If you want to write a good, heroic hero, this is the podcast for you. We’re not necessarily talking about the archetypical, classically-defined, capital-H “Hero” in this podcast, though. We’re talking about what makes readers stand up and cheer.

And yes, this can be applied to the archetype, but let’s not digress.

We talk about perseverance, sacrifice, hard work, fear-facing, and a bunch of other attributes that we find inherently heroic.

Audiobook Plug: The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell

Writing Prompt: Write a scene in which a character makes a noble sacrifice and is not rewarded.

Mystery Soundbite! We have no idea who those gents with mouthfuls of marshmallows were, but Jordo caught them on tape…

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: Heroism — the what-makes-you-cheer moments. Sacrifice. “I wish I could have done that.” Taking risks. Facing fears. Hard decisions and demonstrations of skill or commitment. Working hard and achieving victory (aka Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches). Some elements include the decision, crises of faith, foreshadowing, the possibility of failure, and the heroic payoff. Consider making it clear that the hero’s strengths are not enough — but he squeaks by on other attributes. Make sure to help the reader believe that the hero might fail. Let the victory have costs for the hero. One person can make a difference, can do incredible things against adversity, but it has costs. That’s the heroic concept.

[Howard] 15 minutes long because you’re in a hurry.
[Dan] And we saved the world.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] I’m Superman. No, wait, Spiderman.
[Brandon] All right, Spidey.
[Howard] James Bond.
[Dan] Red. No, blue.

[Brandon] Heroism. Let’s… I want to define this first off saying we’re not talking about the classic hero in this. We’re not talking about the protagonist or the person with the…
[Howard] We’re not talking about the archetypical hero.
[Brandon] Yeah. Archetypical hero. We’re not using the Greek definitions.
[Dan] No classical definitions.
[Brandon] The idea is what makes someone heroic to the modern reader, listener, viewer, whatever. What defines a hero to them? We’re talking about the what-makes-you-cheer moments. What is it that will make you stand up and say, “Yes!” Let’s dig into it. What makes someone heroic to a modern audience?
 [Dan] I think one of the big ones is sacrifice. When somebody gives up something… gives something of themselves in order to help other people, that is something that we love. That makes someone a hero.
[Howard] It’s a little bit like Christmas.
[Dan] Except somebody dies.
[Brandon] This isn’t the… why can’t we be funny on the humor podcast?
[Howard] Christmas is the day when you want to be… when you get to be somebody you want to be all year round. A hero is the guy who does something and you look at it and you honestly say, “I would not have done. I would’ve been too scared, I would’ve been too weak, I would’ve been too slow, but…”
[Brandon] But I wish that I were…
[Howard] But I wish that I could have. I wish that I could have.
[Brandon] So we’re talking about, when we are defining what makes a character sympathetic, we’re talking about just the one side of it that is the extremely capable, the extremely competent, taken to the Nth degree. That is our [garbled]
[Howard] It’s not even necessarily extremely capable or extremely competent. It’s the…
[Brandon] But you could… I’m defining as capable or competent the attribute that we want to have that someone has. It can be that they are willing to run into a burning building to grab a child who was in there screaming when most people wouldn’t.
[Dan] So for example, Tale of Two Cities, the guy who basically just gives his life so that two other people can be together and he dies in someone else’s place. He’s not showing a great skill, but he is competent in that he has the moral fortitude to make that decision.
[Brandon] It’s the same way that Samwise Gamgee is a superhero in that he has a superheroic sense of loyalty.
[Howard] He’s very loyal.
[Brandon] It’s because this is something we want. But sacrifice, is that something different or is that a subset? This is one thing that some people do that we would wish that we would do?
[Dan] It seems like…
[Howard] I think sacrifice is a subset.
[Dan] It’s a subset.
[Brandon] But it seems like it’s the big one when attached to heroes. We love it when someone is willing to risk everything in order to accomplish whatever they want.

[Howard] I think sacrifice and risk are two different things. I think the willingness to make the sacrifice, that they are taking the risk… the news story from this last summer… flooding… I can’t remember the guy’s name, I can’t remember the exact story. But his father had drowned in a flood years earlier. He walks out of the plant, the river is flooding, and there is somebody in the river drowning. He yells at his coworkers, and he himself leads the charge out into the river. The whole time he’s doing it, he’s remembering, “This is how my dad died. He died in a flood and drowned. The same thing could happen to me. But I can’t stand by and watch this person drown.” It had a happy ending, everybody lives. But I could not watch that story without tearing up, because he took that risk and he faced a fear which had a very visceral component for him.

[Brandon] Facing the fear seems like another attribute of a hero that we can chalk up as… they overcome something inside of themselves. We like that overcoming. Dan mentioned one of the other things when we were talking about this podcast is persevering through trials is a mark of a hero.
[Dan] John Brown and I… the reason I thought of this as a topic for a podcast, John Brown and I were having this conversation recently. What we kind of settled on was that heroism depends ultimately on a decision and/or a demonstration. Someone is persevering through trials, they’re demonstrating their fortitude and their endurance. They’re making a decision that’s very difficult, whether that’s a decision to give something up, to give up their own safety, to risk something. They’re making hard decisions and demonstrating great skill or something.

[Brandon] The third one we talked about, maybe, that you said, was what? Work hard and earn a victory. That’s kind of almost like the one you mentioned, but… define that one a little bit more for us. Let’s do the definitions first, then we’ll talk about how to use them.
[Dan] That one I think is what you see in a lot of sports stories, which can break down into any genre of artist or skill. Somebody wants to play football, and their father wants them to be a lawyer instead. But they stick with it, and they practice really hard. It ends with the big game, and all their hard work pays off and they win.
[Brandon] There’s a whole subset genre of fiction… in kind of the early days of fiction. It was right around the turn of the century, 1900. I think the author of them was called Horatio Alger.
[Howard] Oh, yeah. Horatio Alger, Jr.
[Brandon] Yep. The entire story was this, someone works really hard, then their moment comes and they get an extremely huge payoff for working really hard. It’s something that’s kind of simple.
[Howard] Working really hard and being really friendly.
[Brandon] Being really friendly and good.
[Howard] Being overly trusting.
[Brandon] But at the end of the stories… I’ve studied… I actually haven’t read any of them, I studied them as an archetype. But they always would show up as something like the rich man’s daughter falls in the river and this guy is able to go save the daughter or something like that. These were enormously popular. They were the best sellers of their day. They haven’t really stood the test of time because they were all essentially exactly the same story. They were very shallow in lots of other ways of storytelling.
[Howard] He wasn’t well edited either. There were several of these were characters’ names would change the course of the book.
[Brandon] Right. But we can learn something from them. I think that you can say, “Okay, doing only that is a bad idea for a story.” Yet you can take an element of this and say, “What was he doing?” What does it say about humankind, or at least our culture, that we loved these so much during that era and how can we apply that in our fiction? I’ve got to say, I love this. This is one of the main reasons why I read books and go to movies and things like this, is I love to see the heroic payoff. The best one in recent years has been Batman: the Dark Knight which is an element of sacrifice and persevering through trials. It’s where he makes this huge sacrifice at the end of the movie. A sacrifice that even in many ways larger than death. It is sacrificing his good name, his reputation and all this, so that the people can still have hope. That was a beautiful… that’s the sort of thing that makes me cheer. I love that. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to break, and Dan’s going to give us a talk about a book that he loves on audible. Then we’re going to come back and we are going to try to dissect how to do this in our own fiction.

[Dan] My recommendation for a book this week is The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell. It’s the first book in his Saxon Tales series. Cornwell  is one of my very favorite authors. He writes almost exclusively heroic historicals. The Richard Sharpe series about a rifle man in the Napoleonic wars is his big one. The Saxon Tales is about a Saxon named Utred who helps Alfred the Great basically establish England as a kingdom. It goes through… it’s at present, I believe, four books long. It’s just really great. It goes through several battles, explains a lot of heroism, a lot of delicious historical details. If you’ve never read any Bernard Cornwell book, do yourself a favor and pick this one up. It’s my favorite of his series.
[Brandon] audiblepodcast.com/excuse

[Brandon] How do we do it? How can we use this in our fiction without turning into Horatio Alger where it’s just obvious, yet we want… how can we write stories where people will stand up and cheer?
[Dan] We talked before about decision. I think that making sure to include that decision is important, but also knowing where to include it. When you’re dealing with a story about perseverance, that kind of heroic moment comes at the end. That guy is persevering through trials typically doesn’t make any really difficult moral decisions at any point along the way. His choices are made at the beginning rather than the end. I’m going to do this, no matter what it takes.
[Brandon] I’m going to train harder than anyone else and succeed. He makes a decision then. But a lot of people, in the kind of a different style, the Dark Knight archetype so to speak, they make the decision at the end. What decision are they going to make, they come to a very important moment where they have to decide. In that case, they’ve got their heroic flaw that they’re working against.
[Howard] You’ve got to set that up. If the character has made the decision at the beginning of the book to train hard and be the best, we have to have crises of faith throughout the course of the book showing that the guy really did have the intestinal fortitude to stick with this or that the guy really did fail, maybe failed several times, and at the end picked himself back up and squeaked by.
[Brandon] That might be the most important thing to remember, is that this great moment is held up by iron girders under it. The iron girders are your foreshadowing, specifically your readers’ expectation and anticipation. It works because of the anticipation. It works because of the length of time spent nearly failing. You have to be able to convince the reader that they’re going to fail. For a moment, the reader has to think, “Oh, they might fail.” Even though they know… there’s a whole range of these, where they may actually be able… they’d be thinking it. That’s where books in the heroic genre happen. This is David Gammell and things like this. Where sometimes the heroes do fail. They’re usually heroic. They usually succeed in some way. But sometimes they die. Sometimes they… you’re hoping that they won’t in this instance. When they don’t, you cheer. Having it happened that they fail sometimes is a way… or at least they die sometimes as a way to get around this, but…

[Howard] The other thing that you can do to prop it up is to… you establish that the hero… the things that the reader sees as the hero’s strengths are just not going to be enough to carry the day. You make that pretty clear. But you lay down in the groundwork some character attributes that the hero has that may appear to be unrelated. That may have come up in humorous moments or ancillary moments in the book. Then those prove to be something that the hero can draw in order to save the day. I actually use that a lot in Schlock Mercenary where my readers expect the good guys to win. There really isn’t a huge threat level there. What I’m trying to do is keep them guessing as to just how are the heroes going to be able to pull this off.
[Brandon] You build that anticipation. It’s going to be great when it happens. You hang a lot of guns on the wall, you hang hundreds of them, and then everyone knows they’re all going to get shot at once, and it’s going to be beautiful.
[Dan] In a recent storyline, you actually killed a lot of characters. Which is a way of making sure people know that there is actual danger there. That failure is a possibility in your world.

[Brandon] I do think that when we experience fiction in our culture… it’s not this way in all cultures, but in our culture, there is a suspension of disbelief that happens. Not just with what’s happening in the picture. There is a suspension of disbelief that the heroes are going to fail. When we watch a Spiderman movie… a superhero movie, we go in… there is no way that these are the types of movies generally… you know ahead of time, the hero is not going to fail. Yet we suspend our disbelief, we go in and we say, for a moment, we’re allowing ourselves to believe that he could fail or that she could fail. That this could turn out all wrong. When the rest of our mind knows that’s impossible. I think inspiring that in readers… this is why it’s so dangerous to break the fourth wall.
[Howard] As soon as you break the fourth wall, the reader remembers, oh, yeah, this is just a story. Good guys are going to win. Meh.
[Brandon] But it’s also why it’s a bad idea to do that near breaking the fourth wall which is the hero bragging or the hero saying, “Oh, you knew we weren’t going to fail all along.” Anytime you’re pointing out, you’re self-referencing like that, you’re ending up with a big problem. Because you’re ruining the reader’s ability to suspend their disbelief that the heroes are going to fail.
[Howard] Unless you take a hero and you have him boast like that. Then you have him fail. That’s… you want to genre bend a little bit, that will work.

[Brandon] What I’m saying is you’ve got to pay attention to not letting your readers… don’t kick them out. Don’t make them say, “Oh, that’s right, this is a story where the heroes are never going to fail.” There should be some costs incurred in most fiction… not all the time, like some of these super enemies. For our listeners, I’d say, think about what is the cost going to be? We’ve talked about setting up sacrifice. Even if the heroes win, allowing there to be some sacrifice for them, some costs to them, will allow the heroism to shine in my opinion.
[Dan] A great example of this is the first two Spiderman movies. Where… I thought the first one didn’t work as well in some ways because the villain posed this horrible choice, save your girlfriend or save this trolley car, and he was able to save them both. There wasn’t really a cost there, at least for me. Whereas in the second one, the most powerful scene of that entire movie for me was where he saved this train, an elevated train. In doing so, he almost killed himself, lost his secret identity for a select group of people. There was an immense cost for that, it was very grueling, but because of that, it was incredibly heroic.
[Howard] That is one of my favorite scenes in any superhero movie. I think that’s tops on the list.
[Brandon] Let them sacrifice something. Don’t protect them from everything. Allow them to sacrifice something.
[Howard] At the risk of waxing philosophical late in the cast, I think that the reason we enjoy these stories where a sacrifice is made and the payoff is much higher than… going back to Horatio Alger, fishing the girl out of the river and finding out she’s the daughter of the rich man and becoming rich yourself. I think the reason we enjoy these is because as human beings we are wired for altruism. We want to believe that sacrifices will be paid off bigger than maybe in reality they would be. We want that because that’s what makes us do these sorts of things.

[Brandon] The entire heroic genre is about one person being able to make a difference. I think maybe we can solidify the cast into just that concept. It’s the American dream. Whatever you think of it, our heroic notions are tied to one person being able to do incredible things against lots of adversity even though it costs them something.
[Howard] Well, it’s not just an American dream.
[Brandon] That’s the capitalized… not capitalism…
[Dan] The nation that invented cowboys and superheroes.

[Brandon] Vigilante cowboys and vigilante superheroes. We are out of time. Dan, do you want to give us a writing prompt at this time?
[Dan] Yes. I want you to write a scene in which a character makes a noble sacrifice and is not rewarded for it.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now…
[an unknown voice interjects] I say, these marshmallow crackers are the mess…