writing

The Triplets of Tennerton – The Interview

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

In which I steal a bit from John Scalzi and sit down and talk with a probing interviewer – myself! – about my new book.

So you wrote a sequel to Moore Hollow?

Yes, it’s called The Triplets of Tennerton and it’ll be released on May 29.

What a sec – wasn’t Moore Hollow a standalone novel?

When it came out back in 2015, yes, that was the plan. Since its release, however, I had several people ask about writing a sequel. I didn’t really plan to do one, but I came across a real-life inspiration that made realize I could tell some more stories set in that world.

Good grief, you’re not doing another trilogy, are you?

No, not this time. This series is going to be open ended, with each book basically being a standalone adventure. Characters and references will build from book to book, but there won’t be one overarching story that’s driving to a particular conclusion. You can pick up any book in the series and enjoy it without knowing what came before.

So it’s just going to end one day?

That’s possible. I do have a pretty good idea of a story to tell to “end” it, but I’ll jump off that bridge when I come to it.

What’s the setup for this new series? How does it tie into Moore Hollow?

Ben Potter, the main character, has decided to relocate permanently from London to West Virginia. He’s bought a home in Sutton and set up a website called Paranormal Appalachia, where he’ll investigate various local beasties, legends, and other strange goings on.

Hold up – isn’t Paranormal Appalachia the name of this series?

Indeed! It’s what Frank Zappa called “conceptual continuity.”

There are bizarre musical references in this one, aren’t there?

A couple. Ben’s very much like me with regard to his taste in music.

No wonder he’s single.

Anyway, think of Moore Hollow as the movie that set up this world and Triplets (and later stories) as the TV series spun off from it.

In what way?

In the sense that there are several new characters in Triplets that will have a recurring role throughout the rest of the stories.

Such as?

The main one is a local lawyer, Grace, who actually comes out of my first successful NaNoWriMo novel (that nonetheless will never see the light of day). She was an Assistant Federal Public Defender who got a case that dipped into UFOs and whatnot and has developed a reputation for dealing with “weird” cases and clients.

I’m guessing that Ben gets wrapped up in one of those weird cases?

Yup. A old guy named Sid Grimaldi is charged with burning down his home decades before, resulting in the deaths of his infant triplet daughters. Grace takes the case and hires Ben to do some of her investigating.

Naturally, Sid didn’t do it.

That’s what he says, but there’s more.

Oh?

Sid says he knows his girls are still alive, that they didn’t die in that fire.

That sounds impossible.

Did I mention that Ben investigated paranormal and other weird things? Impossible is just the start of it.

Was there an inspiration for that case?

Yes, I’ll be talking about it more in a couple of weeks.

What else is there to look forward to in the coming month?

In addition to a post about the inspiration for this story there will be a couple of excerpts. Then it’ll be release day!

I guess that means it’s time for details.

Right. The new book is called The Triplets of Tennerton and it’s coming out May 29.

The original Moore Hollow has also been revamped to make it part of the Paranormal Appalachia franchise. Get yours now so you’ll be ready for Triplets when it lands on May 29.

Programming Note

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I’ve been delinquent with the blog posts the past couple of weeks. Partly that was due to some business travel related to my day job, but more so it was due to having a few different irons in the fire I thought I’d tell you about.

First, you’ll recall my newest project, that I started during NaNoWriMo last year. As I said in December, although I’d “won” by hitting the 50,000-word target for the month, the first draft wasn’t finished. It wound up not actually getting finished, for a couple of reasons. One of them was that a second main character kind of appeared in my brain and inserted herself into the story in a way that shifted things a bit and made finishing the originally conceived first draft kind of pointless. Long story short, I’m now working on the second version of that first draft, polishing and adapting what’s already been done and weaving in my new character. I’m really excited to see how it comes together.

Second, you’ll also recall that I have a sequel to Moore Hollow in the works. I’m also doing the final prep on that to get it ready for release this summer. Part of that includes rebranding Moore Hollow as the first book in a new series, Paranormal Appalachia. Part of that is a new cover. I don’t want to share it, yet, but here’s some idea of the imagery in it:

The new book finally has a title, The Triplets of Tennerton. More details in the coming months!

So, for the next few weeks, I’m going to buckle down and work on that stuff. Back here in May, I imagine. Until then . . .

Returning to the End of the World (and the Story)

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Last year I wrote some about how the ending of Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World, which I had just read, had been changed in pretty big ways for the film adaptation, Knock at the Cabin, directed by M. Night Shyamalan. At the time I hadn’t seen the movie for myself, and now that I have I wanted to circle back on the matter.

To recap (in spoiler-filled fashion), the book and movie are both about a family – two dads and their young daughter – who are beset in the titular cabin by a group of people who claim that the apocalypse is imminent and the only way to stop it is for one of the family members to kill another (suicide won’t work). The family refuses the bargain and the tension creeps up as it appears that, just maybe, the end of the world is nigh.

As I said last year:

Here’s where things part ways, significantly, between book and movie. In the book there is a struggle over a gun that leaves the little girl dead. Eventually the dads escape (all the intruders die) and they confront the question of sacrificing one of themselves just in case the world is really ending (one is now more of a believer than the other). Ultimately they decide not to, essentially concluding that any kind of God that would require such a thing isn’t worth obeying, and they walk off into a brewing storm that may or may not just be a storm. In the movie, by contrast, the girl is not shot and one of the dads decides to sacrifice himself to save the world on her behalf. The girl and her remaining father leave and find evidence that the sacrifice really is stopping the world from ending.

In that earlier post I was focused on the question of which ending was better described as a “happy” ending – the one where characters refuse to play the game of an abusive deity or the one where they sacrifice for the greater good. Both are a choice and neither is wrong in any kind of a normative sense – one will work better for some, the other for others. Nonetheless why the choice was made is kind of fascinating.

Having seen the movie I did my usual post-viewing due diligence (reading reviews and such) and came across this article which goes into why the ending for the movie was changed:

Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, who wrote the screenplay with Shyamalan, agreed the book’s original, grim ending had to be changed for film.

“We adapted it slightly different than the book, and then [Shyamalan] had a whole new vision for what the ending could be,” Desmond and Sherman told Variety at the “Knock at the Cabin” premiere. “The book is the book, and the movie is the movie, and we think they both were exceptional mediums. This is a big, wide release movie that is meant for a very large audience. There are some decisions that the book made that were pretty dark and may have been a little too much for a broader audience. That was a decision that [Shyamalan] immediately recognized. It’s a great ending now.”

Now, without a doubt, more people saw Knock at the Cabin than read The Cabin at the End of the World. That’s true of any book turned into a movie or TV show (alas). Is that a good reason to change an ending? It feels kind of chickenshit to me to decide the masses can’t handle the ambiguity of the original and decide to spoon feed them a “happier” ending. It’s one thing to imagine that you’re just improving on it from an artistic standpoint (Shyamalan, at least, appears to lean more this way in terms of his outlook on the world), but to admit to dumbing it down feels cheap.

It should be clear by now that I prefer the book’s ending. The entire story, for me, is all about ambiguity: Is what these people are saying about the world ending real? Is it a hoax? Are they honest, but mentally ill, believers? It also gets at an issue that’s frequently lost in popular discussion about the existence of one god or the other – that even if some being like that exists it might not be worthy of worship or obeisance. The book leaves you much more to chew on than the movie does. I may be in the minority, but that’s OK.

Endings are hard. They’re harder still if you’re engaging in some kind of triangulation in an attempt to find the “right” ending for a particular audience, be it broad or narrow casted. Find the ending you think works best for the story. If it puts off some people, well, that sucks. You can’t please all the people all the time – and most of the time it’s a folly to even try.

New Story, New Music – and Come See Me!

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

A couple pieces of “new” to let you know about.

New Story & New Event!

First, I’m very happy to have a story in the debut volume of Old Bones, the new annual literary journal of Henlo Press.

The story is called “To the Sound of Birds.” It’s about a guy setting up to sell used pulp paperbacks at a swap meet in a high school parking lot when he starts to hear odd noises from the mountain across the highway. Naturally he investigates and discovers something beyond his wildest imagination.

For what it’s worth the inspiration for the story was just that – the high school parking lot where my local SCCA chapter used to autocross was across the highway from a pretty sizeable mountain and, one day, I heard something weird from over there. Didn’t check it out, though, so I suppose we’ll have to let my imagination run wild, right?

You can get a physical copy of Old Bones by clicking here or a Kindle version here.

Or, if you want not just a physical copy but a signed copy, you can come see me! On February 25 I’ll be at Henlo’s first Writers’ Block event at the community center in Barboursville, WV. Things kick off at noon and readings by some of the authors start about 12:45 – maybe you’ll get a chance to hear a chapter from my forthcoming Moore Hollow sequel. It all leads up to the launch of 304 Monsters by Stephen Bias, which looks pretty cool if you’re into the weird West Virginia thing (and who isn’t?). I’ll also have all my other books there, too, if you need to stock up.

New Music!

It’s been a couple of years since I put any new music up, but I’m finally getting around to finishing some of the bits and pieces that have piled up since. The genesis of this one actually dates back to the year of the plague, but I didn’t start to really develop it until recently. It’s called “Chihuahua Junk Pixies.” I don’t remember specifically where the name came from, but I’m sure it had something to do with these two:

It’s bouncy and fun, at least in parts, and, if I may say so, kind of catchy. Enjoy!

It’s All Right, They Have a Warrant (and Fangs)

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

I’ve seen a question posed in various places on social media the past few weeks:

I thought if anyone is qualified to answer this question it might just be the guy who is both a public defender and a writer of fantasy (with horror overtones in spots). So, what of it – can that vampire cop enter your house against your will?

Let’s start with the assumption that we’re talking about an American vampire cop here, so they’d have to comply with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits “unreasonable” searches and seizures. It also requires a warrant to execute a search of a home. An arrest warrant will also allow police to enter a home, if they have the necessary suspicion that the person named in the warrant lives there.

A search warrant has to be based on probable cause that evidence of a crime is present in the place to be searched. It’s not a particularly high standard, not even up to the level of “preponderance of the evidence” used in civil proceedings (essentially 51% certainty) and a far cry from the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard needed to convict someone of a crime. Warrants must be particular as to the things to be seized and the places to be searched. That’s supposed to prevent exploratory rummaging of the kind that occurred under “general” warrants in the pre-Revolutionary era. The application of all this in particular cases is tricky and what keeps me employed, but the basic concepts are easy to grasp.

Perhaps not quite so much for vampires, since their lore varies from telling to telling of particular stories. Nonetheless, there does seem to be a consensus that vampires require permission before they can enter a home. According to this article it dates back to at least the 17th Century and a Greek theologian who stated that a way to be safe from vampires was to stay at home, as they couldn’t enter without being invited. But why? One explanation is that the rule “reflects the idea that evil, represented by vampires, can’t harm you unless you allow it to. It’s a choice, an act of free will.” Tough shit if you get taken in by a slick talking blood sucker then!

With that said, let’s set the scene – Detective Angel and Lieutenant Louis show up at your home. As vampires they cannot come in uninvited. Fun fact – as cops, they can’t either! Except, of course, they have a search warrant, which they do (it allows them to search for any and all implements relating to killing the undead). Does the warrant let them in even if you don’t invite them?

The basic answer, I think, is “no.” The law is the law, but the rule that vampires can only enter with an invitation operates more like a law of nature. Police could no more get a warrant to stop the tides or keep the sun from rising than they could to allow a vampire entrance to a home without an invitation. Nor are warrants commands to someone to allow police into your home – they are permission for the police to enter using any means necessary, hence SWAT teams and knocking down doors in the middle of the night.

But the basic answer is not the only answer. For one thing, if we’re assuming a world with vampires – vampires who are police, no less – then presumably the law has made some accommodation for this. Can a court, as part of issuing a search warrant, compel a homeowner to give permission for the vampire police to enter? I don’t see why not. Courts frequently order people to do things they otherwise don’t want to do, including things like provide blood samples and fingerprints. This doesn’t feel any different and doesn’t lean into that kind of acquiescence that might trigger Fifth Amendment self-incrimination concerns (like giving up the password to your phone).

For another, who gets to give consent to enter and how much consent is enough? Many years ago the Supreme Court decided a case where police showed up to a home in response to a domestic dispute. They asked for permission to search the home – the husband denied it, the wife consented. Police searched the home and found drug paraphernalia. The Supreme Court ultimately held that the search was invalid because so long as one person present when the request for consent was made objected to the search, it didn’t matter what anybody else said. In such situations, police had to go get a warrant.

So what if, when our vampire police walk up with their warrant, you’re willing to invite them in but your significant other who also lives there is not? Does the Supreme Court’s rule for the Fourth Amendment carry over to vampire invitations? Or is it a one-person-to-a-home situation? I’m leaning towards the latter, since, as I understand it, once a vampire is invited into a home it is forever invited, implying that consensus among the occupants isn’t necessary.

What makes the question fun to ponder is the clash of what seems like two absolutes – a warrant permits entry versus a vampire’s need to be invited. But that rests on the presumption that the law wouldn’t evolve to account for the fact that (a) vampires were real and (b) they worked in law enforcement. The Founders didn’t imagine automobiles, but the Supreme Court figured out how the Fourth Amendment interacted with them. Same with cell phones. I have no doubt that a legal system that’s been in a constant state of evolution since at least the Magna Carta would figure out how to deal with vampire detectives.

But until then? Ask to see the warrant, then keep your mouth shut, unless you’re asking for your lawyer.

At Least I Got This Cool Graphic

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NaNoWriMo is over, which means it’s time to take stock and see whether it was all worth it. Was it? Well, I did get this spiffy graphic:

Which means, yes, I “won” again this year. I’m particularly pleased since the month included not only Thanksgiving (which my wife and I host for the family, so lots of work) but a birthday weekend jaunt to New Orleans (thanks, honey!) and I still managed to keep to task and wind up with 50k+ words in the end.

I’m really happy with them, too. There are definitely things that need to get worked out in a second draft (I have notes, of course), but this story and this main characters and taking me to some different, interesting places. Alabrie, the city-state where the story is set, is shaping up to be a character all in itself.

It’s not done, of course, not even the first draft, but I can see the end of the tunnel. More than most books I had a real idea of what the entire story was before I sat down to write it. Still, much work still left to do.

Am I a Hack?

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People create for lots of different reasons. Some folks do it purely for the fun or catharsis of creation. Some do it as a vocation, if they’re good at it, enjoy it, and can hit the market just the right way. Others are trying to tap into something fundamental about humanity or probe deep into the eternal mysteries of the universe. And some just want to share their creation with the world and hope it brings a few people joy.

I fall into that last category. I write largely because I enjoy it, because it’s fun to tell stories, and I hope some other folks out there will enjoy reading them. I’m not trying to write the “great American novel” or plumb the depths of the human condition to help better understand my fellow people. All I’m really interested in is entertaining, maybe more thoughtfully sometimes, but that’s it.

Does that make me a hack?

I never thought so until recently. To my mind, “hack” was a pejorative term. Wikipedia, at least, agrees with me, defining a “hack writer” as a:

Term for a writer who is paid to write low-quality, rushed articles or books “to order”, often with a short deadline. In fiction writing, a hack writer is paid to quickly write sensational, pulp fiction such as “true crime” novels or “bodice ripping” paperbacks. In journalism, a hack writer is deemed to operate as a “mercenary” or “pen for hire”, expressing their client’s political opinions in pamphlets or newspaper articles. Hack writers are usually paid by the number of words in their book or article; as a result, hack writing has a reputation for quantity taking precedence over quality.

Putting to one side the unwarranted bias against “pulp” writing or romances inherent in that definition, it’s clear that being called a hack is insulting. It’s a charge that your insincere, only in it for the money, not making art but some kind of crass commercial product. If I was called a hack I’d be deeply offended, same as if someone in my professional life called me a shill or a mouthpiece.

But maybe I’m looking at things all wrong, if this Slate piece by Sam Adams is right. Titled “Bring Back the Hack,” it argues that movie studios should look to “hack” directors to helm their big-budget franchises rather than getting up-and-coming auteurs whose singularity tends to get squished in the franchise machine, anyway:

The problem here is two-pronged. The first is Hollywood’s penchant for sucking promising young directors into its maw, tempting them into selling their artistic souls to the franchise devil with medium-fat paychecks and the possibility of speaking to a larger audience. The second is that the movies frequently end up being lousy, extinguishing whatever hint of personality made the filmmaker attractive in the first place and revealing them to be hopelessly out of their depth when tasked with bending a massive studio movie to their will. You don’t get the unique stamp of an artist, but you also don’t get the frictionless craftsmanship that would be brought to the job by a seasoned old hand—in other words, a hack.

Adams seems to deem the primary feature of a “hack” as being that “you don’t know who they are.” He then launches into a discussion distinguishing workmanlike directors such as Jon Turtletaub and even John Huston from true auteurs. Later on, however, he sort of admits that “hack” isn’t really the word he’s looking for:

That’s where hacks come in. A hack—or, if you insist on a less prejudicial term, a craftsperson—isn’t out to make a movie their own. Their aim is to fulfill the task set before them. Like former cinematographer Jan de Bont and former costumer designer Joel Schumacher, they often entered the business from the lower ranks of the crew rather than as writer-directors, rising to the top with an understanding based in the practicalities of production. A hack is a perfect match for a formula film, whether it’s the latest IP extension or simply squarely in an established genre, because they don’t consider themselves better than the material.

This “craftsperson hack” category includes, for Adams, people like Ron Howard (who won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for A Beautiful Mind) and Jon Favreau (who launched the most successful film series in history, not to mention The Mandalorian). If those guys are hacks then I suppose I’d be happy to be called one, though that term doesn’t feel right. Neither is somebody that’s on my list of favorite directors, the kind of people whose stuff I want to see just because they made it. But Adams cites Favreau’s going to battle with the studio to cast Robert Downey, Jr. for Iron Man, which hardly seems like a pliant, go-along-to-get-along kind of thing. Hell, if hacks can make stuff like Rush then sign me up.

At any rate, I don’t think the same kind of distinction can be made with writers. Name brands are a thing, after all, since people like to read more books from an author if they liked one of their books. That applies equally to deeply sublime stuff and more pulpy just-for-fun stuff. I suppose the closest thing you have in books is situations where some established author’s name continues to hold sway even though others are actually writing the books. Zombie comic strips come to mind, too, I suppose.

I tend to agree with Adams that bringing in somebody known for their personal vision in movies to direct the next comic book flick is kind of a waste. Regardless, I don’t think defining hack so broadly as to lose its meaning does anybody any favors. Leave to it the stain of uncaring make work, produced without any personal motivation.

I may be a lot of things, but I think I’m safe in saying I’m not a hack.

Decision Made (Finally!)

/ JD Byrne / 5 Comments

The more I write the more I realize that coming up with ideas isn’t the hard part. What’s hard is figuring out which ideas have legs and can become stories or books. Sometimes it takes some hard work to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

When Heroes of the Empire came out in June  it brought to a close a long period of focusing on one world and one project. Since 2018, at least, when I started the first draft of Gods of the Empire, I’d basically lived in the world of the Unari Empire, building it out and telling the stories of my characters in it. The only reason I felt able to work on the sequel to Moore Hollow in the spaces between those books was that it meant returning to a world I already knew.

At the same time, I was gathering ideas like some thieving magpie, putting them away in various Word documents for a later date. I knew from the time I collected them that some had more substance than others, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how long it would take me to figure out which ones were which.

See, the thing with trilogies, at least for me, is that they are an implicit promise to the reader – I know how this ends and I’m going to finish it in good time. If I say “here’s my new book, it’s the first part of a trilogy,” rest assured that, barring some unforeseen circumstance, I’m working on those books for the next few years.

Which means, back in June, I got really excited about the idea of diving into a new world. Part of what makes writing fantasy so fun is you get to let your imagination wander and come up with strange new places, things, and people. Writing a trilogy means that you have to put that wandering on hold and I was happy to get my walking shoes back on (so to speak).

And I had a target – I wanted to start my next book during National Novel Writing Month. I’ve done that for several of my books. NaNoWriMo provides a great way to focus on writing for a month, even if what you’re left with on December 1 is only two-thirds or even one-half of a finished manuscript. That would give me a couple of months to build the world, flesh out the characters, and then figure out what was going to happen to them.

Easy, right? If only.

I actually had to go through my idea files pretty brutally, with virtual red pen and everything, and just get rid of stuff that didn’t really strike my fancy. Some of those were mere ideas (“surely there’s a fantasy story in the Scapa Flow incident, right? What about High Noon but with wizards!”) that were never going to become a real story. Others were things that I’d hung on to so long without developing that I figured their time had passed. Ultimately, they were ideas that I just didn’t see sprouting stories and I hadn’t faced up to that fact yet.

In the end I had about three dozen ideas that could become my next project, so I decided to so what my anal retentive self always does – start dividing and conquering them. I put each idea into one of four groups – Sci-Fi, Older Fantasy, Newer Fantasy, and Non-SF/Fantasy (yes, I’ve got a couple of those). The goal was to produce a “winner” in each group and then compare those four to each other. I almost worked – I wound up with five finalists because I couldn’t decide between the top to Newer Fantasy ideas.

I worked through each idea. I took a week and spent one day thinking through all the angles I could for every one. I did a PowerPoint presentation for my wife to get her feedback on the ideas. Good ideas that I at first thought were front runners fell by the wayside either because they weren’t as deep as I’d hoped or they just weren’t singing to me.

Finally, last week, I was in Richmond for court and had some time the night before to work through the final three (don’t worry, my colleague was doing the argument the next morning). I walked around my hotel room, talking to myself, arguing the pros of a particular idea then playing devil’s advocate and tearing it apart. After a couple of hours, and a really enormous calzone, I finally made a decision.

My next project has the working title The Fall. It’s inspired by the sad tale of Franz Reichelt, a Parisian tailor who met an infamous fate:

To use an awful pun, that’s the jumping off point for this project. It’ll be set in a similar kind of world, timeline wise, but include what I think is a really nifty magical element. This is my first time building a magic system for one of my novels, so I’m both anxious and excited about the prospect. Structurally I’m leaning toward doing something like Citizen Kane, where the main character is investigating someone’s life and we see it play out in flashbacks.

All in all, I’m really looking forward to diving into this.

And, yes, it is the one my wife liked best.

The Prequel Problem

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

Ending stories is hard – trust me. But figuring out the right place to start them can be just as hard. That’s true for all kinds of stories, but particularly fantasy or sci-fi stories where you have to build the whole world around the story you’re telling and the characters involved. By definition their world existed before their story did and will continue to do so once it’s over (barring apocalypse, of course).

Which explains the popularity of prequels. There’s so much backstory to dig through, most of it only hinted at, that there appears to be a rich environment to exploit. It must also seem like a fairly safe investment, since you’re dealing with, if not familiar and fan-favorite characters, at least events and histories in which the fans are already invested.

But there’s an inherent problem with prequels – they’re playing in a universe in which the future is already known to us. That can box writers in and sometimes make it difficult for the prequel to stand on its own as a piece of compelling drama, something we should care about for its own merits.

I thought a lot about this problem over the weekend as the wife and I (at her suggestion!) finally caught up with the Obi-Wan Kenobi series.

The six-episode series is set in the time between Rise of the Sith, with its culling of the Jedi, and the original Star Wars (aka A New Hope), a time during which, for all we knew, Obi-Wan was living off the grid on Tatooine keeping tabs on Luke Skywalker. Years pass, of course, so the idea that he didn’t get into anything worthy of telling a story about is pretty sad, but do the writers use that freedom to do something really interesting?

No, not really.

The inciting incident of the series is when Princess Leia is kidnapped on Alderaan (nice planet – too bad it goes boom) by, of all people, Flea. This is part of a plan to draw out Obi-Wan so some Jedi hunters can get him. Those Inquisitors are kind of interesting and could have been explored in some depth, but they have a boss and his name is Darth Vader. And so, the series largely revolves around maneuvering Vader and Obi-Wan into the same space.

As a result, we get two solid confrontations between them, the second of which would have felt like a pretty epic duel if it had any kind of stakes. It couldn’t, however, because of the prequel problem: both Vader and Obi-Wan survive to fight again in Star Wars, so neither can be killed or even seriously injured in ways that conflict with the “future.” Likewise, young Leia (who, as you might expect, is quite the scamp) is never in any real danger, as we know she survives unscathed. Indeed, the series punts her offscreen for the final episode mostly, as it rushes back to Tatooine for a confrontation between one of the Inquisitors and Luke’s family – which, again, we know will ultimately come to nothing.

It didn’t have to be that way. Using Leia’s kidnapping to lure Obi-Wan out of hiding was a solid idea. Imagine if she’d mostly stayed off screen (a MacGuffin, if you will) while he scrapped with and evaded Inquisitors and grew into his status as a hero. There’s actually a good character arc in the series, as Obi-Wan goes from trying to lay low and hide to being more engaged with the Rebellion. Isn’t that a cool enough story to tell? Do we need the Vader stuff? Do we need any suggestion that Leia or Luke will be harmed?

Star Wars knows how to do this. Rogue One is regarded by a lot of people as the best Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, even though we knew precisely how it was going to end. What made it work was that existing characters were largely absent and we got to know and care about a whole new cast so that when they made the necessary sacrifices to complete their mission it landed with some heft.

Ultimately, I think the prequel problem is a matter of characters rather than universes. After all, we read historical fiction all the time that involves real events. It’s not what happens to characters, it how it effects them, changes them, that matters. But when your prequel ties itself to characters who can’t change, that becomes a problem. I’ve dinged Star Trek – Strange New Worlds for tying itself too closely to characters steeped in Trek lore, rather than freely exploring people we know nothing about.

I’ve never really been interested in the idea of writing prequels. I had a prequel story, of a sort, for one of the characters in the Unari Empire trilogy that I almost wrote, but ultimately decided that all that was important about him was in one of the books already. Generally speaking, I’d rather go on and dive into a new world with new characters than revisit old ground.

But if you asked nicely . . .

Is the ATAC a MacGuffin?

/ JD Byrne / 2 Comments

For Your Eyes Only is my favorite James Bond flick.

Part of that is due to when I saw it, it being one of the first Bond movies I’d seen. But a big part of it due to the fact that the spine of the movie’s plot is a more plausible Cold War scenario than the Dr. Evil inspiring big bads Bond often faced.

In a nutshell, a British ship (disguised as a fishing trawler but really a spy ship) sinks off the Greek coast. On board was the Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator or ATAC, a computer that helps coordinate the UK’s ballistic missile fleet. Naturally the Soviets want to get their hands on it. Bond, aided by supreme Bond Girl Melina Havelock, tries to get it back for the Brits. In the end . . . well, the end is one of my favorites of all time:

So I was delighted to come across an episode of the All 80s Movies Podcast about For Your Eyes Only. I was surprised, though, when the guys on the podcast called the ATAC (which they hilarious mispronounce “AhhTAC” – it’s not like they don’t say it over and over again in the movie!) a “MacGuffin.” That didn’t jive with my idea of what a MacGuffin was and got me to thinking about it.

The term apparently dates to about 1930s or 1940s and was coined by a British screenwriter named Angus MacPhail, who worked a lot with Hitchcock. As defined by the OED, a MacGuffin is:

a particular event, object, factor, etc., presented as being of great significance to a character or characters, but in the end proving illusory.

Hitchcock would further explain that a “MacGuffin is the thing that the spies are after, but the audience doesn’t care” and, ultimately, “is actually nothing at all.”

It’s that last part that I always associated with the concept of a MacGuffin. A famous more recent example is the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, which multiple characters go to great lengths to possess, but we never learn what is inside, except for:

But I’m seeing lots of examples cited of things that are, to my mind, so substantial to be considered MacGuffins. Some cite all the things in the Indiana Jones movies (as in “Indiana Jones and the BLANK of BLANK”) as MacGuffins. This includes the Ark of the Covenant in the first movie – but they find the Ark, it melts some Nazis, and basically deus ex machina’s Indy’s escape. Is that a MacGuffin? Another list includes Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, a real human being with whom the main character significantly interacts, as a MacGuffin. That makes no sense to me. Likewise the Death Star plans in Star Wars – not only do they jump start the plot, but we see them after delivery and the info in them allows Luke to blow the place to shit!

Other examples hew closer to my conception of a MacGuffin. “Rosebud” in Citizen Kain, for example, since the important part of the story isn’t the damned sled but that rise and fall of Kain’s life. The Holy Grail in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is an even better example, since it motivates the action but is never seen or obtained by the characters.

While pondering all this I checked out one of the all-time great MacGuffin movies, which I’d never seen, The Maltese Falcon.

It definitely fits the mold of MacGuffin I have in my mind. The bird itself doesn’t show up until about 15 minutes from the end of the film and then, once it’s revealed to be fake, ceases to have any real meaning. Rather, the movie is about what the pursuit of this object (which Bogart’s Sam Spade calls “the stuff that dreams are made of”) changes and corrupts all who decide to pursue it. It could be anything – a Javanese lion, an Andalusian wombat – and the same story gets told. That the damned thing matters to the characters but doesn’t to the audience seems to be the whole point.

I suppose for me the question is how important the actual item is to the resolution of the story. If all it does it motivate people and the ultimate identity/characteristics of the thing doesn’t matter, I’d call that a MacGuffin. If it’s more important than that, probably not.

Where does that leave the ATAC? Since we see it in action, then see it recovered, then stolen, and then ultimately destroyed by the main character so the bad guys can’t have it, I’m definitely not getting MacGuffin vibes from it. It’s just too important to the movie, including the wider world of it. The world of The Maltese Falcon continues to spin regardless of how that petty crime is resolved, while the world of For Your Eyes Only gets considerably more dangerous if the ATAC falls into Soviet hands.

Ultimately, what qualifies as a MacGuffin is probably in the eye of the beholder. As a writer, it’s a useful tool to have in order to motivate characters. On the other hand, don’t lose sight of the fact that sometimes the little doohickey everybody is trying to get their hands on is pretty damned important in its own right.

Just like obscenity, you know it when you see it.