Category: challenge

June 20, 2014

Go Big or Go Extinct

             Pop culture reference.  Huge one.
            I wanted to mention something that ties back to last week’s rant.  It’s about how I choose to begin a story.  I almost included it then, but I figured it worked as a stand-alone, and I’m trying to get away from the posts where I just blab on and on.
            Unless I really need to.
            Anyway…
            One piece of writing advice that people keep repeating is “start with action.”  It started cropping up in Hollywood as development people became more and more involved in shaping a story, mostly because it’s a very simple rule.  And from there it spread out to television, books, and other forms of storytelling.  I’m tempted to say this isn’t so much advice as a good solid rule.
            Now the catch (yeah there’s always a catch—if there wasn’t, I’d have nothing to write about on Thursdays) is that somewhere along the way a lot of people started pushing this rule when they didn’t really understand it.  Some folks hear “action” and immediately think explosions, ninjas, car chases, and giant monsters fighting giant robots.  So that’s what they tell people.
            Thing is, there are lots of issues if I’m going to start with Action (capital A).  One of the biggest is that I can’t start at big.  If I start at big, I’ve got nowhere to go.  Granted, the tension level in my stories should go up and down.  But if my first point is 9.5 out of ten, it means everything after this either has to be a huge drop or it can only squeak half a point higher.  Starting at 9.5 to 10  means every character arc, every bit of tension, every moment of action has pretty much topped out on page one.  There’s nowhere else to go.
            Also, let’s be honest… some stories just aren’t conducive to Action.  What kind of great action scene could I begin To Kill A Mockingbird with?  Or (500) Days of Summer?   The Notebook?  Heck, how many romantic comedies begin with a big action scene?  Action (still capital A) is great for… well, action tales and some genre stuff, but there’s tons of stories that this advice just will not work for.
            And because of that last issue, sometimes writers will force action into a story that doesn’t really need it.  Or shouldn’t have it.  But they’ve been told they need to start with action, so they come up with a way to cram it in.
            Y’see, Timmy, when I say starting with action should be considered a rule, I’m not talking about martial arts or gunfire or high speed bank robberies.  I just mean action in the classic definition of the word.  I need to start with something happening.  Because if  there isn’t something happening, what’s the point of this?
            For the record, this is why I usually shouldn’t begin with five pages of backstory or a random character moment.  I don’t want to hear about what happened before—that’s starting in reverse.  I want to begin with my story already on the move, heading forward.  As I’ve mentioned before, stories are like sharks.  If they’re not moving, they die.
            “Something happening” can mean anything.  Washing a car is action.  Cooking dinner is action.  Hurrying to make it to the meeting I’m late for is action.
            I mentioned last week that most Jack Reacher books begin with the main character in very subdued, quiet settings.  The show Orphan Black begins with a woman on a train and offending some people with her free use of profanity.  Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep starts with a little boy who refuses to use the bathroom.  Most episodes of Castle and Elementarybegin with someone discovering a body, but rarely with the actual murder.
            One of my own books, Ex-Heroes, begins with a woman on guard duty watching a zombie walk into a wall.  Then another character shows up, they talk for a bit, and she goes back to watching the zombie.  That’s all of chapter one.   The sequel begins with a Fourth of July party.  The latest book begins with a girl talking to her therapist about her dreams.
            Want a better example?  A bigger one, perhaps…?
            Captain America: The Winter Soldier has pretty much been the smash hit of the year so far.  It’s a Marvel movie, it has a huge cast of established and new superhero characters.  It even (arguably) has a trio of giant killer robots.  It’s pretty much the definition of a summer action blockbuster.
            How does it begin?
            The Winter Soldier begins with two men doing laps around the National Mall in Washington.  That’s it.  Two guys out for their morning run.  One’s a bit faster than the other, but it’s not exactly a high-tension scene.  And that’s almost the first five minutes of the movie.
            But they’re doing something.  So it’s starting with action.
            Next time… well, I have limited ideas for next time.
            Until then, go do something.
            Maybe write.
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November 14, 2013

Put A Little Effort Into It

Welcome to the holiday season. It means we’re all going to have to try a lot harder. At a lot of things.  Like finding time to write. And losing weight.

This week’s little rant was inspired by Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling. They’ve been floating around the web for a few years now, ever since one of the storyboard artists there tweeted them. I recently stumbled across a nice rendering of them here and they got me thinking about something I was talking about just before Halloween.

Before I go over that, though, let’s go over some basics.

One of the elemental principles of storytelling is the obstacle. It’s what stands between my protagonist and whatever it is they want. Social cliques and jealous jocks separate Wakko from the cheerleader he wants to ask to the prom. An army of mercenaries are keeping Yakko from the missile silo. Financial hardship is keeping Dot  from opening her hair salon. Well, financial hardship and a lack of self-confidence.

Now, while you may have heard the term obstacle, or perhaps even conflict, my personal preference here on the ranty blog is to call all these things challenges. I think there are a few standard rules to challenges, and I’ve gone over those in the past, but I wanted to bring up a new one. It’s kind of an overall corollary to challenges that touches on a lot of those rules.

My character has to try.

To be specific, when I say my character has to try, I’m saying this challenge should actually require effort. It needs to be difficult, because if it isn’t, it isn’t really a challenge. If I don’t have to try, what’s the point?

Vin Diesel beating up a third grader doesn’t impress anyone. Neither does Usain Bolt outrunning a guy on crutches. If I put Kate Upton in glasses and a baggy sweatshirt, it’s still not believable that she’d be saying “oh, wow, how will I find a date for Saturday?” No, not even if  I make her a brunette and then mess her hair up. This is also why uber-prepared or godlike characters very rarely work. We’re just not impressed by people we know will succeed, because success in and of itself is meaningless in a story.

Y’see, Timmy, success is irrelevant.  Despite what Yoda taught us all, trying is the important part. We like to see characters who make an effort, who aspire, who reach past their limits. If they never do—if everything my characters do is within their comfort zone—then they’re not worth reading about.

If Wakko needs to deal with those jocks to talk to cheerleader Phoebe, the ones who’ve bullied him since freshman year, the important part isn’t him beating them up or even getting past them. It’s when he stands up to them. If he does fight back and somehow wins, that’s icing on the cake, but the important moment is when he decides he’s not going to be bullied anymore. That’s the victory that matters.

That’s when we all love him and when he becomes somebody worth reading about.

Next time, I’d like to explain my career in four easy steps.

Until then, go write.

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October 24, 2013 / 2 Comments

The Finest Emotion

            Talking about scary stuff, because it’s the season.  Not in the way we usually do, though…
             H.P. Lovecraft once said “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”  Stephen King said terror is the finest emotion.  And Terror, Inc. once said “My name is my business, and business is good.”
            Okay, that last one’s a bit obscure.
            Anyway…
            I’ll go one step further with this and say that fear is one of the most common emotions.  Most of us live in a state of fear.  I don’t mean that in some socio-political way.  On a regular day, most of us experience fear on some level or another.  Fear of failure.  Fear of rejection.  Fear of injury.  Fear of humiliation.  Maybe even the big ones like fear of helplessness or fear of death.
            In most stories my characters are going to begin things in a state of fear.  Again, maybe not a crippling, hiding-in-the-corner level of fear, but that fear is going to be there. There’s going to be something they don’t want to happen—or something they want to happen—but fear of some kind is going to  keep them from it.  Maybe Yakko wants to ask Phoebe out but is scared she and her friends will laugh at him.  Maybe Dot really wants to make detective, but doesn’t want to risk failing the test for a third time.  Or maybe Wakko just doesn’t want to be torn apart and eaten by a zombie horde.
            Hey, it’s a valid worry.
            Now, I know a lot of people pitch stuff about “strong characters,” and it’s not uncommon for people to misread this to mean characters that are powerful, smart, capable, and confident.  Being afraid of things doesn’t fit into that idea, does it? 
            “Strong characters” isn’t supposed to refer to physical/ mental abilities—it’s about how well they hold up to examination.  Are they believable?  Relatable?  Fleshed out? A strong character can still be nervous about asking Phoebe out in front of her friends.  They can be worried about failure to a point of near-paralysis.  He or she can even be a snivelling coward… as long as they aren’t a shallow, stereotypical snivelling coward. 
            By having my characters begin in a state of fear, I’ve just made them very relatable.  Even better, I’ve automatically set up a challenge for them to overcome.  I’m forcing them to become active and do something.  Better still, my characters have to change internally to overcome fear.  Conquering fear isn’t an exterior challenge (although there can be plenty of those, too).
            Y’see, Timmy, when people are done being scared, they have to be brave.  And that’s when they shine.  Because now that  I’ve forced them to grow and change, they have an arc.  They’ve become better people right in front of us.
            Those characters who aren’t scared?  Well, a few times I’ve mentioned the problem with uber-powerful characters who can deal with anything or who are utterly prepared for everything.  That also ties into this idea of beginning in a state of fear.  It can be summed up best with a joke I heard once…
            A police officer pulls over an elderly lady for a busted tail light.  He’s stunned to see a pair of shotguns and an assault rifle in the back seat, and a pistol strapped to the old woman’s thigh.  She also admits to a pistol in her purse and another one in the glove compartment, as well as a few more rifles and extra ammo in the trunk.  But she has all her permits and everything’s in order. 
            As they’re finishing up, the police officer says, “Ma’am, I have to ask… What are you so afraid of?”
            And the old woman smiles sweetly and says, “I’m not afraid of anything.”
            If my characters don’t have anything to fear, they don’t have anywhere to go from there. They don’t need to grow and change.  They don’t need an arc.  I’ve begun my characters where basic storytelling says they should end.
            So, be afraid.  Be very afraid.  Let your characters be afraid, too.  They should be scared of pain and rejection and failure.  And perhaps also of zombies and werewolves and little alien worms that wiggle into their ears and burrow into their brains.
            Next time… well, I won’t be posting on Halloween for religious reasons, so next time will be in November.  And considering what comes out in theaters around then, I might let somebody else talk about writing movies for Marvel.
            Until then, go write.
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August 9, 2013

Inside the Bottle

            I’d thought of making an I Dream of Jeannie joke about this post title, but then I heard that actor Michael Ansara had died and it felt like it might be in poor taste.  He was Barbara Eden’s husband for a while, and even played another genie on the show once.  Of course, he’s really famous for playing Commander Kang, arguably the Klingon (sorry, Michael Dorn), on no less than three different Star Trek shows across more than thirty years, starring in countless westerns, a famous Outer Limits episode, and also for being the voice of Mr. Freeze for the animated Batman and Batman Beyond.  In short… he was awesome and it’s sad that he’s gone.
            However…
            By odd coincidence, one of the first places I heard the phrase “bottle show” was when I was researching screenplays for Star Trek.  A bottle show was what they called an episode that used only existing sets and costumes, and often only the regular cast with minimal (if any) guest stars.  The producers loved them because they saved money, which also made them a great way for aspiring writers to get in.  Write a solid bottle show and they’d buy it just so they could have it handy for emergencies, or to help counterbalance two or three expensive episodes in a row.
            And in a way, a lot of the bottle episodes tended to be better stories.  Once the writers didn’t have the distraction of the “alien of the week,” they could focus their efforts on either bringing out new aspects of their cast or weaving a much more elaborate story.  By limiting what could be done with one aspect of the storytelling, it made all the other aspects that much stronger.
            And that kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?  Unlimited situations don’t have any tension.  If my characters have unlimited time to solve a problem, or have unlimited space to get away from it, my story isn’t going to be very interesting. 
            The thing is, being “in the bottle” could refer to any sort of restriction.  It could be a limited location, yes, like those Star Trek episodes or a good haunted house tale or the classic Campbell story “Who Goes There,” which most of you probably know better as The Thing.  Most of George Romero’s zombie movies are bottle stories, too, with people trapped in a farmhouse, a mall, an underground complex, and so on.
            But it could also be a time limit, that famous ticking clock.  It doesn’t matter what the character does or doesn’t do, the story is ending in two weeks, or two days, or maybe just two hours.  Many of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories involve ticking clocks (often on an astronomical scale, but they’re there)
             Laughable as it may sound, Speed is a bottle story.  The limit is actually the minimum speed the bus could travel.  That’s what created all the tension, because screenwriter Graham Yost came up with a very clever bottle for his story.
            If you’ve having trouble with a story, try sticking it in a bottle.  Rather than trying to make it big and expansive and epic, figure out how it can be tight and restricted and personal.  Slap a limit on it.  Confine your characters to a few locations.  Figure out some way to restrict their time.  Or even just stick to one viewpoint.  If I see and hear everything through Yakko, it means I don’t know what’s going on in Wakko’s head or where Dot was during that blackout.
            As I’ve mentioned before, one of the key elements of any challenge is that it has to be faced.  If I can avoid facing it because of a lack of limits—letting me get away from it, postpone it, or even massively overpower it—then it isn’t really much of a challenge.  And if there isn’t much of a challenge, there isn’t much of a story.
            Next time, I think it’s important that we all admit a few things.

            Until then, go write.

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