Guest Blogger: Lilith Saintcrow

I first met Lilith through Live Journal when I was hanging out there, but we've connected more via Twitter over the months. Never one to pussyfoot around reality, Lilith is a talented author of urban fantasy who's also direct, honest, and helpful with her blogs about the writing life. Today, she gives budding urban fantasy/fantasy/paranormal romance writers some great advice from the reader's point of view. So please help us welcome Lilith Saintcrow. ---Yasmine

Lilith:

Costs, Consequences, and Consistency

Many writers make the mistake of thinking that shoehorning a paranormal aspect into their work solves problems and is an "easy" fix. With the current popular crop of paranormal suspense, paranormal romance, and urban fantasy filling the shelves, it's a seductive misapprehension. Just throw a witch or a werewolf in there. How hard could it be?

Famous last words, my friends.

The paranormal only looks like an easy fix. Look a little closer, and you'll find snares between the tranquil surface.

Plenty of paranormals in fiction fall flat for a variety of reasons. The first reason is what I call "cost and consequences." No matter what magical creature or system you have in your work, it must involve both. A magical system without a cost or a consequence is just a variety of what my writing partner calls, with her ineffable instinct for les mots juste, "a Magic Dingus." It exists just to Deus ex machina the plot along, and it will get your book thrown across the room by an irate reader quicker than just about anything.

Authorial insertions are notorious for having no cost or consequence to their magic. We've all seen (and retched and rolled our eyes at) the Mary Sue (or Gary Stu) with violet eyes and beautiful hair whose virgin blood holds the power to save the Universe, and when she does magic there's no real effort involved. She just belches and the magic happens.
In real life and in decent fiction, magic, like any other energy, has to come from somewhere. It has to mean something, and a magical system with no cost involved is an edifice ripe for authorial abuse of both meaning and the reader's willingness to suspend disbelief.

Writing paranormal events, characters, or magical systems raises the threshold of disbelief a few notches higher than usual. You want me to believe in a guy who changes into a big hairy half-wolf at the right moonphase, or an immortal with an allergy to sunlight and a thirst for the red stuff? Show me how that works, and show me how it messes up his life. Show him scheduling his appointments around this event, show him locking himself into a bunker so he won't hurt anyone else—or show him anticipating the freedom to do things he doesn't normally get to do and making a game out of eluding the police or other authorities. Show him aching the morning after, or being unable to remember what the hell he did while under the moon's sway or the thirst for blood. Show me how an immortal creature copes with change.

You want me, as a Reader, to believe in a witch who can stop time, use telekinesis, or make a plant grow faster? Show me where that energy comes from, how she has to pay for it. Show me the blood and guts involved in fighting evil with faster reflexes and heightened healing. Beat your characters up and make them pay for the privilege of doing things "normal" people can't, and I'll believe in them that much more readily—and I will identify with them that much more, which is the hat-trick every writer wants to pull off.

Who hasn't wished to have some sort of superpower at least once in their life? But we don't like heroes whose superpowers come with no cost. Superman is perpetually an alien, Batman is incapable of carrying on a reasonable relationship with anyone other than the Joker or Catwoman, even the Kwisatz Haderach has to pay over and over again for his gifts. Frodo ended up saving the Shire, but couldn't go back to his old life within it. There must always be a cost/consequence, because Real Life is full of consequences.

A person in real life who ignores consequences makes an exceedingly bad friend or spouse. In fiction, no character can escape consequences if you expect the Reader to keep reading. Readers will divorce a character who doesn't engage them, because they can do so easily. They have nothing invested in the relationship.

Part of overcoming this problem involves walking a fine line between our cultural expectations (that the villain or the sexually-active woman will be punished before the end of the story, for example) and the very real desire of the writer to make something new, to slip a hand up the skirt of convention. Consequences don't have to be the regular, prosaic things they often end up being in real life. They can be something as simple as "every time I perform magic I suffer temporary amnesia/terrific bruising/bleeding from the nose" or "I'm a cool person, but when I get hairy once a month I don't care who I hurt." These costs/consequences create a necessary tension to float a character on the soap-bubble surface of the disbelief threshold.

Another mistake I see some writers make with the paranormal is treating like even more of a Magic Dingus. Magic is whatever they need at the moment to make the plot go along. It is not internally consistent, and this also irritates a Reader past belief and caring. Your magical system—the rules of being paranormal within the universe of the story—has to have boundaries, rules, and reasons for the exceptions to the rules. You do have to spend time thinking about this, and the strictures of internally-consistent magical systems actually constrain far more than they liberate.

Once a paranormal element appears in a story, the writer is hemmed in by consequences, internal consistency, and the heightened threshold of disbelief. Half the fun of writing paranormal is finding creative ways of playing within these rules, just like half the fun of soccer is not using your hands to touch the ball. Or half the fun in chess is using the strictly-defined ways each piece can move to create a symphony of battle between two opponents.

With all this constraint, why would writers bother with paranormal elements? Because they're fun, for one thing. Also because when done properly, they create a heightening of tension it's very difficult to get in any other way. The escapist and the adrenaline junkie can both find something to love in paranormal elements. Plus, they provide a good way for authors to provide commentary and themes by engaging in a language made of dreams and myths—the vampire, for example, has a well-defined body of folklore and literature that can be mined afresh with each generation to examine the themes of blood, death, sexuality, desire, contamination, release, redemption…The list goes on and on, and it's pretty heady stuff.

Paranormal elements are a literary equivalent of playing with dynamite. You can make a big bang and excavate some pretty deep shafts with it, but it's essential to play with it properly. Or you'll end up blowing yourself up and alienating the Reader, or even worse, fizzling and not even getting a puff of smoke.

And that's no fun at all.

Lilith

Lilith Saintcrow was born in New Mexico, bounced around the world as an Air Force brat, and fell in love with writing when she was ten years old. Lili lives in Vancouver, WA with her two children, a houseful of cats, and assorted other strays. You can find Lilith on Live Journal and Twitter.