You Shouldn't Buy My Book (and I don't like Stranger Things)

There are two things I'm not supposed to say today: 1) I don't like Stranger Things, and 2) You shouldn't buy my book The Exiled Monk. 


The Netflix show Stranger Things is incredibly popular right now. My social media feeds are filling up with praise and delight for the show. But I don't really like it. I'm not supposed to say that, though. It's unpopular to have an unpopular opinion. I'm supposed to like what other people in my friend-group like. And if I don't then I'm clearly wrong. Too many people like it for it to be bad so I must be wrong for not liking it. Right?

Or so the logic goes. For some reason (about which I have some theories) we've decided that there should be one objective preference that everyone must abide by. I know it helps us to create groups of like-minded people. I know it helps us to know, in general, if we'll like other things that the people in our group like. I know that it feels good to enjoy the same things as other people. But it also feels terrible to be on the outside looking in when the conditions for inclusion are whether or not you prefer a certain show or movie or book (also I've never read Harry Potter).

And that's why you shouldn't buy my book. Or rather it's the very reason I don't want you to buy my book. I don't want you to buy The Exiled Monk because you know me. I don't want you to read it because you think it'll make me happy. I especially don't want you to review it positively because of that. What I want for you is what I want for me: the freedom to choose what we prefer and to like what we like.

On paper I should like Stranger Things. I fit all of the demographic markers for someone who should love the show. I grew up in the 1980s as a geeky kid who was way more into books and video games than sports and girls. I'm still into a lot of geeky stuff (I subscribe to YouTube channels about astrophysics and forging fantasy weapons). I like a lot of the same things that overlap with Stranger Things, but I don't like the show. It's okay. It's not bad. I just don't like it. And that's okay!

Both the creation of art and the enjoyment of it are intensely personal experiences. To try to normalize them across a group or to use the enjoyment of a particular piece of art as an identity marker is to miss the uniqueness of each piece of art and every person's appreciation of it.

I really want you to love The Exiled Monk as much as I do. It's precious to me. But it's also a piece of art. It might not resonate with you. That's okay. I won't be offended.

I would be offended if you pretended to like it. If you told me it was good but really thought it was boring. Please don't do that. You don't have to like it to like me, or even to like my writing. I'll write something different next (because I can't seem to help myself). You can come back to see if that works for you. The Exiled Monk is nothing like Like Mind which are both nothing like the project I'm working on right now (hint: Tinker Bell meets Fight Club). 

But if you do like it (*squee*)... Well, that would make me exceedingly happy (*jumping-up-and-down*). I wrote this story because I love it, but I published it because I think that it might be something you could love too. If you do, please let me know. Let others know by leaving a review. They might love it too. Or they might not, and that's okay.

Atop a Mountain

As I met the story that was born in Ireland, and as I imagined the world that story inhabited, I found myself going again and again to the thin places where the barrier between the world of the known and the world of the unknown cannot quite keep the two separate. The thinnest place I found--that I have ever found--was atop a mountain rising from the sea. 

After having climbed the steps of Skellig Michael.

I had decided to go to Skellig Michael during our time touring Ireland after we were done farming (a tourist visa is only 90 days long so we only stayed through the summer). We rented a car and drove through the southwest of Ireland, stopping in the town of Portmagee where we could see both of the Skelligs in the distance (Lesser Skellig is an uninhabitable rock and protected bird sanctuary). We boarded a boat and took the seven mile trip to Skellig Michael. There we climbed over 600 stone steps, laid without mortar, to the top of the rocky islet where a few monks had built a monastery fourteen centuries ago.  

At its height the monastery probably had no more than a dozen people living there. They dwelled in dry-stone huts that were built up in concentric rings. They gardened and fished to support themselves, but with the rest of their time they studied, prayed, and copied down the texts that caused Thomas Cahill to suggest that the Irish monks saved Western Civilization. 

The graveyard at Skellig Michael. 

For me this was a coming home of sorts. If they would have let me I would have stayed there on the island, but the tour allots only about two-and-a-half hours for the entire experience. In many ways this was where my heart and my head began to reunite. This was the evidence of people who had done what I was trying to do. They chose to camp out in the thin places, to befriend them, and to make a way for others to experience them. 

From the top of a mountain or an island you can see far. It is possible to pick a point in the distance and set yourself towards it. But while the mountain can give you the vision to see where you want to go, it cannot show you how to get there. I had experienced the thin places and I knew, from the top of that mountain, that I wanted to share that with others, and even now I'm still not entirely sure how to get there. But for me The Exiled Monk is a part of that journey. 

I didn't know, standing there amidst the gravestones, that I would write The Exiled Monk or that I would try to make a living writing fiction (I was going next to interview to be a preacher on a different island, Maui). I didn't know that working to start a new church with friends would lead to heartbreak as cancer took my friend and scarred my community. I didn't know that instead of starting churches I would walk with them through the process of closing. I didn't know that grieving for my lost friend, my lost community, and my lost career would lead me to a place of knowing myself. 

I often recall standing atop Skellig Michael, smelling the sweet and acrid scent of sea air and sea birds, hearing the distant crashing of waves and the immediate rush of wind, and looking out over the steel-blue water. I was overjoyed to see that island again in the most unlikely place, at the end of Star Wars: The Force Awakens where Luke had been hiding and awaiting Rey. I wanted to be Luke Skywalker growing up and in that moment I wanted to be him again, standing alone on a windswept rock, being in a thin place, wrestling with the certainty that I've been taught and the doubts I live with daily. 

I love The Exiled Monk and I'm terrified. I'm so scared that what I love will be hated, despised, or worse still ignored. I'm afraid that my journey of grief and joy, excitement and pain, certainty and doubt, won't matter. I fear sharing with you how important this book is to me. But not as much as I fear what it would do to me if I didn't. 

The Exiled Monk is a story about coming of age, it's about magic and romance, danger and desperate plans, about leaving behind the old to enter into a new and larger world. It's about all of those things to be sure. But it's also about what I saw from that thin place on top of Skellig Michael, the far off vision where I set my sights. It is a place of courage and wholeness, where thought and emotion are commingled, where vulnerability is strength, and where hope is the only way to face fear. I have to honor the story by living it out. I'm scared to share this with you because it is my heart, but I must and for exactly the same reason. 

The Thin Places

Writing The Exiled Monk took years, not because it was a difficult task to put down words on paper, but because it required me to go to the thin places, where the spirit-realm touches and even intrudes into our own. The Celtic Christians identified these places as holy, that is they were set apart for that purpose. I had to find my own thin places to understand what I was writing about as Peek found the listening places described in the book. 

During our time in Ireland where I began writing professionally and had my first images of the story that would become The Exiled Monk run through my mind, I learned how to meditate. 

Our host in Ireland, in addition to having a farm with horses, chickens, and a donkey, also taught meditation classes. She invited us to join the classes where she led students through both guided and free meditation times. I hadn't spent much time meditating before. A few church retreats had some meditation exercises, and I experimented on my own some, but I hadn't ever spent so much time in focused meditation. Learning how to sit with my thoughts was important, vital even, but I also learned how to listen beyond myself. 

Quick aside, I grew up in a Christian tradition that is highly focused on logic. I heard, on multiple occasions, that I shouldn't trust my feelings because they may have been caused by a spicy burrito as readily as by spiritual forces. Emotions were seen as fallible, weak, and suspect. The idea that God might try to speak to any of us through the Spirit (apart from the bible) was seen as heresy. My head-heart disconnection was due, in no small part, to the fruit of this philosophy. But in Ireland I began learning the strength of emotions, the voice of the Spirit, and the power of the thin places. 

I share this because it's a part of my story and that means it's a part of The Exiled Monk, but please don't take this to mean that the book is an attempt at proselytizing or converting anyone to my way of thinking about faith. It's quite the opposite of that, in fact. 

During my time in Ireland I met a woman whom I helped with some chores. As we were talking about how I came to Ireland I shared about my education and faith. It's often awkward when I share that I'm a pastor, and it was more so in Ireland where many people have strong feelings about the Catholic Church and the abuses that it covered up for many years. I wanted to explain briefly how I was different than a Catholic priest so I said, "I teach people to read the bible for themselves and come to their own conclusions." She laughed and laughed and laughed at that. When she saw our host again she told it like it was a joke: "Hey, read the bible and figure it out for yourself! Look at me, I'm a pastor!"

Her joking was good-natured, but it shows how odd it can be when a religious leader doesn't demand other people agree. A part of what I learned through meditating and visiting the thin places in Ireland was that faith--real belief--can't be taught it has to be experienced. In writing about religion in The Exiled Monk I wanted to make sure it wasn't a Chronicles of Narnia type allegory for Christianity. I spent time inventing a religion that draws on elements of Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and natural spiritual religions because I don't want to try to tell you what to believe through a story. Instead I want to tell a story about someone who is trying to figure out what they believe and why. 

We each have to come to our own conclusions about the thin places. Some of us might find wholly rational and physical explanations, others might engage in mysticism, others still might learn religious practice, and, if you're like me, you'll walk a path that's all of the above and more as you see the strengths and weaknesses in all of those approaches to life. In many ways The Exiled Monk is a story about what it's like when everyone else thinks they know the right path for you, and the work it takes to learn what path to walk for yourself. 

More on the path I walked and how I'm grateful for where I'm from in a later post. 

The First Thought (of Many)

My novel, The Exiled Monk, was born on a farm in Ireland in the summer of 2010, but it still had a long way to go, and so did I.

The entrance to Wickle Cottage, Innishannon, Co Cork, Ireland.

My wife and I would work on the farm during the day and I would write articles in the evening to make a little money for us to go places on the weekends and to save up for a tour at the end of our summer. Most of the time things worked well, but occasionally I would need to go into town to get some more focused writing done. So I would leave Wickle Cottage and walk down the hedge-lined lane to get into the small village of Innishannon. There I could get a cup of coffee and some wifi at the Found Out Cafe, along with some distraction-free writing time.

We knew we weren't going to be able to do everything we wanted to do while we were in Ireland, so we started to prioritize and, very quickly, the UNESCO World Heritage Site on Skellig Michael, rose to the top of the list. It's a 6th century monastery on a remote island in the Atlantic where the Celtic monks would copy and preserve not only biblical texts but also the great artistic and philosophical works that would connect Renaissance Europe to the Classical ages of Greece and Rome.

The main street of Innishannon village on a fair summer's day. 

I got to thinking about what it must have been like to brave the ocean and the unknown to go to that remote island. While walking between the hedges my mind wandered to the fate of a boy who paddled himself out, away from everything he'd ever known, in the hopes that what he would find on the island would be worth the risk. I got lost in a story in my mind. It was like daydreaming, but not about something I might do or had done. I was immersed in my imagination of that boy's experience, his fear, his determination, his exhaustion, and his unyielding hope.

While the story was born out of my growing need to reconnect my head and my heart after studying in seminary, The Exiled Monk really began to take shape as a narrative when I met that boy and began to wonder why he was paddling to an island on the horizon. What was he fleeing? What was he drawn towards? Why?

Those questions would beget questions of their own as I struggled to understand the gargantuan task of writing a novel. I sought to place that boy and those questions in a context that I'm familiar with and have loved since I was a boy: fantasy fiction.

In my very first iteration this nameless boy was sent by the monks on the island to meditate in a cave. In his meditation he found a magic that turned the cave from dark stone to translucent quartz and awoke from his meditative trance to see the sun shining through the rock around him. That scene barely survived (in a drastically altered form) to make it into the book, but for me it was the first thought that this boy and this journey might be a story that I could write, a world I could reveal, a novel lurking within me waiting to come out.

What has remained, both in The Exiled Monk and in my life, is the connection with that boy who would leave behind the familiar, the normal, the safe, and go out into the unknown until finding that point (in actuality the many, many points) where it feels too difficult, too far, too much, too overwhelming, but going back isn't an option. In the novel Peek repeatedly faces moments where there's no way home, there's no way to make things like they were, there's no way to undo what has been done, so the only way out is through. The only way to go is forward. That feeling has characterized so much of my life over the past seven years, especially my writing life.

I have wanted to give up more times than I could count. But each time I have felt too committed to turn around, too invested to give up, and so I persevered. I don't know how many times I thought I was too stubborn for my own good or wondered quietly if I would fail so miserably that it would have been better to have never started to begin with. When I started writing it was euphoric, I was embarking on a new adventure. But as I struggled to wrap up the narrative, as I struggled to incorporate feedback, as I struggled to rewrite the story completely, as I struggled to understand the magic and religion in the world, as I struggled to fund the Kickstarter (and as the first one failed), as I struggled to fulfill the Kickstarter, as I struggled to learn the writing industry, as I struggled to build an audience, as I struggled to not feel like a fraud, failure, fake for not doing everything without struggle, I would look back over my shoulder to see how far I'd already come before turning again into the struggle and giving myself to it.

It started with the thought of a boy paddling out to an island as I walked into the village wondering if I could write enough to pay for the trip to that island (spoiler: I did and I'll tell you about it next).

The Birth of a Story

I started writing professionally while living in Ireland seven years ago. My wife and I were WWOOFing and needed some sort of income. I found a place to write how-to articles online that would pay me for it. So after spending the day working on the farm I would spend the evening writing articles about whatever I could explain quickly enough to make it worth the pay. It was good work, especially in its flexibility, but it also created a growing need in me to do more with my words. How-to articles are an okay way to make some money, but they don't do much to scratch the creative itch.

I had tried NaNoWriMo the year before (let us never speak of that manuscript again), but there was something missing in my writing. I didn't know what it was (in many ways I'm still learning). But on the nineteenth day of June I began to discern what it was. I had lost the way from my head to my heart. I wasn't reading for pleasure. My thoughts weren't connected to my passions. Something was broken, I realized, and needed to be mended.

Reading for pleasure after a day of farming in Ireland, kept company by Nala the dog.

It was there,  looking out over the fields and farms in the fading light of a long summer day, that I first realized that while studying theology in seminary had been a great experience, I hadn't maintained a connection to my feelings as I engaged with my thoughts (and the thoughts of others). One of the simple indicators was that I hadn't been reading for pleasure. Books, that used to be my joy and refuge, had become toil. I started to fix that while sitting in a field in Ireland.

In many ways that's where the story that became The Exiled Monk was born. I still had far to go before it would become the story it is today, because I had far to go to become the writer I am today. Stories are, to be sure, a plot with characters. They are sentences and paragraphs and chapters arranged together in a particular way. They are all of that, but they are also more. Stories are the resonance of experience and empathy shared in such a way that they connect people together. I had to relearn this truth by relearning my own story as both a series of events with characters, and also a connection to myself--a reconnection of my head and my heart--shared in a way that connects with others.

For me faith had become an intellectual exercise. I had studied and exegeted and researched and understood the history and logic of my faith, but I had lost the feeling of my faith. But it was in that losing, that disorientation, that I began to understand my own story. The faith I grew up with had been a steadfast support for me. When I didn't have a place to belong in school I always knew I belonged at church. When the expression of emotion felt dangerous, I could always emote through religious practices. But when those were all analyzed, systematized, and circumscribed by intellect I lost the way to belonging, support, and vulnerability. It would take me years to begin to find the way through, the way to reconnect my head and my heart, and this story helped me to navigate that wilderness.

I'll share more about the creation of The Exiled Monk in the coming days.

New Short Story in a New Anthology -- Chronicle World: Feyland

I like making up new worlds. That's a big reason why I love to write scifi and fantasy: I get to imagine everything about the world. But there's also a danger in getting to make up everything about a world. Laziness.

Yeah, I know, it seems like the least lazy thing to have to make up the geography, history, demography, and thaumaturgy of a place (and it's not an easy task), but for my imagination it can be easier than having to fit the pieces of parts of a story into a world that already exists.

Robert McKee in his book Story talks about the power of creative limitations. He compares limitations to the weights in a gym that offer resistance. The limitations might be harder to move, but the act of moving them, of working within them, pushes creativity.

In Chronicle Worlds: Feyland I got to push against the weight of another author's world.

Anthea Sharp has a series of books set in a near-future where there are hover cars, fully immersive virtual reality games, and a new game "Feyland" that becomes a portal to the very real land of Fairies.

Since I've worked in technical support (and computer sales, and computer training, and computer repair, and writing about computers and software) I couldn't help but wonder what the help tickets must look like when someone accidentally falls into a mythical realm instead of a video game. I also wondered how people from different cultures would interpret the Celtic-Anglo land of Fey.

The constraints of Anthea's world made me think of things that I wouldn't have considered otherwise. I researched the fairie-like legends of Africa and Asia, North America and Central Europe. I learned about the beneficial fairies that helped the Aborigines of Australia and the awful demons that preyed upon the people of India.

I chose to set my story in a call center in India, partly because it has become such a cliche in tech-support circles and partly because I wanted a chance to look at the unique culture of India (in actuality many unique cultures) interpreted through the lens of Feyland.

Ranjeet Nagar keeps getting odd support tickets that don't seem to have anything to do with the game and certainly don't comply with his script. He doesn't have a testing rig to be able to figure out what's going on and unless he can find one the demons that used to frighten him as a child will pour into his world with very real terror and harm.

Read my story, "Tech Support" and eleven other fantastic tales set in the world of Feyland. It's only $0.99 for the launch (until July 6th)!

6 Ways an Author is Like a Role-Playing Character

I've been doing this whole writing thing for a few years now and I have come across, in roughly equal numbers, writers with varying styles and writing guides promoting those various styles. I know writers who are hard-core engineers and plot out their stories using spreadsheets and Github. I know other writers who use note cards taped to the wall to visualize their tale. Others still eschew plotting altogether and simply write words until the story coalesces out of nothingness.

All of that got me thinking about Dungeons and Dragons. Follow with me here.

There's No Such Thing as a Bad Character or Writer

When you first sit down to start playing D&D (or any such role playing game), the first step is to create a character. The character is created by rolling dice and assigning those numbers to different statistics that define the abilities of the character. The rolls often determine how the character will need to be played, which attributes will be emphasized and which will need to be minimized.

If I were to roll up a character with a lot of strength and charisma but with very little wisdom or intelligence, I wouldn't play that character as a mage or cleric, but that same set of attributes would make a nice cavalier. There isn't really a bad roll when it comes to character, just limits on the way that a character can be played.

The same is true for writers. Some of us are ideal engineers, others are poets, others are marketers, and others are professors, but in the end every one of us can write a compelling story. The stats we rolled and the characters we play don't exclude us from writing, but they do force us to consider the best way to take advantage of our strengths and minimize our weaknesses.

We've All Got High Stats

Authors and D&D characters come pre-set with strengths. For the authors it's a mix of nature and nurture that gave them abilities that turn word-piles into stories. In many ways the abilities of an author are as random and uncontrollable as the roll of the dice for an RPG character. None of us had any choice in where we were born or to whom, we weren't able to decide our genetics or our economics. We all just came into this world with the attributes that were given to us and we have to make the best of it. 

The engineer, by trade, may excel at creating believable, well-researched worlds, while the philosopher may force the readers to ask the deep questions. Neither is any less a writer though their strengths vary wildly. 

We've All Got Dump Stats

The flip side of the randomness of our strengths is the utter randomness of our weaknesses. Some of us are born with disabilities or conditions, some of us develop them throughout life. Some authors are crippled by dyslexia others by depression. Some authors struggle with writer's block, unable to come up with ideas, while others are overwhelmed by writer's lock being swarmed by so many ideas they can't seem to choose which one to write. 

If your RPG character has terrible dexterity, that doesn't make it an unplayable character, but it does demand that you take the stat into account while playing. If you don't, the game or the writing may not be very much fun. 

Rigidity Causes Struggle

If you were to sit down, before rolling up a character, and decide that you could only play a warrior in your D&D game, you might be in for a long slog. If you roll up a character with no strength or constitution, your warrior will be doing precious little damage with each hit and have even fewer hitpoints with which to stay alive. You could, if you were committed, push through, get gear that minimizes your weakness, and never leave the side of your party's healer, but every fight would be a struggle to manage the stats of your character. 

Sometimes as a writer, I want to do things the way my heroes do. I want to write Game of Thrones or The Lord of the Rings, but I'm not G.R.R.M. or J.R.R.T. (I don't even have that many initials). If I were to insist on writing according to a certain formula or in a certain style, I might be able to do so, but not without constantly managing the struggle of that choice (and likely relying on my cleric-editor to bail me out time after time). 

Flexibility Leads to Fun

If, instead of choosing to force your character down the path of a warrior, you decided to emphasize your character's strengths you might play it as a bard or a thief that doesn't need to be strong or tough. Having that flexibility gives your more options when playing the character which can lead to more fun in the actual game. Struggle is, absolutely, a part of both role-playing and writing, but so too is the fun of rolling high and doing awesome things. 

By no means am I saying that authors should only concentrate on their strengths and avoid their weaknesses, because we all need to work and grow in our craft, but if it's not fun some of the time, then it'll be increasingly difficult to keep going when the struggle comes. Keeping fun as a part of the work is the carrot that balances out the stick. 

Adventure, Loot, Level Up, Repeat

The point of D&D isn't to craft the best character with the best stats, but rather to go on adventures. The character serves as a vehicle for getting to the adventures not a replacement for the adventures. I'll be the first to admit that it can be fun to obsess over abilities and backstory and gear to tweak a character until it's shiny and perfect. But then that character needs to get beat up and messy as it tackles the challenges in its world. The reward for that effort and struggle is loot and experience that you can use to make your character better so you can go out and have more adventures to get more loot and experience and so on. 

As a writer it is absolutely important to set the stage for adventure by working on the building blocks. Take classes, learn grammar, dissect story, understand character, go to conventions, participate in workshops, even get a degree. But all of those things, as fun and important as they are, exist to get you ready for adventure, not to replace it. There comes a time when you, the shiny, perfect author, must go out and face the adventures. You may be battered and messy after the attempt, you may fail, you may need near-magical healing to get back on your feet, but without adventure there's no improvement and no way to get to bigger adventures in the future. If you don't get rejected submitting your story, if you don't get bad reviews, if you don't have lackluster sales, you lose out on the experience and the leveling up without which greater adventures would be much more difficult to handle. Also, the loot of the writing adventure can be pretty nice. Writing credits, awards, good reviews, and plain-old money all help to make the next writing adventure that much more fun. 

Metaphors break down at some point. You probably don't have orcs or goblins to slay in your writing life (unless you do), but the point is this: there is no one template for what makes a writer. If you're a dyslexic introvert with a degree in chemical engineering or a natural poet who's the life of the party and struggles with depression, you have just as much opportunity to thrive as a writer. But trying to fit yourself into someone else's template, trying to judge your weaknesses by someone else's strengths, or trying to perfect yourself before you ever dare put down words on the page will keep you from writing as surely as trying to run a thief with no dexterity or a mage with no intelligence. 

Why I Won't Watch the Star Wars VII Trailer and You Shouldn't Either

Today (April 16, 2015), the second teaser trailer was released for Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens.

I'm not going to watch it. I didn't watch the first one. I won't watch any more that come out.*

Trailer Failure

Trailers ought to exist to help people decide to watch a movie. They ought to entice people to put their money down, sit in a chair, and enjoy a cinematic experience. But what most trailers have become is a hype machine (yes, there's a difference between hype and marketing).

I'll watch trailers for movies that I've never heard of to help me decide if I want to watch them. But I won't watch a movie I've never heard of in a first-run theater. My first-run movies are rare gems. Usually I don't watch more than about 5 per year. I'll watch second-run movies (at the cheap theater for $3) with less knowledge of the film and/or by watching the trailer. The total investment is quite a bit less, so I'm willing to take more of a risk. If the movie isn't interesting enough to get me out of my house, I'll watch it on Netflix or Redbox.

Hype vs. Marketing

Marketing is the age-old (or a couple of centuries old) practice of trying to convince people that they need to spend their disposable income on your product. You don't really need to market essentials. They pretty much sell themselves. You just need to market luxuries (including upgrades to essentials like fancy homes or gourmet food). 

Hype, on the other hand, is the intentional generation of communal emotions. It's the effort to get society to react to something. Marketing wants to motivate individuals to make a purchase. Hype wants to motivate groups to have an emotion. 

Hype is, by definition, irrational and manipulative. It is a snake consuming itself. The hype machine, when it works, creates a frenzy of people dressing up, standing in line for days, and posting frame-by-frame interpretations of a trailer on the internet.

Hype can occur naturally. It happened around the original Star Wars trilogy without massive changes to the movie marketing system. But once the marketers got a taste of the hype, they wanted more of it. They wanted to manufacture it. They wanted to control people's emotions rather than encourage them.

Story vs. Marketing

I tell stories for a living. There is a part of my soul that dreams about one of my stories generating the kind of hype that Star Wars has. But there's another part of me that wants my stories to be free of that kind of pressure. 

The story of the original trilogy was compelling. It connected with people in a powerful way that made them want to tell their friends about it. It painted a vision of a world that people wanted to inhabit. The story, the world, and the characters generated the hype of the original trilogy. The marketing was in making the best possible space opera and telling the most interesting story. 

I won't generate Star-Wars-level hype by manipulating people's emotions or trying to have the most exciting blurb for my next book. I'll generate the hype is my stories are so amazing that people want to live in the world I create. I'll generate hype if I create characters that connect with people in meaningful, compelling ways. 

Enjoy what You Love

I don't think you should watch the trailer for Star Wars VII. Of course, I'm assuming that you've already committed to watching it (I'll be there on opening day). 

Eschewing the hype machine doesn't mean you have to stop loving things. It doesn't mean you have to stop geeking out over your favorite entertainment. It doesn't mean that you have to stop enjoying all of the things that you enjoy. What I'm asking is that you enjoy things because you enjoy them, not because of a hype-machine that is trying to generate group-think. 

Enjoy what you love because it's good. Enjoy it because it makes you happy. Enjoy it because it's creates a compelling world that you want to live in. 

Not because a trailer came out -- eight months before the movie -- trying to make you wet your pants in fan-joy. 

But what do I know, I'm just an author. 

*Note: If I'm in the theater to watch another movie and the trailer comes on I won't close my eyes, I'm just saying that I'm not going to actively pursue watching the trailer. 

Call to What?

Throughout history we have seen very similar stories. They are the stories of the hero and his/her journey. The basic journey of the hero is a quest. But what actually happens on that quest is the hero is transformed into what they were destined to be.

Arthur becomes a king.
Luke becomes a jedi.
Harry becomes a wizard.
Katniss becomes a revolutionary.

All of those stories start with a call. In writing it's known as the Call to Adventure. Arthur draws Excalibur from the stone. Luke is given his father's lightsaber. Harry is given an invitation to wizard school. Katniss takes the place of her sister.

The underlying presupposition behind all of those calls to adventure is that the nascent hero is passive and must become active. They are being affected by their worlds and they are given a chance to affect their worlds in meaningful ways.

The power of the heroes journey is that we all want to create meaning. We all want to do something purposeful. We all want to stop having the world happen to us and start shaping the world. That's the call. Not necessarily to adventure, but to relevance. To meaning. To purpose.

But what is purpose?

In the past it was useful to prepare children to become adults with stories of battle (for the boys) and being rescued (for the girls). Even if the hearers of those stories were peasants, they still would be called upon to fight (for the boys) and to rely on people fighting (for the girls).

Purpose was survival. Purpose was protecting what was yours from those who wanted to take it from your. Purpose was addressing the lowest levels of Maslow's hierarchy.

The purpose for most people in throughout history was to secure safety. The hero's journey led people to protect themselves and those they loved. As a reward, the heroes would get love and belonging. The prince gets the princess and they live happily ever after.

Or, perhaps, they could win respect through achievement as Odysseus did after his journey.

Or, in rare cases, the end could be self-actualization, as in the story of Arthur and Camelot (though that seemed fated to crumble).

As our modern stories issue calls to adventure, they are often stuck in the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy. They focus on people seeking basic survival or safety or freedom. But most of the readers today have all of those things and much more. Most of the readers today struggle with gaining esteem or self-actualization.

So what are stories to do?

Stories can remind us of what we have. Post-apocalyptic tales tell us, in part, how great things are right now and how important it is for us to remember that. Even the smallest change could send us all back to the point where we must kill or be killed just to get enough to eat.

Stories can remind us of what we want. The world of Harry Potter is one where a boy finds belonging, friendship, and respect. He lacked all of those things in the muggle world and gained all of those things in wizard school.

Stories can also remind us of what we need. Luke chose compassion over revenge. He chose selflessness over pride. He chose redemption instead of justice. Despite all of the things that the Empire and Vader had done, Luke offered forgiveness.

Stories can draw us into our own adventures, but they can also leave us mired in past conflicts. As we tell stories and hear them, we need wisdom to know which stories are calling us to the adventure of maturing and which are calling us to the false-adventure of reliving the past.

Which stories have called you forward? Which have been false-adventures?

Note, these thoughts were in response to the Novel Ideas podcast.

What Makes a Bad Guy Bad?

The Good, the Bad, and the Violence

A few weeks ago I finally got around to watching the movie The Equalizer. In it, Denzel Washington plays a construction store worker (think Home Depot) who lives a mysterious life (I'm going to spoil some stuff, so if you haven't seen the movie, you might want to stop now).

We find Denzel sleepless and a regular at an all-night diner frequented by him and a young prostitute with ambitions of becoming a singer. When the prostitute is hit by a john, she fights back. When her pimp finds out, he puts her in the hospital. Denzel's character tries to buy her out of slavery, but is turned down by the Russian Maffia.

So far, so good. The script hit all the right notes and set up for some cool (if gory) action. But when the thugs decline the offer to buy the girl out of slavery, Denzel ruthlessly murders them all (I think there were six people in the room).

In response, the Russians send over their best hitman to find Denzel and end him.

Here's where the writers of the movie faced a problem. Denzel was meant to be the good guy, but he committed premeditated murder on more than one occasion in the film (as opposed to killing in self defense). They needed a villain who was worse than that so their Russian hitman is seen at one point killing one of the other prostitutes for no reason.

In order to set up a situation in which Denzel is the "good guy" the "bad guy" has to be significantly worse. If Denzel is a murder, then the hitman has to murder women.

How Good is Good? 

There's a code of violence in fiction that tells us where the characters are on the good-bad scale. A white-hat, pure-good hero doesn't kill. The cowboy shoots the guns out of the hands of the bad guys. But some violence is always to be expected from the hero. The good hero with the truly evil villain will usually see the bad guy die without the hero committing the act. It might be falling off a cliff or crashing in a helicopter while making an escape, but the hero's hands are (technically) clean. The farthest end of the pure-good hero is someone like Batman who refuses to kill, but uses fear and violence with abandon.

Heroes that kill are the majority of the action heroes in fiction. The last-resort killing is the most mild end of the spectrum (like Superman in Man of Steel). The middle of the killers spectrum is those who kill out of self-defense. The bad guys are attacking and the hero won't survive if he (let's be honest, these are mostly men) won't kill them back. War heroes are usually in this segment. We also have the anti-hero who kills wantonly, but according to a strict code. The Punisher or John McClane would be at this end of the spectrum where they kill a lot of people, but only those clearly identified as bad guys.

Gender, Age, and Killing

Heroes are never allowed to kill women or children. That's just too evil for people to stomach. Even the darkest, most anti-hero of heroes can't kill anyone but men. So if we want to show that a villain is truly villainous he'll kill women and/or children, because that's a line that no hero would ever cross.

Male heroes can only kill other men, otherwise they cease to be good. Female heroes (when they exist), can kill both men and women and still remain heroic. Child heroes (e.g. Hit-Girl in Kick Ass), can kill men, women, and children. Child heroes cannot, under any circumstances, kill someone who appears younger than them. So Katniss can't kill the younger kids in The Hunger Games and still be good, but she can kill the kids who are her age or older.

Torture and the Justification of the Means

Jack Bauer is a patriot for beating up a bad guy until he reveals the secret location of the bomb. But Nazi overlord is evil for torturing one of the members of the underground in The Man in the High Castle (which, if you haven't seen it, you should watch immediately).

The means -- torture -- is only justified if the end is good. So Jack Bauer is a hero for torturing someone for the purpose of saving lives, but the Nazi is evil for torturing to try to take lives.

Stories and Reality

All of this makes for a fun examination of fiction tropes, but beyond that it also explains a lot about the shape of our society. Fiction both reflects and refines what's happening in society. 

The spectrum of violence speaks to our need to see morality as relative rather than absolute. We consider a person good if they are relatively better than the person who is bad, not because they hold to an unwavering ideal of ultimate goodness. We also have the need to categorize conflict as between good and bad, right and wrong -- even when neither side is objectively right or good. We simply make the opposition worse so that, by default, our side becomes good. 

The gender and age rules of violence are steeped in our gender and age rolls. For all of the movement toward gender and age equality it's still expected that when a ship is sinking the women and children will escape first. Conversely, it's still expected that a good man will not harm a woman or a child. However, as we have made strides in our society toward greater equality we find that both women and children can become the aggressors in conflict. While we're okay with "strong female leads" kicking butt and killing men as they fight through the hordes of foes, the death of a woman or child in fiction is always a rare and special thing holding to their status as the parties that good men ought to protect. 

Finally, torture in fiction informs our view of torture in reality in chilling ways. Though there is no evidence that information obtained through torture is accurate, we still persist in using torture as a nation (the United States), and many people are okay with that torture because it is for the ostensible purpose of saving lives. 

As an author I struggle with these things regularly. For example, I want to write about women who are equal to men. But then I have to allow women to both kill and be killed by women and men. That breaks the unwritten rules of violence in stories, but it's for the purpose of promoting true equality. 

Is that okay? Am I using the ends to justify the means? 

Critique Group and Writing

One of the -- if not the most -- beneficial tools in a writer's box is helpful critique. There are a lot of things that go into making critique helpful instead of just criticism. My friend Erik Wecks and I have worked on offering helpful critique (with many pitfalls along the way) to the point where I know his feedback helps to make my writing better (and I'm sure I do the same for his).

If you don't have a critique group for your writing, I highly recommend getting one together, but don't just throw a bunch of people in a room and hope it all works out.

We talked about some of the stuff that works in this video. You should watch it.