Writerly Ways

Being a little dyslexic I'm not a huge fan of text-speak acronyms out of context. I saw one recently that I had to look up and it was the start of this blog idea. TSTL

Too stupid To Live. Oh yes that is something that has always bothered me. Ironically I saw that in a review for a story where I was a bit nicer about it, discounting the stupid choices to his relatively young age (It was a story by someone in my publishing house so I didn't want to be a bitch about it). But yeah the character is TSTL.

That's often a deal breaker for me. I've seen it more and more in mystery novels where the author (usually female) is in real life in the same profession as her protagonist (Reichs, Fairstein etc) and the protagonist has done something that you know no one in the real world would do. I saw this a lot in Angel and Buffy when they kept secrets for no known reason, about things that they knew their friends would need to know, all in a effort to ramp up the conflict/tension. There are so many examples but the one that springs to mind is the time Angel sends Connor off somewhere when he sets up Lorne as bait for evil!Cordy rather than keeping him close by to hear witness her actions.

Here is the rub. When a reader/viewer is confronted with a character that does idiotic things like that they get frustrated. With the above example, I already knew I liked Joss Whedon and forgave that TSTL moment. But what if that had been a first time author to me? Would I have been so forgiving or would the book have gone flying? I can tell you that instances of TSTL have made me put some authors on library-only status. Others have been bumped totally.

I’m not interested in a character that consistently does/says foolish things, especially if the character is supposed to be smart or experienced. I might forgive it in a young and/or naïve character. I think there has to be a better way to keep conflict and tension going other than making the character doing something totally stupid. In the book where I first stumbled across the acronym, I came up with much easier, less foolish ways to arrive at the situations the character needed to be in.

How about you? What do you do when you run across the TSTL character? Funny enough, as I type this D’Artagnan has been TSTL this whole episode of The Musketeers.

Yearly world count –

I’ve only been editing Soldiers of the Sun to the exclusion of all else.