What's He On About Now?

I made it home. Spent a lot of time sitting around the airport, thinking about writing. Spent a fair bit of time on the plane waiting on the tarmac, thinking about writing. Took a break during the flight to watch a couple of episodes of Carnivale on my iPod. Now, I’m home, doing my laundry, and thinking about writing.

Specifically, I’m thinking about my new novel.

I want to start fresh, after the seminar, and use the method and structure to see where they take me. To that end, I’m making notes about characters, scenes, the types of conflict, things like that. What I’m hoping to discover in the mess of ideas is what the story is about. Once I have that, I’ll have an idea about the antagonist (or forces of antagonism), and I’ll start to see the structure of the thing.

So, did I get what I wanted out of the seminar? Honestly, I dunno yet. I haven’t looked at the list, yet. Let’s do that now.

A better understanding of the underlying structures of story as put forth in the book. I primarily write short stories, with a single completed novel and half of another novel, and I find that thinking about things as Acts and Scenes and Beats doesn’t come naturally to me.

Check. His examples helped this sink home very nicely, and walking through Casablanca was very enlightening.

A better example of the way the elements discussed in the book work together to form the whole. There are tons of examples of each individual idea in the book, but they’re drawn from a number of different sources to illustrate individual points. The seminar features a stop-and-start viewing of Casablanca to analyze the movie scene-by-scene in light of the principles presented in class.

Check. Again, the viewing of Casablanca helped a lot, though there was a lot of time spent on the cinematic aspects of the movie. Fair enough; the seminar is primarily targeted at screenwriters, and I can see how useful and valuable that discussion would be. Some of it was interesting to me, some of it wasn’t. But the exercise gave some real insight into how everything fits together.

Discussion about the various points. Books are great, but a live tutorial session illuminates so many more elements of the material.

Check. Very much check. Several times during the session, I found myself thinking, “Oh, so that’s what the book meant!” Sometimes you just need to hear the right words the right way to really get it.

A renewed passion for writing. I’ve been a little bogged down, mentally, and really want this to recharge my batteries and get me excited about writing again.

Check, and check again. I really want to stay home from work tomorrow to get a full day’s work done on the new novel, but that ain’t gonna happen. Thank god for laptops and lunch hours.

Inspiration about the central conflict in a novel I’m working on. I’ve got a good idea for setting, some good characters, some interesting scenes, but no actual PLOT yet.

Kinda check. See, I don’t have the central conflict, yet, but I do have more confidence that it will emerge as I build and structure the novel using the method from the seminar.

See a little of Vancouver. I’ve got most of a day to walk around, and the hotel is near the waterfront, and Chinatown, and Gastown. I’ve never been to Vancouver, so I’ll be a bit of a tourist.

Check. I also got see one of the cruise ships pull into dock from the window of the seminar venue – it’s an experience I have to remember if I ever have to describe something huge and ponderous and building-sized moving. It was awe-inspiring.

Have dinner with my cousin. He lives there, and we’re going to a place called Sanafir. Once you get past the annoying (but pretty) intro, it looks like interesting food.

Check. Good food, good company.

So, that’s my trip. One last thing to tell you folks – on the taxi ride back to the Vancouver airport, I saw a sign that said, “Left turns restricted ahead. Use Hemlock.” I thought that was a little harsh*.

*I was tired and my head was full of literary thought. I make no apologies.

So, it’s over.

Today was just as long as the previous two, but parts of it dragged more for me. This was simply because more of today’s topics dealt with things more specific to screenwriting than novel writing. Not that the ideas presented were not useful; they just really emphasized the screen over the page. Still, ideas about dramatizing exposition and events, minimizing and pacing dialogue, and developing subtext have real application in all storytelling.

But it was less directly applicable to me, and so seemed to go on longer.

Also, the food court at the venue was closed today, meaning the lunch break was a little more frantic, which meant it wasn’t as much of a break.

I sound like I’m complaining, don’t I? That’s not my intent. But three long days of lectures – even lectures on a subject you love by a fantastic speaker – are very tiring.

The viewing of Casablanca was everything I had hoped it to be. It illuminated a number of key concepts, and showed how the pieces fit together. 

It also highlighted what a deep, rich movie it is.

Tomorrow, I’m going to take a look at my list of what I wanted out of the seminar and see if I got everything – tonight, I’m still a little to close to it. And tired.

I do want to say three last things.

First, what Robert McKee teaches is not difficult on a conceptual level. Learning the form and structure and techniques he teaches isn’t hard. But it opens up a whole depth and breadth of possibility and complexity – once the basics are down, you’ve got a lifetime ahead of you of working to master the form.

Second, Mr. McKee’s seminar (and book) will not fix your writing. It won’t fix anything. But it gives you a set of tools that you can use to fix your writing. It’s not magic. It’s a recipe for hard work to get better. Work that you have to do yourself.

And by you, I mean me.

Third, I shook Mr. McKee’s hand and thanked him for the seminar, and told him how much I enjoyed it. And he said to me, “Do something great with it.”

So, y’know, no pressure.

Another very full day, and my head is buzzing.

The group seems to be relaxing a little more in the seminars; there’s more response to Mr. McKee’s jokes and questions, a little more conversation among attendees at the breaks, and just generally a looser feeling.

The subject matter is tightening up, though, getting into more specifics of the craft of building stories. Three-act structure, building mystery and suspense and dramatic irony, the principle of antagonism, handling exposition, stuff like that.

I don’t know how the man does it. My energy is flagging by the end of the day, and all I’m doing is sitting, listening, and taking notes*. He’s lecturing the entire time I’m sitting in the seats, and he’s still lively and energetic and interesting at the end of the day. A testimony to his stamina and the passion he has for the subject**.

The passion’s contagious. I’ve got a number of new ideas for my writing projects from the seminar, and I’m so eager to use them that I spent last evening, and plan to spend this evening, putting some of what I’ve learned into practice.

A friend of mine once told me that he tries to pick the moment in a seminar or session when he’s got his money’s worth. Sometimes it comes early, sometimes it comes late, and sometimes it doesn’t come at all. It’s a way to evaluate, on the fly, how much value the seminar has for you.

My moment came today, during the afternoon, when it finally clicked for me why the novel and a half that I’ve written so far weren’t working the way I wanted them to. I know how to fix it, too. I’m just not sure it’s worth the time to go back to that when I have a couple new ideas that I could start fresh with, and avoid those mistakes.

Anyway, one day to go, and half of that is going to be watching Casablanca, which I’m really looking forward to. Seeing all the pieces laid out on the workbench is no substitute for seeing how it all fits together in a working movie.

*Not as many notes as I had feared; I’ve got the book, and that covers a bunch of stuff. And a lot of the lecture is paraphrasing basic principles to make sure the point sinks home. And there are a lot of examples to illuminate the principles, and stories to keep everyone’s interest up. 

**I’ve used the word “passion” a coupe of times talking about Robert Mckee. Maybe it sounds melodramatic, but that’s one of is defining characteristics, at least during the seminar.

Wow.  That’s a long day.

Got to the venue just after 7:30 and registered. That was pretty early, so I got to hang out in the lobby for a while before finding a seat in the auditorium. And the session went a little long, so I was over there for about 13 hours in all. 

A long day.

And how was it?

I liked it. 

Robert McKee is intensely passionate about story as an art form. His love of it comes out in his presentation, as he swings from topic to topic and anecdote to anecdote. He is, by turns, gleeful and wrathful, frank and teasing. He draws you in and invites you to share his love of story.

He can be a real martinet about anything that disrupts the flow of his lectures – tardiness, cell phones, talking. His explanation is simple and harsh: he doesn’t want some attendees wasting the time of the other attendees. A laudable goal, in my opinion.

There’s a lot of material, and some real depth to the subject, and he’s got it all at his fingertips. He’s obviously been delivering this seminar long enough that he’s got most of it memorized, and needs to check his notes mainly to pull back to the main point when he follows a tangent or anecdote a little far afield. In short, he displays a complete mastery of the subject matter.

And what did we cover today? The basics. Things like discussing definitions so that we were all working from a shared vocabulary, and talking about what story is, what it isn’t, why there isn’t enough good story around, how story relates to the setting and characters and meaning and audience, and how to write from inside your characters.

Interspersed with this was a wide range of social and philosophical and political commentary, along with stories from the world of screenwriting. These are interesting and entertaining. In fact, his presentation reminds me of video I’ve seen of Richard Bandler, one of the developers of NLP, giving a seminar – he wove in stories and jokes and digressions until he had the right comfort level instilled in the audience, then moved on to the subject matter at hand.

And there’s a fair bit of profanity woven into the presentation. He explains that away by saying that there’s a part of him who is still a twelve-year-old boy that enjoys talking dirty in public.

One day in, and I’ve already got a number of ideas about how to move ahead on some of my writing projects. And the desire to do so. I’m going to try and make a start tonight, but I don’t know that I’ll get much done.

As I said, it was a long day.

Back in the saddle tomorrow.

Got up early today to catch the plane to Vancouver.  I realized yesterday that it had been a long, long time – better than ten years – since I had flown. This was brought home to me when people at work started asking me if I had stocked up on little bottles for my shampoo, etc.

Y’know, it’s a good thing that it was people at work telling me these things. If it had been my friends, they would have taken terrible advantage of my ignorance.

That said, the flight was pretty routine. Security took a little time to get through, and they swabbed my computer to test for “bad chemicals,” and the airline didn’t have any free food or drinks, but I got a window seat and I spent the flight listening to Night and Day by Robert B. Parker on my iPod. It was good.

And wow, was it something of a challenge to find my way out of the Vancouver airport. But I did. And then got a ride in a cab to the hotel, along with an earful about how much the Olympics are costing the taxpayers, and how expensive it is to operate a cab.

At the hotel, my room wasn’t ready. I hadn’t expected it to be, as it was only 10:00 a.m. and check-in time was 3:00 p.m. I really just wanted to drop my suitcase off and take a walk around the downtown. Still, they were very apologetic, and I wound up (when I returned from the walk), upgraded to an executive room, free of charge. Nice folks here at the Ramada. They also loaded me up with a tourist map and pointed out some things I should see.

And then on to my walk. I first scouted the venue for the seminar, to make sure I know where I’m going tomorrow. It’s about a three-minute walk from the door of the hotel, and looks pretty nice, though the actual auditorium was closed and I couldn’t check it out. I like being that close to it.

So, then on to a walk. I saw Chinatown, and the Steam Clock in Gastown, and the waterfront, and lots of the downtown area of the city. On the way in from the airport, I had been surprised at how much greenery there was everywhere. Less of that in the downtown area, but still some nice little parks*. The streets seem more claustrophobic than Winnipeg, mainly because there’s more tall buildings and hills.

Oy, the hills. Living in a city that’s flat as a table doesn’t prepare you for walking the streets of Vancouver. And it’s pretty hot here, today – it was about 28 C around noon. That made me pretty happy when I got back to the hotel and found out about the upgrade, which includes free water in the room.

So, now I’ve been resting up before meeting my cousin for dinner. Apparently the restaurant is about seven blocks away, which is a pretty nice walk. I’m meeting him at 6:30, so I’m gonna jump in the shower now and head out at 6:00.

And then back to the hotel to bed. Another early morning tomorrow.

EDIT

Just got back from Sanafir. Three things to know:

1. My brain keeps wanting to call it Sarafin, blending seraphim and paraffin into some sort of wax angel in my head.
2. Tough to find. I walked past it three times, and finally had to ask someone. No real outside signage.
3. The food and the service are both amazingly good. Heartily recommended.

*I almost got high on the pot smoke coming off Victory Park as I walked by.

I leave tomorrow morning at 8:00 local time for Vancouver, and the STORY seminar. I’m really looking forward to it.

Something I like to do with seminars of this nature is to set out what I want out of the event; that way, I know if I’m getting what I want, and I can determine if it was worth the time, effort, and expense.

So, what do I want out of this trip?

• A better understanding of the underlying structures of story as put forth in the book. I primarily write short stories, with a single completed novel and half of another novel, and I find that thinking about things as Acts and Scenes and Beats doesn’t come naturally to me.
• A better example of the way the elements discussed in the book work together to form the whole. There are tons of examples of each individual idea in the book, but they’re drawn from a number of different sources to illustrate individual points. The seminar features a stop-and-start viewing of Casablanca to analyze the movie scene-by-scene in light of the principles presented in class.
• Discussion about the various points. Books are great, but a live tutorial session illuminates so many more elements of the material.
• A renewed passion for writing. I’ve been a little bogged down, mentally, and really want this to recharge my batteries and get me excited about writing again.
• Inspiration about the central conflict in a novel I’m working on. I’ve got a good idea for setting, some good characters, some interesting scenes, but no actual PLOT yet.
• See a little of Vancouver. I’ve got most of a day to walk around, and the hotel is near the waterfront, and Chinatown, and Gastown. I’ve never been to Vancouver, so I’ll be a bit of a tourist.
• Have dinner with my cousin. He lives there, and we’re going to a place called Sanafir. Once you get past the annoying (but pretty) intro, it looks like interesting food.

And for those who care about these things, I settled on two spiral-bound notebooks and a set of gel pens.

Have you heard about this guy?

I had heard mention of him, then I picked up his book, STORY.

Actually, I went looking everywhere for the book, because I had heard it was good. I couldn’t find it locally. I was getting ready to break down and order it online, but then, in a box that I hadn’t looked at in some time, I found that I had actually bought it some months before and never started reading it.

I started reading the book and was amazed. Not that everything he said in it was a revelation, but he managed to bring to consciousness a number of things that I was doing instinctively, which gave me a greater understanding of the writing process. He provided a structure and vocabulary in a number of areas where I lacked it, allowing me to think in a clearer, more methodical way about how I built stories.

And how to make stories work.

He gives a number of seminars each year, all over the world. Inspired by my friend, Michael, who made one of his dreams come true last summer by walking the pilgrimage to Santiago, I decided that I was going to attend one. This year, he’s only doing one in Canada, and that’s in Vancouver. It starts this coming Friday, and I’m going to be there.

I’m really very excited.

Each of the three days of the session is apparently almost twelve hours long, but I’m going to try and update this blog each day for anyone interested in what’s going on.

Tonight, I have to go find a good notebook (or notebooks; the woman organizing the seminar said she filled three yellow legal pads when she took the seminar) and some nice pens.

I like shopping for stationery.

I’m gonna get a little philosophical in the following post, so be warned. There’s some musing ahead.

I play a lot of RPGs. Right now, I’m playing in three different games, and running three more, not counting the computer RPGs that I indulge in as time permits. I also read a lot of books – got four of them on the go at the moment. And I write a fair bit. Writing is my day job (technical writing), and I’m currently trying to finish writing a novel.

This means that I think a lot about stories.

I’m thinking now specifically about stories in RPGs, because I just finished writing up the character diary for one of my characters. This is something I decided to take on because my character is a bookish, scholarly sort who would keep a diary. My GM in that group has asked me to post it on the game’s forum site, so that it can serve as a recap for the players, and I’m cool with that. It’s fun to write, fun to explore the development of the character out of game time, and fun to let his voice mature through the entries. I’ve done similar things with other characters, but this is the first time I’ve decided to keep a game diary from the get-go, and to make it public. Well, public among the others in the group.

But it’s got me thinking about narrative structure and convention within RPGs, and whether we are, in fact, generating stories when we play.

(Now, when I say “story,” I’m using the word in a very particular way. I’m referring to something that would appear in a novel, short-story collection, movie, or television. That’s a pretty formal and narrow definition, I know, but that’s really part of the point I’m trying to make.)

Yeah, I know, the current trend is to view RPGs as collaborative improvisational storytelling, but are we really telling stories?

I’ve been noticing that, as I write up my diary entries from my notes during play, that I have to do a fair bit of fleshing out of things that didn’t actually happen in play, or smoothing over and conflating things that did happen in play. And even then, it’s hard to call my finished product a story. Even when taken together, the entries from an entire adventure don’t really make up a story. Here’s why:

• Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. RPGs certainly have a beginning, and a whole lot of middle, but the ending is very often not a clean, defined thing. Sometimes, games fade out as interest wanes, sometimes they are abandoned when something new comes along, sometimes they’re ditched after a TPK. Sometimes they make it to a defined ending point, but even those often leave many loose ends and follow-ups. And the middles sort of go on forever, which is really part of my next point.
• Stories have focus. They tell a tale, and show you what’s important to the narrative progress. RPGs may have that sort of thing set up in their structure, but focus tends to go out the window once the players get involved. Because people pick up on different things, are interested in different things, and think about things in different ways, they don’t always spot the plotline right off the bat, and tend to wander around a bit trying to find it. Even when they do find it, they rarely want to focus specifically on it – their characters all have other interests as well as the main storyline.
• Stories are (generally) controlled by the teller. This is what give stories their structure and focus. One voice, one vision, one direction*. In RPGs, the control is split among all the participants, players and GM alike, and each has a different agenda. Each player views his or her character as the main character in the story, and views the story to be about them. Plus the others, but mainly them. This is what weakens** focus and structure in RPGs.

When I look at my completed diary entries, or talk to people about what happened in a game, it doesn’t come out very storylike. The diary entries feel like diary entries, in that they are a strung-together account of events. They may have a little more focus and direction than real-world diary entries, but not a whole lot. Talking about games is the same way – outlining everything that happens in a game doesn’t provide a clear, focused narrative, because of all the little things that clutter it up. If we want to talk about the experience in a meaningful and interesting way, we tend to string together anecdotes from the game to highlight moments that had an impact on us.

Let’s look at the standard D&D*** game. If you tell the “story” of the game, it goes something like:

Goblins were attacking the town, so we went out into the woods, and fought some goblins. Then we fought some goblins with wolves. Then we camped overnight, and a bear attacked us. In the morning we followed the goblin trail to the caves. Along the way, we fought goblins twice more. One of the groups had a shaman. At the caves, we fought goblins with wolves in the first room, then goblin archers behind stacks of haybales in the second room. In the third room there was a pit trap, and we fought some more goblins. Finally, we got to the leader, and he was a bugbear, so we fought him and won. Then we went to collect our reward.

As a narrative, it’s not all that interesting. You fought a lot of goblins and things, and saved the town. There. I just boiled it down to a single sentence. Even if you have a group of very skilled roleplayers who are totally immersed in their characters, it’s not going to really add all that much to the story except some filler scenes to separate the fights.

I wouldn’t buy a book that told that story.****

And have you ever tried to tell a game story to a non-gamer? Don’t even bother. Their eyes glaze over pretty quick, even if they understand what you’re talking about. Even with gamers, what interest there is comes from comparison and identification with their own gaming experience. And a lot of gamers you tell your game story to are just nodding and smiling until you’re done flapping your gums so that they can tell you a real cool gaming story from their own lives.

Now, the argument could be made that I’m oversimplifying and that some RPGs are rich in story. I don’t think so, but I’m fine with being told I’m wrong. What we call story in RPGs is primarily background – the stuff in behind the stories. Or the infamous metaplot, which is closer to what I think of as story, but that I don’t think really comes on stage properly in the average game.

You could also say, “It’s the GM. My GM makes great stories.” And you may be right, but I don’t think so. It’s not that your GM isn’t great, but your GM is making campaigns and adventures, which are story skeletons that get fleshed out by play, and it’s the play that keeps the RPG experience from being story.

I’ve done it myself, creating a campaign that ran for just about eight years, with a storyline running through it, and a beginning, middle, and end, but I have to admit, after the fact, that it wasn’t a story in the way I’m talking about here. It was a collection of events, with a common theme and a sense of linkage to lead from one to the other, and a resolution that tied up most of the loose ends and put a lid on things. But it wasn’t really a story.

So, by my definitions, as outlined above, I’ve pretty much proved***** that what happens in RPGs is not story in the strictest sense. What is it then?

It’s a game.

Now, that may sound obvious or ridiculous, but I think it’s an important distinction. It’s a game, with rules that simulate events in which we participate. It produces a series of linked, simulated events that occur because of our interaction with the rules. These series of events can be adapted and restructured to produce a story, if we put in the effort to weed out the extraneous and add the missing. By applying the structure, focus, and control I mentioned above.

It’s fine that RPGs don’t produce stories as I’ve defined them. In fact, it’s a good thing. The bits that keep RPGs from being the same as novels are the interaction and surprise that emerges from play. Those are great things to have. Control of narration in the hands of the participants is a whole lot of fun. As a GM, not having to flesh out every detail of a plot, and relying on my players to supply the exciting parts is fun. As a player, knowing that I can steal a moment or two in the spotlight, and watch each of my friends do the same is fun.

What about the repetition? Well, that’s fun, too, because in the simulationist rules of the game, it produces varied and interesting results. What does that mean? It means combats are exciting. Introducing a random chance element into play is exciting. It doesn’t look exciting when it’s written down on the page, but man, when you’re rolling and praying for that natural 20, you are excited.

It just doesn’t make for such an interesting story.

So, enjoy the game for what it is. And enjoy stories for what they are. The two are not the same, though, so think about that the next time you read a book or play a game. Look at the differences between the two. It can tell you a lot about the nature of narrative and play.

And, in closing, lest you think I’m picking on games, it happens elsewhere, too. The musical Cats, for example, is a wonderful show, with good music, good lyrics (yay for T.S. Eliot!), good dancing, and great look to it. I love it.

But it ain’t got a story, neither.

*Now, admittedly, this isn’t always the case, but I’m playing it up as a rule to heighten the contrast of my argument. So all you postmodernists out there just bear with me.

**I say “weakens,” but it’s not necessarily a negative. I could also have said “increases the freedom and spontanaeity,” but I am, once again, trying to make a point.

***If there is such a thing. This may be the same sort of philosophical construct as the square root of -1, which doesn’t exist as a number but makes some important high-level math work.

****To be fair, I have bought books that tell that story. And I’ve enjoyed them. I just wouldn’t call them good stories.

*****And if I haven’t, sshhh. I’m bored now, and moving on to the next section.

Okay, we know I’ve started this blog primarily to talk about the Dresden Files RPG. But why am I so hot about the game? And the books? And even the TV series?

Being obsessively introspective, as well as fascinated by story in general, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought.

On the surface, the series doesn’t seem to do anything really new. Magic in the modern world. C.S. Lewis did that in The Magician’s Nephew. Heinlein did it in Glory Road. Peter Beagle did it in Folk of the Air. But that’s okay. There are no really new ideas anymore; I’m pretty sure the Greeks used them all up by the time Aristotle got around to writing his Poetics. Stories may spring from ideas, but ideas aren’t the real driving force of stories.

Stories run on three engines: plot, character, and theme. Ideas can affect any of those three, and usually do, but it’s the end result that we look for. Pulp stories like Doc Savage are big on plot. Things like Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories are all about character. Theme-driven stories usually get lumped into more literary categories, but Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm are good examples.

Okay. So now I’ve defined my terms. Let’s talk about Harry.

Plot:

The plots are decent, if not stellar. They’re no better or worse than the plots in the average mystery novel. If I had to pick a mystery author to compare them to, plot-wise, I’d probably pick Robert B. Parker. Nice twists and turns, a decent number of surprises, no cheats, and it often ends in mayhem. Now, nothing else about the books is really similar to Parker’s writing, but the complexity and solid construction of the plots are about equal.

They are well-served by the rich setting of the books. You’ve got the normal people of the world, including cops, gangsters, coroners, geeks, students, bartenders, store clerks, and anything else you might want. You’ve got the wizards, three types of vampire, four or five types of werewolf, faeries by the bucketful, many ghosts, demons, fallen angels, and even three holy knights wielding magic swords. Add the spirit world (the “Nevernever,” in the books’ parlance) to Chicago’s rich real geography, and season the whole thing with many contracts, grudges, secret deals, and death curses, and there’s a real wealth of material for the plots.

Jim makes good use of it, too. Ten books in, and the plots are still new and engrossing, with interesting elements added every book, and established elements developed further. It’s one of those series whose stories really reward being read in sequence – it’ll draw you on, book by book, to the end.

Now, that said, they’re standard mystery plots. You know there’s going to be a bad guy, and that your first couple of guesses as to what’s going on and who’s doing it are going to be wrong. That’s okay, though. The plots are serviceable and enjoyable, but they aren’t what I read them for.

Theme:

The themes in the Dresden books are good ones. Deep ones. Universal ones.

What does it mean to be a hero? What does it mean to be human? Does power always corrupt? Do the means justify the ends? What is the nature of family? And always, where do you draw your line?

Lots of other books, movies, comics, and other media deal with all these questions, as well. Why? Because they fascinate us. They help us understand choices people make, both in fiction and in real life. They help us decide about ourselves.

Jim handles these in a very smart manner. Harry, the hero of the books, is constantly faced with the questions, and we get to see him struggle with the decision, and the consequences of his choices. That’s good. But the really good part is that the books have other characters facing the same questions and making different choices. We get to see the path not taken, and we can decide whether or not Harry made the right choice. Or if there is a right choice.

See? Smart.

Still, nothing really new here. Just handled well. Sort of like the plots.

Characters:

The main focus of the books is the wizard Harry Dresden. They’re written in the first person, and he’s our viewpoint character. And he’s pretty great.

Sure, in the beginning of the series, he’s a pretty standard archetype of the smart-mouthed PI, with the mystical ability to level buildings thrown in. But as the series develops, you get to see behind his facade. You begin to understand why he’s a smart-mouth. You understand why he’s working as a PI. You understand why, even though he can level buildings, he tries really hard not to. And the reasons are things we can understand and even, in a way, relate to. You learn that he has a code that he follows, one that even he doesn’t admit to. You know the pain that drives him, and the struggle he endures between what he could be and what he should be.

He also has what is, in my opinion, the single most telling trait of a literary hero: the ability to get back up one more time than he’s knocked down.

In true noire tradition, he regularly gets the crap kicked out of him physically, mentally, and spiritually. And yet, he still finds the strength and the reason to crawl back from the pit and face the bad guy. And win.

In a way, he reminds me of a more powerful, less cynical version of my favourite modern fantasy hero, John Constantine of the Hellblazer comics. He knows what he thinks is right, and he won’t quit until he wins, no matter what they do to him. Because he’s fighting the good fight.

The supporting characters in the book sort of work the same way. When you first meet them, they are typical, if interesting, stereotypes. As their role in the story progresses, they grow and develop, without ever losing what made them interesting in the first place. Murphy, the tough-as-nails female cop shows why she tries so hard, and how hard she works to survive in the world of the Chicago Police Department. Charity Carpenter, who hates Harry, becomes much more real when you understand her love of her husband (he saved her from a dragon, after all) and children, and her fears that Harry is going to get her husband killed. Even Thomas, the whimsical sex vampire, has reasons for his on-again, off-again alliance with Harry that make sense.

In short, Jim did his homework. He fleshed out the characters the way you need them to be fleshed out if you want them to be real to the reader. He starts you off with a quick sketch, then fills in all the backstory you need to make sense of them.

And no more. That’s important, too. He knows when to leave it alone.

So, good, solid characters. Maybe nothing really groundbreaking, but well-realized, likeable or hateable, and understandable.

Conclusion:

So, decent plots, decent themes, better-than-average characters. How does that add up to my addiction to the series?

Lemme ask you this: when was the last time you read a book where the author did everything well, and some things superbly?

I don’t know about you, but I usually find myself overlooking certain flaws because of strengths in other areas. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books have decent plots, decent characters, but rehash the same theme of honour and masculinity in every book, usually with long conversations between Spenser and Susan. Still good books. David Eddings’s Belgariad series had a moderately interesting theme, very rich characters, but only enough plot to get you from one character moment to the next. Pretty much all of Heinlein’s stories had grand, expansive themes, rollicking plots, and characters so flat you could slide them under a door. Same thing with Asimov.

So along comes a series with no real weaknesses, and one telling strength. Of course I like it.

And there’s another reason, that has more to do with writing style than story. They’re quick reads. I blast through one of them in a day or so, without stealing time away from work or other responsibilities. Sure, I like the dense stuff, too, but I like it when a book takes me by the hand and says, “Sit down. Relax. No pressure. Here’s a fun story that’ll take no effort. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

And I do.