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Author: Violette Malan

You Think You’ve Got Problems? Where’d I Put That Wand . . .

You Think You’ve Got Problems? Where’d I Put That Wand . . .

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BuffyWhen dealing with sorcery, often the precise source or methodology of the magic is part of the premise of the novel itself – it’s what makes this place or that different from the world we live in. But the real function of any plot device – including magic – is to complicate the lives of your characters. Adding conflict and tension to otherwise humdrum lives is what writers do. It’s our job, and sorcery is one of the tools that fantasy writers have at our disposal.

At the same time we’re using magic to solve problems, like technology does, we’re using magic to create problems. Like technology does.

Just think about what the presence of magic does to that old stand-by, the coming-of-age novel. Being a teenager isn’t bad enough? Coming to terms with the world as it really is, and what your part in that world might be – that’s not hard enough on you? Let’s make you a wizard as well. It’s no coincidence that authors often have magical abilities appear at puberty. And yes, that’s using magic as a metaphor.

We don’t think of her as a wizard, but other than Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is probably the best known specially-empowered teenager. Creator Joss Whedon makes the metaphor fairly obvious, as Buffy suffers through her normal-world coming-of-age simultaneously with her other-world coming-of-age.  Like Harry Potter, Buffy has to learn about herself and her relationship to the world as well as her powers – and that with those powers comes responsibility.

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New Lamps for Old; Or, Now That I’ve Got the Sorcery, How do I Use it?

New Lamps for Old; Or, Now That I’ve Got the Sorcery, How do I Use it?

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HarryLast week I started talking about how we put the sorcery into sword and sorcery novels. People who don’t read fantasy are often mistaken about how its supernatural tropes actually work. In part, they feel that you can’t have any real tension or conflict because there’s magic and magic solves everything. You know, you just wave the magic wand and the problem goes away.* To which I say, “Tell that to the wicked Witch of the West.” Or Harry Potter. Or Gandalf.

I know that this kind of thinking is a lot less prevalent since the success of the LOTR movies, to say nothing of Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones; but it hasn’t gone away completely. And let’s not forget, strange as it may appear to us, there are still more people who haven’t seen these movies (or read the books) than there are people who have.

Before I start talking about plot devices, I would like to address something. Fantasy and SF are frequently described as “plot-driven” as opposed to “character-driven” – where the former means “not-so-good” and latter means “much-much-better.” Sure, there are some badly written books for which that kind of distinction can be made, but in any well-written book, of any genre, character drives plot. Your characters are certain kinds of people. Because they are who and what they are, they make certain kinds of decisions when faced with problems. Those decisions determine what happens next.

Yes, every writer is occasionally faced with the situation where a character simply won’t do what the writer “needs” them to do next. A good writer sits back and figures out a way to deal with that situation – a poor writer “makes” the character act in the needed way.  Hmm. Maybe it’s the writer that’s plot-driven.

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Did I Do That? Or, We’ve Had the Sword, Where’s the Sorcery?

Did I Do That? Or, We’ve Had the Sword, Where’s the Sorcery?

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ElricA while ago, when I started writing these posts, I talked about how to put the sword in Sword and Sorcery, and while doing my latest posts on the Fantasy and SF hero, it struck me that, in a way, I was still really talking about the sword. Maybe it’s time to talk about the sorcery.

This is not to say that our heroes can’t be wielding some kind of magic at the same time they’re wielding swords – but that’s not the way things started out. Most of the early heroes of the genre that we’re familiar with, Conan, for example, and yes, even Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, weren’t magic users. In fact, many of these early heroes were fighting against those who were. Sorcerers were often seen as the enemy, or, at best, as very gingerly tolerated allies.

Along came some notable exceptions to this idea, particularly Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné, and, someone I mentioned last week, Roger Zelazny’s Dilvish the Damned. But these two, we might argue, are representatives of the “New Wave” in Fantasy, which in part introduced the concept of the more complex, multidimensional, anti-hero. They also fall into a special category of sorcerer, in that they’re at least partially magical beings, not humans. Which brings us to the first major subdivision of sorcery or magic that any writer in our genre has to consider: Is the magic internal, or external? Does it come from within, or without?

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I Ain’t No Hero, See?

I Ain’t No Hero, See?

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Have Space Suit -- Will TravelI’ve got a friend I’ve known since we were nine years old who often says that we weren’t really brought up by our parents (neither his nor mine), but by the books we read. I’m not sure if we were lucky or unlucky, but those books were full of, well, heroes. The first book I ever read, by the way, was Treasure Island – I think having seen the movie helped me with the hard parts.

Aside: my parents didn’t come from cultures in which picture books were the norm, so we weren’t allowed to read them, nor comic books. Some illustration could be tolerated, but books with pictures on every page were for illiterate people.

Then my brother recommended The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That was the first fantasy book I ever read. Almost immediately after that I read Have Space Suit-Will Travel, my first SF book.

Not very long after these came Lord of the Rings – and every other Fantasy and SF book I could put my hands on. These were the books that raised me.

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What is SHE Doing Here?

What is SHE Doing Here?

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AthenaWhen I was growing up, Athena was my favourite goddess. What’s not to like? She springs fully-armed from the head of Zeus. She’s the goddess of Wisdom, as well as the goddess of War – oh, and the Liberal Arts. Except for that silly apple of discord episode, she’s the perfect role model for a young girl.

The thing is, when I was growing up, and there were only male heroes in the type of story I liked to read, it didn’t really bother me. When you have nothing else to compare it to, the world you have seems normal. For some reason, I didn’t feel excluded, nor did I feel that women couldn’t be the hero. I just thought no one had written those stories yet. See, all the writers seemed to be men, so I guess I figured that explained it. Certainly all the stories I made up to tell my friends had female leads. Swashbuckling, sword-wielding female leads.

Nowadays we tend toward using words like “protagonist” and “main character” rather than “hero,” and I think that’s to avoid the connotations that come along with the word. For some reason, when people say “hero,” they think it means some flawless gem of humanity. Well, maybe there were some of those, somewhere along the way, but if so, I never read about them. Every hero I’ve personally encountered, from Oedipus to Iron Man, is flawed – some even have a “tragic flaw” that results in their undoing.

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Is This a Kissing Book?

Is This a Kissing Book?

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Tanya Huff Blood Price Blood TiesLet me get one thing out of the way immediately: It’s my belief that the increase in the numbers of female protagonists in the last thirty years (yes, it’s been that long) is directly related to the increase in the numbers of female authors (yes, it’s that simple). Female readers have been here all along. You can trust me on that one.

Last week I was talking about dual heroes, when is a pair a true pairing, and when a hero/sidekick combo? I mentioned Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, for me the original hero pair, and some of their literary descendants. But I left it until this week to talk about a much more recent phenomenon, the female/male hero pair.

Now, just to be clear, I don’t mean a book with a male protagonist, and his female companion – until recently known as a “regular book.” Nor do I mean a book with a female protagonist and a male second lead – until recently known as a “romance novel.” What I mean is the same kind of dual hero I talked about before, where both main characters are equally important to the story, but where one happens to be a woman, and one happens to be a man.

Having established the usefulness of a pair of protagonists (each brings a unique perspective and different skills to the problem-solving; the presence of a “friend” establishes the emotional accessibility of both characters; the chance to reveal character through conversation [thanks to Alex Bledsoe for some of these ideas], and, especially, the usefulness of a country/city pair) does having a female/male pair do anything in particular for us?

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Two Sought Adventure

Two Sought Adventure

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Don QTwo weeks ago I talked about the city vs. country tension that’s often found in literature, and how it might have contributed to the  rise of the barbarian hero in our own genre. Now I’m wondering whether we haven’t seen a fine-tuning of that same tension in a more familiar guise: the buddy movie, or, more to the point for us genre types, the buddy adventure.

Like some of the other stuff I’ve been talking about, I don’t think this concept is something that’s just shown up recently. In Don Quijote – widely considered to be the first novel, though you won’t get many who’ll agree on what genre it is – we have the titular Don himself, but we also have his travelling companion and side-kick, Sancho Panza.

But, you might argue, Sancho is a side-kick, and not an adventurer in and of himself – though again, you’ll find those who’ll dispute that, and maybe even convince you that, title aside, the book really belongs to Sancho. But let’s think about the implications here for genre heroes. When is a character a side-kick (pray note that I don’t qualify that by saying “just”) and when is the character a co-hero?

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Why is it Always a Northern Barbarian?

Why is it Always a Northern Barbarian?

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Taras BulbaMy mother was Spanish and my father was Polish, so there was a little north vs. south going on in my home all the time as I was growing up. My mum would encourage us to watch Zorro and El Cid, my dad was all for Taras Bulba and whoever else Yul Brynner was portraying that week on late night TV. When my mother would make remarks about the superiority of the Mediterranean culture, my father would remind her that the Spanish culture, at least, came mostly from the Moors, and that Rome fell, crushed beneath the heels of the – you guessed it – northern barbarians.

Aside to the historically educated: Yes, I know that isn’t exactly what happened. Otherwise, why did it take Gibbon seven volumes to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? I’m not talking history here, I’m talking popular (mis)conceptions.

Last week I took a look at the rise of the hero in popular culture – by which I meant not just among our genre-respecting selves, but with all those other people. This week I’d like to take a look at where heroes come from – or where we expect them to come from.

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Are We Looking for a Hero?

Are We Looking for a Hero?

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DrWhoThe other day, an issue of Entertainment Weekly arrived in my mailbox. Doctor Who was on the cover. Let me repeat that, because it’s significant.  Entertainment Weekly had Doctor Who on the cover. What’s next? Good Housekeeping? Vogue? The New York Times Literary Supplement?

And there’s more. Out of the last fifteen covers, six featured genre work: the new Superman movie, Game of Thrones, World War Z, Oz the Great and Powerful, and Catching Fire. Counting the Doctor, that’s seven genre covers out of sixteen. And each with a feature article, of course.

Where am I going with this? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m old enough to remember when it would have been UNHEARD OF for any genre work to appear on the cover or front page of any widely or popularly-read entertainment information vehicle. No newspapers, no magazines, no book or movie review sections. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

 

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Pass the Salt, Please

Pass the Salt, Please

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DinnerAccording to some people, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about food. That’s right, I’m one of those people who start planning lunch while we’re still sitting at the breakfast table. But, see, there’s a reason for that: something might need to come out of the freezer, or come in from the garden.

I also have a good grasp on where my food comes from. As a child, one of my aunts kept chickens in her patio, and we kids used to flush rabbits for my uncle and his friends to kill with sling shots – real slings, by the way, not catapults.

Now that I live in the country, I buy meat and cheese from the people who produce them – my neighbours. I also have a very large garden where I grow my own produce, and as it happens, there’s not a lot about freezing, canning, and preserving that I don’t know.

One thing’s for sure: it takes up a lot of time. And in a pre-industrial age – the time period that most of us use for our secondary world fantasies – it took up almost all of the time. So why don’t we see more of it in our books? Well, it’s just that, for most of us, how to get dinner, where dinner comes from, how to pay for it, grow it, etc. isn’t the story we want to tell – nor the story our readers want to read.

But as I’ve suggested already (and no doubt will again), this is information we need to know. Not doing this right – or not doing it or at all –  is the mark of an amateur. Sometimes, in our modern technological world, we’re so far removed from how the food gets produced, that we can easily make serious mistakes – or worse, overlook significant motivation – by not understanding where food comes from, and how it was produced in a pre-industrial age.

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