Category: real

February 8, 2013

The End of Houdini

            My apologies for missing last week.  There’s just a whirlwind of stuff going on with the re-release of Ex-Heroes coming up in a few weeks (pre-order a copy at your favorite bookstore now).

            Anyway, an odd title this time, I know, but it’ll make sense in a few minutes.
            But before then, if you don’t mind, I’d like to brag a bit.
            Most of you reading this know I worked in the film industry for many yearsbefore I started writing full time.  That’s pretty cool, right?  I got to hang out with a lot of actors and actresses you’ve heard of.  I had lunch and dinner with several of them, grabbed drinks at the hotel bar with some of them, even played pool with one or two of them.
            In fact, if I may brag a bit more, I fooled around with one of them.  An actress you’ve probably heard of who made it pretty big shortly after our little liaison.  We got drunk at a wrap party that was being held in her hotel.  It was nothing too serious, and we didn’t speak of it afterwards.  I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d written it off or forgotten it entirely, but it’s a small point of pride for me. 
            Wow, you’re thinking.  Good show, Pete.
            Honestly, though, this isn’t much of a story at all, is it?  It’s not like we dated for any amount of time or ever hooked up again.  If I were writing the story of my life, it’d be a minor detail at most.  Barely even a plot point. 
            And, of course, you figure that over the past fifty years there’s probably been a thousand actors and actresses in Hollywood who could claim that kind of status—someone you’ve heard of who’s undeniably attractive.  And if any of them had vaguely normal sex lives and appetites, they could probably claim that level of physical interaction with at least a dozen people (probably a lot more in the ‘60s and ‘70s).  That’s somewhere around twelve thousand people who could tell the same story as me.
            So it really happened.  But it’s not that interesting.  And it happened to a lot of other people, too.
            Now I said all this to remind you about Harry Houdini. 
            I saw ads for that Cirque de Soleil movie around Christmas and I thought, wow, some production company did not learn from Harry Houdini.  The man’s career tanked with films, because on film anybody can do anything.  At the end of the day, the fact that Houdini was actually doing elaborate escapes on film didn’t matter.  Even in those early days, audiences had realized that people in Hollywood could do amazing things on screen.  They could shoot somebody with a rifle, set buildings on fire, even turn a man into a monster.  Getting out of a pair of handcuffs was nothing.  It was commonplace.
            Y’see, Timmy, if my story is depending on the fact that it’s real and true to make it interesting… well, that’s just not going to cut it. The moment we get caught up in a good story and believe in the characters and the events around them–even just for a moment–they’re real.  So no matter how powerful it may be to me personally, a truestory has to match that level of interest. A real character needs to compete with fictional ones.
            The movie Argois a great example of what I’m talking about.  I remember first reading about the events that inspired the film years ago, and I was blown away by them then.  It’s a heist story wrapped in a con game wrapped in a political tale.  That sounds fantastic, doesn’t it?  And in the hands of a storyteller who knows how to structure his narrative, it’s an absolutely amazing story.
            Who cares if it’s true or not?  It’s just a great story.
             In both books and movies, James Bond is really and truly a secret agent.  So is Jason Bourne.  Chuck Bartowski’s a secret agent, too.  John Carter of Virginia actually traveled to Mars.  The Avengers fought Loki and a bunch of aliens in Manhattan last summer.  I remember it like I was there. 
            If my stories are worth reading, whether they’re true or not is irrelevant.  They need to hit the same levels as these fictional stories.  They don’t need to be action-packed, non –stop thrills, or tons of gratuitous sex and nudity, but they need to have something original and compelling about them that’s going to be interesting to more than a few dozen people.  I’m not talking about universal appeal, but maybe at least… y’know, solar-system appeal.
            More appeal than there was between me and that actress, that’s for sure.
            Next time, on a related note, I thought I’d talk a bit about love.  It’s that time of year, after all.
            Until then, go write.
Houdinireal
March 22, 2012 / 1 Comment

What is ‘Real’? How do You Define ‘Real’?

            Pop culture reference.  Easy one, cause it’s been awhile…

            So, one thing we all strive for in our writing is realism.  We want our characters to feel real.  We want our dialogue to sound real.  We want our settings to have that level of detail that only comes from authentic knowledge and experience.
            To do this, writers will people watch and eavesdrop and travel to obscure places just to get an idea of what the air smells like.  They’ll labor over the dialogue to make it as real as possible.  They’ll add random events to their narrative to give that sense of uncaring fate.  They will make their story as close to reality as possible.
            Here’s the problem, though…
            Nobody wants reality. 
            Not real reality, anyway.  Oh, they may say they do, but that’s kind of a lie.  Most people want fictional reality.  They want clean dialogue.  They want characters who win (maybe not cheerfully or without scars, but they do win).  They want things to make sense.
            Allow me to explain.
            When people talk in reality, they make false starts and pause a lot and trip over their words.  They can drone on for several minutes at a time.  They talk over each other.  If you’ve ever looked at an unedited transcription of a conversation, you know that real dialogue is the worst possible thing for fiction.  People would claw their eyes out, and everything would take forever to say.  When I used to interview writers for articles, it was just understood that I was going to clean up their words a bit to eliminate all that stuff.  It would just be incredibly distracting in an article.
            So fiction writers don’t write real dialogue.  They write “real” dialogue, lines that have a certain verisimilitude, if I may be so bold, which appeals to people.  They get cleaned up and tightened and measured out.  These are the lines that make readers say “Wow, her dialogue felt so real, like she was someone I’d meet on the street.”  That’s what we all want, right?
            Did you catch that, by the way?  The dialogue wasn’t real—it felt real.  Think of how often things get phrased that way.  An open (and often unconscious) admission that this isn’t how real people talk.  But it feels like how real people should talk. 
            As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve made this mistake.  I copied real people’s speech patterns into The Suffering Map, then had two different editors mention that as a specific reason I was being rejected.  It didn’t matter that it was real dialogue, because it wasn’t “real” dialogue.
            Make sense?
            On a similar note, odd, unbelievable stuff happens in reality all the time.  There are amazing coincidences.  Lucky breaks.  Unexplained things just happen.  Heck, people die in freak accidents and that’s it.  Story’s over, no matter how many things are left unresolved.
            I’ve interviewed several screenwriters who did biopics or “based on true events” movies, and one thing most of them talked about was the material they didn’t use.  The events that were so ludicrous people just wouldn’t believe them.  A few different folks have said that the difference between fact and fiction is that  fiction has to be believable, and these writers realized that.  So they removed true events that would’ve made their story seem silly or implausible.
            Here’s another example I’ve used before (and will continue to use again)–  Vesna Vulovic.  She was a flight attendant back in the ‘70s (which technically means she was a stewardess) on a flight that was bombed by terrorists.  Vesna fell six milesthrough the air and survived.  Not in the sense of held alive in an iron lung on life support, mind you—she’s out there today walking, talking, having drinks with friends and laughing about things.  She wasn’t even in the hospital for three months.
            Is that the kind of event I should include in my realistic fiction?  Of course not.  Nobody would believe that.
            Should I kill my characters at random, leaving their arc unfinished and their secrets unrevealed?  Will readers applaud me for my daring and realistic writing?  Not a chance.  When I’m a writer I’m the God of my world, and if something doesn’t serve a greater purpose I’m a piss-poor god at best.
            Y’see, Timmy, reality is a messy thing.  Every aspect of it.  And I don’t want my writing to be messy.  I want it to be clean and polished and perfect. 
            Even when I’m making it “real.”
            Next time… well, I’m on a diet right now, and it’s kind of gnawing at me.  So I’ll probably end up talking about that.
            Until then, go write.
characterdialoguerealSuffering Map
March 16, 2012 / 5 Comments

What Lies Beneath

            First off, a little poll for all of you reading this.  I’ve been thinking of taking a bunch of the posts here and making a condensed, somewhat more organized document that might pass as a book on writing.  If I put something like that out in ebook format for $1.99 or so, would anyone have any interest in such a thing?  I’m also thinking of pairing it with The Suffering Map, released as a cautionary tale about first novels, probably for just a buck.  Does any of that sound vaguely interesting to anyone?  Let me know in the comments section.  

            Now, on to a long-overdue rant about dialogue.
            I’ve said here once or twice or thrice that dialogue can make or break a story.  That’s because dialogue is how we learn about the characters, and they’re what the story’s all about.  So if my dialogue is good, it can lift an okay story that much higher.  If it’s bad, it can sink even the most Pulitzer-worthy piece.
            A key element in great dialogue is subtext.  A couple years back I got to interview actor Chris Eigeman about his screenwriting/ directing debut, and he told me a wonderful quote by Edith Wharton, which I’m now about to butcher for you because I’m quoting someone who quoted a quote to me.  According to Wharton, dialogue is the foam at the tip of a wave.  The wave—all the stuff under the foam and supporting it—is your character, their backstory, their motivation, and everything going on in the story.  But no matter how big that wave is, the thing we all see–the thing that always draws our eye—is that foam.
            On the flipside of that, most bad dialogue has no subtext.   To stick with our previous imagery, if good dialogue is foam on the tip of a wave, bad dialogue is a stagnant tidepool with no motion and no life in it.  Not all of it mind you—some people are very creative and unique in their badness.  But I’d say a good sixty or seventy percent of the awful stuff I’ve seen would vanish if people weren’t so on the nose with their writing.
            I’ve mentioned that phrase a few times here, and some of you may have seen it on feedback forms (for other people’s manuscripts, of course).  On the nose dialogue is when someone says precisely what they mean or what they’re doing without any subtlety or characterization whatsoever.  It comes across as flat because… well, there’s no depth to it.  There’s nothing implied, no innuendoes, no meaning at all past the words themselves.
            If you think about it, most of us are subtle in real life.  We prefer to imply things rather than say them aloud, and when we do speak a lot of us skirt around the things we’re trying to say.  We’re inherently big on subtext and body language, and people who are too straightforward kind of creep us out.  Consider some recent conversations you’ve had.  Think about what you said vs. what you meant.   
            There was a wonderful show on years ago called Keen Eddie, where the Human Target was forced into sharing a London apartment with the Baroness from that god-awful G.I. Joe movie.  At least once an episode they’d shout “I hate you!” “I hate you, too!” back and forth at each other, and while it was pretty dead-on the first few times, it soon became more of a habit with them.  Eventually, even though they kept using the same phrase, it became pretty clear they didn’t hate each other at all, and were using “hate” instead of another word. 
            And then Fox cancelled Keen Eddie.  Because that’s how things go when your show’s on Fox.
            But I digress.
            Check out this example.
            “Hey, fellas,” said Wakko, “what do you think of my new painting?”  He turned the easel to his brother and sister.
            “It’s very, ummm… colorful,” said Dot after a few moments.
            “Yeah,” said Yakko.  “Yeah, I was going to go with colorful, too.”
           
            Now, considering that I didn’t really describe it at all, do you think Wakko’s painting is any good?  Do you think Dot and Yakko like it?  Probably not, because most of us pick up on little things.  There was that pause before they answered, and the kind of stammer to Dot’s response.  We’ve all been in this situation, and we all understand the little white lies (or maybe big, whopping lies, depending on the painting) that are being told here.
            Here’s a few more examples of statements with subtext…
            “Rico, you’re like family to me.  That’s why I’ve chosen you for this job, because I know you won’t disappoint me.”
            “Actually, the partners and I have talked about it, David, and we feel you’d probably be more comfortable in a different position—something with an easier pace.”
           
            “Hey, it’s not too late.  Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?”
            There’s a hidden message to each of these statements, and again it’s one most of you probably picked up on immediately, even out of context.  This is the other thing about subtext—it lets the reader feel smart.  When my characters are spelling out every single thing they’re thinking and doing, it comes across like I’m over-simplifying things for my audience.  Another way to say “over-simplifying,” of course, is “dumbing down,” and we all love it when people think they need to dumb stuff down for us, right…?
            I’m not saying every single line has to be packed with subtext, mind you.  That kind of writing becomes impenetrable because it requires too much effort on the part of the reader.  As I said above, though, consider how often your own words are layered in real life.
            Because when your characters start talking like real people, that’s when they become real people.
            Speaking of which, next time I wanted to talk real quick about reality vs. reality.
            Until then, go write.
dialoguerealsubtextSuffering Map
May 13, 2011 / 2 Comments

Sounds Good

I refuse to take the blame for being late. Blogger was down. Not my fault.

And now back to our regularly scheduled rants and hair pulling…

As has been said many times before, by other people than just me, the key to great characters is dialogue. The way they communicate often tells us just as much about someone as the actual information they’re communicating. If you can’t pull off good dialogue, your career as a writer is going to be an uphill battle the whole way.

The most common way people mess up dialogue is by having, well, god-awful dialogue. Sounds silly, but there it is. Some dialogue just sucks. It’s wooden, on the nose, devoid of any emotion. All you have to do is read it out loud and you can tell it rings false. Making a cheeseburger with rotten meat and moldy cheese is bad—no further explanation is needed. If you can’t figure that on your own, there’s not much anyone can do for you.

The second most common way, believe it or not, is the complete flipside. It’s when people write dialogue that’s too real. Which sounds bizarre, I know, but let me explain…

If you listen to people a lot—people in the real world, not on television—you’ll see that they rarely use complete sentences. Oh, there are a few remarkable statesmen in the world (not all of them politicians) who can speak on any topic and make it sound like they’ve rehearsed their answers a hundred times. For the most part, though, people speak in bits and fragments. We split infinitives, backform verbs, and don’t always match those verbs to the correct number. We pause in mid-thought and try to pick up the threads a moment later. We beat around the bush and sometimes we stall so we can get the rest of our thoughts in order.

You can see this yourself by listening to a recorded conversation. Try it. Ask a friend or two if you can tape a conversation and then talk about anything. The game, politics, a movie you saw, that new pizza place down the street, the new girl at the checkout counter, whatever. They might be a bit stilted at first while they think about being recorded, but eventually you’ll both settle into normal speech patterns.

Now try to transcribe that recording—the whole thing. Write down every pause or false start in the conversation. You’ll probably be surprised how many times you stop in the middle of a sentence and then start over. Or how many times your friend makes a funny noise to fill space while he or she tries to assemble words in the right order.

Get more than two people and you’ll become aware how many random comments people make. And how much space those comments start to eat up, especially when they need to be attributed to someone.

Realistic sounding dialogue is not the same thing as real dialogue. As the saying goes, art imitates life. If art and life are the same thing, though, then you’ve just got life, not art (‘cause we’re not getting rid of life).

I’ve seen a few amateur screenplays that get this wrong in a key way. You know when you walk into a room and half a dozen people say “Hi” and there’s a little burst of small talk from all corners before things settle down again? Some people write that into scripts. So you get six or seven people saying “Hello” and the new arrival responds to all their greetings. Three or four of them ask one like questions like “What’s up?” or “How’ve you been?” or “How’s Wakko?” and the new arrival answers each with two or three words.

Yes, this is very, very realistic. It also means the writer has just taken two and a half pages (when formatted correctly) for what will possibly be thirty seconds of screen time. Unless it’s completely, 100% integral to the plot and half your story will just collapse without it, this kind of thing stands out like a flare for readers as “rookie mistake.” It’s also something that can be written off with “Wakko enters the party, greets a few people, and makes his way over to Phoebe.”

Now, there’s a second part to dialogue that’s too real. If you’ve ever worked in any sort of special field, you’ve probably noticed there’s a certain jargon that develops. Each grocery store, department store, or restaurant has their own behind-the-scenes, shorthand terms for things. If you’ve ever worked in a very intensive field that swallows up a lot of your life—say medicine, the military, or even the film industry—that jargon almost becomes another language. There’s a ton of specialized terms and phrases and abbreviations that get used by people in these fields.

Now, again, here’s the catch. People outside of these fields don’t talk like this and don’t know what these terms mean. Some writers, in the attempt to make their dialogue as realistic as possible, actually make it completely impenetrable. It’s so authentic no one can understand it except other professionals from that field.

The trick for writers is to make this dialogue sound authentic while still being accessible. Think of it like this—you’d never write a character talking with a non stop accent or thick dialect because it becomes difficult to read. You’d pick out a few key phrases and terms and just use those. Things like dropping in “all y’all” instead of “all of you” or saying “pop” instead of “soda.” These give a character a certain flavor without forcing the reader to sound out everything they say.

A great example of this would be television shows like House or NCIS or (dare I say it) JAG. These are shows about people in exceptionally specialized fields, each of which has its own terminology and jargon. In real life, if a handful of lawyers were discussing a case or four doctors were sitting around discussing possible diagnoses of a patient, odds are most of us wouldn’t understand a single sentence (and none of the doctors would look like Olivia Wilde). So the writers of these shows only pepper the dialogue with such terms and flesh out most of it with straightforward, easily-understandable terms. Think about it—when they’re in the middle of a diagnosis, most of their dialogue is explaining their ideas so they’d make sense to a layman.

“Tansey syndrome explains the aversion to light and pale skin. But if you write off the pale skin as a side effect of light sensitivity, not an actual symptom, chloroblastosis of the heart is a better match. It explains the aversion to light, elongated teeth, and the craving for blood… So start treatment for chloroblastosis.”

We don’t need to know what Tansey syndrome or chloroblastosis is because it’s getting explained to us. It’s not how doctors would actually talk, yes, but it still sounds good to the layman and it’s understandable to the layman. And it’s got enough facts right that hopefully doctors won’t be too annoyed or amused. Ignoring the fact that I just made up two medical conditions.

When I was writing Ex-Patriots I knew there was going to be a strong military presence in the book. While I don’t have any experience in that world myself, I was extremely fortunate to have a web of people I could call on. My best friend was in the Air Force. My dad was in the Navy. My step-sister was a Master Sergeant in the Army. I also know a couple other authors with a wide range of military experience.

But I also knew I was writing for a much broader audience than just the military. So I needed to have soldiers speak more like civilians at some points. If I didn’t, I’d run the risk of either alienating the readers or having to explain large swaths of dialogue. Neither prospect was all that exciting.

So don’t write what you know. Write like you know what you’re talking about.

Next time, writer challenge!

Until then, go write.

dialogueHouseJAGreal

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