Narrative Bias, Wizards, and Maltesers

Freshers Week! That glorious week at the beginning of the new university semester, filled with socials, events, meetups, booze-ups, and the next stage of the eternal struggle to keep that traffic cone atop the head of the Boer War general in the high street roundabout!

In other news, I read four books in three days while I waited for my housemates to stop running up and down the corridors at 3am.

I had lots of fun with these books . . . but that doesn't mean I'm above using them to make a point.

Hold onto your hats, friends. Let's talk narrative bias, character flaws, and Maltesers.

I started reading these little delights, The Dresden Files, while I was away on holiday, curled up on my sofa-turned-bed in Prague and polishing it off on the bed-wrongly-considered-sofa in Vienna.

I have so many reasons to recommend this book - it's inventive, it's funny, it's engaging, the world is believable, the plots manage to balance over-arching threads while retaining a nice snacky episodic feel.

These books are probably the literary equivalent of Maltesers; you can keep dipping into the box for lots of little bite-size entertainments, without being overwhelmed by the size of the individual treats. I wouldn't call them high art - more if Harry Potter got a gritty American reboot at the hands of Neil Gaiman.

Although, going back to that old nerdy adage, Harry Dresden would beat the stuffing out of Potter in a fight. And then he'd fluff his duster, make a snarky quip, and dash home to feed his cat before getting an early night for a full day of work tomorrow.

However, much like Maltesers, as much as I like this series I know full well it's hardly five-star cuisine. That's not a bad thing - I'd rather eat Maltesers for a week than force myself to start discerning between different flavours of caviar. I do enough of that with my degree.

That said... Maltesers are full of problems, and if you eat enough of them they'll start leaving a bad taste in your mouth.

Let's start with a couple of biggies: sexism, and racism.

On the whole, I was really, really impressed with how The Dresden Files dealt with its female characters. There's plenty of them, ranging from heroes to villains in every colour, creed, race and skill-set the relatively small-scale casting register will allow. They're relevant to and deeply involved in the story, and they're complex enough to feel just as real as the protagonist. That's a rare thing in mainstream fiction, particularly a first-person story from a male narrator.

Likewise, there's plenty of variety in the races and even religious beliefs of characters: there's a Muslim wizard, a Native American wizard, a Christian knight who fights demons, and the hero's girlfriend is generally indicated to be mixed-race by physical description.

The way these characters are involved in the story is wonderful, and one of my favourite things about the series. There's just one problem.

Harry Dresden.

Now, one of the best parts about The Dresden Files is Harry himself - he's funny, he's loyal, he's resourceful, he believes in doing the right thing above all else, and he's just enough of a shlub to make us support his scrappy underdog battle against the forces of darkness and early morning wake up calls.

Harry is also a chauvinist. It's a self-confessed flaw, and one he acknowledges causes both him and his female friends and associates a lot of trouble. This is great! A main character with a serious flaw, who acknowledges that flaw without unrealistically metamorphosising into a reformed individual at the slightest hint he's wrong. It's part of him, and a part of him he's as chagrinned about as everyone else.

Everyone except the author, it seems.

Note that I call this issue a "flaw" and not a "challenge". You see, while Harry is frequently called out on the inappropriateness of his tendencies - withholding information from women who are on side to help him, feeling he needs to protect them to the detriment of himself and them both - the narrative never gives him reason to stop doing it.

Rather than presenting Harry with any reason to change his ways, the way the story is written paradoxically calls attention to the issue ... and then completely ignores it. Even after he talks about Karrin Murphy's ability to take on a plant monster with a chainsaw, Harry goes straight back to describing her, and every other female character, in terms of their physical attractiveness. He tells us how pretty they are before going into any concrete physical details, like hair colour or why they're currently chewing on the corpse of some hapless local schmuck in a dark alleyway.

The story never gives Harry a reason to believe that his flaw needs to be addressed. Even when it nearly costs his girlfriend her life, he never believes he was wrong in withholding information from her that could have kept her out of the situation entirely. And even when he does share that information, it never helps - and he is always right back where he started, acknowledging the flaw while never doing anything about it. Why? Because the story never engages the issue in the plot.

Three books later, I'm still getting annoyed that the arcane power of the queen of the sidhe is being placed second to how wonderfully her blouse clings to her nipples.

Friends, a flawed character is a wonderful thing. Make them sexist, make them racist, make them homophobic, make them supporters of SOPA to any degree you like. Make them realise this, or don't. Get them called out on it; make them change, or make them resist, whatever.

Just please, if you make this issue an acknowledged one, by the character themself or by one of the others . . . address it. Treat it like something relevant. You don't neccessarily have to change it entirely - faults run deep in even the best of us, after all.

But please, for the love of Maltesers and those who eat them - address it. Don't treat it like just another part of the story that can go on getting stuck in your reader's teeth, even though you've had the mascot stick a warning label on the box in big red shiny letters.

~ Charley R

Zero ... or Hero?

Last night, while I waited for the adjacent dorm of noisy 14-year-olds to quiet down, I found myself flipping through my blog archive. I had been meaning to do some writing, but having been through what felt like a thoroughly gruelling first day back at school, not to mention a very active (and somewhat bruising) karate lesson, I couldn't quite drag my brain into the zone, and everything I wrote ended up sounding contrived and forced.

And, while I was browsing, I found a post named "Two's Company - An Ode to the Faithful Sidekick". I remembered writing the post, though it didn't stick in my memory as being anything spectacularly entertaining. However, looking at the title "Two's Company" it got me thinking about the narrative style of my abandoned work, Warrior, the oh-so-originally-titled first book of the Aeserion trilogy. In the first draft, I only had one narrator - the infamous Rin, whom you've met in many a Beautiful People post this year. This time around, however, I remembered that I was going to have to pay attention to someone else as  well - a second narrator who really hadn't seen that much screentime as anything other than the "sidekick" until very late on in Warrior's original draft.

His name is Florien. Well, it is now - his name in the original draft was too similar to that of another rather central character, and the similarity was beginning to annoy me. And that's not the only thing about him that makes the writing part of my brain twitch.

Having two narrators to a tale isn't all that uncommon, especially in tales where the stories of the two characters run parallel or interweave. I wasn't planning to use Florien at all, until I realised that, while watching me slowly destroy Rin's belief in his own sanity was very entertaining, there was no way he could be aware of half the important events in the plot. And so a new page was saved in the Central Characters folder, under the name of my reluctant new narrator. He was hard work to pin down - he was nothing like as developed as Rin, and personality-wise he had more mood-swings than his pregnant landlady on a bad day.

And, even when I did pin him down, things got even more interesting.

The difference in Rin and Florien's narrative voices is like comparing  a greyhound and a poodle. Rin is fierce, opinionated, confident, and more than happy to liberate a few teeth from the mouths of anyone who invokes his wrath. Florien, meanwhile, is usually found hiding under the nearest table, hoping no one lands on him. True he's intelligent, friendly and talented in his own way, but ... he's no fighter, and he knows it. His sword has been affectionately nicknamed "Hearthwarmer" to indicate how much use it gets.

Not only that, but Florien doesn't want to be a hero. Rin may not like the lemons he's handed, but he'll bite his own fingers off before he lets some sick celestial joke get the better of him, and - like the mercenary he is - he'll take what advantages he can get. Florien would sooner run away. Run away, hide, and hope it'll just go away and leave him alone. Give him the option of taking a daring risk to win personal glory and gratification or staying home playing his pipes to amuse the locals, and he'd be reaching for the pipes before you even finished your sentence. Pacifist, people-pleaser and, to some, a bit of a pansy.

We've all heard of unlikely heroes, but very rarely will we meet one who actively avoids scary tasks for that long. Even if they're not gifted or set up in some advantagous manner beforehand, even the wimpiest of them will know when something has to be done. And, most importantly of all, they'll push their limits, their beliefs, their all to succeed - eventually.

Well then ... why on earth do I tolerate the presence of a character who refuses to even be called "unlikely" in my story? 

Well, no story is ever all about the battles. Fair enough, Rin is the more dominant narrator of the two, and its his story that drives the plot for the most part, but, without Florien, he'd have a slim chance, if any at all, of succeeding. Though he's little use in a bar brawl, having a man who could make even the grumpiest goat grin from ear to ear certainly brightens up miserable nights spent sleeping in haunted forests and wet, dingy borderland forts. Those pointless books he likes to read? They'll come in useful later too. 

And hey, you know what they say about invoking the anger of a gentle man.

So, I suppose, the lesson really is thus. Even if your narrator is even less likely a hero than Bilbo Baggins doesn't mean they're useless. It might look like it, they might act like it, heck, we might even believe it ... until we remember that it sometimes takes more than one central character to screw in a lightbulb. No matter how unorthodox their method.

- Charley R