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I’ve noticed a trend with younger writers, especially those writers of fan-fiction, and that is this perpetual need to make their characters faint as a way to wrap up a chapter. Today, I just started reading one in which the author has posted three chapters to date, and in every single one, his main character — a Commander in the Special Forces, mind you — faints at the end. The character is a Canadian and I’m an American, so it’s possible there’s a cultural disconnect that I’m not aware of, but I didn’t think our cultures were that different from each other that the manliest of their men suddenly become Scarlett O’Hara when a bad-guy shoots a pistol at them. In fact, I kind of thought Canadian men were almost exactly like the men in the United States, only with hockey sticks and better manners.
How does something that is so apparently a cop-out find its way into stories that are otherwise full of great potential? Writing culture has gone from creating energizing and empowering lines like “Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!” to painfully unimaginative ones like this - “And then he passed out from the shock of seeing blah blah blah blah blah” — that make me want to pass out too. Is swooning a necessity nowadays? I think we can answer that with one word: ye….(sorry, the author just fainted).
Swooning has never been high up on the list of potential plot devices, but it seems that its collective overuse has made it fall so far down the totem pole that even the Oakland Raiders can look at it and go, “Damn, you suck!” We’re writing in a time when making characters faint more than Harry Potter around a Dementor is the norm, and to do anything else to resolve a chapter is actually sort of uncool. As a result, swooners are out there in full force, inexplicably fainting when they see a dark shadow under a dim streetlight, have to confront overwhelming feelings when their past comes back to bite them in the ass, find themselves in a huge battle where the stakes are huge, or discover that Snooki has a bestselling book. Okay, that last one I get. Anyway, in most of these cases, the riposte and always defensive “Screw you, I’m new at writing” earns the swoon-happy writer a crown of laurels. Fainting spells are fiction’s version of the appendix; there’s no real use for them, and they might just blow up in the writer’s face and kill you. As plot devices go, you just don’t need them.
There can be times when it’s appropriate to have a character pass out. Obviously, a blunt trauma to the head will cause a person to lose consciousness. Seizures, diabetic comas, low blood pressure, and many more medical reasons exist that would justify a fainting spell, and if this is part of your character’s story, then naturally you want to be as accurate to that condition as possible. In my fan-fiction as well as mainstream stories, I’ve had characters faint when they’ve gotten hit hard in the head and have suffered nasty concussions as a result. When your character gets her skull smashed open in a motorcycle accident, it’s not outside the realm of logic for her to pass out. In fact, you’d be more hard-pressed to explain in that scenario why she didn’t lose consciousness!
You can also use fainting as a way to demonstrate the effect someone/something has on your character as well as that character’s evolution over time. For example, JK Rowling successfully uses swooning in the Harry Potter series, having Harry consistently faint whenever he encounters a Dementor. He passes out to show the kind of psychic trauma these evil, supernatural creatures have on the people they attack. But additionally, as Harry becomes more knowledgeable about magic, their effects on him lessen. This goes to show his growth as a character because we, the audience, get to see him gradually overcome his weaknesses.
The problem is this reliance on fainting as a way to get out of doing your job as a writer. It is not appropriate to have a character faint precisely when they should naturally have an emotional revelation. That is the very worst kind of cop-out. For one, you’re just being lazy. I don’t know how else to put it. For two, it’s a very passive way to solve a problem because the character doesn’t choose that solution. Something is being done to your character that causes him or her to faint. In that instance, he or she might as well be a dog who can perform tricks because all the person is doing is rolling over and playing dead when life presents a conflict. Furthermore, it’s not very realistic. How often have you fainted when you felt something unpleasant inside?
Good writing demands that your character pushes back somehow when conflict arises. Rather than something passively being done to him or her, he or she has to proactively do something first. As a writer, it’s your duty to draw your audience in and make them care about your characters, and the only way to do that is to give them real problems to overcome, and choices for dealing with those problems. How interesting would Abraham Lincoln would have been in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter if he’d passed out right when he was about to fight a vampire? Would you really have wanted to read along with Katniss in The Hunger Games if, instead of volunteering to take her sister’s place, she couldn’t handle the emotion of the moment so she just swooned in the middle of the raffle drawing? To make them compelling, to make them real, you have to get inside your characters’ heads and show us why they choose to do the things they do to solve the problems you’ve given them. You have to scoop out their brains like a jack-o-lantern and then spread the gross, stringy guts on the table for your readers to see. This isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do when you write, and in fact it might be one of the hardest. Lord knows I don’t like the feel of pumpkin guts on my hands as I rip out the seeds. But it is your job after all.
Let me put it to you this way. Having a character faint as a way to get out of dealing with his/her feelings is like that scene towards the end of The Dark Knight in which Batman knocks the Joker off that skyscraper. Batman, unable to let this madman die like he wants, catches the Joker by the leg with a cord and stops him from falling any further than he already has. Then, after he yanks him back up again, he leaves him dangling at the top of the building, doomed to look down longingly until someone rescues him and takes him away. The writer who inserts a superfluous fainting spell is just like Batman in that moment; he has the guts to knock his willing and thrilled reader off the building, but for whatever reason he can’t follow through, so he catches us by the leg with an ill-timed swoon, yanks us back from the abyss, and leaves us dangling over it in frustration.
The other scenario I see with fainting spells is the tendency to use them as a way to wrap up a chapter. This is even lazier than using them to get out of exploring a character’s emotional depths. You can always tell that’s what the writer was doing because there will be intense action leading up that moment, it’ll abruptly stop, and then the character will inexplicably faint. Or, if a reason is given, it’s a weak one at best. Then the chapter will end, and the reader will walk away having a WTF moment.
This nearly always happens during some epic battle scene where logic would dictate that the character in question, more than likely the main character, needs to stay conscious. Yet, the character fights in the battle for a bit, but then gets injured by a blow that seems terribly unlikely to knock a person out, and just blacks out when there is nothing but madness around them. What would the ending of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers been like had Aragorn fainted in the midst of the battle to protect Helm’s Deep? I’ll tell you what. Lame.
When I see a writer do that, it’s obvious he got excited about the chapter, but gradually either lost interest or just got to this moment where he said “Now what?” but didn’t have the stubbornness to solve the problem. It’s easier to have the character swoon, and by doing that the writer doesn’t have to work hard to answer any questions about how the conflict of the chapter got resolved. Your reader can probably buy that in a huge battle, your main character, unless he’s Superman, could theoretically get knocked out. But what about your other characters? What happens to them? How do they drive off their opponents, or do they? Do your characters get captured, killed, what? Your reader wants to know, but if the chapter ends with a fainting spell that somehow neatly wraps everything up in a bow, then you’ve copped-out.
I don’t know about everyone else, but when a writer does that to me, it ticks me off royally because he/she might as well be saying, “I don’t care enough about my readers to do my job to the best of my abilities by fully satisfying the emotional needs of those who read my work.” As a reader, it’s annoying. As a writer, it’s a slap in the face because answering questions is part of your job, and therefore it’s a given that you’re going to have to get your hands dirty and do some serious work. So if I’m not worth the time or effort to work hard for, then you’re not worth the time or effort to reward by reading.
By the way, I just know that some unemployed, irate fan-girl is sitting in her parents’ basement right now, pissed off at me for being so blunt, and is screaming at the computer that I’m arrogant, being too hard on younger writers, and that people who read fan-fiction like swooning anyway. True, for the same reason Eskimos like to eat whale blubber: it’s the only thing on the Arctic buffet, okay?
So here’s a general rule of thumb regarding the use of swooning in your stories: DON’T DO IT. Unless you can make a convincing argument as to why your character should faint, chances are he or she doesn’t need to.
How does something that is so apparently a cop-out find its way into stories that are otherwise full of great potential? Writing culture has gone from creating energizing and empowering lines like “Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!” to painfully unimaginative ones like this - “And then he passed out from the shock of seeing blah blah blah blah blah” — that make me want to pass out too. Is swooning a necessity nowadays? I think we can answer that with one word: ye….(sorry, the author just fainted).
Swooning has never been high up on the list of potential plot devices, but it seems that its collective overuse has made it fall so far down the totem pole that even the Oakland Raiders can look at it and go, “Damn, you suck!” We’re writing in a time when making characters faint more than Harry Potter around a Dementor is the norm, and to do anything else to resolve a chapter is actually sort of uncool. As a result, swooners are out there in full force, inexplicably fainting when they see a dark shadow under a dim streetlight, have to confront overwhelming feelings when their past comes back to bite them in the ass, find themselves in a huge battle where the stakes are huge, or discover that Snooki has a bestselling book. Okay, that last one I get. Anyway, in most of these cases, the riposte and always defensive “Screw you, I’m new at writing” earns the swoon-happy writer a crown of laurels. Fainting spells are fiction’s version of the appendix; there’s no real use for them, and they might just blow up in the writer’s face and kill you. As plot devices go, you just don’t need them.
There can be times when it’s appropriate to have a character pass out. Obviously, a blunt trauma to the head will cause a person to lose consciousness. Seizures, diabetic comas, low blood pressure, and many more medical reasons exist that would justify a fainting spell, and if this is part of your character’s story, then naturally you want to be as accurate to that condition as possible. In my fan-fiction as well as mainstream stories, I’ve had characters faint when they’ve gotten hit hard in the head and have suffered nasty concussions as a result. When your character gets her skull smashed open in a motorcycle accident, it’s not outside the realm of logic for her to pass out. In fact, you’d be more hard-pressed to explain in that scenario why she didn’t lose consciousness!
You can also use fainting as a way to demonstrate the effect someone/something has on your character as well as that character’s evolution over time. For example, JK Rowling successfully uses swooning in the Harry Potter series, having Harry consistently faint whenever he encounters a Dementor. He passes out to show the kind of psychic trauma these evil, supernatural creatures have on the people they attack. But additionally, as Harry becomes more knowledgeable about magic, their effects on him lessen. This goes to show his growth as a character because we, the audience, get to see him gradually overcome his weaknesses.
The problem is this reliance on fainting as a way to get out of doing your job as a writer. It is not appropriate to have a character faint precisely when they should naturally have an emotional revelation. That is the very worst kind of cop-out. For one, you’re just being lazy. I don’t know how else to put it. For two, it’s a very passive way to solve a problem because the character doesn’t choose that solution. Something is being done to your character that causes him or her to faint. In that instance, he or she might as well be a dog who can perform tricks because all the person is doing is rolling over and playing dead when life presents a conflict. Furthermore, it’s not very realistic. How often have you fainted when you felt something unpleasant inside?
Good writing demands that your character pushes back somehow when conflict arises. Rather than something passively being done to him or her, he or she has to proactively do something first. As a writer, it’s your duty to draw your audience in and make them care about your characters, and the only way to do that is to give them real problems to overcome, and choices for dealing with those problems. How interesting would Abraham Lincoln would have been in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter if he’d passed out right when he was about to fight a vampire? Would you really have wanted to read along with Katniss in The Hunger Games if, instead of volunteering to take her sister’s place, she couldn’t handle the emotion of the moment so she just swooned in the middle of the raffle drawing? To make them compelling, to make them real, you have to get inside your characters’ heads and show us why they choose to do the things they do to solve the problems you’ve given them. You have to scoop out their brains like a jack-o-lantern and then spread the gross, stringy guts on the table for your readers to see. This isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do when you write, and in fact it might be one of the hardest. Lord knows I don’t like the feel of pumpkin guts on my hands as I rip out the seeds. But it is your job after all.
Let me put it to you this way. Having a character faint as a way to get out of dealing with his/her feelings is like that scene towards the end of The Dark Knight in which Batman knocks the Joker off that skyscraper. Batman, unable to let this madman die like he wants, catches the Joker by the leg with a cord and stops him from falling any further than he already has. Then, after he yanks him back up again, he leaves him dangling at the top of the building, doomed to look down longingly until someone rescues him and takes him away. The writer who inserts a superfluous fainting spell is just like Batman in that moment; he has the guts to knock his willing and thrilled reader off the building, but for whatever reason he can’t follow through, so he catches us by the leg with an ill-timed swoon, yanks us back from the abyss, and leaves us dangling over it in frustration.
The other scenario I see with fainting spells is the tendency to use them as a way to wrap up a chapter. This is even lazier than using them to get out of exploring a character’s emotional depths. You can always tell that’s what the writer was doing because there will be intense action leading up that moment, it’ll abruptly stop, and then the character will inexplicably faint. Or, if a reason is given, it’s a weak one at best. Then the chapter will end, and the reader will walk away having a WTF moment.
This nearly always happens during some epic battle scene where logic would dictate that the character in question, more than likely the main character, needs to stay conscious. Yet, the character fights in the battle for a bit, but then gets injured by a blow that seems terribly unlikely to knock a person out, and just blacks out when there is nothing but madness around them. What would the ending of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers been like had Aragorn fainted in the midst of the battle to protect Helm’s Deep? I’ll tell you what. Lame.
When I see a writer do that, it’s obvious he got excited about the chapter, but gradually either lost interest or just got to this moment where he said “Now what?” but didn’t have the stubbornness to solve the problem. It’s easier to have the character swoon, and by doing that the writer doesn’t have to work hard to answer any questions about how the conflict of the chapter got resolved. Your reader can probably buy that in a huge battle, your main character, unless he’s Superman, could theoretically get knocked out. But what about your other characters? What happens to them? How do they drive off their opponents, or do they? Do your characters get captured, killed, what? Your reader wants to know, but if the chapter ends with a fainting spell that somehow neatly wraps everything up in a bow, then you’ve copped-out.
I don’t know about everyone else, but when a writer does that to me, it ticks me off royally because he/she might as well be saying, “I don’t care enough about my readers to do my job to the best of my abilities by fully satisfying the emotional needs of those who read my work.” As a reader, it’s annoying. As a writer, it’s a slap in the face because answering questions is part of your job, and therefore it’s a given that you’re going to have to get your hands dirty and do some serious work. So if I’m not worth the time or effort to work hard for, then you’re not worth the time or effort to reward by reading.
By the way, I just know that some unemployed, irate fan-girl is sitting in her parents’ basement right now, pissed off at me for being so blunt, and is screaming at the computer that I’m arrogant, being too hard on younger writers, and that people who read fan-fiction like swooning anyway. True, for the same reason Eskimos like to eat whale blubber: it’s the only thing on the Arctic buffet, okay?
So here’s a general rule of thumb regarding the use of swooning in your stories: DON’T DO IT. Unless you can make a convincing argument as to why your character should faint, chances are he or she doesn’t need to.
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A rant as to why swooning in a story is usually a bad move...
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So swooning is your deal-breaker in a story? I guess we all have a few of those. For me it's the expression "breath he/she didn't realize he/she was holding". I really can't stand that expression, so every time I see it, it ejects me from the story universe (a bit like a bucket of cold water), and then it takes me a few moments to get back in the flow of things.