Writing Fantasy Heroes

by Jason M Waltz (ed)

  And in self-anointed “serious” literature (as if the rest of literature were playful, or about nothing), where the hero is definitely out of fashion, the hero has simply been displaced into the meta-story. The hero of Lady Chatterly’s Lover is not in the novel; the hero is D.H. Lawrence, who heroically shattered the conventions of his time, making himself admirable to those looking for their heroes among the makers rather than the subject matter of literature.

  Even if the author deliberately avoids anything that smacks of heroism or admirability, they’re going to sneak into the story one way or another, because it is impossible to tell a story without, in effect, declaring what is important enough to be told about in story (or through the act of telling this particular story).

  In other words, heroes cannot be avoided; they can only be disguised or displaced. Those who congratulate themselves on preferring post-heroic literature are merely deceiving themselves; indeed, they declare themselves to be heroes of a kind, because they do not need the heroes that common (or old, or dead, or ignorant) people need.

  However, not all heroes are created equal.

  There are heroes who seek to be heroic—the great figures of epic who set out to lead Great Lives, like Achilles, a petulant god-chosen child of warfare. Brave in battle? Highly skilled at killing? Yes and yes. Glory-seeking, pouty, and utterly selfish? Yes again, and again, and again. By our moral code, at least.

  Achilles is a hero of a Heroic Age, who is conceived of by people living in a definitely non-heroic age (us) as being not only aware of his undying fame, but desirous of it. In our era, we regard fame-seeking as somewhat needy—and yet people openly do outrageous, demeaning things merely to be seen by many.

  Inhabitants of Heroic Ages—and the storytellers and audiences who celebrate them—include among the heroic virtues that of desiring Good Fame. When you think of it, this is actually one of the fundamental virtues of civilization. Selfish and brutal as Knights in Shining Armor or demigods might be, the very fact that they care so very much about what their community thinks of them—their reputation—reminds the audience that even the great seek something that only the community can give them, and will sacrifice much to obtain it.

  Policemen and firemen, soldiers and military seamen and pilots are the far-more-altruistic successors of heroes who seek to be heroes. They don’t seek their own death, but they choose to risk it in order to save or protect others, and honor is their highest reward, in part because they volunteered, and in part because their heroism is in the service of the community. They are Heroes by Career.

  But in all times and places, communities also value—and often value more—the hero who does not choose himself.

  It can be the hero of circumstance: The unidentified man from Air Florida Flight 90 when it crashed into the icy Potomac River on 13 January 1982, who stayed in the water helping other survivors get to the lifelines dropped by helicopters, until all were saved but him—he did not board that flight intending to be a hero. Chance put him in the way of heroism, and he acted upon the noble impulse.

  Or the mostly unidentified heroes of Flight 93, who, once they learned that their hijackers intended to crash the plane where it would kill many other people, attempted to take back the plane; they died, but saved many lives.

  How did any of these heroes know that such nobility was expected of them? Because they had absorbed so many hero stories in the past. They were acting out the script that they had learned over and over, which told them that “greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends”—or, in more quotidian terms, the survival of the community depends on the sacrifices of citizens when called upon.

  The heroic acts of the heroes of circumstance are chosen in the moment when action must be taken, or not. Either you snatch the stranger from the burning car now, or it will be too late. Act or don’t act—it is all over in a few moments.

  But the great fantasy literature of today is largely built around heroes who never wanted to be heroic, and who have plenty of time to equivocate, to change their minds, to pass along the burden to others, or to misuse their heroic role.

  The reluctant hero says, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.” Or, in other words, “I will take the Ring to Mordor, though I do not know the way.”

  Is this a mere formula? In the hands of uninspired or untalented writers, of course it is. How many very-bad movies have we seen where the hero keeps coyly saying no until he finally says yes, or until he’s forced into it?

  But the formulaic reluctant hero is a bit of a fraud, and we are not satisfied. Why? Because if he is truly forced into his heroic action, it isn’t heroism at all, is it? Or if he is given a deeply personal incentive, his heroism becomes self-interest.

  I think of the horrible moment in the botched movie The Rock, in which Nicolas Cage has to save San Francisco from a biological death agent. That was his job—he is in the fireman category of hero. But the hackmeisters of Hollywood (either the writers or the executives who defile their work) decided that saving a million people just wasn’t enough jeopardy. So the script has Nicolas Cage’s lover happen to arrive in the danger zone, so now if he fails, she dies.

  The audience groaned aloud, not out of empathy but in disgust. The filmmakers, utterly ignorant as they were of how storytelling actually worked, had increased the jeopardy, but at the cost of virtually negating Cage’s heroism. Now instead of risking death to save the community—heroism—he was risking death to save his main squeeze, his primary reproductive opportunity. Now his urgency isn’t noble, it’s practical.

  We might call people who save their spouses or children heroes, but we don’t emotionally group them with the heroes who gave or risked their lives for strangers. They are brave, but their motivation is personal, not public. If they failed to act, they would be among the primary sufferers; they are sparing themselves.

  The essence of the true reluctant hero is that he is not acting primarily to save himself or those closest to him. He is acting to save a larger community—even the entire human race or the whole world—from a dire threat. He is reluctant to do the heroic deed in part because it is not personal. His own stake in the matter is no more than that of most other people in his community, and yet he must step into a situation that usually offers no plausible escape once he has done the noble deed.

  If he does not want to be a hero, and has no personal stake, and he did not choose a risky heroic profession, how does a reluctant hero get tapped for the job? He feels entitled to say, Why me? Why not someone who has trained and prepared for it?

  Gandalf has no better answer for Frodo than that he thinks somehow Frodo was “meant” to carry the Ring. (Catholic Tolkien was being coy; he didn’t call the one who chose Frodo “God” but that is clearly what was intended, as The Silmarillion makes clear.) It is the prophet Jeremiah: “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.”

  When God or the gods choose you, Oedipus, there’s no escaping it; not even your parents can spare you from it.

  In other stories, it’s an accident of birth (as it partly is in Frodo’s case, being the favorite nephew of the childless Bilbo, and thus the heir to Bilbo’s found-yet-also-stolen Ring). Hereditary kings often make the claim, “I never chose this, I didn’t ask to be king.”

  Indeed, 2010's Oscar winner for best picture, The King’s Speech, makes a reluctant hero of King George VI by stressing again and again how little he wants to be king, yet how desperately his country needs him to inspire them by speaking well. (In fact, England had someone who did a far better job of inspiring them—Winston Churchill—so that the king could have been a Popsicle stick for all his speaking ability mattered.) Also, the film made everybody aware of the inevitability of World War II at a time when Winston Churchill was almost the only person of prominence taking the possibility
seriously.

  In short, the fictionalization of the otherwise accurate The King’s Speech was devoted mostly to making it clear why George VI’s labors to overcome his stammer were not for personal ends—he was happy to be a private man—but rather altruistic, for the good of the nation, required of him because he happened to be the younger brother of a man too idiotic to be King of England (a bar which was already set very low indeed).

  Whether it’s God, gods, fate, or birth, it is important that the reluctant hero has his heroic opportunity thrust upon him. And yet he must choose to embrace it. The reluctant hero does not wish for heroism, but when he sees the need, and the fact that no one else is likely or willing to do what must be done for the sake of all, he grasps the nettle firmly and holds on till the end.

  I had no idea of this whole hero business when I started my writing career. I was vaguely aware of Joseph Campbell—but only in the way I was aware of Ayn Rand, as the author of occasionally interesting nonsense. I had no intention of writing mythic heroes. I meant only to write stories that I believed in and cared about, with endings that satisfied me.

  And I submit that this is the way the great stories come about. When writers attempt to create heroes using formulas, there is an indelible stamp of insincerity that cannot be wiped away. The heroic balance between reluctance and willingness is such a delicate one that the insincere writer, throwing formulas on one side or another of the scale, is bound to get it wrong.

  Only the true believer in the heroic myth, unconscious of how that belief is controlling his story choices, can find his way to a satisfactory—and, on rare occasions, a perfect—balance.

  In the tradition of the reluctant hero, in writing this essay I was loath to use my own stories as examples. Partly that reluctance is due to my experience with authors who can talk about nothing but their own stories. Back when I used to go to science fiction and fantasy conventions, I made it my private code to avoid referring to my own work, taking all my good examples from the work of others.

  (This was not heroic sacrifice; my policy spared me the embarrassment of realizing that nobody in the audience was at all familiar with my work, and I avoided annoying audience members with authorial self-obsession, thereby making them more likely to buy my books. Self-interest was the handmaiden of modesty.)

  But the editor reminded me that the point of this book is for the practitioners of Heroic Fantasy to talk about what they themselves have done. Even so, I really meant it when I said that I was completely unconscious of my own process of hero creation. I did not examine it for fear that I would kill it by laying it out on the examining table. How could I write about something that I had studiously avoided studying—the creation of the hero in my own work?

  Fortunately, I came to write this essay precisely at the time that I was struggling to write yet another draft of the screenplay of my own novels Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow. Time and again, I and other writers had proven that whatever made Ender Wiggin an indelible hero to many readers was devilishly hard to bring to life in another medium.

  We blamed the difficulty on translating the deep penetration of novelistic viewpoint to the absolutely shallow penetration of the screen. And that has certainly been a challenge. But ultimately, the problem was that nobody understood why Ender Wiggin was an effective, memorable hero—least of all me.

  Ender’s Game is not fantasy; it is not a useful prop for this essay. But the things I learned, at long last, in writing this draft of that screenplay apply across the board. I can find the same elements now in all my effective heroes (we will, mercifully, leave the ineffective ones in the corner and largely ignore them, like incontinent or flatulent relatives).

  Let’s take Alvin Miller, of The Tales of Alvin Maker. I started with his birth, and if the first five chapters establish anything, it’s that Alvin, as the seventh son of a seventh son, has greatness thrust upon him. Chosen from conception, his fate is watched over by a little girl who eventually grows up to become his wife. She sees the many possible fates that lie before him—as long as she continues to act to keep him alive.

  Yet as Alvin grows up and discovers his intense magical powers, he still has choices, and at a key moment he takes responsibility for the consequences of his magical deeds. Like many a child, he is a prankster and his siblings become the deserving targets of his pranks. Alvin uses his power to persuade cockroaches to swarm all over his offending sisters—but as they stomp the roaches to death, Alvin feels those tiny deaths and realizes that he has led them to slaughter solely for his own amusement, for the pleasure of petty vengeance for a petty offense.

  He takes a vow never to use his power for his own benefit again. From now on, he will act only to help others—his family, his friends, his community, utter strangers—but never himself.

  Naturally, the story bends around to a decision point where that vow, if he keeps it, will lead directly to his own death, because he has an infection which will kill him, and which only he has the power to heal. This is how I morally torment my characters: Whatever they have righteously decided is the right thing to do, I make impossible; whatever they regard as utterly wrong, I require it of them.

  I never consciously set out to be that writer; it’s just what felt right to me. It was never a “theme”—I despise deliberately chosen themes as part of storytelling; they belong in essays and should stay there. Apparently, however, there is something in my own unconscious conception of how the universe works that makes it so moral rectitude is never responsive to clear, clean lines. As soon as my hero draws a circle and stands within it, I set the circle on fire and force him to find a way back out of it, without destroying himself in the process.

  Because somehow—again without forethought on my part—I find a way for the reluctant hero to remain heroic. And, sad to say, it almost always amounts to this: Others will go into the Promised Land, Moses, but never you. Ender Wiggin saves the human race, but cannot ever return to Earth. Alvin Miller saves his own life, but only at the cost of an unbreakable vow that his life was only worth saving if he devotes it entirely to defeating the Unmaker, who cannot be defeated. His wife, who sees the future, understands that the path he has chosen leads almost inevitably to his own death and to the failure of all his enterprises—and yet she also sees that this is the only path that he can follow and still be the kind of man he aspires to be.

  The Tales of Alvin Maker is an epic, and I have not yet finished it; but, as I have been telling people for years, my ultimate source material requires that the series will end with Alvin murdered, his body lying on the streets of Carthage City, while other, lesser makers try to carry on his work. It is the only way, source material or not, that the story can end. Because it is the only way that Alvin can choose to fulfill the heroic role that was thrust upon him, without defiling the purity of his heroism.

  Purity—I have met a few people in my life who are truly pure in heart, or so I believe; but I am not one of them. Alvin is not “pure”; I write no Galahads. I say only that his heroism is pure, because he loses all that he has for the sake of the larger community, and carries nothing away but his virtue, and leaves nothing behind but his love and teaching.

  So let me turn to a hero of mine who is not so pure: Ivan Smetski, from the novel Enchantment. He grew up in Ukraine under the old USSR; by “chance,” as a child, he was running through the woods and saw a beautiful woman asleep within a sea of leaves: It was Sleeping Beauty. There was also a monster in the leaves around her, and he fled.

  His family emigrated to the United States and he became an American—but he never forgets the woman in the leaves, and when the USSR falls, he goes back to Ukraine as a grad student researching folklore. He returns to the site and finds the woman, still guarded by a magical bear; he bravely gets to her, kisses her, wakens her, goes back with her to her kingdom in the distant past of Russia…

  And then discovers he is in a Russian folktale, which means that the young man marries the princess, yes, but he does n
ot live happily ever after, because she doesn’t like having been given in marriage to a commoner, and tries to kill him.

  They work it out, after he gets her to the America of today for a while, and they eventually fall in love, save her ancient kingdom from Baba Yaga, and all kinds of magical things. (I am overly proud, I fear, of having turned Baba Yaga’s hut-on-legs into a hijacked 747.)

  So what kind of hero is Ivan Smetski? He finds out in the course of the story that nothing he did was really by chance—he was manipulated again and again without realizing it at the time. Yet he also made the heroic choice, and more than once.

  One of the elements of the true Reluctant Hero is that his heroic choice is made in full awareness, not of all possible consequences, but of the strong likelihood that things will End Badly for him. Ivan’s first choice, to waken the sleeping woman, is the act of a Hero of Circumstance: There she is, he thinks she’s endangered by the bear, and certainly she’s under a magical spell which he has the power to lift. He acts at once because it’s either that or act not at all. Only afterward does he find that he has unwittingly set himself on a path fraught with dangers magical, political, and personal.

  Later, when he falls in love with this stranger that he wakened and married on impulse (when you’re caught in a fairytale, don’t you just go with it?), he is tossed to and fro by circumstance. Eventually they fall in love and make the marriage real. But he is not so much a hero as a man desperately trying to escape the consequences of his previous choices.

  It is only near the end of the book that he once again faces a heroic choice—but it is not really his. All of Princess Katerina’s actions, including her marriage to Ivan, have been prompted by her responsibility as daughter of the king of ancient Taina. Marrying him was her sacrifice for the sake of the kingdom, to keep it from being taken over by the utter evil of Baba Yaga.