Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings

Timeless classics are so called because their plots and characters resonate with audiences decades or even centuries after they were published. But even "timeless" stories are inextricably rooted in the age and place in which they were written. The other day I was thinking about how some of our favorite books would hold up if they were written in 2013 America.

A Certified Organic Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

After Alexis, a bored hipster living in the near dystopian future, is arrested at a student debt protest, the government uses her as a guinea pig for the controversial Ludditico Technique, which trains her to fear gizmos and gadgets of any kind. How long can she live without her iPhone?

And Then There Were Nine, by Agatha Christie

A deranged vigilante invites nine criminals to an old house on a secluded island to murder them one by one. But TSA detains him at the airport for stashing toothpaste in his carry-on, so that's the end of that.

Ulysses 2.0 by James Joyce

Two young men wander around, talking about sex and religion and doing crazy things...in Second Life. Then they log off and go to bed.

Little Women: Orange County by Louisa May Alcott

Four fashionable sisters live in a mansion with their single mother, attending socialite parties and dealing with the trials and tribulations of adolescence. Aspiring writer Jo has a fling with her professor. Boy-next-door Laurie had a thing for Jo, but now he's into her little sister Amy. His hot tutor has a crush on her older sister, Meg.

Such is the synopsis for the pilot episode of the latest MTV reality show, Little Women: Orange County.

Anna Karenina Oblonsky by Leo Tolstoy

Anna, the trophy wife of a dignified politician, embarks on a passionate affair with a rakish military officer. Then she divorces her husband; takes the house, the kids, and half of his wealth in alimony; and tops the NYT Best Sellers list with a scandalous tell-all memoir.

I've always loved reading mysteries. Not only to they offer fun puzzles and a bit of mental exercise, but they're very reassuring. The detective/crime/mystery genre offers a dependable catharsis—no matter what injustices the universe throws at us, the truth will always come out. The police will always arrest the right guy and the villains will always get their comeuppance. It's a bald-faced lie, but if I wanted to face reality, I'd read the newspaper instead.

But if you take in enough of any genre, you're going to tire of its tropes eventually. Why the heck can't male and female colleagues on television work together without going at each other like rabbits? Why is every football player or cheerleader on Disney the mortal enemy of any kid with glasses? And why, for goodness' sake, are shoujo manga characters obligated to fall in love with their relatives if they aren't technically blood related?

There are tropes in mysteries that I hope to never see again, but I expect to see employed by every author or screenwriter at some point. Here are a few.

Brother-Sister Incest

Mystery authors seem to believe they must put a shocking twist into every story. Unfortunately, there are only so many shocks to choose from, and one of the most popular is to reveal that a husband-wife pair is actually brother and sister. Incest—or often, "twincest"—is very useful for explaining away suspicious behavior in red herrings or providing murky motives for murder. For example:

• The Midsommer Murders series kicks off with a pair of young brother-sister lovers with a bad habit of coming up with elaborate schemes to kill people who find out about them.
• In the fifth season finale of Inspector Lewis, a man and woman find out after they marry that they're twins who were separated at birth, so they set out to murder their mother and all of her friends.
• A Private Practice episode centers around the salacious discovery that a young couple trying to conceive are half-siblings because their mothers used the same sperm donor.

Even in Agatha Christie's first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the murderers turn out to be a pair of "kissing cousins" who grew up together, which is pretty darned close.

Father-Daughter, Mother-Son, or Uncle-Niece Rape/Incest

If a teenage girl slits her wrists, it's probably because her uncle raped her. If a middle-aged woman hangs herself, it's most likely because her son got her pregnant (and she didn't realize at the time, of course, that he was her son, because she gave him up for adoption after an affair with her predatory principal/coach/tutor). And if the crazed murderer of the story turns out to be a woman, she was likely driven to it because her father abused her. That explains her psychosis and excuses her crimes—one-two punch!

Priests with Wandering Hands

It's practically guaranteed that a clergyman in a mystery series, at some point, will feel up an alter boy or dip his wick into an influential parishioner's wife. The trope started with Nathaniel Hawthorne's honest attempt to portray human weakness to animal urges in The Scarlet Letter, but in modern times it's made the fictional ministry something of a farce. All priests and pastors are pedophiles, adulterers, or both.

Gangsters, Gangsters Everywhere

Turning on the television during prime time would give anyone the impression that crack-dealing, hooker-pimping mobsters are hanging out on every street corner of America. A slick gangster appears in at least 1 out of 3 episodes of any show set in NYC or Chicago...and every single one of them follows the Universal Gangster Dress Code. White gangsters wear t-shirts and beanies, black gangsters wear saggy jeans and gold chains, Latino gangsters wear tight tank tops and cargo pants, and Irishmen and Italians wear Armani suits. It's like the mob bosses conduct regular checks to make sure their underlings are wearing standard issue crime-committing uniforms.

The Communists Did It

This trope isn't as widespread as it used to be, but too many mysteries still get explained away with foreigners. Americans seem to believe that anyone who immigrates from Russia or China is a spy and/or assassin, and anyone with relatives in the Middle East is a jihadist. "Foreigners" can also be westerners outside of mainstream culture—anyone who advocates a political structure other than traditional capitalism must lack both morals and basic humanity.

In 1929, Richard Knox laid down the fifth commandment of good detective fiction: No Chinaman must figure into the story. From a modern perspective Knox was obviously racist, but also the rule shows too many authors were racist. "The Chinaman" was the default villain of the day. Someone with black hair, almond eyes, and a broken accent strolled onto the scene, and you had your guy. You'd think we'd have advanced a bit from 1929, but no—we simply switched out people in conical straw hats for people in kurtas.

For the past few weeks, I've been reading James Scott Bell's Conflict & Suspense on the recommendation of Lynn Viehl, the author of Paperback Writer. It's a short book, but it's jam-packed with advice that makes you stop and think. So whenever I start to read it, I'll get a few pages in and my brain will be whirring with ways to make my stories better, so I'll drop it again and hop over to the computer to tweak outlines. I don't agree with everything Bell says, and I'm not the biggest fan of his writing style, but for the most part his insights are the kind I would have written if I'd thought of them first.

The only shortcoming of the book is that, while Bell has lots of ideas for what writers can do to create conflict and suspense, he doesn't include any warnings about what they shouldn't do. Sometimes, in the blind pursuit of making a novel or screenplay "compelling," "exciting," or simply "not boring," writers throw narrative babies out with the bathwater. They sacrifice characters, consistency, and even basic ethics for the sake of "the story." The end result is that "the story" comes across as artificial, formulaic, and uninspired.

Your conflict will probably feel forced if...

Your protagonists act out of character.

Too often, writers force their perfectly capable protagonists to suddenly become immature, weak, and/or stupid for the sake of conflict. The fourth season of Castle is a prime example. The writers couldn't afford for Rick and Kate to get together before the finale, so they had to make these two intelligent adults act like preteens to drag out the stupid misunderstandings. Rick would overhear something Kate said, jump to conclusions, and sulk. Then Kate would take offense to his concerns for her safety, refuse to talk to anyone about anything, and run off alone to get attacked by assassins.

This is somewhat understandable in TV shows, when you have to fill a certain number of episodes and a drop in tension could mean a drop in ratings. But even when writing novels, authors have the deplorable habit of setting up the protagonist with a certain character, then making his/her actions completely contradict it to keep the story going. For example:

• A modern, independent-minded career woman agonizes for 200 pages over whether she should marry her boss or her high school flame.
• A kick-ass detective spends less time kicking ass than he does getting his own handed to him.
• A sweet, selfless ingénue sits around crying about her misfortunes instead of actually helping anybody.

It can be difficult to come up with legitimate conflicts and obstacles, so making your characters act like wishy-washy idiots offers the easy way out. Love triangles wouldn't last long if the heroine had the spine to sit down with second lead and say, "Dude, I'm just not into you. Don't waste your time." Horror movies would be awfully dull if the characters had the good sense to stay put and stick together instead of running off into the woods/haunted house/zombie-infested island/wherever. And heroes in video games wouldn't have much to do if their princesses were competent enough to avoid getting kidnapped, trapped, or otherwise mortally endangered repeatedly...no matter how many times they're rescued.

But audiences can usually recognize when the supposed conflict is entirely the protagonists' fault. And then the only emotions they feel for them are irritation and contempt.

You change the rules on the fly.

So you have perfectly strong, capable characters. They eat setbacks for breakfast and surmount insurmountable obstacles before lunch. But that doesn't make for much of a story, so what do you do?

You change the rules.

Bio-Hazard Man always used gamma rays to fry the bad guys' internal organs and save the day. But he's in trouble this episode because...um...a tiny glowing rock made him sick. Now the best he can muster are pitiful radio waves. What on earth will Bio-Hazard Man do?

For years, sexy FBI investigator Betty Black has used her unparallelled intuition for human nature to solve unsolvable mysteries. But this time, serial killer is...a robot!

So your video game hero has been collecting equipment and painstakingly leveling them up for days. Now he can run circles around any enemy. But we've still got half a game to go, so...Whoops! The big bad's minions knocked him out in a cutscene and confiscated all of his weapons and armor. Yay, the game is challenging again!

You can occasionally get away with changing the rules mid-game. It's a given that in any long-running series, the heroes will be foiled by some random contrivance that renders all of their usual approaches useless. But in a stand-alone work, contrivances don't fly. If you'll have to weaken your characters in the middle, don't make them too strong in the first place.

The conflict depends on your audience sharing the same world view as you do.

In the first episode of the fifth season of Flashpoint, a disturbed man took his ex-wife hostage. The cops worked with his teenage daughter, May, to find him and rescue her mom. In the final climax on the dark roof of a hotel, just as the guy was about to be arrested, May whipped out a concealed handgun and started firing at him. When she refused to stop, the cops shot her. The End.

Or it should have been The End, except the writers believed the decision to neutralize the trigger-happy May would be controversial. So the cops fought amongst themselves whether it was the right thing to do, or whether they should have just let May kill her abusive father for "justice."

To people who think it's okay for police to turn a blind eye to premeditated murder if the victim is mean and the killer is cute, this episode might have been very emotional and thought-provoking. But to people like me and Sweetie, to whom murder is murder, there was no conflict at all. We had no sympathy for the girl, felt no suspense during the big showdown, and found all the yelling afterwards nothing but annoying.

Let's take a comedic example from Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. Here's a scene from the first novel, One for the Money, as presented by Bell on page 53:

Joe Morelli, who "specializes in virgins," has his way with Stephanie behind a case of chocolate eclairs in the Tasty Pastry.

Then disappears from her life for three years.

Until the day Stephanie sees Morelli in front of the meat market. She is driving her father's Buick and guns it, jumps the curb, and bounces Morelli off the hood. She gets out and asks if anything's broken. He says his leg. She says, "Good," gets back in the car and drives off.

The intended reaction: "Haha! Awesome!"

My reaction: "So this woman had consensual sex with a guy three years ago and he never called, so she feels justified in committing vehicular assault?"

Once again, this scene is only successful if you think it's cool for "the weaker sex" to be excessively violent against men. If the roles were reversed—if a male hero broke his ex-girlfriend's leg and drove away laughing—suddenly it wouldn't be funny anymore. Stephanie Plum is supposed to be quirky and strong, but because my sense of ethics is very different from Evanovich's, all I see is someone petty and sadistic.

Granted, there are some genres of drama or humor that will never resonate with people outside of your niche audience. As an atheist, I couldn't give two hoots about a heroine in Christian fiction whose big crisis is that she's lost her faith, and the emotional suspense comes from whether or not she can find her way back to God. A lot of historical novels base their central conflicts on issues that are no longer relevant, like rigid distinctions of class. To people who love Regency romances, Pride and Prejudice is brimming with drama and tension. But many in the twenty-first century will watch half of a film adaptation and say, in the words of my eloquent college dorm mate, "Jesus, who cares! Just fuck already!"

The Moral of the Post

Conflict is integral to any story. But it's not so integral that you can afford to slack on the other narrative elements. In fact, doing so can reverse the effect you were going for in the first place—what was supposed to be thrilling becomes contrite, and what was supposed to be dramatic makes people roll their eyes.