Category: cuts

May 10, 2018 / 3 Comments

Meanwhile, At A Secret Island Base…

            As has come up here once or twice or thrice, I like to watch bad movies (and usually offer a bunch of half-drunken live tweets as I do).  I’m a big believer in learning from the bad stuff over copying the good stuff.  Plus it’s kinda fun, in a masochistic sort of way.  I mean, statistically, somebodymust’ve made a good shark movie, right?
            Yeah, sure, Jaws, but I’m thinking in the forty years since then…
            Anyway, a few times now I’ve noticed an issue that I’ve also caught in some literary fiction.  By which I just mean “fiction on the page,” to distinguish it from cinematic fiction.  It can be brutal in movies, but it stings in books, too.   So I wanted to blab on for a minute or three about an aspect of pacing that seems to get overlooked a lot.
            It’s a very natural part of storytelling to shift between locations or timeframes. At a particularly dramatic moment, we may leap over to a parallel storyline, or maybe flash back to a key moment that happened hours, weeks, or even years ago.  Depending on our chosen genre, we may leap across centuries or galaxies.
            And that’s cool.  We all love it when a story covers a lot of ground and shifts between points of view. It lets us tell multiple stories and tie them together in clever ways, or to get information across using different methods.
            But…
            There are still some things I need to keep in mind as a storyteller. As beings that live more-or-less linear lives, we tend to notice when there’s a jarring difference in the passage of time.  We understand that time spent here is also time spent there… even if we don’t see it happen.
            That’s the thing to keep in mind.  Just because we cut from scene A to scene B, it doesn’t mean scene A stops. Time still passes.  Characters keep doing things.  They continue to talk and discuss and explain and comment on things.
            It’s not unusual to skip over swaths of time in a narrative.  As I was recently reminded, we don’t need to see the four-day cross country trip if… well, nothing happens during those four days. No matter how beautiful the language or evocative the imagery is, if nothing happens to further the plot, it’s an irrelevant scene.  Or chapter, as it was in my case.
            But here’s the thing I need to remember.  That time is still passing.  My character may get on the bus at the end of chapter six and get off at the start of chapter seven, but that doesn’t mean the journey was instantaneous.  There were meals and probably some conversations and a few bathroom breaks and some sleeping.
            More to the point, it wasn’t instantaneous for everyone else.  Four days passed for all the other characters, too. Time progressed for everyone.
            Now, I can fudge this a bit in a book.  It’s much harder to do in a movie, but in a book we can be made to understand that time didcome to a halt between chapters nine and eleven.  We went off to deal with something else for fifteen pages, yet when we come back everyone’s still standing here with pistols drawn, cards on the table, or awkward confessions hanging in the air.
            But…
            Yeah, another but.  Sorry.
            Whenever I have one of these cutaways, in prose or on screen, I need to consider the pacing and flow.  My readers will need to switch gears and jump into a new headspace for this different scene with different characters.  Sometimes it can be fantastic.  Cutting away can increase tension, ramp up the stakes, or just heighten emotions.  Done right, it can take my readers from screaming to laughing and back.
            Done wrong… and it just reminds people that things weren’t happening.  That the  action just froze during the time we shifted attention to something else.  The writer skipped over it… and they assume the characters did, too.
            I saw this in a friend’s book.  Some characters went through a major event together, drove two hours back home… and thenstarted talking about what had happened.  And my comment was, what were they talking about during the two hour drive?  Or there was a recent geekery movie where one of the aspiring victims was running from the homicidal killer, and then we cut away to six or seven minutes of the local sheriff discussing the recent killings over coffee.  And then… back to the victim.  Still running.  Still with the killer a few yards behind…
            And I did it once, too. In an early draft of Ex-Heroes, right in the middle of the climactic battle, the story cut away to a slow, almost introspective flashback.  Conversations were had, moral decisions were made, and in the end a plan was created to help save as many—WAIT, back to the fight with the zombie demon!!
            My beta readers made fun of me, too.
            Part of this is a pacing issue. If the action is happening with breakneck, life-or-death speed in this scene, I probably want to be cautious about jumping over to a slow stretch of decompressed storytelling.  I don’t want my reader stumbling as they try to figure out what’s happening and when it’s happening.
            Y’see, Timmy, when that stumble happens, it knocks us out of the story.  The cutaway brings things to a jarring halt.  We go from experiencing the story to analyzing it.  Puzzling over it.  Maybe even… laughing at it.
            Laughing at, mind you.  Not laughing with.
            So be careful where you make your cuts.
            Next week I’d like to talk about another aspect of writing that’s really close to this, one I’ve been bringing up a lot lately, to be honest.  This’ll flow really well right into it.
            Until then… go write.
cutsflashbacksflowpacingtimetransitions
August 4, 2017

Stop Hitting Yourself…

            Just want to thank you all for your patience while I was off at (and recovering from) SDCC.
            Now, back to our usual rants about storytelling…
            I’ve mentioned once or thrice before that I like watching (and commenting on) bad movies.  Sometimes I find a hidden gem.  Most of the time, though, they’re just fodder for these little rants. Much like when I used to read scripts for screenplay contests, if I watch three or four bad movies in a row I almost always find some common flaws and teachable moments.
            So I saw a Dracula movie recently… 
            He’s arguably the most commonly-filmed fictional character on Earth.  It’s not that big a surprise I stumbled across one.  Actually, it was a three-Dracula geekery day, if memory serves.
            Anyway, this one was set back in the 16th Century and went the ancient-noble-prince route.  It’s a not-uncommon take on the character (Fred Saberhagen wrote a whole series that used it). Dracula used his supernatural powers to protect Transylvania and had this whole warrior code and all that.  And I’m kind of guessing 16th century.  Vlad Tepes lived in the 15th, but these people were actually dressed in a more medieval-fantasy style.

            Except… we also had Jonathan Harker and Mina and Lucy and Van Helsing.  Medieval versions of all of them.  Again, not terribly uncommon.  We’ve seen lots of interpretations of these characters (looking at you, Hugh Jackman).  So Mina and Lucy being kickass demonhunters isn’t that odd.

            Except… we also had this huge biblical subplot, where vampires are all descended from Cain and can only be truly killed by descendants of Abel.  Which, I mean, I’ve heard stories that tied vampires to the bible before.  So it wasn’t really an outlandish, crazy thing.
            Except… we also had the romance.  You know the one.  Mina is a near double/reincarnation of Dracula’s long-dead princess.  Long scenes of wistful staring and passionate confusion ensue.
            Man, that’s kind of a lot for a ninety-odd minute movie, isn’t it?
            I think one or two Saturday geekeries later I ended up watching this twisty-turvything about dead children and stalkers and swapped identities and second marriages with creepy undertones.  That could all balance out kinda cool, right?  But there was also this whole parallel plot about guardian angels and angel sex (no, seriously) and sin and redemption.  And the plots didn’t so much as dovetail together as butt heads for a while and then have a high-speed impact (which also involved some fatalities…)
            What’s my point here?  Well, I have two, believe it or not.  They’re kinda related, but still—bonus tips for you.

           First, in both of these movies, the plot kept getting in its own way.  There were so many clever ideas that none of them really got developed to a satisfying degree.  We’d start dealing with one and then have to rush off to deal with another one before people forgot about it.  Or the ideas would collide head on, which led to analyzing the story instead of… y’know, enjoying it.

            I’ve talked about this problem a few times before—where a plot or story is just overpacked with ideas.  And what tends to happen is the plot will overwhelm the story, the story will smother the plot, or sometimes they’ll just collapse into this mess of well… random plot and story points.
            This is a really tough idea for new writers to grasp, because it feels counterintuitive to everything we’ve been led to believe as storytellers. If the idea’s good, how can it be wrong for a story?  Thing is, sometimes a really good idea just doesn’t work in the story I’m telling.  If it’s not driving the plot or motivating the characters, if it’s pulling us too far off course or just filling space that could be used for something else… it probably doesn’t belong there. 
            I got to interview Kevin Smith a few years back, and we talked for a few minutes about his legendary hatred of ad-libs. He was quick to point out that he didn’t hatead-libs. His problem was that ad-libs rarely fit into the final story. Sure, they might be hysterically funny at the moment while filming on set, but then you’d get to the editing room. Now they had to fit in with the tone and pacing of the overall movie.  And more often than not… they didn’t.  It’s not that they weren’t funny or clever, they just didn’t fit. And then Smith even made a point of praising his then-leading man, Seth Rogen, for the ability to fire off lots of funny lines that were, as he put it “very germane to the discussion.”
            Y’see, Timmy, when we come up with these really cool ideas for a new take on werewolves, some really hot and sexy dialogue, or an incredibly cool way to describe the feeling of a knife piercing the flesh… well, we want to use them.  That’s our job, after all.  To take cool ideas and make cool stories out of them.  But sometimes—a lot of the time—our job is really knowing when to take the cool ideas out.  It’s being able to cut away the excess, to figure out what our story’s about and what parts are just wasting time and space.
            Which brings us to my second clever point…
            There’s a general idea  I see crop up a lot that stories can be any length.  Any length at all.  I can make the story whatever it needs to be—fifty pages long to five hundred pages long.
            And while, in a general sense, there’s some truth to this, the stark reality is that there are a lot of limits on how long a story can be.
            Look at screenwriting. We all acknowledge that movies are generally ninety minutes to a little over two hours.  It’s just how it is.  When a movie’s only seventy-plus minutes… we feel kinda cheated.  It can be really good, but almost always there’s a response of “That’s it?  Only seventy-one minutes?”  Likewise, when a film stretches out over two and a half hours, it usually feels pretty excessive.  There are a few really great just-shy-of-three-hour movies, but there are a lot of really bloated, desperately-in-need-of-editing ones.  So if my screenplay doesn’t fall in the 90-130 page range… I might get some folks to look at it, but not many professionals are going to take me seriously.
            And if I’m publishing… well, paper costs money.  And shelf space in book stores is precious.  Most publishers don’t want to see a massive, beef-slab of a book unless they know they’re going to sell a lot of copies of it.
            Ahhh, I say, well I’ll just publish it myself, then nobody can turn it down for financial reasons.  True, but a lot of the POD sources still work off page length to calculate costs, and they’ve got much more hard ranges. Just a few pages this way or that can mean a price jump of three or four dollars per copy. And somebody’s got to eat that cost.  It’s not going to be them, so it’s either me or my readers.  This is why I had to cut almost 30,000 words out of my book 14 –the small publisher couldn’t afford to have it stretch into the next page-range.
            Heck, even if I just give up on print altogether and go with epublishing only—check the numbers. Shorter books do better as ebooks, especially from self publishers.  The vast number of folks who’ve had any degree of success with ebooks are doing it with books under 100,000 words.  I think many of them are under 70,000. The “why” of this is a whole ‘nother discussion we could debate for a while, but for now we just need the simple numbers. Ebooks tend to do better as shorter books.
            Y’see, Timmy (yep, a double Y’see Timmy—haven’t had one of those in a while) what all this adds up to is limited space.  Those pages are precious.  My words are precious. I don’t want to waste them on irrelevant things.  I want them to be moving things along for the plot and for my characters.  I want the ideas to work for the story, not to be flexing and contorting my story to accommodate some ideas.
            A while back a friend of mine was working on a Frankenstein-esque story, and he had this super-cool idea for a detail about the monster’s origins.  And it really was a cool idea.  Thing is… his story was all structured around the idea that we never really learn much about where the monster came from or how it was built.  That was part of the mystery.  There wasn’t anywhere to use this idea, but he was soooo determined.  Even when it made no logical sense for this detail to be revealed, he kept trying to force it into different chapters. Because it was too cool an idea not to use… even though the rest of his story was suffering because of it.
            You may have heard that old chestnut—kill your darlings. This is kinda like that.  I may have the coolest line of dialogue, the neatest way to explain something, or the most fantastic description of a giant robot ever, but if it doesn’t work in my story…

            Well, then it doesn’t work.

            And if it doesn’t work—if it’s not adding to my story—then it shouldn’t be there.
            Next time, unless someone has some other ideas, I was going to toss out a few quick little tips about genre and devices.
            Until then… go write.
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July 27, 2017

Pixar’s Rules of Storytelling, Pt. III

            Hey!
            I’m still getting caught up after SDCC (thanks so much to all of you who said ”hi” at one point or another), so I figured I’d take this opportunity to finish off Pixar’s rules.
            Next time—I want to talk about a bully trick.
            Until then, go write.
            Once you finish reading the rules.

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May 11, 2017 / 5 Comments

It Cuts! It Edits!

            It slices! It dices!  It makes julienne fries!  Plus, just add salt, pop the tray into the oven, and look—perfect hash browns, a great addition to any breakfast!
            Okay, I may have watched too many infomercials lately.  There’s been a channel issue with the television.  Don’t judge me.
            Over the past few months I’ve talked with a few folks about editing.  They’re almost always interesting conversations, but I noticed a while back they tend to skew in random directions. Well, not really random.  The questions cover a large range.
            One thing that catches some folks off guard is that there are different kinds of editing. They think of it as a general term, but it’s more of an umbrella that covers a lot of things.  Like how an oil change, brake work, and a car wash can all fall under “basic maintenance,” even though I’d probably have different people do them—and may even do some of them myself.

            For example, I have a regular editor I work with, Julian, and he helps me edit my story.  We dig through and find weak motivations, unclear dialogue, and the thing that doesn’t really match, tone-wise,for one reason or another.  His edits help improve the story.  When someone panics about “an editor making them change their story,” this is usually what they’re talking about.

            For the record, in almost ten years of doing this writing thing, and personally knowing close to a hundred professional writers with careers spanning most of that time, I’ve only ever heard of this happening once.  One time where the editor insisted on a major change that the author disagreed with.  And, no, it didn’t involve me or my editor.
             I also work with a copyeditor.  This is the person who finds spelling and grammar mistakes, inconsistencies that have slipped past everyone, and in some cases even a bit of fact-checking. The copyeditor help me improve the manuscript.
            And of course, neither of these are like the edits that I do myself before the manuscript goes to my editor.  Or even my beta readers. That’s when I’m trimming words, tightening the story, and trying to smooth out rough spots.
            Today I wanted to babble on (probably too much) about those easy edits.  The type of stuff that we all let slip though while we’re writing (and the experienced folks know to then get rid of in their first round of revisions).  I’ve mentioned some of them before in a broad strokes sort of way, but it struck me that maybe I could even boil this down further.
            So here are some words and phrases I can cut from my manuscript.  Not all the time, but a fair amount of it.  A lot of them lead to other words, too—they’re indicating a larger problem—so once I get rid of these it’ll probably mean a few others on either side go away, too.  Which means I’ll end up with a leaner, stronger story.
            One proviso before we dive in.  When I’m talking about these cuts, I’m talking about prose, not dialogue.  Dialogue gets a pass on a lot of this, because people have lots of odd tics and habits when they talk, and all my characters are people, right? Don’t worry about these suggested cuts too much, except maybe where they overlap with basic dialogue tips.
             This would apply to first person stories, too. They’re effectively dialogue—stories being told in a strong, specific character voice.  Just remember, characters and artful dialogue are fantastic, but it all needs to serve the story.  I don’t want my narration to collapse because of an all-too realistic narrator.
            Okay, so…  Ready?
            Adverbs—  As mentioned above, most of us get caught up in the flow of words, and what usually slips in is adverbs.  We try to pretend they’re important—they spent valuable school-hours on them, after all, and school would never waste our time—but the sad truth is they can almost always be replaced.  I’d guess that three out of five times if I’m using an adverb, I just don’t need it.  The fourth time odds are I’m probably using the wrong verb, and once I find the right one, again, I won’t need the adverb.  If I’m using my vocabulary well, there aren’t many times I need one.
            While I was editing Paradox Bound I cut around 170 adverbs and adverbial phrases in my first editing pass.  That’s almost a solid page of adverbs, gone.  Search your manuscript for LY and see how many you find.
            Adjectives—Some folks use a lot of adjectives to make normal, average things sound interesting.  Coincidentally, these folks tend to have a poor vocabulary.  So when I don’t know multiple words for, say, sword, I’ll just use multiple adjectives instead of blade, claymore, rapier, saber, foil, or falchion.
            Of course, we all go a little overboard now and then  (anyone who says they don’t is lying to you) because we’re convinced this person, this place, this thing needs extra description.  Yet we all know too much description brings things too a grinding halt.
            There’s an odd habit I’ve seen among fantasy writers—not only them, and not all of them by a long shot, but enough to make it worth mentioning.  They use dozens of adjectives per page, if not per sentence.  Often redundant ones like “gleaming chrome sword of pure silver.” 
            I was at a writing conference a few years back where writer/ editor Pat LaBrutto tossed put a pretty solid rule of thumb.  One adverb per page, four adjectives per page.  It’s only a guideline, yeah, but if I’m averaging fifteen to twenty adjectives per page… maybe I should give them all a second look.
            That—People tend to drop that into their writing a lot, and a good three out of four times their writing would be tighter without it.  I used to be a that junkie until someone pointed out how unnecessary it often is. Look at these sentences—it doesn’t add anything to them.
            Phoebe could see that the two of them were meant to be together.        
            He punched her in the same arm that she had been shot in.
            She knew that the Terminator would not stop—ever—until it had killed her.
            Use the Find feature, search for uses of thatin your writing, and see how many of them are necessary.  Odds are you’ll find more than half of them aren’t. I cut 132 that‘s from Paradox Bound—just over half a page. 
            (I’ve gotten better about adding them in to start with…) 
            Useless Modifiers — I’ve called this Somewhat Syndrome a few times in the past.  This is another one I wrestle with a lot, although I like to tell myself I’ve gotten better about it.  It’s when I pepper my writing with somewhat.., sort of…, a bit…, kind of…, and other such modifiers. I’d guess nine times out of ten they’re not doing anything except adding to my word count (not in the good way) and slowing my story (also not in the good way).  Use the Find feature again and see how much tighter and stronger your story is without these. 
            I cut over two hundred of these from that first draft of Paradox Bound.  That’s another full page gone.
            Decided—This word’s almost always filler.  Maybe not conscious filler, but it’s almost always filler that can be cut.  If Wakko decides to do somethingand then he does it, I’m just eating up words again.  We all make hundreds of decisions and choices every day, but readers want to hear about the action, not the decision to take an action.  The action itself implies the decision was made. 
            Listen/ Look—If I start a line of dialogue with look or listenI’d bet that almost 80% of the time it’s either an infodump or it’s stating something plainly apparent.  Which means this dialogue is adding something that could be expressed through actions or subtext or any number of ways.  Or it isn’t adding anything.
            Obvious—If something isn’t obvious, it comes across as arrogant to say it is.  So I shouldn’t use the word obvious, because the character (or writer) in question is going to look like a jerk. Which, granted, might be the point…
            On the flipside, if something is obvious, then I still don’t need the word.  Things that are obvious are… well, obvious, so it’s just wasted words for me to tell the readers about it.
            Seemed/Appeared/ Looked – I’ve talked about these words a few times before.  They show up in phrases like “appeared to be,” “seemed to be,” “looked like,” and so on. The catch is,  seemed to be and its siblings don’t get used alone.  They’re part of a literary construction where the second half of that structure is either an implied or actual contradiction to the appearance.  So when I’m saying “Yakko seemed like the kind of man you didn’t want to mess with,” what I’m really saying is “Yakko seemed like the kind of man you didn’t want to mess with but really he was a pushover who fainted at the sight of blood.”  And what I meant to say all along was just “Yakko was the kind of man you didn’t want to mess with.”
           If I’m not trying to establish a contradiction, using appeared to be and the others isn’t just wasted words– it’s wrong.  So cut them
            As you know—I’ve talked about these three words a few times before.  They’re awful.  Just awful.  I won’t say this is the worst way to get the facts out to my readers—I have full confidence there’s someone out there now working on a worse way—but I’d put this in the 99-out-of-100 category. 
            If I’m saying “as you know” to you, it means you already know what I’m telling you… so why am I saying it?  Why waste words blatantly stating something that you and I both know?  Yeah, maybe you’ve got amnesia, but if you do then you don’t know… so why am I saying “as you know” to you?
            If these three words pop up together more than once in my manuscript, odds are I’m doing something horribly wrong.
            Was– I always search for was, because it tends to point at weak verb structures.  It’s when I’ve got “Phoebe was running” instead of just “Phoebe ran.”  It’s a small tweak, but it’s one that gives my writing punch because it makes all my actions read just a bit faster.
            The Word—This is a tough one, because it’s going to depend on experience and spending time going through my manuscript.  I’ve found that a lot of times I’ll inadvertently reuse a word or simple phrase again and again and again.  It’s not really that odd—in the rush to get that first draft out, there are a lot of places I’m going to pick the first word that comes to mind.  Might be a certain verb, might be a noun, might be an adjective.  In Paradox Bound it was glared.  Lots of people glared in the early drafts of that book.  At each other.  At objects.  Out at the uncaring universe…
            Keep an eye out for your word.
            And there’s eleven things I always search for and slice away.  Editing made simple.  Well, some of the editing. 
            One type of editing.
            And this was so much longer than I’d planned.  So sorry.
            By the way, if you’re in the SoCal area, this Sunday is the Writers Coffeehouse.  We’ll be meeting noon to 3:00 at our usual hangout, Dark Delicacies in Burbank.  Swing by, hang out and join us as we talk (this month) about creating great characters.  Or just lurk.
            Next time… I had a few thoughts about genre and devices and structures you might find kind of interesting.
            Until then, go write.
adjectivesadverbscutsdialogueeditinglobruttoobvious

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