Handling the Damsel in Distress

The damsel in distress is a very old trope, dating back to Greek mythology and beyond. You have a girl that needs rescuing, and this drives the plot. Simple, right? Well, in modern media the unqualified damsel in distress has become less popular, due to the rise of various shades of action girl and self-rescuing princesses. Even Princess Peach, the quintessential damsel of the Super Mario Brothers games, has taken a role in ensuring her own safety from time to time (though she still gets kidnapped more often than not).

As a result, the modern damsel in distress must be handled very carefully in order to avoid accusations of one-dimensionality, bad writing, or misogynist subtext. However, not every female character can be Xena Warrior Princess and get herself out of a pinch. Let's explore the reasons why a damsel might be put in distress.

• Simple Kidnapping. Yes, this old chestnut. The villain might need to take custody of your impending damsel for a series of reasons, whether it's for financial gain, to force another character's hand, or because the villain has a serious crush on her.
• She Has a Plot Coupon. Some damsels might possess an item (or know how to access it) upon which the plot hinges. This could be a tattoo that happens to show where the thing that everyone's looking for is, it it might be a book with an encoded message that tells how to get to the thing. In either case, get the damsel, and eventually you get the thing.
• She Is a Plot Coupon. The damsel has a certain ability or set of abilities that will allow her to get to the thing, or access the thing herself, or otherwise solve the plot's main problem. Or maybe she's the heir to the kingdom and everyone in the land is squabbling for the right to marry her--and then someone just cuts to the chase and makes off with her. (That someone might not even know she's a plot coupon when the absconding happens, only that she's pretty or important or what have you.)
• She Happened to be Handy. The damsel of convenience in these plots can offer the perfect opportunity to set up epic amounts of ass-kicking if the villain grabbed the wrong damsel out of the crowd. Whether this is foreshadowed before the throw-down happens is entirely up to the writer.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of why a damsel might be in distress, but it covers most of the basics. Of course, now that your damsel is in distress, let's explore reasons that she might not be able to get herself out of distress.

• Physical Restraints. Again, a classic. This might mean she's tied to a rock or locked in a room or tied up on the metaphorical railroad tracks. Barring any established skills as an escape artist, this is often a perfectly valid reason for the damsel to remain in her predicament and need rescuing.
• Geographical Restraints. The next best sting to tying her up is putting her someplace secluded where the hero can't get to her right away. She might be locked at the top of the tallest tower or parked in a stronghold on a secluded island or in the middle of the villain's stronghold with thousands of guards between her and the hero. In many cases, the hero might have to find her to rescue her, and him finding out her location can make up the bulk of the plot.
• Guarded by Something Scary. This could be anything from a trained Bengal tiger to the villain's trusted assistant Moe to a fire-breathing dragon, but in any case the scary thing provides a really healthy incentive to not try to run off.
• Drugged or Hypnotized. If the damsel is not able to properly get her bearings, obviously she can't make a valid effort to get herself free. Part of the plot might be her trying to clear her head and meet the hero in the middle, bot not always.
• Physical or Mental Handicap. This needs to be navigated carefully, lest one be the target of accusations of insensitivity. However, certain neurological conditions can make a damsel of either sex unable to properly defend herself from harm, or even recognize danger. A blind damsel might be able to use her senses to evade the bad guy, but that's still a form of distress.
• She's Naive. DANGER WILL ROBINSON! You better have a really good reason to use this one (like a sheltered upbringing) and it must be handled very carefully lest your prospective damsel be branded an idiot. I know as well as any that there are dingbats and airheads in the real world who wouldn't know a dangerous individual if he pointed a gun at their face, but if this keeps happening repeatedly without her learning her lesson or taking measures to protect herself (that's called character development, for those of you following along at home), eventually the audience is going to brand her an idiot and throw your book against a wall. If your damsel seems to exist solely to have the plot happen to her, you might want to consider heavy rewriting.

While the damsel in distress may have waned in popularity in recent times, she can still be an effective plot point if handled carefully. Just watch out that she doesn't become nothing more than a cardboard cutout with "LOVE INTEREST" written on it in Sharpie and give her motivations of her own, and you will be well on your way to having an interesting, sympathetic damsel.

 And now, for something completely different...

This week's progress report for Sheep's Clothing sales continues my slow and steady trend. Next month I will propose regular book-signings at the St. Louis Bread Company to see if I can do better there with more advertising and an expected crowd, and in October I plan to sell my books at Archon 38!

2.3%

Black and White and Shades of Gray

Stories about good vs. evil are a perennial favorite. It's just a thing people have hard-wired into their brains that turn every conflict into Good Guys vs. Bad Guys, Us. vs. Them, Good vs. Evil. Stories of clear-cut morality in the central conflict are easy to understand, and easy to write.

The trouble is that they're hard as hell to write well, mainly because baseline humans don't come in Completely Good or Completely Evil. Trying to make every member of a group completely good or completely evil might work well if a certain tribe or nationality exists for the Good Guys to fight against, but doing this too often can get boring in a big hurry.

Evil goblins. Yawn.

Beautiful, pure-hearted elves. Ho hum.

As my tastes in fiction (and high fantasy in particular) have evolved, I've started finding the appeal in ambiguously gray characters. There's the hero who might do morally dodgy things in the pursuit of a noble goal. There's the villain who started out with the best of intentions, but couldn't stop his slide down the slippery slope of morality. Even Spider-Man realizes the temptations of having superpowers, and Darth Vader started as a good man.

Honestly, pure villains or heroes can get boring in a hurry. So you've got a white knight boy scout who always knows the right thing to do and goes around defending the innocent because that's what he does. So you've got an evil lord of evil who wants to use black magic to conquer the world because that's what he does. That might be great for simpler stories, but in complex, overarching epics, that lack of moral ambiguity gets old really quickly.

One of the grayest high fantasy series I've read recently is a Song of Ice and Fire, where you have a lot of factions working at cross purposes to get their own people on the Iron Throne, and very few of them are completely good or evil. You have innocents corrupted in the course of trying to escape horrifying events later. You have people set up as villains in early books, only to be revealed as morally conflicted and redeemable later. The only characters I can name off the top of my head who would fall squarely in the evil category are Cersei Lannister and her son Joffrey. Even then, Cersei is just ambitious and crazy and not as smart as she thinks she is, and Joffrey... well, has Cersei for a mother. And he's, like, twelve.

The best way I've noticed to avoid black-and-white morality in fiction is to get into the heads of both your heroes and your villains. Give the villain a reason for what he does besides LOL I'M EVIL. Maybe he does what he does to prevent something worse than him later on. Give the hero moral quandaries so he's not just LOL I'M THE HERO. Heck, Batman has done more than the Gotham police force to clean up crime, and even his allies (and Batman himself) sometimes question the measures he takes. Superman is the closest to a white knight that the DC universe has, but he has to worry that his superheroing might come back to harm his less-indestructible Earthling loved ones. Being completely good or completely evil should be hard.

Writing nuanced heroes and villains is a good way to add spice to your fiction and make your readers think. Your fans might side with one character or another for various reasons, but at least those reasons won't be exclusively because "he's the hero" or whatever. Writing in shades of gray rather than black and white also makes your story more interesting and enjoyable, and has a high likelihood of enticing your readers back for more.

And now, for something completely different...

Still making progress in my book sales (woohoo!), but I really hope they pick up soon. I'll be at Bookseller's Row at Archon 38 this year, my first time selling stuff at a convention, so feel free to come by if you're in Collinsville, IL the weekend of October 3-5 and pick up a copy!

And my sales progress:

1.3%

I'll be back next week with more ramblings and news! Follow my blog for regular updates!

Adventures in Self-Publishing Part 2: The Fellowship of Self-Publishing

A wise man once said, "One does not simply walk into Mordor." He went crazy with lust for the One Ring and died full of arrows at the hands of orcs, but his general point more-or-less stands, especially when it comes to self-publishing. In this case, walking into Mordor is the process of getting your book from that really snappy manuscript you have to the even snappier hard copy or e-book, minus the hordes of orcs, the Dark Lord, and having the fate of the entire planet resting in your hobbity little hands.

With traditional publishing, the only person you have to contend with is the publisher's editor or an agent--the gatekeeper to get into the land of published authorship. You impress them with your work, and you're in, for certain values of "in". Traditional publishers have a whole horde of people whose job it is to make your book look awesome enough to be purchased, so that all you have to do is sign the contract, and then sit back and let them work this magic.

With self-publishing, however, you have to do a lot of this yourself, obviously. You need your own little fellowship of companions who take care of the various jobs involved in making your book look awesome enough to be purchased. Now, you might be able to take care of some of these jobs yourself--but that will be a hell of a lot of work. Let us look at your fellowship, shall we?

 

Developmental Editor

Developmental editing sounds like one of those things you can do yourself, and if you're patient it's possible that you'd be right. This part takes detachment, though, and the discipline to chainsaw out whole swaths of your manuscript and/or rewrite them if need be. If you want to take care of this yourself, you must be willing to let your manuscript hang out (in whatever format) until you have the proper detachment to perform some truly invasive surgery on the thing. This is someone who must show no mercy towards the manuscript. They must take out everything that doesn't contribute to the story. If you can't find the detachment to do that, you'll be better off hiring someone to edit for you.

 

Beta Reader 

The beta reader is the person you give your manuscript to once it's out of the crappy rough draft stage, the person whose job it is to give the thing a second eyeball check and a second brain check to make sure that everything fits together. You absolutely cannot do this one yourself. I can't emphasize this enough. The beta reader must be at least one step removed from the manuscript. They can be a friend whose opinion your trust, or a colleague who is interested in your writing career and wants to give you honest help. He should be able to tell you if something doesn't work, or if he finds a continuity error, or even if the story doesn't work at all. He will be your peek at your potential readerbase.

 

Proofreader

The proofreader needs to have sharp eyes, because not even Word's spelling and grammar checker will find errors like misused words, or words misspelled so they become other words. The proofreader needs to be a fresh pair of eyes who is able to go through your manuscript with a fine-toothed comb and look for all the tiny errors that even an experience writer might miss. My proofreader has picked up things like misused commas, wonky capitalization, continuity errors (yes, again), and vocabulary derps that my mind told me afterwards that I should have seen, but I didn't. Why? Because I knew the manuscript like the back of my hand. (Or thought I did.)

 

Cover Artist

 Unless you have Photoshop, a fair talent for graphic design, and hours to kill, you'll want to farm this one out. And honestly, if you had hours to kill, you be spending it writing. The cover artist's job is to make an eye-catching cover for your book that reflects what the story's about. I've seen some truly awful covers at the library where I work, and a lot of them came from professional publishing houses. Since you're doing this yourself, you have a bit more freedom to work alongside your artist to get the cover you want.

 

Formatter

The formatter's job is to take your really awesome manuscript and make it play nicely with whatever template your self-publishing company uses so it doesn't look like ass in the finished product. CreateSpace (the company I'm using for Sheep's Clothing) offers a downloadable template for Word, so that you can just copy and paste your text in there and let it do the rest, but be prepared to actually look through the result to make sure everything looks right, or else you'll have more work later on.

 

Printer

Unless you have a publisher-grade printer and all the equipment you could possibly need to make a book (not likely), let someone else handle this. Seriously. Print-on-demand sites allow you to acquire as many books as you need--no more and no less--so this part shouldn't be all that hard. Let their army of professionals assemble your book.

 

Marketing

This last role should on no account be neglected. Without proper marketing, your really awesome book will just fall by the wayside because nobody can freaking find it amongst all the big-name, big-publisher titles. This role also requires a lot of decisions: How will you get the word out? Who will you tell? What marketing materials do you want to offer? How will you reward readers that are willing to give you a shot. If you are self-publishing, you will also be self-marketing for the most part. If you're lucky you might be able to link up with a local marketing firm to take care of this for you, but this can be expensive. Telling people about your book is the best way to make sure it gets bought, and that often requires talking to complete strangers. (Dun-dun-DUNNNNN!) Just keep in mind that the more you get the word out, the better your chances of selling copies of your book.

So there you have it--the Fellowship of Self-Publishing. You can do a lot of these things yourself, but bear in mind that it will take time away from the real point of this whole exercise, your writing. With work and patience, however, you will be able to get your book out there where people (read: future fans) can read it without having to rely on a traditional publisher.

As a final note: I sincerely apologize to the J.R.R.Tolkien estate.