The Concrete Tomb of Hradzka

I am an extraordinarily negative person, and I have a huge list of things I hate, both in fan and in professional fiction. Interestingly, there's not a lot of overlap in terms of things I hate between the two. Fan and pro fiction have different crutches, and thus when they irritate me they do so for very different reasons. I gripe a lot about fanfic, so today I am going to bitch about something I hate more than almost anything in professional writing: the Bullshit Reversal.

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For a while now, I've been doing some thinking about the Bechdel Test, mostly as a background process. For those who haven't heard of it, the Bechdel Test was created by Liz Wallace and immortalized (with credit and by permission) by Wallace's friend, cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Wallace's rule is to not watch a movie unless it contains 1) two women 2) who have a conversation 3) that's not about a man. It's a simple test, and movies and TV fail it often.

If the test itself has a failure, it's that whether something passes or fails it is as far as the discussion usually goes. On those occasions that a conversation does turn to why a work fails the Bechdel Test, there are basically two ways that conversation can go. It can turn into an activist discussion of sexism and society, or it can turn into a discussion of the mechanics of writing. There have been a lot of the former, but there haven't been all that many of the latter. And while I don't want to interrupt any of the former, I think the latter conversation is worth having, too.

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David Mamet created the TV show "The Unit." He wrote notes to his writers. In all capital letters. As you would expect, these are gold.

You've heard of the Bechdel Test ("I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it who, two, talk to each other about three, something besides a man"). Now there's the Mamet Corollary, which is:

ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.

Other wise Mamet insights:

ANY TIME ANY CHARACTER IS SAYING TO ANOTHER “AS YOU KNOW”, THAT IS, TELLING ANOTHER CHARACTER WHAT YOU, THE WRITER, NEED THE AUDIENCE TO KNOW, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.

DO *NOT* WRITE A CROCK OF SHIT. WRITE A RIPPING THREE, FOUR, SEVEN MINUTE SCENE WHICH MOVES THE STORY ALONG, AND YOU CAN, VERY SOON, BUY A HOUSE IN BEL AIR *AND* HIRE SOMEONE TO LIVE THERE FOR YOU.

Originally posted here, picked up here, and transcribed fully and legibly (IMPORTANT) here.

via Terry Teachout, an audio recording of Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler, talking about writing thrillers.

The creators of James Bond and Philip Marlowe, folks. According to Teachout, it's the only known recording of Chandler's voice. (Teachout is disappointed that Chandler doesn't sound more like he'd imagined Marlowe's voice.)

Question for folks: what’s your plotting process like?

I’ve been thinking about putting together a post about plotting for a while. This is partly because I want to encourage folks who haven't yet given it a shot to try it, and partly because I’m curious if other people who write plotty stories, or who write character arcs within ficlets or porn, do it the same way I do.

( This got quite long. I use my story 'When Harley Met Kory' as an example. )

Gun-geekery and SUPERNATURAL collide, as one of my favorite gun-nut sites, The Box o’ Truth, takes a look at rock salt loads. Sam and Dean use them against demons a lot, and on one memorable occasion, Dean shoots Sam in the chest with a load of rock salt at very close range (with a line to the effect that it won’t kill him, but it’ll hurt like hell).

I’ve always been curious about rock salt loads. They’re a staple of movies and TV, with cantankerous old folks peppering rowdy teenagers and the like. Children of the eighties will recall Tanya Roberts, in A View to a Kill, providing Roger Moore’s James Bond with a shotgun that he uses to shoot a bad guy to no effect. (MOORE. “What’s this loaded with?” ROBERTS. “Rock salt.” MOORE. “Now you tell me!”) But when it comes to guns, I am, like Robert Ruark’s Old Man, a damned old maid, and the idea of home-brewed “less than lethal” ammo makes me a little queasy. It seems to me to make the idea of pointing a gun at somebody else into a casual affair, which it isn’t and shouldn’t ever be. Plus, accidents happen, and shells can get mixed up, and… yeah. But it’s a great idea for ghost-fighting.

You can always count on TBOT’s Old_Painless for an interesting range report, and I recommend his post to fanfic writers looking for a little color to throw into SPN stories. He explains how to make rock salt loads, what effect they have, and how to clean the gun after use. (Salt can corrode the weapon. You don’t want that.)

You’ll note that Old_Painless says that after the shooting was done, he and his friend Tman “broke out the Tampax.” Tampax? Yes. As Old_Painless reminds us, feminine products are terrific for cleaning 12-gauge shotguns.

(That’d be a cute bit to throw into an SPN fic, actually. You could go a couple of ways with it: Dean buying tampons in bulk, and Sam squirming with embarrassment at the counter as the cute shopgirl rings Dean up, or looks at him in extreme punishment. Or the guys have an enforced stay at the Roadhouse, and Dean is made extremely uncomfortable by feminine products, until Ellen shows him how useful they are for cleaning shotguns.)

A couple of notes on "Fathers and Daughters:" there is not nearly enough Jim Gordon fanfic out there. I've posted my thoughts before on why that is; but I don't think the restrictions that Jim's lack of membership in the inner circle of the Family make him less interesting, or any less a good focus for a story. One of the ways I come up with fanfic stories is to look at various characters and ask myself what they have in common, or what they'd like to, or what they'd hate to. Figure out how to use those issues in a dramatic situation, and you've got a story. In this case, it's Batgirls' paternal relationships; the Jim-Babs bond is one of the great strengths of the Batbooks, while the relationship of David and Cassandra Cain is abusive, horrifying, and quite rightly beyond repair. Even though Cain really appears to love his daughter, in a very, very twisted way, and some very few of her memories of him are good -- as Babs correctly notes, there's a point at which none of that matters any more, and Cain passed that point long before he used Cass to commit a murder. But those feelings can still inform the characters' emotions.

I used one of Cass's canonical good memories (from Batgirl #22) in the story.

( Here it is. )

By now, it's clear that Batgirl has not been an easy character to write. She's been a happy mute, a frustrated chatterbox, and one heck of a problem for her writers. But as of Batgirl #13, Chuck Dixon and Kelley Puckett have sussed things out. Dixon found Cass's voice, and Puckett showed how striking and effective that voice could be in dialogue. So it has to be smooth sailing from here, right?

Well, not exactly.

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A lot of people have had quite a lot of fun with the random pairing generator and the plot bunny generator. Both are quite fun, and have decidedly evil streaks. (The plot bunny generator just gave me "Bruce Wayne / ...prepares a meal" -- something that, if you're at all in Batfandom, you know is an extraordinarily bad idea.) Many stories have resulted, most of them being ficlets. (In part because of the five-minute game, which was an invention I can only describe as crackheaded and evil. Also fun.)

I suck at the five-minute game, and have been trying to figure out why. I come up with story ideas for a given pairing pretty quickly, but can't hold to the time limit at all. I can do stupid-funny pretty easily, but have only been able to produce one five-minute ficlet that's any good.

I think it's because of what and how I write. I'm a story freak. I love characterization, and banter, and I'm a sucker for good romance, but for me writing is all about *people doing something.* Making decisions, solving mysteries, facing challenges -- whatever. But I'm very much a beginning-middle-end-in-an-Aristotle's-Poetics-kind-of-way guy. And I can't do that in five minutes. Or at least, I haven't been able to yet.

It's not that I don't like ficlets. They're fun. But they're not really stories. They're more like the kind of thing one SF writer (Ray Bradbury, I think) called, "Here's an interesting idea; the end." My Two-Face story definitely falls into that category: it's a portrait, not a story. And I keep trying to write stories with a beginning, middle, and end. So I keep busting the time limit and writing longer ficlets, to the point that they're not really ficlets at all. I think my Lucius/Lois still falls into the "portrait" category, but my Jason Todd/Maggie Sawyer and my Scarecrow/Harley don't. And I prefer the story to the portrait. My reaction to a lot of ficlets is to say, "Neat -- so now what?" The best example is marag's "Fathers and Children" -- I'm annoyed that it ended, because I want to know what happens next. (She has another example of the contrast I'm talking about here: the first is a portrait, the second a story.)

So: ficlets are fun, but ultimately a distraction from storytelling. Which is where my interest lies.

Leslie Thompkins first appeared in 1975, making her the last of the current Batfamily regulars to be introduced in the comic pages -- of the adults, anyway; Tim Drake came along in 1989, and Stephanie Brown and Cassandra Cain are more recent introductions. Dick Grayson, Alfred Pennyworth, and Barbara Gordon all preceded her (not to mention Jim Gordon, but I don't really consider him "family"), and Leslie's canonical relationship to Bruce has changed more than that of any of them.

Women of Gotham has a short but good history of the character that shows some of her incarnations over the years. Briefly, she was introduced in Detective #457, Denny O'Neil's great "There Is No Hope in Crime Alley!" In that story, she's a part of Batman's annual pilgrimage to Crime Alley; she's the woman who comforted young Bruce after his parents' murder. She doesn't know Batman's true identity, had never met him or his folks before the murder, and has no personal connection with Bruce Wayne today.

What a difference twenty-nine years makes, huh?

Today Leslie serves a number of functions in the Batbooks: she's a confidant and an ear on the street; she's a medical resource, when Alfred's skills aren't enough; she's the humanitarian wing of the Batclan -- and those are just her story uses. On a personal level, she's Alfred's confidante and (discreet) love interest. And she's really, really good at taking the piss out of Batman. Leslie has no tolerance for bullshit, even (maybe especially) when Batman is doling it out, because she's known Bruce since he was a frightened little boy and she is never, ever scared of him. She can criticize him, carp at him, and call him on the carpet. And that's gold. It makes her very fun to write.

Leslie is also a pacifist. This is one of the great aspects of her modern characterization: she cares for Batman, she helps him, but she is innately *completely opposed* to his methods. Which makes for conflict on a character level, and it's expressed in any number of different ways, to really great effect. I love Leslie's pacifism.

What I don't love is that the other characters never say that she's wrong. Because at least some of them should.

Take Batman. He should not (as he has recently) admire her pacifism. He should see it as a flaw he tolerates, or a weakness he has to protect from being exploited. Something to wish he could be? No.

Or Alfred. He loves Leslie. The two of them were Bruce's surrogate parents after Thomas and Martha died. He has his issues with Bruce's Mission. But he's a veteran, a combat medic, with experience in intelligence work. He knows that violence can solve problems, if applied correctly. Which, if you think about it, puts him between Bruce and Leslie. (Ghod, what a horrible place to be in. Poor Alfred.)

There's absolutely no reason everybody should put Leslie on a pedestal the way they do, especially when a large part of the reason her clinic can remain open in a rough neighborhood is that the Batfolks and Selina Kyle are on the street busting heads. I can see them wishing that they lived in a world where pacifism was possible, but believing it? Admiring her for setting a moral standard they wish they could live up to, but can't because of some failing on their part? No. Because if Leslie's right, they're not only failing to do any good, they're actively contributing to the problem. Which they're not. So as things stand, Leslie gets to sit in a position of unquestioned moral authority, where she delivers her opinion as if from the mountaintop and nobody ever calls her on it. Which is a shame, because it means there's a lot of potential for drama and character conflict going unrealized.

I played with this a little in "Jason and Me." My Steph is harsh on Leslie there, more than Leslie deserves, especially in that situation -- but she does have a point. Somebody should bring stuff like that up. Maybe not Bruce or Alfred (they probably love Leslie too much to tell her off, but they certainly shouldn't serve as her "virtues of pacifism" amen corner). But somebody.

Because I love Leslie Thompkins.

But she isn't always right.