legends

Recently, a young agent on my staff requested a really good manuscript. She wanted to represent it. Naturally, so did a number of other sharp-eyed agents and thus my young colleague found herself in a so-called beauty contest, a familiar competitive event in our profession.

To back up my young colleague’s bid, I arranged a phone call with the equally young, appallingly talented young writer of the manuscript in question. I told her about our agency, our orientation to career development, our long experience and the staff who would support her work. The young writer in turn assured me that she really liked my young colleague and knew my company’s reputation, and mine. She said, “I mean, like, you’re a legend and all.”

That stopped me. A legend? Now wait a minute. I’ve been doing my job for a long time. I’ve written a couple of influential books on fiction technique. I teach fiction writing. All true. But legend? B.B. King was a legend. Jackie Robinson was a legend. Ernest Hemingway was a legend. But me? Even taking into account the casual hyperbole of young people, I don’t qualify. Believe me, when I’m scraping the breakfast plates or vacuuming our car, I don’t feel like much of a legend.

This mildly unsettling moment came to mind when over the holidays, when we took our kids to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Without spoiling too much, the future Jedi knight Rey seeks out reclusive Luke Skywalker to persuade him to return to the beleaguered Resistance, which according to Rey needs “a legend” for inspiration. Luke however dismisses her, scoffing at his outsized status. After some delay scenes, Luke reveals that he—as he sees it—failed in his training of Ben Solo, who succumbed to the Dark Side of the Force and transformed into murderous Kylo Ren. He spits out the word with ironic contempt: “Luke Skywalker…legend.”

Characters’ backstories come in many varieties, but fairly often authors default to past events that are tragic, hurtful and secret. Protagonists live under a cloud. They’re shadowed, haunted, tormented and burdened by misfortunes or mistakes. Nothing wrong with that, but the prior lives of protagonists can also be built on a foundation of towering reputation, past achievements, high position, notorious crimes or other notoriety that equally complicate their lives.

Some may have established reputations as heroes. Sherlock Holmes. James Bond. Nancy Drew. Conan. Kvothe. Some may be (or become) legends for their achievements. Katniss Everdeen. Martin Dressler. The Mambo Kings. Others may be automatic legends by dint of being rich or patriarchal. Olive Kitteridge. Christian Grey. Smaug. Miriam Raphael (Crescent City). Others may be legendary for their obsessions or ambitions. Becky Sharp. Jay Gatsby. Captain Ahab. Captain Nemo. Others may be legendarily alluring. Scarlet O’Hara. Holly Golightly. Others may be notorious. Boo Radley. John Galt. Harry Flashman. Hannibal Lechter. Others may be legends in their own micro-realms: Evelyn Couch (Fried Green Tomatoes). Harriet Welsch (Harriet the Spy). Bigwig (Watership Down).

Famous or notorious pasts can lead quite quickly to reverse chronology stories, such as Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow or Jeffrey Deaver’s The October List, but that is not automatic. Great characters can have gigantic reputations, pasts that in the present make them revered, feared, self-doubting or targets.

Enormous pasts not only shade characters, they can propel plots. Destiny can be unavoidable, and I’m fine with that, but what happens when a destiny is chosen? Ask me, it becomes that much more compelling. Nothing wrong with an Everyman and Everywoman thrust into extraordinary circumstances, mind you, but what about heroes and heroines who willingly leap into dire conditions or bravely face danger?

In talking about larger-then-life characters, I don’t mean stereotypes like those hilariously cataloged at TV Tropes. I mean those whose lives and actions are detailed, credible and carefully constructed. Readers do not reject big characters; they desire them. We cheer for Scarlet, Sherlock, Forrest and Hannibal, right? We love to be swept away by characters larger than life, so why not put those same dynamics at work for you, too?

Here are some practical approaches: [Read more…]

15+

Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved fairy tales, myths, legends, and fantasy. It’s something I responded to instinctively as a young reader, and something I took to easily as a young writer, too. In my imagination and my dreams, journeying to those magical worlds seemed to me as natural as breathing. Of course I was an imaginative child; but it’s only lately that it’s struck me that perhaps there was also another reason why I so took to those genres. For the classic fantasy themes of the journey between worlds, the sojourn in strange places, and the sudden irruption of a different reality into the everyday is at the very heart of my own lived experience.

I come from a family whose ethnic history is to say the least, complex. Taking in French, Basque, Spanish, Portuguese, and French-Canadian, our history was always more than a bit player in all of our lives. People to whom I’ve told even a fraction of the vivid family stories are thrilled by them; they say, No wonder you became a writer!

But it’s more than that, for three things happened to me as a child that were like fairytale gifts: First, though my parents were both born and brought up in France, I was born in Indonesia, as they were expatriates working there at the time; second, because of ill health, I was then taken as a ten-month old baby to live with my paternal grandmother in France for four years, was told many traditional stories by her–and did not see my parents in all that time; and third, I was then taken, at the age of five, to yet another new place, Australia, where I first discovered English. And what’s more the first book I read for myself in English was a Little Golden Book comprising three fairytales–Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel and Toads and Diamonds–in it (there it is, in the centre of the picture). [Read more…]

Legendary

In Between Worlds