Writer Perspective v. Reader Perspective: Is Fantasy a Plot Element?

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Holy crap, you guys, I have so many browser tabs open to read/link to/comment on and no enthusiasm for the job. I’m tempted to just create a giant link salad so I can be rid of them and their spinning beach ball of death.

But first, there’s a post I’ve been meaning to respond to for exactly one year, so I’m going to get it out of the way today, 365 days after it was posted.

My original post: Superheroes Are Not a Genre, in which I said that fantasy was defined by a plot element.

The response: Fantasy is not a plot element, by LJ user barbarienne (who not so incidentally did the interior design work for The Great Way, who helped me find a printer and cover designer, and was generally indispensable during the publication process. She’s the reason those books look as good as they do.)

My original post was about genres and how to combine them. Genres are defined in different ways: how they make the reader feel, what sort of plot question they have, where they’re set. What barbarienne didn’t like was that I defined fantasy by plot and not by setting.

Her post largely focuses on the importance of worldbuilding. For ex: But it is only in genre fantasy where the created setting is why the readers came here. [I removed a footnote from the middle of that sentence.] Note that she wrote “created setting” because there are several genres where the setting is central to reader interest, such as westerns and historicals, but those settings are re-created. Only science fiction blah blah blah, she covered that in her post, which I hope you’ve read.

And I agree with most of what she says. For the most part, fantasy readers love setting above all else, and some are seeking novelty while others are seeking the familiar. It’s why so many fantasy novels seem like travelogues. Even urban fantasy that’s supposedly set in our world contains sections that read like The Smart Tourist Guide To Secret Places.

But the thing is, I wasn’t talking about the reader’s experience of fantasy. I was talking about the issues a creator has to consider when mixing genres. For example, if you’re creating a fantasy/western, you could just add magic to a story set in Dodge City. You could, if you wanted, create a pseudo-Old West map in the way that other writers create pseudo-medieval maps, but you don’t have to. The magic a writer adds to Dodge City changes the type of story you can tell there, and while it might change some of the characters (gun-slinging wizard?) it doesn’t have to. But it will always change the way the plot progresses. Even if they’re stock western characters with nothing fantastical about them, if they’re facing a dragon or cursed dueling pistols or telepathic cattle rustlers, the fantasy elements affect the plot.

Fantasy readers, with their particular reading protocols, may not experience it that way. “It’s the old west with dragons!” they’d say, as though it was an entry in one of Rick Steve’s books. Fantasy can be defined in several ways, but among the fans of the genre, they’re looking for a interesting fantastical setting, but from the outside, readers think of it in terms of a story containing things that “aren’t real” (often with the implication that they are risible, childish, or a waste of time).

Okay. Let me backtrack a bit to my own books: when it was clear that Child of Fire was popular among fantasy readers who also loved mysteries and thrillers, Del Rey tried to push the book by sending it to mystery/crime reviewers, too. It’s a novel that crossed genres! Why not expect it to beyond the overlap of fantasy and crime into readers of crime novels?

But it didn’t. Crime/mystery readers and reviewers were mostly uninterested. (I say “mostly” because I got some very nice feedback from readers who wouldn’t ordinarily touch a fantasy novel; they only read it because they knew my wife and were surprised by how much they enjoyed it.) Why? It wasn’t the setting. It wasn’t even the general plot questions (Two people arrive in town to find and kill a very bad man). It was the fantastical elements that made up the plot: the spells, the spell book, the monsters, etc.

And if you think Spell books that summon monsters are part of the worldbuilding, you’re not wrong. But they are also elements of the plot, and powerful influences on the characters. In fact, they are all those things at once; as a writer, I can’t think of them in any other way. The temptation that Frodo feels to put on the One Ring is not just a question of character (Frodo can resist where others can’t) and it’s not just a plot question (can he resist temptation for the whole journey) and it’s not just evidence at the way magic works in the setting of Middle Earth. It’s all those things at once, and they are inextricable.

So, to sum up:

1. Speaking generally, fantasy readers read fantasy because they are looking for setting.
2. Speaking generally, fantasy readers experience fantastical story elements as worldbuilding first, character and plot elements second, because as much as they love great characters and exciting plots, setting is the commonplace attraction.
3. Speaking generally, non-fantasy readers experience fantastical story elements in a variety of ways, but typically as elements of the plot. In other words, fantasy readers -> “This is a school where kids learn magic!” / other people -> “These kids overcome their problems by casting spells.”
4. Search your feelings. You know number three is true.
5. For a creator who is combining fantasy with other genres, the fantasy elements may be related to the setting but it’s more likely that the fantasy elements will be plot-based.
6. If it’s unclear what I mean by “plot-based” well, consider questions like: “How can the characters achieve their ends?” “What obstacles interfere with the characters’ efforts?” “What goal are they trying to achieve?” Those are plot questions.
7. For example: Among all the space ships and robots, Star Wars has wizards who use telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, and can shoot blue lightning from their fingertips. When a creator is trying to decide what a character should do next, all those (fantastical) elements are on the table.
8. Some people will try to argue that the presence of fantastical elements indicates a fantasy setting. Those people are wrong. A book set in our New York City, but with jewelry thieves who are secretly dragons, is a fantasy plot in a mundane setting.
9. Which means I believe writers can/must sometimes do fantasy worldbuilding in mundane settings.
10. Those fantastical plot elements can be a tough sell to readers outside the genre, but not as tough as it used to be.

Now I remember why I put off responding to this post, because it’s so much easier to cruise Twitter reading jokes like:

A Giftmas Suggestion (Not Book Related)

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You know how jazz of 50+ years ago was vibrant, complex, commercial art? You know how modern jazz is a kind of high art designed to please knowledgeable aficionados but not the average listener?

While I was on vacation in Lisbon, I found out about an album called Once Upon a Time in Portugal, which is just now available on iTunes.

What it is: complex, vibrant, accessible music aimed at a general audience and played by really great musicians. Basically, it’s excellent commercial art.

Play the previews, for real. For me, I think this music perfectly suits a certain mood. Check it out.

Portugal, Day Twelve: No Pix

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Today was Sunday.

By this point, my legs were aching to a degree that I can’t readily dismiss as simple soreness. Shit was painful. I did my best to take time off, but it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough.

No pix today, obviously.

Portugal, Day Eleven: Sintra

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On this day we went to Sintra—which is just a short distance north of Lisboa, and very near the coast—to see the Moorish castle there. It’s what my sister-in-law referred to often as the “storybook castle” because it looks like something out of a fairy tale.

That was a deliberate choice, as it turns out. King Ferdinand II decided to have the castle restored in keeping with the Portuguese version of Victorian aesthetics. Gardens, moss, and crooked trees were all mixed with the beautifully ruined walls and buildings.

Storybook. Unfortunately, it was more elaborate art installation than useful reference material, so I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures (to my wife’s annoyance). Also, it sat atop a tall mountain, so not only did I have my usual twinges of anxiety from the height of a wall, there was the long, long cliff faces on the other side. Yeah, the view was panoramic, when I could pry my clutching fingers from the stonework and lift my head to take a look.

It didn’t help that I was primed for anxiety by the ride up the mountainside. We rode—standing room only—on a full-sized bus that swung through switchback after switchback. Fast, too: the driver knew the route well and he was rushing up paying tourists up and down the slopes.

Which meant I had to hold on for deal life while looking down through the windows at the slopes we were zooming past.

I didn’t get too many pictures, and everyone was a little too burned out to make the trip to the other hill and see the Palace, so home we went for quiet time and a chance to catch up with old friends.

Portugal, Day 11

Spoiler-filled review of The Force Awakens

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I know that social media will replicate the first few lines of a blog post, so I won’t put anything spoilery right here at the front. Also, I’ll use a cut.

But let me say that I mostly enjoyed it but didn’t think it was all that great. I certainly liked it less than John Scalzi did. Light sabers are still the most cinematic idea ever, but as for the rest of the story?

Meh.

And please don’t ask me to “turn my brain off.”
Continue reading

Ruining a story with a head-fake ending (Spoilers for KRAMPUS)

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This post is going to be filled is SPOILERS for the movie KRAMPUS.

[Added later: Hey new visitors, after reading this, why not click the book cover in the sidebar? It’ll take you to the page showing all my books, and you can read click on one to read a free sample. That’s what this site is for, after all.]

I know. Literally zero of you care about this movie, but I took my son (for nefarious reasons[1]) expecting it to be a poor man’s GREMLINS, and I was mostly right. It wasn’t gory, but it wasn’t as funny or subversive as it imagined it was.

And the ending ruined the movie.

The beginning is pretty great: “It’s Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas” begins to play over a slow-motion door-buster shopper rampage through a department store. People get trampled, they fight over toys, employees with huge grins on their faces taze people. It’s stylish and fun.

Then the movie focuses in on a family and their awful Christmas. Briefly, upscale yuppie family awaits the arrival of their downscale redneck relations, and no one is even bothering to hide their contempt for each other.

Which means that the movie’s hero, young Max (who is too old to still believe in Santa, but believes anyway for the sake of the holiday) gets fed up and tears up his letter to the jolly old elf.

This summons Santa’s shadow, the demon Krampus, who “comes not to give, but to take.” Krampus himself doesn’t do much except carry around a bag full of evil toys and gingerbread cookies. He also has scary-looking elves. In all, people are killed, kidnapped, or devoured.

Of course the family bands together in the face of all this trouble and learn to care about each other. The movie forgets that Max is the protagonist, letting his parents do all the protagging, and, you know, it’s fine. It forgets to be a satire, but it does have a demon teddy bear so whatever.

But what really kills the film (in an interesting way) is the ending. I mentioned SPOILERS, didn’t I? Here’s the thing: the final shot shows the family in Krampus Hell. Basically, they’re celebrating Christmas around the tree, but they’re all trapped inside a snow globe, which is placed on a shelf with a whole bunch of others, suggesting that these people will be stuck together forever.

Which is a fine ending for a PG-13 monster movie, but they way they got there simply didn’t work.

First, you have the scene the backstory sets up: the whole family has been taken but Max remains behind as a cautionary tale.

But Max won’t have it. He takes the Krampus bell (which sort of works, given the context) and demands his family back. He throws the bell, it lands in the snow, the ground cracks open, and a fiery pit is revealed.

I’m thinking Krampus and all his elves and toys gets sucked into Hell? But nope. The pit to Hell is part of Krampus’s MO, and they pitch a cousin into it.

Which leads Max to weep for his family and ask for them back. Krampus reaches out with one of those fakey prosthetic monster fingers and wipes away the tear, leading me to think Will the monster undo everything for the sake of a real tear? Nope. He just laughs and dangles Max over the pit.

Then Max says he’s sorry. He apologizes for losing his faith in the holiday (which is bullshit, considering the shit he’s put up with) and I’m wondering if this could be…

Nope. Krampus drops him, and he does the slow-mo scream & fall into the pit…

And wakes up in his bed. It’s Christmas morning, and everyone is downstairs, and nothing is broken or ruined, and everyone is happy to be together. LOOK GUYS IT WAS ALL A DREAM.

At this point, my son leaned over and said: “He’s going to find a Krampus bell and realize it all happened” which is close enough to the truth to win the kewpie doll because when he unwraps a gift and finds it, everyone remembers, and the camera pulls back to show them trapped in the snow globe, and Krampus walking away.

But I was already soured on the whole thing. Teasing those other, softer endings (the tear, the apology, the dream) gave me the sinking feeling that I was going to see a shitty ending. Snatching away a shitty ending in favor of a different one/a pretty good ending isn’t fun or satisfying. At best, it’s a relief.

You don’t want me thinking “Thank god they did x instead of y.”

Anyway, Krampus: an okay movie with a really underwhelming ending.

[1] Nefarious reasons explained: Giftmas is upon us and my kid wants nothing. There’s almost nothing to buy for him, and it’s a little frustrating. So, knowing that he needs clothes and that he has a particular taste, my wife and I figured he would do well at Old Navy.

She picked something that he could get her for the holiday (inexpensive PJs) and, while we were there, he asked if he could get some stuff, too.

End result, $150 of desperately needed clothes added to his Giftmas pile, and he thinks it was his idea.

Portugal, Day Ten

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When I dragged my kid to the castle in Tomar, I said: When are we going to get another chance to see a castle?

Well, derr on me, there’s a castle right within Lisboa city limits. Of course there is. My wife’s Italian friends are historians, so we thought it would be educational to see a castle with them.

But first! A church. Churches and castles, man. That’s what Europe’s all about.

The church was actually the Lisboa Cathedral, and it was cooler than the castle, but only once you paid to see the treasury and the cloisters. The paid parts contained an archaeological dig that revealed Roman roads and sewers, Moorish homes, and a bunch of Christian sepulchers. Have some pics below.

The castle was pretty crowded, as you’d expect, and it was full of money-making opportunities for the city. There was a fee to enter and lots of opportunities to buy souvenirs and espresso. It was still pretty cool, but a little Disney-fied.

By then my feet were hurting like whoa, because the public transportation to those sites is packed. We stopped for lunch at a little restaurant, where the waiter talked us out of the meal we wanted to order into the house special. It turned out to be, once again, meat w/ two carbs, no veg. I’m pretty much over Portuguese food.

Portugal, Day Ten

The Way into Chaos makes the PW/Booklife “Self-Pub Stars of 2015”

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Self-Publishing Stars of 2015 is the list of self-published books that received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly’s Booklife service, which allows self-publishers to submit work for review in that venerable institution.

And I’m on it.

Apparently, only 18 books in the fiction category received stars this year. That’s a pretty small list, and I’m pleased to be on it.

Also, next time I should seriously consider how my titles turn out in alphabetized lists.

You can buy the book here

Portugal, Day Nine: Turkey Day

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Today was Thanksgiving in Portugal (almost two months early) for my wife’s American friends who have been living in Italy.

There’s not much to tell, so I won’t. I cooked a lot. It went over well. I met one of my sister-in-law’s Portuguese friends and my wife’s friend’s partner from Italy. Both tried to greet me with kisses on the cheek, but I out-awkwarded them. I did not go on vacation to kiss people I don’t know, and if that’s a requirement I should have been warned ahead of time.

So, instead of talking about the nice time we had, I’m going to talk about a few other things. Just a quick summing up of some of the fun things that have been going on:

1. Portuguese sidewalks are made of calçada[1] which is really just a whole lot of similar, mostly square, stones laid out in a grid. Many of the websites that talk about it address the art/mosaic qualities it sometimes has: In downtown Lisboa, the sidewalks have all sorts of designs. In Tomar, they were Templar crosses. But those are in the historic districts, not the regular neighborhoods. In the rest of the country, it’s just plain yellow stones. Here’s a pic.

Calçada

Yeah, it’s not flat. I’m sure it’s super-sturdy and resilient, but man is it unfriendly to feet and bicycle tires.

2. Here’s how you order coffee in Lisboa:
Bom dia. Queria um cafe, fazh favor.
Pronounced: “Bohn DEEya. Keh-REE-ya oon caff-ay, fazh fav-or”
Translated: Good day. I would like one coffee, please.

If you want two coffees, you say “doysh” cafe. For three, “traysh” cafe. “Doysh” has become my new favorite word.

The “cafe” you get is a straight espresso shot in a tiny cup, with a packet of sugar on the side. To get other kinds of coffee, check this out: http://americaninportugaltours.com/how-to-order-savor-coffee-in-portugal/

3. If it’s after noon, you can switch out “cafe” for “imperial” (imp-ear-ee-AHL), which is a schooner of beer. The house beer is generally a light bock. If you want a full pint, you order something else, which I don’t remember because I’ve never ordered one.

But that’s only in the southern part of the country. In the north, it’s something else.

4. It seems to me that Portuguese sounds like a mix of Spanish and Russian.

5. Lisboa has pushed my tolerance for funny waiters who do intrusive comedy routines into the red zone. Let’s consider this an opportunity for my personal growth.

6. Portugal, Brazil, and several other Portuguese-speaking countries recently enacted an agreement that would bring their different versions of the language into one. A number of changes and simplifications have been made with regards to the way people spell certain vowel sounds, and with the elimination of silent letters in words. However, the weirdest thing is that Portuguese now includes letters it didn’t have before: K, W, and Y.

Looking around at all the Portuguese signs on stores and on book covers, I have never seen those letters used, ever. The only place I’ve seen them is in English language text and in graffiti. Google tells me that “GWK”, which is all over the place here, stands for “Graffiti Word Krew.”

7. Portugal has a lot of graffiti.

[1] pronounced “cal-SAH-da” I believe. In Portuguese, the “C” always makes a “K” sound when the vowel that follows it is an “A”, “O”, or “U”. If the vowels that follow it are an “E” or “I”, it makes an “S” sound.

But what if you want an “S” sound in the middle of a word with a following “A”, “O”, or “U”? Then, you change the “C” to an “Ç”. That’s a “cedilla” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ç

“Business! Mankind was my business” Annual repost.

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This is my annual repost of my favorite version of A Christmas Carol, animated for TV.

If the embedding doesn’t work, the link is here.

It’s only 25 minutes long, but it’s full of amazing creative choices: Scrooge’s candle on the dark stair, Ignorance and Want, the transitions that Scrooge takes with the Ghost of Christmas Past, the hands, the waves and clouds, and so many other things.

Really beautiful. If you haven’t seen it before, treat yourself.