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This article originally appeared in SFX magazine. Or at least, I think it did. I never did get a copy . . .

The problem with funny books – I mean, really funny, giggling-uncontrollably-whilst-everyone-in-your-crowded-train-car-speculates-about-whether-perhaps-someone-ought-to-call-the-paramedics sorts of books – is that you can get so wrapped up in the pleasure of reading that you forget to take the story seriously. That would be a terrible mistake in this case, because Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman is a seriously funny book.

Any attempt to encapsulate the story is doomed to fail, but lets just say it’s about the arrival of Anti-Christ (who gets accidentally switched at birth with the wrong baby by a slightly clumsy satanic nun) and the coming battle between the forces of Heaven and Hell (well, except for the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley who’ve become rather good friends over the centuries and would just as soon the Earth not be destroyed, thank you very much). Of course, you can’t have the end times without the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse making an appearance: War, Famine, Death and Pollution (Pestilence retired in 1936) as well as their hangers-on, the Four Other Horsepersons of the Apocalypse, whose members include Grievous Bodily Harm and Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them a Good Thumping.

Oh, and there’s a bit with a dog. Well, a hellhound, technically, but even that doesn’t work out as expected.

Good Omens is a very English book, which makes you wonder how all those poor souls who had to translate it into so many different languages once it became a bestseller managed to make sense of the endless stream of distinctly British references. In fact, if ever a book didn’t deserve to age or travel well, it’s this one. Written in the late eighties and published in 1990, Good Omens embraced the technologies, celebrities and social aggravations of the period. This alone should have doomed it to irrelevance – and yet with minimal adjustments, the fabulous 2015 radio drama produced by the BBC proved not only that both the humour and underlying social commentary of the book apply equally well to our own era, but also provides grounds for optimism about the upcoming 2018 television adaptation.

Neil Gaiman, acting on a posthumous request from Terry Pratchett, has signed on to write the six-episode miniseries. No doubt Gaiman’s talent and passion for the project will ensure that the humour and satire, the eccentric characters and devious plot twists will all be carried forward from page to screen. As a longtime fan, however, my hope is that this new incarnation will also bring forward the book’s subtle but distinctive political theme – one which may either delight audiences or send them racing to their respective social media bubbles in search of suitably vitriolic posts that validate their sense of being absolutely right about everything. Because while Good Omens takes shots at everything from religion to fad dieting, the real targets of its satire are those who demand that human beings take absolute sides against one another. Heaven and Hell get equally skewered in this – notably in the revelation that they’re both unintentionally funding the same Witchfinder Army. More significantly, it’s precisely the series of unpredictable friendships that violate these traditional divisions – between an angel and a demon, a witchfinder and a prophetess, and most importantly between the Anti-Christ and a bunch of punk kids – that provide the chance at salvation. For a book full of supernatural characters and events, Good Omens turns out to be a profoundly humanist book, and one that resonates even more for me in this polarised age than it did when I first read it twenty-five years ago.

See? I meant it when I said that Good Omens is a very funny book that’s worth taking seriously.

I slammed down my copy of George R. R. Martin’s Storm of Swords on top of the bed. It bounced. “That son of a—”
“Please stop yelling at the book,” my wife said, nose-deep in a different, less contentious novel. “The author can’t hear you.”
“He’s killed off another of my favourite characters,” I complained.
“Yes, well, that’s terrible of him.”
I took in a deep breath—a necessary preparation for the lengthy speech I was about to deliver—“What’s worse, I didn’t even like that character in the first place! But then damned George R.R. Martin went and made me like the character and then boom! Killed ‘em off right in front of me.”

I imagine some variation of my rant has been repeated by fans of A Song Of Ice and Fire the world over, always ending with the same question: why do authors insist on tormenting and even murdering our favourite characters?

The Need for Escalating Failures

Think of some of your favourite literary characters. What is it about them that you love? I don’t mean the simple, surface attributes like being witty or clever or attractive. I mean the things that will keep you reading page after page to find out what happens to them. Is it their willingness to sacrifice everything for love? Their ability to stand up to even the worst bullies? Whatever those qualities are, chances are they can only really be seen when the character is facing serious adversity.

But can a character who never fails really be brave or determined? How can we find a character’s inner strength compelling unless we’ve first seen them fail? Falcio val Mond, the protagonist of Traitor’s Blade, starts the novel having already failed many of the most important people in his life. His determination to follow his ideals is only interesting because of the way those ideals have failed him in the past. It’s only through watching the character lose—and lose big–that we can rejoice when he finally succeeds.

But what happens after that final victory when we move onto the next book in the series? Will you, as a reader, really be as emotionally engaged if the next failure the protagonist experiences is no worse than the ones you’ve already seen them overcome in the previous book? The answer, of course, is no. And this means that things have to get harder. The emotional stakes have to get bigger, and the failures have to get worse.

The Need for Increasing Torment

The only people who enjoy tormenting the things they love are psychopaths and writers. In fact, the term ‘enjoy’ is probably a bit off here. I suppose it’s more that the writer feels they have a duty to torment their characters. Now that I think of it, I’m not sure if this makes writers better or worse than psychopaths…

There’s a long sequence of scenes that take place in Knight’s Shadow which will, I suspect, shock a few people. I didn’t write them to be shocking, it’s just that, well, that’s how they turned out. See, if you like Falcio as a character then it’s at least in part because you feel a connection to his ideals. But at the root of ideals are real experiences—often terrible ones—that shape our ideas about the world. To get to the absolute core of Falcio, I needed to strip him down to the point where there was nothing left except that first, fundamental piece of him that couldn’t be taken away.

So while failures are a crucial part of the plot, torment—the internal pain that comes as a result of those failures—is vital for character. This, too, becomes more difficult with a sequel. If your beloved character has emerged from his first adventures stronger than before, then the internal pain they experience has to be commensurately higher the next time around.

The Necessity of Death

So after all that, why in the world would any author kill off a character that fans enjoy? Considering how much work it takes to make people like them in the first place, why would any writer do such a foolish thing?

The simple answer is that, at a certain point, a character has finished their journey. They no longer have a tale of their own to tell, they no longer reveal anything about the world they inhabit, and their continued presence dilutes the overall story. At that point the author is faced with a question: should I simply disappear this character (have them move, retire, or otherwise leave the stage)? Or do they have the ability to dramatically impact other characters who do have a story to tell? If it’s the latter, then some radical shift is likely required, either through death or turning towards a darker side.

As a writer, part of my job is to wring every possible ounce of dramatic potential from my characters. If that comes from them living, great. If it comes from them dying…bring on the guillotine!

Addendum: The Necessity of Life

“So that’s why I’m going to kill him off,” I told my editor, the esteemed Jo Fletcher.
She thought about it for all of a second. “No, you damn well aren’t.”

Okay, she didn’t say it exactly that way. In fact, she never actually forbids me from killing off a character, but she has moved me away from killing off specific characters at various points in the series. The details of the conversations change but the essential question is always the same: “Have you said everything you want to say with that character?”

That, kind readers, is the one and only reason to keep a character alive: when they still have important things to say.

 

Note: I originally wrote this for LizLovesBooks.com in 2015

Fight scenes are dangerous territory for writers. On the surface, they seem as if they’re guaranteed to keep the reader glued to the action in the same way as they often do at the movies. In reality, though, readers tend to skip over fight scenes – skimming the long, tedious, blow-by-blow descriptions in favour of getting back to the dialogue and character-driven drama that truly engages them in the story.

My novel, Traitor’s Blade, is a swashbuckling fantasy in which fight scenes are a crucial part of the storytelling. This means having to ensure that every piece of action is vital and engaging; it means that every duel must draw the reader in and not let them go until the end. So how do you keep the pacing, flow, and more importantly, the drama moving forward with so many fights?

1. Make every fight advance the plot

No matter what you might think, violence is actually boring. Watching two hulking brutes bash at each other with clubs isn’t interesting. Only when one of the brutes is smaller, weaker, and trying desperately to stay alive long enough to let his people know that the enemy is coming does the action start to matter to the reader. But don’t just think in terms of climactic battles or killing off enemies. Sometimes the fight provides a crucial piece of information about the antagonist such as a particular type of cut they make that could explain the wounds on a victim the protagonist discovered in the previous chapter. The fight might also wound your protagonist, slowing them down in later scenes and giving you a chance to make their lives harder and therefore increase the suspense.

2. Reveal character through action

The way your protagonist fights – and when they choose to fight or walk away – tells the reader a great deal about them. Your hero might be a skilled but retiscient warrior or they could be an amateur but with a bloodthirsty streak that comes out when confronted with violence. But don’t just stop with your protagonist or their opponents. Think about what the action reveals in those watching the fight. Does the seemingly helpful mentor figure suddenly become enraptured watching the blood flow? Do the innocent bystanders just sit there or do they scramble to help? Fight scenes that reveal character are by far the most compelling ones for readers – they get to investigate your characters by seeing how they deal with violent situations, allowing you to follow that classic dictum of modern writing: show, don’t tell.

3. Your fight scenes must fulfill the promise of your book

Traitor’s Blade is a swashbuckling fantasy so every fight has to give the reader some of that sense of wonder they first encountered watching classic adventures like the old Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks films. But perhaps your genre is gritty historical fiction. If so, the last thing you want to do is break suspension of disbelief. You have to carefully ensure that the weapons and fighting styles are true to your era (note: this doesn’t mean you can’t have a longsword in the 18th Century since they were around for long periods of time after their proper era, but you can’t have King Arthur swinging a rapier around in 6th Century Britain!)

4. Make every fight unique

I read a YA fantasy recently in which almost every fight involved the main character jumping up and spinning in the air to kick opponents in the face (usually two or three.) Regardless of how unrealistic this would be (after all, realism only matters if it’s part of the promise of your book), the fact is you probably couldn’t remember one fight from another. By contrast, think of a movie like The Princess Bride, in which every fight is special – every conflict is resolved using different means, whether trickery or skill or simply iron-willed determination.

5. Let the reader choreograph the action

If you describe every action of the fight, not only will you bore the reader but your pacing and flow will fall apart. So think of your job not so much as having to meticulously choreograph the fight but rather to give the reader enough insight into the action that they can build the scene in their minds. Show them early on in the fight how each weapon moves through space—make that vivid and visceral. Make the reader feel as if they could actually pick up that weapon and defend themselves even just a little bit. Then you’re free to focus on the character’s actions and reactions—making them distinct, personal, and emotionally motivated just as you do with their words. The reader will then be able to fill in the action while you describe what your characters are saying, what they’re thinking, and what’s showing on their faces. In other words, help the reader to choreograph the fight so that you can spend your time on the drama. This also lets you vary the length of your fight scenes, which helps to keep them from becoming predictable. In Traitor’s Blade there are fights which span an entire chapter and others which are told in four lines.

Think of it this way: violence is dialogue. Make your fights into a conversation spoken with actions in which the real conflict is happening in the hearts of the characters and in which the reader themselves are helping to tell the story.

Note: This article originally appeared in Writer’s Digest back in 2014.

Note: I originally wrote this for ScienceNow.com back in 2014.

Human beings have a complicated relationship with the sword. On the one hand, it’s an instrument of violence with a long history written in blood. Yet it also has the capacity to mesmerize us with the beauty of its varied forms and the way a blade can dance in the air. To watch a sword being skillfully wielded is to see both the brutishness and the elegance in our natures. I’ve had the fairly rare opportunity to choreograph sword fights both for the theatre and in print as part of my fantasy novel, Traitor’s Blade, and so I’m sometimes asked about the difference in working with the two different mediums.

Every choreographer and every writer has their own process for developing a fight scene, but I always start from a basic premise:

Violence is boring.

There are so many fights, stabbings, murders, and assorted forms of torture in media these days that it’s easy to confuse violence with drama. But violence isn’t any more inherently dramatic than ordering coffee. Don’t believe me? Imagine two martial artists walking into a room. Neither one has any expression on their faces. They begin fighting – punching, kicking, jumping, spinning – with speed and precision. They whirl around each other for a few minutes and then one man successfully subdues the other and breaks his neck. Do you care whether it was character A who killed B or B who killed A? Is there anything dramatic in the outcome?

Now instead imagine an elderly woman walking into a coffee shop. She stumbles along with her walker, barely able to make it from the door to the counter. The ravages of the cancer in her bones make this simple trip – one she’s done a thousand times before – the last before she will move into the hospice that will house her for the paltry remaining days of her life. The little moments of this journey – saying hello to the young man behind the counter, choosing which coffee to buy, opening her purse, making the last purchase she’ll make for herself – are the memories she’ll take with her. It’s not much, but it’s everything that’s left. But the man behind her in line is annoyed. The old woman is taking too long and he’s sick of coming into this damned coffee shop on the way to work every day only to end up being late for a meeting because of some old codger holding up the line. He starts to rush her. He’s loud and he’s angry and all this old woman wants to do is shuffle away, with her walker, away from the counter and out of the shop. Sensing she’s about to leave, the man begins to push past her with a perfunctory “excuse me.” But the old woman turns. Just in that moment she turns to this man who threatens her with nothing more than his bluster and angry words and she says “no.” The fight begins.

That emotion you’re starting to feel is driven by the drama of the situation, and your anticipation to see what comes next emerges from the second premise:

The best fights are about character, not plot.

The mechanisms of violence aren’t what make a fight interesting. What’s interesting about a fight scene are the stakes for the character; the way that character fights first with their own fear and only then with their opponent, and the way that individual character’s approach to fighting tells us about them.

Take the following two films: The Princess Bride and The Duelists. You’d have trouble finding two movies whose tone and style are more different. The Princess Bride is a light-hearted swashbuckling fantasy, choreographed by the incredible Bob Anderson (who worked with folks like Errol Flynn back in the day.) The Duelists is a dark, gritty Napoleonic tale based on the short story by Joseph Conrad. The fights were choreographed by William Hobbs who was instructed by director Ridley Scott to make sure the fights looked dirty and ugly and nothing like the swashbuckling of earlier films. But despite the radical differences in the fights of those films, in both cases every action tells you about the character in the fight. The way the two opponents go at it are a reflection of their personality, their fears, and their backgrounds.

We care about Wesley’s fight with Inigo in the Princess Bride because we can sense that these two men admire each other. Their fight is as much an exploration of the other’s talents as it is a duel. In fact, our sense of jeopardy comes from the fact that these two men shouldn’t have to be enemies, and yet, their situation means that one may well die at the hands of the other. Contrast this with the messy, stuttered fights between Feraud and D’Hubert in The Duelists. One man, arrogant and lusting to use violence as his way of getting back at those he believes look down on him. The other, desperate and unsure of what to do – fearing that this fight will end in either death or dishonour. The moves matter; the weapons matter; but only because they allow the audience to see inside the characters and their conflict.

One of the reasons why I love writing Falcio (the main character in Traitor’s Blade) is because he sees each fight as a problem to be solved – he tries to intellectualize the battle and find some ingenious way to survive. But his own past sometimes comes to the fore and takes him over. In those moments, all of his skill and intellect disappear, replaced by rage and recklessness, and we realize he’s not the man he thinks he is.

Once we find the essence of the story—the character-driven tale that must be told, we move to the ways in which the stage, the screen, and the page all work very differently from one another.

Books come with an infinite budget.

Hiring and training actors and stunt professionals is an expensive business whether you’re making a movie or staging a play. Books, on the other hand, let you have as many characters fighting as you want, all for free! You also don’t have to worry about safety – kill your characters as many times as you want and then hit ‘undo’ on the keyboard and they all come back to life. That is, regrettably, not an option with actors in real life. So in movies and on stage there’s a constant push and pull between asking the question, “what action would best convey the drama of this moment in the fight?” versus, “what can we do within budget while ensuring the safety of the actors?” It’s worth pointing out that the first and most important step you need to take in protecting the actors is to ensure that the stunt choreographer or fight director is qualified and prepared. I’ve choreographer plenty of fights but I wouldn’t just jump into a project right now without serious preparation time because I’m out of practice and actors deserve to have someone with the right skills, experience, and current qualifications to take care of them.

Every medium has a different viewpoint.

One of the most pronounced differences between the three mediums is the way in which viewpoint operates. Theatre has a single camera. Wherever you’re sitting, that’s the camera. What that really means for a choreographer is that the fight has to look as good as possible from an incredibly wide range of angles. This is very different from movies where the camera can come in close or move far away; it can take on the point of view of the hero or of the villain or of any number of bystanders. You would think that books would have the most flexible camera of all—after all, you can write from any angle you like. However in practice, the opposite is true. Shifting viewpoints within a scene in a book undercuts the dramatic tension and diminishes the reader’s engagement. Therefore the emotion can really only be understood through one set of eyes—those of the scene’s viewpoint character.

Movie and stage fights can be less realistic than those in books.

This might sound odd at first but it’s absolutely true. Imagine our heroine jumps in the air, does three backflips, tosses four swords in four different directions, and lands elegantly on her feet as each blade strikes its intended target. If you show that action on the screen, the audience’s eyes will tell them its true even if they would otherwise think it preposterous. Similarly, watching a play means engaging in a heightened suspension of disbelief—after all, we know the actors aren’t really killing each other, but we accept it because that’s part of seeing a play. In a book, however, you’re literally asking the reader to create all the action in their heads based solely on the words you put on the page. Anything that doesn’t make sense to them will look like a foggy mess in their minds. For this reason, you have to work harder to create a sense of realism in the movements and actions that you put on the page than you would on the screen.

In books, the reader is the true choreographer and you are simply their teacher.

We experience fight scenes passively when watching them on the screen or on the stage because every part of the action is placed before us. This means you don’t need to explain a move or series of moves because the audience can see them in real time. However a book can’t describe every movement, every posture, every detail. An author who tries to do so will invariably make the experience of reading about the fight become tedious and slow precisely when the reader wants to feel caught up in the flow of the action. So fight scenes on the page require a constant search for economy, for finding things we can leave to the imagination of the reader.

The author shows us small moments of the fight—the sudden thrust of a sharp blade headed for the character’s belly or the worn wooden shield beginning to splinter under the crushing barrage of blows of a horseman’s axe. These details give us just enough grounding in the nature of the fight so that, in the very next sentence, we can be inside the character’s emotions—feeling their fear or anticipation, all the while imagining the continuation of the fight without requiring anyone telling us exactly what’s happening. That, for me, is the magic of a swordfight in a novel—when the reader ceases to be a mere bystander and, in fact, becomes the choreographer.

Let the emotional story reign supreme

The true joy of choreographing a swordfight, whether on the stage, the page, or the screen, is in turning the fight into a new language for the audience. Let the fight scene be a form of dialogue in which each character’s actions are as distinct, personal, and emotionally motivated as the words they use. Sometimes this requires considering accurate historical forms (rapiers and broadswords moved very differently from one another and throwing one at your opponent was almost never a good idea), and sometimes it means ignoring them (the hell with it – throw the broadsword if it works!) Remember that most of what we know about ‘true’ sword fighting comes from reconstructions—books and manuals that have been loosely interpreted. Furthermore, if you’ve ever watched a fencing match then you know that a true swordfight at speed is almost impossible to follow for anyone but an expert. Therefore our job when creating a fight scene isn’t to prove how smart we are but rather that we can bring the audience or reader into the story through the vehicle of the fight. Only when we have done that are we moving from being choreographers to true storytellers of the blade.

I hate knights.

How is it that the biggest bunch of self-involved bullies in all of European history became the most prominent heroes in fantasy literature? These are the same brutish and brutal thugs who murdered, raped, and pillaged their way across Europe and the Middle East in the name of God (thanks a lot, Pope Urban II). Which pre-Madison Avenue public relations firm managed to convince us that knights – I mean, fucking knights – were the paragons of honour and virtue in the Middle Ages?

Were there any good knights? Sure. William Marshall, sometimes called the ‘Flower of Chivalry’ was probably an alright fellow, but he’s the exception that proves the rule. The vast majority of medieval knighthood was made up of noble-born thugs whose most positive contribution to society was due to the occasional accidental death that comes from charging at each other with long sticks on horseback for the entertainment of slack-jawed yokels.

The hell with knights. I’d rather write about heroes.

That little rant is what launched me into writing Traitor’s Blade. I wanted characters that I could see myself rooting for–men and women without the advantages of wealth or military power who fought in service to an ideal rather than a particular church or nobleman or even their own personal honour. In other words, I wanted my main characters, Falcio, Kest, and Brasti, to be the opposite of knights.

I took my starting point from the justices itinerant of England’s twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These were magistrates, appointed by the King and commanded to travel from village to village to hear cases, pass judgments, and ensure verdicts were upheld. A similar phenomenon existed in the United States, especially along the frontiers. In fact, Abraham Lincoln spent much of his early law career on horseback, travelling alongside a judge (the actual term ‘circuit court’ comes from the designated routes of these wandering magistrates.)

I was fascinated by how dangerous a life being a justice itinerant might be. What happens when a baron or count decides he doesn’t like your verdict? Which way might the local knight or sheriff sway when his financial wellbeing is in the hands of the man you’re ruling against? Worst of all, what happens when the sovereign who appointed you dies? Those questions became the basis of the Greatcoats – the wandering magistrates of Traitor’s Blade who dedicate their lives to bringing justice to those living under the capricious rule of the nobility only to be disbanded when the king who appointed them is deposed and killed.

With Traitor’s Blade, I wanted to explore the struggle to keep alive an idealistic view of the law that is at odds with the very foundations of a feudal society. This meant recognizing that, while Falcio, Kest, and Brasti might be heroes to me, they wouldn’t be seen that way by the majority of the population in the world in which they live. Where the knights are admired and respected as military men in service to the will of the gods (which, miraculously, tends to align with the interests of the nobles who employ them), the Greatcoats are despised by the nobility and often reviled even by the peasantry who see them as having failed to bring the justice they promised.

Creating these anti-knights also meant thinking about tactical considerations. Where knights are designed for war, especially mounted combat, the Greatcoats are trained to be expert duellists. In a society like Tristia, the fictional country in which the novel is set, trial by combat is an idea that is ingrained into the culture. It made sense that the men and women who had to hear cases and render judgments might often need to uphold their verdict at the point of a sword. So while the knights wear heavy armour, the Greatcoats wear, well, coats – long, leather coats with thin bone plates sewn inside to provide some measure of defence against the weapons of their enemies while still being light enough to manoeuvre in for extended periods of time. This also fit with the Greatcoats’ need to travel long distances at speed and be protected from the elements. Their coats contain dozens of hidden pockets with little tricks and traps and chemicals to help them survive the dangers faced by those whose role is in direct conflict with the powerful in society.

The more time I spent envisioning the Greatcoats, the more I found myself searching for other adaptations to the way laws are administered in a corrupted feudal society. Verdicts need to be remembered in order to be upheld and a large portion of the population in a country like Tristia would be illiterate. So the Greatcoats set their rulings to the tune of songs that people know – making it easier for people to remember. Verdicts also need people willing to do what’s necessary to uphold them, and so the gold buttons on the coats could be used to pay twelve men and women who would act as a kind of long-term jury and ensure the ruling was upheld after the Greatcoat left.

The process of developing a new societal role inside of a more traditional fantasy setting was without doubt one of the most fun parts of building the world of Traitor’s Blade. I doubt that the historical justices itinerant were much like my Greatcoats, just as the knights of European history have little in common with their modern portrayals. But I like to think that there was a spark of that idealism in those who once wandered the long roads in an effort to bring the machinery of justice to those who lived far outside the protection of the courts.

Note: I originally wrote this for John Scalzi’s Whatever.com back in 2014

The Mender of Soles

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a tragic play fraught with intrigue, betrayal, and murder that makes us question the very foundations of human nature.
It starts with a joke.

To be more precise, the first scene is a series of puns in which a nobleman is made ridiculous to the audience by a cobbler who refers to himself as a ‘mender of soles’ (which, of course, the nobleman hears as ‘souls’.) It’s a remarkably clever scene that no doubt set the audience of the Globe Theatre in 1599 falling out of their seats from laughter. But what follows is the destruction of friendships, the breakdown of civil society, and an unending series of killings until the world of the play becomes utterly desolate. So why on earth does Shakespeare start with a joke?

Using Humour To Bring The Audience Into The Story

People in sixteenth-century England lived in an era where war, disease, and crime were all a part of daily life. Imagine what that was like – knowing that those you cared about might well get sick and die at any moment, and you yourself could be called up to war and never come home. Now imagine sitting in the theatre and watching a couple of poncy actors get up during the first act and proclaim, ‘O, I am slain!’ You’d probably think it was ridiculous. In fact, you might even break out laughing – for all the wrong reasons. So Shakespeare used a series of opening puns to set the audience at ease. He convinces us, however briefly, that despite the play being titled The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, everything is going to be okay. Then he drops a little murder and mayhem on us and makes us squirm.

For modern writers there’s an almost mandatory convention of starting in medias res (“in the middle of things.”) Authors are expected to start with a bang – often as not from a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun. While it’s true that this gets the action started right away, it can often come at the cost of making the violence feel trite. After all, we had no particular reason to care about Mr. Smith, so why should we care that he’s just been shot? Or, conversely, that the hero or heroine just saved him?

Death on its own isn’t dramatic. Any remotely informed human being is aware that countless deaths are taking place all over the world all the time.. In fact, several people have died since you started reading this. And yet, most of us aren’t reacting to those deaths at all because we don’t have a context in which to feel the sense of loss that those deaths entail. Loss, and the possibility of loss, are the real basis of drama. It’s only when we sense jeopardy for our characters – the fear that they’re about to lose something precious – that we become engaged in their drama.

Modern fantasy has, for the most part, taken a turn towards the darker side of our imaginations. This is natural and reflects our need to explore our anxieties about the modern world in a different setting, just as noir novels and films did in the 1940’s and 50’s. But as in Shakespeare’s time, the audience isn’t always going to buy it if you just start with intentionally manipulative melodrama. Humour allows us to open with the characters in a dark place but still have the sense that there is something meaningful for them to lose.

Using Humour To Reveal Character

Another benefit of using humour inside of darker stories is as a way of revealing character. The spectrum of topics, forms, and styles of humour is so vast that the jokes we tell others reveal a great deal about us. Is your character a sexist pig who uses gutter humour in a way that unintentionally demeans those around him? Or perhaps he or she is a prude whose sense of humour lets us see how naive they are about the world around them. Think of a time that you told a joke when first meeting a potential love interest only to realise it was utterly inappropriate. The choice of joke – and the way you cringe at the memory of it – reveal a great deal about your background and sensibilities.

Using my own novel, Traitor’s Blade, as an example (if only because I know why I put things where I did), each of the three main characters has a different sense of humour that reveals something about them to the reader. Brasti loves nothing better than a good bawdy joke. He uses them as a way of reasserting a sense of normalcy about the world. As long as he still thinks it’s funny, life must be okay. Kest, on the other hand, is well known for never telling jokes. That’s why, when he suddenly tells one, we know something profound is happening to him. And finally, Falcio, who usually prides himself on his dry, sophisticated wit, finds himself at a loss when other characters point out how demeaning his cleverness can be.

Using Humour To Intensify Dark Scenes

Not every use of humour in a novel needs to be funny. Bitter humour – the joke told by your character that is never intended to produce a laugh – can actually emphasize the sense of loss the reader feels. For me this tends to work best towards the end of the second act of a novel when things have fallen apart and the characters haven’t figured out how to move forward. Black humour tends to pin us inside of a particular moment – forcing us to feel how dangerous the situation has become.

In Traitor’s Blade, Falcio does this in the dungeons of Rijou when he refers to his unnamed torturer as “Ugh” because that’s what comes out of Falcio’s mouth whenever the torturer hits him. It’s not a funny joke – rather, it amplifies our understanding that Falcio is at the end of his rope.
Conversely, sometimes you might want to use humour as a way of revealing hidden reserves of strength within the character. You can show them in the depths of their worst moment and just when it seems they’re about to drown in it, they say something that, while not actually funny, reveals a desire to make things better.

Using Humour To Heal The Story World

Many of the classic models for explaining narrative structure, such as the Hero’s Journey, emphasize the notion of returning the world to order at the end of the story. In fact, the hero’s role in the story is often to re-establish the natural order that had been shattered by outside events. But in dark fantasy there are usually profound consequences for the actions taken by the hero – ones that prevent us from having a traditional “happy ending” in which everything is back to normal (and in which ‘normal’ is a good thing.) Humour can be a tool for showing that, even though the external world has changed, there is still the potential for healing.

Note: This article originally appeared in Fantasy Faction back in 2014.