More About Mr. Perfect

I've blogged about avoiding superlatives, and beaten up that nice Mr. Mike Smith about his superlative protagonist.

Just now I found something that underscores what I'm talking about. Here's a link to an article about things overachievers do. It gets depressing at the end when it says they don't write books. Sigh.

The point I derived from this article is that if you're really, really good at X, then you'll be less good at A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y, and Z. If that was tedious to read, it was tedious to write. And now imagine that instead of just reading each letter, you were getting a Ph. D. in it? Sounds unrealistic? It should.

If your dashing knight is the best swordsman in the world, then s/he's got no time after swords practice for mastering the violin, or piloting a star fighter, or figuring out how to romance members of the appropriate sex?

If you see any of my ebooks, you'll see the art of Joanne Renaud. We've become friends because I am not an artist. She is. I've hired her to do art for my books. She's good. Yet she reminded me of something that weirded me out some years ago. Did I say I'm not an artist? Keep that in mind.

My sister was cleaning out some of the papers from my dad's house. And some of my teenaged papers were mixed up in them. She sorted them out, and returned them. I saw some landscapes and a picture of a superhero with a jet pack and ray gun.

"Who drew these?" I asked.

"You did," she replied.

I could not imagine any time at which I had been interested in doing something like that. I could not remember making those pictures. They were completely unfamiliar to me. I'm not an artist.

This bothered me a bit and I racked my brain about how these drawings had come to be. Over the course of a couple days I remembered having some time on my hands immediately after graduating from High School and before I started working in my full-time job. In the summer of 1973 I wasn't an artist. I wasn't anything. Just a kid who'd finished school with pretty good grades and a diploma from Kent City High School (The worst high school in Kent County, Michigan back then. I was told.)

In the decades afterwards, I've applied myself to studying Mathematics, Computer Science and Software Engineering. Then I applied myself to writing and storytelling so that my artistic expression is seen in my writing. Not the graphic or visual arts.

Who I am is informed by these activities. The culture of the geeks I ran with helped form my values and attitudes. When I ran into artists in my various writing groups, making purdy pitchers was something they did, not me. Thus my shock and denial that I had dabbled in producing something I was now interested in only as an observer and consumer. This is sort of the inverse of my blog post about reading like a writer.

I'm not anything special and where I aspire to be special, I relate less well to the book-buying public.

I once wrote a writing mantra about making your protagonist someone you'd want to get on the train with. And that means your protagonist has to be someone normal humans can relate to at some level. Stan Lee does this when he makes Peter Parker an awkward high school student. C. S. Forester does this when he lets that nice Mister Midshipman Horatio Hornblower get beat up for doing something right. 

Look again at what those overachievers do: they trim away parts of their life that are unrelated to their goals.

Overachievers are unbalanced characters.

An overachiever in X will be an underachiever in something else. To make your characters believable they must be in this sense realistic. Maybe your ninja is the best swordsman in all Japan, but he sucks at marketing and promotion.

Think about your characters' strengths, and now imagine a list of everything that remains. Regard those things as weaknesses. Sherlock Holmes was an embarrassment to his family when John Watson disclosed he was a flat-earther. Just ask Mycroft.

Wesley Crusher Die Die Die

I sell a $0.99 story, The Aristotelian, and a $2.99 anthology of stories, Finding Time, so this post tacks close to the wind. You should not buy every $0.99 and $2.99 ebook you find on Amazon. Maybe it's because I'm an evil, running-dog capitalist, that I make enough money to make these prices seem quite small. But some $0.99/$2.99 ebooks are no bargain. This is a post arguing against the indiscriminate buying of low-priced ebooks.

Every story is an investment by the reader. The writer has a fiduciary responsibility to protect that interest. The writer who forgets that is a thief and a cheat.

The reader takes her hard-earned, after-tax dollars and buys your book. Then the reader sits down and reads it. We all have a limited amount of time on this Earth. The reader's investment is thus the sales-price plus the time spent reading. This is time that might otherwise be spent catching up on sleep, exercising, or enjoying another hobby. For all but the poorest among us, the time-cost is the harder one to justify. A novel will consume a long Friday night, or an entire weekend, depending upon how long it is and how quickly one reads.

How do you know before you sit down to read whether you'll get to "The End" close the book and think, "More please." OR you'll think, "That's time I'll never get back."

There was a time when wise men of compassion and vision saw publishing as a high vocation. Such men sought to protect the public from inferior prose. They served as watchful dragons making sure only the right words got published. And often publishing dreck that pandered to their bigotry along the way.

Independent publishing means there are no watchful dragons today. Anyone can upload anything to Amazon and get their mother to write a 5-star review of it before suppertime.

This creates a broad spectrum of writing that you can buy for not much money. Some of it is easily identifiable as horrid. Some of it absolutely rocks. (You should decide about "The Aristotelian" and "Finding Time" for yourself.)

The absolute worst thing you can encounter on the Kindle is neither horrid nor awesome. This is what happened with me last night. I had purchased. The Last Praetorian by Mike Smith and I started to read it.

The first thing I noticed was the grammar. I think I can get its/it's and there/their straight, and I feel rather comfortable with who/whom. But lay and lie are a minefield I tend to walk about if I can. These are all mechanical things you can fix if you take the time to learn the rules of grammar and ruthlessly review your text, OR hire someone who already knows the rules of grammar to apply them to your manuscript.

Then I noticed the misspellings. Any fool can find the little red squiggles underlining the wordz spelt worng. But a writer gets no such warning when he says discrete when he means discreet. This is where you need to hire someone who knows the differences and has an eye that can spot them in your manuscript.

I have only myself to blame. I read the opening chapter and the hero, Jon Radek, is the YOUNGEST officer to ever COMMAND the MOST ELITE unit of the BIGGEST empire in human history. He wields the SHARPEST sword ever. And he is assigned to guard the EMPEROR and his spoiled PRINCESS who just so happens to be the MOST BEAUTIFUL woman in the galaxy. The hero not only is an expert with all things martial arts, he is also the BEST PILOT in known space.

Have you noticed any of superlatives in the last paragraph? A perfectly serviceable story can be written around little people. Beginning writers don't realize this. A beginning writer doesn't realize s/he shouldn't make the protagonist and/or love-interest some version of himself. That's the problem with Wesley Crusher in particular and Mary Sue characters in general.

You can be a very good writer and fall into this trap, as I believe Dorothy Sayers did with Lord Peter and Harriet Vane. I think Ms. Sayers fantasized about a perfect man, then wrote him up as Lord Peter Wimsey. And then to indulge her own fantasy of having such a man, she wrote up Harriet Vane. I'll have to take this up with Ms. Sayers when I see her.

Meanwhile, back at the Last Praetorian, the hero is all those superlatives. But did you notice that he never has to practice? He never has to work out in the gym to have those rock-hard abs? He never spends any time in the flight simulator honing his mad skillz?

Likewise this hero is reluctant to kill, because he's seen too much killing in his life. Really? How do we know? We never saw any of it in the opening chapters. And when he chokes the life out of an assailant he doesn't seem remorseful.


The problem is that even in space centuries from now, human nature will still be recognizable. The characters in this story are just chess pieces moved about at the writers' whim according to the demands of the plot. And that's a hallmark of really bad writing: an obliviousness to human nature. Any character, good, bad or ugly, has to have motivation to do the next thing. That motivation can never be "to advance the plot." He may be like Conan or Inigo Montoya looking for revenge. Or Ferris Beuller just taking a day off.

And if you make your hero the owner of an interstellar shipping company, the emperor of a galactic thang, or the captain of a ship o' the line, s/he's a leader with followers. Same goes for your evil villain. S/He'll have minions (which are better than followers b/c you don't have to pay them as much). This means your leader will have to show some hallmarks of leadership or your book will suck.

The spear-carriers have got to have some motivation to keep on following. I quit reading Last Praetorian before I got to see much of the villain's organization. From what I did read, the minions would have ample opportunity to see the villain as inept, venal and certain to regard minions as cannon fodder.

This has been a pet peeve of mine ever since I saw Ernst Stavro Blofeld pet a Turkish Angora Cat while feeding a minion to a shark.

I think one of the hallmarks of a good writer is the ability to create believable motivations for the villain. Why does he live in an extinct volcano instead of the Hamptons? Why does he have a huge world map with blinkie lights behind his desk? Yeah those things were cool when I was 15. Same for Persian cats and monocles. But no sane minion follows a fella with the maturity of a 15-year old. Why follow a putz like that? Does he have a great dental plan?

I quit reading the Last Praetorian, but not before wasting too many hours reading it.

Whenever you read any story, it will raise questions in the mind. What has become of the Emperor? Is he really dead? How did Jon & Sophie get to the Imperial Senate? Why did they separate? Will the Senator's son whose life Jon spared grow up to become a valued ally?

The reader is made physically uncomfortable by story-questions that remain unanswered. This motivates the reader to stick with a story even as s/he is rolling eyes about cardboard characters and furious about the bad writing. That's why I would rather happen upon a story I despise and can quickly dismiss. Nope, no need to read about robot lesbians, next. Nothing I can relate to, I felt no discomfort abandoning Hegemony.

But I liked the Sten novels. And I like Mark Van Name's Jon & Lobo stories. Last Praetorian reminded my of them. So, I bought the novel and disregarded the early warning signs.

At some point I decided the discomfort of leaving the story-questions above unanswered was going to be less than the discomfort of finding them to be answered in an unsatisfactory fashion. My worries of a third-act fail made me think Last Praetorian was a negative sum game.

And the only way to "win" a negative-sum game is to not play.

Two stars. I wish it had been one star so that I would have quit reading sooner.

Because a friend recently got a bad review, and lamented the fact that the reviewer had not "thrown her a bone." I'll throw Mr. Smith, who wrote The Last Praetorian, a bone:

• your world building does not suck, though it reminded me too much of Andromeda, you can build on it.
• hire a copy editor and/or fire whoever you had copy-edit Praetorian.
• hire an editor-editor to point out structural problems and Mary Sue characters.