Darth Vader... saves kittens?

I subscribe to Storyfix.com and today Larry Brooks has a guest post up by Art Holcomb that you really ought to read, you know, if your story has like a bad guy or something. 

It's called The Hopes and Dreams of Truly Awful People.

In it, Art points out that your villain's motive must be clear, and must be more specific than merely good and evil (unless that's the main theme of your work). But something he said almost in passing just made me giggle.

He said, "If appropriate, repay him and delight your reader by writing for the bad guy a humanizing “Darth Vader Rescues the Kittens” scene at least once in a story."

This is brilliant. It made me think of all the stories I've read, or watched or listened to, that have done just this: humanized the villain to get me even more emotionally invested. It makes it all the more heartbreaking when the conflict between the hero and antagonist crushes the sometimes-good villain. Let's see an example.

Here's my version of Darth Vader Rescues the Kittens:

HeeeeeeHooooooHeeeeeHoooooHeeeeeHooooo.

The sound of his mechanical breathing never bothered him before, but this evening in the dark alley behind the Burger Emperor, it sounded more hollow than ever. 

He'd just killed his mentor, his savior from the stupid little dust planet he'd been brought up on. Somehow over the years, that savior had become his nemesis. It might have had something to do with Vader's massacre of all the baby Padawans. Really, who keeps track of these things? 

None of that mattered now. Obi-Wan was gone. 

Slumping to the garbage-stained asphalt, Vader tortured himself, reliving his old master's last moments over and over again. If Obi-Wan hadn't been so damned self-righteous, he could have gotten by with a severed arm or leg, easily repaired. But no. He always had to fight to the death. It was his fault he was dead. Vader slurped the last of his Jabba Hutt shake through a drinking hole in his helmet. 

Next he'd probably have to kill his long-lost son. His breath caught at the thought, and that one moment of pure silence allowed him to hear something he never would have heard in the cacophony of his normal existence. 

A tiny cry. 

He jerked his heavy headgear to the side so his eyes could behold the source of the whimperish sound. It came from the garbage unit. Prying off the lid, Vader searched the dark recesses of the bin. At last he found the crying creature. Creatures. There were five impa-kittens curled up in a box, naked of their fur, huddling together for warmth. Only one of them still had the strength to cry out, its tense little neck jutting up from the rest to make its voice heard.

Something inside him melted as the death-defiant creature pressed its cheek against his black-gloved finger.  "I'll call you Anakin," Vader purred. 

All at once, a terrifying noise disrupted the moment. It was the beeping of the garbage unit, the only warning before the walls would slowly, methodically crush everything within their filthy realm. Vader had mere minutes to act, but he only needed a millisecond. 

Lightning fast, Vader held the walls back with the sheer force of his will... er, the force. The dark side of the force. (It's super powerful.) He scooped up the box of impa-kittens and, holding them close to his cold, hard chest-plate, he blew up the offending garbage unit, again with the sheer force of... the force. 

It was done. He had ended a life today. But he had saved five. The balance was more than restored. As the sun rose beyond the vaulted walls of the alley and the last embers of the garbage unit faded to black, little Anakin purred. For Vader, it was a new beginning.

A bit about the screenwriter who wrote the article...

ART HOLCOMB began his writing career in the sixth grade (at age 13) when one of his plays was professionally performed by the American Conservatory Theater. 

He has published poetry, essays and short stories and has written more than 50 comic book stories for franchises such as THE X-MEN, as well as original and licensed properties for Defiant, Valiant, Acclaim, Big Entertainment, FUNimation, Marvel Comics, DC Comics. His screen work has appeared on UPN, the Sci-Fi Channel and the SHOWTIME Channel. 

He is the co-founder and former Editor-in-Chief of the creative development firm ANDROMEDA ENTERTAINMENT, which adapts screenplays into graphic novels, creating one of the earliest sources of “illustrated screenplays”.

Read more about him here.

Pot Holes and Aha Moments in Your Writing Career

A writing career, just like any other kind, starts at the bottom and works its way to the top. It's a journey, filled with pot holes (hee hee, plot holes), and Eureka moments. 

My first Aha moment as a writer came after I penned my very first novel. It took me from 2003 to 2008 to finish it. Yeah. No, I wasn't working on it the whole time. I belonged to the someday-I'll-write-a-book club. My pot hole was that I didn't have any discipline. From August to October, I finally finished it.

In 2008, my Aha moment said, Writing on a daily schedule yields faster, better results.

Duh, right?

When you write every single day, or close to it, your story simply has more cohesiveness, more natural flow, than it will when you put months between each chapter. Not to mention how your writing style will change over time, even if you're not writing regularly. If you want to see what it looks like when 19-year-old me writes Chapter 1 and 23-year-old me writes Chapter 27, I've got a manuscript that can demonstrate it palpably. An unpublished manuscript. A terminally unpublishable manuscript. I will never do that again.


Another pot hole I faced as a writer was my essay training from high school, which told me to seek out the fanciest word to drive home my point. Never, ever use was or said, my teachers said. If you try to take every was and is/were/are out of a paper or manuscript, you will end up with some funky variations on sentence structure and some even funkier word combinations. Or maybe it's just me.

(e.g. It was proven that the chicken pox are contagious. 
becomes--> The researchers found that chicken pox bore communicable properties.)

Stilted much? Yeah, this won't sound good in your YA novel. Thus, my next Aha moment came after my third book (we'll skip right over the sequel I wrote to the first book which had all the same problems as the first, but with a catchier ending).

It said, Stop trying to sound smart.

I am smart. You are, too. But we don't have to prove that to our readers by using words like ruminated where it would sound more natural for the character to say thought or pondered. Sure, if you've got a narrator or character who would use that word, like John Green's child prodigy in An Abundance of Katherines, then by all means, say ruminated all you like. But not because you're too good for boring words.

A meandering hell of word-vomit at the end of that book taught me this:

A rough outline is better than no outline at all.

Which leads me to today's Aha moment. Two books later, I am still learning the importance of story structure and planning in creating the elusive perfect novel. Meandering? Still happens to me, unfortunately. I'm finally frustrated enough to do something about it. Enter Larry Brooks of storyfix.com:

"In essence, story development separates into two sequential realms: the search for story… [followed] by the rendering of story."

otherwise realized as...

If it took you half the book to figure out your plot and character arcs, the reader has no hope.


Smart guy, that Larry Brooks.


What Aha moments have you had lately? What road blocks or pot holes have you hit?

If you're about due for another epiphany, check out Larry's article: A Mindset Shift That Can Get You Published, which inspired this post.