Bad news for you “24” fans. I read over at Libertas that Joel Surnow, the producer up till now, has decided to leave the show. I find it hard not to believe that his decision has some connection with the recent news that the series is being “reinvented” in a more sensitive, progressive form. Hollywood breathes a sigh of relief. America is the bad guy again. Terrorists are good. The world is back in balance.

I tried watching “24” one season. I forget which season it was. It was the one where there was the big uproar because they actually had some Muslim terrorists.

I enjoyed it for a while. It was nice to see a show where (as Dirty Harry at Libertas notes) you couldn’t see the twists coming a mile away, telegraphed by liberal orthodoxy. I liked the violence, and the moral dilemmas.

But it got to the point where I couldn’t stand it anymore. Maybe being a writer spoiled it for me. I’m aware of plot and character all the time, and I’m just not capable of suspending my disbelief that much about how fast and how often human beings can recover from trauma in a single day. If Jack Bauer had had some kind of super powers, it might have worked for me, but no human being can absorb that much abuse and continue functioning. And once I’ve stopped believing in a story, I stop caring.

I’ve written about heroes and motivation before. If you want to put your hero through a lot of action, you have basically two choices. You can make him a man of violence who’s on the side of right (like Jack Bauer). This is actually harder than it seems. Nice guys—guys you really want to root for—aren’t often stone killers. But it can be done. You can make him a cop or a soldier, a guy who has made a career choice to protect and serve. Or—and this is a challenge but intriguing—you can make him a former bad man who has decided to go straight, perhaps for the love of a good woman. (This was a recurring theme of silent Westerns.) One advantage of this kind of hero is that you can kill him off tragically and satisfyingly in the end, and the reader understands it as redemptive (the original Rambo dies at the end of the novel First Blood).

(Parenthetically, I’d like to mention one of my personal heroes, or at least fascinations, Wild Bill Hickok. I haven’t followed him as closely as Lincoln [see my post yesterday], but I have been to his grave in Deadwood. Hickok discovered during the Civil War that he had a proficiency with the Colt revolver. After the war he became a policeman, though he supplemented his income through playing poker. During that phase of his career, I believe, he had a romantic view of himself as the kind of white knight Harper’s Weekly magazine had portrayed him as. All that ended one night in Abilene, Kansas when, while putting down a riot, he accidentally shot a friend who was coming to help him. Hickok served out his term as town marshal, but his contract was not renewed, and he didn’t particularly object. As far as we know, he never fired a weapon in anger again. He devoted himself to gambling, got married, and generally deteriorated. He was probably going blind when Jack McCall murdered him. No one has yet told his story properly in a novel or movie.)

The second kind of action hero is the Ordinary Guy Pushed to the Limit. Andrew Klavan’s Don’t Say a Word is an exceptional example of this approach. A man who is physically weak and utterly without fighting skills has to go far beyond his personal limits to save the life of his daughter. Dean Koontz’ Intensity, which I reviewed a few days back, is another example.

The advantage of this approach is that your reader will probably identify strongly with this kind of hero. Even as he wonders whether he’d be able to do what your protagonist is doing, he feels a little encouraged by the idea that a man (or woman) can actually do what a man’s gotta do.

The challenge in such a story is to really put the screws to your hero. Most ordinary people have to be pushed cruelly before they resort to violence. So you as the writer have to push him. You have to be ruthless and cruel, or your nice-guy hero will just roll over and give up. It’s amazing how hard this can be to do. In a real sense, you have to become the villain of your story.

Personally, I can’t understand how any fiction writer can ever ask the classic agnostic question, “If God is so good, why does He allow suffering in the world?” Fiction writers know the answer to that. Suffering’s the only thing that gets your characters off their duffs.