Tag: kurt wilcken

Fantastic History #60: Being Right Versus Being True by Kurt Wilcken

Characters are funny things. I think just about any writer will tell you that there have been times when a character took on a life of his own and refused to do the things the writer planned. As the character develops, his personality develops until when the writer gets to the point where Harriet is supposed to marry Peter, the writer realizes that there is no way in hell Harriet would do such a thing. And then she has to write a half dozen more novels worth of character development to get them both down the aisle.

It’s rewarding when this happens, because it means that the character has become more like a real person than simply a cardboard puppet for the author to manipulate; and that means that the character and the things that happen to him are more likely to be meaningful to the reader.

When my characters are obstinate and refuse to follow my elegantly constructed plots, I generally let them have their head and adjust my story accordingly. I’ve got plenty of practice doing this running RPG’s with my wife.

But sometimes I come across a related problem. What do you do when your character has opinions and beliefs that differ greatly from your own?

Usually it’s not that big a deal. It’s a common situation, after all. Imagining what it would be like to be a person other than yourself is pretty much a prerequisite for being any kind of a writer, especially one who is writing about a different historical period. As the fellow once said, the Past is another country; they do things differently there. If a character of mine has different political views or religious beliefs or moral outlook than my own, we can agree to disagree for the space of the story.

I will admit that sometimes I am not above mocking such a character and use my prerogative as author to poke fun at his misconceptions. The biggest temptation of all is to “convert” the characters. Robert Heinlein once said that there were only three basic plots in fiction, one of which being “The Man Who Learned Better.” Growth of understanding is what character development is all about and what better way to develop the character than to have the story be about how the character learns that his former opinions were wrong and comes around to the author’s way of thinking?

Except… when you put it that way… Gee, that sounds awfully egotistical. And worse yet, it reduces the character back to being the cardboard puppet again, dancing for the author’s amusement.

I’m not saying it can’t be done, but to do it right, the writer needs to show the character’s conversion developing naturally out of the character.

Arthur Conan Doyle was an ardent believer in Spiritualism, and once wrote a story in which his character the bombastic Professor Challenger has a dramatic encounter with the ghost of a former assistant which converts him to a belief in the afterlife. Doyle wrote no such story about Sherlock Holmes, in which the Great Detective renounces his skepticism about the supernatural. It would have out of character for him; it would have seemed contrived; it would have seemed false.

I was once in a similar situation many years ago. I was playing a character in a Victorian Era monster hunting game named J. Hamish Broadstead who was an arch-skeptic. He completely rejected the supernatural and had made it his life’s mission to debunk fraudulent mediums. He was your stereotypical late-Victorian scientific materialist — come to think of it, I borrowed a bit of Professor Challenger for him — and I admit, I played him as a pompous buffoon. After all, since there really were vampires and ghosts and such creatures in the campaign, his obstinate refusal to see this was a running gag.

I decided to draw a comic book “origin story” for my skeptic, explaining how he became so obsessive about debunking the supernatural. I framed it as a dream in which he is guided through his past by another of the characters, who was loosely based on the Phantom Stranger. ( “This isn’t going to be like that wretched Dickens Christmas story, is it?” “I’m afraid so, Professor.” “Can’t stand Dickens. Always taking legitimate social concerns and sentimentalizing them.”)

So, I had Broadstead’s spirit guide show him selected scenes from his youth culminating in an incident where as a young man he exposes a fraudulent medium at a seance and the shock of the revelation causes his sickly, invalid sister to fall into a swoon. She dies shortly afterwards, and Broadstead blames the charlatan. Secretly, though, he harbors guilt at the thought that had he not unmasked the fraud, his sister might still be alive.

At that point in the story, I realized I needed to come up with some kind of resolution. There had to be some reason for Broadstead to relive his tragic past. I needed Broadstead to find Redemption.

Except…

I couldn’t buy it. It just didn’t seem right for Broadstead. Given his background and his personality, I could not picture him having a religious experience; it would not ring true. Even if he ever did have such an experience, he would almost certainly interpret it in purely materialistic terms. And in any case, since I framed the story as a dream, he would likely discount the whole thing when he woke up anyway.

So how would I respect Broadstead’s character without seeming to validate a world-view I disagree with? How can I be right and stay true at the same time?

In this particular story, I had the spirit guide offer Broadstead the chance to speak with the ghost of his sister and resolve their issues. Her ghost appears behind him, arms outstretched and beckoning to him. But Broadstead banishes her with a grumpy “Poppycock!” without ever seeing she was there. He doesn’t need anybody’s help and he is perfectly capable of dealing with his own guilt issues by himself, thank you. Besides, if there is an afterlife — which he does not for a moment concede — then his sister certainly has better things to do than to come back here. To the end, Broadstead remains proud and self-sufficient and true to his personal philosophy and code. And yet… his sister was there, if only he would see her. And the story ends with him standing quietly by her grave. Praying? Pondering? I left it for the reader to decide.

I’m not exactly sure if I succeeded in striking the balance I wanted in that story. I thought it worked pretty well at the time, and had some nice bits of dialogue; but in summarizing the plot, it seems rather weak. Sometimes a story works, sometimes it doesn’t.

I found myself in a similar situation with my story “Spitting at the Sun” in which an orkish shaman undergoes a crisis of faith when his world changes and a new religion arises to challenge his own. Working out his traditional beliefs was a fun exercise in world-building. The difficult part came when I needed to have my orc resolve this crisis and reconcile his beliefs to the new situation.

No, I didn’t make him a Lutheran. A Lutheran orc might be interesting; but he wouldn’t fit in this story. I wanted to be true to the character. Anything less would come off as phony. I had to find what aspects of my own beliefs my orc would comprehend and be open to, so that when he comes to a deeper understanding of things, it flows and develops from who he is and what he knows. Having him experience this satori in the middle of a fight helped. He is an orc, after all.

It can be a delicate balance. The character has to have enough in common with the audience that the reader can relate to and understand him, but he also needs to be different enough to be believably part of another world with a different society, different attitudes and different culture. If the writer manages to portray the character well, not only does the character gain a deeper understanding of his world, perhaps the reader does as well.

*****

In his secret identity, Kurt Wilcken is a ninja cartoonist. He has written and drawn stories for Antarctic Press and Radio Comix and his current webcomic, a Pulp-Era adventure titled Hannibal Tesla Adventure Magazine, appears on his website. He also blogs occasionally on subjects ranging from comic books to obscure Bible stories. You can find his story about the orkish shaman, “Spitting at the Sun”, in the fantasy anthology Hunt the Winterlands.

Fantastic History #42: Stories within Stories by Kurt Wilcken

When I was young, I used to enjoy reading books of myths and legends: the Wanderings of Odysseus; the Labors of Hercules; Robin Hood and King Arthur; Paul Bunyan; How the Sea Became Salt and How the Bear Lost His Tail. They helped fuel my love of stories.

Looking back it occurs to me that many of the books I’ve enjoyed have contain their own internal myths, stories within stories, which add flavor to their worlds. The Baskerville Legend from The Hound of the Baskervilles; the Tales of El-ahrairah from Watership Down; the Creation of the Rings of Power from Lord of the Rings, (and many others; you can’t swing a hobbit in LOTR without hitting a tale of ages past). I’ve done something like that in my own stories too: inventing my own myths to provide “corroborative detail” for the worlds I’ve made.

I suppose I should clarify what I mean by “myths”. I don’t mean it in the “Mythbusters” sense of “Something Untrue”, or “Breathing a lie through Silver” as another fellow once put it. Nor am I limiting it to stories about gods and magic, although in a fantasy story either one may pop up.

What I’m calling a Myth is a story that has gained some degree of cultural significance. It conveys a truth — or at least is regarded as doing so — regardless of the factuality of some of its narrative details. It is held to be important by the people who tell it. That’s what separates these internal myths from other types of embedded stories, like flashbacks or backstories. It’s an anecdote which has attained apotheosis.

In the beginning of The Hobbit, Bilbo learns about how the dragon Smaug attacked the Lonely Mountain and drove out the dwarves who lived there. This is important backstory, because it establishes the reason why the dwarves want to return. But Bilbo does not first hear this story in a dry infodump; he, (and the readers), hear it in the form of a song the dwarves sing. This is no “Once Upon A Time” fairy tale. For the dwarves it is a piece of recent history that occurred within living memory of most of the party, but by recasting this tragic event into a song, they have transformed it into more than history. It is lore, a part of their dwarvish cultural identity; and the song captures Bilbo’s imagination in a way that a prosaic infodump might not. That’s what makes it mythic.

A myth can serve different functions in a story. In some cases it is little more than flavor text. In college I created a sword & sorcery comic titled Brisbane the Barbarian. Each issue would begin with an ornately-lettered caption reading: “Ages ago when Atlantis was young and the world still flat, mighty warriors blazed a path of blade and blood across unheard-of realms…” I intended this introduction to set the tone of the comic: Heroic Fantasy after the Robert E. Howard tradition, but not too serious.

Granted, that little snippet of mine, although it tried to sound mythic, is hardly a myth. It’s more like a cross between an invocation and a running gag. At best it serves a similar role to narrative formulas in fairy-tales like “Once Upon a Time” or “And They All Lived Happily Ever After”, which Tolkien compared to margins around an illustration or picture frames; they act like verbal parentheses, marking a story’s beginning and end.

Myths can be put to better use. One of these uses is to provide the reader with background information, as in the case of the dwarves’s song in The Hobbit. In my webcomic, Cat-Men from Mars, the Martian hostility towards the Earth derives from an ancient war between the Martian Old Ones and a now-extinct race which fled to Earth’s Moon. The reader learns about this war between the Martians and the Lunarian in bits and pieces, through fragments of legend which, even to the Cat-Men seem like half-forgotten lore.

The Mythic Introduction has become a standard gimmick of the Three Volume Fantasy Epic, like the Obligatory Map of the Fantasy Realm, describing the cosmology of the world and setting up the major conflicts which will shape the plot. I’m not sure how common this is anymore. Tolkien probably gets some blame for it, although he limited his prologue in Lord of the Rings to just explaining about hobbits and allowed the reader to pick up the rest of the History of the Elder Days as he went along. An Origin Myth shouldn’t leave the reader with the impression that there’ll be a quiz on this later on.

Myths are also useful for introducing McGuffins of Power. If a magical artifact has any significance at all, it’s got to have some sort of myths accumulated around it, if only the story of its creation. In a role-playing campaign I ran many years back, I wanted to give one of my players a magical shield. I invented a story about a warrior of long ago who was given a choice by the gods of either a magical sword that would kill his enemies, or an enchanted shield which would protect his friends. The story was a not-terribly-subtle hint to the player about which item to take when he faced the same choice later in the adventure. Not that the player needed a hint; he was playing Captain America, so of course he was going to take the shield.

None of these absolutely need the mythic voice. A writer can provide a history or a backstory through flashback, through an omniscient narrator, or simply through one character saying “As You Know, Bob…” to another. But invented legends and lore bring something to a story which other types of infodumps might not. A character, or a first-person narrator telling a story reveals something of themselves in the process of the telling. When that background story is presented as a piece of lore, then it also says something about the people who came up with that myth: what they believe, what values they hold, what assumptions they have about the universe. Apart from the narrative details found in a myth, the fact that people chose to mythologize that particular subject also says something about the society and culture.

I once wrote a story for a shared-world anthology a friend of mine organized, about an orkish shaman undergoing something like a crisis of faith when a new religion comes to challenge his traditions. I decided to start the story off with a creation myth, telling how when the World was New, the divine Powers summoned the young races of the earth to let them choose which of the Powers they would worship. The Humans chose the Sun, for it’s splendor and might; the Elves chose the Stars for their great beauty; and the Dwarves chose the Earth for her deep wisdom. When they came to the Orcs, the Father of Orcs, in his pride, refused to worship any of them, saying that Orcs could take care of themselves and would remain independent and free. This angered the Sun, who placed a curse on the Orc-folk, which is why Orcs don’t like the daylight.

This story did a couple of things. For one thing, it helped me get a feel for my narrator’s voice. More importantly, it helped me get into his head. The story of Urg-Dar, the First Orc, helped establish important elements of Orkish culture for my story: their pride, their sense of independence and self-sufficiency, and their strong ties to tradition. It led up to the later conflict with the new religion of the Sleeping God when the World Changes, and how the protagonist ultimately reconciles the old traditions with the new status quo.

Invented myths like these won’t fit in every story; but they can be a useful world-building tool, giving the reader a sense of the people living in that world. Even if the myths are not historically accurate, the presence of the myths give the reader a sense that there is a history behind that world.

***

In his secret identitiy, Kurt Wilcken is a ninja cartoonist. He has written and drawn stories for Antarctic Press and Radio Comix and his current webcomic, a Pulp-Era adventure titled Hannibal Tesla Adventure Magazine, appears on his website. He also blogs occasionally on subjects ranging from comic books to obscure Bible stories. You can find his story about the orkish shaman, “Spitting at the Sun”, in the fantasy anthology Hunt the Winterlands.