Deep Water

George was the undefeated champion of the West Coast Racing circuit, but Willow Rosenberg, rising phenom of Team Hellmouth auto racing thinks she has what it takes to beat him. But why did he have to be so darn cute?

                                               

……….Yeah……ok, there’s about 20 things wrong with that whole concept, but chances are you’ve waded through dozens of these just to find something good to read.  This is something I’ve seen a lot of over the years. Writers who take the characters from a popular series and change almost everything about them so they can be shoehorned into some story concept that they have no business being in. It makes me kind of wonder if the writers were ever fans of the series at all. If you like Harry Potter, then I can only assume you like the things that define him as Harry Potter.  Why then change everything about him so you can write a story about a British Punk Band called the Scarheads with a lead singer whose name is Harry Potter , but whose chain smoking and tattoos belong to Sid Vicious.

 I feel like there are two kinds of fanfiction writers out there.  There are writers who love a particular storyverse, who feel a connection with the characters  and want more from that universe than the creator can reasonably keep putting out.  Sometimes they want to “fix” things they feel the author did wrong.  Sometimes they just want to explore divergent paths that the writer did not take. Ie.  “What if Peter and Olivia raised alternate Universe Olivia’s baby together.”  The characters however are recognizably themselves.

There are other writers however who should really be writing original stories. I feel like using established popular characters has become a crutch that some writers use because their afraid nobody will like their stories if they don’t already love the characters.  I think it’s entirely possible that someone could take the example above and write a very acceptable Romantic Comedy about a woman trying to make it in the intensely male dominated world of Auto Racing, and having a love/hate relationship with the reigning champ marked by lots of witty dialogue and dramatic tension in the races that mirror the state of their relationship. But the woman behind the steering wheel should not be Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen or even Buffy Summers.  

 It’s like there is this invisible barrier that we feel separates us from the “Real Writers” That somehow the Steinbecks  and the Hemingways of the world are part of a different species , Homo-Sapiens Writewellus, and we could never in a million years do what they did. That somehow it’s too hard.  Why is it too hard? Because books are long? I know a Batman fan fiction writer who has turned out almost six novels worth of story.  I saw a Harry Potter story the other day that was just a few thousand words short of being War and Peace. Maybe it’s because real writers can weave a deeply compelling fabric of imagery and metaphors and they did that foreshadowing thing they told us about in middle school, and then they shined the light of truth on some aspect of society.  Those are just tools available to any writer who cares to use them properly.  What is Art? That really depends on who you ask.  I can tell you that I’ve read most of the classics from Homer to Hemingway, and I’ve never found “ literature” that has affected me more than the best of the fan fiction  that I’ve encountered.

Using someone else’s successful characters to prop up your story is kind of like being one of those ancient sailors who always hugged the coastline because the thought of what lay in the deep blue terrified them.  It’s kind of safe. There will always be someone willing to transfer the goodwill they feel for the characters onto your race car story.  I think you’ll find though that your best writing, the hardest and most rewarding writing you’ll ever do is waiting for you to point your boat into the deep waters, where there are no guarantees, limitations or copyrights. Also, this is the only writing anyone will pay you for.

Writing the Love Story

                When you consider that the vast majority of amateur/fan fiction involves a romantic pairing of some sort, I suppose it would be remiss of me not to cover that subject.  I’ve thought about what might be the best way to talk about what makes a compelling love story, and what I’ve come up with is several “case studies” I guess you would call them of relationships that worked for me and maybe one or two that didn’t.  I’ll give each one its own post so I’ll have the space to go into detail.

                The first one that I want to talk about, I consider perhaps the great love story of my generation. There was no “will they?won’t they” dance. They weren’t star crossed lovers separated by opposing destinies.  There was no witty banter worthy of a Carey Grant romantic comedy.  In fact, by the time the story starts, she’s been dead for 7 years.  I’m talking about Adrian and Trudy Monk.

                One might ask “How can you tell what their relationship was like if you never saw them alive together?”  Because the exit wound of losing her was just ghastly.  I’m reminded of a kind of famous story in comics. There was a mystery where a superheroes pregnant wife is attacked in their home and brutally murdered. I remember the hero whose power was a super malleable body physically breaking down as he tried to give the eulogy, literally losing the ability to hold himself together in a form that was recognizably human. That was monk.  For the man for whom symmetry was everything his other half was lost.  If that were all there was too it , it would be enough for me to know much monk and his wife loved each other, but that’s only the beginning of the story.

                A year or two ago, there was a video going around the internet called “the Last Lecture”.  It was given by a professor dying from terminal cancer to his students.  Among the words of hope and encouragement he had for them there was one thing I remember very clearly.  “Very soon now” he said,” My family is going to take a hard fall and for the first time I won’t be there to catch them.  But I can start making nets. “I loved that idea. That the love we give in life is a physical thing. That it has mass and weight and inertia. That even when we have stopped, our love can keep going. It continues to comfort and protect the people we love.  We see this throughout the entire run of the show, that even though Trudy was gone, for Monk she is never absent.  There are so many moments I could talk about, where we can see her influence on monk. The way she helps him cope with his fears, makes him brave, keeps him honorable.  There’s one in particular though. It was one of the most powerful moments I’d ever seen on television.  Monk had gone to New York to confront the man who had put the bomb in Trudy’s car on his deathbed.  Despite being on morphine drip to control his pain the bomber was able to give them a partial description of the man who hired him to build the bomb. Then monk asked for a moment alone with him. 

                Bomber : “You were the husband?

                Monk: “I am the husband."                                                                    

                Bomber: “Forgive me?” 

                Monk: “ Forgive you??......This is me turning off your morphine.

I was stunned. This was the meekest, most phobia crippled man on television so absolutely furious he was willing to torture a helpless and repentant cancer victim.  And then this happened.  As the pain began to set in and you could see the fear and despair in the bombers eyes,  monk continued..

                …...and this is Trudy, the woman you killed turning it back on.

We all have better angels. Adrian Monk married his.

                                                                            

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Mine is an Evil Laugh

When I think back to the stories of my childhood, the cartoons and a lot of the books aimed at kids and teenagers, I realize that as much as I enjoyed them, and have fond memories of them, they weren’t very well written. They didn’t have to be, because their target demographic was kids who could pester parents to buy action figures. They weren’t required  to be sophisticated; they just had to wow us with cool imagery.  The villains of these stories didn’t have particularly clear motivations, usually something as basic as “taking over the world”. Why do you want to take over the world Megatron /Mumra/Cobra commander? Because I’m evil that’s why!?! Why are you evil? Because I’m trying to take over the world. Enough of these insolent questions. Decepticons Attack!

                As a writer you may have heard the expression, “No one is a Villain in their own minds.” Or similarly,  “there are two sides to every story.”  The question is, how do these concepts manifest themselves in your writing?  If you were writing the story from the villain’s side of things what does he believe in? What motivates him to get out of bed at the crack of dawn to practice evil martial arts? What keeps him up late at night tinkering with his Doom Ray, when he’d really rather be making a run at Grandmaster on the Korean Starcraft server?  It’s not enough to say your villain is a bad guy because he’s simply evil natured, or sadistic. There’s no meat on that bone.  Cruelty or savagery is more of a how than a why.  One might say Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones is evil.  Her actions directly harm innocents. She arranges multiple murders and betrayals.  You could say the way she carries out her actions is selfish, and arrogant, and even somewhat sadistic. She does take pleasure in meeting out humiliations over and above simply beating those she sees as enemies.  Her motivation though is to keep her family secure and in power, and if innocents suffer, better them than us.  Her actions would be considered evil, and her way of carrying out those actions callous and cruel. You could contrast that with the Machines from The Matrix.  From our perspective they are evil. The enslaved all mankind.  Used us as batteries.  Wiped out the free ones periodically.  From their perspective, it was simply a logical way to survive.  It wasn’t about anger or revenge. It was simple necessity that did not allow for compassion or compromise.  

                So why is it important to know what drives your bad guy? What makes him seek out power to oppose your hero? What turned him from a presumably innocent child into the monster he is today?   Because when two people who believe absolutely in incompatible things face off against each other, the stakes are much higher.  It’s more than revenge, or justice, or saving the princess.  It’s a clash of ideologies as fought by champions who will determine which will rule the world of the story.   It is Voldemorte’s “Power is its own justification” versus Harry Potters “You don’t bully the weak” Losing doesn’t just mean you failed. It means what the other guy believes in prevails.  Maybe that means  Space Nazi’s rule the Universe in your story or maybe all it means is douchey fratboy instructers at the ski  school get the girl instead of the lovable goofballs therefore it is better to be a douchey fratboy. In any case there should always be more to  your villain than “Because I’m Evil”