Author Archives: fictorians

A guest post by Frog Jones.

In my day job, I’m a public defender. This means, among other things, that any time I am placed on panels at conventions, invariably one of those panels will be the “What Makes A Good Villain” panel. After years of giving this panel, I can say with a certainty that the question of how to build a really solid, evil character is one of the harder challenges in writing.

Because here’s the thing: humans don’t set out to be evil. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says to themselves “That’s it. Time to go dark. I am going to start the killing with…you.” Doesn’t happen that way. No, evil is a slow, insidious process of a thousand decisions, each one of which appears to be completely correct at the time, but the sum total of which is a monster.

I’m talking about villains, here. Not just antagonists; that can be any opposing force. I’m talking about truly evil people who want to do truly evil things. Writing someone like that who doesn’t come off as a mustache-twirling dude in a top hat next to a woman whom he has strapped to some train tracks is a real trick.

And this is why I want to talk about Walter White.

Walter is, in the beginning of the series, just a normal guy. He teaches high school students, has a wife and a disabled son. He works a second job at a car wash to pay the bills, and even then the family is just barely getting by. They cannot afford a new water heater. Still, it’s his pride to be the guy taking care of his family. He’s constantly under stress, but he takes that stress and bottles it down because, well, that’s what you do.

Fast forward to Season Five, and Walter White is a drug lord with no compunctions about murdering for his territory or threatening his family. He is, by anyone’s account, evil.

Now, I’m not saying you have to write five seasons of a television series to get a believable villain into your plot. But I do recommend that you figure out how and why your villain broke bad. And Walter White is a great model of the basic things you need to get there.

For Walter, the cancer triggered him. Once he knows he’s dying of cancer, he realizes he will no longer be able to take care of his family. And that right there? It’s the one thing he had. Oh, he’s not rich like his college buddy who didn’t sell his stock early, but he is taking care of his family. It’s the one thing he has to be proud about.

This pride? It’s normally considered a virtue in society. Walter wants to make sure that he’s the guy who provides, not someone else. Good on him, right? Way to stand up and take responsibility. Way to “be a man.”

So now we have a series of pressures placed on Walter. One is his financial pressure, because he never has enough money to provide for the basics of life. The next is his self-applied pressure to provide for the family himself. When the cancer comes along, it adds a ticking clock. Now Walter has to make a significant amount of money very, very quickly, because to do otherwise would be to fail in his responsibility to his family.

See what happened there? Not a bad guy. Just a guy put in a position where all the pressures on him forced him into a situation where the next choice seems perfectly logical. If you’re a professional chemist, and you need to make a lot of money very quickly, then cooking meth makes a lot of sense.

This right here? This is the point where you need to take your villain. It may be backstory, in your case; it certainly was in mine. But in the life of every evil person, and I know this as someone who spends his entire life working with evil people, there is a series of decisions that lead, inevitably, to damnation. And it starts with one.

Walter’s decision is wrong. But it’s perfectly logical. It makes sense. He’s going to die anyways, so the legal consequences aren’t really a big deal. He needs the money. Someone is going to sell meth to these junkies, and that meth will be laced with all kinds of other things, because they aren’t nearly as good at this as Walter.

This is the moment. The moment where your villain goes wrong. The moment where he or she makes the decision to do the wrong thing for all the right reasons. After that, it’s a slow and gradual slide into hell.

Not every story can or should be Breaking Bad. But everyone who wants to write an evil character should watch Breaking Bad, because it is a perfect case study in how a villain is born.

About Frog Jones

Frog Jones writes with his wife, Esther. After a ten-year vow to never show each other a word they had written, they eventually broke down and wrote a novel together. Together, they have published the Gift of Grace series from Sky Warrior Books, as well as short stories in anthologies such as How Beer Saved the World, First Contact Café, and Tales from an Alien Campfire, as well as many more.

The Joneses live on the Puget Sound in the State of Washington with Oxeye, who is twenty-five pounds of pure bunny. Frog’s works can be found at http://www.jonestales.com, and he also appears on the Three Unwise Men podcast at http://3unwisemen.com.

The Power of Pain

April 14, 2016

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Character Craft & Skills 1 Comment

A guest post by Joshua David Bennett.

Kaladin Stormblessed, hero of Brandon Sanderson’s thousand page monster Way of Kings, is one of my most deeply satisfying character reads in recent years – because of his response to pain.

We first meet Kaladin in chains – enslaved and bound via wooden cart for the far reaches of the world. Sanderson piles the suffering on in subsequent pages, littering Kaladin’s past and present with indignity upon indignity. His family is cheated by the same community they work so hard to heal. His thirteen year old brother Tien is killed in a senseless battle before Kaladin’s own eyes. His comrades and friends are slaughtered. He is betrayed, falsely accused, branded and enslaved. He is forced to serve as a meatshield, cheap and expendable fodder in a protracted war that exists solely to line the pockets of the rich.

Catalyst of growth
Part of what makes Kaladin so engaging is that each wound serves to further draw out his strengths as a leader. When Tien is unfairly conscripted, Kaladin goes to war to keep his brother safe. When Kaladin is enslaved, he includes others in his escape attempts, even though doing so dooms him to recapture. When he is forced, unarmored and unarmed, to carry a bridge toward a line of enemy archers, Kaladin draws their fire to himself to save others. When the other bridgemen curse him, he binds their wounds.

Stormblessed - Kaladin and the Stormfather. Image by Kelley Karris. Used with permission.

It is this pattern of acting with honor that draws a spirit named Syl, who awakens within Kaladin his own power to control the very forces of nature. At his lowest point, Kaladin is stripped and exposed to the oncoming wall of a highstorm – magical tempests that make Earth’s hurricanes look tame. In the storm, Kaladin has an encounter with the divine and is called to refound an ancient order of knights who protected mankind.

Origin of fatal flaws
And yet, the same wounds that spur his growth also cause his greatest failings. Betrayal at the hands of the highborn “Lighteyed” caste causes Kaladin hatred of nobility. He is rash, impulsive, and plagued by his own poor decision making. Like Edmond Dantès, Kaladin thinks he is pursuing justice, but what he really wants is punishment – to hurt those who have hurt him. And like Dantès, his quest for revenge jeopardizes every positive relationship in his life and threatens to nullify all of his sacrificial acts.

Kaladin by Craig Paton.  Used with permission.

After building an unlikely friendship with a general who is noble not only in title but also in action, Kaladin throws away everything he has built, choosing a monumentally poor moment to challenge the man who betrayed him. His actions land him in prison and endanger his friends as well as his new powers. Syl, the spirit who was attracted to Kaladin when he acted with honor, is repelled when Kaladin acts with hatred.

Life IS pain, anyone who says different is selling bland fiction
Suffering and loss are fantastic tools to kick off a character’s arc. Trauma is the inciting incident in many stories, sustaining Edmond Dantès in prison with thoughts of revenge, launching young Bruce Wayne’s unconventional career in crime fighting, and prompting Luke Skywalker to follow a crazy hermit off planet.

However, pain should not only impact a character’s origin. Consider Batman. The murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents is not only a critical starting point, it is also an ongoing source of inspiration and struggle. Despite his great physical strength and massive fortune, Batman still struggles with the passions of fear and anger that were created that night in a Gotham alley. Contrast Luke Skywalker. Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s smoking corpses are seemingly forgotten the moment Luke hops behind the controls of an X-Wing for the first time.

This is not to say that our characters ought to mope. Characters are sympathetic when they overcome pain, not when they wallow in it. As Orson Scott Card says, “if your characters have good reason to cry and don’t, your readers will do the weeping.” And even better if the characters emerge with both wisdom and scars, overcoming in both healthy and unhealthy ways.

Avoiding a world of orphans
I’ve been a gamemaster for Star Wars and Pathfinder role playing games for years, and I have yet to see one happy origin story. The Galactic Empire has seemingly carried out a systematic campaign to orphan every youngling before the age of ten, sometimes even murdering the family nerf just to rub salt in the wound. In a game, this is rarely a problem beyond the first session – once the shooting begins, the power is in the group’s shared experience rather than the story on the character sheet.

In our fiction however, even having two or three main characters with traumatic childhoods might come across as farce. Fortunately, pain comes in many forms and it need not all be at the hands of villains. Characters can be victims of circumstance, nature, or their own past failures, as is the case with Tony Stark or Jack Bauer.

If you do choose to incorporate suffering into a character’s backstory, how do you avoid infodump or yanking your reader out with overblown flashbacks? Thankfully, Fictorians has covered the topic, as have multiple episodes of the Writing Excuses podcast.

Now get out there. Ruthlessly put your characters through maximum pain and (mostly) bring them out the other side, stronger and more interesting for the experience.

Author Joshua David Bennett is a scotch lover, history enthusiast, graphic artist, and world traveler. His first novel, Seacaster, is a Caribbean-Aztec fantasy that tells the story of a young man at war with the magic coursing through his veins. Joshua lives in Colorado with his wife and son.

You Had Me at Nitrogen Pentoxide

April 13, 2016

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Author's Perspective Character Guest Posts Ideas & Plotting Jacqui Talbot POV Reading The Fictorians The Writing Life No Comments

A guest post by Jacqui Talbot

When I was ten, my uncle gave me a chemistry set, and with my first successful experiment, I was hooked.

There were a few less successful endeavors.

Like the time I decided to make a homemade stink bomb. Nothing too difficult. Just cut the heads off some matches and stick them in a bottle with some ammonia. Give it a swirl and then leave it for 3-4 days. Et voila! A perfect tool with which to prank my older siblings.

That is, of course unless a certain person—who shall remain nameless—decided to alter the recipe for maximum stench, and then forgot about it, leaving the bottle in a kitchen cupboard for two weeks during one of the hottest summers on record. And if that nameless (and blameless) child’s stepmother happened upon said bottle, gave it a little shake, and then opened it…. You get the picture. I was grounded for a month and the kitchen was uninhabitable for almost that long.

And then there was the incident with that batch of super-charged homemade gunpowder. (I was trying to make my own fireworks and wound up losing the porch and my eyebrows in at the same time.)

The point is that I have two great loves in my life: chemistry and the written word.

So, as you can imagine, when I discovered Alan Bradleys’ intrepid protagonist, Flavia de Luce, I was entranced. A beguiling cross between Pippi Longstocking and Sherlock Holmes, Flavia is an eleven-year-old sleuth with a passion for chemistry (specifically poisons) and a penchant for crime solving.

You can see why I love this kid.

She stars in seven novels, each one told in first person with some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read. To say that Bradley has a way with words is like saying Michelangelo was handy with a paintbrush. The way he crafts the language is mind-blowing. Here’s the first line of the fourth book in the series: I AM HALF-SICK OF SHADOWS:

“Tendrils of raw fog floated up from the ice like agonized spirits departing their bodies. The cold air was a hazy, writhing mist.

Up and down the long gallery I flew, the silver blades of my skates making the sad scraping sound of a butcher’s knife being sharpened energetically on stone.”

*Sigh* See what I mean?

If Flavia sounds like a character you want to meet, I recommend starting with book one in the series, THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE:

Reading one of Bradley’s books is like diving into a soft bed covered in silk sheets and down comforters. It’s like a hot bubble bath after a long day’s work.

Just be careful when you dive in. Because when it comes to Flavia, you never know what lurks beneath.

But when it comes to memorable characters, that’s not really a bad thing, is it?

About the Author:
Jacqui Talbot is a book worm, devoted Whovian, and certified fantasy geek. When not pursuing her dream of becoming a full-time writer, she spends her time learning different languages (six and counting) and being a nuclear chemist. Her current projects include SPINNERS, a YA supernatural thriller set on the Choctaw Indian reservation where she grew up, and KARMA AND CHEMISTRY, a MG fantasy adventure featuring a twelve-year-old protagonist who uses science to battle dark magic.

A Lesson in Character from Superman

April 10, 2016

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Character Guest Posts 1 Comment

A Guest Post by D.H. Aire.

I can’t think of a better character to explore than my favorite, Superman, particularly with Batman v Superman currently in theaters.

Everyone knows that Superman (who first appeared in Action Comics #1 in 1938) was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. That year they were paid a “kill fee” of $130, signing over all their rights to the character and story they had been developing for five years. This was a significant sum back then for two young men from immigrant families.

Knowing the genesis of Superman, helps us understand why people embraced this character then and why Superman endures. The following historical information about the creation of Superman comes from Arie Kaplan’s From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books.

Superman’s creators, Siegel and Shuster, came from Jewish immigrant families. Jews in that day were seen as weak, a minority that faced persecution. In the United States the comic book industry, like the movie industry, offered opportunity. So, Siegel and Shuster tried to break into the industry, envisioning an immigrant (an illegal one, as it turns out) who epitomized their aspirations – a superman, who falls in love with an American girl, just like they hoped to.

They gave Superman a Kryptonian name, Kal-El, which in Hebrew means Voice of the Lord. (That’s both a statement and an inside Jewish joke that’s been a point of pride to many a Jewish kid reading or watching Superman.) Creating Superman, who fights for truth and justice was more than a story for them. Superman was written at the beginning of World War II, at a time when the Third Reich’s genocide policies against Jews, gypsies, trade unionists and anyone who they labeled as a threat, were being enforced.

They wrote during the cusp of the beginning of World War II, where anyone (such as Jews, gypsies, homosexuals , even trade unionists) the Third Reich chose to claim as a threat to making their nation great was targeted. Thus, a superhero who fights for truth and justice, was more than a mere story for Siegel and Shuster.

Siegel and Shuster, like other comic artists of the day made Nazis the villains at a time when the American public was often enamored of the rhetoric. They and many other Jews in the Gold Age of the comics helped change that perception through their stories of Superman and other heroes, preparing Americans for seeing Nazi Germany’s evil.

Even though Superman was written during a turbulent and horrible time in history, he still endures. So, why do I love Superman? Why do I think so many others do, too?

Perhaps we secretly wish we were Superman. Not necessarily that we want to be a hero, but that we know we have a secret identity – one that we know is the real us. Maybe we know deep down we have a gift, a power, which when we talk about characters might be called “agency,” which may not be a superpower like the ability to fly faster than a speeding bullet, but still the power to make the world a better place in our own way through what each of us does to help others.

Perhaps, it is something else. From the perspective of an author who writes about speculative fiction, thinking about the character of Superman’s appeal, he’s not invulnerable and at key times he depends on Lois Lane or another average person like Jimmy Olsen who often saves him from exposure to Kryponite. He also has human frailties. He’s suffered personal loss. He’s lost his adoptive father, Jonathan Kent, and his biological parents – even his home world, making him the ultimate orphan, a classic aspect of those on the “hero’s journey.”

Better yet, Superman has great duds. I really like the red cape. Okay, I’m not a fan of his glasses, which I guess are intended to make him look smart. His costume is red, yellow, and blue, which might have been better as red, white, and blue, except for the fact it likely would not have looked quite as good in the comics…

But I digress, the costume itself makes Superman bigger than life, suggesting the Man of Steel is a knight in armor in the modern day. What I mean by that is more apparent in Man of Steel, where the costume literally is Kryptonian body armor. There’s also resonance in him being a knight an aspect of his character. He’s a defender of the weak, not unlike the ideal knight or samurai.

That’s always inspired me – just as seeing Superman fly on the movie screen does.

That’s a take away for me as someone who creates characters. I believe that in order to create a memorable character there should be something inspiring about them. Like the rags to riches tales of Cinderella, who appears in a variety of cultures in their folktales, Superman is a small town boy, who becomes the ultimate prince – someone who could almost be any of us with such hopes and dreams.

Another way to look at such resonance is to think of Superman as mythological. He’s godlike powers and emotional human frailties. Think of Hercules, a demi-god, who has amazing strength and fights the good fight on behalf of humanity against evils, human or monstrous. Tapping on the resonance of such old tales makes Superman’s stories feel truer somehow, more epic. That makes for strong story-telling, which comes from creating a wonderful protagonist.

So, Superman is my ideal memorable character and an excellent example of what goes into creating a, well, superb character. And if such insights helps you or I make a memorable character or two along the way, thank you Siegel and Shuster.

An alum of the Superstars Writing Seminar, D.H. Aire became a member of SWFA (the Science Fiction Writers of America) in 2015. He’s the author of ten novels, including the Highmage Plight Series.

You can follow him on twitter @dare2believe1 or the Highmage’s Blog on his website: www.dhr2believe.net.