Lovable Monsters

I’ve loved my share of monsters.

As a reader, I mean. Usually, they’re the kind of monsters who kill bad people. But sometimes, even when they don’t, you can still understand them, empathize with them, and even connect with them, a topic that Colette and Nancy have touched on in their posts this month.

Then, I met a really nasty sort. A crippled torturer by the name of Sand dan Glokta who lurked within the pages of Joe Abercrombies First Law trilogy. Glokta is even one of the major PoV characters. He’s exactly the type of character that seems designed to be hated. Funny thing is, I didn’t hate him.  In fact, he may be one of my favorite characters ever, and judging by discussions I’ve read online, I’m not alone.

The writer in me wants to know why Glokta is so compelling. On the surface, he seems indefensible. His sense of morality is anemic at best. Some of his victims may be deserving, but others are less so. There’s no obvious “save the cat” style scene early on to create likeability. Instead, I think Abercrombie uses a more subtle series of techniques that allows readers to connect with Glokta.

First, introspection. Immediately upon being introduced to Glokta we find him asking himself, why do I do it? This motif continues throughout his character arc. Many of us find ourselves, at some point in our lives, questioning what we’re doing, trying to figure out how we got there. Glokta’s inner reflections also give us hope that he might redeem himself still. That he might realize what he’s doing is wrong. They turn him from a monster to a flawed human.

Second, he’s understandable. Once a famed officer and accomplished duelist, Glokta was captured by his enemies and tortured for two years. The experience left him badly crippled and in constant pain. Returning home, he found himself turned away by many of his friends and left with few options, ended up joining the inquisition. Though we might find him morally repugnant, we can still imagine how bitter the world most look to Glokta, filtered through so much bitterness and pain, for we all have our own dark moments where we contemplate, if briefly, doing dark things.

Third, his enemies are worse than he is. The old adage ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ is an adage for a reason.  Glokta serves as antagonist to some truly vile people. In comparison, he seems downright heroic at times, as he fights against deeply rooted corruption and powerful organizations.

Fourth, Abercrombie makes deft use of authorial sleight-of-hand. Whereas we get many pages of Glokta reflecting on things and plotting against his enemies, torture is given relatively few, if any at all. Abercrombie often fades to black before the worst parts, especially early on in the series. This speaks to the power of editing. Just as in reality shows, real people can seem heroic or villainous depending on which few minutes of the day we see them, so can characters in books.

Fifth, tone. The world in the First Law is not a happy one. The novel sets different expectations from the start.  The characters are all heavily flawed. There is no immaculate hero for us to set Glokta next to. His pain, his shades of gray, even his acts of evil, fit well within the world.

Not all readers will enjoy a character like Glokta. I’m sure more than a few are so repulsed by him that they wouldn’t finish the series. But, as Abercrombie and other authors like George R.R. Martin have shown, there’s clearly an audience for such characters. They take a great deal of mastery to write without alienating your entire readership, so I wouldn’t advise writing one lightly, but if you do, study Glokta carefully. And maybe you’ll find yourself loving a monster too.

Making the Fear Personal

Over the last month we’ve been looking on the darker side of things, and at the way love and terror go so very well together. And they should, really. They are the most basic and universal of human emotions. They are intertwined and hardwired into our psyches, a part of the survival instinct that keeps our species alive and multiplying. They transcend culture, class, and temperament.

For instance, people feel envy over different things and react to it in different ways. I may never sympathize with someone enraged by some slight or another, even though I may understand it on a logical level. But someone who is terrified?

Absolutely.

The funny thing is that, many of us silly humans, seem to still feel that our emotions are unlike anyone else’s. “No one else can understand my heartache or my terror,” we tell ourselves. “They can’t know what I feel. Not really.”

Well, actually, yes, they can. That’s the basis for group therapy, after all, but we do like to feel like we are all the beautiful, unique snowflakes our mothers told us we were, don’t we?

From a writer’s perspective, the universality of these emotions and the vaulted position people like to place their own emotional experiences rather works in our favor. Love and fear are so ingrained in the human psyche that it’s hard to write compelling fiction without tripping over them both while gazing off into the clouds of our imaginations.

Fear is probably the first and most vital of emotions. The need to not get eaten by something big and bad, after all, is the primary instinct of most creatures on this planet. The fear of death, failure, disappointment, loneliness, and pain is prevalent across the fiction board. Fear is the root of tension and plants doubt in every protagonist in just about every book ever written. Small or large, incidental or monstrous, we all recognize the people we’re reading about when their fears are put on the page, and we all hope they overcome their fears somehow, even if (or especially because) we often cannot overcome our own.

At the same time humans are pack animals, and so it’s no surprise that we feel the need to include the binding emotion of love in our stories. The characters don’t necessarily have to be involved in the affair of the century. They simply have to care about something or someone. A character who cares for nothing, is…well…rather boring, to be honest. The anti-hero, Riddick, doesn’t care about anything or anyone when we first meet him in Pitch Black, but it is through his slow turn toward caring for the individuals around him that he becomes human to us, someone to sympathize with. I don’t think anyone could ever say that his caring strays to the romantic—the man is, after all, a psychopath—but his attachments motivate and drive him through multiple films. He changes from a monster himself, into one of us.

Or rather, I should say, his attachments mixed with the inevitable fear of losing those attachments, is what motivates him. It all comes back to the fear in fiction, doesn’t it?  Loving or needing something might be readily recognizable, but it’s the fear of losing those things or of them turning against us, that  really makes it worth reading.

Anytime love and fear end up on a page, we’re using the universal to make a moment personal. We give the readers something almost subconsciously familiar, made interesting by being seen through someone else’s eyes. We show a window into emotional lives that, at first blush, looks nothing like the reader’s, but in actuality uses their personal experiences to pull them further into the story.

We writers often struggle to write something compelling and moving. It’s nice to get a free-bee every so often.

How to Build a Murderer

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Horror and mayhem are all about the villain. Your murderer has to be  as real as and smarter than your hero, whether your hero is a street smart cop, a yoga teacher framed for the killing or a busy body old lady. And really, why would anyone invite Ms. Jane Marple (Agatha Christie’s heroine)  or Jessica Fletcher (Murder She Wrote) to a party? People are falling down dead all around them. All the time.

But I digress.

The challenge in writing a murderer is to push past your own personal revulsion at what the character does and see why he does it.

Why do we love Professor James Moriarty as much as Sherlock Holmes?

Because Moriarty is a whole and terribly wounded person. He has wants, needs and his own (internal) code of conduct. He is at least as clever as, if not more clever than, Sherlock. Moriarty is who Sherlock could have been if he’d been nudged down a different path.

My current work in progress is an urban fantasy thriller. So how did I create a murderer? I did what any writer would do. Research.

I’m probably on the NSA’s watch list based on the serial killer searches I ran from my computer. I read lots of thrillers, murder mysteries, and true crime novels. I took notes.  I read craft books including James N. Frey’s How to Write a Damned Good Mystery: A Practical Step-by-Step Guide from Inspiration to Finished Manuscript.  I highly recommend Frey’s book to anyone writing in this genre. mystery cover

My research confirmed a lot of what I suspected. What makes a good murderer? According to Frey:

“1. Our murderer will be evil.” Frey defines this as someone who is acting out of his or her best interests. I’ll add that this drive toward self-satisfaction will be overwhelming. Our killer doesn’t care who he hurts as long as he gets his selfish desires.

“2.  Our murder will not appear to be evil.”  Sadly, real life bears this principle out. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Aileen Wuornos all looked respectable. Bundy worked a crisis hotline. The idea of evil lurking just under the skin is central to horror stories. Also, if the bad guy is the obvious suspect you fail to create the tension needed to maintain a horror, mystery or thriller.

“3. Our murderer will be clever and resourceful.” Sherlock would not spend his life trying to catch Moriarty if he wasn’t clever or resourceful. The near miss, the hero arriving moments too late, creates tension and makes the chase all that more thrilling. We read thrillers and murder mysteries for the chase and inevitable capture.

“4. Our murderer is wounded.”  A deep psychological wound drives our murderer. After all, he’s taken a step (or several dozen) past the line. He’s gone from thinking of ending someone’s life to actually doing it. Like Jack the Ripper, he may take his crime beyond mere murder and mutilate his victims. He’s shattered the veneer of civilization we all live with, and something outside the normal has made him do it. He (often) justifies killing because of this emotional wound. This is probably the step that most “failed” (defined as stories that didn’t capture my attention) stories miss. Without this driving force shaping your murderer he will feel like a two-dimensional character or a cliché.

“5. Our murderer is afraid.” Even with the thrill of the kill the murderer must worry about apprehension. His fear mixes with an intensifies his other emotions. Your character needs to feel fear whether fear of discovery, losing what he’s built or something else. Fear is a defining human trait. We all fear something. Often many somethings. Fear of failure. Fear of being not good enough. Fear of being discovered as a “fraud.” Without fear a character is a sketch.

Lots of craft books spend time on getting you to flesh out your characters. Your killer should be the most fully realized. You need to know his history and all his actions even though most will never make it into the story – only the results. The psychology of a killer is in many ways more important than his physiology. Merely hitting the high points of psychopathy – like most serial killers in their youth have tortured or killed animals – isn’t enough. Merely hating women isn’t enough. Something in the killer’s path has pushed him over the line from malcontent to murderer.

Did he accidentally kill someone in a fit of temper and “get away” with it but now he has to kill again to protect the life he’s built since (the example Frey uses in his book)? Did he like the thrill? What is he afraid of?

Simply put, if you don’t know how your killer got to the point we find him in this story he’s not going to be very compelling.

Frey spends about 20 pages on developing your murderer and becoming intimate with him. Obviously, I can’t do justice to Frey’s advice in the space of a blog post. But let me leave you with this:

Murderers are three-dimensional characters. They are clever, not just lucky. They are “evil” in the sense that their desires are the most important thing in the world to them. They are highly damaged people. Unless you know what drives your killer (his wound) you can’t know how he kills and won’t keep your reader engaged.

WEB_N Greene-1 You can find me at my blog. Twitter, and Facebook .

 

 

 

Book Launch: Veterans of the Future Wars

VFWCoversm All’s fair in love and war…and sometimes, the last thing you can do for your loved ones is to take up their cause as your own.

VFW: Veterans of the Future Wars is out now from Martinus Publishing. I’m honoured to be part of this military science fiction anthology assembled as as tribute to veterans. 10% of profits will be donated to Disabled American Veterans.

And so, my second post this month isn’t about love and murder. It’s about love and war. It’s about the love that soldiers have for the women and men in their units: their brothers and sisters in arms, the people they live with, work alongside, fight with…and all too often die with. And it’s about a young misfit who realizes, a little too late, that her comrades in arms are the family she’s never had.

What do you do when the only person to look out for you, the only person to really care about you, is taken away from you in a sudden, shocking act of war–before you’ve had a chance to appreciate what she’s done for you? For a young spacer named Jan, she finds herself honour-bound to become the soldier her unit commander always believed she could be. But her greatest enemy isn’t the Colonials who attacked her ship; it’s the devastating emotional aftermath of being a survivor, and that war may continue long after the Colonials lay down their arms.

Jan’s story, entitled “The Last and the Least,” is one of 16 short stories in VFW: Veterans of the Future Wars.  If you’d like to see an excerpt from the story and read a little more about the inspiration for this tale, you can check out my author interview at Three Cents Worth.

You can order your digital copy for Kindle of VFW: Veterans of the Future Wars from Amazon, or order a paper copy directly from the publisher.   Prepare to explore the Future Wars – and honour those who have fought before.