Continuing, then. From the need to Tell the Truth, to be Honest, to the intestinal fortitude to do the same. So, courage, in this context, works in two forms that blend and blur.

You can’t tell the truth if you don’t have the courage to do it.

Put it another way: if, as I have argued, good writing is emotionally honest writing, this requires, in turn, the courage to be the same. All writers write from themselves, and thus, in some manner or fashion, they are writing about themselves. English majors and professors of literature and critics of various and sundry qualifications love this; they adore reading into the text, the idea that what has made it to page or screen is more about the writer than the story. That’s not what I mean. That’s not what I’m talking about. This isn’t Mary Sue-ism, this isn’t wish-fulfillment, and rarely is it as blatant as the audience (and particular, certain critics) believe. Just because a character in a novel I once wrote had an abortion doesn’t mean that my girlfriend at the time did the same. The line is not so straight, nor the connections so literal.

A writer’s ability to empathize is part of their creativity, a necessary part. But it isn’t enough to take what we know, what we have experienced, and then to drop it on our characters, into our stories. If it’s going to work, it’s going to have to be raw, unvarnished, naked. It’s going to have to draw on those things that make us uncomfortable and nervous and embarrassed. Our empathy for our characters is going to make use feel those things for our creations, our stories. In pursuit of the emotional core, we strip ourselves, mine ourselves, and thus expose ourselves. We are not writing for ourselves, whatever we may say to the contrary; if we were, we’d never want to be published. We’re writing to show our work to others. We are, always, presenting ourselves to be judged.

That’s never fun. That’s never easy. This is, incidentally, one of the reasons why certain writers often come across as either arrogant or aloof. That’s armor, that’s simple self-defense. When you release a story into the world to be accepted and praised or rejected and loathed, you are putting yourself into the world in the same way, no matter how much you might wish to pretend otherwise, no matter how far you seek to remove yourself from your creation. This is why, for the most part, most writers hate most critics, I think; the critic assumes the role of judge, and much like a FIFA referee, dispenses their assaults and accolades from a position that is almost impossible to assail. The writer – especially in the age of the interwebs – is vulnerable from all sides. And I would argue that the writer must be – if you’re telling the truth, if you’re committed to your craft, then there is a necessary investment in your work. If you spend 100 days building a model boat, only to have your best friend – or a total stranger – tell you that it stinks, you got it wrong, that’s going to hurt.

Even if it’s true.

This is not to say that all criticism is invalid, of course, nor that writers must be handled with kid-gloves. But if you write, and if you publish, you are going to be judged. And amidst those judgments, there will invariably be someone who is braying for your head on a pike. Sometimes literally. Someone, somewhere, someway, some day. Because if the First Rule is “Show, Don’t Tell,” and the Second Rule is “Write What You Know,” then the Third Rule is as follows:

You are never going to write something that everyone will like.

(I think of this as the Mark Twain Corollary, going hand-in-hand with his quote about a classic being “a book that people praise but don’t read.” As far as it goes, I’m totally making up these Rules. There are rules, to be certain. But I’m not actually a huge fan of them beyond the most basic as listed above.)

Thus, you, dear writer, you’re going to get it in the teeth. Sometimes you’re going to get it in the belly. Sometimes you’re going to be taken to the ground and curb-stomped something vicious, and even better, sometimes it’ll be by someone who is accusing you of writing exactly what you weren’t.

So you damn well better have the courage to take the beating. You damn well better have the courage to sit down and write it anyway. You damn well better have the courage to shout down your lesser angels that are telling you that you cannot do this, that you will fail, that it is too hard, too difficult, too time-consuming, that nobody will care, that it will never be good enough.

Writing is not a static craft. I believe, with absolute heart, that one can never be “good enough.” Writing demands better, that what you attempt tomorrow reaches further, is more informed, is more refined, is more expert than what you delivered yesterday.

This leads to a more nuanced Courage. There’s a note above my bride‘s desk in her office, just a little Post-It, I’m not sure when she wrote it, and I’m not sure what the project was she wrote it about. “Courage to Fail.”

This is, more than anything else, crucial, in my opinion. Good writing requires risk-taking. It requires taking the story places you’re not comfortable with it going, sometimes. This is not writing for effect. This is writing honestly, so honestly that you question whether it’s too much, and yes, sometimes it is.

This courage requires a commitment to writing scenes that, frankly, can scare you – both in their content and in your faith in your own ability. These are moments that, as you work, make your stomach clench with butterflies and that make your heart race. And it is wise to remember, those moments? Sometimes, those moments, done right, are the moments that will do the same to your audience. Those moments that scare you, those raw, frightening moments? Those are the moments, perhaps, of the greatest possibility, where you can forge the purest connection with your audience. Those are the moments of resonance.

Those are the moments that are remembered.

Next week, whips, chains, and Discipline.

Hold fast!

Greg

Blog for today is delayed as I try to get my act together for Bouchercon 2011 in St. Louis, which I shall be attending, and at which I have no idea what I’ll be doing, aside from hanging out with folks I see perhaps once a year.

And I get to see Rick in person for the first time in too many years to count.

Blog post on Thursday will continue the “series on what Greg thinks about writing if you’re interested.”

Not coincidentally, Thursday will also see the start of Chapter Two. We’re much happier with the pacing for Chapter Two; don’t have the hang of everything quite yet, I fear, but I am optimistic that it’ll be a vast improvement to what I feel was the major flaw with Chapter One, ie, my pacing stank on ice.

Hold fast!

Greg

We’re coming to the end of Chapter One, here, which – as Rick pointed out on our weekly status update phone call this morning – has really been one long reveal. We started in “tight,” as they say, on Lady S’ shoes, and since then have steadily been pulling back further and further to show the wider context, to hint at the expanse of the world. I think it’s a fair read. I think it’s an accurate read.

It was also entirely unintentional. Or, more specifically, it was entirely consciously unintentional.

Resorting to yet another anecdote – I do this a lot, I realize, because, again, I can only speak for myself, and thus, uhm… well, I shall. Anyway, some years back I was on a panel at a mystery convention in Bristol. The panel was – I think – about process, and I remember one of the audience asking some question or other about characters “coming to life” and one of the panelists went off on this poor woman for even to dare suggest such a thing. He held forth at some length about this, and the thrust was, essentially, that he felt it was bullshit, that if any writer was actually hearing their characters in their head, they needed help, and they needed it fast. He was emphatic on the matter; his characters didn’t do a damn thing unless he wrote it; he was the master of his domain. Characters didn’t control him, he controlled them. He got a lot of laughs.

And I could see where he was coming from, and in many ways – in the most literal of ways – he is correct.

In others, he’s wrong. He’s just dead wrong.

Because it’s not that simple.

Like many things when one talks about writing, the idea of Characters Coming to Life is often, and perhaps even actively, misinterpreted, right up there with Write What You Know. I’ve said before that Write What You Know refers to an emotional truth, not a literal one; if it did, you’d never have books like The Forever War or, more recently and more popularly, A Game of Thrones. If I only wrote what I knew, there’d be no Lady Sabre, never mind the several hundred super-hero comics I’ve penned.

Characters live. They live through the author, and if the author is extraordinarily fortunate, they live through the audience, as well. Fan fiction is the most ready evidence of this, and fan fiction has existed for millennia; all the internet did was make it that much easier to share. But you spend enough time with anything, you take it into you, you make it a part of yourself. This feeds back to what I’ve said about role-playing; there’s a reason gamers love to talk about what they did – they did it, even if they did it pretending to be some accursed demon-spawn descendent of the high elves of Happyland or whatnot. It’s also why listening to a gamer talk about what they did is so terrifically boring in the main; it’s them talking about themselves.

Spend enough time with your characters and you learn them beyond intimacy. Get a group of people working together on the same characters, the same story,and the mix becomes more arcane, more potent. This is the creative breath of life. This when characters can talk to you, when you know what they will do and why they do it in every situation. They are real, even if only within the confines of the mind, and thus they are alive. This is when they surprise you, when you think you’re writing one thing, have a plan or a plot, then see it suddenly tipped on its ear by words you’ve typed that you’re not at all certain where they came from.

I’m not a neurologist. My understanding of how the mind works is decidedly limited, despite my curiosity in the subject, especially in regards to creativity. Some artists put their creative ‘force’ outside of themselves, call it a muse or inspiration or genius, perhaps. Others root it firmly inside. The source doesn’t matter, perhaps, because in the end, it’s the work that’s the proof.

One long reveal. Rick’s right, it is.

Wish I’d known that was what I was writing when I wrote it.

Hold fast.

Greg

I am technically on vacation. This means that my blog post for Tuesday is a day late and I’m writing less-regularly than normal. Apologies for the delay. I am also in a mood, and that’s probably not a good thing to be in when trying to write a blog post, but I’m going to post this anyway, because it’s that kind of mood. You have been warned.

My son and I went to see Captain America about two weeks back, and it was as enjoyable and delightful a trip to the movies as I can remember in years. My days as a bitchy critic of cinema are long past, mind you, and I’m not interested in posting a review. I could do that. I once did do that. I stopped doing that 20 years ago. The proliferation of people who mistake their opinion for criticism made me stop. We enjoyed it tremendously, and that’s enough. Given the current state of cinema, it may be more than enough.

Rick and I did an interview on Monday for The Long and Shortbox of It with Jon Gorga and Josh Kopin, and over the course of the conversation, we ended up discussing the continued slavish devotion to that which is labeled “dark” and “gritty” in super-hero comics. You’ll get an earful on this when you listen to the podcast, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about off and on for a while now, and this seems as good a time as any to get something off my virtual chest, so to speak.

When I was working on 52, I half-jokingly asked Geoff Johns what it was with him and decapitations. If you’ve read his work, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Black Adam, in particular, had a penchant for removing the top, so to speak. His response was that he’d grown up playing Mortal Kombat. Fatalities were common, as he put it; a decapitation was de rigueur. Me, I was in college when Narc came out. Late formative years, and I still remember being taken aback the first time I watched the animated pitbulls tearing me apart on the screen.

Rick and I want Lady Sabre to be fun. Stealing a page from the Clevinger-Wegener manifesto, if it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing. If it’s not fun, we’re doing something wrong.

Captain America was fun. It was pure, and it was sincere, and it never once apologized for being either of those things, and in fact, that was why Steve Rogers was chosen to become the First Super Soldier. I credit an enormous amount of its success to these factors.

Here’s the thing: I am sick and tired of super-heroes who aren’t super and aren’t heroes, but more, I’m sick and tired of Hollywood blaming us for their failures. I am sick and tired of hearing various Hollywood studio execs who are as disconnected from the reality of middle-American taste as Rick Perry is from Christianity excusing the poor performance of their ill-executed product by tacitly blaming you, me, and everyone else of us who didn’t pay to see their garbage. Catwoman fails? Instead of, perhaps, just perhaps, acknowledging that the movie is a piece of excrement unworthy of use as fertilizer, they conclude instead that a female lead can’t open a movie unless her name is Jolie. So now we’re not only guilty of not being willing to pay for 90 minutes of intellectual abuse, we’re all apparently sexist jerks, as well. The problem with Green Lantern’s performance at the box office is that it’s not “gritty” enough? I don’t think so.

Art – and even if that art is commercial art, produced for entertainment – feeds and is fed by the society that consumes it. So I ask you, right now, looking around you, what flavor of escapism will go down best with you? In an era of terror alerts and bipartisan dysfunction, of rising hate and blossoming intolerance, of bank failure and wide-spread, global unemployment and recession, is gritty really what we need?

Look, I like gritty. I write gritty. There is a time and a place for gritty. I’ll take my Batman gritty, thank you, and I will acknowledge that such a portrayal means that my 11 year old has to wait before he sees The Dark Knight. But if Hollywood turns out a Superman movie that I can’t take him to? They’ve done something wrong. Superman is many, many things. Gritty he is not, something that Richard Donner certainly understood.

(Pet peeve time: for the contingent out there who sneer at heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman and Captain America, those icons who still, at their core, represent selfless sacrifice for the greater good, and who justify their contempt by saying, oh, it’s so unrealistic, no one would ever be so noble… grow up. Seriously. Cynicism is not maturity, do not mistake the one for the other. If you truly cannot accept a story where someone does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, that says far more about who you are than these characters.)

This is not an argument of era or audience sophistication. Sophistication does not negate sincerity, nor does it even deny it, as the Captain America movie proves. Sophistication demands better storytelling, clearer motivation, purer intention. “Gritty” is an apologist word in this sense, used in the place of “realism.” We don’t go to the movies for “realism.” This is why documentaries aren’t the major product in the theaters. Sophistication does not demand realism; it demands smart.

I can think of no other industry where the consumer is made to bear the blame for the product’s failure as much as Hollywood. Seriously, let’s think that one through. The movie didn’t perform, therefore it’s our fault? You got food poisoning eating the fish they served and you paid for, it’s your fault? The brakes on your new car crapped out and you wrapped it around a tree, it’s your fault?

Here’s a crazy thought.

Maybe you made a bad movie.

Hold fast.

Greg