Comedy Hour!

I know I said I was going to talk a bit about endings but I had this kind of funny epiphany at the grocery store the other day. As in, an actual epiphany about funny things. No, really...

I’ve wanted to talk about comedy for a while. I tried once years ago, but—to be really honest—I didn’t quite have the vocabulary for it at the time. I’m not sure I do now, but at least I thought up two things that sounds kind of clever. That’s better than nothing.

Once or thrice I’ve brought up my bad movie habits and explained them. A fairly common thing I’ve seen are movies that bill themselves as comedies or something-comedies. I say “as” because they’re rarely funny, and I think there’s two big reasons for that. Well, three, but the third one's not really relevant here. Maybe some other time. For now, two big reasons.

One is that comedy is very empathy-dependent. Possibly more than any other type of writing. If I can’t put myself in other people’s shoes, I’m going to have a tough time figuring out how to make them laugh.

The second reason is what I wanted to blather on about.

I’ve talked about genres and subgenres here a few times. Sometimes these subgenres have really specific rules. Take horror for example. Cosmic horror stories are not the same as slashers, which are not the same as supernatural thrillers, which are nothing like torture porn, which definitely aren’t monster stories. Or mysteries! There’s over a dozen sub-genres for mysteries, and publishers take them very seriously. Cozies, noir, capers, amateur sleuth, professional sleuth, procedurals... every one of them has their own expectations and requirements and guidelines. I can’t write a cozy mystery about a serial killer who collects his victims’ genitalia. They just don’t work that way.

Comedy is the same way. There are satires, spoofs, farces, romcoms, dramedys, and many more. And just like above, each of these has certain rules and expectations. I can’t just throw down a pile of funny things and declare it to be a spoof. And truth be told, no matter how big that pile of funny things is, I might not even be able to call it a comedy.

Y’see, Timmy, funny is to comedy the same way notes are to music (that’s clever thing #1). You need one to make the other, but that doesn’t mean a pile of one equals the other. I don’t expect thirty random notes to come together and make a song—we all understand I need to arrange them in a certain way, they need to work together, they need to have a certain flow to them. Just like a pile of random ideas doesn’t make a plot, just because I’ve got a pile of funny beats doesn’t mean I’ve got a comedy. What’s funny at the bar might not be as funny at work. That little bit of physical comedy from your date is definitely not going to go over the same way at work. Heck, it might not have even been that funny on the date.

If you don’t want to believe me, I had a chance to talk with Kevin Smith years ago and we discussed ad-libs. He pointed out something you hadn’t planned or scripted can be incredibly funny on set, but the important thing is that it works in the editing room. Just because it’s funny doesn’t automatically mean it’ll make sense in the final film. ”It’s not germane to the discussion,” was how he put it.

When I’m writing a comedy story or screenplay, I need to be aware of what kind of story I’m telling. Am I adding things because they work within the framework I’ve established and they propel the narrative forward... or am I putting it in because people laugh at poop jokes? Is this part of the comedy, or is it just some random funny element? One that’s hopefully still funny in this context. Hopefully.

More doesn’t always mean better. Just because I add more funny things doesn’t mean I’ve made a better comedy, in the same way that just because I added more types of robots doesn’t mean I wrote a better sci-fi story. And really... does anyone think a bunch of jump scares make for a better horror movie?

Remember, whatever it is I’m writing, my elements should serve my story, not my genre.

(and that’s clever thing #2).

Hey, speaking of whatever it is I’m writing, he said by means of a segue, the exclusive period on my novel Terminus has ended. That means you can pick up the ebook version of the book right now. It’s not narrated by Ray Porter, yeah, but I did include a nice-sized afterword where I talked about where some parts of the book came from and how a lot of the characters developed. And if you’ve been waiting all this time for it, I made it fairly cheap, too, as a small “thank you” for your patience.

Next time... endings. Definitely.

Until then, go write.

Don’t Look Back Now...

            Okay, I’m still trying to get caught up on things after a whirlwind of publicity stuff for The Fold.  And to be honest, the storm flags are still blowing a bit.  So I just wanted to offer some quick advice on drafts.  Specifically, how to approach my first draft.

            As I’ve mentioned here a few times before, I tend to treat my first draft as the "just finish it" part of writing.  I just want to get it done with a beginning, an end, and the majority of points in between.  I also don't hold back.  I let dialogue, descriptions, and action scenes run on a bit longer than they probably should.  A lot of it’s not perfect, but I know I'll start cutting in the next draft or two, so there's no reason to worry about length now.  The most important thing is to get the overall framework done.  Personally, I find it's a lot easier to deal with the small things when the big things aren't looming over me.

            A lot of folks I’ve talked to try to do this, but they get caught in early-editing mode.  Ten pages in and they’re going back to edit, or rethink a character, or to tweak the structure.  Forward motion crashes to a halt because the writer’s spending all their time looking back.

            Now, in all fairness, a few people can do this and it works fine for them.  It’s how Kevin Smith writes.  He goes in blocks of ten or twelve pages, writing, rewriting, and polishing until they’re done.  Then he moves on to the next ten. 

            If you’re one of the folks who can do this, power to you.  But in my experience, with all the writers I’ve talked to over the years, those folks are a rarity.  Most of us, alas, have to go through the whole thing, then go through it again.  And again.

            So, if you’re one of us, too, here’s my quick piece of advice.

            Don’t look back.

            When working on a first draft, I can read the page I left off on.  That’s it. If I stop halfway through the page, I can look at the top half before I start writing again.  That’s it.  If I ended at the top of a page, too bad.

            If I close the document, I’ll make a note somewhere else of what page I was on.  When I reopen it, I go right to the page I left off on.  No slow paging through the document.  Get back to where I left off and start writing again.

            Under no circumstances while writing will I hit the up arrow or page up or push the scroll bar.  None of that.  Not even to go up to the last paragraph.  No corrections, no re-reading, no going back to adjust. I don’t go back to fix typos or formatting or anything.  This draft moves in one direction and it doesn’t stop moving in that direction.

            I do not stop.  Ever.  Until it is done.

            This is an adjustment, yes.  And a very tough one.  It might not work for everyone.  But I’ve tried it twice now and found it helps. There’s a lot of stuff to clean up, yeah, but I’m getting to the clean up stage a lot faster than I would normally.

            Y’see, Timmy, forcing myself to only go forward means I’m forcing myself to write.  I don’t get to rethink yesterday’s work or tweak that first encounter or even double check if I usedthe right spelling of prophesy (I didn’t, but it doesn’t matter in a first draft).  I just write until the first draft is done.

            So try going forward.  Only forward. Never back.  Not one line.

            Next time, by popular demand from my fan page, we’re going to talk a bit about screenwriting, clan wars, and hunting.

            Until then, go write.

Crystal Clear Tone

            The title will become clear further into the rant.  Hopefully.

            Shamefully, some pandering, too.  My new novel, 14, just came out.  It's there on the sidebar.  Ebook only, at the moment, but this time next week that link should take you to the paperback version.

            As some of you know, I used to write for a fairly popular screenwriting magazine.  It let me talk to lots of professionals about their job, and it also let me see a lot of movies for free.  A lot of movies, sometimes weeks or even months before they came out.  To be honest, the last movie my lovely lady and I paid to see was V for Vendetta.  Before that was probably Batman Begins, which we saw twice—once with our friend Max and once just the two of us.

            But that really doesn’t have anything to do with this week’s topic.

            Or does it?

            Anyway, one day I was in the office and the editor, Amy, asked me about a film she knew I’d seen a few weeks earlier.  One of the other journalists had suggested the idea of doing a big piece on horror-comedies for the September-October issue, and the movie I’d seen (let’s call it Gorefest) was one of the ones that had come up as a potential subject.  Amy wanted to know if I thought Gorefest would fit the article.

            I didn’t think so.  The filmmakers were telling a horror story, and they knew that too many jokes and cheap laughs would shift the tone of the film and knock it into a different category.  Gorefest was a horror movie, and it had several moments of comedy in it, like a lot of modern horror films.  But it wasn’t a horror comedy.  They never crossed that line.

            The other journalist insisted it was, though, and used it anyway.  In the final article, the screenwriter of Gorefest openly said it wasn’t a horror comedy.  And Amy gave me a little grin the next time I was in the office.

            This is an example of someone being a bit tone deaf.  You’ve probably heard this term applied to both music and writing.  In music, it’s when I don’t realize that a group of notes or chords clashes with another group.  And that’s pretty much what it means in writing, too.  When something doesn’t work in my story, tonally, it means something’s clashing or overpowering something it shouldn’t, to the point that it stands out.  In this particular case, the journalist was projecting emphasis onto those comedy bits that wasn’t there in the script—he was deaf to the actual tone of the film.

            I interviewed Kevin Smith a few years back for one of his movies (Zach and Miri Make a Porno).  One question I asked was about working with Seth Rogen.  After all, Smith notoriously hates ad-libs and Rogen is famous for constantly riffing on lines, coming up with new ideas and variations for almost every take.

            He was quick to correct me, though.  His reputation for hating ad-libs came from his first few films, when he realized he and his cast were too inexperienced to be making big deviations from the script.  So back then, he was very strict about sticking to the page.  And while he’s loosened up a bit, he still favors the script over random interpretations on set.  “So often you’ll get an actor who just starts saying stuff that’s very funny to the crew or me or the other actors, but it’s not germane to the discussion,” he told me.  “It’ll be great on a friggin’ blooper reel, but I can’t fit this into the scene.”

            And, yes, I did clean up Kevin Smith’s quote a bit for those of you reading this at work.  Feel free to swap in the words you think he used.  You’ll be right.

            Just because something’s good in and of itself doesn’t mean something is good in the bigger scheme of things.  I can throw a great slapstick comedy scene into my Somalian pirates script, and it may be some of the greatest slapstick ever written.   But it’s going to stick out like a sore thumb amidst the gunfire, brutal killings, and mounting tension.  I could write some stuff right now that could make most of you reading this cringe or get grossed out.  It’s not really that hard. 

            The thing is, what would be the point of doing it right now?  You’re reading this to learn about writing, not to get nauseous.  It might be some fantastically disgusting imagery, but it just wouldn’t fit here any more than... well, a random discussion about the last couple of movies I paid to see.

            I see this kind of stuff all the time.  Random gore for the sake of gore.  Long monologues in an action film.  Comical sidekicks wedged in for no reason except to be the comical sidekick.  Romance that’s shoehorned in just so there’s a reason for a female character.

            Another quick story, one I’ve mentioned here before.  A friend gave me a horror script to look at a few years back.  It was a basic “cabin in the woods” setup with a clever idea behind it.  My friend knew that sex sells, and he told me before I read it that he'd added a nude scene.  It actually turned out to be a hardcore lesbian sex scene.  Three pages of boobs, some bondage, toys, and insertions.  It was so graphic, in fact, there was nothing to call it except pornographic.  And that’s a major shift in tone right in the middle of a fairly creepy horror story.

            This is one of the harder criticisms to give.  For a lot of people—especially inexperienced people—it’s also one of the harder ones to receive.  It’s very hard for some folks to grasp that something can be good and still not be right. 

            If I had to guess, I’d probably say part of the reason people have trouble with this concept comes from that reverse-engineering idea I mentioned a few weeks back.  Element X works well in story Y, therefore it stands to reason element X will work in story Z.  There’s also probably a bit of special snowflake mentality—the idea that doing something good should somehow automatically translate to success.  And, for some writers, there’s probably an empathy issue in there as well.

            Y’see, Timmy, tone is about my story as a whole.  Not this particular funny joke or that one creepy description or that strongly-implied (or blatantly shown) sex scene.  Tone is how my entire story feels overall and how it’s going to be viewed.  That’s not to say I can’t have comedy or romance or action in my story.  It’s these little moments of flavor and color that make a story really sing.  The trick is to know how much comedy and how much romance will work in a given story—and maybe accepting that the answer is “none.”  Because things that break the tone generally break the flow, too.

            And if you can’t tell you’re breaking the flow... well, don’t worry.  Your readers will let you know one way or the other.

            Next time, I’d like to talk to you about a wonderful lesson we can all learn from an old Benny Hill skit.

            Until then, go write.

Who is Keyser Sose?

Why am I using that famous question as the title?

No reason.

So, a while back, someone I was working with asked if I’d be willing to look over a script he’d been working on with a friend. I said sure, because I hadn’t yet learned to be wary of such situations. And then spent a few days figuring out what I could politely say about said script...

Almost two-thirds of the script was other movies. Quotes from other movies. Visual references to other movies. Deliberate parallel scenes from other movies. Discussions about other movies. And what was left--the original material-- wasn’t much.

Let me tell you another little story.

I was reading a script for one contest where the main character was named Sam Spade. He worked in a diner where their specialty chicken sandwich was called the Black Bird. One of his regulars was named Archer. There’s a waitress named Brigid, and the cook was named Wilmer. Then one day a guy named Cairo wanders in. He works for a fellow named Gutman.

These are the names of pretty much every character in The Maltese Falcon, by the way. If you didn’t know that, hang your head in shame and go rearrange your Netflix queue. How are you going to write anything new if you don’t know the classics?

Anyway, I’m getting away from the point.

What was the point, you ask?

Well, that’s a good question. What was the point of all these names and moments and interactions? If someone’s characters are going to do nothing but talk about movies and they’ve written their script to shamelessly copy movies, what do you think it’s about?

That’s right. It’s about a lost dog.

And that other one. With all those Maltese Falcon references, there’s got to be a lost treasure or a mystery or something going on, right?

Nope. It was a slice-of-life story about this person’s dreams and that person’s aspirations and desperate sex in the storeroom and driving home at night with the music loud. That’s it.

Soooooo... what’s up with all those references?

Personally, I blame Kevin Smith.

Ever since those guys in Clerks had a long debate about the contractors who built the Death Star, dropping references into stories and dialogue has become a standard. Oh, people did it before him but he started doing it in movies and made it very widespread. Smith still does it. Stephen King does it. I do it.

(...like how I lump myself in with the big guys? Not egotistical at all...)

The catch, of course, is that these writers have a reason for doing this. When Dante and Randall get in an argument about the Star Wars trilogy, we’re learning more about them than we are about the movies. When Milla Jovovich’s confused character in Resident Evil goes down into an unbelievable underground world, is it that shocking to discover she’s named Alice?

And let’s not forget that sometimes the reference is just there to drive home similarities or contrasts. In my own books, the Mighty Dragon’s real name is George Bailey. Remember the poor sap in Office Space who’s named Michael Bolton but loathes that musician’s songs?

Y’see, Timmy, once you start throwing out lots of familiar names and sequences, people are going to start looking for patterns. That’s what a good audience does. And there needs to be one. Each of these odd names or references is going to knock a reader out of the story for a moment or two, and if you don’t have any sort of payoff for that disruption... well, it’s not going to go over well.

Not only that, if you don’t acknowledge the oddness of everyone who enters this diner having the same name as a Maltese Falcon character, your readers are just going to get annoyed. If you acknowledge it but don’t have a real, in-story reason why all of them have these names, that’s going to be seriously annoying.

No, sorry, it’s not acceptable just because your three best friends said it was really cool and it wasn’t disruptive.

If you’re going to do something clever in your story, awesome. As long as there’s a real reason for doing it.

Speaking of doing it... next week’s going to be pretty close to Valentine’s Day. I thought I’d ramble on about the rules of love. Yep, there are rules. If only I’d known them in high school. Or college.

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.

No Exceptions. None. Usually.

A week or three back I was browsing over the responses I get here. Luckily there’s only six or seven of you reading this, and I’m sure you’re all busy writing your own stuff, so it didn’t take long.

Anyway, I noticed an interesting thing. One of the most common forms of response here was the “Ahhhh, but...” They weren’t as emphatic or strongly worded as some of the ones you often find on most message boards, but they were there. Salt and peppered throughout the ranty blog.

If you can’t figure it, the “Ahhhh, but...” response is when someone counters a point with contradictory information. For example, I could say “Writing a blog will never help you get a film deal,” and someone could leap forward and say “Ahhhh, but isn’t that just what happened to Diablo Cody, writer of Juno? Not so smart after all, are you, Mister-wise-writer-guy?”

In even simpler words, the “Ahhhh, but...” response is when people point to the exception in an attempt to disprove the rule. Usually, they’re doing this to show that someone else did it the easy way, so we can’t fault them for trying to do it the easy way as well.

Now, let’s be clear on one thing—there are always exceptions to the rule. Always. Anyone who tells you that something is 100%, never-question-it always wrong can be ignored. Especially if they shriek “no exceptions!!”

Here’s the catch... exceptions to the rule are very, very rare. Exceptionally rare, you could say. That’s why they’re the exception and not the rule. For every person who sold the first draft of the first novel they wrote, there are millions of people who did not. Yeah, Kevin Smith got into Hollywood with a successful, low-budget indie film, but tens of thousands of folks have tried the same trick with no results. And, yes, Diablo Cody made a screenwriting career out of her blog—and that’s one out of how many blogs on the internet? One out of ten million? Fifty million? More?

That’s why most people trying to give you useful information, like myself, tell you to stick with all the established rules. It’s a longer, harder, and more frustrating path, but it’s still your best bet at success. Sure, I could sound a lot more positive and cheerful a lot of the time. I could say everyone’s a special snowflake, don’t worry about doing things wrong, and we should just do what feels good because we’ll all get published or produced some day. The overwhelming odds are, though, that I’d be doing all of you a disservice with such statements.

So, here’s my bit of advice for you, and it’s one I hope you’ve seen underlying most of the stuff I’ve said here since the first post you may have read.

The best thing you can do is assume you are not the exception to the rule. No matter how clever, how witty, how perfect your writing is, do not think of yourself as the one person who gets to ignore all the established standards. The absolute worst thing you can do is scoff at the rules and think they don’t apply to you. No matter how vastly superior your work is, always consider yourself working from the same level as everyone else.

The reason you should assume this is because the person reading your work is going to assume it. Nobody goes to a Friday the 13th film thinking it’s going to have an Oscar-winning metaphor for the Israel-Palestine conflict in it. You don’t pick up a Stephen King book for a tearjerker romance. And, personally, I’d be a bit shocked if Charlie Gibson decided to perform the ABC Evening News as an opera some night. We all have certain expectations we’ve built up, and these expectations all tend to fall in line with the rules.

Does that mean all these things won’t happen or can’t be done? Not at all. Your writing may be so utterly, mind-bogglingly spectacular that no one notices the abundant typos. The structure could be so rock-hard the reader will forgive and forget those atrociously dull opening pages. It’s even possible the idea is so fiendishly, unbelievably clever that nobody will pick up on the fact that every character is a paper-thin cut out carbon-copied from the cast of Heroes (not first season Heroes, mind you... I’m talking about fourth season Heroes)

However, here’s the one thing you can absolutely count on. The moment we notice that Jason Voorhees is now dressed in the colors of Hamas, see that Camp Crystal Lake has been bought out by a wealthy Hassidic group as a spiritual retreat, and read all this through a forest of misspellings and misused words... oh, at that moment we’re all going to groan. Our collective eyes will roll and the thought will cross all our minds—Dear God, I should probably just give up on this right now.

That’s what you’re fighting against when you want to be the exception to the rule. Your audience. They’ve seen attempts to break the rules again and again and again, and the overwhelming majority of these attempts have been simply awful. Remember, the exceptions are rare. Very rare. So when you veer away from the rules, everyone is going to go with the numbers and assume your work is simply awful, too.

In which case, it’s only throwing gas on the fire if you just swaggered in, tossed down your manuscript, and announced it to be a work of staggering genius. Those two things combined will pretty much guarantee your manuscript goes in the large pile on the left, regardless of how good your writing may get around page thirty or so.

A nice, simple rule of thumb. If at any single point you find yourself questioning if something matters—assume it does. Does my main character need to be developed more than this paragraph? Will a reader care that I misspelled forty or fifty words? Do I need to make that part of the story clearer? Should I bother to look up the exact format rules for this?

Your default answer for all of these questions needs to be yes.

Again, this doesn’t mean it can’t be done, and there’s always that chance someone might sit through Friday the 13th Part XII: Dredel of Death and walk out saying “Wow... you know, I never looked at the Middle East in those terms before. It’s so clear now how foolish we’ve all been.” I mean, forget Oscars, we’re talking about a Nobel Peace Prize for Jason this time around. It’s hard for established writers to pull off that sort of thing, though, so aspirants really need to be aware of the very, very steep climb ahead of them if they go in thinking the standards don’t apply to them.

You shouldn’t be scared to do something new, because if you break the rules—break them well, mind you—you’ll get noticed and rewarded for it.

Just remember that a lot of people break the rules because they don’t know what they’re doing... and you don’t want to get lumped in with them.

Next week, we’ll discuss the fact that not all explosions are exciting, and a great deal of drama is not dramatic.

Until then, go write.

The Year in Review

So, we’ve all been at this for... what, a couple months now? Well over a year since I made that very first post, by my count. Of course, I took some time off so I can hardly point the finger if you did, too.

Anyway, let’s not nitpick. There’s not much time before the New Year and we’ve got important stuff to discuss.

What have you written so far?

I don’t want you to talk about what you’ve planned. Not interested in any great ideas you’ve had. Don’t care who you had lunch with, what clever software you bought, or what fascinating research you’ve done.

The question is, what have you written?

Easy question, right? How many words have you set down on paper? How many new Word documents or Final Draft files have been created on your computer since you first looked at this half-witted, rambling set of rants I call a blog?

At the end of the day, this is the first marker you have to pass if you want to be a writer. You have to write.

If you’re still getting around to it, playing with a few things, or trying to find the right time when you’re in the right mood—you’re not a writer. You’re one of those folks in the coffee shop who wears a beret, puts on a fake accent, and loves to tell anyone who’ll listen about how everything put out by Hollywood and the big publishers is complete crap and, oh, the fantastic work you would share with the world except there’s no one else as brilliant you to understand it.

Okay, you’re probably not that bad...

Stop and ask yourself, though. If you keep looking here and you haven’t written anything... why not? What’s been holding you back? What are you waiting for? Because believe me, it never gets any easier. If you can’t find the resolve to even get started, do you really think you’re going to be able to keep at it long enough to finish a novel? Or a screenplay? Heck, even just a short story?

Again, what it all comes down to is the writing. If you want to call yourself a writer, you have to write. That’s it. Not just talk about it. Not buy books or software to help you do it. It doesn't even count if you read ranty blogs about writing.

The joy of this little failing, though, is it’s easy to fix. Just go sit down at your desk and write. That’s all it takes.

In the past year or so since I started taking this collection of rants somewhat seriously, I’ve paid the rent by writing a few dozen articles for Creative Screenwriting (including one about comic book movies I was pretty happy with). I got to interview a bunch of heavyweight filmmakers like David Goyer, Kevin Smith, and Zack Snyder. I also did a bunch of film and DVD reviews (and let me save you the trouble—Scorpion King 2 is just not worth it. Don’t sink to that level. You deserve better, seriously).

I’ve also written four short stories, two of which are being published next year in two separate anthologies. At the moment I’m working on two more which are both past the halfway mark.

I placed in three different screenwriting contests with my script Reality Check. It’s sort of a sci-fi, metafiction, comedy film. With giant monsters and spaceships. And enough genre references to make a geek’s head explode.

And there was the novel, Ex-Heroes, which was written in its entirety this year. It started out as a mild rant to a friend and then mixed with a few superheroes I’d made up back in high school. I got the contract from the publisher today, and if all goes well it’ll be on book shelves, Amazon, and Oprah’s reading list sometime next year.

Oh. And I managed to post here two or three times a month pretty faithfully. Well, until the eggnog showed up and productivity dropped to a crawl.

Now, granted, I’m in that lucky small percentage of folks who does this full time, but really there’s no real excuse for not writing. Stephen King wrote Carrie while he was teaching high school. David Goyer wrote his first screenplay while he was fetching coffee and making copies as an office PA. Clive Cussler started his long-running Dirk Pitt series (Raise the Titanic ring a bell?) while he was doing ad copy.

We must write.

Make that your New Year’s resolution. A page a day. Just one page. A mere two hundred and fifty words if you double-space. If you can write one page a day, you’ll have a short story by the end of January, a screenplay by the time May rolls around, or a solid novel this time next year. All that, out of just one measly page a day.

Happy New Year to all nine of you reading this.

Now go write that page.

Proudly Wearing Your Clown Suit

I’ve noticed, among some folks, an ongoing confusion between the how of writing and the what of writing. In some cases it passes confusion and just becomes deliberate ignorance (which seems to come with those accompanying screams of “ART!!!”). While there are common threads, one is not the other, and as a professional writer it’s important to know the difference..

How is the unique part of writing. It’s that artistic bit you always hear about when people do research, write extensive outlines, symbolically burn their first drafts, and consume mass quantities of food, booze, and drugs while they search for that one, elusive, perfect word. Was the night hot or was the night humid?

How is unique to each of us as writers. That’s why I have my one golden rule— What works for me might not work for you. And it definitely won't work for that guy. We’ve all got our own personal quirks and habits and preferences that lead to a finished novel or screenplay or short story.

I got to speak with Kevin Smith a little while ago, and he explained that he only writes a few pages at a time. Then he smokes a lot, goes back, and rewrites them. Then he smokes a bit more, goes back, does some more editing, and moves on to the next scene. By the time he’s done, his script is effectively on his third or fourth draft.

One gent I know writes fairly successful action-adventure novels—three or four a year. He’s got it down to a system where he can plow out thousands of words a day on a notepad, and then the act of typing it up actually becomes his second draft.

Stephen King tends to write in the morning. Neil Gaiman writes at night (or so I’ve heard). My girlfriend needs near-silence to write, and I... well, I had to get a nice set of headphones when we finally moved in together.

There are a lot of habits that work for a lot of people, a few habits that only work for a few people, and vice-versa. In the end, how is when you get to do whatever you want. It’s when you look at all these suggestions about morning routines or dealing with writer’s block and say “No thanks, I’d rather do it this way.”

Three cheers to any of you who write for four or five hours a day, every day, at the same time. Power to you if you always squeeze in some time at the end of the night with your word processor before going to bed. If you can only write on Sundays in a clown suit while standing on your head and using voice-recognition software, congratulations. Not only are you writing regularly, you’re going to make a fascinating interview subject some day.

Now, on the other hand, we have what your finished writing is.

This part, alas, is not so subjective, no matter how hard some folks may like to shriek otherwise.

You must have characters who are believable within their world. The story has to be engaging and has to move along at a pace that will keep readers awake—and it needs to actually go somewhere. Your spelling and grammar need to be perfect.

As many people like to point out (including me), there will always be exceptions to these rules. But they’re exceptions, by definition, because they are the rarity. If you want to do this for a living, the what of your writing is probably going to have to fit within a very common and popular set of guidelines. If you’re going to assume you can be the exception... well, I won’t say that you can’t be, but you’d best be ready for a very long, very strenuous uphill battle.

What it boils down to you is that it’s completely acceptable to write in a clown suit, and feel free to smack anyone who tells you differently (just remember, you’re a writer so odds are they’ll hit back much harder than you). However, writing in a clown suit does not give you cart blanche to say your writing is flawless and beyond question. How you do it is not connected to what you’ve done.

At the end of the day, no matter how we got there, we are all being held up to the same yardsticks. If someone doesn’t measure up, it’s no one’s fault but their own.

So... put that clown suit back on and get back to writing.

Where You Sit on the Shelf

In Hollywood there’s a term called “high-concept.” At its purest, high concept is a film idea that can be boiled down to one sentence or less, and that one sentence will instantly let you know what the film’s about and make you want to see it. Some famous high-concept pitches you’ll probably recognize quickly would include “Aliens blow up the White House” or “Big lizard, Big Apple” (although I hope you didn’t sit though that last one). Steve Alten got quite far with “Jurassic shark” (I never thought the book was that great, but I love that line).

One part of a high concept story is that it’s easy to tell what genre it belongs in. There’s a reason this appeals to executive types. Knowing the genre makes a story—be it a novel or a film—easier to market. If your title cleverly (or not so cleverly) reflects this, all the better. To paraphrase Kevin Smith, no one’s going to walk into Zack and Miri Make A Porno thinking it’s a meditation on the Holocaust. By the same token, if you try to define Batman Begins as a romantic comedy (or market it as one), you’re going to find it misses the mark and fails on pretty much every level.

Story the first...

An acquaintance of mine recently asked me for some feedback on a screenplay she’d written. Her formatting was fine, the dialogue was pretty solid, and she’d come up with a pretty decent core idea. The problem was, I couldn’t figure out what genre the script was. Twenty pages in I couldn’t tell if I was reading a comedy that needed another draft or an action flick that needed three or four. I still couldn’t tell at the fifty page mark. Even when I finished, I was lost as to what kind of story it was. And part of the problem with that was it made the script very hard to interpret. Was this scene going for comedy or high drama? Action or absurdity? Since I couldn’t tell what goals the script was trying to achieve, I couldn’t tell if it reached them or not.

If you were looking for your book at Borders or Barnes & Noble, where would it be? What about the DVD release of your screenplay? Here’s another tidbit of advice from very quotable agent Esmond Harmsworth. “It’s not like anything else is very hard to sell.” While everybody wants to be the publisher/ producer behind a groundbreaking new bestseller/ blockbuster, no one actually wants to be the person who takes the risk of something new and untested. It’s always going to be much safer to go with something proven such as an apocalyptic horror novel in the vein of The Stand, a television show that’s like an updated X-Files, or a film that’s like Die Hard but in a building.

(no joke—that last one was an actual Hollywood pitch. Bonus tip—actually know the stories you’re comparing your work to and not just what people say about them on message boards)

Story the second...

In other posts I’ve mentioned my first attempt at a novel, The Suffering Map. With queries and conferences, I’ve had the chance to pitch it to several agents. And one problem I had from the start was... what genre is it? It had lots of horror ideas and beats, without question, but it wasn’t a straight horror novel. By the same token, there were many fantasy elements, but it really wasn’t a fantasy. A fair amount of gore, but not to splatterpunk extremes. It was set in the real world, but I dreaded calling it urban fantasy. You could even argue a sci-fi label because there was a large time travel element, except there was absolutely nothing scientific about it...

So how the heck would I pitch it without making it seem like some horrible everything-but-the-kitchen-sink amalgamation or... well, not like anything else?

In the end... I made up a sub-genre.

Yep, that’s right. I beat the Kobayashi Maru by changing the rules. After much wrangling and about 200 drafts of a query letter, I made up a classification that fit my story and explained its place in the book store.

End result? Requests from three major agencies.

This doesn’t mean a writer who crosses several genres is doomed to difficult sales, mind you. It just means you need to know what you’re crossing. An action-horror screenplay would interest many producers, but they’ll be annoyed if they open it and don’t find any horror elements. Or worse, an abundance of romantic comedy situations. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not what they picked up the script to find. Likewise, if you send your sci-fi western short story to a mystery digest magazine, it’s not really their fault when you get rejected.

If you’re writing a genre, study it. Read four or five different books by different authors. Watch five or six different films by different writers and directors. How does your material stack up with theirs? Do you have the same beats? The same themes? Similar types of characters? Do they get the reactions you want your writing to get? When your work gets listed as one of the top five –insert genre here—books or films, can you name the other four works on that list alongside yours?

If not... get back to your desk.

And no matter what, get back to writing. You’ve wasted enough time on the internet for now.

The Rules

One of the challenges with writing is that it's something you can only learn by doing. You can take classes, read books, and study examples, but at the end of the day the only way to improve your writing is to write. I'm not saying all that other stuff is bad, but remember my single, simple rule—find what works for you.

As you study the act of writing more and more, you'll begin to discover countless hints, tips, and tricks. Each one has its own faithful followers, and some of these folks will swear by three or four more of these ideas. After awhile, you'll find a large number of people fall into one of two camps.

First, there are those who think of writing as a mechanical process. They've broken it down to a hard, cold science with no talent or experience needed. There are set moments and beats and page counts and pacing and all of that. All paragraphs are three sentences minimum, seven maximum. Scenes are never longer than two pages. Introduce your main character by page six, and your first plot point by page eleven. Your conflict by page nine. Your antagonist by page fifteen. Action begins on twenty with a major turning point on page fifty-three. These are the folks who will quote Syd Field to point out the flaws in your screenplay, or use the MLA Handbook to explain why your novel will never be published.

These folks, by and large, are wrong.

At the extreme other end of this are the folks who think none of this matters. They're the ones who broke the rules, tossed the guidebook out the window, and still roared past the finish line. Kevin Smith. Diablo Cody. Cormac McCarthy. Robert Rodriguez. These writers started from scratch, winged it, and came out on top. And, of course, they've got legions of students and online fans who all say "Well, if they did it, of course I can..." Page counts don't matter. Formatting doesn't matter. Spelling and punctuation don't matter. What matters-- the only thing that matters-- is the pure, raw creative genius and letting it shine through, because that's what people will see on the page and that's what always matters. If you constrict yourself in any way with rules or guidelines, you're just hampering your muse and diluting your talent.

These people are also wrong.

I've been lucky enough to attend conferences twice now where I got to listen to a very well-spoken agent by the name of Esmond Harmsworth. He gave a wonderful little talk the first time I saw him on ten rules for writing a mystery novel, and he set down some basic commonalities that all such stories have as far as location, characters, and complexity. What was even more interesting, though, was when he started talking about breaking these rules.

You see, if you follow every single rule for writing a mystery novel, a screenplay, or even a blog post, you're following a formula. As in, a formula story. It's where anyone with the slightest bit of experience can predict X, Y, and Z when all they've seen so far is A, B, and C. If you've watched a movie or television show where you can immediately guess who the murderer is, who the girl's going to end up with, or how Captain Scarlet's going to stop the missile launch, it's probably because the writers are following a formula.

Now, that being said, you'll notice there's a lot of formula stuff out there. Formula is not necessarily bad. It's the foundation and the ID card of every genre, and it's the common thread that lets all of us access material. Hundreds of writers make really good livings writing novels, television shows, and movies that follow a formula.

Am I saying all formula is good? No.

Every now and then something comes along that breaks all the rules, twists every expectation, and is still magnificent. The novel (if it can be called such) House of Leaves is a prime example. Trying to even define that book is a whole separate post. It's got a cult following and has been a bestseller in several countries (and several languages) for the past decade.

Does that mean any writer can do whateve they want? Nope. Especially not an unpublished, unproduced writer.

As a writer, you need to know what rules you need to follow and which ones you can get away with breaking. Which means you actually need to know what the rules are and how you're breaking them. Study your chosen format. Study your chosen genre. Be aware that if you're going to break a rule, you need a reason, and it can't just be "because I felt like it."

The vast majority of the stories you read will follow most of the basic guidelines for their form. The memorable ones will break a rule or two. The truly spectacular ones will break three or four. And in very, very, very rare-- exceptionally rare-- cases some writers may get away with shattering the rules altogether. The real trick is knowing why and how.

And if you don't know why and how, don't assume you're the exception to the rules.