McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
The I'm Writing Thread.... Celebrate your pages written etc
Quantus:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on January 08, 2013, 04:52:24 PM ---Oh, agreed entirely. Though people are really awfully willing to trust that a first-person protagonist is meant to be sympathetic, pretty much no matter how grey you make them.
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Im curious how you could make a first person protagonist completely unsympathetic. Isnt that sort of the key to drawing readers in? Im not saying that one couldnt be about as Black as they come, but to be devoid of anything the reader could identify with seems like it would make it especially difficult to draw the in, especially in a first person perspective.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Quantus on January 08, 2013, 04:57:25 PM ---Im curious how you could make a first person protagonist completely unsympathetic. Isnt that sort of the key to drawing readers in?
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"Interesting" is not the same thing as "sympathetic" is not the same thing as "can identify with".
The examples I am thinking of, here, are first-person psychopaths/serial killers. I hope not everybody who read American Psycho was finding Patrick Bateman sympathetic, at any rate. My personal favourite first-person-deranged is Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, which I must have read half a dozen times in twenty years, and I'd certainly not call Frank Cauldhame sympathetic - brilliantly fascinating, but not a person I'd wish to identify with at all. (What Banks does with the serial-killer POV second-person bits in Complicity is even nastier for getting under one's skin, but that's kind of stunt writing, not really a technique with much use outside that precise context.)
Quantus:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on January 08, 2013, 06:08:52 PM ---"Interesting" is not the same thing as "sympathetic" is not the same thing as "can identify with".
The examples I am thinking of, here, are first-person psychopaths/serial killers. I hope not everybody who read American Psycho was finding Patrick Bateman sympathetic, at any rate. My personal favourite first-person-deranged is Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, which I must have read half a dozen times in twenty years, and I'd certainly not call Frank Cauldhame sympathetic - brilliantly fascinating, but not a person I'd wish to identify with at all. (What Banks does with the serial-killer POV second-person bits in Complicity is even nastier for getting under one's skin, but that's kind of stunt writing, not really a technique with much use outside that precise context.)
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OK, I can see what you are saying; I was thinking of Protagonist in the classic use of the term, where it is specifically the character the audience is supposed to identify with most, as opposed to simply the Focal Character. The closest thing I have read to those is one of the Dexter novels, and while that guy is a clear anti-hero and psychopath, he does have a few redeeming qualities.
Paynesgrey:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on January 08, 2013, 04:37:13 PM ---Agreed entirely. Everything is political, even the personal. I'm not seeing any way for it not to be - outside of writing SF about a species for which the whole notion of factionalism doesn't parse, I have one of those pencilled in for a small role later on. Humans scare them.
I am finding it as hard to imagine a story that does not somewhere, at some level, connect to some sociopolitical issues, as one about human beings that doesn't have, say, emotions in it.
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This would be where the microparsing comes in. If there is a "theme", it would be regarding things like personal and familial loyalty, the difference between a "community" and "a bunch of people living in the same place." Looking at the long-term (over decades and centuries) good versus the immediate goals of this or that ambitious person or group, and finally perhaps the potential value of both inter- and intra-community cooperation...
Broad "Values" which both factions in today's socio-political blocs claim ownership of.
But in terms of specific issues or causes that people to day, or in the past century, have gone out and picketed or protested in reference to, nada.
Some readers will equate the community that wants the other community's stuff as being a reference to socialists/collectivists, others will look at them as corporate imperialists.
I generally avoid the trope trappings and buzzwords both factions like to bandy about because I'm not keen on cleanly labeling anything and certainly don't want readers to say "Oh, this is about Gitmo/bank bailouts/Israel/unions/domestic surveillance/The Church/etc" (And in my setting, most of those things are irrelevant anyway, but that won't stop some people from trying.
What would be accurate will be the rare bird who says "Oh, this bit reminds me of the Second Boer War, but that other bit's kind of like the Medici's, and hey, this guy's read his Thucydides..."
--- Quote ---Possibly you're looking at a very different section of the genre from what I read, then, because I can think of very few things I've read in the past several years that struck me that way. (R.M. Meluch's Tour of the Merrimack books, maybe; or at least, for something supposedly set that far in the future, it breaks my suspension of disbelief that there will be a US so much like the contemporary US and issues so much like contemporary issues - if it doesn't match fifty or a hundred years ago I do not believe it will match four hundred years' time.)
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Well, my story's set on a colony world left isolated for a thousand or so years, following a huge interstellar war which shattered various empires and polities. Which itself came a couple thousand years after "The Fall of Terra." So any current socio-political events, nationality or ethnic issues, etc are pretty much irrelevant in there setting. Root causes, things that are persistent to human nature like "I want your stuff" crop up, and these people have pretty good historical records, but I've been careful to evolve the various communities in ways which were realistic given the setting without mimicking anything.
The fun thing is that I didn't create that setting with the intention of avoiding current political events. The story concept, main character & her community came first, and the period of time between then and now kept growing as I created the history necessary to put her where she is. A lot of "No, it would take at least this long for the planets's albedo to return to normal, that long for pioneering species to take root in this area again..."
--- Quote ---Right with you on that one. I would be surprised, and probably more disquieted than pleased, to find there was any faction out there that actually shared the views that my central characters hold and that I am interested in exploring. (Which do not overlap entirely with my own views at all.)
I'm not seeing where "agree with" has any relevance here, though. I mean, in the recent past, I've been rereading Daniel Keys Moran's Tales of the Continuing Time, which are books where I disagree philosophically, politically, and largely aesthetically with pretty much every character who is intended to be sympathetic, and find the antagonists much more to my taste, and I enjoy them immensely; and at the same time have read and been a bit bemused by some Christopher Brookmyre satirical mysteries, in which I agree almost entirely with his supposedly sympathetic characters and the overall effect waves back and forth between somewhat guilty pleasure and "dude, you're waving your id around in public and it;'s enough like mine that you;re making me wince from embarrassment."
One of the things I admire about Heinlein is his ability to convincingly get into and really explore the old-style conservatism of Starship Troopers, the right-libertarianism of Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and the hippie groovitude of Stranger in a Strange Land - I don't think there's any plausible way of deriving Heinlein's actual beliefs from those three texts alone, and the ability to that is one I admire. Not many people can do that - Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution books are the only recent example I can think of on a similar scale - but it's definitely a thing I aspire to.
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To clarify, I'm talking specifically about writing to this or that cause, for or against this or that issue, etc. And in particular when it's being done purely to chase the market trends.
Take Avatar: "Do we have enough People of Color portrayed positively? Have we portrayed the corporate and military characters in a negative enough fashion? Do we have Strong Independent Female characters in the proper ratio compared to the number of Sensitive Enlightened Male Characters? Have we made the proper Statements regarding ecology, sexuality, and economics? Oh, wait, we'll make the main character handi-capable too, but he'll get better... what are we missing? Oh, shit, somebody write in a "War on Terror" and "Detainee" reference!"
I'm just waiting for someone to say "Well, that dialogue isn't appropriate or accurate, a Person of Color, particularly a female, wouldn't speak that way..." As if in 4,000 plus years, after the rise and fall of a planetary, then interstellar, then another interstellar civilization, people will even be speaking "English," much less worried about anything beyond whether or not the hydroponics are going to fail and leave them hungry before spring.
--- Quote ---I'm not seeing how "both sides of this conflict have good people and both have fiends" isn't itself a political position on the conflict in question.
Indeed, and he also thought the book was a comedy, in the Swiftian satire direction. Lots of people seem not to get that.
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Again, we have to parse to a finer level then those issues which we'd call "political" in terms of "Current Events" for the past century or so. The odd parallel to a historic event here or there, simply because some events are bound to repeat when Community A wants something from Community B, whether it's oil, silver, peat, spiced, olives, or jum-jum berries.
--- Quote ---Your caps remind me of Flash Gordon. I've nothing against the existence of good stories that people enjoy that hang together at a Flash Gordon level of realism; as a reader they're for the most part not my thing, and as a writer, I'm a mildly obsessive-compulsive professional molecular biologist; for me personally, making it work only at the Flash Gordon level isn't enough, and I see no reason why I can't make a story be exciting and have the virtues of a Flash Gordon story, while also having aliens whose entire evolutionary history makes plausible, rational sense if you care to poke at it.
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Oh, the Space Pandas are just there to provide an example of how some people will try to read socio-political statements into a soup label or the tag on a mattress. Or attempt to school the author of even such a silly space opera in their "responsibility" to address current social issues.
My actual story has fairly hard science, at least on the ground. The space-opera exceptions being limited to B-5 style hyperspace travel, the existence of "artificial gravity" (or call it "Mass Field Enhancement or some-such if you want to be picky"), and the means of keeping your crew from turning to paste on the bulkhead during maneuvers. Plus, I have a species with lifespans in the thousands of years and non-hemoglobin based blood. Which I suppose might be feasible, but until I can find some more speculative science regarding that bit of speculative biology, I'm calling it "space opera.")
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Quantus on January 08, 2013, 06:29:06 PM ---OK, I can see what you are saying; I was thinking of Protagonist in the classic use of the term, where it is specifically the character the audience is supposed to identify with most, as opposed to simply the Focal Character.
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Indeed; it's been a while, but I am not recalling anyone in American Psycho I could readily see identifying with. (One of the nicer bits in Complicity is a serial-killer-with-nailgun scene that's specifically and rather wittily critiquing the unrealism of the serial killer's use of a nailgun in American Psycho.)
--- Quote ---The closest thing I have read to those is one of the Dexter novels, and while that guy is a clear anti-hero and psychopath, he does have a few redeeming qualities.
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I have read all of those, and I still can't for the life of me figure out whether he's actually meant to be smart and charming and isn't working as that for me, or whether Jeff Lindsay means him to read as someone who thinks he's smart and charming but isn't, really, and just happens to be largely surrounded by idiots. They would be an example of a series that intrigue me very much at a technical writing level without having any characters to whom i feel the tiniest bit of emotional connection.
(Maybe I'm just vast and cool and unsympathetic. I could live with that.)
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