Betting the Odds: Kenneth Hite on Taking Risks in Writing

A few short pages into Kenneth Hites’ Cthulhu 101, I thought, “This guy must’ve gone to University of Chicago.”  (Hite, not Cthulhu.)  They train the mind in wondrous ways at U of C, and Hites’ work bears the tell-tale stamp.  Whether writing non-fiction or gaming supplements or children’s books, Hite layers his work with humor, literary allusion, and incisive analysis.  You get the sense that he has read everything and understood it.
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The Town: The Importance of Respecting Your Characters

Very real issues of craft and narrative mean it’s important to think carefully about all of your major and minor characters: it results in further complication and believability. Sometimes, too, the inability to imagine a character as fully human can derail everything–in addition to alienating your audience.

I don’t like to use movies as examples, but what the heck. I’ll make an exception because it’s such a good example: the script for The Town, a movie by Ben Affleck (script by him and Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard), fails miserably to flesh out the character of Claire Kessey, played by Rebecca Hall. The movie is supposed to be about long-time friends who are part of a bank robbing gang. Claire Kessey is a bank employee taken as a hostage and later let go. Affleck’s character (Doug MacRay), who Claire never saw, then falls for her, while his fellow bank robbers want her killed so she can’t identify them.

You could say the main thrust of the movie is on the bank robbers, their relationships, and what happens to them. But the crux of the film is Doug’s relationship with Claire, in part because it makes him do things that undermine his relationship with his friends and thus creates one of the central conflicts in the movie.

The problem is, Claire’s a cipher.

1–We don’t know anything about her friends.
2–We don’t know anything about her family.
3–We know very little about her past.
4–We have very little evidence about her personality, likes and dislikes, etc.

Even worse, Affleck et al have decided that Claire is so unimportant to the story that, after her kidnapping and release, she’s largely moved around the board simply to advance the plot. Several unlikely things happen, including…

1–Claire, despite being frightened out of her mind by the experience, seems to behave much as she did before being kidnapped, in terms of her day-to-day movements and activities.
2–Worse, she has no problem talking to a man she does not know, in a public laundromat.
3–And she has no problem going out on a date with said stranger.

Now, most reasonable people, myself included, if they’d been kidnapped recently, might feel the need to be more cautious. In such a context, I might not even want to go to the laundromat for awhile (except, Claire has no friends to speak of, and thus no one to ask for help). I sure as heck wouldn’t be fond of talking to strangers.

Is it possible Claire might be the kind of person who would deal with the situation differently than I would? The kind of person who would decide that a kind of confrontation with life, a dogged sticking to her normal routine, was the key to recovery? Absolutely! But to know that, we would have to have a much better idea of:

1–Her friends.
2–Her family.
3–Her past.
4–Her personality.

But we get none of that, apparently because Affleck thinks that the crux of the story lies elsewhere.

But the entire time I was watching the last two-thirds of the film, I could not get out of my head the fact that the foundation, the groundwork, had been so thoroughly botched that if the film had been re-contextualized as a house, it would’ve been leaning heavily to one side, with the bricks falling to the ground and the roof sliding half-off.

I was also getting angry, because in robbing Claire of her individuality, Affleck had trivialized the trauma that occurs when one’s personal space and freedom are violated in the way Claire’s were in the movie. Even worse, Claire’s actions at the end of the film betray any vestiges of self-respect the script has left her with…but that’s okay, the script seems to be telling us, because Claire’s mostly there so MacRay will seem somewhat noble and tragic…unless, like me, you’re by this point finding MacRay utterly unbearable because of his interactions with Claire. (The power dynamics of that relationship don’t bear scrutiny.)

The point here is that getting characters right is also about doing what’s right for the story, and when you get that backwards or you ignore a character or rob them of the normal human reactions that occur in the real world, you run the risk of having someone like me think what you wrote sucked.

Grizzly Wrestling: Matthew P. Mayo on the Writing Life

Grizzly Wrestling: Matthew P. Mayo on the Writing Life

Matthew P. Mayo is a master of starting as irresistibly close to the action as possible.  In his fiction and his non-fiction, he opens with just enough that the reader cares and then he hits the character (and the reader) hard.  Mayo’s sentences are lean, tough and graceful.  His writing has a powerful sense of moment and of scene, of gesture and of other human subtleties.

Mayo is a freelance writer living in Maine.  His recent books, Cowboys, Mountain Men, & Grizzly Bears: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of the Wild West and Bootleggers, Lobstermen & Lumberjacks: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of Hardscrabble New England, tell fifty tales each of some of the most harrowing moments in their respective regions.  These aren’t dry recountings or glossy propaganda. 

These are gritty stories – stories, as he says in the introduction of Bootleggers, of “showing courage, resolve, and pluck in one’s daily life, of being tough and uncompromising in the face of adversity.”  Indeed, both of Mayo’s Grittiest Moments books read like Loren D. Estleman and Jim Thompson got together to re-write a Stephen Ambrose history book.

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