Cthulhu and the Crazies

I love Lovecraftian horror.

(That's a really awkward thing to write.  I went back and forth on it a few times, but "I like Lovecraftian horror" was just too weak.)

They're great, though.  I mean, Lovecraft is pretty much the go-to on that, obviously.  (It's got his name right in the genre!)  At the Mountains of Madness, The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Dunwich Horror, Pickman's Model, and The Shadow out of Time are all really amazing stories about the unknown.  With the partial exception of The Dunwich Horror, they all tell stories of an unfathomable universe of which humanity is a completely insignificant part.  We have no chance to fight back.  We cannot hope to defend against the alien things that exist alongside us.  We cannot hope to even understand them.  They are as beyond us as we are beyond ants.

There's one recurring element to Lovecraftian fiction that always jolts my suspension of disbelief, just a little.  The slightest thing out of the ordinary will drive everyone completely insane.

Villains - Part 2

Do all stories need a villain?

Well, no.

Sure, almost any story needs an antagonist, but that antagonist doesn't need to be a person. Since we are talking about speculative fiction, I should add that by "person" I do not necessarily mean "human." A villain can be an alien, a robot, a fairy, a sentient stone, a god, God, or an evil book. However, to be a villain, the antagonist does need to have at least the potential for personality.

Whether the villain has personality or not depends on how well you write him. In my last post on villains, I talked about this, why it's important that a villain be relatable. In this post, I'll talk about how a villain-driven conflict differs from others.

Villains - Part 1

(I wrote this, then realized it would probably be the first of an eventual series on villains.  Here goes.)

Everyone loves good villains.  They can be fun -- or horrifying -- but one thing good villains always are is memorable.  It’s easy to write poor villains, as well.  How can you tell the difference?

In high school, when I started writing fantasy, I always paid special attention to the bad guy scenes.  Several years ago I found copies of several things I had written back then and went over them.  While most of it was quite horrible, the scenes where the bad guy was doing something cool were fairly well written!  I was retroactively proud of myself.

Food in fiction

I don't know about anyone else out there, but I constantly find myself making my characters eat some variation of whatever I'm eating.

Actually, I do know that I'm not the only one who does this. The Turkey City Lexicon calls this a type of Dischism: "The unwitting intrusion of the author’s physical surroundings, or the author’s own mental state, into the text of the story."

As mentioned above, I do this most often with food. I don't know if it can be called unwitting, exactly. I know I'm doing it, and hopefully it gives the characters a bit of authenticity. Sometimes these situations become character traits in and of themselves. I've got a girl in one story who is a burgeoning tea connoisseur; she loves tea and has an improbable level of knowledge about the drink. It's not a major plot point or anything like that, but before the plot came along and ruined her life, tea was her hobby. In most situations, of course, making these little intrusions into defining character traits would be ridiculous. In the same story as the tea girl, there's a character who likes beans. He has a great recipe for beans, and there's a scene where he's making those beans. But if I were to make him into some sort of bean-obsessed bean man, he would look a bit stupid. Obviously, there's a line that can be crossed.

I just thought of this now because I'm in the middle of making a cake, and surprise! I ended up giving someone cake in a story. I erased the scene a few minutes later, because it really made no sense for there to be cake in that situation. If I had been working on a more whimsical fantasy, cake might have worked, but I wasn't. Surprise cake just didn't work in the slightly gritty setting that I was using.

And so sadly, I have learned that surprise cake isn't always a good thing.

By the way, I highly recommend that anyone who hasn't already read the Turkey City Lexicon linked above do so now; it's both hilarious and informative. If you find yourself repeatedly saying, "Hey, I do that!" it might be a good idea to think things over.

Character Motivation

The question "Why do characters want things?" can often be rephrased as "So why exactly is there a plot?"

I've been working on a certain short story for a few days. I had most of the characters sketched out and basically knew their personalities. I'd detailed the history of the city where the story takes place, and given sparser (but enough for my purposes) history to the rest of the world. I'd figured out how the protagonist would interact with the other characters, and written some dialogue between them that looks pretty believable. I knew the primary conflict and a secondary conflict. I had gone so far as to write the climax out entirely, even though I consider that to be almost cheating.

Then I realized why I was cheating. I had no way to plot the story up to the climax, because the protagonist had no reason to get involved with any of this. There was no motivation, and everything that I could think of cram in there was . . . well . . . obviously something I just tried to cram in there.

The story isn't a complete wash, I just need to start from the characters and build my way up to a plot. Going the other direction is easier sometimes, but it results in characters that tend to be a little too vacuum-sealed to the plot. It's easy to fall into the trap, "if it's faster, it must be a good idea!" It's important to remember that characters should generate the plot, not you. (Of course, well-written characters will usually generate something pretty close to the plot you want.)