Lost Manuscript, addendum

I haven’t typed it in yet, but I performed a quick calculation of the number of words per page and number of pages, so I can already tell it’s shorter than I remembered. Only about 37,000 words.

It’s pretty painful to read, although not for the reasons I’d anticipated.

Lost Manuscript Found!

A post or two back, I mentioned an old manuscript about a dystopia that I feared might be lost. Amazingly, I just found it. Not because I decided to go look for it, which I didn’t. I swapped out the bookshelves in my living room for new ones, and in the process, found some papers of mine had been stacked with the books. It is possible, however, that if I hadn’t been thinking about the lost manuscript, I wouldn’t have been curious enough to flip through the papers.

I’m a bit afraid to read the thing, since I expect to be blown away by how awful it is. In my memory, it has a sort of glow. What a pity for glow to meet reality and die. Nonetheless, I want to put it on my computer, so sooner or later, I shall have to copy it. In the process, I expect I’ll have to read it whether I like it or not. I am glad I found it.

Vanilla Yogurt Hero

I mentioned in the last post I wondered if I should make my hero more of an anti-hero. Right now he’s got all the personality of vanilla yogurt. My three year old will only eat one kind of yogurt, the blandest flavor that can still be counted as a flavor, and that’s apparently the same formula my seventeen-year-old-self served in the “Hero” food group. To be fair to Younger Me, this was never meant to be published, it was just some 36,000 words of background material for the 400,000 word Ye Olde Epic Fantasy Tome. I wanted the hero of the prequel to be Standard Hero Fare to contrast with my tortured and utterly awesome hero of Ye Olde Epic.

I ask you, is that fair? Not really. Why should the hero of the prequel have to be a cardboard cutout to make another hero look good by comparison? I think, in those days, I lacked confidence in my ability to craft well-fleshed out characters, as if I would run out if I squandered them. Now I believe it’s the other way around. The more you push yourself, the better you’ll get at it.

Anyway, the hero of this story appears as a side character in Ye Olde Epic, where we learn more about his personality, so there’s no reason he has to be dairy product as the star of his own show.

Even a classic hero usually goes through a stage of Refusing the Quest. The problem now is the Quest just falls into his lap for no particular reason. Right place, right time, and he doesn’t question it. Given his personality as I developed it later, that doesn’t fit. I think he’s going to be more actively scheming from the start, but in the beginning, scheming only in a self-serving way. So he can Grow As a Person and all that when he finally embraces his heroic destiny.

Don’t worry, though. I’m no Virginia Wolfe and this isn’t instrospection-driven literary fiction. The focus is still going to be on bashing people about the head with shiny sticks.

Book Doctor in the House

The book doctor is in the house.

Diagnosis: One thousand words of info-dumping.

Recommendation: Surgery. Immediately. Get this patient under the knife!

Villains, Anti-heroes and Unlikable Heroes

I’ve been reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The protagonists are hardly likable, and though by the end one feels a certain sympathy for them, what drives the reader through the book is not the hope they will succeed in their scheming, but that they will fail disastrously. The ending satisfies because they reap the harvest of their own cruelty. A similar dynamic governs the duology Jean de Florette and Manon De Source. The characters you root for are not the protagonists, but their opponents/victims, Jean and Manon.

Are these protagonists anti-heros? I don’t think so. I’d call them, rather, villains who happen to be protagonists. I would distinguish between different kinds of Main Characters (MCs):

Villains – Villainous MCs aren’t necessarily unlikable, at least not completely. The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are so fiendishly clever and hypocritical, it is a guilty pleasure to watch them spar. They have enough faults to outweigh their good features, so they are true villains, yet enough good features to let the reader take their POV without tedium or nausea. No matter how charming, the reader still roots for their downfall.

Anti-Heroes – Flawed heroes uses questionable means to achieve noble ends — or, more rarely, noble means to achieve questionable ends. Or perhaps they begin as a villains, but unlike the true villain, redeem themselves in the end. Since we are supposed to root for them, anti-heroes are tricky. One advantage of anti-heroes is that they are usually more interesting than heroes because their motives and capabilities are ambiguous. Their victory and redemption is less assured than the traditional hero. However, since the charming rogues are already cliche, some authors try to push the anti-hero into less trite, but less likable, avenues, and this can backfire if the MC loses the allegiance of the reader.

Unlikable Heroes – Heroes can be unlikable for all sorts of reasons. If they are too “perfect,” they are dull. Villains and side kicks easily upstage them. Or maybe the hero has too many annoying characteristics, and not enough endearing habits to make up for these foibles. The problem is that unlikable heros are seldom unlikable on purpose. An author might not be aware that the character is coming across as whiny, passive, pushy, entitled, vain or too-stupid-to-live.

I began some re-writes on the mss I mentioned yesterday. Essentially, every single sentence in Chapter One needed adjustment, additions or erasure. Other than changing every other word on the page, though, I left the chapter as it was.

Ahem. What I mean is that I made no changes to the plot or characters. I tightened POV from a distant to a more intimate Third Person, I added sensory description and deleted overwrought phrases. I knew the characters well. All I needed to do was draw them out more clearly, not change them.

Chapter One begins with side characters, however. (Possibly not a good idea.) When I arrived at Chapter Two, which introduces the MC, it hit me.

This guy bores the brickabrack out of me.

Ouch. Cliched phrases are easy to redress, but a cliched hero spells doom for a book. Quick! How can I fix him without sacrificing the entire story?

Maybe…?

Make him an anti-hero?

I don’t want him to leap from the Great Frying Pan of Cliches into the Furious Fires of Cliche. Yeah, he’s the Chosen One, leader of the raggedy band of slaves and rebels against the evil Powers, yadda yadda yadda, but this comes with the territory of Epic Fantasy. If his character is painted with a fine enough brush, I don’t need anti-hero bells and whistles.

Still, he deserves to stand out from the herd of Chosen Ones somehow, doesn’t he? What if he’s not a real Chosen One. Yes, he’s a slave, but to save his own heart from the knife, he agreed to work for the villain. And the villain wants him to pose as a leader of the oppressed, to lure would-be rebel slaves out into the open….

I’m still wrestling with it, but I like this better than what I had before.

Other Monsters Under the Bed

This is not, btw, my first, or only monster under the bed. I wrote other monstrosities before this one, even uglier. I never even considered trying to publish those. Even Young Me knew they weren’t publishable. Here’s an inventory of the ones I remember:

Fanfic Star Trek (original series) novel. About 70,000 words. I co-wrote this novel with my mother when I was in Jr. High; she wrote the Spock scenes, I wrote the Kirk scenes. I will always have fond memories of it. Long live fanfic!

SF adventure novel about aliens conquering the Earth. (Sooooooo original). I hand-wrote this masterpiece with an eraserless pencil while living in a remote Mexican village when I was fifteen. Word count? Hard to say. Pencil scrawl filled several wide-ruled spiral-bound Mead notebooks. I impressed myself at the time. Knowing what I do now about word count, I’d guess it was probably no more than 30,000 words. The mss is lost. History weeps.

Epic Fantasy. 400,000 words. (Yikes!) I wrote it in high school. Naif that I was, I mailed out this elephant-sized mss to wallow in the slush pools of all my favorite fantasy publishers. Yes, I first began to query in high school. I earned my first reject letters. One reject letter was actually personalized, a kindness I was too ignorant to recognize at the time. (Fortunately, although dejected by rejection, I was never rude.) I accepted the reject letters as one more hint I should go to college, which I did. Not only do I still have the original mss, mailed back to me, I have the original reject letters.

SF about an anti-Semitic theocratic dystopia. Word Count: 50,000-60,000 words. One year in college, God knows why, I decided to spend Finals Week writing this novel instead of studying. Another WTF-was-I-thinking moment. I almost flunked out, sure, but I finished that novel in less than a month. I assumed from the start I would never be able to publish it because of the edgy topic. “Edgy” is now really popular, but I still doubt this novel is politically correct enough to be published. I no longer know where the mss is, though I believe I have a hard copy somewhere. I hope. I would be sad if I lost this one, even if no one ever reads it but me.

Hmm. Looking at this list, mostly if not entirely complete, it strikes me I haven’t written much. I’ve re-written much more. Not on this list are later projects, for instance Dindi, which I have re-written a dozen or more times. I makes me wonder again where a writer’s time and creativity is better invested — in re-writing old works or in writing new ones? Some of these projects were flawed from the start. Re-writing would be wasted on them. Others, such as my Epic Fantasy, could have gold to sift from the dross.