Category: reveal

Is it just the view on my screen, or has the tag cloud over there in the right margin kind of… collapsed? Shattered? It doesn’t look right, that’s for sure. Apologies if you’ve gone looking for something and it’s especially hard to find.

Anyway…

I stumbled across an issue recently in two very different books, and then in a movie, and it’s semi-related to some things I’ve talked about before. So I figured it might be worth a little refresher. And, not to sound silly but.. some of you are going to get this immediately and some of you aren’t.

There’s an idea I’ve mentioned here a  few times, which I first heard (read, really) from Damon Knight.  If we’re presented with a fact we don’t know, it’s information. If it’s a fact we doknow, it’s just noise. I don’t bother to explain what the ranty blog is about every week, because if you’ve found yourself here odds are you already know. But I will discuss Phoebe’s height a lot this week (she’s over six feet tall) because it’s kind of germane to the discussion, as one might say.

So… how do I do this? How do I make sure that when readers picture Phoebe, they picture her as just-over-six-feet in height? That it’s one of her defining details, something they absolutely picture about her?

Well, yeah, I have to put it in her description, sure. Writing it out is kind of a given. But I’ve talked before about how descriptions don’t always stick. We get mental images of characters that don’t always match up with their written descriptions. And, as I’ve mentioned, it’s really important that people remember Phoebe’s pretty tall (she is, as I may have mentioned, just over six feet).

Which brings us to another idea I’ve talked about—repetition. I’ve talked before about repeating words, phrases, and structures to get a certain effect. What I’d like to talk about today is using repetition on a slightly more visible level to try to cement important details (like Phoebe’s just over-six foot height) in my reader’s mind.

And I’d like to do that with the obvious example—A Christmas Story.

For those of you who are somehow unfamiliar with the movie, A Christmas Story is about a boy named Ralphie who wants… well, we can probably say is obsessed with getting a Red Ryder BB gun. It’s pretty much all he talks about. In fact, in a  ninety-three minute movie, he mentions it by name almost thirty times. He’s basically saying it every three minutes. If we go off standard script timing the Red Ryder BB gun comes up every three and a half pages. Is this a good rate to mention something important? I mean, A Christmas Story’s a legendary film, so it’s gotta be doing something right, yeah?

Let’s keep a few things in mind, though. Ralphie’s an obsessed little kid. He’s basically the nice version of Eric Cartman ranting about what color MegaMan he wants for his birthday. He’s single-focused in a way most mature adults grow out of pretty quick. And while it’s funny in small doses, I think we can all be honest and admit that Ralphie’s… kind of annoying. It’s in a cute way, but there’s no way he’d get away with this if he wasn’t a chubby-cheeked little kid with glasses.

(who later grew up to hate Iron Man and run tech support for Mysterio–seriously!)

But if I’m not writing from the point of view of an adorkable pre-teen, this level of repetition can get annoying real fast and start dragging my story down. Take Phoebe and her just over six-foot height for example. I only mentioned her five times (six counting this one), but the mentions of her and her height were starting to get on your nerves, weren’t they? There’s just so many times I can repeat this information before you’re grinding your teeth and saying “Yes, I get it, can we move on now please…”  In this case, repetition is more of a necessary evil, because there’s no way for us to get things across without putting it on the page somehow.

So… how many times?

As a good rule of thumb, I think I’d like to fall back on, well, another rule of thumb I’ve mentioned here once or thrice before. The rule of three. Really, really quick and dirty, the rule of three basically says by the third time I mention something—who Dot got the necklace from, needing to be worthy to lift the hammer Mjolnir, or how tall Phoebe is—my audience almost always gets it.

I’d like to add a small proviso to that, just for when we’re talking about this specific instance. Whatever my super-important detail is, I should mention or give an example of it twice very early on. If it’s Dot’s necklace, maybe she can muse about it once and someone can ask her about it. If it’s about that hammer, maybe Odin can whisper about it once and Thor can demonstrate it fifteen or twenty minutes later. Maybe Phoebe can address some part of her morning ritual she needs to adjust for her height (crouching in the shower) and then someone else can actually flat our comment on it.  These are all early, act one sort of things. Formative things. A one-two punch to land the information and drive it home before it has a chance to become noise.

And then forget about it. If a moment comes up in the story that absolutely calls for this detail to be mentioned again, but if not… don’t. Trust that your audience has it in mind.

The third time should be very close to the payoff, even if it’s hundreds of pages later. This is my last chance to nudge that idea into the reader’s mind before the reveal slams it into their eyes. Or ears. Okay, also into their minds. Look, this isn’t an exact science, okay?

And again, this is only if that fact or detail is really important. Like, deathly important.  Story collapses without it important. If it’s just me wanting Phoebe to be a blonde or, hey, the hammer has a woven leather grip… well, these are just regular bits of description. They’re the things I don’t worry about because my readers are probably going to have their own mental images for them. And that’s fine.. Seriously. If you want to picture Phoebe having auburn-brown hair, that’s cool  And because it’s not important, I don’t want to be driving that point of description home.

Actually, y’know what? I just thought about a better analogy (thus rendering most of this post irrelevant). We’ve talked about names here a bunch of times. How it’s okay not to name some characters? I can just let them sort of be in the background? 

That’s what details are like. There will be a lot of details in my writing that can be beautifully done, but ultimately they’re just sort of there and that’s okay. My reader can enjoy them in the moment but doesn’t need to keep them firmly in mind for things to work in my story. The ones I want to repeat, the ones that need to be specific, are the ones that are going to have an effect on how things unfold.

Y’see, Timmy, much like with names, I don’t want to bog down or annoy my readers with a bunch of details that aren’t going to matter. And I still don’t want to overuse the ones that are going to matter, because that’ll annoy them, too. I need to find that sweet spot where the facts register and get remembered, but don’t become noise.

Next time, I’d like to talk real quick about going with the default settings on this thing.

Until then, go write.

             Y’know, I realized I haven’t done a pop-culture reference in ages, and I’m honestly not sure if I keep thinking of too-obscure references or if I’m just being lazy .  Or maybe I’m just not as in touch with pop culture as I used to be.

            No, it can’t be all three. Think about it.  Don’t go for the bear suit with your snarky comments.

            Anyway…

            I talked about the detective’s speech a few weeks back, and I thought it’d be worth mentioning a big way it can go wrong.

            I can even give an example.  The one I hinted at then…

            So, I’ve mentioned once or thrice that I worked on a detective show for a few years. It wasn’t a very good one, mostly because no one ever seemed really sure if it was a detective show or a cop show or maybe some kind of late-night-cable-sexy show.  And it really didn’t help that all of it got pressed through this sort of ‘80s filter… in the late ‘90s.

            Anyway, one episode reached into the fifth act with our heroes backed into a corner. They had nothing.  None of their clues led anywhere.  None of the motives held up.  Everyone’s alibi checked out.  It really seemed like one of those cases where the bad guy—whoever they were—was going to get away with it.

            Then they went back to talk one of the people they’d interviewed earlier and explained how they remembered something he’d said.  Which led to them examining his bank records last night.  Which led to talking to one of his business partners. Which led to them getting a warrant this morning and searching his house.  During which they remembered his love of European architecture and found the priest hole in his home office. Where they found the murder weapon this morning… with his prints on it.

            Bam!  Case closed.  Another one for the good guys.
            Except… even as we filmed it, the cast and half the crew sensed something was wrong here.  It felt weird.  And not just because of some horrible editing (that came later).

            Our entire mystery was solved off-camera.  Almost nothing we’d seen for the entire episode was relevant.  In the end, we just had the two leads standing there giving the detective’s speech about a bunch of deductions and discoveries that all happened off-camera.  The audience didn’t see any of it. They were told about solving the mystery rather than being… well, shown it. 

            Which is a real killer in a visual medium.  And not terribly great in print, either. It’s easier to get away with, yeah, but still not a habit I want to get into.

            When this happens, I think it’s because writers feel like they’re following Elmore Leonard’s famous rule of thumb about skipping stuff nobody’s going to want to read.  Or not going to want to read twice.  In the case above, we don’t want to see the detectives find all the clues, and then also watch them talk about how they found all the clues.

            So the question is, which one do I cut?

            On one level, this is another empathy thing.  Most of the time, it’s going to come down to dramatic impact.  What’s going to give my reader a bigger kick in the gut—seeing them find the gun, or seeing them stand in a parking lot and tell someone they found the gun?

            On another level, this is just knowing what my plot is.  On a detective show (even a late-night-cable-sexy one), the plot is about solving the mystery. Sure, confronting and catching the bad guy is great, but it’s also… well, kinda incidental.  Solving the mystery inherently means we’ve caught the bad guy.  We want  to know it happened, but that’s not what we picked up the mystery novel for.

            Y’see, Timmy, 99% of the time, plot happens in front of my audience.  I can fade to black for a sex scene, maybe skip over the hero’s six hour shift at the grocery store, maybe not even show the bad guy getting confronted and arrested —but those things aren’t really plot, are they? They’re elements we drop into the story for extra flavor.

            As I mentioned above, Elmore Leonard said to cut out all the parts people skip anyway. But I shouldn’t be cutting out the stuff they picked up my book to see.  If I remove a scene and nothing really changes, it probably isn’t plot.  If I remove a scene, but then need to add another scene where they talk about what happened in the now-missing scene… well, that scene was probably plot.

            I want to see the plot unfold.
            So do my readers.

            Next time… I’d like to talk about origin stories.

            Until then, go write.

            There’s an empathy issue I see crop up a fair amount of time, and I ran into it a few times back in my film days, too.  I just hit a big patch of it recently, and it was while I was working on a pitch/outline that also kind of skirted around it.  So I figured it was worth talking about a bit here.

            That big patch I mentioned was a werewolf anthology I read (some monster names may have been changed to protect the innocent).  One of the things that amazed me was how many of the stories had a “big twist” which turned out to be—ready for it?—this is a werewolf story!  Some of these were pretty good… but I still ended up twiddling my fingers once it became apparent where things were heading and I had to wait for the narrative to get there.

            Now, granted, in this particular case a fair share of the blame for that falls on the editor.  Why would I accept a story for my anthology that’s undercut by… well, the very nature of the anthology?  That just seems like a bad idea.

            But why submit such a story, either? Shouldn’t I, the writer, immediately realize that anyone who picks up the anthology is already going to be clued in to my big reveal?  And shouldn’t I be aware of the failings that creates in my story?

            Either way you look at it, nobody’s thinking about what the readers are going to know when they sit down with this story.

            Simple truth is, what my audience knows affects what kind of story I can tell.  It’s going to affect my structure. Maybe even my genre.

            No, seriously.  Imagine trying to write a mystery story where we all know who the murderer is from the very start.  Before we even pick up the book.  If I try to tell that story in a normal mystery format with normal mystery tropes, it’s going to collapse really fast.  The whole structure of mysteries is based around the audience not knowing certain things, so if they already know them… well, that’s going to be a tough sell.

            Remember that pitch/ outline I mentioned?  It’s loosely inspired by an old ‘50s sci-fi movie.  But one of the big issues is that the “science” that drives most of the story in that movie is just awful.  Oh, it might’ve been borderline acceptable back in the day, but these days my niece could poke a dozen holes in.  And she’s a high school freshman. In Texas!

            That’s how weak the science is.

            So if I want to tell that story now, I’ll need to change a lot of things.  Those rationales and explanations just won’t hold with modern readers because they know better.  It’ll kill their suspension of disbelief almost immediately and they’ll give up on my story before they get to chapter five.

            And I don’t write big chapters.

            As I mentioned above, both of these examples deal with an empathy issue.  I have to be aware of what my audience knows.  What’s common knowledge, what’s obvious, and what sort of thing they’re already aware of.  And I need to understand how that knowledge is going to affect the reception and dramatic structure of my story.  Something they already know can’t be a surprise, and something they know is wrong can’t support a string of plot points.

            Please note an important difference here. Wrong doesn’t mean not real.  I can propose tons of alternate histories or secret societies or fringe science breakthroughs. I’d love to give you guidelines for making up planets or technologies or imaginary animals.  But the simple truth is… it’s an empathy thing.  Every thread in every story is going to be unique and different in how I present it and how you receive it.

            Semi-related—this is also why spoilers suck so much.  They literally change the story I’m telling (or reading) because they change what the reader knows. 

            For example…

            I’m going to spoil The Sixth Sense, so if you haven’t seen it, stop reading now and go watch it. No, seriously, go.  The whole point of this is how knowing things can mess up how you receive a story, so if you keep reading you’ll never be able to watch The Sixth Sense the way you’re supposed to.  NEVER.  If you’ve somehow managed to avoid it until now, I don’t want to be the one to take it away from you, so stop reading.

            STOP!

            NOW!!

            Okay, now that those folks are gone…

            That big reveal at the end of The Sixth Sense is a jaw-dropping moment when we hit it for the first time.   But if we go in already knowing Bruce Willis has been dead all along, this is a very different story.  It’s almost an afterschool special.  “The Boy and his Phantom Psychologist,” Thursday at four on ABC.

            More to the point, that ending doesn’t have the dramatic weight it would without that knowledge. And it never can.  We can’t unlearn things, much as we’d like to.

            Once something’s been spoiled… that’s it.  No takebacks.  No mulligans.

            I’ll even toss this out.  The ending of The Sixth Sense was such a powerful moment that it got copied many times–often by people who didn’t really understand it.  But this often-copied ending still ended up out there.  It became common.  And because it was common knowledge, so to speak, it changed how writers can tell that sort of story.  These days, most readers know to look for that sort of twist.  And they’ll pick up on the subtlest of clues or hints.  And I need to be aware of that if I want to tell one of those stories—that people will almost be expecting it.

            Because if I don’t, I should know I’m about to make some clumsy mistakes.

            Next time, I want to talk about some more basics.

            Until then… go write.

            Okay, it’s just going to be a quick post this week. I found out kind of last minute that I’m hosting the Writer’s Coffeehouse in San Diego on Sunday (noon at Mysterious Galaxy—stop by), so I’ve got to scribble up some notes for that.  Also, I’ve got a big Halloween party the night before, so please don’t be surprised if I show up dressed like Rick from Rick and Morty…

            Speaking of which, I think this is the first time I haven’t done a horror post on the week of Halloween.

            But let me get back to this week’s point, which is…

            One of the greatest parts of storytelling, in my opinion, is the reveal.  It’s when we find out who the murderer is, or that Phoebe isn’t really dead, or maybe how Wakko ended up with the Elder Blade, or maybe that it isn’t really the Elder Blade, or maybe that Phoebe is actually Wakko’s long-lost sister Dot and she’s had the Elder Blade all along.  Or maybe it’s something a little more mundane, but still a bit of a shock.  It might just be finding out someone died last week, or that someone actually came over to break up with you and not to make wild monkey-love, or even getting those test results back… not with the result we wanted.  On one level or another, pretty much every story is going to have a reveal of some kind.

            This is how I get information across to the reader—I reveal it.  My characters answer the phone, open a book, get a text message, pull back a curtain, step around a corner, tear open an envelope, or turn slowly to see who’s sitting in that chair by the fireplace.  Lots of reveals are minor, some are subtle, and a few carry a ton of dramatic weight because they’ve just changed how my readers are viewing the story.

            Now, there’s an important thing to remember here, and it ties back to something I’ve mentioned once or thrice in the past.  Facts we don’t know are information. Facts we do know (or could’ve very easily deduced) are noise.  Another way to think of noise is that it’s literary static–clutter on the page. 

            Since a reveal deals with information, it can’t be about facts we already know or could’ve figured out on our own.  Even if my characters don’t know it, it’s still noise to the reader.  So if I structure a paragraph or scene or chapter around a reveal that, well, isn’t really a reveal… it’s going to fall flat.
            Let’s look at an example (one I’m making up off the top of my head).

            Our first shot will be Yakko being sworn in as President of the United States.  Maybe ten or twenty pages later we’ll see him chatting at length with the White House press secretary. After that, he’ll be stepping off of Air Force One, waving to the crowds.      

            And then, finally, we’ll have him on the phone.  A black phone, one that’s still connected to a hard line.  And as Yakko tells someone on the other end “Make it happen,” our point of view pulls back to reveal he’s calling from inside… THE OVAL OFFICE!!!

            Big shocker, right?

           Okay, it’s not.  Really, it’s not a surprise at all.  All of us know where the President spends his workdays.  And, well, since I’d made it really clear Yakko was the President, none of us are surprised to see him in the Oval Office.  So my big reveal at the end of that example is supposed to carry dramatic weight, but instead it stumbles because it isn’t carrying anything except noise.

            Y’see, Timmy, a reveal should give my readers information if expect it to have some dramatic impact.  It isn’t dramatic if we already know it.  Or if we easily could’ve figured it out.  And if my writing’s all done around the idea that it is a  dramatic reveal… that’s how my manuscript ends up in the pile on the left.

            So go forth and reveal yourself in–In your writing!!!  Jeez, it’s Halloween, yeah, but there’s little kids out there…

            Next time… well, I’ll do something.

            Until then, go write.