Writing Tips of the Day

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Dakarne
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Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Dakarne »

A cross-post from another forum. These are my personal 'writing tips' which are brief, to the point, and actually have a point.

1: Don't worry about Mary Sues, because the so-called 'pandemic' is a wee bit overblown...
Contrary to popular opinion, there are several things which Mary Sues are, and several things which they aren't. They are occasionally annoying, they are very much the wish fulfilment fantasies of whoever happens to be writing them, and they do detract a lot from some stories by having an undue amount of focus put onto them because such level of focus subtracts from the development of other characters. That said, they are not automatically bad, they are not decided by an arbitrary list of factors such as hair colour or eye colour or accent or angst-filled background (if it were true, my shifting accent and years of bullying would qualify me), and they are not in any major way supported by academic discourse.

I've studied literature for three years now, and I have only once seen a professional author refer to the concept, and that was in Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films by Roz Kaveney. She doesn't put much focus on them, but it's notable that her discourse is easily the least masterful of the books I've used, given that she has a background as more of a reviewer than an academic (it is notable that her work cites very few other academic sources, and does not actually have a very extensive bibliography - which is to say that it does not have one at all).

To be honest, it would be more prudent to actually establish what a Mary Sue is; is it someone with bright multicoloured hair or kaleidoscope eyes as applied arbitrarily to the work in question? Yet Delirium from Sandman qualify on that front, despite quite clearly being one of the most unbalanced yet most interesting characters from the comic in question, and this really is saying something. Is it the inability to be killed via conventional methods or being otherwise immortal? Despite the fact that I can mention at least two comics, two television series and a film where these characters are perfectly suited to the environment and tone; it's part of the whole point that they're so indestructible and yet can still remain interesting (if you're wondering, The Crow, Watchmen, Torchwood - at least in the second season, Captain Scarlet and Highlander are the works in question). Is it that they're angsty? But let's face it... I've got twelve shelves covered in novels, plays, poetry, films and games and most of the really good ones feature angst as part of what makes it good (see spoiler tags below).
I can list stuff like To Kill a Mockingbird, Malazan Book of the Fallen, Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, Harry Potter, Dying Earth, Riftwar, Night Watch, Dresden Files, several Discworld novels, Nation, Conan the Barbarian (at times), Sandman, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, every single Shakespearean tragedy, Paradise Lost, When the Wind Blows, Stardust (the book, not the film), War and fucking Peace, the entire collected works of Charles Dickens, Anita Blake (pre-suckage), Batman, Green Lantern, A Scanner Darkly, several Culture novels, Neverwhere, American Gods, Earthsea, Noughts & Crosses, Teacher's Dead, the New Heroes novels, Perry Moore's Hero, Codex Alera, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, the Incredible Hulk, the Omen trilogy, Dragonlance, Star Trek (at times), 30 Days of Night, Sin City, Star Wars (at times), Doctor Who (at times), the Drizzt Do'Urden novels (pre-suckage), Superman (at times) and even some of the tie-in science fiction novels I have...

I have successfully listed many of the pop culture icons of western society. Should I go on further? I haven't even broken into the heart of the angsty comics and television series I have which are extremely fucking awesome yet... note also that the above-mentioned Crow also qualifies very much under this list of awesomeness from angst.


Or is it ultimately the amount of undue focus upon the main character? But that would more or less be the point, wouldn't it, of a main character... you could argue that there's an incredibly high amount of focus on what Superman's doing over what Lois Lane is doing, but the comic's actually called Superman (or Action Comics - Superman's one of a few superheroes who has no less than several books dedicated to him at once, along with the Green Lanterns, Batman and X-Men), and not Lois Lane. You could argue this point in fan fiction, but that's sort of what I've been leading up to, as the Mary Sue is a construct of fan fiction; its original form was the super-beautiful junior officer who was half-Vulcan like Spock, could out-doctor McCoy (whilst also being a 'physicist/bricklayer/etc.' which McCoy often claimed he wasn't), and could out-Kirk Kirk whilst winning his affections.

Ultimately the Mary Sue is far more a phenomenon of fan fiction than original fiction, and its definitions are flimsy at best. I could create a non-Mary Sue character using most of the traits on many Mary Sue litmus tests (because they don't work), but similarly I could create a Mary Sue which doesn't even register on them because the whole thing is about fucking context. Well, I probably could. I don't really see the point except poking certain types in the eye, so I wouldn't really try. I will be revisiting this later in more detail as part of more in-depth academic analysis.

2: Try not to write angst unless it's genuine...
This ties in somewhat with a friend of mine's hatred of emotionless mass-produced novels, but really ties in mostly with the point raised about angst... it's actually somewhat annoying in most of the works it appears in. Ostensibly. You see, I don't buy into the fact that angst is annoying, because it sells ridiculously well on certain markets and does in fact have its own virtues in that it's about the evoking of an emotion. And yet what we run into time and time again as part of every single fucking review I read is 'enough of the teenage angst' or 'oh look, more whining'; but this is because of something I've ultimately come to a conclusion about.

Angst doesn't usually work unless it's genuine, or the writer's really, really good, or both... there are many examples, but I'll try to limit myself to a few of them for the purposes of this. In Twilight, we have a seventeen year old girl worrying about the fact that she's getting older and her boyfriend doesn't age. She angsts about the fact that she's not a vampire. She angsts about the fact that he's too awesome for her. She angsts about the fact that he's not there. She angsts about the fact that she's ugly when every man she knows is attracted to her. None of this feels genuine. It's just generating false emotion to elicit false empathy from the audience.

In other terms, however, we have the Crow. It was written by a grieving man who'd lost his fiancée to a drunk driver who was attempting to work through his angst by writing a comic about it; it's actually based around an incident similar to the one which led to the author's grief. A young couple who are very much in love and in an extremely genuine and moving relationship are brutally murdered; the woman, Shelly, is specifically raped and killed, and the man, Eric, is shot and left paralysed so that all he can do is watch as the mutilation of his fiancée unfolds. This part is told in flashback. The major part of the story follows Eric, resurrected as an immortal being in order enact revenge upon the murderers whilst suffering the endless grief of being parted from his love... this is about as happy as it gets. The comic is dark, gothic, brilliant, and awesome... it's also very angsty, and the reason it works is that you really feel the emotions involved.

You get a genuine sense of the pain of unfair loss, and the sort of emotional turmoil that the author and character were going through. It's this sense of reality, and genuine emotion which drives the story forwards for the reader, and it's really very much why angst is popular; when it's done right, the audience also feels something for the character or characters. Incidentally, the fact that the character serves as an obvious author surrogate, thus a 'Mary Sue', and does not detract from the story whatsoever is a bit of food for thought.

That said, really good writing can produce the feeling of genuine angst because a really good writer can make himself or herself feel these emotions.

3: Avoid trying to make your story 'marketable'
This stems from what I've seen of the Superhero Nation website (which I've mentioned to some of you over messenger programmes) and this serves as a rebuttal; one of the major recurring things on that website is its creator does not actually offer all that much advice when it comes to telling a story. He offers much advice when it comes to selling a story, and the major problem with that is that you lose a lot of the real strength of storytelling that you might have been able to have when you try to sell it rather than tell it. You see, as much as you're playing to what's good and safe and marketable, you're losing out on a lot of the soul of the thing. This is exactly why there's very little strength in the Joel Schumacher Batman films versus the Tim Burton or Christopher Nolan films. No matter which of the latter two directors you think captured Batman better (I actually think Batman and Batman Returns were slightly stronger than Batman Begins and The Dark Knight because they captured the feel of the central character a bit better, even though the Joker of TDK was far superior, but it's really like comparing cool and awesome), many people can agree that Joel Schumacher's films just plain suck.

This is mostly because the Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan films attempted to explore the character, and his relationship with other characters, as opposed to selling something (y'know, endless variations on the Batmobile and Batsuit aside), because their primary goal was to tell a story. This proved to be insanely successful, at least in the case of the Nolan films. The Joel Schumacher films, on the other hand, were far less about storytelling and character and far more about drawing in an audience with shallow little attraction notes; 'oh look, this film has Val Kilmer as a starring role, and the sequel has George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzeneggar making ice-related puns!' Hell, they cast someone who everyone originally mocked for the choice of the Joker in The Dark Knight... but rather than being cast for marketability 'because he'd been in a few famous films', the late, great Heath Ledger was cast for performance because he was easily the best person to play the Joker within the framework of the Nolanverse.

This sort of mindset can not only very easily be applied to writing books, but it's arguably more essential. I've never seen a successful or memorable book which was written purely for marketability; even Twilight and Eragon, crappy as they were, are built around the framework of telling the story that the author wanted to tell, as opposed to selling anything. That Twilight sold well was a secondary aspect, as it wasn't created with marketing in mind, it was created as author wish-fulfilment... and though it was crap, I have far more respect for it than the Joel Schumacher Batman films or anything Superhero Nation puts out because, let's face it, there is far more creative integrity in a crappy vampire romance novel written from the heart of an evidently-dissatisfied middle aged Mormon housewife than there is in manufactured stories built to appeal to a lowest common denominator.

Oh, and the one with most creative integrity of the two? It was actually able to produce something more successful financially. Odd, that.


I've got another couple of tips being revised and expanded, along with these three.
Last edited by Dakarne on Tue Jul 27, 2010 10:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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'For the moment, mortal, they find the thought of killing me more desirable than that of killing you.'
'And what are their chances?'
'The answer to that is evident in how long they've been hesitating, wouldn't you think, mortal?'

-Anomander Rake and Ganoes Paran in Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Heretic »

Dude you know, maybe you too should write a writing/fiction Tips&Guide book.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Dakarne »

4: TV Tropes Is Not A Place To Get Writing Advice From
This one should speak for itself by now, but it's a website that has a lot of undue support behind it, and it's becoming prominent to the point that people are now using it to plan their stories. There are also stories which now reference the so-called 'tropes' by name in a way of attempting to make its characters seem 'genre savvy'. There are a couple of major problems with using it for the purpose of writing advice, and these are actually pretty obvious given a bit of thought put into it, but a lot of people aren't putting that thought into it.

The first major problem with TV Tropes is that it is very much a wiki, and as such its users are almost entirely as uneducated about what they're discussing as your average Fundamentalist Christian is with scientific principles. The whole thing is an amateur creation, and though it does have a few fun aspects to it and can serve as a useful starting point to learn about a specific television programme, film or comic that you're thinking of looking into, it also has the distinctive problem of being entirely lacking in anything even remotely resembling proper sense half of the bloody time. This causes it to become little more than hundreds of incoherent wiki-pages which contradict each-other half of the time. I bloody well know the word subversion does not mean what they think it means, and the word deconstruction is almost never used in that context when it comes to valid literary studies.

The second major problem with TV Tropes is that not only does it get things wrong, it gets the one very important feature wrong. TV Tropes is making the huge mistake of claiming that fiction is built by chaining a series of tropes together, as per the idea of the 'Tropes Are Tools' article, but there's a distinctive problem with that; it's fucking wrong. A few common elements are perhaps used in certain works, such as Shakespeare's seemingly-deliberate use of the genre conventions of comedy to open Romeo & Juliet before continuing on to the tragic latter half of the play. But these such deliberate uses are few and far between, often a minor aspect of an overall work. These genre conventions are created by time and evolution of a series of related or similar works, not the other way around of the original writers deliberately using 'tropes' to 'build up' the genre itself. When you attempt to write something from this method, you wind up making it into something so forced and formulaic that it might as well just be a deliberately copied and pasted work. It's like saying that eggs lay chickens or that you're drawing a scabbard from your sword.

To put a long story short... do not listen to TV Tropes because it's not entirely sure what it's talking about, it gets a fundamental fact of development wrong and let's face it; the word 'trope' is about as aesthetically pleasing as someone burping after a month of eating nothing but rotting fish and eggs. Provided they hadn't died yet.
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'For the moment, mortal, they find the thought of killing me more desirable than that of killing you.'
'And what are their chances?'
'The answer to that is evident in how long they've been hesitating, wouldn't you think, mortal?'

-Anomander Rake and Ganoes Paran in Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Somes J »

I was thinking about necroing this thread to post some of my own thoughts when I came across a discussion about cliches while browsing Comix. Dakarne, do you mind if I post some thoughts on the matter?

Cliches:

In the discussion I mentioned Vagrant Orpheus said that the whole idea of subverting and averting cliches had become itself cliche, to the point that he liked seeing them played straight. The obvious counterpoint came up: is it that subverting and averting cliches has itself become cliche, or is it that one set of cliches has simply replaced another, and already begun to itself become tired? This got me thinking. I think I'll break my thoughts down into two sections:

I: Why cliches are bad
IA: Because they make your job harder
IB: Because they're lazy
II: Why cliches are bad should be a guideline, not a rule


I: Why cliches are bad:

IA: Because they make your job harder:

Cliches have already been used a bunch of times, so it's inherently harder to make your story seem original and interesting if you use them. They already have been thoroughly explored by other authors, so you're going to have a harder time making your work not seem like just a retread of something that has already been done, probably a bunch of times before. By breaking from cliche you make your work easier because simply by doing so you are moving onto ground that has not been so thoroughly explored. It will be easier to make your work seem original and stand out from the crowd simply because you are on comparitively virgin territory. To illustrate, let's say you're writing a fantasy universe and you have two possible portrayals of vampires in mind:

A) They would be immortal undead beings that would sleep in coffins and basically have your standard list of generic vampire traits and weaknesses.
B) They would be nomadic raiders and highwaymen that attack caravans and settlements to kill people and drink their blood. They would not have any supernatural elements except for the need for blood. Their culture would be loosely based on nomadic groups like Mongols, modified to accomodate the developments that would logically arise out of their unique predatory lifestyle.

Neither portrayal is inherently better or worse than the other (more on that in Section II), but Concept B is inherently easier to make original and interesting. The reader is likely to be more interested because he's probably much more rarely or never seen vampires done this way before and is curious about how you've developed them, and it's easier for you to present surprising and novel ideas about them because just by taking the vampire concept in this direction you're treading on relatively virgin territory. Notice that the description for B is much longer than the description for A. I had to do that because for A when I say "generic vampire traits and weaknesses" you can probably form a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about just from that, whereas a novel concept like B leaves much more unanswered questions (what abilities would they have? what would their lifestyle be like? would they be supernatural and if so to what extent? what would their strengths and weaknesses be? etc.).


IB: Because they're lazy:

Cliches are easy and safe because they have already been done lots of times before. All you have to do to write a cliche passably (note I did not say well, just passably) is look at what other writers have already done, change things around a little, mix and match a bit, and present the resulting warmed over stew. What's more, you know that what you're presenting your audience with probably won't challenge their expectations or move them out of their comfort zone very much, because they've already seen it lots of times before (if they hadn't it wouldn't be a cliche). You'll probably be presenting most of your audience with the intellectual equivalent of comfort food.

Because cliches are easy to write, they get written a lot. After all, this is basically the definition of a cliche: something that's been done so often it's become tiresome. This isn't necessarily even conscious on the parts of the authors, I think. It's just that most authors start out as readers, they naturally tend to emulate what they see, and people will naturally tend to take the path of least resistance, which in the case of fiction is to do what everyone else is doing.

The result is that if you write cliches your work risks looking uninspired, lazy, and generic. If your work looks generic, then it becomes harder to come up with a reason that people should read your stuff when they could get the same thing from a lot of other authors, many of whom will likely have a lot more name recognition going for them and at least a few of whom will probably be better at this than you, just because they have more experience if nothing else.


II: Why cliches are bad should be a guideline, not a rule:

Having said all that, just because an idea has been done a lot of times before does not make it inherently bad, or mean that it can't have a place in good literature or worldbuilding. And while originality is good, pretty much all fiction is derivative to some degree or another, so there shouldn't be anything shameful about taking ideas from other authors as long as you can inject enough originality into it that it becomes inspiration rather than theft.

To go back to my vampire example, if the "cliche" concept works better for you, there's nothing inherently wrong with going with concept A for your vampires. It makes it harder to be really original, so as a general guideline I would advise going with Concept B if it was a binary choice and both could work, but there's no rule saying generic Dracula-esque vampires = literary fail.

I'm going to end by tying this in to Dakarne's point about Mary Sues a bit. I think maybe the thing that bothers both Dakarne and Vagrant Orpheus is when people apply an intellectually lazy approach of thinking you can make up simple hard and fast rules about what to avoid to make your writing not be cliche, or your character not be a Mary Sue. I'm not sure how often people actually suggest this, but my experience is intellectually lazy people tend to love simple hard and fast rules because they take so little intellectual effort to apply. Good writing is more complex than that. The right writer can take a concept that seems cliche and write a good story based on it, or can take a character that would set off every alarm bell on some simplistic Mary Sue test and make them sympathetic and interesting, and in some cases that may actually be a better approach for that book/movie/universe than the ideas that simple rule of thumb guidelines would have you go with.

All this is, of course, IMO and somewhat YMMV. :)
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Dakarne »

Okay... where to begin? Your point is sound in theory, but there are a few minor flaws. The first is your examples; there is an innate advantage to Option B over Option A in that whilst Option A does indeed describe what your vampires are like, Option B describes what your vampires are like and what they are doing at the current time - in fact, what they're doing at the current time forms a major centrepoint. Option B's major advantage would be unchanged if you replaced the line 'would not have any supernatural elements except for the need for blood' with 'basically have your standard list of generic vampire traits and weaknesses' because the rest of it is the part that's unique.

Twilight, for instance, features none of the traditional vampire traits outside of their being blood-drinking immortals. They don't burn up in the sun, they don't sleep in coffins, they don't have anything against crucifixes, they don't have anything against scattered rice, they're not particularly allergic to garlic and running water does little more than make them wet. However, it is riddled with the most prominent of recent vampire clichés, in that they're portrayed as the Byronic heroes who are the sorrowful, handsome romantic leads who occasionally sweep mortal women off their feet whilst acting all tortured and romantic. This cliché has been going since 1976, when Anne Rice published Interview With The Vampire.

It's a bit odd to point it out, but you basically fell into the Mary Sue Trap there. You used the bits and pieces to declare one of them the cliché, whilst not incorporating the all-important aspect which needs to be taken into account, and will in fact form the basis of my fifth tip (whenever I get around to properly writing it)... context. Your Option A lacked context. Your Option B had context. That is where Option B actually acquired its strength.

Mind, I don't think I'd have read a story where Option B was the case. The lack of supernatural factors outside of blood drinking just doesn't drink true for the word 'vampire' for me, owing in part to the fact that the idea of a vampire in its theme is that they are an immortal blood-drinker with abilities that are in fact supernatural in nature. You can deviate from one or more of these, probably by incorporating other aspects into them such as longevity to replace immortality, soul-devouring to replace blood-drinking, and rather than having the ability to turn into a bat and superhuman strength, they were able to 'ghost out' and levitate themselves to perhaps differentiate the sort of supernatural abilities they have. Because this is the double-edged sword of the cliché which you really need to consider...

Yes, it's sometimes a cliché for certain things to be in a certain way, but people like things in that certain way. They start to feel that this way is how things are defined in the Human Lexicon - the word vampire means an immortal blood-drinker with supernatural powers to many people. To use more of a fantasy example; the word elf for most fantasy fans refers to the slim, pointy-eared archers who live in trees and tend to bear more than a passing resemblance to Orlando Bloom. This is what they are. You can deviate from these models, but deviating too far has the negative side-effect of perhaps running into the question of whether something so far removed from the original thing it's based off of ought to count as a part of that thing to begin with.

There are people who deny that Twilight vampires are in fact actual vampires, due to their lack of the typical traits, but they're closer than your Option B. It's something to think about, at any rate.
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'For the moment, mortal, they find the thought of killing me more desirable than that of killing you.'
'And what are their chances?'
'The answer to that is evident in how long they've been hesitating, wouldn't you think, mortal?'

-Anomander Rake and Ganoes Paran in Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Somes J »

Dakarne wrote:It's a bit odd to point it out, but you basically fell into the Mary Sue Trap there. You used the bits and pieces to declare one of them the cliché, whilst not incorporating the all-important aspect which needs to be taken into account, and will in fact form the basis of my fifth tip (whenever I get around to properly writing it)... context. Your Option A lacked context. Your Option B had context. That is where Option B actually acquired its strength.
I suppose that's a fair point. On reflection, if I were to rewrite it I'd put it more like this:

A) They would be immortal undead beings that sleep in coffins, are predatory but deceptively charming and elegant creatures (that being part of their hunting/concealment strategy), hide out within human society masquerading as humans, and have the standard list of vampire traits and weaknesses.

So we're basically talking about the standard Dracula type. That was sort of what I was going for, but I suppose I didn't express it very well.
Mind, I don't think I'd have read a story where Option B was the case. The lack of supernatural factors outside of blood drinking just doesn't drink true for the word 'vampire' for me, owing in part to the fact that the idea of a vampire in its theme is that they are an immortal blood-drinker with abilities that are in fact supernatural in nature.
In my mind I was sort of thinking of them having some other "standard" vampire features like nocturnity, but these would have a hard science rather than supernatural basis, and it would be a technologically primitive setting so it would be a difference that would probably only be significant in background materials, but that's somewhat beside the point. To my mind the need for blood and predatory lifestyle is enough to qualify them as vampires. I think it's one of those YMMV things; I don't think it's really possible or worthwhile to try to come up with some "objective" standard of what exactly is and is not a vampire, nor do I think such a standard is desirable. It strikes me as something that would stifle creativity; if it makes sense in this hypothetical setting that people would think of these creatures as something like "vampires" I don't see why I should be forbidden to use that term just because these guys don't fit some out of universe pop culture litmus test. Honestly assuming this is in the context of a decent book I doubt "ZOMG these aren't real vampires how dare him use that term nerdraeg!" would be a serious problem.

Mind you, I think you may have an idea that I'd be marketing this primarily as vampire fiction, whereas I was thinking more of it being fantasy with vampires just being one setting element. Then again, even if I were to a write a book about, oh, vampire Genghis Khan forming a massive alliance of vampire tribes and trying to take over Not!China and turn it into a giant blood farm I think the novelty would probably attract more people than the "they aren't undead or immortal laem" would turn people off. I may simply be projecting my own tastes, but then I'm personally fairly comfortable with my work not necessarily appealing to everyone (what does?) and I think trying to please everyone would probably be more likely to hurt the quality of an author's work than help it.
You can deviate from one or more of these, probably by incorporating other aspects into them such as longevity to replace immortality, soul-devouring to replace blood-drinking, and rather than having the ability to turn into a bat and superhuman strength, they were able to 'ghost out' and levitate themselves to perhaps differentiate the sort of supernatural abilities they have. Because this is the double-edged sword of the cliché which you really need to consider...

Yes, it's sometimes a cliché for certain things to be in a certain way, but people like things in that certain way. They start to feel that this way is how things are defined in the Human Lexicon - the word vampire means an immortal blood-drinker with supernatural powers to many people. ... This is what they are. You can deviate from these models, but deviating too far has the negative side-effect of perhaps running into the question of whether something so far removed from the original thing it's based off of ought to count as a part of that thing to begin with.
This is true, and in some contexts (notably some of the SDN crowd's attempts to "improve" Star Trek) I myself have run into things where I look at it and think "basically the only thing this thing has in common with what it's supposed to be is the name, why not just make it your own thing?" At worst, this can look like a cheap marketing ploy where you've got your own thing but want to be able to ride the name recognition of some more established thing. It is a consideration, but I don't think it necessarily means that taking a lot of liberties with common tropes is necessarily a bad thing, and I think the line of where it becomes a problem is inherently subjective, so it's not something I'd lose that much sleep over.

I think all this comes back to your point that context is really important. :)
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Heretic »

Albeit I believe it's true that TvTropes isn't the best place, it's so damn addicting to go to, and if you don't fully absorb everything it says. As Dakarne said, you can find alot of cool stuff there, and I learned many new concepts that help my writing.

So yeah, don't do TvTropes, kids: it'll waste your life *Snorts Tropes*
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Dakarne »

In my mind I was sort of thinking of them having some other "standard" vampire features like nocturnity, but these would have a hard science rather than supernatural basis, and it would be a technologically primitive setting so it would be a difference that would probably only be significant in background materials, but that's somewhat beside the point.
Anything where vampires and hard science are used in the same sentence makes me want to vomit.
To my mind the need for blood and predatory lifestyle is enough to qualify them as vampires. I think it's one of those YMMV things; I don't think it's really possible or worthwhile to try to come up with some "objective" standard of what exactly is and is not a vampire, nor do I think such a standard is desirable. It strikes me as something that would stifle creativity; if it makes sense in this hypothetical setting that people would think of these creatures as something like "vampires" I don't see why I should be forbidden to use that term just because these guys don't fit some out of universe pop culture litmus test. Honestly assuming this is in the context of a decent book I doubt "ZOMG these aren't real vampires how dare him use that term nerdraeg!" would be a serious problem.
I will point out that the major reason for the supernatural abilities is to make them threatening and intimidating. Even with vampires having a hard-science background, they would benefit from greater-than-human physical abilities by sheer logic of evolution; a lion has sharper teeth than a gazelle, because the lion has evolved to kill things. A vampire is evolved to kill things, therefore it needs its own equivalent of sharp teeth, claws and improved musculature allowing it to actually act like a predator. Even if this is not necessary in the scientific terms, it's necessary in storytelling terms - it makes them more of a threat. Vampires are meant to be horrific, terrifying beings (even if they haven't been scary since Tarantino's From Dusk Till Dawn), and in order to fulfil that role adequately, they would need to have some sort of way of making them more threatening than the mere statement of 'I want your blood'.

What's scarier; a highwayman who wants your blood, or a highwayman who wants your blood, will never tire, will never age, and will never stop? In fact, in order to kill the latter highwayman, you have to cremate his remains because he'll heal from any other wound and not stop until this occurs; this is where the immortality comes into it. There is a universal 'litmus test' that one ought to bear into consideration; and that's thematic appropriateness being far more important than avoiding clichés. I suppose that shall follow as Tip #6.

This is really the only bone I have to pick, though.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Somes J »

Dakarne wrote:Anything where vampires and hard science are used in the same sentence makes me want to vomit.
Not a fan of Blindsight vampires I take it?
I will point out that the major reason for the supernatural abilities is to make them threatening and intimidating. Even with vampires having a hard-science background, they would benefit from greater-than-human physical abilities by sheer logic of evolution; a lion has sharper teeth than a gazelle, because the lion has evolved to kill things. A vampire is evolved to kill things, therefore it needs its own equivalent of sharp teeth, claws and improved musculature allowing it to actually act like a predator. Even if this is not necessary in the scientific terms, it's necessary in storytelling terms - it makes them more of a threat.
Well, yeah that would come under the heading of the "standard" traits that are based on science rather than the supernatural. They'd probably have faster reflexes, superior senses, and superior strength to humans, probably at the cost of somewhat reduced endurance and need for a more meat-rich high calorie diet of "conventional" food along with the blood. PS, one of my pet peeves with the way "superstrength" and the like is portrayed in a lot of fiction is it never seems to come with any trade-offs. In real world biology and engineering maxing out one thing tends to have costs elsewhere; a roughly human-shaped creature with superstrength would probably need more food to sustain that extra muscle, be less resistant to starvation as it has less body fat, and/or have lower endurance due to a higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle to slow-twitch muscle. A creature with really fast regeneration would probably be vulnerable to some really nasty cancers. But a lot of authors just seem to go superhuman = awesome and not bother to think of what drawbacks might come with some of these superhuman abilities. You'd think it'd be fairly obvious that if superstrength had no significant costs we'd probably have it as it'd have been massively useful in our ancestral environment, but I guess not. Of course when talking about supernatural critters this isn't so much of an issue as these things can just be handwaved with magic, but personally that's a good part of the reason I prefer to stay away from using supernatural and soft SF elements as much as possible and really prefer writing pure hard SF: having the option of filling the holes and smoothing over the rough edges with bullshit takes a lot of the fun challenge out of the game to me. I think a superhuman with serious disadvantages to come with his superhuman abilities is more interesting than one that's just straightforwardly more awesome than a human.

That said, this is somewhat beside the point. I think you could do a strictly human + blood drinking vampire and have a decent story. For instance, I remember somebody on SDN wrote a pretty neat short story about a world in which vampires were known to the public and basically thought of in a similar way to pedophiles (they didn't need blood to survive, but they were normal people with a disease that made them really enjoy drinking it and killing people). His vampires still had some more "fantasy" elements, immortality for instance, but a hard SF take on vampirism where it's a blood disease that gives you a craving for drinking people's blood and increases your sadistic tendencies as a way to insure its own propagation, and this is known to the general public, and maybe the story is about a vampire struggling with his condition or a social worker who works with vampires, could be pretty cool. It's all about context and execution.
Vampires are meant to be horrific, terrifying beings (even if they haven't been scary since Tarantino's From Dusk Till Dawn), and in order to fulfil that role adequately, they would need to have some sort of way of making them more threatening than the mere statement of 'I want your blood'.

What's scarier; a highwayman who wants your blood, or a highwayman who wants your blood, will never tire, will never age, and will never stop? In fact, in order to kill the latter highwayman, you have to cremate his remains because he'll heal from any other wound and not stop until this occurs; this is where the immortality comes into it.
I think the latter idea would probably work better if you want vampires to be relatively rare and somewhat mysterious. You'd have stories about some monstrous bandit (or maybe group of them) who's reputed to have been raiding along this road for hundreds of years, killing people and draining their blood. On the other hand I was thinking of them as more of a relatively common race, in which case you get the issue of if they are so awesome why are they marginalized bandits instead of ruling the humans? Besides, and honestly more importantly, I find unambiguously superhuman fantasy races somewhat tiresome personally.
There is a universal 'litmus test' that one ought to bear into consideration; and that's thematic appropriateness being far more important than avoiding clichés.
Agreed. Context is very important.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

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Heretic wrote:Albeit I believe it's true that TvTropes isn't the best place, it's so damn addicting to go to, and if you don't fully absorb everything it says. As Dakarne said, you can find alot of cool stuff there, and I learned many new concepts that help my writing.

So yeah, don't do TvTropes, kids: it'll waste your life *Snorts Tropes*
It's an entertaining distraction, but it's just that, entertainment. It shouldn't be taken seriously at all. You write a goddamn story because you're writing a goddamn story, because you want to write about some goddamn thing or some goddamn person doing some other goddamn things to some goddamn one or some goddamn one else. That's all there is to it.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Dakarne »

Somes J wrote:Not a fan of Blindsight vampires I take it?
Not particularly. You may notice from my history that I don't actually go much for science fiction at all, and have consistently been a fan of fantasy fiction with myth, magic and the supernatural as a matter of course.
Besides, and honestly more importantly, I find unambiguously superhuman fantasy races somewhat tiresome personally.
Most of your earlier point seems to stem from this. You seem to think that something being unambiguously superhuman presents a drawback. It merely presents a trait; it is neither good, nor bad, but merely one piece of an overall puzzle. The Hulk is unambiguously superhuman, and yet presents the very compelling story of a person wrestling with his own humanity, struggling every day to keep from turning into a monster which destroys everything in its path. Count Dracula is unambiguously superhuman with his magic, strength, and ability to change shape - even though he does have distinctive weaknesses - but all that does is make him more threatening to the protagonists, thus playing much better into his theme as a villain.

I personally find the whole 'power = bad' thing unbearably tiresome. Because having a powerful character or being within a story immediately nullifies any storytelling potential, am I right? I mean, it's not as if Alan Moore's Watchmen featured one of the most powerful characters to have ever been portrayed in fiction... and yet was easily one of the greatest comic books ever written. :roll: Which will probably make the basis of Tip #6; Good Storytelling Is More Important Than Anything Else.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Siege »

Not sure Dr. Manhattan is a good example of your point considering I found him a damned near insufferable, unbearable twat for most of the book, to the point where I was seriously considering putting the book down altogether during several parts that featured him, but particularly during the eye-roll-worthy Mars scenes.

Besides, I think Somes' point had more to do with the way unambiguously superhuman fantasy races are typically written, i.e. they are quite frequently stuffy, egotistical pricks with egos the size of small moons. They can be done right (the Elves from Lord of the Rings come to mind as a good example), but far more often are not, which then typically results in spectacularly irritating prose.

What's worse, we rarely get to see just what makes these self-styled superior races so superior. I mean it'd be nice if your superior people at least demonstrated a bit of their superiority in a skill field other than 'gloating' or 'staring down haughtily'. At least with the aforementioned Elves you got a pretty good handle on why they felt Man was a bunch of easily corruptible weaksauce pansies. Frequently, we don't even get that benefit. The Vorlons from Babylon 5 come to mind as an example. I'm sorry, what did they do again that made them worthy of reverential treatment? They're useless cryptic pricks! Pricks with hugely powerful warships to be sure, so I get why none of the Young Races wanted to get on their bad side, but please don't speak about them in hushed tones when they're not around; they haven't done anything to deserve it.

The same thing goes for greatly superhuman characters in a mostly baseline setting by the way: sure, a massively supernatural Dracula can work perfectly well in a piece of fiction -- if you're Bram Stoker. Chances are though that you're not, and most attempts at such characters are simply made of fail and suck. Take Superman, or the Hulk, or other such damn near unstoppable characters: most of the stories surrounding them are just utterly awful rubbish. In fact I'm tempted to claim that most stories featuring such characters are crap, but then I haven't actually read enough superhero comics to make that judgement. I definitely suspect I'd be right though.

It's the same then as with superhuman races. Can you write good stories about superhuman characters? Sure you can. But most people can't or don't, which is my point. If you're going to do this, you better know damned well what you're doing, because if you don't you're probably heading for wank territory. And you can't stop there, because it's wank territory.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Dakarne »

I suppose 'mileage may vary' is a fair statement here. Though really? I've seen absolutely nothing intrinsic to the idea of a 'powerful' being an aspect which can detract from fiction. In fact, I've seen enough stories wherein lowering the level of power would have ruined the entire strength of the work. I suppose I've had a few lucky choices when choosing books to read or something.

I will also oppose your statements regarding Superman and the Hulk. Having read quite a bit of fiction both good and bad featuring them, I can say that it was completely irrespective of power - Silver-Age Superman (the version which could move planets) had some of the best stories of the lot, particularly in the revival All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison, and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow by Alan Moore. In contrast, many attempts to lower the strength of Superman in fiction actually resulted in such things as the 1990s portrayal, which was basically lacking in any narrative strength whatsoever, and the comic only got good again when Superman became more powerful... but only because the writing had, at the same time, also improved as seen in All-Star Superman and some of the more recent arcs. The Hulk's strength as a character lies in his being a modern-day representation of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde dynamic, and his levels of superhuman strength are irrelevant to this.

And in the area of other characters the Hulk's comic was somewhat usurped by the introduction of a new protagonist, Hercules, an incredibly powerful character who was pretty much given as the Greek demigod of the same name having survived to modern day Earth and was operating in the modern day as a superhero. And that series was pretty awesome, the tongue-in-cheek adventures of a Hercules who ought to be played by Brian Blessed, and who had such feats as towing Manhattan Island under his belt. Astro City opens up with the Samaritan, someone who casually arrives in time to stop a tidal wave on the opposite side of the world as his first major superheroic action, and yet this is one of the stronger character explorations I've seen in a comic, focusing on a hero who spends his life doing nothing but counting the seconds spent flying between saving various people from various accidents due to his overwhelming sense of responsibility, and how much it actually taxes him. Other stories explore similarly-powerful, more-powerful and less-powerful characters as it goes along... and yet what makes it good is that its character-exploration is well-handled, good at getting into the minds of the various figures presented.

The Culture novels, Doctor Who, Malazan Book of the Fallen, the Dresden Files, Prince of Nothing, Sandman, the Xeelee Sequence, Warhammer 40,000... all of these are good, and all of these feature vastly powerful figures being in focus.

In other areas, the worst superhero stories have surrounded characters such as Spider-Man, with One More Day reverting just about all character development that had taken place since the 1970s. Spidey isn't even remotely a powerful superhero, and yet this is one of the utter worst comics to have been written in the past ten years. The relatively-mundane Iron Man was most responsible for the travesty that was Civil War, but the other major event comic at that time was Annihilation, which featured vast events on a cosmic scale, with characters such as the Super-Skrull, Silver Surfer, Nova, Quasar and other such being in direct focus... and that was an awesome comic handled at least partly by Dan Abnett of Warhammer 40,000 fame.

So do I think that powerful characters/races ruin stories? Do I fuck. Bad writing ruins stories. Good writing makes stories work. This is true whether your protagonists are ants or gods, and power has nothing to do with it.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Somes J »

Dakarne, it took me a while to think of a way to properly put my objection to immortal bandit vampires into words.

One of the concepts I wanted to subvert with this idea is that it's awesome to be a vampire, which is present to some extent in both the romantic and predatory vampire archetypes. These guys don't have it awesome. In fact they have it worse than humans in many ways. They're poor. They live on the margins of society. Their need to consume human blood sharply limits their population, so they would have a hard time ever really amounting to anything because they lack the numbers to be any serious force. They're hunted like animals by other, more advanced and powerful races. They're pariahs. The future probably does not lie with them.

Making them immortal would totally clash with that. It would make it awesome to be a vampire. In a very important way they would have it much better than humans. Which, like I said, would just be the complete opposite of what I'd be trying to convey.

In fact, thinking of it this way helps me put my other statement about how I'm tired of superhuman races into words better. I think with a lot of fictional races there's a certain amount of wish fulfillment that goes into them. And part of that wish fulfillment is the desire to be more physically awesome. To be strong, have keen senses, live long, have funky mind powers. And of course because it's about wish fulfillment the drawbacks that would logically come with this, like superstrength meaning trade-offs in starvation resistance and endurance, are neither mentioned nor really wanted. I don't think it's even necessarily wish fulfillment per se but those things are associated with a character or a race being awesome and cool. Take a look and tell me that with nerds (or really people in general) there isn't this meme of powerful = cool. There's also that nonhuman races are often approached sort of as animal-people and, of course, people associate animals with natural abilities humans don't have. It's an easy way to make them obviously nonhuman. And of course it's an easy way to make them seem threatening if they're antagonists.

Well whatever the combination of factors that go into it I don't like it and I'm sick of it. It's silly. Just by statistics humans should be average, and the fact that we don't have things like superstrength even though they'd have been massively useful during our evolution should tip you off that those things would probably come with significant disadvantages. There should logically be trade-offs to all these super-awesome abilities. The guys with superstrength should need a higher calorie diet than normal humans, be less resistant to starvation, have a harder time supporting a large population as a result, and have lower endurance. The guys who can regenerate near-fatal wounds in two days should have a much higher death rate from cancer. The guys who can fly should be small, weak, and fragile because they need to be light to get off the ground. That's more plausible and I think more interesting than just giving them these advantages with no disadvantages. And before you say it, no, I'm not saying it needs to be that way for them to be interesting, but giving them disadvantages as well as advantages gives the writer more to work with. You could, say, write a story about humans and some flying species needing to ally to storm some castle, and a major story element could be how the two races need each other because the flyers can get in over the walls but they couldn't effectively take it because they're all little weedy 90 pound dudes whose bodies are half wing and flying muscles by mass and the only way is for them to get a team in to temporarily seize one of the gates and open it so the humans can storm in and defeat the enemy with their superior strength. You couldn't do that if the flyers had all the same advantages as humans, only they can fly too.

Edit: for another example, let's take Spock. OK, he comes from a world that's sort of like a bigger Mars so he has greater resistance to extremes of temperature, can breathe thinner air, and has better hearing. He also has superstrength. Now let's say we look at the disadvantages that should logically bring. He needs more food and can't last as long without it. He has lower endurance since he has a higher ratio of fast twitch muscle to slow twitch muscle. He's more vulnerable to nitrogen narcosis and oxygen toxicity. Going with the big Mars theme, Vulcan has lower gravity; his skeleton is more fragile because it didn't need to be as tough as a human's so Vulcans invested some of that physiological energy in other stuff, like maybe their superstrength.

See any story possibilities here you didn't have with the original show, where we never saw any of these drawbacks?
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Mobius 1 »

The Culture novels, Doctor Who, Malazan Book of the Fallen, the Dresden Files, Prince of Nothing, Sandman, the Xeelee Sequence, Warhammer 40,000... all of these are good, and all of these feature vastly powerful figures being in focus.
I think you're confusing contextual scale. Most if not all of these franchises feature protagonists that, while powerful, are still very much in the rest of the world's power range - the enemies, mostly, is what I'm driving at. Take the Dresden Files. Sure, Harry is powerful and can flip a car onto your head, but with the power creep in the villains, he's been handed his ass more times than he's won in a straight fight//won through ally intervention (allies who usually never help him anyway)//won through technicalities to victory (re: Storm Front, Changes). To borrow your habit of massive lists as to the villains Harry is outclassed by: the Loup Garou, Mavra, Nicodemus (at least until he gets sucker-punched, and he's still not dead), Lord Raith, Cowl, Elder Gruff, the Skinwalker, and the Red King.

Moreover, 40K's triple-hearted Marines face down the grimdark hordes of Flood Zerg Xenomorphs Tyrannids and all the dozen other evil races out there.

Compare this to Vampire fiction, where the highest powers are the vampires (though the entire genre should probably just be taken out into the back and shot, but that's my intensely personal opinion). Superman and the Hulk are at their best when their either contemplating their existence (re: a good story once every decade) or beating up other giant monsters (re: Doomsday/Abomination). Superman movies often either have to focus on stuff like Zod or the Lois Lane angst because the average crook turning his minigun on Supes to no effect is boring as shit. You might say that's where people like Lex Luthor come in, but given his tendency to also need decade-spansed good stories or to fall into villanous breakdowns (Great job losing the Presidency, mang), he also falls victim to Sturgeon's law.

The Hulk is this, only doubled. His entire concept has been done to death several times over since the sixties, with the angst of Banner wondering about the beast inside him and running from the military - something best done by the TV series. But as of now, Hulk exists to punch people, fall victim to the Worf Effect, and occasionally eat them in Ultimate Verse. The Worf Effect (we are still allowed to use the names, right, or is that part of TVtropes banned over convenience?) is probably the largest detriment of the above, given that the Hulk's unstoppable mystique is kinda ripped up by him losing to literally everyone up to and including Batman.

We need to separate power from good writing, and hard. You can have both, but one is not dependent nor detrimental to the other. For the two to exist in concert, one needs the trusty LAW OF BRUCE - that is, your story is only impressive as your villain. But that's another discussion.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

Hey Somes, as a biology student I have to agree that it'd be nice to see a story exploring all these physiological limitations placed on X, Y and Z mythical creatures if they were real, and I'll definitely read and review the saga of Vampire Genghis Khan if you write it. However, I'd say that power usually does come with a tradeoff in fiction, even if it isn't strictly physiological, and you might be thinking in narrow terms with regard to that.

Take Dracula, for instance. Yes he is superhumanly powerful, but he has a few weaknesses to go with it which humans don't: Needs to sleep in a coffin, unable to cross running water, afraid of crosses and faith in general. Moreover, since it is written in a Christian context, he is permanently denied the chance to go to Heaven, which, if Heaven and Hell are real, is a pretty big drawback.

Likewise, Superman. Yes he has Super-everything, but that kind of power means he lives in a world made of rice paper, so he always has to be careful to use a bare minimum of his true potential. Even if he has the self control to do so all the time it still makes him very much an outsider, and means that the responsibility must fall on him to protect human society from the things it can't handle itself like giant planet eating mutant star goats or whatever. OK, what's the problem?, you ask, he's Superman, he can handle any number of mutant star goats and everyone loves him as a result, I'd like to get me some of his problems.
Well, yes, it sounds good, but keep in mind what happens if, one day, he's not up to it, or if he messes up just a bit and the star goat takes a bite out of, I don't know, China. Bam. That's three hundred million deaths you should have prevented.

I realise the problem with these drawbacks is that it's harder to convey them than the fact that someone has to drink their own weight in peasant blood every couple of days so they don't waste away, afterall this is the kind of drawbacks that the vampires in That Franchise have. And, yeah, this comes down once again to how good the writing is. If you can convey the fact that being a vampire means you feel like there's a starving, gnawing void within you that seeks to eviscerate you from the inside out and reduce you to nothingness, and the only way to stop it from chewing you up is to feed it someone else's blood, then it doesn't sound like fun. If you just say that without any kind of conviction or backing it up, then the vampire in question just looks whiny and ungrateful.
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What's worse, we rarely get to see just what makes these self-styled superior races so superior. I mean it'd be nice if your superior people at least demonstrated a bit of their superiority in a skill field other than 'gloating' or 'staring down haughtily'. At least with the aforementioned Elves you got a pretty good handle on why they felt Man was a bunch of easily corruptible weaksauce pansies.
This is incredibly annoying, and something which seems to go along with this, or which this frequently morphs into, is the "superior races who aren't actually superior but in fact a bunch of smug pricks who are probably inferior to you". For instance didn't the Vorlons finish their run by being self righteously instructed by some human or other "get the hell out of our galaxy!"?
Or take the Vulcans, who in the latter series of Star Trek and the recent movie, are nothing but a bunch of holier than thou arseholes. I mean they even had Vulcan school bullies, how is bullying logical? And that prick who gave Spock a backhanded compliment about overcoming his difficulties in having a human mother, how is that logical? Vulcan self control is learned, not genetic, so it can't be that, and his mother was married to a vulcan, lived on the planet Vulcan and was sufficiently integrated into vulcan society to be part of their council of elders, or whatever it was, so she's clearly vulcan enough that one shouldn't worry about her being a bad influence.

For some reason there's this idea that superior races would act towards humans like the most uptight and racist of colonial officers would act towards locals in India during the 1800's. That's not necessarily wrong, (though I don't think a superior race would have evolved beyond the need for manners) but some writers just seem to think that's what you need to show someone is superior, without showing why they feel entitled to this. If you don't show or even know the reason behind your creations sense of entitlement it's then a short and entirely logical step to realise they aren't superior at all, they're just smug arseholes who need some plucky, rough and ready humans to show them the error of their ways. If it was done with more nuance I wouldn't mind, if it was elaborated that their society has lost certain good aspects that we have but we suffer from some problems they don't, but it isn't. All their advantages are nullified by the fact that they've "forgotten the wonder of (X)/forgotten how to (Y)/grown indolent in their old age", and are never touched on again.

This is personally something I find very annoying because it always seems to just ignore the fact that there are problems in society by making the supposedly better society worse, which exonerates ours from all blame, obviously.

OK that was a bit of a rant, sorry.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Dakarne »

So... Mobius 1's response to my point is to... repeat my point. My point was that good writing made stories good, bad writing made stories bad, and power had nothing to do with it. Mobius 1 just rephrased it. That said, I have a few notes with your commentary on the villains, and how that isn't necessarily correct either, especially as a villain isn't always that important to a good story.

As for Somes J... you really need to find another niche than Speculative Fiction if such a thing as 'superhuman levels of strength' strikes you as too silly to work properly. The simple fact of the matter is that your way of looking at things isn't necessarily wrong, but it's actually far more narrow than you give it credit for; it's a perfectly valid storytelling approach, but at the same time, so is having a race of beings which can warp the entirety of reality with a snap of their fingers (a feat which somewhat outdoes superhuman strength). Hell, the latter provided us with Q, who was one of the best characters in Star Trek. I'm going to have to second everything Speaker-To-Trolls has said in this area as well, seeing as we have the same point here (though I did begin writing this prior to him posting that; being busy in the background sort of backfired on me).

And the simple fact of the matter is that fiction does not always obey the laws of science just because you want it to. In fact, it shouldn't have to, and more often than not it's not meant to either. Fiction is exactly that; stuff which is not real. Therefore it isn't necessarily meant to obey the rules of things which are real. It can still do that, but it's not necessary. Sometimes it's a detriment. I have yet to encounter a truly good hard science fiction story which was based entirely on the fact that it was using strict hard science, for instance, with the best stories being those that involve human drama. Take the sci-fi vampire drama... I Am Legend... the novel was based off of a more-scientific-than-usual spread of vampirism amongst the world and yet its major strength was in the plot, and the slow devolution into insanity suffered by the protagonist. This would have worked regardless of whether the vampires were scientific, magical, or otherwise.

The whole thing about superior(ity complex) races is something I wholeheartedly agree with. Of course, if handled correctly, races with the 'superior(ity complex)' style would actually present a good antagonist, or only-just-begrudging ally. The Vulcans in the latest Star Trek film actually handled this somewhat well; they weren't meant to actually be superior to humanity, they were just acting superior to humanity.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Siege »

Dakarne, I'm going to take your word for the stuff you wrote about Silver Age Superman, because like I said I haven't read much stuff featuring him and frankly I can't be arsed to look it up. Some points, however:
Dakarne wrote:The Culture novels, Doctor Who, Malazan Book of the Fallen, the Dresden Files, Prince of Nothing, Sandman, the Xeelee Sequence, Warhammer 40,000... all of these are good, and all of these feature vastly powerful figures being in focus.
The Culture, Dresden, and Warhammer books do not typically feature characters vastly more powerful that the setting that surrounds them (unless it's as obstacles to overcome, such as in the case of the Excession, Mavra or Pontius Glaw, all of which naturally aren't the protagonist). So none of these can be compared to Superman, who is massively more powerful that most of the characters surrounding him, barring the occasional Darkseid or whoever. In case of the Prince of Nothing series there is, of course, a massively superhuman character in the shape of Kellhus -- who if you ask me is immediately the most irritating character in the books. Certainly I was wishing Cnaiur would cleave the fucker in half for most of the trilogy. He was just irritatingly overskilled. Oh, not only does he have that 'probability trance' thing going for him, he's also a magician, and he also can master the Gnosis in like three days flat! For heaven's sake, the most interesting thing featuring him was when the Holy War said 'fuck this guy' and nailed him to a cross hoisted him up on the Circumfix. Which he dealt with in three days, of course. No, sorry Mr. Bakker, I didn't get the symbology, could you please make it a little more obvious for me?

I'm not sufficiently familiar with the other works, but I think my point has been made regardless: characters who are excessively superhuman even within the context of their setting are frequently boring and/or irritating.
So do I think that powerful characters/races ruin stories? Do I fuck. Bad writing ruins stories. Good writing makes stories work. This is true whether your protagonists are ants or gods, and power has nothing to do with it.
No-one is arguing that "powerful characters/races ruin stories". What I am arguing is that it's much harder to write a proper good story featuring such characters/races however, because it's difficult to pull them off in a way that seems convincing and at the same time won't irritate the reader. Hence why so many people are having issues with Vampire protagonists. They (and many other superhuman entities) just work far better as obstacles than as protagonists, because you and I both know what 'super character/race as protagonist' leads to in case of most amateur writers (which is, let's face it, what you're aiming these 'writing tips' at): utter wankery of the worst order.
Somes J wrote:For instance didn't the Vorlons finish their run by being self righteously instructed by some human or other "get the hell out of our galaxy!"?
Well, not exactly. Basically every single Young Race in the galaxy together with all the other remaining First Ones got together and gave the Vorlons and Shadows the finger, told them that "we ain't gonna work on Maggies farm no more", and nicely asked them to GTFO. Which they promptly did, followed by all the other First Ones who realized that the jig was up and it was time to go. Of course, the great alliance or whatever it was called was lead by John Sheridan, who was human, but it could just as easily have been G'Kar or Delenn or even Londo making that declaration. It was just that Sheridan out-awesomed the lot of them for a bit there.

This is after the Shadows dick over the known galaxy by instigating wars and the Vorlons blow up a whole bunch of planets of course, so it's not like the Young Races didn't have any reason to be annoyed with their antics.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Somes J »

Seige, you mistakenly attributed something Speaker To Trolls said to me. No big deal, just pointing it out.

Now to address the rest.

Dakarne, I think you seem to have a very distorted idea of what I was trying to say (which is probably my own fault because in discussions like this I have a weakness for going off on tangential ranting and kvetching). The original point I was making actually had very little to do with superpowered characters, and was really just me making an observation about how fantasy/alien races that are stronger, longer-lived, and otherwise physically superior to us with few compensating disadvantages don't appeal to me very much (unless there's a good thematic or in-universe reason that it makes sense for them to be that way, which in reflection is something I probably should have clarified), and then using that as an excuse for a rant about how it annoys me how often aliens and fantasy critters are depicted as physically superior to humans with no attention paid to the costs those advantages should logically have.

I certainly didn't mean to say or imply that powerful characters and races are bad or inherently something that should be avoided. I can see how you took that from what I was saying but it wasn't what I meant at all.

As for your point about science - I agree that scientific verisimilitude isn't necessary for good fiction, and I recognize that my own tastes largely represent a ghetto within a ghetto and are hardly representative. That said, at some level I can't help feeling vaguely irritated at the sheer casualness with which adherence to hard science is dismissed in a lot of speculative fiction circles. It's not so much that I think scientifically ludicrous fiction is bad as that I think the possibilities of hard science fiction are both great and severely underutilized. It has a lot to do with the fact that one of the big complaints about hard SF is it makes telling the kinds of stories speculative fiction authors want to tell hard, but I don't think that's really true. I think what's actually hard to do with hard SF is certain soft SF tropes that are not actually the only way to accomplish that particular storytelling objective but that authors tend to incorporate for a variety of reasons that basically boil down to humans naturally tending to follow the herd. The big ones I'm thinking of here are the Known Galaxy and the Galactic Empire with FTL. You don't actually need FTL to have settings that bear a passable resemblance to those concepts. For one thing it is possible to have an interstellar setting with STL, even one where your hero can have adventures on lots of different planets - the main thing you need to get rid of is the assumption that your characters will be limited to present human lifespans, which is IMO rather silly and depressing anyway. For two, most soft SF "star nations" and "galactic empires" could probably fit comfortably in a single solar system with habitats; I suspect a lot of people don't realize what a huge setting you could logically get just in the solar system just looking at the amount of space and resources available in it. You can have your massive empire with trillions of people with gangster worlds and cowboy worlds and whatnot, it just would be a solar system instead of a galaxy and they'd be O'Neil/Bernal Colonies instead of planets. There are other options too, like a dense star cluster, which IIRC seems to be the route Firefly went. Now it's perfectly legitimate to say none of those ideas would work for your setting, but I suspect in a lot of cases authors say that not because it's really true but because they don't want to take the effort to break from the standard tropes even a little bit. The thing about that is breaking from well-worn tropes can be a good idea for the reasons I outlined in my original post on cliches ... well, I could get into the ways I think hard SF can make your work more awesome by forcing you to stop using magic to ram square pegs into round holes, but this screed has gotten long and pompous enough, I better stop before I really get rolling. Especially as this is sort of how I got in trouble the first time.

I think I'll address some of what other people have said in a seperate post as this is long enough.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Somes J »

speaker-to-trolls wrote:However, I'd say that power usually does come with a tradeoff in fiction, even if it isn't strictly physiological, and you might be thinking in narrow terms with regard to that.
Oh yes, there are definitely a lot of ways to "balance" a character or a race other than just physical limitations. I never denied that. Honestly, I think the whole thing was taken more generally than it was intended, probably mostly by my own fault for not making it clear exactly what I was trying to say.
And, yeah, this comes down once again to how good the writing is.
I agree.
Siege wrote:No-one is arguing that "powerful characters/races ruin stories". What I am arguing is that it's much harder to write a proper good story featuring such characters/races however, because it's difficult to pull them off in a way that seems convincing and at the same time won't irritate the reader. Hence why so many people are having issues with Vampire protagonists. They (and many other superhuman entities) just work far better as obstacles than as protagonists, because you and I both know what 'super character/race as protagonist' leads to in case of most amateur writers (which is, let's face it, what you're aiming these 'writing tips' at): utter wankery of the worst order.
Good point. I didn't originally really intend to talk about superpowered characters at all, but I'll respond to this a bit. Superpowered characters aren't bad, but they do present issues that makes them harder to write, especially as protagonists (though disproportionately powerful villains have their own problems - Star Trek's Borg villain decaying from a terrifying alien civilization that was to the Federation as the Conquistadors were to the Incas to being shuffling space zombies comes to mind as a noteable object lesson in the hazards of writing a setting-breakingly powerful villain).

I ran into this in older versions of my own work when my hard SF uni still had a human society with superintelligent AI. I pretty quickly realized that once you have a friendly/subservient superintelligent AI hanging around keeping the human characters relevant and giving them agency would be a bit of a challenge. After all, the AI would logically be better at pretty much everything. If there was any danger or obstacle to deal with the AI would handle it, and the human characters would probably be completely noncontributing to the solution even if they were trying, and might actually if anything just get in the AI's way if they tried to help it, and anything the AI couldn't deal with they almost certainly would be completely hopeless against. And making the AI the protagonist would have been even harder, because, well, for one thing realistically writing from the perspective of a massively superintelligent entity might well take a transhuman author and I sure as heck don't trust myself to authentically imagine what it would be like inside the mind of such a thing, and for two I didn't want to anthropomorphisize the AI and its perspective would have been very alien even if you take the superintelligence factor out of the equation. I mean, the thing wouldn't even have any emotions or care about its own survival except as a subgoal of fulfilling its programming. How am I supposed to make Joe Popcorn sympathize and empathize with that for a whole novel?

I also started running into the same problem as I've heard Larry Niven did in the latter stages of Known Space, which is that the tech of the setting was so powerful that a lot of the obstacles and problems and mysteries I might throw at the characters should be trivial to solve for somebody with the capabilities they'd have access to.

In the end I decided I was much better off taking the usual route of looking for some way to cop out of the whole problem and stop the Singularity from happening, and I've found my setting works vastly better when superintelligence and Singularitan supertechnology is not available to the human characters.

Now the point of this is that I don't think stories with characters that have a superintelligent AI at their command would necessarily be bad, in fact I'd love to see a lot more of them. But it creates storytelling issues that an author wouldn't have to deal with if he was writing about human characters that had to rely on their own intelligence.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Dakarne »

The problem is, it isn't somehow 'better' to use hard science to replace magic. It's merely a genre choice, nothing more and nothing less. Using hard science couldn't, for instance, create a workable fantasy setting with wizards, dragons and other such. Using hard science would make the entire fantasy genre an utter impossibility; it's therefore unnecessary. Anything that deletes the possible existence of an entire genre is unnecessary. And to be honest, much of my response may actually come from the fact that I'm personally pretty bloody tired of always seeing so many people take the hard science approach to fiction and declaring it as being inherently superior; this is more of a general SDN-crowd thing, but it's so bloody irritating. Similarly, the hatred of powerful characters and settings without any real thought put into whether or not it could be good regardless by so many people is also extremely annoying.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Soban »

Replacing magic with extreme levels of technology (including having dragons, lol) is exactly what I'm doing with Peoples of Almure, in spite of your being less than enthusiastic for the idea. Sure, there's a whole lot of Rule of Cool and creative license involved, but I've actually put a lot of thought into how technology could be used to do the same stuff as magic.

And as for hard sci-fi being "inherently superior", I have to admit a certain satisfaction at knowing that something in a story is actually feasable, as opposed to pure "what if" material. Star Trek, for example, gave us barely scientific concepts that, if they even have a scientific plausability, would either be fringe fringe science or utterly impractical. As much as they claimed scientific accuracy, a lot of it was bullshit. Mass Effect gave us the titular mass manipulation that could actually be acheivable (maybe exaggerated with creative licence) using exotic matter. ME called it Element Zero, Second Star calls it Halevium. Love it or hate it, Mass Effect did a good job at creating a well-developed and interesting setting that was quite refreshingly hard for a game that was heavily inspired by space opera; the traditional haven of softer sci-fi.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Dakarne »

My rejection isn't of the hard science fiction as such, but the thought that just because it is hard science fiction, it's going to be 'better' than something which isn't. The simple fact of the matter is that you could be hard as diamond and having a shitty story and shitty characters... and at the same time you could be as fluid as water but have great characters and a great story. And even if both had equally-great characters and an equally-great story, it wouldn't be a note of superiority on the story using hard science; it'd be a note that it used a different method of reaching its goal, thereby exploring a slightly different set of themes which are neither inferior nor superior to works which didn't use those themes.

If Lord of the Rings had energy fields and sufficiently advanced alien biology as explanations for Gandalf, Sauron and the Ring of Power, the story would not be improved for it. It wouldn't be detracted from either. It'd just be a somewhat different exploration of the genre. Well, it might be detracted from as it's arbitrarily changing the thematics of an established story for no real reason, but that's something of a different matter entirely.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Somes J »

Dakarne wrote:The problem is, it isn't somehow 'better' to use hard science to replace magic. It's merely a genre choice, nothing more and nothing less.
It isn't inherently better, but I think it can encourage greater creativity simply by forcing you to break with certain traditional SF tropes, which largely consist of using magic to ram square pegs into round holes, which goes back to my original point about cliches.

I'll give you an example: the interstellar empire. Most pop SF seems to base this fairly straightforwardly on historical models: it's either Space America or maybe Space Victorian Britain or Space Rome or Space Middle Ages, with economics and systems of control cribbed straight from those periods, and maybe a little mixing and mashing being done. Of course this makes no sense realistically. The great distances between the stars render centralized control extremely difficult; a realistic interstellar government would have to be highly federalist. The tremendous energy required to get between the stars in remotely reasonable timescales and the enormous resources that should be available in a single solar system renders traditional economics with mining colonies and interstellar traders and taxation and an exploited periphery vs an industrial center and whatnot a laughable absurdity; each system should be economically self-sufficient.

Of course this means that you can't just rip off historical precedent, and so magic is brought in to ram those square pegs into those round holes. FTL is invoked to shrink the effective distances between the stars and remove the tremendous energy requirements of interstellar travel, McGuffinite is invoked to justify interstellar trade and traditional economic arrangements. So you get to have your David Weber rip-off setting with the politics and economics of the 19th or early 20th century shoehorned with sufficient magic into a context in which they make no sense, and now your challenge is to make me want to read it instead of all the other authors who are giving me the same basic thing.

On the other hand let's say instead you take the logical implications of an interstellar civilization and run with them. OK, it'll take years or decades for a simple hello to get from one part of the empire to another ... what sort of politics and government does that imply? What systems might evolve to deal with the challenge of maintaining cohesion over those kinds of distances, which is unprecedented in any historical political system? Trade will probably be strictly intra-system so the usual justifications of empire-building to acquire resources won't fly ... why do they do it? What's the capital's motivation for even trying maintain a unified state? Would a unified state even be possible, and if so how? Wars over resources don't fly any more so if you want a conflict, what's the motivation? Or would wars happen more within solar systems and rarely or never between them?

There are a lot of possible answers you can come up with to these questions, but whatever set you go with it's very likely that, without even really trying, you'll come up with a setting much more distinctive and unique than the 19th century in space one you had before. A more unusual setting flows naturally out of your premise, because you're facing up to problems that most SF simply handwaves away with magic, and those problems will demand solutions that most SF uses magic to dodge out of needing. And this goes back to my original point on cliches: your books are more likely to be interesting now just because your readers won't have seen the issue approached from this angle as much before. Innovation will be easier for you because just by accepting challenges that most SF ducks out of you've entered relatively unexplored territory.

Now, of course, you can write a 19th century in space setting and come up with something very interesting - but it's easier to be fresh and original if you start out with premises that most SF authors reject, like a c limited universe. And if you're an amateur writer, there's something to be said for taking the route where you don't even have the option to fall into making cliche stew because a lot of the cliches just don't make sense with your premise.

Of course, you don't need hard science to break away from overdone SF tropes - but hard science does have the advantage of giving you a ready-made broadly encompassing and consistent alternate set of premises you can run with, instead of you having to make up your own from scratch.
Soban wrote:And as for hard sci-fi being "inherently superior", I have to admit a certain satisfaction at knowing that something in a story is actually feasable, as opposed to pure "what if" material.
Same here. One of the big draws of hard SF for me is I love the idea of writing about stuff that might not be real, but could be.
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Re: Writing Tips of the Day

Post by Dakarne »

But at the end of the day, Somes J... you could have all of that, and if your characters and story aren't up to scratch, it will all have been for nothing. It's not just unnecessary, it's also not really the most important thing to focus on.
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