The Writing Art

What I Learned from Bad Movies

This week I have been watching a lot of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 with my husband Tee Morris. He was very surprised I had never actually watched this show before, but I explained to him it never made it to New Zealand. We didn’t get everything after all. Now after a massively successful Kickstarter campaign, it is available on Netflix, as we decided to dive in.

If you’ve never watched MST3K, it is a cute show where a host and a bunch of robot puppets watch, and make hilarious commentary on a variety of bad movies. It’s kind of like spending an evening with your witty friends, where you don’t care so much about watching the movie. It’s OK, they are so bad the riffing is the best part.

So I mostly avoided watching bad movies when I was growing up…though I did accidentally view a few (I’m looking at you Dungeons and Dragonsâ€”I’ll never forgive you for what you did.)

So while watching MST3K I had my eyes opened to the truly bad movies out there. Manos: The Hands of Fate was a particular horror. Seriously it is consistantly on the top worst movies of all time lists and for good reason. Poor Torgo, he was supposed to be a satyr but the only clue was his strange metal rigging under his pants. Also the word satyr was never even mentioned. It was certainly not apparent…even with these dodgy eyebrows.

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However after I had recovered from watching a bunch of these, I began to realize that bad movies do have something to offer to writers. Sometimes you need to see what not to do to, to point you in the right direction.

To illustrate this, I’m going to use the 1956 weird west classic The Beast of Hollow of Hollow Mountain that I had the dubious pleasure of watching last night. It has a stampede, a dodgy love interest, terrible racist stereotypes, and eventually…an allosaurus. But about that last part

Get to it

If your show is called the Beast of the Hollow Mountain, then don’t wait until the last twenty minutes before showing that the title wasn’t just a joke. Honestly, you have a beast, but you spend 3/4ths of this movie only the boring stuff. Viewers and readers will only get restless if you don’t get to the point. While watching I couldn’t help complaining ‘where’s that damn beast already?’ I just wanted it to show up and stamp the crap out of everyone. I had to wait a long…long…long time…

Yes there is something called building tension, but there is also the point where you will start losing readers. Honestly if I hadn’t been watching this hot mess in the structure of MST3K I would have bailed out ten minutes in. Don’t let that happen to your readers. You don’t have to show everything straight away, but give them a little something so that you know that you’re not just stringing them along. If there is a beast, then prove that to them!

Characters are more than one thing

When creating characters, make them more than just one or two motivations and character traits. Jimmy in The Beast of Hollow Mountain wanted to build his cattle ranch and be successful, and…ahhhhh…yeah that was pretty much it. Still he did better than every other character in the movie. His love interest Sarita wanted to…well she didn’t have any goal for herself. Even the villain seemed only there to try and foil Jimmy. They were as empty as a cracked open egg.
So please for your readers sake, make your characters complex. The ones in The Beast of Hollow Mountain were so flat, I was rooting for the beast to just eat them all.

Falling back on sloppy stereotypeâ€”just don’t

Pancho was painful to watch. The stereotype of a drunken foolish Mexican father was cringeworthy, so for the sake of all that is holy, don’t do it. He was supposed to be funny, but I don’t know what sort of moron would find that amusing. Probably some racist from the 1950s I suppose.

Instead do something the audience doesn’t expect, expand their minds by showing some of the variety of humans in race, gender, sexuality. Break stereotypes instead of perpetuating them.

His young son Panchito managed to overcome his terrible name, and had probably the most real character in the whole movie. As MST3K said ‘Panchito is a real baller’)

Plot holes…OMG the plot holes

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The Beast of Hollow Mountain must have been a first draft. It had to be. The plot holes were ridiculous. I mean there is suspension of disbelief, and then there is so much of a stretch the whole concept breaks.

The idea that an Allosaurus could live in a swamp, and no one see him for years. Too much. The fact that said dinosaur could exist in this swamp, and not know how to navigate it without being sucked to his death. Far too much.

Connect the dots, and make it reasonable. I would have happily believed the beast had just escaped from the zoo rather than it had been living there for years.

Write your first draft, but for goodness sake don’t stop there. Go back, look it over, and be critical. No one in this movie was being critical.

Don’t be a damn lazy writer.

There was a part of the movie where rancher Jimmy, found one of his herd had become trapped in the swamp’s deadly quicksand and died. Rather than the obvious conclusion, it had wandered in there, Jimmy said ‘well it was obviously shoved in there by Rios’. The writer wanted to set up bad blood between our ‘hero’ and Rios, but was so lazy didn’t even give Jimmy reason to think that.

Thus the character looks like an idiot and the writer looks lazy. Seriously don’t make your characters look like chumps. No one is going to root for a chump.

Poor Jimmy had a chance to do some real detective work, and instead he looked like an utter numbnut.

It’s OK to have a character make mistakes, they are human after all, but don’t make them so stupid that the readers are hoping for the beast to come swallow them up.

In Love with the Imaginary

So right now, if you are on any kind of social media you will see the outrage about Captain America.

If you have somehow managed to avoid it, SPOILER ALERT…

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In the latest comic, Captain America is revealed to have been a Hydra agent this whole time. Yes, creators just made Cap a Nazi.

This has brought about an outpouring outrage from many, and a great deal of sighing and eye rolling from the ‘it’s just an imaginary character’ crowd.

Yes, Marvel owns their characters, and the copyright to everything he’s in…but he also is a beloved character that lots of people have embraced in deep ways that others can probably find very hard to understand.

Ever since Hercules performed his tasks, and Beowulf took on Grendel, people have been drawing strength and inspiration from imaginary characters. Maybe they recall Captain America’s moral integrity when being tested, or his determination when he was just a 90lb weakling trying to serve his country.

Stories after all from their beginnings around the camp fire, have been a way to learn about how to deal with a world set against us. Heroes like Beowulf and Grendel after all would not have persisted throughout so many generations if they didn’t have something deep and important to offer.

It isn’t ours to judge what people get out of characters. Even as writers our own creations, once they are out in the world, are absorbed into the readers in very deep ways. They cease to belong to us, and become personal to the reader. They develop meanings and importance to this wider group of people than we can ever have imagined. They teach things about perserverance, hope, and morals, and inspire those in others.

As a writer I cannot imagine a higher honour than someone I wrote about caring so much about a character that it becomes so beloved. It is hard as an author or an artist to grasp that sometimes. We love them, we create them, and sometimes it is hard to grasp that characters life meaning so much to a reader.

So when something like this Captain American furore breaks out, I actually like it, because it shows that humans are still invested in this imagined things. They still matter, no matter how much technology we surround ourselves with. The grubby, frightened human gathering around the campfire is still within us, looking for strength where ever they can find it.

I feel sure there is some switchero that Marvel is going to pullâ€”but in the end, that doesn’t really matter. The important bits of Captain America, reside in those that care about him passionately, and no matter what the latest writer working on this iteration says, he can’t touch that.

People have fallen in love with someone imaginary, and made him real. As a writer that is a beautiful thing. The rest is all noise.

Fantasy and Romance, and the grey space in between

Having just returned from the RT Booklovers Convention, I have spent the last few weeks musing over the differences and similarities between romance and fantasy and science fiction.

You see, here is my confession. When I was a teenager, probably about sixteen, I purchased my first romance novel to read. Now, I was a huge speculative fiction addict, and I grew up reading my Dad’s Norton, McCaffrey, and Cherryh. Still, I wanted to try something different, and the allure was there. So I purchased my first foray into romance with the secretiveness most people reserve for their first adult literature.

I remember the cover, but not the title. It was blazoned red, with a swooning woman in a half-naked man’s arms. Her bodice was half-off so it certainly lived up to the ideal of a bodice ripper. As a teenager it was heady stuff. The lure of the adult world.

I even ventured into Barbara Cartland territory, since I loved to read about history.

For about six months I read all the romance I could get my hands on…and then I was done. I discovered all were the same, or so dreadfully similar that I got bored. Just as quickly as I had taken up romance, I gave up on it.

Did I mention this was nearly thirty years ago? Ouch…

Through all that time I held onto the belief that romance was all the same. I admit that even as a female, I kept away from it because of that impression I had formed as a teenager. For some reason in my head, romance was stationary even as other genres moved, changed, developed.

I suspect I had this inherent bias towards the genre that kept me from going back to test the waters again. Until it was that I began to make friends with other authors, others outside my genre.

Then Dawn’s Early Light won the RT Reviewers Choice Award, and I was invited to go to Dallas to accept the award. My bias loomed up again. A romance award? How did we win that? Our books aren’t romance.

I was about to get a massive lesson, and romance was about to beat me about the head with my own ignorance.

What I found out when I got to the convention was a group of authors and readers who were incredibly welcoming. You see, inÂ both speculative fiction and literary fiction crowd previous to this, I have run up against biases, even from people who were relative strangers to me. Hard science fiction readers who roll their eyes at ‘woman’s science fiction’. People who think steampunk is a load of old tosh. People who can’t handle fantasy that deals with ‘issues’, or is just ‘escapist trash’. Yep, there is a lot of judgement to go around.

Also it was also a very female crowd. Women were at least 95% of the attendees. Again, different from the sci fi and fantasy conventions.

But the thing that really struck me was how welcoming they were. The readers I met were interested in what I wrote, even though it would never be marketed as romance. I have always had romantic elements in my booksâ€”I think relationships and romance are part of most people’s livesâ€”but these readers didn’t run my books past any sort of test, they didn’t turn up their noses at me.

And then I sat next to Patricia Briggs at an RT panel. Suddenly it was like a light switch went off. If they could accept Â her books, which would be called urban fantasy generally, then…hey…maybe there was a place for me at that table.

Because romance is a big table with plenty of room around it. Erotica. Armish. Paranormal. Science fiction. Contemporary. Historical. There is a place for every kind of book.

Ever since the Author’s Guild back in New Zealand turned up their noses at me writing genre, I guess part of me has been anticipating rejection where ever I went. So this broad acceptance is actually heady stuff.

I am aware that there is drama in romance too; authors and/or readers doing foolish things spans every genre. However there is a general air of acceptance I can only admire.

So I am ready to read romance again. After thirty years I am sure things have changed. My question to you as presumably genre readers, are you ready to try along with me?

Once The Ghost Rebellion is out, I am going to get back in and reach outside the genre I’ve kept myself in for so long. I’ll probably make a hashtag and blog about it.

Shall weÂ explore that grey space in between together?

A Writer in the World…and not

It’s been a difficult week for pretty much everyone with a eyes to see and a heart to break. The news has been full of pain, loss and huge amounts of fear. Innocent people all over the world have had their lives forever changed and broken by humans who fail to see the humanity in us all.

Writers are just like human beings…in fact some of us are human beings. And this week I have been struggling come to terms with the wonderful things happening in my life, whileÂ horrible things happen outside it.

The wonderful things in my lifeâ€”apart from the awesome kid and husbandâ€”have been one of those real milestones for a writer. The book Tee and I wrote Social Media for Writers is now available. I’m truly proud of what we have written, and I hope it helps a lot of people.

It’s huge for a technical book (clocking in at around 70,000 wordsâ€”nearly a novel!), and it has something for everyone; best practices for people already in social media, and appendices for those that want some helping getting into the pool.

We also just finished the audio version, which concentrates on best practice, since screen shots really don’t work in audio! That should be out in the next few weeks and it was fun putting that together.

Then there was the massively exciting results of the Kickstarter we ran for the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences. We funded two novel and a novelette in a one month campaign. As a writer you can’t ask for more validation than people laying down their hard-earned money for a book you haven’t even written yet. Thanks to our readers, we are going to produce stories, they are going to have awesome covers, and it is going to be an exciting year in 2016.

And yet, I feel guilty about these things when so much is going on around usâ€”especially this last week. The bombings in Beirut and Paris. The attack in Nigeria. Even for those people not directly affected by these horrific events, it feels like a stone cast into dark poolâ€”the ripples touch us all. Compared to these things a couple of books coming out doesn’t seem like much.

Yet as I thought about it, I realized every little positive thing we do in the world, is fighting back against those that would destroy it. Every act of kindness and creativity must do something to balance this all out.

And perhaps if we writers are honest, maybe this is why we write in the first place. A little creative spark in a dark world. If we add them all up, don’t they make a greater light, and maybe we can reach minds lost in hate… Probably not all of them I know, but the act of creation is powerful.

Writing is more than that too.

When we write, we create worlds in which we have controlâ€”in which bad things might happen, but we have a say in how they end. In our reality right now there seems to be no one with answers or any chance at control.

Candles and hearts That might seem like escapism…which it is in part. The human mind has always cravedÂ a place to go where things make a kind of sense, a place of magic and heroes. That is why legends contain all those things, and why our ancestors after a back-breaking day in the field huddled around a fire to listen to a bard tell a tale. That ability to transcend time and place is incredible.

However, stories are more than a place to hide and dream. They are also places to gain strength and understanding in. ProbablyÂ we will never understand why bad things happen to good people, but we can build heroes there and fight back towards the light. We create better versions of ourselves in stories.

Perhaps, that visualization of ourselves helps us in the real world too. We need to read stories about the nobody person, who fights on against the odds and wins. We want to read about the victim who chooses to change her own narrative and make herself into a survivor.

Stories matter. They always have, and they always will. It might not seem much to fight back with, but stories have opened peoples minds and eyes since we found language.

As the initial panic and pain wears off, we are finding stories in the rubble.

As they emerge, they bring hope that we can find meaning and strength in the chaos. This man who lost his wife, and yet refuses to hate her killers…now that is a story worth holding onto.

Such strength is something we need to write about, repeat, and hold up against what those that bring terror want to achieve.

Keep making, keep hoping, and keep your heart open to others even if it hurts.

The Trouble with the Wife

Thinking about wives Yesterday I was watching the start of the second season of Sleepy Hollow. The show is goofy fun, with a great mix of characters, pseudo-history, and a charming pair of leads.

Usually I enjoy the show, but there are some scenes I feel really disinterested in; the ones with Ichabod’s wife, Katrina. Yep, I had to Wikipedia her to even remember her name.

It’s not a problem with the shows creators doing a poor job of writing female characters, because Abbie Mills is a fantastic person that I really enjoy watching. Her sister Jenny Mills, is even more tormented with a collection of kick butt skills, and attitude to match.

So the writers of the show can create great female characters, instead it’s the usual problem. ‘The wife.’

It’s a terrible tag. Think about it; in most shows or books, when there is a wife character, she is usually the one fans or readers complain about the most.

She’s the one whose scenes feel flat or forced. She always gets in trouble, and the hero has to drop everything to go and save her. She is either whiny, too perfect to be true, or has such a pitiful sense of survival that she should have been a Darwin Award winner.

As a wife myself, I’m a little distressed by this. For a moment I wondered, is there something inherently dull about being a wife? Does somehow becoming one make the rest of your life fall away? Do you lose all your common sense and become merely an appendage?

Luckily, I know plenty of fascinating, strong, and loving wives who show that is not true. Nope, unfortunately, it’s something about the way many writers approach writing wives.

Now, I’m going to point out that this could be said of any ‘side kick’ characterâ€”including a husbandâ€”but most often it does seem to be the wives that get this treatment.

So here’s how it begins…

When writing a male character, there is a statistical chance that at a certain age, he will have married. So the writers go, ‘ah he needs a wife.’

Ugh. First thing, by throwing that label on her immediately, is putting her into some weird mold of what a ‘wife is’. New flash darlings; wives are actually women cunningly in disguise. Frighting, huh?

Instead of just putting in a cardboard cut out of ‘the wife’ in your story, think about what sort of woman you want? She can be anything; any colour, have any jobâ€”but the one thing she must have is her own goals and aspirations. Yes, they can be family, but as a wife I can tell you I have ambitions beyond that too.

In other words, stop thinking of the wife in terms of the family alone. Where did she come from? What have her life experiences been? What are her faults? (Please don’t forget that one!)

Put as much effort into making her a character with fullness and completeness, as you did making her husband. (Again this goes for any sex, or any sidekick too)

Katrina Crane in Sleepy Hollow is also the McGuffin. She only exists to be the goal just out of reach for Ichabod. Now I love my husband, but I don’t want to be his McGuffin. I am his equal, and my back-story is in reality as complicated as his. Sometimes I will save his bacon; sometimes he will save mine.

Now things have moved on from last century, and writersâ€”especially of genre fictionâ€”have worked out, people do like strong female characters. However, in ‘the wife’s’ case that strength can…well it can waver…

Katrina, like many of the ‘wifey’ characters these days, has been built up to have powers of her own. When Ichabod is not around, she is a strong witch and leader of a coven. She can do spells and…stuff…

That all sounds cool, until Ichabod is near her, where suddenly she loses all those powers. Pffffttt, I don’t know where they go… This tends to happen with the portrayal of women, but in the ‘wife’s’ case it is almost endemic.

It does disappoint me, because I enjoy all the other characters in the Sleepy Hollowâ€”and I hate feeling this way about a female character. The show has a wonderfully racially diverse cast, and a pretty equal percentage of male to female.

My favourite, Abbie Mills is a rounded person with back-story and character quirksâ€”but then she is not hobbled with the almost cursed title of ‘the wife’.

It is the problem with labeling anyone with archetype, and I am hoping the Sleepy Hollow writers can bring Katrina foreword as her own, real character as the season goes on.

As a writer it serves as a reminder, to think in terms of people rather than simple placeholders. The wife problem is part of the wider, characters considerations, so I know if writers put themselves in the heads of wives, they will find their motivations and goals too.

So go out there, make full, wonderful, conflicted, powerful, diverse charactersâ€”and if you write a woman who is a wife, make sure that you show the world that wives are also people too!