Who knew that scientists could study narrative with an MRI?

Can they build a diagnostic tool to help me figure out how to end my novel?

Link via Quantum Storytelling.

My husband brought me a copy of On the Origin of PCs, the printed prequel to my favorite webcomic, The Order of the Stick. It was fun learning a little backstory about the characters, though none of the strips made me laugh outloud as much as this recent one did.

Honestly, my favorite bit of the book was in the preface, presumably written by one of the supporting characters in the story, Redcloak. After explaining exactly what PC and NPC means, for those readers who aren’t familiar with gaming terminology, he makes this hard-to-argue observation:

Heck, as far as I’m concerned, the presence of players is a necessary evil at best. I think most gamemasters will agree that their world functions significantly more smoothly before the PCs ever show up.

Truer words were never spoken!

I started reading Order of the Stick because of the roleplaying jokes, but I have found the story that has developed over the past 450+ strips to be quite intriguing, and the commentary the author, Rich Burlew, provides in the printed volumes is useful and enlightening, from a storyteller’s point of view. I wish I had No Cure for the Paladin Blues, the second collection, on hand to quote some of the more interesting passages, but alas my mate has taken it off to Indiana with him. I’ll have to try to get back to it another time.

In the meantime, here’s an interesting link to a blog post with some thoughts about creating and fulfilling reader (or viewer) desires in narrative, the main point being that it is the job of the storyteller to defer satisfaction, which not only keeps the audience intent but makes it all the more satisfying in the end.

My life is like a big novel, when all the little subplots start to come together into one big story…

Okay, so maybe that’s a little exaggerated. My life is not nearly that dramatic, but I have noticed some parts of my life that were previously separate starting to come together in ways I had not ever anticipated.

I have just started a new job as a part-time associate editor for the company for whom I have been freelancing for nearly a year. Stampington & Company, besides producing their own rubber stamps and artists’ supplies, publishes a number of very fine magazines on papercrafts, mixed media, collage and various other crafty pursuits. It has been immensely satisfying to combine my vocation (writing) with my hobby (crafts). Yes, I am a lifelong crafter, having dabbled in a little bit in everything but most especially in papercrafts (rubber stamping, cardmaking, etc.), at least in the last few years. But I never thought to write about it! The opportunity I have now, to bring these two halves of my creative self together is liberating, to say the least. I feel more satisfied, personally, and engaged, professionally, then I have in years.

But the dovetailing continues.

The particular project I have been brought aboard to work on is a special publication meant to showcase some of the excellent artists’ blogs out here on the web. Once I got over my doubts about whether or not people would actually pay for such a magazine (and I do think they will, once they see what we’ve got planned), my biggest questions were, 1) how to decide which blogs to include, and 2) how to produce 15-20 articles about the blogs that didn’t all read as some variation of “I saw all these other blogs and so I started one too.”

The answer to the first question was really pretty easy: we’re an art magazine publisher first, and so high-quality images are the top thing I’ve been looking for in potential blog candidates. The answer to the second question hit me almost out of the blue after three or four days spent clicking through blog after blog after blog — and it all came down to the same topic I’ve addressed here time and time again: narrative.

In my search, I have found that the blogs that really captured my attention have an innate sense of storytelling present. I don’t necessarily mean long written narratives about some meaningful event; it could be as simple as a short caption to an evocative photo, or a series of pictures showing a work in progress. My realization was that, in presenting the blogs we will choose to include in the magazine, we need to find the narrative core of each individual blog and put on paper, so that, yes, readers are willing to pay their $10 to bring it home so they can curl up with under the covers, just like they would a good novel.

Life is about stories, I tell ya. Even when you’re not expecting them, you find them shaping the world around you.

In order to urge on this confluence of the themes in my life — writing, art, narrative — I’ve decided to make a few changes around here. I’ve been keeping two blogs for some time now (three if you count the journal at my DeviantArt account) and I’ve begun to wonder if this division isn’t the reason why all of them suffer from neglect. It’s time, I think, to unify my public face by unifying my blogging efforts, to stop compartmentalizing my thoughts and create a more cohesive vision of myself. So from now on, all my blogging will be done here, at Artifacts, and I’ve installed a useful little plug-in that will forward all my posts automagically to my LiveJournal. And from now on, I won’t reserve this blog for only posts that suit my writerly interests; it’s going to be a cross-purpose journal, and hopefully that will mean it will get used more often.

I don’t know exactly where this is going to lead, or what might show up here in the long run, but I do know one thing: The big story is just getting started, folks! Stay tuned for the next chapter.

I’ve been a Arthurian fangirl since before “fangirl” was a word. I think it was in junior high that we were first introduced to excerpted, modernized sections of Malory (probably the sword in the stone episode), and I remember my best friend complaining how boring it was. I could only gape and stare and stutter, “Are you kidding me? This is ripping good stuff!” Okay, I didn’t really say “ripping good stuff” but I did find the material thrilling and didn’t understand how anyone could think otherwise. Ultimately, my love Arthuriana led me to a major in Medieval Studies (though somehow I got distracted by all the other cool Medieval topics out there and never actually studied King Arthur and his knights) and to graduate studies in Folklore & Mythology.

But I have to confess that I’ve never understood the whole emphasis on Lancelot and Guenevere. While I appreciate the extra dimension the tragic love story gives the legend, I hate the way so many treatments (especially modern ones) blame the fall of Camelot and the demise of Arthur on the affair of his queen had with his best friend. It is the same, in a way, as saying that the original Star Wars trilogy was about Han and Leia falling in love. The way I see it, Arthur, a Hero in the mythological sense of the word, should not fall because of the actions of two other people, no matter how close they were to him. Only his own actions, his own flaws, should be capable of his destruction. In short, Arthur died because he killed the babies. And no cinematic version of the story is going to be fully satisfying unless it acknowledges that fact.

This is a long introduction to a point about characterizing villains I’d like to make, which I mentioned a while ago as a post-worthy subject. The topic back then was Martha Well’s The Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, in particular the substanceless nature of the villains; to quote myself, “the antagonists are something like the false front of an old building: there’s not much behind the ominous presence.”

As a novice writer, I spend a lot of time looking around at various writing sites trying to distract myself from writing to learn as much as I can about my craft, and have read any number of articles about characterizing villains. Largely, the advice revolves around the idea of humanizing the villain, so that the bad guy is not just some cardboard evil in a black hat. Just like a hero, the villain should have goals and motivations and probably shouldn’t think of himself (or herself) as the bad guy. The writer, at least, should have empathy for the villain, even if the reader cannot. That’s hard to argue with. The Dark Lord trope has been done to death in fantasy literature, and the idea of absolute evil is hard to pull off convincingly in a world where gray is the dominant color.

But I don’t think it’s enough that you understand your villain, which is where most advice ends. Yes, you need to know why your character is going to perform evil deeds. It’s more significant to know why your protagonist is going to be the one to defeat him. Why? Because ultimately the story is not about the villain, but the protagonist — just look at the Star Wars prequels to see what happens when you try to make the story about the villain.

Protagonists, we’ve known since Aristotle wrote The Poetics, must have a tragic flaw. Usually we talk about this flaw (or mistake, as Aristotle’s term harmartia might be interpreted) in terms of how it leads the hero to his downfall — Oedipus, Macbeth, Willy Loman. That’s because Aristotle was talking about tragedies. Arthur’s fall, likewise, should be interpreted as a result of harmartia (his fatal mistake was killing the babies). We’re less fond of tragedies these days, and tend to prefer stories where the protagonist doesn’t end up dead or maimed, but overcomes his flaw (or mistake) and triumphs over adversity. But the flaw is still there.

Now, in order to understand how the concept of harmartia relates to creating meaningful villains, we must jump from Aristotle to Jung (and please pardon my very novice Jung skills — specifics may be off, but I think I have the gist of it right). Central to Jungian psychology is the concept of the Shadow, which in psychological terms represents the repressed aspects of the conscious self. While not necessarily evil, Jungian psychology maintains that the shadow-self must be confronted in order to prevent negative behaviors from emerging.

The Shadow is one of four primary archetypes named by Jung (the other three are the Self, the Anima, and the Animus) that operate on both a personal, psychological level as well as existing on a universal level as part of the collective unconscious. Scholars, such as Joseph Campbell, have shown us over and over again how these archetypes emerge in myths throughout history, and continue to influence structure and characterization in storytelling today. (This is interesting stuff, but I’m going to skip further explanations here, to keep to the point; follow the links if you need more details.)

If you’ve ever investigated dream analysis, a field heavily influenced by Jung, then you have probably encountered the guideline that anyone encountered during a dream should be interpreted as an aspect of the dreamer’s self. In the same vein, I would suggest that the characters in a myth (or any story based upon mythic structures) can be interpreted as aspects of the protagonist’s Self, which is a reflection of the Self of the collective unconscious (which is why we’re able to relate to the protagonist in the first place). What I mean to say is that when a protagonist of a myth has a meaningful interaction with any other character, it can be interpreted as a dramatization of the internal interactions between aspects of the personality that take place in the psyche.

Still with me? I know I’m generalizing a lot, and the academic merits of my argument are lacking, but bear with me. To summarize, the two main points I want to emphasize are 1) the protagonist should be forced to confront his tragic flaw/error (harmartia) in the course of a story; and 2) a mythic story should dramatize the psychic development of the protagonist (by which I mean the development of his psyche, not that he’s going to start reading people’s minds!).

In a mythic story (which fantasy most often is) the protagonist’s tragic flaw is a reflection of his Shadow and should be personified in the role of the Villain. Therefore, when the protagonist confronts the villain he is symbolically confronting his own Shadow. Sometimes the connection between the protagonist and his Shadow is made explicit: Frodo’s climactic battle is with Gollum, a creature who was once very like a hobbit himself. Luke, who has already been shown that he is dangerously in peril of turning into Darth Vader himself, finds out that his antagonist is actually his father. And King Arthur meets his doom at the hands of his own son, Mordred, who’s death he tried to arrange in order to prevent such a fate. Talk about sublimation!

Of course, not every hero is so explicitly connected to the external representation of his Shadow. We’d get pretty tired of everyone being related if that were the case. But if there is not at least an implicit association between the hero’s Shadow and the villain, then the villain becomes nothing more than a catalyst for the internal struggle of the hero. A McGuffin, if you will. This happens a lot in “character driven” fiction, where the hero must conquer his inability to trust others, or his fear of heights, or some other flaw the author has decided upon, before he is able to confront the villain. By the time the final climax occurs, the hero has already won the essential battle within himself and only has to defeat the villain in order to tie up the plot.

But when the villain actually embodies the hero’s Shadow, then there’s a real sense of tension when the climax occurs. Both Frodo and Luke are perilously close to succumbing to the dark within them, and only the physical confrontation with their Shadows allows them to survive in the end. King Arthur, too, confronts his Shadow physically, but his death on the field of Camlann is a keen reminder that there is a real risk in the struggles of the psyche, and “victory” is not always assured (but, like Arthur, there is always a promise of another chance).

I need to wrap this up now — I’ve been literally working on it for months, adding a paragraph here and there (and loosing a few more through browser crashes than I care to dwell upon) as I nursed this random thought that there needs to be more to villains than just good characterization. Like I said, the story belongs to the protagonist — it doesn’t matter how well your villain is characterized if there’s no intrinsic connection to the protagonist, something that makes it important that the protagonist is the one who defeats (or fails to defeat) him in the end. It doesn’t have to be an explicit connection, but it does need to be there, on some level, perceivable by the reader, so that — at least subconsciously — they understand that the victory over the villain represents a psychic victory for the protagonist as well.

I should, probably, bring this back around to King Arthur again, to make a well-rounded conclusion. But all I can think of is “it didn’t have anything to do with Guenevere and Lancelot.” Instead, I’ll mention the book I just happened upon last week that agrees with my supposition that a story is the dramatization of the inner struggles of the psyche. I’m only about half-way through Stealing Fire from the Gods so far, and will write more about it when I’ve finished it. Like Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, it’s by a screenwriter and promises to be a roadmap, based on Jung and Campbell, that will help other aspiring screenwriters (along with storytellers in other mediums) create “great stories.” It has a lot more substance behind it than Vogler, however, which focused archetypes and patterns, and…well, I’ll save the rest for a proper summary when I’ve finished the book.