If you are a writer, and you probably are if you are reading this, than you may have a favorite author from your youth. Mine was Robert E. Howard. I have reread Howard's work every decade since my teens and have picked up on things that I totally missed in my youth—or did I?
Howard wrote action yarns and my sci-fi is marked with what some regard as excessive levels of action. So, one might assume that my action writing is Howardesque. However, where Howard wrote action scenes in a very atmospheric style from the viewpoint of a physically dynamic character, I do not. I write action from the physically dynamic character's perspective in a descriptive way. This comes from my experience interviewing compulsively violent people.
When I write violence atmospherically, I do it from the point of view of a passive, disoriented or sedentary character.
But certainly Howard influenced my style?
I decided to read a 1936 letter from Howard to a fan who had done a chronology of the Conan stories and had sketched a map of the setting.
The following passage struck a deep chord in my writer psyche:
"In writing these yarns I've always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That's why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows an ordered plan…"
So had I internalized this passage, which was quoted in the introduction to the first ACE Conan paperback I picked up in 1976? Did I simply take Howard's advice when I began to write action scenes, by tapping into my experiences interviewing high functioning psychopaths?
This consideration prompted me to read this letter carefully with an eye on Howard's perspective as an author. The one thing that Howard's work has not done is strike a chord with the movie-going public. The imagery of the character is stronger than Tolkien imagery, but not the story. This is simple to understand, as Tolkien wrote in the ancient epic 'save the world for the rich and the weak' tradition.
This was the tradition of all epic poetry, which means most of literature for most of history. When converted to film, Howard's lack of save the world themes strikes the Hollywood crowd as a glaring omission of the only suitable theme for an action adventure, and they hastily sketch in a save the world theme absent a soul, or a root in the story of the iconic character, whether it is Conan or Solomon Kane of Red Sonja [who was just trying to save her virginity], or Kull, with all of these efforts failing as the hack jobs they are.
Howard also pulled from the epic ancient tradition, but with emphasis on the god defying characters of Gilgamesh, Achilles, and Herakles. Indeed, Achilles was the counter culture anarchist anti fat-cat rebel of the Iliad. Howard's characters are penned in this vein, against the epic narrative grain, and can find no true purchase in the liberal State-worshipping materialistic culture of our filmmaking fraternity.
Indeed Howard's characters are too masculine to find acceptance among today's feminized moviegoers. Likewise the nesting instinct of the female moviegoer and reader demands the happily-ever-after monogamous ride into the sunset of an assisted living facility, not Conan riding off and leaving the wench behind at the inn where he spent his last shekel on her.
I wonder now, with the correction of my long held contention that Howard did not influence my action writing by the above passage, are there other passages in this letter that speak to the mind behind the illumination of the masculine ideals that inform his stories, that may have done more to inform my perspective than my parent's centrist 1970s political vapidity?
More importantly, in this letter, dated March 10, 1936, does Howard—essentially the master of the kind of pulp writing that is finding a resurgence online—address any broad truths for the aspiring writer that might help those seeking to do something other than imitate the creators of The Lord of The Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek, vampire romance, and Harry Potter?
Character Ignorance and Lack of High-resolution GPS in the Narrative Framework
"…I feel a certain amount of license, since the inhabitants of the western Hyborian nations were about as ignorant concerning the peoples and countries of the south and east as the people of medieval Europe were ignorant of Arica and Asia."
The fact that our feminized postmodern reader has a soap opera level of back story requirement—which is addressed these days by replaying cuts from setup scenes in movies just before the resulting act of vengeance comes down—the realistic depiction of the world of your character as murky and not totally understood is dicey.
This is much worse than you might imagine. Despite the vast ignorance of postmodern bots, most of them not only think that they are human, but that they are well informed. 'News' programming glazes their mind with a patina of surety. The ability to Google facts makes them feel all knowing, although most of them would not be able to find their house on a map. This has resulted in a population of fiction readers who are impatient with characters who are not as all knowing as James Bond or Gandalf the White. This is one reason why serious sci-fi can never be popular, because it deals in realistic levels of ignorance.
I often refuse to write to this soap opera level, which is economically obtuse of me to say the least. One thing I do to compensate for the absence of unrealistic levels of back story presentations is use dream sequences and unexpressed thoughts to let the reader into the psychological life of the character. I see this as the big challenge to serious fiction writers who wish to be popular. I am exploring the options.
Enigma
"There are many things concerning Conan's life of which I am not certain myself."
Howard just failed his postmodern online writer's quiz. Enigmatic characters are no longer valued much in fiction, print or film, and are scoffed at by female editors who have that impulse to know and understand all about people they get close to, like a protagonist.
Well Babe, real men don't spill their guts, they spill other men's guts! For this reason traditional action heroes are now hard to sell. They must all be mind-fucked in some explicable way clearly delineated in the narrative. Of course this amounts to grafting a feminist concept over a masculine reality.
Buck this trend at your peril. 9 or 10 editors, reviewers and agents are either female, or feminized. Howard would be starving today.
Ambiguous Endings
"He [Conan] had no male heir at the time, because he had never bothered to formally make some woman his queen, and the sons of concubines, of which he had a goodly number, were not recognized as heirs to the throne."
Oh we can't have that!
Non happy endings are frowned upon almost entirely, even when a sequel is being set up! Even the old school editors and pastiche writers of the Ace series and the comics insisted that Conan had a Queen and an heir! Hell if Howard was writing Conan today he would have to be a stay at home dad!
Again, the writing field is dominated by female authors, editors, readers, and viewers as well as the legions of mangina video gamers who absolutely demand a happy, or at least stable, ending, as if the human ass-kicking machine played by Jason Statham would really be a contented and stable house husband.
Saving the World Sucks
Howard describes that [as happened in the real world of barbarian usurpers in later Roman history] the world of Conan was going to hell quickly. Aside from a wish to explore the Mayan prehistory with the Conan character Howard wraps up with a sentence on the fate of the European proto-history he had named the Hyborian Age with a passage that included the following, "…Whether he succeeded in conquering a world-wide empire, or perished in the attempt, I do not know."
What Howard was doing in his own writing mind, by refusing to pin down his greatest creation, was rejecting the order-making writer's instinctive female need to domesticate through comprehensive knowledge the troubling character who is also the interesting protagonist.
Just as fighting systems like karate attempt to hem in the violent act through rigid and comprehensive controls, the writer—in essence an organizer of facts and memories and feelings for the listener, reader, and viewer—comes equipped with an impulse to know too much about the character. Howard knew that it was Conan's wild nature that made him a hit. He declined to neuter Conan as Edgar Rice Burroughs would go on to do to his wild Tarzan.
Social Order as Seductress
Again, I had thought that my reluctance to go into the mothering role most writers adopt with their characters was an impulse born of my interviewing of violent men, who sat with me for these talks knowing that I—a man—would decline to push them too far into self-discovery; that I would not be playing the prying female. I wonder now, did Howard's declining to neuter or chain his characters influence my technique as an oral historian and violence researcher? I read him and Burroughs before I read Durant and Bury. Or did I just arrive at the same conclusion Howard did via a different route?
In the end Howard has outsold—and most importantly outlived—most of the writers that have followed the 'save the world domestic ending despite soap opera levels of intrigue' formula. However, the top practitioners of the sellout art of writing metaphoric ruling class adorations for the page and screen by way of save the world formulas have far outstripped him. Look, if I live and write in the reign of an evil ruling class, and I depict the king in a novel as worthy of preservation, and noble enough to inspire my protagonist to such levels of heroism that will ensure his continued reign, then that is a message that my masters want read and spread.
When Tolkien has eagles saving everybody—and even his story—they represent the Royal Air Force as surely as the Nazgul represent the Luftwaffe. When Aragorn takes the throne in The Return of The King that justifies all sitting rulers so long as they have lineage. And we all know that only the best behaved and most self-sacrificing people have rich and powerful parents!
But Howard stands alone, and his characters stand more harshly and taller over those of other authors; characters too dark, too hard, too violent to not stress the tolerances of the flimsy plots that coddle lesser protagonists who are saved by magic, and eagles, and wizards, and God.
Conan's proto-Nordic god Crom does not give a shit about Conan!
Kane's Christian God demands he face the Devil rather than offering salvation.
The wizards and scheming vampires and magical children that save the established political orders and perpetuate the lies that bind mankind in the works of Rice, Tolkien and Lewis, are, in Howard's hands, the sorcerer; his metaphor for the apex social parasite typified, in his time and ours, by the investment banker and political lobbyist.
Our society does not even have the collective balls to break away from a make believe story that has the possibility of a bad ending. By a bad ending I'm not just talking about lack of victory for the protagonist, of which fans of Howard's characters were assured. The most important aspect of the ending in film and fiction in our propagandistic age is the affirmation or restoration of the social order.
In terms of the epic myth of the Trojan War, while Tolkien and the others wrote of Nestor, Menaleus and Agamemnon, being those who served the destined political order, Howard instead wrote of Achilles and Priam, the damned and the doomed, without whom the three sots above who survived them would not constitute a story worth remembering, let alone telling.
In contrast Howard's characters lived their violent lives in a brutally realistic all-devouring world of darkness impinging on light. The light was not some Tolkienesque beacon on an authoritarian castle turret, but a torch held by a singular man living a turbulent life, winning victories too small to keep the darkness forever at bay; a man that would rather die with truth on his lips than a comforting lie in his heart.
That hero might sound like a villain in this day and age, but he was a Depression Era creation, and we are writing in a reimagined Depression Era, so I thought revisiting Robert E. Howard made cyclic sense.
"I got a story it ain't got no moral, let the bad guy win every once in a while." James I think you found a literary niche that needs filling. Happy endings all the time just gets boring. Some of us like a little variety and unpredictability in our story telling.
I'm glad you think so JB, and others do to, just not the masses.
The thing is when you get down to the craft of writing, the mandated status quo ending actually warps the characters, distorting meaningful character development in many ways. An opposing example is the slasher movie, in which the entire plot is dependent on stupid characters making predictable unlikely decisions. So, in my mind, having the high school letterman leave the cheerleader behind to investigate that bump in the dark, is just as corrosive to the narrative as Tolkien's eagles.
Mind you Mark Twain has a famous quote that I cannot spit out precisely to the effect that while real life does not make sense a story must. I also enjoy such stories. But as a writer it is vexing when that is all you are permitted; either a pointless slasher tale enabled by ridiculously stupid characters for the fringe crowd, or the status quo restoration yarn for the masses.
When switching from nonfiction to fiction I ran into the problem of violence in fiction. If, as a novelist, you introduce any violent act that does not further the plot through 'blood on the page' than you are literary trash, the equivalent of a rapper or death metal growler at a gathering of classical pianists. My problem with that rule, is that very much violence is pointless and does nothing to propel anyone along a meaningful narrative arc, but, more likely, just keeps them in squalor.
Finally, what is killing me lately, is that happy endings in film are increasingly being replaced with status quo affirmation endings that point to a worship of our current politic system which to any one with a functional social nose fairly reeks.
Thanks for checking in Jeremy.
Remember I will be casting you in Mantid as a cynical old advisor to a heavy handed tyrant ever ready with a prescient quote to sway his oppressive highness...we shall name him Jaunt the Balladeer. I'll make sure you get a free copy of Mantid when it is done.