Category: story

‘Endings?’ you snort derisively. ‘What would you know about endings? You’ve spent nearly two years working on the same novel and you haven’t finished it yet, distracted as you are by day jobs, video games and watching Japanese tokusatsu shows on YouTube!’

That’s true, Hypothetical and Unpleasantly Confrontational Reader, although I’ll thank you not to drag my burgeoning interest in Kamen Rider into this. Raven’s Blood is taking too long, but I am drawing close to the end of it, and endings are on my mind, especially after last week’s post on beginnings.

More to the point, that’s not my only project, and last weekend I wrapped up Exile Empire, the 4th ed D&D game I’ve been running for the last 3.5 years. (Only 24 sessions in that time, true, but so it goes.) After adventures throughout Stormreach and against a variety of enemies, the party of heroes ventured into Dolurrh, the Realm of the Dead, to rescue the soul of another adventurer. It was pretty damn fun, lemme tell you – you can read the details here, if you want a bit more context for what follows.

Now, running a roleplaying campaign ain’t like dusting crops boy writing a novel, but there are things each can learn from the other, as I’ve written about before. Plus, story is story no matter how it’s packaged and delivered, and a satisfying end to a narrative has certain elements no matter whether it’s communicated through deathless prose, dice rolls or a dance battle.

So with that in mind, here are four things that, based on my experiences with good endings and bad (and with the end of Exile Empire as an example), make for a satisfying and engaging ending to any story.

Resolution

The payoff, the big finish, the wrap-up; the ending needs to resolve the core line of the story. That’s not necessarily the same thing as ‘resolve the story’, especially since you might have multiple plotlines going on in a big story and this book might only be the first instalment. But the start of your book is a promise of what the story may hold, especially if you use the start of the story to make your mission statement (and you should); the end of the book is where you need to make good on that promise. In other words, you need to finish, not just end; don’t just come to a sudden stop and say ‘well, book’s done now.’ You might think that would go without saying, but any number of novels make this mistake, including up-to-that-point good ones like Neal Stephenson’s early books.

The premise of Exile Empire was ‘heroes forge new lives in Stormreach and have adventures’, and that’s a formless enough thing that there are many ways I could have ended it. But in those first few sessions we lost two PCs, and that brought up a plot hook where someone stole one of the bodies, and it’s that plot thread – along with arcs that tied back to that hook at some point, and a couple of stand-alone why-the-hell-not side treks – that formed the spine of the campaign; it didn’t start as the mission statement, but it certainly became one soon enough. If I hadn’t made that the central element of the last arc, if I’d dropped that and brought up something new to cap off the campaign, then it might have been enjoyable in and of itself but it wouldn’t have been satisfying. To say nothing of not being as cool as going to the afterlife and beating up a dracolich.

More books should end with dracolich fights. Catcher in the Rye, I’m looking at you.

Closure and breathing room

As resolution is to story, closure is to character; the time to bring their personal arc and growth to a head and draw a line. Imagine for a second the ending of your favourite big action/adventure story – and then it stops right at the climax, with no glimpse of how the characters feel or cope with their victory (or defeat). Sounds pretty dull, right? Right? (Come on, agree with me.) If you hit all the crescendo notes in the climax (or anti-climax, if that’s your thing) and then stop, it’s like coaxing the audience into a sugar high and then telling them to go to bed right now. The dust needs to settle, the wounds need to heal; we need to see how the fulfilment of the story’s promise has changed the characters and how they move on from where they were. Without that character focus, it’s like seeing fight scenes in a loop; cool at first, sure, but eventually boring. And to do that, you need some time post-climax (stop sniggering) to focus on your world and characters, even if only for a quick scene; enough breathing room for everyone to settle into the new equilibrium.

The odd part of Exile Empire’s climax was that it was all about a character who was dead and who didn’t have a strong relationship with any of the surviving PCs. So to make it satisfying I had to give them reasons to care about saving his soul and to brave Dolurrh. Slaine’s master had been hurt when the corpse was stolen; Ash and Spark were caught up in the Prophecy motivating things; Caleb turned out to have a secret connection to the other dead PC, Jin; and Kaddik… okay, he was mostly along for the ride. I backed that up with encounters with the dead villains they’d defeated, plus chances to see how they’d changed Stormreach for the better, so that the players felt invested. And once the dracolich was defeated, we had quick scenes of everyone’s personal aftermath, giving players room to define for themselves how their characters had grown (or not).

Surprises

The thing about the 100% dramatically appropriate ending is that after you see a few of them they become kind of dull. All those expected character and plot ‘beats’ (god I hate that term) sounding at the expected time – even if they’re beautifully crafted, the gloss wears off. And if they’re not beautifully crafted, you get the same ol’ Hollywood ending we always sigh and roll our eyes at. So mix it up some when you get to the end and throw in something no-one expected, maybe not even you. Kill off a major character! Transform an enemy into an ally! Reveal that Rosebud was a sled, but it’s a talking sled and it’s come for revenge and oh god the sled is calling from inside the house! Or something else that isn’t perhaps so crazy. In my defence it’s very hot in my study and I think my brain has curdled.

The big surprise at the end of Exile Empire was that someone would have to stay behind in the Realm of the Dead in order for Alarich’s soul to leave. I hadn’t foreshadowed or suggested that (although it’s a classic ‘journey to the underworld’ trope), and so even though they knew this was the final session, the players had to wrestle with the notion that it would be very final for one of them. That led to earnest discussions and volunteering to stay behind, but when Spark elected to stay it felt both surprising and right – a shock (including to me) but a satisfying one. The other, smaller surprise was learning of Caleb’s connection to Jin and the secret plot he’d been working on all along – again, no real foreshadowing on it, but it felt right nonetheless.

A few loose ends

The other thing about Hollywood endings, while I’m badmouthing them, is that they can feel pat and contrived; they always wrap everything up neatly at the end. So too do some other stories, especially large ones with lots of subplots and hooks (comics/serial fiction is a particular culprit), and for me that rarely feels genuine. At best it feels too easy; at worst it feels rushed and super-forced. I think there’s value in a slightly messy ending to a big story, one where not every prop introduced in Act One gets used in Act Three (sorry, Chekov). Obviously you have to wrap up the core and most important things, but leaving a couple of things dangling, in a way that doesn’t interfere with the resolution of the main plotline, can make an ending feel that little bit more real. And leave room for a sequel.

Like most ongoing/serial games, Exile Empire had a bunch of story hooks and lines that came and went. The last arc of the game wrapped up the main ones – the Storm Hammers, the Prophecy, the trip to the Underworld – but I deliberately left others undone. Whatever happened to Janda-Shen and Ballast? Will Ash’s demonic relatives ever come for him? Who were those people chasing Spark? What was the real story behind Jin, Caleb and Jaris Cantar? What of the Prophecy and the power behind the Emerald Claw? We don’t know, and it’s okay – it didn’t hurt the story to leave those fallow at the end. (In the case of Spark’s story, in fact, the sudden twist of him staying in the Underworld made dropping those threads all the more dramatic.) I have material to work with if I want to return to the campaign (not any time soon, but it may happen), and the players have that sense of being part of something larger, messier and more interesting than the snippet we saw over 24 sessions.

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Well, this was meant to be a short and punchy blog post, but that plan has obviously collapsed and died in the heat. Take a note, RPG writers – examples always eat up the wordcount.

What are your thoughts on a satisfying ending? Leave a comment and tell us what you think, even if – especially if – you disagree with my take. And come back next weekend for a look at one way from getting from the beginning to the ending without losing your readers’s attention.

It involves fishing. Yes, really. Metaphorically. Sort of.

Hey folks. Last weekend – using ‘weekend’ as a synonym for ‘Monday night’ because shut up – I talked about writing stories about failure, or that drove towards failure. You know, the sorts of stories that most people don’t want to read.

What do people prefer? Stories about success, unsurprisingly; stories about protagonists who overcome conflicts and succeed at their goals. Sometimes those protagonists are regular people; sometimes they’re Superman or Commander Shepard (FEMSHEP 4 LIFE). You know, stories that are fun rather than being a massive downer; stories that have a satisfying climactic ending rather than a gear-shifting anti-climax.

And yet, for all the fact that people (myself included) love these sorts of stories, they’re very easy to do badly. I’ve read too many stories and seen waaaaay too many movies where success seems pedestrian rather than exciting, where heroic competence is dull rather than engaging, and where the climax feels safe and predictable rather than exhilarating.

So once again Mister Tells-You-How-to-Write-Despite-Never-Finishing-Anything is here to give you some tips, this time on writing a strong story about a successful, engaging character. Trust me, I’ve read a lot of Batman comics, I’ve played a lot of D&D; I know how this shit works.

Success comes from competence

You have a main character and she’s awesome. She has two guns and she can pick any lock. And when she gets to the secret base to steal the gold-plated McGuffin, she walks in and out unmolested because Count Bad Guy trips over a staircase and knocks himself out rather than fighting her. Is that an exciting story?

The key to drama is conflict, and the key to an engaging, meaningful conflict is that victory has to be earned rather than given away. It’s important that the character succeeds through their own skill, ability and effort, not just through lucky breaks or through their opposition stuffing up. A hero who wins the day thanks to their rival’s incompetence or because she walked through the right door isn’t interesting, and their conflict (and victory) feels false. So when bringing your character out on stage, show off her skills – don’t hide her light under a bushel. Let her be aware of what she’s good at, let her use those abilities and let them be effective in overcoming obstacles and conflicts.

Failure comes from someone else’s competence

You want your character to win at the end, yes, but along the way it’s good for them to have a few setbacks and take a couple of knocks, if only so that they can bounce back from the defeat and learn from it. But if those setbacks are due to them not being skilled or strong enough to have a chance in conflicts (your hero has two guns but doesn’t know how to shoot them), or if she fails due to bad luck or random chance (her lockpicks get stolen by pigeons along with her lunch), then she doesn’t come across as a credible hero, she comes across as a schmuck.

The way to frame defeats, then, is to give your character competent opposition, antagonists or dangers that are simply greater than even her skills can overcome. She’s a crack shot with her pistols, but Count Bad Guy has bulletproof handwavium skin; she can read minds, but that doesn’t help when her yacht hits an iceberg. Situations like this position your antagonists and dangers as being meaningful and relevant, rather than just set dressing or minor speedbumps, because we never know if or how the hero will prevail. But prevail she will, because these conflicts can’t stop the narrative short; instead, the character can find new ways to get around the obstacle, either through improving skills (making armour-piercing handwavium bullets) or applying different abilities (picking the lock of the frigid prison at the heart of the iceberg).

Randomness brings narrative opportunities

So if you can’t use bad luck or external events to make your character win or lose, then what are they good for? Glad you asked. These externalities – sudden rainstorms, food poisoning, everyone in Chicago turning in a werewolf – open up new avenues for conflicts. A gunfight on the top of a burning skyscraper, with no way of getting off, is a lot more engaging than a gunfight in an empty street on a sunny day. Your hero can pick any lock with the right tools, but her picks were stolen by pigeons (remember?); now she had to improvise tools from bits of frozen scraps before the ice prison sinks. The context of the conflict changes, the parameters of description change, and everything gets more interesting.

External factors like this are also a good way of opening up new directions for the story, because they allow for different consequences and to explore the reactions of the main characters to those consequences. Your hero didn’t set that skyscraper on fire herself, and in fact got burned in the blaze, but now everyone blames her and she must avoid the police while seeking medical treatment. She escaped from the frozen prison before it sank, but now she’s stranded in the Arctic and the ice wolves are coming. None of these things are her fault, but they keep the dangers and conflicts flowing even after she’s succeeded to doing what she needed to do – she reacts to them, rather than them being reactions to her.

Flaws and weaknesses increase the awesome

It goes without saying that flawed characters are more interesting than perfect ones. (And in case it doesn’t, I’ll state it quickly – flawed characters are more interesting than perfect ones.) But flaws need to have an impact on the story to feel meaningful; your character being frightened of octopi doesn’t matter if the entire story takes place in the desert. A good way to make those flaws meaningful is for them to open up new conflicts as the character reacts against them – like an external problem, but internalised. Your hero hates Nazis, so she goes out of her way to bust up a ring of Illinois Nazi werewolves, and now she has to take them on at the same time as fighting Count Bad Guy. If she could have left well enough alone… the story would have been duller.

The other good way of making weaknesses work is to use them to raise the stakes in conflicts. Your hero has a bad temper, so when a contract negotiation goes bad she kicks over a table and calls the Pope a motherfucker. Now this negotiation is a lot more complex and difficult, and if she can’t mollify the Pope he’s gonna open up a can of white smoke on her arse – and won’t lend her the Vatican Guard to help her fight the Illinois Nazi werewolves. Which is going to really hurt when the ice wolves come for her in the Arctic… Flaws exist to get your character into trouble; trouble exists to make conflicts feel more important.

Victory has a price

Nothing in this world comes for free; victory needs not just hard work but sacrifice. For success to feel important, it kind of has to suck for the hero; she needs to give up something in the process. It might be love, happiness, her left arm, the chance to live a normal life or even her life, but whatever it is, it has to hurt; it has to be a price she would rather not pay. This is where too many blockbuster films slip up – the hero works for a victory (often by punching/shooting lots of people) but never sacrifices anything, never has to lose anything important to her to save what’s important for others. There’s no note of sadness (or at best a temporary one) in the relentless bugling of success.

And this, in turn, is the flip side of last week’s discussion. In a story of failure, the protagonist gives up the big goal for the small goal; they choose to fail at one in order to succeed at the other. It’s exactly the same in a story of success, but the priority remains as it was at the start of the story; the main goal is achieved, but the secondary, personal goal is forever lost. Batman can never be happy; Ripley never gets to build a life with Hicks and Newt; Commander Kirk can never just spend his days banging hot aliens. (Well, not unless the film is dumb.) Maybe it comes down to a choice, maybe it doesn’t; maybe the price is paid early, maybe right at the end. But winning has to be a kind of loss; that’s how you know it was worth it.

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I really should workshop this gun-toting Nazi-werewolf-fighting cat-burglar concept more. There’s at least a novella in it.

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Come back next week when I talk about editing! Or something else if I change my mind!

No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful

Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful

No, I’m not depressed (I’m pretty much never depressed), nor am I quoting They Might Be Giants lyrics just because I saw them live earlier this month (an excellent gig). It’s just that I’ve been thinking about failure, as I am often wont to do, particularly on those days when I blow my own self-imposed schedule of writing blog posts on Sunday nights.

I like stories about failure; I like books where the main character sets out to do one thing at the start and ends up doing something fundamentally incompatible with that at the end. You know, books like Michael Chabon writes; pretty much all his novels are about failure on some level, especially Wonder Boys and Telegraph Avenue, both of which I loved. (His other main theme is dysfunctional father-son relationships, so it’s really like he’s writing books just for me.)

Stories about failure aren’t that popular, which is hardly surprising; we tend to prefer stories about success and overcoming odds, which are cathartic and dramatically satisfying. Last night we saw Star Trek: Into Darkness, for instance, which was well-produced and thrilling enough (albeit a bit ordinary on the whole), but there’s nothing in that movie about failure, and nor should there be. That wouldn’t be much fun. Still, sometimes you don’t want fun; sometimes you want to taste that human sadness, and a story about failure has that salty flavour.

So if you want to write stories that melt like mediocrity on the tongue (yep, taken the metaphor too far again), here are a few pointers on how to mix the recipe (doing it again PULL OUT PULL OUT):

Tell the right story at the right length

Genre stories of almost any stripe are rarely appropriate for fail-stories. You could say it’s because genre stories are about plot and fail-stories are about character, but that’s too reductive. Better to say that genre is about exploring ideas and seeing them through to fruition; fail-stories are is about swerving away from that fruition. We want to see the Dark Lord defeated, the mystery solved, the hot plumber nailed harder than Jesus; dash that expectation and there’s not much point in continuing. So fail-stories are generally the traffic of lit-fic; you can pull off something downbeat and melancholy and frustrated in genre, sure, but if you’re not Ursula le Guin maybe it’s best to try something else.

The other thing about fail-stories is that they tend to be either short or long, not medium-sized. Short stories are good fodder for fail-stories, because you can get in, set parameters, subvert them and then get out before anyone has a chance to get disappointed, like jazz in a minor key. Longer stories give you more opportunity to build connection and empathy for your main character (see below), which makes the process of failing more viscerally satisfying. Going for something in between, like a novella or a serial fiction, is trickier.

Focus on building empathy

Like I said, it’s not about prioritising character over plot, except that I lied and it totally is.

If we don’t care about a character, their failures are just boring; if we do care about them, their failures consume us. If we can put ourselves in their shoes and want what they want, need what they need, then their inability to gain those things hurts us, reminds us of all the times we fell short ourselves. To hit that point, we need more than just interest in or enjoyment of a character; lots of people like James Bond but a film where he failed to save the world would not make us happy.

What we need is to identify with the character, rather than idolise them. They need to be someone at our own level, be that conceptually or emotionally or what-have-you; they need to be someone sharing our skin. We need to understand their choices and their pain; we need to be able to nod knowingly and think yes, I’d have done the same thing, damnit. Without that sympathy, we don’t care that Jane Doe didn’t find true love among the dugong-people of Neptune and instead became a Venusian hermit, we just feel frustrated that all that hot manatee-love didn’t materialise and oh God this example has gone very wrong.

Small victories, meaningful failures

The small victories / The cankers and medallions whoops sorry sudden Faith No More lyric let’s start again.

Look, no-one wants to read a book where the protagonist just gets his face rubbed in dogshit for 200 pages and then it’s the end. (If you do, please stop reading my blog, you’re creepy.) An engaging narrative has a constant escalation of challenge-response-challenge, a rising tension throughout the story’s arc – and to keep that arc rising in a fail-story, your protagonist still has to meet and overcome some of those challenges, just like in a regular and-then-he-saved-the-world-from-the-Star-Groaties novel. And no, you can’t just have him win at everything and then fuck up at the final hurdle, because that would just be shithouse.

Instead, your protagonist needs to win at the things that don’t matter to him and fail at the things that do, and what that means will vary from story to story. If the hero has to solve a crime while also keeping his marriage intact, you need to decide which of those is what matters to you, and thus which is what will matter to the character (and the reader). That usually means the one that’s most emotionally meaningful; a story where the detective gets closer to the killer while his marriage falls apart is more interesting that one where he can’t make sense of any clues but his husband can’t wait to go on dirty weekends with him. Go back to empathy; we understand those personal, human failures more than the fictional ones, so that’s where the focus needs to go.

Set stakes and then reset them

At the start of a story’s arc you define the conflicts and the stakes; this is what’s going down, this is the opposition, this is what will happen if the hero can’t get her shit together – and, most importantly, this is what the hero will have to sacrifice to reach her goals. This isn’t new; this is Storytelling 102, after the course in hey-maybe-your character-should-have-limbs. (Unless it’s important for the story that he doesn’t have limbs, which is cool too.)

The key manoeuvre in a fail-story is revisiting those conflicts and stakes around or just past the halfway mark of the arc and giving the character the opportunity to question them – to say ‘shit, maybe I’m not prepared to give up the thing that matters to me to obtain my goal’. I don’t mean that abstractly; I mean that the character has to confront that dilemma within the narrative, to question everything they’ve done before that point. And that’s the point where you posit new goals, conflicts and stakes; that’s the point where you lay out signposts to an alternative ending, one that both the readers and the characters can see.

Failure is a choice

And once those signposts are in place, you put it on your protagonist to decide while the reader is screaming in his ear no no turn back not that way! Because failure due to incompetence or intellectuality isn’t fun to read about, it’s just frustrating; it’s like a gaming session where the player rolls a 1 in the final session and bang there’s two years of the campaign fucked. Failure matters when it’s deliberate, when the hero throws in the towel, turns her back on the fight; when she decides that the TKO isn’t as important as going back to art school, or whatever.

Because in the end, an effective story about failure is a trick – it’s about success after all. It’s just that what ‘success’ means by the end of the story isn’t what it meant at the start. For example, Wonder Boys starts with Grady Tripp defining success as finishing his novel; by the end he defines it as being a decent husband and father, even if that means giving up on his life’s work. He fails at his first target, but that’s okay, because it stopped mattering to him as much as the second one – and because Chabon built empathy and immersed us in Tripp’s head and heart, that’s what matters to us too. Through an act of narrative aikido, the direction of the story’s desire is turned upon itself, and the character makes the choice to be flipped onto the mat.

It’s not failure. It’s just realising that you prefer the taste of defeat. And the reader, hopefully, will too.

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I hope all that made sense. It’s been a long day. If not, I admit defeat OH SHIT YO SEE WHAT I DID THERE ah never mind.

As a counterpoint, next weekend I’ll talk about narratives of awesome success and how to make them not suck.

Because if anyone knows about awesome success, it’s me.

 

In Sean Howe’s fascinating book Marvel Comics: the Untold Story there’s a bit about Chris Claremont, whose seminal run on Uncanny X-Men defined pretty much the entire superhero genre in the 1980s. Apparently Claremont was completely disinterested in the action elements of the comic, usually letting artist John Byrne take charge of those with a note like ‘fill three pages with fight scenes here’; left to his own devices, Claremont would have just let the X-Men argue with each other in coffee shops about who was sleeping with who.

Stories like that, or the Gail Simone anecdote about an unnamed colleague who would just copy-and-paste the action scenes from previous scripts and then change the names, make me want to find these writers and shake them like Polaroid pictures, and not in a sexy way. To have the opportunity to write a great, meaningful fight scene and say ‘oh, I don’t care about that, just draw dudes hitting each other’ makes my heart fill with sorrow. Sorrow and kickspolde.

For my part, I freaking love fight scenes – in movies, games, comics and (especially) prose. Not because I am a hairy-knuckled thug who just likes watching biffo, but because fights scenes are one of the most enjoyable, effective, flexible weapons in the writer’s arsenal. Engaging fiction revolves around action, in the sense that it involves characters acting and doing things, and fight scenes are a powerful way to make that principle manifest. I’m finally getting the chance to write them in Raven’s Blood and they are huge fun, and I find myself wondering why I didn’t write them before now.

So then, in no particular order and at no great length, here are some things that fight scenes provide or illuminate and why you should write them.

Clear conflicts and stakes

Drama is founded in conflict, about two characters or factions competing for something that only one can win. Fight scenes push conflicts into the foreground of your story and make them overt, make them something that can’t be mistaken, and escalate them so that the fallout can’t be ignored in future conflicts.

And conflicts aren’t just about me-vs-you, either; they’re about the setting of stakes and defining what each party is trying to achieve. Again, fight scenes make this explicit, especially when the stakes are very high, such as ‘stop Mega-zilla from eating the world’ – but they also throw smaller stakes into sharp focus just from incongruity. There’s also dramatic potential in mismatched stakes – two parties trying to kill each other is a very different story if one party is trying to escape instead.

Character

Is your character confident? Overconfident? Highly skilled? Lucky? Capable? In over her head? Nothing showcases and demonstrates a character’s traits like throwing her into action. Portraying character, after all, should be done through showing rather than telling, and fight scenes are all about showing, about acting, about writing with strong verbs – about your character applying her skills and style to shaping the narrative, and possibly also staying alive. Even minor, seemingly cosmetic things like tool use can reveal character in a fight; any gamer can tell you that ‘dude with a battleaxe and shield’ feels totally different to ‘equally skilled dude with a rapier’, and both are different again to ‘nun with a shotgun’.

Plot

You think I’m going to quote Chandler and ‘When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand’. And yes, that’s a good way to use a fight scene – to kickstart the plot’s energy when it flags or when you don’t know where to go next. But more pertinently, plots are driven by conflict, and we already established that fight scenes emphasise and demonstrate conflict. That makes fights a powerful force multiplier for plot, because pushing things into a physical confrontation leaves you with a whole host of consequences to follow up. Who got injured and now needs to recover? Who got killed, leaving a power vacuum that must be filled? What got totes blown up and needs to be rebuilt – and what might be found in the ruins? High stakes lead to major consequences, and major consequences reshape the flow of plot.

Setting

On the micro level, fight scenes are an excellent avenue for description; you need to let the reader visualise the physicality of the scene before you set it all on fire. Very few fights happen in featureless white rooms – although that would be an arresting image – and an engaging fight is one that takes in the landscape, tools, bystanders, chandeliers and other features of the environment, letting you describe in context without pausing for exposition. On a macro level, fights can also be used for worldbuilding, demonstrating the weapons, techniques and attitudes of your fictional society. A society where duels are accepted practice is different to one where they aren’t, and a society where duels are fought with giant poisonous flowers (as in The Book of the New Sun) is different again.

Tone

Is your story serious? Then fights are a chance to show broken bones, horrific pain and ruined lives. Is it a story of melodramatic derring-do? Then fights might be a romp where a hero fights off a legion of mooks with only an umbrella. Light adventure? Then all those impossible kicks and last-minute escapes result in no more than bruises and injured pride. Fights are one of the best way of establishing the tone of your story, especially in genre pieces, because they let you flag all the way physical conflict is different from how it is in the real world, and that puts readers on the same wavelength so that they understand the flavour of your gritty thriller, superheroic adventure or cartoon escapade.

Contrast

But tone is also a tool, and one you can use in many ways to keep the reader on their toes. A fight scene is a great way to make a light story suddenly feel serious, or blow off steam by turning a horror story into an occult adventure. Consider one of my favourite movies, Grosse Pointe Blank. For all that it’s about a hitman, the first two thirds of the movie has almost no action and works as a tongue in cheek, self-aware romantic comedy. Then Benny the Jet shows up and kicks the fucking shit out of John Cusack before getting stabbed in the neck in an amazing fight scene that takes a sharp turn into gritty, messy violence. Suddenly the tone is different, suddenly we take the story more seriously; suddenly the stakes – both physical and romantic – feel a lot more real.

Fuck, I love that movie.

Theme

Over and below the level of  plot, the question of what your story is actually about is one you should be addressing – and the best way is almost always through action. Fight scenes won’t illuminate every theme, but you might be surprised how much resonance can emerge from a punch-up that reflects your story’s meaning. If your story is about the price of success and the need for sacrifice, then a fight is a desperate, terrifying clash won only after losing an ally. If it’s about great risk leading to great reward, then a fight could be a kung-fu dust-up on the wing of a biplane with the fate of a city in doubt. And if your theme is ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ or something like that, well, there’s a whole library of fight scenes that have showcased that and similar themes over the years. You should read some of them.

Engagement

Look, let’s just admit it – fights (fictional ones) are fun. They’re exciting, they’re entertaining, they’re full of colour and movement and stunts – and even the realistic ones are tense and gripping in that oh-god-I-want-to-look-away-but-I-can’t kind of way. A boring fight is hollow and pointless, providing no push to see what happens next – it’s like a cheesy karate-fight in a bad 80s action movie. But a powerful, entertaining fight scene draws you in, keeps you in suspense, makes you care about what happens to the characters – and then, having caught your attention with bullets and body blows, makes you care about everything that happens between the fights as well. For further illustration of this topic, see every film John Woo and Chow Yun Fat ever made.

Stylistic freedom

This is what I love most of all about writing fights – all the various ways you can whip up pace and movement and flash with just words. Fight scenes are a time for exclamation marks! ALL-CAPS SOUND EFFECTS! Adverbs! Adjectives! Run-on sentences that evoke a breathless rush and panic and then he turned to smash the zombie with a baseball bat but suddenly –

– there was a jump cut to another scene made with a hanging emdash!

And so on. Writing a fight scene lets me change up my game, vary the voice and style, break all the rules of my story’s grammar and do something different, something with a frantic energy that the story can’t sustain in the long term but that briefly facepunches the reader and then bodyslams them into the rest of the narrative.

Exclamation marks are a hell of a drug.

—

None of the above means that you must include a fight scene in your book, obviously. It’s not like Love in the Time of Cholera or Middlesex would have been improved by a car chase or a rooftop shootout. But if your genre and voice allow such things, if your story has a place for physical as well as emotional action, try to explore that space.

Jump in and give it a bash – possibly by having a character jump on someone and bash them.

So I had a plan for the week that’s just ended. It was to go to New Zealand on Tuesday morning, spend the next three days conducting day-job-related meetings, spend the evenings working on Raven’s Blood in my hotel room and then to fly back on Saturday afternoon.

Instead, this happened:

Yes, my skull turned blue and transparent and a red light flashed in my jaw.

No, wait, I mean I got a toothache. A REALLY FUCKING BAD TOOTHACHE, YOU GUYS. So bad that I couldn’t sleep or focus on writing; so bad I had to cut the trip short and come back on Thursday night. Fortunately my doctor was able to fit me in on Friday morning and I got a root canal. Which are not very much fun, but better than losing your mind due to constant pain.

Ah well. Life goes on.

But this is a writing blog, not LiveJournal, so how can this experience be used in a story? Well, the obvious answer is a story about toothache, but BORING AND ALSO OUCH. I’m more interested in the derailing aspect – the idea of a story cruising along as intended until some outside influence comes into the narrative.

I mean, sure, you could just write it that way – a sudden interruption and then you return to the plot – but that’s not the way to go. As a reader and editor, I don’t like extraneous material in a story; if an event or character or situation doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the story, it doesn’t belong there. Real life has stuff that just happens, but the whole point of fiction is that it’s not real life, even when it pretends to be.

So what are some ways to make something like this work to improve the story?

Let’s say that you’re writing an urban fantasy story in which Con Johnstantine, Greek occult investigator, is looking into a case of crotch goblins manifesting in people’s pants.

…hmm. Possibly the painkillers are still fucking with me. But let’s roll with it.

Okay, so there are crotch goblins and Con is on the case, but in chapter 6 he gets a massive goddamn toothache and needs a root canal. Here are five ways to work that kind of left-field event into the story and make it feel not only relevant but meaningful to the overall narrative.

Delaying tactic

Con is on the case and close to a break-through, but then the toothache knocks him for a loop for three days/pages. When he recovers, it’s too late, and Shit Has Got Real – the crotch goblins are rampaging across the entire city! External distractions and problems can be good obstacles to put in a protagonist’s path to slow them down and raise the tension. They’re especially useful because they don’t damage the character’s perceived competence – Con didn’t let things escalate because he’s a bad occult detective, he just got sidelined by something that could happen to anyone.

Subplot

Con goes to see the Flagstaff Dentist, putting the case safely on hold for a while. He strikes up a friendship with a dental technician, and perhaps will learn to love again, but then she gets possessed by the crotch goblins and the tragedy renews his determination to rid the world’s underpants of evil. To be honest, I don’t love subplots – unless you’re working in a strongly compartmentalised milieu like TV or comics, I generally find them distracting. Stay focused on the core story, rather than noodling around the edges! But an exemption can be made for subplots that illustrate points of character or personality, or let them develop in ways that the main plot probably wouldn’t allow.

Key subplot

Better yet, have the subplot lead into plot points that directly impact the core storyline. Even dulled by anaesthetic, Con realises that novocaine would be a useful weapon against the crotch goblins. He grabs a case of it from the dentist’s after chatting up the dental technician and uses it to take out most of the goblins before fighting their king, David Bowie. This is more satisfying because the diversion means something concrete; on the other hand, you shouldn’t make the subplot an absolutely vital part of the story’s outcome. A secondary plot should help overcome a secondary obstacle, not the primary obstacle.

Parallel plot

Con thought crotch goblins and toothache were problems enough – until he realised that the dental technician was in fact the Tooth Fairy, hidden in witness protection and being hunted by the Toothpaste Mafia! Now he has to protect his new love and the city while manoeuvring his two enemies into wiping each other out in a riot of mouthwash and underwear. This is the classic A-plot/B-plot structure used in many a book (including The Obituarist) and it’s a great way of adding depth to a story without muddying the waters of a single narrative. Swap from one to the other, using the moves to control pace and tension, and then bring them together at the end.

Swerve

Hah! You thought this book was about crotch goblins! But no, it’s all about Con and the Tooth Fairy fighting King Colgate and his army of floss demons, ready to crack open the dentures of all reality! The goblins were just a fake-out, and Con can clean them up with a holy water douche in the denouement or epilogue or something. This kind of bait-and-switch can piss off readers who get invested in the fake-out early, but if you’re careful with it you can use it as a form of world-building; it gives the strong impression that there are many equally valid concerns in the world that the protagonist must deal with, rather than just one cah-RAZY problem.

So whether your story’s about crotch goblins or academic intrigues or just too many hot dudes wanting the protagonist’s number, there are ways to throw a wrench into the works and still make it feel organic and meaningful, rather than tacked on.

Just be sure not to hit me in the face when you throw that wrench. My gums are still pretty tender.

—

In other news, I turned 42 yesterday. Whoo! It was a somewhat muted celebration, as I’m still not in great shape from the root canal, but I’m having a proper party next weekend.

If you feel like giving me a present, consider the gift that keeps on giving – a positive review of one of my ebooks over on Amazon, Goodreads, Smashwords or anywhere else that people might see it. Come on, folks, this dental work isn’t going to pay for itself!

…man, what if dental work could pay for itself somehow? There’s a story in that. A squicky one.

So everyone’s talking a lot about rape lately.

That’s kind of a weird thing to kick off with, isn’t it? But it’s true, at least in gaming circles. Much as speculative fiction grappled with depictions of race and culture a few years ago in the RaceFail 09 debacle, gaming (video, RPG, whatever) seems to be hitting a period where parts of the fanbase are (quite justifiably) finding fault in their preferred media.

In this case, it’s female gamers (and their male allies, of course) speaking out about depictions of women in games. Which they’ve done for a long time, because a lot of games depict women in really fucked-up ways, from lesbian sex ninjas to big-titted prizes for male characters to win. Other games depict women in much better ways, and indeed in really interesting and effective ways, but it’s the shitty depictions that get the attention – and rightly so.

And all of that has pretty much been horses for courses for ages, enough so that game companies seem to think we’ll be bored with standard, easy misogyny and are instead playing the rape card to get our hearts started.

The tipping point for the explosion of discussion on this seems to be the new Tomb Raider game, of all things, a prequel in which we learn how Lara Croft learned how to do flawless backflips while wearing Daisy Dukes. But because the notion of a capable female protagonist is just crazy talk, this prequel casts Lara as a vulnerable Other that gamers will want to shepherd and protect rather than embody or empathise with. Lara is just a weak girl, and players must look after her as she’s beaten, brutalised, starved, kidnapped and threatened with rape. Screw up and she dies; make a mistake and she is raped and killed. And then you reload and she’s fine and you can try again.

Man, that game sounds fan-fucking-tastic, don’t it? Because the best way to pave the way for an escapist adventure where you shoot dinosaurs and explore a wardrobe of belly shirts is to drop us off at Rape Camp for a spell first.

Reaction to this has been largely negative – imagine that – and the game’s producers have started backpedalling so hard they’re running the Tour de France in reverse, but the important thing is that it’s really kickstarted a discussion about rape culture in gaming. And kickstarted a whole pile of rape threats to any woman talking about rape culture in gaming, of course, because the human race is awful.

(If you’d like to read more on these topics, I recommend this excellent article by Daniel Golding, which talks both about the problems with gaming culture and how we can perhaps work to understand it as a product of the general culture. Seriously, check it out.)

—

And while this is all happening in the world of videogaming, it’s also cropping up in the smaller, less visible but equally problematic world of roleplaying, which also has a long and storied history of treating women as Scary Vagina Mutants and rape as just one of those things us fellas can joke about with impunity. The uptick in women saying ‘hey, this is shit’ and games pushing the rape button for attention is smaller there, but it still exists, and the waves being caused by the videogame discussion are lapping against the dicey shores and kicking over rocks.

Under one of those rocks lives James Desborough, creator of ‘hilarious’ ‘games’ such as Hentacle and The Slayer”s Guide to Female Gamers, which are every bit as charming as they sound. His attempt to cash in on the outrage women feel about being objectified and othered was to write an essay called ‘In Defence of Rape’, in which he says that ‘rape or attempted rape is a fucking awesome plot element’. I won’t put in a link to that, because – and I want to say this in as professional and dignified a manner as I can – Desborough is a piece of ambulatory dogshit shaped like a man. He’s a noxious, pathetic failure of a person who’s built a ‘career’ out of publishing games that objectify and demean women, that glorify and trivialise sexual assault, and that present the most egregious kinds of misogyny under the argument that ‘it’s just a joke, don’t take it seriously’. If you want to see an indepth takedown of his pathetic ‘argument’, there’s a terrific essay over at MightyGodKing that does just that.

(Also, I’m sure that during his regular egosurfing Desborough will find this blog and leave a bullshit comment, and I’ll delete it and block him, just as I’ve deleted and blocked his bullshit comments on other social media platforms in the past, and he’ll cry martyrdom and censorship to his rape-is-awesome fanbase and they’ll talk about how terrible I am while rubbing their dicks. This is a dance that has happened before. It is a dance that will happen again. Like the Macarena, but one dancer is a piece of dogshit.)

There’s a lot of back and forth about Desborough, his works, roleplaying’s attitude to rape and all of that happening on various gaming forums right now, as well as petitions, flamewars, accusations of censorship and the like on other platforms like Google + and Facebook. People are angry. That’s possibly a good thing, because anger can motivate people to get things done. Or it can motivate them to scream and snipe at each other on the internet for the foreseeable future. We’ll see which happens.

But in any event, there’s a quick (!) précis of what’s been going down in the world of gaming and discussions of rape.

Fun times.

—

But although I occasionally discuss gaming because I love games so goddamn much, this is primarily meant to be a blog about writing. So what about rape in fiction? Should writers censor themselves and shy away from the topic? Should it be taboo? Or should they view it as a ‘fucking awesome plot element’?

Many writers have used rape well as a meaningful and important event in their novels and works, from William Shakespeare to Alice Sebold. And many more writers have used rape for cheap stakes-raising and shock value, or as a clumsy and trite tool to motivate female characters who can only be defined by their femininity and by ‘overcoming’ it through trauma. And, obvious bigot and censorship lover than I am, I think a writer who views fictional rape as ‘fucking awesome’ is unlikely to write the next Lovely Bones or Titus Andronicus.

What to write instead? Well, here’s a great quote from author John Perich (whose book Too Close to Miss is on my Kindle and waiting to be read):

On the Great Wheel of Unfortunate Fates that writers spin whenever they need something bad to happen to a protagonist, there are several entries for men:

• Losing a job or a source of wealth;
• Getting hurt;
• Getting scarred;
• Losing a loved one;
• Having a loved one kidnapped;
• Having a loved one used as leverage for a threat;
• Being arrested;
• Being seduced by nefarious people;
• Being betrayed;
• Being watched by nefarious people;
• Being lost far from home;
• Etc.

If your protagonist is female, however, there are only three:

• Sexual assault;
• Kidnapping;
• Pregnancy.

I’m exaggerating for comic effect, but not that much.

(As Perich says, this is an exaggeration, but it’s an effective and useful one.)

All of this is particular interest to me because I’m writing two books right now that star female protagonists, and young female protagonists at that. I want to cast those young women as interesting and flawed characters who overcome trials and their own weaknesses to find victory, albeit in very different kinds of stories, and in a way that engages, rather than alienates or upsets, both male and female readers.

Here are things that happen to Gwen in Arcadia:

• Struggling to tell fantasy from reality
• Becoming homeless
• Making really bad decisions that hurt herself and others
• Unrequited love
• Reading The Lord of the Rings for the umpteenth time
• Being chased through Melbourne’s alleyways by a private detective
• Failing to protect that which she loves most
• Doing everything she can to make it right again

Here are things that happen to Kember in Raven’s Blood:

• Getting arrested for sedition
• Trying to repair her relationship with her father
• Uncovering the truth about a vanished masked avenger
• Fighting golem-men, giant snakes and other monsters
• Nearly drowning
• Running across rooftops
• Dealing with tragedy and loss
• Taking up the mantle of a fallen hero

Here are the things that won’t happen to either character:

• Getting raped
• Being threatened with rape

These are stories that involve physical and emotional danger and turmoil, and I want to make that danger and turmoil exciting and gripping. But taking rape out of my repertoire doesn’t do much to stop me telling the stories I want to tell and to (hopefully) make those stories exciting and emotionally engaging. Hell, it doesn’t do a goddamn thing to my work.

In the end, writers have the right to use rape as a device in their stories. And if they exercise that right, they then have the responsibility to exercise it well, with sensitivity and care and for powerful emotional effect, rather than using it for cheap, visceral pops. When they succeed, it should be acknowledged; when they fail, it should be discussed; when they don’t even try to do it right, they should be criticised and possibly even condemned. (Certainly if they’re arsenuggets like James Desborough.)

For my part, though, I think I’ll just avoid it, because I don’t see a need for it in the stories I’m currently writing and those I’m planning to write.

(I may have a future idea that requires addressing rape, sure; I get lots of ideas, and maybe Future Me will come up with a story that demands a careful and responsible depiction of sexual violence and its consequences. Past Me did that once, after all; the short story ‘Godheads’ (in the anthology of the same name) includes sexual violence, although it’s in the past and mentioned only obliquely without being described. But I don’t see it happening for a good long time, and if it does I’ll try my hardest to explore it sensitively – and if I find I can’t, I’ll change my idea into something that works better.)

—

To summarise:

Can rape be used as a worthwhile plot point in a strong narrative? Absolutely.

Could I use rape as a worthwhile plot point in a strong narrative? Possibly.

Am I going to use rape in my books? No, because I don’t fucking want to. And I think that’s a reasonable desire for myself or for any other writer.

(Yes, this is the point of the whole post. Because why use 40 words when I can use nearly 2000?)

None of that makes me Internet Writing Jesus or the most sensitive and loveable of all dudes, of course. Saying ‘hey, I don’t plan on writing about rape’ only clears the bar of Things Worth Saying because that bar is set so goddamn fucking low that even snails have to hump their amorphous butts over it. But yet some trails of slime still manage to go under the bar, and we find awful toerags like Desborough at the other end, extruding shit from their keyboards, so there is at least a little bit of value in saying that.

Which is kind of sad in and of itself, to be honest.