Why Dr. Strange Is So Damned Hard To Write, Or: The Problems With Comic-Book Magic

So Marvel is finally making a Doctor Strange movie!  Which is great!  Doctor Strange is one of my favorite comic characters!
…one of my favorite comic characters who I hardly ever read!
It seems strange, to be a fan of a dude you don’t ever buy his comics, but that’s because – like Superman – Doctor Stephen Strange is an awesome idea, usually executed awfully.  When you get someone who gets Dr. Strange, the man is written wonderfully.  When you don’t, you get Comic-Book Magic.
Comic-Book Magic is the least satisfying form of magic.
You know Comic-Book Magic when you see it – the magician waves his hands, and a wave of fire sweeps across the landscape.  Then he waves his hands again, and he summons a great clanking suit of animated armor to kick ass.  Then he waves his hands again, and he teleports himself and all his friends away to the Heaven Dimensions.  Then he waves his hands again, and heals all his friends’ wounds, and conjures up a buffet of turkey, and a palace for them to live in and you’re wondering a very important question:
What can’t this guy do?
And here’s the thing: “What can’t this guy do?” is the key to all good fiction.
Every hero (or heroine) has gotta struggle, man – that’s the point.  Fiction is fundamentally about growth.  And you don’t generally grow as a person until you find something all your current techniques don’t work on.  The tough ladykiller finds a beautiful woman who all his best pickup lines fail to impress!  The all-duty female soldier finds a moral dilemma her orders can’t fix!  The sensitive new-aged therapist meets a hardened street kid who his talk-it-out techniques fail upon!
When the old tricks don’t work, you have to learn new tricks.  That’s the character arc.  In failing, the character finds new strengths.
Comic-Book Magic never fails.
The trick to magic – or superpowers in general – is that if you grant someone Powers Beyond Mortal Comprehension, those powers have to have inherent limits.  The reason Batman always works is that, as smart as Batman is, we know he’s a dude who can get shot like any of us if someone gets lucky.  Spider-Man is the fastest hero, but almost never the strongest.  The X-Men all have awesome powers, but they’re never going to have any outside friends because they are hated mutants.
What about Superman?  Superman has the most inherent limit of all: he’ll always use his powers to save people first.  Which means Superman is endlessly faced with dilemmas where he has to stop the bad guy, but that building is about to collapse!
That’s pretty much why the good comic book characters work: they have a combination of power limits (Batman’s a very strong man, but still a man) and psychological limits (and he won’t kill anyone).  You have a really good sense of what will threaten them physically (the sniper has Batman in his sights!) and psychologically (Batman can’t kill that sniper, even though he wants to!), and from that you derive endless tension.
And maybe in a lot of those stories, there’s a very small character arc – Superman learns a trick he can use to fuse a building and stop the bad guy at the same time – but it is there.  (The best comic stories, the ones become canon and get made into movies,  are the ones where the lesson is huge – Spider-Man discovers that he can’t just put the mask down, Batman discovers his hidden strengths when Bane completely breaks him.)  But those character arcs, big or small, come because the character’s powers and psyches have limits.
Comic-Book Magic, however, has no limits.  What can’t Dr. Strange do?  Well, officially?  Not much.  Various writers have given him temporary handicaps, but they’ve never really stuck.  So the only reason Dr. Strange can’t raise the dead or turn the Earth into a wad of cottage cheese usually consists of bullshit inconsistencies – “Oh, the stars aren’t in alignment.”  “The veils are cloudy.”  “You know that one time I totally did that was because of mystic stuff that will totally never happen again.”
So there’s no tension in Dr. Strange’s battle sequences.  We literally don’t know what his weak spots are.  How would you defeat Dr. Strange?  Um, well, probably don’t confront him in his Inner Sanctum.  That, we know.
But aside from that?  It’s formless, silly magic.  Bad Dr. Strange comics have a lot of clunky asides like “His magic is too strong for me! I must flee!” or “The Crimson Bands of Cyttorak will hold these thieves,” because in truth even long-time readers don’t have a good sense of when Dr. Strange is in trouble.  He has to tell them.
You don’t have to be told when Captain America’s got a challenge: You see that five-ton robotic Nazi robot clanking in his direction firing missiles, and you go, “Uh-oh.”
(Which, as an aside, is why I thought very hard about the magic system in my upcoming urban fantasy Flex.  I knew it would have videogamemancers battling government SMASH teams of Unimancers, and anarchomancers going toe-to-toe with bureaucromancers, and I wanted the rules to be clear enough so you would know when someone was winning or losing.  Magic in my universe has a lot of powers, but the drawbacks are both psychological and physical, which helps a lot when determining when your favorite gal is on the ropes.)
So Doctor Strange has some problems as a movie, because if on the screen he can do anything, then he’s basically a walking Deus Ex Machina.  And traditionally, if that happens then you do the Superman thing of saying “Here is a psychological limit that encompasses a wide variety of things he will never do,” but Dr. Strange doesn’t have that baked in.
So I hope the writers of Dr. Strange are smart enough to put those elements into the movie.
For all that, you might ask, why was Dr. Strange so beloved?  And the answer is simple: despite what I’ve told you, not all stories are about character growth.  Some are travelogues, a person ushering you through a landscape of endless Weird Shit – and Lee and Ditko were miraclemakers of Weird Shit, their visuals and imagination beyond compare.  Sure, we might not have known what Dr. Strange could or couldn’t do, but who cared when you had flame-headed Dormammu and hordes of unstoppable Mindless Ones and the crazy half-faced Eternity standing watch?
So Dr. Strange was a weak character in a strong travelogue… and that was wonderful as a comic book. A comic book written by two of the all-time greats of the industry.  But comic books are not often written by all-time geniuses, they’re churned out by the month by average shmoes, and when you get average shmoe trying to show you Great Wonders you get half-baked meh.
Plus, as a movie these days, we expect a little more than a walk through wild special effects.  And my fear is that Dr. Strange will be an erzatz Green Lantern with no yellow weakness and no recharge time, able to whip up anything he wants whenever he wants, just because who the hell knows how magic works?  And I suspect that, given the current writer for this project is the guy who did Prometheus, instead of explaining what magic is we’ll have the even less satisfying technique of obfuscation and mystery, where we don’t even know what magic is but the very point is that it doesn’t make sense.
Which isn’t fun.  Which is why Prometheus is not well-loved these days.  Once you figure out that something doesn’t make sense on a fundamental, practical level, you get even more bored than you do by a guy who can solve any problem with a wave of his hand.
So please, Dr. Strange people: do the smart thing.  Even though Marvel has never defined the laws of magic before, I urge you to do so in your film.  And even though it is not set in stone that Dr. Strange follows the Hippocratic Oath, it’s better when he treats it like a lifetime commitment.
Because otherwise?  You’ve got something visually splashy that won’t stick in the heart.  Please.  Make it clear what Stephen Strange can’t do, and won’t do, so when he figures out how to win despite these drawbacks I will be cheering for him.

Should I Do The Clarion Write-A-Thon This Year?

As y’all know, the Clarion Write-A-Thon is coming up, when I write for six weeks to raise funds for the Clarion Writers’ Workshop – the inciting incident that turned me into a professional writer after twenty years of noodling.  Usually, I create a locked community, and then post my daily writing in that community (along with feedback on what did or didn’t work, i.e., an excerpt and then an analysis of the excerpt).
But this year is a little different, and I am weighing the pros and cons.
Pro: It raises a lot of funds.
I’m usually the #1 or #2 fundraiser.  Without me, they’re off a couple of thousand dollars.
Con: I’m in mourning, and this is more work. 
My goddaughter Rebecca has passed on at the age of six, and I am in deep grieving.  My energy levels are low.  I’ll also be spending more time at the Meyers, and though I love them, visiting them pretty much shreds my evening.  I usually have to get off work early, toss off quick writing, drive forty minutes cross-town, stay late, drive forty minutes back, and then work a ten-hour shift the next day and try to write after that.
Adding more work to that is troublesome.
Pro: I’ll get free feedback on the new novel I’m writing.
The sequel I’m currently writing to Flex is, well, a sequel, and it’ll be good having feedback from people who haven’t read it before.  People who don’t know the magic system or the characters need a new introduction, and I’m curious as to how this book’s start works when you’re starting from zero.
Con: I’ll also be giving huge spoilers. 
The beginning of Flux starts by exploring some of the ramifications of what happens at the end of Flex (which James Patrick Kelly, the award-winning writer who taught me plotting, told me he “didn’t see coming”), and I’m a little leery about giving it all away before the book’s even out.  Which I suppose is inevitable, but I don’t know if I want to start that soon.
Pro: It’ll encourage me to work on the novel when I am depressed over Rebecca.
Which is good for me, but….
Con: I probably will not finish the novel during the Clarion Write-A-Thon
…thereby cockblocking a few people.  And don’t tell me to hell with those people; they donated to get something good for themselves, and I do not want to disappoint them. Giving them part of an exciting novel is a little sad.  (Though I might finish, you never know.)
Pro: I’m a “bigger” writer this year, as people are generally more excited about novelists than short story writers, so I may raise more funds. 
Which is good.
Con: It may distract me when I need to be planning PR for Flex. 
Which is bad.
Con: I’m leaving the last week of The Write-A-Thon for a trip to Italy.
…but on the other hand, I managed to keep most of the Write-a-Thon up when I was in Hawaii last year on vacation, so who knows?
So I dunno.  If you’ve contributed to the Write-A-Thon in the past (or would think about doing so this year), what would make you feel appropriately rewarded for donating?  Aside from my gratitude, of course.  You’ll always have my gratitude, and so that’s, like, the baseline.  I want to know how to make this better, and to know whether I could do it in a way that would satisfy people.

Come Hear Me Talk On Polyamory This Saturday!

If you’ve ever said, “Boy, I enjoy Ferrett’s essays, and now I would like to hear his disappointingly high-pitched voice,” now is your opportunity! For I will be speaking at Ohio SMART this very Saturday at 8:00, and should you be in Cleveland then you might be lucky enough to hear me speak about….
Handling Jealousy And Conflict In Polyamorous Relationships
You’ve got infinite love, but not infinite time – and your partner may not be infinitely secure in that infinite love. So how can you communicate sanely to smooth out the inevitable bumps as you add (and remove) partners? Ferrett and his wife, polyamorous for over seven years, discuss the best ways to handle communication – and talk about what jealousy really signifies.
WARNING: My wife, depending on her mood after the Shiva for Rebecca ends, may or may not be there. I, however, certainly will.
You can get all the deets at the FetLife events page for this – which, if you’re curious about Ohio SMART‘s events, I encourage you to do so, as there’s a handy little orientation class for newcomers. And SMART is pretty great.
(If you find yourself asking “How do I get a Ferrett to talk at my group?”, the answer is simple: find a free spot on my schedule, then reimburse me for the travel to get there and back. I like talking to people, I like travelling, but I don’t like spending hundreds of bucks of my own cash to speak at public events. If y’all feel like contacting me to say “Hey, can you make it out?” then I probably won’t say no as long as there’s reimbursed gas and a hotel stay somewhere.)
(Also, I will almost certainly be doing fireplay at this event. Just in case you’re curious about that.)

Shiva Is…

Shiva is…
That egg salad has been out all day, time to throw it out.  Oh, this woman brought a tray of rugeleh, make room for it on the table.  We’ve been making too much coffee, we need to cut down on that.  It’s the end of the day, wrap those cold cuts, put this soup in the freezer.
People bring food endlessly during Shiva, a glorious generosity always on display, but the food requires management and most days it feels like managing a small catering company.  There’s always cleaning up, putting away, nibbling, stashing the most delicious food for the Meyers that we think they’d like (because they’re not eating well), wiping off, wrapping up.
I miss meals, strangely enough.  My day consists of grazing off the endless buffet.  I miss having a time to sit down with friends, a time clearly delineated as “this is when we feast and talk,” and instead it’s catch-as-catch-can.
But boy, do some of these people know how to cook.
Shiva is…
Endlessly discussing the tragedy.  Strict Shiva tradition would have you believe that you take your cue from the mourners, and if they are silent then you are too, but it is the most human of responses to see a friend in pain and ask, “How are you?”  So we are endlessly poked, endlessly prodded with love, endlessly requested to recreate at least some portion of the horror that has happened.
Shiva is…
Endlessly supporting the guests in their time of grief.  I thought Shiva would be about us, and maybe it’s that I’m too compassionate, but about two-thirds of the conversations that start with someone asking me “So how are you doing?” end up with me asking, “So how are you doing?” and helping someone in some small way unpack their upset about this.
No one really believes this has happened.  All of us hope, each morning, that we will wake from this bad dream; none of us can understand in any real sense that a child as vibrant and clever as Rebecca has gone.  And so they talk to me about how they feel, and I feel like I am doing a mitzvah in listening, and yet I wonder when I signed up to be the on-call therapist.
Yet Rebecca is, was, wonderful, a comet inscribing a fiery trail across the sky, now vanished into a cold and empty constellation beyond our reach.  Some days I sag, I think I cannot talk to one more person, and then I remember that each confession of grief to me is a memorial to a wonderful child, and I grab another glass of Sierra Mist and I listen again.
If they were not in pain, then Rebecca would not have mattered.
Rebecca mattered.
I listen.
Shiva is….
Having a wonderful conversation about something that is not Rebecca, on movies or on programming or on someone’s ill-advised mishap, and laughing loudly – and then the hush as I feel guilty that I shouldn’t be having a good time here, any good time, and yet wouldn’t Rebecca have laughed?  Wouldn’t she want jokes?
Then I think of all the silly stories I never got to tell her, and how thoroughly she would have appreciated a wicked sense of humor that would never have been appropriate to unleash upon a six-year-old, and this is the strangest party.  It’s not a party.  Yet all my friends are here, we are all eating and chatting, the kids are playing in the back yard, and I don’t know what to think of this.
Shiva is…
Hope.  People are doing poorly.  They have had the heart stolen from them.  They do not speak to us, or speak in whispers, often commands of things that must be done to console them.  We gossip endlessly, exchanging data on what someone ate or someone else said, trying to assemble data points to see if they’re improving or declining, and it’s not a good habit and we know that yet we are wreathed in worry.
And I wonder: Am I helping?  Should I be here? 
And I think of every spring, when my Seasonal Affective Disorder kicks in, when the chemical depression makes me want to cut holes in my flesh, when Gini holds me tight and comforts me.  Every year, she wonders whether she does any good.  And this won’t be good.  The depression will never be good.
But oh, Gini, how much worse this would be without you.
So we stay.  And pray.  And hope that we aren’t getting in the way.
Shiva is…
Designed by extroverts to exhaust introverts.  We steal a few precious hours of solitude, and then the guests arrive, and then they stay late, and then we clean up, and then I must edit.  There is always someone to talk to.  Always something that needs to be communicated.  The scant times I can just stare at my screen and type things like this are treasures, to a man like me.
I do not grieve for Rebecca.  I cannot.  All my emotional energy is spent in support.  I have had one moment of genuine grief, immediately after the funeral, when I sat alone in the car for twenty minutes and it all hit me.  And then the grief was like a blow; I stumbled inside for Kaddish prayers, then sat in the basement and stared at a wall for half an hour.  People worried I might be having another heart attack.  Kat even came over and took my pulse.  And eventually someone led me up to Rebecca’s room, which has become sort of a temple of solace for me, and we talked, and an hour later I emerged.
But since then?  No grief.  No time.  I look at the pictures of Rebecca on the wall and I miss her, but it has been six days of Shiva and I am wrung.  Grief is a luxury, and there is hummus to be put away.  Perhaps that is the point.  Perhaps we are expected to be exhausted, or perhaps this is the unique chemistry of the Meyers, a family so wonderful that parades of people come through the door every night to express sorrow and solidarity, and we the silent army that helps to enable these guests.
I miss you, Rebecca.  But Shiva has not enabled my mourning.  It has been a distraction from it, and I know some day I will be alone in my house and I will break down and be extravagant in ripping my clothes, covering the mirrors, rending my heart as my universe has been rent.
But today, at three o’clock, the guests arrive.  And I have a price-rounding module to complete for work, and the floor must be Swiffered, and all the food unwrapped from the refrigerator and laid out for noshing.  You would do us a mitzvah if you ate, you really would.  Our freezers are packed like Tetris games.
Come.
Eat.
Grieve.
And some day, God willing, I will too.

"What Two Consenting Adults Do Is Their Own Business"

Sheila made $14 an hour and had no savings – which was a vast improvement on the dirt-poor family she’d grown up in.  She’d started to get the little luxuries most people take for granted – being able to pay her bills before the shutoff notices came, seeing the doctor when she was sick, not worrying about the landlord’s visits because her rent check was in.  Even if her apartment still had a thermostat that didn’t work and a leaky bathroom ceiling because her drunk neighbor upstairs kept overfilling her bathtub.
Then Peter told her something really awesome: for the same amount her apartment cost, she could buy a house.
The government was subsidizing housing loans, now, and what with the rising economy, houses would be cheap forever.  He showed her all kinds of reports showing how she could keep a nice, two-bedroom house to raise her kids in, instead of the sketchy neighborhood Sheila lived in now.  She was doubtful – $14 an hour wasn’t a lot, particularly after the bills came due – but Peter was on her side, wanting her to get the nice things she deserved.  He kept coming by to explain all the complicated financial details that would make this work – an endless series of refinances, exactly what all the rich people did, to keep her payments low.
Peter was kind, and sweet, and even strangely protective of her, in his own way.  And frankly, Sheila didn’t have a lot of experience in matters of finance.  She’d grown up in a place where most business was done on a handshake, where traded favors were the norm, and hardly anyone had the cash to deal with taxes or interest rates or anything like that.
She had no clue.  But Peter did.  And Peter, as noted, was nice.  He even bought her lunch sometimes.
So when Sheila signed the contract and moved into her new home, she was thrilled.  She held a housewarming party, so all her friends could see how she’d moved up in the world!  She told all her buddies and co-workers that she was a proud homeowner.
This was one of the greatest moments in Sheila’s life, honestly.  This was proof she’d escaped poverty.  That she’d worked hard, and now was being rewarded with the American Dream.
She was truly, deeply happy.

She was also a consenting adult.

Now, I’m pretty sure you know where this is going: Sheila’s happiness was based on a bunch of false assumptions, the first of which was that Peter was her friend.  Peter was, in fact, selling houses in bulk because he got a percentage of the final sale – once the sale was completed, so was his interest in Sheila.
Peter’s entire interest was to get Sheila to buy as expensive a house as could possibly be wrangled out of her, pulling various tricks to fluff her credit (including some outright fraud in what Sheila made), and engineering the absolute worst kind of loans.  If he could get $14-an-hour Sheila to buy a $200,000 home – and he wasn’t even the bank giving her the loan! – then he would get $10,000 in cash.  He told Sheila, “Oh, you can refinance later on,” but that was never going to happen; the minute interest rates rose by half a percentage, Sheila was toast.
Peter didn’t give a crap.  To Peter, Sheila was a target to be fleeced.  He knew she had no experience with finances. He knew, in fact, that in the neighborhoods she came from, it was seen as a sign of disrespect to question a friend’s word.  So he abused Sheila’s reluctance to let himself outright lie about what was on the contact, telling her entirely different things than what were on the paper she was legally binding herself to, knowing that nobody had ever told Sheila, “You read everything before you sign it.”  And in fact, Sheila did notice some oddities as she was signing, but Peter told her, “That’s just a contract, we’ll renegotiate those in a year.  This is standard operating procedure.”
Sheila, it should be noted, was very very happy on the day she bought her house.

Now.  This isn’t (that) fictional a story.  My wife’s a bankruptcy lawyer, and she’ll tell you about all the messes she’s cleaning up from Peters who used every legal trick to screw people out of their money.  In fact, her job is largely seeing what she can to keep people in their homes, which they’re very proud of, and heartbroken to lose.
But what she often has to tell people is, “Peter lied.  The only reason you moved into this house is because Peter was quietly fucking you over to get his commission.  And now you’re going to lose the house.”
The Sheilas of the world are not happy.  Very not happy.   In fact, all the happiness they had when they threw their housewarming parties now seems like utter foolishness.
Which, actually, it kinda was.
Shame they didn’t know better.

Now, you can have all sorts of debates about how smart Sheila should have been despite an environment that had utterly unprepared her for complex questions of finance, or exactly what sort of duties Peter had to warn her about his true motivations.  But that’s not the point.
Strangely, this essay isn’t about the housing market.
It’s about consenting adults.
Because over the weekend, one of my old essays went viral again, racking up over 1,200 new “loves” on FetLife and 250 new comments plopping in my inbox.  That essay was on how awful the One-Penis Policy usually is, wherein some insecure dude tells his girlfriend she can date anyone she wants, so long as it’s someone he’s attracted to.  And not someone with a penis.  Because God forbid there’s a penis to compete with his colossal schlong.
And while there are many women who remain happy with this arrangement, many more eventually find that the One-Penis Policy is actually a danger sign: the boyfriend doesn’t want his girlfriend to be happy, what he wants is to have all of his fantasies fulfilled.  He doesn’t actually give a shit about her, he only cares about potentially fucking her friends, treating her like jiggling bait dangled in sexy waters.
And when the girlfriend’s emotional needs come into conflict with the boyfriend’s – as happens, in any relationship, over time – then they discover that their entire relationship is a variant on the One-Penis Policy – which is to say, “Your sex life is only all right so long as it titillates me, and your emotions are all right only as long as I’m not inconvenienced.”  And at the first major divergence, poof.  He’s gone.
This isn’t an illusion, by the way.  Like my wife endlessly trying to fix the mess that poor homeless Sheilas are in now, you can go to FetLife and see literally a hundred comments from women going, “Yeah, that happened to me.”
But there’s also half as many comments from people going, “Ghod, Ferrett, this is two people in a consenting relationship, and if both are happy, who the fuck are you to judge?”
And the answer is, because Sheila was happy.  She was happy because she thought Peter was her friend, whereas Peter was actually looking at her as a natural resource to be exploited.  Her happiness was based on something that wasn’t actually true – an untruth encouraged by Peter, who did everything he could to obscure his true motives.
And while there are doubtlessly good-Peters out there, Peters who found a legitimate way to get good housings for Sheilas with slightly better credit lines, saying, “Well, as long as it’s between two consenting adults, it’s wonderful” is to condemn poor Sheilas to years worth of agony and self-recrimination.  I’m not saying that every Sheila is getting fucked over, nor am I saying that every guy who institutes the OPP is a selfish and unsupportive monster.
But the comments will show: Some significant percentage of them are.
And to handwave that experience away under the guise of “Who are we to judge?”, implying this judgy topic shouldn’t even be raised, condemns ignorant future-Sheilas to endless predations by Peters.
I’m not saying women should never enter into a One-Penis Policy relationship.  I’m not saying Sheila should never ever buy a home.  But I am hoping to fuck that anyone who enters into a One-Penis Policy understands that it goes wrong for a lot of women in precisely this way, and to watch for the danger signs, because even though you’re as happy as a new homeowner now, this happiness may turn out to be something you ultimately regret.
Maybe it won’t.  And if so, I wish you success with your new sole-penis in your new two-bedroom home, because if you’re happy in the long run then I am happy.  For true.
But a little education would have saved Sheila from a tremendous upset, just as reading my OPP essay has caused a couple of women to reexamine their relationships and ask some questions that revealed the true motivations of their boyfriends.  And if you’re going to say, “Who are you to question what happens between two consenting adults?” the answer is that I am not anyone who should be questioning.
The person in the relationship should be questioning.  And sometimes, like Sheila, they don’t know quite enough yet to ask the right questions.  And it’s only by airing questions like this that they have any hope of learning.