Blog - Page 4 of 77 - Jeff Deck - Novel Writing Coach

The best Star Wars movie? KOTOR 2.

OK, asking which Star Wars movie is the best is setting myself up for a fight. But it’s May the Fourth, so I’ll ask it anyway — what do you think?

What if I told you (cue the Morpheus meme) that the best Star Wars movie is actually a game . . . and a decade-old, notoriously broken game at that?

Guess I’m really asking for a punch in the Naboo now. But let me introduce you to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, aka KOTOR 2.

Whereas all the movies have subscribed, more or less, to a straightforward “good versus evil” system of morality, KOTOR 2 is ballsy enough to bring up the possibility that the Jedi, in adhering to a strict, uncompromising code, could actually be in the wrong. And that, maybe, the Sith have a point.

You (or rather, the main character) are continually forced to confront these questions by an elderly, blind, former Jedi master named Kreia, who is one of the most fantastic characters ever to grace any video game, not just a Star Wars game. Kreia asks tough questions about the supposedly binary Light and Dark Sides of the Force that nobody else seems to be asking.

For example, after doing the typical RPG hero thing and giving a few bucks to a refugee in need, Kreia asks you: “Why would you do such a thing? Such kindness will mean nothing, his path is set. Giving him what he has not earned is like pouring sand into his hands.”

If you defend your actions, saying you were helping the refugee to survive and to find hope for the future, Kreia goes on:

“The Force binds all things. The slightest push, the smallest touch, sends echoes throughout life. Even an act of kindness may have more severe repercussions than you know or can see. By giving him something he has not earned, perhaps all you have helped him become is a target.”

In a few short sentences, Kreia provides more justification for a ~~Republican~~ Sith / Dark Side worldview than we’ve been given in hours upon hours of Star Wars screen time. Maybe it’s not all about mustache-twirling evil; maybe there’s actually a coherent philosophy underlying the actions of the villains.

Later, Kreia critiques the Jedi’s monk-like approach to upholding their principles:

“Turning away from that which tempts you or causes you fear is not strength. Facing it is.”

“It is only through interaction, through decision and choice, through confrontation, physical or mental, that the Force can grow within you.”

I mean, that’s not only an argument for the value of, erhm, player choice, but also for an active approach for shaping one’s own character, rather than the passivity that the Jedi seem to advocate.

I’m not saying Kreia’s right — there’s a lot of different ways to look at this question (e.g., Western vs. Eastern philosophy, determinism vs. free will, etc.) that don’t hinge on one side being “right” and the other “wrong.” That’s what makes this approach to the Star Wars universe so fascinating . . . it’s set up, at least potentially, as a clash of competing philosophies rather than “bad guys want to destroy the world because evil, and good guys want to stop them.”

The lead designer for KOTOR 2, Chris Avellone (most famous for the monumental achievement Planescape: Torment), admitted that he used Kreia to challenge the existing lore: “She was questioning everything about the Star Wars universe that I thought should be questioned.”

Maybe, you say, this particular universe doesn’t need to be questioned — maybe it’s just meant to be an extended allegory, a simple tale of space wizards versus the forces of darkness. And that’s fair. I’m not sure George Lucas initially had anything much more sophisticated than that in mind.

But I love that it contains the possibility of stretching out into something more complex, and that’s where KOTOR 2 really shines: as both a tribute and challenge to the source material. The game was released as a buggy mess but has since been cleaned up in the “Restored Content” version, largely created by fans who saw the storytelling potential in KOTOR 2 and wanted to help it shine through.

I’ll grant you, though, that the new Star Wars movie was pretty damn good, and I’m looking forward to seeing it again.

Why predicting the future is so hard

What are your best predictions for what the world will be like, say, 50 years from now? How about 25?

Okay, how about just nine years from now?

Even if you enjoy science fiction, and have read lots of it, you’ll probably have a tough time getting the future right. When doing research for Player Choice, rather than making my own haphazard and uninformed guesses, I tried to take cues from the smartest and most skilled minds out there. But sometimes even that approach can go awry.

The “future” is here now

The biggest hurdle to predicting the future is that we think in linear, not exponential, terms.

That’s something pointed out by Ray Kurzweil, one of 60 contributors to a 2008 book called The Way We Will Be 50 Years from Today, a compilation of essays imagining the year 2058. Kurzweil aside, most of the essayists are far too conservative in their predictions for the future.

How do I know this? Well, it’s 2016. Only nine years after the contributors wrote their essays, in 2007. And many of the predictions for 2058 in the book have already come true.

In 2058, we’ll “speak to our appliances” . . . oh, we’re actually doing that now. Some of them are always listening.

In 2058, we’ll have a “personal organizer that gauges our mood and selects a music stream and gives us the news of the day” . . . so yeah, for the music and news, we already have those. We have wristbands that track our heart rate and our sleep, and sensing moods and emotions is just around the corner.

In 2058, we’ll have our “second woman president, three of the nine Supreme Court justices are women, and eleven state governors are women” . . . well, the U.S. seems likely to elect the first female president later this year. The second probably won’t take another forty-two years to arrive. We’ve had three female Supreme Court justices for six years now, and may even end up with four depending how the post-Scalia shitshow goes. As for governors, we have six women now (plus the mayor of D.C., which is denied statehood), and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that number double within the next decade.

In short, the supposedly far-flung future is looking closer every day. Want some nanobots? Now we have our first ones. Want your own complete DNA profile? Just send these folks your spit. Want to send robots to Alpha Centauri? Stephen Hawking’s new project has got you covered (pony up).

Look back to look forward

Hindsight is 20/20, as the old saw goes. I wouldn’t have done any better of a job in 2008 predicting 2058, or even 2016. We should look back at past predictions not to mock what they got wrong — but to recalibrate our predictions for our own future. It’s a sound justification for daring to dream on a lot bigger scale.

If you want the best of our current guesses for what’s over the horizon, you really can’t go wrong with the father of exponential thinking, the aforementioned Kurzweil. His most recent book is from a few years ago, How to Create a Mind. Michio Kaku covers similar ground in The Future of the Mind.

Any other futurists you’d recommend who seem to have their heads on straight?

Yes, you can change your novel

You know what one of the upsides of self-publishing an e-book is?

If you find something wrong in your book — or something that you could obviously improve — you can update your book file and re-upload it to the publishing site. With, say, Amazon, your changes are live in the marketplace within 48 hours.

Having lived in this world of near-instant publisher responsiveness for the past year or so, I’ve noticed my brain has trouble re-adjusting to the world of legacy publishing that many other people are still living in. Thus, I was honestly confused when I saw this Slate article: “Karen Hall’s Rewrites: A thriller writer gets a second chance to revise her novel 20 years after it first came out. Did she make it better?”

My first reaction was: Uh, why is this news?

The gist of the article is, Wowee, this “thriller writer” Karen Hall dared to rewrite her book and re-release it, something that, according to the article writer, “almost never happens.”

Let’s leave aside the fact that Hall’s book is a horror novel, not a thriller (the novel is about an exorcism, for Mephisto’s sake!). I already ranted last time about people’s gross misunderstanding of horror, which probably accounts for why the Slate writer doesn’t deign to apply the label here. Instead, let’s start with this assertion that writers almost never change their books.

A quick glance at indie publishing shows the lie here: self-published authors change their books all the time, going back and fixing up older titles when they feel they have more to offer those books. But the Slate writer has already demonstrated a bias against self-publishing, so in her world, maybe indie books don’t count as “books.”

There’s a more interesting question embedded here, though: why did this book revision strike the Slate writer as heresy? Or at least, as something shocking enough to write a whole article about?

Because this is what happens when people are too precious about books.

Now, I say this as an author. And as someone who maybe made a fetish of books in the past. But just imagine a person gasping their surprise at, say, an extended edition of a movie, or a remake of a video game, or an updated version a song. This happens all the time in other forms of media in the mainstream, and nobody bats an eye.

Books are somehow different, though. Almost, but not quite, “entertainment.” Burdened with this extra baggage of seriousness by many people.

It’s the reason why some people dread reading altogether. And (going back to the snobbery about self-publishing) it’s the reason why some critics feel compelled to draw the line about what deserves to be called a “book” and what doesn’t.

For Preciousness Exhibit B, just look at this other, ridiculous recent Slate article (yes, I seem to spend a lot of time hate-reading Slate). Wherein the writer complains that J.K. Rowling tweeting about rugby ruins the magic of the Harry Potter books themselves. Because, you know, an author is supposed to be removed from ordinary mortals, serious and erect on her throne at Olympus.

Look. George R.R. Martin’s blog entries about football bore the fuck out of me. But they don’t affect my enjoyment of his A Song of Ice & Fire books, because I never pretended that his books were written by anything but a human being.

Once we stop being so goddamn precious about books — and learn to enjoy them as mortal creations — then we can allow ourselves to realize the potential value in updating a book. Changing it for the better.

There’s a reason that developers update software. Nobody gets everything right in the beginning. Not even after extensive bug testing.

And honestly, the more that aspiring writers themselves accept this, the less likelihood there is of them slaving away on their first novel for ten years in agony and isolation (and maybe even chucking the thing in the trash in the end).

I would much rather see a writer put out an imperfect product and revise it later than to have that writer wait in the wings for years, struggling for a perfect draft that not only may never come, but may not exist.

Books are not sacred objects. And authors ain’t saints. We can leave this absolute notion of “canon” to the priests and rabbis.

But hey, don’t take my word for it. You already know my bias; I’m the guy who wants you to ignore the gatekeepers and just go for it. I’m like the democratic socialist of books these days.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make a few tweaks to Player Choice. I’m writing the prequel now, and it’s helped me realize a few things I could clarify and improve in the original. Who knows, maybe I’ll even make the main character slightly less of a dick. Time to go defile the holy text of my novel!

They’re all wrong about horror books

99% of people do not know what a horror book is.

If you’re in the 1% that do know, you can stop reading right here. You can go relax with a beer and check out some fine specimen of the genre, like Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts. But you may want to stick around anyway . . . just to learn how to handle Uncle Gilbert when he asks you why you read that “gory trash.”

As for everyone else: You don’t know what in the Nine Hells you’re talking about.

Here’s a quick question. What is the one thing that a story needs to make it a horror story?

Blood and guts?

Wrong.

A knife-wielding psychopath?

Still wrong.

Torture? Rape? Murder?

No.

Zombies? Vampires? Werewolves?

Not even close. Sorry, chum.

There’s only one thing all horror books have in common: fear. They induce fear in the main characters and/or the reader. That’s it.

Horror books don’t necessarily have brutal murders, excessive amounts of gore, cackling psychotic villains, the shuffling undead, or flesh-eating monsters born of nightmares. They might — but to say that they all do, or even that most of them do, is grossly inaccurate.

Fear is the unifying factor.

So, before we get into why that’s so important, how did so many people get the utterly wrong idea about what a horror book is?

A different medium can take the blame here: movies.

Let’s be honest here, as much as it hurts for a wordslinger (and one accustomed to making stuff up, at that). People consume a fuckton more movies than they do books. And even when they haven’t watched a particular movie, they’ve still been inundated with information about it. Trailers on TV. Sidebar ads on the internet. Movie posters.

It’s all there, whether you want to see it or not. And it’s all visual. And in the case of horror movies, usually pretty fucking gross.

So then, based on the mostly lowest-common-denominator, shock-value, torture-porn output of the horror film industry over the past couple of decades, the average person comes away thinking:

“I know what horror is. And I don’t like it.”

Unlike, say, sci-fi or fantasy, when somebody decides they don’t like the genre of horror, they decide that they really don’t like it. They mean that they’re disgusted by it (not just a particular work, but the genre!), and they often indicate this disgust verbally with a “Eugh” or a pretend vomiting sound.

I was reminded of this special status of the genre last night during a trustee board meeting of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project, a nonprofit organization that puts on events for writers.

I had just finished explaining to the group why creating genre-specific writing critique workshops would be ideal, rather than mixing writers from different genres into the same workshop to critique each other’s work. The reason, I said, was that everyone has their own biases against certain genres.

“Oh, that’s not true,” somebody spoke up. “I read everything. I read all genres.”

“That’s great,” I started to say. “That’s rare . . .”

Then she amended herself: “Oh, you know what? Except for horror. I don’t read horror.”

I guarantee you this person didn’t come to a careful consideration of her feelings about the genre after reviewing the classics, such as The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson or “The Call of Cthulhu” by H.P. Lovecraft or House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. No, this flat denial from a person with otherwise ecumenical reading habits can only be a reaction to the horror movie idea of what horror is.

So what’s the big deal? What are 99% of people missing out on, when they refuse to give horror books a chance?

In short, explorations of the human condition. Just like the best of any other genre. The only difference with horror books is that fear is your companion and your guide through those explorations (as opposed to, say, wonder with fantasy, or curiosity with science fiction). And fear can take you places that our other primal emotions cannot go.

To go back to my examples above:

The Haunting of Hill House is an amazing, intensely uncomfortable character study of a repressed woman searching for a place to belong. Her fear of rejection by other people is even stronger than her fear of the “haunted house.” There is no blood shed in the story, unless I’m forgetting a scene where one of the characters stubs a toe. And almost nobody dies. We don’t see a single monster. (Contrast with the faithless 1999 horror movie adaptation, The Haunting, which features monsters, explosions, face slashing, near-drowning, and a decapitation.)

“The Call of Cthulhu” is a meditation on dimensions of space and time beyond our capacity to understand, and our powerlessness in the face of a vast and uncaring universe. Sure, there is a (now famous) gigantic tentacle monster. But what that monster existentially represents is far more terrifying than any immediate threat it poses to those unlucky enough to cross its path. This is not the literary equivalent to Godzilla — this is the embodiment of our fear that we are nothing. (And yes, there’s some virulent racism in the mix, a part of Lovecraft’s legacy that horror writers are actively grappling with today: see The Ballad of Black Tom and Lovecraft Country, two novels that both came out last month.)

House of Leaves is a dizzying metaphorical exploration of a marriage, a satire of academia (reams of fake citations, footnotes within footnotes, whole stories appearing within said footnotes), and a deconstruction of storytelling itself, all at once. Even the layout of the text begins to break down and assume strange new shapes. The reader’s fear is rooted in disorientation: in the story, on the page, in the margins. It becomes impossible to tell what’s real and what’s a fictional construction . . . and then you start imagining the endless hallways that might be lurking in your own life, just beyond the corner of your vision. (Side note: do not read this one as an e-book.)

And I won’t even go into the breadth and depth of the work of Mr. Stephen King — an author that many people will read without acknowledging he is a horror author. During a panel at the recent science fiction convention Boskone, the horror writer John Langan mentioned that the same people who tell him they “don’t read horror” will say just moments later how much they like Stephen King.

Fear is key to understanding who we are. It’s about facing the things we don’t want to face, and learning from what happens as a result.

This chronic avoidance of the horror book genre may be the fault of bad horror movies, but I believe there’s an unwillingness to face fear as well. Maybe I’m way off on this. But I’m guessing that many of the readers who categorically reject horror are the same readers who stick to genres that offer the comfort of a predictable experience. Say, romance with the implicit guarantee of a happy ending. Or mystery with the implicit guarantee of solving the crime by book’s end.

My challenge to these readers is this: check out a story that makes you nervous. You’re not really afraid of this horror stuff, isn’t that right? You were just turning up your nose at excessive blood and violence. Which is perfectly understandable.

So now that you know that horror books aren’t all about buckets of gore and gleeful sadism, why don’t you start by taking a look at one of the subtler, psychologically focused titles in the genre? Say, Hill House. Remember, Owen Wilson doesn’t get his head chopped off in this version.

I mean . . . you’re not scared, are you?

Welcome to the 1%. We’re all facing our fears here. And we’re having a blast doing it.

We’re not the Chosen Ones

The prophecy was wrong, okay?

There is no Chosen One. There never was, actually. Do you know what happens in real life when we anoint someone as a savior?

They let us down. Inevitably, and invariably. They were supposed to save the world, but they’ve been doping on the sly. Or fucking their nanny. Or secretly slipping a hand down the pants of corporate interests. You know, when you weren’t watching.

So when I read about a Chosen One, I can’t relate. I’ve never seen a Chosen One in real life. I don’t think there’s one staring me in the mirror.

What I see here, on this warming rock in the year 2016, are people who were never supposed to save the world, and yet they’re doing it anyway. In small ways. Small kindnesses and acts of courage. People whose coming was never foretold by a guy with a long beard and a rune-covered scroll; people whose lineage doesn’t contain a trace of magic or divine power. No long-forgotten royal blood or familial estate waiting in the wings, either.

Just schmucks. Plebes. But clever ones, for all that.

I don’t think I can stomach one single more Chosen One in the fiction I read. And honestly, I don’t think you should either. The worlds of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror offer infinite possibilities, and that goes double when it comes to main characters. (Yeah, that’s right: I just doubled infinity. Eat that, Einstein!)

If we can imagine any reality we want to, let’s imagine one where our protagonist survives only by the skin of her wit. Not by the power of the Jesus Dragon from which, we learn, she was actually descended.

I’m not letting kids’ books off the hook, either. Sure, every kid’s secret fantasy is to learn that their real parents were a werewolf samurai and a centaur master necromancer. Whose awesome powers are about to awaken in said kid on their thirteenth birthday, etc., etc. That doesn’t mean we have to market directly to that fantasy. That’s a lazy way to make a buck, and does the kid no favors down the road.

Let’s show our heroes triumphing not from inborn gifts, but from skills they’ve had to work to win. Let’s still put them up against evil empires and malicious demigods and horrors from beyond the curtain, but let’s strip them of their father’s Greatsword +5 and their best friend the almighty archmage, and just see what happens.

Well, I’ll tell you what happens: these heroes will have to use their brains, and their hard-won skills, or they will die. How’s that for stakes?

That’s not just my manifesto as a reader, but also the mission for my own work. In Player Choice, you’ll find a main character who has been handed nothing, who’s been working toward a dream for nearly his whole life. In The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley, the protagonist has been given not a gift, but a curse, and his mind struggles not to break in the face of an overwhelming darkness.

When these characters succeed (or if they even do), it’s earned. Because, like you and me, they’re not the Chosen Ones. They have to do the best they can with what they’ve got. I believe that the very best speculative fiction uses its fantastical setting as a kind of funhouse mirror, to show us something about ourselves. What we’re capable of, for good or bad.

Demand more from the fiction you read, and we’ll all be better for it. Seek out the stories that reject the Chosen One narrative and show us us. And let me know about your favorite ones in the comments.

Talk to you tomorrow.

(Written as Day 1 of Jeff Goins’ “Blog Like a Pro: 7-Day Challenge.” Thanks for the inspiration, guy!)