action, adventure, motives!

[marycatelli]

One thing throwing lots and lots of danger at your character does is push the question of motives into the background.

This is not always a good thing.


Sure, scrambling away from the bad guy gives your character an immediate purpose, and a motivation that doesn't even have to be spelled out, but a whole rush of such scrambles do not form a story, just a maniac sequence of episodes.  ("Of simple plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot episodic when there is neither probability nor necessity in the sequence of episodes.")

Smuggling in an overarching purpose is somewhat easy, as long as there are a few lulls, and points at which character choices are driven by the purpose and not the threat of the moment. 

It's his motive for this purpose, why he wants that end point, and what it will secure him, that gets interesting, because even if his motive is survival, as it is when running headlong from the ravening wolves, it isn't obvious merely from his running from wolves.  He'd do that even if his motive was to clear his father's name, locate his long-lost brother, show up his evil uncle. . . .

If the character has a chance to leave the danger, that's a good point, but it's not always practical to have such a moment; it would affect too much else of the plot.  Some other point to slither in the moments of reflection on what it's all about are needed -- and real fun to slither in.

Comments

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

… Ye-e-es, but it's not really necessary. In his charming essay, “Tom Swift Jr - an Appreciation,” my friend Jeff Duntemann observed that

Tom Swift as a character was almost completely devoid of distinguishing personality traits. He was brilliant, strong, patriotic, hard-working, and respected his parents—and beyond that was as featureless as a billiard ball. In one sense that was because Tom Swift was a sort of Halloween costume that we donned in our imaginations, and any specifics that clashed too strongly with our specifics might have made this identification difficult. (I had this problem with numerous other characters in later SF, which made me more a spectator than a participant in the action) …

Yet if the goal is cinematic, that spectator role is fine - preferred, even. Keith Laumer's masterpiece A Plague of Demons features a main character who is indeed featureless - we learn nothing about him even at times when he could be contemplative, because the narration is intensely visual and cinematic and complex characterizations would simply impede a ripping yarn.

Steep stairs led down. I followed them, came into a narrow corridor with a three-inch glare-strip along the center line of the low ceiling. There were doors set at ten-foot intervals along the smooth, buff-colored walls. Voices muttered at the far end of the corridor. I stepped to the nearest door, listened with my hearing keened, then turned the handle and stepped inside.
It was an eight-by-ten cell papered with photo-murals of Central Park, chipped and grease-stained at hand level. There was a table, a metal locker, a hooked rug on the floor, a tidy bunk, a single-tube lamp clamped to the wall above it beside a hand-painted plaster plaque representing a haloed saint with a dazed expression…



It was very still here; far away, I heard a worn turbine coming closer, then going away.

The moon was up now, an icy blue-white disc glaring in a pale night sky, casting shadows like the memory of a noonday long ago.

My instincts were as silent as everything else. Maybe the beating they'd been taking all evening had given them the impression I didn't need them any more… I had been playing it by ear from moment to moment; maybe that was the best technique, when half of what you saw was unbelievable and the other half impossible…

Note that even in a lull, when we could have learned something of the character from what he thought or remembered (“memory of a noonday” where?) this is specifically sidestepped.

So if this is the kind of story you’re writing, then it’s okay to lay on the action with a trowel without concerning yourself with characterization. [Did Conan the Barbarian ever take a moment to recall “That Old Gang of Mine”? Debate the philosophic depths of the universe? It is to laugh. – Whereas King Kull, Howard’s earlier character, did, interestingly enough, in between swinging his war-axe and chopping people apart like veggies on a kitchen cutting board.]

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

There's also the idea that how he evades the danger might figure into his characterization and his motives. I'm thinking of a story whose name I cannot recall, where the main character has been given a witness-relocation brainwipe, has no idea who he was or why the bad guys are after him - he appears harmless enough, but under attack he “lets go his conscious self and acts on instinct,” goes absolutely Bruce Lee / “Our Man Flint” badass (something like Summer Glau in the film Serenity, if you recall, as in, “where did THIS come from?”) and after he wipes the floor with the bad guys the marveling girl who is prepared to snark about his supposed “amnesia” sees that he's terrified, this mild-mannered conflict-avoiding schoolteacher had been possessed by a demon that's apparently living inside him and seems to be his true self…

[marycatelli]

I think that's more characterization than motives. Closely related, to be sure, but his motive in that scene, whatever his acts were, was to stay alive.

[marycatelli]

Not all stories, even action stories, tolerate such featurelessness.

And Conan certainly had his philosophic moments. His very first appearance -- his first scene -- has him contemplating his friend Prospero, who, not being king, can come and go freely. Or in Hour of the Dragon, where he's seriously tempted to give it all up. By this and other means, Howard conveys that Conan really loves being in harm's way.

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

You're right, of course - what made Andre Norton's own ripping yarns better was that she DID bother to give the main character motives, a back story. K Laumer's book was odd in that regard and certainly it is weaker for it as a novel, but believe me, as pulp fiction it is first-rate, and when you're reading it you don't notice this problem any more than you wonder what James Bond is truly feeling as he's swinging through one of his movie adventures…[The books are different. Ian Fleming crafted Mr Bond carefully, and few of the movie incarnations jibe.]


By the bye, speaking of pulp fiction, I'm talking about Robert E Howard's short stories for Weird Tales back in the 1930s. They are surprisingly few, considering what the decades have wrought since. As I recall, Conan's first appearance was as a stripling youth fleeing from wolves into an underground cavern where he battled a liche for possession of its sword, with which he put paid to the wolves… It was written into the 1984 Conan the Barbarian movie with Ah-nold, but the original story appeared fifty years earlier.

[marycatelli]

I'm not sure that's a Howard story -- it may have been one of deCamp's pastiches, or even one he worked up from an incomplete Howard story -- but I'm pretty sure that the only really young Conana story was "The Frost-King's Daughter."

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

I seem to have jumped time-tracks here. I'm seeing “The Phoenix on the Sword,” written in 1932 that begins exactly as you say, but I have been a fan of REH since high school and I have what I'd swear is every Howard 'Conan' story and I've never seen nor heard of this one.

At least I determined that Hour of the Dragon is what I have as Conan the Conqueror, so I'm not totally screwy.

[marycatelli]

It wasn't published in his lifetime, I believe.