ROAR!

Hi Guys,

Just to let you know. My next book should be out in the next few days - Roar. It's an epic fantasy about a wizard who got transformed into a lion in a magic battle and wants nothing more than to be able to return to his former shape. Of course nothing's ever that simple!

Here's the cover done by Cathy Walker. Looks brilliant!

Cheers, Greg.

The Villains

Hi Guys,

Been a while since I posted last – what else is new?! But recently I was on Facebook and someone asked a question that prompted me to do some thinking and it occurred to me that it might be good to put my thoughts down in pixels. They might be useful to some of you out there working on your own books.

So the question that was asked is – what makes a good villain? Which is in my view a damned good question.

Often in epic fantasy we concern ourselves with the heroes. Painting them in all sorts of glorious shades of emotion and tragedy, giving them feet of clay and heads in the clouds. We pour our hearts and souls into them – and very often they turn out to be an idealised version of ourselves. The people we would want to be.

There's nothing wrong with that of course. It's probably the heart of heroic fantasy. Though of course a common criticism of epic fantasy writers is that the heroes are just not real. And that's probably true – but my response is pretty much always going to be – it's fantasy mate, get over it!

Having said that a lot of people didn't get over it, and as a result the genre of grimdark was born. So this is the fantasy of Game of Thrones etc where everyone is flawed and even good people do bad things.

Now personally I'm not a lover of grimdark though obviously a lot of people are. But to me the thing that screams most loudly, is the fact that the characters of grimdark are just as unreal as the heroes of heroic fantasy. At the heart of the genre is this idea that everyone is inherently both good and evil – which is probably true to an extent – and that all that is needed are the right conditions to bring the evil to the fore. The problem with this of course is that as I look around at the people I know in whatever capacity, I can't imagine any of them actually rushing out raping and pillaging the moment society breaks down a little. Yes people do contain good and evil, but in nearly all cases the good far outweighs the evil.

Now here's where I come to the question of villains. What makes a good one? And the first thing I can say is that the one thing I don't want in a villain is to identify with him. I don't want to think that there, but for the grace of God, go I. Some people may. I simply don't. I don't want a grimdark villain.

But having said that, one thing I do want in a villain is to be able to understand him.

There are exceptions – Bond villains in my view have mostly been one dimensional characters who really only have a single drive – to take over the world etc – and a few character traits that make them interesting. And they work perfectly in that role, because they become the people you can love to hate. And when they meet their terrible ends as they must, you can cheer. They aren't real so killing them isn't something we have to be bothered by.

I've used this sort of villain myself. In Dragon my villains were giant alien bugs set on conquering the universe and enslaving the human race because our manual dexterity was so much better than theirs as they had pincers. So they could steal our technology and then use us to build their world. Most important of all, my hero could slaughter them in huge numbers and no one would have felt in the least uncomfortable about it!

Having said that in most heroic fantasy, we writers have to walk a careful path between these two extremes. We can't have our villains as unbelievable superhero / Bond cut outs who only work if we don't question anything about them. And making them poor suffering creatures that we feel sorry for as in the grimdark genre, is going too far the other way.

So the key to writing a good villain for me, is to give them a back story that explains them. It may be more fleshed out in your notes than in the actual story, but enough needs to be there that the reader reads them and understands why they do as they do.

My approach is to go into the psychology of the villain. So for example in Fineas and Tusk my villain was a man born with a single gift – the ability to control others – and then I tried to work out what a child raised with such a gift would be like. And the answer is a simple one. He would be completely corrupted. A true sociopath. He would be a child who never learned the meaning of being told no. Who never learned to love – because why would he love something that he could control completely? More importantly, why would he value them? And the answer? He wouldn't.

In the book coming out next – Roar – my villain is instead an immortal. And immortality has two consequences for a person's moral centre. The first is that as the years pass and the people you know and love die and are forgotten, you become divorced from the world. You lose your family and friends and ultimately become a loner. Everyone else just becomes a transient figure in your life. And their value to you, becomes less. In the end they just aren't important. The other thing about immortality is that death becomes a strange sort of bogeyman to you. Everyone else in the world lives with the knowledge that they will die. And so they learn to accept it. But to an immortal for whom death is always a possibility but never a certainty, it becomes something more than that. It becomes an intolerable fear. A terror. So now the question becomes, what would such a man do to avoid ever having to face the spectre of death? And the answer? Pretty much anything!

So anyway, that's my approach to writing villains. Get into their head space. Don't make them someone you would want to identify with. But do make them someone who, when they do horrible things, you can understand why they did them. Unless of course you really do want to write a shoot em up – in which case make them one dimensional with lots of quirks and as unreal as possible! Then have at them!

Cheers, for now. Greg.

Real Villains

 

Hi Guys,

 

 

 

(All graphic elements were taken from PhotoMorgue.)

 

 

New topic for me. Having completed the first draft of the third volume of the Wizard At Law books – Money Matters, I had a little time on my hands. Enough time to create new covers for all three of them, and then to go on my various fora and get back into some serious chatting with other writers.

 

On one of them a question was asked that fascinated me. Not so much for the question itself, as what it said about the entire genre of fantasy and where it's heading. And yet on the face of it the question was a stupidly simple one. How do we make our villains more real?

 

This is a topic I have touched on briefly before when I wrote about not really wanting to understand villains – just dispatch them. But it's not really something I've explored in any depth. This time though I want to go into the psyche of the fantasy villain in more depth. In particular the concept of making the villain more “real” and the place of this within the modern fantasy sub-genre known as grimdark.

 

Grimdark is as the name implies, simply a movement in the genre towards the creation of worlds and characters that are more gritty – grim and dark. It is a movement where the heroes are flawed and the villains are often as much misunderstood victims as they are actual villains. And currently the best example of this movement and certainly one of the most popular is George R. R. Martin's Game of thrones. In his world, every hero has feet of clay and every villain has a reason for being as dark and terrible as he or she is.

 

Proponents of grimdark, and fans of course, will argue that this is more real. That real life is not black and white. That there are no white knights slaying evil dragons. And on the face of it that almost seems reasonable – until you remember that we're all writing fantasy! But then when another writer asked that simple question I I turn had to wonder – is it actually any more “real” than what preceded it? And my thought is that it actually isn't.

 

The movement towards grimdark in fantasy in my view has been born of a dissatisfaction with and a rejection of the former typical heroic fantasy of the golden age of science fiction and fantasy. It is a reaction to having read and seen too many heroes of pure nobility and courage and of course pure hearts, racing in to save the world from the dastardly villain – and maybe kill a dragon or two along the way. And I understand that. You can only read the same thing so many times before you start to want to read something new and fresh. But while it makes sense to want something new, it doesn't make sense to believe that that something new is more realistic. True the white knight and the Bond villain were not real. But neither are the new crop of fantasy heroes and villains.

 

Nowhere is this seen more clearly in my view, than in the villains.

 

Consider the archetypal big baddies. Starting with Ming the Merciless – and seriously what baddie would call himself “the merciless” to begin with – it sort of gives the entire game away as to who he is! Ming was a simple villain. He wanted nothing more than ultimate power and to rule the universe, while his arch enemy Flash Gordon was the all American hero. Really there wasn't a lot of character development that went into our baddie. His motivation was simply a lust for power and that was enough to explain him.

 

And that pattern has continued for decades with a while host of Bond villains. You know the ones – petting their cats and coming up with ingenious plans to take over the world. They had no great depth until the more recent movies. And obviously this is no longer enough for audiences.

 

So obviously as writers we can't use these archetypes so much any more as a basis for our villains. But what do we use instead? Because that is where grimdark falls down.

 

We can't use real villains, no matter how much we want to make our villains more “real”. The reason is unfortunately as simple as it is sad. Real villains are sort of pathetic. Most of those who commit serious crimes, are from bad homes, raised with little in the way of education, and by and large simply aren't very bright. The reason they commit their crimes is usually a horrible lack of coping strategies. They actually find themselves in difficult situations and the only way they can think to get out of them is by doing something bad. As a basis for arch-villains they would by and large be unconvincing and boring.

 

Sociopaths became rather fertile ground to explore with the advent of villains like Hannibal. And for a while we were all thrilled by the idea of this super-intelligent plotter with no moral compass. But unfortunately while sociopathy is not nearly as rare as we would like it to be, the reality is that most sociopathic criminals aren't incredibly smart. In fact they aren't particularly smart at all. For a rather disturbing view of one of them you should watch the interviews done with Richard Kuklinski – the Iceman as he was known. With what is believed to be over a hundred assassinations that can be laid at his door, the man was cold and not particularly bright, with a violent temper and little actual understanding of people.

 

In reality the reason he was not caught for so long was that he was protected by organised crime and there was no relationship between him and his victims and therefore no reason to suspect him. It is this same lack of connection between victim and killer that makes most serial killers harder to catch than others – not any great intelligence.

 

Last I suppose there's the tortured soul. The angst ridden, long suffering wretch who is so twisted up inside that he can do the most vile things. Probably the benchmark for grimdark villains. These are the ones that readers want to believe are real. But really are they? Yes there are such people in the world. Sadly I've worked in an institution and met some of these people. But the sad fact is that these people don't generally become major villains. They sometimes commit crimes, sometimes horrible crimes. But as to taking over the world etc, it's not usually in their compass. It's hard to be taken seriously as a master villain when you spend your days talking to yourself, or curled up in a corner staring at a wall. And that's the sad fact of the matter. The more tormented the soul is the more likely the man is to be so badly broken that his capability to be an arch villain is destroyed.

 

Which brings us back to the central thrust of this post. The question that was asked. How can we as writers make our villains more “real”? And my answer is that we can't.

 

This is fantasy, and the villains we write are not real at all. They never were. They weren't real when they were archetypal power crazed despots and Bond villains. They weren't real when they were super-intelligent sociopaths. They weren't super-villains when they were based on actual criminals and in fact they were too boring for the most part to even pen. They weren't real either when they were tortured souls reacting to the horror's of their past lives.

 

Grimdark is no more “real” than heroic fantasy was before it.

 

So my thought is that as authors instead of concerning ourselves with questions like how real our villains are, we should instead ask the more accurate question – how believable are they? Because that's what people actually mean when they talk about “real”.

 

Well, enough wild ranting from me for one day. As always be good or don't get caught.

 

Cheers, Greg.

 

 

 

Of Warp Driven Spaceships And Betrayal

Hi Guys,

(Mock up model of The Intruder from my cover artist Adam Kopala - can't wait to see the finished version.)

 

Just sent off "The Stars Betrayed" for its second line edit, and so have a little time to spend on other things. So I thought I'd talk a little bit about the ship.

 

First, though the ship - The Intruder - is important to the story, this is not a simple "man in a battleship goes off to have adventures" space opera. The ship is just a vehicle (pun intended!) for the story. Rather this is a story of lies and betrayal - betrayal at every level. (Though I will not explain that any further since it might spoil the story by giving away some plot elements.) It's about why people will betray others including the ones they love. What will push them to do something almost unthinkable. And what sorts of betrayals can be forgiven. But also it asks the question, is their a longer term price to be paid?

 

It's also a story about Nietzsche's supermen. As some of you may know I am not a fan of Nietzsche, and I regard his supermen as people akin to sociopaths. People with no moral compass other than what they decide for themselves to be right and wrong, good and evil. That is not in my view a good thing. And when you give such people power, it can become a very bad thing indeed. When you give them ultimate power through say genetic engineering, it can be a nightmare.

 

Nietzsche himself saw his ubersmench as heroic figures in the ancient Greek tradition. Almost godlike and unbowed. He saw them as a vision of what men should be. He did not seem to accept that men have the impulses of both angels and demons in them. That yes we can be wonderful, true and loving. But we can also be monsters. And when psychologists tell us that one to three percent of our society have sociopathic tendencies, the monster within has to be recognised.

 

The Stars Betrayed grew out of these disparate ideas and also one further one - that some betrayals, even the most terrible can be forgiven. For example the father desperate to save both his drowning children who can only save one. He has to sacrifice / betray one to save the other, or else lose both.

 

Yes that can be forgiven. It can be understood even. But the cost of such a decision would be soul destroying for the father. And the question hardly ever asked is what would the sacrificed child think of his father's betrayal? Could he forgive him? Could he understand? Or is it a betrayal too great?

 

I hope that this book will make readers think about these same issues - as well as hopefully be entertained!

 

Cheers, Greg.

 

Villains - Sometimes We Don't Want To Understand Them!

Hi Guys,

Been doing a lot of writing lately, and the next book "The Godlost Land" is in the final stages of it's first draft.

I'm pleased with the way the book is going, and particularly with the way the bad guy - Terellion - has shaped up. He is a thorough going baddie which is what I wanted him to be. In fact to quote (or probably mis-quote) one of my favourite authors Harry Harrison, he is the perfect example of a complete freewheeling bastard!

All of which has set me to thinking about villains in general in writing. And of course how Terellion will fit in among them.

To give some background to my thinking on the subject, there has been a trend in recent years in a lot of genres to go for greater realism. Grimdark in fantasy and science fiction is an expression of this trend - the belief being that by making things somehow more horrible they will become more real. In my view this is a reaction to the unrealistic optimism, heroic victory tropes that dominated fantasy until the seventies. But also in my view grimdark is just as unrealistic as that which it replaces, and in some cases it can go too far. In science fiction the best example of this in my view would be the Gap series, by Stephen Donaldson, where the three main characters all go through cycles of being victims. And in fantasy I would argue that GRR Martin's Game of Thrones follows this same trope where all the heroes have feet of clay and the villains have reasons for doing what they do. (Except for Joffrey who is a truly horrible spoilt child king and needs to die a terrible death  in my view!)

As part of the entire movement towards grimdark and realism in the fantasy genres there has been one trend which has become particularly prevalent - the villain being another victim. Misunderstood and suffering from whatever trauma in his past, the reader is asked to "understand" and even empathise with the villain - because villains are real people too!

I understand this desire to humanise the villain, and to a certain extent I agree with it. After all in real life villains do usually have reasons for what they do. But it occurred to me as I was writing Terellion, that this is high fantasy. It isn't real life, it's escapism. And sometimes a villain should just be a villain - and preferably die a horrible death! Besides even in real life there are villains who simply are just villains. The mafia hit man Richard Kuklinski (the iceman) is a perfect example. He was a sociopath pure and simple. In every interview he gave it was clear that he never really understood the suffering of others.

So if in real life there are people like this, and if what I'm writing is pure escapism, why should my villain be more than just a sociopath?

That was the realisation that struck me as I wrote Terellion. Granted I gave him a back story to explain how he became what he did and explain his motivations, but at no stage did I as the writer want to "understand" him. I didn't want to sympathise with him. And while some readers may find my choice challenging in the face of modern grimdark fantasy which seems to be all over the book shelves, I'm happy with it.

I hope you will be too.

Cheers, Greg.