Category: details
July 8, 2011 / 2 Comments
Can You Describe the Problem?
April 8, 2011
The Back Seat Driver
Many thanks for your patience. Sorry I had to miss last week. It’s for a good cause, trust me.
I’m sure you’ve all heard that titular term before, yes? Most of you have probably experienced it at one time or another. It doesn’t even need to be in the car. There are folks who can be backseat drivers in the kitchen, at work, and at school. And definitely on the internet…
If you’re not familiar with the term, a backseat driver is someone who’s not behind the wheel, yet continues to tell the person who is what they should be doing. It’s not all that far off from the old chestnut “those who can’t, teach.”
I’m sure you’ve also all heard about plot-driven stories and character-driven stories. They’re terms that get applied to tales where the focus is either the characters or the plot. Summer blockbusters and best-selling “beach books” tend to be thought of as plot-driven while slow-paced indie films and more “literate” books are often considered to be character-driven.
Now, personally, I don’t think there’s any such thing as a plot-driven story. All stories are moved forward by the actions (or inaction, in some cases) of their characters, thus all stories are character-driven. I think it’s one of those cases where a shorthand term developed which then somehow became a mild pejorative. The usual implication is that if you have a plot-driven story you have crap characters who are flat on the page. That’s why you’ll often see people refer to (for example) “a character-driven horror story” or some such, because the implication is this was just a horror story, or (heaven forbid) a plot-driven horror story, it couldn’t be that good. Being character-driven validates a work, while being plot-driven invalidates it in some way.
Plot-driven generally gets used as a pejorative because it’s a common way stories get messed up. Some writers (or in the case of Hollywood, some development execs, directors, and actors) get so obsessed with individual beats and moments they forget the overall whole. Explosions are cool, but explosions that serve no purpose are just silly. Emotional monologues and character reversals are fantastic, but when they happen at awkward moments with no motivation behind them… well, then they’re laughable. When the story gets twisted to accommodate these things, it tends to get considered plot-driven. I have a list of plot points and I’m going to hit them no matter how bizarre, pointless, or crammed-in they feel.
But back to my driving metaphor…
Plot has to take a back seat to characters. As I’ve said here many, many times before, characters have to be your priority. If I can’t believe in Wakko and Yakko, their story’s dead on arrival. I need to accept their motivations, actions, and reactions. If characters act in an unbelievable way, it doesn’t matter what’s going on around them. Good, well-developed characters must be the driving force in a story.
I’m not saying plot isn’t important, and I’m sure as hell not saying you don’t need it. Anyone who’s been following along here knows how much a story with no plot drives me nuts. But at the end of the day, your audience is going to notice an unbelievable character over an unbelievable situation. So if you know your characters are good, you need to tweak the plot to suit them, not vice-versa.
In all fairness, I’m also guilty of this particular sin. I’ve done it before, I still do it today sometimes, and odds are I’ll do it again sometime in the future. Keep this little fact in mind for your summer reading–the final climactic day in Ex-Patriots was originally two days. Yep, right in the middle of all that’s going on in the last ten chapters, people stopped and went to bed for the night. Seriously. Is that lame or what? Fortunately I recognized that sticking this rigidly to my roughly-outlined plot was injuring the story as a whole and forcing my characters to act unnaturally.
Now, with all that being said, reality has to take a back seat to plot. And we’re out of back seats, so reality has to go in the trunk. Yeah, we could be in a limo or something, but the importance/ seating order is kind of reversed in a limo. That just messes up my beautiful metaphor.
Anyway, at the end of the day, people are reading your work for a good story, not for an education. Anyone who’s reading Dan Brown for an insightful and true view of the Renaissance is in for a major disappointment. Thomas Harris may not be the number-one source for how FBI profilers act. I just had a discussion with a publisher about brain structure which ended with us agreeing my words will sound pretty good to most folks, but hopefully any neurologists will be willing to suspend disbelief a little more than the layman.
You don’t want to bring a really cool plot to a crashing halt by rigidly adhering to facts. You don’t want to be blatantly wrong, but you’re also not writing a textbook. Well, maybe you are, but then most of this doesn’t apply to you. How many phenomenal movie gun battles would lose a lot if the filmmakers counted every bullet and showed the hero reloading again and again and again? If it took nine days for a steamship to cross the Atlantic but I say my Victorian heroine has access to a ship that can do it in seven, is that going to upset anyone?
Well, yes… there’s always someone on the internet who will feel the need to write an essay about the ludicrous degree to which I’ve massaged the facts. Can’t be helped. Just take that one as a given and move on.
I got to hear Ray Bradbury tell a wonderful story once about how he was hired by the Smithsonian to spruce up the script for their failing planetarium show. Their show, he immediately realized, was a dry recitation of facts rather than an exploration of the wonders of the universe. When he turned in his version, he got back a list of notes that was longer than the script itself–and every note was replacing one of his poetic exultations with another rigid, precise fact and an explanation of the fact. When they challenged Bradbury’s statement that the universe was over fifty billion years old, he dared them to prove it.
“So they fired me,” he said gleefully, “for being a smartass.”
And another planetarium happily bought his script.
So… the characters are driving. The plot is in the back seat where it can offer suggestions if need be. Facts are in the trunk–we know right where they are if we need them and they can be heard if they yell really loudly.
Make sense?
Next time I’d like to talk to you about Jenga. Yeah, Jenga. The wooden-blocks game. Trust me, it’ll be cool.
Until then, hit the road. And go write.
August 26, 2010
It’s A Trap!!
I would like to thank Admiral Ackbar for pointing out the obvious.
Alas, sometimes things aren’t as apparent as we think they should be. Like the horror story where the absolute last thing someone should do is open the door to the study, so of course Yakko is reaching for the knob…
Lots of aspiring writers fall into traps. Sometimes it happens when they follow bad advice. Other times it’s because they insist on using a method or writing in a style which really doesn’t work for them. And sometimes… sometimes that trap’s just sitting there in the field kids play kickball in, hidden by some leaves, waiting to snap…
So, with all that being said, here are some common–and dangerous– misconceptions people have about writing. Beware them, and beware the people who set these traps for themselves and others.
Writing is easy – Probably the most common misconception there is. I mean, most of us learned how to put words on paper when we were ten, right? We could write passable essays by ninth grade. So writing for a living, for an audience greater than your immediate friends and loved ones, how hard could it be? Anyone can do it once you’ve got a clever idea. Heck, I’d bet 90% of Americans have immediate access to a word processor of some sort.
Truth is, writing—not basic, grade-school literacy, mind you, but the ability to write— is a skill which needs to be learned like any other. All you need to do is browse the comment sections of any news feed or message board to see how few people know how to express their ideas through words. Yeah, I took English and reading classes in school. I also took music classes, so maybe I should expect to get a recording contract sometime soon? Twelve years of gym classes, too, but for some reason I haven’t made it onto any Olympic teams.
Writers need to train and practice for months–maybe even years–before they’re ready to show off their writing. I don’t need to look it up to tell you Wolfgang Puck didn’t get any praise for the first hundred meals he cooked, Mark McGuire did not get paid big money the first thousand times he swung a baseball bat, and Stephen King didn’t make a single cent off the first 100,000 words he wrote. Writing is work. Hard work. It requires skill, a great deal of practice, some actual talent, and a heck of a lot of dedication. This is why so many people can’t succeed at it.
This is probably the best trap because it doesn’t just catch the writer, it tends to kill them 2/3 of the time. Most of the wanna-be writers who believe this have never actually written anything. Once they do, they come up with an excuse why they’ll never be completing their manuscript (see below), then slink away to become musicians. Or writing gurus.
Writing doesn’t require any writing – A few decades back there was a huge spec script boom in Hollywood. It was one of those rare periods when studios acknowledged the importance of the writer and were paying top dollar for screenplays, or even just the idea for one. A popular story is how established screenwriter Joe Eszterhas scribbled the bare idea (no pun intended) for Jade on a cocktail napkin and ended up with a multi-million dollar contract for it.
As I said, however, this was over twenty years ago. These days producers and publishers are much more cautious and they’re not interested in ideas. They’re interested in complete, finished works. Not two-thirds of a manuscript. Not most of a script. Just to save time, knowing the right people won’t change this. No, it won’t. I don’t care what you read on the special snowflake website.
Not to sound too harsh but… well, no, this is harsh because people can only end up in this trap by choice. If someone can’t write and complete something, they can’t be a writer. That’s really all there is to it. Stop now and go back to those criminal justice classes you signed up for.
For the record, some folks argue they don’t want to write until they get paid. These people should give up on any sort of fiction– because that’s not going to happen there–and go into journalism. Then they need to find a staff job on a website, magazine, or newspaper.
Good luck with that, by the way, not having a writing resume and all…
First person is easy – A lot of prose writers start off with first person stories. It’s quick, it’s not hard to get into, it’s easy to find a voice. It’s also very personable, so a reader can relate to the characters immediately. Plus there are tons of formats ready and waiting; journals, diaries, letter, memoirs, and so on.
Truth is, first person is a very difficult, very limiting tense to write in. There’s a reason so many professional writers avoid it. Beginning writers rarely develop their first-person characters past their voice. I could go on about this one for a while, and as it happens I did earlier this year.
Writers who get caught in this trap start their first novel and pound out 20,000 words worth of journal entries over the weekend. There’s always that chance they may be brimming with so much raw talent they’re the next Hemingway or Steinbeck. There’s a far better chance, though, they’ve just wasted a long weekend.
Writers don’t need to read – Somewhere along the line, someone started promoting the silly idea writers shouldn’t waste time reading, they should spend all their time writing. This is kind of like saying you don’t want to waste time stopping for gas while you’re driving. Every professional writer I’ve ever met, interviewed, or even just read about (myself included) reads voraciously. A writer should be devouring works in their chosen field to stay current and snacking heavily on everything else to stay fresh.
Sad but true, the people who fall into this trap tend to write plain awful stuff. They go for every easy idea, hit every cliché plot point, and tend to follow the textbook formulas they were taught in some creative writing class somewhere. What else can they do? They try to mimic one or two famous examples of what they aspire to and usually end up looking just like the worst of the worst (because they have no idea what the worst looks like)
Research everything – Alas, this is one of the two deadliest traps out there, which is why I saved it for one of the last. We all want to get the facts right in our stories. We check research books, make phone calls, visit important locations, or maybe some of us just spend a lot of time on Wikipedia. The point is, how can I be expected to move forward with my story if I don’t know the name of George Washington’s barber and what size shirt he wore? It’ll ruin everything if I just call him John Smith, neck 16.
This is an awful trap because getting stuck in it means a writer was trying to do the right thing. Research is important, but never forget it’s not writing. There’s a time for putting noses in books but there’s also a time for putting pens to paper (or binary code to electromagnetic bubble memory, as it may be)
Some people get caught in an even deeper layer of this trap. They get stuck researching how to write. We’ve all known someone like this, the one who buys book after book, takes class after class, but never does any actual writing. For some people this becomes a defense mechanism of sorts, sometimes subconsciously and sometimes… not so subconsciously. If they never start, they won’t have to put the work in and their work stays in that wonderful hypothetical stage where it’s the greatest thing (almost) ever committed to paper. It’s a tragedy, really, they never had time to write it down…
Rewrite until it’s perfect – The last and deadliest of the traps in our showroom. For some people, rewriting turns into an endless loop. There’s always another opinion to listen to, more feedback to get, and revisions which need to be done because of them. Just thought of a new way to do those action scenes? That calls for another draft. Maybe last night’s Chuck inspired a new opening? Perhaps Aunt Betty is visiting and she thought the ending was a little violent, and a good writer knows changing the end means changing everything which leads up to the end.
There are two ways people fall into this trap. One is a combination of bad advice and bad judgment. So many gurus tell people to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. How many times have you heard “writing is rewriting” parroted in classes or on message boards? There’s some truth to that, but there’s also a lot of truth in the phrase “poop or get off the pot” (cleaned up for work computers). Eventually, a writer just needs to call it done and move on or they’re going to be trapped in one manuscript forever.
The other way people fall into this trap is by purpose. A bit like with research, constant rewrites are an excuse not to actually produce anything. You don’t expect me to show you an incomplete or old draft, do you? I was going to send it to some agents or publishers, but I think it needs one more polish to make it perfect. Maybe one more after I go through and clean up a few loose threads. Rewrites are a way wanna-be writers–again, consciously or not– can avoid possible failure yet still keep up the illusion of forward motion.
Are all of these traps deadly? No, but getting snagged in one can definitely cost you some time. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t fallen victim to one or three of them over the years. Fortunately, one of those things only has to slam on your leg once and you’ll rarely let it happen again.
Assuming, of course, that you get out of it the first time.
Next time, I’m going to throw around some big words relating to the throwing about of big words.
Until then, go write. And watch your step.
May 21, 2010
Background Noise
A multi-purpose title, as will hopefully become clear.
Submitted for your approval is one Theresa Cano. Theresa was a character in the early drafts of The Suffering Map, my first solid attempt at a novel. She’s a young woman who works as a cleaning lady in San Diego to pay for her night courses in computer engineering. Theresa’s going to build the first thinking computer, you see. As it turns out, one of Theresa’s regular employers is an antique store owner named Lois Antanello. Lois is kind of an old bitch, to be honest (she is one of the lesser villians of the book), but she pays well so Theresa bites her tongue when Lois snidely refers to her “immigrant accent.” Theresa has no accent, you see, because her family’s been living (legally) in southern California for about fifty years longer than the Antanellos, who showed up just after World War II. As it happens in the story, Theresa is working there in the antique shop one day when Lois gets a disturbing phone call from her namesake, her Uncle Louis, who is, as some folks might say, a very bad man.
Keep all that in mind. We’ll be getting back to Theresa in a bit.
Names and descriptions are a kind of shorthand for readers. They let the readers know this person is important. They could be the protagonist’s best friend, an old lover, or an old rival. Maybe we’re supposed to note the color of their eyes or just remember them when their dead body shows up fifty pages from now. We don’t know yet why they’re important because the story’s just beginning. But when the writer takes the time to give us someone’s name and what they look like, that’s a sign to us we need to remember this person. They’re an actual character.
As such, a horrible mistake beginning writers tend to make is when they name and describe everyone. Every single person on the page gets a name, age, body type, ethnicity, and a quick (or not so quick) personal history. This is great for your main character, but it really sucks for the waitress who’s just saying “your drink, sir,” and putting a glass on the table.
The problem is that naming everyone clutters the story with characters. Yes, characters are great and they really make your writing. You can’t have good writing without good characters. However, pointless characters just drag on a story. As the reader, I’m trying to keep track of the important people and getting bombarded with the unimportant ones. An excess of characters is like that lady on the sinking ship who keeps insisting she needs to bring all fifty items of luggage into the lifeboat. All we really need to get moving is to get her in the lifeboat, but as long as she’s taking her time with hatboxes, makeup cases, and steamer trunks we’re not going anywhere.
Did you catch that? The sentence where I listed out all the types of luggage was kind of clumsy, wasn’t it? Because we don’t need to know all that. Your mind trips over it because, as an experienced reader, you instinctively know it’s not that relevant.
In his book Creating Short Fiction (check out the carousel at the bottom of the page) Damon Knight explains that a fact we don’t know is information, but a fact we already know is just noise. I’d add to that by saying a fact we don’t need to know is also noise, it just takes a bit longer to recognize it.
This mistake is lethal in scripts. Would you spend a full paragraph describing that waitress in so much detail in a novel? Then why would you do it in a screenplay, where the object is to make your writing as lean and tight as possible? Think about it. One hundred and fifty words spent on the hopes and dreams and legs of the cute waitress is 150 words you don’t get to spend on your main character. Or on that climactic action scene. So why waste those words on someone who doesn’t matter? There’s a reason people in film production refer to those folks as “background” or “extras,” and not as cast members. If we know she’s a cute waitress, that’s all we need to know.
Can you imagine reading the lobby scene in The Matrix if every person was named and described? The four cops at the metal detector when Neo and Trinity walk in. The two dozen guards who come filing out into the lobby. The whole scene would drag like nobody’s business. It’d be four pages of description before Neo even pulled out his second set of guns. Sure, maybe those guys have wives, kids, rich lives, and a lot of that, but for the purposes of this story they’re just there to catch a lot of bullets and a few kicks from Trinity. The screenwriters of The Matrix knew that none of those guys mattered, which is why that scene is barely half a page long.
And, yes, I used to do this myself. Remember Theresa? She existed for no other purpose but to overhear the start of a phone conversation. We never saw her before. We never saw her again. When I removed her from The Suffering Map it didn’t even cause a ripple. She was nothing more than a clever way to get into the scene and fill an extra two pages. Once I realized that, I knew she had to go.
It’s not just excess characters, though. Any decription can be rich and lush and vivid, but what it will be, no question, is a pause in the story. A big description means a big pause and a big pause gives me time to wonder if I should be doing the laundry rather than reading. Do we need to know exactly what this apartment looks like? Every detail of how Yakko is dressed? Each line and panel and rivet of that armored exo-skeleton? The readers are going to fill in a lot of that for themselves, so if you’re spending time doing it–especially on elements that have no real bearing on the story–you’re just shooting your writing in the foot.
Now some folks might argue that such elaborate descriptions of every character, major and minor, is what makes writing great. To a small extent, they are right. To a far larger extent, they’re wanking off. Leonardo wasn’t scared of painting empty space when it was needed. Shakespeare knew sometimes a soldier was just a soldier and a crowd didn’t need to be anything more than a crowd. If you think you’ve got a better sense of art than them, knock yourself out.
When you write, make sure you’re focused on the foreground, and not spending your time and energy and pages on those distracting background elements.
Next week, something a bit more definitive. I’m going to prattle on something the reader should never, ever see in your writing.
Until then, go write.