A couple of weeks ago I read a blog post by Joe Abercrombie asking if characters always have to change for the better and if happy endings are absolutely necessary. Given that I’m reading Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers it seemed particularly relevant and I’m going to try to answer the questions.

Do characters need to change for the better? I forget where I heard it, but it has been said that that’s what a story is – a series of events that act upon a character and force them to grow. I’ve heard it said that if your main character isn’t different at the end then it isn’t a story. And it is true that in many cases a character is redeemed or potentiated by their journey. But not always.

Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey has been hugely influential and has been recommended to me by a wide variety of writing and non-writing acquaintances. I have struggled with applying it to Sacrifice (the work-in-progress), partly because Sacrifice is non-linear and partly because my protagonist is a bastard whose idea of being a better man is to be a richer, more powerful man. The Writer’s Journey is based around the concept that all story-telling is myth and this is where the requirement for positive change and happy endings comes from.

Myths aren’t just for entertainment. They are for teaching. Myths tell us how to be, what behaviours are acceptable and how we will be punished if we don’t conform. Myths are all about social control and maintaining the status quo. The protagonist’s change is usually in the form of growing up – accepting the responsibilities and duties of adulthood, accepting the rewards for conformity and giving up childish things. Other myths dwell on the punishments for wanting things that you shouldn’t want or doing things that you are told not to do. I simplify a bit.

Jungian psychology has raised mythic archetypes from widespread patterns of social organisation to truths about the human condition. But these are patterns derived from the stories and new stories will give rise to new archetypes.

As fantasy is the genre most closely aligned with myth there is perhaps a greater desire to see fantasy conform more closely to mythic structure. Ursula Le Guin, in her somewhat elitist essay ‘From Elfland to Poughkeepsie’ describes fantasy as a journey into the subconscious and says that like psychoanalysis it will change you. (Ah, but change you into what exactly? Change can be good or bad.)

But that’s myth, where the farm hand grows inexorably into a just and righteous king, where a young girl opens a door she’s been told not to and sees that others who’ve trod that path have died horribly, where the young girl who is obedient and gentle and kind and passive gets rewarded with the big house and handsome husband. Myth tells us how the world works and it lies.

In real life, people try to change and they fail. Sometimes they try again and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes people spend a lifetime trying to change and their success is small or non-existent. Often people spend time trying to change the people around them imagining that it will make their experience better. Of course time and experience change people but not always for the better and not always with their awareness.

I think that learning does not always come best from a model of what to do. Sometimes an example of what not to do is more instructive. There are myths and stories that do this, that show what is lost from not taking the opportunity to change.

So does this mean that characters must change? No. I think that there must be the possibility for change and the story is in how the character responds to the possibility. The change can be good or bad and the response can be to change or not. I think that people are becoming more sophisticated (if only slowly) and more literate in the mechanics of story telling and myth making. (As a aside, I wonder if advertising is not the true descendent of mythology?)

Personally, I find fantasies of the ‘farm hand grows inexorably into a just and righteous king’ type superficial and immature. Which doesn’t mean they aren’t fun or well written, just that they are empty mental calories – candyfloss for the brain. I like a meaty exploration of the dynamics of change. It’s hard to become a different person and the people around you are often unsettled by it. It can seem as if the world conspires against any attempt to become a better person. A story that tells how a character reacts to these trials can be much more emotionally fulfilling.

On to happy endings. I resist the choice of happy or sad endings. Moral certainty is much less monolithic than it might have been in the past and our stories will reflect that. Right and wrong, good and bad, are not so easy to define in complex, intertwined relationships. The ‘good’ guy’s happy ending is the ‘bad’ guy’s unhappy ending. A story with several characters reacting to the possibility of change in a variety of ways will have an ambiguous ending. It will be shades of grey for most of the characters with some happiness and some loss.

I feel strongly that an ending must fit the story being told and sometimes we choose to tell stories that don’t end up in a happy place. It’s not so much about predictability as about internal logic. An ending can surprise the reader without losing a sense of rightness.

For the record, I think Best Served Cold presented it’s characters with possibilities for change and they each responded in their own way.

I was a bit busy over the weekend so I just pasted a story into a post and let that be it. I wanted to offer some explanation and to have it in a separate page of it’s own, but I had a train to catch. At some point I’ll have a play around with blogger and see if I can present it differently. I can sort out the explanation part.

On Thursday last week, I was having trouble getting the Hub website to load, so I followed a link to their old wordpress website. The penultimate post, from 2007, was a lengthy discussion of the declining readership of speculative fiction magazines and it touched briefly on the model of giving work away. Which got me thinking.

My goal is to eventually publish novels. I write short stories for fun and as vehicles for working on writing technique. Most short story markets don’t pay in actual cash and those that do, don’t pay much. Even the highest paying markets don’t pay at rates that really reflect the hours that go into writing a short story. Black Static, for example, I believe pays £20 per thousand words (although there’s nothing on their website about paying at all; I will check) and is one of the highest paying markets. Is £100 fair remuneration for the amount of time a 5000 word story will take?

Ok, maybe I’m a slow writer and maybe each story needs a lot of work. And I should say my basis for comparison is what I earn in my day job – £15 an hour. At that rate, in order to make a living I need to be writing and editing 750 words per hour, thirty five hours a week. Probably more, because I won’t be getting holiday or sick pay. Maybe some people can do it, but to me that feels like an exhausting and unrealistic pace.

So, if I’m not making money with my short stories, what is the purpose of trying to get them published? Partly, it’s about getting feedback and partly it’s about raising my profile.

I want some feedback on my writing and I want it from people who know what they’re talking about. That can come from a writers’ group or you can pay for it, but there’s nothing that says ‘yes, you’re good enough’ like getting accepted for publication. But what if that says more about my beliefs about validation than it does about the standard of my work? Many editors acknowledge that they reject plenty of stuff that is ‘good enough’ but not right for another reason. These days I feel that my critical faculties are better – I can objectively judge my own work and rely less on the opinions of others.

Profile raising is really the key reason I want to publish short stories. It’s all about getting my novel off the slush pile and read. It’s about having a readership. Several authors have shown that there are other ways to do that, such as putting stories online and giving them away for free. So, there you go – Hell is a free to read story. And I’d love to know what you think.

I’m not eschewing traditional publication totally – it’s still a great feeling when someone likes your work enough to publish it – just expanding my options.

I have my hard drive back. I have all my stories and bits of writing. I am so happy.

It did cross my mind that the hard drive was completely dead but time and money (thanks to very generous parents) have brought my stuff back. I now have two external hard drives and proper back ups.

I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve read writers exhorting other writers to back everything up, usually because they’ve lost years worth of work themselves. I know, as a reasonably technology-literate, fully paid up member of the 21st century, that copies are vital. I’ve even watched the Blackadder 3 episode, Ink and Incapability, with horror, imagining what it would be like to write without a PC. Just imagine, if you had to start from scratch if your dictionary got burnt. The horror; the despair; the finger cramp.

And yet…. It remained an item on a to-do list. And if the hard drive hadn’t died, it probably would still be an item on a to-do list.

I’m not pondering this because I want to celebrate the return of my stories or punish myself for procrastination. I’m doing it because it reveals to me something about how caution, or the lack of it, informs our behaviour and therefore that of our characters. In most cases our charaters will know what they should do but that doesn’t mean they will do it.