Category: flow

            I tried to come up with a clever title using Flo from those Progressive Insurance commercials, but I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t feel… well, kind of awkward.  They weren’t bad titles, they just didn’t read well.  Or they required a bit of mental gymnastics to make sense.

            Either way, they didn’t work.

            Which is, oddly enough, what I wanted to blather on about this week.

            Have you ever read a book you just couldn’t put down?  One where you start reading just after lunch and suddenly realize it’s two in the morning?  Or maybe it was a movie that sucked you in and you were stunned to realize that the 163 minute run time was already used up.

            Oscar-winning screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin made a wonderful observation a while back.  To paraphrase, we experience good stories in our gut, not in our head.  A good story grabs us at an emotional level—in the gut.  But whenever something goes wrong, we start to analyze and examine it—we go into our head. 

            The best term I’ve heard for this is flow.  Put at its simplest, flow is the readability of my story.  It has to do with how much effort it takes for the reader to keep reading.  Having good flow means my writing is smooth and slick, that every line, paragraph, and chapter rolls into the next and carries you along for the ride.  Readers can’t stop because it’s actually easier to keep turning the page than to put the book down. 

            On the other hand, a story with bad flow will make a reader stumble a lot.  If I’m reading a book, whenever I pause to roll my eyes, scratch my head, or go back two or three pages to figure something out… each one’s another bump in the road.  If you’ve ever tried a book and just couldn’t get into it, odds are the flow sucked.  You’d read, trip over a page or two, and put it back down.  You can’t get into it because you keep getting knocked back out.

             Flow is a large part of editing.  I’ve mentioned giving things a polish before, and it’s just what it sounds like.  It’s going through my manuscript and smoothing down the rough edges. It’s me knowing this could be a little clearer and people might get hung up on that.

            Unfortunately, this means flow isn’t something I can just fix by changing a word here or there.  It’s one of those things where you can tweak each element but still not affect the final outcome.  Getting good (or even better) at flow is an experience thing that just comes from writing.  The more I write, the more subtle methods and tricks and fixes I develop.

            That being said… here are a few things my story needs to do if it’s going to have good flow.  Or, if you prefer, these are some of the things a story with bad flow often won’t do…

            Be interesting–  Easiest way in the world to keep my story from lagging—don’t be boring.  This doesn’t mean I need five explosions and a swordfight on page one, but when I’m telling a story, I need to get to the story.  If it’s sci fi, I should show the reader something amazing.  If it’s a love story, my characters need to display some passion.  If it’s a horror story, I need to scare some folks, or at least weird them out a bit.

            Have characters act in character–  A writing coach named Drusilla Campbell once commented that when the nun viciously kills a gardener, that’s also when most people remember that laundry they have to fold.  People who are blatantly incompetent at their jobs, cruel people who do nice things, people who are just a little too smart or too scared or too law-abiding when it suits the story.  It’s jarring when my characters act in contradictory ways to what the reader’s come to expect.  And that jarring is what gets books and screenplays tossed in the big left-hand pile.

            Have smooth  dialogue–  Kind of related to the last point.  I can get away with one character who talks like a computer.  Maybe another who keeps slipping into a foreign language.  But too much stylized, unnatural, or just plain bad dialogue brings things to a grinding halt.  Adults should talk like adults, kids should talk like kids, and cybernetic lizard men should talk like… well, you know.

            Watch the word choice–  If I’m picking obscure or overly-long words just to create flowery descriptions or show off my vocabulary, there’s a good chance I’m disrupting the flow of my writing.  It’s really cool that I can describe someone as a female with resplendent obsidian ink ornamented across her glabrous scalp, but it’s much smoother and just as visual for me to say she’s a bald woman with dark tattoos.

            It’s worth noting that typos and misused words fall into this category, too.  Anytime someone sees something like that in print, it pulls them out of the story and puts them back in analyzing mode.  In their head.  And that’s not where I want them to be.

            Take it seriously.  Everyone makes a joke now and then to break the tension, but things need to carry the correct amount of gravity in my writing.  Death, rape, unrequited love, violence… I shouldn’t bring these things up and not address them in an appropriate way.  If my characters are drowning cats, threatening their employees, or punching strangers in the head, these acts should all be getting a response from my characters.  If the reader thinks I’m not taking the events in my book seriously, well… why should they?

            Again, though, just adjusting these elements doesn’t guarantee that my writing now has great flow.  Every story is unique and has its own path to follow.  But if you keep at it and continue to work on it, one day you’ll start to see the patterns.  And then you’ll be able to go with the flow.

            Next week, unless any of you have some requests or suggestions, I’ve been thinking about Captain America and superheroes a lot lately.  So I wanted to make a small distinction.  

            Until then, go write.

            …there was an aspiring writer.  And he lived in a beautiful world of wild dreams and deep denial…

            But let’s not talk about that guy.

            Last week I talked about basic linear structure.  This week I want to talk about narrative structure.  Narrative structure relates to—big surprise—my narrative.  It’s about how I’ve chosen to tell my particular story.  While events unfold in a linear fashion for the characters, how I decide to relay these events to my audience can change how the story’s received and interpreted (more on that in a bit).  So linear is how the characters experiences the story, narrative is how the reader experiences the story.

            One quick note before I dive in.  Within a story there might be a device or point of view, like a first person narrator, which gives the appearance of “telling” the story.  For the purposes of our discussion here, though, if I talk about the narration I’m talking about the writer.

            That being said…  here we go.

            In a large chunk of the stories any of us will encounter, the linear structure and narrative structure are going to be the same thing.  The story starts with Wakko on Monday, follows him to Tuesday, through Wednesday and Thursday, and concludes on Friday.  It’s simple and straightforward, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it.  My own book, 14, fits in this category.  It’s loaded with twists and reveals, but the linear structure parallels the narrative.

            There are also a fair number of stories, though, where the narrative doesn’t follow the timeline of the story.  Sometimes the writer does this with flashbacks, where a story is mostly linear with a few small divergences.  Other times, the story may be broken up into several sections and the reader needs to follow clues as to where these sections line up.  These are often called non-linear stories, or you may have heard it as non-linear storytelling (it was the hip new thing for a while there). 

            Now, there’s more to narrative structure than just wanting to switch around my story elements so I can look all cutting-edge.  If I’ve chosen to jump around a bit (or a lot) in my narrative, there’s a few things I have to keep in mind.  Be warned, we’re moving into an area that requires a little more skill and practice.

            First off, putting things in a new narrative order can’t change the linear logic of my story.  As I mentioned above, the week goes Monday through Friday, and this is true even if the first thing I do is tell you what happened on Thursday.  Monday was still three days earlier, and the characters and events in my story have to reflect that.  I can’t start my book with everyone on Thursday baffled who the murderer is, then roll the story back to Monday were everyone witnesses the killing and sees the murderer.  If they knew then, why don’t they know now?  There’s no logic to it (barring a case of mass amnesia).  If I have Phoebe act surprised that she owns a cat on Friday and then have the narrative jump to her finding the cat in an alley on Tuesday, I’m going to look like an idiot while my linear structure collapses. 

            These are very broad, simplistic examples, yes, but it’s amazing how many times I’ve seen this problem crop up.  Writers want to switch stuff up, but ignore the fact that the logic of their story collapses when the narrative elements are put in linear order.  This is an easy one to fix, it just requires a little time and work.  And sometimes a bit of rewriting.

            The other big issue with having narrative and linear structures so far apart is that people need to be able to follow my plot.  I can have tons of fancy word choices and beautiful language in my story, but readers are still going to put it down if they can’t figure out what’s going on. 

            For example…

            Think about when a little kid tells you a story about Iron Man and Batman and Snuffleupagus and there’s a moon base and they had a spaceship that Iron Man made before they fought the werewolf and the werewolf hates only getting to go out on Halloween so he decided when he was a little kid because only Snuffleupagus liked him and the rest of the time he has to get shaved because it’s too hot so he decided to go to the Moon so he could be a werewolf all the time and no one would make fun of him cause he didn’t know there were aliens on the moon but Batman saw the wolfman spaceship and tried to stop it and asked Iron Man to help and they fought the werewolf and Batman knew the werewolf when they were kids before he was Batman so he decided to help him move to the moon because they broke his spaceship but Iron Man had another spaceship he built after the Avengers movie and it looks like a big Iron Man and the werewolf had promised Snuffleupagus when they were little that he could come and so they got him out of the broken ship and you kind of tune it out and start mentally skimming.  I mean, you just skimmed a lot of that, right?  It jumps around so much that after a point it just becomes noise.

            Y’see, Timmy, the problem with chopping up my narrative too much is that people are automatically going to try to put it in linear order.  As I mentioned last week, we all do this almost automatically because it’s how our brains are set up.  The harder the narrative makes it for someone to reorganize the linear story, the less likely it is they’ll be able to follow it.  Which means the more likely it is that they’ll put it down.

            I talked about the idea of a detective at a crime scene last week.  If you’ve read a few mystery stories—or watched a few crime shows—you know a standard part of the mystery formula is the hero going through the events of the story and putting them in linear order for the other characters and the audience.  And how many are there? Eight or nine, usually?  Call it ten elements that are out of order and  the writer’s admitting it might be kind of tough to keep up at this point.

            There was a movie that came out about eight or nine years ago (I’ll be polite and not name it) that was a non-linear mess.  I don’t think there were two scenes in it that followed each other.  So we’re talking about well over a hundred scenes that were all scrambled and out of order.  Maybe as many as two hundred.  The actors were fantastic, but the story was impossible to keep up with.  It didn’t help that certain events repeated in the story.  Again, to be polite and protect the innocent, let’s say one of the characters was in a serious car crash and then was in another serious car crash two years later.  The audience was getting random scenes of burning cars, ambulances, emergency surgeries, recovery, and physical therapy… from two car crashes.  So we’re left trying to figure out which car crash the character was experiencing/recovering from at various points–once it was clear there’d been two car crashes–and then figuring where this scene fit in relation to all the other scenes.  The audience had to spend their time trying to decipher the movie rather than watching it.

            So non-linear structure can be overdone and become a detriment if I’m not careful.  This can be really hard to spot and fix, because it’s going to depend a lot on my ability to put myself in the reader’s shoes.  Since I know the whole linear story from the moment I sit down, the narrative is always going to make a lot more sense to me, even though for someone coming in cold it might be an illogical pile.  This is one of those times where I need to be harsh and honest with myself, because if I don’t my story’s going to be incomprehensible.

            That’s narrative structure in a nutshell.  Maybe more of a coconut-shell.  However I decide to tell my story, it still needs to have a linear structure, it still needs to be logical, and it still needs to be understandable. 

            Next time, I want to explain how linear structure and narrative structure combine via dramatic structure to tell a good story.

            Until then… go write.

            Is this pathetic or what?  Someone else offers to write a ranty blog post for me and I still can’t get it up on time.  It’s sad, really…

            Well, here’s Thom Brannan, author of Lords of Night and (with DL Snell) co-author of  Pavlov’s Dogs and their new book The Omega Dog, talking a bit about clarity.  I’ll be back later this week (hopefully on time) to talk about Easter eggs.

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            Hello is alright, again. On occasion, Pete has stuff to do; like, a lot of it, and he knows there are a lot of you who come to this blog for tips and tools.

            So this week, it’s me again. Thom Brannan. I’ll try to avoid disappointing you. Those of you who know who I am, congratulations! For those who don’t, here is a picture.

            Today, I’m here to talk to you about transparency. It’s a thing, a real thing, where you can read something an author wrote, and there’s a lot of the author in there, one way or another. Sometimes it’s political, sometimes it’s in the interests… most times, you’ll find it in the details.

            For your readers who are just like you, no doubt this will be a source of delight and entertainment. But not everybody is like you. For those readers, this will induce the effect known as “God, I’m skimming this part.” It happens.

            Let me hit you with an example. I recently finished reading something by Robert A. Heinlein. He’s one of my literary heroes, okay? I love his work and his verve and his ideas and just everything.

            Almost.

            I’m now catching up on works of his I’d missed previously, and it’s great joy. Except when he devotes entire paragraphs to doing math. Really, honestly, when I started reading his stuff, it made me want to run out and get a slide rule, just so I could keep up. True story. But that was a different me, back in high school. Math was one of my things. Now, when I get to a part where any of his hyper-competent characters go on about anything that remotely resembles figuring, I just skim over it.

            But that wasn’t enough to spark this blog entry. I’m also reading a WWII story about… well, about spooky stuff. (I don’t want to put too fine a point on what or who I’m reading.) So, there’s a passage where some dirty, nasty Krauts are in a plane with a creepy box which may or may not have something moving in it, and the author is clearly enamored with the plane. With the plane. There is a serious chunk of text dedicated to the plane and why it was chosen for this type of mission and the capabilities of the plane and how it got its nickname, et cetera.

            But what about the spooky box?

            The spooky box, if I’m reading the foreshadowing correctly, contains something (someone?!) which is going to be major later on, and next to no text is dedicated to it. It’s just kind of there, and the Nazis eye it, and the plane they’re in is endlessly fascinating.

            Now, in other places in this very blog, Pete has said things like have a reason to describe it, or to avoid being focused on the wrong thing. Sometimes, it’s hard to figure out when YOU’VE LOST YOUR GODDAMN… excuse me. Sometimes it’s hard to know when the thing you’re writing is what people need to read about the story. Or if people will even read it. Skimmers gonna skim.

            For an easy litmus test, corner someone your work with. Or someone you live with. Or someone in the grocery store. Whatever. Start telling them all this cool stuff you’ve unearthed about maybe Einstein being a plagiarist, or the use of Tesla technology to cripple other nations, or how the innards of a watch work, or how the Warthog got its nickname of the Warthog, or whatever stupidly addicting thing you’re bound and determined to include in your current or next work.

            If at any point their eyes start to glaze over, cross that crap off your list.

            And since I didn’t say this from the get-go, this is what I’ve found works for me. I have a relatively diverse background, and I find a lot of things fascinating. But only a fraction of that stuff finds its way into my prose because I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes, that loss of focus when they’re not really listening to me anymore. It happens quite a bit, as I tend to ramble.

For instance, in my most recent work, The Omega Dog(with D.L. Snell) there’s a section where the protagonists travel in the Gulf of Mexico in a narco-sub. I’m a former submariner, and the intricacies of the works of subs, even the fiberglass jobs used to transport drugs, kind of trips my trigger. So I sat and wrote maybe two pages of all this, and then I stopped.

            There was also a drug lord, my protagonists, a person who may or may not have been human, a strapped-down zombie and a goddamn WEREWOLF, all in this tiny space… and here I was writing about navigation and whatnot. A little bit of submarine development history had made it in there, too. What the hell?

            I deleted all that before I sent it to Snell, because he would just delete it. He’d be nicer about it than I was to myself, but the end result would be the same.

            There are exceptions, of course. What’s his name, the legal writer guy? The one who wrote The Pelican Brief. He leaves a lot of that stuff in there because hey, that’s what his readers are reading him for. The same with gun porn. I mean, men’s adventure. My good friend Doug Wojtowicz knows a lot about guns, and that kind of detail is not only expected in The Executioner, but welcome. God help him if he leaves something out. Or gets it wrong, yikes.

            But I guess I’m starting to get long-winded. Shaddap. I guess my point is this: if you’re including something like that, be sure it moves the story along, or is at least an interesting tangent with some story elements to it. If at any point, your manuscript starts to read like a Wikipedia entry, you’re doing it wrong.

            So there. My two cents. Again, your mileage may vary.

            Go write something.

            Shamefully, some pandering, too.  My new novel, 14, just came out.  It’s there on the sidebar.  Ebook only, at the moment, but this time next week that link should take you to the paperback version.

            As some of you know, I used to write for a fairly popular screenwriting magazine.  It let me talk to lots of professionals about their job, and it also let me see a lot of movies for free.  A lot of movies, sometimes weeks or even months before they came out.  To be honest, the last movie my lovely lady and I paid to see was V for Vendetta.  Before that was probably Batman Begins, which we saw twice—once with our friend Max and once just the two of us.

            But that really doesn’t have anything to do with this week’s topic.

            Or does it?

            Anyway, one day I was in the office and the editor, Amy, asked me about a film she knew I’d seen a few weeks earlier.  One of the other journalists had suggested the idea of doing a big piece on horror-comedies for the September-October issue, and the movie I’d seen (let’s call it Gorefest) was one of the ones that had come up as a potential subject.  Amy wanted to know if I thought Gorefest would fit the article.

            I didn’t think so.  The filmmakers were telling a horror story, and they knew that too many jokes and cheap laughs would shift the tone of the film and knock it into a different category.  Gorefest was a horror movie, and it had several moments of comedy in it, like a lot of modern horror films.  But it wasn’t a horror comedy.  They never crossed that line.

            The other journalist insisted it was, though, and used it anyway.  In the final article, the screenwriter of Gorefestopenly said it wasn’t a horror comedy.  And Amy gave me a little grin the next time I was in the office.

            This is an example of someone being a bit tone deaf.  You’ve probably heard this term applied to both music and writing.  In music, it’s when I don’t realize that a group of notes or chords clashes with another group.  And that’s pretty much what it means in writing, too.  When something doesn’t work in my story, tonally, it means something’s clashing or overpowering something it shouldn’t, to the point that it stands out.  In this particular case, the journalist was projecting emphasis onto those comedy bits that wasn’t there in the script—he was deaf to the actual tone of the film.

            I interviewed Kevin Smith a few years back for one of his movies (Zach and Miri Make a Porno).  One question I asked was about working with Seth Rogen.  After all, Smith notoriously hates ad-libs and Rogen is famous for constantly riffing on lines, coming up with new ideas and variations for almost every take.

            He was quick to correct me, though.  His reputation for hating ad-libs came from his first few films, when he realized he and his cast were too inexperienced to be making big deviations from the script.  So back then, he was very strict about sticking to the page.  And while he’s loosened up a bit, he still favors the script over random interpretations on set.  “So often you’ll get an actor who just starts saying stuff that’s very funny to the crew or me or the other actors, but it’s not germane to the discussion,” he told me.  “It’ll be great on a friggin’ blooper reel, but I can’t fit this into the scene.”

            And, yes, I did clean up Kevin Smith’s quote a bit for those of you reading this at work.  Feel free to swap in the words you think he used.  You’ll be right.

            Just because something’s good in and of itself doesn’t mean something is good in the bigger scheme of things.  I can throw a great slapstick comedy scene into my Somalian pirates script, and it may be some of the greatest slapstick ever written.   But it’s going to stick out like a sore thumb amidst the gunfire, brutal killings, and mounting tension.  I could write some stuff right now that could make most of you reading this cringe or get grossed out.  It’s not really that hard. 

            The thing is, what would be the point of doing it right now?  You’re reading this to learn about writing, not to get nauseous.  It might be some fantastically disgusting imagery, but it just wouldn’t fit here any more than… well, a random discussion about the last couple of movies I paid to see.

            I see this kind of stuff all the time.  Random gore for the sake of gore.  Long monologues in an action film.  Comical sidekicks wedged in for no reason except to be the comical sidekick.  Romance that’s shoehorned in just so there’s a reason for a female character.

            Another quick story, one I’ve mentioned here before.  A friend gave me a horror script to look at a few years back.  It was a basic “cabin in the woods” setup with a clever idea behind it.  My friend knew that sex sells, and he told me before I read it that he’d added a nude scene.  It actually turned out to be a hardcore lesbian sex scene.  Three pages of boobs, some bondage, toys, and insertions.  It was so graphic, in fact, there was nothing to call it except pornographic.  And that’s a major shift in tone right in the middle of a fairly creepy horror story.

            This is one of the harder criticisms to give.  For a lot of people—especially inexperienced people—it’s also one of the harder ones to receive.  It’s very hard for some folks to grasp that something can be good and still not be right. 

            If I had to guess, I’d probably say part of the reason people have trouble with this concept comes from that reverse-engineering idea I mentioned a few weeks back.  Element X works well in story Y, therefore it stands to reason element X will work in story Z.  There’s also probably a bit of special snowflake mentality—the idea that doing something good should somehow automatically translate to success.  And, for some writers, there’s probably an empathy issue in there as well.

            Y’see, Timmy, tone is about my story as a whole.  Not this particular funny joke or that one creepy description or that strongly-implied (or blatantly shown) sex scene.  Tone is how my entire story feels overall and how it’s going to be viewed.  That’s not to say I can’t have comedy or romance or action in my story.  It’s these little moments of flavor and color that make a story really sing.  The trick is to know how much comedy and how much romance will work in a given story—and maybe accepting that the answer is “none.”  Because things that break the tone generally break the flow, too.

            And if you can’t tell you’re breaking the flow… well, don’t worry.  Your readers will let you know one way or the other.

            Next time, I’d like to talk to you about a wonderful lesson we can all learn from an old Benny Hill skit.

            Until then, go write.