Villains
Jo Walton
asked a question about heroes and villains and which are better done.
I said that people often appear to be better at one than the other, and
various people quoted Lewis on how much easier it is to magnify a flaw
than a virtue. Then Tim Barton, who was moderating, asked why we need
villains at all and said that nobody is a villain really.
Well, I said, nobody is a villain _to themselves_ , but stories do have
villains (and so does real life) from the POV of the other characters.
Tim asked _why_ they have to, and I said because it moves the plot along,
which is a bad answer, and that's a question worth pondering. It is
necessary to story to have plot, and to have conflict, and generally
it's necessary to have people opposed to the protagonists and taking
different sides. But are they really villains? I mean Sauron is
unequivocably evil, but Saruman justifies himself to himself and is
much more realistic as a person.
In most modes of writing where the writer is sticking to one POV, certainly
in first or tight third, unless that POV is the villain, then the actions,
motivations and self-justifications of the villain aren't going to be fully
understood unless the villain spends a long time gloating or otherwise
justifying themselves. Getting the villain to come over as other than
a caricature can thus be challenging. This is OK where it doesn't matter
that they be fleshed out. It does if they're going to be on-stage a lot.
I also have another problem here. In order to write a POV I have to
sympathise with that POV. This just plain isn't a problem, I can
sympathise with pretty much any POV. But a villain without a POV I
don't have to sympathise with, I can hate along with my characters.
The problem is that I have to work out what those villains are doing,
and to do that I have to think about their motivations and the way
they see themselves. This generally ends up with me working out that
they had a terrible childhood (this made everyone laugh when I said
it, but I can't help it) and then I start to feel sorry for them.
My best villains don't start off as "and there's this plot hole
requiring a bad guy" they start off as characters who slowly show
me what they're like and it isn't very nice. Or they start off as
someone doing something awful and later on grow up or change
their minds or I start to like them. I've got examples of each
of those in what I'm writing, and I'm perfectly happy with them.
(I've another who was supposed to turn into a villain but didn't
when I got to know him, which is also OK.)
But I also have a couple of out and out evil but non-caricature people,
one of whom died in volume 1, and the other of whom is still around.
I can get my head around his motivations but I don't like doing it, I
don't like him, I wish I didn't have his nasty schemes to deal with
just as much as my POV character wishes that. (But "we all lived happily
ever after" isn't much of a plot, really.) I haven't had him on stage
much, but I know how to deal with him when I do, which I've just realised
I'm going to do in the next chapter which I'm going to get on with when
I've finished this post.
The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
Anyone got any useful thoughts, useful tangents, interestingly different
ways of doing it?
--
Jo - - I kissed a kif at Kefk - - J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk
http://www.bluejo.demon.co.uk - Interstichia; Poetry; RASFW FAQ; etc.
Dan Krashin
J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk wrote:
[snip]
> The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
> more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
> at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
> as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
> to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
> I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
> story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
>
> Anyone got any useful thoughts, useful tangents, interestingly different
> ways of doing it?
Well, you've probably already tried this, but it might help to think or
write about how he got that way -- was he raised by his parents to be
an Orc-hater, or did he get that way after an Orc stole his horse or
burnt down his parents' house?* Is he unusual in his prejudices or
is it expected in his peer-group to hate Orcs and slay them whenever
possible? Would he or does he support violent acts against the people
he doesn't like? Is there any sexual element to his bigotry?
I have also known (in RL) stone bigots who were perfectly comfortable
working with members of groups they despised collectively. I think this
is pretty common, actually. So does your guy know "one good Orc"?
OTOH, maybe answering these questions will make you dislike the
character even more. Another approach might be to try to see him
from a friendly perspective, someone for whom he is a friend or
uncle first, and who tries "not to get him started" on the subject
of Orcs.
Hope this is of some help.
* Using "Orc" in the revisionist sense of "despised ethnic group existing
in a fantasy novel".
--
Danny
"The last man on earth sat in a room. There was a wok on the door."
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Brenda
Dan Krashin wrote:
> In article <924255...@bluejo.demon.co.uk>,
> J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk wrote:
> [snip]
> > The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
> > more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
> > at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
> > as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
> > to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
> > I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
> > story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
> >
> > Anyone got any useful thoughts, useful tangents, interestingly different
> > ways of doing it?
>
> Well, you've probably already tried this, but it might help to think or
> write about how he got that way -- was he raised by his parents to be
> an Orc-hater, or did he get that way after an Orc stole his horse or
> burnt down his parents' house?* Is he unusual in his prejudices or
> is it expected in his peer-group to hate Orcs and slay them whenever
> possible? Would he or does he support violent acts against the people
> he doesn't like? Is there any sexual element to his bigotry?
>
>
The best creator of villains I've ever read is Ruth Rendell. Her villains are
psychopaths, kooks, complete looney tunes, but totally comprehensible. Read
her THE BRIDESMAID or her current one, A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES.
Brenda
--
---------
Brenda W. Clough, author of HOW LIKE A GOD, from Tor Books
http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda/
Mary K. Kuhner
Jo Walton <J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
>more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
>at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
>as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
>to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
>I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
>story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
Strong walls can come about through fear: can you find out what is
frightening enough to justify (in his eyes) those defenses? Can you
imagine a scene in which Something is pounding on the walls trying
to get in?
My own scariest experience with POV came about during a correspondence
from someone who was doing clinic-defense work during a violence-
against-abortion-clinics scare in California. She had a very hard
time of it, and I had an easy time identifying and sympathizing with
her.
But one day, in the course of a roleplaying game session about someone
entirely else, I had a flash of seeing the situation from the point of
view of the doctor-killer. He thinks he's a hero, and he thinks it
for reasons that are actually not that hard for me to understand; his
situation maps onto ones I might find myself in a *lot* more closely
than I would have expected. I suppose I've gained something by knowing
this, but it was a frightful thing to discover. I've never been able
to look at the conflict the same way since.
My husband says that Robin Hobbs does this very well in _Ship of Magic_
with her gender-bigot character. Might be something to look at.
A roleplaying friend who corresponded about this with me said that
her single most successful evil NPC was a Teacher. His only
wickedness--and it was enough--was that he put his calling above
petty likes and dislikes of individuals. So he was, in essence, a
Jedi Master who would teach Vader as willingly as Luke. This she
could fully understand, and empathize with, and still find dismaying.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Rachael M. Lininger
On 16 Apr 1999, Mary K. Kuhner wrote:
>A roleplaying friend who corresponded about this with me said that
>her single most successful evil NPC was a Teacher. His only
>wickedness--and it was enough--was that he put his calling above
>petty likes and dislikes of individuals. So he was, in essence, a
>Jedi Master who would teach Vader as willingly as Luke. This she
>could fully understand, and empathize with, and still find dismaying.
You mean Obi-Wan?
:)
Rachael
--
Rachael M. Lininger | "Some causes of angst have not worn well."
lininger@ |
virtu.sar.usf.edu | Dr. A. McA. Miller
Mike Totty
>
>Tim asked _why_ they have to, and I said because it moves the plot
along,
>which is a bad answer, and that's a question worth pondering. It is
>necessary to story to have plot, and to have conflict, and generally
>it's necessary to have people opposed to the protagonists and taking
>different sides. But are they really villains? I mean Sauron is
>unequivocably evil, but Saruman justifies himself to himself and is
>much more realistic as a person.
Sauron is as evil as cardboard can get (no Jay, let's not bring that one
over here).
>
>In most modes of writing where the writer is sticking to one POV,
certainly
>in first or tight third, unless that POV is the villain, then the
actions,
>motivations and self-justifications of the villain aren't going to be
fully
>understood unless the villain spends a long time gloating or otherwise
>justifying themselves. Getting the villain to come over as other than
>a caricature can thus be challenging. This is OK where it doesn't
matter
>that they be fleshed out. It does if they're going to be on-stage a
lot.
I guess this one depends. If the moral conflict in the story is such
that it is very easy to make a "correct" decision, then obviously it
won't take much to make their motivations believable. But this
simplicity of purpose for the protags, makes for a more difficult
position to justify on the antag side. I think that's why you see so
many stories resort to the fall back position of doing evil for evil's
sake or they're motivated by a very uncomplicated drive for power or
greed.
So I guess that means that the moral conflict at the center needs to be
complex, multifaceted. It needs to be reasonable for a reader to say,
yeah, I may not like the Dark Overlord <TM>, but I can see how he thinks
he's just been misunderstood.
My current WIP takes a different tack. I don't know that there is a
_primary_ antagonist at all. It's told from a series of first POV
devices. The Civil Engineer Serial Killer (it's a fantasy novel, FWIW)
is an antagonist, but the actions of the protagonists aren't directed at
him, in fact the main protags don't know he's a threat at all until the
pivotal moment. And even he is a very devout religious person who
genuinely thinks he is protecting others.
Other than the CESK, there are no "bad" guys. There's some plotting of
one House against another. And lots of subtrefuge, but no villains. The
protags are of the vaguely anti-hero mold.
The complex situation (race against time to save the captured soul of a
noble, before the ecumenical courts excommunicate the family, rendering
them legally helpless against the other noble families in this
Renaissance-esque collection of provinces set within a single massive
urban landscape) is the primary antagonist.
I find it intriguing handling this sturcturally. Of course, no one may
find it all that interesting to read.
>The problem is that I have to work out what those villains are doing,
>and to do that I have to think about their motivations and the way
>they see themselves. This generally ends up with me working out that
>they had a terrible childhood (this made everyone laugh when I said
>it, but I can't help it) and then I start to feel sorry for them.
I don't have a problem with this at all. A terrible childhood, a few
betrayals later in life, bitterness over unrequited love, saddness about
paths not taken, sounds like the ingredients of a very real character --
villain or hero.
>
>The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
>more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
>at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
>as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
>to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
>I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
>story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
>
>Anyone got any useful thoughts, useful tangents, interestingly
different
>ways of doing it?
Assuming that the bigotry is a defining characteristic, I'd say explore
why he's a bigot. Try to give him a complex reason for his bigotry.
IMHO, socialization and peer pressure are usually driving forces behind
bigotry. Your character always wanted to please his stern, powerful
father, who was a fierce bigot. Segregated from the object of the
bigotry, the character never sees the "others" as people. His friends
reinforce the bigoted attitudes and, in fact, contrary attitudes would
make him an outsider. The hatred is abstract. Later, he becomes
economically disadvantaged or personally humiliated by the "others". The
abstract becomes concrete.
I don't know if that helps any.
mike
PWrede6492
writes:
>Tim asked _why_ they have to, and I said because it moves the plot along,
>which is a bad answer, and that's a question worth pondering. It is
>necessary to story to have plot, and to have conflict, and generally
>it's necessary to have people opposed to the protagonists and taking
>different sides.
Well, no, you don't actually have to have villains and/or people on some other
side from the protagonist. There are plenty of gripping stories in which the
conflict is essentially Man vs. Nature. Ditto and likewise Man vs. Himself.
Janet Kagan's MIRABILE is an excellent example of the former; the primary
"antagonist" in those stories is the alien environment and its effect on the
oddly packed genetics of the animals and plants the colonists brought with
them. The one or two human folks who are in opposition to whatever is going on
are mainly complications, not primary antagonists.
> But a villain without a POV I
>don't have to sympathise with, I can hate along with my characters.
>The problem is that I have to work out what those villains are doing,
>and to do that I have to think about their motivations and the way
>they see themselves. This generally ends up with me working out that
>they had a terrible childhood (this made everyone laugh when I said
>it, but I can't help it) and then I start to feel sorry for them.
Doesn't sound like a problem to me.
>The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
>more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
>at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
>as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
>to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
>I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
>story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
That, on the other hand, does. Hmmm. Is the reason you don't want to get
close to him that you think he's an obnoxious creep and you don't want to get
close enough to an obnoxious creep to write his POV, or is it that you dislike
his views so much that you don't want to get close enough to begin seeing how
anyone who holds those views could possibly think they were justified? Because
if it's the first, you mostly just have to remind yourself that he's probably
not an obnoxious creep on the inside, to himself, and once you're in there you
won't (from his POV) be writing an obnoxious creep. But if it's more that you
yourself don't want to get anywhere near a head that could rationalize those
particular views...I don't know what you do. Maybe just keep him offstage as
much as possible.
Patricia C. Wrede
Mike Kozlowski
>Well, I said, nobody is a villain _to themselves_ , but stories do have
>villains (and so does real life) from the POV of the other characters.
Perhaps the best recent handling of villains I've seen is in George R.R.
Martin's ongoing fantasy series.
As the series starts, we're in familiar territory, with a noble lord in
the North, and decadent usurpers in the South. But it quickly gets more
complicated: some of the allies of the Northerners are selfish losers;
some of the southerners are really pretty decent folk.
The second book makes it even more ambiguous, by making one of the
powerful "villains" someone who's interested in justice, fair and able
rule, and keeping the realm together; while the northerners are
increasingly portrayed as rebellious, self-centered barbarians. By the
end of _A Clash of Kings_, I was actually cheering for the "villains."
It's very clever of Martin, really, to take a genre that predisposes the
reader to think in terms of good and evil, and to use it to tell a tale of
politics, where good and evil aren't really meaningful terms, but there's
conflict nonetheless.
--
Michael Kozlowski m...@cs.wisc.edu
Recommended SF (Updated 3/17): http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~mlk/sfbooks.html
Randy Money
One fictional tactic I like is the doppelganger, the character who is a
parallel of another character in the story. Thomas Harris' _Red Dragon_
does this quite well. The killer, Francis Dolarhyde, has some close
affinities to the cop, Will Graham, who's trying to track him down.
Harris even uses the bad childhood gambit to enlist our sympathy for
Dolarhyde. This ends up emphasizing the moral complexity of what Graham
is up to and the tactics he's willing to use to do his job.
So, does this bigot parallel someone else in the story? Can s/he be
seen as a sort of doppelganger of another character? If so, look at the
other character's motivations and think about what twists would have to
be made for her/him to become the bigot.
Just a thought.
Randy Money
Jouni Karhu
>
>The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
>more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
>at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
>as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
>to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
>I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
>story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
>
>ways of doing it?
For writers who do 'villains who are not villains' see G.G.Kay and
C.J.Cherryh -- although both _do_ have books with genuine villains,
they also have books that have only well-rounded characters who just
happen to be on different sides. Cases in point: Lions of Al-Rassan
and Tripoint.
--
'I have something to say! | 'The Immoral Immortal' \o JJ Karhu
It is better to burn out, | -=========================OxxxxxxxxxxxO
than to fade away!' | kur...@modeemi.cs.tut.fi /o
Bruce Sterling Woodcock
> Anyone got any useful thoughts, useful tangents, interestingly different
> ways of doing it?
One way I think villains often distinguish themselves from the average or
"the good guys" in real life is their willingness to cross a certain line.
Most always they have the same motivations, hopes, and fears as ordinary
people, but they eventually wind up in a situation where they do something
that is morally wrong but in their mind the best option at the time. And
they rationalize that it really isn't so bad, that it's justified, and
they do it. And then they become a villain. They are so set on doing
whatever it is they think is right that they no longer see the wrongness
of it. A President lying under oath, a betrayed husband harassing his
ex-wife, or a cop shooting a guy he knows is guilty in the back are all
examples of the same basic thing. They usually lack the character to do
the right thing when no one else is looking.
Sometimes the villain's "transgression" is minor and probably doesn't even
warrant villification, but nevertheless allows him to be cast in the role.
If you'll allow me to diverse from written sf into mainstream movies, Gene
Hackman's character in _Unforgiven_ is for the most part a man of high
character, who's only real fault at the beginning is not punishing some
criminals hard enough for a crime that, while he takes seriously, he does
not believe was all that bad. Cutting up a "whore" isn't as bad as hurting
a decent, "normal" human being in his mind. But he also has a mean streak,
something that cannot be avoided when tempted, which eventually leads him to
accidentally kill a man while whipping him. On the other side, our hero, is
someone of even lower character, but he has tried to better himself and is
only now driven to do immoral deads due to the pressures of the situation.
But Clint Eastwood's character serves our purpose to punish the criminals
for their wrongs, and to punish Hackman for his. Hackman doesn't deserve
to be cast as the villain. "I don't deserve this... to die like this! I
was building a house!" "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."
So our heroes can be villains too, from someone else's perspective. Once
they've objectively done something wrong, they're eligible; what makes a
real villain is how those actions are then viewed and magnified by others.
And even if your heroes are perfect, the villain doesn't have to be very
evil to wind up opposing them. And in the end we don't always have to get
inside a villain's head to know every detail. In Hackman's character, we
do not know why he is mean. But we understand meanness, and we understand
that feeling that is there in all of us, and we can understand how a man
could be driven to act it out in limited ways he can rationalize as fair.
The story is in what it is he does, and what that then leads to.
Okay, I'm rambling, and I think most of what I said is obvious anyway, but
those are my thoughts. (By the way, not all of the above are my personal
opinions on the subject of right and wrong and moral relativism. They are
just observations based on a variety of social and emotional processes that
can be applied for the purposes of writing believeable characters in fiction.)
Bruce
Helen Kenyon
>At Reconvene I was on a panel about characterisation in SF, and someone
>asked a question about heroes and villains and which are better done.
>
>
>
>I also have another problem here. In order to write a POV I have to
>sympathise with that POV. This just plain isn't a problem, I can
>don't have to sympathise with, I can hate along with my characters.
>The problem is that I have to work out what those villains are doing,
>and to do that I have to think about their motivations and the way
>they see themselves. This generally ends up with me working out that
>they had a terrible childhood (this made everyone laugh when I said
>it, but I can't help it) and then I start to feel sorry for them.
>
real life "villain". And whether it's simply an excuse or whether the
person really had no choice leads to interesting (if possibly ultimately
futile) discussions of predestination and free will. Political policy
on punishment versus rehabilitation can also be dragged in at this
point. However, none of this is is probably helpful to a writer who's
trying to convey a variety of realistic characters.
As it happens, one of my villains (the one who most obviously brings
down death and destruction and general nastiness on the good guys) *did*
have an awful childhood. I actually have a lot of sympathy for him,
though he was not justified in doing what he did, just because he had
the power to do so. The other, far nastier villain (IMNSHO) in the WIP
had everything any child could wish for, being born into one of the
wealthiest families in the country and having been doted on as a boy.
Bad childhoods don't invariably lead to villains, just as good
childhoods don't always lead to good people. (OK, I like stating the
obvious. :-))
>
>But I also have a couple of out and out evil but non-caricature people,
>one of whom died in volume 1, and the other of whom is still around.
>I can get my head around his motivations but I don't like doing it, I
>don't like him, I wish I didn't have his nasty schemes to deal with
>just as much as my POV character wishes that. (But "we all lived happily
>ever after" isn't much of a plot, really.) I haven't had him on stage
>much, but I know how to deal with him when I do, which I've just realised
>I'm going to do in the next chapter which I'm going to get on with when
>I've finished this post.
>
I'm wondering here if it's actually necessary (as you're not writing
from this character's POV) to worry about his motivations. Or do you
mean that in order to make his behaviour consistent, you need to know
why he's doing it, in order to work out what he'll do next?
>The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
>more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
>at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
>as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
>to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
>I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
>story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
>
>Anyone got any useful thoughts, useful tangents, interestingly different
>ways of doing it?
>
To take a Zen approach, all unsatisfactoryness in life comes from the
ego and anger. "When all human grasping and human need are ended, there
is wisdom and compassion." That is the state of an enlightened person.
Ordinary nice people are part way to this state; villains are further
away. Anger often comes from fear and insecurity. It also comes from
simply reacting, without thinking, to what someone else says or does.
The, "See what you made me do now, you made me angry," approach.
Bigots appear to me to arise because they are totally wrapped up in
themselves and in what they were taught by authority figures (without
stopping to question or to measure what they have been told against
reality). They need to feel superior and if they can do that by
defining their way of life, their people as somehow "better", they will
do so and begin to make "us" and "them" distinctions. The few bigots I
have known seem to have truly closed minds and will only see things that
reinforce their beliefs.
Don't know if any of this rambling is helpful...
Helen
(who should really be working on Chapter 15 but thought this was an
interesting question...)
--
Helen Kenyon, Gwynedd, Wales *** One of my short stories is now on my
webpage. The "House in the Hollow" was first published in MZB's FANTASY.
http://www.baradel.demon.co.uk/fiction/
**Please delete the extra bit from e-mail address if replying by mail**
Jo Walton
ken...@baradel.demon.co.uk.please.delete.this "Helen Kenyon" writes:
> Hee hee... I think we just laughed because it's the stock excuse for any
> real life "villain". And whether it's simply an excuse or whether the
> person really had no choice leads to interesting (if possibly ultimately
> futile) discussions of predestination and free will. Political policy
> on punishment versus rehabilitation can also be dragged in at this
> point. However, none of this is is probably helpful to a writer who's
> trying to convey a variety of realistic characters.
I don't think it's an excuse, as in excusing bad behaviour, I do think
it's a reason, as in explaining it.
> As it happens, one of my villains (the one who most obviously brings
> down death and destruction and general nastiness on the good guys) *did*
> have an awful childhood. I actually have a lot of sympathy for him,
> though he was not justified in doing what he did, just because he had
> the power to do so. The other, far nastier villain (IMNSHO) in the WIP
> had everything any child could wish for, being born into one of the
> wealthiest families in the country and having been doted on as a boy.
>
> Bad childhoods don't invariably lead to villains, just as good
> childhoods don't always lead to good people. (OK, I like stating the
> obvious. :-))
Being doted on probably wasn't the best thing for him.
My theory is that a lot of why people are like they are is because of
their pasts.
> >But I also have a couple of out and out evil but non-caricature people,
> >one of whom died in volume 1, and the other of whom is still around.
> >I can get my head around his motivations but I don't like doing it, I
> >don't like him, I wish I didn't have his nasty schemes to deal with
> >just as much as my POV character wishes that. (But "we all lived happily
> >ever after" isn't much of a plot, really.) I haven't had him on stage
> >much, but I know how to deal with him when I do, which I've just realised
> >I'm going to do in the next chapter which I'm going to get on with when
> >I've finished this post.
> >
> I'm wondering here if it's actually necessary (as you're not writing
> from this character's POV) to worry about his motivations. Or do you
> mean that in order to make his behaviour consistent, you need to know
> why he's doing it, in order to work out what he'll do next?
Yes. He has to do things, and I have to know what they are, and why he's
doing them and what he hopes to get out of them. (Scumball.) If I don't
know that then it doesn't make sense to me, and it needs to make sense
to me to make sense to the readers.
Don't other people have to work out why all the characters are doing
things?
> >The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
> >more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
> >at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
> >as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
> >to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
> >I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
> >story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
> >
> >Anyone got any useful thoughts, useful tangents, interestingly different
> >ways of doing it?
> >
> To take a Zen approach, all unsatisfactoryness in life comes from the
> ego and anger. "When all human grasping and human need are ended, there
> is wisdom and compassion." That is the state of an enlightened person.
> Ordinary nice people are part way to this state; villains are further
> away. Anger often comes from fear and insecurity. It also comes from
> simply reacting, without thinking, to what someone else says or does.
> The, "See what you made me do now, you made me angry," approach.
>
> Bigots appear to me to arise because they are totally wrapped up in
> themselves and in what they were taught by authority figures (without
> stopping to question or to measure what they have been told against
> reality). They need to feel superior and if they can do that by
> defining their way of life, their people as somehow "better", they will
> do so and begin to make "us" and "them" distinctions. The few bigots I
> have known seem to have truly closed minds and will only see things that
> reinforce their beliefs.
Yes. That's what's wrong with this guy. I've been trying to think of
good things about him - he is honest within the limits of his closed
mind. That's about it. It doesn't make a scene with him in any easier
to get clear.
> Don't know if any of this rambling is helpful...
Definitely. Thank you. And thanks to everyone else as well - this is
kind of hard to talk about without going into too much detail, but I
do really appreciate it.
Lucy Kemnitzer
wrote:
>At Reconvene I was on a panel about characterisation in SF, and someone
>asked a question about heroes and villains and which are better done.
>
>I said that people often appear to be better at one than the other, and
>various people quoted Lewis on how much easier it is to magnify a flaw
>than a virtue. Then Tim Barton, who was moderating, asked why we need
>villains at all and said that nobody is a villain really.
>
>Well, I said, nobody is a villain _to themselves_ , but stories do have
>villains (and so does real life) from the POV of the other characters.
>
>Tim asked _why_ they have to, and I said because it moves the plot along,
>which is a bad answer, and that's a question worth pondering. It is
>necessary to story to have plot, and to have conflict, and generally
>it's necessary to have people opposed to the protagonists and taking
>different sides. But are they really villains? I mean Sauron is
>unequivocably evil, but Saruman justifies himself to himself and is
>much more realistic as a person.
It's already been said that there doesn't have to be a separate
person in opposition to the character to provide the conflict: in
fact I think sometimes the conflict that drives the story isn't
_between_ the character and anybody or anything, but between
_stuff_ that the character stands in some relationship to. _China
Mountain Zhang_ for example: it isn't Zhang vs. the system or
Zhang vs. anybody, it's aspects of Zhang's situation vs. other
aspects of Zhang's situation. Zhang almost doesn't do _anything_
to make the story happen: all the things he does are kind of like
mooching around just trying to make a life, not struggling with
plot elements. And yet there is a story, and what I've been told
to call a story arc, and there's plenty of conflict-resolution in
the story.
That's a very nice, very satisfying book too, and an example (to
me) of one where you don't have to buy into any particular piece
of the conceit for the story to work, I think because it's so
wise.
>
>In most modes of writing where the writer is sticking to one POV, certainly
>in first or tight third, unless that POV is the villain, then the actions,
>motivations and self-justifications of the villain aren't going to be fully
>understood unless the villain spends a long time gloating or otherwise
>justifying themselves. Getting the villain to come over as other than
>a caricature can thus be challenging. This is OK where it doesn't matter
>that they be fleshed out. It does if they're going to be on-stage a lot.
Or where the POV character or somebody else spends a deal of time
worrying about the villain's motivations.
>
>I also have another problem here. In order to write a POV I have to
>sympathise with that POV. This just plain isn't a problem, I can
>sympathise with pretty much any POV. But a villain without a POV I
>don't have to sympathise with, I can hate along with my characters.
>The problem is that I have to work out what those villains are doing,
>and to do that I have to think about their motivations and the way
>they see themselves. This generally ends up with me working out that
>they had a terrible childhood (this made everyone laugh when I said
>it, but I can't help it) and then I start to feel sorry for them.
>
<snip>
>
>But I also have a couple of out and out evil but non-caricature people,
>one of whom died in volume 1, and the other of whom is still around.
>I can get my head around his motivations but I don't like doing it, I
>don't like him, I wish I didn't have his nasty schemes to deal with
>just as much as my POV character wishes that.
I got myself into a lot of trouble a few months ago when I
admitted that I truly wish that all this bad stuff didn't have to
happen to my characters.
<snip>
>The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
>more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
>at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
>as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
>to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
>I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
>story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
What kind of stiff necked bigot?
He's sort of a by-the-way obstacle kind of person rather than a
villain, right?
Could he be inconsistent in his bigotry? Or have a soft spot for
something unexpected?
Why do you want to keep him at ten-foot pole length?
Lucy Kemnitzer
Helen Kenyon
<J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> writes
>In article <AMGujOAm...@baradel.demon.co.uk>
> ken...@baradel.demon.co.uk.please.delete.this "Helen Kenyon" writes:
>
>> Hee hee... I think we just laughed because it's the stock excuse for any
>> real life "villain". And whether it's simply an excuse or whether the
>> person really had no choice leads to interesting (if possibly ultimately
>> futile) discussions of predestination and free will. Political policy
>> on punishment versus rehabilitation can also be dragged in at this
>> point. However, none of this is is probably helpful to a writer who's
>> trying to convey a variety of realistic characters.
>
>I don't think it's an excuse, as in excusing bad behaviour, I do think
>it's a reason, as in explaining it.
Except that lots of people have even worse childhoods and yet somehow
rise above them...
>
>> As it happens, one of my villains (the one who most obviously brings
>> down death and destruction and general nastiness on the good guys) *did*
>> have an awful childhood. I actually have a lot of sympathy for him,
>> though he was not justified in doing what he did, just because he had
>> the power to do so. The other, far nastier villain (IMNSHO) in the WIP
>> had everything any child could wish for, being born into one of the
>> wealthiest families in the country and having been doted on as a boy.
>>
>> Bad childhoods don't invariably lead to villains, just as good
>> childhoods don't always lead to good people. (OK, I like stating the
>> obvious. :-))
>
>Being doted on probably wasn't the best thing for him.
>
>My theory is that a lot of why people are like they are is because of
>their pasts.
Hmmm... Up to a point, I suppose. But the same thing can happen to a
bunch of people and they'll react to it differently. I remember one TV
documentary about a fire on an aircraft at Manchester Airport some years
ago. It was a very nasty incident. A number of people died, others had
had a lucky escape. In the programme they followed up some of the
survivors. The experience had ruined the life of one woman. She had
become agoraphobic and had lots of other mental health problems. She
couldn't work or even leave the house. Another bloke, though badly
affected at first, had gone back to being just as he had before, doing
the same job, going out with the same bunch of friends, even to flying
on the same package holidays on the same type of plane from the same
airport. Yet another couple, who had been together on the flight, had
since married, had a child and said that the narrow escape had made life
seem even more beautiful and precious, had made them realise that they
had to live life to the full. So how these different people reacted
depended on lots of other stuff, not just on the incident.
To take another example from real life. A friend of mine was once
attacked by a mugger in the hallway of her block of flats. She fought
off the attack and the man left empty-handed. Some friends, however,
said that she shouldn't have fought him as next time he might use a
knife or other weapon on someone else. Leaving aside that fact that in
the heat of the moment, one doesn't have time to run a complete
Utilitarian style analysis of all the likely future outcomes of one's
actions -- one simply acts or perhaps reacts on instinct -- different
muggers will react differently to being fought off. One might decide
that mugging wasn't such a good idea after all and stop doing it.
Another might say, I'm not going to be beaten and next time I'll take a
knife, cosh or gun.
>
>> >But I also have a couple of out and out evil but non-caricature people,
>> >one of whom died in volume 1, and the other of whom is still around.
>> >I can get my head around his motivations but I don't like doing it, I
>> >don't like him, I wish I didn't have his nasty schemes to deal with
>> >just as much as my POV character wishes that. (But "we all lived happily
>> >ever after" isn't much of a plot, really.) I haven't had him on stage
>> >much, but I know how to deal with him when I do, which I've just realised
>> >I'm going to do in the next chapter which I'm going to get on with when
>> >I've finished this post.
>> >
>> I'm wondering here if it's actually necessary (as you're not writing
>> from this character's POV) to worry about his motivations. Or do you
>> mean that in order to make his behaviour consistent, you need to know
>> why he's doing it, in order to work out what he'll do next?
>
>Yes. He has to do things, and I have to know what they are, and why he's
>doing them and what he hopes to get out of them. (Scumball.) If I don't
>know that then it doesn't make sense to me, and it needs to make sense
>to me to make sense to the readers.
>
>Don't other people have to work out why all the characters are doing
>things?
>
I hadn't thought about this before, but the answer is no, not really.
There's a sufficiently wide range of possible things that people might
do that as long as I can justify it (if necessary) with hindsight, I
don't need to have the rationale before writing the scene. (Assuming
that the character is NOT a POV character in the scene.)
I suppose I tend to work the opposite way to you. I know what's got to
happen in my key scenes. I then have to maneouvre my characters into
the position where that becomes the only natural thing for them to do.
This may involve writing earlier scenes to explain why they behave like
they do in the crucial one, but I'm writing from fixed scenelet to
scenelet, image to image, filling in the blanks, rather than looking at
my characters and saying, "OK guys, what are you going to do next?"
I'm not saying that either way is necessarily better; they're just
different approaches to the same end product. My way is like herding
cats as very often I know something has to happen, yet on the face of
it, my character wouldn't behave in such a way. The maneouvring has to
be done carefully and with great subtlety or the characters simply
become puppets, twitched about for the sake of the plot. Occasionally,
I have to ditch a nice idea for a scene because it really will not work
with these characters in this book. (I can usually save it for another
story though.)
Helen
Jo Walton
pwred...@aol.com "PWrede6492" writes:
> In article <924255...@bluejo.demon.co.uk>, J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton)
> writes:
> >The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
> >more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
> >at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
> >as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
> >to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
> >I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
> >story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
>
> That, on the other hand, does. Hmmm. Is the reason you don't want to get
> close to him that you think he's an obnoxious creep and you don't want to get
> close enough to an obnoxious creep to write his POV, or is it that you dislike
> his views so much that you don't want to get close enough to begin seeing how
> anyone who holds those views could possibly think they were justified? Because
> if it's the first, you mostly just have to remind yourself that he's probably
> not an obnoxious creep on the inside, to himself, and once you're in there you
> won't (from his POV) be writing an obnoxious creep.
The whole novel is written from a single first person POV, there's no
question of doing anyone else's POV within the story. This has required
some discipline getting this far with, there was a bit around the
beginning of volume II where I would have given anything to be able
to do a different POV both for a change and because it would have been
so much easier to get a ton of incluing in about the way people other
than my protagonist see the world. She's not necessarily typical. But
anyway.
I don't need to write his POV. I need to write his _dialog_ and have
what he's doing make sense.
But if it's more that you
> yourself don't want to get anywhere near a head that could rationalize those
> particular views...I don't know what you do. Maybe just keep him offstage as
> much as possible.
I can do that, but he still has to be there the least much that is necessary,
the creature.
Matthew F Johnson
Jo Walton (J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk) writes:
> At Reconvene I was on a panel about characterisation in SF, and someone
> asked a question about heroes and villains and which are better done.
>
> I said that people often appear to be better at one than the other, and
> various people quoted Lewis on how much easier it is to magnify a flaw
> than a virtue. Then Tim Barton, who was moderating, asked why we need
> villains at all and said that nobody is a villain really.
>
> Well, I said, nobody is a villain _to themselves_ , but stories do have
> villains (and so does real life) from the POV of the other characters.
>
> Tim asked _why_ they have to, and I said because it moves the plot along,
> which is a bad answer, and that's a question worth pondering. It is
> necessary to story to have plot, and to have conflict, and generally
> it's necessary to have people opposed to the protagonists and taking
> different sides. But are they really villains? I mean Sauron is
> unequivocably evil, but Saruman justifies himself to himself and is
> much more realistic as a person.
Of course, Sauron is only unequivocably evil in LOTR, because we never
actually see him as a _character_ - just a force. In light of The
Silmarillion he becomes more complex (Tolkien, in his letters, refers
several times to the fact that neither Melkor nor Sauron were irredeemably
evil - Suaron had his chance at redemption, at the end of the FIrst Age,
and genuinely menat to repent, but was swayed by his pride).
>
> In most modes of writing where the writer is sticking to one POV, certainly
> in first or tight third, unless that POV is the villain, then the actions,
> motivations and self-justifications of the villain aren't going to be fully
> understood unless the villain spends a long time gloating or otherwise
> justifying themselves. Getting the villain to come over as other than
> a caricature can thus be challenging. This is OK where it doesn't matter
> that they be fleshed out. It does if they're going to be on-stage a lot.
>
> I also have another problem here. In order to write a POV I have to
> sympathise with that POV. This just plain isn't a problem, I can
> sympathise with pretty much any POV. But a villain without a POV I
> don't have to sympathise with, I can hate along with my characters.
> The problem is that I have to work out what those villains are doing,
> and to do that I have to think about their motivations and the way
> they see themselves. This generally ends up with me working out that
> they had a terrible childhood (this made everyone laugh when I said
> it, but I can't help it) and then I start to feel sorry for them.
There are two forces behind villains: selfishness and certainty. (You
could throw madness in there too, but at that point the "villain" status
becomes confused). Selfishness is not hard to understand as a motive.
Certainty refers to the characters' certainty that _they_ are right and
everyone else is wrong - or else the certainty that they are more sinned
against than sinning, so whatever they do is justified as getting their
own back.
>
> The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
> more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
> at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
> as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
> to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
> I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
> story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
>
Is there any reason to be sympathetic to him? How does your POV
character see him? If your POV would see him as just some cardboard Cletus
the Slack-Jawed Yokel figure, then that's all we're going to see.
--
Matthew
PWrede6492
writes:
>I don't need to write his POV. I need to write his _dialog_ and have
>what he's doing make sense.
But to do that, if I understand you correctly, you have to get inside his head
almost as much as you would if you *were* writing his POV. I mean, that's what
the problem is, isn't it? If you didn't feel you *had* to understand him in
order to write his dialog plausibly, then you could just look at what he says
and make sure it's internally consistent with everything else he says, using
the sort of speech pattern he uses, in more or less the same ways that "real
life people like him" seem to talk, without having to get into his head at all,
really. But you do, so you can't.
>> But if it's more that you
>> yourself don't want to get anywhere near a head that could rationalize
>>those
>> particular views...I don't know what you do. Maybe just keep him offstage
>>as much as possible.
>
>I can do that, but he still has to be there the least much that is necessary,
>the creature.
Well, how *much* of his motivations and rationalizations do you need to
actually understand in order to write him the least much that is necessary? If
he's the prime mover sort of villain, I expect probably a lot, but if he's a
minor walk-on sort of villain, maybe all you need to really be concerned about
is that he is consistent with himself within his brief appearances in the
story. (Of course, if your backbrain refuses to let you write him without
understanding him, then as far as I can see you're stuck. You have to figure
out the inside of his head somehow, whether you want to or not. But maybe you
can persuade your backbrain to look the other way, just this once...)
What would it take to convince *your* backbrain that he's justified? (You said
that he isn't coming across as sufficiently real because he ought to seem
justified.) What could or would be sufficient to justify him in your mind, in
some alternate universe from the one you're writing? What would it take to
make him *right*, really? To make his opinions straightforward observations of
fact, on the order of "Cats have fur and dandruff that makes it a very bad idea
for people with asthma to be around them much"? *That's* the thing he has to
believe (wrongly) is true, in order for him to seem justified without being
right.
Patricia C. Wrede
Matthew F Johnson
"Rachael M. Lininger" (lini...@virtu.sar.usf.edu) writes:
> On 16 Apr 1999, Mary K. Kuhner wrote:
>
>>A roleplaying friend who corresponded about this with me said that
>>her single most successful evil NPC was a Teacher. His only
>>wickedness--and it was enough--was that he put his calling above
>>petty likes and dislikes of individuals. So he was, in essence, a
>>Jedi Master who would teach Vader as willingly as Luke. This she
>>could fully understand, and empathize with, and still find dismaying.
>
> You mean Obi-Wan?
Very much so. Episodes 4-6 are as much about the older generation
fixing their mistakes and redeeming themselves as they are about the
younger generation (Luke, Han, Leia etc.) finding their way.
--
Matthew
Matthew F Johnson
> [snip]
>> The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
>> more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
>> at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
>> as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
>> to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
>> I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
>> story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
>>
>> ways of doing it?
>
> write about how he got that way -- was he raised by his parents to be
> an Orc-hater, or did he get that way after an Orc stole his horse or
> burnt down his parents' house?* Is he unusual in his prejudices or
> is it expected in his peer-group to hate Orcs and slay them whenever
> possible? Would he or does he support violent acts against the people
> he doesn't like? Is there any sexual element to his bigotry?
I have to disagree here. The worst bigots I'v eknown had generally had
little or no exposure to the groups they despised - they had simply been
raised to believe this was so, and had never though to think otherwise.
>
> I have also known (in RL) stone bigots who were perfectly comfortable
> working with members of groups they despised collectively. I think this
> is pretty common, actually. So does your guy know "one good Orc"?
>
> OTOH, maybe answering these questions will make you dislike the
> character even more. Another approach might be to try to see him
> from a friendly perspective, someone for whom he is a friend or
> uncle first, and who tries "not to get him started" on the subject
> of Orcs.
Or perhaps there is a disagreement among characters here - one who
doesn't want to rock the boat, another who thinks that anti-Orc racism
shouldn't be tolerated even in one's own elderly relatives.
Whoa - flashback to last Thanksgiving...
--
Matthew
Matthew F Johnson
Mary K. Kuhner (mkku...@kingman.genetics.washington.edu) writes:
>
> A roleplaying friend who corresponded about this with me said that
> her single most successful evil NPC was a Teacher. His only
> wickedness--and it was enough--was that he put his calling above
> petty likes and dislikes of individuals. So he was, in essence, a
> Jedi Master who would teach Vader as willingly as Luke. This she
> could fully understand, and empathize with, and still find dismaying.
>
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
"Nazi, Shmazi," says Wehrner von Braun
You too can be a big hero
If you learn to count backwards to zero
"In German, and English, I know how to count down
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wehrner von Braun.
- Tom Lehrer
Their Germans are better than our Germans!
- _Doctor Strangelove_
--
Matthew
Jo Walton
pwred...@aol.com "PWrede6492" writes:
> In article <924461...@bluejo.demon.co.uk>, J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton)
> writes:
>
> >I don't need to write his POV. I need to write his _dialog_ and have
> >what he's doing make sense.
>
> But to do that, if I understand you correctly, you have to get inside his head
> almost as much as you would if you *were* writing his POV. I mean, that's what
> the problem is, isn't it? If you didn't feel you *had* to understand him in
> order to write his dialog plausibly, then you could just look at what he says
> and make sure it's internally consistent with everything else he says, using
> the sort of speech pattern he uses, in more or less the same ways that "real
> life people like him" seem to talk, without having to get into his head at all,
> really. But you do, so you can't.
Yeah. How would I know what he was going to say if I didn't know why he
was saying it?
If I were writing his POV it might almost be easier.
> Well, how *much* of his motivations and rationalizations do you need to
> actually understand in order to write him the least much that is necessary? If
> he's the prime mover sort of villain, I expect probably a lot, but if he's a
> minor walk-on sort of villain, maybe all you need to really be concerned about
> is that he is consistent with himself within his brief appearances in the
> story. (Of course, if your backbrain refuses to let you write him without
> understanding him, then as far as I can see you're stuck. You have to figure
> out the inside of his head somehow, whether you want to or not. But maybe you
> can persuade your backbrain to look the other way, just this once...)
>
> What would it take to convince *your* backbrain that he's justified? (You said
> that he isn't coming across as sufficiently real because he ought to seem
> justified.) What could or would be sufficient to justify him in your mind, in
> some alternate universe from the one you're writing? What would it take to
> make him *right*, really? To make his opinions straightforward observations of
> fact, on the order of "Cats have fur and dandruff that makes it a very bad idea
> for people with asthma to be around them much"? *That's* the thing he has to
> believe (wrongly) is true, in order for him to seem justified without being
> right.
Thank you. Those are useful helpful questions and have jolted something
loose. He's _never_ going to compromise, he's going to try casting out
demons, and then get laughed at, and he hates being laughed at. What it
would take for him to be justified would be that everyone who doesn't
convert after sufficient opportunity be _wilfully_ not converting out
of malice.
Thank you again. Sometimes wailing on this group is remarkably well
rewarded.
PWrede6492
writes:
>Yeah. How would I know what he was going to say if I didn't know why he
>was saying it?
>
>If I were writing his POV it might almost be easier.
Well, some people can do perfectly well writing characters at the level of
external consistency only.
I find that there are two different levels of getting inside the character's
head, for me -- one is a sort of intellectual understanding, and the other is
an emotional understanding. I don't need to understand most of the
spear-carriers and walk-ons at all; the guard at the gate says "Welcome,
heroes" because it's his *job*, he doesn't need any more reason than that. The
sort of mid-level minor characters I usually understand "from the outside," the
way I understand real live people (which means, not very well). I can predict
their actions, and sometimes I can say why they did X or Y instead of A or B,
but sometimes I just know that that's what they'd do, because they're like
that. The main characters, including of course the POV, I have to have some
sort of heart-level emotional understanding of.
It's not nearly this clear-cut, of course; some minor characters I know inside
and out from the moment they walk on, and once in a while a main character
refuses to provide even a teeny tiny clue as to what's going on in hiser head
("Why should I tell you?" "If you didn't want to tell me anything, why did you
walk into my head demanding that I write a story about you?!?" "<shrug> Didn't
have anything better to do. Got it finished yet?" "I CAN'T WRITE IT TILL YOU
TELL ME WHAT'S GOING ON!" "<beady stare> You're supposed to be bright. Figure
it out." "ARRGGH!") Note that I can do his dialog just *fine*... I simply
haven't a clue as to why he's like that, and every time I make up some
background for him, he glances over my shoulder, sneers, and says, "Wrong
again." Jerk.
>Thank you. Those are useful helpful questions and have jolted something
>loose.
Glad to have been of help.
Patricia C. Wrede
Charles Riggs
Johnson) wrote:
In one post you complain of bigots and then, two posts later, quote
one of the most unreasonable German-haters I know of. I like his
comedy otherwise, but was impelled to boo him once in a concert while
hearing his incessant railings against a people, generations after the
war their nation started:
> Gather 'round while I sing you of Wehrner von Braun
> A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
> Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
> "Nazi, Shmazi," says Wehrner von Braun
>
> You too can be a big hero
> If you learn to count backwards to zero
> "In German, and English, I know how to count down
> Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wehrner von Braun.
>
> - Tom Lehrer
The above is kinda funny, but he gets mean real fast when he gets
going on the subject.
Charles Riggs
Rachael M. Lininger
On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Jo Walton wrote:
>In article <19990418155939...@ngol03.aol.com>
> pwred...@aol.com "PWrede6492" writes:
>> writes:
>>
>> >I don't need to write his POV. I need to write his _dialog_ and have
>> >what he's doing make sense.
>>
>> But to do that, if I understand you correctly, you have to get inside his head
>> almost as much as you would if you *were* writing his POV. I mean, that's what
>> the problem is, isn't it? If you didn't feel you *had* to understand him in
>> order to write his dialog plausibly, then you could just look at what he says
>> and make sure it's internally consistent with everything else he says, using
>> the sort of speech pattern he uses, in more or less the same ways that "real
>> life people like him" seem to talk, without having to get into his head at all,
>> really. But you do, so you can't.
>
>was saying it?
>
>If I were writing his POV it might almost be easier.
Why? Because once you got into it it would be ok, and it's the jumping
in and out, or seeing him though the POV character's filters, that's
stopping you?
I wonder, is it you that has to understand him, or your POV character
filters, in some weird way? (That made sense to me just now; if it
doesn't maybe I can try to explain it later). Is it a problem with his
voice not coming through her POV?
Maybe try writing the scene from his POV, see what he says, and then
do it through her POV using that.
<neat questions>
>Thank you. Those are useful helpful questions and have jolted something
>loose. He's _never_ going to compromise, he's going to try casting out
>demons, and then get laughed at, and he hates being laughed at. What it
>would take for him to be justified would be that everyone who doesn't
>convert after sufficient opportunity be _wilfully_ not converting out
>of malice.
Oh, my. That's interesting. Does anyone manage to get him to stop?
>Thank you again. Sometimes wailing on this group is remarkably well
>rewarded.
Isn't it, though?
Jo Walton
rit...@cruzio.com "Lucy Kemnitzer" writes:
> It's already been said that there doesn't have to be a separate
> person in opposition to the character to provide the conflict: in
> fact I think sometimes the conflict that drives the story isn't
> _between_ the character and anybody or anything, but between
> _stuff_ that the character stands in some relationship to. _China
> Mountain Zhang_ for example: it isn't Zhang vs. the system or
> Zhang vs. anybody, it's aspects of Zhang's situation vs. other
> aspects of Zhang's situation. Zhang almost doesn't do _anything_
> to make the story happen: all the things he does are kind of like
> mooching around just trying to make a life, not struggling with
> plot elements. And yet there is a story, and what I've been told
> to call a story arc, and there's plenty of conflict-resolution in
> the story.
>
> That's a very nice, very satisfying book too, and an example (to
> me) of one where you don't have to buy into any particular piece
> of the conceit for the story to work, I think because it's so
> wise.
I like CMZ a lot, but it hadn't actually got anything one might
call a plot. This isn't a lack in the case of that particular
novel - it's a mosaic, and a world and a person, with some
fragments of story, and that's what it needs to be the novel it
is. I suspect McHugh is a natural short-story writer (partly
because I love her short work) because the stresses and balances
of what is like a plot in CMZ are all short story ones. It's a
coming of age story, and really if there is a plot in the overt
sense it's "Zhang grows up a bit".
In other words, you're right, it's possible, but there aren't a
whole lot of examples of what you're talking about, as opposed
to stories with overt antagonists.
> >In most modes of writing where the writer is sticking to one POV, certainly
> >in first or tight third, unless that POV is the villain, then the actions,
> >motivations and self-justifications of the villain aren't going to be fully
> >understood unless the villain spends a long time gloating or otherwise
> >justifying themselves. Getting the villain to come over as other than
> >a caricature can thus be challenging. This is OK where it doesn't matter
> >that they be fleshed out. It does if they're going to be on-stage a lot.
>
> Or where the POV character or somebody else spends a deal of time
> worrying about the villain's motivations.
True. Good point.
> >But I also have a couple of out and out evil but non-caricature people,
> >one of whom died in volume 1, and the other of whom is still around.
> >I can get my head around his motivations but I don't like doing it, I
> >don't like him, I wish I didn't have his nasty schemes to deal with
> >just as much as my POV character wishes that.
>
> I got myself into a lot of trouble a few months ago when I
> admitted that I truly wish that all this bad stuff didn't have to
> happen to my characters.
I stand by what I said then, which is that without the bad stuff you
don't have much of a story. My characters would like to live happily
ever after, whereas I just don't like getting too close to him.
My protagonist likes villains, actually. She just likes them to be
clearly marked as bad guys and on the other side, so she can take
them out with lowered spears in a cavalry charge and solve the problem
straightforwardly and for good.
> >The one I have a problem with though isn't an out and out villain,
> >more of a stiff necked bigot, and I just can't feel sympathetic to him
> >at all. My POV character doesn't like him and he's just not coming over
> >as sufficiently real because I can't get my head around him. He ought
> >to seem justified, and he doesn't because I just can't understand him.
> >I just want to call him names. I could try doing his POV outside the
> >story and see if that helped, but I don't _want_ to get close to him.
>
> What kind of stiff necked bigot?
He's a priest, and he believes in giving people a chance to convert, but
if they don't he thinks they're at best wilfully obstructive and at worst
possessed by demons.
> He's sort of a by-the-way obstacle kind of person rather than a
> villain, right?
Politically, running him through with a spear would be a mistake, yes.
> Could he be inconsistent in his bigotry? Or have a soft spot for
> something unexpected?
The one good point he has is integrity, he isn't a hypocrite, he really
does believe he's doing the right thing. Which could be a flaw.
> Why do you want to keep him at ten-foot pole length?
I just don't like him, and I know I'm not being fair to him. Intellectually
I want him to come over sounding as if he's wrong but he has a point.
Emotionally I just have no sympathy so he comes over sounding like a
dunderhead. That my protagonist thinks he's a dunderhead is only part
of the problem. If he was as stupid as all that he'd not have got to
the position he's in. There are people she doesn't like who I do like,
and there are people she likes who I don't like much, all that's fine.
It's not her attitude that's the problem, it's mine. Dammit.
Dan Goodman
He's talking about _one_ German, who worked willingly for the Nazis.
--
Dan Goodman
dsg...@visi.com
http://www.visi.com/~dsgood/index.html
Whatever you wish for me, may you have twice as much.
James Nicoll
Charles Riggs <ri...@tinet.ie> wrote:
>On 18 Apr 1999 19:43:42 GMT, cr...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Matthew F
>Johnson) wrote:
>
>In one post you complain of bigots and then, two posts later, quote
>one of the most unreasonable German-haters I know of. I like his
>comedy otherwise, but was impelled to boo him once in a concert while
>hearing his incessant railings against a people, generations after the
>war their nation started:
>
>> Gather 'round while I sing you of Wehrner von Braun
>> A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
>> Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
>> "Nazi, Shmazi," says Wehrner von Braun
>>
>> You too can be a big hero
>> If you learn to count backwards to zero
>> "In German, and English, I know how to count down
>> Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wehrner von Braun.
>>
>> - Tom Lehrer
>
>The above is kinda funny, but he gets mean real fast when he gets
>going on the subject.
>
The only other song I can think of where L mentions the Germans is
the MLF song, written barely a generation after WWII.
James Nicoll
--
"The initial over-all composition, purporting to traverse the
nation, deliberately overlooked a large piece of the nation--Chicago
to Cheyenne. [...] For more than a billion years, little to nothing
had happened there." _Annals of the Former World_, John McPhee
PWrede6492
writes:
>He's a priest, and he believes in giving people a chance to convert, but
>if they don't he thinks they're at best wilfully obstructive and at worst
>possessed by demons.
<snip>
>The one good point he has is integrity, he isn't a hypocrite, he really
>does believe he's doing the right thing. Which could be a flaw.
A flaw from whose point of view? From where I sit, if he *didn't* really
believe in what he was doing -- if he were just doing it to further his own
ambition, or because those were his orders, or whatever -- then he'd be the
worst kind of evil scum. But if he really truly believes that what he is doing
is saving someone's soul/pleasing the gods/destroying a foul evil, then he
isn't evil scum, he's just mistaken. Possibly horribly mistaken and tragically
wrongheaded, like the medieval physicians who used to feed people mercury as a
medication. But not evil.
Why do you see it as a *flaw* that he is sincere in his actions?
>I just don't like him, and I know I'm not being fair to him. Intellectually
>I want him to come over sounding as if he's wrong but he has a point.
>Emotionally I just have no sympathy so he comes over sounding like a
>dunderhead. That my protagonist thinks he's a dunderhead is only part
>of the problem. If he was as stupid as all that he'd not have got to
>the position he's in.
It is beginning to sound as if you think that whatever he believes in is
something that no reasonably intelligent person would believe, and that
therefore, he is an unsympathetic idiot *because* he believes those things.
Maybe you need to do a little more work on his theology, rather than on his
personality?
Patricia C. Wrede
Eugenia
[...this character...]
> He's a priest, and he believes in giving people a chance to convert, but
> if they don't he thinks they're at best wilfully obstructive and at worst
> possessed by demons.
R. Kirby revealed that one religion's missionaries are expected to
keep (and submit) a log of how many contacts they had made per week
and how many people they had successfully gotten to attend church
services or whatever. Kirby also revealed that he got in trouble
with his Elder because he didn't keep his log up to date with the
reasoning that "God would know". The Elder was not amused.
[...]
> I just don't like him, and I know I'm not being fair to him. Intellectually
> I want him to come over sounding as if he's wrong but he has a point.
> Emotionally I just have no sympathy so he comes over sounding like a
> dunderhead. That my protagonist thinks he's a dunderhead is only part
> of the problem. If he was as stupid as all that he'd not have got to
> the position he's in. There are people she doesn't like who I do like,
> and there are people she likes who I don't like much, all that's fine.
> It's not her attitude that's the problem, it's mine. Dammit.
You might want to consider the social organization of the church
the priest belongs to separate from the theology itself.
I've known a number of people who fit the description of this
character. The social group they belong to encourages strict
conformity among its members and obedience to the church hierarchy,
and limits contacts to outside sources as much as possible.
What you end up with is a bunch of people who have never had to
deal with shades of gray in ethical situations, have never come
into contact with different belief systems, and have never been
allowed to experience life as an individual. I'm afraid I would
consider a lot of them "dunderheads" because they HAVE been limited
intellectually and the standards of their social group is structured
so they aren't exposed to the "evil heathens" or information, books,
or whatever that haven't been church approved as suitable.
In this case, the "at best" case is a pitying look and sigh of
"Well, I tried", and the "at worst" case is "You're going to HELL!"
Ray Radlein
>
> J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton) writes:
>
> >He's a priest, and he believes in giving people a chance to convert,
> >but if they don't he thinks they're at best wilfully obstructive and
> >at worst possessed by demons.
> >The one good point he has is integrity, he isn't a hypocrite, he
> >really does believe he's doing the right thing. Which could be a
> >flaw.
>
> really believe in what he was doing -- if he were just doing it to
> further his own ambition, or because those were his orders, or
> whatever -- then he'd be the worst kind of evil scum. But if he
> really truly believes that what he is doing is saving someone's
> soul/pleasing the gods/destroying a foul evil, then he isn't evil
> scum, he's just mistaken. Possibly horribly mistaken and tragically
> wrongheaded, like the medieval physicians who used to feed people
> mercury as a medication. But not evil.
Perhaps not the same kind of evil in nature, but perhaps a worse kind in
effect. After all, if he is a hypocrite, you could perhaps appeal to his
baser instincts or self interest to stay out of his way; on the other
hand, if he really is a True Believer, he's not going to budge from
athwart your path.
It is some comfort knowing that your enemy is a man of integrity who
cannot be bought off -- as long as you don't need to buy him off, that
is.
- Ray R.
--
************************************************************************
"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so, Brain, but what if hexapodia really *is* the key insight?
Ray Radlein - r...@learnlink.emory.edu
homepage coming soon! wooo, wooo.
************************************************************************
Julian Flood
> He's talking about _one_ German, who worked willingly for the Nazis,
who aimed for the stars and often hit London.
--
Julian Flood
Life, the Universe and Climbing Plants at www.argonet.co.uk/users/julesf. Mind the diddley skiffle folk.
Jo Walton
pwred...@aol.com "PWrede6492" writes:
> In article <924468...@bluejo.demon.co.uk>, J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton)
> writes:
>
> >Yeah. How would I know what he was going to say if I didn't know why he
> >was saying it?
> >
> >If I were writing his POV it might almost be easier.
>
> Well, some people can do perfectly well writing characters at the level of
> external consistency only.
If I do that they don't come alive at all. They're just scenery, spear
carriers, crowd in crowd scenes. I can't do that with anyone who gets to
talk - I think that's the dividing line.
> I find that there are two different levels of getting inside the character's
> head, for me -- one is a sort of intellectual understanding, and the other is
> an emotional understanding. I don't need to understand most of the
> spear-carriers and walk-ons at all; the guard at the gate says "Welcome,
> heroes" because it's his *job*, he doesn't need any more reason than that. The
> sort of mid-level minor characters I usually understand "from the outside," the
> way I understand real live people (which means, not very well). I can predict
> their actions, and sometimes I can say why they did X or Y instead of A or B,
> but sometimes I just know that that's what they'd do, because they're like
> that. The main characters, including of course the POV, I have to have some
> sort of heart-level emotional understanding of.
>
> It's not nearly this clear-cut, of course; some minor characters I know inside
> and out from the moment they walk on, and once in a while a main character
> refuses to provide even a teeny tiny clue as to what's going on in hiser head
> ("Why should I tell you?" "If you didn't want to tell me anything, why did you
> walk into my head demanding that I write a story about you?!?" "<shrug> Didn't
> have anything better to do. Got it finished yet?" "I CAN'T WRITE IT TILL YOU
> TELL ME WHAT'S GOING ON!" "<beady stare> You're supposed to be bright. Figure
> it out." "ARRGGH!") Note that I can do his dialog just *fine*... I simply
> haven't a clue as to why he's like that, and every time I make up some
> background for him, he glances over my shoulder, sneers, and says, "Wrong
> again." Jerk.
My characters appear, trailing what I call their possible pasts.
(The expression comes from a Pink Floyd line, "They straggle behind you,
your possible pasts..." - my allergy to reading how-to-write books means
that I not only reinvented the wheel while trying to teach myself to
write, I also reinvented names for things other people know are called
spokes and hubs and so on. By the time I was 19 I had a complete
vocabulary for talking about writing, none of which was shared with
anyone else at all. I sometimes still accidentally slip into it, and
I'm sometimes forced into it where there doesn't appear to be a proper
term for what I want, or if there is I don't know it.)
Their possible pasts include not only their past history but who
they are and why, and sometimes some possible futures as well. They're
subject to revision if I have a better idea, but only up to a certain
point, or they would stop being themselves. The reason they're "possible"
isn't because I can change them, it's because people present themselves
in different ways at different times, people can be very different,
but only within the range of possibilities for them, for who they are.
I wouldn't have someone like your mysterious sneering guy - they mostly
don't take much notice of me. (Though when they do it can be most
disconcerting. There was a bit towards the end of part I where someone
was being most uncharacteristically overconfident because he knew I was
on his side right then.) Someone might talk like that to the other
characters but if I focused on him I'd know who he was and why he was
doing it or I wouldn't be able to write him at all. It seems really odd
that you can. I might be very vague on details until I'd thought about
it, but the general shape would be there.
There's one bit where I went back to write a bit to find a name for
a horse (because there were too many pronouns) and discovered I'd
missed a fairly major character asleep in the hay the first time I
was in that barn.
But once I think of a character and they have a name they have
possible pasts too, it doesn't take any effort, it's on autopilot.
Except occasionally, where they don't, I know them but I don't have
any sympathy for them. It's more usually people I've made up because
there has to be someone in that position than people who have come
out of the dark on their own - in fact I don't think that's ever
happened with the latter.
It's sorting itself out now, in this particular case.
PWrede6492
writes:
>I wouldn't have someone like your mysterious sneering guy - they mostly
>don't take much notice of me. <snip> Someone might talk like that to the other
>characters but if I focused on him I'd know who he was and why he was
>doing it or I wouldn't be able to write him at all.
Well, he's been a viewpoint character for at least one scene, and he simply
refuses to give any details of his past. But I know what he's like *now*. And
he sees no reason to talk to me any differently than he talks to other
characters. So I can see into his head; big deal. He's not in the sort of
situation where he has any call to think about his past...and in fact, he seems
to be avoiding such situations, as if to spite me.
> It seems really odd
>that you can. I might be very vague on details until I'd thought about
>it, but the general shape would be there.
How general? I mean *something* happened to make this guy the close-mouthed,
cynical guy he is now; I know that. I just don't know what. Though it doesn't
seem to have been anything connected to the death or betrayal of someone
important to him -- I've tried most of those on him, and he just curls his lip
or rolls his eyes. And he wasn't abused as a kid, either. He Just Doesn't
Want To Talk About It. I may simply have to write my way into him. The real
kicker is that I have a deeply felt suspicion that whatever is haunting his
past is vital to the outcome of the plot... and he won't tell me what it is!
Oh, well -- at least if I can't figure it out, the readers probably won't tip
to it ahead of time...
Patricia C. Wrede
Geoff Wedig
> Well, he's been a viewpoint character for at least one scene, and he simply
> refuses to give any details of his past. But I know what he's like *now*. And
> he sees no reason to talk to me any differently than he talks to other
> characters. So I can see into his head; big deal. He's not in the sort of
> situation where he has any call to think about his past...and in fact, he seems
> to be avoiding such situations, as if to spite me.
> How general? I mean *something* happened to make this guy the close-mouthed,
> cynical guy he is now; I know that. I just don't know what. Though it doesn't
> seem to have been anything connected to the death or betrayal of someone
> important to him -- I've tried most of those on him, and he just curls his lip
> or rolls his eyes. And he wasn't abused as a kid, either. He Just Doesn't
> Want To Talk About It. I may simply have to write my way into him. The real
> kicker is that I have a deeply felt suspicion that whatever is haunting his
> past is vital to the outcome of the plot... and he won't tell me what it is!
> Oh, well -- at least if I can't figure it out, the readers probably won't tip
> to it ahead of time...
I hope you know you're making me *horribly* curious about this guy as well.
Please let me know when this book/story is finished and published 'cause I
want to see this guy in action.
Of course, by that time I'll probably have forgotten about this whole
thread. Oh well.
Geoff
Rachael M. Lininger
On Tue, 20 Apr 1999, Jo Walton wrote:
>My characters appear, trailing what I call their possible pasts.
I like that. It's very much like what mine do: because you can only
have a voice if you have memories. You may not remember all of them,
but you usually _have_ all of them, unless there's a severe
dissociative problem.
>(The expression comes from a Pink Floyd line, "They straggle behind you,
>your possible pasts..." - my allergy to reading how-to-write books means
>that I not only reinvented the wheel while trying to teach myself to
>write, I also reinvented names for things other people know are called
>spokes and hubs and so on. By the time I was 19 I had a complete
>vocabulary for talking about writing, none of which was shared with
>anyone else at all. I sometimes still accidentally slip into it, and
>I'm sometimes forced into it where there doesn't appear to be a proper
>term for what I want, or if there is I don't know it.)
Hee. I bet I'd like your terms better.
<snip>
>I wouldn't have someone like your mysterious sneering guy - they mostly
>don't take much notice of me. (Though when they do it can be most
>disconcerting. There was a bit towards the end of part I where someone
>was being most uncharacteristically overconfident because he knew I was
>on his side right then.)
<blink> Oh.
That explains something for me. Thank you. I think I just figured out
what my omniscient narrator is. This is _very_ useful, it means I know
what to research for it.
I wish my subconscious were not so ambitious, though. It feels right,
but it's going to be hard.
<snip>
>It's sorting itself out now, in this particular case.
That's good.
Dan Krashin
Although that kind of novel is pretty common in the mainstream --
a young slacker goes to the Big City, finds work he is really good
at, has a doomed love affair, and gets some sense of the seriousness
of life. Except that CMZ takes place in that neat Chinese-dominated
future.
There aren't too many novels I read that work pretty well by both
genre and mainstream rules (_Timescape_ and _Drowning Towers_ are
other examples).
--
Danny
"The last man on earth sat in a room. There was a wok on the door."
--From _Atomic BBQ: Great SF Stories about Cooking
and Nuclear Holocaust_ (Greenberg, ed.)
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
Dan Goodman
PWrede6492 <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>In article <924604...@bluejo.demon.co.uk>, J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton)
>writes:
>
>
>>characters but if I focused on him I'd know who he was and why he was
>>doing it or I wouldn't be able to write him at all.
>
>refuses to give any details of his past. But I know what he's like *now*. And
>he sees no reason to talk to me any differently than he talks to other
>characters. So I can see into his head; big deal. He's not in the sort of
>situation where he has any call to think about his past...and in fact, he seems
>to be avoiding such situations, as if to spite me.
>
>>that you can. I might be very vague on details until I'd thought about
>>it, but the general shape would be there.
>
close-mouthed,
>cynical guy he is now; I know that. I just don't know what. Though it doesn't
>seem to have been anything connected to the death or betrayal of someone
>important to him -- I've tried most of those on him, and he just curls his lip
>or rolls his eyes. And he wasn't abused as a kid, either. He Just Doesn't
>Want To Talk About It. I may simply have to write my way into him. The real
>kicker is that I have a deeply felt suspicion that whatever is haunting his
>past is vital to the outcome of the plot... and he won't tell me what it is!
>
>Oh, well -- at least if I can't figure it out, the readers probably won't tip
>to it ahead of time...
Have you tried:
1) He did something early in his life that he can't forgive himself for.
2) He did something early in his life which he considers incredibly
stupid.
3) When he was ten, he had to be the adult in his family; the
chronological adults weren't mature enough.
William Burns
>In article <924604...@bluejo.demon.co.uk>, J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton)
>writes:
>>characters but if I focused on him I'd know who he was and why he was
>>doing it or I wouldn't be able to write him at all.
>Well, he's been a viewpoint character for at least one scene, and he simply
>refuses to give any details of his past. But I know what he's like *now*. And
>he sees no reason to talk to me any differently than he talks to other
>characters. So I can see into his head; big deal. He's not in the sort of
>situation where he has any call to think about his past...and in fact, he seems
>to be avoiding such situations, as if to spite me.
Could he be avoiding the situation because he doesn't _want_ to think
about his past? IE; something horrible happened to him, or he did
something horrible, and he deliberately chooses not to bring it up
because he is afraid to face it.
>> It seems really odd
>>that you can. I might be very vague on details until I'd thought about
>>it, but the general shape would be there.
>How general? I mean *something* happened to make this guy the close-mouthed,
>cynical guy he is now; I know that. I just don't know what. Though it doesn't
>seem to have been anything connected to the death or betrayal of someone
>important to him -- I've tried most of those on him, and he just curls his lip
>or rolls his eyes. And he wasn't abused as a kid, either. He Just Doesn't
>Want To Talk About It. I may simply have to write my way into him. The real
>kicker is that I have a deeply felt suspicion that whatever is haunting his
>past is vital to the outcome of the plot... and he won't tell me what it is!
It doesn't have to be connected to anyone important to the character,
except himself. IE; as a kid he was involved in a viiolent incident
that he chose to forget about. It hasn't changed his mind about
anything, but should he face up to it, he is going to realize there
was absolutely no reason for it to have happened. Result - the deep
held beliefs installed into him by his parents and peers will be
shaken to the core.
-- William
Year 2000: 256 Days To Go.
PWrede6492
writes:
>Have you tried:
>1) He did something early in his life that he can't forgive himself for.
>2) He did something early in his life which he considers incredibly
>stupid.
>3) When he was ten, he had to be the adult in his family; the
>chronological adults weren't mature enough.
It definitely wasn't #3. #1 and #2 aren't much help without knowing *what* the
thing was that he did that was unforgiveable or stupid. Like I said, I know
there's *something* interesting back there, but he won't talk. I'm currently
operating on the chip-away-everything-that-doesn't-look-like-a-duck
system...only starting with an enormously huge block of marble, and working
with a very small chisel that only cuts very tiny chips...
Patricia C. Wrede
Dan Goodman
Perhaps he _did_ talk about it, to someone he was certain would understand
-- and who didn't.
Graydon
> How general? I mean *something* happened to make this guy the
> close-mouthed, cynical guy he is now; I know that. I just don't know
> what. Though it doesn't seem to have been anything connected to the
> death or betrayal of someone important to him -- I've tried most of
> those on him, and he just curls his lip or rolls his eyes. And he
> wasn't abused as a kid, either. He Just Doesn't Want To Talk About
> It. I may simply have to write my way into him. The real kicker is
> that I have a deeply felt suspicion that whatever is haunting his
> past is vital to the outcome of the plot... and he won't tell me
> what it is!
My assumption in such circumstances is that the fellow in question is
much more intelligent than he is articulate, and got mightily tired of
being laughed at when he tried to talk, on the one hand, and the
apparent wilful stupidity of people in general, on the other.
--
graydon@ | Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,
lara.on.ca | mod sceal þe mare þe ure maegen lytlað.
| -- Beorhtwold, "The Battle of Maldon"
Will Grzanich
>
> In article <RF4T2.176$5N3....@ptah.visi.com>, dsg...@visi.com (Dan Goodman)
> writes:
>
> >Have you tried:
> >1) He did something early in his life that he can't forgive himself for.
> >2) He did something early in his life which he considers incredibly
> >stupid.
> >3) When he was ten, he had to be the adult in his family; the
> >chronological adults weren't mature enough.
>
> It definitely wasn't #3. #1 and #2 aren't much help without knowing *what* the
> thing was that he did that was unforgiveable or stupid. Like I said, I know
> there's *something* interesting back there, but he won't talk. I'm currently
> operating on the chip-away-everything-that-doesn't-look-like-a-duck
> system...only starting with an enormously huge block of marble, and working
> with a very small chisel that only cuts very tiny chips...
Pardon a lurking newbie for jumping in like this, but this is
interesting...
All I know about this character of yours is that he's "close mouthed and
cynical." Given just that, one (kind of far-out) thing that leaps to my
mind is that he knows something nobody else does. Like he's seen The
Truth, and he's gotten way past the stage of simply being terrified of
it, and is now just sort of resigned.
Just an idea.
Take care,
-Will
--
-= "Soul Brother #1" =- | Visit the Asylum at
"All you need is love." | www.ews.uiuc.edu/~grzanich!
-John Lennon | Contains no MSG!
Jouni Karhu
>How general? I mean *something* happened to make this guy the close-mouthed,
>cynical guy he is now; I know that. I just don't know what. Though it doesn't
>seem to have been anything connected to the death or betrayal of someone
>important to him -- I've tried most of those on him, and he just curls his lip
>or rolls his eyes. And he wasn't abused as a kid, either. He Just Doesn't
>Want To Talk About It. I may simply have to write my way into him. The real
>kicker is that I have a deeply felt suspicion that whatever is haunting his
>past is vital to the outcome of the plot... and he won't tell me what it is!
Throughout his youth, he thought -- no, he _knew_ he was something
Special. And yes, he was a bright child, even exceptionally so. But
everything was too easy for him, so he never really learned how to
_push_. Later in life he started to notice that opportunities and life
itself were beginning to pass him by. It happened many times that he
lost a deal, or a competition, or something like that, to someone he
considered inferior. Why? Because he had never learned how to work
hard. In his heart he still knew he was superior to all others; but
the world was conspiring against him. Slowly, he began to withdraw,
and watches what happens 'outside' with a detached air and sharp
cynicism. He is bitter, because a nagging voice has started to speak
inside his mind and is saying that this was all his own doing, that he
really _could_ have been something special, if he had set his mind to
it. But now it is all too late.
Or something completely different :)
--
'I have something to say! | 'The Immoral Immortal' \o JJ Karhu
It is better to burn out, | -=========================OxxxxxxxxxxxO
than to fade away!' | kur...@modeemi.cs.tut.fi /o
Lucy Kemnitzer
wrote:
<I had written of China Mountain Zhang as a book without
villains:>
.
>
>I like CMZ a lot, but it hadn't actually got anything one might
>call a plot. This isn't a lack in the case of that particular
>novel - it's a mosaic, and a world and a person, with some
>fragments of story, and that's what it needs to be the novel it
>is. I suspect McHugh is a natural short-story writer (partly
>because I love her short work) because the stresses and balances
>of what is like a plot in CMZ are all short story ones. It's a
>coming of age story, and really if there is a plot in the overt
>sense it's "Zhang grows up a bit".
Thank you so much for this. I've been puzzling over it all day
trying to figure out why I don't agree with it, and why I keep
waffling back and forth when I talk about plot, and I figured it
out, and it's extremely irrelevant to the kind of writing you're
talking about and central to the kind of writing I'm doing, and I
can't tell you how grateful I am for this, and maybe I can write
the last two or is it five chapters of that novel now.
Here it is:
There really is a traditional plot structure to China Mountain
Zhang, but it's not where you expect it. Zhang is _not_ the
protagonist -- he's the Mcguffin. The protagonist is the society,
and the story is "man against himself" or "the man who learned
better," I'm not sure which.
The conflict in the story is not Zhang's. The question is not
"will Zhang get a life? How?" -- although it seems to be on the
surface -- the question is "will this society mature? how?" -- and
the moment when Zhang tells his class his new political insight
-- which seems at first glance to be out of the blue, but somehow,
strangely, appropriate -- is _not_ Zhang's moment, but a moment
for the society.
The loose chaining of the stories of people who are distantly
connected to, and benefitted by their association to, Zhang, are
not just there to illustrate that Zhang is worthy despite being
loose-ended -- otherwise McHugh might have chosen people who were
closer to him for POV shots -- they're there to set up the
_social_ challenge and to allow this new thing that Zhang is part
of some scope to operate.
I'm not expressing it, I know I'm not, but it's there all the
same, and the key to it is in the organic engineering and the
relationship of the engineer to the system, to the house.
>
>In other words, you're right, it's possible, but there aren't a
>whole lot of examples of what you're talking about, as opposed
>to stories with overt antagonists.
I think I may find them more than you do, because I'm thinking
about this other kind of conflict. Also I get impatient with the
"action" scenes in a book, and skim them over to get to the juicy
stuff, so if a book is all actiony I miss a lot of it.
>> I got myself into a lot of trouble a few months ago when I
>> admitted that I truly wish that all this bad stuff didn't have to
>> happen to my characters.
>
>I stand by what I said then, which is that without the bad stuff you
>don't have much of a story.
This is true. But it doesn't keep me from getting upset when one
of my characters suffers. I don't get that hands-rubbing glee
that the writers of murder mystery cozies are supposed to get when
they think of something really diabolical.
Oh, and I thought of something for you, too. About bigotry:
At the base of bigotry is fear, but the fear doesn't have to be
what you might think it would be. A person's bigotry could be
based in fear having to do with a belief that certain types of
people would bring in improprieties that would truly pollute what
is good and right about their own community. Fear that
associating with such people would wear down one's moral sense, or
force one to live in unclean ways. Or fear that the people would
never give one the respect that is essential to one's way of life.
Or would never respect one's ancestors properly. Or would never
respect the rituals, or the attitudes, or whatever, that give the
world meaning and hold things together. I guess I'm getting at
visions of spiritual death, or something.
If a person has a very short list of things that keep the world
running properly and keep one safe in it, then one might be less
flexible about keeping that list intact.
Helpful at all?
Lucy Kemnitzer
Nancy Lebovitz
Mike Totty <to...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>My current WIP takes a different tack. I don't know that there is a
>_primary_ antagonist at all. It's told from a series of first POV
>devices. The Civil Engineer Serial Killer (it's a fantasy novel, FWIW)
>is an antagonist, but the actions of the protagonists aren't directed at
>him, in fact the main protags don't know he's a threat at all until the
>pivotal moment. And even he is a very devout religious person who
>genuinely thinks he is protecting others.
>
>Other than the CESK, there are no "bad" guys. There's some plotting of
>one House against another. And lots of subtrefuge, but no villains. The
>protags are of the vaguely anti-hero mold.
>
>The complex situation (race against time to save the captured soul of a
>noble, before the ecumenical courts excommunicate the family, rendering
>them legally helpless against the other noble families in this
>Renaissance-esque collection of provinces set within a single massive
>urban landscape) is the primary antagonist.
>
>I find it intriguing handling this sturcturally. Of course, no one may
>find it all that interesting to read.
>
I like the premises.
Nancy Lebovitz
>refuses to give any details of his past. But I know what he's like *now*. And
>he sees no reason to talk to me any differently than he talks to other
>characters. So I can see into his head; big deal. He's not in the sort of
>situation where he has any call to think about his past...and in fact, he seems
>to be avoiding such situations, as if to spite me.
>
>>that you can. I might be very vague on details until I'd thought about
>>it, but the general shape would be there.
>
>cynical guy he is now; I know that. I just don't know what. Though it doesn't
>seem to have been anything connected to the death or betrayal of someone
>important to him -- I've tried most of those on him, and he just curls his lip
>or rolls his eyes. And he wasn't abused as a kid, either. He Just Doesn't
>Want To Talk About It. I may simply have to write my way into him. The real
>kicker is that I have a deeply felt suspicion that whatever is haunting his
>past is vital to the outcome of the plot... and he won't tell me what it is!
>
something more subtle than what's usually called child abuse--
overwhelmingly snoopy and critical parents.
Maybe he's worried about being stabilized into print. Maybe he's worried
that other characters will be embarrassed by whatever he can reveal.
Maybe he's got a really peculiar sense of humor/teasing. Maybe he suspects
that there's *nothing* special about him, so he sets himself up as a
man of mystery.
Maybe he's under a geas.
Maybe he was born to be rasfc's Rohrshach blot.
Nancy Lebovitz
Ray Radlein <r...@learnlink.emory.edu> wrote:
>
>Perhaps not the same kind of evil in nature, but perhaps a worse kind in
>effect. After all, if he is a hypocrite, you could perhaps appeal to his
>baser instincts or self interest to stay out of his way; on the other
>hand, if he really is a True Believer, he's not going to budge from
>athwart your path.
>
Nancy Lebovitz
Matthew F Johnson <cr...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote:
>
> There are two forces behind villains: selfishness and certainty. (You
>could throw madness in there too, but at that point the "villain" status
>becomes confused). Selfishness is not hard to understand as a motive.
>Certainty refers to the characters' certainty that _they_ are right and
>everyone else is wrong - or else the certainty that they are more sinned
>against than sinning, so whatever they do is justified as getting their
>own back.
>>
Note that heros need certainty too--both heros and villains have to
ignore short-term feedback while trying to achieve their goals.
PWrede6492
writes:
>Perhaps he _did_ talk about it, to someone he was certain would understand
>-- and who didn't.
Nope. Anyway, that wouldn't help; he's just fallen in with a whole crop of new
acquaintances, to whom he isn't telling *anything*, including his real name. I
know rather more about him -- just not as much as I'm going to need to know
*eventually.* I think he's decided to invent the Federal Witness Protection
Program for one. My point was that even though I don't have *nearly* as much
background as Jo has, I can still write his dialog, actions, and even POV.
Because I know what he's *like*.
For me, it's kind of like writing real people. Some of them have very strong
personal voices; given three different phrasings, I could easily pick out which
one *sounds* like them, and/or the thing they absolutely *would not* say, even
though I've no idea what shaped those speech patterns and personal idioms or
the reasons behind why they do and say certain things. Most real people don't
start out your acquaintaince by blurting out their entire past life,
preferences and beliefs, fears, hopes, and idiosyncracies. (And if they do,
they're usually leaving out *something* important.) One has to learn about
them gradually. And the first thing one learns is usually something on the
order of "Oh, she doesn't like fish" or "Darn, he's married," rather than
anything traumatic or joyful out of their past history.
It's *easier* when I know everything I'm going to need to know about the
characters up front. But to use Jo's analogy -- when they turn up in my head,
they aren't trailing their possible pasts so much as they are provided with
their concrete and actual personalities. I may have no idea *why* they're like
that, but boy oh boy, they surely aren't like anything or anybody else! Which
may explain our different ways of working.
Patricia C. Wrede
PWrede6492
>My assumption in such circumstances is that the fellow in question is
>much more intelligent than he is articulate, and got mightily tired of
>being laughed at when he tried to talk, on the one hand, and the
>apparent wilful stupidity of people in general, on the other.
He's a bit of a misanthrope, yes, and very bright. But he's quite articulate.
I can, in fact, give you a pretty thorough run-down on his personality; it's
the exact events that shaped it that I don't know. It'll come clear in the
writing, eventually.
Patricia C. Wrede
PWrede6492
writes:
>Pardon a lurking newbie for jumping in like this, but this is
>interesting...
>
>All I know about this character of yours is that he's "close mouthed and
>cynical."
Okay, if you're all going to treat it like a game of Twenty Questions, I'd
better give you some more to work with.
This particular character is in his early thirties. He comes from an imperial
culture whose government is essentially a triumverate -- the Emperor holds the
official secular/military power, but the wizards' guild is sufficiently
powerful that they can veto a lot of stuff they don't like, and the gods in
this world are real and active, so you *don't* ignore the priesthood. His
family is of the nobility; if there are any living members of his immediate
family, he is currently estranged from them all. There are certainly living
relatives in his extended family, at least one of whom is politically
important. He himself is a wizard, but for various reasons he is a) concealing
this fact from the people he has just fallen in with, and b) of much lower rank
in the official wizard's guild (which has a merit-based, test-based system of
rising in rank) than he ought to be. I do not know whether he deliberately
kept *himself* low in rank for some reason, or whether he was deliberately
stifled by someone above him, but deliberation was involved somewhere, and I
suspect he did it himself. He is extremely intelligent and articulate, but
more than a bit of a misanthrope. The misanthropy is part of the reason behind
his sarcastic, cynical attitude; the other part is that it's a rather extreme
defense mechanism for keeping people at a distance. One of the other
characters, who is better at this than I am, has just observed that he has
twice gotten everyone else to not-panic-and-pull-together in a crisis by making
himself and his position so thoroughly disliked that everyone else did the
opposite (which was the right thing); she has concluded (accurately, I think)
that he did this deliberately. Though he is not of Faerie, he dislikes being
thanked; he hates being under obligation to anyone or anything (and at present,
considers himself not to owe anything to anyone). He has a tremendous thirst
for knowledge, and he trusts books far more than people. He considers himself
extremely practical. He is currently on the run from the Imperial Guards for
unspecified reasons that are fairly minor, or at least initially appear to
everyone to be so (the Guards don't want him badly enough to chase him down and
start extradition procedures [i.e., invade] now that he's out of the Empire).
He has not yet told anybody *why* he's on the run, though circumstances have
made it obvious to everybody that he is.
He is observant and able to draw both logical and intuitive conclusions from
his observations. He is not particularly devoted to any of the gods, nor has
he been "chosen" by any of them -- though he does pay attention to them (as any
sensible person would, given a world in which the gods *are* in direct and
regular contact with their priesthoods, and *do* take action from time to
time). He will not break an oath he has given, whether the gods are involved
or not, but he has no problem cheating or lying to people if he hasn't *said*
that he won't. It is unclear whether his arrogance stems from his noble
background or whether it's simply a result of his knowing that he's smarter
than most people. Probably some of each. He likes being a "disinterested
observer" and uses his sarcasm and obvious attitude to keep people at a
distance so he can observe them, but in actuality he is a lot more involved
than he is willing to admit even (especially?) to himself. He believes, not
quite consciously, that he deserves to be the center of attention, but dislikes
being fawned on; this, too, contributes to the sarcastic wit (which makes
people notice him without going all gushy), and may be yet another hangover
from his noble childhood. He is not married, nor ever has been; if there's a
love affair, tragic or otherwise, in his past, I don't know anything about it
and he's not talking.
> Given just that, one (kind of far-out) thing that leaps to my
>mind is that he knows something nobody else does. Like he's seen The
>Truth, and he's gotten way past the stage of simply being terrified of
>it, and is now just sort of resigned.
If he saw The Truth, he'd spit in it's eye. He *doesn't* want to be a priest,
and that's what you are, on this world, if you can see The Truth. But it's not
a bad suggestion.
Patricia C. Wrede
Mike Totty
>>
>>I find it intriguing handling this sturcturally. Of course, no one may
>>find it all that interesting to read.
>>
>I like the premises.
Thank you very much, Nancy.
mike
Lois McMaster Bujold
>
> In article <371D151A...@uiuc.edu>, Will Grzanich <grza...@uiuc.edu>
> writes:
>
> >Pardon a lurking newbie for jumping in like this, but this is
> >interesting...
> >
> >All I know about this character of yours is that he's "close mouthed and
> >cynical."
>
> Okay, if you're all going to treat it like a game of Twenty Questions, I'd
> better give you some more to work with.
> for knowledge, and he trusts books far more than people.
You know, if he knew/learned as much about how books get written
as *we* do, he might be forced to change that opinion...
Ta, L.
Dan Goodman
PWrede6492 <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
[snip]
>> Given just that, one (kind of far-out) thing that leaps to my
>>mind is that he knows something nobody else does. Like he's seen The
>>Truth, and he's gotten way past the stage of simply being terrified of
>>it, and is now just sort of resigned.
>
>If he saw The Truth, he'd spit in it's eye. He *doesn't* want to be a priest,
>and that's what you are, on this world, if you can see The Truth. But it's not
>a bad suggestion.
Probably not usable here, but: what if he saw the _wrong_ Truth? For
example, he knows what the gods believe in -- or that they don't believe
in anything.
Jo Walton
lini...@virtu.sar.usf.edu "Rachael M. Lininger" writes:
> On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Jo Walton wrote:
> >Yeah. How would I know what he was going to say if I didn't know why he
> >was saying it?
> >
> >If I were writing his POV it might almost be easier.
>
> Why? Because once you got into it it would be ok, and it's the jumping
> in and out, or seeing him though the POV character's filters, that's
> stopping you?
Yes, because if it were his POV he'd be much less difficult to put over
as a person, because I'd have his self-justifications and his filters.
> I wonder, is it you that has to understand him, or your POV character
> filters, in some weird way? (That made sense to me just now; if it
> doesn't maybe I can try to explain it later). Is it a problem with his
> voice not coming through her POV?
That is the problem.
The problems with writing in first, as Orwell perspicaciously
remarked in his unfinished essay on :Brideshead Revisited:, are that
you have to have a remarkably intuitive character work out what
everyone else is feeling from their outward appearance, secondly
that there's a great tendency to have people confide in your
character more than anyone normally confides in other people in
any circumstances and thirdly that in order to have them see
enough of the story to report it you have to have them appear
everywhere, overhear meetings they'd not be invited to, and have
them invited to meetings in circumstances in which it would be
unlikely for them to attend naturally. (He uses some terrific
examples from :Great Expectations: and ;David Copperfield:, as
well as :Brideshead:. He goes on to say how the great advantage
of first is how immediately credible and sympathetic it is.)
My problem here is related to the first and third of those, actually,
getting him through her filters for one thing and her actually being
there in that situation where she wouldn't necessarily naturally be
participating for another.
> Maybe try writing the scene from his POV, see what he says, and then
> do it through her POV using that.
I'll do that if I have to. I've got it about half done, and I've
got the revision of the other chapter with him in about half done
as well.
> <neat questions>
>
> >Thank you. Those are useful helpful questions and have jolted something
> >loose. He's _never_ going to compromise, he's going to try casting out
> >demons, and then get laughed at, and he hates being laughed at. What it
> >would take for him to be justified would be that everyone who doesn't
> >convert after sufficient opportunity be _wilfully_ not converting out
> >of malice.
>
> Oh, my. That's interesting. Does anyone manage to get him to stop?
Trying to convert people? Never. There are much worse people than him
in his religion too, one of them forcibly converted a whole island
by magic and force of will. (She wasn't there for that, she just heard
about it later.)
He might forgive them right now though, it looks as if he's going to.
Random
Jo Walton wrote in message <924706...@bluejo.demon.co.uk>...
>In article <Pine.GSO.4.02.99041...@virtu.sar.usf.edu>
> lini...@virtu.sar.usf.edu "Rachael M. Lininger" writes:
>
>> On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Jo Walton wrote:
>> >Yeah. How would I know what he was going to say if I didn't know why he
>> >was saying it?
>> >
>> >If I were writing his POV it might almost be easier.
>>
>> Why? Because once you got into it it would be ok, and it's the jumping
>> in and out, or seeing him though the POV character's filters, that's
>> stopping you?
>Yes, because if it were his POV he'd be much less difficult to put over
>as a person, because I'd have his self-justifications and his filters.
Hmm. How about writing a few pages in his POV then, as a trick to make him
spill the beans about himself. Then when you have that information, you can
allow the other characters to infer it?
Geoff Wedig
>
> Probably not usable here, but: what if he saw the _wrong_ Truth? For
> example, he knows what the gods believe in -- or that they don't believe
> in anything.
This comes horribly close to a novel I had batting around my head for a bit
wherein the main character is given the Truth, the totally culturally
destroying and socially inefficient truth. Much of the novel would have
dealt with what they did with it, and the questions of "Is it better to have
a good civilization based on a lie, or a fallen civilization that knows the
truth" and so on.
Geoff
Dan Goodman
Very big difference -- that assumes the main character can convince others
(and eventually the entire society) of the Truth. Rather than a situation
in which he has no hope of convincing anyone else.
Bill Oliver
Jo Walton <J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>Anyone got any useful thoughts, useful tangents, interestingly different
>ways of doing it?
>
Most of the characters I have written about are based, more or less,
on folk I have known. You might ask yourself *who* you are thinking
of when you are writing about this character. If that's a person
you know well, then you have some insight. Just about all of us
have a few bigots/narrow-minded folk in our extended families, and
we know many of them pretty well -- well enough to understand how
and why they are the way they are, or at least well enough to make
them seem human.
Another resource is autobiography and biography by intimates of
folk. Even though autobiography is self-serving, the very way
they excuse things tells us how they think.
Bigotry, in the generic sense of American usage, covers a lot
of territory. I think back of folk I know who are clearly
bigoted in one way or another, and I can think of three or
four people, all of whom express their bigotry in a way that
is modified and which modifies their underlying personality.
I think of one person I know, a farmer, who was raised to think
of African-Americans as lesser people. He engaged in classic
racial remarks and espoused racist views. But, honestly, he
never met a black person in his life. A black farmer moved into
his area and his basic friendliness and humanity won the battle
over at least part of his immediate predjudice. Over the
next few years, he and his neighbor cooperated in a couple of
ventures and shared resources. Through it all, though, my
friend continued to say the most horrible things about "blacks."
When I asked him how he managed to think these things while
obviously having a neighbor dear to his heart, he said, "Well,
Bobby isn't black, he's a farmer just like me. I mean, you know,
he's not like those niggers like you see on TV. That's different."
The bottom line is that this friend of mine was, and remained
a racist and a bigot on a general level, but his basic nature
was such that he had no problem ignoring it on a personal level.
I like to think that his basic goodness showed though -- barely,
and only in the small -- in spite of his upbringing and ignorance.
That does not excuse his attitudes, but it does show how personality
affects how they are implemented.
In contrast, I know another person who is a profound religious
bigot. While mouthing platitudes about love and Christianity,
he has, as far as I know, never actually helped anyone in need.
Instead, he spends his time developing rationalizations for
finding fault with the rest of the world. In one amazing act
of cruelty, he attended a funeral of the mother of a good friend
of mine and chose that very day to go up to my friend and tell
her that it was such a pity that her mother was likely in hell
this very day because she was not a member of his church.
The bottom line for this acquaintance of mine is that he
is almost the opposite of the racist noted above. He has
taken what some people make into a liberating and uplifting
philosophy and turned it into a tool of cruelty and bitterness
and cold and small as his heart.
While my interest is more in the psychopathology of
killing than mere bigotry, the principles of getting
into the "head" of perpetrators is about the same. Listen
to them talk. Read what they write.
Many people have written memoirs and autobiographies
of doing things of incredible bigotry while maintaining
a sense of righteousness that is almost childlike. Others
have shown the combat between the evil that they do and the
"good" in whose service they pretend to act. Read the
book "The Nazi Doctors," or "Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi
Medicine and Racial Hygiene." Memoirs by victims are
easier to find than those by perpetrators, but one stunning
account is the memoir of Rudolf Hoss, once commandant of
Auchwitz. It is a wonderful example of the ability to
rationalize anything.
Similarly, there are excellent texts on the mindset of
rapists, child molesters and killers, all of which share
much in common with malignant bigots -- both share
a sense of dehumanization that allows extreme actions
and judgements about another. Seth Goldstein has a new
text out on sexual predation of children. Hazelwood and
Burgess' textbook on rape - Practical Aspects of Rape Investigation --
has a very good examination of psychological profiling.
While the above are not about "bigotry" per se, the
thought processes of devaluation, removal
of empathy, and establishment of power
are not all that different.
billo
Graydon
> In article <7fj0ru$rt7$1...@lara.on.ca>, gra...@lara.on.ca (Graydon)
> writes:
> >My assumption in such circumstances is that the fellow in question
> >is much more intelligent than he is articulate, and got mightily
> >tired of being laughed at when he tried to talk, on the one hand,
> >and the apparent wilful stupidity of people in general, on the
> >other.
>
> He's a bit of a misanthrope, yes, and very bright. But he's quite
> articulate.
So maybe he got tired of people telling him was crazy rather than
asking him what he meant....
> I can, in fact, give you a pretty thorough run-down on his
> personality; it's the exact events that shaped it that I don't know.
> It'll come clear in the writing, eventually.
I would assume so, yes. (180 kwords before I figured out what the
king's world view was based on. Sigh.)
Will Grzanich
[snip]
Wow. Okay, here's a few thoughts, most of which you've probably already
considered or are hideously obvious.
Among other things, we know:
- He's a wizard, and we think he's holding himself back in the ranks.
- He hates other people in general.
- He hates owing people, being in their debt.
- He distrusts people.
- He's on the lam.
- He keeps his own word, but only as far as the promise he's made.
The feeling I get is that he got royally screwed somewhere along the
line. He put his trust in somebody; perhaps there was a deal made
somewhere, where someone else swore to do something for your character
in return for a service, and that someone reneged. Maybe that happened
more than once, more than a few times. That would explain his hatred
and distrust of others, as well as his need to keep his own promises (so
he's better than everyone else, who just screw people over). He doesn't
like to be in debt to others because he knows they'll just go back on
their words (or just not repay him). He did that reverse-psychology,
make-everyone-else-do-the-opposite-of-what-I-want thing so that they
wouldn't decide that it was he who saved them.
His reservations about gaining higher status among the wizards might,
then, be due to his noble family (or other noblemen) being the ones who
gave the guy the short end of the stick. Just a parallel between the
high status of the nobility and the high status of the wizards. Either
something directly related to the deal he made with the noblemen or
something he did because the noblemen lied to him led to his being
wanted by the law.
Hey, you never know, right?
Rachael M. Lininger
On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, Jo Walton wrote:
>In article <Pine.GSO.4.02.99041...@virtu.sar.usf.edu>
> lini...@virtu.sar.usf.edu "Rachael M. Lininger" writes:
>> On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Jo Walton wrote:
>> >Yeah. How would I know what he was going to say if I didn't know why he
>> >was saying it?
>> >
>> >If I were writing his POV it might almost be easier.
>>
>> Why? Because once you got into it it would be ok, and it's the jumping
>> in and out, or seeing him though the POV character's filters, that's
>> stopping you?
>
>Yes, because if it were his POV he'd be much less difficult to put over
>as a person, because I'd have his self-justifications and his filters.
Ah, ok, that makes a lot of sense. It's not so much that _you_ can't
get into his head, but that his POV has to seep through both the
viewpoint character's _and_ your own, and that's what wasn't working
so well.
>The problems with writing in first, as Orwell perspicaciously
>remarked in his unfinished essay on :Brideshead Revisited:, are that
>you have to have a remarkably intuitive character work out what
>everyone else is feeling from their outward appearance, secondly
>that there's a great tendency to have people confide in your
>character more than anyone normally confides in other people in
>any circumstances and thirdly that in order to have them see
>enough of the story to report it you have to have them appear
>everywhere, overhear meetings they'd not be invited to, and have
>them invited to meetings in circumstances in which it would be
>unlikely for them to attend naturally. (He uses some terrific
>examples from :Great Expectations: and ;David Copperfield:, as
>well as :Brideshead:. He goes on to say how the great advantage
>of first is how immediately credible and sympathetic it is.)
Oh, that's wonderful.
Did he do any essays, finished or not, on omniscient?
Although there are books where that doesn't matter so much, because
presenting everything isn't the goal. Hmm.
>My problem here is related to the first and third of those, actually,
>getting him through her filters for one thing and her actually being
>there in that situation where she wouldn't necessarily naturally be
>participating for another.
Maybe she can be sitting there, bored, listening to other people talk
and thinking scurrilous things about them? :) Might not be in
character, though. (I have one who will sit around, bored, listening
to herself talk and thinking scurrilous things. I like her.)
>> Maybe try writing the scene from his POV, see what he says, and then
>> do it through her POV using that.
>
>I'll do that if I have to. I've got it about half done, and I've
>got the revision of the other chapter with him in about half done
>as well.
Oh, good, now people can just wander around chatting instead of
attempting to be helpful.
>> >Thank you. Those are useful helpful questions and have jolted something
>> >loose. He's _never_ going to compromise, he's going to try casting out
>> >demons, and then get laughed at, and he hates being laughed at. What it
>> >would take for him to be justified would be that everyone who doesn't
>> >convert after sufficient opportunity be _wilfully_ not converting out
>> >of malice.
>>
>> Oh, my. That's interesting. Does anyone manage to get him to stop?
>
>Trying to convert people? Never. There are much worse people than him
>in his religion too, one of them forcibly converted a whole island
>by magic and force of will. (She wasn't there for that, she just heard
>about it later.)
Ah. I've known people like that. If you've read my reaction to
religion, I'm sure you can guess what they thought of me.
>He might forgive them right now though, it looks as if he's going to.
Will he forgive himself for not converting them, or is that an issue
for him? And there are few things quite so annoying as being
forgiven for not converting, too.
Rachael
--
Rachael M. Lininger | "Some causes of angst have not worn well."
lininger@ |
virtu.sar.usf.edu | Dr. A. McA. Miller
PWrede6492
>
> Probably not usable here, but: what if he saw the _wrong_ Truth? For
> example, he knows what the gods believe in -- or that they don't believe
> in anything.
Interesting, for a different book.
Patricia C. Wrede
Michelle
> Most of the characters I have written about are based, more or less,
> on folk I have known. You might ask yourself *who* you are thinking
> of when you are writing about this character.
The only character in whom I have been able to trace a definate
resemblence to some one I know, is the 13 year-old protagonist of _Rune
& Fire_ who is suspiciously like my four-year-old daughter.
However, this character was conceved BEFORE my daughter was, and _Rune &
Fire_ was half done by the time my daughter was two years old. I only
have just started noticing the resemblance...
Just a coincedence maybe?
Michelle Bottorff
Geoff Wedig
> In article <7fl25g$hth$2...@pale-rider.INS.CWRU.Edu>,
> Geoff Wedig <we...@darwin.cwru.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >> Probably not usable here, but: what if he saw the _wrong_ Truth? For
> >> example, he knows what the gods believe in -- or that they don't believe
> >> in anything.
> >
> >wherein the main character is given the Truth, the totally culturally
> >destroying and socially inefficient truth. Much of the novel would have
> >dealt with what they did with it, and the questions of "Is it better to have
> >a good civilization based on a lie, or a fallen civilization that knows the
> >truth" and so on.
> Very big difference -- that assumes the main character can convince others
> (and eventually the entire society) of the Truth. Rather than a situation
> in which he has no hope of convincing anyone else.
Oh, I wasn't saying it was completely analogous, just that it seemed similar
enough and I thought it a neat enough idea that I thought I'd share. The
situation was more complex than I explained actually, since the main
character didn't *want* to know the truth, but now that she does, it wants
to be told (the Truth, in this case, was an active force as well, not just
simple knowlege that lays there)
It wasn't meant analogously, and I didn't really think it would help Pat,
but I like throwing out these snippets of ideas now and again, and enjoy it
when others do to (and if I recall, you have rather a prediliction for doing
that as well, throwing out snippets of ideas, I mean.)
Geoff
Manny Olds
> important. He himself is a wizard, but for various reasons he is a) concealing
> this fact from the people he has just fallen in with, and b) of much lower rank
> in the official wizard's guild (which has a merit-based, test-based system of
> rising in rank) than he ought to be. I do not know whether he deliberately
> kept *himself* low in rank for some reason, or whether he was deliberately
> stifled by someone above him, but deliberation was involved somewhere, and I
> suspect he did it himself.
Last night, this part of the description kept nagging at my mind. I kept
thinking what it would be like to build your whole life around the plan to
be a great, intellectual, powerful, respected Good Mage, because you are
bookish and are told you have great magical potential. And to discover
that the only kind of magic you can to well is things like turning people
inside out, or turning their bones to water, or withering limbs, or making
frogs rain from the sky.
--
Manny Olds <old...@clark.net> of Riverdale Park, Maryland, USA
"If people are going to start calling on the Gods as if they were Santa's
reindeer, they deserve whatever they get." -- She Devil With A Modem
PWrede6492
<old...@clark.net> writes:
>Last night, this part of the description kept nagging at my mind. I kept
>thinking what it would be like to build your whole life around the plan to
>be a great, intellectual, powerful, respected Good Mage, because you are
>bookish and are told you have great magical potential. And to discover
>that the only kind of magic you can to well is things like turning people
>inside out, or turning their bones to water, or withering limbs, or making
>frogs rain from the sky.
There are aspects of this that have potential, though as it stands it doesn't
quite fit my background. Their magic doesn't come in "good" or "bad" flavors
-- it's all just magic, and it's what you do with it that matters. But it
would make sense to have similarities in various types of spells, and if my guy
got the idea that he was being steered toward the nasty ones...hmmm...
Patricia C. Wrede
Dan Goodman
Geoff Wedig <we...@darwin.cwru.edu> wrote:
[snip]
>Oh, I wasn't saying it was completely analogous, just that it seemed similar
>enough and I thought it a neat enough idea that I thought I'd share. The
>situation was more complex than I explained actually, since the main
>character didn't *want* to know the truth, but now that she does, it wants
>to be told (the Truth, in this case, was an active force as well, not just
>simple knowlege that lays there)
Offhand, I'd say that could be countered only by an equally true and
equally strong Truth.
>It wasn't meant analogously, and I didn't really think it would help Pat,
>but I like throwing out these snippets of ideas now and again, and enjoy it
>when others do to (and if I recall, you have rather a prediliction for doing
>that as well, throwing out snippets of ideas, I mean.)
I do, but I don't throw out as many as I could. For one thing, it's
relatively easy to come up with them systematically. One way is to take
an unconvincing story and figure out what would need to be true for it to
make sense. The easy one: "Yes, they _are_ trying to get themselves
killed."
And something just occurred to me about a well-known (and much-debated)
short story: the reason the stowaway (the one who has to be thrown out
the airlock, because her extra weight would doom the medical delivery) had
no trouble stowing away is, the authorities _wanted_ her to stow away and
subsequently die.
obscurity
> Okay, if you're all going to treat it like a game of Twenty Questions, I'd
> better give you some more to work with.
Ooh! Can I play? Can I? Huh? Pleeaaase?
My 2p worth:
The reason he hasn't told anyone about his background yet is that he hasn't
met anybody who has any damned business knowing about his background. He's
very independant and extremely protective of his personal life - this is
also the reason why he hasn't revealed that he is a wizard - and unless
someone has a very good reason to know, he's never going to say. And if
anyone pries without very good reason, he's going to be extremely wary and
defensive. If you want to find out, you're going to have to have a character
in a position where they *really* need to know. If it's a character that he
cares about (likely to be one who's intelligent and/or creative - not that
he'll *show* that he cares about them, of course), then he'll open up. If he
can trust them not to shout it from the rooftops. He's much more likely to
open up to someone who has already found out that he's a wizard but has kept
quiet about it.
You're right that he deliberately kept himself at a lower rank. He has a
deep love and respect of his wizardly arts, and has absolutely no interest
in the distractions that come with a higher rank. Doing what he enjoys most
and is best at is more important to him than power or acclamation.
He does have immediate family, but can't understand them and is somewhat
embarrased by them - they don't share his love of knowledge, or his firm
principles. He disowned the lot of them after what was to them a fairly
minor disagreement but to him a matter of personal ethics, and (many years
later) has still not forgiven them for putting him in a position where he
had no choice but to perform an unethical act (probably breaking a promise).
He will not be ordered around, and the more someone tries to coerce him, the
less likely he is to do what they want.
He thinks stupid people should be shot at birth, just to put them out of his
misery.
He was bought up to believe that he is worthless, and has a deep-rooted need
to prove that he can Do Great Things without any help from anyone else
whatsoever. If someone *does* help him, he feels compelled to even the
score, so that he can convince himself that he owes nobody for his sucesses.
He takes great satisfaction from the fact that he has already done better
for himself, by himself, than those who looked down on him when he was
younger, and it is the knowledge that he did it all himself that gives him
his feeling of superiority.
He feels extremely uncomfortable being praised - he remembers only too well
how worthless he was made to feel when young, and half expects that the
moment he accepts any praise, the person praising him will turn it into a
cruel joke and laugh at his expense.
Well, just some general musings. Probably all hopelessly wrong, but I
thought I'd share them.
--
obscurity.
"Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure." - Oscar Wilde
SAMK
>
> > Given just that, one (kind of far-out) thing that leaps to my
> >mind is that he knows something nobody else does. Like he's seen The
> >Truth, and he's gotten way past the stage of simply being terrified of
> >it, and is now just sort of resigned.
>
> If he saw The Truth, he'd spit in it's eye. He *doesn't* want to be a priest,
> and that's what you are, on this world, if you can see The Truth. But it's not
> a bad suggestion.
This opinion about The Truth is not inconsistent with anything you said
about the character so far.
SAMK
sa...@inil.com
Zeborah
> The feeling I get is that he got royally screwed somewhere along the
> line. He put his trust in somebody; perhaps there was a deal made
> somewhere, where someone else swore to do something for your character
> in return for a service, and that someone reneged.
I get a similar feeling; but especially I get the feeling that it was a
close friend of his. Maybe someone from his estranged immediate family
- a brother, or cousin? Probably not a lover.
Perhaps he owed a favour to this person; they called him on it and asked
him to do something somewhere in between legal and illegal; he agreed,
albeit reluctantly; things went wrong; the person didn't bother sticking
up for him and now he's on the run from the Guards.
Dunno if the timetable fits (or the rest of it) but it's a thought.
Zeborah
Ray Radlein
>
> He himself is a wizard, but for various reasons he is a) concealing
> this fact from the people he has just fallen in with, and b) of much
> lower rank in the official wizard's guild (which has a merit-based,
> test-based system of rising in rank) than he ought to be. I do not
> know whether he deliberately kept *himself* low in rank for some
> reason, or whether he was deliberately stifled by someone above him,
> but deliberation was involved somewhere, and I suspect he did it
> himself.
[snip]
> Though he is not of Faerie, he dislikes being thanked; he hates being
> under obligation to anyone or anything (and at present, considers
> himself not to owe anything to anyone). He has a tremendous thirst
> for knowledge, and he trusts books far more than people. He considers
> himself extremely practical. He is currently on the run from the
> Imperial Guards for unspecified reasons that are fairly minor, or at
> least initially appear to everyone to be so (the Guards don't want him
> badly enough to chase him down and start extradition procedures [i.e.,
> invade] now that he's out of the Empire). He has not yet told anybody
> *why* he's on the run, though circumstances have made it obvious to
> everybody that he is.
It occurs to me that one possible reason for his (self-inflicted)
failure to advance within his guild is that some third party who *does*
have influence within the guild is sponsoring him in a big way, and he
doesn't want to be indebted to this person. Perhaps the individual in
question has some agenda with which Our Hero does not agree. Perhaps Our
Hero was unable to explicitly reject the offered assistance without
giving offence, and so was forced to simply keep screwing up at
carefully planned moments so as to fail to advance. Perhaps he has run
out of different ways of screwing up (like Fred Cassidy in "Doorways in
the Sand" running out of ways to avoid graduating), so he has simply
fled. Perhaps he is of sufficient import that his unexplained
disappearance from the guild merits an investigation by the Imperial
Guards; or perhaps his would-be sponsor has sent them. On the other
hand, there's only so far that the Imperial Guards would be willing to
chase a wayward student who isn't charged with anything much in
particular (overdue library books, perhaps?).
- Ray R.
--
************************************************************************
"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so, Brain, but what if hexapodia really *is* the key insight?
Ray Radlein - r...@learnlink.emory.edu
homepage coming soon! wooo, wooo.
************************************************************************
Manny Olds
I thought of an analogy: What if you wanted to be Odin, but were only
qualified to be Loki? Or, as you say, only trained to be Loki?
--
Manny Olds <old...@clark.net> of Riverdale Park, Maryland, USA
Sometimes you give a guy a fish, sometimes you teach him to fish,
sometimes you establish a fisherman training school, and sometimes you
have to let him find his own solution.
PWrede6492
obsc...@obscure.org (obscurity) writes:
>Well, just some general musings. Probably all hopelessly wrong, but I
>thought I'd share them.
Some of them were dead on; some weren't. He wasn't made to feel worthless when
he was young, for instance -- quite the contrary (and I didn't know that
before, thank you). The reason he dislikes praise is that to him it equals
meaningless flattery; he's *sure* that negative reactions are real, but
positive ones he always suspects of being insincere "sucking up." He also
didn't keep himself low-ranked in order to avoid the distractions of higher
rank; in this wizard's guild, you don't get access to advanced knowledge until
you are of a certain rank (no open library stacks). Holding himself down to a
second-or-third ranked wizard was therefore a great personal sacrifice,
contrary to his natural inclinations, and he must have had an extraordinarily
powerful reason for doing it. But he hasn't said what. (Come to think of it,
he may be on the run because somebody finally found out that he's been
illegally sneaking looks at higher-ranked stuff than he's officially entitled
to -- they're a bit paranoid about rouge wizards in this society, for assorted
reasons.)
He is indeed keeping quiet about his background because he is intensely
private, and because he hasn't met anyone yet (me included) whom he thinks has
any reason to know any of it. That's part of the problem... He hasn't let
anyone know he's a wizard yet because he thinks that a) they'll bother him to
do things, and b) he'll be harder for the Guard to track/find if the Guard is
looking for a wizard but nobody he's traveling with knows that he is one.
Patricia C. Wrede
PWrede6492
fitc...@netaccess.co.nz (Zeborah) writes:
>I get a similar feeling; but especially I get the feeling that it was a
>close friend of his. Maybe someone from his estranged immediate family
>- a brother, or cousin? Probably not a lover.
Yes, well, there's the rub. Who and what? It wasn't a lover who messed him
over; I tried that. It also wasn't a brother. (He *seems* to be an only
child, but I don't trust him on this one; he's being *too* close-mouthed, so I
suspect siblings who are either deceased or severely problematic [from his
viewpoint] in some way.)
>Perhaps he owed a favour to this person; they called him on it and asked
>him to do something somewhere in between legal and illegal; he agreed,
>albeit reluctantly; things went wrong; the person didn't bother sticking
>up for him and now he's on the run from the Guards.
I don't think the two incidents are that closely connected. He's in his early
thirties; whatever made him the cynical misanthrope he is, it was not a recent
occurance. He's too set in his ways. But it also wasn't a trauma as a young
child -- he's not set *enough* in his ways to have lost his faith in humanity
at the age of three. Late teens or early twenties, I think. The thing with
the Guards is very recent, a matter of days or weeks at most. I think.
Patricia C. Wrede
David Owen-Cruise
>Some of them were dead on; some weren't. He wasn't made to feel worthless when
>he was young, for instance -- quite the contrary (and I didn't know that
>before, thank you). The reason he dislikes praise is that to him it equals
>meaningless flattery; he's *sure* that negative reactions are real, but
>positive ones he always suspects of being insincere "sucking up." He also
>didn't keep himself low-ranked in order to avoid the distractions of higher
>rank; in this wizard's guild, you don't get access to advanced knowledge until
>you are of a certain rank (no open library stacks). Holding himself down to a
>second-or-third ranked wizard was therefore a great personal sacrifice,
>contrary to his natural inclinations, and he must have had an extraordinarily
>powerful reason for doing it. But he hasn't said what. (Come to think of it,
Thought one: Has he reached the highest level which does not stand out from
the crowd? It sounds like he has a strong aversion to attention.
Thought two: Does he prefer to let people underestimate him? Does he tend to
dress and behave in a manner other than that which would be expected of
someone in his social and economic circumstances?
[snip]
--
David Owen-Cruise
"Blessed are they who learn from their mistakes, for they shall make,
if not necessarily fewer of them, different and more interesting ones."
Dorothy J. Heydt
Geoff Wedig
> In article <7fn2re$aj9$2...@pale-rider.INS.CWRU.Edu>,
> Geoff Wedig <we...@darwin.cwru.edu> wrote:
> >It wasn't meant analogously, and I didn't really think it would help Pat,
> >but I like throwing out these snippets of ideas now and again, and enjoy it
> >when others do to (and if I recall, you have rather a prediliction for doing
> >that as well, throwing out snippets of ideas, I mean.)
> I do, but I don't throw out as many as I could.
Neither do I. But it's fun to do now and again. I liked the idea someone
mentioned in this very thread about a wizard who could only do nasty spells,
despite their inclinations to the contrary.
For one thing, it's
> relatively easy to come up with them systematically. One way is to take
> an unconvincing story and figure out what would need to be true for it to
> make sense. The easy one: "Yes, they _are_ trying to get themselves
> killed."
Yes. Always a fun project. I wonder if anyone's tried it on really bad
fiction though (Eye of Argon bad, I mean.... *shudder*) I'm not sure it's
*possible* to make that make sense.
Geoff
Beth Friedman
<19990423085351...@ngol06.aol.com>...
>In article <924825397.10283.0...@news.demon.co.uk>,
>obsc...@obscure.org (obscurity) writes:
>
>>Well, just some general musings. Probably all hopelessly wrong, but I
>>thought I'd share them.
>
>didn't keep himself low-ranked in order to avoid the distractions of higher
>rank; in this wizard's guild, you don't get access to advanced knowledge
until
>you are of a certain rank (no open library stacks). Holding himself down
to a
>second-or-third ranked wizard was therefore a great personal sacrifice,
>contrary to his natural inclinations, and he must have had an
extraordinarily
>powerful reason for doing it. But he hasn't said what.
You mentioned his intensely private nature earlier. Did he refuse
advancement because there's some sort of mind-scan that's an automatic
requirement, and he's not willing to submit to that?
--
Beth Friedman
b...@wavefront.com
Carol Flynt
>How general? I mean *something* happened to make this guy
>the close-mouthed, cynical guy he is now; I know that. I
>just don't know what. Though it doesn't seem to have been
>anything connected to the death or betrayal of someoneimportant
>to him -- I've tried most of those on him, and he just curls his
>lip or rolls his eyes. And he wasn't abused as a kid, either.
>He Just Doesn'tWant To Talk About It. I may simply have to
>write my way into him. The real kicker is that I have a deeply
>felt suspicion that whatever is haunting his past is vital to the
>outcome of the plot... and he won't tell me what it is!
Don't know that this will help, but the above paragraph joggled
this out of me:
Once of the non-fiction books I'm reading as background to
my WIP (and it is *in progress* - what a grand feeling!)
introduced me to a true villain: a cold-blooded assassin,
skilled at his job, prideful of his accomplishments, a
very dangerous man.
It is true that he was abused as a child, and had what
I certainly would call a "rough" childhood - but none
of that is what made him what he is. Oh, it was the
mechanism by which he fell into the military, which
led him to the Navy Seals and special training. But
it was the *training,* not the background, that turned
him into the killer he is. And, although in the non-fiction
book we never really learn if this is true, it appears that
the training is also the key to how he got involved with
the crime underground which is the whole subject of the
book.
I learned two things from this reading experience:
First, I was shocked to learn how much I *liked* this
guy. One of the things that kept me reading through
the book as though it were a novel was the desire to
learn what happened to this guy. And I realize that I
need to feel that way about my antagonist in the WIP
(who, of course, is modeled partly on this non-fiction
character I met.) I was literally shaken by a
return to the POV of the law officials who described
this guy as a trained, cold killer, totally amoral,
and very dangerous. It was a powerful moment.
Secondly, I learned how convincing it can be that it
is not the *background* per se, but the opportunities/
bad choices that the background presents to the individual
that makes the individual what he is by the time I catch
up to him as a character in my novel. I.e., it's not
his background, but his back story, that I need to
flesh out. It's not what happened to him, but what
he *did* about it - that's where the key to this
character lies.
So, is there something about what this guy has
done in the past that makes him what he is? What
could that be? In my villain's case, the fact
that he was abused simply made him another hard luck
story. The fact that he had special training - by
the US government - that made him a skilled killer,
and that taught him to take pride in his kills, and
that made him numb to the normal "moral" objections
to killing, and then was turned loose with no place
to use these carefully (and legally) honed skills
when he was (honorably) discharged; it was all this
back story that turned him to the crime underground.
Carol (Well, it was a new approach for me, and I thought
it wouldn't hurt to share) Flynt
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| PREFERRED EMAIL ADDRESS: ca...@cflynt.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alter S. Reiss
> obsc...@obscure.org (obscurity) writes:
>
> >Well, just some general musings. Probably all hopelessly wrong, but I
> >thought I'd share them.
>
Well, just a few more questions to ask the character:
Who's attention is he trying to avoid?
Did someone close to him get badly burned because he/she appeared
too competant?
Were any of his siblings well liked?
--
Alter S. Reiss -------------------- http://www.geocities.com/Area51/2129
"Are you feeling stupid? I know I am!"
-- Homer J. Simpson
Dan Goodman
Geoff Wedig <we...@darwin.cwru.edu> wrote:
>Dan Goodman <dsg...@visi.com> wrote:
>> In article <7fn2re$aj9$2...@pale-rider.INS.CWRU.Edu>,
>> Geoff Wedig <we...@darwin.cwru.edu> wrote:
>> >It wasn't meant analogously, and I didn't really think it would help Pat,
>> >but I like throwing out these snippets of ideas now and again, and enjoy it
>> >when others do to (and if I recall, you have rather a prediliction for doing
>> >that as well, throwing out snippets of ideas, I mean.)
>
>> I do, but I don't throw out as many as I could.
>
>Neither do I. But it's fun to do now and again. I liked the idea someone
>mentioned in this very thread about a wizard who could only do nasty spells,
>despite their inclinations to the contrary.
Of course, there's probably also a wizard who wants to be evil, evil, evil
-- and whose talent only works for good.
> For one thing, it's
>> relatively easy to come up with them systematically. One way is to take
>> an unconvincing story and figure out what would need to be true for it to
>> make sense. The easy one: "Yes, they _are_ trying to get themselves
>> killed."
>
>Yes. Always a fun project. I wonder if anyone's tried it on really bad
>fiction though (Eye of Argon bad, I mean.... *shudder*) I'm not sure it's
>*possible* to make that make sense.
Universe built by an incompetent god. Only thing to do is destroy it, so
a better one can be done by a more competent god. The people who seem to
be the Good Guys are interfering with this, and are therefore the Bad
Guys. (Heinlein used something close to this in a short story.)
PWrede6492
writes:
>Thought one: Has he reached the highest level which does not stand out from
>the crowd? It sounds like he has a strong aversion to attention.
No, he *likes* attention -- he just doesn't trust it when it's favorable.
Being snarky lets him be the center of attention (people looking at you saying
"What a jerk" are still *looking* at you), without making him worry that it's
insincere.
Though I think he *has* got as high as he can while still being part of the
crowd. He just has some other reason for not wanting to stand out in this
particular crowd. It may be political; the Emperor is *not* one of the Good
Guys, and the very top levels of the wizard's guild have to swear binding oaths
directly to him (and he *still* doesn't trust them). Yes, I bet that has a lot
to do with it -- one more level up, and the Emperor (and various
Prince-Potentials) would start paying attention to him, because in another
level he'd have to swear his oath, and they like to check those folks out
early.
But I think there's still more to it than that.
>Thought two: Does he prefer to let people underestimate him? Does he tend
>to
>dress and behave in a manner other than that which would be expected of
>someone in his social and economic circumstances?
Oh, yes, indeedy. Letting people underestimate him keeps them out of his hair.
Patricia C. Wrede
PWrede6492
>So, is there something about what this guy has
>done in the past that makes him what he is?
Um, he's not a villain. Possibly I ought to have mentioned this before...
Patricia C. Wrede
PWrede6492
<b...@wavefront.com> writes:
>You mentioned his intensely private nature earlier. Did he refuse
>advancement because there's some sort of mind-scan that's an automatic
>requirement, and he's not willing to submit to that?
No, that doesn't fit.
But they might have been trying to get him to *develop* one...
Patricia C. Wrede
PWrede6492
Reiss" <asr...@ymail.yu.edu> writes:
> Well, just a few more questions to ask the character:
>
> Who's attention is he trying to avoid?
If you're asking the character, what you get is a beady-eyed stare and "Let's
start with yours, bozo." If you're asking me... Well, the Imperials, for
starters. Which means keeping an either low- or misleading- profile among this
batch of folks, simply because he doesn't know which of them might be informers
(or at least willing to turn him in, if they figured out there was spare change
in it for them). *Possibly* somebody at the wizards' guild as well, though not
the Evil Scum cousin (see below -- she's not looking for him.)
> Did someone close to him get badly burned because he/she appeared
>too competant?
Character: "None of your business." Me: "I dunno; he won't talk. I don't
think so, though; I think this time he's reluctant to say because he doesn't
want to talk about anybody who might or might not be close to him. Private,
remember?"
> Were any of his siblings well liked?
Character: Rolls eyes and turns away. Me: "I don't know whether he had any.
He *really* hates talking about his immediate family. He has a cousin who is
popular but Evil Scum, and who is currently quite high in the wizard's guild,
but I think he mostly just avoided her -- which wasn't hard, since they didn't
live close to each other. She isn't as perceptive as he is; he figured out way
back that she was really Evil Scum, but she still hasn't tumbled to the fact
that he flubbed his pre-promotion tests on purpose. (That would have been
three or four years ago, I think.) Beyond that...well, 'popular' in his neck
of the woods had a lot to do with 'putting on a good false front for court
intrigue purposes', which may be yet another reason why he doesn't try too hard
to make nice."
Patricia C. Wrede
PWrede6492
writes:
>Of course, there's probably also a wizard who wants to be evil, evil, evil
>-- and whose talent only works for good.
Oh, *he'd* be a fun one to write! Make him a stereotypical Evil Villain in the
extreme, given to gloating, ruthless, power-mad...and everything he does turns
to happy endings for other people. Talk about frustration...
Patricia C. Wrede
Jo Walton
bi...@saltmine.radix.net "Bill Oliver" writes:
> In article <924255...@bluejo.demon.co.uk>,
> Jo Walton <J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> >Anyone got any useful thoughts, useful tangents, interestingly different
> >ways of doing it?
>
> Most of the characters I have written about are based, more or less,
> on folk I have known. You might ask yourself *who* you are thinking
> of when you are writing about this character.
Very few of my characters are based on people I know, they're characters,
they come out of the dark, I know them better than people I know.
However, when I read that line, I instantly thought "Hildebrandt",
(the C.12 pope known to his friends as Gregory VII) which was actually
a useful thought.
--
Jo - - I kissed a kif at Kefk - - J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk
http://www.bluejo.demon.co.uk - Interstichia; Poetry; RASFW FAQ; etc.
Jo Walton
lini...@virtu.sar.usf.edu "Rachael M. Lininger" writes:
>
> On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, Jo Walton wrote:
> >Yes, because if it were his POV he'd be much less difficult to put over
> >as a person, because I'd have his self-justifications and his filters.
>
> Ah, ok, that makes a lot of sense. It's not so much that _you_ can't
> get into his head, but that his POV has to seep through both the
> viewpoint character's _and_ your own, and that's what wasn't working
> so well.
Yes. She's never going to like him, but then she doesn't like other
people and I manage to get them across OK.
> >The problems with writing in first, as Orwell perspicaciously
> >remarked in his unfinished essay on :Brideshead Revisited:, are that
> >you have to have a remarkably intuitive character work out what
> >everyone else is feeling from their outward appearance, secondly
> >that there's a great tendency to have people confide in your
> >character more than anyone normally confides in other people in
> >any circumstances and thirdly that in order to have them see
> >enough of the story to report it you have to have them appear
> >everywhere, overhear meetings they'd not be invited to, and have
> >them invited to meetings in circumstances in which it would be
> >unlikely for them to attend naturally. (He uses some terrific
> >examples from :Great Expectations: and ;David Copperfield:, as
> >well as :Brideshead:. He goes on to say how the great advantage
> >of first is how immediately credible and sympathetic it is.)
>
> Oh, that's wonderful.
>
> Did he do any essays, finished or not, on omniscient?
The essay fragment (which I avoided looking up before due to the fact
he was dying when he wrote it and reading any of the things he wrote
when he was dying distresses me) begins:
"Actually, to write a novel in the first person is like dosing
yourself with some stimulating but very deleterious and very
habit-forming drug. The temptation to do it is very great, but
at every stage in the proceedings you know perfectly well that
you are doing something wrong and foolish."
(Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume
Four, p.574, Penguin, 1968.)
Even though I disagree with that strongly and would like to bring
up lots of examples, I can't help falling in love with the prose
style in which he says it.
He doesn't say anything about omniscient, though he used it
rather well in :Burmese Days:. I don't remember him saying
anything about it anywhere.
> Although there are books where that doesn't matter so much, because
> presenting everything isn't the goal. Hmm.
What he calls involving the protagonist in "amateur detective work or
eavesdropping" is definitely a problem in some circumstances, and I've
thought of that passage once or twice in the last 160,000 words.
> >My problem here is related to the first and third of those, actually,
> >getting him through her filters for one thing and her actually being
> >there in that situation where she wouldn't necessarily naturally be
> >participating for another.
>
> Maybe she can be sitting there, bored, listening to other people talk
> and thinking scurrilous things about them? :) Might not be in
> character, though. (I have one who will sit around, bored, listening
> to herself talk and thinking scurrilous things. I like her.)
She could do that with some people, but not with those people. She's
there because she has orders to be there, otherwise not even horses
would have got her in there.
Playing games with what she doesn't notice means I have to be sure
the reader will. This works well enough for things that are real
major cultural differences between her and a C.20 person, but
otherwise not.
> >> Maybe try writing the scene from his POV, see what he says, and then
> >> do it through her POV using that.
> >
> >I'll do that if I have to. I've got it about half done, and I've
> >got the revision of the other chapter with him in about half done
> >as well.
>
> Oh, good, now people can just wander around chatting instead of
> attempting to be helpful.
Heh. I think I've got it done, I'll wait and see.
With any luck I have and I can get on with the next chapter which
ought to be more fun.
> >Trying to convert people? Never. There are much worse people than him
> >in his religion too, one of them forcibly converted a whole island
> >by magic and force of will. (She wasn't there for that, she just heard
> >about it later.)
>
> Ah. I've known people like that. If you've read my reaction to
> religion, I'm sure you can guess what they thought of me.
The person who told her about it later is like that, never been much
bothered by the affairs of the gods, either in exile or at home,
gets bored by people going on and on about it. He's not much like you
in other ways though!
> >He might forgive them right now though, it looks as if he's going to.
>
> Will he forgive himself for not converting them, or is that an issue
> for him?
I think he might if he were allowed to.
And there are few things quite so annoying as being
> forgiven for not converting, too.
That's a good point. I can get that into 39 or 40, Sulien fuming over
being forgiven for not converting.
Will Grzanich
> >Neither do I. But it's fun to do now and again. I liked the idea someone
> >mentioned in this very thread about a wizard who could only do nasty spells,
> >despite their inclinations to the contrary.
>
> Of course, there's probably also a wizard who wants to be evil, evil, evil
> -- and whose talent only works for good.
That sounds like a great idea for a story, sort of going deeper into the
whole "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" adage -- or, even
more uniquely, "the road to heaven is paved with bad intentions."
-Will
--
-= "Soul Brother #1" =- | Visit the Asylum at
"All you need is love." | www.ews.uiuc.edu/~grzanich!
-John Lennon | Contains no MSG!
Jouni Karhu
>In article <924825397.10283.0...@news.demon.co.uk>,
>obsc...@obscure.org (obscurity) writes:
>>Well, just some general musings. Probably all hopelessly wrong, but I
>>thought I'd share them.
>
>he was young, for instance -- quite the contrary (and I didn't know that
>before, thank you). The reason he dislikes praise is that to him it equals
>meaningless flattery; he's *sure* that negative reactions are real, but
>didn't keep himself low-ranked in order to avoid the distractions of higher
>rank; in this wizard's guild, you don't get access to advanced knowledge until
>you are of a certain rank (no open library stacks). Holding himself down to a
>second-or-third ranked wizard was therefore a great personal sacrifice,
>contrary to his natural inclinations, and he must have had an extraordinarily
>illegally sneaking looks at higher-ranked stuff than he's officially entitled
>to -- they're a bit paranoid about rouge wizards in this society, for assorted
>reasons.)
Perhaps when wizards advance in ranks, certain safeguards are
installed. Binding oaths that make it impossible for them to use their
magic in certain ways, for example. So, if he has found a way to sneak
peeks in the arcane tomes outside his own rank, he could probably
become more powerful in some ways than the higher-ranked wizards.
Perhaps that extraordinarily powerful reason is that he desperately
needs a certain type of magic that a wizard would only get to learn at
a higher rank but would not be able to use it in the way he needs to
use it because of the safeguards? To return a loved one from death?
Cliche, maybe a variant of that.
But now he has been found out.
This way you could have very specific framework of rules what a wizard
of given rank can do -- and still have this character be able to break
them in surprising ways. :)
--
'I have something to say! | 'The Immoral Immortal' \o JJ Karhu
It is better to burn out, | -=========================OxxxxxxxxxxxO
than to fade away!' | kur...@modeemi.cs.tut.fi /o
PWrede6492
Karhu) writes:
>Perhaps when wizards advance in ranks, certain safeguards are
>installed. Binding oaths that make it impossible for them to use their
>magic in certain ways, for example. So, if he has found a way to sneak
>peeks in the arcane tomes outside his own rank, he could probably
>become more powerful in some ways than the higher-ranked wizards.
As I mentioned, there are binding oaths involved, but they're not the sort that
would affect how they use their power (though they really ought to be -- I
think somebody has a blind spot about this). They're *very* careful about
letting anybody see the higher-ranked spells who isn't of proper rank -- my guy
may, perhaps, have managed to get himself a few things from the next rank up,
but two or three higher (which is where the really dicey stuff starts) he
wouldn't have had a chance to look at, nor would he have been able to do
anything with them without all the knowledge of intervening stuff even if he
*had* been able to see them. It'd be sort of like trying to understand
Einstein's theory of special relativity without having gotten past sixth grade
science class...by looking at Einstein's paper, not at one of the popular
explanations.
>This way you could have very specific framework of rules what a wizard
>of given rank can do -- and still have this character be able to break
>them in surprising ways. :)
Actually, the rank system this particular culture uses is rather artificial.
*They* think that you absolutely positively have to advance in certain ways,
and that their "tests" are necessary to open up a wizard's mind/abilities
enough so that he can handle the next level of power. And it is one of the
faster ways of doing it. But isn't *necessary*, the way they think it is. His
real problem, in the long run, would be a) overcoming his own cultural
blinders, and b) finding someone who can and will train him *without* insisting
on the guild-run ordeals.
Patricia C. Wrede
Mary K. Kuhner
Geoff Wedig <we...@darwin.cwru.edu> wrote:
>Dan Goodman <dsg...@visi.com> wrote:
> For one thing, it's
>> relatively easy to come up with them systematically. One way is to take
>> an unconvincing story and figure out what would need to be true for it to
>> make sense. The easy one: "Yes, they _are_ trying to get themselves
>> killed."
>Yes. Always a fun project. I wonder if anyone's tried it on really bad
>fiction though (Eye of Argon bad, I mean.... *shudder*) I'm not sure it's
>*possible* to make that make sense.
Diane Duane's _XCOM_ novel is a great test case--the game just does
not make sense, so how can you novelize it? The book's actually kind
of fun--the characters realize their situation is a bit dippy, and
even comment on it (who is buying all those alien corpses, and what
are they doing with them?) I loved the scene where the main characters
are shopping for a secret underground base in Switzerland....
It does not make sense, though, no matter how hard she tries.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Matthew F Johnson
Nancy Lebovitz (na...@unix3.netaxs.com) writes:
> In article <7fdc52$2...@freenet-news.carleton.ca>,
> Matthew F Johnson <cr...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote:
>>
>> There are two forces behind villains: selfishness and certainty. (You
>>could throw madness in there too, but at that point the "villain" status
>>becomes confused). Selfishness is not hard to understand as a motive.
>>Certainty refers to the characters' certainty that _they_ are right and
>>everyone else is wrong - or else the certainty that they are more sinned
>>against than sinning, so whatever they do is justified as getting their
>>own back.
>>>
> Note that heros need certainty too--both heros and villains have to
> ignore short-term feedback while trying to achieve their goals.
Of course. IMHO, the best villain is a hero who never doubts himself.
>
--
Matthew
Stacey Doerr
news:19990423085351...@ngol06.aol.com...
> He also
> didn't keep himself low-ranked in order to avoid the distractions of
higher
> rank; in this wizard's guild, you don't get access to advanced knowledge
until
> you are of a certain rank (no open library stacks). Holding himself down
to a
> second-or-third ranked wizard was therefore a great personal sacrifice,
> contrary to his natural inclinations, and he must have had an
extraordinarily
> powerful reason for doing it. But he hasn't said what
Maybe powerful wizards are expected to go around doing great deeds and
not-so-powerful wizards are left to do their own thing? He doesn't strike
me as the type to want to be sent down to rid the port of the sea monster
blockade. Especially since that sort of thing might get songs written about
him! That still doesn't explain the cause of his intense wish for privacy,
though.
Alternately, maybe he had a friend in the wizards' guild. A year or two
older, someone he hero worshipped. That friend was showing all the signs of
being a very powerful wizard. The friend was apprenticed to one of the
masters that everyone liked. Your character and his friend trusted and
respected this master. Then something horrible happened to the friend.
Your character has some reason to be suspicious that the master caused the
friend's death/mutilation/loss of magic talent because the friend was too
powerful, but he doesn't have any proof. The betrayal caused his lack of
trust. He's pretending to be less powerful than he really is to avoid the
master noticing him. And he keeps to himself because he's been hiding this
secret for all these years and if he allowed himself to get close to anyone
he might slip up.
Ciao,
Stacey
Cheryl Whitmore
suspect he does? So he's pretended to be less competent or less interested to
hide that he actually does know? (They may even be controlling a family
member you don't yet know about. One that supposedly died at a young age,
but he has learned they still live.) He may have been under a lot of
scrutiny and escaped.
Could he have a special skill or ability that he fears that they, the powers
that be, might try to exploit and he has recently become aware of himself.
These powers would destroy him to either keep him from using his power or
would destroy his soul to use him. So he must go a different route in order
to reach the level he needs to protect himself.
My musings.
Cheryl Whitmore
Alter S. Reiss
(Stuff about her character. That is to say, a character who appears in
something which she is working on, to forstall those who are tempted
toward word games.)
Just a few more thoughts here.
Does there have to have been an event in his backstory? Maybe
it's just that if he would make a move toward real power, either through
his family connections or through the mage guild, he'd put himself in a
position where he is either subordinate to extremely mean people, or
against them, and shortly after they find out he's against them, dead.
While it might be possible to work for these people while at the same time
trying to work against them, that's dangerous, and he's seen people get
crushed when trying that.
Maybe evil scum cousin did something pointlessly cruel back when,
nothing major, but he realized that if he tried to say anything about it,
not only wouldn't it accomplish anything, even if he was believed, but
also he would suffer. So he's tried to stay unimportant, and not usefull.
By trying to stay a lower level wizard, he was trying to keep from being
interesting to someone who could use a promising young mage to reinforce
his power base, or whatever. Maybe evil scum cousin, maybe scheming old
family member of some sort.
The realization that if the evil scum cousin did something wrong,
he was the one who would get punished, and it wasn't even important enough
for the evil scum cousin to remember would help make him a fairly cynical
kid; that might be a bit early for his cynicism to have developed, though.
Mary K. Kuhner
Stacey Doerr <sta...@microsoft.com> wrote:
>Alternately, maybe he had a friend in the wizards' guild. A year or two
>older, someone he hero worshipped. That friend was showing all the signs of
>being a very powerful wizard. The friend was apprenticed to one of the
>masters that everyone liked. Your character and his friend trusted and
>respected this master. Then something horrible happened to the friend.
>Your character has some reason to be suspicious that the master caused the
>friend's death/mutilation/loss of magic talent because the friend was too
>powerful, but he doesn't have any proof. The betrayal caused his lack of
>trust. He's pretending to be less powerful than he really is to avoid the
>master noticing him. And he keeps to himself because he's been hiding this
>secret for all these years and if he allowed himself to get close to anyone
>he might slip up.
A variant: nothing overtly awful happened to the friend, but the
character doesn't care for the way his friend's personality changed,
and blames the initiatory process/training/gain of new abilities. At
one point I knew several people who took a particular self-help
course, and seemed to come out of it with an arrogant, elitist,
and ultimately self-damaging mindset: that really breeds mistrust
quickly, and could certainly prevent someone like your mystery character
from wanting to undergo initiation (or whatever) himself.
A tangent: could "people change" be the insight that he is having
trouble dealing with?
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Graydon
> I thought of an analogy: What if you wanted to be Odin, but were only
> qualified to be Loki? Or, as you say, only trained to be Loki?
Ur?
They are _awfully_ similar -- tricksters, shapeshifters, magical, and
not to be trusted. Blood-hungry and wantonly destructive, the both
of them, too; the main difference is that Loki is associated with fire
and Odhin is associated with frenzy.
--
graydon@ | Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,
lara.on.ca | mod sceal þe mare þe ure maegen lytlað.
| -- Beorhtwold, "The Battle of Maldon"
Alexander Austin
pwred...@aol.com (PWrede6492) wrote:
> writes:
>
> >Thought one: Has he reached the highest level which does not stand out from
> >the crowd? It sounds like he has a strong aversion to attention.
>
> No, he *likes* attention -- he just doesn't trust it when it's favorable.
> Being snarky lets him be the center of attention (people looking at you saying
> "What a jerk" are still *looking* at you), without making him worry that it's
> insincere.
The particular variety of cynicism which you've attributed to this character
strikes me as being the cynicism of a former idealist, who's had more and
more of his convictions about what is "right" worn away with time. The focus
on honesty in others, beyond being a sign of cynicism, is also a sign that he
values the ideal of truth (and possibly other standard ideals)... he's just
been stomped on too many times when he trusted what someone else told him.
Growing up an idealist in an empire rife with intrigue (and what empire is
_not_ rife with intrigue?) would turn almost anyone into a sour cynic after
enough of his naive dreams have been crushed and betrayed by people he
thought were his friends.
Naturally, anyone who tries to appeal to his idealism or his better feelings
after he intentionally hammers them down so he can avoid further heartbreak
will be horribly suspect. After all, every time that someone appealed to his
idealism _before_, they were pulling his strings...
> Though I think he *has* got as high as he can while still being part of the
> crowd. He just has some other reason for not wanting to stand out in this
> particular crowd. It may be political; the Emperor is *not* one of the Good
> Guys, and the very top levels of the wizard's guild have to swear binding
> oaths directly to him (and he *still* doesn't trust them). Yes, I bet that
> has a lot to do with it -- one more level up, and the Emperor (and various
> Prince-Potentials) would start paying attention to him, because in another
> level he'd have to swear his oath, and they like to check those folks out
> early.
You're dealing with an empire (what most people would describe as an _evil_
empire, from what I've read of your descriptions of it), and that tends to
imply vicious politicking and backbiting among those who are competing for
power in the various hierarchies. An entirely possible and reasonable
explaination for his avoiding a higher rank is the simple fact that
leadership and high rank makes you a target, either as a potential pawn in
the machinations of those above you in power or as the focus of the slander
and attacks of those beneath you. The benefits of high rank might not have
outweighed the potential danger to one's security and life.
Given his personality, I also doubt he's made the kinds of friends and allies
that it takes to hold onto one's rank (or one's life) once one gains a
sufficiently exalted position. Quite the contrary, rather. And I have no
doubt that he's aware of this himself.
>
> >Thought two: Does he prefer to let people underestimate him? Does he tend
> >to dress and behave in a manner other than that which would be expected of
> >someone in his social and economic circumstances?
>
> Oh, yes, indeedy. Letting people underestimate him keeps them out of his
> hair.
All the more reason to try and lay low, without rising in the ranks... if you
look mediocre, and aren't jumping to seize power, everyone else is less likely
to worry about you, and more about the obvious threats.
Admittedly, if he feels that he's better and smarter than those around him,
laying low is going to rankle... which undoubtedly contributes to his sunny
and cheerful disposition.
-Alec Austin
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