In Defense of Mentors

My writer's group has been working through the Hero's Journey in our discussions. Last week we talked about the mentor character, and several people lamented that the Mentor always withholds essential information.

Having had some experience writing mentors lately, I have to step up and defend the mentors from unfair villification.

The mentor seems like he or she knows everything because he has to. After all, the secret to leadership is to act like you know what is going on at all times, even if you don't, but not to commit to anything unless you have good information. So, mentors come across as irriatating know-it-all's, but that is often not the case.

I feel sorry for the mentor, actually. Think of all the responsibility. Not just the burden for developing the hero from  hapless youth with unmet potential into a the defender of truth and goodness, but quite often the responsibility for keeping the whole realm from falling apart until he is ready to save it. Mentors must get very little sleep. Like anxious mothers, surely they hide their own fears until the wee hours of the night when no one else can see them weep and rail, then act like a wall of strength when the sun comes up or the monster awakens to threaten their young.

Mentors also get sacrificed in the middle of the plot, because the Hero has to do it by himself. So, off with Obi-Wan's head! Into the abyss with Gandalf! Thanks for everything, but your usefulness has ended and it is time to be replaced.

Sort of like the professional world, now that I think about it. (!)

Anyway... Be kind to Mentors. Remember that they, too, are struggling to fulfill their potential.

Heroes and Heroines, recall that one day soon you may well be in their shoes, and that you, too, might be cast into the abyss to make room for the next generation.

I swear, I didn't know it was "The Cave"!

When I posted last about the song that one of Betsy's characters sang to Marenya - the one that made me dissolve into weeping over my laptop - I didn't know it was "The Cave" by Mumford & Sons. I'd never heard of them until yesterday. Now, of course, I'm playing it over and over.

I think it so cool. Betsy's characters - twins Aidan and Kaelin - have such a raw, gut-ripping dynamic, that just knowing their situation and how it affects Aidan, then throwing in a few well-crafted song lyrics with no music whatsoever in my head, tore my heart out. And the way Betsy did it on the thread was just awesome. (Kaelin is undercover as a rogue demon in order to get close enough to the dominus Lorcan to kill him for torturing Aidan, but Kaelin is losing his soul in the process.)

Marenya is trying very hard to figure out what to do to help Aidan cope with the loss of his twin, and Marc, one of Aidans cousins and sworn guards, sings her a song about them. The really sweet thing is that Marenya doesn't get it that she's in danger. She's only thinking about Aidan because he's so obviously in over his head. She thinks Marc is just being sweet, not that he's her bodyguard. But I guess she'll have to figure it out pretty soon.

As Betsy says, "This is seriously nuts. My stomach's in knots." "These people aren't REAL." (to read the scene, go here and start with Aidan's commment @ 5:45 pm. He is about to speak to Faldur about taking Marenya away from him, and is given a vision of an alternate eternity than being in Hell, which is the destiny of all the demons in Sentinel unless they can defeat the demon Asmodai who made them. The contrast between the two eternities - Aidan and Marenya's - brings home even more poignantly Kaelin's tragic self-destruction for the sake of revenge.

Remember folks, this stuff is not planned! It just kinda happens as we write it. We might say, "Marenya needs to figure out she's in danger" but exactly how it plays out is all spontaneous. With some really funny bumps in the road, too.

(Yes, I know I have to get back to real life soon. As soon as these meds wear off, I'll be my usual business-like self, I promise.)

Sunday Snapshot

Time for the Sunday Snapshot!  Post the very last paragraph (or up to 5 lines of dialogue) that you wrote.  It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't even have to be good. It just has to be yours!

Here's mine:

Marenya was shaken from a kind of stupor by a deep, hollow rumbling from under the earth behind them.  Everyone turned to look over their shoulders. A great white column of steam rose up to join the clouds that coated the sky like ice on a frozen pond.  They waited, but nothing else happened other than that the birds flew up from the valley and wheeled south on the wind in one long, trailing mass.

Painfully Familiar

After working on the same book for so long, the characters with whom I was once so rapturously in love have now become like painfully familiar relatives I am reluctant to introduce to society.

 Insert gratuitous Hugh Jackman photo here:

Why Fantasy? Part II

Pennsylvania Renaissance knight

A couple of weeks ago, I asked if there isn't something a little wrong with a 40-year-old woman writing medieval fantasy. Why fantasy? Why is it at all popular or relevant in 2011?

I got some great answers from you in the comments. The desire to escape into another world was primary, along with capturing the magical feelings of childhood and, yes, pretty clothes!

But I think that it goes deeper than that. All genre fiction is an escape from reality to some degree. I'm not talking about nitty-gritty realistic or literary fiction, but the stuff that we read for fun.  And it seems to me that, despite the general claim that traditional fantasy is out of mode, there is a faithful cache of readers who love it.

But why swords instead of six-shooters?  Why magic instead of science?

These questions have plagued me for months, and I find myself uncharacteristically at a lost for answers.  Being an analytical, big-picture kind of person, the fact that I can't pin it down bothers me.  So here are my random theories, and I'm genuinely interested to know what other people think. 

My first theory is that, due to the highly technological and time-bound culture in which we live, a world without machines or clocks or anything that ties us to half a billion other people every second of the day is tremendously appealing.  I think we long for a sense of mental and personal space.  A chance to find out who we are when not driven by the whip of technology.  But we don't like being bored, either, which is why we want a story and not just a vacation to Ireland.

Not that Ireland is boring! I'm going to get myself in trouble here. I really want to go to Ireland some day. What I mean is... not just to reside in a castle somewhere for a week but to have an adventure populated with living, breathing contemporaries and an element of danger.

Speaking of danger, the world around us is dangerous enough. I take my life in my hands when I drive to work each morning in New Jersey traffic. I'm haunted by the images of body parts in the Moscow airport after last week's suicide bomb, and I would really like to know about the other people who were shot at the same time as Congresswoman Gifford.  Who are they?  How is their recovery process going? I actually gave my husband an itinerary of where I was going to be last Sunday at the Philly Area Writer's Meetup, in case someone decided to go on a shooting spree in Center City. It was eerie, knowing that was my conscious reason for being so detailed in communicating my plans. I'd never done that before.

But all of these things are out of our control. We can't go after the bad guys with a sword, or shoot a catapult at our irritating neighbor's house no matter how many times they block our driveway with their car.  We need a release.  I know that video games serve that purpose to an extent.  I also believe that the reason the states in these "United States" don't break out into wars all the time like Eastern Europe does is that we have football instead.  The solution to world peace is the NFL.

But besides just emotional release, we want a story.  We want the struggle to have meaning.  So much of life does seem meaningless.  When your number is up, it's up.  And when you lose your job, tough luck. There is a sense of drudgery underlying all the flash and hype.  I am bombarded with ads constantly everywhere I go. "Be healthier.  Have more fun.  Eat this. Drink that. Wear these."  But no matter how many {blank} I buy, I will still have to get up and go to work and meet my boss's (and my own) expectations, fight the traffic home again, make dinner, walk the dogs and cope with all the family stuff, good and bad, or with being sick or with not sleeping well.

It *feels* like a heroic struggle some days.  Yesterday was one of them. I wasn't sure if I'd pull through.  I had a killer headache, been unable to sleep the night before, spent two-and-a-half hours in traffic, had a huge presentation due at 2 p.m. that wasn't ready, and I really thought I'd just throw up right there in the big corporate meeting I'd been summoned to. But I didn't. When lunch was brought in I ate something, grabbed a Coke, slipped out to the atrium and finished my presentation.  I gave it at 2:00 with enthusiasm and a smile, with much success.

But I felt like Faldur.  I think that his character - totally unexpectedly - has tapped into something very deep in me.  His endurance, discipline and unwillingness to let go of a mission, is something that I think I have been unconsciously cultivating my entire life.  There are those of us Who Do It - and those of us Who Don't. Not that it's always a person's choice.  I had a hard time at first with the concept of a "hero" until I realized that sometimes it's just a question of being born strong.  (Or pig-headed, if you ask my husband.) 

Some of us start out life charmed, and some struggle for every accomplishment.  Marenya is one of those who struggles. She doesn't see herself as important or capable except in very small, domestic things. But in the end she realizes that she is exceptionally gifted and powerful in ways she could never have understood if she hadn't been tested.

One more thing... Magic is a universal stand-in for spirituality.  C.S. Lewis has a quote that I cannot for the life of me find again about how fairy tales let us put spiritual truths in beautiful stained-glass colors for anyone to see.  That's what I'm trying to do with "The Golden Gryphon."  I hope that it will resonate with my audience as much as it does with me.  Because ultimately I'm writing myself a story.

Why Fantasy?

For a long time now I've been wondering if there isn't something a little wrong with me.  Why am I writing medieval fantasy?  And why would it be relevant to modern readers, if at all?

Is there something inherently "off" about a grown-up, middle-class, professional woman living in one of the most technologically advanced parts of the world and of human history, who spends her free time writing stories about maidens in distress, magical gryphons, and heros with swords and magical abilities?

(You know, just in case on or the other fails.  No sword? Use magic. No magic?  Use sword.)

It amazes me how popular the "The Lord of the Rings" books and movies still are, sixty years after their publication.  And Harry Potter.  And all the vampire, werewolf, etc. movies.  Why did the "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" series take off the way it did?  And oh, my goodness, did we really need another Robin Hood movie last year?  Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed it but I kept asking myself "Why?"


Why is a modern, socially and intellectually enlightened audience so fascinated with tales we associate with the Dark Ages- a time steeped in poverty, violence, disease and ignorance?  Particularly the paranormal or magical aspect.  Shouldn't we be past this?  Haven't we grown up yet?  What does this say about us?

Is there something unacknowledged in modern life which we are trying to find or to escape from?  Or is it just a general love of adventure stories, well-told or well-acted, that keeps drawing us in?