Writer on Writing

Feels Like The First Time

2012-01-26T03:03:00.000-08:00

Okay, firstoff, a bit of shameless self-promotion that also pushes my street cred, as thekids say. Amazon Studios is developing afilm with the working title of Original Soldiers. It’s a sci-fi tale about human soldiersleaping into action when America’s droid army is shut down by an opponent. I’m one of five folks (well, four folks and awriting team) who were hired by Amazon to expand my simple pitch off theirlogline into a full treatment.

So, betweenthat and Ex-Communication, things might slow down a bit in themonth of February. Just letting you allknow now.

Oh, andcheck it out. You can still pick up The Junkie Quatrain. It's very cheap for your Kindle or Kindle app ofchoice. Just saying...

Anyway...

I’d like tobegin this week, if you don’t mind, with a personal question or two. You don’t have to answer them, but I want youto keep the answers in mind.

Yourcurrent significant other—girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband—do you rememberthe first time you saw them naked?

Not justthe date or time, mind you. Do youremember how you felt when you saw them like that? What thoughts were going through yourmind? What emotions? What your pulse and breathing were like?

Follow upquestion—do you remember the most recent time you saw them naked? How did you feel then? What thoughts were going through your mind?

Nextquestion—do you remember your first day at your current job? Do you remember looking at things, meetingpeople, learning the ropes? Can yourecall any thoughts that went through your mind?

Follow upquestion—what was today like at your current job? What did you think about? Who did you see?

Some of youmay have picked up on the point I’m trying to make here. There’s a big difference between the firsttime something happens and the fiftieth or hundredth or five-hundredth. My first day on a film set was exciting ashell, but at the six year mark even the days with naked women on set werepretty dull, and at twelve years I was generally known as one of the cynicalpeople on any given set.

Now, I makethat point so I can make this one...

One mistakeI see a lot in stories and screenplays is when writers can’t make thedistinction between the first time your readers or audience are seeingsomething and the first time the characters are seeing it. Characters go to work, have dinner withfamily, or teleport to their secret lair and express confusion or wide-eyedamazement at these things. It knocks areader out of the story because it’s immediately apparent this issomething the characters should be familiar with.

It soundssilly to say it so blatantly, but if I’ve been living in New England my wholelife, a brutally cold winter shouldn’t come as a real shock. If I’ve worked for Discorp for over a decade,their business practices shouldn’t catch me off guard. If I’ve been with Phoebe for eight or nineyears, the odds are we’ve seen each other many, many times and had many, manyconversations about many, many things.

The thingis, many storytellers become focused on the fact that this is the first timethe readers have seen Wakko in action or me and Phoebe together. So these folks tweak dialogue and reactions toplay to the audience, rather than the genuine responses of the characters. It seems correct from a mechanical point ofview, but once you really study the moments this sort of thing falls apart.

Here’s anexample of doing it right that ties back to my opening questions--Mr. and Mrs. Smith. When the film begins,the title characters have been married for several years and... well, thingsare getting a bit stale between them. They’ve had all their conversations. This is why Mr. Smith doesn’t really react much when Mrs. Smith—playedby Angelina Jolie—is walking around their bedroom in her underwear.

Let merepeat that last bit—Angelina Jolie is walking around their bedroom in herunderwear.

While thiswould be an absolutely amazing moment for about half of the folks reading this,Mr. Smith barely notices it. He’s beenseeing her in her underwear for years, after all. It may be the first time all of us have seenher dressed (or undressed) like that, but for him this is just like every otherday.

This isclosely related to another problem I’ve brought up once or thrice before, thedreaded “As you know...” When one of my characters says “as you know,” they’re admitting right upfront that they and the person (or people) they’re speaking to already know thefacts that are about to be spoken. It’sclumsy, it’s wasted space, and it’s unnatural because it sounds like thesefolks are having a conversation for the first time when common sense tells usthis has to have come up a dozen times before. My girlfriend and I have been together for over seven years now, so wedon’t need to talk about when our birthdays or anniversaries are. I helped my best friend move into his house,so I don’t need to ask him where he keeps the rum or how to get to thebathroom. My dad’s been an expert in hisfield for decades, so I don’t think he’d be stunned to learn working onreactors involves potential exposure to radiation.

This is why the ignorant stranger is a great story device. When I’ve got a character who’s new to theworld of the story it gives me someone who can experience things for the firsttime while my other characters can be well-established sources of knowledge. Yeah, I know where the rum’s kept in thehouse, but Yakko doesn’t, so my readers will accept it if Yakko and I talkabout where to find the booze or the bathroom.

Anothergreat example if this is—

SPOILERS—

Men In Black .For James Edwards, the policeofficer who becomes Agent J, the MIB is an intergalactic wonderland of non-stopdiscovery. He’s the ignorantstranger. Alien life forms, aliencustoms, alien technology—it’s all new to him. But consider Agent K. Everythingthat excites or stuns J makes him yawn. Invading battle fleets, extraterrestial assassins, talking dogs, rocketcars, a warp-drive powered superball... these things all bore the hellout of him. In fact, as the storyprogresses it becomes clear that K is at a disadvantage because he’sbecome so jaded by the world he lives in.

One of theworst things I can do as a writer is confuse the first time the audience seessomething with the first time the characters do. It’ll come across as false and it’s one ofthose clumsy mistakes that’s hard to recover from. So just remember... the first time for youmight not be the first time for me. Andit’s almost definitely not the first time for him.

Next week,as we’re close to opening day for a lot of the big screenplay contests, Ithought I’d talk about a lot of common screenplay mistakes I’ve seen.

Until then,go write.

Freeze!

2012-01-19T13:12:00.000-08:00

Okay, firstoff, it’s time for some shameless pandering.

PermutedPress just released a collection of short stories I wrote called The Junkie Quatrain. I talked aboutit here a couple weeks ago. There’sa little picture/ link of it over there on the right (the green one). It’s four connected/ interwoven/ overlappingshort stories set in the same post-apocalyptic world. I’ve been explaining it to people as 28 Days Latercrossed with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon.It adds up to a mid-sized novella, soit’s also very cheap.

Anyway, Iwas thinking about today’s little rant and a phenomenal analogy sprung tomind. No, seriously, phenomenal. You’ll be talking about this one for monthsto come. Ready?

Jeopardy.

Have youever watched an episode of Jeopardy where Alex Trebek will give anextremely easy clue and everyone just stands there? He’ll say something like, “It’s the longestriver in Egypt,” and all three contestants will twist their faces with intense concentration. The timereventually runs out and an eight hundred-dollar clue vanishes into thegame-show ether.

The answeris “The Nile,” by the way.

Thing is,you all knew that, didn’t you? And sodid those three hypothetical contestants. They were just overthinking it, because there’s no way the answer couldbe that easy and straightforward. So they convince themselves it has to be something other than theirautomatic first response.

If youwatch Jeopardy a lot, you know one of the most challenging categories(statistically) is “Stupid Answers.” Guaranteed, every time that shows up on the board, the players will missthe first one or two questions. They’llget something like “It’s the tomb memorializing soldiers whose identities areunknown,” and all three contestants will frown, furrow their brows, run throughlists in their—oh, time just ran out again.

There’sactually a catchy little term for this you might’ve heard before. It’s called paralysis by analysis. It’s when we get so caught up in thinkingabout how to do something that we never get around to doing it.

Some peopledo this with writing. They get sowrapped up in having the right word and exquisite language and perfect characters that they don’twrite a single thing. They’ll spendtheir time going to seminars with gurus, buying books, and reading articleafter article about how to write. And indoing so, the one thing they never get around to is... well, writing.

These folksare convinced there has to be something more to it than just sitting down and putting words on paper. Theythink there has to be some special trick of structure or plot, andonce they learn it writing will be a breeze. Until then, it’s not worth doing anything. They end up paralyzed by constant attempts tobreak storytelling down to a simple formula.

The onlyway to move forward in your writing is to write. Like so many things, a week of experience isworth more than months of instruction. I’m not saying instruction is useless, mind you, but I have to know whenit’s time to put other people’s books aside and start writing my own. Put another way, I can’t expect anyone elseto think of me as a real writer if I acknowledge I’m still studying how to be awriter, just like I can’t think of someone as a real doctor if they’re stillstudying in medical school. We mightearn our titles someday... but that day isn’t today.

It’s stillclose to the start of the year, so next week I’d like to blab about somethingfor the first time.

Until thengo write.

We’re All Domed! DOMED!!!!

2012-01-12T02:33:00.000-08:00

Will, itsthyme too tock abut spilling a gain. Eyeno fur must off yew this top pick is suck a none-eschew, butt their our sumidioms out they’re whom thank they or grate spillers jest bee cause theresmell-chick tills then all they’re wards are spilled rite, ant they knead two sea this moor than youduo.

You allunderstood that last paragraph, right? Context and all that? Cool, andthe spell-checker says it’s okay so I’m just going to call that good...

No,wait. If we go that way I’ve got nothingto talk about this week.

Hot tip forthe week. Spelling matters. Last week I mentioned there arecertain things that are always right and wrong. Spelling is one of them. There’sno quicker way to tell an editor or reader you’ve got no idea what you’re doingthan to have a lot of spelling mistakes in the first few pages of amanuscript. And if I’m going to put alot of effort into double and triple-checking the first ten pages, I might aswell act like a pro and check them all.

Hot tipnumber two. Every spell-check program isan idiot. They can be outsmarted by myalmost-one-year-old nephew banging on the keyboard with his eyes closed. If I decide to take on an idiot as a writingpartner, whose fault is it when there are mistakes in my manuscript? Heck, we’ve all been stuck with an idiot atwork at some point in our lives, yes? But did we ever depend on the idiot? Did we let everything ride on the idiot doingtheir job, or did we cover our butts and make sure everything was getting doneregardless?

Now, thereare those people who try to say spelling and grammar don’t matter. If the story’s good, you should be able toenjoy it even with a few typos and malonyms and failed parallels and so on. And there’s some truth to that. I’ve enjoyed a lot of stories with two orthree typos in them.

What Ihaven’t enjoyed are stories that have two or three typos on the firstpage. And the reason I haven’t enjoyedthem is because I stopped reading at that point. Just like any other casual reader will. In the few cases I’ve been required to readthe rest of the manuscript, I usually found that the writer who couldn’t bebothered to learn how to spell also couldn’t be bothered to write a remotelyinteresting story. No big shock there.

Another argumentI’ve seen a few times is that spelling and grammar and conjugation are allarbitrary anyway. There isn’t a “right”way to spell words, it’s just a set of rules some people made up and decidedeveryone had to follow. Of course, bythat logic, there aren’t any real rules to football--those were justmade up, too. So next time you play afriendly game of football with your friends, try giving hockey sticks and cricket bats to your linebackers. Please let meknow how it goes over with everyone.

And there’salso a few folks who try to use first person as an excuse fortypos. “It’s not me, it’s the characterwho doesn’t know how to spell.” Theproblem here is that a reader can’t tell the difference between deliberate mistakesand accidental ones. All they see on thepage is a mistake, plain and simple. Anda manuscript loaded with mistakes is going to be one that probably ends up inthe big pile on the left.

Soooooo...withthat in mind, let’s take a look at some of the ways wanna-be writers provedthey didn’t know how to write. Asbefore, I remind you that all of these are actual typos I’ve come across. Most of them more than once. To be honest, almost a quarter of these cameout of one particularly incoherent screenplay I had to read. One came from the first paragraph of aproudly self-published book whose author claimed the people mocking hisspelling were just jealous because they’d never written a book. And one I’ve seen repeatedly at a much largerwebsite that likes to put up posts about stupid spelling mistakes peoplemake...

heel and heal – one of these is a command to adog

beet and beat – two reds--your kid should not be one of them

vale and veil – one of these often refers todeath

bare and bear –one of these means to endure ortolerate

here and hear—one of these is where you areright now

minuet and minute—one of these means small

can’t and cant—one of these is a secretlanguage

pedal and peddle—one of these deals withmotion

strait and straight—one of these refers towaterways

trusty and trustee—one of these is a person

moors and mores—one is social, one is ethnic

sheer and shear – one means to slice,the other means perpendicular

cloths and clothes – one of these is made intothe other

site and sight—one is found on a firearm

profit and prophet—one of these is oftenreligious (don’t be snarky)

imminent and eminent —one will be happeningsoon

baited and bated—you don’t want yourbreath to be one of these

calender and calendar—one is a tool, the otheris a machine

essay and assay—only one of these in a verb

breath and breathe—only one of these is a verb

domed and doomed – one you’re screwed, oneyou’re protected

ramped and rampant—one of these is just out ofcontrol

trader and traitor—one sells loyalty, onesells goods

surely and shirley—this writer never saw Airplane...

nee and knee—married women are sometimesaddressed this way

tied and tide – one of these will have to holdyou over until later

It’s alsoworth noting that—much like my first paragraph up above--none of these wordsare spelled wrong, which is why spell-check programs ignore these mistakes whena writer makes them. They’re just thewrong words, period. The only mistake onthe spell-checker’s part is that it assumes the writer knows what the hellthey’re doing and there’s a real reason you put down moors when youmeant mores. Of course, as Imentioned before, the spell-checker is an idiot...

Y’see,Timmy, using shear when I mean sheer is no different than callingthat new girl Elizabeth when her name’s Andrea—in both cases I look like anidiot who can’t be bothered to learn the right word to use. Or like someone who trusted an idiot to getthese things right.

I’ve saidit before, I’ll say it again—get a dictionary. You’ll retain more searching through a dictionary than you will bytapping change or ignore on your spellchecker. There’s some nice ones on Amazon, oryou can probably find one cheap at a used bookstore. Don’t worry if it’s a couple years out ofdate—99% of the words are the same. Thebig red one on my desk is from 1997 and I’ve never had a problem with it.

Next timeI’ll probably just have a quick tip for you. Assuming I don’t start overthinking it and freeze up or something.

Until then,go write.

Why Are We Here?

2012-01-05T00:48:00.000-08:00

I don’tmean that in some vague, metaphysical sense. It’s pretty straightforward. Whyare you looking at this web page? Whatare you hoping to find here?

Let me makeit easier. Let me explain why I keepposting here.

No, thereisn’t time to explain. I will sum up.

(bonuspoints if you get that one)

Two little stories. Tale thefirst.

I’ve wantedto tell stories as far back as I could remember. I was setting up my Star Wars figuresand Micronauts in little tableaus when I was in grade school. By middle school I’d found my mom’s oldelectric Smith-Corona (complete with vinyl dust cover) in the back of thecloset and I was sending clumsy “submissions” to Jim Shooter at Marvel Comics. And by high school, well, by then myrejection collection was getting pretty thick.

It’s gottenthicker since then, believe me.

Tale thesecond.

Not toomany months back I stumbled across a link to a published author’s newblog. He was about at the same level asme—years of trying to get in and finally had a few sales under his belt. Two of them to a very big, respectablepublisher. Said author, much likemyself, wanted to offer some tips for new writers who were just starting out. However, unlike me, this fellow didn’t wantto talk about how to improve your writing. He was going to offer tips onnetworking, promotion, blog tours, and so on.

Of course,looking over his first four posts, there was one point he kept hammeringhome. The best way to sell your writingis to have good writing. The best way tospread word of mouth about your writing is to be an excellent writer. This could not be stressed enough. All the clever gimmicks and sales tricks andblog tours weren’t going to help in the slightest if you didn’t have somethingpeople wanted to read.

But hewasn’t going to talk about that on his blog. He was going to talk about clever gimmicks and sales tricks and blogtours.

That’s kindof what got me started on this whole thing years ago. At the time, I was seeing tons of articlesand websites about the tricks and gimmicks, but very few about the actual craftof writing. And, yes, I do feelpretentious talking about “craft” when I write books about superheroes fightingzombies.

Anyway, I’dsay a good sixty or seventy percent of the material I saw was tips on what todo after you’d written something. How to get reps, how to get your books in stores, that sort of thing. Which alwaysseemed a little cart-before-the-horse, as people used to say in the pre-Segway world. Perhaps even worse, a large percentage of theremaining material—the stuff that actually talked about writing-- spoke aboutit in terms of absolutes and set down hard rules that didn’t seem to come fromany sort of actual experience. It wasjust people parroting some rule about storytelling they’d heard somewhere as ifit were a quantifiable, scientifically-proven fact. In some cases, as far as I could tell, thesepeople had just made up their rules out of the blue.

And a fewof these folks were asking for money.

At the timeI was sitting on this half-assed Blogspot site. I’d pulled a loosely Egyptian-themed name from the back of my head(Thoth was the god of writing), a title that I put even less thought into(seriously, check out how many “Writer on Writing” blogs and columns there areout there), and used the space to post a few spec columns I’d created for amagazine I was working for. They’d beenrejected (twice) so I’d thrown them up here as... honestly, I don’t know. Just so it felt like I’d done something withthem. I thought they were fairly wellwritten and made some good points—I didn’t want them to languish on my computer. Maybe in the tiny, limited space that was theinternet somebody would stumble across them and find them useful.

Bonus fact. It was maybe a year after I started postinghere more-or-less full time that somebody pointed out Thoth-Amon was also theevil sorcerer in the Conan books and comics. Completely slipped my mind when I picked thissite.

Anyway, asI worked my way further and further into the life of a full-time writer, I gotexposed to more and more people’s work. I read scripts for a couple different contests and got a bunch ofexposure to it (reading 400+ pages a day will do that to you). And one thing that amazed me was I keptseeing the same basic mistakes. Often toheadache-inducing levels.

A largenumber of aspiring writers fall into one of two camps. Some of them think writing and storytellingare mechanical, quantifiable processes that can be broken down to A1-B2-C3. These are the folks who will quote the MLA Handbook to explain why their novel deserves to be published and useSyd Field as proof their screenplay is perfect. The other group think rules are forold-school losers who don’t get that spelling, formatting, and structure justhamper the creative process and will get overlooked when people see the inherent art in the writing.

Both groupsare usually wrong, for the record.

Note that Isaid “usually.” Most folks think it’sall-or-nothing. You have to be on oneextreme or another. The truth is that it’smore of a middle ground.

Y'see,Timmy, there are things that are absolutely “right and wrong” in writing. Ihave to know how to spell (me—not my spellchecker). I have to understand the basics ofgrammar. If I’m writing a script, I’vegot to know the current accepted format. A writer can’t ignore any of these requirements, because these arethings you can get wrong and you will be judged on them.

On theother hand, there is no “right” way to start your writing day or to develop acharacter, only the way that’s right for me and my story. Or you and your story. Or her and her story. If you ask twenty different writers abouttheir method, you're going to get twenty different answers. And allof these answers are valid, because each of these methods work for that writer. But that doesn’t mean I can ignore everyconvention or rule I don’t like.

And that’swhat I’m doing here. Prattling on about someof the hard rules and general suggestions I discovered during thirty-odd yearsof learning how to be a writer, along with some of my own I've developed aftertrying to write a hundred or so short stories, scripts, and novels. It's stuff I think might be helpful if you're actually serious about writing for a living.
And I'm going under the general assumption that if you've slogged through all this, you've got at least a basic grasp of this writing thing and are hoping to go further with it. Perhaps even make a few dollars with it. And if any of you have a specific question or topicyou’d like me to prattle on about, let me know.

Next time, speakingof right and wrong, we return to one of my favorite topics—spilling!

Until then,go write.

Let's Review

2011-12-29T14:12:00.000-08:00

Just enoughtime and space left in 2011 for me to squeeze in one last ranty blog post.

This was abig year for me. For the first time inmy life, I spent the entire year writing fiction. I’ve spent over five years as a full-timewriter, but a lot of those years were writing magazine articles aswell as my own stuff. This was the firstyear of nothing but my fiction and living (well, squeaking by) on the money Imade off that.

Which alsomeant this was the first year I had no schedule. I had a few broad deadlines for projects, buteven most of those had a 30 day buffer built into the contract. So anything I got done this year—or didn’tget done—was all my responsibility. If Ididn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done.

How did Ido with all the extra pressure of living the dream life?

--I startedthe year by finishing up the last draft of Ex-Patriots,which hopefully two or three of you have since picked up and enjoyed.

--Then Iwrote The Junkie Quatrain as part of a bonus materialdeal with Audible.com. Four interlocking/ overlapping shortstories that form a pretty solid-sized novella (about 37,000 words) in sixweeks. I was pretty darned proud ofthat. It reminded me of tales about RayBradbury and Robert Lewis Stevenson writing stories specifically to pay rent. Permuted Press is putting out TheJunkie Quatrain as an ebook next month (shameless plug), and I think Audible.com is going to release them as a collected piece as well.

--I wrote -14-,which was a whopping 149,000+ words in the first draft. It went through five more drafts that cut alot and added some more. The 129,000word manuscript is under the keen eyes of the Permuted editor right now.

--I did abouta dozen DVD reviews for the Cinema Blend website. I wanted to do more, actually, but they’reshifting over to Blu-Rays and I haven’t gotten around to picking up a Blu-Rayplayer yet. Maybe for my birthday...

--I wroteforty-eight entries for the ranty blog (counting this one). There’s also a half dozen on the H.P. Legocraftsite and another nineteen entries on another blog I do. Plus a few lengthy diatribes on the PermutedPress message boards and the Facebook fan page I’ve got going.

--At themoment I’m 20,000 word into Ex-Communication, the third Ex-book. To be honest I’d hoped to be a lotfurther along at this point, but then there were holidays and traveling andthis monster eggnog my brother makes with lighter fluid...

--And assoon as I finish this post I’m going to try to grind out a superhero story foran upcoming anthology called Corrupts Absolutely. It’s due by December 31st, so we’ll see how Ido.

So, that'swhat I wrote this year.

How aboutyou?

Yeah, I hadthe advantage of writing fiction full time as my day job. I’m guessing most of you didn’t havethat. Still, you’ve written something,right?

Hopefullythe answer is yes. If it isn’t, here’s asimple New Year’s resolution, one I suggest every year about this time.

Write apage a day. That's all. Tell yourself you’re going to do that andstick to it. It’s about three hundredwords, depending on your formatting.

If youwrite one page a day, you can have a short story by the end of January. You could have a screenplay by the end ofApril, giving you plenty of time to enter some of the big contests. Next Christmas you could have a very solidnovel on your computer. All from writingjust one page a day.

If you'reactually serious about being a writer, this should be the equivalent ofresolving to sleep in the months to come. Not sleep more or sleep better. Just to sleep. In other words, itshould be something you couldn’t stop yourself from doing if you wanted to.

Happy NewYear to the double-handful of you who keep stopping by to read this. Next time will be the first post of 2012, soI thought I'd do a quick recap about the history of the ranty blog and why Ikeep scribbling here once a week for several years now.

Until then,go drink some champagne, kiss someone you love, and toast the new year.

Then gowrite.

Just writeone page.

Wherefore Art Thou Romeo

2011-12-23T17:36:00.000-08:00

Pop culturereference, four hundred years late. Plus,if you actually know how to read that title line, you’ve got a hint at whatthis week’s ranty blog is about.

Sorry thisis late, by the way. Yesterday was earlyChristmas lunches with family and parties at night with friends.

Speaking ofwhich, one last push before Christmas—you can still order Kindle books as lastminute gifts and my publisher has a ton of them on sale for dirt cheap prices,including my own Ex-Heroes. You can also pick up the Kindle version of The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe for half off the paperback price.

Now, withall that out of the way... let’s get back to our title subject.

One thing Istumble on a lot in stories is names. Sometimes writers will load up every single character in theirmanuscript with a proper name. Iread through and I know the given name of the cabbie, the waitress, the office intern, the homeless guy at thefreeway exit, the woman whose ahead of the main character in line at thegrocery store. It doesn’t matter howimportant—or unimportant—they are to the story, they get a name.

Anotherthing that makes for a troublesome read is when there are lots of people withsimilar names. Sometimes, if there areenough of them, it can just be the first letter of the name. Believe it or not, I read two scripts this year by two different people, but each screenplay was loaded withnames that began with the letter J. There was Jason, Jackie, Jerry, Jonathan, Javarius, Jacob, Jenny, andeven a Jesus. I read one the year before where everyone’sname began with P. Since names are thereader’s shorthand for characters, making them confusing is not a great way togo.

What I’dlike to do now is to suggest a simple rule of thumb that can eliminate both ofthese potential problems. And I’d liketo illustrate this rule of thumb with a popular character most of you probablyknow...

Calvinand Hobbes was created by Bill Watterson back at the end of that ancientdecade known as the ‘80s. The glaciershad retreated, a few mammoths still wandered the plains, and I had just startedcollege in western Massachusetts. Thetwo title characters were Calvin and his stuffed tiger, but after them the twopeople we saw the most were Calvin’s long-suffering mom and sometimesjust-as-mischievous dad (no real question where Calvin got it from). Their names, as any fan of the series knows,were Mom and Dad.

No,seriously. That was it. Mom and Dad. I challenge anyone here to find a single scrap of evidence from thedecade or so of Calvin and Hobbes strips that shows these two charactershave any names past that.

There’s asimple explanation for why they didn’t. The entire strip is done from Calvin’s point of view. In his world, people randomly transmorgifyinto giant bugs or space aliens. Dinosaurs are still common if you know where to look. And those two adults in his house with thesagging poll numbers are just Mom and Dad. Not “just” in the sense that they’re diminished somehow—they simplydon’t have any identity past what Calvin’s given them.

Acharacter’s name should be what your main characters refer to them by. If my main character doesn’t know their name(and never will) there’s probably not a reason for the reader to know it. Calvin never thinks of his parents asanything other than Mom and Dad, so within the story of Calvin and Hobbesthey never get names, just those simple titles.

It’s notjust Calvin and Hobbes, of course. Thereare a lot of examples where storytellers don’t name someone because it’sunrealistic for the main character(s) to know that name. A few other well-known characters withoutnames include...

--Thelittle red-haired girl

--The alienbounty hunter from X-Files

--The otherwoman

--House’scellmate

--The bald man with tattoos

--The cuteblonde waitress

It didn’tlessen any of these characters to not have actual names. If anything, you could probably make the casethat some of them were more memorable because they didn’t have names—it addedto their sense of mystery.

Consider itthis way. Stephen King’s novella “RitaHayworth and Shawshank Redemption” is about Red, Andy, and the other prisoners. Because of this very few of the guards getnamed, even though there are dozens of them in the story. They’re the outsiders. But in King’s The Green Mile it’s theguards who are the focus of the story so most of the prisoners don’t get names,even though there are hundreds of them in the prison.

Or, if youprefer, consider this. If you’ve everworked as a waiter or waitress, or ran the checkout counter at a store, howmany of your customers could you name? On the flipside, can you name the waiter from the last time you wentout? Or the clerk the last time youbought something? They were probablyeven wearing a nametag, but I bet you can’t. And the reason you can’t is because they weren’t important to yourstory.

Whilegiving every character a name helps show how well-thought out the world is, inthe long run it makes a story confusing. If your main character doesn’t know who someone is, there’s nothingwrong with just calling them Man #3 or the other girl, and it usually makes fora much cleaner, easier read when you don’t have to info-dump half a dozen nameson each page.

Next time,I thought I’d do my annual sum-up of the year in writing.

MerryChristmas, Happy Hanukah, and a general Happy Holidays to you all.

Try not totake the whole week off from writing.

He Wakes Up In a Bathtub Full of Ice And...

2011-12-15T16:24:00.000-08:00

Have younoticed the somewhat blatant examples of product placement on television showslately? Our heroes are on a stakeout,driving to a crime scene, or fleeing for their lives... and they suddenly stoptalk about how cool their car is. Heroesjumped that shark early on with their constant references to the Nissan Rogue,but as of late it seems like almost every show is doing it. There was a truly awful example on Housea few weeks back.

For therecord, I give CHUCK a pass on blatant product placement because theshow completely embraces the idea of blatant product placement and, as such,blends it in a lot better than the others. It pretty much made Subway cool by pointing out how ridiculously un-coolSubway is.

Anyway...

One thingwe’ve all seen is when a story veers off into unrelated, irrelevant materialfor a little while. It’s as if thewriter lost track of where their story was going and it just meanderedaway. We’ve all heard people say "Ilet the characters guide me,” but if the characters are guiding the story off the page and into a different book, it’s probably time for the writer to pausefor a moment and reassess things.

Violet, moments before her gruesome end.

Forexample, remember in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the book, notthe movie) there’s the whole recurring bit about how the bad kids keep messingthings up and putting their various parts where they’re not supposed to be. Eventually little Violet Beauregarde chewssome gum she shouldn’t and swells up into a giant blueberry. The other guests are horrified, Wonka sighsin regret, and the Oompa-Loompas roll poor Violet away to a soundproofed roomwhere the other guests can’t hear her screams or terror and agony as the littlepeople gut the swollen girl and harvest her organs for the international blackmarket ring that the candy factory is just a front for.

You don’tremember that bit?

It is a bitoff from the rest of Dahl’s book, isn’t it? Tonally speaking. Probably why hedidn’t include a scene like that. If youdo remember that scene... well, you should probably talk to someone. Preferably someone who can prescribemedication

The problemI’m talking about is telling a story that isn’t your story. Sometimes, in the middle of a perfectly goodtale, writers will steer off into... well, something else entirely. Another few examples...

If I’mdoing a touching character piece, I shouldn’t have a ninja attack.

A post-apocalyptic thriller probably should not have a song and dancenumber in the middle of it.

If I’mwriting a romantic comedy, no one should get kidnapped and harvested for their organs (a common theme to veer off into, apparently).

In apulse-pounding action story, no one should pause for a ten minute monologueabout how horrible it was watching their mom get worn away by cancer.

If you’vebeen reading the ranty blog for a while, you probably remember a while backwhen I talked about the rules of love. The fourth rule relates directly to this idea. Sometimes a romantic element just doesn’t fitin a story. Maybe the people are toodifferent. Perhaps there’s too manyother things going on. Maybe the currentsituation just doesn’t allow for those kind of thoughts.

A lot oftime when we see stuff like this, it’s a poor attempt to copy somethingelse. The writer’s seen an element workin another existing story and tried to transplant it into this story,regardless of whether or not it works.

Speaking ofblack market organs, that’s a great analogy—transplants. If any of your family or friends has everneeded blood, bone marrow, or maybe a kidney, you know it’s a big deal (and hopefullyyou’re all tagged as donors). Even withblood, which is pretty easy these days, there’s a half-dozen or so tests thatneed to be run. If it’s an actual organtransplant there’s a ton of factors that need to match up for it to besuccessful, and these factors need to be determined by a professional. Even between close relatives there can behuge differences. I can’t just tosskidneys from one person to another and assume they’re going to work, because ifeven one of those factors doesn’t match up, I’ll have two dead people on myhands.

The same istrue of stories, too. Something that’screepy in your book might not be creepy in my book. Just because this joke worked when she saidit doesn’t mean it’ll work when he says it. This story may have ended with the young couple together, but it doesn’tmean mine can do it. If I just pullelements from one story and stick them in another, there’s a better chance I’llkill the story than save it. I need todo cross-checking and make sure all the factors line up before I do atransplant.

What arethe important factors? Well, a big oneis whether or not the patient actually needs a transplant or not. Is there a reason to bring in this oddelement? Does it contribute to my storyin one way or another?

Past that,it depends on what’s being transplanted, and also from what into what. Each one’s going to be different. A joke or a cleverdescription might not need much alteration, but pulling over a major subplot orcharacter could take lots of work to both the element and the story it’s goinginto. That’s part of the job of being awriter—knowing what works, what doesn’t, and what I need to do to bridge thegap.

More to thepoint, it’s my job to tell the story I’m telling. I shouldn’t be trying to tell my sci-fi storywith a bit of Stephanie Meyer tween romance twisted in. I shouldn’t be writing my dramatic screenplaybut with that fun scene from Captain America wedged into it. And it’s a bit silly to stick a cute dog in my horror short story just because all the Tintin books have one.

Know your storyand write your story. Don’t worry aboutthat other story.

Next time,I’d like to babble on about a great lesson you can learn from the parents in Calvin& Hobbes.
Until then, go write.

Counting the Minutes

2011-12-08T17:59:00.001-08:00

It’sChristmastime. Of course we’re allcounting the minutes.

I’m alsocounting the minutes until John Carter comes out, but that’s anotherstory entirely.

You knowwho else counts minutes? Scriptsupervisors. It’s one of those creditsyou see in film and television that a lot of non-industry people don’t reallyknow what it means.

Very simplyput, the script supervisor (often called the scripty) keeps track of things. He or she’s the one who notes exactly what’sbeen filmed (what shots and sizes and angles and lines) from each scene. Like lots of other key folks on set, thescript supervisor does their own breakdown of the script. And the scripty’s breakdown is all abouttime.

The standard estimate for a screenplay is a page a minute If you talk to most script supervisors,they’ll tell you it’s actually closer to fifty-odd seconds (I want to sayfifty-three), but a page a minute is a solid estimate. There’s always going to be some wiggle room, ofcourse, especially when you’re dealing with action. As I’ve mentioned here before, the lobbyscene in The Matrix is less than half a page. According to Hollywood legend, the chariotrace in Ben Hur was just one line in the script.

This is whymost professional readers groan when they get a screenplay that’s 140 or 150 pageslong. That’s two and a half hours. Any script that long has a major strikeagainst it before the reader’s looked at page one. I read two scripts this year that the writer had “squashed” to make them shorter, but I could tell they were bothover 200 pages, easy. That’s close tothree and a half hours. Possibly evenmore if they’d had action sequences in them. Which they did.

If you’re ascreenwriter, look at your script. Ifyou’ve got a solid page of dialogue, that’s a minute of talking heads. A minute is a brutally long time in a movie.

Don’tbelieve me? Try this. Look up at the ceiling and count off tenMississippis. Don’t cheat, don’t rush...just look up and count them out in your head nice and steady like you’resupposed to. Go on. I’ll wait.

That wasten seconds. Oscar-winning screenwriterBruce Joel Rubin pointed out once that ten seconds can be an eternity onscreen.

So thinkabout how long some of those character monologues are. It may be brilliant on the page, but there’sa good chance it’ll be torturous to watch. It’s important to understand the distinction between how long somethingtakes on the page and how long these actions and conversations will actuallyneed (or not need).

This goesfor prose writers too (just so you don’t feel left out). I’ve mentioned the pacing issues that canhappen if action gets stretched out too long. Certain things happen at certain speeds, andif they get slowed down with dialogue, descriptions, or excessive actionthey’re just going to look silly. Not inthe good way.

And whensomething reads silly, people put your manuscript down in the big pile on theleft.

Next time,I wanted to tell you a story about telling you a different story.

Until then,go write.

Simon Says, One Step Back

2011-12-01T22:43:00.001-08:00

Okay, firstoff... more shameless pandering.

Mypublisher’s doing a big sale for the holidays he’s calling Black December. The ebook versions of ten bestsellers and new releases are marked down to a mere $2.99 for the wholemonth. That includes my own Ex-Heroes,available over in the right hand column here. He’s also got five ebooks for free. No strings, no tricks, absolutely free. Five books he’s just giving away. Go check it out.

Oh, and TheEerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe isn’t part of thesale, but the ebook version's still marked down to half the paperback price. Just saying...

Now, withthat out of the way, I’d like to talk to you about Pitch Black.

If youhaven’t seen the film, I highly recommend it. Sharp dialogue, good characters, a lot of action, and a damned cleverstory backing it all up. It’s the moviethat really launched Vin Diesel’s career as “the guy you do not mess with,” andif you watch it with the commentary you’ll learn he also had a fair amount todo with shaping the script.

There’s awonderful bit early on when our assembled heroes need to make a break across astretch of open ground. As it turns out,Diesel’s character, Riddick, has superhuman vision and can see in thedark. He peers out, announces it “Looksclear,” and the group of survivors dashes for cover. But then things come soaring down out of thedark sky and... well, not everyone makes it. One of the other survivors immediately blames Riddick—“You said it wasclear!”

“I said it lookedclear!” Riddick snaps back.

This bitusually gets a dark chuckle from the audience. It also points out something I’ve mentionedhere once or thrice before, and I thought it was worth blabbing on about in abit more detail this week. As our heroeslearned the hard way, “It looks clear” is not the same thing as, “It isclear.” Riddick knew they’re not synonymous,and that difference is very important. "It looks clear" implies there's a bit more to be said.

This is aconstruction I see come up a lot, where writers put an additional step betweenthe story and the reader. Usually theydo it by adding an extra layer of verbiage that relates to somethinginternal. Other times it’s an attempt todo something clever with the description. It seems to show up a lot in high fantasy writing because peoplemistakenly use it in the elaborate, purple-prose descriptions that genre tendsto attract. I’ve also seen people followthis route when they’re trying to be mysterious and imply a lot of spookinessthat might not actually be there.

And, to behonest, it’s something I used to do a lot myself.

Let me giveyou a few examples...

Hethought about trying to be a writer

We’ve allseen this one somewhere, right? Nothingwrong with it on the surface. But let’sstop and break it down for a moment.

The act ofthinking implies this isn’t happening, it’s just a possibility. So if my character’s thinking about trying todo something, it means this is a possibility of a possibility of somethinghappening. Unless he’s specificallythinking about the actual attempt instead of the end product, this is justexcess words.

Hethought about being a writer.

See? Cleaner, clearer, and two words shorter. Here’s another one.

Shedecided to write her blog post.

This is fineif she decided to—but that was as far as she got because something kept herfrom doing it. But if she decided to doit and then she did it, the writer’s just eating up words again. We all makehundreds of decisions and choices every day, but most readers want to hearabout the actions, not the decision to take an action. I wouldn’t write Peter decided to make aturkey sandwich, made the sandwich, and then chose to sit at the table to eatit. Well, I wouldn’t write stuff like that any more, at least. Why would I want to waste all those words onmundane stuff? Peter made a turkeysandwich and sat at the table to eat it. Likewise, the sheer act of writing tells us our lovely blogger made adecision.

Shewrote her blog post.

See? Nothing else needed. Now check out this one...

Phoebeappeared to be a shapely blonde who stood six feet tall.

Appearedto be is one of those phrases I got in my head and used to use all thetime. Sometimes I’d swap in one of itskissing cousins, looked like, seemed to be , and a few wildcombinations we shouldn’t discuss in polite company. Problem was, I didn't understand thesephrases. Y’see, Timmy, they don’t get usedalone. This sort of phrase is the firstpart of a construction where the second half is either an actual or impliedcontradiction. That sentence up above isreally saying something more like this—

Phoebeappeared to be a shapely blonde who stood six feet tall, but she actually bleachedher hair on a regular basis and made a point of always wearing spike heels.

There’snothing wrong with that sentence, of course, whether it’s written out or leftimplied. None of us will fault Phoebefor thinking that blondes have more fun and wanting to be a few inchestaller. The problem is that a lot of thetime I wasn’t trying to establish a contradiction, I just wanted artsy sentencestructure. What I really wanted to saywas this--

Phoebe wasa shapely blonde who stood six feet tall.

So I wassubtly pushing the reader back for no reason with extra words, while alsoshowing that I didn’t really know what I was doing. If a writer isn’t trying to establish thatcontradiction, using appeared to beand its bastard stepchildren isn't just wasted words-- it's wrong.

Now,there’s nothing wrong with an elaborate sentence now and then. Most of us love a good turn of phrase—it’sthe kind of thing that made us want to be writers. Just remember that like any other element inyour writing, there has to be a point to that long string of words, and theyhave to be used correctly. Because if they’re not, I’m just eating up words andwasting everyone’s time.

Speaking ofwhich, next time I was going to rant about something for about a minute.

Until then,go write.

Our THREE Secret Weapons Are...

2011-11-17T13:46:00.001-08:00

Pop culturereference. Overdue.

Okay, sowhat I wanted to blather on about today has its roots in screenwriting, butit’s a lesson that can get applied to short stories and novels as well. Simplyput, it has to do with boring your readers.

Some of youmay have heard of the "rule of three." It's agood screenwriting rule of thumb that you should never do something more thanthree times in a movie because it starts wearing on the audience. By the third time you’re showing mesomething, I’ve either got it or I don’t. And if I don’t, it’s not my fault...

Forexample, in the movie Iron Man we see three big examples of Tony Stark’splayboy lifestyle before something happens to make him change (blowing off theaward ceremony, sleeping with the hot reporter, and partying on his privatejet). He then goes on to design threeversions of the Iron Man armor, which also involves taking three testflights (one of them very, very short). While all this is going on, we get three examples of what a great guy ObadiahStane is, three of what an evil jerk he is, and the ever-loveable Agent Coulsonasks three times about debriefing Tony and we get three jokes about theoverly-long name of his government division before the payoff most comic geekssaw coming.

Seriously,pick up almost any movie you like and you'll be stunned how quick the threesadd up. The Hulk goes on three rampagesin his last movie. In Highlander we see three other immortalsdie before the final battle. In Aliens there are three major attacks andthree examples of Burke being a slimebag. In the movie Severance, the bear trap slams shut three times (andif you haven’t seen it, I’m not explaining that any further). In Casablanca,Victor and Ilsa ask for the letters of transit three times. Heck, in The Princess Bride, how manychallenges does the Man in Black have to overcome to claim Buttercup (I’ll giveyou a hint—Inigo, Fezzik, Vincini)? Andthere are three great swordfights in that film—all involving Inigo.

Now I’msure some folks reading this are thinking three’s just an arbitrary number,right? It could be the rule of two orthe rule of four. That’s very true, andyou can find some examples of both. In Charlotte’sWeb, for example, the children’s classic by E.B. White (he of the awfulstyle guide), there are four words that get spun into webs and none of us werescreaming “get on with it” when our parents read that book to us.

In a scriptI just read, though, there were over a dozen examples of how low the single-dadmain character had sunk. It starts withhim late for work (as a waiter—historically a job of high pay and greatrespect) where he had a party dine-and-dash so he has to cover their bill. Then his car breaks down and he has to walkhome in the rain. Then he gets acollections notice. Then he has to go grocery shopping and doesn’t have enoughmoney. Then the babysitter demands moremoney because he’s late again. Then hispower gets shut off. Then anotherparty dines-and-dashes on him and he gets fired. Then he gets an eviction notice. Keep in mind, this is only the first twentypages of the script or so, and there’s still more examples coming.

At whatpoint did you get the idea this guy’s at rock-bottom? Halfway through that list? A third? Check which note you got it on and count backwards. Was it on the third example?

I bet itwas...

Here’s thething. Each time we get exposed to informationor events, it changes our understanding of them. And a writer needs to be aware of how thereader is going to be seeing these facts or events.

The firsttime we get exposed to a piece of information—and only the first time—it’s something new. We, asthe audience, didn’t know this or haven’t seen it before. Agent Coulson’s introduced as yet another guy who needs toschedule a meeting about Tony escaping from Gulimar. We brush him off the same way Pepper does(well, those folks do who don’t recognize the initials of his agency).

The secondtime we see this happen, on the page or on screen, it establishes apattern. Now we know the first timewasn’t an isolated event or a fluke, and it gives us a little more informationabout things and characters. Coulsonshows up again and hasn’t forgotten about this meeting and he isn’t goingaway. There’s also the unspoken questionof how did some low-end, government flunky get into this extremely high-endexclusive party.

The thirdtime confirms that pattern. Thesebehaviors or incidents are a definite element of the character or story. Coulson shows up to remind Pepper of hisloosely-scheduled appointment and she grabs him to use as a shield against Obadiah.

When Istart going past this point, things start becoming less informative and more...well, boring. Once the information’sbeen established, continuing to repeat it is just noise the reader’s going totune out. And eventually—quickly,really—they’re going to get annoyed that I’m just repeating stuff they already know rather than moving forward, because storytelling is all about forwardmotion.

Now, as Isaid above, there are always exceptions to the rule of three. One of the easiest ways is when a writer isvery subtle about something and the reader doesn’t realize they’ve gotten thatfirst exposure. They may be on theirthird or fourth before they notice it, so the pattern forms around the fifth orsixth time—and is all the cooler when they look back and realize the patternwas there all along. When we finallynotice the Observer on Fringe, we discover he’s been there all along, inevery episode. Another good example isJason Hornsby’s Eleven Twenty-Three, where a town is suffering frombrief outbreaks of extreme violence. It happens twice before the charactersrealize the outbreaks always occur exactly at the titular time, and then theysuffer through three more of them before the end of the book.

On theflipside, there are times we only need to see something once or twice toestablish them. This works best forreal-world things that most people can relate to. Neo only gets chewed out once by his boss, atthe beginning of The Matrix, and we all immediately realize what kind ofemployee he is. In Dean Koontz’sunderappreciated Fear Nothing, we only need to see one of Christopher’sparents die to understand his sadness and loneliness.

You can also change the dynamic. Establishing something with the rule of threedoesn’t mean you’re stuck with it. Oneof the standards of good storytelling is conflict that forces things tochange. Once we’ve seen three examplestelling us who this character is, it’s agood time to start working that arc to change them into something else. Yes, that third time asking about theappointment makes Coulson look like the ultimate paper-pusher, but right afterthat point we discover just how calm and collected he really is. This is a guy who doesn't just have asidearm, he carries around shaped explosives just in case he needs to open alocked door.

Look backover some of your writing and see how many times you give examples of something. Character traits, recurring events,whatever. Could some of them go away totighten your novel or give you more space in that script for something else? Or can you restructure things to hit one ofthe exceptions I mentioned above (three exceptions, for those of you keeping score).

Next time,I wanted to take a step back and explain why you should avoid taking a stepback in your writing.
Until then, go write.

Tone Deaf

2011-11-10T01:57:00.000-08:00

So, Iwanted to talk to you a bit about G.I. Joe.

Not the coolcartoon, mind you. Or the toy line. No, I’m talking about the completelyGod-awful, live-action movie. It had problems. Lots of problems. Not the least of which was a complete failure to remember sixth-gradescience class.

The bigissue I’d like to address, though, is the weight.

Doc Brownand his assistant Marty taught us that some things are heavy. They have weight. They have, if I may use a literary term(sorry), gravitas—a certain dignity and importance and bearing.

StephenKing, on the other hand, taught us that some things are soft and squishy andbleed a lot when you shove knives or claws or fangs into them.

And let’snot forget the Wachowski Brothers, who taught us that some things getshot. A lot. In slow motion. While doing kung-fu.

What do allthese things have in common? And what dothey have to do with weight?

Well, let’sthink about it. Doc Brown and Martydidn’t think everything was heavy, just a few key revelations that cameto them across three movies. StephenKing doesn’t kill everyone in his stories—all in all characters in his bookshave a pretty decent survival rate (The Stand notwithstanding). The Wachowski Brothers might have pioneered“bullet time” and virtual camera array shots in film, but there’s also a lot ofstuff in The Matrix that follows basic camera set-ups—master, overs,coverage, done.

And thenthere’s the G.I. Joe movie. Which wascool. Super cool. Cool action, cool characters, coollines of cool dialogue uttered coolly in cool situations.

Saying cool that many times is kind of lame, isn’t it...?

Anyway,keeping that in mind, I’d like to perform a simple experiment. Please pay attention to the next paragraph. Take notes if you feel it might help yourecall things.

LA LA LA LALA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LALA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LALA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LALA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LALA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA!!!!

So... whatparts of that stood out to you?

Odds arenone of it did. Well, maybe the factthat it ended. In fact, you probablyskimmed it, didn’t you? Any sane personwould’ve. It was a bunch of LAs, that’sall.

Here’sanother example, one which will probably drive my point home. Have you ever heard a tuning fork? Have you ever felt compelled to listen to onefor hours? Tuning forks are perfect,y’know. If you have a middle-C tuningfork, it will hit that note and hold it for ages. Why wouldn’t you want to listen to constantperfection?

Becauseit’s boring!

A tuningfork plays one note. That’s it. It’s the musical equivalent of LA LA LA LA LALA. Middle C is great, and any musicianwill tell you it’s invaluable to performing almost any composition, from LudwigBeethoven to Lady Gaga. But it isn’t theonly note. It’s important because it’spart of a system of highs and lows that we call music.

Storieswork the same way. A story that’s justall the same thing is the literary equivalent of a tuning fork. It’s neat for about a minute and then itstarts to wear on your nerves.

Comical andserious. Loud and quiet. Horrific and reassuring. Thrilling and mundane. Failure and success. If you look at any good story, you’ll seethat it swings back and forth between extremes in a series of low troughs and high peaks.

Yeah, TheMatrix had tons of kick-ass visuals and amazing action sequences. It also had a scene of Neo getting berated byhis boss, mocked by an old woman in a kitchen, and a lengthy discussion aboutthe true nature of “Tasty Wheat.” Someof these scenes were vitally important to the plot. Others were just interesting charactermoments. They all had different weight.

This iswhat the creative folks behind G.I. Joe didn’t get. You can’t have all cool lines and allcool action all the time in a story. If everything is set to ten, it all has the same weight. Another way of saying “all the same” is that it’smonotone. And monotone is boring. It’s boring whether it’s all set to three orfive or ten or eleven.

Y’see,Timmy, it’s the back-and-forth, up-and-down nature that makes for interestingstories. A good story has a baselinethat the reader can relate to. It’sgoing to have pitfalls that sink below that baseline, and maybe some reallytragic potential consequences. And it’sgoing to have some parts that grab the reader’s attention, shoot high above theline, and make the heart start pumping.

Because ifit doesn’t have these back-and-forth elements, if it’s all the same, then it’sjust a line. It doesn’t matter how highthe line is. It’s just a flat line.

And I’msure most of you know what “flat line” is another term for...?

Next time,I have three things I’d like to talk about.

Until then,go write.

Changing It Up

2011-11-04T15:50:00.000-07:00

So, theback and forth thing really hasn’t gelled in my mind, so I’m taking the easyway out and just tossing up a quick tip. A day late.

Man, I’vegot to be honest. The new Blogger is notworking for me at all. It’s such aradical change behind the scenes here. It takes twice as long to do anything because they’ve needlessly spreadeverything out, and it’s just hard on the eyes. Who thought orange on white was a good color scheme?

Anyway...

I don’tknow about you, but I tend to write in Times Roman, single-spaced. It flows a little easier on myeyes. It also lets me have more of thestory there on the page in front of me. It’s just my thing.

Now, speaking of change (as we were), therecomes a time when it has to go into the correct format for submissions—Courier12, double-spaced. And I don’t do thisat the very end. I do it at the start ofmy last or second to last draft.

Changing itlike this forces my eyes to look at it differently now. Unlike Times Roman,Courier is a proportional font—it uses the same amount of space for every letter,so an I on the page uses the same area as an M or a W. You could actually lay out a Courier page ona grid and it would all line up.

When I reformat my manuscript, all the wordssit differently on the page now. Theirspatial relationships shift. Lines don’tend in the same place. Because of thespacing, the words themselves look different. Check it out.

See how different these two lines look?

See how differentthese two lines look?

What thismeans for me is that I’ve got a chance to look at my writing fresh. Which means another chance to look at it witha critical eye. Since I’m not beingdistracted (so to speak) by the familiarity of words and sentences that I’veseen a dozen times, it lets me catch things that could be tightened up orare a bit repetitive.

Even aftera ton of slashing, I cut another two thousand words out of -14-after I switched formats. So many thingsstood out now as excessive verbiage or unnecessary descriptors. I’d made a good five passes at the manuscriptat that point, but none of them really popped until I looked at it like this.

So trychanging things up and see if it helps your next round of editing.

Next time,I should have this other post figured out.

Until then,go write.

Blaming the Victim

2011-10-27T19:35:00.000-07:00

I’vefinally switched over to the new Blogger format. A bit torn on it, myself. Please let me know if you like it or not,because I can duplicate the old style, it just takes a bit of work.

Halloweenis upon us, which means it’s time for me to do something horror-related here onthe ranty blog. It’s a topic I’vetouched on once or thrice before. Thistime I thought I’d put a slightly different spin on it.

As some ofyou know, I spent last weekend up at ZomBCon in Seattle. It was eye-opening in several ways, and oneof those ways (like any decent convention) was the people in costume. There were a lot of fantastic zombies andrelated beasties, but there were also a lot of zombie fighters—people withminiguns and machetes and body armor. Heck, one of my fellow Permuted Press authors, Eloise J. Knapp,showed up dressed to kill. Not in thefun way.

A lot ofhorror tends to focus on the enemy. My zombies are different from your zombies. Your vampires are different than myvampires. Neither of our axe-wielding,demonically-possessed psychopaths are like her axe-wielding,demonically-possessed psychopath. Horrorcan be broken down into many different sub-genres, just like sci-fi, comedy,or other art forms like sculpting or painting. Being labeled "horror" doesn't mean Frankenstein is anything like TheDescent, and neither of them resembles ParanormalActivity VII.

What I wantto talk about, though, are the victims. Different types of antagonists define a story, true, but the same holdsfor the protagonist. While A vs. B makesone type of story, A vs. C is something different and D vs. G is another worldaltogether. So recognizing what type ofcharacters I’m writing about can help me define what kind of story I’m writing,which helps me market it. If I tell aneditor it's not torture porn when it plainly is, at the best I’m going to getrejected. At the worst, they'll rememberme as "that idiot" when my next piece of work crosses their desk—evenif I’ve fixed my mistakes since then.

Here’s afew types of horror stories and the people you often find in them.

Supernatural stories

Not talkingabout the television show, mind you.

Thecharacters tend to be average folks in most supernatural stories. They’re not idiots, but they’re notmillionaire Nobel winners or retired assassins. Almost universally, the maincharacter of a supernatural story rarely comes to harm. They’ll need clean underwear, maybe have todye their hair back to its natural color, and they probably won’t sleep wellfor a few months or years. Physically,however, they tend to come out okay. Theremight be some mental scarring, but that’s about it. If anyone suffers in a supernatural story it'susually the bad guy or a supporting character. Often, though, people havedied in the past.

Slasher stories

These talesfeature teenagers and young adults as their victim of choice. Lots of teenagers, out of which two at mostmight survive. A few people over the ageof twenty-five may catch a machete, but ever since John Carpenter made theoriginal Halloween (and it was horribly misunderstood and copied bydozens of filmmakers) it’s pretty much set in stone who the victims are in thissub-genre.

A keydifference between slashers and torture porn stories (see below) is that thevictims here have a chance to escape. It’s rare for the victim to die without hopeor warning in a slasher film. There’soften a chase or at least a struggle. Weget the sense that if Phoebe didn’t trip over that tree root or if Wakko hadn’tstopped to “deal with this guy” they might’ve gotten away. Heck if Dot just could’ve run a little fastershe would’ve made it to the car and relative safety.

Monster stories

A monsterstory is about an unstoppable creature. Godzilla is a monster, in a very obvious sense, but so is Freddy Kruger(in his later films), a zombie horde, and the alien in Alien. I think the reason Jason X is so reviled by fans of the franchise is that thefilmmakers turned it into a monster movie, not a slasher film like the onesbefore it.

As such,the focus of a monster story is usually to get away from the threat. Yeah, most horror movies involve runningaway. In a monster story, though, it’simmediately self-evident this is the best choice of action. Monster stories can have a lot of survivorsbecause the monster, by its nature, is kind of attacking randomly. It never gets personal for them. The characters in a monster story are almostbystanders, swept up in the events and sometimes just left to watch from thesidelines.

Giant Evil stories

In thesestories the characters are usually pathetic pawns at best, helpless victims atworst (well, from their point of view). Giant evil stories are close to monster stories in that the antagonistis just overwhelming. There aretwo big differences, though. One isthere’s no way for characters to escape giant evil. It’s everywhere. Two is that giant evil rarely has aface. It may have minions ormanifestations, but often it isn’t something characters can “find,” if thatmakes sense.

Thecharacters in giant evil stories tend to be older and smarter. They’re not hormone-crazed teens, but veryeducated adults with a bit of life-wisdom under their belts. In my opinion, it’s because a large part ofthe horror here is realizing just how overwhelming the force against themis. It’s something a younger characterusually isn’t quite up to grasping because they don’t have as much of a worldto overturn.

Thrillers

Thrillerstend to focus on just one or two characters rather than a larger cast, so whenpeople die they tend to be supporting characters or nameless folks in the background. A thrilleris about what could happen, not what does happen, so the big threatshave to stay looming. While charactersin a thriller tend to be more active in a general sense, for the most partthey’re reacting to the sinister plots and machinations going on aroundthem.

Adventure Horror stories

Toparaphrase from Hellboy, adventurehorror is where the good guys bump back. While these stories may use a lot of tropes from the other subgenres,the key element to these stories is that the characters aren’t victims—they’reactively fighting back from the start. Not in a dumb, facing-off-against-Jason-Voorhees-with-a-baseball-bat way,but in a heavily-armed-armored-and-prepared way that has a degree of success.

It canstill go bad for them (and often does), but these characters get to inflict somedamage and live to tell the tale. For awhile, anyway.

Torture porn

A keyelement to torture porn is the victim is almost always helpless. By the time the characters know what’s goingon (no matter how obvious it is to the reader) they’re already bound anddrugged. They’re completely alone or vastlyoutnumbered. Unlike a slasher film (seeabove) there’s no question in these stories that the victim is not going to get away. That hope isn't here, because that's not whatthese stories are about.

Tortureporn walks a delicate line with its characters. If they’re bland and interchangeable, what happens to them is kind ofmeaningless. When was the last time youshed a tear for that broken chair in your back alley? However if we know these characters too wellthen their torture really does become truly unbearable and horrific to thepoint that it isn’t remotely entertaining. We cheer when people get killed in the Saw movies, but not when they’re killed in Schindler’s List.

I’ll alsomake the observation that characters tend to be one type or the other. It’s very rare to see such a dramaticcharacter shift that Phoebe goes from being the complete victim to completelykick-ass. As has been said to death, theseeds are always there. Ripley may notgear up until the end of Aliens, but there are plenty of reminders allthrough it that she’s just as capable and resilient as any of the ColonialMarines—including the fact that she’s the only survivor of the firstmovie. When someone changes too muchwithout any motivation they become inconsistent, and an inconsistentcharacter’s a sure way to end up in that big pile on the left.

So, dwellon these points while you're munching on the ill-gotten gains you score whiletrick-or-treating with your candy beard. Yeah, all of you with kids, you know what I'm talking about.

Next time,I’ve been going back and forth about what I want to do. I might just give a random quick tip. Or maybe I’ll talk about going back andforth.
Have a Happy Halloween. Don't forget to write.

God is My Co-Writer

2011-10-13T18:00:00.000-07:00

So, a few years back one of my friends read for a religious-themed screenplay contest. And, when it got to the point that he was pulling his hair out, I pitched in and read a few scripts for him (I owed him money, anyway). It exposed me to a lot of stories about God, Jesus, various members of the heavenly host, and—to be terribly honest—a lot of really bigoted, small-minded people. Not all of them, by a long shot, but enough that it’s worth mentioning, unfortunately.

Two weeks back I asked for ideas, and one fellow (stand up and wave, Matthew) suggested the idea of approaching God, or any god, in a story. How can you do it without annoying readers while still doing justice to your chosen almighty?

And then, by yet another odd coincidence, on one of my favorite message boards, a few of us were recently batting around the film The Adjustment Bureau, which, in the big picture, is about... well, guess.

First off, a few grammar and spelling points. If we’re talking about the Judeo-Christo-Islamic deity, it’s always God. Capital G. This also holds if you choose to call him the Lord. It doesn’t matter if you or your character are an atheist or agnostic or whatever—this isn’t a religious point, it’s just standard, accepted spelling. This deity is considered the definitive article and as such his (if I may be so presumptuous) name is always capitalized. It’s a proper noun. The same goes for the Bible. If you’re referring to the religious text that encompasses the old and new testament, it’s the Bible. You only use lower case when you’re speaking about a generic book of absolute fact, like if I tell you that Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is my bible.

And, really, if you’re going to write about Biblical-era tales, check out the MLA Handbook, because there are a bunch of unique grammar and spelling rules that apply to these names.

All of which leads to point two. I’m not talking specifically about God in this week’s rant, because a lot of the folks reading this are just as interested in Greek gods, Norse gods, Egyptian gods, Chinese demons, and cosmic entities from beyond time. But when it comes to stories, they all deal with a lot of the same issues.

Now, speaking of definitive articles, I’d like to start with an analogy...

In Danse Macabre, King tells a wonderful story about hearing William F. Nolan (the writer behind Logan’s Run and the legendary Trilogy of Terror films) talk at a convention. Nolan explained horror in terms of a closet at the end of the hall in a creepy, old house. Maybe the hero or heroine can hear something bumping around in there from anywhere in the house, and every now and then it thumps as whatever it is in there knocks an item off a hanger or tips a box off a shelf. As he or she gets closer, perhaps they can hear it scratching on the inside of the closet door. Endless scratching, scratching, scratching...

Finally, despite all our silent urgings, the character reaches out, turns the knob, and yanks open the door to reveal a ten-foot tall cockroach!!!

Thing is, even with the screams and the hissing and the mood music blaring, it’s kind of a relief to see that oversized bug. A ten-foot cockroach is pretty scary, no question about it, but a twenty-foot cockroach... man, I don’t know about you but that’d make me wet my pants pretty quick. It’s kind of a defense mechanism. Once I know what X is, I can imagine a scarier Y and X is reduced by comparison.

In the same way that naming the unknown horror lessens it, deities are lessened by defining them. When a writer tries to explain or show the scope of a god’s power, more often than not they’re really just establishing the god’s limits. If you tell me your god burns with the light of a hundred suns, I can say mine burns with the light of a thousand. If yours is a thousand feet tall and moves mountains, mine is ten-thousand feet tall and moves continents. The more the writer tries to show me, the easier it is for me to imagine something bigger and better (or nastier).

A great example of this is The Omen. No, the original. We shall not mention the remake here. Without giving away too much (although, why don’t you know this story already?), The Omen is about a diplomat who adopts a little boy. The boy, Damien, might be the Antichrist. I say “might” because... well, the movie actually makes you wonder. There are definitely people who think he’s the Antichrist. There sure are a lot of accidents and disturbing events that circle around the little boy. But the thing is... he never does anything. His eyes never glow, he never speaks in a deep, stentorian voice, he doesn’t shoot flames or lightning from his hands. Damien comes across as nigh-omnipotent because it seems completely effortless for him to get to anyone, anywhere—and that what makes him all the more terrifying. Because he doesn’t actively do anything, how’s anyone supposed to stop him? And what will happen when he does start being active?

Y’see, Timmy, defining something in any way automatically minimizes it, because the moment it’s been defined we can think of something bigger. Think of the little kid who yells, “infinity” and immediately gets countered with “infinity-plus-one!”

That’s why it’s always best to leave such omnipotent beings in the shadows rather than dragging them out into the light. By their very nature, they're vast, undefinable beings. Thus, the moment they get any sort of definition they're being lessened.

So, here’s a few quick thoughts for including a deity in your story.

Don’t—The simplest thing to do. Is a personal appearance really required for this story to work. The members of Congress have a big effect on my life, but I’ve never seen a single one of them in person. Heck, the only messages I’ve gotten from them have been spam emails and robocalls. But it doesn’t mean they aren’t there influencing aspects of my existence, and it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be impressed if one of their aides gave me a call to chat about something. Which leads nicely to...

Minions—Gods of any type are impossible to fight, so including them on either side of the story equation really unbalances things. But I believe someone could beat cultists or demons or maybe even an angel. These are the beings my characters should be encountering. Remember, you can almost never get to the CEO because there’s a wall of flunkies, advisors, junior execs, and bodyguards in the way.

Silence is Golden—They used this one way back in It’s A Wonderful Life, when Clarence the angel would have one-sided conversations with the sky. Neil Gaiman did it in both The Sandman and the wonderful Good Omens (with Terry Prachett). Kevin Smith did it in Dogma. Mere mortals can’t hear the voice of God and expect to survive, so the Lord speaks through a number of mediums... or not at all. Keep in mind, to pull this off—especially the one sided conversation—your dialogue needs to be sharp and you can’t fall back on clumsy devices like repeating everything the silent person says just to make it clear what your god hates.

Comedy—People are a lot more willing to accept divine intervention (of one kind or another) if it has a comedy element. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because when the writer’s not taking the matter seriously, it’s hard for people to have serious complaints. That’s why George Burns and Christopher Moore get away with mocking the man upstairs and The Last Temptation of Christ gets months of picketing. But this tone has to spread through your whole story. You can’t have your deity be the only source of comedy, because then you’re mocking him or her in the bad way.

Minimal Miracles—D’you ever hear the old saying about being so tough you don’t need to fight to prove it? More to the point, have you ever watched a movie where the bad-ass hero just fights and fights and fights and fights and fights? It gets boring, no matter how often he wins. Your omnipotent beings shouldn’t be expressing their power just to prove they can, because that power will start to get boring and take all the challenge out of the story one way or another. If everybody who dies gets brought back to life, what are people even fighting for?

Simply put... gods are the ultimate “less is more” when it comes to writing. The more a god—or demon, or cosmic entity—gets defined, the easier it is to name god-plus-one.

Next week... well, I’m going to miss next week. I’m one of the guests at ZomBCon up in Seattle. But when I come back, I’m sure I’ll have all sorts of scary and horrific things to talk about.

Until then, go write.

This Should Be Obvious...

2011-10-06T20:10:00.000-07:00

I’m a bit under the gun right now, so I don’t have time to rant on and on like I normally do. But I wanted to toss out something for this week.

The late Michael Crichton has a book called Travels which is more or less an autobiography of his early life. How he entered (and eventually left) medical school, selling his first few novels, and getting involved in the great, grinding machine of Hollywood. It’s a bit dry at points, but there’s some pretty interesting stuff in there. Including a fun story about how he once almost killed Sean Connery with a speeding train. Also how he and his girlfriend were molested by an elephant while camping in Africa.

If those last two sentences don’t make you want to buy that book, you have no real business being here.

For our purposes today, though, the important thing is a piece of writing advice young Michael got from his dad. If you want to know the full story behind it, again, grab the book. I’ll give you the short form.

Be very careful when you use the word obvious or its adverbial kissing cousin, obviously. It’s one of those words that should always get a second look in fiction, nonfiction, email, random message board posts, and so on.

If something isn’t obvious, it sounds arrogant to say it is. Think of all those times you’ve asked someone a question and they’ve answered you with “Isn’t it obvious?” If it was obvious we wouldn’t’ve asked the question (actual or implied). What the speaker or narrator is saying is, effectively, “I know I’m way smarter than you idiots and want to gloat about it.” So, if this is the situation, don’t use the word obvious, because the character or narrator in question is going to look like a jerk.

Unless, of course, the character saying so is supposed to be a jerk.

On the flipside, if something really is obvious, then you still don’t need the word. Things that are obvious are... well, obvious. The sky is blue. Sugar is sweet. Ninjas are cool. Expensive things cost money. Oxford is a good school. Nazis are bad. Colonel Hans Landa is very bad. Car crashes hurt, especially if you’re outside the car. All these things are, in fact, obvious to everyone, so it’s just wasted words for a writer to tell us so.

Try it. Use the “Find” feature to look for obvious or obviously in your latest manuscript and see how often you really need it.

Except for that one guy from Pod Six. He needs it. He’s a jerk.

Next time, by request and also by a series of conversations, let’s have a little talk about God and other gods.

Until then, go write.

Muah-Ha-Hah

2011-09-29T00:03:00.000-07:00

Evil villain laugh.

Hey, guess what I wanted to ramble on about this week?

No, not the new Ex-Patriots button the sidebar... (how's that for subtle?)

Villains! The bad guy (or gal). That character with the evil scheme that is pure genius in its simplicity.

First off, I want to make sure we’re all clear on something. There’s a difference between a villain and an antagonist (scary literary terms!).

While your villain is almost always your antagonist, they aren’t always. The first thing that pops to mind is the “lurking in the background” type villain who we know is there, but who never actually does anything. For example, the Emperor is definitely still one of the villains in Star Wars (the first movie had no subtitle, sorry George), but he’s hardly the antagonist. Likewise, it’s actually kind of common to have an antagonist who isn’t a villain. Two examples would be the Fugitive or the oft-maligned Lilo & Stitch. In both of these cases the antagonists are policemen who are 100% on the side of law and order.

I wanted to make that distinction because in this little rant I am going to be talking about villains. Antagonists are easy. In fact, too many people wuss out and have antagonists instead of villains, because creating a good villain is a lot harder than it looks.

Now, I’m going to start by bringing up a touchy subject. I hope everyone here realizes I’m doing it for instructive purposes and not to start any sort of debate. I apologize now if anyone gets offended, but... well, if discussing some of these things morally offends you, a career as a writer might not be for you.

Anyway...

I once read a screenplay about a morally conflicted woman who worked in an abortion clinic. She had very mixed feelings about her job and tried (somewhat) to see both sides of the argument. The screenwriter of this piece was pushing a message, though, and that message was pro-life/anti-abortion.

So... problem. It’s tough to do moral issues on screen in and of themselves. We need to see an actual conflict. An A vs. B situation. Our heroine is on the side of life, and thus is sane and rational and good, so where’s the conflict? What’s she going to struggle against?

The homicidal clinic staff.

That’s right, I said homicidal. As in... maniacs.

Every doctor twirled their mustache and laughed gleefully at the thought of getting to perform an abortion. They had pools going to see who could do the most in one day. When the main character convinces one patient to leave, the doctor actually snaps his fingers and says, “Ah, well... maybe next time.” The rest of the staff would blatantly lie to patients and trick them into signing “binding contracts” that forced them to go through with procedures.

Now, a lot of you who read this collection of rants know that I have a habit of being a bit verbose and pushing things. But the sad thing is, right now I’m not. I’m actually understating things a bit. The staff at this medical clinic was a bunch of ridiculously over-the-top caricatures of evil that made the staff at Auschwitz look like canonized saints.

This is a common problem in message scripts. Whether the message is pro-life, pro-environment, pro-religion, or pro-science, the writers often have trouble putting themselves in the other side’s shoes. If a writer zealously believes in any cause, to the point that nothing could sway their beliefs, it’s going to very difficult for them to empathize with anyone who has opposing views. How could you possibly have opposing views, after all? It’s SO CLEAR that I am right!

This is a problem, because empathy, as I’ve mentioned before, is what makes a good writer. You can always spot it when you’re reading a story by someone with little or no empathy for how other people feel and react. Being able to put yourself in different viewpoints is the key to great characters.

And guess what? Villains are characters. If handled correctly, they’re fantastic characters. Mess them up and... well, they’ll probably end up twirling their mustaches and saying, “Muah-ha-hah” a lot.

Because they’re characters, that means the bad guys can’t be illogical or fall back on madness as an excuse to explain their behavior. They need to have a real motivation for their actions. The best villains don’t scream and shriek and wave straight razors around. No, the best ones calmly and coldly ransom the life of everyone on your homeworld for a single piece of information.... and then blow up your homeworld anyway. And they do this because—in their minds—they have a perfectly logical reason for doing it. And because they're complete bastards.

Y’see, Timmy, a real villain is a person. You might not agree with them. You might not like them. But you should be able to make sense of why they do what they do.

In the movie Inglorius Basterds, Hans Landa is an absolutely terrifying Nazi officer. He isn’t scary because he shouts or has people killed. What makes him such an effective villain is that he’s completely rational. He makes a calm, solid case for why it makes perfect sense to hate Jews and want to kill them. And then he tops off this little exercise in logic by showing that he’s far smarter than anyone else present (including the audience) and has been guiding the conversation since the moment he entered the room. And that’s when we realize just how evil Landa is.

On the flipside, consider Tank Evans, the over-muscled penguin from the movie Surf’s Up. No, it’s actually fun, you should watch it. One of the problems the writers and actor Diedrich Bader struggled with was trying to make the villianous surfer believable and relatable. Thier inspiration came when Bader’s son pointed out that Tank wasn’t the bad guy, he just loved all his trophies. Not only did it cement the character, but it gave them an all new scene (you’ll know it when you see it).

So, here’s my helpful hint for you. If a writer cannot put themselves in the villian’s place at all, don’t try to write them. If it’s completely impossible to empathize with what this character is thinking or to get a grasp on their line of reasoning—and to do it in a way that lets them remain believable—then this character shouldn’t be in the story.

That’s true of any character. So it should true for the villain, too, right?

Next time... y’know, I’m coming off a few intensive drafts and my brain’s a bit fried. Is there anything in particular someone would like addressed? I got a few calls last time I asked. Anything new pop to mind? If not, next week might just be me falling back on something obvious.

Until then, go write.

Do You Read Sutter Cane?

2011-09-22T02:20:00.000-07:00

And if you get that title reference, you know the answer really determines what kind of person you are.

A character sketch is one of those things that comes up a lot in the storytelling world. Novelists and screenwriters talk about them, but in a variety of ways. Sometimes very indy films are even called “character sketches.” So it’s understandable the term could cause confusion, especially when some folks talk about them as vital, necessary things for a writer to have without really explaining what they are.

In a visual-artistic sense, a sketch usually isn’t a finished work. It’s when you use a few quick lines and textures to suggest an image rather than forming a complete image. It’s inherently incomplete, but implies something more than itself.

In a similar sense, a character sketch shouldn’t be an exhaustive list that covers every possible detail. It’s supposed to give you, the writer, a sense of the character you can refer back to as a guideline. It’s notes about how they talk, how they move, what they like, and what they hate.

Like a fair number of the things I pontificate about here on the ranty blog, a character sketch is going to be something that’s unique to each author. Probably to each character, as well. Some characters may need pages of exhaustive notes. Others may only need a line or two. And with a few, you may never need to write a single note because they’re perfectly in your mind.

In the book I’m working on right now, I sketched out a short paragraph about each character. Most of them got two or three lines, and a few of them got five or six. For the most part, though, I let character elements develop as I went, growing off those initial impressions. I didn’t know Xela was a nudist or Clive was a recovering alcoholic, so neither of these fairly defining traits are in their simple character sketches.

However, there are a number of surprises and reveals in this story. The characters end up reacting to a lot of things. By the third draft, it was clear I needed to know just how everybody would react. Debbie and Clive were pretty clean-cut. Nate, Veek, and Roger, on the other hand, would definitely swear. But how would they swear? After all, profanity’s just as much a part of someone’s speech patterns as whether or not they say pop or soda. So I do know precisely how everyone swears.

Now, on the flipside, I got to talk to filmmaker Stephan Elliot a while back about his film adaptation of Easy Virtue. When I asked about how he developed the character of Furber the butler, Elliot laughed and said one word—“Hate.” That’s it. That was the entire character sketch. Furber completely, openly loathes his employers, and his contempt is clear every moment he’s forced to be on screen with them.

So, what is a character sketch? It’s whatever works for you. I’ve found one of the easiest ways to create one, though, is just to ask questions. Not only does this help you get various answers about someone, it also generally leads to other questions about them that develop the character more.

For example... let’s talk about Phoebe.

For the record, I have never, ever in my life met someone named Phoebe (to the best of my knowledge). That’s why it’s my fallback name for things like this (along with the Warners). If I used a name like Tammy, Stephanie, Becky, Colleen, or half a dozen others when I make these examples, I would catch sooooooooooooo much crap from someone, somewhere. It’s the writer’s curse. If I have a character with the same name as someone I know, I must be talking about them. Heaven forbid I give the character my name, because then I’m just a raging egomaniac. Or, at least, I’m finally admitting it openly.

Anyway... we were talking about Phoebe. Let’s ask a couple questions. Answer as you see fit. You don’t need to write them down, but you can if you want to .

Where did she grow up?

Does she get along with her family?

Did she go to college? Did she live at college?

Did she do any “experimenting” during her college years?

Did she finish college?

Republican or Democrat?

What does she do for a living?

What does she want to be doing for a living?

How much does she spend on her hair each month?

Does she brush and floss regularly?

Does she have any hobbies or collections?

Does she go to church? What church?

Where does she live?

Where does she want to live?

Does she have roommates?

How does she swear? Like a sailor? Like a prude?

Phoebe’s five favorite movies? Books? Bands?

How old was she when she had her first drink?

How often does she go out with friends?

Are most of her friends male or female?

Does she smoke?

Has she ever done drugs?

Does she go to the gym?

What kind of car does she drive?

What kind of car does she want to drive?

Does she have pets?

If you answered half of those questions, that’s a ton of information about Phoebe. Plus, as you’ve probably noticed, a lot of it implies other facets of her personality. Even if you don’t use all of it, it’s going to give you much better insight into how she talks and reacts to the world around her and how she might react to a different world (figurative or actual) if she were to suddenly find herself in one.

Now, let me jump back to the artistic analogy of sketches. There’s another term you’ve probably heard called negative space. It’s when you define shapes by the emptiness around them rather than by the shapes themselves. And sometimes, alas, that’s how some writers try to define their characters.

For example, have you watched any of the GOP debates? You’ll notice the one resounding theme among them—among most politicians—is who they are not. They are not Washington insiders. They are not part of those over-educated elitists trying to create socialism. They sure as hell are not President Obama. They’re nothing like him, and they’ll get angry if you dare hint otherwise.

The question is, though, who are they? They’re so busy establishing what they aren’t, they rarely talk about what they are. In the rush to tell you what doesn’t work and what they won’t do, they never get around to what does work and what they will do.

Now, I’m sure there’s a philosophical argument to be had here. Does a hole punch make 1/4” circles of paper or does it make 1/4” holes in paper? Does it make a difference which it does since both are technically correct?

Y’see, Timmy, the problem with defining by negatives is that it’s like trying to prove a negative. That kind of definition leaves too many variables for it to be clear. If I tell you the shirt I’m wearing right now isn’t red, does that really tell you anything about the color of my shirt?

Sure, say some folks—we know it isn’t red. Okay, so what is it? Is it blue? Green? Black? Tan? White? Gray? Striped? Plaid? If I tell you to picture a not-red shirt, everyone here’s going to picture something different. And if all you know about someone is that they’re not Obama... well, that narrows it down to about five billion people. You need positives to define characters—even unlikable characters and flat-out villains.

Finally, one last point I brushed against up above and I also mentioned last week. Just because you come up with stuff for a character sketch doesn’t mean you need to use it in your work. Oh, you’ll use all of it in that greater “grand tapestry” sense, but just because I came up with a background element doesn’t mean I need to use it.

Y’see, Timmy (yep, two Y’see Timmys in one post), an all-too-common mistake is when people come up with lush backstories and then feel the need to shoehorn every single line of them into their manuscript. Again, a character sketch is for the writer, not the reader. It’s good for me to know Malavika’s a third-generation Indian who graduated high school a year early and had her first sexual experience at age twenty... but none of this is really relevant to the story I’m telling now.

So I didn’t bother to put any of it in.

And neither should you.

Next week, we take care of the bad guys once and for all. Hopefully.

Until then, go write.

Screenwriting 101

2011-09-15T02:02:00.000-07:00

Okay, I’ve said many times that I don’t want to use this blog to go over the basics. If you’ve found your way here, I’d like to pretend that you’ve got a loose grasp of your chosen writing format. But after a few recent scripts I’ve seen, it’s apparent the basics aren’t as well-known or understood as they should be.

So, without further ado (because there's a lot to go over), here’s a baker’s dozen of basics you should have down before you show your screenplay to someone. And especially before you submit it to someone.

1) Basic Format—Scripts are always in single space Courier 12. Always. If you heard a story about a professional screenwriter who only works in Times Roman and turns in his or her work that way, I can tell you two things—that person’s already got the leeway you only get with a well-established career, and as soon as they handed the script in the whole thing was reformatted into Courier 12. It’s the industry standard for a number of reasons, including timing and scheduling. Every other department needs that script in Courier 12.

Ahhh, says clever wanna-be #7... but if they can convert it anyway, what difference does it make if I want to write in Times or Arial or Wingdings?

It doesn’t make any difference how I write it. But when I submit it to a contest, an agent, or a production company, it has to be in Courier 12. Because scripts are always in Courier 12. Always. And I’m trying to convince people that I’m a professional.

And another thing—you don’t use scene numbers in a spec script. That’s something that comes up much later during the actual pre-production for a film. They’re a tool for the assistant directors and department heads, not the screenwriter. Putting them in now will just get me tagged as an amateur.

2) Basic Style—Always use third person, present tense. Always. The script is what’s happening on screen right now. Characters can have dialogue where they talk about things in past tense, but all my action blocks and descriptions must be in third person, present tense.

A screenplay that switches person or dips back and forth between past and present tense is always a good tip-off for readers that this is someone’s short story or novel they sloppily adapted into screenplay format. There’s also usually a reason no one bought their short story or novel, and it’s related to the fact that they didn’t bother to learn how to format a screenplay...

3) Don’t use archaic terminology – Forsooth, whenst thou uses scrivening of yesteryore, thy words appearst equally of yesteryore. And few and far between liest those who show interest in the dry, dusty bones of a mouldering anecdote.

Or, as we say today, no one’s interested in an old script.

It used to be common to end every scene with CUT TO or FADE, or to end every page with (CONTINUED). It also used to be common to see kids be-bopping to their transistor radios. In both cases, no one’s done that for years. When I started working in the film industry back in 1993, CUT TO was already dead. CONTINUED was on life support, and only crops up in very limited use, usually for ongoing dialogue.

If you’ve been using an old script from Casablanca, Star Wars, or Chinatown to learn this stuff--toss it. The film industry grows and changes like any other industry. If a script wasn’t written in the past ten years, it’s probably going to give you more bad habits than good ones.

4) Capitals -- This really isn’t that tough. You use capitals the first time we see a character so the reader knows this is someone new. I’ll go into this a bit more in a minute.

You also use capitals when something important happens. When YAKKO IS SHOT or Dot’s exploring the cellar and finds A SEVERED HAND ON THE FLOOR. Keep in mind, though, that in this sense capitals are just like exclamation points. The more often I use them, the less power they have, and eventually they’ll tip the scale and just start frustrating or annoying the reader.

Also, none of this applies to dialogue. Again, for clarity, never apply the above rules to dialogue. If dialogue is in capitals it means someone is shouting, nothing else. There is no other way to interpret capitals in dialogue. So even if my step-sister has never been mentioned before, I don’t say “Have you met my step-sister CAROLYN?” I also don’t say “Hey, over there on the floor, is that A SEVERED HAND!?!!?”

Well, okay, I might shout if I see a severed hand... Question is, am I supposed to be shouting?

5) Names -- Again, whenever I introduce a character, I always put them in all caps, even in the action blocks. The very first time I see YAKKO WARNER I need to know he's someone new. After that he's just Yakko. For example...

Another man cut from the 50’s action cloth, ZACK “ZAP” MARSHALL is standing by another panel, a few feet down the wall from Lance’s. This one has three large buttons on it, marked “laser,” “missile,” and “x-ray”. Zap also wears a wide, high-tech belt buckle with a large button in the middle of it.

REX

Ready, Zap?

ZAP

Just give the command, Captain. I’m ready to blow it out of space.

Dialogue headers are always all caps and you never change dialogue headers for a character. Jack’s dialogue is always headed with JACK, Jill’s is always headed with JILL. The only time they would change is if the character has completely changed identities on screen.

For example, in Lord of the Rings when we find out the ranger Strider is actually Prince Aragorn. He’s STRIDER in headers until he’s revealed as ARAGON in either the action block (because you’re introducing a new character) or dialogue. Then his next dialogue header should be STRIDER/ARAGON. Use that double-header once, and then he’s ARAGON from there on in.

6) Don't Name every Character—In the abbreviated, concise format of a screenplay, names are an important tool. They tell the reader that this character is someone we need to pay attention to. They’re important enough to the story that they rate a name and not just a title like MAN #2 or WAITRESS or OFFICER.

Alas, some idiot somewhere started pushing the idea of naming everyone in a screenplay. The logic is that this gives more detail, nuance, or some such nonsense. Do not do this. If your screenplay is littered with extra names, I’m going to be tripping over myself trying to keep them straight because the logical assumption is that they need to be kept straight. You made the effort to name them, after all. So rather than focusing on the story, I’m trying to figure out how the guy at the bus stop and the waitress figure into it. That’s breaking the flow and it’s going to piss me off when I realize I wasted time and effort juggling twenty-seven names for no reason.

Never name someone just to give them a name. No one—not even the actor—is going to be upset with just MAN #2. A friend of mine has made a good career out of being MAN #2. Trust me, MAN #2 is going to make a nice chunk of money, even for just one day on set.

7) Actually Describe Things—A few years back I got to interview screenwriter-director David Goyer (The Dark Knight, Batman Begins, the Blade trilogy) and he told me a funny story about getting smacked down by Guillermo del Toro. It seems Goyer had described a character in a script as “a living nightmare.” del Toro looked at this and said “What does that even mean? That is boolshit!”

There is a time and a place for pretty, evocative imagery and language. That time and place is not while writing a screenplay. As I mentioned above, the script is about what’s on screen, which means it has to be something we can actually see. A reader needs to be able to visualize what’s on the page, and it’s very important that multiple readers visualize the same thing. I can tell you Kara is a dead ringer for my college girlfriend Penny, but that doesn’t mean a damned thing if you don’t know what Penny looked like. “It’s every bad dream you’ve ever had rolled into one” sounds fantastic, but it’s really hard to do concept sketches and storyboards off that.

During the interview, Goyer actually admitted this issue bit him in the ass when he was directing one of his own scripts. He’d given a vague, roundabout description of a sequence, but once he was on set he actually had to figure out how to film it—now he needed a real description. So the gears of production jammed up while Goyer and his assistant director tried to clear up the mess writer-Goyer had left them to deal with.

That leads nicely into...

8) Don’t write what we can’t see – A solid corollary to the last point. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen stuff like this in amateur screenplays.

Tight on a man sitting on the side of a bed. This is JOHN, a computer scientist who created a new type of parallel processor chip. He’s depressed because he found out his wife is cheating on him with his best friend. He’s moved out of the house and has been living in this hotel room in Boston for the past six weeks as he tries to figure out what to do with his life. He’s thinking about divorcing her, but part of him is still in love, despite the pain she’s caused him.

What’s wrong with that paragraph? Well except for the first sentence, how is the audience expected to know any of this? All we’re going to see is a guy sitting on a bed. Again, the script is what’s on screen. Not what’s in someone’s head on screen. That’s the stuff that comes out through dialogue, action, and maybe some clever set dressing or wardrobe choices. But definitely not in a block of exposition in the action blocks.

9) Don't Over-Describe Characters—This sounds a little contrary to some of the stuff I’ve just said, but trust me--it isn’t. A bad habit some writers develop—especially prose writers—is to go mad with character description. Hair color, eye color, education, underwear preferences, etc... They take their entire character sketch and drop it into the screenplay.

You don’t go nuts describing characters in scripts for a few reasons. One is that you always want to be tight and lean in a screenplay. Two is, as I just said above, you don’t want to describe anything you can’t see. Three is the one none of us like to think about—there’s a good chance this character will change. I can spend half a page describing Angelina Jolie and then they decide to cast Kiera Knightly. It happens. Just give enough description so the character stands out from any other character. Really, if you’ve got more that two sentences of character description you’ve got too much. Yeah, you may have tons more, but remember—the script is about right now. Everything else about your character will come out in the course of the story through their dialogue and actions. If it doesn’t, my problem is not that I only got two sentences of character description.

10) Don’t act – Okay, you know those little descriptions under the dialogue header, usually in parentheses? These are called parentheticals. Sometimes, as a joke, they’re called wrylies. It’s a quick set of instructions to the actor about how the line’s supposed to be delivered.

Actors hate parentheticals. They hate them the same way screenwriters hate development and producers who want you to add in a bit with a dog and a part for their girlfriend. It’s someone who has no idea how to do your job telling you how to do your job. Let’s look at a quick scene from one of my own scripts...

WENDY

(excited)

You did it!

TED

(proud)

Yeah, great shot, Zap!

LANCE

(relieved)

All clear again, Captain.

REX

(serious)

Yes. But for how long?

WENDY

(confused)

What do you mean, Rex?

REX

(thoughtful)

If it wasn’t for brave crewmen like Lance, Zap, Ted, and the rest of you, the galactispiders would make the starways far too dangerous.

Are those parentheticals really telling you anything useful? Most actors would be able to figure this stuff out just from context. So would any reader. Which, for the record, is why none of these parentheticals are actually in my script—I just added them for this example.

Y’see, Timmy, there are only two times to use a parenthetical. One is if it’s life or death important to the story that this line is delivered a certain way. If the whole film is going to fall apart if Yakko doesn’t whisper in this scene, then add a (whispered) to that line of dialogue. Two is if I think there’s a very real chance this line could be misunderstood, even with all the context and lines before it, and the resulting misreading will destroy the entire film.

If you’ve got a parenthetical in your screenplay, think long and hard about if it meets one of these two criteria. And then remove it. They’re the adverbs of screenwriting.

11) Don’t direct—Okay, remember what I just said about actors hating it when you tell them how to act? Directors loathe writers who fill up a script with directing notes. When I fill pages with stuff like “Dolly over to reveal” or “pan up to Dot’s face,” directors start shaking their heads and figuring out how they’re going to shoot it.

Like the parenthetical above, only put in direction if it’s life or death important to the film. If the story hinges on this being a crane shot, then put in—if the story really hinges on it. Me thinking this scene would be really cool with a crane does not make it a pivotal shot.

Plus, a lot of time adding direction honestly detracts from the story. Here’s a great example—how many of you have seen The Shawshank Redemption? The last time we see Andy walking to his cell, it’s pretty important that we don’t see his feet, right? Except if I point that out, readers are going to spend the next ten pages trying to figure out what’s so important about Andy’s feet and that’s going to override a lot of what’s going on now. If I hadn’t mentioned it, they wouldn’t’ve thought about it, but now it’s essentially a low-level spoiler in my own script that his shoes are going to be key. By the time the readers get to the flashback and figure it out, they’ll understand that when the movie is filmed we can’t see his feet at that point.

By the way, just to clarify—it doesn’t matter if I plan on directing the script myself. The script I submit to a contest, an agent, or a producer, has to be a script for anyone. If you’ve actually going to be the director, you’ll have plenty of time later to add that stuff. Plus you’ll have your own notebook and schedule. For now, all those things are just taking up space on the page.

12) VO vs. OC—Okay there’s a huge difference between voice-over and off-camera. This is one of those little things that can get me tagged instantly as an amateur if I get them wrong.

Voice-over (V.O.) is when someone’s talking that no one else can hear. Announcers and narrators are usually voice-over. Train of thought is voice-over. “Little did he know...” tends to be voice-over. Another good tip—I will never, ever see lips moving for a voice-over.

Now off-camera (OC) is when someone’s talking that other characters can hear but the audience can’t see. For example, if Yakko’s on his phone talking to Dot, and we hear her voice, she’s off-camera, not voice over. That old bit when everyone hears a voice, turns, and sees that Wakko’s come into the room—that’s off-camera.

I want to use OC carefully, because too much makes it look like I’m trying to direct again (see above). I’m not going to put it during an intercut phone call. I don’t use it when we know Dot’s on the other side of the room but we’re not seeing her at this moment.

13) Don’t use real celebrities as characters—The last of our baker’s dozen. I’ve read screenplays where one character married Carmen Electra, another one where someone ended up on a cruise with Whoopi Goldberg, and a really, really creepy one about Matt Damon falling in love with a producer (who happened to have the same name as the screenwriter). Unless your movie is already in production and Zachary Levi happens to be your best friend in the world who would do anything for you, do not use his name in your screenplay.

Yeah, I’m sure some of you are already calling foul. After all, didn’t I litter Ex-Heroes and Ex-Patriots with mentions of celebrity zombies? Well, yes I did. But that’s the difference between a book and a screenplay—you can still read the book if Angelina Jolie, Alex Trebek, or Nathan Fillion don’t show up. Now if someone ever decides to make a movie... well, then there’ll be issues. Although I feel relatively safe saying Fillion would show up...

So, thirteen tips to a more coherent screenplay. I’m betting the majority of you knew most of them. But a few of you... well, now you know.

And knowing is half the battle.

Next week, I think I’ll steal another reader suggestion and show you some of my etchings

Until then, go write.

An Ode to OED

2011-09-08T01:00:00.000-07:00

No, don’t worry. There will be no poetry.

There will, however, be mocking. And some shameless plugging.

Ex-Patriots is now out in both paper and ebook formats, available pretty much anywhere fine books are sold. Mysterious Galaxy, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Bord... well, okay, not Borders. But I got to see Ex-Heroes there a few times, at least. Please feel free to pick up a copy.

Anyway, let’s talk about the Oxford English Dictionary. Or Webster’s, if you prefer. I’m actually a dictionary traitor. One of my college professors was on the OED board and I have a huge Webster’s dictionary on my desk.

But I digress... again.

Remember last week’s little rant about tools? Those folks who insist on carrying their tools around one at a time even though it makes the job take ten times as long? Well as bad as it is to be the person showing up on the jobsite with only one tool at a time, imagine if someone showed up with a basic tool they didn’t know how to use?

Seriously--what would you do if you were the foreman and one of your workers--someone who claimed they were a skilled, professional carpenter--admitted they had no idea how to use a hammer? Their excuse? “Well, y’know... I always work with Wakko, and he does all the hammering. So, really, I don’t need to know how to use one.”

Would this guy still have a job at the end of the day?

And yet, it’s stunning how many would-be-writers—people trying to convince publishers that they’re skilled professionals—don’t know how to spell. Their excuse? They’ve got a spellchecker on their computer. It already knows how to spell, so why should they learn how?

Words are our tools, and knowing what they are and how to use them is the most basic skill any of us has to have if we want people to take us seriously as writers. If you don’t know how to use them it is painfully obvious to someone who does.

Let’s go over a little list of words and see how many definitions you can get.

pour, poor, and pore - only one of these means to read intently

confirm and conform – one of these means to become similar

faze and phase – only one of these deals with a blow to the head

role and roll – only one of these is a list of names

further and farther – one of these usually refers to physical distance

glutton and gluten – only one of these words is a person

desert and dessert – only one of these comes after supper

barely and barley – one of these is a food source... almost

satin and satan – one of these is a silky fabric

lightning and lightening – only one of these is an atmospheric event

conscience and conscious – one means being awake

Done with the list? Good.

Now, I’m sure two or three of these made you laugh. Satan and satin? Really? I mean, they’re so obviously different words only a complete idiot would mess them up, right?

Bad news, everyone.

Your spellcheck program is a complete idiot. It’s the worst writing partner you could possibly ask to have. As far as it knows, your main character is supposed to be making a gluten of himself by shoving barely down his throat for desert.

Y’see, Timmy, whenever I make these lists they’re from words I’ve seen misspelled in manuscripts or screenplays I’ve been given to read. Not once or twice in a hundred pages but consistently. These are all mistakes made by people who were trying to convince me (or, through me, someone higher up) that they know how to write. People claiming to be professionals.

One story I recently read had someone trying to resist the temptations of Satin all the way through it (which makes it sound like a very different story, believe me). The power of Satin, get behind me Satin, resisting the will of Satin, all that. If the writer hadn’t asked an idiot to check the whole thing for them, they wouldn’t’ve had that problem. And my opinion of the story wouldn’t’ve dropped every single time I came across it.

I’ve said many times before that people need to buy a dictionary, and more than once I’ve gotten a chuckle from folks over it. After all, the computer does that sort of thing for us, right? Silly dinosaur, telling people to resort to books. Modern writers don’t need such antiquated tools.

As the above list proves, though... a sizeable percentage do.

Using a dictionary doesn’t just mean looking up how a word is spelled. It also means you’re going to look up what the word means. These two things are inherently bound together in a dictionary and they’re not in a spellcheck program. I look up barely and realize it’s not a grain, it’s an adverb. I also just learned that baresark is another form of berserker, which I can probably file away and use sometime later.

But the spellchecker? It looks at barely, grins, and gives you a big thumbs up. “Looks cool—send it off to a publisher.”

Plus, when you use a dictionary, odds are you’ll learn something and not need the dictionary next time. My mechanic’s worked on my car a few times, but I didn’t learn anything about auto repair because I wasn’t the one doing the actual work. I’ve also gone out to eat several times, but having someone else cook for me didn’t teach me anything about cooking. If your writing partner’s doing all that vocabulary work--idiot or not--how do you expect to learn anything?

I’m about to start my fifth novel. Not my fifth attempt at a novel. Not my fifth manuscript to sit in a drawer. My fifth already-got-a-contract-and-deposited-a-nice-advance novel. And I still reach for the dictionary at least once a day to make sure I’m spelling a word correctly or that I’m using it correctly. Using the dictionary doesn’t make me a lesser writer. It makes me a better writer. I’m the guy who shows up at the jobsite with all his tools and who knows how to use them. I don’t need anyone else to do the work for me. Which is why I’m the guy the foreman hires again and again.

If the foreman didn’t hire you... maybe it’s because you’ve got an idiot for a partner.

Not sure what I’m going to rant on about next week. I’ve got a half-formed post of random screenwriting tips. Also got one on villains. And the bare bones of one about motivations...

Any of those sound interesting? Let me know.

Until then, go write.

The Sonic Screwdriver

2011-09-02T01:16:00.000-07:00

First off, my apologies for running late. Lots of work on the new book.

Second off, a bit of shameful self-promotion. If you haven’t picked up my “debut novel” Ex-Heroes, the publisher’s put the ebook version on a fantastic sale right now. $2.99 for the next week (starting today). Kindle, Nook, Kobo, whatever. If you haven’t grabbed it, now’s a great chance. If you’ve been pushing a friend to get it, tell them about it now. Or just buy it for them. After all, the sequel’s out in about four weeks.

And now, with that ugly bit of capitalism out of the way...

If you’re a big fan of Doctor Who (like me), you know the sonic screwdriver is about the most useful tool ever invented. It opens and closes locks, takes readings, repairs barbed wire, gives phones universal roaming, acts as a TARDIS remote control, and hundreds of other things. Put simply, it’s the greatest all-in-one tool that has ever existed.

Alas, most of us just have to buy a whole tool box worth of stuff. Hammers. Wrenches. Pliers. Tape measures. And of course, screwdrivers. But it’s not enough to have all this stuff. You can only really work on something if those tools are handy.

For example...

Let’s say your significant other comes home from the market and says “Hey, the flux capacitor on the car isn’t fluxxing. You might want to check it out.”

So you go out to the car and see you need a screwdriver to open the housing on the flux capacitor. So you go back inside, dig your toolbox out of the cabinet under the sink, and get a screwdriver out. Then you go back out to the garage and discover you needed a Phillips head screwdriver, not a flathead. Head back in, grab a Phillips, back out to the garage.

You get the housing open on the flux capacitor and it looks like the problem’s really in the plutonium intake. So, you head back to the kitchen, grab a pair of pliers, and go back out to the garage. Alas, that feeder tube is on a little too tight so you’re really going to need a crescent wrench for this one. Walk to your apartment again, grab a crescent wrench, one more time to the garage and start to—dammit, that intake valve is just too big for a 5/8” wrench. You’re going to need the full 1” to take it off. Back inside to the kitchen...

I’m sure you can all see what’s going wrong here. It’s not that we’re trying to fix the plutonium intake when the problem’s clearly in the flux dispersal array. The problem is that we’re attacking this project piecemeal, trying to solve it a single element at a time, and in doing so things are dragging out far longer than they need to. Unless you’ve actually got a sonic screwdriver, you can’t grab one tool out of your toolbox and go see what the problem is. You also don’t go check the problem, walk back, and grab the next item you need at this particular stage.

No, you take the whole toolbox. You bring everything. Because it’s worth the little extra effort to have it all handy and there to work with if you need it. Yeah, you’re not going to use every single tool you brought out there, but the amount of time you save is worth that initial extra effort.

For the record, my friend Laura got me a sonic screwdriver for my birthday.

But that’s not important right now.

How many of you have figured out the point of this little scenario...?

A lot of people take forever when they write. Years and years. Sometimes it’s basic procrastination, yes, but sometimes it’s just that they’re trying to get every single element right before they put it down on paper (so to speak). They won’t write one word unless they know it’s the word they’re going to have in the final draft. So each sentence takes hours and each chapter can take weeks.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to get things right. That’s the whole point of feedback and editing and doing multiple drafts. Thing is, you can’t do a second draft until you have a first one. Which means the entire process is really at a dead halt until that first draft is done.

When I sat down with my new project, -14-, I spewed out pages and pages of stuff over three months, and soooooooo much of it got cut in later drafts. A lot of it got reworded and some of it got completely rewritten. But I was able to keep working because I had stuff to work with.

Y’see, Timmy, it’s always better to have something to work with than to have nothing to work with. Don’t be scared to put everything in your first draft. Bring it all. Don’t hold back because you think you might not need something or it might not work. Write bits you know you’re going to cut and characters you know are going to be trimmed out. Because you can’t edit or rewrite a paragraph that doesn’t exist.

Next week, unless I get a really cool request or suggestion, a little free verse love poem about the Oxford English Dictionary.

Until then, go write.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One...

2011-08-19T00:41:00.000-07:00

My apologies for not posting anything last week and being late this week. To be honest, I was so wrapped up in the new draft of this book I forgot what day it was. Soon the fall season will start back up and I’ll be able to tell where we are in the week by episodes of Fringe and Castle.

Anyway, there was a suggestion for a topic and it got me thinking about something funny...

A joke is a great diagram for a story, because all good stories have a setup and a punchline. Not in the sense of evoking laughter, but in the sense of that one beat near the end that strikes a chord and gives you a little rush. In jokes and stories, you have a setup and a payoff. For example...

A nun, a priest, and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says “What is this, a joke?”

It’s very short, but it does the job. It’s just setup, payoff, done. That first sentence is the setup. To be exact, it’s a type of setup we’ve all heard a dozen or more times, which is what makes the second sentence (the payoff) funny. Adding in other elements would just slow the story—the joke—and probably detract from the punchline.

Now, let’s take this a step further. Has someone ever told you a longer joke, maybe one that took a minute or three to tell? If they knew how to tell it, odds are you chuckled a couple times during the setup, yes?

In this case it’s not just the A-B of that first joke. We’ve got A-B-C-D and then the payoff of E at the end (E is for end, after all). There’s enough space to work with for B and C to be a bit funny themselves and get that extra chuckle before the punchline.

Here’s the thing to keep in mind, though. B and C are still serving the greater payoff of E—the greater good, if you will. They aren’t filler or random asides. Even though they get a laugh of their own, they’re necessary steps on the way to the punchline.

This is a lot like your standard short story. Most of them really just have one big payoff and that’s it. Think of some of the collected stories in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot or most of the classic Sherlock Holmes tales by Arthur Conan Doyle. The characters set out to accomplish goal A and by the end of the story they’ve done it. Or, in a few rare cases— “Evidence” and “A Scandal in Bohemia” come to mind—they admit they haven’t.

Even though they’re two hours long, most feature-length scripts tend to have more in common with short stories than books. In fact, if you talk to lots of screenwriters, they’ll tell you it’s always easier to adapt a short story than a novel. Most of us have read a short story and thought it would be fun to see more of him or learn about her backstory and maybe get a better sense of what happened there. That’s the stuff which is great to expand on in a screenplay. If you look at most films, you’ll see that they’re still a pretty straight line from A to E (or maybe up to J with the expansion). You may have heard some guru-types calling this the through-line. It’s how you make way through a story (or a joke) without any odd segues.

Look at the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. There’s one main story—catch the Black Pearl, stop Barbossa—which is made up of two side-by-side stories (arguably three). Despite this, though, each one of these elements has a very simple and clean A-B-C-D story. Will just wants to rescue Elizabeth, and all of his scenes reflect that. Jack just wants to reclaim the Black Pearl and sail free, and all his scenes reflect that.

Also, as I mentioned above, adding in unnecessary clutter would just slow the story—either the individual element or the film as a whole—so there isn’t any. Will never has a segue where he rescues puppies from a burning building or decides he needs to learn karate to rescue Elizabeth. Jack seems very scattered at first, but as the movie goes on it becomes clear how sharp and how focused he really is. Every scene in the film, no matter which thread it's part of, is leading us to the same big payoff.

Let’s go another order of magnitude bigger and consider novels. The average novel’s going to be six or eight times the word count of most screenplays. It’s where the writer’s got time and space to go all out. We’ve now got A through Z. Maybe it’s even looping around to something like A through AF or something. The writer has a little more space to wander down those paths or maybe take the scenic route to their destination.

Good analogy, that one. Remember that when you take the scenic route, as a writer, you still need to get where you’re going. When you go down a random road for no reason it doesn’t matter how pretty the foliage is at this time of year. If there was no purpose to it you weren’t on the scenic route—you were lost. It’s cool that you enjoyed being lost and you got some nice pictures, but not everyone’s going to feel that way. A lot of folks are just going to see four hours of driving time they lost.

So even in a book, with all that extra space for plot and characters, you need to be aiming for that big punchline. Each of those smaller elements that got a chuckle are expected to get a full laugh on their own now, but they’re also still expected to serve the greater good. Remember, you don’t want to drop 4-5-6 in the middle of H-I-J-K-L.

Here’s another tip. Have you ever heard the term “episodic” used to describe something. Yes, television, of course, but there’s a reason for that. When something is episodic, the setups and payoffs come one after another. A is the setup for B, C is the setup for D, E is the setup for F, and so on. Think of older videogames where you’d move from one level to the next. New problem, solved, next problem. You rarely got a sense of the big story because nothing carried over. That’s what episodic writing does--it presents challenges that are immediately dealt with, so the story feels more like individual episodes than a coherent whole. To use our joke analogy, it’s the difference between a two hour stand-up routine and a two hour comedy movie.

If your story involves multiple setups and payoffs, take a second look at where they fall. Make sure they’re spread out, and make sure they’re all leading somewhere. Hopefully the same somewhere.

Finally, here’s a little exercise for you. Yep, there’s homework. I’m sure at some point in your life you’ve had to listen to someone who didn’t know how to tell a joke. So ask yourself—what did they do wrong? Was it their pacing? Did they give away the punchline to soon? ‘Cause the real trick to telling a good joke is being able to tell a good story. If you don’t know why they did it wrong... are you sure you aren’t?

Next week, why you should never carry just a screwdriver.

Unless you’re the Doctor, of course...

Until then, go write.

Simpsons Did It!

2011-08-04T15:07:00.000-07:00

A pop culture reference that’s so spot-on it’s not even funny.

Okay, it’s a little funny...

(General Disarray, go get the minions before they get lost...)

One of the big worries with creativity is wondering if you really are being creative. Is that clever new idea of yours something you came up with all on your own, or is it something you unwittingly borrowed from someone else? Maybe you skimmed over the back copy of a paperback in your local neighborhood bookstore or read a few spoiler-filled reviews on Amazon and your brain just filed it away. Worse yet, what if your clever story gets out there and then you discover five other people already had similar ideas. Now you just look like some hack plagiarist.

I’ve been involved in a bunch of discussions about stuff like this in the past few weeks. Has anyone crossed X with Y before? Have you ever seen this element used in that genre? What about that plot but in this setting?

The answer to all of these, alas, is yes.

Some guru-types like to drawl on about how there are only seven stories (or nine, or thirteen, depending on who’s selling what this week). While I think this is an oversimplification, it does point out an obvious truth. Most stories have things in common with other stories. That’s just the way of it. The same type of characters show up. The same situations arise. The same relationships form.

Here’s a random observation for you. When was the last time you met someone who didn’t remind you of someone else? Think about it for a minute. When we were little everything was new and fresh but as we got older we started to see patterns and similarities. A guy I met at a birthday party last weekend reminded me of a guy who lived across the hall from me in college. When I first met her, I thought my girlfriend looked a lot like one of my next-door neighbors. A production assistant I used to work with looks kind of like a sound mixer I know in San Diego. Another one reminded me of my cousin Chrissie crossed with a bit of Angelina Jolie (a very good mix, I have to say).

But those are all first impressions. As I delve deeper, I start to see the uniqueness of each person. The better I got to know them, the more Leo, Colleen, Russ, and Sarah became individuals and those superficial similarities dropped away.

Still, those initial generalities can be a bit bothersome. If there’s something else out there that’s similar to your work, should you worry about it?

Probably not.

Submitted for your approval is The Dueling Machine. It’s a 1969 sci-fi novel by multiple-Hugo-award winner Ben Bova. In the far, far future, a brilliant scientist has created a machine to help reduce hostility. It’s “a combination of electroencephalograph and autocomputer” which lets two or more people connect their minds through the machine and interact in an imaginary dream world that they create inside the machine. The story comes about when someone is killed during one of these “simulated” duels—is it possible that dying in the imaginary world could make someone die in the real world?

Hopefully this premise sounds a bit familiar to you. It should because it’s a big chunk of the plot to The Matrix movies. And The 13th Floor. Also the Lawnmower Man films. Plus there’s a few books like Cybernetic Samurai and Snow Crash and Giant’s Star. And that television show VR5 that was on for a while. And about a hundred Star Trek episodes where people get trapped on the now-deadly holodeck, because the holodeck safety systems are apparently made of cobwebs and wet tissue paper. Heck, you’ve all probably got a dozen more at your fingertips, don’t you?

For the record, there are also dozens of books and movies and television shows featuring vampires in space (one’s actually called The Space Vampires—it was the basis for the movie LifeForce). And zombies in the old west. And new takes on time travel, space travel, politics, Jekyll and Hyde, all that stuff.

Now, this doesn’t mean that most stories copy other stories. We all draw from a lot of the same sources, so our thoughts are going to follow a lot of the same paths. But even on those paths we’re all going to march to the beat of our own drummer, so to speak. We’re also going to dress differently, bring different things with us, ask different people to come along, and we’re all probably heading down that given path for different reasons.

Y’see, Timmy, we put our own stamp on everything we do. If I did a modern version of Dracula and you did a modern version of Dracula, neither of us would end up writing Salem’s Lot, which was Stephen King’s modern version of Dracula. You might stick with Europe, but I’m probably going to set mine in southern California. We’d have our own ideas and notions and way of looking at it, just like Mr. King did.

Now, there’s a downside to this apprehension, too, and it’s kind of similar to the people who won’t write anything because they’re too busy learning how to write. Sometimes we—yes we—get so caught up in worrying if something is original that we grind to a halt trying to prove it isn’t. This desperate need to avoid being a copycat brings things to a dead halt.

True story —I was working on a book a few years back (right before I was inspired to start Ex-Heroes, in fact) called Mouth. As I was typing away, I suddenly came up with the coolest way to explain teleportation ever. I mean, this was Stephen Hawking-level brilliant. It was, if you’ll pardon the phrase, sheer elegance in its simplicity. I typed up a quick scene where Character A explained it this way to Character B, read through it, and realized it was even cleverer than that.

Too clever, in fact, for a guy like me to come up with it. It was too clean. Too perfect.

In a panic, I wracked my brain trying to figure out where I’d heard it before. Because I must’ve seen this somewhere. Online? In a comic book? All I was reading at the time was Amazing Spider-Man and that was all packed full of “Civil War” nonsense. Maybe a television show? What had we gotten from Netflix in the past few months?

I asked my girlfriend to read it. I figured she might recall whatever this source was, because I kept drawing a blank. She went through the chapter, got to the questionable explanation, and loved it. When I asked her where she’d seen it before, she couldn’t remember ever seeing it. After I pressed her for a bit and she re-read it again, she admitted it was vaguely like the explanation of “tessering” in Madeline L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle In Time, but only in that it took what was plainly a very complex idea and boiled it down to an extremely simple explanation.

In other words, it was all mine. But I wasted a week worrying over whether or not I’d copied it.

Do a quick look at your chosen field. Make sure no one’s done something exactly like your idea. Then just write. Your own style and vocabulary and characters will give it a flavor all its own.

Like the Buddha says, don’t sweat the small stuff.

Next time, if I don’t get any suggestions, I may have to fall back on spelling.

Until then, like I just said, go write.

Slasher Porn!

2011-07-28T14:07:00.000-07:00

No, it’s not what it sounds like, or even pop culture. I’m just trying to boost the hit count a bit. Of course, some of you read this at work, so I probably just got half of you blocked.

So, let’s talk about cutting things up.

I’ve got a lot of slashing to do in my near future. The first draft of my new book is almost done, which means a polish draft and then I start cutting. And there’s going to be a lot to cut. It’s closing in on 140,000 words and around 110,000 is where a trade paperback starts to get a little too heavy. I already know a few sections that are going to vanish, but there’ll have to be more to get this down to fighting weight.

So, there’s a little tip I’ve mentioned here once or thrice. First time I heard it was in Stephen King’s On Writing. He got it from an editor when he was a kid, and still tries to follow it today. It’s not a hard-fast percentage, but it’s a great rule of thumb. I’m sure you remember this one--

Second Draft = First Draft – 10%

Now, by coincidence, I’m also going over layout pages for Ex-Patriots right now. It’s coming out in about two months, and it’s already out as an audiobook. By further lucky coincidence, I actually kept track of some exact numbers for Ex-Patriots as I started to edit it. So let’s go over some of them.

The first full draft of Ex-Patriots was 109,088 words. For me, that’s really the second draft because I tend to fly through the first draft and neaten up in my second draft. It means some stuff gets cut early, some stuff gets tightened up, but some stuff gets added, too.

For example, I lopped out one whole chapter because I realized after the fact it didn’t fit the tone and a couple elements in it were happening a bit too soon in the big scheme of things. It was only half-formed, granted, but I still thought it was well done and I liked it, so I plucked the whole thing out before it even got polished. It’ll probably show up in Ex-Communication. Seventeen months from now you can say “Ah-HAH!” when you read the dinner party chapter. That was 500 words gone before I even start the serious cutting.

So my second draft tends to be tighter and leaner, but still a bit larger overall. Let’s see how much I can cut out of this with just a few passes.

First off, I removed 225 thats in the third draft. Almost a full page of them. For the record, I cut over one thousand thats from The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe. I’ve mentioned that before as a word which is easy to cut. Go through your writing and I’ll bet you’ll find half your uses of that could go away with no problem. Right there, the draft is down to 108, 863 words.

Then I cut 406 words worth of adverbs and adverbial phrases. I’ve mentioned a couple times how easy it is to lose adverbs. It usually forces you into using better words, too.

Next I got rid of useless modifiers. This is a bad habit I developed along the way that a friend (and editor) of mine named Somewhat Syndrome. It’s when I use modifiers as half-strength adverbs and adjectives. It comes up a lot when I have to describe measurements (a bit over a mile, almost two hundred pounds, and so on). I deleted 61 kind ofs, 14 sort ofs, another 61 uses of almost, and a whopping 70 a bits. That’s over 200 more words gone altogether. At this point the manuscript’s down to 108, 251 words.

Then there was some general tightening. I’d go through and look for places where contractions would make the dialogue flow better or excess verbiage had just crept in one way or another. It happens when I think too much, to be honest, and start wondering if sentences are clear or if I’m being specific enough.

For example, what’s the difference between I’ll drive my own car and I’ll drive my car? Not much except for some emphasis, which might already be established with the tone of the moment. Or what about she blinked her eyes open and closed, as if there was some other way to blink and some other part of your body to do it with.

Another 220 words went away during this pass.

So check this out. Remember that great little tip from Mr. King? At this point I’ve cut well over a thousand words, five solid pages of manuscript, and I haven’t even changed anything. I haven’t taken out any dialogue or removed characters or shortened sequences.

Y’see, Timmy, editing isn’t always painful and arbitrary. A lot of the time it’s necessary. And the necessary stuff isn’t that hard to deal with. All those cuts I just mentioned used the Find feature in word, so that’s only a day’s worth of work.

A few other chunks went away later in the editing process. There were a few jokes and ten percenters I’d added that I since admitted weren’t worth the payoff. One scene went away when I realized it made no sense with my revised timeline.

By the end of the third draft of Ex-Patriots, I’d cut over thirty-five hundred words. Not the mathematical ten percent we’re aiming for, but with the cuts and revisions between first and second, I felt pretty good about it.

Of course, you can get the book in a few weeks and tell me if I messed up

Next time... well, I’m open to suggestions. If no one has any, I might rant about spelling again (we’re due). I’ve got one potential idea, but I’m not sure if it’s been done already...

Until then, go write.

Tastes Like Chicken

2011-07-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

There’s about a hundred jokes in that title. Hopefully one or two of them will fit with this week’s little rant...

Sorry about missing last week, by the way. I’ve been trying to stay ahead on the new project and prepare for Comic-Con, and the blog somehow slipped right past me. Shouldn’t happen again. Well, not for a little while, anyway.

My dad is a phenomenal cook. Have I ever mentioned that? For a guy who refuses to retire and spends his working hours writing up safety protocols, his cooking skills are just fantastic. There was a time when my mother and brother and I were all trying to convince him to open a restaurant, but he wasn’t interested. Cooking was the fun thing he did to relax. He didn’t want to take that extra step and make a job out of it.

We were all fine with it. Mostly because it worked out great for us. My dad can turn Thanksgiving leftovers into a sandwich you’d gladly pay twelve bucks for, so I’m definitely not going to complain. Not as long as I keep getting invited to Thanksgiving.

No, really, this is all relevant. You’ll understand why soon.

As it happens, I’ve had several different friends and acquaintances ask me for writing advice over the past few months. Granted, they all had different skill levels, but none of their questions were really about writing. They were about improving by buying the right books or starting blogs or catching the interest of publishers. I tried to answer as politely as I could, but I’m pretty sure none of them were really listening. I know at least two weren’t.

So, here’s a better way to look at it. Should you go to cooking school?

I’m sure a lot of you are shaking your heads at that one, but let’s stop and consider it. Cooking is a great metaphor for writing, on a bunch of levels. It’s an art. The end product has to hit certain benchmarks but it also, to a fair degree, is a matter of personal taste. A few rare people have a natural knack for it but most of us need lots of practice. It’s something most of us do every day, but we know only a small percentage of people are good enough at it to deserve recognition or make a living off it.

So, if you want to get better at cooking, should you go to cooking school?

Right up front, let’s be clear. Any cooking school is going to expect that you have a minimum degree of experience and knowledge right off the bat. They’ll assume you can tell flour from sugar on sight and that you know the difference between basil and oregano. The point of cooking school is not to teach you how to make peanut butter sandwiches. If you’re still struggling with these things, cooking school is really a waste of your time and money.

Now, if you plan on making a living off food, cooking school is almost a necessity at some point. Not everyone needs to take classes on desserts and soups and seafood. We’re just never going to use them. There’s about a hundred better, cheaper things we could be doing to improve our cooking skills. There are free recipes online and on the back of most staple ingredients. There are tons of cooking shows and podcasts where we can learn little tips.

And of course, the easiest thing we can do—what hopefully most of you have already seen as the obvious thing I’ve skirted around—is cook stuff. Just get in the kitchen and cook. If I want to be a better cook, the most useful way to spend my time is cooking. Makes sense, yes?

Y’see, Timmy, if you want to be a chef, there’s a point that you need to take some classes, and you’re probably going to keep skimming through cookbooks forever. But it’s all going to come down to spending time in the kitchen. That’s how you become a good cook. Going to Harvard doesn’t automatically make you a great journalist and going to MIT doesn’t guarantee you’ll be a phenomenal engineer. In all these fields, at the end of the day, it comes down to just doing the work and how hard you’ve been doing it.

In fact, there’s a fair argument to be made that cooking school won’t help you become a great chef. It can make you into a good chef, but the greatness comes when you go out and start doing stuff on your own. You don’t hear about Wolfgang Puck or Gordon Ramsay taking classes. Neither of them probably has in over a decade, at least. If you just keep going back to cooking school and never really stepping into the kitchen, it should be clear you’re dooming yourself to a life of mediocrity (at least, on the food-preparation front).

You’ll always learn more by doing the job than you will by reading books about doing the job. Doing the job is almost always more educational than taking classes about doing the job.

So, with all that being said... should you go to cooking school?

A bit clearer now, isn’t it?

This pile of rants is cooking school, in a way. Not one of the great French academies, but a bit higher up than the Home Ec class you took in seventh grade. Probably better than those cookbooks aimed at recent college grads.

A few people who are reading this right now desperately want advice on getting agents and publishers interested, but they haven’t bothered to learn how to spell. They’re convinced they’ll learn some magic structure or word (...mellonballer...) that will make it all easy for them. They’re so desperate to learn the secrets of a good Hollandaise sauce they haven’t bothered to learn how to boil an egg.

I’m guessing most of you can use about half of the various tips and suggestions I throw up every week. There’s weeks that you learn a clever trick or new approach to an issue in your writing. There’s also those weeks you just skim because it’s something you’ve got a good grip on.

And a few of you... well, you’re probably just killing time here, aren’t you? There isn’t much I go over that you don’t already know. You’re just putting off doing some actual work for half an hour or so.

Learn the basics first. Don’t worry about level five before you’ve mastered level one. If you aren’t sure what the basics are, that’s probably a good sign you haven’t mastered them yet. I’m not being glib. If you’re reading this rant with the goal of becoming a better writer, you should already know what it means when someone says “the basics of writing.”

And then, once you’ve hit that level, start thinking about cooking school.

Next time, just for something different, let’s chat about slasher porn and why it’s not as bad as you may think.

(Yeah, I’m probably misleading you a little with that title...)

Until then, go write.

Can You Describe the Problem?

2011-07-07T18:28:00.000-07:00

First off, a bit of shameless self-promotion (because I haven’t done any in weeks now)...

Ex-Patriots, my third novel and the sequel to Ex-Heroes got a slightly early release this week from Audible.com. It’s coming out in paper/e-book format in September, but if any of you are impatient you can go grab it now. There’s also a bunch of videos for their ZombieFest promotion where a bunch of folks wrote in with questions for the authors of all the featured books. So if you’ve ever wondered just how goofy I sound in real life (or look, or act, or dress...) , here’s your big chance to find out.

And now, back to our previously scheduled pontification...

So, if you’ve been reading this pile of rants for a while, you know there was a point a few years back when I helped to run an online fantasy MUD. If you’re not familiar with the term, a MUD is a multi-user dungeon. Because the game is entirely text-dependent, it was a lot like writing or reading a story. In fact, it was a great tool for polishing your writing, because if you got too long-winded with your words people wouldn’t be able to read them—the description would just scroll up the screen and vanish as other things continued to happen. You had to describe things, but you couldn’t get bogged down in useless details. People would either ignore it or lose their forward momentum as they went back to read it.

One of the things staff members had to monitor was the descriptions players wrote up for their characters. We checked for basic spelling and grammar (“His dark hair compliments his thin lips” was a common phrase). We also checked to make sure the style and wording, by way of the game’s narrative nature, wasn’t forcing actions or reactions on other players (“This scarred man may be the most terrifying person you have ever seen, and the mere sight of him makes your stomach churn with fear.”)

Now, I told you all that so I could tell you this little story...

One day, a staffer called attention to the description of a new female character. Y’see, when the game was originally built the coders left some stuff at default settings, and one of those things was the range for the description string. It was ridiculously high, but no one had ever bothered to set it because... well, there were more important things to do. And, really, who would ever fill it, right?

Well, this player had figured out the high-end range and written a description that was yards and yards and yards of purple prose. On a rough guess, their character description was around five or six hundred words. Maybe more. When you accessed it, the first dozen or so lines automatically scrolled up and off the page because it was so long.

I’m sure some of you are already thinking of character sketches you’ve done that are far longer, but keep in mind, this is all just physical description. It isn’t personality quirks or dietary preferences or anything like that. By nature of the game, it’s not clothes or weapons or equipment, either.

Needless to say, we pointed out that it was excessively long and asked her to trim it. She refused. By her reasoning, since the buffer allowed such a long description, it had to be game-legal. And if people didn’t want to see it, they didn’t need to scroll back.

We pointed out that those first dozen lines contained all the gender and age information for the character. This wasn’t “optional” material, it was stuff other players needed to know.

Still, she refused.

Now, stepping away from my tale, let’s think about this for a moment. A writer is refusing to edit a description, while at the same time admitting most people are going to skim over it or ignore it altogether. Even when authorities on the topic are explaining why it doesn’t work, said author is steadfastly refusing to change.

Does this sound remotely like a writer who’s interested in having an audience?

A common problem for all writers is when description gets too excessive. We get caught up in giving all the details and nuances of this character or those rooms or that magnificent sword which seems to be stuck in a stone... a jagged, raw stone, although one could see hints of granite and shale and flecks of white quartz that gleamed like the teeth of ancient dragons, the likes of which the world had not seen in long millennia. So perhaps calling it “a” stone was a misnomer, for it seemed to have a rich ancestry and heritage written through its structure. This was, perhaps, several stones that had come together untold eons ago, perhaps even then sensing the greater purpose they would serve and the rough bed they would form for the sleeping blade. Or perhaps it was just a coincidence that the gleaming sword had found itself in this particular malformed mound of misshapen rock, and in truth any of the many stones scattered around this subterranean chamber could have been oh dear God I think I’m making myself sick.

As I was saying...

We go one and on and sometimes lose track of the fact that somebody’s going to have to read all this. And since most readers are more interested in the story, that active element of your writing, odds are they’re going to start skimming after the fourth or fifth flowery description which they’ve come to realize has no bearing on the story. At which point, any decent storyteller should question why they’re including stuff that people are just going to skim over.

Elmore Leonard famously said that when he writes he leaves out all the parts people would skip anyway. Alfred Hitchcock said drama is life with all the boring parts taken out. And I’ll tell you that a six hundred word description of how a character’s hair hangs over her ears is either wasting time or is going to bring things to a crashing halt.

As I’ve mentioned once or thrice before, this kind of overwriting is a deadly mistake in screenplays. Screenwriting is a very concise, minimal form of storytelling. One of the most common complaints I hear from professional readers is when the writr puts in piles of description that just doesn’t need to be there.

That, of course, leads to another issue with massive over-description. We all tend to form our own mental pictures of people and objects in stories. My lovely lady and I were chatting the other day about Lee Child’s character Jack Reacher and realized we both had very different ideas about what he looked like. That’s part of the joy of books. We can all have our own view of different characters like Taran Wanderer or Harry Bosch or St. George or Stu Redman. And nothing’s more distracting or disruptive than to be constantly reminded of all the many details the author’s putting in that don’t match up with that mental picture we’ve already formed.

Now, there’s another side to description, and that’s when writers never actually describe anything. Sometimes this is an attempt to invoke mystery or suspense (check out that dark figure across the street watching our main character). Other times it’s a way to evoke an emotional response with a clever metaphor or simile (when the knife sinks into your back and it’s like every painful sensation you’ve ever had in your life got balled up, hammered flat, and slipped beneath your shoulder blade).

And sometimes... well, sometimes it’s just a cheat. I can try to avoid the monster for as long as possible, which helps build suspense and dread, but eventually I need to say what it is. It’s not uncommon for a writer to try to find a way around an actual description at this point. After all, I’ve been hyping X for three-quarters of the manuscript now, and an honest description may not live up to all that hype.

I got to interview David Goyer (screenwriter of Blade, Batman Begins, and many others) a few years back. He’d just taken a turn in the director’s chair and I asked him if doing so had affected how he approached writing scripts. He laughed, admitted it had, and then told me a very funny story about working on a script with Guillermo del Toro. At one point, it seems, Goyer had “cheated” in the script and just described something as “a complete nightmare.” As they went through, del Toro pointed out this bit, shook his head, and said “What does that even mean? That’s boollshit.”

Which, Goyer admitted, it was. He’d dodged writing any sort of description because he knew it was something the director and art department guys would deal with. But he’d given them nothing to work with. Which was fine... until he was the director and under the gun to figure out what the hell it was that writer-Goyer couldn’t be bothered to put down on paper.

So, here’s an easy tip. It’s so easy I bet half of you will shake your head and ignore it. And some of you are probably already doing it without thinking about it.

If you’re going to describe something, have a reason to describe it. Thats’ it. Not only that, have a reason for the level of detail you’re using. A soldier in a war zone, a housewife, and a forensic examiner can all see a bullet hole in a person’s head, but they’re all going to treat it differently. And if it takes three or four paragraphs to explain what the housewife sees, where does that put the forensic examiner?

If you’re going to describe a person, have a reason for doing it. I’m betting nobody here can list off all the people they crossed paths with the last time they were pushing a cart through the grocery store. Oh, one or two might stand out in some small way, but let’s face it... there were probably close to a hundred. They just weren’t important in the long run. You can’t describe the police officer who gave you your last ticket, but you can probably give a lot of details about the last person you went out to dinner with.

Give descriptions the same weight you’d give characters or dialogue. Y’see, Timmy, if you waste them on the little things, they won’t have any strength when you get to the big things.

And then... well, then you’ve got nothing.

Next time, I’d like to ramble on about cooking school.

Until then, go write.

One Time Only

2011-06-30T17:54:00.001-07:00

If at first you don’t succeed... destroy all evidence you ever made the attempt.

No, no, don’t do that...

A few years back I was working on a film set where we were staging a bank robbery. The director... well, let’s be polite and say he wasn’t quite as knowledgeable as he thought he was.

We ended up doing a big dolly track move that encompassed the whole scene. Then we did a series of tighter moves. Then we did a wide master of the scene and got all the coverage. Then we did a reverse master of the scene and started doing coverage on that. Then came all the reaction shots for everyone in the bank. And by this time, the crew was starting to grumble, because every one of us knew what was going wrong.

As it turned out, my department had an intern, and he was still watching all this with complete newbie glee. As the day (and the bank robbery) wore on and on, he asked me what everyone was getting so grumpy about. After all, weren’t these all cool shots? I agreed they were, but pointed out that at least half of them were a waste of time. When he asked why, I came up with this way to explain it.

“When all this gets cut together,” I told him, pointing at one of our extras “you can only use one shot of them robbing that bank teller. You can break it up a bit, but not much because it’s happening so fast. At the end of the day, you can only rob teller number five once, so filming nine different versions of her getting robbed is a waste of time. If this guy knew what he was doing, he’d just get the shots he was going to use and that’d be it.”

The intern took those words to heart, and two or three more times during that project he’d give me a nod on days when scenes were just dragging and say “You can only rob teller number five once.”

The point of the story being, I know at least one person has gotten something useful out of my rambling.

No, wait, sorry, the point is that when you’re telling a story you can’t do the same thing again and again and expect it to have the same weight.

There’s an idea in literary theory (sorry, I do have to go there now and then) which says you can only experience a story for the first time once. After that first time, your brain can’t help but restructure your view of the story to see it with more experienced eyes. If you’ve ever read a mystery novel for a second time, or maybe rewatched films like The Sixth Sense, Dead Again, or The Prestige, you know it’s a very different experience when you go through these stories a second time. Or a third time. But you can never, ever get that first time again. Even something like The Empire Strikes Back changes between the first and second exposure to the material.

This is why we all hate spoilers, because the innocence, so to speak, of that first experience is being taken away from us and we can never get it back. To be honest, this is also one of the problems I have with the “film school” approach to movies. A lot of these folks get taught to study and dissect films rather than to watch them, so the first time with the story is lost on these people. They never see the movie the way it was intended to be seen—they just jump straight to the second viewing. Which seems counterproductive when you want to learn how to do something. It’s like going to cooking school and never bothering to taste anything.

Anyway... I digress. But not by much.

There’s another aspect to doing the same thing more than once, and this is the idea of noise. A few times before I’ve brought up Damon Knight and his wonderful observation about facts. A fact we don’t know is information, but a fact we already know is noise. This is true even if we just learned the fact ten or fifteen pages earlier.

An example...

I read a book a while back where one piece of information was “revealed” four times. Essentially, character A discovered a mysterious South American temple that shouldn’t exist. Then A was killed and B found his notes, so B discovered the temple. B quickly related the story to C and then C explained the whole thing to D, so now D learned about the temple. And D... well D was pretty high-ranking, so he went to the President and told the whole Cabinet about the temple. And every single time people would have incredulous reactions and then the reader got the explanation of what the temple represented and who built and how we know it’s ten thousand years old and what we think it is.

Every. Single. Time.

Y’see, Timmy, that information is powerful the first time we hear it. Like so many things that get repeated, though, it loses power every time. In this case, it’s not just losing power, it’s taking a rapid plunge from information to noise.

Plus, it’s taken a huge emotional hit. Finding out that the pyramid strongly implied, if not proved, a pre-human civilization was amazing... the first time. The second time it was something we already knew, even if it was new to this particular character. The third time it was annoying. By the fourth time, personally, I was skimming.

Here’s an easier example, and one we’ve all probably dealt with at some point or another. Have you ever had someone tell a joke (or what they thought was a joke) and then they repeated the punchline when no one laughed? Maybe they repeated it two or three times. Perhaps they went after people one on one (“Hey, Timmy, did you hear when Mike said he wasn’t putting in enough hours and I said ‘That’s what she said’..”). In these situations, as the joke was repeated again and again, we all just got more and more annoyed, didn’t we?

Now, anytime a writer has a fair-sized cast of characters and an even slightly challenging plot, they’re going to have to deal with this issue. You can’t have everybody walking around together experiencing every single thing at the same time. Which means there are going to be points when A and B know something C and D don’t. The trick is coming up with ways to share that information without having the story come to a grinding halt while characters discuss things the reader already knows.

I bring this up not just because of the head-banging nature of that book I referenced above, or because of scarring memories of the bank robbery. Y’see, this is something I’m dealing with right now. In my current project I’m juggling a large cast who are investigating a mystery separately, but keep coming together to compare notes. I know my mystery, but the roadblock is getting past awkward infodump scenes without neglecting this character or that one. I mean, Debbie’s reaction to what they found in the sub-basement is just as valid as Pash’s, isn’t it? She just had the bad luck of having to work that day so she couldn’t go exploring and had to get that information second hand.

You get one chance for your big reveal and that’s it. One. You can’t keep revealing it again and again and expect that reveal to have the same emotional weight. It’s also not going to draw the audience in, because it’s gone from being a surprise to being... well, just another fact.

And if you’re not careful, repetitive facts can get dry and boring really quick.

Next week, I’d like to tell you about the time I sat around for hours watching the most inefficient bank robbery ever.

No, actually, next time I’d like to describe something you’ve probably never seen before.

Until then, go write.

Top Eight... No, Top TEN Mystery Tips

2011-06-24T18:50:00.000-07:00

Our three secret weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...

So, a few years back I attended the SDSU Writers’ Conference and got to listen to a gentleman named Esmund Harmsworth. Look him up. Nowadays he’s an agent at ZSH Literary.

He caught my attention one year when I attended a Q&A panel with a bunch of agents. The panel had been running for about half an hour when one fellow stood up and asked a question about his sci-fi novel. One agent immediately told him to throw it away and two others joined in. The trio of battleaxes berated the poor questioner and loudly declared genre as the absolute worst thing to write. Horror, sci-fi, fantasy—it was all garbage. Each of them stressed that they would never, ever look at a genre writer as a potential client.

After a few minutes of them going on and on, Mr. Harmsworth (on the far side of the platform) cleared his throat into his microphone. It tripped them up for a moment, and in the pause he pointed out to the questioner (who had, at this point, shrunk to a height of about two feet and was crying quietly to himself) that if you write something good any agent is going to want to see it. That’s their job, after all, and every agent on the panel was secretly hoping to find the next Stephen King. He sat back in his chair and the battleaxe brigade immediately backpedaled and agreed that quality writing was what mattered over everything else.

Needless to say, when I saw Harmsworth’s name on a seminar list the following year, I made a point of being there. Yeah, it was about mysteries, his chosen field, but I figured there’d be something to glean out of it. And there was, even though Harmsworth admitted halfway through that he’d really only had eight rules but the conference folks said ten looks a lot better on the seminar listings so he made up a couple to round out his list.

That being said—I’m not repeating his entire ten points. If you were in the room that day or have heard him give this little lecture since, don’t try posting an “AHA!!!” because I misnumbered something or left something out. I’m telling you now—things are probably misnumbered and left out.

Also, I can’t understand all the notes I wrote to myself seven years ago...

First Rule – There are no rules. Despite everything I’m about to recount, there is no “A-B-C-Done!” when it comes to writing. I’ve mentioned this here before. You can’t point to any rule of writing without acknowledging there are at least twenty examples of violating that rule. So if people are telling you “you must absolutely, always do this!”—especially when this relates to things like page counts or turning points or redemptive moments-- it’s a sure sign they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Now, that being said... Agents sell books (and movies) by comparing them to books that have already sold. Makes sense—that’s how most of us buy books. So saying “it’s not like anything else” makes your manuscript very hard to sell. Your book needs to follow those rules you keep hearing about to some extent.

However... following all of the rules makes you a formula writer. Nothing wrong with that. Lots of people make a decent living writing formula books and formula television shows. Just be clear that no one’s going to sing the praises of such a thing or offer mega-millions for it. Formula manuscripts are the junk food of publishing and Hollywood. They sell steadily, no one pays a lot for them, and most folks forget them half an hour after they’re gone.

Second Rule – Know the difference between mysteries and thrillers. Agents sell your manuscript to publishers and producers, but you need to sell it to an agent. One of the key elements, of course, is to know what you’re selling. It can be a pain in the ass these days with some of the sub-sub-genres out there, but you should have a solid idea which one of them your story fits into. This is when you need be honest with yourself. It doesn’t matter how much you wanted to write a historical drama—if you’ve ended up with a low fantasy story that’s what it is and you need to admit it.

Different genres also tend to have different lengths. You can sell a horror novel that’s 115,000 words, but mystery novels should be topping out around 90,000.

Also, you should know who your audience is. Most mysteries are bought by women (they’re 80% of the sales), most thrillers are bought by men. If you’ve written a kick-ass thriller aimed solidly at a female audience, you’re fighting an uphill battle. Not an impossible one, mind you, but be aware of what you’re up against.

Third Rule – Have a real mystery. One telling thing that came up in this seminar—editors will reject a mystery if they can solve “whodunnit” before the hero does. The story needs to have real clues, red herrings, antagonists, foils—a good mystery isn’t just withheld information. It should involve a lot of thought by the reader—thoughts that a good writer will be guiding down the wrong paths.

As I’ve mentioned once or thrice before, mysteries also depend on strong characters. I need to care about Wakko or his finding clues and working out answers isn’t going to mean anything to me. Plus, if you think about it, most mysteries tend to be mystery series, and no one’s going to want to follow multiple adventures of a character who’s just not interesting or likeable.

Fourth Rule – Location is key to mysteries. Harmsworth summed this up in one neat line. Most mysteries take place somewhere people would go on a dream vacation. People read mysteries set in Las Vegas and Hawaii and New Orleans. These are places most people will read about regardless, and will love to see a clever story set there.

Keep in mind this dream setting can be manipulated a bit and can be represented by some industries or careers. Hollywood is a dream job for a lot of people, so it makes a great setting for mysteries. So is Washington, because we’re all curious about those hallways of power.

Make sure your story is set somewhere inherently interesting—and not just interesting to you.

Fifth Rule – The idea is key to thrillers. I’ve mentioned the term “high concept” here before. It’s when you can sum up the whole idea of a story in just one or two sentences. A great high concept idea doesn’t even need that much, which is how you end up with pitches like “big lizard, big apple,” “Jurassic Shark,” or “it’s like Die Hard in a building.”

A good thriller depends on a central idea that can be summed up in one or two lines. If it can’t, then the whole thing needs work. Because of this, thrillers tend to be very linear and don’t rely on a lot of subplots or a vast array of supporting characters. They’re driven by suspense and the mounting threat that was mentioned in that two-line pitch..

Sixth Rule – Be patient. You can write an amazing novel or clever screenplay and still have the bad luck of finishing it just as interest in said topic has dropped to an all-time low. Some people tried to jump on the supernatural romance boat just as Buffy and Angel were coming to a close, and... well, that ship got dry-docked for a couple of years. Then there was Twilight and suddenly that ship wasn’t just crewing up, it was press-ganging people.

If someone tells you that your book won’t sell, just put it away, go work on something else, and try submitting it again in four or five months. If it’s a good book it will sell eventually. Honest.

If it’s a good book.

And there you have it. Ten (more or less) tips on how to write better mysteries, many of which can be applied to almost any manuscript.

Next week, I’d like to tell you about the time I sat around for hours watching the most inefficient bank robbery ever.

Until then, go write.

Jane, You Ignorant Slut!

2011-06-16T18:24:00.000-07:00

Pop culture. Really. I pity you if you don’t get it.

Anyway...

I know I said I was going to write about mystery tips, but I got distracted by a few things. And then my mind went other places. So I ended up scribbling notes for some potential rants down the road rather than working on the one for... well, this week.

So I thought, hey, what if rather than doing a rant about mysteries, I did one about getting distracted by other ideas? Yeah, it’s more of the procedural end of writing than I usually deal with, but isn’t it about time to try something new? Doing something a little different could really ignite the old spark again, right?

Well, let’s see...

A while back my girlfriend told me a wonderful story about the slutty new idea. I laughed a lot and immediately identified with it. She’d read it on a message board, but couldn’t remember who posted it. I dug around and found it here on Richard F. Spencer's blog, and he’ll be getting credit from me unless I hear otherwise.

The story goes something like this...

You, the writer, are out with your story. Maybe it’s a novel or a screenplay or just a short story you’re working on. Whichever it is, you’ve been together a while and you’ve fallen into a good pattern.

Perhaps, in fact, too good. Maybe a bit of a rut. You just don’t have the enthusiasm for the story you once did. There was a point that it was fun and exciting and all you could think of, but as of late... well, the honeymoon’s over and now it actually takes a bit of work to get anywhere with your story. Things have almost become mechanical.

So, anyway, you and the story are out and you happen to notice an idea across the room. It’s big and bright and it’s got that look to it that just says “you know it’d be fun to tumble around with me for a while.” It’s got a naughty edge to it, and it’s showing just enough to make you think about all the stuff you aren’t seeing, and how great it would be to get at those hidden parts. Just looking at it across the room you know that is the kind of smoking hot idea a writer’s supposed to have, not the dull thing you’ve somehow wound up with

In fact, let’s just take a moment and be honest with ourselves. That’s how we all want things to be with our ideas, right? It’s supposed to be a wild and spontaneous and intoxicating relationship you just can’t get enough of. You want it to keep you up late and wake you up early so you can get right back at it.

By the way, any innuendo or double meanings here are purely your own inference, I assure you.

Alas, more that a few of us know the awful truth of the slutty idea. Oh, it’s fun at first, but then one of two things happens. Sometimes you find out there’s not really anything else to it. Oh, that first night is fantastic, maybe the week after it is pretty cool, but it doesn’t take long to realize the slutty idea is... well, it’s a bit shallow. You had some fun, but after a couple days you realize things just aren’t going any further.

On the other hand, things might work out with you and the idea. The passion fades a little bit, but you’re still giving it your all and getting quite a bit in return. Eventually the two of you settle down into a comfortable story together. And just as you realize things are becoming a bit of work with your story, the two of you are sitting down one evening and you happen to notice a slutty new idea hanging out over at the bar...

Again, let’s be honest. We’ve all been there.

Now, a sad corollary to this that I’ve developed is the booty call idea. This is the idea you used to spend a lot of time with, but now you don’t for one reason or another. Maybe you needed some time apart. Maybe it just wasn’t working out between you. It’s possible you decided to call it quits altogether.

But, there you are late at night, and suddenly that idea looks really sweet again. There’s a lot of stuff you could do with that idea if you had a little time. Nothing serious, mind you, just a writer and an idea hooking up for a few hours and doing what they do. Yeah, there’s other things you should be working on—putting serious effort into, really—but one night won’t make any difference, right? Heck, not even the whole night. Just a couple hours to ease back into it and take care of that little itch you’ve had.

And yeah, maybe this time it’ll be different. But more often than not, come morning you’ll feel a bit guilty about that time you spent with the booty call idea when you should’ve been, well, doing other things.

Y’see, it all comes down to focus. Writing isn’t always going to be fun and fast and exciting. Sometimes it’s going to be work. There are going to be periods when the days just blend together. But if you stick with it and don’t just chase after every little idea that flashes you a bit of plot, you’ll find that most of the days are going to be good ones. And more than a few will be fantastic.

So, don’t chase after the slutty idea. Resist the urge to check in with the booty call idea. You’ll be a better writer if you do.

Speaking of which, I should really go work on that top ten mystery rant so I’ll have it for next week.

Until then, go write.

I Was A Very Driven Boy Scout

2011-06-10T16:52:00.000-07:00

Not pop culture. Crap joke. Blame Eddie Izzard.

I’m sorry this is a bit late. I wanted to have it done for Thursday, but then... y’know, then I just couldn’t find a compelling reason to work on it.

Speaking of which...

I read a book a few weeks ago where the main antagonist is an ex-con. While he was in prison he found a niche market, learned about computers, and set up a nice little business for himself involving convicts still inside. It’s nothing great, but it’s completely legal, ethical, and he’s pulling in close to a grand a week for fifteen or twenty hours of work. He often ponders the fact that if he’d know it was so easy to make money legitimately, he never would’ve ended up in prison.

Which is especially confusing because at the start of the book he’s working as a one-man Brute Squad and committing murder to neaten up “any possible loose ends” for the big man who’s pulling all the strings. Much later in the book (after more brutality and further explanation of how great his niche business is doing) the antagonist finally explains that he feels he owes a debt of honor to this person he’s working for. That man pulled a few strings to help get him out of prison, after all, and he sure as hell doesn’t want to end up back in prison.

Those last italics are mine. They’re not from the ex-con who’s got a completely legitimate business pulling in a grand a week for twenty hours of work and is murdering people on the side. A guy who, it’s also been established, has no real loyalty to anyone but himself. And his business, which he’s thinking he may expand.

Sooooooo... it wasn’t really clear why this guy was doing any of the stuff we saw him doing. In fact, as the book went on his actions became less and less plausible. Especially when he kidnapped a woman so he could blackmail her husband and then suddenly decided to rape her.

Definitely the action of an ex-con determined not to go back to prison.

One of the most common things that makes a character unbelievable is when they have no motivation for their actions. We’ve all seen it. The guy who decides to pick a fight over something petty in the middle of a crisis. The person in charge who continues to ignore someone with key information. The spouse who’s just a jerk. The ninja who attacks for no reason.

Y’see, Timmy, nothing knocks a reader out of a story faster than people just randomly doing stuff. There’s a simple reason for this. In the real world, when people do things for no reason, they’re usually considered to be insane. Not an interesting insane, either, but the “lame motivational excuse” insane. If I run into a burning house to save a baby or a dog, I’m going to be considered a hero whether I make it out or not. If I run into the flaming house just because it’s there, I’m going to be considered an idiot.

People need a reason to do things. Real reasons. Reasons that jibe with their background and their personality and with basic rules of behavior. That’s why you’ve heard of people motivating horses with a carrot on a stick but not with a t-bone steak on a stick. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s completely understandable that Belloq wants to open the Ark before taking it to Germany, and believable that the Nazi officers would feel uncomfortable about performing a “Jewish ceremony.” This fits with Belloq’s smarmy background and it makes sense—historically, even-- that Colonel Dietrich would be a bit by disturbed by what needs to be done to open the Ark.

So here’s a challenge for you—try to picture that scene reversed. Can you imagine if, at that point in the film, Dietrich is insistent on performing the ceremony and Belloq is saying “no, no, I really think we should just take it to der Fuhrer and let him deal with it”...? It wouldn’t make any sense, would it?

In the book I’m working on right now, a very major motive for many of the characters is curiosity. So is fear. And, after a certain point, survival. I’m not saying that everyone in the book acts rationally, mind you, but their actions fit who they are and what they believe they’re going to accomplish.

Now, sometimes the story needs people to act a certain way. It’s been plotted out and now the characters need to do this so that can happen a bit later. What some writers don’t seem to get is that this doesn’t make a character’s actions more believable or forgivable.

In the example I gave above, the reader’s given two contradictory sets of information about the ex-con. On one hand we’ve got a man determined to stay on the straight and narrow with all the motivation he needs to do it—good character building stuff. However, almost all we see him do in the book is commit acts of murder, kidnapping, blackmail, and even one breaking and entering. All this advances the plot, yes, and at a breakneck pace, but it does this by making the character less and less believable. And that really made him less and less of a threat. To be honest, I realized at one point I was actually picturing him as a cartoon. In my mind, the book had turned into a sort of high-tech thriller version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit because the only way to rationalize this nonsensical character was to turn him into something completely absurd.

Here’s one other good point worth noting. The reader has to be able to relate to the character’s motives. This is especially important for stories set in radically different cultures (Japan, for example, or India under the caste system) or perhaps in entirely fictitious ones (Barsoom, Diagon Alley, or the grim darkness of the future). While the characters might have very true and proper motivations within the context of their tale, those motivations still need to be interpreted by the chosen audience. It’s common to hit this wall in stories where the writer knows their chosen setting too well or maybe had to build their amazing world from the ground up.

People’s motivations tend to be simple. If you’ve ever seen a procedural show, they often talk about the common motives for murder. Love, money, revenge—they’re very basic ideas. The unspoken motive for the cast of these shows is justice, or perhaps closure. In Raiders, Belloq is looking for glory and maybe a bit of power (I think it’s safe to say he was secretly hoping he’d get all the benefits of that “hotline to God”).

Look at the characters in one of your stories. Follow them for a few pages. Can you explain their actions with one or two simple words? Are they words that most people will know? Do these words relate to the character and not your outline?

Then you’ve probably got some very driven characters.

Next week, a few tips from Esmund Harmsworth about mysteries—many of which can be applied to writing as a whole.

For now, hopefully you feel motivated to go write.

As The Tree Said to the Lumberjack...

2011-06-02T15:27:00.000-07:00

I had no idea what to rant about this week. None. Blank slate. I’d had an idea in the car a few days ago, but it’d slipped my mind by the time I got home.

You people weren’t much help. I asked for suggestions last week, but apparently none of you have any problems or issues with writing. Must be nice.

So this reminded me of the recurring gag in Throw Momma From The Train. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a movie about a completely blocked novelist (played by Billy Crystal). Said novelist is framed for the murder of his ex-wife (played by Captain Janeway) by a clueless and incompetent student from one of his writing classes (Danny Devito) who thinks Crystal’s tips on writing a murder mystery are an offer to trade actual murders (ala Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train). Anyway, throughout the film, our hero is constantly lamenting—whining almost—about the fact that he’s been completely blocked and can’t get past the first line of his next book. Was the night hot, or was the night humid? He’s been going back and forth between those two words for months.

And then, while all this was rattling around in my head, someone thanked me over on my Facebook page for helping them get past the mental impasse they’d hit a while back with one of their stories.

All of which is well and good, but doesn’t help me figure out what I’m going to do for this week’s ranty blog.

Now, despite how I started this paragraph, I don’t really believe in writer’s block. I think there can be moments, maybe even minutes, of indecision or problem-solving, but I just can’t believe any halfway decent writer is going to get so completely blocked that they can’t write anything. When presented with the question of hot or humid, most writers will agree it’s very important to have the right one, and they’ll probably come back to it many, many times during their revisions and edits, but I find it hard to believe they’d stop there and do nothing else. Heck, Stephen King was hit by a van and almost killed, but he was still back at the keyboard a few weeks after he left the hospital.

I think when a lot of folks say they’re blocked, what they really are is nervous. They’re sitting down to write and they’re afraid the words getting put down may not be the glittering gems this particular story needs. I mean, one slip up and the whole thing’s over, right?

Nope.

This fear may be normal, but it’s completely unfounded. It’s just this asinine idea of creating ART rather than writing. Do any of you think Lady Gaga never touches a piano except for recording sessions and concerts? Does Michael Phelps stay out of the pool unless he’s at a competition. Does every single thing Gordon Ramsay cooks go out on a restaurant plate?

More to the point, do you think it’s always been that way for these folks? Did Gaga write a few number-one hits the first time she sat down at a piano? Had Phelps ever gone swimming before the Olympics? Do you really think the very first thing Gordon Ramsay ever cooked got him high praise?

But, alas, so many writers think the first words they set down are going to be the ones that get them a Pulitzer. And it makes them freeze up. And so they never write.

Do you remember that old joke about the guy who tells his doctor it hurts whenever I do this? Remember the punchline from the doctor? That’s the big secret for beating writer’s block. If you keep writing, you can’t get stuck.

So, more to the point, here’s a few easy ways to keep writing.

Stop Before The End-- This is what I try to do all the time. It was something I read years ago in a Writer’s Digest sidebar, if memory serves. I leave myself stuff to start with tomorrow. If I feel like I’ve got five or six pages of writing to get out today, I only do four. If I know where the rest of this page is going, I stop after the first paragraph.

What I’m doing is giving myself an easy starting place for tomorrow. There are few things more intimidating than sitting down with no idea where to begin. This way I’ve got that last bit I left to start with, and once the storytelling engine’s up and running it’s a lot easier to keep it going.

Shuffle-- This is another suggestion you’ve probably heard before. I used to do it a lot, but not as much since I’ve cut way back on magazine work. It can help to have more than one project going at a time. If you get stuck on A, you can switch over to B or C. It also helps if these projects are a bit different, in terms of genre, format, and so on. Any bodybuilder will tell you that you can’t just work one muscle group day after day. You get better results when you rotate. When I wrote Ex-Heroes I was constantly switching between that book, screenwriter interviews for the magazine, and the ranty blog here.

Fill er’ up-- Sometimes the reason you’re not moving forward is because you’re out of gas. Despite those silly folks who claim “real writers don’t have time to read,” the simple fact is you need input if you want output. Read a book, watch a movie, or play a videogame. Not one of your favorites that you know by heart, but something new. Get some fresh words and ideas and images into your head. Once they start swirling around in there, you might find that starting point you were looking for—or maybe even an all-new one.

The Batting Cage-- Take the pressure off yourself and just write anything with the knowledge it doesn’t matter. Name and describe all the pets you’ve ever had. Type out a list of your favorite books or your favorite birthday presents. Write up explicit lists of people you’ve slept with or people you wish you’d slept with. It doesn’t matter what you write or what language you use—no one’s ever going to see this. Just get the words flowing. Go with stream of consciousness or random fragments or quotes you’ve been meaning to jot down for other projects.

After fifteen or twenty minutes of this, you’ll probably find you’re writing coherent, consecutive sentences. Even if they don’t have anything to do with your current project—or any of your side projects—they’ve still gotten that part of your brain up and running for the real work of the day. So now you can toss all that and get back to important stuff.

Like trying to come up with something to post on your blog.

Next week, I feel motivated to talk about character stuff again.

Until then, go write.

Artsy Character Stuff

2011-05-26T23:16:00.000-07:00

A while back, on one of the message boards I frequent, someone accused me of being horribly biased against anything that’s “character driven” or lacks a plot. I didn’t feel the need to address it there, but it did get me thinking. Am I horribly biased?

On reflection, yes. Yes I am.

Keep in mind what bias means. It means someone has an automatic tendency to lean toward or away from something when it comes to judgment. If I have the choice of watching a sitcom or Doctor Who, my personal bias is to watch Doctor Who. If one dish is made with spinach and one with peas, I’ll probably choose the peas. It doesn’t mean Doctor Who beats any sitcom or peas are always better than spinach, but that’s the way I roll.

By the same token, if I have the choice between an overwritten character study where elegantly-defined protagonists do absolutely nothing and a tight story with good characters and an arc... well, I’ll go with option B every time.

So, yes, I’m biased. In fact, if you check the numbers, you’ll find most people are. We like compelling characters, but we also want to see things happen. Check out a list of bestselling books or films or plays. How many of them involve people sitting on their butts for long periods of time? That kind of stuff just doesn’t sell.

Now, keep in mind I’m not the only one saying this. People have been saying it for decades. Probably centuries. There’s a reason so much of Shakespeare’s populist crap survived and most people can’t even name three of his contemporaries. People want to be entertained. Silent film director Marshall Neilan humorously pointed out (about a hundred years ago) that there are two kinds of directors—the ones who make artistic movies and the ones whose movies make money.

Are being popular and making money the only yardsticks of success? Not by a long shot. But they’re the most common ones and the ones most folks go off. If I tell you I wrote a phenomenally successful book, the assumption is not that I made my mom proud, impressed my tenth grade English teacher, or really touched three dedicated readers. “Phenomenally successful” means the book sold a few million copies and I’m writing this next to my pool while Stana Katic rubs my shoulders.

That being said, there are a lot of real-world, character-driven stories that are just fantastic. They’re vastly outnumbered by the bad ones, no doubt about it, but saying all such movies are bad would be just as lazy as the folks who dismiss all genre work as pedestrian and simplistic. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is far more a slice-of-life story than it is a courtroom drama. The film (500) Days of Summer is closer to a character study than a romantic comedy.

And there are, believe it or not, genre books that go this way as well. James P. Hogan wrote a wonderful novel called Inherit the Stars which has almost no action in it at all. About three-fourths of the book is people sitting in offices and laboratories bouncing theories off each other about a body they’ve found on the Moon. Aliens are mentioned in it, but we only see a few skeletons because they’ve been dead for tens of thousands of years. It’s been one of my favorite books since high school.

So, if you want to write quiet little things that lean far more on character then action, here are three tips for making them something people still want to read.

1) Have compelling characters

Somewhere along the line a lot of people got it in their heads that the only way a character can be interesting is if they’re seriously messed up. This became the yardstick for “mature” fiction. By this standard, a good character’s an alcoholic, chain-smoking, spouse-beating, molested-as-a-child part-time convenience store worker with Asperger’s Syndrome. One film I saw had a pedophile as one of the main characters. No hyperbole, this was a confessed, done-prison-time pedophile, who wasn’t really sure if he was reformed or not. He was still thinking it over and debating if he’d done something wrong or not.

While such people probably has a great deal going on under the surface and give actors tons of meaty moments to emote, you do have to wonder how the audience is supposed to relate to these characters. Or how we’re supposed to like them. And why on God’s Earth would we root for such people? “Go, man, go!! You can get your groove back and molest three more children before the end of the film! I have faith in you!!”

If you’re going to make your story all about characters, make it about characters people will actually like. They don’t need to be perfect, by any means, but they also don’t have to be so flawed we wonder why they’re not in prison or an institution. Someone facing an uphill battle is great, but someone facing a sheer cliff is just pointless.

2)Have something happen

This is probably the biggest complaint I have with 99% of such stories and scripts I read. Nothing happens. The week this story covers is indistinguishable from the same week a few million other people have had. Heck, it’s indistinguishable from the same week these characters have had fifty-two times a year. There’s nothing special or noteworthy about it in any way.

Now, nobody has to steal the Declaration of Independence for a story to be interesting. They don’t need to rob a bank or fight off alien invaders or save the Ark of the Covenant from the Nazis. But they need to do something. If the characters don’t have a reason to aim a little higher while we’re watching them, then we’re seeing static characters.

Ready for a horrific example? Think of Flashdance. Almost half the movie is Alex’s friends following their dreams and failing miserably. The ice skater who loses her balance and destroys her routine. The comedian whose mind goes blank and leaves him sweaty and panicked in front of an audience of hecklers. But the key thing is they’re at least making an attempt while the main character is too scared to even try. It’s a basic, simple situation we can all relate to, from one side or the other. They’re all doing something, even though none of them are succeeding.

3) Have an arc

Once you’ve got a compelling character and you’ve got something happening, you’ve got to have an arc. By its very nature, an arc implies we end somewhere else. Arcs that end in the same place are called circles, and there’s a reason you haven’t heard of well-structured character circles. You’ve heard of people running in circles, though, haven’t you? And it’s never a good thing...

The whole point of a story is to get from A to B. If there’s only going to be A, that’s just a plot point. Plot points can be fascinating, but they also tend to sit on the page if they’re all alone with nothing backing them up. Just as something needs to happen in the observed life of your character, something needs to change.

The previously mentioned (500) Days of Summer is about a guy falling for a girl, dating her, and then getting dumped by her. And he grows up a bit because of it. Inherit the Stars is about a group of scientists learning some revolutionary facts about the Earth and the solar system. He Was A Quiet Man is about the office loser who decides to shoot up his office but becomes a hero when someone else beats him to it and he shoots them instead.

And there you have it. Three simple tips to having a character-driven story that still makes audiences cheer. Because cheering audiences pay better.

Next time...

Honestly, I don’t know what I’m going to rant about next time. Does anyone have a topic they’d like to see addressed? Some sticky issue or recurring problem they’ve been having? I’ll try my best to address them, if so.

If not, I’ll probably just find something else to be negative about.

Until then, go write.

A Challenge Has Been Issued

2011-05-20T12:27:00.000-07:00

You would not believe what I had to go through to get this post up.

Anyway...

A simple element of storytelling is the obstacle. It's what stands between the characters and whatever they want. An army of Nazis stand between Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark. The possibility of getting caught stands between Ferris Bueller and his perfect day off. The armored construct named the Destroyer stands between Thor and saving the world, but so does the inability to wield his mystic war-hammer, Mjolnir, because of his own doubts of his worthiness.

While opinions vary a bit more on this one, I think an obstacle is slightly different from a conflict. It’s just terminology, but exterior problems tend to be called obstacles, while interior ones are almost always labeled as conflicts. In the example I gave above Thor has to defend his friends from the Destroyer (obstacle), and he can’t wield Mjolnir because of his self-doubt (conflict). Make sense?

Now, while in strict literary terms obstacle is correct, I prefer to use the term challenge. I've found that thinking about "obstacles" tends to guide the mind solely onto physical impediments, like parts of an obstacle course. While this isn't technically wrong, it does tend to result in a lot of the same things. This is when you get challenges that have that sort of “level boss” feel to them. Character A defeats obstacle B, then moves on to obstacle C, and finishes up with D.

Anyway, I did it a while back, but I thought it might be useful to scribble out some tips about challenges. And just so we can have cool, current pictures, I’m going to relate a lot of it to Thor. Some of them you might not have considered before, and a few of them... well, one or two it’s kind of sad that I feel it’s necessary to bring them up.

For example...

You have to have one.

Yeah, this sounds basic, I know, but it’s surprising how often I see stories where people either sit around doing nothing or just stroll through events with no effort. I ranted on about this sort of thing just a few weeks ago. Anything the characters need just appears. Anyone they need is willing to help with or without any motivation to do so. Any lucky break that has to happen does at the precise opportune moment. I know it sounds silly to most of you, but it’s honestly stunning how often this happens in amateur books and screenplays. Heck, it’s bothersome how often it happens in professional writing.

There needs to be something between your characters and their goals. If there isn't, they would've accomplished these goals already. If I want a Diet Pepsi, I go get one from the fridge-- that's it. Hardly material for a bestseller, no matter how much you dress it up. On the other hand, if I want to drink from the Fountain of Youth, odds are there are some immortal pirates and conquistadors in the way, maybe a few alligators, quicksand, and the random swamp monster. That’s a story.

Your characters need a reason to confront it.

If your characters are going to take on a challenge, they need a reason to do it. A real reason. Indy isn’t chasing those Nazis halfway across two continents for an empty crate—he’s doing it for an artifact which represents the sum total of his entire life’s work. Thor isn’t squaring off against the Destroyer because he can’t think of any other way to spend the afternoon—the lives of his friends and innocent civilians are at risk.

Make sure this reason is really there. It might be obvious in your head why the characters are going to undertake a challenge, but is it that clear on paper? This is especially true for more internal things like Thor dealing with his pride issues, where the audience needs to understand why not being able to lift Mjolnir is such a big deal.

You need a reason for it to exist.

A combination of the first two points. Nothing’s worse than a challenge that only exists to be a challenge. It has no reason for existing in the world of the story, no past, no future, no motivation. It’s only there to serve as an obstacle for the protagonist to overcome. You might remember in Galaxy Quest when Sigourney Weaver loudly points out that the mashing hallway serves no purpose whatsoever. We can probably all think of a book or movie where, for no reason at all, an obstacle just popped out of nowhere. That kind of stuff just weakens any story.

Challenges have a purpose. They're characters in their own right, or maybe obstacles other characters have set in your protagonist's way. There’s a reason the Destroyer exists (it protects Odin’s vault), and there’s a reason it’s going after Thor (Loki ordered it to kill him). It didn’t just fall out of the sky and start smashing stuff for no reason. Think about why a given challenge is in your story, and if there isn’t a real reason, stop for a couple minutes and re-think it.

I’ll add one other note here. It’s generally better if the audience (reader or viewer) has at least some idea why said challenge exists. They don’t need to know immediately, but you also shouldn’t save it for the last five pages and say “Oh, the ninjas that have been hunting us for the past week? They were sent by my business rival in Hokkaido...”

It has to be daunting.

It’s bad enough the Destroyer was built to be the ultimate killing machine, but Thor has to face it with no powers whatsoever. No strength, no armor, no thunder, nothing. Atticus Finch stakes his career, his personal morals, and possibly his life on his defense of Tom Robinson. Jonathan Harker, Dr. Van Helsing, and their companions are the only who ones who know a supernatural monster has arrived in England—one that could kill tens of thousands if not stopped.

Characters should never want to deal with a challenge, because let's be honest-- we'd all love it if more things were just handed to us. Again, Diet Pepsi vs the Fountain of Youth. A challenge needs to be something that gives the character (and the audience) pause, or else it isn't really a challenge. Even John Carter, gentleman of Virginia, Warlord of Mars, and greatest swordsman of two worlds, would occasionally look at the odds he was facing and say "Oh...crap."

Well, Burroughs was always a bit more eloquent than that, but you get the point.

It can’t be impossible.

There’s nothing worse than being on the wrong side of a sure thing. Nobody reading this wants to get in a fist fight with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson because we all know it’d be no contest. None of us want to be given the responsibility of stopping a runaway asteroid or even just a runaway bus, because I’m willing to bet for all of us here (myself included) those would be things we just couldn’t deal with.

If you’ve ever watched a boxing match, or any sporting event, you’ve probably noticed they're evenly matched. NFL teams don't face off against pee-wee football teams. The Yankees and the Red Sox don’t do practice games against little league. The most boring stories tend to be the ones where the protagonists have no chance whatsoever of meeting the challenge. If you've ever watched a horror movie where the killer is merciless, unstoppable, and inescapable... well, that gets pretty dull after the second or third kill, doesn't it? One of the reasons Jason Voorhees was always scary in the Friday the 13th films (well, the originals, anyway) is that he never ran. He just sort of... marched? It always seemed like somebody had a chance of getting away from Jason if they could just go a little faster... and not trip on a root or a broken heel or something.

The other risk to be careful of here is if the challenge is completely impossible and your protagonist pulls it off anyway, it can look unbelievable and knock your audience out of the story.

Another thing to be wary of is the challenge that seems impossible to the character, but has a painfully obvious solution to the reader. This makes the characters unlikeable, by nature of stupidity, and that’s not going to win anybody points.

It should be unexpected.

This isn’t an absolute rule, but it’s something I still lean heavily toward. It’s the next logical step once you admit there has to be a challenge.

Every heist movie involves an enormous challenge—usually getting past near-foolproof security to break into a vault or museum. There are many chapters or scenes of preparation. Then, almost without exception, in the middle of pulling the actual job, something always goes wrong. There’s a variable that wasn’t accounted for, something the heroes and the audience are not expecting. A new set of guards, new security equipment, or maybe just a drunken woman at the bar who distracts people and throws off the timetable. There have even been a few clever stories where it’s not the heist that has the unexpected twist but the payoff. And this is where the story gets exciting. If my heroes are so trained and ready for anything that the job goes off without a single hitch, there really wasn’t a challenge, was there?

A small bonus of the unexpected challenge is that it often gives your characters a chance to look better. When they beat the unexpected challenge through sheer skill or cleverness, it makes them all the more likable.

You need to resolve it.

Once the writer has set up a challenge, the readers need to see it resolved somehow. We can’t set the Destroyer loose on the world and then just forget about it. To Kill A Mockingbird doesn’t dangle the threat of a mob in front of us for the whole book and then have nothing happen. I can’t have the hero pining over their lost love for the first third of my story and then never, ever address those feelings again. Believe me, your readers will remember these things. Once we, as writers, present a challenge to the audience it can’t be forgotten or ignored. As Chekhov said, if we see a phaser on the bridge in act one, we need to see it fire in act three.

So, if you’re up to it, make sure the challenges in your writing really are challenging, for the characters and for your audience.

Next week I’m going to accept a challenge myself, and talk about something I don’t like.

Until then, go write.

Sounds Good

2011-05-13T11:17:00.000-07:00

I refuse to take the blame for being late. Blogger was down. Not my fault.

And now back to our regularly scheduled rants and hair pulling...

As has been said many times before, by other people than just me, the key to great characters is dialogue. The way they communicate often tells us just as much about someone as the actual information they’re communicating. If you can’t pull off good dialogue, your career as a writer is going to be an uphill battle the whole way.

The most common way people mess up dialogue is by having, well, god-awful dialogue. Sounds silly, but there it is. Some dialogue just sucks. It’s wooden, on the nose, devoid of any emotion. All you have to do is read it out loud and you can tell it rings false. Making a cheeseburger with rotten meat and moldy cheese is bad—no further explanation is needed. If you can’t figure that on your own, there’s not much anyone can do for you.

The second most common way, believe it or not, is the complete flipside. It’s when people write dialogue that’s too real. Which sounds bizarre, I know, but let me explain...

If you listen to people a lot—people in the real world, not on television—you’ll see that they rarely use complete sentences. Oh, there are a few remarkable statesmen in the world (not all of them politicians) who can speak on any topic and make it sound like they’ve rehearsed their answers a hundred times. For the most part, though, people speak in bits and fragments. We split infinitives, backform verbs, and don’t always match those verbs to the correct number. We pause in mid-thought and try to pick up the threads a moment later. We beat around the bush and sometimes we stall so we can get the rest of our thoughts in order.

You can see this yourself by listening to a recorded conversation. Try it. Ask a friend or two if you can tape a conversation and then talk about anything. The game, politics, a movie you saw, that new pizza place down the street, the new girl at the checkout counter, whatever. They might be a bit stilted at first while they think about being recorded, but eventually you’ll both settle into normal speech patterns.

Now try to transcribe that recording—the whole thing. Write down every pause or false start in the conversation. You’ll probably be surprised how many times you stop in the middle of a sentence and then start over. Or how many times your friend makes a funny noise to fill space while he or she tries to assemble words in the right order.

Get more than two people and you’ll become aware how many random comments people make. And how much space those comments start to eat up, especially when they need to be attributed to someone.

Realistic sounding dialogue is not the same thing as real dialogue. As the saying goes, art imitates life. If art and life are the same thing, though, then you’ve just got life, not art (‘cause we’re not getting rid of life).

I’ve seen a few amateur screenplays that get this wrong in a key way. You know when you walk into a room and half a dozen people say “Hi” and there’s a little burst of small talk from all corners before things settle down again? Some people write that into scripts. So you get six or seven people saying “Hello” and the new arrival responds to all their greetings. Three or four of them ask one like questions like “What’s up?” or “How’ve you been?” or “How’s Wakko?” and the new arrival answers each with two or three words.

Yes, this is very, very realistic. It also means the writer has just taken two and a half pages (when formatted correctly) for what will possibly be thirty seconds of screen time. Unless it’s completely, 100% integral to the plot and half your story will just collapse without it, this kind of thing stands out like a flare for readers as “rookie mistake.” It’s also something that can be written off with “Wakko enters the party, greets a few people, and makes his way over to Phoebe.”

Now, there’s a second part to dialogue that’s too real. If you’ve ever worked in any sort of special field, you’ve probably noticed there’s a certain jargon that develops. Each grocery store, department store, or restaurant has their own behind-the-scenes, shorthand terms for things. If you’ve ever worked in a very intensive field that swallows up a lot of your life—say medicine, the military, or even the film industry—that jargon almost becomes another language. There’s a ton of specialized terms and phrases and abbreviations that get used by people in these fields.

Now, again, here’s the catch. People outside of these fields don’t talk like this and don’t know what these terms mean. Some writers, in the attempt to make their dialogue as realistic as possible, actually make it completely impenetrable. It’s so authentic no one can understand it except other professionals from that field.

The trick for writers is to make this dialogue sound authentic while still being accessible. Think of it like this—you’d never write a character talking with a non stop accent or thick dialect because it becomes difficult to read. You’d pick out a few key phrases and terms and just use those. Things like dropping in “all y’all” instead of “all of you” or saying “pop” instead of “soda.” These give a character a certain flavor without forcing the reader to sound out everything they say.

A great example of this would be television shows like House or NCIS or (dare I say it) JAG. These are shows about people in exceptionally specialized fields, each of which has its own terminology and jargon. In real life, if a handful of lawyers were discussing a case or four doctors were sitting around discussing possible diagnoses of a patient, odds are most of us wouldn’t understand a single sentence (and none of the doctors would look like Olivia Wilde). So the writers of these shows only pepper the dialogue with such terms and flesh out most of it with straightforward, easily-understandable terms. Think about it—when they’re in the middle of a diagnosis, most of their dialogue is explaining their ideas so they’d make sense to a layman.

“Tansey syndrome explains the aversion to light and pale skin. But if you write off the pale skin as a side effect of light sensitivity, not an actual symptom, chloroblastosis of the heart is a better match. It explains the aversion to light, elongated teeth, and the craving for blood... So start treatment for chloroblastosis.”

We don’t need to know what Tansey syndrome or chloroblastosis is because it’s getting explained to us. It’s not how doctors would actually talk, yes, but it still sounds good to the layman and it’s understandable to the layman. And it’s got enough facts right that hopefully doctors won’t be too annoyed or amused. Ignoring the fact that I just made up two medical conditions.

When I was writing Ex-Patriots I knew there was going to be a strong military presence in the book. While I don’t have any experience in that world myself, I was extremely fortunate to have a web of people I could call on. My best friend was in the Air Force. My dad was in the Navy. My step-sister was a Master Sergeant in the Army. I also know a couple other authors with a wide range of military experience.

But I also knew I was writing for a much broader audience than just the military. So I needed to have soldiers speak more like civilians at some points. If I didn’t, I’d run the risk of either alienating the readers or having to explain large swaths of dialogue. Neither prospect was all that exciting.

So don’t write what you know. Write like you know what you’re talking about.

Next time, writer challenge!

Until then, go write.

More Shameless Self-Promotion...

2011-05-10T16:33:00.000-07:00

On the off chance you didn’t know, I write books for a living. People actually buy them. For money.

A while back my publisher cut a deal with Audible.com and now they’re having a wonderful little cross-promotion called Zombiefest. All this summer there are going to be zombie audiobooks up for great prices from Audible.com. I’ve got one in the first wave, just released today (Ex-Heroes) and it seems I’m also first out in the July wave, just after Fourth of July, with Ex-Patriots. Plus the books in the July wave come with a little bonus material, also by me, called The Junkie Quatrain.

So check it out.

Thursday I still plan on rambling on about how you can sound professional. Is anyone still reading? Haven’t been any comments in a month or two, now...

This IS Ceti Alpha Five!

2011-05-05T18:48:00.000-07:00

If you get that title reference, you probably feel an equal mix of pride and shame. Just like I do for coming up with it.

For those of you who don’t get it, it’s from a sci fi movie where the characters suddenly discover they aren’t on the planet they thought they were. They (and the audience) had gone along assuming they were on planet A, only to discover they were on planet B instead. It’s a mistake that costs them dearly—they end up getting little parasitic worms stuck in their ears.

Silly as it may sound, a key part of storytelling is knowing the world your story is set in. I can tell the story of a noble knight on a quest to find the Holy Grail, but depending on the world I set it in, he can be a glorious hero (The Once and Future King) or a deranged madman (The Fisher King). We’d all frown if one of the Bourne books had him stopping an alien invasion and we’d shake our heads if Jack Reacher took on a cult of Satanists that had summoned an actual demon.

One of the biggest ways writers mess this up is to take too long to establish what kind of world they’re in. For example, they’re doing a spoof-comedy, but the first thirty pages have been completely straight. Or (on the flipside) they do establish the world and much later in the narrative try to switch that world to something else. I’ll blab on about that in a minute.

For now, consider the movie Predator. The original, with Governor Arnold, Governor Jesse, Secretary of Defense Carl Weathers, and screenwriter Shane Black.

Predator begins with the team landing in Central America and getting briefed on their mission. They head into the jungle, locate the crashed plane, find the enemy camp, and have an awesome gunfight. Then Arnold discovers that Carl set them up and dumped them in the meat grinder. They head back out for the rendezvous... and that’s when they discover there’s something else in the jungle.

We’re, what... half an hour into the film at this point?

Except... that’s not how Predator begins. If you think back, the movie actually begins with an alien spaceship flying past Earth and launching off a small shuttle/ drop pod. We’re told in the first minute of the film that this is, ultimately, a sci-fi story. We may get distracted for a bit by the hail of bullets, but when the title alien shows up it isn’t a surprise... just a bit creepy.

On the other hand, one recent book I read was 100% set in the real world. Everything about it was realistic. The basic idea was two people who had found the last notebook of a dead research scientist who claimed (in his notes) to have discovered a cure for cancer. The cure for cancer. The entire book was about them trying to figure out what the heck they had while half a dozen pharmaceutical companies chased them—all wanting the notebook one way or another. Well, in the end they escape big pharma, sell the notebook to a group of researchers for a couple million dollars, and cancer is cured across the globe.

Yep. We cured cancer everywhere in the last seven pages. Go us.

I also once saw a script that started out as a dramatic comedy sort of thing. Young woman, single mother, trying to make the best of life even though she keeps getting knocked down... we’ve all seen it a few dozen times. That was the first forty odd pages. Then, on page 44, if memory serves (almost 3/4 of an hour into the movie, mind you), we discover that the old man she just helped cross the street is actually the Easter Bunny, who decides to reward the woman with a wish for her random act of Christian charity.

That’s right. A key point in this story is that the Easter Bunny spends his downtime walking among us disguised as an octogenarian. And the Easter Bunny is all about Christian charity because... well, the brown of the chocolate and the brown of the wood of the cross... or something...

Like any other disruption in the flow of a story, it’s very jarring when a story is set up in one world and then veers off into another one. It’s like discovering that one of your main characters has actually been insane all along. It forces the reader to re-examine what’s come before, and not in a good way. In fact, more often than not, these sudden shifts in tone and world force a story into pure comedy. Again, not in a good way.

Consider this. There’s a classic Saturday Night Live skit which claims to be the famous “lost reel” of It’s A Wonderful Life. In this, just as everyone’s sitting around singing and rejoicing, Uncle Billy remembers that he misplaced the money in the newspaper Mr. Potter took. It only takes a few moments for this realization to turn the celebrating friends and family into an ugly mob, and they march to Potter’s house, give the man a mass beating, and burn his home to the ground. The End. The Simpsons did something similar with a lost final reel of Casablanca. Here Ilsa parachutes out of Laszlo’s plane to be with Rick, saving him from (and killing) Adolph Hitler in the process. The happy couple is married shortly afterwards. The End...?

No, seriously. That’s how they “ended” Casablanca, with the ellipse and the question mark. Which, as Bart points out, leaves them open for a sequel.

So just by (hypothetically) shifting the tone/world of the endings, both of these classic, award-winning films become absurdist comedies.

Now here’s a key thing to remember. You can still have a fantastic story set in the real world provided the events of your story don’t change the world. If I wage a secret battle against lizard men from the center of the Earth and at the end of my story no one knows the war happened, then the world hasn’t changed, has it?

Perfect example—Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not only does this story involve a Nazi plot to seize arcane objects across the globe, it has reputable archeologist Henry “Indiana” Jones finding hardcore evidence that God is real. Think about the repercussions that information would have. If someone went public in the 1930s with absolute, undeniable proof of God’s existence, what kind of world would we be living in today? What kind of story would you be telling?

Which is why that evidence never goes public. We’re left with the distinct impression no more than a dozen people know what Dr. Jones recovered from that island, and that he’s been well-paid not to talk about it. And the Ark... well, we all know what happens to the Ark, don’t we?

I really, really hate to use this analogy, but it is perfect. If you want to set an amazing story in the real world, you need to use conspiracy theory logic. Yep, the same reasoning used by the birthers, moon-landing deniers, and “9-11 was staged” folks is what makes for a good fiction story. How sad is that?

By conspiracy-theory logic, the lack of evidence for X is the proof that X is true. Any facts that disprove X are manufactured by the powers that be, thus further proving X is true. And if you stumble across a few coincidences that imply X is true, well, that of course is solid proof that X is true.

Y’see, Timmy, by this chain of reasoning, the untouched real world is undeniable proof the imaginary world of your story is true. Only the BPRD knows what really happened to Adolph Hitler after the Occult Wars, so it’s understandable that most of us only know the publicized version of events. There are a dozen enchantments that keep the magical world of Hogwarts and Diagon Alley separate from the real world, thus the fact that no Muggle has ever seen Hogwarts pushes the idea that the stories about it are true. Only a worthy mortal can lift the hammer of Thor (bonus points if you remember its name—offer not good after Friday), but we all know we’re not 100% worthy so we accept that we’ve never had the chance to lift it. The fantasy world doesn’t change the real world, so that fantasy world is more believable.

So do amazing things in amazing worlds. Just make sure no one finds out about it.

Next time, I wanted to rant a bit about sounding like a professional.

Until then, go write.