RealityBypass

Idiot plots. That’s the sort of plot where everyone has to be an idiot in order to get it to work. Where nobody ever says “You know, walking through a dark alley in the worst part of town at midnight is probably not a terribly good idea; why don’t we just call a cab?” because then the characters wouldn’t get mugged and set the plot going, or “Hold off an army of orcs all by myself? Are you nuts?” or “Now, why would I believe for half a minute that marrying a king who is known to be a vicious, manipulative liar will bring permanent peace to our warring countries? Especially since he’s already broken our last three treaties and murdered my parents and siblings into the bargain?” I really, really dislike characters who are supposed to be intelligent but who keep making stupid mistakes. (Characters who are supposed to be stupid are a different matter; they’re tricky to pull off, though.)

A related problem, especially with fantasy, is the idiot background. By that I mean the setting or history that just doesn’t hang together if you stop and look at it straight on, because the author hasn’t thought through all the implications. Like all the pre-industrial fantasy societies that have modern 21^st century attitudes toward sex…with no reliable birth control anywhere in sight. And none of the female characters ever get pregnant, and none of the male characters who’ve been tomcatting around are ever presented with children. Or the stories in which there are no schools to speak of and the nobles all have private tutors, yet all the peasants and guards seem to be literate. Or the ones in which everyone uses swords and rides horses and all the technology seems to be at about that same level, except for the inexplicable presence of indoor plumbing, complete with hot showers. If you’ve got indoor hot showers, you’ve got boilers and metal-working technology for pipe-making and ceramic or glassworking technology and something to pump the water from the heater to the shower and valve technology for turning the water on and off…and all of that should be applied to a whole heck of a lot of other things besides just plumbing. Not to mention the side effects of having indoor plumbing even without the hot showers – you just know that all those anachronistic toilets are not dumping their waste into a period open sewer in the middle of the street.

I’m very fond of spunky princesses like the Paper Bag Princess, who don’t sit around waiting for other people to fix things and who are perfectly willing to call the stuck-up prince on his bad manners if that becomes necessary. I doubt that this will come as a big surprise to anyone who’s read my books, though.

I have to pick just one? OK, I suppose computer games. The Civilization series and the Elder Scrolls series are currently top of the list for that. I can waste weeks if  I’m not careful.

Curling up by the fireplace with a good book comes instantly to mind.

When I’m seriously working, I tend to get hyperfocused, and will not even notice a plate of chocolate chip cookies even if someone shoves them under my nose. When I’m merely thinking about working, or worse yet, avoiding working, anything remotely edible is fair game.

Define “really good villain.” For some people, that means a realistic, complex character doing things for believable reasons; for others, it means someone or something so truly evil that they’re completely unsympathetic, so that the reader can enjoy watching the villain get shredded and feel that he’s go tten his just deserts. Me, I’d say that what you need for a really good villain is one that suits the story you are telling. A realistic, complex, multifaceted person who’s doing the wrong things for the right reasons would not have been the right choice for Sauron in “The Lord of the Rings;” or even Sauruman. Either the story would have fallen apart, or it would have turned into a completely different story. A simple, purely evil character would be totally wrong for George R.R. Martin’s “A Clash of Kings” – again, either the book falls apart, or it has to morph into a totally different story.

So I guess I’d say that to do a really good villain, you have to be willing to let the villain be what the story needs him/her to be, rather than any one fixed type.

I don’t think I’ve ever used one of my villains as a viewpoint character, which I think is what it would take to come up with something nasty enough to scare me in the way you’re asking about. I’ve read enough history to know that whatever atrocities I can dream up are paltry, compared to what’s actually happened.

As a character, probably the one I’m working on now, Eff Rothmer. Most of my main characters have needed to get things done, but Eff needs to do a lot of growing into herself as well. She doesn’t start out with as much self-confidence as most of my heroines have, and I’ve had some trouble keeping the balance right. Plus, I find her universe utterly fascinating—she lives in a world where the New World is full of magical and post-Ice-Age creatures, which is making the settlement of the Western U.S. go a bit differently from the way it went in our world, and I keep getting sidetracked into backstory and alternate history and ecology.

I don’t tend to remember things for very long once I’ve cut them, because the reason I cut them is that they don’t belong in the book. I’ve always been focused more on story than on style, which means I seldom have the sort of “murdered darlings” that most people think of when they hear this line (the quote “murder your darlings” is originally from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and pre-dates Stephen King by quite a lot of decades, by the way. It’s been re-quoted so often by so many people that it’s frequently mis-attributed).

What I do have are plans for the plot that don’t come off. Probably the most spectacular of those was when I was writing “The Raven Ring.” My heroine and two companions were supposed to be leaving town for a long, adventurous trip home, and on the way out, they were supposed to be attacked by the bad guys. So that happened, they beat off the attack, and then the one character says, “Let’s get out of here.” And the young nobleman who’s the other companion stares blankly and says, “Why?” And by the time they got that sorted out, the cops had shown up and I had to spend four unanticipated chapters dealing with them. Once I finally did, the head guard said basically, “OK, you’re free to head home now.” And my heroine looked at h im and said, in essence, “Do you think I’m crazy? That attack was planned. I’m in a city with a nice, competent police force that knows me and knows somebody is out to get me, and you expect me to leave? Not til we catch those creeps, or at least find out a lot more about what they’re up to!” Which pretty much shot the entire plan for the rest of the book. I finally got her heading for the city gates at last…on the last page of the novel. Not at all what I’d expected.

It’s not exactly a “murdered darling” because none of it ever got written, so it didn’t actually have to be cut/murdered. But it feels the same. And I do kind of regret missing out on the camping scene I had in mind, where they all argue about cooking. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have had the fortune-telling scene with the picture cards (that world’s version of the Tarot) if things had gone the way I planned. It evens out.

Procrastinating. But I really will get around to stopping it. One of these days.

Megan Whelan Turner. I want to know how she does that thing in “The King of Attolia” where she leaves out all these scenes and all this information that you’d swear was critical to the plot or the characterization or both, and it works anyway. And it makes you feel smart because you got it without her telling you outright. (It’s the third book in a sequence, and I highly recommend it, but if you don’t want serious spoilers, you need to read the first two first. They’re both good, but the third one is brilliant. I think, anyway.)

Well, that would depend on the character, wouldn’t it? And on the troubles and tribulations. So many things that one person thinks are troublesome aren’t any trouble at all for someone else. Breaking into the king’s treasury, for instance, which is a great deal of trouble for the king and his guards, and quite a bit of trouble for the person who’s breaking in, but no trouble at all for the shoemaker down the street. Unless of course the king has the shoemaker locked in the treasury vault for some reason. Some kings do things like that. And then there are things that nearly everyone finds troublesome, like having an army invade, or being turned into a loathly worm, or washing socks. Advising people to use warm water so they won’t shrink is quite the best thing for washing socks, but not at all useful for invading armies or loathly worms, or even invading armies of loathly worms. Under most circumstances, anyway. I believe one of the Imperial Wizards tried to shrink an invading army with hot water once, but I’m afraid it didn’t work very well , which just shows you.

Which sort of magic powers? I believe I could dispense quite well with Black Sorcery, though of course if I happened to be a Black Sorcerer, which I am not, I would almost certainly feel very differently. And there are so many different ways to do things, though some of them are really more trouble than they’re worth. One could chop down a tree with a nail file, but an ax is so much more convenient. That is, if one happens to have an ax; if the only thing handy is a nail file, one does what one can. Spells and magic are exactly the same. Only different.

Not underestimating them, which is quite easy to do, even though people are warned about it all the time. Listening seems to be so very difficult for such a lot of peop le, even when it’s an important warning that they ought to be listening to, except of course just when you’d prefer they didn’t, such as when you’re planning a surprise birthday party, or plotting an assassination, or talking to your houseplants. At least, a good many people seem to find it embarrassing to be caught talking to their houseplants, though I’ve never really understood why. Mine are quite sensible conversationalists, much better than most of the kings and princes I’ve met. And there are always shoelaces. Tying someone’s shoelaces together frequently works very well, though of course very few dragons actually wear shoes.

Ever after is such a long time, except when it isn’t. Such as when one gets run over by a delivery wagon unexpectedly—not that one ever really expects to be run over by a delivery wagon, but it’s the principle of the thing. And you know, one never actually gets to the horizon. At least, by the time one does, it’s somewhere else. So I’m afraid I don’t pay very much attention to either one. Being happy right now is quite enough work for any sensible person, especially since now is never the same, either, and so difficult to get to come out the way one would like, what with wizard-kings interfering, and ancient sorceries getting in the way, and the weather always being quite wrong. Snow when one wants to have a picnic, and rain when it’s been flooding, and wind when one has just that minute finished dusting.

Definitely more trouble than they’re worth, if you’re on the receiving end. Assuming, of course, that the wizard who made whatever-it-is did a reasonably competent job—so many of them want to make a sort of magical Swiss Army Knife, and end up with a magic staff that shoots lightning bolts , makes the wielder invulnerable, and does dishes, but only shoots the lightning at turnips, makes the wielder invulnerable to straw arrows, and does only the very best Dangil china dishes, which is quite useless, really, because if you are wealthy enough to own the very best Dangil china dishes, you generally pay to have someone else wash them for you. And then they’re horribly disappointed and go around blowing up turnips just for spite, even though if you think about it, a magic staff that does any sort of dishes is really quite an unusual accomplishment and something one ought to be proud of.