So has anybody written a thriller about net trolls yet?
Trolling is not a new phenomenon, as any teacher or performer can tell you. There's an irreducible number of people who feel that enthusiasm is ridiculous and get some sort of satisfaction out of baiting people. I'm not talking about giving people enough rope to hang themselves, which can be a useful service - I'm talking about poking people until they holler for one's own amusement.
Once upon a time, this could only be done face-to-face, which inevitably made it personal and potentially risky. Then the advent of news media made it possible to use op-ed pages and hoaxing to poke people at one remove. But the internet brings trolling into the realm of the casual hobby - it is now possible to annoy more people than ever before, with less effort. Social media, e-mail, websites, comment sections - stir the pot and laugh at how angry people get, feel the power of your idle nastiness, without any danger of being hit on the nose or becoming persona non grata in every venue in town (because town is infinitely large and you can always move on). It's wholesale, impersonal bullying, and it's practically consequence free. Even if it advances to cyberstalking and illegal activity, if you choose your victims well, no one's likely to be able to bring you to book for it.
But what if you poke the wrong bear one too many times?
The same qualities of the internet that protect you from the wrath of your victims, make you vulnerable to the skilled user who decides to turn the tables on you.
Thrillers do not necessarily require a sympathetic protagonist; personally I prefer them because if I'm going to be spending time with them I want to be able to root for them. Nor do I personally enjoy stories that are raining vengeance down on the head of the evil protagonist; they leave me with a nasty taste in my mouth. But the obvious angle here is the troll as protagonist. Maybe it's someone who targets people for what she believes are moral reasons - I don't suppose many of us would feel too bad about a troll whipping up the social media of the KKK into foaming frenzies. Yet it should be clear from the outset that this is an excuse, and that her moral superiority to her targets is problematic at best. She has proper activist outlets available to her, of which she does not avail herself, and she's apt to go for the motes in the eyes of others while ignoring the beam in her own. In her real life she feels powerless, and rather than taking real-world action to correct this, she takes out her feelings being an anonymous internet bully.
For best results, her situation should be a hard one; her weakness and cowardice should be of a sort and in a style that will rouse the audience to say "yes I see but," not "oh get off your butt and do something about it." She is redeemable, but has a steep character arc and some hard lessons to learn before the audience will be ready to embrace her.
So we have someone who smothers fragility in smugness and seeks self-esteem in emotional sadism because she doesn't know any other way to get it. Probably there's something/someone she truly cares about besides herself - a sibling, perhaps, or a pet or a friend. She is young because trolling is a young person's game. She has a lot of time on her hands, much of which she might prefer to spend doing something else but for some reason (disability? Restrictive life circumstances?) is trapped at her computer instead, and trolling relieves her frustration. And she eventually takes that frustration out in the wrong venue, on the wrong person.
Most people, when they realize they're being trolled, are content to shut the troll down - block the username from private space; petition to get it banned in a public, moderated one; turn off anon posting; simply stop replying. But our protagonist hits someone on a very sore spot indeed; and this particular person is the troll's evil double, only more so. Someone with a similar base personality, possibly even a similar base situation to the protagonist, but someone who has concluded that the best defense for the squishy miserable self is a strong offense. Threats are not walked away from - they are turned on, and annihilated.
At first it's fun, going head-to-head with someone playing the same game; but it's not a game to the Other anymore, it's deadly serious. Other is very, very good at finding people's buttons, much better than Troll, and Troll soon finds that having your buttons pressed with unerring accuracy, repeatedly, is no fun at all. (The reader is allowed to think "Serves you right" at this point.) When she finds herself weeping after a hit that strikes at the core of her situation she tries to detach.
But that's not good enough for Other. Hacking her social media, identity theft, online spying - things Troll would never have thought of doing because they'd destroy her sense of moral high ground are fair game for Other. Real life consequences start to accumulate, and her initial situation becomes steadily worse.
The threat that forces her to stop retreating and taking pot-shots from the shadows is not likely to be to her directly. If we are too cowardly to stand up for ourselves, we pretty much have to bottom out to do it; if cowardice is paired with low self-esteem, we are likely to assume that bottoming out is no more than we deserve. No, what forces her to turn is that thing/person/pet she truly cares about. Because of course the Other finds out what that thing/person/pet is, and goes for it.
We will be brave and effective for those we love, even when we wouldn't raise a hand to save ourselves.
She will need to learn new skills for this. She will need to confront herself and the depth of the resemblance between herself and her persecutor. She will probably need an ally, and for maximum impact this should be someone she has no right to expect help from, someone she's bullied, who knows who she is and what she does and whose first response is to say: "Serve you right." Someone who will show her what generosity looks like.
It is not necessary for the ending to, strictly speaking, be happy. If Troll finds a core of true worth and breaks out of her old behavior pattern, she does not need to destroy Other. She can even be destroyed (in one sense or another) herself. Work out what she loves and the nature of Other's threat to it, and the emotionally satisfying climax, in which perhaps she loses and wins at once, or wins by changing the definition of losing (she and Other having shared a twisted set of rules between them) will emerge naturally.
The thought of writing all this makes me tired, though.
Showing posts with label Idea Garage Sale; Thrillers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Idea Garage Sale; Thrillers. Show all posts
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Idea Garage Sale: Libraries of Timbuktu
Way too many news stories happen in any given year for me to garage sale them all, even if I made a serious effort to keep up with the news. (Which I don't, because depression + crying jags.) So excuse me that the inspiring link to the thriller about the rescue of the Manuscripts of Timbuktu dates back to April.
It boggles my mind, however, that there's no movie in the works yet. Youthful vow to guard a fabulous fragile treasure in the form of the manuscripts, implacable black-hearted foe in the form of the book-burning legions of Al-Qaeda posing an imminent threat; desperate coordinated action under the noses of the conquering Bad Guys; "exotic, distant" lands (from the point of view of the locii of thriller-making, southern California and New York) - seriously, this has it all! For YA authors, it is no great stretch to get a fictional hero in the correct age range, given that business about "family vows," working within the covert organizational framework provided by Dr Abdel Kader Haidara, who led the rescue attempt.
The equally urgent threat of mold and subobtimal curation environments in the Mali refuge where the bulk of the manuscripts wound up is less photogenic and requires more work. But a movie which used the safe arrival in Mali as the unambiguous happy ending required by the thriller format could be leveraged into a fundraising effort to provide for the safe curation and study of the manuscripts, and benefit the reputation and bottom-line of the production company. So the sooner somebody with deep pockets gets on this, the better.
A whole treasure-trove of disparate stories, however, lies behind this, in the possibilities presented by Sankore University of Timbuktu, where these manuscripts originated. Starting with a mosque in the tenth century, Sankore attracted students and scholars from all over the known world. Timbuktu was a thriving cosmopolitan metropolis which rivaled the cities of Europe - yes, even Paris; even Rome - when it didn't outright overshadow them. As a setting, it can't be beat - none of the stories buried in this fertile soil have been told to modern Western audiences before. It should only take a little digging to turn up a lifetime's worth of intriguing possibility. Love stories, war stories, political intrigue, spiritual exploration; fantasy and gritty realism - they must all be waiting there for the willing researcher.
What if a modern Al-Qaeda member intent on destroying the knowledge of the past got lost in a time loop and went back, alone, to 16th-century Timbuktu? Would he wreak havoc? Would he undergo a major character arc and, in the absence of the social, personal, and political pressures that set him on this path, acquire more humility and a truer Islamic spirit? Or would his isolation in an alien time exacerbate his opinions into madness?
What if the last member of a family sworn to protect its cache of books is a young girl who has internalized both her responsibility to the manuscripts and her responsibility to adhere to "traditional" feminine roles? What positions does this put her in; and how does she choose when these responsibilities conflict?
Who was the "female philanthropist from Mandinka" who financed the infrastructure of the University; what else did she fund, where did her money come from, what motivated her philanthropy?
How did European scholars who came to study in Sankore during the times generally called "medieval" live? What did they do with the knowledge they gained? How did they deal with living as a Christian minority among Muslims, and learning from them? What were the burning questions and conflicts of the day?
Asian scholars, ditto?
It's kind of like that dazzling expanse of snow I remember waking up to when I was small and lived in places where snow happened. You're afraid to step in it, lest you mess it all up. But you can't build snowwomen, or forts, or have snowball fights, or even get to school, without taking those first steps; and once you start, isn't it glorious to run around in?
It boggles my mind, however, that there's no movie in the works yet. Youthful vow to guard a fabulous fragile treasure in the form of the manuscripts, implacable black-hearted foe in the form of the book-burning legions of Al-Qaeda posing an imminent threat; desperate coordinated action under the noses of the conquering Bad Guys; "exotic, distant" lands (from the point of view of the locii of thriller-making, southern California and New York) - seriously, this has it all! For YA authors, it is no great stretch to get a fictional hero in the correct age range, given that business about "family vows," working within the covert organizational framework provided by Dr Abdel Kader Haidara, who led the rescue attempt.
The equally urgent threat of mold and subobtimal curation environments in the Mali refuge where the bulk of the manuscripts wound up is less photogenic and requires more work. But a movie which used the safe arrival in Mali as the unambiguous happy ending required by the thriller format could be leveraged into a fundraising effort to provide for the safe curation and study of the manuscripts, and benefit the reputation and bottom-line of the production company. So the sooner somebody with deep pockets gets on this, the better.
A whole treasure-trove of disparate stories, however, lies behind this, in the possibilities presented by Sankore University of Timbuktu, where these manuscripts originated. Starting with a mosque in the tenth century, Sankore attracted students and scholars from all over the known world. Timbuktu was a thriving cosmopolitan metropolis which rivaled the cities of Europe - yes, even Paris; even Rome - when it didn't outright overshadow them. As a setting, it can't be beat - none of the stories buried in this fertile soil have been told to modern Western audiences before. It should only take a little digging to turn up a lifetime's worth of intriguing possibility. Love stories, war stories, political intrigue, spiritual exploration; fantasy and gritty realism - they must all be waiting there for the willing researcher.
What if a modern Al-Qaeda member intent on destroying the knowledge of the past got lost in a time loop and went back, alone, to 16th-century Timbuktu? Would he wreak havoc? Would he undergo a major character arc and, in the absence of the social, personal, and political pressures that set him on this path, acquire more humility and a truer Islamic spirit? Or would his isolation in an alien time exacerbate his opinions into madness?
What if the last member of a family sworn to protect its cache of books is a young girl who has internalized both her responsibility to the manuscripts and her responsibility to adhere to "traditional" feminine roles? What positions does this put her in; and how does she choose when these responsibilities conflict?
Who was the "female philanthropist from Mandinka" who financed the infrastructure of the University; what else did she fund, where did her money come from, what motivated her philanthropy?
How did European scholars who came to study in Sankore during the times generally called "medieval" live? What did they do with the knowledge they gained? How did they deal with living as a Christian minority among Muslims, and learning from them? What were the burning questions and conflicts of the day?
Asian scholars, ditto?
It's kind of like that dazzling expanse of snow I remember waking up to when I was small and lived in places where snow happened. You're afraid to step in it, lest you mess it all up. But you can't build snowwomen, or forts, or have snowball fights, or even get to school, without taking those first steps; and once you start, isn't it glorious to run around in?
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: Half-sibling Hurricane
So I had one of those dreams, the ones that are clearly a story and they all hang together and you can work this but by the time you get to the notebook all the connections have fallen apart. The notes look like this:
Hurricane. Connections. half-siblings, but how was this figured out? He rescues his half-brother and sends him off to their mutually unknown father but how is this discovered? Purple woven-plastic strap - held a pager - protagonist scavenges it off of the street after his brother loses it - connection not made till later - only one it could have been in that area, the purple indicates a hotel in another part of town. Protag is frustrated, angry, keeps rescuing people but doesn't know how big a difference he's making - because it's all incidental to something else he's trying to do, and failing. In the dream, everyone was male but the woman who lost her dog. Even the dog was male. Why?
I'm tolerably good at remembering my dreams, compared to most people, but as you see, that's still not very good. And it leaves out the storekeeper running after the dog yelling "Cumin!"
The trouble, of course, is that these dreams don't make as much sense when you have them as they seem to at the time. Your brain isn't working the same way it does when awake, so connections are made differently and sense doesn't mean the same thing. It is as much a myth that you can take your dreams and transfer them directly to stories as it is that you can do so with your real life. Both require a lot of organizational work before they can be useful.
Even, I suspect, if the plan is to be deliberately surrealistic and dreamlike.
The purple pager strap is the most vivid image from the dream, so I could start organizing with it; but that quickly grows frustrating as it's not in itself an evocative thing and I am immediately bogged down in logistics, maps, timing, and such issues before I have any idea of the important parts of the story: i.e. What the protagonist was trying to do when he incidentally rescued people; and What is the deal with the half-siblings and the unknown father? Because though only the protagonist and one half-brother are indicated in those notes, in the dream there were definitely six.
That six is almost certainly derived from the Sims2 Tricou bastards, so I would have no solid reason to retain that specific number if I went with this as a story; but the sense of this poor desperately solitary boy, able to help everyone but himself although he has a family he's already interacting with is the emotional core of the dream, so he's certainly got more than the one half-sibling. And it's not like that's a story that wraps up with a happy reunion, either. No matter how much a kid with an unknown father wants to meet him, the reality of doing so has to be full of resentment by the nature of things.
So who is this kid?
Why is he so good at rescuing people from hurricanes?
What/who is it he's so desperately searching for? There must be some stable, loved figure in his life, someone he depends on or who is dependent on him. Someone who is now in jeopardy, or at least lost in a situation in which jeopardy is imminent. Someone who can get the credit for the kid's being so much more responsible than his father was that his actions allow something coherent to rise from the chaos of the storm.
Figure that out, everything else follows, and you've got yourself a story.
Don't figure it out, and all you've got is another mess of a dream.
Hurricane. Connections. half-siblings, but how was this figured out? He rescues his half-brother and sends him off to their mutually unknown father but how is this discovered? Purple woven-plastic strap - held a pager - protagonist scavenges it off of the street after his brother loses it - connection not made till later - only one it could have been in that area, the purple indicates a hotel in another part of town. Protag is frustrated, angry, keeps rescuing people but doesn't know how big a difference he's making - because it's all incidental to something else he's trying to do, and failing. In the dream, everyone was male but the woman who lost her dog. Even the dog was male. Why?
I'm tolerably good at remembering my dreams, compared to most people, but as you see, that's still not very good. And it leaves out the storekeeper running after the dog yelling "Cumin!"
The trouble, of course, is that these dreams don't make as much sense when you have them as they seem to at the time. Your brain isn't working the same way it does when awake, so connections are made differently and sense doesn't mean the same thing. It is as much a myth that you can take your dreams and transfer them directly to stories as it is that you can do so with your real life. Both require a lot of organizational work before they can be useful.
Even, I suspect, if the plan is to be deliberately surrealistic and dreamlike.
The purple pager strap is the most vivid image from the dream, so I could start organizing with it; but that quickly grows frustrating as it's not in itself an evocative thing and I am immediately bogged down in logistics, maps, timing, and such issues before I have any idea of the important parts of the story: i.e. What the protagonist was trying to do when he incidentally rescued people; and What is the deal with the half-siblings and the unknown father? Because though only the protagonist and one half-brother are indicated in those notes, in the dream there were definitely six.
That six is almost certainly derived from the Sims2 Tricou bastards, so I would have no solid reason to retain that specific number if I went with this as a story; but the sense of this poor desperately solitary boy, able to help everyone but himself although he has a family he's already interacting with is the emotional core of the dream, so he's certainly got more than the one half-sibling. And it's not like that's a story that wraps up with a happy reunion, either. No matter how much a kid with an unknown father wants to meet him, the reality of doing so has to be full of resentment by the nature of things.
So who is this kid?
Why is he so good at rescuing people from hurricanes?
What/who is it he's so desperately searching for? There must be some stable, loved figure in his life, someone he depends on or who is dependent on him. Someone who is now in jeopardy, or at least lost in a situation in which jeopardy is imminent. Someone who can get the credit for the kid's being so much more responsible than his father was that his actions allow something coherent to rise from the chaos of the storm.
Figure that out, everything else follows, and you've got yourself a story.
Don't figure it out, and all you've got is another mess of a dream.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: The Alternative Life
One reason I read, and write, and play the kinds of games I do is that one life doesn't seem like enough. No one can do everything she wants to do; and most things one would like to do have either long patches of unrewarding dullness, steep learning curves, or circumstantial limitations like, say, physical impossibility. I can't live in the Pleistocene, I don't have the temperament for academia, and my body is being a bugger about letting me garden, let alone do avocational archeology which is theoretically within my reach. Like everyone else, I have to focus on overcoming the dullness, learning curves, and circumstantial limitations of the one thing that matters most. Which is storytelling. Which encompasses all other possible lives, as it happens.
The conventional wisdom says: "Write what you know." But how boring would that be? I say, "Write what you'd like to know," and then you have an excuse to go find out.
So you decide to write about who you'd like to be. Say, someone capable of sailing solo around the world. Not in a race or anything. Just sailing, between the lonely sea and the sky, with flying fishes jumping on board in certain latitudes, going ashore in Tahiti and Singapore and remote Arctic islands and it's all very pleasant, and gives you an excuse to read up on Tahiti and Singapore and remote Arctic islands, but while you're reading up you realize that an endless travelogue makes poor reading and the parts of the research that draw you on, that excite you, perversely that make the concept attractive, aren't pleasant at all. A story is about characters in conflict. If you want this alternate life of yours to be worth reading about, you'll have to disrupt your alternate self's good time.
So you start with all the reasons you do not, in fact, sail solo around the world, and figure out how your alternate self copes with them, and why it's worth it to her.
For starters, you probably wouldn't find this fantasy compelling enough to write about if you couldn't sail, but odds are good you're not a competent enough sailor to go solo. Your alternate self must be or she wouldn't be doing it - would she? Maybe, if she had compelling enough circumstances; if she didn't expect to be alone, or if something is pushing her away from her native shores hard enough that death by incompetence in the watery deep seems preferable.
You probably don't have enough money, either, or any way to make your round-the-world tour self-supporting. Your character must have one or the other or she wouldn't be doing it - would she? Maybe. What if, instead of being richer than you, she's poorer? What if that push factor is enough to make stealing a yacht (fully stocked) a good enough short term solution that she decided to postpone thinking about the long-term?
Whoa, wait a minute, you don't want to be a thief!
Okay, maybe she doesn't steal it exactly. Maybe she salvages it. Maybe she's out in a little dinghy, the only place she can get away from - Who? What? Something terrible - an abusive family situation? The snowballing effects of some small mistake, made in the wrong place at the wrong time, drawing the attention of the wrong person? Think about that later. She's in her dinghy on the morning after a storm and there's the yacht, all its lines slack, drifting but sound, and she hails and gets no answer. It's abandoned, or maybe there's a corpse washing around in the hold, or maybe the only inhabitant is a seasick cat. But there's food. There's charts. There's fishing tackle. It's a simple enough rig and a small enough yacht that she thinks she could figure out how to handle it alone. And then she could just sail away from all her troubles...
But of course the troubles follow her. Either physically, if it's a thriller; or mentally, because we don't leave our troubles behind, we cling to them even as we run away. If she was in an abusive relationship she has the scars of that. If she's running from someone, someone must be chasing her. If she's made one mistake, she's likely to make another. And that yacht, though I believe legally hers by right of salvage, wasn't always abandoned or empty. Someone else was sailing her for a reason, and is no longer doing so for a reason, and those reasons can present their own challenges in addition to the ones she brings with her. And of course, there's the ocean to deal with. Being alone in a storm. Seasickness. Access to fresh water. The endless work of sailing, which is bound to entail more than you or she at first envision. Fetching up in foreign parts with no money and no passport.
And by now she's not an alternate you anymore. She's something much better - she's herself. A character. Someone who can give you an entree into the alternate life you can't live, and be more interesting than you.
The conventional wisdom says: "Write what you know." But how boring would that be? I say, "Write what you'd like to know," and then you have an excuse to go find out.
So you decide to write about who you'd like to be. Say, someone capable of sailing solo around the world. Not in a race or anything. Just sailing, between the lonely sea and the sky, with flying fishes jumping on board in certain latitudes, going ashore in Tahiti and Singapore and remote Arctic islands and it's all very pleasant, and gives you an excuse to read up on Tahiti and Singapore and remote Arctic islands, but while you're reading up you realize that an endless travelogue makes poor reading and the parts of the research that draw you on, that excite you, perversely that make the concept attractive, aren't pleasant at all. A story is about characters in conflict. If you want this alternate life of yours to be worth reading about, you'll have to disrupt your alternate self's good time.
So you start with all the reasons you do not, in fact, sail solo around the world, and figure out how your alternate self copes with them, and why it's worth it to her.
For starters, you probably wouldn't find this fantasy compelling enough to write about if you couldn't sail, but odds are good you're not a competent enough sailor to go solo. Your alternate self must be or she wouldn't be doing it - would she? Maybe, if she had compelling enough circumstances; if she didn't expect to be alone, or if something is pushing her away from her native shores hard enough that death by incompetence in the watery deep seems preferable.
You probably don't have enough money, either, or any way to make your round-the-world tour self-supporting. Your character must have one or the other or she wouldn't be doing it - would she? Maybe. What if, instead of being richer than you, she's poorer? What if that push factor is enough to make stealing a yacht (fully stocked) a good enough short term solution that she decided to postpone thinking about the long-term?
Whoa, wait a minute, you don't want to be a thief!
Okay, maybe she doesn't steal it exactly. Maybe she salvages it. Maybe she's out in a little dinghy, the only place she can get away from - Who? What? Something terrible - an abusive family situation? The snowballing effects of some small mistake, made in the wrong place at the wrong time, drawing the attention of the wrong person? Think about that later. She's in her dinghy on the morning after a storm and there's the yacht, all its lines slack, drifting but sound, and she hails and gets no answer. It's abandoned, or maybe there's a corpse washing around in the hold, or maybe the only inhabitant is a seasick cat. But there's food. There's charts. There's fishing tackle. It's a simple enough rig and a small enough yacht that she thinks she could figure out how to handle it alone. And then she could just sail away from all her troubles...
But of course the troubles follow her. Either physically, if it's a thriller; or mentally, because we don't leave our troubles behind, we cling to them even as we run away. If she was in an abusive relationship she has the scars of that. If she's running from someone, someone must be chasing her. If she's made one mistake, she's likely to make another. And that yacht, though I believe legally hers by right of salvage, wasn't always abandoned or empty. Someone else was sailing her for a reason, and is no longer doing so for a reason, and those reasons can present their own challenges in addition to the ones she brings with her. And of course, there's the ocean to deal with. Being alone in a storm. Seasickness. Access to fresh water. The endless work of sailing, which is bound to entail more than you or she at first envision. Fetching up in foreign parts with no money and no passport.
And by now she's not an alternate you anymore. She's something much better - she's herself. A character. Someone who can give you an entree into the alternate life you can't live, and be more interesting than you.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Idea Garage Dale: A Sunday Brunch Buffet
Before we begin, please, I would like to appeal to anybody out there who knows how to update Facebook with this blog to contact me and tell me how it's done. Because I know people do this sort of thing, but neither I nor the person who helped me set up pages for Sullivan and me can figure it out.
All right, on to the regularly scheduled Garage Sale and since I have a new Fortean Times again, I'll go back to that bottomless well, Human Weirdness. I open it at random and find myself faced with the Strange Days feature. A man who has licked every cathedral in the British Isles on a bet. A naked "Texas Wildman" who lives in a cave in "the hills" (a phrase which conjures up completely inaccurate pictures of the landscape in question) around El Paso, living by donating blood and recycling cans, who harasses hikers and puts out dead snakes as food for wildlife. Hmm...A Japanese man whose library cards were washed away by the March 2011 tsunami hopes someone on the west coast of the US will find and return them...Holey Cheese, an empty 28-foot yacht with no identification markings, a tidy cabin, and Dutch sea charts, recovered about six miles from a nuclear power plant in Suffolk. And the world's oldest parrot, Tarbu, dead at age 55.
Not surprisingly, given the structure of the Strange Days features, each of these news snippets lacks an important feature necessary to the production of a full-fledged story; but each of them has potential. Taking them in order:
With the cathedral-licking story (the feature for the page, with a full column of text and two pictures) we have an attention-getting, but largely pointless, story. A bet is not, in and of itself, sufficient motivation for odd behavior for a story. Something else needs to be going on for this to be a good novel; probably the licker's character arc. And a character arc is implied by his reluctance to claim the original forfeit for the bet, which was that the friend who made the challenge streak outside York Minster. This now seems disrespectful, and he's likely to change the terms to a monetary contribution to York Minster. Yes, something could be done with it; and something has, and possibly will be, as he has a blog on the subject and considers writing a book. Therefore, the rest of us need to keep our hands off of this until it's undergone a chemical change in the compost heaps of our brains and produced something that won't infringe on his intellectual property rights in the matter of his own life.
Moving on to the "Texas Wildman," what we have here is, on the face of it, only another homeless person with mental issues, and most of the mystery and intrigue of the situation would probably vanish if we knew more about it. The fact that the snippet is credited to the Sydney MX News rather than any closer news source would seem to indicate that the people who live near him find him more annoying and/or pitiable than interesting. This is not unusual, as the poor of distant places, for whose welfare one cannot by any stretch of the imagination be made responsible, are often exotic and mysterious, while those who live close by are a mere itch in the conscience we would rather not notice. Given that poverty and inadequate public mental health provisions are not readily soluble problems, what we have here is a character without a plot. The plot, however, could be generated by an unflinching imaginative exploration of the character. Is the assumption of mental issues true, to begin with, or does he in fact have rational, functional reasons for his behavior? If he does, what are they, and where do they take him? Who are the other characters in his life - family, friends and ex-friends, the hikers (does he truly harass them, or do they feel harassed by his mere existence?), the owner or representative of the owner of the land on which he lives? Perhaps it's family land. Perhaps he owns it. What about the snakes? Does he wear clothes to cash in his recycling and give blood? How do the staff at the plasma center feel about him? You start answering questions like that and investigating the difficulties of the life he's leading, you'll find yourself a story, I promise you.
The Japanese man with the library cards is a character without a story; an optimist, or someone with no concept of scale. You couldn't stop with the library cards for this person. You'd have to show him in action, moving through mundane life at a completely different level than those people around him - ridiculous, maybe annoying, maybe endearing - and make some kind of point about the disconnect between expectation and reality. I wonder what would happen if his life trajectory intersected that of the man in the cave? Or the cathedral licker's?
And then the Marine Mystery, oh boy! What we have here is a teaser leading nowhere, the mystery rather than the solution, a nearly blank slate. A writing prompt, in fact. First, you'd have to decide from which direction to tackle the situation - will you be telling the story of the people who created the mystery, or of people who come upon it after the fact and uncover that story? Either way, you need to work out what happened. Is the nearby nuclear plant relevant, or a red herring? Are we talking a supernatural mystery, a thriller, or a personal tragedy? What are the implications of the lack of identification on the vessel? What maritime laws are broken here; what maritime customs make sense of this or that feature that merely puzzles a landlubber?
The 55-year-old parrot, who said "Hello, my darling" to his owner every morning, is a character without a story. Unless, of course, you put him alone on that empty yacht...
All right, on to the regularly scheduled Garage Sale and since I have a new Fortean Times again, I'll go back to that bottomless well, Human Weirdness. I open it at random and find myself faced with the Strange Days feature. A man who has licked every cathedral in the British Isles on a bet. A naked "Texas Wildman" who lives in a cave in "the hills" (a phrase which conjures up completely inaccurate pictures of the landscape in question) around El Paso, living by donating blood and recycling cans, who harasses hikers and puts out dead snakes as food for wildlife. Hmm...A Japanese man whose library cards were washed away by the March 2011 tsunami hopes someone on the west coast of the US will find and return them...Holey Cheese, an empty 28-foot yacht with no identification markings, a tidy cabin, and Dutch sea charts, recovered about six miles from a nuclear power plant in Suffolk. And the world's oldest parrot, Tarbu, dead at age 55.
Not surprisingly, given the structure of the Strange Days features, each of these news snippets lacks an important feature necessary to the production of a full-fledged story; but each of them has potential. Taking them in order:
With the cathedral-licking story (the feature for the page, with a full column of text and two pictures) we have an attention-getting, but largely pointless, story. A bet is not, in and of itself, sufficient motivation for odd behavior for a story. Something else needs to be going on for this to be a good novel; probably the licker's character arc. And a character arc is implied by his reluctance to claim the original forfeit for the bet, which was that the friend who made the challenge streak outside York Minster. This now seems disrespectful, and he's likely to change the terms to a monetary contribution to York Minster. Yes, something could be done with it; and something has, and possibly will be, as he has a blog on the subject and considers writing a book. Therefore, the rest of us need to keep our hands off of this until it's undergone a chemical change in the compost heaps of our brains and produced something that won't infringe on his intellectual property rights in the matter of his own life.
Moving on to the "Texas Wildman," what we have here is, on the face of it, only another homeless person with mental issues, and most of the mystery and intrigue of the situation would probably vanish if we knew more about it. The fact that the snippet is credited to the Sydney MX News rather than any closer news source would seem to indicate that the people who live near him find him more annoying and/or pitiable than interesting. This is not unusual, as the poor of distant places, for whose welfare one cannot by any stretch of the imagination be made responsible, are often exotic and mysterious, while those who live close by are a mere itch in the conscience we would rather not notice. Given that poverty and inadequate public mental health provisions are not readily soluble problems, what we have here is a character without a plot. The plot, however, could be generated by an unflinching imaginative exploration of the character. Is the assumption of mental issues true, to begin with, or does he in fact have rational, functional reasons for his behavior? If he does, what are they, and where do they take him? Who are the other characters in his life - family, friends and ex-friends, the hikers (does he truly harass them, or do they feel harassed by his mere existence?), the owner or representative of the owner of the land on which he lives? Perhaps it's family land. Perhaps he owns it. What about the snakes? Does he wear clothes to cash in his recycling and give blood? How do the staff at the plasma center feel about him? You start answering questions like that and investigating the difficulties of the life he's leading, you'll find yourself a story, I promise you.
The Japanese man with the library cards is a character without a story; an optimist, or someone with no concept of scale. You couldn't stop with the library cards for this person. You'd have to show him in action, moving through mundane life at a completely different level than those people around him - ridiculous, maybe annoying, maybe endearing - and make some kind of point about the disconnect between expectation and reality. I wonder what would happen if his life trajectory intersected that of the man in the cave? Or the cathedral licker's?
And then the Marine Mystery, oh boy! What we have here is a teaser leading nowhere, the mystery rather than the solution, a nearly blank slate. A writing prompt, in fact. First, you'd have to decide from which direction to tackle the situation - will you be telling the story of the people who created the mystery, or of people who come upon it after the fact and uncover that story? Either way, you need to work out what happened. Is the nearby nuclear plant relevant, or a red herring? Are we talking a supernatural mystery, a thriller, or a personal tragedy? What are the implications of the lack of identification on the vessel? What maritime laws are broken here; what maritime customs make sense of this or that feature that merely puzzles a landlubber?
The 55-year-old parrot, who said "Hello, my darling" to his owner every morning, is a character without a story. Unless, of course, you put him alone on that empty yacht...
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: Mobbing the Ghost
Another month, another Fortean Times full of potential waiting to be developed.
This month, I find an article on "ghost mobs," detailing the common 19th-century English occurrence of huge mobs of people on the lookout for ghosts - in cemeteries, in supposedly haunted neighborhoods connected to infamous crimes, outside buildings plagued by poltergeists, and so on.
Clearly related to other forms of mass hysteria such as UFO or cryptid flaps, the significant features of these ghost mobs were that they were overwhelmingly made up of poor people, that they focused on ghosts, and that they caused a good deal of trouble to the police. When 2000 people show up outside a single supposedly haunted house, it's a serious hindrance to traffic even before people start picking each other's pockets, drinking, and jostling for the best view of nothing at all.
Of course very few of these people ever even thought they got to see the ghost that attracted them. In 1834, a party of men climbed over a wall into a cemetery to confront the ghost, which turned out to be a woman guarding her son's grave against bodysnatchers - which raises the question, What if some of those supposed ghosts were in fact bodysnatchers? Very bad for business, ghost mobs.
Some of the mobs happened in response to a hoax - the classic "kids in sheets" meme seems to have its origin here - and some ended in tragedy. In 1803, a bricklayer, dressed in his trade's traditional garb of white linen pants, white flannel vest, and a white apron, had to come and go from work through a supposedly haunted area and was molested by curiosity seekers, some of whom were deterred when he threatened to punch them in the head, but others of whom, in one of those terrible combinations of alcohol, guns, bragging, and mass psychosis, killed him. His killers were ultimately pardoned, which I can't help considering a gross miscarriage of justice, despite the undoubted truth that no one participating in such a mob can be said to be entirely in his right mind. No one made them bring a gun to a ghost hunt!
Ghosts or no ghosts, we have the makings of quite a head-spinning mystery or thriller here. Whether it's a historical depends on exactly which elements one finds most intriguing. We have plenty of mobs, mass hysteria, and tragic juxtapositions of guns and alcohol in modern times to work with, and bringing the bricklayer's case forward 200 years might be illuminating. However, what I see when I look at this article is an historical mystery, beginning with a couple of bodysnatchers serving the medical cadaver trade staging a haunting in one place to draw attention away from their areas of operation, and ending with one of them in the dissection theater himself, having lost control of his own hoax.
Because no one can ride a mob. The mob rides everyone.
This month, I find an article on "ghost mobs," detailing the common 19th-century English occurrence of huge mobs of people on the lookout for ghosts - in cemeteries, in supposedly haunted neighborhoods connected to infamous crimes, outside buildings plagued by poltergeists, and so on.
Clearly related to other forms of mass hysteria such as UFO or cryptid flaps, the significant features of these ghost mobs were that they were overwhelmingly made up of poor people, that they focused on ghosts, and that they caused a good deal of trouble to the police. When 2000 people show up outside a single supposedly haunted house, it's a serious hindrance to traffic even before people start picking each other's pockets, drinking, and jostling for the best view of nothing at all.
Of course very few of these people ever even thought they got to see the ghost that attracted them. In 1834, a party of men climbed over a wall into a cemetery to confront the ghost, which turned out to be a woman guarding her son's grave against bodysnatchers - which raises the question, What if some of those supposed ghosts were in fact bodysnatchers? Very bad for business, ghost mobs.
Some of the mobs happened in response to a hoax - the classic "kids in sheets" meme seems to have its origin here - and some ended in tragedy. In 1803, a bricklayer, dressed in his trade's traditional garb of white linen pants, white flannel vest, and a white apron, had to come and go from work through a supposedly haunted area and was molested by curiosity seekers, some of whom were deterred when he threatened to punch them in the head, but others of whom, in one of those terrible combinations of alcohol, guns, bragging, and mass psychosis, killed him. His killers were ultimately pardoned, which I can't help considering a gross miscarriage of justice, despite the undoubted truth that no one participating in such a mob can be said to be entirely in his right mind. No one made them bring a gun to a ghost hunt!
Ghosts or no ghosts, we have the makings of quite a head-spinning mystery or thriller here. Whether it's a historical depends on exactly which elements one finds most intriguing. We have plenty of mobs, mass hysteria, and tragic juxtapositions of guns and alcohol in modern times to work with, and bringing the bricklayer's case forward 200 years might be illuminating. However, what I see when I look at this article is an historical mystery, beginning with a couple of bodysnatchers serving the medical cadaver trade staging a haunting in one place to draw attention away from their areas of operation, and ending with one of them in the dissection theater himself, having lost control of his own hoax.
Because no one can ride a mob. The mob rides everyone.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Roadside Bigfoot
I turn again to the Fortean Times; to the same page of the same Fortean Times as last week, in fact, as the quarter-column about the mechanical ape is preceded by Bigfoot coverage: about three-quarters of a column on Bigfoot sightings in, and a dubious YouTube video from, Ohio (not thought of as Bigfoot country by the mainstream media), and half a column on a practical joker in Montana dressed in a ghillie suit and trying to spark a Bigfoot flap being accidentally hit by a teen driver, then run over by the teen driving the car behind her. Which is tragic, particularly for the teens, who now get to live with the fact that they've killed a man; even if it was, arguably, not their fault. Being hit by a car has to be accepted as a natural risk inherent in the activity of dressing in camouflage and deliberately looming up from the side of the highway trying to scare people at night.
Nor are cars the only hazard involved in impersonating Bigfoot, particularly in a state like Montana where gun racks are standard pickup equipment; but that's probably why August was chosen as hoaxing month. People are a lot less primed to shoot large animals in August than in November.
This is all evocative enough, but the trouble is, there's no real implied plot here. None of the characters have any obvious connection beyond that fatal conjunction at the side of the highway and nothing was at stake in the masquerade except for a practical joke. In a sparsely-populated state like Montana, the odds are reasonable that all of the principals knew each other, at least by sight, but Westerners are accustomed to driving long distances for what would seem to be slight cause in more densely-populated areas, and he presumably chose a relatively well-traveled area to maximize the potential that his prank would pay off, so it isn't a given.
So if you're going to use these elements, you have a lot of work ahead of you still. Here's some sample questions to answer before you even sit down to write:
Does the accident have to be fatal, or can you get away with pulling that punch and telling a farce?
Is the accident the end of the story, or the beginning? If it's the end, then the story is a tragedy (unless the hoaxer was using a Bigfoot disguise to cover up a nefarious crime, which is contrived and melodramatic, but contrived melodrama still has its place in literature); if at the beginning, the story will be about the two teens learning to cope with what happened and can, therefore, have a happy ending.
Is there some useful mid-point for the event, the third-act turn, for example, in which the discovery of a Bigfoot hoaxer turns the entire plot to that point on it's head? This would require that the protagonists (presumably the teens) were dealing with some mysterious events, all of which have been assumed to be Bigfoot-related; but now that they know about the man in the ghillie suit, not only have they got accidental manslaughter on their consciences, a big chunk of whatever they were involved in is suddenly not explained by the Bigfoot hypothesis and they're on a downhill run to the climax.
What are the connections between the two teens, the hoaxer, and Bigfoot, either as a concept or as a real phenomenon?
What more interesting motives than tomfoolery or boredom might have prompted a Bigfoot hoax? Perhaps the hoaxer is not a mere silly joker, but someone trying to create a flap in order to hoist the local economy out of the dumps through increased tourism. Perhaps there's a real Bigfoot population and he's trying to protect it by drawing the attention of cryptid hunters to areas where it's not.
Does it have to be Bigfoot?
Does it have to be Montana? Sometimes an incident floating in isolation in the news can be snapped into place in one's own culture and location, and you know that, if that had happened here, it would have happened on such-and-such a road, the hoaxer would have been a member of a particular subculture, his motivation would have been thus-and-so, and the teens would have been on their way to the county line to buy kegs; and the rest of the story would roll out effortlessly from there.
This is why people think it's hard to get ideas. Getting ideas is as easy and pleasant as reading the Fortean Times. Developing ideas, now - that's work!
Nor are cars the only hazard involved in impersonating Bigfoot, particularly in a state like Montana where gun racks are standard pickup equipment; but that's probably why August was chosen as hoaxing month. People are a lot less primed to shoot large animals in August than in November.
This is all evocative enough, but the trouble is, there's no real implied plot here. None of the characters have any obvious connection beyond that fatal conjunction at the side of the highway and nothing was at stake in the masquerade except for a practical joke. In a sparsely-populated state like Montana, the odds are reasonable that all of the principals knew each other, at least by sight, but Westerners are accustomed to driving long distances for what would seem to be slight cause in more densely-populated areas, and he presumably chose a relatively well-traveled area to maximize the potential that his prank would pay off, so it isn't a given.
So if you're going to use these elements, you have a lot of work ahead of you still. Here's some sample questions to answer before you even sit down to write:
Does the accident have to be fatal, or can you get away with pulling that punch and telling a farce?
Is the accident the end of the story, or the beginning? If it's the end, then the story is a tragedy (unless the hoaxer was using a Bigfoot disguise to cover up a nefarious crime, which is contrived and melodramatic, but contrived melodrama still has its place in literature); if at the beginning, the story will be about the two teens learning to cope with what happened and can, therefore, have a happy ending.
Is there some useful mid-point for the event, the third-act turn, for example, in which the discovery of a Bigfoot hoaxer turns the entire plot to that point on it's head? This would require that the protagonists (presumably the teens) were dealing with some mysterious events, all of which have been assumed to be Bigfoot-related; but now that they know about the man in the ghillie suit, not only have they got accidental manslaughter on their consciences, a big chunk of whatever they were involved in is suddenly not explained by the Bigfoot hypothesis and they're on a downhill run to the climax.
What are the connections between the two teens, the hoaxer, and Bigfoot, either as a concept or as a real phenomenon?
What more interesting motives than tomfoolery or boredom might have prompted a Bigfoot hoax? Perhaps the hoaxer is not a mere silly joker, but someone trying to create a flap in order to hoist the local economy out of the dumps through increased tourism. Perhaps there's a real Bigfoot population and he's trying to protect it by drawing the attention of cryptid hunters to areas where it's not.
Does it have to be Bigfoot?
Does it have to be Montana? Sometimes an incident floating in isolation in the news can be snapped into place in one's own culture and location, and you know that, if that had happened here, it would have happened on such-and-such a road, the hoaxer would have been a member of a particular subculture, his motivation would have been thus-and-so, and the teens would have been on their way to the county line to buy kegs; and the rest of the story would roll out effortlessly from there.
This is why people think it's hard to get ideas. Getting ideas is as easy and pleasant as reading the Fortean Times. Developing ideas, now - that's work!
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Bird's Eye Mysteries
A professor at Idaho State University has put together a project for aerial reconnaissance of the northwestern American forests, in order to look for Bigfoot. This strikes me as a good approach to the problem. I am reminded of an anecdote repeated to me by the operator of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum,
who is the natural depository of any and every passers-by's bigfoot story, of a small plane pilot overflying a clearcut area littered with felled, but not yet removed, trees. Below him he saw a truck driving down the road, and a large dark more or less humanoid shape paralleling it; when they came to an angle at which they could view each other, the humanoid threw itself to the ground in imitation of the logs!
My own belief is that Bigfoot is a good old-fashioned shape-changing fairy, but I approve of this project. If nothing else, it will take reams of footage of ordinary daily life in the flyover area, which is almost bound to discover unexpected behavior in known animals. The technology could also be adapted to security and search-and-rescue uses.
And of course fictional ones. Suppose you had a small self-propelled group of crypto-hunters put together one of these, or simply using a remote-controlled toy to survey an area in which they suspected a bigfoot, or chupacabras, or Goat Man, was hanging out. What human activity might be going on in the same area - secret activity, of people who will go to considerable lengths to keep from being found out?
You could write a crime drama around this premise. Or a more basic juvenile mystery, with the drone camera called into service to clear somebody of, say, vandalism. You could have mundane secrets cross tracks with exotic ones. The drone's operator could disappear, and his fate be puzzled out based on the evidence in the drone's camera. You could uncover Bigfoot - or bigfoot hoaxers - or both at once. You could have a comedy of errors, with the camouflaged drone mistaken for something exotic by a separate group of mystery-hunters, and the drone's deployers misreading their shots of the mystery-hunters' own cleverly disguised attempts to track the Thunderbird.
Why not?
who is the natural depository of any and every passers-by's bigfoot story, of a small plane pilot overflying a clearcut area littered with felled, but not yet removed, trees. Below him he saw a truck driving down the road, and a large dark more or less humanoid shape paralleling it; when they came to an angle at which they could view each other, the humanoid threw itself to the ground in imitation of the logs!
My own belief is that Bigfoot is a good old-fashioned shape-changing fairy, but I approve of this project. If nothing else, it will take reams of footage of ordinary daily life in the flyover area, which is almost bound to discover unexpected behavior in known animals. The technology could also be adapted to security and search-and-rescue uses.
And of course fictional ones. Suppose you had a small self-propelled group of crypto-hunters put together one of these, or simply using a remote-controlled toy to survey an area in which they suspected a bigfoot, or chupacabras, or Goat Man, was hanging out. What human activity might be going on in the same area - secret activity, of people who will go to considerable lengths to keep from being found out?
You could write a crime drama around this premise. Or a more basic juvenile mystery, with the drone camera called into service to clear somebody of, say, vandalism. You could have mundane secrets cross tracks with exotic ones. The drone's operator could disappear, and his fate be puzzled out based on the evidence in the drone's camera. You could uncover Bigfoot - or bigfoot hoaxers - or both at once. You could have a comedy of errors, with the camouflaged drone mistaken for something exotic by a separate group of mystery-hunters, and the drone's deployers misreading their shots of the mystery-hunters' own cleverly disguised attempts to track the Thunderbird.
Why not?
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Call Me Crazy...
A few years ago, my husband and I were woken in the middle of the night a couple of times by a neighbor calling the curse of God down on us from the street. Her relations were very apologetic about this, and explained that she'd gotten away from them, and that her conviction that we were Satanists who were putting spells on her was probably something to do with the fact that she used to live in our house with her grandmother, though they weren't sure what. In any case, they were pretty sure it was nothing directly personal, but they warned us that, since they had a hard time riding herd on her, we should be careful about locking our doors. She showed no sign of being violent, but if her delusions were centered around our house, her becoming convinced that she needed to get into it was a distinct possibility.
A few days ago, this woman stopped me on the street to apologize for her own behavior, thank us for being understanding about it, and tell me she liked my dress (which happened to be one I'd made myself - always the best compliments). She's got the right meds now and is doing much better, enough better to be as embarrassed as her relatives were. But honestly, something like that, you can't hold against somebody any more than you'd hold it against a cancer patient that she threw up on your shoes.
All of which makes me think about those fantasy and horror novels in which things happen in objective reality that are so off-the-wall and outside of human experience that everyone in the story except the protagonist assumes that the protagonist must be mad. But in those stories, the protagonist is the only one seeing clearly, and his seemingly-mad actions - the magical ritual or secret violence at the heart of the fantasy and/or horror - are the things that prevent disaster. Or sometimes there's a madman in a mystery story, and his madness will either lead him to do something terrible, or leave him vulnerable to manipulation by the real villain.
And the thing is this: In neither type of story (generally) is the reader in any doubt about whether there's insanity in the case or not. But wouldn't the emotional impact of a story be enhanced if the reader does spend most of the story changing his mind about what is and is not reality?
I have read stories that did this. Liar, by Justine Larbalestier, does a stand-up job of messing with your head in this way; and there's a Stephen King short about a kindergarten teacher who becomes convinced that the children in her classroom have been replaced by aliens in which the teacher's point of view is maintained so meticulously I couldn't be sure whether she was right, or not. But it is a tremendously difficult thing to do in the context of a market dominated by genre expectations and with a relentlessly genre-savvy audience.
It would also be an extremely uncomfortable thing to do, and would require the kind of specialist knowledge about the subjective experience of mental illness which racks up the emotional cost of writing to an even more uncomfortable pitch. You'd want to do it with sensitivity toward the mentally ill; who, face it, could be anybody. And you'd be forced to go to the weak places in your psyche; the fault lines along which your own mind could break.
You wouldn't have to have direct experience of mental illness yourself; but you'd have to have been close to it enough times to put yourself into the head of someone who is in real doubt about whether he's mad, the degree to which he can trust his senses, and what to do about it. And that's a difficult, scary place to go. A friend of mine (who I trust will excuse me for telling this story) who had herself committed during a bad patch said during her process that she was "a bacterium in a petrie dish." When her husband repeated this to me, I - like him - knew what she meant; she was speaking metaphorically, about the unfortunate fact that to be a mental patient at this phase of our understanding of mental disease is to be an experiment. We'd discussed this many times when she was lucid. But those committing her assumed she'd meant it literally. When she was lucid again I asked her which of us had been right - had she been trying to convey that idea to the medical persoonnel, or had she truly felt herself to be a bacterium? Her answer was "yes;" and this blurring of the mental line between metaphor and reality is a terrifying thing.
It is also where the interest of this story concept lies.
But that blurring doesn't only happen in mental illness. Perfectly healthy people with religious beliefs also treat certain metaphors as realities, because the realities they express are too difficult for the finite human brain to encompass without the metaphor. If you weren't familiar and comfortable with the cultural background and symbolism of communion, you'd have a hard time bending your head around the concept that crackers and grape juice are the body and blood of the son of God, or believing that any nice sort of person who believed that would then eat it!
So if the problematical concept about which the reader is intended to be uncertain echoes real religious beliefs, it should be easier for us to raise that doubt. Also, easier to piss off a lot of people and get banned...because you weren't playing nearly close enough to the edge when you decided you wanted to address perceptions of mental illness in this story, oh no! You could have a fringy cult, something pagan, or one of those numerous schisms of the Protestant church that either die on the vine or become full-fledged churches; perhaps a leader who thinks he's a shyster but someone from the lower ranks sees all too clearly what's Really Going On, and both of them have their character flaws arranged in such a way that the reader flip-flops constantly between versions of reality as envisioned by this book...
Doing this would be worthwhile, with the right characters and concept at the heart of it; but finding those characters and that concept - well, that's the hard part, isn't it?
A few days ago, this woman stopped me on the street to apologize for her own behavior, thank us for being understanding about it, and tell me she liked my dress (which happened to be one I'd made myself - always the best compliments). She's got the right meds now and is doing much better, enough better to be as embarrassed as her relatives were. But honestly, something like that, you can't hold against somebody any more than you'd hold it against a cancer patient that she threw up on your shoes.
All of which makes me think about those fantasy and horror novels in which things happen in objective reality that are so off-the-wall and outside of human experience that everyone in the story except the protagonist assumes that the protagonist must be mad. But in those stories, the protagonist is the only one seeing clearly, and his seemingly-mad actions - the magical ritual or secret violence at the heart of the fantasy and/or horror - are the things that prevent disaster. Or sometimes there's a madman in a mystery story, and his madness will either lead him to do something terrible, or leave him vulnerable to manipulation by the real villain.
And the thing is this: In neither type of story (generally) is the reader in any doubt about whether there's insanity in the case or not. But wouldn't the emotional impact of a story be enhanced if the reader does spend most of the story changing his mind about what is and is not reality?
I have read stories that did this. Liar, by Justine Larbalestier, does a stand-up job of messing with your head in this way; and there's a Stephen King short about a kindergarten teacher who becomes convinced that the children in her classroom have been replaced by aliens in which the teacher's point of view is maintained so meticulously I couldn't be sure whether she was right, or not. But it is a tremendously difficult thing to do in the context of a market dominated by genre expectations and with a relentlessly genre-savvy audience.
It would also be an extremely uncomfortable thing to do, and would require the kind of specialist knowledge about the subjective experience of mental illness which racks up the emotional cost of writing to an even more uncomfortable pitch. You'd want to do it with sensitivity toward the mentally ill; who, face it, could be anybody. And you'd be forced to go to the weak places in your psyche; the fault lines along which your own mind could break.
You wouldn't have to have direct experience of mental illness yourself; but you'd have to have been close to it enough times to put yourself into the head of someone who is in real doubt about whether he's mad, the degree to which he can trust his senses, and what to do about it. And that's a difficult, scary place to go. A friend of mine (who I trust will excuse me for telling this story) who had herself committed during a bad patch said during her process that she was "a bacterium in a petrie dish." When her husband repeated this to me, I - like him - knew what she meant; she was speaking metaphorically, about the unfortunate fact that to be a mental patient at this phase of our understanding of mental disease is to be an experiment. We'd discussed this many times when she was lucid. But those committing her assumed she'd meant it literally. When she was lucid again I asked her which of us had been right - had she been trying to convey that idea to the medical persoonnel, or had she truly felt herself to be a bacterium? Her answer was "yes;" and this blurring of the mental line between metaphor and reality is a terrifying thing.
It is also where the interest of this story concept lies.
But that blurring doesn't only happen in mental illness. Perfectly healthy people with religious beliefs also treat certain metaphors as realities, because the realities they express are too difficult for the finite human brain to encompass without the metaphor. If you weren't familiar and comfortable with the cultural background and symbolism of communion, you'd have a hard time bending your head around the concept that crackers and grape juice are the body and blood of the son of God, or believing that any nice sort of person who believed that would then eat it!
So if the problematical concept about which the reader is intended to be uncertain echoes real religious beliefs, it should be easier for us to raise that doubt. Also, easier to piss off a lot of people and get banned...because you weren't playing nearly close enough to the edge when you decided you wanted to address perceptions of mental illness in this story, oh no! You could have a fringy cult, something pagan, or one of those numerous schisms of the Protestant church that either die on the vine or become full-fledged churches; perhaps a leader who thinks he's a shyster but someone from the lower ranks sees all too clearly what's Really Going On, and both of them have their character flaws arranged in such a way that the reader flip-flops constantly between versions of reality as envisioned by this book...
Doing this would be worthwhile, with the right characters and concept at the heart of it; but finding those characters and that concept - well, that's the hard part, isn't it?
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Miracles, Mistakes, and Lies
I'm tired of leafing through my old notes; fortunately, I got a Fortean Times this week. FT 289 (the people on the newsgroup are already discussing FT 290, but they're mostly British and can get it regular mail, while my issues have to hitch a ride on a tramp steamer or something) contains, on page 10, in a "Back from the Dead" round-up article, the story of an Argentinian woman who was told her premature baby was stillborn. Twelve hours later, they decided they wanted to say good-by properly, so the hospital staff pulled the frost-covered body out of the morgue drawer. Her mother touched her hand, and the baby opened her eyes.
Woah. As a preemie, she still had only a 10% chance of survival, but that's plenty enough to start off with.
But we also get, on the same page, a Chinese case of an eight-month preemie declared dead at birth, on the grounds of no breath, no heartbeat, and a purple color. However, the child's aunt insisted on seeing the baby, which was handed to her in a "yellow plastic bag." In addition to being alive, the baby was a boy, not a girl as originally declared. Tracking down further news stories on the web, we find that this baby wasn't even found in the morgue, but in a restroom where someone had absentmindedly left him! The family is suing and large numbers of people have been sacked, reprimanded, etc. Not surprisingly.
The hospital staff in the second case has a plausible excuse for the sex change, in that there's still a strong preference for sons over daughters in China, and the nurses thought it'd be less of a blow to lose a girl than boy. Still...my goodness... you put these two together...
The Baby in the Yellow Plastic Bag could be dystopian science fiction, with the baby being a natural gender-switcher in a society in which flexibility is the key to survival. Or a grim realistic novel about modern poverty. Or a mystery, with the stillborn baby swapped out for a live one - by whom? Why? Or a legal thriller, with the baby's misdiagnosis revealing layer after layer of malfeasance that it's in Someone's best interest to cover up. Or a religious novel - the Argentinian baby was named Luz Milagros, Light Miracle, for obvious reasons. Or horror - the baby's body is alive, yes, but that's not the baby's original spirit in there. Or paranormal, as the baby's early NDE and imperfect separation from the spirit realm grants her supernatural powers. Or...
Yeah, the problem with this one is to stop having ideas!
Woah. As a preemie, she still had only a 10% chance of survival, but that's plenty enough to start off with.
But we also get, on the same page, a Chinese case of an eight-month preemie declared dead at birth, on the grounds of no breath, no heartbeat, and a purple color. However, the child's aunt insisted on seeing the baby, which was handed to her in a "yellow plastic bag." In addition to being alive, the baby was a boy, not a girl as originally declared. Tracking down further news stories on the web, we find that this baby wasn't even found in the morgue, but in a restroom where someone had absentmindedly left him! The family is suing and large numbers of people have been sacked, reprimanded, etc. Not surprisingly.
The hospital staff in the second case has a plausible excuse for the sex change, in that there's still a strong preference for sons over daughters in China, and the nurses thought it'd be less of a blow to lose a girl than boy. Still...my goodness... you put these two together...
The Baby in the Yellow Plastic Bag could be dystopian science fiction, with the baby being a natural gender-switcher in a society in which flexibility is the key to survival. Or a grim realistic novel about modern poverty. Or a mystery, with the stillborn baby swapped out for a live one - by whom? Why? Or a legal thriller, with the baby's misdiagnosis revealing layer after layer of malfeasance that it's in Someone's best interest to cover up. Or a religious novel - the Argentinian baby was named Luz Milagros, Light Miracle, for obvious reasons. Or horror - the baby's body is alive, yes, but that's not the baby's original spirit in there. Or paranormal, as the baby's early NDE and imperfect separation from the spirit realm grants her supernatural powers. Or...
Yeah, the problem with this one is to stop having ideas!
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Father's Hands
A long time ago, the parent of a friend of mine was shot by police during the commission of a crime. He didn't die immediately (people seldom do; that's our visual media sugarcoating reality for us and for its own convenience) and my friend saw him before he died, but he was not conscious and my friend said he didn't look like himself, except for the hands.
My friend has a large family with a complicated dynamic. The father's role in it had dysfunctional elements, but even the family members least fond of him felt at the time that the crime came out of left field. It required considerable rewriting of personal history, with reshuffling of facts and interpretations of events so that different elements received different emphasis than formerly, in order for them to make sense of what happened. Some did this with greater ease than others. My friend was the one closest to the father, and has constructed his response to the event in such a way that the action was the result of a physical pathology. Other members of the family have constructed their life stories differently. The simplest description of what happened is, that the dead member became an easy scapegoat for a lot of things for a lot of people, and it is impossible for an outsider to judge how fair this is.
Me being who I am, my empathy for my friend, could not prevent my latching onto the story elements. First, the hands. Second, the unrecognizability of the person on life support. Third, the mystery of what prompted the crime. Fourth, the contradictory, simplified memories created to overlay upon the complex reality of an entire family's life in response to this single event.
Fifth: My friend travels a lot on business. Sometimes, inevitably, in the immediate wake of the event, these travels intersected the paths of someone who resembled the dead father so much as to require second or even third looks.
So I thought, what if, one time, the postmortem double kept reappearing? What if my friend started receiving communications, and became convinced that the father was not dead?
That's a thriller. That's a thriller with a lot of potential, actually, for good and ill. The father could be a hero or a villain or a victim, depending on the real reason for the crime and who that was lying in the hospital with the father's hands. It could be a straight mystery thriller, or a supernatural one, or science fiction; it wouldn't matter, as long as the storyteller didn't get so distracted by shiny McGuffins and bait-and-switch plot as to lose track of the core process of the survivors' continual need to rewrite their lives and their relationships based on events centering on this person.
As you can probably tell by the awkward, stilted way I've described the case, I'd as soon cut my hands off as write this, even after all this time. The potential for hurting my friend is too great. Even if I did everything right and the stars aligned and I got an Edgar and a major motion picture deal, if I followed the plot into a dark corner for which my friend couldn't forgive me, I'd be the loser by it.
Even now I'm really hoping I succeeded in stripping out every possible specific detail that could hack somebody off.
I had a conversation with my friend's SO that brought the subject back into the front of my mind. I trust now I can let it sink back into obscurity.
My friend has a large family with a complicated dynamic. The father's role in it had dysfunctional elements, but even the family members least fond of him felt at the time that the crime came out of left field. It required considerable rewriting of personal history, with reshuffling of facts and interpretations of events so that different elements received different emphasis than formerly, in order for them to make sense of what happened. Some did this with greater ease than others. My friend was the one closest to the father, and has constructed his response to the event in such a way that the action was the result of a physical pathology. Other members of the family have constructed their life stories differently. The simplest description of what happened is, that the dead member became an easy scapegoat for a lot of things for a lot of people, and it is impossible for an outsider to judge how fair this is.
Me being who I am, my empathy for my friend, could not prevent my latching onto the story elements. First, the hands. Second, the unrecognizability of the person on life support. Third, the mystery of what prompted the crime. Fourth, the contradictory, simplified memories created to overlay upon the complex reality of an entire family's life in response to this single event.
Fifth: My friend travels a lot on business. Sometimes, inevitably, in the immediate wake of the event, these travels intersected the paths of someone who resembled the dead father so much as to require second or even third looks.
So I thought, what if, one time, the postmortem double kept reappearing? What if my friend started receiving communications, and became convinced that the father was not dead?
That's a thriller. That's a thriller with a lot of potential, actually, for good and ill. The father could be a hero or a villain or a victim, depending on the real reason for the crime and who that was lying in the hospital with the father's hands. It could be a straight mystery thriller, or a supernatural one, or science fiction; it wouldn't matter, as long as the storyteller didn't get so distracted by shiny McGuffins and bait-and-switch plot as to lose track of the core process of the survivors' continual need to rewrite their lives and their relationships based on events centering on this person.
As you can probably tell by the awkward, stilted way I've described the case, I'd as soon cut my hands off as write this, even after all this time. The potential for hurting my friend is too great. Even if I did everything right and the stars aligned and I got an Edgar and a major motion picture deal, if I followed the plot into a dark corner for which my friend couldn't forgive me, I'd be the loser by it.
Even now I'm really hoping I succeeded in stripping out every possible specific detail that could hack somebody off.
I had a conversation with my friend's SO that brought the subject back into the front of my mind. I trust now I can let it sink back into obscurity.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: The (Your Hometown Here) Slasher
We had some nice rain yesterday; at least, in my neighborhood we did. And the fires are finally thinning rather than just shifting their locations. Soon, I will find something new to obsess about. Yay!
Meantime, after all that generalization last week that went on and on and on, I thought I'd do something short and specific today. Also, I'm not much in the mood today and I need to wake Damon up to play the Sunday puzzle soon. So I do what all experienced authors do when they need an idea in a hurry - I opened up some old files.
Seriously, I have a subfolder in my Story folder labeled "Dormant." Stuff I haven't worked on in forever and am pretty sure I can't make saleable, but am not ready to discard, because hey, the idea was sound; I just didn't execute it well enough. And hey, I still have a word processing file for "The San Antonio Slasher." Good lord, there's a blast from the past. Draft 1 was almost certainly typed on my old electric machine.
It was the story of a Day in the Life of a wannabe serial killer and his victim. Jim Seagram is a young man whose ambition is to be a serial killer, a mysterious figure who strikes terror into the hearts of all and whose identity becomes a popular intellectual game. His heroes are Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer. And his victim of choice is little old ladies. It's the day he's planned for his debut, and the story alternates between him - going to his job at a small neighborhood garage, interacting with his co-workers, planning the evening's work - and his designated victim, Persis Morgenroth, going about her little old lady business. Her daughter is a worrywart and keeps calling her, wants her to get a guard dog or something, but Persis has lived in this house for over fifty years and is on good terms with all her neighbors (though that mechanic is beginning to annoy her, the way he glares at her). She gossips with her garden club, makes a carrot cake, runs her errands, goes jogging, and feels secure. Nothing bad can possibly happen to her in the house she came to as a bride, where she raised all her children, where she can still feel her family's love all around her.
Even when Jim breaks in, Persis remains calm; which is more than can be said of him. The reason he wants to kill little old ladies is that he resents the power they exert over him - he was raised by his grandmother, who treated all men as incompetent boys - and he thinks his big knife will reverse that. But Persis recognizes him despite his carefully worked out disguise and she just can't feel anything but annoyance at that rude young man from the garage.
It doesn't end well for Jim.
I realized, writing all this out, that I've gone back to the core idea - the story alternating between the serial killer who kills, or tries to, out of his sense of inferiority and his innocent prospective victim, who really is superior to him - for the often-rejected novel to which I sometimes refer as "The Happy Family Serial Killer Story." I don't seem to have quite made it work there, either.
But if somebody could, I'm positive there's an awesome story to be made of it.
Meantime, after all that generalization last week that went on and on and on, I thought I'd do something short and specific today. Also, I'm not much in the mood today and I need to wake Damon up to play the Sunday puzzle soon. So I do what all experienced authors do when they need an idea in a hurry - I opened up some old files.
Seriously, I have a subfolder in my Story folder labeled "Dormant." Stuff I haven't worked on in forever and am pretty sure I can't make saleable, but am not ready to discard, because hey, the idea was sound; I just didn't execute it well enough. And hey, I still have a word processing file for "The San Antonio Slasher." Good lord, there's a blast from the past. Draft 1 was almost certainly typed on my old electric machine.
It was the story of a Day in the Life of a wannabe serial killer and his victim. Jim Seagram is a young man whose ambition is to be a serial killer, a mysterious figure who strikes terror into the hearts of all and whose identity becomes a popular intellectual game. His heroes are Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer. And his victim of choice is little old ladies. It's the day he's planned for his debut, and the story alternates between him - going to his job at a small neighborhood garage, interacting with his co-workers, planning the evening's work - and his designated victim, Persis Morgenroth, going about her little old lady business. Her daughter is a worrywart and keeps calling her, wants her to get a guard dog or something, but Persis has lived in this house for over fifty years and is on good terms with all her neighbors (though that mechanic is beginning to annoy her, the way he glares at her). She gossips with her garden club, makes a carrot cake, runs her errands, goes jogging, and feels secure. Nothing bad can possibly happen to her in the house she came to as a bride, where she raised all her children, where she can still feel her family's love all around her.
Even when Jim breaks in, Persis remains calm; which is more than can be said of him. The reason he wants to kill little old ladies is that he resents the power they exert over him - he was raised by his grandmother, who treated all men as incompetent boys - and he thinks his big knife will reverse that. But Persis recognizes him despite his carefully worked out disguise and she just can't feel anything but annoyance at that rude young man from the garage.
It doesn't end well for Jim.
I realized, writing all this out, that I've gone back to the core idea - the story alternating between the serial killer who kills, or tries to, out of his sense of inferiority and his innocent prospective victim, who really is superior to him - for the often-rejected novel to which I sometimes refer as "The Happy Family Serial Killer Story." I don't seem to have quite made it work there, either.
But if somebody could, I'm positive there's an awesome story to be made of it.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: Cipher
Getting up this morning with no clear idea for a garage sale, I opened up the link to the Fortean Times breaking news page and looked at the stories posted on Friday. Here I found a story about a man in Massachusetts who claims to have deciphered a 340-character message from the Zodiac Killer which has defied all previous attempts to read it.
You don't have to know anything about the Zodiac Killer, or to have read very many examples of Fortean code poking, such as the search for ciphers in the Bible or the works of Shakespeare, to realize that the guy is, um, overly optimistic. He's started from one bit of coincidental data (340 characters, 340 is the area code of the Virgin Islands - but only since 1997; the message was received in 1969), used addition and subtraction to get another number, used this number as the basis to decide on a particular established code with which to work; made a huge assumption about how the letter ought to start; then pushed, pulled, and prodded the bits of the message that don't work within his framework and under his untested assumptions until they more or less almost do and he gets a message that kinda sorta makes sense and even fingers a definite person.
And then he is surprised and offended that the relevant police departments aren't interested.
The interesting thing, the relatable thing, here is the way the case interested this person to the point of obsession, of forgetting to eat; of spending hours working on an internal construct that would offer him some sort of resolution he can project onto the outside world.
Because we all do this. Writers do it and produce books and poems; painters do it and make paintings; the Fen do it and produce fanart, fanfic, costuming, and props; programmers do it with programs; gamers do it with games. Sometimes the result is a fun, harmless hobby; sometimes it's a great work of art; once in awhile someone actually solves a crime this way; sometimes it's a mental train wreck that eats up a life, or a virus that spreads to innocent other people and mutates in unpredictable ways.
The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy preoccupation seems to be the capacity to keep perspective. Fan artists, novelists, master chess players - they know where the boundary lies between their absorbing mental preoccupation and the exterior world. They don't use their preoccupation to filter the real world into someplace it's comfortable for them to live, then try to persuade other people to accept this filtered version of reality as reality. Which is what crackpots are generally trying to do, and the point at which they become pathetic, tedious, and potentially dangerous to themselves or others, because walking through hallucinatory terrain is inherently dangerous.
So what we need for a story is two people embodying these different ways of dealing with the same preoccupation, illustrating the advantages and the dangers of the interior life - without, of course, being didactic, because the audience can tell when you're doing that and it makes the story suck. That's always the danger when starting with a theme rather than a character or situation; so let's proceed to those ASAP.
Since this train of thought began with Zodiac's code, let's start with a similar, but fictional, situation. Forty years ago, Drama City was terrorized by a killer who taunted the police in coded letters. Although the case is now only a cold and bitter memory, it has never officially been closed, and the knowledge that Cipher is still out there is like a taint in the town's water. Shadows of suspicion still lie on several people. The daughter of one of these people - still suspected in the public eye, though officially and definitively cleared - is a cop, and she can't stay out of the case files, continually going over and over evidence and trying out various dodges to solve the unsolved ciphers. Or are they codes? Because those aren't the same things. She isn't making headway. No one ever does. But trying to understand Cipher has had the side benefit of improving her job skills.
A newcomer in town moves into a building associated with the Cipher killings in some way. Perhaps he lives in the apartment of a victim, or a suspect; perhaps a body was dumped in the alley behind his office. He's a bit of an encryption buff, probably a programmer, and he becomes fascinated by the case and the messages. So he starts working on them as a hobby. Maybe there's even a local group that offers a prize for solving one. He has one of those jolts of inspiration that feel like revelation, so clear and so compelling that he assumes it must be true. Using this as his guide, he "solves" the ciphers and takes them to the local police, meeting Detective Daughter. Possibly his solution points back to her family, so that when she tries to show him the fundamental errors that arise when his assumptions are tested against reality, it's easy to claim that she's protecting the guilty. It needn't be her father that's implicated; he could easily have a brother hitherto never considered, or something.
This begins a raging political division in town, with Mr. Solution heading up a faction determined to expose police corruption and incompetence at a time when the police department is already struggling for funds and personnel. Detective Daughter, who has worked hard to get the respect of her peers and rise above the shadow of Cipher, finds herself thrust into a false position, her mere presence a danger to the reputation of the force. Even if she solved Cipher, would anyone, in light of the conspiracy theories suddenly running amok in Drama City, accept her evidence and chain of reasoning?
This being a story, we must have a definitive resolution - Cipher must be caught, and he must be someone significant, but he cannot be the person indicated in Mr. Solution's version of the code. He can, however, be someone Detective Daughter kept coming back to; someone who feels threatened? No; police taunters are arrogant SOBs who feel superior to the police. The kind of people who, seeing this kerfluffle arise after years of dormancy (and you'd need a convincing cause for this dormancy), would be unable to resist getting into the middle of it. Guiding it. Using it for some end of his own.
Mr. Solution would be easily manipulated by such a person. Could easily turn into his puppet.
And if Detective Daughter's father was suspected because Cipher always wanted him to be suspected - if he has some sort of grudge against her family - and now she also represents the police whom he has always longed to humiliate -
Well, that's a thriller plot, isn't it? The key thing to get right would be the character and motivation of Cipher. Do that, and everything falls into place around it.
I'm not about to live in such a person's head long enough to write so far out of my comfort range. What if his voice took over like Len's did? Ugh.
I might read the book, though, if somebody else wrote it.
You don't have to know anything about the Zodiac Killer, or to have read very many examples of Fortean code poking, such as the search for ciphers in the Bible or the works of Shakespeare, to realize that the guy is, um, overly optimistic. He's started from one bit of coincidental data (340 characters, 340 is the area code of the Virgin Islands - but only since 1997; the message was received in 1969), used addition and subtraction to get another number, used this number as the basis to decide on a particular established code with which to work; made a huge assumption about how the letter ought to start; then pushed, pulled, and prodded the bits of the message that don't work within his framework and under his untested assumptions until they more or less almost do and he gets a message that kinda sorta makes sense and even fingers a definite person.
And then he is surprised and offended that the relevant police departments aren't interested.
The interesting thing, the relatable thing, here is the way the case interested this person to the point of obsession, of forgetting to eat; of spending hours working on an internal construct that would offer him some sort of resolution he can project onto the outside world.
Because we all do this. Writers do it and produce books and poems; painters do it and make paintings; the Fen do it and produce fanart, fanfic, costuming, and props; programmers do it with programs; gamers do it with games. Sometimes the result is a fun, harmless hobby; sometimes it's a great work of art; once in awhile someone actually solves a crime this way; sometimes it's a mental train wreck that eats up a life, or a virus that spreads to innocent other people and mutates in unpredictable ways.
The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy preoccupation seems to be the capacity to keep perspective. Fan artists, novelists, master chess players - they know where the boundary lies between their absorbing mental preoccupation and the exterior world. They don't use their preoccupation to filter the real world into someplace it's comfortable for them to live, then try to persuade other people to accept this filtered version of reality as reality. Which is what crackpots are generally trying to do, and the point at which they become pathetic, tedious, and potentially dangerous to themselves or others, because walking through hallucinatory terrain is inherently dangerous.
So what we need for a story is two people embodying these different ways of dealing with the same preoccupation, illustrating the advantages and the dangers of the interior life - without, of course, being didactic, because the audience can tell when you're doing that and it makes the story suck. That's always the danger when starting with a theme rather than a character or situation; so let's proceed to those ASAP.
Since this train of thought began with Zodiac's code, let's start with a similar, but fictional, situation. Forty years ago, Drama City was terrorized by a killer who taunted the police in coded letters. Although the case is now only a cold and bitter memory, it has never officially been closed, and the knowledge that Cipher is still out there is like a taint in the town's water. Shadows of suspicion still lie on several people. The daughter of one of these people - still suspected in the public eye, though officially and definitively cleared - is a cop, and she can't stay out of the case files, continually going over and over evidence and trying out various dodges to solve the unsolved ciphers. Or are they codes? Because those aren't the same things. She isn't making headway. No one ever does. But trying to understand Cipher has had the side benefit of improving her job skills.
A newcomer in town moves into a building associated with the Cipher killings in some way. Perhaps he lives in the apartment of a victim, or a suspect; perhaps a body was dumped in the alley behind his office. He's a bit of an encryption buff, probably a programmer, and he becomes fascinated by the case and the messages. So he starts working on them as a hobby. Maybe there's even a local group that offers a prize for solving one. He has one of those jolts of inspiration that feel like revelation, so clear and so compelling that he assumes it must be true. Using this as his guide, he "solves" the ciphers and takes them to the local police, meeting Detective Daughter. Possibly his solution points back to her family, so that when she tries to show him the fundamental errors that arise when his assumptions are tested against reality, it's easy to claim that she's protecting the guilty. It needn't be her father that's implicated; he could easily have a brother hitherto never considered, or something.
This begins a raging political division in town, with Mr. Solution heading up a faction determined to expose police corruption and incompetence at a time when the police department is already struggling for funds and personnel. Detective Daughter, who has worked hard to get the respect of her peers and rise above the shadow of Cipher, finds herself thrust into a false position, her mere presence a danger to the reputation of the force. Even if she solved Cipher, would anyone, in light of the conspiracy theories suddenly running amok in Drama City, accept her evidence and chain of reasoning?
This being a story, we must have a definitive resolution - Cipher must be caught, and he must be someone significant, but he cannot be the person indicated in Mr. Solution's version of the code. He can, however, be someone Detective Daughter kept coming back to; someone who feels threatened? No; police taunters are arrogant SOBs who feel superior to the police. The kind of people who, seeing this kerfluffle arise after years of dormancy (and you'd need a convincing cause for this dormancy), would be unable to resist getting into the middle of it. Guiding it. Using it for some end of his own.
Mr. Solution would be easily manipulated by such a person. Could easily turn into his puppet.
And if Detective Daughter's father was suspected because Cipher always wanted him to be suspected - if he has some sort of grudge against her family - and now she also represents the police whom he has always longed to humiliate -
Well, that's a thriller plot, isn't it? The key thing to get right would be the character and motivation of Cipher. Do that, and everything falls into place around it.
I'm not about to live in such a person's head long enough to write so far out of my comfort range. What if his voice took over like Len's did? Ugh.
I might read the book, though, if somebody else wrote it.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: Wired
Did you know that on any random day you could be going about your ordinary business with somebody wearing a wire?
My horse expert gets income as a mystery shopper. This is someone who goes to a store or other venue, such as banks and apartment complexes, and reports to the Powers That Be for that venue on what it was like. How was she treated? Was the store being run and maintained to spec? Are the apartment's grounds properly maintained? What happens when she asks a tough question or requests something unusual but not unreasonable?
She mentioned that one upcoming session was a recorded one, which involved - in essence - wearing a wire. She also described a couple of times when she'd shopped the wrong store because of confusing addresses and stores set up too close to each other, where they should be competing with each other - on opposite sides of a highway, for example. In a town like San Antonio, where addresses aren't well-displayed, or in any modern urban sprawl area, the strip malls and shopping centers and industrial parks and apartment complexes all look the same.
Sounds like a plot hook to me.
We're talking crime thriller, of course. Quite possibly one with comedy elements. The protagonist is a mystery shopper doing a mix of assignments and errands. Maybe instead of the corporate-owned apartment complex she's supposed to go to she winds up in one that's owned by The Mob (that handy faceless villain) and used as a safe location for various purposes. Maybe she wanders into the wrong venue at the wrong time and witnesses the wrong thing. Is she spotted, her wire detected, and she taken hostage? Does she go undetected, deliberately record the event, and spend the rest of the movie dodging the people who saw or heard her on her way out to take her evidence to the police? Does she blunder innocently into a situation and get mistaken for somebody else? Does her recording even come out audible?
All that's obvious enough, but let's look for other possibilities. What kind of person becomes a mystery shopper? Someone who needs extra income in addition to a full-time job; someone who's between jobs and scrambling for money; someone with a life condition that makes full-time work problematic. In a different economy, someone who is already comfortably off but is bored and wants more to do - though anybody who can't come up with more to do on her own is an iffy protagonist, with all there is to do in this world, for my money. Each of these motivations implies a different character arc, and possibly a different nefarious deed caught on tape.
Is there a temptation for the person in dire need of money to exploit her possession of the recording? Maybe it wasn't a major criminal deal; maybe it was just a spot of adultery and she's trying to blackmail the parties. Maybe she's dumb enough to try to sell the evidence. Maybe what she witnessed was a bit of shady backroom dealing that results in her having inside information that can make her a huge profit if she works it right.
What if she loses the recording or it's no good, and no one she reports to believes her because the life condition that makes full-time work problematic is paranoid schizophrenia, and even she's not sure, in the absence of the recording, that she's lucid? The antagonist in this story would be less the criminals and more her own brain, as she strives to prove to herself, one way or another, the reality of the situation she witnessed.
What if she's got self-esteem issues and thinks she's not smart, resourceful, or educated enough for any better job than mystery shopper? Nothing like evading bad guys in a thriller to apply the kind of pressure that brings out competence she didn't know she had.
You see how the hook is only the start of the idea? Define the character, define the stakes; and then you have the story.
My horse expert gets income as a mystery shopper. This is someone who goes to a store or other venue, such as banks and apartment complexes, and reports to the Powers That Be for that venue on what it was like. How was she treated? Was the store being run and maintained to spec? Are the apartment's grounds properly maintained? What happens when she asks a tough question or requests something unusual but not unreasonable?
She mentioned that one upcoming session was a recorded one, which involved - in essence - wearing a wire. She also described a couple of times when she'd shopped the wrong store because of confusing addresses and stores set up too close to each other, where they should be competing with each other - on opposite sides of a highway, for example. In a town like San Antonio, where addresses aren't well-displayed, or in any modern urban sprawl area, the strip malls and shopping centers and industrial parks and apartment complexes all look the same.
Sounds like a plot hook to me.
We're talking crime thriller, of course. Quite possibly one with comedy elements. The protagonist is a mystery shopper doing a mix of assignments and errands. Maybe instead of the corporate-owned apartment complex she's supposed to go to she winds up in one that's owned by The Mob (that handy faceless villain) and used as a safe location for various purposes. Maybe she wanders into the wrong venue at the wrong time and witnesses the wrong thing. Is she spotted, her wire detected, and she taken hostage? Does she go undetected, deliberately record the event, and spend the rest of the movie dodging the people who saw or heard her on her way out to take her evidence to the police? Does she blunder innocently into a situation and get mistaken for somebody else? Does her recording even come out audible?
All that's obvious enough, but let's look for other possibilities. What kind of person becomes a mystery shopper? Someone who needs extra income in addition to a full-time job; someone who's between jobs and scrambling for money; someone with a life condition that makes full-time work problematic. In a different economy, someone who is already comfortably off but is bored and wants more to do - though anybody who can't come up with more to do on her own is an iffy protagonist, with all there is to do in this world, for my money. Each of these motivations implies a different character arc, and possibly a different nefarious deed caught on tape.
Is there a temptation for the person in dire need of money to exploit her possession of the recording? Maybe it wasn't a major criminal deal; maybe it was just a spot of adultery and she's trying to blackmail the parties. Maybe she's dumb enough to try to sell the evidence. Maybe what she witnessed was a bit of shady backroom dealing that results in her having inside information that can make her a huge profit if she works it right.
What if she loses the recording or it's no good, and no one she reports to believes her because the life condition that makes full-time work problematic is paranoid schizophrenia, and even she's not sure, in the absence of the recording, that she's lucid? The antagonist in this story would be less the criminals and more her own brain, as she strives to prove to herself, one way or another, the reality of the situation she witnessed.
What if she's got self-esteem issues and thinks she's not smart, resourceful, or educated enough for any better job than mystery shopper? Nothing like evading bad guys in a thriller to apply the kind of pressure that brings out competence she didn't know she had.
You see how the hook is only the start of the idea? Define the character, define the stakes; and then you have the story.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Idea Garage Sale: Ripping Off Headlines
I'm not a newshound by any stretch of the imagination. We don't take a paper, though we pick up the local alternative weekly; we hardly ever watch the news; and though he regularly listens to NPR the headlines my husband chose to call up on our Yahoo page are from The Onion. I have websites I go to for science and literary news, and other than that, my current events knowledge is random.
But I don't write thrillers. If I did, I'd be all on top of the news looking for the next book. Case in point: over in the mainstream news forum of the Fortean Times Message Board, I saw people discussing the "Bulger case." In a nutshell, in 1993, in Liverpool, two 10-year-old boys abducted, tortured, and killed a two-year old boy. I'd never heard of it, but you can imagine the publicity and strong feeling in Britain.
The case began being discussed again this week because one of the two perpetrators, released on probation with a new top-secret identity in 2001, violated the terms of his release and was returned to jail. Official information on what he'd done to break probation was not provided; which prompted one of those displays of watercooler invention that support my contention that everybody gets story ideas all the time. He'd contacted the family of the murdered boy; the family of the murdered boy tracked him down for payback; he'd fallen asleep on a friend's couch and didn't check in with his probation officer; he got in a drunken brawl with a co-worker; he's a junkie; he surfs the web for kiddie porn. A co-worker's husband on the force with contacts says this, someone who ought to know says that - you know the game.
Yes, game. A ghoulish game, but a human one; and one writers have to play. This one's a little outside my comfort zone, but Hobkin and Vikki Vanishes both began with news only a little less horrific than this. I'll tell you how that worked some other time. Right now, I'm looking at the branching roads that spread out from this particular horror, and here's how I parse it.
First of all - you commit a crime like this at age 10, you wake up every morning for the rest of your life as the person who committed this crime. I am naturally reminded of Nancy Werlin's The Killer's Cousin, which explores this reality.
The fact that two boys are in this situation is particularly fruitful for the YA thriller writer, as it automatically opens up the possibilities for character development. Whose ideas was it? Was this a twisted blood brotherhood rite, a case of a dominant personality and a subservient one feeding into each other, a bizarre outbreak of normal childish aggression? Do they blame each other? Support each other? Ignore each other? Is one repentant and one not? What about their families - is there a little brother who looked up to one, was either of them abused, were they spoiled rich kids? The anonymity of the two boys allows us to project our own fears, theories, and fictional purposes onto the blank canvas of official secrecy.
The water cooler gossip I saw reported on my message board exemplifies the rich selection of plots that can arise out of this situation. If the repentant one contacts the family to try and make amends, that's one story; if the family is hunting both down for revenge, that's a very different one. Drunken brawls, drug abuse, chaving at the restrictions of probation-based life all lead in different directions. And what's going on with the other one? Is he really making good; or is he the dominant, unrepentant one, minding his p's and q's in order to keep his indulgence of his evil impulses under police radar? Maybe the repentant one is framed by the unrepentant one because he realizes his old friend is up to his old tricks!
At this point, if you're thinking: "Ick, gross, shut up, these are real people you're talking about, what if the family of the murdered boy stumbles on this blog somehow?" well - so am I. If you want to rip your stories out of the headlines, and you have any sense of decency, I recommend you do this stage of the brainstorming process in the privacy of your head and your trusty notebooks, detaching your fiction from the fact as fast as possible. How Truman Capote could live with the idea of the families of the victims reading In Cold Blood I can't imagine. Invent your own details, change the setting, change up genders, mash this crime together with others, do everything you can to separate the reality from fact.
Exploiting the real pain of real people for entertainment is - ooh. No. How'd you like it if somebody did that to you? You'd hate it, that's what! You'd hate the author. You'd hate everybody who made the book a bestseller and a blockbuster movie. The fact that people are ghouls and eat this stuff up with a spoon is disgusting.
But it's real. So the thing to keep in mind when you're ripping off those headlines is: How do I do this in a way that isn't disgusting? How do I mine this horror for the urgent and important themes it contains; the questions of evil, responsibility, maturation, forgiveness, vengeance, endurance it raises, without falling into a morass of sensationalism? How would I want this story told, if it began with my own story?
And when you've figured that out, write the hell out of it.
But I don't write thrillers. If I did, I'd be all on top of the news looking for the next book. Case in point: over in the mainstream news forum of the Fortean Times Message Board, I saw people discussing the "Bulger case." In a nutshell, in 1993, in Liverpool, two 10-year-old boys abducted, tortured, and killed a two-year old boy. I'd never heard of it, but you can imagine the publicity and strong feeling in Britain.
The case began being discussed again this week because one of the two perpetrators, released on probation with a new top-secret identity in 2001, violated the terms of his release and was returned to jail. Official information on what he'd done to break probation was not provided; which prompted one of those displays of watercooler invention that support my contention that everybody gets story ideas all the time. He'd contacted the family of the murdered boy; the family of the murdered boy tracked him down for payback; he'd fallen asleep on a friend's couch and didn't check in with his probation officer; he got in a drunken brawl with a co-worker; he's a junkie; he surfs the web for kiddie porn. A co-worker's husband on the force with contacts says this, someone who ought to know says that - you know the game.
Yes, game. A ghoulish game, but a human one; and one writers have to play. This one's a little outside my comfort zone, but Hobkin and Vikki Vanishes both began with news only a little less horrific than this. I'll tell you how that worked some other time. Right now, I'm looking at the branching roads that spread out from this particular horror, and here's how I parse it.
First of all - you commit a crime like this at age 10, you wake up every morning for the rest of your life as the person who committed this crime. I am naturally reminded of Nancy Werlin's The Killer's Cousin, which explores this reality.
The fact that two boys are in this situation is particularly fruitful for the YA thriller writer, as it automatically opens up the possibilities for character development. Whose ideas was it? Was this a twisted blood brotherhood rite, a case of a dominant personality and a subservient one feeding into each other, a bizarre outbreak of normal childish aggression? Do they blame each other? Support each other? Ignore each other? Is one repentant and one not? What about their families - is there a little brother who looked up to one, was either of them abused, were they spoiled rich kids? The anonymity of the two boys allows us to project our own fears, theories, and fictional purposes onto the blank canvas of official secrecy.
The water cooler gossip I saw reported on my message board exemplifies the rich selection of plots that can arise out of this situation. If the repentant one contacts the family to try and make amends, that's one story; if the family is hunting both down for revenge, that's a very different one. Drunken brawls, drug abuse, chaving at the restrictions of probation-based life all lead in different directions. And what's going on with the other one? Is he really making good; or is he the dominant, unrepentant one, minding his p's and q's in order to keep his indulgence of his evil impulses under police radar? Maybe the repentant one is framed by the unrepentant one because he realizes his old friend is up to his old tricks!
At this point, if you're thinking: "Ick, gross, shut up, these are real people you're talking about, what if the family of the murdered boy stumbles on this blog somehow?" well - so am I. If you want to rip your stories out of the headlines, and you have any sense of decency, I recommend you do this stage of the brainstorming process in the privacy of your head and your trusty notebooks, detaching your fiction from the fact as fast as possible. How Truman Capote could live with the idea of the families of the victims reading In Cold Blood I can't imagine. Invent your own details, change the setting, change up genders, mash this crime together with others, do everything you can to separate the reality from fact.
Exploiting the real pain of real people for entertainment is - ooh. No. How'd you like it if somebody did that to you? You'd hate it, that's what! You'd hate the author. You'd hate everybody who made the book a bestseller and a blockbuster movie. The fact that people are ghouls and eat this stuff up with a spoon is disgusting.
But it's real. So the thing to keep in mind when you're ripping off those headlines is: How do I do this in a way that isn't disgusting? How do I mine this horror for the urgent and important themes it contains; the questions of evil, responsibility, maturation, forgiveness, vengeance, endurance it raises, without falling into a morass of sensationalism? How would I want this story told, if it began with my own story?
And when you've figured that out, write the hell out of it.
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