Monday, November 25, 2013

Writing Action Scenes :Part IV Chases

     Chase scenes encompass a wide variety of action sequences, from car chases, to rooftop chases over the iconic rooftops of Istanbul, to evasive maneuvers through asteroid fields. A good action story will use a combination of combat sequences and chases to keep the audience on the edge of their seats. In general you will want to carefully position lulls in the action filled by dialogue, exposition, plot advancement, maybe character building or love scenes, then right back to the action. These lulls are to keep the audience from becoming numb to all the action you throw at them.

     Questions you will want to consider, are does the story require the person being chased to get away or not? What are the physical abilities of the participants? A rooftop chase involving a physically fit Parkour enthusiast is going to play out differently that an out of shape cop chasing a purse snatcher up a fire escape. An expert driver will weave in and out of oncoming traffic a lot more effectively than the average driver, with a lot fewer collisions involved. A good chase will have a number of obstacles that the runner and the chaser will have to clear. This could include gaps that have to be jumped, busy intersections, space debris to be avoided and so on. Those are kind of the beats of the chase scene. Some of the obstacles are created by the runner to slow the pursuit down. He tips over a shelf to block the hallway, he shouts fire in a crowded theater to create a panicked mob that the pursuer has to fight his way through. Maybe he puts someone in jeopardy that the person chasing him has to stop to save.

If the runner is to get away, you need to employ some sort of chase breaker. It isn't dramatic if one or both of the runners just get tired, slows down and stops, then gets caught trying to catch his breath.
A chase breaker is something that interrupts the chase allowing the runner to get away. A classic example is the car chase where the runner gets across the train tracks just before the train comes through and the pursuer has to stop. Jumping off a high cliff into water where the guy chasing you is afraid to jump after you is another popular one. If the runner is meant to be caught, maybe he gets cut off by someone working with the chaser. He might try to run across a street and be hit by a car and too injured to continue. Maybe he tries to make a jump and dies.

     So your basic chase scene is Initiate pursuit, throw in a few obstacles or location changes then have the runner get caught or employ a chase breaker. By location changes I mean you can't just have someone run up the road like he's running a marathon. For Instance, the police kick a suspects door in and he jumps out the window to the fire escape. The police chase him and radio ahead that he's on his way down the back alley. A patrol car pulls up and cuts him off. He turns and runs through the back door of a Chinese restaurant. The policeman chases him into the kitchen where he grabs up a butcher knife and throws it at the cop. The cop dodges behind a door. The runner turns and shoves his way through to the front of the restaurant and out into another street....

Try not to let your chases go for too long. If your story were filmed, you probably wouldn't want it to run for more than two or three minutes. Also when you're running from the police you can't outrun their radios. You have to break the chase and be out of sight before they can get roads cut off and helicopters in the air. Typically one might lose the first cop chasing him by causing him to crash, then duck quickly into a parking garage and steal a different car to get away in.






Friday, November 22, 2013

The Hidden Pitfall of a Silly Mechanic

I'm going to take a quick break from the Writing Action thing to bring up something I ran into on Youtube the other day, that I never really thought of before which was the problem that can arise when you make up a rule for the universe of your story that works on a small scale, but looks ridiculous when your story calls for you to use that "rule" many times in a row.

Case in point.  In the Twilight storyverse, you kill a vampire by tearing his head off and setting him on fire. I'm kind of a vampire lore purist, but in the first book when they kill the one vampire that's stalking Bella, it's pretty straight forwards. Tear his head off, burn his body, he's dead. Fast forwards a few years to the last book and the Big Vampire Clan Battle (with special guest Big Wolves).


I've never seen so many people get their heads pulled off in my life.
In  games, they call these "universe rules" a mechanic. In chess you eliminate pieces by capturing(moving your piece onto their square) You win by trapping the king to where he is under threat and can't move out of threat. The mechanic works no matter how many times you do it in a row. Play a hundred games in a row and there is never the sense that this is getting ridiculous. Not so much with decapitation.

I guess the object lesson is when you're creating a fictional world, look into the future and imagine you story was wildly successful and what might come of that. Make sure the rules of your world can scale up.



Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Writing Action Scenes : Part III : Shootouts


Most people who have played First Person Shooters or are military lore buffs know all of this stuff, but for those few who might not know, a few terms to start out with;

Flanking/Outflanking : This is when a force maneuvers to attack an enemy from the sides or rear. Flanking allows you a better angle of attack on an enemy using cover, and forces them to divide their attention between two or more directions.  In almost any extended firefight, someone will maneuver to outflank the enemy.

Covering Fire: This is shooting at the enemy not  so much to hit them as to keep their heads down, usually while an ally moves to a better position. An example would be firing on a machine gun nest while someone gets close enough to throw grenades in.

Ambush:  Basically a surprise attack. Usually at a time and place which gives the attacker a tactical advantage. A typical Ambush might be blowing up the front and back vehicles in a convoy with rockets to block the way forwards and back, then firing on the middle vehicles from the rooftops.  Ambushes typically run parallel to an enemies line of travel, in an L shape, parallel with a short leg in a flanking position or V shaped. It is never advisable to attack from both sides in a way that might have your shooters hit each other. Conventional wisdom says if you are ambushed it is best to retreat immediately the way you came rather than try to push through or fight it out. The enemy will anticipate this, but you at least know whats behind you. The best you can do is get as many of your people out alive to fight another day. Fighting from the "Kill Zone" will likely get most of your unit killed. In a military ambush the targets, in order of importance are the radio/communications guy (he can call for reinforcements or artillery), the commanding officer (he will try to keep their force organized and moving when you want them panicked and disorganized) and the heavy weapons detail (they can inflict the most damage on you). Everyone else is a target of opportunity.

     I was thinking of talking about weapons. Describing the specs of the guns seen most often in action scenes, but that's a lot of information that can already be found elsewhere. What I would suggest as far as firearms go, is to picture the scene you want to write in your head. Figure out what kind of armament the people involved would be carrying; Ak-47's like a drug cartel or communist army? Maybe silenced sub-machine guns for commando types. Perhaps the typical load out for an American police officer. Once you have a general idea, go online and look them up. Get a general idea of things like how far they can shoot accurately, how many bullets the standard magazine holds, what kind of stopping power they have and so on. Finally, go on Youtube and find a video of someone shooting the gun you want to use. Listen to how loud it is, see how much it kicks. Just have that visual reference floating around in the back of your brain while you write.

     OK for the actual shootout, there are two kinds. Stationary and Moving. In a stationary shootout, the participants typically hide behind cover,  exchanging gunfire til the dynamic changes in some way, IE someone gets hit, runs out of ammo, a gas line is ruptured and everyone gets out just ahead of the explosion. A moving gunfight is more dynamic. In this situation to stay in one place is death for one of the parties involved. Examples include the opening of Saving Private Ryan where the Nazi's had the beach zeroed in and trying to find cover and hunker down meant death for you and the people behind you. The famous Bank Heist in the movie Heat is another. Staying in one place meant dying at the hands of the police or being captured. With the moving gunfight you need to figure out a way to end it. The Bank Robbers make it to the getaway vehicle and the scene transitions to a chase. Or they get to a place where they can get out of site, get rid of their disguises and weapons and blend into the crowd. With either kind of shootout, any cover is better than no cover at all, but most furniture and a lot of walls will not stop bullets. This is a great reason to go antiquing with your wife. In the event of a shootout you want a nice 3 or 4 inch thick solid hardwood tabletop or desk between you and the bullets.  Having a character wear body armor is a great way to maintain the realism of people getting hit when bullets are exchanged without necessarily having to kill your character. Although body armor is not a get out of injury free card. You'll still suffer bruising and perhaps broken ribs.

     Which brings me to my next point. Guns are kind of an all or nothing proposition. You can't shoot someone and guarantee you won't kill them. You could try to shoot someone in the knee, miss by inches and hit them in the femoral artery causing them to bleed out before help could arrive. Size doesn't seem to correlate with gunshot wound survival. Sometimes big guys go down to one lucky bullet while much smaller guys have survived being shot half a dozen times. So exchanging bullets is serious business, every time. Therefore gunfights should be planned carefully. If your bad guys shoot it out with your heroes and hit nothing, you've devalued the threat they represent. They become the cliche storm troopers or bond bad guys who can't shoot straight. This may tempt you to include an expendable character with your heroes to take the bullet and demonstrate the high stakes, but be warned, your readers will always spot a "Red Shirt". If you are going to include a sacrificial red shirt character, plan ahead. Introduce him early, and pretend he's a real character. Give him dialogue that doesn't involve retiring in three days or having a new baby, sure fire signs that someones about to bite it. Let him make contributions to the good guys efforts. Maybe give him a subplot with a love interest who is not the main heroine, because that's another death omen. This way people might be surprised and actually care when he buys it. In fact, it's not a bad idea to have a guy like this on hand even if you never kill him. He's there if you need him, and until then he's a useful character.

     One last thing, just a couple of pet peeves. Don't hold your gun sideways and shoot like a gangsta. You can't aim it that way and it ejects hot brass at your face when you shoot. If you're in an extended firefight and you kill a guy, for the love of god take his weapons and ammo. You'll need every bullet or grenade you can get, and it's one less thing for the bad guys to pick up and use against you. Also if someone on your side is shot, at least make the attempt at first aid. Put some pressure on the wound. Try some CPR. People often survive this sort of thing with a little help so long as people don't stand around just looking at his body. Even if the character is supposed to die for the story at least it doesn't look like your other characters  just let him go. Also not a big fan of pistol whipping. If you're close enough to hit someone with your gun, he's close enough to take it away and shoot you with it. Especially if you stopped pointing it at him so you could hit him with it.



     OK, that's it for gunfights. Next time I'll cover chase scenes, and that will be a wrap for this action scene series.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Writing an Action Scene: Part II

Thoughts on Writing Action: Part II

    Okay, new plan.  The topic of writing action is just too large to cover in one or two post, so I'm going to break it down further into categories. Today I'm going to talk about writing hand to hand combat. Later I'll cover shootouts and chase scenes. There are many more kinds of action scenes than those of course , but I think those are probably the most common.

      So, hand to hand combat.  The more of these blogs I do, the more I see that nearly every kind of scene comes with questions to be answered. For hand to hand combat, the first question is who do you need to win the fight in your story? When you know that, ask yourself, who wins on paper. By that I mean, when you tally up all the advantages and disadvantages of everyone involved who is still standing at the end of the fight? If a character is meant to win in the story, but loses on paper, you'll need to come up with some scenario that swings the odds in their favor, IE. they get their hands on a weapon or they manage to blind the other guy with chemicals, that sort of thing.

    So what constitutes an advantage in hand to hand combat? Size for one. There's a reason combat sports have weight classes. A larger person has a advantage in mass. That means they can hit harder and absorb more punishment than a smaller person. They'll generally have a reach advantage meaning they can hit the other guy while staying just out of the other guys threat range. There's physical fitness. That's strength, endurance, speed and agility. A fighter who is smaller, but physically fit can cancel out some of the advantage a larger fighter has if it's mostly fat. There's training. A trained fighter is more efficient than a brawler. He waste less energy, his attacks are more accurate and hit more often.  Depending on what he's trained in he may be a fighter who throws combinations to set up a knockout while the untrained fighter usually throws hay-makers. Any kind of weapon is an advantage. They increase a fighter reach and make any hit more damaging. Disadvantages include a lack of physical fitness, an exploitable injury or condition like bad knees or partial blindness, and a lack of training or experience. The average chartered accountant is less likely to have a killer instinct than a marine back from his second tour of duty in Tikrit. That lack of killer instinct can make you hesitate when you have a chance to finish an enemy, or be slow to realize a situation just escalated into a fight.

    In general, I believe it's better to think of fight scenes in terms of stage by stage as opposed to blow by blow. Think where does the fight start? Where does the fight need to finish? How do I get there? A blow by blow description of a fight is going to be overlong and tiresome to read. IE.

      Jake should have known better than to try to hustle pool in a skinhead bar. He sensed movement behind him and something told him to duck, as a pool cue whistled through the space his head had been moments before. He threw an elbow back and felt a satisfying crunch as the skinheads nose shattered. Now the big one with the swastika tattoo on his forehead moved in with a vicious right cross. Jake barely got his arm up to block, then countered with a left jab, then a right to the body and a left cross which swastika head barely seemed to feel. He smirked at Jake then grabbed his jacket and pulled him into a headbutt which left Jake seeing stars. Jake staggered back against the bar where his hand fell upon a empty beer bottle.  Grabbing the neck Jake smashed it over the head of swastika face and backed away waving the jagged remains of the bottle menacingly....

     All that for about 10 seconds of bar fight. It's a bit wordy. There isn't much room for imagination. What I meant by thinking in terms of stages in a fight, is what are the highlights? the transitions from one thing to the next in the fight. This fight from the Jason Bourne movies is a very dynamic fight between two highly trained master assassins. The first stage is fighting for control of the gun, then the disarm, then the transition to an exchange of empty handed blows and blocks, then another transition to getting hold of improvised weapons and using them, then another disarm, then a change of location into the bathroom and so on.


     The use of weapons and environment to harm the enemy is a good way to make a fight very fast paced and visceral. Jason Bourne kicks killer in the head, good. Jason Bourne kicks killers head through ceramic toilet bowl, better. You just know that someone who takes a hit like that is badly hurt if not dead. In my experience, a short brutal fight scene plays better than a long drawn out fight with lots of descriptions of where and how guys hit each other.

      I guess the last things to think about here is the mood of the fight, and whether or not the story calls for the fighters to become allies later.If the mood of the story is comical, the fight can't be vicious. If a character is going to become your heroes friend later in the story or series, your hero probably shouldn't maim him in a fight, even if it would make sense to do so at the time. This is running long, so I'll end it here. Next time we'll talk about shootouts.

Monday, November 4, 2013

A Philosophy of Writing Action


     The subject of action scene writing is a fairly large one, and I'll be adding multiple video's for illustration, so I'm going to split it into two post. The first will deal with my general philosophy of action writing and later I'll get into specifics. In brief, action scenes, should advance the plot in some way. There is pacing of course, any action scene will add energy to a story when it begins to lag, but that action scene should serve a purpose.

     As with writing Love scenes, there are questions the writer should ask and answer when deciding how the scene should play out. The most basic of these is what kind of story are you telling? A funny Jackie Chan style fight where he beats up the bad guys with a priceless painting doesn't belong in a bloody Tarentino heist flick like Reservoir Dogs. A brutal fight club style beating doesn't belong in an action comedy where Jack Black is tapped as the new James Bond. Another question is what are the consequences of the action scene? Does the hero get hurt, and if so how bad? Will his or her injuries come into play later in the story like when Sherlocke Holmes injured shoulder put him at an untenable disadvantage to Moriarty? Does the action sequence lead to an advantage or disadvantage for the hero going into the next scene? For instance the car chase was a setup and the hero cop is led into an ambush. A hijacked garbage truck plows into his car and throws him over an embankment. When he comes to the witness he was protecting has been taken. Now the clock is ticking and he needs to find where they the bad guys took her. This leads to the next scene where he intimidates an informant into telling him about a ship leaving the docks at midnight. Also, does the action escalate from the last scene. It's a well known principle of action writing that the danger gets worse as the story goes on, and the greatest threat is generally the one at the climax of the story.

Another thing to think about, is whether the action sequence has a greater meaning? Is the fight a metaphor for something else? Or perhaps an act of catharsis? There are a lot of things that a fight can be beyond the exchanging of fist and bullets. For Example;



       The Metaphor here is pretty much outright stated. The fight is a physical manifestation of his internal struggle to find the will to keep going after his wife died.



     And this scene has an undercurrent of poetic justice. Alan Rickmans character from Quigley Down Under fancies himself an old west style gunfighter. But he doesn't get the epic Dodge City showdown with his nemesis that he thought he deserved. Quigley casually guns him and his cohorts down as easily and with as little glory as Rickman had killed the unarmed aborigines.


       This one is simply a peace of art. The silence and the muted colors and rain belie the intense emotions here. Tom Hank's mob hitman Michael Sullivan has been driven to the point where he must kill the man who has been a father to him to avenge his family. Paul Newmans Irish mobster character is fully aware of the implications and accepts his fate.

I suppose the point is that everything in your story should have a reason for being there. If your instincts are telling you that your story needs a fight or a chase in this chapter or act, take the time to think it all out. Even a fight can be art. Figure out all the why's and hows and what it all means. Next time I'll talk about the actual writing of fights from melee to large scale battles.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

This is how you write a love letter.

I have nothing to add to this. It's just perfect.


If you ever find the occasion to write a love letter to someone; it really is a lost art; you could do worse than to start here. Then work your way to the poetry of Pablo Neruda who frankly smokes any other poet or song writer I've ever heard when it comes to love.



Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Writing the Love Story: Jim and Pam

Just a short post tonight.

I'll be honest, I love a good love story.  The depth and breadth of what may be considered a love story is astounding. The things people have done for and out of love. The things endured and surmounted.  War stories, ghost stories, desperate fights for survival, wherever there are people, there's always a love story to be found. Most fiction writers write about people at the center of powerful and dramatic events. The love stories that they write center on heroes and heroines, people on whom the fate of the world, or at least the world of the story rest.

What I like about the love story between Jim and Pam from "The Office", is that they don't fit into that mold, and are all the more appealing for that. They're just two coworkers in a utterly unremarkable business.  It was one of the more realistic love stories I've ever seen, because I've seen that dance before in my own work place happening to people I know. There's all the elements of mutual attraction but bad timing, Emotional hurdles to be crossed. People that everyone can see belong together finally getting together, which doesn't happen as often as it should. What I take from Jim and Pam's' story is simply this; Love is not the domain of the mighty alone. A peasant may love as deeply and completely as a king. Love is not dependent on being important or powerful or beautiful. You just have to be sincere. I find that a very hopeful thing.






Sunday, October 20, 2013

Sexy Badboys or Good Looking Scumbags?




                When it comes to storytelling, you will rarely find anything truly new under the sun.  Once you allow for the changing language and styles and times, you will find that most of the characters in fiction have existed in various forms for thousands of years. The last century gave rise to something sort of new though. In the past the lines between good and evil were pretty clearly defined.  You could tell the good guys from the bad pretty easily by the way they acted and the things they did. There was a belief that if you worked hard, lived a good and moral life, did right by your family and community that everything would be alright, that the good would prosper, and the evil would be punished.  Then we had the Civil War, brothers fighting brothers, then reconstruction, World War I and the Spanish Flu epidemic, Millions dead. Then the Great Depression…there came a point when people just couldn’t hold on to that belief anymore against the mountain of evidence to the contrary? When you lose that surety how do you know right from wrong anymore? Bank robbers are bad guys,by definition, but how do you feel when the Bank just took your home, about the guy who took the Banks stuff? This gave rise to the various “folk hero” bandits like Bonny and Clyde and John Dillinger.  Maybe the first of what might be considered “Sexy Bad Boys” (and Bonny)

                So that’s the back story. But how do you write a …good..sexy bad boy and not just a good looking scumbag? Because there is a difference. I have a theory about that. We all learned about the competing theories of nurture and nature in child development in High School.  I think of it like this; a person’s nature is like Spring Steel. It has a form that it always wants to return to.  His “Nurture” is the force that attempts to hold the spring steel of a person’s nature to a form. When a person’s nurture aligns with his nature you will see a very strong and pure expression of who that person is. A good “Sexy Bad Boy” character is one who is a good person by nature, perhaps twisted to bad by his upbringing or environment, but with something inside of him actively seeks to return to good.  His story arc will be the process of forcing back the influence of his nurture so that more of his nature can assert itself, probably with the help of the good guys.

                Take Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer for instance. Before he was turned he was a decent enough guy if maybe a bit milquetoast. He took care of his mother, wrote poetry, and wanted to fit in. When he was turned into a vampire, he lost his soul and went on a 200 year killing spree, because well, Vampire, but even as a vampire, he wasn’t like the others who all seemed bent on ushering in the apocalypse.  Unlike Angelus, he had sympathetic aspects to his personality He was a caring and attentive boyfriend to Drusilla, he liked Manchester United and the Clash. After he got chipped so he couldn’t hurt humans he started hanging out with the Scooby’s, and more of his good nature started to show through. He protected Dawn. He brought flowers when Joyce died.  He fought on their side against Glory when he didn’t have to.  He still did plenty of bad stuff too, but for a guy without a soul he was pretty ok. When he got his soul and got past the whole first evil thing he became a pretty Stalwart hero. But he still had that bad boy edginess to him that the girls like.

      Now look at Prince Joffrey from Game of Thrones. Good Looking Scumbag. His nature is evil. He is a Sadistic, Cowardly, Arrogant Bully. That’s his nature. His upbringing was being ignored by his “father” and doted on and spoiled by his mother.  There were social restraints on him for a time, but his innate cruelty was always trying to get out. Once he became king he indulged it on every occasion. He was never going to be a good person. Not with the love of a good woman, or time to mature, or with the responsibilities of Fatherhood.  His nature would always be trying to force its way back to bad. As opposed to Tyrion Lannister whose good nature asserts itself through a largely cruel upbringing. 

                For writers I would suggest taking a honest appraisal of a characters nature. What do his past actions tell you about him? Let go of the idea that being handsome or wealthy or capable of tossing off snarky dialogue forgives all sins. People do not really change their natures; maybe a handful in a million, they only conform for a time to the pressures placed upon them. If you are determined to write fanfiction about one of these bad boy characters then you need to go back and work in some indicators that they have within them a good nature. And try not to be a Sansa.



Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Thoughts on Writing a Thriller



                Writing a good thriller can be a bit more demanding than writing a comedy, romance or action adventure.  You can follow a sort of formula with those, and even though your audience will generally have an idea of what’s going to happen, they can still be entertained. With a thriller, you have to keep them guessing, and you have to have a very tight control of your pacing to keep your audience on the edge of their seats.  You can’t really write a thriller to formula; however I did have some basic ideas to begin with. It calls for switching the perspective from which you write your stories back and forth between the good guys and the bad guys.

                From the early days of computer gaming levels and enemies were like problems you had to solve.  Through experimentation you learned the patterns and timings and actions you had to take to win, and once you had solved the problem  the game had posed, you could beat it pretty much every time.  In a thriller, the sides present problems for each other and while they're more complicated than those old video games it's still that struggle to solve what the other sides throwing at you.  You start with a problem for the bad guys.  The secret CIA list with the names and locations of all our operatives is very well protected. How do the bad guys get it? Because bad guys are evil and unscrupulous they can use any means necessary to crack the problem, from a traitor on the inside to blackmail, or hacking. For the purposes of the story, you create the security around the list, and then you figure out what it would take to beat the security.  This will always be successful; otherwise you don’t have a story.  The bad guys don’t act until they have a perfect unbeatable plan, and the hero generally doesn’t enter the story until after the bad guys have made the first move.

                Now it’s the hero’s turn. He has a problem. The bad guys have an unbeatable plan that they have worked out in every detail.  The hero will generally be working from behind with limited information and resources.  He has to figure out how to break down the bad guys’ unbeatable plan. This could be something large scale like a Tom Clancy espionage thriller, or smaller and more personal, like a detective trying to solve the perfect murder, or find the kidnapped socialite before the serial killer finishes her. In this case the criminal’s problem was how to commit the perfect crime and get away with it. When the hero begins unraveling the bad guys carefully constructed plan, the problem switches sides again. How do the bad guys stop the hero from interfering enough to jeopardize their perfect plan? Do they try to kill him? Maybe the killer runs him off the road after he shows up asking questions. Maybe they frame him for the murder. And so on, back and forth.

                Now since things never go according to plan in real life, a good thriller introduces unforeseen elements on both sides.  Usually the earlier one helps the hero like in the action thriller Diehard, one of the first terrorist John McClain took out happened to be the one carrying the detonators for the bad guys’ explosives.  That was a break for McClain and  a wrench in the works for the bad guys plan. Later, the shoe will be on the other foot, and something unexpected will happen to screw the good guys over. Towards the end  in Diehard, John could not have anticipated that reporter going on the news and outing his family to the terrorist, allowing Hans Gruber to discover that he already had McClain’s wife hostage.  This is usually the point where the good guys really have to step up their game to pull out a victory.

Finally, you have to end it. As big and dramatic as you know how. You’ve been keeping up the pace all this time right? Ratcheting up the tension? Raising the Stakes? Then let her rip. Yippee Kai Yay…



Sunday, October 13, 2013

Empowerment




     When we talk about empowerment in the creative arts it’s usually in the context of female empowerment, sometimes extending to other minority groups gaining the strength to overcome disadvantageous conditions. To see a character like Katniss Everdeen, or perhaps Honor Harrington as leaders and strong warriors overcoming impossible odds is inspiring to girls reading their stories and wondering what they can accomplish in life. Personally, I hold to the idea that a well written story needn’t stop at its demographic. It can inspire everyone.  

     Too often, however, I see the styling’s of empowerment with none of the substance. I used to think of this as Spice Girls empowerment, although for you younger folks that might be Katy Perry Empowerment.  It’s the “You Go Girl” “You’re a smart, sexy, sophisticated girl on the town and you’re going places, Yeah!” school of feel good empowerment. Unfortunately, saying it doesn’t make it so, any more than someone saying I’m a loose cannon, a maverick who plays by his own rules but gets the job done makes me Dirty Harry. It’s the emotional equivalent of a sugar high, and it will not sustain you when you need it to. Real empowerment requires the earning of Real Power, not just the semblance thereof.

     I’ve never really publicly jumped on the bandwagon of trashing Twilight. I mean, what’s the point? It’s been well and truly panned by people far more eloquent than me.  Of the many things wrong with that series one in particular stood out with me.  Edward never taught her how to drive. It was just “Oh you’re such a terrible driver, I find that exasperating and yet cute and adorable. Now get your ass in the passenger seat.”  This is all well and good so long as he is available to drive her around. What would happen though if they were attacked by multiple vampires and the only way she could escape was by jumping in the car and burning rubber while he held off as many as he could? Well, my guess is she runs into a tree 100 yards down the road and dies because he never took her to a big empty parking lot after dark and practiced with her until she got it down. 

     There are millions of different kinds of power whether it’s money, or learning jujitsu or Spanish, or how to drive safely at high speeds. It’s not something you can just wish into being. It’s real and it’s useful and it’s yours to keep independent of anyone else. Real power is earned through time and effort. Sometimes someone helps you gain it. Sometimes it’s something you do for yourself.   Sometimes it’s only a change in the way you fell about yourself and is as simple as making a choice and sticking with it.  In Hunger Games Katniss made a choice not to let her family starve. She stopped reacting and hoping to be saved and started acting on her own to control her own fate. That was empowering.  She chose to break the rules of their oppressors by entering the restricted area to hunt. That was empowering. She made a bow and learned to hit what she was aiming at. That was empowering.  All this was real power and was there for her to call upon when she needed it to survive.