When Bad Guys Go Too Bad

by Holly West

Before I begin this week's post, I'd like to announce that Thomas Pluck will be sharing Wednesdays with me starting next week. I always enjoy when Tom writes a guest post, so I think we can all look forward to some insightful and entertaining content from him. Welcome, Tom!

The following post will be a bit spoiler-y, particularly if you haven't watched the last-ish seasons of House of Cards, Nurse Jackie, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and Orange is the New Black. No plot revelations, but I'll be discussing character development of these shows.

I'm sure I've said this before, but I love a flawed protagonist. They are, in fact, my favorite kind of protagonists. I'm attracted to misfits and characters who walk the thin line between good and bad. Characters who are fundamentally good but for some reason do a lot of bad things--maybe because they can't help themselves or they can't get ahead in life or they don't feel they have a choice. Maybe it's their job. Characters who are somehow able to justify the bad things they do in such a way that the audience is able to root for them in spite of their flaws.

Oh, how I loved Tony Soprano.

Take Tony Soprano. In the beginning, he was the perfect flawed protagonist. Admittedly, he was more bad than good, but that works for me. He did terrible things, but dammit, he really loved those baby ducks. And his struggles with his mother? I'd watched my own father have similar ones with his mother. I could relate. Tony was so simple and yet so complex and I loved him completely.

And while we're talking The Sopranos, what about Nurse Jackie (played brilliantly by Carmela Soprano--er, Edie Falco)? Another superbly flawed character whose drug addiction causes her to lose nearly everything. At first, the awful things she does are balanced out by her brilliance as a nurse but eventually, she hits bottom and we're left to wonder if redemption is possible. Has she pushed us too far, like she pushed away everyone else in her life?

Which brings me to the point of this post: what happens when characters go so bad they're no longer enjoyable to watch/read? I'm not talking about the bad guys--the guys whose job it is to be terrible. I'm talking about the so-called good guys. Flawed or not, the ones we tune in for each week (or turn each page or buy each book in a series) because they're compelling and sympathetic in spite of the bad things the do. In some cases, because of it.

In Tony Soprano's case, it became increasingly harder to empathize with him as the series wore on and that made him less interesting. There was no chance of redemption for him as a character because he'd pushed me to my limit and he wasn't giving enough back. Where are the baby ducks when you need them? I was ready to let him go before the series actually ended (though I loved him so much in the beginning, I still wanted him to live on in some kind of alternate universe, even if I no longer wanted to watch him).

Oh well.

I'm not saying that a character shouldn't, over the course of a series, become unredeemable. Often, that's a compelling arc and I'm into it. But as writers we need to be cognizant of when a character has reached the pinnacle of his/her evil and not let it drag on too long. Know when to cut him off at the knees. He can't go on indefinitely without consequences (and sometimes, the consequences are the end of the series).

A good current example is House of Cards. At the end of season three, I wondered if perhaps the Underwoods had become truly evil and whether I wanted to watch them any further. They no longer seemed to have any moral dilemmas--their only problems were keeping the power they'd gained and not getting caught for their many misdeeds. I'd watched for three seasons thinking they were working for some kind of greater good only to learn that they themselves were the greater good. Womp womp. But then, the season three finale ended with a good cliffhanger so I watched season four. Unfortunately, I think I'm through with the Underwoods--the series should've ended this season (and if you've seen it, you know they had the perfect opportunity).

I also mentioned Orange is the New Black. We're half way into the latest season I'm having trouble with the main character, Piper. Perhaps the goal was to harden her as the series proceeded (because let's face it, she is in jail and even if the inmates are magically able to have sex whenever they want it's still taxing) but she's lost most of the vulnerability that was so appealing at the beginning of the series. She's one-dimensional now. Not complex and not interesting.

Want an example of a show that did it right? Breaking Bad. The series ended at precisely the right time. I could still root for Walter because he was in the end stages of his disease and well, that's got to fuck a person up, but really, he'd turned so bad that having him live on would've been tedious. His story was finished and it was time to kill him off and move on.

I'm aware that I've only discussed television shows here. But these rules apply to books, though maybe not in the same way, unless you're talking about a series. Thinking about these issues reminds me to work harder at character development. Add some subtlety. Maybe a quirk or two. Good fiction demands we magnify some of qualities for effect, but no one is all good or all bad and we need to keep this in mind. We're creating characters here, not caricatures.

Wyatting past the Graveyard: Guest Piece by Joseph Hirsch

Scott's Note: Joseph Hirsch contributes a piece today.  Hirsch has a new book out called The Bastard's Grimoire, a book I enjoyed and blurbed, describing it as something akin to a Middle Ages set Terry Gilliam film with an NC-17 rating.  Since his first novel came out in 2013, Hirsch has been prolific; he has 10 books published all together.  He has worked in a number of genres so I asked him to write about precisely that: what prompts him with each book he does to write in a difference genre or meld of genres?  

Here's his answer.

Wyatting Past the Graveyard

by Joseph Hirsch

Every writer has their strengths and weaknesses. If I had to pinpoint my major weaknesses, they would be a tendency toward what the writer John Sheppard once (accurately) called overly-elaborate sentence construction, or what the writer Lori Fraser (also accurately)  referred to as my descriptive powers that sometimes reduce readability. I think it was Ben Bova who once said a writer has two options, to either have a reader admire their words or believe their stories.

There are some writers for whom the admiration of their words is bound to the believability of the story (one doesn’t so much read H.P. Lovecraft as admire the impenetrable paragraphs he constructed with a near-saurian disregard for what the reader thought). 

I personally think that the style a writer uses should be contingent upon the task at hand. Different genres call for different levels of ornamentation. Gothic horror gives one a chance to lard on the descriptions of putrescent moss and cracked fissures in cenotaphs, while a noir novel calls for a more minimalist approach. If I’ve made a mistake in the past (and I have), it’s that I used a scalpel where a chainsaw would have better suited my purposes, and vice versa. There are those who like my crime output, especially my novel Rolling Country, but I have mixed feelings about the book. The crime maestro Elmore Leonard once said, “After I write something, I read it, and if it looks like writing, I rewrite it.” I personally like my writing to look like writing, and so my forays in the crime genre have been few and far between, or have been slipstream affairs that meld crime fiction with other, bizarre elements.

Another one of my weaknesses is too much (hat-tip to John Sheppard, again) “table-setting.” I can go a full act or two without introducing much conflict, and then turn on the afterburners in the final stanzas of the third act. Some readers find this unconventional arc gratifying; others are flustered or confused by it.

Getting to what I think are my primary assets, I would enumerate two:

1). I rarely repeat myself, or allow myself to be reduced to formulaic writing. I have written tales about nano-sized robots who force a pizza deliveryman to place his pubic hairs on pepperonis in the pizza shop where he works, so that the little machines can monitor humans from inside of their digestive systems to determine whether or not our species deserves to be exterminated;  I have also written a tale about a heroin addict who goes to Afghanistan and makes some sort of Faustian pact with a reclusive Middle-Eastern billionaire, which turns his blood into a drug; I’ve written a straightforward crime foray about an over-the-road trucker who kidnaps a young prostitute, and I wrote a book about how Satan himself was nestled in a bed of ice beneath the Appalachian Mountains. I’ve written weird Westerns that involve cannibals, or trackers blessed with super-sensitive noses that can scent out fugitives and menstruating vaginas with equal ease. My latest novel, The Bastard’s Grimoire, is a fantasy tale set in a German High Middle Ages in which a wizard reads the biblical passage about “be fruitful and multiply” to a young man, in inverted Latin, which causes the lad to bring a monster into the world every time he copulates with a woman.

I do not have the weakness or problem usually ascribed to Chuck Palahniuk or Kurt Vonnegut (both of whom, I should add at this point, are probably better writers than me and are more successful than I will ever be). I have worked in every genre, not with any sort of overarching conscious plan, but because to do otherwise than to transplant my skillset from one area to another would be boring. “Talent is transplantable” as Richard Price once said, before going on to write the same novel over and over again (after Clockers, which was a masterpiece), before he became a successful TV writer whose return to the game was a pseudonymously penned lackluster affair called The Whites, written as Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt (what the fuck?), but I digress.

People who like my weird westerns and my crime novels (or my latest fantasy novel), who expect me to churn out the same book over and over again for their satisfaction should heed the words of the rapper Jay-Z: “Niggas want my old shit, buy my old album.”

All writers, I think, smart from criticism, especially in our internet age, when the time between “farm and fork” so to speak is pretty rapid, compared to in the nineteenth century or in the first half of the twentieth century. Melville and Fitzgerald both had to wait months or even years between the writing and the publication of their works, before an ungrateful or indifferent public responded to their books. We in the 21^st century have Goodreads and Amazon.com, both of which I’ve stopped checking for reviews of my works.

I recently read a book about the internet that quoted a study in which it was observed that the neurological response to hurtful comments about oneself online mimics the effects of gripping a scalding cup of coffee. I know better ways to hurt myself than to constantly check the reviews and ratings for my books online. I’ve got a root canal and a lidocaine injection slated for this upcoming week, and if I’m feeling really frisky, maybe I’ll slam my dick in the car door, which brings me to my second, and most important asset as a writer:

2) I am insane. If one were to offer me the blandishments of Hollywood, cocaine, beautiful women, a mansion, fame, etc., if I would only allow myself to be reduced to a formula (or to writing screenplays), I would not take the bait. I would prefer to stay in my rented house with the worn vinyl siding, listening to ambient music on my stock computer speakers, and typing like I am right now, with my dog lying behind me on the bed where a woman hasn’t lain for some time.

This is what I was born to do. During my last two years in the Army, I told myself I wanted to be a professional writer. After I got back from Iraq I started submitting stories to various magazines and while I did get some rejections ranging from the indifferent to the mean-spirited, I also eventually broke that door down/ dug through that prison wall with a spoon (choose your metaphor). I eventually had something like eight or nine books published. I am not bragging. I had no choice; I still don’t.

I think that, even if I wanted to sell out, I wouldn’t know how. The progressive rock musician Robert Wyatt (former drummer of The Soft Machine) is so confounding in his approach to music that there is a neologism coined to describe driving people crazy by playing his solo work on jukeboxes in pubs in England. They call it “Wyatting.” (sic)

In Wyatt’s biography, Different Every Time, Robert was asked about the term and found it somewhat amusing, replying with a chuckle that he never set out to be prog or experimental in his music, that his real role model was Ray Charles. Wyatt said he always strove to make pop music, but it always came out strange in spite of his designs to sounds mainstream. I have the same problem.

But then again, the dichotomy of “strength” / “weakness” might be a moot one, if the reader remembers that old quote by Jean Cocteau: “What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”

With that in mind, let me get back to writing my hardboiled PI novel about a loquacious gumshoe prone to logorrhea tasked with monitoring the priapic doings of a husband who has foregone his connubial vows to his betrothed and now partakes in myriad extramarital dalliances.

That last sentence probably made Elmore Leonard do a three-sixty in his grave, and rightly so. I can’t write crime / hardboiled / pulp for shit.  

The Bastard's Grimoire is available at Amazon right here.

Release Day!

By Claire Booth

This is the week. THE BRANSON BEAUTY comes out on Tuesday.

 

It’s not my first book but it is my first novel, and I’m surprised by how differently I feel about it compared with my nonfiction. I think that’s because the novel is completely mine. The nonfiction was my writing, of course, but the events and the characters and everything else already existed. The book released on Tuesday is all me.

If you’re interested, THE BRANSON BEAUTY will be available wherever books are sold.

Here’s what some people are saying about it:

“Touches of sly humor add appeal to Booth’s standout debut...Issues left unresolved hint at much more to come in what promises to be a most engaging regional police series.”―Publishers Weekly (starred review)


“Former crime reporter Booth imbues her fast-moving narrative, which celebrates its Ozarks setting, with humor and humanity. A promising debut.”―Booklist


“Former crime reporter Booth’s debut introduces an engaging cop with wonderful family appeal.” - Library Journal