May 10, 2018 / 3 Comments

Meanwhile, At A Secret Island Base…

            As has come up here once or twice or thrice, I like to watch bad movies (and usually offer a bunch of half-drunken live tweets as I do).  I’m a big believer in learning from the bad stuff over copying the good stuff.  Plus it’s kinda fun, in a masochistic sort of way.  I mean, statistically, somebodymust’ve made a good shark movie, right?
            Yeah, sure, Jaws, but I’m thinking in the forty years since then…
            Anyway, a few times now I’ve noticed an issue that I’ve also caught in some literary fiction.  By which I just mean “fiction on the page,” to distinguish it from cinematic fiction.  It can be brutal in movies, but it stings in books, too.   So I wanted to blab on for a minute or three about an aspect of pacing that seems to get overlooked a lot.
            It’s a very natural part of storytelling to shift between locations or timeframes. At a particularly dramatic moment, we may leap over to a parallel storyline, or maybe flash back to a key moment that happened hours, weeks, or even years ago.  Depending on our chosen genre, we may leap across centuries or galaxies.
            And that’s cool.  We all love it when a story covers a lot of ground and shifts between points of view. It lets us tell multiple stories and tie them together in clever ways, or to get information across using different methods.
            But…
            There are still some things I need to keep in mind as a storyteller. As beings that live more-or-less linear lives, we tend to notice when there’s a jarring difference in the passage of time.  We understand that time spent here is also time spent there… even if we don’t see it happen.
            That’s the thing to keep in mind.  Just because we cut from scene A to scene B, it doesn’t mean scene A stops. Time still passes.  Characters keep doing things.  They continue to talk and discuss and explain and comment on things.
            It’s not unusual to skip over swaths of time in a narrative.  As I was recently reminded, we don’t need to see the four-day cross country trip if… well, nothing happens during those four days. No matter how beautiful the language or evocative the imagery is, if nothing happens to further the plot, it’s an irrelevant scene.  Or chapter, as it was in my case.
            But here’s the thing I need to remember.  That time is still passing.  My character may get on the bus at the end of chapter six and get off at the start of chapter seven, but that doesn’t mean the journey was instantaneous.  There were meals and probably some conversations and a few bathroom breaks and some sleeping.
            More to the point, it wasn’t instantaneous for everyone else.  Four days passed for all the other characters, too. Time progressed for everyone.
            Now, I can fudge this a bit in a book.  It’s much harder to do in a movie, but in a book we can be made to understand that time didcome to a halt between chapters nine and eleven.  We went off to deal with something else for fifteen pages, yet when we come back everyone’s still standing here with pistols drawn, cards on the table, or awkward confessions hanging in the air.
            But…
            Yeah, another but.  Sorry.
            Whenever I have one of these cutaways, in prose or on screen, I need to consider the pacing and flow.  My readers will need to switch gears and jump into a new headspace for this different scene with different characters.  Sometimes it can be fantastic.  Cutting away can increase tension, ramp up the stakes, or just heighten emotions.  Done right, it can take my readers from screaming to laughing and back.
            Done wrong… and it just reminds people that things weren’t happening.  That the  action just froze during the time we shifted attention to something else.  The writer skipped over it… and they assume the characters did, too.
            I saw this in a friend’s book.  Some characters went through a major event together, drove two hours back home… and thenstarted talking about what had happened.  And my comment was, what were they talking about during the two hour drive?  Or there was a recent geekery movie where one of the aspiring victims was running from the homicidal killer, and then we cut away to six or seven minutes of the local sheriff discussing the recent killings over coffee.  And then… back to the victim.  Still running.  Still with the killer a few yards behind…
            And I did it once, too. In an early draft of Ex-Heroes, right in the middle of the climactic battle, the story cut away to a slow, almost introspective flashback.  Conversations were had, moral decisions were made, and in the end a plan was created to help save as many—WAIT, back to the fight with the zombie demon!!
            My beta readers made fun of me, too.
            Part of this is a pacing issue. If the action is happening with breakneck, life-or-death speed in this scene, I probably want to be cautious about jumping over to a slow stretch of decompressed storytelling.  I don’t want my reader stumbling as they try to figure out what’s happening and when it’s happening.
            Y’see, Timmy, when that stumble happens, it knocks us out of the story.  The cutaway brings things to a jarring halt.  We go from experiencing the story to analyzing it.  Puzzling over it.  Maybe even… laughing at it.
            Laughing at, mind you.  Not laughing with.
            So be careful where you make your cuts.
            Next week I’d like to talk about another aspect of writing that’s really close to this, one I’ve been bringing up a lot lately, to be honest.  This’ll flow really well right into it.
            Until then… go write.
September 22, 2017 / 5 Comments

Hitting The Fan

            Running a little late this week. Sorry.
            Truth be told, I don’t have a ton of time so this is going to be a bit short. So’s next week, honestly. Right now I’m trying to do a bunch of pre-publicity stuff for the release of Paradox Bound next week, and next week is… well, four signing events with about five hundred miles between them, plus some other stuff, plus getting ready to go to New York Comic Con..
            I’m going to be busy, okay?
            Plus, I have a bad habit of over-preparing for things. A holdover from being dirt poor.  I just assume everything bad is going to happen and try to cover all my bases.
           Of course, inevitably, the bad thing is something I didn’t plan for. I mean, if I’d planned for it, it wouldn’t be that bad, right?  It might be annoying, a minor obstacle at best, but it’d be tough to think of it as some kind of crisis.
            Anyway…
            I wanted to talk today about the moment in a story when things go wrong and our characters suddenly have to depend on their wits to make it through.  They’re in a position they didn’t intend to be in.  I’m a big believer in that moment.  I think it’s what seperates a lot of average-to-good stories from great ones.

           Let’s use a heist as an example.  We’ve all read a good heist story (or at least seen one of the Ocean’s Eleven movies).  In a heist, we usually see our heroes and/or heroines go through lots and lots of planning, working out every detail. They know when the guards change shift, how long the elevators take, how much weight sets off the pressure plates, and more.

            But then—always—something goes wrong.  There’s a new alarm system.  They’ve changed the guard rotation.  There’s a power outage before our power outage—one we’re not in control of!—and Jake doesn’t know!  How’s he going to get out of there?!
            This is the moment we grow to love characters. When they have to think fast to get themselves out of a tricky situation.  When they’ve got to do something they weren’t prepared to do.
            Now, on the flipside of this… there’s a show I’ve been watching, and I really want to like it. It’s got a lot of elements I usually enjoy.  But nothing ever goes wrong for them.  I mean, they’ll hit problems.  Have thing they need to deal with.  Sometimes major adversaries to overcome.
            But again and again, they’d hit a problem, figure out what they needed to do in order to beat it… and that would work.  I need to do this.  I did this.  The end.
            Sounds kind of unsatisfying, doesn’t it?
            Spoilers—it was.
            This all ties back to something I’ve mentioned here before.  When someone’s so over-prepared that nothing’s a challenge, my story is boring.  My characters aren’t being pushed in any way, so it diminishes whatever’s driving the plot.
            Likewise, if my characters barely even need to be prepared and nothing’s a challenge… well, then my story’s still boring,  It might even be more boring.  Because now, no matter what this week’s crisis was, it’s clearly something that takes minimal effort to deal with.
            And let me take a quick minute to clarify something about effort.  Effort doesn’t just mean gritting my teeth and sweating.  If we know the hatch Wakko needs to open weighs three hundred pounds and he heeeeeeeaaaaaves it open, that’s just planning to do something strenuous.  What we’re talking about is when Wakko goes to heave open that three hundred pound hatch… and somebody padlocked it since yesterday when he scouted the place.  And he’s still only got ninety seconds to get it open before the zombie horde reaches us.
            That’s going to take some effort.
            And impress the hell out of my readers when Wakko does it.
            Speaking of readers, hopefully I’ll see some of you next week during my crazy California signing tour.  Or next weekend at NYCC.
            Until then… go write.
            And put some effort into it.
            If any of you happen to follow me on Twitter, you know I have a habit of watching bad B-movies on the weekend–usually while I’m geeking a bit.  While I do, I tweet out random observations about the story, dialogue, plot points, and so on. More often than not… they’re not positive ones.
            There’s usually a lot of drinking going on, too.

             A few weekends back I was watching this movie that went for the standard “group of assorted soldiers thrown into an unnatural situation” scenario.  The same one that’s been kind of become the standard since Aliens did it with the Colonial Marines.  Often copied, never duplicated, as they say.

            Maybe twenty minutes in, one of the civilians asked a grunt why they were all so dedicated to the sergeant.  And said grunt told him this two or three minute story about how, five years ago, they’d been stationed on Theta Sigma, things went belly-up one night on patrol, and Sarge was the only one who kept it together.  He got them out of that hell-zone on the death planet, and he even carried Bronsky for the last three miles.
            Then, maybe thirty five-forty minutes in, one of the civilian scientists asked the lieutenant why he was such a hard ass.  And he told her about how four years ago he’d been walking the perimeter, checking on his men, and he found some civilians in a restricted area. But he cut them some slack… and then the Lictors attacked. If he’d been hard then, if he’d sent them away as soon as he found them, those three people’d be alive today.
            And then someone sat with the Sarge for a while as he recovered from a wound (he’d been impaled right through the chest, and that put him off his feet for, y’know, almost six hours).  She asked how he could stay so positive, making jokes while the whole mission was turning to crap around them.  And he told her about how, seven years ago, he’d been on this bug hunt on Ceti Alpha Five…
            Look, you get the idea, right?  Do I really need to finish that story?
            Yeah, most movies don’t do it that many times, sure.  Still… that element’s kind of become a standard in a lot of military stories, too, hasn’t it?   The soldier/Marine/Amazon/Mooncop who gives us a flashback in dialogue to explain a strange bond, a weird character tic, or maybe even that scar she’s got that runs from her temple down past her jaw. 
            Here’s the funny thing, though. This never happens in Aliens.  Not once. Not even for a few seconds.
            Y’see, Timmy, in Aliens the story only goes forward. We don’t need to go backwards to learn interesting stuff about these characters.  We’re learning about them through how they react to things now, not how they reacted to them six years ago in Kazakhstan.
            If the only way I can make my characters interesting is by flashing back six or seven years… maybe I don’t have interesting characters.  Not now, anyway.  It’s possible they were interesting back then, but if they’re interesting now… why’s all their character development in the past?
            At the very least, I don’t have an interesting story.  If I did, wouldn’t there be  cool stuff happening now?  Stuff my characters could be reacting to and giving the reader a better sense of who they are, even as it drives the plot and story forward?
            If it’s only that recollection or flashback that’s making them cool… maybe that’s the story I should be telling.
            Anyway, just wanted to toss that out real quick.
            Thursday, our regularly scheduled post.
            Until then, go write.
September 5, 2015 / 2 Comments

The Pace Car

            Okay, first off, I’m afraid I need to have a shameful self-promotional moment. The Ex-Heroes series is Amazon’s Kindle deal of the month.  You can pick up digital copies of all four books for less than ten dollars.  So… there’s that.
            And now, moving on to our actual topic of the week…
            Last week I gave some more-or-less quick answers to a couple questions and requests folks had left here on the ranty blog.  This week I wanted to address one in particular that was worth a little more space.
            So… here we go.
            I’d love to hear your thoughts on plotting and pacing. I’m struggling with knowing when to do what plot elements so things don’t drag and so they seem natural, and don’t feel like the story is on rails.
            Okay, this is another tough one because every story is going to have its own specific pace. 
            One of the reasons a lot of folks end up worrying about this, in my opinion, is because of an often misunderstood writing rule that gets thrown at them all the time—start with action!  There’s a bunch of problems with this statement, many of which I’ve talked about before, but one key one is that it gives people a very skewed view of pacing.  If my story starts cranked up to eleven, it’s hard to make anything feel urgent after that point.  And if it doesn’t start at eleven, well, why is anyone going to keep reading, right?
            Part of this is about dramatic structure, knowing where things should happen in my story for maximum impact.  It’s also about compressing time so things don’t sprawl.  Yeah, maybe four hours passed while Wakko was pulling his turn standing watch, but do I really need eight pages of him standing around doing… well, nothing?
            I think that’s one of the biggest problems when people have “pacing issues.”  It’s not whether or not my chapter is slow or fast, if it’s filled with action or dialogue or inner monologues. It’s about whether or not anything’s actually happening.  When my story come to a grinding halt, it’s not because I’ve got characters doing research instead of kung-fu… it’s because the story’s come to a grinding halt.  It’s stopped moving forward
            A good way to check pacing is to go through my story and ask myself this—what purpose does this element/ scene/ chapter have in the overall story?  Is it forwarding the plot?  Is it forwarding a character’s story?  If it doesn’t do either of these things… why am I spending time on it?  As William Goldman said in The Princess Bride, “What with one thing and another, three years passed.”
            Speaking of famous screenwriters, Shane Black once made a great observation about what he called “shoe leather” scenes in scripts.  If I have a scene where two guys are having a conversation and anotherscene where there’s a key news story on the television… why aren’t they the samescene?  A good part of storytelling is trying to accomplish two things at once rather than spreading things so thin they’re see-through.  It’s great to have a character scene, sure, but maybe those character moments could also advance the plot somehow.  I really want to use a lot of this research material, but could it advance someone’s story?
            Y’see, Timmy, if I’m lucky and somewhat skilled, my audience might let me have one scene that doesn’t really do anything.  Maybe two.  But pushing it to a third means my story is dragging, and four is going to get eyerolls.
            Now, all that being said (yep, there’s always a however), there is still one thing to keep in mind for pacing.  Every story is going to start slow and pick up speed, yes.  And all those stories are going to be moving at their own pace. I need to be careful, though, when I try to slow things down, for whatever reason.  If you’ve ever driven a car with a manual transmission (or know of such things), you’ve probably heard the term downshifting.  It’s when I shift into a lower gear to help with slowing down (you’ve probably seen James Bond do it a few times).  It’s one thing to go from fifth gear to fourth, it’s something else entirely to go from fifth down to second.  Odds are that’ll going to leave parts of my transmission  (read—story) scattered behind me, possibly on fire.
            So if my story involves a lot of zero-to-sixty-to-ten-to ninety-to-fifteen pacing—yes, even though it’s still technically moving forward—I may want to rethink a few things.  And if it doesn’t involve any forward motion…
            Well, I may need to rethink a lot of things.
            Next time, I’d like to talk about how Darth Vader killed Luke Skywalker’s father.

            Until then… go write.

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