Gratuitous Sex and Violence

I’m in the midst of slogging my way through the latest thriller by a NYT bestselling author. I’m putting myself through this torture because I like to keep current with the publishing industry, and because the subject of this particular book touches close to something I’ve written myself. Since I’m not enjoying the process, I’m reading fast. And I’ve found I can skip the action sequences without missing anything. I’ll come to one and think, Oh, good; the bad guys are going to try to kill the heroes again; I can skip ahead at least ten pages!

If that isn’t the definition of gratuitous violence, I don’t know what is. I’m reminded of the gratuitous sex scenes that populate so many of today’s romance novels. When I was judging RITA entries, I frequently found myself skipping sex scenes, too. Now, since authors put in sex and violence in order to make their books more entertaining, yet some of their readers are actually skipping those scenes, something is obviously wrong.

So how does a writer keep an action sequence—or a sex scene—from being boring?

In the best action sequences or a sex scenes, something happens that actually moves the plot forward. We learn something new about the characters. The characters learn something new about themselves or each other. The action ups the stakes. Or it changes the characters’ motivation. Or it changes the characters’ goal. Or the characters acquire new information that causes them to alter their course of action. But something has to happen besides just violence or sex. When nothing changes—if the characters and the conflict are all the same at the end of the scene as they were at the beginning—then the scene is gratuitous. The writer could yank the car chase/shootout/sex scene from the plot (or the reader could skip it) and no one would notice. The plot line would flow on without interruption or confusion.

Unfortunately, today’s audiences are so addicted to sex and violence that writers frequently feel the need to insert sex/violence every so many pages/minutes. Now, it’s pretty hard to make each and every one of those scenes pivotal. Yet I do think it is possible to have gratuitous sex and violence without boring the more discriminating members of your audience. How? By creating sympathetic characters.

If your readers care about your characters, they will be carried along by the action, both because they care what happens to the characters and because they like spending time with them. If I’m watching a movie and I don’t like the characters, I have nothing at stake; I couldn’t care less if they killed or caught. Oh, our heroes are being shot at again? Yawn. Let me go make another cup of tea…

Even if I don’t care about the characters, an action sequence can still hold my attention if it’s well done, if the sequence is original, or funny, or cleverly orchestrated. Ironically, the NYT bestselling author of the thriller I’m reading at the moment writes really, really bad action sequences. They’re unoriginal, unbelievable, and badly executed. There is absolutely nothing to entice me to read them. So, I skip. A lot.

Of course, a lot of people really don’t care if the sex and violence in a book or movie is gratuitous or unoriginal--they're actually reading/watching for the sex and violence. Sigh.

When a Character Won’t Gel

This isn’t a problem I have often, but I’m wrestling with it now: the antagonist in my current WIP (Work in Progress, i.e., THE DEADLIGHT CONNECTION) just won’t come to life. He lies there on the page, a pale dull reflection of nothing.

Why? I’m not sure. The character in question is an Army general. Now, I know military men. For heaven's sake; my father was an Air Force colonel and I’m married to a retired Army colonel. But this character is also hyper-religious and a racial bigot. And while I’ve known a fair share of people like that, too (although not, fortunately, too intimately), for some reason my General Boyd just won’t gel.

I spent most of yesterday trolling the Internet, reading some truly scary stuff written by some truly scary people out there. Rabid evangelicals (with ready White House access) who think the End Times are upon us and all they need to do to help things along is go nuke Iran. People who homeschool their kids to protect them from the evil influences of biology classes and then send them to colleges where students pledge not to KISS until they’re married. People who drip hatred and ignorance and vile prejudice (many of them also with White House access).

And still the General lays there, an illusive cardboard figure.

I’ve developed his background (for my own usage; most of this stuff never sees the light of day). I know all about his childhood. His rowdy, beer-drinking youth. His decision to “take Jesus Christ as his personal savior”. His marriage and his six kids. And still he lies there on the page, hollow and wooden.

Bookstores are full of popular thrillers with silly, unreal villains. I keep telling myself, Most of your readers will neither notice nor care.

But some will. And I will.

Going Against Cliché

I have a writing rule I borrowed from one of the books I’ve read on screenwriting (sorry; I don’t remember which one). The basic concept is that whatever idea first pops into a writer’s head—whether it’s for a character, a setting, or the direction a scene will take—is usually the cliché. A wise writer will ignore that easy answer and keep looking. I’ve found it to be a useful rule to follow. Recently, I had a good example of just how useful it can be.

In THE ARCHANGEL PROJECT, one of the protagonists has a next-door neighbor. When it came time to create him, my first thought was to make him gay. Bzzzz. Cliché, right? So I kept searching. The result was a character named Ambrose King.

Now, the funny thing is that both my agent and editor raved about Ambrose King. They both said, What a great character! Can’t we see more of him? My first reaction was, huh? This guy is little more than a walk on, a hole filler: I needed someone to take care of the heroine’s cat. He appears in person in exactly one scene. There is another brief scene where the heroine calls him and asks him to take care of the cat, and a two-line paragraph where the bad guys mention his name and what he does for a living (he plays the sax at a tourist dive down in the French Quarter).

I was puzzled. What was it about this character that touched such a chord with both my agent and editor? So I asked my agent exactly what she liked about Ambrose King. Her answer? “I think every woman would love to have a male next door neighbor like that. The kind of guy friend she can ask to take care of her cat.”

Her answer made me think about the genesis of Ambrose King, and how he started life as a stereotypic heroine’s gay friend. Instead, he turned into a scraggly musician with long hair and a beard. I had a lot of friends like Ambrose when I was young--irreverent rebels with a built-in antagonism to the forces of the law. The role Ambrose plays is still that of a nonsexual male friend. The only difference is, he isn't gay. That’s what makes him unique, and that’s what makes him memorable.