Category: details

Hey, look! Lori made a request a few weeks back and we’re fulfilling that request. Because that’s how we roll here!

So, the question is details. How much is too much? How do you know if it’s not enough?

This won’t be great to hear but… this is pretty much impossible to answer. Mostly because writing is art and all art is subjective and a lot of the stuff we call “description” is a huge chunk of the art portion of this equation. Hypothesis? Theorem?

Anyway, my book isn’t going to be anything like your book. Your style isn’t going to be anything like my style. And we each probably have different ideas about how we want our respective stories to land. And that’s before we even touch on basic structure ideas, that different chapters and scenes are going to have different pacing and purposes and will need different levels of description and detail. Within the earlier restrictions I mentioned about our individual styles and all that.

Really filling you with confidence right now, aren’t I?

I thought about this a bit, and I think the best thing I can do is give you my own personal rules for how I tend to approach these things in my own writing. The sort of rules-of-thumb I use to decide if I spend a paragraph describing someone or something, or a full page, or maybe just half a sentence. And like any kind of writing advice, this is just what works for me, so it might not work for you. It definitely won’t work for that guy. But hopefully it’ll get you thinking and considering things in your own work…

So here’s my three guidelines for adding (or not adding) details/descriptions in my writing.

1) Are these details necessary

There’s an idea I’ve brought up once or thrice here before, Damon Knight’s information vs noise. Facts we don’t know are information. Facts we already know are noise. We like getting information and we pay attention to it. Noise is annoying, and we tend to ignore it whenever we can.

In my mind, describing objects, places, or processes that we all know is kind of a waste of my word count and the reader’s patience. Especially if these things aren’t somehow important to my plot or story. We all know what a smartphone looks like. And a grocery store. And how to pump gas. I don’t want to spend my precious words on things like this. I want to use them to describe the strange pendant that woman slipped into my pocket when she bumped into me. Or that alien in the middle of the road I might have just hit with my car.

What’s that in the back? Well, yeah, there are a lot of makes and models of phones out there. Very true. But honestly… how many of them look all that different, especially once they’re in a case? I mean, think of the BBC Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch. His smartphone was a huge part of his character and how he interacted with others, and the show itself changed how everyone does texting in television and movies.

Off the top of your head,…can you say if Sherlock’s phone was an Android or iPhone? You probably can’t because the truth is it’s completely irrelevant. It would’ve been a waste of time to make any sort of distinction.

In fact, as I’m scribbling this, I’d like to expand on the information/ noise idea a bit. I think the first few times we encounter obvious noise in a story, we tend to think there’s a reason for it. That the author has a purpose for describing something we’d otherwise consider not worth mentioning. I mean, they wouldn’t give us half a page of description of the waitress and give her a name if she wasn’t kind of important to the story, right? This has to be information. And that’s why this sort of thing can cause a lot of frustration, because at some point the readers realize the waitress is irrelevant and it doesn’t matter what kind of phone she uses and they’ve just been processing a lot of noise that isn’t necessary to the story.

Now, before anyone gets too grumpy, I want to move on to my next wishy-washy rule…

2) Do these details serve a purpose

A purpose? Wait, isn’t that what I was just saying? Am I having a stroke?

When I say a detail serves a purpose, I mean it might not be a necessary, integral part of my plot or story, but I still have a reason for including it. Maybe it’s helping me set the tone or the mood or it’s hinting at something about a character or location or an object. Whatever it is, if you asked I could explain the function of this bit of description.

For example, what color and model of car Yakko drives is probably irrelevant to my plot. It’s important that he has a car, but nothing hinges on him having, for example, an economy car vs a sports car. The reader could picture either and nothing would change in my story. But if I call it his fire-engine red midlife crisis on wheels? That’s giving you piles of extra information, isn’t it? It’s not necessary, but it serves a purpose.

A few key things here. First is word choice. Since I’m putting in this description for a reason, I should really make sure the words I choose push that purpose. Like with Yakko’s car. It could’ve just been a red sports car, but describing it the way I did told you it’s a red sports car and about Yakko, and about how I (or maybe the narrator?) want you to view him in this story.

Second is not to go overboard. It’s easy to describe more and more and more and come up with a rationalization for all of it. Like, if I want to show how wealthy someone is, I could give lush descriptions of every item in their office and it’d all fall nicely under the umbrella of “showing how wealthy they are.” But I could also probably do this by focusing on just one or two things– maybe that painting or the weird glass sculpture of.. whatever that is. Friggin’ modern art. Costs a bundle and I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a flower or a naked woman or maybe it’s just a shape? I don’t know. Some people have money to burn, right?

I’ve got one more details guideline for you. I really think this is the most important thing about including details. If you want to ignore the last two things, fine, but please consider this one…

3) Are these details affecting the pacing

Almost universally, things are going to get faster and tenser as my plot and story progress. That’s just basic narrative structure. It picks up its pace as it moves along. And I want my readers to feel that quickening of events, that rise of tension. I want it to carry them along like a wave carries a surfer.

Description almost always brings things to a halt. It can’t be helped. In the real world we can actually see/ hear/ feel things and absorb all those details almost instantly, but on the page we have to write them out. A single glance can take four or five paragraphs to cover everything we saw.

This means it’s very easy for details to mess up my pacing. If things are moving at even a mild pace, one or two paragraphs of description can slow things down and knock us out of the story for a moment. If we’re near the end and things have really picked up speed, hitting even a few lines of excess description can be jarring. So I need to be careful about where and when I deploy them.

It’s my own personal style, but I’ve mentioned before that I like action (as in fists and guns and swords and car chases action) to feel like it takes about as long to read as it would take to happen. As close as possible, anyway. It doesn’t sell a blinding-fast martial arts fight to write out each strike, each block, each counter. Same with running in sheer terror from the monster in the woods, which has two primary horns on each side of its head, three smaller curled horns clustered around them, and a sort of ridged brow over each eye, which are a fiery red. These are times when–IMHO–pausing to add a lot of detail can really kill the pacing or tension. It knocks us out of the fast-paced flow of the moment and suddenly we’re standing around counting eyebrow ridges instead of running for our goddamned lives.

Also, overall, I feel it’s better to describe things earlier than later. The pacing should be slower in the beginning of a story, so it makes a brief pause here or there fit in better. Plus, it makes sense to describe things when we first see them (or when we eventually stop running away from them)

And again, there could always be an exception to this. There might be an all-new element in the third act that has to be described in detail. But really, if you think about it, structure kind of demands these things be rare. If I’m introducing a lot of necessary stuff in my third act… something may have gone wrong somewhere.

So that’s it. Those are the three ways I tend to screen my descriptions and details to figure out if they’re good, excessive, or just completely unnecessary. Hope they help a little.

And if you’ve got a question or a topic request, please let me know.

Next time here, I’d like to talk a little bit about one of our planet’s great philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

It’s going to be so much fun.

Until then, go write.

I’d like to start by telling you about my one of my favorite film edits of all time. Top five, easy. It’s a single, straight cut between one scene and the next and it’s beyond brilliant. There’s a simply unbelievable amount of character and plot development in it. No joke, it’s a level of storytelling that most filmmakers and authors (self included) don’t have a prayer of ever achieving. I say this with complete and utter sincerity.

And Sam Raimi did it in a Spider-Man movie.

You probably know the moment. Struggling student/ photographer/ superhero (shhhhh) Peter Parker has just been introduced to physicist/ genius/ role model Otto Octavius. Otto takes a moment to criticize Peter for his laziness, but they warm up to each other as Peter makes some insightful observations about Otto’s new fusion reactor. Then Peter asks a question and Otto answers it as they finish off dinner at Otto and Rosie’s apartment later that night.

D’you know that moment? Seriously, go watch it if you don’t. Alfred Molina’s freakin’ amazing as Doctor Octopus.

Anyway, point is, we instantly know what happened during that cut. All of it. We understand how the discussion went. How they ended up back here. How their views of each other have changed over the past few hours. Yeah, it’s clearly been hours and we all know exactly what happened during them.

And just to be clear for those of you who might like to look down on superhero movies, none of this is because of pre-existing knowledge. Raimi and screenwriter Alvin Sargent were going in an all-new direction with Otto’s backstory and how it overlapped with Peter’s. They’d never been seen in this way before.

How many pages of storytelling did they fit into that cut?

Maybe a better way to look at it is, how many script pages did the movie not need because of that cut?

Truth is, most of us are pretty smart. We can figure out what goes between A and C. And between X and Z. As writers, we don’t always need to fill in every detail. Especially all the boring details. There’s lots of stuff we can skip over without hurting our story in the slightest. In a lot of cases, it’ll even make our story better.

I think this works on both a micro and a macro level. On the micro level, I’m talking about clauses and sentences and maybe paragraphs. I’ve talked in the past once or thrice about trimming away excess details. Steps in the process. Parts of the routine. Things the majority of readers will figure out happened. To put it another way, the thing that happens between A and B.

On the macro level, I’m talking about scenes or story beats or maybe even whole chapters. It’s the same idea as the micro, except we (the writers) have taken it even further, adding more details and nuance to what was already… well, unnecessary details. I’ve cut multiple pages and even whole chapters out of manuscripts once I realized the whole thing was a beautifully rendered and detailed scene that ultimately just wasn’t necessary.

And I’m sure someone just read that and said “whoa whoa WHOA! What about the art?! If that chapter’s beautifully written, isn’t that reason enough for it to be in the book?”

Well… no, to be honest. Don’t get me wrong. I love a beautiful turn of phrase or exquisite prose as much as the next guy. Probably more. I’ve read some things where other writers choose the absolutely perfect word or come up with a beautiful description and all I can say is “goddamn.” And sometimes “I’m jealous as all hell.”

The catch, of course, is those words are all describing something that needs to be in the story. It’s an aspect of writing I’ve mentioned once or thrice before. Just because something’s good doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for my book. Something can be fantastic and still just not belong in there. For any number of reasons.

F’r example, one or two of you may have read a book called Paradox Bound. And you may have heard that, in the first draft my editor saw, I had a full chapter describing Eli’s bus trip across America after he flees the Faceless Men. It was about seven or eight single-spaced pages. And it was about Eli seeing the bigger world for the first time. The assorted people on the bus. The places they briefly stopped. The food he ate for a three day bus-ride, Sleeping sitting up. Wearing the same clothes for three days. And some clever observations about life and humanity and mass transit scattered in there too.

But ultimately, when viewed as part of the whole story, absolutely none of this mattered. It was about Eli getting on a bus in Boston and getting off a bus in Pasadena. All that quiet stuff in between… well, you would’ve just assumed most of that happened. Seriously. What else would he do on a bus for three days? How much of it would’ve been painfully obvious once he stepped off the bus?

Here are three general rules of thumb I’ve developed for myself when it comes to such things. I generally cut something if…

1) The average person would know, or logically assume, B had to happen between A and C. If my character leaves work and the next time we see her she’s arriving home with a Jack in the Box takeout bag, do you immediately assume I made a big continuity error? “She didn’t have that bag when she left work!!!” Or do you just assume she stopped at Jack in the Box on the way home? We make these kind of cuts all the time. We don’t show people traveling between two points. They go to the gym and suddenly they’re in workout clothes. We see two folks sneak upstairs at the house party and then suddenly they’re in bed– flopped on their backs, breathless, and (hopefully) looking kind of happy. None of us have any confusion about what we “missed” in any of these examples.

2) If B is completely irrelevant to A and C. We can safely assume it happened during the timeline of the story (see above rule), but it has no effect whatsoever on the tale I’m telling. Perfect example of this– how many books have you read that take place over three or four or more days? Probably a lot of them, yes? If anything, a story taking place entirely in one day is a bit of a rarity.

How many times have you read about someone using the bathroom? It’s something we all inherently know happens, but we also know it’s just not that important to most stories. So we don’t question when it’s not there. Same with eating. Did these people really go for a week without eating? Or did the author just not bother showing it and save a page or two?

3) If it just works better without it. Because sometimes it does. The paragraph reads better, the action flows better, the horror has a little more punch. Sometimes I don’t want to get bogged down in the details, and neither does my reader. And as I’ve been saying above, if people are probably going to figure it out anyway, why bog things down? To paraphrase a famous lawyer, we could skip all that and just, well… get to the good stuff.

And to repeat, all three of these are just rules of thumb. It’s not hard to find examples of some beautiful writing that contributes absolutely nothing to the plot or story. But I feel safe saying it’s also not all that common.

Y’see, Timmy, if I trust my audience to figure this stuff out on their own, they’ll appreciate that trust. They’ll know I trusted them to fill in the blanks. And when they figure something out on their own, even a little thing, they’ll love what they’re reading even more.

So look back over your manuscript, go over some of those beats… and maybe give your readers the benefit of the doubt.

Next time, unless anyone’s got a better idea, I’d like to talk about this personal teleporter I invented.

Until then, go write.

Oh, back again so soon? Well, I guess that’s as much on me as it is on you. But I did have another thought I wanted to bounce off you.

This is something I’ve seen several times in books and in bad B-movies, but it only recently struck me what was actually going on. How the storytellers were twisting things in a really unnatural way to solve a problem. So this may make you (and me) look back at some older posts I’ve done in a slightly different light..

But first, let’s talk about pasta.

I got into cooking during the pandemic. Started watching lots of cooking videos. Trying some things that were kind of new and daring for me. Maybe some of you did too. I’ve found all the prep and cooking kept my mind off other things but still working in creative ways. And now I can make really good stir-fried noodles.

Speaking of noodles, you’ve probably heard of the spaghetti test. When it’s cooked properly and ready to eat, you can throw a strand of spaghetti at the wall and the moisture and starches and, I don’t know, pasta epoxy will make it stick. If it isn’t done cooking yet, it just falls off or does a slow downward tumble like one of those Wacky Wall Walkers.

There’s another phrase you may have heard which grew out of this spaghetti test. “Let’s throw it at the wall and see what sticks.” It shows up a lot in the development stages of all sorts of things. We’ve got thirty ideas and we don’t know which one’s going to work? Well, let’s just do allof them. We throw all the spaghetti at the wall—the whole pot—and everything that sticks is good and ready to go and whatever doesn’t… isn’t. Sound familiar?

I think most of us have tried this sort of blunt, brute force approach on something. I know I’ve rewritten conversations severaltimes to see if it works better with Yakko taking the lead, or Dot, or Wakko, or Phoebe, or… who’s that guy? Let’s see what happens if he takes the lead in this. Same thing with names. Holy crap, Murdoch in Terminus went through sooooo many different names. Sometimes for whole drafts, sometimes just for a page or three. But then I found Murdoch and it was perfect.

Thing is, there’s a weird sort of flipside to this. Or maybe an inverse? Freaky mutant bastard offspring? Anyway, I talked a while back about shotgun art, and I think this is what’s going on here.

Sometimes, in books and movies, we’ll see storytellers who just pile on the characters. One after another after another, many of them with only the thinnest connection to the main plot. It’s the cousin of the best friend of a supporting character in one plot thread. Or, y’know, even less than that. I read one story where we spent two whole chapters with a character who’s only purpose was to bump into one of the main characters in a third chapter. That was it. She served no other purpose in the story except to be that two page delay in his day And, y’know, fill out the page count a bit.

What struck me a few weeks back is when storytellers are doing this—layering on dozens of simple, almost stereotypical characters and conflicts—is they’re taking the spaghetti approach and just throwing everything at the wall. Rather than developing any of these characters or elements to any degree, they’re just giving us lots and lots of quick, shallow ones. I mean why spend time making a complex character when I could just create fivecharacters with only one character trait each? It’s so much less effort, right? I mean, ex-wife, former best friend, alcoholic rival, pregnant woman, aggressive military guy—there’s got to be something there that strikes a chord with my reader, right?

That example I gave up above? The woman who served no purpose except to bump into one of the protagonists? She was late for work. That was it. That was her entire character. I mean, she had a name. She had some dialogue. She had a pet in a tank in her apartment (some kind of lizard, I think). But that was it. The only other thing we knew about her—her alarm didn’t go off, she overslept by almost two hours, and she was late for work. We never learned why her alarm didn’t go off (power outage? forgot to set it? sabotaging pet lizard?). We never learned why she was so tired she overslept by two hours (drastically overworked? got blackout drunk? a wild hookup that left her exhausted?).

Heck, weird as it sounds, we never even found out why being late was a bad thing (on the verge of being fired? abusive boss? big presentation?). We just knew she was late, had to get showered and dressed fast, had to get to work, and that was supposed to be enough for us. Anything else would require more thought about who she was, what she wanted out of life, and what she was actually getting.

And this book had over a dozen characters like her. Seriously. It spent a significant amount of time with people who could be 100% completely summed up with things like “Wakko needs some drugs,” “Dot’s worried about her dog,” or “Yakko is a no-nonsense soldier.” That’s it. That’s all of who they were.

One place you may recognize this from (tis the season after all) is old slasher movies. Okay, and some modern ones. Most of the cast is one note characters with just barely enough depth that we can tell the machete went through them. They’re the bulk filler of the plot. The serious woman. The goofball. The jock. The nice girl. The drunk/ stoner. They just exist to be minor obstacles between our killer and the one or two survivors.

Now, again, the idea is that the reader (or the audience, if this is a B-movie) has to find something more-or-less relatable in these broad stereotypes. I mean… you’ve known somebody who’s late for work before, right? Or was a jock? Or a serious woman? Okay, well… I bet you knew someone who was worried about their dog at some point, right?

I think people do this for two reasons. One is that they’re nervous about creating complex characters. Maybe they don’t think they’ve got the skill to do it, or possibly just not the skill to do it in the number of pages allotted to it. Perhaps they think their plot can’t function with only three or four threads. Or possibly they’re worried about having such a limited number of viewpoints.

I think the other reason is they’re worried about having characters with no traits. Like that woman running the register at the gas station. She doesn’t even have a name tag. She’s just there to sell the protagonist gas and a couple snacks. She’s got no arc or backstory or tragic flaw. That doesn’t seem right. We have to give her something, right? Maybe she could be, I don’t know, late for work or something?

Thing is, no matter what my reasoning is for this flood of one-dimensional characters, this always ends up leading to one of two things. Either we mistake their lack of depth for deliberate avoidance (“Hmmmmmm… why isn’t the writer saying why she was up late last night? Is she the murderer???”) and then we get frustrated when this goes nowhere. Or we recognize these characters don’t actually serve a purpose and get frustrated waiting to go back to someone who’s actually going to affect the plot in some way.

I also think it’s worth noting the three traits of good characters I’ve mentioned here a few dozen times—likable, believable, relatable. And yeah, I’ve also mentioned that supporting characters can sometimes get away with only two of these traits. Catch is, when characters are this flat and undeveloped, they almost always end up unbelievable—their actions and reactions just seem ridiculous because there’s no depth to ground them in. So we’re down one good trait already! Then my shotgun approach means they’re going to be randomly relatable at best, and lots of folks fall back on “snarky jerk” as a default personality, soooooooooooooo… Not a lot going for these folks.

Y’see, Timmy, burying my story in simple characters doesn’t work because it’s forgetting a basic truth of the spaghetti test. All those noodles that didn’t stick to the wall? I don’t sweep them up off the floor and put them back in the pot. The whole point of doing it all was to see what did and didn’t work—to figure out what shouldn’t be in my story.

So said noodles definitely shouldn’t be part of my finished entree.

Everyone gets the food-book metaphor here, right?

Anyway… next time…

Wow. Already halfway through October. I guess next time I could do the obligatory horror post. Or maybe talk about NaNoWriMo? Any preferences?

Either way, go write.

So, there’s something I was hoping we could avoid talking about this week…

Subtext is one of those things that gets mentioned a lot. In fact, I’d hazard a guess it gets mentioned more than it gets defined, and it probably get defined more than people actually give examples of how to do it. Which is weird because it is so important to good writing. It shows up in prose, it should be all through dialogue, it’s just… it’s everywhere

I think we all get a little nervous around subtext because when it’s done well it’s soooo friggin’ good it becomes intimidating. How many college professors went on and on about it? It’s also one of those things where if I dig deep enough, I can find almost any meaning to anything I want. Which then—through the power of the internet—makes it look the author crafted these twelve layers of intricate meaning when they wrote this chapter and holy crap I don’t know about you but I’m intimidated again.

So what is subtext? It’s the conversation beneath the one my characters are having out loud. Or maybe it’s beneath the conversation I’m having with the reader—that I’m telling you this but we both know we’re talking about this. And sometimes it can be that simple. Subtext doesn’t always have to be rich and elaborate and layered with exquisite meaning. There don’t need to be twelve layers. Or even six.

But good dialogue almost always has some kind of subtext, because that’s how people work. We talk around things more than we say them directly. We have in-jokes and shared experiences and understood context and all these things that let us say exactly what we mean without saying… well, what we mean. Without subtext, it’s really tough to do comedy. It’s almost impossible to flirt.

Here’s a few common examples of subtext you’ve probably seen before. Maybe even used before. They’re really simple and even just using these can bump my dialogue up a notch or two. Also, these are just my own names for all of these. I’m sure there’s some literary or psychological theory that gives them a much more accurate name. But I think you’ll know what I’m talking about, and that’s what matters.

The Friend— Let’s start with the most familiar one. So familiar it’s pretty much become a comedy gag. How many times have you read a story or seen a show where someone goes to the pharmacist to pick up their “friend’s” ointment for… their rash.  Or maybe I know this, uhhhh, person from my book club who got really confused by this one Doom level, and was wondering if you could explain how to beat it in simple terms. For him. And the obvious subtext here is that there is no friend, it’s just the character trying to put some distance between them and the embarrassment of needing that ointment. This is an easy form of subtext, because I’m still saying everything, I’m just pushing all the emotions and thoughts onto a different character—even if it’s a nonexistent character.

A close relative of the Friend is the Hypothetical. That’s when we’re talking about the accursed book of damned souls and I ask you, “well, just for argument’s sake, what if I had read a page of the book out loud? What would happen? Not that I did it, I just want to be sure we all understand the stakes here…”

The Metaphor—This is basic subtext 101. It’s the one I mentioned above, when we’re  talking about X but everyone knows we’re really talking about Y. It’s like talking about my friend, but we’re broadening our palette a bit. I’m talking about cleaning out the garage, but it’s really about letting go of the past. Perhaps my co-worker and I are talking about how much we enjoyed doing this project together when it’s clear we’ve fallen in love. Or maybe the boss is telling his new employee about how much he loves the Klingons in Star Trek, and how in their society you advance by taking out the people above you. Ha ha ha, anyway, welcome to the company. Good luck!

Sometimes an example of this sort of subtext gets repeatedly used so much the metaphor becomes a euphemism—it’s so broadly understood, the subtext has essentially become the text. If my partner calls me up at ten at night and asks if I’m up for some Netflix and chill, we all understand she’s not hoping I’ll sit through the first three episodes of Sweet Tooth(although we may have it on in the background).

The Reverse—Another simple way to use subtext is for my character to just declare the exact opposite of what they really mean. At one point or another, we’ve all probably heard something along the lines of “It’s okay, I really didn’t want the promotion. It would’ve been too much work, anyway.” And we all knew Wakko was lying, but we just nodded and politely agreed with him. Or think of Michelle in Spider-Man: Homecoming, who’s not obsessed with Peter Parker or anything, she’s just knows his class schedule because she’s very observant. That’s all.

Worth noting–a lot of times the reverse can be sarcasm, because sarcasm is all about the subtext. Odds are all of us have made a suggestion where one of our friends has rolled their eyes and said “Oh, yeah, I’d love to do that.”

The Next Step—If you’ve ever read about someone ordering a double at the bar before they break some bad news to their tense friend, you know this method. Or maybe when I know the in-laws are coming for dinner, and I take three or four pictures down from the wall and put up other ones. It’s when a character shows they’re one or two steps ahead. She’s not thinking about now, she’s thinking about fifteen minutes or an hour from now, and planning accordingly. Through their words or actions, my character’s saying “I know where this is going and I know how it’s going to end.”

The Blank—This one’s a slightly trickier way of doing subtext. It’s when my character demonstrates their opinion on something by offering no opinion. Sometimes they do it by ignoring the topic, like when Wakko asks his brother’s opinion on Phoebe and his brother instead pointedly wonders aloud how much the DJ gets paid at this club. Other times he might just dance around it, saying he doesn’t know Phoebe that well or giving a very vague non-answer (“Look, how well can you really know anyone, right?”)

And there’s five easy ways I can put a little subtext into my writing. You’ve probably seen a lot of them already. You may already be doing it—good on you.

It’s worth mentioning that all of these methods need a bit of skill and practice, because sometimes people are just really observant. Every now and then we really do just want to relax and watch something on Netflix. And maybe the boss just really likes Star Trek and I wasn’t supposed to shove Dot down that elevator shaft. 

Y’see, Timmy, the trick with subtext is making sure it’s clear what I really mean. I can’t be so blunt that my characters aren’t really hiding anything, but I also can’t be so subtle that people think my characters… aren’t really hiding anything. It’s a fine balancing act, and it’ll take a few tries to get it right. Nothing to be ashamed of. I have this one friend and none of his early writing had any subtext in it at all.

Next time…

Okay, so, next week, in a world where everyone had masked up last year and gotten vaxxed as fast as they could this year—in that world, next week is SDCC. Alas, we don’t live in that world, so next week is another virtual con with lots of Zoom panels. Which are fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not doing any of them. In fact, at best, I may do a more public Saturday geekery and watch a couple fun B-movies. Like maybe the MCU Incredible Hulk and Resident Evil: Apocalypse.

I was also thinking about the blog post for that week. Normally I’d just update my “Top Ten B-Movie Mistakes” list (found footagewas finally going to get a slot). But that just feels kind of needlessly negative, especially after the past year, and I want this place to be more constructive.

So here’s what I’m thinking about doing…

Next week I’m going to do two posts (Tuesday and Thursday) about how to make a better B-movie. Tuesday’s going to about writing it (based on my experience as a writer, screenwriter, and entertainment journalist) and Thursday’s going to be about filming it (based on my experience working on a few dozen B-movies and TV shows, some of which you’ve actually heard of). It’ll probably just be a “top seven tips” sort of thing, and I doubt anyone from the Asylum will ever see it, but I’ll feel better putting something more positive out into the world. And maybe it’ll help somebody.

Sound like fun? 

Cool.

Until then, go write.

And get your shots!