Dear Fantasy: It's Not Me, It's Your (Lack Of) Setting

From Author Pat Kirby:

I've fallen out of love with epic fantasy. To some extent, also urban fantasy, because the embittered, ass-kicking woman who is estranged from her family, and has more issues than a magazine just isn't blowing my metaphorical skirt up anymore. The thing is, a quick glance at my Goodreads account reveals that I am still reading fantasy, or at least novels with a significant speculative fiction element. But gone are the days when I would devour tome after tome of McGuffin-driven quests, featuring earnest young farm boys with Luke Skywalker-esque destinies. And it's not just a gender issue, since similar plotlines featuring the rare female heroine usually don't do it for me, either.

It would be easy to blame the problem on time. As in, a whole lot of it has elapsed since I've been born and consequently, "been there, read the hell out of it" describes my attitude to most plots.

Except, I totally dig tropes, stereotypes, and well-worn narrative elements. I'm a big believer in the idea that there aren't any new stories, and I've got no quarrel with "derivative." Love derivative; done right, it's like crack, or Oreo cookies.

So what gives?

The issue is that it takes more than an otherworldly setting to sell me on a story. Because I've seen just about every variation of magical land, extraordinary creature, weapon of destiny, etc.

For all their exhaustive world building, I find that some epics have a poorly developed sense of place. I mean, yeah, these stories contains words, piled on words, and more words, some of them quite pretty, devoted to describing the author's shiny new land. Flora, fauna, culture, etc.

For all that meticulous detail, however, it doesn't feel like the characters really live there.

Unlike, say, characters in many mystery novels. For example, the novels penned by the late Tony Hillerman. Hillerman's novels are vibrant with the colors, textures and flavors of life in the desert southwest, in particular, the lands of the Navajo Nation. He was writing as someone who had an inside track into the good, bad, and ugly of the landscape and culture of the region. As opposed to a tourist who gawps at the majestic mesas and buys cheap, knock-off Kokopellis and coyote-howling-at-the-moon chachkes sold in souvenir shops. He saw New Mexico and Arizona as you see the place where you live.  And his experiences and perceptions were filtered through his characters, grounding them and their setting firmly in my mind. The settings aren't just described; they are described through the characters' eyes. In turn, the novels' settings shape and deepen the characterization.

Some fantasy novels, on the other hand, read like a travel guide to a mystical land. Great detail, with handy info, like which inns serve the best ale, and yet, rather superficial. The settings are like painted backdrops in a stage production, set up to hide stuff backstage and give the audience a vague sense of place. And, why not? Often that spare set design is just the ticket. In. A. Stage. Production.

Fantasy novel? Not so much.

I guess what I'm saying is that if the author of Big Fantasy Epic wants me to click Buy, he or she needs to give me the same intimate sense of place that I find in a good contemporary mystery novel. Honestly? I don't need to know a detailed history of the gods or the founding of the current dynasty. Especially, not as an info-dump in a prologue (insert teenage eye roll). If, however, your novel begins with the protagonist ranting about the idiotic practice of banning the sale of swords on Tuesdays in your land of make believe, I'm sold. Because that's that kind of stuff real people do. Everywhere.

So, what about you, folks? Any genre or genre trope that makes you want to jab red hot needles in your eyes? Conversely, what do you love?

Author Pat Kirby & Confessions of a Fan Fic Writer

Author Pat Kirby ("The Canvas Thief" and "Music of Chaos") discusses why she currently writes fan fic:

My name is Pat Kirby and I'm...a fan fiction writer. It's been a day, okay, half an hour, since I last took someone else's characters and wrote the hell out of them.

This confession is brought to you by an eff-load of personal drama over the last year, which obliterated the desire to write original fiction, and the realization that even in the midst of absolute pathos, I've strung words into sentences, scenes and, glurk, written nearly 200K words worth of fan fiction.

Truth? The first thing I ever wrote, a Legolas and Mary Sue love story, penned when I was eleven, was fan fiction. This was followed by dabbling in Buffy-verse and Babylon 5, featuring more embarrassing self-insertion characters. Fortunately, I was too self-conscious to post that crap anywhere and it all vanished several computers ago.

Eventually, I decided to be a "real" writer, fell in with a crowd of writers who believed that fan fiction made the Baby Jesus cry, and gave up my fannish ways.

I was clean and fic-free for nearly a decade until I hit a creative dry spell. Think Sahara Desert. My muse was a tinder-dry mummy, so friable it collapsed into dust in the lightest breeze. This muse-killing heat wave powered by a combo of personal crisis and crippling self doubt that assured me that everything I wrote had more suck than a Dyson vacuum.

One day, for old times' sake, I wandered over to a fan fiction site and perused the movie-based archives, ending up in the one for Marvel's Thor. And there, I fell face-first into a non-canon pairing that was so ridiculous, it made total sense. Then, like all characters, borrowed or otherwise, these two crazy kids started a conversation in my head. I wrote down that dialogue. Added some description. Tripped over a plot.

And, holy jalapenos, Batman, I had the beginning of a story! Uploading that beginning made for a kind of online field of dreams: if you post it; they will come, and read.

I was writing again. Not my world. Not my characters, but words. Some pretty awesome (and destined to be reused in something original). Even when shit continues to go splat on my fan, my borrowed characters keep yapping at each other, and the story grows.

I have no idea why.

Maybe it's because someone is actually reading the fracking thing. Last I looked, it had well over a thousand followers. Which, sadly, or amusingly, (depending on how sober I am) is many times the amount of people who have read my original fiction.

Mostly, I think it's because it is fan fiction. No pressure (except for those thousand followers--Yikes!), no worries, no editors--"Look Ma, I makes typos and errors in the subjunctive tense," no chance of pissing off paying readers. I suppose, if I were inclined to brave the wrath of Marvel and go all 50 Shades, doing the search-replace thing and swapping "Thor" for "*Todd," the potential exists for a making a few pesos off a self-pubbed thing. But, you know...ethics?

The fact that my fic will never be anything more than a glorified writing exercise is very freeing. It's a public work-in-progress and Jackson Pollock-like, I'm splattering words on the page, sometimes with a plan, sometimes just for the sheer joy of letting this character say something appalling to that character.

As I write this, my overwritten tome of dubious legal provenance is two chapters away from being done and my feelings range from vaguely sniffly (I'll miss you, misused characters not mine) and Halle-fracking-luiah, I Finally Finished Something.

As habits go, fic writing hasn't been that destructive. Awoken by jealousy and a sense of neglect, my original characters have started muttering in the background. Perhaps 2014 will be the year of 200K words in an original work.

Or maybe I'll fall off the wagon and play with more borrowed characters and worlds. It's all words; it's all good.

Happy New Year!

*The Mighty Todd. Therein lies some fabulous parody potential. There's your writing prompt; have at it kids! 

Loki vs. Anakin Skywalker: Writing the Tragic (Anti-) Hero from Patricia Kirby

Today we have an interesting post comparing Loki and  Anakin Skywalker, from Pat Kirby, Author of The Canvas Thief:

A few nights ago, after dinner, I crept to my writing cave to string together some sentences and my husband, absent his live-in film critic, popped Star Wars, Attack of the Clones into the VCR. Within minutes, I heard the audio pause as he fast-forwarded through the romantic stuff. Honestly? I'd do the same.

In my office, I cranked up the volume on iTunes and got to work on a steampunk WIP. I also tinkered with an ongoing Thor fan fiction story. As I worked, I was struck by two things: first, how disappointing the Star Wars prequels had been, and second, how the Thor movie (2011), got the whole tragic hero thing right.

As I see it, Loki's descent into supervillainy in Thor, is what Anakin Skywalker's, in the Star Wars prequels, should have been but wasn't.

When it comes to storytelling, one could write a thick doorstopper of a book on the many ways that the Star Wars prequels went wrong. The excruciatingly, unromantic love story between the future Vader and Padme Amidala, for one.

Most notable is the ruination of the man in black himself, Darth Vader. George Lucas took one of cinema's most iconic villains and turned him into a whiny little boy in need of a nap. For a big-bad who will go on to run a galactic empire that terrorizes all freedom-loving people and blows up entire planets, Vader's youthful self doesn't inspire much confidence in his future in villainy. Mostly, Anakin makes my fingers twitch with the urge to deliver a resounding slap, a la, Cher in Moonstruck: "Snap out of it!" I can't, for the life of me, figure out what Padme saw in the guy, except that they shared the same remarkable ability to deliver lines in dull wooden tones.

When Anakin isn't chatting up his older lady love with oaken dialogue, he's complaining about all the stifling Jedi Order rules to his mentor, Obi Wan Kenobi. And that, in a nutshell, is the sum and total of Anakin's angst, the reason why he will eventually throw a tantrum on a volcano, and try to kill the guy who saved him from a lifetime of digging Tatooine's sandy grit from his eyes.

As I write this, Season Three of Game of Thrones (GOT) is beginning, and many viewers are hoping for the timely death of Joffrey Baratheon, Westeros's version of Anakin Skywalker. The resemblance is striking. Neither youth has any reason to be such a douche canoe. Joffrey is the coddled, spoiled child of royalty. Anakin is the coddled, spoiled Jedi wunderkind. Yeah, Anakin did a short stint in his youth as a slave, but when Obi Wan found him, Anakin wasn't exactly chained in a shed, covered in bruises and starving. His master didn't hand out cookies and milk, but the boy's hands probably weren't thick with calluses from hard work. He had enough free time to build C3PO and R2D2. I'm no slave, but I barely have enough time to get my hair cut, let alone put together an adorable robot duo. (The kid is like a small, male, midichlorian-enhanced Martha Stewart.)

There's also no indication that Anakin's teen years were troubled. Yoda grumbles that the boy is to old to begin training--what exactly is the usual age for inclusion in Jedi school? In utero?--but Anakin gets accepted into training nonetheless. Now, if Lucas had dug around in his sofa cushions, found some change and bought himself a clue about character building, he might have written Anakin a backstory that included alienation and bullying during his times in the Jedi academy. A justified reason behind Anakin's ambivalence toward the Jedis. But that didn't happen. So we're left with a privileged young man whose beef with the universe is pretty much, "I don't like rules."

Disdain for rules is reasonable motivation for stealing lipstick from Wal-Mart ("reasonable," not "justified"), but hardly a reason to plot bloody vengeance against the organization that has clothed, fed and trained you for many years. Had George Lucas put as much time into Anakin's character arc as he did into the CGI, Anakin's descent into darkness would have been emotionally wrenching. Instead it's his very short journey from bratty youth to deranged and still bratty youth--Now with cybernetic limb action! (Yes, Anakin's mother is eventually murdered by Tusken raiders, but all that plot thread does is demonstrate that the supposedly "noble" Padme is happy to ignore her boyfriend's slaughter of innocents because...love.)

Contrast that with Loki's dive into madness in Thor, which, coincidently, is a meatier story arc than the hero's. Like Anakin Skywalker's, Thor's character arc is only visible under a high-powered microscope. Thor, however, isn't an insufferable prick. But he is arrogant and it's fortunate that he's "The Mighty" Thor, because it must take immeasurable strength to haul that ego around all day. Therein lies the first of Loki's justifiable issues with Papa Odin.

Thor didn't just wake up yesterday and--Abracadabra--become a blundering jock with a penchant for violence. He's been running around kicking sand in the faces of 98-pound weakling realms for centuries. Odin knows this, but still dotes on him and decides to hand him the throne. This is followed by Odin acting surprised and butt-hurt when Thor storms off and attacks Jotunheim. Okay, so Thor was egged on by Loki, but it wasn't like the mischief maker had to expend much effort to get his blowhard brother to thunder off and make things dead.

There's also the problem that Loki's main strengths--intellect and magic--aren't respected in the land of testosterone-y warriors. (In this, Loki is like GOT's Tyrion Lannister.) It's sort of how people smile condescendingly and say that writing isn't a real job. If I heard that for a millennium, I'd probably start kicking puppies, so it's easy to see why Loki might be a smidge put out by the endless degradation of his abilities.

The coup de grace comes when Loki learns he's adopted. For Loki, the cutesy, inspirational saying, "It doesn't matter what you look like on the outside; it's what's on the inside the counts," is a cruel irony, since on the inside he's a frost giant, a member of a race so [purportedly] awful that their homeland had to be turned into an icy glass parking lot, which is now treated like the ghetto of the nine realms. His dad is none other than king of frost giants, Laufey.

Brother is an asshat, but no one else seems to care? Check. Skills disrespected on an hourly basis? Check. You are the monster in the fairy tale? Check. None of these are reasons to inflict maximum breakage on a little blue planet populated by fragile mortals, but one can see how Loki's mind might be like a frog in a blender, set on "chop."

Which is why Loki's character arc is what Anakin Skywalker's should have been. The story of a smart, talented, young man who allows himself to be warped by unhappy circumstances. Loki's story arc is especially relatable for anyone who's ever been the outsider, the geek pushed around by the jocks. Anakin, on the other hand, is the obnoxious jock. Heck, he even gets the girl. There's no gravitas in his characterization and the only darkness in his personality is an inability to accept that you can't always get what you want.         

On thing can be said for George Lucas. He could teach a master class in how not to write fictional characters.

The Canvas Thief :

Maya saw her first demon when she was seven. She learned to hide what she saw, ignore the paranormal beings around her and build an ordinary life. But she had to tell her secrets somehow, so she began drawing, creating her own world, her own characters.

Twenty years after that first demon entered her life, her normal existence is shattered when she's faced with two of her comic book characters come to life. Living in our world for years, each has his own agenda.

Benjamin Black, sexy thief with a cause, wants to get back to his own world. The world Maya thought she created. Only now he says she's his reason to stay in this one.

Adam Richards, once a cop, now a ruthless crime lord, wants to be immortal and he'll do anything, including hurting Maya's loved ones, to get what he wants.

The problem is, the men are inextricably linked through Maya's drawings. Ridding the world of Adam means Benjamin disappears from Maya's life forever...

Available at Amazon