#hack writing

"There's a particular tradition in Christian culture, especially Western Christian culture, where people consume suffering as a moral exercise. Christ on the cross, Saint Sebastian pierced with arrows, the Massacre of Innocents. For centuries, Christian art trained audiences to look at images of pain, feel compassion, and understand that feeling as spiritually meaningful."

She is specifically talking in the context of fake memoirs of suffering, such as Go Ask Alice, Satan's Underground, Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, and A Million Little Pieces. She notes that these stories elicit a sense of righteousness in the reader without drawing attention to and asking them to question the material conditions that allow extreme suffering to exist:

"Reading sad, yet inspirational stories about the Holocaust let American audiences feel virtuous without thinking about slavery or Jim Crow or America's role in the Holocaust or anything that might actually confront them. The genocide happened Over There, perpetrated by Them. Our role is to feel appropriately moved and say Never Again without having to specify what exactly we're preventing or how or whether it might be happening right now somewhere we'd rather not look. The Holocaust becomes a uniquely horrible thing that happened once to other people far away in the past rather than a warning about what is possible under specific recognizable repeatable conditions. The misery memoir boom inherited this worldview wholesale."

But I think this attitude shapes fiction, too. I think a lot of fiction tries to exploit our cultural sense that watching people suffer is somehow virtuous and makes us better people. Even if we don't consciously think of it that way, many of us still have a strong sense that depicting suffering makes a work deep, especially if a character makes a sacrifice.

The MCU's fridging of Natasha Romanoff is what I'd consider an example of this. She dies when a contrived plot device necessitates her to sacrifice herself for the greater good. Then Clint Barton suffers, and we are supposed to suffer vicariously through him.

How about the end of Supernatural? There was nothing to be said or accomplished by not allowing Dean and Castiel to be together. Nothing besides creating a sense of tragedy to try and appease a culture that vampirically feeds on suffering.

A more obscure example is what happened with the second Pacific Rim film. When Guillermo del Toro was in charge, the film's villain was intended to be a Silicon Valley techbro. This would have made the story an implicit criticism of the kind of people who've gone and pushed AI on us. It would have said something. But when the film was handed to Steven S. DeKnight, they made the kaiju scientist (Newt Geiszler) into the villain, his mind taken over by hostile aliens. This gives his former lab mate/rival (Hermann Gottlieb) much to suffer about throughout the story. DeKnight had also originally intended the aforementioned kaiju scientist to redeem himself through sacrifice, and die. Meaningful political commentary was banished so that audiences could sup upon gratuitous suffering.

In the recent comic book published by Legendary, Newt cannot be saved and Gottlieb kills him. They both suffer, and there is absolutely no narrative value in it. It's pain for the sake of pain, insofar as the clumsy writing can evoke it.

Me: Cool what’s it about?

Comic book writer: It’s about (whatever current social topic that has been done to death) isn’t that neat?

Me: Hasn’t that been done already?

Comic book writer: Doesn’t mean I can’t do it.

Me: Sure but you could at least do it in an interesting way or something.

Comic book writer: Proceeds not to do that.

“So tell me, do you believe she is ready?”

“Ready?  No.  Though, she is getting closer… Hydaelyn has chosen her champions well.  See how her crystal shines a sublime light…”

“But as her light grows, does she not become a greater threat to our own purpose?”

“Of course not… as her crystal grows, its edges grow jagged.  Light… Hydaelyn’s light… makes for a fickle mistress.  To truly triumph, light must eradicate all trace of darkness, and with even the slightest crevice, darkness cannot fade.”

“So your plan, then…?”

“She will learn the truth.  She will learn how darkness is that which can truly shelter all, whereas pure light is barren and inhospitable, nurturing only the one, the source, that which emanates all light across an expansive, featureless void.”

“And you think you can win the girl with words?”

“Perhaps not.  But should they catch even the smallest hint of intrigue, they shall form another crack, another edge, in which darkness can fester amid her shining light… she has already embraced her dark side, and it is but a matter of time before she does so again.”

“The night is nigh to close.  Any parting words for me?  For her?”

To wit, oh god, Talisa Maegyr.

Oona Chaplin is great. Richard Madden as Robb Stark is great. They have acceptable chemistry, which smooths over the fact that they are nearly 30-year-old actors portraying the misbehaving teenaged children in the book. This isn't their fault, and they in fact elevate the material.

But Talisa Maegyr...

You replaced a nothing character, who only served to drag the melodramatic plot forward in the book, with a cool sexy fanfic OC. I get it. You have to make the audience of the show care when she inevitably gets stabbed in the baby.

But COME ON. This "year off" exotic rich girl Peace Corps shit pissed me off 12 years ago, and it hasn't aged at all, in that it still pisses me off.

This is a dark Medieval fantasy universe where all the men are stabbing one another atop mounds of filth, and all the women are their property, who are expected to sew lace all day. "Princess Diana, running a field hospital" is utterly not a thing that fits in here. It's just nonsense.

Why did she do this? Who let her? How and why would they let her? How would she even get this far with it? It makes no sense. Pardon me, but this is utterly too WOKE for this universe. It just doesn't fit. It feels like something you'd only write if you've been living in California too long, and confuse rich girl poverty tourism for an actual personality.

All this trouble to create this new, deeper character, and she STILL doesn't have depth. She does fantasy medicine because she's nice, and she has a story about the time she realized an enslaved person was human, because he did something that personally benefited her. That...what is that? Those are things she has done. That isn't a character. She's just a nice lady. In a show with Cersei Lannister and Caitlin Stark, that's frail nothing, as far as character depth goes.

Robb gets hot for her on the basis of her looking like Oona Chaplin, but the slavery story really sets him off. That's odd and gross. It would make more sense if she was just a nobody he thought was hot, because that is exactly the point of this wrinkle in the book. It goes to Robb's character, as a young man who is making young man decisions. Clouding the whole thing with Talisa's dinner party-virtue signaling adds...what, exactly? I'm supposed to become enamored with her, because she's "nice"? That makes her inevitable death more shocking?

None of that works, because it's so obviously a desperate ploy.

You could have legitimately created a person I would care about. Instead you inserted a hack stereotype to trigger my 2012 American sensibilities. I understand why you did it. But it's still lazy and lame and doesn't work.

Do you make these two newbie writing mistakes?

These two writing mistakes which a particular pet peeve of mine. No matter how well everything else is written, these (more often than not) let the whole text down. They both sound too much like “writing” to be good storytelling. Sometimes they sound like bad writing too. Newbie writing mistake #1: As-abuse The first newbie mistake is this: The word “as” in the wrong place. Let me give you an…