There Are Motivations Other Than Vengeance and Tragedy, You Know

Motivation is why characters do the things that they do. Sometimes that motivation is immediate, like they need to pull one last heist because their kid is sick and needs an operation they can't afford. Sometimes that motivation is long-term, like holding to an oath they swore when they were young that they refuse to give up on even in the face of certain doom.

There is a mistake that a lot of writers make, though, and it's assuming that for a character's motivation to be interesting that it has to come from a place of pain. That rage, a thirst for vengeance, or some great tragedy are the only motivations worth bringing to the page... and I tell you from experience this can often negatively affect your writing.

So take a moment, and reflect on the motivations you use. Then ask yourself if you reach for the same ones over and over again, and why that is?

Really sit with it for a bit, and contemplate.

Before we get into it this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron!

Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

How Does Your Garden Grow?

I want you to take a moment and think of everything you know about Batman. What came to mind first? Probably that he's the world's greatest detective, a deadly martial artist, and the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation. However, chances are good that you also remembered the fact that his parents were gunned down in front of him when he was a child, and that this traumatic event has become key to his one-man crusade against street crime.

That sort of fact about a character's background and motivation seems like it would be super important, right? As if that's where you'd plant the seed of a character and grow outward from there? Well, according to most reports of comic book history, the dead parents backstory was tacked on later. When Batman first landed on the comic book scene he was just a grim avenger in a cool costume fighting cultists, mad scientists, and weird mutants. He was compelling enough through his looks and actions, and didn't actually require this motivation of sheer tragedy to get the audience interested in him. It was just sort of tacked on, like some sprinkles on an already tasty cupcake. And even once it was established, it was really a huge focus of the character until his gritting up in the 1980s... it rarely, if ever, came up in depictions before that (particularly in the TV series that vaulted the character to heights of fame).

Batman could have had dozens of other motivations. From taking a vow like a literal Dark Knight (one of service and not vengeance), to civic pride, to simply obeying Rule .303 (those with the ability and the means have a duty to assist), he was a blank slate at the time. The audience was already buying the comics, proving the tragic backstory was not a necessary component of who the character was.

It worked, but it wasn't required.

Now, this is not to say that tragedy and revenge are never integral to who a character is, what they represent, or the story you're trying to tell with them. From Darth Vader, to the Punisher, to the Phantom of The Opera, these grim, tragic aspects are often central to what characters represent. However, this becomes one of those all rectangles are squares, but not all squares are rectangles sort of scenarios. Because while these motivations are central to some stories and characters, they are by no means central to all of them as some kind of necessary ingredient.

Just because you can doesn't mean you must.

Content, Happy People, and Dragon Hunting

I've talked about this subject a bit on my gaming blog Improved Initiative, specifically in the posts Do Content, Happy People Hunt Dragons? and Why So Many Sad Backstories? but I think it's worth repeating. A dragon doesn't have to have murdered someone's grandparents, or be actively threatening their family, for them to be motivated to go stop it. The character might have a strong sense of duty, demanding they protect others from harm even if they themselves are now in danger. They might be employed as a dragon slayer, meaning that this is the entire reason they're kept on the payroll. They might seek the thrill of the hunt, or even need a part of that dragon's body in order to make a medicine to stave off sickness, push back old age, or merely to become stronger.

Once you've eaten a dragon's heart, you can skip leg day.

All of this is not to say that you immediately need to alter your protagonist's motivation in your story. If you have a character who's obsessed with catching a serial killer because they murdered that protagonist's son, and that works for building drama in your story, stick with it. If your villain is motivated by a sense of aggrieved entitlement because they were never recognized for their genius, and no other motivation works as well for them, don't fix what isn't broken!

The point of this exercise isn't to tell writers to rely less on dark, tragic motivations for their characters and stories. It's to ensure that, before we reach for those backstories, that we examine all the options we have available to make our story work. Sometimes it's an old vow taken by an aging, cynical knight that hits us even harder than someone trying to settle an old score.

And for those who could use a bit of a jumpstart on thinking outside this particular box, I'd recommend giving 100 Character Goals and Motivations a look! While written for RPGs, it's just as useful for writers trying to find some fresh inspiration.

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!

The Key To Grimdark Fiction is Showing How Things Could Have Been Better

From A Song of Ice and Fire to the far future of Warhammer 40,000, grimdark fiction takes many forms. However, while the details of the settings, worlds, and stories may vary from one book to another, the key to really making these tales work is that they're tragedies on a whole other level. But for a tragedy to really hit home, and to resonate with the audience, it's important to show the audience how things could work out... to make them really wonder if maybe this time characters will get a happy ending.

They won't, of course, but the reader needs to at least think it's possible.

They need to drop their guard for you to land the blow.

Before we get started, remember to sign up for my weekly newsletter if you want to stay on top of all my latest releases. If you want to help me keep the wheels turning and the lights on, consider becoming a Patreon patron. And lastly, to follow all my followables check out my Linktree!

Now then, let's get to it!

The Spoonful of Sugar Helps The Poised Pill Go Down

I've been thinking on this topic for a good while now, especially while working on some Warhammer 40K tales of my own like Field Test, which is about an experimental deployment of a previously untested weapon by an inquisitor, and Waking Dogs: A World Eaters Tale, which is about one of the fallen legionnaires deciding he's had enough of his lot in life. And something I realized while I was doing all that thinking is that a major flaw in a lot of grimdark fiction is that a lot of writers mistake bleakness for tragedy. This really undermines a story, and it can stop readers from getting invested in what's going on.

What makes grimdark fiction (and really any tragic story) work is that the audience has to actively want the tragedy to not occur, even if they're reasonably certain that it will. If things start bad, and only get worse with no suggestion that they could ever have been better, then there's no contrast for the audience to be impacted by. It's just a parade of rakes to the face as they try to walk across the yard.

A perfect example of what I'm talking about is slasher movies. While neither grimdark nor tragic (usually, anyway), a good slasher movie gets the audience invested in the survival of the protagonists. We watch them being stalked by an implacable, masked killer, and we know they're in a bad situation, but we're hoping they will make the right decisions and survive (if not triumph) because we've developed empathy for these characters. Even if everything in the story, the score, and our experience says they're going to fail, we hope they don't. In bad slasher movies (much like in bad grimdark fiction) we often have characters that bad things continually happen to with no reprieve or chance that they might not happen. And because it feels like there's no chance things could turn out better, it creates a sense of bored Nihilism; why bother getting emotionally invested when it feels like there's no point?

One of the best ways to do this is to give the audiences glimpses of how things could happen. Show them how our protagonists might triumph, or what things they could do to avoid the terrible fate. Can our lead overcome their pride and make restitution? Could our coward nobly sacrifice themself to save everyone else? Would someone selfish give up their most prized possessions, or their power, for the good of others?

The answer to all of these is usually, "no," because we're still talking about grimdark stories here. However, if the audience sees the possibilities, it can be a lot like seeing the bomb under the table. They know what could happen, and because you've put that possibility in play they can't un-know it. The only question as they watch the tragedy unfold is will it be the road the story goes down? Or just a glimpse of what-might-have been that will make the grimness hit all the harder?

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!

What is The Difference Between Tragedy and Grimdark?

Labels are important, both for readers as well as for writers. How you classify a story helps libraries and bookstores sort which shelf it goes onto, and it can act as a big, red sign for readers who have a taste for particular fiction. Sometimes those labels can be helpful, like when a sub-genre emerges and grows into its own distinct category. Sometimes these labels can be used to pour shame onto books though, labeling them as surely as a big, scarlet A.

One of those labels is Grimdark, and it is still a battleground for readers and writers alike.

In the gutters of the genre ghettos there can be only one heir to the fantasy throne.

What Is Grimdark?

Before we get too far into the conversation we should all be on the same page. The phrase Grimdark, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, began with the quote, "In the grim darkness of the future, there is only war," which comes from the Warhammer 40,000 game. For those not familiar with the game it features a bleak, dystopian future where all races and species are locked in bloody, eternal conflict across the stars, and the millions of bodies and oceans of blood are justified by nothing so much as a need to feed the war machine.

The label has expanded beyond the war game and its brethren though; today it refers mostly to speculative fiction (a broad term encompassing sci-fi and fantasy alike) where there is A) a grim and dark tone (natch), B) a sense of realism, and C) the agency of the characters involved in the story.

For example, say you were writing a fantasy story. Let's say that this story depicted a world where deaths are visceral, and the politics behind wars are realistic. Kings are not noble, divine rulers but rather spoiled children or iron-fisted tyrants who took the throne by the sword and keep it the same way. The heroes of your story have flaws, and there is no guarantee that their actions are noble or good. There is, in fact, no guarantee that the protagonists will succeed (or even survive), or that in succeeding they will enact any real change.

Does this sound familiar?

Brace yourself... Martin is coming.

George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has become the standard-bearer for grimdark fantasy. It is, in its way, an anti-Tolkien where the world is full of human complexities, evil is present in the hearts of men rather than in some outside force that must be defeated, and where vicious killers and tortured souls can exist in the same character.

Grimdark has its detractors though. People who claim that this kind of fiction glorifies brutality, and that in its pursuit of "realism" it's simply creating soulless pornography. Where is the hero's journey? Where are the morality tales where knights in gleaming armor fight against the evils that plague humanity in the form of dragons, demons, and evil wizards? Lastly, and the most often asked question, who the hell gets catharsis out of this?

I have an answer to that last one, actually. Humans, and they have since the dawn of Western civilization.

Tragedy's Rockstar Child

The Grimdark sub-genre is seen by many as an unnecessary attempt at edginess. It's fantasy in a black leather jacket with bad boy shades, out to make you think he's going to change before he fucks your girlfriend, blows smoke in your face, and roars out onto that highway to hell with flames shooting from his tail pipe.

The catharsis in watching terrible things happen, and in seeing characters try to fight against overwhelming forces, goes back a long, long way though. According to the Wiki gods it goes back to about the 6th century BCE.

A couple thousand years before this fellow, if you're counting.

Greek tragedy is, in its basest form, watching fundamentally flawed characters struggle against things too big for them to beat. Oedipus fights against fate, and his quest for truth opens his eyes before he shuts them forever. Antigone doesn't fare much better, struggling against generations of tragedy before smashing against the rocks of her own. Watching a world where one wrong decision, or one perilous action can wreck bloody ruin on everything you held dear has been the preferred entertainment of people for more than a millennium.

Grimdark is just the latest child of this human desire to watch everything fall apart.

When Everything Ends in Blood and Tears

There will always be people who prefer happy endings and black-and-white stories, just as there were people in Ancient Greece who preferred comedy to tragedy. Some people like to pick up whichever mask most suits them that day, satisfying the need they have at the time. Some people, readers and writers alike, just can't get enough of that sensation of meeting a character just as flawed and lost as they themselves are, reading through that character's choices and adventures, and riding that roller-coaster all the way down until their Icarus smashes to paste on the rocks below.

Speaking of which...

To answer the question I posed in the title of this blog post, Grimdark and tragedy are related. Dark overtones and dystopian horrors are certainly right at home under tragedy's big tent, but not all tragedy is Grimdark. Some tragedy sneaks up on you, getting its fingers under your skin and gently caressing your heartstrings before it uses them as an instrument to play you a sad song. Sometimes it looks like everything's going to be all right, and you let yourself hope, before the sad mask brings down the curtain on another broken ending.

If you're a fan of tragedy, but you can only take Grimdark in small doses, check out my latest book New Avalon: Love and Loss in The City of Steam. Take a tour of a place where the brilliant light of science casts shadows dark enough to get lost in, and where down every alley there's a new story itching to be told. The first two tales, along with the introduction are free to all, so step up and take the $2 tour.

You've got nothing to lose but a few tears... and that's a small price to pay, don't you think?

As always thanks for stopping in, and if you'd like to help support me then stop by The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a patron today! If you want to be sure you catch all of my updates then be sure to follow me on Facebook and Tumblr while you're at it!

Sell More Books By Choosing The Right Anthology or Collection Theme

My long-time readers know two things about me; I've got a healthy amount of experience with anthologies, and I like to sell books. Getting into anthologies is a lot easier than selling them though, mostly because you need something unique to get them out of your inventory and into the hands of your readers. Maybe it's a bundle deal with a more popular book, an awesome book cover designed by a famous artist, a Big Name who contributed a short story, or another gimmick entirely.

Holding readers at gunpoint is certainly different, but not in the way you're looking for.

One unique selling point that a lot of writers overlook when it comes to anthologies as well as single-author short story collections is the theme. If you can hook readers with a theme they haven't heard before you'll get them to read your sample. Once they've dipped a toe in you're that much closer to snapping up another sale.

Dare to be Different

Since folks like examples here's one that's hot off the presses.

Seriously, go take a look inside!

What you're looking at is my latest release, and the first book I've never had to share with other contributors. New Avalon: Love and Loss in The City of Steam contains 10 steampunk noir stories, each of which is connected by a single theme. Is it romance? Tragedy? The corrupt heart of the clockwork city that drinks the blood and souls of those who dig too deep?

It's all of those things, but specifically the book acts as a guided tour of New Avalon.

From the steam-shrouded souk of the Grates to the concrete bunkers of Cranktown, from the soupy, rotting alleys of the Gutters to the misty quays of Headsman's Wharf every story takes the reader by the hand and leads them on a district-by-district journey. Readers see the possible and the impossible, meet residents of the city, but more than that they see New Avalon's many faces. From the miraculous to the monstrous there's something for every reader in this book.

Assuming of course you aren't a fan of happy endings?

Know What You're Selling (Preferably Before You Write It)

Anthologies and collections are similar to other books in one way; it's easier to sell them if you know your market before you start. If you're writing a horror story for example, who are you appealing to? Will the latest hordes of zombie fans want to devour it? Will it be the latest fad among the vampire sect? Are you appealing to old-style fans of shows like The Twilight Zone and Tales From The Crypt?

While there's no need to pigeonhole your project before you even open up a blank word document, you need to think about what selling points it has. Returning to our above example, New Avalon has several fulcrums I can lever to get it into the hands of fans. Those include:

- Noir Steampunk: While the genre is no stranger to mysteries and detectives something that's more Sam Spade and less Sherlock Holmes is something that turns readers' heads.

- No Happy Endings: It's right there in black and white in the introduction, which I think of as the user-agreement for this book. New Avalon is a place happy endings go to die, so for those who find catharsis in tragedy this is definitely a book for them.

- Guided Tour: As mentioned the book's stories are all separate, but they are used to paint a picture of a single place. This can give it a serialized feel not unlike Frank Miller's graphic novel Sin City. While stories may intersect like gears in a watch, none of them know what the others are doing.

- Single Author Collection: One of the big hurdles when you're trying to sell a multi-author collection is that even if someone likes your work they're only getting one of your stories. This book offers multiple tales, but they were all penned by the same hand. If you're putting together an anthology though you'd want to get several well-known authors to make the book feel like a safer bet.

- Free Sample: Not sold yet? Check it out and read the first two stories for free!

Do I Need To Do All That?

That depends, are you selling as many books as you want to?

If you're reading my blog then we both know the answer to that question.

Some authors will get lucky their first time out. If you look at the news it seems like all some authors had to do was get one influential person to see their book and bam! overnight bestseller! Whether it was a viral send off on social media, or just the spirit of the zeitgeist taking hold they happened to write a winning ticket.

For most of us (and even most of the authors who look like they hit it big overnight) that isn't how it works. We write blogs, participate in community forums, guest post, get reviews, find guest slots on podcasts, try to catch the attention of local media, set up signings, and go to tons and tons of events. And because every yutz with a computer and Internet access can become an author that means there are hundreds of thousands more books out there for you to compete with. If you're peddling short stories you're already at something of a disadvantage, which is why you need to try and turn that weakness into a strength by finding a way to sell it.

Also, May is National Short Story Month! Use that as a crowbar if you can, and see how many doors you pry open with it.

If you'd like to support me, but New Avalon doesn't seem like your bag then feel free to stop by The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page and become a patron today! Even as little as $1 a month can make a big difference. If you want to be sure you're getting all of my updates then make sure you're following me on Facebook and Tumblr as well!