Direct Pressure

            So very late.  So very, very sorry.  Thanks for your patience.

            By the way, just hold that there and press.  If you don’t, it’s going to keep oozing.

            Hey, speaking of medicine...

            A friend of mine is a med student and she’s joked with me a couple times about the television show House.  Believe it or not, House was a very unrealistic view of medicine.  But it was unrealistic on a level most folks don’t consider.  On the show, tests that would take days were often run in hours.  Treatments showed results in minutes instead of days.  Even his revival rate was amazing.  Said friend told me the odds of actually reviving someone who crashes in the real world—well, they’re not good.  CPR saves lives, but nowhere near as many as you’d like to think.  But on House they pulled it off at least every other episode.

            There’s a concept you may have heard of (or some variation of) that we’ll call compressed storytelling.  Very simply put, it’s the idea that we can skim over a lot of time and events without it affecting our story.  As the name implies, certain events are compressed so I can spend more time with others. 

            Most short-form stories—movies, episodic television, and short stories—are usually compressed to some degree or another.  Alfred Hitchcock—director, storyteller, partner of the Three Investigators—once said that drama is real life with all the boring parts cut out.  That’s also a good way to sum up compressed storytelling.

            Compressing the story often builds tension and knocks the stakes up a bit.  Silly as it may sound, compressing the story builds pressure.  If my villain plants a bomb in the city that’s going to go off in two months, that’s not a lot of pressure on the hero.  If it’s going to explode in twenty minutes... that’s a bit more urgent.  Likewise, if my hero (or heroine) has eight semesters to tell Phoebe his true feelings for her, he’s got a while to think about it.  If she leaves in two weeks for a year abroad with Steve Carlsburg (man, that guy’s such a jerk)... well, our protagonist needs to get his or her act together now..           

           Now, the flipside of this is decompressed storytelling.  It’s the idea that I should take my time and include everything.  And I mean everything.  Every single detail and nuance and fact, whether they’re relevant to the story I’m telling or not.  If we’re going to believe Hitchcock (and the man did know a few things about storytelling), this is when we add all the boring parts back in.  Supposedly also in the name of drama.

            Y’see, Timmy, decompressing the story takes the pressure off my characters.  If they have time to sit in a diner talking about the movie they saw last week or their intense feelings about Miracle Whip, there really can’t be anything else urgent going on in their life.  Yeah, good characters might have an occasional conversational segue, but it’s the difference between randomly commenting that I don’t like ketchup and telling the half hour story about the scarring childhood event that made sure I never touched the stuff again.

           Here’s an even better example.  I could tell you that I woke up this morning and sat down to write this week’s post (a few days late)... 

            Or I could tell you that I woke up, rolled over, folded my pillow in half, and went back to sleep for ten minutes.  Then my girlfriend got up and I looked at the clock and realized I really needed to get up because I have a deadline coming up, but first I tried to remember some bits of a dream I had.  Then I wandered into the bathroom, did my morning business, so to speak (we’ll skip over details there for the sake of politeness), washed my hands, dried them on the tan towel that doesn’t match the rest of the bathroom because I could only get one in the correct color, and then spent a minute playing with my hair.   I’m thinking about trying a new style, something like the brushed-forward cut Jonny Lee Miller has on Elementary.  We’ve got similar hairlines, so I think it could work for me. 

            Anyway, then it was off to the kitchen for my morning yogurt drink and a bit of grumbling at the fridge when I realized I drank the last of the Diet Pepsi last night.  Which is clearly the fridge’s fault and not mine.  I checked Facebook and Tumblr and even Google+, even though I’m honestly thinking of dumping G+ and going back to MySpace, just so I feel like I’m getting a better use of my time.  It just doesn’t get the response that either Facebook or Tumblr does.  My friend Bo put it in a good way, that Google+ just never hit that critical mass where a site really takes off.

            Then my girlfriend and I debated when we should go to the grocery store, because I needed Diet Pepsi and we also needed cat litter. But we were hoping the new Star Trek: Attack Wing ships will come out today because we love the game and we want that Borg tactical cube.  If we were going out later for that, it’d be much more time-efficient to do all our shopping at once.  But we didn’t know if the ships were definitely coming out today or not, which would also affect dinner plans because if we went over to Game Empire we’d probably grab a slice of pizza at Mamas and Papas and call that dinner.

            Then there was a minor panic attack after an email with my editor.  Turns out I had that deadline wrong and I was really freaking out before he calmed me down and assured me I could work for another two ort three weeks and it wouldn’t change a thing on his end.  So I took a few deep breaths, made a joke about how this just feeds into my drinking problem, poured myself a drink, and then sat down to write today’s ranty blog.

            Which, as a reminder after all that, is about how I don’t need to include every single detail and nuance and fact.

            And, man, I did not have time for all that.  I’m on a deadline...

            In my experience, some writers fall back on decompressed storytelling when they don’t actually have much story to tell.  I can’t make my novel lean and tight because if I did it’d only be three chapters long.  So I fill it up with segues and character moments and drawn out descriptions. 

            The common excuse for this is that I’m being “literary.”  I’m raising the bar and writing at a higher level than the rest of you.  All you people who keep skimming over those character moments and beautiful details and exquisite language in favor of things like “plot” and “action”... you’re the ones responsible for the dumbing down of America.

            I think a lot of this mindset is a function of something I’ve mentioned before—the very special episode syndrome.  If you’re not familiar with it, the very special episode is when a series does something a bit out of character.  Sitcoms do a serious story about abuse or racism.  Dramas do an all-musical episode.  Superhero comics spend an issue dwelling on the nature of mental health and suicide.  These decompressed stories tend to get a lot of notice and praise because they’re daring to push the envelope a bit and do something that radically contrasts their usual material.  I’m sure anyone reading this can come up with dozens of examples of such things.

            Something to take note of, though, is part of the reason the very special episode works is because of that contrast.  When we see a story where Spider-Man deals with one of his regular foes going kind of crazy and eventually killing himself, it has a lot more punch than if we read about a similar story in a psychiatric textbook.  Its rareness makes it special.  It’d be interesting to see what James Bond or Freddy Krueger do when they’ve got an absolutely free day, but it’s also going to wear pretty thin by the end of the first act.

            This is the big mistake I think people make with VSE (my new abbreviation), and it’s something else I’ve talked about before.  It’s when I look at the rare exception and assume that’s the rule.  It’s when I think the one aberration is what we should all be following.  If one story about Spider-Man dealing with mental health does well, we should do five!  Or ten!  Hell, why would we do anything except mental health issues? 

            This is why the last four seasons of Scrubs were all about people dying from cancer and drug overdoses, by the way...

            Now, as I often say, there is a place for both of these things.  I am a very big proponent of the idea that if you want to succeed in this business (the business of selling stories for money), then less is more.  But to automatically declare either method “wrong” is... well, just wrong. 

            If everything I’m writing is all one or all the other, though... maybe I should stop for a moment and reconsider.  Do I actually have a story and plot?  Are my characters dynamic and trying to resolve a conflict?  Or am I using decompressed storytelling to hide the lack of these things behind a lot of flowery language and drawn out, irrelevant dialogue?

            Are my characters fleshed out?  Is my setting well established?  Or am I skimming past plot points as fast as I can so nobody will notice I don’t have these things?

            Maybe it’s time to adjust the pressure a bit.

            Speaking of which, next time, there’s an idea I’d like to impress upon you...

            Until then, go write.

Character Cheat Code

            Up up, down down, left right, left right—novel.

            If only it was that easy...

            I haven’t blathered on about characters in a while.  Well, not strictly about characters.  Characters are the heart of storytelling, so really I’m always blathering on about characters.  And I saw something great a few weeks ago that got me thinking.

            Anyone here watch Game of Thrones?  I wanted to talk about a bit at the start of this season.  No, don’t worry, no spoilers...

            On the off chance you don’t watch, Arya Stark is the tomboy daughter of a noble family.  She’s on the run after a good chunk of said family’s been killed.  The Hound is a giant, mercenary brute who’s served as bodyguard, champion, and enforcer for the king, depending on what the moment calls for.   He snatched Arya up thinking he might get a reward for saving her, and they’ve formed sort of an uneasy alliance since then.  In the bit I mentioned, Arya and the Hound are riding doubled-up through the forest and she’s complaining about their lack of food and her lack of horse.  She berates the Hound for not stealing any gold from the King before he fled the city.

            “I’m not a thief,” he growls.

            Arya, who’s had some unpleasant encounters with the Hound in the past, glares at him and says “So killing an unarmed eight year old boy is fine, but you won’t steal?”

            The Hound looks past her, shrugs, and says “A man’s got to have a code.”

            My friends and I all chuckled at that.  The truth is, I think the Hound went up a few notches in everyone’s opinion right there.  He became a better character.

            Why?

            We like people who have a code.  It doesn’t need to be something spoken aloud or written down or sworn to in an oath.  It doesn’t mean they have to give up their possessions or disavow their former lives or change their name.  It just means these people are true to their beliefs.  True to themselves.  They say this is who they are and what they do, and they’re being honest.  The Hound.  Leon the Professional.  Dexter.  Barney Stinson.  Hannibal Lecter.  The Terminator.  All of these characters should be villains, or loathsome at best, but we like them because they all have a certain code they follow, and they won’t change that for just anything.  Awful as it may sound, we all like the fact that the Hound can kill a child without question, yet be insulted at the thought he’d pocket a few coins he wasn’t entitled to.

            From a writer’s point of view, a code is good because it means my audience can get a clear definition of my character.  It gives me a bit of background and development, because I can now explain or hint at why this person has said code.  It also provides me with an immediate source of conflict, because I now know there are things my character won’t be willing to do (and because a character who can do anything gets boring fast).

            The downside, of course, is that once I establish a character has some form of personal code, it’s tough to have them go back on it.  Y’see, Timmy, people don’t base their lives around an idea and then just change their minds on a whim.  These beliefs are an integral part of the character, so altering them is a major thing.  If someone tosses their vows or beliefs aside over something minor, it makes them look like very weak. 

            Which, by extension, doesn’t make me look too good as a writer.

            Next time, I’d like to talk about compression.

            Until then, go write.

Information vs. Noise

            Many thanks for your patience.  Sorry I missed last week, but—as suspected—travel stuff kind of overwhelmed me.  Texas Frightmare was pretty amazing.  If you’re a fan of horror, or any subgenre of horror, I highly recommend it.

            Enough of that, though.  Let’s make some noise.

            Actually, let’s not.

            Writer and writing coach Damon Knight made an interesting observation about how we receive facts as we read.  When we come across a fact that we don’t know, it’s information (I have four different statues of the Egyptian god Anubis on my desk).  Information is new, and we tend to pay attention to it. 

            A fact that we already know, on the other hand, is noise (the sky is blue, candy is sweet, the KKK is bad).  Noise is annoying.  It’s repetitive and distracting.  We try to block it out and focus on other things, because we know listening to noise is a waste of our time.

            Let me give you an example...

            I saw the pilot for a television show a few months back.  Well, most of the pilot.  I shut it off halfway through.  Normally I wouldn’t call out shows or movies for mistakes, but since this one’s already been cancelled, I don’t think it matters.  The entire first act of Once Upon A Time In Wonderland goes back and forth between young Alice adventuring in Wonderland with her Djinn boyfriend and adult Alice in an insane asylum, where she’d been for years because she insisted her childhood stories were all real. 

            As we kept going back and forth, the style of storytelling (and, granted, the whole premise of the show) made it very clear that Alice actually experienced these things.  So the ongoing inquisition at the asylum became doubly pointless.  I knew they thought she made it up and I also knew it really happened. 

            And information we know is just noise. 

            What’s interesting, though, is that as this back and forth continued, a shift happened.  The Wonderland sequences became noise, too.  Even though they were giving new information, it was still couched in the frame of “this really happened.”  And I already knew it really happened, because that was established early on.  So I began to glaze over the entire first act of the show and wondered when the actual story—something new—was going to begin...

            I just finished a book where everyone in a small village is being affected by mood-altering technology that are making them dull and listless.  The most vibrant people are tired and apathetic, and even pale from lack of sunlight.  As our young heroine returns home, she keeps observing how everyone is tired and apathetic and pale.  The girl at the local Quik-E-Mart is tired and apathetic and pale.  The clerk at the grocery store is  tired and apathetic and pale.  The deputy who she confronts about it is tired and apathetic and pale.  And she comments to her as-yet-unaffected friend about how tired and apathetic and pale everyone seems to be, and they wonder what’s going on.

            And I’m sure you were skimming a bit at the end there, because there’s only so many times you can see “tired and apathetic and pale” before you start glossing over it. It’s what I ended up doing.  I have to admit, I skimmed large swaths of the book because it kept showing me the same things over and over again.

            Y'see, Timmy, I need to be aware of noise not only in my story, but in the way I tell my story.  It’s unavoidable that I’ll need to repeat something every now and then.  But this should be the rare exception, not the standard pattern of my storytelling. 

            My story should always be moving forward.  My characters should be growing and learning and developing.  This is all progressive motion, and it’s what every story needs to survive. 

            Because if my story doesn’t have forward movement, it’s just me sitting there making noise.

            Next time, I’d like to speak in code for a bit.

            Until then, go write.