Category: Writing

Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad is one of the most well-constructed TV series I’ve ever seen. It follows Walter White on his rise from over-qualified high school chemistry teacher to methamphetamine drug lord. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend getting on Netflix and watching it before proceeding.

The series features many well-developed characters, but Skyler, Walter’s wife, in particular caught my interest. A fellow Breaking Bad fan, and the person who introduced me to the series almost a decade after its final episode aired, however, told me this was an odd choice. The wife of the shady protagonist in crime dramas like Breaking Bad (e.g. The Sopranos) tends to receive a lot of hate from viewers. They’re either submissive to whatever their criminal significant other wants them to do, making them seem weak or unrealistic to the audience, or they are antagonistic, making it natural for the audience to dislike them for getting in the “hero’s” way.

As Walter White’s wife, Skyler is no exception to the rule of being a commonly disliked character. She begins the series oblivious to Walter’s criminal activities. After she discovers them, she transitions between reluctantly or unwillingly supporting them, trying to separate herself and/or her kids from them, and finding herself hopelessly ensnared by them. Walter reasons that his actions are for the good of his family. He wants to provide them with wealth and safety for after he dies prematurely from terminal lung cancer. Skyler similarly reasons that her actions are for the good of her family. She hides Walter’s criminal activities partly to protect her son, who would be devastated to discover the father he admires is a criminal, and partly to protect her brother-in-law DEA agent Hank Shrader, who would be devastated to discover a criminal mastermind in his midst.

While Walter is willing to sell drugs and commit murder to provide for his family, Skyler is willing to go to equal extremes to protect them. She concocts a clever explanation for Walter’s wealth for her sister and brother-in-law. With her former career in accounting, she insists on overseeing Walter’s money-laundering operation to ensure no one discovers it. She pays most of Walter’s accumulated fortune to her former employer when she discovers he is at risk of being investigated for tax evasion. Fearing her household and money laundering business will also fall under this investigation, Skyler insists he use the money she forces on him to pay his bills and shutter his business, even sending goons to scare him into doing so. Unfortunately, she does this at a time when Walter needs his accumulated wealth most, unwittingly creating a seemingly insurmountable obstacle for him.

Admittedly, after watching the series a second time, Skyler is most interesting during this period of reluctant acceptance, which peaks in Season 4. Her prior period of revenge sex with her former boss in order to punish Walt for hiding his criminal activity and post period of deep depression and antagonism after she discovers Walt is not only a drug dealer but a murderer is less interesting. Perhaps this is because in both cases she reaches the contradictory conclusion that she must split her family apart for the good of the family.

Still, she was the character I didn’t know existed and yet needed for inspiration. I’d never watched a crime drama before and was unfamiliar with her archetype. It turns out I’ve been writing a novel with a loose crime drama sub-plot for over a decade, and the “crime boss’s” wife was my weakest character. Unknowingly following the trend of crime dramas, I’d never had a good idea of what to do with her to make her likeable or even interesting. Skyler made me wonder, “How far would this supporting character go to protect her family?” While I can’t say I’ve solved the problem of the “crime boss’s wife” archetype, finding an answer to this question resulted in a much more interesting character.

A rant about smut and experimental writing

A friend recently recommended that I read stories from the Human Domestication Guide (HDG). This collection of stories takes place in a universe where Earth has been taken over by technologically advanced invaders. These invaders, however, have an imperative to reduce suffering, even if that means imprisoning a miserable person in order to take care of all their physical and mental needs. The stories are technically smut but 90% of their content examines disability, mental health, and gender expression.

It interests me partly because I like researching topics in mental health and gender expression. Additionally, at least some stories are written from the perspective of characters who desire to give someone else total control of their life. This ideology is the exact opposite of my own: everyone should have as much freedom to act as individuals as possible. A government-less society is the ideal… which is about as realistic as the society of post-scarcity, boundless resources, and total control depicted in the HDG. It interests me because I want to understand a perspective so different from my own.

I’m no stranger to picking through smut for other aspects of a story that interest me, but I’ve gotten rather annoyed with having to do so as evidenced by the following rant I gave my friend:

In regard to the Human Domestication Guide, is my fascination with experimental writing showing when I say I’m more interested in the methods the creators use to attempt to maintain coherence across thousands of stories and dozens of writers than I am in the stories themselves? At first I thought the Wiki (which I found first) was the HDG, but then, I found the collection of stories that actually compose it. If it had been the Wiki, that would have blown my mind. Non-linear writing is neat.

I’ve been slowly writing/adding to this “non-linear saga outline,” “digital garden,” thing: https://the-net-digital-garden.vercel.app/. Eventually, it will basically be a collection of my notes, backstories, character profiles, and other things that are too detailed or too irrelevant to put into any book I plan to write. They’re things I needed to flesh out to make the stories and characters that these notes support appear coherent (hopefully) though. At first I thought HDG was something similar that already existed.

I’ve imagined that some writer out there could find my notes and be inspired to write their own story within my universe. I don’t plan to flesh out six planets worth of things after all, just the parts that I need. There’s plenty of room for someone else to write within it… And then I think, “Someone is just going to use all these ideas as a backdrop for smut, aren’t they? I’ve certainly given them enough fuel to do that. -_-”

Smut has it’s place I suppose if it’s allowed HDG to grow as large as it has. It’s just annoying. HDG’s ideas sound interesting enough on their own without pandering to the reptile brain. It’s a plague within experimental writing, too. Even House of Leaves, a book objectively unique and interesting to look at without even reading it, has straight up porn in the middle of it.

I reread Vurt by Jeff Noon a few years ago and realized that it represents everything I dislike reading and everything I dislike about experimental writing. It’s a book about drugs and incest (and robo-dog-cop-vurt-human-shadow hybrids) and written from the perspective of a guy writing a book (that’s a different rant). Yet, I still loved the basic story, the characters, and the subtle experimentation with perspectives, which is what I remember most and remember liking a lot back in high school. I realized I’ve kind of spent the past twenty years trying to recreate what I liked so much about Jeff Noon’s writing but without all the smut.