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.