Categotry Archives: Realities of Fantasy

I have a serious problem with violence in fantasy fiction. Not with the violence itself, but how the violence is handled. A long while ago (I think it was in the discussion of fantasy races), I talked about the dangers of ‘video game logic’ bleeding into fantasy writing, and today I want to reiterate the shocking revelation I made before.

Books are not video games.

In a fantasy video game, players expect the journey from point A to point B in the plot to be filled with fighting, battles and general violence, because that is nine times out of ten the mechanics of the game – hack’n’slash, RPG, action/adventure, etc.. In fantasy novels, one of the earliest mistakes I think a writer can make is to do the very same: inserting an action scene before, during or after every major (and usually a fair few minor) plot points just for the sake of having an action scene.

I’m not entirely sure where this phenomenon comes from. I know I’ve always been wary of the term ‘swords and sorcery’ in describing fantasy works, because when one deconstructs the term one is left with the implication that the primary substance of the piece is numerous individuals sticking each other with sharpened bits of metal, or shouting eldritch phrases at one another. It suggests that when the story descends into violent confrontation between the various characters (and it usually does so with some regularity), there is nothing to be gained from it by the reader except a quick, visceral thrill. The story, the characters, the very narrative pause for a brief moment of indulgence, then things resume normally.

In such a case, the violence is quite literally word-wank.

Now, obviously I’m not saying fantasy novels (or sci-fi novels, or any novels for that matter) shouldn’t have violent moments. Of course they should have action scenes – one of the beauties of fantasy writing is the immense creative freedom it gives the author to imagine and realise never-before-read scenes, and that lends itself beautifully to creating exciting and innovative action scenes. But such scenes cannot simply exist for their own sake; they should not be inserted purely to excite the reader and for no other purpose. That is practically the textbook definition of pornography, absent only the genitalia.

Think of your story as a religion, and every scene as an acolyte. Each acolyte has its day-to-day events: a life it leads and ambitions it seeks to achieve. Thus each scene has its own events and desire effects upon the reader. But, as an acolyte to the great religion of the story, all the scene’s day-to-day events serve a higher purpose. Everything that happens in the scene advances the story somehow, whether through plot development, character insight/growth, thematic analysis, etc.. If the scene seeks to shock, it does so in pursuance of the story, not simply to make the reader leap from his chair and exclaim ‘holy shit!’. Whatever a scene does, it does so because it furthers the story you are trying to tell; that’s why you as an author choose to pick that scene from the character’s life and lay it out for the reader in glorious detail. It’s why writer’s rarely dissect a character’s breakfast every morning, unless it serves some purpose to the story.

Every scene has to have a point, a purpose greater than itself. Action scenes are no different. Even in pulp stories, which relish in visceral thrills, the action still serves a greater purpose than just existing to thrill the audience. At the very least, it advances the story, but often does more into the bargain: the chase scene emphasises the power and determination of the pursuing force, the final confrontation between protagonist and antagonist acts as a venting for all the conflict built up between the pair throughout the story. This higher purpose gives the action scene meaning, elevating it above the stereotypical ‘and then the hero had to fight his way through another hallway of minions’ action scene – because there’s nothing to be gained from that scene, it serves no purpose beyond existing.

The best recent example I can think of comes from the story-writing in Spartacus: Blood and Sand. As one might imagine from a T.V. series centred around gladiatorial combat, it is not a story short on action scenes and copious violence – I don’t think an episode went by which didn’t have at least two of the main cast throwing down in the coliseum and doing some poor bastard in with a sharpened bit of metal. But each time the fighting started, it was serving a point: a character might develop during the fight, cause or solve some complication in the plot, or at the very least the outcome of the battle would have some lasting repercussion to the story.

This final point is, I think, the most general and important. Action scenes are not asides to the story: parallel dimensions the characters are sucked into to do battle before returning to the realm of plot. An action scene is as much a link in the chain as a scene of character development, plot revelation, so on and so forth. It is caused by the plot that precedes it, and it has effects upon the plot that follows. Too many fantasy writers seem to operate on the parallel dimension understanding of action scenes: the characters fight, then go on with their business. There is no, for want of a better word, feedback following the violence. And this is video game logic at its zenith: I remember playing Dragon Age: Origins and slaughtering my way through demonspawn, then coming out the other side of the battle into a story-based cut-scene where my character interacted cool as you please, but was drenched from eyebrows to kneecaps in gore. To me, that’s the perfect summation of the problem with violence in storytelling. It doesn’t serve a point because it’s never reacted to.

The reaction doesn’t have to be big. Not every character is going to be thrown into some deep, spiritual crisis about the supposed righteousness of his actions after every confrontation. Many will, quite rightly given the circumstances, shrug their shoulders and tell themselves that their opponents had it coming, or it was a them/me situation. But even in that situation, it’s still a reaction, it still means that the action scene was an actual part of the story that has some (albeit perhaps small) impact on the rest of the plot, and it still gives us some sort of deeper insight into the characters.

For a novel about a conflicted assassin in a post-apocalyptic city, Crescent Knife has fewer actions scenes than I might have first envisaged, and that’s because very early on in the creation process I stripped out all the unnecessary combat from the story. This is supposed to be a novel about a trained killer trying to find some reason for his actions, a comforting cause to justify all the murders he’s carried out. Throwing excess action scenes at him is therefore counter-intuitive – it risks stunting that development – and so every time I do throw the protagonist into a fight scene, you can be damn sure it’ll have lasting effects on the story, teaching either the protagonist or the reader something about his personality. Indeed, the very first chapter (coming soon, trust me!) counterpoints his indifference towards killing to defend himself from armed thugs against his conflicted reaction to murdering an associate in order to cover his trail. Every act of violence therefore means something to the story, because it pushes the protagonist one way or another along the spectrum of his development, damning or redeeming him in turn.

Violence is a big thing. If not for the people committing the violence, then at least for those caught in the immediate aftermath of it. Blood may not always beget blood, but blood does flow. It moves with purpose, pushed by arterial force and pulled by gravity. And the same has to be true with violence in our stories: pushed by what has come before in the story, and running onwards into what comes next. If you’re going to have your characters throw down with one another, make sure you’re not going to flinch over getting blood on your manuscript.

I want to put forward an alternative theory. Everyone says that your protagonist should be real: his motivation should be understandable (and, ideally, sympathetic), his actions believable and his development consistent with external and internal factors. All this ties into what I was saying a few weeks ago about strong antagonists: a fully fleshed-out character has a force of personality to him that attracts the reader’s interest (his ‘charisma’). This is obviously a golden rule that should be applied to all characters, not just the antagonists – I merely brought it up there because often an antagonist can get away with an absence of depth if they have sufficient strength of personality to keep the reader engaged and entertained.

But the protagonist has to be more than just a strong character. More than just fully developed.

More than just real.

The protagonist is usually your POV character: the eyes and ears through which your reader experiences your world, the medium through which he follows your story. Even if he isn’t, he’s still the main driver of your plot, constantly pushing towards a goal despite rising odds and the opposition of the antagonist. Sure, he might get help, but in the end he’s the one rolling that boulder up the hill and praying he’s not going to end up like Sisyphus.

And to do that, he has to be something more than ordinary. He has to be broken. His motivation, whatever it may be, is so great, so utterly compelling, so entrenched in his psyche, that he’ll refuse to stop no matter what stands in his way. This isn’t to say he can’t have been an ordinary man, but once he adopts the mantle of the protagonist he breaks something within himself. He becomes a kind of Olympian Torchbearer: he has picked up his cause and he will carry it until he lights his brazier, or he falls flat on his face and the fire goes out.

Obviously, the protagonist is still a character. His motivation is not a substitute for personality; rather, personality translates the motivation into action. Two characters motivated by the same cause, but with different personalities (attitudes, traits, backgrounds, etc.) will act differently. But his motivation is always there, driving him to act one way or another. Whatever his reason, he has to keep going, has to keep advancing your story, or stop and never start again.

All writers talk about giving their characters arcs. This broken, obsessive motivation is the cannon that’s going to fire your protagonist across his arc. Last week I mentioned how a character, especially the protagonist, has to have ownership over his actions. Well, their broken nature acts as a magnifier to this. In driving them forwards, it forces them to confront obstacles and, through those obstacles, their own natures. By encountering opposition, perhaps stumbling, perhaps taking blows and suffering loss as they push themselves on, the protagonist is forced to constantly assess and reassess his actions. Are they right? Is his motivation the proper one? Why does he feel that way? Where is all this taking him? An ordinary person would shrug, because the act of turning away from his path isn’t a monumental decision, but just one of many everyday choices. But a protagonist, whose motivation has already put him through so much, at his own behest, is forced to dig deep to understand himself in order to decide whether to stay the course, change his ways or let that little, niggling doubt triumph and fall into entropy.

Motivation is often described as an engine. It’s what makes your characters go. But it’s more complex than that, especially for the protagonist. Motivation is an engine, yeah, but it powers more than just your characters. It powers their big-ass mental drills too; it powers their depth. Introspection, soul-searching, agonising, angsting, meditating – whatever you want to call it, a character’s reflection on his own nature, on why he acts and how that makes him act and what his reaction to his effects are, is essential to depth. Because your reader will ask the same questions, and maybe come to the same conclusions as the character for different reasons, or come to different conclusions. It’ll raise understanding, hopefully even sympathy, for your characters (protagonist at the very least) because the reader has been allowed a glimpse into the maelstrom of thoughts and emotions that surrounds their obsessive drive. But more importantly, it’ll raise questions. The reader will ask whether the character’s ultimate rationale and approach are right, whether their own outlook is correct, whether there might have been a third path that solved all problems.

And none of that can happen if your character isn’t somehow broken. If he can shrug and pass the whole problem off as irrelevant in the face of circumstances, then whatever reflection he carries out is superfluous. If the hero rejects questions as to the morality of killing conscripts by stating, simply, that the Evil Overlord must be defeated, no matter the cost, then you as a writer have lost the opportunity for depth. If, on the other hand, your hero is somehow broken, obsessed with being the better man, with retaining the moral high ground perhaps, then you allow yourself a golden opportunity for introspection into the morality of his actions, and the propriety of his reason for action.

Obviously, introspection isn’t sufficient on its own to develop a character’s depth. In the same way that the introspection is caused by external stimuli – something beyond the character challenging his motivation and/or perspective on matters – your character’s soul-searching has to have practical ramifications. This isn’t to say that your character must reverse his approach to matters, or even take dramatic right-angle turns, after every challenging moment. To make light of an important point, think of your character as a college student: when a new approach to matters is posited, he’s rightly tempted to experiment – to try new things. Like I said last week, one of the most important points you have to guarantee in your story is that your protagonist is free to choose, not bound by some form of destiny to act in a particular way. The very same point applies to his own nature: characters change, growing or falling or developing in any of a hundred other directions. Just as you should bind your character to an external force, you have to avoid binding him to his own nature. Make him question himself and, at the very least, consider the possibility of change. Even if he ultimately decides to stay the course, that will be an important ramification of his introspection, namely that he has come to the conclusion that he feels comfortable with his actions and has returned to pursuing his objective with fresh confidence in himself.

The hallmark of higher thought is the capacity to reflect and assess oneself. In this way, having the protagonist, or any character, keep one eye trained inwards upon his own nature is perfectly realistic. We all do it. The only difference is the weight attached to that introspection. I might stand in an aisle of the local Tesco and ask myself whether I want to buy the more expensive fair trade chocolate, or the cheap stuff that’s made from orphan’s tears and the tusks of endangered elephants. It’s certainly a choice, and it certainly reveals something about my nature, but I don’t attach it any great weight – I’m just goddamn hungry and want a bar of chocolate. This is why writers don’t usually waste their time discussing the moral quandaries of their central heroes when they pick up their groceries.

Because they lack the weight that warrants a part of the story being devoted to focussing on their internal dilemma.

But consider this. I eat meat. Love the stuff. I don’t pay any heed to the morality of killing animals to sate my appetite and I’m fairly indifferent to what people conclude about my personality from it. Now, let’s think up a hypothetical protagonist. He’s one of the few survivors of an isolated village that was once sacked by slavering, bloodthirsty monsters that devoured the greater part of the population. Bearing witness to that has instilled within him a great loathing of those monsters and forms the motivation for a genocidal campaign against them. In short, it has broken him. As part of that broken, obsessive motivation, the protagonist forswears the eating of meat, because slaughtering a cow for his own hunger is no better than the monsters slaughtering his townsfolk for theirs. In that case, any temptation to consume meat is an important quandary for the character, because in that situation is has weight. It’s part of his broken nature and you, as the writer, the god of broken things, should examine it because it’s a weighty matter that heavily reflects upon the protagonist’s core motivation and values.

Crescent Knife is, at its heart, a character piece: the story of a man trying to find a reason for his atrocities. The protagonist, Memphield, is most definitely broken. He’s obsessed with survival, moreso that is than any human being. He will kill, betray, deceive, cheat and flee if he thinks it’s the best way to keep his heart beating. That’s his obsessive motivation. And yet, from all sides, alternatives are being posited: resistance fighters are dying for a cause, fellow Crescent Knives are murdering for their masters’ machinations, and the nobility are backstabbing and deceiving one another for advancement and political power. It leaves him feeling ill at ease: the problem isn’t with what he’s doing, but why he’s doing it. When asked in the opening chapter (yes, there is actually some of the damn thing written – expect it once Legacy has all been posted) why he has betrayed and is about to murder an old acquaintance, the best he can offer is ‘better you than me’. The betrayal and murder don’t bother him; it’s the ultimate pointlessness of doing so that does – after all, he’s going to end up dead himself eventually. So as he pursues the conspiracy that lies at the heart of the main plot, he’s also undertaking his own introspective journey by encountering different groups with different motivations, part of him eager to embrace something that might make all the terrible crimes he’s committed actually matter, the other part utterly terrified of the risk of death that living for more than just life’s own sake entails. His brokenness means this cuts to the heart of his character – the weight it possesses means that each push and pull effects a change in his personality and affects his actions. In a way, Memphield’s trying to get rid of his obsession and find another one.

He knows he’s broken. He just doesn’t like how he’s broken.

You know what sucks about being a farmboy? Asides from the long hours, cruel winters and poor personal hygiene?

Nobody cares.

Maybe I’m being unfair. Perhaps there is a small demographic out there in the Highlands, or the grazing slopes of Wales, that love themselves a protagonist that comes from agrarian stock to achieve. If you’re a member of that demographic, then good on you – and could you possibly see to sending some more of that Aberdeen Angus or fine lamb my way?

Let me step back. I don’t have a problem with farmboys. I don’t even have a problem with heroes rising from humble origins. Where my beef (ha-ha) gets involved is with how protagonists generally find themselves involved and invested in the plot. And while farmboys generally fall foul of this particular problem, any protagonist can.

I’m talking about ‘destiny’. I’m going to use that word in this post to cover a multitude of sins. Firstly, and most obviously, is actual destiny: a predetermined path that the protagonist must follow (go somewhere), a pre-determined checklist he has to complete (do something), that sort of thing. Secondly is the mandate: the protagonist is tasked by so-and-so to go somewhere and do something. Third is the fuzzy-end-of-the-lollipop scenario: thanks to circumstances conspiring against the protagonist, he finds himself obliged to, you guessed it, go somewhere and do something.

I could go on, but hopefully a pattern is emerging. The problem with protagonists being pushed along the story by ‘destiny’ is that it renders the protagonist impotent. And that’s the last thing your protagonist should be. He’s the primary POV character, the individual who your readers will latch onto as their go-to-guy in your story, the one they should come to care for the most and thus be invested in his trials and travails, discovery and development.

Destiny screws all that up. Think about it. Your protagonist is obliged (forced/ordered/prophesied – take your pick) to follow a certain route and achieve certain objectives. You have two areas to manoeuvre in. Firstly, you can choose whether he follows willingly or grudgingly – the former offers nothing, the latter an antagonist who fills the narrative gaps with complaining. Secondly, you can choose how he carried out his pre-appointed task – congratulations, you still have some narrative control over the flow of the plot.

Nowhere in the destiny scenario is there any importance attached to motivation. Sure, a protagonist may have his own reasons for following his pre-arranged path, but ultimately they play second (and distant) fiddle to the fact that his reasons don’t really mean jack: he has to do it regardless. Your protagonist has no control over the events he finds himself in, and thus no ownership over him. If your protagonist ever says ‘I never asked for this’, then step back and look at your story because you are doing it wrong.

Contrast that with the character who acts the same way, but because he chooses to. His actions are directly and primarily linked to his motivations, thus there is a personal stake to his progression through the story. Your character comes across stronger because he is the author of his own future, taking matters into his own hands to seek an outcome he desires, and because he is invested in the plot’s progression and development, the reader following him will as well.

A protagonist propelled by destiny is a motorboat, a protagonist propelled under his own rationale is a rowing boat. The former moves the character forward easily, taking him from one point in the plot to the next – the trip is fast, possibly exciting, and fairly effortless. And nobody will care when it’s over. ‘Oh, that was over soon, well time to move on’. The latter makes each landmark encountered along the plot-river-metaphor-thing a sort of victory earned through hard work and sweat – it demands engagement, both protagonist and reader putting their backs into it. The reader staggers away at the end, gasping for breath and thinking boy, wasn’t that one hell of a trip. Sore, but satisfied.

Your protagonist drives the story. He is the primary actor, seeking an objective than the antagonist is opposing. Without wanting to strain the metaphor, he really is the method of propulsion, and, even more importantly, he’s the primary focus. He needs to have an arc, some method of developing, that is influenced by and influences in turn the story. If the protagonist is being pushed through by some outside force, his arc diminishes in importance. Instead of getting a glimpse into the important choices that will shape how the central figure in your story ends up shaping said story, you get limp bouts of introspection which will have little to no actual impact.

But here’s the trick you can use to cheat the problem. If you really do want to involve a destiny scenario in your story, think on this. What if your protagonist rejects the destiny imposed upon him. I’m not talking about the protagonist rejecting the destiny only to have it imposed upon him regardless, or otherwise come to realisation. No, that’s not smart storytelling; that’s tapping your reader on the shoulder with one hand then hooking him with the other.

I’m talking about an actual, full-blown, screw you and the horse you rode in on, middle finger to whatever imposition is made upon your protagonist. I recently read a story that takes this idea as its central premise. In Johannes Cabal: the Necromancer, the titular necromancer attempts to escape from a Faustian pact with the Devil by collecting a hundred souls in return for his. The catch, obviously, is that the Devil would much rather win the pact and only gain one soul, than lose and gain a hundred, and so throughout the entire novel Johannes is struggling against what is, in essence, a force of cosmic power that seeks to thwart his efforts. Essentially, the central antagonist is a manifestation of the typical destiny scenario.

The beautiful thing about such an inversion of the scenario is that it inverts the problem as well. A protagonist following along with destiny has his own motivations and arc subsumed into secondary concerns. A protagonist actively defying destiny has his motivations right out there on his sleeve, wielding it like a weapon, and his arc is developed at the forefront of the action, through blood, sweat and tears. Conflict is at the heart of every story – through conflict the story progresses and characters develop – and if you place your character in conflict with part of the story itself, it offers a great deal of narrative richness for you to explore. Hellboy’s prophesied unleashing of the apocalypse. The cast of Mass Effect standing against the cycle of galactic destruction. Christ, even Peter Pan’s refusal to grow up. If you put your protagonist up against more than just the antagonist, but also lead him into conflict with part of the story itself, you give yourself far more room to develop your characters.

This was something I went into Crescent Knife thinking about. A running theme throughout the novel is the reasons one is moved to action: self-preservation, greed, zealotry, love. So, obviously, forcing the characters to act via the medium of some destiny was going to put a serious kibosh on that. But my problem with the destiny scenario went deeper than that. Not only did I need my characters to truly own their actions, but I needed their actions to be a challenge. After all, it’s easy to say you’re motivated by X, Y or Z when the going is good, but what about when the going gets tough? I didn’t want my cast coming across as fair-weather followers of their respective motivations (or, at least, if they are, to show them develop when the cold light of day kicks its way in). So having them simply flow along, carried on the whims of some prophecy scenario was exactly the opposite of what I needed. I needed my characters to fight every step, opposed not just directly by the antagonist, but by the very story itself – the system, the entire world around them trying to force them to give up and give in. Their superiors demanding a change in their course of action, events conspiring to force them into difficult choices. It’s a make-or-break world, and it means I really get to put my cast through the ringer: they’ll be challenged, tempted and assaulted from all sides, and how they react and develop to that will be right at the forefront of the story. Some will break, some will remain resolute, some will realise that what they’ve been holding on to as a driving force has been the entirely wrong thing. But however they come out, they’ll all go through the same trial.

So keep your destines. I’ll take a crucible any day.

There was once an English nobleman. You know the sort I’m talking about: a lineage he could probably trace back to Agincourt, half a county in his deeds and more noughts in his bank account than correctly-firing neurons in his skull. He liked to think himself a gentleman of culture, but lacked both the intellect or the inclination to uplift himself – either from his morass of ignorance, or his armchair. So he tempted an aspiring artist to his country manor with the promise of patronage, in return for one small favour: he was to read to the nobleman the greatest works of the English geniuses.

The artist started with Milton’s Paradise Lost, the great primordial tale of Lucifer’s war against God and Man’s fall from grace. His recitation began well enough, the nobleman enraptured by Lucifer’s defiant speech to his followers as they languish in eternal torment, and his infernal plan to corrupt the souls of God’s latest, greatest creation. But as the artist recounts Lucifer’s journey to the mortal world, the nobleman raises one hand for him to stop, tugging his pipe out of his jowly maw with the other. The artist pauses mid-sentence, unsure whether his patron-to-be is about to lambast him for choosing such a satanic verse, or reveal some deep epiphany brought on by one of the finest pieces of English literature. The nobleman inhales, bombastic waist threatening his belt, and then speaks.

‘By Jove, I don’t know who this Lucifer chap is, but I damn sure hope he wins.’

The story ends there. I like to think that the artist shut his book and left immediately, or the sheer idiocy caused some sort of cataclysmic upheaval in the planet’s crust, and thus was born the Lake District. Either way, it illustrates an important point for any writer who wants to create a compelling villain.

Last week I talked about the two types of antagonist, the perpetrator and victim. Victim-antagonists fall less into the ‘villain’ category and instead act as a sort of ‘tragic adversary’. Perpetrator-antagonists, on the other hand, land squarely in the definition of ‘villain’: bad actions committed because of bad motivations.

And what better illustration of the villain, the perpetrator-antagonist, than the Arch Enemy of the Judeo-Christian world himself? Lucifer, Satan, whatever you want to call him, is most often portrayed as evil incarnate, and even Paradise Lost, which is told from his perspective, nevertheless portrays him as a perpetrator-antagonist: he engineers Mankind’s descent into sin to spite God for rightfully punishing the rebel angels. A bad action, committed because of bad motivations.

And yet Milton, in a time of high religious tension, was able to turn a creature who today is often portrayed as a generic, cut-out (literal) demon figure into a compelling character. Not exactly sympathetic like a victim-antagonist would be, but nevertheless a character that engages the reader; who makes you, perhaps despite your better judgement, want to see how he gets on with his diabolic plan.

Contrast Milton’s Lucifer with any similar character, especially from fantasy. Sauron, Voldemort, Emperor Palpatine – any stereotypical ‘Dark Lord’ archetype you care to mention. All threatening antagonists certainly, presenting resilient obstacles to the protagonists, but mostly lacking the compelling nature of Lucifer. Why?

One word: charisma.

Many perpetrator-antagonists succeed in presenting a challenging obstacle to the protagonist – they burn down his home village, invade his nation, hatch schemes to summon ancient, malevolent forces back into the world, etc. – but fail to actually be interesting in and of themselves. They are often threatening, in that final-boss-at-the-end-of-a-video-game sense, but lack that strange compulsion that makes the reader go ‘I know this is a bad thought, but what if the bad guy won?’.

In the same way Milton’s Lucifer made that nobleman eager to see him triumphant, a charismatic perpetrator-antagonist can overcome what might otherwise be a quite shallow role ( ‘bad guy’ has become a term synonymous with weak characterisation and simplified morality in recent years). Was I the only one curious, in a terrified sort of way, to see if the Joker in Dark Knight was vindicated on this theory concerning the human condition? Who else found Battlestar Galactica’s Number Six to be an unsettling but engaging religious zealot? Didn’t Jaime Lannister, smug bastard though he was, have a certain magnetism?

Charisma, my friends. It’s what’s for dinner.

I recently gave another writer some feedback over her proposed fantasy setting. She was risking falling into one of the easiest pitfalls when writing an antagonist: making them bad for the sake of being bad. While she ended up working out a pleasantly deep and detailed backstory charting the genesis of her antagonist’s villainy, I came away with a bitter taste in my mouth. I hadn’t told the whole truth. You see, charismatic perpetrator-antagonists represent one of the dirty secrets in storytelling. Readers won’t care about an absence of depth in a character if you make the surface details interesting enough. As they say in Chicago: razzle-dazzle them.

No one cares that Lex Luthor or the Joker lack any real nuance, beyond their interactions with their respective nemeses, because the surface details are enough to keep them interested in the character. Their charisma more than makes up for it. The former is the charming, hyper-genius megalomaniac that can sweet-talk his way into the Oval Office, while the latter is the maniacal sadist who commits atrocities with a smile and punch-line. They draw us in, grab us by the throat and drag our interest along. We want to see what they do next, what their latest plan will be and, God forbid, what if they actually won?

I was reading a blog post by Chuck Wendig the other day, and I found one of his lines pleasantly succinct regarding the two types of villains a writer can field in his story:

‘The biggest and best test of an antagonist is that I want to a) love to hate them and/or b) hate to love them.’

I’ve been working on a few novella submissions recently, and the general ‘pulp’-esque feel the publishers are looking for has encouraged me to look away from the antagonist as a character that challenges the reader’s perceptions of both the story and real life, and instead just focus on making them fully realised and exciting bastards. My mantra has been ‘not deep, just developed’. I’m not looking to provoke the reader, or even impart some message. I just want to grab them by the jugular and pull them from the first page to the last.

That’s the foundation of any antagonist, hell, any character period: he/she has to be developed. Regarding the antagonist specifically, he doesn’t oppose the protagonist just because; he has to have a reason – his role is the antagonist, but that’s not his persona. There’s still a rationale behind it all, a genesis to explain how he came to fill the role of antagonist, and a personality to act as the vector for the conflict and opposition he produces. He’ll have weak traits that can be taken advantage of, and core beliefs to be challenged – his character might even change as the story progresses. But that’s simply a strong character right there, fully thought-out and actualised. He doesn’t need to be constantly agonising over what he is doing, occupying a morally grey area and making the reader doubt whether or not he’s actually in the wrong, or even sympathetic in any way; provided his bad actions are realistically motivated by bad reasons, which make sense given his backstory, personality etc., then your antagonist has strength to him. Not deep, just developed. And that strength of character will give your antagonist his charisma – if you as the writer know why he’s acting against the protagonist (i.e. the antagonist is still fully realised), and the reader understands as well, then you have the ingredients for a character your audience will love to hate. So what if he isn’t a morally grey individual, or raises conflicting reactions in the reader? He’s developed and strong, and that’ll help drive your story – the antagonist will represent a dangerous, powerful obstacle and source of conflict that keeps the other characters on their toes – and the reader will be hooked. What’s he going to do next? How’s the protagonist going to beat him? The reader will be too busy being hooked on those questions, too busy simply enjoying the ride, to complain that your antagonist is not some deep case-study in the corruptive influence of power on good intentions, or even just a sympathetic figure.

And it’s this that separates a good villain from the uncompelling adversaries. What separates Lucifer from Sauron. One, although not deep, is still fully fleshed out, fully real and believable, and so his villainy is grounded. His actions make sense for the character, even if they are objectionable, and the personality behind that lends it an engaging quality – the actions are not simply to advance the plot, hinder the protagonist or otherwise do the writer’s bidding, but are coloured by the character of the antagonist. His role is influenced by his persona. That’s what lends him charisma.

To be perfectly honest, I’ve been trying to steer clear of perpetrator-antagonists in Crescent Knife. Don’t get me wrong, this is not because I view them as a lesser type of character, but simply because they don’t fit the feel of the story I’m going for. The world of Crescent Knife is a cruel one, with nearly every individual committing at least some form of (objectively) morally dubious actions for varying (subjectively) good reasons. There are few to no characters simply motivated by purely negative rationales – the closest I can think of is a ‘rather you than me’ mentality, which is ironically displayed most strongly in the protagonist at the novel’s outset. If you want my take on a perpetrator-antagonist, take a look-see at Uploading or A Legacy of Corpses (although in the latter it’s debatable whether it is in fact the main character who’s actually the antagonist… just food for thought as you read some gritty sci-fi pulp).

All that being said, I’ll leave on this point. All antagonists are real people, and that means they have to be developed. But not every real person out there provokes a deep reaction in us. To put it simply, sometimes we come away from an encounter just thinking ‘gee, what an asshole’.

There’s a fine line between a character being sympathetic, and being downright pathetic. The former engages the reader through the medium of compassion, encouraging him to care for the character and show concern for him during the trials and tribulations that you, as the author, put him through during the story. It makes the story more tangible as the reader feels every knock and subsequent rise the character goes through, and from a meta-narrative perspective it makes your story that much harder to put down.

A pathetic character, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish entirely. A pathetic character encourages only disdain from the reader: a displeased indifference to the character’s fate, where the only incentive to keep following the character’s journey may be to see him get the come-uppance the reader believes he has deserved.

Now, pathetic characters can work reasonably well in the background as minor adversaries for the central characters to overcome, thus playing on the reader’s desire to see them get put in their place, and put there hard. Sadism is hardly a positive human trait, but it’s nevertheless one of the tools in our arsenal as writers. Readers find a certain character contemptible and/or insufferable? Give them his head on a metaphorical pike and you can accomplish two things: the central characters have overcome an obstacle, thereby advancing the plot, and you’ve satisfied your readers for a time.

The problem comes when pathetic characters are not background players in your story. Pathetic protagonists are a major problem in a lot of fantasy writing, and I’m going to be devoting August to an examination of that, but given July’s recurring theme of general nastiness and villainy, today I want to consider pathetic villains.

Your average antagonist will fall into one of two categories: the ‘perpetrator’ and the ‘victim’. The perpetrator is the classical villain, acting in an unlawful or otherwise immoral reason for motivations that lie on the darker end of the human spectrum – the seven deadly sins, to be general (greed, envy, pride etc.). The victim is an attempt at a more tragic villain who commits his antagonistic deeds for what should be a sympathetic cause: he does wrong (or acts in a way that antagonises the central characters), but he has a reason for doing so that is not inherently ‘dark’.

Comic books provide an ideal illustration of these two categories. Take two of Batman’s most iconic adversaries. The Joker is a perpetrator, killing and breaking the law for pleasure (one might classify his particular sin as ‘lust’, namely bloodlust). Mr. Freeze, on the other hand, is a victim: he kills and breaks the law as well, but does so in an attempt to save his dying wife.

Both categories have their uses in storytelling, and it would be unfair to rate one as objectively ‘better’ than the other. Perpetrator-antagonists are useful as tools for analysing the protagonist (for example, the question of how far Batman will go to stop the Joker), and although not inherently deep provide a strong, gripping adversary for your story. Victim-antagonists on the other hand are more inherently deep, motivated by profoundly human rationales (I personally find Mr. Freeze one of the most identifiable villains in comic book history simply because I am sure that, were I in his shoes, I would be no different), and this allows him to become sympathetic to the reader, thus creating that compassionate attachment I spoke of above. A sympathetic victim-antagonist engages the reader, and gives his ultimate defeat a bittersweet dimension – the reader triumphs with the protagonist, but nevertheless feels a pang of sorrow at the antagonist’s defeat because, in the end, he can understand and appreciate why the antagonist acted that way.

In theory, at least.

Here’s the problem. Writing a victim-antagonist is a balancing act. On the one hand he has to have a compelling rationale for acting against the protagonist, but on the other hand it cannot be portrayed as ‘too compelling’ – the antagonist still has to be in control of his actions, rather than a slave to his rationale. The former aspect is comparatively easy – any human motivation can be suitably corrupted towards a ‘dark’ purpose – but it’s this latter aspect that risks turning the victim-antagonist into a pathetic character, rather than a sympathetic character.

I had high hopes for the Star Wars prequels. Darth Vader was one of the great enigmatic anti-villains of the sci-fi world, and an entire trilogy devoted to his fall from grace sounded like Milton-meets-space-opera.

To say I was disappointed by the end of Revenge of the Sith is gross understatement. I could write a second dissertation on the flaws of the prequel trilogy, but I’m going to limit myself (for today) to talking about Anakin’s fall to the dark side. Clearly they were going for a victim-antagonist feel to Darth Vader – his annihilation of the Jedi Order and off-screen infanticide motivated by a desire to save his wife from death (sounds familiar?) – but they got the balance all wrong. Yes, the motivation is compelling, but it is portrayed as too compelling – there was never a moment in the films where I felt that Anakin’s actions were his own conscious choice. Rather he seemed to be being dragged through these atrocities, constantly whining about how he had no choice, he had to save Padme.

He was a pathetic character. He suffered from what I like to call ‘whiny bitch syndrome’.

Here’s the deal: a victim-antagonist is a victim, sure, but he’s still an antagonist as well. No amount of sympathy or compassion, no rationale, is going to change the fact that, at the end of the day, your antagonist is still the central blockade standing between the protagonist and the story goal. And he has to do this consciously – it must be an active decision to oppose the main character, because otherwise he will fall victim to ‘whiny bitch syndrome’. Take the final confrontation between Anakin and Obi Wan: a pseudo-father/son confrontation that should have been tragic, reduced to Anakin whining about how he doesn’t want to hurt his former master, but he has no choice.

That’s the line that turns an antagonist pathetic. ‘I have no choice’. As soon as an antagonist says that, he’s crossed the line: his rationale is ‘too compelling’ and he has become a slave to it. He is not in control of his actions. A reader can sympathise with a villain who acts in a somehow evil fashion based on a conscious choice to do so based on some human drive, but will find a villain that tries to excuse the same action because he has no other choice to be pathetic. An antagonist that has chosen to act in a certain way (break the law, oppose the protagonist, etc.) because it furthers some goal he desires not only makes for a sympathetic character, depending on the goal sought, but also makes him a more exciting obstacle. If he has actively chosen to pursue a certain end, then he will likely be more zealous, more unpredictable, perhaps even more desperate, in combating the protagonist and any others standing in his way. On the other hand, an antagonist who does not desire the goal, but feels obliged to pursue it regardless, is less exciting: his efforts, if accompanied by a constant narration of ‘you don’t understand, I have to do this’, are going to be seen as limp and impotent by the reader. Whiny bitches make for neither interesting nor exciting antagonists.

I’m going to pass on the ubiquitous ‘here’s-what-I’ve-learned-from-my-own-writing’ spiel today. The central antagonist in Crescent Knife has been sitting in the forefront of my mind for the past week whenever I sit down to do my planning, and making a suitably complex, sympathetic character has been – to continue the motif of this post – an utter bitch. Sadly, revealing a great deal of what I’ve gleaned from my work would also reveal a great deal of the novel’s deeper revelations, so I’ll just have to leave things today with the abstraction above. To finish off with at least something of a practical example, here’s a quote from one of the old, animated Batman movies, spoken by Mr. Freeze and perfectly encapsulating how the victim-antagonist should be handled:

‘Think of it, Batman. To never again walk on a summer’s day with the hot wind in your face and a warm hand to hold. Oh yes, I’d kill for that.’

My partner told me a story this morning. A scorpion stood on one side of a fast flowing river, unable to cross because of the speed of the water. After a while, a fox came along and offered to carry the scorpion across on its back, the fox being a far larger animal who could resist the current. The scorpion accepted, but as the pair crossed the river, it jammed its stinger into the base of the fox’s neck. As the fox felt the venom paralyse its limbs, it asked the scorpion why it had stung him, for in a moment the fox would drown and the scorpion would be dashed against the rocks by the water.

The scorpion replied, ‘it is my nature’.

Last week I was talking about true monsters and how they transcend the fourth wall to disturb the reader as much as, if not more so than, the characters in the story. This week, I shall leave the fourth wall intact and, continuing July’s de facto theme of the monstrous, villainous and generally unpleasant, focus on a different facet of the evil that infests fantasy settings.

Think about the monsters in any given fantasy setting. Orcs are usually my go-to exemplar on this topic, but any non-human, bestial adversary will suffice. Why do they do what they do? Why do they pillage the defenceless when it is not for loot, or revenge, or the machinations of some higher evil? Pleasure? Perhaps in some settings, but I find that a shallow rationale. A deeper reason to explain what both we as readers/writers and the characters in the story see as barbarous is because that is natural to the creature in question. The Orc ravages because it is in its nature to do. In Tolkien’s lore, the Orcs are mutilated and twisted Elves – in such an instance, suffering and agony have defined the race since its birth, in the same way that cooperation to overcome superior foes and crushing odds define Humans.

The word inhumane has, understandably, taken on a moral tint over the decades, but look at it for a second. What we consider abhorrent we often decry as ‘inhumane’: not befitting of a human. Obviously, in the real world, this is an expression of moral disgust – a human acting inhumanely is something to be reviled – but in a fantasy setting, where humans are not the only race, it is merely a subjective statement. Of course an Orc will act inhumanely, for it is not human.

I want to make two conflicting points with this concept. Returning to my belief in the resources a writer with every work, this concept of inhumanity lends itself to two distinctive approaches. One mitigates the monstrous, the other magnifies it.

Let’s return to those pesky Orcs. They pillage and burn, as is their nature, and perhaps the main character of our story seeks to avenge his murdered family. What we ultimately reach is a clash of natures: Human nature, the drive to be part of a collective and the outrage when that is denied to us, clashes with Orc nature. As Humans ourselves, we obviously err on the side of the avenging protagonist, but one can’t overlook the fact that ultimately he is foisting his nature on the Orcs as much as the Orcs foisted theirs upon his family. A simplification, no doubt, but just like that the story goes from a simple ‘good guy kills bad monsters’ to ‘how far above these so-called monsters are we really?’. Perhaps I was wrong: it doesn’t necessarily mitigate what the Orcs have done, but it offers far richer resources to our story in how the protagonist responds.

The second approach, that which magnifies the monstrous, is one I’m far more interested in right now. Having a complex issue of natures clashing in your story gives it greater depth, no doubt, but the inhumanity of monsters can also be used to turn a simple adversary into something much more terrifying. We are unsettled at best by the unknown, and what is more unknown than something that defies our understanding of existence? Something that thinks, feels and acts completely different to us? Something that is inhuman.

Lovecraft understood this better than any recent writer, I think. His stories contain several inscrutable beings whose very age and power is inconceivable to the mortal minds of men, let alone their motivations and rationales. We guess at what they might seek, reducing them to the most common denominators, but they are anthropomorphisations at best and gross over-simplifications at worst. Because we simply are not equipped, either in faculty or outlook, to understand them. We are Human, they are Not. And because we can only ever see thinks through our eyes, never truly capable of a terrifying objectivity that would probably drive us mad, we can never comprehend them. Thus, they are Not – alien, inhuman. And that scares us, because not only are they unknown, but they defy our perception of the world. We may call them cruel, petty, merciless, but in truth they simply operate differently to us.

To borrow a more recent example (admittedly ruined by recent developments): the Reapers from the Mass Effect series. In the first instalment, one of these ancient alien behemoths offers a chilling rationale for why they harvest all advanced life in the galaxy every few thousand years: because they can, and because they want to. This is the most basic common ground any two creatures can share, regardless of nature: capacity and inclination. And yet, even then, it indicates that these creatures are of a vastly alien nature, because they possess that inclination when we would not. Their existence is of a fundamentally different sort, and that leads to a truly terrifying ‘monster’; one that cannot be plead, bargained or negotiated with. Its nature leads it to destroy and deafens it to caring. It is Not, and that makes it terrifying. We cannot know what drives it (ironically, finding out in the third instalment that it is not as complicated as the first intimated was regarded as a gross disappointment by fans), and we cannot stop it.

In Crescent Knife, one of the defining features of the setting is the cataclysmic phenomena known commonly as ‘the Mist’, which surrounds the last city on the planet after wiping out all other life. Whether or not it is in fact sentient, or simply some world-ending disaster, is up for discussion – I do not intend to offer a definitive statement one way or another (mystery, after all, keeps people talking about a work for a long time afterwards). But nevertheless, it is an alien thing: it’s nature is different from that of ours. How it works, where it comes from, perhaps even why it does what it does, doesn’t conform to the characters’ understanding of the world. When the wrong short of wind blows upon the city, and the Mist rolls over the high walls protecting those inside, drinking the breath from lungs and leaving twisted cadavers in its wake, people are terrified not just because they may die. Death, after all, is common in a city populated by the desperate and ruthless. No, they are afraid because, sentient or not, something monstrous, alien, and utterly inhumane is coming at them, jaws stretched wide open.

[Brief note: yes, I'm finally back. Exams are over, graduation has passed, and I am now returning for good to this blog and the wonderful world of writing in general. Weekly posts of Realities of Fantasy and short stories will be a regular thing from now until forevermore, and I've got an uber-bumper story ready for this month. So, back to the scheduled programming.]

A lot of things scare me. Sometimes I refuse to close my eyes at night because I’m worried there may be a spider in my room, and if I don’t maintain a constant vigil I’ll wake up with it squatting on my face. I’m leery about entering any body of water so large I can’t see the bottom, just in case there’s something lurking out of sight. I have not been to a circus in more than a decade out of fear I may deck a clown in a panicked pre-emptive strike.

Yeah, a lot of things scare me. Mundane, everyday, often quite pathetic things. You know the only things that don’t scare me?

Monsters in fiction.

I’m desperately trying to remember the last novel I read that contained a scary monster. Not scary-looking, not scary-to-the-characters, but put-the-book-down-and-try-to-breath-regularly scary. I think it might have been the creature It, from the Stephen King novel of the same name. Not just because it was an unholy amalgam of spider and clown, but because of what lay beneath that terrifying façade. It was a disturbing creature: not content with just hunting you down and eating you, but doing so with macabre humour and a smile on its face.

Stephen King took something mundane and everyday and made it wrong. He crafted a clown, supposedly the bringer of innocent joy to children everywhere, a fond and familiar memory to nearly everyone in the western world, and broke it. Because you can only make something disturbing if that something is already familiar. To go back to circuses, think of a Hall of Mirrors: you place an everyday object down in front of one, step back and look at the warped reflection.

And that’s what monsters in fiction have lost. They invariably fulfil the first prerequisite of a good monster, being somehow superior to us and thus establishing themselves as a credible threat, but they fall at the second hurdle. They’re not disturbing. There are dozens of predatory animals here on Earth that would be superior to us if we lacked modern conveniences, but we don’t label them as monsters.

Take Lovecraft. From the Shoggoth to the Mi-Go, nearly all of the Cthulhu Mythos’ bestiary treats man as a walking snack at best. Indeed, that’s one of the central themes of the Mythos that’s continued well past its creator’s death: man’s vast inferiority compared to the great terrors that lurk beyond our insignificant speck of a planet. An unpleasant, perhaps even uncomfortable theme, but ultimate no different from that device in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that gives you a glimpse of the scale of the Universe in comparison to your tiny self through the medium of a muffin. Lovecraftian creatures have always been visceral, eldritch and unpleasant, and the message behind them strikes a resonant chord in the human psyche, but they are not disturbing creatures. I have never lost sleep over a Deep One.

I’m tempted to say that monsters have degenerated into what they are nowadays thanks to the creeping encroachment of video game logic into fiction. The concept of the ‘monster’ nowadays exists simply to provide a roadblock for the main characters; battle-fodder for an action scene. But that would actually be unfair on a great number of video games which have actually been making great strides in developing ‘true monsters’. Recently, indie games like S.C.P. Containment Breach and Slender have carved out terrifying reputations for being able to turn mundane things like the act of blinking, or the landscape over your shoulder, into the dangling promise of nightmares and death. Classic games like Silent Hill pioneered the idea of the enemy that left your skin crawling long after you’d shut your console off. One of Silent Hill’s most iconic critters, the apron-clad executioner Pyramid Head, is a prime example: a vile caricature of masculinity and potency that turns the male psyche in a thing to be feared.

All these examples and more have one thing in common: they take something we know, something that we see everyday, and turn it against us. S.C.P. made me fear what might happen during the micro-seconds of vulnerability I experience every time my eyes blink shut, Slender has me double-checking what’s behind me every time things get a little to quiet. Dear old Pyramid Head left me questioning my tendencies as a male gamer to engage in graphic, often gratuitous violence for a long time afterwards.

A monster is more than a beast. It is not just a predator that threatens the characters in the story, a creature-feature whose threat ends once it is slain. It reaches out beyond the fourth wall, staying with the reader long after the suspension of disbelief has passed. The Losers’ Club may have killed It, but I still refuse to go within striking distance of a clown. A monster ruins a bit of us, leaves us feeling uncomfortable with something out there in the wider world, irrevocably taints our perception of it.

A few posts ago I was talking about the role the sub-human creatures collectively referred to as ‘ver-men’ were hopefully going to play in Crescent Knife. But I want them to be more than nightmarish to the characters. I want the reader to feel some of that fear when they crawl onto the page. That means pushing the suspension of disbelief and tapping into that little psychological distinction between a beast and a monster. I’ve been working on a side project (which might end up finding its way onto this site when it’s more than just maddened scratches on my word processor) that tries to take something mundane and turn it into a thing to be feared, namely a horror scenario where the reflections in a mansion’s mirrors turn against their owners.

The everyday mundane thing I’m attempting to corrupt with the ver-men is, unsurprisingly, vermin. Have you ever found a spider in your room, or a fly, even a mouse, and wondered how the hell it got there? It’s one of the reasons I flatly refuse to go to Australia: no matter how much protection a building seems to offer, spiders always seem to find a way into your towel during a shower. It’s that sense of insecurity, that your house isn’t metaphorically watertight to opportunistic little critters, that I’m working on turning against the reader. Because once that seed it planted, every rustle in the middle of the night, every scrape and scratch, might just be a creepy-crawly lying in wait. We had what we thought was a mouse infestation at one of our old houses, but when we found a rat in the garden one day that seed was planted: maybe it wasn’t benevolent, hungry mice scurrying around and gnawing on the carpet, but fat, aggressive rats that’d quite happily take a nibble out of you if they thought they could get away with it. The slightest skittering beneath my bed was enough to send me from nearly-asleep to painfully-awake in a heartbeat during that time.

Now make that bigger. Instead of a rodent the length of your forearm squeezing through some unseen hole, it’s a man-sized amalgam of all the worst vermin creatures out there, finding some dark corner to wait until you’re at your most vulnerable. Something mundane and already a little uncomfortable, turned wrong. Impossible, yes, but monster-induced fear is never rooted in reality. I don’t actually think a clown is going to eat me, or a Kraken will rise from the sea and drag me down into the drowning dark. It’s irrational, impossible, but monsters over the years have left me with that fear regardless. Because when you’re out there, at your most vulnerable to whatever the instilled fear it, you don’t need the book or game or whatever to suspend your disbelief. Your mind, your damned imagination, does that for you.

It can’t be real. It’s impossible.

Right?

There’s no way to introduce this week’s subject in a pithy way without coming across as someone who doesn’t take serious issues, well… seriously. And since my short story this week was sprinkled with racial epithets, I’m sure you can understand my approaching the delicate subject of race with just that: delicacy.

So, here’s the bottom line: racial stereotyping is wrong, m’kay? It’s unacceptable in real life, so why should we tolerate it in our writing? It doesn’t matter how supposedly flattering the stereotyping is, if you say that the Chinese are good with maths, the Germans with organisation or the French with love-making; you’re still painting an entire people with broad strokes of sweeping generalisation.

In modern society, it’s offensive to the race in question. In writing, it makes for shallow story telling.

And yet the fantasy genre, along with perhaps the science fiction genre to a lesser extent, is often woefully guilty of racial stereotyping. Last week’s issue of affirmative action goes hand in hand with this: many writers, in satisfying this phantom obligation to foist fantastical races upon their stories, end up portraying those races in broad, generalised terms. It goes back to the simple matter of resources: the more you put into your story, the less you can actually focus on. So, if you shoe-horn in Elves, Dwarves and what-else-have-you in, then in order to preserve space for your actual narrative any attempt to examine and analyse these races is going to be done in expansive terms. And your story is going to suffer for it.

I’ve always have a personal beef with fantasy stories’ depictions of Elves. They’re irritatingly good at everything as a race. They’re frequently the fastest, strongest, smartest, most magically competent race in a writer’s setting. But what I find intolerable is not so much their universal superlativity in all fields, but the fact that it seems to be something that applies to each and every one of them. It’s the broad stereotype that annoys me: each and every one is a superior elder being possessed of deep spirituality and, usually, some profound connection to nature. The same with Dwarves as gruff, recalcitrant blacksmiths with a penchant for drinking and a bad mood. Or Halflings as ebullient, gregarious farmers with a penchant for drinking and a seemingly irrepressible good mood. Or Orcs as single-minded, quasi-animalistic, blood-thirsty savages.

Starting to get my drift?

Now, of course a race is going to have generally shared characteristics. But it’s more than a matter of ‘Dwarves are gruff and surly because they are Dwarves’. If you want gruff and surly Dwarves they you need to give them a reason to be that way. Some rationale in their racial history, culture and/or psyche that makes them generally prickly towards others. And there’s the operative word: generally. It may sound obvious, but you cannot make, or more importantly portray, all Dwarves in this fashion. And you can’t just make the Dwarf attached to the protagonist group different and think you’ve gotten away from the problem either.

Put it this way: when you’re dealing with fantasy races, sit back for a moment and ask yourself whether you’d be able to get away with what you’re planning in the real world. Saying the Dwarves are generally mistrustful of outsiders and perhaps have a slightly grim outlook on matters is, in real life terms, similar to saying that Americans prefer more conservative politics or Japanese culture possesses a greater focus on law and order. But portraying each and every, or even a great deal, of Dwarves in that way is coming dangerously close to portraying a good deal of Americans as gun-toting, bible-bashing red-necks, or the Japanese as honour-bound subservients.

I guess that’s what I’m trying to get around to saying: culture is, by definition, a broad-stroke generalisation that will always have exceptions to the rule. As a writer, it’s your obligation to show those exceptions, to demonstrate that a race isn’t a single, uniform body that marches to the beat of one drum. Not all Dwarves are going to be surly and stand-offish, or be interested in mining or metallurgy, despite general cultural and socio-historic indicators to the contrary. That’s the difference between cultural statements and racial stereotyping: one provides a useful focal point to anchor a reader’s understanding of a race (if a reader is informed about certain cultural, social and historical predilections towards certain features, it frames any subsequent information the writer will give them about groups or individuals), while the other creates shallow, generic copy-and-paste automata.

This is something that, the more I think about it, the more I really ought to be worried about this operating on Crescent Knife. You see, it’s easy to say ‘I want this setting to be filled with humans pushed to the brink, caught in a life-long desperate fight for survival’, but that risks falling into what I’ve just described. It flirts with the boundary between a general cultural statement that mankind is struggling to live from day to day, and a quickly-tiresome clichéd depiction of each and every character in my story. The fact that a ‘fight for survival’ cultural paradigm offers a lot of different manifestations goes a small way, I think, to avoiding this, but nevertheless the danger remains. There always need to be exceptions, not to prove the rule but to actively disprove it. Even in a constant life-or-death, there will always be exceptions. Those who try not to give in to baser survival instincts, who rebel against generations of self-interest and the stand-alone complex.

The resistance, for example, is more than just a means to an end. It goes beyond an effort to survive by redistributing wealth and power. At its most fundamental, it’s an enraged cry that people should not be forced into a situation where they have to backstab one another, and an active demonstration that cooperation can still get something done. Or the last remnants of the Churches, clinking to their husk-gods and their dusty teachings, sacrificing their own well being to stay true to a higher cause.

Stereotypes go beyond being potentially offensive clichés. If everything is uniform, then there’s nothing interesting to examine as a writer. If every last human in Ivarda was a self-obsessed pragmatist driven by his/her survival instinct, then it all smears together into an unrecognisable blur. Variety is the spice of life, and it punctuates the population of a world. Culturally, I will certainly say that humanity is pushed to the bring, but to let that then inform each and every individual is shooting myself in the foot. It reduces the difficulty and tragedy of the struggle to something bland and commonplace. But if there are exceptions, groups and individuals who break from that cultural norm, then it makes those who haven’t all the more tragic, and those who do not necessarily heroic, but outstanding in the most literal sense. They stand out and interest the reader, they make him ask how and why they’re different.

Perhaps other fantasy races won’t feel this as profoundly as I’ve doe with Crescent Knife, but the point is nevertheless valid. Mistaking a broad cultural statement for a blueprint to even a majority of your race is going to lead to a people your reader doesn’t care about. They see one, they’ve seen them all. It takes more effort, no doubt, but a race needs to be, and be seen to be, full of dynamic differences. It may complicate the story with more conflicts than otherwise, and require more exposition to weave into the narrative in a subtle fashion, but in the end it’ll pay dividends.

Please, take this to heart. If I have to read about one more insufferably homogenous race of Elves I swear I will eat my laptop.

So, last week’s spiel was all about masking the plot purposes of cities behind a veneer of history and development. This week is, perhaps, an inversion of that: giving history and development to something that doesn’t have a purpose.

I’m talking about races.

As soon as you think of the fantasy genre, your mind jumps to fantasy races, doesn’t it? Elves, Dwarves, Men, Hobbits/Halflings/Vertically-Challenged-Hirsute-Creatures (or whatever you wish to call them). And who can blame you? It’s practically been a given since Tolkien; a trope that most writers of the genre have bought into at least once in their careers.

But why? Why do writers fill their worlds with strange creatures and alien cultures? The answer, many times, seems to be nothing more than ‘just because’. Because that’s the perceived obligation from fantasy stories. Because it helps the author establish that this is, in fact, a weird and wonderful world apart from ours. Because the author doesn’t feel that his story is creative or fantastical enough without them.

You know what it ultimately boils down to? A literary version of affirmative action: authors introducing these different races to their stories purely because they’re different races. They serve no ultimate purpose to the plot that the central race, say Humans, could accomplish. They exist purely to be other.

I’m going to put forward a rather controversial point. Books are not video games.

Woah, right? I’m gonna let you take a moment to collect the pieces of your mind that have been scattered across your room after being blown by that point. In your typical fantasy video game, plot elements are introduced for one of two primary reasons: story and gameplay. And races, more often than not, fall into the latter category: the plot involves Elves, Dwarves, Humans et cetera not because the story demands it, but because the gameplay requires a player be able to choose which he wants to play for sundry cosmetic and mechanical reasons.

Much the same is true with ‘affirmative action’ in fantasy. The writer wants a race that looks and behaves differently from the norm and so introduces them into the story. In this way, Elves and Dwarves serve no purpose to the story beyond being just that: different. There is nothing gained from their presence in the story beyond difference.

I’d like to take an example from a game. The first Dragon Age ascribed to the traditional triumvirate of fantasy races: Elves, Dwarves and Humans. It gave the game’s story a degree of diversity, but in the end the races had little impact on the story being told. The Elves were a downtrodden race that lurked in ghettos, the Dwarves a stoic, mistrustful people under siege from demonic infestations plaguing their cities. It allows the story to move to different locations and throw the central characters into different situations, but beyond that it serves no greater purpose. In gameplay terms, yes, it’s very useful to inject variety into mechanics and levels. But in story-telling terms there’s no real point to them. They don’t fulfil any role that the central race could. It might just as well be a subset of Humans that are downtrodden and lurk in ghettos (gee, maybe that’s not such a fantastical idea, huh?), or a colony of Humans having to deal with constant infestation.

My problem isn’t that fantasy races are introduced because they’re different. Of course they’re different. But that difference serves no purpose. It is a means without an end. Bad fantasy writers seem to think, ‘oh, I’ve introduce a strange new race to my setting’ and think that’s the end of it. The question then becomes, ‘okay, what are you going to make with that difference?’. How is that difference going to impact your story beyond its mere difference.

Writers are quick to borrow the ‘Tolkien triumvirate’ of races, but slower to borrow the reason behind them. Tolkien wasn’t exactly a writer who was shy about giving his races a vast amount history and development, but they never existed in The Lord of the Rings, say, purely for the sake of being something outlandish. Tolkien’s Elves, for instance (and this is a Kodak moment, because it might be the only time on this site I actually complement Tolkien’s Elves) actually served a greater purpose in the story. They were a race in their twilight years, who had come to terms with the fact that their wisdom and power would fade from the mortal world. While I have plenty to say about said ‘wisdom and power’, they provided an excellent counter-point to Mankind, who fought to the last man in a desperate war for survival. The Elves were content to go quietly into that good night, while Humanity was going to kick and scream until the end. It gave the story a beautiful dynamic of one race passing the torch to the next: yes, the Elves had once stood alongside Mankind in the battle for survival, but now their time is passing and it’s up to Humanity to step up to the plate alone.

Similarly, the Dwarves, although they played a miniscule part in the main story (if memory serves, Gimli is the sole (living) Dwarf in the entire series), they nevertheless exist to do more than just ‘be different’. The whole Elf/Dwarf rivalry, and Gimli and Legolas’ overcoming of that, serves as an excellent vector for the unifying power that conflict and adversity can have on disparate peoples (which, given the context of its writing, is hardly surprising).

Tolkien didn’t just throw in Elves and Dwarves because there was some well-established fantasy trope (although he is massively responsible for that resulting trope). He didn’t introduce them to the world because he needed it to appear more fantastical and outlandish. They served a greater purpose to the story.

This is something I had to sit down to ponder on for a long while when I first started developing the idea of Crescent Knife. The siren song of having additional fantasy races kicking around the story, thus giving a writer a lot more resources (remember those?) to work with, is massively tempting. But I quickly realised that there was nothing that additional races could do that the ‘central race’, in this case Man, couldn’t do on its own (if not better). A city driven to betrayal and duplicity, with neighbour conspiring against neighbour, every man for himself and no moral scruples getting in the way of survival? How would introducing Elves or Dwarves into that help? Is it not actually more effective to see Man screwing over his fellow Men; isn’t that more indicative of the level to which the citizens of Ivarda have sunk in their desperate struggle just to stay alive?

So yes, I decided that Crescent Knife was going to be Humans-only. No fantasy affirmative action. To an extent…

I’m currently toying around with the idea of a quasi-race (perhaps ‘sub-species’ is a better term): the ver-men. It’s a working title, an obvious attempt to play around with the word ‘vermin’, because that’s what this sub-species is: feral humans who, over the centuries, have regressed (de-evolved is an ugly term) into a state where they’ve begun to resemble rats, cockroaches, wild dogs, spiders… your typical city pests only with much greater cunning, aggression and size. And I’m not putting this in just to make Ivarda feel like a weird, different city. These ver-men serve a purpose beyond being weird and different; they’re a constant reminder to the inhabitants of what survival can mean, the living, hunting and killing embodiment of the dangers of that particular instinct taking over completely. The unspoken threat that there might be worse fates than death. Just as the Mist outside the walls serves as a constant looming threat from without, the ver-men are going to be a constant, festering threat from within – not just from within the city, but from within every man himself. Ultimately, I’m not introducing them to be different. I’m introducing them to be profoundly, terrifyingly the same.

When I was younger, I was utterly stoked for the release of a computer game called Rise of Nations. It was a sort of real time civilisation simulator that had you building your own personal empire, city by city, while amassing resources and either negotiating or warring with neighbouring empires. What had me really itching to play this game was the prospect of being able to take a patch of land, plant a few hovels and slowly build it into a fully fledged city. I’d always had a thing for designing interesting layouts of buildings in other real time strategy games, and the opportunity to take that to the next level by designing an entire city was irresistible.

When the game came out, I was drastically disappointed. As it turned out, the much-anticipating city-building mechanic was actually quite sparse, consisting of the player placing down a central ‘city’ structure and then building a few choice additions around it: marketplaces, ports, fortresses and maybe one or two interesting landmarks if you have the cash to spare.

This past week, in expectation of my weekly musings on the craft of fantasy writing, I’ve been reminiscing about my experiences with Rise of Nations and paying more attention to my surroundings than I usually do on my daily walks to and from University (although, more attention than barely any isn’t saying much). That’s because I want to round off my informal opening trilogy of musings about setting with a discussion on cities. City-building, in particular.

Building a city can be the easiest part of writing a fantasy story. Like in Rise of Nations, you only need a core body of residential buildings supplemented by whatever the plot or setting requires that city to have: a marketplace, a port, a fortress and maybe one or two interesting landmarks. Throw that all together onto a map location and boom, you have yourself an easy city.

Here’s the catch. Writing, like all good alchemy, is all about equivalent exchange: you get out as much as you put in. If you put in the bare essentials to build a city easily, that’s all you’re going to get out. If all your city boils down to is a central body of buildings with a few extra add-ons scattered throughout like salt over a bag of chips, your city’s going to closer resemble one of the old Wild West film sets made up of building-fronts and nothing else, rather than an actual living, breath, thriving (or faltering) community.

As it turns out, however, a lot of fantasy writers fall into this groove. I’d comment on Eragon, but I picked on Paolini last week and I really don’t want to beat the same drum twice. But the point remains: if you treat your city as a generic lump of necessary homes and halls, with whatever the plot requires stapled to the city, you’re not going to have a very convincing location either on your hands, or on your map.

A city is for life, not just for a chapter. No matter how passing a glimpse the reader is given of a city, they’ll be able to tell whether it’s plot convenience in disguise or an actual developed settlement. Because readers are canny bastards like that. But there was a key word in that statement: developed. Cities don’t just spring up because some higher authority wills them; they develop. They grow based on external stimuli and internal desires, changing and learning and adapting. Cities, in the end, are just very big characters with an inability to talk.

One of the earliest examples of a truly developed city I ever read was the alternative London in The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray. Following the appearance of monstrous, quasi-demonic creatures in the wake of a British/Prussian war, London has sealed off everything south of the Thames and currently exists in a state of siege as these creatures slowly but surely breach this quarantine on a nightly basis. The abandoned southern city has a hollow, echoing feel to it, while the northern half of the city tries to carry on beneath the looming spectre of this supernatural threat. The police are over-worked and verging on draconian policies, few dare venture out after dark unless it’s urgent, suspicion and superstition abound.

This is a city that’s grown from its history, evolving and producing its own unique atmosphere and feel, and indeed population. Yes, it provides the plot with the necessary elements (secondary antagonists, dangers, complications), but none of it feels contrived purely for the sake of advancing the plot. When the protagonists need to capture one of these monsters and go down into the sewers to make the attempt, it doesn’t feel like the monsters are suddenly crawling around in the sewers because the protagonists need one – it’s a logical point given the fact that these monsters are trying to infiltrate past the quarantine. Similarly, when the protagonists are constantly road-blocked by a police officer, it doesn’t feel like forced conflict because, hey, if I was a bobby in that city I wouldn’t want a bunch of private investigators and monster hunters running around unchecked either.

Let me put it this way. You wouldn’t introduce a character, no matter how small and ancillary, without having some idea of his personality and back-story. He isn’t just going to act as a mannequin upon which you hang plot threads. The same is true with a city. Yes, you need something from the city, a castle to breach or a port to carry the heroes across an ocean, but you can’t just staple those elements onto the city. And you can’t just give reasons either. Sure, the city has a castle because it borders upon uncivilised wild-lands, or it has a port because it’s next to a large body of that slightly bluish wet stuff most worlds call water. No shit. There has to be a history to it, and some sort of personality, if you want your readers to not just accept the city, but believe in it. The city has a castle, but it’s been worn down by decades of attack, or the enemy has developed new tricks to get around it. The city has a port, but it’s been retrofitted from military shipyards, or it’s being abandoned because there’s no good fishing to be had any more. These may not impact your story any more than the little flash of back-story you gave that smuggler in chapter 3 (his father was an alcoholic and so he got into smuggling because he realised there was always going to be a demand for booze, say). But the point isn’t to impact your story. The point is to make your story more than just a connection of happy coincidences that let it progress. You want your reader to believe that there’s more to your world than the bare essentials required for the plot to advance: the inclusion of details means that these necessary elements aren’t regarded as glaring necessities, but logical parts of a developed whole.

I’ve really been feeling this point weighing down on me with Crescent Knife. Limiting myself to just one city as the entirety of my story’s setting, it’s obviously of major import to me that this city is more than just a constellation of useful features to get from plot point A to B in X number of chapters. I’ve needed to develop an entire back-story to develop the city, to make sure that everything I end up using to further my story doesn’t appear as something shoe-horned in because I need it to be there, but something that’s organically grown from what the reader knows about the city.

The really great thing I’ve realised about Ivarda, and something that happened unintentionally, is that it came into my head after the original idea about the Mist. That was where Crescent Knife began, and everything else has grown around that concept (which is ironic, given that I have no real intention of exploring the Mist – I like the idea of it always being an unexplained, unresolved phenomenon). This means that the city, Ivarda, has already been developing in my head based on this cataclysm that befell it. Yes, there’s an overcrowded Lower City that is fermenting with ill-will towards the Nobility and a constant breeding ground for resistance movements, and that’s a great source for me as a writer to develop grey-shaded characters who can either help or hinder the protagonists depending upon how they fit into their guerrilla schemes. But hopefully it won’t come across as just ‘there’s a resistance because I need an organisation that can’t always be trusted, but is occasionally useful’. Rather, it comes across as part of a logical development of the setting. Similarly, yes there’s an underground complex of ancient machines that allows pretty much anyone that knows their way around to move undetected through most of the city, but since Ivarda was once the capital of an empire at a pinnacle of technological and magical development, it comes across as a logical element of the city, rather than something I’ve forced it to avoid the occasional plot problems when I need characters to move around unnoticed.

Some may say that all this really boils down to is glorified window dressing. That ensuring your cities have little historical quirks to make the necessary plot point developed and organic is nothing more than adding a little trim and tassel to doll up your plot. I’d like to think that yes, that’s exactly what it’s doing. That’s what engenders the willing suspension of disbelief in readers. Putting in those details, that extra effort to show that a community doesn’t just exist one way or another because the author needs it for some meta-plot reason, but because of reasons grounded in the world itself, is what immerses the reader in a story. So the next time you sit down to write about a city your characters visit, by all means ask yourself what you need that city to do for your plot. But don’t just then tack those essential elements onto the city and think you’re done. Take the city and nurture it into what you need it to become. It needs a history and stimulus – that’s the sun and water required to make it grow.