Category: narrative

Okay, we’re in the middle of a big discussion/ lecture/ infodump about story structure. To be more exact, the different types of story structure, because there are a bunch of them and they all serve a different purpose. That’s what I blathered on about last week. Well, that and linear structure. So if you skipped last week, you might want to jump back (look, a handy link) and read that first. Or maybe re-read it as sort of a refresher before we dive into this week’s little rant.

Now I want to talk about narrative structure. As I mentioned last time, these things have a few different names, depending on who’s talking or teaching, so maybe your stuffy literature professor called this syuzhet or something like that. But for now (and because it’s what I’ve done in the past) I’m going to call this narrative structure.

Remember how I said linear structure is how the characters experience the story? The narrative structure is how I, the author, decide to tell the story. It’s the order and style and viewpoint I choose for how things are going to unfold. It’s me saying I want to start with a prologue or ten minutes before the finale and then jump back to the beginning. Or that every third or fourth chapter will be a flashback. Or that I’m going to tell the whole thing from the point of view of the sidekick instead of the superhero. Or maybe, somehow, all of these things in one story. All of these are narrative decisions.

Actually, that’s a good before-we-go-any-further thing. My story might use a point of view or a device (say, a journal or epistolary form) that gives the appearance of “telling” the story. For our purposes here, though, if I talk about the narration I’m talking about me, the writer, and the choices I make. Watsonian vs Doylistic, remember? Because that first-person narrator or journal scribbler doesn’t say or do anything I don’t want them to. No I don’t care what that one other writer says about the characters having a life of their own and telling the writer what they want. I’m in charge. I’m God in the world of the story.

So, now that we’ve got our weekly blasphemy out of the way…

In a good number of stories we encounter, the linear structure and narrative structure are identical. They’re linear stories. Things start with Phoebe on Monday, follows her to Tuesday, and conclude on Wednesday. Simple, straightforward, very common. These books may shift point of view or format, but the narrative pretty much just goes forward hour by hour, day by day. My book, Dead Moon, fits in this category. It’s got a bunch of twists and reveals, but the narrative is pretty much a straight line from the beginning to the end. No flashbacks or frames or anything.

I’m not going to talk about this type of narrative too much because… well, I already did. If my narrative matches my linear structure, any narrative issues I might have are also going to be linear ones. And we talked about those last week (here’s another handy link in case you missed the last one).

Our focus right now is going to be stories where the narrative doesn’t follow the linear structure of the story. Sometimes the story has flashbacks or a frame, where it’s mostly linear with a few small divergences. Others might split the story between multiple timeframes, with one thread taking place in the present and one in, say, the 1950s. Or maybe the story’s broken up into lots sections and the reader needs to keep track of how they all line up—these are called non-linear stories, or you may have heard it as non-linear storytelling. It was the hip new thing for a while there. My book, The Broken Room, has a large flashback section where Natalie talks about her past, and it’s worth noting that her extended flashback/ retelling is all linear within its own subset of the book (she’s very precise about that sort of thing).

It’s important to understand narrative structure is more than just switching around my story elements. It means I need to start actively thinking about how all these structures interact. So here’s a few things I need to keep in mind when I start playing with my narrative structure.

First off, putting things in a new narrative order doesn’t change the linear structure of my story. As I mentioned above, the week goes Monday through Friday, and this is true even if the first thing I tell you about is what happened on Thursday. Monday was still three days earlier, and the characters and events in my story have to acknowledge that. I can’t start my book with everyone on Thursday baffled who stole the painting, then roll the story back to Monday where everyone was a witnesses who saw the thief’s face.

That’s a kinda stupid, overly-simple example, yeah, but you’d be surprised how often I’ve seen this problem crop up. Sometimes in really simple ways like this. Storytellers want to switch stuff around, but then they ignore the fact that just because they told us about Thursday before Wednesday doesn’t mean Thursday happened first. Again, the story collapses when the narrative elements are put in linear order. This is a really easy problem to avoid, it just requires a little more time and work.

Yeah, weird, I know. Telling a story in a more complex way is more work. Go figure.

The second thing to keep in mind when experimenting with narrative structure is… why? Seriously, why am I breaking up my story instead of telling it in order? I mean, yeah, all that non-linear stuff was edgy and bold for a while, and a lot of folks still do it, but… what’s the point of it in my story? Why am I starting five years ago instead of today? Why do I have this flashback at that point?

As an aside, I know some people hate “why is it happening now” as a story critique, and in a Watsonian way, I kind of get that. Sometimes things happen just because they happen. That’s how life works. I think sometimes things can work this way. I think sometimes they can’t.

But remember, we’re not talking about the Watsonian view of the story, we’re talking about the Doylist one. So why did I, the author, arrange these events in this way in the story? What effects am I trying to create? How is the narrative improved by shaping it this way?

And if I can’t explain how the narrative’s improved by shaping it this way—or if it plainly isn’t improved—again, what’s the point?

The third and final issue with a complex narrative structure is a little more subjective.

Last week I mentioned that we all try to put things in linear order because it’s natural for us. It’s pretty much an automatic function of our brains. This flashback took place before that one. That’s a flash forward. This flashback’s showing us something we saw earlier, but from a different point of view. Our brains latch onto the little details (or sometimes the big headers) and sort things accordingly.

But our brains have limits. There’s only so much we can keep track of and—let’s be honest—only so much we’re willing to keep track of. if I give you four or five numbers or letters and ask you to put them in order, it’s not a big deal. G X B N. See? You did that without too much effort.

On the other hand, if I throw a deck of cards on the floor and ask you to put them all in order… well, now this is a task. Heck, first you’ve got to find all the cards. And are they all supposed to be in numerical order or should you be doing them by suits? Are aces high or low? And if this is all in order, where do we put the jokers?

Point is, there’s a point where I’ve tweaked my story so much, my audience is going to spend less time reading it and more time analyzing it. Diagramming it like some photo-and-yarn covered conspiracy board. When somebody hits the ninth flashback done in a third tense from a fifth point of view… there’s a good chance they’ll need to pause to reorganize or re-analyze things in their head. And every time they have to pause, it’s breaking the flow. It’s knocking them out of the narrative when I want them to be sinking deeper into it.

And once I break the flow, that’s when people set my book aside to go have a glass of wine and watch gardening shows. I can say whatever I want about art or attention spans or readers putting in some effort, but at the end of it people can’t get invested in my story if they can’t figure out my story. And if they’re not invested… that’s on me.

Y’see, Timmy, narrative structure can be overdone if I’m not careful. I know some of the examples above sound a little extreme, but the truth is… they’re not. I’ve seen manuscripts where writers tossed linear order out the window and jumped tenses and povs and timeframes a dozen times. And some of them did all of that in the first fifty pages. Seriously.

This is something that can be tough to spot and fix, because it’s going to depend a lot on my ability to put myself in the reader’s shoes. Since I know the whole linear story from the moment I sit down, the narrative is always going to make a lot more sense to me, but for someone just picking up my story… this might be a bit of a trainwreck.

That’s narrative structure. However I decide to tell my story, it still needs to have a linear structure. Maybe even more important, it still needs to be understandable.

Next time, I’ll try to explain how linear structure and narrative structure combine to (hopefully) form a powerful dramatic structure.

Until then… go write.

And now for something completely different…

Everyone else is talking about how soulless IP is, so since that’s covered I thought instead I’d answer a question sent to me over on Twitter. Which was… 

“As a bad movie expert, where does one find the good b-movies that come out nowadays? Is there a modern day Roger Corman?”

Okay, first off, there are people who’ve put far more study and hours into B-movies (bad and good) than I ever have (seriously, check out Patton Oswalt’s Silver Screen Fiend). I watch a lot of them, yeah, but I freely admit there are some holes in my education. On the other hand, I also have a much more rounded film education than a lot of folks—being a huge fan, having worked as a film journalist, and having worked both above and below the line on film projects. I worked on a movie that spent three weeks at number one at the box office, another movie that’s considered one of the worst films ever made, and a double-handful of movies I guarantee you’ve never, ever heard of.

All that said, I think B-movies have a fascinating history, and I think we need to consider it—and how we define them—in order to answer that question.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin…

On the off chance you didn’t know, B-movies started out as the lower-billed movie on a double ticket. You’d go to the movies for your big-budget studio picture (sometimes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars), but the studio’d also tack on something a little simplistic and low-brow so you felt like you were getting your full 40¢ worth. Usually this was a genre movie—westerns, horror, comedy, early sci-fi stuff. Some of it was even based on hahahhahhaaaacomic books.

Double-bills became less common in the ‘50s, but it turned out there was enough of a market for these lower-budget genre B-movies to keep producing them and putting them out on their own. They were cheap, usually aiming more to entertain than artistically enlighten, and they tended to at least make back the meager investment in them (a winning formula by almost anyone’s standards).

Plus, this became an entry point for writers, directors, actors… Move to Hollywood, start with small positions on small projects, learn stuff, work your way up. Lots of film icons and heavyweights started out in B-movies. Seriously, pick your favorite actor/director/screenwriter and scroll down IMDb to their first few credits. There’s probably some B-movies there. Look—here’s a very young Leonard Nimoy in the giant ant movie THEM (1954).

Then came the 1970s. The 70s blew the idea of “B-movies” out of the water and upended the whole film industry. Jaws. Halloween. Star Wars. There was a sci-fi boom and a horror boom. Suddenly what had been B-movies were dominating the box office.

So we had an early 80’s rush of people trying to copy that success. Lots of studios tried to manufacture B-movies with the intent of them becoming megahits. And within just a few years of that we had even more radical changes in the industry. Cable television and home video. Now there was a desperateneed for content. We need to fill video store shelves and tens of cable channels!

So this, in my opinion, is the second golden age of what we tend to think of as B-movies. Once again, we need stuff so people feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. Lots of cheaper movies aimed at pure entertainment more than art.

BUT…

It’s important to note these were all still people with a degree of training. They weren’t grabbing people in Tulsato make these movies, they were grabbing people in Hollywood. Because Hollywood was where all the crews and actors and equipment were. And those cameras are super-expensive, so the studios weren’t handing one over to just anyone. They went to the people who were dedicated filmmakers—who’d moved to Los Angeles to be in the film industry, taken PA jobs so they could learn and office jobs to be near the decision makers. Yeah, sure maybe you had an 8mm camera at your home in Tulsa, but that just wasn’t going to cut it in the 35mm age.

(minor segue—go read Bruce Campbell’s If Chins Could Kill for a great story of him, Sam Raimi, and Rob Tapert trying to screen an 8mm print of their movie that they’d already blown up to 16mm and then tried to blow up again to 35mm)

(go on—support your local bookstore!)

So, in my eyes, this second golden age (silver age?) re-established B-movies as stepping stones. Studios were now willing to take some gambles on lots of lower-budget stuff, and there were a lot of films that needed filmmakers. And even if they were less experienced, they still had basic, baseline experience.

I also think this is why there are so many great B movies from this era. It was a perfect confluence of lots of experienced, dedicated people waiting for an opportunity and studios willing to take lots of chances. Or at least say “Yeah, sure, whatever… just have it done by the 15th.” Which also meant some people had a chance to slip in a little art after all…

But as studios evolved, we began to see less and less of these low budget B-movies as execs leaned more and more into what we usually now call “tentpole” movies. Things either got larger budgets or… got forgotten. Heck, there was a brief-point in the late 90’s when horror movies almost broke out of their low-budget niche and started getting $40, $50, and even $60 million dollar budgets. But it didn’t last long and that’s a whole ‘nother story.

And that brings us to what I think was the last big B-movie boom. Our bronze age. And this is an odd one, I admit.

SyFy. Or, as it was known then, the Sci-Fi Channel.

There was a solid seven-eight year period where SciFi Pictures put out a new original movie every single week. Plus a few multi-part miniseries. Remember that? It was one of their claims to fame. Seriously, go look up Sci-Fi Pictures and see how many movies they put out. And then they became SyFy and put out that many more again. There’s close to a thousand movies altogether on those lists, spread over a little less than a decade. Sci-fi, horror, fantasy. Were they all winners? Hell no. But even if we only say 20% of them are worth watching, that’s still around 200 solid movies. More importantly, it created opportunities again and gave a lot of skilled (and, yeah, some not-so-skilled) people the chance to move up a notch or three on the Hollywoodladder.

Now, with all that in mind, the original question. Where do we find B-movies today?

I don’t think they really exist anymore. Sorry.

I shall now explain.

One thing that defined filmmaking for ages was a level of *gasp* gatekeeping. As I mentioned above, like most arts, filmmaking required a lot of rare, specialized equipment and the knowledge to use that equipment correctly. Plus I’d need to understand narrative storytelling and visual storytelling. One thing you’ll notice throughout this little history is that most B-movies, in all eras, came from people who already had a degree of experience. They’d been exposed to filmmaking. They understood concepts like framing, camera angles, coverage, crossing the line, and more. Yeah, we can always point to a few exceptions here and there, but the vast majority of folks making B-movies came out of Hollywood.

Today we live in a world that’s both wonderful and, well, a little troublesome. Today most of us are carrying whole camera/editing packages around with us. You might even be reading this on one. It’s ridiculously easy to shoot a movie today. Anyone can, experienced or not.

And on one level, that’s fantastic. I’m a huge fan of giving everyone the tools to do the thing they love. I mean, how many fantastic filmmakers did we lose because they couldn’t make it out to Hollywood? It’s a huge, terrifying leap—said as someone who did it!

On another level, I think this easiness encourages a lot of folks to leap ahead before they’re really ready. They’re getting stuck in, as the Brits say, without understanding a lot of the concepts I mentioned above. And again—on many levels this is great. You can try different shots, experiment with lighting and effects, and find out if Wakko can really act or hasn’t improved since that fifth grade play. And you can do all this for free—no worrying about the price of film or equipment rentals or truck rentals to haul around the equipment.

But I think for a lot of folks the current mindset tells us this isn’t practice, it’s the finished product. It’s done and ready to go. And there are lots of studios and distributors who are fine with slapping a logo on those practice shots, FX tests, and audition tapes and putting them out there. Honestly, if the technology existed back in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, they probably would’ve done it then, too.

That’s why, in my opinion, we don’t see those kind of quality B movies being made right now. Not in any sort of quantity, anyway. Studio/ distributors aren’t dependant on the pool of people who already know how to make movies and just need someone to make an investment in them. Distributors can get lesser movies for pennies, fill all the empty spaces in those digital shelves, and easily make back the minimal amount they paid for it.

Again, for the people itching to fight—I’m not saying there aren’t any good movies made this way. But they’re very, very rare. Much rarer than they were when the requirements tended to favor filmmakers who already had a degree of experience. I’ve been doing this Saturday geekery thing for a little over three years now, probably close to 45 weekends a year, easily averaging three movies each time. And in all that time of watching “B-movies” made in the past twenty years I’ve stumbled across… six? Maybe seven where I said “Holy crap, you all need to watch this.”

And as far as being a stepping stone, well… This is already super-long, but let me close with a quick story.

Way back in the day, a friend and I had worked up a pitch for a potential series, and we were toying with the idea of shooting a quick teaser trailer for it. This was when “sizzle reels” were really common, to give producers a sense of what the finished product would be like. We talked about it with a producer friend of ours and she shook her head, vigorously, and told us it’d be a waste of money.

The problem, she explained (and I’m paraphrasing) is that the people who make the big money decisions rarely have great imaginations. They don’t look at something and see potential, they look at it and just see what it is. If we shot a super low-budget, semi-professional trailer for our high-concept sexy-vampire-wars series, they wouldn’t imagine it with better lighting or hotter actors or cooler stunt work. All most of them would see is… a super low-budget, semi-professional trailer.

Which meant we’d probably make a super low-budget, semi-professional show, right?

Which is why a lot of these films never really work as stepping stones.

And that’s waaaaaay too much about B-movies. But to be honest, it was something I’d been thinking about before the question was asked.

Take care of yourself, wear your mask, go write.