FROM THE EDITOR'S MAW FULL POWER
by Quentin Long
©2007 Quentin Long

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   I’ve always seen things differently than most other people; the way I usually describe it is, “My train of thought runs at right angles to everybody else’s.” This is a bit of a mixed blessing, because it sometimes means that I find myself taken by surprise when an otherwise-intelligent person says something that, to my way of thinking, is Just Plain Stoopid.
   Case in point: A recent discussion on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to. For whatever reason, the conversation had gotten around to The Care And Feeding Of Powerful Characters—that is, how an author can/should deal with a character who has one or more exceptionally strong abilities—and I found myself a bit gobsmacked by some of the things people were saying.
   Me, I like high-powered characters. I think they’re fun to play with. Other people disagree, and that’s fine—diversity of opinions is a Good Thing™, you know? But I wasn’t prepared for the sheer vehemence of some of the people who dislike high-powered characters! One of these guys went so far as to assert that putting a high-powered character into a ‘shared world’ setting, such as Tales of the Blind Pig or Metamor Keep, is the moral equivalent of urinating into a swimming pool; for this person, it would appear, any use of a high-powered character in a multiple-author setting is intrinsically wrong, end of discussion, and the best you can possibly hope for is that any such character appears in so few stories that the wrongness is kept down to an innocuously imperceptible level. Because, you see, some of the people who write in a shared-world setting are going to be too inexperienced, and/or incompetent, and/or self-absorbed to make constructive use of high-powered characters… and therefore, no shared-world writer whatsoever should use them.
   When I read that, my reflexive gut reaction was, “Say what!?” Because the person who wrote it is ordinarily intelligent and sensible, and I found it difficult to believe they could actually hold a position which is logically equivalent to the Harrison Bergeron-esque proposition ‘since babies cannot chew solid food, nobody at all should eat steak’. Sorry, folks, but I happen to be a grownup— I can eat steak—and I’m going to continue to eat steak as and when I see fit. And I say that in any situation where there are differing degrees of competence, the right thing to do is not to drag the top-end people down to the level of the bottom-enders, but, rather, to help the bottom-end people improve their skills to the point where they can be top-enders, too!
   Another “Say what!?” moment—or set thereof, seeing as how it came up more than once—occured when someone said you can’t write good stories about high-powered characters, because when a character’s response to getting shot is to let the bullet bounce off his invulnerable skin, what’s the point?
   The point is, you don’t shoot an invulnerable character. Instead, you confront them with a different situation that will be a challenge to them. Yes, brute physical threats don’t qualify as a ‘challenge’ to an invulnerable character—but does anybody out there think brute physical threats are the one and only form of challenge it’s possible to write about? Apparently, there are some people out there who do think so. How can I say that? Because the ‘if you can’t shoot ’em, who cares?’ argument just doesn’t make sense to anyone who recognizes that brute physical threats are merely one of the potentially-infinite number of ways in which an author can challenge his characters.
   What made this a certified “say what!?” moment: We’ve got these writers, okay? Creative souls, demonstrably capable of coming up with original concepts, all that good stuff. And these people… these creative, idea-generating people… these guys are dismissing high-powered characters on the grounds that they can’t figure out what to do with such characters. Never mind the fact that these guys are writers who all have solved a variety of literary problems in the past; apparently, this particular literary problem is one that they’re all just too incompetent, or too lazy, or too hidebound, or too something to solve.
   Say what!?
   I just don’t get it, myself. Chalk it up to my right-angled train of thought in action.
   As I said before, I happen to like high-powered characters… but at the same time, I also realize that other people disagree. So if you happen to have tried writing about high-powered characters, and (for whatever reason) you didn't enjoy the experience, that’s fine by me. But if you haven’t written about any high-powered characters, and the reason you haven’t tried it is one that boils down to ‘I’m not competent’ or some such… why not give it a shot? Try it, and maybe you’ll like it!


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