Category: point of view

            First off, so very sorry post have been irregular here as of late. Believe I’ve mentioned I’m juggling a few things.  One of which is the con I’m at right now.

            But we’ll talk about that in a bit…

            This week I wanted to revisit an idea that I’ve brought up a couple of times over the past few months.  I’ve heard it called a few different things, but my preferred term has always been flow.  First heard it that way from a wonderful author and writing teacher named Drusilla Campbell, and it always stuck with me.

            The visual I’d like to put in your head for flow is traffic. Regular old automobile traffic.  I’m going to go out on a limb and guess most of you reading this can drive, and the few who don’t have still ridden in a car.  And hopefully most of you have been to a city, or at least on a highway of some kind.

            So… let’s talk about the flow of traffic.

            Living in Los Angeles (and before that San Diego, and before that the greater Boston area), I’m very used to highway traffic.  Sometimes, often late at night, the highway is clear and wide open.  There’s barely anyone on the road and you can pretty much fly.

            Of course, even if there aren’t many cars on the road, something big can still create a traffic jam.  Major construction or a big accident can condense things down to one lane, and suddenly that very open road is densely packed and moving at a crawl.

            During the day it can be even worse.  When there’s a million people on the road (no exaggeration here in LA) one small problem can slow everything down.  A large one can bring things to a crashing halt.  Hell, there’s a big hill on the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass and it always causes traffic slowdowns, both ways, up and down.  I’ve been in traffic jams so bad you could actually shut your car off, get out, and stretch your legs for a bit.

            There are places where the very structure and layout of the freeway just naturally causes traffic jams. There’s no way to avoid it the way things have been constructed.  I know a couple stretches where—for no reason—the road goes from six lanes to three.  And then back up to five.  That mile of three lanes… it’s almost always clogged.

            Traffic patterns can even get messed up when people just start looking at the wrong thing. We’ve all been in massive slowdowns that are simply caused by people staring at something on the side of the road. Or sometimes on the other side of the road.  A big accident in the northbound lane can make everybody in the southbound lane slow down to take a look.

            Sometimes it works great, though.  Those million people can be on the road and it’s fantastic.  Everything works.  I’ve had times when I’ve been looking at all the cars on the road, but then looked down to realize I’m almost doing sixty-five.  We’re all going at almost sixty-five, in perfect sync.  I was just caught up in everything and didn’t even realize what was actually going on.

            But that flow can get disrupted so easily.  Again, one car going really slow.  One closed lane.  One distraction over on the shoulder.

            What’s the point of this little visualization?

            Reading a story is a lot like traffic.  It has a flow.  When the flow’s great, we barely notice how fast things are going.  We just zoom along and suddenly realize we’ve read a hundred pages and it’s dark out and where the hell am I?  A book that you can’t put down has great flow.  A book that you should love but you just can’t get into… probably doesn’t.

            Here’s a few things that have the potential of causing a traffic jam in my story.

            A friend of mine has a book where the main character slips into sort of a fever dream.  She’s sick, she’s been medicated, and now she’s… a bit out of it.  And so the next two chapters of the book are in stage play format.  It becomes a bit more separated from reality for the reader and we understand it’s more surreal for the character as well.

            Compare this to another book I read recently when, for no reason, maybe 15-20% of a page would suddenly be in screenplay format.  Dialogue, prose, prose, slugline, dialogue, stage direction, prose, dialogue.  It jarred me out of an otherwise wonderful book every single time, and the author did it every four or five pages.  I looked for patterns and tried to figure out if there was a recurring motif, but couldn’t find anything.  I loved the story, but I kept getting knocked out if it.

            There’s nothing wrong with doing clever things.  It’s highly encouraged.  But I need to have a reason to do them, because my readers are going to assume there’s a reason I did it. That’s natural, isn’t it? I made the effort to put it in the book, so there must be a point to it.  Bruce Joel Rubin once mentioned that when we stop experiencing stories in our gut, we go into our head and start analyzing them.  That’s when the flow breaks.  When we stop reading and start drawing mental diagrams.

            I was reading this big sprawling generational family saga recently.  Not normally my kind of thing, but I’ve been trying to expand my reading umbrella lately.  And I’m overall glad I read it.

            But…

            One issue it had was that, by nature of being multigenerational, there were lots of people who were called “Dad,” and quite a few who were “Mom.”  And they were all Dad and Mom.  No “Pops” or “Papa” or “Daddy Dearest.”  No “Mum” or “Ma” or “Mother.”  Which got confusing because the book also jumped POV and timeframes a lot.  We might be in Yakko’s head for a chapter, then hop over to his granddaughter’s.  Which meant “Dad and Mom” is now referring to different people.  Some of them even had the same name, so there was a Yakko Jr. and a Yakko the III (fortunately grandpa had died)

            Anyway, what it amounted to was me going back to analyze the book every ten or fifteen pages to make sure the person behind this POV was who I thought they were.

            This is closely related to something else I’ve mentioned before—when lots of people have very similar names, especially when they all begin with the same letter.  We naturally lock on to that first letter to help keep things straight in our heads. If my story has a large cast featuring John, Jerry, Jacob, Jared, Justin, Jean, Jon, Jeri, Juan, Jenn, and Jess, people are (again) going to spend just as much time going backward to figure out who’s who as they are going forward to, well… read my story.

            We work with words.  That’s a simple fact of the job.  And nobody wants to use common words.  We want to work with amazing words.  Exciting, sexy, awe-inspiring words that people will remember years from now.  Decades from now, even.

            But here’s the thing to remember.  The words don’t really matter. The story matters. The characters matter.  The actual words are just a delivery device.  They’re how I’m telling you the story.  As a writer and a reader, I don’t want to be focused on the act of communication more than what’s being communicated.  The words should be almost invisible.

            And the truth is… the common words are going to be a lot less visible than the uncommon words. As readers—as people—we notice the uncommon. It stands out. And in many cases… it’s distracting. 

            This isn’t to say we can’t use uncommon or obscure words. There should be a reason for using them, though, and that reason shouldn’t just be me wanting to show off the obscure word I learned on Doctor Who a few months ago.  They shouldn’t be stumbling blocks for my reader.  Again, they should be adding to the story, not the delivery device.

            That’s just a few things.  I’ve mentioned some others before.  Flow is kind of tough to get too specific about because something that causes a small bump for me might be slamming you into a metaphorical wall.  Or vice versa.

            Y’see, Timmy, that’s the biggest lesson about flow.  It’s an empathy issue.  It’s about being able to put myself in someone else’s shoes—a lot of other people’s shoes—and make an honest assessment about things.  Will this reference trip people up?  Is this structure confusing?  Is it easy to keep all these characters straight?

            Because if I can’t be honest about my work, there’s a good chance I’m going to jam things up.

            And if that happens too often, to stick with our traffic metaphor… people will start looking for alternate routes.  

           Next time, I’d like to talk about that opening chapter.  You know what I mean.  The P word.  Although, fair warning, next time might not be for two weeks or so.

            Oh, and hey—I’m at Phoenix Comic Fest right now!  Are you reading this? You should come find me. I’m that guy typing on his phone. And also talking on panels and signing stuff and all that.  Come by and say hi.

            And then go write.

            It’s come up once or thrice that I’m a lover of bad movies.  Partly for the laughing aspect, partly because I think you can learn as much from bad storytelling as you can from good.  Partly because I need to justify my drinking, and some of these movies make it reeeeeally easy.

            A while back I tossed out a list of really basic things a lot of these movies messed up.  Film school 101-level stuff that people were getting wrong.  Even though some of them went to film school.  And I wondered if it might be possible to do something with stories in general.
            Kristi Charish (of the fantastic Kincaid Strange series—book two coming soon) recently mentioned this idea (for a different topic) in a much better way—the invisible handshake.  It’s sort of an unofficial, unspoken contract between the author and the reader. If you’re picking up my book, there are certain automatic assumptions you’re making about what I’ll be providing you with, and I should be meeting these assumptions.  Basic things about plot and structure and character that are just… well, basic.
            At the end of last year I read a book that fumbled that handshake.   Fumbled it bad.  It was like that awkward moment with someone at the end of the night where you’re not sure how to say goodbye, so the two of you make a bunch of half-moves toward different things.  Do we hug?  Shake hands?  Peck on the cheek?  Write an awful book? 

            We’ve all been there, right?

            I ranted a bit about said book on Twitter, but even then I was thinking I should revisit a lot of those issues here.  And while said book was very rant-worthy, I’ve been .trying to keep things a bit more on the positive side here.

            So, a few general things I need to keep in mind when I’m writing.  I’ve mentioned most of them before, but I thought a general, all–at-once

            First, I need to be clear who my main character is.  If I spend the first four chapters of my book with Yakko… everyone’s going to assume Yakko’s the main character.  This book’s clearly about him, right?  So when he vanishes for the next seven chapters… well, people are going to keep wondering when we’re getting back to him.  Because he’s 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 spending time between a bunch of characters, I need to establish that as soon as possible.  If the first three or four chapters are all the same character, it’s only natural my readers will assume that’s going to be the norm in this book.

            Secondis that I need to keep my point of view consistent.  This kinda goes with the first point—being clear who my main character is.  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 Wakko’s shoulder and then driiiiiiiiiiiiiift over so we’re suddenly looking over Dot’s.

            Again, it’s cool to switch POV and there’s nothing wrong with it, but I need to make it clear to my readers that I’m doing it. 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.  That’s never a good thing.
            Thirdthing I need to do is be clear who my actual characters are.  Who’s part of the story and who’s just… well, window dressing.  If my two protagonists go out to dinner, there’s going to be other people in the restaurant.  But I shouldn’t describe them all. Or name them all. 

            Names and descriptions are how I tell my reader a character’s going to be important and worth remembering.  Three paragraphs of character details means “Pay attention to this one.”  So if I’m telling the reader to keep track of people for no reason, I’m wasting their time and my word count.

            I want to note a specific way people do this, too.  I’m calling it “describe and die” (trademark 2018).  This is when the author introduces a character, spends five or six pages describing them, their history, their goals, their loves, their life—and then kills them.  We’ve all seen this, yes?  Here’s Yakkoshiro, a twenty-nine year-old salaryman who spends all his free income on Gundam models and always wears long sleeves to the office because he won’t stop wearing his fathers watch, even though nobody wears watches anymore and looking behind the times like that could hurt his chances at a promotion so… long sleeves, never rolled up, even when the air conditioner dies (which happens a lot). And tonight he has a date with the beautiful woman from the Gundam store, who he’s exchanged nervous banter with for months now and, oh, he’s dead.  A kaiju stepped on him.  Now, back to our heroes…

            Don’t do that.

            Fourthis that 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 Wakko trying to save the family car wash, I should probably get that out to my readers before I start the romance subplot or the backstabbing partner subplot or the Uncle Gus has cancer and wants to travel around the world before he dies subplot.  After all, they picked up my book because the back cover said it was about saving the family car wash or escaping that Egyptian tomb.  I should be working toward that first—meeting those expectations.

            If I’m spending more time on a subplot than the actual plot, maybe I need to revisit what my story’s actually about.

            Fifth, closely related to four, is that my subplots should relate to the main story somehow.  They should loop around, tie back in to the main plot, or at least have similar themes so we see the parallels.  If I can pull out a subplot out of my story and it doesn’t change the main story in the slightest… I probably need to reconsider it.

            And if it’s an unrelated subplot to an unrelated subplot… okay, seriously, I’m wasting pages at that point.  Not to mention this all starts getting, well, distracting.  I don’t want to kill whatever tension I’m building in my main plot by putting it on hold for eight or nine pages while I deal with… well, something completely unrelated.  It’s like switching channels in the middle of a television show. Nobody’s saying what’s on the other channel is bad, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the show we’re trying to watch.

            Sixth…

            Okay, this is an odd one.

            Remember how much fun it is when you meet someone you’re interested in and there’s all these fascinating little mysteries about them?  We want to learn all their tics and hidden secrets.  Where are they from?  What’d they study in school?  What movies do they like?  How’d they develop a taste for that?  Why do they have that accent?  Where’d they get that scar?  Just how big is that tattoo?

            But… we don’t want to learn those secrets from a book report.  We want to hang out with these people, talk over drinks, go on road trips, maybe stay up all night on the phone or on the couch.  It’s how we get to know real people… and it’s how we want to learn about characters, too. Pages and pages of backstory often makes characters less interesting because it leaves me with nothing to reveal about them.  It kills that sense of mystery, because there’s nothing left to learn about them.

            There’s nothing wrong with me having all that backstory, but I don’t need to use it all in book.

            And I definitely don’t need to reveal it all in the first two or three chapters.

            Seventhand 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.

            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 a pastry chef for my bakery, there’s always a possibility this particular one doesn’t use a whisk.  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 them.  

            Because if that same pastry chef also doesn’t use a spatula…  Or butter… Or flour…

            Again—the invisible handshake (trademark K. Charish, 2018). 

            It’s a legally binding contract in forty-two states and four Canadian provinces.

            Next time, I’d like to tell you about something that happened off-camera on a TV show I worked on years ago.

            Until then, go write   

            Not so much a pop culture reference as a tech reference.  Came up with that title and then remembered working with my first computer when I was… nine?  I remember having to format floppy discs before you could use them.  Anyone else remember that?

            Very sorry I missed last week.  Deadline crunch. Which I’m still in, really, but I didn’t want to miss two solid weeks in a row.

            Anyway…

            I was rewatching some episodes of an old show recently, and it struck me that it had a major format problem.  And as I mulled on it, it struck me I’ve seen this problem a few times before. Sometimes firsthand, happening right in front of me.

            I want to point out something… well, I’d say it’s obvious, but I don’t think it always is. I think it’s been muddled by a lot of would-be gurus and experts spreading bad information.  And since that’s what led to the ranty blog in the first place, well…

            Anyway, let me throw some wisdom at you.

            Novels are not comic books.

            Comic books are not television scripts.

            Television scripts are not movie scripts.

            Movie scripts are not stage plays.

            Stage plays are not novels.

            As I said, should be obvious, right?

            Thing is, each of those storytelling formats is unique unto itself.  Seriously. I can rattle off at least half a dozen inherent differences between any of them.

            We always hear people complain about changes when something is adapted from a book into a movie, but the simple fact is things have to change.  I cannot tell a story in a screenplay the same way I’d tell it in a book.  And I can’t tell a story in a motion picture script the same way it’d be told in an episodic television script.

            Let me give you some examples.

            Based off my own experience—as a crew person, a contest reader, and a screenwriter–I’d guess that 99.9% of all film, television, and stage work is done from the audience point of view.  The only parts that aren’t are the very limited POV shots that sometimes crop up in horror movies or thrillers(usually outside windows, inside closets, or across parking lots) and the rare experimental film like Hardcore Henry that was funded entirely by the powerful carsickness/nausea lobby.
            Contrast that with a book, where the author, with full control, can shift to any point of view they want. I can make the reader see, hear, and experience everything through one character’s senses, knowledge, and memories… and then shift to a different character.  There’s no real way to do that on film.

            However… a book is, for a lack of a better term, a one-source format.  I have to write things out.  There’s no way for the reader to know George has blond-brown hair without me putting “George has blond-brown hair” down on the page.  I might be able to get a little subtle with it, maybe pull some literary sleight-of-hand, but at the end of the day all I can do is put words on the page.  That’s it.  I can’t slip in some details in the background, because everything in a book is presented in the foreground—right there in front of my reader on the page.

            If I’m writing for television, I also need to be aware of the very specific format that most television writing requires.  Episodic shows are usually done with a four or five act structure (not to be confused with three act structure, which is kinda-sorta something else) which requires my story to have a series of mini-cliffhangers where the commercial breaks will be.  If it’s a show with an arc, it also needs to address that a week’s passed since the last episode, and some story points may need to be repeated or re-addressed to cut down on audience confusion.

            Stage writing is also unique because it’s happening right in front of us. There’s an inherent storytelling conceit that we’ll accept these actors don’t see us.  Or that they’re not actually in a forest.  Or they can’t hear that guy behind the tree bellowing his lines out to the back of the theater. This is a different kind of storytelling mechanic, and that’ll be reflected in my writing.

            And none of these are like comic books. Comics are this fantastic medium where we can have an active, flowing story that’s being told completely through static images.  So my comic script has to reflect this. Each panel has to be a single moment, and it has to be the right moment to convey the most impact and information while still flowing smoothly into the next moment I choose to continue the narrative.

            You’re wondering why I’m talking about all this, yes?

            These days it’s not uncommon for a story—or a storyteller—to jump mediums. As I mentioned above, we’ve all seen a ton of books and comics adapted for the movies.  I know several novelists and screenwriters who’ve worked in comics.  I’ve worked with theater directors and playwrights on film projects.

            Thing is, a story can’t go directly from one format to another.  The devices and mechanisms I use here won’t always work here.  Usually won’t, in fact. And I need to be able to make those adjustments.  A really common mistake I’ve seen is when people just yank a story from one format to another with no changes.  Or when they start using the conventions of one format in another

            That show I mentioned up at the top?  In one episode it had three reveals. Thing is, each one was essentially revealing the same thing.  But the filmmakers had assumed since Yakko was the main character for that scene, and Dot was the central figure in that scene, and Wakko was the focus of the final scene… well, they could do the dramatic, big music reveal for each of them.  Alas, it just doesn’t work that way, because—as I mentioned above—we can focus on different characters but it’s all really audience POV.  So the second time around it was more eye-rolling than dramatic and the third time was… well, laughable.

            Last year I had a chance to be in an X-Files anthology.  Truth is, though, the main spine of my short story actually came from a spec script I’d written for an old TV show called The Chronicle.  And I had to make adjustments for that.  Most notably, all those mini-cliffhangers in the story had to be smoothed out.  Some things had to be described much more than they were in the script, because now all those details actually had to be on the page.

            Y’see, Timmy, if I want to shift a story from one format to another, I better understand the conventions and limitations of each one.  And if I want to write in a different format. I need to learn that format as well as I know my current one.  I can’t just go in assuming it won’t matter, or that I’ll be the exception who gets to slide.

            So know what you’re writing.  And how you’re writing.

            Next time, I’d like to talk about some artsy character stuff.

            Until then, go write.

            As promised, two in one week.  Both with clever titles.

            So, want to know an easy way to boost the hits on your website or Twitter account?  Post a sentence along the lines of this…

             I’m sure several of you already see the problem, yes?  I used clip instead of magazine.  Well, here’s the catch…

            Yes, as usual here, there’s a catch.

            At the risk of angering a lot of folks… If I ever feel the need to correct someone about this, I’m probably not a good writer.  Seriously.  I would say nine times out of ten when I see other would-be-writers make this complaint…they’re wrong.

            (And I say would-be because that does seem to be where a good three-quarters of the comments come from—newbies intent on explaining to established writers where they messed up)

            Now, I’m sure a few folks are already leaping down to the comments to tell me I’m wrong.  There is a difference between a magazine and a clip.  And it matters! 

            To those people I have one thing to say.

            Paintbrushes.

            You heard me.

            Remember Bob Ross, the happy painter on PBS with the bushy hair?  Even if you never actually saw his show, he’s such an iconic part of Americana you probably know him.  Heck, it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a large number of people outside the US who can identify him.

            Bob Ross could paint a gorgeous landscape in under half an hour and make it look easy.  He did it with an array of paints, a few specialized tools, and maybe six or seven different brushes.

            Name three of them.

            Any three brushes he used.  Or any painter uses.  Go.

            I’m sure a lot of you thought of the fan brush.  Then maybe smiled and thought of the happy brush.  Maybe… wasn’t there an angled one, like a… a wedge, or something? 

            But even then… their actual names?  No clue.

            That’s not really surprising, of course.  I’m willing to bet most of us here have never done more than dabble in painting.  It’s not our field of specialty, so we don’t know a lot of the specific terms.  We just know the brushes on sight or maybe by the names we’ve given them or heard a few times.  Like the happy brush.

            In a similar manner, if my characters don’t know anything about weapons, it wouldn’t be unusual for them to not understand the difference between a magazine and a clip (or between a Sig and a Glock, or a broadsword and a longsword, or…).  They’d just go off what they remember from television and movies, or maybe some novels they read.  Sure, Yakko the former black ops guy would know, but Wakko the homemaker?  Odds are, he’s going to call that thing full of bullets a clip. Just like Mr. T did on The A-Team.

            Y’see, Timmy, all those people muttering about magazines vs. clips—they’re not wrong about terminology. They’re just focused on the wrong thing (one might even say it’s an empathy issue).  The important question here is not which term is factually correct, it’s which term should be used in my story,  We’re not writing textbooks, after all, we’re writing fiction.  And one of the bigger lessons to learn in fiction is that sometimes my characters will get things wrong. They’re not going to know everything.  Because characters who know everything tend to be very boring and wooden.

            If I had to guess why some people get so adamant about this—and I’ll try to tread lightly here—I’d think it’s because firearms are a divisive subject.  They tend to divide people politically, ethically, and even socially.  And this can cloud a writer’s view of things in both directions.  Some folks don’t want to make a stupid libtard mistake.  Others don’t want to listen to some crazy, overbearing gun nut.

            But, as I mentioned earlier this week, this isn’t the real world—it’s fiction.  If I want to keep my point of view consistent, I’m going to have some characters who load their pistols with clips.  Maybe a lot of them. And, yes, also some who know it’s called a magazine.

            Next time, I’d like to keep talking about characters and gunslingers a  bit by talking about bulletproof people.

            Until then, go write.