Looks like no one’s been reading lately. That’s okay. I’m used to people not listening to me.

And now you’re probably all at Horror Realm.

Bastards.

Then again, maybe I just need to rant about better topics.

Speaking of which, we were going to discuss that ever-growing backside of yours. And when I say backside, what I really mean is backstory. They’re pretty much interchangeable, because nobody wants to look at your backstory unless it is just perfect.

A few months back there was a response here from loyal follower #11 (who has since moved on to read Craig Mazin’s very informative blog, The Artful Writer) that rather than getting tighter, he often found his manuscripts growing as he did draft after draft. The characters became more nuanced, the story filled out, and the page count went up. I’ve had this happen, too. I think it was the second or third draft of The Suffering Map that introduced Theresa, the cleaning woman who overheard many things that took place at the Memory Lane antique shop. And I’ve also mentioned police detective Barroll and his partner, Lt. Cheryl Vacha.

Y’see, Timmy, a lot of stories get bulked up on backstory, because people keep introducing stuff in draft four, eight, or fifteen and assume this is essential material simply because it’s in a later draft. After all, I said a while back that by your sixth draft you should be more or less solid, yes? So by my own words, anything in the sixth draft must be essential, right?

Wrong.

What I eventually came to realize was that these weren’t later drafts of The Suffering Map. This was still me working on the first draft. I hadn’t figured out who these people were, what their motivation was, or why they all looked at each other nervously at a mention of Uncle Louis. What I thought was refinement and polish was still just me getting the raw materials together. The serious cutting hadn’t even begun yet.

The real problem with backstory is that it means moving back, and you want your story to go forward. Every page of character history means two pages you have to write to get the story to a new point. God help you if you decide to start with ten or twenty pages of backstory, because that means you’re in the hole on page one.

Not to mention the fact that so much backstory is completely unnecessary. At least four or five of you keep reading this collection of rants even though you have no idea what my brother’s name is, the name of the first girl I kissed, or what the first story I wrote was about. Does it keep any of you from absorbing or mocking what I say here? Not at all. It’s unnecessary.

It all comes down to what the reader needs to know. I gave the example once that no one talks about Masada at any point during Raiders of the Lost Ark because that film has nothing to do with Masada. In a similar vein, we don’t need to know how Ferris Bueller got his two-tone leather jacket, what Atticus Finch’s mother was like, where Hannibal Lecter studied for his doctorate, or which mission the Colonial Marines were on before the events of Aliens.

Keep in mind, I’m not saying that these aren’t interesting stories. In the hands of skilled writers, many of them would probably be very entertaining. The key thing here is all these stories were in the hands of skilled writers, and those writers chose not to include any of this. I was reading a film review a few weeks back and the critic, Nathan Rabin, made the very keen observation that stories like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings saga succeed despite their elaborate, epic backstories– not because of them. Backstory can be an amazing, powerful thing if it’s used at the right time and in the right quantities.

If it helps, think of being a writer like being a bodybuilder. One of the skills of being a competitive bodybuilder is to develop all of your muscle groups equally. You can’t ignore your shoulders while you do constant abdominal work, and your legs will suffer if you focus too much on your arms. More to the point, we’ve all seen the people with the unusual physiques who do these unbalanced workouts. The folks whose arms hang away from their bodies or whose shoulders always hunch forward. The ones with no neck. These people developed one muscle group so much it overpowers others and distorts the overall image. They’re phenomenal muscles, don’t get me wrong , and they could probably crush my flimsy writer hands with… well, whatever part of their anatomy you picture we’re talking about… but they fail as bodybuilders because they’ve developed things in the wrong proportion.

If Mr. Berenson the grade school teacher suddenly displays an amazing aptitude for wiping out ninjas and hijackers with nothing but a stapler and his bare hands, it might be worth mentioning he spent seven years in the Special Forces and how he ended up teaching kids the right way to use an apostrophe. However, if the PTA meeting got snowed in and they’re just sitting around waiting for a plow, telling that same story is now just a bit of excess padding.

There is a flipside to this, of course. To stick with the bodybuilder analogy, it’s when the writer doesn’t put in anything and the characters are left looking like anorexics. The readers are left wondering who all these characters are, why this action is happening, and why everyone speaks cryptically about “The Omega.”

Your characters need a backstory, believe me. It has to be there, and you as the writer should know it backward and forward. But that doesn’t mean you need to tell all of that backstory and nuance to the reader. A lot of it’s going to be irrelevant. Some of it you’re going to want to keep shrouded in mystery.

And, yes, some of it you’re going to need to tell.

Next time, it struck me that I’ve been ranting for ages about stuff that goes into stories, but I’ve never really said anything about the stories themselves. So let’s hope the deadline gods are kind to me so I can pontificate about that for a bit.

Until then, go write.

Very sorry I didn’t get to post anything last week. Spent the time trying to hammer out a last few wrinkles in my current project… and hopefully succeeding. Guess we’ll know soon enough.

But enough about me and my problems. Let’s talk about your problems. To be more exact, let’s talk about the people who are causing problems for your characters.

The technical term for this person is the antagonist. He, she, or it is the entity that’s opposing your hero or heroine. Simply put, it’s the bad guy. There are cases where the antagonist is actually the good guy in the story, or at least the more respectable one, but those tend to be much larger, Shakespearean-level stories (well, when they’re done right) than anything most of us are dealing with. There are also cases where the antagonist and the villain are two separate characters (yes, it can happen– look at The Fugitive). So for ease of discussion, I’m just going to be tossing stuff out with the understanding that the antagonist is the bad guy for whatever story we’re working on.

(That title’s another pop-culture reference, by the way, but only the older geeks will get it…)

The bad guy can make or break your story. Whether it’s an enemy general, a high school mean girl, a homicidal sociopath, or even just the overbearing boss at the office, the bad guy has to be just as solid and well developed as your main character. How many books have you read or movies have you seen which failed because the villain was just a two-dimensional caricature tossing out random challenges and “threatening” lines.

So, a few things to keep in mind when crafting your antagonist. Like most things I toss out, they’re not all hard-fast rules, but I think if you look back over some of your favorite books and films, you’ll see that the most memorable bad guys tend to be…

Smart — No one’s saying the bad guy has to have a degree from Oxford, but if you’ve got a gullible character who has trouble opening closet doors and can’t string two thoughts together, it’s going to be tough convincing your audience he or she somehow rose to the position of being a real threat. There’s book smart, street smart, and even just plain old animal instinct. But the reader has to believe your bad guy has a brain in his or her head. Remember, few things are more intimidating than a villain who’s a step ahead of the hero–especially when that puts him or her a few steps ahead of the audience, too. In Die Hard, when Hans Gruber quickly assumes the identity of a cowering hostage, we all think John McClane is smart for asking his name and department… until we realize Hans assumed this would happen and already memorized the office directories.

Motivated — The hero has a believable motivation, and the bad guy should, too. There has to be a reason they’re doing whatever it is they’re doing. Robbing homes, starting wars, humiliating people, killing kids at a summer camp– none of these things are done just for the heck of it. In fact, one of the worst motivations a character can have is “just because,” which is probably the only thing worse that saying “because he’s insane!!” If the writer knows why these acts are happening, it helps flesh out the bad guy and make him or her more than a forgettable cut-out. The men who betray Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo all have different reasons for screwing him over, but every one of them has a solid motive for sending their friend off to prison.

The Good Guy – This one’s definitely not hard/fast, but it’s an important one to consider, especially when you look at the last one. Many of the best villains honestly think they’re doing the right thing, so their motivation is similar to the hero’s (even if their methods are a bit questionable). Magneto in X-Men saw one of his subsets of humanity (the Jews) almost exterminated in World War II, and so he’s determined not to let that happen to the other subset he belongs to (the mutants). The flipside of that is Josef Mengele in The Boys From Brazil, who honestly believes what he’s been doing is the right thing, even though pretty much every historian on the planet would disagree.

Doesn’t act like the bad guy — It’s easy to make someone the obvious bad guy. How many romantic comedies have you seen where the love interest starts off paired up with some who is so obviously not right for them? It’s easy to have the third leg of that romantic triangle be a jerk or a bitch. When the bad guy straddles that gray line, they’re a lot harder to write off. They also tend to be much creepier, because once their true nature is revealed it becomes clear how manipulative this character is. Consider Nazi Colonel Landa in Tarantino’s recent Inglorious Basterds. He’s a pleasant, polite, smiling goof who laughs at every joke…and yet the audience can’t help but be on edge around him because of it, wondering when and if the other shoe’s going to drop.

Calm – again not a hard fast rule, but like I was just saying, the quiet, friendly villain is almost always scarier than the shrieking, raging one. Just like with heroes, someone who’s calm is in complete control of the situation. Part of the eeriness of the original Jason Vorhees was he was slow and quiet. Never rushed, never crazed. Who was really scarier in the original Star Wars— Darth Vader who psychokinetically strangles a guy? Or Grand Moff Tarkin, who blackmails the princess with the life of a whole planet… and then coldly wipes it out anyway after she cooperates? And didn’t Vader jump up a few creepy notches in Empire Strikes Back when he calmly invited the heroes to join him at the dinner table? Heck, consider that when we first meet Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (either the book or the film) he’s meticulously pleasant, doesn’t make one threat, doesn’t raise his voice… and leaves us squirming in our seats.

Limited — When I talked about superpowers a few weeks back, I mentioned that the more believable tales tended to involve characters with limits. An all-powerful antagonist is just as boring as an all-powerful hero. Superiors, vulnerabilities, emotional weaknesses– there has to be something that convinces people from early on that the antagonist can be overcome. Every tyrannical office manager has to answer to a supervisor, who has to answer to a junior executive, who has to answer to a senior executive. Captain Barbossa had a few unlucky gold coins. Randall Flagg is nightmarishly powerful in The Stand, but most of his power stems from people believing he’s nightmarishly powerful. Bad guys need their own swords hanging over their heads.

Finally, one or two things to avoid. First, you don’t want your bad guy to be a dupe. It’s almost always frustrating on some level to get to the end and find out the bad guy has been blackmailed/ brainwashed/ manipulated into the role of the bad guy. If you saw the recent G.I.Joe film, you probably remember how silly and pointless it felt when it was revealed the Baroness was really a good woman who’d been hypnotized by… nanotech… or something. Not saying it’s impossible to make this little twist work, but it has to be played with carefully because it’s one of those elements that bad writers have pushed to the edge and now it’s teetering on cliché.

Also, you probably don’t want your bad guy to have some secret, hidden past ties to your hero. Ever since we found out Darth Vader was Luke’s father (and I would apologize for the spoilers but come on! Where have you been?) it’s been an easy out for writers to drop in this sort of thing as a weak attempt to flesh out characters. Janie and Megan were best friends back in grade school. Dillon and Dutch served in the same military unit. Jake and Mitch used to be in love with the same woman. These sort of reveals seem clever at first glance, but more often than not they’re pointless and have no real bearing on the actual story. If you’ve got some of these ties in your manuscript, try cutting them out and see now much they really affect the story. If you’ve got less than ten lines of rewrites to do after removing them, you probably didn’t need them.

And there you have it. Whether your bad guy is a bionic ninja warlord from the future bent on conquering the Earth or just Britta from fifth period English who wants to be prom queen no matter what, hopefully something in this little rant will strike a chord with you, one way or another.

Next week–and it will be next week, I promise–I’d like to rant a little about your backside. It’s getting a little sizeable, and not in that good way…

Until then, go write. Go! Who’s stopping you?

Well, since not one of you voted last week, I got to seize power again and decide what to rant about this week with no input or opinions. Viva Democracy! The system works!

So, speaking of things working, action can mean a bunch of things. It can be Yakko finally getting a backbone and standing up to his abusive boss. It can be Wakko fighting off cyborg ninjas from the future. It can be Dot running from a serial killer deep in the forest one night because she was doing naughty things at summer camp.

We all want to do cool action, because it’s fun and it’s memorable and it makes producers think “this would look great on the big screen– give that writer a quarter-million dollars!” But most of us have probably read a book or three with painful action descriptions, and any script reader can tell you about the dozens they dropped because the action scenes were sleep-inducing at best.

Probably the most common problem I see with action is a desire to put in all the action. Every single instant of it. Every gunshot, every punch, each flail of the legs as someone tries to climb up a cliff, and all the individual roars of an angry dinosaur.

Thing is, too much detail slows action down. It can be the most amazing bit of kung fu fighting ever, but each time the writer pauses to describe the harsh open-palm strike which is blocked with a swift overhand block which rolls over the wrist and into a hold to create an opening for two quick punches, one to the face, one to the… man, that should be half a second of fighting, but it’s two lines here. That is one slooow, overwritten fight.

Putting in all the action also tends to get messy from a vocabulary point of view. Bad enough the writer is putting in all seventy punches, but they also know that seeing “punch” seventy times on the page is going to get dull. So suddenly the combatants are punching, hitting, striking, whamming, banging, thrusting, pounding, blasting… It starts feeling needlessly complex, and yes, you should also notice that it starts sounding vaguely pornographic as well.

Now, compare all that to this…

Their hands were a blur of strikes, blocks, and counterstrikes.

I didn’t give as much information, but I did convey a much faster, intense scene, and with far fewer words. Fewer words means a faster read, which means a faster fight.

In my mind, action is a lot like character descriptions. You want to give broad strokes and only use fine details when absolutely necessary. Let the reader fill in a lot of it– because odds are they will anyway.

Action, by it’s very nature, is usually fast, so use this as a rule of thumb. If something is only taking a few moments to happen in your story, it should only take a few moments to read. If there’s an important detail that will matter later in the story, sure, add it in. But otherwise, keep it clean and simple.

Another key note… it has to be possible for the reader to visualize the action. One screenplay I read a while back had gladiatorial games where one man was pitted against three hundred. It actually said that in the script– “Now he fights 300 men with just his sword.” This was going on in the background, for the record.

Gigantic action scenes involving a hundred thousand people are cool, but they’re hard for someone to keep in their mind. That’s why such huge battles tend to concentrate on smaller, individual conflicts. In Tolkien’s The Two Towers, thousands fight at Helm’s Deep, but we’re mostly concerned with Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas. When Dan Abnett writes about the Tanith First and Only on a battlefront, he tends to focus on Gaunt, Mkoll, or Rawne, not on the regiment as a whole. Saving Private Ryan is about World War Two, but it’s mainly about this one small unit of soldiers.

Visualizing can also be a common knowledge problem. It’s cool that the author knows all the Japanese names for every kick, punch, strike, and block from each of fifteen fighting styles… but does the reader know them? Do they need to? From an audience point of view, it there a huge difference between a hail of bullets from an M-16 and the spray of lead from an AK-47? Anything that makes your readers pause to consider what’s going on is slowing down the action and it’s breaking the flow of your writing. Especially watch for this in genre material, where writers can be making up completely unique weapons and fighting styles. It’s great that Nimwadda is a Zonbovac master with his gwerttig, but it’s a lot easier to visualize if I’m told he’s a world champion axe-fighter… even if it’s a special goblin axe.

A special note for screenwriters. A lot of action stuff gets redone on set, for a variety of reasons. Time is one. Money’s another. Plus, let’s face it… most stunt coordinators have a better idea how to set up a cool-looking fight on screen than most writers do. That’s their job, after all. They’re also keenly aware of what’s possible– and what’s safe— for the stunt teams and actors to do. I heard a funny story from the live action Spawn movie, about the petulant writer/ director who was angry a stuntman wouldn’t do one stunt sequence he’d blocked out… because it almost certainly would kill the stuntman.

In a screenplay, worry about setting the mood and tone of an action sequence more than a shot-by-shot description of the sequence itself. The swordfights in The Princess Bride have a very different tone than the ones in Highlander. The slugfests in Rocky are not like the ones in Hellboy. Skim over the action itself, just make it clear what kind of fight it is, which way it’s going, and who wins.

As an example, let’s look at the lobby battle in The Matrix. Neo steps through the metal detector wearing a hundred guns he borrowed from his grandfather’s arsenal and then it’s mass carnage. From the moment we see Neo’s boots coming out of the revolving door to the moment he and Trinity step into the elevator is almost precisely three minutes, fifteen seconds of bullets, karate, acrobatics, and aggressive redecorating.

How long is it in the script?

About half a page. Ten lines.

Neo and Trinity walk in, he guns down the guards. More guards come, they’re gunned down, and our two heroes continue on their way, cool as ice. That’s it.

However, it’s still okay to note key elements of a sequence. In The Princess Bride, we need to know that Inigo and the Man in Black both switch hands during their swordfight, but we don’t need to know which steps their blades clash on as they work their way up the staircase. Watch a couple films with elaborate action sequences, like Equilibrium, Brotherhood of the Wolf, or even (dare I say it) Attack of the Clones. There are long stretches of action, but what stands out? What catches your eye? Remember the “hallway of death” in Equilibrium? We remember the auto-loaders in Cleric’s sleeves, his roll onto the “weeble” clips, and him kicking up the rifle near the end. There’s a lot more to the scene than that, but that’s all you’d need to focus on.

So that’s where the action is, if you’ll pardon the pun. And if you won’t, well… you should’ve voted when you had the chance.

Next week, we bring on the bad guys and talk about why John Saxon never got to play a good screen villain, but Alan Rickman did.

Until then, take action. And go write.

Michael Jackson, as promised.

So, this week I wanted to talk about… well, talking. I prattled on about dialogue descriptors just a few weeks back, and the simple power of said. However, a few recent things I’ve read over the past couple weeks– plus one god-awful movie I saw which was supposed to be about a real American hero– have had me thinking about dialogue as a whole.

Dialogue really is the lifeblood of fiction. Sounds corny, I know, but it’s true. If you’ve got dialogue problems in a novel or short story it’s really bad. In a screenplay it’s pretty much fatal. It’s a killer because everyone knows what people sound like. They may not all disarm warheads, fight ninjas, or race dinosaurs, but everybody talks to people, so it’s the first place a writer’s work can get picked apart.

So, here are five easy things to spot in your writing which can keep dialogue from flowing naturally.

Extra descriptors— Even if you’re using said, you don’t always need to use it. After a point, it should be apparent who’s talking. Look at this…

——————————————————–

Tom cracked his knuckles. “You really want to do this?”

“I do,” said Jerry.

“No holds barred?”

“All out. Mano e mano.”

“You’re going to get hurt.”

“I better, for your sake.”

“Cocky little rodent, aren’t you?”

——————————————————–

No problem keeping track of who’s talking, is there? Plus with less words it’s leaner and faster. You can feel the tension building in the exchanges because you’re not getting slowed down by excess words.

Not only that, once you’ve got speech patterns down for your characters, you should need descriptors even less. In my book Ex-Heroes, Gorgon’s dialogue could never get confused with Stealth’s. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy doesn’t speak the same way as Belloq, and neither of them sound like Toht, the black-coated Gestapo agent. Their voices identify them just as well as a header would.

Spoken names— It’s very rare to address someone by name. Pay attention during your next phone call, or look at The Road by Cormac McCarthy. We never learn the character’s names because they never say them. Why would they? They’re the only two people around, and have been for ages now. Look at that last example up above. Tom and Jerry know each other, and we get the sense they’re speaking directly to one another, so they don’t have to keep saying each other’s name again and again. It just starts sounding kind of cartoony.

——————————————————–

“You know, Fred…”

“Yes, Barney?”

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Wilma. Fred, do you remember that week Betty was away and you had to work late a lot down at the quarry?”

“Barney, you son of a–“

“We didn’t mean to, Fred. It just happened! It was–Fred, no! Put the club down, Fred! FRED!!!”

——————————————————–

Even if you’re doing it a bit more seriously than I just did, spoken names can also come across as a bit fake. It’s the author acknowledging the audience may be having trouble keeping track, and throwing in a name is the easiest way to deal with it, rather than the best way. Remember, if you’ve got two characters who have been introduced, it’s really rare that they’ll need to keep using each other’s names. Especially if they’re the only ones there.

Cool lines— D’you remember that bit in The Incredibles when Syndrome reveals his master plan? “And when everybody’s super… no one will be.” It’s an ugly truth–everything becomes mundane when there’s no baseline. If everyone’s a millionaire, being a millionaire isn’t all that great. If everyone on your basketball team is eight feet tall, who’s the tall guy? If anybody can hit a bullseye at 100 yards out, hitting a bullseye doesn’t really mean anything, does it?

The same holds for dialogue. We all want to have a memorable line or three that sticks in the reader’s mind forever. The thing is, they’re memorable because they stand out. Even in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s old films, when he had piles of one-liners, he also had piles of lines no one remembers that just advanced the story. We all remember the first line he says to the Predator, but do you remember the first line he says to Dylan? What about any line he gave to Hawkins, the skinny guy?

Fun side note–believe it or not, Hawkins is screenwriter Shane Black, the guy who wrote Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.

If you try to make every line a cool line, or even most of them, you’re shooting yourself in the foot because none of them are going to stand out. When everything’s turned up to eleven, it’s all at eleven– it’s monotone.

“As you know…” – If you take nothing else from today’s rant, take this. Find every sentence in your writing that starts with this phrase or one of it’s halfbreed cousins like “You know, (insert character name)…”.

Once you’ve found them, delete them ALL.

This is probably the clumsiest way to do exposition there is. Think about it.

“Yakko, you know I get grumpy if I don’t eat.” If he does know, maybe you should just get to your point.

“As you know, Wakko, my birthday is coming up…” Well if Wakko knows, why does the speaker need to point it out?

“You know, Dot, we’ve been friend for twelve years now…” Did Dot have a head injury and needs to be reminded of this? If so, cool, if not…

“As you know, men, this war against the Zentradi has been going on for seven years now…” Seven years and you’ve got to tell a room full of soldiers who they’ve been fighting against and for how long? Where did these folks get shipped in from?

If you’ve got a really solid manuscript, you might be able to get away with doing this once. Just once. As long as you don’t do it your first ten pages or so. Past that, get out your editorial safety scissors and start cutting.

Grammatically Correct – very few people speak in perfect, grammatically correct English, aside from a few freaks with inferiority complexes. We all speak differing degrees of colloquial English. Our verbs don’t always line up with our nouns. Tenses don’t always match. Fact is, a lot of “spoken” English looks awful on the page. If you’ve got the grammar function on in Word (and, seriously, why is it on? Kill that thing right now. And the spellchecker while you’re at it), spoken English is a nightmare.

This is where a lot of new writers choke, because they can’t reconcile the words on the page with the voices in their heads (so to speak). Thus, they end up with several characters, all of whom speak in a precisely regulated manner which seems wooden, affected, and does not flow by any definition of the term. To help beat this, you want to have someone else read your words out loud. Not you, because you know where to pause and emphasize. See what someone else does with it, how natural the words really sound, and how well they really flow.

And that’s that. Five things you should be able to spot and fix with almost no effort at all.

Next week… I don’t know. Part of me was thinking about talking about action scenes, but I’ve also been bouncing around some thoughts about antagonists. Any preferences?

Regardless, go write.