Category: death

            Oh, get your mind out of the gutter…

           Well, it’s been a brutal week on a couple levels. And it’s the holiday season, I think we can all use a little cheering up, don’t you?  So let’s talk about some good stuff.

            And I’ll start by talking about what happens in the grim, dark future…

            As I’ve mentioned once or thrice here, I’m a bit of a geek.  One of my biggest geekery hobbies by far is Warhammer 40K.  If you’re not familiar with the game, it takes place in the distant future (around the year 40,000—surprise!) where mankind has risen, fallen, risen, fallen again, risen one last time… and is now pretty much on the way out.  Not immediately. Not in our lifetime.  But the glory days are gone and the Empire of Man is well past middle aged and fighting to hang on to its driver’s license, if you get my drift.

            When my lovely lady and I first started hanging out, she expressed interest in this silly toy soldiers game, and—being a geek—I immediately started telling her about the different armies and the massive back story and setting of the game.  And after a few hours of listening to stories of the waning Imperium, she finally laughed and said, “Why would anyone want to live in this world?  I’d just kill myself.”

            Which is a fair point.  To be honest, I hadn’t been fond of some of the earlier stories myself.  They were just bleak as hell. You may have heard the term “grimdark” used for some fiction.  It actually comes from this game.  That phrase I used up above, “in the grim, dark future”—that’s part of Warhammer 40K’s tagline.

            Of course, it’s not just the little toy soldiers.  The grimdark label ends up on a lot of things these days.  Urban fantasy stories.  Post-apocalypse stories.  Superhero stories.  And this isn’t just about genre books.  People try to do “serious” books all the time that are nothing but sadness, misery, and death.  There’s a common belief that making things gritty and dark, and edgy automatically makes them more “mature.”   I’ve mentioned once or thrice before how some writers think having bleak, depressing endings is artistic because it’s more “real.”

            I’m sure you can think of plenty of examples of this.

            The catch is, this gritifying of stories rarely works.  Usually making something grim and dark just makes it… well, grim and dark.  That’s it.  Seriously, check out bestselling books or big box-office movies.  The popular stuff almost always leans toward lighter and fun.  A lot of it has (gasp) happy endings.

            As another famous sci-fi icon once said, it’s not enough to live.  You have to have something to live for.

            Again, why would anyone want to live in my fictional world?  Seriously.  Take a moment and think about it.

            What saved the world of Warhammer 40K for me was the writing of folks like Dan Abnettand Sandy Mitchell.  They added a human element.  They told stories that involved jokes and drinking buddies and love and people just enjoying their lives.  Heck, Abnett had a whole subplot in one book about a toymaker saving his business by building wind-up robots.
            I’ve gotten a lot of praise for my Ex-Heroes series.  It’s a series that’s lasted through five book so far, and across six years. Long after when many people said zombies were… well, dead.  And I believe a lot of that praise and success comes from one simple thing.

            It’s a post-apocalyptic story, but it’s a hopeful one.  Yeah, things are overall awful, but the characters are actively trying to make life better.  They choose to move forward rather than do nothing or wallow in the past.  They laugh.  They love.  They play games.  They flirt.  They celebrate.  They have fun.  A lot of their life is stressful and difficult, but it’s not every-minute-every-hour-every-day stressful and difficult.

            And it’s important to see these other moments because now we know why the characters are going on.  We know what they’re living for.  Deadpool is a story about hopelessness and terminal diseases and bloody revenge, but it’s also a story where Wade and Vanessa pretty much screw each other silly for an entire year before he proposes with a Voltron ring

            Resist the urge to have nothing but grim darkness.  Don’t be scared about having a good thing or three happen in your story.  Don’t think you can’t have any light-hearted moments. 

            Believe in the happy ending!

            On which note, I hope you all have a fantastic weekend and (if it’s your holiday) a very Happy Christmas.

            Try and get a little writing in before then.

            Hey, everyone.  Hope you’re all doing well after the brutal temporal shift out of Daylight Saving time.  It can be pretty rough.

            Speaking of being rough… I wanted to babble on for a couple moments about some rough types we’ve all probably run into at one point or another. And maybe even written about.

            Lots of people—including fictional people—have dealt with bullies.  They are, unfortunately, a constant across all ages, cultures, genders, sexualities, and industries.  There’s a wonderful line in Paranorman–“If you were bigger and more stupid, you’d probably be a bully too.”

            Bullies are kind of common in fiction for two reasons.  The first, the easy one, is because it’s a type of person we can all relate to.  We’ve all had to deal with  that jerk at school, at work, online, or somewhere in our lives.  And every now and then, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes not, maybe we’ve even been that person.  It’s an archetype we all know.

            The second reason is that bullies make a great low level antagonist for my protagonist to deal with.  They can drive a subplot or even just be a warm-up for the main plot.  While investigating drug smugglers or human traffickers, it’s not unusual for Jack Reacher to run into an obnoxiously stubborn town sheriff who likes to throw his weight around.  Countless villains have their lieutenants or top henchmen.  Steve Rogers had an actual bully that followed him from civilian life to boot camp… where said bully got punched out by Agent Carter.

            And that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about.  We all kind of giggle and maybe even cheer a bit when Peggy decks Hodge.  It’s a nice moment, because Hodge is an ass and flat out misogynist. 

            But what if it had gone a little differently…?

            What if Peggy decked him, and then kicked him a few more times in the ribs while he was on the ground?  Then maybe stomped on his hand to break some fingers.  Hell, maybe she stomps on his head.  Kicks him in the teeth.  Breaks his nose or maybe the orbit around his eye.

            This just became a very different scene, didn’t it?  Hodge isn’t getting his just deserts, he’s suddenly become the victim in this scenario. He punched Steve in an alley, made some crass and sexist remarks… and so Carter mauls him, possibly leaving him crippled?  Heck, does she even know he punched Steve at this point? She just put this guy in the hospital for being obnoxious to her.

            What if she’d shot him? One round to the head, right between the eyes. He smirks and then he’s dead, his brains sprayed out behind him. Or maybe she goes big—grabs a riflefrom a nearby soldier and shreds Hodge’s chest with a dozen bullets. That’s an ugly way to go, isn’t it?  Broken ribs, punctured organs, equal chance of bleeding out or drowning as your lungs fill up with your own blood…

            We can all agree this is kind of an extreme response. Hodge is an asshat, absolutely, but he doesn’t deserve this level of punishment.  Hell, if anything, we feel a twinge or two of sympathy for him.

            I’ve talked about this effect a few times before.  Something extreme happening to a character can help shape how we feel about them.  If it’s extreme enough, it might even override how we felt about them before.

            For example (flipping things again), what if Hodge was an utterly reprehensible person?  Physically and emotionally abusive to men, women, children, and animals.  Now what’s supposed to be horrible can suddenly becomes great because it’s happening to such a completely sadistic person.

            Seriously, think about it?  How often have you watched a scene of nightmarish violence in a movie and cheered—out loud or internally—because of who it’s happening to?  This isn’t horror, it’s justice.  This person deserves what’s happening to them, and we’re glad we get to read about it (or watch it).
            I’ve talked about this before, too, in regards to killing people, because this is a really common mistake I see in low-end B-movies.  As audience members (or readers), we don’t care when unlikable people die.  In fact, if someone’s aggressivelyunlikable (sexist, misogynist, racist, alcoholic, hypocritical, deliberately ignorant)…  we may even be kinda happy when they get killed off.  No amount of patting the dog will change our view on this.  And suddenly this death means something very different.  It’s not building tension in the story—it’s releasing it.

            There’s a careful balance that needs to be struck in these situations.  My bully needs to have enough unsavory traits and moments to make them a good antagonist. But if they have too many, it’ll affect how that bad scene gets received by my readers.  Likewise, if the bully isn’t that bad and catches the bad end of some truly horrific things, it’s going to make my readers empathize with them,

            Y’see, Timmy, I need to be aware of what I’m trying to accomplish with moments like this.  It can’t just be violence and/or death—there needs to be a greater purpose to it in my story.  When Carter lashes out at Hodge, do I want the audience to be rooting for Hodge or for Carter?  When Freddy Kruger murders another child, am I going for scares or for laughs?  When Jason Bourne tortures someone for information, should I be cringing or cheering?

            Because what I’m trying to achieve is going to depend on more than just that one moment.

            There’s a bully in my new book, Paradox Bound. His name’s Zeke.  He starts off as a childhood bully, ends up being an adult bully—a bad cop who abuses his position.  Alas, it happens sometimes.  We’ve all seen it, or at least heard of it.  Zeke does a lot of bad things and… well… no spoilers in case you haven’t read it, but bad things end up happening to him.

            This was a really tricky balance to achieve, though.  Y’see, in an earlier draft, we actually see Zeke violently beat a woman.  And my editor’s assistant pointed out this made it really hard for us to have any sympathy for Zeke.  And because of this, when the bad things happened to him, what I’d hoped would be a very creepy, cringe-worthy moment actually became… well, more of a “serves him right” moment.

            But Zeke needed to be a serious bully in order for other aspects of the story to work.  More than just an annoyance, we needed to believe Zeke could potentially be—on some level—an actual threat.  So there was a lot of back and forth as I tried (with some help from my editor and his assistant) to find a point where Zeke would be unlikable and dangerous… while still not coming across as so unlikable that we’d automatically cheer when something awful happened to him.

            And we found that balance.

            Find your own balance point. Make sure that when that character gets punched or tortured or killed, I’m feeling exactly what you want me to feel.

            And not… something else

            Next time…

            Y’know, nobody’s left a comment here in a while. What should I talk about next time?  Somebody offer a suggestion, just so I know I’m not ranting into the void.

            Until then… go write.

            A full day late. So very sorry.  I could make excuses about surgery and blood and all that sort of stuff but… well… No, actually that’s a great excuse. And it’s the truth.  So there–I regret nothing!
            Okay, I’ve brought up a few times my Saturday viewing habits and why I do it.  After a few awful flicks last weekend, though, it struck me that a ton of B-movies tend to make the same mistakes. I mean, they all usually have a unique way of doing it, but they all tend to go wrong in a lot of the same ways.

            And I say a lot of this as a guy who hasn’t just watched a lot of B-movies (and read a lot of scripts), but worked on many as well.  I saw a lot of these mistakes happen in real time.  Sometimes inherent flaws or technical issues, but many other times it was story elements that could’ve been fixed with very little work.

            No, nobody listened to me then, either.

            Of course, this is also true of a lot of stories in general.  They all tend to go wrong in similar ways.  That’s kinda how this big pile of rants got started.

            So, even if you’re not interested in screenwriting, there’s probably a helpful thought or two in here somewhere for you.

            Okay, top ten B-movie mistakes starts with…

            Let’s just get this one out of the way, because it’s the easy one.  This’ll be a horrible blow to anyone who likes auteur theory, but the simple truth is there are a lot of professional directors out there who have no clue what they’re doing.  None.  Yes, even some directors you’ve heard of.  They have no business sitting in a director’s chair.  Even one they bought at Target and keep on their back porch.  They have no concept of narrative, continuity, pacing, anything. 

            And I’m not just pulling this opinion out of my butt.  I worked with a lot of truly fantastic, brilliant directorsduring my time in the industry, but I also worked with some really awful ones.  And friends shared stories of awful ones they’d worked with.  It’s a lot more common (and widely known in the industry) than most film professors would like their students to believe.

            My point is, the director’s the one determining how the story is being told. Their job is to interpret the story on the page into a visual story on the screen, and the best story can be ruined by a bad storyteller.  How often have we seen a book or movie that had such a cool idea or interesting character… and it was just wasted?

            I’ve heard people say they might try writing romance because it’s “so easy,” or fantasy because “you can just make it all up.”  These are simplistic, demeaning ways to look at these genres, and that sort of scorn’s always going to show in the storytelling. It doesn’t matter if it’s the latest hot thing—if I don’t like it, don’t have a background in it, don’t really want to do it… it’s probably not going to turn out that great.

            D’you ever play Dungeons & Dragons when you were young?  Remember that one kid (we all knew this kid) who got so excited to be Dungeon Master, and made that awesome dungeon with five liches and ten silver dragons and twenty gold dragons and thirty minotaurs all wearing +3 plate armor and using +5 flaming axes and a hundred zombies and Demogorgon and half the Norse gods and…

            You remember that, right?

            Some B-movies get like that.  The filmmakers have too many ideas—way more than their budget or schedule allows—and they try to stick them all into the story.  Every cool idea from every other cool story, sure to be just as cool here, right?

            Truth is, they almost never are.  All these extra ideas just end up being under-developed distractions at best.  And at the worst, well…

            Okay, this is kinda related to the last  point.  The flipside of it, really.
            There are a couple shortcuts people use in storytelling to make us like characters.  There’s one called “saving the cat” that you’ve probably heard of.  There’s also giving someone a backstory that connects them to another character.  And there’s banter and bickering and all sorts of little dialogue tricks.

            We’ve all seen this one, right?  The awkwardly-slow fight scenes.  The medium-speed chase that drags on waaaaaay too long.  The melodramatic challenge that clearly didn’t need to happen.  Or just shouldn’t’ve happened.

            Action gets seen as filler a lot, and it doesn’t help that a lot of gurus teach it that way.  “Hit page 23, action beat. Hit page 42, action beat.”  There’s nothing wrong with action, but bad action hits worse than just about anything, especially in the visual storytelling format of movies.  If it drags on the page, it’s not going to be better when we film it.

            Think of scale, too.  It’s always better to have a small, well-done action scene than a sprawling, poorly-executed one.  I can relate to two people fighting so much better that two gangs of sixty people each slamming together.

            I worked on a B-level sex-revenge-thriller once, and the director was convinced he was making a noir mystery.  I’ve seen sci-fi and fantasy movies that were done as horror films, and vice versa.  Heck, I’ve written stories where I’d planned it as one thing, and realized halfway through it was something very different.

            I just talked about this a few weeks ago, so I won’t go into it too much here. To sum up quick if you don’t want to hit the link, all genres have certain expectations when it comes to tone, pacing, and even structure.  If I’ve got a story in one genre that I’m telling with the expectations of another, there’s going to be a clash. And that clash probably won’t help my storytelling.

            Okay, so there’s always going to be collateral damage in stories—especially action stories. The nameless bystander who catches a bullet.  The dozens of office workers crushed when a giant monster slams into their building.  The person who dies in the early weeks of the epidemic.

            Thing is, by nature of being collateral damage, the story doesn’t focus on these people and their deaths don’t really register with the audience or within the plot.  And they shouldn’t. That’s what collateral means after all—they’re secondary. Not as important.

           I’ve mentioned before the awful habit of introducing characters for no purpose except to kill them.  We meet Phoebe, get five minutes of backstory and –bang- dead without moving the plot forward an inch.  Because Phoebe was never part of the plot, she was just there to wear a bikini top and let the FX crew show off.  That kind of thing is wasting time, as I just mentioned above.

            The only thing worse than this is when it’s time for the heroic sacrifice… and my hero doesn’t make it.  A minor character steps forward to leap into the monster’s mouth or climb up to connect that last cable to the junction box, even though the power flowing through it could kill him.  So the “hero” sits and watches while someone else saves the day.

            Why are they the hero…?

            This comes up so often it’s sad.  It kinda falls under bad directing, but I’ve  seen it many times where it was clearly a problem inherent in the story.  Sometimes a story keeps pushing X in our face when we really want to see Y.  Or Z.  Sometimes the story calls for Y to be the center of focus, but we still keep seeing X.

            I saw a B-movie recently that didn’t show the love interest’s face until almost twenty minutes into the film.  The movie kept having clever angles and shots… but it didn’t show her face.  Watched another one where the monster was revealed in a horrible panning shot that racked to it in the background.  In both of these cases, we were seeing the wrong thing—or the right thing the wrong way.

            I’ve talked about subtlety, using the scalpel vs. the sledgehammer.  That’s part of this, too.  Sometimes there’s a reason we’re seeing a swirling mass of blood and gore, but all too often… it’s just because the storyteller doesn’t know what else to show us.

           In any storytelling medium, bad dialogue makes for unbelievable characters.  If I can’t believe in the characters, I can’t believe in the story.  If I can’t believe in the story… well, that’s kind of it, isn’t it?

            So many movies have painfully bad dialogue.  Arguments for no reason. Awful technobabble.  Annoying characters who won’t stop talking. And sometimes—too much of the time—it’s just bad.  It’s awkward, clumsy dialogue that sounds more like people reciting prepared statements than, well, talking.

            Bad dialogue always drives me nuts because it means the storytellers have no idea how human beings talk or sound. It’s a massive failure of empathy, and that lack of empathy almost always shows up elsewhere.  I’ve never, ever seen a story with bad dialogue that excelled everywhere else. This almost took the #1 slot.

            But, the number one thing B-movies tend to screw up…

            This is the killer. This one brings so many B-movies to a grinding halt. 

            I’ve seen sooooooo many movies with absolutely no likable characters.  Everyone’s self-centered or obnoxious, idiot or arrogant.  They’re just awful, sometimes disgusting people. All of them.  The bad guys and the good guys.  People start dying and I’m honestly not sure if I’m supposed to be sad or cheer.

            If I’m going to sit here for ninety minutes—and remember the story afterwards–I need a reason to follow someone besides “they’re the main character.”  I need to like them and I need to be able to identify with some aspect of their personality.  The story needs to have someone I actually care about, because if it doesn’t I just won’t care if they win or lose. And if I don’t care about that… well…

            Game over, man.

           So there you have it. My top ten B-movie flaws, based on years of awful movie watching. And reading. And making.

            Feel free to offer one or two of your own.

            And then go write.