November 10, 2011 / 3 Comments

Tone Deaf

           So, I wanted to talk to you a bit about G.I. Joe.

           Not the cool cartoon, mind you.  Or the toy line.  No, I’m talking about the completely God-awful, live-action movie.  It had problems.  Lots of problems.  Not the least of which was a  complete failure to remember sixth-grade science class.
            The big issue I’d like to address, though, is the weight.
            Doc Brown and his assistant Marty taught us that some things are heavy.  They have weight.  They have, if I may use a literary term (sorry), gravitas—a certain dignity and importance and bearing.
            Stephen King, on the other hand, taught us that some things are soft and squishy and bleed a lot when you shove knives or claws or fangs into them.
            And let’s not forget the Wachowski Brothers, who taught us that some things get shot.  A lot.  In slow motion.  While doing kung-fu.
            What do all these things have in common?  And what do they have to do with weight?
            Well, let’s think about it.  Doc Brown and Marty didn’t think everything was heavy, just a few key revelations that came to them across three movies.  Stephen King doesn’t kill everyone in his stories—all in all characters in his books have a pretty decent survival rate (The Stand notwithstanding).  The Wachowski Brothers might have pioneered “bullet time” and virtual camera array shots in film, but there’s also a lot of stuff in The Matrix that follows basic camera set-ups—master, overs, coverage, done.
            And then there’s the G.I. Joe movie.  Which was cool.  Super cool.  Cool action, cool characters, cool lines of cool dialogue uttered coolly in cool situations.
            Saying cool that many times is kind of lame, isn’t it…?
            Anyway, keeping that in mind, I’d like to perform a simple experiment.  Please pay attention to the next paragraph.  Take notes if you feel it might help you recall things.
            LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA!!!!
            So… what parts of that stood out to you?
            Odds are none of it did.  Well, maybe the fact that it ended.  In fact, you probably skimmed it, didn’t you?  Any sane person would’ve.  It was a bunch of LAs, that’s all.
            Here’s another example, one which will probably drive my point home.  Have you ever heard a tuning fork?  Have you ever felt compelled to listen to one for hours?  Tuning forks are perfect, y’know.  If you have a middle-C tuning fork, it will hit that note and hold it for ages.  Why wouldn’t you want to listen to constant perfection?
            Because it’s boring!
            A tuning fork plays one note.  That’s it.  It’s the musical equivalent of LA LA LA LA LA LA.  Middle C is great, and any musician will tell you it’s invaluable to performing almost any composition, from Ludwig Beethoven to Lady Gaga.  But it isn’t the only note.  It’s important because it’s part of a system of highs and lows that we call music.
            Stories work the same way.  A story that’s just all the same thing is the literary equivalent of a tuning fork.  It’s neat for about a minute and then it starts to wear on your nerves.
            Comical and serious.  Loud and quiet.  Horrific and reassuring.  Thrilling and mundane.  Failure and success.  If you look at any good story, you’ll see that it swings back and forth between extremes in a series of low troughs and high peaks.   
            Yeah, The Matrix had tons of kick-ass visuals and amazing action sequences.  It also had a scene of Neo getting berated by his boss, mocked by an old woman in a kitchen, and a lengthy discussion about the true nature of “Tasty Wheat.”  Some of these scenes were vitally important to the plot.  Others were just interesting character moments.  They all had different weight.
            This is what the creative folks behind G.I. Joe didn’t get.  You can’t have all cool lines and allcool action all the time in a story.  If everything is set to ten, it all has the same weight.  Another way of saying “all the same” is that it’s monotone.  And monotone is boring.  It’s boring whether it’s all set to three or five or ten or eleven.
            Y’see, Timmy, it’s the back-and-forth, up-and-down nature that makes for interesting stories.  A good story has a baseline that the reader can relate to.  It’s going to have pitfalls that sink below that baseline, and maybe some really tragic potential consequences.  And it’s going to have some parts that grab the reader’s attention, shoot high above the line, and make the heart start pumping.
            Because if it doesn’t have these back-and-forth elements, if it’s all the same, then it’s just a line.  It doesn’t matter how high the line is.  It’s just a flat line.
            And I’m sure most of you know what “flat line” is another term for…?
            Next time, I have three things I’d like to talk about.
            Until then, go write.
December 11, 2009 / 4 Comments

I Put The Poison In Both Cups

Easy geek reference up there for you.

So, this week’s little rant is sliding in under the wire. To be honest, I’ve been buried under a ton of last-minute stuff for work. Plus the holidays. Plus some family stuff. I can’t be expected to keep up on all of it.

Well, that’s not true. It’s a bit of a cop-out, really. If I’d managed my time a bit better a lot of this would’ve been done on time. There were even two or three times this week I remember thinking “I need to start working on this week’s ranty blog post.”

Cop-outs suck, don’t they? You’ve made an investment in some piece of writing and then wham! Out of nowhere the writer just does something lame. They’ll change the rules or deliberately ignore continuity and just try to bluff their way through. Epic stories that don’t deliver. Mysteries that aren’t explained. Ominous foreshadowing that never pays off. All of these are cop-outs.

The very first story I can ever remember telling had a cop-out ending. I was about eight years old, it was summer, and Mom had taken us to the beach even though I wasn’t feeling well. Somehow I ended up sitting with the father of my friend Todd, while everyone else played in the water, and I spent the time regaling him with the epic tale of G.I. Joe fighting off the Intruders.

For those of you born after 1980, G.I. Joe used to be just shy of a foot tall and had fuzzy hair. You could even shave him. He was also firmly grounded in the real-world military. When Star Wars shifted the toy paradigm to science fiction, GI Joe suddenly gained a bunch of new friends, like the superhero Bulletman and the cyborg Mike Power. And enemies called the Intruders which were a race of alien bodybuilder midgets who wore metal leotards… sort of…

Anyway, on with the story.

You see, the Intruders came down in asteroids. And they all crash-landed at GI Joe’s secret base. There were lots and lots and lots of them. In fact, there were a million of them. So GI Joe was shooting at them with his gun and he shot ten of them, and Mike Power was kicking with his bionic leg–

(Mike Power had one bionic leg. Just one. Even at the age of eight, I could see the gigantic flaws in this bit of cybernetic engineering.)

–and Bulletman used his ray to lift a bunch of them into the air and send them away. This pattern of violence was repeated enthusiastically twice or thrice before I declared all the Intruders defeated.

Not so, Todd’s father told me. A million is a lot.

I conceded this, and explained that the above mentioned pattern of gun-kick-ray happened again. So now they were all gone.

No, he said with a smile and a shake of his head, a million means there’s a lot more left.

I nodded, then said that Bulletman had used his ray to scoop up everyone who was left and send them away.

It seemed like a very solid ending at the time.

Granted, it’s easy to excuse an ending like that from an eight year old, but far too many adults use them, too. Except for poor spelling, there isn’t a much more glaring sign of poor writing than a plot thread that winds up with a cop-out. It shows the writer didn’t think things out, or just couldn’t be bothered to.

A few common types of cop-outs.

Changing the rules–While it completely fits the story it’s told in, the title reference of this little rant is a perfect example of changing the rules. In the midst of this serious contest of life and death, we find out it wasn’t a fair contest. We’ve been told within the story that X + Y = Z, but the writer suddenly announces X + Y can also equal Q. This usually comes about because the story has been written into a corner and the writer won’t take the time to go back and change things (when the ancient Greeks did this, they called their cop-out deus ex machina). As Billy Wilder once observed, a problem in your third act is really a problem in your first act.

Changing the rules is inconsistent and it breaks the flow. William Goldman used it for comedic effect in The Princess Bride, but it’s doomed to almost certain failure in anything except a comedy. Heck, thanks to Goldman it’s going to look pretty tired in a comedy, too…

The so-called twist–This is a more specific type of changing the rules. I’ve set out the rules for a good twist before, and they’re pretty simple for anyone to figure out. That’s why it’s so frustrating when a writer has Debbie pull off her wig and announce “Hah!! I’m really Larry’s second-cousin!!!” This is often followed by flipping through pages to figure out who Larry is and why his second cousin would have it in for everybody.

Usually a poor twist tries to solve one problem in the story at the expense of the story itself. A weak twist isn’t just a cop-out for a plot thread, it’s almost a guarantee the manuscript will end up in the large pile on the left.

No payoff –Few things are as annoying then to go through a story waiting to see the two enemies clash or to learn the answer to the mysterious puzzle that’s plagued out heroes… only to not get it. The enemy gets away. The mystery gets skirted over. It just leaves the reader feeling cheated.

Sometimes it’s not even a question that’s not answered, it’s just a payoff that never happens. When the climactic, world-altering final battle occurs off-camera and we just see the characters talking afterward about how amazing it was, that’s a cop-out.

Just plain weak– Sometimes when a writer uses a cop-out, they’re just choosing the path of least resistance. It’s quick and easy and wraps stuff up. Oh, he was dreaming and she was insane. Sometimes an ending can seem solid, but it’s still weak because of the promise of something bigger. A worldwide alien invasion is awesome. A worldwide invasion where the aliens can be defeated by tap water… not so much. Remember, a story can be weak by inclusion just as much as by omission.

And there you have it. I’d put more, but, as I mentioned before, I have a lot of work to do still.

Plus, I’m really Larry’s third cousin.

Still open to suggestions as we head into the holidays. If not, next time I’ll end up blathering about women I’ve dated or something.

Until then, go write. At least your Christmas cards.

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