If you’ve followed popular culture over the past few years, even at a remove, you will likely have noticed a paucity of truly excellent stories on the television screen (actually your computer, but that’s neither here nor there), particularly of good stories in the Big Name franchises- Marvel, Disney, Star Wars, and the rest. I’m not talking morals here. The morals of Big Entertainment are abysmal, abominable, and abhorrent, but the problems I’m talking about aren’t those moral perversities. I’m talking about the immense lack of artistic skill on display. So, today and over the next two weeks (II, III), I’ll be going over an array of problems that keep popping up.

Take It Seriously

When we write stories, we often write about things and ideas and actions we think are contemptible, unworthy of being taken seriously. To do this, however, can be deadly to the art. When I write a character, I must remember from the authorial perspective that this character is fully real, within the story, not merely a puppet. This does not mean characters and movements in the story cannot show contempt- perhaps they should- but I as the author must not render down elements of the story into empty (!) caricature.

The commonness of this error in Hollywood writing it, honestly, a result of their real-world worldview. For all its ‘standpoint epistemology’, liberal worldviews, as they are now, tend to be catastrophically bad at standing in other people’s shoes, preferring emotional projection to empathy. Thus, woke liberals tend to be incapable of stating the conservative position, while many conservatives (not all) can state the liberal position. The woke worldview does not view contrary perspectives to be comprehensible except as a manifestation of evil- which evil is considered a form of insanity. The proponent of a position which is not woke, therefore, cannot be taken seriously, merely mocked, not even considered human. He does not have arguments to be answered; he is merely presenting the excuses he has designed for his underlying prejudices and insanities.

The stories written by woke writers, therefore, have a tendency to forget the reality and depth of their ‘villains.’ They are presented not as people, with vices and virtues, though perhaps more of the first, but as people-shaped facades to be knocked over, along with the impersonal forces of history which propel them. If Narnia were written by a woke man, and the White Witch were to remain the villain (it’s by no means certain), she would not be a tyrant with personality (strengths and weaknesses) but a cardboard cut-out spouting the writer’s preferred ‘bigotry,’ probably about race, acting as the plot requires to see the heroes stomp her out.

See, that’s what happens when the author treats a character or group of characters with contempt. As soon as they lose the human aspect, the intelligence, agency, and motivation which comes with being (facsimiles of) the image of God, they become merely tools of the plot. Thus the ridiculous logistics of Rings of Power, where armies march 650ish miles through heavy forest in under three weeks on foot with siege weaponry and no supply depots, without being noticed on the way. See, that army wasn’t a group of characters with plans and motivations; that army was a tool to bring about the writer’s desired spectacle.

Take your characters seriously, as people. A comedic character may be there to be funny- but he is still, in the conceit of the world, a person, and his comedy should be founded in that. A villain is there to fight the hero, yes, or to obstruct him (possibly accidentally), but he does so for reasons of his own. These characters have motives and desires and histories which are from their perspective as grand and as intense and as serious as your own motives and desires and histories, as important as the hero’s too. This has the benefit besides of teaching readers to perceive characters as real people, people who are funny or terrifying or inspiring as people, not as words on a page.

Think (Enough) about Realism

Realism is important in stories, though not all-important. Whatever you’re writing, take a moment to consider what parts of realism you must have, what parts you don’t need, and what parts you can have and therefore probably should. I’ll take them in a jumbled order.

There is a part of realism which isn’t, frankly, worth the bother of not having. If horses are available, why make the characters in your historical fiction (set in medieval France) ride around on Komodo dragons? This may be extreme, but I think you get the point. Some parts of realism will go unmissed if they are missing, particularly if it’s by omission rather than addition of unrealistic details, but why not have it? So long as it does not interfere with other elements of the story, with plot or character or pace or theme or tone, it can aid verisimilitude, keep the reader grounded and seeing the story’s world as real-for-now, reacting to it as if it is real.

Some parts of realism are absolutely necessary, though, and some not quite indispensable but thoroughly desirable. The absolutely necessary realism comes most obviously in the characters. Your characters must appear to be people or the whole thing is a bust. They must act in a way which makes the reader perceive them as human. This, confusingly, does not mean they must be entirely realistic; their dialogue and bodily functions will often be a little artificial or abbreviated. They must, however, be realistic in the deeper sense than the mechanical: by being human in character. Their relationships and their choices are perhaps the most important parts here. If the ways they relate and the choices they make seem to be those of real people, you have succeeded in this necessary element of realism.¹

The ’not indispensable but thoroughly desirable’ is, I think, best explains with some actual examples. Amazon’s abomination, The Rings of Power, had a budget of nearly 500 million dollars. Nevertheless, they chose to simulate the armor the Numenoreans wore by, in part, giving them shirts printed with a pattern. They also made outright armor pieces- but these were little better, looking remarkably cheap. Then, on the less technical side, they gave one character, an elf, a ridiculous wooden breastplate. In the first case, the realism broke because of the bad cosplay; in the second case, the realism broke because it makes no sense to use wood for a breastplate, not when you’re backed by or allied with the finest smiths of Middle Earth, in Eregion and Moria, and honestly not even if you aren’t (there’s a reason wood isn’t used as armor basically anywhere in history). In that second case, of course, many people probably couldn’t articulate quite why it was a realism break, but they assuredly noticed it.

Modern stories often fail in both these types of necessary realism. The logistical-mechanical issues of the second are often more evident at first glance. The Rings of Power was rife with such issues, as well as the more subtle manifestation of them in the Californication of the elves, how they dressed and talked and looked like transplanted moderns, at least in the eyes of many. It had worldbuilding failures aplenty (see also: the organization of Numenor, the incredible 100-horse ships, and the queen’s spontaneous switches between blind-and-not-blind). But even if these are looked past, the issue remains on a deeper level, for that show, because of failures in the more central type of realism: people realism.

The impression I’ve gotten from a variety of reviews is that, by-and-large, most of the relationships and characters in the story are artistically broken. Personally I put this down in part to the other issues discussed in this section and in next week’s article, but the blame lies also in the life experience of the writers. Their experience in relationships with others and their experience with fiction, I wager, are thin and strangled and broken and superficial, because that’s what the woke society promotes: party loyalty, ideological loyalty, personal isolation, the devolution into a particulate mass that acts as a single amorphous whole. This is the dysfunction modernity has created for itself, and writers who have not known or conceived of or experienced-by-proxy something else can only stumble onto working relationship-writing by accident, by trying to write something broken (though without understanding how it is broken, this is a path to the same bitter end of artistic dullness), or by blindly imitating the mechanics of better stories without understanding why they work.

Some realism, finally, is unneeded. Sometimes that’s because you can get away without it, as the details are not sufficiently proximate to the story to matter. Sometimes that’s because the realism actually harms the story. How can realism harm the story? Well, consider this: would The Chronicles of Narnia be improved by Lewis providing a clear and scientific account of how all the Talking Animals were given vocal chords or other speaking mechanisms that allow them to use human registers as well as their own? After all, bears simply lack the biological capacity to speak as a human does, to my knowledge. Explaining that, though, is unnecessary and (because it takes up space better used in other ways) damaging. A less prominent (intentionally so) example of this sort of (usually) desirable unrealism is the nonexistence of defecation and urination in many stories. Exercise your judgement. Is a complete tectonic history of your world necessary to the story? If it’s not, consider setting it aside- at the least, consider leaving it unmentioned, even if you sketch it out in your notes.

Conclusion

Take your characters seriously; take their thoughts, lives, histories, motives, and positions seriously. Sometimes that means crushing them relentlessly, but crush them as men and women, not facades and ciphers. In doing so, take care for what realism aids you, what is required for your purpose, and what you either can or must discard. I’m still waffling on how much tectonic realism I want to go for with my stories, how much research into How Landscapes Form is worth it. Do not compromise the essentials of realism, the logic of the world (which I admittedly didn’t get into, but it is essential in itself) and the characters, how they are and how they relate.

Next week we’ll talk more about characters, as well as some more diffuse concepts.

God bless.

Footnotes

1. There are always exceptions. Sometimes you don’t want this sort of realism, whether because this is an inhuman character, because it is a pseudo-character only (a realistic and therefore mechanistic AI, for instance, might be alien in this sense), or because of the need of some element of the art style (surrealist, etc.). ↩︎