GOOD GUYS ARE BAD NEWS ... for your novel

{ I had to start my post with a photo of a bad girl to counterbalance the good guy subject matter.

Ah, not buying that? Didn't think so. It was worth a try.}


"Good guys are boring?," I said earlier tonight.

Nickie, my co-worker, nodded sagely. "Yep. Boooooring."

We'd been talking my disenchantment with Sookie in the TRUE BLOOD novels.

Bill, her first lover, had suffered near death twice for her, but she is attracked to sociopath vampire, Eric.

"Vampire Bill is boring while Eric is just bad and sexy."

"Uh, he tore apart a guy who was just trying to escape being chained in a cellar. And then, he got upset when the man's blood ruined his hair's highlighting."

Nickie giggled, "That was so cute."

"What if the guy had been your kid brother? Still cute?"

"Oh that guy was a jerk. He had it coming."

"And the two little children Eric looked down as munchies toward the end of season two? Did they have it coming?"

"Oh, you're as boring as vampire Bill." And Nickie hurried off to read the latest Sookie Stackhouse novel.


Our conversation got me thinking on how difficult it is to write a non-boring hero or heroine.

But being good boring? Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, once wrote : "Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for."

I don't know about you, but that's pretty much how it's been for me.


So Niki and actors who moan that good guys are boring don't really mean boring in the obvious sense.

As writers we have to look at heroes through the reader's eyes. And what do they want of their heroes?

To live vicariously through them.

And who wants to suffer through routine living second-hand? We get enough of that up close and personal. Our failure with heroes is that we make them routine.


What do the readers want from the hero of the novel they're reading?


To live dangerously and to have fun through them by :

Dialogue :

How often have you been stung in a situation, only to come up with the perfect comeback HOURS after the fact?

Think CON-AIR when

Cameron Poe says to agent Larkin : "Sorry boss, but there's only two men I trust. One of them's me. The other's not you."

Or with Robert B. Parker when Spenser says :

"...You have any suggestions, make them. I'm in charge but humble. No need to salute when you see me."
Fraser said, "Mind if we snicker every once in a while behind your back?"
"Hell, no," I said. "Everyone else does."
— Robert B. Parker (The Widening Gyre)

Or when Spenser walks into a TV station's boardroom to see three lawyers sitting on a couch beside one another.

"Which one of you speaks no evil?," I asked. (A Savage Place)


{Side-bar} :

University professor turned writer, Robert B. Parker, had thought-provoking things to say about writers, literature, and life :


“It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.”


"Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.”


“The advantage of writing a series is that it probably replicates, for lack of a better word, real life more than most fiction because most people have a history and know people and come and go and you have a chance to play with the characters and not just the protagonist.

It gives you the opportunity to develop--lapsing back into academe for a moment--a whole fictive world. Gee, I love saying that now, just keeping my hand in. Fictive world!.”

"I sit down every day and write five pages on my computer. At some point I found that not outlining worked better than outlining. The outline had become something of a limitation more than it was a support.

When I did the Raymond Chandler book, Poodle Springs, which was in the late eighties, I was trying to do it as Chandler did it, and since Chandler didn't outline then I thought I won't outline.

If you read Chandler closely you can see that he didn't outline. What the hell happened to that chauffeur? I would recommend to the beginning writer that they should outline because they probably don't have enough self-confidence yet.

But I've been writing now since 1971 and I know that I can think it up. I know it will come."

"It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way."



But I digress ...

What, besides saying snappy dialogue, do readers want to do through their heroes?

To do the extraordinary.

Even if it is in ordinary circumstances. Spit in the eye of the bully. Tweak the nose of a snobbish boss.

Take this scenario :

A tired stone mason sits at a bar run by one of his few friends. Another man sits down beside him. He never looks at our hero, but he pushes a thick manila envelope over to him.

He whispers, "Ten thousand now. Ten thousand after she's dead."

He gets up and slowly walks away. Our hero hurriedly opens the envelope. Sure enough there is the money. And a blown-up photo of a woman from her driver's license.

Our hero gets up to follow the man to see if he can get the license plate number of his car to give to the police. The man is already outside -- getting into a police car.

What does our hero do? What would you do? And so starts the Dean Koontz novel, THE GOOD GUY. (Hey, I couldn't resist.)

There is a hero inside all of us ...

if we only know where to look. There is a magentism to your hero of your novel ... if you know where to look.

And where is that?

In your heart, my friend. In your heart.
*******************************************

***

DEATH and MADNESS

{"Men of broader intellect know
that there is no sharp distinction
betwixt the real and the unreal."

- H. P. Lovecraft.}


Ah, you say. The ghost of H. P. Lovecraft.
Now, he will tell us if what he wrote was true.

Short-sighted mortals. I dare not say. I can not say.

I will but put forth this : my imagination was too stunted,

my words too feeble to paint what lies beyond.

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life,

and that our vain presence on this terraqueous globe is itself

the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.


Then, what brings me to Roland's blog?


I was wandering Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders,
where many have passed but none returned,

where walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men,

and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those
who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city.

Abruptly, the ghosts of Samuel Clemens, Raymond Chandler, Will Rogers, and Ernest Hemingway (all heavily armed) made their cautious way to me.

And well they should have been careful,

for I am no longer altogether ... human.

I watched them from the shadows with some amusement. They stepped warily around shards of marble that thrust up from the misty ground.

The shards gave the illusion of ancient bones of some grotesque corpse protruding from an ill-made grave.

The ruins projected a diseased aura as if the very stones were cursed.

Clemens approached me. "You can roll around in your horrors like they were catnip for all I care, Lovecraft. But you owe Roland."

"Indeed I do. What would you suggest?"

"Write a piece for his ... computer newspaper."

"How quaint. On what exactly, Clemens?"

"Why the blue blazes you chose to write what you did."

"It chose me, Clemens."

"Then, write that. And try to remember what it meant to be human while you're doing it."

I fought down the gibbering darkness. "You are lucky I owe DreamSinger, ghost."
***
So I am here. Why did I come? I came because of my lost childhood :

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth;

For when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts,

and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

But some of us awake in the night

with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens,

of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas,

of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone,

and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests;

and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates

into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

Enough of me. I ask : Did your genre pick you?

I know mine did.

My reason for writing stories

is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly the

fragmentary impressions of wonder which are conveyed to me by certain
ideas and images encountered in art and literature.

I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best -

one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve the
illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations

of time, space, and natural law which forever
imprison us

and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces
beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.

These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion,

and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions.

Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected,

so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law
or cosmic alienage or "outsideness"

without laying stress on the emotion of fear.

As to how I write a story - there is no one way. The following set of rules might be deduced from my average procedure :

1.) Prepare a chronological order of events.

2.) Prepare the narrative order of those events if you are beginning in the middle or the end.

3.) Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically.

4.) Revise the entire text, paying attention to vocabulary, syntax, rhythm of prose, proportioning of parts, niceties, and convincingness of transitions.

5.) One last note : Prime emphasis should be given to subtle suggestion.

Imperceptible hints and touches of selective associative detail

which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion
of the strange reality of the unreal.

Avoid bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no substance or meaning

apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and symbolism.

**And so now I ask you again :

Did you pick your genre, or did it pick you?

Why has this genre captured you?

Do you have a blueprint you follow when you write your story or novel? Let me know. The remnant of humanity still clinging to me is interested.

And remember :

"Pleasure is wonder —

the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.

To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral;

the past in the present; the infinite in the finite;

these are to me the springs of delight and beauty."
***
Now, Clemens would have me insert this photo to keep a pledge to Laila Knight. Since, I, in my own way, am an old world gentleman. Here it is :

***

GOOD GUYS ARE BORING?

{ I had to start my post with a photo of a bad girl to counterbalance the good guy subject matter. Ah, not buying that? Didn't think so. It was worth a try.}



"Good guys are boring?," I said earlier tonight.


Nickie, my co-worker, nodded sagely. "Yep. Boooooring."


We'd been talking my disenchantment with Sookie in the TRUE BLOOD novels. Bill, her first lover, had suffered near death twice for her, but she is attracked to sociopath vampire, Eric.


"Vampire Bill is boring while Eric is just bad and sexy."


"Uh, he tore apart a guy who was just trying to escape being chained in a cellar. And then, he got upset when the man's blood ruined his hair's highlighting."


Nickie giggled, "That was so cute."


"What if the guy had been your kid brother? Still cute?"


"Oh that guy was a jerk. He had it coming."


"And the two little children Eric looked down as munchies toward the end of season two? Did they have it coming?"


"Oh, you're as boring as vampire Bill." And Nickie hurried off to try saving LEGEND OF THE SEEKER.



Our conversation got me thinking on how difficult it is to write a non-boring hero or heroine. But being good boring? Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, once wrote : Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for.

I don't know about you, but that's pretty much how it's been for me.


So Niki and actors who moan that good guys are boring don't really mean boring in the obvious sense.


As writers we have to look at heroes through the reader's eyes. And what do they want of their heroes?


To live vicariously through them.


And who wants to suffer through routine living second-hand? We get enough of that up close and personal. Our failure with heroes is that we make them routine.


What do the readers want from the hero of the novel they're reading?


To live dangerously and to have fun through them by :



Dialogue :

How often have you been stung in a situation, only to come up with the perfect comeback HOURS after the fact?



Think CON-AIR when

Cameron Poe says to agent Larkin : "Sorry boss, but there's only two men I trust. One of them's me. The other's not you."



Or with Robert B. Parker when Spenser says :

"...You have any suggestions, make them. I'm in charge but humble. No need to salute when you see me."
Fraser said, "Mind if we snicker every once in a while behind your back?"
"Hell, no," I said. "Everyone else does."
— Robert B. Parker (The Widening Gyre)


Or when Spenser walks into a TV station's boardroom to see three lawyers sitting on a couch beside one another.

"Which one of you speaks no evil?," I asked. (A Savage Place)



{Side-bar} :

University professor turned writer, Robert B. Parker, had thought-provoking things to say about writers, literature, and life :



“It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.”



"Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.”



“The advantage of writing a series is that it probably replicates, for lack of a better word, real life more than most fiction because most people have a history and know people and come and go and you have a chance to play with the characters and not just the protagonist.

It gives you the opportunity to develop--lapsing back into academe for a moment--a whole fictive world. Gee, I love saying that now, just keeping my hand in. Fictive world!.”



"I sit down every day and write five pages on my computer. At some point I found that not outlining worked better than outlining. The outline had become something of a limitation more than it was a support.

When I did the Raymond Chandler book, Poodle Springs, which was in the late eighties, I was trying to do it as Chandler did it, and since Chandler didn't outline then I thought I won't outline.

If you read Chandler closely you can see that he didn't outline. What the hell happened to that chauffeur? I would recommend to the beginning writer that they should outline because they probably don't have enough self-confidence yet.

But I've been writing now since 1971 and I know that I can think it up. I know it will come."




"It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way."



But I digress ...


What, besides saying snappy dialogue, do readers want to do through their heroes?


To do the extraordinary.


Even if it is in ordinary circumstances. Spit in the eye of the bully. Tweak the nose of a snobbish boss.

Take this scenario :


A tired stone mason sits at a bar run by one of his few friends. Another man sits down beside him. He never looks at our hero, but he pushes a thick manila envelope over to him.


He whispers, "Ten thousand now. Ten thousand after she's dead."


He gets up and slowly walks away. Our hero hurriedly opens the envelope. Sure enough there is the money. And a blown-up photo of a woman from her driver's license.


Our hero gets up to follow the man to see if he can get the license plate number of his car to give to the police. The man is already outside -- getting into a police car.


What does our hero do? What would you do? And so starts the Dean Koontz novel, THE GOOD GUY. (Hey, I couldn't resist.)


There is a hero inside all of us ... if we only know where to look. There is a magentism to your hero of your novel ... if you know where to look. And where is that?


In your heart, friend. In your heart.

*******************************************

And if you have the time, here are some interesting scenes of an ancient TV series derived from the Spenser detective series. I fell in love with Susan Silverman from that series -- an intelligent, brave, caring woman.