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reading, 'riting, and rambling
Somebody 'round here recently posted about a highly-recommended book they'd read and really liked, until they got to the end and realized the author had killed all the queers, and I can't find the post again and wish I could, because I'm wondering if they read the book I just read...
It did get me thinking, though, about Kill Your Queers as a story formula, and why I was so surprised when this book did it, even though this book basically telegraphed from beginning to end that a certain character was going to be toast. And I realized that the first time I ever encountered that as any kind of a story element (really, the first time I ever encountered explicitly non-het canon characters) was in Diane Duane's Tale of the Five, where the founding myth of the culture is the story of Lion and Eagle, a pair of male lovers who take up divine power to defeat the Shadow, even though they know they will die of it, and they do.
And through the series, the main characters slowly come to the realization that to defeat their time's great evil, they are probably going to have to re-enact the myth, and among the party are a pair of male lovers, each a direct descendant of Lion or Eagle, who are learning how to work with power, so you go into the final battle FULLY EXPECTING, as they half-expect, that the two of them will have to become Lion and Eagle and die. And sure enough, as the battle gets really dire, Prince #1 takes up the mantle of Lion knowing what it will mean, and he sees Eagle fighting with him, and together they beat back the Dark, and all is triumph and tragedy--
And then we cut to Prince #2, who finds him afterward, and is astonished and overjoyed to see him still alive, and he says, paraphrase, "Yeah, after we were done the Goddess told me she didn't see the need to tell the same story over and over again, so we have to live to clean up the mess instead. Didn't she say that to you?" and Prince #2 says, "Actually the Eagle wasn't me, it was our friend the Queen, her husband and ex-girlfriend are looking for her now."
...So, I was trained from very early that if a story looks like it's going to kill the queers, what it's actually going to do is make a point about how dying is easy, living is harder but better (and also that many kinds of love are the kind you can sacrifice with).
And then of course I read a ton of slash, a significant percentage of which could be summarized as Being Gay Will Save Your Life Even If You Die In Canon. It's probably not unrelated that Diane Duane reads slash.
Anyway, so the result is that with books like the one I just read, I pick up on ALL the markers that mean This Queer Character Is Toast, and I interpret them to mean "clearly, this character is going to Learn How To Live, that is how this kind of story goes" and then it hits out of NOWHERE when the author, predictably, kills them.
...So anyway. Other than reading the novels you all recommended I have still been trying to figure out how to write original stuff, and as part of that I'm reading a how-to-write book, which I picked up solely because it was the only one available at my library that was supposed to be focused on revision, since when I asked y'all for 'how to revision' recs I got no bites. :P
Anyway, spoilers: 3/4 of the book is just a retread of dude's previous 'how to write a saleable novel' book, and only the very end is about revision. But! Tying back into the bit above about killing your characters! I got to the chapter on characters, and the section where he was pushing very hard on how you have to make sure your reader is invested in your characters, all your characters, make them care! make them care a lot! Even if it's just a minor walk-on who will be killed two chapters later!
And I legit recoiled, and it took me a bit to figure out why, but, okay: look, as a reader, me getting really invested in a character is a multi-year commitment, you know? A lot of time and energy and emotion involved. I especially don't want to care a whole lot about the character you plan to kill! That makes me sad! Fuck you I hate this book and I hate that there is no fixit fic for it go away.
So I don't really know what to do with that reaction. And certainly 'make your readers invested in the character' is super-common writing advice, and I've certainly complained plenty of times that I didn't like a book because I didn't care about the characters, and every time I've read that before I've just nodded and thought, that makes sense, but I've never hit that advice in that blunt a way that soon after reading a novel where the author killed all his queers, I guess.
And a lot of what I read is fanfic, where the characters come pre-invested and if you kill them I can just find another story so it's okay.
...But I do also think that saying that the key to good characters is to make the reader get deeply invested in them is, maybe, not something I agree with 100%, now that I'm thinking hard about it. Because, among other things, as a reader, I find that kind of book exhausting. Give me one or two characters to get deeply invested in, and if you do a good job, then I'll care about the others because they care about them, and it'll be fine. But when I pick up a novel I don't know yet, I'm looking for friends, not new life-partners.
But also, I think as a characterization goal, it has a... poor failure mode? Like, most of the time I'm happy with a book if the main characters are people I'm interested in knowing about, and people I am enjoying time in the shoes of, and maybe most importantly, are believably people. And if you flub one of those a little bit, I still have a reasonable chance of enjoying the book, and getting something out of it that I like. And if you hit on one of those just right, and happen to touch on one of the things that make me buy in, I might even get super-invested in them.
If, on the other hand, you put everything into making them INCREDIBLY COMPELLING so the reader CAN'T HELP BUT CARE, and you miss the mark a even little bit - and judging by some of the books I've read, it's pretty easy to miss the mark, at least for some significant fraction of your audience - you get overwrought, frequently unlikeable and/or unbelievable characters who actively turn me off, or if you're lucky you get characters who grab the reader for the length of an action story and are then utterly forgettable.
So. IDK where I'm going with this. And here I am critiquing standard writing advice from the great height of having recently written, but not revised, about two-and-a-half novelettes. But I still think that maybe I will shift my characterization goal from "keep the reader invested in the person" to "keep the reader interested interested in the person."
..and speaking of two-and-a-half novelettes, which is really one novelette, 60% of a novelette, and 90% of a novelette, let's talk about endings.
The orig story I'm currently trying to finish is nearly finished, and has been stuck at nearly finished for a very, very long time. I just keep writing stuff and hoping the ending will come and it doesn't. I know where the plot finishes - the POV character comes to a decision, or rather decides not to decide - but I don't know how to make that an ending that'll actually make the story feel finished.
With fanfic - as you have probably noticed if you've been reading me for awhile - I usually just go 'eh, I'm tired of messing with this, so I will tack on a final reaction shot, call that a denoument, and post it' but I am well aware that is lazy as anything and, judging by the comments I get assuming there will be more, really unsatisfying.
And it's not that I can't do an ending I like: the ending to story #1, while it was like pulling teeth to get it out, is one I'm pretty happy with. But that was a much simpler story structure - just up and then down and around to the beginning again - and it was still awful to figure out. Story #2 is in no way that well-behaved, and it's a much more ambivalent story anyway (It's possible I just have the wrong ending and I need to do revisions first, the story needs a lot of revision, but I don't want to call it on the draft without getting to *an* end, the only way I'm figuring out what needs to be revised is by writing the crappy version first.)
I was already thinking about this because when I asked for Hugo recs, I mentioned that I was unlikely to nominate something that wasn't a 'complete, stand-alone story', and then we hit on different definitions of what makes a complete story and what is too much of a cliffhanger to count as stand-alone.
I read Seraphina and Shadow-scale off that recs post after one of you said they were planning to nominate them as a complete series, and they are definitely two parts of one story, but as I got to thinking about it, I realized that I actually found the ending of Seraphina more satisfying than the ending of Shadow-Scale. Seraphina ends by tying off all the major plot threads it raised, but leaves a lot of minor things unresolved or only partially resolved, and ends with the immediate problem solved, but a very obvious quest outlined for the main character to pick up the rest of those threads in, and a looming war to fight. Shadow-Scale, on the other hand, ends with pretty much all the mysteries solved and plot problems fixed and certainly it's a little bit open - it's clear that part of the happy-ever-after is going to involve a lot of changes coming - but there is no major, obvious, 'this is what we need to tackle next'.
A lot of people would probably say that the ending of the first book was an opening that clearly needed and expected a sequel and it doesn't work well on its own. And don't get me wrong, I picked up and read book two as soon as humanly possible. And yet. I really do feel like "Immediate problem is solved, major plot threads finished, we're safe and have breathing space and we know exactly what to do next" works as a complete ending for me.
It's, like, a horrible ending to torture readers with, I guess (but they can always write fanfic!) but I almost, IDK--
So traditionally there's two ways to end a story, right? It's either "They lived happily ever after to the end of their days" or "Rocks fell, pretty much everyone died." I am not going to talk as much about the unhappy ending version because I am still internally weeping from the kill-the-queers story. But the first one - like, if you take the most cliche form, where there's a wedding right before the happily-ever-after, you can either read that wedding as "And they were Married now so nothing interesting happened to them ever again" - which is basically, metaphorically, the Rocks Fall version - or it treats the marriage like the beginning of a magical journey together.
Which is in its own way a version of the "ending" that works by outlining the next quest, really. (Which is also how I would say, for example, Ancillary Justice ended, with that book's quest and character arcs nicely finished and a clean new quest just starting up, as opposed to Ancillary Sword, which really didn't function as a complete story for me; it was too much just setup for Mercy and not much actually resolved. And Mercy - interestingly - ends once again with the obvious setup for another quest, one that's going to be way harder than the one that just finished.)
I guess I like that kind of ending for - a bunch of reasons. Partly because it's great for fanfic, right. Partly that I spent most of my prime reading years reading series out of order as I found them used. But partly because - the kind of ending that really does make an effort to tie everything up, leave nothing hanging, etc. often feels like its own version of the wedding-as-death ending. And partly because no ending ever actually does tie everything up - because life is complicated and everything has repercussions - so what it sometimes ends up doing is feeling like it's saying none of the rest of it is important - oh, you turned the world upside down and razed a couple villages and whatever, but the hard part is over so we're done, when actually, as you know bob, winning is easy, governing's harder. And I'm not saying you have to write the governing part - that doesn't generally make as exciting a story - but when you wrap up in an ending that ignores that, it, idk, feels depthless.
And also: there's the fact that, you know, if I try to think up the ideal happy ending, it's not "and I got everything I ever wanted," it's "I got everything I ever wanted, and I know what I need to do next."
...so I don't know if that actually solved my 'how do endings' problems but at least it helped me figure out what I like in an ending. (which basically comes down to 'do what Ann Leckie and/or Diane Duane did', which probably shouldn't be a shock...)
In conclusion, writing is hard. Revising is hard. Reading is fun but makes me think too much. The end.
It did get me thinking, though, about Kill Your Queers as a story formula, and why I was so surprised when this book did it, even though this book basically telegraphed from beginning to end that a certain character was going to be toast. And I realized that the first time I ever encountered that as any kind of a story element (really, the first time I ever encountered explicitly non-het canon characters) was in Diane Duane's Tale of the Five, where the founding myth of the culture is the story of Lion and Eagle, a pair of male lovers who take up divine power to defeat the Shadow, even though they know they will die of it, and they do.
And through the series, the main characters slowly come to the realization that to defeat their time's great evil, they are probably going to have to re-enact the myth, and among the party are a pair of male lovers, each a direct descendant of Lion or Eagle, who are learning how to work with power, so you go into the final battle FULLY EXPECTING, as they half-expect, that the two of them will have to become Lion and Eagle and die. And sure enough, as the battle gets really dire, Prince #1 takes up the mantle of Lion knowing what it will mean, and he sees Eagle fighting with him, and together they beat back the Dark, and all is triumph and tragedy--
And then we cut to Prince #2, who finds him afterward, and is astonished and overjoyed to see him still alive, and he says, paraphrase, "Yeah, after we were done the Goddess told me she didn't see the need to tell the same story over and over again, so we have to live to clean up the mess instead. Didn't she say that to you?" and Prince #2 says, "Actually the Eagle wasn't me, it was our friend the Queen, her husband and ex-girlfriend are looking for her now."
...So, I was trained from very early that if a story looks like it's going to kill the queers, what it's actually going to do is make a point about how dying is easy, living is harder but better (and also that many kinds of love are the kind you can sacrifice with).
And then of course I read a ton of slash, a significant percentage of which could be summarized as Being Gay Will Save Your Life Even If You Die In Canon. It's probably not unrelated that Diane Duane reads slash.
Anyway, so the result is that with books like the one I just read, I pick up on ALL the markers that mean This Queer Character Is Toast, and I interpret them to mean "clearly, this character is going to Learn How To Live, that is how this kind of story goes" and then it hits out of NOWHERE when the author, predictably, kills them.
...So anyway. Other than reading the novels you all recommended I have still been trying to figure out how to write original stuff, and as part of that I'm reading a how-to-write book, which I picked up solely because it was the only one available at my library that was supposed to be focused on revision, since when I asked y'all for 'how to revision' recs I got no bites. :P
Anyway, spoilers: 3/4 of the book is just a retread of dude's previous 'how to write a saleable novel' book, and only the very end is about revision. But! Tying back into the bit above about killing your characters! I got to the chapter on characters, and the section where he was pushing very hard on how you have to make sure your reader is invested in your characters, all your characters, make them care! make them care a lot! Even if it's just a minor walk-on who will be killed two chapters later!
And I legit recoiled, and it took me a bit to figure out why, but, okay: look, as a reader, me getting really invested in a character is a multi-year commitment, you know? A lot of time and energy and emotion involved. I especially don't want to care a whole lot about the character you plan to kill! That makes me sad! Fuck you I hate this book and I hate that there is no fixit fic for it go away.
So I don't really know what to do with that reaction. And certainly 'make your readers invested in the character' is super-common writing advice, and I've certainly complained plenty of times that I didn't like a book because I didn't care about the characters, and every time I've read that before I've just nodded and thought, that makes sense, but I've never hit that advice in that blunt a way that soon after reading a novel where the author killed all his queers, I guess.
And a lot of what I read is fanfic, where the characters come pre-invested and if you kill them I can just find another story so it's okay.
...But I do also think that saying that the key to good characters is to make the reader get deeply invested in them is, maybe, not something I agree with 100%, now that I'm thinking hard about it. Because, among other things, as a reader, I find that kind of book exhausting. Give me one or two characters to get deeply invested in, and if you do a good job, then I'll care about the others because they care about them, and it'll be fine. But when I pick up a novel I don't know yet, I'm looking for friends, not new life-partners.
But also, I think as a characterization goal, it has a... poor failure mode? Like, most of the time I'm happy with a book if the main characters are people I'm interested in knowing about, and people I am enjoying time in the shoes of, and maybe most importantly, are believably people. And if you flub one of those a little bit, I still have a reasonable chance of enjoying the book, and getting something out of it that I like. And if you hit on one of those just right, and happen to touch on one of the things that make me buy in, I might even get super-invested in them.
If, on the other hand, you put everything into making them INCREDIBLY COMPELLING so the reader CAN'T HELP BUT CARE, and you miss the mark a even little bit - and judging by some of the books I've read, it's pretty easy to miss the mark, at least for some significant fraction of your audience - you get overwrought, frequently unlikeable and/or unbelievable characters who actively turn me off, or if you're lucky you get characters who grab the reader for the length of an action story and are then utterly forgettable.
So. IDK where I'm going with this. And here I am critiquing standard writing advice from the great height of having recently written, but not revised, about two-and-a-half novelettes. But I still think that maybe I will shift my characterization goal from "keep the reader invested in the person" to "keep the reader interested interested in the person."
..and speaking of two-and-a-half novelettes, which is really one novelette, 60% of a novelette, and 90% of a novelette, let's talk about endings.
The orig story I'm currently trying to finish is nearly finished, and has been stuck at nearly finished for a very, very long time. I just keep writing stuff and hoping the ending will come and it doesn't. I know where the plot finishes - the POV character comes to a decision, or rather decides not to decide - but I don't know how to make that an ending that'll actually make the story feel finished.
With fanfic - as you have probably noticed if you've been reading me for awhile - I usually just go 'eh, I'm tired of messing with this, so I will tack on a final reaction shot, call that a denoument, and post it' but I am well aware that is lazy as anything and, judging by the comments I get assuming there will be more, really unsatisfying.
And it's not that I can't do an ending I like: the ending to story #1, while it was like pulling teeth to get it out, is one I'm pretty happy with. But that was a much simpler story structure - just up and then down and around to the beginning again - and it was still awful to figure out. Story #2 is in no way that well-behaved, and it's a much more ambivalent story anyway (It's possible I just have the wrong ending and I need to do revisions first, the story needs a lot of revision, but I don't want to call it on the draft without getting to *an* end, the only way I'm figuring out what needs to be revised is by writing the crappy version first.)
I was already thinking about this because when I asked for Hugo recs, I mentioned that I was unlikely to nominate something that wasn't a 'complete, stand-alone story', and then we hit on different definitions of what makes a complete story and what is too much of a cliffhanger to count as stand-alone.
I read Seraphina and Shadow-scale off that recs post after one of you said they were planning to nominate them as a complete series, and they are definitely two parts of one story, but as I got to thinking about it, I realized that I actually found the ending of Seraphina more satisfying than the ending of Shadow-Scale. Seraphina ends by tying off all the major plot threads it raised, but leaves a lot of minor things unresolved or only partially resolved, and ends with the immediate problem solved, but a very obvious quest outlined for the main character to pick up the rest of those threads in, and a looming war to fight. Shadow-Scale, on the other hand, ends with pretty much all the mysteries solved and plot problems fixed and certainly it's a little bit open - it's clear that part of the happy-ever-after is going to involve a lot of changes coming - but there is no major, obvious, 'this is what we need to tackle next'.
A lot of people would probably say that the ending of the first book was an opening that clearly needed and expected a sequel and it doesn't work well on its own. And don't get me wrong, I picked up and read book two as soon as humanly possible. And yet. I really do feel like "Immediate problem is solved, major plot threads finished, we're safe and have breathing space and we know exactly what to do next" works as a complete ending for me.
It's, like, a horrible ending to torture readers with, I guess (but they can always write fanfic!) but I almost, IDK--
So traditionally there's two ways to end a story, right? It's either "They lived happily ever after to the end of their days" or "Rocks fell, pretty much everyone died." I am not going to talk as much about the unhappy ending version because I am still internally weeping from the kill-the-queers story. But the first one - like, if you take the most cliche form, where there's a wedding right before the happily-ever-after, you can either read that wedding as "And they were Married now so nothing interesting happened to them ever again" - which is basically, metaphorically, the Rocks Fall version - or it treats the marriage like the beginning of a magical journey together.
Which is in its own way a version of the "ending" that works by outlining the next quest, really. (Which is also how I would say, for example, Ancillary Justice ended, with that book's quest and character arcs nicely finished and a clean new quest just starting up, as opposed to Ancillary Sword, which really didn't function as a complete story for me; it was too much just setup for Mercy and not much actually resolved. And Mercy - interestingly - ends once again with the obvious setup for another quest, one that's going to be way harder than the one that just finished.)
I guess I like that kind of ending for - a bunch of reasons. Partly because it's great for fanfic, right. Partly that I spent most of my prime reading years reading series out of order as I found them used. But partly because - the kind of ending that really does make an effort to tie everything up, leave nothing hanging, etc. often feels like its own version of the wedding-as-death ending. And partly because no ending ever actually does tie everything up - because life is complicated and everything has repercussions - so what it sometimes ends up doing is feeling like it's saying none of the rest of it is important - oh, you turned the world upside down and razed a couple villages and whatever, but the hard part is over so we're done, when actually, as you know bob, winning is easy, governing's harder. And I'm not saying you have to write the governing part - that doesn't generally make as exciting a story - but when you wrap up in an ending that ignores that, it, idk, feels depthless.
And also: there's the fact that, you know, if I try to think up the ideal happy ending, it's not "and I got everything I ever wanted," it's "I got everything I ever wanted, and I know what I need to do next."
...so I don't know if that actually solved my 'how do endings' problems but at least it helped me figure out what I like in an ending. (which basically comes down to 'do what Ann Leckie and/or Diane Duane did', which probably shouldn't be a shock...)
In conclusion, writing is hard. Revising is hard. Reading is fun but makes me think too much. The end.
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However, I don't think I draw as sharp a line as you do between investment and being interesting/realistic. If a character is interesting, I automatically get at least somewhat invested. If I'm not invested at all, it's because the character is either uninteresting or unlikable or both.
The way a book tends to fail for me if it's going for the "make sure ALL the characters are interesting" is that the supporting characters are more interesting than the leads - the small roles get to be eccentric or flashy or fun, while the leads are dull. The writer clearly put effort into making the supporting cast fun, but (I'm guessing) relied on the roles of the leads to make readers interested in them - of course readers will be interested, they're the protagonists! Nope.
Anyway, I think if you focus on "keep the reader interested" the readers who enjoy being invested will get invested anyway.
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But, you know. I'm in online media fandom. That is my benchmark. And getting that invested in a character isn't actually a life goal of mine. And it happens even outside of the fandom I'm a part of; lots of people have fictional characters that have completely changed their lives, they just don't always hang out online in groups of other people who understand.
I guess it's something to aspire to as a writer, but as a reader, it's not something I want to happen, it's just something that happens without the reader having any say in it, and then you surface however much later and go 'what just happened to me?'.
...And. I can't say I utterly disliked any books where I was deeply invested in all the characters? But I've read a lot of books where the author was clearly trying for "emotional investment" and got "deep dislike" - and I guess that does count as emotional investment, come to think of it, it's just the kind that results in me throwing a book across the room. And I've read enough of those where if I can tell from the cover copy that it's a book that's really really banking on just that, I probably don't need to bother reading it.
(It probably doesn't help that I'm 100% aro/ace so any book that thinks sexual desire/romance/etc is going to be enough to make characters universally relateable without elaboration will probably lose me early on.)
And I've read books where I really, really didn't want to like the book, I hated everything about the book, and I wasn't actually enjoying reading it, but I had to keep going, because I was invested in the characters by that point. (The Scarlet Letter is possibly my go-to example - I hated the book, but I couldn't abandon the characters alone in that awful book, so I had to stick it out.) That is not actually a fun experience. I would much rather have been able to stop reading that book, and would probably have come away with much less bitterness toward Mr. Hawthorne, if I'd found the characters less compelling.
And I also read comics, and there are plenty of cases where I get too deeply invested to get out, and then the book switches writers or the writer stitches tracks, and...also not fun.
So, yeah, idk. If your advice for "get the reader invested" is make them believable as people, give them motivations and stakes that you establish well, write with compassion and keep the reader wanting to know them better, that is good advice I agree with, and if you do it in a balanced way, it will give you good characters that will make a fair number of your readers invested by whatever definition, and at least keep the others entertained enough to stick it out. Probably part of my reaction to this particular book's advice was that he was leaning more toward "And kill his girlfriend offscreen to give him the kind of motivation that everyone will sympathize with!" and. you know. no.
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And that's a huge part of the power of storytelling! But it's not really a power that needs to be thrown around with abandon as the basics of how to make a character (....as evidenced by some of the Tyler Durden fans I've known), because it's a really dangerous power, too.
And even when I get really invested to the extent of how invested I get, and I really like the book a lot, it's not always a great experience, because the book ends one way or another, and then I've lost this person I now care really deeply about, and it feels like I've been pushed off a cliff into cold water, and then I either sink myself in the fanfic (if there is any!) or go around for a couple weeks with a dazed expression on my face. And either way I'm not feeling super-motivated to go read more books like that anytime soon, you know?
And the people who get the really life-changing experiences - that's usually it for them, for at least a couple *years*, in terms of bonding hard with a character. So, again, not necessarily a super-efficient thing to aim for every time, as an author.
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It was very good other than that! And no particular complaints about the portrayal of said characters in general. I'm sure the author just thought he was killing the characters that would most affect our main character, because ~tragedy~, but it makes a pattern, and the pattern is "I can't imagine any story to tell about queer men except tragedy followed by death."
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You have made me want to read Morrigan in Shadow, though!
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I think you would like Morrigan in Shadow!
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