Category Archives: POV

Gambler, Trickster, Son of Battles

Character Gregory D. Little POV The Writing Life No Comments

No list of memorable characters in fantasy would be complete with Mat Cauthon. Robert Jordan’s resident troublemaker from The Wheel of Time series, Mat underwent an interesting journey, both within the pages of the books themselves and in this reader’s esteem as well.

[Warning: extensive spoilers for The Wheel of Time follow]

Mat begins the story as the town clown of Emond’s Field, Jordan’s Shire-like origin point for most of the series’ main characters. Everyone knows a Mat in real life. He’s the kid so known for troublemaking that everyone blames him as soon as something goes wrong. Most of the time, they aren’t wrong to do so. An archetypal “trickster” character, Matt’s eye for adventure and treasure along with his complete lack of common sense in the early books led him to quickly become my least favorite of the main heroes. Time after time his antics nearly get the others (and himself) killed. In the most singular example, he picks up a cursed dagger against explicit orders because it has a ruby in the pommel, and he pays dearly for this impetuous decision by nearly dying several times and losing large chunks of his memory. It’s safe to say that by the end of the second book, The Great Hunt, I was ready to wash my hands of Mat as a reader.

Then something funny happened. In the third book, The Dragon Reborn, Mat is presented as a viewpoint character for the first time. He also, quite against his own idea of better judgment, begins stepping up to responsibility when no one else is there to do so. Thus begins an epic quest within the larger story of the series, as Mat seeks to repair the damage done to him by the cursed dagger, repeatedly save his friends’ lives whether they admit to needing saving or not. Through a series of steps, each of which Mat himself would argue were perfectly necessary at the time, Mat becomes a proficient warrior, a master general, possessor of several powerful magical artifacts, husband to an empress and a true hero in his own right. But this is the stuff of any number of coming of age stories. Mat isn’t even the main character of The Wheel of Time. What makes him memorable isn’t just what I’ve listed above.

What makes it memorable is that Mat accomplishes all this while being absolutely hilarious about it all.

To be sure, Matt isn’t one of those characters who spouts off three witty lines per page for the entirety of the series. The humor of his character isn’t in what he says, but rather the irony the series continually thrusts upon him.

Contemptuous of nobility from the moment he first encounters them, of course he marries an empress. Disdainful of the notion of heroism and responsibility, of course he becomes a hero and a great battlefield commander. A gambler, drunkard (at least as far as The Wheel of Time’s PG-13 sensibilities allow) and a shameless flirt, Mat is utterly flummoxed when a young orphan boy his elite military squad adopts begins flirting with every woman he encounters. He repeatedly vows to determine who is teaching the boy such bad habits, never once realizing that, of course, Mat himself is.

Mat is a stellar example of how to make a character funny not by what they say, but but who they are. That’s actually a lot harder to do than it sounds.

Fans of Norse mythology will begin to recognize some of Mat’s exploits as they read, and the archetypal nature of his character begins to resonate with the gods (not the Marvel characters) Loki and Odin as the series goes on. The links to Loki, the trickster god, are obvious, but Wheel of Time fans who are unfamiliar with Mat’s connection to Odin may feel a little chill when they hear of Odin hanging himself from a tree and cutting out his own eye for the sake of wisdom.

From my least favorite character, Mat rocketed up the charts to become my favorite character in the series, and it wasn’t even close.
About the Author: Gregory D. LittleHeadshot

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (sometimes during) classes. His first novel, Unwilling Souls, is available now from ebook retailers and trade paperback through Amazon.com. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens and A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their yellow lab.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com), his Twitter handle (@litgreg) or at his Author Page on Facebook.

 

 

The Semi-True Story

Character Craft & Skills Horror Mary Pletsch Narrative Voice POV The Writing Life World-building No Comments

I gave a copy of Fossil Lake:  An Anthology of the Aberrant to my parents with a proviso attached:  it’s not autobiographical.

fossilThe assumption would be easy enough to make.  My contribution to Fossil Lake, the short story “Mishipishu:  The Ghost Story of Penny Jaye Prufrock,” is set at a summer camp for kids.  The name of the camp in the story, Camp Zaagaigan (the Algonquin word for “lake”) is fictional; so is Lake Mishipishu (I actually checked on the maps and found a Mishibishu Lake…)  My parents, however, would be able to name the real camp and the real lake after they read the story:  from the cabin line to that infamous H-dock, the layout of Camp Zaagaigan mirrors its real-world counterpart, and they drove me there often enough to recognize it.

From there it’s just one step further to wondering how much more of the story is real.

I’m often asked whether the characters in my story are “me,” or whether the events are “real,” and all I can ever say is that I write semi-true stories.  Semi-true in that I’ve never been able to take a person, event, or revelation and transcribe it into fiction word-for-word.  As a writer friend of mine says, real life doesn’t have to make sense, but fiction does.  Even if I’m starting with something “inspired by a true story,” in order to make event or character coherent, I have to add things here, or take things away that might have happened in real life, but don’t add anything useful to the tale I’m telling.  Sometimes changes to the story make it more dramatic, more compelling, or more satisfying; and so the events “inspired by a true story” move ever farther away from a faithful reflection of reality.  After all, I’m writing fiction—I’m not required to report on reality.  I’m required to tell an engaging and powerful tale.

And semi-true in that I do my best to write characters who feel real:  who behave in realistic ways, who are recognizable and relatable, who are emotionally honest.  When I write them, I put myself in their position and see the world through their eyes; and yes, to an extent, I feel what they feel, and try to express that emotion in the words I’m writing.  Often this emotional connection is informed by my own real-world experiences.  I do know what being bullied feels like.  I do know what doing something I know is against the rules feels like.  I don’t know what it feels like to drown, but I do know what it feels like to not be able to breathe, so I write about that…and imagine one step farther, based on research and my own ideas.  These characters aren’t me, but they have pieces of my emotions inside them.

So no, I was never bullied at that summer camp you sent me to,  Mom and Dad.  No, I never snuck out of the cabin after hours.  No, I was never a suicidal twelve-year-old, and no, I’ve never lost sight of the line between reality and imagination.

…or at least, I’ve always found it again in time.

About Mary: 

Mary Pletsch is a glider pilot, toy collector and graduate of the University of Huron College, the Royal Military College of Canada and Dalhousie University. She is the author of several previously published short stories in a variety of genres, including science fiction, steampunk, fantasy and horror. She currently lives in New Brunswick with Dylan Blacquiere and their four cats.

Monsters in All Their Forms

Character Craft & Skills POV Reader Investment & Empathy No Comments

A friend and I were sitting in a brewery last weekend, killing time before meeting our wives for dinner. A wide-ranging discussion of pop culture touched on the concept of monsters in fiction, and what we want and expect out of them.

There are as many types of monsters as can be imagined, and as the quote from A Beautiful Mind goes, “man is capable of as much atrocity as he has imagination.” But fictional monsters can be loosely gathered up into two categories: those with a backstory and those without. Think of them as “evil because,” and “evil just because.” Each of these concepts can do the job of terrifying the reader or viewer, as long as it is consistent with the goals and tone of the story being told.

Monsters with no backstory are easy to find. Look no further than John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece Halloween or the much more recent instant horror classic It Follows. In Halloween, six-year-old Michael Myers transforms from a seemingly normal child into the brutal murderer of his own sister in the films opening moments, filmed chillingly from first-person perspective. From then on, he never speaks a word and barely moves a muscle until fifteen years later when he breaks out of his mental ward and begins killing again.

The monster of It Follows, despite the film’s slasher sensibilities, isn’t even human. Rather, it’s a malevolent force that kills whomever has been afflicted with it. Spread through sex, the entity follows its victims at the same maddeningly slow pace wherever they flee. If it catches them, it brutally kills them, then begins working its way back down the line of the cursed, seeking next the person who passed the curse to its now-dead victim. Once afflicted, you are never truly safe again, even if you pass the curse along. Only the afflicted can see the entity, which takes the form of random people, sometimes a stranger, sometimes people they know. Whatever helps it get close.

In both these films, our inability to relate to or understand the monster is a large part of what makes them scary. You cannot reason with Michael Myers or It, just as you cannot fathom why they are doing what they are doing. Despite later films’ ill-advised attempts to tie Michael Myers to a pagan, druid ritual involving the holiday that would become Halloween, any attempt to explain this sort of monster to the viewer robs it of some of its power. No attempt at all is made to explain the curse of It Follows, and that is to the film’s benefit. These monsters are forces of nature, and they are frightening specifically because they recall the fear, buried deep in our DNA, of being preyed upon by creatures that would never offer mercy and could never be reasoned with. Creatures that saw us only as food.

For examples of villains with backstories, look no further than George R.R. Martin and Thomas Harris. A Song of Ice and Fire is replete with human monsters of both the “evil because” and “evil just because” variety, but where Martin really excels is establishing the protagonist family of the Starks and setting them against the antagonist family of the Lannisters. Very quickly the reader is led to hate the Lannisters, and at some point in the story each member of that family commits monstrous acts, either against the Starks directly or just in general. But over the course of the series, Martin masterfully peels back his onion layer by layer, and we are shown the inner worlds of the Lannister characters and the reasons (very valid to them) why they do awful things. Tyrion we sympathize with from the beginning of course, but no one was more surprised than I when Martin made me like Jaime Lannister. Even with Cersei I could find a measure of pity if not any warmth. If you delve into The World of Ice and Fire, you can even learn a bit of what Tywin Lannister, the main architect of his children’s misery, endured as a younger man that shaped him into the man he later became.

Few books I’ve ever read chilled me as much as Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon. The first of the Hannibal Lecter books, this features a plot similar to the more well-known Silence of the Lambs, but with a different FBI investigator trying to catch a different serial killer. This killer, Francis Dolarhyde, is a singular creation in fiction. He murders entire families at the behest of an alternate personality he calls the Red Dragon. Much of the book is told from his perspective, and it’s the most effective example of getting into the head of a deeply disturbed individual I’ve ever read. We come to learn that Francis, born with a harelip and a cleft palate, was abandoned by his mother and raised with brutal cruelty by his grandmother. This treatment ended up warping Francis into the monster he becomes, and the reader feels anger, horror and pity all at once for the character.

If done effectively, this kind of monster awakens a very different kind of fear. Rather than worrying what lurks beyond the firelight, waiting to eat us, the “evil because” monster forces us to look inward, to see the monster lying dormant within each of us (and our fellows). We look and we wonder. Everyone has heard the quote “There but for the grace of God go I.” If we were perhaps less strong or even just less fortunate, if the various circumstances of our lives had combined in the perfect (or anti-perfect) way, would we end up as warped as these characters? Just how far beneath our surface does a monster lurk?

Each of these kinds of monsters can be used effectively in your writing. However, care must be taken to avoid combining traits of the “evil because” and “evil just because” monsters into a single character. It accomplishes nothing but to muddy the waters and confuse the reader, dragging them out of any sense of immersion you’ve built. The key, as always, is in figuring out the kind of story you are trying to tell and what tools need to be pulled from your toolbox to perform the work.

Don’t worry, the rest of the monsters will still be there, waiting for you, when this particular story is done…

 

About the Author: Gregory D. LittleHeadshot

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (sometimes during) classes. His first novel, Unwilling Souls, will be available later this year. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens and the upcoming Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their yellow lab.

No Evil Required

Author's Perspective Character Conflict Craft & Skills Evan Braun POV 1 Comment

Evil exists in the world. In fact, to some degree it exists in all of us—a dark side that usually only emerges in our most private thoughts but may occasionally peek into the light of day. For the most part, we don’t let this happen. Indeed, for the most part we are good people. In evolutionary terms, goodness propagates itself more successfully; evil is inherently maladaptive.

The worst kind of motivation for a villain is intrinsic, deep-seated evil. They’re evil because they were born that way. Or they crave power obsessively. To me, this almost never rings true. I suppose there are some people like that in the real world, but they must be a rare breed. Most people think of themselves as more or less good—not necessarily saintly, but closer to Mother Teresa than to Adolf Hitler.

Intriguingly, even the people who really are closer to Adolf Hitler probably view themselves as being closer to Mother Teresa, and this is fertile ground for growing conflict in our stories. First of all, a villain is not the same thing as an antagonist. You don’t need a villain to tell a good story, but you probably need an antagonist. What’s the difference? Well, think about it this way. Sometimes you just have two fairly normal people who just happen to want very different things… perhaps even diametrically opposed things… and thus the clash happens. (Exhibit A: Sad Puppies vs. Social Justice Warriors; no evil, moustache-twirling villains here, but a hell of a lot of conflict-enriching antagonism.)

When building a story, try setting up a conflict between two or more sides in which every side could be anchored by a strong, relatable protagonist. The only difference between a protagonist and an antagonist is often the fact that the protagonist gets the primary point of view; if you swap things around, those two characters can easily switch roles without changing the fundamentals of the story.

As a thought experiment, it could even be interesting to try actually writing the story from different points of view. Walk in your antagonist’s shoes; make them the protagonist and see what happens.

Indeed, conflict requires no evil. Just opposition. And effective, relatable, compelling opposition is rarely in short supply.

1Evan Braun is an author and editor who has been writing books for the last two decades. He is the author of The Watchers Chronicle, whose third volume, The Law of Radiance, is forthcoming this spring. He specializes in hard science fiction and lives in the vicinity of Winnipeg, Manitoba.