Mystery Science Theater 3000

Remember MST3K? They watched reeeeeeeally bad movies and mocked them relentlessly all through. I once saw a really bad piece of fan-fic (Dragonriders of Pern / Star Trek Next Gen crossover, yes, really) that had been MST-ified. It was hysterical.

And you know, reaidng through that ancient piece of juvenalia (college-student-alia?) that I posted on the dare, I kept coming up with snarky comments. So here goes.

LJ-cut for length.

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You know, what might also be interesting would be to post what I would say to a workshopper who turned in a story like this, because I wouldn't be snarky. My early mentors were very never snarky to me; Nancy Vedder-Shults, in particular, was wonderfully encouraging and lovely and kind. So I think I will come back in yet another post and imagine what I would say to my 21-year-old self, if I had her in a workshop.

What I would say about this story in a workshop

I have led a couple of writing workshops at cons; I really enjoyed doing it both times. As I was wrapping up the snark regarding my old story, I started thinking about how I would never in a million years be that degree of snarky about someone else's writing. In fact, when leading workshops, I try to discourage people from making jokes at each other's expense. It's perfectly fine to be negative and critical, but try to present it in an analytical way, rather than a harsh way or a snarky way.

"This sucked" is not analytical. "This story took my suspension of disbelief and hung it by the neck until dead" is snarky (and a line used in rejection letters by the late Marion Zimmer Bradley -- her choice, and fair enough, but I think it would be really mean to say that to someone's face). An analytical way to say this would be, "I didn't buy in to this story. I didn't believe in this world because of ____ and ____ and ____." Be tactful when you can; when you can't, be specific and concise. Think of things that will actually be useful to the writer, either when they're revising, or when they're writing their next piece.

So, here is what I would say to my 21-year-old self if she turned Guild Oath in for critique at a workshop.

***

First, you have a solid grasp of mechanics. That's great; a lot of people have trouble with the mechanics of sentences. Your grammar is good and your sentence construction is solid. I like some of the images in this story: the inconspicuous assassin in gray is cool, the sound of weeping in the Temple is cool. I kind of like that Maire comes back and commits the murder and doesn't experience redemption, because I expected that things would turn out cozily, and instead it's a very dark story.

However, I had several pretty big issues with the story.

First, I found myself thinking that you probably play a fair amount of RPGs, or possibly that you read a lot of a certain kind of cheesy fantasy. I'd strongly encourage you to branch out. RPG-inspired fantasy tends to be written inside kind of a mental box. A lot of the stuff in that box doesn't really make sense -- the D&D worlds don't hold up that well on close inspection. Even when things make sense, the stuff from inside this box isn't ever going to surprise your readers.

Second, I found that this story really strained my suspension of disbelief. You've set Maire up as a really cold, efficient killer, and then she immediately hesitates, even before she finds out that the priestess is her sister, and is in touch with the goddess and able to hand out ecstatic experiences as a gift. And then Rachaen doesn't take advantage of her opportunities to flee, and it's really not clear why. If her death is going to accomplish something, we don't see it. I also kind of wondered what the point was of having them be sisters. Shakespeare gets away with the separated twins all over everywhere so obviously it can be done, but honestly, I think it works better in comedy (which is where Shakespeare mostly used it). Unless they sent her to her sister for some particular reason (like, having a sister murder a sister inside a Temple, which is a clear desecration, will complete some powerful spell). If they're both tools for some much larger plot, I could buy into that, though then I'd really want you to do more with it than just have Maire shoot Rachaen dead. I mean, they could team up to figure out what's going on -- that could be a really fun plot.

Third, I will admit I have some issues with assassin stories generally. I find myself wondering how a guild of killers-for-hire even functions. How many killers does your average city really need? Who hires them? Just how high is the murder rate in this town, because you know, New York City had only 584 murders in 2002, and there's no way a medieval-type city is going to be anywhere NEAR as big as NYC. Are they used by organized crime to keep people in line? If she were working for the fantasy equivalent of the Yakuza, I could totally buy into that, but that's a whole organized crime organization, not just a bunch of assassins.

Anyway, I have a couple of specific suggestions, not so much to improve this story, but to improve your next story and the story after that.

First, broaden your reading. If you're currently reading series books, and you have a limited amount of time to read (and who doesn't), I'd encourage you to branch out and try a bunch of new authors. Get a sense of some of the ways that writers are surprising their readers, because a lot of what your story is missing is a sense of the unexpected.

Second, read a bunch of non-fiction. If you want to write about assassins, pick up a bunch of books about real assassins, organized crime, organized crime in the middle ages, etc. Also, pick up The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones. It's absolutely hilarious; it's a guide to fantasy cliches written as a travel guide to the Generic Fantasy World where a lot of fantasy is set.

Third, I disagree with the idea that in order to write a single short story you have to know EVERYTHING about the world right down to the materials of the socks, but when something is as important and central as an assassin's guild, I'd encourage you to think in some detail about how it works on a day-to-day level. Shake it hard and see if it holds together, at least.

Fourth, keep writing. I think you have potential as a writer if you keep working at it.

[Edited to fix the crime stats for NYC. I should not write LJ posts this late at night, apparently.]

RPG-based fiction

ukelele asked in response to my last post:

I'm curious -- "RPG-inspired fantasy tends to be written inside kind of a mental box. A lot of the stuff in that box doesn't really make sense -- the D&D worlds don't hold up that well on close inspection." -- care to elaborate?

My reply got long enough that I decided to make it a new post.

There are a lot of issues that come up when someone writes fiction based on RPG campaigns.

First, even if you're using a really well-designed, well-thought-out world, what makes for a good playing experience rarely translates well to fiction. Just to throw out one example: in RPGs, you usually have a pretty large group of people. (Not always, but often.) Stories usually have to focus in fairly tightly or readers just can't keep track. The game I participated in that would translate best to fantasy fiction was GM'ed by probably_lost from 1995 through 1997. There were bits and pieces that really worked as narrative, but one thing that would have had to change, were Curtis to want to turn it into a novel, was the number of characters. There were six or seven of us, IIRC, all tromping around together. It was a great group and the perfect size for an RPG (at least for one Curtis was GM'ing) -- we had complimentary attributes, and conflicting attributes. But even in a novel, you don't want seven major characters who are all on stage at the same time.

Second, the "formula" that the most satisfying stories are usually built around, IMO, is character change. Part of why Curtis's game would work as narrative fiction was that several characters (including the one I was playing) went through profound changes. This is relatively rare in RPGs, and even more rare in an RPG that includes an alignment system, which tends to encourage people not to change, at least not in any fundamental way. (As a side note, this is part of why Deep Space Nine was far and away my favorite of the Star Trek franchise: characters changed, and changed in important ways, and their relationships shifted accordingly. *nostalgic sigh*. That was such a great show.) This is not always true, but serious character change can sometimes make a character unplayable in the game that the player is really enjoying.

Third, a hell of a lot of the worlds you get out of a box (especially, just to name names, the worlds you get with a D&D or AD&D based system) are not thought out particularly well. Think about the economic system and the way gold gets thrown around. Also, Orson Scott Card notes in his book on writing SF/F that fantasy works best when magic has a price -- because otherwise, mages become insanely powerful and there's no real check on that, and no real acknowledgement that absolute power really does tend to corrupt absolutely (that's apparently solved by the alignment system, in which absolute power corrupts absolutely if you're Chaotic-Evil to begin with, but it's really no problem at all if you're Chaotic-Good.) Again, this structure works well for playing a game; not so well for writing fantasy.

The whole concept of the assassin's guild is very common in RPGs, and yet makes very little sense when you stop to think about it. Killing people is illegal pretty much everywhere. Certainly, historically there have been (and continue to be) people who specialize in individual murder, but most tend to be part of larger organizations (the CIA, say, or the KGB, or the Mossad; or the Mafia or Yakuza; or the IRA, or Hamas, or the French Resistance...) that is dedicated to some larger goal. I am not 100% certain that a real assassin's guild has never existed anywhere, but I find the idea really questionable.

And this character is so obviously an AD&D assassin, complete with all the thief-class skills that a real contract killer isn't going to need but lacking in the social engineering skills that they would need. (And incidentally, I worked for a while at a business -- an ice factory in Madison -- that hired a lot of ex-convicts. One of my coworkers there was a former fence. He'd received an entire truckload of little cans of motor oil, so clearly this was not a sideline for him but something he did quite regularly. And you know, Tom was a great guy. Really, really likeable with kick-ass people skills. Criminal businesses are still businesses, and reward many of the same skills that other businesses do.)

(This is a major tangent, but years back I heard this absolutely fascinating piece on NPR where they interviewed a drug dealer. She did home delivery of marijuana for a major criminal organization, in NYC. She had health insurance benefits and sick days. If she got busted, she had been trained, during her orientation, to immediately call the on-retainer corporate lawyer; however, she wasn't particularly worried, as she was doing home delivery, not street sales, and Giuliani had made it pretty clear that he wanted it off the streets, period. Oh, AND, they had little customer loyalty punch-cards, just like a coffee house: buy 10, and your next is free. I was just in awe of how efficient this all was. The woman was very cheerful and upbeat; she said they were great employers and this was a very good job.)

Aaaaaaaaaaanyway, getting back to the RPG issue.

It's also very noticeable, reading this now, that I knew nothing about the weapons in the story. If you're being sent out to commit murder and will be murdered yourself for failure, a crossbow is a really stupid choice of weapon, just as a handgun would be unless you're firing at point-blank range; even if you're damn good, they're just not going to be particularly accurate. Snipers are a modern phenomenon. This is a chronic problem with RPGs. Fights need to last a while to be fun, so they tend not to work the way a real fight does. (And don't even get me started on hit points. I had a D&D character once who got stabbed, while not wearing armor, by about 23 people at the same time, and survived. Not only that, if the DM hadn't remembered the 23rd person, and she'd been stabbed only by 22 people, she still would have been standing, conscious, and able to act on her next turn.)

Anyway, one of the hazards of playing a lot of RPGs is that it can get you into a certain lazy mindset. (It clearly did for me.) As a player, I didn't question the existence of an assassin's guild, so as a writer I also didn't. Among other things, this meant that I didn't stop to think about what I could come up with that would be better. If I wanted a story about a girl who was trained from age four to be a cold-blooded killer, she could have been recruited and trained by the Queen's intelligence service, or by the intelligence service of a rival power. She could be a member of a larger criminal organization, and she could work as a killer for them. She could be a member of a terrorist group -- religious, or political. There are all sorts of possibilities that are actually interesting, but I didn't explore them because I was thinking inside the box. The box that comes from TSR with a big red dragon on the front. That box. And that's what I was talking about.