Category: Writing

Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 1, Poor World Building

7/26/2014

Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my month long countdown of some of my greatest fictional pet peeves. Or, at least, what should have been a month-long countdown, but craziness of all sorts (in both life and writing) have delayed this final entry a few weeks more than it should have been. Sorry for whatever inconvenience this may have caused.

Back to the list front, already we have taken a good look at why I'm bugged by "perfect" characters (# 5), characters whose life revolves entirely around coincidence (# 4), characters who refuse to evolve with their series (# 3), and plot hoops (# 2), but today I'm going to focus on my biggest pet peeve of all: poor world building.

A little history, first, namely that my background is in history. I majored in history in college and very nearly pulled the trigger and studied to teach it. Although I didn't go that far, I am glad for the education, because it's given me a lot of perspective I wouldn't otherwise have (including a constant need to play devil's advocate, which can get pretty annoying sometimes) and a need to see where everything logically fits. Every story element that is introduced has to have some history and internal logic to it that will fit with other story elements, otherwise, well, it takes me out of the story and the last thing I'm generally looking for when I'm in a story is to be forcibly taken out of it.

Much like being taken out of The Matrix against your will.

There's a lot of different ways that poor world-building can go horribly awry and not enough article to put them all in, so I've narrowed it down to some of the ones that bug me most in what I'm calling my Seven Deadly Sins of Poor World Building. So, in no particular order...

1) Oversimplification

Welcome to Tatooine, home of deserts, scum, villainy, and not much else.

Particularly common in genre fiction, whenever characters are introduced to a new planet or race, it has to have some universal traits that can be used to easily describe it in a moment. This is the warrior race. This is the scientist race. This is the desert planet. This is the forest planet. This is the planet that inexplicably rains toads every 23 minutes (okay, maybe I'm the only one who's ever really wanted to see that one. In small doses, this is actually pretty acceptable, as you want your audience to be able to remember this somewhere down the line. However, this is a trend that tends to fall apart most when significant time is spent developing a story element.

Sorry, Star Trek.

While I love Star Trek and the way it has handled its many races over the years, it gets particularly egregious how oversimplified a lot of their races are the more they're focused on. My beloved Klingons, for example. While years of development have shown them to be a deeper, more varied race than on initial appearance, their culture is still pretty monochrome. They have one religion, one language (despite occasional mentions of other dialects), and one form of martial art, for an entire planet that identifies itself as a warrior race, none of which have really changed in centuries. The same problems can be found across every other major race that the series spends time on, and instead of making the universe seem larger, it manages to make it feel substantially smaller.

2) Underthinking "Cool" Elements

So you've got a world, why not fill it with a lot of cool elements that'll make it even more colorful and vivid? Fine. So long as you can properly rationalize them and make them fit into your world and make it seem reasonable that they can exist, this is fine. Introducing an element that sounds awesome but makes people take pause to try to sort it out, well, that teleports you out of the fantastical world you've put them in. For example, let's go back to Tatooine.

We're introduced to the Sarlaac as Jabba the Hutt's preferred method of execution. A giant, stationary terror beast in the middle of the desert that waits for its prey to fall into its mouth? Fine. Cool even. Then we're told that it digests its prey for a thousand years as if this is some great threat. This is where things get fuzzy. How can an animal live this way? How can they know this? No, it doesn't make any sense, and in the time it's taken me to think this through, three redshirts and an unnecessarily popular bounty hunter have fallen in, and I have to rewind to actually enjoy myself.

Sorry, Boba Fett, you're just not that important.

3) Problems of Scale

In line with the last problem, a lot of artists have trouble understanding scale in their fictional universes. You get this all the time in space opera stories, where distances between planets and stars are casually handwaved away with technobabble, but they're not the ones that I tend to have a problem with. No, it's often the smaller scale stories that tend to have this problem.

An exact population of Hogwarts is never stated in the books, but Rowling has stated in the past that she expects the school has about a thousand students. Stretched across seven years, this figure not only makes Harry's class look ridiculously small (being one of forty students sorted in his year), but it makes the school look more negligent than usual, given its limited and oft poorly trained faculty of perhaps 20 people. Magic can only account for so much here.

Things get even stranger in The Hunger Games universe. Much time is spent in District 12, which seems roughly the size of a small town (given the fact that the entire population can show up in a square on reaping day). While this is fine on its own, it gets a little confusing when we start seeing maps that indicate the districts (including 12) to be the size of at least one current US state and seeing the massive populations of other districts (including the Capitol) when compared with 12. Given the high mortality rate from starvation, mining accidents and the evils of Panem, its amazing that District 12 has anyone left alive for the games. Either the Capitol doesn't care much for coal, or it's going to need to shuffle in some new breeding stock ASAP.

You know, assuming the story didn't end as it did.

4) A World Without Consequences

This one is most common in superhero fiction, but can expand to pretty much any story that's liable to be made into a summer blockbuster. In the never-ending battle for cooler setpieces, we're seeing more and more senseless destruction in fiction, with characters smashing through private property instead of avoiding it, even when they should know better. You never see any aftermath, no people's lives ruined due to losing their homes and businesses, no periods of mourning, no years of rebuilding and governmental investigations. You just see characters looking on in a brief moment of awe before moving on to the next setpiece. The next day, people barely look like anything has happened, even if the scale of destruction would be best called a national tragedy.

This is further baffling in fiction where this sort of thing happens all the time in one particular place, with people refusing to move out even though the likelihood of being crushed to death is somewhere around 100%.

You'd really think Tokyo would've given up after at most it's 5th kaiju attack.

5) Ignoring Superman

I call this one Ignoring Superman, but really, it comes down to ignoring any fix-it-all device that may exist in fiction. So often, in the course of creating awesome universes, you create plot devices to save the day. The problem with this is that rarely are these plot devices actually destroyed, meaning that once it's been used, you often find yourself asking, "Why didn't they use X to save the day this time?"

There are so many problems we could fix with this Time Turner. Now let's never use this again.

But fine, set some restrictions on this plot device, and you may be OK. Where this really gets bad is when there is literally no good reason to ignore the existence of a fix-it-all and artists have to try, clumsily, to explain why it is being ignored.

Yup, back to these guys again.

One of the more memorable Batman comic book storylines was No Man's Land, where a devastating earthquake had cut Gotham City off from the rest of the world, and the government decides to make it no longer part of the United States due to some weird combination of religious mania and no longer wanting to foot the bill for this hell on earth city. Batman is doing his best to keep the peace and restore the city. Fed up with seeing part of his beloved country being ignored, Superman breaks into the city at one point to set it to rights, and is kicked out! Not because he's a terrifying god-like being or because he did something terrible, but because Batman doesn't think that Superman 'gets' the problems with Gotham, and can't fix them, and Superman agrees! Yes, this is a unique situation, and yes, Batman does get Gotham more, but for f***'s sake, can't you at least borrow Superman for a bit to, you know, maybe help deal with the massive supervillain problem and bring in much needed medical supplies?

6) Ignoring the Outside World

A lot of fictional worlds are fairly insular places where we only really get a perspective from a particular location, usually a small town or country, and this is fine. Oftentimes it's probably for the best to create a well-developed small world instead of hastily putting together a massive one. That said, there are some stories where a greater perspective would add a lot. I'm probably not the only one curious to see what the rest of the world (assuming, there still is a rest of the world) in The Hunger Games and The Purge universes thinks of the United States' new perspective on murder. These, however, are just cases that I think would be interesting. There are some where it feels like a vitally missing plot point.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Voldemort and his Death Eaters violently take over the Wizarding World in the British Isles, creating a pretty awful place to be overall. While this is thrilling and creates a stark, scary final chapter, it does fail to mention one thing, namely that the U.K. doesn't contain all the wizards in the world. Throughout the series we see a massive subculture of wizards existing throughout the world, and I have a really hard time believing that none of them were interested in stopping an evil, genocidal dictator's rise to power in Europe (since the last time that happened, things didn't go very well). Voldemort has England for close to a year, and not once do we hear of international intervention. While this makes for a better story of 'La Resistance', it does stretch credibility and rob us of seeing the awesomeness of a Wizarding World War.

7) Introducing World Elements, Then Completely Ignoring Them

Seriously, Lost, f*** you. I love you, but f*** you.

In Conclusion:

I probably take world-building too seriously. (Wait, who am I kidding, probably?)

Beyond that, though, it's like I've been saying for the better portion of this list. Artists: Just take a little more time, put a little more thought into the story and its universe, and you can make something truly special.

So dear readers, are there any pet peeves in fiction that have always bugged you? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)

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Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 2, Plot Hoops

6/26/2014

1 Comment

Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my month long countdown of some of my greatest fictional pet peeves. Already we've taken a good look at why I'm bugged by "perfect" characters (# 5), characters whose life revolves almost entirely around coincidence (# 4) and characters who refuse to evolve with their series (# 3), but today I'm going to focus on a pet peeve I like to call Plot Hoops.

So you've become invested in a story. It's well written, it has fun, likable characters, and you can't wait to see what happens next. You can tell they're building up to something big, that an awesome scene is right around the corner. Your enthusiasm builds, the story speeds up, and then suddenly... someone does something wildly out of character, possibly even incredibly stupid that makes absolutely no sense given everything you'd already seen.

Hey guys, I know there's a bunch of torture zombies outside right now, but I think we should split up.

There's probably a term for this type of literary problem, but I've always called them Plot Hoops. They're not quite plot holes, not really, because they don't always actively contradict past events and characterizations in the story, but they will always feel so out there, so off, that it feels like the characters may as well have been jumping through hoops for the sole purpose of moving the story along to the next big scene. And sure, while the scenes these plot hoops often lead to are entertaining and even the centerpieces of their respective works of art, they remain irritating and problematic and militantly cannot be ignored. I could go on listing every example I could think of...

Like flying down the Death Star's heavily armed trench instead of just flying directly at the thermal exhaust port?

Like pretty much everything involved with the Tri-Wizard Tournament and the resurrection of Voldemort?

Or pretty much any decision Janeway ever made? (Though truth be told, I know this one has more to do with a massive, disinterested writing team than anything else.)

...but that would just be scratching the surface of this problem, and, well, there are also too many examples to list in one article while still maintaining people's attention, so I'm just going to leave it at those few examples.

The cause of this problem is one of the easiest to point out and one of the most difficult to deal with: the outline. Most stories require an outline, whether a formal written one or a casual, rough idea of a plot, to get off the ground. And while I cannot speak for every writer in the world, I have to imagine the outlining process for most has to work a lot like this:

Step 1: Come up with some really cool/necessary scenes for the story's plot

Step 2: Put them in a good order

Step 3: Fill in the gaps

Step 4: Profit!

Step 1 is the easy part. Step 2 is often a little bit harder. It's Step 3 where this problem universally pops up. (Though like any good writer trying to make a living off of it, I'll admit that Step 4 is indeed the truly hard part.)

We all create stories with an eye on certain scenes that we think are particularly important for the story, yet these often come at the expense of the rest of the story. To see how this happens, let's make up a story. For the sake of argument, let's imagine that this story we're working on is an 80's slasher film.

Oh, hi Jason!

Now being writers behind an 80's slasher movie, we know that the main scenes people come to see, and indeed generally write these movies around, are the death scenes. And because we enjoy squishy too, that's what we're going to focus on when outlining. So we think of a number of bizarre weapons to kill people with (knives, machetes, rubber chickens, the soundtrack of The Bodyguard (on vinyl), the moon's gravitational pull, a burlap sack containing the collected works of Leo Tolstoy...), and we get our death scenes. We attach them to our great list of stereotypical horror movie victims, and we've got... well, about 15% of a movie. There needs to be some filler. If you add some back story before the killing, great, then you get about 50% of a movie.

Which, like having only 50% of an actor, is rarely a good thing.

So now it's a matter of putting in that vital connective tissue between the death scenes and, well, here's where the problems come in. See, for most of these death scenes to work, we need characters to be on their own, which usually means they have to make some bad decisions.

The same kind of decisions that many actors think they made in doing horror before becoming famous.

No matter how smart or genre savvy the character has proven themselves to be throughout the movie, we need to remove their agency and have them make some truly baffling decisions in order to get them exactly where we need them to be, when they need to be there, so we can see just how much squishy we could squeeze out of them. Sure, maybe with a little thought we could maybe make their actions make some kind of sense, but that would take time, and work, and may interfere with our precious death by Tolstoy scene, and we can't have that now, can we? No, at times like this it's best to hurry through so we can finish the script and get to all the parties and drugs and groupies that horror film writers must have!

You're kidding, right?

So writers get lazy. We all do it, and sometimes these contrivances are the only things that can get us from one place to another. If we don't want people to constantly call us on these, though, we need to do two things:

1) Take care with the connective tissue! Don't hurry this part, ask if it makes sense, and please, please, please just make sure that you've done your best to make everything make sense in a way that won't have your readers say 'OH, COME ON!' more than five times per book.

2) Don't fall in love with your big scenes (too much). This one's the hardest, I know, because a certain amount of love is necessary to pull most of these off in the first place, but it's probably the most necessary. When you fall in love with a particular scene, you want to mold the entire story around it, but in the end you need to look at the story as a complete organism, not just a bunch of parts thrown together a la Frankenstein's monster, because just like Frankenstein's monster, if some of your story parts work better than others, it still stands a chance of derailing your entire story, going on a violent rampage that might end in a misunderstanding with a small girl drowning in a lake, which we can't have.

Sorry about that joke. Please don't hurt me.

For a quality, cohesive story, you need to make sure that all the parts are in good working order, and if that means altering, changing or maybe even removing some of the big scenes you had in mind from the beginning to make it work, then that's what you have to do. It may feel awful to do it, but in the end, your story, and your readers, will thank you for making it all make sense in the end.

Thanks for that like, speech, man, but can we go back to our drugs, premarital sex and investigating strange noises now?

Then again, maybe some characters were meant to jump through hoops.

So dear readers, are there any pet peeves in fiction that have always bugged you? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)

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Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 3, Character Stagnation

6/17/2014

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Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my month long countdown of some of my greatest fictional pet peeves. Already we've taken a good look at why I'm bugged by "perfect" characters (# 5) and characters whose life revolves almost entirely around coincidence (# 4) but today I'm turning my attention to Character Stagnation.

There has to be a rational explanation for this, even though I've spent the last six years of my life seeing plenty of the irrational.

Serialized stories are great, when they're done right. I love a good overarching story as much as anyone, especially when its mixed together with excellent character drama.

There are exceptions to every rule, naturally.

However, in any serialized, or even partially-serialized series that finds much of its appeal from a recurring, core cast of characters, you run a serious risk of character stagnation as the series goes on, where characters remain pretty much as they have since the series began, or have become near caricaturized versions of themselves that, by the end, they barely resemble the nuanced, well-realized characters they may have started out as.

For the sake of simplicity, I'm ignoring comics and animated television as they have a floating timeline that pretty much exists out of our own world, though I will say that as a huge fan of old-school Simpsons, I find the cheap parodies of themselves that most of the characters have evolved into over the years to be pretty sad.

Typically this problem seems to come up in genre shows and films, where one main character is forced to play the skeptic, even after seeing pretty conclusive proof of the existence of the supernatural.

Sorry Locke, but I don't care if I saw you getting dragged off by a living column of black smoke, I STILL DON'T BELIEVE IN ISLAND MAGIC!!!

Yeah, I'll believe in bible magic and enchanted stones, but aliens? You gotta be out of your goddamn mind.

And of course, the ever classic example:

Special Agent Dana Scully.

Now, by the time Mulder left The X-Files, she had become a full true believer in the paranormal. Until then, however, she remained the show's resident skeptic, always discounting Mulder's theories and trying to think up a scientific rationale for what she was seeing despite having seen countless things that go beyond the realm of the explainable (and this is discounting the show's weird insistence that she believe in every bit of paranormal that might have to do with religion, which she's apparently totally okay with). Of note, within the course of one season, while still a skeptic, she witnessed firsthand:

- A pair of ghosts trying to drive her and Mulder to suicide

- A couple of centuries old, near-invisible monsters who probably became this way from drinking from the Fountain of Youth

- A serial killer with the ability to force his will on others

- A haunted doll that makes people kill themselves

- A blind woman with a psychic link to a murderer

- A giant, insectoid monster that sucks out people's souls and hides as a middle manager at telemarketing companies around America

- A town full of vampires, led by Luke Wilson

It's a strange show, is what I'm saying.

In every one of these episodes she has witnessed, and sometimes even deduced the paranormal phenomena going on, and every time something new comes up in a future episode, she automatically discounts any supernatural explanation (or Mulder theory in general) even though she sees this stuff happen all the time and has spent more of her FBI career dealing with this kind of shit than anything else!

So, yeah, it's nice that in the long run she became a true believer, but for the longest time her refusal to do so was one of the show's more infuriating aspects.

Of course, this cliché isn't only relegated to genre shows.

Nope.

Booth and Bones from the aptly titled show Bones were one of my favorite TV relationships for the longest time because of their great opposites attract chemistry; he was the impulsive, think with his gut humanist, she was the analytical scientist with poor people skills. Over the course of nine years they've been friends, lovers, and married with a child. You think this long a run and this much time together would affect them profoundly as it will so often do for people in real life (god knows my wife and I are very different from the people we were before we met). Instead, over the course of the show, they have become near parodies of who they were in the beginning. His think-with-his-gut attitude and disdain for the sciences has transformed him almost into a monosyllabic caveman, and her analytical nature and poor people skills have turned her into a misanthropic narcissist who has less of an understanding for how people work than Data did at the beginning of his run on Star Trek.

Please don't drag me into this.

So many series' do this, giving the illusion of taking steps forward while keeping their characters at a status quo that's impossible for them to get around. While it is one of the most irritating of my fictional pet peeves, I also must unfortunately admit that it is easily one of the most understandable. A lot of shows have dedicated audiences who could tell you every detail of every nuance of every minor character and plotline, but most people who watch, watch more casually. They have a basic idea of what a character or characters are like, allowing them to drop in and out without missing too terribly much. While the post-Lost boom in serialized dramas has muddled this considerably, most shows stay with this kind of character stagnation to keep them accessible, which, much as it may annoy me, I will begrudgingly respect, because that's the nature of the business.

It doesn't mean I have to like it, though.

So dear readers, are there any pet peeves in fiction that have always bugged you? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)

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Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 4, The Everywhere Man

6/12/2014

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Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my month long countdown of some of my greatest fictional pet peeves. Already we've taken a good look at why I'm bugged by "perfect" characters (# 5), but today I'm turning my attention to the character I like to call The Everywhere Man.

Hello.

Coincidence is a huge part of storytelling, and is often very necessary because sometimes, well, creators need to get their characters out of (or into) a problem in a hurry and can't entirely justify a more longwinded and accurate explanation as to how they got there in the first place. In proper doses, or if done with just enough charm, I don't have a problem with this.

Hello again.

But in the wrong doses, coincidences become contrivances, and contrivances become annoying as hell. One of the most annoying types of coincidence to me involves characters who just happen to be everywhere the plot needs them to be, no matter how long the odds of them showing up wherever crazy events are happening may be.

Hey, I'm as surprised as anyone that it's possible to get attacked by Godzilla in three separate cities stretched across a hemisphere.

Now, if a character is going out of their way to be a part of the plot, this can easily be excused. After all, they're trying to be where the action is. However, far too often characters are just put in a position where they just so happen to be right where they need to be for something relevant to happen to them, purely by chance, and oftentimes without even wanting to be present to find out what they have..

Surprisingly, a lot of this tends to involve characters overhearing important conversations while in a bathroom stall.

Now I could go into an exhaustive list of characters that this happens to, but that'd take longer than I want on this article. Instead, I'd just like to focus on the character that I think is most guilty of this particular pet peeve.

Sorry, Harry.

Harry Potter has to be, without a doubt, the single luckiest character in fiction. With the help of his trusty invisibility cloak, he has overheard nearly every relevant conversation in this series’ existence, usually without ever having to seek out the information in the first place. (Note: Yes, I’m aware that oftentimes him overhearing conversations is part of an evil/Dumbledore/evil Dumbledore plot, but the depth of these conversations and how the details pertain to him are generally improbable.) He accidentally steps on the wrong staircase? It leads him to the plot of the book! Didn’t buy the right textbook? Don’t worry, the loaner copy is full of cliff notes from one of the greatest potion masters of all time, letting you get in good with just the teacher you need to get in good with for this book! He sees a magical device and decides to shove his head into it? Good news, it’s one of the few devices in the wizarding world that won’t kill you for doing that!

Seriously though, why was his first instinct, “I must shove my head in this magical object I know nothing about!” You think he might've learned something from the whole Tom Riddle's Diary incident.

Improbable luck with the character being in the right place at the right time doesn’t always have to be good luck, either. Plenty of fictional characters find themselves in awful situations where their ridiculously specific skills and experiences come in handy. Like when Agent Scully takes a vacation on The X-Files and just so happens to come across a small town being plagued by an evil, magical doll.

Then again, she did vacation in Stephen King’s Maine, so she should have seen that coming.

Or the sheer number of forensic crime shows where the heroes, while not on the job, just so happen to stumble across a crime that fits their narrow specialization.

Then again, how many airplane flights don’t end with the discovery of a partially skeletonized murder victim?

Or the heroes who just so happen to stumble into the exact same specific situations and people time and again on different sides of the country/world.

Has stumbled into elaborate robberies staged as terrorist attacks that only he and his colorful, western-based, language and the occasional sidekick can solve in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C.

Has been abandoned by his family around the Christmas holiday, befriended an elderly recluse, evaded local authorities and defeated the exact same two criminals in Chicago and New York.

In Conclusion:

It’s necessary to have your main character/characters where the action is, that’s just how storytelling works, I get that. If your character happens to be in the middle of the action without actively seeking to be a part of it or being thrust into it by outside forces, you better have their incredible fortune/misfortune be the main focus of the story, otherwise people will start to get more distracted by this character’s crazy luck than the situations that their crazy luck has gotten them into yet again. Just a little care, a little extra exposition (or a good wink and a nudge at the audience if you’re in a cheeky/self-referential/4th-wall-breaking mood) can deal with that whole suspension of disbelief problem.

My favorite example of The Everywhere Man done right, or as I like to call him, The Scumbag Alternative to Forrest Gump.

So dear readers, are there any pet peeves in fiction that have always bugged you? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)

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Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 5, The "Perfect" Character

6/7/2014

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Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my blog after an unfortunate two month hiatus. I can give a whole lot of excuses for why I've missed these months of blogging, but in the end it really came down to me wanting to dedicate all my writing time to getting my current novel, After School Special, into something remotely readable. It's not the best excuse in the world, but it's the only one I've got at the moment. I'm sorry if I disappointed anyone out there.

Maybe I should have gone with my "Rabid Tribble Attack" excuse after all.

In working on and researching After School Special (yes, I'm going to write that name out every time, mostly because making it into an acronym would lead to a lot of awkward situations) I've been spending a lot of time on a strong contender for the greatest website for writers in the world, TV Tropes. It's an easy place to get lost in with its comprehensive listing of clichés and tropes as they pop up in all forms of fiction. Naturally, looking into this fictional abyss, it got me thinking about a lot of the aspects of fiction that annoy me most. Thusly, I am dedicating my June list to my fictional pet peeves. First up, I aim my blog at "perfect" characters.

You see them all over the place in fiction. Characters who are good at everything they attempt, no matter how difficult it is or lacking in experience they are...

Characters who are universally beloved (or at least envied) for reasons that are never adequately shown...

I know it's low-hanging fruit. I'm OK with this if you are.

Characters who are always right...

Sorry Holmes fans, I just don't get the appeal.

Characters who have all the powers in the world...

I don't see why you should have a problem with this.

Shut up, Dr. Manhattan.

They're called Mary Sues, Gary Stus, and probably a bunch of other expletives that I don't have the time to look up, and whether we want to admit it or not, every artist is guilty of creating them at one point or another. God knows I've had my fair share.

There are a lot of reasons to be annoyed by this particular trope, but I promised myself that I was going to approach this list as a writer, so I’m going to go into the two main reasons that this bothers me from a writer’s perspective.

1) Perfection is boring.

I call this the “Why There Will Never Be a Good Superman Movie” principle.

Sorry Chris, I like you, and you’re great for the part, but, well…

Superman is perfection personified. He won the genetic lottery when it came to getting superpowers, is widely regarded as one of the strongest beings in his fictional universe, and has the good-old American charm of having been raised in Kansas on his side.

And is typically the current generation's definition of a hunk.

Yet, for all that he’s got going for him, as a character, Superman is usually portrayed as a blank. As a symbol. As an ideal we can strive to be. Most of his character development comes from trying to live up to, or failing to fulfill, this idea, with very little attention paid to who he is as a person. If anything, his character is incidental, it’s what he means, or just how cool he is, that’s important to the story, and that can only go so far. Maybe this sort of idealism would work in a short dose, like in commercials, but for extended periods of time there has to be more there before the attention starts to wander.

Even when he's doing his level best to destroy the city he's trying to save.

Further, this kind of perfection also tends to transform these characters into actual objects. When you have a character whose sole purpose is they're so beautiful/powerful/awesome that their sole purpose is defined by other characters pursuing them, they become a MacGuffin, no different from a piece of treasure in an Indiana Jones movie. When someone comes in, solves all the other characters problems and then leaves without bringing any of themselves to the scene (aside from some latent superiority at being the only character who can consistently solve everyone's problems), that makes them more a problem-solving machine than character, something most cell phones probably have an app for these days.

Suddenly Data's fascination with Sherlock Holmes makes a ton more sense to me.

2) A lot of creators try to round out their characters lazily.

Seeing that they've created a perfect (or bland, or perfectly bland) character, many lazy creators will feel the need to round them out, but instead of truly rounding them out, they just give one flaw or weakness that is supposed to make them more "human" and "relatable", yet usually serve to make them something of a caricature. This often comes in the form of a vaguely hinted at rough childhood that doesn't come up in the plot, or a scar the hero thinks is disfiguring but everyone else thinks is beautiful/badass, or as is often the case in YA and romantic comedies, making a character clumsy.

Making them roughly as rounded a character as anyone on America's Funniest Home Videos.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are also characters who are remarkably perfect and well adjusted despite having pretty much every problem that exists in the world, an improbable and equally problematic fate which seems to befall YA, video game and action movie leads with equal frequency.

And Superman, interestingly enough, given the commonness of Kryptonite.

In Conclusion:

I know it's impossible to give every character in a story complete characterization, and I know that having a character that's the best at what they do, or is perfect (or near perfect) is necessary under some circumstances. All I ask is that some care and consideration goes into them to make them a little more than just a blank slate that is full of awesome.

And now as I step off my soapbox and realize that I've got four more of these entries to go this month, I realize I might be in some trouble.

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The Challenge of Writing Sequels - Special Guest Post by Lehua Parker, author of One Shark, No Swim

9/21/2013

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Today please welcome special guest blogger Lehua Parker, author of the Niuhi Shark Saga. The second book in this YA series, One Shark, No Swim (available here) has just been released by the fine folks at Jolly Fish Press. Having been working on some sequels myself recently, I wanted to talk to her today about some of the challenges that come with this particular type of book.

Writing sequels can be particularly challenging given the need to expand the story while maintaining continuity with the first. What are some of the biggest challenges you faced while writing the sequel and how were you able to get past them?

You know, Matt, I kinda wish my problem was expanding the story. I have the opposite problem of trying to decide how much to tell and where to end in each book. In my head, the Niuhi Shark Saga is just one loooong story that needs to be told in chunks that make sense to a middle grade/young adult audience. The really challenging part? I see the entire saga as a single thread in a tapestry of interwoven stories that all take place in an imaginary place called Lauele Town on Oahu, Hawaii. Most Lauele Town stories are not for MG/YA and I wear blinders and ear muffs to shut out those other characters’ voices and themes in order to create something that will resonate with the Niuhi Shark Saga’s target audience.

Looking back at book one, One Boy, No Water, I can see that I was still thinking of Zader and his adventures as side plots to a much bigger story. In book 2, One Shark, No Swim, I’ve corrected that and centered the story firmly on Zader and his journey to discover his true nature. The reader is in Zader’s head more and I’ve used that as a device to set up inside jokes that island kids see coming and mainland kids figure out from Zader’s reactions. Zader is also more vulnerable as he questions the answers he used to take for granted. I think the tension and conflict is stronger because of it.

Another thing I realized between books is that middle grade readers need more bread crumbs (and sometimes the whole loaf!) to make intuitive leaps about a character or plot than older readers. Sometimes it takes a neon sign that says, “Pay attention to this detail. You may be quizzed on it later.” Most of them are at the age where they are just learning about symbolism, metaphor, and foreshadowing and if you do too much, you lose them. I’ve found myself writing the story in layers—the straight forward surface adventure, the cultural conflicts, and the coming of age angst all wrapped up like a burrito. (Or laulau, if we’re keeping to the Hawaiian theme.) It’s my hope that the series will also appeal to adult readers who will have a very different experience than the middle graders.

In a nutshell, my biggest challenges were switching gears to write the story that made sense rather than the vision in my head and making sure readers could connect the dots between books. But I gotta admit, I had a lot of fun channeling my inner 12 year old boy who doesn’t want to believe he’s not human because that truth would change everything.

Thanks for hosting me on the One Shark, No Swim blog tour. Both One Boy, No Water and One Shark, No Swim are available online as trade paperbacks, hardcovers, and eBooks through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes. Readers interested in following my adventures in writing can connect with me at--

Blog & Free Short Stories: http://www.lehuaparker.com/

All things Niuhi Shark Saga: http://www.niuhisharksaga.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LehuaParker

Twitter: @LehuaParker

About One Shark, No Swim

There’s something bugging adopted Zader Westin, something more troubling than his water allergies where one drop on his skin burns like hot lava. It’s bigger than his new obsession with knives, designing the new murals for the pavilion with Mr. Halpert, or dealing with Char Siu’s Lauele Girlz scotch tape makeover. Zader can’t stop thinking about a dream, the dream that might not have been a dream where Lē‘ia called him brother then jumped into the ocean and turned into a shark.

Zader’s got a lot of questions, not the least being why he’s hungry all the time, restless at night, and why he feels a constant itch on the back of his neck. It’s making him feel like teri chicken on a pūpū platter, but Zader doesn’t want to think about chicken, not with his growing compulsion to slip it down his throat--raw.

With Jay busy at surf camp and Uncle Kahana pretending nothing’s happening, Zader’s left alone to figure things out, including why someone--something—is stalking him before it’s too late.

Summer in Lauele Town, Hawaii just got a little more interesting.

About Lehua Parker

Lehua Parker is originally from Hawaii and a graduate of The Kamehameha Schools and Brigham Young University. In addition to writing award-winning short fiction, poetry, and plays, she is the author of the Pacific literature MG/YA series the Niuhi Shark Saga published by Jolly Fish Press. One Boy, No Water and One Shark, No Swim are available now. Book 3, One Fight, No Fist will be published in 2014.

So far Lehua has been a live television director, a school teacher, a courseware manager, an instructional designer, a sports coach, a theater critic, a SCUBA instructor, a playwright, a web designer, a book editor, a mother, and a wife. She currently lives in Utah with her husband, two children, three cats, two dogs, six horses, and assorted chickens. During the snowy Utah winters she dreams about the beach.

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Matt's Five Least Favorite Pop Culture Endings # 1, The Works of Stephen King

8/27/2013

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Hello readers, and welcome back to my month-long tribute to pop culture endings that have confused, disappointed and even infuriated me. Thus far we have seen entries based around young adult classics (# 5), hour-long procedurals (# 4), foreign horror films (# 3) and syndicated science fiction programs (# 2). Today, however, I draw my attention not to any singular work of art, but to the works of one man…

The one and only.

This one is going to be rough, because I am a huge, huge Stephen King fan (I won't say I'm his # 1 fan, because that would just be creepy). I’ve got one bookshelf dedicated to a set of first (and nearly first) editions of his work, and hope one day for the full set with the intent of ultimately reading every word the man’s put to paper. I’ve read The Stand more times than I can count (and even brought a copy of it along when my wife and I took a cross-country road trip several years back), regularly watch Under the Dome in spite of its colossal stupidity, and consider The Mist among my favorite horror movies of all time due to its reverence to King’s terrifying source material.

Try telling me this isn’t scary.

And yet… yet… as much as I love the man’s work, I have to admit that his track record with endings is pretty poor. Sure, he knocks it out of the park sometimes, but more often than not fails to completely stick the landing. This comes as much from his awesome setups as it does the endings themselves, as no ending could ever really match up to some of the amazing stories that preceded them.

I mean, how can you top God randomly showing up to nuke Vegas? And why do I get the feeling this caption’s getting me on some sort of government watch list? Also, to those of you who make said government watch lists, hi! My name is Matt Carter, I'm an author and my book, Splinters, comes out in late 2014! Buy lots of copies!

Other times, though, the endings just fall apart, or even manage to be wildly insulting to the readers who had invested hundreds of pages of time getting into the story and characters. Instead of going through and listing every single ending that he’s botched or disappointed with, I’m just going to give a quick rundown of my Top 3 below.

# 3: THE STAND. King's ultimate tale of good versus evil takes place in an America ravaged by a virus that has killed close to 99% of the population. Those who survive have been driven into one of two camps, one good, led by the aged Mother Abigail, and the other evil, led by the personification of darkness itself, Randall Flagg. After some minor conflicts and skirmishes, four men from the good side take part in a journey to Las Vegas to face Flagg and fulfill an almost biblical prophecy. By this point in the story, you're probably thinking, man, this is awesome! This Stand is going to be great!

Eh, not so much.

Stu, the man who has been for all intents and purposes the main character since the beginning of the book, is taken out of this journey early by a broken leg, and despite King's insistence throughout the remaining pages of the book, his story
is basically done here. The other three then go to Vegas to confront Flagg, where their "Stand" basically consists of getting forced into a public execution whose sole cosmic purpose seems to be to collect all the bad people in one place so God can nuke them. Instead of the battle for the ages between good and evil, we get a bunch of people standing around yelling while a crazy guy brings in a nuke to his false god while the real God blows it up. While not his worst ending, it is tremendously anticlimactic given the amazing setup that came before.

# 2: IT. Stephen King's It is without a doubt one of his most bloated, featuring tons of unnecessary side stories and clocking in at close to his longest book. It gained a following mostly around the superior miniseries and Tim Curry's terrifying portrayal of Pennywise the Clown, I think, but for most of the book itself I was really enjoying the ride. Its many vignettes are filled with some of the creepiest images King has ever put to the page (leeches, frickin' leeches), and it has an awesome backbone that is built around this great friendship of the books seven main characters. These kids, by circumstance or divine intervention, have been drawn to one another, forming these great bonds that have to remind anyone reading it of their own childhood friendships, bonds that will help them defeat one of the greatest evils put on the page.

Pennywise: Ruining every positive memory about clowns you might have ever had since 1986.

And once they've served their purpose (and had a very uncomfortable to read about orgy; don't ask), that's it. Their friendship is done. It turns out that their friendship that gave them the power to overcome this ancient evil was set in motion by an ancient god, and once they've done their job they're all sent on their separate ways, cursed to forget that they ever knew each other. Their friendship was a sham, and as a reader I couldn't help but feel cheated out of nearly 1,200 pages of my life.

Dear lord get that thing away from me!

# 1: INSOMNIA. This one really pisses me off, I can't stress that enough. Insomnia isn't one of King's best known books, but like many it is overlong and unnecessarily padded with extra characters and mysticism, but I have to say I enjoyed myself for most of the run. Its story of a couple retirees whose powerful insomnia has helped them tap into another dimension and bizarre powers is trippy, and has a lot of fun imagery, and when we find that the main character has gotten these powers for the purposes of stopping a terrorist attack, I had to say that it sounded pretty cool.

But then this guy had to show up.

It is revealed that stopping this attack, indeed the point of this whole book, was not to save the lives of hundreds of people. No, it was just to save the life of one young boy in the crowd who we'd only had a few paragraphs of the entire book dedicated to. This is fairly King in nature, and wouldn't warrant a spot on this list, but to go that extra mile, we are told that somewhere in the future this kid is going to help Roland, the hero of King's Dark Tower series, which basically transforms this 600+ page book into a prequel for one of The Dark Tower books. When I'm reading a book, or watching a movie, I want to view it for its own merits, I don't want to see it as the lead-in for a completely unrelated work of art. By making the whole point of this book about another book that hadn't yet been written, I felt tremendously cheated, and could not resist putting Insomnia as my least favorite of King's endings.

Sorry, Steve. I still love you, though.

Stephen King is my favorite author, and as many problems as I've got with his work, I will still read whatever he writes. Call it masochistic, call it crazy, but that's just how I roll.

So what say you, dear readers? Are there any other Stephen King fans out there? Any haters? What are your most and least favorite King endings? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)

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So, What About Fan Fiction?

8/1/2013

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Sorry folks, it's time for another article on writing. It's not going to have many pictures, it won't be as funny, and it will have next to no pop culture references, and it's also going to be a bit shorter than usual. I apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you, but will promise I'll be back on that line later again this week. Scout's honor!

I'm here today to talk about my opinions on a topic I've seen usually talked about with anger, embarrassment, or at the very least light confusion: fan fiction. I don't know what the general consensus is on it, but having seen the uproar after the recent announcement of Amazon permitting the sale of certain types of fan fiction, and mulling over the idea in my head some, I wanted to put my two cents out there.

In short, I think fan fiction is a good thing.

Mostly.

If you'd like, I can recommend a few good places to buy torches and pitchforks to use against me.

Avoid Phil's Pitchfork Shack, his prices are terrible.

Before I go any further, I will say yes, I did get my start in fan fiction. Elementary and middle school Matt would write vague stories for Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds and whatever other things happened to catch his short attention span for a moment or two. As soon as I discovered the internet and the thriving community of fan writing that existed there, I might have gone a little crazy. For a few years there I was a writing machine, writing stories for various horror movies, mostly as an excuse to get as horribly violent as I wanted to be and enjoy how squishy the human body is, but also to absorb adulation and inflate my ego after briefly making a name for myself in a fandom or two. I look back on those years now with a mixture of fondness and embarrassment. Fondness for those nights when I would just while away until the insane hours of the morning trying to figure out just how many more plot twists I could cram into a chapter, embarrassment at how much of an ego this gave me and how bad most of what I'd written actually was.

Not this bad, at least.

Still, all in all I think that fan fiction is a good thing. It's one of the easiest and best gateways to writing, lacking the intimidation factor of having to come up with a whole new world and new characters, and allowing those who want to write a chance to stretch their legs. Not all of those who want to can, but hey, at least the opportunity exists. And even for established writers, I think it can be a fun diversion or writing exercise. One day, should such a thing as free time actually exist in my writing schedule, I fully intend to write a tongue-in-cheek novella, Harry Potter and the Terror of Camp Crystal Lake with an adult Harry & Ron as aurors battling Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th series (stupid, yes; awesome, potentially).

Who do you think would win?

My one problem with fan fiction, really, is the increasing legitimization of it. As a diversion and a gateway for moving into different kinds of writing, I think it's fine, but if it's made into a viable career option we may see a sudden dropoff in creativity flooding the market, and that worries me. We see it already in movies where studios aren't taking any risks and are only really greenlighting established characters and franchises, I fear that happening in other forms of fiction as well. I still want there to be a world where people seek to put new and exciting stories out there with new and exciting characters. I don't want to live in a world where the only stories that can exist are ones involving people and places and things that have already existed.

But enough ranting. I enjoyed my time as a fan fiction author, I'm glad to no longer be one, and I'm glad anyone who wants to write has the opportunity to do so in this fashion.

(P.S. You'll note that I completely ignore the topic of erotic fan fiction in this article; I did this because I do not feel particularly qualified to do so, and am honestly a little frightened of it. I respect it's existence, but I have a harder time arguing that fan fiction should exist when said fan fiction involves Jean-Luc Picard and Inspector Gadget double-teaming a sentient Rubik's Cube, not that I've ever seen that particular grouping, but given the nature of Rule 34 it probably does in some dark, weird corner of the internet.)

Did you honestly expect me to try and find a picture for that?

So what do you think, dear readers? Are you for or against fanfic? Is its existence a sign of the apocalypse or a good, harmless form of fun? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

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What Are You Looking At, Butthead?: A Plea for Deeper Fictional Bullies

7/15/2013

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Hey, an article on writing! Who knew? Don't worry, there's still plenty of unnecessary pop culture analysis mixed in here as well.

In writing the third book of The Prospero Chronicles, I've met the challenge of playing with a character archetype I never really thought I'd get around to: the bully. Having been mostly invisible in my school days I never really encountered that many bullies in real life, and I've never found that many of the ones in pop culture to be particularly compelling. Oh sure, there's plenty of iconic and entertaining ones out there if you look around a little (just pick a random 80's teen movie, any one, you'll find one), like Biff Tannen, Nelson Muntz, Draco Malfoy, Douglas C. Neidermeyer...

Ogre...

...the list goes on. However, with very few exceptions I can't say I've ever found most bully characters to be particularly interesting. Sure, you can get a good actor in their shoes and these deficiencies can be ignored, but until I started writing a bully I could never really put my finger on just what my problem with bully characters was, but now I think I've got it. By the very nature of storytelling conventions, most bullies border on completely insane.

Maybe not meme-level insane, but you get the idea.

In most stories, bullies fill an antagonist's role, where their goal is to make the main character's life a living hell. This is fine and all, bullies do do this in real life, and yay for realism, right? However, given the narrow perspective of fictional stories, far too often we are just given a thinly drawn character whose antagonism for the hero borders on a level of obsession that H.P. Lovecraft would call excessive.

For a good example of this, let's take a look at Draco Malfoy.

Hi Draco!

He's in the Harry Potter series from the very beginning, and is ostensibly a rival of Harry's, but at best he only ever rises to the level of annoying tertiary antagonist, and at worst he's an annoying borderline stalker. Notice the word annoying in both parts. Instead of ever proving to be a serious danger to Harry, Draco spends most of his time obsessing about how much he hates Harry, or what Harry is doing, or what Harry's friends are doing, until it makes you start to wonder if he's got Harry Potter posters covering his room in Slytherin house. We know he even fumes over him in private, as we sneak into what he thinks is a private conversation in Chamber of Secrets and he's talking about... yup, Harry Potter. He follows Harry everywhere, he harasses Harry and his friends every chance he gets, is ridiculously popular (for some reason, we never see why even the other Slytherins tolerate him), and up until the last two books of the series, when he is developed some, dedicating most of his free time toward making Harry's life a living hell. On top of that, regular jokes are made of his cowardice, and he's physically hurt and/or mutilated as a punchline fairly regularly.

How he spends the other half of the books when not harassing Harry.

In small doses, any number of these behaviors are perfectly acceptable in a fictional bully. However, when your bully solely exists as a distorted mirror of your hero, where he's there only to show you what the hero is not and has no real character to him otherwise, you've got a problem. For a bully to be a real threat to the hero, they need to be more than just an obstacle; they need to be a character who has reasons for doing what they're doing. They can't just bully because they like doing it, or because they're just plain evil. They should actually get something out of the act of bullying, or at the very least have a rationalization for their behavior that works in their own twisted mind. Or take a page from the real world where they bully because they get even worse treatment at home and this is their easiest path to power (it's depressing, but if done well it's effective).

As well, their relationship to the hero needs to be taken into consideration. It's fine for them to butt heads occasionally, or even often, but unless you're writing a horror story about dangerous obsession, the bully would still have a life outside of harassing the hero. The hero cannot be their entire life. Show me the bully hanging out on the street, or walking his dog, or going to the grocery store, or, shocker of all shocks, DOING SOMETHING NOT EVIL! (Not that I'm implying that hanging out, walking the dog or going to the grocery store are inherently evil). It's unheard of, I know, and it may take up a few valuable words, but developing a bully even just a little beyond how they relate to the hero can really expand them as a character.

I hope I'm doing this right. The bully character we just introduced into The Prospero Chronicles is so far proving a lot of fun to write for. He's loud, he's abrasive, and he spends a lot of time making one character's life hell, however we've made it clear that he does have other interests in life and lives by an odd code of honor and morality that doesn't always make sense, but always makes sense to him. Whether or not he actually works out is for the readers to decide, but I think he'll prove fun at the very least.

As for the rest of those fictional bullies out there... I just want to see a little respect thrown their way. I want to see them as more rounded out characters and not just straw men. I want to see them actually work with the story instead of having them just be a crutch for it. I want to see them be as dangerous as their stories demand they be.

Except you Stan Gable. You stay magnificently blonde and douchey.

So what do you think, dear readers and fellow authors? What are your thoughts on the bully dilemma? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

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My First Post. Behold!

5/22/2013

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Hello one and all, and welcome to my blog. I'm new to this, so apologies in advance for any growing pains or posting oddities as they may come up, I hope to inform, and if not inform than to entertain, and if not to entertain, then, well, I certainly hope not to embarrass myself. I'm a big pop culture buff and an even bigger nerd, so in addition to talking about all things writing here, expect more than a few odd jokes and strange tangents to sneak their way in here.

Now, all disclaimers aside, I spent a good long while trying to figure out how best to kick this blog off; would I just do a short post saying hello and promising a great many things to come, or would I go on a rambling, sprawling 420,000 word epic poem describing my life from birth until the moment I began writing this blog post. In the end, with the help of my lovely wife and co-author, Fiona, I came up with a compromise in the form of 18 Questions About Matt to help you get to know me better.

Enjoy!

(P.S. Why 18? Because 20 felt too long, and 17 just didn't feel quite right)

18 Questions About Matt

About Matt the Author:

So, what kind of stories do you write?

For the most part, you could say I'm a genre writer. I really enjoy writing both sci-fi and horror and have dabbled with the odd bit of fantasy here and there (though more along the lines of things not working as they should and less mystical lands of dwarves, elves and dragons). I skew toward the dark, because at heart I'm a little boy who still loves his monster movies, but I'm willing to give pretty much anything a try so long as I'm allowed to put my own spin on it.

What sets your work apart within its genre?

I love playing with a juxtaposition of darkness and comedy in stories. If you see me writing a dark story, expect lots of odd bits of humor (often uncomfortable humor) to be sprinkled throughout to try and unsettle the reader. If you see me writing a comedy, on the other hand, I love to insert moments of unexpected darkness to shock the reader from their expectations. I love making people laugh and cry, and will do my best to get them to do both at the same time. As well, I've been told I've got a very cinematic style. I love setting a vivid scene, whether to instill wonder or terror or confusion in the reader. If you can feel the legs of one of my creepy-crawlies crawling up your spine when reading one of my stories, then I've done my job.

Who are your strongest influences?

Having been raised on movies as much as I have been on books I can name a nearly equal number of authors and filmmakers who have shaped my writing style. On the authorial end of the spectrum, I gotta say Stephen King has been my greatest influence, with honorable mentions going to Max Brooks, H.P. Lovecraft, Harry Turtledove and George MacDonald Fraser. Filmmakers whose styles have sculpted my writing (and a fair few of my nightmares) would include John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Eli Roth and Sam Raimi (pre-Disney, pre-Spider-man Raimi who knows how to keep the laughs and the screams coming).

What’s your journey as a writer been like so far?

A long, fairly standard path these days I imagine. Started writing stories when I was about seven (my shining achievement being a short story about how my friends and I were eaten by a robot T-rex and lived in its stomach), moved on to fan-fiction in my teenage years, and finally started attempts at professional writing in earnest once I hit my 20's. I've had a few short stories published in a variety of small press anthologies, but I am now looking forward to getting that ever-elusive first novel out there.

What are you working on now?

With my writing partner and lovely wife, Fiona, I am currently working on the third book in our series of YA SciFi/Horror books, The Prospero Chronicles. Taking influences from H.P. Lovecraft, The X-Files and The Thing, we are having a lot of fun writing this, and think you'll have quite a bit of fun reading it.

What’s your favorite part of the writing process?

The second draft. Why? Well, my first drafts almost always turn out pretty long-winded. It feels really good to take a machete to the extraneous words, sentences and paragraphs to find out what the chapter's really supposed to look like.

What’s the hardest part for you?

Starting stories. Getting the first line, the first paragraph, the first chapter down is always a challenge. There is nothing scarier than a blank page and a flashing cursor.

What’s your strategy for dealing with writer’s block?

Write whether I want to or not and hope it gets the motor running. If that doesn't work, there's always taking a walk or bingeing on video games, though this latter technique isn't the most reliable.

What storytelling pitfalls do you find most important to avoid?

Making characters jump through plot hoops. So often a story outline is just a series of scenes you have in mind that you absolutely want to write, but it's very easy to get lazy and not adequately explain how characters get from one situation to the next. In fact, it's usually much easier to just have a character completely forget who they are and act wildly out of character just so you can get them to the next scene that you really really want to get to. Sure, it's an easy shortcut in writing, but it'll distract readers. Take the extra time to think things through, make each action flow logically to the next, and the story will benefit greatly.

In the pursuit of your writing career, what question have you most fantasized about being asked by an interviewer, and how would you answer it?

Considering the kind of stuff I write, I hope one day to be asked, "How do you sleep at night?" And my answer would probably be something along the lines of "On top of a large pile of money surrounded by many sharp objects, just in case." Whether or not this will be true by the time I'm asked is another matter entirely, but what can I say, I'm an optimist.

About Matt:

Other than reading and writing, what’s your favorite way to spend a day?

This'll probably sound clichéd, but it'd be spending a day with my wife. Maybe catch a movie or two, or hit up Disneyland, or go to the zoo, or if we're not particularly ambitious maybe spend a day inside marathoning movies, cartoons or Star Trek, or playing games (board games, video games, Magic: The Gathering... we love our games in the Carter household). We have a lot of fun together.

One food you can’t live without?

Peanut butter. So versatile. So addictive.

What’s one fact about you that most people would never guess?

I am a huge fan of Disney musicals from the 1990's-2000's, especially The Little Mermaid, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Princess and the Frog. In fact, given enough caffeine I can bust a pretty mean rendition of "Friends on the Other Side".

What’s your zombie apocalypse survival strategy?

Consistently surround myself by people who aren't as fast as me and hope for the best.

DC or Marvel?

Though Marvel has a better track record of movies, I gotta say I'm all about DC. I am a proud child of the Batman generation.

If you could be a member of any fictional species/race/class/subset of humans or humanoids, which one would it be?

Klingons, hands down. They know how to party, they love telling good stories, and they take pride in how much of their day is spent playing with sharp objects. Qapla'!

If you could have a loyal magic guard pet to strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, what would it look like?

A Lovecraftian horror so great and terrible and indescribable that a mere glimpse of it would cause instant madness. Playing fetch with it would be a challenge, but I imagine a combination of sunglasses, mirrors and a few pulleys would make it possible with some effort.

And of course, coffee or tea?

I don't drink hot drinks, but if I had to choose among my iced options, I would go with tea.

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Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 1, Poor World Building

Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 2, Plot Hoops

Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 3, Character Stagnation

Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 4, The Everywhere Man

Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 5, The "Perfect" Character

The Challenge of Writing Sequels - Special Guest Post by Lehua Parker, author of One Shark, No Swim

Matt's Five Least Favorite Pop Culture Endings # 1, The Works of Stephen King

So, What About Fan Fiction?

What Are You Looking At, Butthead?: A Plea for Deeper Fictional Bullies

My First Post. Behold!

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