I’m sorry, but I thought the argument about who gets to define art was over. Or at least, had been deconstructed so thoroughly that attempting to mount an argument has been deemed not only pointless but laughable. And correct me if I’m wrong, but since when does anyone get to say that black text on white pages bound between two covers has any more obligation than a Saturday evening popcorn movie?

In other words, since when do all books have to be art? And who are you to say that a book is not?

Recent current events have launched myriad discussions about what a book is allowed to be. Apparently, it’s not allowed to be any of the following:

a) merely entertaining
b) chick lit (come on, you saw that one coming)
c) conceived, designed, and/or written by committee
d) a product to be sold

And so I must pose the question: Why the hell not?

Let’s take this one backwards. The “books are art, not product” thing has been bouncing around in several places, not the least of which is a discussion on Bookseller Chick’s blog which asks about the validity of movie and television tie-in novels. BSC herself doesn’t take a stand, which makes sense, since she, you know, makes a living at selling all manners of books, from Proust on down to the latest Buffy tie-in manga. My favorite response, hidden amongst all the ravings vis-a-vis “it’s a travesty that not every piece of black text on white paper between two covers isn’t a timeless classic of literature” is the following, by Robin Brande, who argues:

I see no reason for all the snobbery. Books to movies, movies to books, TV to books–let’s have them all. It’s all story-telling, and if someone wants to watch a movie based on one of my novels instead of reading it, I’m not going to complain. Or if someone is so excited by a television show they want to read a dozen books based on the series, great–they’re reading.

Word. I know a lot of authors who do tie-in novels. Sometimes they do it to pay the rent, or support other, more independent pursuits (a lot of those Buffy novelists are writing Bombshells and urban fantasy in their spare time). Sometimes they are honestly thrilled to be able to play in such a fecund sandbox (which sounds rather gross, but there you have it). How come you are to be envied if you’re invited to, say, write a spec script, but not if you write a novel tie-in for the same show? How come, if it’s printed instead of shot, you are somehow held to this high expectation that it needs to be art?

Sometimes a book is a product. Actually, no, it’s always a product. It’s bought, it’s sold, it’s returned, it’s paid for with credit cards and gift certificates, it’s sold alongside coffee and magazines and breathmints and Itty Bitty Book Lights and porn, it’s a stack of rectangular bound paper (unless it’s Clarissa, which is practically a square, it’s so frickin’ thick) with a barcode on it. Product.

Books are always products. They are produced by publishing houses in order to make the publishing houses money. They are only produced by pulishing hosues if the publishing hosue thinks it will make money.

You’re getting confused. Books are always product. Sometimes, also, they’re art.

Okay, moving on. The next thing that books are apparently not allowed to be is created by more than one person, slaving away (and hopefully tubercular whilst doing so) in a garret with a typewriter. Television shows can have whole teams of scriptwriters. Movies have directors and producers and actors and art designers and makeup artists. Even plays, those grand old dames of the artisitc world, are created by committee. They are written and directed and acted and choreographed and set designed and costumed designed and music designed and lighting and makeup and who knows what else designed and everyone has a hand in influencing the final product. But books, oh, the holy medium! They cannot be produced by more than one person, well, at the most two, but only if they have equal billing, none of this “as told to” and hell no to the “ghostwritten” or “writer for hire” bullshit. And don’t even speak to me about packaging! That’s heresy! An abomination! Don’t you realize these are boooooooks?

Please.

Next. Chick lit. Wow, do we have to do this again? I’m weary of talking about it. Nothing anyone who actually reads and knows something about the genre has to say about the matter will convince some people that books with “cute and curvy dresses on the cover” are anything but crap. The argument about judging books by their covers was clearly lost on these snobs. Most of them haven’t even read the really interesting chick lits, or indeed anything at all beyond a few post-Bridget bestsellers. And don’t get me started on booksellers who have decided that, like the Jack Black character in High Fidelity, they are the self-appointed guardians of culture, doling out their pet books to people they deem worthy and “qualified” to read it. that’s like when that Corrections bloke decided that soccer moms in flyover states who watch Oprah weren’t good enough to read his book. You people should be ashamed of yourselves, first off for dismissing a whole genre of books based on some color choices and secondly, for deciding who gets to read what, where, when, and why. I’ve read all your blogs this week, and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

And finally, “books can’t be merely entertaining.” Whoa. Who died and made you the thought police? Books can be whatever their authors want: entertaining, meaningful, entertaining and meaningful, entertaining but not meaningful, meaningful but not entertaining, neither…

I’m a genre writer, so my goal is to make my books entertaining, first, last and always. I hope also that they are meaningful to the person who reads them, but entertainment is the point. Of course, what passes for entertainment is different for everyone. Me, I’m entertained when a book: makes me laugh, a lot; makes me cry; makes me think about a time we don’t live in anymore, or have never lived in, or haven’t… yet; makes me think about another place; scares the crap out of me; worries the crap out of me; makes me wonder what I’m doing with my life; makes me think about religion; reminds me about things I’ve learned, or things I wish I’d known; teaches me things I don’t know at all; inspires me to do something; discusses the nature of love; makes me think about my relationships; makes me wonder what I’d do; talks about cool ways to have sex, or to do anything else (kill people, blow up shit, make a cheesecake, jump off a cliff, drives a sportscar, whatever); makes me question my beliefs; distracts me from a bad day; or any of another endless list of reasons that books can entertain me. Don’t kid yourself: being entertained is meaningful. It’s as meaningful as it gets.

First of all, if anyone with the artistic abilities God saw fit to deny me ever wants to make something as cool as Kate’s drawings of Uglies characters (as created by Scott Westerfeld, who posted on my blog yesterday… pause for fangirl squealing) for Secret Society Girl books, have at it. The ones of David and Zane, especially, made me feel all nummy. I think Kate’s David has a sort of Huck Finn air, don’t you?

So the conversation two posts down has devolved into a sort of chat about writerly desperation, which is a topic I’ve covered here before, and one that Jo Leigh attacks brilliantly at today’s RTB column (as with the Kate link, above, it opens in a new window, for Gina’s — and Gina’s cat’s — reading ease).

The part I found most intersting about her column was this:

I hate to say it, but I think RWA fosters this mistaken belief. I’m not exactly sure how, but it has something to do with the competitiveness, with the rush to be published. It has less to do with a worthy apprenticeship than a race to a finish line that leaves people disheartened, depressed and/or sick with envy, none of which fosters creativity. Because the game is all about getting published now, then whoever can bestow this state is the savior. Not a partner.

Now, I’ve noticed this “race” Jo mentions. And not just in RWA. Whenever people freak out if someone mentions “average time it takes to get published” or spends time they should be using to work on their craft to comb the internet looking for absolutely meaningless statistics of acceptance rates, they are succumbing to this kind of desperation. (The statistics are an especially big pet peeve of mine. WTF, really? Here’s the only statistic you need to know about: if your book is really good, you have a good chance of getting it published. If your book is bad, you have a piss poor chance. After that, you can start applying lottery like stats.)

There is no publishing race. Or thre is, but it’s a race with as many courses, shortcuts, black holes, time warps, cheats, hacks, you name it, as the most in depth video game. Let’s present a hypothetical. Say there is a hypothetical unpublished author who has been trying with all of his or her might to get published. Say this hypothetical author has been writing manuscripts, working on her craft, etc. etc. etc., and just hasn’t gotten that lucky combo of timing whereby the right manuscript hits the right editor’s desk at just the right time. All around her, her friends are selling, and selling, and selling. Their books are coming out, books that she saw in infant stages, back when they were newbies to the publishing game, and she was their highly experienced mentor. Maybe she has an agent, even. Maybe she has dozens of contest wins. Maybe for the past few years, when she’s been at author’s booksignings, people have written, “You’re next!” inside the cover of their books.

Life is hard for this author. When is it going to be her turn? She’s been running just as hard as everyone else, and people are actually lapping her around the track! She’s lost the race, hasn’t she? There’s no way she can catch up.

Wrong. The only way she loses is if she stops running. Because one day, as this hypothetical author jogs along, watching people “lap” her, she gets a call from a publishing house that wants to strap a turbo charged rocket to her back. They want to publish her book. And not just her one book, but maybe a few more. And they want to publish it big. And they want to pay her a lot of money for it. And they want to know how fast she can write them, because they want to put them out every few months starting next year.

It doesn’t matter how far behind she was. She just got caught up. You can’t make this about a race, because not everyone is running the same course. You can’t make this about comparisons, because it’s not just apples and oranges, it’s apples, oranges, broccoli, chicken wings, and ice cream sundaes.

So strap on your blinders so you don’t see the other runners (including that one who just got taken down, beaten to a bloody pulp right there on the track, and had her books pulled from the shelves — oh wait, I’m sidestepping current issues, aren’t I?) and keep your eye on YOUR course.

When I visited Paris, and I wandered the halls of the Louvre or the Musee d’Orsay, I saw a ton of student artists standing before masterworks, blank canvas in front of them, paintbrush in hand, copying down the lines and colors and shadows of the geniuses that preceded them, teaching themselves how to do it by tracing the work of the best.

Back in St. Petersburg, Florida, I visited the Dali Museum to check out Dali’s juvenilia, painstakingly collected by the Morse family. Fine pictures, but you’d never guess they were his. You could see his thought process as he painted. I wonder if I could paint like Cezanne, like Picasso, like Miro. Dali doing cubism, for fun. Dali trying his hand at impressionism. Dali training himself to figure out what Dali works looked like by seeing how he differed from the artists that came before him.

I think writers develop in much the same way. I look back on stories that I wrote in high school and college, and can see how much the voice of my juvenilia was cribbed from whatever writer currently held me in thrall. An old fashioned epistolary novella meant to sound like Richardson. A sad, lilting, introspective short heavily influenced by Binchy. I was the student artist, paintbrush in hand, tracing the words of the masterworks, trying to see how they did it. I was the young Dali, trying to write like Richardson to see if I could.

One of my literarture classes was learning about narrative. What a great class. We did things like watch Rashomon and read Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein and watch a Rashomon-esque episode of the X-Files called “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” and Maus and discuss the limitation of certain forms of narrative and how the expectations of narrative have changed over time and blah blah blah… anyway, one day, we had this awesome assignment. Rewrite one of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries as an X-Files episode.

I was assigned fanfic. Cool beans. Now, I love fanfic. I think of it as literary training wheels. When you learn to ride a bike, you get training wheels to spot you the balance while you learn the other bike skills — pedalling, steering, stuff like that. When you write fanfic, you’ve been spotted a premise, or characterization, so you can learn to write while concentrating on plotting or pacing, or something else.

One regular reader of this blog hates fanfic, full stop, because she had a bad experience in which one of her novels was lifted wholesale and posted on a website as a piece of fanfic. I’ve made this argument before and I’m about to make it again: That ain’t fanfic, it’s plagiarism. And it happens in both the muddy and unregulated waters of “posting fiction on the internet” as well as in the world of legitimate publishing. (Watch me neatly sidestepping the current events.) Just because the plagiarist called the story fanfic, and just because that was the author’s only experience with it, that doesn’t make it fanfic. It’s still just plagiarism.

Fanfic is using another creator’s world and characters and premise to write your own story, using your own words. The assignment I did for my Literature class reimagined the Holmes story as if it had been Mulder and Scully showing up to solve the mystery, rather than Holmes and Watson. The only words in common were from a letter which was a piece of evidence.

The thing about fanfic is: you can’t publish it. You can’t sell it. The characters don’t belong to you. If you are using it for training wheels, or a school assignment, that’s one thing. You can’t go listing your crap on Amazon. Unless, of course, it’s out of copyright.

Tor editor Theresa Nielsen Hayden had an excellent post on fanfic recently, which pointed out an interesting fact: this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is a piece of fanfic. March, by Geraldine Brooks, is published by Viking, and follows Mr. March, of Little Women, during the war years.

Brooks is not alone in her reimagining. The shelves of my local bookstore are crammed with “sequels” to Pride and Prejudice, and I studied Wide Sargasso Sea (Jane Eyre from the point of view of the mad wife) in college. Sometimes, fanfic is training wheels, and sometimes it wins awards, rocks the literary world, and serves as the benchmark for a whole new genre. They don’t call these things fanfic (because fanfic is, as TNH says, a modern definition born of legal issues). But that’s what it is.

There is a story that I would love to write in the vein of March or Sargasso — taing a minor character from a piece of fiction and imagining their life beyond the purview of the story in which they appear. It’s there, somewhere on my multitude of back burners, simmering away. As for fanfic as it is currently considered, I stopped writing that when it began to be more about my character than the copyrighted characters I was using. When they were relegated to minor roles in my story, i knew I was ready to take the traiing wheels off.

And when I had written enough to stop sounding like other writers, I knew I was ready to start submitting my work. Development is necessary, at whatever pace, at whatever age. (watch me sidestep current issues again).

To find the perfect title, I’ve been combing through a lot of old poetry, stories, etc. It’s so nice when you stumble across somethign you haven’t read in years, and remember the way it made you feel when first you read it. (Dylan Thomas gave me a little chill yesterday).

This morning, however, I read a good old story that could always conjure up a lively debate at the dinner table in my college dining hall. The Lady or the Tiger?

So, what do *you* think? The lady, or the tiger?

Be back later with my thoughts…

I have been participating in a lot of conversations on my various lists and with my various writer friends about agents and publishers. As regular readers of this blog know, I hold pretty strong opinions about both. Many writers sign with crap publishers or marginal agents because of a mistaken belife that if they “can just get it out there…” that the rest will take care of itself.

I agree that the best thing that agents and publishers do for you is get your work out there, but a bad agent and publisher is not going to be able to do that for you.

Let’s talk about what this means.

For an agent: “getting it out there” means getting your work read by a variety of editors at a variety of publishing houses. Anyone can mail something in. It’s the guys that get your stuff read, that get it treated as something more than the latest addition to the slush pile, that get editors excited about it and taking it seriously and putting aside their mountains of other work to read it, read it now, that constitutes “getting it out there.”

When I talk to friends with bad agents, they tell me of 18 month wait times, or agents who have sent their books to one or two publishers and then give up. To me, that’s not getting it out there. If your work is being treated like every other slush pile manuscript, then you aren’t out there — not in any way that counts. Any fool can lick a stamp. An agent is the one that not only gets the package to the editor, but also gets the editor to read it.

And they do a billion other things, from finding the right editor for your book to discovering new opportunities for your writing to negotiating contract points to playing author advocate every time you and your publisher have different opinions…

Can your agent do this? Has he or she done it for a variety of writers at a variety of levels for a variety of publishers? has he or she done it in your genre? Do you know that he or she can? Do you know why ALL of these questions are important? Because if your agent is a one trick pony, who only sells to one house, or only has one selling writer, and you don’t fit into the demographics of that trick, you’re S.O.L. Great as the agent might be for that person, or for that publisher, he or she is no good for you.

Most people who spend any time in this business have heard the saying, “A bad agent is worse than no agent.” But have they really let it sink in? I have friends who have said this even as they have convinced themselves that their bad agent is good. They work themselves into an absolutely gorgeous state of denial whereby this maxim applies to everyone else but them and their agent. Sorry, kiddos, it doesn’t work like that.

For a publisher: getting it out there is pretty obvious. It means not only making your book into a pretty book form, but also getting it into readers’ hands. Now, most publishers get your books into readers’ hands through good distribution. I had no idea how important this was until I sold my first book. Maybe we, as writers, should stop talking about “getting published” and start talking about “getting distributed” — because this step is the tricky one.

9,999 times out of 10,000, if your book is not on bookstore shelves, it’s not going to sell to anyone other than your family and friends. Do you need to be with a large publisher to accomplish this? Well, it doesn’t hurt. But there are some fabulous small publishers who get amazing distribution, like Red Sage. I can’t remember the last time I was in a major bookstore and did not see a Red Sage book on the romance shelves. (And I always look.)

There are a few e-publishers who have made their own websites a major destination for their books. Branding is paramount in these cases. Just as online surfers go to Travelocity to book airline tickets, they go to Ellora’s Cave to purchase erotic romance e-books. (Now of course, EC IS doing major distribution in bookstores, and I see those trade sized EC books right next to the trade sized Red Sage books, right next to the Bravas…) But for years, when EC was mainly an electronic publisher, they did hella advertising to make their publisher website a DESTINATION for people wanting to read the kind of branded, hot, sexy “romantica” they published.

But, exceptions like popular online publishers aside, the name of the game is distribution. Are you on bookstore shelves? A LOT of bookstore shelves? Do you have prominent placement? Being “listed” on Amazon is not “getting out there” unless you’re on the front page. There are a million books on Amazon. It’s rare that anyone is going to stumble across you if you’re just “listed” there.

Update: I forgot to add that people ask if I’ll freak out when I see my book for the first time. I’m sure I will — the first time it’s on the shelf at my local bookstore. In a box in my apartment, I’ll be happy, but it’s real to me when any stranger can pick it up and read it. Distribution, baby. Distribution…

So next time you think about doing something just to “get out there” — ask yourself with brutal honesty what getting out there really means, and if the agent or publisher is someone who can really make that happen.

Blogger won’t let me publish posts…

unday afternoon, I kept catching myself in the act of indulging in my usual Sunday anxiety. “Oh no, it’s 4 p.m. already — how am I ever going to all the things that need to get done this weekend? Oh, wait, I don’t have work tomorrow. That’s right. I’m a full time writer now.”

But as I sit here on my computer at 8:12 a.m., I’m feeling deliciously naughty. Like I’m somehow skipping out on work. It feels weird not to be there. It feels weird not to be sitting down at my cubicle, saying hi to my coworkers, etc.

Sailor Boy keeps asking what my schedule is going to be, saying that I need to accomplish a certain number of things per day to really feel as if I’m progressing anywhere. Another friend said I should take the first day off and just revel in it. But I’m afraid I’m not really hard wired for that sort of indulgence. This time last year I had 80 pages of SSG. I do not have 80 pages of SSG2. (And it just goes to show how much this blog has changed in the past year that I feel uncomfortable telling you all that.)

In short, there are many things that need to be done by me this month, in writing, in revising, in promotion, in everything. So I wont’ be sitting around, this week or any other.

So, question for the day (I learn so much from you guys whenever I ask a question on this blog — cf. last Friday — that I think I’m going to have to make it a regular feature): What makes a good title? How do you find titles? Do you break out your thesaurus, or search for poems or quotations on bartleby.com, or do they just come to you, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus? Do you prefer short titles or long titles? Or do you not think much about titles at all, knowing that your editor will change them anyway?

Discuss amongst yourselves. I’ll be back when I’ve accomplished something.

Today is my last day of work at the day job. I’ve enjoyed my time there and I love all the fabulous people I work with (I think I have the best coworkers in the world!) but I’ve decided to take the leap and write full time. Wish me luck, and expect a lot of posts here in the future about setting up a schedule and etc.

(Yes, I have health insurance.)

Also, it was one year ago today that I sold my novel to Kerri Buckley at Bantam Dell. Happy anniversary, book contract!

Finally, they’ve got my correct cover up at Amazon. Woo hoo!

Okay, on to other stuff. In the comments trail of the last post, the hierophant Becca asked:
“Could I ask: How central does a romantic subplot have to be to count a book as a cross genre romance?”

Gosh, I have no idea. I guess my first question is, what do all those terms mean? What do you think of as a romantic subplot? As a cross-genre romance? I know some people who think that ANYTHING that accompanies the word “romance” in the genre description makes it “cross genre, such as “romantic comedy” or “historical romance” or “time travel romance.” I’m not really with them on that one. Is a romantic suspense a cross-genre book, because many of them have huge crossover appeal? (I think books like Allison Brennan’s are probably read by a much different demographic than the romance one.) Or are you talking about the trendy “with romantic elements” kind of story? (Probably, since you said “subplot”.) I’ve heard of a few paranormal romances referred to as cross genre, since they are as much if not more supernatural (i.e., shelved in fantasy or horror) than they are romantic. Bookseller Chick once lamented whether books like Mary Janice Davidson’s Undead series should be shelved in romance or sci fi/fantasy. I suppose that would be as much a reflection of the books’ lack of romance as it would be of their fantasy elements, because there are stories with far, far more complex fantasy worlds that are shelved in romance because the story is totally about love.

Do you see all those keywords in the above paragraph? “Shelved” and “bookseller” and etc? That’s the clue, right there. Cross genre is not really something that you, the writer, decide. The publisher and bookseller decide. If the publisher or bookseller for whatever reason decide that you will sell better in romance than in sci-fi, you’re going to get shelved in romance. You might get shelved in romance at one store and at sci fi in another and in both at a third store, because the guy running that store knows that a lot of his customers know to look for, say, Diana Gabaldon in romance but he also thinks that a lot of people who would love Diana Gabaldon would never look in the romance section and so also shelves her in fiction. (This was actually a big hullabaloo this past year, as some big chain finally officially moved Gabaldon out of romance and into fiction.)

“But,” I see a certain kind of writer say, “I don’t want my books to be romance. I want them to be insert-genre-here.” (I’m not saying this is Becca, mind you. This is just for the sake of discussion.)

Well, that’s nice for you. That and $3.50 will get you a latte at Starbucks. Okay, serioously, there area few things you can do about that. When you speak to your agent about marketing this book, you two decide to market it to mystery houses (if you’re a cross genre mystery) rather than, say, chick lit or romance houses. This is a very popular option right now for the type of book we used to call, unblinkingly, a chick lit mystery. Because the chick lit market is in a slump, the savvy editor is going to go to the publisher with some “fabulous mystery with a snarky, witty voice and a dash of romance” rather than a “chick lit with crime.” Or you might try shopping to a fantasy-centric house before a romance-centric one. But if that fails, your agent is going to sell your cross genre fantasy romance to a romance house and not blink an eye. Because the point is to sell it as best you can, and if a romance house wants it and will do good things for it and pay you a pile of money, then maybe there’s a reason.

Regarding the strength of the subplot though, I haven’t the foggiest, and I’m probably the wrong person to ask, as I question whether or nto the romantic subplot in my first release even counts as “with romantic elements.” I would say that to be legitimately cross-genre, it had better be reasonably strong. In terms of percentages, I dunno. I don’t know if it’s about page numbers or about happy endings or about emotional involvement… I think it depends.

Let’s see what other people think, especially those who are writing cross-genre novels. Julie, that means you.

No, seriously, what do you all think about this question? How do you define “cross genre” and how do you measure the strength of a romantic subplot?

(And go check out Nalini Singh’s blog, where she has a slam book story going on…

A lot of stuff going on here today. Enjoy the quiz.

You are the Chariot card. The Chariot has the energy to succeed. Their ambition and drive leads them into competition, and they often come out the victor. The fast-paced energy of the chariot is met with the ability to control and lead. The Charioteer’s leadership is not authoritarian but rather an attempt to bring their team to victory. The Charioteer can be obedient to those who have proven themselves in a position of leadership. Physical prowess and activity are important to the meaning of this card. Travel is found here as a journey of personal growth. Moving from one point to another in attempt to find a better place may be taken both literally and as a metaphor for the inner self. Image from: Dorothy Simpson Krause.

http://www.dotkrause.com/art/tarot/tarot.htm
Which Tarot Card Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

(Note: I’m posting this on a dare.)

So the other day, after a few too many glasses of chianti, I got to thinking about some of the fictional heroes that shaped my young fantasies. Mostly, these heroes were a procession of Han Solos, Han Solos, and more Han Solos, with the occasional Westleys a.k.a. Dread Pirate Roberts and Gilbert Blythes thrown in for good measure.

But it occurred to me that there were other, more unexpected influences. So this isn’t an “Everything I Needed to Know About Heroes” (since we cannot forget Han!) but closer to a

“Some Of The Things I Know About Heroes,
I Learned From C.S. Lewis.”

First, and most importantly, the heroes of the Chronicles of Narnia simply dripped with honor.
Or honour, as the case may be. Whatever, they were the finest, most upstanding guys, when they weren’t, you know, under enchantments and stuff. And they covered most of the major “heroic archetypes” (check it out, Gina… opens in a new window, just for you!) I’d learn about when I grew older and started deconstructing this hero stuff. Let’s take a look.

Peter Pevensie, High King of Narnia: Chief. Fine, upstanding, do-gooding, a bit bossy, sure, and slightly stick in the mud. His character develops best in the second book of the series, Prince Caspain, wherein basically everyone looks to him at every opportunity to be the one making the decision and he always rises to the occaion. He’s got a very kingly air about it, corrects other people’s grammar, works hard, etc. etc. Totally swoonworthy for all 12 year old girls in the sword fighting scene there… very brave when he thought he was going to his death.

Edmund Pevensie, King of Narnia, sometime.. um… traitor under duress: Bad Boy. Oh wow, does this guy have a problem with authority figures. He even gets one of them killed. But you know what, Edmund is my favorite of all the Narnians, because he, unlike goody two shoes like Lucy and Peter, actually knows the value and truth behind the magic. He understands what he could have lost, what he was almost responsible for destroying, and it colors his EVERY REACTION in the rest of the series. You can see it. He says he trusts Lucy because last time he didn’t. He comforts Eustace the dragon with the info that no matter how much of a PITA Eustace was being, Edmund had been worse. He’s got a really phenomenal character arc (though so do Eustace and Shasta). Unlike his brother, he can also crack a joke. And he always thinks about things very carefully. King Edmund, you’re my number one hero…

King Caspian the Tenth of Narnia: Swashbuckler. I mean, Prince Charming and all, but you know this guy would rather be on the High Seas. It’s said over and over again that he was never so happy as when he was exploring, and he’s the only one of the Narnians who shows any interest in visiting Earth. Ever. (Reepicheep wants to go outof the world, but it’s more like a religious thing to him.)

Prince Rillian of Narnia: Lost Soul. I mean, really. He’s actually described at one point as reminding someone of Hamlet! Tortured? My lord. I think the whole section where Rillian is tied to the Silver Chair and then the confrontation with the witch afterwards is the best writing in the whole series. Can you imagine being the prince in that moment? Trying to come to grips with losing half your life as a slave while trying to save your neck in the process? Rillian rallies admirably.

Shasta, a.k.a. Prince Cor of Archenland: The Warrior. I thought for a while about making him a “Best Friend” because he does have a lot of those qualities to him, but he’s also incredibly brave, the bravest person in the book. And his reactions to things have a definite “warrior” flair to them. Come on, who goes after a charging lion with his bare hands because there’s nothing else?

Diggory Kirk, a.k.a. The Professor: The Professor. Do I even have to go on with this one?

King Tirian, the Last King of Narnia: The Warrior. He fights even when he knows he has lost. I hate this book though, so I won’t say much more about him.

You’re probably wondering why I haven’t spoken about Eustace. Frankly, I can’t fit him in. He’s not a heroic archetype. I was trying to make him a “best friend” but he really doesn’t fit the profile. Plus he’s such an unmitigated pill for much of his page time that it’s tough to tell what he’s like as a hero. But most of all, unlike the other characters, you never get to see what Eustace grows into. Despite all of his adventures, he’s never a man in Narnia. I think, given the chance, he’d be halfway between a Best Friend and a Professor, with a bit of Warrior thrown in, because, well, he’s a friend of Narnia, and they’re always a bit Warrior. Plus, he’s got all that dragon experience.

No Charmers, though. That character type is too “fake” to do well in such an honor-heavy series as Narnia.

Weird the way my mind works sometimes. Later, we can do a compare and contrast of Gilbert Blythe and Philip Ammon, or the various Disney Princes (I like Aladdin and the Prince in Sleeping Beauty — ten points if you remember his name!)