As a child growing up in Winnipeg in the late ‘Sixties, most of my non-school time was spent in the company of my mother. My father, who had been a chef, had gone back to finish his high school, and then on to university for a BA, MA and, eventually, a PhD in psychology; all the while working as a waiter in at least two restaurants to keep the family afloat. We pretty much lived on his tips.

By the time I was ten or eleven, I stumbled onto the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, which set me on this lifelong path in science fiction and fantasy. I used my weekly allowance for these, buying them all at Eaton’s, a large department store in downtown Winnipeg, because my mother and I were downtown an awful lot around then. I suspect she was deeply bored, going a bit stir-crazy. The one-bus-trip pilgrimage probably kept her from climbing the walls.

She loved movies. And somehow we could find enough spare cash for a regular visit to one of the four cinemas downtown. So I watched a lot of films with my mother, often without knowing much about those films at all. If accompanied by an adult, everything barring R-rated films were fair game. I do recall one instance of severe mutual embarrassment, suffered in the natural silence and darkness of the cinema. She was a fan of Sean Connery. Well, who wasn’t? But this particular film wasn’t a James Bond one. It was called Zardoz. And there was a scene on a beach early on … well, that was a bit excruciating, though probably more for her than me.

That one sticks in my memory, for all the wrong reasons. But there’s another film that has stayed with me, although in a fragmented way. I can’t even recall its title. It was a war film. Its setting was somewhere in a jungle. This might have been the Vietnam War, or Korea, or maybe even WWII. The story centered on two escaped POWs, fleeing through the jungle while being tracked by their captors. Or maybe they weren’t POWs at all, but downed airmen. I’m leaning towards the former, however.

One of those men was an asshole. Weak, always complaining, always wanting to give up. The other was heroic, forever cajoling his companion, dragging him onwards. Eventually, they approach an encampment of fellow soldiers, but to reach the dug-in position, the two have to run across a killing field, zigzagging while under constant fire from the tree-line behind them.

Soldiers in the trenches are watching, then urging them on. They’re going crazy, unable to help, as the two exhausted runners draw closer and closer.

Then one is shot, goes down. The other continues on, bullets zinging past, and finally makes it to the trench, falling into the arms of the soldiers.

And we see that it’s the asshole. The hero is lying dead in the field behind him. The wrong man survived.

Needless to say, this had an impact on me. An emotional gut-punch. I was furious. I felt betrayed. And seeing all those soldiers congratulating the asshole and calling him a hero was even worse. Because, unlike them, I’d watched that entire journey through the jungle. I knew better. The entire audience knew better.

Is this film considered a classic? I don’t know. I never saw it among the dozens of war films regularly broadcast on television in all the years following. It seemed to drop entirely out of sight, maybe because it’s ending was simply too brutal, too criminal. Or maybe it wasn’t a very good movie, with bad acting of something. The eyes of a ten-year-old wouldn’t know either way.

***

Elements of that story found their way into the Malazan Book of the Fallen, in myriad ways. The most obvious example is their influence on the conclusion of the Chain of Dogs, in plot-terms, in Deadhouse Gates. But in a perhaps more subtle way, that film – and its impact on me as a child – has shaped my entire approach to the author’s relationship with an audience, as it relates to the tale being told.

But in order to understand that, that film and its premise and pay-out needs a bit of deconstruction. It’s down to what is witnessed, what is known, and who witnesses, and who knows and who doesn’t know. In the film, the audience – the viewers – are there with our two protagonists. We get to know them, their strengths and flaws. We are invited to favour one over the other, to like one and not like the other. So that, by the time they reach the tree-line and see salvation two hundred yards away, we know who to root for.

But then the camera pulls back. It switches point of view to a trench-full of strangers, witnesses to two distant, bedraggled figures running across the killing field towards them. And from this distance, there’s no telling the two apart.

In terms of emotional attachment, we as audience have more investment on who is who. The soldiers in the trench don’t know them like we do. All they want is for at least one of them to make it. For them, even one survivor constitutes victory.

But not for us. Not for the audience. The asshole surviving is a pretty sour victory, because we carry in our minds that chain of events leading us here. We saw the heart of courage, and it’s lying torn and no longer beating, out in that field. We observe all the congratulations with a pretty jaded, bitter regard.

Of course the film makers intended it that way. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? But did it work as well as they hoped it would? I would suggest, maybe not.

But it was a good idea anyway, because it had a very important thing to say about war, didn’t it? The favoured don’t count. Good or evil, saint or asshole, that random bullet, or arrow, doesn’t give a fuck.

It was a good enough idea to be revisited, and slightly revised, in a war film many now consider a classic. The key difference, I think, is what made the first film fall away into obscurity while the second film won multiple Oscars.

Platoon tells a very similar story, a bit more heavy-handed in typical Oliver Stone fashion. The two POWs are replaced by two squad leaders, as played by Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger. But this time the audience has an on-screen presence, a stand-in for all of us, and that is the character played by Charlie Sheen. That is a crucial difference, I think.

This time, when we see the wrong man die, we see it from Sheen’s point of view. We even get Sheen then summarize and voice-over the obvious, assuming somebody out there didn’t get it the first time (thanks, Oliver).

This time, then, we share a character’s outrage, his sense of betrayal, of injustice, and all of this feed directly into Stone’s desire to expose the rotten heart of an unjust war.

***

Film of course has short-cuts to delivering emotion to an audience that books don’t have. Music comes to mind, as providing the background cue to scenes intended to be emotional. It’s so common now we barely notice it (except when it becomes comical in its clunkiness. Say, for example, this season 3 of Star Trek Discovery, or any season of Discovery for that matter, or Picard too, in both instances because the writing is so bad), so the cues in fiction have to be different, delivered exclusively by words.

Platoon was released in 1986. This predates the Malazan Book of the Fallen and I freely acknowledge its influence (along with The Big Red One in 1980, Full Metal Jacket in 1987, Saving Private Ryan in 1998, and Apocalypse Now in 2001). Their impact was not just the boots-on-the-ground take on war (as opposed to, say, Midway), but also with respect to emotional investment, audience, and point-of-view.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen is often criticized for the long build-ups to climatic conclusions; the ever-shifting point-of-view characters with their back-histories (touched on or not) and often minor roles in later big events. I seem to be dancing all over the place and it may indeed appear at first glance to be chaotic, but it isn’t.

I now believe that nothing in narrative is more crucial for delivering emotional payoffs than point-of-view. The simplest approach is to mostly stay with one (Charlie Sheen in Platoon, Joker in Full Metal Jacket), around which other characters are built by being witnessed, with the one standing in for the audience. Variations include final shifts of point-of view (Saving Private Ryan), or the occasional omnipotent, characterless point-of-view, as used (kind of) in The Big Red One’s opening scene, each time for the intention of adding emotional context to the scenes and the story.

I kind of mixed the bag’s contents for the Malazan Book of the Fallen. The question I asked myself was: is it possible to reach that emotional payoff for the audience by passing the baton between characters, one after another, with the only real continuity being the reader? My answer was, predictably, yes and no.

Accordingly, I decided that, rather than committing to one approach and staying with it come hell or high water, I would run the two options in parallel. In other words, a very few number of characters were going to shoulder the emotional energy right the way through; while in most other instances, I’d do the baton thing.

This opened up the thematic notion of heroism. What is it? Is it intrinsic to an act or a decision regardless of whether or not it is witnessed by anyone else? Or does the essence of heroism belong exclusively in that act or decision being witnessed? And is it enough for that ‘witness’ to be solely and exclusively the reader (audience), aka that nameless war-movie I described earlier, or do we need it to be witnessed by other characters on the page (as with Platoon)?

Is there is a difference between the emotions felt when sharing them with a character on the page, versus one sans companion? What is the role of the character on the page who witnesses heroism, if not the ham-fisted voiceover summary we saw in Platoon, then something delivered with a bit more subtlety? Do what extent are we, as readers, in need of that on-the-page point-of-view to assist us in contextualizing our emotional response?

Which has more impact (value?): a character crying on the page versus a reader crying while sitting on the bus? What happens in a scene where both are offered (Fiddler), versus a character staying shut down, emotionally, while true tragedy takes place (Beak)?

I have no answers because I think these questions can only be answered individually, but I explored them all. You got Fiddler, but you also got Felisin. You got Anomander Rake, but you also got Itkovian. You got Icarium and Mappo, but then you got Tavore.

So, in terms of observations that might be useful to beginning writers, I’ll say this.

One: you can’t hope to bring every reader along.

Two: you can mitigate that by exploring every approach to emotional payoff available to you. Each one has value.

Three: take your time setting that all up, even if it makes the occasional reader impatient. Because, without the set-up, there’s no payoff.

Four: it never hurts to keep a soundtrack handy when writing those emotional scenes (I used Leave No Man Behind from the soundtrack to Blackhawk Down), and don’t be afraid to feel the feels when writing those scenes. If you don’t get to that place, down in the core of your gut, don’t expect the readers to ever get there either.

Five: but keep one discerning eye open, cool and gauging. Emotional scenes are always at risk of being overwritten and thereby becoming maudlin, overwrought and melodramatic. Less is more for those scenes: the tighter the writing the better.

Six: sometimes gestures speak the most eloquently (Korlat standing under the rain in MoI) in lieu of dialogue. Avoid if you can the Oliver Stone overkill.

Seven: consider long and hard the point-of-view you choose for that payoff scene; consider where they come from, what they know, how they feel about whatever you’re witnessing (even if they don’t know how they feel about what they’re witnessing).

Eight: don’t cut away too early if you want to have the reader and audience share the emotional payoff (burial of Itkovian).

Nine: cut away immediately if all the emotional payoff belongs exclusively to the reader (Duiker at end of MoI).

Ten: emotional payoff can come from anywhere.

***

I grew up under the influence of my mother, her love of books, her love of films. I was occasionally embarrassed to be seen in town by school-mates, them in a small gang, cut loose and wandering, and me walking beside my mother. I see now that I was often too young to be left alone, at least as far as she was concerned, and that she liked the company, and also that I was often the one eager for the book section of Eaton’s, or what was on offer at the nearest cinema. She indulged me often.

We often went into town to wait for my father to finish his shift at some nearby silver-service restaurant, or when he worked as a chef at Eaton’s. All these patterns of my youth were sharply defined and remain with me, and to recall them is to sense the shadow of my mother at my side, with me struggling to choose which book to buy, since I could only buy one, and yet so many were on offer.

I still have those books, on my bookshelf. They are the overgrown garden of my imagination and my lonely childhood all rolled up in one.

My mother never lived to see my first book.

But her maiden name was Erikson.