9W: Cake or Death? Plot, Pacing and Character Death

Cake or Death? Plot, Pacing and Character Death

Track: All of the Books

So my first event was this, a number of authors discussing the thorny matter of how to distribute good happenings (cake) and bad happenings (death) throughout a book. This is not an accurate journalistic rendition of their discussion as it occurred in space-time; this is a conceptual walk through some of the ideas presented, as they stood out to me.

All the Cake, All the Time: Early in the talk, Zen Cho provided us with a snippet of a discussion that's best read over at her blog, about the type(s) of fanfic which focus on rewarding much-beloved characters whose canonical works are (perceived as being) undeservedly bad to them. The bad things have already happened; why not actually set stories in the happily-ever-after? It's catharsis, certainly. It's also more detailed than a storyteller has any place going into. We get to see our hero/ine/s beaten, shot, battered, bruised, tormented, and forced to make unspeakable choices before they can have their HEA - so why leave it at just those three little words? Why describe their trials in excruciating detail but give no description of their joys?

For my part, I sure as hell remember reading a whole bunch of Gundam Wing fanfic when I was a teenage cub, most of it slashfic, much of it cracky Curtain Fic (though I'm not sure the term had been coined back in the early 00s), which focused on the five main characters spending happy and fulfilling lives together after the harrowing events of the anime.

All the Cake - But It's Just for Looking At: After a few early examples of different media's balancing acts of reward/slap for their characters, Paul Cornell brought up The City and the Stars*, describing it as very much cake. "Nothing very bad happens," he said, "but you're not reading it for that; you're reading it for the exploration." The world-setting of Iain M. Banks came up too, for the first of many times this weekend, but I'll leave that for a future thread.

I have to admit I'd find this damned difficult to write. World-building's quite the task when you're just doing one at a time, and it's not hard to find explorers and travel-writers who struggle to communicate what they're seeing without just framing it in the terms of their own culture. To do this while simultaneously making up new cultures - I admire the writer who can pull that off, especially given how easy and how dangerous it is to do badly. The cultural appropriation thread underlying that sentiment, however, is for yet another talk this weekend, but I'm curious - does Arthur C. Clarke, our example cited above, manage to avoid it or do it appropriately?

Cake and Death Will Be Served at the Following Times: Audiences seem to perceive strong genre conventions about how we hand out cake and death. In the words of one panellist, if you’re writing space opera, “people expect explosions with their starships”. Now, my classic SF reading experience is broad but shallow by some standards, I’m not ashamed to admit, but it seems as if that wasn’t always the case – at least, not among the texts we consider the most central of the genre. Indeed, aren’t exploding spaceships usually a sign that you’re reading pulp sci-fi? (Then again, a genre is partly defined by its common denominators, including the lowest). Is it, therefore, a genre convention? I dunno; someone who’s read more Ian M. Banks than me tell me if the Culture novels are full of explosions**.

In any case, there are genre conventions to be respected here. Some of them are intentional handwaves – nobody thinks about the true existential horrors of teleportation, for instance, just about the explosive consequences of being telefragged. Some of them can be permitted without thinking too closely. And yet, not thinking too closely about it has gone wrong in the past, and continues to do so now.

There are a handful of vile genre conventions which we can acknowledge only for long enough to express our abhorrence. Some of the panel ticked off on their fingers – no redshirts, no refrigerated girlfriends, no rape as motivation (a trope itself bizarrely overused, as if there were many, many SF authors who couldn’t think of more inventive ways to torment 51% of the population; as a writer of inventive mental tortures, I have to tell you, you’re just not putting the effort in there).

So we’ve got respect for some genre conventions, but we acknowledge that others need to go. What’s the difference? Well, I’ve touched on it already. Rape-as-motivation***, murder as vengeance-fuel, and creating characters for the sole purpose of throwing them on the bonfire of a protagonist’s backstory are all just fucking lazy. Proper character development, as GRRM could tell you, is the dividing line between mourning a character and forgetting them, and that’s got much broader consequences for the work as a whole. If the death of a(n exegetically) forgettable nobody spurs a war, or a vengeance-quest, or causes a character to re-evaluate their loyalties or morals, it can seem all the more as if that character was inserted for that specific purpose. And that’s so tacky, and so hated moreover, that it’s hardly worth the trouble.

So genre conventions are a thing to be peered at closely before investing in them - and even then, invested in only delicately (unless you're David Eddings, in which case, keep up the good work). That's cool.

 

Death Will Be Served Hot or Cold: Please advise your waiter if you would like vegetarian death.

The panel touched on the subject of the ratio of heroic to anticlimactic deaths in fiction. In the real world, the number of people who die performing acts of heroism is tiny. By comparison, the overwhelming majority – several orders of magnitude more – just die in their sleep, diseased, of accidents or the consequences of accidents. Obviously, if your story’s set in a war, you’re probably going to lose involved characters to fighting or assassination or sabotage, but even then, there’s no need for it to always shine forth. I’ve got two examples here.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, to the horror of a passionate readership, several beta-string characters met their ends off-screen in battle, and most of them did so with not so much as a kind word to quell the tide of grief. This actually works differently diegetically and exegetically; within the story, there’s an army outside (and Death is waiting for you), and everyone’s too tense to let useful hatred turn to crippling mourning just yet; outside it, however, the reader can’t just glance and feel the gut-punch of revulsion and guilt and keep moving because they have to. They have no such constraints on their time. They get to mourn all day long, with no pesky invading armies to demand their attention. I’ve just rewatched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that deals prominently with death (and not just in the usual way), and it massively messes with the show’s distinctive filming style to try to create a similar effect, lingering where a reader lingers, on the body, on that first sentence when you realise you’ve lost someone. You know the one I’m talking about; if you don’t, don’t follow the link.

In Band of Brothers, the second example I’d like to take forward here, an awful lot of people are portrayed dying, some of them built-up main characters, others less so. But the characters around them are volunteer soldiers in a 20^th-century army; they have their motivation to fight, and when their comrades die, that’s a chance they all know they’re all taking. They’re still human – one does break down, and comes back with PTSD – but they aren’t using their friends’ deaths as motivation. They’re using their patriotism, mostly, and so the show has no real reason to linger on the dead. So it doesn’t. This is character death in a very different context to the example above.

In both cases, we have unheroic (or rather aheroic), often anticlimactic deaths in combat (and an example of a TV show behaving like a book, but that’s Joss for you), but dealt with in contradictory fashions. But the contradiction demonstrates something helpful; the writer has thought about the context and treated the deaths appropriately. In Deathly Hallows, Rowling has her main character witness the bodies of his friends when his decision is already made. He needs no further motivation. He’s also pretty emotionally dead by this point. But we’re given that glimpse, still, just to remind us what we’re fighting****. I wonder if, at that point, she’s trying to motivate the reader as much as Harry, or whether War Is Hell and that’s an end to it. But that’s another thread.

So this largely turned into a post on character death and how to treat it – but in fairness, so did the talk. Examples of brilliant cake were cited (including the apparently legendary Ready Player One), and the panellists touched on the modern fashion for films which ended with both (The Cabin in the Woods, Moon and District 9 were all cited), but for the most part, it was death all the way. Interesting, given that at least one of the panellists cited herself as a cake-first-and-foremost woman, that death should just be more interesting – but then, they say drama is conflict, right?

 

A final thought before I sign off; the word “eucatastrophe” (which in my brain looks far better with a k: “eukatastrophe”), as in a dramatic, all-encompassing change for the better at the end of a story, ensuring the protagonist doesn't meet the grim end they've had coming to them. I have nothing to say in particular about it, but damn, what a gorgeous word. Purr.

*Caveat: It sounded like he said "City in the Stars", and if indeed this is the book he meant, apologies.
**This is one of the first lot of results for typing "culture explosions" into Google Image Search. It was awesome enough to put in. I can see this becoming a thing.
***This phrase is so awful I shudder to type it. I’m sorry.
****That's another Google Image result for "Snakeface"; I would watch the shit out of HP every goddamn day if Voldemort could do this.

Nine Worlds Geekfest: Queer High Tea and Safe Spaces

It's a fair drive down from Manchester to Heathrow; if you started Titanic as you set off you might just make it down before the credits, but anything shorter and you're pretty much doomed. You could watch to the entire conclusion of a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in that time, or the entire plot of a season of Sailor Moon. You could listen to Radio 4 the whole way down, but you thereby risk overfeeding the gluttonous brain.

By the time I got down there, I think my brain had gone into that slump. The three-and-a-half-hour drive in the searing heat of a British summer hadn't helped, nor concluding the journey with a dive into the demonic influence of the dread sigil odegra. More importantly, though (trembling little newcomer, remember), I honestly had no idea what to expect. That paralysing uncertainty of the goat stuck between the two fruit-bushes magnifies when there's twenty bushes, and some of them have bananas and some of them have grapes and some of them have sushi, and all of them smell delicious.

Fortunately, there were others who knew exactly what to do to people in such situations: newly-arrived, too hot and flustered, filled with talkative energy but lacking brain from the stress of the road. Pretty much every one of the small conference spaces which would later host Tracks now hosted hospitalitea of one kind or another, ferociously advertising themselves to the newcomers, with an entertaining (and occasionally completely awesome) muscial backdrop from the aptly-named Friendship room.

But we weren't headed to Canterlot - not yet, anyway. We were headed to the Queer High Tea. And wow, was it packed.

I met writer, Queer Track organiser and general magnifico* Tori Truslow on a desperate sprint to refill a tea-urn, lest some poor frazzled queer find themselves briefly uncaffeinated, and settled down to my lunch in an atmosphere charged with geekery and good cheer. I met a few people for the first time, including poet and panelist Hel Gurney, and bumped into old friend, the wonderful James Webster, who would later do the best Spider Jerusalem impression I've seen to date, and his other fraction Dana.

Here, for the first time, with recent talk of "safe spaces" echoing around the cavernous expanse of my oversized skull, I began to understand that concept, personally and viscerally, for the first time. I've never really gone into a new environment before and been quite so relaxed quite so quickly. Part of that, I'm sure, was falling into a familiar (and much-missed) pseudo-academic paradigm, discussing lectures and taking notes, one pair of attentive eyes and perked ears among many. I'm sure, though, that more of it was the widespread air of friendliness, the giddy community atmosphere, and the (appallingly un-English) way in which people just up and spoke to whomever was in the queue next to them. I know this isn't what "safe space" literally means, but it was a space that felt safe, and that - however liminal it might be, however giddy and transient - is not to be sneezed at. It doesn't need to last forever - just long enough to leave an impression.

Reading about 9W after the fact, "safe" seems to be one of people's favourite adjectives for the weekend. At least at the end of the upper floor corridor was a room designated "Quiet Space", and though it seemed to go unspoken in words, there was a distinct aura of love and tolerance. I didn't just speak to people who I'd normally have let pass because I felt safe, but because I felt that they would have felt safe too. I know that's no guarantee, and as the broad-shouldered white male speaking here, I don't have the most reason to feel unsafe in most environments - but it never once failed. Mad props to the person in the rat suit; thanks to the girl with the knitted Dalek; regards to the two guys with whom I talked information security and the coming Paranoia superstate (protip: never happen); same to all the queers of Bifrost.

I'm not sure how much of it was effort going into creating a safe environment, and how much was just simply convincing everyone to make it one - but I'll admit, here and now, after the fact, that it's a thin line between that and just holding a Con with a thousand awesome people.

In truth, I'm honestly not sure how you'd tell the difference.

*"General Magnifico" is now a title.

Nine Worlds Geekfest, 9th-11th August 2013

So there was this con, right...

It's weird how these things work. For years and years, I've heard stories of the Great Conventions. I know some people who go to plenty, and some who've actually flown across the entire Atlantic Ocean to visit them. They seemed to vary in their qualities: some were the mental melting-pots in which new ideas were smelted; others seemed to form echo chambers for devoted fandoms large or small; yet more seemed to blur at the edges into weekend-long all-but-music-festivals. All occupied positions on a scale which ran from the ridiculous to the ridiculous, and if there was one constant between them, it was the costuming and the fursuits. Not that I have a problem with dressing up as a cat.

Anyway.

From the start, Nine Worlds seemed bizarrely unsure of what it was. Publicity emails to those who Kickstarted the project had an almost surprised tone, as if the event organisers had just woken up to find the frost giant living in their wardrobe had left them another set of enthusiastic geeks on the doorstep, stunned but salivating at the prospects being offered to them. The core idea, to provide a decent-sized summer Con for the UK which offered a mixed experience - neither Expo nor Con, neither vast overstimulating multimedia event nor tightly-focused enthusiast-exclusive meetup - was absolutely solid, but the wide focus made the whole thing seem far too huge. The list they provided on the Kickstarter implied tasty morsels for fans of

board gaming, film and film-making, Doctor Who/Torchwood, science, feminism, Tolkien, SF&F academia, video games, partying like a dancefloor demon, role play gaming, Discworld, My Little Pony, social gaming, SF&F literature, knitting, Harry Potter, creative writing, Star Wars, queer fandom, buying cool stuff, steampunk, the occult, open culture, Star Trek, Whedon, skepticism, costuming, comics, anime and J-culture, or fanfic[.]

That list made me nervous. It said nothing about what you might do if you're into two of those things. Perhaps you could miss something. The authors/crafters/actors/geeks behind it might forgive you, provided you returned in supplication to purchase a fresh action figure. That's what events like this are about, right?

(The list said even less about the terrifying possibility that you might be into most of it. That thought didn't bear thinking about, so I put on my blinkers and resolved myself to a weekend with the bronies, who would presumably be the best people to look after my poor choice-blind brain and feed its attendant meat-car muffins until it went cross-eyed).

I know what you're thinking. Poor little con virgin. At least I lacked the dodgy moustache I wore to my first Maelstrom.

"Tracks" were marked out by expert event-planners, with the intention of organising the herd (or rather, allowing it to organise itself) along conceptual lines; most of the items above had their own Track, with the blissful exceptions of "buying cool stuff" and "partying like a demon", which might well have killed anyone who tried actually doing them all weekend long. (A brilliant bit of shared-experience marketing was the stamp-sheet provided with the welcome pack, which allowed the curious to keep a record of where they'd been - if they didn't leave it at home on the Saturday, like certain stripy schmucks). For the most part, these stayed in the same rooms, but the mechanism allowed for the groups running a particular series of events to suddenly branch out into communal areas or larger spaces without their guests losing track of them on the incredibly overstuffed events log. I don't know if it's a new name on an old idea, as (I might have mentioned) I was new to this, and more than a little snowblind - but it worked. If I had one complaint about it, it was that the event handbook itself didn't use the Tracks as their event-listing format - but then it would have been harder to compare items by time, and that would have been just as bad.

All in all, I went to a whole bunch of stuff about writing and books in conference rooms with authors and writers of everything from fanfic to major novel series, including a handful of my recent favourites in all the world. I was a little disappointed by some of the smaller talks; on occasions, I found myself sitting in audience before authors who clearly had a lot to say but simply weren't sure how to say it. They seemed to have fallen prey to poor expectation management, genuinely unsure of what their audience knew or wanted from them, and so delivered GCSE-level talks to postgraduate audiences. One in particular was all going fine until-

-but I digress. I'll get to that sort of thing later.

The vendors' room was far from my expectations. A wide-eyed innocent, I'd expected a ballroom half the size of the NIA with hanging banners and professional representation from (at least) all the major print media companies. In its place, a sweet, cosy arrangement of mostly individual crafters, writers, artists and kit-makers, an Etsy room (albeit screened for quality) of the best SFF reads you've never heard of and a wide spectrum of cool shit you don't need but now want. Vastly preferable, the latter model; I very much hope it lasts.

The gaming-spaces at the Radisson were considerable and excellently comfortable, with large-scale boards for a number of favourites like Ticket to Ride and Pandemic (both of which I played, both of which I enjoyed immensely) and plenty of free spaces to set up and play whatever else you'd brought with you. The noise contributed to a real feeling of being a part of a community - I think I'd felt the slightly alienating silence around the average gaming table before, but never been able to put a name to it until now. More on that later.

A highlight from Saturday evening was Bifröst, the Queer Cabaret. Compered by an inestimable poet (whose name I need to look up, sorry), nervous but adventurous and really very funny, it displayed five acts of music and poetry either by queer people, about queerness, or both (including my lovely wife and her guitar-wielding partner). As always, Lashings of Ginger Beer Time were as hilarious as they were audacious, filking mercilessly for fun and profit (pronounce the phrase kinky andro-romantic transmasculine asexual fast and see what else it sounds like), and in case anyone's in Edinburgh, go see them at the Fringe.

By Sunday I was probably in more of a mood for chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool, but the Con decided to punish me with more scholarship, and some of the best of it. Notes were taken, opinions had, famous authors observed - but I can barely remember much of Sunday, so I'll get back to that later(!). The lovely missus, ever full of vim and vigour, got a slot to go toe-to-toe with the First Blade of Braavos (threatening such a competent swordfighter with nothing but her forefinger; I'm so proud), but by and large, the day was one of comfortable listening. My greatest regret of the Con is missing Jack Cohen speak on designing other intelligent species, but I got my timeslots swapped; I guess I'll just have to buy the book.

I'm very glad I was at the first Nine Worlds. I have a feeling this is something I'm going to look back on and remember, probably when I'm old enough to be a proper greymane complaining that it's changed and now it's all about the holo-emitted [new forms of entertainment] and the commercialistic [new forms of economic exploitation]. I'm glad to have gone there with good people and met good people, including a lovely chap cosplaying the Seventh Doctor, the cool crew behind BUCK, a lovely couple who helped us try (and fail) to save the world in Pandemic, and a panoply of geeks of all stripes.

I look forward to next year. If you're a geek in the UK, you should be too.