Monthly Archives: June 2021

Murder in Fiction.

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Fiction is different from real life— fictional life makes more sense. Everything that happens in fiction is part of a plot. Real life is just one thing after another.
Fictional murders, even in ‘gritty, realistic’ stories, tend to make more sense. In real life, a murder often seems motiveless or senseless, or the reason is crazy, like that serial killer who claimed he had to kill people to prevent an earthquake.
Fictional murders, like other fictional behaviors, have to be motivated. And in most fiction, that motivation has to be something an ordinary person might understand.
Murder mystery murders.
In conventional murder mysteries— the kind now tamed down and called ‘cozies,’ the murder at the center of the plot has a commonplace motive. Financial gain is very common, as it allows there to be a number of suspects, especially if the murder victim was wealthy and had a number of heirs.
Marital jealousy, a big motive in real murder, doesn’t work so well in a murder mystery since that motive points to one suspect usually. If that proves to be the motive of the ultimate killer, that factor must be hidden to make the killer’s identity a mystery.
Murder to prevent a revealing of secrets is also a possibility, especially if the author can frame the victim as someone who habitually ruined people by revealing their shameful secrets.
The suspect individuals in a mystery may have a variety of possible motives, rather than having them all after money or all protecting secrets. The main thing in the traditional murder mystery is that there must be a variety of suspects. No one can be standing over the dead victim with a knife in his hand— unless that someone is actually innocent and the real killer must be located.
Criminal enterprise murder.
In many types of adventurous fiction, the murders go back to a central criminal mastermind or Dark Lord.
The initial corpse can be a result of whatever the criminal enterprise normally kills people for— someone who didn’t go along with the gang’s extortion plot, a witness, a rival gang member, a young wizard whose magic powers might be stolen, whoever owns the McGuffin….
Afterwards, murders tend to be plot complications in the quest of the hero to stop the criminal villain. Witnesses that the hero wants to question might get murdered first. A friend or associate of the hero might get killed to intimidate the hero.
The more murdery your criminal enterprise villain or Dark Lord is, the more important it is for the hero to stop him. Also, the more corpses the hero encounters along the way, the more power the villain seems to have. Does it seem hopeless? It should. You want your hero to face an almost impossible challenge and win.
Incidental murders.
Every fictional life is precious. But some minor charaters must die or disappear as part of the plot, and sometimes murder is the cause.
It’s common to make fictional characters orphans, since that makes them more vulnerable. Sometimes that orphaning happens by means of a murder.
Murders in your character’s backstory can be just sad events, or perhaps your character will need to get justice/revenge for a murdered father. This need not be the central theme of the plot, however.
Sometimes an incidental murder might just be an obstacle to your hero’s actions. That one person with the important information is now dead so the hero must make other plans. At other times, the murder can point up dangers. If your hero goes to a dangerous city and the first person he speaks to ends up murdered by the end of the day, that illustrates the dangers of the city.
The hero kills.
In commercially viable or non-grimdark fiction, the hero can’t be a murderer. If the hero kills, it must be justified— defense of others or self-defense, ideally. Sometimes a bad guy just won’t surrender and must be killed to protect others.
In certain circumstances, the hero may do a ‘justice killing.’ In a remote region— in the pioneering West, or on a remote planet— there may be no realistic way to get a murderer to formal justice.
Also, in a dystopian totalitarian regime like the real-life regimes of Stalin, Mao or Hitler, a killer might be protected by the ‘judicial’ system because he is part of it. If the hero kills such a killer for righteous reasons, that will stop him from going on killing.
A fictional hero must have a very strong motivation to kill. Perhaps he lost a loved one, or has some strong emotional connection with the victim. He must have strong knowledge of the guilt of his target. In a dystopian regime, that killing judge has to be proved to be doing more killings than he needs to, rather than serving as a brake on a killing regime.
The big test of any murders you may commit in your fiction is, how well do readers accept it? Do they feel it is a tragic but necessary part of the plot, or are they mad at you, the author, for an unneeded killing? Reading should take your reader to an exciting adventure, not introduce interesting characters doomed to die so an author can earn his grimdark credentials.
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Interact with Nissa on:
The doomed, pro-censorship Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nissa.amas.katoj

Fixing the alleged ‘Mary Sue’ Character.

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A common writing worry is of writing an alleged ‘Mary Sue’ character. I personally don’t believe in the ‘Mary Sue,’ and I hate the trend of giving unpopular traits common women’s names (as in Karens.) This is not fair to those named Mary or Susan or Karen.
But if you have gotten feedback that calls your favorite character a Mary Sue and you want to fix any problem with that character and his plot, here are some steps.
  1. Ask for more details. Why did that feedback-giver or beta reader call the character a Mary Sue? If it was because the character was described as popular, making the character less handsome and a bit pudgy won’t fix the problem.
  2. Check your story’s villain. Is he stronger than your alleged Mary Sue? Does he present a real challenge to the character? The villain must seem almost unbeatable for your plot to seem like a challenge to the character.
  3. Make a list of your alleged Mary Sue’s traits. Underline any which seem very un-Mary-Sue like. Did you actually mention these things in the story? Should you show them a bit more?
  4. More action. If your beta reader has time to slow down and call your character a Mary Sue, maybe the pace of your story is slacking. Bring in a man with a blaster or a sword, or even a gun. Get your character fired or evicted.
  5. Swat your alleged Mary Sue with more trouble. He may need more of a challege.
  6. If your character is Superman, invent Kryptonite. In author Declan Finn’s Saint Tommy series, Tommy Nolan is blessed with special spiritual gifts (like bilocation) but these gifts seem to attract loads of scary demon-possessed bad guys, so Tommy Nolan is very well challenged.
  7. Believe in yourself and your character. Just because someone said the Mary Sue word about one of your characters doesn’t make that criticism true. You are free to write the story you want with the characters you want. You may find that while some people call your character a Mary Sue, others find that character to be a favorite.
  8. Write a short story featuring your character. Post it on Wattpad, Inkitt or a blog. If you can get some feedback from multiple sources on this character in the setting of a short story, you might be able to make any needed improvements of that character for a longer work.
Talk about characters as ‘Mary Sues’ is common among neophyte writers, but that doesn’t mean it’s something a serious neophyte writer should be worrying about. If your character has a proper level of challenges to cope with, and fails before he succeeds, chances are your character will not have one of the shortcomings of the ‘Mary Sue’ type of character.
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Interact with Nissa on:
The doomed, pro-censorship Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nissa.amas.katoj

Stuck on Wattpad

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As readers of this blog might know, I am currently limited in my writing capabilities by my lack of access to technology, caused by the poverty of being on SSI disability.
I’m currently writing some short stories using the Lester Dent formula as a guide. But I can’t submit the completed stories to anthologies or gather them into a collection and self-publish. The only thing I can think of to do with the stories is publish them online at Wattpad.
Wattpad isn’t a friendly environment for people like me. Most of the users seem to be teenage children writing what they describe as ‘smut.’ I worry— in what way is ‘smut’ written by the underaged, with underage characters, not kiddy porn?
They actively promote ‘pride month,’ but allow hostility towards Christian authors because Christian fiction should include more Islam.
So you can believe that every story segment I post on Wattpad was written on Evernote first, so if Wattpad chooses to take anything of mine down I have a copy.
The first completed short story of my short story ‘binge’ is called ‘Banned Books, Banned Girl.’ It’s a near-future story, set in a country which has lost its democratic freedom. Main character is a girl with Asperger Syndrome, threatened with government ‘mercy’ for being defective, who has escaped government control and survives as a ‘ghost worker.’ Her job includes pullin newly banned books off the shelves of a bookstore.
I wrote the story because I believe in free speech. I don’t like it when people get censored or deplatformed because some one thinks they are expressing an opinion not on the approved list. I was appalled to learn there are some Christians who approve of the censorship on Facebook, to the point they won’t say punishing someone for quoting the ‘wrong’ Bible verse is censorship. But if we don’t stand up for our own freedoms, we can’t complain if we lose them.
I don’t know what good writing my little stories will do, especially if it is so hard to get them out into the world where people can read them. But stories are my thing, see?
The Lester Dent formula for writing a pulp fiction short story can be found online— that’s where I found it. It’s also mentioned in some of the available books on how to write pulp-slyle fiction. It can help in creating whatever level of outline you need to write a short story.

How Grimdark killed the Reading Habit

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People don’t read anymore— I read that recently in two different books so it has to be true. 😉
Seriously, there is evidence that reading, as a way to be entertained, was a much bigger thing back in the heyday of pulp magazines (1920s and 1930s.)
People, even people who dropped out of school in seventh grade to work full time, bought the many different pulp magazines available at ‘any newsstand’ for a few cents.
By the time I came along, when you wanted to read Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, as my mother did, you had to subscribe to it— which she did in spite of the fact that when the magazine came she often didn’t get to read it until I finished.
People don’t seem to be like that now. In my county, people used to be able to shop for books at the new bookstore in the next county, or else the used bookstore, also in the next county. Now there are no bookstores in the next county, and I don’t know how far I’d have to drive to get to a bookstore. Farther than I can actually get these days.
I have read that a lot of people never pick up another book once they leave school. Which to me is shocking. The only other place to get your stories is from TV and movies which have increasingly lost the ability to appeal to anyone.
Why is there so much non-reading these days? I think a lot of it is because of the schools. Schools have been convinced that the only things worth reading are things that are painful to read— full of grimness and deaths and ‘heroes’ with less of a moral compass than the story’s villains.
I remember one story I had to read in high school, called ‘The Cold Equations.’ The story had two major characters– a space pilot going about his duty, and a girl stowaway on his ship. Being a naive reader, I thought the girl stowaway was more interesting so identified with her. It wasn’t until I re-read the story years later that I realized it was a story about the pilot. All I remember about my initial reading was the shock as I came to realize that the girl stowaway I thought of as the main character was probably about to be killed by being put out the airlock into space.

(Update: the author of The Cold Equations is Tom Godwin.)

Now, this story was not grimdark as we have it today. The pilot tried to work out a way to save the girl, but his mission was to deliver medical supplies to a plague-stricken outpost, and he had limited fuel. Saving the girl would condemn multiple people to death.
But this was a story chosen for a bunch of high school kids to read. We had to, as part of our classwork. It was a painful story, because an innocent character died. I have since wondered if most of the girls in that class had the same shock as I did, from identifying with that doomed character.
Now, this story is not true grimdark. The girl meant no harm, and the pilot had no way to save her, because his mission was to save more than one person and he just didn’t have extra fuel. In a grimdark story, the pilot wouldn’t have had altruistic reasons to kill the girl, and she would have proved to be a villain anyway.
But it was a painful story for high school kids to read anyway. The school authorities must have been convinced that a story with the death of an innocent character was somehow medicinal for us. Instead, it showed us all reading could be painful. Back in those days, deaths of major characters were not a big part of television shows, except for Dark Shadows, where the dead characters came back as vampires or ghosts.
This tendency seems to have gotten worse. Painful reading in schools continues to be the norm, and many schools are ever less responsive to the objection of parents.
Publishing also has gone full grimdark. Instead of fictional heroes that are good guys, we have Dexter, the serial killer who kills other serial killers. I love Dexter and all, but a guy who enjoys cutting other people up while they are still alive has a major-league character flaw.
Traditional publishers seem to think that what people want is fiction without heroes and without a moral compass, but with grim didactic sections about global warming, gender identity, and why ‘white’ people should just die.
Most normal, emotionally healthy people don’t need that kind of grimdark in our lives. We have too much of that in reality. We want to escape into books that will take us on a grand adventure and leave us feeling uplifted instead of hopeless. If the books trad-publishing wants to put out won’t do that, potential readers will look elsewhere.
It is authors of written fiction who have the chance to change this trend. You can’t, from your own home without large sums of money and large numbers of co-creators, make a non-grimdark television series or major motion picture. But you can write a short story or a novel and self-publish it. If you keep on writing, and develop your skills, you can find an audience of people who are still willing to take a chance on a book.
Have you experienced grimdark or painful fiction in your schooling? Have you ever had a hard time finding fiction that bucks this trend, fiction that is actually fun to read?

Here is a link to a short story of mine, Banned Books, Banned Girl.
https://www.wattpad.com/story/269878745?utm_source=android&utm_medium=link&utm_content=share_reading&wp_page=reading&wp_uname=NissaAnnakindt&wp_originator=3%2FHhugZziTPCYp0F89QpLRycKGlstKU7FQhf4dqMFdwTFqU1zpzY6OwL8y97uvtrXyqxIG%2FZMDCB6KEDErnomXKBCgJ4TA%2BEK8Gr6x5bIWNZt9HbALaY8IbM96EiD35N