Hello! I hope you’re enjoying your holiday. I should have shared last week that the combination of LTUE and today being a holiday would prevent me from doing a usual blog post, but since I didn’t I need to make a quick update today.

Here’s a heads up: LTUE is amazing. If you are an aspiring author, or if you are an artist, I highly recommend it. More on that later, hopefully next week.

Quick Discussion: The Self-Immolating Henchman

One of my least favorite tropes is this: when, somehow universally, a bad guy’s henchmen would rather kill themselves (or otherwise render themselves unable to communicate, maybe by biting off a tongue and not knowing how to write) than allow themselves to divulge information to the good guys. Almost regardless of what a story’s justification is, the moment this trope shows up I feel that the author is extremely lazy.

I imagine the goal of this trope is to show just how big and bad the villain is—if he’s so scary that the henchmen would rather kill themselves than tell the heroes anything about him, that means the villain is more of an ubervillain, right? That’s me giving the trope the benefit of the doubt.

Well… The villain never, ever manages to live up to that mantle. I can’t think of a single story where that’s been a successful buildup; as a result, the bad guy falls flat, and the illusion is ruined with future stories. (As a tangent, this is kind of like what GRRM did with A Song of Ice and Fire: he created this interesting illusion of total danger by killing main characters off in A Game of Thrones, but then the illusion quickly dissipated when the reader discovered, even as soon as the second book, that the remaining main characters still have plot armor, because killing all—even merely a handful—of your main characters, or most beloved characters, before the end of a series doth not a satisfying series make. Then other people try to copy the trope and do as poorly, or worse, at maintaining the illusion… GRRM started a lot of bad trends. Tangent over)

There’s another problem with this trope. For one, without some sort of magical or sci-fi compulsion, I find it completely unbelievable that every henchman would rather kill himself than strike a deal with the heroes: information for protection. Not one? Not one, single henchman? Henchmen aren’t exactly known for loyalty, and the desire of living things to stay alive is almost overwhelmingly strong. I’ll buy that some, or even many, henchmen could be brought to off themselves because of fear or zealotry, but not every single one.

And finally, this trope puts too much weight on what the average henchman, or other lower-level baddie, knows. It’s more realistic, and more interesting, for the henchmen to provide what information he or she knows, and for the hero to realize that these are low-level grunts that don’t actually know much of worth. It still gives the hero something to figure out, a puzzle to solve (sorting through what’s useful information and what isn’t), rather than providing a simple brick wall of progress.

Don’t use this trope. It’s dumb.

Writing Updates

Last week I was at 35,000 words in Hazel Halfwhisker, and this week I’m at… 38,000? Wow! I honestly didn’t think I wrote that much. I spent so much time taking notes at LTUE that, to be honest, I didn’t write much those days, so I must have been more productive than I thought I was earlier in the week.

Hopefully that number goes up a lot before next week. I’m compiling and synthesizing notes, I’m making plans on how to act on what I’ve learned, and I’m leaving lots of notes in the margin of the story. My original plan to revise Part 1 before moving on to Part 2 is being shelved because it’s a better practice to finish the story before beginning the revision process—hopefully that means the word count skyrockets in coming weeks. I’d really like to see that.

Send-Off

I usually read through my blog posts two or three times before hitting “Publish,” but I just plain don’t have time for that today, so I apologize for any typos or weird wordings. Thank you for reading, thank you for sticking around (or showing up for the first time), and have an excellent week!