In Which Our Narrator Once Again Laments

I am, in multiple senses, a student of writer's block. I've experienced it a great many times in my life, as a result of a great many factors--indeed, I feel like it's many times easier to prevent good writing than to create it--and yet, I never know when it's coming to hit me, I never know how long it's going to last, and I never know what the key is going to be that unlocks the floodgates and lets me put my internal world back in order. It is my long-considered opinion, in fact, that anyone who claims to have a surefire cure for writer's block (especially anyone who insists that you try their cure) has either never really experienced writer's block or never really experienced the act of writing. Right now, as I write this, is one of the moments that I know I'll be studying once it's passed.

I could write a great many posts on writer's block (a minor irony that I never tire of considering). Indeed, I have an essay brewing right now, or perhaps it's a rant, about the curious alchemy of the writing mind and the multitude of things that can send one's brain plummeting into the place where a blank page opens up before your eyes and roars for your blood. (Can you tell I'm a bit annoyed at the current state of affairs?) But for tonight, I have been musing on a different aspect of the issue, and I have to posit the argument that there is more than one kind of writer's block.

The classic writer's block, of course, is the kind Hollywood loves to show you, the kind that gets played for schadenfreude and laughs: the writer hunched over his typewriter or bashing his eyeballs against the screen with a cloud of mismatched words storming overhead. I've had this one; hell, everybody who's ever been introduced as knowledgeable about a subject of conversation has had this one, the sudden mental lockdown and the panicked scrabbling for words. (Now those of you who are readers but not necessarily writers know what I mean, don't you? I promise I won't claim you owe me anything.) I absolutely hate this, as it clashes horribly with my quasi-Puritan devotion to writing regularly, or rather, it engenders the clash between my need to write regularly and my desire to write well, because what good is it doing me if all I'm producing is crap?

But there is another variety of writer's block out there, and it's far more pernicious. This is the stealth writer's block, the block that is even more insidious because you don't realize you're blocked. You're sticking to whatever writing schedule it is you like, and ideas are hitting your brain at full force. Narratives unwind and braid together in front of you, characters walk out of the back rooms of your brain and start to spout dialogue and put on quirks and habits for you to compliment or reject; but then, around about 4000 words in, you sit back, and all you can see are the ways in which you've produced what is often colloquially termed "a steaming pile".

Some writers might think this was preferable, and certainly I have from time to time--after all, you're still productive, right? This is better than only being able to work on your screenplay about Elvis's epic battle with Bigfoot for the living, beating Heart of America. This way, at least there might be some good seeds in with the blighted and miserable.

Unfortunately, this kind of block seeps into everything. You look at what you wrote and all you can see are the terrible, self-aggrandizing turns of phrase, the wooden dialogue, the little hairline cracks in the plot, and rather than rolling up one's sleeves and trying to make these things work you just throw them all away, because really, it's not worth it. This kind of blockage plays upon one of the most important skills a writer can have--the good sense to know that an idea isn't going to clean up to be any less vile, and discard it before too much energy is poured into it. It's dangerous, because sometimes that's true, God knows I've written more than one story that I've read five years later only to say "Really?"; but on the other hand, Huxley hated the ending to Brave New World, and Kafka wanted his stories burned after his death rather than published. Just as a writer can't always find the flaws in a manuscript by himself, so too a writer can't always find the moments of perfection, and it is this fact which stealth blockage prevents you from remembering.

Take my current situation: I finished a 10,000 word story three weeks ago, but I barely care. I'm 4,500 words into another story, and all I can think is that it probably sounds like a novel someone else wrote somewhere (I have a specific someone in mind, but there's a chance that (a) I'm wrong and (b) that in saying who I might spoil it, which proves that I'm not completely mired in this latest bout of blockage). I started my fourth novel and then stopped again 1,000 words in, and while I've got the introductions to this and about three other stories in mind, all I can do is pour a higher word count into a story I'm not sure is going anywhere, or at least not anywhere good. Heck, I'm so blocked up right now that I can't even find a witty way to end this. In fact, that last sentence was originally going to cap off the entire post. Yes, it's really that bad.

But none of this bothers me so much as the concern that maybe I'm not blocked, maybe I'm just spending my time on bad ideas. And that in and of itself does not concern me as much as the worst part of either kind of writer's block, hands down: the knowledge that it's going to end. Because the only thing more terrifying to a writer than the thought of not being able to write is the thought of having absolutely no excuse, and the only thing worse than worrying something you're writing is terrible is knowing it with crystal clear, unbiased certainty.

I'll come out of this again. I'll start loving to write again--heck, I've gotten a little thrill just from penning this, though I am as I post this concerned it didn't flow very well. But every time I do emerge, I can't help but turn a wary eye to the part of me that really wishes I didn't have to. And that, no matter the type of writer's block, no matter the reason for its appearance in my life, is the absolute worst part: the fact that when you don't have to write, there is a level on which it feels good.

Review: The Incredible Hulk

Let's open this review with a trivia question: In the course of the movie, there are two major Hulk characters and a character with his own comic book who are hinted at but not explicitly named as such. Who are they? (One of them is introduced in their pre-superhuman form, so you'll need to guess the Super-Sekrit codename to get the win.)

My experience of The Incredible Hulk, in under 100 words: It was a thoroughly enjoyable film, with Edward Norton and William Hurt's performances standing out among the somewhat tepid work from the others, but with the fight scenes and special effects standing heads and shoulders above any other good thing about the movie, except for how wonderfully geeky their scriptwriters are. Definitely moremore eye-candy than brain-candy, but still with the thoughtfulness that is the hallmark of good Incredible Hulk stories.

That said, if you want my spoilerific deeper thoughts, you'll have to delve into the next paragraph, which begins a document that is FULL OF SPOILERS! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

[[BEGIN SPOILERS]]



My comic-book geekdom is more or less a side effect of my mother's boss's comic-book geekdom. I never had a series I followed religiously until I was older and too caught up in my twenty-something college elitism to read anything but Vertigo titles--all my comic books in high school were last month's issues, given to the family by my mother's boss so I could enjoy them, which meant I generally had a day or two of reading a dozen comics and then had to hope the generous giver of comics was still following that series the next month. And yet, somehow, I understand the Marvel Universe deeply and completely. Call it cultural osmosis. Or perhaps just call it Wikipedia. Whatever it is, I love Marvel's universe much more than DC's, and I'm so grateful to see it getting such great treatment on the silver screen.

And among the various Marvel characters, I've always found the Hulk has one of the most enthralling, because while he is superhuman he is only rarely a superhero. At root, the Hulk is just a creature, a force of nature, even, separate from any morality except that which is imposed on him by external forces--when he's heroic it's usually because Bruce Banner aimed himself at something evil before the transformation, or because whatever was evil that week coincidentally got in his way. I won't get into analyzing the psychological side of the Hulk, as plenty of paper has already been sacrificed to that subject; I will, though, say that the film did a fantastic job of portraying this side of the Hulk.

Really, the best thing about Marvel movies is that they know their audience. All of their movies have been full of comic-fan in-jokes, but the amount of Hulk trivia tossed into The Incredible Hulk is amazing. We have our now-standard and still-awesome Stan Lee cameo (though Iron Man still has the best one to date), we have references to two major Hulk antagonists and a very covert reference to another superhero who, I believe, will be getting his own movie sooner than later, all of which came out without ever feeling like they interrupted the narrative to do an apostrophe to the nerds. And we have a "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry" joke, and Lou Ferrigno coming back to voice the Hulk (that's right, that "Hulk Smash!" was original, grade-A Smash) and even giving us a little pizza-loving cameo.

But even separate from my enormous nerdiness, there is plenty to love about The Incredible Hulk. I was at first put off by them deciding to skip the origin story in favor of beginning in media res, but as the movie continued, the quick flashes of the Hulk's origins they did during the credits grew on me more and more. I like that they focused on the fugitive angle, and brought the audience in to Bruce's angst after it had mellowed and matured.

I have to give major kudos to Edward Norton for his portrayal of Banner--I can give no higher compliment than to say that I sometimes forgot who was playing the character. I really felt for Bruce over the course of the movie, but never in that awful, too-clean way that seems to always infect superhero films. Scenes like the almost-sex between Bruce and Betty highlight the fear and stress and misery that is life as the Hulk, without dragging the film into bathos. I have to congratulate William Hurt, also, for his portrayal of Thunderbolt Ross, though I do have to jump in here and say that his character is where the script breaks down a little for me (more on that in a minute).

Of course, I have to talk about the fight scenes, which are excellent. The Hulk is, as he should be, a force of nature, but while he's brutish, he's got an animal cunning that belies the utterly brilliant scientist inside him. The final battle with the Abomination, in particular, was awesome, especially the outburst, necessary and spine-tingling, of a nice, old-school "HULK SMASH!"

Unfortunately, I now have to jump back to Thunderbolt Ross. He was far too dumbed down. I know, I know--why would I go to a superhero movie expecting an intelligent script? Because this wasn't just a superhero movie, this was a Hulk movie, damn it! Give me some brains in amongst the brawn. And they did--except that they transformed Ross into an out-and-out villain. In the comics, Ross headed the project that created the Hulk, but he considered the Hulk a monster and was doing his best to arrest or destroy Banner, not bring him in to create more Hulks; he was a bad guy only in the sense that he kept shooting the Hulk with missiles. I felt like the angle presented in the comics was far more interesting: it made Ross a more morally gray character, rather than a mustachioed metaphor for the military-industrial complex.

And while I am talking about characterization, I have to talk about the Abomination. I love Tim Roth, and I have found him to be an amazing part of any movie he's been in. Except this one. Maybe it's that Emil Blonsky's motivations are really just a huge, steaming cup of blind testosterone, but it seemed like Roth wasn't even trying. And while the shot of Blonsky standing about three inches tall next to the towering slabs of first the Hulk and then Thunderbolt Ross may have been meant to give us some insight into his thirst for strength, it really just came off as comically ham-fisted.

(I'm not even going to get into Liv Tyler--she did a great "the world hurts me" face, and her ability to plaintively say "Bruce?" was strong, but for the most part I'm not impressed by her as an actress.)

Ross and Blonsky (and Roth, though not Hurt) are really the weak points of the movie, and the fact that their motivations are the underpinnings of the plot makes the whole thing feel sort of overly simplistic, plot-wise. Fortunately, Norton's and Hurt's acting skills, some really inventive fight scenes, and the constant low-grade thrill of watching Banner try to evade Ross and his goons help to redeem the movie.

And then... [[WARNING! WARNING! DOUBLE-PLUS SPOILER AHEAD!]]

[[BEGIN SPOILER]]



And then...there's the end of the movie. There's Thunderbolt Ross, and he's drunk (and William Hurt is playing a hilariously gruff and miserable drunk in this scene, let me say), and he's sad, and then the door opens and there's a silhouette and the whole surface of my skin tingles because Tony Stark just walked into the bar! (I cannot give this the emphasis I want, lest I attract bypassing eyes to this spoiler.)

I love this last scene more than I reasonably should. It made the Marvel film universe feel interconnected in exactly the way the comic books were, and that was a level of cool I did not think it was possible for these movies to hit. And beyond that, it reminded me that pretty soon this is coming out, and while I don't love the Avengers that much I am going to be all over that movie like William Burroughs on a key of heroin.



[[END DOUBLE-PLUS SPOILER]]
[[END ALL SPOILERS]]

In short--this movie was excellent, and a comic book fan will love it on a whole different level. I felt like the Hulk was finally done cinematic justice. Now, don't forget your Hulk trivia--answers go up tomorrow.

"He Sighed Annoyingly": the Problem with Vanity Presses

I try not to be one of those people who peppers his blog with links to other people in lieu of content--it's an easy trap to fall into, and as much as I love writing I do not labor under the delusion that my commentary on someone else's blog/tweet/fan-fic/cat macro/animutation is actually important to anything that exists outside my ears. But then, there are things like this.

(For those keeping score at home, I received a rejection letter the day before I received this link. Let's count our blessings that I was in a good mood.)

If I had seen that link two weeks ago, I could have posted it and spared you all the trouble of my essay on urban fantasy and the definition of "epic". Books like The Shadow God (which retails, by the by, for more than most normal hardbacks) are the problem with my genre, and the reason that I have no problem with considering myself a "struggling author". Without pressure, a diamond is a lump of coal, a bicep never gets larger, and a waffle languishes as a blob of water and flour; likewise, without pressure, a person writing on a level that makes R.A. Salvatore look like a literary messiah becomes a Published Author (pronounced with your best mangled French accent) and doesn't bother to figure out that lungs can't fill with innovation.

I could, if I wanted to go a little bit into debt, easily get Done with Mirrors published; or, for that matter, the original, cartoonish version of Ether Street, or God forbid all 60,000 brain-mincing words of The Lay of Quinn (don't ask). I'm very grateful, and not just fiscally, that I haven't done this. I've grown as a writer in the past 5 years, let alone the past 10, 15, 20...and while there are all those obvious concerns of selling out and dumbing down that plague the artistic mind, I'd rather become a published author because someone with the power to do that decided I should, not because I paid $1000 to some guy who bought a printing press off Craigslist.

Certainly, there are documents better thrown out into the world via vanity presses--things that won't target a large audience or that are too short or unusual for most large presses to deign to vet them, for instance--and certainly there are authors who want to go that route, and I won't blame them for it (though I will also be very wary of reading their work). Certainly, also, what I'm saying sounds an awful lot like "selling out" to the way things are done now and ignoring possible innovations in publishing procedure or copyright law. I'm not saying that vanity presses are, across the board, of the devil (though the author of The Shadow God certainly seems to wish they were), or that those who choose to publish via vanity presses, the Web, or under Creative Commons licenses or what-have-you are somehow less "real" than authors who sign the standard deals with their publishing companies and agencies What I am saying is, I feel like the challenges of getting something published and publicized and into the hands and brains of those who would be your readership are potentially as much a valuable part of a writer's process as they are the enemy of creativity; and I think that The Shadow God, along with a few others I could name, are perfect examples of what can go wrong when that hurdle is removed.

I got bit.

Fucking survivors from lunch came back and holed up here with us, and of course, of course, because no-one pays attention to what's happening, someone snuck a bite wound past us, and then he died in the bathroom and we didn't notice until he was trying to gnaw Devin's face off...

Fuck. Fuck.

It sort of itches, and I can feel my blood buzzing. My head's light and my brain's on fire and I know I don't have very long if Miller and Harrison are any indication.

I'd kill myself, but I know that any of these idiots is going to take forever to kill me. There are some cops outside; I'm going to go hole up in the stairwell and hope that whoever finds me first makes it quick.

I'm sure there will be plenty of these--little snippets of blog posts left by bite victims and trapped soon-to-be bite victims, the last traces of ended lives. I wish mine were a little more poetic, but I can't afford time that could be spent getting away from survivors.

Bye.

I work on the 4th floor of an office building in Foster City, in one of the least pedestrian-friendly areas I have ever visited. Getting to us requires either an elevator ride or a four-story stair climb to a pair of security doors, which only a company ID can access. The windows only overlook the parking lot, and you can't hear anything from outside--it's so quiet in here we're startled when people in the 5th floor gym drop weights too hard.

I say this so you'll understand why I didn't know before now, and why I am apologizing to all of my readers who have lost somebody.

When I was on the train this morning they talked about emergency exits and where to find them; today's monthly meeting had a segment on power outages, and warned us about the accidents and problems currently gumming up every form of transit, mass or otherwise, in and out of the area, to a chorus of groans.

Groans. Jesus, there's a word I'm going to start hating. Metacommentary: My anti-drug.

I am for once really glad I tend to take off for lunch a few minutes later than others--I found out when I opened the security door and saw the little bastards pounding at the mesh security door a story down. They had downed two of the WoW players from the next row while they were on the stairs, and I got lucky enough to come out the door and freeze in shock just in time to watch Miller drag himself up off the floor and look at me like I was slightly up and to the left of where I was standing. I can safely say that no movie has ever properly duplicated the effect of someone walking with a broken neck.

I'm safe. I guess I'm calm. I have phones and Internet, for the moment, and toilets, running water, and a supply of food that will at least suffice to keep us from starving. But then I think about my friends, and my loved ones, and all the people who aren't in this fortress and I go into a whirlwind of panic and almost fall over.
Please. Sound out. Comment. Let me know you're alright.

If you see a man anywhere near Foster City going by Adam French, please, call 650-495-6716 and let me know, his wife wants to know where he is. If you are in Foster City and you need somewhere safe to be, come to 1051 East Hillsdale and call that number, or my cell (650-495-2819). I'll let you in, but if you have a bite on you I will kill you myself.

I can't believe I'm saying this. Please, be safe.

What's the Opposite of Congested

I normally don't post about my real life on this blog, but after today and yesterday I need more than my usual vents to get through...

My train was packed to standing-room-only capacity again, and then crawled past San Antonio and California Ave because of another fatality on the tracks. I'd thought we were just seeing a series of technical problems, like maybe Caltrain's maintenance teams were way behind schedule, but two fatalities in two weeks, both during commute hours? This is ridiculous. It's starting to be hard to empathize, especially when the conductors keep trying to make light of it.Oh, and because no bad day is complete without three things to make it crappy, the train was full of sick people. I mean really, stupidly sick, like clearing throats and sunken eyes all up and down every car I went through. If I get the flu I'm going to stab someone in the jugular.

What's problem three, you ask? Mysterious network outages at work, of course! They're saying there was a power failure at our main storage facility and a bunch of client-facing applications (read: things that make us look like idiots when they're down) are not working yet, which also means that I'll get back from my monthly meeting to find every proofreading request ever written since the dawn of mankind sitting in my inbox. Seriously, I expect slabs of rock with Semitic on them.

I have hated this week.

That's Not Epic; Or, Why I Don't Like to Admit to My Genre

So, Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, as many of my readers might know, recently posted this magnificent denigration of the Anita Blake series. Without getting into the meat of the article, he summarizes several events in the series, and frankly, stripped of whatever talent for prose Laurell K. Hamilton may have, the sheer silliness of the series is laid bare. These elements are one tip of the many-peaked iceberg of what I hate in urban fantasy as a genre, and why I am so reluctant to use that term to describe my writing, however apt it might be.

There is a tendency in all fantasy, urban or not*, which I have been aware of and had trouble articulating for years. I think the most basic, raw way I can describe it is the tendency to believe that, narratively, "bigger is better"; a conflation of "epic" and "overpowered", and also of "many plot elements" and "good plot". I've seen it at its worst in gaming (even--perhaps especially--in professionally written materials), and I don't understand it.

To address the issue of "epic": I have often heard things defined as "epic" which seem to me to just be silly, masturbatory power fantasies. Take, for example, The Elric Saga—a series which, I will allow, I very much enjoyed, but which is guilty of this very thing. At several points in the series, Elric is faced with monsters/sorcery/gods/whatever that are beyond the capability of he and his allies to defeat, a fact which is usually hammered into the reader's perception via the bathetically horrible death of one of said allies (who, seriously, should all wear red shirts and talk in bad accents, because if their enemies don't kill them, Elric does). Even Elric's supposed impossibly powerful black sword, Stormbringer, can't defeat these foes, though in some cases (I'll note the lizardmen in The Sailor on the Seas of Fate) it does some half-assed sort of damage to them. When Elric does defeat his Unstoppable Horror of the Day, it is never through some ingenious plan on his part, or some noble sacrifice—he always summons Gadonkadonk, Lord of Tree Sloths or Maguffinator the Scuzz Elemental, and they swoop down/up/through the scene and (sometimes after expounding on how much Elric owes them) take care of whatever the problem is.

This isn't interesting. This stirs my blood about as effectively as a swizzle stick. Elric never seems challenged, and he never seems interesting—he always faces impossible odds, and then after some flailing and struggling that is there basically to pad the word count, just calls up today's deux ex machina.

This is exactly my problem with what a lot of people call "an epic story". When all odds the heroes face are impossible, "impossible" loses meaning as a word; when the world seems to be ending every day, saving the world takes on all the savor of punching a time clock at a gym (something which happens in the Buffyverse all the time, but Whedon and his staff have the courtesy to comment on that narratively).

To me, an epic story should include high stakes, but those stakes need not always include the world, and they need not always involve foes who can explode mountains with their mind or shrug off tactical nuclear weapons or what-have-you. While these ideas might make great action movies (and I emphasize might), they make for piss-poor storytelling. The best stories—even the best true epics—involve threats to at most a region (Hrothgar's kingdom in Beowulf), which, granted, was probably the scope of the world to those authors; usually, the stakes are high, but only, or mostly from the perspective of those struggling to attain them (The Odyssey). And while those threats may be supernaturally powerful, or at least very powerful in comparison to the heroes, the heroes rarely attain their victory by just buying a bigger gun—even the world's favorite action heroes tend to win through a combination of firepower and ingenuity (look at the Terminator movies—the first two. Or Die Hard).

A similar issue plagues stories that are just, to use a description which was unfortunately applied to something I wrote, "a grab-bag of magical touchstones"; or, to be more specific, stories which cram in a bunch of plot elements and expect the narrative to somehow mash them up into something fascinating and riveting. Tell me, which of these pieces of vampire fiction would you rather read:

• A story wherein a journalist is bitten by a vampire and tries to control his degeneration into a monster, while dealing with a group of AIDS and cancer patients who want the physical stasis vampirism offers and are seeking a way to "cure" the infected/afflicted portion of the human population through transformation into vampires, ignoring the fact that becoming a vampire brings one's predatory instincts to the fore; or
• A story wherein a man can, thanks to being half-fairy before he was bitten by a vampire, choose to access his new powers whenever the sun sets, but must contend with a nonspecific risk of fully degenerating into a vampire every time he does so, based on a variety of factors; while he faces this problem, he finds himself set against a group of vampire bite victims who can, thanks to their experiences, literally sniff out vampires through the dead blood in their veins, and who want to perform an ancient ritual to transform the moon into a second sun so that vampires will be driven off the planet, too fanatic to care about the damage this will do to the earth.

Yes, that second plot is far, far dumber than the first one, and is absolutely a straw man argument on my part; but this is what most fantasy and urban fantasy books look like to me. For a classic example, check out the Nightside books by Simon R. Green, which include such great scenes as the battle wherein the most fearsome wizards in all of the Nightside face the main character and two men who cannot die, and are then killed to a man by one of those two immortals and the other's demonic girlfriend, before said girlfriend teleports the main characters to a bar run by the descendant of Merlin so they can talk to him about the whereabouts of Lilith, Adam's first wife…

No, there is not much else to the book. This is how the plot of Hex and the City progresses. I guess in theory the main character winds up struggling a little with the discovery he's not wholly human, but it lasts a page and previous to that, he shows about as much humanity and depth as Jason Voorhees. And the Nightside series is middle of the road for urban fantasy—many of the classic, constantly-cited works of urban fantasy have problems like this. You also see the issue in many well-known video games, movies, TV shows, and anime series—a climactic battle in which one character is exploding the other character's head repeatedly, only to have their head reform before they charge in with their overpowered magic item they got because of some nonspecific destiny and cut off one of the eight arms of the villain's true form. There's no life, no conflict, no character development—or when there is, it's so over the top and loaded with pathos that it's about as riveting as an actor on a blank stage clawing at his face and screaming "NOT THE BEES!"

But then, there's the Silent Hill series of video games. There's Tim Powers, whose novels, while they might sometimes involve the fate of the world on some metaphysical level, are usually about the struggle between two characters with the magic just serving as its backdrop. And there's Joss Whedon, who, while he ends the world eight or nine times in the course of eight years, manages to work that level of constant drama into the characters' personalities, and uses it as a springboard for a commentary on the human condition—two words absent from many fantasy authors' lexicons.

This, I think, is my biggest problem with the bloated excuses for "epics" and the overly crowded narrative landscapes: all too often, it seems like these authors are waving brightly-colored flags to distract from the fact that their stories aren't saying much. Their characters don't grow or change; any internal conflict they go through is flat and two-dimensional, sometimes no more than a throwaway line like "I was disgusted". These stories wind up being the literary equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, without the special effects budget necessary to make the lack of substance interesting to watch. This is why, despite its aforementioned failures, I love the Elric Saga and will defend Moorcock's writing: while sometimes he's hyperbolic, and some of the notes on his narrative instrument are out of tune, the man does give us a little bit of insight into Elric's struggle, and that combined with some strong prose brings the story out of the swamp that mires so many fantasy series. The Song of Ice and Fire, which I have mentioned here before, is so amazing partially because it is about nothing but people (some would argue too many people, but that's a different discussion), with the magic, as I will harp so many times, serving to add a bit of a creepy sheen and a few narrative curveballs to the story.

The world has urban fantasy that does what I would like it to do, it's just not what the world tends to think of when it thinks of "urban fantasy". And that is why, for right now, I am reluctant to admit to my genre. I don't think I'll necessarily revolutionize urban fantasy; I'm not even sure I'll move urban fantasy ten degrees clockwise from where it is right now. But right now, I am working on a synopsis for Done with Mirrors, and my number one hurdle is: "How do I not make this book like every other urban fantasy book I have ever read?" And in that, at least, I have a clear guide, formed though it is from research into the genre's failings. Watch my plot elements. Watch my power level. Don't put the world in peril again. And always, always ask myself this question: how does this forward the internal arc of my characters?

*It is, to my mind, worse in urban fantasy, because the silliness is rendered more blatant when the world surrounding the writing is comparatively normal.

Six Things I Hate About Fantasy

For all its cultural marginalization (a topic for a different post), science fiction and fantasy cover a huge amount of literary and cinematic ground. Unfortunately, this breadth also means that it covers a fair amount of very bad literary and cinematic ground; there are dozens of books with a title something like "[Occupation/Species] of "[Region/Planet/Fictional Location]" or "[Name]'s Quest/Journey", and the phrase "b-movie" conjures more images of cheap rubber suits and bad vampire makeup than pretty much anything else. And don't even get me started on the comedic fantasy genre (Pratchett gains special exception from my aspersions on the matter).
Now, there's not a lot to be done for this; every genre of book, film, and TV show is going to attract its bad apples, it just happens that, as a fan, I am more pained by the bad fantasy shows than the bad mainstream stuff. Like any writer with a blog and a little bit of faith in their ability, I like to think that there are some people reading this who have considered writing in the same genre I do; and it is for you, my loyal readers and colleagues, that I write this post. What follows is a list of things which have not only infiltrated the genre, but have been done to absolute death. The ideas have entered the realm of parody kicking and screaming; barring some truly revolutionary spins on these concepts, any attempt to use them must be performed only in conditions of abnormally high irony.

1. Count Dracula. This guy has narrowly escaped death, only to be killed again, more times than I can count. I understand the literary desire to revamp old myths and legends and books--Alan Moore has built a fantastic career out of this desire and some form of hallucinogen. But Dracula has been strip-mined into oblivion. He's been portrayed by four great actors (well, the jury's perhaps still out on Leslie Neilsen and David Carradine), battled at least three generations of the Van Helsing family, been Mina's captor, been Mina's lover, led a town full of vampires to redemption, and, at least twice, has been part of a vampire movie's "twist ending". Vampires are a difficult trope to work with in general--the BBC series Ultraviolet being one of the few versions of the myth that hasn't been done to death--but the Big D himself has been trod into the ground and sewn back together so many times he looks like a Victorian hamburger. Leave him in peace.


2. Jack the Ripper. Speaking of the urge to revamp...the indomitable Liz Lacy has already tackled this subject previously, so I will keep this brief: I understand that the Ripper murders are one of the world's most famous unsolved mysteries. I understand that the rumors of a Masonic connection make him very appealing as a focal point for a sci-fi or fantasy piece. But trust me, whatever you want to do with him, it's probably been done. Move on to the Zodiac Killer, or the Boston Strangler; they are far creepier for their lack of wide cultural exposure.


3. The Third Reich. I'm not sure if Raiders of the Lost Ark started it, but I'm hoping Mike Mignola will prove to have finished it. "It", in this case, being the constant narrative abuse of Nazi occultism or super-science. It is, from what we can tell, a historical fact that Hitler was a member of an occult secret society, and that certain non-Judeo-Christian mythologies were a part of National Socialist belief. It is even, according to some sources, a fact that Hitler and his top men were involved in all sorts of strange black magic rituals to ensure the victory and endurance of the Reich. And certainly, I love some good urban fantasy, and I appreciate that the Nazis are one of the most universally-accepted villains here on God's green Earth. But just as it is impossible to tread new ground with Count Dracula, Hitler's purported demonological experiments have seen too much action to be employed well at this stage; a mention of "Nazi occultism" is more likely to get rolling eyes than clapping hands. Given the examples of both Hitler and Dracula, maybe you can use this rubric: If it's been used as the final boss in a video game, don't write about it. (It has the advantage of also covering ninja...)


4. Heroic Vampires.
I never watched Moonlight, and I never watched it for one simple reason: I'd seen the exact same show twice before. I love a good redemption story, but we're to the point where the heroic vampire is an assumed part of the vampire subgenre. That isn't to say that your vampires should be cackling and inhuman to a man, but there are far more ways to add humanity to a vampire than to have them go out and fight crime. And for God's sake, learn from the examples I just linked to: if you have to add a vampire to your story, don't ever make a vampire a detective.

5. Assassins. People who kill for money are all over every form of entertainment media, but the fantasy genre is particularly bad about them, I think; the "fantasy novel about an assassin" is an exhausted subgenre in and of itself. Again, giving these authors the benefit of the doubt, I think this stems from a need for a psychological and cultural backdrop of the character's inner morality and struggle to be good with evil methods, and a need for an excuse to put the main character in harm's way, but you can paint these narrative elements with a much finer (and less worn) brush.


6. And last, but not least...The Honorable Loner, Outcast from His People. The temptation to title this last item "Drizzt do'Urden" was almost irresistible. Drizzt is just one of the most visible (to a fantasy nerd) examples of a trope that is also embodied in the Heroic Vampire, above, and the heroic assassin, and a vast number of other characters who are from more noble backgrounds. Fantastic literature, stretching all the way back to ancient mythology, is brimming with heroes who rejected or were rejected by their cultures, families, what-have-you. Some theorists think this is the hallmark of the hero's journey. But the outcast has gained a certain cultural sheen that I think goes unremarked-upon far, far too often; someone I know once commented that they felt it was stupid that the rebellious main character of a video game was punished and had to make do with substandard equipment for most of the game, when as the rebel they should be a bigger badass than anyone who obeys the rules. James Dean was a beautiful drop of poison in our culture's narrative cup; Wolverine made the poison taste like beer. That is not to say that I think every main character should be utterly accepted and mainstream and integrated--having a normal man wander out into a paranormal adventure is just as bad , stereotype-wise, as having the main character be an outcast vampiric assassin. I certainly play with the stereotype of the outcast hero in my own manuscripts. But I do think that it needs to be approached with caution, lest you find your main character developing a squint and a predilection for cigars (a point at which there is no choice but either descent into parody or narrative euthanasia).

There you go. This is certainly advice from someone who may or may not be qualified to give it, but even if all this does is make one budding writer reflect a little on the content of their narrative, I feel like I've made a worthy contribution. And as proof that I do not consider myself infallible, I encourage you to read my short story "A Study in Hellfire", and judge for yourself whether or not I achieved a sufficient level of irony. If I did, maybe you'd be willing to listen to my thoughts on the narrative uses of Jesus...