“Cheer up, it can only get worse.” Ok maybe that’s the Australian’s dry way of coping with utter disaster. ‘The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.’ It’s the sort of dour humor that goes with living in a country where three years out of five give you searing drought, and the fourth floods. And the fifth year pays for all… except for the locusts.
Seriously, it’s a place for relentless optimists, rather like the people who make a career out of writing fiction. Sometimes it does come good. We have to believe that. Without it there is despair. And, certainly in fiction, anyway, I personally do not want despair. I’m up for dissent here. But for me bleakness is something I’ve had to face often enough to have no place in my choice of reading. That doesn’t necessarily mean the hero wins or someone precious does not die. But it is not futile. Not if I wrote it, or if I read it twice.
However, the book — as it goes along, you can bet your booties it WILL get worse, as the hero/s get better (what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger… whoever said that, needs a good kicking. It’s not always true. Ask the black knight from Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail. However, with rare and usually annoying exceptions (Thomas Covenant IMO), the trials do make fictional heroes ‘stronger’) because anticlimax is really not the writer’s friend.
Personally, I try to give the reader respites – as in when I give the character respite. But you know it’s a lull in the storm. I honestly think this is why so many of my pantser friends find their stories petering out – because either there is no respite, and the writer is exhausted (so is the reader) or – as I have seen several times – inept hero goes from zero to super-hero in the first disaster… and then every disaster is an anticlimax.
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “The Future may be Worse.”
Thomas Covenant was the biggest whiner ever.
I applaud your optimistic cynicism. One of my mottos is, “Nothing is ever completely useless. It can always be used as a bad example.”
BTW I’ve always contended that that quote from Nietzsche is a result of a typo in the English translation. It should read, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stranger.” 🙂
As it pertains to writing, your statement, “That doesn’t necessarily mean the hero wins or someone precious does not die. But it is not futile. Not if I wrote it, or if I read it twice,” certainly holds true. One of the sage pieces of writing advice I got from a grizzled veteran was, “Make things worse.” The journey must be worthy of the struggle. As my wife said after watching Arnold Schwarzenegger in Andrew Marlowe’s End of Days, “Sometimes you have to die to get the happy ending.”
I’ve tried to read T.C. the unbeliever several times. Wall them each time. Want to just grab the character by the throat and say “Oh, just commit suicide already, you worthless shit.”
Thank you!
I’ve never gotten around to reading the adventures of Mr. Covenant. I used to think that I ought to make time for it someday. However, after the various comments of people here, I think I’ll finish everything else in my To Be Read pile first.
I honestly think this is why so many of my pantser friends find their stories petering out…there is no respite, and the writer is exhausted (so is the reader).
My own view on this is that when you keep going like that, you’re building expectation. And, if you don’t know how to pay it off, you just keep building more expectation in order to keep the words going, figuring that as long as you’re writing, your making progress, and eventually the pay off will come to you. But at some point, you realize that you’ve hyped up the situation to such an extent that anything you might write would be a let-down.
You’ll be rooting for him to catch an arrow. Spoiler, he doesn’t. But he should have.
Thomas Covenant. [spit]
I was rooting for that guy to be killed for the whole trilogy. I only finished it out of spite, hoping he’d eat it.
Mr. Donaldson got no more of my money after that.
Might have something to do with how I write my characters now. They -learn- from experience, they don’t keep making the exact same wrong choice every time.
And also, I’m sorry, but if I’m going to read something I require the characters to start out with the basics of human decency and half a friggin’ clue. Otherwise I’m out.
I tend to associate “grungy people doing grungy things” with certain kinds of literary fiction, and some nihilistic police procedurals. And too much of the scifi I see on bookstore shelves. No thanks. I don’t want Gray Goo. A flawed hero who gets better is what I want to read about, people who try, mess up, learn, and try better.
And if that means occasionally saying “chuck it” and just shooting the Really Bad Person rather than trying karate, kung fu, or magic, well … So be it. An arrow into the villain from behind beats four dead Good Guys.