Middle book, middle age

[mrissa]

I swear, between the Moss Troll Problem and the Sirs Not Appearing In This Book, it's a miracle I don't spend more time clutching my head and whimpering.

Not that I spend no time clutching my head and whimpering. But really.

You know what the disadvantage to having a middle-aged protagonist really is? You know why people are really writing about young people all the time? It's this: middle-aged people have gone around knowing people and doing stuff for just years. And it gets complicated, and sometimes comes back and bites them on the butt. Not just the youthful misdeeds, but the things that were the absolute best they could do at the time, trying their hardest and thinking their smartest and using all resources at their disposal: they can still sometimes look at the results a decade or two later and think, "Uh-oh. That's not how this was supposed to go at all."

But it turns out that what they do after that can be pretty interesting.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The thing about middle-aged people who have had active lives across much of the world doing stuff that has had consequences is, though, that when something serious enough happens to get a story started around them, with tension and jeopardy and the like, they immediately start visiting X and calling on Y and wishing Z were here and drawing on all that unwritten backstory without a second thought, and somehow you have to get in the feel of adequate spearshaft for all this stuff that has in the character's reality the spearshaft of their years of experience but to the reader has none such, and unlike the wide-eyed teen discovering stuff for the first time the character will take all this stuff for granted so explicitly thinking it all out will break POV, and aaargh.

This concern needs a spiffy name akin to the moss-troll problem, but one is not coming to me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I gave her a protégé. Which helps. There's at least one point at which the protégé eagerly suggests a standard fantasy novel course of action and gets a, "What? We tried that twenty years ago with the thus-and-such, and it failed spectacularly!" (There are also spots where the protégé's energy and creativity are good things, so it's not Young People Are Bad and Stupid.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

This middle-aged person has a bunch of former proteges, one of whom is still living in the same city and on more or less good terms save for the bit where they were Hero and Mentor in the standard "rescue the magic sword to fight the Dark Lord" bit and failed miserably because of the Mentor having actually got it wrong about the Hero, which kind of casts a shadow over things. Not a shadow I've managed to get in good focus so far because of how much else is happening in the city now that people have to pay attention to, annoyingly.

Former protege, at the moment, having tried being the Prophesied Hero and given it a good but not successful attempt when he thought it was what he was Meant To Do, is now rather enjoying being an undergraduate, and isn't going to like the plot catching up with them at all.

I realised last night that part of why this is being so awkward is that it's got the sort of plot that multi-POV sprawling fantasy novels have with lots of stuff happening all over the place, and a single third-limited viewpoint to squeeze all that through. Ah well, if it were easy, someone else would almost certainly have already done it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Poor former protege. Sigh.

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

"moss-troll problem?" You have me curious.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's linked in the entry.

[loup_noir]

In a roundabout way, you've summed up why I'm bored with so much of contemporary fantasy. Everyone's this dynamic young thing who charges forward with few thoughts about repercussions. It's all so easy, so sexy, so...dull. I can see the plot twists miles away. You know immediately who fills what role.

Give me those few middle-aged and older protagonists, preferably with emotional scars, who know what their actions will cause.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

...and who sometimes have to do it anyway.

That's what I'm really loving about writing a middle-aged protag: not only does she have to deal with her past decisions, but she knows that her current decisions will be like them. She knows that she can only do the best she can do, and yet she can't let herself do anything less. If I do it right, the climax of this book will feel utterly different than if it had been a 20-year-old heroine doing exactly the same things.

I often wonder about whether I'm smart enough to write whatever book I'm writing, and this is no exception, but better to try, I think.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I seem to have fallen into a weird limbo-- I have a pair of up-and-coming heroines running a rebellion that would have worked *perfectly* if the middle-aged pair who planned it had had a plan for 'bad guys get us both and the kids have to handle everything'. They're doing okay, but they know they aren't doing as well as they think they should be.

I really, really like books with some history behind them. Impossible to write, at least for me at this moment, but so much better than prophesied King Farmboy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

There was a reference to a pretender fifteen years ago in the last chapter I wrote. I think this comes of reading too much British history.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Better too much than too little. I'm much more likely to be annoyed at poor researchship than unnecessary context. And if you've read a lot of British history, you can impress people like me, who have British history as it pertains to the US (I am fairly liberal with this-- I start with Henry 8 and Catherine of Aragon) and whatever they've managed to pick up to figure out historical fiction. I know there's insanity in there somewhere, but I don't know exactly where. I know a bit of Napoleonicish stuff, but not much. Beyond that, it's sort of randomly kingy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's not set in Britain or anywhere else in our universe, but it's strongly influenced by historical events and patterns there in some ways. Others not so much.

The insanity crops up often in different forms in different branches; yay, hereditary monarchy.

Middle Age in Middle Earth?

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

=v= So what's considered middle age for character who live hundreds of years? :-)

Seriously, though, as a young reader I really enjoyed reading about middle-aged protagonists because they always had knowledge, experience, friends, etc. to draw on. It made me envious and in a hurry to grow up. I suspect more than a few authors have used this to just pluck a plot device out of thin air ("I learned this, Watson, in Her Majesty's Secret Service, when I posed as a cross-dressing exotic dancer in Singapore").

In this regard, I always thought of Tintin as the most enviably middle-aged boy in all of Belgium.

Re: Middle Age in Middle Earth?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think it works to pull plot devices out of thin air that way as long as it's entertaining. As long as it's not, like, "When I temped for the discount store's main branch in Omaha," because I've done that, and it's no thrill. Also it helps if there are other references to that sort of thing, not just the ones required by the plot.