Choo-Choo-Choose You II: The Last Starfighter

            I posted a link to last week’s rant over on my Facebook fan page, and somebody asked a question about it.  And I started answering there, but then I realized it’d be better over here. And then (as I was scrawling my response in the comment section) I realized it’d work even better as a quickie Tuesday post.

            So... the question.

            I'm curious how you view Alex Rogan's arc in "The Last Starfighter". It seems to violate your rule about chosen ones not getting invested in the other world. As a character arc, it was pretty believable to me, 

            A fair point.  I tried to make this clear, but I can see where it might not be.  Two points from Ravenclaw for that one.
            Okay, I hate that I have to refer to this but...

            (shudder)

            In his various musings on story, Joseph Campbell has a step—“rejecting the call.” At first glance it seems like it’s a rebuttal of my “not getting invested” point, but it's not. Y'see, rejecting the call happens much earlier in the plot. In The Matrix, for example, it's Neo refusing to trust Morpheus when they first talk on the phone (and getting arrested). In The Force Awakens, it's Rey insisting she can't leave Jakku and has to stay behind. And here, in The Last Starfighter, it's Alex learning about aliens, the KoDan Armada, the head-crushing bad guy, and saying “nope, nope, nope—take me home!”

            But really, how long does that refusal last?  In any of these cases? Alex is home for all of... what, an hour?  Two?—before he realizes he has to go back.

            One of the thing about investment is that it takes time. In-story it takes even more time.  When a plot dives head-first into action on page one, it doesn’t mean much because we don’t know who these people are. And how often do we roll our eyes when a story tries to convince us of “love at first sight”...?

            When someone refuses to get invested and walks away, that happens later in the story.  In the particularly bad movie that sparked that rant, the chosen one walked away over an hour into the movie.  Within the movie, weeks had passed, weeks of people training this guy as the chosen one.

            In a way, this is a lot like the difference between saving the cat and patting the dog.  The isolated acts themselves look very much the same, but they’re different because of when they happen in my story and what they’re trying to accomplish.  Refusing the call is a character thing.  It’s a believable response to being shown a bigger world, or a bigger destiny, and it helps ground our suddenly-overwhelmed protagonist and make them more believable.

            But refusing to be invested is just a cheap attempt to build tension.  It undercuts any character growth that’s happened and makes the reader/audience question if this character can really be trusted. Which really sucks if the character is my long-heralded chosen one protagonist.

            In short, it makes my story worse.

            Next time, character stuff. For real.

            And, hey—two weeks from today I’ll be at Borderlands in San Francisco with my brand-shiny-new second hardcover, Paradox Bound. Give ‘em a call, reserve a copy, and come say “hi!”

            Until then, go write.

I Choo-Choo-Choose You!

            Pop culture reference. Just a decade or two old.

            Hey, speaking of pop culture, if you’ve lived on the Earth at any point this century, you’ve probably heard of a type of narrative called a chosen one story. They’ve been around in books and movies for, well, many decades, but over the past ten years or so this particular sub-genre has become kinda popular.

            On the off chance you haven’t been on Earth that long (in which case you have a spectacular story of your own to tell), a chosen one story is about a regular—often less-than-regular, somewhat sub-average and  outcast—person who comes to find out they have a grand destiny. Sometimes they’ve been prophesied, other times they just happen to fill a long-unfilled void.  King Arthur was a chosen one, as was Perseus.  On the more modern side , there’s also Neo, Buffy Summers, Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, Percy Jackson, Beatrice Prior... just to name a few.

            Seriously, just a few.  This has become a ridiculously common thread in books and movies.  Most of them tend to lean toward fantasy and young adult.  Not all, but enough that it’s worth mentioning. 

            And a lot of them, to be blunt, aren’t that good. Oh, there were some amazing ones up front, but as more and more writers dove at this popular sub-genre, we ended up getting more and more folks who... well, just didn’t get it. Nowadays, you’ll see a lot of agents and editors on their homepages or on Twitter, all more or less begging writers not to send them any chosen one stories.

            During a recent bout of Saturday geekery, I stumbled across a chosen one movie.  It had a lot of problems, and almost all of them circled around the idea that our main character was supposed to be some sort of chosen one. I say supposed to because... well, he was kinda awful at it.  On a bunch of levels.

            Let’s talk about a couple of them.

            So, some ways in which my chosen one might kinda suck...

--A chosen one who doesn’t do anything

            This is an issue for any main character, but it tends to really stand out with a chosen one.  I’ve seen far too many of these stories (including that recent one) where the chosen one is the least active character—in any sense. The entire supporting cast is doing all the work, making all the decisions, sharing all the information and my chosen one is doing... nothing.

            I’ve mentioned this sort of thing before. If I can swap out a character for a dufflebag full of towels and nothing would change in my story... maybe I don’t need that character. If all they are is something to hand off, protect, give orders to... I probably need to develop them more.  And have them be a little more active.

--A chosen one who doesn’t do anything anyone else couldn’t do

            This is kinda-sorta related to the last one.  I’ve seen more than a couple chosen ones who, when all’s said and done, just aren’t all that special.  It’s like if I said Jeff was the chosen one because he can mix drinks.  Are we living in some horrible mixerless dystopia? Are there no more shot glasses so nobody can measure anything? 

            You laugh, sure, but I’ve seen chosen ones who are “special” for far less then that.

            If my chosen one just needs to put a key in a lock, pick up a stone, or flip a few switches... my readers are going to wonder why nobody else could’ve done this.  If they need to read a page from a book, have blonde hair, steal a coin, or enter a password... there really isn’t anything that special about them.  These are all things anyone can do.  If someone’s been chosen for a great destiny, my readers (or audience) are going to expect that it’s, well... great.  Definitely not mediocre or mundane.

--A chosen one whose “gift” is ridiculously specific to the threat they face

            Okay, this is a tricky one.  Sometimes, in an attempt to make things more believable by having them very toned down, a storyteller end up with a chosen one who has an extremely specific gift or ability. For example, if Dot has a complete immunity to radiation in the 395-405 nanometer wavelengths... which happens to be the exact frequency of the laser weapons used by the alien battle robots.  Or maybe the evil dictator is famous for killing his enemies with a specific variant of cyanide... a specific variant that Yakko’s completely resistant to after a bizarre childhood accident.

            I know, these sound kinda ridiculous.  But this sort of thing crops up again and again.  The writer gives the chosen one a very narrow-focus ability, and that narrow range is exactly what the protagonist needs.

            In a way, it’s kind of like when characters suddenly, for no reason, start preparing for a crisis that doesn't exist.  And now, when a crisis does suddenly happen two months later... Phew, good thing my character spent those two months stockpiling food, weapons, ammunition, batteries, medical supplies, solar cells...

            When I do this, I’ve removed all sense of a challenge and also damaged the willing suspension of disbelief.  Yeah, it would’ve been hard to believe that Yakko is immune to all poisons, but not as hard as it is to believe he happens to be immune to the very specific one he needs to be. It doesn’t feel like destiny, it feels like I created a flimsy coincidence to get myself out of a corner.

            Look at it this way.  If the threat didn’t exist, would this gift make our chosen one special in any way?  Or would it seem like a really weird character trait I added on for no reason?          

--A chosen one who doesn’t become invested in this other world  

            This is a biggie.  It’s rare, but I want to talk about it because it can kill a whole story.  I mean, bang, dead, tossed across the room.
            Most chosen one tales involve the idea of another world or society existing alongside our main one, often in complete secrecy.  Wizarding worlds, cabals of rebel freedom fighters, supernatural beings, and secret conspiracies are all fairly common    Our chosen one often serves as a bridge between these two worlds, both for other characters and for my readers.  And they’re usually the chosen one because they’re either going to save that world or, alternately, bring it down and save ours.

            Another key aspect of these stories is there’s almost always a moment of doubt. Some point where Yakko doesn’t believe he’s the chosen one, or maybe Phoebe just doesn’t believe in him anymore.  It’s when my protagonist suddenly realizes they could just walk away from all this.

            But they don’t.

            The Oracle told Neo he wasn’t the One.  The various ministers, and even Voldemort, give Harry a bunch of chances to just walk away and stop fighting.  How many times did Katniss toy with the idea of just running away to live in the woods?

            And yet... none of them did.

            In the especially bad chosen one story I saw recently, the protagonist was destined to stop a cruel, murderous overlord. But then a few things went wrong. And the love interest said “Maybe you’re not the chosen one after all,” and someone else said “You should just go.”
            So he did.  The chosen one just left and went back to his old life.  Started pulling the nine-to-five again as if nothing had happened.  Never looked back once until the others came looking for him again.

            Does that sound like a hero anyone’s going to root for?
            Y’see, Timmy, one of the key things here is that my character needs to care about this struggle past how it involves them. They need to care about the crisis and the people involved in it. Really, their role as the chosen one needs to be secondary.

            And that’s that.  Four ways my chosen one might not be the best choice for a character.

            Speaking of which, next time I may talk about characters a little more.

            Oh, and this Sunday is the Writers Coffeehouse.  Noon to three at Dark Delicaices in Burbank. Stop by and see how eloquent I sound when I have to talk about this stuff on the fly.

            Until then... go write.

Simpsons Did It!

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.

On Your Mark... Get Set...

Hey! It’s contest season again, isn’t it?

Technically it’s always contest season, yeah, but it’s the start of the year and a couple of the big ones are opening their doors for new submissions. So, as I often do at this time of year, I was going to offer a few insights into things that make all those contest readers want to put a gun in their mouth.

Well, that’s probably a bit extreme. There are some really awful scripts out there, but you can rest assured none of them are going to drive a reader to suicide. Murder, maybe, but not suicide.

Now, as I’ve said many times before, none of these mistakes are sure-fire ways to lose. But they’re all things that make readers roll their eyes and reach for the Captain Morgans, which means it just got that much harder to impress those readers. So keep that in mind before you fill out an entry form and maybe give your masterpiece one more good look. I mean, really look at it

Spelling -- Yeah, I’m harping on this again. There’ll probably be a whole post coming up sometime in the near future.

Because it matters, that’s why.

Over the course of a few years I wrote two different contest columns for Creative Screenwriting, interviewed dozens of contest directors, and asked each of them about tips for aspiring entrants. Across the board, the first thing most of them said was spelling and grammar.

Now, a random typo doesn’t mean you blew it. We all make mistakes, and readers know that, too. If they go through and find a their on page 42 when it should be there, they’re going to cluck their tongues but keep reading. If there’s a typo on every page, though... Heck, there were a few screenplays I looked at where I wasn’t even thirty pages in and I’d lost track of how many there were.

Whenever you hand off a manuscript you’re trying to convince the reader that you’re a real writer. Someone who can do more with words than just sign their name, scribble a shopping list, or send a txt mssg (ROFL LOL STFU). The absolute, bare-bones basic tools of writing – any writing-- are vocabulary, spelling, and grammar. Which means you need to master them, not your spellchecker. If you establish early on that you can’t handle the basics, why would a reader look any farther?

Apostrophe S -- You could argue this goes under spelling, but speaking as someone who’s read a thousand or so scripts by aspiring screenwriters, I can say it’s in a class by itself. Messing up an apostrophe S stands out like a flare to anyone who knows how to use it. As I said above, we all make mistakes now and then, but it’s painfully obvious when a writer’s just throwing down random apostrophes and getting a few right by sheer chance.

Knowing the difference between a plural, a possessive, and a contraction is past basic—it’s a fundamental part of the English language. Stop writing, go get a grammar book--even a fun one like Eats Shoots & Leaves (look at the carousel down below)--and actually read it. Promise yourself that as of this moment there will be no more guessing or wild stabs in the dark.

Logic holes -- A friend of mine called me once, laughing in hysterics. He was reading for a contest and was halfway through a sci-fi script where human colonists were struggling with the affects of a war that had taken place 200 years earlier. The enemy had released a bio-weapon that wiped out pre-pubescents, so every generation of colonists had lost all their children for the past two centuries.

Give it a second. You’ll start laughing, too.

You’ve probably heard of “movie logic,” a term which also applies to television and even prose. It’s when the writer bends the laws of common sense to solve an issue or a problem. As long as you don’t look at it too close, movie logic can usually get skimmed over and carry you to the next scene or paragraph.

The flipside of this is a complete lack of logic, which makes readers call their friends to share the joke. A lack of logic knocks the reader out of the story, which means it breaks the flow of the story. And that gets scripts put in the big pile on the left.

Fortune Cookie Talk -- Also sometimes called Confucius-speak by another friend of mine. This is when a screenwriter tries to cut down their page count by cutting all the articles, “small” words, and transitional bits from their script. I think there’s also a misguided belief that this gives their writing more “punch.”

Neo walks streets. Man pulls gun. Neo dodges. Drives kick into man’s chest. Man out cold. Neo is One.

Trust me, there are only two things this leads to. One is annoyance as the story slowly edges into unreadable. Two is laughter. Not the good kind of laughter. The “all the kids die every generation for 200 years” kind of laughter.

The Squashed Script -- Sometimes the writer refuses to make any more cuts (for conscious reasons or sheer denial) and ends up with a 170-or-so page script. So they change the font size or the margins or the line spacing and crush the script down into an acceptable number of pages. After all, going from 12 to 9 point Courier can shrink a 170 page script down to 130 pages. That’s a fine length for a script, right?

This is annoying on a bunch of levels. First and foremost, if any writer is manipulating their script like this, it means they know their script is unacceptably long and they’re making no real effort to fix the problem. Second, it shows that the writer is assuming the readers won’t realize what’s going on (and why), which is kind of arrogant if you think about it.

Believe me, readers love arrogant writers who assume they’re idiots. It makes the job soooo much easier.

(not in a good way, in case the sarcasm wasn’t showing...)

Reality is What You Make It -- More often than not, either the title or final page of this screenplay assures the reader that this tale is, in fact, based on the true accounts of me/ my best friend/ my brother/ my parents/ my grandparents/ someone I read about in a magazine article. These are tales of cancer, disease, genocide, military struggles, marital struggles, crises of faith, and various other conflicts of this world we live in. Alas, sometimes they’re also about struggling writers searching for someone to recognize their genius. Often, the fact this is all true is stressed to give a certain validity and gravitas to the screenplay.

Thing is, it doesn’t matter if the story is true or not. Nobody cares. They just care if it’s a good story and it’s well-told. And in that respect, a tale of an orphaned cancer survivor in Rwanda needs to stand up against the story of a black-ops secret agent who teams up with prehistoric lizard men from Atlantis to save the world from a zombie apocalypse. Whether or not its true is irrelevant. In the end, you’re telling a story, and it’s either going to have its own validity or it isn’t. Reality just doesn’t enter into the equation for the reader, so it can’t for the writer.

Frankenanite -- A large percentage of genre scripts involve nanites which somehow go rogue and endanger mankind. Don’t know what a nanite is? No problem--a couple of these writers don’t either. If you’re writing a genre screenplay about nanites (or something indistinguishable from nanites like genetically-altered bacteria or something) think carefully. If I had to pick the ten most overused plot devices, these little guys would be in the top three.

Epic -- Avoid the word epic. The only time the word epic should appear in your script is if someone in the script is telling a very overblown story. It’s a word for critics, publicists, and producers. Screenwriters can use it in interviews, but not in their writing.

Orbs -- No orbs. You would not believe how much this word is overused. People throw it in everywhere because they think it’s better than pedestrian words like round or sphere. Much like mellonballer is guaranteed to get you a Nicholl Fellowship, using the word orb to describe eyes, mystical stones, the sun, or pretty much anything else will make the reader shake their head and pour themselves a second drink. Then they will pour a third drink onto your script and set fire to it.

To Be Continued -- You get one script to impress someone with. One. Nobody wins anything with the first of an epic trilogy (see above). That one manuscript has to stand on its own. Ending a screenplay - especially a contest entry screenplay- with “to be continued” hammers home the fact that this is an incomplete tale. It tells the reader you had no idea how to end this story in 120 pages.

Remember, The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Highlander were not written as trilogies. Despite everything you may have heard, neither was Star Wars. Every one of these films was conceived of, written, and shot as a lone entity. They had to stand alone and succeed alone. If they had to do it that way, don’t think for a minute that your story won’t have to.

And there you have it. Ten ways you can make a reader sigh and shake their head in disdain. Which really means this is ten ways you can avoid getting the head shake, and that means your manuscript is that much closer to dodging the big pile on the left and ending up in the right pile.

Next time... well, I’m not sure what I’m going to rant about next time. But there will be a point to it, I assure you.

Until then, go write.

Background Noise

A multi-purpose title, as will hopefully become clear.

Submitted for your approval is one Theresa Cano. Theresa was a character in the early drafts of The Suffering Map, my first solid attempt at a novel. She’s a young woman who works as a cleaning lady in San Diego to pay for her night courses in computer engineering. Theresa’s going to build the first thinking computer, you see. As it turns out, one of Theresa’s regular employers is an antique store owner named Lois Antanello. Lois is kind of an old bitch, to be honest (she is one of the lesser villians of the book), but she pays well so Theresa bites her tongue when Lois snidely refers to her “immigrant accent.” Theresa has no accent, you see, because her family’s been living (legally) in southern California for about fifty years longer than the Antanellos, who showed up just after World War II. As it happens in the story, Theresa is working there in the antique shop one day when Lois gets a disturbing phone call from her namesake, her Uncle Louis, who is, as some folks might say, a very bad man.

Keep all that in mind. We’ll be getting back to Theresa in a bit.

Names and descriptions are a kind of shorthand for readers. They let the readers know this person is important. They could be the protagonist’s best friend, an old lover, or an old rival. Maybe we’re supposed to note the color of their eyes or just remember them when their dead body shows up fifty pages from now. We don’t know yet why they’re important because the story’s just beginning. But when the writer takes the time to give us someone’s name and what they look like, that’s a sign to us we need to remember this person. They’re an actual character.

As such, a horrible mistake beginning writers tend to make is when they name and describe everyone. Every single person on the page gets a name, age, body type, ethnicity, and a quick (or not so quick) personal history. This is great for your main character, but it really sucks for the waitress who’s just saying “your drink, sir,” and putting a glass on the table.

The problem is that naming everyone clutters the story with characters. Yes, characters are great and they really make your writing. You can’t have good writing without good characters. However, pointless characters just drag on a story. As the reader, I’m trying to keep track of the important people and getting bombarded with the unimportant ones. An excess of characters is like that lady on the sinking ship who keeps insisting she needs to bring all fifty items of luggage into the lifeboat. All we really need to get moving is to get her in the lifeboat, but as long as she’s taking her time with hatboxes, makeup cases, and steamer trunks we’re not going anywhere.

Did you catch that? The sentence where I listed out all the types of luggage was kind of clumsy, wasn’t it? Because we don’t need to know all that. Your mind trips over it because, as an experienced reader, you instinctively know it’s not that relevant.

In his book Creating Short Fiction (check out the carousel at the bottom of the page) Damon Knight explains that a fact we don’t know is information, but a fact we already know is just noise. I’d add to that by saying a fact we don’t need to know is also noise, it just takes a bit longer to recognize it.

This mistake is lethal in scripts. Would you spend a full paragraph describing that waitress in so much detail in a novel? Then why would you do it in a screenplay, where the object is to make your writing as lean and tight as possible? Think about it. One hundred and fifty words spent on the hopes and dreams and legs of the cute waitress is 150 words you don’t get to spend on your main character. Or on that climactic action scene. So why waste those words on someone who doesn’t matter? There’s a reason people in film production refer to those folks as “background” or “extras,” and not as cast members. If we know she’s a cute waitress, that’s all we need to know.

Can you imagine reading the lobby scene in The Matrix if every person was named and described? The four cops at the metal detector when Neo and Trinity walk in. The two dozen guards who come filing out into the lobby. The whole scene would drag like nobody’s business. It’d be four pages of description before Neo even pulled out his second set of guns. Sure, maybe those guys have wives, kids, rich lives, and a lot of that, but for the purposes of this story they’re just there to catch a lot of bullets and a few kicks from Trinity. The screenwriters of The Matrix knew that none of those guys mattered, which is why that scene is barely half a page long.

And, yes, I used to do this myself. Remember Theresa? She existed for no other purpose but to overhear the start of a phone conversation. We never saw her before. We never saw her again. When I removed her from The Suffering Map it didn’t even cause a ripple. She was nothing more than a clever way to get into the scene and fill an extra two pages. Once I realized that, I knew she had to go.

It’s not just excess characters, though. Any decription can be rich and lush and vivid, but what it will be, no question, is a pause in the story. A big description means a big pause and a big pause gives me time to wonder if I should be doing the laundry rather than reading. Do we need to know exactly what this apartment looks like? Every detail of how Yakko is dressed? Each line and panel and rivet of that armored exo-skeleton? The readers are going to fill in a lot of that for themselves, so if you’re spending time doing it--especially on elements that have no real bearing on the story--you’re just shooting your writing in the foot.

Now some folks might argue that such elaborate descriptions of every character, major and minor, is what makes writing great. To a small extent, they are right. To a far larger extent, they’re wanking off. Leonardo wasn’t scared of painting empty space when it was needed. Shakespeare knew sometimes a soldier was just a soldier and a crowd didn’t need to be anything more than a crowd. If you think you’ve got a better sense of art than them, knock yourself out.

When you write, make sure you’re focused on the foreground, and not spending your time and energy and pages on those distracting background elements.

Next week, something a bit more definitive. I’m going to prattle on something the reader should never, ever see in your writing.

Until then, go write.

Oh, The Humanity!

Historical reference, just to be different. Although awful things with zeppelins isn't the greatest parallel for what I wanted to talk about. Plus I understand that airship pilots (of which there are ten in the whole world) get really testy if you bring up the Hindenberg...

Anyway, what I'd like to prattle on about this week is balloons. Y'know... those things that get bigger and bigger and finally explode.

It's not uncommon for a writer to want to take an idea a little further. To turn that short story into a novella, that novella into a full-fledged book, or those two or three clever scenes into a feature-length screenplay. We're all creative people. It's what we do.

Plus, let's be honest. Sometimes it just needs to be longer. We need another 5,000 words to hit a publisher's minimum or maybe ten more pages to get this producer interested.

Now, the way most people try to expand their stories is by adding words. Sounds kind of obvious, I know, but there's a catch. These folks mistake adding words for adding substance. Often, the words being added bulk up the manuscript but don't actually add anything to it. They're just putting back in all that stuff that was already edited out for being unnecessary.

It's easy to explain this with a visual aid. Ready?

Picture a large balloon. A good-sized one. Pretend I wrote a short story on this balloon. Got that? Now it's easy to make the story bigger, yes? Just inflate the balloon until it's twice as big. We've all done something like this at some point, so it's still easy to picture, yes?

Have I actually made the story bigger, though? It's just the same ink forming the same story, now spread thin. In fact, since I filled it with... well, hot air, the story's gotten a bit insubstantial for its size. It's tough to read because it covers so much space and we can actually see through it at points.

If you've got a solid, edited story, you've already let all that hot air out. The story on the balloon is compact and dark, if you get my meaning.

Here's a few quick, easy ways to spot a balloon...

Giving more description is a typical way of ballooning a manuscript. You throw in a few more adjectives or adverbs or a few more clever metaphors about how Phoebe looks like Angelina Jolie's hot little blonde sister or something. What's going on here, though, is all those cuts the writer made during editing are being reversed, just like I mentioned above. The unnecessary stuff is getting added back in and... well, that just doesn't make sense.

Close to this is when the story's revisiting the same idea again and again. Let's have another example in the story of how clueless Yakko can be. Or perhaps yet another scene of slackjawed, stammering men which shows us how stunning Dot is. Maybe one more sequence where Wakko demonstrates how awesomely powerful and badass he is. Besides being a variation of the description problem above, belaboring a point like this gets dull fast. Anyone who wants a dull story, raise your hand now.

Then please leave.

Extending action sequences is another way writers sometimes balloon a story. I mentioned a while back that action (in my opinion) shouldn't take much longer to read than it would take to do or watch. But an easy way to fill space is to decribe the history behind that perfect jodan zuki the ninja throws which connects with Yakko's jaw. Then I can describe the excruciating pain as one of Yakko's molars (which he got two fillings in as a boy and almost had pulled but his father insisted he had to keep his teeth as long as possible) gets smashed loose and the coppery taste of blood fills his mouth even as the impact of the strike twists his head around and... well, you get the idea. Does it really take that long to hit someone in the face? Can you imagine if every punch, strike, kick, or gunshot took that long? Dear God, the elevator scene in The Matrix would be longer than Atlas Shrugged.

So, that's a few easy ways not to expand your story. But how should you?

Well, like so many things in this field, that's a bit harder to say. A key thing to remember is expanding something often involves changing it. If your 7,500 word story is structured a certain way, the structure will probably have to alter when the story becomes 10,000 words. If it becomes 35,000 words it'll have to change a lot. If you're determined to keep the structure exactly the same, you're probably going to have a lot of trouble making your manuscript bigger.

Another easy rule of thumb-- you shouldn't be adding things that don't need to be there. So if you want to add a quirky conversation about "the first time," angel hair pasta, or who got beat up more as a kid, there needs to be a reason for this conversation to take place.

Just to be clear, "boosting the word count" is not a viable reason.

Y'see, Timmy, if you want to expand a story you can't add hot air--you need to add actual material. You want a bigger balloon, not the same balloon puffed up to look bigger.

Some quick examples...

--Throw an additional character into the mix. It could change relationships, action, pacing, all sorts of stuff. And add to all of these as well.

--Change someone's motivation. Not everyone walks to the grocery store for the same reason after all. Yeah, maybe Wakko is helping out because he's a decent guy, but maybe he's doing it to try to make up for something he did years ago. This could change how he reacts to things, his exact actions, and maybe what's a desirable ending for him.

--Make a new goal. A short story is generally A to B, maybe even C. So stop trying to cram in A 1/2 or B 3/4. Have your story go on to D, E, and maybe all the way to X.

And then, when you've made this change (or these changes), go over your new, larger story and polish it again.

There's a chance I might miss next week as I rush to meet a bunch of deadlines for Creative Screenwriting. But please check in and perhaps we'll talk for a spell, as they used to say.

Until then, go write.

Being Punctual

Dellman, your nose was on time but you were fifteen minutes late.

Pop culture reference for old people.

So, I said way back at the beginning of the ranty blog that I wasn't going to bother with the absolute basics. I was not going to discuss grammar, proper formatting, or page counts. These are the absolute basics of writing, the grade-school stuff. If you're reading this, I'm going under the assumption you already know the correct way how to string a handful of words together into a coherent sentence.

All that being said, I'm going to take a moment to talk about three punctuation issues that are probably the most common ones that get misused, overused, or not used enough.

Apostrophes -- I've mentioned this a few times before, but I'm going to bring it up again. The apostrophe has nothing to do with plurals. Nothing! Say it with me. No-thing. Using it for plurals will get your novel, script, or short story tossed almost immediately. You'll get one pass on the off-chance it was a typo or fluke mistake. The second time your manuscript goes in the big pile in the left. It's a sure-fire sign you haven't mastered the basics of writing, so why should a reader go further? Would you trust a mechanic to rebuild your transmission when he's baffled by how to check the oil?

On a similar note-- its and it's. If you don't know the difference, stop writing query letters or downloading contest entry forms. You're just wasting time and money. Know the difference between these two. It can't be something you're pretty sure of or something you can figure out. You have to know this. It should be unconscious and automatic.

The Exclamation Point-- This is an easy one, right? You use it for emphasis. Problem is, many beginning writers don't know when to use emphasis. They think if this is an exciting moment or a loud moment or an important moment, it needs to be emphasized!

Of course, most of the moments in your story are important. If they weren't, you probably would've cut them already, right? Which is why some people feel free to scatter exclamation points throughout their action scenes or their shouted dialogue or their urgent reveals.

This kind of ties back to something I said a while back about using cool lines in dialogue. If every line is cool, none of them stand out and the dialogue is monotonous. The same holds true here-- the more things are emphasized, the fewer of them carry actual emphasis. An exclamation point needs to be applied with care and thought. Just because someone's shouting they don't necessarily need one. They're also not required for all angry dialogue.

Personally, I try to think of them like adverbs. Use them, but use them sparingly, and more in dialogue than prose. I almost never use an exclamation point outside of dialogue. To be honest, I can't remember the last time I did. I think the last time I poked at a screenplay, I may have used two.

There's a related point for screenwriters. In scripts it's common to capitalize something in the action blocks that's important. For example, the first time we see WAKKO, his name is capitalized so the reader understands without question that this is a new character. When, out of nowhere, Wakko suddenly STABS his partner, that gets emphasized to make sure the reader registers the abruptness of it. Same thing if Wakko finds A SMOKING GUN on the floor by a puddle of blood, we want to be sure the importance of this sight is noted.

A common rookie mistake, by the way, is to capitalize such things in dialogue. Capitals in dialogue blocks means someone is shouting, and few things look as silly or as bad as coming across a character talking with his friend about how much he'd like to ask PHOEBE out on a date.

Now, here's the catch to this. Much like with the exclamation point, a writer has to know how often to use these capitals. If they start cropping up in every action block--even if it's an action script--they have less and less power. After a while they aren't an emphasizing, they're distracting. Wakko stabbing his partner is unexpected and needs that extra emphasis. Wolverine or Jason Voorhees stabbing someone... not so much.

I read a nice little gangster script a year or so back that started grating because the screenwriter emphasized every single gunshot. Every time someone fired there was a BANG. I'd fire twice and there would be BANG-BANG. Then you shoot back at me BANG BANG BANG. I got you BANG but there's another guy up on the landing shooting down at me BANG BANG. Stay down, I'll draw his fire. BANG BANG BANG. He shoots back BANG BANG...

As you can see, this gets old really fast. Can you imagine the lobby scene in The Matrix if that script was written this way?

Choose your emphasis the way you would choose your battles.

By the way, one last point. The all-caps thing was much more common in the past. If you're seeing it in a lot of old scripts (or hearing it as advice from a lot of old gurus), just be aware that it's no longer the convention, and hasn't been for almost two decades now.

The Oxford Comma-- This last one will be a sticky point and I'm sure it will get the comments section flowing. Debate over the use of the serial comma, also popularly known as the Oxford comma, has started two wars since Magna Carta, and countless minor skirmishes. They teach it in school, but most modern publications in America make a point of not using it. Oddly enough, I hear it's the exact opposite in Great Britain, where they teach kids not to use it, but journalists insist on it.

I am of the school that you should use one. As a writer, my job is clarity, and while less punctuation might make my work feel like a slightly faster read, it also makes it less clear.

Here's a great example of why you need an Oxford comma.

"Let's split up. Shaggy, Scooby, Daphne and Velma, pick a door and see where it leads."

How many groups did those meddling kids just split up into, three or four? Would you be caught off guard when, in the next chapter, you found Daphne alone? Or when you find her with Velma? You've probably heard of the apocryphal legal battles that result from wills written this way, when the inheritance is supposed to be split evenly between Tom, Dick and Harry. Does it get split two ways or three?

Here's another one.

I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

Either this author has a spectacular lineage or he dropped a comma he really shouldn't have. Is the existing comma separating items in a list? Or is it an implied breath, a pause replacing the understood words who are named in that sentence? In this case, we're probably safe saying Ayn Rand and God are not the author's parents. But suppose it was my book and I had this.

I dedicate this book to my parents, David and Colleen.

Is it still so clear? It is to me. My parents supported and encouraged me, my friend David offered a great deal of fantastic editorial advice, and Colleen is the love of my life. How could this dedication possibly be misunderstood?

This is my main argument for using the Oxford comma. Y'see Timmy, there aren't any optional rules in grammar. There isn't a single punctuation mark where the rule is "use it if you think you need it." Either the mark goes there or it doesn't. Since we can come up with solid examples where the comma must be there for clarity, but there aren't any examples where it can't be there without causing confusion (I've yet to see one, at least), you have to go with using it.

Now, because it is a hotly debated matter, let me say this...

If you are absolutely, 100%, stake-your-life-on-it sure that the sentence could not in a million years ever be interpreted another way if that comma wasn't there...

...and you are entirely, with the sum of all your being convinced that having the comma there utterly destroys the flow of your sentence to the point its meaning is lost...

...then, and only then, should you feel free not to include it.

By the way, if a particular editor (who wants to buy your work) chooses to remove the Oxford comma, that's their prerogative. Don't argue with them. It doesn't mean they're right, but they're paying you after all. Heck, the magazine I write for tends to remove them.

And I continue to use them.

Next week it'll almost be Valentine's Day. So we could talk about love and feelings and relationships. Or we could skip straight to the sex. Which do you think will get more readers?

While you ponder that, go write.

Getting in on the Action

Well, since not one of you voted last week, I got to seize power again and decide what to rant about this week with no input or opinions. Viva Democracy! The system works!

So, speaking of things working, action can mean a bunch of things. It can be Yakko finally getting a backbone and standing up to his abusive boss. It can be Wakko fighting off cyborg ninjas from the future. It can be Dot running from a serial killer deep in the forest one night because she was doing naughty things at summer camp.

We all want to do cool action, because it's fun and it's memorable and it makes producers think "this would look great on the big screen-- give that writer a quarter-million dollars!" But most of us have probably read a book or three with painful action descriptions, and any script reader can tell you about the dozens they dropped because the action scenes were sleep-inducing at best.

Probably the most common problem I see with action is a desire to put in all the action. Every single instant of it. Every gunshot, every punch, each flail of the legs as someone tries to climb up a cliff, and all the individual roars of an angry dinosaur.

Thing is, too much detail slows action down. It can be the most amazing bit of kung fu fighting ever, but each time the writer pauses to describe the harsh open-palm strike which is blocked with a swift overhand block which rolls over the wrist and into a hold to create an opening for two quick punches, one to the face, one to the... man, that should be half a second of fighting, but it's two lines here. That is one slooow, overwritten fight.

Putting in all the action also tends to get messy from a vocabulary point of view. Bad enough the writer is putting in all seventy punches, but they also know that seeing "punch" seventy times on the page is going to get dull. So suddenly the combatants are punching, hitting, striking, whamming, banging, thrusting, pounding, blasting... It starts feeling needlessly complex, and yes, you should also notice that it starts sounding vaguely pornographic as well.

Now, compare all that to this...

Their hands were a blur of strikes, blocks, and counterstrikes.

I didn't give as much information, but I did convey a much faster, intense scene, and with far fewer words. Fewer words means a faster read, which means a faster fight.

In my mind, action is a lot like character descriptions. You want to give broad strokes and only use fine details when absolutely necessary. Let the reader fill in a lot of it-- because odds are they will anyway.

Action, by it's very nature, is usually fast, so use this as a rule of thumb. If something is only taking a few moments to happen in your story, it should only take a few moments to read. If there's an important detail that will matter later in the story, sure, add it in. But otherwise, keep it clean and simple.

Another key note... it has to be possible for the reader to visualize the action. One screenplay I read a while back had gladiatorial games where one man was pitted against three hundred. It actually said that in the script-- "Now he fights 300 men with just his sword." This was going on in the background, for the record.

Gigantic action scenes involving a hundred thousand people are cool, but they're hard for someone to keep in their mind. That's why such huge battles tend to concentrate on smaller, individual conflicts. In Tolkien's The Two Towers, thousands fight at Helm's Deep, but we're mostly concerned with Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas. When Dan Abnett writes about the Tanith First and Only on a battlefront, he tends to focus on Gaunt, Mkoll, or Rawne, not on the regiment as a whole. Saving Private Ryan is about World War Two, but it's mainly about this one small unit of soldiers.

Visualizing can also be a common knowledge problem. It's cool that the author knows all the Japanese names for every kick, punch, strike, and block from each of fifteen fighting styles... but does the reader know them? Do they need to? From an audience point of view, it there a huge difference between a hail of bullets from an M-16 and the spray of lead from an AK-47? Anything that makes your readers pause to consider what's going on is slowing down the action and it's breaking the flow of your writing. Especially watch for this in genre material, where writers can be making up completely unique weapons and fighting styles. It's great that Nimwadda is a Zonbovac master with his gwerttig, but it's a lot easier to visualize if I'm told he's a world champion axe-fighter... even if it's a special goblin axe.

A special note for screenwriters. A lot of action stuff gets redone on set, for a variety of reasons. Time is one. Money's another. Plus, let's face it... most stunt coordinators have a better idea how to set up a cool-looking fight on screen than most writers do. That's their job, after all. They're also keenly aware of what's possible-- and what's safe-- for the stunt teams and actors to do. I heard a funny story from the live action Spawn movie, about the petulant writer/ director who was angry a stuntman wouldn't do one stunt sequence he'd blocked out... because it almost certainly would kill the stuntman.

In a screenplay, worry about setting the mood and tone of an action sequence more than a shot-by-shot description of the sequence itself. The swordfights in The Princess Bride have a very different tone than the ones in Highlander. The slugfests in Rocky are not like the ones in Hellboy. Skim over the action itself, just make it clear what kind of fight it is, which way it's going, and who wins.

As an example, let's look at the lobby battle in The Matrix. Neo steps through the metal detector wearing a hundred guns he borrowed from his grandfather's arsenal and then it's mass carnage. From the moment we see Neo's boots coming out of the revolving door to the moment he and Trinity step into the elevator is almost precisely three minutes, fifteen seconds of bullets, karate, acrobatics, and aggressive redecorating.

How long is it in the script?

About half a page. Ten lines.

Neo and Trinity walk in, he guns down the guards. More guards come, they're gunned down, and our two heroes continue on their way, cool as ice. That's it.

However, it's still okay to note key elements of a sequence. In The Princess Bride, we need to know that Inigo and the Man in Black both switch hands during their swordfight, but we don't need to know which steps their blades clash on as they work their way up the staircase. Watch a couple films with elaborate action sequences, like Equilibrium, Brotherhood of the Wolf, or even (dare I say it) Attack of the Clones. There are long stretches of action, but what stands out? What catches your eye? Remember the "hallway of death" in Equilibrium? We remember the auto-loaders in Cleric's sleeves, his roll onto the "weeble" clips, and him kicking up the rifle near the end. There's a lot more to the scene than that, but that's all you'd need to focus on.

So that's where the action is, if you'll pardon the pun. And if you won't, well... you should've voted when you had the chance.

Next week, we bring on the bad guys and talk about why John Saxon never got to play a good screen villain, but Alan Rickman did.

Until then, take action. And go write.

Don't Get Me Wrong

Several months back a friend of mine was celebrating her birthday in the usual way (with too much alcohol and far too much karaoke) and I got to catch up with a couple of friends I haven't seen in ages. Contrary to everything Castle has taught us, most working writers don't have tons of free time, and as such I'm lucky if I get out socially once every two months or so.

We were batting around random stories about the film industry and one of my friends made a comment about last year's WGA Strike (you may have heard about it). Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was Laura belting out Cake's "Short Skirt/ Long Jacket" up on stage, or maybe it was just a poorly-emphasized word. Needless to say, I heard an insult and I snapped back a sharp defense of the writers and the strike.

My friend threw up his hands. "Dude," said he, "you totally took that the wrong way. That is not what I meant." Yes, he actually said dude.

I looked back over his chosen words, realized the good-natured joke he'd tried to make, and shamefacedly bought the next round as an apology for verbally leaping at him.

The lesson here is twofold. One, always make sure you can afford to buy a round if you go out with friends. Two, if it's that easy to misinterpret someone's words in person, face to face, imagine how easy it is to do on the page.

Getting misunderstood is sort of the core flaw of all bad writing. I thought this character looked smart, you think he looks like an idiot. I consider this bit action-packed, you consider it to be chaotic. I felt like the message was clear, you found it to be a muddled mess. Part of this is an empathy issue, but often it's just a matter of clumsy writing.

Here are a few easy things to check on in your own work to make sure the reader is thinking the same thing you are. Or at least, what you want them to be thinking...

Spelling - I know, I know. I never give up on the spelling Probably because it's the most common problem I see. I'm not talking about random typos, but words people have just plain spelled wrong or used incorrectly. Know the difference between plane and plain, their and there, corporeal and corpulent. You don't want your mad scientist to unleash a deadly plaque upon the world, one that will cause mass history.

Alas, there is only one way to beat this. Shut off your spell-checker, pick up a dictionary, and learn how to spell all these words you're using. Sorry.

Grammar - The British comedian Benny Hill (best known in the US as that late-night guy with the awe-inspiring Hill's Angels) had a recurring skit about actors who muddled their lines because of an unpunctuated script. Usually they'd end up delivering such zingers as "What's that up in the road--a head?" or the beautiful woman who asks her partner "What is this thing called, love?" One of my personal favorites as of late was a dedication that read "This book is for my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

Commas, capitalization, verb-noun agreement-- none of these were made up because editors had nothing better to do one afternoon. They make sure a reader knows precisely what the writer means. Which is why the writer needs to know precisely how to use them. Remember, it doesn't matter if it makes sense to you. It needs to make sense to an absolute stranger looking at it for the first time.

Common knowledge - One frustrating thing most of us have probably encountered (I know I have) is when a term comes up in a story that the characters all understand but we, the readers, don't. It could be a joke, a reference, or maybe even a key plot element. Point is, if the reader doesn't know what the writer's referring to, it's just a stumbling block that will knock them out of the story.

If you're using a term for a certain effect, make sure it's a term most people know so it can achieve that effect. If I'm told "she's as mean as a Catachan puffball," does that mean she's vicious or is it sarcasm? How many times can my characters refer mysteriously to "Omega" before the reader decides to fold laundry or make lunch? Before you answer, consider this-- we're barely twenty minutes into The Matrix when Morpheus begins to explain the mystery of what the Matrix is.

Sarcasm - We all know sarcasm. As mentioned above, it's when someone says one thing but means another-- sometimes the exact opposite. This can go wrong in real life, so on the page it can be a killer. It can be especially rough in screenplays, which are often so stripped-down that the reader has to make up a lot of the context on their own. If sarcasm is read wrong on the page, it can send the reader down a false path, and once they realize they're on a false path... well, there's that large pile on the left.

Be careful using sarcasm too soon in a story. Make sure the reader knows the characters before you risk confusing them.

Language barrier - I mentioned this a while back as a common script problem, but it happens in prose as well. Even when two countries have a shared language, there are colloquial terms that vary. Boot, bonnet, pasties, Macintosh, rubber-- all these words mean one thing in the UK and something very different in the US.

Know who your readers are and make sure you've adjusted your vocabulary appropriately. Through the wonders of social networks and message boards, most of us know at least one person in another country. If you know someone who's part of your target audience, ask them to take a look at your writing.

Double meanings – This one's kind of close to the language barrier. There are a lot of words and phrases that can mean one thing in one context, but something entirely different in another. Which means when there's not much context, they became dangerously vague. When my boss tells me she's got an opening that needs to be filled, is she hitting on me or asking if I know anyone who's not working? What if I see a couple birds twittering in a tree? Are they making noises or social networking? Is that antique ring something wicked (uber cool) or something wicked (pure evil)?

This ties back to vocabulary (which ties back to spelling). A writer has to know what a word means, and also what it could mean. If not, there will be more confusion. And that path leads to pain, suffering, and laundry.

So, there are six quick tips that might help achieve a bit more clarity in your writing. Or at least make sure it's muddled in all the right places.

Next time I'd like to talk about going from A to B. Or from B to A. You can go both ways, really. We don't judge here.

Until then, you need to go write. Clearly.