U is For Unrealistic...Well, ANYTHING

Tropes…love ’em or hate ’em, some seem to be here to stay.  Whether they should or not is actually up to the individual reader.  I think the main problem with tropes is that an author reads a story, they’re so drawn into the world of those characters, and they love those characters so much, they decide they want to write a story like that.  Okay, that’s great.  Imitation is often referred to as the highest form of flattery.  However, there’s a problem.  When someone decides to write a story like that, they often have a tendency to rewrite THAT particular story.  Oh, not in the manner of plagiarism—though that’s happened—but they’ve taken the bare bones of the inspiring story and just dressed it up in different clothing.  There’s not a whole lot out there that hasn’t been done before, and most stories have commonalities as their core.  Because of this, you have a tendency to see certain tropes that pop up quite often in specific genres.  Some of those tropes have such a universal theme you’ll find them in other genres as well.  The secret is, if you do decide to go with a tried and true trope that a lot of readers still love, then you need to find a way to put a new spin on it.  To teach an old dog new tricks.

U is for...
Unrealistic...Well, ANYTHING

I originally intended to write this post about a more specific unrealistic trope, but which one to choose?  Then, I realized that I took issue with most anything that was unrealistic in the world for which it was created.  In my last post, I touched on this with magic, but there are others that bug me as well.

For example, in fantasy and other genres, you have horses riding hellbent for leather, non-stop.  When these poor animals are ridden in such a way, why is it they never drop dead from exhaustion?  Sure, your horses coud be mythological creatures that can travel vast distances in a short span of time, but the horses I'm talking about don't seem to come from such bloodlines.  If they did, in most cases they didn't seem to have inherited the speed aspect, since the characters are often on their quest for as little as several weeks, or as long as a year or more.  Granted, this isn't exactly a trope per se, but it still fits because you can often find this in fantasy novels.

And what about unrealistic societies?  Our regular blog readers might remember me mentioning this during a previous post about world building, but I think it bears repeating.  Fiction is wonderful for the freedoms it gives you as a writer.  However, even if you create a world from scratch, you have two primary things to focus on pertaining to societies.  Obviously, you're going to have other things to consider as well, but these two are primary.  First, the society has to work in your world.  No matter how outlandish your world or your society, the society has to work in the world.  You wouldn't put a mining-type society in a world that doesn't have any kind of mining technology, and you wouldn't put it in an area where it wouldn't be geologically possible to find whatever they're supposed to be mining.  So you have to make sure it works in your world.

Second, you have to make sure your society is realistic and makes sense in your world.  Once, I received a manscript that was interesting and showed promise, but I ultimately had to reject it because it had too many flaws.  One of the primary flaws pertained to the two societies of the world.  One society was a purely female society, and the other had men and women in it, but the men ruled.  Women were not considered equals in that society, and their rights were limited.  A resistance was forming that was composed of people who believed men and women should be equal partners.  The biggest problem with this was that there was no explanation for why the men-and-women-as-equals society hadn't naturally formed before, and why they had to be an underground resistance.  A brief explanation of why the other two societies formed was given, but there was no logical reason given for the equal society not to exist openly.  You can create any kind of society you want, but it has to have a logical basis and make sense within your world.  If your readers apply the logic and traditions of your world to the society, they have to be able to see how and why it exists.

The same is true of unrealistic characteristics of the people in a society or race.  Everyone in a particular society or race isn't going to be the same.  I suppose you could get away with this if all those who are different are banished from the society.  However, if banishment is the standard reaction to difference, then you're likely to have those who publically follow the norms of their society, but who have different viewpoints or practices in private.  Much as many pagans did when the world first began converting to Christianity.  Of course, that woud be one way to create conflict within a particular society.  There are some things that could be widely believed or practiced throughout the society, but there could also be differing opinions on the right way to do those things, or even wheher or not those things are right to begin with.  Not every member of a society or race is going to have the same values and beliefs.  You see diversity in humans, even among those of the same societies, religions, social orders, and races, so why wouldn't that hold true for others as well?  Even an alien race is likely to have differences within its population, unless they happen to have a hive mind like the Borg in Star Trek.

There are many more things that fall into the unrealistic category, but this post is probably long enough.  I don't want to bore anyone!  When you're writing, you need to make sure to avoid the many unrealistics floating around out there.  Ask yourself if this seems too unrealistic.  And when you send your manuscript out to your beta readers, if one says something doesn't seem realistic, it's possible it's just that reader, but do take a second look and mull it over.  If you have two or more questioning the believability of something, then it's very likely there's a problem, so definitely take another look at it.  Things might look good or sound cool at first, but they usually won't hold up under scrutiny.

M is for Magic Without Boundaries or Consequences

Tropes…love ’em or hate ’em, some seem to be here to stay.  Whether they should or not is actually up to the individual reader.  I think the main problem with tropes is that an author reads a story, they’re so drawn into the world of those characters, and they love those characters so much, they decide they want to write a story like that.  Okay, that’s great.  Imitation is often referred to as the highest form of flattery.  However, there’s a problem.  When someone decides to write a story like that, they often have a tendency to rewrite THAT particular story.  Oh, not in the manner of plagiarism—though that’s happened—but they’ve taken the bare bones of the inspiring story and just dressed it up in different clothing.  There’s not a whole lot out there that hasn’t been done before, and most stories have commonalities as their core.  Because of this, you have a tendency to see certain tropes that pop up quite often in specific genres.  Some of those tropes have such a universal theme you’ll find them in other genres as well.  The secret is, if you do decide to go with a tried and true trope that a lot of readers still love, then you need to find a way to put a new spin on it.  To teach an old dog new tricks.

M is for…

Magic Without Boundaries or Consequences

While this is primarily found in pure fantasy novels, you’ll come across it in other genres where the story has fantasy elements.  You’ve probably come across it in one novel or another, and you might even be able to name that novel right off the top of your head.  Simply put, Magic Without Boundaries or Consequences occurs when the magic-wielders can use obscene amounts of magic without ever getting tired or suffering any ill side effects.  It also occurs when you see magic-wielders who are supremely powerful and have a spell that will take care of anything and everything.

There are a couple of reasons this is problematic.  First, if the magic-wielders are so powerful, why is there even a struggle in the manuscript?  If the good guys have such a powerful magician/witch/wizard/sorcerer, why can’t they just destroy or capture the bad guy before he gets out of hand?  How is there even any conflict?  If it’s the bad guy who is so powerful, again, how is there a conflict?  Why doesn’t he just take over the world?  Why don’t either of these characters basically take on a god-like persona?

The exception to this would be when you’re dealing with characters who are gods of some sort.  Their lack of involvement is usually explained with the age-old reason that they don’t involve themselves in the affairs of mortals, unless it directly impacts the gods.  Fair enough.  In those cases, the gods may become involved, but what they can or can’t do is usually limited, and there are reasons for that.  For example, one book series I know of has gods who become involved in the affairs of mortals because it has direct bearing on the gods.  Another god of their pantheon is the one causing all the trouble.  However, the other gods are reluctant to get involved at first, because they have their own very specific laws about how they must deal with each other.  Much to the annoyance of the humans involved.  Due to circumstances like this, the display of a god’s all-powerful magic either isn’t seen at all, or it’s saved for something very specific.

Back to our normal magic-wielders.  You’ve seen them.  They’re the ones who continually blast through devastatingly powerful spells, and they just keep right on doing it.  They don’t need any time to rest and recharge, because they don’t get tired or pass out, or suffer any other ill effects.  Now, this can depend on the magic of your world, so you have to have a pretty concrete idea of how it works, and you should communicate that to your readers without boring them with it.  Does the magic come from within the mage?  Does the mage have the capability of drawing the power directly from the world?  Does the magic depend entirely on spell components?  Knowing how the magic in your world works is important, because if you know how it works, you can set limits on the magic and create consequences that are believable.  For example, most magic is portrayed as coming from power within the mage.  Since this type of magic is essentially energy, a mage’s magical ability should be limited by their physical energy.  They should get tired and need rest after using a lot of spells, or even after one or two very powerful spells.  They should black out or suffer another major side effect after overexertion, after attempting a powerful spell when they haven’t had enough time to recharge, or after attempting a spell that is too advanced for them.

Though they’re from movies, I can think of two good examples where consequences for using magic were employed.  The first is from The Covenant.  In this movie, there are four young men who are warlocks and are referred to as The Sons of Ipswich.  They’re descended from four of five magical families.  While they have some power earlier, they don’t come into their true power until they turn eighteen.  The drawback?  Using their power is addictive, and their power is tied to their life force.  The more they use it, they more they WANT to use it.  When they use their power, it takes away from their life force.  At one point in the movie, we finally see the main character’s father.  Even though the man hasn’t really even hit middle-age chronologically, physically, he looks like he’s in his eighties…and time hasn’t been kind.  Not only is the magic seductive, making the user addicted if they aren’t careful, it ages the user dramatically.

The other is from Mirror, Mirror.  While it isn’t quite as complicated or involved as The Covenant, it does use the premise that magic ages the user.

What about if your characters are able to simply draw the energy from their world?  Should there be any consequences for that?  This one’s a little trickier, because I can see both sides of the coin in this situation.  First, you could say that because the character is merely a conduit, it shouldn’t require any energy from them, so they shouldn't suffer any kind of drain.  I can see that argument, but I can also see why some people would say it would take the user’s energy to tame the wild energy of the world and to use it to achieve the effect they want.  Honestly, I can see this particular situation going either way.  If an author chooses to use this in their world, I think they should still flesh out how the magic works and find a way to explain either situation believably.

What if your characters only use magic that comes from spell components?  With this one, in my personal opinion, the mage is still going to use energy to achieve the desired result.  Now, you may set your world up so all the mage has to do is learn the words to the spell, follow the directions, and use the proper components to explain why there isn’t any physical drain.  Of course, in a world like this, you’d have to plan the magic very carefully.  Unless you could find a plausible explanation, there wouldn’t be a lot of elemental manipulation, or at least not in the form of a character being able to conjure fireballs out of thin air, or being able to shoot lightning bolts from their fingertips.  Elemental magic would require careful considerations as to how you could make it work.  And what would be special about mages?  In a world like this, anyone could be a mage.  If you don’t want to create a society where everyone’s a mage, in a world like this, you’d have to be able to explain why everyone can’t be a mage.  Maybe only people from certain families are allowed to be mages.  Maybe there are schools that children are sent to, and unless you completed training through those schools, it was illegal for you to even own magical implements.  Perhaps the laws are so strict that a person who is untrained and found to merely be in possession of a magical implement is imprisoned for an extremely long time, or even put to death.  If the children attend schools to learn how to be mages, how does that work?  Do parents apply the moment their child is born and hope they get in?  Do all children attend a basic magic school, and then the school determines who they want to continue on into the more advanced studies, with those who were rejected being forced to agree to never practice magic?  Are all of those rejected children put to death?  Are they forever watched to make certain they don’t try to use what little magical knowledge they have?  Or is there some kind of memory wipe (whether technological or magical) that makes them forget what they learned?

While there are some tropes that I actually enjoy, I have to agree this one can be annoying.  If you choose to have characters who use magic, keep these things in mind.  A lot of people enjoy stories with magic in them, but they also get exasperated with this trope.  They want magic they can believe in, and since most magic-wielders in stories are humans, it’s hard to swallow a mage who has an unending supply of spells, who has a spell for EVERYTHING, and who has an unending supply of energy.  None of us have an unending supply of energy, and it stands to reason that magic does require the use of energy.  There needs to be some kind of consequence for using magic.  At the very least, the mage needs to be tired after using it.  And it can’t be the answer to everything.  If it’s used as such, it’s basically a built-in deus ex machina.  And really, who wants that?

E is for Evil for the Sake of Evil

Tropes…love ’em or hate ’em, some seem to be here to stay.  Whether they should or not is actually up to the individual reader.  I think the main problem with tropes is that an author reads a story, they’re so drawn into the world of those characters, and they love those characters so much, they decide they want to write a story like that.  Okay, that’s great.  Imitation is often referred to as the highest form of flattery.  However, there’s a problem.  When someone decides to write a story like that, they often have a tendency to rewrite THAT particular story.  Oh, not in the manner of plagiarism—though that’s happened—but they’ve taken the bare bones of the inspiring story and just dressed it up in different clothing.  There’s not a whole lot out there that hasn’t been done before, and most stories have commonalities as their core.  Because of this, you have a tendency to see certain tropes that pop up quite often in specific genres.  Some of those tropes have such a universal theme you’ll find them in other genres as well.  The secret is, if you do decide to go with a tried and true trope that a lot of readers still love, then you need to find a way to put a new spin on it.  To teach an old dog new tricks.

E is for…

Evil for the Sake of Evil.

This trope is not exclusive to just one genre.  Evil is often the best way to create conflict and obstacles for characters.  Good versus evil is a tried and true concept that has appeared in manuscripts since man first set pen to paper.  There are stories where it works, and there are stories where it doesn’t work quite so well.  It’s a universal theme.  (And no, I’m not about to start discussing theme, symbolism, or any of the other stuff that, while fascinating at times, often brought us to tears or made our brains hurt in Lit classes.)  Good versus evil has been ingrained in the human psyche for millennia, and I really don’t see that concept going away.  This is because I believe that deep down inside, most people want to see good win.  We live in a world where there are a lot of evils out there, and all too often, we see evil triumph in real life.  However, a lot of good versus evil stories became too predictable, and I think that’s why some writers turned the concept on its head by allowing evil to triumph in their stories.

While there’s nothing wrong with a good versus evil story, a problem arises when you have evil simply for the sake of evil.  If your antagonist is just another cardboard cutout representation of all that’s evil in the world of your characters, you’re in trouble.  It makes certain aspects of your story predictable.  Now, I’m not saying that you can’t use this trope, because you can.  You just have to be careful with how you present it.  Of course, if your evil “character” is an entity, demon, or something similar, it’s going to be hard to present it in any other way.  And for the record, yes, I do believe that pure evil exists in this world, whether it takes on human form or not.  Yes, I do believe there are people out there who are simply born evil.  The type of person who—no matter what amount of love and kindness they were shown in their lives, despite their parents’ best efforts, and without the affliction of any kind of mental illness or personality disorder—went on to do horrific things.  Yes, I do believe that type of person exists.  But unless you’re writing about an entity that’s the embodiment of evil, your readers are going to have a hard time accepting evil in human form without some kind of explanation as to why they’re so evil.  Once upon a time, simply presenting a person as evil without any explanations for their behavior was acceptable, but nowadays, it’s harder to make a reader swallow that pill.  The same is true for the reverse—characters so perfect and good that they don’t have any flaws at all.

If your evil persona is a human character, you want to present them in a human light.  Whether it’s a wizard, a serial killer, or an ex who would prefer to see their former love dead than in the arms of another, they need to be presented in such a light that—while we don’t condone their behavior and would never act that way ourselves—we can sort of understand why they are the way they are.  By day, the serial killer can have a loving relationship with their spouse and children, be a pillar in their community, be the type of person others aspire to be like, and essentially be living the American dream.  By night, however, he’s the embodiment of evil who does horrific and grisly things to his victims.  That’s all fine and good, but WHY does he do these things?  What’s hiding in his psyche that makes him this way?  Was he abandoned as a child and never had a loving and stable home?  Is that why he’s targeting families that seem perfect on the outside?  Make him a little sympathetic to your readers.  No, you don’t want to endear him to the readers to such an extent that they’re secretly rooting for him to get away with his crimes, but you want to make him someone they can relate to and sort of understand, even if they wouldn’t react the same way.  If your character scares YOU because on the surface he could be your next-door neighbor or anyone else in your life, then you’re doing it right.  You see some people like this on the TV show Criminal Minds.  Yes, I know that these shows get some things wrong, but we’re not analyzing the show for procedure or anything like that.  It’s a loose comparison.  And remember, while it’s not exactly as it’s portrayed on TV, the BAU and NCAVC really exist.

The same can be said of the evil queen who wants to subjugate the entire world to her rule, and she's doing so by war, famine, mass executions, etc.  Give her some redeeming qualities, or at least make her someone your readers can relate to.  Do you remember the movie, Snow White and the Huntsman?  While I raised my eyebrows at the portrayal of Snow White (how is it that someone who was locked away in one tiny cell for so long, with very little human interaction, could be so resourceful?  How is it she wasn’t just a little more wary of people in general?  Why wasn’t she just a little unhinged from the isolation?  Among other things…), we were shown enough of Ravenna’s past to see why she became the woman she was.  We could sympathize with her, even if we didn’t condone her behavior, and we could sort of understand why she did the things she did.

Don’t make a character evil just because you need a reason for your protagonists to go against them.  Avoid the cookie-cutter, cardboard stereotype.  Give them reasons for their behavior, give them some redeeming qualities, make them a little more human.