Boots

It’s strange, how thoughts, images, and ideas recur in our minds in different guises throughout our lives.  For example: When I was about fifteen, I was obsessed with the SyFy Channel show Lexx.  This, for those of you who don’t know, is basically Star Trek’s anti-heroic, poorly-funded, juvenilely-sexual evil twin. 

The Lexx, in the show, is an organic spacecraft, piloted by three people: Stanley Tweedle, the cowardly accidental captain, Kai, the re-animated former assassin, and Xev, the half-reptilian, erstwhile love-slave.  The show is exceedingly tawdry, but Xev, a redhead doomed to love the undead, is still one of my all-time favorite SF characters—maybe because of her kick-ass black boots.  What can I say?  They went up to her knees.

At the time I watched Lexx, I was writing a fantasy novel, and Xev inspired my character Cheria, who also had red hair and wore kick-ass boots.  Cheria, a few years ago, transmogrified into a person named Sarah Butler, one of the main figures in my story “The Limits of Monday”, which was published in The Ear Hustler magazine in August, 2011. 

Sarah Butler belonged to a world quite similar to our own—a world with county fairs and fast cars and deceased businessmen—but now, in a novel I’m currently writing, she’s having an altercation with a dragon.  Turning the genre-circle again.

I know authors are a little loony, to have mental doppelgangers who shadow their every move for years.  That’s how stories get written, though: the doppelgangers insist (quite stubbornly) that there’s more to it than you’ve told.  They insist that their lives have progressed, since the last time you chatted—that they’ve developed allergies to chickpeas, or want to go to Spain.  They insist, like the rest of us, that their current opinions are the ones that truly count.  They make dumb decisions for good reasons, try their best to ignore the misery of others when they can’t alleviate it, and crave dangerous adventures up until the point dangerous adventures actually arrive.

When did you get so human? I ask my resurfacing characters.

I’ve always been human, they grumble.  You just weren’t human enough to see it, last time we talked. 

            Some people make the mistake of thinking that genre fiction—SF, mystery, fantasy, horror—isn’t “deep” enough to house complex characters.  I have the exact opposite opinion: I think that genre fiction, by dint of being one shade removed from regular life, allows us to see characters as whole entities, working within the fertile milieu of their societies and times.  An excellent book I read recently was Out of Oz, by Gregory Maguire, the conclusion to the Wicked cycle.  In it, Maguire was able to characterize Oz, during a period of social unrest, in a microcosmic way that would be impossible with a real place.   

            Let me say that another way:

            In fiction (even in realism) all worlds are invented worlds.  This is because of how much power the authors have, to include and ignore whatever aspects of existence they choose.  In a truly invented world, however, one that’s based only slightly and slyly on an actual place in the universe, the author has the power to thoroughly explain a certain chain of events.  There’s no hopeless speculation about what was going on in the characters’ minds at the time: the author, if she or he has an active-enough imagination, can figure it out.

            Of course, it’s been my experience that, the deeper authors get into invented worlds, the more they are forced to recognize their own fallibility.  The more text you accumulate, the less possibilities remain open for the content of the text remaining.  You’ve put in something that limits a character, like a newfound hatred of chickpeas—and now that you know she hates chickpeas, you can’t in good conscience have her go on a date to get felafels.

            That’s a silly example, but the main point I’m making, I suppose, is that genre fiction can be just as multifaceted, or multifarious, as mainstream literature—if not more so.  My character Sarah Butler is having an argument with a dragon—and this, rather than simplifying her personality, is expanding it.  Because now I get to find out how she’d react to having an argument with a dragon.  

            A warning to the wise, however: the more complex a place, person, or group of characters get, the harder it is to write a strictly happy ending.  When the happy ending comes, it’s beautiful, because it’s been earned—but it doesn’t come all the time.

            Look at Lexx.  I would argue passionately that, however predictable its main characters may have been, they had a level of complexity that came precisely from their over-the-top wackiness.  Somebody put a lot of mindpower into making each of them an individual:

--The undead man who doesn’t want life, but merely a cessation of existence. 

--The attractive, randy woman who shows the only real courage and talent for leadership among the crew. 

--The cowardly, strangely-likeable captain, who, when not chasing space princesses, spends most of the time huddling in fear.

I would argue that Lexx had unexpectedly intricate characters—and that show didn’t have a happy ending.  Not in the strict sense of the phrase, anyhow.

Maybe it was the boots.

            Okay, I’m being facetious again—but here’s a thought-experiment for you.  Think of a beloved story with a happy ending.  How about—I don’t know—Cinderella?  She doesn’t wear boots.  She wears glass slippers.

            Boots are for the people who need to travel the rough, thorny, less predictable roads—the roads with details, pain, humor, intriguing side-trips, and ambiguous resolutions.

In a choice between boots and glass slippers (for what it’s worth), I’d choose boots every time.