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.

Writers Mantra #6

OK, long posts are hard to write and you don't want to allocate a long time. So, I'm only going to give you one writers' mantra. Feel free to ask for a discount.

Evoke sympathy for the hero, then evoke identification with his story goals.

When we left off last week I said that you want the reader to "get on the train" with your characters. The reader must derive pleasure from the association. Even if it is the perverse pleasure of seeing a bad person get their comeuppance. But you don't want to go around confusing heroes and villains, you want the reader rooting FOR the hero and AGAINST the villain.

When I read C. S. Forester's Mr. Midshipman Hornblower the author introduced me to this nice young man upon whom every imaginable injustice was inflicted. The kid would do something good, and then get punished for it.

It was terribly unfair.


Does anybody remember how they felt about Wesley Crusher on Star Trek The Next Generation? He was never beaten within an inch of his life for doing something right. On the contrary, he went from glorious success, to glorious success. And I hated him for it. I thought him a smug little twerp and wished to put him in a red shirt and beam him onto the original Enterprise to die die die messily.

Whatever your story, and whoever your hero is, you want the reader to sympathize with him or her. The best way to do that is visit heartbreak upon him or her in the opening scene.

Why? Because you want the reader to care what happens to your characters. Until your reader is fully vested in your characters, s/he can depart at the least provocation. Once the readers care what happens to your hero, they'll bleed a little when you cut him. You want this. The reader will want to stick around long enough

Once you've introduced your hero to your readers, something had better happen. Perhaps the hero is given a quest or a task.

Suppose the French Navy is preparing an invasion of England, and someone must stop it. That's something with which most of my readers can identify.

Conversely, suppose the US Army is preparing an invasion of Canada. Well, sorry Brits and Canucks, I remember the Raisin.

Likewise, if your hero is a Nazi, most people will only identify with his story goals if he's trying to thwart Hitler or something.

You don't want your audience rooting against your hero. When you saw the movie K-19 Widow Maker you wanted the Russians to carry the day. I hope you did not feel the same way when you saw Red Dawn? I totally identify with the Brits in The Bridge On The River Kwai. Less so with the Brits in The Patriot. (Or maybe more depending on how you feel about Mel Gibson.)

Alliances shift with time and if your audience include Brits when the villains are British, you've got to frame things carefully to say that you are excusing your audience from any participation in the villainy.

Update:
If you want to jump to the next writers mantra #7, it's here.

Mary Sue Baxter

 If you've been paying attention to writing, you've heard the term "Mary Sue" and I had the bad fortune to have Mary Sue shoved in my face last night. The snow outside was such that I spent the evening in with the delightful Mrs. Poling watching streaming Netflix. Before we found an acceptable movie, we sampled two clunkers, "Journey to the Seventh Planet" and also "I Hate Valentine's Day" I was in the mood for Romantic Comedy and the latter seemed a better bet than it proved. We had enjoyed "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and this movie had the same male & female leads. And we really liked John Corbett's work in "Northern Exposure." Sure, this movie had bad reviews, but we could overlook some flaws, right? Wrong.

I don't want to bad-mouth Ms. Vardalos, who seems a delightful person I wouldn't mind knowing, but I saw one huge mistake she made in Valentine's that I've committed and I want to warn you against. It's the same mistake that George Lucas and others have made, so she's in good company. When you watch the opening credits on Valentine's you'll see one name recurring as writer, director, and actor. "There's your problem." Ms. Vardalos works all three jobs. In Wedding she adapted her one-woman show and had someone else direct, also, she had some big names who knew something about romantic comedy as her producers to say those magic words, "you can't do that." Without the words "you can't do that" you get things like Jar Jar Binks.

The trouble with Valentine's is that Ms Vardalos has written a role for herself to play and that character is a Mary Sue. And without a director or producer to say "you can't do that" disaster results. The story has a good premise and I think all the supporting actors do their jobs well. There's just this spinning vortex of Mary Sue at the center of the movie that destroys everything.

If you now what a Mary Sue is skip this paragraph. A Mary Sue is any character, male or female who is the projection of the writer's wish-dream into the story. In my writing, watch out for a male protagonist who looks a lot like Thomas Sullivan Magnum and talks a lot like Wesley Crusher. If you see that character in my writing, schedule an intervention.

My writing friends say that you should kill your Mary Sues. That's not bad advice, because everyone hates a Mary Sue except the writer. There's nothing in the world you will find more boring than my prose about me. When my solipsism is personified in a Mary Sue the reader response isn't merely boredom but rage. You want the reader to first sympathize with and then identify with your protagonist.

That will never happen with a Mary Sue. The fatal flaw of Valentine's is that Ms. Vardalos made her protagonist a Mary Sue. Everything about her character was perfect--too perfect. All the other characters orbited about her and served to setup her lines or laugh at her jokes. So, I started wondering how I might rescue the story were it within my power.

It came to me in the shower this morning. In Romantic Comedies, you generally have two people who'll be together in the last scene having resolved the problems posed by the last 90 minutes of cinematography. Often those characters meet in an early scene and are immediately attracted to one another, BUT the problem is that they're already attached to Someone Else.

This is such an overused trope of such story telling that they made a movie The Baxter wherein the rejected guy is the protagonist. One characteristic The Baxter stresses is the dullness of the character. But if you look at the classics, you'll see the Baxter is not necessarily dull (e.g. My Favorite Wife).

As a writer, you want the reader to be presented with a romantic competitor who's everything your protagonist is not. Strong where s/he is weak. Smart where s/he is stupid. Good where s/he is venal. The worst thing is for the audience to identify with Baxter instead. You want your audience to be identifying and rooting for your protagonist while hating the oh so perfect Baxter. Sometimes this is done by making the Baxter somehow horrid, a snob, a racist, or just doesn't like the love-interest's kids. Or, horrors, a chartered accountant!

That's a cheat. Make the Baxter a better man (or woman) than your protagonist. Better in every way, and perfect--just like a Mary Sue.