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D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

The Only Constant

12/19/2016

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“Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different...?”
                -C.S. Lewis
 
It sure is, Jack. And so true. Even in a world where change is the only constant, happening at breakneck speed. Because on the one hand, our individual lives mostly don’t tend to change very dramatically from day to day, kind of like what many scientists are saying nowadays about the whole process of evolution: that rather than being a steady stream of change, it tends to occur in fits and starts. (Often giving us fits and starts as well.)
 
As we approach the end of yet another year --- a year of momentous change in so many areas of human endeavour --- it seems only fitting to muse a little about change, something so many of us regard with loathing, or at least dread. It’s a very appropriate topic in terms of writing, as well, because regardless of how we dress things up in our stories --- genre, plot, point of view, character, setting, theme --- everything really boils down to two things: change and how people, real or fictional, respond to it.
 
Whether we’re talking about our world or imaginary worlds, there are really three attitudes constantly in play in our society in terms of approach to change.   The first --- and possibly most common --- is represented by those people who are just plain bad tempered about the whole thing... well, actually, seriously, it’s those who are actively trying to hold change off, to maintain the status quo… and their reactions are perhaps not so much bad temperedness as fear. Why?  Because many people regard change as threatening.  Why again? Because it represents a departure from the known, the comforting, and the familiar.  And many of us are afraid of the unknown. Despite the fact that we may bitch and bellyache about the stupefying boredom of the known, of doing the same things, day in and day out, the weird thing is that many people crave that sameness, because it’s at least known and therefore can give us the comforting illusion of being in control. The unknown... well, it’s that dark cave our ancestors were timidly looking at in the gloaming all those thousands of years ago, and our reactions are the same now as they were then: we want to avail ourselves of what it offers, but we’re terrified by the possibility that it might be filled with Things That Go Bump In The Night.
 
(Or, to put it another way... Obligatory Tolkien Reference Of The Day as a supporting example: Saruman bottled up in the Tower of Orthanc, with Gandalf down below pleading for him to come to his senses and join them. “A shadow passed over Saruman's face; then it went deathly white. Before he could conceal it, they saw through the mask the anguish of a mind in doubt, loathing to stay and dreading to leave its refuge. For a second he hesitated, and no one breathed.”)
 
Then there are those at the opposite end of the spectrum: people who are very much in favour of change, so much so that they will charge forward without restraint or thought to the consequences. These gung-ho types are so enthusiastic about the New Way of Doing Something that they don’t give a damn about what may happen, or blithely assure everyone that It Will Just All Work Out, and dismiss those saying, “now, wait just a minute --- have you thought about...” as merely a bunch of reactionary nay-sayers and pessimists.
 
The third group --- very possibly the most rational of the three --- is composed of those elements of society trying, with great and gentle civility, to perform a delicate balancing act: acquiesce to the inevitability of change while minimizing the often-disastrous effects it generates without bringing everything to a screeching halt.  They have come to an understanding that attempting to hold off change is futile --- and, truth be told, quite undesirable, because they recognize that societies and people who do not change and grow are heading for stagnation and oblivion. But accomplishing change smoothly and with a minimum of angst is no small feat.
 
As a writer, knowing your story is all about change --- because we pretty much all start out with a scenario requiring an alteration of the status quo in some form or another --- your characters will slot into one of those three categories. Since the protagonist is likely going to fit into either the second or the third group --- promoting change, whether enthusiastically, carefully, or out of sheer desperation --- it follows that your antagonist(s) will be the people saying, no, things are fine, thank you very much, and We Don’t Need No Change (or Education). Or they will want change, but only on their own (possibly/likely very twisted or evil) terms.
 
Of course, the ironic side of this topic of change is summed up in the famous French saying: plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose --- or the more things change, the more they stay the same, which would seem to contradict the idea of change’s inevitability. But the saying isn’t really geared to physical, technological change, I think; it deals more with people and their all-too-fallible attitudes, that unpredictable variable in an otherwise pretty concrete equation.
 
Perhaps, though, we can end on a more positive note about change... so we’ll give the last words to Jack, just as we let him begin this post: you are never too old to set another goal or dream a new dream.
 

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Retread or Renew

12/12/2016

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A couple of posts back --- wherein I ostensibly took a swipe at fanfiction --- I also took a swipe at sequels, particularly the way Hollywood approaches them. Specifically, I wrote, “Now look, I understand: when we like something, we tend to like it a lot, and want more. And more and more --- not unlike those poor lab rats whose brain pleasure centers were wired to electrodes and ended up starving to death in a weirdly masochistic, orgasmic frenzy. I get it, truly. So does Hollywood, by the way, which long ago came to the realization it could avoid all kinds of creative costs by simply churning out clones/sequels/ rehashes/insert-your-own-term to satisfy our insatiable desire for More Of The Same.” (Ooh! Quoting myself!) Since then, however, I’ve been taken to task by several people who argued I was unnecessarily harsh. So perhaps today we should elaborate a little by asking the question: when talking sequels, do we mean new, or retread? Because there’s a biiiig difference.
 
Sequels are bad when...
 
Particularly in the visual medium --- i.e. Hollywood --- sequels seem to mean, more and more, simply rehashing material that may not even have worked really well last time out (creatively speaking), but nonetheless, audiences adored and spent big bucks on with their attendance. And some studio executive noticed and thought to him/herself: we can make a potful of money by just doing the exact same thing again. Because I’m going to demolish a sacred cow and say that most people, when they go to watch films, are not going in order to be intellectually or imaginatively challenged; they just wanna be entertained, frequently in a fairly mindless fashion. I suppose we could say it’s rather like going to the bar to drink yourself insensible, except without the messy effects of being drunk and hung over the next day. (Although some films do leave a nasty taste in your mouth, metaphorically speaking.) Case in point: the most charitable thing I can say about the Star Trek reboot films and the new Star Wars film is that they’re extremely derivative, really short on anything especially new or creative. (Both being done under the aegis of J.J. Abrams, I note. Although I don’t dislike everything he’s done. I liked Fringe... although you could argue even that was a rehash of The X Files.)
 
Now, before you come to the conclusion that I am some sort of unbearable, hoity-toity snob, let me just say I have nothing against people being entertained. Even mindlessly. From time to time. We don’t always have to be watching stuff like The Iceman Cometh. I’ve been known to cometh home from a hard day/week at the salt mines emotionally and/or intellectually drained, and just want to watch a film or play a video game best described as big, dumb and stupid. But not all the time, in a steady diet of drivel.
 
Sequels are good when...
 
They advance the story they’re telling by giving their audience completely new developments, not just warmed over versions of what happened before.
 
So sometimes, we’re not even really talking about sequels at all.
 
Case in point: Tolkien intended The Lord of the Rings to be one story. Period. The Two Towers is not a sequel to The Fellowship of the Ring, and The Return of the King is not a sequel to either. It was his publisher who said they had to be three separate books, presumably for economic reasons. Although the first copy of The Lord of the Rings that I owned was actually done in one long volume, minus most of the appendices. (First copy? you ask, puzzled. Well, yes, of course. I have --- umm, let me see --- three copies of LOTR. Because the first was wearing out, so I had to get a second, and then of course the third was a really good deal, you see, and... never mind.)
 
Another (much less famous) example is my own novel, Gryphon’s Heir. On its final publication draft, it clocked in at somewhere around 186,000 words, and there’s a cliff-hanger ending. (Loved the story, said a friend after reading it. Hated the ending, she continued, but I understood why you did it.) So is its follow-on, Gryphon’s Awakening --- currently under construction, by the way --- the sequel? Well, by my own definition today... not really. It’s all part of the same story. I just found a good spot to end the first book, which was about as big as it realistically could be and not cost the earth to buy, and brought it to a halt (temporarily). And yes, he said defensively, I’m not ashamed to admit it ends on a cliff-hanger. After all, one wants the reader to come back for more, doesn’t one? Besides, Professor T did the same thing with LOTR, particularly at the end of The Two Towers: “The great doors slammed to. Boom. The bars of iron fell into place inside. Clang. The gate shut. Sam hurled himself against the bolted brazen plates and fell senseless to the ground. He was out in the darkness. Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy.” Wow! What a place to stop! Boom! Clang! Huzzah! Let’s get on to the... uh... sequel! Continuation! Whatever!
 
Because I’m stoked and can’t wait!

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Backstory

12/5/2016

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“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”
            -Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii.
 
Why do people in life --- or characters in our writing --- do the things they do?
 
Well, contrary to what many of us believe when watching the often crazy/ridiculous/inexplicable behaviour of our fellow human beings, there’s one thing you can pretty much guarantee: people do not do things arbitrarily or without cause. There’s always a reason why someone does the things they do --- even if those things look unfathomable to the rest of us. Just as Will says in the quote above: “though this looks like madness... there is a reason for it.” Yup.
 
People are always looking for something, or something to happen. Or the reverse, wanting something not to happen. Or they’re acting based on past experiences or fears. (We could say they act on hopes, but unfortunately, waaaay too much human behaviour seems based on the negative crap --- the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to borrow another one of my favourite phrases from Will --- we all undergo in our life journeys. Some of us more than others, admittedly, although karma is a subject we could discuss another time. And it’s not really the right word to employ, anyway, unless you’re a Buddhist, which I most definitely am not.)
 
Part of our bemusement stems from the fact that people also often act impulsively --- irrationally the rest of us might say --- based on their emotional state at any given time. But even there, those emotional states are triggered by past experiences. You know, considering how highly homo sapiens tends to hold itself in intellectual regard (look up the Latin translation of the species if you’re unfamiliar with what it means), an awful lot of our behaviours and actions seem governed by some pretty elemental parts of our brains.
 
So... before this irretrievably becomes a treatise on human behaviour... let’s hie ourselves over to the real point of today’s epistle, shall we? Something every writer would do well to at least consider, for both protagonists, antagonists, and assorted other major characters. At least, if they want to do justice to both characters and story and produce something of any literary merit.
 
Here it is: backstory.
 
It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking good guys or bad guys, you need to have an idea where the character is coming from so that you can account for his or her behaviour. People do do stupid things (for which just about every writer breathes a silent prayer of thanks, because stupidity explains or at least justifies a great many otherwise unbelievable actions), but their actions are, in large part, governed by their past experiences. How did Orwell put it? "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Well, with sincerest apologies, George, the literary equivalent paraphrase of that is, I think: writers who want to control their character’s present will make sure they control said character’s past. And that will determine the character’s future. (At least as much as it’s possible to do so --- I have said in previous posts that, as a writer, you know you’re onto something when characters suddenly stand up in the midst of your narrative, give you the buffalo eye, and tell you flatly that they’re doing something quite different from what you had in mind for them, thank you very much, and if you don’t like it you can take a flying leap. And that’s not a bad thing; actually, it’s very exciting --- if a little shocking at the time --- because it means those characters are alive.)
 
Case in point: in Gryphon’s Awakening, the sequel-in-progress to my first novel Gryphon’s Heir, my protagonist is periodically bedevilled by an attractive young woman identified as a Fallen One (which makes ‘bedevilled’ an excellent choice of word, if you get my drift). But I’m keenly aware that, unless I want her to be just another cardboard cut-out villain, we need to understand something of her past in order to understand why she undertakes the malevolent things she’s doing --- or trying to do --- to my protagonist in the here and now.
 
And as I said, this doesn’t just apply to antagonists. I’m also keenly aware that at some point in my narrative, I need to explore why my protagonist suffers from a sometimes almost crippling lack of self-confidence in his abilities (to the utter exasperation of his friends).
 
Now, this doesn’t mean you need to provide your readers with detailed life CVs for everyone in your tale. Some of the details and incidents you develop for a given character may never make it into your narrative. Nor should they. You’re not writing a biography, for crying out loud. Your readers don’t need to know every last detail about every character. Nor do you, for that matter.
 
But you really need to know what makes them tick --- which will also help you understand what the hell is going on when they do unexpected things that leave you staring at the page, thinking to yourself, “What just happened here? I did NOT see that coming.”
 
‘Cause people are funny that way, aren’t they?

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    Author of The Annals of Arrinor series.  Lover of great literature, fine wine, and chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

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