A wise man once said that a character can only be as smart as the person writing that character.
 
The modern fiction market is a vast wasteland of idiotic, morally objectionable characters who make the worst possible decisions at the worst possible times.
 
These characters either don’t communicate when they should or they communicate so badly that they make their situations worse than they need to.
 
Their behavior, decisions, and the situations they end up in as a result are so wildly unrealistic that they could never occur in real life because no one could possibly be that stupid.
 
This is the definition of bad writing.
 
The writers are so bad at their craft that they don’t know how to create realistic conflict, either internal or external.
 
The writer then falls back on the device of having the characters make the stupidest possible decisions.
 
The characters get themselves into situations that are totally avoidable and unnecessary.
 
The writer tries to pass this off as conflict when it isn’t. It’s just the reader watching the character flounder in a cesspool of their own idiocy.
 
We could explain this away by saying that these writers are learning from others who are as moronic as themselves.
 
New writers come along and copy the tropes and conventions of the brainless writers who went before them.
 
The new writers see everyone else doing it and think this is the way it’s supposed to be done.
 
The other possible explanation is that our society is so morally degenerate that the lion’s share of these writers are wallowing in the same intellectual and moral sewer as the rest of the population.
 
If ninety percent of the population is low intelligence, then it follows that ninety percent of the writers will be the same. Their characters will all be low intelligence, too, and they’ll act accordingly.
 
The same goes for the moral aspect of fiction.
 
If ninety percent of the population thinks it’s okay to engage in morally reprehensible behavior, then ninety percent of the writers will think it’s okay, too.
 
They won’t have a problem making their characters act the same way—which will lead to ninety percent of the fiction on the market displaying this kind of behavior as normal—which is exactly the state of affairs we find ourselves in right now.
 
Case in point: the movie Arrival (2016) directed by Denis Villeneuve and screenwritten by Eric Heisserer.
 
***Spoiler alert***
 
We won’t address the question of whether this movie was well directed, well shot, and well scripted. This post will focus on one aspect of the story that illustrates the point I’m making about idiotic and morally reprehensible characters.
 
The movie’s main character Louise learns an alien language that allows her to experience time in a non-linear fashion. This allows her to see events in her future that have not yet happened.
 
She sees that she will marry her future husband, Ian, and that they will have a daughter who will die of cancer.
 
Louise decides to keep their daughter’s impending death a secret from Ian. Louise foresees that he will leave both her and their daughter when he finds out that Louise kept the secret from him.
 
The movie raises the question of whether any individual would make the same life choices if they knew in advance what would happen.
 
Note that it doesn’t raise the question of whether she should have kept the secret from him.
 
The movie only raises the question of whether she would choose to give birth to her daughter knowing that the girl would die too soon.
 
We’re also going to put aside the obvious plot hole here that Ian would have known about his daughter’s death in advance, too.
 
The movie suggests that Louise taught the aliens’ language to everyone on Earth so everyone experienced time the way they do.
 
The question here is why the writers and directors made Louise do something so cruel to her husband and daughter.
 
This device serves absolutely no function in the story at all except to make Louise into a villain instead of a hero. This woman is a selfish, sadistic narcissist who deliberately inflicts unforgivable damage on the two people she supposedly loves so much.
 
It would have taken Louise a fraction of a second to sit Ian down and tell him the truth before they conceived.
 
Then the story could have proceeded exactly the same way. This problem could have been solved by removing a single line of dialogue from the entire movie.
 
Ian could have made the same choice to father a child and enjoy his daughter’s company for a few years before both he and Louise lost her.
 
The movie tries to make Louise come off as heroic for raising this girl on her own, but it doesn’t come off that way at all.
 
It just makes her look selfish and the movie makes Ian look like a shallow, selfish bastard, too.
 
The movie tries to make the ending seem all romantic and heart-warming. Exactly the opposite happens.
 
We can actually see the moment in Louise’s eyes when she makes the decision to leave Ian in the dark even when she knows it will drag him through the most torturous ordeal of his life.
 
This scene should be taught in the schools as a textbook example of narcissistic behavior. She knows exactly what keeping this secret will do to him and she does it anyway.
 
I honestly cannot imagine why the writers and directors think this is okay. I can only think of one possible explanation.
 
The entire production staff must be so morally degenerate that they actually think it would be okay to keep a secret like this from your spouse and the future co-parent of your child.
 
These people actually think it would be okay for a father to abandon his child and never see her again just because the mother was a selfish witch who destroyed his life by keeping an important secret from him.
 
Maybe the writers were trying to portray Ian as the bad guy here because he isn’t even present for his daughter’s death.
 
If the writers were trying to do that, they only succeeded in making Louise look even worse for driving him away.
 
She manipulated him into caring about a child he could never have—all to serve her own selfish whims.
 
She tricked him into getting her pregnant under false pretenses so she could play house.
 
The movie even implies that she shouldn’t have told him at all and that she should have kept the secret from him forever. She says the only mistake she made was telling him something she shouldn’t have.
 
Art has the potential to elevate humanity, teach us new things, and bring us closer together.
 
The modern fiction market seems to be deliberately designed to do the opposite.
 
It teaches an entire generation to engage in the worst, most toxic relational strategies, make the stupidest decisions for the stupidest reasons, communicate in a way most likely designed to destroy relationships and drive people apart, and drag all of us through the moral gutter along with it.
 
This is the picture we’re painting for the next generation of what’s normal.
 
We’re painting romance as a series of selfish, degenerate, toxic acts deliberately intended to make all relationships seem as destructive and hurtful as possible. This is what we’re teaching the younger generation to look for in romantic relationships.
 
We can look past the obvious social implications and see how this process actually works against us as fiction writers.
 
Portraying our characters making bone-headed decisions only serves one purpose—it makes the characters less relatable. This is exactly the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish as writers.
 
We want the reader to love the character and root for them. The reader can only do that if the character is smart and morally strong as well as resilient and forward-thinking.
 
The character has to face overwhelming odds or crippling life conflict and still make the right decision.
 
In many cases, there is no right decision. This is how life works.
 
We’re faced with an endless parade of Kobayashi-Maru scenarios. We just have to make a choice and live with the consequences.
 
This is how a writer creates compelling characters.
 
The question is then left in the reader’s mind whether things would have played out differently if the character made a different choice—or if the reader would make the same choice in the same situation.
 
The reader should never point to a character and say they were stupid, selfish, or just plain badly written. That’s a sign of artistic failure on the writer’s part.
 
The reader should never be able to find fault with the character’s decisions or at least be able to identify with why the character made the decision they did make.
 
Even in the case of the villain or antagonist, it’s still better to make them smart, insightful, and always strong both physically and mentally.
 
Making them anything else weakens the hero and paints them as pathetic, selfish, and unheroic by comparison. The better the villain, the better the hero appears by overcoming them.
 
Every character is a portrait of the writer.
 
What we’re seeing on display in the modern fiction market is an entire population of morons with access to computers.
 
These aren’t artists. They’re monkeys punching the buttons of their keyboards and churning out whatever random bullshit happens to pop into their heads.
 
This gives us a clear window into exactly what is going on inside their heads and it isn’t pretty.

Recently, I made the mistake of visiting a writer’s forum. The participants were talking favorably about using AI to improve their work.
 
Their logic was that AI is a tool that makes our lives easier. It boosts the quality of our work and makes everything more efficient the same way computers, cars, and kitchen appliances do.
 
One of the participants  in the discussion compared using AI for writing to using Python to construct complicated computer code or using an Excel spreadsheet to organize mathematical calculations.
 
By this analogy, the writer who uses AI to either generate or edit content isn’t a writer at all. They’re a computer programmer.
 
Before the days of Excel speadsheets, accountants used pen and paper to keep records of exactly the same mathematical equations. Accountants could easily go back to that now if they absolutely had to.
 
The analogous technology that makes writing faster and easier is Microsoft Word. I use Microsoft Word. The only thing Microsoft Word does for me is to make typing, cutting, and pasting quicker and easier than using pen and paper.
 
The content is the same because it all comes out of my head.
 
Plenty of modern authors still use pen and paper. There’s nothing better or nobler about it. They do it because it helps their creative flow.
 
Typing on a computer helps my creative flow because I can type as fast as I can think. I word-vomit the content onto the page. Writing with pen and paper would slow me down and cramp my flow. It’s a matter of personal idiosyncrasy for each writer.
 
The difference here is that the reader knows—and the writer knows—that the finished product came authentically from that individual writer. AI-generated content didn’t come from that writer. It came from a machine.
 
Computer code serves a specific function. Its function is to execute whatever task the code is programmed to execute.
 
Writing also serves a function. The function of writing is to communicate the writer’s ideas to the audience. That is the only function of written language.
 
A writer who uses AI—or any other tool to generate content—isn’t communicating with the audience. It’s the opposite of communicating with them.
 
This would be equivalent to the US President sending his speech writer to negotiate with the Premier of Russia. The Premier of Russia would be justifiably offended that the US President sent someone inferior to communicate in his place.
 
Your reader is far more concerned with receiving your communication than with how perfectly it’s written. If you’re worried that it isn’t written perfectly enough, the solution is to improve your writing skills—not to do something that could interfere with communication.
 
In the worst-case scenario, your reader would correctly assume that you substituted a machine to communicate in your place—which is the opposite of what communication is supposed to be.
 
All people have millions of thoughts going through their heads every single day.
 
Written communication acts as a lens through which your reader looks into your mind and sees the ideas the way you see them. Your writing skill either muddies the lens or makes it sparkling, crystal clear depending on how good your writing is.
 
Written language is synonymous with thought. Your thoughts are only as good as your ability to communicate them in writing. Writing things down is literally the act of organizing your thoughts.
 
We can directly measure the quality of those thoughts by how well you articulate them. Any random thought doesn’t mean anything until you communicate it in a way that the rest of the world can understand.
 
Using AI either to generate this written content or using AI to manipulate it into something other than whatever came out of your mouth or the end of your pencil—both methods short-circuit the communication process and the process of organizing your thoughts.
 
Ask yourself one question.
 
Why do you need to use AI at all?
 
I use spellchecker and grammar checker on my finished documents. Some might argue that these are AI tools.
 
Most of the time, I ignore the tool’s recommendations because it doesn’t understand things like idiom and readability.
 
Whenever the tool gives me a recommended correction, I critique the recommendation compared to what I know about punctuation, grammar, spelling, and word choice rules.
 
I also compare it to the way I want the work to flow and the message I want to communicate to my audience.
 
Nine times out of ten, the recommendation is wrong. I only know this because I know more about how written language works than the tool could ever know.
 
Only a bad writer would need to use AI to write content or improve it. You’re showcasing your lack of skill because you can’t produce something better on your own.
 
You wouldn’t need AI if you really did your job—if you really learned your craft and perfected all the rules and skills you need to call yourself a writer in the first place. You would produce an even better result without it.
 
If you’re bad enough as a writer that you have to use AI, whatever you produce will be bad because you won’t know what good writing is.
 
You won’t recognize where it needs to improve. You won’t think you need to improve because you’ve outsourced improvement to a machine.
 
AI can never be anything more than a crutch. It’s a shortcut on the road to excellence.
 
If you take this shortcut, you will never be excellent and everyone who reads your work will see you as the fraud that you are.
 
Think about the legacy you’re leaving behind with this content. Imagine your children and grandchildren looking back on the work you produced in your life.
 
Imagine how proud they’ll be of the books you wrote, the blogs you authored, the legal briefs you produced, and the research you conducted.
 
Now imagine how they’ll feel when they find out that you used a computer to generate this content. Which would you prefer to be known and remembered for?
 
The betrayal and disappointment they’ll feel will be equivalent to millions of young fans finding out that Lance Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs to win all his cycling titles.
 
Lance Armstrong spent years denying that he doped during his cycling career. Then the whole world turned against him when the truth came out.
 
No one denies that he actually cycled in those races. No one denies that he actually won those titles.
 
He might have been able to win those titles without using drugs. We’ll never know because he used a crutch to do it. He used a tool that made cycling easier, faster, and more efficient.
 
That’s what AI is. It’s a performance-enhancing drug.
 
It boosts your native skills and allows you to accomplish something more.
 
You might have been able to produce something as good or better if you only tried.
 
We’ll never know because you didn’t try. You took the easy way out and wound up with something mediocre and totally devoid of personality and excellence.
 
I could write every single one of my books using pen and paper. The result would be the same. The stories would be the same. The wording would be the same. The process would just take longer.
 
True greatness can’t be AI-generated. You will never be great if you cut corners, take shortcuts, and let technology do the work for you.

​All content on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann.
You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

We hear a lot in the fiction world about how our characters need to have flaws, backstories, and vulnerabilities to make them human. This is what allows our audiences to connect to and identify with the characters.
 
There has been a huge trend in the fiction world lately toward creating character-driven plots. These plots start off with the character’s flaws and insecurities as the focal point of the story.
 
I actually had a prospective client turn me down for a job because I didn’t use this approach.
 
We see examples of this littered throughout the fiction industry.
 
Harry Potter was an abused child, hated by his aunt and uncle, and kept locked in a cupboard under the stairs.
 
Katniss Everdeen is a poor girl struggling to survive in a harsh world without any advantages.
 
Bruce Wayne survived a violent robbery where he witnessed his parents getting murdered before his eyes.
 
All these characters experienced these traumas before the story starts. The characters’ backstories are supposed to make them more human and relatable.
 
A character’s insecurities, dark secrets, and hidden pain are supposed to inform the audience about the character’s motivations. The dark history is supposed to help us understand why the character does what they do in any given situation.
 
Personally, I see this approach as forced, contrived, and unrealistic.
 
When we meet a new person on the street, we don’t understand their backstory, their hidden insecurities, or their underlying motivations for doing anything.
 
We learn and discover that over the course of time. In most cases, we don’t ever find out any of that information about someone. We deduce it through their actions and behavior.
 
The same goes for fictional characters.
 
The best way to flesh out a character’s personality, motivations, and humanity is by displaying their actions and body language.
 
The audience meets the character for the very first time on the page the same way they would meet someone in real life. The audience knows nothing about this person.
 
Dumping a bunch of backstory on the audience is the worst way to make a character realistic and believable.
 
The Batman franchise is the absolute worst for this. Practically every instalment of the franchise begins with a flashback sequence. We revisit Bruce’s parents’ deaths leading into some shoe-horned segue that explains how the murders made Bruce become Batman.
 
Character development works much better when we play out the scene in real time and show the character’s personality through action, dialogue, and body language.
 
More of the character’s personality and hidden motivations becomes apparent as the story goes.
 
If the writer does his job, the events of the story will throw the character into different situations that cause the character to react in certain ways unique to his or her personality type.
 
We as humans are subconsciously programmed to make judgments about someone’s personality based on their body language and reactions to events that take place around them.
 
This is how we get to know people over time. A person never has to tell us their life story or explain anything to us. We make those judgments automatically and come to those conclusions on our own.
 
Given enough time, we’ll come to know the person even better than if they did explain themselves to us. People can lie to themselves about who they are and why they’re doing something.
 
Whatever a person tells us might be completely wrong—either because they outright cover up their own character flaws or because they don’t understand themselves well enough to give an accurate picture of why they do anything.
 
Getting to know the person and finding these things out for ourselves gives us a much clearer picture of who they are, what they’re capable of, and what motivates them to act the way they do.
 
The same applies to fictional characters. The events of the story will lead us to get to know a character better than if the writer dumps a bunch of information on the audience at the beginning.
 
Quentin Tarantino explains this perfectly in this video describing why he thinks Robert DeNiro is the greatest actor of our time.
 
Tarantino explains that DeNiro goes so deeply into becoming his character that he can only react a certain number of ways to any given situation.
 
These reactions reveal the character more thoroughly than any explanation could.
 
If a dog walks across the set, DeNiro doesn’t say, “Cut! Cut! We have to start over!”
 
He reacts to the dog exactly the way the character would.
 
This is what I do. Once I’ve created a character, I place them in a scene and allow the scene to play out naturally. The character can only respond to the situation in a limited number of ways considering their personality and experience.
 
Let’s do a little thought experiment.
 
How much difference would it make to the story if we never found out that Bruce Wayne witnessed his parents getting murdered in a robbery?
 
What would the Batman story be if Bruce’s parents never got murdered at all? What if they died in a car accident or were still alive and living in another part of the country?
 
What if Bruce just decided to become Batman because he couldn’t stand to watch crime destroy Gotham?
 
Would it really make any difference to the story if we take out that element of his history?
 
I say no, it wouldn’t make any difference. Each of the Batman stories would have played out exactly the same way because how he became Batman isn’t really that important. He already is Batman.
 
He would have battled the Joker and all his other nemeses exactly the same way whether he had that traumatic history or not.
 
We don’t need some sob story about his painful childhood to make us think he’s a poor little rich kid we should all sympathize with. That’s just the writer trying to manipulate us.
 
If an element isn’t critical to the plot, it doesn’t belong in the story. If the story works without it, then it has to go because it’s superfluous to the story itself.
 
It would work just as well or better if we saw Bruce’s inner conflict over his current situation. He’s only one man. He can’t be everywhere at once.
 
We could see him haunted by the horrors he’s seen on the streets and brooding over all the lives he can’t save.
 
What about Harry Potter? How would the story be different if Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon never mistreated Harry?
 
Would it really make any difference to the story if Harry showed up at Hogwarts as a happy, confident, well-adjusted boy?
 
Some might argue that he had to be abused to explain why he didn’t know he was a wizard. I personally wouldn’t have done it that way because I don’t think it’s necessary to the plot.
 
The author could easily have written it into Dumbledore’s letter asking the Dursleys to keep Harry’s magic a secret from him for his own safety. They could have been kind, caring relatives who went along with this for Harry’s benefit.
 
Then the story would have played out exactly the same way. This traumatic backstory is totally unnecessary and irrelevant to everything else that happens.
 
When I create characters, I drop them into a situation in the opening chapter of the book. I don’t tell the reader anything about the character at all. I let the reader to meet the character there as if they were meeting a total stranger on the street.
 
The unfolding events of the plot give the character plenty to cope with, struggle with, and react to. This is how the character develops.
 
The character will develop over the course of the story exactly the same way they would develop in real life. The past takes a back seat as the character attempts to cope with the present.
 
The history can be revealed later when it becomes relevant and necessary for the reader to understand it. It doesn’t belong at the beginning when the audience is just meeting the character for the first time.
 
I created a scene towards the end of the Prideland series where Renfroe and Tom Sharples meet in Renfroe’s garden.
 
These two characters have barely spoken to each other through the entire series and never in any meaningful way. They’ve barely been in each other’s presence for more than a few minutes over the course of five years.
 
They come face to face across the garden and they share a moment of significant eye contact before they start their conversation.
 
All the other events of the story leading up to this moment are what make this moment actually mean something.
 
This moment is a combination of forces that have been acting on both characters over the course of time.
 
The two characters didn’t know each other at all before the story started. Neither of them even knew the other existed.
 
The events of the story cause each character to mean something to the other. Each character exerts his influence on the forces affecting the other. This is how character development works.
 
These forces come together in a moment of significant eye contact. This moment means something even though the characters have hardly met or spoken before.
 
Two characters seeing each other across a garden wouldn’t mean anything without all the events leading up to it.
 
We never find out anything about Renfroe’s or Tom’s history before the story. None of that matters.
 
I did the same thing in Battalion 1. In the opening chapter, the audience knows nothing about Captain Corban Rhodes except his name and the current circumstances in which he finds himself. We don’t know anything about his past or his personality.
 
The unfolding events of the following chapters offer enough challenge and tension to create both an internal and external conflict for him to grapple with.
 
We see his responses, emotions, and struggles through his decisions, body language, and internal dialogue.
 
Battalion 1 never elaborates on Rhodes’s backstory because it isn’t relevant to the plot. None of the characters’ backstories are relevant to the plot.
 
Rhodes doesn’t ask about his subordinates’ histories because the situation doesn’t call for him to know that. The characters have enough to deal with already without digging up the past.
 
This is character development done the right way. Artificially inserting information about the character’s history is unnecessary and contrived.
 
It isn’t necessary or even desirable to deliberately assign flaws, trauma, dark secrets, or insecurities to make a character relatable. We don’t have this information in real life and it doesn’t work in fiction.
 
It works much better to start off with what looks like a normal person on the surface.
 
Remember the old saying: A normal person is someone you don’t know very well.
 
Getting to know the person over time reveals what makes them something out of the ordinary.
 
It works even better if the audience sees the person transform into something completely different over the course of the story.
 
The character doesn’t need to start out as something out of the ordinary. That could actually make them less relatable instead of more so.
 
It’s a sign of amateur writing when an author feels the need to insert these traumatic backstories that serve no useful purpose to the plot or even the character’s development.
 
The events of the story should be interesting enough. The audience wants to see the character’s effort to grapple with these events and the internal conflict that arises from the struggle.
 
These contrivances only weaken the character instead of strengthening them. It’s a sign that the character and the story itself aren’t strong enough to stand on their own.
 
The writer doesn’t have to manipulate the audience’s feelings into caring about a character they would otherwise find boring and one-dimensional.

​All content on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann.
You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.