August 22, 2013

Making It Count

            I haven’t babbled on about dialogue in a bit, so I thought I’d toss out a quick idea about that.
            And I thought I’d make it interesting by telling a story.
            As some of you know, I worked in the film industry for several years.  This let me work with a lot of storytellers of all different types—most notably (for this little rant) directors.  If the screenwriter is the person who creates the story, the director’s the one who decides how to tell the story.  Some of them were very good at this.  Others were not.
            A common flaw I saw in bad directors was an urge to make every single shot special.  It didn’t matter if it was a wide shot, a close-up, a master, or coverage.  Every shot required tons of set up and rehearsals and discussions and little tweaks and adjustments.
            Now, I’m sure some of you are saying “Isn’t that the director’s job?  To make it look good?”  Well, yes and no.  That is one element of the job, yes.  Another one is sticking to a schedule so material gets delivered on time (very important in television and the lower-budget realms), and another one is making sure the material that gets delivered is usable and cuts together well.
            So what I’d see again and again is unskilled directors who would spend hours on their first scene or two of the day, then come back from lunch and discover they still had 85% of the day’s schedule to film.  And they’d do this again and again.  I worked with some directors who’d do this on every day of a shoot.
            And this was bad for the final product, too.  All this effort was put into those first scenes no matter what they were, and then later scenes had to be rushed through and skimmed—no matter what they were.  So the final film was uneven.  It had too much punch were it didn’t need it, not enough where it did.  These guys were so focused on making each individual shot look amazing—no matter what that particular shot was—that they didn’t stop to think of the film as a whole.
            Enter… Krishna.  I worked with him on a Sci-Fi Channel show (yes, it was Sci-Fi back then) called The Chronicle and he was wonderful.  Krishna started out as a lowly crew guy (one of his first film credits is John Carpenter’s Halloween) and worked his way up, learning the whole way.  He had kind of an unwritten rule—I’m not even sure he ever put it into words.  “One pretty shot a day.”  Once a day we’d have an elaborate shot with the camera dolly or a crane (if we had one), or an elaborate one-er that involved lots of rehearsal.  Everything else would just be master-overs-coverage-done.
            I’m sure there’s a few film students reading this who might be muttering about the lack of art in television or making some snide comments about “real” directors, but keep these things in mind.  Krishna made his schedule pretty much every day.  The cast and crew loved working with him and worked twice as hard because of it.  Because he didn’t overload himself trying to do too much, he had time to make sure all his material fit together just how he wanted.  And he still had (on an average television schedule) seven pretty shots in a forty-odd minute episode.  That’s a great shot every six minutes, which meant he could use them to punctuate the moments where he wanted to have visual impact.
            And, like any rule, sometimes he’d bend it a bit.  There were days we’d do two pretty shots, or maybe we’d have an elaborate stunt or effects sequence on top of the regular pretty shot.  But these were always the exception, not the rule.  And his episodes looked fantastic.
            Many of you are probably wondering what this has to do with dialogue, yes?
            I’ve mentioned the word said a few times before.  Said is the workhorse of dialogue descriptors.  It does the job without being showy or flashy, and it’s quick and simple to use.
            I used to avoid said like the plague.  I went out of my way to make sure all my dialogue descriptors were special and pretty.  I’d actually spend time making sure I never used the same one more than once on a page.  And I never used saidSaid was for pedestrian writers with no skill.  No art.
            As some of you may recall, one of the very first critiques I ever received from a professional editor was to stop using so many flowery descriptors and start using said.  It’s advice I took to heart, and still follow today.   Hell, it’s number three on the late, great Elmore Leonard’s rules of writing.  
            That doesn’t mean I don’t use whispered or shouted or chuckledor any of those other colorful descriptors.  I just use them less often.  A lot less.  I save them for when it really counts rather than wasting them.  I want my words to have the most impact, and that means saving the good ones for the moments that count.
            So when your characters have something to say… just have them say it.
            Next time, author Thom Brannan’s going to step in here for a guest post so I can get some work done on a new project.  But I’ll be back the week after that to talk about Easter eggs.
            Until then, go write.
April 18, 2013 / 3 Comments

Stripped Bare

            First, time for the shameless plug. Ex-Patriots, the second book in the Ex-Heroesseries, gets re-released on Tuesday from Broadway Books with a cool new cover.  It’ll be at bookstores, airports, your local PX… pretty much everywhere.  You can pre-order it over there on the side, or go visit your friendly neighborhood bookstore and ask them to get you a copy.

            Now for a quick tip.  Well, quick compared to last week’s ramblings.
            If you’ve been reading this collection of rants for a while, you’ve probably picked up that I’m a bit of a genre fan.  If you’ve read any of my books, it’s probably very clear.  Sci-fi stories, horror stories, fantasy stories… I love this stuff.
            Of course, a big part of loving something is recognizing the flaws in it.  Let’s be honest—there are a lot of horrible genre stories out there.  A real lot.  Depending on who you talk to, some of them are mine…
            Anyway, it struck me the other day that there’s a simple test for good genre stories.  Can I explain my story—and have it make sense—without any of those genre elements?  For example…
–Without the strange force field, Under the Dome is the story of an isolated town falling apart as different characters make different power grabs.
A Princess of Mars becomes a straightforward fish out of water story if you pull out the sci-fi elements.  John Carter could be anyone dumped in a strange, baffling culture where he doesn’t speak the language.
SuperTroopers is still a solid story about police rivalry and budget cuts even without all the comedy.  With the corrupt cops and drug smugglers, you could almost make it a crime drama.  Or a Romeo & Juliet-style love story.
–If you take the undead out of I Am Legend (any version of it), it’s a desert island story.  It’s one man alone (or sometimes with a dog) trying to balance staying alive with staying sane.
Without magic, the Harry Potter books are the story of an unpopular orphan as he grows up, makes friends, finds his way in life, and learns about the parents he never met.
Ghostbusters without comedy becomes a great sci-fi/ horror story about a Sumerian prophesy come to life.  Strip out the sci-fi/ horror and it’s a comedy about a bunch of guys trying to start a bizarre business who suddenly discover they’ve hit a gold mine and everyone wants to hire them.
IT without the horror is just a group of childhood friends who reunite to solve a puzzle from their childhood.
Pitch Black is the story of shipwreck survivors who find themselves dependant on their somewhat-misjudged prisoner to protect them from dangerous predators.
            Now, I’m not saying this as a jab at these books or movies.  The point is not that these tales can be boiled down to much simpler plots.  It’s that they have underlying plots which have nothing to do with their respective sci-fi/fantasy/horror elements.
            Y’see, Timmy, if I strip out the genre components of my story, I should still have a story.  Some writers depend so much on their genre stuff that they don’t grasp they haven’t actually developed any sort of real plot.  They’ve just got a pile of cool elements that doesn’t really add up to anything.  And if they looked at it without the sci-fi/fantasy/horror elements, they’d see that immediately.
           So, get your story out and start stripping.  Pull off all those layers, take a good look at what’s underneath, and… well, make sure you’ve got something worth looking at.
            Next time…
            Okay, I’m going to be honest.  Next time is a week before this new book is due on my editor’s desk, so I’m not going to be here.  I’ll be busy panicking.
            Week after that, though, I’d like to talk with you about the dreaded Scooby Ambiguity.  And I’ll probably be a day early because Thursday morning I head to Dallas for Texas Frightmare.
            Until then, go write.

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