on frying pans and fires

[marycatelli]

When the hero sets out on his quest, is he leaving his comfortable home for danger and unpleasantness?  Or is he leaving unhappiness behind in search of promise and possibility?

There are stories both ways.  Cinderella, no doubt, preferred the ball to the kitchen -- in all her various manifestation.  The heroine of East of the Sun, West of the Moon no doubt did not prefer the strange castle where she did not know what got into bed with her each night, and still less the quest over land and sea to recover him, to her old home.

Much, no doubt, depends on what incites the story.  "Terrible bad things have threaten -- or harmed, or overturned -- your safety" is needed to push people out of their comfortable homes.  A discontented soul is much easier to get moving, though some inciting incident is needed to make it plausible that they left just then.  (Lends itself more to a character-driven plot, though.)

Of course, both ways have their problems.  Lord of the Rings was leaving the comfortable home, and it was slow getting off the ground.  (Frodo's desire for adventures like Bilbo's did not get much play.)  Plus, of course (though Lord of the Rings had less of this), you have passivity problems with the hero.  Sitting around content with what you have may be admirable virtue, but it's very poor aesthetics.  Your character needs to want something -- which does, I suspect, help explain why so many of them start with an attack and the character charging off for revenge.

Then if the hero's trying to get away -- there is first of all the question of whether the character has real reason to get away.  There are Special Little Snowflakes who think it's an injustice to have to do their share of the farm-work; there are Poor Abused Children who are the butts of unmotivated malice; there are people who are leaving other characters in a lurch (which is why so many characters are on the cusp of adulthood, minimizing their chances of doing this). 

But even if the reasons are justified, there is the little matter of he can't get what he wants, or the story ends.  Even if he wants adventure -- once he gets it, he has to have another motive.  To be sure, staying alive works, but it's hard to make your hero active if all you do is throw trouble at him, so he's scrambling to react and ends up as passive a hero as anyone else who's pushed around. 

Then you have to raise the question of why the hero is continuing the quest after it's become clear that it's going to be even worse than back home -- it has to be, to raise the stakes -- and the hero doesn't even raise the question of why on earth aren't I just dumping this and going home and eating humble pie?

Part of bittercon 

Comments

[akilika.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I like Willow is this--he DOES have a comfortable home, with a wife and family he's loathe to leave; he IS leaving them in a lurch, since even before he left, it was doubtful he could plant his fields in time for the rains. He wants the respect of his townfellows (I think--the fair at the beginning would suggest this), and to practice magic, and leaving home makes it less likely for him to get either of them. We don't have a pat scenario where of course he's leaving, and it's just about time he found some adventure.

It makes the weight of his decision to go find a home for the baby (I can never remember her name), and to not return at all opportunities, more noteworthy--and the fact that he really does love the child despite his initial cantankerousness come through.

(It's not that I don't have my troubles with the movie, but I always found that part of it--the warmth and appeal of house and home, and the relationship between [baby's name] and Willow--rather nice. The stuff with the Brownies, on the other hand . . . and the fact that I really can't see Madmardigan settling down with Sorsha . . . and some stuff like that. But given that the stuff I like is the core of the movie, while the stuff I don't is window-dressing, the movie still gets my overall favor.)

[marycatelli]

If you stack the issues high enough, you can get the most homeloving person moving, and it does produce nice conflicts.

As opposed to the runaway, whose conflicts are at least somewhat, often largely, and sometimes entirely fixed by running away, meaning you quick need another conflict.

[idiosyncreant.livejournal.com]

Sometimes authors use the character running away from action to get them into all their plot-lines. This grates on my nerves. I didn't realize why until I looked a bit more closely at tension and motive in narrative.
And even then, until you mentioned the ways characters get moving, it didn't occur to me this was kind of the backward motive.

Something about the "leaving the old place for better" side of this I never thought about before is I don't identify much, and feel much more distant. Harry Potter, 8 Days of Luke, James and the Giant Peach--I didn't grow up with quite such awful adults in my life, so it feels foreign.

Frodo, Cimorene of Dealing with Dragons, characters who are forced into adventure, or are given reason to join it from a fairly common life connect with me more.

I do know what it's like to have life change dramatically for reasons I don't control--my family moved overseas when I was a teenager. I guess that's rather personal.

I wonder if people are divided a bit by their own background, which they find more familiar, which is more fascinating in a stranger-way.

[marycatelli]

A lot of people identify with the "awful adults" situation through some imaginative exaggeration of their own conflicts (with some white-washing of their own faults).

[stormsdotter.livejournal.com]

This came up in my wiring group, with the joke that there's a Star Ward Quote for everything. "But that would lead them back...home."

My main character wants to go home, but his party member points out that The Bad Guys have already killed one of his friends. If he goes home, they'll follow him and kill all his friends.

[marycatelli]

Motivation!

And since he wants to go home, he will not just be content to run away -- he will want to kill or otherwise disable the Bad Guys.

[hkneale.livejournal.com]

Never put much thought into it. I never got much past the reasoning behind characters doing what they do beyond that they know if they don't do it, Bad Things Are Going to Happen.

As I didn't grow up in a very emotionally supportive environment, I was continually trying to run away from uncomfortable situations. (Prolly explains why I moved to the other side of the planet.)

I'll have to consider that in my next story: emotionally osmosive motivation.

My current WIP features Our Anti-Hero who is trying to convince Our Heroine to leave her home. She spends an entire book (out of a trilogy) resisting leaving her home. It's not until he threatens to destroy her home entirely that she agrees to leave.

[marycatelli]

My only fear with writing such a work is that the period of staying home would lack progression. But I suppose Our Anti-Hero can continually ratchett up the pressure.

[hkneale.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what happens.

Anti-Hero: Marry me!
Our Heroine: (realising he's the Epitome of All That's Bad) No!
AH: (Making bad things happen) Marry me!
OH: (not falling for his tricks) No!
AH: (Slowly killing off her support group) Marry me!
OH: (Sobs) NO!
AH: (Brings war to area) Marry Me!
OH: (copes with disaster) No!
AH: (Brings war to doorstep) Marry Me!
OH: (Realises that he will never stop, and will destroy all she holds dear) Only if you make all this go away.
AH: Yes!!!
OH: Well?
AH: (keeps his promise) Marry me!
OH: (with reluctance and honour) All right. (Lives to regret it. But hey, the village is safe.)

[marycatelli]

killing her support group? Is there a particular reason why she did not express her displeasure in a non-verbal form? Say with a very pointed argument?

[aamcnamara.livejournal.com]

This is something I'm twisting around in my head right now. One of the things I know I have to do with the second draft of this novel I'm revising is give the main character a motive to get out the door in the first place.

The motivation that I'm currently considering doesn't quite seem to fit with either of those modes, though--initially, she'd be leaving to help a friend, and only then get drawn into What Is Wrong. Unfortunately, no one else seems to know about it, dot dot doom-laden dot.

But it's still intriguing to consider it in light of that construction, and see how the implications (of it being the "help a friend" instead of anything else) resonate back on what kind of heroine she is, what sort of choices she makes, etc.

(Here via bittercon.)

[marycatelli]

Realizing your character lacks motivation can be a real pain.

There was a time where the characters would never tell me their motives in the first draft. I had to write out the story, and then, having gotten all the action down, they would tell me why it happened.

But there's no reason why it can't be six of one, half a dozen of the other, if her original setting is rather annoying in some respects but useful in others, because it's reliable, or something.

[aamcnamara.livejournal.com]

I think everyone has that sort of relationship with wherever they live--annoying in some respects, useful in others, or whatever it is. Which is helpful in that you can take that balance and tip it whichever way is useful for the story. (But it's less realistic if you don't include at least a little of the other side, probably.)

Sometimes I don't figure out why until well after the first draft, or if I do it doesn't make it onto the page. Still we soldier on!

[marycatelli]

the delights of revision