It doesn’t matter if you’re writing hardboiled crime or urban fantasy, space operas or western ballads: The most inventive plot will crack and disintegrate if there aren’t real and compelling characters supporting it. 

These characters, though, are not just arbitrary attributes housed inside a shell. From Luke Skywalker to Phineas Poe to Hamlet, the most memorable figures in literature can be aligned with a character archetype. By studying these archetypes—their characteristics and their place within a plot—we can create characters that readers are able to identify with.

But, will this make the reader follow the characters into Hell? We need to make these characters real, living, bleeding people, and by exploiting the archetypes, by subverting and humanizing them with concise, evocative details, we can create the type of characters that a reader will follow into whatever shadowed alley, extraplanetary prison or damned castle in which their dark fate lies.

This class will focus on genre fiction, which has long been ghettoized by the literati for being formulaic and poorly written. There are several reasons for choosing genre, the least of which is showing why this notion is not accurate.

First, there are as many genres as there are ways to dispose of a body. This is important because each genre has their own tropes and expectations, ones that we will learn to subvert and combine with other genres to create surprising and original tales in a variety of settings.

Second, genre fiction tends to have the most obvious character archetypes, for better or worse, and this will allow us to analyze, deconstruct and rebuild them into more fully-realized people that will work as easily in a noir melodrama as a dystopian western.

Finally, many stories in these genres are fueled by the desire for power or love, an impulse that impacts almost every action in every aspect of society. 

On Thursday, 11 April, I’ll be leading a fiction workshop, “From Hero to Trickster: Using Archetypes in Your Fiction” as part of CCBC’s Creative Writing Forum. We’ll be talking about character archetypes in fiction, as well as plotting stories. The workshop will wrap up with the entire class building a story from the ground up. The workshop will be in Room E213 from 4-5.15PM on CCBC’s Catonsville campus.

A few days later, I’ll be moderating the “Mysterious Adaptation: Noir from Novels to the Movies” panel at the CityLit Festival in Mount Vernon (which George Saunders is headlining!) on Saturday 13 April from 12-1.30PM. Ariel Winter, Art Taylor, Brian Lindenmuth and I will be discussing adapting mystery novels from page to screen. The panel will be in Pratt Library in the School and Student Services room on the second floor from 12-1.30PM. There will also be a signing/arguing session afterwards. The panel blurb is below.

With the recent release of the Anthony Hopkins movie Hitchcock, interest in film noir has peaked again. But before these stories hit celluloid, many of them lurked in the dark pages and gutters of books. What is the mystery behind adapting a great novel to the silver screen? Join host Nik Korpon and panelists for a thrilling discussion.

There’s more exciting stuff that I should be able to talk about soon, the least of which is a redesign of this woefully outdated website. Don’t get me wrong: It’ll still be WordPress, but at least a different WordPress than it is now.

Cheers
Nik

Cheers
Nik

The good people at the CityLit Project were crazy enough to let me teach a class at the Patterson Theater in Baltimore this winter. It will be on Thursday nights from 6-8, starting 14 February and running for six weeks. There’s going to be some history talk, some theory talk, some craft talk, and a whole lot of geeking out.  You should sign up and tell your friends to sign up. Huge, bloody thanks to Gregg Wilhelm and Christine Stewart for making it happen.

CLASS DESCRIPTION

At Creative Alliance: N is for NOIR FICTION. Feb 7 – March 14. Fedoras, femme fatales, bootleg hooch and … text messages? Classic noir fiction has inflicted its indelible images on us, but is it still relevant? You’d be surprised. Through craft-based discussion and short-story critiques, we’ll explore ways to effectively use the tropes established by classic noir and crime fiction; new ways to approach and subvert those conventions; and techniques to create compelling characters you’d follow into the shadows. This class is geared towards newbies or Underwood veterans, novelists or short story writers. All you need is a love for the dark. Nik Korpon—author, editor, teacher, grifter and vagabond—leads the group through the history of noir fiction, from the early pulps to contemporary incarnations. 7-9 pm. Adv. reg $150, $140 mbrs. Walk-in $160, $150 mbrs. http://www.creativealliance.org/events/2013/n-noir-fiction

(That’s a Descendents reference for those who haven’t realized Milo Aukerman is god.)

I’ve been holding back while everything behind the scenes got itself sorted, so I’m pretty well bursting with excitement to say that I’ve signed on with the excellent Brooks Sherman of FinePrint Literary Management. I’m still new at this whole agent stuff, but he totally gets what I’m doing and had incredibly insightful suggestions, and we’re on the same wavelength with projects, so I couldn’t be happier.

Right now we’re working on FAIT AVE, a hardboiled/noir novel set in Baltimore. If you’ve read a couple of my more recent stories, you’ll recognize a number of characters–Elroy, Beigler, Harry, Pat, Fat Billy. Their trajectories, however, will inevitably nosedive into the gutter.

More as it comes. I’m off for a bourbon.

Godspeed
Nik

I was lucky enough to get tapped by Ben Tanzer to be part of Daddy Cool, an anthology that will be published by Artistically Declined Press. This is especially exciting–and not just because of all the amazing authors they have lined up–because it’s a YA anthology, or as ADP puts it: ‘Fathers writing for and about kids.’ This is my first foray into YA, though I felt obliged to keep it creepy with my creatively-titled story, The Ghost Train, which is about a ghost train that steals kids and takes them into the Neverafter if they cross a certain point the tunnel. There are some carnies and other weird things thrown in for good measure.

Anyway, ADP just kicked off their Kickstarter campaign to help fund the book, and the rewards are pretty damn awesome. Almost as awesome as the lineup: J.A. Tyler, Robert Duffer, Pete Anderson, bl pawelek, Seth Berg, Matthew Salesses, Mark Brand, Nik Korpon, Nathan Holic, Caleb Ross, Corey Mesler, CL Bledsoe, John Longstocking, Jason Fisk, Robert Arellano, Barry Graham, Chad Redden, Dave Housley, Dan Coxon, Jesse Jordan, Fred Sasaki, Ryan W. Bradley, and Ben Tanzer.

I know, right?

ADP has a month to meet their goal, and if not… You all know how Kickstarter works. Please, drop a little money in their coffers, get yourself something cool and sleep well knowing you helped this antho get off the ground.

Big news posted tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Godspeed
Nik

Richard Thomas tagged me, so I guess it’s my turn on the great meme machine. Joining me this week are Monica Drake, David James Keaton, Caleb J. Ross and Simon West-Bulford. Some things are in the mix that I can’t talk about publicly yet, plus I’m absolute crap at promoting my fiction, so I modified these questions to talk about Bar Scars, my short story collection that came out this fall on Snubnose Press. I should have another post up in a week or so talking about some other cool stuff.

What is the title of your last book?

Bar Scars: Stories. I stole it from a City Paper column that used to run a couple years ago. It fit the collection well, though, and the column was awesome.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I had a bunch of stories I liked that had either been published a while ago or had gone out of print and I didn’t want them to die in anonymity. Plus, as I talked about in an essay at Elizabeth A. White’s blog, I’d recently discovered that, though the characters initially had different names, I was writing about the same people in my stories, my novels and my novellas. I thought a collection was a good way to throw all these lowlifes into one location and let them destroy each other.

What genre does your book fall under?

Crime, most definitely. Hardboiled, noir, mystery, it’s all about people who need something, consequences be damned.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I see the characters as more of an aura or a voice than a fully-sketched person. I try to let their character define for itself rather than physical attributes. That being said, definitely Ryan Gosling because he’s dreamy… Wait, what?

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Whiskey is thicker than blood and the most important question is always where to hide the body.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It was published by Snubnose Press, who also published my novella Old Ghosts.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

The stories were written over a three-year period, but compiling and editing only took a month or so.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

All of the best books ever written are exactly like Bar Scars.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I had some stories that I really liked and had either been published in small zines, in print, or with places that had since gone dark. I thought it’d be a good way to revisit some of that stuff, especially because it had been brought into a new context after I’d realized that, even though the names were different when the stories were first published, I’d been writing about the same characters in my novels and shorts. I explain this much better at Elizabeth White’s blog.

What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

The stories are gritty, funny, sexy, gross, disturbing, scarring, ridiculous, disheartening and goofy, but at their core, they’re all love stories. Like the song says, Love is a many splendored thing.

As I mentioned recently, my first short story collection BAR SCARS recently came out on Snubnose Press. What I didn’t mention was that my homeboy Richard Thomas had his first short story collection, HERNIATED ROOTS, come out on Snubnose a week later. Though not planned at all, I thought it was very fitting. I came up with Richard, in a manner of speaking. We’ve published in many of the same magazines, we’ve edited each other’s stories for years, we have our first novels on the same press (albeit the same now-shuttered press.) The long and short of it is that we know the other’s work very well, so we thought it’d be nice to review each other’s collection. His review of BAR SCARS is posted here. Instead of talking about each story, I chose the ones that really exemplified something in his writing that I enjoy. On some stories I ramble longer and others I practice what I tell my students: Be concise. All of them, though, show something pretty special.

A brief caveat before going into this: Much of this review is very positive, but rest assured that it’s no easy back-pat for a friend. Behind closed doors, before these stories were published, we tore into them viciously, and probably bruised some egos along the way, but did it for the sake of the story. And really, isn’t that what friends are for?

Unzipped

A man meets a girl in playing pool in a bar and it all goes downhill from there. This story is an example of what Richard does best, creating that interplay between inference and action, the perceived bleeding over into the actualized. It’s not even a question of which one exists as much as which one you’d rather exist, which is possibly more unsettling than the story itself. While the narrative itself is compelling—what more can you ask for in noir than a hot chick and inevitable self-destruction? —the quick mental flash the protagonist has at the end shines a new light on everything. It’s one of those sleight-of-hands that cause you to reevaluate the story on a second, third and fourth read.

Your Enemies Will Devour You

Besides being a wrenching story of moral decay and loss, Enemies has one of the best lines of the whole collection, wonderful because of its disarming simplicity: ‘She is like an old pair of gloves—soft and supple, giving and familiar, torn and abused.’ Comparing a woman to a pair of old gloves—and particularly a love interest who is supposed to arouse us—is a risk to begin with. There are a ton of ways it can go awry. But the sentence just unfurls in this unexpected way, each paired-comparison deepening the understanding of this character. It’s so simple but so effective, like all great writing.

Later in the story, the protagonist utters a line that could almost be the thesis of the collection: ‘I cannot stop drinking so I don’t even try.’ It’s not because this collection, or Richard’s work in general, is populated by scores of drunks, but more that it focuses on people who recognize their internal darkness and embrace it. Though they might try to put a nice face on for the outside world, they never forget who they are, no matter how much they try to drink, snort, fight or fuck it into submission.

Even later in the story, he ups the ante again. With golf club in hand, he waits for his boss to leave work. One shot to the head knocks him down, the protag goes to work, but not on the head. ‘I beat his back like a dusty rug.’  I write a fair amount of depraved stuff, but this line really chills me. Part of it is the simplicity I spoke of earlier—this sentence is only eight words if you count the article ‘a’—but the chill runs much deeper. Part of it is the juxtaposition of this hyper-violent act right up against the domesticity of cleaning the rug that sits in your living room. What really gets me about it, though, was something that I didn’t fully realize until I’d read the story four or five times: How long do you have to beat someone on the back to kill them, and what other kinds of noises are made during that beating? With all the lush descriptions that Richard writes, it’s these short, sharp ones that cut through that lovely haze and fishhook you in the gut.

Last thing about this story: I love this story because, like with a lot of his work, we slip between mania and violent reality, only in this instance, I didn’t realize until the last line what the story is: A perverse love letter to a son.

Bird in Hand

This is a lovely little twist, the double-double cross. Each time I read it, I think about the ending of A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s one of my favorite endings of all time, because everyone thinks they’re winning, but in actuality everyone is losing. Similar feeling here. It’s also, as a recent transplant to the ‘burbs, a nice subversion of the Suburban American Dream. The dialogue crackles, too.

Released

This is an exercise in how many different ways there are to say ‘red’ and how those simple descriptions can color your understanding of a character. It also called back another example worth noting. Watching Philip Seymour Hoffman drink whiskey from a baby food jar in Capote is one of the saddest things I’ve ever witnessed. A glass jar is nothing by itself, but this glass jar is imbued with so much emotional weight that it hurts to watch. Same with the red barn in this story. I won’t ruin it for anyone, but by the time you understand what the significance of the barn is, it really deflates you, knowing that this barn will recur for days and days and days.

Herniated Roots

It’s not a flashy story, but a quiet and tense examination of a man’s disintegration. This harkens back to what I was talking about in Enemies. So, I guess in that vein, it’s not so much a disintegration of man but an acceptance, maybe even a dark enlightenment. My point is, this is what it’s like to watch someone die.

On a little side note, part of this stuff was chopped out by the editor, which Richard then rewrote and sent to Shotgun Honey. It’s interesting to read the two alongside each other because you can see the threads crossing between, yet they remain separate.

Descent

The blurring between reality and fantasy/delusion/hallucination is a common theme in the collection, and this story is a shining example. Looking at it from an analytical perspective, Descent is really interesting for the sub-genre explored here that could be adjacent to mystery, where instead of investigating ‘who they are’ we’re investigating ‘what they are.’

The story starts with ‘She haunts my dreams’ and ends with ‘I never ask why.’ The border between worlds/states reminds me of a tropical waterfall, in that the underside—a dark, protected cave—and the outside—a lush lagoon ringed by a throbbing jungle—are kept separate only by running water. Standing on one side, you can easily stuck your hand through and reach the other. It might be an ecstatic sensory experience, and it might rip your arm out of your shoulder and pull you under.

Tinkering with the Moon

This is just beautiful, top to bottom. It’s probably my favorite story in the collection. It starts with a simple premise: A young boy copes with dysfunctional and absent parents by building sculptures with Tinker Toys. The way the emotion is handled though completely gutted me. It mixes the painfully real with the emotion of the ethereal and leaves you wondering what you just experienced. Actually, it doesn’t leave you wondering. You don’t care what you’ve just experienced. It leaves you wanting to nestle down inside that feeling, close your eyes and just let it envelop you.

In other stuff, Shotgun Honey just released the cover for the BOTH BARRELS anthology, and it is pretty amazing. They have pictures over at the site. The lineup is even more amazing than the cover, so definitely keep an eye out for that.

I also got word that I’ll be teaching a noir fiction class through the Baltimore CityLit Project. The class starts mid-February and there will also be a panel in conjunction with the class at the CityLit Festival in April. More deets on those as I know them.

Last thing. Obviously, I’m pretty bad at keeping this updated, so I figure it’s better to just cut my losses. If you’re actually reading this and would like to stay in touch, please check me out at Facebook at The Crimes of Nik Korpon or on Twitter at @NikKorpon. I will post things up here from time to time, but I’m pretty active on those two. According to the new-media-author-experts, I’m committing virtual suicide, but I’d rather spend time writing stories than blog posts.

BAR SCARS SYNOPSIS
Double-crosses gone wrong, underage lovers with overprotective brothers, fathers searching for their dead daughters. No one in Bar Scars gets away clean. In Korpon’s Baltimore, whiskey is thicker than blood and the most important question is where to hide the body. It doesn’t matter that these are the normal people you see every day, because whether they’re from a broken bottle of beer or the jagged edge of broken dreams, these scars will always shine through.

Godspeed
Nik

Speaking of Hardboiled, I’ll be a guest on Booked Podcast‘s Intro to Hardboiled this evening. I’ll post links when they’re live.

Too, if you’re in the Arlington, VA area next week, I’m doing a noir panel at One More Page Books with Elizabeth Hand, James Grady, Sandra Ruttan and Con Lehane. It’s panning out to be a very academic week in which I will consistently be able to geek out on crime books. Good times.

Godspeed
Nik