Category: genre

            Now for a quick tip.  Well, quick compared to last week’s ramblings.

            If you’ve been reading this collection of rants for a while, you’ve probably picked up that I’m a bit of a genre fan.  If you’ve read any of my books, it’s probably very clear.  Sci-fi stories, horror stories, fantasy stories… I love this stuff.

            Of course, a big part of loving something is recognizing the flaws in it.  Let’s be honest—there are a lot of horrible genre stories out there.  A real lot.  Depending on who you talk to, some of them are mine…

            Anyway, it struck me the other day that there’s a simple test for good genre stories.  Can I explain my story—and have it make sense—without any of those genre elements?  For example…

–Without the strange force field, Under the Dome is the story of an isolated town falling apart as different characters make different power grabs.

—A Princess of Mars becomes a straightforward fish out of water story if you pull out the sci-fi elements.  John Carter could be anyone dumped in a strange, baffling culture where he doesn’t speak the language.

—SuperTroopers is still a solid story about police rivalry and budget cuts even without all the comedy.  With the corrupt cops and drug smugglers, you could almost make it a crime drama.  Or a Romeo & Juliet-style love story.

–If you take the undead out of I Am Legend (any version of it), it’s a desert island story.  It’s one man alone (or sometimes with a dog) trying to balance staying alive with staying sane.

—Without magic, the Harry Potter books are the story of an unpopular orphan as he grows up, makes friends, finds his way in life, and learns about the parents he never met.

—Ghostbusters without comedy becomes a great sci-fi/ horror story about a Sumerian prophesy come to life.  Strip out the sci-fi/ horror and it’s a comedy about a bunch of guys trying to start a bizarre business who suddenly discover they’ve hit a gold mine and everyone wants to hire them.

—IT without the horror is just a group of childhood friends who reunite to solve a puzzle from their childhood.

—Pitch Black is the story of shipwreck survivors who find themselves dependant on their somewhat-misjudged prisoner to protect them from dangerous predators.

            Now, I’m not saying this as a jab at these books or movies.  The point is not that these tales can be boiled down to much simpler plots.  It’s that they have underlying plots which have nothing to do with their respective sci-fi/fantasy/horror elements.

            Y’see, Timmy, if I strip out the genre components of my story, I should still have a story.  Some writers depend so much on their genre stuff that they don’t grasp they haven’t actually developed any sort of real plot.  They’ve just got a pile of cool elements that doesn’t really add up to anything.  And if they looked at it without the sci-fi/fantasy/horror elements, they’d see that immediately.

           So, get your story out and start stripping.  Pull off all those layers, take a good look at what’s underneath, and… well, make sure you’ve got something worth looking at.

            Next time…

            Okay, I’m going to be honest.  Next time is a week before this new book is due on my editor’s desk, so I’m not going to be here.  I’ll be busy panicking.

            Week after that, though, I’d like to talk with you about the dreaded Scooby Ambiguity.  And I’ll probably be a day early because Thursday morning I head to Dallas for Texas Frightmare.

            Until then, go write.

            Is there nothing they couldn’t do…?

            Back when I was in college, I submitted a story to a magazine.  It was loosely based on the myth of the Wandering Jew, and I’d had a character passing through time at a couple key events in history.  I later incorporated it into my college novel, The Trinity, which none of you have ever read.  For good reason.

            The story was rejected.  Not really a surprise, in retrospect, but the editor did send back a personalized response.  He congratulated me on my language, my characters, my dialogue, and my descriptions.  “However,” he said (paraphrasing a bit), “there isn’t much of a story here.  It’s a really neat magical mystery tour, but that’s it.”

            That term threw me a bit at first.  Wasn’t much of a story?  I’d written about an immortal passing down through the ages.  He was there for the Crucifixion.  The fall of Rome.  Magellan’s voyage around the world.  The Boston Tea Party.  How could this editor say there wasn’t a story?  Well, college-age me grumbled a bit and moved on, but I eventually figured out what that editor was talking about.

            Let me give you a few quick examples…

            (and these are just titles to get the point across—don’t read too much into them)

            Sometimes the tour might be the Non-Stop Laughs Roadshow.  We’ve all read these stories or seen these films, where every single line pushes for another laugh.  There’s never a pause to breathe, not even a moment.  Sight gags, puns, fart jokes, awkward pauses, absurd segues, funny voices.  Characters, plot, tone—nothing matters but getting the next laugh.

            Another version could be Merlin’s Wondrous Mobile Fae Emporium.  Every page has something else magical or supernatural to remind us what a magical and supernatural world this is.  I introduce the reader to ancient gods, spirits, supernatural creatures, and arcane mailmen.  Magical weapons, armor, jewelry, and household utensils.  Everything is magical.  Everything is from the dawn of recorded history. Except maybe the bathmat.

            No, sorry, the bathmat was woven on the loom of Fate with the silk of astral spiders.  But the washcloth is pretty mundane.

            The High-Tech Pan-Galactic Tour is sci-fi for the sake of sci-fi.  Because in the future or alien world that I’ve created, everything is different.  People wear clothes for different reasons.  They have robots that aren’t reallyrobots.  Things are powered in an entirely different way.  Transportation, food, the internet, entertainment… it’s all very alien and unrelatable.  Don’t even ask about sex.  In the future it’s so different you wouldn’t’ believe it.

            We could also call the tour, say, Captain Spaulding’s Traveling Horror Show.  It’s when people die one after another in horrible ways, usually after witnessing the gruesome death of the last poor bastard.  There’s blood and gore and some really nauseating dietary choices and a few nightmarish torture scenes.  Running someone feet-first through a meat grinder is tame compared to what happens in the horror show.

            In my case, it was the Historical Talent Show and Social Mixer.  If my story is set in the 1960s, my character will run into every single person you’ve ever heard of from that decade.  Fidel Castro, Andy Warhol, the Apollo 11 crew, the cast of Star Trek, Ed Sullivan, Harper Lee, Kurt Vonnegut, Kennedy, Nixon, Hendrix, Elvis, and (of course) the Beatles.  Most of them won’t do anything, but they’ll pass through and offer a few words here and there.  Maybe one of them will offer a helpful tip, but odds are they’re just there to get recognized.

            Y’see, Timmy, the mistake I made—one I still see lots of people make—is the assumption that a pile of plot points is the same thing as a story.  This is kind of like saying a pile of lumber is the same thing as a house, or there’s no difference between a palette of oil paints and the Mona Lisa.

            A lot of the time these stories will end up with a very episodic feel to them.  In the case of comedies, it’ll be a constant stream of setup-joke-setup-joke-setup-joke.  In horror stories, it’s victim-death-victim-death-victim-death.  The magical mystery tour almost always feels episodic because I’m using it to show you one thing after another with very little connection between them.  Oh, look, it’s the Crucifixion.  Oh, look, it’s Magellan.  Oh, look, it’s Paul Revere.

            All of these things I’ve listed above are great elements, no question about it.  If they’re not doing anything to advance the plot or the story, though, they’re just distractions.  There’s a point that this kind of thing is rich detail and there’s a point that it’s just padding.  And that’s the kind of detail that just slows down my story.

            Assuming I’ve even got a story.

            Any time you feel the need to drop a detail like this into your manuscript, stop for a minute and think.  This may absolutely be the greatest take on werewolves anyone’s ever put on paper, but if the werewolf’s only in the story to show this take… maybe I should save it for something else.  I may have scribbled the most elaborate death scene ever, but if absolutely nothing changes in the story when I swap out those six pages with “And then Phoebe killed Wakko,” maybe I should reconsider those six pages.

            And if I can just pull them out altogether without changing the story…  Well, I’ve got to wonder what they were doing there in the first place.

            Next time, I want to talk about your but for a little bit.  Especially yours.

            Yours… not quite so much.

            Until then, go write.

            However, it’s also a good time to look back and think about what we did this year.  Did last year’s resolutions get met?  Did we get close?

            Did we even really try?

            I started off the year working for Amazon Studios, the film branch of the well-known online media giant.  I had a meeting and did a treatment for a sci-fi film called Original Soldiers they were trying to develop.  It was pretty clear early on that we had different opinions on it, but they decided to see what I did with it anyway (I saw Liam Neeson in a glorious B-action movie and they thought they could get… I don’t know, Schindler’s Robot).  They still went with someone else (or possible, as my girlfriend supects, just canned the project when they didn’t see a potential Oscar anywhere), but they paid very well for the work I did.

            After that it was diving back into Ex-Communication, which I’d only barely started.  That was a good chunk of the year (I think until late August or early September).  The final, sixth draft came in at a little over 100,000 words. And I’ll be doing some more work on it before the Crown release.

           It’s about time to mention Crown, too.  As some of you may have heard, I was offered a four book deal with Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, for the Ex-series just as I was finishing up Ex-Communication.  While it’s great on one front, it did sort of put me on hold for a while as far as “what to write next.”  If the deal happened, Crown was going to want another Ex-book.  If it didn’t happen, well, I usually wrote something non-superhero-and-zombie related between Ex-books as sort of a palate cleanser.  So there was a period of about two months this fall where I wasn’t really sure what to start working on.

            I ended up going back to a sci-fi horror idea I’d started ages ago (before my Crusoemash-up) and doing a fair amount of work on that.  But then some things shifted, negotiations hit a certain point, and I shelved it again.  Alas, at this point I think I can honestly say Dead Moon has become my booty call idea.  I should keep that in mind next time it’s late at night and I’m feeling the need to poke at something…

            For a couple of reasons, I shifted over to an idea that had been tickling my mind, a concept for a new series.  After a false start, I ended up scribbling out almost 15,000 words of notes and outlines and huge swaths of action and dialogue.  I stopped because I didn’t want to burn out on it, and also because the Crown deal was finalized.

            So, right around Halloween, I started working on the fourth Ex-book.  Still working on a title for it, but the book itself is about 2/3 done by now.  I think I might actually be on schedule for the April 1st deadline.

            I also had to do a bunch of layout stuff and edits for the new editions of the Ex-books.  It wasn’t tough, but it is time-consuming. And there’s more of it coming in January.

            I also managed to squeeze in about ten reviews for Cinema Blend here and there.  I enjoy writing reviews because when they’re done right they’re a good mix of critical analysis, storytelling, and a bit of snark (when deserved).  Which reminds me, I still owe them a review for this box set…

            And of course, here on the ranty blog I scribbled out forty-four articles about writing.  In all fairness, this is one of the weakest years here since I started this.  Plus thirty-three articles on another page I keep up.  And those H.P. Legocraft pages.

            So that’s what I did.

            What did you do?

            Yeah, I know, I’ve got a bit of an advantage.  I don’t have kids.  This is my day job.  So I get to focus a lot more time on this than most people.

            But y’know what?  I had a full-time journalism job when I wrote Ex-Heroes. Almost all of my fellow authors at Permuted Press—Craig DiLouie, C Dulaney, Tony Faville, Jessica Meigs, Thom Brannan, and more—still have full time jobs.  Michael Crichton started writing when he was in medical school.  You don’t get much more full-time than that.  Edgar Rice Burroughs, Maya Angelou, John Grisham, David Wong, Clive Cussler, Stephen King… all these famous writers and many, many more had full-time jobs when they started their writing careers.  Heck, King had a full-time job and two kids.

            So, with that in mind… I ask you again.  What did you do this year?

            As I’ve mentioned before, it all comes down to priorities.  If I want to spend a few hours each day with my (hypothetical) kids or watching Netflix with my lovely lady, that’s my business and my decision.  It says where my priorities are and there’s nothing wrong with that.  Likewise, the fact that my lovely lady and I live together, both work out of the home, and only see each other for a total of four or five hours a day on an average day… well, that says something about our priorities, too.

            A fellow I know got the screenplay rights to a fairly well-known book series.  It was at the same time I was starting a novel, so I jokingly said we should make a contest out of it.  He kind of brushed me off, but loudly announced his upcoming adaptation to the Twitterverse.
            The book I was starting was 14.  To the best of my knowledge, he still doesn’t have a first draft of his adaptation.  Granted, he’s trying to start a business and has two kids.  And there were a lot of movies he had to see.  And some opening night parties.  And a bi-weekly poker game he never misses…
            The only way to get ahead is to write.  There is nothing else. There are no tricks or magic bullets.  The work will not get done if you don’t do it.  It doesn’t matter how you spin it, if you’re not writing, you’re not getting any closer to selling something.  And if you’re not selling anything, it’s really hard to make a living at this.

            Which is why you’re here, yes?  To get some tips on making a living at this.

            A page a day.  That’s it. That’s all you need to do.  If you can write a page a day, you’ll have a solid draft of a novel by next New Year’s Eve.  You could have the first draft of that script done by April Fools Day.

            If you write it.

            But if the latest episode of Dexter or Dancing With The Stars deserves your time more than writing… well…

            Next time—or next year, if you prefer—I’d like to go over what this little collection of rants is trying to accomplish.

            Until then, pour yourself a glass of champagne, kiss someone special, and then go write.

            Just write one page.

            And I suck at self-promotion.

            But that’s all a bit besides the point.  I didn’t want to blather on about crossing that line this week.  I wanted to talk about crossing lines.

            Some people think a genre story has to be pure.  A horror story should be nothing but suspense and scares and gore.  Every moment of a drama should be serious and weighty.  Comedies should be non-stop laughs—there shouldn’t be a moment where something inherently funny isn’t happening on the page or the screen..

            The thing is, those “pure” stories are all boring as hell.  The horror ones stop being scary.  The drama becomes melodrama.  The comedy becomes painful. 

            The reason for this is a lack of variety.  An idea I’ve mentioned before is that the tension levels in a story should rise as the story progresses.  It’s great to begin my story with the action dialed up to nine, but it doesn’t really leave me anywhere to go.  If my novel or screenplay has everything dialed up to nine, what I’ve really got is a monotone story.

            Likewise, if every point on my story graph is the same point—say unspeakable horror or maybe uber-cool action—then what I now have is a homogenous script.  Flipping pages is like cutting into a block of cheese.  Every part is just like every other part.  Case in point…

            unspeakable horror

            Unspeakable Horror

            Unspeakable Horror

            UNSPEAKABLE HORROR

            Even when I’m escalating things, getting the same point over and over and over again becomes silly pretty quick. 

            Consider most of the good stories you’ve read or seen.  There’s a lot of comedy in Jaws.  Ernie Cline’s cyber-fantasy tale Ready Player One has some moments of serious suspense.  Raiders of the Lost Ark has a wonderful love story in it.  Dan Abnett’s sci-fi action novel Embeddedhas a pretty enthusiastic sex scene.  Ghostbustersactually gets a bit scary at points.  The characters in the new Hobbit movie break out into song.  Twice.

            That being said, I don’t think any of us would call Jaws a comedy, and Embedded is hardly a porno.  Raiders has that love story and a couple really good laughs, but I don’t think anyone in their right mind would call it a romantic comedy.  And The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journeyis definitely not a musical.  We all realize that little dips and swings into what would qualify as another genre doesn’t invalidate a story.

            If anything, they usually strengthen it.

            The secret to all storytelling is characters, and the best characters are going to act like real people.  They’ll tell jokes at the wrong time.  Some of them will think about love and sex when they should be paying attention in board meetings, and others will fret about those board meetings at moments they should be thinking about love and sex.  A few of them might even be stressed about scratching the paint on Dad’s car when they should really be worried about the axe murderer lumbering up behind them.  

            One of the most dramatic moments in The Empire Strikes Back is when they’re about to test the carbon-freezing on Han Solo.  For all intents, he’s walking to his execution.  He knows it, his friends know it, we know it.  Even if he survives– he’s gone.  Leia knows this and finally admits her true feelings… and Han responds with a wiseass comment.  We all giggle and then there’s a horrible blast of steam as Han’s turned into a piece of collectible wall art.

            Y’see, Timmy, if my stories and characters lack this kind of range they’re going to come across as very flat and tedious.  If I can’t have a moment of laughter, a bit of flirting, or a non-sequitor distracted thought, my characters are going to feel like puppets rather than people.  Much like a chef uses a few different flavors to bring out the main tastes of a meal, a writer wants to sprinkle in a few moments that step out of the genre to make the characters and the material much more powerful.

            So don’t be scared to stretch a toe over those lines now and then.

            I know I said I was going to talk about structure, but that’s kind of a huge set of post so I think I might save it until the new year and take a bit of stress out of my holidays.  So next time, I’m  probably just going to say something quick about heroes.

            Until then, go write.