Year: 2010

Presto!

Looks like I gotta get another hat…

Anyway, back in the day, when there just weren’t as many stories to be told, there was a very common structure to Greek stage plays. Essentially, the characters screwed up. A lot. They’d fail at tasks and get themselves in way over their heads. Just when all seemed lost, the stagehands would lower in “the gods,” one or more actors on a mechanical cloud, and the gods would use their omnipotent magical powers to take care of everything. No harm, no foul. Everybody wins.

If you didn’t already know, the name of this mechanical cloud was the deus ex machina (god from a machine). The term is still used today, although it doesn’t have the lofty implications it used to. It’s when a solution to a problem drops out of the sky.

Or, in this case, drops out of the sacred orb of Shen’nikarruan.

With the cinematic success of Lord of the Rings and the overall success of Harry Potter, fantasy is a hot genre again. Mix in a little softcore horror like Twilight and a lot of folks are probably tempted to write in that sexy-dark-mystic sort of style. Even a lot of people who’ve never had any interest in this sort of story before. Which is a shame because a writer really needs to be familiar in whatever genre they decide to write in.

A common problem beginning writers make–especially genre writers– is to fall back on magic to solve their problems. Characters get into a load of trouble, back themselves into a corner, square off against nigh-impossible odds, but are saved at the last moment as they all lay hands on the sacred orb. It doesn’t matter how world-spanning or universe-threatening the problem is, when the pure-of-heart grab that big emerald sphere it’s all going to go away and make life so much better for the good people.

For the record, it’s not just mystic orbs. The offenders also include–

–magic wands

–mystic swords

–enchanted rings, necklaces, or bracelets

–tiger-repelling rocks

–artifact X which must be returned to/ retrieved from the temple of Y

Now, before any other genre writers reading this start feeling smug, let me remind you of Clarke’s Law. You’ve probably heard some variation on it before. Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. A writer may call it the Technotron 9000 and explain it harnesses neutrinos to bend quantum fields, but for all intents and purposes it’s just another mystic orb.

This all goes back to something I’ve ranted about many times before. No one wants to read about a problem that solves itself. They want to read about characters who solve problems, preferably the characters they’ve been following for most of your manuscript. Lord of the Rings does not end with god-like mystic flames destroying the one true ring when the heroes reach the end of their journey. No, it ends with one character all-but driven mad from the burden of carrying it and another one who was driven mad by the ring accidentally destroying it because of his obsession to possess it again. Likewise, Harry Potter never beats his final challenge with magic but just through his sheer determination to do the right thing.

Y’see, Timmy, in good stories the sacred orb of Shen’nikarruan isn’t a solution, it’s just a MacGuffin. For those not familiar with the term, Alfred Hitchcock coined it to describe things that motivate plot and story without actually interacting with them. The Maltese Falcon (in the book and movie of the same name) is a classic MacGuffin. It’s what motivates almost every character in the story, but the legendary statue itself never even appears.

Now, as I often point out, this isn’t to say a magical plot device will never work. If you think about it, Raiders of the Lost Ark has God step out of a box at the last minute to kick some Nazi ass (and save Indy and Marion). Take a moment, however, and think of how many other things in that movie have to work perfectly in order for that ending to work. It’s a level of storytelling most of us–myself included–never have a prayer of reaching.

Which actually brings me to a potentially touchy angle, but one I feel obliged to point out. So if you’re easily offended, you may want to stop reading now…

There is a nice little niche market of faith-based films these days, and a few well-paying contests as well. In these stories, it’s completely acceptable to have prayers answered and problems solved by divine intervention. Heck, it’s almost expected in some of these markets. The Lord steps in to cure diseases, cast out evil spirits, and sometimes even make a personal appearance. At the very least, he’ll send down one of the archangels to help that nice woman who couldn’t pay her mortgage to the evil capitalist developer.

The thing is, despite the previous example of Raiders, “God saves the day” really isn’t an acceptable conclusion to a story. In those niche markets it’s fantastic, but for every other audience it’s just as much a cop-out as the magic orb or the Technotron 9000. The characters aren’t solving problems or doing anything active. In fact, they tend to be innately passive while they wait for the big guy to solve things for them. Which makes sense, because these faith-based stories usually aren’t about the characters, they’re about a religious message the writers are trying to get across.

Again, nothing wrong with having magic, uber-technology, or even divine intervention. But this isn’t ancient Greece. These days, it has to be about character first.

(I had no idea how I was going to end this, and then the archangel Beleth pointed out that I could just bring it back around to the opening idea…)

Next time, I’m going to drop names and prattle on about the time I talked with Hawkins from Predator about storytelling. Yeah, the skinny guy with the glasses. Him.

Until then, go write something.

All right you primates, listen up. This is my BOOMSTICK!

The twelve-gauge, double-barreled Remington– S-Mart’s top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That’s right, this baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan and retails for about $109.95. It’s got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger.

To get to my point, though…

The great advantage of the shotgun is that it’s very hard to miss with one. Load a few shells of buckshot and you can pretty much guarantee you’ll hit whatever reanimated dead thing you’re more-or-less aiming at. Heck, even if you’re not sure what you’re aiming at, you’ll still probably hit it. You won’t hit it with full force, granted, but with that amount of spread you will hit something. And if you’re lucky and hit enough of it, you’ll do more than slightly annoy your chosen target.

With that being said, I’d like to tell you a story…

It’s the story of Yakko Warner, a young man who wanted nothing more than to grow up and be on the Olympic pie-throwing team. It was his dream for as long as he could remember. But then, in the womb, tragedy struck…

Yakko was diagnosed with Sudden Infant Death syndrome and Alzheimer’s. Despite this, he fought on, born an orphan just two years after his parents were killed by a drunk driver. Working his way through private school and an ivy-league college by collecting deposit bottles every night and weekend, he graduated and became an alcoholic writer, artist, and musician on the same day he discovered he had AIDS, brain cancer, and Lou Gehrig’s disease. The next day, a random gang shooting killed his pregnant wife and four-year old son and left him crippled and in a wheelchair.

Yakko decided to become a teacher, in the hopes his story would inspire inner city autistic children to stay out of gangs. Alas, his students were all killed by drug dealers, crooked cops, homophobic bigots, racists, tragic suicides, random household accidents, and Somalian pirates.

Then he decided to write a book about the experience. Then he decided to option the book to be a screenplay. Then he decided to skip teaching and writing the book and just sell the story to Hollywood for the money. The screenplay won a Nicholl Fellowship, a Pulitzer, a Nobel Peace Prize, and a Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award.

Finally, on the day Yakko went to pick up his Academy Award for General Excellence, he was killed by a drunk driver. Ironically, the same drunk driver who had killed his parents five years earlier. As he bled out in the gutter, waiting for an ambulance that was delayed because Republican politicians he’d backed had slashed health care bills, a dove landed nearby. Then–as he stared at the bird and realized he’d wasted his life in books when he should’ve been out there living– Yakko died the most painful, agonizing death ever imagined.

~Fin~

Okay, you’re probably chuckling a bit, but what might be hard to believe is how common this kind of storytelling is. I saw it in writers’ groups in college (part of the reason I don’t belong to such groups anymore) and countless times when I used to read for screenplay contests. You wouldn’t believe the number of dramatic stories that are just brimming with excess plot devices and story threads.

This all springs from a common misconception–that writing a bunch of plot points and character elements is the same thing as writing a story. The logic is that if I load up my story with every possible dramatic cliché for every single character, one of them’s bound to hit the target, right? And then, eventually, the story will be dramatic. Plus, adversity builds character, therefore it stands to reason all this extra adversity in my story will make for fantastic characters.

I mean, Yakko comes across a dramatic, dynamic character, right…?

In all fairness, it’s not just the dramatic types looking to create literature and art who do this, although I must admit, they seem to be the most common offenders. I just read a book a while ago that puts the old action pulps to shame. Every punch drew blood, every car chase (or skimobile chase, or quad-runner chase…) ended with an explosion, and every leap rattled bones. Not only that, but every character had a snappy one-liner to toss out before, during, and after offing one of the villains. And there were lots and lots of villains…

There’s also the horror story that has blood and gore and chunks of flesh everywhere. Well, it would be everywhere except the story is told in complete darkness. Plus there’s a little chalk-skinned child who moves in high-speed “shaky vision” and the borderline psychopath and the one person who isn’t a psychopath but snaps anyway and gets dozens of people killed because he or she opens a door or invites something in or plays with the puzzle box.

Don’t even get me started on the sci-fi stories that have epic alien wars and ancient technology and sacred orbs and unstoppable monsters and long-prophesied, godlike, cosmic beings and cyborg ninjas and out-of-control nanites. God, I hate nanites. You’d think they’re more common than bacteria, the number of stories they show up in…

Y’see, Timmy, whatever your chosen genre is, just loading up with plot elements and blasting away with your No.2 shotgun does not create a story. That’s called mad libs, and it’s the opposite of writing in just about every way possible.

Which brings us to the flipside of using a shotgun. At close range your shot will definitely hit. It will hit with everything. And when that happens, you will completely annihilate your target. Nothing left but rags.

Take that as you will.

Next week I have a ton of deadlines so I might not be able to post anything, but if I do it will be pure magic, as always.

Until then, go write.

I’m sure most of you reading this are familiar with the title of this week’s little rant. Nowadays it’s just useless marketing hyperbole. I mean, really, is every episode of Gray’s Anatomy that powerful?

If you watched television as a kid, though, you knew that phrase was a hidden message from the network. We all knew “on a very special episode of…” really meant “this week’s episode is going to suck.”

Really suck.

Because “on a very special episode of…” meant this week wasn’t going to be about laughs or action or something enjoyable. It was going to be about a message. A message that, more often than not, was wedged and crammed and kicked into the episode until it fit. The characters were going to talk about racism or bigotry or death or drugs or sex or something else that just did not fit the tone of the show. Those episodes always felt awkward and forced because they disrupted the storytelling rhythm the shows had established.

One thing I see on a fairly regular basis is people who decide to write a story about a message. Not a story with a message, mind you, but a story about a message. There’s a small but oh-so-important difference there. When the writer is more interested in the message than the story, things quickly fall out of balance.

Let me give you a few examples.

I’ve seen scripts about people sinking deeper and deeper into addiction and dragging their friends and loved ones down with them. There’ve been more than a few stories about people who mess up the priorities of their lives and later come to realize what’s really important. I also read a story about the ghosts of aborted children haunting a clinic worker until he leads a crusade against his evil and sadistic employers. For the record, they really were evil and sadistic, and would keep a running tally of which doctor could abort the most babies in a day. I am dead serious about this.

I was even given one deeply disturbing script where a cute young woman came to realize that the real problem with America today was “all the coloreds moving in everywhere” and how much better off everything would be if we just got rid of them all… y’know, for the good of the country.

Yeah. I probably would’ve called the FBI about that last one if there’d been contact info on it. Needless to say, I gave them a low score.

Now, before anyone freaks out, there’s nothing wrong with having a message in your story. Most of the best stories do, on one level or another. Problems arise, however, when the writer approaches things from the wrong end, like some of the folks above did.

Here’s a simple test. If your story or script has a message in it (God is good, illegal immigrants are bad, Cthulhu is really bad), at what point did the message come into it? Did it grow naturally from the idea for a certain character or scene? Or did this story start with the message, and then get fleshed out with minor things like characters, plot, and dialogue?

When a writer starts with the message, everything else tends to get slaved to that singular idea. Characters in these tales tend to have awkward or unbelievable motivations because the story isn’t about what these folks would naturally, organically do. Their decisions, actions, and reactions are bent to reinforce the idea that’s being promoted. So they often come across as puppets that all enforce the idea. In one of the examples I gave above, no matter what your personal views, does anyone seriously think the people who work at abortion clinics sit around twirling their mustaches and giving out Machiavellian cackles as they do their job? Of course not. If they didn’t, though, they’d weaken the message that particular story was written around. So the story suffers because the characters aren’t relatable or believable.

This leads into the next point, which is dialogue. When the message dominates, dialogue suffers. People will spout out emphatic monologues, and a lot of the time they just sound insincere. The characters just end up serving as a mouthpiece for the writer’s views and ideas. Like motivations, this makes their words become stiff and wooden. It also has a tendency of being very on the nose. Characters can’t be there just to parrot the writer’s viewpoint on different matters.

Now, I gave some vague examples above, but let me give you a specific one. Who’s heard of Robinson Crusoe? Most of you, yes? I’m also guessing most of you have read it in one form or another as well.

How many of you have read the sequels?

I’m not talking about spin-offs or modern takes or anything like that, mind you. I’m taking about the two sequels Daniel Defoe himself wrote to one of the most famous books in English literature. Crusoe ends by claiming this is the end of the first volume of his adventures, after all.

Did you even know there were sequels?

Most people don’t, and they reason they don’t is because the sequels are considered to be some of Defoe’s worst writing. Now that he had an incredibly popular character, he decided he had a vehicle to pontificate about whatever he felt like. So in the next two books, Robinson Crusoe basically complains about people a lot and makes snide comments about how much more virtuous he is than everyone else. The most believable part of the second book is when the crew of his ship get tired of this non-stop commentary about their flaws and decide to dump Crusoe on the next island they pass (how’s that for irony?). The third book borders on being a manifesto from Defoe, thinly veiled by Crusoe’s voice.

Needless to say, books two and three didn’t go over that well with anyone.

Y’see, Timmy, your story can have a message, but it can’t be about the message. The message needs to serve the story, not the other way around. When it gets skewed like that, the writer ends up with something on par with one of those silly “Chick tracts” that tried to show how Dungeons & Dragons always led to suicide and Satanism. Not necessarily in that order.

And nobody here wants that, right?

Next week, I want to talk to you medieval primates about my boomstick.

Until then, go write.

Do you want to be a writer? YES / NO

Continue to the next paragraph.

One thing I’ve mentioned here once or thrice before is flow. It’s one of those elements of writing that we’re all instinctively aware of but it rarely gets a consistent name put to it. I first heard it referred to as flow years back by a writing coach named Drusilla Campbell. It was such a perfect term I’ve used it myself ever since.

Flow is how well the reader can move through your writing. It’s the way every line of dialogue rolls off the tongue, how each paragraph and chapter draws the reader into the next one. Like the flow of a river or the flow of traffic on a freeway. When the flow of writing is going well, you love it.

We can also define what makes for bad flow. When the river or the freeway aren’t going so well you get rapids, bottlenecks, gridlock, and so on. More to the point, you get frustrated and angry. A story that makes you stumble a lot doesn’t flow well at all. Clumsy, wooden dialogue and poor characterization don’t work either. Whenever a reader pauses to scratch their head or roll their eyes over the latest “twist,” that’s another speedbump in the proverbial road. If you’ve ever tried a book and just couldn’t get into it, odds are the flow sucked. You’ll read, trip over a page or two, and put it back down.

Y’see, Timmy, it’s not a bad thing to shock the reader once or twice with a bit of unexpected action, a clever reveal, or something else that jars them out of complacency.. It’s important, though, to remember that those shocks are the exception, not the rule. If a story is nothing but flashbacks or “gotcha” moments one after another, it degenerates into nonsense and frustration.

Readers keep reading material with good flow because it’s easier to keep reading than to put it down. Stephen King writes books with great flow. So do Lee Child and Clive Cussler. They’re all famous for it, in fact. Shane Black’s screenplays are notoriously fun to read. It’s also a big part of the reason all these people keep selling their work for high sums of money.

Now, for the record, flow is another one of those things I believe you can’t easily work on and develop in your writing. It’s one of those X-factors, where you can manipulate each of the variables but still not affect the final outcome. You just have to keep writing and keep writing and eventually one day it will all come together.

For example, in Goju-ryu, one of the original three forms of karate developed on Okinawa, there’s a kata called senchin (no, trust me, this is another one of those brilliant metaphors). The moves for senchin are often taught to the white belt novices. The instructors know that by the time the novices become black belts, they’ll have an understanding of how all the moves go together and can start to work on the form itself. The Okinawan masters understand that working on parts doesn’t always help you master the whole. One day, it just all comes together.

I’ve mentioned most of these before (often in greater detail), but here are a few easy tips that can help the flow of a story. I’m not saying doing these guarantees great flow, but if you’re going out of your way not to do them… well…

Keep it interesting– Easiest way in the world to keep readers from getting bored is not to be boring. A story that drags on and on before getting to the point doesn’t have good flow. If you’re telling a story, get to the story. If it’s a murder mystery, give me a body. If it’s sci fi, show me something amazing. If it’s a love story, show me passion on some level.

Keep it honest– Nothing will kill a story’s flow faster than something that reads as inherently false. People don’t give long speeches about love, honor, or duty in real life. Most of us stopped with the silly, mushy, giggly, fluttering eyelids in ninth grade. And it takes a lot for someone to stay angry for days, let alone years. Fake emotions and actions comes from fake people. Fake people are boring. See above for tips on boring your reader.

Keep it simple— If a writer tries to cram fifteen supporting characters, eight subplots, and the setup for four sequels into a 110 page screenplay, there’s not going to be a lot of room for a coherent story. If said writer decides to alternate each chapter, scene, or spoken line of dialogue between one of ten different time frames it’s going to keep knocking the reader out of the story as they try to keep track of what’s happening where and when to who. Don’t forget the basic goal of writing is to make the reader go on to the next page, not to baffle and confuse them.

Keep it smooth — If you’re picking obscure, awkward, or overly-long words just to show off your vocabulary, there’s a good chance you’re disrupting the flow of your own writing. It’s very impressive that you can picture what a titian-haired female with atramentous works of muted ink inlaid in her flesh looks like, but it’s much smoother, easier, and just as visual to tell us she’s a tattoed redhead.

Keep it relevant–One thing that pretty much always causes a stumble is when the writer adds in something completely irrelevant. Not when this character makes an odd movie reference or a cat walks by for no reason. No, the stumbling point is when the writer spends a paragraph or a page or more on something that has no bearing on the story whatsoever. When there’s an exacting description of the bus driver, a monologue about the morality of Israel vs. Palestine, or a flashback to fourth grade art class, odds are the flow has just been dammed up for no reason.

Watch your dialogue– You can get away with one character who talks like a robot and uses all those obscure, overly-long words I was just talking about. Possibly another who keeps slipping into a foreign language. Too much unnatural, stylized, or just plain bad dialogue brings the story (and the reader) to a screeching halt, though. Mechanics talk like mechanics. Investment bankers talk like investment bankers. Heavily armored mutants from Skaros talk like heavily… well, you get the point.

Have characters act in character.— On the same panel where she talked about flow, Drusilla Campbell commented that when the nun viciously kills a gardener is also when most people remember they have laundry they should be folding. Master snipers who can’t hit what they’re aiming at. Genius investigators who miss obvious clues. High school students who talk and act like 35-year-old investment bankers. If you’re not very, very careful, these are the characters who get books and screenplays tossed in the big left-hand pile.

Take it seriously– So, everyone makes a joke now and then to break the tension. But you should never be winking at the audience. Even if you’re doing camp or comedy, you need to be approaching your material as a sincere and honest effort on your own part. If you’re not, the reader will know and they won’t take you seriously. Not being taken seriously gets your manuscript put down in the left hand pile. After all, if the reader thinks the events in your writing don’t mean all that much to you, why should they care about them?

Eight tips for all of us to follow. Especially you. Yeah, you.

Next week’s little rant comes with an important message, so please be here.

Until then, go write.