I hope Storyteller will prove interesting and valuable. I also hope it will go somewhat smoother than my first foray into teaching creative writing. It was the 1970s; I was in my early 20s, and a freelance assistant editor on Tammy, a girls’ comic published by IPC Magazines. I’d already written numerous serials for girls and boys comics. Some romance stories for teenagers. And countless cartoon scripts for the various ‘fun’ comics. But I didn’t regard most of what I had written as having any value. Primarily because I was successfully writing to market, but not always writing from the heart. I was writing to pay the mortgage. So my stories lacked lustre – to me at any rate. They lacked passion. They didn’t have the ‘divine spark’, which comes from the muse. Any time I did write anything with passion it was invariably censored. Thus a girls’ comic serial I wrote about the Irish Great Hunger was changed (by a Scotsman) to the Highland Clearances – because they didn’t want to upset anyone. Another girls’ serial Captives of Madam Karma featured Madam Karma using the sophisticated interrogation techniques (sound weapons) the British were currently using in Northern Ireland. That, too, was disapproved of. But it was only the historic or political subtext in stories that lit my fire. Otherwise, I was often bored stupid writing them. It was all very confusing to me. In fact, that was the reason I was working as an assistant editor on Tammy – so I could gain some in-house training and an understanding of the art of commercial writing.
The Captives of Madame Karma ™ REBELLION PUBLISHING LTD, COPYRIGHT ©  REBELLION PUBLISHING LTD, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

My phone rang and the voice at the other end asked, ‘Is that Pat Mills? This is Clifford Wright. I’m in charge of IPC Magazines training courses and I’d like you to give a talk about creative writing to a group of our trainees.’ Considering the low opinion I had of my own work, that seemed highly unlikely. Why choose me of all people, when I thought most of my stories were crap?

‘Really? Clifford Wright, eh?’ I jeered in response. ‘Me – give a talk to trainees? Yeah, yeah, sure. That’s very good. Who is this really? Wilf…? Malcolm…?’

‘No, I am Clifford Wright, head of training,’ the voice replied coldly.

All of us on Tammy regularly played hoax phone calls on each other and this seemed like a typical example.

‘Come on, ‘Clifford’, don’t take the piss. You know, I was almost taken in by you, Wilf. But that snotty voice gave you away. Otherwise, you’d have sounded pretty real to me.’

‘I am real,’ said the voice at the other end.

‘Oh, shit, really?’ Humbly apologising, I told Clifford I’d be pleased to help, although I was still rather baffled why he should have chosen me of all the numerous writers available to him. However, I insisted that I wanted to keep things informal, as I could only be a couple of years older than his trainees. And I’ve always felt storytelling is a universal gift: then and now I disapprove of hierarchies. ‘I don’t want to be a teacher standing in front of a class, so no blackboards or anything like that.’

‘I could bring a whiteboard and some marker pens,’ Clifford suggested helpfully. I think my talk with trainees went down okay. I recall I was very frank, telling them how they needed to find something in the magazines they would be working on that lit their fire. Otherwise they might as well be selling second hand cars for a living. I told them about my personal loyalty to girls’ comics because they produced stories with genuine emotions, rather than boys’ comics, which were pretty mindless at that time. And how I would force myself to write humorous scripts by using a formula and typing on a continuous roll of wallpaper, otherwise I’d fall asleep. I don’t think that was quite what Clifford had been looking for.

I fear I haven’t changed since those Tammy days. I still like to keep my talks on creative writing informal. If I’m honest, it’s because I’m not a great fan of traditional teachers who have to expound the virtues of a restrictive national curriculum and, all too often in my experience, restrict rather than encourage storytelling. Because they invariably want kids to write like someone else – Dickens, for instance. Rather than to be themselves. So they’re awed and overwhelmed by Dickens’ incredible prose and think they either have to imitate him (an impossible task) or give up writing because they believe they’re rubbish. This actually happened to someone I know. So we’ll do this without a blackboard (or a whiteboard) if that’s okay? Where to start? Naturally, with the hero. Hero, in this instance, is not gender specific – the rules apply to any gender. And this term also includes the anti-hero and the protagonist. We’re also talking popular culture and heroes who could appear in any media form, comics, novels or film. This is how I set about it.

Hero checklist

  1. Pick an iconic and clearly defined hero that you want to write about. Secret Agent. Future soldier. Serial Killer. Assassin. Resistance fighter. Future cop. Detective. Wizard. Barbarian. And so on. The more defined the role, the more likely they are to be successful.
  2. Base it on someone you know, suitably amplified and added to. In the case of Rogue Trooper, the writer Gerry Finley-Day had a background in the territorial army. So he knew what he was talking about. It’s why his Rogue Trooper stories were always more popular than subsequent writers who took over his character. The same applies to his Fiends of the Eastern Front featuring German soldiers. And his V.C.s about combat in space. The readers intuitively sensed his conviction.
  3. If you don’t know anyone like your hero, but still feel compelled to write about them, turn to a non-fiction source for inspiration. With Sláine, I looked at accounts of ancient Celtic battles, and Celtic myths and legends, notably the legend of Cuchulain in The Tain. Draw on reality as much as you can.
  4. To ensure you’re staying within commercial tramlines, read books and watch films in the same genre. Not to copy them, but to see what the current style and appeal is. Understand the tropes. What are the key elements that readers or viewers expect from your genre? And ensure you have something equally valuable and powerful to offer. Don’t be disheartened by other authors’ impressive writing – they’re not always as elevated as you might think. For example, read any fantasy story by Lord Dunsany, a writer at the turn of the twentieth century (available free online), and you’ll see how he influenced most subsequent fantasy writers. Everyone from H. P. Lovecraft to Tolkien to Michael Moorcock. I didn’t know about Lord Dunsany when I was creating Sláine and I’m glad in a way, because I think my Celtic saga has a different fantasy tone as a result.
  5. Look at another genre – Westerns, for instance, which easily convert to fantasy, crime or science fiction. See how the ground rules are roughly the same, and plot lines and sequences can inspire stories in a different genre.
  6. The hero must go through an emotional arc. Often they refuse the quest, before reluctantly going ahead, and are impeded by the flaws within them, which they may or may not finally triumph over.
  7. They have to be up against powerful forces of evil that will make life incredibly difficult for them.
  8. Once you have your hero, consider what you want them to say or do that’s unique. How they can look or act in a memorable way. Go for long walks or sit in crowded, noisy pubs, musing on your character. Expect your hero to go through endless changes and refinements, a process that could take two weeks to six months or even longer, but if you’re passionate about the character you won’t care.

Let’s now look at what kind of hero they should be in a little more detail. All my heroes – whether in comics or in text novels – are invariably working class, and/or are the underdog.

Charley’s War ™ REBELLION PUBLISHING LTD, COPYRIGHT ©  REBELLION PUBLISHING LTD, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
  • There’s Charley Bourne, the boy soldier hero of the anti-war saga Charley’s War.
  • Defoe: an ex-Leveller and 17th century zombie hunter.
  • Moonchild (Misty) fights an abusive mother and school thugs.
  • Nemesis, an alien demon, leads the alien resistance against a tyrannical human empire.
  • Cassy in Land of No Tears (Jinty) travels forward in time to compete with genetically perfect but emotionless schoolgirls.
  • Old One Eye, a T-rex, battles human time travellers in Flesh.
  • Marshal Law, a humble hospital orderly, hunts and kills America’s greatest superheroes.
Nemesis The Warlock™ REBELLION PUBLISHING LTD, COPYRIGHT ©  REBELLION PUBLISHING LTD, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

There’s a common theme here – my heroes are all from an underclass in one form or another and they all win. They are relatively rare in fiction – a point that needs lingering on. Because I believe we are deliberately programmed and conditioned to think our own lives are not important and not worth writing or reading about. Instead, heroes are usually elitist. Superheroes, often billionaires with ‘shock and awe’ super-powers, dominate our cinemas. Yet I’m not aware of any good-guy billionaires in real life. It’s a fantasy of the elite. They are characters we’re taught to look up to.

Consider how the majority of classic heroes are middle class or upper class: Sherlock Holmes, Richard Hannay, James Bond, Scarlet Pimpernel, Batman, Superman and Iron Man. This is deliberate: the media gatekeepers want it that way. I once clashed with a Doctor Who TV script editor because he said I couldn’t possibly have a working class captain of a spaceship (which was a huge abattoir in space). The space captain was a fairly rough character, based on the working-class captain of a dredger, but that didn’t matter. We can’t have working class captains. We are meant to look up to our ‘betters’.

When there are working class protagonists, they are invariably desperate criminals, like Graham Greene’s superb characters: Raven in A Gun For Sale, Pinkie in Brighton Rock and Harry Lime in The Third Man. And they are usually destroyed. So we fed a relentless message: do not challenge the system. An extreme example of this is the film Never Let Me Go, where young people are harvested for their organs whilst accepting their fate. It’s the only film I’ve watched where a number of young women in the cinema audience were so disgusted by the characters’ defeatism, they rightly walked out.

The common theme to my storytelling is that the hero or heroine is taking back their power, challenging the system, and winning.

There’s a huge gap in the market for this kind of story today. Publishers will probably not agree with me, because they are generally gatekeepers, and instinctively react negatively to such stories. The 1970s era of New English Library with its hard-hitting titles and working-class heroes, aimed at a ‘down-market’ audience, is long gone. But today’s audience will still love such stories, even if the ex-public old boys now controlling the system don’t care for them. Hence Charley’s War, an anti-war saga, with a not very bright kid as the hero, was the number one story in Battle, a pro-war comic about World War Two, and it still has a strong audience today, both here and in Europe. But today, it would be impossible to originate a story with such a strong anti-establishment message. It would never get past the gatekeepers. Believe me, I tried.

The usual hero story today is rather different. We are brainwashed into Orwellian thinking that the system, and America in particular, is constantly under attack by sinister forces, rather than that the system has created those sinister forces in the first place. Consequently, so many authors produce mildly rebellious, but ultimately obedient establishment heroes: ‘My country right or wrong.’ They’re the stories most likely to get past the gatekeepers. Usually these heroes are dealing with ‘terrorists’, the designated villains of the 21st century. Just as Germans and Russians were the designated villains of the 20th century. Is that really what you want to write? Commercially, you would be absolutely spot on. The gatekeepers will love you. But it’s bad for the soul and it will cost you in some way, unless you’ve got an angle that is somehow still heartfelt and sincere.

Meanwhile, there are more valid home grown villains, perfect for drama, who are generally ignored because they have close links to the establishment. Corporate arms dealers and establishment paedophile rings, for example. Both are equally evil, yet they rarely feature in stories. People in the media have told me those subjects are usually ‘taboo’.

Equally taboo are working-class heroes shown to win – rather than destroyed, like Graham Greene’s protagonists.

In my stories, my working-class heroes win. Eventually. Such as Dave Maudling in Read Em And Weep.

Heroes are heroic, but can also be comedic in their efforts to defeat the bad guys. Here’s Dave in pursuit of bad guy Fabulous Keen, snooping around his apartment for clues and getting his tie caught in a comptometer – an ancient calculating machine like something out of Bletchley Park, which now threatens to strangle the life out of him.

‘Guuhhhh!’ said Dave as the tie was sucked deeper inside the comptometer, tightening around his neck. His strangulated cry was drowned out by the coughing and wheezing of the machine in infinity mode…

Positioned round the back of the machine, Dave couldn’t see where the ‘stop’ button was, so it continued to strangle him as he tried blindly pressing random buttons without success. It just seemed to make it worse, judging by its groaning and heaving and straining sounds…

Dave’s head was pulled down close to the carriage, as the ever changing numbers spun on their relentless journey to infinity. His ear mere inches from the machine, the noise was thunderous. He was trapped there until the end of time, or until the machine caught fire, burned out, or Keen returned – whichever came first. Probably Keen returning, although the machine was becoming unbearably hot and starting to smoke ominously now. (From Read Em And Weep 2: Goodnight, John-boy)

Dave finds damning evidence that Keen is part of a celebrity paedophile ring, and leads kids to strike back against him. Outside of fantasy, this is unheard of in fiction. Kids are generally portrayed as senseless terrors, as in Lord of the Flies, or Kids Rule Ok! (a strip in my comic Action). They are not meant to take the law into their own hands. It’s taboo. It’s all right for the privileged billionaire Batman to be a vigilante, beating up underclass street scum, but it’s not okay for young people to carry out vigilante justice. They are meant to accept their fate and become victims, such as in Never Let Me Go. Or, at best, turn to adults for help, who will intervene on their behalf. Really? That was a waste of time in the 1970s, adults just didn’t want to know, as Serial Killer and Goodnight, John-boy makes abundantly clear.

So, for me, this is something worth writing about – a hero fighting real life injustice and real life establishment villains. And what’s the alternative? For female protagonists, there’s a range of possibilities, but for male heroes, it’s most likely to involve two-dimensional but scary terrorists, CIA-created dictators, criminal scum or deranged psychopaths. There’s still horror, science fiction, fantasy crime-noire and historical novels, of course, but the possibilities in the present day are really limited. SF or historical stories can regularly slip under the radar of the gatekeepers because it was all a long time ago or in a galaxy far away, so who cares?

The success of 2000AD was based upon this premise. We consciously retreated from reality and regularly got away with some quite sensational and shocking stories because they involved robots, cyborgs or aliens, rather than humans. So our stories didn’t appear to be as hard-hitting as stories set in the present day. Appear. That said, I still personally see much of SF as a form of escapism and wish there were more film, comics and books focussed on modern times. It’s also possible to use a little subterfuge to get the green-light from the gatekeepers. I’m told writer-artist Bill Sienkiewicz got his wildly psychedelic series Stray Toasters past a Marvel editor by saying ‘It will be a bit like Die Hard’. Check out Stray Toasters and the comparison may well elude you! So there are ways. More on subterfuge later. After all, I did it with Marshal Law, where the hero, with a deep hatred of superheroes, was published by Marvel and is currently published by D.C. Comics, both premier homes of mainstream superheroes. This was definitely a case of ‘letting the fox in with the chickens’. And Law still has the feathers in the mouth slit of his gimp mask to prove it. These successes notwithstanding, it is a challenge to get past the gatekeepers and produce a story that has something valid to say without it being totally obscured by SF, fantasy or historical window dressing. If you succeed, your muse – and your audience – will love you for creating a genuine hero, rather than a phoney hero of the elite. Because, as John Lennon said, ‘A working class hero is something to be.’

 

12 Comments

  1. Peter Hope

    Dear Pat I met you at Marxisim many years ago you introduced me to V for Vendeta. Thanks we spoke about developing a Disabled hero. I didn’t develop the idea. I believe society has and will continue to regress around values of equality.

    Reply
  2. Attila (@kisserattilalom)

    Mr. Mills,

    Never analyzed the social status of the Heroes I like in comic books, but now that you mentioned how some of the obvious ones I couldn’t care less for are from the upper class (Batman, Iron Man and all the X-Men members backed by the riches of professor Xavier) the answer was right in front of me. I do root for the lower class Heroes. This is very much true for one of my all time favorite comic book: (ALAN FORD by Bunker and Magnus). I could never understand why this comic book so popular in the Mediterranean region was never brought to America. Not only is that book full of sardonic references to aspect of Western society, but the hierarchy within the group itself (TNT) is a mirror to what you said. This is a story of “secret agents” paid literally pennies for each mission they complete, while No. 1, their leader collects millions from the hiring parties. Place the one from the upper class on the wrong side of what is morally correct and you’ll be embarking on a Sisyphean task. I’m not surprised Alan Ford never made it pass the gatekeepers.

    Not all Heroes in the mainstream start from the top either, like Peter Parker did. But even he ends up being rich. So I guess, the end game of the Heroes within the big two is to get wealthy. This mentality has to die. It will die one day, I’m sure of it, but who will replace the void when it does? Like Mike Taylor suggested earlier, I also think, you Sir, should form a publishing company to create a balance.

    Reply
    • Pat Mills

      I remember a Serbian friend really rating Alan Ford. In former Yugoslavia they would have appreciated the working class angle. Like you, I was surprised it was unknown in the UK. Now I know why. In the 1970s, New English Library and others published novels with working class heroes or middle/upper class villains. Though not all are very PC these days, they were very popular – Sven Hassel, a skinhead series, a western series, G.F. Newman’s Sir You Bastard, Flashman, plus any number of movies – Soldier Blue, Midnight Cowboy, Clockwork Orange. So when we (myself, Gerry Finley-Day and John Wagner) were changing comics at that time,we were following a trend that I thought would grow and grow. Sadly, I was wrong. Today, only Peaky Blinders comes to mind. I’m certainly focussed on writing more working class heroes.

      Reply
  3. jonhayes1@yahoo.co.uk

    Hi Pat,

    Really interesting post. I wanted to add something I came across, but didn’t come up with, about developing a strong three-dimensional antagonist. It’s simply this: a strong antagonist one who wants exactly the same thing your hero wants, but has a radically different way of achieving it that’s in direct conflict with the methods your protagonist employs.

    So … for example … The Terminator. When you first meet Kyle Reese and Ahhhh-Nuld they want the same thing – to protect their respective futures and the key is finding Sarah Connor. However, Kyle Reese wants to protect her and Ahhh-Nuld! wants to kill her.

    Same objective, different methods.

    I’m not saying it’s the only way to develop a strong antagonist, but it’s a useful tool to have in your kit-bag if you get stuck.

    Reply
    • Pat Mills

      That structure makes for tight plotting. Definitely a useful tool.

      Reply
  4. pete doree

    Hi Pat, that note specifically about corporate arms dealers and establishment paedophile rings is so obvious, yet it had genuinely never occurred to me before. I practically slapped my forehead when I read that. Great post.
    Not to pre-empt you as you might touch on this, but something else that I read about storytelling, that really stuck with me, was never to assume the reader already knows the basics of your character. Even every Sherlock Holmes or Superman story is somebody’s first, and it’s incumbent on the writer to guide the reader along in that way, hopefully without them even realising it’s happening.
    I hate this trend at Marvel and DC where, when a character pops into frame, there’s a caption with their name and rank at S.H.I.E.L.D. ( or whatever ), and sometimes even an arrow pointing to them. That’s the epitome of lazy storytelling for me. You should be able to define ( and redefine ) your character each time with just a couple of lines of dialogue or even an action. Anyway, slightly off topic but wondered how you felt about that.

    Reply
    • Pat Mills

      Very true. Easier in text novels to characterise everyone properly, but it should be done in comics, too. The character should be someone the writer knows or knows of and/or has researched carefully. Or it can be a shard of the writer’s personality, suitably added to. I liked Nicholas Cage film Lord of War, but he wasn’t a corporate arms dealer or financier. For a while I researched Baron Zaharoff – he featured in Reilly Ace of Spies and he started wars. He was the ultimate arms dealer. Graham Greene used him in a Gun For Sale. Although he’s fine as a villain, he’s nowhere near as good a character as Greene’s secondary villains in that same novel who are really scary. This is because Greene was drawing on people he knew, I’m sure, and didn’t meet Zaharoff and the latter made damn sure he covered his tracks. After I read about 3 Zaharoff biographies, I gave up on him, I just couldn’t see an angle. Fortunately, I then found an arms financier that novelists seems to have missed. I recognise the type and know just how to write him. Looking forward to featuring him in a text novel next year.

      Reply
  5. Rossferatu (@RossFisherDavis)

    Hi Pat,

    Do you have any advice regarding how different heroes need to be when writing for a younger audience?

    I’m a firm believer in not treating younger readers like they’re stupid, but in your opinion, what goes down better across younger age readers compared to an adult audience?

    (Not that I wouldn’t have been crazy about Claudia, Vampire Knight when I was a kid though!)

    Reply
    • Pat Mills

      Girls comics and YA are a whole world of their own. In simplistic terms, they could be toned down versions of adult books. So my Moonchild was heavily influenced by Carrie. A similar process can apply to younger male readers. Essentially taking out sex and extreme violence and plot complexity and talking heads. I also discovered on Action that young readers don’t like some stories that we adults love. E.G. The Fugitive and similar chase movies. Kids didn’t like the Running Man in the same genre. Even the great Bourne films might not have gone down well with that audience. They like the protagonist to be the pursuer – Judge Dredd etc. That came as quite a shock to me at the time. I absolutely agree with you that younger readers shouldn’t be talked down to – I get the feeling that British publishers don’t really understand this. Wasn’t there a Junior Judge Dredd comic which quickly died the death? If I was doing a younger male comic I’d simply look at the computer games that were selling – Assassin’s Creed etc. For a very young female comic, W.I.T.C.H.E.S. is a good place to start. The creators never talk down to their audience – I was impressed. It sold worldwide apart from UK and USA where publishers passed on it, I think. This bears out my overarching theory that many professionals in British comics don’t really understand kids and don’t like producing comics for them. They’d rather graphic novels etc.

      Reply
      • Rossferatu (@RossFisherDavis)

        Thankyou for the reply!

        I very much agree that there is a lack of respect with a lot of publishers aiming at young adults. They enjoy maturity and complexity too, just in a different way. Very interesting about the pursuer viewpoint though! That gives me something to think about.

        I’m working currently on a YA novel, and have learned a lot, as my usual fair is exclusively adult. I’m trying not to censor the work, like actively removing sex and such, just finding very different ways to refer to it, word it, and reference it.

        Reply
  6. Mike Taylor

    Really interesting, Pat. Here’s what I found msyelf thinking. You refer several times to gatekeepers who won’t let you write what you want to — or at least, who won’t publish it. But aren’t you enough of a name to bypass the gatekeepers and publish what you like? Wouldn’t a Pat Mills Press be in a good position to bring about the revolution in comics that you obviously ache for?

    Reply
    • Pat Mills

      I can self publish what I like, but that limits my output. Text is particularly attractive to me. Why? Because in recent times five – yes, five – established and very successful artists have sat on my stories for years. And I do mean years. And this was after they’d been written, accepted by the publisher and paid for. (Two of them are French.) Mentoring new artists is something I do, to try and get over the problem, but it’s a long process and sometimes the editor doesn’t see what I see in the new artist. The brilliant Fay Dalton is a case in point. I just couldn’t get her into 2000AD. So text just seems like a better bet. I wish it were different, Mike!

      Reply

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