Scary But Funny

I wanted to talk a little bit about horror today, as I tend to do around this time of year. More I thought about it, though, I was having trouble thinking of an aspect or angle of horror I haven’t done before. Sometimes more than once. I’ve talked about sub-genres of horror. Talked about monsters. Talked about the victims.

So then I thought I’d talk about the mechanics of horror. But even that’s tough because of the wide and varied sub-genres. I’ve mentioned this before. The horror of Frankenstein is not the horror of, say. Experimental Film by Gemma Files which is not the same as Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and none of those are The Devil's Rejects. Depending on what kind of horror I’m aiming for, I could be trying to do some very different things. Which means different rules and guidelines and expectations.

And this made me think, of course, about comedy.

Structure-wise, comedy’s a lot like horror. It’s got many levels and subgenres. It can be subtle and nuanced or in-your-face blatant and over the top. It’s really common for people to like one form of it but not another. I  also think they’re both something that’s kind of ever-present in our lives, on some level or another. There’s a lurking dread or a potential for laughs in almost any situation.

I made what I thought was a semi-clever observation about comedy a while back, and I think the same parallel holds for horror as well—scary is to horror the same way notes are to music. One is made up of the other, but just having a bunch of those components doesn’t automatically make the bigger thing. Just taking a big pile of “scary things” and dumping them on the page doesn’t mean I wrote a horror story, in the same way that, well, having a big pile of meat and bones doesn’t automatically give me a person.

See? That was kind of creepy, right? So is this post a horror story now? No, of course not. No, not even if I add a jump scare. Or is it? Maybe as we keep going you’ll realize how I’ve lulled you into this false sense of security and then maybe you realize... you’ve been in this horror story all along.

Also, it kind of matters what’s in that pile. I can’t just have a big pile of bones, especially the same kind of bones. A big pile of skulls definitely isn’t the same thing as a person. I also can’t mix in random horse bones or gorilla muscles or insect DNA. I can’t just shove anything in there and expect to end up with a working person (or horse, or insect). And even when I get all those components right, they can only go together a certain way. These bones go here, those muscles connect there, that part... okay, look, that’s kind of optional. You can put it in or leave it out at your discretion, just remember what you did with it.

This might seem kind of boring, just putting together a person. Makes it sound like every person we make is going to be like every other person. And on some level... yeah, they are. There are a lot of basic similarities between people, but there are a lot of differences, too. Yeah, even on this basic constructional level. And even more so once we get to know them.

Also, quick pause before we move on. Please don’t get confused by my use of a body as a metaphor for a story. If I’m writing horror, yeah, obviously mixing horse parts with human parts can be an element in a great story. Mixing in some insect DNA has been the basis of several great horror stories. But that’s talking about things in the story, not the structure of the story itself. To fall back on said metaphor, that’s me focusing on an individual bone and saying there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it while ignoring the fact said bone is in a pile of meat that used to be a person.

Or that I’m trying to tell you is still a person...

So, anyway, how do I do this? How do I figure out which parts I’m going to sew together into this new person a.k.a. story? Which ones do I want in there, which ones need to be in there, and which ones... okay, look, the antlers are cool, yes, but people don’t have antlers. No antlers!

Okay. maybe very small antlers.

A lot of this is going to depend on two things. Knowing what I want to end up with and general empathy. The first one’s easy. Once I know what kind of horror story I want to tell, it’s easier to choose the parts I need to tell that story. Yeah, there’s some general stuff I’ll need, but after I’ve got the rough framework there I can start fleshing in (so to speak) all the little details and elements that are going to make this story unique. And this can be a multi-step process. I don’t need to get it all right on the first try, I can go back through and shape the story to better be what I want it to be.

The second part, general empathy, is a little tougher. As I’ve said here once or thrice, I can’t tell you how to have empathy. But it’s sooooo important in horror, because I need to know what my audience is expecting and I need to understand how they’re going to receive these elements in my story. Is that person being sprayed with blood and gore and slime supposed to be horrific? Awful-but-funny? Mildly erotic? Am I sure my readers are going to take it the way I intended it? Because having a beat land wrong can really kill the flow of my story.

And that would be... well, horrible.

So there’s some quick thoughts on horror. Should be easy for you to swallow, now that they’ve been deboned and cut into little bite sized chunks. Yeah, some of them are still moving, don’t worry about that...

Narrator: And as they choked down the morsels, they realized... it had been a horror story all along.

Next time, we could probably talk real quick about NaNoWriMo.

Until then... I’m not letting you out of the room until you swallow every last piece of this.

I mean, hahahahaaa, go write. That was it. Go write.

Non-Standard Cake

At this point I’ve blabbed on about my weekend movie/Twitter habits more than a few times. I won’t bore you with them again. Just wanted to say that’s what inspired this week’s blathering.

I’ve mentioned once or twice before that there are some very standard shots in filmmaking. Decades—almost a century, really—of natural selection in the editing bay has established these as the solid basics. The foundation of a visual storytelling language we've all picked up on. Once you know these shots, you’ll spot them again and again and again in every show or movie you watch.

Of course, they’re not the only shots used in filmmaking. Some clever filmmakers figure out how to combine these basics with a push in or some other camera move, making what would be a static shot a little more dynamic at a key moment. Others may skip over one type of shot in a certain scene to heighten tension, or maybe to decrease it. And some figure out how to toss all of those shots and create something new that does the job they need done better than anything else could.

Which brings us, naturally, to cake.

I’ve mentioned growing up poor here once or thrice before. One aspect of this is we didn’t have treats in the house that much when I was a kid (or, y’know, food in general sometimes). So my mom was always looking for ways to save money and cut corners—a lot of stuff we’d call lifehacks today. One she stumbled across one time was a magazine article suggesting (you may have heard this one) mayonnaise in cake recipes instead of eggs and cooking oil. I mean, that’s what mayo is, right? Eggs and oil. My brother and I were highly skeptical and voiced our well-thought-out concerns (“Eeewwwwwwwww!”), but my mom tried it anyway.

Much to everyone’s surprise, it worked fine. The cake looked and tasted like... well, cake. We couldn’t even tell the difference. Granted, my palate was a little less refined back then, but to a generally picky kid who wanted chocolate cake... it was chocolate cake.

Here’s another fun cake story. I’m a big fan of German oatmeal cake. When I (finally) grew out of little kid basic-chocolate love, German oatmeal became my new favorite. And still is. My partner’s made it several times for my birthday, even when we were dirt poor and the whole thing was 99¢ Store mix and frosting. Since then she’s made it from scratch a few times, too.

But... it was never quite right. It wasn’t bad, by any means (and I always ate way more than I should’ve) but something about it didn’t quite line up with how I remembered it as a kid. And then this year she stumbled across a version of the recipe saying to broil the cake for a few minutes once it had been frosted, which would let the frosting melt, sink in, and even caramelize a tiny bit. And it was fantastic. It wasn’t bad before, but this alteration to the recipe made it so much better.

Of course, we all understand that these aren’t random choices. There’s a reason that mayo substitution trick works, but we couldn’t do the same thing with any condiment and expect the same results. Horseradish mustard in cake mix? I feel safe saying it’s not going to be all that tasty. Likewise, there’s a big difference between tweaking the recipe to broil the cake as opposed to, say, grilling it over an open flame. We definitely won’t get the same results.

And just because these results worked in cake doesn’t mean they’ll work anywhere else. This mayonnaise-for-eggs trick isn’t going to work if I’m trying to make an omelet. Definitely won’t work for steak tartar. Heck, I might not even be able to make it work in pancakes and they’re pretty close to being... well, cake.

Also worth noting.. the mayo cake wasn’t really any better. It wasn’t suddenly the best cake I’d ever had. As I mentioned, one of my few solid memories of this is all of us talking about how you couldn’t notice the difference at all. It just tasted like... cake. So –barring some weird dietary restrictions—it’s not really worth a new recipe. It’s just a good trick to remember if I happen to run out of eggs.

I’ve used cooking a few times before as a metaphor for writing, so hopefully at this point you’ve got a vague sense where I’m going with this.

There’s nothing wrong with trying new and different things. Really, it’s what we’re all trying to do, right? To find a new way of telling an old story, or a completely unexpected way to tell a new story. To solve those storytelling problems in a way nobody’s ever solved them before.

But the key point here is I want my new and different solutions to be better than the standard way of solving these problems. If I figure out a way to do something in my story—a trick with the structure, maybe a clever way of phrasing things, perhaps a very cool way to have a big reveal—and it works so much better than the standard way of doing it... I mean, that’s fantastic. I’ve improved on the original recipe, so to speak, and my end result is even better because of it

If I decide to do things in a new way and it works just the same as the old way, no better no worse, well... personally, I’m a little torn. I mean, it’s not like my new idea’s failing in any way, as far as the story itself is concerned. But I think—and this might just be me—that it’s distracting. Now I’m doing something different and there’s no real point to it except... to be different. I’m doing it just to do it, not to actually make the story better. And that seems—to me, anyway—like I’m trying to draw attention to myself (the author) rather than to my story.

And if my new way of doing things works worse than the old way... well, why would I do that? Why would I want a structure that makes the story much harder to follow? Why would I use phrases or formats that knock my readers out of the story? I mean, it’s (sort of) understandable I might be tempted to try chocolate-and-horseradish mustard cake, but hopefully I can be honest with myself about what came out of that oven and just, y’know, destroy it, rather than forcing the members of the culinary school admissions board to each try a slice.

Y’see, Timmy, people talk about how change is good, but there are times this phrase gets used as more of a defense than a reassurance. Yeah, it’s absolutely okay to try to change things and I shouldn’t worry about trying. But something isn’t automatically good just because it’s a change. Sometimes I’m changing things just to change them, and the only thing different about the final work is me yelling “I changed things!” And other times... well, it’s just bad. I’ve done something that didn’t work and didn’t get the response I wanted. I’ve pushed my reader away rather than drawn them in.

And that’s not going to get me any cake.

Next time... I don’t know. If nobody’s got any questions, maybe I’ll talk about spoilers or something.

Until then, go write. 

Shhhhhh! Say Nothing!

Let’s have a little moment of truth between us. At some point or another, for any number of possible reasons, most of us have been in a position where it’s in our best interest not to answer a question.  Or, at the very least, to take as long as possible to answer it.  A few such questions might be....

— “Hey, what’s in the bag?”
— “Do these jeans make me look fat?”
— “Are you actually claiming this as a deduction?”
— “Did you eat the last piece of cheesecake?”
— “So, where were you last night?”

Now, by the same token, there are questions that should take no time at all to answer. Things where, if someone asks us and we know the answer, there are very few situations where it makes any sense for us to delay or be evasive. These are the ones where I have to seriously wonder why someone isn’t answering--and they’d better have a damn good reason for their lack of response. A few examples of that would be things like

— “Do you love me?”
— “How the hell do we get out of here?”
— “What are tonight’s specials?”
— “Which one of these is the antidote?”
— “WTF is that thing and how do we kill it?”

I mean, why would you hesitate on any of these? If we need the antidote and I know which vial it is, that's a no-brainer, right? Grab the yellow vial marked #23 and pour it down his throat.

For example, I loved LOST.  Yeah, sorry, absolutely loved it. Even the questionable third season. Yes, I will fight you if you say foolish things about the ending.

But... I can admit LOST suffered a bit when Benjamin Linus became a regular member of the cast. And a big part of that was because we all knew there was a lot of stuff he wasn’t telling anyone. There were still lots of cool mysteries on the island and Michael Emerson is a wonderful actor... but there were also lots of times where the “mystery” was just Ben sitting there... not talking.

A concept I’ve brought up here a bunch of times is withheld information. I’ve mentioned it a couple times recently, but it occurred to me I haven’t’ really explained it in... wow, ten years? Seriously? Okay, so this is long overdue.

Withheld information is when the characters (or really, the writer) hold back information from the audience for no other reason than to drive the plot forward. Characters just don’t talk about things, even though it’d be very natural for them to. Or they make vague statements when they could just as easily make clear ones. We’ve all seen things like this, yes? Where the only reason there are conflicts or challenges is because characters just aren’t saying what they know.

Withheld information’s the clumsy, unskilled version of mystery and suspense. It’s what I fall back on when my story doesn’t actually have a mystery but I’m trying to create the illusion of one. Because there’s more to a mystery—or suspense, or a twist—than me just not telling my readers stuff.

The thing is, withholding information is really just me and my characters... not doing anything. The plot may keep advancing in a clumsy way, but it’s almost always going to end up falling flat. Because information in a story tends to hit a tipping point. There comes a time when that knowledge has to come out because it just makes absolutely no logical sense for it not to. And when it doesn’t...

Y’see, Timmy, the one thing withheld information definitely creates is frustration with my reader. If Wakko’s been poisoned, Phoebe knows which one of the vials is the antidote, and she’s just not telling anyone—that’s just going to annoy the hell out of my reader. I mean, yeah, it makes the scene more tense, but why wouldn’t Phoebe save her friend? Why wouldn’t she help? If she’s the villain, sure, but other than that...?

And, wow, if we get to the end of the story and that’s when we find out Phoebe knew which one was the antidote and didn’t say anything? I mean, I need to have some ironclad reasons for her silence then. That’s when my readers are going to be looking to punch holes in things, so I need things to be sooooo solid if I’m going to go this way.

Now, all of this doesn’t mean I need to tell my readers everything. But what I don’t tell them depends on what kind of effect I’m trying to create in my story. If I withhold (or give out) information at the wrong points, my story’s going to trip over its own feet. So to speak.

So here are three story elements and how they use information.

A mystery is when the main character and the audience are aware a piece of information has been hidden from them, and my story usually involves a search for that unknown fact. At it’s simplest, a mystery is a question someone in my story is asking and trying to find the answer to.

Suspense is when there’s an important piece of information the audience knows and the characters don’t. The key here is that the characters don’t know that they need to know this vital fact. ussually as soon as possible. Like that Phoebe (who Wakko’s taking back to his hotel room) is the murderer. Or there’s a bomb under the table. These are common suspense situations we've all been in, right?

A twist is when a piece of information is revealed that my characters and my readers didn’t know was being kept from them. They didn’t even suspect those facts were out there, waiting to affect the story. A twist comes from out of nowhere and changes a lot of perceptions for the reader and probably the characters. We’ve all been assuming <<SPOILERS>> Luke Skywalker’s father is dead, so when we learn that Vader is his father, it’s a twist that alters our view of several things we’ve been told up until now.

Yeah, sorry. Blew the big Skywalker family secret there.

If I’m trying to use one of these devices, I want to make sure I’m using them correctly. I don’t want to just withhold information. My characters should be just as smart and clever as my audience, and if they aren’t talking... well, I should be sure there’s a solid reason why.

Next time, I’m going to try to answer another question that got tossed my way.

Until then, go write.

Building A Better B-Movie, Pt 2

Last time we talked about how to write a good script for a B-movie. Something cheap but still solid and clever. Something we can shoot ourselves.

Well, now that the script is written—

(you did write it all out, yes? That was one of the tips!)

—we can move on to the next fun phase. The one we’re all more interested in. Yeah, be honest. What we really want to do is direct. But I think first we need to talk a little bit about what directing involves. Yeah, even on this level.

Y’see, Timmy, making a movie is a lot like being in the military. When you think of the Army, most people tend to think of big battles, shooting rifles, driving in tanks, and stuff like that. But if you talk to anyone in the military (and if you’ve been in, you already know this), there’s a huge amount of logistical work. Planning. Scheduling. Inventories. Duty rosters. It’s all that advance work that makes the shooting rifles/ driving tanks moments go off without a problem.

Well, with significantly fewer problems. We’ll talk about that, too...

Filmmaking’s the same way. So much of it gets done before everyone shows up to set on that first day of shooting, and a huge amount of that work is done by the director. Even with numerous department heads doing lots of work for them, the director’s the one making most of the decisions. And at the budget level we’re talking about, I’m probably going to be doing even more as the director.

This isn’t meant to scare or discourage anyone. I’m just trying to make it clear that a lot of what makes a good director isn’t just the flashy stuff on set when I frame shots with my hands and yell “cut!” And if I want to make a good B-movie, I need to be a good director. Some of the stuff I’m going to talk about is going to sound really boring, and more than half of it’s going to happen before the first time I get to yell “action!” Yay! Welcome to filmmaking!

So here’s a few things I should probably have if I want to do a better-than adequate job of directing. Especially at our B-movie budget level.

1) Have Some Experience
This is the easiest one. Not saying I should’ve already shot another movie or some shorts or anything like that. But before I get a dozen of my friends together... I should just play around with the camera a bit. Even if I’m just planning on shooting this on my phone, go spend some time with the phone. Figure out what it can do. Believe me, it’s a lot better to figure it now than when all your friends are standing around ready to shoot a scene.

Easy thing to do? I should think of shots I like in movies, shots I’ve imagined for my movie, and just try to do them. No pressure, no requirements, just see if I can make my camera do the thing I’m picturing in my head. Maybe use action figures or get a friend who’s willing to be my living mannequin for the day and try a bunch of different shots with different angles/ lighting/ costumes. Then look at these shots and try to figure out what needs improvement. Spend lots of time doing this.

Seriously, start doing it tonight. Start doing it right now. Point the camera at the cat and give me a serial killer POV shot—go!

You’ve done that already? For real, you’re not just saying it so you can rush to the next step? Well, okay than...

2) Have the basics down
Okay, in the past I’ve talked about some standard film shots, so here’s a link for those. I want to start thinking of the script in these terms. Visually, what each scene’s going to look like and which shots I’ll need to construct that scene.

I’ll also point you at Krishna Rao’s unwritten rule of thumb—one pretty shot a day. Maybe I want to do a neat POV shot on a slide or outside someone’s window. Maybe I’m going to use a bicycle to keep up with somebody running down the street. Maybe my friends and I figured out how to do a real cool overhead spinning shot. These are all fantastic, but I don’t want to get bogged down in dozens and dozens of them on the same shooting day (I’ll explain why in a bit).

Let me hit you with two more good things to know. There’s a term you may have heard called screen direction. It’s really important, and it’s one of those things we all instinctively notice when its done wrong. Really simply put, pretend there’s a line down the center of the camera frame. Everything has to stay on its side of the frame, unless we see it switch sides on camera. Things on the left stay on the left, things on the right stay on the right. If you’re on the left and I’m on the right, I should be looking left (at you) when we’re talking in close ups and you should be looking right (at me). If we’re both looking the same way it looks.. weird. It goes against the cinematic language we’ve all picked up over the years.

Now, there’s another aspect to this and it’s called crossing the line. Here’s how it usually gets explained. Natasha and Yelena are sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast and the box of cereal's on the table with them. When we shoot our master shot, these things are going to be on one side or the other—some people say it’s with her or with her For example, Yelena's bowl of cereal would clearly be with her, Natasha's bowl is with her. But the box... who’s the box with? Because if we try to shoot it with both of them, it’s going to jump back and forth on screen as it crosses the line. If the camera’s facing Yelena, it’ll be on the left, but if it’s facing Natasha now it’ll be on the right. Make sense? Look, I even included helpful visuals. So we need to make a decision and stick with it (I’m saying the cereal is with Natasha).

When people mess this up, it’s usually because they’re confusing the actual geography of the location—what they’re seeing with their own eyes—with what the audience is seeing through camera. It doesn’t matter where the cereal box actually is in relation to you or me. Even if it’s actually at the middle of the table, on camera, it looks closer to you and that’s how we established it, so that’s how we need to shoot things. As far as the camera’s concerned, it’s on your side, not my side.

A fantastic example of screen direction (done right) is the first swordfight in The Princess Bride. Even with all the leaping around and changing camera angles, Inigo and the Man in Black never switch sides. He’s always on the left, he’s always on the right. The only time it changes is when we actually see them physically switch sides on camera.

Something I touched on above, closely related to crossing the line, is eyelines (this is the second of those two good thing to know). Have you ever watched a movie or TV show and someone seems to be looking off over there somewhere, not at the person they’re talking to? That’s an eyeline issue, and a lot of the time it ties back to crossing the line and/or people thinking more about geography then camerawork. The actors are looking at where their co-star is in the room, not where the camera's told us they are.

ProTip—most of the time if I’m close on Yakko and he’s looking at Phoebe (but we don’t see her), he’s actually just looking an inch or two away from the camera lens. Left or right of the lens depends on which side of the frame Phoebe was on. It seems weird at first, but it looks right when you cut it together.

Yeah, I know. It’s a lot of stuff to keep track of. We should probably be making a list.

Speaking of which...

3) Have a shot list
Okay, up above where I talked about different shots? This is where I need to start figuring out which of them I need for each scene. Seriously—before the first day of filming, I should know every shot I need/want for every scene.

For example... scene one. The walk-and-talk scene outside the office building. Most of it’s just going to be a wide shot of Wakko and Dot walking, but I might want to get some overs for the last third of their conversation. I might not want to go in for coverage yet because (theoretically) tension levels are still low.

But that sword fight in the forest? Well, I’ll probably want masters from both directions, and some overs to get the swords in, plus tight on their faces for a few reaction shots. And this might be a good place for one of those pretty shots—maybe a really big camera move at a good part of the duel.

I need to do this for every scene in the script. Picture all of it in my head—how its going to look on screen—and then figure out what I’m going to need to make that happen. Yeah, it can be a lot of work—I’ve seen directors spend three or four days on a shot list just for a formula television show. I knew one guy who'd block all his shots out with action figures.

Here’s two quick pro tips about making shot lists....

First, I should remember that being in close to someone tends to give us more emotion, so I usually want to start wide to establish things and then go tighter to connect with the characters. There’ll be exceptions sure, but this is a great rule of thumb. It works for scenes and for the movie as a whole. The scenes at the start of my movie should be shot wider and looser, giving me some space to breathe, but they get tighter as the story progresses and tension builds. Seriously—go watch one of your favorite movies and see how many close-ups there are in the first few scenes as opposed to the scenes closer to the climax.

Second, when I print out my script (because I wrote out the whole script, right?), three-hole punch it and put it in a binder. Seriously, movie sets pretty much run off three ring binders. And one of the reasons why is that—if I printed my title page—every page of the script now has a blank page right next to it (the back of the previous page). I can fill that blank space up with the shots for that page, notes to myself, diagrams, all sorts of stuff. Now it’s all right there, right next to the relevant scene.

As sort of a subset to the shot list, I should know how I want every scene to make the audience feel. Is this a scary movie? A funny movie? Should they be thrilled by the action or the romance in this scene? And it doesn’t always have to be big reactions—they can be intrigued or hopeful or kind of sad. But it probably means something if I have a scene and I’ve got no idea how the audience is supposed to feel about it. Or if those feelings don’t really line up with the scenes around them.

4) Have a shooting schedule
So our script has a bunch of locations in it. An office building. A tent. A forest. A meadow. I probably want to make sure I’m listing the inside and outside of places as two different locations, so Interior: Office and Exterior: Office. This can come in handy later.

What I need to do now is figure out the best order to shoot things in that also works with when we can get those locations. Like, I can shoot inside the office during the week after 6:00PM, but it’s a two hour drive to the forest, so we need to that on the weekend. Also, that walk and talk outside the office is during the day, but we can only do that on the weekends, too. Plus, Wakko’s busy on the third weekend of the month, so he can’t be in anything then.

Plus... well, you may remember last time I mentioned a good rule of thumb is that it’s going to take 90 minutes to shoot a properly formatted page. Just to be safe, I should probably double that for pretty shots and/ or stunt stuff. So that page of swordfighting—I should plan on three hours to film that.

What I’m getting at is I also have to factor in how long we need to be shooting at each location. We may need the office for twenty hours altogether. Add in that we can’t get in there until after 6:00... it means we’re probably going to have to spread this over three nights of shooting. But not over the weekend Wakko can’t be there. Unless... we just do the two scenes he’s not in on that weekend.

This is why so many movies shoot stuff out of sequence. Yeah, those four office scenes are all through the script, but it makes a lot more sense to shoot them all at the same time. And the meadow and the exterior tent are almost forty minutes apart in the movie, but... well, is there any reason we couldn’t set up the tent in the meadow once we’ve shot the meadow stuff? We could just turn the camera a bit for a different background and bam exterior tent.

Yeah. It’s a bit of a puzzle figuring out how to make all of this work. It always is. I have friends who are assistant directors and I’ve watched them juggle these things back and forth, trying to make everything line up as best they can. Trying to work this all out will probably be when we’re doing a lot of begging and pleading and desperate promising with various people. Because we’re doing all this super-cheap, mostly off people’s goodwill, so we need to make everyone happy. This is my dream, but it might not be theirs.

Also, now that we’ve got this all these different scenes set down in shooting order, I can see that oh, crap... I’ve got three of my  pretty shots scheduled for Tuesday night. Do I really need all of them? Which one’s going to add the most to the story I’m trying to tell, to give it the most dramatic weight at a key moment? I should probably aim to get that one done and put the others aside for now.

Again, like the shot list, everything will go soooooooooooooo much smoother if we work this stuff out ahead of time. In fact...

5) Have Everything Prepped Beforehand
I’ve really gotten into cooking videos over the pandemic and I’ve basically watched... well, 90% of Binging With Babish at this point. In one of his Basics videos, Andrew talks about having as much prepped beforehand as possible when you’re cooking. Cut all the veggies. Weigh all the ingredients. Make sure all the pots and plates are clean. The less I have to do once the water’s boiling, the less chance there is I’ll mess this up.

I want to be the same with my movie. Know who’s bringing snacks and drinks to set. Know who’s bringing everything to set—if something’s supposed to be there, who’s bringing it? Me? You? Her? Have all the costumes ready to go beforehand—even if they’re wearing their own clothes, know which clothes they’re wearing. Have locations lined up and scouted and confirmed. Have the swords picked out. Any decision I can make before we all get to set is one less decision I have to make there on set.

Because when I’m on set, I want to be focusing on getting this shot from my shot list, not figuring out if Phoebe should be wearing leather armor or chainmail in a scene we're shooting four days from now.

6) Have Lighting and Sound
Okay, so... odds are pretty good we were thinking of spending some money on camera equipment. Maybe the camera itself. Maybe we’re using our iPhone to shoot this and we want to get one of those smartphone steadicam rigs. Or even just some selfie sticks and a few stands to prop it up on.

Here’s what I’d do. Right now, I’d think of the number I was willing to spend on the camera and cut it in half. Seriously, whatever I was thinking of getting, odds are I can find a cheaper version of it online. Yeah, we want good equipment, but let’s be brutally honest—at this budget level it’s all going to be kind of the same.

Then I should take the other half of that money I’d budgeted for camera and spend it on lights and sound. Yeah, I’ve mentioned lights a few times. Trust me, it matters. It will make a gigantic difference, just having a few lights I can aim and throw some diffusion over (diffusion in this case is wax paper, unless we've got access to a theater department and their gel cabinet (in which case, I want a few general purpose frosts)).

The only thing that can make a bigger difference than lighting is sound. So many B-movies these days have absolutely awful sound because those filmmakers try to just use the microphone on their camera and nothing else. But we’re smarter than that. We can just put a recording app on everyone’s phone, buy two or three cheap lav mics, and voila we now have better sound than half the indie B-movies out there. Just remember to clap really hard at the beginning of every take—one clap that all the mics can pick up. Now you’ve got something to sync all the different recordings to when you edit.

Yeah, that’s what the little clapper board’s for. It’s usually a digital sync these days, but for our purposes the old ways work just as well.

Told you this’d be educational.

7) Have a production meeting
Another term you’ve probably heard before. Maybe a week or so before we want to start shooting, I want to get everyone who’s going to work on this together. Not the cast members—all the people who are going to be behind the camera helping with costumes, props, lighting, locations, and well... the camera. And, yeah, at this budget level there’s a good chance some of them will also be cast members, but I’m not thinking of them that way today.

What I want to do is go through the entire shooting schedule page by page, with the script right next to it. If the very first thing we shoot is scene 23, then let’s go to scene 23 and make sure we’re all, so to speak, on the same page. We know where it is, who’s in it, what’s in it, if we need anything special for it (is this that running scene we need the bicycle for? Who’s got the bicycle?). We’ll go through the first day of the schedule, the second day, and so on.

Now, in all fairness, I know a few of my friends who are Assistant Directors will roll their eyes at me about this, because there are those folks who prefer to just read straight through the script and do the production meeting that way. This is an option, yeah, but in my experience sooooo many low budget films and shows had problems that tied directly back to people not being clear that A and B were (or weren’t) happening on the same day. Or that we were going to film Y a week before we shot X. And that’s stuff that won’t come out by just reading the script.

We can do it either way but personally... I’d go with the shooting schedule.

Also have snacks and drinks at the production meeting, even if it’s just chips and bottled water. Have something. All these people are here doing me a favor. Thank them for it constantly.

8) Have a read-through
Guess what? Now we’re going to go through the script in order. Maybe a day or three after the production meeting, I want to get my whole cast together, maybe order a pizza or three, and all of us read the script together. They all read their parts, I read everything else. This is when they get to all play off each other, get a sense of timing, get a sense of how they’re going to play their characters. I can get a sense for how the dialogue sounds, maybe tweak a few lines here or there, perhaps even suggest a few things now so –again—I’m not dealing with it on set. This is also a chance for everyone in the cast to just meet each other (assuming they don’t all know each other already) so they’re a little more relaxed on set that first day of shooting.

ProTip—this is a great time to take a couple random photos of people if my movie needs them. If the script calls for a casual picture of Wakko, or maybe a shot of Dot and Phoebe together for their phones, get them now. They’ll be in different clothes in a different setting, so they won’t look staged or photoshopped. Also, this may be the only time you have some people together who never actually share a scene in the movie (so they’d be scheduled for different days).

And now... we finally get started. It’s our first day of shooting, everyone’s together, and I’m about to take my place in the annals of film history as a director. So here’s two last things for me to keep in mind.

9) Have a Plan B!
Look... things are going to go wrong. Sometimes at the last minute. We’re going to lose that location. That actor’s going to get sick. The guy in charge of bringing the sword is going to forget the sword. It’s going to rain on the day of our big sunny scene. And it’ll rain really hard, believe me, because God hates us, and he hates that we’re actually making our movie while his is stuck in development hell.

While it’s good to have everything planned out, like I’ve said a few times above, it’s also good to have a few alternate versions in my head in case something goes wrong. Because things going wrong is really common at this budget level. It’s unavoidable. So I need to be flexible. Do I really need Wakko in this scene? Is there a way to do it without the sword? If I really need the sword, could this scene happen somewhere else, location-wise? Is there something else that could happen here today instead with the actors we have? Like could this office scene somehow happen outside the office building—or outside a different office building??—and maaaaaaybe one of the... meadow scenes could happen here in the office? We’ve got all the actors to do that, right? See, this is another time a shooting schedule will come in handy. Or maybe Wakko’s really sick so we just do the meadow scene now and the office scene will happen much later inside an... elevator? Parking garage?

And hey—sometimes having that flexibility can be for good things. Maybe things are going great and I’m seriously ahead of where I should be right now—we planned on this taking five hours and it only took three—well, maybe I’ve got time to squeeze in another one of those pretty shots after all.

10) Have confidence
Last thing. Be confident. When you’re making a movie, the director is the captain of the ship. We’re the person in charge, the one guiding everything. Nothing’s more demoralizing for the cast or crew than to have someone in charge who doesn’t know what to do. I’ve been on set when a director just sort of shrugs and looks around for someone to solve their problems. Hell, I worked with one guy who routinely admitted he didn’t know how to shoot the day’s scenes. It’s not fun.

I’m betting most of the folks working on this movie, cast and crew, are doing it as a favor to me. Because they believe in me. So the least I can do is convince them they’re right to believe in me. I can be prepared. I can have a vision. I can keep my cool and adapt when things go wrong.

This isn’t to say I should be a raging egomaniac and ignore everyone else’s thought and ideas and opinions. I don’t want to be that kind of confident. Think of it more like Bob Ross. He knew what he was doing, didn’t beat us over the head with it, and if something went wrong or got messed up, well... that’s just a happy little accident. Let’s deal with it and keep moving forward.

And that’s my ten top tips for being a better B-movie director, on top of ten tips for being a better B-movie writer. All of which should help make a much better B-movie. Which I can then sing the praises of during a future Saturday geekery.

I probably could’ve made this a top fifteen or twenty, but this is already so damned long I may need to take a break next week to make up for how much time I spent on this. If there was some question you were really hoping I’d answer or an aspect I’d cover, let me know down below. I’ll try to respond to the best of my abilities/ knowledge/ experience.

Also... this is SDCC weekend! I know the con itself is online, but I hope you’re doing something fun and geek related. If you’re interested, I’m going to be doing a three-movie viewing party/ live tweet instead of my usual, anonymous Saturday geekery. Everything’s going to kick off at noon (Pacific time) with Man-Thing, then at 2:00 I’ll be starting The Incredible Hulk, and we’ll finish it all off at 4:30 with Resident Evil: Apocalypse. And a few other writer friends may join me for different movies, if you want to follow some hashtags.

(Man-Thing’s free to watch on Tubi and RE: Apocalypse is on Hulu. The Incredible Hulk is the troublesome one—not available to stream anywhere, so if you don’t already own it and want to watch along, you may need to rent it. Sorry...)

And next time here... jeeez, like I said, I may take a week off. Put up a Tom Gauld cartoon or two. But next time... I don’t know. I should tell you what I’m thinking about doing, but I’m not going to.

Until then... go write.

Or direct.

I’m not the boss of you. Just go do something creative, dammit.

Hatching The Plot

I haven’t had to come up with an idea in weeks because all of you keep asking questions. And I’m really grateful because my attention’s been split, like, nine different ways lately so having one task where I’m just being told what to do is kind of relief. Seriously.

That said... we did the Writers Coffeehouse at WonderCon again this year (many thanks to Sarah Kuhn, Stephen Blackmoore, Fonda Lee, and Greg van Eekhout for taking part) and tried to answer a lot of your questions about writing. But after we finished recording, I realized someone had sent a question I hadn’t seen. Probably because social media algorithms tend to be jerks. Anyway, Tomasthanes asked...

”How did you learn how to plot? Did you take a course? Did you work through 50+ spreadsheets? Are you ‘gifted’ and just do it? What does the product of your plotting look like?”

Personally, I think there’s a bit of a mystique element to questions like this. Some of you may remember I’ve talked once or thrice about the difference between the textbook ability to write and the ability to compose a narrative. A simple analogy I’ve used is the difference between being able to cook and being a chef. It’s something I think a lot of us come to realize on some level when we start really examining this whole writing thing in a serious way.

However—and this is just my thoughts on this, don’t take them as gospel truth—I think this realization can also backfire on us for a bit. Some folks assume there must be some specific “pro level” they need to achieve for every aspect and element of writing. They must absorb the life-energies of ten other writers and then they'll know how to pick the grade-A ideas and create master-class characters and have, I don’t know, gold star spelling ability.

Truth is, most of these skills and tools work the same way on the expert levels. It’s just that those folks have more experience using them. It’s like thinking chefs get some kind of special knife that lets them chop faster or make interesting cuts. It’s not any different than the knives you or I probably have. They’re just more experienced with it and have learned a few tricks that work well for them.

And when it comes to plotting... the truth is, most of us already know how to plot. We learned from comics and cartoons and movies and fairy tales yes maybe even from books (wilder things have happened). We understand the basic chain of cause and effect that makes up every story.

So I don’t think it’s so much learning how to plot. It’s just figuring out how to get better at it. Finding a workout routine that works best for us, whether it be working through 50+ spreadsheets or... something else.

Anyway, here’s an easy something else for you to try.

Think of a story you loved as a kid. Not in the YA range, but more single digit. Maybe it was a book or a comic, possibly a movie or TV show. Something you know you loved.

Here’s the catch—it needs to be something you loved then, but you’ve since revisited and discovered it’s not as great as you remembered. Maybe it feels a little goofy or simplistic now. I mean, it might just be flat-out stupid. A plodding structure, a complete lack of worthwhile challenges, painfully obvious clues for the transparent "mystery.” I bet if you’re the type of person who reads these little rants, you can think of at least one story like that, right?

(I know I can)

So... think about how that story’s bad. Why is it silly or goofy? What would need to change, structure-wise, for it to be better? Something more suited for an older, somewhat more savvy audience?

Does it begin at a good point, or does it need a new one? Is there some sort of antagonist? Should there be? Are there real stakes? If not, what needs to be done to the story to increase them? What did our hero do to accomplish their goals? Were they actually challenged? Is there a satisfying ending? Or at least, satisfying in terms of the story I'm telling?

If you can explain why alongside any of these answers, even better.

A lot of these tweaks will probably also mean making adjustments to my characters. They might need to be a little more complex to justify some of their decisions and actions in the story. And that means they may end up having an arc of some kind, a story, and well, I’ve talked about that feedback loop. Plot pushing story, story driving plot, which lead to the plot again having an effect on the story...

Whoa! Hey, look at that. We’re plotting stuff. Just like the professionals do.

Will this be perfect? No, probably not. Like I said up above, there is an experience aspect to this as well. Some folks might have a knack for it, others may need a little more work, but none of us are going to be phenomenal at it right out of the gate. Maybe not out of our fifth or sixth gate. But it’s not because we don’t know how to do it. It’s just because we’re still figuring out our way of doing it.

And speaking of doing it...

Next week I’ll be trying to finish a huge pitch document for this new project, so I’m probably not going to have a post for you. Unless one of you gives me a really amazing question that I feel compelled to answer as soon as possible. But check in here anyway and I may have a cartoon or quick thought for you.

Then after that... clowns. Probably.

Until then, go write.

License to Prologue

I know I said I was going to talk about creepy clowns this week, but I couldn’t get the idea to gel quite right in my head. Plus then I got the social media question and had to deal with some other stuff. Anyway, I figured I’d backburner the clowns for now and talk about something more exciting for a minute.

Prologues.

Sorry, not prologues. Everyone knows prologues are awful and you should never, ever use them. Except, y’know, when they work. What I meant to say was Bond.

James Bond.

Let’s talk about James Bond and prologues.

If you think about it, prologues are kind of baked into the Bond film formula, especially the classic films. We’d always begin with James off on some little side mission, or maybe just finishing up a larger one, and then the opening credits would roll and we’d begin the actual movie. You know what I’m talking about, yes? It was the standard structure for decades, and even the new films kind of hold to it (although not quite as rigidly).

So why were these prologues so amazing that they were used through over twenty movies?

Three reasons...

First, it’s starting with action. By dropping us into the story right as a mission’s being brought to a close, it’s a perfect time for face-punching, explosions, gunfire, and bigger explosions. So not only are we starting with action, it’s action that has a clear purpose, a reason for its existence.

Second, the prologues always directly involve Bond. We don’t get long prologues about what other agents are doing, it’s about what our hero is doing. Right now. He’s part of the action, and usually the driving force behind it.

Third, and maybe most importantly, the Bond prologues always end up tying back to the main plot. Often directly to it. We get far enough in and learn that guy’s not dead after all, she was related to that other guy, or that other person got away with the goober that’ll let them do the thing in act three. So the prologues also serve as a bit of worldbuilding for the overall story and maybe some character introductions, too.

Three solid reasons the Bond prologues always worked.

And it’s not just Bond. This structure became so popular dozens of other action movies followed it. Hell, they’re still following it. Look at Thor: Ragnarok. Drops us right into the action with Thor winding up a mission to get Surtur’s crown, which ultimately ties back and becomes a key part of resolving the movie’s main plot.

So don’t be scared of doing prologues. Just make sure they follow Bond’s three simple rules. And if they don’t, well...

I was going to make some sort of “licensed to kill” joke here but everything I came up with was pathetic. Just pretend I said something fantastic. And accept there’s a good chance I’ll need to get rid of a prologue that doesn’t follow these guidelines.

Next time... I may double-post again next week. So there could be multiple topics.

Until then, go write.

Keeping Our Heads Down

This is something I’ve talked about several times here on the ol’ ranty writing blog, but I realized I haven’t talked specifically about it in, well, many years. Too many years, really. Definitely not since I’ve tried to lean away from the more ranty, accusatory tone I tended to write in back at the start of this.

Look, reading all those movie scripts made me pull out a lot of hair.

I talked a month or so back about the idea of a contract between author and reader. There’s one other aspect to that contract, a sub clause, and I think it’s one of those “so obvious we don’t think about it” sort of things. To be blunt, nobody’s picking up one of my books to hear from me. Or to see me.

I mean, sure, they like a lot of the characters and worlds I’ve created. Some folks probably (hopefully!) like my style enough that they’re willing to try something new from me. But they still don’t want to see me. They want the story, and they definitely don’t want me getting between them and it.

Now, this doesn’t mean I’m going to follow you home from the bookstore and stick my hand between you and the page or sing nonsense in your ear. It’s just that nobody wants me distracting them from the fact they’re reading my story. They just want to sink into that world and get lost.

Yeah, of course, on one level you know I crafted each of those sentences and paragraphs, chose where all

the breaks

should go, but we have this quiet understanding that I won’t be leaning over your shoulder asking “Did you like that? Did you see what I did there? Wasn’t that clever?” You just want to immerse yourself and forget about the world for a little bit. Or at least get to look at it from a neater angle.

That was jarring, wasn’t it? That weird paragraph break? It was only two lines, but it broke the flow for a second, and you stopped hearing my voice and started hearing your own instead. Probably saying something like “was that a mistake? Is he doing beat poetry? Was he trying to do something funny there?”

And this is the worst thing that can happen to a writer. I don’t want you thinking about me. I want you to be thinking about Hector and Natalie and the people they’re running away from. If you’re noticing me, thinking about what I’m doing... it means I’ve done something wrong.

Think of it this way. It’s the difference between the tough guy in a story who commits unimaginable acts of excessive violence to look tough... and the tough guy who doesn’t need to commit those acts. The one we understand is more impressive without seeing a blatant demonstration. Being able to restrain myself is usually more impressive than how excessive I can be. Less of us is more of the story.

So here’s four easy ways I can keep my literary head down.

Vocabulary— When I started out, I know I desperately wanted to show I had a better vocabulary than the average person. Because that’s a hallmark of a good writer, yes? I didn’t want to use common, pedestrian words, the words just anyone would use. I was a skilled anecdotist, after all, not some mere amanuensis.

And let’s be honest—I wasn’t alone. This is a phase a lot of us go through as we’re starting out. We latch onto (or more often, look up) obscure and flowery words for our literary masterpiece, as if we’re going to get a quarter every time the reader has to look something up. And if the reader doesn’t enjoy going to the Miriam-Webster site every three paragraphs? Well that sounds like their problem, doesn’t it? Not my fault you’ve got such a limited vocabulary.

Truth is, any word I choose just to get attention—to prove I don’t need to use a common word—is the wrong word. Any word that makes my reader stop reading and start analyzing from context is the wrong word. I can try to justify my word choice any way I like, but nobody’s picking up my book hoping for a vocabulary lesson. When a reader can’t figure out what’s being said for the fourth or fifth time and just decides to toss my manuscript in the big pile on the left... there’s only one person to blame.

(It’s not them, in case you had any lingering thoughts on the matter)

Structure-- Just like obscure vocabulary, convoluted structure’s another common sign of writer ego. One of the most common forms of this is insisting on grammatical perfection. This usually mean a lot of rigid, formal text and very stiff dialogue. It’s when I get so insistent on proving I know the correct way to structure a sentence my words end up sounding forced and artificial. Also worth noting the flipside of this which is insisting I don’t need to follow any grammar or spelling conventions. Punctuation? Capitalization? Those are tired tropes for losers.

The second most common sign is needless complication. I can admit I used to write—or try to write—sprawling, impenetrable prose. Sentences that went on and on. Descriptions that never ended. It took someone two pages to step through a doorway because we had to know what kind of socks and underwear they were wearing and what flavor toothpaste they preferred. If they were mentioned in the text, I had to remind you of these facts and how they were posed at the exact moment they spoke. Believe me, if something could be explained or described in less than ten words, I’d find a way to do it in at least fifty.

And while I never got quite that bad, there are also some writers who choose arcane story structures or points of view or tenses. Just because they can. Things will go from non-linear first person musings to omniscient third person flashbacks to second person song lyrics and then to a telepathic gestalt mind that only speaks in one of those single, three page sentences I was just talking about. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things, in a general sense, but so often they’re not there to serve the story. It’s just an attempt to look cool and do cool things. If I want to do something like this, I should be able to explain why I’m doing it. And the explanation needs to better than “y’know... reasons,” or I’m just going to leave my readers confused and frustrated as they get knocked out of my story again and again.

Said—Sad admission, kind of going with the vocabulary point up above. For many, many years I didn’t use said. Said was, in my opinion, the lowest common denominator of dialogue descriptors. It’s the kind of word used by writers who weren’t going places, writers not destined for greatness, like I clearly was. Not only that, I’d try to never us the same descriptor on a page twice. So in my early work my characters would respond, retort, exclaim, demand, muse, mutter, sneer, snap, shout, snarl, grumble, growl, whimper, whisper, hiss, yelp, yell, exclaim, or ejaculate. 

Oh, grow up. It was a common dialogue descriptor for years. Really.

Of course, once I finally got to sit down and talk with a professional editor and show him a few pages, this was the very first thing he commented on. Truth is, nobody notices said on the page. It’s an invisible word. Yeah, of course there’s going to be times when my characters are hissing or shouting or gasping. But I should save those words for then so their impact hasn’t been used up and weakened. The vast majority of the  time... stick to said.

Names—If used in moderation, names are also invisible. If you think about it, they’re just a shorthand note for the mental image of my character or MacGuffin or whatever. And they help us keep things straight if I’ve got a bunch of people all talking together.

It’s worth mentioning many fledgling sci-fi or fantasy writers feel the need to rename a lot of things. Or everything. Characters have all-new, correct-for-this-world names and so do their pets. And their gods. And their elements. And their system of weights and measures, their money, their units of time...  It’s great worldbuilding, but I’d guess 83% of the time this is just wasted words.  My elaborate sci-fi empire won’t collapse if I call mind-to-mind communication telepathy, but it might if I keep calling it intralobeech, which, as we all know, is short for “intralobe speech.”

Which, as we all know, is telepathy.

Always remember that moderation is key. Even a simple name like Bob can stack up and get distracting really quick. Which is why the ancient ones created...

Pronouns--when those proper names start to stack up, we switch to pronouns.  Just like names are shorthand for story elements, pronouns are shorthand for those names. When nouns start to clutter up my writing, they’re there to leap in and shoulder the weight.  It’s how Hector becomes he, that mysterious island becomes there, and a Hudson Hornet becomes it.

The catch here is I need to make sure my pronouns are clear. No questions exceptionally clear, ‘cause the moment someone gets confused about which her I’m referring to, they’re going to stop reading my story and start studying the page. We’ve all had to do that, right? Feel our way though a paragraph so we’re clear who she is. Or work backwards through the dialogue, trying to figure out who’s speaking which lines. I’m always super-careful with pronouns, because I don’t want that happening to anyone in my books.

Again—pronouns good. Pronoun confusion—bad. And it’s a writing rule you can apply to real life.

So there they are.  Four simple ways to keep our collective heads down so readers don’t see us standing there. Staring at them. Waiting to be noticed.

Y’see, Timmy, every time I make my reader hesitate or pause just for a second, I’m breaking the flow of the story. I’m encouraging them to skim at best, put the book down at worst. My reader should forget they’re paging through the latest Peter Clines novel, hopefully forget they’re reading altogether. And the easiest way to make that happen is for them not to see the writing.

It’s tempting to wave our arms and shout and try to get the reader to admit they can see us, but all this does is ruin things for everyone. It’s like Sherlock Holmes showing how he came to his amazing deductions or a magician explaining their greatest illusion. That moment is when the whole thing falls apart.

As writers, we need to go unnoticed. We want our characters to be seen and our dialogue to be heard, yeah. We want our action and passion and suspense to leave people breathless, absolutely.

But we’re just distractions.

Next time... hmmmmm. Not sure. I’m open to requests or suggestions if anyone has any. If not, I might tell you about a conversation I recently had with someone about getting published.

Until then... don’t let me see you writing.

Where to Begin

Look, taking all the requests and granting wishes in the holiday season.

A few weeks back a friend of mine from the Burbank Writers Coffeehouse (and hey, have you bought anything from Dark Delicacies during this rough time?) asked me about when you begin a story. To use his example, if 98% of my story takes place on Mars, but we need to know just how our protagonist got to Mars... what do we do? Do we start on Mars and do flashbacks? Do we start on Earth and have a slow burn to our main story on Mars? Where does the story actually begin?

I’d been mulling over how to answer this for a few days when I sat down with my partner to watch a Christmas movie or three. And one of them had...a lot of beginnings. It had a frame story. Then an introductory story. Then we jumped ahead a couple years to (I guess) the main story. And each new beginning forced us to ask is this when the story starts...? And if so, what was all that earlier stuff for?

So, hey... let’s talk about beginnings.

First and foremost, this is all going to be kind of vague and loose. Not in a hand-wavey “don’t think about it” way, but just acknowledging the fact that every story is going to have different needs. If I (or anyone else) tried to set down a hard rule for “always begin here” we could all come up with a dozen or more well-known examples that break that rule. Every story (and every writer) is unique, which means every starting point is unique.

That said...

One of the first things we should be clear about is that “where to begin” is a structure question. We have the linear structure of the story—A to B to C to D—but we also have the narrative structure, the order I’m choosing to tell this story to my audience. A lot of the time A is an acceptable starting point, but it’s not uncommon to start at B or maybe even D. It depends on what I’m trying to do as the writer, and being able to recognize that telling a story in a different way creates a different story.

Second, there’s one or two things we can say with a lot of certainty shouldn’t be my starting point. I talked a while back about the problems a lot of prologues have, one of the big ones being that describe-and-die thing that tends to show up in a lot of B-movies. Not saying these things will never, ever work as beginnings but... wow, it’s going to be a tough hill to climb, y’know?

Third, I should really be clear when things happen in a story has a lot of bearing on how we receive those things. Doing this now looks brave, while doing it then just highlights my cowardice. Putting this here is somewhat interesting, putting it there makes people shriek with excitement. There’s probably a whole post’s worth of stuff in that to discuss, but for now I just need to consider what this starting point is (or isn’t) doing to some of these first bytes of information I’m giving my reader.

Fourth is kind of the unspoken one under all of these. I can’t really figure out  a good starting point until I’ve got a story more or less assembled. It might not be written out in full, but I should have at least a rough sense of my plot and story. Maybe it’s a rough outline or just a good set of character ideas and plot points in my head. I can’t decide where to start telling my story if I don’t have a story, right?

I think this step trips some folks up. They come up with a cool opening, or they want to mimic the structure of a cool opening they saw somewhere else, but ultimately this opening doesn’t work for the story they’re trying to tell. It might be the coolest hat ever, but it just doesn’t go with this outfit. And if I keep insisting it does, I won’t notice that my little Kangol cap would go perfectly with that tie and really help bring out some subtle colors in the jacket.

(writing tips and fashion tips!)

But all of this still leaves us trying to figure out what makes a good starting point. Again, it’s tough because our stories are all going to be unique to us. I can’t really say “do this” and think it’s going to work for... well, maybe for any of you.

So here’s two thing to try.

Thing One—look at that rough draft or outline or framework and just lop off the first chapter (or its equivalent). Whatever you were thinking of using as a starting point, go past it and start there instead. As I mentioned above, a lot of us develop bad storytelling habits because we got hit too many times with the “start with action” stick. So our gut reaction is to create an artificial starting point that has a boxing match or a car chase or a two-headed shark attack.

And a lot of the time, if I snip off that artificial opening, what I’m left with is still a very solid opening—usually a better one. It gets me right to my characters. It gives me a stronger dramatic structure. It works better for reveals. Does it always work this way? Not always, but a surprising amount of the time... maybe 83%...

Thing Two—I’ve mentioned the idea of an elevator pitch before. Lucky me, I’ve just ended up in an elevator with a high-powered Big Five (is it Big Four now?) editor. So I’ve got one, maybe two sentences tops, to tell them my story and get them interested. No run-ons or rambling. I'm going to get three breaths, tops.

Do that right now—how would you pitch me your story in one sentence? Yes, now I’m the high-powered editor. Surprise twist!

Where did you start your pitch? Did you skip over anything? And if something wasn’t important enough to mention in the big sales speech... does it need to be there? 

And in both of these, please keep in mind I’m not saying I won’t ever need these bits I’m cutting loose in my story. They might be things to come out in backstory or flashbacks. I’m just saying maybe I don’t need to start my story with them.

 So go forth and find new beginnings! Or confirm the old ones are solid. That’s cool, too. Just as long as you’ve got a great opening.

Next time...

Holy crap. Next time is Christmas Eve. I’ve got to get these last few cards in the mail. And wrap stuff.

But maybe next week, as we’re all settling down for our long winter’s nap, we could talk about something seasonal. 

Like Die Hard.

Until then, go write.