Low/High Thrillers – Obligatory genre disclaimer here

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We all know that genre definitions are inexact (to put it mildly). Stories defy easy categorization, and that’s what genre (and sub genre is all about). Still, humans like to sort things, and we like to think of things by their types. Which is why I’m typing all this out.

Most everyone reading this knows the meaning of the term “High Fantasy” (warning! that’s a tvtropes link!): Fictional-world stories about kings and armies, lots of magic, vast and powerful Evil, an epic scale, and the characters are people firmly within the halls of power.

In contrast, Low Fantasy seems to have been created to cover everything else. It doesn’t, not really, but low fantasy is often characterized as having little magic, small stakes and a less GvE morality. The characters are more likely to be common citizens–often they’re part of the criminal class–and the story centers on their personal problem rather than the fate of the world. And while High Fantasy is often noble in tone, Low Fantasy is frequently cynical or funny.

Now, yeah, we can all come up with examples of stories that straddle definitions–we don’t need to check off every item from the list for something to be one or the other. LOTR is certainly High Fantasy, even though it doesn’t have all that much magic in it, for instance, but Conan falls pretty solidly in the Low Fantasy tradition.

A while back, I decided I should apply these descriptors to thrillers. I’m talking about books here, not films, because in movies “thriller” means something different. My idea is that a High Thriller concerns people in power–not kings, obviously, since thrillers are set in our world, but Presidents, CIA officials, FBI investigators, DEA agents, etc. A High Thriller has gigantic stakes, good guys and bad ones, and a major part of the appeal is that it gives the reader a peek into the “halls of power” to lean heavily on a cliche.

Want to know how the president stays connected while on Airforce One? Want to know how a CIA Agent files secret reports? Curious to see how a White House Chief of Staff spends his day? A High Thriller makes an implicit promise to the reader that the writer has researched the book to the degree that, while the characters and the dangers are fictional, the depiction of how these powerful people and agencies act is bulletproof.* In fact, that research is part of the foundation of the genre’s appeal.

By contrast, a Low Thriller doesn’t portray powerful people. It generally portrays low level criminals or regular citizens who get caught up with low level criminals. An insurance salesman’s black sheep brother turns up after 15 years, with criminals on his trail. The criminals want the money the brother stole, and they’ll do anything they have to do to the salesman’s family to get it. Or a low-level mobster realizes he’s about to be betrayed by his bosses. Or some oddball criminal types try to pull off one last job, with comically disastrous results.

David Morrell and Elmore Leonard write these sorts of books, along with many many others. They might be noirish or comic. The characters are rarely wholly good or bad (although the villains are often crazed killers) and a tense confrontation is more likely to take place in a motel or boiler room than the Oval Office.

Which isn’t to suggest that Low Thrillers aren’t carefully researched, or that the research isn’t part of the appeal. But typically, the research isn’t there to give the reader a glimpse at the tools and methods of power.

Low Thriller is my favorite sort (and I’m still trying to work out how it differs from and overlaps with “Detective Fiction”) but I’ve been trying to figure out how this dialectic would map onto urban fantasy. High Fantasy and (my invented idea of) High Thriller both focus on people of authority and power, and there’s certainly a lot of that in UF. You have werewolf clans, vampire courts, wizard societies, etc., each with its own politics and area of authority. You also have outsiders, criminals and average citizens (well, not as many of those as I’d like). You have stories about the end of the world, and stories about small-scale threats.

It’s something I’m going to be thinking about.

* Police procedurals also rely on this sort of bulletproof research, but they are generally not thrillers and have a different sort of appeal.

Woo-hoo! Child of Fire Makes Another “Best of 2009” List!

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This time the list is at PopSyndicate.com. Here’s the link.

The author added an “e” to my last name, but hell, everyone does that; at least she’s done it in an unusual way. Here’s a quote:

“This one has some delicious creep factor to it, and Lilly is a protagonist that you find fascinating.”

Did you hear that, universe? You find him fascinating!

Hee. I’ll write a grownup post sometime soon. :)

Randomness for 1/6

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1) A cult I might join, and a manifesto that would do me good.

2) This is an article I’ve been waiting a few days for: What if the Christmas bomb had exploded? Did the Nigerian terrorist have enough explosive to bring down the plane? The answer seems to be “Maybe, but probably not.”

3) Lunch Lady Paper Dolls! Not your average lunch lady, either–it’s the crime fighting lunch lady from the popular comics.

4) Pride and Prejudice, told through emoticons. This is awesome.

5) The Venn Diagram of Cookie Status.

6) The difficult, difficult work of plotting AVATAR.

7) Screenwriters are trained to fail the Bechdel Test. “Ego and laziness – the intrepid supervillain team!” via Jim Hines.

Giftmas

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This Christmas, my wife bought me a Wii Fit Plus and a huge (as in eight inch by five inch tin with a candy bar in it. At first, I was surprised by this. Wouldn’t the “Dark Chocolate Caramel & Sea Salt Bark” counteract the exercise games?

Apparently not, because I’m not the one who was supposed to be eating it. I had, in fact, been saving it, but when I opened it today, all but an inch-and-a-half was gone.

Now, I’ve certainly been guilty of giving people things I wanted. For years I gave books that I wanted to read to my friends, with a polite request to read it when I was done. Hey, I was poor.

But those were books. When you finish a book, you can hand it to a friend. Fancy candy, not so much. My wife, she’s a smart woman. Oh, and it’s really good candy.

I just got home

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… and found the cover art for Game of Cages waiting in my inbox.

!!!

I don’t have permission to share it yet, so I will have to share my excitement instead.

:-D

It’s not “selling children”. It’s “selling parenting rights.”

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The (supposed) moral implications of selling children according to libertarians.

Having said that much, I’m sure you know exactly what you’ll find at the other end of that link.

Reviews for Child of Fire, part 9

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This time I have some interesting ones, but they’re still… Behind the cut! Continue reading

Quote of the day

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This is a long one, from an interview with Terry Rossio, one of the highest-paid screenwriters working today, and the man who runs the Wordplay site, which is full of writerly advice. I learned a lot on the Wordplay message boards, and in the columns, and I learned a lot from this interview (even though I’m supposed to be MAN BITES WORLD.

Anyway, this is about screenwriting, naturally, not writing books, but I think it’s pertinent:

JRM (interviewer): How did you break in, and how did you come to be where you are now?

Terry Rossio: I’m going to try to not give the usual boilerplate answers in this interview, and that means not going along with false presumptions, no matter how seemingly benign. The question about breaking in seems perfectly legit, but really it’s not. A writer must create compelling work, and then try to sell it. Once sold, the writer has to do the same thing again. It’s really not true that the writer ‘breaks in’—that’s an artifact of the belief that the person is being judged, not the work, and also of the belief that there is an inside and an outside, which I don’t think exists. There are too many screenwriters out there with only a single credit for there to be an inside, and too many writers on the outside making sales, to too many markets which are either new, changing, or undefined.

In truth buyers are just not that organized, your buyer is not my buyer, or in some cases, you can become your own buyer. Courtney Hunt was nominated for an Academy Award this year for best screenplay for Frozen River, and she’s never sold a screenplay. Is she on the inside or the outside? In truth, anyone, at any time, can come up with South Park or Superman or Sandman, and that’s all that matters.

And I can’t resist adding this one:

Screenwriters are the Charlie Browns of Hollywood, and everyone else holds the football.

I recommend reading the whole interview. Yeah, it’s a little long, but the stuff on constructing a story is wonderful

Remembering 2009 as it should be remembered

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By the worst movie of the year!

It played in four theaters, and I’m told the distributor asked the theater owners to burn the prints so they wouldn’t have to pay to have them shipped back.

Here’s the trailer, which I imagine was supposed to interest viewers instead of drive them, laughing, to other theaters.

“They’ve got, uh, printers in the basement you can use.”

Public Access TV would be a step up for these guys.

New morning, new year

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This past year saw a lot of changes for me. Child of Fire (Amazon.com | Indiebound.org) came out, obviously, which is a goal I’ve been working toward for a long, long time.

But I also went through a round of major revisions on Game of Cages (Amazon.com | Indiebound.org) which was extremely challenging and made me question myself and my actual writing/career plans. I went to San Diego Comic Con and endured the press of a hundred thousand people. I did face-to-face interviews. I did a signing.

Basically, I came out of my shell (a little). I can’t say I liked it much, but I’m willing to do what I have to. Let’s call it a year of personal growth opportunities (translation: I was pushed into a lot of uncomfortable situations).

One thing I didn’t do, which I’d planned to do, was steal time from my schedule for exercise. I’m not any bigger than I was at the start of the year, but I’m holding steady at a point I don’t want to be in. More on that later.

One thing I learned that I didn’t expect was that I don’t read fast enough to be a writer. It’s not just that I take forever to do my research, I take forever to do my revisions, too. I only read 15 books a year.

It’s untenable and has to change. I’ve already started working on this, but I’ll have to put more effort into it this year.

And, since so many others are doing it: Ten years ago, I was working for Children’s Hospital in Seattle (temping, actually), while they stocked up on medical supplies in anticipation of Y2K. In the years since, I tried to move to Los Angeles to pursue screenwriting, ditched that idea. I tried my hand at low-budget filmmaking but found I wasn’t suited for it. I started writing novels and found success. My family came damn close to bankruptcy because of health care issues, but we came through it, stronger than ever.

And of course my son was born. I don’t talk about him too much here for his privacy’s sake, but he changed my whole life; I remember the time before he was born as though it had been lived by a different person.

New morning, new year. I’m going to start working on book 3 now.