Category: Batman

I blabbed on last time about characters. This time I wanted to scribble a few thoughts on motivation. To be specific, one less-than-desirable kind of motivation that crops up all over the place. While it’s most noticeable in films and television, you can also find it in books, and in several graphic novels.

I’ve come to call it the insanity defense, and like most times you’ve heard this phrase invoked, it’s still a cheap cop-out. The insanity defense is when the police detective, the brainy college girl, the private investigator, the spunky reporter, Shag, Scooby, and the rest of the gang have spent the entire story chasing a killer. It’s not always a killer, mind you. Might be a serial rapist, a stalker with hopes for the big leagues, something like that. Anyway, they run down clues, have close calls, and spend the whole time trying to make sense, one way or another, of what’s been happening. And finally, at the end, the mysterious killer is cornered and his secret layed bare for all to see.

He’s insane.

Yup. Mad as a hatter. That’s why the killer kills people.

He’s insane.

That’s why he wears the mask, laughs at the sight of blood, and played all those mind games with the police. It’s also why he disguised himself as a woman, left the poetry-based clues, used only a 1967-issue fire axe to commit the decapitations, cries for his mommy when he gets shot, and only listens to punk music. It’s also why he’s able to ignore being shot seventeen times and stabbed nine, walk through an inferno, slip through holes smaller than shoeboxes, hold his breath for twelve minutes underwater, move faster than the speed of sound, and apparently teleport just by moving back into a dark corner of any given room.

He’s insane.

I’m not actually picking on any one real novel or film, mind you. Although I could pull up a quick list of at least a dozen stories I’ve read or seen in the past two years that fall back on two or three of these points. In at least half of them, the insane killer is a she, by the way.

This is probably the weakest motivation a character can have, because all it does is show the audience you couldn’t be bothered to work out any real motivation. Why did he do all of this? He’s insane. How did she manage to do that? Well, she’s insane. That explains everything, right?

Well… doesn’t it?

I know I’m in the minority, but I’ve never liked the movie Se7en for exactly this reason. As the screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker progresses, the killer’s methods and motives become more and more vague. John Doe (played by Kevin Spacey) goes from finding people who exemplify a sin and killing them, to making people exemplify a sin and killing them, and then it finally all resolves in a bizarre double-twist suicide-by-cop. It’s one thing to find a grossly obese man who eats twenty-five pounds of groceries a day and say he embodies gluttony. It’s another to decapitate a man’s wife, show him the head, and then try to claim he embodies wrath because he kills you for it. There’s no consistency in his method (and thus, his motive) and this glaring inconsistency, in my mind, overpowers the powerful performances by Morgan, Brad, and Gwenyth.

Now, this isn’t to say insanity is a bad thing in fiction. It just isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card (or, as the fancy folks say, carte blanche) that lets you do whatever you want. Novels and films are filled with characters on the brink of insanity, or well past it. The thing is—they’re still developed characters, not just a catch-all excuse for an explanation. Mrs. Rochester, Hannibal Lecter, Renfield, Tyler Durden, and of course the Joker. All of these folks have thought processes that don’t quite jibe with the general public. However, they also all have distinct personalities and limitations. We’d all call foul if Hannibal Lector slipped out of a straight jacket by force of will, if Renfield survived falling ten stories and was still fighting, or if the Joker began butchering people and eating them with fava beans. Insanity doesn’t make them superhuman, not does it make them completely irrational. To quote one madman, “Just because I’m crazy doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”

If you’re just going to use insanity as an easy excuse for whatever your character needs to do, don’t be surprised if people if people put your writing on par with April Fool’s Day, Friday the 13th, or some other bad 80’s horror film.

About a year ago I was lucky enough to end up with a new laptop. Not that there’s anything wrong with my loyal desktop, but I was heading off on a four week business trip to the frozen north and I needed something more portable with wireless capability. It’s far from the most stunning or powerful model on the market, and the battery only lasts about two hours a shot (less with music), but I can easily say it’s almost tripled my productivity. I write these columns on it, I pounded out the majority of a screenplay to meet a contest deadline, and started poking at my second novel for the first time (in all honesty) in about a year.

In fact, I barely do any creative writing at all on my desktop these days. Sure it gets second drafts and polishes, but it’s become much more of a “social” machine now. A place for e’mail, Dawn of War, and Cities of M’Dhoria. Although it’s been only a dozen months or so since I got the laptop, this small evolutionary step only really stood out when I was thinking about this month’s column, where I really wanted to talk about legal pads.

No, trust me. This is all going somewhere.

One of the biggest causes of writer’s block for all of us, in my mind, is simple fear. Fear that the words that are about to flow down and out through our fingertips, dance across the keyboard, and appear on that screen are going to be anything less than Oscar/ Emmy/ Nobel-prize-winning gold. That they are not going to be worth writing down. So we pause, we stall, we overthink, and eventually, whether consciously or not, we’ve put off writing for another day.

Thus, the legal pad.

Many years back, when I was in college and mammoths were crossing the land bridge into North America, there was a sidebar article in Writer’s Digest defending the use of blue ink and legal pads as a valid “method” of writing because it frees the writer up creatively. It was so ridiculously simple and true, it’s stuck with me for almost twenty years, and now I’m sharing it with you.

A legal pad is about the lowest form of paper there is. Seriously. That’s why lawyers use them (zing!). They’re cheap, disposable, bright yellow, and absolutely no one is ever going to accept a screenplay written on one. Absolutely. No. One.

What a relief.

That means whatever we do on that legal pad is not going to be seen. We can rest assured going in that it doesn’t need to be gold. In fact, it can be crap. Complete crap. No need to worry about spelling or grammar or fact-checking. We are off the hook and utterly free to scribble out three or four nonsensical, utterly inaccurate pages of crap every day in that horrible handwriting that baffles our parents, friends, and loved ones. A legal pad is a safe place. We can scrawl out anything at all without care or concern. Most importantly, without fear.

Write down that new screenplay. Write out Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon or The Princess Bride from memory. Write a list of college friends or family pets or people you’ve slept with or people you want to sleep with. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing as long as you are writing. All you need to do is put pen to paper and write.

Because that’s what it’s all about. Getting the words flowing down and out into the world. Any words. Once you’ve got momentum, it’s easy enough to slip off onto that new script, and before you know it you’re two or three pages closer to another Oscar statue on your mantle. Or at least a few more bucks in your bank account.

This is what all of us, as writers, need to do. Find a place or a format where, bizarre as it sounds, the content doesn’t matter. A legal pad. A laptop. A placemat. A PDA. A way that we can just write, just put out anything we can that fills up that bright yellow page. Without worry of censure or criticism of any type.

This little Gateway laptop has become my legal pad. I can sit here and stab away at this odd-shaped, compacted keyboard and not worry about the quality of my output. I know absolutely no one’s ever going to see what’s on it (except maybe my girlfriend leaning over the couch to peek, or my cat sprawled across the keyboard). So I can whip out the first draft of this column while watching The Batman/Superman Movie (Kevin Conroy is the one, true animated Batman) and not feel at all guilty about some of the references and examples I toss out, since I know they will never, ever see print. They probably won’t even make it to an editor’s desk to be red-lined.

Find your legal pad. Write on it every single day. Anything at all, because the important thing is to write.

And to read next month’s column.