Category: ideas

            As you probably noticed, there was no ranty blog last week.  All the publicity stuff for Ex-Purgatory ate up a ton of my time.  And this week is fallout from that plus a bunch of dental issues I won’t bore (or horrify) you with.

            Thankfully, Thom offered to dive in and make some helpful tips for editors, and for writers who might be suffering from poor editor-ship.

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            Usually, Pete tries to talk about the craft of writing, and the many, many pitfalls he’s seen as both a casual reader and as a judge for some hifalutin’ screenwriting business. One of the things he’s asked for is a continuance of this tradition, but this blog will be a little different. If you’re reading this, Pete wasn’t only busy, but has allowed it.

            I’m talking to the readers today. Not your everyday, run of the mill readers, but participants in writer’s circles and beta readers instead. If you take time out of your busy, busy schedule to read for content and to provide meaningful critiques, I’m talking to you. If you’re receiving these critiques, I might be talking to you, too.

            During the course of these readings and critting, there are some phrases which make the rounds I wish to all that everybody, everywhere holds holy I could remove. They’re next to useless, and sometimes, downright insulting. If you use these phrases, but not in the way I’m about to mention, relax. Down, Simba. I’m not talking to you.

            You may have to forgive me if I become… animated during the writing of this blog. These things tend to get my hackles up.

            If this is the limit of your advice for any bit of a critique, you’re doing it wrong. Please, readers, if you feel the urge to spout this piece of… advice, attach an example of what you mean. Or at the very least, be specific about what it is you wish to see and not be told.

            For instance, if the writer has written “John felt nervous,” and your reply is SDT, throw your writer friend (or circle-mate) a bone and give some examples. Don’t you think if the author in question had thought of a way to show it, he or she would have?

            It’s so bad that in my capacity as editor, I find myself cringing when I come to an instance where I want the author to show something. Somehow I power through, but always, always leave an example.

            Yes. This one kind of sets my blood aflame. That was in an early critique I’d gotten; I disremember the reason. It might have been opening with a dream sequence. But the least helpful thing I read that day was, “This would work if you were Harlan Ellison, but you’re not.” You know what, you silly bitch? Before Harlan Ellison was Harlan Ellison, he wasn’t. The same holds true for Stephen King, for Clive Barker, for Cormac McCarthy, for goddamn anybody else. We all start small.

            I guarantee you, the guy up the street who has a woodworking shop wasn’t… uh, insert famous carpenter who isn’t Jesus here… the first time he picked up a hammer and saw. He was clumsy with his tools, and maybe if you look close, you’ll see he’s missing part of one of his fingers where he learned a bloody lesson. But now he has his own place, doing what he loves for a living, and fashioning memories for other people using those same tools he was clumsy with on day one.

            You don’t say. Man has only been telling stories for thousands of years. I would never have thought the same thing might pop up in more than one story.

            Clichés exist for a reason. They work. The work involves taking a pile of clichés and using them in a way that turns them on their heads, if need be, or exactly as they were intended. What? Yes. Sometimes it is a dark and goddamn stormy night. Don’t tell me that doesn’t happen, I’ve lived in Seattle. There most definitely is a calm before the storm. People don’t realize they’re holding their breath until whatever they’re holding it for is over. This really happens. And while some of these things are over-represented in fiction, that’s no reason to shun them.

            The same holds for monsters. As I’ve said before, not every instance of a monster needs to be a stunning new breakthrough in horror technology. Dracula hasn’t lost a scary step in 116 years; the vampire was done right the first time. (Yes, I know Dracula wasn’t the first. If you have to keep telling people this, maybe it’s because he was the first done really well.) The same holds for zombies and werewolves and man-made creatures of doooooom.

            For my money, the last worthwhile advance in horror technology came with “The Call of Cthulhu” and the idea of an uncaring, inhuman universe where we’re not the apex predator.

            But I digress. Things have been done before. If that’s your beef, maybe suggest ways the author could keep his or her cliché but use it in a better way.

            Not everything mentioned in a novel will be essential to the plot, or to the overall story, or to character development. While it’s true that a lot of the bestest books and movies tie everything together in a neat little bow, some of them do not.

            Look at The Blues Brothers. Everybody loves that movie. Don’t they? Well. I do, and that’s enough for me. Where was I?

            Right. Take The Blue Brothers, if you will. That movie is just full of so much win, and there are parts in the beginning that link to parts at the end, and little bits in-between that talk to you when you see them reappear. “They broke my watch,” I laugh and laugh every time I hear that.

            But there are unrelated things. “Did you get my Cheeze-Wiz, boy?” What the hell is that? Is it important? Does it shed some light on Elwood’s character that, yes, he did in fact bring the Cheez-Whiz? No. No, it doesn’t. “Orange whip?  Orange whip?  Three orange whips?”  Does it matter what he ordered? No, it only mattered that the VP of the company asked to be included, and John Candy is a funny, funny man.  “Fix the cigarette lighter.”  Did that ever come back to haunt them? Hells, no, it didn’t. “Breaks my heart to see a boy that young goin’ bad.” Did that kid come back and help out? Or hurt the cause? Or was he even in the sequel? It’s in this paragraph for a reason.

            No, that’s not one of the phrases, that’s just me, trying to figure out how to bring this to a clean-ish close. There are plenty more noxious phrases, but Pete doesn’t like these to be too long. Hey, if there’s reason, and he says yes, I’ll do another one. But for now, let me leave you with this.

            Beat readers and critiquers, you fulfill a vital part of the writing process. All the acknowledgements you read include people just like you, and authors rely on you to be straight with them, and to do what you can to help. From my own experience, the few works I do have out in the world would have been poorer indeed without the input of my beta team and the Permuted Pit and Pendulum critique groups.

            So, yes, you’re needed. Try not to be dicks about it.

            Hope you all had a wonderful Halloween, Guy Fawkes Day, or respective eerie holiday.

            As some of you know, I’m a bit of a geek, and as such I’m very excited for the release of Thor: The Dark World tomorrow.  And since I’m always willing to be pop culture relevant—and I’m really slammed with other stuff right now—I thought I’d post a fun conversation I had with Justin Theroux, who wrote the third of the “Wave One” Marvel movies, Iron Man 2.  Justin was great to talk to, even when he had to bite his tongue about some still-secret plot points and reveals.  He also had a very positive and realistic view of working in Hollywood and working on a major tentpole movie (a sequel in a set of interlocking movies, at that).

            A few points, but you’ll probably figure it out as it goes.  I’m in bold, asking the questions.  Keep in mind a lot of these aren’t the exact, word-for-word questions I asked (which tended to be a bit more organic and conversational), so if the answer seems a bit off, don’t stress out over it.  If you see a long line of dashes (————) it means there was something there I didn’t transcribe, probably because it was just casual discussion or something I knew I wasn’t going to use in the final article for one reason or another (there are off the record discussions now and then).  Any links are entirely mine and aren’t meant to imply Justin was specifically endorsing any of the ideas I’ve brought up here on the ranty blog—it’s just me linking from something they’ve said to something similar I’ve said. 

            By the very nature of this, there will probably be a few small spoilers in here, though not many.  Check out the movie if you haven’t seen it yet.  It’s fun and you’ll get a bit more out of this.

            Material from this interview was originally used for an article that appeared in the May/June 2010 issue of Creative Screenwriting Magazine.

            So, anyway, here’s me battering Justin with questions about Iron Man 2.

So… how does someone go from being an actor to screenwriter on a huge comedy to the sole writer on Iron Man 2? 

(laughs)  Your guess is as good as mine.  I don’t know.  I’ve been in Hollywood for about twenty years now.  I don’t know if that’s overnight.  Everyone has a weird road in this town and mine’s no different, I guess.  Everyone has a weird little story to tell.

I have, yeah.  If I were to thank anyone or lay it at anyone’s feet, it would be Ben Stiller who’s always been a very big champion of mine and always convinced me to do something professionally.  So Tropic Thunder was the first thing we were able to do together.  He was the one who first looked at my pages, years and years ago, and said ‘These are really decent pages.  You should be doing this more.’  He was the one that gave me the confidence.  So much of anything in the entertainment industry is confidence, and he was the first one to inject me with that.

We met… I was doing a play that he came and saw here in New York.  We met after the show and he was very flattering and I was very flattering to him.  I adored some of his earlier MTV shows and sketch work and The Ben Stiller ShowI thought was an unbelievably good show.  So I was gushing about that.  We sort of became friends over that.  That was in… 94?  95?  Four, maybe?  Somewhere early ’90s.

Yeah.  I was and am a comic book fan.  I wasn’t one of those comic book fans who ran out every week and bought whatever new issue was out there.  I sort of came into it backwards.  I read a lot of underground comics–Heavy Metal, Art Spiegelman, that kind of thing– but I also was an avid Spider-Manand Iron Man fan when I was a kid.—So I was a fan.  Not as probably die-hard as you might think, but I am a fan of the genre.

I had worked with Robert on Tropic Thunder and we had worked very well together and got along.  So he was the one who brought me over to Marvel.  He said ‘You should meet with Marvel.  You guys should sit down and see if you have any common ground because I think it would be a good fit.’  So I did.  I went when they were first gearing up for the very, very first initial push into development for Iron Man 2.  I sat with them for a long time and had long discussions with them about the character and that world.  We just hit it off.  It was a good match.  Shortly thereafter they said they’d love to have me and I was completely  flattered and floored, and we started developing the script right away.

Yeah.  I don’t know.  I don’t remember when they said that, but it sounds completely in line with the way those guys think and work.  They’re amazing quality control, both of them.  As is Marvel.  They were extremely hands on, even in the creation of the story.  It was enormously collaborative.  I never felt like I was abandoned to write the script by myself, even though I did the actual writing.  There was always someone to bounce ideas off of.  Kevin Feige, Jeremy Latcham, Jon Favreau, obviously, and Robert, they were always there to lob in their ideas and support.  It was a very socialist endeavor, the creation of the script.

(laughs)  You try to forget.  While you’re doing it you really try not to realize the pressure you’re under.  You try not to focus on it, at least.  You have to fake it and pretend you have all the time in the world to create it, because if you put a calendar and start X-ing days off you’ll go crazy.  I sort of operated, as we all did, I think, where it’s like ‘Well, we’ll deal with that when we get to it.’  As we had to turn in pages to effects and the line producer, we did a lot of punting of things until we absolutely had to try to move the ball across the finish line.

I don’t know. I love discussing things with people, almost to a fault sometimes.  I’ll bug a bus driver if I really want someone’s opinion.  The way I love to work is with someone who I trust knows the material, like Favreau and Feige, and bounce ideas off them.  Those guys had the benefits of doing [the first Iron Man] and were well-versed in the pitfalls and problems of where certain ideas could take you.  They were great at helping me eliminate certain things.  They could dismiss things that otherwise I might waste time spinning my wheels in.  That being said, when it actually comes down to writing I prefer to just wake up in the morning, make a cup of coffee, and just sit down and start hammering pages.  I write fat, usually, and hope the director can help guide me.  In this particular case Jon was good at guiding me towards what ——– on the one hand you’re trying to create a script that matches what Favreau’s vision is and what he wants to do.  I’m a big believer in being in service to the director as much as possible.

No, no, we did plenty of notecards and outlines and all the rest of that.  I think at a certain point you just have to start trucking through the deep snow and shoveling your way into it.  Or out of it.

Yeah, we met every single day in pre-production.  He was doing Couples Retreat for portions of that.  So we met very often, these epic sessions where we’d all—me, him, Robert, Kevin, and Jeremy—we’d sit in that room and beat through it.  Then I’d go away and do pages, come back, we’d beat through it some more, and I’d go away and do pages.  It was a very unified effort. We were all pulling on the same rope.  It was the way this movie had to work just because of the time frame.

Yeah, absolutely.  Many days we met up at his house and scribbled stuff on cards.

It was everything.  He’ got such an insane–insane in a great way–of working.  He’s just an idea generator.  He’s like a firehose with a powerful stream.  He’s one of those guys who’s just constantly percolating with new ideas and pushing into different areas and places where you didn’t think it could go.  There were certian idea he would have and you’d think ‘That’s completely insane.  There’s no way we could get away with that.’  He’d stick to it, and we’d write it and rewrite it, and we’d show up on the day and he’d perform it and–Oh, I get it.  That totally makes sense.  He’s the one who has it in his head.  There’s a lot of lightning firing off that guy.

I honestly couldn’t tell you.  Even though we had a production draft that we ended up working off of, we were still developing whole chunks of it as we were shooting it.  Once we had the schedule for what we were shooting, we then knew we could go back in and since this is towards the end of the shoot we can go back in and really start finessing it.  So I was working on stuff on set all the way up until the very last day of shooting.

Now, how much of this was laid out for you from the start?  There was some stuff hanging there from the first movie, of course, but did you come on and it was already “Okay, we want Whiplash, Justin Hammer, the Black Widow, War Machine, the briefcase armor… give us a story.” 

No, no, no. To their credit, they really do give everyone involved in the process a blank slate to start with.  And that’s a blessing and a curse.  I think in the end it always ends up being beneficial to them.  You go in knowing anything is a possibility and they don’t shut any doors or windows to what you want to do until it becomes either cost-prohibitive or just doesn’t make sense with the brand.

            They’re firm believers that the fans are the shareholders in this whole thing, so they go in with the attitude of what do people want to see.  It’s not necessarily about what we want to do, it’s what people are expecting and what they want of this character.  And that’s a wonderful way to work, especially in this genre.  Everything was on the table and then it was just a question of taking things off the table.

            We opened up all the characters.  We opened up Whiplash and all the famous villains of the past and started picking up each one, rolling it around in meetings, and going “What about this guy?  What about that girl?”  We ended up getting three new characters for this movie–Whiplash, Black Widow, and Justin Hammer–and realizing there was a very powerful dynamic between those three.

Y’know, there was a bunch… I won’t bore you with who we were looking at—translate ‘bore you’ as ‘get in trouble’.  It was really Jon’s idea.  I think Jon, very early on, had the idea of using Mickey.  We have sort of an energy theme going on, sort of a confluence of many things.  One is, our Tony Stark is a public figure.  Two, we knew we wanted to have this energy element to it.  What is the thing that’s inside him?  Could this thing become public?  Could it get out there?  It’s an arms race, essentially.  Then when we were looking at the different characters, we were thinking where can we sort of plug that idea into a character, and Whiplash—through Jon’s vision of what that character could be or become–what we all gravitated toward.  Weall thought that’s the guy.  Once Jon had pitched the way he envisioned that character, which is very different from a guy with a big ponytail and a cape, we thought that’s very cool.  These big energized whips emenating from his center chest piece.  It all, organically, started to take shape.  With the back story we thought we could have some fun there.

Again, it sort of followed that….  If we walked into the room with anything, when we first started to develop, the one thing that was obviously on the table that we could not ignore was that he was a public figure.  That was the first little piece of clay that hit the table that we knew we’d have to build off of.   We thought, well, what comes with that?  What comes with that is a strange kind of arrogance, especially in today’s world, that that’s definitely going to entail?  Some kind of a newfound celebrity, to have a guy who’s a public superhero.  So there’s sort of an arrogance to Tony at the beginning of the movie that he’s the only one who is in possession of this technology.  So then the next dramatic device is… what if he’s not?  What if someone else can create it as good as he makes it, or almost as good?  That’s where we went with that.  What if the genie got out of the bottle?

I don’t want to talk about other’s people’s movies but… War Machine is not a dark force.  Our thinking was Tony is out in the world and has perhaps bitten off more than he can chew.  One of the themes of the movie is can one man be an island?  Are men islands in themselves, especially if you’re Tony Stark?  Again, without giving away too much, the War Machine armor and who’s using it really complements that idea or that theme.  I found it a relief to have that character in the movie.  And obviously Don is wonderful.  Only in the fact that they’re such good friends does that work.

I wouldn’t say I was worried.  There were times where I felt that we had a luxury of riches.  It was like putting a bunch of desserts out in front of you an wondering which one you wanted to taste first.  It never worried me in that way.  If anything, it just made me want to work harder at servicing every one of them.  But I think we’ve done a pretty good job of tempering that and making sure that it doesn’t just turn into a Jackson Pollack.  Everyone has a purpose in the film, and I think as long as each one of those characters is well-defined and as long as they’re purpose-driven, then at the end of the day it just feels like a great big fun movie as opposed to a big, y’know, clusterfuck. (laughs)

(laugh)  I feel like Marvel has a great tradition of screwing the next writer. (laughs)  I think initially, when they first started interweaving it, things were considered afterthoughts.  Now—I don’t want to give away things happening in other movies—they’re starting to put a lot more thought into it and seeing it as a larger scheme.  We have things in our movie that are doffing their hats or perhaps telegraphing things that are going to happen in other movies.  That’s probably a much as I can probably say.  It wasn’t like we had a big meeting with Kenneth Branaugh about Thor.  There’s just enough cross-pollination to make it interesting, but not enough to start eating into other people’s sandwiches.

No, we knew we were going to have Nick Fury.  He showed up, you just can’t ignore it. And then there’s much smaller clues and things that we seeded throughout that will play out in other movies.  Obviously once Avengers is up and running you’ll start to feel the cumulative effect of those little jigsaw puzzle pieces getting put together.

Yeah.  For me, I just acted as if he was doing it.  We were putting him in.  He was going to go in.  It was up to the powers that be to make that happen.  I just kept writing as if he was going to show up on the first day.

Yes, but not in a way…  Marvel is a very special place.  Kevin Feige is probably the biggest comic book fan I’ve ever met.  He’s the biggest fan of his material.  He is, without question, one of the best keepers of that torch.  There would be times when we’d be bumping our heads or going ‘I don’t know how to make this work,” and Kevin would bring a clarity to the situation.  I’ve never experienced it with any other studio or any other creative process, where–literally–the head of the studio would be the one to go ‘No, you know what the fans want?  The fans want this, and at this moment in the movie this is what needs to happen and this is what we’re forgetting.”  He– and Jon, too– was great at just refocusing it.  He knows his brand and he knows his charcters so well.  He’s one of those guys who can tell you the day and date he saw this character or that issue came out or that movie premiered.  He just knows everything.  He’s encyclopedic.  I was always eager for him to put his two cents in an I would eek out his counsel on a regular basis.

For sure.  Websites like Superhero Hype and IGN.  I wouldn’t say it’s an internet-made movie or anything close to that– because a lot of time people have ideas that have no bearing on what’s ultimately possible– but definitely.  There were times… As I said, the modus operandi of Marvel is that the only shareholders are the fans.  There’d be times when they would say ‘Oh, I read this thing, they’d be stoked if this happened.’  So we know we’re not on the wrong track pursuing that idea.  That’s really interesting and fascinating because it sort of puts a ghost partner in the room with you.  A shadow voice in the room.

I’m not confirming or denying that remark. (laughs)  I think that’s still in the distant future.  I would say if people looked for it they would definitely find it.

            Months early for Easter, I know.  But, as some of you may have guessed, I’m not really talking about those Paas coloring kits.  Or the Cadbury Bunny.

            For those few of you who are still waiting to see if Betamax is going to win the format wars, an Easter egg is a hidden bonus on a DVD or Blu-ray.  As of late, the term’s been broadened to include any little onscreen reference or in-joke. 

            A lot of superhero movies tend to have “Easter eggs,” in this broad sense.  Captain America’s shield (or a version of it) showing up in Tony Stark’s workshop.  Superman and General Zod crashing into a Wayne Industries satellite while they fight.  Agent Coulson stopping at a Roxxon gas station on the way out to New Mexico.  Professor Horton’s synthetic man at the WWII Stark Expo (a two-for-one Easter egg, really).  Heck, I remember giggling with geeky joy when Val Kilmer’s Bruce Wayne made an offhand comment about some people being “halfway to Metropolis by now.”

            I think most writers do this on one level or another.  We put in little in-jokes and references.  Sometimes they’re ten percenters, others they’re so small and private maybe only a dozen people in the world are going to get them.  I know I’ve done a bunch of them in different books and short stories.

            Now…a few weeks back I read an interview with Joss Whedon about the new Agents of SHIELD show.  The interviewer wanted to know if we’d be seeing lots of guest spots from some of the movie characters like Nick Fury or Cap or maybe Dr. Banner.  Whedon kind of shrugged it off and said while he wasn’t against it, the show wouldn’t last long if it was all about waiting for the next guest star or movie reference.  It needed to stand on its own feet, without support from the films.

            See, that’s the catch with these sort of in jokes and clever references.  My story needs to work despite these ten percenters, not because of them. If all I’ve got is a few clever nods to other things, I don’t have a real story—no matter how clever those nods are.

            This is also relates to a common prequel problem.  In prequel stories, there are often Easter eggs to all the stuff the audience knows is in the future.  Smallville would often dress teenage Clark Kent in blue t-shirts with a red jacket, or have numerous guest stars who would be important later in his life (like ace reporter Perry White).  Hannibal Rising had the titular character learning to cook and trying on samurai half-masks that hinted at the signature muzzle he’d wear later.  The Star Wars prequels showed us glimpses of the Death Star and hints of the Empire.  As I write this, there’s a pair of shows on the air, each about a famous fictional serial killer at an earlier part of their life.  And each show relies heavily on the fact that we, the audience, knows who this character is going to become.  There are constant winks and nods and references to things in their respective futures.

            In most of these cases, though, when you strip away all the references to “the future,” it becomes clear there’s very little going on in the now.

            There’s a similar problem you’ll see a lot in bad comedies.  It’s when the plot grinds to a halt to show us a painfully long setup for a joke that does nothing except get a quick laugh.  It’s not humor advancing the story, it’s just humor for the sake of humor.  And that gets old real quick, no matter how funny the gag might be on its own.

            I’ve mentioned seeing this in a fair number of genre stories.  A writer comes up with a really cool and new (or what they think is really cool and new) idea about zombie origins or time travel mechanics or vampire biology or cyborg implants or something.  But they don’t actually have a story.  They just have this one cool idea trying to carry everything. 

            All of these examples tie back to something I’ve brought up before.  One cool idea isn’t a story.  It’s just a story point.  And one story point—or even a dozen of them—does not make a book.  Or a movie.  Or even a short story.

            Easter eggs are cool and fun, no question about it.  But you can’t live off them. And a story can’t survive on nothing but sly winks.

            Next week, I think it’s time for that long overdue lecture on structure that I’ve been promising for months.

            Until then, go write.

            Grab a piece of paper and write these things down real quick.  Don’t think, don’t second-guess yourself, just scribble down the first things that come to mind, okay?  I want you to write down a television show about an island, a number from one to four, a Disney princess, and a vegetable.

            We’ll get back to that in a bit.

            Every now and then you’ll hear some guru talk about Jung or the zeitgeist or collective subconscious.  They’re pretty terms, but I’d guess four out of five times the people slinging them don’t really know what they mean.

            I think it’s much simpler than that.  Nowadays we’re all watching the same shows and movies and listening to the same music.  A lot of us are reading the same highly-recommended books.  Through the wonders of the internet, we can spend an hour each morning getting news updates from around the country and around the world.  Plus, all of us can discover the same Korean rap star within a week of each other.

            I’d guess at least ninety percent of you reading this had a basic Western education.  Most of us probably went to college for a few years, too.  We’ve compared banks and apartment-shopped and made budgets for either work or the home.  Maybe both. 

            We all share a lot of the same experiences, and we draw on those experiences to make the same decisions.  Because of this, we tend to be drawn to the same things—especially when you start dividing folks into fans of different genres and styles. 

            This is why you should never, ever go with the first idea you think of.  Because the odds are very good that at least a thousand other people just thought of it, too.  And half of those people are going to attempt something with that idea.

            I’ve talked about screenplay contests and some of the recurring concepts that made me and other readers cringe.  One of those was the Current Events script.  It’s a screenplay based off a recent, high-profile story that got a fair amount of news coverage.  They’re almost always rushed and, more to the point, there’s usually at least half-a-dozen of them about the same event.  And that’s just what one individual reader sees, so odds are there are a few hundred  of these scripts floating around each contest, all based off the same event. 

            A few months back I started toying with the idea of a new book, one that could possibly be the start of a new series.  Almost immediately, I came up with something that I thought was fairly clever and very open-ended.  I mentioned it to a friend over Labor Day weekend, though, and she said it sounded familiar.  She whipped out her Kindle, browsed Amazon for a minute, and came up with a name and title for me.

            Well, I got home and started checking it out.  It turns out the other author and I had both come up with the exact same premise.  Our main characters had the same background, the same life-changing event with the same results (and requiring the same medical breakthrough), and the same changes in their life because of it.  Different plots, but the story of our main character was almost identical.  The other author had just come up with it eighteen months earlier than me.

            We all get exposed to the same input and process it in similar ways.  That’s why the first thing that comes to mind is usually the thing that everyone else thought of, too.  Even if I think I’m a clever and exceedingly smart writer, I’m going to make the same first choices as everyone else.

            Don’t believe me?  Remember those things I asked you about up above?  I’m willing to bet that most of you wrote down LOST, three, Cinderella, and carrots. 

            What did I get?  Three out of four right?  I bet I got four out of four for some of you.

            When it comes to plot, try to avoid going with the first thing that comes to mind.  If you’re feeling gutsy, avoid the second and third, too.  That’s what makes a good writer—going beyond the obvious.

            Next time, unless I get another really cool request, I’m thinking I might talk a little bit about characters.

            Until then, go write.