Babel Clash

Thanks, Tom & Joel for contributing to Babel Clash!  Please take this opportunity with your last couple of posts to share any information you’d like regarding The Grave Thief and Petrodor.  Or to just get the last word in on gods and their uses . . .

And for all you readers, tune in tomorrow for the beginning of our next conversation with A. Lee Martinez.

The biggest problem of putting Gods into a story, in my opinion, is that Gods tend to be very powerful, yet as every storyteller knows, the most dramatic characters have flaws.   Ask any one who watches ‘House’.   Flaws are interesting, and give the character something to struggle against, and viewers or readers something to empathise with.

So how flawed is too flawed?   I think House is a great character, but though I’ve seen it a few times, I don’t watch the show because a) I’m not much into the whole medical show thing, and b) at times I think the character overdoes it.   As characters go, House isn’t big on nuance, and I find his schtick at times just endless.

On the other hand, some characters aren’t flawed enough.   Let’s reference a more recent TV show (and yes, I am using TV in preference to books because let’s face it, there’s a far greater chance more readers will have seen a particular TV show than read a particular book) in Castle.   The lead character, Rick Castle, has obvious flaws — vanity, immaturity, etc, but done in a lovable way.   That’s the key to a good character flaw, they have to make the character if not more lovable (House is not always that) then at least more sympathetic (he does save peoples’ loves, so we forgive him).

Yet Castle’s opposite, Kate Beckett (the scrumptious Stana Katic) started the series too perfect, the beautiful homicide detective who is not only brilliant, but somehow the only woman in NYC resistant to Castle’s charms.   Her ‘perfect detective’ thing made her a little aloof and distant at first, and the writers have been busy adding lovable flaws to her character ever since — she’s a lot more insecure now, and her struggles to hide it and pretend otherwise are quite entertaining.   In short, vulnerability, which is so much more interesting in a strong character.   It’s also, as we discussed below, a problem more likely to be inflicted upon female characters than male, as the PC impulse often makes them too perfect, flawless, and thus boring.

When I wrote ‘Sasha’, I figured very early that her principle flaw was the same thing we see in a lot of top athletes — self absorption.   It’s a common trait amongst exceptionally talented people.   It doesn’t necessarily make them bad people, although it can.   But I didn’t want to overdo it, because again, good flaws make characters more lovable, not aggravating.

Here’s the key — in most people, their best qualities are also their worst.   Sasha is a powerful woman in a man’s world, she has no choice but to be driven, passionate and egotistical to some degree, or she simply could not fulfill that role.   These qualities are admirable, yet they can also be called flaws, because while she’s brave, loyal and entertainingly exuberant, she’s also hot tempered and sometimes short sighted — a real handful.   So it’s a balance.   The things that make her lovable also make her sometimes a pain in the neck.   And aren’t most people like that?

I’d steer away from gods in anything I wrote because to counter balance a power or perfection as intense as a god might wield, you’d have to create a flaw so big it’d either annoy everyone, or dominate every other character.

And yes, I did use the word ’scrumptious’.

There’s a different concept going on here with Roman and Greek style gods.   Those gods are an extension of the old pagan-style nature worship.   So a pagan culture might worship natural forces, like lightning, wind, the ocean, etc.   The role of these gods is to personify those forces, and to give each god a personality that symbolises the natural force that they represent — so Thor god of thunder is violent and temperamental, and Poseidon god of the ocean is, well, violent and temperamental…. see a pattern here?

Given that those natural forces can be destructive and compassionless, no wonder the gods have those personalities also.   So the concept of worship in those societies is very different to in ours — a pagan society sees itself surrounded by self-interested and selfish forces who need to be placated least they kill everyone for sheer spite.   Though probably the European Christian concept of god wasn’t so different five hundred years ago, and a lot of Christians still say he’ll burn you in hell forever if you don’t believe in him, which sounds pretty nasty and self important to me.

And I reckon we haven’t lost this love of wild and powerful forces, and the idea of heroes who are empowered by those forces.   These days we call them superheroes, and once a year people gather to worship them at ComicCon, and other such religious festivals.   Quite seriously, I think the pantheon of superheroes is the closest thing we still have to the old pagan god worship still around.   Maybe that’s why superhero movies are some of the highest-grossing movies in India, as the tales of Spiderman and company don’t seem so different to a lot of Indian viewers from tales of Hanuman and Ganesha.

My wife’s certainly suggested so in the past, through sniggers at one thing or another… But anyway, Joel’s issue with my kind of gods is the backstory and the mechanics of the world. I can certainly see his point, there’s a lot of work to be done there, but for me that simply adds an extra dimension to the world. I want to work out where the gods came from, the nature of spirits and daemons, the creation story etc etc – I want to fit all these elements together and construct a tapestry that both directly affects the characters and their actions, and creates a framework and context for it all.

The richness of a world’s history if vitally important for me, as are the folktales that act as the foundation of every day life. I’ve made some references to folktales I’ve not worked out fully, just certain comments designed to help the richness flower in the reader’s mind. It’s something that Susanna Clarke did beautifully in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – not to everyone’s tastes, but the little details and footnotes were what elevated the story for me and helped me ignore my concerns over the scale of power wielded my magicians. While I don’t go nearly so far I want the readers to be aware there is a world outside the story being told, that it’s not just window dressing for what I’m writing but there (and hopefully internally consistent) in its own right.

Joel’s comment about actually asking gods what they meant in scripture is a good one, but I think that depends on how patient one’s god is. Most of mine are squabbling brats with the attention span of a four year old and a similar tendency for tantrums. Ok, so they can think and act rationally, but especially when scripture/myth was recorded, they were younger and more aggressive so will have acted accordingly – there’s enough of an argument to be had over the contradictory actions and sayings to keep the most argumentative scholar happy, especially when the alternative is risking a good smiting for annoying the hell out of your god by pointing out the times they might have been wrong.

One additional plus to gods is the fact that they’re divine (stay with me here, I know some of you are think “the first rule of tautology club…”). Generally, I love working out a plot and fitting it into the world – that’s one of the fun parts of writing for me, but one really major annoyance with the medium I’ve chosen is how slowly people travel and communicate, travel in particular. My blood pressure increases every time I get an email from my editor saying ‘a horse can’t travel that distance in that time frame’ – she’s right; I know it, she knows it, and considering Joel’s comment right at the start of this, he’s bloody certain of it, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating.

Gods are one of the few entities that aren’t so constrained by physical limits; everyone else has got a three week boat trip plus a month on horseback. In a setting where there are a lot of constraints due to internal consistency, they’re an X-factor that can be a catalyst for something great or deus ex machine that ruins it for everyone.

Tom’s point about the idea of infallible & omnipresent gods being a relatively recent innovation in human history got me thinking about deities in fantasy that are no where near perfect or omniscient.  Some of my favorites from the list I came up with are Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, Cthulhu who brings to light the insignificance of humanity, and the Authority from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy (the Authority happens to be my personal favorite fallible deity).  Why do I love these deities?  Because they’re not perfect.  They’re destructive or frail or overwhelming or chaotic.  I find them more compelling because they’re not perfectly knowledgeable or perfectly benevolent.  I guess I want a little snap and pizazz and uncertainty from my deities.

Anyway, thinking about the last two also led me to this fun poll . . . Cage Match 2010.

My problem with writing these kind of gods into anything I wrote is that I’d have to create a plausible working backstory for it all — how gods work, how does one get to become a god, why do different gods have different powers, and how does worship work if unlike our own religion, where the ‘word of god’ can be interpreted in any number of different ways, here you can actually ask the guy himself.

Maybe there’s something in my Jewish half that makes that strike me as a good opportunity for comedy.   How disappointed the Jews would be if god himself could actually tell them what he meant when he said ‘x’, because it would deprive them of something to argue about.

I guess I’m more of a sociologist than a pure fantasist, I don’t write raw fantasy just to create something fantastical, I’m always writing about how stuff works in the real world.   Because there’s plenty of stuff that’s pretty amazing and even fantastical in the real world.   But I enjoy READING good raw fantasy, that’s different.

In honour of ME we’re going to talk about gods – I like how that sounds. I have to agree with Joel on one (the one major) point about gods, namely that mortals must control their own fate.

To take a slight diversion, what’s bugged me about many novels, TV series and other things is the existence of prophecy – it’s a millstone about the neck of so much and unless you specifically have a plan for it, it’s a lazy excuse for not thinking a plot through. While it’s often not specified as to the origin of the prophecy they’re in the same boat as a divine, ineffable plan, so most of the time you just need to follow the script and the world will be saved.

Needless to say I’ve always found that very boring – they may both have their place in novels, but use them in the wrong way and it’ll backfire. Taking away the importance of actions and their consequences is most definitely the wrong way to go about fiction and the right way to leave your reader wondering why they bothered getting to the end.

Fantasy worlds tend to involve some sort of the supernatural and whatever part of the whole spectrum it involves, it allows for the possibility of beings beyond normal constraints. Now you don’t have to use them, but the more magic involved the more likely, to my mind anyway, there will be gods and monsters – it tends to be a form that involves power and the capacity for unlimited change so they’re a logical consequence and once you’ve got that, they’re characters with their own set of rules. The idea of an infallible, intangible and omnipresent god is a relatively recent one in human history (or at least throughout the majority I believe) and as a plot device sounds a pretty lazy one to me. And if you’re going to have them, they’re going to want to get involved in whatever’s going on.

Most importantly, they’re fun, or at least they can be! Being long-lived and more powerful than humans doesn’t mean they always do the right thing or fail to make mistakes – it just means the consequences of their actions are proportionately grand and destructive. Their potential impact on a world is not infinite and would most likely be far less than a GSU from a Culture novel – what you do with them is up to you but don’t ignore them. If a world has magic and gods, then factor them in, don’t just use them as window-dressing. Otherwise you run the risk of your creation lacking the depth and consistency it deserves.

I understand that in honor of Tom, we’re also going to talk about Gods, and whether they should intervene directly in the story or not.

Well, that depends.   Probably in telling this kind of story, you’re being inspired by the Greek or Roman pantheons of very interventionist Gods who are a long way from any modern, secular notion of benevolent indifference.   And you can’t really critique whether it’s the ‘right thing’ to do in a story or not, because this kind of story is almost a sub genre in its own right, and saying it’s silly is to write off the entire sub genre, to say nothing of a big chunk of ancient Greek and Roman culture.

But to do it in a modern storytelling context, there’s some obvious pitfalls — for one, can your Gods be defeated?   This is kind of important, because if they’re going to be bossing our mortal characters, the mortals are going to need to get their own back every now and again, because otherwise there’s no resolution to the drama.   Why fight against someone you can never defeat?

The biggest danger that I see in this kind of story is that the Gods will suck the dramatic life out of the mortals, because the mortals need to hold the dramatic fate of the story in their own hands.   So the Gods need to be restrained in some way, because otherwise our mortals may as well not bother getting out of bed in the morning.

But anyway, over to Tom…

Before we leave the topic of gender and sexual politics entirely, I thought I would bring up a link that was submitted by a Babel Clash reader a few months ago.  The author makes some very good points about difference between strong - physically speaking - female characters and strong characters who happen to be female.  I particularly enjoyed the idea that “the feminists shouldn’t have said “we want more strong female characters.”  They should have said “we want more WEAK female characters.”  Not “weak” meaning “Damsel in Distress.”  “Weak” meaning “flawed.””  Anyway, check it out.

Why Strong Female Characters Are Bad for Women

Funny how this conversation moved so quickly onto sex and gender!

I thought I’d drag it a little back toward the initial question of capabilities (if that’s okay with everyone) and keep it fresh by answering a question I get asked a bit at conventions and such — namely given my more subversive attitude toward gender in general, what are my interests that inform my attitudes?   Or in other words, it’s another variation in the old ‘where do you get your ideas?’ question.

Well I follow a bunch of stuff on the internet for one thing.   Women’s sports always interested me, because it combines my sociological interest with my love of sport.   I’m intrigued, for example, at how bad women’s coaching is in most sports.   Take women’s tennis.   For some odd reason, women’s tennis coaches from young ages teach the girls to play completely differently from boys.   Women, they reason, can’t play like men, should produce shots differently, etc.   They should all be tall, powerful, and hit flat with no clearance over the net because women can’t generate power any other way, right?   And the result can be ugly.

I saw this when I was involved with women’s basketball in Australia as a reporter.   Women can’t play offence, just teach them to play defence.   Only then a few players emerged who could play offence, players like Lauren Jackson and Penny Taylor, and they blew all their competition away.   Likewise in tennis, tiny Justine Henin (my favorite) did the impossible and played just like a man, and blows much larger girls off the court.   Turns out that power is a function of technique as much as muscle.

Which is how I know that ‘separate but equal’, when applied to male and female in most arenas and not just sports, is stupid.   There’s what works, and what doesn’t work.   Unfortunately for women, men often get access to what works, and women are told they can’t be like men, so they’re told to do something else — what doesn’t work.   And sports in this way is a pretty good model of what happens in a lot of other areas of society.

And it’s amazing how much in sports has informed my fantasy writing, especially on sword fighting.   Nearly every sport you look at, footwork is the huge, underrated thing.   Same with martial arts — footwork comes first, everything else is second, because if you’re not balanced, you’re useless.   Hard work and self-centered determination are similarly important, and in ‘A Trial of Blood and Steel, Sasha’s personality is influenced to some extent from watching sportspeople, and seeing the huge egos and narrow-focused attitudes.   It’s not always pretty, but it’s necessary, to be that good at something.

To be a good writer, I think you have to be interested in SOMETHING, because that something is what informs your work.   Doesn’t have to be sports, you just need to find stuff interesting.   Any most good writers have their own stuff that intrigues them, however obscure.