To Write Better Stories, Set Your Ego Aside

It takes a certain amount of ego to be an author in the first place. Because anyone can make up stories in their head, but to dedicate dozens to hundreds of hours to put that story down on a page? And then, once you have manifested it in the world to put it out there for people to see? To decide that the story you have to tell is good enough that people (many of whom you have never met in your life) should take time out of their day to read it? And not only that, but that they should pay hard-earned money for the privilege?

Yeah, that's how art should work... but you've got to admit, in this climate, it takes some serious fortitude to stand up and make that claim boldly.

However, the flip side to this coin is that a lot of us become so reliant on our egos to help us plow through those trying to stop us from making art that we deafen ourselves to legitimate criticism. Which is why it's important to maintain your forward momentum, but to also learn how to listen to people who raise issues we need to actually think about.

Is that a hater, or a helper? I can't tell...

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Now then, let's get to it!

Hear What They're Saying, and Evaluate

First of all, let's address the elephant in the room. You are not required to just shift gears and bow to every opinion that comes your way. A safe rule I've found is that if you wouldn't go to a person for advice, then you probably don't need to give serious weight to their criticism.

With that said, though, criticism is going to come your way whether you seek it out or not. What you need to do is figure out how to set your ego to the side, and to evaluate what's being said so that you can decide what to do about the issues being raised... or if you need to do anything at all.

Incoming negativity. Analyzing...

My recommendation is that you ask a couple of questions, and try to put yourself in this other person's shoes so that you can see your work the way they see it. Some good places to begin are:

- Is This a Matter of Taste? A lot of the time criticism comes down to whether someone personally likes or dislikes something. There's no right or wrong there, but it helps to ask if the issue is structural (something in the story is actually weak) or flavorful (the presentation/style isn't to the person's liking). Maybe they wanted a Happily Ever After, or a certain character got killed that they really liked; being personally disappointed is valid, but may not rise to the level of making edits.

- Did This Have an Unintended Consequence? Sometimes the way we tell a story just doesn't land, or brings up things we didn't intend to. Maybe a particular term is actually really offensive among a certain community, so using it to refer to characters in your story makes it racist even if that wasn't your intention (Pro Tip: The proper term is Inuit). Maybe the way a villain is queer-coded plays into problematic stereotypes. It's better to fix an issue than to double-down on it, especially if you genuinely didn't see this reaction coming.

- Is This Situation Necessary? Let's say you were writing a psychological revenge thriller, and you wanted it to have that grimy, nasty feel from films like I Spit on Your Grave. However, we aren't in the 1970s anymore, and sexual-assault-as-plot-device is pretty gross regardless of when the story was told. Is this absolutely necessary? Or could the character seeking revenge have been wronged another way? Did someone spread vicious rumors that got them kicked out of their social circles? Did someone not speaking up and telling the truth lead to them getting thrown out of school? Losing out on a big job? Being sentenced to prison for a crime they didn't commit? If someone asks whether a particular situation, tone, event, etc. is necessary, stop and genuinely ask yourself if it has to be that way, or if there are alternatives that would work better.

- How Much of an Effect Will This Have? Sometimes an issue with a story is relatively minor. You have a historical inconsistency that a lot of folks may not notice at the time (looking at you Titanic), or you have a character use a particular turn-of-phrase that isn't right for the location where this story is set. Sometimes an issue is major, and it leads to the audience rolling their eyes, or being taken out of the story entirely. Evaluate the scale of both the issue, and what changing it would cost in terms of time, energy, and effort.

Most importantly, when looking at criticism leveled at your work, ensure you have an answer as to why you aren't making changes to it. Perhaps it's because a certain event is key to a development that happens down the line, and you would have to re-work an entire plot or subplot by making too many changes. Maybe it's a deliberate homage that you feel is an important part of the story, even if not all your readers are going to like it.

Generally speaking, though, you should always have a reason beyond, "Because I don't want to change it." Of course you don't. No author ever does. But you need something more compelling than that.

You Aren't Obligated To Change Anything

The important thing to remember here is that you are not obligated to change anything in your story. It is yours, and you can tell it how you want to. However, it does behoove you to examine the criticism, and see what validity it has. When you reach this point not changing things should be a deliberate choice you make, rather than simply your standard position.

Figured I'd share a few of the ones I dealt with.

For those who haven't read Crier's Knife, it's a sword and sorcery novel I put out some time ago. It's been generally well received by folks who've actually read it, but there were more than a few criticisms that came my way when I was getting it ready for release. Some of those (and my response to them) were:

- The Introduction Is Unnecessary: The intro of this book starts with a young man escaping captivity, and sending up what amounts to a magical signal flare to let his family know he's in trouble. One person I spoke to told me I should cut it because it was a waste of space, and distracted the audience from the actual story. I was fully in agreement that the introduction wasn't a necessity, but I kept it for two reasons. First, because I wanted to make an homage to classic sword and sorcery novels where we were presented the situation before our hero came along to fix things. Second, I didn't want to make the word count up somewhere else in the book.

- The Magic is Confusing: Our protagonist comes from a family whose matriarch is a witch who lives on a mountaintop. We see her magic, as well as the magic of a strange cult, in action several times throughout the book. This criticism came from a reader whose background was more in high fantasy and RPGs, and was used to Vancian magic systems. As a piece of pulp, magic is significantly softer in this novel, and shouldn't be easily understood (especially since our perspective character is a warrior, not a witch). So while I understood the criticism, I felt it was more the reader being unfamiliar with this genre and expecting it to act like a different kind of fantasy.

- I Don't Get The Setting: The world where this novel takes place isn't like a lot of high fantasy settings where there are ancient, long-established kingdoms and nations. There are, in fact, no countries on this map. Most people exist in smaller communities like villages and hamlets, with a few large city-states existing as centers of power. The way I brought this across was how language changed from one place to another, making it clear there weren't huge highways like we often see empires build, or how most trade was done with barter instead of with coins. Input from other readers said this made the setting feel unique, so I'm glad I didn't change it to make it more conventional.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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Horror Blends Well With Pretty Much Every Genre

Since we're coming up on the Halloween season, most people's minds are turning to spooky stories and terrifying tales. Even if you're not a proponent of the horror genre as a lifestyle like some of us are, this is the season where everyone gets in on the fun. However, I had a conversation earlier this week that bothered me because it's a sentiment I've come across several times both as an author, and as an RPG writer. That is, essentially, that horror simply can't be mixed with other genres.

So I wanted to take a moment to make a very simple statement, and then to get deeper into it. Because horror can be combined with practically any other genre you choose. And if you can't fathom how you could weave some of those dark threads into this or that genre, then I would suggest you need to dream a little bigger.

Oh my, my... how did THAT get in there?

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Also, if you're in the mood for some short, snacky scares, don't forget to check out my 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories. And if you like it make sure you spread the word, and leave a tip. I'm thinking about doing a follow-up, but I go where the reads lead me!

Horror Really is a Universal Spice

I know that not everyone out there is a lifelong horror fan the way I am. However, the more I've talked with people in the general populace, the more often I come across folks who have very specific ideas of what horror can be, and even more important ideas of what it cannot be. But before we get into debating this or that particular scenario, I would suggest folks take a moment to watch something from Scaredy Cats, as this channel has perhaps the most succinct definition of horror that I've ever come across.

It's those three, simple requirements that I think can solve a lot of issues when it comes to discussions of horror. While I don't necessarily agree entirely with the first (that the piece of media must be fictional, though inspiration and retellings are fictitious enough to pass the smell test), the second two standards (it must concern the macabre, and the characters in the story must be scared) are actually very useful indeed.

And if more people looked at horror from this perspective, I would get into a lot fewer fights on the Internet.

Because it is this broader definition that really showcases how flexible horror is as a genre mixer. You can take horror and mix it with comedy, and get something like The Addams Family or Krampus, for example. You can mix horror with science fiction to produce something like Alien, Event Horizon, or large swaths of the Warhammer 40K universe. You can mix it with melodrama in order to make something like Dark Shadows, you can swirl it into sword and sorcery to get adventures of characters like Conan, Kull, or Solomon Kane (or my own novel Crier's Knife). You can put it into high fantasy to create something like the Midnight RPG setting, and you can blend it into a coming of age story, a period drama, and nearly anything else you feel like.

The Thousand Faces of Horror

This might be a bit of a soapbox topic, but for fans of horror like myself, this is something that I feel folks need to stop and think about. Because so many people will either assume that horror A) has to be something that they would personally find frightening or uncomfortable, or B) that it can only concern certain topics, and that if those topics are absent or rendered moot by another element then horror cannot exist.

Rather that singling any one person out, though, I wanted to discuss some of the conversations I've run into, and why I find them so infuriating. And, hopefully, the responses I have to them will help show folks a broader perspective on my favorite genre.

I've got a lot to choose from, okay?

"Fantasy can't have horror in it because death isn't permanent."

This is a paraphrase of part of the most recent conversation that started me off on this topic, and it refers to how in traditional high fantasy RPGs players usually have the ability to be resurrected from the dead to continue the adventure should they meet an untimely end. The idea that if death isn't permanent then what do you have to be scared of exemplifies the kind of mindset that only thinks of horror in terms of a single facet. Because surely dying is something people are scared of, even if it can be undone? Especially since, in these settings, heaven and hell are very real places. If you know you weren't a good person, and you wound up in hell (even for a few moments) what would that do to your mind? Especially since (in most settings, at least) you're still going to die eventually... barring become a lich, a vampire, or some other eternal creature.

Which, in its way, makes those monsters even more frightening. Because for every power mad duke or arrogant wizard, there's going to be someone who would rather live a tortured, eternal half life than face what lies beyond the coil of their mortal flesh. And if that's not horror, I don't know what is!

"This isn't a horror game because it doesn't make me uncomfortable."

Vampire. Werewolf. Mage. Changeling. I've had this conversation about fully half of the World of Darkness RPG setting with my fellow players, and it never ceases to baffle me. Because make no mistake, these games as they're written are horror games through and through. Whether it's questions about whether you can cling to your humanity for eternity, about whether you can control the violence surging through you to keep those around you safe, about whether your hubris will be your downfall, or about not being able to fully trust your own mind and the world around you, these games all deal with a variety of different flavors of horror.

Something that I feel needs re-iterating is that horror doesn't have to scare you. Most of the time that's not what it's going to do. It doesn't have to leave an impression of lasting terror, either. It can, but that's not required for it to still be horror. And while a lot of horror will leave you asking hard questions (What does it really mean to be human? What will people do when driven to desperate measures? What makes someone a monster?), it's not required to be harrowing or to include elements you find distasteful.

"That's not a horror story, it's just dark X/Y/Z."

This might be something of a controversial opinion, but people will go to ridiculous lengths to avoid stories they like being associated with horror. Up to the point that I've seen it said several times that the film category of "psychological thriller" was invented by the Academy Awards to ensure that no movie labeled a horror film (like Silence of The Lambs would have been) won prestigious awards.

In my opinion this is where a lot of stories, books, and games will label themselves as a "dark" version of a particular genre instead of just admitting they're mixing in horror elements. Dark fantasy has questionable themes and monsters more familiar to the horror genre. Dark thrillers go further than normal thrillers do, punching up the stakes and usually including deeds that would be more common in an Argento film than a John Grisham novel. Dark romances touch on sensitive topics that can be as titillating as they are triggering, and so on, and so forth.

Horror gets around, and like a flexible wine you can pair it with practically any meal. It might go better with some than it does with others, but it's everywhere once you learn to recognize the flavor.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!