Angst and pathos

These are my by-words. Angst and pathos.

According to dictionary.com:

Angst: a feeling of dread, anxiety, or anguish.

Pathos: A quality, as of an experience or a work of art, that arouses feelings of pity, sympathy, tenderness, or sorrow.

So, basically, my characters suffer (angst) and try to make you feel sorry for them (pathos). This is called 'drama.' (for a crash course in what I'm talking about, go watch Season 1 of Veronica Mars. RIGHT NOW)

But is there a limit? Is there a too far? A pit of despair from which the viewer cannot climb, that leaves him less entertained? Of course there is. That's why all angst and pathos must be comingled with laughter and adventure. (for a crash course in this, see Season 1-and-only of Firefly, and the movie, Serenity) Off-set a crushing situation and you have a situation that has unlimited potential. Until a budget-minded exec kills your show.

Now, let's be honest. Angst must be well-done and subtle to be effective. Otherwise you're way out in Smallville territory, and who wants that? Clark, get a spine, and grow some real angst. (season 1 Clark, anyway; I'm still playing catch-up)

Anyway, how does this translate into my writing? (everything comes back to writing, here) Well, some of my projects got so mired down in the angst they started to depress me. That's never good. And there was no wisecracks; it was much too serious a book. Others remained so angst-free or angst-lite--seriously, it was like Smallville's Clark showed up in my novels, angsting hard about things that hardly made sense, acting sensitive and sucking his cheeks in.

I have ofund balance, though, in my most recently plotted out book. One with laughs, high adventure, and deep angst. It started as a writing exercise in writing anti-epic books. What if you wrote a book about a high, epic war, from the POV of one person in it, a minor character, one whose life is turned to tragedy by that war? Not only would you have the terrific show Firefly, you could write a novel that was heartbreaking and funny, full of (you guessed it...) angst and pathos.

And that's where it's at.

More on motivations;

One of my projects turned into a muddle because I didn't give one character ANY motivations. I gave him a lot of actions and an interesting background, but only hints as to motivations because I hadn't thought his motivations out. He ran around, he gave hints, but... no reasons.

That stunk.

There's a fine line of balance. In RL, you never know a person's true motivations. The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to be beleivable. (to paraphrase Twain)

Let's take X-Files as an example, shall we. Mulder was driven by his sister. That memory haunted him. He wanted to explore the absurd, to find the unreal, because of it. It was a comic book motivations. "My... sister... dissappeared... when... I ... was... young!" It was kind of a big deal.

...what was Scully's motivations?

They were a lot more complex. She was driven by a desire to succeed in her career, a logical skepticism, and even by loyalty to Mulder. Yet she continued doing the job, going above and beyond, time after time after time. We saw glimpses of reasons. We saw some braveness. We saw some real fear. We saw, above all else, an almost real person.

Almost real. Nobody's quite real in fiction.

Motivations

I mentioned motivations in passing, when talking about Iron Man vs. Batman.

When I first started writing, every character I wrote had to have a crystal clear, logical motivation for what they did. They rationalized, and I helped them. They knew who they were. They an absolute sense of identity.

Do I even need to point out how completely unrealistic and unreadable that is?

If I want to read a story about somebody with a complete and realized identity I'll read a Dirk Pitt novel. And I won't enjoy it very much, either. There's no character growth possible. There's not even anything interesting about Dirk Pitt. There wasn't anything interesting about my early characters, either.

Name your favorite story, and think about the identity and motivations of the main character. Say... Star Wars. The original, not the prequels. Think about Luke Skywalker, and the way his motives and identity changed. How his moral certainty was broken down, and he had to find a new way. How the man he was in the end had almost nothing in common with the whiny farmboy.

So, as I enter in my however-many-years of writing, I try to write more complex characters. Characters driven by motives that may not even be clear to them. Characters rejected by their parents. Characters who lost their parents. Emotional characters. Illogical characters.

In short, real people.

It's both harder, and more rewarding.

More on this later.

Mixed Feelings

So, by all reports Grindhouse is a brilliant, brilliant movie. Filled with all sorts of interesting dialogue, poor plotting, cheesy effects, and outstandingly bad acting. Altogether, that sounds like just the sort of movie I'd like, doesn't it?

Excessive use of violence, swearing, sex and nudity comprise the greater part of this movie. In fact, the excesses of the movie define it. That's what it's all about, right?

And that's where they lose me.

Why is it that in order to be artistic, in order to be considered at all serious about film-making, you need to drench your movies with blood and sex in equal hues? Is restraint in filmmaking only enforced from without, by stringent censors? Were the films that had to imply everything really so much less than the current let-it-all-hang-out movies? And isn't there something infantile about the American obsession with sex and violence?

That little whine-fest aside, this is a good time to be a big old nerd. Superhero movies are finally coming into their own as a mainstream phenomena. And as the kind of guy who collects comic books, let me just say... some of them stink. Big time. I mean, I kind of liked Daredevil, but even I was left with a bad feeling my mouth and a hatred for Mark Steven Johnson. (he did a little better with Ghost Rider, but you were still left wanting so much more)

Still, when they hit it out of the park... The trailer, that first adrenaline rush, for FF2, was awesome. It was a scene more awesome than anything we saw in the first movie. It was a scene worth waiting for. It was great. Images from the third Spidey flick are great. Spiderman in a bell tower fighting the symbiote? Wow.

And the very IDEA of an Iron Man movie starring Robert Downey Jr and directed by, of all folks, Jon Favreau... Wow. Jon Favreau blew me away with the saccharine-sweet Elf, and then again with the very dark and tragic kiddie movie Zathura. The idea of him being set loose with a dark hero like Iron Man... it's great. Of course, people don't know who Iron Man is. He's not one of the big names, like Hulk, Spidey, Bats, or Supes. Iron Man is, in his own way, darker. Batman, after all, pretends to be a worthless millionaire play-boy to hide his dark, serious alter ego. Tony Stark is a worthless millionaire play-boy, an alcoholic womanizer... with a dark, serious alter ego. Dark and consuming past? Um, no, just a rich kid with nice toys. Reasons? Motivations? Just because it's the right thing to do. I can't wait to see that movie.

It's a good time to be a fan.

Workouts and their wonderful effect on the brain

Novelists should work out constantly.

No, seriously! I want to see all potential novelists get health lectures. No junk food! Take long walks! Work the weight set!

Working out, exercising, eating right... these things don't just extend your life and give you strength. They clear your mind. They get your mind running at 100% of optimal. They give you a huge creative rush. This is what they should be teaching in schools. It's a great way to crack a case of writer's block. It's a great way to get your day going. You don't need a gym or anything. I'll give you a hundred exercise to kick your butt you can do in your own home, without any special equipment.

In other news, it turns out pointing and saying bang is discriminatory or obscene. Who knew? Apparently the professor wanted to talk about guns, gun control, and whether violence breeds violence. He wanted his students to think. So he started this discussion, pointed at one and said bang. Presumably to demonstrate something. Maybe how easy it is to kill with a gun? It says that subsequently another student pointed at him and said bang, demonstrating that if you armed the kids at school, something of this magnitude couldn't happen. (although the idea of a classroom debate when all the kids are packing heat makes me sweat...)

Well. Freedom of speech has been dead a long time. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

I'm going to write a lot today about selling your soul to the devil. Although I think too much is made of those big decisions, those epiphanies. It's the little decisions and moments that drive us forward. The song Sympathy for the Devil, by the Stones, lays it out like this: I shouted out,/Who killed the kennedys? /When after all/It was you and me. The message? We all want to know who the bad guy is when we put ourselves forth as the bad guys a long time ago without realizing it. Our little decisions caused the big problems. We wonder why there's a war in Iraq, but every single American is complicit there. Did you think our way of life, from the Coke bottle to the car, could survive? Did you think the entire idea of all men being created equal could survive without wars?

So it's a compelling thing to write about. Hopefully I can get my obligatory 1,500 words today.

Dear Diary; Hello World

Borrowing from some famous cliches for the title, here, aren't we?

Anyway.

As a writer I've been running into some dead ends lately. Some stressful dead ends that in anybody else I would call writer's block. But a good friend of mine once told me that there is no such thing as writer's block. There's no time in your life when you are unable to write, when some cramp in your brain cuts off all your words. There will be times in your life when it's hard to write. When nothing leaps to mind.

That's the time you need to work for every word; and that's the time you need to exercise your word power.

So here I am, exercising my word power. Journalling is one of the easiest writing exercises there is, one of the easiest ways to work out the excessive fear of committing a wrong word to paper. One of the easiest ways to remind yourself why you write about the things you write about.

What do I write about? I write for the popcorn flicks of the literary world. Fantasy, science fiction... space opera would be more precise. Stories more about people than the fantastical things they do and see. Stories about flawed and unlikable people, for the most part.

Well. In addition to writing I'm trying to buy my first house, which is much too large and expensive for me. I'm about to put myself into the house-poor category, resoundingly. And then, after that, I will be so far in debt I may never get out. Yay!