Seven Books You Should Read Instead of Waiting for Winds of Winter

 

Is it really worth it?

I shared my opinion on the ending of Game of Thrones, but now I hear occasional remarks about how Martin’s vision for the books will surpass the show and fix all the mistakes that left so many of the fans disappointed. I am not so convinced. While A Song of Ice and Fire has its good points, on the whole, there are much better books that offer all of the things that Martin’s bloated saga claims to have. So, I thought it would be appropriate to list 7 books that one could read instead of waiting for Martin to complete his 7-volume fantasy series.

 

1.     Lyonesse by Jack Vance

I figured I’d start with the obvious and recommend a fantasy series. I’m cheating a little bit here, since this is actually a trilogy of novels, but I read the single volume that contains all three books, and since this entire trilogy is about the length of a single volume from SOIAF, I’m counting it as one. The Lord of the Rings, is the first fantasy series that comes to everyone’s mind when comparing Martin’s epic to its inspirations, but, though this series is less commented on, its author, Jack Vance, was another huge inspiration for Martin. Reading this trilogy, you can definitely see what Martin was trying to do. Unfortunately for Martin, Vance is able to write a story that, not only isn’t as ethically cut and dry as typical fantasy fare, but that is also much more economical, and still leads to a satisfying but believable conclusion.

 

2.     A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14^th Century by Barbara Tuchmann

Next, we have a history book. Alison Weir’s The Wars of the Roses is known to have inspired Martin, and I must confess I have not read that book. I have, however, read the excellent Distant Mirror, which uses the life of French knight Enguerrand de Coucy as a focal point from which to detail everything from The Hundred Years War to the Black Plague to the Crusades. It’s an invaluable portrait of life in the Middle Ages, and one just as full of violence and intrigue as Martin’s novels.

 

3.     War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Now we’re going to bridge the gap between the last two entries with a work of historical fiction. This is the most daunting of the books on this list, clocking in at around 1,200 pages, but if you’re intimidated by the book’s length, consider this: The five volumes of Martin’s still uncompleted series add up to over 5,000 pages! Why wait for about 2,000 more, only to be disappointed yet again, when you could read a story set in the middle of one of the most infamous military campaigns in history—Napoleon’s misguided Russian invasion—and end with some of the most insightful passages on the nature of war and of the lives that get caught up in it that have ever been written?

 

4.     The War of Dreams by Angela Carter

Now we return to the fantasy genre, but this time to a much more idiosyncratic example of it. The War of Dreams—or The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, is a picaresque novel that follows the sexual misadventures of a young man named Desiderio while in pursuit of his lady love, Albertina. So much of the allure surrounding SOIAF is its supposedly mature and unflinching portrayal of sex. Compared to War of Dreams, Martin’s novels come across as both tame and juvenile by comparison. Carter doesn’t flinch, not only from the violent but from the bizarre as well. Though it is shocking to read, the payoff in the end is immense. It’s an incredible book, not just about sex for sex’s sake, but about how it has the ability to manipulate our perceptions of ourselves, of other people, and the world at large.

 

5.     King Henry IV, Part 1 by William Shakespeare

Let’s return to the realm of historical fiction, this time from the pen of another of the all-time greats. If War and Peace’s 1,200 pages seems a little daunting, then why not breeze through some Elizabethan verse instead? Believe it or not, this was the equivalent of a prestige blockbuster back in the day. This is the work that introduced one of Shakespeare’s most popular character’s: the drunken knight, Falstaff, whom Shakespeare brought back for a sequel and a spin-off! This is a play that has it all. In addition to Falstaff’s comedic misadventures, there is also the drama and intrigue of young prince Hal, who is the real hero of the story, for all that the play is actually named for his father, King Henry. This is one of the best coming-of-age stories I have ever read, and under-read by many in comparison to Shakespeare’s more widely-known plays.

 

6.     Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

This is the last fantasy novel on this list, and also my personal favorite of the three. The magic in this book is so delightfully mysterious and off-kilter. I’ve never read a writer who juxtaposes the dry, occasionally pedantic manner of a historian with the fantastical content of their story so well. I’ve recommended a few other lengthy books on this list, but of them all, these are the pages that always seem to pass the quickest. I always read this book looking forward to the next time I get to revisit the delightful characters in this novel.

 

7.     The Oresteia by Aeschylus

Compared to the other books on this list, this one is a very quick read, but it still manages to say so much. I mentioned Aeschylus’s masterpiece in my last blog post on the subject of Game of Thrones, so it only made sense to bring it back here. The battle of good and evil that takes place in every human heart has rarely been so elegantly told. These plays are perfect, and you can well understand after having read them why Aeschylus was considered such a titan in his own lifetime.

Why We Love Love Stories

 There are few scenes that epitomize all we love and hate about love stories than the iconic reconciliation between the two leads in Jerry Maguire. The male lead, Jerry, comes back to his love interest, Dorothy, and tells her, with tears in his eyes, “You complete me,” to which she replies, “You had me at hello.” I’ve lost track of the number of people who tell me about how much they love love stories like Jerry Maguire, but then disparage their regard, not just for love stories, but for romantic love itself. To a degree, I can relate to the sentiment that love stories have sold us an unfulfillable fantasy. However, love stories have a spectrum of quality with some being sentimental trash, and others providing valuable insight into the bonds two people can form. Jerry Maguire falls somewhere in the middle, with some surprisingly sincere moments interspersed with schmaltz like the iconic scene mentioned above. Naturally, people who approach a relationship hoping that the other person will complete them usually walk away feeling embittered and disappointed. No person can actually bear the weight of being another person’s sole reason for living. However, the sensation, that a fully-formed person feels when falling in love with a partner does resemble the feelings Jerry shamelessly displays, albeit with some realistic preconditions. When it comes to the more well-written love stories, there’s often something more powerful at work than mere wish fulfilment. If we take a closer look at how these bonds form in real life, and how stories distill that real phenomenon into its most dramatic representation, we can actually delineate between what is toxic illusion and what is genuine insight into the nature of romance.

One of the best commentaries I’ve heard on the hard facts of romantic love—or pair-bonding for the scientifically inclined—is a video posted by evolutionary biologist, Bret Weinstein, called “Marriage as an Evolutionary Phenomenon.” In it, Weinstein likens the feeling of falling into true and lasting love as a broadening of the sense of self, first to include a partner, and often, to eventually include children. Of course, one of the first milestones that one has to pass before broadening one’s identity in this way is to come fully to grips with one’s own, individual sense of self. It is the failure to meet this first step that so often stymies people who want to bring love into their life. This is also the step that is missing from lower-quality love stories. More sophisticated love stories, on the other hand, often handle this part of human development as well. In order, to show how love stories actually reveal the truth about love, we first have to say a few words about how stories in general reveal the truth.

The foremost point to bear in mind when thinking about stories—and their distinction from everyday life—is that stories are heightened forms of reality. On the one hand, they are dangerous to confuse with everyday life, but they are equally dangerous to dismiss as simply untrue. They are meta-realities in which everything is supercharged with meaning, in a way that the often dreary details of everyday life are not. For one thing, every story’s hero must have a desire. This desire has to be clear-cut, so that we know whether or not the hero has reached it by the end of the story. In real life, people often strenuously avoid chasing their desires, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have them. Even if they do pursue their desires, the pursuit is full of dull, repetitive work. If one were to take up boxing, for example, you’d have to put in lots of long hours at the gym, working a heavy bag, learning combinations, and sparring with a comparably skilled partner. If one were to film every single day spent learning to box, there would be several days’ worth of material of someone making barely perceptible, incremental progress at the same exact thing, over and over again. When you watch a movie like Rocky, on the other hand, you watch Sylvester Stallone do all of these things with noticeable progress each time, with stirring music in the background. Then, within two minutes the montage is over, and he’s ready to step into the ring with Apollo Creed. This isn’t because the movie is lying to us. It’s only because it shows just enough of the struggle involved in a rigorous training regimen to get the point across to a general audience. In the same way that a map does not include every blade of grass or crack in the pavement in a landscape, a story cuts out the superfluous details of life, and focuses on those events that have the most impact on pursuing a valiant goal.

After desire, the next important element that art distills from life is opposition, not only from without, but from within. Well-written characters have some serious flaw that they must uncover and then change in order to reach their desire. To use the previous example of Rocky, Rocky’s flaw is that he has let his talent as a boxer go to waste, making a living as a loan-shark’s collector. Over the course of the film, we see Rocky not only go through grueling physical training, but wrestle with his self-doubt, until he finally faces Apollo Creed in the ring and gives his opponent the fight of his life. While real life is full of people who successfully avoid thinking about their weaknesses, there are others who, when confronted with a lofty ambition, do take stock of the personal weaknesses holding them back from fulfilling that ambition. Stories are virtually always about the second sort of people. Stories are elitist in this sense, and, in order for a story to hold our attention, and stick with us after we’ve finished watching it or reading it, the hero has to pursue a goal that is difficult, and they have to do some painful soul-searching in order to reach it.

Now, how do these artistic principles play out in a love story? Some of the best insights I’ve gained on what goes into a high-quality love-story have come from one of the genre audio classes taught by John Truby, a screenwriting instructor, whose seminars have gained him international recognition. Truby points out several requirements for a love story that complicate the already intense battle between weakness and desire in other, simpler stories. For one thing, good love stories have, not one, but two heroes: the two lovers. In less developed love stories, this dynamic is often left out and it focuses exclusively on the arc of one lover—often a man—at the expense of the beloved—often a woman. However, the most discerning audiences want to see a love story between two well-drawn characters. This means that both characters have to have clearly defined weaknesses—such as cynicism, bitterness, low self-esteem, or superficiality—that stand in the way of their desire, which is to love and be loved by the other.

Next, we come up against the problem that we mentioned earlier that so often stands in the way of love, which is some insufficiency, not in our relationship to others, but in our relationship to ourselves. In order to truly love and be loved by another person, we have to love ourself. In story terms, this throws another complication into the mix. To track the progress of each lover’s journey to self-discovery in addition to their journey to mutual love, we have to create a subplot. Truby refers to this as the success subplot: each lover yearns for success in some sphere of their life that has nothing to do with the other lover. In Jerry Maguire, Jerry wants to get his client a better contract. In Sideways, Miles wants to publish his novel. In Emma, Emma wants to find a suitable match for her protégé, Harriet.

We have already spoken about how art distills all the superfluous details out of everyday life when showing how a character overcomes some deep weakness in order to achieve a difficult desire. We have now doubled, not just the number of heroes, but the number of desires for each of those heroes! Consequently, we double the amount of meaningful details that, on the one hand, delivers us the most relevant details of life, but also the superfluous details of life that we cut out. In life, a person can go for years, coming to grips with their own sense of self without once thinking of love, and then suddenly find themselves bringing another person into an already fulfilling life. Other people meet someone when they are young and untested, and coexist blissfully for several years before encountering some undeveloped part of themselves that they need to address. Despite the distance that can separate the journey to self-realization and the journey to a loving relationship, the two are still interdependent. Learning to realize one’s full potential beforehand is great training for realizing the full potential of a relationship, and having a valuable relationship can serve as heady motivation for reaching that full potential. A love story’s purpose is not to remain true to pedantic details of how far apart these things seem, but to dramatize how intimately interwoven they truly are, and to do so in the most dramatic way possible. So, we meet two lovers, who are struggling in life in some way. They meet, and then have to grapple with the weaknesses that keep them from both their personal ambitions and from each other all at the same time in an intense counterpoint.

While we are right to beware of pandering, simplistic cliches, we would do ourselves incredible harm to give up the truth that these cliches often strain to capture. By all means deride a poorly-told love story, but never throw away a true love story, and certainly never stoop to disparaging love full stop. If we can do that, then we can take the lessons from great pieces of narrative art and learn to live life not just realistically, but with love as well. No person can ever “complete” us in the sense that they can be a substitute for coming to grips with our true selves, but they can startlingly expand that same sense of self—once attained—in such a way that often makes us feel as if even that grueling work of self-realization was only the halfway point to something greater. If we make the first step of separating the hyper-meaningful world of art from the more prosaic one of life, we can actually have our cake and eat it to. There is much that occurs in life and love that stories simply cannot show us, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not still worthwhile maps to take along the journey.

The Failure of Irony in the Game of Thrones Finale

I recently read Robert McKee’s famous book on screenwriting, Story, and one of my big takeaways from that book was his passage about the paths a writer can follow with their theme: that of the idealist, the pessimist, and the ironist. Generally speaking, when we’re young, we favor the optimist’s point of view. When we’re adolescents we grow pessimistic, but at some point, we become adults and learn to appreciate life’s rich ironies. Making one’s peace with the dual nature of life is always a difficult milestone on the way to maturity, and mastering ironic stories that reflect life’s duality is the most difficult milestone to maturity for a writer. Of the many pitfalls on the way to this milestone, McKee writes, “Irony doesn’t mean ambiguity. Ambiguity is a blur; one thing cannot be distinguished from another. But there’s nothing ambiguous about irony; it’s a clear, double declaration of what’s gained and what’s lost, side by side. Nor does irony mean coincidence. A true irony is honestly motivated. Stories that end by random chance, doubly charged or not, are meaningless, not ironic.” Failing to draw a line between irony and ambiguity or coincidence trips up many ambitious writers, whose stories show a lot of promise in the beginning.

Among the most notable such failures from the last few years was the Game of Thrones finale. When the series first started, everyone was talking about how mature it was, how it provided a fresh dose of realism to the genre of epic fantasy, which can all too often pit clearly defined good guys against clearly defined bad guys. But when the series finale aired, many fans were upset. All that apparent realism had crumbled into a big nothing. It wavered on that line between the adolescent predilection for pessimism and mature recognition of life’s deep ironies where joy and grief dwell side by side. Though George R.R. Martin has stated that he has a great deal of respect for the more conventional genre stories that he was subverting and didn’t want to merely tear everything down, that is still more or less what the series finale ended up doing. Figuring out why exactly that happened, and proposing an alternative path that the story might have taken, may help anyone aspiring to write a mature story. The main technique that Martin, along with showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, did not fully avail themselves, is reading deeply and broadly for inspiration from everything that has gone before, so you write something fresh and not an inferior version of an older story. Based on a lot of what I’ve seen from the show, it was almost as if the showrunners were writing as if only the optimistic and the pessimistic themes had been done before. Nothing, however could be further from the truth. As McKee writes, “stories that end in irony tend to last the longest through time, travel the widest in the world, and draw the greatest love and respect from audiences.” Given this fact, I’m going to briefly dissect two masterpieces of ironic storytelling, one of which has moved audiences for the better part of 80 years, and another that has done so for about 2,500 years. Then, I will show how the showrunners for GOT, might have learned from these two masterpieces to create an ending for their show that would have given their fans the ending that they craved.

The first masterpiece from which Martin, Benioff and Weiss failed to learn was The Oresteia, a trilogy of Greek tragedies by Aeschylus It’s a great loss that more people have not read these plays, if for no better reason than they are the only surviving example of a complete trilogy—the format chosen by the major Greek tragedians— that explores a thematic arc of thesis, antithesis and synthesis over the course of the three plays. Despite technically being tragedies, the final play in the trilogy actual marks a heroic triumph for its hero, Orestes who finds redemption in the third play after murdering his mother in the second play to avenge her own murder of Orestes’ father in the first play. Orestes’ father, King Agamemnon, who led the Greek army in the Trojan war, provides a very compelling tragic figure, whose many flaws might have given a more robust profile from which to draw on for GOT’s Ned Stark.

Agamemnon, like Ned has also been unfaithful to his queen, Clytemnestra. Not only that, but Agamemnon has taken his mistress, Cassandra, who is actually the niece of his conquered enemy, King Priam, back to Greece with him. Furthermore, Cassandra is a priestess of Apollo, whose temple Agamemnon desecrated during the sack of Troy. Finally, before Agamemnon sailed for Troy, he sacrificed his and Clytemnestra’s daughter, Iphigenia so that he would have good fortune in the forthcoming war. Needless to say, when Clytemnestra, along with her lover, Aegisthus, murders Agamemnon, we understand all too well that she has her reasons for doing so. Though it is not Ned’s wife who murders him in GOT, his infidelity could still have been a valuable source of dramatic tension that could have lasted into the show’s finale, had it been allowed to stand rather than being wiped out for an admittedly exciting twist. The twist in question—that Jon Snow is not Ned’s son at all, but the product of a marriage between Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark—though exciting in the moment, is actually the worst blow to Ned’s believability as a character. It also hurts the themes of realistic, amoral, medieval politics, and puts Jon Snow’s character arc far more in step with a conventional, optimistic hero’s journey: Snow is actually the legitimate heir to the Iron Throne and we want him to win. Not only this, but one of the flaws that lent Ned some complexity has been wiped clean; his infidelity to his wife turns out to have been a noble act of self-sacrifice, making him considerably less complex, and just a more unalloyed good guy than he already seemed at the beginning of the show. What the writers ought to have done was keep Jon a bastard. Though this would have taken away one of their more surprising twists, it would have kept a major obstacle in Jon Snow’s path to following a conventional, optimistic character arc, and laid the groundwork for a more complex and ironic ending. Before we get to that, however, we need to take a look at our second ironic masterpiece.

That masterpiece is Casablanca, which could have given a more viable blueprint for the love story between Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen as well as how that love story meshes with the overarching plot of the war for succession to the Iron Throne. Like GOT, Casablanca has at its center a story of illicit love amidst great political turmoil. Casablanca’s two lovers, Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, meet in Paris, but when the Nazi’s began to take over the city, Ilsa leaves Rick at the train station where they are supposed to meet and leave Paris together. When Ilsa shows up in Casablanca on the arm of another man, Rick understandably thinks he’s been played by a heartless manipulator. Over the course of the film, however, Rick realizes that Ilsa thought her husband was killed when she met him in Paris and that she really does love him. However, when the final confrontation of the film takes place, Rick sends her away because she needs to stay with her husband and help him because he is a major force for good against the Nazis. The ending is a beautiful, bittersweet example of how personal happiness sometimes has to be sacrificed for the greater good.

Had GOT’s writers taken inspiration from Casablanca’s ironic balancing of love and heroism, they might have come up with a story for their own lovers that went something like this: Jon proves his courage and steadfastness as a leader, but he still doesn’t have a head for politics, and dislikes talking with people he doesn’t respect. He also isn’t made King in the North because he is a bastard. He is, however, made a military leader and one of Sansa’s closest advisors. Dany is also a strong, charismatic leader, but she lets her emotions get in the way of a more broad-minded view of justice, simply doing things that appeal to her personal morals, rather than considering how to make compromises. Then, the northerners and Daenaerys join forces, and Dany and Jon fall in love. We watch the two learn from one another, both as a person and as a leader. You watch them grow closer and learn to respect the different skill sets that each of them brings to the table. Danaerys teaches Jon how to play the political game when it’s necessary, and Jon teaches Danaerys the value of sacrificing personal emotional whims for a more cool-headed form of leadership. Eventually, their combined forces retake King’s Landing, but then they receive word that the Night King has breached the wall and is marching south. Jon confronts the Night King and defeats him. Everything appears to have gone back to normal but weeks or months later, reports come back that there are still white walkers roaming the north. Just as in real life, evil never rests. The Wildlings, whom Jon has befriended, desperately need a leader, given the still-present danger of the white walkers. Jon makes the decision not to be with Dany in King’s landing, but leaves of his own accord, rather than as an involuntary exile, to become the new King-Beyond-the-Wall. Jon and Dany, both have brought order and justice to a bleak world, but tragically they cannot be together. They each have to sacrifice their personal happiness for the wellbeing of their respective kingdoms. You have given the audience an overall positive ending that actually rewards the arcs that both Jon and Dany have undergone, first as individuals and then together, learning how to grow past their flaws and become strong but just rulers. But you also give them the realistic undercutting of political realities that force them to make a heartbreaking personal sacrifice in order to becomes those strong just leaders.

That would have been an ending that gives the audience the true pleasure of irony: watching how something heroic and beautiful, like learning how to be a great leader who brings peace and justice to an ailing kingdom, goes hand in hand with great sacrifices, like choosing not to be with the person one loves most dearly. The ending that the GOT fans actually got was rife with ambiguity and coincidence, but very little true irony. For a writer who, like Martin, Benioff, and Weiss, wants to write a truly mature and ironic story, capable of moving an audience over cast stretches of space and time, it behooves one to learn from miscarriages like the GOT finale, and draw inspiration from the best sources possible.

Bechdel Versus Truby on Strong Female Characters

If you’re interested in female representation in popular narratives, you’re probably already familiar with The Bechdel Test. For the uninitiated, the Bechdel Test—named after the cartoonist and author, Alison Bechdel—delineates three minimum requirements for writing strong female characters: the story must have at least two female characters, these two characters must speak to each other, and they must speak to each other about something other than a man. I find this is an excellent place to start if you want to put some strong female characters in your story. However, I should mention that I don’t think the problem of weak female characterization is as rampant as many feminist critics and authors claim. The lack of strong female characters is no more remarkable or telling than the lack of good characterization in general. The skill of characterization—female or otherwise—creates the same spectrum of quality that any other skill does, with a few extraordinarily talented people on one end, a few hilariously incompetent people on the other, and most falling into the sea of mediocrity between.

While outdated and prejudicial worldviews contribute to this spectrum of quality, they are by no means the only factor, and no matter how much we may wish that there were only strongly-written female characters, there will always be at least nine misfires for every success, just like most people who pick up a basketball can’t play in the NBA. Blaming the alleged lack of moral awareness in authors, critics and audience members for the lack of strong female characters only gets us so far. A more helpful exercise is to revisit what makes strong characters, and then talk about what this means for female characters specifically. I’d like to take Bechdel’s three criteria, and build off of them with some of the best advice I’ve gotten on characterization from another source: John Truby’s Anatomy of Story.

Let’s start with Bechdel’s first criterion: there has to be more than one woman in the story. When it comes to the importance of creating more than one character, The Anatomy of Story has this to say: “Most writers come at character all wrong. They start by listing all the traits of the hero, tell a story about him, and then somehow make him change at the end. That won’t work, no matter how hard you try.” I like this passage from Anatomy quite a bit because it points not only to a mistake that writers make when creating their characters, but one that critics and social commentators make when analyzing those characters. Often, I’ll read a review or an opinion piece that talks about what job a female character has, how good-looking they are, or about what race they are: “Why couldn’t she have been a CEO instead of a housewife?” “Does she really have to play into conventional beauty standards?” “Why was the hero white instead of a racial minority?” While writing female characters with these traits is admirable, unless the writer nails the fundamentals, their characters will just be a list of traits, empowering though those traits may be. A character could be a black, female CEO who doesn’t look like a Victoria’s Secret model and still be a flat, uncompelling bore.

Truby goes on to say that “the single biggest mistake writers make when creating characters is that they think of the hero and all other characters as separate individuals. Their hero is alone, in a vacuum, unconnected to others. The result is not only a weak hero but also cardboard opponents and minor characters who are even weaker." Truby further advises writers that the secret to creating a multidimensional character—especially a multidimensional protagonist—lies in the counter-intuitive strategy of fleshing out the supporting characters around them and making sure that they contrast. This is a much more comprehensive and dynamic way of looking at female characters than the minimum demands of the Bechdel test and it places us at the cusp of how Truby’s ideas for character can help us surpass the two remaining criteria of the Bechdel Test: have the two women talk to one another and have them talk to one another about something other than men.

To start, I would actually argue that the third criterion in the Bechdel test is actually its weakest. Love and romance are a huge part of life, and making our characters talk about something other than the opposite sex can limit us far more than it frees us. With that said, it is good to open up the possibilities for dialogue between two characters to more topics than romance. But what the Bechdel test doesn’t say about dialogue and character interaction in general is what makes those interactions meaningful. Truby’s next piece of advice for creating your cast of characters can help fill in that blank. Truby advises that every character needs to be a variation on the story’s central theme. In other words, each character has to have a different perspective on some pressing moral issue about what it means to live a meaningful life. It isn’t just that the characters have to talk about something both specific and novel, they have to actually disagree about it, because each one is going to have a unique perspective about the story’s central moral issue.

To illustrate this point, let’s return to the example of our black, female CEO. For simplicity’s sake, let’s also say that this character is our protagonist. If our protagonist is a CEO, then the theme of our story could be that power corrupts. In order to pass the Bechdel Test, we only need one other female character to appear in the story, and she has to talk to our CEO about something other than men; we could meet our CEO before she gets promoted to that position and have her talking in the break room with one of her female coworkers. They could talk about a huge client that our future CEO landed for her firm, and about whether or not she will get a promotion for it. However, if we’re going to build off of this minimal standard with Truby’s advice, we need more female characters and we need each of them to have a differing opinion on the theme of power. Our future CEO could be hell-bent on success, but very idealistic and think that all she has to do is prove herself. Our female coworker could be an older, more jaded member of the corporate world who tells our young CEO that she needs to be ruthless if she wants to get ahead. We could then add an old college friend of our CEO’s, who started off as a young professional but scaled back her professional life so that she could get married and have children. Then we could throw in another old college friend, who works as an activist and thinks that the whole corporate world is inherently corrupt. As the story progresses and our CEO pursues her goal over the course of the story, she will clash with all of these other female characters over what right action to take in various situations.

Finally, if we are going to do real justice to our female characters, we have to now stray completely outside the boundaries of the Bechdel test, and we have to give all of our characters, but especially our protagonist a weakness. Most writers are savvy to the necessity of character flaws, but they often do so in a way that is not particularly effective. They make the character a condescending know-it-all, but they constantly make them right. They make them an emotionless killing machine but they don’t show how the consequences of the character’s actions have any effect on them. In order for a weakness to do the work that it’s meant to do in the world of the story, it has to actually stand between the character and their goal. They have to pursue a goal that the audience clearly sees the hero gain or lose. When the character first attempts to reach their goal, something unexpected happens and they fail. They rationalize why this is, blame circumstances or other people, they make a half-assed attempt at change, or try to simply appear as though they have changed without having actually done the work. Finally, by the time the story reaches its climax, the character will have to look back on all the hard knocks that they’ve taken, and make the painful but mature step towards actually changing who they are and overcoming this weakness.

Writers who write in order to put a message out into the world often write a hero that has no weakness. They face off against a villain who is completely wrong, and manages to stand between the hero and their goal simply because they are powerful, not because they actually have a compelling and believable worldview. By the end, either the hero kills the villain, or persuades the villain over to their side. A handy little trick you can pull as a writer is, if you are trying to persuade a person who holds a particular point of view that they are wrong, don’t make that person your villain. Make them your hero! This is actually the most convincing way to make a compelling moral argument through story, and it’s the best way to win an audience over and get them to empathize with your characters.

If you’re a crusader that’s out to win hearts and minds over to a fresh perspective, then you need to add a little sugar to make the medicine go down. When a writer spends the majority of their time looking through the eyes of the character whose heart and mind they would like to expand, it shows the audience that you understand that everyone has to start from somewhere. If you think that women are pathologically career-oriented at the expense of family, you can make our CEO from earlier in this essay, start by pursuing her goal at work, only to find a man that gradually changes her mind. If you think that career-orientation is all well and good, but that it can fall prey to an inherently corrupt system, have your CEO begin by trying to play by the system’s rules, gradually come to realize what the price of cutthroat corporate politics really is, and finally decide to stand up for what’s right. If you think that a career really is what a modern woman should pursue and that you have to toughen up in order to achieve that, then you have to start your CEO naïve and overly trusting, and gradually thicken her skin and sharpen her political instincts so that she can finally make it big. Surround this arc with characters who all have sharply differing opinions on this arc, and you will create a multilayered web of female characters that will show your audience what life as a woman is like from many different angles, rather than preaching to them about the struggles of womanhood. This approach only makes people smile and nod like lemmings just to get you to shut up, or completely shuts them down because they know their intelligence has just been insulted.

If you’re a writer who cares deeply about increasing the quality of female characters in contemporary stories, don’t take the easy way out by blaming others for not already seeing the world in the way you would like them to see it. Instead, show that you have mastered a particular moral issue by using the craft of characterization to attack that moral issue from every possible angle. Then, emphasize what that issue looks like through the eyes of the person you would like to see change their mind. If you do that, you won’t have to wag your finger in people’s faces. You will reveal to them how they can change by having looked at the world through their eyes first.

Review: The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

When I was a kid, I liked rules. What’s more a lot of these rules came from my own parents, who I loved and who loved me. I was shy and cautious, and as far as I could see life was pretty simple; rules were for our own good, and people who stuck to the rules were happy, but people who broke the rules were not.  Of course this convenient dichotomy soon started to tear at the seams. Exceptions to the rules cropped up, and I found myself frantically trying to sew the seams back together. When that no longer worked I began tossing aside a few of my parents’ rules, first reluctantly, and eventually rather gleefully. I came to possess new beliefs, and the experience rather thrilled me. After a while though, some of my new beliefs began, in turn, to wear just as thin as my parents’ beliefs. Any set of beliefs, convictions, or values threatens to crumble at some point under the chaotic forces at work in the world. The drive to make sense of the world, especially by creative means, can sometimes run dry in the face of discouragement. It can become tempting to give in to despair, and save ourselves from being disappointed ever again by falling into a permanently standoffish relationship with the idea of belief itself. An artist struggling in the face of such despair could easily take refuge in a storytelling tradition fixated on aesthetics and form over everything else, and that sees the literary achievements of the past as no more than lines of text, arranged in a pattern made only to be broken down, and not as the stuff with which we connect ourselves to the world and to other people, and to help us live a more fulfilling life. But can an artist really be said to be creative if all they do is destroy what came before? For my money, I think such an artist only has half of the picture in mind. It’s human nature to test the rules of both our biological and literary parents, but the journey has to come full circle. David Foster Wallace played a key part in jolting the literature of the recent past out of despondency, and his comment on literature devoted to destruction still rings true:

"For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means we're going to have to be the parents."

Given his dissatisfaction with postmodernist preoccupations, it’s no surprise that Wallace wrote a review of Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank’s biography of the literary titan, and commended Frank’s commitment to giving readers an exhaustive understanding of the ideological climate in which Dostoevsky wrote his great novels. In his review, Wallace compares Dostoevsky’s struggle with the nihilism infecting Russian thinking with the “nihilistic spell” under which so many of Wallace’s own contemporaries had fallen. Compared to these contemporaries of Wallace’s throwing up in the umbrella stand, Dostoevsky is a rejuvenating voice of parental authority, calling readers and writers to provide some order to their house.

This is not to say that The Idiot is necessarily comforting. The nihilism against which Dostoevsky was fighting by writing the novel would not have been threatening if the despair that fed it were not a beast capable of persisting beyond nineteenth-century Russia, on into the literary culture in which Wallace and Frank found themselves twenty years ago, and continuing to trouble us today. The titular idiot, Prince Myshkin, embodies all the values that Dostoevsky hoped would save Russia from this despair. Like a loving parent trying to make everything better he plies the people around him with love: the delusional General Ivolgin, the manic Nastasya Filippovna, the violent Rogozhin, the obsequious Lebedev. They all cannot bring themselves to put aside their egos and put themselves under a loving hand, and most all of them come to tragic ends. They become trapped in a late-night revel of their own making.

Though despair overcomes most of the characters, the love with which Myshkin sought to cure them is just as tenacious. Though the loving would-be parent of Dostoevsky’s characters is banished to a Swiss Sanatorium, the need which he offers to fill does not go away. We might be trapped in an authority-free, spiritually malnourished environment, but we can be our own parents. We can bring some order to the world, even if it doesn’t last. Our hearts will break, but better to have a broken heart capable of love, than be the cool kid who tries to hold the world at arm’s length.

Why Good Art Fails

In a Goodreads review that I recently wrote, I quoted Neil Gaiman's short story, "The Mapmaker" in its entirety, which I will do again here:

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.

The tale is the map which is the territory.

You must remember this.

There was an emperor of China almost two thousand years ago who became obsessed by the notion of mapping the land that he ruled. He had China re-created in miniature on an island which he had constructed, at great expense and incidentally a certain amount of loss of life (for the waters were deep and cold) in a lake in the imperial estates. On this island each mountain was become a molehill, and each river the smallest rivulet. It took fully half an hour for the emperor to walk around the perimeter of his island.

Every morning, in the pale light before dawn, a hundred men would wade and swim out to the island and would carefully repair and reconstruct any feature of the landscape that had been damaged by the weather or by wild birds, or taken by the lake; and they would remove and remodel any of the imperial lands that had been damaged in actuality by floods or earthquakes or landslides, to better reflect the world as it was.

The emperor was contented by this, for the better part of a year, and then he noticed within himself a growing dissatisfaction with his island, and he began, in the time before he slept, to plan another map, fully one one-hundredth the size of his dominions. Every hut and house and hall, every tree and hill and beast would be reproduced at one one-hundredth of its height.

It was a grand plan, which would have taxed the imperial treasury to its limits to accomplish it; and it would have needed more men than the mind can encompass, men to map and men to measure, surveyors, census-takers, painters; it would have taken modelmakers, potters, builders and craftsmen. Six hundred professional dreamers would have been needed, to reveal the nature of things hidden beneath the roots of trees, and in the deepest mountain caverns, and in the depths of the sea, for the map, to be worth anything, needed to contain both the visible empire and the invisible.

This was the emperor’s plan.

His minister of the right hand remonstrated with him one night, as they walked in the palace gardens, under a huge, golden moon.

‘You must know, Imperial Majesty,’ said the minister of the right hand, ‘that what you intend is . . .’

And then, courage failing him, he paused. A pale carp broke the surface of the water, shattering the reflection of the golden moon into a hundred dancing fragments, each a tiny moon in its own right, and then the moons coalesced into one unbroken circle of reflected light, golden in water the colour of the night sky, which was so rich a purple that it could never have been mistaken for black.

‘. . . Impossible?’ asked the emperor, mildly. It is when emperors and kings are at their mildest that they are at their most dangerous.

‘Nothing that the emperor wishes could ever conceivably be impossible,’ said the minister of the right hand. ‘It will, however, be costly. You will drain the imperial treasury to produce this map. You will empty cities and farms to make the land to place your map upon. You will leave behind you a country that your heirs will be too poor to govern. As your adviser, I would be failing in my duties if I did not advise you of this.’

‘Perhaps you are right,’ said the emperor. ‘Perhaps. But if I were to listen to you and to forget my map-world, to leave it unconsummated, it would haunt my world and my mind and it would spoil the taste of the food on my tongue and of the wine in my mouth.’

And then he paused. Far away in the gardens they could hear the sound of a nightingale. ‘But this map-land,’ confided the emperor, ‘is still only the beginning. For even as it is being constructed, I shall already be pining for and planning my masterpiece.’

‘And what would that be?’ asked the minister of the right hand, mildly.

‘A map,’ said the emperor, ‘of the imperial dominions, in which each house shall be represented by a life-sized house, every mountain shall be depicted by a mountain, every tree by a tree of the same size and type, every river by a river, and every man by a man.’

The minister of the right hand bowed low in the moonlight, and he walked back to the imperial palace several respectful paces behind the emperor, deep in thought.

It is recorded that the emperor died in his sleep, and that is true, as far as it goes – although it could be remarked that his death was not entirely unassisted; and his oldest son, who became emperor in his turn, had little interest in maps or mapmaking.

The island in the lake became a haven for wild birds and all kind of water-fowl, with no man to drive them away, and they pecked down the tiny mud mountains to build their nests, and the lake eroded the shore of the island, and in time it was forgotten entirely, and only the lake remained.

The map was gone, and the mapmaker, but the land lived on.

This was a particularly galvanizing story for me to read as a fan of epic fantasy. While there are some examples of the genre that I still enjoy, many of its allures have since withered on the vine. One of the genre’s hallmarks is a detailed map that unfailingly graces the first page of any book within the genre. This facet of the genre was cribbed by legions of post-Tolkien fantasists, beginning with Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan and continued ad nauseam even into the present. After I got out of college, I began to read more widely in the fantasy genre and away from this trend. Neil Gaiman, obviously, was one. I more recently read M. John Harrison's Viriconium novels for the first time, which not only eschewed this practice but which Harrison deliberately set as the antithesis of the mapmaking instinct, which, in his words, seeks to "exhaustively survey a place that isn't there." Reading stories like Gaiman's and Harrison's opened up a brave new world for me, namely THE world. Writers like Gaiman and Harrison are a necessary antidote for the childish urge to memorize genealogies of completely fictional royal families and try to figure out to exactly what proportions the fictional sword of a fictional hero was made. 

But, though I had begun exploring fantasy and other genres of literature with a new lease on life, I soon encountered another variation of this same childish impulse that was all the more disturbing for occupying a more respected place in the culture at large: the allusion-heavy postmodern fiction of writers like novelist David Foster Wallace and screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann. Though on the surface these writers seem to have sidestepped the debilitating, mapmaking impulse, they have only fallen prey to a potentially even more vicious form of it. On the one hand they don't traffic in completely made up worlds; they allude to actual history and to works of literature that exist in the real world, but they can all too easily imprison their writers and readers in a never-ending labyrinth of references and allusions that are as detrimental to one's personal development as the fabricated histories of J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin. These stories pose the equal and opposite problem. Rather than representing a childish urge to blindly literalize a faux-medieval world, it represents an adolescent urge to suspend judgment on all worlds and not take anything literally. Rather than blindly pass a favorable judgment on one thing at the expense of everything else, one suspends judgment indefinitely. This might be bad enough but, just like the often emotionally stunted fans of genre fantasy, the devotees of this dense postmodern fiction have an urge, not just to wallow in their unfortunate tastes themselves, but to proselytize anyone unfortunate enough to get close to them. They seem to think that they are the lone voices of truth in a morally lost universe. This sense of moral superiority doesn’t hold any weight though, because it’s still art that tries to shield us from life rather than motivate us to live life.

This artistic ethos brings to mind a quote that I heard recently that was attributed to Freud, which is that all good mothers fail. Obviously, this is not literally true, but what Freud meant is that it is a struggle for all mothers who love their children to distinguish between when their child actually needs them and when they themselves just need to be needed. The older their child gets, the less they will—or at least the less they ought to—need them. Art has a very similar relationship to its readers. The problem that doorstop novels, both of the epic fantasy and the postmodern variety, pose to their readers is that they send out a siren call to any unlucky reader who buys too undiscerningly into their ethos. They don’t want their readers to get more in touch with what’s meaningful in life and then go out to experience it for themselves. They just want their readers to go on reading their books over and over again so that they never have time to actually go out and live life, not unlike an overprotective mother who shelters their child so well and so long that eventually they turn into a child in an adult’s body. It’s a heartbreaking business for mothers to reach the point where their children no longer need them, but if they want their children to live meaningful lives, that is exactly what they have to do. It’s likewise a heartbreaking business in many respects for an artist to think that the greatest compliment that can be paid to one of their books is that reading it made the reader want to immediately put it down when they were finished and take what they learned out of the library and into the wider world. Just like any mother worth her salt, a good artist must ultimately fail.