Category: focus

I’m having a really crap day, but fortunately for you, this was already pretty much done. And maybe blabbing on about writing will make me feel better about stuff.  Probably not, but what the hell…

I’d like to babble on about another one of those “this is so self-evident why are we wasting time on it” ideas that… well, seems to come up a lot. 

As writers, we get cursed with ideas. Tons and tons of them. Books, comics, movies, epic television franchises, soooo many ideas. And, naturally, we want to use as many of them as we can. Cause they’re all friggin’ fantastic, right?

But, as I’ve mentioned here once or thrice before, that’s not always a good thing, no matter how fantastic my ideas are.  More isn’t always better. Sometimes stories get cluttered with ideas. I want to create a certain kind of character, use this cool idea I saw in a Gizmodo article, explore a few different themes, develop this awesome backstory I came up with, and then wait until you see all the stuff in chapter two!

We’ve all done this. Be honest. If I think I haven’t done this, it probably means I don’t realize I’m doing it right now in my current work.

Now, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having a lot of stuff in a story.  My book Dead Moon touches on zombie horror, body horror, sci-fi, action, mystery, and comedy. There’s a lot of talk about sex. There’s some politics. There’s some questions about self-worth and finding your place in the world (or the solar system).

But if you asked me… I’d tell you it’s about zombies on the moon.  Horror and sci-fi.

Let me give you a less personal example. I watched this geekery movie recently that was… okay, let’s just say it was about AI (or was it?  Maybe cloning? I’ll never tell). Anyway, there was a lot in it about the ethics of creating an intelligence solely for a specific purpose (is this slavery??). There was also stuff about the morality of assassination. Plus a lot of assassination-related action scenes. Then questions were brought up about the possible ethical issues when the scientist starts having sex with this thing she created. More so when it turns out the body said scientist made for this AI is the spitting image of her dead husband. Plus there’s a heist element as they plan to rob the CEO of the company. And some torture porn. Arguably some parenting, nature-vs.-nurture aspects, corruption of the innocent bits, too.

Now, all of these could be cool things to bring up in a movie. Hell, any one of them is probably a story in and of itself.  There’s a lot of fascinating character moments that can happen with almost any of these.

But again… what is this story about?

’Cause this AI movie made it about everything. The filmmakers gave every one of these elements equal weight. It was the ethical AI-assassination morality-action-sex issues-heist-torture porn-corruption movie we’ve all been waiting for. Just search for that category on Netflix.

(it’s not on Netflix—the category or the movie)

Is something just a conceit for the story?  Cool.  But to be clear… what’s my story then?  If I’m using clones to tell a long-distance love story, that’s cool.  Super clever. One of you should take that and run with it. But if that’s the case, I probably shouldn’t spend half the book talking about the science behind the cloning.  Likewise, if I’m writing a taut thriller about cloning assassins… maybe there shouldn’t be 250 pages of clone-love in there.

Subplots? Great.  Parallel plots?  Fantastic. Twiststhat subvert the plot? SOOO COOL! But what is this book about? What’s the dominant idea here? What aspect of the story are we spending the most time with?

Here’s a way to think of it.  There’s a Hollywood term you may have heard—the elevator pitch. It basically means I should be able to explain my story in one or two sentences, the length of an elevator ride. It comes from the awful idea that I should leap at people when I find myself alone in elevators with them. Because who doesn’t respond positively to that?

Anyway, if I got a chance to elevator-pitch the AI story above, how many of these things do I mention and explain? How many would I leave out? When I’ve only got thirty seconds to tell my story, what parts of it do I not bother telling?  It’s not going to be 100% accurate, sure, but it’s a safe bet my elevator pitch is going to make me really focus on the key things in my story.

And if I can’t focus on them… well, that’s probably telling me something.

Y’see, Timmy, it shouldn’t be that hard to explain what my story’s about.  It can have lots of elements—and hopefully it does—but there should be an overriding idea I can point to and sum up in a few lines.  “It’s about an android assassin who starts to question the morality of his existence, especially when he learns more about his creation.”

Which, alas, is not what that movie was about.

Next time, let’s talk about winding things up.

Until then, go write.

            A quick post this time.  As I mentioned last week, I’m kinda in a deadline crunch and… well, this time nobody stepped up to bail me out. Thanks again to Kristi Charish for helping out.  Screw you, every other writer friend I have.

            Naaaah, not really…

            Anyway, what I wanted to talk about this week is a bad decision I see every now and then. I saw it a lot when I used to read for screenplay contests. And I still hear mentions of it now and then.

            So… okay, look, we all love the idea of getting published, right?  Of getting some kind of recognition—maybe even some kind of payment—for what we do. I mean, it’s the big goal.  The brass carrot.  The… something. 

            I’ve already run out of humorous mixed metaphors.

            As I was saying, back when I was reading contest scripts for ramen money, one thing I’d see again and again was people who’d done a clumsy, half-assed pass on their screenplay in a feeble attempt to make it eligible for a contest.  A few cuts here. A find-and-replace there. Maybe adding in a random scene or two.  Believe me, it was very clear that’s what happened.

            Plus, talking with writers at many points in their careers, I sometimes hear ideas and plans. Cutting this novella down.  Bulking that short story up.  Maybe doing another quick draft and playing up Phoebe as a bisexual half-Asian for this one magazine. Especially if Phoebe isn’t either of those in the current draft.

            It’s really tempting.  I get it.  We all want to get published, win the prize, get the recognition.  And we’re willing to do what it takes to get there.

            But…

            I probably don’t want to make sweeping changes or cuts to my story just to fit a market or contest or trend. If a magazine doesn’t touch anything over 8000 words and my short story is 8108… okay, maybe I can snip a bit here or there. But if they don’t want anything over 5000, well… my story’s probably out.  That’s almost half of it gone.

            Likewise, cramming in a romance just so I can try to get into a Valentine’s Day anthology… that probably won’t work.  Or some hamfisted references to God and angels so I can win some of that sweet faith-based contest money.

            And I know you’re probably smiling right now, but keep this in mind…

            I’m not making up random examples.  People do stuff like this.  All the time.  I read scripts for a faith-based contestand—in the course of two years—read no less than five sex-romp comedies where characters would suddenly, for just one scene, look up to the sky and beg for God’s help.  And one of these was—dead serious–for help getting the hot female supporting character out of her clothes.

            Because that’s funny and sexy and religious.  See? Triple threat!  How can it lose?

            (it lost)

            I saw someone in an online writers group just push for “cutting your story down to meet their requirements.”  This was a discussion about an 11,000 word novella being trimmed to meet the needs of a 8,000 word market. And an amazing number of people chimed in to say “yeah, go for it.”

            Y’see, Timmy, once we’ve been doing this for any amount of time, we start to get a feel for ideas.  Some are great for flash fiction or short-short stories. Others are made to be novellas.  And some are just waiting to be fleshed out into books.

            And, yeah, some books are bigger than others.  The book I’m wrapping up is a solid 100,000 words, but I know Chuck Wendig recently finished a monster almost three times that size, and another friend who has one coming in at a nice tight 85,000.

            My point is, if I rewrote and edited and polished and my final story came in at 12,000 words… there’s a chance it’s a 12,000 word story.  And cutting 25% of it will make it… well 25% less than a good story.

            In my experience, most editors aren’t interested in 25% less than a good story.

            Likewise, if I can make major changes to a character and it has absolutely no repercussions anywhere in their story… maybe I don’t have a great character.  If making Phoebe bisexual instead of straight doesn’t change anything in my story, it’s doubtful this is the kind of story a niche market is looking for.

            As always, there’s no absolutes here.  Maybe I really can afford to lose three or four thousand words.  Perhaps my story does need a different viewpoint to excel.

            But…

            I should think long and hard about forcing a story to meet a new set of requirements.  Length, style, content, whatever they may be.  When I’m done, it may not be what it was.

            Which would suck if it was good.

            And this has turned into a much longer rant than I planned.  Apologies.

            Next time… well, I just finished a draft.  Maybe I’ll talk a little bit about that whole process.

            Until then, go write.

            Well, this is overdue.

            So sorry for the long delay.  I’d hoped to get this up before I left for NYCC, but that day turned into the usual rush of dealing with this and that and more of this.  I don’t know why it’s always so frantic. It’s not like I was going to be there for a week or something.  Two nights, but I always pack as if I’m gone for a week anyway. I’ve got stuff for different weather conditions.

            Stuff for downtime.  Some stuff for fans. I’m ridiculously overprepared.

            But let’s take a brief break from that and talk about paragraph breaks.

            Like that weird one I just did up there.

            I’ve mentioned paragraphs here once or twice before.  If sentences are taking a nice bite of the story, paragraphs are three or mouthfuls before having a taste of something else.  I eat some spaghetti, then I have a sip of wine or maybe nibble some garlic bread.  The different tastes and textures work together to make the meal more enjoyable.  If I just had to sit and eat a bowl of spaghetti with nothing to break it up, it’d get kind of monotonous. No matter how much I like spaghetti.

            Hell, at some point, depending on the size of the bowl, I’d probably even start dreading the stuff.

            And that’s what I’m trying to avoid with paragraphs.  I don’t want readers to get bored or intimidated by what they see on the page. I want to break up the text in a way that furthers the story.

            For example, when two people are talking, my attention goes back and forth between them.  Yakko to Wakko.  Someone new talks, and my attention shifts to them.  Perhaps it’s going back and forth, or it could be bouncing between three or four people.

            Think of paragraphs as those moments of attention.  If something shifts my attention away, I should have a new paragraph.  And then maybe it’ll shift back. or perhaps shift to something new, and my attention will follow it there.

            Even if the same character keeps talking, it can get broken into two or more paragraphs. In any long monologue, I should be able to sense the pauses and shifts, the places where our attention moves on to a slightly different aspect of the topic.  Maybe I’m going on about death, with a slight shift into funeral arrangements, my time in Kazakhstan, maybe even thinking ahead to my own end.  Perhaps we’re talking about relationships, and being in love vs. young love vs. older love, and maybe those few times we mistook sex for love, or knew it wasn’t love and didn’t really care at the moment.  In each of these long discussions, it’s easy to see where it could—and should—spin off into a separate paragraph.

            Y’see, Timmy, when I don’t break things up, I end up with a paragraph where it jumps around a lot, nothing’s really described, and it covers a lot of ground.  Sometimes I may do that for a certain effect, yeah, but most of the time… that’s not great storytelling. Of course, the flipside to this is breaking something in the wrong place.
            When I do that, the flow stumbles, because it means I’ve probably broken a point of focus.  Like up at the top, when I broke the second paragraph in the middle of describing the items I was packing.  Or just two sentences back.  I should’ve started the new paragraph on “Of course,” because where I did break it cut off this whole idea I’m trying to explain.

            Which, granted, helped to explain it.

            See—new idea, new break, great flow.

            You can feel the energy and the pace right there, just seeing it written out, can’t you?  We understand there’s a lot going on and that all these people are—in their own way—involved in making this complete scene.  Our attention jumps around in one paragraph, but it does it fast because this is a fast-paced scene. 

            See, in prose (unlike film), those breaks would slow down the action.  Notice how the whole Arya–Brienne fight, almost two minutes on film, gets summed up really nicely in there?  When an action scene moves into several paragraphs, it tends to make things drag.  If I take six or seven lines to describe something that happens in one or two seconds, I’m altering the flow and forcing the action to that pace. 
            There may be reasons to do that, sure… but I’d better have a reason if I’m doing it that way.
            There’s also another issue at work here.  As readers, we kind of expectthese breaks.  How often have you seen a wall of text in a book or online and just groaned a bit (out loud or internally).  They make that TL;DR reflex twitch in the back of our brains.  It’s because we understand information doesn’t come in giant slabs like that.  A wall of text is someone going on way more than necessary about a single topic. 

           The breaks help us keep things organized, too.  Remember I mentioned the back and forth aspect of watching a conversation?  We tend to follow that in prose, too.  If I have dialogue between Yakko and Dot, we don’t expect that dialogue to share a paragraph.  The breaks help us set the back and forth rhythm in our minds.  And when something disrupts that rhythm, it also breaks the flow.

            And, as I’ve mentioned many times before, breaking the flow of my story can be fatal.

            Because that’s my ultimate goal.  To have my story be smooth and readable. For it to draw people in, not push them away.  You’ll find people who try to tell you the punctuation and formatting of a story don’t matter, that a good story will stand on its own despite those things.  The truth is, though, the way it’s set out is going to have a huge impact on how it’s interpreted by readers.  How easily it flows.  How fast it feels. How accessible it looks. 

            So break things up. Y’know before your readers decide they need a break…

            Next time, I’d like to talk a little more about the center of our attention.

            Until then, go write.

            Very appropriate title for this week.  If you don’t know it, shame on you.

            This may be a controversial post in some eyes, but hopefully folks will read and digest before diving for the comments to make an angry response.

            On the first week of the first television series I ever worked on, I witnessed a minor snit between the line producer and the director of photography.  The episode was falling behind schedule, and the producer had decided it was the camera department’s fault.  He berated the DP for a while, questioned the abilities of the camera crew, and—in a very passive-aggressive way—drove home the need to pick up the pace.

            When he was done, the director of photography held up three fingers.  “Fast.  Cheap.  Good,” he said with a smirk.  “Pick two.”

            The catch, of course, is that it was a very low-budget show (which we all knew).  And no one was going to say it didn’t have to be good.  So the one thing it wasn’t going to be was fast. 

            The line producer fired the DP at the end of the week.  But the rule held true, and I saw it proven true again and again over my time in the industry.  I would guess that four out of five times if there ended up being a train wreck on set, it was because someone was trying to find a way around this rule and get all three choices.
            I worked on Bring It On, the cheerleading movie.  It was incredibly low budget.  But the director had a very relaxed schedule because, at the time, Kirsten Dunst was still a few weeks away from her eighteenth birthday.  As a minor she could only work so many hours a day.  So the film was inexpensive and good, but it wasn’t fast.  I also worked on a bunch of B horror/action movies that were cheap and shot super-fast, but the directors acknowledged they were making straight-to-DVD genre movies so we didn’t waste time with artsy composition or elaborate lighting set-ups.  We all went in knowing these projects weren’t going to be winning any awards–they just needed to be competent films that would entertain people for ninety-odd minutes or so.  And they were

            Are there exceptions to this rule?  Yeah, of course.  But exceptions are very rare and specific by their nature, so I should never start off assuming I’m one of them.  Because we all knows what happens when I assume…  And I saw more than a few projects crash because someone above the line kept insisting they could get all three.

            The “pick two” rule doesn’t just hold for moviemaking, though.  It holds for writing and publishing, too.  We get to make the same choices for our work, and trying to find a way around that choice—a way to have all three—almost always makes a mess.

            Allow me to explain…

            I’m going to go under the assumption most of us here are aiming for good.  Yeah, some of you are shooting for great, but for today’s little experiment, that’s the same as good.  Which means one of my choices is gone right there. 

            So the real question is, are we going for fast or for cheap?

            Several folks decide to go fast, blasting through drafts and edits like a snowplow through slush.  But going fast—and keeping it good—requires lots of eyes and/or lots of experience.  And those aren’t cheap.  A decent editor is hard to come by, and the good ones aren’t going to work for free—especially not work fast.

            If I want to go fast, and I want it to be good, there’s going to be a cost for someone.  That’s just the way it it.  I know a lot of folks who write very fast, but they realize there’s going to be a big investment after that if they want the book to be good.

            On the other hand, I can decide to keep it cheap and good.  And this is when I really take my time.  I do multiple drafts, going through each one line by line.  No spellcheckers or auto-grammar websites.  If I plan on doing this for a living, then I need to be able to do this for a living.  I can’t pretend I know what words mean or how to string them together.  I need to examine each page and paragraph and sentence with my own eyes.

            Doing a manuscript this way could take seven or eight months—maybe even more.  But that’s how I keep costs down—by doing it all myself and being meticulous about it.  And, yeah, meticulous means slow.  It means seven or eight pages a day if I’m lucky.
            What combination does that leave us?

            Fast and cheap.  It’s one I’m sure we’ve all seen.  The people who aren’t willing to take the time or to make an investment.   Fast and cheap means I write one 85,000 word draft in a month, show it to my friend who scraped by with a C in high school English, run it through the spellchecker, and then put it up for all the world to see.

            That’s fast and cheap.  And odds are it’s not good. 

            Again, that isn’t an absolute.  There are a few books out there that managed all three.  If I choose to go fast and cheap, though, good is definitely the exception, not the rule.

            So be honest with yourself and choose your two.

            But choose wisely.

            Next time, on a related note, I’d like to blabber on about some words every writer should know.

            Until then, go write.