How to Employ the Triad of Tension (Blog Post by Tara Maya)

All stories need conflict, which implies two sides, protagonist and antagonist, or Good Guys versus Bad Guys, even if the “bad” in the story is not actually another person. The protagonist could be struggling against herself, or against her environment.  Conflict still requires at least that minimum of forces to the conflict, personal or impersonal.

Often, however, a little more complication spices things up. It’s surprising how much more complex a story grows by just introducing a third side, to create a triad of powers all in competition with one another. This can of course, be further subdivided, although too many independent powers can overwhelm the reader.

Not every kind of triadic antagonism possible works terribly well. For instance, you could write a story pitting three different groups of Bad Guys against one another. It would be a straight power game. Some Mobster fiction and Caper crime fiction pretends to this, but if you look closely you’ll usually find that at least one side is, by comparison, less evil than the others, and the one we end up rooting for.

The only time I’ve read a novel where there were really only Bad Guys (whether two or three sides), it was usually not the intention of the writer at all, it was simply bad writing. The writer forgot to create a likable protagonist. The result was a throw-to-the-wall novel.

So in future posts, I’ll be looking at the most effect ménage a trois of the Triad of Tension:

GBB

BGG

GGG

Now, drag your mind out of the bedroom… that stands for: Good/Bad/Bad, Bad/Good/Good, and Good/Good/Good. There’s also the special case of the Good/Bad and the Good Guys in White… the later referring to a group that thinks they are good, in fact, even better than the real Good Guys, but behaves in an evil fashion.

I will also look at the only combination of B/B/B that works, which is the inverse: on of the so-called Baddies is really an Anti-hero, or someone who will redeem himself through the novel, rising above the other sides, which remain unredeemably wicked.

Creating three sides drives plot twists. Instead of straightforward clashes between Good and Evil every chapter, the Good Guys may find themselves embroiled in the conflict between two equally repellent forces, and must either side with one to avoid the other, or fight against the overwhelming odds of an alliance between both. It also adds uncertain, as characters switch sides, or hide their true allegiance.

A long work, such as an Epic Fantasy, Space Opera, or Historical Saga, can easily employ more than one trifecta. Take Lord of the Rings. We have the triad of tension between three Good Guys: the Elves, the Dwarves, and Men. We have the alliance of Good Guys undermined by the traitorous Bad Guy in White, Saruman the White, then faced with the alliance of two Bad Guys, the Two Towers.

Recommended for Writers: Bullies, Bastards & Bitches by Jessica Page Merrell

Bullies, Bastards & Bitches is a great title for a book about Baddies, don’t you think?

Whereas Rayne Hall’s Writing About Villains provides plenty of checklists and nuts and bolts for your villains, Jessica Merrell excels at analysis and example. She dissects numerous villains from literature to show the various shades of evil, from wicked gods to annoying neighbors. I think both approaches are useful and balance each other.

 

 

 

How to Make Your Villains Scary (Guest Post by Rayne Hall)

WRITNG CRAFT: HOW TO MAKE YOUR VILLAINS SCARY

Most novels and short stories have an antagonist (someone who opposes the protagonist), and this person or creature is often dangerous and perhaps evil. Here are ten professional techniques for making them truly scary.

 

1. The villain thinks of himself as a good guy who will do anything for what he believes is a noble cause.
2. He has a genuinely good side – perhaps he is a loving son who cares for his ageing parents, or he goes out of his way to protect children from harm.
3. During the first encounter, he seems pleasant and likeable.
4. Describe his voice. (“His voice sounded like a ….”)
5. He smiles rarely – but when he does, describe the smile in detail, comparing the shape of his mouth to something dangerous.

1. Describe his hands, the way they move, the texture of the skin, the shape of the nails.
2. Describe his eyes by comparing their colour to something unpleasant or dangerous.
3. Describe the way he moves. To increase the suspense, give him slow, deliberate movements.
4. What does the villain smell of? Innocuous smells, such as mothballs and peppermint toothpaste can work well.
5. Avoid clichés such as maniacal laughter and hot stinking breath.

Although this article uses the word “he” for the villain, your antagonist can of course be a devious female!

Questions?

If you’re a writer and want to discuss your ideas for a fictional villain, or if you have questions, please leave a comment. I’ll be around for a week and will reply. I enjoy answering questions.

 Buy Writing About Villains by Rayne Hall

The Bad Guys in White, Part II (Blog Post by Tara Maya)

(This post will contain spoilers for The Unfinished Song, so if you haven’t read up to the end of Book 6, you might want to come back to it later.)

In my earlier post The Bad Guys in White, Part I, I discussed the term “Bad Guys in White,” the fantasy trope of a group of villains based on Templars or the Inquisition. I maintain that, given how much evil the Inquisition perpetrated over the centuries, it’s still fair game for inspiring many, many bad guys to come.

Of course, we can move beyond the clichés by, first of all, doing research on the real Inquisition, not simply recycling (as I suspect some writers do) the baddies from video games or other fantasy novels. Direct research always refreshes world building. One can tell when a writer has done her research by how alive and unique her world is, even when, from afar, it seems to be an overdone trope, such as a vaguely medieval Europe. Just look at the Kushiel’s Dart series, set in a fantastique recognizably based on pre-modern France.

My character the Bone Whistler, whose rise to power is described in Book 11 (and the novella Tomorrow We Dance, which is an excerpt from Book 11), is based on a Xhosa prophet. The Xhosa, like the Europeans, also believed in witchcraft, and the trials of accused witches were not much more fair than those under the Inquisition. But the real crisis to their community came when their land and way of life came under pressure from British colonialism. After a Xhosa girl saw visions, her uncle made her famous, and thousands of Xhosa people followed her, to their utter ruin.

We can also move past the easy tropes to really think about what makes the Bad Guys in White such a problem for the Good Guys.

A couple of things, really.

One, the Bad Guys in White say they are on the Good Guy’s side, but aren’t—they are hypocrites. Or they go further and accuse the Good Guys of being Bad, so they confuse innocent by-standers and third-parties, turning the very people the Good Guys are trying to protect against them.

Two, the Bad Guys in White divide the Good Guy’s camp. The Good Guys either have to work with these vipers, even knowing they are evil, or fight them at the same time they are fighting the Bad Guys in Black.

It may help to remember that history is full of examples of this dilemma in real life, not at all limited to the Inquisition. Just think of the two worst tyrants of the Twentieth Century: Hitler and Stalin.

During WWII, the democracies had to ally with Stalin in order to fight Hitler. Churchill, at least, was under no illusions about what Stalin really was, or how far he could be trusted. When he said he would ally with the devil himself to fight Hitler, I’m sure he knew that wasn’t far off. But Hollywood war propaganda painted “Uncle Joe” as an avuncular guy to sell the alliance to the American people. As a result, the Americans were not prepared when Stalin turned on his allies and crushed Eastern Europe.

Think of the irony: Britain and France declared war on Germany for the express purpose of honoring an alliance with Poland, yet at the end of the war, Poland once more a captive nation. Thousands of innocents who had just been liberated from Nazi concentration camps were rounded up again and sent to die in gulags.

And it’s sobering to think that if Hitler had been content to simply hunker down in his own nation, confining his genocide to his own borders, but Stalin, by himself, had invaded Poland (in real history, he invaded, but under the cover of the co-invasion by the Nazis), the West might have allied with Hitler to stop Stalin. Instead of jovial “Uncle Joe,” the Americans might have been sold a charismatic “Uncle Adolph,” and to this day, Fascists might be regarded as well-meaning if misguided idealists, the way all too many people regard Communists.

The Communists make a good model for “Bad Guys in White” because unlike Fascism, Communism seemed to many to offer a better, purer, more moral way of life than decadent industrial capitalism. Equality of all people, of men and women, the end of nationalism, the sharing of all material wealth, a future of reason and science, in which a wise and selfless vanguard would eventually lead everyone into a world without any government, or indeed suffering of any sort, at all. Who could object to such lofty goals? (The Inquisition, too, did everything only for the good of your immortal soul and to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven.)

And yet, if only because they were in power longer, the Communists succeeded in mass murdering five times as many people as the Fascists–100 million human beings as opposed to the mere 20 million the Fascists managed to snuff out. (I have no doubt that if Hitler had been left in power, however, the Fascists would have gone on killing…and killing…and killing. Though maybe, they too would have eventually have collapsed from within, as in Harry Turtledove’s evocative Alternate History, In the Presence of Mine Enemies.)

But, say you were trying to convince people of the 1950s that Stalin was preparing a new genocide, apparently inspired by Hitler, to eliminate all the Jews, and millions of others, inside the Soviet Union. (Fortunately for the world, Stalin died first.) McCarthy would be the last “ally” you’d want. He’s become synonymous with the modern day witch-hunter, a real Bad Guy in White…or in this case, a pinstripe suit. In fact, there were quite a few genuine Soviet spies in positions of power in the government, sciences, and media, but McCarthy’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach probably gave them more cover than exposure.

Good Guys in an Epic Fantasy or an Urban Fantasy should have to struggle with foes like this, as much as with other kinds of villains, because ordinary people do too.

Don’t forget to check out Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum.

Recommended for Writers: Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum

The finest dystopian fiction of this century, books such as 1984, We, and Darkness At Noon, were written by authors who had glimpsed a broken world in the mirror. They had lived it. Once–and this was perhaps the true horror–they had believed in it. The Twentieth Century was the Century of Dystopia Triumphant…. of Fascist and Communist empires that heralded themselves as earthly messiahs of a new Golden Age, while delivering mass murder, mass terror, mass famine and war.

The Nazi half of the horror that was the previous century is well known, but the scope of the Communist nightmare is still little felt, at a visceral level, in the same way. This is one reason that the work of authors like Anne Applebaum are so crucial. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, is an amazing and sobering portrayal of totalitarianism triumphant.

Anne Applebaum writes nonfiction more grippingly than many lesser writers manage to write fiction. She writes and argues history as all history should be (but seldom is) written and argued. Her reasoning is logical, her organization is lucid, her prose is luminous. She salts the meaty heaps of evidence with personal vignettes that bring the tragedies, absurdities and ambiguities of the period alive. The history of genocide and conquest must always be in danger of fading to gray under the immensity of its own statistical weight. And as Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Applebaum returns human faces to the cynical mass murdering oligarchs who crushed Eastern Europe, whether as conquering foreigners or collaborating locals, as amoral psychopaths or feverish true believers.

Dystopia has become a hot genre lately, but not every dystopia is portrayed as convincingly as Panem. Likewise, many near future or far future science fiction or paranormal/contemporary fantasy novels set out to portray the conquest of nations by a hostile, dystopian human or alien force, but many end up falling flat because the authors haven’t read any actual history.

How does a nation that arrives not only as a conqueror, but as a liberator, impose its rule…and its ideology? Force is present, but not always naked; what clothes does force wear? Here is a real history of how several different nations all learned to march in step to the same tune, and how that was accomplished.

But while we’re on the subject of historically real dystopias, I must also recommend Anne Applebaum’s other books on Communism, especially Gulag and Gulag Voices (an anthology of first hand accounts which she curated).

 

Learn more about Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe by Anne Applebaum.

Recommended for Writers: A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages by Henry Charles Lea

We all think we know what the Inquisition was, but for most of us, our knowledge of that period of history is hazy at best…and it comes entirely from second-hand and third-hand sources. Maybe a half-remembered high school year book or college course, but more like, some Hollywood riff or musical spoof.

If you’re a writer, or just a human being, and you want some insight into real evil, however, you should study history. Real history, not a watered down textbook, and definitely not Hollywood spin.

Current academnic books can be intimidating, and, well, expensive. Publishers often price the ebooks the same as the hard cover. I’ve seen some history ebooks that cost over $100, which is just crazy. However, don’t despair.One of the great things about the age of the ebook is that so many excellent older histories available for free or dirt cheap, since they are out of copyright. Often these older books are actually more legible and enjoyable to read than some of the postmodern bilge that sometimes emerges from modern academia.

A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages by Henry Charles Lea is one such work that is well worth the read. I bought my print version a long time ago, and it cost me a pretty penny, but I’ve noticed that you can now buy all three volumes for a buck. If you want a fascinating overview of how folk in the Middle Ages embarked on the frenzied hunt of witches, demons and heretics, this is a marvelous three-volume set.

As interesting as the persecutions are in and of themselves, it’s also worth noting that people of the Middle Ages, illiterate and isolated though they might have been, were not as stupid or credulous as we often assume. They did not necessarily rush into the persecutions as a blind mob; they had to be goaded there by centuries of propaganda and show trials. This makes reading about the Inquisition interesting to compare to thoroughly modern phenomena, such as the conquest of Eastern Europe by the Soviets. (So be sure and check out tomorrow’s Recommended books for writers as well.)

First of all, the Inquisition started much earlier than the Spanish Inquisition, and lasted centuries longer than most people realize. The incredible combination of pure evil and utter hypocrisy they exhibited during their reign of terror over a millennium of European history is impossible to exaggerate in even the most outrageous of fantasy villains. The Inquisition had roving targets: pagans, heretics, witches, Jews, Protestants, scientists and artists, but the methodology of terror transferred century by century from one persecution to another.

Henry Charles Lea describes the late medieval witch craze, in the third volume of his oeuvre A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages:

No one can read the evidence adduced at a witch-trial, or the confessions of the accused, without seeing how every accident and every misfortune and every case of sickness or death which had occurred in the vicinage for years was thus explained, and how the circle of suspicion widened so that every conviction brought new victims; burnings multiplied, and the terrified community was ready to believe that a half or more of its members were slaves of Satan, and that it would never be free from their malignant vengeance until they should all be exterminated. For more than two centuries this craze was perpetually breaking out in one part of Europe or another, carefully nursed and stimulated by popes and Inquisitors, Bernard of Como and Bishop Binsfeld, and the amount of human misery thence arising is simply incomputable. (p.509)

The Monty Python spoofs of how witches were tried was not exaggerated, but rather softened. Otherwise the joke would have been too horrid to laugh about. It wasn’t a matter of whether a witch floated like a duck, but whether she (or he) broke down and confessed during torture.

“The inquisitor was formally instructed never to declare him [the witch] innocent.” (p. 513) The names of witnesses were suppressed; if the accused was given counsel, that person was appointed by the Inquisition and threatened with being accused of a witch as well if he actually defended his client; the Inquisitor was allowed to falsely promise clemency if the accused publically confessed, but after confessing, the accused was duly burned anyway.

It wasn’t just a matter of guilty until proven innocent, as in secular law at the time: There was no innocent.  

Formally endurance of torture might be regarded as an evidence of innocence, now it was only an additional proof of guilt, for it showed that Satan was endeavoring to save his servitor… 

One new infallible sign was the inability of the witch to shed tears during torture and before the judges, though she could do so freely elsewhere. ….Still with the usual logic of the demonologist, if she did weep it was a device of the devil and was not to be reckoned in  her favor.

…Equally frivolous was the pretense that the punishment of burning was merely for the injuries wrought by the witch, for we shall see that in the case of the Vaudois of Arras the convicts were burned as a matter of course, although attendance upon the Sabbat was the only crime with which most of the sufferers were charged. (p. 514. 516)

Henry Charles Lea’s work covers three volumes, about five hundred pages each, describing case after case of maniacal persecution for charges so ludicrous that even people at the time could not believe most of them. To the modern mind, that is sometimes what strikes us most: that the punishment was so brutal though the crime was completely imaginary.

On the other hand, for a fantasy writer, the amazing powers attributed to witches, demons, werewolves and so on are tempting material to mine for magic systems. And that gives us an opportunity which more prosaic minds seldom ask: suppose witchcraft were real—would that have justified the excess, the lies, the confiscation of property that paid for it all, the ongoing tortures and genocides of the Inquisition?

Of course not.

That is exactly why I think some form of Bad Guys in White are an important component of Epic Fantasy. Their presence reminds us that self-righteousness is not the same as being right.

Also read The Bad Guys in White, Part II.

Learn more about A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages by Henry Charles Lea.