Recommended for Writers: The Elements of Writing by Charles Euchner

Charles Euchner has several versions of his book out, but it’s worth overcoming any confusion this may cause to get your hands on a copy. When I bought the book it was called The Big Book of Writing, and in other editions it seems to have been called The Writing Code. Now, glancing at his page on Amazon, I see it’s called The Elements of Writing.

He’s now broken up the book into component parts to sell as separate ebooks, which means that if you only want to focus on one aspect of writing at a time, you can do so. For instance, you might check out his book/section on characters:

But, frankly, his entire series is so good, that I recommend you buy the whole kit’n’kaboodle, The Elements of Writing. Don’t skip his advice on sentences and paragraphs, even if you fancy you can already turn out a good phrase. It’s excellent advice to hone your prose.

From those bare bones, he truly does address nearly every aspect of writing, imparting juicy bits of wisdom at every stage.

Check out the The Elements of Writing.

Do Villains Need Backstory? (Guest Post by Vashti Valant)

The question of whether evil is born or bred lies at the heart of many works of fiction. From Frankenstein to Harry Potter, glimpses of “villains’ ” or “monsters’ ” perspectives are usually given to provoke that discussion. Of course, there are also those who decide to keep their villains’ secrets. Here are some bad guys whose motivation we never really learn. They’re just evil, plain and simple.

The eye of Sauron may keep watch and his voice is heard from time to time, but we really only get a few brief accounts of his masterful manipulation of all Middle Earth, creating and gifting the rings of power to each race and saving an all-controlling ring for himself.

Other than that, he’s more of a looming threat than hands-on villain (maybe he would have been more directly involved if he had more of a body to work with). He has henchmen and minions that do his dirty work, but there is never any insight into why he went about subjugating the races of Middle Earth. While some history for Sauron is provided in the Silmarillion, in the more popular Lord of the Rings, Sauron is simply an evil that must be vanquished for the survival of all.

Similarly, the Emperor in Star Wars gets little backstory, even in the three prequels. Darth Vader’s fall from protective Jedi knight to a Sith Lord and the Emperor’s right-hand man are well explained, but how did Palpatine become a Sith? He proves adept at planning and deception, working his way into the established governmental system before setting off a chain reaction that would trigger a coup. Was he born with the Dark Side already flowing through him or, like Vader, was he turned from a different path?

While Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein goes out of its way to give the monster a voice, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is told only from the letters and diaries of those fighting the Transylvanian vampire. How someone becomes a vampire and how to kill a vampire are covered, but only some vague speculation regarding Count Dracula’s pre-vampire days. Nor do the brigade of vampire-hunters care. That is actually a common trait among the heroes of these stories: they have very few if any qualms about their actions. If they debate or question anything along the way, it is restricted to means, method, the plan of action; there’s never a doubt about the desired outcome.

How to Employ the Triad of Tension (Blog Post by Tara Maya)

All stories need conflict, which implies two sides, protagonist and antagonist, or Good Guys versus Bad Guys, even if the “bad” in the story is not actually another person. The protagonist could be struggling against herself, or against her environment.  Conflict still requires at least that minimum of forces to the conflict, personal or impersonal.

Often, however, a little more complication spices things up. It’s surprising how much more complex a story grows by just introducing a third side, to create a triad of powers all in competition with one another. This can of course, be further subdivided, although too many independent powers can overwhelm the reader.

Not every kind of triadic antagonism possible works terribly well. For instance, you could write a story pitting three different groups of Bad Guys against one another. It would be a straight power game. Some Mobster fiction and Caper crime fiction pretends to this, but if you look closely you’ll usually find that at least one side is, by comparison, less evil than the others, and the one we end up rooting for.

The only time I’ve read a novel where there were really only Bad Guys (whether two or three sides), it was usually not the intention of the writer at all, it was simply bad writing. The writer forgot to create a likable protagonist. The result was a throw-to-the-wall novel.

So in future posts, I’ll be looking at the most effect ménage a trois of the Triad of Tension:

GBB

BGG

GGG

Now, drag your mind out of the bedroom… that stands for: Good/Bad/Bad, Bad/Good/Good, and Good/Good/Good. There’s also the special case of the Good/Bad and the Good Guys in White… the later referring to a group that thinks they are good, in fact, even better than the real Good Guys, but behaves in an evil fashion.

I will also look at the only combination of B/B/B that works, which is the inverse: on of the so-called Baddies is really an Anti-hero, or someone who will redeem himself through the novel, rising above the other sides, which remain unredeemably wicked.

Creating three sides drives plot twists. Instead of straightforward clashes between Good and Evil every chapter, the Good Guys may find themselves embroiled in the conflict between two equally repellent forces, and must either side with one to avoid the other, or fight against the overwhelming odds of an alliance between both. It also adds uncertain, as characters switch sides, or hide their true allegiance.

A long work, such as an Epic Fantasy, Space Opera, or Historical Saga, can easily employ more than one trifecta. Take Lord of the Rings. We have the triad of tension between three Good Guys: the Elves, the Dwarves, and Men. We have the alliance of Good Guys undermined by the traitorous Bad Guy in White, Saruman the White, then faced with the alliance of two Bad Guys, the Two Towers.

Recommended for Writers: Bullies, Bastards & Bitches by Jessica Page Merrell

Bullies, Bastards & Bitches is a great title for a book about Baddies, don’t you think?

Whereas Rayne Hall’s Writing About Villains provides plenty of checklists and nuts and bolts for your villains, Jessica Merrell excels at analysis and example. She dissects numerous villains from literature to show the various shades of evil, from wicked gods to annoying neighbors. I think both approaches are useful and balance each other.

 

 

 

How to Make Your Villains Scary (Guest Post by Rayne Hall)

WRITNG CRAFT: HOW TO MAKE YOUR VILLAINS SCARY

Most novels and short stories have an antagonist (someone who opposes the protagonist), and this person or creature is often dangerous and perhaps evil. Here are ten professional techniques for making them truly scary.

 

1. The villain thinks of himself as a good guy who will do anything for what he believes is a noble cause.
2. He has a genuinely good side – perhaps he is a loving son who cares for his ageing parents, or he goes out of his way to protect children from harm.
3. During the first encounter, he seems pleasant and likeable.
4. Describe his voice. (“His voice sounded like a ….”)
5. He smiles rarely – but when he does, describe the smile in detail, comparing the shape of his mouth to something dangerous.

1. Describe his hands, the way they move, the texture of the skin, the shape of the nails.
2. Describe his eyes by comparing their colour to something unpleasant or dangerous.
3. Describe the way he moves. To increase the suspense, give him slow, deliberate movements.
4. What does the villain smell of? Innocuous smells, such as mothballs and peppermint toothpaste can work well.
5. Avoid clichés such as maniacal laughter and hot stinking breath.

Although this article uses the word “he” for the villain, your antagonist can of course be a devious female!

Questions?

If you’re a writer and want to discuss your ideas for a fictional villain, or if you have questions, please leave a comment. I’ll be around for a week and will reply. I enjoy answering questions.

 Buy Writing About Villains by Rayne Hall

The Bad Guys in White, Part II (Blog Post by Tara Maya)

(This post will contain spoilers for The Unfinished Song, so if you haven’t read up to the end of Book 6, you might want to come back to it later.)

In my earlier post The Bad Guys in White, Part I, I discussed the term “Bad Guys in White,” the fantasy trope of a group of villains based on Templars or the Inquisition. I maintain that, given how much evil the Inquisition perpetrated over the centuries, it’s still fair game for inspiring many, many bad guys to come.

Of course, we can move beyond the clichés by, first of all, doing research on the real Inquisition, not simply recycling (as I suspect some writers do) the baddies from video games or other fantasy novels. Direct research always refreshes world building. One can tell when a writer has done her research by how alive and unique her world is, even when, from afar, it seems to be an overdone trope, such as a vaguely medieval Europe. Just look at the Kushiel’s Dart series, set in a fantastique recognizably based on pre-modern France.

My character the Bone Whistler, whose rise to power is described in Book 11 (and the novella Tomorrow We Dance, which is an excerpt from Book 11), is based on a Xhosa prophet. The Xhosa, like the Europeans, also believed in witchcraft, and the trials of accused witches were not much more fair than those under the Inquisition. But the real crisis to their community came when their land and way of life came under pressure from British colonialism. After a Xhosa girl saw visions, her uncle made her famous, and thousands of Xhosa people followed her, to their utter ruin.

We can also move past the easy tropes to really think about what makes the Bad Guys in White such a problem for the Good Guys.

A couple of things, really.

One, the Bad Guys in White say they are on the Good Guy’s side, but aren’t—they are hypocrites. Or they go further and accuse the Good Guys of being Bad, so they confuse innocent by-standers and third-parties, turning the very people the Good Guys are trying to protect against them.

Two, the Bad Guys in White divide the Good Guy’s camp. The Good Guys either have to work with these vipers, even knowing they are evil, or fight them at the same time they are fighting the Bad Guys in Black.

It may help to remember that history is full of examples of this dilemma in real life, not at all limited to the Inquisition. Just think of the two worst tyrants of the Twentieth Century: Hitler and Stalin.

During WWII, the democracies had to ally with Stalin in order to fight Hitler. Churchill, at least, was under no illusions about what Stalin really was, or how far he could be trusted. When he said he would ally with the devil himself to fight Hitler, I’m sure he knew that wasn’t far off. But Hollywood war propaganda painted “Uncle Joe” as an avuncular guy to sell the alliance to the American people. As a result, the Americans were not prepared when Stalin turned on his allies and crushed Eastern Europe.

Think of the irony: Britain and France declared war on Germany for the express purpose of honoring an alliance with Poland, yet at the end of the war, Poland once more a captive nation. Thousands of innocents who had just been liberated from Nazi concentration camps were rounded up again and sent to die in gulags.

And it’s sobering to think that if Hitler had been content to simply hunker down in his own nation, confining his genocide to his own borders, but Stalin, by himself, had invaded Poland (in real history, he invaded, but under the cover of the co-invasion by the Nazis), the West might have allied with Hitler to stop Stalin. Instead of jovial “Uncle Joe,” the Americans might have been sold a charismatic “Uncle Adolph,” and to this day, Fascists might be regarded as well-meaning if misguided idealists, the way all too many people regard Communists.

The Communists make a good model for “Bad Guys in White” because unlike Fascism, Communism seemed to many to offer a better, purer, more moral way of life than decadent industrial capitalism. Equality of all people, of men and women, the end of nationalism, the sharing of all material wealth, a future of reason and science, in which a wise and selfless vanguard would eventually lead everyone into a world without any government, or indeed suffering of any sort, at all. Who could object to such lofty goals? (The Inquisition, too, did everything only for the good of your immortal soul and to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven.)

And yet, if only because they were in power longer, the Communists succeeded in mass murdering five times as many people as the Fascists–100 million human beings as opposed to the mere 20 million the Fascists managed to snuff out. (I have no doubt that if Hitler had been left in power, however, the Fascists would have gone on killing…and killing…and killing. Though maybe, they too would have eventually have collapsed from within, as in Harry Turtledove’s evocative Alternate History, In the Presence of Mine Enemies.)

But, say you were trying to convince people of the 1950s that Stalin was preparing a new genocide, apparently inspired by Hitler, to eliminate all the Jews, and millions of others, inside the Soviet Union. (Fortunately for the world, Stalin died first.) McCarthy would be the last “ally” you’d want. He’s become synonymous with the modern day witch-hunter, a real Bad Guy in White…or in this case, a pinstripe suit. In fact, there were quite a few genuine Soviet spies in positions of power in the government, sciences, and media, but McCarthy’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach probably gave them more cover than exposure.

Good Guys in an Epic Fantasy or an Urban Fantasy should have to struggle with foes like this, as much as with other kinds of villains, because ordinary people do too.

Don’t forget to check out Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum.