Category: zombies

            Sorry for missing last week.  When I should’ve been posting this, I was at the San Diego Comic-Con, hanging out in the Geek & Sundry lounge and watching the Welcome to Night Vale panel (I even got to ask a question about writing).  And the G&S folks gave me a free copy of the Zombies: Keep Out! board game and a card game called Love Letters.   And Felicia Day smiled at me once as she walked past.

            Y’know, in retrospect, I’m not really sorry I missed last week.

            But I am finally caught up on my sleep. I was exhausted for a while there.

            Speaking of which…

            I write a series set in a post-apocalyptic world.  It was first put out by a small press that specializes in end-of-the-world fiction, and I’ve met a bunch of authors who work in that genre and related ones.  Needless to say, I’ve read a lot of these books and stories.  I’d have to guess close to a hundred in the past five years.

            I have seen a lot of people die on the page.

            I’ve characters die of disease or injury.  Seen them shot or stabbed.  Some have been crushed.  Many have been torn apart by zombies—both classic slow ones and the runners.  A few people have gone peacefully and with no pain… but not a lot of them. 

            On a semi-related note, for a long time there was a joke in comic circles that no one stayed dead except Bucky and Gwen Stacy (who’ve both been resurrected in recent years).  It’s one of the things that made some folks point to comics as low-brow, pulpy writing, because villains and heroes would always return with elaborate tales of how they’d avoided death… again.  The new term tossed about is death fatigue.  Readers are just plain bored with overhyped “deaths” that are reversed in twelve issues or less.

            What I’d like to blab on about this week is sympathy fatigue, also sometimes called compassion fatigue.  It’s a medical term that refers to when doctors, nurses, and caregivers have become so drained by the death and suffering they see that they just… well, can’t feel sympathetic anymore.  Constant exposure has desensitized them.  I had the (very awful) experience once of visiting the “death row” of an animal shelter, and the woman who mass-euthanised the cats and dogs admitted she didn’t even look at them anymore.

            Readers and audience members can feel sympathy fatigue, too.  After watching countless people die, the carnage just fades into a background hum.   It no longer carries any emotional weight.  How often have you watched a horror film with an audience and, after a certain point, people just start laughing? Characters on screen are stabbed, tortured, crushed, and decapitated, and you and your friends are giggling.  Maybe even cheering.

            How do I keep people from laughing?

            Let me get to that in a kind of roundabout way…

            A bad habit I’ve mentioned before is naming every character.  I think some time in the past an MFA professor or writing coach offered some advice about names and it went through a dozen iterations of the telephone game.  Now there’s a (thankfully small) school of thought that says every character should have a name.  That guy at the bus stop.  The cook behind the counter.  The woman in the leather jacket.

            When I give a character a name, I’m telling the reader that all these people are important.  There’s a reason she’s Phoebe and not “the blonde” or “the woman in the leather jacket.”  A name tells the reader to take note of this person because they’re going to affect the story.  If it turns out Phoebe has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, it means I’ve distracted the reader.  And distractions kill the flow of my story.

            When this idea gets mixed with death, it creates a pattern you’ve probably seen before in stories.  We’ll get introduced to a random person, be told a bunch of character stuff about them, and then, eight or nine pages later… they’ll die.  Usually their death will be connected to the larger threat, if not the larger story.  Giant ants, Ebola, vampires, terrorists–whatever the actual protagonists are dealing with, these poor folks will stumble across it and be wiped out.  In some books, this can happen four or five times.  Introduce a character, kill ‘em.  Introduce a character, kill ‘em.  Introduce a character, kill ‘em.  Introduce a character… well, you get the point.

            The idea here is that I’m showing my readers the widespread nature of the threat, or perhaps the ruthlessness of the killers.  And it should carry emotional weight because I spent a couple of pages making Phoebe or Wakko or Dot feel like real people.  From a mathematical, by-the-numbers viewpoint, this is all good, right?

            Catch is, though, my readers are going to notice this pattern really quick.  Just like they’ll notice that I’m naming background characters who have nothing to do with the plot, most readers will realize I’m just introducing characters to kill them off.  So they’ll stop investing in these characters as a way to save time and effort.  It’s a defense mechanism.  They just stop caring.

            And once the reader stops caring, well…

            Perhaps the worst thing this means is that once my readers have been conditioned by all the meaningless deaths, they’re going to be numb to the important ones.  One of my leads will make a heroic sacrifice or that jerk supporting character will finally get what’s coming to her, and my readers will gloss over it the same way they barely registered the last six or seven deaths.  My whole story gets lessened because I’ve lessened the impact of death.

            Don’t get me wrong.  It’s okay to have people die.  I’m a big fan of it.  But I can’t use cheap tricks to give these deaths weight.  I need to be aware of who my characters are and what their deaths are accomplishing within my story structure.  If I just need someone to die gruesomely to set the mood or tone, I don’t need to make them a major character—or to convince my readers he or she is a major character.  And if I’m going to kill off one of my major characters, her death shouldn’t read just like the nineteen deaths that came before it.

            Because when I kill off someone important, I want you to care.

            Next time, I’d like to offer you all a simple choice.

            Until then, go write.

            This week’s blog title is from a future Asylum movie for SyFy.  It’s not in development or anything, as far as I know, but I’m pretty sure just by writing that online I’ve caused it to happen.  It’s the internet butterfly effect.

            And speaking of that geeky reference to a geeky reference…

            What that title really comes from is a note from a friend of mine, the editor at a sci-fi/ science site called Giant Freakin Robot (check it out—it’s fun and educational).  He was explaining what kind of movies and television shows the site covered.  To paraphrase, if the zombies have biochemical or viral origins, GFR will cover them, but not if they’re raised by voodoo spells or curses.

            Over the past few years, a lot of genres have really blended together.  In books and movies, it’s not uncommon to see strong action, drama, or even comedy threads mixing in with sci-fi, fantasy, or horror.  Nowadays it’s just as common for protagonists to fight the undead as it is to run from them, and in doing so writers and readers have created dozens of subgenres.

            Personally, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of this.  I think any story that stays too much in one vein tends to get dry pretty quick.  There’s almost always some humor in every situation, even incredibly dark ones.  It’s not uncommon for men and women to have inappropriate thoughts at really inopportune times (or to act on them).  Hey, I grew up on Doctor Who, so in my mind it makes perfect sense for religion-obsessed barbarian tribes to be descended from intergalactic survey teams or for aliens to be controlling the Loch Ness Monster.

            Now, sad but true, there aren’t a lot of firm rules on mixing these things.  Every story is different, so the way mystory blends horror and comedy is going to be different from the way yourstory blends them.  Ten of us can use the same basic plot, but we’re each going to end up with our own unique story.  My characters won’t react the same way as yours, hers will make different decisions than his.

             As such it’s hard for anyone to say which amount is right or wrong without having all the context.  To use one of my frequent cooking analogies, it’s kind of like if I asked “is this too much sugar?”  It’s an impossible question to answer without knowing what I’m cooking, what are the recipe standards, what are my preferences, and what are the preferences of the people who are going to be eating it.  My own skill level in the kitchen matters, too, on whether I should be trying a fried Alaska, death by chocolate, or maybe just a bowl of Captain Crunch.

            However… all that being said…

            I think when these mixed genre stories go bad, a lot of folks tend to look at the small issues and ignore the big ones.  Something isn’t bad because it mixed androids and artificial intelligence with Arthurian legends, or because it introduced a lot of comedy into the Cthulhu mythos.  Those are just the easiest targets, so they get the criticism first. 

            What I’ve come to realize is that most bad genre stuff tends to be bad for the same three reasons.  Granted, there’s always going to be someone who tries to write a sexy mutant cockroach story (or something worse), and there will always be people who just load up on basic mistakes like spelling or flat characters or incoherent plotting. In my experience, though, most genre stuff goes wrong in three basic ways—whether my story is one pure genre or several overlapping ones.

            The firstand often biggest mistake is when authors try to make their stories too fantastic.  If I have an idea, it gets included in the story.  No matter what it is, I’ll cram it in there.  If you’ve ever watched old slasher movies, you know most of them just devolved into creative ways to kill people, and sometimes there are excess characters for no other reason but to allow for more inventive deaths.  Most of us have probably read a sci fi novel that went to great lengths to explain how the weapons, shoes, uniforms, food, transportation, education, and economics are all very different on that other world or in that not-so-distant future.  I read a book recently that had to do with… well, everything.  No, seriously.  Government conspiracies, bio-engineering, super-soldiers, angels and demons, secret identities, zombies, aliens from Neptune, extraterrestrial dragons, thrill-killers, child abuse, sadism, torture porn, regular porn, and lost civilizations in the Amazon.  All of these things were major threads and elements in one average-length novel.  Heck, I’m tempted to say it was even on the shorter side.

            The problem with writing a story like this (book or screenplay) is my audience has nothing to connect with as they’re overwhelmed with all these unfamiliar elements.  The people are different.  The setting is different.  Motivations are different.  I may have created the most amazing post-apocalyptic matriarchal feudal society run by a supercomputer (and its secret android army) that’s ever been seen, but my readers need to be able to understand those characters and that society and relate to it right now while it’s on the page in front of them.

            This is closely related to the second problem—when the writer tries to explain everything.  Bad enough that I felt the need to include the secret android army, but now I’m also going to write about how they were first developed by the Mysteridroid Corporation three hundred years ago, how they see the world, and even how they recharge in various situations.  I think most people reading this have read a story or two that suddenly deviated into exposition like that.  Edgar Rice Burroughs had an awful habit in his Mars books of having his characters stop and explain various aspects of Barsoomian technology (one midnight walk with the Princess famously spun into a discussion of how radium bullets are manufactured and used).  A few recent horror films have gone to great lengths to explain why their antagonist turned out the way he or she did, even though that mystery was part of the character’s strength.

            What this often leads to is stories that feel very exotic and detailed, but very little ever actually happens in them.  Page after page of explanation can add up really fast, and no matter what my chosen format is, there’s only going to be so many pages.  Suddenly a third of my book is just… details.  And while I’m going over those details, my characters are just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for something to happen again.  This can also lead to a bit of resentment from the reader as I’m spoon-feeding them all this information.

            As it turns out, problem number three is the flipside of two.  It’s when the writer doesn’t explain anything.  I’ve gone through whole chapters of a book trying to figure out which character was Kristo.  Mystery Science Theater 3000 once had a running gag about a mystical object (or maybe it was a person…) called “the Sampo.”  We’ve all seen stories where people ride “twyrfels” and we’re left wondering what the hell a twyrfel is (an animal? a vehicle? some kind of transporter beam?).

            There’s also the folks who hide motives and actions to create a sense of mystery.    Characters will appear, make a mysterious statement or three, and then vanish from the story.  Creepy messages will be found on walls, sidewalks, or computer screens and we never learn how they got there.  Disturbing objects are found in the cellar, but never discussed again.  Ever.

            There are two general causes behind this, in my experience.  In the first case it’s when I’ve sunk so far into my fictional world and spent so much time there that I forget the reader isn’t quite so familiar with it.  I can tell you the whole history of the twyrfel as transportation, so I forget that you don’t even know what one looks like.  In the second case, they’re trying to duplicate the tone of books like House of Leaves or shows in the vein of LOST or Person of Interest, but they don’t really understand how those stories achieved that tone.  This is especially frustrating when there’s clearly no real mystery, just a bunch of withheld information.

            So, there’s three big, common mistakes in genre fiction.  Sci-fi, horror, fantasy—we could probably give an example of each failing for each genre.  We could even make a chart.

            Or we could go over a few simple ways to avoid these issues…

            For that firstproblem up above, my story needs to have something my audience can immediately relate to in some way, and it’s best if it’s the main character.  Someone who hates their job, who wants something they can’t have, or maybe who just feels like an outsider.  Simply put, a person with a universal need or desire. 

            I’ve mentioned once or thrice that believable characters make for believable stories, and that’s especially true here in the genres.  Seriously, pick a popular genre story and I’ll bet the main character has a very humble, relatable origin.  Dan Torrance is a nursing home orderly before he’s forced to confront the True Knot.  Katniss Everdeen is just trying to put food on the table when she’s forced to fight for her life in an arena.  John Anderson (a.k.a. Neo) was a cubicle drone who was dragged into a war between humanity and sentient machines.  Dana, Marty, Jules, and their friends were regular college students before they decided to spend their vacation at that old cabin in the woods.  Hell, even in Pacific Rim, one of the most over-the-top movies of the year, our hero Raleigh is working a construction job when we catch up to him in the present, still shaking off the death of his brother.

            I think there’s two ways to deal with the second problem, too much information.  One is a concept I’ve talked about here in the past—the ignorant stranger.  If things are going to be explained, I should have an actual, in-story reason for that explanation.  Yakko may know all about the secret android army, but Dot doesn’t.  This gives him a valid reason to talk about the Mysteridroid Corporation for a page and a half.  I just need to be sure this really is an ignorant stranger situation and I’m not falling back on the dreaded “as you know…” crutch.

            But is it necessary to the story, or is it just there to help push things deeper into my chosen genre?  It’s cool that my hero has an energy sidearm that uses ultrasonic beams focused through a blue quartz crystal to set up a harmonic vibration in the target’s cells which causes extreme pain and eventual molecular disruption, all powered by a cold-fusion microbattery… but in the long run is this any different than just saying he has a blaster?  Or a pistol?  I may have the most inventive take on teleportation ever, but if there’s no point to teleportation technology in my story except to show off this idea… why bother?  If the plot flows along fine without it, why take up space on the page with it?

            The thirdproblem, not explaining anything, is a little tougher.  On one level, it’s just a matter of skill and practice.  I need to be a good enough writer to know how my plot’s shaping up and to empathize with my audience. 

            A friend of mine gave me a great rule of thumb once—my main character should mirror my audience.  If my main character’s angry about something, the reader should be angry about it.  If my protagonist is puzzled, it means the audience should be puzzled. And if my hero is annoyed because he still doesn’t know what’s going on… well, that’s probably a sign I should have a reveal or two in the immediate future.

            The other way to deal with that third problem is to be sure my story actually has a real mystery, not just the sense of one.  Tying in to what I just mentioned, nothing will aggravate my readers more than to stumble through a story alongside my hero and then discover I’m not revealing a single thread of my mystery.  Or, worse yet, they might realize there isn’t a mystery at all—I was just stringing them along with some nonsense clues.  I need to know what the secret is going to be and work backwards, making sure my characters are smart enough to uncover it or honestly motivated to hide it, depending on which side of the mystery they’re on.

            Are these three the only problems that might crop up in my genre writing?  Not by a long shot.  But these are the ones I see cropping up again and again, so they’re worth looking at and considering.  And fixing.

            Next time, the last post before Christmas, I’d like to share a little holiday conversation I had with the writer-director of Iron Man 3, back when he was just the guy who did Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,

            Until then, go write.

            Talking about scary stuff, because it’s the season.  Not in the way we usually do, though…

             H.P. Lovecraft once said “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”  Stephen King said terror is the finest emotion.  And Terror, Inc. once said “My name is my business, and business is good.”

            Okay, that last one’s a bit obscure.

            Anyway…

            I’ll go one step further with this and say that fear is one of the most common emotions.  Most of us live in a state of fear.  I don’t mean that in some socio-political way.  On a regular day, most of us experience fear on some level or another.  Fear of failure.  Fear of rejection.  Fear of injury.  Fear of humiliation.  Maybe even the big ones like fear of helplessness or fear of death.

            In most stories my characters are going to begin things in a state of fear.  Again, maybe not a crippling, hiding-in-the-corner level of fear, but that fear is going to be there. There’s going to be something they don’t want to happen—or something they want to happen—but fear of some kind is going to  keep them from it.  Maybe Yakko wants to ask Phoebe out but is scared she and her friends will laugh at him.  Maybe Dot really wants to make detective, but doesn’t want to risk failing the test for a third time.  Or maybe Wakko just doesn’t want to be torn apart and eaten by a zombie horde.

            Hey, it’s a valid worry.

            Now, I know a lot of people pitch stuff about “strong characters,” and it’s not uncommon for people to misread this to mean characters that are powerful, smart, capable, and confident.  Being afraid of things doesn’t fit into that idea, does it? 

            “Strong characters” isn’t supposed to refer to physical/ mental abilities—it’s about how well they hold up to examination.  Are they believable?  Relatable?  Fleshed out? A strong character can still be nervous about asking Phoebe out in front of her friends.  They can be worried about failure to a point of near-paralysis.  He or she can even be a snivelling coward… as long as they aren’t a shallow, stereotypical snivelling coward. 

            By having my characters begin in a state of fear, I’ve just made them very relatable.  Even better, I’ve automatically set up a challenge for them to overcome.  I’m forcing them to become active and do something.  Better still, my characters have to change internally to overcome fear.  Conquering fear isn’t an exterior challenge (although there can be plenty of those, too).

            Y’see, Timmy, when people are done being scared, they have to be brave.  And that’s when they shine.  Because now that  I’ve forced them to grow and change, they have an arc.  They’ve become better people right in front of us.

            Those characters who aren’t scared?  Well, a few times I’ve mentioned the problem with uber-powerful characters who can deal with anything or who are utterly prepared for everything.  That also ties into this idea of beginning in a state of fear.  It can be summed up best with a joke I heard once…

            A police officer pulls over an elderly lady for a busted tail light.  He’s stunned to see a pair of shotguns and an assault rifle in the back seat, and a pistol strapped to the old woman’s thigh.  She also admits to a pistol in her purse and another one in the glove compartment, as well as a few more rifles and extra ammo in the trunk.  But she has all her permits and everything’s in order. 

            As they’re finishing up, the police officer says, “Ma’am, I have to ask… What are you so afraid of?”

            And the old woman smiles sweetly and says, “I’m not afraid of anything.”

            If my characters don’t have anything to fear, they don’t have anywhere to go from there. They don’t need to grow and change.  They don’t need an arc.  I’ve begun my characters where basic storytelling says they should end.

            So, be afraid.  Be very afraid.  Let your characters be afraid, too.  They should be scared of pain and rejection and failure.  And perhaps also of zombies and werewolves and little alien worms that wiggle into their ears and burrow into their brains.

            Next time… well, I won’t be posting on Halloween for religious reasons, so next time will be in November.  And considering what comes out in theaters around then, I might let somebody else talk about writing movies for Marvel.

            Until then, go write.

            I’d thought of making an I Dream of Jeannie joke about this post title, but then I heard that actor Michael Ansara had died and it felt like it might be in poor taste.  He was Barbara Eden’s husband for a while, and even played another genie on the show once.  Of course, he’s really famous for playing Commander Kang, arguably the Klingon (sorry, Michael Dorn), on no less than three different Star Trek shows across more than thirty years, starring in countless westerns, a famous Outer Limits episode, and also for being the voice of Mr. Freeze for the animated Batman and Batman Beyond.  In short… he was awesome and it’s sad that he’s gone.

            However…

            By odd coincidence, one of the first places I heard the phrase “bottle show” was when I was researching screenplays for Star Trek.  A bottle show was what they called an episode that used only existing sets and costumes, and often only the regular cast with minimal (if any) guest stars.  The producers loved them because they saved money, which also made them a great way for aspiring writers to get in.  Write a solid bottle show and they’d buy it just so they could have it handy for emergencies, or to help counterbalance two or three expensive episodes in a row.

            And in a way, a lot of the bottle episodes tended to be better stories.  Once the writers didn’t have the distraction of the “alien of the week,” they could focus their efforts on either bringing out new aspects of their cast or weaving a much more elaborate story.  By limiting what could be done with one aspect of the storytelling, it made all the other aspects that much stronger.

            And that kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?  Unlimited situations don’t have any tension.  If my characters have unlimited time to solve a problem, or have unlimited space to get away from it, my story isn’t going to be very interesting. 

            The thing is, being “in the bottle” could refer to any sort of restriction.  It could be a limited location, yes, like those Star Trek episodes or a good haunted house tale or the classic Campbell story “Who Goes There,” which most of you probably know better as The Thing.  Most of George Romero’s zombie movies are bottle stories, too, with people trapped in a farmhouse, a mall, an underground complex, and so on.

            But it could also be a time limit, that famous ticking clock.  It doesn’t matter what the character does or doesn’t do, the story is ending in two weeks, or two days, or maybe just two hours.  Many of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories involve ticking clocks (often on an astronomical scale, but they’re there)

             Laughable as it may sound, Speed is a bottle story.  The limit is actually the minimum speed the bus could travel.  That’s what created all the tension, because screenwriter Graham Yost came up with a very clever bottle for his story.

            If you’ve having trouble with a story, try sticking it in a bottle.  Rather than trying to make it big and expansive and epic, figure out how it can be tight and restricted and personal.  Slap a limit on it.  Confine your characters to a few locations.  Figure out some way to restrict their time.  Or even just stick to one viewpoint.  If I see and hear everything through Yakko, it means I don’t know what’s going on in Wakko’s head or where Dot was during that blackout.

            As I’ve mentioned before, one of the key elements of any challenge is that it has to be faced.  If I can avoid facing it because of a lack of limits—letting me get away from it, postpone it, or even massively overpower it—then it isn’t really much of a challenge.  And if there isn’t much of a challenge, there isn’t much of a story.

            Next time, I think it’s important that we all admit a few things.