fantasy

The Secret to Writing Man vs Man Conflict? Be a Dick to People!

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Whether it’s hitting a shot over your opponent, shoving a bayonet into the belly of a wounded soldier to make sure he dies, or getting the news that your employees’ class action lawsuit against you won’t make it to trial, it feels good to destroy your enemies.

So it’s no wonder that Man versus Man conflicts are the most popular in fiction. Audiences love seeing Batman take on the Joker, they love seeing Superman also take on the Joker. And they love watching James Bond duke it out with a woman who just won’t listen to reason.  

This is the second installment of our six-part series about the six main conflicts in fiction. While last week was catered toward the lonely and depressed viewers who probably should seek professional help instead of listening to me, this week will be more relatable for the more confident Stories’ Matter fans, those who don’t understand why everyone else is such a stupid fucking asshole.

Man vs Man conflicts usually focus on characters who are at odds due to differences in beliefs, values or ideologies. The conflict is usually resolved with one character triumphing over the other, however, it can also be resolved by characters working through a misunderstanding to ease tensions, which never really occurred to me until I started researching this article.

Before we go further, I should also use this time to point out that some viewers protested my use of Man versus Self and stated I should use the more gender-neutral Person versus Self. Well, it was only one person, and as we’ll see in this video, you can use your interactions with self-righteous virtue signalers like this to inspire your writing. Each tip today will use a personal vendetta of mine to illustrate ways to improve your writing.  

We’ll be shitty to wait staff and drive around town like a district judge on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

~

Tip One – Make Your Characters Reflections of Each Other

A great villain is often one who reminds us of the protagonist. They often have the same goals, but use evil means to achieve them. Or they may have had a similar upbringing but chose a different path. Like how my brother and I grew up in the same abusive household, but while I became a writer, he started a boat-themed cult.  

In my own life, Tabitha Cartwright was a great example of a reflective antagonist. She was a writer like myself and she had a great knack for clever book marketing strategies. In the mid-2000s she became something of a mentor figure, and as anyone who watched this video knows, she got me through the most productive year of my career by secretly poisoning me with amphetamines.

It wasn’t the poisoning so much that rubbed me the wrong way. I knew when I became a writer that I’d have to sacrifice my health for fame and fortune, and most of the books I’d written under the influence were decent. Unfortunately, Tabitha also knew my one weakness: that I hadn’t gotten a vasectomy. I have to assume the maid she’d hired was a call girl meant to entrap me and make me even more dependent on Tabitha, seeing as she did a terrible job of cleaning my house. 

Anyway, you can use this duality in your fiction to have your characters reflect on their own methods and moral codes, creating an interesting combination of internal and external conflict. You’d be surprised how true this rings. For example, a few years ago, I’d noticed my employees were a little logy at their desks. I had several discussions with my building superintendent about putting some sort of aerosolized caffeine into the air duct system until I thought about it for a moment and realized I’d be no better than Tabitha if I did that.

Tip Two – Make your antagonist believable

Villains who do things for the sake of evil are never interesting. Your antagonist should always have a goal that’s at least a little bit understandable, even if it’s something totally crazy. In my novel Zodiac, the killer wants to murder one person every year using that animal of the Zodiac. While most of us wouldn’t try doing this – after all, finding a way to kill someone with a rabbit sounds exhausting – I think we sympathize with the need to see a goal to its completion.  

Fans of the channel will know my first agent and I came to odds in the early 2010s shortly before I started D&E Publishing. We had been a great pair for almost 10 years. Long story short, I had written a book of medical advice that I realized would probably kill somebody if they actually followed it. And while I had books inspire readers to kill themselves before, this wasn’t some teens imitating a fictional gunslinger detective who shoots through his own body to kill the main villain. Anyway, I wrote the manuscript but refused to send it to the publisher. For the next several years my agent devised cleverer and cleverer ways to try and steal the manuscript back. Which is understandable, seeing as I’d spent the advance I’d gotten. Anyway, long story short again, this is why I’m even more vigilant about catfishing scams.

Tip Three – Make Them Fight For the Same Goal

Darth Vader might seem like an unrelatable villain. He’s basically magic and he kills little kids really quickly for a guy who hadn’t spent much time around them. But it works in the story because he and the Jedi are fighting for control over the galaxy.

My second wife’s new husband to this day is the greatest villain in my life. And of course, we have the same goal, the love and affection of Cindy. Like in fiction, we had different methods of obtaining it. He relied on boring things like money and handsomeness while I relied on my wit and charm and letting her make all of the decisions in the relationship. While we’re at the point in the story where he’s the winner, as he ages and loses his good looks, in addition to the lawsuit I’m filing against his company, there’s still a future where I emerge victorious. Anyway, it’s conflicts like these that will win you readers.

How To Write Complex Villains (from the HR Department to United Airlines)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

From the cashier who refuses to bag your groceries to the co-worker who threatens to report you just for saying you like the way her dress hangs off her body, villains are an inseparable part of our daily lives. As a writer, villains fill an equally commanding role in your fiction, driving the conflict, defining the hero’s journey and giving your reader that extra little thrill to keep them engaged. In today’s article, we’ll look at ways to create unforgettable villains without resorting to gender, ethnic or class stereotypes no matter how true they might be.

Just like in real-life, villains in fiction come in many forms. For example, we have villains who are shadowy reflections of our protagonist. They might mirror the journey, the experiences, the worldview or the methods of the protagonist. Batman and the Joker are a perfect example of this. For example, they both operate outside the law, they both wear makeup and they both keep a younger sidekick around decked in tight-fitted clothing to distract opponents.

Next, we have the corrupt villain. These are villains who utilize great their power and resources and the mechanisms of the large systems they control to enact their evil. They’re Mafia dons who have the police in their pocket. They’re crooked senators who steal taxpayer money to give Medicare to lazy welfare queens. They’re Chinese people.

Then we have The Force of Nature villains. These are beasts, monsters, zombies, plagues, uncontrollable psychopaths, menstruating women, vampires, Chinese people again, swarms of locusts, Napoleon’s armies, swarms of vampires, tornadoes, despite the title, pretty much all stories about robots or androids, tsunamis, lahars, which are a sort of mudslide full of pyroclastic material and debris which can occur even without being triggered by volcanic activity and threaten the Pacific Northwest in particular, heroin, electricity and the corrupting influence of big boobies.

Finally, we have the anti-villain. These guys go against our protagonist, but actually we kind of end up sympathizing with them because they often make a pretty damn good point. We sympathize with Thanos because making a stupid decision like eradicating half of all life instead of just doubling all resources is totally a brainfart we’d have. We sympathize with Hannibal Lector because being a therapist and listening to people’s problems all day would probably drive us to cannibalism, too. We sympathize with Misery’s Annie Wilkes because who hasn’t wanted break the legs of an author who wrote a book that sucked. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Now, let’s look at some tips to make our villains shine their brightest.

Step One: Choose a real-life model

Famous authors do this all the time. Pennywise was largely inspired by John Wayne Gacy, Vlad the Impaler was the inspiration for Dracula and Monster’s Aileen Wuornos was largely based off of Hilary Clinton. And yes, while people like Clinton, Kamala Harris, AOC or Ilhan Omar would probably inspire great villains,  you don’t have to limit your search to the headlines. In my 2013 thriller Game, Set and Match, the murderer was based on a woman from my tennis club who rudely refused to let me give her pointers.

Step Two: Give them believable and even relatable motivation

In real life, villains don’t need much reason to commit crimes. Child killers, for example, do it because it’s fun and it’s easy. But in fiction, your reader will engage more if the villain has a relatable reason for doing bad things. Maybe they’re out for revenge (Dr. Freeze). Maybe they think watching rich, powerful people kill each other is funny (Iago). Maybe they think it’s better if women aren’t left to their own devices (Handmaid’s Tale). So I suggest thinking of something you want from life and making your villain get it through any means necessary. If your neighbor has a loud dog, make your villain a dog murderer.  If your dealing with rent hikes, make your villain a squatter who refuses to respect property rights.

Step Three: Don’t skimp on the backstory

Most people aren’t born evil. Upbringing and unfortunate circumstances play a large role in nurturing evil in the real world. For example, we all know that Bernie Sanders’s radical and evil Communist policies wouldn’t exist were it not for his brother being gangraped by Rockefellers. In fiction, you can give your villain a tragic backstory or at least depict the conditions that led to their rise. Like how Norman Bates’s overbearing and controlling mother led to his psychosis. Or how Humbert Humbert’s pedophilia was due to him being born in France.

Step Four: Introduce them with a bang

I’ll never forget that first moment I saw Darth Vader, walking down that corridor, trying to stop those Wookies from celebrating Life Day. Give your reader a clear message from the outset that this a bad dude you don’t want to mess with. Have them steal from an orphan. Have them blow up a convent. Have them blow up a convent filled with stolen orphans. Or tone it down and have them do a normal activity, but in a sinister way. Like tai qi in the nude or fencing in the nude.

These Are the Biggest Mistakes New Fantasy Authors Make

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Fantasy: the refuge of the obese, teenage boys with skin conditions, and people who want an escape from reality without devoting themselves to the violence that being a member of ISIS or a K-Pop fan necessitates.  Still, fans of fantasy literature are a tough nut to crack. While I’m not much a fantasy writer, I was a long-time fantasy reader who read dozens of fantasy manuscripts from up-and-coming authors before my publishing company was shut down for siphoning electricity from the building next door. And I can’t tell you how often I’d spend a cozy evening in that office, draped in six or seven Afghans, reading under the light of a dozen candles, ready to be taken into a new world, only to have cliches, stereotypes and paper-thin backstories bring me back to the real world and remind me of all the blisters on my hands from pulling copper wire out of the walls. Anyway, we’ll look at the biggest mistakes fantasy writers make on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Now, in this video there’s a lot of common mistakes that could be applied to any type of fiction that I won’t go over. Everybody knows a good book has little expository dialogue, has characters that are three dimensional and doesn’t use words like “rizz,” “spankbank” and “beer-o-clock.”

Mistake One: Using Info Dumps and Having Inorganic Worldbuilding

Does this sound familiar? “At the start of the Fourth Age, during the reign of King Vailor the Wise, the worlds of men, elves and grogs were divided…” You get the idea. The only good thing about books like this is they usually burn long enough to provide adequate heating for your office once the city cuts your gas line.

Sure, one of the selling points of fantasy is the history and the worldbuilding. But it’s got to be organic, to relate to the characters and their struggle. While history is important, the average person doesn’t have a great grasp on it. In America for example, people think history is a bunch of granite statues of traitorous slaveholders, instead of, you know, things educated people wrote down in a fucking book. Anyway, my point is, I don’t think about Sir Walter Raleigh every time I open the office window to have a smoke.

So, instead of starting your fantasy novel with a history lesson or a lore dump, start with some immediate action, like a bar fight, a house burning down in the middle of the night or two home intruders trying to hide the corpse of a man they killed on accident. Your reader will relate to this more because, if they’re anything like me, something like this has happened to them in real life.  

Mistake Two: Overreliance on the Hero’s Journey

Easily the greatest of Joseph Campbell’s crimes against humanity, several generations of fantasy writers have been doomed by the hero’s journey. Though Campbell’s not to blame entirely: if Homer, Tolkien, and Boll hadn’t been so successful, we wouldn’t have a million hacks trying to copy them.

But, you might be asking, what I am supposed to write about it, if I can’t write about a farm boy who sets off to fight a great evil, is tutored by an old sage and finds a special weapon to help him on his journey? Well, what I’d do, is take the plot of any other kind of movie and convert that into fantasy.

I mean, who wouldn’t want to read a fantasy retelling of films like Bio-Dome, How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days or The Squeeze? I went in a more artsy direction with my first fantasy novel, a retelling of My Dinner With Andre, about two monks having dinner in a tavern after one comes back from sabbatical. It was actually my best reviewed book of the 2000s even though it sold poorly and was partially responsible for my business partner’s suicide.

Mistake Three: Having an Inconsistent or Incoherent Magic System

The great thing about being a fantasy writer is that, unlike drama, mystery or historical fiction writers, you don’t have to be smart enough to think of logical reasons for things to happen. But just because you can write yourself out of a corner doesn’t mean you should.

Your system should be well-defined. Maybe, like in Harry Potter, the use of magic takes decades of study, though why it takes decades to learn how to flick your wrist and say, like, ten different goddamn Latin words, I guess I don’t know.

And you need to put limitations on your magical system. If your monks are able to immaculately conceive children while keeping their vows of celibacy, what’s to stop any pervert from impregnating every fair maiden in the village? Of course, I explained this in my novel, though, as I’ll show later, it led to a whole other list of problems.  

Mistake Four: Giving Your Characters Shitty Names

Just look at some of these names. I don’t even know how I’m supposed to pronounce most of these. And don’t go the other way and give them common every day names. No character should ever be named Greg. Hell, no person in real life should be named Greg.

There are a few hacks for people who have trouble with names.  Dead tongues are always a great choice, but don’t make the same mistake I did and try to use ones from the Voynich manuscript.

Portmanteaus are another solid option, which is where you put two words together. This is how George RR Martin came up with the name Daenerys and how I came up with the name Dickswayne Heathersmash.

You could also use your take the people in your own life and slightly modify their names, but that’s not always a good idea, which leads me to the final mistake…

Mistake Five: Making it a thinly-veiled confession of your personal debauchery

Fantasy often works best when it’s an allegorical response to modern day issues, like the British class system or how a power vacuum can lead to religious fundamentalism.

It works less well when it’s an allegory about how you impregnated your business partner’s wife on a trip to Mexico and you’re hoping she leaves him for you. And even if you can convince your fans that your Stephen King diet of corn, milk and pure fishscale cocaine was to blame, you’ll probably burn a lot of bridges and need to move to a cheaper office in a part of town where drug dealers hide bodies of rival gang members.

The main takeaway: Fantasy is about escape from the disaster that is your personal life. Keep it that way.