Category: Leonard

             Y’know, I realized I haven’t done a pop-culture reference in ages, and I’m honestly not sure if I keep thinking of too-obscure references or if I’m just being lazy .  Or maybe I’m just not as in touch with pop culture as I used to be.

            No, it can’t be all three. Think about it.  Don’t go for the bear suit with your snarky comments.

            Anyway…

            I talked about the detective’s speech a few weeks back, and I thought it’d be worth mentioning a big way it can go wrong.

            I can even give an example.  The one I hinted at then…

            So, I’ve mentioned once or thrice that I worked on a detective show for a few years. It wasn’t a very good one, mostly because no one ever seemed really sure if it was a detective show or a cop show or maybe some kind of late-night-cable-sexy show.  And it really didn’t help that all of it got pressed through this sort of ‘80s filter… in the late ‘90s.

            Anyway, one episode reached into the fifth act with our heroes backed into a corner. They had nothing.  None of their clues led anywhere.  None of the motives held up.  Everyone’s alibi checked out.  It really seemed like one of those cases where the bad guy—whoever they were—was going to get away with it.

            Then they went back to talk one of the people they’d interviewed earlier and explained how they remembered something he’d said.  Which led to them examining his bank records last night.  Which led to talking to one of his business partners. Which led to them getting a warrant this morning and searching his house.  During which they remembered his love of European architecture and found the priest hole in his home office. Where they found the murder weapon this morning… with his prints on it.

            Bam!  Case closed.  Another one for the good guys.
            Except… even as we filmed it, the cast and half the crew sensed something was wrong here.  It felt weird.  And not just because of some horrible editing (that came later).

            Our entire mystery was solved off-camera.  Almost nothing we’d seen for the entire episode was relevant.  In the end, we just had the two leads standing there giving the detective’s speech about a bunch of deductions and discoveries that all happened off-camera.  The audience didn’t see any of it. They were told about solving the mystery rather than being… well, shown it. 

            Which is a real killer in a visual medium.  And not terribly great in print, either. It’s easier to get away with, yeah, but still not a habit I want to get into.

            When this happens, I think it’s because writers feel like they’re following Elmore Leonard’s famous rule of thumb about skipping stuff nobody’s going to want to read.  Or not going to want to read twice.  In the case above, we don’t want to see the detectives find all the clues, and then also watch them talk about how they found all the clues.

            So the question is, which one do I cut?

            On one level, this is another empathy thing.  Most of the time, it’s going to come down to dramatic impact.  What’s going to give my reader a bigger kick in the gut—seeing them find the gun, or seeing them stand in a parking lot and tell someone they found the gun?

            On another level, this is just knowing what my plot is.  On a detective show (even a late-night-cable-sexy one), the plot is about solving the mystery. Sure, confronting and catching the bad guy is great, but it’s also… well, kinda incidental.  Solving the mystery inherently means we’ve caught the bad guy.  We want  to know it happened, but that’s not what we picked up the mystery novel for.

            Y’see, Timmy, 99% of the time, plot happens in front of my audience.  I can fade to black for a sex scene, maybe skip over the hero’s six hour shift at the grocery store, maybe not even show the bad guy getting confronted and arrested —but those things aren’t really plot, are they? They’re elements we drop into the story for extra flavor.

            As I mentioned above, Elmore Leonard said to cut out all the parts people skip anyway. But I shouldn’t be cutting out the stuff they picked up my book to see.  If I remove a scene and nothing really changes, it probably isn’t plot.  If I remove a scene, but then need to add another scene where they talk about what happened in the now-missing scene… well, that scene was probably plot.

            I want to see the plot unfold.
            So do my readers.

            Next time… I’d like to talk about origin stories.

            Until then, go write.

            So, a friend of mine gave me a book a while back…

            Okay, gave might be the wrong word.  I think she got rid of the book and I happened to be the unlucky recipient, like a bottle imp or that sexually-transmitted monster in It Follows.  She needed it out of her life, I just happened to conveniently be there at the right time. It was nothing personal.

            Anyway…

            The first page of the book was nothing but exposition about the main character’s backstory. Exquisite, laboriously crafted, meticulous exposition.  Where she grew up. How she grew up. Facts about her mother, father, and brother. 

            Page two was her life as a child, a teen, and a blossoming adult.  Favorite toys, sports, and fashions.  Random crushes. Assorted adventures.

            Page three was the college years.  Classes she liked and didn’t. Boys she liked and didn’t.  Women she liked and didn’t.  Intellectual growth, sexual discovery, more fashion, and a tiny bit of body modification which would lead to arguments with her parents.

            Page four was after college. The new job. New fashions.  Being an amateur athlete. Competing in the office and out on the street. Getting better. Moving up the ladder, seeing big things in her future at the job and the sport.

            Page five was the accident. The long, drawn out accident.  Gruesome details of it as it happened.  More gruesome details as doctors took drastic action to prevent further damage.  Some of this spilled onto page six.

            Most of six and seven were recovery. Coming to terms with her new life.  Depression. Self loathing.  Breaking up with Chris.  Purging everything that reminded her of who and what she used to be. Getting rid of so many favorite clothes and shoes.  Won’t be needing shoes anymore. More sulking and self loathing.

            On page eight— we introduced the next character.

            By sheer coincidence, page eight is also where I stopped reading.

            Seven pages of long, rambling sentences showing off an impressive vocabulary, but all of it telling the story, not one line of it showing anything.  Nothing actually happened, I just got told a bunch of stuff that had happened in the past.  There wasn’t even any dialogue in all of that.  None.  After all the clothes talk, I could probably tell you how many days the main character’s bra and underwear matched, but I didn’t have the slightest clue what kind of voice she had.  Or anyone around her.

            Hell, you probably started skimming all that, right?  And that was just me describing what the book was describing.

            A common problem for all writers is when description gets too excessive.  I get caught up in giving all the details and nuances of this person I fleshed out in my character sketch.  Or mentioning every detail of that period furniture and firearms I spent three days researching.  Or maybe just taking all those little things I noticed on my hike through the woods and putting every one of them down on the page.

            And at some point, while I’m pouring all this magnificent stuff out, I lose track of the fact that somebody’s going to have to read all this.  And since most readers are more interested in the plot and story–the active elements of my writing—odds are they’re going to start skimming after the fourth or fifth flowery description they’ve come to realize has no bearing on the story. 

            So, maybe I should question why I’m including stuff my readers are just going to gloss over. Most semi-decent storytellers would.  Alfred Hitchcock once said that drama is life with all the dull bits cut out.  Elmore Leonard said he leaves out all the parts people would skip anyway.

            Excessive description that serves no purpose… serves no purpose.  That’s all there is to it.  And, no, “art” isn’t a purpose.  If I’m going to spend seven pages describing Phoebe’s wardrobe through the first twenty-six years of her life, everything that happens in the rest of the book better hinge on those clothing choices.

            (Bonus tip–this kind of overwriting is deadly in scripts.  By its very nature, screenwriting is a very concise, minimal form of storytelling.  A sure way to get rejected from a contest is to put in piles of description that just shouldn’t be there.)

            Now, I’d like to mention another issue with massive over-description.  We all tend to form our own mental pictures of people and objects in stories.  My lovely lady and I were chatting once about Jack Reacher, the Lee Child character, and realized we both had very different ideas about what he looked like.  I get notes from people all the time about how this cover got Stealth wrong or Cerberus doesn’t look like that.

            That’s part of the joy of books.  We can all have our own image of characters like Stealth or James Stark or Kincaid Strange or Sinjir Rath Velus.  In that little movie theater inside our skulls, they have a certain look and sound that’s special just to us.  And nothing’s more distracting than to be constantly reminded of all the many details that don’t match up with that mental picture we’ve already formed.

            Okay, one last thing…

            There’s a flipside to description, and that’s when I never actually describe anything.  Sometimes this is an attempt to invoke mystery or suspense.  Other times it’s a way to evoke an emotional response with a clever metaphor or simile (when the knife sinks into your gut and it’s like every painful sensation in your life got balled up, hammered flat, and pushed up under your ribs). 

            And sometimes… well, sometimes it’s just a cheat.  I can try to avoid the monster for as long as possible, which helps build suspense and dread, but eventually I need to say what it is.  It’s not uncommon for a writer to try to find a way around an actual description at this point.  After all, I’ve been talking about how fantastic the Hypotheticoid is for three-quarters of the manuscript now, and my description of it may not live up to all that hype.

            But I still need to describe it.

            So, here’s an easy tip.  It’s so easy I bet half of you will shake your head and ignore it.  And some of you are probably already doing this without thinking about it.

            If I’m going to describe something… I need a reason to describe it.  That’s all. I need a reason for the level of detail I’m using.  The cashier at WalMart and a medical examiner can both see a bullet hole in a person’s head, but they’re both going to view it very differently.  And if it takes me three paragraphs to explain what the cashier sees, what am I going to need for the medical examiner?

            If I’m going to describe a character, I should have a reason for doing it.  I can’t describe the last police officer I dealt with, but I can give a lot of details about the last few people I went out to dinner with.  I’m betting nobody here can list everyone they crossed paths with the last time they were in a grocery store.  Oh, one or two might stand out, but let’s face it… there were probably dozens of people there.  

            And they just weren’t important in the long run.  

            Y’see, Timmy, if I waste my descriptions on the little things, they won’t have any weight when I get to the big things.  Because by then my readers will already be conditioned to skim my descriptions because they don’t matter.  And once readers are just skimming…

            Well, then I’ve got nothing.

            Now go write.

            I haven’t babbled on about dialogue in a bit, so I thought I’d toss out a quick idea about that.

            And I thought I’d make it interesting by telling a story.

            As some of you know, I worked in the film industry for several years.  This let me work with a lot of storytellers of all different types—most notably (for this little rant) directors.  If the screenwriter is the person who creates the story, the director’s the one who decides how to tell the story.  Some of them were very good at this.  Others were not.

            A common flaw I saw in bad directors was an urge to make every single shot special.  It didn’t matter if it was a wide shot, a close-up, a master, or coverage.  Every shot required tons of set up and rehearsals and discussions and little tweaks and adjustments.

            Now, I’m sure some of you are saying “Isn’t that the director’s job?  To make it look good?”  Well, yes and no.  That is one element of the job, yes.  Another one is sticking to a schedule so material gets delivered on time (very important in television and the lower-budget realms), and another one is making sure the material that gets delivered is usable and cuts together well.

            So what I’d see again and again is unskilled directors who would spend hours on their first scene or two of the day, then come back from lunch and discover they still had 85% of the day’s schedule to film.  And they’d do this again and again.  I worked with some directors who’d do this on every day of a shoot.

            And this was bad for the final product, too.  All this effort was put into those first scenes no matter what they were, and then later scenes had to be rushed through and skimmed—no matter what they were.  So the final film was uneven.  It had too much punch were it didn’t need it, not enough where it did.  These guys were so focused on making each individual shot look amazing—no matter what that particular shot was—that they didn’t stop to think of the film as a whole.

            Enter… Krishna.  I worked with him on a Sci-Fi Channel show (yes, it was Sci-Fi back then) called The Chronicle and he was wonderful.  Krishna started out as a lowly crew guy (one of his first film credits is John Carpenter’s Halloween) and worked his way up, learning the whole way.  He had kind of an unwritten rule—I’m not even sure he ever put it into words.  “One pretty shot a day.”  Once a day we’d have an elaborate shot with the camera dolly or a crane (if we had one), or an elaborate one-er that involved lots of rehearsal.  Everything else would just be master-overs-coverage-done.

            I’m sure there’s a few film students reading this who might be muttering about the lack of art in television or making some snide comments about “real” directors, but keep these things in mind.  Krishna made his schedule pretty much every day.  The cast and crew loved working with him and worked twice as hard because of it.  Because he didn’t overload himself trying to do too much, he had time to make sure all his material fit together just how he wanted.  And he still had (on an average television schedule) seven pretty shots in a forty-odd minute episode.  That’s a great shot every six minutes, which meant he could use them to punctuate the moments where he wanted to have visual impact.

            And, like any rule, sometimes he’d bend it a bit.  There were days we’d do two pretty shots, or maybe we’d have an elaborate stunt or effects sequence on top of the regular pretty shot.  But these were always the exception, not the rule.  And his episodes looked fantastic.

            Many of you are probably wondering what this has to do with dialogue, yes?

            I’ve mentioned the word said a few times before.  Said is the workhorse of dialogue descriptors.  It does the job without being showy or flashy, and it’s quick and simple to use.

            I used to avoid said like the plague.  I went out of my way to make sure all my dialogue descriptors were special and pretty.  I’d actually spend time making sure I never used the same one more than once on a page.  And I never used said.  Said was for pedestrian writers with no skill.  No art.

            As some of you may recall, one of the very first critiques I ever received from a professional editor was to stop using so many flowery descriptors and start using said.  It’s advice I took to heart, and still follow today.   Hell, it’s number three on the late, great Elmore Leonard’s rules of writing.  

            That doesn’t mean I don’t use whispered or shouted or chuckledor any of those other colorful descriptors.  I just use them less often.  A lot less.  I save them for when it really counts rather than wasting them.  I want my words to have the most impact, and that means saving the good ones for the moments that count.

            So when your characters have something to say… just have them say it.

            Next time, author Thom Brannan’s going to step in here for a guest post so I can get some work done on a new project.  But I’ll be back the week after that to talk about Easter eggs.

            Until then, go write.

Ex-Patriots, my third novel and the sequel to Ex-Heroes got a slightly early release this week from Audible.com. It’s coming out in paper/e-book format in September, but if any of you are impatient you can go grab it now. There’s also a bunch of videos for their ZombieFest promotion where a bunch of folks wrote in with questions for the authors of all the featured books. So if you’ve ever wondered just how goofy I sound in real life (or look, or act, or dress…) , here’s your big chance to find out.

And now, back to our previously scheduled pontification…

So, if you’ve been reading this pile of rants for a while, you know there was a point a few years back when I helped to run an online fantasy MUD. If you’re not familiar with the term, a MUD is a multi-user dungeon. Because the game is entirely text-dependent, it was a lot like writing or reading a story. In fact, it was a great tool for polishing your writing, because if you got too long-winded with your words people wouldn’t be able to read them—the description would just scroll up the screen and vanish as other things continued to happen. You had to describe things, but you couldn’t get bogged down in useless details. People would either ignore it or lose their forward momentum as they went back to read it.

One of the things staff members had to monitor was the descriptions players wrote up for their characters. We checked for basic spelling and grammar (“His dark hair compliments his thin lips” was a common phrase). We also checked to make sure the style and wording, by way of the game’s narrative nature, wasn’t forcing actions or reactions on other players (“This scarred man may be the most terrifying person you have ever seen, and the mere sight of him makes your stomach churn with fear.”)

Now, I told you all that so I could tell you this little story…

One day, a staffer called attention to the description of a new female character. Y’see, when the game was originally built the coders left some stuff at default settings, and one of those things was the range for the description string. It was ridiculously high, but no one had ever bothered to set it because… well, there were more important things to do. And, really, who would ever fill it, right?

Well, this player had figured out the high-end range and written a description that was yards and yards and yards of purple prose. On a rough guess, their character description was around five or six hundred words. Maybe more. When you accessed it, the first dozen or so lines automatically scrolled up and off the page because it was so long.

I’m sure some of you are already thinking of character sketches you’ve done that are far longer, but keep in mind, this is all just physical description. It isn’t personality quirks or dietary preferences or anything like that. By nature of the game, it’s not clothes or weapons or equipment, either.

Needless to say, we pointed out that it was excessively long and asked her to trim it. She refused. By her reasoning, since the buffer allowed such a long description, it had to be game-legal. And if people didn’t want to see it, they didn’t need to scroll back.

We pointed out that those first dozen lines contained all the gender and age information for the character. This wasn’t “optional” material, it was stuff other players needed to know.

Still, she refused.

Now, stepping away from my tale, let’s think about this for a moment. A writer is refusing to edit a description, while at the same time admitting most people are going to skim over it or ignore it altogether. Even when authorities on the topic are explaining why it doesn’t work, said author is steadfastly refusing to change.

Does this sound remotely like a writer who’s interested in having an audience?

A common problem for all writers is when description gets too excessive. We get caught up in giving all the details and nuances of this character or those rooms or that magnificent sword which seems to be stuck in a stone… a jagged, raw stone, although one could see hints of granite and shale and flecks of white quartz that gleamed like the teeth of ancient dragons, the likes of which the world had not seen in long millennia. So perhaps calling it “a” stone was a misnomer, for it seemed to have a rich ancestry and heritage written through its structure. This was, perhaps, several stones that had come together untold eons ago, perhaps even then sensing the greater purpose they would serve and the rough bed they would form for the sleeping blade. Or perhaps it was just a coincidence that the gleaming sword had found itself in this particular malformed mound of misshapen rock, and in truth any of the many stones scattered around this subterranean chamber could have been oh dear God I think I’m making myself sick.

As I was saying…

We go one and on and sometimes lose track of the fact that somebody’s going to have to read all this. And since most readers are more interested in the story, that active element of your writing, odds are they’re going to start skimming after the fourth or fifth flowery description which they’ve come to realize has no bearing on the story. At which point, any decent storyteller should question why they’re including stuff that people are just going to skim over.

Elmore Leonard famously said that when he writes he leaves out all the parts people would skip anyway. Alfred Hitchcock said drama is life with all the boring parts taken out. And I’ll tell you that a six hundred word description of how a character’s hair hangs over her ears is either wasting time or is going to bring things to a crashing halt.

As I’ve mentioned once or thrice before, this kind of overwriting is a deadly mistake in screenplays. Screenwriting is a very concise, minimal form of storytelling. One of the most common complaints I hear from professional readers is when the writer puts in piles of description that just doesn’t need to be there.

That, of course, leads to another issue with massive over-description. We all tend to form our own mental pictures of people and objects in stories. My lovely lady and I were chatting the other day about Lee Child’s character Jack Reacher and realized we both had very different ideas about what he looked like. That’s part of the joy of books. We can all have our own view of different characters like Taran Wanderer or Harry Bosch or St. George or Stu Redman. And nothing’s more distracting or disruptive than to be constantly reminded of all the many details the author’s putting in that don’t match up with that mental picture we’ve already formed.

Now, there’s another side to description, and that’s when writers never actually describe anything. Sometimes this is an attempt to invoke mystery or suspense (check out that dark figure across the street watching our main character). Other times it’s a way to evoke an emotional response with a clever metaphor or simile (when the knife sinks into your back and it’s like every painful sensation you’ve ever had in your life got balled up, hammered flat, and slipped beneath your shoulder blade).

And sometimes… well, sometimes it’s just a cheat. I can try to avoid the monster for as long as possible, which helps build suspense and dread, but eventually I need to say what it is. It’s not uncommon for a writer to try to find a way around an actual description at this point. After all, I’ve been hyping X for three-quarters of the manuscript now, and an honest description may not live up to all that hype.

I got to interview David Goyer (screenwriter of Blade, Batman Begins, and many others) a few years back. He’d just taken a turn in the director’s chair and I asked him if doing so had affected how he approached writing scripts. He laughed, admitted it had, and then told me a very funny story about working on a script with Guillermo del Toro. At one point, it seems, Goyer had “cheated” in the script and just described something as “a complete nightmare.” As they went through, del Toro pointed out this bit, shook his head, and said “What does that even mean? That’s boollshit.”

Which, Goyer admitted, it was. He’d dodged writing any sort of description because he knew it was something the director and art department guys would deal with. But he’d given them nothing to work with. Which was fine… until he was the director and under the gun to figure out what the hell it was that writer-Goyer couldn’t be bothered to put down on paper.

So, here’s an easy tip. It’s so easy I bet half of you will shake your head and ignore it. And some of you are probably already doing it without thinking about it.

If you’re going to describe something, have a reason to describe it. Thats’ it. Not only that, have a reason for the level of detail you’re using. A soldier in a war zone, a housewife, and a forensic examiner can all see a bullet hole in a person’s head, but they’re all going to treat it differently. And if it takes three or four paragraphs to explain what the housewife sees, where does that put the forensic examiner?

If you’re going to describe a person, have a reason for doing it. I’m betting nobody here can list off all the people they crossed paths with the last time they were pushing a cart through the grocery store. Oh, one or two might stand out in some small way, but let’s face it… there were probably close to a hundred. They just weren’t important in the long run. You can’t describe the police officer who gave you your last ticket, but you can probably give a lot of details about the last person you went out to dinner with.

Give descriptions the same weight you’d give characters or dialogue. Y’see, Timmy, if you waste them on the little things, they won’t have any strength when you get to the big things.

And then… well, then you’ve got nothing.

Next time, I’d like to ramble on about cooking school.

Until then, go write.