Category: action

            Of course, being active is just good advice in general, don’t you think?

            Active can mean two different things in writing.  We can be talking about my writing in and of itself.  We can also be talking about what’s happening in the story and who’s doing it.

            First things first.  You’ve probably heard the term “active voice” tossed around a lot by guru types.  It refers to how I’ve structured my sentence.  Simply put, active voice is when my characters are doing stuff.

–Yakko mixed the soup and added pepper.

–Dot lit up the room with a flashlight.

–Wakko eviscerated the minotaur with his sword

            If you want to be a bit more grammar-oriented, when I’m using the active voice my characters should be the subject of my sentence.  They’re the ones doing things and making things happen.  They’re the movers and the shakers.

            Passive voice, on the other hand, is when stuff is being made to happen by my characters.

–Pepper was added to the soup as it was mixed by Yakko

–The room was lit up by Dot with a flashlight.

–The minotaur was eviscerated by Wakko’s sword

Wakko celebrates his adjective status.

            See, all these sentences convey the same information, but my characters are all objects now.  The focus has shifted to the soup, the room, and the minotaur. Heck, to keep things simple, Wakko the character was effectively removed from that last sentence.  He’s just a possessive adjective describing the sword (the real object).

            Another advantage of active voice is that it tends to be clearer.  Passive voice is an element of purple prose, which sounds nice sometimes but often gets confusing with all of its twists and turns, breaking the flow of the story.  Active voice is also usually more concise, which is great for pacing and word counts.  It just feels more dynamic.

            Now, you’ve probably heard a lot of gurus rant on about how you’ve always got to use the active voice.  Always, always, always, no exceptions.  Never use the passive voice for anything..

            This is wrong, of course.  There are plenty of times it’s fine to use passive voice.  It’s the same with having non-stop action or focusing exclusively on my main characters and ignoring the secondary ones.  It’s a way to alter the tempo or tone a bit in a story.

            The passive voice could be a quirk of a particular character’s way of speaking, especially in first person.  It could be used to “step back” in a moment of drama or mystery.  In screenwriting, it’s a clever way to change the visual of a moment without including camera angles or stage directions.  Done right, passive voice can even be used to increase horror—what could be worse than a character getting reduced to an object in all ways?

            So while  there are some good reasons to phrase things in the active voice, you don’t need to avoid the passive voice like the plague.

            However…

            It’s not just enough to phrase things in an active way.  My characters actually have to be active.  They need to make choices.  They have to face challenges.  They must take action.  Not in a gun-slinging, sword-fighting, car-chasing way.  Just in the simple sense of doing something.  On one level or another, my characters need to be the ones making things happen in a story.

            I honestly couldn’t tell you the number of stories or scripts I’ve read where the main character doesn’t do anything.  They just sit there as the story flows around them.  Other people tell them what to do and make their decisions for them.  They don’t take any action unless they’re dragged/ kicked/ forced into it.  A lot of them are little character-study “indie” things, but I’ve seen action movies done this way and horror novels, too.  Heck, I saw the film adaptation of a Harry Potter-esque book and it was almost halfway through the movie before the title character did a single active thing.  Up until then he was just a sock monkey getting handed off to different characters.

            Keep tabs on the voice of your story and make sure you’re not being too passive with your writing. And by the same token, you don’t want to have a lot of active writing about a character who doesn’t do anything.

            Next time I’d like to share a little idea I had about reverse-engineering.

            Until then, go write.

            I’m also counting the minutes until John Carter comes out, but that’s another story entirely.

            You know who else counts minutes?  Script supervisors.  It’s one of those credits you see in film and television that a lot of non-industry people don’t really know what it means.

            Very simply put, the script supervisor (often called the scripty)  keeps track of things.  He or she’s the one who notes exactly what’s been filmed (what shots and sizes and angles and lines) from each scene.  Like lots of other key folks on set, the script supervisor does their own breakdown of the script.  And the scripty’s breakdown is all about time.

            The standard estimate for a screenplay is a page a minute  If you talk to most script supervisors, they’ll tell you it’s actually closer to fifty-odd seconds (I want to say fifty-three), but a page a minute is a solid estimate.  There’s always going to be some wiggle room, of course, especially when you’re dealing with action.  As I’ve mentioned here before, the lobby scene in The Matrix is less than half a page.  According to Hollywood legend, the chariot race in Ben Hur was just one line in the script.

            This is why most professional readers groan when they get a screenplay that’s 140 or 150 pages long.  That’s two and a half hours.  Any script that long has a major strike against it before the reader’s looked at page one.  I read two scripts this year that the writer had “squashed” to make them shorter, but I could tell they were both over 200 pages, easy.  That’s close to three and a half hours.  Possibly even more if they’d had action sequences in them.  Which they did.

            If you’re a screenwriter, look at your script.  If you’ve got a solid page of dialogue, that’s a minute of talking heads.  A minute is a brutally long time in a movie.

            Don’t believe me?  Try this.  Look up at the ceiling and count off ten Mississippis.  Don’t cheat, don’t rush… just look up and count them out in your head nice and steady like you’re supposed to.  Go on.  I’ll wait.

            That was ten seconds.  Oscar-winning screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin pointed out once that ten seconds can be an eternity on screen. 

            So think about how long some of those character monologues are.  It may be brilliant on the page, but there’s a good chance it’ll be torturous to watch.  It’s important to understand the distinction between how long something takes on the page and how long these actions and conversations will actually need (or not need).

            This goes for prose writers too (just so you don’t feel left out).  I’ve mentioned the pacing issues that can happen if action gets stretched out too long.  Certain things happen at certain speeds, and if they get slowed down with dialogue, descriptions, or excessive action they’re just going to look silly.  Not in the good way.

            And when something reads silly, people put your manuscript down in the big pile on the left.

            Next time, I wanted to tell you a story about telling you a different story.

            Until then, go write.

           Not the cool cartoon, mind you.  Or the toy line.  No, I’m talking about the completely God-awful, live-action movie.  It had problems.  Lots of problems.  Not the least of which was a  complete failure to remember sixth-grade science class.

            The big issue I’d like to address, though, is the weight.

            Doc Brown and his assistant Marty taught us that some things are heavy.  They have weight.  They have, if I may use a literary term (sorry), gravitas—a certain dignity and importance and bearing.

            Stephen King, on the other hand, taught us that some things are soft and squishy and bleed a lot when you shove knives or claws or fangs into them.

            And let’s not forget the Wachowski Brothers, who taught us that some things get shot.  A lot.  In slow motion.  While doing kung-fu.

            What do all these things have in common?  And what do they have to do with weight?

            Well, let’s think about it.  Doc Brown and Marty didn’t think everything was heavy, just a few key revelations that came to them across three movies.  Stephen King doesn’t kill everyone in his stories—all in all characters in his books have a pretty decent survival rate (The Stand notwithstanding).  The Wachowski Brothers might have pioneered “bullet time” and virtual camera array shots in film, but there’s also a lot of stuff in The Matrix that follows basic camera set-ups—master, overs, coverage, done.

            And then there’s the G.I. Joe movie.  Which was cool.  Super cool.  Cool action, cool characters, cool lines of cool dialogue uttered coolly in cool situations.

            Saying cool that many times is kind of lame, isn’t it…?

            Anyway, keeping that in mind, I’d like to perform a simple experiment.  Please pay attention to the next paragraph.  Take notes if you feel it might help you recall things.

            LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA!!!!

            So… what parts of that stood out to you?

            Odds are none of it did.  Well, maybe the fact that it ended.  In fact, you probably skimmed it, didn’t you?  Any sane person would’ve.  It was a bunch of LAs, that’s all.

            Here’s another example, one which will probably drive my point home.  Have you ever heard a tuning fork?  Have you ever felt compelled to listen to one for hours?  Tuning forks are perfect, y’know.  If you have a middle-C tuning fork, it will hit that note and hold it for ages.  Why wouldn’t you want to listen to constant perfection?

            Because it’s boring!

            A tuning fork plays one note.  That’s it.  It’s the musical equivalent of LA LA LA LA LA LA.  Middle C is great, and any musician will tell you it’s invaluable to performing almost any composition, from Ludwig Beethoven to Lady Gaga.  But it isn’t the only note.  It’s important because it’s part of a system of highs and lows that we call music.

            Stories work the same way.  A story that’s just all the same thing is the literary equivalent of a tuning fork.  It’s neat for about a minute and then it starts to wear on your nerves.

            Comical and serious.  Loud and quiet.  Horrific and reassuring.  Thrilling and mundane.  Failure and success.  If you look at any good story, you’ll see that it swings back and forth between extremes in a series of low troughs and high peaks.   

            Yeah, The Matrix had tons of kick-ass visuals and amazing action sequences.  It also had a scene of Neo getting berated by his boss, mocked by an old woman in a kitchen, and a lengthy discussion about the true nature of “Tasty Wheat.”  Some of these scenes were vitally important to the plot.  Others were just interesting character moments.  They all had different weight.

            This is what the creative folks behind G.I. Joe didn’t get.  You can’t have all cool lines and allcool action all the time in a story.  If everything is set to ten, it all has the same weight.  Another way of saying “all the same” is that it’s monotone.  And monotone is boring.  It’s boring whether it’s all set to three or five or ten or eleven.

            Y’see, Timmy, it’s the back-and-forth, up-and-down nature that makes for interesting stories.  A good story has a baseline that the reader can relate to.  It’s going to have pitfalls that sink below that baseline, and maybe some really tragic potential consequences.  And it’s going to have some parts that grab the reader’s attention, shoot high above the line, and make the heart start pumping.

            Because if it doesn’t have these back-and-forth elements, if it’s all the same, then it’s just a line.  It doesn’t matter how high the line is.  It’s just a flat line.

            And I’m sure most of you know what “flat line” is another term for…?

            Next time, I have three things I’d like to talk about.

            Until then, go write.

On reflection, yes. Yes I am.

Keep in mind what bias means. It means someone has an automatic tendency to lean toward or away from something when it comes to judgment. If I have the choice of watching a sitcom or Doctor Who, my personal bias is to watch Doctor Who. If one dish is made with spinach and one with peas, I’ll probably choose the peas. It doesn’t mean Doctor Who beats any sitcom or peas are always better than spinach, but that’s the way I roll.

By the same token, if I have the choice between an overwritten character study where elegantly-defined protagonists do absolutely nothing and a tight story with good characters and an arc… well, I’ll go with option B every time.

So, yes, I’m biased. In fact, if you check the numbers, you’ll find most people are. We like compelling characters, but we also want to see things happen. Check out a list of bestselling books or films or plays. How many of them involve people sitting on their butts for long periods of time? That kind of stuff just doesn’t sell.

Now, keep in mind I’m not the only one saying this. People have been saying it for decades. Probably centuries. There’s a reason so much of Shakespeare’s populist crap survived and most people can’t even name three of his contemporaries. People want to be entertained. Silent film director Marshall Neilan humorously pointed out (about a hundred years ago) that there are two kinds of directors—the ones who make artistic movies and the ones whose movies make money.

Are being popular and making money the only yardsticks of success? Not by a long shot. But they’re the most common ones and the ones most folks go off. If I tell you I wrote a phenomenally successful book, the assumption is not that I made my mom proud, impressed my tenth grade English teacher, or really touched three dedicated readers. “Phenomenally successful” means the book sold a few million copies and I’m writing this next to my pool while Stana Katic rubs my shoulders.

That being said, there are a lot of real-world, character-driven stories that are just fantastic. They’re vastly outnumbered by the bad ones, no doubt about it, but saying all such movies are bad would be just as lazy as the folks who dismiss all genre work as pedestrian and simplistic. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is far more a slice-of-life story than it is a courtroom drama. The film (500) Days of Summer is closer to a character study than a romantic comedy.

And there are, believe it or not, genre books that go this way as well. James P. Hogan wrote a wonderful novel called Inherit the Stars which has almost no action in it at all. About three-fourths of the book is people sitting in offices and laboratories bouncing theories off each other about a body they’ve found on the Moon. Aliens are mentioned in it, but we only see a few skeletons because they’ve been dead for tens of thousands of years. It’s been one of my favorite books since high school.

So, if you want to write quiet little things that lean far more on character then action, here are three tips for making them something people still want to read.

Somewhere along the line a lot of people got it in their heads that the only way a character can be interesting is if they’re seriously messed up. This became the yardstick for “mature” fiction. By this standard, a good character’s an alcoholic, chain-smoking, spouse-beating, molested-as-a-child part-time convenience store worker with Asperger’s Syndrome. One film I saw had a pedophile as one of the main characters. No hyperbole, this was a confessed, done-prison-time pedophile, who wasn’t really sure if he was reformed or not. He was still thinking it over and debating if he’d done something wrong or not.

While such people probably has a great deal going on under the surface and give actors tons of meaty moments to emote, you do have to wonder how the audience is supposed to relate to these characters. Or how we’re supposed to like them. And why on God’s Earth would we root for such people? “Go, man, go!! You can get your groove back and molest three more children before the end of the film! I have faith in you!!”

If you’re going to make your story all about characters, make it about characters people will actually like. They don’t need to be perfect, by any means, but they also don’t have to be so flawed we wonder why they’re not in prison or an institution. Someone facing an uphill battle is great, but someone facing a sheer cliff is just pointless.

This is probably the biggest complaint I have with 99% of such stories and scripts I read. Nothing happens. The week this story covers is indistinguishable from the same week a few million other people have had. Heck, it’s indistinguishable from the same week these characters have had fifty-two times a year. There’s nothing special or noteworthy about it in any way.

Now, nobody has to steal the Declaration of Independence for a story to be interesting. They don’t need to rob a bank or fight off alien invaders or save the Ark of the Covenant from the Nazis. But they need to do something. If the characters don’t have a reason to aim a little higher while we’re watching them, then we’re seeing static characters.

Ready for a horrific example? Think of Flashdance. Almost half the movie is Alex’s friends following their dreams and failing miserably. The ice skater who loses her balance and destroys her routine. The comedian whose mind goes blank and leaves him sweaty and panicked in front of an audience of hecklers. But the key thing is they’re at least making an attempt while the main character is too scared to even try. It’s a basic, simple situation we can all relate to, from one side or the other. They’re all doing something, even though none of them are succeeding.

3) Have an arc

Once you’ve got a compelling character and you’ve got something happening, you’ve got to have an arc. By its very nature, an arc implies we end somewhere else. Arcs that end in the same place are called circles, and there’s a reason you haven’t heard of well-structured character circles. You’ve heard of people running in circles, though, haven’t you? And it’s never a good thing…

The whole point of a story is to get from A to B. If there’s only going to be A, that’s just a plot point. Plot points can be fascinating, but they also tend to sit on the page if they’re all alone with nothing backing them up. Just as something needs to happen in the observed life of your character, something needs to change.

The previously mentioned (500) Days of Summer is about a guy falling for a girl, dating her, and then getting dumped by her. And he grows up a bit because of it. Inherit the Stars is about a group of scientists learning some revolutionary facts about the Earth and the solar system. He Was A Quiet Man is about the office loser who decides to shoot up his office but becomes a hero when someone else beats him to it and he shoots them instead.

And there you have it. Three simple tips to having a character-driven story that still makes audiences cheer. Because cheering audiences pay better.

Next time…

Honestly, I don’t know what I’m going to rant about next time. Does anyone have a topic they’d like to see addressed? Some sticky issue or recurring problem they’ve been having? I’ll try my best to address them, if so.

If not, I’ll probably just find something else to be negative about.

Until then, go write.