Premeditated Candor

When the Dorans hijacked SpaceStation Vagabond and used it to get behind the Space Force's defenses during the first chapter of SpaceStation Colt: Damnitio Exeum (2009), I began to wonder where writers come up with this stuff. I could point out that this particular tactic was very reminiscent of how Transformers: The Movie (1986) also started off, but the larger discussion has me trying to figure out where these amazing sequences of murder come from.

Truth be told, our resident writer would not hurt an insect. Believe me, I've seen it - he takes them outside so that nobody else can smoosh them. To a fault, I've witnessed him put up with a lot of nonsense over the years that I, personally, would've handled so much differently - violently. One of the nicest people who you could ever meet, many have taken his kindness and loyalty for weakness and made no qualms about throwing him in the trash, and he rarely if ever retaliated.

But this is also the same writer who has rung up a body count of fifty characters in less than ten books worth of work. The number does not seem to be a whole lot because some action movies ring that up in just under two hours worth of running time, but it happens to be important because, according to our universe encyclopedia, there are two hundred and thirty-nine total characters (as of this article) in all the Dope Universe. He's slaughtered over twenty percent of the universe! Written differently, one-fifth of our characters are deceased. That's not just significant, it's staggering.

Described even more differently, two out of ten characters have a chance of dying in the Dope Universe. I'd personally be concerned about my continued safety and the well-being of my family, working for a company like this - except, we all absolutely love it here! The writer grew up watching soap operas where dead characters often came back after contract details got worked out, so what is death in creativity? Just another angle for the story line, I'd say.

Besides, I'm convinced that the writer has our best interests at heart. I'd explain how I'm so confident of that, but the details of my contract with Dope Enterprises stipulates that I don't divulge things until a formal statement is made on the matter. At a high level, he holds the utmost amount of respect for the characters in his heart. Remember, this is the guy who spent over ten years pining over them and crafting a 753 page apology (From the Depths of Death in the Midst of Chaos (2010)) to those very same characters of the SpaceStation Colt Zero Universe.

If a character perishes within the pages, this writer feels that personally because he does not see himself as a god - more of a scribe, a facilitator. Just as his role is well known to him, the other parts to the literary trinity (character, plot, writer) also take their responsibilities seriously. Neither is above any of the others. Everybody has a specific job to perform, and when each puts their soul into the project, the eBooks become blessed with originality, passion, and style.

So why are the characters taking such a hit for this team? Did the plot really call for this much morbidity? Is the writer projecting - getting even in print for not being able to lash back in life?

To a character, the chance to die for a story line is honestly an honor because, when done properly, it can propel an eBook forward with a deeper sense of emotionality and an added sense of seriousness. Plus these aren't just minor characters who wind up perishing in our eBooks but major characters with many lines of dialogue and many pages of face time as well.

For the plot, the writing is not sensationalist by any stretch of the writer's imagination. We actually operate off the formula of creation being greater than destruction, and I don't see that changing anytime soon or ever.

Those two - the characters and the plot have most of the say over everything. The plot dictates what needs to happen in order for an amazing story to be created. The characters have to agree to it. If they don't get on the same page, so to write, then the project goes nowhere, and the writer has no means of moving things forward nor the requisite material to use for the sake of ideas. Disregarding the relationship with and whim of the characters makes for an uninspired effort. Forcing things on the plot kills the flow and makes for a disjointed effort.

In many respects, writers are actually powerless without the characters and the plot, so if we were truly concerned about the sheer amount of deaths around here, we only have ourselves to blame. The part of the writer which comes into play where the subject of culpability is concerned happens after the green light is given, but the ends were already decided, so the means is really the only thing that's being authored.

Fifty kills, some similar but most weren't duplicated, is still a disturbing number of times to be thinking up somebody's demise. I'd wonder about the writer becoming consumed by this and the creativity spilling out into reality at some point, but our particular writer lives a relatively balanced life; the characters, whether alive or not (in the eBooks), continue to keep him grounded; and the plot subscribes to the twenty/eighty rule. We've all heard of the eighty/twenty rule which states that eighty percent of some metric comes from twenty percent of the aggregate to whatever groups are responsible for generating that output. Well, the twenty/eighty rule says that these eBooks are going to hold somewhere around being twenty percent negative and eighty percent positive.

That's sustainable, and nobody around here likes unhappy endings, so the stories are each designed with this ratio in mind. Conflict is an important part of writing, but so is resolution - in the majority of circumstances, we believe even more so.