Sell the Sequel

I often say that you use the last chapter to sell the sequel. Make it an aircraft carrier catapult.

There's a business to writing and the writer is wise to be mindful of business considerations while creating his or her dazzling work of stunning magnificence. And if you haven't gotten Max Perkins or his equivalent at one of the big publishing houses backing you with a book deal, you may be considering self-publishing. In self-publishing, you must be VERY MINDFUL of business considerations.

And the biggest consideration (even bigger than getting paid) is reaching your audience, which people prettier and smarter than I can attest is the big challenge in today.

Mindful of this, consider the sequel.

People who like one novel by an author are more likely to like another novel by that author. How many times have you noticed that the novel ends with a chapter or two worth of text to the right of the thumb on the spine only to discover that the publisher has thoughtfully provided sample chapters of similar works?

It should go without saying--but I'm saying it--that when a reader is reading your work, you have a free opportunity to reach one of the people most likely to buy another one of your works.

Have you ever felt that let-down when you finish a novel and wish you could enjoy it a little more? What better way is there to enjoy a little more than by picking up the sequel!

For this reason the author is wise to use this opportunity to sell the sequel. Sure, you should have links to your author platform and to your other works, but you have an opportunity within the body of your current novel to sell the sequel.

Let's jump up to 10,000 feet, or maybe even Low-Earth-Orbit and view your writing project very abstractly: It starts out introducing a setting and characters, then proceeds to a climax, then winds down through a denouement. The End.

Mindful of your reader, I hope you have maintained a steady stream of story questions and you've answered them faithfully enough to maintain the reader's trust.

If you have no sequels planned for this work, you are wise to make sure no story questions remain unanswered. (Unless you have some cool ambiguity thing you're working where maybe the supernatural stuff is a hallucination or maybe not. But ambiguity works better for short stories than for novels.)

But if you do have one or more sequels in mind, you'll want to devise just a few story questions you intend to leave unanswered in this novel, but that you intend to answer in a sequel. Be careful not to annoy your reader with too many of these.

Consider the first of the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, you see a shadowy figure who was obviously pulling the strings of this movie's antagonist, but you don't see who that figure is. You'll have to wait until Game of Shadows to find out.

In Science Fiction the writer does a fair bit of world-building and this creates a LOT of backstory that the writer is wise to regard as scaffolding and share only the essentials. Use something in that backstory to stimulate a story-question. Make it big and make it vague. THEN in the last chapter of your novel, add a reminder of this unanswered story question to intrigue your reader. That's what you're going for. Don't do a cliff-hanger, I've griped about that earlier.

Be careful not to annoy your reader with something gratuitous without any foreshadowing. The second novel of the Evan Gabriel trilogy ends fairly well, then somebody gets kidnapped in the last chapter. No foreshadowing. No set up. It just happened. Now you know the hero has to go rescue the kidnap victim and in so doing destroy the evil conspiracy that's been pulling the strings in the prior novels. That's a bad job of selling the sequel. I disapprove.

Instead, I think you should be as subtle as possible giving just a whiff that something's up in the first third of the novel, then just a sound like a rustling leaf in the middle of the novel, and then make it clear in the last chapter. Elliot Kay did the setup fairly well in Poor Man's Fight. BUT the last chapter led me to believe that the sequel might undo the hero's main accomplishment in this novel. We'll have to see.

You can write your whole novel, then review it figuring out how you want to set up your sequel in a way that'll appeal to your readers. Then add just a touch here, and a sentence there to set up your last chapter where you make it clear that such-and-such is not a dangling thread, but the reason why your dear readers MUST buy the sequel.

It Works Like This

I touched upon this obliquely when I claimed one ought never put two Sherlocks in the same room wherein I deprecated the practice of baffling the reader with a bunch of inside-baseball expert blather. And I've touched upon this obliquely when I noted that Science Fiction has a distinct expression that favors invention and science over sociology and culture. I'm more a fan of the Jules Verne expression over the H. G. Wells expression.

The writer may know things other than writing. For instance, Erle Stanley Gardner was a practicing lawyer before Perry Mason argued his first murder case. Police procedural stories are often written by former cops or forensic pathologists. Military Science Fiction stories are often penned by former military people. In each of these cases, the writer can truly say to the reader, "I know something you don't."

This enables the writer to do two things: 1) He can lend details from his experience. Mr. Gardner was able to use his own courtroom experience to insert small details that lend verisimilitude to his narrative. 2) He can explain how something works. If you want to see world-class explaining, pick up a Neal Stephenson book. You won't need a forklift. You just think you will. I'm interested in the explaining thing today.

Experts love to be true to their craft, and this makes them think, "I cannot dumb this down." They say this to justify writing that proves opaque to the ordinary reader. If you refuse to dumb something down, you're the dummy.

I was in the middle of my Masters' degree studies in Mathematics at Michigan State University when a visiting scholar came by to give a colloquium. He gave a talk on a topic of mathematics that was very difficult for me, and I knew I did not understand it going in. So, I was a little scared at the beginning of the talk. I needn't have been. The guy made the topic seem a lot easier than it really was. He knew multiple motivating examples for the key ideas and he knew which ideas were the more important ones.

I realized that this was the smartest guy I'd run into at MSU. It takes genius to make some things look easy.

C. S. Lewis famously said that if you cannot explain something to the woman who does your washing, you really don't understand it.

Understanding is like cutting a path through the tangled undergrowth of your ignorance. When I first learn something, I blaze one trail through this jungle and it twists about a lot. But when I learn a thing better, I have more than one way to get to the same point. All knowledge is interconnected somehow and the more you know, the more interconnects you possess.

Also, when I barely understand a thing, I don't know what's important and what's insignificant. Pretty much everything has to be held onto for dear life lest it be needed later. It's a lot less work when you know what the essential issues are and can dispense with the rest.

Suppose you're writing an explanation for something--like how a radio antenna works. You have to decide which parts of the explanation are pertinent or not. And then you can devise analogies that motivate the key ideas. An antenna element is not exactly like a tuning fork. It uses vibrating electrons to induce electromagnetic radiation whereas a tuning fork uses vibrating tines to induce sound. However, the process is essentially the same even if the details vary.

Cool facts about the partial differential equations governing the behavior of the radio waves can be left out of some explanation, because they are not pertinent to the story. Sure, you'll need to know them if you ever build an antenna, but not when you write for a popular audience. The expert is an expert because s/he knows what can be safely left out.

The expert is also an expert because s/he knows the connections between this thing and other things. Your audience may not know anything about short wave radio, but they do know something about other things, like snakes. Those other things they know about should be what you use to approach the subject.

I spoke of this obliquely before, but I'll say it directly here. The writer should make the reader feel empowered and good, not intimidated and bad. Maybe the reader lacks the time and the inclination to take a degree in radio engineering and/or pursue FCC licensing. But s/he can get a taste of the coolness of the work. The writer must be sensitive of and compassionate toward the reader to make the prose understandable and enjoyable.

Stupid Villainy

Unhappy events in my life have reminded me that criminality if far more plausible when it is stupid than when it is genius. We like our detective fictions to be chess matches between masters. We want to see Holmes contending against Moriarty, Spiderman against Green Goblin, James Bond against Ernst Blofeld--the list goes on. But villainy in real life is far more often perpetrated by idiots.

I tend to forget this. I've complained about the villain who feeds minions to his sharks when they displease him. Why would I go to work for the guy in the monocle who kills off his minions? That's moronic.

Consider the movie Fargo. This movie is hilarious. William Macy plays a feckless loser who hires two criminals to kidnap his wife. The criminals are hilariously stupid as you can see in their various interactions. Their madcap antics turn this comedy into darkest black when they start murdering innocents.

This illustrates something significant. You may need to be smart and/or good to make it through life, but you can be both stupid and evil to create a great deal of mayhem. The best crime writers know this and they can make the reader laugh at the stupidity of enterprising criminals who end up re-enacting Wile E. Coyote pratfalls and Darwin Awards. This can add some comic relief to some rather heavy reading. And then you can make your readers feel guilty for laughing.

Unthinking villainy can affect well-educated folk, too. Let's suppose I were a High School Chemistry teacher with cancer and neither money nor insurance for chemotherapy treatment. Sure, I could start cooking meth, but that would entail scary work with scary colleagues. OR I could saw off the end of a shotgun, walk into a bank wearing a Barak Obama mask, and demand the contents of all the registers. The feebs would pick me up before dinner time, and after my conviction on bank-robbing & weapons charges, they'd ship me off to the Mayo Clinic to get my cancer cured at public expense. That's a lot smarter than what Vince Gilligan's villain came up with in Breaking Bad.

Let's face it, you don't have to be Darth Vader to choke the life out of your girlfriend. And you don't need to be Gabbar Singh to toy with the victims of your cruelty.



I think stupid villainy is something like Mr. McGregor's veggie garden. You've got a nice, tidy little garden going on. Then some pestilent little bunnies come along and take what they want and cause damage much greater than whatever value they could derive.

These criminals may aspire for the "big score," but they are seldom capable of more than venal enterprises. Their misdemeanors reflect the lack of trust they inspire. Smart people do not leave high-value items unprotected. They do not entrust high-value items to lame brains. The protection afforded high-value items is seldom penetrated by numb-skulls. The criminal who is a dunce must settle the scrap-metal value of a cast-iron antique he steals because he lacks the sense to take it to somewhere besides a junk-yard. They feel they've put something over on you when they lie about matters inconsequential.

This mindset is what I think lies at the heart of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. He has the role of constable, he's not very bright, and he tells himself he's not a criminal by affecting the intelligence he does not possess.

Of course, the cretinous villain does not realize his disability. He thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. This makes him ripe for manipulation. Which I suppose is something the super-villain with a monocle knows. S/he can promise the dimwit shiny things. "After we hold the moon for ransom, you'll be right there at my side."

More likely, the smart villain can set up the blockhead villain with a "big score" to the end of getting him caught, whereupon the smart villain can steal the lolly from the evidence room. (This scenario does not even require a super-genius villain.)

So, next time you're up for some crime writing, or want to put together a mystery, consider putting some addle-brained imbeciles on the chessboard.

Two Sherlocks Walk Into a Bar

A while back I advised the writer to never put two Sherlocks in the same scene. Or if they do, they must never talk shop. What I said then I stand by, provided you understand why I said it. Understanding why will guide you should you wish to put ignore my earlier advise.

You should remember that whenever you hear a "rule" it is subject to being overcome by another "rule" just as a magnet's field overcomes Earth's gravity field when iron filings lying on a table fly upward to the magnet when it gets sufficiently close.

When you are writing there are multiple forces in play and those forces may occasionally balance or overcome one another.

The delightful Selena McDevitt last night reminded me of this when she tweeted, "Two experts "talking shop" should be explosive and near violent! They should be like two peacocks fighting."

Consider the psychology of two experts in a room talking shop. If they are male, female spectators may later speak of testosterone poisoning. Experts are justifiably proud of their expertise and will want to demonstrate this. Put two together and each should try to demonstrate his superiority over the other. (Unless one is clearly superior and self-confident whereupon he'll kick back and let the other hang himself.) When rivals vie for supremacy that is conflict and conflict is interesting.

So, in this we have an example of two "rules" that are pulling in opposite directions. The "No Two Sherlocks" rule says keep them apart. The "Conflict is Interesting" rule says, push them together.

This is not necessarily a trade-off or gambit situation, because the way you depict the conflict might not offend (or anesthetize) the reader.

Consider the "why" of the "No Two Sherlocks" rule. You don't want to have Expert A say something about something the reader doesn't understand, whereupon Expert B will reply with something else the reader doesn't understand. The reader doesn't want to feel dumb and the smart writer doesn't want to make the reader feel dumb.

Georg Cantor and Leopold Kronecker were rival German mathematicians of the 19th Century and they had different ideas about infinity. They clashed with great heat and passion. The content of that conflict might find its way into a Neal Stephenson novel (because he tends to include math proofs in his novels), but nowhere else. But one description of their many arguments has stuck with me for decades.

When they fought, the large Cantor would be picked on by the much smaller Kronecker. Spectators at the time characterized their conflict as Cantor trying to get walk away from Kronecker who would chase him around like an angry dog yapping at his heels. This image has stayed with me for decades.

That's why you need a Watson in the room. S/he must serve as the eyes and ears of the reader to interpret the experts' conflict and depict their conflict in terms and images that the reader will understand.

If you are going to put two Sherlocks in the same room and if they are bound and determined to talk shop, then by all means stress the angry dog or the fighting peacocks imagery while soft-pedaling the transfinite number theory content.

Alimentary Tract

A few weeks ago I was watching what passes for a Sherlock Holmes TV show on American television. The show begins with a policeman coming under fire from what sounded to me to be a machine gun. The appearance of the weapon was a hand-held machine pistol and I heard to term MP5 used to describe the weapon. Presumably, this machine gun was the Heckler & Koch MP5 that has a firing rate of 700 too 900 rounds per minute.

It has been unlawful since 1934 (The National Firearms Act) for civilians to own machine guns without special permission from the U.S. Treasury Department. Since the Firearms Owners' Protection Act of 1986, ownership of newly manufactured machine guns has been prohibited to civilians. Machine guns which were manufactured prior to the Act's passage are regulated under the National Firearms Act, but those manufactured after the ban cannot ordinarily be sold to or owned by civilians.

In the course of the investigation Sherlock Holmes' boss, a policeman makes a point to state that the gun was a semi-automatic with a large-capacity magazine. These are code-words in the current debate about gun control.

At first blush, it appeared that the script writer wanted to show that the police in New York City do not understand the difference between a semi-automatic weapon and a machine gun.

That's not unusual, a lot of people who know nothing of firearms hear fully-automatic or semi-automatic and they make no distinction. But the former is a machine gun and the latter is a single-shot firearm.

Upon further reflection, the script writer was saying something different, because later s/he intimates that the gun had been subjected to an illegal modification to convert it into a machine gun. So the writer was making a point about this illegal modification. Perhaps the justification for this narrative speed-bump was to make the viewing public more supportive of new gun laws.

One needn't possess Sherlock Holmes' deductive powers to wonder how would new gun laws deter the criminal who in this story had already violated Federal laws passed in 1934 and 1986?

But I'm more interested in the narrative speed-bump.

The audience tunes into a detective show on television to see all the things one expects of crime-fighting--searching for clues, drawing inferences from them, catching criminals, and bringing them to justice. Audience members can be equally entertained by this whether they are NRA members, ACLU members, or both. The audience has not tuned into a tract for any activist's cause.

Any speed-bump takes the audience out of the story--even those sympathetic to the political axe being ground. This is a tax on the storyteller. Part of what I call the Hollywood Stupid Tax.

Create A Snazzy Cover

When you publish an ebook you're going to need a cover.

I like pretty girls and I won't balk at buying a book with a pretty girl on the cover. Obviously, I'm not into Regency Romance novels, but if I were I'd be on the lookout for books with a pretty boy on the cover--some dashing Captain back from the war in a pirate shirt. Maybe holding a sword and looking swashbuckling.

And a girl holding a sword looking swashbuckling is appealing, too. I'm not trying to be a sexist jerk here. I'm just saying that your ebook will have a market and that market will respond to the cover of your book.

Sex sells. If you are gnashing your teeth at the intimation that an attractive female might be reduced to an object of commerce, you might take comfort that attractive males can be so objectified, too. And this is the problem with using sex to sell: you can easily offend unawares or unintentionally. Tread tastefully.

If you are a closet Rembrandt, then all you need do is dash off a pleasing study of your main character doing something interesting--hopefully with a gun or swashbuckling. Sadly, I am not a closet Rembrandt, or Picasso, or anybody else. My art is best pinned on refrigerators with little magnets.

With this in mind I set about finding an artist. Here's what I did and it has worked out quite well for me: I went to Google image search and put in "steampunk" because I was looking to publish a Sherlock Holmes story. I confined the search to deviantart.com. After paging through a few hundred images, I found one I liked. Then I looked at the artist's portfolio and liked what I saw. (I recommend you look for a particular "style" that you find agreeable.)

A few moments later I emailed Joanne Renaud asking if she might do the cover art for The Aristotelian. She would and she quoted a price I found fair. We drew up a simple contract to do the art and get paid. PayPal provided a satisfactory conduit for payment. Joanne and I live in different states, but we were able to make effective use of email, facebook & twitter to convey my vision to her and to get back drafts.

Your publishing project may include a different mix of specialists, and you should learn to work effectively with each business partner. I recommend that you keep the questions "what" and "how" clear in your mind. You own the "what" and your specialist owns the "how."

I regard Joanne as a business partner and I value her opinions about artsy stuff. I would propose ideas and ask if they worked artistically. I had a devil of a time describing what a Lasanian skycycle looked like and I ended up googling images and saying "like this, but elliptical." I suppose that had we been able to share sketches on the back of a napkin, it might have gone faster.

You should learn to do rough sketches and storyboards. More on that later...

It is important to share a clear vision of what you want to the cover to look like. I recommend going through bookstores and finding the covers that jump out at you. I suggest standing about 20 feet away from a shelf of books and then look at their covers. If they pop out visually, consider something like them. Then go to Amazon, where most people will be making the buying-decision for your book, and look at what works for you. And understand why it works for you.

I devised a sort of "grammar" of what the big-money book designers are doing and I tried to implement something like that in Finding Time. In the case above, I took inspiration from both Sarah Hoyt's Darkship Thieves and also Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.

Ender's Game is an interesting book-cover-study. Do a Google image search on the cover. You'll see how cover design has evolved in the last three decades. The cool, angular space ships and funky typefaces of the '80s have been replaced with something that's more personal and more iconic.

You'll want to think a bit about your cover lettering. It should mesh with your story. I picked a Trajan typeface for Finding Time because it was more "timeless" and I used an Algerian typeface for The Aristotelian because it was more "Victorian."

But don't do what I tell you, do what you think works for you.
(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Plausible Villainy

I think I just learned what's been bothering me for a while about Professor Moriarty in the BBC Sherlock and also The Master in Dr. Who. As well as several other stories you'd find immediately recognizable. The problem is that I find their villainy implausible.

I have a high tolerance for implausible. If my family suffered and died at the hands of some criminal, I might seek vigilante justice in a manner that resembles Charles Bronson in the Death Wish movies. Nevertheless I don't begrudge Batman or Spiderman their spandex.

And I don't begrudge the Riddler his question-marked spandex, because I understand his motivation. He wants to rob a bank or something. Nothing wrong with ill-gotten gain as a motive for villainy--unless you scale up the size of the payday too high. Does a thief ever steal more money than he can possibly spend in a lifetime? I'd expect a big-time thief to use the lolly to fund some hard-to-hide legitimate enterprise/purchase. And that will point the finger of blame at him. "Where did you get the money to buy Microsoft, Mr. Penguin?"

An interesting story is generally a contest of equals. If you create a super-detective Holmes, you need a super-villain Moriarty. And if you create a super-villain Moriarty, you have to give him an understandable motivation for his villainy. Money works, but only at the beginning of the villain's career. I suppose you can use the "thrill kill" motive, but that's hard to do believably.

I recently started reading a story about an asteroid-mining operation that comes under attack by some Greenpeace-like environmentalist nuts. (No, Greenpeace isn't filled with nuts. The story was fiction and the bad-guys' organization said things that reminded me of Greenpeace.) There's a satisfying space-battle with good guys and bad guys shooting it up in and around a moon-base. And the bad-guys manage to steal a space-ship--the flagship of the asteroid-mining company's fleet.

I quit reading.

I can imagine a nation-state summoning the resources to put men on the moon. Same goes for Google, Apple, or Microsoft. I can't see Greenpeace doing this. Same goes for Al Qaeda. It is just not plausible to me. Yes, those sorts of people can hijack airliners, or operate pirate ships on the high seas, but they are just too small an organization to have a space program.

And if their malevolent design is to crash an asteroid into the Earth, why not use whatever means they used to insinuate their agents onto the moon base. Suppose you smash the Earth with an asteroid, you kill a bunch of people, and you destroy civilization. What's the payday in that? Oh, but humanity is despoiling Gaia and must be punished. Dude, you're going to despoil Gaia a lot more with your asteroid.

I don't buy it. It's not plausible. I jumped off the train.



So, I've uncovered another Writing Mantra just now: the villain must be plausible with a plausible motivation.

Never Put Two Sherlocks In A Scene

I have a friend who is an expert in something I'm blissfully ignorant of. I'm really quite an ignoramus on this topic. And she wrote a story wherein the first scene, her dazzling knowledge is on full display. Two characters are both experts in this same field and they are discussing a specific exhibit at a specific gallery of a specific museum in New York City.

Though I am an ignoramus, I'm not stupid and I know it. But if I was stupid, or just a little less confident in my little gray cells, I would be turned off by that narrative.

She's resisting the urge to "dumb it down," and I can appreciate that. I write at a fairly high level when the narrative strays into my areas of expertise. Just keep me away from the unobserved quantum systems and everybody walks out of here alive.

I hope the reader comes to my prose with a desire to have some fun. I'm never going to be assigned reading in any school course and I don't write to save humanity from itself. Should everyone on the planet who ever picks up one of my stories come away knowing about quantum mechanics or Cartesian Rationalism? God forbid.

Gentle reader, I promise I won't intentionally make you feel stupid. Even when I know whodunnit and am playing strip-tease with the clues. No, it isn't Mrs. White in the Library with a Pipe. Nice guess though.

If you make too many specific New York Metropolitan Museum of Art references, your readers will feel stupid. If they feel stupid, they'll buy fewer books. This isn't a call to "dumb down" the narrative, but to make it more inclusive of smart, yet ignorant people. I hope you'll find my narratives inclusive of smart, but ignorant people.

Keep in mind that I am ignorant person. There are gaping gaps in my knowledge. Those gaps are there because of a misspent youth finding out about transcendental mathematics, infinite sets of Lebesgue-measure zero, and other mathy stuff. And I haven't even gotten to Turing machines. Or unobserved quantum systems.

Thus when you have a scene that's set in a gallery of a museum, I suggest you channel your sensations in that space instead of identifying it by name. Not everyone has been inside the Henry Ford Museum, but they know the feel of a velour cordon, the echo of a woman's heels on polished marble, the glint of light on a glass display case.

If my character stands beside a turquoise Duesenberg, that's not as compelling to the reader as being in the presence of chrome and paint that is polished to an almost painful degree of shininess that calls to mind the craftsmanship of a lost age and evokes a yearning automotive lust that is utterly unattainable unless you--gentle readers--start buying my writing faster than Clive Cussler's. Here's a link, hint hint.

I have a story wherein I did something stupid with two characters named Luke and Xavier. One's a Catholic Alien, and the other is a Baptist Human. They are both Christians and they're both conversant in the scriptures of the Christian faith. They're normally polar opposites in terms of culture and temperament and the conflicts between these two protagonists work delightfully.

What I did stupidly was dueling Bible References. One would give a snippet of a verse, and the other would provide chapter-and-verse. I thought it was cute. I'm an idiot. It's annoying and it kills the narrative flow of the scene. If you're not a Bible scholar, you might appreciate an aphorism drawn from the scriptures here and there, but you won't give a fig about looking it up for yourself. When these fellas are playing Bible Roulette it is like two Sherlocks in the same room talking to each other and leaving the rest of the class in their dust.

That's why Watson is priceless to Arthur Conan Doyle and us mere humans. Someone must be an everyman of normal intelligence to whom Holmes can explain his line of reasoning. By normal intelligence, I don't mean an IQ of 100. I mean an IQ of your target market.

Thus the natural conversation between Holmes and Watson serves the purpose of opening the mind of Holmes to the reader.

When the writer is an expert s/he should regard the role of writer as that of popularizer. If you're Carl Sagan, Sister Wendy Beckett, or James Burke you've got all this awesome expertise rattling around your noggin. And if you're any of these people, you've made a ton of bread making that expertise accessible to the general public.

I've talked about how the writer does not know everything he needs to know. And though the writer may fake it, s/he cannot be caught faking it. This is the opposite. It's a twist on the curse of knowledge.

The citation of specifics lends verisimilitude to the narrative. It tells the reader you've done your homework and gives you credibility. But there's a price you pay when readers don't follow you. Like everything, you need balance. If you are thinking of yourself as a popularizer, then you won't overload your readers.

If your interlocutors in scene are both experts, they will talk expert-to-expert. Their conversation will be full of jargon and your audience will be completely lost. I can't see how that can ever work for you when they're talking shop.

When I put Sherlock and Mycroft in scene together, I won't won't give you a disquisition on forensic science or the deductive arts. Instead you should expect to see brothers bickering like brothers do. A lot of people understand sibling rivalries, so that's what I give the reader.

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.

A Few Bad Men

I've griped about how I think Dr. Who and BBC Sherlock failed when it came time to depict their protagonists' nemesis. In the case of Dr. Who, it is another Time Lord called "The Master," and in Sherlock Holmes's case it is Professor Moriarty. Every Batman needs his Joker and every Superman needs his Lex Luthor.

Thinking through your antagonist is as important as your protagonist and his/her love interest.

My complaint with BBC Sherlock is that Professor Moriarty seemed exactly like The Master who seemed like a nasty schoolboy. True, nasty schoolboys personify evil, but they needn't be taken that seriously. (Unless putting one over your knee and spanking him is not an option.) I guess that's my complaint: If the villain is just like someone you've spanked, s/he falls short of being taken seriously.

Likewise, fellas with monocles and long-haired cats don't work for me. But instead of enumerating what's wrong with other villains, I'd like to say what I think is right with one. I seek a Specification for Antagonist Design.

In one sense, anything that's to your hero's advantage should have a corresponding advantage in your villain. The Doctor is special because he's a Time Lord. Then the Master is a Time Lord, too. Sherlock has mad deductive skillz. So does Moriarty. But they needn't be the same sorts of advantages. They can be formidable, but different. Maybe your villain cannot shoot webs from his wrists, but he has robotic arms coming out of his back instead.

In World War II, the Japanese Zero was a superior aircraft in several key aspects. Nevertheless, the Americans learned how to avoid its strengths and exploit its weaknesses. Avoid a turning fight against a Zero, and if you can't, get outta Dodge. That's how conflicts work in real life and that's how your stories should work.

Stories without conflict suck. And where conflict is concerned, it takes two to Tango. Thus you want to think carefully about your protagonist's dance partner(s). The best villains have several admirable qualities about them. Sure, Gabbar Singh is evil, but he's got a sense of humor and irony and he loves to laugh--before he shoots them. Darth Vader was a sensitive soul easily disturbed by his co-workers' lack of faith--before he choked the life out of them. The Operative was motivated by his faith.

Most Westerners share a cultural heritage of the Greek/Persian conflicts of antiquity. We relate to the independent-minded Greek hoplites who are vastly outnumbered by a host of Persian slaves, but win because they are free men who can seize the initiative on the battlefield while their opponents await the commands of their masters. Thus your story will resonate better with Western audiences if you have a feisty band of Rebels outmaneuvering the giant Empire.

The circumstances needn't be martial. You can write the same conflict between Preston Tucker versus the Big Three automakers with the same asymmetry.

Because companies are generally larger than readers, it's common to make some Corporate Type the villain. Given the amorality of common corporate governance, this is not a stretch. But Big Labor and Big Government work just as well in the role of Persians waging a war of attrition. And since the only good politicians in Washington are Whigs (and long dead) you can show bipartisan villainy. If you want to make Big Religion the villain, choose one that is not in the habit of chopping people's heads off.

That's where I'm at right now. I'm putting together a villain who's motivation is money. He won't blow up the world, because that would destroy all the shops where he spends money. He won't kill everyone, because then there would be no one left to be minions. He doesn't feed his minions to sharks, because it reduces minion-morale. However, his minions are well paid, they have full health insurance with dental, and a generous 401k matching plan.

In other words, he's exactly like me, but with a few billion dollars.

Well, he's different from me in one regard: I'd waste time in the third act gloating about the details of how my nefarious plan works. This villain would just kill the hero and move on to the next item on his Things To Do Today list.

Solzhenitsyn said the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. This means you should show the stuff on the good side of the line in the villain's character. Once upon a time, that might have meant being a pious, church-going man, but the Hollywood stupid tax has made religion a telltale of villainy.  In choosing the good you put into a villain, you risk making him more sympathetic than your hero.

So, what good attributes do you think should inhere within the character of a villain?