In Defense of Non-Ordinary Characters

I’ve talked about this topic before, here, but it’s something that’s been on my mind a lot the past few weeks as I’ve binge watched several seasons of Doctor Who.  The Doctor is, according to a lot of the sort of people who frequent rpg and writing forums, exactly the kind of character no one enjoys any more . . . hypercompetent, too smart for the average person to identify with, too alien for real people to identify with . . . shit like that.

Yet the show is insanely popular.

This, plus re-reading the InCryptid novels in preparation for the next one coming out later this week — a series which has had more than one book make the NYT Bestseller List, if I recall correctly — have made me realize anew that the people saying what people don’t want in a character, what makes a character a “Mary Sue” by the modern definition (which is ludicrously far from the original definition) are full of shit.  People do want those things. They don’t.  They are a subset of people, a subset that’s got a big enough ego to think they’re speaking for everyone, a subset that also is not nearly as big as it thinks it is.

They also are a subset that I think scares far too many would-be creators out of doing what they really want to do.  Gods know they scared me out of it for years.  Universal Nexus started as a unholy massive crossover fanfic setting and got refined and rebooted a lot to become what it is today.  One of the things I focused on so goddamned much during the final reboot and, until recently, was worrying about when I made little refinements here and there, was making sure that no one was too powerful, too important.

A while back, I had a moment of panic when I realized that despite this, Jake had gone from just one of many decorated starship captains to the commander of the entire Sweytzian Fleet and the descendant of countless generations of warrior priests . . . specifically a family of them with a galaxy-wide reputation for two things:  1)  being excellent swordfighters, and 2)  lacking a sense of self-preservation, with rumors that they were bred or genetically engineered long ago to have these traits, especially the first.  Opinions differ on whether the second makes them better warriors or was an accident.

His eldest daughter . . . the female main character in the story currently called “Quinn’s Story” . . . went from just a mechanic and excellent swordswoman to a genius mechanic who’s revolutionizing maneuver drives, a kickass fighter pilot, and an excellent swordswoman.

Hell, Quinn himself went from someone whose whole character description was “walking Ruvellian stereotype — flamboyant, good with a sword and blaster, gambles a lot; looks a lot like Antonio Banderas” to the second son of a major Ruvellian noble, someone who is closely related to the queen of Ruvellia  — one of the major worlds of the setting, and a former professional gambler who was making quite a good living at it and gaining quite a bit of fame before he decided he wanted to do something more exciting with his life.

The major family in the setting went from “well off” to “each of their 30 kids will inherit at least a million upon the parents’ deaths, aside from that, I don’t actually know how much they’re worth.”  (The thirty kids, I must add before anyone criticizes it, come from various combinations of a total of eleven biological parents, and include some multiple births.)  It suddenly struck me that this made them less identifiable, more whatever-the-fuck-they-aren’t-supposed-to-be.

Then I realized, with some help from Jaye, that it doesn’t fucking matter.  They’re not Mary Sues except by the stupidest definition.  They are, alas, characters many reviewers aren’t going to like, because for some reason far too many of the people who review sf of any kind are the sort who subscribe to the belief that powerful characters are a terrible, horrible thing, that ordinary people . . . people “just like them” . . . are what every author should be writing about.

But they’re characters I, personally, like a lot more than I did when they were more ordinary people.  And I’m my target audience, not some unknown person on the internet who is a self-appointed expert on what everyone wants in their entertainment.

A series about Rose Tyler or Amy Pond where they never met the Doctor would’ve been boring as hell, in my opinion.  Yeah, there are people who say they like “true to life” stories like that.  But even those stories aren’t about ordinary people living ordinary lives most of the time.  They’re about when something interferes with that ordinary life.

Yeah, ordinary lives are what I wanted to show with Intertwined Lives and what I will, eventually, be touching on again in other works.  But not the ordinary lives of ordinary people.  Who the fuck wants to read about that?!  Sure, I’ve got a character who married into the major family who before that was just a humble coffee shop owner.  There’s no way in hell I’d use him as a viewpoint character before he met them.  That story would have chapters about such exciting things as “Going to church on Christmas” and “Hiring a new employee”.  Wheee!  I’d totally want to read that book!  Before he met Viktor, he’d exactly two interesting things happen in his life:  1)  emigrating from Earth, and 2)  his husband dying of a horrible internal fungal infection.  Those might be worth writing about.    But the first isn’t really that interesting without showing more of the surrounding political situation than could easily be done, and the second is too depressing for my tastes, so odds are I won’t ever bother.

I sometimes feel like the pressure to write characters people can identify with comes from people with no imagination.  I’m not, I hasten to add, talking about the people who say that meaning they want more characters that aren’t straight, cis, white men.  Those people have a very good point; they are just wording it differently than I would.  I’m talking about . . . well, a good example is someone from a conversation on a GURPS’ forum once who refused to play characters over a certain point level because he couldn’t identify with people who were that much more powerful than him.  This meant he could never play a game with superheroes, or archmages, or, hell, depending on where he drew the line exactly, possibly even realistic special forces characters.  I can’t wrap my head around this. Okay, some of this is admittedly probably because I sometimes think I was born the wrong species and was meant to be a stereotypical dwarf (not in an otherkin kind of way, just in a “they make so much more sense than modern humans!” way) so I’m, honestly, not really good at being an ordinary person.  Fuck, I’m not an ordinary person!  I’m a bisexual, Odin worshipping, democratic socialist with OCD and anxiety.  I can’t identify with ordinary characters!  And I don’t expect to anyway.  I don’t want to read about me; I want to read about other people.

Guess the genre of these stories

So, I recently read some writing advice about the importance of the first page — so roughly 200 to 250 words — in establishing “the writer’s contract with the reader”, i.e. telling the reader what the book is going to be about.

I, as shouldn’t surprise anyone by now, thought this was completely stupid.  I don’t know about you, but personally if I pick up a book in the sci-fi section, or the romance section, or whatever, I’ve already got a pretty good idea what to expect, regardless of what the first page is like.

Anyway, here are the first 200ish words of two of my works-in-progress.  Have fun figuring out the genre . . . sci-fi is a given, so try to figure out the secondary genre . . . action-adventure, romance, mystery, what?

The answer is down at the very bottom of the post.

Excerpt the first:

I took a deep, centering breath before walking into the High Chancellor’s office.  I was scared . . . no, I was fucking terrified . . . but there was no way I was going to let him see that.  Not today, not with the rumors I’d been hearing.  By the time I approached His High Assholeness’ desk, I was the very picture of a calm, collected, highly trained assassin.

“You wanted to see me, High Chancellor?” I asked.  He was expecting me to try something stupid, that was clear from the blaster he had casually laying in front of him.  He knew me too well.  I said a quick, silent prayer for patience and self-control.

“Yes.  I have a mission for you, a very straightforward one:  Arrange for Kenshin Kenodori to meet with an untimely demise.  Immediately.”  He didn’t yell the last word, that wasn’t his style, but it was a near thing.

“Kill Kenshin?” I said incredulously, calling on years of training to keep the worry and fear I was feeling out of my voice.  “What kind of joke is this?”

He smiled evilly.  “Oh, I think you know this is no joke.  You know exactly what he’s been doing, don’t you, taverlot?”

Excerpt the second (this one is from a pretty early draft, hence the bit in parenthesis):

I had just finished sending the last foe near me to the Spirits when I heard a terrible scream from the direction Renata had gone, chasing someone attempting to run from the battle.  I just knew that it was her who had screamed, not the ((enemy)).

I numbly climbed the overturned troop transport and found my dearest friend stumbling, her hand clutching her side, blood flowing freely between her fingers.  The bastard who’d stabbed her was growing smaller in the distance, running faster than any Human ever could have.

Don’t let her die like this! I pleaded with the Spirits as I jumped off and ran to her.  I forced myself to stay calm.  That was surprisingly easy to do.  Years as a Dagger have somewhat inured me to seeing people I care about mortally wounded.  “Let me help,” I said, gently, as I eased her to the ground.

She was growing paler by the piclanid.  I applied pressure to the wound on her side with one hand while keying my comm with the other.  “Ren needs a medevac, now.  Here are our coordinates.”

They’re both romances.  Either I’m a total failure as an author, or that advice is particularly stupid even by the standards of writing advice.

Is This Seriously What Readers Care About?!

I found an blogpost full of blogpost suggestions for authors that are not only supposed to improve your novel (some in ways that seemed to me to be quite a stretch — like the writer of the post came up with the subject line and then had to make the content fit any which way she could), but also supposed to help engage with readers and make them want the book.

Some of them were logical enough . . . sharing excerpts and short stories, for instance, but some . . . do you really want to know about the research I did on stab wounds to the lung to write the Quinn and Renata thing?  Is that really going to help you decide whether or not to buy the book when it’s out?  Is anyone really going to go “Wow, she really knows her shit when it comes to what happens when you’re stabbed in the lung; I’ve got to buy her romance novel where that happens to someone!”?

I’m pretty sure the answer is no.  Please tell me if I’m wrong.  I did do a lot of research on it, so if it really would help sell the book to blog about what I learned, I guess I could.

This, I suspect, is one of those bits of advice that works much better for certain genres than others.  If I was writing something that involved researching, I don’t know, Greek Christmas celebrations or something, maybe it could actually be interesting to share with my readers.  But I write space opera.  Space opera which will — to hopefully avoid more reviews like I keep getting complaining that it’s not hard sci-fi enough — contain the disclaimer at the beginning that “Scientific realism is tied up in the corner wishing it could remember the safe word.”  So I don’t research science-y stuff.  Research tends to be of the “Okay, so what’s the longest they could survive that without medical treatment?” variety.  Or the “I know what the British coronation ceremony is like, but what are others like?”  (The answer to that one could have been an interesting blogpost, I admit . . . if most of the info I found hadn’t been so poorly written that I couldn’t make sense out of it.)

This blogpost, like the last one I ranted about, also said that readers want to read posts about ordinary days-in-the-life of writers.  I seriously doubt that.  I very, very seriously doubt that.  On the off chance you do, here is my day so far today:  I got up around 10, played some games on my iPod while I had tea, had the battery go dead midgame because I’d forgotten to charge it last night, ate leftover pizza for lunch, had a brief rpg session that was in the middle of something so it would make no sense to anyone who wasn’t there for the beginning so I’m not about to try to explain it, opened Pinterest and couldn’t remember why, got annoyed at seeing atrocious grammar in writing advice so often and considered blogging about that, found this blogpost I’ve been ranting about, tried making a blogpost about one thing it said all by itself but that ended up way too short so I’m writing this one instead.  Later, I’ll be making a grocery list and then going to the store.  I assume dinner will be on the agenda for this evening too.  If this makes you want to read any of my books or more interested in me as a person, please explain how.  Oh, somewhere in there I had a brief nosebleed too.  Does that make the day more interesting?  It certainly made it more uncomfortable.

Hmmm . . . I was curious how they’d made a “day-in-the-life” post interesting, so I clicked their example of one of their own.  It wasn’t a day in the life.  It was pictures of and quotes from a book she was reading, along with stuff about how beautiful or whatever they were.  I guess I could do that.  I haven’t been reading much lately, but I could share my favorite Doctor Who quotes from episodes I’ve watched recently, along with screenshots.  Except I think Tumblr is probably a far better medium for that sort of fannish geekery than my professional blog.  This might be one of those things that works a lot better if you’re into more literary/highbrow stuff.

Another suggestion is to take inspiring quotations from your work and make wallpapers and such of them to offer your readers for free.  I, uh, don’t produce much that has much in the way of inspiring quotations.  Humorous quotations, sure.  Inspiring?  I’ll leave that for the people who aren’t writing about a ninja/spy/assassin with a knack for pissing off his girlfriend.  Lots of snarky quotations in No More Lies, but offhand I can think of only one line that might be sort of inspiring, and it’s so generic that I’m sure someone else has said it better.  Pretty sure this is another one that only applies to certain types of stories.

What about my favorite writing tools and programs?  Does anybody really care about that?    I mean, it’s interesting to learn that George R. R. Martin uses an ancient DOS word processor still, but he’s mentioned it in passing, not devoted a whole blogpost to it, you know?  I assume there’s a reason for that.  That reason being that nobody gives a fuck!  (Except the people who are somehow convinced that if he switched to more modern software he’d somehow write faster.  I really am beginning to think Scrivener sends out mind control waves because it’s always it that people are suggesting in conversations like that.)  Will you be more likely to read my books if you know that this is my most favoritest pencil in the whole universe?  Is that really the sort of thing anybody gives a damn about?

Or maybe I could blog about the themes of my novel!  That’d take whole seconds.  If there are any, it’s not intentional.  There.  That’s that whole post!  Is this a lit class or an author’s blog?  Does anyone really come to an author’s blog for a discussion of the themes of a novel?!

Or about what my purpose is in writing a novel!  That one is two whole words!  To entertain.  There.  That’s it!

In further thinking about it, I’m coming to the conclusion that the real problem isn’t the suggestions in that blogpost, so much as it is the author of said post assuming the advice she was giving was universal when it clearly is not.  If you’re writing some literary thingy, full of themes, and meanings, and you’ve got a purpose beyond entertainment, then maybe the kind of reader you want to attract will care about that kind of stuff.  If you’re writing something set in the real world, maybe you can share recipes and other stuff the characters make . . . another of her suggestions.

I’m not though.  I’m writing things full of spaceships that go whoosh, smart ass protagonists, alien/Human crossbreeds (within reason), sword and fist fights, damn near a whole cast that fails some Mary Sue tests spectacularly, and other stuff like that.  I’m writing good old-fashioned pulpy space opera, in other words.  (With modern sociopolitical sensibilities, though, because I’m me.)  This does not lead itself to deep discussion of things like themes, nor to fascinating posts on things I’ve learned, nor to me penning inspirational quotes to share.

And when I think about it, none of the author blogs I follow at all do I follow because of what they tell me about any previous or upcoming books.  Nor because of anything they have to say about the craft of writing.  Hell, one of the authors whose blog I follow recently wrote a post that was specifically writing advice type stuff, and I saw the first line, rolled my eyes, and didn’t read the rest!  This has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not I’ll buy her next book, amazingly.  I follow one author’s blog despite thinking his books are incredibly overrated!  Why do I follow his blog then?  Because he has interesting opinions on things like politics and various things going on in fandom . . . and regularly posts kitten pictures.  (And probably every sci-fi fan reading this knows who I’m talking about now.)

I really don’t think the relationship between blog readership and book readership for any given author is all that high.  Maybe for GRRM, since a lot of people seem to be reading his blog under the weird notion that he’ll announce the next book there first.  But for most of us?  No.  People read blogs for all kinds of reasons.  Some of you reading this may have no interest in my books.  That’s cool.  I hope I’m entertaining you anyway.  I hope you’ll at least give my stuff a try . . . the stories are free, after all.  All you have to lose is time and a tiny bit of hard drive space.  But I’m very rarely writing a blogpost to try to convince you to read my books.

Why, then, am I blogging?  Often, to be bluntly honest, because Jaye’s sick of listening to me rant about something so I’m ranting to a broader audience.  Or because I have an opinion and the written word is how I express myself best and, hey, I might as well share what I wrote with people.  I have no grand scheme.  Blogging isn’t part of some overall marketing strategy of mine.  Hell, I can’t even write a book with an eye on the marketplace; I sure as fuck am not even going to try when writing a blogpost!

Besides, if readers really care about the shit like these articles keep saying they do . . . then I’m screwed anyway.  Because I don’t want to write about this shit any more than I’d be interested in reading it.

People are weird

English: George R.R. Martin signing books in a bookstore in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Slovenščina: George R.R. Martin med podpisovanjem knjig v ljubljanski knjigarni. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So, as I’m sure everyone know by now, yesterday (or early this morning) George R. R. Martin made an announcement which should have surprised exactly zero people familiar with his writing pace . . . namely that there still isn’t a release date for Winds of Winter.  I am amazed that people are surprised by this, but even more amazed by some of the reactions I’ve seen:

People saying they’ve been crying since they found out.

People sure it’s being delayed so people will actually watch the sixth season of the show.

People convinced he could be done by now if he just learned to type faster/got a newer computer/used a modern word processing program.

People speculating on how many years he has left to live — going so far as to use an online life expectancy calculator in one case! — and concluding that there is no way the seventh book will be written by him.

People convinced that he’s suffering from some sort of fear of not living up to people’s expectations and that’s why it’s taking so long, so he needs a good psychiatrist.

People thinking he doesn’t want to finish it because he’s been working on the series for so long that it would cause him to have to acknowledge his own mortality.

As well as the usual entitled whiny brats saying “I’ve invested x years/$x in this series!  He owes it to us fans to finish it and quit accepting invitations to do other things/writing other things” in every conceivable fashion short of actually calling him their bitch.

But none of these floored me as much as one particular sort of response I saw:  People who won’t be reading the book when it comes out since they’ll already know what happens from the show.  This, despite GRRM pointing out in his blogpost that the books and show have already seriously diverged!  These people, when pressed about it, acknowledge that there will be differences, but the big plot points will still be the same.

I just can’t wrap my head around this.  Maybe it’s because little me started the Little House series with Little Town on the Prairie, after having seen various episodes of the show set all over the timeline, but for me, reading a book has never been about finding out how things end up.  It’s about the journey, not the destination.  (Come to think of it, this might have something to do with trouble with coming up with plots . . . or maybe that’s my love of Little House in general being the issue there.  More on that in the blogpost I intended to make today which I’ll almost definitely probably make later this week.)

I can’t comprehend reading something as long as A Song of Ice and Fire just to find out how it ends!  I read over twice as fast as the average person (between 400 and 700 wpm, depending on which online test I use . . . I’m calculating this based on 500 because it made sense at the time); it’d take me 3540 hours to read all of the books so far!  That’s 147.5 days . . . assuming I could read 24 hours a day, which I can’t.  Assuming a more reasonable 6 hours a day spent reading, it’d take me 590 days to read the books.  That’s over a goddamned year!  If who Jon’s parents are or who’s going to ultimately end up on the throne was the only thing keeping me interested, I’d have long since given up!

It especially doesn’t make sense to be reading GRRM’s books for that purpose since this is the guy who has repeatedly said the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself!  I think that makes it pretty damned obvious that he’s not writing the books with his focus being on the end point of the plot!

EDITED TO ADD:  I have found even more confusing commentary elsewhere:  People saying that GRRM himself will not be interested in the books any more after the show ends, “since he won’t get to show us the ending”.  What the fuck?!  Guys, no writer ever has ever written something just to get to show readers the ending.  In fact, given GRRM’s “sins” — the “overdescribed” banquets and heraldry and “too much emphasis on characters people don’t care about” — I’m willing to bet what he wants is the same thing I do:  to show people the cool characters and setting he made.