Bad Ideas

I’ve drawn plenty of positive inspiration for my writing from books. When I was young just the fact that they ended and left me wanting more was enough to encourage me to scribble away. I’ve even found inspiration in reading the blurb on a dustjacket and imagining the plot it describes, which usually bears no resemblance to what’s inside the covers of course. As I’ve mentioned before the idea for the Pioneer Wars came out of a discussion about an apparent plot hole in someone else’s story idea. There is though a great deal of inspiration to be drawn from books that are poor or just outright awful.

As I said a really good book can be a source of inspiration, but it can just as easily become a seemingly insurmountable challenge, a piece of greatness you can never hope to even get close to matching. A bad book on the other hand encourages you to think 'I know I can do better than that and if they got published..' A bad book however can offer much more than that, after all as a writer you learn by trial and error, so why not seek to speed up your learning by examining the mistakes that others have made? Courtesy of various bad books I've learned that proof reading is not optional, that cool ideas do not equal a plot, that starting a story and hoping an ending pops up is a bad idea and that writing a book because a particular genre is 'hot' right now is seldom going to work well.

So what I'm saying is that as writer if you invested your time and money in a reading a really bad book you can console yourself with the thought that it was an educational experience. :)

Redemption

So the game 'Star Wars Battlefront 2' was due for release and video ads showing the protagonist of the single player campaign(i.e. the part with an actual story) were doing the rounds. The character is an imperial soldier and a lot of the comments I saw on YouTube were hoping that she stays with the Empire and doesn't get 'redeemed' and join the Rebellion. I had two thoughts on that. Firstly, yeah the redemption arc is kind of predictable and secondly that those people are probably going to be awfully disappointed.

The problem is that you are usually going to want your leader character to be relatable, someone the reader will like, or would like to be. If you have that character on the side of what are indisputably the bad guys then sooner or later your reader/viewer is going to get frustrated with the situation. The various ways to try and justify the character's actions don't really help. If they are under duress, secretly working against the bad guys or simply oblivious to how evil their side is then they either are actually on the good side already or the writer is just postponing their moment of redemption.

You could of course have a villain who is just unremittingly evil, with no redeeming features, problem is that gets old very quickly. The unrelenting villain can become more of a plot device than a character, only really existing to create a threat to the heroes and/or justify the 'bad' things the heroes have to do. You can tell how hard it is to write a unrelenting villain is the way that writers will eventually start trying to give them some depth and texture. A classic example is the Klingons from Star Trek. Back in the era of the original series they were nothing more than the living personification of the 'Red Menace' a largely one dimensional threat with zero context. Wind forward to the Next Generation era and they've become a warrior race with a sense of honour and a complex cultural background. It's almost inevitable its going to happen with the unrelenting villain, either they cease to be unrelenting or they're given a backstory to explain their behaviour and make them more sympathetic, they just become too one note to hold the interest of the writer, never mind the reader.

The 'redemption' character arc is here to stay, it's too powerful and too appealing to let go of, the best you can hope for is that the writer will be clever enough that you wont see it coming, or inventive enough to keep you hooked with a charming monster of a villain.

Finding the time

It's one of those things that people sometimes say, 'Oh if only I had the time I'd write'. Now leaving aside the implication that somehow time is the only requirement for creating story, characters and dialogue there is the question of how hard is it to find time to write? My own personal experience is that the mechanics of writing has gotten so much easier than it was in the days of pen and paper, or the typewriter. I personally could never get the hang of the latter, especially as I'm the sort of writer who likes to blast out a chunk of text then go back and fix any mistakes or sections that just don't flow. The arrival of the word processor was a god send, although of course at first that meant your were still tied to the desk where said word processor lived.

The advent of the laptop computer may have made it theoretically possible to write anywhere, but in practice I found them clunky and awkward. The only time they were really useful was when you were sat in a hotel room somewhere. the devices that have really freed up writing time for me are the smart phone and the tablet.

With these two devices I can write anywhere whenever I have a free moment and I can make what I write accessible on my computer via cloud storage. It just opens up whole knew opportunities with devices that you really can take wherever you go and are genuinely convenient, so my advice as far as computing goes is have a desktop for home and use a tablet or a decent sized smart phone for everywhere else.

The other thing that's changed is that you used to have to be a little bit anti-social when it comes to writing, you are going to want to spend those spare moment tapping away instead of discussing sports, movies, or what you did last weekend/are going to do this weekend. Again the smartphone and the tablet have come to the rescue here. At lunch time I often walk into the canteen at the office and find a dozen people there. The overwhelming majority of them with headphones on, glued to a screen and watching YouTube, or a video downloaded from Netflix or Amazon Prime. Now it's easy to sit there obliviously typing away, so long as you don't succumb to the blandishments of YouTube yourself.

An added bonus of the inability of people to put down their smartphones is that nobody ever asks what your doing and then follows up with an endless string of questions about what your writing. I find nothing is more likely to kill your enthusiasm for a story than having to repeatedly summarize it for people who have zero interest in your genre of choice and will inevitable utter the words 'Oh if only I had the time...'

Covered

And yes this one is about cover art, a topic that if you look back at the old blogs has plagued me for as long as I have been working on the 'last' draft of Secession Campaign and here is the final version of the cover:

And if you've checked the name of the file, yes there were indeed versions A through O. Now the question is was it really worth all the effort? I have to say I think it was if only because I can recall a couple of instances where a really bad cover out me off a book. Now lets be clear about what I mean by a bad cover, I mean something that looks like it was thrown together as an afterthought. The two instances I have in mind were the opposite of one another stylistically, one was very simple and one was quite busy in terms of visual elements but both were lacking in any creative effort and like it or not falling down on one part of a creative effort doesn't inspire confidence in the rest.

My cover is a mixture of 3D rendering and postwork in a paint program and given that this book is about space war something like it is almost mandatory in the genre. On the other hand if your book is a Victorian romance then maybe some text and a few 'curlicues' are all you really need so long as its clearly yours, not just some piece of clipart from the internet with some Comic Sans text on it (Comic Sans is just a no, trust me).

Would you...???

I'm going to start this blog by proposing that you as a writer are faced with one of the three opportunities:

A - A film company is remaking movie X and wants you to write the script

B - A publisher wants you to write a new addition to popular fiction series Y

C - Famous author Z left an uncompleted work and their publisher wants you to finish it.

Each of these offers of course with the requisite promises of fame and fortune, so the question is would you take any of these offers?

So here's my take. As far as A goes the response has to be, 'which movie?' If someone is planning to remake Casablanca or Citizen Kane then it has to be a big fat no. The simple truth is that the best you can hope for with a classic is that the critics and film buffs won't call for your summary execution. On the other hand there are plenty of movies that had the potential for greatness and fell flat, that might be a challenge worth taking.

B is another 'maybe' scenario. There are series that have enough 'white space' in them that a new story could fit in easily, consider James Bond or Sherlock Holmes, new stories have been created around those characters for years and some of them are pretty good. On the other hand there are series with a tight narrative structure where a new story would be downright ridiculous, who in their right mind would take on creating a fourth chapter of 'The Lord of the Rings' for example?

C is by far the easiest to answer, basically no, nyet, non. This option is a poison chalice. The fundamental problem is that whatever you do, however brilliant you plot and dialogue and it is never going to match up with what the fans of the author imagined, you are doomed to disappoint whatever you do.

So would your answers be the same or would you bravely throw yourself into the fray?

All In The Game

So movies based on video games have not had a shining history, regardless of the quality of the cast, the effects, the cinematography, they all seem to fall down when it comes to story telling. What is the apparently insurmountable problem with writing a good video game movie?

Once upon a time games had zero narrative, no one felt the need to provide a detailed backstory for Pong, or Pacman or Space Invaders. Over time though narrative began to creep in even if it didn’t amount to much more than ‘the princess has been captured jump around all these platforms to save her, which of course brings up one of the earliest, and most infamous, game movies, ‘Super Mario Bros.’ This set a something of a template for future failure decent budget, decent cast (Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper included) and yet rejected by critics and the paying public alike as a disaster.  There are plenty of versions of what went wrong, but it can all be stripped down to a fairly simple issue. The makers of the film had a story in mind, however it had nothing much to do with Mario and Luigi. The film effectively applies a thin veneer of Mario Bros. over a generic story to little or no effect, appealing neither to Mario fans nor the general viewing.

This set something of a pattern for video game movies, a few name checks from the game pasted into a generic movie plot in the hope of a quick pay day before anyone notices how poor the film is. Now to be fair stripped of the gameplay elements the narrative of a game could quite often be comfortably fitted on a post-it note. In recent years though narrative has become a much richer affair in gaming, games like Bioshock, Prey or Red Dead Redemption are to a large extent driven by their story rather than simply treating it as an excuse for the action. This would seem to make things easier when it comes to creating a game movie, but I think it's actually made things worse.

For one thing more complex narratives has gone hand in had with the development of 'open worlds' and multiple ways to play the game. it wasn't uncommon in the past for what looked like open maps to contain 'invisible walls' to make sure the player stuck to where the designers had actually filled in the details and allowed interaction. Now the trend is towards games where you can wander where you like and interact with everything. This goes hand in hand with offering the player multiple options to complete a particular objective, you can kick in the doors and shoot everything that moves or slip in and out without anyone knowing your character was ever there. This makes for entertaining gameplay, but a nightmare for anyone trying to write an essentially linear film script. You may create a good script, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the experience of the majority of players and unless your story can resonate with those completely unfamiliar with the game, well lets say that to date it seems no one has managed that latter achievement.

There may though be a more fundamental problem at work though, when you've lived a character's life vicariously, whether it's Max Caulfield from 'Life is Strange' or John Marston from 'Red Dead Redemption' is there really enough appeal in simply sitting back and watching someone else's take on the same experience to ever make a successful box movie?

Bullet Time

I've done a couple of blogs about some of the social issues in a future universe, but this time I'm turning to the topic of future firearms and why there may never be 'a last bullet'

Whether its called a blaster, a phaser, or just a beam weapon science fiction loves what they like to refer to in modern military parlance as directed energy weapons. Stripped down to its basics a directed energy weapon does away with a projectile in favour of a focused beam of energy, lasers being the best known example. Science fiction stories assume that you can turn something like the HEL MD into a rifle or pistol sized weapon. While we're all familiar with the way all manner of technology has been miniaturized to the point of being handheld, but in doing so the power requirements have been massively reduced. For a DEW this is obviously not a viable option, the power it can deliver to a target is the whole point of the thing. This is going to not only require a battery with quite astonishing storage density, but there is also the issue of converting the charge into the battery into a beam of energy. The laws of physics dictate that is not going to be 100% efficient, there's going to a be certain amount of waste energy, and waste energy usually manifests itself as heat. So now your DEW needs either active cooling, fans or refrigeration, or some kind of radiator and if you want dissipate that heat quickly it's going to be a big radiator.

Now in a science fiction universe all these problems can be resolved, infinite storage and perfect energy conversion are a snap if you can imagine a universe with teleportation and FTL. The thing is though why would anyone put in the effort to begin with? Turning HEL MD into a rifle is going to be a long evolutionary process and what we have right now works pretty well, indeed you can argue that from a caveman throwing a rock at an animal to the state of the art railguns being developed for next generation warships is an unbroken line of projectile weapons. Simply put guns work, they get the job done so why would anyone want to spend the time, effort, and money on making your blaster/phaser possible?

The Star Trek phaser actually illustrates one of the better reasons to invest in a handheld DEW, the power can be dialled up or down depending on the situation. Now the nice neat delineation between a stun and lethal setting is a little unlikely, but the idea of a weapon that could be varied from simply inflicting pain at the bottom end of its range to a lethal shot at the top end is not unreasonable is not unreasonable and offers more flexibility, particularly valuable in our current day world where combatants are often hard to tell from the innocent bystanders.

The other big attraction is ammunition, both the weight of it for the soldier and the logistics of supplying it. Modern firearms can eat through ammunition at a frightening rate and despite the tendency towards smaller calibre ammo with lighter rounds the weight is still a burden for the soldier who faces the dilemma of carrying enough into battle for extended combat or risk running out because supplying ammo to a fast moving front line is a challenge for any military organization, especially if your means of delivery is liable to come under attack and you can't just make more out in the field. Now with a DEW the soldier effective can make their own ammo, they just need an energy resource to tap into, that might be anything from a solar panel to a power socket in some home or factory. Lifting the burden of worrying about ammo would be a major incentive to adopt energy weapons on a wider basis.

Now this isn't a matter of one side of this being right or wrong, really it's just to show that you can make an argument for whichever approach you want to take with weapons in your story, you can justify sticking to the tried and trusted bullet or go with a light show of different types of DEW. Only thing I can't come up with is an explanation for why so many beam weapons in TV and movies seem to fir a burst that travels at about walking pace...