"Don't Forget To Be Awesome" (Dishonored)

In my ongoing quest to waste lunch breaks catching up on electronic entertainment, I spent the past few weeks playing Dishonored (content warning), Arkane Studios' hacky-slashy, dash-n-skulk first person sneaker that garnered a bucketful of awards in 2012.

The title takes place in plague-ridden Dunwall, which is sort of an alternate-history London with steampunk science, a religion informed by ancient stoicism, and a trickster god on the loose with his own inscrutable ends. That deity, dubbed The Outsider both by those who worship and those who fear him, has fastened on a new object of interest -- Corvo, a disgraced royal bodyguard. Under Corvo's watch, Dunwall's empress fell to an assassin's sword and young princess Emily vanished into thin air. The authorities say he masterminded the whole thing, but in truth he's innocent, a pawn caught in a clandestine coup attempt. At least he is until a group of rebels break him out of jail and the Outsider appears to him in a dream, imbuing him with powers beyond those of mere mortals. Now Corvo has become a force to be reckoned with, a supernatural killer set on vengeance.

Though I've played my fair share of video games, I'll be the first to admit that most titles are rubbish. Filled with clichéd, boring storytelling, many have turned to lowest-common-denominator material to keep audiences' interested. Not Dishonored, though. Populated by manipulative politicos, self-aggrandizing academics, almost-honorable cutthroats, and charmingly quirky laborers, the characterization ranges from comedic to tragic. The plot is filled with political machinations, riddled with double crossings, and features a twist that feels shocking when first experienced and nigh inevitable upon further rumination. What thrilled me the most, though, were the themes. Dishonored takes a dim view of elites, and the narrative is essentially a cautionary tale about the seductive draw of power and the deceitful charms of revenge.

I don't remember any of that being in the marketing materials, though. Mostly they just emphasized how the game was totally awesome.

While skulking through the sewers in an early portion of the game, Corvo overhears a guard disparaging his reputation and ethnicity, only to be quickly rebuked by his partner, who says, "Kids like you, you never saw what he was like. I saw him fight three to one in the practice yard. He's a whirlwind." Players get to hijack that wild fighting style, dropping from above to bury a sword in a target's neck, felling an assailant with a single brutal blow after blocking an attack, and employing deadly gadgetry such as shrapnel-loaded proximity mines and Molotov-tipped crossbow bolts. Non-lethal options abound, too, and the powers granted by The Outsider make that path as equally exhilarating as combat. (Indeed, I completed the game without killing a single soul.) The adrenaline really gets pumping when you sneak into a crowded courtyard, knock a guard out, and bend space and time to blink yourself out of danger's way.

You're probably wondering why I'm going on about all this.

Writer John Green (The Fault in Our Stars) has minted his own unique tagline: "Don't forget to be awesome." That's great counsel. Awesome is fun. Awesome sells. Gamers came to Dishonored wanting a parkouring warrior with a spring-loaded sword and a fistful of magic. They wanted awesome and got it. But they also received a story about how the greatest might lies in grace. So fill your tales with complex characters, lofty ideas, and lovely language. Just don't forget to leaven the lump with a hearty measure of awesome.

(Picture: CC 2013 by Inkd screenshot resouces)

Legendary Author Battle: Phil Wade vs. Loren Eaton

People like to fight. How else do you account for heavyweight championships, Monday Night Football, and 24-hour cable news? We writers like to pretend we're a sedate bunch, but in reality a pugnacious pugilist turns lap after lap inside every one of us, just itching to spar. Perhaps that's why Simon Cantan (Shiny New Swindle) created Legendary Author Battles.

The setup is as simple as it is brilliant: Have a pair of authors try to write each other into a corner while composing a collaborative story and turn the whole thing into an audiovisual delight at the end. It starts with the challenging writer picking a defender and taunting him about his inevitable literary demise. The defender counters by selecting a genre and a time period. The challenger follows it up by penning descriptions of the hero and villain. The defender details the hero's special power that will allow him to defeat the villain, and the challenger provides an in media res summary of where there story will start.

Then the real fun begins.

Over the course of nine alternating rounds, the two duel, each trying to stump the other as plot and characters develop. Of course, the ultimate decision comes down to the judges, who happen to be ... you. At least you're the judges when it comes to my battle with Phil Wade of Brandywine Books. Our tale includes an evil fae, a clueless bureaucrat, a stolid solider, a falcon made of metal and magic, burnings, enchantments, poisoned fruit, grammatical humor, epic clashes between fantasy races, and ... you know what? You should really just watch the video below (quite professionally produced by Cantan himself, if you don't mind me saying so). Or there's always plain old text should you prefer.



For more Legendary Author Battles, visit SimonCantan.com.

Bertrand on Making It Matter

Over at The Page Has Turned, J. Mark Bertrand (Back on Murder) talks about how finally cemented the daily discipline of writing after years of struggling:

Same thing happened to me in graduate school. Here I was in the mecca of craft, with a coveted spot at a top creative writing program, but I found myself writing much less than I had before. ...

Later, after a three year hiatus, I returned and finished my degree. In the meantime I’d started writing for myself again, and cared more about the prose than I did about class participation. All the theory became real, because I needed it for my work. ...

Which leads me to wonder whether, faced with repeated failure trying to maintain any kind of discipline, if instead of redoubling your effort (failing again, only with more at stake) it wouldn’t be wiser to look for the underlying issue. Soldiers in barracks clean their weapons for drill, and have to be ridden by superiors even to do that. Soldiers in battle keep them clean so they’ll keep firing. All that changed was the sense of necessity. Things that don’t matter don’t keep getting done. Things that do become second nature. The key to any discipline, I suppose, is figuring how to make it matter.

Read the whole thing. In one way, Bertrand's counsel is almost prophetic: After all, those who can't figure "how to make it matter" ultimately won't have a reason to put pen to paper, no matter how much short-term discipline they manage to drub up.

(Picture: CC 2010 by Jonathan Reyes)

What Is Horror For? (The Mist)

Note: This post contains a single obscenity used in quotation.

Here's an interesting question to ask of your favorite sort of story: What is this genre for? What purpose does it serve? Horror seems to aim for at least two things, namely to prompt audiences toward an oxymoronic delight in terror and to show them the things they ought to fear. The former goal is the stuff that makes people pick up a paperback or buy a movie ticket; too much of it, though, turns a story pornographic. The latter is the didactic material that makes people mull over the nature of existence itself; an overabundance here can make a tale dry and dull, while emphasizing wrong or inappropriate ideas can cloak it in irrelevance. Such things were very much on my mind as I watched Frank Darabont's big-screen adaptation of The Mist, originally an eighties-era Stephen King novella.

The plot of The Mist is classic high-concept genre. After a violent thunderstorm damages his lakefront home, artist David Drayton drives into town with his eight-year-old son to buy groceries. No sooner have they begun filling their shopping cart than a mysterious mist envelopes the store and a bleeding man runs in screaming that bloodthirsty things skulk through the murk. A few try to leave. They die horribly. Tensions begin to rise in the store, and soon Drayton starts to wonder if the most fearsome creatures are on the inside of the locked doors.

Okay, remember the two things horror does? Let's start with the first. The Mist goes in pretty heavily for splattery joys. A hapless stock boy gets flayed by giant tentacles, while another brave soul ends up torn in half. Spiders burst en masse from mummified victims. Sprays of acidic silk strip off skin in great sheets. A captive takes a butcher knife to the gut with predictably gory results. As for the ending ... well, let's talk more about the ending in a moment. Darabont (who directed The Shawshank Redemption) knows how to make an effective movie, but all of this drive-in-theater content begs an obvious question. What does The Mist offer as the reason for such grue? Do the things it says we ought to fear justify the means used to communicate them?

That's the stuff of the second question, and it isn't an idle inquiry. Divorced from higher thought, extremes on the page or screen become titillation for the maladjusted. The Mist isn't that. It offers rationales, tells us the things we ought to fear. Bugs, for one thing, the whole chittering, skittering horde of them. Feckless military scientists, too, because who knows what their peculiar blend of brilliance and belligerence will expose us to. Oh, and don't forget those fundamentalist Christians; they're necessarily stupid and/or insane, don't you know, and need only the flimsiest excuse to start literally sacrificing unbelievers. True, these themes at least reach for higher things, as far as they go. But when your Big Points About Fear range from the quotidian (insects) to the embarrassingly misinformed (fundamentalists), you can't exactly say your story has scaled Mount Profundity.

Then there's still the ending.

Okay, how do I discuss it without spoiling it? Let's say that, in the film's closing moments, a despairing Drayton makes a bad decision -- a very bad decision which turns the previous terrors into something about as frightening as a nursery rhyme. That held some thematic potential, either as a warning against giving in to hopelessness or to instruct about the fallibility of man's judgment. Director Darabount, though, chooses neither. Instead, the ending seems an embodiment James Ellroy's nihilistic noir aphorism: "We're all fucked."

That's a bad message to couch in good craft.

(Picture: CC 2008 by rgmcfadden)

Smith on Character Building Through Incidental Detail

Over at Dreams of the Shining Horizon, C.L. Smith discusses character building through incidental detail. Excerpts:

I was re-watching [director Peter Jackson's] The Fellowship of the Ring the other day when I saw two scenes that reminded me that building a character, like building a world, is a matter of detail. ...

I suspect that Aragorn was an archetype long before Tolkien wrote him; he’s certainly become one since. ...

Such characters are usually abrasive (they live as they do because they don’t like other people), and have nothing but contempt for the soft ways of civilization-dwellers. ...

That’s not what we see here. It’s obvious that Aragorn has never heard of “second breakfast”, and he clearly considers the idea ridiculous.

As one would expect from the hard-bitten ranger, he gets the “soft” city folk moving. ... But then Aragorn tosses apples back to them.

Detail. It’s the key to everything.

Read the whole thing, especially to see the clips Smith mentions. Detail alone might not prove a storytelling panacea, but Smith reminds us that it's a great way implement the old writing maxim -- show, don't tell.

(Picture: CC 2006 by Andrew Becraft)

Let Shambling Stagger Onto Your Reading List

If you like genre fiction in general and short stories in particular, you owe Mur Lafferty some respect. Why? A prolific podcaster for over a decade, she has been instrumental in bolstering shows that have kept short-form SF, fantasy, and horror sitting up in their hospital beds and smiling. No small feat given how we dwell in the age of the novel. But despite having listened to her podcasts for years, I'd never sampled her fiction and decided to remedy that with The Shambling Guide to New York City, a book that's part urban fantasy and part travel guide for the supernaturally enabled.

The first rule? Don't call them monsters. Vampires or zombies, water sprites or fire demons, Norse deities or randy succubi, it doesn't matter. All of them consider the word an insult. If you must refer to the strange creatures that dwell secretly among us by a collective term, call them coterie. That leads to the second rule: You don't want to insult them. Zoë Norris is about to learn that first hand. See, Zoë has returned to her childhood home of New York City in unemployed disgrace, a once-successful travel writer who saw everything go south after an affair with her boss. Not that she knew it was an affair at the time; her employer had deftly hidden his matrimonial status until his wife vandalized Zoë's home. Now she's broke, depressed, and desperate, so when she happens across a flyer advertising a travel writing job at Underground Publishing, it seems a godsend, the perfect fit for her. She applies and get accepted, not knowing that she'll soon be working with several species of undead, an incubus who quickly develops a crush on her, and a Welsh goddess of the underworld. As if that wasn't bad enough to have coterie coworkers who could eat her for lunch, Zoë soon will learn that she may be all that stands between New York and destruction.

The Shambling Guide starts off a little slow, if for no other reason than the all the shiny has been rubbed off on the tropes of urban fantasy from constant use. We know that the protagonist will get rudely dropped into a world beneath the world, will struggle to accept it, and then will somehow find his place in it. So far so familiar. Fortunately, Lafferty quickly moves past this stage, unfurling both a delightfully imaginative setting and a humdinger (to use the vernacular) of a plot. I won't spoil the latter much since discovery is part of its delight, except to say that the climax involves fighting a massive golem made out of airplanes (airplanes!). If that somehow doesn't sell you, let me expound on the former. Lafferty intersperses each chapter with tidbits from the titular guide, introducing readers to New York from a coterie point of view. For instance, the Statue of Liberty represents not freedom to the coterie but rather the New World's longstanding hostility toward them since it's actually the tomb of the giant French demon Chandal L'énorme. Vampires have created an extreme race called Tough Blooder where humans afflicted with hemochromatosis (an overabundance of iron) are periodically pounded upon by pointy-teethed undead as part of their "treatment." The Rockefeller Christmas tree was planted by a descendant of Odin from one of the seeds of Yggdrasil. Wonderful stuff. Lafferty has earned her place in both my listening and reading lists for a long time to come.

(Picture: CC 2007 by Llima Orosa)

Mussman on Pink Princesses and Dystopias

Over at The Federalist, Anna Mussman ponders how a steady diet of Disney's stereotypically pink princesses might fuel a desire for dark fiction in adolescent girls. Excerpts:

[A]s is often pointed out by princess defenders, this craze is merely a phase. Little girls grow out of fluffy dress-up gowns. They move on to other, less pink things. The question is, what are those things? When Aurora’s reunion with her prince fails to thrill, what kind of romances (in the broad sense of the word) are we offering older girls? It is interesting that dystopian stories are a hot thing in the world of young adult entertainment. Whether it is Divergent, Uglies, The Hunger Games, or even Game of Thrones, many young women gravitate toward books set in a world of cruel tyranny and dysfunctional societies. Somehow, images of determined, gutsy, politically helpless heroines in a dark and depressing world seem to strike a chord within the young adult soul. ...

Correlation is not causation, but I wonder if, in a broad sense, the cultural message of pink princesses ultimately makes girls more receptive to stories in which traditional happy endings are impossible. ...

Dystopian fiction is written as if it were designed to answer the questions of a soul who has been given only the babyish dreams of pink princesses with which to face real life -- a soul that is secretly and angrily disappointed by the dawning realization that boys are not princes and kingdoms aren’t available, and that she herself is far from a perfect princess. Dystopian heroines cannot hope to save the world. Their worlds are too big, too bad, and too far gone to save. This message might sound gloomy. Yet it relieves the heroine of the responsibility to be heroic. It saves her from thinking that she need worry about anyone other than herself and her chosen, beloved few. It allows her to retreat to the ranks of the peasantry.

Read the whole thing. There's a lot going on in Mussman's piece, from critiques of Disney's negative social impact to the role stories play in moral development to how children can interact with consumerist tales while dodging their acquisitive grasp. It's an article that deserves devoting a little time to properly digest it. Myself, though, I want to narrowly focus on an axiom implicit in Mussman's thesis: Stories have consequences for readers beyond those intended by their authors.

Longtime ISLF readers might blink in puzzlement at that assertion. After all, I'm a faithful champion of what could quaintly be called reading comprehension, the idea that a reader's first work is to understand an author's intent. But even I'll admit that there's more to the proverbial story than that. For instance, while Disney doubtlessly wants to sell as much branded product as it can, I doubt that the writers of their most popular films want to encourage jaded cynicism in young viewers; still, their movies -- with all their concomitant idealism -- can and sometimes do. I doubt that the folks who pen plucky-heroine-struggling-against-overreaching-autocracies dystopian thrillers are trying to advocate monastic withdrawal from society; all the same, some could. See, we know as good readers that an author has put words on paper to communicate something to us, and our job is to do our best to discern that one thing. But as writers, we need to understand that those who compose our audience can apply the intent they discern (either correctly or incorrectly) in a manifold number of ways, some of them obviously negative. It's up to us to assess that risk and exercise compositional responsibility.

(Picture: CC 2012 by canhasal)

Thinner Is a Weighty Morality Tale

See the title above? I'm not sure that I really like it. I mean, it's fine enough from a craft perspective, providing a decent summary of the upcoming review's content and (I like to think) adding a bit of panache with the wordplay. But that phrase "morality tale" has a lot of connotative baggage. It makes me worry that readers might think the book represents a pedantic period in Stephen King's oeuvre, an uncharacteristically preachy interlude from the evangelist of grue. (Non-spoiler: It doesn't.) Still, I can't quite manage to divorce myself from the descriptor, because it so ably describes the book. Thinner really is a grim ethical examination of the universality of human depravity and the need to accept responsibility for one's own sins.

Some people have measured out the good things in life with coffee spoons. Not so Billy Halleck. A successful attorney, loving husband, and doting father, he has portioned out life's delights by the shovelful -- and nowhere is that more apparent than at dinnertime. Halleck weighs in at 251 pounds, a good fifty pounds heavier than he ought to be given his age and height. Or he used to weigh that much. Just the other day, he'd been driving through town when his wife Heidi had scooted over and started fiddling with his fly. He'd liked that, liked it a lot. Then a gypsy woman had stepped from between two parked cars, and Halleck had run her down like a dog. Of course there'd been a trial, but Halleck knew the judge and so the charges didn't stick. He'd walked free from the courthouse, but an ancient gypsy man with a cancerous hole where his nose should've been had grabbed him, caressed his cheek with a crooked finger, and murmured, "Thinner." Unpleasant, but nothing Halleck couldn't handle -- or can he? Ever since the encounter, the scale's needle rises a little less each day, and no how much he eats, Halleck can't seem to stop its slide.

I won't call Thinner profound; it has too much pulp in its bloodline for that. But it hefts some pretty weighty issues all the same, not the least of which is humanity's universal moral culpability. As Halleck's weight plummets, he bounces the crazy-sounding idea of a gypsy curse off of a police officer who'd been present at the accident. Could the gypsy man have cursed him out of some bent desire for vengeance? No, he had to know the accident wasn't entirely Halleck's fault. The lawman attempts to bolster such moral rationalizations, but his assurances fall stillborn from his lips: "I couldn't agree more that there's no absolute right and absolute wrong; there's just one gray shading into the next, lighter or darker. But you don't think [the gypsy woman's] husband's going to buy that [expletive], do you?" No, and readers won't either. Sure, no one can claim complete innocence, what with Halleck's unsafe driving and the gypsy woman's jaywalking. Halleck, though, took unethical steps to insulate himself from the consequences, and he transforms into something fearsome while trying to remove the punishment he thinks was unfairly thrust upon him. A "push" is what he calls the curse. "No blame, you say," the ancient gypsy intones near the novel's end. "You tell yourself and tell yourself and tell yourself. But there is no poosh, white man from town. Everybody pays, even for things they didn't do." In other words, blood requires blood. A morality tale? Yes, the oldest and most fundamental kind.

(Picture: CC 2009 by st4bucks)