Category: ideas

            Just want to thank you all for your patience while I was off at (and recovering from) SDCC.

            Now, back to our usual rants about storytelling…

            I’ve mentioned once or thrice before that I like watching (and commenting on) bad movies.  Sometimes I find a hidden gem.  Most of the time, though, they’re just fodder for these little rants. Much like when I used to read scripts for screenplay contests, if I watch three or four bad movies in a row I almost always find some common flaws and teachable moments.

            So I saw a Dracula movie recently… 

            He’s arguably the most commonly-filmed fictional character on Earth.  It’s not that big a surprise I stumbled across one.  Actually, it was a three-Dracula geekery day, if memory serves.

            Anyway, this one was set back in the 16th Century and went the ancient-noble-prince route.  It’s a not-uncommon take on the character (Fred Saberhagen wrote a whole series that used it). Dracula used his supernatural powers to protect Transylvania and had this whole warrior code and all that.  And I’m kind of guessing 16th century.  Vlad Tepes lived in the 15th, but these people were actually dressed in a more medieval-fantasy style.

            Except… we also had this huge biblical subplot, where vampires are all descended from Cain and can only be truly killed by descendants of Abel.  Which, I mean, I’ve heard stories that tied vampires to the bible before.  So it wasn’t really an outlandish, crazy thing.

            Except… we also had the romance.  You know the one.  Mina is a near double/reincarnation of Dracula’s long-dead princess.  Long scenes of wistful staring and passionate confusion ensue.

            Man, that’s kind of a lot for a ninety-odd minute movie, isn’t it?

            I think one or two Saturday geekeries later I ended up watching this twisty-turvything about dead children and stalkers and swapped identities and second marriages with creepy undertones.  That could all balance out kinda cool, right?  But there was also this whole parallel plot about guardian angels and angel sex (no, seriously) and sin and redemption.  And the plots didn’t so much as dovetail together as butt heads for a while and then have a high-speed impact (which also involved some fatalities…)

            What’s my point here?  Well, I have two, believe it or not.  They’re kinda related, but still—bonus tips for you.

            I’ve talked about this problem a few times before—where a plot or story is just overpacked with ideas.  And what tends to happen is the plot will overwhelm the story, the story will smother the plot, or sometimes they’ll just collapse into this mess of well… random plot and story points.

            This is a really tough idea for new writers to grasp, because it feels counterintuitive to everything we’ve been led to believe as storytellers. If the idea’s good, how can it be wrong for a story?  Thing is, sometimes a really good idea just doesn’t work in the story I’m telling.  If it’s not driving the plot or motivating the characters, if it’s pulling us too far off course or just filling space that could be used for something else… it probably doesn’t belong there. 

            I got to interview Kevin Smith a few years back, and we talked for a few minutes about his legendary hatred of ad-libs. He was quick to point out that he didn’t hatead-libs. His problem was that ad-libs rarely fit into the final story. Sure, they might be hysterically funny at the moment while filming on set, but then you’d get to the editing room. Now they had to fit in with the tone and pacing of the overall movie.  And more often than not… they didn’t.  It’s not that they weren’t funny or clever, they just didn’t fit. And then Smith even made a point of praising his then-leading man, Seth Rogen, for the ability to fire off lots of funny lines that were, as he put it “very germane to the discussion.”

            Y’see, Timmy, when we come up with these really cool ideas for a new take on werewolves, some really hot and sexy dialogue, or an incredibly cool way to describe the feeling of a knife piercing the flesh… well, we want to use them.  That’s our job, after all.  To take cool ideas and make cool stories out of them.  But sometimes—a lot of the time—our job is really knowing when to take the cool ideas out.  It’s being able to cut away the excess, to figure out what our story’s about and what parts are just wasting time and space.

            Which brings us to my second clever point…

            There’s a general idea  I see crop up a lot that stories can be any length.  Any length at all.  I can make the story whatever it needs to be—fifty pages long to five hundred pages long.

            And while, in a general sense, there’s some truth to this, the stark reality is that there are a lot of limits on how long a story can be.

            Look at screenwriting. We all acknowledge that movies are generally ninety minutes to a little over two hours.  It’s just how it is.  When a movie’s only seventy-plus minutes… we feel kinda cheated.  It can be really good, but almost always there’s a response of “That’s it?  Only seventy-one minutes?”  Likewise, when a film stretches out over two and a half hours, it usually feels pretty excessive.  There are a few really great just-shy-of-three-hour movies, but there are a lot of really bloated, desperately-in-need-of-editing ones.  So if my screenplay doesn’t fall in the 90-130 page range… I might get some folks to look at it, but not many professionals are going to take me seriously.

            And if I’m publishing… well, paper costs money.  And shelf space in book stores is precious.  Most publishers don’t want to see a massive, beef-slab of a book unless they know they’re going to sell a lot of copies of it.

            Ahhh, I say, well I’ll just publish it myself, then nobody can turn it down for financial reasons.  True, but a lot of the POD sources still work off page length to calculate costs, and they’ve got much more hard ranges. Just a few pages this way or that can mean a price jump of three or four dollars per copy. And somebody’s got to eat that cost.  It’s not going to be them, so it’s either me or my readers.  This is why I had to cut almost 30,000 words out of my book 14 –the small publisher couldn’t afford to have it stretch into the next page-range.

            Heck, even if I just give up on print altogether and go with epublishing only—check the numbers. Shorter books do better as ebooks, especially from self publishers.  The vast number of folks who’ve had any degree of success with ebooks are doing it with books under 100,000 words.  I think many of them are under 70,000. The “why” of this is a whole ‘nother discussion we could debate for a while, but for now we just need the simple numbers. Ebooks tend to do better as shorter books.
            Y’see, Timmy (yep, a double Y’see Timmy—haven’t had one of those in a while) what all this adds up to is limited space.  Those pages are precious.  My words are precious. I don’t want to waste them on irrelevant things.  I want them to be moving things along for the plot and for my characters.  I want the ideas to work for the story, not to be flexing and contorting my story to accommodate some ideas.

            A while back a friend of mine was working on a Frankenstein-esque story, and he had this super-cool idea for a detail about the monster’s origins.  And it really was a cool idea.  Thing is… his story was all structured around the idea that we never really learn much about where the monster came from or how it was built.  That was part of the mystery.  There wasn’t anywhere to use this idea, but he was soooo determined.  Even when it made no logical sense for this detail to be revealed, he kept trying to force it into different chapters. Because it was too cool an idea not to use… even though the rest of his story was suffering because of it.
            You may have heard that old chestnut—kill your darlings. This is kinda like that.  I may have the coolest line of dialogue, the neatest way to explain something, or the most fantastic description of a giant robot ever, but if it doesn’t work in my story…

            And if it doesn’t work—if it’s not adding to my story—then it shouldn’t be there.

            Next time, unless someone has some other ideas, I was going to toss out a few quick little tips about genre and devices.

            Until then… go write.

            Pushing this one up to the wire, but it’s technically still Thursday.

            Somewhere…

            So, there’s an author I follow on Twitter (she wrote one of my favorite books I read last year), and she was recently grumbling about something she’d run across.  “I’m tired of the ‘everything sucks’ genre of fiction. We’re all corporate drones and suckers for advertisements – I get it.”

            I remember sighing, because I knew just what she was talking about. I think we’ve all run into this sort of writing.  The big-idea, big-character moment stories.  Often—not always, but often—they’re stories that are so beautifully “real.”

            A standard element in this type of writing is when a character has an epiphany—either on their own or pushed on them.  A supposedly world-altering revelation about their life.  About life in general—everyone’s life.

            I say “supposedly” because most of them are the sort of simple life lessons most people have figured out by… I don’t know, the time we turn twenty?  Somewhere around there?  That it’s better to be healthy and loved than to be cool or rich.  That sometimes we have to compromise our beliefs to achieve certain goals.  That big multinational corporations may have an agenda that doesn’t involve my personal health or financial prosperity.  That advertising is trying to get us to buy stuff.  Y’know, those sort of things.

            Minor aside.  Can you imagine if I was bragging to someone about having cereal for breakfast?  And—not to overlook this point—I prepared it!  With no help from anyone.  I didn’t even watch any YouTube instructional videos. I just grabbed that box, shook some Captain Crunch into the bowl, and poured on the milk.

            I even fed myself. With a spoon and everything.  I’m just that good.
            Let’s stop and consider for a moment.  Is this really an accomplishment I should be boasting about?  That I should be particularly proud of?  It’s like congratulating someone for having a stripper at their Las Vegas bachelor/ette party–so many people do it, it’s almost taken as a given.

            And if this was the “big thing” you’d been going through two hundred pages to find out…?

            I can’t help but think a lot of these moments get put in for one of two reasons.  Well, really the same reason, just approached from two different points of view.

            One is the kind of innocent one,  The writer’s including this amazing revelation because they don’t grasp that everybody has these moments.  The vast majority of people assume they’re “normal.”  That everyone thinks the same way I do and knows the same stuff I know.  So if I make a sudden discovery about the world, it kinda stands to reason that nobody else knew about this.  Even if it’s something like “Whoa—did you know Stan Lee is in every one of the Marvel movies?”

            The other one is… okay, it’s the same one, but with a lot more attitude.  Now the writer assumes that nobody has everknown this.  They—and they alone—had the brilliance to spot this, and they’ve graciously decided to share their brilliant insight into the world with all those folks of lesser intelligence.  This is when it’s suddenly “Most people don’t catch it, but Stan Lee is the bartender in Ant Man and  also the delivery man in Civil War.”

            Of course, as I said before, normally they’re not talking about Stan Lee cameos.  We’re talking about priorities.  We’re talking about the industrial complex.  We’re talking about multimedia, like advertising and Twitter and random blog posts!
            *ahem*

            In a way, this is the flipside of an empathy issue I’ve mentioned here a few times.  I even mentioned it up above.  Sometimes, as a writer, I make the mistake of assuming that everyone knows all the same things I do—that they’ll get all my jokes and references. In this case, I’m assuming I found something all-new that nobody’s ever seen before.

            My lovely lady friend came up with a term for this a while back, developed after many years of reading for screenplay contests.  Simply put– it’s the moment when a baby discovers their own feet.  It may be the coolest thing that’s ever happened in the life of the baby, but for the rest of us… well, it’s not quite as exciting.

            Yeah, sure it is for the parents.  But for everyone else?  Can you imagine having your friends call you over to sit and watch their baby giggle at his or her toes for two hours?

            When a character figures out it’s more important to spend time with their loved ones than at work, they’re discovering their own feet.  If someone comes to the jaw-dropping conclusion that they’ve messed up a life that was clearly messed up on page one, it’s their own toes they’re staring at.  When someone realizes that bad things happen to good people and most other people don’t even care–OH MY GOD!  The toes wiggle when I think about wiggling them!!!!

            This is one of the reasons I’m always encouraging people to read. I need to read in my genre, yeah, but outside it, too.  All those best sellers and the bad stuff.  I need to know what stories have been told, how they were told, and I need to have a good grasp of how well they’re know.  This isn’t the 1820s anymore—it’s tough to be a writer and be disconnected from the world.

            Because I really don’t want my big reveal to be that Ford’s top priority is selling trucks…

            Next week, I’d like to give a belated sendoff to my favorite stewardess.

            No, not a flight attendant.  Back then, alas, she was considered a stewardess.

            Until then… go write.

            By odd coincidence, this is post 404.

            There’s an old development saying you’ve probably heard—let’s throw it at the wall and see what sticks. The premise here is that if we use every single idea we have, surely the good ones will do something to get noticed.  They’ll stick to the wall or rise to the top or… something.

            The unwritten part of this premise is that you’ll also end up with a serious mess.  Yeah, my two or three good ideas stuck to the wall, but look at all the crap piled up on the floor under them. Hell, look at the wall itself.  It’s all stained and smeared and streaked.  This isn’t a clean-up situation, it’s a straight repaint.  I can say with confidence that we’re not getting our security deposit back.

            With all that in mind, I’d like to tell you the story of Phoebe McProtagonist…

            Phoebe struggled through life from an early age, born ten months premature on the same day her father died in the Middle East, one week before his two-year tour ended.  Overwhelmed with grief, her mother committed suicide during the birth.  Phoebe’s years as an orphan in child protective services left her hard and jaded, and she never had a single role model—growing up without parents, foster parents, inspiring teachers, sports heroes, pop icons, internet stars, or even a giving tree.

            In high school, Phoebe struggled with drug addiction, alcohol addiction, adrenaline addiction, video game addiction, sex addiction, a hoarding problem, OCD, Tourette’s syndrome, and extreme boredom because she wasn’t being challenged (no inspiring teachers, remember). She got pregnant three times on prom night, couldn’t get any abortions because she lived in a red state, then suffered four miscarriages from drinking lead-tainted Jaegerbombs after graduation.

            (alcohol addiction, remember?)  

            Determined to honor the memory of her unborn children, Phoebe withdrew from society and home-grad-schooled herself, eventually receiving magna cum laude, perfect attendance, and a triple doctorate in music theory, film criticism, and genetic engineering.  Thus armed, she applied to be an astronaut and, after months of rigorous testing, was finally accepted into the astronaut training program by those goddamned f@¢%!#g bastards at NASA.

            (Tourette’s, remember?)

            But when the rest of her team was killed in a launchpad fire that also burned down her house,  Phoebe took time off to sort out her life.  She sorted it out, got her groove back, got her ducks in a row, realized what’s important, and was struck by lightning walking along the beach.  As she sprawled on the shore, feeling a moment of divine bliss and agony as all the hair on her body burned away, giant mutant fiddler crabs came out of the ocean, the product of unregulated industrial waste dumping—

            (red state, remember? See how it all ties together? That’s what good literature does!)

            —and dragged her away into the water. In her final moments, the race between drowning and being eaten alive by the mutant crabs, she realized the single secret to clean energy, FTL travel, and how to make the perfect 7&7.  But there was no one to tell before she died, because she walked the beach alone.

            Okay, that was maybe a little bit over the top, but you might be surprised how common this kind of storytelling is.  I saw it in writers’ groups in college (part of the reason I don’t belong to such groups anymore) and countless times when I used to read for screenplay contests.  You wouldn’t believe the number of dramatic stories that are just brimming with excess plot devices and story threads. Hell, I freely admit some of the early drafts of The Suffering Map were the same way.

            This springs from a common misconception–that writing a bunch of plot points and character elements is the same thing as writing a story.  The logic is that if I load up my story with every possible dramatic idea for every single character, one of them’s bound to hit the target, right?  And then, eventually, the story will be dramatic.  Plus, adversity builds character, therefore it stands to reason all this extra  adversity in my story will make for fantastic characters.

            I mean, Phoebe comes across a great character, right…?

            Simple truth is, this is all just excessive. If I’m doing this, I’m wasting ideas and wasting words, using thirty or forty examples instead of just three good ones.  It’s the kind of thing that tells a reader I was more interested in creating art than I was in telling any kind of decent story.

            Of course, in all fairness, it’s not just the artsy literature types who do this, although I must admit, they seem to be the most common offenders.  We’ve all read (or seen) the action storywhere every punch draws blood, every car chase ends with an explosion, and every leap rattles bones.  Plus every character had a snappy one-liner to toss out (or at least think about) before, during, and after offing one of the villains. And there were lots and lots of villains…

            Then there’s the sci-fi stories that have vast interstellar conflicts and near-magical technology and unstoppable cyborg monsters and omnipotent, cosmic beingsand sacred orbs   Seriously, reading contest scripts I was so sick of orbs.  I came to loathe the word.  Know what else?  Nobody in bad fantasy ever has eyes, they all have orbs.

            Friggin’ orbs.

            And sooooo many horror story that have cubic yards of blood and gore everywhere.  Plus there’s a little chalk-skinned child who moves in high-speed “shaky vision.”  And a secret psychopath.  And one person who snaps and gets dozens of people killed because they opened a door or invited something in or played with the puzzle box. 

            It’s been almost thirty years, people. Thirty. Years.  Haven’t you figured this out yet?  Nothing good comes from opening the damned puzzle box!  Even my mom knows this!

            Y’see, Timmy, whatever my chosen genre is, just loading a bucket up with plot elements and flinging them at the wall does not create a story.  It’s the opposite of writing in just about every way possible.  No, not even if I only consider the leftover stuff. As I mentioned above, all those other ideas are still going to leave stains and streaks, no matter how solid the good stuff is.

            Take that as you will.

            Next week I’ll talk a bit more about cons, and I might talk about excessive stuff a little more, too.

            Until then, go write.