YOUR MIND? Ahem. Sorry. Some protagonists are subject to a “fatal flaw,” which is a tragic-in-the-truest-sense weakness that forever threatens to undo all the good that the protagonist has done. My fatal flaw is writing POOPFIRE in all caps. And doing heroin. Mmm, heroin.

23. Discover The Sadness

That sounds like a new Sarah McLachlan song, doesn’t it? Anyway. I’ve posited this before and I’ll posit it again: sadness lingers at the nucleus of every story. It may not be dominant or prominent but it’s there — and I think you can find the same thing inside the protagonist. Every protagonist should be wounded in some way; the wound may be a small but potent one or it may be the all-consuming spiritual equivalent of a sucking chest wound, but it should be present. In this wound grows sadness, and by digging for this griefstruck little pearl and unearthing it you will expose a critical part of the protagonist’s makeup.

24. Find Yourself Inside The Protagonist

I don’t mean that literally, of course. (Sexy as it may sound.) I mean that, to discover what lies at the heart of your protagonist you should endeavor to find some shared human experience, some critical emotional core sample that is a match betwixt the both of you. It can be anything, of course — “We’re both orphans! We both have anger issues! We both enjoy have enjoy having cocaine snorted off our perineums by drunken diner waitresses!” — but it helps to channel a bit of yourself into the main character. If only so you create that sense of empathy needed to grok the protagonist’s motives, fears, and goals.

25. The Superglue Of Shared Story

And therein lies the secret. When we respond to a protagonist it’s because we see a bit of Our Story in Her Story. That’s the glue that affixes us to the character, that makes us want to cling to him or her like a cuddly little marmoset. The protagonist can be wildly different from us as long we can see in him some aspect of shared human experience, some piece of driftwood bobbing in the great big chaotic ocean that is that protagonist’s persona. (This is, I’d argue, why we respond to Luke Skywalker but not to Anakin — it’s easier to see ourselves in Luke than his father.) Don’t keep the protagonist at arm’s length by giving her traits and experiences understood by only a small subset of the audience. That’s not to say the protag cannot be a serial killer, alien, or star fighter pilot — it just means that some part of that character’s makeup must reach across the abyss between story and audience in order to create common ground.

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February 13, 2012 / 67 Comments

Is Free A Price We Can Pay?

It seems that every book these days — or, at least, every self-published book — is popping up free for a short period of time, an act driven by inclusion in the exclusive Amazon KDP Select program.

I did it with SHOTGUN GRAVY, as you may have seen. To report back on the experiment, the novella has once more gone back to its two or three sales a day mark. The sales basically went like this: after going free for just over a day, the novella moved around 5200 copies. Then, after the promo ended, I sold (daily): 70, 4, 89, 48, 36, 13, then it we’re back to the two or three sales per day. During the time SG spiked, my other e-books mysteriously dipped for a couple days but then raged back strong thereafter. During that stretch, it netted be about 20 new reviews. So, I’m willing to call it a success.

And I’m not yet sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

The results were a good thing. But it’s the ramifications of those results that has me feeling wibbly-wobbly.

Here’s where I’m a bit troubled.

First, the fact we’re now seeing a new type of authorial self-promotion (my book is free! hurry up and not pay for it!) is troubling if only because I fear we’re just contributing to the overall noise — and it’s noise that spreads an intrinsic notion about the value of our work, which is to say, it maybe ain’t worth that much. This noise also helps to set up expectation: “If I wait around long enough, this book might just show up free for a couple days.” So, where before readers were becoming trained to wait for a sale — “Oh, now the book is $2.99 instead of $4.99, or now just a buck” — they’re instead waiting for it to cost them absolutely zero.

Second, the boost in sales that comes out of this process is effectively a cheat. It’s an exploit like you’d find in a multiplayer game. It’s not based on human word-of-mouth, it’s based on a programmatic exploitation of Amazon’s recommendation system — a system that is inscrutable and unpredictable. Amazon may intend for it to work that way so, in this sense it’s not strictly an exploit — but my point is that it’s based on an algorithm of recommendations rather than actual recommendations. Moreover, if that algorithm becomes dominated by this mode of juggling books to the top, then those books that are not participating may have a harder time finding a place in that already-unknowable and potentially-overcrowded recommendation system. Right? So, not only is this “free product exploit to boost sales” trick creating a potential ecosystem of lowered expectations in a story’s value (because a buck wasn’t cheap enough!), it’s also enforcing a programmatic ecosystem where if your book does not participate, it doesn’t get to play in the Reindeer Games with all the other once-free books.

Third, we’re reinforcing the notion that Amazon is the 800-lb. gorilla in the room — except now, Amazon is becoming the 800-lb. mecha-gorilla in the room (now with rapid-fire gatling gun arms!). I already sell minimally on the Nook and most authors I talk to have the same experience. On the one hand, that coffin’s already got eight nails in it. On the other hand, if our aggregated Amazon exclusivity hammers in that ninth and final nail, that means Barnes & Noble officially fails to be a competitor (which is as much their fault as anybody’s, to be clear). And a book publishing ecosystem that loses both of its main players (in Borders and B&N) is a troubled one. Up until this point, Amazon has been very author-friendly. Outside a few little stumbles and bumbles, they’re pretty good to authors and offer a genuine benefit. Amazon has changed publishing and how authors reach audiences. But, Amazon is a company. I hold no illusions that they do this to be warm and fuzzy. They’re making friends with authors so as to shank publishers in the kidneys. What happens when bookstores and publishers finally die, gurgling in their own lung-blood? Will authors continue to get a great deal in that ecosystem? Self-publishers who scream and cry about publisher monopoly plainly do not understand monopolies. Amazon has the ability to become just such a monopoly.

Let me be clear — I used the promotion, it worked, and I’m fairly happy with the results. I’m not knocking it nor am I knocking any who seek to access that exploit. You do what you have to do. If your unknown book is now known due to this process, then that’s a clear win.

My fear is that it’s a win in the short term. But that there may be harm in the long-term.

(As a sidenote, if you’ve nabbed a free book from an author and then read that book, you should do something to pay the author back: leave a review or buy other books by that author. It’s only fair.)

Curious to hear your thoughts — I’m not settled on any of this (how can you be, with the ground moving so swiftly beneath our feet?), and for all I know this represents just another step toward an authorial Renaissance. On the other hand, I worry we’re cutting out one middle-man for another, except this one is a faceless insane Amazon algorithm that lives in the dark and seeks to undo all existence with his cybernetic Hands-of-Atropos. Snip, snip.

You tell me. Have you tried the free thing either as author or reader? How’d it work for you? What are your thoughts and fears over all this? Talk it out. Curious to unpack this, see where authors of all stripes stand.

Oh! One more thing:

If you’re a self-published author, you know that one of the hardest things to come by is data.

So, go fill out this self-publishing survey. Please?

February 10, 2012 / 65 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: The Unlikable Protagonist

Last week’s challenge — “One Small Story In Seven Acts” — is deserving of your penetrating stare.

Next week, I’ve got a post queued up about protagonists.

And, in one portion of this post, I discuss the power of the unlikable protagonist.

The balance is writing an unlikable protagonist that still remains compelling — we still find some reason to keep reading, and we may even find empathy or sympathy with that character.

Even if we don’t want to “go out and get a beer with him.”

So, that’s your task.

You’ve got up to 1000 words to write a tale featuring an unlikable protagonist that still remains readable and compelling. Having this as a flash fiction challenge offers up one bonus and one disadvantage: the disadvantage is that you won’t have more than those one thousand words to establish the complexities an unlikable protagonist might need. The bonus, however, is that flash fiction is short — you can get away with a lot more because you’re not expecting that the reader will have to hang with your story for 300 pages.

Get to it, ink-slingers.

One week is all you’ve got. Challenge ends at noon EST on Friday the 17th. The drill is the same: post your story somewhere on the web, link back here in the comments so that we can all come and read.