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Hey Shaelin! I thought as the Queen of Litfic/Contemporary you'd be a good person to ask this to. I've been writing a contemporary novel and struggling a bit with developing the conflict since there is no real external antagonist. I guess the main antagonist is my character's lack of ambition and mental illness? But I would love your thoughts on how you built up your motives/conflicts for your contemporary works. Thank you very much for all your advice!

Ohh I really like this question because it’s exactly what I love about contemporary! I’ve never been one to be too interested in villain characters, creating them, writing them, or reading them. So that’s why I love contemporary: you don’t need a villain. Just an antagonist. And those things are different. 

A villain is going to be a character who is consciously trying to undermine the protagonist in order to achieve some sort of evil end.

An antagonist is any person or force that prevents the protagonist from achieving their goal.

In any story, there should be more than one type of antagonist, and you should hit these three points:

Interpersonal 

Internal

Societal

Let’s use an example. I’m going to use my short story “Kudzu Girls” for this because the wants the characters have are very simple.

This story concerns Poppy, who yearns to have a romantic relationship with her best friend Nell, but is undermined but the following forces of antagonism:

Interpersonal: Nell doesn’t return her feelings, and is also hyper-critical and rude to Poppy.

Internal: She is insecure and has poor self control, image, and understanding.

Societal: She is a young, gay woman in a setting where she does not have education or support regarding her sexuality.

This story makes Nell the antagonist, but it doesn’t make Nell the villain, because Nell is not consciously trying to undermine Poppy’s goal, she’s just an obstacle in achieving it. I mean she’s also the goal, but yanno.

The important thing to note is that antagonistic forces are coming from multiple sources. They don’t all have to be equally important. In “Kudzu Girls” the setting is never even stated, only implied. The whole story takes place between two people in one place at one time, so the societal antagonism is just in the background.

That’s the key to including interpersonal antagonisms without having a villain. These antagonists are simply characters who have wants that oppose the protagonist’s, no matter their intention or the morality of their intention. I picked “Kudzu Girls” because it’s as simple as could be. Poppy wants to kiss Nell. That’s her goal. It’s a very simple goal. Nell is an antagonist because her wants oppose Poppy’s. Nell doesn’t want to kiss Poppy. This doesn’t make her a villain, she’s just a person living her life, with conflicting goals.

You’ll probably have many human antagonist’s throughout. In litfic almost every other character will probably be an antagonist, if not every other character. In literary fiction, even a love interest will probably be an antagonist. Because litfic love is fucked up. In non litfic contemporary, you can probably have side characters who aren’t antagonists, but they might function as antagonists in some scenes. Remember, all it takes for a character to be an antagonist is to be somehow preventing the protagonist from achieving a goal. This doesn’t even have to have any ill intent or intention at all. 

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I'm attempting to write a novel in the perspective of a psychopath. Do you have any tips on how to accurately characterize them? Thanks! Love your writing videos, and I look forward to the day where I see your novels on bookshelves in stores. Good luck! :)

Ooo good luck! The most fun I ever had with a novel was writing from the perspective of a psychopath!

First of all, do your research. A lot of research. There is a big difference between movie psychopaths and medical psychopaths (people with anti social personality disorder). Research ASPD all you can, learn what psychopaths are really like and everything you can about the disorder. Make sure your character’s actions are consistent with the diagnostic criteria (if they truly are a psychopath). 

The thing about writing from the perspective of a psychopath is that psychopaths aren’t usually nice people, especially if they are fictional. What you have to do is create a character that people still want to read about, but who is still a psychopath. It’s very difficult to create a psychopathic character who is likeable, so what you have to do instead is focus on creating a psychopathic character who is interesting. I doubt people will be reading on because they find this character relatable, endearing, etc. What you need is a character so enthralling, so interesting, that even when your reader dislikes them personally or is even appalled by their actions and thoughts, they still want to read on. I think an important step in this is giving the reader time. Don’t reveal right away on page one that this character is psychopathic, give it time. Let the reader slowly learn, this way the reader is able to get into the story before the character’s personality might put them off. Of course, this might not fit with you plot so you may need to find other ways to do this. 

(I just have to add a little side note here: some people are like me, they love reading about dark characters. Give me a book with a psychopath as a protagonist and I’m there any day. However, I was surprised at how many people aren’t like this. Most people really need to like and relate to a character in order to read on.)

Another tip I have for writing psychopaths is to keep in mind the way they think. When I was writing my psychopathic character, Gemma, the book was told in her 1st person voice. Keeping in mind that she was a psychopath, all the metaphors or analogies she used were extremely violent. For example:

“I look into his eyes and I already see thebattle. It’s quite the war going on in there; nuclear bombs are going offeverywhere. Gunfire so thick you can’t see. He is struggling to hear over thecries of pain and the fire of bullets.”

“I invade his space, punching bullet holes in hiscomposure. I take out my crossbow and shoot him right through the heart, takingcontrol, turning his dead body into my puppet.”

“This time, it’s three in the afternoon. Twelvehours of difference. It all seems much less criminal when light is streamingthrough the windows like blood from an open wound.”

Normal people just don’t think like that. How does one get into the mind of a psychopath? Research and intuition. Nothing more complicated, but it’s still very difficult.

My final tip for you is to understand your character outside of their psychopathy. Like any person with a mental illness, they are not only that illness. If you write a character who is a psychopath and nothing more, it falls flat. This character has a personality outside their disorder, yes some of this personality might be linked to or influenced by their psychopathy (ASPD is a personality disorder after all) but it is very important to know who your character is beyond the fact they are a psychopath.

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“The Wire” versus “Breaking Bad”

Both are titillating stories, to some extent. (Okay The Wire spends half of its time on something different ---- kind of philosophical remarks on how society works ---- which I can only observe I care surprisingly little for, in relation to how spot on they are.)

Both have very distinctive characters, that come very much alive.

Both feature outstanding acting performances.

Both produce moving emotional climaxes, “deeply touching moments”.

Both create lots of scenes that make me re-watch them time and again.

The Wire was written and directed by a group of people with a keen eye for, and appreciation for, visual things like (black) coolness, outfits, body language. In comparison, you will find very of little of this in Breaking Bad. (Well, there are Tuco’s shirts I suppose. But overall, it leans more towards “gangsters as imagined by writers”.)

Breaking Bad was written by a (group of) “tellers of stories, tellers of fairy tales”. Overall, Breaking Bad tells the more compelling story. (One of) its great strength lies in creating its characters super seriously, and following them on their journey.

Breaking Bad has two major “larger than life villains” that are titillating and impressive to watch, Tuco and Gus. Tuco impresses with his intense volatile psycho violence and unpredictability. Which, allegedly, felt so intense for the actor who was playing it, that he asked to be killed off on the show sooner than they had intended, so that it wouldn’t hurt his psyche. (A little more of Tuco, and it would have been too painful to watch, at least for me.) Gus impresses with his super controlled behaviour, bordering on the chilling, his foresight, his ability to forgo instant gratification for the long game. His jovial ways, when he interacts with “representants of the community”, like he police. The way he uses his deep understanding of people’s motivations, to get them to do what he wants. (Like in the way he plays Jesse.) While he does bare a burning hatred for Hector, for killing his best friend, that finds its outlet in his extended torture of Hector ---- he is in fact, just as he observed, very very different from Walt, in the sense that his ego is less inflated and less fragile. I just find the actor extremely impressive in his performance of utter self control and his chilling glance that makes you freeze to the bone.

Breaking Bad pulls of the stunt of having a two(!) larger than life villains, in a story that excels in psychological story telling. The price is --- if you want to look at it as a price ---- that it basically tells the ages old story of “the hero” fighting for his life against the villain, and winning both times. Except that the story has come a long way, since “Who shot Liberty Valance”.

If “the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself” --- Walt certainly offers lots to write about. He is both "borderline autistic”, and a very emotional at the same time. He has a massive chip on his shoulder or axe to grind, due to feeling he never got the recognition he is owed. (And he is right about that much, that he is very competent in what he is doing.) His kick seeking behaviour and penchant “empire building” lend some credibility to Mike’s remark about him being a ticking time bomb. Was he always bound to turn on Gus, due to his nature? Hard to tell. One thing that I have missed to be mentioned in the discussions of his character that I have happened to come across so far, is that ultimately, the fall-out with Gus was due to Walt’s loyalty towards Jesse. A loyalty that Gus mocks early on, in his remark about care in choosing one’s associates. In his own way, he stays super loyal to both Skylar (after he finds out she gave the money to Ted) and Jesse (after the countless fuck-ups Jesse produced of the course of the show). I am not trying to argue that this has to count as a strength, rather than a weakness. Also, his willingness to let Jane die, kind or proves that his loyalty is more to their realtionship, than to the actual person.

Walt is a kind of made-up character, custom designed for the plot the story they wanted to tell ---- and a character, who totally comes alive. All the seeming contradictions --- calculated versus emotional, big hearted versus super petty, able minded versus self sabotaging, ... ----- make total sense from a psychological perspective. Yes, he is still something like a fairy tale character. But one that totally works, totally fulfills its purpose.

Where The Wire went for “larger than life”, with the later Omar episodes, and the character of Brother Mouzone, and failed ---- Breaking Bad succeeded. Not always. The cousins were over the top. But even so ..... sometimes you even sympathize with something that failed, because you feel sympathy for the general philosophy of “the rule of cool”, or “giving precedence to awesomeness over realism”, that shines through even a failed attempt.

The Wire pulls of the stunt of telling a compelling story with lots of conflict --- completely without a villain. 

Breaking Bad pulls off the surprising stunt of combining larger than life with psychological drama. We learn nothing about Tuco’s back story, and just enough about Gus’ to make the story arch where he exerts revenge on the cartel work --- and yet they managed to create a character in the Gus Frings figure, that won’t be forgotten in a long time.

To use an analogy from painting: The Wire is "painting a version of what one sees”, Breaking Bad is "painting from within”. The Wire shows some cool aspects of the World, Breaking Bad shows “the things that the collective subconscious of a group of talented writers found out about storytelling”. Breaking Bad is more of a story-story --- and at the same time more engaging, to some extent exactly because of this. Both a fairy tale, AND psychologically sound. It also tells the more monolithic story, which basically consists of one big story arc, the story of Walter White. When you watch it, you kind of want to watch it in one go, and once you’ve watched it to the end, you may not want to re-watch it as soon as The Wire.

Both achieve things that won’t get repeated any time soon.

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more on this “erotic games” would-be genre

The whole thing is based on the observation, how adding some simple little rules can have a surprisingly profound effect on how people behave, and what they are open to engage with.

Imagine you move into an apartment building, and you find out that on some floor, in some mysterious flat, there are these “lewd forbidden sexual things going on”. You get curious and want to know more, and after some arduous investigation, this is the image that emerges:

The flat is owned by a girl --- let’s make her a girl in this case, but could be of any gender ---- who hosts these things that take place, and who is kind of the person who ultimately decides how things are done.

Maybe it works as a closed society, that you have to be invited to, and where, while you can’t apply directly, there are things you can do to increase your chances of getting invited.

Or maybe --- this is what I would tend to go for --- the story that is being told is a story of seduction, where the girl running the flat invites the new girl over, and gradually and skilfully involves her in the things happening there. She already has a number of girls who volunteer as her assistants, but the new girl is different, very much her own woman, very independent.

So anyway, before I get carried away with plotting here ...

The way the whole thing works, goes something like this.

There are different “games” being played.

What kind of games you take part in, is up to you, and depends on what you signed up for, and to what extent the people you are interested in are interested in you.

One such game is a game where one party is pitched against the other in some competition, maybe if somewhat erotic nature --- and where the winner takes it all, while the loser has to assist.

Another game ---- possibly connected to the first game ---- is that one of a whole group of people can win the title of “director of the day”, which entitles him to set up the rest on the group to do things that he or she wants to see. Sort of you are the director, and they are your cast, and you can use them to shoot any kind of scenario you want to see, provided it is covered by wha you signed up for.

Let’s say there is this nerdy guy, who lusts after this one girl. (Let’s make it this way around, because getting an attractive guy to have sex with a nerdy girl is way too easy.) Since he’s not on her list, he can’t really win sex with her. But maybe he gets her to sign up with playing with another girl in front of him, as he films them, and maybe gets teased or mocked by them. Or maybe, if he should win the director’s hat for the night, he could make her have sex with one of the guys and girls and whatever else that are on her list, and make her perform what he wants to see. Which would also create a chance for him, to be so good in playing into her strongest fantasies, that this might changed his status with her, making more things accessible for him. (The Alfred Hitchcock way of getting some action, according to legend.)

Like masturbating in front of him, while he gets to fuck her assistant Or maybe even consenting to SOME kind of sex --- since sex doesn’t equal sex. Maybe she will consent to some scenario, where all he gets to do is just sit there, wearing a mask, while she slowly rides his dick, as she is teasing and putting on a show for some guy via skype. (What difference does it make whose cock fills out that condom, as long as it’s a nice fit cock and she doesn’t have to see or talk to its owner.)

The deeper you get involved in these games, the more things can happen like, you getting sent to some person as a sexual present, as in the example I already described, or you being ascribed as a teacher to someone (say the-girl-he-lusts-after being ascribed as teacher to the guy, or the-guy-she-lusts-after to the girl), where the teacher teaches the pupil you how to properly satisfy a woman / a man, according to him.

The psychology behind this is, that a little change in angle may make a huge difference of what people are open to do, what people are made to enjoy.

Imagine the difference between being a whore for real, or playing a whore in a film. Or being in a real life “Casting Couch scenario”, versus playing a girl in a film, who gets into a casting couch scenario. And how the number of girls you could get to do the second thing is so much higher, in comparison to how surprisingly small the difference with respect to the actual things you have to do might be. (In both cases you may end up getting groped and kissed by a guy you find unattractive.)

Or imagine the difference between actively seeking a situation where another guy gets to fuck the girl you fancy, while you only get to jack off on her heels --- as opposed to a scenario, where you take part in a bet where you have a chance of ending up in either of those two positions.

Or, like in the scenario of “3 hunks get sent to service a horny chubby girl with a somewhat plane face for her birthday”, where the hunks might have all sorts of reasons not to be publicly known for doing these things, while they might secretly be super into it.

The natural dynamics that happens, when you find out that being the one who looses a game of “ouch poker”, is in some respects actually much more rewarding than being the one that wins, at least in hindsight; and even if it might be quite painful to endure while it lasts.

Or just imagine the psychology of a simple straight forward he night, where the group dynamics between different girls makes is super easy for them to engage in things that they might consider far too slutty for their taste under normal circumstances.

Or the psychology of sexual things happening during carnival or Mardi Gras, with girls stripping and offering to getting groped in exchange for glass pearls.

The more the people play, the more they get eager to try out things that push their own limits.

To some extent, the whole set-up works as one big “catch your dreams” scenario, where people with certain mindsets meet and assist each other in making some of their deepest fantasies come true, that might be rather hard to come by in the traditional way. (As opposed to if all somebody should want is straight on sex, where you are pretty well served by things like swinger’s clubs.)

But isn’t there this kind of a law of storytelling, that the things that are super enjoyable to do in real life, rarely make for good storytelling? Would these things that happen there really make for a good story?

They probably wouldn’t, I agree. Not on their own, that is. But they might work well as an opener, and maybe a kind of background setting on which these other, emotionally more engaging, high stakes conflicty things are happening. If series set in hospitals can work ---- maybe a “sexual games” backdrop could work, too.

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Extreme approach #1:

Judging a story by lacking something that it isn’t even trying to do, and doesn’t need to do, simply because not all stories need to deliver the same things.

(It’s okay for a children’s story not to have character’s that die. It’s okay for the character of Bender to unrealistic. (Realistic, and “totally becoming alive in the minds of the viewers”, are too different things.) It’s okay for fighters to be able to defy gravity in Wuxia films.)

Extreme approach #2:

Opening a different genre for a every single film, and then saying “if you don’t like it, just pick a different genre”.

It seems to me that any approach that wants to be fruitful has to lie somewhere in between these two extremes.

As in: Acknowledge that on the one hand, there are different types of stories, that cater to very different needs. "Futurama” may fail in almost everything that makes “The Wire” a good story, but what it does, it does well. (For the most part.) Nobody wants to watch ONLY stuff like “The Wire” on every day of his life.

While at the same time also acknowledging, that particular stories, episodes etc. can fall short or even fail with in their respective genre. Some Futurama episodes are better than others. Some episodes of “Breaking Bad” are better than others. A bad Futurama Episodes may contain a really good something (an idea, a character, whatever), and its worth noticing and appreciating this, but this isn’t enough to make it a good epidode. Not all episodes are created equal.

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Another thing that changed:

Before I started, I thought there was zero point in negative criticism.

What’s the point of writing a slating review?

You, and only you, are responsible for the things you read and watch.

The only conditions under which you shoud read or watch a story, is if you are ready to engage openly with it, and set out to find as many things that resonate with you as possible, for your own gain, and so that you might make use of in your own writing.

If you can’t relate to a story --- just stop reading it.

Don’t play judge. Don’t fall into the trap of accusing a story of having failed something that it wasn’t trying to achieve. To use an analogy from cooking: Instead of thinking “this plant tastes horrible and is completely useless for cooking”, treat it as “I have not been able to come up with a use for this, but I wouldn’t completely exclude the possibility that somebody else will”.

While I still subscribe to this, it so happened that I felt a strong desire to be able to better wrap my head around what it is exactly that I find lacking in “Game of Thrones”. What I mean exactly, when it strikes me as an naive story.

Sort of: Naive can be okay, but Game of Thrones is naive at places where it wouldn’t have to be.

“Star Wars” is naive, in a way that I don’t have issues with. It’s “perfectly well done for its genre”.

But Game of Thrones is not.

Or be able to pin down exactly, why I wouldn’t count the films by Quentin Tarrantion as “Ausmalungsfilme”. (Sloppy answer: Too much urban legend, too much “violence of the sake of being cool”, without taking the violence really seriously. Somebody making films as references to film, rather than life experience.)

Or to be able to poinout, why I find the scene in “The Wise Man’s Fear” where he kills all the fake Edema Ru --- borderline repulsive. Kind of the point, where naivite reaches the transition point where it becomes ... scarily self righteous? “Now thank us for our mercy for putting you to the fire to save your imortal soul, witch?” I can’t think of  a better description right now.

(Although this is definitely also a sign that I need to do some self therapy here :) Especially compared to how much violence goes completely unobjected by me in other places.)

--->

Publishing slating reviews is one thing. Being able to point out what is wrong with a story, that I ended up reading AND enjoying, in some respects, is another. I could be wrong, but right now, it seems to me that this could be a valuable contribution to the process of sussing out what it is exactly that makes me like a story.

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Talk about villains:

Another insight was, that Ramsey (of Game of Thrones) might not be as clearly a villain as I used to think. And that I may have underestimated the amount of interpretation on my part, that made me think of him as one.

After all, I don’t have issues with a story that introduces characters who are “impressively unpleasant”. People like this exist in real life, and I see no reason why they should not occur in a story. Middle ages like environments definitely breed a different type of people. So how can I be sure Ramsey isn’t just one of those, who happens to end up in a place of power?

I can’t deny he is a somewhat fleshed out character, there is enough back story to make it plausible how someone with certain dispositions woud come to be the way he is.

--->

I would suspect that, from a storytelling point of view, there is still something wrong with this character, but I am less sure about it than I was before. And I learned that the line between villain and unpleasant character is more open to interpretation than I was aware of.

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Before I started, I used to think of villains as a kind of naive story telling device.

Until I thought of Frank, in “Once Upon a Time in America”. The fun of watching whom kind of reminded me of the “Femme Fatale” trope: The fun of portraying something larger than life. Indulging in the fun of portraying a character who is super dangerous or super sexy.

“But doesn’t having a villain kind of limit the story to fairy tale status”? Well, in a sense of course, yes.

But contrast this, say, with the characters of “The Big Bang Theory”, who are all super human, feal super real, make for great comedy --- but at the same time are guaranteed to prevent people from fantasizing about them. (Well, all of the main characters except for Penny maybe.)

Things like villains and femme fatales are kind of phenomenon of perspective. They can only happen in the mind of an obeserver, who has limited knowledge of who these people actually are. A phenonemon of distance, and projection.

This is a far shot, but maybe, who knows, there could even be a way to introduce a character as a villain or femme fatale first --- and then gradually replace him or her by a real fleshed out human character, as we get to know more and more about the character.

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Some things I learned while writing this blog .....

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(Disclaimer: Very speculative, and very “top down”, as in not sufficiently founded on actually looking what people report.)

It seems to me, that there are two fundamental pillars of writing, one very big one, and one much much smaller one, that work as something like two opposing sides from which to approach writing from.

The big one is the intuitive approach, where the virtue lies in being extremely open to different ideas popping up in your head, and following them up in faith, with as little premature meddling or forcing as possible, to see where they might lead you to. Creating characters in your mind, that develop a life of their own, and then letting them lead you by listening what they want to do, rather than forcing them to perform some premeditated script or master plan you have laid out for them. What George Martin might call the gardener approach, versus the architect approach. Or, alternatively, “process orientated, versus result orientated”.

Its power lies in tapping into the vast faculties of the subconscious, which tends to be so vastly more powerful to our conscious thinking. The part of our thinking, that allows us to surprise ourselves. The part of our mind, that can sometiems make us come up with dreams that we still find really impressive after we have woken up. (Whenever I read about different writing tips, it seems to me that a lot of them are about “how to let your subconscious range free, without subjecting it to the dictatorship of the ego”.)

To me, being able to do this is what makes you are writer. Or at least an important part of what makes you a writer, in the sense of: Lack this, and either your writing will feel super contrived, or you will end up not writing at all, because you will get locked up in plotting.

A person who excels at this to come up with some super original and surprising stories, that sort flow out of themselves, , without seeming forced contrived in any way, with the end result feeling like it hat this internal unity to it.

Maybe this is what enabled people like Simenon to write down novel after novel, with taking no longer than two weeks.

The downside to this is, that a writer can write novel after novel this way, having super fun along the way ---- and yet, when he looks back to what he has writt3n, say, the past 2 years, he might end up thinking something like: “Did the world REALLY need this story? Were there truly no stories like this one before? And even if there weren’t: How much do these stories have to do with me, as a person, with the things that are most important to me? How many more awe creating made up little stories does mankind really need?”

Just like the price of too little openness will typically be that a story will feel contrived or forced or “not being held together by one encompassing spirit” --- the typical price of too much openness is arbitrariness.

One day, you openly follow up on an image of “two ordinary guys cooking meth in a van”, and the kind of simplistic idea of “what if a guy went from sympathetic loser to more and more and more bad?”, and you end up creating “Breaking Bad”. And another day, with the same openness, you engage with the idea of creating a spin-off based on Saul, and you end up creating “Better call Saul”. Which, while its writing shares many of the virtues with the writing of Breaking Bad, will never get anywhere near Breaking Bad, because it shows people we don’t really care about enough, doing things we don’t really care about enough.

Which directly leads me to the thoughts that I tried to express in this posting.

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Why is it so hard to come up with a good theory of what kind of stories a given person likes? (”good” in the sense, that it can be used as a tool to predict what stories this person will like, with a “good enough accuracy to be excited about”?)

Let me try to point out a few things that I think make this a complex task or challenge.

I’m gonna take myself as an example, and make some common sense assumptions; partly by using analogies from other areas, like our taste in food etc.

My taste has changed over the course of my life, and will continue to do so. What we like and dislike, is to some extent a matter of education. Over the course of time, I have learned to appreciate completely new different dimensions of a film, that I hadn’t really paid attention to before.

What I like on a given day depends of what I have watched before. Just like in the case of food, in can both make me less likely to want more of the same, AND make me more likely to want more of the same. For every one dramatic story I watch, I may want to watch 2,3 or 4 light stories, to nicely cushion the heavy stuff. Our appetite for ANYTHING we like is always limited. Even with the my top top fave stories, or my top top candidates for “easy viewing” --- give me more and more and more of them, and before long, my limit will become maxed out.

But even in a situation where there is no effect of what I have watched previously ---- say in a situation where I haven’t read or watched any story in a long time --- the answer to what kind of story I feel like on a given day is bound to vary from day to day. Sometimes I wake up with an energetic frame of mind, sometimes with a more melancholic one, sometimes with a mind that sees nothing but problems, and sometimes with a mind that thinks the world belongs to me.

And it may depend on whether I just got up, or reaching my time of sleep. Sometimes, when my mind had to process a lot over the course of the day, I might only feel like some “light” reading or watching. And sometimes, while I am mourning about something, or “struggling with fate”, I may want to watch something where people are facing similar problems.

Engaging with a new series, takes more openness than watching another series where all the main characters are familiar.

To some extent, the things we like and dislike depend on the circumstances of how we grew up. Whether we group up in a harsh environment, or a protected one. Whether we belong to this generation, or to that one. (I believe that when circumstances are very different, this will inevitably literally produce different people.)

And it may even depend on arbitrary things, like what kind of people we happened to bump into. (I remember really enjoying the characters of Quark in Deeps Space 9 and Bender in Futurama, because I knew someone in real life who kind of works a bit like a combination of those two.)

The fact that our taste tends to develop over the course of time --- is enhanced by the fact, that there has been a rapid development of the quality of storytelling over the last few decades. While it’s possible to name the odd film, say, older than 20 years, that is still very enjoyable today ---- most storytelling from so long ago tend to seem super naive and boring. So many things progress at the same time. The art of storytelling. Society. Sense of humour. Everything progresses, along with your own taste. If you should be older than, say, 25, just try it out for yourself by going back to watching some of your favourite stories from your childhood, that deeply impressed you at the time, and watch out if you feel the shock of “What? I used to be impressed by this super naive and lame stuff?”

All of these are things, that a theory about a person’s taste, that can actually be used to “predict” what a given person will like, would have to take into account. Don’t expect it to predict in the sense of “what he/she will like on any given day”. (Unless you can come up with a second, additional theory, that allows you to predict with what kind of state of mind he/she will wake up the next day. Which I would find very surprising, if this should turn out to be possible.)

It seems to me, that the answer is a bit similar to the answer to the question “What exactly can we learn from history, and to what extent can this really be applied to future situations?”. I think there are things to be learned from history --- but I also think that the application of these insights to future situations is definitely not a straight forward thing, and excludes anything close to “I can predict how this or that situation is going to play out”.

So what makes me believe that what is left, is still worth putting effort and work in?

Roughly speaking, the same kind of reasoning that makes people think that the fact that we can understand a potentially unlimited number of sentences that we never heard before goes to show that there must be some set of rules of grammar, some kind of mechanism that generates “the infinite from the finite”, or “very very many things from much, much fewer things”. If it didn't --- how could there be such a surprising degree of consistency, both within one person (at different times), and between different people?

Yes, the degree of consistency is considerably smaller when it comes to judging stories. While I do believe that all the things that I mentioned before have to be taken into account, and many many more --- I refuse to believe that the question of whether or not we like a given story is arrived at by some arbitrary process, like flipping a coin.

Yes, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, in the sense that “the sensation of beauty can only ever happen in the mind of a sentient being”. But this doesn't imply, that the sensation of beauty we get when we are looking at certain faces, doesn't have SOMETHING to do with the exact proportions, textures and other features of the face.

I am ready to concede that there have been surprisingly many “bad stories” that have been super popular, in some sense; but at the same time, I also strongly suspect, that the huge success of series like “The Wire” or “Breaking Bad” DOES have something to do with their quality. Or at least their quality, respective to the time when they were created.

Recent years were called the “golden age of tv” for a reason. The reason being, that it was a time that created an impressive number of good shows, or a quality of certain shows that was unheard of before. And I strongly doubt that this impression I have, and that I share with many people, can be explained as some effect of mass hysteria, where the view that these series were particularly good for their time, is arrived at on pure social convention, rather than having to do with “objectifiable qualities” inherent to these stories.

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So trying to analyze what makes me like certain films or tv series brings me to things like:

titillating, seductive, “fat world”

intriguing characters

intriguing relationships

“pushing the envelope”, by portraying some truth about human nature that is likely to stirr negative emotions, like, say, portraying a bully / victim relationship where the victim kind of enjoys what the bully does

mood inducing

touching, moving (in a good way)

and some more qualities like this.

Which could make it tempting to think: “If I should ever make my own series, I better make sure that these will be present in my series.”

Except this isn’t how this works. More doesn’t always equal better. A bit like you can’t create the perfect meal by trying to combing ALL things that contributed to every favourite dish of yours you ever tasted.

I remember how, quite some time ago, I had this vague idea of creating a more edgy, more realistic version of Pinocchio ---- until I realized that the things that make me like the series so much are actually finely tuned, and very hard to vary without spoiling the overall effect. Including a certain naivite, including the fact that no one really dies (unlike the original Pinocchio story, where Pinocchio kills the cricket early on).

The same thing that is crucial to the quality of one particular film, could easily ruin another one.

Basically, on the most fundamental level, it’s about finding a kind of coherent or harmonious overall tone of the story. Which can and will sometimes depend on most subtle differences in language.

My favourite way of demonstrating how hard this is to pull off, is the way how the very author who created a certain masterpiece can sometimes fail to accurately reproduce its spirit, like David Lynch failed to reproduce the spirit of “Twin Peaks” when he created “Fire Walk With Me”, or Emir Kusturica failed to reproduce the spirit of “Time of the Gypsies” when he created “Black cat, white cat”. (Although it’s possibly that, rather trying to reproduce something, they were deliberately going for a slight variation, which then turned out not to work.)

Which is also why the recipe “Want to write the best book ever? Just take the best book so far, and improve it in one place” works much better as joke as it does as a realy recipe. Although, who knows, maybe this will change in the near future, through making use of the assistance AI systems that are trained on emulating a certain style, as it has already been done, with some success, in creating “new unknown paintings of famous painters”.

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“mastermind” not in the sense of “pulling off complicated premeditated plans successfully”, but in the sense of “having fun in building more complex, titillating things out of things”. Taking things step by step, reacting to opportunity, with no fixed goal in mind.

To me, Valmont and Merteuil aren’t super contrived characters, because in my experience, people like this definitely exist in real life. A bit like, at the time when “Jackass” was airing, groups of people would pop up youtube having fun with this, and posting videos their clips about it. Or the various traditions of hazing all around the world.

I like stories with characters that “make the world not a better, but a more exciting place”. Intelligent and mischievous characters, who realize the kind of potential that lies in a situation where so many people are hoping for something unusual to happen --- and where you are the one who makes them happen. Making them characters with strong agency, and characters who kind of deserve what they get, to the extent they get it, because they bring it about themselves, by combining fortunate circumstances with imagination.

So could this imagined new genre work?

Hard to say in advance. Maybe if I should ever actually sit down try to create a nice “codifying example”, I will quickly find they this doesn’t actually work out the imagined, because it feels contrived and what have you. Maybe no one but me would be interested in this genre.

But then again; what fun to picture a scenario, where even a small number of people around the world re-enact their own sexual version of jackass, after somebody wrote the first truly seductive example of this genre.

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Erotic games scenarios

It would be easiest to start with some examples, but since, to my best knowledge, this genre really only exists in my head so far, the examples that best approximate this are:

“Les Liaisons Dangereuses”

Some aspects of Season 1 of Skins. (The way how Tony and Michelle set up Sid with Cassie. The way Tony later kind of “parks” Michelle with Sid, to be free to follow his own erotic pursuits.) Although it’s probably just me seeing that into it.

The most erotically charged among the various “Big Brother” type reality series. (There used to be

A lot of “cam couple” porn clips, where a couple has sex in front of their cam, while communicating with their followers, reacting to their suggestions.

So a typical scenario could go something like this.

Two or three or four groups of teens move into an apartment together. (So that you end up with, say, 10 or 12 different characters, spread over 3 or 4 different apartments, inhabited by 3 different groups.)

As you’d expect, different people are gonna end up feeling sexually attracted to certain other people.

Let me first tell you what the unfoalding story is NOT about.

In a typical soap opera, you could have things like: Two guys fighting over a girl, a girl feeling jealous about watching her ex with his new girlfriend, etc. etc.

While there may be elements of this, the main focus of “teenage erotic games” is different, namely on things that are a little less obvious, and require more imagination.

Another thing it’s not about is creating porn; not even porn of the psychologically sophisticated variety. This may happen as kind of the side effect, but it is not the main intention. Some hentai manga supply really good ideas, but the point where they deviate from what I have in mind is when they show pages and pages of sex or sexual interactions. In contrast, the “teenage erotic games” genre is not designed to get you off per se.  The creation of porn built on these characters is best outsourced to fan fiction.

So what are they about then, and how are they different from what I mentioned so far?

They are “social sex” scenarios, with more than 2 people present; but without all of them equally being involved in some sex act. A sex act in front of an audience. A sex act directed by a director, who tells the two or three people involved exactly how to move, what to do. A sex act as a kind of live pornographic show, directed at one specific spectator, who can participate at will.

They are about “seduction and progressive transgressions”.

Girl with a boyfriend she’s in a happy relationship in, moves into a flat together with a bunch of girls, among them, unbeknownst to her, the “erotic mastermind” queen bee who takes great pleasure out of leading her astray, by skilfully leading her on the path of progressive transgressions, starting with seemingly innocuous things, and then gradually upping the ante, by luring her with things like easily earned money and / or getting secret sexual desires of her fulfilled that her loving boyfriend is completely unaware of she has.

As in this example, often, at the core of this, there will be one or two “erotic masterminds”, who derive pleasure from taking the different people and their respective crushes, sexual turn-ons, etc., and “building interesting things out of them”.

The queen bee is friends with girl B, who is not the type that guys typically flock around. Maybe she’s somewhat fat, maybe she is somewhat plain looking, or just doesn’t know dress sexy. (While she does have a strong sex drive, and a kind of self assurance or “resting in herself.) So the queen bee approaches 4 of the hottest guys that she knows of through anonymous email, and makes them an offer they cannot refuse: To pleasure and service a fat horny girl for her birthday, without anyone ever knowing about this.

The way she coaches her girls:

“When it becomes obvious that a guy you are not into wants to have sex with you ----- don’t look at this as a problem, look at it as possibility.”

These stories are about “seeing through people, and putting their secret or not so secret desires and turn-ons to work.”

M, the male erotic mastermind, tells his girl to do a lap dance for his shy friend. Shy friend can’t believe it when M tells him that she will have sex with whoever he tells her to, simply because she gets turned on by acting like a total slut.

While these stories are obviously build around heavily sexual situations and even sex acts, they will very rarely directly tend to sexual turn-ons, but will often show “awkward sex, bad sex, sex for an ulterior motive, ...”. storytelling, always take precedence over sexual titillation.

(In my mind, I mostly see the protagonists of these stories as teenagers and people in their early 20s. Why? Basically, because these kinds of stories best suit the teenage mindset. Highly sexualized. Carefree. Pleasure centred. “The world is mine”. But also: Somewhat naive. Inexperienced. Lots of things happening for the first time. Confused or sometimes even completely in the dark about ones own dispositions.)

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Looking back at what I have written up until now --- what do my thoughts seem to gravitate towards?

So far, it’s really an assortment of all sorts of thoughts, like my digression into “My most missed genre, and is there a way for a group of people to establish a new genre?”, or this reocurring question of “example for ‘stories follow their own laws --- or simply unimaginative storytelling?”

The one big thread that I try to keep coming back to, is this big quest, that I described a bit in my first posting, namely to try to find out what it is exactly that makes my favourite stories my favourite stories.

Step 1 was the assembly of a list of some of my favourite stories, to have an empirical base to draw from. (Which is the much, much better approach than working “top down”, because it immediately eliminates lots of interesting sounding ideas that simply don’t pan out.)

Followed by the much more extensive attempt, to trying to zoom in on what is exactly that makes them work for me, with the idea in mind to isolate them, so that I would be able to use them as a tool for my own projects. “This and that was at the core of what made story x work for me, so now let me check if I can apply this to story Y.”

The second big underlying theme of this blog, that I expect to keep coming back to, is this question of “what should the stories I want to plot / write myself be about?”. Not the how of writing, but the what, so to speak.

This is what lead me to the concept of “titillating story”, and the one of “deep titillating story”.

Within this --- very broad --- “master genre”, there seem to be two sub genres, or sub themes, that keep popping up time and again.

One are all the stories, that are about kids on the prowl, exploring, being submitted to various trials and experiences, in a kind of lawless, very free set-up; with dangers lurking, yes, but also with lots of encounters of much more ambivalent or even benevolent nature. As represented by films like “Les Valseuses”, the basic scenario of the Pinocchio story once he’s on the prowl, the part where Kvothe has to survive the streets of Tarbean in “The Name of the Wind”, much of the Arya arc in “Game of Thrones” when she’s with the Hound. Or, more on the heavier side, stories like “Simplicius Simplicissimus”, of the old Picaresque Novel genre, or, a little closer to the present day, a film like “Johnny Mad Dog”. Kind of adventure stories, about free roaming kids, that focus on the kinds of skills you need to survive on the road. How can I find a good place to sleep at? Who to trust? How to build trust? Who to team up with? How to defend yourself?

There is a second big cluster of plots, that I didn’t really talk about yet, which, as best I know, seems to only exist in my head so far, and which I don’t have a catchy name for yet, and which very crudely described is about “a bunch of youngish people, engaging in certain erotic games, possibly fuelled by some horny masterminds among them”. I will try to do a better job of describing what I have in mind here in my next posting.

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How much agency can the main characters have and still work?

Is it an example for “stories follow their own laws”, that main characters so often tend to be reacting rather than acting --- or is this more a problem of unimaginative storytelling?

Spontaneously, I would have answered something like this:

I hate your usual “average nondescript guy has to save the universe” plot. I don’t want the main characters to be average, and I don’t want them to save the universe.

But this is a slightly different point.

The question of how much agency they can have, with the story still working, is a little trickier to answer.

My first approach here, would be to think of those ones among my stories, where the main characters have the maximum amount of agency, to get an idea of a potential upper limit.

The two characters that come to mind here, are Walter White in “Breaking Bad”, and Valmont in “Liaisions Dangereuses”.

Heist stories would be an example where the characters have even more agency --- but I don’t particularly like Heist stories.

And maybe the same is even true for the main character pulling off any kind of master plan. Okay I guess Valmont is kind of an exception, but I think in his case, I might like the story in spite of this kind of master plan like thing, rather than because of it.

Being confronted with some situation, and THEN coming up with some more or less clever plan to cope with it, is another matter. This is something that I can imagine. (I kind of find it fun to imagine, what would habe been said exactly as the Greeks were forming their plan to fight off the invasion of Xerxes with his giant army. And I kind of like the plan that Walter, Mike and Jesse came up with, to destroy Gus’ laptop. (Which then turned out to have been completely unnecessary, because the polics didn’t manage to break Gus’ encryption.) Although I have to say, I probably like the aspect of them conferring together, and discussing different options, even more than the actual execution.

So yes, my first impression in this case is, that actually, at least for me, there seems to be an upper limit to the agency they can have.

One candidate for a reason for that could be, that A) we tend to spend lots of time with our main characters, and B) we want to be surprised, so that C) the surprise moves have to be generated by the people we spend less time with.

Except it seems to me that this, while there may be some truth to it, is a somewhat superficial reason. (Actually Rothfuss in “The Wise Man’s Fear”, is experimenting with a kind of workaround to this, where, like in the example where Kvothe finds out that the Maer is being poisoned, or, even more so, in the example where he ends up at the fire with the fake “Edema Ruh”, he manages to surprise us to a certain extent, by just showing Kovthe’s actions, without betraying his thoughts, which only get revealed later; which reminded me a bit of one the old Icelandic Sagas.)

I think the deeper reasons are to be found somewhere else. And my prime candidate for it, has to do with this quote by Nabokov where he says “chase your hero up a tree, and then throw rocks at him”. Somehow we seem to have this deep rooted longing to see our main characters in really tough spots. Like Tyrion, in this whole trial episode. 

Maybe it has to do with the fact, that a person who got his act together too much, doesn’t really inspire our empathy. We root for the outsiders, and we seem to even sometimes root for the people who kind of act like their own worst enemies. (Like Walter White jeopardizing everything, by telling Hank that he doesn’t believe that Gale was the mastermind he (Hank) is looking for, because his notes are too derivative, unoriginal. Or those other occasions, where Walt kind of “acts out” against his own best interest. (Or against his own maybe not so good after all imagined interests.)

The world is unpredictable. The world has a tendency to throw sticks in the path of everybody and anybody, no matter who, no matter what their plan may be. Even Caesar had to constantly adapt his plans, in the series “Rome” as much as in real life. And I am not sure that he is somebody that many people rooted for.

As much as I hate to watch characters that constantly get into trouble that could have been completely avoided, as much as I hate “character idiocy”, or whatever the corresponding trope is named; it would still seem, like I kind of like to see my characters get into tough spots, where they have to use all of their imagination to find a way out of it.

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Every puzzle ...

Every question of type “Who was the murderer?”, “Who is the father of her baby?”, “How will prophecy X come true?” ...

Everything that raises the question “How will it end?” ...

Every outer conflict. Every duel, every battle, every war. Every cliffhanger. Every attempt to rescue someone. Every scene that begs the question: How can this character possibly escape this conundrum? ...

... all these things are just means to make us stick with the story, while the really important things happen. They may be what we keep watching for, but they are not what we remember when we think back to the story. They are the scaffolding, that is there to hold the really important things together.

So what are these essential things, then?

They can be all sorts of things.

They are the things we make gifs of, or the scenes we keep watching over and over again, that aren’t action related, but of type “what happens between two people in a room”. Key conversations or interactions between two characters. Often associated with at least one of the characters, but often all of them, experiencing some kind of intense emotion. A key moment, that changes the relationship between two characters for good.

They are not just the big things, but often the small things. A funny remark bringing levity to a somewhat bleak situation, making the other character(s) smile.

A characteristic reaction or quote, or way of looking, or piece of body language, that is typical for a certain character.