The Long Redemption of Anakin Skywalker

Full-on Star Wars nerdery ahead. Really not relevant to anything else. Enjoy at will.

Like I said earlier this week, I watched the holy trilogy again in mid-December. Jedi has always been my favorite, which I used to hide and no longer care to hide. It's because Jabba fascinated me when I was a little girl, and because Luke's journey (and Hamill's deep grip on the character) has become electrifying, and because the space battle at the end is excellent chaos, and because I love redwood trees. (I don't love the Ewoks, but I'm not offended by them.) Lots of other reasons, too, but I'd essentially be summarizing the highlights of the movie if I went on. Empire is the better film, but I like Jedi best.

We got to the scene when Luke turns himself in to Vader down on Endor - when they have that pivotal conversation about Luke's father, about the Dark Side, about Anakin. I paused it, and I said that I thought this point in the trilogy is where Anakin's characterization in the prequels is at its most threadbare. A conversation followed that lasted half an hour or more, and that made me reverse my opinion altogether. I wish I'd had all my other SW friends in the room, but that's why I'm writing it up here.

Let's, just for the moment, take the position that everything in the prequels is deliberate and makes sense.

I'll give you a minute to get there.

Step Right Up, Find the Character Arc and Win a Prize

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a literary story of about 3,000 words, and on Monday I revised it. Matt read it yesterday, and he asked me why the main character didn't undergo any change.

I had reasons, but we tangented out to talking about whether it's necessary for the main character of a literary short story to have a character arc at all. I thought through some examples and ultimately decided that the answer is no, but that I couldn't really say why the non-arcing dynamic works in those stories.

In literary stories, I tend to write characters that resist change. I find those characters most interesting. A gymnastics coach who has a girl die under his care and still insists that it's her fault, not his. A serial killer who recognizes that his victim is a person, not an object, and kills her anyway. In the story at hand, a woman whose hypocrisy and self-centeredness never budge, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that she's a terrible person. I like exploring people who behave this way.

Matt said that the story had the feel of a string of incidents, though, and that there was no overarching change as one incident led into the other. At least she has to be getting worse, he said, more hypocritical and self-centered, even if she doesn't have an actual epiphany.

He gave me the tools to fix the story, I think, but it certainly was an interesting question. I think over a novel you kind of have to create a character arc, but maybe not necessarily in a story. In fact, I'd argue that a number of the stories I've read for the UCLA class don't have one: "I Don't Talk Service No More," "Rock Springs," "Two Gallants." In each of those, stuff happens to the characters, but there's no evidence of how they are different people at the end of the story than they are at the beginning. Sometimes there are obstacles that they overcome (or don't), but sometimes it's just stuff happening. I feel like you can pretty easily have a story where the main character will remember the culminating incident forever, will know that things were never quite the same after that happened, but will still refuse any significant personality change.

Frankly, I prefer this to an epiphany that the writer worked up but that I don't understand. I've read quite a lot of those in the plethora of short stories I've consumed over the past six months. Okay, so this was a big change, but from what to what?

Also, doesn't the arc take place in the reader, in some way? Aren't you the one who's different after reading a really stunning story? What do you think?

Incidences

For nearly all of my stories and for some of my books, I've conceived and executed the whole thing. Characters, story, descriptions, themes, etc etc, up to and including putting words on the page and then (of course) revising them. But other books I've talked over with Matt until we're both hoarse. In some of these cases, he's given me central ideas, ideas without which the project would not exist. I've told him repeatedly that I feel guilty taking these ideas and putting my name only on the book, but he tells me that he can't write the damn thing, and what good are his ideas without the writer who does all the work?

My guilt persists. This weekend we talked for over an hour on the wikibook (as it shall now be known), because I was brainstorming and wanted to know if certain technology ideas I had were feasible. The information and ideas he gave me in the course of this conversation may (or may not) end up being pivots on which the plot turns. Like, they're his ideas, his plot. Doesn't he deserve some credit for that other than a thank-you in acknowledgements that no one reads?

What do you think? Where does authorship start and end?

On Sunday night I watched L.A. Confidential for the 1800th time, and man, it just never is anything but brilliant in every gesture, every moment. The reason I loved it most this time was how character-driven it is. One of the most recent times I watched it, it dawned on me how hard it is to create three main characters who are superficially alike but thoroughly different underneath without turning them into broad sketches. It's a difficult balance and I'm always impressed by it. This time around it was inspiring to see just how much character drove the plot - how intertwined character and motivation were, and how characteristics slotted in to make plot developments fresh (if not surprising per se), moving, and easy to comprehend.

That's how I want to write. It's harder on character Z that X event happens because he has characteristic Y, and the reader knows it in an instant because Z has been developed so well. I attempted that in Highbinder, but I think it was a little rudimentary, and I had a lot fewer moving pieces there than L.A. Confidential does. (A GM assembly line has fewer moving pieces than L.A. Confidential does.)

Incidentally, while watching I found myself thinking of The Black Dahlia and realizing that part of the reason it failed so spectacularly at being a good movie was that it was trying to be the next L.A. Confidential. Which was a dumb thing to do. Also incidentally, I just saw Guy Pearce in Iron Man 3 last weekend, and he looks not a molecule different now than he did 15 years ago. Whatever he's using, I want some.

Today I went to the L.A. County Museum of Art to see the Kubrick exhibit. I also took a quick walk around the modern art gallery and saw all kinds of wonderful stuff. They have a Rothko, which I sat and looked at for a little while. I had a freaky transcendental experience in the Rothko gallery at the Tate Modern about ten years ago, and ever since then I've been a fan.

This is the one I saw, White Center, 1957. 

Incidentally (again!), if you choose to go to LACMA - and you should, it's a wonderful museum - set aside a considerable period of time to get there and back. I've been down into the city a handful of times for various things since we moved here (exhibits, a concert, To the Wonder), and this was by far the worst experience I've had with it. Nevertheless, I had such a wonderful time looking at Hollywood (the district) outside my car windows. There's so much to see on every block. I'd want to live there if it didn't have such a vacant, sad, dangerous feeling in the air.

1K Per Day

I wrote a long post about a journalism controversy that peaked at the beginning of this week, but it's...long, and I have this sneaking feeling that it's not especially interesting. So I think I'll save it for Friday or Saturday.

In the meantime, I am dealing with...just...bullshit. Life bullshit. From so many corners. Most of it's meaningless drama bullshit that'll be over in a few weeks, which makes it easier to step back but harder to withstand. You know? 

Despite this, I made a mini-resolution to try and write something every day. Most of my story ideas do not appeal right now, or I'm intimidated by the idea of writing them, so until I'm ready to write something for the outside world I'm writing stuff for the sake of it. It's a great lesson for me, to write with no real likelihood of the work seeing daylight. Something I've needed to do for a long time. 

Yesterday I did a writing exercise from a prompt book I've had for years but never yet used. I wrote 1,000 words about a guy doing an open mike, a guy who was extremely terrible at music but deluded about his terribleness. I rarely do humor and I know I'm not especially good at it, but it was still fun to write. (I was inspired a little by Silver Linings Playbook, which I saw over the weekend and truly loved. Flawed and deluded male characters, generally those played by Marky Mark, have been some of my favorites to know.) 

Two days ago I wrote a flash piece for a real live idea that I've been kicking around for a couple of months. I wrote it basically as a straight-up tell, a "this is what happened" from start to 75% through, and such a blatant violation of the rules means that it might not go anywhere (or that it sucks). I'm letting that one sit and might ask for readers on it in a couple of weeks. 

I marked many more exercises in the prompt book, and I hope to do those every day until the juices are flowing enough for me to write something significant. Matt floated the idea of posting them here, for your amusement and subsequent tearing-apart, but I shy away from that idea. Why would you be interested in my unpolished, ungood writing exercises? 

That's all I have today without lapsing into talking about music. Oh, except I'm reading an incredible book about the Beatles, Revolution in the Head. Such amazing insights into the 1960s and into the band, and I've only read the prefaces and half the introduction so far. In that spirit:

The Empty Vessel

Like all other things, I've found that blogging is cyclical. For a while I'll have nothing to write about, and then suddenly I have a rush of topics, too many to do in a single post or even a single week of posts. There are four different ideas in my draft queue to write about, along with a post cannibalized from previous material that is suddenly relevant again.

So, topic #1 for today. In my previous post I mentioned that Matt drew out something from me about what I prefer in heroes that is apparently unlike most readers. I marveled at it for hours afterward because I'd never sketched this difference so cleanly before. We were talking about main characters, and I told him that it's always bothered me how the main character has to be the superhero of the story. Why do we have to read about the apocalypse from the POV of the guy who saved the world? There are so many stories out there about this particular apocalypse, and the story of the guy who saved the world is going to be part of the history books anyway. Why not hear some of the more obscure stories? I want to read them. The writer can choose to write about anybody, after all.

I told him that the type of main character I'd always wanted most to read about was someone like Lucy Pevensie from the Chronicles of Narnia. She didn't have any special powers; she wasn't a keen archer like Susan or a great leader like Peter or especially clever like Edmund. She was smart enough, and brave, and honest, and had a good heart, but none of those things set her so strongly apart that she was the superhero of the story. Yet she was the central narrator of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I loved her dearly. Still do.

For so many reasons. I could give you a dozen examples of moments where I identified with her, wanted to weep or celebrate with her, admired her for her cool head or her compassion. For instance: when she decides to explore the wardrobe, she leaves the door open behind her, because she knows it's very foolish to shut oneself in a wardrobe. This utterly sensible instinct endeared her to me instantly. (Of course, Edmund is not so sensible.)

This is where I'd put a picture of Lucy if I could draw.
Google Images only turned up photographs of Georgie Henley,
who is all wrong because she isn't blond.
(Sorry, Georgie.) 

I always want my heroines to be like Lucy. She doesn't have any overarching motivation other than to explore, be with people she likes, and do the right thing. She's instantly relatable because her superpowers are nonexistent; she's just a little girl who does her best.

In the course of explaining all this, I looked at our bookshelves, and saw that a lot of the books I hold dearest have heroes like this, and a lot of the books that everyone else loves have central characters steeped in exceptionalism. Holes, for instance, has the most singularly ordinary hero I can think of, and I am deeply enamored of that book. Conversely, The Hunger Games tells the story of the girl who not only defeated all of her foes, but did her part to topple an evil empire. Bag of Bones is about just, you know, this writer. Ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances, with pretty subtle motivations at first. But Harry Potter is the ideal example of the central superhero - he's the most unique person in his entire universe. Although Harry moves me (since he, too, is always only trying his best in a hard world), I've always had a bigger soft spot for Ron Weasley. He is the non-Harry. (And Hermione, of course, whose superpower is BOOKS.) Why do I love Samwise so much more than Frodo? And Legolas so much more than Aragorn? They're along for the ride; their goodness sees them through, but they're not driven the way the superheroes are. And Superman? He's the most boring character in all of Christendom.

Yeah, yeah. Sell it to somebody else, sweet cheeks. 

This is why, in writing the [non-]horror novel, I accidentally made the sidekick more interesting than the main character. I wanted the main character to be a Lucy Pevensie, brave and smart and trying her best, but not pushed by any distinct motivation other than what was forcing her hand. I wanted readers to replace her with themselves, to hope for the best and admire her instincts and imagine how they would react. I failed to understand that a) fictional main characters need more of a motivation than "get through this in one piece", whether trapped in a lodge or trapped in their own lives, and b) non-me people enjoy reading about the superhero, not the empty vessel.

So one of the two biggest changes I'm making in the rewrite is to reinvent her as the superhero. I cringe to do it, because it always seems like...a coincidence, you know? As if it just so happens that the person you started with on this journey is the most important person in the book. Nay, the most important person in the world. All the books that start out with the central character on an ordinary day at college and wind up with the central character clinging to the bottom of a supersonic helicopter and shooting at terrorist dolphins (is there a book where that happens? Maybe I should write one) seem like they're the documentarian who got lucky by focusing on the ONE girl among hundreds who went from Miss Teen Podunk Hills to Miss Teen America.

Leaving aside beauty pageants, this was an important writing lesson to me. Even though I don't always want to read books about the superhero, they're certainly the most popular ones, and the ones I should probably try to write at this point in my nonexistent career as a novelist. I think that ties back to uncompromising art; my friend Max left a comment on my Facebook link to that blog post saying that maybe what people do is they compromise the art to get published/funded/whatever, and then they write the stuff that's really bizarre and awesome, once they have an audience. I thought petulantly of a bunch of examples where this didn't happen, where the art was what it was from day one and no one had to compromise to put it out there. But then I learned that the Beatles did this exact thing. And thought of a ton of examples of radical artists compromising a little bit (didn't even have to be a lot!) at first to be able to stride forward into experimental wonderfulness. So score one for Max. Where the line is between compromise and whoring oneself I think is a more complex question, and different for every artist, but it's not today's post.

Although today's post certainly did tangent a lot. Speaking of which, visual-art friends, can one of you draw me a picture of someone hanging off the bottom of a supersonic helicopter shooting at terrorist dolphins? Because as much as I wanted to be able to draw a picture of Lucy Pevensie as I see her, the image of grizzled terrorist dolphins with bandannas and cigars clutched between their teeth and souped-up AK-47s in their flippers...I don't think I've ever wished quite so badly that I could draw.

This Is Not a Unicorn

There are several excellent reasons why I didn't update more recently:

• Health
• Las Vegas
• Work, unfortunately
• Staring at empty blog post window with finger in nose and drool tailing down chin

But the big one is that I haven't written anything, so I can't follow up on my previous post to let you know if I'm still a wishy-washy idiot or not. Maybe that will come in a few days, but for the moment, I'll just talk about another one of the images on my little pinboard next to my desk.

This is R.A. Salvatore standing next to a statue of Drizzt Do'Urden and his companion Astral Plane panther, Guenhwyvar. The statue was created for GenCon some years ago, I think, although I don't know what its fate has been. I happened upon this picture shortly after finishing Homeland, to date the only Salvatore book I've read, and I stared at it on my screen for minutes on end, fascinated.

See, Drizzt isn't real. Salvatore made him up. Invented him from nothing. Conjured him from the ether. He's fictional. And yet there he is, plain as day, with his scimitars and white hair and magical panther, a real, life-size statue of a not-real drow created by the person standing next to the statue.

So, put yourself in Salvatore's shoes. Can you imagine how goddamned cool it would be to stand next to the statue of a character that you invented?! Yes, interrobang, because it's so cool that it blows my tiny mind how cool it would be.

This is a goal picture. I look at it and get all grinding-jealous and then inspired-jealous and then just inspired. Because I want to make a character who's that enduring, that interesting, that people want to create a statue out of her. Maybe I'll have the humility to just smile when there's a picture of me taken next to her, but I think I'll be pointing with my jaw dropped, kind of like that college student who met the President.

Villains Are No Joke

Last night before bed, I read The Killing Joke, which I had unearthed in the course of cleaning yesterday. It was not very smart, I admit, to read this right before trying to sleep; it wouldn't leave my mind. 

Wikipedia discusses how the depraved treatment of Barbara Gordon in the comic is focused proof of a horribly misogynistic mindset, particularly in comic books but also in the wider world. That on its own is a post I wish I had the skill to write, because it ties in with my point of view on the problems of women in combat and the way I believe we will move forward in gender relations (hint: it's not through total equality). But the article also says that a lot of experts have called The Killing Joke the ultimate Joker story, and that's today's knot to untie. Or, more accurately, to fiddle around with until it's un-untieable. 

At the Thursday program at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference, I sat through a day of lecture with Donald Maass (who is pretty wonderful, if you ever get the chance to hear him speak, and not remotely what I expected). It didn't resemble any lecture I've ever attended; there was a lot of prompting by him and a lot of writing by us, and not a lot of actual lecture. One of the topics was what makes a compelling character, and we started with protagonists and moved on to antags. Great great heroes are characters like Frodo, brave and self-sacrificing but flawed and susceptible to weakness, or Scarlett, relentlessly flawed but utterly compelling. Heroes seem to behave under stress either how we know we would behave, or how we sincerely hope we would. Great great villains - well, I hoped the first one to come up would be Hannibal Lecter, because I wanted to hear from an expert what was so great about him. 

Hannibal fascinates me, for quite a few reasons, and I remember freewriting many years ago in an attempt to figure out what makes him so urgently interesting. I decided that his draw came from the fact that his only motive to do such appalling things was preference - that he liked to eat people, and that was sort of all. Presumably he got some pleasure out of killing, too, but the key was that he just enjoyed cannibalism, one of the most ingrained taboos of Western society. 

How did he get that way? This is the question that keeps the reader reading (along with "what is he going to do next?"), but there's no answer that could possibly satisfy us. Also, the fact that - and I'm no psychologist, but this is my theory - he's totally sane, not actually unhinged but just with a different set of ethics than 99% of the population, is quite frightening to the average reader/viewer. If he was unhinged, I don't think he'd be able to accomplish what he does, be as methodical as he is. 

A villain who didn't come up, but to whom I've given a lot of thought, both before and after this lecture, is the Joker. I think Nolan's vision of the Joker (the Joker via 9/11, as it were) is quite different than the comic version, and while I was reading The Killing Joke I was thinking of Hamill, not Ledger. But when I was done, my mind went back to Ledger, because the Dark Knight Joker evokes many more character questions for me than the comic Joker. A character who just wants to watch the world burn - so why does he make the specific choices he does? Is he sane, or not? What leads him to value his own life at all? Does he have an ego, or is he 100% id - the total opposite of egocentric, with no personality recognizable to the DSM? And the question Batman seems to be asking all throughout The Killing Joke: how do you defeat this creature without killing it? 

I was disappointed that The Killing Joke presented an origin story that I think we as readers were supposed to buy. Ledger's Joker, with several explanations, none of which explained anything worth knowing, was much closer to what I would have wanted from this character. Like Hannibal, no explanation of how he got this way could possibly satisfy; he is too far away from us. He just is a cannibal; he just is a terrorist. 

From here, I could move on to explain how I integrated these lessons into the villain in my own book, but it doesn't really interest me this morning. Instead, I'll leave you with an idea that I'd love to have contradicted by people who've read more graphic novels than me: Alan Moore genuinely hates humanity. I think he really believes that the human race is bad at the core. While redemption is a powerful idea for him, it doesn't seem to me that he really believes in it. Commissioner Gordon's plea for Batman to show the Joker that "our way works" made me laugh out loud in my bedroom last night. Give me a fucking break. The Joker won't ever see that, not ever, and Gordon is four goddamn years old if he actually believes his own words there. Alan Moore doesn't buy it either, if you ask me - the idealism of that panel was utterly out of step with the rest of the comic. It all seemed artificial, suddenly; all at once, it was obvious that I was reading a comic book. 

And finally, I'd like to note that every single panel of that comic was a spectacular work of art. Visually, it was completely arresting, more so than any graphic novel I've read. (Although I admit that's not saying much.) It reminded me of walking through a museum. Well done, all. 

Flat as a Fairy Tale

Torn between two ideas: sci-fi idea derived from Star Wars that I'm not really sure I can write well, and old old literary idea that I love and which I'm pretty sure I'm going to fuck up if I try to write it. So, yesterday, I wrote neither, which I'll grant was a pretty stupid way to avoid the problem. Plus there's outlining the Marilyn book, which GAH-BLAH.

There's also this old story, a fairy tale, that I workshopped with the Barrelhouse group during the fall. They told me that my main character wasn't interesting enough and quibbled annoyingly with my first line. I made my main character an everygirl on purpose, because that's how you do it in fairy tales, right? Snow White is not exactly the most three-dimensional character ever to strut around a Disney landscape. Oh. Pun. Ack.

Point is, this week I've been thinking over whether I want to rewrite this story with this idea in mind. It was this post at Errantry that put me in mind of it. My main character sings (which becomes an important aspect of the story at the end of it), and that is her Only Thing, like the love of honey of the tale Kathleen illustrates. To the workshoppers, this was not enough, and she was really flat and boring. I tried to argue that I'd constructed her like a normal, flat fairy tale heroine, the kind you can project your own characteristics on because she has none of her own (ahem*BELLA*ahem), but they didn't care. The more I think about it, the more I become concerned (not quite convinced) that they're right. I think I'd end up adding a hell of a lot more words if I made the character more interesting, which I guess is okay with me, except that I was happy with a 4,000-word story and don't really want it to be a 7,000er. If it makes the story better, well of course, but it won't necessarily be more saleable if it's better and too long. But that spins me up into asking what the point is, whether I want to write a good story or a saleable story, when the answer is really both. I guess write more, and then try to cut back elsewhere?

I unintentionally created part of a universe in this story that I want to explore elsewhere, so I don't think it would be a bad thing if I were to work a little harder at this first foray into it. It's too short to get much into the universe, so that would be part of expanding the word count, expanding the world. The conflict admittedly appears a little late, but I thought the language made up for it, a bit. I could break it down and start all over, from the top down, with the universe in mind, rather than sneaking into it with just my main character in mind the way I wrote it originally. But that sounds like an awful lot of work, she whined.

Like I said above, I'm still not convinced that flat heroines are entirely wrong for fairy tales written in the present day. (Not set in modern times, just written right now.) Just as I think many readers like predictability to a certain extent, I think many readers like characters they can live through more personally due to having few specific characteristics. Vibrant heroines who are thoroughly foreign to the average reader, but who still possess some universal traits, are one kind of way to draw in readers (cf Scarlett O'Hara), but I think the opposite way is not invalid. Children's books and YA are rife with these sorts of folks, after all.

Y'know, having thought through how not-fun it will be to rewrite this story, I'm suddenly far more interested in working on the SF story. Unexpected bonus. Maybe I'll get down to it today.