The Lesson of Flashdance

Oh, hey everyone. What's new with you? Anything cool going on?

I’ve had this idea on the backburner for... well, a few years now, but now that I’ve got a handle on it, I’d like to talk to you about one of the most important creative-arts films of the 1980s.

You read the title, so I’m pretty sure you can guess where I'm going with this.

Quick sum up, for those of you who’ve never seen Flashdance. Alex is an eighteen-year-old welder who dreams of being a professional dancer and makes side money as a... what would we call it? Exotic dancer? A non-nude provocative dancer. She’s got a friend who wants to be a professional ice skater and another one who wants to be a comedian. Alex also has a boyfriend who’s twice her age and also her boss at the steel mill, and there’s a lot to unpack there.

Actually, there’s so much to unpack in that relationship  it’s what a lot of reviews will focus on. That and, weirdly enough, how unrealistic it is someone could be a professional welder at eighteen in a union town. Probably the same people who complain about how lightsabers work and about how the military sets look in zombie movies.

Getting off topic. Sorry. Anyway...

In my opinion, those issues distract from the actual story, which—if you think about it—is a much more ‘90s story about a trio of young, aspiring performers all looking to break into their chosen fields. We’ve seen a few versions of that, yes? If we look at Flashdance in that light, what’s the story about?

Well, we have our trio of aspiring artistic friends. Alex gets a chance to audition for an exclusive dance conservatory and gets nervous and leaves without auditioning. Her friend enters an ice skating competition and fails (kinda horribly). Her other friend gets a chance to do his comedy routine at an open night mic and bombs (also horribly), but then he decides to move to LA where there are more comedy clubs to try performing at. Meanwhile, Alex’s boyfriend gets her another chance to audition for the conservatory and... she comes up with another excuse to not audition.

Seeing the pattern here? One of these things is not like the other. In this trio of aspiring artists, the other two are failing, but it’s only because they’re actually trying. Alex is the one who won’t take any risks. She’d rather stay in her safe, small pond where she’s a superstar rather than find out she’s not good enough to go higher. That’s her story—working up the courage to try. Because until she does that, nothing else changes. She stays where she is.

This happens to a lot of us in the arts. We get nervous about if we’re good enough and talk ourselves out of doing more. We can’t get rejected—we can’t fail—if we never put ourselves out there, right? Heck, there are even some folks who’ll twist failure into some sort of victory. “Yeah, I got rejected, but that just proves my writing’s too good for the homogenized publishing industry!”

As I’ve mentioned before, though, rejection’s just part of the process. Failure is how we learn and sharpen our craft. And we can’t fail if we never try to do more, to push ourselves higher. So if I’ve never failed... maybe it means I’ve just been playing it safe and not doing enough. Maybe it means, on some level, I stopped.

Y’see, Timmy, we need to push ourselves. We need to keep at it. Even when we get rejected. Even when someone says our chosen genre sucks. Even when they say our writing sucks. Like any art, the only way to improve is to keep doing it. To keep challenging ourselves again and again and again.

Ray Bradbury once said the only way you fail is if you stop writing. Which is the short form of this. So yes, I could’ve called this "the lesson of Bradbury," but half of you wouldn’t’ve paid attention.

Next time, I’d like to talk about why you rarely see a good writer.

Until then, go write.

Recycling

So, I wanted to blather on about something that seems to come up now and then.  I’m guessing for at least three out of four of you, this is going to seem kinda obvious.  But for that other person... you may really need to hear this.  No matter which direction you’re approaching it from.

I’m a big fan of recycling. Fan’s probably not even the right word. It just seems like a no brainer to me. Why wouldn’t you do it? Why would someone be against it? We recycle our glass and plastic. We compost a lot of our food waste and cardboard and even some old clothes. Yeah, you can compost old clothes.  Weird, I know.

We reuse and repurpose a lot of stuff, too. That comes out of, well, being poor.  Even though I’m on a much better footing these days, financially, I still try to reuse things. We never broke the habit of using those spaghetti sauce mason jars as glasses. Half our Tupperware is take-out containers. And I still look at frozen pizza boxes as potential tanks.

What’s odd, though, is a certain subset of folks who’ll mock you for doing this with your writing.

I’ve brought up many, many times the need to cut manuscripts.  We write so much stuff that gets trimmed away.  Clever bits of descriptions.  Cool dialogue.  Sometimes whole scenes, subplots, or even whole characters. When it comes time to hone and focus that first draft, all these things can fall under the editorial knife.

Now, weird as this may sound—like I said, for most of you this is going to sound bizarre, but—some people think this cut material’s gone for good. It’s been deleted. Even if some record still exists, it’s unusable now. Toxic. Radioactive. It’s somehow been tainted forever.

I think a lot of this comes from people who lean a little too heavily on the art side of writing. Oddly enough... the ones who don’t write that much.  They get a little too focused on the idea and the craft and the ART of it. I put these words together in this way for this story.  I didn’t use them like that or like that, and so pulling them out and putting them somewhere else would just be wrong.  It’s not what I first intended.  It’s not what those phrases were created to do.

If I listen to those folks too much... or maybe if I am one of those folks (it’s okay, admitting it is the first step)... I probably have a somewhat shallow view of recycled material.  Those dialogue exchanges that I cut, or that subplot or character... they’re not going to work anywhere else.  I’m not being artistically honest or something like that.  How could a character crafted for story A possibly work in story B? Dialogue that I’d intended for X just shouldn’t work coming out of Y’s mouth, especially if Y’s in a completely different book.

And if I do try it and it does work... well, that just says something about me, doesn’t it?  I probably don’t know what I’m doing. My writing must be pretty thin and generic if I can just pluck some material from here and drop it in over there.  I’m probably lazy as hell in other aspects of my life, too.

If you happen to be the one out of four who thinks this... sorry.  It just isn’t true.  In any way.  Just in case my tone wasn’t carrying through.

Of course I can repurpose material. Artists have done it throughout history.  We jot down notes for one thing and end up using them for another.  We cut from that and then repurpose it for this.  Exchanges of dialogue. Neat ways to describe something.  Maybe a whole scene of morning-after awkwardness or a supporting character who got nixed for space.

Granted, none of this is going to slide right in without a bit of work and some tweaks.  I’m probably going to have to change a few proper nouns, and possibly a few personal pronouns, too.  Maybe an adjective or three.  That’s just the nature of such things. But it’s still absolutely fine to use it.

And honestly, because it’s older stuff I didn’t use before... I may have improved since I first wrote it (hopefully I have). That was a great bit back then, but y’know, if I just did this it’d be fantastic.  Or maybe he seemed like a good character for back then, but now I realize this should all really be centered around her.

I’ve got a book coming out later this summer/early fall called Terminus (that’s probably what we’re calling it), and it’s got a discussion between two characters I’ve been trying to use for almost eight years now. Seriously. I had to cut it from another book, but it’s got some great character stuff and I’ve always wanted to use it. Terminus finally gave me a great place where it could fit. And, yeah, it needed some adjustment to fit in this story with these characters at this point in the overall story. But it’s still 80-85% the same and I think folks are going to love it when they read it.

Still not convinced? Are you one of those one out of four who’s ready to pop down to the comments and point out I'm one of those lazy hacks who barely qualifies as a real writer?

How about Ray Bradbury? Is he a lazy hack? Most of Fahrenheit 451 is recycled ideas, after all. Bradbury had already used the firemen (the book burning ones) in a bunch of different short stories.  They even show up in The Martian Chronicles.  He'd also done longer stories about book burning and corpse-burning (seriously).  The spider-like Mechanical Hound is from an old short story he’d never finished.  There it‘s a law-enforcement tool used by sheriffs and police. He lifted the entire description, almost word for word, and dropped it into 451, along with some dialogue about it. Heck, the whole book is an expanded version of his short story "The Fireman" which he expanded into a novella and then expanded again into a full book.

And he's not alone. Lots of writers have files of material they had to cut. And they're always trying to find that material a new home.

Y’see, Timmy, yeah, writing is an art. But like every kind of art, the “how I do it” is entirely up to me. My manuscript might be pristine and pure and new. It might make Frankenstein look like somebody with a small appendectomy scar. But honestly, none of that matters. The only thing that matters is the manuscript I have at the end. Does it flow? Are the characters believable?  Is the plot interesting? Does the dialogue ring true?

Then it’s good.  And that’s all that matters.

Next time... okay, to be terribly honest, next time is the day before my birthday. One of those milestone, “we should make note of this” birthdays. What I’m saying is, I’m probably going to be drunk. Which means I’ll end up talking about Godzilla or something.

Until then... go write.

Why Do I Do This, Anyway...?

            Joyous arbitrary point in the solar orbit!  Or, as some people like to say, Happy New Year!  Hope 2018 hasn’t been too rough on you so far.

            At the start of the year I try to scribble out something about why I keep writing this ranty blog week after week (sometimes twice a week) for year after year (over ten years now).  It’s not like I’ve got thousands of fans checking this page all the time.  Heck, I see the numbers.  The average post here barely gets 200 views, and I’m willing to bet a good handful of those are bots looking to drop some spam links about great opportunities mining bitcoins or something like that...

            Please don’t get me wrong.  It’s not that I don’t appreciate the eyes I get. I’m honestly amazed by the half-dozen or so of you who’ve reading these rants for years now. Since long before I was considered any kind of pro.

            But let’s be honest.  If you added it all up, I probably put 80-100 hours a year into this blog.  I could write a third of a novel in that time—a novel I’d probably get paid for. Heck, that’s three other books I could’ve written in the years I’ve spent here.

            Hardly the best use of my time.

            Sooooo... why?

            Well, for a long time (and still sometimes) it came from frustration.  It’s annoying to watch a movie or read a book and see people make basic storytelling mistakes.  Not “oh, I didn’t like that choice”—full-on mistakes.

          And I see a lot of them because, in my self-flagellating way (oh, get your mind out of the gutter), I tend to watch a lot of B-movies.  Because I believe people can learn at least as much from the bad stuff as the good stuff.  Possibly more from the bad stuff (think of it as a literary Anna Karenina principle, odd as that sounds).  So I watch the B-movies, break down problems, and then rant about them here when I spot recurring patterns of mistakes.

            Writing these posts also helps me figure out stuff, to some extent.  I’ve approached some problems in my own writing from the angle of “how would I explain this on the ranty blog” (sort of like going to the doctor and saying “I’ve got this friend who’s been having, y’know... problems...”).  And once I’ve figure out a way to avoid a problem, I like to share it with all of you and the bitcoin bots.

            But there’s one simple reason I do it.  The same reason I look forward to doing the Writers Coffeehouse every month over at Dark Delicacies

            I wish there’d been something like this when I started out.

            Seriously, back in those heady days (when half the writers were shrieking about how papyrus was going to mean the death of clay tablets and anyone who didn’t adapt immediately was soooooo Old Kingdom) it was tough to come across decent writing advice.  Of the four fiction-writing instructors I had between high school and college, one was fantastic, two were okay, and one was just bad (as a teacher and especially as a writing teacher).  There were only two writing magazines that were easily accessible (and I say this as a college student whose campus had a huge newsstand).  The internet at this point was pretty much just six trained ravens, at least three of which were out at any give time carrying messages and they always made that horrible screeeeEEEEEEEEEchhhhhhhh...

            Anyway...

            The idea a professional writer would toss out advice at random was just mind boggling to me.  Even when I got in touch with a few, like Ray Bradbury or Lloyd Alexander, the fact that they responded clearly had to be the exception, not the rule.  And I still see that mindset today—that pro writers are these crabby, closed off people who clawed their way to this point in their career and will scare off anyone who tries to take their perch from them.

            That’s nonsense.  To paraphrase a friend of mine “other writers aren’t my competition.”  Writers help other writers.  We offer those little leg-ups we wish we’d gotten from the start and try to steer folks away from the bad advice we followed for too long. 

            So that’s why I do it.  Because I want to help people.  Because there isn’t much solid writing advice out there, and a lot of what there is tends to be about how to make a million dollars by self- publishing your novel about the great Bitcoin heist of 2019.  Because it’s kinda fun.

            Seriously, though... why do you keep showing up?

            Speaking of showing up, next time, I’d like to talk a little bit about them. And what they know.

            You know who I’m talking about.

            Until then, go write.

The Stakes

            Hello, all. Sorry again for the delay.  I’ve been beating myself near-senseless against this new draft, and tax stuff, and prepping for a con (Texas Frightmare in Dallas/Fort Worth—one week from now!).  Plus I got selfish and decided to sleep for three hours one night...  I think we’re going to be back for the next several weeks with no problem, though.  I just focused a lot on the new book because I feel like there’s a lot riding on it.

            Speaking of which...

            If you listen to writer-types a lot, one term you’ve probably heard a few times is the stakes.  What are the stakes? What’s at stake? Something like that.

            Every story needs stakes.  Simply put, the stakes are the possible repercussions of failure or inaction.  It’s what’s going to happen if my characters don’t succeed in their various challenges.

            This may seem a little silly to say, but generally those repercussions are bad.  A common thing we see at stake is someone’s life—or maybe many people’s lives.  Maybe it’s the protagonists, maybe it’s the life of someone else.  For a lot of summer movies it can mean the fate of the whole world.  The old school/orphanage/watering hole is another common stake.  Freedom’s one, too.  Secretes being revealed.  And there’s always money (billions of dollars at stake!).  These are all great stakes to have in a story.  It’s also not uncommon for a story to lead us in by claiming X is at stake, only to twist things a bit and let us see we’re trying to prevent a much bigger Y from happening.

            Stakes can also be internal, more about my story than my plot.  Maybe Wakko’s sense of self-worth is at stake.  Or maybe his dream of being an astronaut.  Or of getting the girl.

            (...although let’s face it. If Beth is only interested in you because you can ski the K-12, maybe she’s not really worth it.  Have you noticed that cute foreign exchange student across the street?  She seems like a much better person overall...)

            Now, this brings up a key point.  You may notice a lot of the stakes in that last paragraph are kind of small.  Minor, you might even say.  And it’s true, these are small-scale stakes—for you and me.  For Wakko, though, these stakes are huge!  And in a small, personal story that’s fine.

            See, the thing about stakes is they have to be high for my character. That’s what matters.  Yes, it’s horrible if a husband/father might die in a taxi crash in New York, but stopping it from happening is going to mean a lot more to his wife and kids than it does to me.  If we were in the position, any of us would try to stop it—we’re all decent people—but none of us is going to have that sheer need to stop it that his wife and kids would.  For them, those stakes are much bigger.

            So, hey, let’s talk about this with a shameless Marvel movie reference...

            In Ant-Man, Hank Pym has a long talk with Scott Lang where he explains the whole situation with his shrinking technology, the balance of power, and his old assistant Darren Cross.  Scott listens, then very calmly says “I think our first move should be... calling the Avengers.”  And we all laugh, because this is a perfectly reasonable thing to say in the Marvel Cinematic Universe when someone has what feels like a big problem.

            The ugly truth is, though, in a world where AI robots drop cities out of the sky and fish oil pills can bring destructive superpowers or death... Hank’s problems are kind of small scale.  No pun intended.  And when he busts Scott out of jail and gets him involved so Scott will have a chance to repair things with his ex-wife and daughter, well... it’s still pretty small.  Keeping technology from falling into the wrong hands, a jailbreak, stopping the crazy apprentice, fixing my life so I can be with my daughter... these are all small stakes, in the big scheme of things.

            Thing is, that’s exactly why they work.  It’s completely believable that Hank will be obsessed with how the technology he invented is used.  With all the problems in the world, we wouldn’t buy it if the Black Widow or Thor showed up just to save this one guy’s daughter—but it’s very believable that Scott would do anything he could for his daughter.

            Another point, kind of related to the personal aspect.  Stakes need to be believable.  As I’ve said many, many times, storytelling all comes down to characters.  If I can’t believe in what my characters are experiencing or encountering, in their motives or goals, it’s going to be really hard for me to believe in the story as a whole.  I believe in the Infinity Gem creating some very high stakes in Guardians of the Galaxy—an entire story set against a cosmic, futuristic backdrop—but that kind of nigh-omnipotent power just wouldn’t fit in Ant-Man.  The tone needs to be believable, too.  Again, cosmic vs. small and personal, epic vs. intimate.  There’ve been numerous Muppet movies with high stakes, but none where the goal is to stop a serial killer or prevent a bioterror attack.  These stakes are high, no question, but they’re just not the right tone for a story starring the Muppets.

            There’s also a time factor with stakes—there shouldn’t be enough of it.  If Yakko has a deadly disease that kills people in thirty years, bare minimum... well, that doesn’t seem that urgent.  If Wakko’s daughter is kidnapped and they say they’re not going to think of harming her for six months... well, this is bad, but we’ve got time.

            If my stories have a threat, that threat has to happen now.  Not in a year, not in a month—now.  The window of opportunity for my characters should be closing fast, because if it isn’t... well, human nature, right?  Why put it off until tomorrow when I really don’t need to worry about it until August.

            August of 2068, just to be clear.

            This brings me to another small point (again, no pun intended).  The butterfly effect doesn’t really work when it comes to stakes.  If you’re not familiar, the butterfly effect is when very small actions lead to very large repercussions.  In the classic Ray Bradbury story “A Sound of Thunder,” killing a butterfly millions of years in the past changes a time traveler’s present from a progressive, Federation-esque world to a harsh, neo-fascist one.  It’s a common idea.  Changing A will result in B, which will give us C, only one short step from D, and after D then E is inevitable.  And nobody wants E to happen.

            Nobody.

            The catch is that it can be very tough to convey that.  Stakes need to be a little more immediate and personal and not quite so “long chain of events.”  I’ve talked before about keeping things close and personal for my characters—this is that kind of thing.

            Let’s look at Ant-Man again.  One of the plot points is how much damage Hank’s technology could cause if everyone had it.  If Hydra or the Ten Rings got hold of that tech, they could kill anyone with impunity.  Armies of 1/16” assassins.  Terrifying, right?

            And yet... the story kinda brushes over this.  It’s addressed, but after that it just becomes about stopping Cross from selling the tech.  We don’t need to deal with those further-down-the-road repercussions, we just need to stop him right now.  We put a face on it, because these are the stakes that are big to Scott, Hope, and Hank.

            So, my stakes need to be big.  More importantly, big for my characters.  They need to be believable.  They also  need to be imminent.  And they need to be very direct—the more separated they are from the characters and their actions, the less impressive they’re going to be.

            Easy, right?

            Actually let me toss out one last thought on this...

            Hollywood’s convinced a lot of people that everything needs to be huge. Epic-huge!  WORLD-SHATTERING HUGE!  If the stakes don’t involve at least five billion deaths and/or seventy billion dollars, they’re not high enough.  Producers push for this all the time, so these days a lot of screenwriters (and novelists) tend to lean this way automatically...

            Thing is though, those kind of stakes can be exhausting for everyone.  The readers, the characters... even the writer.  That’s one of the other reasons Ant-Man went over well with so many folks. After all the previous Marvel movies had saved the United States from being overthrown (three times), saved mankind from extinction (twice), and even saved the whole galaxy from a would-be god... yeah, it was nice to deal with a story where the stakes were a bit smaller and more personal.  Hell, figure one of the best- selling books of the past decade—Andy Weir’s The Martian—is about saving one guy’s life. One. That’s it.

            So make sure you’ve got your stakes set.

            Next time... we’re going to talk about something we haven’t discussed in a while. Using the rite words.

            Until then... go write.

Hunger Games

            Sorry I’m running a bit late.  I’m weak from starvation.

            Did I mention I was on a diet?  I can’t complain too much, because I’ve lost seven pounds in two weeks, and it’s actually starting to show in the waist.  Still...  I wouldn’t complain if one of you slipped me some Doritos.

            Anyway...

            I’ve used food and cooking before as a metaphor for writing, and I think it’s one that works well.  What counts as good food is largely a matter of individual taste, although most of us can agree on a few key things that make food bad.   There’s also some good parallels between being a chef and being a writer.  Almost all of us can cook, but we recognize that being able to microwave hot dogs doesn’t make me a chef, just like being able to send a text message doesn’t make me a writer.  There’s also books and classes for both, but the only way to improve is to just get in there and do it—again and again and again. 

            Also dieting, like writing, is going to work different ways for different people.  I need to make a set diet and follow the rules strictly, but you might be one of those god-awful people who can eat anything you like.  Sticking to it is agony for me, but maybe you barely notice you’ve changed what you eat.

            This doesn’t mean I can alter my diet to match yours, though.  My girlfriend’s also dieting, so we’re shooting for the same basic goal, but we’re not following exactly the same path to get there.  This is the Golden Rule I mention here now and then, my one bit of guru-istic advice.  What works for me might not work for you, and it definitely won’t work for that other guy.  We all need to find what methods and habits work best for us when it comes to getting to that basic goal

            So, since starting this diet—I mentioned I was on a diet, yes?  And that I would probably be willing to harm two or three of you for some garlic bread?—it’s struck me that there’s another way food and writing are similar, and that’s in how we portion things out.

            All of us develop habits in our writing, and they tend to stick with us until we make a serious attempt to change them.  And just like eating, most of our initial habits are bad ones.  We go for the fun stuff without realizing how bad it is in large quantities.  Action.  Gore.  One-liners.  Sex.  Melodrama.

            The next step, though, is when people now take their writing (or eating) to the other extreme.  I think all of us know someone who’s borderline insane about what they eat.  They have to know every ingredient in something, the precise number of calories, the recommended daily allowance of saturated fats, the grams of protein.  Heck, some of them don’t just want to know what’s in their food, they want to know each ingredient’s pedigree.  Was the low-fat cheese made from the milk of grass-fed cows?  Was the grain in this bread mechanically threshed or hand-sifted?  And it is organic grain grown in non-chemically fertilized soils?

            Once I started getting a lot more serious about writing, I tried doing all the outlines and character sketches and charts and index cards.  I made sure every character had an extensive backstory (all of which ended up on the page), every object had an elaborate description (all of which ended up on the page), and every location had an array of smells and sounds and sights that could only come from experience and practiced observation (and they all ended up on the page).  Because I was a serious writer now.  And serious writers take writing seriously.

            Just like this diet—I mentioned I was on a diet, yes?  And that I would gleefully kill half of you for a chocolate chip cookie?—when I started writing I needed to learn what habits were good and which were bad.  What were the things I was doing all the time that were hurting more than helping?  I had to figure out what things are good, which were good in moderation, and which were just plain bad.

            I mentioned a while back that I worked with a personal trainer for a few years.  In his heyday, Jerzy was an Olympic-class weightlifter and went on to  set a world record and even win several awards for bodybuilding.  One of the keys to his success was a ruthless diet that let him get his fat levels down to minimal levels.  To be honest, dangerous levels.  Just before a tournament, Jerzy would often get his body fat below two percent.  He looked phenomenal, but it actually left him very weak because his body had no reserves whatsoever.  It had access to what was in his system right at that moment and not a scrap more.

            So the moment the tournament was over, he’d go out and get the biggest, greasiest cheeseburger he could and eat the whole thing.  Sometimes two of them.  That’s not what you’d normally consider former Olympian-weightlifter food, but Jerzy knew that once he’d reached that heights of success it was imperative that he replenished those fat levels as quickly as possible.  His health depended on it.

            Y’see, Timmy, sometimes the stuff we think of as bad isn’t just good, sometimes we need it.  Because the big secret to eating well—and writing well—isn’t extremes, it’s moderation.  Drama needs to be moderated with comedy.  Comedy needs a bit of seriousness.  Horror needs calm.  Chaos needs structure.  The great stories, the ones we really remember forever, are never all one thing. 

            Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is considered one of the greatest pieces of writing in American literature, an unparalleled drama.  Yet the book has a lot of humor in it as we see events interpreted through the eyes of young Scout, a girl who’s a few years from even touching puberty.  Christopher Moore’s Lamb is a comedy about Jesus’ older brother, Biff, which gets very grim and serious at points.  Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life are both coming of age stories with a strong horror element.  For every skin-crawling moment in Stephen King’s IT, there’s a moment of complete twelve year old goofiness.

            Did I mention one of the standard things on this diet is a cheat day?  A lot of the best diets have them, because it’s easier to stomach all the food restrictions if you get a break from them every now and then.  One day a week I’m supposed to indulge.  I get to have Doritos and garlic bread and chocolate chip cookies.  And my body will forgive me for it because I’ve established this isn’t the norm. 

            So nobody has to die for me to get a cookie.

            Not this week, anyway.

            Next week I might be a bit short on time, but I had a capital idea I wanted to share with you.
            Until then, go write.

All Good Things...

I just finished reading a trilogy co-written by a legendary sci-fi author. I’m betting it was more like “casually glanced at by,” but I guess we’ll never know. The series started out amazing, but got weaker and weaker as it went on. The final chapter randomly introduced a character who’d been mentioned once or twice and never seen. To be honest, it introduced the future/ adult version of this character. It also introduced a new setting, a new terminology, and an entire war that kind of came out of nowhere.

Cymbal crash.

Confused? Yeah, so was I. That was the end of the last book. The final line was “Cymbal crash.” I think it might be a reference to Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey but I’m not 100% sure on that. Needless to say, it didn’t leave me with a good feeling about the series.

Likewise, a few weeks back I saw a low-budget film loosely based on H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories. It had some real structure problems and the tone was all over the place. But it had a solid ending and the final scene knocked it out of the park, so I’ve recommended it to a few people.

An ending can make or break a story. They are the dessert after a feast of words. You can have the best filet mignon in the world with an exquisite wine, but if the cheesecake is slimy and bitter... well, you’re going to be walking out with a bad taste in your mouth. A so-so film with a phenomenal ending will usually get favorable reviews. A strong manuscript that spirals downward at the end will, more often than not, be tossed in the large pile on the left.

Now, while some folks are content to say “well, that sucked” and leave it at that, a storyteller has to know why something doesn’t work. Bad endings don’t all have the same root problem. Sometimes the writer had a phenomenal way to start a character arc, but wasn’t sure how to wrap it up. Or it can happen when people have a really cool idea for a story, but don’t know where to go with it past that initial idea. Sometimes an ending just doesn’t work with the rest of the story. Some endings almost never work, no matter what the rest of the story is.

Note that I said almost never. As I go over this list of failed endings, you’ll probably be able to name some books or films that use them very successfully. These endings are exceptionally difficult to pull off, though, and should be approached with extreme caution...

Nothing Changes—Let’s start with the basics. If the first fifteen pages and the last fifteen pages of a manuscript show characters in the same place, doing the same things, with the same people, and they’re not any wiser for the experience... Well, that wasn’t much of an experience, was it? For them and probably not for the readers. I’m not saying characters need to have some big emotional breakthrough or spiritual growth. There has to be something notably different, though, or this was just more wasted time.

One type of story that does this a lot is the “slice of life” tale. Just two or three average days in the life of two or three average people. Now, yes, most of our lives don’t change radically in any given moment. I’ve spent most of today here at my desk writing, just like I did yesterday and probably like I’ll be doing tomorrow. So it would be a truthful ending if a slice of life story about me had me back here at my desk.

The question you need to ask yourself is... why would anyone want to read about that? I know I sure wouldn’t. I go through a slice of life every day where nothing changes. I want to be entertained!

...And They Write a Book/ Screenplay About the Experience—I’ve mentioned once or thrice before that this is pretty much the worst ending you can have for a screenplay. It isn’t much better in a book. This is almost always a tacked on ending to assure the reader that the protagonist didn’t just survive this story—they benefited from it. Immensely. Yeah, you would think kicking drugs, reconnecting with the family, and getting the girl/boy would be enough for most folks to consider it a good week, but noooooooo... according to some writers they need acclaim and wealth and celebrity, too.

In my experience, writers tend to fall back on this ending for one of three reasons (sometimes more than one of them). One is that it falls into that silly “write what you know” tip we’ve all heard for years and years. Two is a desire to add that patina of reality to the story, thus making it more valid... somehow. Three is that it’s sort of a wish-fulfillment validation. My character writes a book about how she used to be a crack whore and it becomes an acclaimed bestseller. So, logically, my story about a character writing a story about how she used to be a crack whore should also become an acclaimed bestseller.

That there’s crazy-person logic is what that is...

Everybody Dies and the Antagonist Wins—One of the biggest problems with wrapping things up this way is it gives the reader a sense that the story was pointless. They’ve just invested a few hours (or perhaps days) of their time into this tale only to see it come to an unpleasant ending. This can be especially frustrating if the reader comes to realize the character never had a chance at accomplishing their goals. It’s even more frustrating if the characters made some foolish decisions somewhere along the way. After all, it’s bad enough when you have to watch the fifth person in a row walk through the archway marked Painful Death, but when that’s the point the writer chooses to end the story on...?

I know. It’s hard to believe that after centuries of storytelling this is still considered an unsatisfying ending.

Your protagonist doesn’t need to come through unscarred, mind you. Heck, you can even get away with killing your lead. But they need to win on some level.

The Left Fielder—Called such because it’s the ending that comes out of nowhere. The business-obsessed dad gives up his career to care for his senile mother, but then she falls in the pool and drowns. The wallflower finally gets her act together, aces her exams, gets the quarterback, is voted prom queen, and then gets hit by a bus on the last day of school. Or, as I once experienced, a ninety minute sketch comedy show which climaxes with a bleak monologue about racial inequality and prejudice.

No, seriously. I worked on a play like that once. The director rewrote the end and honestly couldn’t figure out why no one liked it.

In my experience, the vast majority of writers who use this kind of ending are trying to achieve ART. It’s an attempt to show how perfectly this story mimics a random and sometimes meaningless real world by having a random and meaningless ending. It doesn’t relate to anything that happened because it’s too real. And tragic. And artistic.

Besides suffering from all the same frustration issues as the previous ending, the left fielder just isn’t that special anymore. It’s become one of the most common conclusions in indie films and “literature.” So besides exasperating an audience, it’s an ending they’re probably going to see coming for the simple reason it wouldn’t be what they’d expect.

There is nothing wrong or pedestrian about putting the right ending on a story. As I’ve mentioned before, nobody got hit by a train at the end of Slumdog Millionaire and it was still a good film.

The Y’see Timmy—I use this phrase here a lot, and it’s a bit of an homage to the film that I got the term from. This ending gets its name from the old Lassie television show. Little Timmy would encounter some problems, work his way out of them, and at the end Mom would sit him down and explain what happened and why. “Y’see, Timmy, sometimes people get hurt inside and it never heals...” Timmy and the audience learn a little something about life and we all go home as better, happy people.

Alas, in inexperienced hands the Y’see Timmy quickly becomes “beating your audience over the head.” If you’ve ever made your way through Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, you probably remember the 98 page monologue at the end which recaps every one of the subtle lessons that were shown in the first 800 pages of the book. You also probably ended up skimming the monologue, just like everyone else did.

If the moral of the story is clear, do you need to explain it to your audience again? If it isn’t that clear, then the problem isn’t your ending, is it?

If you’ve never seen it, go watch Speechless (written by Robert King) and you’ll see Michael Keaton do a fantastic job explaining this idea to Geena Davis. It’s how I found the term. Plus it’s just a fun movie.

The Wedding—There are a few reasons weddings can make folks yawn at the end of a story. First, it’s ridiculously common. Much like the artsy Left Fielder, so many writers end their romances or rom-coms with a wedding it’s become the default, which means it’s far too common to use in any other genre. A wedding also draws attention to the timeline in a story, which is not always a good thing. It can either emphasize that these folks are getting married less than a month after meeting each other, or it can point out that the narrative just skipped seven or eight months between pages, which means it’s just tacked-on to give the ending a bit more uumphh (as they say).

It Was All a Dream—Probably the worst offender here. All too often the amazing tale of adventure ends with one of the heroes waking up on the couch or in a hospital bed. No, none of the story the audience has just invested their time and attention in really happened, not even in the world of the story. We all just put ourselves into a story about a person who was putting themselves into a story.

Now, there was a time when this ending was fresh and bold and caught people off guard. That time was 1890 when Ambrose Bierce first sold his short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”

In the 121 years since then, this ending’s been used once or thrice in literature and about a billion times since the creation of the sitcom. Heck, there are old Shadow radio plays that use this device. As I mentioned above with Everyone Dies, this just tells the reader they made an investment for no reason. Was there anyone who went to see Click who didn’t immediately say “it’s all going to be a dream!!” the moment Adam Sandler stretched out on that Bed Bath & Beyond display? Think about it—this is such a common ending it’s easy to spot the moment the dream begins.

So, there they are, a few endings that were overused years before Edgar Rice Burroughs or Ray Bradbury decided there might be something really cool up on Mars. Like many of the tips I toss out, I’m not saying it’s impossible to do one of these. It is very, very difficult, though, and you may want to think twice before tackling one of them.

Next time may be a bit late because I’ve got a deadline I need to hit. But when we do get together next, we’re going to go for a little drive.

Until then, go write.

Looking Back Over the Year

A solid year of this stuff. Who would've guessed any of us would be so interested in my blatherings for so long? I sure didn't.

So, the whole point of this blog (besides lowering my blood pressure) is to hopefully give a helpful hint or two. The best way to utilize those tips, silly as it sounds, is to write. That's why we're all here, yes?

That being said... what did you write this year?

As I said last year, I'm not interested in the cool ideas you’re going to do something with eventually. I don’t want you to talk about what you’ve planned to do. I also don’t care what clever software you bought, or what fascinating research you’ve done, or who you had an extended online chat with during lunch one day.

The question, my eleven faithful followers, is what have you written?

Y'see, Timmy, if you're not writing, that's kind of the end of the discussion right there. We can't talk about editing, improving, or polishing our work until we've actually got some work, right?

We have to write. Until you're writing on at least a semi-regular basis

So, what did I do over these past twelve months?

I wrote thirty-eight articles for Creative Screenwriting magazine. Granted, because of lead times some of this won't see print until next year, but by the same token some of the stuff that did come out this year were things I actually wrote last year. I got to sit down and talk with Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, Nora Ephron, Mike Judge, Nancy Meyers, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, and even Frank Darabont at one point. Plus a bunch of screenwriters you've probably never heard of but loved their work (like David Self, Kundo Koyama,Tony Gilroy, Simon Kinberg, David Hayter, and Bruce Joel Rubin). If you haven't seen (500) Days of Summer yet, by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber, you're missing out. Also add in another thirty-four reviews and interviews for the CS Weekly online newsletter (sign up over there on the right if you haven't already). That let me see a bunch of movies for free and also interview another pile of screenwriters like Stephan Elliot and Shane Black. There were also a few scattered reviews in there for both CinemaBlend and Coming Attractions. I think the final total for non-fiction pieces comes in at seventy-five.

It's also fair to mention that I got to work with two really great editors for a lot of this, David and Jeff. They've each got their own style, they each have their own preferences, and I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a headbutt or three in there throughout the year. They both kept me on my toes, though, and made sure I was putting out the best work I could. Half the reason I can write fast and tight is because of these two guys.

I scribbled down a quick short story/ article for the upcoming Moron's Guide to the Inevitable Zombocalypse which will see print in 2010. There's also a story going out to a time-travel anthology pretty much right alongside this post. I'm kind of proud of these two on a couple of levels. One is that they're two pretty solid stories that I managed to get out really quick. As soon as I had the idea, I had the whole story. The other thing was that it had a very Bradbury feel. In many of his autobiographical tales he talks about when he would rush out stories so he could pay the rent, and there is a very nice feel to ever-so-briefly living in that world of "I need money--I better write something quick and sell it."

I wrote one of those mash-up books that's so popular right now, blending modern horror tropes into classic literature. Although, in all fairness, about 60% of the finished book was written by someone else two hundred years ago, which is some serious lead time. Hopefully I'll get to say a bit more about that sometime soon. It's making the rounds right now, as they say.

To be honest, I don't know what they say. I just wanted to sound like I was in the loop, as they say.

I'm currently about 30,000 words into a sci-fi/horror novel set 200 years in the future. It's on the Moon, so it's beyond everything. Alas, it got set aside for the above-mentioned mash-up project, and it may take a bit of work to get back into it. There are a few moments in it that are just wonderful, though, so I'm sure it will see the light of day sometime or another.

There are also twenty-five pages of notes for an Ex-Heroes sequel. The publisher has been asking me about it since the day he bought the first book. However, while I was doing the Orci and Kurtzman interview mentioned above, Roberto Orci made an offhand comment about sequels while looking me right in the eyes and... well, he's been haunting me ever since. So expect me to dive into that in March, after there's been some response to the February release of Ex-Heroes.

Oh, and I managed to post here on a fairly regular basis. Better than last year, even. For a free blog that's supposed to go up once a week, 49 posts in a year is pretty impressive. At least from where I'm sitting. I also threw up a counter back in late June (starting it at 500), so using my impressive math skills it would seem I'm getting around 100 peeks a week here. So someone's looking at it besides me. Maybe all eleven of you keep coming back every day.

That's what I wrote this year. How about you?

Make the same New Year’s resolution as last year. A page a day. That's it. It usually works out to under 300 words if you've got the formatting right. If you write one page a day, you can have a short story by the end of January. You could have a solid screenplay by the time May rolls around. This time next year, you could have a novel. All that, out of a mere page a day. If you're actually serious about being a writer, this should be the equaivalent of making a resolution to breathe in the months to come.

Happy New Year to all eleven of you reading this. Next time, will be the first post of 2010, so I thought I'd do something that dealt with the first.

Until then, go drink some champagne and toast the new year.

Then go write. Just write one page.

Got Anything That Doesn't Suck?

Thank the late Captain Murphy for that title.

Let me pull out the big guns right at the start. There's a great line by Tolstoy (see, I warned you)-- Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. There's a wonderful lesson in those words, and it's what I wanted to pontificate about this week.

Everyone reading this has read something that was awful or seen a movie that just sucked, right? I mean, if you're doing your job as a writer and taking in everything you can, it's unavoidable. We've all been exposed to some serious crap.

Time for another one of my random guilty confessions. I love bad stuff. I can watch awful movies for hours (sometimes I even get paid to watch them). I've been exposed to crap scripts that are getting off easy with the label crap. I read horrible books cover to cover, and I've read some stinkers. My girlfriend is often in awe (we'll call it awe, anyway) that I continue to read things even as I lament how bad they are. I admit I take a certain perverse pride in being able to say I've finished almost every book I've ever picked up. Some took longer than others, and some I'm still working on, but I don't think I've ever given up on something once I started reading it.

Why?

That's a fair question. I mean, why subject yourself to the bad stuff? There's plenty of great stuff out there, after all. There are timeless works of fiction in all genres. Some phenomenal movies and television. Why should anyone waste time and effort going over the crap?

Let's play a little game. Name five writers someone must read if they want to be a good writer. No ifs, ands, or buts, you have to know these authors' works. You can write them down if you like, or just keep them in your forebrain for a few minutes. This won't take long.

Got 'em?

Okay, then...

Shakespeare's probably there on your list, yes? Maybe Hawthorne, Dickens, Hemingway, or Steinbeck? If you're a bit more horror-oriented, odds are you have Lovecraft or King. Bradbury and Matheson both bridge horror and sci-fi quite nicely, if that's your focus.

The point of the game--of this round of it, anyway--is that I probably just named at least three of your top five authors, didn't I? Maybe even all five? The reason I can do that is because everyone picks the same authors. We could do the same thing with five filmmakers every budding director or screenwriter should study. Go on, try it with your friends.

That brings us to round two. Can you name five authors someone should avoid at all costs if they're studying to be a writer? Heck, can you just name five books?

It's been said that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. The unspoken lesson is you can't just study all the winners, you have to study the losers, too. Knowing why Ronald Reagan won his election is good, but it's also good to know why Jimmy Carter lost--and no, they are not the same reasons.

The same goes for writing. You can take dozens of classes that will teach you (and tens of thousands of other people) all the same things about all the same good authors and novels. Then all of you can turn out the same good stories of your own that imitate those same authors and novels.

The problem here is that you're not learning how to avoid the problems and pitfalls of writing-- you're being taught they don't exist. It's the literary equivalent of the spoiled rich kid whose never had to do anything for him or herself. Paris Hilton never learned how to change a flat tire because in her world there's always a repairman and a back-up limo one phone call away. Does that make her an expert at car repair or just someone who never has to deal with it?

Of course, just reading the bad stuff and rolling your eyes doesn't help. Anyone can say "that sucks." Anyone. It doesn't take any special skills or education. Heck, you can train a parrot to say it. Keep that in mind. When someone points at a piece of writing and just mocks it for no reason, they're operating on the same level as a bird (or celebutante daughter of a hotel magnate) with a brain the size of a walnut.

No, you need to look at the bad stuff and be able to explain why it sucks. What mistakes did the storyteller make. What's wrong with the dialogue? Why can't you believe in the characters? Is it an actual problem or a matter of personal taste? Why was the resolution so unsatisfying? And the most important question to answer, of course, is how could you make it better? What would it take for this piece of crap to be something passably good, or even great? Again, you want to have a real answer, not a smart-aleck, off-the-cuff response. A real writer can discuss a crap book just as easily as a good one.

Which brings us back around to the why.

Y'see, Timmy, if you can honestly identify and critique another piece of work, it's going to make it easier for you to judge your own work. Being able to honestly judge your own work is how you're going to improve. There are a lot of ways to be a bad writer, and if you can't recognize them for what they are--and figure out how to avoid them--then odds are that's the path you'll end up on and you won't even know it.

So go forth and learn from the badness.

Next time, I'd like to talk about something completely different.

Until then, go write. And for God's sake, write something that doesn't suck.

Tell Me About Your Childhood

Has anyone else noticed that it’s only considered “telling” with the pop psychology folks if you write horror? If you write scary stuff, it must be because something awful happened to you as a child. Absolutely no one wonders if young Ray Bradbury met Martians, if Tom Clancy was a spy kid, or if ten year old Dan Brown got chased by a secret society. Write about zombies or serial killers, though, and the immediate assumption is that on your eight birthday you witnessed Uncle Bob killing his wife with a chainsaw while wearing a Santa Clown suit.

Go figure.

In past rants here, I’ve talked about how important believability can be and also offered a few tips about crafting believable characters. A lot of this, though, can all get thrown under one blanket term. We call it empathy.

The idea of empathy has been around for a while in one form or another, and it’s something that gets a lot of study from psychologists and sociologists. There are tons of more specific definitions, but simply put, it’s that unconscious connection we have with the people around us. If you’ve ever realized this is not the crowd to tell that joke in, that’s empathy. It’s how you know when your friend needs a hug, a stiff drink, or maybe just to be left alone. It’s also how you can sense he’s not interested, she’s waiting to pounce, and that other guy... well, we should all just keep clear of that other guy.

For writers, empathy is probably the most important skill you can have. It’s going to be very hard to be successful without it. It’s what lets us craft characters that act like real people instead of puppets, because it’s how we know when something seems natural and/ or unnatural for a real person to do. Empathy is also what lets us predict how the audience is going to react. Are they going to be excited? Screaming? Howling with laughter?

An example...

Let’s say I wanted to make you cringe a bit while you read this post. I could try typing bunnies a few dozen times, but except for one or two of you who were emotionally scarred in your youth, it’s not going to produce the desired result. Even when the imagery catches you off-guard, it’s still FLUFFY BUNNIES!!!! unlikely this mental image will make you wince or shudder for a moment. Trying to make you cringe that way just shows a lack of connection to my audience and how they’re going to react.

On the other hand, if I was to mention one of those women with the long, curving, dragon-lady fingernails and watching her pluck out someone’s eyeball like an olive from a jar... that might affect you. And if I told you she took a potato peeler to that eye while it was still attached by that long string of nerves, and sliced off thin slivers of eyeball one after another for almost half an hour before it finally burst... Heck, that gets to me, and I’m the guy who made it up.

Not only that, but I also knew the bit about the bunnies would make you chuckle. Or at least smile a bit.

A story...

Back when I was at UMass, I was stealing a friend’s computer in the afternoons to type out page after page of my college novel, which went under the working title of The Trinity. The villain was a bit of a headcase who thought God loved bloodshed and fear, so his master plan was to use shaped demolition charges to tip over the Empire State Building during business hours. Thousands die in the tower. Thousands die under it when it falls. And probably a few more die in the ensuing panic and chaos that would spread throughout the tri-state area. Keep in mind, I was writing this in the early ‘90s.

Well, said friend—we’ll call him Alpha-- read my notes and listened to my idea and said “That’s silly.”

“What? What part?”

“His plan. People wouldn’t act like that.”

“Of course they would.”

“No they wouldn’t,” said Alpha with a dismissive grin.

“You think if the Empire State Building fell over and thousands of people died in Manhattan in the space of an hour, it wouldn’t cause massive panic and terror?”

“Oh, for a little bit. Maybe an hour or two. But then everyone would calm down.”

Needless to say, I was briefly tempted to hunt down Alpha’s phone number one September ten years later. Just to say “Told you!”

Another story, this one from the flipside...

One of the very first films I prop mastered was a little train wreck called Special Delivery. The basic idea was kind of clever, but the first time writer/ director/ producer/ actor simply had no empathy—for his characters, his audience, or his cast and crew (a friend got fired off the show and I was actually jealous of her). One of the gags the writer/ director would not let go of involved the stepmother’s yappy little dog. He had a “hilarious” scene scripted at the end of the film when the two pre-pubescent sons would hook the dog’s leash up to the garage door opener. This way when stepmom came home and opened the garage the little yappy dog would get hanged right in front of her.

Now several of us tried to explain this was not a funny gag at all, and many alternatives were proposed. But the director shrugged everyone off. He was convinced this would be the funniest thing ever, seeing the little animal kicking and flailing as it was strangled. “It’s so annoying,” he’d say with a grin. “How could people not find that funny?”

How indeed...

In my own experience, I think empathy tends to fail us most often as writers when the plot takes priority. If we know by the end of this scene or chapter Yakko and Wakko must get out of this room or need to discuss everything they know about Dot, sometimes we focus on that goal rather than on the characters. Getting from A to B becomes more important than how we get from A to B. And suddenly, the characters aren’t acting naturally anymore. They’ve stiffened up and the audience can’t relate to them. I see this happen a lot in screenplays and short stories, two forms that force writers to be as fast and economical as possible.

The other empathy problem I see is writers who just don’t know anything about the world. Not in that Googling hard facts way, but in the sense that the writer seems to be writing wholly from conjecture rather than experience. Now, the overwhelming majority of us have no idea what it’s like to gaze upon an Elder God, travel in hyperspace, or dismember a body (except for you, reader #9), so it’s understandable that these things need to be products of our imagination.

However, most of us have been shouted at by a superior of some kind. We’ve gotten a first kiss from someone special. We’ve had heated arguments. We’ve been scared, driven cars, waited in line, made love, had a good meal, and gotten frustrated with paperwork. Often more than once. These are the things that can’t just be imagined or looked up on the internet (remember Steve Carrell talking about the “big bag of sand” in 40 Year Old Virgin?). Your audience will sense that something is off. They won’t feel the connection because the writer didn’t feel it. More so, the writer didn’t even realize they didn’t feel it, which is also apparent in these situations. And that’s a failure of empathy.

Now, to a point, you can develop and improve empathy. You can even have fun doing it. Talk to people. Friends and family members and strangers. Not online or on the phone, but real people in front of you. Go out to bars and parks and restaurants. Talk about work, relationships, sporting events, kids, tell some jokes—anything and everything. Listen to them. Watch how they react, how they move, what they do with their eyes. And then try to put yourself in their shoes. Why does this person think this or do that? It’s just what you should be doing with characters and your audience, so try to do it with people right in front of you. Try watching groups of people, too. Friends at parties. People in line at the supermarket. Crowds at big events. How do they react? How many go against the crowd? How many follow blindly?

Simply put, go connect with people. Because the better you can connect in the real world, the better you can connect through your writing.

Next week, I’ll have a little challenge for all of you reading this.

Until then, go out and have a drink.

And then go write.