“Hello, my name is _____.” An even worse version is “Hello, my name is ______, but you can call me ______.” If the most interesting thing about your main character is his name, you should probably get back to the drawing board. Leading with another detail– any other detail– is likelier to interest readers.
Today we got an e-mail that asked “who’s paying you to crank this [expletive] out, the CIA?” Well, no. As far as I know, the CIA doesn’t offer grants for superhero novels, even kickass ones with accountants and mutant alligators from Homeland Security. In fact, judging by my ramen account, it looks like no one is paying us to write this novel.
Not sure what to name your superhero’s alternate identity? This name generator can give you hundreds of suggestions based on US census data. Also, its names are surprisingly ethnically-diverse.
On art-sites like DeviantArt, if you do searches for things like “superhero” or “book cover,” more than 90% of the results will be utter garbage or half-past-strange. If you think that searching for visual references shouldn’t feel like a creepy waste of time, you might like our new DeviantArt wall of favorites. You can use that to check out hundreds of visuals we’ve found impressive. We have separate folders for superhero stuff, fantasy and sci-fi, depending on what you need your visual for.
TV Tropes notes the cliche that stories with real-world settings tend to be in New York City. In comic books, that’s overwhelmingly true. (And Gotham/Metropolis aren’t fooling anyone… at the time DC Comics first used those, they were nicknames for New York City). There are a few reasons for this cliched setting.
Generally, characters that are based on the friends and family members of the author turn out poorly.
1. These characters tend to be boring because they lack flaws. If your character is based on a friend or family member, you might feel afraid to give that person flaws because the friend might find out. PS: If you’re using someone as a model, they’re probably close enough to you that they’ll read the book eventually. (Alternately, if the character is based on someone the author hates, the character will probably have no likability or style whatsoever — that sort of character is usually a liability even as an antagonist).
2. It may limit the character’s development if you feel that you have to be “true” to the real-life model. Generally, it’s easiest to write when you completely own the material.
3. Your friend or family member might not fit into the story or a satisfying development arc. Well-constructed characters will have traits, flaws, skills, conflicts and usually growth arcs carefully tailored to the story. If the character’s details don’t work for the plot, it may detract from the reading experience. For example, Soon I Will Be Invincible inexplicably tried to fit several adult superheroes into a conflict between geeks and jocks. If it seems strange that adults would really care about who was popular back in high school, it seems absolutely mind-blowing that a mutant tiger would.
4. Your friends and family are probably not quite as interesting or endearing to readers as they are to you. No offense, but most people aren’t interesting enough to have biographies written about them. Why will we care about your friends?
5. If I were evaluating a novel manuscript, I’d be really concerned about whether the author had enough distance from what he was writing.
6. While modeling characters on acquaintances is probably problematic, you can still use your real-life observations to make your characters or story feel more realistic. For example, you might draw on certain traits or habits from people you know rather than transplanting characters wholesale. That will help you maintain full ownership over the work and modify characters as necessary to fit the plot. If you find yourself making writing decisions based on what your friends/family would do in a particular situation, you would probably benefit from more creative control over your material.
Microsoft Word automatically corrects common spelling mistakes. It also allows users to tell it which words should be autocorrected. Here are a few ways you can use autocorrect to make your life easier.
If you use the same long phrases repeatedly, you can use autocorrect to create a macro. For example, our book repeats phrases like Agent Orange and the Office of Special Investigations, so we told autocorrect to turn the “word” [OJ] into Agent Orange and the “word” [OSI] into Office of Special investigations. When you set up macros, I recommend either using a combination of letters that will never come up naturally (like OJ) or a bracketed phrase. That way, you will reduce the odds of accidentally setting off your macro.
If you change a character’s or location’s name, you can use autocorrect to help remind you not to use the original. If you change your hero’s name from Hiro to John, suddenly referring to him as Hiro will confuse readers. Autocorrect will help you from adding more mistaken references to Hiro. (However, it won’t fix instances of “Hiro” that are already in the work– use “Find and Replace” to hunt those down).
This can help you maintain stylistic consistency. For example, sometimes authors forget how they spelled the names of minor characters. Mr. Merriman might become Mr. Merryman. Mrs. Busch might be married to Mr. Bush. If you notice that this is a problem, you can use autocorrect to prevent future occurrences by telling it to turn Merryman into Merriman.
Thanks for your e-mail, Giuseppe. Questor’s title failed to distinguish its premise. The setting is uncommon, but what happens in the book? What is the hero trying to accomplish in ancient Rome? Generally, the best titles identify the book’s premise.
His Majesty’s Dragon (“what if the war against Napoleon was fought with dragons?”)
Soon I Will Be Invincible: (“what if we told a superhero story mostly from the supervillain’s perspective?”)
Some other titles neglect the premise and focus on the subgenre and setting. That may be sufficient, but it’s generally not as impressive.
Superhero Nation. The title suggests it’s a superhero story set in the real world, but you’d have to look at the book cover to know that the book is mainly about an unlikely police officer and his non-human partner.
Questor. It’s a story set in ancient Rome, but that’s just the setting. What is the premise? What happens? What is the hero attempting to accomplish? My guess is that the setting isn’t interesting enough to sell the book on its own.
Many beginning authors think that they can create a brilliant plot by adding layers of deception, betrayal, double-agents and triple-agents, lies wrapped within feints, etc. It can be done well, but more often it’s a recipe for a horribly convoluted plot. Rather than seeming brilliant, your plot will probably come off more like this assessment of Metal Gear Solid.
These convoluted characters usually try to show that their characters are brilliant because they make freakishly accurate predictions about what other characters will do. At its worst, that devolves into a game of “I know you know I know” that will leave your readers writhing in agony. A genuinely brilliant character should use plans that leave the audience wondering why they didn’t think of that. Typically those plans are simple and rely on predictions that seem obvious in hindsight. Let me demonstrate.
In Justice League, Batman tries to find the Joker by convincing his assistant, Harlequin, that the Joker has ignominously replaced her with another woman. (Transcript below). One aspect that really impressed me about the scene is that Harlequin doesn’t immediately turn against the Joker. Instead, Batman merely increases her doubt of him, so that she goes off to confront him… And Batman secretly follows her! It’s more believable because it requires a less significant shift from Harlequin.
BATMAN: Where’s Joker?
HARLEQUIN: After all these years, you still think I’d give up Mr. J.
BATMAN: Why not? He gave you up.
HARLEQUIN: That was a long time ago. He’s changed. We’ve been to couple’s counseling.
BATMAN: I’m talking about right now. Haven’t you been watching? [He points at a screen showing Joker with his new female sidekick.] The way he touches her hair. The way he rubs her shoulders.
HARLEQUIN: You mean Ace? She’s just a kid.
BATMAN: Really? Then why is she with him when you’re in the cold?
[Harlequin slaps Batman, but goes to confront the Joker.]
The consensus seems to be that Fringe is a less-inspired version of X-Files. What bothered me was the torture sequence. Allowing torture as a plot device robs interrogation sequences of any semblance of wit and intelligence. I’d much rather see a foxy cop trick a criminal into confessing than beat it out of him. (Also, torture is typically a disappointing way to make the hero morally conflicted). But enough about torture. I’d like to quote one review of Fringe…
“Hi, Vague Agent I don’t know from Adam. I’m Nina Sharp, Executive High Muckity-Muck. I’m just going to assume you’re in on the conspiracy. Oh, by the way, have you seen my absurdly high-tech prosthetic arm? Sorry if this is going too fast, but we only have an hour and a half to out-WTF Lost and The X-Files at the same time. Do try to keep up.”
Some of the mad science was pretty cool, but other aspects were patently ridiculous and goofy (talking to the dead, LSD-communing, etc.)
Defense Tech has an article on military exoskeletons. We haven’t reached the level of killer androids (yet), but strength-enhancement is interesting, too. (Also, if killer androids are in the works, exoskeletons will help programmers teach the androids how to move naturally, says one commenter).
Today in Charlestown, construction workers found a live 10-pound artillery round from the Civil War inside a home’s walls. What distinguishes your character’s house from the other ones on the block? If that’s too broad for you, try this: who, if anyone, has lived in the house before and what have they left behind?
Let’s say you’re writing a book about a candidate trying to join the Navy SEALs. Unless there’s something holding him there, he can always walk away if it gets too hard. That’s a lousy plot. There’s no consequence for failure! If failure is an acceptable option, we probably won’t care whether the character succeeds. You can make this story more dramatic by adding personal urgency. For example, perhaps the SEAL candidate had a brother or father that died as a SEAL and he sees it as his life’s mission to finish the job.
Here are some other suggestions to keep your characters in the story.
There is nothing to return to. The Empire killed Luke’s family. (Careful, this is a bit cliche).
Too much is at stake to walk away. In The Day After Tomorrow, the protagonist doesn’t have to trek from Philadelphia to Manhattan, but it’s the only way to save his son. Alternately, the characters in LOTR have no choice but to fight their genocidal enemies.
The character physically cannot walk away. If your character is in prison, he can’t avoid the local thugs. His only choices are submission and resistance. Alternately, she may be trapped on a spaceship with a killer alien.
Given a choice, try to find cause and effect. One event happens because of something else we’ve seen — ideally, something the hero himself has done.
Instead of having the hero accidentally overhear a key conversation, get him actively trying to listen. Or have an interested third party steer him in that direction — perhaps for his own reasons. At every juncture where a reader could ask “Why did that happen?”, try to have an answer that isn’t, “just because.”
CADET DAVIS ADDS: The most contrived plot I can think of is Heroes season 2. Please consider the following…
In the last two minutes of the first season, Sylar is nearly killed by a crowd of ten heroes but somehow slinks away into a sewer. No one, including a psychopathic MPD victim or the police officer who was seriously wounded by Sylar, thinks to make sure that he’s dead or otherwise accounted for.
The Company captures Sylar and keeps the formerly-superpowered serial killer in a zero-security facility with a single attendant that is tasked with restoring Sylar’s powers. There’s no reason to suspect that Sylar would have made a good employee under any circumstances, but how were they hoping that this would turn out?
Sylar kills the attendant and walks out of the facility. He tries to return to the US to find Suresh, but he drops of famine along the side of the road. The first person to come across him is Maya, another superpowered person that’s looking for Dr. Suresh’s father. What a lucky break! Sure, why not come along?
In spite of being wanted for murder and presumably not wanting to attract suspicion, Maya and her brother take Sylar along. Do not pay attention to the gringo in the back seat!
Peter’s failure to consider the possibility that Adam is evil starts out as implausible and gets so unbelievable that it strains the suspension of disbelief. Peter knows the following facts: The Company has held the virus for 30+ years without using it. Shortly after Adam escapes, the virus is unleashed. If you’re wondering whether Adam’s escape is related to the release of the virus, you’re already 5 episodes smarter than Peter.
One of the easiest ways to create comedy is to use a double act. You set up a comedic conflict between two characters– usually, one character is sober and the other is crazy or one is savvy and the other is clueless. This is a very flexible setup that can handle most genres. For example…
Many villains do gratuitously bad stuff to remind us that they’re EVIL. For example, the nerdy antagonist in Live Free or Die Hard coldly executes his hackers even though there’s surely enough money to go around (ahem… hundreds of billions of dollars). Not only was it unnecessary for him to kill the hackers, but it was also out of character (he didn’t seem otherwise psychopathic). There’s no reason he should have been that evil– it didn’t gel with his main objective, which was to show his old agency that it was wrong to cast him aside.
Authors usually write their villains as gratuitously evil to make them badass. That rarely works. Except for Dark Knight’s Joker*, superevil villains are rarely as badass as their more restrained peers (such as Darth Vader, Dr. Octopus, Naomi Novik’s Napoleon and Dr. Doom). Why are superevil villains insufficently badass? A villain that feels more evil than his plot requires is probably cartoonish. In contrast, a badass villain is almost always serious and sober.
*In case you’re interested, I argue below the jump that the DK Joker isn’t unnecessarily evil.
Tobias Buckell gathered some data describing how much authors make on their first advance. The median author in SF or fantasy makes $5000. The average in both categories is slightly higher (about $6500), but that’s probably distorted by a few superstars that skewed the distribution curve.
He also broke the data down by agented vs. unagented submissions. The median advance for an unagented manuscript is $4000, compared to $5500 for an agented manuscript. You might think to yourself “aha! I will make more if I have a superior negotiator on my side!” That’s probably true, but please also consider that a novelist that is good enough to convince an agent to work with him is probably better-than-average to begin with. In addition to that selection bias, you’d also have to factor in the agent’s share of the advance.
That said, I think an agent can be a powerful ally and (all things considered) one that will probably pay for himself.
If you’re interested in writing about thieves at the top of their game, you might find it interesting to know how the super-wealthy protect themselves. For example, a German shepherd from a security services firm will cost $40,000. What kind of face-ripper does that buy you? Here’s what one customer says…
In Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Clark Kent is written to be an idealized Red-Stater and Lois Lane is an idealized Blue-Stater. What I love about her, compared to the average damsel in distress, is that she adds something. She completes him. Usually, fictional stories write love interests as cardboard characters designed to show that the protagonist has “arrived.” These characters typically seem more like trophies than people. If they are developed at all, it will be to show how desirable a trophy they are: really beautiful and super high-class! Enter Eragon, stage right.
On Fiction Addiction, literary agent Jeff Kleinman offers a few ways to protect your plot ideas. I have nothing against copyright registration (although it is unnecessary for novelists), but I wouldn’t recommend getting hung up on fears that someone is going to steal your ideas. Most novels excel based on their execution rather than their original content. An extraordinarily well-written story will stand out even if its premise is time-worn.
For example, His Majesty’s Dragon has a premise very similar to Harry Turtledove’s Into the Darkness. (Humans use dragons to fight Napoleon or a thinly-veiled fantasy Hitler, respectively). HMD is drastically better, not because its plot is original but because its characters are far better-executed and its writing is snappier. If someone writes a book with a premise similar to yours– and that will almost assuredly happen to superhero writers– you will probably have to compete with them for readers by demonstrating superior style and execution.
I will leave you with this cryptic cartoon about the dangers of relying too much on an unusual concept to sell a book…
Homo superiors are characters that are like humans but better in every conceivable way. How would you describe how Superman differs from a human? “Well, he can do anything a human can, but a hundred times better.” He even looks like a human. Homo superiors are usually aliens or elves, but sometimes a human with enough superpowers or enhancements.
A homo superior is usually not merely better at fighting than everyone else, but also more sophisticated and savvy. If he has a character flaw, he’s probably arrogant because he knows he’s so much better than everyone else in the story.
Why Homo Superiors Wreck Stories
Homo superiors are usually undramatic. Superman never really struggles to do anything, because he’s the best at everything. But a struggling character is what makes stories interesting. If a police officer is in a standoff with a hostage-taker, that’s dramatic because we don’t know if the police officer will succeed. The police officer will only win if he’s wittier and craftier than the criminal. Perhaps he convinces the criminal to surrender. Maybe he convinces the criminal to lower his gun and then shoots him in the face. In contrast, Superman just uses his superspeed or eye-rays and stops the criminal. That’s quite boring, especially after you’ve already seen it a few times.
Homo superiors also usually lead to overpowered characters, which can make the plot feel unbelievable. Let’s say you want to write a fantasy story with a dragon rider. But why would the dragon take a rider? What does he think he gets out of having a puny human on his back? Why is Superman willing to risk his own life for humans? I couldn’t imagine myself being so charitable to ants and, from his perspective, we must seem something like smarter ants. Why would an incredible elven-mage be willing to join a ragtag band of adventurers? Etc.
Fixing the Problem
The best way is to try to explore ways in which the character is either mediocre or inferior. Maybe that elf, normally so elegant and well-spoken, completely goes to pieces in high-stress situations like combat. Maybe the dragon thinks that having a human might be useful in certain situations.
Here are some other ways in which a character might be different and/or inferior.
The Batman was terrible. If you’re mainly watching this for comedic potential, I’d get as many Spanish-speakers or gringos as you can find, and let’s learn about the difference between “el” and “la” with Batman. –There’s a spectacularly strange scene where Batman tries interrogating Riddler and Riddler bursts into a soprano rendition of Ave Maria. […]
–There’s intense violence but not a lot of feeling here. It’s not a very exciting movie. But it’s functional. It’s frequently tedious but rarely boring. Only the political sermons and Weasel are viciously bad. It’s definitely a huge improvement over the first movie. –Most of what sucked about Suicide Squad 1 was an overfocus on […]
1:30 – 6:55: Cyborg sees his Mother Box acting up. Then Mera sees her Mother box acting up. Then Amazon guards see their Mother Box acting up. Also there’s a Lex Luthor flashback where the computer shows him that Mother Boxes are plot relevant in case you missed that. PS: In the first 8 minutes […]
–Wonder Woman 1984 is not nearly as good at the original. Pluses: the cast is still very charming, and a few of the fight scenes are effective. I did actually like most of the first hour of the movie. –Setting: In the original Wonder Woman, the WWI setting contributes to a hard bleakness which effectively […]
1. I don’t know where to start with Captain Marvel. So many things went so wildly wrong that we’d need a presidential commission to get to the bottom of it. It’s like the Chernobyl of superhero movies. 2. If at any point you feel like your action movie would benefit from a character whose main […]
1. This version of Spider-Man is a useless toolbox who actively avoids doing interesting things, and what he does attempt is usually wimpy and/or incompetent. 2. Unlike most main characters, his choices don’t matter much. For example, he chooses to leave his supersuit at home (but his aunt sneaks it in anyway) and he tries […]
We’re up to 72 superhero movies since 2000 (current as of November 2017). You can download the full data here. Some observations: R movies are making up the quality gap with PG-13 movies. Superhero movies are improving. Over the last 5 years (2013-2017), the average superhero movie is averaging 70% on Rotten Tomatoes, up […]
