A Lover, a Piglet, and a Deep Hole; or, Three Types of Tension

I propose an experiment:

Step One: Acquire a garden hose, a stopwatch, two air horns, a terrified piglet, a wheelbarrow filled with manure, and a hole in the ground ten feet deep and six feet across.

Step Two: Trick your wife or husband, boyfriend or girlfriend, romantic partner or best friend, into stepping into the hole.

Step Three: Gently lower the piglet into the hole.

Step Four: Join both of them in the hole.

Step Five: Explain, once you are both at the bottom of the pit, that you’d like to discuss a subject on which the two of you (the two people, not you and the piglet) have historically disagreed.

Step Six: Arrange things such that, as soon as the discussion begins, another set of people begins filling the hole with water, blowing the air horns, and pelting you with manure.

Step Seven: Allow the piglet to race around the bottom of the pit throughout.

Step Eight: Use the stopwatch to carefully time how long it takes the two of you (again, the two people, not you and the piglet) to come to some sort of agreement or compromise on the issue of historical disagreement.

I’ll admit that it’s just possible that these conditions might lead your friend or partner to submit instantly and absolutely, conceding his or her own side of the debate just to get out of the fucking hole already. More likely, however, much more likely, is that something ugly is going to happen at the bottom of that pit, something far removed from rational discourse and compromise, and you’d just better hope to hell that the air horns and the squealing piglet drown out the screaming.

Why would you do this? Well, to become a better writer, obviously.

This is, after all, what you have to do with your characters all the time. Take the famous scene from The Fellowship of the Ring in which Gandalf, Frodo, Aragorn and the rest attempt to cross the Redhorn Pass in the shadow of the great peak, Caradhras. The fellowship is clearly threatened by weather and rockfall, but the threat doesn’t end there. The strain of the conditions leads to the disastrous decision to turn back, to attempt to cross beneath rather than over the mountains, through the Mines of Moria. One can imagine this discussion going differently had it taken place back, say, in Rivendell, when everyone was well rested and well fed. In the cold and wind, however, battling against the evil of Caradhras, the social fabric of the group begins to fray. There’s no piglet, of course, and no air horns, but close enough.

Tolkien knows, of course, that there are three primary sorts of literary tension: the psychological, the social, and the environmental. These are my terms, not his, and I’ll give a set of examples:

Psychological Tension: Jocelyn has lived most of her life ashamed at having fled from the Goblin Horde that murdered her family years earlier. This shame leads her to take foolish risks in all sorts of situations. The tension that results is primarily a product of her psychology, at least so far.

Social Tension: Jocelyn is travelling with Matt. Matt is an anxious person. His palms sweat at the prospect of riding a spirited horse, let alone facing down a Goblin Horde. Jocelyn’s constant risk-taking leads him to a grim conclusion: she’s going to get them both killed… if he doesn’t kill her first. Matt’s psychological weakness are exacerbated by the people around him, by the social tension that results.

Environmental Tension: Jocelyn and Matt might actually scrape by if all they need to do is walk down the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Nothing would provoke Jocelyn into risk-taking, and Matt, therefore, would be able to keep a lid on his murderous desperation. When we pluck them from Santa Cruz, however, and plop them down in a different environment – in the cellars, say, of the Palace of the Goblin King – things are unlikely to end well.

The three types of conflict are sometimes treated as though they’re separate. You hear people complain regularly of the latest action flick: “It’s all just car chases and things blowing up.” While I happen to love car chases and things blowing up, the point can be a valid one. Environmental tensions that do nothing to exacerbate social tensions are hollow and bombastic. If the characters start getting along better when the city bursts into flames, you (the author) have a real problem.

Likewise, social tensions that don’t chafe against raw psychological tensions are pointless. Imagine: Jesse makes fun of Jimmy’s ears. Jimmy, a level-headed and self-respecting young man, ignores him. Not much of a story there.

Give Jimmy a psychological weakness or wound, however, and we’re off to the races. Let’s say his ex-wife divorced him, saying, “You look like a goblin with your tiny face and huge, stupid ears.” Let’s say he really took that to heart. When Jesse makes his crack, Jimmy’s going to have him hanging over the Brooklyn Bridge by his ankles.

This kind of dynamic plays out all the time in my favorite sport: adventure racing. Teams drop out of races all the times, and at first blush, it usually looks as though it was the environment – the freezing rain, the endless bog, the capsized boats – that did them in.

Closer observation, however, usually reveals something else: the environmental difficulties irritate social tensions (John is sick to death of Jill telling him how to paddle the fucking boat), which are themselves almost always based on psychological issues (John was worried from the get-go that he’d be shown up by Jill, and sure enough, she’s proving far, far tougher than he is). The three types of tension meet in a perfect storm.

The teams, on the other hand, made up of happy people with good senses of humor, women and men who can work hard without taking themselves too seriously, usually endure with equanimity and even laughter the very worst of environmental tensions.

“Literary fiction” (whatever the hell that is) often (but certainly not always) eschews environmental tension as superficial or gaudy. We get tight little portraits of depressed men and women staring at blue jays while drinking themselves to death. Or whatever. Epic fantasy, though, is epic for a reason. It’s great to have a group of unhappy, distrustful people, but if you can put them on a rocky ledge above a gorge with a thousand hungry wolves on their trail and raging wildfires ahead, why wouldn’t you? Also, it never hurts to throw in a piglet.

Marriage is not Epic Fantasy; POV and the Dangers of Intimacy

“Even after twenty years together, my wife/husband/partner still surprises me every day!”

When I hear comments like this, I know I’m supposed to say, “Shucks, isn’t that sweet!” Instead, I want to call bullshit. If you spend twenty years with a person and they still surprise you on a daily basis, either you haven’t been paying very close attention, or you’re married to someone with a serious personality disorder.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love my wife, and marrying her was one of the two best things I’ve ever done (the other being having a kid). However, if we made a list of the wonderful things about our shared life, “Daily Unplumbed Mystique Coupled with the Bass Thrum of Bottomless Mystery” probably wouldn’t appear near the top.

Not to say that Jo doesn’t feel an occasional shiver of unanticipated pleasure when I do something unusual like unloading the dishwasher all the way. Or that I don’t find myself staring when she says it’s actually ok to have an “October Beer and Mud Sports Festival” in our backyard. Still, we don’t tend to shock each other all that often because after five years together, we know each other. Mostly. Which I have to think is sort of the point of a long-term commitment like marriage.

Marriage, however, is not epic fantasy.

The intimate familiarity that can make a romantic relationship so rich and secure can be anathema to the fantasy reader. After all, if we’re looking for a familiar story, we don’t tend to open books with paintings of half-orcs battling ice trolls beneath a sky spangled with blood-red stars. Now, obviously not everything about a great fantasy is mysterious and unusual. We need some contact with our own lives, contact that usually comes through a character or group of characters whose intellectual make-up and emotional responses are recognizable, familiar.

If all of the characters are cozy and familiar, however, if they all seem like our aunts and car mechanics and friends, we start missing out on the epic in epic fantasy. After all, we come to the genre expecting certain characters to be mysterious and larger-than-life, unfathomed and unfathomable. We should be able to relate to Sam and Frodo (even if we don’t agree with everything they do or think), but when we’re reading about Gandalf, we probably shouldn’t be thinking, “Yeah, I totally get what it’s like to be the Servant of the Secret Fire; I hated wielding the fucking Flame of Anor.” The story would be weak if Galadriel, who has lived through the three ages and thousands of years, seemed just like Jessie, the pigeon-toed brunette from that cocktail party you were at a few weeks ago.

Most fantasy writers understand all of this intuitively. Fantasy novels are replete with truly epic characters: gods and immortal mages, inscrutable dragons and sentient battle-axes. There is mystery. There is awe. There are unresolved questions.

One of the most potent tools in maintaining this mystery is point of view. Many of these larger than life characters aren’t POV characters, meaning we never get inside their heads. They can utter grand pronouncements or rattle off impossibly witty quips page after page, and they never seem too normal, too familiar (if handled well) because we only see what the writer lets us see. The POV keeps the mystery intact.

There is, however, a danger. Often, these secondary characters, due to exactly the mystery and awe just mentioned, become fan favorites. To take just one example, consider Boba Fett, the masked bounty-hunter from Star Wars. In the original three movies (episodes IV, V, and VI), Fett has a very small role, but people love him, he has his own fan club – and people want more of the characters they love. When this happens, the author (or film maker) is pressured to explain, to reveal, to expose psychology and backstory. Such explanations jeopardize the very foundation of the reader’s initial interest in the character.

And this is where POV comes into play. If we’re in Gandalf’s head, we know every time he has to take a dump, every time his gout acts up, every time that luxurious beard itches. None of that is necessarily bad. Sometimes it’s extremely effective to puncture the bubble of mystery and awe. Given the difficulty of unpuncturing bubbles, however, it’s well worth thinking about what will be lost through greater revelations, what will be destroyed through intimacy.

Peter Watts, in addition to being one of the best sci-fi writers around, understands this. His brilliant novel, Blindsight, involves a ship filled with misfits captained by a hyper-intelligent vampire named Sarasti. Watts makes the crucial decision to keep us out of the vampire’s mind, and he goes a step further: not only does he keep the reader in the dark about Sarasti’s motives and emotional make-up, even the other characters in the book are baffled by him. They often don’t understand his tactical decisions or the reasoning behind them, and Sarasti himself makes little effort to explain himself. “You can’t follow,” is his response to the questions of his crew. Those three words, in cutting off any avenue of inquiry, open up an entire world to our imaginations.

Of course, I wouldn’t want to be married to Sarasti, but damn is he fun to read about.

NOT SHRINKAGE! Fantasy and the Problem of Distance

All fantasy writers must, at one point or another, face down the following conundrum:

1. An epic world is physically vast.
2. A vast world takes a long time to traverse.
3. Too much traversing gets really, really boring.

The author is left to attack one (or more) of the three premises, but each approach has its risks.

Some writers choose to make their worlds smaller. Scott Lynch confines the action of his first book to a single city. Patrick Rothfuss allows Kvothe more leeway in The Name of the Wind, but the vast majority of book one transpires in just two locations; the voyages between are elided pretty swiftly. This can be an elegant solution; all the more so in the realm of fantasy, where concision and focus are not commonplace virtues. Confining the action to one specific locale (or a few of them) allows the writer to fully explore the location and avoid all the tedious traipsing required to get from point A to point B. That said, one of the reasons that many of us read epic fantasy is to explore a truly vast and diverse new land. Tightening the focus undermines this opportunity.

Some writers choose to whittle away at the second premise. The world can be huge, as long as your characters (or some of them) have a way to jump around with a little more alacrity when we get bored of slogging down the dusty roads and stopping at the wayside inns. Robert Jordan has the ‘Ways’ and later, when even those are too tedious, the ability of just about every major character to open a gateway. Tolkien has Gwaihir the eagle tote Gandalf around in two instances (once in his escape from Orthanc, the other after his battle with the Balrog), as well as rescuing Frodo and Sam after the destruction of the Ring. There are plenty of ways to move characters around a fantasy world quickly, but here, too, we run into dangers, although a different set from those mentioned above.

Chief among these new problems is shrinkage. As characters move more quickly, the world seems smaller. It’s harder to have forgotten cities or unexplored primeval forests when people can jump from one end of the world in an eye-blink. It’s harder to adopt an ominous tone, saying, “No one knows what lies beyond the mountains,” when the characters could simply hop through a gateway or jump on an eagle and check. The solution here is to limit the method of travel to certain occasions (e.g. it only works once a year) or characters (e.g. only these two dudes can do it).

But it’s easy to run into unexpected plot consequences. People are forever asking why Gandalf didn’t just stick Frodo (with the Ring) atop Gwaihir – ship him off to Orodruin and have done with it. While it may be possible to respond to this objection, the overarching problem remains: much of fantasy depends on physical obstacles to human movement. The very notion of a quest is generally dependent on geographical distance. Shrink that distance and quests (and treks, and hunts, etc.) shrink correspondingly in their significance.

The dangers inherent in attacking the first two premises lead some writers to attack the third: they disagree with the very notion that a slog of, say, a thousand miles, must eventually get boring. In fact, many writers find opportunity in this challenge. Fantasy literature is replete with epic treks (one of my favorites being the Chain of Dogs in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen). There’s no question that a long journey in which the protagonists are exposed to strange places – the more frightening, unexpected, and exotic, the better – can be a joy to read. And yet, I would contend that most series can only pull off one or two of these. After that, the reader (and characters) are familiar with the world and we want to get on with the plot already.

There’s no perfect solution. I tend toward option B in my own writing: selective opportunities for fast travel. Having created these opporutnities, however, I’m constantly amazed at how frequently they threaten to screw up my plot. I’d be curious to hear how other readers and writers think about this “problem of distance,” and the solutions you find most compelling.