Storytellersunplugged

(The real world intruded and prevented Matt Schwartz from posting an essay today, so I hope you won’t mind this revised piece I wrote a while back for my other column over at www.chizine.com)

By David Niall Wilson

Since my earliest days as a reader I’ve been enamored of books that form a series. I collected the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, then later moved on to fantasy trilogies, The Destroyer, and The Executioner, and have now “graduated” to detectives, forensic experts, and the occasional bounty hunter. I read audio books voraciously, and if you find a decent series coupled with a good narrator, this is a uniquely pleasant form of entertainment – like having a long, very extended episode of a favorite television show trapped in your car with you. I’m sure that we’ll soon hear more on this from Mr. Hill, who I’ve shared many hours with (he was reading the words of our own Mr. Steinberg, so it was quite the storytellers unplugged party). I have started by stating all of this, not because I I want to write about audio books, but because I want to establish that I am familiar with the ground I’m about to cover — the art of writing about continuing characters.

Stephen King has taken this art to a new level, finding ways to intertwine seemingly unrelated works with one another, dragging characters from his own literary past, answering questions left hanging in old stories and novels and weaving it all into a huge, wonderful tapestry. He’s damned good at it, but it isn’t a task for the faint of heart, or the fuzzy of memory. In fact, part of King’s success in this realm is probably attributable to the fact he has someone helping catalogue, map correspondences, and track inconsistencies. It’s a daunting task.

King’s form of serialization isn’t what I want to talk about, though. I’m interested in discussing the serial character. Kay Scarpetta, Spencer, Anita Blake, the 37th Precinct, Lucas Davenport, Dave Robicheaux, the list is endless. Each book finds our hero or heroine battling the forces of evil, or crime, or terrorists. We are presented with familiar faces, names, character traits and side plots. The familiarity is a good thing, in most cases. It establishes an immediate rapport between the author and the reader that has to be earned when the book is a stand alone project.

The problem lies in keeping the books and the characters that populate them fresh the sub-plots under control, and this is where nearly every series breaks down for me. If you follow the careers of authors famed for their serialized characters, you will notice an almost universal trend. The first book, maybe the first couple of books, receive wide critical acclaim. Readers and reviewers alike love the plot, the twists, and the introduction to these new characters that will grow easy and familiar over time. Then, as book after book is added to the series, an odd transformation takes place. The plots become secondary. The characters grow to fill so much of the book with their lives, their side-plots, and their over-repeated idiosyncrasies, that there isn’t enough story left to bring back the magic of the earlier volumes. Some series characters churn along for years like this, but most sink back and are replaced by new rising stars, until they eventually fade from view.

There are a couple of factors that play into this, I think, and I’ll touch on them briefly. One is that authors seem to tire of characters that don’t need to be invented. They are as familiar with their creations as the readers, and then some – and the tendency is to repeat descriptions and dialogue, to give the characters tics and memories they fall back on again and again. Readers of the series will find entire passages that might have come from any of the books in the series, repeating facts and memories, descriptions and pat phrases that take the place of crisp, new writing. The relationship between writers and their characters is as delicate as that between men and women, parents and children, and close friends. If you don’t work at it, it gets stale, and everyone loses interest. Never take that relationship for granted.

The second of the two major problems I detect in many of the series novels I’ve read is the urge to “one up” the last book. This leads to wilder and wilder flights of implausibility as the characters face harder and more impossible personal and professional challenges, never keeping a relationship and always reaching for some new plot device that is just out of reach. Sometimes the sense a reader gets from these novels is that the author thought of all the personal sub plots carefully, and then patched in a wild hodge-podge of unlikely events just to tie together the next episode in the character’s lives, without considering that the most important part of a dramatic book is the plot.

Every criminal faced is superhumanly strong, cunning, trained in some odd thing that no one else knows about, followed closely by the next criminal, even smarter and more impossibly elusive. It gets old, after a while, and you start to just want to see the character chase something real…have a good period in his or her life with a solid relationship and no “issues” and solve an honest-to-goodness interesting crime with believable components. Real life can’t be ignored or bent to fit a silly plotline without anyone noticing. You can’t just say that a lawyer can’t win his case when you’ve presented more evidence already than ten lawyers would need in the real world and assume that your readers won’t question it. It doesn’t matter that the lawyers trademark character flaw is his overwhelming self-doubt – once you’ve presented facts that don’t fit, you can’t expect people to just let you get away with it.

I find myself about to launch a couple of novels that will, if everything goes as planned, lead to series characters. One is my detective, Tommy Doyle, the Psychos-R-Us cop who will appear in the Maelstrom Books limited signed hardcover “SINS OF THE FLASH” – the other is Donovan DeChance, a magician, occult expert who gets involved in mysteries dealing with a wild array of dark, fantastical characters. The first novel in that series is titled “Vintage Soul,” and is making the rounds of publishers (including one who has specifically requested it) starting with the birth of the New Year. Both of these characters will hopefully develop a readership, and both will demand that I continue to develop the world that each inhabits, while keeping the plots intriguing and fresh. I never want to have a book I write remembered as just another book in a series. I want it to be remembered as “that book where that really cool thing happened,” and then, secondarily, “yeah, isn’t that one of those “so-and-so” novels?”

I realize this is apparently the opposite approach that most series novelists take, but I have little sympathy for them. I hear novelists complain about the work involved in writing a book a year. These are men and women with no day job, but only this one book to write. It boggles the mind. If you already know most of the characters, and already intend to populate half the pages with recycled fluff, how long can writing that book actually take? And why, given the above circumstances, can’t the plot that fills the rest of the pages be well thought out, memorable, and bring all those readers back for more? Maybe these aren’t questions that can be answered. Maybe characters just die of entropy. Maybe a series can only be kept fresh for so long before it’s impossible to twist your imagination back to their little world even one more time. I hope I never reach that point with my characters. Currently, I enjoy their company.

Onward!

DNW