Category: point of view

This week’s random topic is something that’s been gnawing at me for a while. I’ve been batting it around, trying to come up with a good way to explain it, and I think the catch is there really isn’t a good way to do it. This is one of those slightly-more-advanced writing things I either understand or I don’t. If I do… I probably already know to avoid it.

Anyway let’s see if I can stumble through some analogies and examples and hopefully make this a little clearer.

You’ve probably heard the term framing once or twice. It has to do with how I choose to present things in a story. If my character is talking about something, how they’re saying it is part of the framing. So is how people react to it—in both out loud and unspoken ways. How I choose to describe it in the text says a lot about it, too. Framing can involve a lot of subtext, and a lot of not-so-sub text.

(also, just to be clear, we’re not taking about frame stories which are something else altogether that I’ve meant to ramble on about for a while now)

So let’s jump storytelling forms for a moment and I’ll give our first example.

In moviemaking (and photography) people talk about framing a shot. This is a very similar idea. If I’ve got Phoebe on camera, it’s how I’m choosing to set up this shot. How are going to set the edges of the shot? What’s in the background or foreground? How close are we to her? What angle are we seeing her from? Is the camera static or moving? And if it’s moving, how is it moving?

How I frame the shot affects how we, the audience, perceive this shot. It’s an added layer of meaning. A sort of visual subtext, if you will.

Here’s an example I’ve given you a few times before. Let’s say our scene is the young lovers dashing up to the bedroom. One pushes the other down on the bed and then does a sexy, laughing striptease for them. Easy to picture, yes?

However… we’re going to frame this with a handheld camera, looking though the crack between the closet doors. As the shirt gets tossed and those pants are wiggled out of, the camera can tilt one way or another, so the audience can see as much as possible. Where things land, what state of undress people are in. But, y’know… all through that narrow crack.

And this has suddenly become different scene, hasn’t it? Not so fun and sexy anymore. Now we’re just waiting to see who—or what—comes bursting out of that closet. because there’s definitely something in that closet, right? They wouldn’t be framing the shot this way if there wasn’t somebody in there watching all this happen.

That’s kind of the key point I’m awkwardly getting at here. Things can get weird in movies when there’s a big disconnect between what’s going on in the scene and what the subtext tells us is going on in the scene. One of them will usually override the other, and since movies are a visual format, the camerawork—the framing—can override any spoken text pretty easily.

Now, a lot of time this is deliberate. That scene I just described above (and a few hundred just like it) is a pretty standard horror movie shot, especially for slasher movies. The unknown killer watches from the closet. Or maybe just that pervy voyeur they’ll yell at when he stumbles out of the closet (and then they’ll throw him out of the room and he’ll be the one who gets killed). Point is, the storytellers (in this case, the filmmakers) are deliberately subverting what should be a sexy scene by framing it in a way that make it very creepy.

Thing is… it isn’t always that way. If you’ve ever followed along with Saturday geekery on Twitter, you know one of my common complaints is when inexperienced filmmakers try to copy a shot from another movie without really understanding why it worked in that movie. I’ve seen folks do the “peeking out of the closet” shot or the “looking through the window from outside” shot and they did it because, well, that’s how you film sexy scenes in horror movies, right? Wasn’t it super hot when she was swaying at the end of the bed and pulling open her…wait, what? You thought it was ominous? Why? Now suddenly the film is stumbling because the sexy scene is creepy as hell but it was supposed to just be… well, sexy.

And the audience will sense this screw-up. Even if we don’t always know the syntax or conjugation, so to speak, we know enough filmic language to realize something wasn’t landing right there. We’ll figure out eventually from context (y’know, when something doesn’t come out of the closet), but that stumble is going to break the flow and throw us out of the movie as we try to figure out what’s actually going on. Was this a creepy scene or a sexy scene or what? How were we supposed to feel about it?
And we can frame things in our writing, too. We can layer in that subtext through our characters and their reactions, our story structure, even just with with our vocabulary choices. We can make insults sound like compliments, word something innocent so it could be flirty, make it really clear how weak that guy making the loud, angry speech is.

But…

If we’re not careful when we do this, we can end up with that same stumble I was just talking about inexperienced filmmakers causing. If Yakko just insulted Phoebe but my word choice makes it sounds a little too much like a compliment, even though we know Yakko wouldn’t compliment her… well, wait, what’s going on? Or if everything structure-wise says this is when I learn if Phoebe is the super-werewolf or not and instead it’s revealed that we first went to the Moon in 1969… I mean, that’s not remotely the answer we were looking for. It’s not even really an answer. It’s just a random fact. Is it even relevant to this story? And why is it in italics? Why are we emphasizing it? Did somebody think the Moon landing was in some other year?

I know this is one of those things that sounds kind of silly and self-apparent, but I’m surprised now often I’ll come across it. A writer pretty clearly trying to do X, but they’ve set everything up as Y. Unusual framing. Odd vocabulary. Weird emphasis. Things that feel like they’re meant for a different version of this scene. And like with the films, I think these writers are trying to copy something they saw work, but haven’t quite worked out why it worked.

And that’s why this is a tough thing to explain. It’s hard for me to say “make sure you’re using the right subtext for your scene” when I don’t know the scene or the subtext you’re currently using or the effect you’re trying to create with it. It’s going to be different for every writer, every project, every scene.

Okay, I know this hasn’t been super-helpful, so let me toss out a few last suggestions that should make it easier to avoid this issue.

1) Know what words mean—This should be a serious basic for any writer. A bad habit most of us start with is running across words we don’t know and kinda getting their meaning from context, and then using them as we kinda think they’re intended. Which, no surprise, can cause real confusion for people who actually know what the word means. And that’s not even taking into account that I might spell it wrong and spellcheck swaps in some other word altogether. Which I also don’t know.

2) Know how this is supposed to make my readers feel– is this a sexy page or a scary page? Funny or creepy? Should my readers be tense or fascinated? If I don’t know how this bit’s supposed to make them feel, how can I get any sort of emotion across on the page? Bonus—knowing this should also help me figure out if any moments are particularly jarring. Not in the way I might want.

3) Work on my Empathy– I’ve said it before and it’s still true. I need to understand how other people are going to react to things. If I don’t have a good, honest sense of how this character’s going to be received, how that line of dialogue’s going to go over, how my readers will react to this beat or that reveal… well, it’s going to be tough to tell a story. I need to be able to put myself in other people’s shoes so I can take a look at my work and say “Wow… if I do it like this, the readers are totally going to think someone’s in the closet watching Chris and Pat.”

Anyway… this was a little rambly, but hopefully you got something out of it.

Next time… look, I’ll be honest. I’m not sure there’s going to be a post next week because I’ve got a four or five hour drive on Friday and then a talk about worldbuilding. Plus—if you hadn’t heard– I had a new book come out last week and I’ve been a bit overwhelmed. Which means now I’m playing a bit of catch-up. But I’ll try to get something out, if time allows.

Until then… go write.

If you’ve been following this blog (or me on Twitter) for any amount of time, you know one of my favorite Saturday thing to do is watch B-movies. I’ve always had a certain love for them, and I think it’s a place to find some unsung gems if you’re willing to dig. Plus, lots of chances to flex your storytelling muscles and figure out some stuff. Where did this go wrong? Am I doing this in my own writing? How could it be fixed?

One type that always puts me on edge is found footage movies. After movies like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield became huge hits, shooting movies in this style exploded. Especially lower budget movies. There are dozens and dozens of them out there, covering topics from US forces in Afghanistan to dinosaur lost worlds to Judgment Day itself. Although you do have to ask… who found that particular footage…?

The catch, though, is found footage is one of those storytelling methods that looks very simple and forgiving. In fact, it’s an incredibly difficult way to tell a story, especially if I want to do it well. Possibly one of the hardest ways. And I’ve thought a few times about scribbling up a bunch of points and warning signs to watch for in such things, but the simple truth is I don’t offer a lot of straight screenwriting (or filmmaking) advice here anymore. Nothing major, anyway.

But it recently hit me there’s a way this ties to prose writing, and that’s through the epistolary form. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s when the story’s told through letters, journals, news articles, and other bits of found media (aaahhhhh, sound familiar?). Dracula and Frankensteinare both classic epistolary novels. There’s a magnificent one that just came out from Dan Frey called The Future is Yours, which uses emails and blogs and text messages. I used it for a section of one of my own books, Ex-Communication, where we get a look at a young girl’s journal, and in the very first story I ever sold for cash money, “The Hatbox.”

But just like found footage, an epistolary novel or short story can look deceptively easy. And it turns out they hit a lot of the same basic problems as found footage movies. So I thought I could take a few minutes and talk about four major flaws I see in both of these related formats—the movies and the books..

As always, none of these are die-hard absolutes, and it’s always possible someone could do this in a movie/ novel and make it work beautifully. But I also think they’re common enough as flaws that I need to be 100% sure what I’m doing is flawless if I decide to use one of these devices, because the automatic assumption is going to be… it’s a mistake. And when people hit the third or fourth obvious mistake in my story, they’re probably going to move on to something else. And that’s all on me, not them.

So… first thing.

Mistakes must be deliberate and clearly be deliberate
A lot of storytellers see the found footage/epistolary style as, well, an excuse to be lazy. Yeah, they do. Sorry.

Sure, there are lots of spelling mistakes, but that’s only because my narrator doesn’t know how to spell. Yeah, there are gaping holes in the plot, but the narrator wasn’t there for everything—they can only tell what they know. Yeah, this isn’t what we want to see or hear, but it’s more believable they’d be writing about this or pointing the camera at that. And, whoa, did we not once get the actress’s face in that scene? Well, it’ll be fine, that’ll just look even more authentic.

What’s going on here is something I’ve talked about before. People are confusing reality—that thing we walk around in most of the time—with fictional reality. Often they fall back on this to excuse bad dialogue or behavior in prose. Here I’m using it to excuse my writing in general. Or, in the film case, horribly framed and/or lit shots.

The bigger aspect of this, though, is my audience (readers or viewers). I mean, we can all spot mistakes when we see them. Clearly I wasn’t supposed to see that crew member in the mirror, or the battery pack and wires for her mic pack, and we all know the difference between there and their and they’re (don’t we…?). So when we see these things, our automatic gut reaction isn’t “gosh, this seems so real,” it’s just “Mistake!!” and maybe a pointing finger.

That’s why I need to be super cautious about “mistakes” in this sort of storytelling, because they’re going to be interpreted as, well, actual mistakes. Not something wrong with my character’s spelling ability, but a failure on my editor’s part. Its just an actual mistake in the film or book. And that’s the kind of thing that ruins the flow.

Cause here’s the thing… Absolutely no one went into Cloverfieldthinking they were looking at actual footage of a giant monster attacking New York. They knew it was a movie (or a book in their hands). The format pulls it a little closer to home, maybe bulks up the willing suspension of disbelief a bit, but everyone still knew this was something that had been created and promoted for months in advance.

So if I’m going to make mistakes, they have to be super-blatant mistakes. Things nobody could’ve missed. Things a spellchecker would catch. I don’t want to put their instead of they’re, I want to see there’re or theyer. Really clear, very deliberate mistakes.

Cameras are not characters
There’s a scene (or series of scenes) in every found footage movie where the camera moves too much. It’s imitating the gaze of the character holding it rather than, y’know, being a camera they’re holding. These moments can be subtle and ring a bit false—looking back and forth between two things, for example—or they can be big and make the audience shout “Why are you stillholding the camera?!!?” Y’know, like when you stop to point the camera at the giant monster opening its mouth to eat you.

We all recognize in these moments that no human being would still be carrying a camera on their shoulder or holding a cell phone out in front of them. They definitely wouldn’t be turning, aiming, resizing, refocusing, and so on. It’s a cheat, and we all recognize it as one.

Likewise, there are things it’s tough to buy in epistolary form. A journal is close to first person POV, but it’s still something different and distinct. If I just spent six hours fighting the zombie horde with an axe, am I really going to sit down and write out those six hours in meticulous detail? Would I write out what all the zombies looked like, what I was thinking of when I decapitated them, some random observations about the human condition? Or would my entry just be—

Feb. 18th (??? Thursday???) – brutal day killing zombies. friggin exhausted. most everyone made it. maybe write more tomorrow if there’s time.

Heck, would I even write that much? I mean, with everything going on, am I really going to spend any of my precious downtime writing? And by… flashlight? Campfire?

And it’s not just fighting zombies. How much would you want to write after eight hours of hiking or a twelve hour work day? Seriously, think of the writing you’ve done in your own life. Letters, journals, diaries—how much detail did you really go into? How often? How many things did you just skim over? I know my attempts at journaling were never that great, and I know they would’ve been worse if I was in the middle of a custody battle or an alien invasion. Or both. Heck, I still write physical letter to a few folks, but there are long gaps between them and lots of stuff I never include. Yes, Kevin, I know I’m very behind—sorry.

I need to have amazingly rock-solid reasons for why people would continue to point that camera or keep up those journal entries. And doing this can’t conflict with that first flaw up above. There’s only so many times we’ll buy “oh, I thought I turned the camera off.”

Cameras are not eyes
When watching my Saturday geekery movies, it’s pretty common for me to give a movie crap for jump scares. Especially ones where the monster/ ninja/ cyborg is leaping into view of the camera but it clearlywould’ve already been in view of the characters. This is a really common problem in found footage movies—confusing what the camera sees for what the character sees.

This is more a mechanics of storytelling issue. Understanding there’s more going on than we’re seeing, and that my characters have thoughts and experiences beyond what they share with the audience. We know they’re hearing and seeing things the camera isn’t, so it’d be bizarre for them to act as if the only things they experienced were the things that appeared on camera.

A weird flipside of this that happens enough to make it worth mentioning—I can’t show something on a found footage camera and then say my characters didn’tsee it. Either they were looking through the viewfinder or they watched it reviewing the footage (because why else did they have cameras running?). So characters acting like they didn’t see what we, the audience, saw just makes them look stupid.

Likewise, journals aren’t really narrative. They’re one person’s very limited view of a narrative Even more limited than regular first person. We’re removed from the actual events by the narrator and by the narrator’s personal biases and limitations—again, how much they actually write and what they write about vs. what’s actually happening in the narrative.

If that sounds a little confusing, think of it in terms of an unreliable narrator. We know they’re telling us a story, but we also know it’s not the real story. Maybe they’re leaving things out or putting a spin on the facts or just don’t understand what’s going on around them. We understand we have to translate what they’re telling us and fill in some facts ourselves.

And this is what every journal is like. They’re all kinda unreliable. They’re filtered by our individual experiences, our knowledge, our maturity, and our own views. There’s always going to be more going on than what’s on the page.

Super short version of this–I can’t have piles of story beats that are only about how the audience will react to things—I need to consider the characters too. How are they interpreting and reacting to the events going on all around them?

It’s all just random incidents and coincidences
This is what usually happens when more than one of the above flaws happen. The narrative starts to break down because it can’t actually be supported in this form. A lot of time when this happens, filmmakers will give up on the found footage conceit altogether and just have random camera views from, well, anything. It was 90% cell phone footage until we had a car chase, so now it’s all random traffic cams or ATM cameras. How did we get that footage? Not important!

Likewise, as tension mounts in a story, it becomes less and less believable that someone’s taking the time to write out more and more details in their diary. It makes us aware that the zombies could burst in at any minute, but I took half an hour to scribble down all the gory details of how Wakko died. It’s either the story grinding to a halt or the story getting skimmed over because who has time to be writing right now?!?!

A common sign of this in both films and journals? The story just stops. It doesn’t end, mind you. It just… stops. The movie that goes black or the journal that ends in mid-sentence. Which, I mean, is still slightly better than…

I hope this letter gets to you somehow, Yakko, because I hear footsteps on the stairs. There’s no way out for me but remember what I told you! Oh no!! They’re right outside my door!!

Anyway…

There are the four common flaws I’ve seen in this type of storytelling. Each one is pretty bad. I think any two of them together will pretty much sink my story. So if I’m going with the found footage/ epistolary style, I need to make sure I avoid them.

But hang on! All of this means it’s going to be a lot harder to tell the story, right? I’m going to have to figure out new scenes and sequences. Probably change dialogue. Maybe restructure some things. And then still make it a good story?

Well… yeah. I mean, I chose to tell something in this format. This is what the format needs. What am I complaining about? Can you imagine if I started writing a romance novel an then said “awwww, geeez… there’s all this relationship stuff and kissing I have to deal with. I don’t want to write any of that.”

Like so many artistic things, I need to do a lot of work to make it look easy.

Hey, speaking of work and advice… WonderCon is coming up, and I’m going to be doing another Writers Coffeehouse with a bunch of professional writer-friends. We’re recording next week, so if there’s any writing-related question you’d like to get a consensus answer on, this is your big chance. Just toss it in the comments below or hit me up with it on Twitter. Outlining, characters, dialogue, daily schedules, editing, tell us what you need.

And next time here, I’d like to talk to you about the one time when all these rules don’t matter.

Until then, go write.

Or shoot something with your phone.

I  was glancing back over the whole A2Q thing I did a few months back. I admit, I’ve been toying with the idea of combining the posts, expanding on some aspects, and offering it as a cheapo ebook (at all interesting to anyone?). And it struck me there are a few aspect of writing I kinda skimmed over and others I barely touched on at all.

So I thought it wouldn’t be a bad thing to add in a few basics about forming a plot, shaping my structure, dealing with characters, that sort of stuff. A little less how-to (“press your foot down on the gas pedal to go fast”) and a little more but-keep-in-mind (“don’t go ninety in a school zone while a cop’s parked there”). Make sense?

I’ve mentioned most of these ideas before, so they may feel familiar. Also, since I’m loosely tying this back to the A2Q, I’ll use my character examples there rather than my standard Animaniacs references. I don’t want anyone to think I’ve abandoned Yakko, Wakko, and Dot.

Anyway…

First, I should be clear who my protagonist is. In my head and on the page. If I spend the first five chapters of my book with Phoebe… everyone’s going to assume Phoebe’s the main character. The book’s clearly about her, right?  So when she vanishes for the next seven chapters and I focus on Luna or Quinn… well, people are going to keep wondering when we’re getting back to Phoebe.  Because she’s who I set up as the main character.

Now, a lot of books have a big cast of characters.  An ensemble, as some might say.  That’s cool.  But if my book’s going to be shifting between a bunch of characters, I need to establish that as soon as possible.  If the first four or five chapters are all the same character, it’s only natural my readers will assume that’s going to be the norm for this book, and it’ll be jarring when I jump out of that norm.

Second, speaking of jumping and jarring, is that I need to keep my POV consistent. Even with a third person POV, we’re usually looking over a specific person’s shoulder, so to speak. Which means that character can’t walk away and leave us behind.  Likewise, we can’t start over Phoebe’s shoulder and then drift over so we’re looking over Luna’s.

It’s cool to switch POV—there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it—but I need to make it very clear to my readers I’m doing it. They need that stability and consistency. If they start seeing things from new angles or hearing new pronouns, it’s going to knock them out of the story and break the flow. And that’s never a good thing.

Third, while we’re talking about peering over other shoulders, is that I should be clear who’s part of my story and who’s just… well, window dressing. I probably don’t want to spend three or four pages describing Doug, hearing his backstory, reminiscing about his workday, and then discover he’s just some random guy at the bar. Phoebe serves him a drink and then we never, ever hear about him again.

Names and descriptions are how I can tell my reader if a character’s going to be important and worth remembering or is they’re just there to show Phoebe’s doing her job. Three paragraphs of character details means “Pay attention to this one.” So if I’m telling readers to keep track of people for no reason—or for very thin reasons—I’m wasting their time and my word count.

Fourth is I need to have an actual plot before I start focusing on subplots.  What’s the big, overall story of my book?  If it’s about Phoebe trying to fins out the secret of the super-werewolf, I should probably get that out to my readers before I start the betrayal subplot or the romance-issues subplot or the how-could-mom-and-dad-have-hidden-this-family-secret-from-us subplot.  After all, they picked up my book because the back cover said it was about fighting super-werewolves. I should be working toward meeting those expectations first.

If I find myself spending more time on a subplot (or subplots) than the actual plot, maybe I should pause and reconsider what my book’s about.

Fifth, closely related to four, is my subplots should relate to the main plot somehow.  They need to tie back or at least have similar themes so we see the parallels.  If I can pull a subplot out of my book and it doesn’t change anything it the main plot in the slightest… I might want to reconsider it. And if it’s an unrelated subplot to an unrelated subplot… okay, wow, I’m really getting lost at this point.

Sublots face a real danger of becoming, well, distracting. People are showing up for that sweet werewolf on werewolf action, and I don’t want to kill whatever tension I’m building by putting that on hold for  two or three chapters while I deal with inter-hunter rivalry and politics at the werewolf-hunting lodge. It’s like switching channels in the middle of a television show. What’s on the other channel isn’t necessarily bad, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the show we’re trying to watch.

Sixth is knowing when I need to reveal stuff. Remember how much fun it was when you met that certain someone and there were all those fascinating little mysteries about them? We wanted to learn all their tics and favorites and secrets. Where are they from? What’d they study in school? What do they do for a living? What are their dreams? Do they have brothers or sisters? Where’d they get that scar? Just how big is that tattoo?

But… we don’t want to learn those secrets from a dossier. We want to hang out with these people, talk over drinks, maybe stay up all night on the phone or on the couch. The memories of how we learn these things about people are just as important as what we learn. And it’s how we want to learn about characters, too. Just dumping pages and pages of backstoryactually make a character less interesting. It kills that sense of mystery, because there’s nothing left to learn about them.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with me having incredibly fleshed out characters. But I might not need to use all of that backstory in the book. And I definitely don’t need to use it all in the first two or three chapters.

Seventh and last is flashbacks. Flashbacks are a fantastic narrative device,but… they get used wrong a lot. And when they’re wrong… they’re brutal. A clumsy flashback can kill a story really fast.

A flashback needs to be advancing the plot. Or increasing tension. Or giving my readers new information. In a great story, it’s doing more than one of these things. Maybe even all of them.

But a flashback that doesn’t do any of these things… that’s not a good flashback.  That’s wrong.  And it’ll bring things to a grinding halt and break the flow.

And that’s seven basic things to keep in mind while I’m writing my story 

Now, as always, none of these are hard-fast, absolute rules.  If I hire someone to paint my house, there’s always a possibility this particular painter doesn’t use a roller. There can always be an exception.  But I should be striving to be the exception, not just assuming everyone will be okay with me not following all the standards. My readers are going in with certain expectations, and I need to be doing honestly amazing things to go against those expectations. 

Because if that same painter also doesn’t use a brush… or dropcloths… or a ladder…

Next time, just to be different, I’d like to explain something else to you. But I’m probably going to skim over most of it, if that’s okay.

Until then, go write.