The likability fallacy, revisited

Last year, I wrote a post on what I then saw as the fallacy that characters in stories ought to be likable. My argument, which I still mostly believe, is that characters need to be interesting—or, even better, that they take logical actions in response to the vivid situations in which they find themselves—and that if a protagonist isn’t engaging, it’s less a problem of sympathy than a symptom that something is going wrong elsewhere in the story. In the meantime, however, I’ve found myself backing away slightly from my initial hard stance. I’m still a little wary of likability, partially because it’s one of those notes, along with raising the stakes, that can never be wrong, which means that you’re likely to get it from readers who aren’t writers themselves. But since it’s a note that I expect to receive for the rest of my life, I’ve decided to work my around to a more nuanced version of what I’ve said here before. Likability may not be essential, but it’s a smart baseline from which to begin. All things being equal, I’d rather have a protagonist that the reader liked and admired than otherwise, so it makes more sense to start with that assumption and inch away from it as necessary.

In other words, likability belongs to the short list of best practices in fiction, rules that can be broken when the story demands it, but followed whenever you’re in doubt. The problem with likability, of course, is that it’s an inherently slippery concept. Unlike such guidelines as providing your characters with a clear sequence of objectives, which works as an unambiguous test, a character’s likability is a very subjective thing, with a wide range of potential interpretation, and it leads to confusion even among capable storytellers if they’re unable to distance themselves from the material. We may like or take an interest in our own characters, but it can be hard to know how others will react, even when the potential issues are obvious. (Witness the recent kerfuffle on Game of Thrones, which continues to position Jaime Lannister as a likable rogue despite a despicable act, not present in the original books, that the show’s creators don’t seem to have thought through until it was too late.) Likability makes me nervous because it’s an emergent property, arising from many small choices and decisions along the way, and you often don’t know what you’ve got until you’re done.

Still, that’s true of anything in fiction, and it’s still possible for writers to influence the outcome with smart choices. I got to thinking about this after reading a provocative piece by the economist Russ Roberts in Politico, in which he argues that Frank Underwood—the manipulative, borderline psychopathic politician played by Kevin Spacey on House of Cards—is a Democrat for shrewd narrative reasons:

I think [series creator Beau] Willimon made Underwood a Democrat because he wanted us to like him…The show wouldn’t work if he were totally despicable. And for a lot of viewers, that means he can’t be a Republican. Because for some significant number of Netflix viewers, Republicans are automatically despicable in a way that Democrats can never be.

Roberts, for the record, is a passionate proponent of small government (and also a published novelist) who sounds a little like Aaron Sorkin’s Ainsley Hayes when he makes his case against federal spending for education and the poor. His piece is intended as a wakeup call for Republicans to regain the moral high ground, but it indirectly points to how canny House of Cards, for all its flaws, can be. Underwood can be a liar, a manipulator, and worse, but we’d turn against him at once if he were, say, a racist—or a conservative.

In other words, likability doesn’t seem all that different from anything else in writing: you start from a principle of doing no harm, follow the rules you know, and don’t make things any harder on yourself than they need to be. Of course, if that was the only way we proceeded, we’d end up with a lot of formulaic fiction, and in practice, the process is more of a spiral than a straight line, homing in gradually on the center we’re trying to find. (Contrary to what I may have implied above, by the way, there are plenty of rules out there for constructing likable protagonists, from the list of good and bad character flaws on TV Tropes to Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, and I’ll leave it up to you to decide how useful they are.) But I suppose I’ve come around to the realization that likability, as muddled a concept as it might be, is something that a writer needs to take seriously, especially if it inspires other elements in the story to snap into focus. It can’t be taken in isolation, and if you force it, the reader or viewer will naturally resist. If it’s lacking, the real problem may be somewhere else entirely. But yes, it’s important. Which doesn’t mean I have to like it.

In praise of the cinematic baguette

You’ve seen this baguette before. In any movie or television show in which a character is shown carrying groceries, a big loaf of french bread is invariably seen peeking out over the top of the bag. On the few occasions when it isn’t there, a similar role is assumed by a leafy bunch of carrots, or, in exceptional cases, celery. As the comically detailed TV Tropes entry on the subject points out, you’ll see the baguette among groceries carried by the unlikeliest of characters, like Liam Neeson in Taken, who carries not one, but two. (He’s in Paris, after all.) And given how often this loaf of bread turns up, it was only a matter of time before a clever screenwriter, in this case Tony Gilory in Michael Clayton, gave us a grocery bag full of nothing but baguettes. In this instance, it’s partially intended as a reflection of the unstable mental state of the character played by Tom Wilkinson, but it’s also a nod to a cinematic convention that, over time, has come to seem like a particularly ludicrous visual cliché.

And yet that baguette is there for a reason. For one thing, it’s a convenient prop that is unlikely to wilt under hot studio lights or after hours spent on location. It’s also a handy bit of narrative shorthand. If we see a character carrying a paper bag without any clues about what it contains, we immediately start to wonder what might be inside. The baguette poking out over the top is a visual flag that, paradoxically, actually makes the bag less visible: as soon as we understand that it’s just a bag of groceries, we stop worrying about it. (Thomas Harris, a shrewd exploiter and creator of narrative tropes, even utilizes it as a plot point in Red Dragon, when Francis Dolarhyde, the killer, uses a big bunch of leafy celery as camouflage in his escape from a crime scene: “He stuffed his books and clothing into the grocery bag, then the weapons. The celery stuck out the top.” And when he passes the police a moment later, carrying what is obviously just a bag of groceries, they don’t give him a second glance.)

Most clichés, after all, start out as a piece of authorial shorthand that allows the reader or viewer to focus on what really matters. William Goldman, who is close friends with Gilroy, makes a similar point in his wonderful book Which Lie Did I Tell? He ticks off some of the most notorious examples of how the movies depart from real life—the hero can always find a parking space when he needs one, the local news invariably happens to be talking about a necessary plot point when a character turns on the television, taxi fares can always be paid with the first bill you happen to grab without looking down at your wallet—and goes on to make an excellent observation: all of these clichés are about saving time. In a good movie, everything that isn’t relevant to the story goes out the window, which is why we see so many ridiculously convenient moments that allow us to move on without pausing to the next important scene. That baguette serves a useful purpose. If they gave awards to props, it would at least merit a nod for Best Supporting Actor.

The trouble, of course, is that as soon as a narrative device proves its usefulness, it’s immediately copied by every writer in sight. And it’s easy to understand why: such tricks are worth their weight in gold. In my own novels, I’m constantly trying to find the right balance between advancing the plot and avoiding story beats that seem too obvious or convenient. (For example, in both The Icon Thief and City of Exiles, there’s a scene in which a suspect cracks a bit too easily under interrogation, just because I wanted to get on to the next big thing. I try to disguise such moments as best as I can, but I can’t claim the effect is entirely successful.) And whenever a writer discovers a novel piece of shorthand, or a clever spin on an old cliché, it’s like stumbling across a new industrial process. You’d like to patent it, but once it’s in print, it’s there for anyone to use. So the search for new tropes goes on, as it should. Because a baguette, as we all know, doesn’t stay fresh for long.

What I learned from Mystery Science Theater 3000

Like a lot of obsessive film fans, I’ve spent much of the weekend poring over the individual critics’ lists at the Sight & Sound movie poll, looking up favorite titles, searching for trends, and pondering inexplicable patterns. (My favorite discovery so far is the fact that of the four critics who included Eyes Wide Shut among their list of the greatest films of all time, three of them also included The Killing of a Chinese Bookie by John Cassevetes, which also received only four total votes. I have no idea why this is the case, and if critics Craig Keller, Adrian Martin, or Stanislav Zelvensky want to enlighten me, I’m all ears.) Yet if there’s one conclusion I can draw from these lists, it’s that there’s something genuinely mysterious about most great works of art. You can’t just disassemble Vertigo or Tokyo Story or L’Atalante to see how they work, and even movies that ostensibly show us their moving parts, like Citizen Kane, become all the more enigmatic with time. As a writer, I’ve learned a lot from great movies, but less than you might think: it’s often in the flawed, the mediocre, and the outright terrible that the fundamentals of storytelling can most clearly be seen.

Which brings us to Mystery Science Theater 3000. There was a time in my early teens when I was convinced this was the best television show ever, or at least the ultimate distillation of the culture of my generation, and I don’t think I was entirely wrong. When I first saw those wisecracking silhouettes at the bottom of my television, I didn’t quite understand what was going on, and the moment when it all clicked into place—it was during Time of the Apes, if you’re curious—still feels like an epochal revelation. Watching this show at its peak, which, as in the case of The Simpsons and Mad Magazine, often means whenever the viewer first encountered it, was like being given the access card to a mad scientist’s laboratory where the building blocks of the culture around us were being taken apart, analyzed, and recombined in surprising ways. Godard says that the way to criticize a movie is to make another movie, but MST3K did him one better, by turning bad movies into commentaries on themselves until the result almost achieved sentience. And it was impossible to watch it without relating to movies on an altogether different level.

What made the show special was right there in its premise: the writers talked back to the screen. They took movies designed for the laziest, most passive of audiences—the exploitation film, the TV movie, the sci-fi cheapie—and engaged them with savage humor and intelligence. Each episode was like a miniature war against shoddiness, cynicism, and cliché, and the moral was that if we can’t prevent bad movies from existing, we can at least confront them on our own terms. The show turned bad filmmaking into comedy in a way that bears comparison to the best of found art, and its ad hoc influence has been incalculable, especially among fans who were inspired to hack the elements of pop culture into something undefinable and weird. The show’s greatest popularity happened to coincide with the rise of Internet fan fiction, which included MST3k-inspired commentaries on other works of fanfic, and much of the show’s spirit lives on, for better or worse, on sites like TV Tropes, in which the layers of commentary on shows like, say, Stargate SG-1 expand into something far more interesting than the original series itself.

That’s why the host segments were so crucial, and it’s the element of the show I miss the most, even as its legacy lives on in successors like RiffTrax and Cinematic Titanic. If the show done nothing but made fun of bad movies, it would have seemed arch and disdainful, but the host segments made it clear that the show’s creators were in the same boat as the filmmakers they were mocking: constrained by low budgets, cheap sets, and recalcitrant robot puppets, even if the result was delivered with far more wit and imagination. Much of the show’s appeal arose from the fact that it looked like it had been filmed in someone’s garage in Minneapolis: its funky aesthetic made you want to go out and try it yourself, as a lot of fans undoubtedly did. As a result, there was a DIY sweetness under the snark that made it endearing in a way that a lot of its imitators don’t understand. The show wasn’t just about making fun of awfulness, but about turning it into something better, to the point where, as in the case of The Girl in Lover’s Lane, they rewrote the ending of the movie itself. And the result was undeniably empowering. If life gave us bad movies, the show said, we didn’t have to sit back and take it. Maybe we could even do better ourselves.

So what is science fiction?

Like most authors, although I don’t always like to admit it, I’m very interested in other people’s reactions to my work. One of the singular things about being a writer these days is that one has access to a huge range of opinions about one’s writing: on review sites, blogs, discussion boards, and all the other venues for talking about fiction that didn’t exist even twenty years ago. As a result, every few days I’ll snoop around the web to see what people are saying. (One of my few disappointments following the publication of “Kawataro” was that it coincided with the demise of the Analog readers’ forum, where I had once been able to count on a spirited discussion—or at least a ruthless nitpicking—of my stories.)

For the most part, readers seem to enjoy my stuff well enough, and it’s always gratifying to find a positive review online. Over time, though, I’ve noticed a particular theme being struck repeatedly even by people who like my work: they don’t think it’s science fiction at all. Now, I’m pretty sure that my novelettes and short stories are science fiction—if they weren’t, they  wouldn’t be published in Analog, which doesn’t have much interest in anything else—but I can understand the source of the confusion. Thanks mostly to my X-Files roots, my stories are set in the present day. They all take place on this planet. I don’t do aliens or robots. And while the plots do turn on science, they’re more often structured as contemporary mysteries where the solution depends on scientific information, which I gather is fairly uncommon.

It’s worth asking, then, whether we can come up with a definition of science fiction broad enough to include both my work and, say, Kim Stanley Robinson’s. (Or even L. Ron Hubbard’s.) TV Tropes, usually a good starting point for this sort of thing, despite its sometimes breathless fangirl tone, argues that science fiction hinges on technology:

The one defining(-ish, definitions differ) trait of Science Fiction is that there is technology that doesn’t exist in the time period the story is written in.

Which automatically disqualifies most of my stories, since I don’t have much interest in technology for its own sake, at least not as a narrative device. I’m also not especially interested in world-building, another hallmark of conventional science fiction, if only because so many other writers are better at it than I am.

So if my stories don’t include technology or alien worlds, where does that leave me? Wikipedia comes to the rescue, defining science fiction as dealing with “imagined innovations in science or technology,” including one particular subcategory:

Stories that involve discovery or application of new scientific principles, such as time travel or psionics, or new technology, such as nanotechnology, faster-than-light travel or robots.

Which is basically where I fit in, as long as you stretch the definition to include connections between previously unrelated scientific principles. “Inversus,” my first published novelette, is basically about psionics, but links it to a number of existing phenomena, like situs inversus. “The Last Resort” takes a known phenomenon—limnic eruptions—and transfers it to a novel part of the world, with a speculative explanation of how it might be caused by human activity. “Kawataro” fictionalizes the case of the Al-Sayyid Bedouin, moves it to Japan, and connects it to another medical mystery. And my upcoming “The Boneless One” begins with a real scientific project, the effort to sample genetic diversity in the world’s oceans, and speculates as to how it might lead to unexpected—and murderous—consequences.

Much of my favorite fiction is about such connections, whether it’s the paranoid synthetic vision of Foucault’s Pendulum, Illuminatus!, or Gravity’s Rainbow, or the constructive impulse of the great science fiction novels. (Dune, for instance, gains much of its fascination from the variety of Frank Herbert’s interests—ecology, energy policy, the Bedouin, the story of T.E. Lawrence—and from how he juxtaposes them in astonishing ways.) My love of connections is what led me to focus on my two genres of choice, science fiction and suspense, both of which reward the ability to see connections that haven’t been noticed in print. And the ultimate playground for ideas is science. The science is real; the connections are plausible, but fictional. Put them together, and you get science fiction. Or something like it, anyway.

Fanfic and the writer’s apprenticeship

Fuel Your Writing has a nice little piece this morning on whether fanfic is worth a writer’s time. I have two tidbits of my own:

1. There exists a Kung Fu Panda fanfic, “A Different Lesson,” that is 632,000 words long. (According to TV Tropes, “very little of it is filler; there’s just that much going on.”) By way of comparison, War and Peace weighs in at a mere 460,000 words. I don’t have much else to say about this, except that it’s possibly my favorite fact ever.

2. If you believe, as I do, that a writer’s apprenticeship is best served in public, then fanfic is incredibly useful. Back when pulp magazines were still thriving and a strong market existed for paperback originals, it was more than possible for a young writer to learn his craft in public, with actual readers, and even get paid for the privilege. These days, when most pulp magazines have folded and publishing is increasingly focused on a few big books, that kind of public apprenticeship is all but impossible, except for a lucky few.

Which is where fanfic comes in. Given the broad range of fanfic that exists—for every television show, most big movies, and an incredibly large number of literary sources—it isn’t hard for a writer to find a fandom that might accommodate the kind of writing he or she wants to do. And stories written in a popular fandom, if executed with even a modicum of style, will be read, for pleasure, by real people. Even novels. Even screenplays. Even radically experimental works. And the author will get feedback, much of it encouraging, from people under no obligation to read his or her work at all.

Writing this sort of fiction, of course, poses problems of its own. Among other things, a fanfic writer’s capacity for creating original characters can easily wither and die. But if approached with care, fanfic can be an extraordinary opportunity for a writer to develop craft and find a voice in front of a real audience. (Naomi Novik, among other novelists, has credited her work in fanfic with much of her development as an author.) Anyone interested in writing for a living would certainly be advised to consider it.